Take a Letter, Maria

In 2001—man, it doesn’t seem that long ago—Nixon’s Head, the band I’ve played in with old friends for nearly ever, was invited to contribute to a Muscle Shoals tribute album, Burlap Palace. The only requirements were that the song had to originally be recorded at Muscle Shoals and our version had to be recorded at a then-newly opened studio that was trying to make its name in town. As usual, we jumped at the chance to record and release a new song. As big soul music fans with a history of having covered plenty of soul chestnuts we figured we’d have no problem choosing a track. Then, as usual, we over thought the offer and spent 2 weeks sending each other detailed lists and frequently heated reasons why every song under consideration wasn’t quite right.

As much as we loved soul music and, Yankees that we were, thought all those southern scenes overlapped, we learned that we were not exactly connoisseurs of the Muscle Shoals Sound. They often seemed to drag the sweet soul music of Stax/Volt recordings into the unwashed early ’70s. The choice wasn’t going to be as easy as we imagined. The songs that first jumped out at us were quickly wiped off the boards. For instance, we had no hope of doing anything worthwhile with titanic Muscle Shoals recordings like “Brown Sugar” or “I’ll Take You There.” Had we still had my original guitar partner, Mike (aka John Quincy Nixon) in the band, the guy I taught how to play our nascent Head songs and punk rock favorites while he slaved away at learning every Lynyrd Skynyrd lick, we would have latched onto “That Smell” from Street Survivors. Mike had long ago moved across the country. We wisely avoided falling prey to our slave-to-humor tendencies and taking a crack at Bob Seger‘s “Night Moves.”

One poppy song that fit our core interests kept coming to mind: R. B. Greaves‘ “Take a Letter, Maria.” I grew up loving that song, and I knew our singer, my old friend Andy (Townsman andyr in these parts), did too. Hell, I’d spent a day with him in 5th grade crouched under a covered card table, spinning 45s for a nickle as The Human Jukebox at a school fair. We talked about it outside rehearsals, outside the e-mail chains with the rest of the band, as we often did (and, sadly, still do) when we feel the need to build a coalition behind what may be an unpopular position. We were always the AM radio guys in our band. Our guitarist-bassist, Mike (aka Chickenfrank), grew up as much a British Invasion and punk fan as we were, but he was a tougher sell on the kind of bubblegum stuff we dug (unless a Monkees cover was on the table). Our drummer, Seth (aka Sethro in these parts), was an easier sell for an AM radio staple. Andy and I planned to lobby Seth first. Our bassist at the time, John, was easygoing. Keyboardist/singer Dorothy may have had the best ’60s singles collection among us. We figured she’d be on board with this choice.

Growing up I really loved “Take a Letter, Maria.” It had a chooglin’ rhythm, like a CCR song, which I’d been a sucker for as long as I’d remembered. It had the “bullfighting” horns I’d first dug on my Mom’s Herb Alpert records. It told a story, a skill which in itself dazzled me as far back as my earliest record-spinning years spent rocking away and time traveling to The Band‘s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” As I got into my teens and the realities of my Mom’s pain and loneliness over her divorce sunk irreparably into my own world, the song took on further meaning.

My Mom was a secretary. Her name is similar to the name of the woman in the song, and she often expressed a desire to restart her life with that more romantic version of her name. After an early childhood of not knowing her that well, while she fretted over me as a new Mom will do with her first kid and while she left the house for her second job as a hot pants-and-boots wearing waitress minutes after my Dad got home from work, we became close and friendly during my early teens, when our family was down to me, her, and my little brother. Along with being her firstborn and most hounded, I became her confidant, sometimes willingly, sometimes not so willingly. There were times she needed to talk, and I was the next-most  mature person around. Often she’d come home and unload about her day at the office. I’d get a clear picture of her office dynamic and the men she supported in her day job. She was many things, but most of all a good secretary to these guys. Like the Maria in the song, she was often their confidant, either directly indirectly called into the middle of their personal business.

She had a lot of respect for the men she supported as a secretary. And loyalty, one of her undying qualities. She liked these guys, occasionally inconsiderate ways and all, and thought some of them deserved better than their harping wives, women who’d never worked a day in their lives, women who spent and spent and spent, women who didn’t pay bills, women who didn’t cook, women who had nannies watch over their kids while they did god knows what with their free time. She’d suck me into her world, her experiences as a kind of trailblazing single mom in the mid-’70s, often working 2 jobs, raising 2 fatherless boys, and taking things one day at a time (but without half the patience of Bonnie Franklin). The deeper I empathized with her plight the deeper strange fantasies developed in my mind whenever I heard “Take a Letter, Maria.” It was played on an oldies show we used to listen to in car rides home from often volatile Sunday dinners at my grandparents’ house. When the boss in the song sees his secretary in a “sweet” light and asks her out to dinner I would imagine a similar fantasy happening to my Mom the secretary. I would imagine her having a real partner and my brother and I having a real father. I gave no thought to the guy’s wife and kids while Greaves’ smooth voice carried over that chooglin’ rhythm and the bullfighting brass.

So, getting back to the band and the decision to cover this song for the Muscle Shoals tribute… Andy and I had Seth lined up to support our choice. We pitched it at rehearsal that night. Mike was not sold on the idea. John was agreeable; he was always agreeable. Dorothy, who is as hard working and loyal and sensitive as anyone I know dropped a bomb on our campaign, getting really worked up over how sexist the song was. I was shocked. I knew people joked about that song being, let’s say, quaint, but I had never considered it sexist. I had this weird fantasy built up from my youth. I’d grown up hearing this song as something almost liberating, at least as liberating as things were going get in our world circa 1977. I tried to express some of this to my bandmates in the heat of our little studio, with cords at our feet and amps buzzing. They heard me out. They respected my take on things, as these great old friends have done so often, or maybe I just wore them down or pulled them into my weird world, the way my Mom could do to me.

[audio:https://www.rocktownhall.com/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/08-Take-A-Letter-Maria.mp3|titles=08 Take A Letter Maria]

Here’s our humble take on a childhood favorite, complete with a patented Nixon’s Head-style forearm-pumping outro. RIP R. B. Greaves.