"Cry One More Time."

Performed by the J. Geils Band. Written by Seth Justman and Peter Wolf. Produced by Bill Szymczyk. From the album The Morning After, Atlantic Records, 1971.

by Bill Tuomala

Gram Parsons slacked his way through a song called "Cry One More Time" on his debut solo album. Your best bet is to stick with the Geils original. It starts with a simple piano and guitar intro followed immediately by the chorus two times:

Cry one more time for you, I really got it bad

Cry one more time for you, I lost the best I had

They start the song off with the hook. No singer/songwriter meandering or deep lyrics or setting a scene. Justman and Wolf are from the R&B/soul school of songwriting, hence they are more about the song then the writing.

The lyrics tell a simple story. A guy sits alone, drinking. He's on a preemptive drunk. His woman is leaving him, they both know it. It's inevitable, there's not a thing he can do about it. So he drinks and thinks and drinks.

This takes place to the sounds of the wail of Magic Dick's harmonica, the plaintive playing of Justman's piano, the shuffle of Geils's acoustic guitar, along with his brief killer electric solo. One of the great lost songs of seventies rock, it's over in a concise, beautiful three-and-half minutes. I have yet to tire of it.

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