“There’s Only One Girl”
by Dick Marsh
1960 song
"There's Only One Girl" was the flipside to "What Chance Have I", Sky Saxon’s earliest known extant single. It was released in 1960, credited to Dick Marsh (Sky’s real name), on Rosco Records. "There's Only One Girl" is typical early 1960s teen pop, beginning with a chorus of girls singing cloyingly in falsetto, “I’m his one and only, his one and only girl” and featuring Sky’s young voice moving fearlessly through the melody.
Lyrically, Mr. Marsh is wishing on a star, dreaming of finding “the one and only girl for me”. Rock and roll, after a series of disasters and scandals, was playing it safe at the time, and meaningless lyrics such as these would be about all you could expect. (Actually, that would remain the case with rock lyrics for quite a while, making a Seeds song like "Evil Hoodoo" even more shocking, but that’s a different story.)
"There's Only One Girl" is not a bad song, with its light acoustic guitar and been-done-a-million-times chord sequence, but from a modern perspective it’s hard to get past Sky’s singing voice: thin and pure, it sounds as if it’s merely biding its time, waiting for the go-ahead to mature into the ferocious psychedelic growl it would eventually become. The overall feel is one of Sky having a laugh, playing it straight for comedic effect. (Listen to the way he emphasizes the ‘r’ on “for me”).
That, however, is with the benefit of hindsight. At the time, Richard’s vocals on "There's Only One Girl" were sneering but socially acceptable; one could even imagine Sky establishing a career as a third-rate pop crooner with a little more luck.
In the end, it wasn’t meant to be, of course. The Beatles and The Stones came and demolished the music of groups like The Four Seasons, and Sky would twist his nasally baritone into the aggressive beast that would make him a legend with The Seeds.
This song was largely unknown to Sky Saxon fans until 2003, when it (and its flipside) were added to the vinyl LP Sky Saxon Presents "A Starlight Date With Richard Marsh". That LP is still the best place to find all twelve known pre-Seeds Sky Saxon recordings despite heavy-handed noise reduction that muffles the sound too much.
