9:17 p.m. - 2003-10-20
i make hamburgers, i get all the girls.
i am very very busy and the last thing i should be doing is goofing around on the internet, but a few minutes won't really kill me. anyway i am pumped. nothing will stop me now.
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songs that time forgot, #2:
Song: I Make Hamburgers
Artist: The Whitlams
Album: Undeniably The Whitlams [maybe - see below]
Sample Lyric: "Hey that's a salad roll, I said / And we started going out."
Ampresands (out of 5): & & & & &
A joyous, summery confection of a tune, "I Make Hamburgers" is made up of leftover parts from at least a few other songs (it yanks the piano line from what I'm fairly sure is "Summer Breeze" verbatim) but glides past all suspicion on giddy charm if nothing else. Loaded with sweet little keyboard fills and unobtrusive guitar work, the song puts the emphasis on the vocals, which waffle between the endearingly banal and the charmingly obscure. The plot? The song's narrator is a burger-flipper with a knack for picking up his female customers by making witty, flattering comments based on their orders, ie: "My second customer was Susan / She came in for Diet Pepsi, morning tea / each day, and I said / you don't need to be on a diet, wanna come out tonight?" Somehow this manages to come off as sweet, rather than creepy; the chorus veers off into weirdland with a strangely specific plan for the upcoming date: "I said I'll bring Gringo / He's got a lot of money [�] He'll buy us those beers / They give it to you in bottles, with lemon on top / and it don't taste too bad, I'm telling you."* Uh�okay? Leaving aside the sort of nondescript blahness of these "clever" lyrics, the song has a great happy punch to it - not bad at all for material that could have easily turned into a dreadfully unfunny boast.
The exact situation of this song as a hit/non-hit/song that time forgot is somewhat mysterious to me. I first heard it on snooty hipster radio, but AllMusic.com, in its biography of the Whitlams, remarks that "a track from /Undeniably The Whitlams/, "I Make Hamburgers", [received] significant airplay." Perhaps this was only in the band's native Australia? Regardless, AllMusic's link to the album leads to�.nowhere at all, a curious oversight that makes the song even more of a cipher. For my purposes, it's assuredly one of the nicest little Songs That Time Forgot of the last decade.
* As usual, this part is improved greatly if you get the words wrong. The first time I heard the song I was driving around with Julie Hathaway and Travis Hallenbeck, member of the sensational local band Green Bean Go, and I could swear the guy was singing "I said, ah, Green Bean Go has got a lot of money!" This may not work as well if you're not familiar with Green Bean Go (and their distinct lack of a lot of money) but hey.
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time to be productive.
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