Judson Spence – Yeah, Yeah, Yeah
If writing this blog has demonstrated one thing to me, it’s that pretty much every song I ever loved or record I ever bought has a story behind it. It might not be a story in which I look cool or even decent, like buying Van Halen’s “1984” as a beard so that people wouldn’t think I was gay – yep, that’s the word that my 20-year-old male mind conjured up – for buying Wham’s “Make It Big”. I might even come off as pathetic (we’ll get to one of those eventually – unless my “1984” story counts). I might not even realize what the story is until I start writing about it. But it’s there.
For example, I became a Judson Spence fan because I could not resist the lure of free stuff.
There was a stretch in the mid to late 1980s when I spent such a disproportionate share of my take-home income on music and music adjacent products and activities that there should have been an intervention. Without giving away too much, my average weekly spend would be the equivalent in 2023 dollars of $200 to $250, which is insane. It was sort of an investment, since when I reached a particularly low point in the summer of 1988 and was forced to sell some of my albums in order to eat, I got two weeks worth of groceries out of one trip to the local used record store. (Goodbye, pristine copy of Led Zeppelin’s “In Through the Out Door”, among other gems.)
A few months later, in early October 1988, I relocated to Toronto from St. Catharines and found an exponential increase in music buying possibilities, though the cost of living and lack of a safety net (St. Catharines had lots of people who were happy to feed me and generally watch out for me, and I ran away to Toronto to free myself from their strangling embrace) led me to temper my profligacy. But I would still journey downtown every Saturday morning to walk around the record (and book) stores, travelling north with my finds in mid afternoon to my basement room in a boarding house.
It was on an autumn 1988 Saturday, possibly my second in the city, that I noticed concert tickets sitting on the counter near the cash register at one such record store. I learned from the clerk that they were free, all for mid-week shows being sponsored by some record label to promote a new act. I didn’t know who any of the artists were, and thought it would be greedy to take more than one pair, so I pretty much randomly decided to go with Judson Spence, who at least sounded normal.
My date for the show was my friend Chris, who hadn’t heard of him either but had nothing better to do that night. It was a completely platonic date – we had once tried the real thing just to see what might happen, which turned out to be nothing (attraction can’t be faked, and she at least was smart enough to pretend afterwards that the date had never happened). I don’t remember much about the show, other than we didn’t know any of the songs yet still had a great time. Great enough that on the following Saturday, I bought the cassette, and played it many, many times over the next few years.
Although I have not listened to Spence’s music for a very long time, a few lines from his song “Attitude” have claimed a permanent space in my brain: “The lawyers all grin / As she makes her way in / Like a scene from a movie” and “Falling apart at the seams / My heart gets the message she’s sending” have often been conjured up out of the ether. Neither is a particularly original line, but that again is one of the mysteries of music. Like when I played “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah” for the first time in what has to be at least 25 years, and quickly had a sort of muscle memory, of jumping up and down with Chris in a crowd of more or less equally unknowing people, just caught up in the flow of the sounds and his energy as a performer, and the lyrics quickly started coming back to me so that on the second play I could sing along (to my cats’ chagrin) for almost the entire song. It’s a bouncy tune, trying to be funky but just too white bread to pull it off. It aims for the feel of a rocking gospel tune, with church organ and finger-picked bass, but it’s gospel lite at best. What it really is is a pretty good example of uptempo late 1980s’ blue-eyed soul (the real giveaway is when he adds in saxophone, the official instrument of “someone’s getting laid tonight” of the era), maybe with some sloppy urban thievery, and the whole album would fit nicely on your Hall & Oates or Steve Winwood playlist. I happened to love those guys in the 1980s, so Spence’s record was right in my wheelhouse.
Spence, like a lot of artists, probably didn’t have the career he wanted. “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah” peaked at #32, and that was the end. As best I can tell, he’s managed to release four albums over the past 35 years, only two of which are on Spotify or Apple. He’s still active – he released two singles in 2022, and I can’t say I liked either of them, but that’s just how it is with music: all my faves have music I dislike (or actively hate – cough, “We Didn’t Start the Fire”, cough). I don’t know what else is going on in Judson’s life, but I hope everything has worked out, because his first record gave me a lot of joy in 1988 and the next few years after, and again with relistening to it now. For free, as it was in the beginning.
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