the first round
(12) foreigner, “hot blooded”
overheated
(5) freddy fender, “before the next teardrop falls”
175-82
and will play on in the second round

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on March 6.

kelly shire On “Before the Last Teardrop Falls”

Recently my mom was complaining about having to fill out an early census survey sent to her by the United States government. In typical fashion, she’d ignored it awhile, then ignored a couple letters reminding her to complete and return the survey at her earliest convenience. Now the latest letter had moved from sounding mildly annoyed to mildly threatening, so she was filling it out, but wanted me to know her own annoyance at having to answer so many prying questions about her household.
In the midst of her complaint, she dropped an anecdote about her dad, my grandpa Ed.
     Ed was also once asked to complete a census questionnaire.
Before we continue, you should know that my grandpa was a gentleman, by which I mean that he was thoughtful, soft-spoken and measured in his opinions. He was a blue-collar worker, a foreman for an L.A. suburb’s water department throughout my childhood until his retirement. Every day he returned home hot and dirty and showered and changed into fresh chinos before relaxing in his armchair to read the newspaper. He was patient, and polite with telemarketers, never hanging up on them mid-sentence, like I do.
But my grandpa lied on his census form. According to my mother, Ed hovered a long while before checking off the box that inquired about his ethnicity. Latino? Chicano? Hispanic? Mexican-American? However it was phrased, he didn’t check off any of those boxes. Ultimately, he checked the box that said only “White.”
“I’m not any of those things,” my mother says he grumbled aloud later. This was, is, untrue. Unlike me, who comes honestly by my dithering over the same question on official forms (does half count? Am I of “Hispanic heritage?”), it should have been a fairly easy question for my grandpa.
Does his lie matter? Whose answer matters?
     And who wants to know?
For I think that may have been the real question at the heart of my grandpa’s fib to the United State Census Bureau: Who’s asking, and why?
     My grandpa Ed was not white. On paper, his was one of the most common Latino surnames in the local phone book. In person, the color of his skin, his high cheekbones were the giveaway: he was sometimes mistaken for Native American, and even Japanese. Basically, you would not ever have glanced at my grandpa standing on his driveway watering his beloved dichondra lawn and thought: White Guy.

Freddy Fender was born in 1937 in Texas, which means that when his song “”Before the Next Teardrop Falls” hit #1 on the pop and country charts in 1975, he was almost 40 years old. Although this was the first time he’d gained attention on the national level, he’d been kicking around the south Texas music scene since he was a child: at 10, he won an amateur talent contest and could be heard on the radio singing “Paloma Querida.” In 1960, he had a regional hit with an early version of “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights,” the follow-up to single to “Teardrop” that reached number eight on the charts in ‘75.
You’ve probably already guessed that Freddy Fender wasn’t his real name. Perhaps, like me, you assumed the “Fender” was a play on his given surname of Fernandez, just like Richie Valens’ last name was a white-out of “Valenzuela.” Maybe Freddy’s first name was Francisco, or Federico. But Freddy was born Baldemar Huerta. (Pronounce the B like a “V” in your head, and you’re a little closer to what it may have sounded like when his parents called his name across the beet fields where they all labored as migrant workers during his childhood.)
Coming up around the same time as Richie Valens, who was a couple years younger, Huerta must have known that his given name wouldn’t get him very far. From the start, he  played under nearly a dozen stage names—El Bebop Kid, Scotty Wayne, and my favorite, Eddie con los Shades—before settling on the alliterative one he rode to the top. Fender for the famous guitars, Freddy  because “the gringos will like it.”

And it’s better to be a gringo, correct? I was raised with this assumption, though no one ever spoke that thought out loud. They didn’t have to. I grew up surrounded by my mom’s close-knit Mexican-American family, and by close-knit, I mean I was over at my grandparents’ house almost every single day of my life until I was eight, when we moved one town away. My mom, the eldest of her siblings, was the first of her two sisters to marry a white guy from the Midwest who came to Southern California, and in turn both of my aunts did the same.
I was white, our dominant culture was white. If you ignored the people who owned the house, there was scarcely anything you might point to and label “Mexican” about my grandparent’s household. And what exactly would such an item be, or look like, anyway?
     I hear tell there was a time, before I was born, when my grandma cooked traditional dishes like nopales (cactus) or tamales. When I was little, she kept a dark stone molcajete on her kitchen counter, a mortar and pestle used for grinding up chiles.  But as she grew older, my grandma abandoned most of that, cooking instead toward their doctors instructions for lowering cholesterol and preventing heart disease. Chicken breasts, well-done flank stank, nonfat milk and rainbow sherbet were the foods mostly eaten around the dinner table. (She regularly made “Mexican” rice; it involved a bottle of Heinz 57 ketchup.)

In the decade that gave us “Disco Duck,” “The Streak,” and so many other terrible hits, Mr. Huerta’s song is comparatively easy on the ears. I make the comparison, because in the weeks that I’ve spent listening to it on repeat and mulling it over, I’ve reached the conclusion that “Before the Next Teardrop Falls” almost qualifies as a novelty song. It’s not funny, it’s not a parody, and yet it has that element of strangeness that defines the stand-alone definition of the word “novelty.” After all, did the American audience that propelled this song to #1 in early 1975 on the country and pop charts enjoy it solely for its catchy tune and heartfelt sentiment, or was something else at play?
The premise of “Teardrop” is the spurned lover wishing happiness for his old flame: the singer pledges to rush to the woman’s side when the new guy makes her cry, to be there before her next tear can even fall. It’s a nice sentiment, though probably impossible to literally execute. And does this ex want him there, anyway? Does Freddy truly wish her all the best, is it her happiness that matters most? Are any among us that unselfish in matters of the heart, or do we all just want what we want? The listener can’t know, because there’s not much more to the lyrics besides the title. 
I’m pulling apart the few lines, trying to find deeper meaning to give the song its fair shake, but ignoring the obvious, the part I believe is the real draw, the power even, in the 2:33-minutes of this country-pop crossover. The part that makes it a novelty: the Spanish, of course.

It was the mid-1970s, and like most households of the era, my grandparents’ color television was housed in a massive console, a heavy slab of dark wood that my grandma polished with lemon Pledge. Atop it sat a silk houseplant, a couple of photographs or knickknacks. On this television was the usual: the local news, my grandma’s beloved afternoon soap, a lot of mid-afternoon talk shows with hosts like Mike Douglas or Dinah Shore. My grandpa loved Westerns—old Saturday matinee showings of John Wayne movies, re-runs of Gunsmoke and Bonanza.
Every once in a while, for whatever reason, my mom and I would drop by my grandparents’ at an unusual time, unannounced. Often when this happened, we’d come upon my grandparent’s watching an old Mexican western, usually in black and white, on a Spanish language station. My grandpa loved these old movies, but as soon as we walked through his front door and sat on the couch, he’d change the station back to regular English-language programming. The Waltons, perhaps, or a random sports broadcast. I mentioned that my grandpa was polite, so maybe that’s why he changed the channel so quickly: I didn’t speak Spanish after all, and though my mother could mostly understand it, she wasn’t a fluent speaker. But even as a kid, I felt a little guilty when our visits prompted my grandpa to turn off something he enjoyed. A longer, more complicated conservation might ask why I’d never been taught my grandparents first language, or why my mother was allowed to let her understanding lapse, though a condensed answer is mostly again: the gringos will like it.

Into my grandparent’s household, over the airwaves, came the sight and sound of Freddy Fender. There are several YouTube videos of Fender performing on 1970s variety shows, including Hee-Haw. In some he’s lip-synching, but in the best quality video, he performs the song live. I have no idea whether either of my grandparents actually caught one of these TV performances of “Teardrop,” but I’m willing to bet they did, based on how their TV was always on in the evenings, and the ubiquity of so many different music and variety shows back then.
There stands Freddy, in front of a fake farmhouse porch on a studio set, looking like no other pop or country star sharing the charts with him. His black mustache is thick and drooping, his black cloud of curly hair even thicker. He wears a patchwork blue denim suit, the jacket open to another denim shirt highlighting a bit of paunch; his brown hand grasps the mic. This is his moment—after years of playing in Texas tejano bands, getting kicked out of the Marines for drinking, and serving two years in a Louisiana prison for pot possession—middle aged Fender is singing on national television, and after the first lines of English, he busts out into a full stanza of Spanish.

I’ve never learned to speak Spanish. I had to consult the internet to find out what he’s saying in those lines, the only part of the song that Fender wrote himself. The words are almost identical to the English verses; instead of teardrops it’s crying, and he’ll be there to talk when she’s sad. And yet the Spanish verse feels so much like the main point of the song—when it begins, it’s the moment where (in the recorded version) the tejano accordion kicks in, lending a musical swell to this section where Fender’s emotions sound the most impassioned. The Spanish verse is the element, I’m convinced, that propelled the song to the top of the charts.
In the comments section of the Songfacts website, “Dianna” from Georgia primly expresses her concern that Fender’s lyrics are not in fact accurate Spanish: “these are very basic grammar mistakes,” she notes. Another commenter addresses this: “I see where your comming from [sic],” he says, but “it is very correct indeed. Maybe not European Spanish, but it is very much Mexican.” 

Bad or good, “Before the Next Teardrops Falls” is an important song, at least to the folks who wrote the dozens and dozens of comments accompanying the online videos, dedicating it to the memory of all the papis and abuelitos and dads and tios and older hermanos who are no longer with us, RIP to them and to Freddy himself, the best singer EVER who was the real thing, a real talent who did not need to use autotune ever, amen.
I know that my family, both immediate and extended, must have enjoyed it, because it was everywhere, a given in the cultural memory of my early childhood, along with a lot of other country-pop songs from the same year. (It was pushed off the #1 position the following week by John Denver’s slap-happy “Thank God I’m a Country Boy”—another near-novelty tune.)  Also, looking at the cover of Fender’s album that produced “Teardrop” along with “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights,” produces a jolt of memory: my grandpa owned the album, I’m guessing in 8-track format, the better to play in his tan Chevy pickup.
I think of what it meant to my grandparents, to see such a clearly Chicano man (Fender uses the term to describe himself in another video) on their television, not in an old movie on a staticky Spanish station at the top end of the dial, but on a major network. For the two and a half minute duration of the song, it was better to not be white, it was okay to not be white, because look at how the whole country embraced Freddy Fender as a star.
But at least once during my multiple listens to the song Fender was destined to perform for the rest of his life, I could hear my grandparents’ voices again. I saw them, sitting together in their living room, eyes on the television, and between them passed a murmur of approval and amusement, an appreciative chuckle at the spectacle on the screen: the fuzzy-headed man, his eyes shut tight with emotion, singing his cheesy song one more time.

Kelly Shire is a child of the seventies who was gifted a K-Tel album and Donna Summer’s Bad Girls for her tenth birthday. She’s lived her whole life in Southern California and has had essays about music and family appear in Brevity, Under the Gum Tree, and Memoir Mixtapes, among others. She also contributed work to the recent Springsteen anthology Shut Down Strangers and Hot Rod Angels (Bone and Ink Press). Last year she wrote about the The Cult for March Vladness.

amy rossi on “hot blooded”

INTRODUCTION 

When I was a teenager, an older friend once said half-jokingly, “You have such good taste in books and movies. How can your taste in music be this bad?”
How do you respond to that when you are maybe sixteen, and it’s true that you read well-regarded books and call movies “films” and also feel so seen when you listen to sex-drenched classic rock and glam metal that has nothing to do with your life as lived thus far? “Guilty as charged!”?
It wasn’t the first time I’d been informed my taste in music was bad, nor the last. In the nearly 20 years since, I’ve embraced the fact that the Venn diagram of music that’s considered bad and music that I love without inhibition is nearly a circle.
I take my pleasure without guilt. You could say I’ve been training for this my entire life.
So maybe “Hot Blooded” is bad in your estimation. And that’s fair. In the words of one W. Axl Rose, everybody warms themselves to a different fire. But, so often when a song is dismissed as “bad,” what that really means is that it’s too much—too committed to its concept, too earnest, too open, too detached from any sense of irony, too unconcerned with the listener’s comfort.
What I’m saying is, if a whole-hearted celebration of the single entendre, enthusiastic consent, and making good choices that also includes SPIES is bad, what even is good?
*record scratch*
“I’m sorry, spies?” you might be saying.
Yes. Spies. We’ll get there, but we have to start at the beginning. There is an ethos to “Hot Blooded,” in all its too-much glory, and it is only through this ethos that you can get to the spies.

THE VERSE / THE CHORUS

You don't have to read my mind to know what I have in mind.
Honey, you oughta know.
Now you move so fine, let me lay it on the line:
I wanna know what you're doin’ after the show.

First of all, this is refreshing as all outdoors. How many times have you been kind of flirting with someone, but you’re not sure if they’re flirting back? It’s exhausting! So let’s appreciate the fact that our narrator is transparent enough to ensure there will be nary a lick of mind-reading involved when it comes to conversing with him. No cards to hold back here. He would rather lay on the line and ask the woman he’s interested in what she is doing after his concert than play it cool. 

Now it’s up to you, we can make a secret rendezvous,
Just me and you, I'll show you lovin’ like you never knew.

Let’s repeat it for the people in the back: it is up to you. Is he going to make his case? Well, yes. Several times. He wants to be sure she’s clear on his offer. But once he outlines that plan, he is placing the ball in her court because it takes two enthusiastic partners to rendezvous. He doesn’t declare that she’s his or that she should be his or that he’s going to make her his. There’s no language of possession. And one gets the sense that if she says no, he’ll pay her a final compliment and find another girl who is also moving pretty fine. 

I’m hot blooded, check it and see.
I got a fever of a hundred and three.
Come on baby, do you do more than dance?
I’m hot blooded, hot blooded.

What makes “Hot Blooded” such a joyful song is that the actual temperature of the narrator’s blood is literally the only metaphor in the entire thing. And honestly, it might not even be all that metaphorical because a) he’s been under stage lights and probably does feel quite warm and b) he’s also a little bit high, as he informs us at the very end, so his perception of his blood heat could be off.
“Do you do more than dance” isn’t like, a great come-on, I know, but also I appreciate the narrator’s acknowledgment that sometimes a person just wants to hang out in the front row and dance their way through a show, and if there are a few hip swivels and gyrations therein, it is not necessarily for anything but the music and to assume that it’s about him is not okay.

(METAPHORICAL) BRIDGE: A NOTE ON BADNESS

I saw Foreigner in July 2018, the headlining act of a bill that included Whitesnake and Jason Bonham’s Led Zeppelin evening. It was as ridiculously incredible as it sounds: outside in a North Carolina heat wave, questionable frozen margaritas sipped from plastic palm trees, and a local choir participating in “I Want to Know What Love Is.” Also, I would later end up recognizing Whitesnake’s guitarist playing at a Cher concert.
About a year before I ever saw actual Foreigner, though, I saw a local all-woman Foreigner cover band. It had been a dark news week, the kind that can make you not want to be a woman alone in public, and I went back and forth over whether or not it made sense to go, if I was up for being in a dark, boozy, crowded venue by myself, or if that would be asking for trouble. But I knew I needed it. I needed to take up space and dance and feel the loudness, be the loudness. Be too much.
The women on stage sunk into the wonderful ’70s/’80s cheese. They made it their own. They wore amazing vests. And when they sang “Jukebox Hero” about a young woman instead of a young man, I got a little wet-eyed.
What I’m saying is: one person’s badness is another person’s moment of grace.

THE VERSE / THE CHORUS, CONTINUED

If it feels all right, maybe you can stay all night.
Shall I leave you my key?
But you've got to give me a sign, come on, girl, some kind of sign.
Tell me, are you hot, mama? You sure look that way to me.”

Just in case we were not 100% clear that sexual activities are on our narrator’s mind, he is once again laying it on the line—if she’s into it. If she wants to stay, that’d be awesome. No need to decide right now, and if it ends up not feeling all right later, understood. Plus, he’s not leaving that key unless she gives him a sign that that’s a thing she actually wants. And while she looks hot to him, he knows looks alone don’t mean anything.

Are you old enough? Will you be ready when I call your bluff?
Is my timing right? Did you save your love for me tonight?

Okay, I know, but how many cringe-inducing tales of 1970s rock star excess and outright criminality have you read or watched in a VH1 rock doc that concluded with, “Yeah but it was the ’70s, it was a different time ¯\_(ツ)_/¯” either plainly stated or implied?
It wasn’t that different.
This walking hormone knew well enough in 1978 to check that the young woman he was hitting on was of age before continuing on to confirm that she would enthusiastically want to accompany him to his hotel room.
And also he recognizes that she could be over 18 and find him attractive, but the timing might not be good and she just might not be feeling it. The bar is low, and our narrator is stepping over it with aplomb.

Now it's up to you, can we make a secret rendezvous?
Oh, before we do, you'll have to get away from you-know-who

Here it is.
Once again, this is a song with half a metaphor at most. We have a narrator who openly states that one does not have to read his mind to know what he is thinking of. Which is sex. Single entendres are his maximum threshold. He asks her if she is old enough. He is flashing hotel keys. In sum: he is not subtle. This is an actual ode to not being subtle.
If the woman in question was attending this concert with a boyfriend or other love interest, or even a parent or guardian, nothing in the previous verses suggests our narrator would not acknowledge it outright. Consider the fact that the line could easily be, “Before we do, you’ll have to tell him you found someone new.” It scans.
Ergo: she’s dodging spies.
It’s right there in the text. I don’t make the rules, I just report on them.

CODA

I didn’t disagree with the friend who marveled at the depths of my bad musical taste years ago, but I do now, in that I’m not sure I have good taste in any kind of pop culture anymore, and what’s more, I don’t care. I am just not cool, and not in the way cool people say they aren’t cool. I am a messy sort of uncool, wanting too hard and feeling too big, and it has taken me a really long time to not just acknowledge my uncoolness—my badness—but to realize that it’s fine.
The thing is, I love wearing earnest glitter and snakeskin and my tee shirt that says Go to Bed with Motörhead, and I love singing along, not well, to Foreigner and Warrant and Culture Club and so many other bands deemed too over-the-top to take seriously, because I’m hot-blooded, okay, check it and see, because the times I feel the most myself in this world are when I don’t think to worry about being too much, because there is joy in being cheesy, joy in embracing my own tackiness.
There is joy in laying it on the line instead wondering if someone will bother reading around it.

Amy Rossi lives, writes, and attends every Badness-adjacent concert possible in North Carolina. Find out more at amyrossi.com.