Late-night burgers in LA with The Temptations on the jukebox.

There’s an all-night burger joint off Sunset Boulevard where Hollywood heads towards Silver Lake and Los Feliz, with the best jukebox you’ll ever find in a fast food restaurant.

Despite its unappealing name, the burgers at Fatburger are pretty great. They’re cooked and made to order, which means you have to wait for your food. That’s when the jukebox comes in.

Late one night, coming home from a gig, my friend Michael (aka Mickey Bee), a native Angeleno and music connoisseur, took me there and told me about the great jukebox. With a wait for our food, it was splendidly serendipitous to flick through and find the full 12-minute version of Papa Was A Rolling Stone.

So we were able to spend our waiting time, late at night in the almost deserted City of Angels with no one but the Mexican server and short order cook for company, drinking a beer (it’s one of the few licensed burger joints) listening to one of the single greatest pieces of music ever composed.

There’s nearly four minutes of that moody intro – the ticking hi-hat and the three-note bassline, the strings gently floating in, the wah-wah guitar, that soaring trumpet. an electric piano…

Then, after what feels like an entire movie soundtrack, the vocals come in with that melancholy memory: “It was the third of September / That day I’ll always remember / ‘Cause that was the day / That my daddy died.”

Each line has a pause at the end for a little curlicue of guitar to accentuate the emotion of the memory, while the rest of the song consists of the four band members, playing the part of siblings who have never known their absentee father, questioning their Mamma about their dead Pop’s peregrinations.

Each time she brushes his crimes and misdemeanours under the carpet with the chorus line: “When he died, all he left us was a loan” – the poignant double meaning in the word all too clear.

The most heartbreaking bit is when they interrogate her about all the rumours they’ve heard about him. The falsetto voice asks whether it’s true that he never worked a day in his life and the bass vocal queries the talk of the town that he had another three “outside children and another wife – and that ain’t right.”

Another brother questions whether he really was a bogus preacher “stealing in the name of the Lord,” while the fourth concludes that he never was much on thinking, “spent most of his time chasing women and drinking.”

At that point Maurice Davis’s celestial trumpet solo comes in, swathed in swirling strings sounding like a shimmering dub production by Lee Perry.
Norman Whitfield, its creator, would sadly soon be sacked by the band for his extravagant psychedelic soul productions with the Funk Brothers – adored by critics but increasingly at odds with the group’s preference for the more traditional soul ballads with which they had made their name.

It’s just glorious, all 12 minutes of it, though the seven-minute single version is still one of the all-time greats, especially when performed live. The burgers were pretty great too.

Ps. I never knew til now that the song was originally recorded by The Undisputed Truth in 1971.