"Come As You Are" by Peter Wolf

Song#:  3042
Date:  02/29/1987
Debut:  71
Peak:  15
Weeks:  15
Genre:  Rock



Pop Bits:  This former J. Geils Band lead singer started off his solo career on a good note with his 1984 debut LP Lights Out going to #24 and generating the #12 title track (#6 Rock). Three years later he returned with his follow-up effort Come As You Are. The title track would be issued out as the lead single and it did excellent at Rock reaching the #1 spot. It also did well on the Pop chart becoming his second Top 20 entry. Yet despite the hit, the album didn't sell as well as his debut and it stalled at a low #53.

ReduxReview:  A simple, but effective guitar lick starts this rock raver. It's a party song with a hooky chorus that even includes some "woo-woo" background vocals. The production is nice-n-beefy with a great band and hot sax solo. This is a song you can hear on a cruddy day and it will immediately perk you up. I liked this tune when it first came out, but for some reason I didn't pick up the single or the album, which was a mistake. I really liked his previous LP Lights Out so it's weird I didn't grab this one. Might have been finance limitations at the time, as was often the case back in my college days. The video for this song is awesome (see below) and between that and this song, if you don't wanna hop around and party, you just don't have this cranked up enough.

ReduxRating:  8/10

Trivia:   The video for this song pay homage to a scene from an old movie musical. The 1953 film Small Town Girl starred Jane Powell, Farley Granger, and Ann Miller. It featured several musical numbers including "My Flaming Heart," which was sung by Nat King Cole in a guest appearance. That song would be nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Song. Two other staged musical numbers would actually outlive the film. Ann Miller tapped her way across a stage in "I've Gotta Hear That Beat" where the floor was full of disembodied arms/hands playing various musical instrument. It became one of Miller's most famous routines. The second one had co-star Bobby Van literally hoping around town during an instrumental version of the film's song "Take Me to Broadway." In the scene, Van emerges from a house and proceeds to hop to the beat of the music. He hops all about the town encountering traffic, hedges, dogs, and various people. He also hops by a billboard advertising the 1952 Lana Turner film The Merry Widow. For the video of "Come As You Are," Wolf recreates the scene and hops around a 1950's town. He also happens to hop past a billboard poster of a movie, but this time around it was an ad for the film he was paying homage to, Small Town Girl.

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