“The Little Old Lady from Pasadena” (1964) * Written by Don Altfeld, Jan Berry, and Roger Christian * Produced by Jan Berry * LP: The Little Old Lady from Pasadena * 45: “The Little Old Lady from Pasadena” / “My Mighty G.T.O.” * Label: Liberty * Charts: Billboard Hot 100 (#3)
Jan and Dean’s “Little Old Lady from Pasadena” rode in the slipstream of a commercial campaign featuring Kathryn Milner as a high-speed Dodge driver. Lyricist Roger Christian did penance for his role in the Beach Boys’ “Shut Down”—where he had depicted a Chevy outpacing a Dodge—by celebrating Dodge’s popular ad mascot. The mythical “old widow in Pasadena” with a set of barely-driven wheels in the garage was by then a California car lot cliché, but where are its origins? Perhaps the first mention of it appears in the 1953 theatre cartoon Magoo Slept Here, in which the near-sighted hero boasts of getting his antique TV (actually a washing machine) from an “elderly lady in Pasadena.” A different archetype in the song is Jan Berry’s bored, vibrato-free Cali-teen drawl, which you later hear in everything from early Black Flag to Green Day to Blink 182. Wrecking Crew regular Tommy Morgan is likely playing the harmonica, giving it a backwoods flavor that also summons the familiar character of Granny in The Beverly Hillbillies. (Dean Torrance’s “Blue Fox” sweatshirt advertises a Tijuana bar with a sleazy reputation, foretelling the duo’s 1967 rewrite of “Little Old Lady from Pasadena” as “Tijuana,” which turns her into a narcocorrido metaphor.)