My Top 1000 Songs #406: You Tore Me Down

[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.]

A lot of artists can come up with a decent enough Beatles pastiche. But definite bonus points for concocting a song that sounds so much like a Help-era deep cut you've somehow forgotten that you find yourself checking the liner notes for a Lennon/McCartney credit. And even better if you can pull that off without simply sounding derivative, a song that takes the beloved Beatles aesthetic yet somehow still sounds new (and, yeah, arguably even better).

So that's "You Tore Me Down," from Flamin' Groovies 1976 power pop landmark Shake Some Action. This was FG version II--the band's co-founder and vocalist Roy Loney had left, and in place of the band's early garage rock and R&B revivalism, they returned from a brief hiatus with a new, jangly pop sound. (Though apparently this song was recorded in 1972, so they'd barely skipped a beat in their pivot.) 

It's a timeless classic, but I have to concede it had escaped my notice until Yo La Tengo recorded a faithful update on their 1990 acoustic covers album Fakebook. So in my mind it'll always be as much a Yo La Tengo song as a Flamin' Groovies tune.

Live 2015:

Yo La Tengo:

Yo La Tengo, live unplugged in 2012: