"Barber Shop"
'Foreign Affairs', 1977
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“Barber Shop” is a pleasant but forgettable song off the pleasant but (mostly) forgettable album Foreign Affairs. Tom himself might not entirely disagree with that assessment: he’s never played it live or, best as I can tell, talked about it in an interview. He wrote it, recorded it, and appears to have immediately forgotten it.
But in researching it, I did find one interesting factoid.
The song starts and ends with Tom scat-singing “Good morning, Mr. Snip-Snip-Snip.” It places the lyrical conversation at the titular barber shop. But it also stealthily refers to an old World War I song called “Good Morning Mr. Zip-Zip-Zip!”
Minus the snip/zip switch, Tom borrowed the opening the couplet verbatim:
Good morning, Mister Zip-Zip-Zip,
With your hair cut just as short as mine,
In that 1918 song’s case, Mr. Zip-Zip-Zip refers to a fellow buzz-cut soldier. Tom’s similarly-nicknamed character doesn’t tie into the war directly (perhaps he should have saved the line for “Soldier’s Things”?). Tom’s is a light, funny dialog between a juvenile delinquent kid and the barber he’s razzing. It features some good lines—"I see you're still cuttin' hair, I'm still cuttin' classes”—but doesn’t really amount to much.
For comparison’s sake, here’s a version by the Tony Pastor Orchestra during the second World War. The video was made for Panoram machines, jukeboxes that played little video clips that were popular in the 1940s. In some ways, these were the first music videos.
Corny as it is, I kind of prefer that song to Tom’s…