Podcasts about Acker Bilk

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 16, 2020 52:49

Episode 101 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs is the first one of the podcast's third year. This one looks at "Telstar" by the Tornados, and the tragic life of Joe Meek, Britain's first great pop auteur. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Apologies for the lateness of this one -- my two-week break got extended when my computer broke down. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Wipe Out" by the Surfaris. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Most of the information here comes from The Legendary Joe Meek: The Telstar Man by John Repsch. Some bits come from Clem Cattini: My Life Through the Eye of a Tornado. This compilation contains most of the important singles Meek produced, with the notable exceptions of the Tornados' singles. This, meanwhile, contains the early records he engineered before going into production. This is probably the best compilation of the Tornados' music available. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Welcome to the third year of A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, and welcome to the future! Although for this particular future we're actually going backwards a couple of months. This episode and the next one are both about records that were released a little before "Love Me Do", which the most recent episode covered, and that's something I should point out -- the podcast is never going to be absolutely chronological, and in this case it made sense to tell that story before these ones. Before we start this episode, I need to give warnings for a whole lot of different things, because we're looking at one of the most tragic stories we'll see during the course of this podcast. This story contains discussion of occultism, severe mental illness, legalised homophobia, an unsolved probably homophobic murder, and a murder-suicide. I am going to try to deal with all those subjects as sensitively as possible, but if you might become distressed by hearing about those things, you might want to skip this episode, or at least read the transcript before listening. I also want to make something very clear right now -- this episode deals with a mentally ill man who commits a murder. He did not commit that murder *because* he was mentally ill. Mental illness is far more likely to make someone the victim of a crime than the perpetrator, and I have known many, many people who have had the same symptoms but who have not committed such awful acts. It is impossible to talk about the events in this episode without the risk of increasing stigma for mentally ill people, but I hope by saying this I can reduce that risk at least somewhat. Today we're going to look at the first British rock and roll record to make number one in the USA, and at the career of the first independent record producer and engineer in Britain. We're going to look at the sad life and tragic end of Joe Meek, and at "Telstar" by the Tornadoes: [Excerpt: The Tornadoes, "Telstar"] Joe Meek is someone who has become something of a legend among music lovers, and he's someone whose music is more talked about than listened to. People talk about him as a genius, but rather fewer of them explain what it was that he did that was so impressive. This is partly because, more than much of the music of the era, it requires context to appreciate. Meek was a producer above all else -- he had no real knowledge of music, and had no ear for singers. What Meek did know was sounds, and how to achieve sounds in the recording studio that could not be achieved anywhere else. Meek had, from a very young age, been fascinated by the possibilities of both sound and electronics. He had experimented with both as a child, and when he'd moved to London he'd quickly found himself jobs where he could make use of that -- he'd started out as a TV repairman, but quickly moved on to working at IBC, one of the few independent studios in existence. There he was given the job of assistant engineer on a Radio Luxembourg show that was recorded live in theatres up and down the country -- he had to plug in all the mics and so on. He soon moved on to editing the tape recordings, and then to working the controls himself. As well as being main engineer on the radio show, though, he was also still an assistant engineer in the studio for music sessions, and for a long time that was all he was doing. However, he kept trying to get more involved in recording the music, and eventually to shut him up the studio boss gave him the chance to be the main engineer at a session -- for a twenty-piece string section. The boss assumed that Meek wouldn't be able to handle such a complicated assignment as his first engineering job, and that he'd be kept quiet if he knew how hard the job was. Instead, he did such a good job balancing the sound that the musicians in the studio applauded the playback, and he was quickly promoted to senior balance engineer. The world got its first small inkling of what Meek could do in 1956, when he created the unique sound of "Bad Penny Blues", a record by the trad jazz trumpet player Humphrey Lyttleton. "Bad Penny Blues" actually happened more or less by accident, at least as far as the musicians were concerned. There was a five-piece band in the studio, but the saxophone player had to leave early, and so they were stuck for what to record once he was gone. Denis Preston, the producer in charge of the session, suggested that they just play a blues, and so they improvised a boogie woogie piece, based around something they played in the clubs -- Johnny Parker, the piano player, played somewhat in the style of Dan Burley, the man who had coined the term "skiffle". But what made the track wasn't the group or the producer, but the engineering: [Excerpt: Humphrey Lyttleton, "Bad Penny Blues"] These days, that doesn't sound all that revolutionary, but when they heard it back the group were furious at what Meek had done to the sound, because it just didn't sound like what they were used to. There were several innovative things about it, at least for a British record, but one of the most important was that Meek had actually bothered to mic the drum kit separately -- at this point in British studios, which were several years behind American ones, it was considered unnecessary to mic the drums properly, as their sound would get into the other microphones anyway, because the musicians were all playing together in the same room. If you really wanted a good drum sound, you'd hang a single mic over the drummer's head. Meek was using separate mics for each drum on the kit. Because of this, Meek had managed to get a drum sound which was unlike anything that had been heard in a British record before. You can actually *hear* the kick drum. It sounds normal now, but that's because everyone who followed Meek realised that actually bothering to record the drums was something worth doing. There was another thing Meek did, which again you will almost certainly not have noticed when listening to that recording -- he had added a lot of compression. Compression is a standard part of the sound engineer's toolkit, and a simple one to understand. All it does is make quiet sounds louder and loud sounds quieter. Used sparingly, it gives a recording a little more punch, and also evens out the sound a bit. So for example, when you're listening to a playlist on Spotify, that playlist applies a little compression to everything, so when you go from a Bach piece for solo piano to a Slayer track, you can hear the Bach piece but your earbuds don't make your eardrums bleed when the Slayer record comes on. By the way, this is one of those words that gets used confusingly, because the word "compression", when referring to Internet sound files such as MP3s, has a totally different meaning, so you might well see someone talking about compression of a recording in ways that seem to contradict this. But when I refer to compression in this episode, and in any of the episodes in the foreseeable future, I mean what I've talked about here. Generally speaking, recordings have had steadily more compression applied to them over the decades, and so the moderate use of compression on "Bad Penny Blues" might not sound like much to modern ears -- especially since when older recordings have been reissued, they almost always have additional compression on them, so even when I've excerpted things in these episodes, they've sounded more compressed than the original recordings did. But Meek would soon start using a *lot* more compression, even than is used these days, and that drastically changed the character of the sound. To show what I mean, here's me playing a few bars on the guitar, recorded with no compression whatsoever: [guitar] Here's the same recording with a touch of compression: [guitar with compression] And the same recording with a *lot* of compression: [guitar with steadily more compression added] This was one of the things that Meek would do over the course of his career, and which very few other people were doing at the time in the UK. "Bad Penny Blues" became one of the most important British jazz records ever -- probably *the* most important British jazz record ever -- and it made the top twenty, which never happened with jazz records at the time. Meek's reputation as an innovative engineer was set. Shortly after "Bad Penny Blues", Meek was given his first opportunity to indulge his love of sound effects, on what became one of the biggest-selling British records of the year. Anne Shelton was recording a military-themed song, and the producer suggested that they needed the sound of marching feet. Rather than play in something from a sound-effects album, which was what the producer expected but which wouldn't have been in time with the music, Meek got a box of gravel and had someone shake it in time with the music. The result did sound exactly like marching feet, though the dust from the gravel apparently made Shelton's new suit into a mess, and the record went to number one for a month: [Excerpt: Anne Shelton, "Lay Down Your Arms"] Another hit Meek engineered in the mid-fifties has led to an urban myth that's been repeated unquestioningly even in the Guardian, even though a second's thought proves that it's nonsense. Frankie Vaughan's "Green Door" went to number two in 1957: [Excerpt: Frankie Vaughan, "Green Door"] That line, "When I said 'Joe sent me' someone laughed out loud" has been taken to be referring to Meek himself, and a whole elaborate mythology has been spun around this. As Meek was gay, and as there was a lesbian club called The Gateways in London which happened to have a green door, people have stated as fact that the song is about that club, and that the people in there were laughing because a man was trying to get into a lesbian club. There's only one slight problem with this, which is that it's complete nonsense. For a start, while Meek was gay, he saw being gay as an affliction, something to be ashamed of, and was hardly likely to make a whole jokey record about that — at least at this time. He did some things later on. Then there's the fact that Meek was at the time only a moderately-known engineer, not the famous producer and songwriter he became later. But more important than either of those things -- the song was a cover of an American hit record by Jim Lowe, written by songwriters who had almost certainly never even been to Britain. And the line about "Joe"? That was in the original, and was a reference to a 1954 hit on the same lines, "Hernando's Hideaway": [Excerpt: Ella Fitzgerald, "Hernando's Hideaway"] During this early period of his career, Meek was recording all sorts of music. While the bread-and-butter work of a recording engineer at the time was orchestral pop covers of American records, he also engineered skiffle records by Lonnie Donegan, with a stinging guitar sound he would later use on many other records: [Excerpt: Lonnie Donegan, "Cumberland Gap"] Calypso records by people like Lord Invader or the Mighty Terror: [Excerpt: Mighty Terror, "T.V. Calypso"] And jazz records by Chris Barber, Acker Bilk, and Humphrey Lyttleton, usually produced by Denis Preston, who after "Bad Penny Blues" insisted on using Meek for all of his sessions. Because of this connection, Meek also got to engineer some of the very first blues records cut in Britain. Barber would bring over American folk-blues artists to tour with him -- and we'll be looking at the consequences of that for much of the next three years -- and Preston arranged sessions, engineered by Meek, for Big Bill Broonzy: [Excerpt: Big Bill Broonzy, "When Do I Get To Be Called A Man?"] And Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee -- who wouldn't seem a natural fit with Meek's very artificial style, but the echo he applies to Terry's harmonica, in particular, gives it a haunting feel that really works, to my ears at least: [Excerpt: Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, "Key to the Highway"] But while Meek was becoming the best engineer in Britain, he was not getting on at all well with his boss. In large part this was because of the boss in question being extremely homophobic, so when Meek refused to work with assistants he perceived as incompetent and insisted on other ones, the boss assumed he wanted to work with people he fancied. In fact, Meek was just being a perfectionist -- but he was also very prone to mood swings and stubbornness, and bursts of paranoia. He started to think that the people he was working with were stealing his ideas. And he was having a lot of ideas. As well as close-micing instruments, adding compression as a sound effect, and adding extra echo, all of which were almost unknown in British studios at the time, he was also the first person in Britain to deliberately add distortion to a sound, and he also came up with a primitive method of multi-tracking, at a time when everything in British studios was recorded straight to mono. He would record a backing track, then play it back into the studio for the musicians to play along with, rerecording the backing track into another microphone. This way of working round the limitations of the studio ended up giving some of the records a swimmy sound because of loss of fidelity, but Meek leaned into that, and it became a signature of his music even after he eventually gained access to multi-track recording. So Meek knew he would have to move on from just being an engineer, working for a homophobe who also didn't appreciate his talents. He needed to become a producer, and this is where Denis Preston came in. Preston was himself an independent record producer -- the only one in Europe at the time. He would make records and only after they were recorded would he make an agreement with a record label to release them. Meek wanted to go even further than Preston -- he wanted to become the first independent producer *and engineer* in the UK. Up to this point, in Britain, the jobs of producer and engineer were separate. Meek had recently built a tiny studio in his flat, for recording demos, and he had cowritten a song, "Sizzling Hot", that he thought had hit potential. He recruited a local skiffle band to record a demo of the song, and Preston agreed it had potential, and funded the recording of a proper version of the song: [Excerpt: Jimmy Miller, "Sizzling Hot"] Jimmy Miller, the singer of that song, was present at an event that shaped much of the rest of Joe Meek's life. Now, I need to emphasise that when he reported this, Miller was talking many years later, so he may have exaggerated what actually happened, and I have no reason to think that what I'm about to describe actually involved anything supernatural. But the way Miller told the story, he, Meek, and a friend of Meek's named Faud were conducting a seance in January 1958. Miller was shuffling and dealing tarot cards with one hand, while holding Meek's hand with the other. Meek in turn was holding one of Faud's hands, while Faud held a pen in the other hand and was performing automatic writing. As Miller told it, at one point he felt strange and gripped Meek's hand so hard it drew blood, and at the same moment Faud wrote down the words "Feb 3, Buddy Holly dies", in what looked to Miller like Miller's own handwriting rather than Faud's. Meek tried to get the record labels and publishers to warn Holly, but they didn't. February the third 1958 came and went with no problem, but Meek was still worried, and so when Holly and the Crickets toured Britain in March that year, Meek waited outside the stage door and slipped Holly a bit of paper warning him. Holly apparently treated him politely, but he was later heard to joke on the radio about some of the strange things that had happened to him on tour, including being slipped this note. And then, on February the third 1959, Buddy Holly did die. Now, again, we only have Miller's after the fact word that the seance predicted the exact date of Holly's death, but it's very clear that something happened that day that affected Meek deeply, and that he did make efforts to warn Holly. Meek was severely disturbed when Holly died, and while he had already been a fan of Holly's, he was now something more. He was convinced that Buddy Holly was *important* to him in some way, and that Holly's music, and Holly's personality, were something he needed to study. Later on, he would become convinced that Holly's ghost was talking to him. But for the moment, this, and Meek's mood swings, didn't affect things too much. He quit working at IBC and started his own studio, Landsdowne studio, which was funded and owned by Preston, but with equipment designed by Meek, who was to have the run of the place. His songwriting was starting to pay off, too. While "Sizzling Hot" hadn't been a hit, Meek had written another song, "Put a Ring on Her Finger", which had been recorded by Eddie Silver, and had been unsuccessful. But then Les Paul and Mary Ford had covered it in the US, and it had made the US top forty: [Excerpt: Les Paul and Mary Ford, "Put a Ring on My Finger"] And Tommy Steele had covered their version as the B-side of his top-ten UK hit cover of Richie Valens' "Come on Let's Go". But that success as a songwriter led to Meek leaving Lansdowne studios in November 1959. Denis Preston owned the publishing company that published Meek's songs, and Meek started pestering him to take more songs. He did this in a recording session, and Preston told him to concentrate on the session and leave pitching songs to afterwards. Meek stormed out, leaving his assistant to finish the session, and Preston told him not to bother coming back -- Meek was a great engineer and producer, but was just too difficult to work with. Luckily for Meek, his firing came at a time when he was in high demand in the industry. He'd just co-produced "What Do You Want to Make Those Eyes at Me For?" by Emile Ford and the Checkmates, which became both the first number one of the sixties and the first number one by a Black British artist: [Excerpt: Emile Ford and the Checkmates, "What Do You Want To Make Those Eyes At Me For?"] He had two more records in the top ten as well. But even so, he found it hard to get any more work, and so he spent his time working on an experimental album, I Hear a New World, which was inspired by the launch of the first Sputnik satellite and by his getting hold of a clavioline, the same kind of keyboard instrument that had been modified into the Musitron on "Runaway". I Hear A New World wasn't a success, but it was the first attempt at something that would later become very big for Meek: [Excerpt: The Blue Men, "Magnetic Field"] I Hear a New World was eventually released as a limited-pressing EP and an even more limited pressing album by a new label that Meek set up with William Barrington-Coupe, Triumph Records. Triumph lasted less than a year. While working at the label, Meek did produce three hit singles, including "Angela Jones" by Michael Cox, which made the top ten: [Excerpt: Michael Cox, "Angela Jones"] But Meek soon became paranoid about Barrington-Coupe, and for once he may have been right. Most of the businesses Barrington-Coupe was involved with collapsed, he spent some time in prison for tax fraud in the mid-sixties, and he would later become involved in one of the great scandals to hit the classical music world. Before linking up with Meek, he had married the minor concert pianist Joyce Hatto, who had a reputation as being moderately, but not exceptionally, talented, and who recorded for Barrington-Coupe's Saga Records: [Excerpt: Joyce Hatto and the New York Pro Arte Symphony, "Rhapsody in Blue"] While Hatto's career continued into the seventies, both she and Barrington-Coupe then disappeared from public view. Then, in 2002, Hatto started releasing what was the most extraordinary outpouring of music from any classical musician. She released over a hundred CDs in the next four years on a label owned by Barrington-Coupe, performing almost the entire major classical piano repertoire. She was only working in the studio -- she was very ill -- but she became a legend among lovers of classical music: [Excerpt: "Joyce Hatto" (Vladimir Ashkenazy), Brahms Piano Concerto #2] It was only after her death in 2006 that the truth came out -- none of the recordings from her late golden period were actually of her. Barrington-Coupe had simply been taking other people's recordings of these pieces -- often recordings by relatively obscure musicians -- and reissuing them under her name, with made-up conductors and orchestras. That's the kind of person that Barrington-Coupe was, and it suggests that Meek was correct in his suspicions of his business partner. But for a short time, Meek was happy at Triumph, and he set up a fruitful working partnership with Charles Blackwell, his young co-writer on "Sizzling Hot", who worked as his arranger and would translate Meek's ideas into music that other musicians could understand -- Meek couldn't play an instrument, or read music, or sing in tune. To write songs, Meek would often take an old rhythm track he happened to have lying around and record a new vocal on it, la-laing his way through a melody even if the chords didn't go with it. Blackwell would take these demos and turn them into finished songs, and write string arrangements. So he was creatively happy, but he needed to move on. And while he quickly decided that Barrington-Coupe was a chancer who he shouldn't be having any dealings with, he didn't feel the same about Major Banks, who had provided the funding for Barrington-Coupe's investment in Triumph. Banks came to Meek with a new idea -- rather than have a record company, they would do like Denis Preston did and make records which they would then lease to the major labels. Meek would deal with all the music, and Banks with the money, and Banks would pay for Joe to move into a bigger flat, where he could have his own professional recording studio, which would be cheaper than recording in other studios, as he had been since he'd left Lansdowne. RGM Sound was born. Meek's new studio was something utterly unheard of in Britain, and almost unheard of in the world. It was a three-storey flat above a shop on a residential street. He was recording in a normal home. The live room he used was a bedroom, and sometimes musicians would play in the hallway or the bathroom. Other than odd amateur disc-cutting places, there was no such thing as a home studio in the Britain of the 1950s and sixties. Studios were large, purpose-built facilities run by very serious pipe-smoking men employed by major multinational firms, who wore lab coats if they were doing technical work or a suit and tie if they were on the creative side. The idea of making a record in someone's bedroom was just nonsensical. Meek started making records with a new young songwriter named Geoff Goddard, who took on the stage name Anton Hollywood, and found a lucrative opportunity in a young Australian manager and agent named Robert Stigwood. Stigwood had a lot of actors on his books who had TV careers, and he wanted to promote them as all-round entertainers. He started sending them to Meek, who was good enough in the studio that he could make even the worst singer sound competent, and then one of them, John Leyton, got a part in a soap opera as a pop singer. Whatever his next record was, it would get the kind of TV exposure most acts could only dream of. Goddard wrote a song called "Johnny Remember Me", Blackwell came up with the arrangement, and Meek produced it and managed to get Leyton sounding like a singer: [Excerpt: John Leyton, "Johnny Remember Me"] It went to number one and sold half a million copies. But those lyrics about hearing a dead person's voice were a sign of something that was eventually going to lead to tragedy. Goddard shared many of Meek's obsessions. Goddard, like Meek, was a spiritualist, and he thought he could talk to the dead. The two started to hold regular seances, in which they would try to contact Buddy Holly, who Goddard believed had sent him "Johnny Remember Me" from the spirit world. Meek's obsession with the undead also showed in some of the other records he was making, like the instrumental "Night of the Vampire" by the Moontrekkers: [Excerpt: The Moontrekkers, "Night of the Vampire"] The Moontrekkers did have a singer, but after hearing him audition, Meek came running into the room flapping his arms and blowing raspberries, because he thought he was too awful to record. Rod Stewart would have to wait a while longer for his recording career. In 1961, Meek put together a group for studio work. The group started because the lead guitarist of the Outlaws, one of the bands Meek produced, got sacked. Their bass player, Chas Hodges, later more famous as half of Chas & Dave, switched to guitar, and Meek had tried to replace him with a new bass player, one Heinz Burt. Heinz was someone who Meek was very attracted to -- reports differ on whether they were lovers or not, but if not then Meek definitely wanted them to be -- and Meek was moulding Heinz to be a future star, despite his lack of musical ability. While he was being groomed for stardom, he was made the bass player in the group -- until Hodges decided he was going to switch back to bass, because Heinz couldn't play. Alan Caddy, formerly of Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, became the new guitarist for the Outlaws, and then the group lost their drummer, who was replaced with Clem Cattini, Caddy's old Pirates bandmate. By this point Chas Hodges was the only Outlaw left, and Meek really wanted to give Heinz a job, and so he took Caddy and Cattini and made them into a new group, for studio work, who were to be known as the Tornados, with Heinz on bass. Soon they added a rhythm guitarist, George Bellamy, and a keyboard player, Norman Hale. Larry Parnes was, as we saw in the last episode, always on the lookout for bands to back his stars, and so in 1962 the Tornados became Billy Fury's backing band -- something that was to cause problems for them more quickly than they imagined. At the time, it seemed like a great opportunity. They were going to record for Meek -- both their own records and as the backing musicians for anyone else that Meek thought they'd work with -- and they were going to tour with Fury, so they'd have regular work. And Meek saw it as an opportunity for him to possibly get involved with Fury's recording career, which would have been a great opportunity for him had it worked out. The Tornados' first single, "Love and Fury", seems to have been named with this new association in mind: [Excerpt: The Tornados, "Love and Fury"] Unfortunately for the group, it wasn't a hit. But then Meek got inspired. In July 1962, the first ever communications satellite, Telstar, was launched. For the first time in history, people could see events on the other side of the world broadcast live, and so Europeans got to see, in real time, a speech by President Kennedy and part of a baseball game. It's hard now to imagine how revolutionary this was at the time, but this was a time when things like the Olympics were shown on twelve-hour delays or longer, as to show them the TV companies had to film them on actual film, and then fly the film over to the UK. Telstar was the future, and Meek, with his interest in space, was going to commemorate that. He took a song he'd recorded with Geoff Goddard, “Try Once More”: [Excerpt: Geoff Goddard, “Try Once More”] As was always his way with writing, he took that backing track, and sang a new melody over it: [Excerpt: Joe Meek, “Telstar (demo)”] He then got the keyboard player Dave Adams to work out the melody based on that demo, and recorded Adams playing that melody over a different pre-recorded backing track: [Excerpt: Dave Adams, “Telstar demo”] He then used that as the demo to show the Tornados what to play. They spent twelve hours in the studio recording the backing track, between Billy Fury shows, and then Meek got Goddard in to play piano and clavioline, and do some wordless vocals, as the Tornados didn't have enough time between shows to finish the track by themselves. Meek then overdubbed the track with various backwards-recorded and echoed sound effects: [Excerpt: The Tornados, "Telstar"] "Telstar" entered the charts on the fifth of September, and reached number one on the tenth of October, the week after "Love Me Do" came out. It stayed there for five weeks, and as well as that it went to number one in America -- the first British rock and roll record ever to do so. The follow-up, "Globetrotter", also charted -- and got into the top ten while "Telstar" was still there: [Excerpt: The Tornados, "Globetrotter"] Unfortunately, that was to be the high point for the Tornados. Larry Parnes, who was managing them, didn't want them to take the spotlight away from Billy Fury, who they were backing -- he let them play "Telstar" on stage, but that was it, and when they got offers to tour America, he insisted that Fury had to be on the bill, which caused the American promoters to back out. Not only that, but the other Tornados were getting sick of Meek putting all his attention into Heinz, who he was still trying to make into a solo star, recording songs like the Eddie Cochran tribute "Just Like Eddie", written by Geoff Goddard and with a new young guitarist called Ritchie Blackmore, who was the guitarist in Chas Hodges' latest lineup of Outlaws, playing lead: [Excerpt: Heinz, "Just Like Eddie"] And then in March 1963, the composer of a piece of French film music, "Le Marche d’Austerlitz", sued Meek over "Telstar"s similarity to that tune: [Excerpt: Jean Ledrut, "Le Marche d’Austerlitz"] It was a frivolous suit -- Meek had no way of having heard that piece, which was from a film which hadn't been released in Britain -- but it tied up all Meek's royalties from “Telstar” for the next four years. Meek was still having hits -- "Just Like Eddie" eventually made number five – for example, but in 1963 with the rise of Merseybeat he was having fewer and fewer. Not only that, but his mental health was getting worse and worse, especially after he was arrested for soliciting. He started getting more and more paranoid that people were stealing his ideas, and one by one he cut ties with business associates like Larry Parnes and Robert Stigwood. Heinz got a girlfriend, and everyone was in Meek's bad books. But he was still turning out the hits, like "Have I The Right" by the Honeycombs: [Excerpt: The Honeycombs, "Have I the Right"] That went to number one, but meant the end of Meek's association with Goddard -- Goddard claimed that he had written the song, which was credited to the Honeycombs' managers, and Meek thought he was just claiming this so he could avoid being associated with Meek now that his homosexuality was public knowledge after his arrest. Goddard ended up suing over the song. Meek was also just producing too much music in an attempt to remain on top. He's often compared to Phil Spector, but in a three-year period Spector had twenty-one hit singles out of twenty-four releases. Meek, in the same period, had twenty-five hit singles -- but released 141 singles, almost one a week. His failure rate in turn made record labels more and more wary of buying his tapes. By the mid-sixties, the hits were well and truly drying up. Meek was still producing a group called the Tornados, but it had none of the original members in and now featured guitarist Ritchie Blackmore and drummer Mitch Mitchell . This lineup of Tornados split up shortly after Meek pulled out a shotgun in the studio and aimed it at Mitchell's head, saying he'd shoot him if he didn't get the drum part right. Meek's final important record was in mid 1966, when he finally jumped on the Merseybeat bandwagon two years late, with "Please Stay" by the Cryin' Shames, the most popular band in Liverpool at the time: [Excerpt: The Cryin' Shames, "Please Stay"] Unfortunately, that only made the lower reaches of the top thirty. Meek was getting deeper and deeper in debt, and his mental health was getting worse. He was seriously considering quitting as an independent producer and taking a steady job with EMI instead. And then, a tragic event happened which eventually led to the unravelling of Meek's entire life. Meek was already in a very low place when he learned of the murder of sixteen-year-old Bernard Oliver, a young gay teenager who Meek had known (reports vary on how well they knew each other, with some saying that Oliver had done some work for Meek at his studio, while others say they just vaguely knew each other). The murder, which has still never been solved, was a major news story at the time, and it led to a massive increase in police harassment of anyone who was known to be gay, especially if they knew Oliver -- and Meek had a conviction. Meek already believed he was being spied on and that his phone was being tapped, and now the world started giving him reason to think that -- strange cars parked outside his house, almost certainly undercover police spying on him. On February the second, 1967, the PRS received a letter from the French performing rights society, saying that Meek's problems with the Telstar lawsuit would soon be over -- the court had determined that no matter what had happened, the composer of “Le Marche d'Austerlitz” would only be entitled to a small percentage of the royalties from "Telstar" at most. Frederick Woods, the assistant general manager of the PRS and a friend of Meek's, put the letter aside intending to call Meek and tell him the good news -- all he had to do was to write to the PRS and they'd be able to give him an advance on the money, and soon almost all of it would be coming through. He'd soon be getting the bulk of the £150,000 he was owed -- nearly three million pounds in today's money. But Woods got distracted and didn't make the phone call, and Meek never found out that his money troubles were nearly over. Ritchie Blackmore's wife Margaret called round to see Joe, as she sometimes did. He was apparently not in his right mind, talking a lot about black magic and comparing Margaret to Frieda Harris, one of Aleister Crowley's associates. He was convinced people were stealing his ideas from his mind, and asked her to leave. While she was there, she saw him destroying correspondence and paintings he owned. The next morning, February the third, Meek asked his assistant to get his landlady, Violet Shenton, up to Meek's office. There was some shouting from Meek, and then he turned a gun he had, which was owned by Heinz, on Mrs. Shenton and killed her. Meek's assistant ran into the room, but before he could get to Meek, Meek shot himself, dying instantly. It was the eighth anniversary of Buddy Holly's death. The lawsuit over "Telstar" was finally resolved just three weeks later, in Meek's favour. There's a plaque now at the building where Meek's studio was. It says that Joe Meek, "the Telstar man", "Lived, worked, and died here". It doesn't mention Violet Shenton. After all, she wasn't a great male genius, just the male genius' female victim.

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Episode 101: “Telstar” by the Tornados

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 16, 2020

Episode 101 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs is the first one of the podcast’s third year. This one looks at “Telstar” by the Tornados, and the tragic life of Joe Meek, Britain’s first great pop auteur. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Apologies for the lateness of this one — my two-week break got extended when my computer broke down. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Wipe Out” by the Surfaris. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Most of the information here comes from The Legendary Joe Meek: The Telstar Man by John Repsch. Some bits come from Clem Cattini: My Life Through the Eye of a Tornado. This compilation contains most of the important singles Meek produced, with the notable exceptions of the Tornados’ singles. This, meanwhile, contains the early records he engineered before going into production. This is probably the best compilation of the Tornados’ music available. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Welcome to the third year of A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, and welcome to the future! Although for this particular future we’re actually going backwards a couple of months. This episode and the next one are both about records that were released a little before “Love Me Do”, which the most recent episode covered, and that’s something I should point out — the podcast is never going to be absolutely chronological, and in this case it made sense to tell that story before these ones. Before we start this episode, I need to give warnings for a whole lot of different things, because we’re looking at one of the most tragic stories we’ll see during the course of this podcast. This story contains discussion of occultism, severe mental illness, legalised homophobia, an unsolved probably homophobic murder, and a murder-suicide. I am going to try to deal with all those subjects as sensitively as possible, but if you might become distressed by hearing about those things, you might want to skip this episode, or at least read the transcript before listening. I also want to make something very clear right now — this episode deals with a mentally ill man who commits a murder. He did not commit that murder *because* he was mentally ill. Mental illness is far more likely to make someone the victim of a crime than the perpetrator, and I have known many, many people who have had the same symptoms but who have not committed such awful acts. It is impossible to talk about the events in this episode without the risk of increasing stigma for mentally ill people, but I hope by saying this I can reduce that risk at least somewhat. Today we’re going to look at the first British rock and roll record to make number one in the USA, and at the career of the first independent record producer and engineer in Britain. We’re going to look at the sad life and tragic end of Joe Meek, and at “Telstar” by the Tornadoes: [Excerpt: The Tornadoes, “Telstar”] Joe Meek is someone who has become something of a legend among music lovers, and he’s someone whose music is more talked about than listened to. People talk about him as a genius, but rather fewer of them explain what it was that he did that was so impressive. This is partly because, more than much of the music of the era, it requires context to appreciate. Meek was a producer above all else — he had no real knowledge of music, and had no ear for singers. What Meek did know was sounds, and how to achieve sounds in the recording studio that could not be achieved anywhere else. Meek had, from a very young age, been fascinated by the possibilities of both sound and electronics. He had experimented with both as a child, and when he’d moved to London he’d quickly found himself jobs where he could make use of that — he’d started out as a TV repairman, but quickly moved on to working at IBC, one of the few independent studios in existence. There he was given the job of assistant engineer on a Radio Luxembourg show that was recorded live in theatres up and down the country — he had to plug in all the mics and so on. He soon moved on to editing the tape recordings, and then to working the controls himself. As well as being main engineer on the radio show, though, he was also still an assistant engineer in the studio for music sessions, and for a long time that was all he was doing. However, he kept trying to get more involved in recording the music, and eventually to shut him up the studio boss gave him the chance to be the main engineer at a session — for a twenty-piece string section. The boss assumed that Meek wouldn’t be able to handle such a complicated assignment as his first engineering job, and that he’d be kept quiet if he knew how hard the job was. Instead, he did such a good job balancing the sound that the musicians in the studio applauded the playback, and he was quickly promoted to senior balance engineer. The world got its first small inkling of what Meek could do in 1956, when he created the unique sound of “Bad Penny Blues”, a record by the trad jazz trumpet player Humphrey Lyttleton. “Bad Penny Blues” actually happened more or less by accident, at least as far as the musicians were concerned. There was a five-piece band in the studio, but the saxophone player had to leave early, and so they were stuck for what to record once he was gone. Denis Preston, the producer in charge of the session, suggested that they just play a blues, and so they improvised a boogie woogie piece, based around something they played in the clubs — Johnny Parker, the piano player, played somewhat in the style of Dan Burley, the man who had coined the term “skiffle”. But what made the track wasn’t the group or the producer, but the engineering: [Excerpt: Humphrey Lyttleton, “Bad Penny Blues”] These days, that doesn’t sound all that revolutionary, but when they heard it back the group were furious at what Meek had done to the sound, because it just didn’t sound like what they were used to. There were several innovative things about it, at least for a British record, but one of the most important was that Meek had actually bothered to mic the drum kit separately — at this point in British studios, which were several years behind American ones, it was considered unnecessary to mic the drums properly, as their sound would get into the other microphones anyway, because the musicians were all playing together in the same room. If you really wanted a good drum sound, you’d hang a single mic over the drummer’s head. Meek was using separate mics for each drum on the kit. Because of this, Meek had managed to get a drum sound which was unlike anything that had been heard in a British record before. You can actually *hear* the kick drum. It sounds normal now, but that’s because everyone who followed Meek realised that actually bothering to record the drums was something worth doing. There was another thing Meek did, which again you will almost certainly not have noticed when listening to that recording — he had added a lot of compression. Compression is a standard part of the sound engineer’s toolkit, and a simple one to understand. All it does is make quiet sounds louder and loud sounds quieter. Used sparingly, it gives a recording a little more punch, and also evens out the sound a bit. So for example, when you’re listening to a playlist on Spotify, that playlist applies a little compression to everything, so when you go from a Bach piece for solo piano to a Slayer track, you can hear the Bach piece but your earbuds don’t make your eardrums bleed when the Slayer record comes on. By the way, this is one of those words that gets used confusingly, because the word “compression”, when referring to Internet sound files such as MP3s, has a totally different meaning, so you might well see someone talking about compression of a recording in ways that seem to contradict this. But when I refer to compression in this episode, and in any of the episodes in the foreseeable future, I mean what I’ve talked about here. Generally speaking, recordings have had steadily more compression applied to them over the decades, and so the moderate use of compression on “Bad Penny Blues” might not sound like much to modern ears — especially since when older recordings have been reissued, they almost always have additional compression on them, so even when I’ve excerpted things in these episodes, they’ve sounded more compressed than the original recordings did. But Meek would soon start using a *lot* more compression, even than is used these days, and that drastically changed the character of the sound. To show what I mean, here’s me playing a few bars on the guitar, recorded with no compression whatsoever: [guitar] Here’s the same recording with a touch of compression: [guitar with compression] And the same recording with a *lot* of compression: [guitar with steadily more compression added] This was one of the things that Meek would do over the course of his career, and which very few other people were doing at the time in the UK. “Bad Penny Blues” became one of the most important British jazz records ever — probably *the* most important British jazz record ever — and it made the top twenty, which never happened with jazz records at the time. Meek’s reputation as an innovative engineer was set. Shortly after “Bad Penny Blues”, Meek was given his first opportunity to indulge his love of sound effects, on what became one of the biggest-selling British records of the year. Anne Shelton was recording a military-themed song, and the producer suggested that they needed the sound of marching feet. Rather than play in something from a sound-effects album, which was what the producer expected but which wouldn’t have been in time with the music, Meek got a box of gravel and had someone shake it in time with the music. The result did sound exactly like marching feet, though the dust from the gravel apparently made Shelton’s new suit into a mess, and the record went to number one for a month: [Excerpt: Anne Shelton, “Lay Down Your Arms”] Another hit Meek engineered in the mid-fifties has led to an urban myth that’s been repeated unquestioningly even in the Guardian, even though a second’s thought proves that it’s nonsense. Frankie Vaughan’s “Green Door” went to number two in 1957: [Excerpt: Frankie Vaughan, “Green Door”] That line, “When I said ‘Joe sent me’ someone laughed out loud” has been taken to be referring to Meek himself, and a whole elaborate mythology has been spun around this. As Meek was gay, and as there was a lesbian club called The Gateways in London which happened to have a green door, people have stated as fact that the song is about that club, and that the people in there were laughing because a man was trying to get into a lesbian club. There’s only one slight problem with this, which is that it’s complete nonsense. For a start, while Meek was gay, he saw being gay as an affliction, something to be ashamed of, and was hardly likely to make a whole jokey record about that — at least at this time. He did some things later on. Then there’s the fact that Meek was at the time only a moderately-known engineer, not the famous producer and songwriter he became later. But more important than either of those things — the song was a cover of an American hit record by Jim Lowe, written by songwriters who had almost certainly never even been to Britain. And the line about “Joe”? That was in the original, and was a reference to a 1954 hit on the same lines, “Hernando’s Hideaway”: [Excerpt: Ella Fitzgerald, “Hernando’s Hideaway”] During this early period of his career, Meek was recording all sorts of music. While the bread-and-butter work of a recording engineer at the time was orchestral pop covers of American records, he also engineered skiffle records by Lonnie Donegan, with a stinging guitar sound he would later use on many other records: [Excerpt: Lonnie Donegan, “Cumberland Gap”] Calypso records by people like Lord Invader or the Mighty Terror: [Excerpt: Mighty Terror, “T.V. Calypso”] And jazz records by Chris Barber, Acker Bilk, and Humphrey Lyttleton, usually produced by Denis Preston, who after “Bad Penny Blues” insisted on using Meek for all of his sessions. Because of this connection, Meek also got to engineer some of the very first blues records cut in Britain. Barber would bring over American folk-blues artists to tour with him — and we’ll be looking at the consequences of that for much of the next three years — and Preston arranged sessions, engineered by Meek, for Big Bill Broonzy: [Excerpt: Big Bill Broonzy, “When Do I Get To Be Called A Man?”] And Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee — who wouldn’t seem a natural fit with Meek’s very artificial style, but the echo he applies to Terry’s harmonica, in particular, gives it a haunting feel that really works, to my ears at least: [Excerpt: Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, “Key to the Highway”] But while Meek was becoming the best engineer in Britain, he was not getting on at all well with his boss. In large part this was because of the boss in question being extremely homophobic, so when Meek refused to work with assistants he perceived as incompetent and insisted on other ones, the boss assumed he wanted to work with people he fancied. In fact, Meek was just being a perfectionist — but he was also very prone to mood swings and stubbornness, and bursts of paranoia. He started to think that the people he was working with were stealing his ideas. And he was having a lot of ideas. As well as close-micing instruments, adding compression as a sound effect, and adding extra echo, all of which were almost unknown in British studios at the time, he was also the first person in Britain to deliberately add distortion to a sound, and he also came up with a primitive method of multi-tracking, at a time when everything in British studios was recorded straight to mono. He would record a backing track, then play it back into the studio for the musicians to play along with, rerecording the backing track into another microphone. This way of working round the limitations of the studio ended up giving some of the records a swimmy sound because of loss of fidelity, but Meek leaned into that, and it became a signature of his music even after he eventually gained access to multi-track recording. So Meek knew he would have to move on from just being an engineer, working for a homophobe who also didn’t appreciate his talents. He needed to become a producer, and this is where Denis Preston came in. Preston was himself an independent record producer — the only one in Europe at the time. He would make records and only after they were recorded would he make an agreement with a record label to release them. Meek wanted to go even further than Preston — he wanted to become the first independent producer *and engineer* in the UK. Up to this point, in Britain, the jobs of producer and engineer were separate. Meek had recently built a tiny studio in his flat, for recording demos, and he had cowritten a song, “Sizzling Hot”, that he thought had hit potential. He recruited a local skiffle band to record a demo of the song, and Preston agreed it had potential, and funded the recording of a proper version of the song: [Excerpt: Jimmy Miller, “Sizzling Hot”] Jimmy Miller, the singer of that song, was present at an event that shaped much of the rest of Joe Meek’s life. Now, I need to emphasise that when he reported this, Miller was talking many years later, so he may have exaggerated what actually happened, and I have no reason to think that what I’m about to describe actually involved anything supernatural. But the way Miller told the story, he, Meek, and a friend of Meek’s named Faud were conducting a seance in January 1958. Miller was shuffling and dealing tarot cards with one hand, while holding Meek’s hand with the other. Meek in turn was holding one of Faud’s hands, while Faud held a pen in the other hand and was performing automatic writing. As Miller told it, at one point he felt strange and gripped Meek’s hand so hard it drew blood, and at the same moment Faud wrote down the words “Feb 3, Buddy Holly dies”, in what looked to Miller like Miller’s own handwriting rather than Faud’s. Meek tried to get the record labels and publishers to warn Holly, but they didn’t. February the third 1958 came and went with no problem, but Meek was still worried, and so when Holly and the Crickets toured Britain in March that year, Meek waited outside the stage door and slipped Holly a bit of paper warning him. Holly apparently treated him politely, but he was later heard to joke on the radio about some of the strange things that had happened to him on tour, including being slipped this note. And then, on February the third 1959, Buddy Holly did die. Now, again, we only have Miller’s after the fact word that the seance predicted the exact date of Holly’s death, but it’s very clear that something happened that day that affected Meek deeply, and that he did make efforts to warn Holly. Meek was severely disturbed when Holly died, and while he had already been a fan of Holly’s, he was now something more. He was convinced that Buddy Holly was *important* to him in some way, and that Holly’s music, and Holly’s personality, were something he needed to study. Later on, he would become convinced that Holly’s ghost was talking to him. But for the moment, this, and Meek’s mood swings, didn’t affect things too much. He quit working at IBC and started his own studio, Landsdowne studio, which was funded and owned by Preston, but with equipment designed by Meek, who was to have the run of the place. His songwriting was starting to pay off, too. While “Sizzling Hot” hadn’t been a hit, Meek had written another song, “Put a Ring on Her Finger”, which had been recorded by Eddie Silver, and had been unsuccessful. But then Les Paul and Mary Ford had covered it in the US, and it had made the US top forty: [Excerpt: Les Paul and Mary Ford, “Put a Ring on My Finger”] And Tommy Steele had covered their version as the B-side of his top-ten UK hit cover of Richie Valens’ “Come on Let’s Go”. But that success as a songwriter led to Meek leaving Lansdowne studios in November 1959. Denis Preston owned the publishing company that published Meek’s songs, and Meek started pestering him to take more songs. He did this in a recording session, and Preston told him to concentrate on the session and leave pitching songs to afterwards. Meek stormed out, leaving his assistant to finish the session, and Preston told him not to bother coming back — Meek was a great engineer and producer, but was just too difficult to work with. Luckily for Meek, his firing came at a time when he was in high demand in the industry. He’d just co-produced “What Do You Want to Make Those Eyes at Me For?” by Emile Ford and the Checkmates, which became both the first number one of the sixties and the first number one by a Black British artist: [Excerpt: Emile Ford and the Checkmates, “What Do You Want To Make Those Eyes At Me For?”] He had two more records in the top ten as well. But even so, he found it hard to get any more work, and so he spent his time working on an experimental album, I Hear a New World, which was inspired by the launch of the first Sputnik satellite and by his getting hold of a clavioline, the same kind of keyboard instrument that had been modified into the Musitron on “Runaway”. I Hear A New World wasn’t a success, but it was the first attempt at something that would later become very big for Meek: [Excerpt: The Blue Men, “Magnetic Field”] I Hear a New World was eventually released as a limited-pressing EP and an even more limited pressing album by a new label that Meek set up with William Barrington-Coupe, Triumph Records. Triumph lasted less than a year. While working at the label, Meek did produce three hit singles, including “Angela Jones” by Michael Cox, which made the top ten: [Excerpt: Michael Cox, “Angela Jones”] But Meek soon became paranoid about Barrington-Coupe, and for once he may have been right. Most of the businesses Barrington-Coupe was involved with collapsed, he spent some time in prison for tax fraud in the mid-sixties, and he would later become involved in one of the great scandals to hit the classical music world. Before linking up with Meek, he had married the minor concert pianist Joyce Hatto, who had a reputation as being moderately, but not exceptionally, talented, and who recorded for Barrington-Coupe’s Saga Records: [Excerpt: Joyce Hatto and the New York Pro Arte Symphony, “Rhapsody in Blue”] While Hatto’s career continued into the seventies, both she and Barrington-Coupe then disappeared from public view. Then, in 2002, Hatto started releasing what was the most extraordinary outpouring of music from any classical musician. She released over a hundred CDs in the next four years on a label owned by Barrington-Coupe, performing almost the entire major classical piano repertoire. She was only working in the studio — she was very ill — but she became a legend among lovers of classical music: [Excerpt: “Joyce Hatto” (Vladimir Ashkenazy), Brahms Piano Concerto #2] It was only after her death in 2006 that the truth came out — none of the recordings from her late golden period were actually of her. Barrington-Coupe had simply been taking other people’s recordings of these pieces — often recordings by relatively obscure musicians — and reissuing them under her name, with made-up conductors and orchestras. That’s the kind of person that Barrington-Coupe was, and it suggests that Meek was correct in his suspicions of his business partner. But for a short time, Meek was happy at Triumph, and he set up a fruitful working partnership with Charles Blackwell, his young co-writer on “Sizzling Hot”, who worked as his arranger and would translate Meek’s ideas into music that other musicians could understand — Meek couldn’t play an instrument, or read music, or sing in tune. To write songs, Meek would often take an old rhythm track he happened to have lying around and record a new vocal on it, la-laing his way through a melody even if the chords didn’t go with it. Blackwell would take these demos and turn them into finished songs, and write string arrangements. So he was creatively happy, but he needed to move on. And while he quickly decided that Barrington-Coupe was a chancer who he shouldn’t be having any dealings with, he didn’t feel the same about Major Banks, who had provided the funding for Barrington-Coupe’s investment in Triumph. Banks came to Meek with a new idea — rather than have a record company, they would do like Denis Preston did and make records which they would then lease to the major labels. Meek would deal with all the music, and Banks with the money, and Banks would pay for Joe to move into a bigger flat, where he could have his own professional recording studio, which would be cheaper than recording in other studios, as he had been since he’d left Lansdowne. RGM Sound was born. Meek’s new studio was something utterly unheard of in Britain, and almost unheard of in the world. It was a three-storey flat above a shop on a residential street. He was recording in a normal home. The live room he used was a bedroom, and sometimes musicians would play in the hallway or the bathroom. Other than odd amateur disc-cutting places, there was no such thing as a home studio in the Britain of the 1950s and sixties. Studios were large, purpose-built facilities run by very serious pipe-smoking men employed by major multinational firms, who wore lab coats if they were doing technical work or a suit and tie if they were on the creative side. The idea of making a record in someone’s bedroom was just nonsensical. Meek started making records with a new young songwriter named Geoff Goddard, who took on the stage name Anton Hollywood, and found a lucrative opportunity in a young Australian manager and agent named Robert Stigwood. Stigwood had a lot of actors on his books who had TV careers, and he wanted to promote them as all-round entertainers. He started sending them to Meek, who was good enough in the studio that he could make even the worst singer sound competent, and then one of them, John Leyton, got a part in a soap opera as a pop singer. Whatever his next record was, it would get the kind of TV exposure most acts could only dream of. Goddard wrote a song called “Johnny Remember Me”, Blackwell came up with the arrangement, and Meek produced it and managed to get Leyton sounding like a singer: [Excerpt: John Leyton, “Johnny Remember Me”] It went to number one and sold half a million copies. But those lyrics about hearing a dead person’s voice were a sign of something that was eventually going to lead to tragedy. Goddard shared many of Meek’s obsessions. Goddard, like Meek, was a spiritualist, and he thought he could talk to the dead. The two started to hold regular seances, in which they would try to contact Buddy Holly, who Goddard believed had sent him “Johnny Remember Me” from the spirit world. Meek’s obsession with the undead also showed in some of the other records he was making, like the instrumental “Night of the Vampire” by the Moontrekkers: [Excerpt: The Moontrekkers, “Night of the Vampire”] The Moontrekkers did have a singer, but after hearing him audition, Meek came running into the room flapping his arms and blowing raspberries, because he thought he was too awful to record. Rod Stewart would have to wait a while longer for his recording career. In 1961, Meek put together a group for studio work. The group started because the lead guitarist of the Outlaws, one of the bands Meek produced, got sacked. Their bass player, Chas Hodges, later more famous as half of Chas & Dave, switched to guitar, and Meek had tried to replace him with a new bass player, one Heinz Burt. Heinz was someone who Meek was very attracted to — reports differ on whether they were lovers or not, but if not then Meek definitely wanted them to be — and Meek was moulding Heinz to be a future star, despite his lack of musical ability. While he was being groomed for stardom, he was made the bass player in the group — until Hodges decided he was going to switch back to bass, because Heinz couldn’t play. Alan Caddy, formerly of Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, became the new guitarist for the Outlaws, and then the group lost their drummer, who was replaced with Clem Cattini, Caddy’s old Pirates bandmate. By this point Chas Hodges was the only Outlaw left, and Meek really wanted to give Heinz a job, and so he took Caddy and Cattini and made them into a new group, for studio work, who were to be known as the Tornados, with Heinz on bass. Soon they added a rhythm guitarist, George Bellamy, and a keyboard player, Norman Hale. Larry Parnes was, as we saw in the last episode, always on the lookout for bands to back his stars, and so in 1962 the Tornados became Billy Fury’s backing band — something that was to cause problems for them more quickly than they imagined. At the time, it seemed like a great opportunity. They were going to record for Meek — both their own records and as the backing musicians for anyone else that Meek thought they’d work with — and they were going to tour with Fury, so they’d have regular work. And Meek saw it as an opportunity for him to possibly get involved with Fury’s recording career, which would have been a great opportunity for him had it worked out. The Tornados’ first single, “Love and Fury”, seems to have been named with this new association in mind: [Excerpt: The Tornados, “Love and Fury”] Unfortunately for the group, it wasn’t a hit. But then Meek got inspired. In July 1962, the first ever communications satellite, Telstar, was launched. For the first time in history, people could see events on the other side of the world broadcast live, and so Europeans got to see, in real time, a speech by President Kennedy and part of a baseball game. It’s hard now to imagine how revolutionary this was at the time, but this was a time when things like the Olympics were shown on twelve-hour delays or longer, as to show them the TV companies had to film them on actual film, and then fly the film over to the UK. Telstar was the future, and Meek, with his interest in space, was going to commemorate that. He took a song he’d recorded with Geoff Goddard, “Try Once More”: [Excerpt: Geoff Goddard, “Try Once More”] As was always his way with writing, he took that backing track, and sang a new melody over it: [Excerpt: Joe Meek, “Telstar (demo)”] He then got the keyboard player Dave Adams to work out the melody based on that demo, and recorded Adams playing that melody over a different pre-recorded backing track: [Excerpt: Dave Adams, “Telstar demo”] He then used that as the demo to show the Tornados what to play. They spent twelve hours in the studio recording the backing track, between Billy Fury shows, and then Meek got Goddard in to play piano and clavioline, and do some wordless vocals, as the Tornados didn’t have enough time between shows to finish the track by themselves. Meek then overdubbed the track with various backwards-recorded and echoed sound effects: [Excerpt: The Tornados, “Telstar”] “Telstar” entered the charts on the fifth of September, and reached number one on the tenth of October, the week after “Love Me Do” came out. It stayed there for five weeks, and as well as that it went to number one in America — the first British rock and roll record ever to do so. The follow-up, “Globetrotter”, also charted — and got into the top ten while “Telstar” was still there: [Excerpt: The Tornados, “Globetrotter”] Unfortunately, that was to be the high point for the Tornados. Larry Parnes, who was managing them, didn’t want them to take the spotlight away from Billy Fury, who they were backing — he let them play “Telstar” on stage, but that was it, and when they got offers to tour America, he insisted that Fury had to be on the bill, which caused the American promoters to back out. Not only that, but the other Tornados were getting sick of Meek putting all his attention into Heinz, who he was still trying to make into a solo star, recording songs like the Eddie Cochran tribute “Just Like Eddie”, written by Geoff Goddard and with a new young guitarist called Ritchie Blackmore, who was the guitarist in Chas Hodges’ latest lineup of Outlaws, playing lead: [Excerpt: Heinz, “Just Like Eddie”] And then in March 1963, the composer of a piece of French film music, “Le Marche d’Austerlitz”, sued Meek over “Telstar”s similarity to that tune: [Excerpt: Jean Ledrut, “Le Marche d’Austerlitz”] It was a frivolous suit — Meek had no way of having heard that piece, which was from a film which hadn’t been released in Britain — but it tied up all Meek’s royalties from “Telstar” for the next four years. Meek was still having hits — “Just Like Eddie” eventually made number five – for example, but in 1963 with the rise of Merseybeat he was having fewer and fewer. Not only that, but his mental health was getting worse and worse, especially after he was arrested for soliciting. He started getting more and more paranoid that people were stealing his ideas, and one by one he cut ties with business associates like Larry Parnes and Robert Stigwood. Heinz got a girlfriend, and everyone was in Meek’s bad books. But he was still turning out the hits, like “Have I The Right” by the Honeycombs: [Excerpt: The Honeycombs, “Have I the Right”] That went to number one, but meant the end of Meek’s association with Goddard — Goddard claimed that he had written the song, which was credited to the Honeycombs’ managers, and Meek thought he was just claiming this so he could avoid being associated with Meek now that his homosexuality was public knowledge after his arrest. Goddard ended up suing over the song. Meek was also just producing too much music in an attempt to remain on top. He’s often compared to Phil Spector, but in a three-year period Spector had twenty-one hit singles out of twenty-four releases. Meek, in the same period, had twenty-five hit singles — but released 141 singles, almost one a week. His failure rate in turn made record labels more and more wary of buying his tapes. By the mid-sixties, the hits were well and truly drying up. Meek was still producing a group called the Tornados, but it had none of the original members in and now featured guitarist Ritchie Blackmore and drummer Mitch Mitchell . This lineup of Tornados split up shortly after Meek pulled out a shotgun in the studio and aimed it at Mitchell’s head, saying he’d shoot him if he didn’t get the drum part right. Meek’s final important record was in mid 1966, when he finally jumped on the Merseybeat bandwagon two years late, with “Please Stay” by the Cryin’ Shames, the most popular band in Liverpool at the time: [Excerpt: The Cryin’ Shames, “Please Stay”] Unfortunately, that only made the lower reaches of the top thirty. Meek was getting deeper and deeper in debt, and his mental health was getting worse. He was seriously considering quitting as an independent producer and taking a steady job with EMI instead. And then, a tragic event happened which eventually led to the unravelling of Meek’s entire life. Meek was already in a very low place when he learned of the murder of sixteen-year-old Bernard Oliver, a young gay teenager who Meek had known (reports vary on how well they knew each other, with some saying that Oliver had done some work for Meek at his studio, while others say they just vaguely knew each other). The murder, which has still never been solved, was a major news story at the time, and it led to a massive increase in police harassment of anyone who was known to be gay, especially if they knew Oliver — and Meek had a conviction. Meek already believed he was being spied on and that his phone was being tapped, and now the world started giving him reason to think that — strange cars parked outside his house, almost certainly undercover police spying on him. On February the second, 1967, the PRS received a letter from the French performing rights society, saying that Meek’s problems with the Telstar lawsuit would soon be over — the court had determined that no matter what had happened, the composer of “Le Marche d’Austerlitz” would only be entitled to a small percentage of the royalties from “Telstar” at most. Frederick Woods, the assistant general manager of the PRS and a friend of Meek’s, put the letter aside intending to call Meek and tell him the good news — all he had to do was to write to the PRS and they’d be able to give him an advance on the money, and soon almost all of it would be coming through. He’d soon be getting the bulk of the £150,000 he was owed — nearly three million pounds in today’s money. But Woods got distracted and didn’t make the phone call, and Meek never found out that his money troubles were nearly over. Ritchie Blackmore’s wife Margaret called round to see Joe, as she sometimes did. He was apparently not in his right mind, talking a lot about black magic and comparing Margaret to Frieda Harris, one of Aleister Crowley’s associates. He was convinced people were stealing his ideas from his mind, and asked her to leave. While she was there, she saw him destroying correspondence and paintings he owned. The next morning, February the third, Meek asked his assistant to get his landlady, Violet Shenton, up to Meek’s office. There was some shouting from Meek, and then he turned a gun he had, which was owned by Heinz, on Mrs. Shenton and killed her. Meek’s assistant ran into the room, but before he could get to Meek, Meek shot himself, dying instantly. It was the eighth anniversary of Buddy Holly’s death. The lawsuit over “Telstar” was finally resolved just three weeks later, in Meek’s favour. There’s a plaque now at the building where Meek’s studio was. It says that Joe Meek, “the Telstar man”, “Lived, worked, and died here”. It doesn’t mention Violet Shenton. After all, she wasn’t a great male genius, just the male genius’ female victim.

united states america tv love american spotify history europe uk internet olympic games british french european mental australian night songs shame ring britain vampires apologies guardian liverpool triumph adams banks pirates highways fury studios new world barbers cds lived bach runaways tornados outlaws generally meek slayer excerpt heinz shelton rod stewart tilt hodges sputnik blackwell crickets emi rhapsody rock music aleister crowley prs compression goddard buddy holly chas caddy phil spector globetrotters wipeout spector hideaway ibc gateways magnetic fields black british hernando les paul cryin mp3s what do you want austerlitz leyton ritchie blackmore telstar lansdowne eddie cochran green door michael cox chris barber love me do mitch mitchell le marche richie valens joe meek radio luxembourg angela jones shenton cumberland gap merseybeat mary ford jimmy miller lonnie donegan vladimir ashkenazy mefor brownie mcghee dave adams surfaris robert stigwood acker bilk honeycombs chas hodges lord invader joyce hatto tilt araiza

Internet Radio man #141 Is She Built?

Radio Wilder

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 9, 2020 106:51

The Three Circles of Worry!! Circle 1, The first circle is everything you can control. The second circle is what happens as a result of the first circle. The third circle is what you can't control; which is most everything! These 3 circles come from Greg Hague of 72Sold.com. So this week on our musical merry go round (circle1) we are really going to roll, Ryan Hamilton and The Harlequins, Kaleo in the sticky, All Them Witches, Enuff Z Nuff, Acker Bilk, Sting and tons more! Music begins after 'Baby Ruth' brings her hubby more ice cream, cleans up Act and checks on her bees! Catch us on radiowilder.com, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, or if you want, stream us by going to radiowilder.com and click on the streaming link.Shout out to Bozeman and Sri Lanka.Thanks as always for hanging out with the Wilder Wagon! Harry and the Wilder Crew!

music spotify built worry circle act stitcher sting sri lanka bozeman internet radio harlequins kaleo ryan hamilton radioman three circles enuff z'nuff all them witches acker bilk greg hague

Stranger on the Shore by Mr. Acker Bilk

Classic 45's Jukebox

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 18, 2020

فصل 1: فیروزه جزایری دوما-قسمت 5-6: عطرسنبل،عطرکاج

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 3, 2020 28:13

این رمان اولین اثر نویسنده ایرانی آمریکایی به نام فیروزه جزایری دوماست که در سال 2003 با عنوان Funny in Farsi در آمریکا منتشر شده است. کتاب در واقع بازگویی خاطرات نویسنده و خانواده اش درباره مهاجرت به آمریکا با زبانی طنزآمیز است. قسمت پنجم: قیژقیژ قسمت ششم: به کمک دوستانم موسیقی Stranger On The Shore by Acker Bilk,( His Clarinet and Orchestra) برای دیدن فیلم و عکس هایی از نویسندگان به کانال تلگرامی قاصدک شنو با شناسه زیر سر بزنید: @Ghasedaksheno قاصدک شنو را می توانید از سایر اپلیکیشن های پادگیر اندروید و آیفون با جستجوی نام ghasedaksheno نیز دریافت کنید.

فصل 1: فیروزه جزایری دوما، قسمت 2-1: عطر سنبل عطر کاج

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 3, 2020 20:25

این رمان اولین اثر نویسنده ایرانی آمریکایی به نام فیروزه جزایری دوماست که در سال 2003 با عنوان در آمریکا منتشر شده است. کتاب در واقع بازگویی خاطرات نویسنده و خانواده اش درباره مهاجرت به آمریکا با زبانی طنزآمیز است.Funny in Farsi قسمت اول: روز اول دبستان قسمت دوم: سک های داغ موسیقی Stranger On The Shore by Acker Bilk,( His Clarinet and Orchestra) برای دیدن فیلم و عکس هایی از نویسندگان به کانال تلگرامی قاصدک شنو با شناسه زیر سر بزنید: @Ghasedaksheno قاصدک شنو را می توانید از سایر اپلیکیشن های پادگیر اندروید و آیفون با جستجوی نام ghasedaksheno هم دریافت کنید..

فصل 1: فیروزه جزایری دوما-قسمت 3-4: عطرسنبل،عطرکاج

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 3, 2020 20:45

این رمان اولین اثر نویسنده ایرانی آمریکایی به نام فیروزه جزایری دوماست که در سال 2003 با عنوان Funny in Farsi در آمریکا منتشر شده است. کتاب در واقع بازگویی خاطرات نویسنده و خانواده اش درباره مهاجرت به آمریکا با زبانی طنزآمیز است. قسمت سوم: بولینگ قسمت چهارم : میکی نجاتم بده موسیقی Stranger On The Shore by Acker Bilk,( His Clarinet and Orchestra) برای دیدن فیلم و عکس هایی از نویسندگان به کانال تلگرامی قاصدک شنو با شناسه زیر سر بزنید: @Ghasedaksheno قاصدک شنو را می توانید از سایر اپلیکیشن های پادگیر اندروید و آیفون با جستجوی نام ghasedaksheno هم دریافت کنید.

فصل 1: فیروزه جزایری دوما- قسمت7-8: عطرسنبل عطرکاج

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 3, 2020 24:03

این رمان اولین اثر نویسنده ایرانی آمریکایی به نام فیروزه جزایری دوماست که در سال 2003 با عنوان Funny in Farsi در آمریکا منتشر شده است. کتاب در واقع بازگویی خاطرات نویسنده و خانواده اش درباره مهاجرت به آمریکا با زبانی طنزآمیز است. قسمت هفتم: مکزیکی قسمت هشتم: دوازده جاکلیدی نخی موسیقی Stranger On The Shore by Acker Bilk,( His Clarinet and Orchestra) برای دیدن فیلم و عکس هایی از نویسندگان به کانال تلگرامی قاصدک شنو با شناسه زیر سر بزنید: @Ghasedaksheno قاصدک شنو را می توانید از سایر اپلیکیشن های پادگیر اندروید و آیفون با جستجوی نام ghasedaksheno نیز دریافت کنید.

فصل 1: فیروزه جزایری دوما- قسمت 9-10: عطرسنبل عطرکاج

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 3, 2020 25:14

این رمان اولین اثر نویسنده ایرانی آمریکایی به نام فیروزه جزایری دوماست که در سال 2003 با عنوان Funny in Farsi در آمریکا منتشر شده است. کتاب در واقع بازگویی خاطرات نویسنده و خانواده اش درباره مهاجرت به آمریکا با زبانی طنزآمیز است. قسمت نهم: تعطیلات خوش با ال قسمت دهم: مردها و پشه ها موسیقی Stranger On The Shore by Acker Bilk,( His Clarinet and Orchestra) برای دیدن فیلم و عکس هایی از نویسندگان به کانال تلگرامی قاصدک شنو با شناسه زیر سر بزنید: @Ghasedaksheno قاصدک شنو را می توانید از سایر اپلیکیشن های پادگیر اندروید و آیفون با جستجوی نام ghasedaksheno هم می توانید دریافت کنید.

این رمان اولین اثر نویسنده ایرانی آمریکایی به نام فیروزه جزایری دوماست که در سال 2003 با عنوان Funny in Farsi در آمریکا منتشر شده است. کتاب در واقع بازگویی خاطرات نویسنده و خانواده اش درباره مهاجرت به آمریکا با زبانی طنزآمیز است. قسمت بیست و سوم: فصلی درباره بینی قسمت بیست و چهارم: داورا رشوه گرفتن موسیقی Stranger On The Shore by Acker Bilk,( His Clarinet and Orchestra) برای دیدن فیلم و عکس هایی از نویسندگان به کانال تلگرامی قاصدک شنو با شناسه زیر سر بزنید: @Ghasedaksheno قاصدک شنو را می توانید از سایر اپلیکیشن های پادگیر اندروید و آیفون با جستجوی نام ghasedaksheno هم دریافت کنید.

فصل1: فیروزه جزایری دوما- قسمت21-22: عطرسنبل عطرکاج

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 3, 2020 46:52

فصل1: فیروزه جزایری دوما- قسمت 17-18: عطرسنبل عطرکاج

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 3, 2020 20:13

فصل1: فیروزه جزایری دوما- قسمت 15-16: عطرسنبل عطرکاج

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 3, 2020 31:03

فصل1: فیروزه جزایری دوما- قسمت 13-14: عطرسنبل عطرکاج

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 3, 2020 31:22

این رمان اولین اثر نویسنده ایرانی آمریکایی به نام فیروزه جزایری دوماست که در سال 2003 با عنوان Funny in Farsi در آمریکا منتشر شده است. کتاب در واقع بازگویی خاطرات نویسنده و خانواده اش درباره مهاجرت به آمریکا با زبانی طنزآمیز است. قسمت سیزدهم: آمریکا سرزمین آزاد قسمت چهاردهم: جزیره گنج موسیقی Stranger On The Shore by Acker Bilk,( His Clarinet and Orchestra) برای دیدن فیلم و عکس هایی از نویسندگان به کانال تلگرامی قاصدک شنو با شناسه زیر سر بزنید: @Ghasedaksheno قاصدک شنو را می توانید از سایر اپلیکیشن های پادگیر اندروید و آیفون با جستجوی نام ghasedaksheno هم دریافت کنید.

فصل1: فیروزه جزایری دوما- قسمت11-12: عطرسنبل،عطرکاج

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 3, 2020 25:02

این رمان اولین اثر نویسنده ایرانی آمریکایی به نام فیروزه جزایری دوماست که در سال 2003 با عنوان Funny in Farsi در آمریکا منتشر شده است. کتاب در واقع بازگویی خاطرات نویسنده و خانواده اش درباره مهاجرت به آمریکا با زبانی طنزآمیز است. قسمت یازدهم :جولی قسمت دوازدهم: واترلو موسیقی Stranger On The Shore by Acker Bilk,( His Clarinet and Orchestra) برای دیدن فیلم و عکس هایی از نویسندگان به کانال تلگرامی قاصدک شنو با شناسه زیر سر بزنید: @Ghasedaksheno قاصدک شنو را می توانید از سایر اپلیکیشن های پادگیر اندروید و آیفون با جستجوی نام ghasedaksheno هم می توانید دریافت کنید.

Episode 90: “Runaway” by Del Shannon

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 18, 2020

Episode ninety of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Runaway” by Del Shannon, and at the early use of synthesised sound in rock music. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Blue Moon” by the Marcels. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—- A note Almost every version of “Runaway” currently available is in stereo, and the stereo version of the song has a slightly different vocal take to the original mono version. Unfortunately, there appear to be multiple “original mono versions” too. To check that what I’m using here, a mono track available as a bonus on a reissue of the album Runaway With Del Shannon, is actually the hit single version, I downloaded two vinyl rips of the single and one vinyl rip of a mono hits compilation from the sixties that had been uploaded to YouTube. Unfortunately no two copies of the song I could find online would play in synch – they all appear to be mastered at slightly different speeds, possibly due to the varispeeding I talk about in the episode. I’ve gone with the version I did because it’s a clean-sounding mono version, but it may not be exactly what people heard in 1961. Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. This one is in two parts because of the number of songs by Del Shannon in the mix. Part one, part two. Only one biography of Del Shannon has ever been written, and that’s out of print and (to judge from the Amazon reviews) not very well written, so I’ve relied again on other sources. Those include the liner notes to this CD, a good selection of Shannon’s work (with the proviso that “Runaway” is in stereo — see above; the articles on Shannon and Max Crook on This Is My Story, the official Del Shannon website, and the Internet Archive’s cached copy of Max Crook’s old website. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today’s episode is an odd one to write, as just as I put the finishing touches to the script I discovered that Max Crook, the keyboard player at the centre of this story, died less than two weeks ago. The news wasn’t widely reported, and I only discovered this by double-checking a detail and discovering an obituary of him. Crook was one of the great early pioneers of electronic music, and a massive talent, and he’s a big part of the story I’m telling today, so before we go into the story proper I just wanted to take a moment to acknowledge his passing, and to regret that it hasn’t been more widely noted. One of the things we’ve not talked about much in this podcast so far is the technology of music. We’ve discussed it a bit — we’ve looked at how things like the change from 78s to 45s affected the music industry, at the transition from recording on discs to recording on tape, at the electrification of the guitar, and at Les Paul’s inventions. But in general, the music we’ve looked at has been made in a fairly straightforward manner — some people with some combination of guitars, bass, piano, drums, and saxophone, and maybe a few string players on the most recent recordings, get together in front of a microphone and sing and play those instruments. But today, we’re going to look at the start of synthesisers being used in rock and roll music. Today we’re going to look at “Runaway” by Del Shannon: [Excerpt: Del Shannon, “Runaway”] Synthesised sound has a far longer pedigree than you might expect. The use of electronics to create music goes back to the invention of the theremin and the ondes martenot in the 1920s, and by the 1930s, people had already started using polyphonic keyboard-based electronic instruments. The Novachord was produced by the Hammond organ company between 1938 and 1942, and was introduced at the World’s Fair in 1939, where Ferdinand Grofe, who we talked about a little in the episode on “Cathy’s Clown”, led a group consisting only of Novachord players in a public performance. The Novachord never achieved mass popularity because of World War II halting its production, but it was still used in a few recordings. One that’s of particular interest to those of us interested in early rock and roll is Slim Gaillard’s “Novachord Boogie”: [Excerpt: Slim Gaillard, “Novachord Boogie”] But also it was used on one of the most famous records of the late thirties. These days, when you hear “We’ll Meet Again” by Vera Lynn on documentaries about the second world war, this is the version you hear: [Excerpt: Vera Lynn, “We’ll Meet Again”] But the record that people actually listened to in World War II didn’t have any of that orchestration. It was Lynn accompanied by a single instrument, a Novachord played by Arthur Young, and is notably more interesting and less syrupy: [Excerpt: Vera Lynn with Arthur Young on Novachord, “We’ll Meet Again”] So even in the late thirties, synthesised sounds were making their way on to extremely popular recordings, but it wasn’t until after the war that electronic instruments started getting used in a major way. And the most popular of those instruments was a monophonic keyboard instrument called the clavioline, which was first produced in 1947. The clavioline was mostly used as a novelty element, but it appeared on several hit records. We’re going to devote a whole episode in a few months’ time to a record with the clavioline as lead instrument, but you can hear it on several fifties novelty records, like “Little Red Monkey” by Frank Chacksfield’s Tunesmiths, a UK top ten hit from 1953: [Excerpt: Frank Chacksfield’s Tunesmiths, “Little Red Monkey”] But while the clavioline itself was in use quite widely in the fifties, the first big rock and roll hit with an electronic synthesiser actually used a modified clavioline called a musitron, which was put together by an electronics amateur and keyboard player named Max Crook, from Ann Arbor, Michigan. Crook had built his musitron using a clavioline as a base, but adding parts from TVs, reel-to-reel recorders, and bits of whatever electronic junk he could salvage parts from. He’d started playing electronic instruments in his teens, and had built his own recording studio. Sadly, the early records Crook made are not easily available. The only place I’ve been able to track down copies of his early singles in a digital format is one grey-market CD, which I wasn’t able to obtain in time to include the tracks here and which only seems to be available from one shop in Cornwall. His first band, the White Bucks, released a single, “Get That Fly” backed with “Orny”, on Dot Records, but I can tell you from experience that if you search anywhere online for “White Bucks Orny” you will find… well, not that record, anyway. Even more interestingly, he apparently recorded a version of “Bumble Boogie”, the novelty instrumental that would later become a hit for B. Bumble and the Stingers, with Berry Gordy at some point in the late fifties. Sadly, that too is not generally available. But it wasn’t until he auditioned for Charlie Johnson and the Big Little Show Band that Max Crook met the people who were going to become his most important collaborators. The Big Little Show Band had started as Doug DeMott and The Moonlight Ramblers, a honky-tonk band that played at the Hi-Lo Club in Battle Creek, Michigan. Battle Creek is a company town, midway between Chicago and Detroit, which is most famous as being the headquarters of the Kellogg company, the cereal manufacturer and largest employer there. It’s not somewhere you’d expect great rock and roll to come from, being as it is a dull medium-sized town with little in the way of culture or nightlife. The Hi-Lo Club was a rough place, frequented by hard-working, hard-drinking people, and Doug DeMott had been a hard drinker himself — so hard a drinker, in fact, that he was soon sacked. The group’s rhythm guitarist, Charles Westover, had changed his name to Charlie Johnson and put together a new lineup of the group based around himself and the bass player, Loren Dugger. They got in a new drummer, Dick Parker, and then went through a couple of guitarists before deciding to hire a keyboard player instead. Once they auditioned Crook, with his musitron, which he could clip to the piano and thus provide chordal piano accompaniment while playing a lead melody on his musitron, they knew they had the right player for them. Crook had a friend, a black DJ named Ollie McLaughlin, who had music industry connections, and had been involved in the White Bucks recordings. Crook and Johnson started writing songs and recording demos for McLaughlin, who got Johnson a session with Irving Micahnik and Harry Balk, two record producers who were working with Johnny and the Hurricanes, an instrumental group who’d had a big hit with “Red River Rock” a year or so previously: [Excerpt: Johnny and the Hurricanes, “Red River Rock”] Johnson recorded two songs in New York, without his normal musicians backing him. However, Micahnik and Balk thought that the tracks were too dirgey, and Johnson was singing flat — and listening to them it’s not hard to see why they thought that: [Excerpt: Del Shannon, “The Search”] They told him to go back and come up with some more material that was less dirgey. Two things did come out of the association straight away, though. The first was that Charles Johnson changed his name again, combining a forename he chose to be reminiscent of the Cadillac Coup deVille with a surname he took from an aspiring wrestler he knew, Mark Shannon, to become Del Shannon. The second was that Johnny and the Hurricanes recorded one of Max Crook’s instrumentals, “Mr Lonely”, as a B-side, and you can hear in the Hammond organ part the kind of part that Crook would have been playing on his Musitron: [Excerpt: Johnny and the Hurricanes, “Mr Lonely”] Shannon and Crook recorded a tape of many other songs they were working on for McLaughlin to play to Micahnik and Balk, but they weren’t interested — until they heard a fragment of a song that Shannon and Crook had recorded, and which they’d then mostly taped over. That song, “Runaway”, was the one they wanted. “Runaway” had been an idea that had happened almost by accident. The band had been jamming on stage, and Crook had hit a chord change that Shannon thought sounded interesting — in later tellings of the story, this is always the Am-G chord change that opens the song, but I suspect the actual chord change that caught his ear was the one where they go to an E major chord rather than the expected G or E minor on the line “As our hearts were young”. That’s the only truly unusual chord change in the song. But whatever it was, Shannon liked the changes that Crook was playing — he and Crook would both later talk about how bored he was with the standard doo-wop progression that made up the majority of the songs they were playing at the time — and the band ended up jamming on the new chord sequence for fifteen or twenty minutes before the club owner told them to play something else. The next day, Shannon took his guitar to the carpet shop where he worked, and when there were no customers in, he would play the song to himself and write lyrics. He initially wrote two verses, but decided to scrap one. They performed the song, then titled “My Little Runaway”, that night, and it became a regular part of their set. The crucial element in the song, though, came during that first performance. Shannon said, just before they started, “Max, when I point to you, play something”. And so when Shannon got to the end of the chorus, he pointed, and Crook played this: [Excerpt: Del Shannon, “Runaway”] When they were told that Micahnik and Balk liked the fragment of song that they’d heard, Shannon and Crook recorded a full demo of the song and sent it on to them. The producers weren’t hugely impressed with the finished song, saying they thought it sounded like three songs trying to coexist, and they also didn’t like Shannon’s voice, but they *did* like Crook and the Musitron, and so they invited Crook and Shannon to come to New York to record. The two men drove seven hundred miles in a broken-down car, with their wives, to get from Michigan to New York. It was the middle of winter, the car had no heating, and Shannon smoked while Crook was allergic to tobacco smoke, so they had to keep the windows open. The session they were going to do was a split session — they were going to record two Del Shannon vocal tracks, and two instrumentals by Crook, who was recording under the name “Maximilian” without a surname (though the “Max” in his name was actually short for Maxfield). Crook was definitely the one they were interested in — he rearranged the way the microphones were arranged in the studio, to get the sound he wanted rather than the standard studio sound, and he also had a bag full of gadgets that the studio engineers were fascinated by, for altering the Musitron’s sound. The first single released as by “Maximilian” was “The Snake”, which featured Crook and Shannon’s wives on handclaps, along with an additional clapper who was found on the street and paid forty dollars to come in and clap along: [Excerpt: Maximilian, “The Snake”] After that, the two women got bored and wandered off down Broadway. They eventually found themselves in the audience for a TV game show, Beat the Clock, and Joann Crook ended up a contestant on the show — their husbands didn’t believe them, when they explained later where they’d been, until acquaintances mentioned having seen Joann on TV. Meanwhile, the two men were working on another Maximillian track, and on two Del Shannon tracks, one of which was “Runaway”. They couldn’t afford to stay overnight in New York, so they drove back to Michigan, but when the record company listened to “Runaway”, they discovered that Shannon had been singing flat due to nerves. Shannon had to go back to New York, this time by plane, to rerecord his vocals. According to Crook, even this wasn’t enough, and the engineers eventually had to varispeed his vocals to get them in key with the backing track. I’m not at all sure how this would have worked, as speeding up his vocals would have also meant that he was singing at a different tempo, but that’s what Crook said, and the vocal does have a slightly different quality to it. And Harry Balk backed Crook up, saying “We finally got Del on key, and it sounded great, but it didn’t sound like Del. We mixed it anyhow, and it came out wonderful. When I brought Ollie and Del into my office to hear it, Del had a bit of a fit. He said, ‘Harry, that doesn’t even sound like me!’ I just remember saying, ‘Yeah but Del, nobody knows what the hell you sound like!” Like most great records, “Runaway” was the sum of many parts. Shannon later broke down all the elements that went into the song, saying: “I learned falsetto from The Ink Spots’ ‘We Three,'”: [Excerpt: The Ink Spots, “We Three (My Echo, My Shadow, and Me)”] “I eventually got hooked on Jimmy Jones’ ‘Handy Man’ in ’59 and would sing that at the Hi-Lo Club.”: [Excerpt: Jimmy Jones, “Handy Man”] “I always had the idea of ‘running away’ somewhere in the back of my mind. ‘I wa-wa-wa-wa-wonder, why…’ I borrowed from Dion & The Belmonts’ ‘I Wonder Why.'” [Excerpt: Dion and the Belmonts, “I Wonder Why”] “The beats you hear in there, ‘…I wonder, bam-bam-bam, I wa-wa…’ I stole from Bobby Darin’s ‘Dream Lover.'” [Excerpt: Bobby Darin, “Dream Lover”] Listening to the song, you can definitely hear all those elements that Shannon identifies in there, but what emerges is something fresh and original, unlike anything else out at the time: [Excerpt: Del Shannon, “Runaway”] “Runaway” went to number one in almost every country that had a chart at the time, and top five in most of the rest. In America, the song it knocked off the top was “Blue Moon” by the Marcels, one of those songs with the doo-wop progression that Shannon had been so bored with. At its peak, it was selling eighty thousand copies a day, and Billboard put it at number three hundred and sixty four on the all-time charts in 2018. It was a massive success, and a game-changer in the music industry. Maximilian’s single, on the other hand, only made the top forty in Argentina. Clearly, Del Shannon was the artist who was going to be worth following, but they did release a few more singles by Maximilian, things like “The Twisting Ghost”: [Excerpt: Maximilian, “The Twisting Ghost”] That made the Canadian top forty, but Maximilian never became a star in his own right. Shannon, on the other hand, recorded a string of hits, though none were as successful as “Runaway”. The most successful was the follow-up, “Hats off to Larry”, which was very much “Runaway part 2”: [Excerpt: Del Shannon, “Hats off to Larry”] But every single he released after that was slightly less successful than the one before. He soon stopped working with Crook, who remained at the Hi-Lo Club with the rest of the band while Shannon toured the country, and without Crook’s Musitron playing his records were far less interesting than his earliest singles, though he did have the distinction of being one of the few singers of this era to write the bulk of his own material. He managed to further sabotage his career by suing Micahnik and Balk, and by 1963 he was largely washed up, though he did do one more thing that would make him at least a footnote in music history for something other than “Runaway”. He was more popular in the UK than in the US, and he even appeared in the film “It’s Trad Dad!”, a cheap cash-in on the trad jazz craze, starring Helen Shapiro and Craig Douglas as teenagers who try to persuade the stuffy adults who hate the young people’s music that the Dukes of Dixieland, Mr. Acker Bilk and the Temperance Seven are not dangerous obscene noises threatening the morals of the nation’s youth. That film also featured Gene Vincent and Chubby Checker along with a lot of British trumpet players, and was the first feature film made by Richard Lester, who we’ll be hearing more about in this story. So Shannon spent a fair amount of time in the UK, and in 1963 he noticed a song by a new British group that was rising up the UK charts and covered it. His version of “From Me to You” only made number seventy-seven on the US charts, but it was still the first version of a Lennon/McCartney song to make the Hot One Hundred: [Excerpt: Del Shannon, “From Me to You”] He made some interesting records in the rest of the sixties, and had the occasional fluke hit, but the music he was making, a unique blend of hard garage rock and soft white doo-wop, was increasingly out of step with the rest of the industry. In the mid and late sixties, his biggest successes came with songwriting and productions for other artists. He wrote “I Go to Pieces” which became a hit for Peter & Gordon: [Excerpt: Peter and Gordon, “I Go to Pieces”] Produced the band Smith in their cover version of “Baby It’s You”, which made the top five: [Excerpt: Smith, “Baby It’s You”] And produced Brian Hyland’s million-selling version of a Curtis Mayfield song that I’m not going to play, because its title used a racial slur against Romani people which most non-Romani people didn’t then regard as a slur, but which is a great record if you can get past that. That Hyland record featured Crook, reunited briefly with Shannon. But over the seventies Shannon seemed increasingly lost, and while he continued to make records, including some good ones made in the UK with production by Dave Edmunds and Jeff Lynne, he was increasingly unwell with alcoholism. He finally got sober in 1978, and managed to have a fluke hit in 1981 with a cover version of Phil Phillips’ “Sea of Love”, produced by Tom Petty and with Petty’s band the Heartbreakers backing him: [Excerpt: Del Shannon, “Sea of Love”] He also came to people’s attention when a rerecorded version of “Runaway” with new lyrics was used as the theme for the TV show Crime Story. In 1989, Del Shannon was working on a comeback album, with Jeff Lynne producing and members of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers as backing musicians. The same people had previously worked on Roy Orbison’s last album, which had been his biggest success in decades, and Lynne was gaining a reputation for resuscitating the careers of older musicians. Both Lynne and Petty were fans of Shannon and had worked with him previously, and it seemed likely that he might be able to have a hit with some of the material he was working on. Certainly “Walk Away”, which Shannon co-wrote with Lynne and Petty, sounds like the kind of thing that was getting radio play around that time: [Excerpt: Del Shannon, “Walk Away”] There were even rumours that Lynne and Petty were thinking of inviting Shannon to join the Travelling Wilburys to replace Roy Orbison, though that seems unlikely to me. Unfortunately, by the time the album came out, Shannon was dead. He’d been suffering from depression for decades, and he died of suicide in early 1990, aged fifty-five. His widow later sued the manufacturers of the new wonder drug, Prozac, which he’d been prescribed a couple of weeks earlier, claiming that it caused his death. Max Crook, meanwhile, had become a firefighter and burglar alarm installer, while also pursuing a low-key career in music, mostly making religious music. When Shannon was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Crook volunteered to perform at the ceremony, playing his original Musitron, but his offer was ignored. In later years he would regularly show up at annual celebrations of Shannon, and talk about the music they made together, and play for their fans. He died on July the first this year, aged eighty-three.

america tv love new york amazon history world chicago uk british canadian dj michigan search detroit argentina world war ii broadway sea cd hurricanes clowns rock and roll lonely pieces snake clock billboard runaways hats petty bumble tvs hammond ann arbor tom petty cornwall walk away kellogg rock and roll hall of fame crooks dukes mclaughlin tilt mixcloud blue moon rock music internet archive romani roy orbison heartbreakers handyman prozac crime stories curtis mayfield amg les paul balk battle creek berry gordy baby it jeff lynne bobby darin from me chubby checker charles johnson dixieland stingers maxfield maximillian richard lester del shannon lennon mccartney vera lynn gene vincent dream lover dave edmunds belmonts ink spots my shadow marcels charlie johnson this is my story jimmy jones travelling wilburys craig douglas helen shapiro i wonder why acker bilk phil phillips slim gaillard we three orny mark shannon tilt araiza

Episode 90: "Runaway" by Del Shannon

LISTEN: This Day In History

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 18, 2020 32:06

Episode ninety of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Runaway" by Del Shannon, and at the early use of synthesised sound in rock music. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Blue Moon" by the Marcels. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more---- A note Almost every version of “Runaway” currently available is in stereo, and the stereo version of the song has a slightly different vocal take to the original mono version. Unfortunately, there appear to be multiple “original mono versions” too. To check that what I'm using here, a mono track available as a bonus on a reissue of the album Runaway With Del Shannon, is actually the hit single version, I downloaded two vinyl rips of the single and one vinyl rip of a mono hits compilation from the sixties that had been uploaded to YouTube. Unfortunately no two copies of the song I could find online would play in synch – they all appear to be mastered at slightly different speeds, possibly due to the varispeeding I talk about in the episode. I've gone with the version I did because it's a clean-sounding mono version, but it may not be exactly what people heard in 1961. Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. This one is in two parts because of the number of songs by Del Shannon in the mix. Part one, part two. Only one biography of Del Shannon has ever been written, and that's out of print and (to judge from the Amazon reviews) not very well written, so I've relied again on other sources. Those include the liner notes to this CD, a good selection of Shannon's work (with the proviso that "Runaway" is in stereo -- see above; the articles on Shannon and Max Crook on This Is My Story, the official Del Shannon website, and the Internet Archive's cached copy of Max Crook's old website. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today's episode is an odd one to write, as just as I put the finishing touches to the script I discovered that Max Crook, the keyboard player at the centre of this story, died less than two weeks ago. The news wasn't widely reported, and I only discovered this by double-checking a detail and discovering an obituary of him. Crook was one of the great early pioneers of electronic music, and a massive talent, and he's a big part of the story I'm telling today, so before we go into the story proper I just wanted to take a moment to acknowledge his passing, and to regret that it hasn't been more widely noted. One of the things we've not talked about much in this podcast so far is the technology of music. We've discussed it a bit -- we've looked at how things like the change from 78s to 45s affected the music industry, at the transition from recording on discs to recording on tape, at the electrification of the guitar, and at Les Paul's inventions. But in general, the music we've looked at has been made in a fairly straightforward manner -- some people with some combination of guitars, bass, piano, drums, and saxophone, and maybe a few string players on the most recent recordings, get together in front of a microphone and sing and play those instruments. But today, we're going to look at the start of synthesisers being used in rock and roll music. Today we're going to look at "Runaway" by Del Shannon: [Excerpt: Del Shannon, "Runaway"] Synthesised sound has a far longer pedigree than you might expect. The use of electronics to create music goes back to the invention of the theremin and the ondes martenot in the 1920s, and by the 1930s, people had already started using polyphonic keyboard-based electronic instruments. The Novachord was produced by the Hammond organ company between 1938 and 1942, and was introduced at the World's Fair in 1939, where Ferdinand Grofe, who we talked about a little in the episode on "Cathy's Clown", led a group consisting only of Novachord players in a public performance. The Novachord never achieved mass popularity because of World War II halting its production, but it was still used in a few recordings. One that's of particular interest to those of us interested in early rock and roll is Slim Gaillard's "Novachord Boogie": [Excerpt: Slim Gaillard, "Novachord Boogie"] But also it was used on one of the most famous records of the late thirties. These days, when you hear "We'll Meet Again" by Vera Lynn on documentaries about the second world war, this is the version you hear: [Excerpt: Vera Lynn, "We'll Meet Again"] But the record that people actually listened to in World War II didn't have any of that orchestration. It was Lynn accompanied by a single instrument, a Novachord played by Arthur Young, and is notably more interesting and less syrupy: [Excerpt: Vera Lynn with Arthur Young on Novachord, "We'll Meet Again"] So even in the late thirties, synthesised sounds were making their way on to extremely popular recordings, but it wasn't until after the war that electronic instruments started getting used in a major way. And the most popular of those instruments was a monophonic keyboard instrument called the clavioline, which was first produced in 1947. The clavioline was mostly used as a novelty element, but it appeared on several hit records. We're going to devote a whole episode in a few months' time to a record with the clavioline as lead instrument, but you can hear it on several fifties novelty records, like "Little Red Monkey" by Frank Chacksfield's Tunesmiths, a UK top ten hit from 1953: [Excerpt: Frank Chacksfield's Tunesmiths, "Little Red Monkey"] But while the clavioline itself was in use quite widely in the fifties, the first big rock and roll hit with an electronic synthesiser actually used a modified clavioline called a musitron, which was put together by an electronics amateur and keyboard player named Max Crook, from Ann Arbor, Michigan. Crook had built his musitron using a clavioline as a base, but adding parts from TVs, reel-to-reel recorders, and bits of whatever electronic junk he could salvage parts from. He'd started playing electronic instruments in his teens, and had built his own recording studio. Sadly, the early records Crook made are not easily available. The only place I've been able to track down copies of his early singles in a digital format is one grey-market CD, which I wasn't able to obtain in time to include the tracks here and which only seems to be available from one shop in Cornwall. His first band, the White Bucks, released a single, "Get That Fly" backed with "Orny", on Dot Records, but I can tell you from experience that if you search anywhere online for "White Bucks Orny" you will find... well, not that record, anyway. Even more interestingly, he apparently recorded a version of "Bumble Boogie", the novelty instrumental that would later become a hit for B. Bumble and the Stingers, with Berry Gordy at some point in the late fifties. Sadly, that too is not generally available. But it wasn't until he auditioned for Charlie Johnson and the Big Little Show Band that Max Crook met the people who were going to become his most important collaborators. The Big Little Show Band had started as Doug DeMott and The Moonlight Ramblers, a honky-tonk band that played at the Hi-Lo Club in Battle Creek, Michigan. Battle Creek is a company town, midway between Chicago and Detroit, which is most famous as being the headquarters of the Kellogg company, the cereal manufacturer and largest employer there. It's not somewhere you'd expect great rock and roll to come from, being as it is a dull medium-sized town with little in the way of culture or nightlife. The Hi-Lo Club was a rough place, frequented by hard-working, hard-drinking people, and Doug DeMott had been a hard drinker himself -- so hard a drinker, in fact, that he was soon sacked. The group's rhythm guitarist, Charles Westover, had changed his name to Charlie Johnson and put together a new lineup of the group based around himself and the bass player, Loren Dugger. They got in a new drummer, Dick Parker, and then went through a couple of guitarists before deciding to hire a keyboard player instead. Once they auditioned Crook, with his musitron, which he could clip to the piano and thus provide chordal piano accompaniment while playing a lead melody on his musitron, they knew they had the right player for them. Crook had a friend, a black DJ named Ollie McLaughlin, who had music industry connections, and had been involved in the White Bucks recordings. Crook and Johnson started writing songs and recording demos for McLaughlin, who got Johnson a session with Irving Micahnik and Harry Balk, two record producers who were working with Johnny and the Hurricanes, an instrumental group who'd had a big hit with "Red River Rock" a year or so previously: [Excerpt: Johnny and the Hurricanes, "Red River Rock"] Johnson recorded two songs in New York, without his normal musicians backing him. However, Micahnik and Balk thought that the tracks were too dirgey, and Johnson was singing flat -- and listening to them it's not hard to see why they thought that: [Excerpt: Del Shannon, "The Search"] They told him to go back and come up with some more material that was less dirgey. Two things did come out of the association straight away, though. The first was that Charles Johnson changed his name again, combining a forename he chose to be reminiscent of the Cadillac Coup deVille with a surname he took from an aspiring wrestler he knew, Mark Shannon, to become Del Shannon. The second was that Johnny and the Hurricanes recorded one of Max Crook's instrumentals, "Mr Lonely", as a B-side, and you can hear in the Hammond organ part the kind of part that Crook would have been playing on his Musitron: [Excerpt: Johnny and the Hurricanes, "Mr Lonely"] Shannon and Crook recorded a tape of many other songs they were working on for McLaughlin to play to Micahnik and Balk, but they weren't interested -- until they heard a fragment of a song that Shannon and Crook had recorded, and which they'd then mostly taped over. That song, "Runaway", was the one they wanted. "Runaway" had been an idea that had happened almost by accident. The band had been jamming on stage, and Crook had hit a chord change that Shannon thought sounded interesting -- in later tellings of the story, this is always the Am-G chord change that opens the song, but I suspect the actual chord change that caught his ear was the one where they go to an E major chord rather than the expected G or E minor on the line “As our hearts were young”. That's the only truly unusual chord change in the song. But whatever it was, Shannon liked the changes that Crook was playing -- he and Crook would both later talk about how bored he was with the standard doo-wop progression that made up the majority of the songs they were playing at the time -- and the band ended up jamming on the new chord sequence for fifteen or twenty minutes before the club owner told them to play something else. The next day, Shannon took his guitar to the carpet shop where he worked, and when there were no customers in, he would play the song to himself and write lyrics. He initially wrote two verses, but decided to scrap one. They performed the song, then titled "My Little Runaway", that night, and it became a regular part of their set. The crucial element in the song, though, came during that first performance. Shannon said, just before they started, "Max, when I point to you, play something". And so when Shannon got to the end of the chorus, he pointed, and Crook played this: [Excerpt: Del Shannon, "Runaway"] When they were told that Micahnik and Balk liked the fragment of song that they'd heard, Shannon and Crook recorded a full demo of the song and sent it on to them. The producers weren't hugely impressed with the finished song, saying they thought it sounded like three songs trying to coexist, and they also didn't like Shannon's voice, but they *did* like Crook and the Musitron, and so they invited Crook and Shannon to come to New York to record. The two men drove seven hundred miles in a broken-down car, with their wives, to get from Michigan to New York. It was the middle of winter, the car had no heating, and Shannon smoked while Crook was allergic to tobacco smoke, so they had to keep the windows open. The session they were going to do was a split session -- they were going to record two Del Shannon vocal tracks, and two instrumentals by Crook, who was recording under the name "Maximilian" without a surname (though the "Max" in his name was actually short for Maxfield). Crook was definitely the one they were interested in -- he rearranged the way the microphones were arranged in the studio, to get the sound he wanted rather than the standard studio sound, and he also had a bag full of gadgets that the studio engineers were fascinated by, for altering the Musitron's sound. The first single released as by "Maximilian" was "The Snake", which featured Crook and Shannon's wives on handclaps, along with an additional clapper who was found on the street and paid forty dollars to come in and clap along: [Excerpt: Maximilian, "The Snake"] After that, the two women got bored and wandered off down Broadway. They eventually found themselves in the audience for a TV game show, Beat the Clock, and Joann Crook ended up a contestant on the show -- their husbands didn't believe them, when they explained later where they'd been, until acquaintances mentioned having seen Joann on TV. Meanwhile, the two men were working on another Maximillian track, and on two Del Shannon tracks, one of which was "Runaway". They couldn't afford to stay overnight in New York, so they drove back to Michigan, but when the record company listened to "Runaway", they discovered that Shannon had been singing flat due to nerves. Shannon had to go back to New York, this time by plane, to rerecord his vocals. According to Crook, even this wasn't enough, and the engineers eventually had to varispeed his vocals to get them in key with the backing track. I'm not at all sure how this would have worked, as speeding up his vocals would have also meant that he was singing at a different tempo, but that's what Crook said, and the vocal does have a slightly different quality to it. And Harry Balk backed Crook up, saying "We finally got Del on key, and it sounded great, but it didn't sound like Del. We mixed it anyhow, and it came out wonderful. When I brought Ollie and Del into my office to hear it, Del had a bit of a fit. He said, 'Harry, that doesn't even sound like me!' I just remember saying, 'Yeah but Del, nobody knows what the hell you sound like!" Like most great records, "Runaway" was the sum of many parts. Shannon later broke down all the elements that went into the song, saying: "I learned falsetto from The Ink Spots' 'We Three,'": [Excerpt: The Ink Spots, "We Three (My Echo, My Shadow, and Me)"] "I eventually got hooked on Jimmy Jones' 'Handy Man' in '59 and would sing that at the Hi-Lo Club.": [Excerpt: Jimmy Jones, "Handy Man"] "I always had the idea of 'running away' somewhere in the back of my mind. 'I wa-wa-wa-wa-wonder, why...' I borrowed from Dion & The Belmonts' 'I Wonder Why.'" [Excerpt: Dion and the Belmonts, "I Wonder Why"] "The beats you hear in there, '...I wonder, bam-bam-bam, I wa-wa...' I stole from Bobby Darin's 'Dream Lover.'" [Excerpt: Bobby Darin, "Dream Lover"] Listening to the song, you can definitely hear all those elements that Shannon identifies in there, but what emerges is something fresh and original, unlike anything else out at the time: [Excerpt: Del Shannon, "Runaway"] "Runaway" went to number one in almost every country that had a chart at the time, and top five in most of the rest. In America, the song it knocked off the top was "Blue Moon" by the Marcels, one of those songs with the doo-wop progression that Shannon had been so bored with. At its peak, it was selling eighty thousand copies a day, and Billboard put it at number three hundred and sixty four on the all-time charts in 2018. It was a massive success, and a game-changer in the music industry. Maximilian's single, on the other hand, only made the top forty in Argentina. Clearly, Del Shannon was the artist who was going to be worth following, but they did release a few more singles by Maximilian, things like "The Twisting Ghost": [Excerpt: Maximilian, "The Twisting Ghost"] That made the Canadian top forty, but Maximilian never became a star in his own right. Shannon, on the other hand, recorded a string of hits, though none were as successful as "Runaway". The most successful was the follow-up, "Hats off to Larry", which was very much "Runaway part 2": [Excerpt: Del Shannon, "Hats off to Larry"] But every single he released after that was slightly less successful than the one before. He soon stopped working with Crook, who remained at the Hi-Lo Club with the rest of the band while Shannon toured the country, and without Crook's Musitron playing his records were far less interesting than his earliest singles, though he did have the distinction of being one of the few singers of this era to write the bulk of his own material. He managed to further sabotage his career by suing Micahnik and Balk, and by 1963 he was largely washed up, though he did do one more thing that would make him at least a footnote in music history for something other than "Runaway". He was more popular in the UK than in the US, and he even appeared in the film "It's Trad Dad!", a cheap cash-in on the trad jazz craze, starring Helen Shapiro and Craig Douglas as teenagers who try to persuade the stuffy adults who hate the young people's music that the Dukes of Dixieland, Mr. Acker Bilk and the Temperance Seven are not dangerous obscene noises threatening the morals of the nation's youth. That film also featured Gene Vincent and Chubby Checker along with a lot of British trumpet players, and was the first feature film made by Richard Lester, who we'll be hearing more about in this story. So Shannon spent a fair amount of time in the UK, and in 1963 he noticed a song by a new British group that was rising up the UK charts and covered it. His version of "From Me to You" only made number seventy-seven on the US charts, but it was still the first version of a Lennon/McCartney song to make the Hot One Hundred: [Excerpt: Del Shannon, "From Me to You"] He made some interesting records in the rest of the sixties, and had the occasional fluke hit, but the music he was making, a unique blend of hard garage rock and soft white doo-wop, was increasingly out of step with the rest of the industry. In the mid and late sixties, his biggest successes came with songwriting and productions for other artists. He wrote "I Go to Pieces" which became a hit for Peter & Gordon: [Excerpt: Peter and Gordon, "I Go to Pieces"] Produced the band Smith in their cover version of "Baby It's You", which made the top five: [Excerpt: Smith, "Baby It's You"] And produced Brian Hyland's million-selling version of a Curtis Mayfield song that I'm not going to play, because its title used a racial slur against Romani people which most non-Romani people didn't then regard as a slur, but which is a great record if you can get past that. That Hyland record featured Crook, reunited briefly with Shannon. But over the seventies Shannon seemed increasingly lost, and while he continued to make records, including some good ones made in the UK with production by Dave Edmunds and Jeff Lynne, he was increasingly unwell with alcoholism. He finally got sober in 1978, and managed to have a fluke hit in 1981 with a cover version of Phil Phillips' "Sea of Love", produced by Tom Petty and with Petty's band the Heartbreakers backing him: [Excerpt: Del Shannon, "Sea of Love"] He also came to people's attention when a rerecorded version of "Runaway" with new lyrics was used as the theme for the TV show Crime Story. In 1989, Del Shannon was working on a comeback album, with Jeff Lynne producing and members of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers as backing musicians. The same people had previously worked on Roy Orbison's last album, which had been his biggest success in decades, and Lynne was gaining a reputation for resuscitating the careers of older musicians. Both Lynne and Petty were fans of Shannon and had worked with him previously, and it seemed likely that he might be able to have a hit with some of the material he was working on. Certainly "Walk Away", which Shannon co-wrote with Lynne and Petty, sounds like the kind of thing that was getting radio play around that time: [Excerpt: Del Shannon, "Walk Away"] There were even rumours that Lynne and Petty were thinking of inviting Shannon to join the Travelling Wilburys to replace Roy Orbison, though that seems unlikely to me. Unfortunately, by the time the album came out, Shannon was dead. He'd been suffering from depression for decades, and he died of suicide in early 1990, aged fifty-five. His widow later sued the manufacturers of the new wonder drug, Prozac, which he'd been prescribed a couple of weeks earlier, claiming that it caused his death. Max Crook, meanwhile, had become a firefighter and burglar alarm installer, while also pursuing a low-key career in music, mostly making religious music. When Shannon was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Crook volunteered to perform at the ceremony, playing his original Musitron, but his offer was ignored. In later years he would regularly show up at annual celebrations of Shannon, and talk about the music they made together, and play for their fans. He died on July the first this year, aged eighty-three.

america tv love new york amazon history world chicago uk british canadian dj michigan detroit argentina world war ii broadway sea cd hurricanes clowns rock and roll lonely pieces snake clock billboard runaways hats petty bumble tvs hammond ann arbor tom petty cornwall kellogg rock and roll hall of fame crooks dukes mclaughlin tilt mixcloud blue moon rock music internet archive romani roy orbison heartbreakers prozac crime stories curtis mayfield amg les paul balk battle creek berry gordy baby it jeff lynne bobby darin from me chubby checker charles johnson dixieland stingers maxfield maximillian del shannon richard lester lennon mccartney vera lynn gene vincent dave edmunds belmonts ink spots my shadow marcels charlie johnson this is my story jimmy jones travelling wilburys craig douglas helen shapiro acker bilk phil phillips slim gaillard orny mark shannon tilt araiza

May 26th This Day in History

Play Episode Listen Later May 26, 2020 2:14

Today in history: Mr. Acker Bilk kicks off the British Invasion. Accident on the USS Nimitz. Resorts Casino Hotel opens. Operation Dynamo occurs. 'Dracula' first published.

history news dracula accident british invasion uss nimitz operation dynamo acker bilk

142—From King Henry the VIII to the Rolling Stones on Eel Pie Island

The Kitchen Sisters Present

Play Episode Listen Later May 26, 2020 22:43

Eel Pie Island, a tiny bit of land in the River Thames has a flamboyant history involving King Henry VIII, Charles Dickens, The Rolling Stones, Pete Townshend, Rod Stewart, Anjelica Huston, Trad Jazz, Rock and Roll… and eel pie—a disappearing London delicacy. The story goes that Henry VIII in the 16th century would be rowed up the Thames on the Royal Barge and would stop at the island for an eel pie. Charles Dickens immortalized it in his novel Nicholas Nickleby. In the 1950s a jazz club was started on the island featuring Skiffle and Trad Jazz with people like Ken Colyer, Acker BIlk, and Lonnie Donegan. “Eel Pie Island was where they used to fish out the eel up through the 1960s. The eels would be sold in the front of fishmonger shops, big, fat, some as thick as your arm, lying around on the marble slabs,” remembers actress Anjelica Huston who grew up in London in the 60s and made the pilgrimage to Eel Pie Island, an early rock and roll mecca. Eric Clapton did a lot of his early playing on the island. “When I was a beatnik back in the early 60s, that was the only thing there was.” “The hotel stood alone, I remember it a little bit like a Charles Addams drawing,” recalls Huston. “It was a time when a lot of the old ways were meeting new ways out of the rations and the hardships of WWII and the blitz, and the hunger. Eel Pie Island, the eels that had been cut up on the white marble slabs since the days of Henry the VIII were suddenly meeting the Youth Quake.” Ronnie Wood, who would later join the Rolling Stones, called it a great melting pot. “You might bump into Mick Jagger in the bar, Pete Townshend came by, Ray Davies, Keith, Bowie…” Paul Jones who played in the 60s band Manfred Mann said, “Any band that was worth its salt had to play there. Till you ticked off that one on your itinerary, you hadn’t really arrived.” The place was proclaimed a health hazard in 1967 and forced to shut down. Squatters immediately came into the space and the UK’s largest hippie commune was born. The building eventually burned down and eighteen townhouses were constructed in its place. Today, Eel Pie Island has a couple of hundred inhabitants. Artists and craftspeople maintain studios on the island along with some boat works. “Eel Pie Island, it’s a very specific little place in space and time,” says Huston. “A little point of liberation on the Thames. But very alive, just like the eels.”

Z107.7 FM Many Moods of Ben Vaughn #389 - January 26, 2020

The Many Moods of Ben Vaughn hosted by Ben Vaughn

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 26, 2020 58:00

paul mccartney vaughn miles davis moods hugh masekela link wray freddie king little walter junior walker ben vaughn many moods acker bilk z107.7

漫谈法兰西125-开创科学时代的祖师爷，笛卡尔

漫谈法兰西（泛法语文化）

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 23, 2019 13:22

录制时间：2019年11月23日主持人&出品人：Charles, 广州，微信2169396背景音乐：Fly me to the moon, Acker Bilk，英国著名黑管演奏家本期简介：勒内·笛卡尔，法国著名哲学家、数学家、物理学家。他对现代数学的发展做出了重要的贡献，因将几何坐标体系公式化而被认为是解析几何之父。他是二元论唯心主义跟理性主义的代表人物，留下名言“我思故我在”，提出了“普遍怀疑”的主张，是西方现代哲学的奠基人。他的哲学思想深深影响了之后的几代欧洲人，开拓了欧陆理性主义哲学。本期节选吴军博士《文明之光》第十二章关于笛卡尔的章节

acker bilk

漫谈法兰西125-开创科学时代的祖师爷，笛卡尔

漫谈法兰西（泛法语文化）

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 23, 2019 13:22

acker bilk

漫谈法兰西125-开创科学时代的祖师爷，笛卡尔

漫谈法兰西（泛法语文化）

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 23, 2019 13:22

acker bilk

Show 89, “The Clarinet,”

Sam Waldron

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 8, 2019 58:00

Show 89, “The Clarinet,” features 17 pieces of music that highlight the clarinet, including jazz, classical and easy-listening. Performers include David Bowie, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Sabine Meyer, the Budapest Clarinet Quintet, Acker Bilk, and... Read More The post Show 89, “The Clarinet,” appeared first on Sam Waldron.

david bowie performers clarinet benny goodman artie shaw acker bilk sabine meyer

En cadence #129 : Belles saisons

Du spectacle

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 10, 2019

Voici le cent vingt-neuvième opus d'"En Cadence", une émission mensuelle consacrée aux grands thèmes éternels de la musique populaire : l'amour, les voyages, les filles, les réseaux ou les fruits exotiques."L'été est arrivé, 28 degrés à l'ombre, c'est fou, c'est trop, on est tout seuls au monde : tout est bleu, tout est beau. Tu fermes un peu les yeux, le soleil est si haut, je caresse tes jambes, mes mains brûlent ta peau, j'éteins ma cigarette, il fait encore plus chaud."Liste des morceaux :01. Virginia Astley - Summer of Their Dreams02. Donovan - Summer Day Reflection Song03. Liston Smith & the Cosmic Echoes - Summer Nights04. Claudine Longet - Lazy Summer Night05. Lana et Rospo - Summer Wine06. Véronique Sanson - Birds of Summer07. Lou Christie - Make Summer Last Forever08. Milky Way - Summer Time Love Song09. Mr. Acker Bilk & His Paramount Jazz Band - Summer Set10. Afrikanders - Africa (L'Été indien)11. Thor's Hammer - Midsumarnott12. The Durutti Column - Sketch for Summer13. Catherine Howe - In the Hot Summer14. Almond Marzipan - Summer Love15. Suzanne Menzel - Summer Rain16. Melchior Alias - L'Espace d'un été17. Stig & Steen - Sommer18. Caetano Veloso - Chuvas de Verão19. Michèle Arnaud - Le Bleu de l'étéÉcouter

playlist mixtape liste compilation spectacle belles stig saisons hot summer acker bilk their dreams durutti column sketch

#41: August 26th 1976 - From Acker Bilk To Chlamydia In Two Minutes

Chart Music

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 9, 2019 241:20

The latest episode of the podcast which asks: can you remember a wazz you had 43 years ago? This episode, Pop-Crazed Youngsters, is the beginning of a five-part mini-series where members of Team Chart Music run a finger along our TOTP collection and select one of their favourites - and Our David has kicked it off by pulling out an absolute plum from the very end of the Drought. Your panel were killing time during the summer holidays sitting in hot cars, playing Shove Matchbox, or trying to be the Lord Killinan of the ladybirds, but over in the BBC TV Centre, Noel Edmonds has graciously taken time out from getting ready for Swap Shop (and presumably counting the excrement passing through the piping system) to deluge us all with another massive dollop of brightly-coloured Pop gunge. Musicwise, it's a mainly above-par serving of the usual mid-70s melange: Manfred Mann turn up the knob on their synth. The Bee Gees lob a glitterball through the window of the charts. Robin Sarstedt - the Lothario of the Tea Dance - pitches up one more time. The Stylistics stand in a park on Dress-Down Friday. Gallagher and Lyle do something. The Chi-Lites are accompanied by a non-racist cartoon. OH MY GOD IS THAT CAN. And most importantly, we finally get round to Ruby Flipper, the dance troupe that actually featured men and - gasp! non-white people. David Stubbs and Taylor Parkes join Al Needham for a lick of the Lolly Gobble Choc Bomb of '76, veering off on such tangents as belt shops in East London, mid-70s sexual health clinic procedures, Ian Hitler, the Brum Burger, Godzilla and Social Exclusion, and one of Chart Music being a retired male stripper. NOW WITH ADDED SEXUAL SWEAR WORDS WARNING! Video Playlist | Subscribe | Facebook | Twitter Subscribe to us on iTunes here. Support us on Patreon here. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

pop godzilla drought gallagher east london bee gees two minutes chlamydia manfred mann stylistics social exclusion swap shop noel edmonds totp lothario tea dance david stubbs acker bilk video playlist chart music bbc tv centre

"Rock Island Line" by Lonnie Donegan

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 25, 2019 37:24

Welcome to episode twenty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at "Rock Island Line" by Lonnie Donegan. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. ----more----Erratum I say in the episode that rationing in the UK ended the day that Elvis recorded "That's All Right Mama". In actual fact, rationing ended on July 4, 1954, while Elvis recorded his track on July 5. Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. The resource I've used more than any in this entry is Roots, Radicals, and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World by Billy Bragg. I thought when I bought it that given that Bragg is a musician, it would probably not be a particularly good book, and I only picked it up to see if there was anything in it that I should address, given it came out last year and sold quite well, but I was absolutely blown away by how good it actually is, and I can't imagine anyone who listens to this podcast not enjoying it. This five-CD box set of Lonnie Donegan recordings contains over a hundred tracks for ten pounds, and is quite astonishing value. And this collection of Lead Belly recordings is about as good an overview as you're likely to get of his work. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? And why not back the Kickstarter for a book based on the first twenty episodes? Transcript In this series, so far we've only looked at musicians in the US -- other than a brief mention of the Crew-Cuts, who were from Canada. And this makes sense when it comes to rock and roll history, because up until the 1960s rock and roll was primarily a North American genre, and anyone outside the US was an imitator, and would have little or no influence on the people who were making the more important music. But this is the point in which Britain really starts to enter our story. And to explain how Britain's rock and roll culture developed, I first have to tell you about the trad jazz boom. In the fifties, jazz was taking some very strange turns. There's a cycle that all popular genres in any art-forms seem to go through – they start off as super-simplistic, discarding all the frippery of whatever previous genre was currently disappearing up itself, and prizing simplicity, self-expression, and the idea that anyone can create art. They then get a second generation who want to do more sophisticated, interesting, things. And then you get a couple of things happening at once -- you get a group of people who move even further on from the "sophisticated" work, and who create art that's even more intellectually complex and which only appeals to people who have a lot of time to study the work intensely (this is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is a thing) and another group whose reaction is to say "let's go back to the simple original style". We'll see this playing out in rock music over the course of the seventies, in particular, but in the fifties it was happening in jazz. As artists like John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Thelonius Monk and Charles Mingus were busy pushing the form to its harmonic limits, going for ever-more-complex music, there was a countermovement to create simpler, more blues-based music. In the US, this mostly took the form of rhythm and blues, but there was also a whole movement of youngish men who went looking for the obscure heroes of previous generations of jazz and blues music, and brought them out of obscurity. That movement didn't get much traction in the jazz scene in America -- though it did play into the burgeoning folk scene, which we'll talk about later. But it made a huge difference in the UK. In the UK, there were a lot of musicians -- mostly rich, young, white men, though they came from all social classes and backgrounds, and mostly based in London -- who idolised the music made in New Orleans in the 1920s. These people -- people like Humphrey Lyttleton, Chris Barber, George Melly, Ken Colyer, and Acker Bilk -- thought not only that bebop and modern jazz were too intellectual, but many of them thought that even the Kansas City jazz of the 1930s which had led to swing -- the music of people like Count Basie or Jesse Stone -- was too far from the true great music, which was the 1920s hot Dixieland jazz of people like King Oliver, Sidney Bechet, and Louis Armstrong. Any jazz since then was suspect, and they set out to recreate that 1920s music as accurately as they could. They were playing traditional jazz – or trad, as it was known. These rather earnest young men were very much the same kind of people as those who would, ten years later, form bands like the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, and the Animals, and they saw themselves as scholars as much as those later musicians did. They were looking at the history, and trying to figure out how to recapture the work of other people. They were working for cultural preservation, not to create new music themselves as such -- although many of them became important musicians in their own right. Skiffle started out as a way for trad musicians who played brass instruments to save their lips. When the band that at various times was led by Ken Colyer or Chris Barber used to play their sets, they'd take a break in the middle so their lips wouldn't wear out, and originally this break would be taken up with Colyer's brother Bill playing his old seventy-eight records and explaining the history of the music to the audience -- that was the kind of audience that this kind of music had, the kind that wanted a lecture about the history of the songs. The kind of people who would, in fact, be listening to this podcast if podcasts had been around in the late forties and early fifties. But eventually, the band figured out that you could do something similar while still playing live music. If the horn players either switched to string instruments for a bit, played percussion on things like washboards, or just sat out, they could take a break from their main set of playing Dixieland music and instead play old folk and blues songs. They could explain the stories behind those songs in the same way that Bill Colyer had explained the stories behind his old jazz records, but they could incorporate it into the performance much more naturally. And so in the middle of the Dixieland jazz, you'd get a breakout set, featuring a lineup that varied from week to week but would usually be Chris Barber on double bass instead of his usual trombone, Colyer and Tony Donegan on guitar, Alexis Korner on mandolin, and Bill Colyer on washboard percussion. And when, for an early radio broadcast, Bill Colyer was asked what kind of music this small group were playing, he called it "skiffle". And so Ken Colyer's Skiffle Group was born. In its original meaning "skiffle" was one of many slang terms that had been used in the 1920s in the US for a rent party. It was never in hugely wide use, but it was referenced in, for example, the song "Chicago Skiffle" by Jimmy O'Bryant's Famous Original Washboard Band: [excerpt: "Chicago Skiffle"] We haven't talked about rent parties before, but they were a common thing in the early part of the twentieth century, especially in black communities, and especially in Harlem in New York. If the rent was due and you didn't have enough money to pay for it, you'd clear some space in your flat, get in some food and alcohol, find someone you knew who could play the piano, or even a small band, and let everyone know there was a party on. They'd pay at the door, and hopefully you'd get enough money to cover the cost of your food, some money for the piano player, and the rent for the next month. Many musicians could make a decent living playing a different rent party every day, and musicians like Fats Waller and James P. Johnson spent much of their early careers playing rent parties. If a band, rather than a single piano player, played at a rent party, it would not be a big professional band, but it would be more likely to be a jug band or a coffee pot band -- people using improvised household equipment for percussion along with string instruments like guitars and banjos, harmonicas, and similar cheap and portable instruments. This kind of music would have gone unremembered, were it not for Dan Burley. Dan Burley was a pioneering black journalist who worked as an editor for Ebony and Jet magazines, and also edited most of Elijah Mohammed's writings, as well as writing a bestselling dictionary of Jive slang. He was also, though, a musician -- he'd been a classmate of Lionel Hampton, in fact, and co-wrote several songs with him -- and in the late 1940s he put together a band which also included Brownie and Sticks McGhee (although Sticks was then performing under the name of "Globe Trotter McGhee"). They called themselves Dan Burley and His Skiffle Boys, and it was them that Bill Colyer was remembering when he gave the style its name. [excerpt: Dan Burley and His Skiffle Boys: "South Side Shake"]. The trad jazz scene in Britain, like the overlapping traditional folk scene, had a great number of left-wing activists, and so at least some of the bands were organised on left-wing, co-operative, lines. That was certainly the case for Ken Colyer's band, but then Colyer wanted to sack the bass player and the drummer, because he didn't think they could play well, and the guitarist, now calling himself Lonnie Donegan after his favourite blues singer, because he hated him as a person. As Chris Barber later said, "Anyone who’s ever dealt with Lonnie hates his guts, but that’s no reason to fire him." The band weren't too keen on this "firing half of what was meant to be a workers' co-operative" idea, took a vote, and kicked Colyer and his brother out instead. Colyer then made several statements about how he'd been going to leave them anyway, because they kept doing things like wanting to play ragtime or Duke Ellington songs or other things that weren't completely pure New Orleans jazz. The result was two rival bands, one headed by Colyer, and one headed by Chris Barber, which became known unsurprisingly as the Chris Barber band. Barber is one of the most important figures in British jazz, although he entered the world of music almost accidentally. He was in the audience watching a band play when the trombonist leaned over in the middle of the show and asked him if he wanted to buy a trombone. Barber asked how much it was, and the trombonist said "five pounds ten". As Barber happened to have exactly five pounds and ten shillings in his pocket at the time, and he couldn't see any good reason *not* to own a trombone, he ended up with it, and then he had to learn how to play it. But he'd learned well enough that by this point he was the obvious choice to lead the band. Both bands were still wanted by the record label, and so at short order the Chris Barber band had to go into the studio to record an album that would compete with the second album by Colyer. But they didn't have enough material to make an album, or at least not enough material that wasn't being done by every other trad band in London. So then the idea struck them to record some of the skiffle music they'd been playing in between sets, as a bit of album filler. They weren't the first band to do this -- in fact Colyer's own band had done the same some months previously. Colyer's new band featured clarinetist Acker Bilk, who would later become the very first British person ever to have a number one record in the US, and it also featured Alexis Korner in its skiffle group. That skiffle group recorded several songs on the first album by Colyer's new lineup, including this Lead Belly song: [excerpt: Ken Colyer, "Midnight Special"] That's Ken Colyer, Bill Colyer, Alexis Korner, and Mickey Ashman. And that gives an idea of the polite form of skiffle that Colyer played. But what the members of the Barber band came up with, more or less accidentally, was something that was a lot closer to the rock and roll that was just starting to be a force in the US than it was to anything else that was being recorded in the UK. In fact there's a very strong argument to be made that rock music -- the music from the sixties onwards, made by guitar bands -- as opposed to rock and roll -- a music created in the 1950s, originally mostly by black people, and often featuring piano and saxophone -- had its origins in these tracks as much as it did in anything created in the USA. The important thing about this -- something that is very easy to miss with hindsight, but is absolutely crucial -- is that these skiffle groups were the first bands in Britain where the guitar was front and centre. Normally, the guitar would be an instrument at the back, in the rhythm section -- Britain didn't have the same tradition of country and blues singers as the US did, and it was still more or less unknown to have a singer accompanying themselves on a guitar, as opposed to the piano. That changed with skiffle. And in particular, a record that changed the world almost as much as "Rock Around the Clock" had was this band's version of "Rock Island Line", featuring Lonnie Donegan on vocals. "Rock Island Line" is a song that's usually credited to Huddie Ledbetter, who is better known as Lead Belly -- but, as with many things, the story is a little more complicated than that. Ledbetter was one of the pioneers of what we now think of as folk music. He had spent multiple terms in prison -- for carrying a pistol, for murder, for attempted murder, and for assault -- and the legend has it that at least twice he managed to get himself pardoned by singing for the State Governor. The legend here is slightly inaccurate -- but not as inaccurate as it may sound. Ledbetter was primarily a blues musician, but he was taken under the wing of John and Alan Lomax, two left-wing collectors of folk songs, who brought him to an audience primarily made up of white urban leftists -- a very different audience from that of most black performers of the time. As well as being a performer, Ledbetter would assist the Lomaxes in their work recording folk songs, by going into prisons and talking to the prisoners there, explaining what it was the Lomaxes were doing -- a black man who had spent much of his life in prison was far more likely to be able to explain things in a way that prisoners understood than two white academics were going to be able to. Ledbetter was, undoubtedly, a songwriter of real talent, and he came up with songs like "The Bourgeois Blues": [Excerpt: Lead Belly, "The Bourgeois Blues"] But "Rock Island Line" itself isn't an original song. It dates back to 1930, only a few years before Lead Belly's recording, and it was written by Clarence Wilson, an engine-wiper for the Rock Island railway company. Wilson was also part of the Rock Island Colored Quartet, one of several vocal groups who were supported by the railway as a PR move to boost its brand. In that iteration of the song, it was essentially an advertising jingle. But within four years it had been taken up by singers in prisons, and had transmuted into the kind of train song that talks about the train to heaven and redemption from sin: [excerpt Kelly Pace: "Rock Island Line"] In this iteration, it's closer to another song popularised by Lead Belly, "Midnight Special", or to Rosetta Tharpe's "This Train", than it is to an advertisement for a particularly good train line. Lead Belly took the song for his own, and added verses. He also added spoken introductions, which varied every time, but eventually coalesced into something like this: [excerpt Lead Belly "Rock Island Line"] And it's that song, an advertising jingle that had become a gospel song that had become a song about a trickster figure of a train driver, that Lonnie Donegan performed, with members of Chris Barber's Jazz Band. The song had become popular among trad jazzers, and one version of "Rock Island Line" that Donegan would definitely have heard is George Melly's version from 1951. Unlike Donegan's version, this was never a hit, and Melly later admitted that this lack of success was one of the reasons he wasn't a particular fan of Donegan -- but Donegan definitely attended a concert where Melly performed the song, several years before recording his own version. Melly's version was so unsuccessful, in fact, that it seems never to have been reissued in any format that will play on modern equipment -- it's not only never been released as a download or on CD, it's never even been released on *vinyl* to the best of my knowledge! -- and it's never been digitised by any of the many resources I consult for archival 78s, so for the first time I'm unable to play an excerpt of a track I'm talking about. The only digital copy of it I've ever been able to find out about was when an Internet radio show devoted to old 78s played it on one episode nearly six years ago, but the MP3 of that episode is no longer in the station's archives, and the DJ hasn't responded to my emails. Sorry about that. So I've no idea to what extent George Melly's version was responsible for Donegan choosing that song to record, but it's safe to say that Melly's version didn't have whatever magic Donegan's had that made him into arguably the most influential British musician of his generation. Donegan's version starts similarly to Lead Belly's, but he tells the story differently: [excerpt: Lonnie Donegan, "Rock Island Line"] In his version, the line runs down to New Orleans, which is not where the real-life Rock Island Line runs -- Billy Bragg suggests in his excellent book on skiffle that this was a mishearing by Donegan of "Mule-ine", from one of Lead Belly's recordings -- and instead of having to wait "in the hole" -- wait at the side while another train goes past, the driver lies in order to avoid paying a toll (which wasn't a feature on American railways). Amazingly, Donegan's version of the song's intro became the standard, even for American musicians who presumably had some idea of American geography or the workings of American railways. Here, for example, is the start of Johnny Cash's version from 1957: [Excerpt: Johnny Cash "Rock Island Line"] But it wasn't the story that made Donegan's version successful -- rather, it was the way it became a wailing, caterwauling, whirlwind of energy, unlike anything else ever previously recorded by a British musician, and far more visceral even than most American rock and roll records of the period. [excerpt: Lonnie Donegan "Rock Island Line"] "Rock Island Line" was originally put out as an album track on the Chris Barber album, but was released as a single under Donegan's name a year later, and shot to number one in the UK charts. But while it seemed like it was just a novelty hit at first, it soon became apparent that it was much more than that -- and it could be argued that, other than "Rock Around the Clock", it was the most important single record we've covered here. Because "Rock Island Line" created the skiffle craze, and without the skiffle craze everything would be totally different. Soon there were dozens of bands, up and down the country, playing whitebread versions of 1920s and 30s black American folk songs. The thing about the skiffle craze was that, unlike every popular music format before -- and most since -- skiffle could be emulated by *anyone*. It helped if you had a guitar or a banjo, of course, or maybe a harmonica, but the other instruments that were typically used were made out of household items -- a washboard, played with a thimble; a teachest bass, made with a teachest and a broom handle; possibly a jug, or comb and paper. (Of course, ironically, many of these things later became obsolete, and now the only place you're likely to find a washboard is in a music shop, being sold at an outrageously high price for people who want to play skiffle music). This was in stark contrast to other musical genres. An electric guitar, or a piano, or a saxophone or trumpet or what have you, required a significant investment, money that most people simply didn't have. Because one thing we've not mentioned yet, but which is hugely important here, is *just how poor* Britain was in 1954. The USA was going through a post-war boom, because it was the only major industrialised nation in the world that hadn't had much of its industrial capacity destroyed in the war, and so it had become the world's salesman. If you wanted to buy consumer goods of any type, you bought American, because America still had factories, and it had people who could work in them rather than having to rebuild bombed-out cities. Much of the story of rock and roll ties in with this -- this is the time when America was in the ascendant as a world power. The UK, on the other hand, had gone through two devastating wars in a forty-year period, and basically had to rebuild all its major cities from scratch. And it wasn't helped by the US suddenly, in August 1945. withdrawing all its help for Britain in what had been the Lend-Lease programme. 55% of the UK's GDP in the second world war had been devoted to the war, and it ended up having to take out a massive loan from the US to replace the previous aid it had been given. That loan was agreed in 1946, and the final instalment of it was paid in 2006. The result of this economic hardship was that the post-war years were a time of terrible deprivation in the UK, to the extent that rationing only ended in July 1954 -- nine years after World War II ended, and a week before "Rock Island Line" was recorded. (In fact, rationing in the UK ended on the same day that Elvis Presley recorded "That's All Right Mama", so if we want to draw a line in the sand and say "this is where the 1950s of the popular imagination, as opposed to the 1950s of the calendar, started", that would be as good a date as any to set). Bear all this in mind as the story goes forward, and it'll explain a lot about British attitudes to America, in particular -- Britain looked to America with a combination of awe and envy, resentment and star-struck admiration, and a lot of that comes from the way that the two countries were developing economically during this time. So, around the country, teenagers were looking for an outlet for their music, and they could easily see themselves as Lonnie Donegan, the lad from Scotland brought up in London. Half the teenagers in the country bought themselves guitars, or made basses out of teachests. And Lonnie Donegan was even a big star in the US! All the music papers were saying so! Maybe, just maybe, it was possible for you to go and become famous in the US as well! Because, surprisingly, Donegan's record did make the top ten in the pop charts in the USA, in what became the first example of a long line of white British men with guitars gaining commercial success in the US by selling the music of the US' own black people back to white teenagers. Donegan wasn't a big star over there, but he was close enough that the British music papers, buoyed by patriotism, could pretend he was. In fact, Donegan wasn't quite a one-hit wonder in the USA -- he was a two-hit wonder, first with "Rock Island Line", and a few years later with the novelty song "Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour On The Bedpost Overnight?" -- but he still made more of an impact there than any other British musician of his generation. [excerpt: Lonnie Donegan “Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour On The Bedpost Overnight?”] Any version of "Rock Island Line" recorded by an American after 1955 would be based around Donegan's version. Bobby Darin's first single, for example, was a cover version of Donegan's record, in a reversal of the usual process which would involve British people copying the latest American hit for the domestic market. It was the first time since Ray Noble in the 1930s that a British musician had achieved any kind of level of popular success in the USA at all, and the British music public were proud of Donegan. Except, that is, for the trad jazz fans who were Donegan's original audience. For a lot of them, Donegan was polluting the purity of the music. The trad jazz *musicians* usually didn't mind this. But the purists in the music papers really, really, disliked Donegan. Not that credibility mattered -- after all, as the session guitarist Bert Weedon said to Donegan, "You’re the first man to have made any money out of the guitar. Bloody well done!" And while Donegan didn't make any more than his initial sixteen pound session fee -- his fee for the entire Chris Barber album from which "Rock Island Line" was taken -- from the initial recording, he did indeed become financially very successful from his follow-up hits like "Puttin' on the Style": [Excerpt: Lonnie Donegan "Puttin' on the Style"] That was famously parodied by Peter Sellers: [excerpt: Peter Sellers "Puttin' on the Smile"] But there's another recording of that song which probably shows its cultural impact better. This is a very, very, low-fidelity recording of a teenage skiffle group performing the song in 1957. Apologies for the poor quality, but it's frankly a miracle this survives at all: [excerpt: The Quarrymen, "Puttin' on the Style"] Later, on the same day that recording was made, the sixteen-year-old boy singing lead there would be introduced properly for the first time to another teenager, who he would invite to join his skiffle group. But it'll be a while yet before we talk about John Lennon and Paul McCartney properly.

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“Rock Island Line” by Lonnie Donegan