‘We All Love Peanut Butter’ – The One Way Street(s), 1966

Five thousands songs is a lot. I’m still digesting the contents of the Hello Kitty flashdrive James Nicholas Pell sent me.

So far my favorite album is Back From the Grave 1, a garage rock compilation. I’d like to get the others in the series.

Here’s a lengthy appreciation of one of the tunes, the cult classic “We All Love Peanut Butter”:

The sole 45 recorded by The One Way Street (incorrectly listed on the single as The One Way Streets) is not esteemed for its rarity, but for its sheer strange coolness. The One Way Street was a quartet (actually a quintet, but one member couldn’t make the session) of Zanesville and Cambridge Ohio teens who showed up at Sunrise Studios in Hamilton, Ohio out of the blue and recorded a 45 (A-side “We All Love Peanut Butter,” which Kid Congo Powers turned me on to, and B-side “Jack The Ripper”) while the mother of guitarist/vocalist Sonny Dickens waited outside in her car.

Contrary to popular belief, A-side “We All Love Peanut Butter” is not a LSD cautionary tale. More intriguingly, it’s a satiric tale (evidently based on a true story) about a “teen craze” involving shooting up peanut butter. As such, it makes a great companion piece to The Angry Samoans’ “Lights Out,” about a teen fad involving poking out your own eyes with a fork.

We All Love Peanut Butter” is sui generis; it doesn’t sound anything like any of the other tunes on Back From The Grave: Vol. 1. Nor for that matter does it sound much like anybody else from that period, period.

The song keeps promising to get faster and faster but never does. A strange sensation.

Lyrics here.

More here.