She Wants You

Zoo Freaks, the Zoo Crew just laid the needle on a record that still smells like warm vinyl and Memphis neon. She Wants You by The Breaks, the opener off their self-titled album The Breaks, is the kind of 1983 rock and roll that a biker DJ can ride all the way down the fairway without once reaching for a playlist. It is spare, tight, and a little dangerous, with group harmonies stacked where a lesser band would have dumped a synthesizer solo. Pat Taylor and Susanne Jerome Taylor wrote it together, and if you have ever heard a husband-and-wife team lock into a chorus like that, you already know why the Zoo Crew keeps this one in the crate.

The song clocks in around three minutes and fifty-seven seconds, and it was the first thing RCA wanted the world to hear. The label pulled it as a single in the summer of 1983, backed with Keepin' the Love Alive, catalog number RCA 13583. By October it had climbed to number 39 on the Billboard Top Tracks chart, which in those days was the rock radio scoreboard that mattered. A video directed by Martin Kahan slipped into MTV rotation, and that clip kept the song alive long after the chart run cooled. Years later it kept turning up on eighties hits collections, the way a good leather jacket keeps turning up in the back of the closet.

The story behind the track is pure Memphis stubbornness. Pat Taylor was born in Little Rock and landed in Memphis as a kid. Messick High School put him in the Castlemen, then the Village Sound, whose Steve Cropper-produced single Hey Jack (Don't Hijack My Plane) became a regional hit on Stax's Hip imprint in 1968. From there he moved through Edgewood, which became D. Beaver and the Combinations, then the AOR outfit Jaguar, which cut an album for RCA in 1977, and a long stretch as guitarist and singer with Larry Raspberry and the Highsteppers. Jon Hornyak, a longtime Memphis musician and studio hand, once said the Village Sound was one of the coolest of the Memphis garage bands, and that Pat always had a great voice and tons of charisma. He looked like a rock star from the very beginning.

Susanne Jerome came up the same river. A native Memphian, she cut her first single at nineteen, Light in the Long Run, for Mercury, with Cropper and Duck Dunn in the room and the Pointer Sisters on the backup vocals. She built a following in local rooms, then crossed paths with Pat, who was a Mercury artist himself at the time. They married in 1980. Before the band even had a name that stuck, the two of them co-wrote the FM100 theme Memphis I'm Coming Home to You, the one that goes My Radio's Pickin' Up FM100, and that jingle held down the air for three years running. If that does not sound like a couple who understood radio, the Zoo Crew does not know what does.

They put The Breaks together in Memphis with keyboardist Tom Ward, bassist Rob Caudill, and drummer Russ Caudill, a five-piece that built a local following on original songs instead of cover-band leftovers. RCA A&R director Nancy Jeffries heard them while they were scraping together a self-financed album, and the label signed them after eight months of back-and-forth. Sessions wrapped in April 1983 at Sunset Sound Factory in Los Angeles. Songwriter-producer Vini Poncia, the same cat who had just worked the Scandal EP and Ellen Foley's Another Breath, sat in the chair. Engineer Bob Schaper and assistant David Egerton ran the board. The record came out in July 1983 on RCA as AFL1-4675, ten songs, a little under forty minutes, the kind of album you can flip without losing the thread.

She Wants You sits in the pole position, and it earns it. The production stays out of the way. The harmonies land exactly where they should. Susanne co-wrote nine of the ten songs on the album, five of them with Pat alone. Wishy Washy brings in Tom Ward and D. Ward. Fire in the Wire pairs her with John Paul Daniel. Lonely Girls is the only cut without a Taylor credit. The sleeve, art-directed by Norman Moore, the same hand behind The Police's Synchronicity cover, and shot by Raúl Vega, splits the band across pastel wall panels, four of them grouped on the left and Susanne standing off by herself on the right. It looks like a band that already knew who carried the chorus.

Hornyak later put the whole thing in one clean line. Pat and Susanne were so perfect, he said: this couple who had great songs, great vocals, and a great look. They had all the things major labels were looking for at the dawn of music videos. The Breaks' little run helped wake the big labels back up to Memphis after a quiet stretch, and a string of signings followed. Fire in the Wire came out as the second single in January 1984, flipped with Green Eyes and given a fresh mix by Poncia. That song later got a second life when Bailey and the Boys covered it. Susanne's writing traveled even farther than the band did. Robin Trower cut All That I Want. Martha Reeves and the Vandellas took a pass at Light in the Long Run. She picked up two Premier Player Awards for Best Female Vocalist from the Memphis chapter of NARAS along the way.

The band did not stay The Breaks forever. Pat and Susanne regrouped as Drama and cut Scene from a Distance for RCA in 1985, a slicker record with outside co-writers and a studio crew that included Jack Holder, Joni Mitchell bassist Larry Klein, and a guest turn from Paulinho Da Costa. Paralyze was the lead track, and it had that hi-tech dance-floor snap the mid-eighties loved. Rob and Russ Caudill went on to The Willys with Memphis guitarist Shawn Lane. Pat eventually settled in behind the glass at Ardent Studios and Kiva, engineering sessions for Albert King, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Joe Walsh, then founded All Access Tech and kept playing around town with Susanne and their son Paul. Larry Raspberry, who had known him for life, called him a great talent and an extremely well-formed and balanced human being. Pat died in Memphis on February 11, 2015, at sixty-five, after a long fight with cancer. The songs stayed.

That is the trip the Zoo Crew hears every time She Wants You comes around on THE ZOO. A Messick High kid, a Stax-side single, a marriage, a self-financed tape, eight months of label haggling, a room at Sunset Sound Factory, and a chorus that still sounds like somebody leaning across a table and telling you the truth. The long version of the band's run, from the RCA album through the Drama years, is written up clean over at JazzRockSoul, and Bob Mehr's piece in the Commercial Appeal holds the quotes from the people who actually stood in the room with them. No fan-club handshake required. Just the record, the story, and a room full of Zoo Freaks who still know a deep cut when the needle finds it.