A Timeless Wavelength

Mouse and the Traps – A Public Execution

All musicians are constantly being influenced by the music they hear.  The boundaries between “ripoff” and “tribute,” and between “tribute” and “unconscious influence,” aren’t very clear, as George Harrison could have attested.  Sometimes it’s not even obvious who is ripping off whom.

Case in point:  You all know that Robert Allen Zimmerman of Hibbing, Minnesota changed his name to Bob Dylan and tried to become the next Woody Guthrie.  As part of this transformation he ditched his Midwestern accent and affected a vaguely Texan one.  He then built a career on songs in the style of the folk music and blues of the American South.

Meanwhile, Ronnie “Mouse” Weiss was growing up in Tyler, Texas.  He had a Texas accent because that’s the way everybody he knew talked.  He played bluesy, folksy music because that’s what he heard around him.  In the mid-1960s his band Mouse and the Traps scored a minor hit with “A Public Execution.”  Everyone said, “This guy’s a total Dylan ripoff!  Just listen to him!”

Now, there are too many similarities, and Dylan was by then too well-known, for anyone to claim that Mouse wasn’t influenced by Dylan.  The imitation was probably even deliberate.  But is it fair to claim that Mouse was a Dylan ripoff? More likely, this guy heard some Midwesterner trying to copy the music and accents he grew up with, and said, “I’m the real thing.  I can do Dylan better than Dylan can.”  He never did go on to achieve Dylan’s mass appeal, but he did manage to record some catchy songs in the process.

It reminds me of a band I once saw in a touristy “blues bar” in Memphis, Tennessee.  I noticed all the songs they were playing were blues songs that had become hits only when they were covered by white rock bands.  They seemed to be staying closer to the style of the rock covers than the blues originals, too.  Here were a group of black blues musicians in Memphis, Tennessee, trying to sound like British art school students from the Sixties trying to sound like black blues musicians in Memphis, Tennessee.  Except I’ll bet nobody ever called them Rolling Stones ripoffs.

So let’s just enjoy Mouse and the Traps.  No matter who they sound like.