‘I’m Gonna Get Me a Gun’: Yusuf/Cat Stevens’ misfired cowboy parody
September 30th, 1966. Yusuf Islam, then known simply by his stage name Cat Stevens, released his first single—and I’m not making this up—’I Love My Dog’.
It’s true, the man who would go on to write some of the most powerful and emotionally compelling music of the entire 1970s kicked off his career essentially writing novelty songs. Even then, though, the man had range. While he was starting out with peans to man’s best friend, within two singles, he’d go from one end of the novelty single spectrum to the other.
On his third single, Yusuf/Cat Stevens went from the kind of novelty single that you could play in a nursing home to one you could play in a secondary school with the cowboy power fantasy, ‘I’m Gonna Get Me a Gun’. I really must stress that in between those singles, he released ‘Matthew and Son’, a genuine masterpiece that pointed to the songwriting genius he would later become.
However, in the early days, Stevens had a knack for the same kind of cringe-inducing whimsy that would cause David Bowie to inflict ‘The Laughing Gnome‘ on us all.
There are unsubstantiated rumours that the song was written for an unproduced Billy the Kid musical that Cat Stevens was working on, and, even on your first listen of the song, you can see how it might get this reputation. This is barely a pop song in the traditional sense of the word—this is a song that isn’t just telling the listener a story, it’s setting the scene. Beginning as it does with a Marty Robbins-style flush of strings and piano, as Stevens sings about being demoralised too many times and deciding not to take it anymore.
Then the song bursts to life, and he sings about stuff that he might cringe even more about today than the rest of us. Over a jaunty, maddeningly catchy orchestral backing, he talks about getting himself a six-shooter and taking violent revenge on all the people who wronged him. Any specifics? Nope. Any motive? Nope. Just jazz-hands and violent death, just the way we like it.
Was this Yusuf/Cat Stevens song a hit?
You bet it was. While most of his early work has aged as well as milk in the sun (the aforementioned ‘Matthew and Son’ not withstanding), they were hits. At least in his native UK, these were making him a pop star and ‘I’m Gonna Get Me a Gun’ was no exception.
In fact, it was his second top ten hit. This makes sense, as barely three years earlier, Herman’s Hermits were seeing global hits with ‘I’m Henry the Eighth, I Am’. If you want to be charitable, you could say that Stevens was tapping into that music-hall spirit with his song.
After all, it’s a character piece with an easy-to-follow story wrapped around a tune catchier than smallpox. All the hallmarks of vintage British music-hall, even considering how unreconstructedly American the whole charade is. There are even promotional posters for the single featuring Yusuf/Cat Stevens sporting a Colt .45 and a white Stetson, to the point where most took it as a parody of American gun culture.
On the surface, this looks about right. American culture does deify the cowboy, and there is something powerful in presenting all the traditional cowboy tropes along with a story that, at its core, shows what American gun culture actually is: A bunch of pathetic man-children throwing a tantrum and using a weapon of war to soothe their broken egos.
Yet, the track’s satire is all surface-level. Compared with The Beatles’ masterful cowboy parody ‘Rocky Raccoon‘, ‘I’m Gonna Get Me a Gun’ has so little to say that it almost comes back around to being a straightforward “aren’t cowboys cool” narrative. Given the work that the musician would later be responsible for, it seems weird to accuse him of shallow songwriting. On this weaksauce work of faux-balladry, he’s more than guilty of it.
