History
The song evokes secret agents both musically (making use of a memorable guitar riff written by Chuck Day and inspired by Monty Norman's James Bond theme) and through its lyrics (which describe the dangerous life of a secret agent). In an unusual situation, due to the format of the series, the show's original British theme song, an instrumental entitled "High Wire", was actually retained as it was played over the episode credits following the "Secret Agent" titles. The lyric "They've given you a number and taken away your name," referring to the numerical code names given to secret agents, as in 007 for James Bond. When it was originally recorded by Rivers, it merely had one verse and one chorus. Later, after the song began to gain in popularity, Rivers recorded it live, with two more verses, and the chorus repeated twice more. The "live" version was recorded in 1966 at the Whisky A Go Go, but not released until after a few studio production touchups were done shortly after.
Read more about this topic: Secret Agent Man (song)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the shade.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)