My Favorite Song In The Vinyl Finale

Straight up, it was Clyde McPhatter’s “You’ll Be There.” Not Traffic or Queen or the Stooges or the MC5 (though it was great to be taken out with “Kick Out the Jams”). Not the Nasty Bits. The voice that made me sit up and Shazam (because I was watching the show while lying on the floor on the brink of falling asleep) was Clyde McPhatter’s. His music speaks to me in a way that the edgier late 70s tunes don’t. I was born in the wrong decade.

Fun fact #1: the sound of Nasty Bits is based on the wild, uncategorizable mid-70s band Jack Ruby, whose demos and unreleased recordings were restored from cassette and remastered by yours truly. They were released on boutique label Saint Cecilia Knows, which describes them thusly:

They have been variously described as “the Velvet Underground in a car crash” and the “art-punk Steely Dan”.

Don Fleming and Lee Ranaldo recorded four Jack Ruby songs with James Jagger on vocals for Vinyl, which I would love to hear.

Fun fact #2: I did a bunch of vinyl transfers for Vinyl so they could use authentically clicky, poppy, sometimes warbly music in their sound mixes. Respect, HBO!