The other night, I was picking up a late bite from Sel De Mer after a quick beer run late on my way home. Sel De Mer's the kind of restaurant New York needs more of: good food, open late, not much regard for trendy trappings of the rest of the city's food scene. It's a seafood joint with a good burger (and -- shocker -- no lobster roll), and they switch up their specials nightly based on whatever they have in. They're a pretty typical take-out spot for me, and they're almost always throwing down on something good with their music. The later it gets, the more the place clears out, the louder and more eclectic the music will get. And the other night, I heard something that more or less blew me away. It was a doo-wop track by what sounded like an actual, real, completely authentic early doo-wop group. And it had the word "fuck" in it.

Tragically, Americans didn't really get comfortable with having our country's favorite explicative and third-favorite word in music in the 50s, but then again, was it really necessary? Probably not. But when you hear the crooned lyrics of:

Well, take a little advice from me. Play around with TNT, but Baby: Don’t fuck around with love.

... it more than kind of takes one aback. And the shock at what could be “actual, real, completely authentic” sounds coming out of the stereo is because (a) this is in Williamsburg, where a bunch of mustached hipsters recording tracks on 50-year-old equipment could actually be on the rise, and (b) because you would never, in a million years, hear a doo-wop group from that era use the word "fuck." Little did I know: the track is real. Recorded by a real doo-wop group in 1953, at the behest of their producer, The Blenders re-recorded their track "Don't Mess Around with Love" with the magical word in the place of the title lyric's "mess," and voila: you have one of the most awesome B-sides of all time.

"Don't Fuck Around With Love" can be heard here, and downloaded in any number of places, but right here and right here's a pretty good place to start. Think of this as one of those perfect mixtape ingredients you need to finish the thing as a stand-out. Like the restaurant I first heard it in, it's the simple bits of surprising awesomeness that'll keep recipients of this nice little treasure coming back again and again.