Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress

You are locked on The Zoo, the listener-supported, commercial-free rock station bringing the deep cuts and the big ones back to the air the way Dallas used to hear them. This one is a record that still fools people the first time it comes up. Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress, The Hollies, off the 1971 album Distant Light. If you only know the Manchester boys for the chiming guitars and the three-part stack on Bus Stop or Carrie Anne, this cut will throw you. No choir of voices. No polite British pop polish. Just a chugging riff, a dry kit, and a voice that sounds like it crawled out of a bayou instead of an AIR Studios room in London.

The song is a little noir movie set in American Prohibition. An undercover man is working a joint when the feds roll in. The place is full of bad company, the barrels are about to get smashed, and then he clocks a woman at the bar. She is five foot nine, beautiful and tall, a long cool woman in a black dress, and the line about a pair of .45s that made him open his eyes is the kind of double meaning songwriters used to get away with on the radio. He does not want her caught in the raid. Shots ring out. He gets her clear. Allan Clarke has said the whole thing was sketched in about five minutes. Roger Cook, the British writer who also had a hand in I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing, remembers it differently in the details and the same in the spirit. June 1971, Cook's office on Park Street in London, a lunch near Marble Arch with wine and a brandy, then back to the upright piano. They wanted speakeasies, G-men, and Hollywood bad guys. Cook locked a blues figure on the keys. Clarke put the guitar under it. Cook had a standing deal with his partner Roger Greenaway that songs either of them wrote got both names, so the label reads Clarke, Cook, and Greenaway even though Clarke later told the BBC it was him and Cook in the room.

They cut it in July 1971 while Distant Light was being finished at AIR Studios, the George Martin room that was brand new then. Longtime Hollies producer Ron Richards was out sick the day they tracked it, so the band produced the take themselves and Richards mixed it when he got back. That accident is the whole sound. Clarke played the riff himself. Tony Hicks, the guitarist who usually owned every Hollies lead, was not needed on the figure Clarke had already built. Bobby Elliott is on the drums, Bernie Calvert on bass. Clarke has said that with Hicks in the building you normally hand him the guitar, but this one was his. The vocal is the other shock. The Hollies were harmony singers. This track has none of that. Clarke pushed the mic into a swamp-rock bark. He has pointed at early Elvis rockabilly, the Sun Records bite of something like Mystery Train, and the session started as a Jerry Reed country-rockabilly idea. By the time the echo was on the vocal and the guitar was saturated, everybody in America heard Creedence Clearwater Revival and Green River. Cash Box reviewed it as rocking in the tradition of Creedence and T. Rex, the most commercial Hollies single since He Ain't Heavy. John Fogerty was not flattered. He filed over the resemblance. The matter was settled out of court, and the widely told version is that Fogerty came away with a share of the song. Years later Fogerty got sued by his old label for sounding too much like himself. Rock and roll keeps the books in strange ways.

Distant Light came out in Britain in October 1971, the band's eleventh UK album and one of the first records associated with AIR. The American company was slower. Epic had passed on the album at first. The single did not land until April 17, 1972, Parlophone at home, with Cable Car on the British flip and Look What We've Got on the American one. It entered the Billboard Hot 100 in June 1972 and sat at number two for two weeks in September, blocked by Gilbert O'Sullivan's Alone Again (Naturally). Billboard ranked it the number 24 song of the year. It went to number one in Canada, number two in Australia and New Zealand, and only number 32 in Britain, where the Hollies were still filed under the old harmony hits. Worldwide sales have been put around two million, about a million and a half of them in the States. The album itself eventually made the Billboard 200, helped by this track and by Tony Hicks's Long Dark Road.

Here is the twist that makes the record a radio story and not just a chart story. By the time America could not get enough of Long Cool Woman, Allan Clarke was gone. He had wanted a solo album. The band and the producer put the choice to him: the group or the solo career, not both. He walked after Distant Light. Swedish singer Mikael Rickfors took the microphone for the next two records, and neither of those albums moved the way the old Hollies records had. The group was out promoting a smash written, sung, and riffed by a man who was no longer in the lineup. Clarke came back in 1973. He has said the timing was not a disaster for him, because his name was on the song. For the band it was the record that kept the American door open after the British Invasion years had cooled.

The Hollies came out of Manchester in 1962, built around childhood friends Allan Clarke and Graham Nash, with Tony Hicks on guitar and, soon enough, Bobby Elliott on drums. Bernie Calvert settled in on bass. They were the bright, tight end of British beat music: Just One Look, Look Through Any Window, Bus Stop, Stop Stop Stop, On a Carousel, Carrie Anne. Nash left in 1968 for Crosby, Stills and Nash, and Terry Sylvester stepped into the harmony chair. He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother in 1969 proved they could still own a ballad without Nash. Long Cool Woman proved they could throw the harmonies out and still own a rock station. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame finally called them in 2010. Hicks and Elliott carried the live band for decades after Clarke's later retirement from the road. The catalog never really left the dial.

Put the needle on Distant Light and the rest of the album is still a Hollies record, melodic and carefully built. Then this track starts and the room changes. A Manchester band, a London studio, a song about a New York raid, a singer doing his best bayou bark, and a hit that arrived after the singer had already left. That is the kind of story that belongs on a freeform rock station. Stay with The Zoo for the rest of the cut and the ones that follow it.

Hear more deep cuts and the records that built this format at The Zoo. The Hollies keep the official word at theholliesofficial.com and on the long-running site hollies.co.uk. Find the band on Facebook, Instagram, and X.