The Beach Boys' "Amusement Parks U.S.A."

This morning I listened to a compilation album of the Coasters.  A spoken line at the beginning of "Little Egypt" caught my attention:  "Just one thin dime, one tenth of a dollar."  I had to reference the recording to get the exact phrase, but word-for-word, this is almost the same exhortation that's in the Beach Boys' "Amusement Parks U.S.A." on the Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!) album.  There, it's "One thin dime, just one tenth of a dollar."

Last time I did Collection Audit, I postulated that that phrase in "Amusement Parks U.S.A." came from the song "Broadway," specifically the line "One thin dime won't even shine your shoes."  This song by the Coasters seems much more likely to be the actual origin though.  While I don't know if the Beach Boys were familiar with this song, both it and "Amusement Parks U.S.A." have a carnival-esque atmosphere.

The Coasters' "Little Egypt"

I already wrote a post about the Coasters compilation album I listened to this morning, but I found enough to say about "Little Egypt" that I felt I should make it a separate post.

At first, all I was going to say was that Leiber and Stoller use the phrase "one thin dime" again.  ("Just one thin dime, one tenth of a dollar, step right up, folks")  It also appears in "On Broadway."  ("One thin dime won't even shine your shoes.")

I actually don't know much about "On Broadway," but according to internet research, it was written by Leiber and Stoller along with Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil.  It's possible that Mann and Weil came up with the line while writing "On Broadway," and then Leiber and Stoller later used it in "Little Egypt."  I don't know how the chronology fits into this either.  ("Little Egypt" was released in April 1961.)

But because I'm transcribing the lyrics for the songs whose lyrics I comment on, I found some other interesting things:

There's some opposites in the line "They pulled the curtain up and when they turned a spotlight way down low."

There's a fair amount of alliteration in some lines:  "Little Egypt came out strutting, wearing nothing but a button and a bow," "She had a ruby on her tummy and a diamond big as Texas on her toe," and "When she did her special number on a zebra skin I thought she’d stop the show."

And, finally, there's some internal rhyme in a line in the last verse:  "She’s too busy mopping and a-takin’ care of shoppin’ at the store."

The Robins' "Riot in Cell Block #9"

This morning I listened to a compilation album of The Coasters, which also includes two songs by The Robins (an earlier group that evolved into the Coasters).  I found "Riot in Cell Block #9" interesting because of the connections it has to Ritchie Valens' "Framed," which I listened to a few days ago on a compilation album of Valens (I'm in the midst of the The Very Best of albums).  While listening to "Framed," I noticed some musical similarity between it and "Riot in Cell Block #9" - specifically that both songs are built around a riff that separates each line of the verses.  Both also have repetitious choruses and feature verses that - aside from the punctuating riff - are unaccompanied by any instruments (or mostly unaccompanied, there's slight percussion throughout the verses in "Framed").  So I noticed that they were similar, but I didn't think any more about it.

But then I listen to "Riot in Cell Block #9," and the first line is "On July the 2nd, 1953."  That was pretty good evidence for the two songs' being related since "Framed" contains the line "He says, 'Where were you on the night of July 1953?'"  Both songs are musically similar, refer to July 1953, and mention law enforcement in one form or an-other.

But then I looked up the publication data and discovered that both were written by Leiber and Stoller, so the two songs are irrefutably related.  They both seem to have the same setting, although the singer/speaker couldn't be the same in both.