Three Dog Night released "One Man Band" in 1970. I seemed like a strange title for a band that had seven members, including three singers. This performance is from the BBC series In Concert in 1972.
In the early 1980s Walt McKeown (stage name: Colonel Wingnuts) played for dinner and tips in restaurants in Mendocino, notably Sip and Sup Souphouse. He had a one-man band arrangement that he'd built, of instruments attached to and hanging from his seated body, and on a stand nearby. Kazoo, of course. A big fancy mechanical harmonica on a stand around his neck had a pneumatic piston and a hose to a rubber bulb under his arm to shift the register. Kick-drum, high-hat cymbol, guitar, double-recorder, trombone (!), etc. /He/ was billed as a one-man band; he and his musical exoskeleton were one complete thing.
That's the first interpretation I get from your video: I think the songwriter would like the woman he's addressing to play him, by festooning herself with him and rhythmically squeezing and sliding and manipulating and strumming and handling and blowing and sucking and honking and stepping on this or that part of him and clashing him between her knees. Or it might be meant the other way around: her body might be the collection of instruments for the songwriter to wear and play, if she agrees to his plea.
And it might simply be that the band is the band --all of them are singing, after all; they ask her to consider them as performing for her personally, alone in her room with the record or the radio. Or, simplest of all, the object of their affection might be one man, and they would be his literal one-man band. That's probably it.
My favorite song of theirs was /Liar/. When they shouted "LIAR! ...LIAR! LIAR!" it sent a thrill up my back, and it still does, even just remembering it.
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In the early 1980s Walt McKeown (stage name: Colonel Wingnuts) played for dinner and tips in restaurants in Mendocino, notably Sip and Sup Souphouse. He had a one-man band arrangement that he'd built, of instruments attached to and hanging from his seated body, and on a stand nearby. Kazoo, of course. A big fancy mechanical harmonica on a stand around his neck had a pneumatic piston and a hose to a rubber bulb under his arm to shift the register. Kick-drum, high-hat cymbol, guitar, double-recorder, trombone (!), etc. /He/ was billed as a one-man band; he and his musical exoskeleton were one complete thing.
That's the first interpretation I get from your video: I think the songwriter would like the woman he's addressing to play him, by festooning herself with him and rhythmically squeezing and sliding and manipulating and strumming and handling and blowing and sucking and honking and stepping on this or that part of him and clashing him between her knees. Or it might be meant the other way around: her body might be the collection of instruments for the songwriter to wear and play, if she agrees to his plea.
And it might simply be that the band is the band --all of them are singing, after all; they ask her to consider them as performing for her personally, alone in her room with the record or the radio. Or, simplest of all, the object of their affection might be one man, and they would be his literal one-man band. That's probably it.
My favorite song of theirs was /Liar/. When they shouted "LIAR! ...LIAR! LIAR!" it sent a thrill up my back, and it still does, even just remembering it.
That's quite... descriptive, especially that middle paragraph. I certainly never put that much thought into it.
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