R. Dean Taylor – Indiana Wants Me

5th June 1971 · 1970s, 1971, Music

There are songs you hear so often that you never want to hear them again. And ones that still lift your spirits as soon as they start to play. This is one of those.

I remember reading once that R.Dean Taylor was the first white artist ever signed to Motown (he wasn’t – but he was the first to have a hit). He was already a staff songwriter at Motown, and co-wrote hits for The Temptations, The Supremes and The Four Tops with Eddie Holland of the legendary Holland-Dozier-Holland songwriting team.

His first solo single in 1965, a protest song called Let’s Go Somewhere, went nowhere. His second, There’s A Ghost In My House, also flopped – but became a hit nearly a decade later thanks to its popularity on the Northern Soul circuit.

In between, he hit the UK charts with Gotta See Jane in 1968 and followed it up with this song, which reached No.2 in April 1971. Taylor, a Canadian, wrote it after seeing the film Bonnie & Clyde, inspiring this first-person account of a fugitive who has shot a man for insulting his girl.

Once again, I don’t think I’d ever paused since childhood to ponder what the song was about, despite the wailing police sirens and a straightforward narrative lyric, including the excellent line “If a man ever needed dyin’ he did / No one had the right to say what he said / About you”. I might have worked it out if I’d seen this video before now.

Apparently some radio stations removed the police sirens from the record because of drivers complaining that when they heard it on the car radio they pulled over, thinking the sirens were real.