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| "Do the Dangle" | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
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| Single by John Entwistle | ||||
| from the album Rigor Mortis Sets In | ||||
| A-side | "Do the Dangle" | |||
| B-side | "Gimme' That Rock 'n' Roll" | |||
| Released | May (UK), June (US) Both 1973 | |||
| Format | Vinyl single, 7" single, 45 RPM | |||
| Recorded | Nova Sound Studios, London, England, October - November 1972 | |||
| Genre | Rock, hard rock, rock and roll, rockabilly, country | |||
| Length | 4:05 | |||
| Label | Track Records | |||
| Songwriter(s) | John Entwistle | |||
| Producer(s) | John Entwistle, John Alcock | |||
| John Entwistle singles chronology | ||||
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"Do the Dangle" is a song written by John Entwistle. The song is on his album, Rigor Mortis Sets In . This entire album is an affectionate homage to, or satire of, 1950s and 1960s rock music. In addition to some actual "oldies", original compositions include "Roller Skate Kate" and "Peg Leg Peggy". The lyrics for the latter say that Peggy "really knows how to hop", a phrase originally used in rock songs to mean that a person was a skilled dancer, but in this case is a blackly humorous reference to Peggy having an artificial ("peg") leg.
John Alec Entwistle was an English bass guitarist, singer, songwriter, and film and music producer. In a music career that spanned more than 40 years, Entwistle was best known as the original bass guitarist for the English rock band The Who. He was the only member of the band to have formal musical training. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the Who in 1990.
An album is a collection of audio recordings issued as a collection on compact disc (CD), vinyl, audio tape, or another medium. Albums of recorded music were developed in the early 20th century as individual 78-rpm records collected in a bound book resembling a photograph album; this format evolved after 1948 into single vinyl LP records played at 33 1⁄3 rpm. Vinyl LPs are still issued, though album sales in the 21st-century have mostly focused on CD and MP3 formats. The audio cassette was a format used alongside vinyl from the 1970s into the first decade of the 2000s.
Rigor Mortis Sets In is the third solo album by John Entwistle, who was the bassist for The Who. Distributed by Track Records, the album was named John Entwistle's Rigor Mortis Sets In in the U.S. Co-produced by Entwistle and John Alcock, it consists of three Fifties rock and roll covers, a new version of the Entwistle song "My Wife" from The Who's album Who's Next, and new tracks. Rigor Mortis Sets In set in motion John Entwistle assembling his own touring unit during the increasing periods of The Who's inactivity.
The song is also found on Entwistle's compilation album So Who's The Bass Player? The Ox Anthology.
The BBC said that "Do The Dangle" song "prospers" Entwistle's dark sense of humour, and that it is a "1950s" rock and roll homage about strangulation. [1]
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters are at Broadcasting House in Westminster, London, and it is the world's oldest national broadcasting organisation and the largest broadcaster in the world by number of employees. It employs over 20,950 staff in total, 16,672 of whom are in public sector broadcasting. The total number of staff is 35,402 when part-time, flexible, and fixed-contract staff are included.
The song's opening lines list actual popular dances from the early to middle 1960s: the Shake, Boogaloo, Mashed Potatoes, Hoochie-Coo, Twist, and Funky Chicken. All of these dances, and numerous others, were created after the huge international popularity of the aforementioned Twist, which began in 1960 with the release of the song of the same name by Hank Ballard. A sound-alike cover version by Chubby Checker tremendously out-sold the original, and was the first recording to attain the number one position on Billboard magazine's Top 100 listing in two different years (1960 and 1961). The overall dance fad faded after 1965 when progressive rock music rapidly evolved away from lightweight subjects like dancing.
In "Do the Dangle", composer Entwistle sings of three new dances, invented by him in 1972 but described in the style which would have been used a decade earlier. These are the Wheezy, the Strike, and the Dangle. Instructions for dancing the latter, from the lyrics, are:
"Here's a brand new dance with a brand new angle / It's the very last waltz, and it's called the Dangle / You tie a rope 'round your neck, then you stand on a chair / Then you kick it away, and you're dancing on air." [2]
The dark humor of this ironically light-hearted description of suicide by strangulation ends with Entwistle urging his listeners, "Everybody get up and - swing!" This phrase too had been used in older songs as an exhortation to dance, but here conjures a vision of a body swinging from a rope.
Entwistle called this album "Rigor Mortis Sets In" and illustrated the cover with a photo of a coffin and a grave, implying that rock music was dying or dead, and that one could only look back at its earlier days of glory. In fact it was released just as a re-appreciation of older rock & roll was just getting started, which served to invigorate the careers of former singing stars and introduced their songs to a new audience. An early manifestation of this awareness was the performance of the group "Sha Na Na" (a nonsense phrase from the 1950s doo-wop song "Get A Job") who sang 1958's "At The Hop" at the Woodstock music festival in 1969. Popular music had changed so drastically in the previous ten years that the Woodstock audience could laugh knowingly at the perceived naivete of the 1950s. The film "American Graffiti", first shown in 1973 (the same year of "Rigor Mortis Sets In") was the real instigation of the fad for the so-called "Fabulous '50s" which also inspired the hit TV series "Happy Days". Although "American Graffiti" was set in 1962, its soundtrack featured 1950s music, to emphasize that society was about to change drastically the following year with the death of President Kennedy and the subsequent upheavals in much of society.
