Janis Ian - The Secret Life of J Eddy Fink

I was going to write a piece on the phenomenon of Rebecca Black’s “Friday,” but at 40,000,000 views and counting, that story has been played to death.

Contemplating “Friday,” the target was obviously too easy to consider a complete butchery of Black and her endlessly amusing lack of talent. I understand the backlash that we’re now seeing of legitimate sources quietly writing, “It’s not that bad” and, to that point, they’re probably right. The proof is how my daughter recalled the chorus “Friday Friday Friday” ten minutes after she first heard it, and isn’t that kind of mindless recall that pop music is supposed to provide?

But my daughter is three, and by no means should that example be used as a marketing tool; nobody wants the promotional copy to read “Three year olds agree: “Friday” is awesome!” And there’s nothing to brag about how someone just entering pre-school can recite the chorus of this embarrassingly stupid song.

I’m just saying.

At the end of it all, Rebecca Black did virtually nothing on this song. The “record deal?” Bought. The songs? Someone else wrote that tripe. The music? Not her. The voice? Ditto.

So essentially she’s a vehicle of Ark Music…whatever it’s called…that’s packaged like virtually any other teen artist within the pop confines. She’s 2011’s Tiffany, or whatever cheesy reference you want to conjure up, which is what I was beginning to do one evening this week. And while I was thinking of all of those young stars from pop past, I stumbled across a teenage girl that seemingly was the antithesis of Rebecca Black and any other teen dream for that matter.

I remembered Janis Ian.

Now most of you recognize her from the MOR staple of self-loathing called “At Seventeen” which is just so wonderfully depressing that it deserved to be a hit. Even though the song is probably intended to be a bit self-autobiographical, do you know what Janis Ian was really doing at seventeen?

She was making records.

In fact, Janis Ian was probably writing “Society’s Child” around the same age as Rebecca Black was wondering if she should sit in either the front seat or back seat.

For those of you not familiar with the story, “Society’s Child” was a controversial song that Ian wrote about teenage interracial relationships. It was “controversial” in the sense that there was a whole mess of white folks who didn’t like the idea of people having romantic relationships with another race and they also didn’t like a teenage girl singing about it either.

The ensuing controversy may have indeed caused a radio station that played the song in Georgia to get burned down by an angry racist, but there simply weren’t enough offended bigots to burn down enough transmitters to prevent “Society’s Child” from reaching #14 on the Billboard singles charts.

I’m too young to remember “Society’s Child” impact, and the funny thing is that I’d never heard the song until after I’d heard “At Seventeen.”

But the even stranger thing was that I had been listening to Janis Ian before that hit.

My exposure to Janis Ian came in the form of her last two records for Verve-albums number three and four for her, if you use the full-length that held “Society’s Child” as her debut.

Out of those two, The Secret Life of J. Eddy Fink was my favorite, and when I say “favorite” I mean that it strangely found a recurring role on my turntable, right next to things like Sgt. Pepper’s, Beggar’s Banquet and Love It To Death.

“J. Eddy Fink” is actually Janis Ian’s real name, and her “secret life” was essentially a glimpse of a teenage girl-now a half-decade older than her 13-year-old counterpart was-who’s suddenly fallen out of pop fashion. Just a few years prior, she was being touted as a girl genius and rubbing shoulders with Leonard Bernstein.

By album number three, Ian was tired of playing the marketing game, disenchanted by all of the managers and record company people who were thinking “How do we continue to promote this very plain-looking-very Jewish looking-young woman to the same saps that are buying the new Archies single?

Janis wasn’t dumb. She knew the answer was “You don’t.” And had the dumbasses recognized this and done a bit more until the inevitable singer/songwriter surge began in the early seventies, they may have had a contender with Carole King or Carly Simon.



The Secret Life of J. Eddy Fink is a collage of folk elements, slightly pretentious rock leanings, and hints of Julliard musicianship. Guitarist/bassist Carol Hunter is responsible for much of this-Ian’s co-arranger on Fink. Like Janis, Hunter was another child prodigy honing her craft until she eventually moved on to work with Bob Dylan during his Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid soundtrack era.

She’s most remembered for her guitar work, but I’ve got to mention that her bass performance on Fink is exquisite. It’s so crafty and totally in the pocket. At some points, you can catch her showing off a bit with speedy trills and nifty walks around the fretboard. I’m stunned that her talents weren’t used more as the next decade(s) progressed.

There may be too much Broadway arrangements going on between the two for most people’s tastes, but for me, the result of these two young women is stunning even to this day.

My heart skips a beat when I hear Janis trying to conjure up her own “Subterranean Homesick Blues” during the opener “Everybody Knows.” It swells again during the intricate “Mistaken Identity” suite. I get a kick out of the 60’s psychedelic shuffle ‘n fuzz of “Sweet Misery” with it’s line “It don’t make a difference if you’re six or sixty-three when you have left your hold on a dream/Forget that you’re human/Become a machine/You’re old and you’re…tethered!” Impressive for a young woman barely old enough to drive a car.

But my favorite song is the one where Ian prefaces the older-and-wiser remembrance that made “At Seventeen” such a hit with Fink’s “42nd Street Psycho Blues” where she takes a deep breath and sees who was really working her strings during the heights of “Society’s Child.”

It’s one of the album’s few acoustic moments, a perfect backdrop for a subtle attack on managers (Don’t smoke up in public kid/The image won’t sell/Trapped in the confines/Of my own private hell”), fellow performers (“If you see my friend the star, ask him how the syndicate is/ And has he finished paying them for the promotion job they did?”) and the fake friends she’s gathered along the way (“No I don’t go to parties anymore/’Cause when they ask for a song/I don’t feel like a guest/I feel like a whore.”)

She sounds exhausted and that’s what cinches it for me. In just a few short years, she’s gone from a teenager to a middle-age woman who wonders “What the fuck happened to my youth?” And yet she trudged on, finally hitting platinum when she reflected again on the cruelty of her teenage years.

I’m not that big of a fan of Between The Lines-the album that features “At Seventeen.” It sounds too old for Janis, if that makes sense. In some respects, that’s par for the course as The Secret Life of J. Eddy Fink sounds too old for its creator’s real age at the time it was released.

The difference is the approach, and Fink still contains a lot of youthful exuberance and a desire to take chances between two smart, young women (Janis and Carol) who were growing brave enough to say “Fuck all!” and make music that challenged them.

It proved to be too challenging for some as proven by the poor sales of the album. But for those who remember it, The Secret Life of J. Eddy Fink demonstrates that we don’t need to settle for poorly composed and woefully executed music from pretend teenage artists.

There’s nothing good that will come from Rebecca Black and the millions of views that her shitty little song has produced. Meanwhile there’s plenty of real inspiration that the few thousand copies that her third album managed. As the owner of two of those copies, I can easily say that I’ll continue to listen to The Secret Life of J. Eddy Fink for years long after I’ve forgotten about “Friday.”