Songs About Crime So Good They’re Almost Criminal
“You can imagine my embarrassment when I killed the wrong guy.”— Joe Valachi
Please do not highlight.
“Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap” by AC/DC
“Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap” was the title track of AC/DC’s 1976 album but it was not released in the US until 1981, more than a year after lead singer Bon Scott’s death. “Dirty Deeds” describes various types of mayhem offered at affordable prices.
The song was written by bandmates Angus Young, Malcolm Young and Bon Scott. The song’s title was inspired by the popular ’60s cartoon show Beany and Cecil. The show’s villain, Dishonest John, had a business card that read, “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap. Holidays, Sundays and Special Rates.”
“We signed the record deal to go over to England and just as we’d completed the tour, they told us we had to do another album,” said Malcolm Young in Classic Rock. “All we did was go straight into the studio after doing the night’s gig and knock up some new ideas.
“It was Angus that came up with the song title ‘Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap.’’ It was based on a cartoon character that had the phrase as his calling card. Then Bon stuck in the line ‘I’m dirty, mean, mighty unclean’ from an advert for mosquito spray that was running on Aussie TV at the time.”
Despite its title, the band didn’t advocate violence. “Rugby clubs have been doing the same thing for years — songs like that,” Bon Scott said. “The songs that won the Second World War were like that, with the chaps singing them as they marched into battle.”
“There’s not much seriousness in it,” added Angus Young. “It’s just rock ’n’ roll. Chew it up and spit it out.”
“Psycho Killer” by Talking Heads
“Psycho Killer” was the second song written by David Byrne and the first hit for Talking Heads. “Psycho Killer” is often believed to be about David Berkowitz, the notorious Son of Sam murderer who terrorized New York City in the 1970s. “There’s no question that Son of Sam was a psycho killer,” drummer Chris Frantz told Smashing Interviews.
“But the reason the song was about a psycho killer is because David said that he got the inspiration for it from an Alice Cooper song. Alice Cooper was very big at that particular point in time with an album called Billion Dollar Babies. The band’s whole thing was about horror. So Alice Cooper was like the springboard for ‘Psycho Killer’.”
“I’m glad I did it,” Byrne told CBS News. “But I’m also glad that I didn’t stick with that as my — oh, like, ‘This is working. Let’s do more like this.’ I’m glad that I decided, ‘No. Now you have to do things that are a little more original musically.’”
“Lawyers, Guns and Money” by Warren Zevon
“Lawyers, Guns and Money” was released in 1978 on Warren Zevon’s Excitable Boy album. The story of a young man in trouble in Cuba who contacts his father for help was released as a single but failed to chart.
Zevon explained in the liner notes of his anthology I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead how he came to write the song.
“My friend Burt Stein (who was also my A&R man at Asylum Records) and I were on vacation in Kauai, Hawaii. We were riding past the cane fields with a young woman whose acquaintance I’d made the previous evening, and she was taking us to a friend’s ‘plantation house.’ She mentioned sort of off-handedly that her friend wasn’t home; that we might, in fact, have to break in.
“I turned to Burt. ‘Dear Joe,’ I said, thinking of Joe Smith, the president of the record company. ‘Send lawyers.’ ‘And guns,’ Burt added. I said, ‘And money.’”
The song’s lyric, “Send lawyers, guns, and money / The shit has hit the fan” had the song banned on some radio stations. Asylum Records released an edited version that omitted the entire verse. In any case, the song has become a classic rock radio staple and a favorite of Zevon fans.
“The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde” by Georgie Fame
Georgie Fame escaped becoming a one-hit wonder when he followed 1965’s “Yeh Yeh” with “The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde,’ a №7 hit in 1967. The song tells the tale of real-life desperados Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, who robbed banks throughout the Midwest during the Great Depression. The song was written by Mitch Murray and Peter Callander.
“We both decided that they had blown the music,” Murray explained in 1000 UK #1 Hits. “They should have had a hit song and so we thought we’d write one. At first we considered giving it to Joe Brown or Lonnie Donegan, but they didn’t seem quite right for the song.
“Then the managing director of CBS told Peter that they had signed Georgie Fame and were looking for a big hit. We added a special jazzy bit for Georgie — ‘Bonnie and Clyde got to be Public Enemy Number One’ as we thought that would sell it to him, but he wasn’t very keen on the song. We did a demo with machine guns and skidding cars and we were asked to go to the session with our sound effects.”
Fame has continued to perform solo and often works with Alan Price, Van Morrison, and Bill Wyman.
“Midnight Rambler” by the Rolling Stones
“Midnight Rambler,” written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, was loosely based on the crimes of Albert DeSalvo, who confessed to being the Boston Strangler. DeSalvo murdered 13 women in the Boston, MA area between 1962 and 1964.
Richards played all the guitars on the track; Jagger performed vocals and played harmonica. “Midnight Rambler” was included on the Stones’ 1969 LP Let It Bleed. Despite its dark theme, Jagger said that “Midnight Rambler” was written in a “beautiful, sunny place.”
“That’s a song Keith and I really wrote together. We were on a holiday in Italy. In this very beautiful hill town, Positano, for a few nights. Why we should write such a dark song in this beautiful, sunny place, I really don’t know. We wrote everything there — the tempo changes, everything. And I’m playing the harmonica in these little cafes, and there’s Keith with the guitar.”
“Usually when you write, you just kick Mick off on something and let him fly on it,” Richards said in Rolling Stone. “Just let it roll out and listen to it and start to pick up on certain words that are coming through, and it’s built up on that.
“A lot of people still complain they can’t hear the voice properly. If the words come through it’s fine, if they don’t, that’s all right too, because anyway, that can mean a thousand different things to anybody.”
“I Shot the Sheriff” by Bob Marley and Eric Clapton
“I Shot the Sheriff” was written by Jamaican reggae artist Bob Marley and released with his band the Wailers in 1973. Eric Clapton’s 1974 version became a №1 hit.
“That message a kind of diplomatic statement,” Marley told The Guardian. “You have to kinda suss things out. I shot the sheriff is like I shot wickedness. That’s not really a sheriff, it’s just the elements of wickedness, you know. How wickedness can happen.
“But the elements of that song is people been judging you and you can’t stand it no more and you explode, you just explode. So it really carry a message, you know.
“Clapton asked me about the song because when Clapton finished the song he didn’t know the meaning of the song. Him like the kind of music and then him like the melody and then him make ‘I Shot The Sheriff.’”
Band members had to convince Clapton to include the song on 461 Ocean Boulevard. “At the time I didn’t think it should go on the album, let alone be a single,” Clapton admitted in Classic Rock Stories. “The record came out and went up the charts, and shortly after that I got a phone call from Bob . . . I kept asking him if it was a true story — did he really shoot the sheriff? What was it all about? He wouldn’t really commit himself. He said some parts of it were true, but he wasn’t going to say which parts.”
“Coming Into Los Angeles” by Arlo Guthrie
As Arlo Guthrie returned on a flight home to Los Angeles from London in the mid-’60s, he discovered that his friends had slipped a small amount of drugs into his gifts. Guthrie’s fear of getting busted by US Customs inspired the song “Coming Into Los Angeles.” Guthrie admits that his lyric “Coming into Los Angeles / Bringing in a couple of keys” exaggerated the size of his stash.
Guthrie recorded “Coming Into Los Angeles” for his 1969 album Running Down the Road and performed the song at the 1969 Woodstock festival. The film of the event used Guthrie’s song over a montage of pot-smoking hippies.
“I know I did ‘Coming Into Los Angeles,’ but the one on the record, the one that you see in the movie, is not the ‘Coming Into Los Angeles’ that we did,” Guthrie revealed in Back to the Garden: The Story of Woodstock.
“That’s the one that they took from another recording somewhere and snuck it on there — which is why you never see us playing in Woodstock ’cause they couldn’t synch it up. They always have pictures of people smoking dope or something like that, you know. That was a shame too, because they took the worst possible recording of some terrible night we did somewhere in the city, and stuck it on there, and I was always horrified at that.”
Guthrie told the Los Angeles Times that in 2003 he attracted the attention of two federal agents at Boston’s Logan Airport. “Now, people like me, we have a chemical reaction to people like that. One of them walks over and says, ‘You Guthrie?’ I said, ‘Yeah,’ and he looks at my bag and goes, ‘You got, uh, a couple keys in there?’ Then he just smiled and asked for an autograph. Hah! The times have changed, haven’t they?”
“Murder in My Heart for the Judge” by Moby Grape
The underrated San Francisco band Moby Grape recorded “Murder in My Heart for the Judge” in 1968 for the Wow/Grape Jam LP. Its co-writers, guitarist Jerry Miller and drummer Don Stevenson, told Rock Cellar in 2017 that the lyrics are rooted in fact.
“My driver’s license had expired so they wrote me up and in San Mateo, you had to go to court if you wanted to fight the thing,” recalled Stevenson. “I had just come down from Seattle and hadn’t been there long enough, I thought maybe I can get a little mercy here because even though it’s expired I’m down here in a different state, I really hadn’t gotten to it yet.
“So I went into the courtroom and prior to my case, there was a very attractive young lady who had pretty much the same condition I had. And the judge said, why don’t you go ahead, we’ll give you a warning this time. Get all this stuff straightened out and we’ll just give you a warning.
“Well, there were a couple of other cases that went by and I thought, oh man, I got it made. I got up there and I guess I didn’t look like that girl and he certainly didn’t give me the same verdict.”
“As soon as we got back to this little club we were playin’ at, I sat down on the stage and started singing, ‘Murder in my heart for the judge,’” said Miller. “Some of the original words I had to change: ‘Fat old bastard wouldn’t budge.’ We didn’t do that. ‘Fat old judge wouldn’t budge.’
“We had to be careful. And the funny thing is, it was about 20 years ago or so, I was in court in Marin County and the judge came out with that album. And I said, ‘Oh no, your honor, I knew this would happen. But I didn’t mean it, your honor, I didn’t even mean it then. I don’t have no murder in my heart for nobody.’
“So the whole courtroom laughed and it was in the Marin Sun the next day with the judge holding up that album in the newspaper. That was funny.”
“Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” by the Beatles
“Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” was Paul McCartney’s tune about a homicidal maniac, Maxwell Edison. “The song epitomizes the downfalls in life,” McCartney explained in The Beatles Anthology. “Just when everything is going smoothly — Bang! Bang! down comes Maxwell’s silver hammer and ruins everything.”
“Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” was included on the Beatles’ 1969 album Abbey Road. McCartney brought the song to the band during the Let It Be sessions. “Sometimes Paul would make us do these really fruity songs,” George Harrison told Crawdaddy in 1977. “I mean, my God, ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ was so fruity. After a while we did a good job on it, but when Paul got an idea or an arrangement in his head . . .”
John Lennon disparaged the song and didn’t play on it. “The worst session ever was ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’,” said Ringo Starr in Rolling Stone. “It was the worst track we ever had to record. It went on for fucking weeks. I thought it was mad.”
McCartney had the last word. “They got annoyed because ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ took three days to record. Big deal.”
“Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen
In “Bohemian Rhapsody,” Freddie Mercury sings, “Mama, just killed a man / Put a gun against his head, pulled my trigger, now he’s dead.” Written by Mercury, “Bohemian Rhapsody” was a №9 hit in 1976. Clocking in at almost six minutes, the song is a mix of a cappella, opera and rock anthem elements.
“I always wanted to do something operatic,” Mercury said in Rolling Stone. “I wanted something with a mood setter at the start, going into a rock type of thing which completely breaks off into an opera section, a vicious twist and then returns to the theme.
“I don’t really know anything about opera myself. Just certain pieces. I wanted to create what I thought Queen could do. It’s not authentic . . . certainly not. It’s no sort of pinch out of Magic Flute. It was as far as my limited capacity could take me.”
“Bohemian Rhapsody” was recorded at five studios between August and September 1975 and required nearly 200 tracks for overdubs.
“‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ was totally insane, but we enjoyed every minute of it,” producer Roy Thomas Baker explained in Mix. “It was basically a joke, but a successful joke. We had to record it in three separate units. We did the whole beginning bit, then the whole middle bit and then the whole end. It was complete madness.
“The middle part started off being just a couple of seconds, but Freddie kept coming in with more ‘Galileos’ and we kept on adding to the opera section, and it just got bigger and bigger. We never stopped laughing . . . It started off as a ballad, but the end was heavy.”
“The vocal harmonies was something we wanted to do from the beginning, as we are always keen to do that kind of thing,’ guitarist Brian May told On the Record in 1982. “We wanted to be a group that could do the heaviness of hard rock, but also have harmonies swooping around all over the place. We thought there was some real power and emotion in that combination.
“The guitar solo was pretty much off the cuff, except I think I had plenty of time to think about that one. I remember playing along with it in the studio for a while when other things were being done. I knew what kind of melody I wanted to play.”
When the song appeared in the 1992 film Wayne’s World “Bohemian Rhapsody” was re-released and reached №2.
“Hey Joe” by the Jimi Hendrix Experience
“Hey Joe” was first recorded in the 1960s but its authorship has long been disputed. Folk singer Billy Roberts, who performed “Hey Joe” in the 1950s and Dino Valenti of Quicksilver Messenger Service both claimed to have written it. Roberts later regained the copyright to the tune.
A slowed-down version of the tale of a husband who shoots his wife’s lover and flees to Mexico was recorded by Tim Rose in 1966. Rose’s version was heard by the Animals’ bassist Chas Chandler, who was to become the manager of Jimi Hendrix.
“He was a monster guitar player,” Chandler told Guitar Player. “The weird thing was, I was going out with a girl in New York at the time, and the night before I saw Jimi, she had played me this record called ‘Hey Joe’ by Tim Rose. It’d been out for eight months or so and had never been a hit.
“I said, ‘Wow, I’m gonna find an act and record that song in England. That’s going to be a hit.’ When I saw Jimi Hendrix at the Cafe Wha? in Greenwich Village, the first song he played was ‘Hey Joe.’”
“When you’re working in acoustic folk clubs, you hear bits and pieces by lots of singers,” Rose said in The Independent. “I heard ‘Hey Joe’ one day but this guy, Vince [Martin], was singing it in a monotone all the way through. I added a verse and went up a third. I was essentially writing a new song but using the inspiration of the four or five lines that I heard.
“I know Chas Chandler, who managed Hendrix, played my version to Hendrix as he told me so, but I was not thrilled with what happened next. I was accused of taking a Hendrix song, but I said, ‘No, it is the other way round.’ I know I’m not the guitar player he was but I still think my version is better. Hendrix had a unique voice and he did it very well, but not as well as me.”
Released in 1967, “Hey Joe” was the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s first single but failed to chart. It was also the final song performed by Hendrix to close out the 1969 Woodstock festival.
This story appeared in Rock Cellar Sept. 14, 2023
Frank Mastropolo is the author of the 200 Greatest Rock Songs series and Fillmore East: The Venue That Changed Rock Music Forever.
