“The Tide Is High” (1967) – The Paragons * LP: On the Beach with the Paragons * Written by John Holt * Produced by Arthur “Duke” Reid * Label: Treasure Isle.
The Paragons’ original Jamaican version of “The Tide Is High” is the most palatable one for me. I, like you, have heard the Blondie version—a number one hit in the US and UK in early 1981—a zillion times, but that’s not the only reason I don’t need it on my desert island. There’s an easy going restraint to the original that gives it a richness in meaning. With Blondie, no calypso horns or steel pan drums can hide the fact that the vocalist who sings “I’m not the kind of girl who gives up just like that” is the same one who also sang “one way or another, I’m gonna getcha getcha getcha” and “come on, rip her to shreds.” There’s an insistence in Blondie’s remake that gives its radio dominance a sense that we’re continually surrendering and ceding space to it.
The Paragons, on the other hand, are more seductive, with singer and writer John Holt implying that although he’s “not the kind of guy who gives up just like that,” he will bide his time. Even the tide metaphor strikes the right tone, different from what Brutus said in Julius Caesar about there being one big wave in our lives that leads on to fortune, and that if we don’t take it “when it serves” we’ll spend the rest of our lives in “shallows and in miseries.” This kind of narrow vision took Brutus to the grave not long after he uttered it, and he would have done well to consult with an islander, who would have told him that “the tide is high,” but there are many more to come. Is there not an allure to island music, and surf music, for that matter, that implies that the tide is an ever changing thing? And that big waves are not to be feared but celebrated and anticipated as long as we breathe?
In 2002, a girl group called Atomic Kitten took the song back to number one in the UK, and it played during the opening credits of The Lizzie McGuire Movie the following year. That it conveys no overtly non-manufactured message only supports the emotional reads I’m getting from the other two.