Them – Gloria

Please pardon the personal story…but, you should be used to it by now, by the way I go on.  I hope I haven’t told this story before, but if I have…I apologize. This is just one of the songs we played. 

This song belongs right beside Louie Louie and Wild Thing as a staple of garage band rock. Three chords… E D A, and you are off to the races.  A beginner guitar player can emulate this song rather well. When I was in high school, the band I was in… played this song. We would play more challenging songs, of course, but this one always got a good response and participation from the crowd with the call-and-answer lyrics.

When I was a senior, we played in the “fall frolics” (rock bands, singers) in our high school gym, and I had a couple of friends who were curious/envious and wanted to know how it felt to play in front of people. We had been playing at parties and a bar (shhhh yea we were underage) by this time. What I did was show one of them this song on bass…it’s that easy… and the other one we handed a tambourine and told him to participate in the chorus.

For that one song, we called them up and they got to know how it felt. I ran into one of them a few years back, and he thanked me again. He said it was one of the scariest but best moments he ever had in high school.

Sorry for the detour… This song was by “Them,” which featured no other than Van the Man Morrison (who also wrote the song). It peaked at #93 in the Billboard 100 in 1965 and #71 in 1966.

Morrison wrote this song while fronting Them at the Maritime Hotel in Belfast, often using it as their closer, a song that could stretch to ten minutes or more depending on the crowd and Van’s mood. Recorded at Decca Studios in London, it was originally the B-side to Baby, Please Don’t Go. Ironically, this song would outlive its A-side by miles, becoming a rock ’n’ roll rite of passage for any band that could play an A, D, and E chord. Well…their version of Baby, Please Don’t Go is my definite version of the song.  

The song charted higher for The Shadows of Knight in 1966 at #10 on the Billboard 100, but this is the version I listen to. Finding Them at 18 led me to Van Morrison, which I have followed ever since. The first thing I did was order an album from the UK, which I still have with many of their hits. 

At this stage in their career, sometimes, some session musicians played on Them’s records instead of the actual band, although Van Morrison did the real singing. One of these session players was Jimmy Page, who played guitar on this song.

In the video below…is that a donkey they flash to? 

Gloria

Like to tell you ’bout my baby
You know she comes around
Just ’bout five feet-four
A-from her head to the ground
You know she comes around here
At just about midnight
She make me feel so good, Lord
She make me feel all right

And her name is G-L-O-R-I
G-L-O-R-I-A
Gloria!
G-L-O-R-I-A
Gloria!
I’m gonna shout it all night
Gloria!
I’m gonna shout it every day
Gloria!
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

She comes around here
Just about midnight
She make me feel so good, Lord
I want to say she make me feel all right
Comes a-walkin’ down my street
Then she comes up to my house
She knock upon my door
And then she comes to my room
Yeah, and she make me feel all right

G-L-O-R-I-A
Gloria!
G-L-O-R-I-A
Gloria!
I’m gonna shout it all night
Gloria!
I’m gonna shout it every day
Gloria!
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
So good
Gloria!
All right
Feels so good
Gloria!
All right, yeah

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Author: Badfinger (Max)

Power Pop fan, Baseball, Beatles, Alternative music, old movies, and tv show fan. Also anything to do with pop culture in the 60s and 70s... I'm also a songwriter, bass and guitar player. Not the slightest bit interested in politics at all.

53 thoughts on “Them – Gloria”

  1. Pingback: Them – Gloria – MobsterTiger

  4. I like how French TV called them “The Them”. This was a song that every cover band covered. It brings me back to homemade “strobe” lights (with a spinning baffle creating the strobe effect), sparkly upholstered Kustom amps, and stage lighting like an aluminum Christmas tree – a floodlight with a rotating colored gel in front of it.

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    1. We we have the Kustom amps….now…one sparkly… I love the strobe lights but it would mess me up while playing…it took a while for me because it was hard to stay in time against a strobe for me but I finally got the hang of it.

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      1. Here is the song he sang,

        My girl Thoria has always been a dancer,
        she teaches her students during the day. 
        Although she thinks that I am her answer,
        for the moment I really just cannot say. 
        I say, ‘Tell me, tell me, tell me your answer!  
        Will you be my lover and not just my dancer?’ 
        She is a super hot dancer that knows how to move. 
        Every time she shakes her body, I approve. 
        I dream of her dancing just for me every night.  
        Watching her dance and getting to hold her tight. 
        I just can’t get her off my mind,
        A girl like this is hard to find. 
        She brightens my day with her smile,
        My girl does it for me with her style.
        T. H. O. R. I. A.,
        Thoria in eggshell this day, yo.
        The sweetest girl that I ever met.
        Gracefully dancing on the floor.
        It is in her bed, that I want to get.
        I’m hoping that she won’t snore.

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      1. Well I never ‘played’ bass but I did noodle around on one long enough at one party to get the real basic feel of it and belief I could play it, songs like this at least. Doubt I could ever come close to McCartney, Burnel, Sting, Foxton even if I had practiced years.

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  11. Starting as a garage band in the early ’60s, this song was a staple, and if you didn’t play it, there would be repercussions. We could stretch it as long as our fingers, and the dancers held up. I had a black Kustom amp and our rhythm player had a blue sparkle one, with, of course, the aluminum Christmas tree rotating light show, which was also a must by 1965. Great pick, Max. PS, we also sang the dirty lyrics to Louie Louie.

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      1. We played the song at a church street dance and came close to being kicked off of the property. The kids loved it, not so much the youth ministers. “What? was is something we said?” Ahhh, the good old days, back when decent folks wore flat-top haircuts and drank Miller High Life beer.

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      3. Reminds me of our 1966 block picnic when a kid snuck the Mothers of Invention Freak Out onto the turntable and blasted it to the street. That was the year after I sang “Mrs. Brown You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter” at the same picnic, accompanied by my neighbor on his new Gretsch Chet Atkins Tennessean and Fender Super Reverb. (I bet he wishes he still had those!)

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      5. Our drummer in the mid sixties was a huge Mothers fan and even taught himself to play the Sitar like Harrison, but his one and only time to use it at a live teen dance didn’t turn out well. He wouldn’t wear brown shoes because Zappa referenced it in one of his songs. Sounds as if we are musicians from the same era with similar experiences.

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      6. Brown Shoes Don’t Make it. I’m not a musician, though my son is. That was my sole public appearance as a singer. I still fantasize about learning pedal steel guitar. A used guitar shop that used to be around the corner from me had an ancient steel (no pedals) for sale and I was tempted.

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  12. This is straightforward ’60s basic garage rock; as everyone says rock-solid foundation, bang it out, repeat and repeat till the band gets tired or the dancers cramp up. It can just keep going.

    But Van’s vocals elevate this to above most garage bands.

    I’m also glad you gave a couple of guys a mini-taste of Beatlemania. The memory obviously stuck for them.

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    1. It was a cool experience…and they ask me “do you feel this way everytime?” I said sort of…but I told them…you went through 2-3 practices with us to do this one song…imagine practicing every single night for a 50 song songlist… but it’s one of those songs that Dave, you, Randy, and me could play live!

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      1. (My younger bro David does play bass- next time I’m on the phone I’ll ask him if he can accept the challenge and play me the hugely technically challenging bass line?!)

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  13. Was a big hit for Chicago’s own Shadows of Knight because they replaced some of the “unacceptable language” with slightly less offensive verbiage. (It was the ’60’s, which meant there was absolutely nothing even remotely suggestive about the lyrics except in the filthy minds of members of the clergy…)

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  16. That’s a pretty cool song to be able to pull off in high school no less! Sure ordering an album from the UK is what I was doing at that age! Such a great song. That second video was odd, and yes a donkey of all things.

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  17. Max, your story made me think of a time when I was in the sixth grade. There was a talent show of sorts and for whatever reason lip-sync was considered a talent. Myself and another kid decided to showcase “American Woman” and “No Sugar Tonight.” We faked our way through both songs before an auditorium “crowd,” and it was an amazing rush at that time. It was also as close as I got to a stage performance again…

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    1. You ain’t alone. My fifth grade talent show was won by a foursome with mops on their heads (dyed black) and broom guitars, lip-synching “I Want to Hold Your Hand”. (Yes, it was early 1964.) Alas, I was not one of them because they wanted me to swear to agree to be in their act before they would tell me what it was. As they weren’t really my friends, I was afraid of what I would be agreeing to.

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