I didn't realize until a couple of weeks ago that I Fought The Law came out in '65. For some reason, I thought of it as a pre-Beatles recording, and that the Bobby Fuller Four were contemporaries of guys like Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent. I'm pretty sure I didn't know any of their other songs.

Then I heard Another Sad & Lonely Night on the Underground Garage and my mind was blown. The double-tracked vocals and guitars. The melodic (McCartneyesque, I daresay) bass line. I did a quick Google search and saw that my imagined timeline was way off.

I pulled up a comp off Amazon Prime (Forgotten Years Vol. 1 & 2, which paradoxically, appear to be what he recorded in LA, rather than Texas) and have really been enjoying it.

If there any sort of "Complete Recordings" set I should be aware of? Is the one I'm listening to a good representation of what they sounded like on 45? I was suspicious that it might have been remixed or overdubbed due to the big echo on the recordings, but from what I've read, he was a big fan of echo, and built an echo chamber in his first home studio in El Paso, so I'm less suspicious at this point.

Any other BF4 fans out there?

Love the weird time signature at the beginning of Let Her Dance.

I don't know much about Fuller's other work, but the reason "I Fought The Law" sounds retro for its time is because he very closely copied the original version by the Crickets, which was recorded in 1959:

I can totally imagine The Posies doing an amazing cover of this one.

Well, this totally makes sense.

This was the follow-up to I Fought The Law, released a few weeks before his death. The backing vocals remind me of I'll Keep On Holding On by The Action.

Not sure what I like better here - the fuzz bass or the multi-tracked vocals.

He had a great song called "Love's Made a Fool of You", where he sounds very much like Buddy Holly (I think it's actually a Buddy Holly cover). The comp I have is one that was put out by Del-Fi/Rhino in the 90s and collects two albums "KRLA King of the Wheels" and "I Fought the Law." It's a great sounding CD, and covers a lot of the most important stuff.

Here's the one I like.

Not surprisingly, that's a pretty straight copy of The Clash's arrangement of the song:

I see an import version of that on Amazon for $40 for a single disc. Looks like most everything is out of print, and physical media is getting collectors' prices.

And yes, Love's Made a Fool Of You is a great tune, but it does suffer from reusing the same riff as IFTL. It looks like Buddy wrote it in '54, recorded it in '58 (and then only as a demo to give to the Everlys), the Crickets re-recorded it after his death, and released it on In Style With The Crickets, the same album that had IFTL. Buddy's version was posthumously released in '64. I'm guessing that the re-recording was probably the inspiration for the cover.