The flowers were officially dead on Saturday - it was nice of them to hold on for so long - so Valentine's is over. I can't think of a more fitting song than "The Big Hurt" by Miss Toni Fisher to start the month. As much as it is admired for its sound, it's the image that the sound conjures that nails me to the wall: A bawdy blond, just past the point where lush turns to lumpen, in a dimly lit diner drinking from a lipstick smeared coffee cup. In front of an overflowing ashtray, she clings to the memory of the aftershave on another woman's husband, and while the world moves past her, she waits while wondering if that was the last time that she would see him.
Of course, you're free to create your own scenario because "The Big Hurt" is a piece of art, textured and layered, yet open to interpretation. It's been widely reported that Jimi Hendrix found this record to be an inspiration for his own artistry but I've not yet seen it in quotations.
For the less imaginative, "The Big Hurt" is recognized as the first record to use a phasing effect, the result of an accident, in this case. When hearing the playback, Miss Fisher's husband, songwriter Wayne Shanklin, felt that her vocal was buried too deep in the mix. Since the track was cut in mono, engineer Larry Levine made a copy of the tape and then fed them both through a third recorder. Fiddling with the frequencies, the slightly out of sync tapes created a staggered - some say staggering - effect and an innovation was born.
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