The Day the Squares Turned Cool

So, Graham Nash leaves The Hollies, talkin' all kin' a trash about how his ex-bandmates were squares who wouldn't tune in, turn on, and drop out, and then ... this?

I mean, Nash calls them squares, so The Hollies go back in time to the 1950s?

By all rights, they should have fallen flat on their faces. Instead, they gave us a hard-boiled crime story that might have turned Mickey Spillane -- who was still writing in those days -- green with envy. Instead of aiming for the mountaintop, they made a record that sounded as though it had been recorded in a Midwestern bowling alley on the busiest night of the year.

They did make one concession to current tastes: the lyrics were almost indecipherable, and the added mystery made this record even cooler. What had really happened that night? If the lyrics weren't on the album sleeve (I don't know; I wasn't allowed to listen to rock and roll when I was a kid), it was anybody's guess -- until the Internet, anyway.

It took them a couple of years, but The Hollies beat Graham Nash at his own game, releasing a single that was cooler than anything their supercilious old buddy (who, paradoxically, can write a hit single like nobody's business) ever thought to record.

These are The Hollies with "Long Cool Woman (In A Black Dress)".