Panel from Otto Messmer's Dell Comics Four Color issue #46, 1944
When I first heard the Yellow Pills: Prefill power pop compilation, three tracks stood out to me immediately as different from the rest, and two of them were by the Toms. The home-recorded solo pop project of Tom Marolda, the Toms easily had the two best songs on Prefill, "Sun" and "(I Wanna Be A) Teen Again", so I went looking for any records by the Toms that happened to be in print. I was thrilled to find that Not Lame Records had re-released the Toms' 1979 debut album in a two-CD set with a bunch of other Toms songs from that era. I was excited because these recordings dated roughly from the time when he had recorded "Sun", but initial listens to The Toms revealed it to have a less distinctive sound, lying squarely in the typical power-pop sound of the era.
The Toms revealed itself over time to be a set of solid songs recorded with a dinky, homespun charm, but it took a while to get over that initial disappointment. You should go find "Sun" somewhere on the Internet if you haven't heard it to get a sense of where my high expectations were coming from. But I'm going to share the song that popped up on the Jukebox, an outtake from The Toms called "I Can Go Now". It's easily as good as any of the songs that ended up on the album, with a nice jangly intro that leads right into the song's catchy verse/chorus, featuring Marolda backing himself up with some nice harmonies. The one thing that bugs me about "I Can Go Now" is the way he put heavy emphasis on the first syllable of "immune" right before the bridge - "I'm IMM-une to you!"
"I Can Go Now" by the Toms
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