The Atrocious Music Collection: #30 in a series
Artist: Sonny Bono
Song Title: Pammie’s On a Bummer
Category: Professional Musician
Years: 1967
Cover art style: 16th-Century wood cut
Audio: Pammie’s On a Bummer
Acquisition: Recorded from WFMU ca. 1987
You all know Sonny Bono, right? Sonny and Cher? I Got You Babe? TV variety show? Heck, I’ll take Republican Representative.
Tracking in a nearly eight minutes, Pammie’s On a Bummer appeared on Sonny’s only solo album, Inner Views, which only contained five tracks, bookended by the two long ones: I Just Sit There opening the album, and Pammie’s On a Bummer closing it.
The first three minutes of Pammie sound like a free-form instrumental improvisation, and a rather dreadful one at that. Finally, the vocals enter, on rather mundane music which is essentially unrelated to the lengthy introduction. By the way, the opening stuff is never coming back – the rest of the track is just the “song” part, and it’s close to five minutes. It's that long only because it’s slow, both in tempo and delivery, with long pauses after each line.
The basic story of the song is that a prostitute, Pammie, develops a habit, graduating from weed to “trippin’.” Her journey of discovery, through sleeping around and taking acid, was confirmed in “all the songs of today” as the thing to do, according to Bono. Even in these early days, Bono was apparently a conservative.
Sonny clearly disagrees with all those songs glorifying acid, and we should applaud his early warning on the negative impact of psychedelic drugs. That he starts the song with a trippy improv is a bit confusing, but maybe it is meant to represent where Pammie ends up – but if that's the case, wouldn't the trippy improvisation come at the end of the song?
Here's the weird thing, though. According to the song Pammie becomes a prostitute in order “to find where she was at,” an odd notion I don’t recall seeing anywhere else in literature or song or movies. Only after the prostituting begins to get to her does she turn to drugs. That narrative is so unexpected, at least one take on the song actually flips the order, incorrectly stating that, for Pammie, “marijuana leads to acid and eventually prostitution and so on.”
So secondly, let’s applaud Bono for eschewing the clichéd plotline. He’s a rebel.
Toss in poor production, what sounds like a decision to accept all first-takes, and a flat arrangement (although the oboe is a nice touch, I guess), and I can safely say Pammie embraces multiple dimensions of atrociousness. Listening to I Just Sit There, it’s clear Pammie’s On a Bummer is not alone in having these characteristics, and the entire album looks like a worthy addition to any atrocious music collection.
I will be keeping a look out for it.