Gimme Little Sign

GIMME LITTLE SIGN, BRENTON WOOD

(circa 1992)

I'm actually shocked that I don't remember the exact first time I heard this song. I'm guesstimating 1992, mostly because that's the earliest time I can remember listening to 98.1 KISS-FM, which is San Francisco's Old School R&B station (though, lately, there's been a lot more modern R&B stuff and, while Beyonce is arguably the biggest force in mainstream R&B today, there's only so many times you can listen to "Single Ladies" or "Irreplaceable" without going crazy), and pretty much the station that raised me musically. The station, like any other, has several songs that are mainstays and always are on rotation, and while KISS-FM's favorite is Betty Wright's "Tonight Is the Night," this Brenton Wood song is also one of them.

All I know is that I'm not such a fan of this song. I have it because every Memorial Day weekend, KISS-FM has their countdown of the Top 500 Old School songs of all time, and when I was a junior or something at UCLA, I downloaded all of them (or, at least to 200 or something) off of Limewire and proceeded to burn them on to CDs, and "Gimme Little Sign" was one of them. I don't know why I don't like it... I mean, I know all the words (not that that means anything) and it is comforting in a nostalgic reminds-me-of-home-oddly kind of way, but the composition is weird, to me. The doo-wop intro, the psychedelic organ during the bridge... it's a weird mix-match of styles that I just don't necessarily respond to, even though not having this song in my repertoire is worse than not having it at all. But I still tend to skip it when I listen to it in my Zune.

True story, however: Daniel loooooooves this song. He refers to it as one of his jams. He was interning at KISS-FM last summer with the promotions department when he went to help them out with a concert, where one Brenton Wood, ancient soulster of Shreveport that he is, was performing. It sounded like an amazing concert, even with "Gimme Little Sign" as part of the set, with Wood performing alongside War, Tierra, and Trinere (frankly, I was unexcited about her... either that, or uninformed of her existence - Daniel refers to her as a poor man's Debby Deb). But the festivities were disrupted when a group of stoned cholos decided to start stabbing each other. It was in the middle of War's set. Daniel was thoroughly pissed. I never asked if Brenton Wood ended up performing.