Tommy James & The Shondells - Crimson & Clover

Crimson & Clover on Apple Music

Tommy James claims he wrote Crimson and Clover by combining his favorite color and his favorite flower, which is the kind of thing songwriters say when the actual answer is more complicated than they want to admit in an interview. Neither crimson nor clover means anything on its own, but put them next to each other and something happens that neither word can do by itself, a small alchemy that turns two flat nouns into something you can feel in your chest before you can explain it. That is also, more or less, a description of sex, which is probably why nobody has ever been fully satisfied by James’s explanation and why Amy Phillips felt compelled to write, in Pitchfork’s list of the best songs of the 1960s, that this track is quite possibly the closest white pop musicians have ever come to approximating how making love actually feels. She’s right, and the reason she’s right has less to do with what the song says than with how long it takes, and how tenderly, to say it.

The single edit runs about three minutes, which is the length of an average pop song and also, coincidentally or not, roughly the length of time most pop songs assume you’re willing to linger on any one feeling before you want a new one. The album version runs five minutes and thirty-two seconds, and the difference between those two songs is not incidental. It is an ocean worth of desire and the entire argument. Somewhere around the two-minute mark, after James has already told you he doesn’t hardly know her but thinks he could love her, after the tremolo guitar has already started its slow shiver and the “over and over” has already looped past the point where a normal song would resolve into a bridge or a final chorus, Crimson and Clover stops being a song with a structure and becomes a body you’re pressed against. Verse-chorus-verse is a story, and stories have endings, but what James built in that extended version isn’t a story so much as a warmth you let envelope you, and warmth doesn’t end so much as it eventually lets you go, loose-limbed and, hopefully, a little dazed.

The actual stakes of tempo suggest a lazy afternoon, sun streaking low across rumpled sheets, the kind of unhurried tenderness that never has anywhere else it needs to be. Joan Jett’s cover, which is a great record and deserves every bit of its own reputation, speeds the whole thing up and turns it into a two-and-a-half-minute assertion, all hunger and no patience. It’s confident and direct, and it knows exactly what it wants, which is a perfectly reasonable way to make a rock song and a slightly dishonest way to describe what actually happens between two people who enjoy the taste and touch of each other. James’s original, especially in its full album length, refuses that kind of directness almost entirely. The lyrics themselves barely qualify as lyrics. There’s a woman he doesn’t really know, there’s the possibility that he could love her, there’s a description of her walking over, and then there is, for two full minutes, nothing but the title phrase repeated with the tremolo effect swelling and receding like breath against skin. If you tried to diagram this song the way you’d diagram a Springsteen song, you’d be making a terrible mistake. You can’t track image against image or you’ll come up empty, because the information isn’t in the words. It’s in the way the sound rises and falls against you, with you, again and again, until you stop counting.

This is where the song becomes genuinely psychedelic rather than just adjacent to psychedelia because it happened to come out in 1968 with a wobbly guitar effect on it. Psychedelia isn’t about depicting an altered state from the outside. It’s about building one from the inside, using whatever’s at hand, which in this case means a tremolo pedal and four words and the patience to let both of those things run well past the point where a more anxious record would have cut them off. The three descending chords I keep hearing as pieces of clothing hitting the floor aren’t a metaphor James consciously built. They’re just what happens when you slow a simple progression down enough and loop it long enough that your ear stops tracking it as a sequence and starts feeling it as one continuous pulse, which is also more or less what happens to your sense of time when things are going well, when the whole world narrows to the next slow rise. Nobody having a good afternoon in bed is thinking in verses. They’re murmuring, if they’re saying anything at all, something closer to that tremolo swell, a phrase that means less each time you hear it, and more each time you feel it against your ear.

There’s a version of this argument that gets made about disco a decade later and house music after that, the idea that four-on-the-floor repetition is itself erotic, a deep pulsing rhythm that disables conscious thought and hands control over to the body, to the hips, to whatever is underneath thought. Crimson and Clover gets there first and gets there by accident, or at least without any of the theoretical apparatus that would eventually surround disco. James wasn’t trying to build a machine for inducing trance states. He was a Midwestern pop musician who liked how a guitar effect sounded and had a song that felt unfinished, so he let it keep going, let it breathe, let it roll under and above the sheets longer. But the accident is instructive, almost as if some woman once told him not to stop and he simply listened. The single edit is what happens when a record label’s sense of convention wins. The album version is what happens when the song wins, and the song, like good sex, always wins in the end.

The actual words are, fittingly, unglamorous, because no one dialed all the way into pleasure, breathing it in and out, is capable of much else, let alone songwriting. “I don’t hardly know her” is not a seduction. It’s an admission of almost nothing, a whisper across a bar, the bare minimum required to let someone know that two people exist close enough to each other that something might happen. The song never tells you what she looks like or what she says or what, precisely, “everything” refers to when James says he wants to do everything, and you can practically hear the eyebrow lift on the word. It withholds every detail a more conventional song would linger over, and it withholds them so the title phrase can fill that space instead, the way the best kinds of intimacy make specific words less necessary the further in you go, until touch and breath are doing all the talking. By the time the song is five minutes deep into “over and over,” it has stopped being about a particular woman entirely and become about the general shape of wanting someone, of being wanted back, which is a much stranger and more honest thing for a pop song to sit inside than most pop songs can manage.

James later said he had no idea the song would end up read as an erotic record, which might be true and might also be the kind of thing a Midwestern Methodist songwriter says for the record, regardless of what he privately understood about tremolo, repetition, and the particular alchemy of two words that mean nothing until you put them together and let them run, and run, and run.

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