Although it's now all but forgotten for some reason -- I have heard this song on the radio exactly once, on a late-night broadcast from the late great KOMA-AM in Oklahoma City when I was driving across eastern New Mexico a few years ago -- "Master Jack" was an actual hit single, reaching #18 in June of '68. (Bizarre bit of chart trivia: as far as I know, there have only ever been three US chart hits by South Africans, not including Dave Matthews: this, Miriam Makeba's "Pata Pata" and Hugh Masekela's "Grazing in the Grass." All were hits in the space of about eight months. So how come there was no media buzz about the new "South African Invasion" like there was with the Dutch a couple years later?) It's hard to believe, since this song is so...well, weird. The very first time I heard it, I was working a temp job at Ralph's Records in Lubbock my senior year in high school when Ralph himself found a copy of the 45 in a forgotten pile and played it over the stereo system three times in a row. To this day, I tend to play this song multiple times whenever I put it on; it's addictive like that. What's particularly interesting to me about this song is that an entire generation of twee pop bands have unknowingly copped their entire sound from this single: one wispy female singer, a remarkably clean-sounding electric guitar playing a repetitive arpeggio riff, brushed drums and a bass part that's so subliminal you have to really strain your ears to hear it. (I guess the fourth Jack is just doing the little harmony vocal on the chorus.) But the oddity of the song is in the elliptical lyrics and the mournful way that Glenys Lynne sings them. I can't improve upon Wayne Jancik's description in his write-up in The Billboard Book of One-Hit Wonders (Billboard Books, 1998): Lynne sings "as if she has experienced ontological reality, has been transformed forever, and is not very happy about the whole matter." All I can say is that if this was a hit, there was really no reason why Nico couldn't have made it bigger than she did.