Singled Out! #1 -- "Master Jack" / "I Looked Back"

Anytime I’ve thought deeply about the aesthetics of 45 rpm singles, I am reminded of what Peter Buck, former R.E.M. guitarist, and one of my all-time favorite music people, had to say about them in the liner notes to R.E.M. Dead Letter Office rarities compilation:

I’ve always liked singles much more than albums. A single has to be short, concise and catchy, all values that seem to go out the window as far as albums arc concerned. But the thing that I like best about singles is their ultimate shoddiness. No matter how lavish the packaging, no matter what attention to detail, a '45 is still essentially a piece of crap usually purchased by teenagers. This is why musicians feel free to put just about anything on the b-side; nobody will listen to it anyway, so why not have some fun. You can clear the closet of failed experiments, badly written songs, drunken jokes, and occasionally, a worthwhile song that doesn’t fit the feel of an album.

And there you have it. And if you think that Buck’s comment about a single being “a piece of crap” is provocative, consider this: even in era of a renewed interested in vinyl albums, singles have almost no pop cultural currency.

Real memoir talk here: 45 rpm vinyl singles have been part of my life all the way back to the earliest fringes of my memory, and even back beyond that. I played singles on toy record players probably before I entered kindergarten. The first records I ever bought myself, before I could afford albums, were singles and I still own most of those original purchases.

Singles have had greater or lesser importance over the course of my lifetime, with the ten-year period preceding 2024 being a time of lesser interest. Even during that time though, I never seriously considered de-accessioning — as they say in art museums — the 45s. I’ve trimmed the collection now and then but never thought to just outright get rid of it.

My love of singles has recently been reignited in a big way, in part due to some fun crate-digging expeditions I’ve done over the past month, on my own, and with my son Chris, who is currently engaged in the task of finding every Martha and the Vandellas’ single ever released.

Getting back to 45s has obviously given me some “new” old records to play, but this renewed analog fascination has influenced my digital listening as well, since I’ve started making Apple Music playlists based on the singles I’ve been finding. This is leading to musical epiphanies all over the place: long-forgotten minor hits across a wide variety of genres; songs I’d forgotten I loved so much; obscurities that never quite made it; and even a handful of post-1990 music that somehow made it to the 7-inch single format in the CD/Napster/iTunes/whatever age.

Mostly, getting back to 45 rpm singles has been a blast, so I thought I’d share the fun, with a series of entries here, highlighting items in my collection. In the spirit of the 45, these entries (other than this introductory one) will be, as the esteemed Mr. Buck noted, “short, concise and [hopefully] catchy.”

To ensure “short, concise and catchy”, I will limit each of these entries to one single. I’ll tell you about the songs (if what I’m saying intrigues you, you can seek them out on your own) and maybe instill a little bit of my philosophy about singles/life in general along the way.

But enough of my yakkin’. Here’s a few words on our first entry:

Singled Out #1: “Master Jack” / “I Looked Back” — Four Jacks and a Jill (1968)

My friend Shawn recently passed a box of singles on to me. A big chunk of them will be headed to a nearby thrift shop soon — I can’t keep everything these days! — but I’m going through the stack of potential keepers and finding lots of weird little gems, many of which were mid-level hits from 1959 through 1963. That was a liminal, and now often neglected, time in pop music: everybody had gotten over the shock of Elvis and the other early rock’n’rollers, but the Beatles hadn’t come along to shake things up quite yet. So what was going on? Turns out, quite a bit was happening during those years.

I’ll probably get around to some of the ‘59-’63 records in Shawn’s box, but this Four Jacks and Jill record is not one of those. Four Jacks and a Jill was a pop group from South Africa and, if Apple Music is any indication, some iteration of the group released an album as recently as 2010.

“Master Jack” was released on RCA Victor in 1968, and rose to #18 on Billboard’s Top 40 singles chart. “Master Jack” was the band’s only Top 40 entry.

Prior to this weekend, I don’t think I’d heard “Master Jack” before. I’ve now listened to it a bunch of times, and I don’t think I’ll need to hear it too often going forward. It’s cutesy pop music that makes ABBA sound like the Rolling Stones, and I mean Exile on Main Street Rolling Stones (just to be clear: I love ABBA).

The b-side, “I Look Back”, is probably too precious as well, but it’s marginally better than “Master Jack”. "I Look Back” might stick around on my playlists for awhile.

Despite my lukewarm reaction to “Master Jack” and “I Look Back”, I have found myself fascinated by Four Jacks and a Jill for this reason: I am almost certain that I recently had a conversation with somebody during which the other person mentioned a group called Four Jacks and a Jill. I think this person was asking me if I was familiar with such a group, but I don’t know if they were talking about the makers of “Master Jack”.

I’m also not sure if this person was familiar with the infamous Air Force base scene in which Fred Willard’s officer references a band called Four Jacks and a Jill that “works outta Kansas City”. I have always assumed that Willard pulled that name out of his immensely creative brain, but now I am wondering if he had a certain South African pop group in mind?

The fact that I had apparently had a conversation in which “Four Jacks and a Jill” came up just weeks before this single popped into my life feels like a “plate of shrimp” moment to me, compounded by the fact that I cannot remember who the person I had this conversation with was.

This conversation may have occurred at a rooftop bar I recently visited. I was drinking an Old Fashioned, and I was about to cosplay the founder of the organization for which I work in front of an assembled multitude. There were so many people there that the conversation could have happened and I could have easily forgotten all about it by the end of that night. But finding the single shook part of the memory out of my brain.

Or did it? Maybe the Four Jacks and a Jill conversation is a false memory of mine. I won’t have been my first. Or maybe I dreamed the conversation and lost the dream the moment I woke, only to have it flash back to me the moment my eyes fell on the RCA record label.

In any event, I am beguiled by this.

But if it really did happen, if I really did speak to somebody who mentioned Four Jacks and a Jill to me, and if you happen to be that person, please let me know! Maybe we can get together again, enjoy an Old Fashioned and circle back to that conversation.