Song of the Day 2/5: Johnny Rivers, “Secret Agent Man”

Word comes that the Musk administration has given all personnel in the Central Intelligence Agency his “buy-out” offer. It seems to me that pissing off thousands of spies might be risky business, but given how effectively the CIA has been at keeping the Russians from fucking with our lives, I’m not counting on their revenge taking any competent form.

“Secret Agent Man” was the theme song to a spy series, but the song lasted a lot longer than the series did. “Danger Man” was a British spy show that predated the James Bond film series, first airing in 1960; Ian Fleming worked on developing the show. It was cancelled after one season, then was resurrected in 1964, after the Bond movies started a secret agent craze. It starred Patrick McGoohan, who leveraged his role into his own creation, “The Prisoner,” the most interesting spy series ever aired.

For the American version of the show, producers changed the title and scrapped the original theme music. CBS, which picked up the series for the U.S. market, wanted something “hummable,” and songwriter P.F. Sloan answered the call. His publisher, Lou Adler, also managed Johnny Rivers, who originally balked at singing the tune. After it went to No. 3 on the Hot 100, it became one of his signature songs.

Rivers later claimed to have written the song’s distinctive guitar lick, but Sloan’s demo shows that it was there from the first, when the song, like the show, was still called “Danger Man.” Some of the other lyrics and a couple of chords were changed along with the title.

The song’s many covers include versions by crooner Mel Tormé and jazz legend Art Blakey, and the Plugz recorded this Spanish version for the 1984 film “Repo Man.”