Every Moment Has A Song

Manfred Mann: “My Name is Jack” (1968)

Manfred Mann’s nursery rhyme-ish 1968 single (#8 UK, #104 US) was one of the more often-played 45’s in my proud collection as a four-year-old, and more recently became a favorite of my granddaughter at about the same age.

But the more you learn about the song’s origins, the less like a nursery rhyme it all seems.

The Greta Garbo Home for Wayward Boys and Girls was a real place. San Francisco’s Kirkland Hotel, a Victorian-style hostel located not far from the Fillmore, got its nickname from a Greta Garbo poster on its wall.

The characters in the song–written by American John Simon and featured in the 1968 counterculture documentary You Are What You Eat–were also real.

“Superman” (originally “Superspade” but altered for the song’s American release) was a drug dealer.

Some reminiscences of former residents:

I remember it well. The guys who opened it were enamored of the beats and want to recreate that era. When they were first opened (with very little in the way of renovation) some of the residents found a cache of old but never worn high button shoes in the basement and soon hippie chicks all over the bay area were wearing them. The last time I was there, I went to see Betsy, a skinny southern girl and a quy I owed 20 bills to and had lost track of for 2 years. Someone told me Betsy knew where he was and, indeed, he was living on the same floor as she. By then the building was overrun with hippies and the lobby was full of runaways just hanging out (must have been 50 or 60 young kids there). There were two SFPD detectives walking around with a poster board covered with photos asking: “Have you seen any of these people”. People were freely smoking weed in front of these cops. I was told the floors of the building had been informally divided up by drug of choice with potheads on the first floor, acidheads on the second and ending up with the Meth Monsters on the 5th. As you walked the hallway you could see that every door had been kicked in at least once (management? cops? thieves?) and had hasps and padlocks on them.

And…

We got one of the rooms with a bay window – on which we painted a picture of HULK. We were scared to death that heavy dopers would crash through the thin wooden door – but the Hulk seemed to scare them away.

Our room overlooked a little deli that sold tiny loaves of bread for like a nickel. I think we lived on those. We drove a VW bus of course.

And…

Super Spade, featured prominently in the film was a friend of my older brother, who lived at 408 Ashbury, a block-&-a-half north of Haight. Bro told me Super got into dealing drugs, and got himself killed in an unsolved crime.

The Kirkland was eventually demolished, and a church was opened on the site in 1975.

It’s odd that an English band would record a song extolling the rather unremarkable real-life residents of a seedy San Francisco hotel.

It’s odder still that it would be a top 20 hit in the UK, Ireland, Austria, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the Netherlands but not the U.S.

But oddest of all is that this nursery rhyme of a pop song (in reality an ode to flower power gone to seed) washing back onto American shores as an obscurity, would find the eager ears of a four-year-old on the east coast in 1968, and do the same once more in the 2020’s.