The "Needle" version of "A Mighty Day" was written by Mike and Maggie Molosso, who sang at a Seattle coffeehouse in downtown Seattle called "92 Yesler" (which, strangely enough, was the address of the coffeehouse) during the Seattle World's Fair in 1962. The Needle referred to was the Space Needle, built just before 1962 on the fairgrounds, leaving Seattle with an icon of the city—sort of Seattle's answer to the Eiffel Tower.   Some 605 feet tall, it features observation decks and a restaurant at the top that slowly rotates once an hour, giving diners a 180 degree view of the city, the surrounding mountains, and Puget Sound. Info and pictures HERE.

The song, "A Might Day When the Needle Hit the Ground" dealt with the catastrophe that occurred (purely fictional) when a young lady was running about naked in her apartment on Queen Anne Hill (which you can see—the hill, not the young lady—in the background of the first picture in the article I linked to). Someone on the observation deck of the Space Needle spots her, calls everyone's attention to her, and they all rush to one side of the deck to get a look at her. This overbalances the top of the Space Needle, which topples off, "rolled down Denny Way (which runs along one side of the fairgrounds), cut the viaduct in half, and landed In the bay!" Geographically impossible, but it makes a good story. Couldn't happen, of course, because the Space Needle, constructed to withstand high winds, not to mention the occasional earthquake, is a lot sturdier than that!

Mike and Maggie got a lot of requests for the song during the fair.

A whole lot more than you wanted to know.

I learned the song from Bob Gibson's record—the Galveston version, that is. I sang it a fair amount, especially around the time that Galveston got hit by a similar hurricane in the early 1960s, but with weather satellites and all, there was plenty of advanced warning and they made it through without much damage or loss of life.

Don Firth