In every college dorm, every year, you’ll hear a story about someone who fell out of a building. It may have been on your campus just long enough ago that no one around now remembers the specifics. It may have been at another college nearby or something you heard from friends going to school in other parts of the country.
The stories have the air of urban legend, but for the kids who fell, whether by youthful misadventure or a deteriorated mental state, it’s incredibly tragic. Yet due to the social nature of dormitory life, it’s going to become a story that gets bent and spread far and wide.
That’s close but not quite what “Andy Fell” is about. Early 80s Boston band Human Sexual Response, the group behind the cheeky and glorious “Jackie Onassis” (another song unavailable on streaming services), concerns one Andy who fell. The song raises conflicting possibilities on what happened. Was it an accident? Were other people around? Also a mysterious question: Where is he now?
He’s gone, they never found him
Someone thought an angel could have caught him
Andy didn’t just fall, he also disappeared. Also mysterious: Andy had an apparent fascination with Bishop Pike, a controversial figure who practiced spiritualism and who died in Israel in 1969 after falling down a canyon wall. It’s not clear why Bishop Pike gets mentioned in the song, but it further muddies the narrative, leading to the lines:
Everybody has a different story
Everybody feels so sorry
In burying the lede, it’s not the mysterious turn of events that makes the song a gem. Rather, it’s the uplifting guitar riffs and the lead singer’s sincere and full-voiced post-punk vocal style that expresses real concern that should have made this a hit in 1981. The band broke up, the public missed out, and they never did find Andy.
