Don’t Keep It a Secret

Song 309: This week the playlist comes around to Let It Out (Let It All Hang Out) by The Hombres, written by Jerry Masters, Gary McEwen, B. B. Cunningham and John Hunter (the four band members). Again this week, last week’s cut leads to another, this time due to the lyric. In After Midnight, J. J. Cale sings the line “After midnight, we’re going to let it all hang out” a lot, so this track seemed like a good follow-up. I thought perhaps one lyric might have owed something to the other, since they both originated in roughly the same era, but I could find no clear indication of that. When this single showed up in the fall of my junior year at HS, a few of my friends used it as yet another occasion to make fun of me for how unhip I was, because I initially felt that the title phrase had sexual connotations. “Oh, you don’t know what it means,” they laughingly said to me, and, during that fundamentalist Christian phase of my life, I found it a bit reassuring to believe that the song wasn’t a sly sexual reference, although I liked plenty of other records that did have such hints. Somehow I never managed to clearly hear the spoken intro during the 45’s chart run, and I’m sure that if I had, that would have bothered me too, but a few years later, free of the fundamentalist constraints and able to collect old favorites, I added this one to the collection, and the first spin on the turntable, the intro really made me smile, at a moment in my life where I could freely appreciate the temptations of Eve rather than fear them. By then, I understood that my HS friends had been playing with me when they insisted that the phrase had no sexual overtones, but I also had grasped the other nuances of it as well, so I felt like I too could let it all hang out.