Condition Red. The Goodees. 1967. Hip.
The death of childhood innocence is a necessary requisite for initiation into the rock and roll experience. Our passage into adolescence, marked by the hormonal flush, advances another tick on the global death clock, and an unidentifiable terror somewhere in the glandular regions of the earth’s core is released, sending an orgasmic shiver along the spine of children learning for the first time the excitement of self, the gift of our destructive inner power, the imagination. The Goodees, a Memphis girl group trio, released their single Condition Red after winning a local talent contest held by Stax as part of the inauguration of their offshoot label Hip in 1967. Condition Red is a slightly less melodramatic reworking of the Shangri-Las’ Leader Of The Pack, the great mid-sixties ballad of a young motorcyclist’s final ride, memorialized by his girlfriend Betty, whose parents martyrized Jimmy after forbidding her to see him. The concept of teenage rebellion, the pivot around which girl gro...