Podcasts about big jay mcneely

We've got a small-town Alabama group's rare version of Mr. Pitiful for you today, plus R&B, northern soul, and more from Bobby McClure, Jackie Shane, The Traits, Trini Lopez, a Billy Joe Royal favorite, some British Psych from the Spencer Davis Group, and The Coasters' early 1970s take on Love Potion Number Nine. -Originally broadcast November 24, 2024- Willie Mitchell / That Driving BeatJunior Wells / You're Tuff EnoughThe Jagged Edge / Baby You Don't KnowJeanette Williams / All Of A SuddenThe Goodees / Condition RedThe Seeds / Can't Seem To Make You MineThe Fabulous Shades / Mr. PitifulPips / Room In Your HeartThe Sharpees / Do the 45"Big Jay McNeely & Band / ...Back ...Shack ...TrackBenny Spellman / Fortune TellerMary Wells / My GuyEvelyn Legrand / I Got CaughtTrini Lopez / What Have I Got of My OwnElvis Presley / Rubberneckin'Tension / It's a FactJohnny Jones & The King Casuals / Purple HazeCopper & Brass / Does Anybody Know What Time It IsPaul Anka / My Baby's Comin' HomeDee Clark / Cross Fire TimeBobby McClure / The Peak Of LoveThe Blue Notes / Hot Chills And Cold ThrillsCoasters / Love Potion Number NineRoger James Four / Leave Me AloneThe Furys / Never MoreJackie Shane / In My TenementSteve Alaimo / Every Day I Have To CryOscar Toney Jr. / You Can Lead Your Woman to the AltarBilly Joe Royal / Heart's DesireThe Persuaders / You Must Have Put Something In Your LoveTom Storm and the Peps / That's The Way Love IsThe Pirates / Mind Over Matter (I'm Gonna Make You Mine)The Traits / Harlem ShuffleThe Runarounds / You're A DragThe Avengers / Crying All AloneThe Spencer Davis Group / Time SellerHuman Beinz / This Little Girl of MineJr. Walker & The All Stars / Brain WasherBobby Fuller Four / The Magic Touch Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Desde Londres nos llega el disco destacado del día, “Soothe my soul”, con el que descubrimos a este heredero de Sam Cooke, Ray Charles o el sonido New Orleans llamado Rob Picazo. Suenan además adelantos de los próximos trabajos de los británicos The Bevis Frond o el californiano Kelley Stoltz. Y el último lanzamiento de esa disquera británica llamada Hyperloop, especializada en arqueología garagera, que rescata dos canciones perdidas de la banda de Pensilvania The Magic Mushrooms.(Foto del podcast; Rob Picazo)Playlist;Disco destacado; ROB PICAZO “Black cat” (Soothe my soul, 2023)ROB PICAZO “Soothe my soul” (Soothe my soul, 2023)ROB PICAZO “Wall to wall” (Soothe my soul, 2023)RAY COLLINS HOT-CLUB with BIG JAY McNEELY “Kellerbar” (single 2024)THE HILLBILLY MOON EXPLOSION “Knocked down” (Back in time, 2024)THE LIMBOOS “Dark is the night” (adelanto del álbum “Off the loop”)WESLEY FULLER “Alamein line” (adelanto del álbum “All Fuller no filler”)KELLEY STOLTZ “Reni’s car” (adelanto del álbum “Le Fleur”)THE BEVIS FROND “Hairstreaks” (adelanto del álbum “Focus on nature”)THE COURETTES “You woo me” (single, 2024)THE MOCKS “Find her” (Do you want me too, 2024)THE MAGIC MUSHROOMS “I’m all ears” (single, 2024)THE MAGIC MUSHROOMS “Pain” (Hyperloop) (single, 2024)THE SCANERS “No return” (III, 2024)E.T. EXPLORE ME “98%” (Drug me, 2024)Escuchar audio

Los Maestros del Ritmo de King: Todd Rhodes, Sonny Thompson, Big Jay McNeely, Earl Bostic, Lynn Hope, Bill Doggett... Presenta, edita y posproduce Jose M Corrales. t.me/EnfoqueCritico (https://t.me/EnfoqueCritico) debateafondo@gmail.com @EnfoqueCritico_ facebook.com/DebateAFondo facebook.com/josemanuel.corrales.750/ https://www.youtube.com/@EnfoqueCritico Instagram enfoquecritico Mastodon @EnfoqueCritico@masto.es

Playlist:  1. Goblin - Suspiria (Celesta & Bells) 2. John Carpenter - Here Comes The Boogie Man 3. Carl Stalling - The Skeleton Dance 4. Bettye LaVette - Witchcraft In The Air 5. Los Africanos - Monster Party 6. The Grim Reapers - Two Souls 7. R. Dean Taylor - There's A Ghost In My House 8. Serge Gainsbourg - Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde 9. Link Wray & His Ray Men - Jack The Ripper 10. The Stomach Mouths - Nightmares 11. Sultans of Ping - Teenage Vampire 12. The Fall - City Hobgoblins 13. Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Graveyard 14. Jon Spencer - Ghost 15. Shorty Long - Devil With The Blue Dress 16. The Duhks - Death Came A Knockin' 17. The Beautiful South - (Don't Fear) The Reaper 18. The Poets - Dead 19. France Gall - Frankenstein 20. Tommy Falcone & The Centuries - Like Weird 21. The Spellbinders - Castin' My Spell 22. The Electro-Tones - Ghost Train 23. Dave Gardner - Mad Witch 24. Big Jay McNeely & Band - Psycho Serenade 25. Screamin' Jay Hawkins - Little Demon 26. Little Richard - Heeby Jeebies 27. The Sonics - The Witch 28. Mad Mike  & The Maniacs - The Hunch 29. The Ghastly Ones - Grave Dig Her 30. The Caravans - The Spook 31. The Ebb-Tides - Seance 32. The Cramps - Human Fly 33. The Five Blobs - From The Top Of Your Guggle (To The Bottom Of Your Zooch) 34. Rose & The Arrangement - The Cockroach That Ate Cincinnati 35. The Alleykatz - The Friendly Undertaker 36. Mark Sultan - Coffin Nails 37. Johnny Fever - Zombie 38. Mr. Baseman & The Symbols - Do The Zombie 39. Steve King - Satan Is Her Name 40. Bryan "Legs" Walker - Trick Or Treat 41. The Nu Trends - Spooksville 42. The Moon-Rays - Mr. Ghost Goes To Town 43. Elroy Dietzel & The Rhythm Bandits - Rock-N-Bones 44. Claudine Clark - Walkin' Through A Cemetery 45. Bobby Bare - Vampira 46. Tom Waits - Whistlin' Past The Graveyard 47. The Birthday Party - Release The Bats 48. Elvis Costello - Shallow Grave 49. Iron Butterfly - Real Fright 50. The Soft Boys - The Face Of Death 51. Madonnatron - Mother's Funeral 52. Siouxsie & The Banshees - Halloween 53. Southern Death Cult - False Faces 54. Bauhaus - Dark Entries 55. Go-Go's - He's So Strange 56. Parallels - Pet Semetary 57. The Smiths - Death At One's Elbow 58. The Cure - The Blood 59. Roky Erickson & The Aliens - I Think Of Demons 60. Chuck Prophet - Castro Halloween 61. Robyn Hitchcock & The Egyptians - My Wife & My Dead Wife 62. Franz Ferdinand - Evil Eye 63. The Damned - Grimly Fiendish 64. David Lindley & El Rayo-X - Werewolves Of London 65. Fishbone - Bonin' In The Boneyard 66. Depeche Mode - Enjoy the Silence (Harmonium) 67. 'Dead - The Twilight Zone '85 Main Title 68. Broadcast & The Focus Group - A Seancing Song 69. John Carpenter - Was It The Boogie Man? Image: Halloween 2023      Podomatic: https://soulshenanigans.podomatic.com Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3fYzstV Google Podcasts: https://bit.ly/331g0tM Amazon Music: https://amzn.to/32OIqGI TuneIn Radio: https://bit.ly/30UUPIu Mixcloud: https://www.mixcloud.com/soulshenanigans  Twitter: @soulshenanigans Facebook: soulshenanigans Email: soulshenanigans(at)gmail.com          

When the Grammy Museum honored Big Jay McNeely in 2017, when he was 90, they said: McNeely is a true original and the last of a generation of blues/R&B musicians who inspired the early rock pioneers, and are still around to remind us where popular music came from. As Off-Ramp jazz correspondent Sean J. O'Connell put it when he interviewed him for the show:  "Big Jay McNeely was etched into pop music immortality in 1951. Photographer Bob Willoughby captured McNeely at a concert at Los Angeles's Olympic Auditorium 1951. In the photo, the Watts native is blasting his tenor sax on his back, the camera capturing the raised fists of post-war teenage hysteria seething in undershirts and pompadours at the foot of the stage. From Central Avenue with Charlie Parker and Art Tatum in the 1940s to the R&B circuit of the '50s and '60s, McNeely was there through a roller coaster of musical evolutions and had a good time along the way. His showmanship and soul are both youthful and timeless. He is rock & roll history, alive and well." Big Jay died a year later, but not before our listeners got to hear his story, and now you do, too. Support for this podcast is made possible by Gordon and Dona Crawford, who believe that quality journalism makes Los Angeles a better place to live; and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private corporation funded by the American people. Off-Ramp theme music by Fesliyan Studios. Bob Willoughby photo used with permission from his estate.

Episode one hundred and forty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Trouble Every Day" by the Mothers of Invention, and the early career of Frank Zappa. 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 "Christmas Time is Here Again" by the Beatles. 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/ Resources I'm away from home as I upload this and haven't been able to do a Mixcloud, but will hopefully edit a link in in a week or so if I remember. The main biography I consulted for this was Electric Don Quixote by Neil Slaven. Zappa's autobiography, The Real Frank Zappa Book, is essential reading if you're a fan of his work. Information about Jimmy Carl Black's early life came from Black's autobiography, For Mother's Sake. Zappa's letter to Varese is from this blog, which also contains a lot of other useful information on Zappa. For information on the Watts uprising, I recommend Johnny Otis' Listen to the Lambs. And the original mix of Freak Out is currently available not on the CD issue of Freak Out itself, which is an eighties remix, but on this "documentary" set. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Just a quick note before I begin -- there are a couple of passing references in this episode to rape and child abuse. I don't believe there's anything that should upset anyone, but if you're worried, you might want to read the transcript on the podcast website before or instead of listening. But also, this episode contains explicit, detailed, descriptions of racial violence carried out by the police against Black people, including against children. Some of it is so distressing that even reading the transcript might be a bit much for some people. Sometimes, in this podcast, we have to go back to another story we've already told. In most cases, that story is recent enough that I can just say, "remember last episode, when I said...", but to tell the story of the Mothers of Invention, I have to start with a story that I told sixty-nine episodes ago, in episode seventy-one, which came out nearly two years ago. In that episode, on "Willie and the Hand Jive", I briefly told the story of Little Julian Herrera at the start. I'm going to tell a slightly longer version of the story now. Some of the information at the start of this episode will be familiar from that and other episodes, but I'm not going to expect people to remember something from that long ago, given all that's happened since. The DJ Art Laboe is one of the few figures from the dawn of rock and roll who is still working. At ninety-six years old, he still promotes concerts, and hosts a syndicated radio show on which he plays "Oldies but Goodies", a phrase which could describe him as well as the music. It's a phrase he coined -- and trademarked -- back in the 1950s, when people in his audience would ask him to play records made a whole three or four years earlier, records they had listened to in their youth. Laboe pretty much single-handedly invented the rock and roll nostalgia market -- as well as being a DJ, he owned a record label, Original Sound, which put out a series of compilation albums, Oldies But Goodies, starting in 1959, which started to cement the first draft of the doo-wop canon. These were the first albums to compile together a set of older rock and roll hits and market them for nostalgia, and they were very much based on the tastes of his West Coast teenage listenership, featuring songs like "Earth Angel" by the Penguins: [Excerpt: The Penguins, "Earth Angel"] But also records that had a more limited geographic appeal, like "Heaven and Paradise" by Don Julian and the Meadowlarks: [Excerpt: Don Julian and the Meadowlarks, "Heaven and Paradise"] As well as being a DJ and record company owner, Laboe was the promoter and MC for regular teenage dances at El Monte Legion Stadium, at which Kip and the Flips, the band that featured Sandy Nelson and Bruce Johnston, would back local performers like the Penguins, Don and Dewey, or Ritchie Valens, as well as visiting headliners like Jerry Lee Lewis. El Monte stadium was originally chosen because it was outside the LA city limits -- at the time there were anti-rock-and-roll ordinances that meant that any teenage dance had to be approved by the LA Board of Education, but those didn't apply to that stadium -- but it also led to Laboe's audience becoming more racially diverse. The stadium was in East LA, which had a large Mexican-American population, and while Laboe's listenership had initially been very white, soon there were substantial numbers of Mexican-American and Black audience members. And it was at one of the El Monte shows that Johnny Otis discovered the person who everyone thought was going to become the first Chicano rock star, before even Ritchie Valens, in 1957, performing as one of the filler acts on Laboe's bill. He signed Little Julian Herrera, a performer who was considered a sensation in East LA at the time, though nobody really knew where he lived, or knew much about him other than that he was handsome, Chicano, and would often have a pint of whisky in his back pocket, even though he was under the legal drinking age. Otis signed Herrera to his label, Dig Records, and produced several records for him, including the record by which he's now best remembered, "Those Lonely Lonely Nights": [Excerpt: Little Julian Herrera, "Those Lonely, Lonely, Nights"] After those didn't take off the way they were expected to, Herrera and his vocal group the Tigers moved to another label, one owned by Laboe, where they recorded "I Remember Linda": [Excerpt: Little Julian Herrera and the Tigers, "I Remember Linda"]  And then one day Johnny Otis got a knock on his door from the police. They were looking for Ron Gregory. Otis had never heard of Ron Gregory, and told them so. The police then showed him a picture. It turned out that Julian Herrera wasn't Mexican-American, and wasn't from East LA, but was from Massachusetts. He had run away from home a few years back, hitch-hiked across the country, and been taken in by a Mexican-American family, whose name he had adopted. And now he was wanted for rape. Herrera went to prison, and when he got out, he tried to make a comeback, but ended up sleeping rough in the basement of the stadium where he had once been discovered. He had to skip town because of some other legal problems, and headed to Tijuana, where he was last seen playing R&B gigs in 1963. Nobody knows what happened to him after that -- some say he was murdered, others that he's still alive, working in a petrol station under yet another name, but nobody has had a confirmed sighting of him since then. When he went to prison, the Tigers tried to continue for a while, but without their lead singer, they soon broke up. Ray Collins, who we heard singing the falsetto part in "I Remember Linda", went on to join many other doo-wop and R&B groups over the next few years, with little success. Then in summer 1963, he walked into a bar in Ponoma, and saw a bar band who were playing the old Hank Ballard and the Midnighters song "Work With Me Annie". As Collins later put it, “I figured that any band that played ‘Work With Me Annie' was all right,” and he asked if he could join them for a few songs. They agreed, and afterwards, Collins struck up a conversation with the guitarist, and told him about an idea he'd had for a song based on one of Steve Allen's catchphrases. The guitarist happened to be spending a lot of his time recording at an independent recording studio, and suggested that the two of them record the song together: [Excerpt: Baby Ray and the Ferns, "How's Your Bird?"] The guitarist in question was named Frank Zappa. Zappa was originally from Maryland, but had moved to California as a child with his conservative Italian-American family when his father, a defence contractor, had got a job in Monterey. The family had moved around California with his father's work, mostly living in various small towns in the Mojave desert seventy miles or so north of Los Angeles. Young Frank had an interest in science, especially chemistry, and especially things that exploded, but while he managed to figure out the ingredients for gunpowder, his family couldn't afford to buy him a chemistry set in his formative years -- they were so poor that his father regularly took part in medical experiments to get a bit of extra money to feed his kids -- and so the young man's interest was diverted away from science towards music. His first musical interest, and one that would show up in his music throughout his life, was the comedy music of Spike Jones, whose band combined virtuosic instrumental performances with sound effects: [Excerpt: Spike Jones and his City Slickers, "Cocktails for Two"] and parodies of popular classical music [Excerpt: Spike Jones and his City Slickers, "William Tell Overture"] Jones was a huge inspiration for almost every eccentric or bohemian of the 1940s and 50s -- Spike Milligan, for example, took the name Spike in tribute to him. And young Zappa wrote his first ever fan letter to Jones when he was five or six. As a child Zappa was also fascinated by the visual aesthetics of music -- he liked to draw musical notes on staves and see what they looked like. But his musical interests developed in two other ways once he entered his teens. The first was fairly typical for the musicians of his generation from LA we've looked at and will continue to look at, which is that he heard "Gee" by the Crows on the radio: [Excerpt: The Crows, "Gee"] He became an R&B obsessive at that moment, and would spend every moment he could listening to the Black radio stations, despite his parents' disapproval. He particularly enjoyed Huggy Boy's radio show broadcast from Dolphins of Hollywood, and also would religiously listen to Johnny Otis, and soon became a connoisseur of the kind of R&B and blues that Otis championed as a musician and DJ: [Excerpt: Zappa on the Late Show, “I hadn't been raised in an environment where there was a lot of music in the house. This couple that owned the chilli place, Opal and Chester, agreed to ask the man who serviced the jukebox to put in some of the song titles that I liked, because I promised that I would dutifully keep pumping quarters into this thing so that I could listen to them, and so I had the ability to eat good chilli and listen to 'Three Hours Past Midnight' by Johnny 'Guitar' Watson for most of my junior and senior year"] Johnny “Guitar” Watson, along with Guitar Slim, would become a formative influence on Zappa's guitar playing, and his playing on "Three Hours Past Midnight" is so similar to Zappa's later style that you could easily believe it *was* him: [Excerpt: Johnny "Guitar" Watson, "Three Hours Past Midnight"] But Zappa wasn't only listening to R&B. The way Zappa would always tell the story, he discovered the music that would set him apart from his contemporaries originally by reading an article in Look magazine. Now, because Zappa has obsessive fans who check every detail, people have done the research and found that there was no such article in that magazine, but he was telling the story close enough to the time period in which it happened that its broad strokes, at least, must be correct even if the details are wrong. What Zappa said was that the article was on Sam Goody, the record salesman, and talked about how Goody was so good at his job that he had even been able to sell a record of Ionisation by Edgard Varese, which just consisted of the worst and most horrible noises anyone had ever heard, just loud drumming noises and screeching sounds. He determined then that he needed to hear that album, but he had no idea how he would get hold of a copy. I'll now read an excerpt from Zappa's autobiography, because Zappa's phrasing makes the story much better: "Some time later, I was staying overnight with Dave Franken, a friend who lived in La Mesa, and we wound up going to the hi-fi place -- they were having a sale on R&B singles. After shuffling through the rack and finding a couple of Joe Huston records, I made my way toward the cash register and happened to glance at the LP bin. I noticed a strange-looking black-and-white album cover with a guy on it who had frizzy gray hair and looked like a mad scientist. I thought it was great that a mad scientist had finally made a record, so I picked it up -- and there it was, the record with "Ionisation" on it. The author of the Look article had gotten it slightly wrong -- the correct title was The Complete Works of Edgard Varèse, Volume I, including "Ionisation," among other pieces, on an obscure label called EMS (Elaine Music Store). The record number was 401.I returned the Joe Huston records and checked my pockets to see how much money I had -- I think it came to about $3.75. I'd never bought an album before, but I knew they must be expensive because mostly old people bought them. I asked the man at the cash register how much EMS 401 cost. "That gray one in the box?" he said. "$5.95." I'd been searching for that record for over a year and I wasn't about to give up. I told him I had $3.75. He thought about it for a minute, and said, "We've been using that record to demonstrate hi-fi's with -- but nobody ever buys one when we use it. I guess if you want it that bad you can have it for $3.75."" Zappa took the record home, and put it on on his mother's record player in the living room, the only one that could play LPs: [Excerpt: Edgard Varese, "Ionisation"] His mother told him he could never play that record in the living room again, so he took the record player into his bedroom, and it became his record player from that point on. Varese was a French composer who had, in his early career, been very influenced by Debussy. Debussy is now, of course, part of the classical canon, but in the early twentieth century he was regarded as radical, almost revolutionary, for his complete rewriting of the rules of conventional classical music tonality into a new conception based on chordal melodies, pedal points, and use of non-diatonic scales. Almost all of Varese's early work was destroyed in a fire, so we don't have evidence of the transition from Debussy's romantic-influenced impressionism to Varese's later style, but after he had moved to the US in 1915 he had become wildly more experimental. "Ionisation" is often claimed to be the first piece of Western classical music written only for percussion instruments. Varese was part of a wider movement of modernist composers -- for example he was the best man at Nicolas Slonimsky's wedding -- and had also set up the International Composers' Guild, whose manifesto influenced Zappa, though his libertarian politics led him to adapt it to a more individualistic rather than collective framing. The original manifesto read in part "Dying is the privilege of the weary. The present day composers refuse to die. They have realized the necessity of banding together and fighting for the right of each individual to secure a fair and free presentation of his work" In the twenties and thirties, Varese had written a large number of highly experimental pieces, including Ecuatorial, which was written for bass vocal, percussion, woodwind, and two Theremin cellos. These are not the same as the more familiar Theremin, created by the same inventor, and were, as their name suggests, Theremins that were played like a cello, with a fingerboard and bow. Only ten of these were ever made, specifically for performances of Varese's work, and he later rewrote the work to use ondes martenot instead of Theremin cellos, which is how the work is normally heard now: [Excerpt: Edgard Varese, "Ecuatorial"] But Varese had spent much of the thirties, forties, and early fifties working on two pieces that were never finished, based on science fiction ideas -- L'Astronome, which was meant to be about communication with people from the star Sirius, and Espace, which was originally intended to be performed simultaneously by choirs in Beijing, Moscow, Paris, and New York. Neither of these ideas came to fruition, and so Varese had not released any new work, other than one small piece, Étude pour espace, an excerpt from the  larger work, in Zappa's lifetime. Zappa followed up his interest in Varese's music with his music teacher, one of the few people in the young man's life who encouraged him in his unusual interests. That teacher, Mr Kavelman, introduced Zappa to the work of other composers, like Webern, but would also let him know why he liked particular R&B records. For example, Zappa played Mr. Kavelman "Angel in My Life" by the Jewels, and asked what it was that made him particularly like it: [Excerpt: The Jewels, "Angel in My Life"] The teacher's answer was that it was the parallel fourths that made the record particularly appealing. Young Frank was such a big fan of Varese that for his fifteenth birthday, he actually asked if he could make a long-distance phone call to speak to Varese. He didn't know where Varese lived, but figured that it must be in Greenwich Village because that was where composers lived, and he turned out to be right. He didn't get through on his birthday -- he got Varese's wife, who told him the composer was in Europe -- but he did eventually get to speak to him, and was incredibly excited when Varese told him that not only had he just written a new piece for the first time in years, but that it was called Deserts, and was about deserts -- just like the Mojave Desert where Zappa lived: [Excerpt: Edgard Varese, "Deserts"] As he later wrote, “When you're 15 and living in the Mojave Desert, and you find out that the World's Greatest Composer (who also looks like a mad scientist) is working in a secret Greenwich Village laboratory on a song about your hometown (so to speak), you can get pretty excited.” A year later, Zappa actually wrote to Varese, a long letter which included him telling the story about how he'd found his work in the first place, hoping to meet up with him when Zappa travelled to the East Coast to see family. I'll read out a few extracts, but the whole thing is fascinating for what it says about Zappa the precocious adolescent, and I'll link to a blog post with it in the show notes. "Dear Sir: Perhaps you might remember me from my stupid phone call last January, if not, my name again is Frank Zappa Jr. I am 16 years old… that might explain partly my disturbing you last winter. After I had struggled through Mr. Finklestein's notes on the back cover (I really did struggle too, for at the time I had had no training in music other than practice at drum rudiments) I became more and more interested in you and your music. I began to go to the library and take out books on modern composers and modern music, to learn all I could about Edgard Varese. It got to be my best subject (your life) and I began writing my reports and term papers on you at school. At one time when my history teacher asked us to write on an American that has really done something for the U.S.A. I wrote on you and the Pan American Composers League and the New Symphony. I failed. The teacher had never heard of you and said I made the whole thing up. Silly but true. That was my Sophomore year in high school. Throughout my life all the talents and abilities that God has left me with have been self developed, and when the time came for Frank to learn how to read and write music, Frank taught himself that too. I picked it all up from the library. I have been composing for two years now, utilizing a strict twelve-tone technique, producing effects that are reminiscent of Anton Webern. During those two years I have written two short woodwind quartets and a short symphony for winds, brass and percussion. I plan to go on and be a composer after college and I could really use the counsel of a veteran such as you. If you would allow me to visit with you for even a few hours it would be greatly appreciated. It may sound strange but I think I have something to offer you in the way of new ideas. One is an elaboration on the principle of Ruth Seeger's contrapuntal dynamics and the other is an extension of the twelve-tone technique which I call the inversion square. It enables one to compose harmonically constructed pantonal music in logical patterns and progressions while still abandoning tonality. Varese sent a brief reply, saying that he was going to be away for a few months, but would like to meet Zappa on his return. The two never met, but Zappa kept the letter from Varese framed on his wall for the rest of his life. Zappa soon bought a couple more albums, a version of "The Rite of Spring" by Stravinsky: [Excerpt: Igor Stravinsky, "The Rite of Spring"] And a record of pieces by Webern, including his Symphony opus 21: [Excerpt: Anton Webern, "Symphony op. 21"] (Incidentally, with the classical music here, I'm not seeking out the precise performances Zappa was listening to, just using whichever recordings I happen to have copies of). Zappa was also reading Slonimsky's works of musicology, like the Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns. As well as this "serious music" though, Zappa was also developing as an R&B musician.  He later said of the Webern album, "I loved that record, but it was about as different from Stravinsky and Varèse as you could get. I didn't know anything about twelve-tone music then, but I liked the way it sounded. Since I didn't have any kind of formal training, it didn't make any difference to me if I was listening to Lightnin' Slim, or a vocal group called the Jewels (who had a song out then called "Angel in My Life"), or Webern, or Varèse, or Stravinsky. To me it was all good music." He had started as a drummer with a group called the Blackouts, an integrated group with white, Latino, and Black members, who played R&B tracks like "Directly From My Heart to You", the song Johnny Otis had produced for Little Richard: [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Directly From My Heart to You"] But after eighteen months or so, he quit the group and stopped playing drums. Instead, he switched to guitar, with a style influenced by Johnny "Guitar" Watson and Guitar Slim. His first guitar had action so bad that he didn't learn to play chords, and moved straight on to playing lead lines with his younger brother Bobby playing rhythm. He also started hanging around with two other teenage bohemians -- Euclid Sherwood, who was nicknamed Motorhead, and Don Vliet, who called himself Don Van Vliet. Vliet was a truly strange character, even more so than Zappa, but they shared a love for the blues, and Vliet was becoming a fairly good blues singer, though he hadn't yet perfected the Howlin' Wolf imitation that would become his stock-in-trade in later years. But the surviving recording of Vliet singing with the Zappa brothers on guitar, singing a silly parody blues about being flushed down the toilet of the kind that many teenage boys would write, shows the promise that the two men had: [Excerpt: Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart, "Lost in a Whirlpool"] Zappa was also getting the chance to hear his more serious music performed. He'd had the high school band play a couple of his pieces, but he also got the chance to write film music -- his English teacher, Don Cerveris, had decided to go off and seek his fortune as a film scriptwriter, and got Zappa hired to write the music for a cheap Western he'd written, Run Home Slow. The film was beset with problems -- it started filming in 1959 but didn't get finished and released until 1965 -- but the music Zappa wrote for it did eventually get recorded and used on the soundtrack: [Excerpt: Frank Zappa, "Run Home Slow Theme"] In 1962, he got to write the music for another film, The World's Greatest Sinner, and he also wrote a theme song for that, which got released as the B-side of "How's Your Bird?", the record he made with Ray Collins: [Excerpt: Baby Ray and the Ferns, "The World's Greatest Sinner"] Zappa was able to make these records because by the early sixties, as well as playing guitar in bar bands, he was working as an assistant for a man named Paul Buff. Paul Buff had worked as an engineer for a guided missile manufacturer, but had decided that he didn't want to do that any more, and instead had opened up the first independent multi-track recording studio on the West Coast, PAL Studios, using equipment he'd designed and built himself, including a five-track tape recorder. Buff engineered a huge number of surf instrumentals there, including "Wipe Out" by the Surfaris: [Excerpt: The Surfaris, "Wipe Out"] Zappa had first got to know Buff when he had come to Buff's studio with some session musicians in 1961, to record some jazz pieces he'd written, including this piece which at the time was in the style of Dave Brubeck but would later become a staple of Zappa's repertoire reorchestrated in a  rock style. [Excerpt: The PAL Studio Band, "Never on Sunday"] Buff really just wanted to make records entirely by himself, so he'd taught himself to play the rudiments of guitar, bass, drums, piano, and alto saxophone, so he could create records alone. He would listen to every big hit record, figure out what the hooks were on the record, and write his own knock-off of those. An example is "Tijuana Surf" by the Hollywood Persuaders, which is actually Buff on all instruments, and which according to Zappa went to number one in Mexico (though I've not found an independent source to confirm that chart placing, so perhaps take it with a pinch of salt): [Excerpt: The Hollywood Persuaders, "Tijuana Surf"] The B-side to that, "Grunion Run", was written by Zappa, who also plays guitar on that side: [Excerpt: The Hollywood Persuaders, "Grunion Run"] Zappa, Buff, Ray Collins, and a couple of associates would record all sorts of material at PAL -- comedy material like "Hey Nelda", under the name "Ned and Nelda" -- a parody of "Hey Paula" by Paul and Paula: [Excerpt: Ned and Nelda, "Hey Nelda"] Doo-wop parodies like "Masked Grandma": [Excerpt: The PAL Studio Band, "Masked Grandma"] R&B: [Excerpt: The PAL Studio Band, "Why Don't You Do Me Right?"] and more. Then Buff or Zappa would visit one of the local independent label owners and try to sell them the master -- Art Laboe at Original Sound released several of the singles, as did Bob Keane at Donna Records and Del-Fi. The "How's Your Bird" single also got Zappa his first national media exposure, as he went on the Steve Allen show, where he demonstrated to Allen how to make music using a bicycle and a prerecorded electronic tape, in an appearance that Zappa would parody five years later on the Monkees' TV show: [Excerpt: Steve Allen and Frank Zappa, "Cyclophony"] But possibly the record that made the most impact at the time was "Memories of El Monte", a song that Zappa and Collins wrote together about Art Laboe's dances at El Monte Stadium, incorporating excerpts of several of the songs that would be played there, and named after a compilation Laboe had put out, which had included “I Remember Linda” by Little Julian and the Tigers. They got Cleve Duncan of the Penguins to sing lead, and the record came out as by the Penguins, on Original Sound: [Excerpt: The Penguins, "Memories of El Monte"] By this point, though, Pal studios was losing money, and Buff took up the offer of a job working for Laboe full time, as an engineer at Original Sound. He would later become best known for inventing the kepex, an early noise gate which engineer Alan Parsons used on a bass drum to create the "heartbeat" that opens Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon: [Excerpt: Pink Floyd, "Speak to Me"] That invention would possibly be Buff's most lasting contribution to music, as by the early eighties, the drum sound on every single pop record was recorded using a noise gate. Buff sold the studio to Zappa, who renamed it Studio Z and moved in -- he was going through a divorce and had nowhere else to live. The studio had no shower, and Zappa had to just use a sink to wash, and he was surviving mostly off food scrounged by his resourceful friend Motorhead Sherwood. By this point, Zappa had also joined a band called the Soots, consisting of Don Van Vliet, Alex St. Clair and Vic Mortenson, and they recorded several tracks at Studio Z, which they tried to get released on Dot Records, including a cover version of Little Richard's “Slippin' and Slidin'”, and a song called “Tiger Roach” whose lyrics were mostly random phrases culled from a Green Lantern comic: [Excerpt: The Soots, "Tiger Roach"] Zappa also started writing what was intended as the first ever rock opera, "I Was a Teenage Maltshop", and attempts were made to record parts of it with Vliet, Mortenson, and Motorhead Sherwood: [Excerpt: Frank Zappa, "I Was a Teenage Maltshop"] Zappa was also planning to turn Studio Z into a film studio. He obtained some used film equipment, and started planning a science fiction film to feature Vliet, titled "Captain Beefheart Meets the Grunt People". The title was inspired by an uncle of Vliet's, who lived with Vliet and his girlfriend, and used to urinate with the door open so he could expose himself to Vliet's girlfriend, saying as he did so "Look at that! Looks just like a big beef heart!" Unfortunately, the film would not get very far. Zappa was approached by a used-car salesman who said that he and his friends were having a stag party. As Zappa owned a film studio, could he make them a pornographic film to show at the party? Zappa told him that a film wouldn't be possible, but as he needed the money, would an audio tape be acceptable? The used-car salesman said that it would, and gave him a list of sex acts he and his friends would like to hear. Zappa and a friend, Lorraine Belcher, went into the studio and made a few grunting noises and sound effects. The used-car salesman turned out actually to be an undercover policeman, who was better known in the area for his entrapment of gay men, but had decided to branch out. Zappa and Belcher were arrested -- Zappa's father bailed him out, and Zappa got an advance from Art Laboe to pay Belcher's bail. Luckily "Grunion Run" and "Memories of El Monte" were doing well enough that Laboe could give Zappa a $1500 advance. When the case finally came to trial, the judge laughed at the tape and wanted to throw the whole case out, but the prosecutor insisted on fighting, and Zappa got ten days in prison, and most of his tapes were impounded, never to be returned. He fell behind with his rent, and Studio Z was demolished. And then Ray Collins called him, asking if he wanted to join a bar band: [Excerpt: The Mothers, "Hitch-Hike"] The Soul Giants were formed by a bass player named Roy Estrada. Now, Estrada is unfortunately someone who will come up in the story a fair bit over the next year or so, as he played on several of the most important records to come out of LA in the sixties and early seventies. He is also someone about whom there's fairly little biographical information -- he's not been interviewed much, compared to pretty much everyone else, and it's easy to understand why when you realise that he's currently half-way through a twenty-five year sentence for child molestation -- his third such conviction. He won't get out of prison until he's ninety-three. He's one of the most despicable people who will turn up in this podcast, and frankly I'm quite glad I don't know more about him as a person. He was, though, a good bass player and falsetto singer, and he had released a single on King Records, an instrumental titled "Jungle Dreams": [Excerpt, Roy Estrada and the Rocketeers, "Jungle Dreams"] The other member of the rhythm section, Jimmy Carl Black, was an American Indian (that's the term he always used about himself until his death, and so that's the term I'll use about him too) from Texas. Black had grown up in El Paso as a fan of Western Swing music, especially Bob Wills, but had become an R&B fan after discovering Wolfman Jack's radio show and hearing the music of Howlin' Wolf and Sonny Boy Williamson. Like every young man from El Paso, he would travel to Juarez as a teenager to get drunk, see sex shows, and raise hell. It was also there that he saw his first live blues music, watching Long John Hunter, the same man who inspired the Bobby Fuller Four, and he would always claim Hunter as the man whose shows taught him how to play the blues. Black had decided he wanted to become a musician when he'd seen Elvis perform live. In Black's memory, this was a gig where Elvis was an unknown support act for Faron Young and Wanda Jackson, but he was almost certainly slightly misremembering -- it's most likely that what he saw was Elvis' show in El Paso on the eleventh of April 1956, where Young and Jackson were also on the bill, but supporting Elvis who was headlining. Either way, Black had decided that he wanted to make girls react to him the same way they reacted to Elvis, and he started playing in various country and R&B bands. His first record was with a group called the Keys, and unfortunately I haven't been able to track down a copy (it was reissued on a CD in the nineties, but the CD itself is now out of print and sells for sixty pounds) but he did rerecord the song with a later group he led, the Mannish Boys: [Excerpt: Jimmy Carl Black and the Mannish Boys, "Stretch Pants"] He spent a couple of years in the Air Force, but continued playing music during that time, including in a band called The Exceptions which featured Peter Cetera later of the band Chicago, on bass. After a brief time working as lineman in Wichita, he moved his family to California, where he got a job teaching drums at a music shop in Anaheim, where the bass teacher was Jim Fielder, who would later play bass in Blood, Sweat, and Tears. One of Fielder's friends, Tim Buckley, used to hang around in the shop as well, and Black was at first irritated by him coming in and playing the guitars and not buying anything, but eventually became impressed by his music. Black would later introduce Buckley to Herb Cohen, who would become Buckley's manager, starting his professional career. When Roy Estrada came into the shop, he and Black struck up a friendship, and Estrada asked Black to join his band The Soul Giants, whose lineup became Estrada, Black, a sax player named Davey Coronado, a guitarist called Larry and a singer called Dave. The group got a residency at the Broadside club in Ponoma, playing "Woolly Bully" and "Louie Louie" and other garage-band staples. But then Larry and Dave got drafted, and the group got in two men called Ray -- Ray Collins on vocals, and Ray Hunt on guitar. This worked for a little while, but Ray Hunt was, by all accounts, not a great guitar player -- he would play wrong chords, and also he was fundamentally a surf player while the Soul Giants were an R&B group. Eventually, Collins and Hunt got into a fistfight, and Collins suggested that they get in his friend Frank instead. For a while, the Soul Giants continued playing "Midnight Hour" and "Louie Louie", but then Zappa suggested that they start playing some of his original material as well. Davy Coronado refused to play original material, because he thought, correctly, that it would lose the band gigs, but the rest of the band sided with the man who had quickly become their new leader. Coronado moved back to Texas, and on Mother's Day 1965 the Soul Giants changed their name to the Mothers. They got in Henry Vestine on second guitar, and started playing Zappa's originals, as well as changing the lyrics to some of the hits they were playing: [Excerpt: The Mothers, "Plastic People"] Zappa had started associating with the freak crowd in Hollywood centred around Vito and Franzoni, after being introduced by Don Cerveris, his old teacher turned screenwriter, to an artist called Mark Cheka, who Zappa invited to manage the group. Cheka in turn brought in his friend Herb Cohen, who managed several folk acts including the Modern Folk Quartet and Judy Henske, and who like Zappa had once been arrested on obscenity charges, in Cohen's case for promoting gigs by the comedian Lenny Bruce. Cohen first saw the Mothers when they were recording their appearance in an exploitation film called Mondo Hollywood. They were playing in a party scene, using equipment borrowed from Jim Guercio, a session musician who would briefly join the Mothers, but who is now best known for having been Chicago's manager and producing hit records for them and Blood, Sweat, and Tears. In the crowd were Vito and Franzoni, Bryan Maclean, Ram Dass, the Harvard psychologist who had collaborated with Timothy Leary in controversial LSD experiments that had led to both losing their jobs, and other stalwarts of the Sunset Strip scene. Cohen got the group bookings at the Whisky A-Go-Go and The Trip, two of the premier LA nightclubs, and Zappa would also sit in with other bands playing at those venues, like the Grass Roots, a band featuring Bryan Maclean and Arthur Lee which would soon change its name to Love. At this time Zappa and Henry Vestine lived together, next door to a singer named Victoria Winston, who at the time was in a duo called Summer's Children with Curt Boettcher: [Excerpt: Summer's Children, "Milk and Honey"] Winston, like Zappa, was a fan of Edgard Varese, and actually asked Zappa to write songs for Summer's Children, but one of the partners involved in their production company disliked Zappa's material and the collaboration went no further. Zappa at this point was trying to incorporate more ideas from modal jazz into his music. He was particularly impressed by Eric Dolphy's 1964 album "Out to Lunch": [Excerpt: Eric Dolphy, "Hat and Beard"] But he was also writing more about social issues, and in particular he had written a song called "The Watts Riots Song", which would later be renamed "Trouble Every Day": [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Trouble Every Day"] Now, the Watts Uprising was one of the most important events in Black American history, and it feels quite wrong that I'm covering it in an episode about a band made up of white, Latino, and American Indian people rather than a record made by Black people, but I couldn't find any way to fit it in anywhere else. As you will remember me saying in the episode on "I Fought the Law", the LA police under Chief William Parker were essentially a criminal gang by any other name -- they were incompetent, violent, and institutionally racist, and terrorised Black people. The Black people of LA were also feeling particularly aggrieved in the summer of 1965, as a law banning segregation in housing had been overturned by a ballot proposition in November 1964, sponsored by the real estate industry and passed by an overwhelming majority of white voters in what Martin Luther King called "one of the most shameful developments in our nation's history", and which Edmund Brown, the Democratic governor said was like "another hate binge which began more than 30 years ago in a Munich beer hall". Then on Wednesday, August 11, 1965, the police pulled over a Black man, Marquette Frye, for drunk driving. He had been driving his mother's car, and she lived nearby, and she came out to shout at him about drinking and driving. The mother, Rena Price, was hit by one of the policemen; Frye then physically attacked one of the police for hitting his mother, one of the police pulled out a gun, a crowd gathered, the police became violent against the crowd, a rumour spread that they had kicked a pregnant woman, and the resulting protests were exacerbated by the police carrying out what Chief Parker described as a "paramiltary" response. The National Guard were called in, huge swathes of south central LA were cordoned off by the police with signs saying things like "turn left or get shot". Black residents started setting fire to and looting local white-owned businesses that had been exploiting Black workers and customers, though this looting was very much confined to individuals who were known to have made the situation worse. Eventually it took six days for the uprising to be put down, at a cost of thirty-four deaths, 1032 injuries, and 3438 arrests. Of the deaths, twenty-three were Black civilians murdered by the police, and zero were police murdered by Black civilians (two police were killed by other police, in accidental shootings). The civil rights activist Bayard Rustin said of the uprising, "The whole point of the outbreak in Watts was that it marked the first major rebellion of Negroes against their own masochism and was carried on with the express purpose of asserting that they would no longer quietly submit to the deprivation of slum life." Frank Zappa's musical hero Johnny Otis would later publish the book Listen to the Lambs about the Watts rebellion, and in it he devotes more than thirty pages to eyewitness accounts from Black people. It's an absolutely invaluable resource. One of the people Otis interviews is Lily Ford, who is described by my copy of the book as being the "lead singer of the famous Roulettes". This is presumably an error made by the publishers, rather than Otis, because Ford was actually a singer with the Raelettes, as in Ray Charles' vocal group. She also recorded with Otis under the name "Lily of the Valley": [Excerpt: Lily of the Valley, "I Had a Sweet Dream"] Now, Ford's account deserves a large excerpt, but be warned, this is very, very difficult to hear. I gave a content warning at the beginning, but I'm going to give another one here. "A lot of our people were in the street, seeing if they could get free food and clothes and furniture, and some of them taking liquor too. But the white man was out for blood. Then three boys came down the street, laughing and talking. They were teenagers, about fifteen or sixteen years old. As they got right at the store they seemed to debate whether they would go inside. One boy started a couple of times to go. Finally he did. Now a cop car finally stops to investigate. Police got out of the car. Meanwhile, the other two boys had seen them coming and they ran. My brother-in-law and I were screaming and yelling for the boy to get out. He didn't hear us, or was too scared to move. He never had a chance. This young cop walked up to the broken window and looked in as the other one went round the back and fired some shots and I just knew he'd killed the other two boys, but I guess he missed. He came around front again. By now other police cars had come. The cop at the window aimed his gun. He stopped and looked back at a policeman sitting in a car. He aimed again. No shot. I tried to scream, but I was so horrified that nothing would come out of my throat. The third time he aimed he yelled, "Halt", and fired before the word was out of his mouth. Then he turned around and made a bull's-eye sign with his fingers to his partner. Just as though he had shot a tin can off a fence, not a human being. The cops stood around for ten or fifteen minutes without going inside to see if the kid was alive or dead. When the ambulance came, then they went in. They dragged him out like he was a sack of potatoes. Cops were everywhere now. So many cops for just one murder." [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Trouble Every Day"] There's a lot more of this sort of account in Otis' book, and it's all worth reading -- indeed, I would argue that it is *necessary* reading. And Otis keeps making a point which I quoted back in the episode on "Willie and the Hand Jive" but which I will quote again here -- “A newborn Negro baby has less chance of survival than a white. A Negro baby will have its life ended seven years sooner. This is not some biological phenomenon linked to skin colour, like sickle-cell anaemia; this is a national crime, linked to a white-supremacist way of life and compounded by indifference”. (Just a reminder, the word “Negro” which Otis uses there was, in the mid-sixties, the term of choice used by Black people.) And it's this which inspired "The Watts Riot Song", which the Mothers were playing when Tom Wilson was brought into The Trip by Herb Cohen: [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Trouble Every Day"] Wilson had just moved from Columbia, where he'd been producing Dylan and Simon and Garfunkel, to Verve, a subsidiary of MGM which was known for jazz records but was moving into rock and roll. Wilson was looking for a white blues band, and thought he'd found one. He signed the group without hearing any other songs. Henry Vestine quit the group between the signing and the first recording, to go and join an *actual* white blues band, Canned Heat, and over the next year the group's lineup would fluctuate quite a bit around the core of Zappa, Collins, Estrada, and Black, with members like Steve Mann, Jim Guercio, Jim Fielder, and Van Dyke Parks coming and going, often without any recordings being made of their performances. The lineup on what became the group's first album, Freak Out! was Zappa, Collins, Estrada, Black, and Elliot Ingber, the former guitarist with the Gamblers, who had joined the group shortly before the session and would leave within a few months. The first track the group recorded, "Any Way the Wind Blows", was straightforward enough: [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Any Way the Wind Blows"] The second song, a "Satisfaction" knock-off called "Hungry Freaks Daddy", was also fine. But it was when the group performed their third song of the session, "Who Are The Brain Police?", that Tom Wilson realised that he didn't have a standard band on his hands: [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Who Are the Brain Police?"] Luckily for everyone concerned, Tom Wilson was probably the single best producer in America to have discovered the Mothers. While he was at the time primarily known for his folk-rock productions, he had built his early career on Cecil Taylor and Sun Ra records, some of the freakiest jazz of the fifties and early sixties. He knew what needed to be done -- he needed a bigger budget. Far from being annoyed that he didn't have the white blues band he wanted, Wilson actively encouraged the group to go much, much further. He brought in Wrecking Crew members to augment the band (though one of them. Mac Rebennack, found the music so irritating he pretended he needed to go to the toilet, walked out, and never came back). He got orchestral musicians to play Zappa's scores, and allowed the group to rent hundreds of dollars of percussion instruments for the side-long track "Return of the Son of Monster Magnet", which features many Hollywood scenesters of the time, including Van Dyke Parks, Kim Fowley, future Manson family member Bobby Beausoleil, record executive David Anderle, songwriter P.F. Sloan, and cartoonist Terry Gilliam, all recording percussion parts and vocal noises: [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Return of the Son of Monster Magnet"] Such was Wilson's belief in the group that Freak Out! became only the second rock double album ever released -- exactly a week after the first, Blonde on Blonde, by Wilson's former associate Bob Dylan. The inner sleeve included a huge list of people who had influenced the record in one way or another, including people Zappa knew like Don Cerveris, Don Vliet, Paul Buff, Bob Keane, Nik Venet, and Art Laboe,  musicians who had influenced the group like Don & Dewey, Johnny Otis, Otis' sax players Preston Love and Big Jay McNeely, Eric Dolphy, Edgard Varese, Richard Berry, Johnny Guitar Watson, and Ravi Shankar, eccentric performers like Tiny Tim, DJs like Hunter Hancock and Huggy Boy, science fiction writers like Cordwainer Smith and Robert Sheckley, and scenesters like David Crosby, Vito, and Franzoni. The list of 179 people would provide a sort of guide for many listeners, who would seek out those names and find their ways into the realms of non-mainstream music, writing, and art over the next few decades. Zappa would always remain grateful to Wilson for taking his side in the record's production, saying "Wilson was sticking his neck out. He laid his job on the line by producing the album. MGM felt that they had spent too much money on the album". The one thing Wilson couldn't do, though, was persuade the label that the group's name could stay as it was. "The Mothers" was a euphemism, for a word I can't say if I want this podcast to keep its clean rating, a word that is often replaced in TV clean edits of films with "melon farmers", and MGM were convinced that the radio would never play any music by a band with that name -- not realising that that wouldn't be the reason this music wouldn't get played on the radio. The group needed to change their name. And so, out of necessity, they became the Mothers of Invention.

Episode one hundred and thirty-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Eight Miles High” by the Byrds, and the influence of jazz and Indian music on psychedelic rock. This is a long one... 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 "Winchester Cathedral" by the New Vaudeville Band. 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/ Resources No Mixcloud this time, as there were multiple artists with too many songs. Information on John Coltrane came from Coltrane by Ben Ratliffe, while information on Ravi Shankar came from Indian Sun: The Life and Music of Ravi Shankar by Oliver Craske. For information on the Byrds, I relied mostly on Timeless Flight Revisited by Johnny Rogan, with some information from Chris Hillman's autobiography. This dissertation looks at the influence of Slonimsky on Coltrane. All Coltrane's music is worth getting, but this 5-CD set containing Impressions is the most relevant cheap selection of his material for these purposes. This collection has the Shankar material released in the West up to 1962. And this three-CD set is a reasonable way of getting most of the Byrds' important recordings. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript This episode is the second part of a loose trilogy of episodes set in LA in 1966. We're going to be spending a *lot* of time around LA and Hollywood for the next few months -- seven of the next thirteen episodes are based there, and there'll be more after that. But it's going to take a while to get there. This is going to be an absurdly long episode, because in order to get to LA in 1966 again, we're going to have to start off in the 1940s in New York, and take a brief detour to India. Because in order to explain this: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Eight Miles High"] We're first going to have to explain this: [Excerpt: John Coltrane, "India (#3)"] Before we begin this, I just want to say something. This episode runs long, and covers a *lot* of musical ground, and as part of that it covers several of the most important musicians of the twentieth century -- but musicians in the fields of jazz, which is a music I know something about, but am not an expert in, and Hindustani classical music, which is very much not even close to my area of expertise. It also contains a chunk of music theory, which again, I know a little about -- but only really enough to know how much I don't know. I am going to try to get the information about these musicians right, but I want to emphasise that at times I will be straying *vastly* out of my lane, in ways that may well seem like they're minimising these musicians. I am trying to give just enough information about them to tell the story, and I would urge anyone who becomes interested in the music I talk about in the early parts of this episode to go out and find more expert sources to fill in the gap. And conversely, if you know more about these musics than I do, please forgive any inaccuracies. I am going to do my best to get all of this right, because accuracy is important, but I suspect that every single sentence in the first hour or so of this episode could be footnoted with something pointing out all the places where what I've said is only somewhat true. Also, I apologise if I mispronounce any names or words in this episode, though I've tried my best to get it right -- I've been unable to find recordings of some words and names being spoken, while with others I've heard multiple versions. To tell today's story, we're going to have to go right back to some things we looked at in the first episode, on "Flying Home". For those of you who don't remember -- which is fair enough, since that episode was more than three years ago -- in that episode we looked at a jazz record by the Benny Goodman Sextet, which was one of the earliest popular recordings to feature electric guitar: [Excerpt: The Benny Goodman Sextet, "Flying Home"] Now, we talked about quite a lot of things in that episode which have played out in later episodes, but one thing we only mentioned in passing, there or later, was a style of music called bebop. We did talk about how Charlie Christian, the guitarist on that record, was one of the innovators of that style, but we didn't really go into what it was properly. Indeed, I deliberately did not mention in that episode something that I was saving until now, because we actually heard *two* hugely influential bebop musicians in that episode,  and I was leaving the other one to talk about here. In that episode we saw how Lionel Hampton, the Benny Goodman band's vibraphone player, went on to form his own band, and how that band became one of the foundational influences for the genres that became known as jump blues and R&B. And we especially noted the saxophone solo on Hampton's remake of "Flying Home", played by Illinois Jacquet: [Excerpt: Lionel Hampton, "Flying Home"] We mentioned in that episode how Illinois Jacquet's saxophone solo there set the template for all tenor sax playing in R&B and rock and roll music for decades to come -- his honking style became quite simply how you play rock and roll or R&B saxophone, and without that solo you don't have any of the records by Fats Domino, Little Richard, the Coasters, or a dozen other acts that we discussed. But what we didn't look at in that episode is that that is a big band record, so of course there is more than just one saxophone player on it. And one of the other saxophone players on that recording is Dexter Gordon, a musician who was originally from LA. Those of you with long memories will remember that back in the first year or so of the podcast we talked a lot about the music programme at Jefferson High School in LA, and about Samuel Browne, the music teacher whose music programme gave the world the Coasters, the Penguins, the Platters, Etta James, Art Farmer, Richard Berry, Big Jay McNeely, Barry White, and more other important musicians than I can possibly name here. Gordon was yet another of Browne's students -- one who Browne regularly gave detention to, just to make him practice his scales. Gordon didn't get much chance to shine in the Lionel Hampton band, because he was only second tenor, with Jacquet taking many of the solos. But he was learning from playing in a band with Jacquet, and while Gordon didn't ever develop a honk like Jacquet's, he did adopt some of Jacquet's full tone in his own sound. There aren't many recordings of Gordon playing solos in his early years, because they coincided with the American Federation of Musicians' recording strike that we talked about in those early episodes, but he did record a few sessions in 1943 for a label small enough not to be covered by the ban, and you can hear something of Jacquet's tone in those recordings, along with the influence of Lester Young, who influenced all tenor sax players at this time: [Excerpt: Nat "King" Cole with Dexter Gordon, "I've Found a New Baby"] The piano player on that session, incidentally, is Nat "King" Cole, when he was still one of the most respected jazz pianists on the scene, before he switched primarily to vocals. And Gordon took this Jacquet-influenced tone, and used it to become the second great saxophone hero of bebop music, after Charlie Parker -- and the first great tenor sax hero of the music. I've mentioned bebop before on several occasions, but never really got into it in detail. It was a style that developed in New York in the mid to late forties, and a lot of the earliest examples of it went unrecorded thanks to that musicians' strike, but the style emphasised small groups improvising together, and expanding their sense of melody and harmony. The music prized virtuosity and musical intelligence over everything else, and was fast and jittery-sounding. The musicians would go on long, extended, improvisations, incorporating ideas both from the blues and from the modern classical music of people like Bartok and Stravinsky, which challenged conventional tonality. In particular, one aspect which became prominent in bebop music was a type of scale known as the bebop scale. In most of the music we've looked at in this podcast to this point, the scales used have been seven-note scales -- do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti- which make an octave with a second, higher, do tone. So in the scale of C major we have C, D, E, F, G, A, B, and then another C: [demonstrates] Bebop scales, on the other hand, would generally have an extra note in, making an eight-note scale, by adding in what is called a chromatic passing note. For example, a typical bebop C major scale might add in the note G#, so the scale would go C,D,E,F,G,G#, A, B, C: [demonstrates] You'd play this extra note for the most part, when moving between the two notes it's between, so in that scale you'd mostly use it when moving from G to A, or from A to G. Now I'm far from a bebop player, so this won't sound like bebop, but I can demonstrate the kind of thing if I first noodle a little scalar melody in the key of C major: [demonstrates] And then play the same thing, but adding in a G# every time I go between the G and the A in either direction: [demonstrates] That is not bebop music, but I hope you can see what a difference that chromatic passing tone makes to the melody. But again, that's not bebop, because I'm not a bebop player. Dexter Gordon, though, *was* a bebop player. He moved to New York while playing with Louis Armstrong's band, and soon became part of the bebop scene, which at the time centred around Charlie Christian, the trumpet player Dizzy Gillespie, and the alto sax player Charlie Parker, sometimes nicknamed "bird" or "Yardbird", who is often regarded as the greatest of them all. Gillespie, Parker, and Gordon also played in Billy Eckstine's big band, which gave many of the leading bebop musicians the opportunity to play in what was still the most popular idiom at the time -- you can hear Gordon have a saxophone battle with Gene Ammons on "Blowing the Blues Away" in a lineup of the band that also included Art Blakey on drums and Dizzy Gillespie on trumpet: [Excerpt: Billy Eckstine, "Blowing the Blues Away"] But Gordon was soon leading his own small band sessions, and making records for labels like Savoy, on which you can definitely hear the influence of Illinois Jacquet on his tone, even as he's playing music that's more melodically experimental by far than the jump band music of the Hampton band: [Excerpt: Dexter Gordon, "Dexter Digs In"] Basically, in the late 1940s, if you were wanting to play bebop on the saxophone, you had two models to follow -- Charlie Parker, the great alto saxophonist with his angular, atonal, melodic sense and fast, virtuosic, playing, or Dexter Gordon, the tenor saxophonist, whose style had more R&B grease and wit to it, who would quote popular melodies in his own improvisations. And John Coltrane followed both. Coltrane's first instrument was the alto sax, and when he was primarily an alto player he would copy Charlie Parker's style. When he switched to being primarily a tenor player -- though he would always continue playing both instruments, and later in his career would also play soprano sax -- he took up much of Gordon's mellower tone, though he was also influenced by other tenor players, like Lester Young, the great player with Count Basie's band, and Johnny Hodges, who played with Duke Ellington. Now, it is important to note here that John Coltrane is a very, very, big deal. Depending on your opinion of Ornette Coleman's playing, Coltrane is by most accounts either the last or penultimate truly great innovator in jazz saxophone, and arguably the single foremost figure in the music in the last half of the twentieth century. In this podcast I'm only able to tell you enough about him to give you the information you need to understand the material about the Byrds, but were I to do a similar history of jazz in five hundred songs, Coltrane would have a similar position to someone like the Beatles -- he's such a major figure that he is literally venerated as a saint by the African Orthodox Church, and a couple of other Episcopal churches have at least made the case for his sainthood. So anything I say here about him is not even beginning to scratch the surface of his towering importance to jazz music, but it will, I hope, give some idea of his importance to the development of the Byrds -- a group of whom he was almost certainly totally unaware. Coltrane started out playing as a teenager, and his earliest recordings were when he was nineteen and in the armed forces, just after the end of World War II. At that time, he was very much a beginner, although a talented one, and on his early amateur recordings you can hear him trying to imitate Parker without really knowing what it was that Parker was doing that made him so great. But as well as having some natural talent, he had one big attribute that made him stand out -- his utter devotion to his music. He was so uninterested in anything other than mastering his instrument that one day a friend was telling him about a baseball game he'd watched, and all Coltrane could do was ask in confusion "Who's Willie Mays?" Coltrane would regularly practice his saxophone until his reed was red with blood, but he would also study other musicians. And not just in jazz. He knew that Charlie Parker had intensely studied Stravinsky's Firebird Suite, and so Coltrane would study that too: [Excerpt: Stravinsky, "Firebird Suite"] Coltrane joined the band of Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson, who was one of those figures like Johnny Otis, with whom Vinson would later perform for many years, who straddled the worlds of jazz and R&B. Vinson was a blues shouter in the style of Big Joe Turner, but he was also a bebop sax player, and what he wanted was a tenor sax player who could play tenor the way Charlie Parker played alto, but do it in an R&B setting. Coltrane switched from alto to tenor, and spent a year or so playing with Vinson's band. No recordings exist of Coltrane with Vinson that I'm aware of, but you can get an idea of what he sounded like from his next band. By this point, Dizzy Gillespie had graduated from small bebop groups to leading a big band, and he got Coltrane in as one of his alto players, though Coltrane would often also play tenor with Gillespie, as on this recording from 1951, which has Coltrane on tenor, Gillespie on trumpet, with Kenny Burrell and two of the future Modern Jazz Quartet, Milt Jackson and Percy Heath, showing that the roots of modern jazz were not very far at all from the roots of rock and roll: [Excerpt: Dizzy Gillespie, "We Love to Boogie"] After leaving Gillespie's band, Coltrane played with a lot of important musicians over the next four or five years, like Johnny Hodges, Earl Bostic, and Jimmy Smith, and occasionally sat in with Miles Davis, but at this point he was still not a major musician in the genre. He was a competent, working, sideman, but he was also struggling with alcohol and heroin, and hadn't really found his own voice. But then Miles Davis asked Coltrane to join his band full-time. Coltrane was actually Davis' second choice -- he really wanted Sonny Rollins, who was widely considered the best new tenor player around, but he was eventually persuaded to take Coltrane. During his first period with Davis, Coltrane grew rapidly as a musician, and also played on a *lot* of other people's sessions. In a three year period Coltrane went from Davis to Thelonius Monk's group then back to Davis' group, and also recorded as both a sideman and a band leader on a ton of sessions. You can get a box set of his recordings from May 1956 through December 1958 that comes to nineteen CDs -- and that's not counting the recordings with Miles Davis, which aren't included on that set. Unsurprisingly, just through playing this much, Coltrane had grown enormously as a player, and he was particularly fascinated by harmonics, playing with the notes of a chord, in arpeggios, and pushing music to its harmonic limits, as you can hear in his solo on Davis' "Straight, No Chaser", which pushes the limits of the jazz solo as far as they'd gone to that point: [Excerpt: Miles Davis, "Straight, No Chaser"] But on the same album as that, "Milestones", we also have the first appearance of a new style, modal jazz. Now, to explain this, we have to go back to the scales again. We looked at the normal Western scale, do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do, but you can start a scale on any of those notes, and which note you start on creates what is called a different mode. The modes are given Greek names, and each mode has a different feel to it. If you start on do, we call this the major scale or the Ionian mode. This is the normal scale we heard before -- C,D,E,F,G,A,B,C: [demonstrates] Most music – about seventy percent of the melodies you're likely to have heard, uses that mode. If you start on re, it would go re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do-re, or D,E,F,G,A,B,C,D, the Dorian mode: [demonstrates] Melodies with this mode tend to have a sort of wistful feel, like "Scarborough Fair": [Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, "Scarborough Fair"] or many of George Harrison's songs: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I Me Mine"] Starting on mi, you have the Phrygian mode, mi-fa-so-la-ti-do-re-mi: [demonstrates] The Phrygian mode is not especially widely used, but does turn up in some popular works like Barber's Adagio for Strings: [Excerpt: Barber, "Adagio for Strings"] Then there's the Lydian mode, fa-so-la-ti-do-re-mi-fa: [demonstrates] This mode isn't used much at all in pop music -- the most prominent example I can think of is "Pretty Ballerina" by the Left Banke: [Excerpt: The Left Banke, "Pretty Ballerina"] Starting on so, we have so-la-ti-do-re-mi-fa-so -- the Mixolydian mode: [demonstrates] That mode has a sort of bluesy or folky tone to it, and you also find it in a lot of traditional tunes, like "She Moves Through the Fair": [Excerpt: Davey Graham, "She Moved Thru' The Bizarre/Blue Raga"] And in things like "Norwegian Wood" by the Beatles: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Norwegian Wood"] Though that goes into Dorian for the middle section. Starting on la, we have the Aeolian mode, which is also known as the natural minor scale, and is often just talked about as “the minor scale”: [demonstrates] That's obviously used in innumerable songs, for example "Losing My Religion" by REM: [Excerpt: REM, "Losing My Religion"] And finally you have the Locrian mode ti-do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti: [demonstrates] That basically doesn't get used, unless someone wants to show off that they know the Locrian mode. The only vaguely familiar example I can think of is "Army of Me" by Bjork: [Excerpt: Bjork, "Army of Me"] I hope that brief excursion through the seven most common modes in Western diatonic music gives you some idea of the difference that musical modes can make to a piece. Anyway, as I was saying, on the "Milestones" album, we get some of the first examples of a form that became known as modal jazz. Now, the ideas of modal jazz had been around for a few years at that point -- oddly, it seems to be one of the first types of popular music to have existed in theory before existing in practice. George Russell, an acquaintance of Davis who was a self-taught music theorist, had written a book in 1953 titled The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization. That book argues that rather than looking at the diatonic scale as the basis for music, one should instead look at a chord progression called the circle of fifths. The circle of fifths is exactly what it sounds like -- you change chords to one a fifth away from it, and then do that again and again, either going up, so you'd have chords with the roots C-G-D-A-E-B-F# and so on: [demonstrates] Or, more commonly, going down, though usually when going downwards you tend to cheat a bit and sharpen one of the notes so you can stay in one key, so you'd get chords with roots C-F-B-E-A-D-G, usually the chords C, F, B diminished, Em, Am, Dm, G: [demonstrates] That descending cycle of fifths is used in all sorts of music, everything from "You Never Give Me Your Money" by the Beatles: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "You Never Give Me Your Money"] to "I Will Survive" by Gloria Gaynor: [Excerpt: Gloria Gaynor, "I Will Survive"] But what Russell pointed out is that if you do the upwards cycle of fifths, and you *don't* change any of the notes, the first seven root notes you get are the same seven notes you'd find in the Lydian mode, just reordered -- C-D-E-F#-G-A-B . Russell then argued that much of the way harmony and melody work in jazz could be thought of as people experimenting with the way the Lydian mode works, and the way the cycle of fifths leads you further and further away from the tonal centre. Now, you could probably do an entire podcast series as long as this one on the implications of this, and I am honestly just trying to summarise enough information here that you can get a vague gist, but Russell's book had a profound effect on how jazz musicians started to think about harmony and melody. Instead of improvising around the chord changes to songs, they were now basing improvisations and compositions around modes and the notes in them. Rather than having a lot of chord changes, you might just play a single root note that stays the same throughout, or only changes a couple of times in the whole piece, and just imply changes with the clash between the root note and whatever modal note the solo instrument is playing. The track "Milestones" on the Milestones album shows this kind of thinking in full effect -- the song consists of a section in G Dorian, followed by a section in A Aeolian (or E Phrygian depending on how you look at it). Each section has only one implied chord -- a Gm7 for the G Dorian section, and an Am7(b13) for the A Aeolian section -- over which Davis, Cannonball Adderley on alto sax, and Coltrane on tenor, all solo: [Excerpt: Miles Davis, "Milestones"] (For the pedants among you, that track was originally titled "Miles" on the first pressings of the album, but it was retitled "Milestones" on subsequent pressings). The modal form would be taken even further on Davis' next album to be recorded, Porgy and Bess, which featured much fuller orchestrations and didn't have Coltrane on it. Davis later said that when the arranger Gil Evans wrote the arrangements for that album, he didn't write any chords at all, just a scale, which Davis could improvise around. But it was on the album after that, Kind of Blue, which again featured Coltrane on saxophone, that modal jazz made its big breakthrough to becoming the dominant form of jazz music. As with what Evans had done on Porgy and Bess, Davis gave the other instrumentalists modes to play, rather than a chord sequence to improvise over or a melody line to play with. He explained his thinking behind this in an interview with Nat Hentoff, saying "When you're based on chords, you know at the end of 32 bars that the chords have run out and there's nothing to do but repeat what you've just done—with variations. I think a movement in jazz is beginning away from the conventional string of chords ... there will be fewer chords but infinite possibilities as to what to do with them." This style shows up in "So What", the opening track on the album, which is in some ways a very conventional song structure -- it's a thirty-two bar AABA structure. But instead of a chord sequence, it's based on modes in two keys -- the A section is in D Dorian, while the B section is in E-flat Dorian: [Excerpt: Miles Davis, "So What"] Kind of Blue would become one of the contenders for greatest jazz album of all time, and one of the most influential records ever made in any genre -- and it could be argued that that track we just heard, "So What", inspired a whole other genre we'll be looking at in a future episode -- but Coltrane still felt the need to explore more ideas, and to branch out on his own. In particular, while he was interested in modal music, he was also interested in exploring more kinds of scales than just modes, and to do this he had to, at least for the moment, reintroduce chord changes into what he was doing. He was inspired in particular by reading Nicolas Slonimsky's classic Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns. Coltrane had recently signed a new contract as a solo artist with Atlantic Records, and recorded what is generally considered his first true masterpiece album as a solo artist, Giant Steps, with several members of the Davis band, just two weeks after recording Kind of Blue. The title track to Giant Steps is the most prominent example of what are known in jazz as the Coltrane changes -- a cycle of thirds, similar to the cycle of fifths we talked about earlier. The track itself seems to have two sources. The first is the bridge of the old standard "Have You Met Miss Jones?", as famously played by Coleman Hawkins: [Excerpt: Coleman Hawkins, "Have You Met Miss Jones?" And the second is an exercise from Slonimsky's book: [Excerpt: Pattern #286 from Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns] Coltrane combined these ideas to come up with "Giant Steps", which is based entirely around these cycles of thirds, and Slonimsky's example: [Excerpt: John Coltrane, "Giant Steps"] Now, I realise that this is meant to be a history of rock music, not jazz musicology theory time, so I promise you I am just hitting the high points here. And only the points that affect Coltrane's development as far as it influenced the music we're looking at in this episode. And so we're actually going to skip over Coltrane's commercial high-point, My Favourite Things, and most of the rest of his work for Atlantic, even though that music is some of the most important jazz music ever recorded. Instead, I'm going to summarise a whole lot of very important music by simply saying that while Coltrane was very interested in this musical idea of the cycle of thirds, he did not like being tied to precise chord changes, and liked the freedom that modal jazz gave to him. By 1960, when his contract with Atlantic was ending and his contract with Impulse was beginning, and he recorded the two albums Olé and Africa/Brass pretty much back to back, he had hit on a new style with the help of Eric Dolphy, a flute, clarinet, and alto sax player who would become an important figure in Coltrane's life. Dolphy died far too young -- he went into a diabetic coma and doctors assumed that because he was a Black jazz musician he must have overdosed, even though he was actually a teetotal abstainer, so he didn't get the treatment he needed -- but he made such a profound influence on Coltrane's life that Coltrane would carry Dolphy's picture with him after his death. Dolphy was even more of a theorist than Coltrane, and another devotee of Slonimsky's book, and he was someone who had studied a great deal of twentieth-century classical music, particularly people like Bartok, Messiaen, Stravinsky, Charles Ives, and Edgard Varese. Dolphy even performed Varese's piece Density 21.5 in concert, an extremely demanding piece for solo flute. I don't know of a recording of Dolphy performing it, sadly, but this version should give some idea: [Excerpt: Edgard Varese, "Density 21.5"] Encouraged by Dolphy, Coltrane started making music based around no changes at all, with any changes being implied by the melody. The title song of Africa/Brass, "Africa", takes up an entire side of one album, and doesn't have a single actual chord change on it, with Dolphy and pianist McCoy Tyner coming up with a brass-heavy arrangement for Coltrane to improvise over a single chord: [Excerpt: The John Coltrane Quartet: "Africa"] This was a return to the idea of modal jazz, based on scales rather than chord changes, but by implying chord changes, often changes based on thirds, Coltrane was often using different scales than the modes that had been used in modal jazz. And while, as the title suggested, "Africa" was inspired by the music of Africa, the use of a single drone chord underneath solos based on a scale was inspired by the music of another continent altogether. Since at least the mid-1950s, both Coltrane and Dolphy had been interested in Indian music. They appear to have first become interested in a record released by Folkways, Music Of India, Morning And Evening Ragas by Ali Akbar Khan: [Excerpt: Ali Akbar Khan, "Rag Sindhi Bhairavi"] But the musician they ended up being most inspired by was a friend of Khan's, Ravi Shankar, who like Khan had been taught by the great sarod player Alauddin Khan, Ali Akbar Khan's father. The elder Khan, who was generally known as "Baba", meaning "father", was possibly *the* most influential Indian musician of the first half of the twentieth century, and was a big part of the revitalisation of Indian music that went hand in hand with the growth of Indian nationalism. He was an ascetic who lived for music and nothing else, and would write five to ten new compositions every day, telling Shankar "Do one thing well and you can achieve everything. Do everything and you achieve nothing". Alauddin Khan was a very religious Muslim, but one who saw music as the ultimate way to God and could find truths in other faiths. When Shankar first got to know him, they were both touring as musicians in a dance troupe run by Shankar's elder brother, which was promoting Indian arts in the West, and he talked about taking Khan to hear the organ playing at Notre Dame cathedral, and Khan bursting into tears and saying "here is God". Khan was not alone in this view. The classical music of Northern India, the music that Khan played and taught, had been very influenced by Sufism, which was for most of Muslim history the dominant intellectual and theological tradition in Islam. Now, I am going to sum up a thousand years of theology and practice, of a religion I don't belong to, in a couple of sentences here, so just assume that what I'm saying is wrong, and *please* don't take offence if you are Sufi yourself and believe I am misrepresenting you. But my understanding of Sufism is that Sufis are extremely devoted to attaining knowledge and understanding of God, and believe that strict adherence to Muslim law is the best way to attain that knowledge -- that it is the way that God himself has prescribed for humans to know him -- but that such knowledge can be reached by people of other faiths if they approach their own traditions with enough devotion. Sufi ideas infuse much of Northern Indian classical music, and so for example it has been considered acceptable for Muslims to sing Hindu religious music and Hindus to sing songs of praise to Allah. So while Ravi Shankar was Hindu and Alauddin Khan was Muslim, Khan was able to become Shankar's guru in what both men regarded as a religious observance, and even to marry Khan's daughter. Khan was a famously cruel disciplinarian -- once hospitalising a student after hitting him with a tuning hammer -- but he earned the devotion of his students by enforcing the same discipline on himself. He abstained from sex so he could put all his energies into music, and was known to tie his hair to the ceiling while he practiced, so he could not fall asleep no matter how long he kept playing. Both Khan and his son Ali Akhbar Khan played the sarod, while Shankar played the sitar, but they all played the same kind of music, which is based on the concept of the raga. Now, in some ways, a raga can be considered equivalent to a mode in Western music: [Excerpt: Ali Akbar Khan, "Rag Sindhi Bhairavi"] But a raga is not *just* a mode -- it sits somewhere between Western conceptions of a mode and a melody. It has a scale, like a mode, but it can have different scales going up or down, and rules about which notes can be moved to from which other notes. So for example (and using Western tones so as not to confuse things further), a raga might say that it's possible to move up from the note G to D, but not down from D to G. Ragas are essentially a very restrictive set of rules which allow the musician playing them to improvise freely within those rules. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the violinist Yehudi Mehuin, at the time the most well-known classical musician in the world, had become fascinated by Indian music as part of a wider programme of his to learn more music outside what he regarded as the overly-constricting scope of the Western classical tradition in which he had been trained. He had become a particular fan of Shankar, and had invited him over to the US to perform. Shankar had refused to come at that point, sending his brother-in-law Ali Akbar Khan over, as he was in the middle of a difficult divorce, and that had been when Khan had recorded that album which had fascinated Coltrane and Dolphy. But Shankar soon followed himself, and made his own records: [Excerpt: Ravi Shankar, "Raga Hamsadhwani"] The music that both Khan and Shankar played was a particular style of Hindustani classical music, which has three elements -- there's a melody instrument, in Shankar's case the sitar and in Khan's the sarod, both of them fretted stringed instruments which have additional strings that resonate along with the main melody string, giving their unique sound. These are the most distinctive Indian instruments, but the melody can be played on all sorts of other instruments, whether Indian instruments like the bansuri and shehnai, which are very similar to the flute and oboe respectively, or Western instruments like the violin. Historically, the melody has also often been sung rather than played, but Indian instrumental music has had much more influence on Western popular music than Indian vocal music has, so we're mostly looking at that here. Along with the melody instrument there's a percussion instrument, usually the tabla, which is a pair of hand drums. Rather than keep a steady, simple, beat like the drum kit in rock music, the percussion has its own patterns and cycles, called talas, which like ragas are heavily formalised but leave a great amount of room for improvisation. The percussion and the melody are in a sort of dialogue with each other, and play off each other in a variety of ways. And finally there's the drone instrument, usually a stringed instrument called a tamboura. The drone is what it sounds like -- a single note, sustained and repeated throughout the piece, providing a harmonic grounding for the improvisations of the melody instrument. Sometimes, rather than just a single root note, it will be a root and fifth, providing a single chord to improvise over, but as often it will be just one note. Often that note will be doubled at the octave, so you might have a drone on both low E and high E. The result provides a very strict, precise, formal, structure for an infinitely varied form of expression, and Shankar was a master of it: [Excerpt: Ravi Shankar, "Raga Hamsadhwani"] Dolphy and, especially, Coltrane became fascinated by Indian music, and Coltrane desperately wanted to record with Shankar -- he even later named his son Ravi in honour of the great musician. It wasn't just the music as music, but music as spiritual practice, that Coltrane was engaged with. He was a deeply religious man but one who was open to multiple faith traditions -- he had been brought up as a Methodist, and both his grandfathers were ministers in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, but his first wife, Naima, who inspired his personal favourite of his own compositions, was a Muslim, while his second wife, Swamini Turiyasangitananda (who he married after leaving Naima in 1963 and who continued to perform as Alice Coltrane even after she took that name, and was herself an extraordinarily accomplished jazz musician on both piano and harp), was a Hindu, and both of them profoundly influenced Coltrane's own spirituality. Some have even suggested that Coltrane's fascination with a cycle of thirds came from the idea that the third could represent both the Christian Trinity and the Hindu trimurti -- the three major forms of Brahman in Hinduism, Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. So a music which was a religious discipline for more than one religion, and which worked well with the harmonic and melodic ideas that Coltrane had been exploring in jazz and learning about through his studies of modern classical music, was bound to appeal to Coltrane, and he started using the idea of having two basses provide an octave drone similar to that of the tamboura, leading to tracks like "Africa" and "Olé": [Excerpt: John Coltrane, "Olé"] Several sources have stated that that song was an influence on "Light My Fire" by the Doors, and I can sort of see that, though most of the interviews I've seen with Ray Manzarek have him talking about Coltrane's earlier version of "My Favourite Things" as the main influence there. Coltrane finally managed to meet with Shankar in December 1961, and spent a lot of time with him -- the two discussed recording an album together with McCoy Tyner, though nothing came of it. Shankar said of their several meetings that month: "The music was fantastic. I was much impressed, but one thing distressed me. There was turbulence in the music that gave me a negative feeling at times, but I could not quite put my finger on the trouble … Here was a creative person who had become a vegetarian, who was studying yoga, and reading the Bhagavad-Gita, yet in whose music I still heard much turmoil. I could not understand it." Coltrane said in turn "I like Ravi Shankar very much. When I hear his music, I want to copy it – not note for note of course, but in his spirit. What brings me closest to Ravi is the modal aspect of his art. Currently, at the particular stage I find myself in, I seem to be going through a modal phase … There's a lot of modal music that is played every day throughout the world. It is particularly evident in Africa, but if you look at Spain or Scotland, India or China, you'll discover this again in each case … It's this universal aspect of music that interests me and attracts me; that's what I'm aiming for." And the month before Coltrane met Shankar, Coltrane had had a now-legendary residency at the Village Vanguard in New York with his band, including Dolphy, which had resulted not only in the famous Live at the Village Vanguard album, but in two tracks on Coltrane's studio album Impressions. Those shows were among the most controversial in the history of jazz, though the Village Vanguard album is now often included in lists of the most important records in jazz. Downbeat magazine, the leading magazine for jazz fans at the time, described those shows as "musical nonsense" and "a horrifying demonstration of what appears to be a growing anti-jazz trend" -- though by the time Impressions came out in 1963, that opinion had been revised somewhat. Harvey Pekar, the comic writer and jazz critic, also writing in DownBeat, gave Impressions five stars, saying "Not all the music on this album is excellent (which is what a five-star rating signifies,) but some is more than excellent". And while among Coltrane fans the piece from these Village Vanguard shows that is of most interest is the extended blues masterpiece "Chasin' the Trane" which takes up a whole side of the Village Vanguard LP, for our purposes we're most interested in one of the two tracks that was held over for Impressions. This was another of Coltrane's experiments in using the drones he'd found in Indian musical forms, like "Africa" and "Olé". This time it was also inspired by a specific piece of music, though not an instrumental one. Rather it was a vocal performance -- a recording on a Folkways album of Pandita Ramji Shastri Dravida chanting one of the Vedas, the religious texts which are among the oldest texts sacred to any surviving religion: [Excerpt: Pandita Ramji Shastri Dravida, "Vedic Chanting"] Coltrane took that basic melodic idea, and combined it with his own modal approach to jazz, and the inspiration he was taking from Shankar's music, and came up with a piece called "India": [Excerpt: John Coltrane, "India"] Which is where we came in, isn't it? [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Eight Miles High"] So now, finally, we get to the Byrds. Even before "Mr. Tambourine Man" went to number one in the charts, the Byrds were facing problems with their sound being co-opted as the latest hip thing. Their location in LA, at the centre of the entertainment world, was obviously a huge advantage to them in many ways, but it also made them incredibly visible to people who wanted to hop onto a bandwagon. The group built up much of their fanbase playing at Ciro's -- the nightclub on the Sunset Strip that we mentioned in the previous episode which later reopened as It's Boss -- and among those in the crowd were Sonny and Cher. And Sonny brought along his tape recorder. The Byrds' follow-up single to "Mr. Tambourine Man", released while that song was still going up the charts, was another Dylan song, "All I Really Want to Do". But it had to contend with this: [Excerpt: Cher, "All I Really Want to Do"] Cher's single, produced by Sonny, was her first solo single since the duo had become successful, and came out before the Byrds' version, and the Byrds were convinced that elements of the arrangement, especially the guitar part, came from the version they'd been performing live – though of course Sonny was no stranger to jangly guitars himself, having co-written “Needles and Pins”, the song that pretty much invented the jangle. Cher made number fifteen on the charts, while the Byrds only made number forty. Their version did beat Cher's in the UK charts, though. The record company was so worried about the competition that for a while they started promoting the B-side as the A-side. That B-side was an original by Gene Clark, though one that very clearly showed the group's debt to the Searchers: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "I'll Feel a Whole Lot Better"] While it was very obviously derived from the Searchers' version of "Needles and Pins", especially the riff, it was still a very strong, original, piece of work in its own right. It was the song that convinced the group's producer, Terry Melcher, that they were a serious proposition as artists in their own right, rather than just as performers of Dylan's material, and it was also a favourite of the group's co-manager, Jim Dickson, who picked out Clark's use of the word "probably" in the chorus as particularly telling -- the singer thinks he will feel better when the subject of the song is gone, but only probably. He's not certain. "I'll Feel a Whole Lot Better", after being promoted as the A-side for a short time, reached number one hundred and two on the charts, but the label quickly decided to re-flip it and concentrate on promoting the Dylan song as the single. The group themselves weren't too bothered about their thunder having been stolen by Sonny and Cher, but their new publicist was incandescent. Derek Taylor had been a journalist for the Daily Express, which at that time was a respectable enough newspaper (though that is very much no longer the case). He'd become involved in the music industry after writing an early profile on the Beatles, at which point he had been taken on by the Beatles' organisation first to ghostwrite George Harrison's newspaper column and Brian Epstein's autobiography, and then as their full-time publicist and liner-note writer. He'd left the organisation at the end of 1964, and had moved to the US, where he had set up as an independent music publicist, working for the Byrds, the Beach Boys, and various other acts in their overlapping social circles, such as Paul Revere and the Raiders. Taylor was absolutely furious on the group's behalf, saying "I was not only disappointed, I was disgusted. Sonny and Cher went to Ciro's and ripped off the Byrds and, being obsessive, I could not get this out of my mind that Sonny and Cher had done this terrible thing. I didn't know that much about the record business and, in my experience with the Beatles, cover versions didn't make any difference. But by covering the Byrds, it seemed that you could knock them off the perch. And Sonny and Cher, in my opinion, stole that song at Ciro's and interfered with the Byrds' career and very nearly blew them out of the game." But while the single was a comparative flop, the Mr. Tambourine Man album, which came out shortly after, was much more successful. It contained the A and B sides of both the group's first two singles, although a different vocal take of "All I Really Want to Do" was used from the single release, along with two more Dylan covers, and a couple more originals -- five of the twelve songs on the album were original in total, three of them Gene Clark solo compositions and the other two co-written by Clark and Roger McGuinn. To round it out there was a version of the 1939 song "We'll Meet Again", made famous by Vera Lynn, which you may remember us discussing in episode ninety as an example of early synthesiser use, but which had recently become popular in a rerecorded version from the 1950s, thanks to its use at the end of Dr. Strangelove; there was a song written by Jackie DeShannon; and "The Bells of Rhymney", a song in which Pete Seeger set a poem about a mining disaster in Wales to music. So a fairly standard repertoire for early folk-rock, though slightly heavier on Dylan than most. While the group's Hollywood notoriety caused them problems like the Sonny and Cher one, it did also give them advantages. For example, they got to play at the fourth of July party hosted by Jane Fonda, to guests including her father Henry and brother Peter, Louis Jordan, Steve McQueen, Warren Beatty, and Sidney Poitier. Derek Taylor, who was used to the Beatles' formal dress and politeness at important events, imposed on them by Brian Epstein, was shocked when the Byrds turned up informally dressed, and even more shocked when Vito Paulekas and Carl Franzoni showed up. Vito (who was always known by his first name) and Franzoni are both important but marginal figures in the LA scene. Neither were musicians, though Vito did make one record, produced by Kim Fowley: [Excerpt: Vito and the Hands, "Vito and the Hands"] Rather Vito was a sculptor in his fifties, who had become part of the rock and roll scene and had gathered around him a dance troupe consisting largely of much younger women, and also of himself and Franzoni. Their circle, which also included Arthur Lee and Bryan MacLean, who weren't part of their dance troupe but were definitely part of their crowd, will be talked about much more in future episodes, but for now we'll just say that they are often considered proto-hippies, though they would have disputed that characterisation themselves quite vigorously; that they were regular dancers at Ciro's and became regular parts of the act of both the Byrds and the Mothers of Invention; and we'll give this rather explicit description of their performances from Frank Zappa: "The high point of the performance was Carl Franzoni, our 'go-go boy.' He was wearing ballet tights, frugging violently. Carl has testicles which are bigger than a breadbox. Much bigger than a breadbox. The looks on the faces of the Baptist teens experiencing their grandeur is a treasured memory." Paints a vivid picture, doesn't it? So you can possibly imagine why Derek Taylor later said "When Carl Franzoni and Vito came, I got into a terrible panic". But Jim Dickson explained to him that it was Hollywood and people were used to that kind of thing, and even though Taylor described seeing Henry Fonda and his wife pinned against the wall by the writhing Franzoni and the other dancers, apparently everyone had a good time. And then the next month, the group went on their first UK tour. On which nobody had a good time: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Eight Miles High"] Even before the tour, Derek Taylor had reservations. Obviously the Byrds should tour the UK -- London, in particular, was the centre of the cultural world at that time, and Taylor wanted the group to meet his old friends the Beatles and visit Carnaby Street. But at the same time, there seemed to be something a little... off... about the promoters they were dealing with, Joe Collins, the father of Joan and Jackie Collins, and a man named Mervyn Conn. As Taylor said later "All I did know was that the correspondence from Mervyn Conn didn't assure me. I kept expressing doubts about the contents of the letters. There was something about the grammar. You know, 'I'll give you a deal', and 'We'll get you some good gigs'. The whole thing was very much showbusiness. Almost pantomime showbusiness." But still, it seemed like it was worth making the trip, even when Musicians Union problems nearly derailed the whole thing. We've talked previously about how disagreements between the unions in the US and UK meant that musicians from one country couldn't tour the other for decades, and about how that slightly changed in the late fifties. But the new system required a one-in, one-out system where tours had to be set up as exchanges so nobody was taking anyone's job, and nobody had bothered to find a five-piece group of equivalent popularity to the Byrds to tour America in return. Luckily, the Dave Clark Five stepped into the breach, and were able to do a US tour on short notice, so that problem was solved. And then, as soon as they landed, the group were confronted with a lawsuit. From the Birds: [Excerpt: The Birds, "No Good Without You Baby"] These Birds, spelled with an "i", not a "y", were a Mod group from London, who had started out as the Thunderbirds, but had had to shorten their name when the London R&B singer Chris Farlowe and his band the Thunderbirds had started to have some success. They'd become the Birds, and released a couple of unsuccessful singles, but had slowly built up a reasonable following and had a couple of TV appearances. Then they'd started to receive complaints from their fans that when they went into the record shops to ask for the new record by the Birds, they were being sold some jangly folky stuff about tambourines, rather than Bo Diddley inspired R&B. So the first thing the American Byrds saw in England, after a long and difficult flight which had left them very tired and depressed, especially Gene Clark, who hated flying, was someone suing them for loss of earnings. The lawsuit never progressed any further, and the British group changed their name to Birds Birds, and quickly disappeared from music history -- apart from their guitarist, Ronnie Wood, who we'll be hearing from again. But the experience was not exactly the welcome the group had been hoping for, and is reflected in one of the lines that Gene Clark wrote in the song he later came up with about the trip -- "Nowhere is there love to be found among those afraid of losing their ground". And the rest of the tour was not much of an improvement. Chris Hillman came down with bronchitis on the first night, David Crosby kept turning his amp up too high, resulting in the other members copying him and the sound in the venues they were playing seeming distorted, and most of all they just seemed, to the British crowds, to be unprofessional. British audiences were used to groups running on, seeming excited, talking to the crowd between songs, and generally putting on a show. The Byrds, on the other hand, sauntered on stage, and didn't even look at the audience, much less talk to them. What seemed to the LA audience as studied cool seemed to the UK audience like the group were rude, unprofessional, and big-headed. At one show, towards the end of the set, one girl in the audience cried out "Aren't you even going to say anything?", to which Crosby responded "Goodbye" and the group walked off, without any of them having said another word. When they played the Flamingo Club, the biggest cheer of the night came when their short set ended and the manager said that the club was now going to play records for dancing until the support act, Geno Washington and the Ramjam Band, were ready to do another set. Michael Clarke and Roger McGuinn also came down with bronchitis, the group were miserable and sick, and they were getting absolutely panned in the reviews. The closest thing they got to a positive review was when Paul Jones of Manfred Mann was asked about them, and he praised some of their act -- perceptively pointing to their version of "We'll Meet Again" as being in the Pop Art tradition of recontextualising something familiar so it could be looked at freshly -- but even he ended up also criticising several aspects of the show and ended by saying "I think they're going to be a lot better in the future". And then, just to rub salt in the wound, Sonny and Cher turned up in the UK. The Byrds' version of "All I Really Want to Do" massively outsold theirs in the UK, but their big hit became omnipresent: [Excerpt: Sonny and Cher, "I Got You Babe"] And the press seemed to think that Sonny and Cher, rather than the Byrds, were the true representatives of the American youth culture. The Byrds were already yesterday's news. The tour wasn't all bad -- it did boost sales of the group's records, and they became friendly with the Beatles, Stones, and Donovan. So much so that when later in the month the Beatles returned to the US, the Byrds were invited to join them at a party they were holding in Benedict Canyon, and it was thanks to the Byrds attending that party that two things happened to influence the Beatles' songwriting. The first was that Crosby brought his Hollywood friend Peter Fonda along. Fonda kept insisting on telling people that he knew what it was like to actually be dead, in a misguided attempt to reassure George Harrison, who he wrongly believed was scared of dying, and insisted on showing them his self-inflicted bullet wounds. This did not go down well with John Lennon and George Harrison, both of whom were on acid at the time. As Lennon later said, "We didn't want to hear about that! We were on an acid trip and the sun was shining and the girls were dancing and the whole thing was beautiful and Sixties, and this guy – who I really didn't know; he hadn't made Easy Rider or anything – kept coming over, wearing shades, saying, "I know what it's like to be dead," and we kept leaving him because he was so boring! ... It was scary. You know ... when you're flying high and [whispers] "I know what it's like to be dead, man" Eventually they asked Fonda to get out, and the experience later inspired Lennon to write this: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "She Said, She Said"] Incidentally, like all the Beatles songs of that period, that was adapted for the cartoon TV series based on the group, in this case as a follow-the-bouncing-ball animation. There are few things which sum up the oddness of mid-sixties culture more vividly than the fact that there was a massively popular kids' cartoon with a cheery singalong version of a song about a bad acid trip and knowing what it's like to be dead. But there was another, more positive, influence on the Beatles to come out of them having invited the Byrds to the party. Once Fonda had been kicked out, Crosby and Harrison became chatty, and started talking about the sitar, an instrument that Harrison had recently become interested in. Crosby showed Harrison some ragas on the guitar, and suggested he start listening to Ravi Shankar, who Crosby had recently become a fan of. And we'll be tracking Shankar's influence on Harrison, and through him the Beatles, and through them the whole course of twentieth century culture, in future episodes. Crosby's admiration both of Ravi Shankar and of John Coltrane was soon to show in the Byrds' records, but first they needed a new single. They'd made attempts at a version of "The Times They Are A-Changin'", and had even tried to get both George Harrison and Paul McCartney to add harmonica to that track, but that didn't work out. Then just before the UK tour, Terry Melcher had got Jack Nitzsche to come up with an arrangement of Dylan's "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue": [Excerpt: The Byrds, "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue (version 1)"] Nitzsche's arrangement was designed to sound as much like a Sonny and Cher record as possible, and at first the intention was just to overdub McGuinn's guitar and vocals onto a track by the Wrecking Crew. The group weren't happy at this, and even McGuinn, who was the friendliest of the group with Melcher and who the record was meant to spotlight, disliked it. The eventual track was cut by the group, with Jim Dickson producing, to show they could do a good job of the song by themselves, with the intention that Melcher would then polish it and finish it in the studio, but Melcher dropped the idea of doing the song at all. There was a growing factionalism in the group by this point, with McGuinn and to a lesser extent Michael Clarke being friendly with Melcher. Crosby disliked Melcher and was pushing for Jim Dickson to replace him as producer, largely because he thought that Melcher was vetoing Crosby's songs and giving Gene Clark and Roger McGuinn free run of the songwriting. Dickson on the other hand was friendliest with Crosby, but wasn't much keener on Crosby's songwriting than Melcher was, thinking Gene Clark was the real writing talent in the group. It didn't help that Crosby's songs tended to be things like harmonically complex pieces based on science fiction novels -- Crosby was a big fan of the writer Robert Heinlein, and in particular of the novel Stranger in a Strange Land, and brought in at least two songs inspired by that novel, which were left off albums -- his song "Stranger in a Strange Land" was eventually recorded by the San Francisco group Blackburn & Snow: [Excerpt: Blackburn & Snow, "Stranger in a Strange Land"] Oddly, Jim Dickson objected to what became the Byrds' next single for reasons that come from the same roots as the Heinlein novel. A short while earlier, McGuinn had worked as a guitarist and arranger on an album by the folk singer Judy Collins, and one of the songs she had recorded on that album was a song written by Pete Seeger, setting the first eight verses of chapter three of the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes to music: [Excerpt: Judy Collins, "Turn Turn Turn (To Everything There is a Season"] McGuinn wanted to do an electric version of that song as the Byrds' next single, and Melcher sided with him, but Dickson was against the idea, citing the philosopher Alfred Korzybski, who was a big influence both on the counterculture and on Heinlein. Korzybski, in his book Science and Sanity, argued that many of the problems with the world are caused by the practice in Aristotelean logic of excluding the middle and only talking about things and their opposites, saying that things could be either A or Not-A, which in his view excluded most of actual reality. Dickson's argument was that the lyrics to “Turn! Turn! Turn!” with their inflexible Aristotelianism, were hopelessly outmoded and would make the group a laughing stock among anyone who had paid attention to the intellectual revolutions of the previous few decades. "A time of love, a time of hate"? What about all the times that are neither for loving or hating, and all the emotions that are complex mixtures of love and hate? In his eyes, this was going to make the group look like lightweights. Terry Melcher disagreed, and forced the group through take after take, until they got what became the group's second number one hit: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Turn! Turn! Turn!"] After the single was released and became a hit, the battle lines in the group hardened. It was McGuinn and Melcher on one side, Crosby and Dickson on the other, with Chris Hillman, Michael Clarke, and Gene Clark more or less neutral in the middle, but tending to side more and more with the two Ms largely because of Crosby's ability to rub everyone up the wrong way. At one point during the sessions for the next album, tempers flared so much that Michael Clarke actually got up, went over to Crosby, and punched Crosby so hard that he fell off his seat. Crosby, being Hollywood to the bone, yelled at Clarke "You'll never work in this town again!", but the others tended to agree that on that occasion Crosby had it coming. Clarke, when asked about it later, said "I slapped him because he was being an asshole. He wasn't productive. It was necessary." Things came to a head in the filming for a video for the next single, Gene Clark's "Set You Free This Time". Michael Clarke was taller than the other Byrds, and to get the shot right, so the angles would line up, he had to stand further from the camera than the rest of them. David Crosby -- the member with most knowledge of the film industry, whose father was an Academy Award-winning cinematographer, so who definitely understood the reasoning for this -- was sulking that once again a Gene Clark song had been chosen for promotion rather than one of his songs, and started manipulating Michael Clarke, telling him that he was being moved backwards because the others were jealous of his good looks, and that he needed to move forward to be with the rest of them. Multiple takes were ruined because Clarke listened to Crosby, and eventually Jim Dickson got furious at Clarke and went over and slapped him on the face. All hell broke loose. Michael Clarke wasn't particularly bothered by being slapped by Dickson, but Crosby took that as an excuse to leave, walking off before the first shot of the day had been completed. Dickson ran after Crosby, who turned round and punched Dickson in the mouth. Dickson grabbed hold of Crosby and held him in a chokehold. Gene Clark came up and pulled Dickson off Crosby, trying to break up the fight, and then Crosby yelled "Yeah, that's right, Gene! Hold him so I can hit him again!" At this point if Clark let Dickson go, Dickson would have attacked Crosby again. If he held Dickson, Crosby would have taken it as an invitation to hit him more. Clark's dilemma was eventually relieved by Barry Feinstein, the cameraman, who came in and broke everything up. It may seem odd that Crosby and Dickson, who were on the same side, were the ones who got into a fight, while Michael Clarke, who had previously hit Crosby, was listening to Crosby over Dickson, but that's indicative of how everyone felt about Crosby. As Dickson later put it, "People have stronger feelings about David Crosby. I love David more than the rest and I hate him more than the rest. I love McGuinn the least, and I hate him the least, because he doesn't give you emotional feedback. You don't get a chance. The hate is in equal proportion to how much you love them." McGuinn was finding all this deeply distressing -- Dickson and Crosby were violent men, and Michael Clarke and Hillman could be provoked to violence, but McGuinn was a pacifist both by conviction and temperament. Everything was conspiring to push the camps further apart. For example, Gene Clark made more money than the rest because of his songwriting royalties, and so got himself a good car. McGuinn had problems with his car, and knowing that the other members were jealous of Clark, Melcher offered to lend McGuinn one of his own Cadillacs, partly in an attempt to be friendly, and partly to make sure the jealousy over Clark's car didn't cause further problems in the group. But, of course, now Gene Clark had a Ferrarri and Roger McGuinn had a Cadillac, where was David Crosby's car? He stormed into Dickson's office and told him that if by the end of the tour the group were going on, Crosby didn't have a Bentley, he was quitting the group. There was only one thing for it. Terry Melcher had to go. The group had recorded their second album, and if they couldn't fix the problems within the band, they would have to deal with the problems from outside. While the group were on tour, Jim Dickson told Melcher they would no longer be working with him as their producer. On the tour bus, the group listened over and over to a tape McGuinn had made of Crosby's favourite music. On one side was a collection of recordings of Ravi Shankar, and on the other was two Coltrane albums -- Africa/Brass and Impressions: [Excerpt: John Coltrane, "India"] The group listened to this, and basically no other music, on the tour, and while they were touring Gene Clark was working on what he hoped would be the group's next single -- an impressionistic song about their trip to the UK, which started "Six miles high and when you touch down, you'll find that it's stranger than known". After he had it half complete, he showed it to Crosby, who helped him out with the lyrics, coming up with lines like "Rain, grey town, known for its sound" to describe London. The song talked about the crowds that followed them, about the music -- namechecking the Small Faces, who at the time had only released two single

Sintonía: "35-30" - Paul Williams "Reet, Petite and Gone" - Louis Jordan; "Fine Brown Frame" - Nellie Lutcher; "Long Gone, Pts. 1 & 2" - Sonny Thompson; "Chicken Shack Boogie" - Amos Milburn; "Teardrops from My Eyes" - Ruth Brown; "Deacon´s Hop" - Big Jay McNeely; "I´m Just A Fool In Love" - Amos Milburn; "Gotta Find My Baby" - The Ravens; "I Wanna Be Loved" - Dinah Washington; "Let´s Jump Tonight" - Chuck Willis; "Cornbread" - Hal Singer; "Up Above My Head" - Sister Rosetta Tharpe; "Anytime, Anyplace, Anywhere" - Joe Morris (Laurie Tate, Vocal); "Mardi Gras In New Orleans" - Professor Longhair; "So Long" - Ruth Brown; "Drinkin´ Wine, Spo-Dee-O-Dee" - Stick McGhee; "Danny Boy" - Al Hibbler La 1ª Parte de esta recopilación de 2 CDs (Factory of Sounds, 2018) se emitió el pasado 20 de Mayo de este año (20-05-2021); puedes escucharla en el servicio de Podcasts de la Web de Radio 3. Escuchar audio

Host Nate Wilcox is joined by R.J. Smith to talk about his book "The Great Black Way: L.A. in the 1940s and the Last African American Renaissance." It was a pivotal place and time in American music history that brought together gospel, jazz and blues and brought forth Rhythm & Blues and modern jazz.Let It Roll is proud to be part of Pantheon Podcasts.

Host Nate Wilcox is joined by R.J. Smith to talk about his book "The Great Black Way: L.A. in the 1940s and the Last African American Renaissance." It was a pivotal place and time in American music history that brought together gospel, jazz and blues and brought forth Rhythm & Blues and modern jazz. Let It Roll is proud to be part of Pantheon Podcasts.

Host Nate Wilcox is joined by R.J. Smith to talk about his book "The Great Black Way: L.A. in the 1940s and the Last African American Renaissance." It was a pivotal place and time in American music history that brought together gospel, jazz and blues and brought forth Rhythm & Blues and modern jazz.Let It Roll is proud to be part of Pantheon Podcasts.

Host Nate Wilcox is joined by R.J. Smith to talk about his book "The Great Black Way: L.A. in the 1940s and the Last African American Renaissance." It was a pivotal place and time in American music history that brought together gospel, jazz and blues and brought forth Rhythm & Blues and modern jazz. Let It Roll is proud to be part of Pantheon Podcasts.

Here is a podcast for you from my blues radio show "Bluesland" on KMRE 102.3 FM. Johnny Winter, Ray Charles, Big Jay McNeely, Joe Bonamassa, Johnny Land, Taj Mahal and more. Also saluting Black History Month with quotes, stories, and facts. It's free. Just click on the link/picture.

Aquest dilluns a Blues Barrelhouse farem una travesía a través del Jump Blues. Corrent que va prosperar en les dècades del 40 i del 50, i coneixerem alguns dels seus protagonistes tals com Big Jay McNeely, Louis Prima, Ruth Brown… The post Blues Barrelhouse 19/10/2020 first appeared on Ripollet Ràdio.

Laura Green (A Reason To Sing The Blues); Richie Milton and The Lowdown (Drowning Man); Earl King (I'm Still Holding On); Todd Roth (Trimmed An' Burnin'); Reverend KM Williams (Lay My Heavy Burdens); Eliana Cargnelutti (Soulshine); Carolyn Wonderland (Palace Of The King); Michael Hill's Blues Mob (Hurt Nobody); James Crawford (Flood And Thunder Blues); Sloppy Henry (Some Sweet Rainy Day); Charlie Musselwhite (Hey Miss Bessie); Chris O and Derek Phillips (Write Me A Few Lines); Bow Thayer (Goin' Down The River); Larry Garner (Someplace For Evil); Big Jay McNeely and Dana Gillespie (Who Blew The Blues Away).

The conversation continues as the twins talk about playing their first gig after the Myrtle Beach area reopened bars and restaurants. They weigh in on the losses of Little Richard and author/entertainer Ian Whitcomb, their Rogue Alley days, and the Continental Riot (Hyatt) House. SHOW NOTES: 0:00 – Roger Defends his Sennheiser mic. Chris relents. 0:55 – First show since shutdown: LuLu’s North Myrtle Beach. 1:55 – Rogue Alley: “Only a Fool” – another song from our “hair days.” 6:15 – Band rundown: Jim Alden (Drums), Mark Cerneka (Guitars. RIP Mark), Richard Klotz (Bass) Roger (keyboards), Chris (frontman and diva). Hollywood 1990-1991. First lineup. 7:75 – The loss of Little Richard – “The Architect of Rock ‘n’ Roll.” 8:15 – Chris encountered Richard when he was in preacher mode – at Rock ‘n’ Roll Denny’s on Sunset. Roger speculates whether or not Rodney Bingenheimer was sitting in a booth that night. 9:39 – Another encounter with Richard at the Continental Hyatt House – or Riot House – on Sunset – years later, while we were being wined and dined by our new managers.   10:50 – Roger explains why he didn’t like Led Zeppelin until he was in his 30s. Something to do with the skater kids at Hollywood High. 11:30 – Chris recently read that Chris Robinson met Little Richard at the Riot House. 12:15 – “Managed by the Mob?” 12:44 – Frank Scarabino aka “Franky the Beast” 15:18 – Remembering Ian Whitcomb 15:35 – Ian Whitcomb: “You Turn Me On” 17:00 – Ian Whitcomb: “My Dead Dog Rover” 16:39 – Ian’s Grammy, his books, the ukulele. 18:18 – “The Boogie-Woogie Jungle Snake” – one of Ian’s albums that Chris drummed on. Along with Little Richard’s sax player, Lee Allen, Big Jay McNeely and more – with music direction by Ronnie Barron, who was closely associated with Dr. John.  Roger came along to one of these sessions, tripping balls. 19:55 – Myrtle Beach area allergist and uke performer/collector Joe Moyer – recently spoke to Roger about Whitcomb. That was a happy coincidence. 20:24 – Ian was the first guy to play our music. At KROQ back in the day. 22:55 – Archival outtake – The Garden Court Apartments. Facebook: www.facebook.com/theyalebrothers Email: yalebrothers@gmail.com

Welcome to episode forty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This one looks at “Goodnight My Love” by Jesse Belvin, and at the many groups he performed with, and his untimely death. . 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 podcast, on “In the Still of the Night” by the Five Satins.—-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. My principal source for this episode was this CD, whose liner notes provided the framework to which I added all the other information from a myriad other books and websites, including but not limited to Jackie Wilson Lovers, Marv Goldberg’s website, and Etta James’ autobiography. But as I discuss in this episode this is one of those where I’ve pulled together information from so many sources, a full list would probably be longer than the episode itself. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   Before we begin, a quick content warning. This episode contains material dealing with the immediate aftermath of a death in a car crash. While I am not explicit, this might be upsetting for some. Jesse Belvin is a name that not many people recognise these days — he’s a footnote in the biographies of people like Sam Cooke or the Penguins, someone whose contribution to music history is usually summed up in a line or two in a book about someone else. The problem is that Jesse Belvin was simply too good, and too prolific, to have a normal career. He put out a truly astonishing number of records as a songwriter, performer, and group leader, under so many different names that it’s impossible to figure out the true extent of his career. And people like that don’t end up having scholarly books written about them. And when you do find something that actually talks about Belvin himself, you find wild inaccuracies. For example, in researching this episode, I found over and over again that people claimed that Barry White played piano on the song we’re looking at today, “Goodnight My Love”. Now, White lived in the same neigbourhood as Belvin, and they attended the same school, so on the face of it that seems plausible. It seems plausible, at least, until you realise that Barry White was eleven when “Goodnight My Love” came out. Even so, on the offchance, I tracked down an interview with White where he confirmed that no, he was not playing piano on doo-wop classics before he hit puberty. But that kind of misinformation is all over everything to do with Jesse Belvin. The end result of this is that Jesse Belvin is someone who exists in the gaps of other people’s histories, and this episode is an attempt to create a picture out of what you find when looking at the stories of other musicians. As a result, it will almost certainly be less accurate than some other episodes. There’s so little information about Belvin that if you didn’t know anything about him, you’d assume he was some unimportant, minor, figure. But in 1950s R&B — among musicians, especially those on the West Coast — there was no bigger name than Jesse Belvin. He had the potential to be bigger than anyone, and he would have been, had he lived. He was Stevie Wonder’s favourite singer of all time, and Etta James argued to her dying day that it was a travesty that she was in the rock and roll hall of fame while he wasn’t. Sam Cooke explicitly tried to model his career after Belvin, to the extent that after Cooke’s death, his widow kept all of Cooke’s records separate from her other albums — except Belvin’s, which she kept with Cooke’s. Marv Goldberg, who is by far the pre-eminent expert on forties and fifties black vocal group music, refers to Belvin as the genre’s “most revered stylist”. And at the time he died, he was on the verge of finally becoming as well known as he deserved to be. So let’s talk about the life — and the tragic death — of Mr Easy himself: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin, “Goodnight My Love”] Like so many greats of R&B and jazz, Belvin had attended Jefferson High School and studied music under the great teacher Samuel Browne, who is one of the great unsung heroes of rock and roll music. One of the other people that Browne had taught was the great rhythm and blues saxophone player Big Jay McNeely. McNeely was one of the all-time great saxophone honkers, inspired mostly by Illinois Jacquet, and he had become the lead tenor saxophone player with Johnny Otis’ band at the Barrelhouse Club, and played on records like Otis’ “Barrel House Stomp”: [Excerpt: Johnny Otis, “Barrel House Stomp”] As with many of the musicians Otis worked with, McNeely soon went on to a solo career of his own, and he formed a vocal group, “Three Dots and a Dash”. Three Dots and a Dash backed McNeely’s saxophone on a number of records, and McNeely invited Belvin to join them as lead singer. Belvin’s first recording with the group was on “All That Wine is Gone”, an answer record to “Drinking Wine Spo-De-O-Dee”. [Excerpt: Big Jay McNeely with Three Dots and a Dash, “All That Wine is Gone”] After recording two singles with McNeely, Belvin went off to make his own records, signing to Specialty Records. His first solo single, “Baby Don’t Go”, was not especially successful, so he teamed up with the songwriter Marvin Phillips in a duo called Jesse and Marvin. The two of them had a hit with the song “Dream Girl”: [Excerpt: Jesse and Marvin, “Dream Girl”] “Dream Girl” went to number two on the R&B charts, and it looked like Jesse and Marvin were about to have a massive career. But shortly afterwards, Belvin was drafted. It was while he was in the armed forces that “Earth Angel” became a hit — a song he co-wrote, and which we discussed in a previous episode, which I’ll link in the show notes. Like many of the songs Belvin wrote, he ended up not getting credit for that one — but unlike most of the others, he went to court over it and got some royalties in the end. Marvin decided to continue the duo without Jesse, renaming it “Marvin and Johnny”, and moved over to Modern Records, but he didn’t stick with a single “Johnny”. Instead “Johnny” would be whoever was around, sometimes Marvin himself double-tracked. He had several minor hit singles as “Marvin and Johnny”, including “Cherry Pie”, on which the role of “Johnny” was played by Emory Perry: [Excerpt: Marvin and Johnny, “Cherry Pie”] “Cherry Pie” was a massive hit, but none of Marvin and Johnny’s other records matched its success. However, on some of the follow-ups, Jesse Belvin returned as one of the Johnnies, notably on a cover version of “Ko Ko Mo”, which didn’t manage to outsell either the original or Perry Como’s version: [Excerpt: Marvin and Johnny, “Ko Ko Mo”] Meanwhile, his time in the armed forces had set Belvin’s career back, and when he came out he started recording for every label, and under every band name, he could. Most of the time, he would also be writing the songs, but he didn’t get label credit on most of them, because he would just sell all his rights to the songs for a hundred dollars. Why not? There was always another song. As well as recording as Marvin and Johnny for Modern Records, he also sang with the Californians on Federal: [Excerpt: The Californians, “My Angel”] The Sheiks, also on Federal : [Excerpt: The Sheiks, “So Fine”] The Gassers, on Cash: [Excerpt: The Gassers, “Hum De Dum”] As well as recording under his own name on both Specialty and on John Dolphin’s Hollywood Records. But his big project at the time was the Cliques, a duo he formed with Eugene Church, who recorded for Modern. Their track, “The Girl in My Dreams” was the closest thing he’d had to a big success since the similarly-named “Dream Girl” several years earlier: [Excerpt: The Cliques, “The Girl in my Dreams”] That went to number forty-five on the pop chart — not a massive hit, but a clear commercial success. And so, of course, at this point Belvin ditched the Cliques name, rather than follow up on the minor hit, and started making records as a solo artist instead. He signed to Modern Records as a solo artist, and went into the studio to record a new song. Now, I am going to be careful how I phrase this, because John Marascalco, who is credited as the co-writer of “Goodnight My Love”, is still alive. And I want to stress that Marascalco is, by all accounts, an actual songwriter who has written songs for people like Little Richard and Harry Nilsson. But there have also been accusations that at least some of his songwriting credits were not deserved — in particular the song “Bertha Lou” by Johnny Faire: [Excerpt: Johnny Faire, “Bertha Lou”] Johnny Faire, whose real name was Donnie Brooks, recorded that with the Burnette brothers, and always said that the song was written, not by Marascalco, but by Johnny Burnette, who sold his rights to the song to Marascalco for fifty dollars — Burnette’s son Rocky backs up the claim. Now, in the case of “Goodnight My Love”, the credited writers are George Motola and Marascalco, but the story as it’s normally told goes as follows — Motola had written the bulk of the song several years earlier, but had never completed it. He brought it into the studio, and Jesse Belvin came up with the bridge — but he said that rather than take credit, he just wanted Motola to give him four hundred dollars. Motola didn’t have four hundred dollars on him, but Marascalco, who was also at the session and is the credited producer, said he could get it for Belvin, and took the credit himself. That’s the story, and it would fit with both the rumour that Marascalco had bought an entire song from Johnny Burnette and with Belvin’s cavalier attitude towards credit. On the other hand, Marascalco was also apparently particularly good at rewriting and finishing other people’s half-finished songs, and so it’s entirely plausible that he could have done the finishing-up job himself. Either way, the finished song became one of the most well-known songs of the fifties: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin, “Goodnight My Love”] Belvin’s version of the song went to number seven in the R&B charts, but its impact went beyond its immediate chart success. Alan Freed started to use the song as the outro music for his radio show, making it familiar to an entire generation of American music lovers. The result was that the song became a standard, recorded by everyone from James Brown to Gloria Estefan, the Four Seasons to Harry Connick Jr. If John Marascalco *did* buy Jesse Belvin’s share of the songwriting, that was about the best four hundred dollars he could possibly have spent. Over the next year, Belvin recorded a host of other singles as a solo artist, none of which matched the level of success he’d seen with “Goodnight My Love”, but which are the artistic foundation on which his reputation now rests. The stylistic range of these records is quite astonishing, from Latin pop like “Senorita”, to doo-wop novelty songs like “My Satellite”, a song whose melody owes something to “Hound Dog”, credited to Jesse Belvin and the Space Riders, and released to cash in on the space craze that had started with the launch of the Russian satellite Sputnik: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin and the Space Riders, “My Satellite”] That featured Alex Hodge of the Platters on backing vocals. Hodge’s brother Gaynel Hodge, who like Belvin would form groups at the drop of a hat, joined Jesse in yet another of the many groups he formed. The Saxons consisted of Belvin, Gaynel Hodge, Eugene Church (who had been in the Cliques with Belvin) and another former Jefferson High student, Belvin’s friend Johnny “Guitar” Watson. Watson would later become well known for his seventies “gangster of love” persona and funk records, but at this point he was mostly making hard electric blues records like “Three Hours Past Midnight”: [Excerpt: “Three Hours Past Midnight”, Johnny “Guitar” Watson] But when he worked with Belvin in the Saxons and other groups, he recorded much more straightforward doo-wop and rock and roll, like this example, “Is It True”: [Excerpt: The Saxons, “Is It True”] The Saxons also recorded as the Capris (though with Alex Hodge rather than Gaynel in that lineup of the group) and, just to annoy everyone who cares about this stuff and drive us all into nervous breakdowns, there was another group, also called the Saxons, who also recorded as the Capris, on the same label — at least one single actually came out with one of the groups on one side and the other on the other. Indeed, the side featuring our Saxons had previously been released as a Jesse Belvin solo record. Anyway, I hope in this first half of the story I’ve given some idea of just how many different groups Jesse Belvin recorded with, and under how many different names, though I haven’t listed even half of them. This is someone who seemed to form a new group every time he crossed the street, and make records with most of them, and a surprising number of them had become hits — and “Goodnight My Love” and “Earth Angel” had become the kind of monster perennial standard that most musicians dream of ever writing. And, of course, Belvin had become the kind of musician that most record companies and publishers dream of finding — the kind who will happily make hit records and sell the rights for a handful of dollars. That was soon to change. Belvin was married; I haven’t been able to find out exactly when he married, but his wife also became his songwriting partner and his manager, and in 1958 she seemed to finally take control of his career for him. But before she did, there was one last pickup group hit to make. Frankie Ervin had been Charles Brown’s replacement in Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers, and had also sung briefly with Johnny Otis and Preston Love. While with Brown’s group, he’d developed a reputation for being able to perform novelty cash-in records — he’d made “Dragnet Blues”, which had resulted in a lawsuit from the makers of the TV show Dragnet, and he’d also done his Johnny Ace impression on “Johnny Ace’s Last Letter”, a single that had been rush-released by the Blazers after Johnny Ace’s death: [Excerpt: Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers, “Johnny Ace’s Last Letter”] Ervin was looking for a solo career after leaving the Blazers, and he was put in touch with George Motola, who had a suggestion for him. A white group from Texas called The Slades had recorded a track called “You Cheated”, which looked like it could possibly be a big hit — except that the label it was on wasn’t willing to come to terms with some of the big distributors over how much they were charging per record: [The Slades, “You Cheated”] Motola wanted to record a soundalike version of the song with Jesse Belvin as the lead singer, but Belvin had just signed a record contract with RCA, and didn’t want to put out lead vocals on another label. Would Ervin like to put out the song as a solo record? Ervin hated the song — he didn’t like doo-wop generally, and he thought the song was a particularly bad example of the genre — but a gig was a gig, and it’d be a solo record under his own name. Ervin agreed to do it, and Motola got Jesse Belvin to put together a scratch vocal group for the session. Belvin found Johnny “Guitar” Watson and Tommy “Buster” Williams at a local ballroom and got them to come along, and on the way to the session they ran into “Handsome” Mel Williams and pulled him in. They were just going to be the uncredited backing vocalists on a Frankie Ervin record, and didn’t spend much time thinking about what was clearly a soundalike cash-in. But when it came out it was credited as “The Shields” rather than Frankie Ervin: [Excerpt: The Shields, “You Cheated”] That’s Belvin singing that wonderful falsetto part. Frankie Ervin was naturally annoyed that he wasn’t given the label credit for the record. The recording was made as an independent production but leased to Dot Records, and somewhere along the line someone decided that it was better to have a generic group name rather than promote it as by a solo singer who might get ideas about wanting money. In a nice bit of irony, the Shields managed to reverse the normal course of the music industry — this time a soundalike record by a black group managed to outsell the original by a white group. “You Cheated” ended up making number twelve on the pop charts — a massive hit for an unknown doo-wop group at the time. Ervin started touring and making TV appearances as the Shields, backed by some random singers the record label had pulled together — the rest of the vocalists on the record had been people who were under contract to other labels, and so couldn’t make TV appearances. But the original Shields members reunited for the followup single, “Nature Boy”, where they were joined by the members of the Turks, who were yet another group that Belvin was recording with, and who included both Hodge brothers: [Excerpt: “Nature Boy”, the Shields] That, according to Ervin, also sold a million copies, but it was nothing like as successful as “You Cheated”. The record label were getting sick of Ervin wanting credit and royalties and other things they didn’t like singers, especially black ones, asking for. So the third Shields record only featured Belvin out of the original lineup, and subsequent recordings didn’t even feature him. But while Belvin had accidentally put together yet another million-selling group, he had also moved on to bigger things. His wife had now firmly taken control of his career, and they had a plan. Belvin had signed to a major label — RCA, the same label that Elvis Presley was on — and he was going to make a play for the big time. He could still keep making doo-wop records with Johnny “Guitar” Watson and Eugene Church and the Hodge brothers and whoever else, if he felt like it, but his solo career was going to be something else. He was going to go for the same market as Nat “King” Cole, and become a smooth ballad singer. He was going to be a huge star, and he actually got to record an album, Just Jesse Belvin. The first single off that album was “Guess Who?”, a song written by his wife Jo Anne, based on a love letter she had written to him: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin, “Guess Who?”] That song made the top forty — hitting number thirty-three on the pop chart and managed to reach number seven on the R&B charts. More importantly, it gained Grammy nominations for both best R&B performance and best male vocal performance. He lost to Dinah Washington and Frank Sinatra, and it’s not as if losing to Dinah Washington or Frank Sinatra would have been an embarrassment. But by the time he lost those Grammies, Jesse was already dead, and so was Jo Anne. And here we get into the murkiest part of the story. There are a lot of rumours floating around about Jesse Belvin’s death, and a lot of misinformation is out there, and frankly I’ve not been able to get to the bottom of exactly what happened. When someone you love dies young, especially if that someone is a public figure, there’s a tendency to look for complex explanations, and there’s also a tendency to exaggerate stories in the telling. That’s just human nature. And in some cases, that tendency is exploited by people out to make money. And Jesse and Jo Anne Belvin were both black people who died in the deep South, and so no real investigation was ever carried out. That means that by now, with almost everyone who was involved dead, it’s impossible to tell what really happened. Almost every single sentence of what follows may be false. It’s my best guess as to the order of events and what happened, based on the limited information out there. On February the sixth, 1960, there was a concert in Little Rock Arkansas, at the Robinson Auditorium. Billed as “the first rock and roll show of 1960”, the headliner was Jackie Wilson, a friend of Belvin’s. Jesse had just recorded his second album, “Mr Easy”, which would be coming out soon, and while he was still relatively low on the bill, he was a rising star. That album was the one that was going to consolidate Belvin’s turn towards pop balladry in the Nat “King” Cole style, but it would end up being a posthumous release: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin with the Marty Paich Orchestra, “Blues in the Night”] It was an all-black lineup on stage, but according to some reports it was an integrated audience. In fact some reports go so far as to say it was the first integrated audience ever in Little Rock. Little Rock was not a place where the white people were fans of integration — in fact they were so against it that the National Guard had had to be called in only two years earlier to protect black children when the first school in Little Rock had been integrated. And so apparently there was some racial abuse shouted by members of the audience. But it was nothing that the musicians hadn’t dealt with before. After the show they all drove on towards Dallas. Jackie Wilson had some car problems on the way, and got to their stop in Dallas later than he was expecting to. The Belvins hadn’t arrived yet, and so Wilson called Jesse’s mother in LA, asking if she’d heard from them. She hadn’t. Shortly after setting off, the car with Jesse and Jo Anne in had been in a crash. Jesse and the drivers of both cars had been killed instantly. Kirk Davis, Belvin’s guitarist on that tour, who had apparently been asleep in the back seat, was seriously injured but eventually came out of his coma. And Jesse had apparently reacted fast enough to shield his wife from the worst of the accident. But she was still unconscious, and seriously injured. The survivors were rushed to the hospital, where, according to Etta James, who heard the story from Jackie Wilson, they refused to treat Jo Anne Belvin until they knew that they would get money. She remained untreated until someone got in touch with Wilson, who drove down from Dallas Texas to Hope, Arkansas, where the hospital was, with the cash. But she died of her injuries a few days later. Now, here’s the thing — within a fortnight of the accident, there were rumours circulating widely enough to have been picked up by the newspapers that Belvin’s car had had its tyres slashed. There were also stories, never confirmed, that Belvin had received death threats before the show. And Jackie Wilson had also had car trouble that night — and according to some sources so had at least one other musician on the bill. So it’s possible that the car was sabotaged. On the other hand, Belvin’s driver, Charles Shackleford, had got the job with Belvin after being fired by Ray Charles. He was fired, according to Charles, because he kept staying awake watching the late-night shows, not getting enough sleep, and driving dangerously enough to scare Ray Charles — who was fearless enough that he used to ride motorbikes despite being totally blind. So when Jesse and Jo Anne Belvin died, they could have been the victims of a racist murder, or they could just have been horribly unlucky. But we’ll never know for sure, because the institutional racism at the time meant that there was no investigation. When they died, they left behind two children under the age of five, who were brought up by Jesse’s mother. The oldest, Jesse Belvin Jr, became a singer himself, often performing material written or made famous by his father: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin Jr, “Goodnight My Love”] Jesse Jr. devoted his life to finding out what actually happened to his parents, but never found any answers.

Welcome to episode forty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This one looks at “Goodnight My Love” by Jesse Belvin, and at the many groups he performed with, and his untimely death. . 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 podcast, on “In the Still of the Night” by the Five Satins.—-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. My principal source for this episode was this CD, whose liner notes provided the framework to which I added all the other information from a myriad other books and websites, including but not limited to Jackie Wilson Lovers, Marv Goldberg’s website, and Etta James’ autobiography. But as I discuss in this episode this is one of those where I’ve pulled together information from so many sources, a full list would probably be longer than the episode itself. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   Before we begin, a quick content warning. This episode contains material dealing with the immediate aftermath of a death in a car crash. While I am not explicit, this might be upsetting for some. Jesse Belvin is a name that not many people recognise these days — he’s a footnote in the biographies of people like Sam Cooke or the Penguins, someone whose contribution to music history is usually summed up in a line or two in a book about someone else. The problem is that Jesse Belvin was simply too good, and too prolific, to have a normal career. He put out a truly astonishing number of records as a songwriter, performer, and group leader, under so many different names that it’s impossible to figure out the true extent of his career. And people like that don’t end up having scholarly books written about them. And when you do find something that actually talks about Belvin himself, you find wild inaccuracies. For example, in researching this episode, I found over and over again that people claimed that Barry White played piano on the song we’re looking at today, “Goodnight My Love”. Now, White lived in the same neigbourhood as Belvin, and they attended the same school, so on the face of it that seems plausible. It seems plausible, at least, until you realise that Barry White was eleven when “Goodnight My Love” came out. Even so, on the offchance, I tracked down an interview with White where he confirmed that no, he was not playing piano on doo-wop classics before he hit puberty. But that kind of misinformation is all over everything to do with Jesse Belvin. The end result of this is that Jesse Belvin is someone who exists in the gaps of other people’s histories, and this episode is an attempt to create a picture out of what you find when looking at the stories of other musicians. As a result, it will almost certainly be less accurate than some other episodes. There’s so little information about Belvin that if you didn’t know anything about him, you’d assume he was some unimportant, minor, figure. But in 1950s R&B — among musicians, especially those on the West Coast — there was no bigger name than Jesse Belvin. He had the potential to be bigger than anyone, and he would have been, had he lived. He was Stevie Wonder’s favourite singer of all time, and Etta James argued to her dying day that it was a travesty that she was in the rock and roll hall of fame while he wasn’t. Sam Cooke explicitly tried to model his career after Belvin, to the extent that after Cooke’s death, his widow kept all of Cooke’s records separate from her other albums — except Belvin’s, which she kept with Cooke’s. Marv Goldberg, who is by far the pre-eminent expert on forties and fifties black vocal group music, refers to Belvin as the genre’s “most revered stylist”. And at the time he died, he was on the verge of finally becoming as well known as he deserved to be. So let’s talk about the life — and the tragic death — of Mr Easy himself: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin, “Goodnight My Love”] Like so many greats of R&B and jazz, Belvin had attended Jefferson High School and studied music under the great teacher Samuel Browne, who is one of the great unsung heroes of rock and roll music. One of the other people that Browne had taught was the great rhythm and blues saxophone player Big Jay McNeely. McNeely was one of the all-time great saxophone honkers, inspired mostly by Illinois Jacquet, and he had become the lead tenor saxophone player with Johnny Otis’ band at the Barrelhouse Club, and played on records like Otis’ “Barrel House Stomp”: [Excerpt: Johnny Otis, “Barrel House Stomp”] As with many of the musicians Otis worked with, McNeely soon went on to a solo career of his own, and he formed a vocal group, “Three Dots and a Dash”. Three Dots and a Dash backed McNeely’s saxophone on a number of records, and McNeely invited Belvin to join them as lead singer. Belvin’s first recording with the group was on “All That Wine is Gone”, an answer record to “Drinking Wine Spo-De-O-Dee”. [Excerpt: Big Jay McNeely with Three Dots and a Dash, “All That Wine is Gone”] After recording two singles with McNeely, Belvin went off to make his own records, signing to Specialty Records. His first solo single, “Baby Don’t Go”, was not especially successful, so he teamed up with the songwriter Marvin Phillips in a duo called Jesse and Marvin. The two of them had a hit with the song “Dream Girl”: [Excerpt: Jesse and Marvin, “Dream Girl”] “Dream Girl” went to number two on the R&B charts, and it looked like Jesse and Marvin were about to have a massive career. But shortly afterwards, Belvin was drafted. It was while he was in the armed forces that “Earth Angel” became a hit — a song he co-wrote, and which we discussed in a previous episode, which I’ll link in the show notes. Like many of the songs Belvin wrote, he ended up not getting credit for that one — but unlike most of the others, he went to court over it and got some royalties in the end. Marvin decided to continue the duo without Jesse, renaming it “Marvin and Johnny”, and moved over to Modern Records, but he didn’t stick with a single “Johnny”. Instead “Johnny” would be whoever was around, sometimes Marvin himself double-tracked. He had several minor hit singles as “Marvin and Johnny”, including “Cherry Pie”, on which the role of “Johnny” was played by Emory Perry: [Excerpt: Marvin and Johnny, “Cherry Pie”] “Cherry Pie” was a massive hit, but none of Marvin and Johnny’s other records matched its success. However, on some of the follow-ups, Jesse Belvin returned as one of the Johnnies, notably on a cover version of “Ko Ko Mo”, which didn’t manage to outsell either the original or Perry Como’s version: [Excerpt: Marvin and Johnny, “Ko Ko Mo”] Meanwhile, his time in the armed forces had set Belvin’s career back, and when he came out he started recording for every label, and under every band name, he could. Most of the time, he would also be writing the songs, but he didn’t get label credit on most of them, because he would just sell all his rights to the songs for a hundred dollars. Why not? There was always another song. As well as recording as Marvin and Johnny for Modern Records, he also sang with the Californians on Federal: [Excerpt: The Californians, “My Angel”] The Sheiks, also on Federal : [Excerpt: The Sheiks, “So Fine”] The Gassers, on Cash: [Excerpt: The Gassers, “Hum De Dum”] As well as recording under his own name on both Specialty and on John Dolphin’s Hollywood Records. But his big project at the time was the Cliques, a duo he formed with Eugene Church, who recorded for Modern. Their track, “The Girl in My Dreams” was the closest thing he’d had to a big success since the similarly-named “Dream Girl” several years earlier: [Excerpt: The Cliques, “The Girl in my Dreams”] That went to number forty-five on the pop chart — not a massive hit, but a clear commercial success. And so, of course, at this point Belvin ditched the Cliques name, rather than follow up on the minor hit, and started making records as a solo artist instead. He signed to Modern Records as a solo artist, and went into the studio to record a new song. Now, I am going to be careful how I phrase this, because John Marascalco, who is credited as the co-writer of “Goodnight My Love”, is still alive. And I want to stress that Marascalco is, by all accounts, an actual songwriter who has written songs for people like Little Richard and Harry Nilsson. But there have also been accusations that at least some of his songwriting credits were not deserved — in particular the song “Bertha Lou” by Johnny Faire: [Excerpt: Johnny Faire, “Bertha Lou”] Johnny Faire, whose real name was Donnie Brooks, recorded that with the Burnette brothers, and always said that the song was written, not by Marascalco, but by Johnny Burnette, who sold his rights to the song to Marascalco for fifty dollars — Burnette’s son Rocky backs up the claim. Now, in the case of “Goodnight My Love”, the credited writers are George Motola and Marascalco, but the story as it’s normally told goes as follows — Motola had written the bulk of the song several years earlier, but had never completed it. He brought it into the studio, and Jesse Belvin came up with the bridge — but he said that rather than take credit, he just wanted Motola to give him four hundred dollars. Motola didn’t have four hundred dollars on him, but Marascalco, who was also at the session and is the credited producer, said he could get it for Belvin, and took the credit himself. That’s the story, and it would fit with both the rumour that Marascalco had bought an entire song from Johnny Burnette and with Belvin’s cavalier attitude towards credit. On the other hand, Marascalco was also apparently particularly good at rewriting and finishing other people’s half-finished songs, and so it’s entirely plausible that he could have done the finishing-up job himself. Either way, the finished song became one of the most well-known songs of the fifties: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin, “Goodnight My Love”] Belvin’s version of the song went to number seven in the R&B charts, but its impact went beyond its immediate chart success. Alan Freed started to use the song as the outro music for his radio show, making it familiar to an entire generation of American music lovers. The result was that the song became a standard, recorded by everyone from James Brown to Gloria Estefan, the Four Seasons to Harry Connick Jr. If John Marascalco *did* buy Jesse Belvin’s share of the songwriting, that was about the best four hundred dollars he could possibly have spent. Over the next year, Belvin recorded a host of other singles as a solo artist, none of which matched the level of success he’d seen with “Goodnight My Love”, but which are the artistic foundation on which his reputation now rests. The stylistic range of these records is quite astonishing, from Latin pop like “Senorita”, to doo-wop novelty songs like “My Satellite”, a song whose melody owes something to “Hound Dog”, credited to Jesse Belvin and the Space Riders, and released to cash in on the space craze that had started with the launch of the Russian satellite Sputnik: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin and the Space Riders, “My Satellite”] That featured Alex Hodge of the Platters on backing vocals. Hodge’s brother Gaynel Hodge, who like Belvin would form groups at the drop of a hat, joined Jesse in yet another of the many groups he formed. The Saxons consisted of Belvin, Gaynel Hodge, Eugene Church (who had been in the Cliques with Belvin) and another former Jefferson High student, Belvin’s friend Johnny “Guitar” Watson. Watson would later become well known for his seventies “gangster of love” persona and funk records, but at this point he was mostly making hard electric blues records like “Three Hours Past Midnight”: [Excerpt: “Three Hours Past Midnight”, Johnny “Guitar” Watson] But when he worked with Belvin in the Saxons and other groups, he recorded much more straightforward doo-wop and rock and roll, like this example, “Is It True”: [Excerpt: The Saxons, “Is It True”] The Saxons also recorded as the Capris (though with Alex Hodge rather than Gaynel in that lineup of the group) and, just to annoy everyone who cares about this stuff and drive us all into nervous breakdowns, there was another group, also called the Saxons, who also recorded as the Capris, on the same label — at least one single actually came out with one of the groups on one side and the other on the other. Indeed, the side featuring our Saxons had previously been released as a Jesse Belvin solo record. Anyway, I hope in this first half of the story I’ve given some idea of just how many different groups Jesse Belvin recorded with, and under how many different names, though I haven’t listed even half of them. This is someone who seemed to form a new group every time he crossed the street, and make records with most of them, and a surprising number of them had become hits — and “Goodnight My Love” and “Earth Angel” had become the kind of monster perennial standard that most musicians dream of ever writing. And, of course, Belvin had become the kind of musician that most record companies and publishers dream of finding — the kind who will happily make hit records and sell the rights for a handful of dollars. That was soon to change. Belvin was married; I haven’t been able to find out exactly when he married, but his wife also became his songwriting partner and his manager, and in 1958 she seemed to finally take control of his career for him. But before she did, there was one last pickup group hit to make. Frankie Ervin had been Charles Brown’s replacement in Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers, and had also sung briefly with Johnny Otis and Preston Love. While with Brown’s group, he’d developed a reputation for being able to perform novelty cash-in records — he’d made “Dragnet Blues”, which had resulted in a lawsuit from the makers of the TV show Dragnet, and he’d also done his Johnny Ace impression on “Johnny Ace’s Last Letter”, a single that had been rush-released by the Blazers after Johnny Ace’s death: [Excerpt: Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers, “Johnny Ace’s Last Letter”] Ervin was looking for a solo career after leaving the Blazers, and he was put in touch with George Motola, who had a suggestion for him. A white group from Texas called The Slades had recorded a track called “You Cheated”, which looked like it could possibly be a big hit — except that the label it was on wasn’t willing to come to terms with some of the big distributors over how much they were charging per record: [The Slades, “You Cheated”] Motola wanted to record a soundalike version of the song with Jesse Belvin as the lead singer, but Belvin had just signed a record contract with RCA, and didn’t want to put out lead vocals on another label. Would Ervin like to put out the song as a solo record? Ervin hated the song — he didn’t like doo-wop generally, and he thought the song was a particularly bad example of the genre — but a gig was a gig, and it’d be a solo record under his own name. Ervin agreed to do it, and Motola got Jesse Belvin to put together a scratch vocal group for the session. Belvin found Johnny “Guitar” Watson and Tommy “Buster” Williams at a local ballroom and got them to come along, and on the way to the session they ran into “Handsome” Mel Williams and pulled him in. They were just going to be the uncredited backing vocalists on a Frankie Ervin record, and didn’t spend much time thinking about what was clearly a soundalike cash-in. But when it came out it was credited as “The Shields” rather than Frankie Ervin: [Excerpt: The Shields, “You Cheated”] That’s Belvin singing that wonderful falsetto part. Frankie Ervin was naturally annoyed that he wasn’t given the label credit for the record. The recording was made as an independent production but leased to Dot Records, and somewhere along the line someone decided that it was better to have a generic group name rather than promote it as by a solo singer who might get ideas about wanting money. In a nice bit of irony, the Shields managed to reverse the normal course of the music industry — this time a soundalike record by a black group managed to outsell the original by a white group. “You Cheated” ended up making number twelve on the pop charts — a massive hit for an unknown doo-wop group at the time. Ervin started touring and making TV appearances as the Shields, backed by some random singers the record label had pulled together — the rest of the vocalists on the record had been people who were under contract to other labels, and so couldn’t make TV appearances. But the original Shields members reunited for the followup single, “Nature Boy”, where they were joined by the members of the Turks, who were yet another group that Belvin was recording with, and who included both Hodge brothers: [Excerpt: “Nature Boy”, the Shields] That, according to Ervin, also sold a million copies, but it was nothing like as successful as “You Cheated”. The record label were getting sick of Ervin wanting credit and royalties and other things they didn’t like singers, especially black ones, asking for. So the third Shields record only featured Belvin out of the original lineup, and subsequent recordings didn’t even feature him. But while Belvin had accidentally put together yet another million-selling group, he had also moved on to bigger things. His wife had now firmly taken control of his career, and they had a plan. Belvin had signed to a major label — RCA, the same label that Elvis Presley was on — and he was going to make a play for the big time. He could still keep making doo-wop records with Johnny “Guitar” Watson and Eugene Church and the Hodge brothers and whoever else, if he felt like it, but his solo career was going to be something else. He was going to go for the same market as Nat “King” Cole, and become a smooth ballad singer. He was going to be a huge star, and he actually got to record an album, Just Jesse Belvin. The first single off that album was “Guess Who?”, a song written by his wife Jo Anne, based on a love letter she had written to him: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin, “Guess Who?”] That song made the top forty — hitting number thirty-three on the pop chart and managed to reach number seven on the R&B charts. More importantly, it gained Grammy nominations for both best R&B performance and best male vocal performance. He lost to Dinah Washington and Frank Sinatra, and it’s not as if losing to Dinah Washington or Frank Sinatra would have been an embarrassment. But by the time he lost those Grammies, Jesse was already dead, and so was Jo Anne. And here we get into the murkiest part of the story. There are a lot of rumours floating around about Jesse Belvin’s death, and a lot of misinformation is out there, and frankly I’ve not been able to get to the bottom of exactly what happened. When someone you love dies young, especially if that someone is a public figure, there’s a tendency to look for complex explanations, and there’s also a tendency to exaggerate stories in the telling. That’s just human nature. And in some cases, that tendency is exploited by people out to make money. And Jesse and Jo Anne Belvin were both black people who died in the deep South, and so no real investigation was ever carried out. That means that by now, with almost everyone who was involved dead, it’s impossible to tell what really happened. Almost every single sentence of what follows may be false. It’s my best guess as to the order of events and what happened, based on the limited information out there. On February the sixth, 1960, there was a concert in Little Rock Arkansas, at the Robinson Auditorium. Billed as “the first rock and roll show of 1960”, the headliner was Jackie Wilson, a friend of Belvin’s. Jesse had just recorded his second album, “Mr Easy”, which would be coming out soon, and while he was still relatively low on the bill, he was a rising star. That album was the one that was going to consolidate Belvin’s turn towards pop balladry in the Nat “King” Cole style, but it would end up being a posthumous release: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin with the Marty Paich Orchestra, “Blues in the Night”] It was an all-black lineup on stage, but according to some reports it was an integrated audience. In fact some reports go so far as to say it was the first integrated audience ever in Little Rock. Little Rock was not a place where the white people were fans of integration — in fact they were so against it that the National Guard had had to be called in only two years earlier to protect black children when the first school in Little Rock had been integrated. And so apparently there was some racial abuse shouted by members of the audience. But it was nothing that the musicians hadn’t dealt with before. After the show they all drove on towards Dallas. Jackie Wilson had some car problems on the way, and got to their stop in Dallas later than he was expecting to. The Belvins hadn’t arrived yet, and so Wilson called Jesse’s mother in LA, asking if she’d heard from them. She hadn’t. Shortly after setting off, the car with Jesse and Jo Anne in had been in a crash. Jesse and the drivers of both cars had been killed instantly. Kirk Davis, Belvin’s guitarist on that tour, who had apparently been asleep in the back seat, was seriously injured but eventually came out of his coma. And Jesse had apparently reacted fast enough to shield his wife from the worst of the accident. But she was still unconscious, and seriously injured. The survivors were rushed to the hospital, where, according to Etta James, who heard the story from Jackie Wilson, they refused to treat Jo Anne Belvin until they knew that they would get money. She remained untreated until someone got in touch with Wilson, who drove down from Dallas Texas to Hope, Arkansas, where the hospital was, with the cash. But she died of her injuries a few days later. Now, here’s the thing — within a fortnight of the accident, there were rumours circulating widely enough to have been picked up by the newspapers that Belvin’s car had had its tyres slashed. There were also stories, never confirmed, that Belvin had received death threats before the show. And Jackie Wilson had also had car trouble that night — and according to some sources so had at least one other musician on the bill. So it’s possible that the car was sabotaged. On the other hand, Belvin’s driver, Charles Shackleford, had got the job with Belvin after being fired by Ray Charles. He was fired, according to Charles, because he kept staying awake watching the late-night shows, not getting enough sleep, and driving dangerously enough to scare Ray Charles — who was fearless enough that he used to ride motorbikes despite being totally blind. So when Jesse and Jo Anne Belvin died, they could have been the victims of a racist murder, or they could just have been horribly unlucky. But we’ll never know for sure, because the institutional racism at the time meant that there was no investigation. When they died, they left behind two children under the age of five, who were brought up by Jesse’s mother. The oldest, Jesse Belvin Jr, became a singer himself, often performing material written or made famous by his father: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin Jr, “Goodnight My Love”] Jesse Jr. devoted his life to finding out what actually happened to his parents, but never found any answers.

Welcome to episode forty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This one looks at “Goodnight My Love” by Jesse Belvin, and at the many groups he performed with, and his untimely death. . 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 podcast, on “In the Still of the Night” by the Five Satins (more…)

Welcome to episode forty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This one looks at "Goodnight My Love" by Jesse Belvin, and at the many groups he performed with, and his untimely death. . 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 podcast, on "In the Still of the Night" by the Five Satins.----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. My principal source for this episode was this CD, whose liner notes provided the framework to which I added all the other information from a myriad other books and websites, including but not limited to Jackie Wilson Lovers, Marv Goldberg's website, and Etta James' autobiography. But as I discuss in this episode this is one of those where I've pulled together information from so many sources, a full list would probably be longer than the episode itself. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   Before we begin, a quick content warning. This episode contains material dealing with the immediate aftermath of a death in a car crash. While I am not explicit, this might be upsetting for some. Jesse Belvin is a name that not many people recognise these days -- he's a footnote in the biographies of people like Sam Cooke or the Penguins, someone whose contribution to music history is usually summed up in a line or two in a book about someone else. The problem is that Jesse Belvin was simply too good, and too prolific, to have a normal career. He put out a truly astonishing number of records as a songwriter, performer, and group leader, under so many different names that it's impossible to figure out the true extent of his career. And people like that don't end up having scholarly books written about them. And when you do find something that actually talks about Belvin himself, you find wild inaccuracies. For example, in researching this episode, I found over and over again that people claimed that Barry White played piano on the song we're looking at today, "Goodnight My Love". Now, White lived in the same neigbourhood as Belvin, and they attended the same school, so on the face of it that seems plausible. It seems plausible, at least, until you realise that Barry White was eleven when "Goodnight My Love" came out. Even so, on the offchance, I tracked down an interview with White where he confirmed that no, he was not playing piano on doo-wop classics before he hit puberty. But that kind of misinformation is all over everything to do with Jesse Belvin. The end result of this is that Jesse Belvin is someone who exists in the gaps of other people's histories, and this episode is an attempt to create a picture out of what you find when looking at the stories of other musicians. As a result, it will almost certainly be less accurate than some other episodes. There's so little information about Belvin that if you didn't know anything about him, you'd assume he was some unimportant, minor, figure. But in 1950s R&B -- among musicians, especially those on the West Coast -- there was no bigger name than Jesse Belvin. He had the potential to be bigger than anyone, and he would have been, had he lived. He was Stevie Wonder's favourite singer of all time, and Etta James argued to her dying day that it was a travesty that she was in the rock and roll hall of fame while he wasn't. Sam Cooke explicitly tried to model his career after Belvin, to the extent that after Cooke's death, his widow kept all of Cooke's records separate from her other albums -- except Belvin's, which she kept with Cooke's. Marv Goldberg, who is by far the pre-eminent expert on forties and fifties black vocal group music, refers to Belvin as the genre's "most revered stylist". And at the time he died, he was on the verge of finally becoming as well known as he deserved to be. So let's talk about the life -- and the tragic death -- of Mr Easy himself: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin, "Goodnight My Love"] Like so many greats of R&B and jazz, Belvin had attended Jefferson High School and studied music under the great teacher Samuel Browne, who is one of the great unsung heroes of rock and roll music. One of the other people that Browne had taught was the great rhythm and blues saxophone player Big Jay McNeely. McNeely was one of the all-time great saxophone honkers, inspired mostly by Illinois Jacquet, and he had become the lead tenor saxophone player with Johnny Otis' band at the Barrelhouse Club, and played on records like Otis' "Barrel House Stomp": [Excerpt: Johnny Otis, "Barrel House Stomp"] As with many of the musicians Otis worked with, McNeely soon went on to a solo career of his own, and he formed a vocal group, "Three Dots and a Dash". Three Dots and a Dash backed McNeely's saxophone on a number of records, and McNeely invited Belvin to join them as lead singer. Belvin's first recording with the group was on "All That Wine is Gone", an answer record to "Drinking Wine Spo-De-O-Dee". [Excerpt: Big Jay McNeely with Three Dots and a Dash, "All That Wine is Gone"] After recording two singles with McNeely, Belvin went off to make his own records, signing to Specialty Records. His first solo single, "Baby Don't Go", was not especially successful, so he teamed up with the songwriter Marvin Phillips in a duo called Jesse and Marvin. The two of them had a hit with the song "Dream Girl": [Excerpt: Jesse and Marvin, "Dream Girl"] "Dream Girl" went to number two on the R&B charts, and it looked like Jesse and Marvin were about to have a massive career. But shortly afterwards, Belvin was drafted. It was while he was in the armed forces that “Earth Angel” became a hit -- a song he co-wrote, and which we discussed in a previous episode, which I'll link in the show notes. Like many of the songs Belvin wrote, he ended up not getting credit for that one -- but unlike most of the others, he went to court over it and got some royalties in the end. Marvin decided to continue the duo without Jesse, renaming it "Marvin and Johnny", and moved over to Modern Records, but he didn't stick with a single "Johnny". Instead "Johnny" would be whoever was around, sometimes Marvin himself double-tracked. He had several minor hit singles as "Marvin and Johnny", including "Cherry Pie", on which the role of "Johnny" was played by Emory Perry: [Excerpt: Marvin and Johnny, "Cherry Pie"] "Cherry Pie" was a massive hit, but none of Marvin and Johnny's other records matched its success. However, on some of the follow-ups, Jesse Belvin returned as one of the Johnnies, notably on a cover version of "Ko Ko Mo", which didn't manage to outsell either the original or Perry Como's version: [Excerpt: Marvin and Johnny, "Ko Ko Mo"] Meanwhile, his time in the armed forces had set Belvin's career back, and when he came out he started recording for every label, and under every band name, he could. Most of the time, he would also be writing the songs, but he didn't get label credit on most of them, because he would just sell all his rights to the songs for a hundred dollars. Why not? There was always another song. As well as recording as Marvin and Johnny for Modern Records, he also sang with the Californians on Federal: [Excerpt: The Californians, "My Angel"] The Sheiks, also on Federal : [Excerpt: The Sheiks, "So Fine"] The Gassers, on Cash: [Excerpt: The Gassers, "Hum De Dum"] As well as recording under his own name on both Specialty and on John Dolphin's Hollywood Records. But his big project at the time was the Cliques, a duo he formed with Eugene Church, who recorded for Modern. Their track, "The Girl in My Dreams" was the closest thing he'd had to a big success since the similarly-named "Dream Girl" several years earlier: [Excerpt: The Cliques, "The Girl in my Dreams"] That went to number forty-five on the pop chart -- not a massive hit, but a clear commercial success. And so, of course, at this point Belvin ditched the Cliques name, rather than follow up on the minor hit, and started making records as a solo artist instead. He signed to Modern Records as a solo artist, and went into the studio to record a new song. Now, I am going to be careful how I phrase this, because John Marascalco, who is credited as the co-writer of "Goodnight My Love", is still alive. And I want to stress that Marascalco is, by all accounts, an actual songwriter who has written songs for people like Little Richard and Harry Nilsson. But there have also been accusations that at least some of his songwriting credits were not deserved -- in particular the song "Bertha Lou" by Johnny Faire: [Excerpt: Johnny Faire, "Bertha Lou"] Johnny Faire, whose real name was Donnie Brooks, recorded that with the Burnette brothers, and always said that the song was written, not by Marascalco, but by Johnny Burnette, who sold his rights to the song to Marascalco for fifty dollars -- Burnette's son Rocky backs up the claim. Now, in the case of "Goodnight My Love", the credited writers are George Motola and Marascalco, but the story as it's normally told goes as follows -- Motola had written the bulk of the song several years earlier, but had never completed it. He brought it into the studio, and Jesse Belvin came up with the bridge -- but he said that rather than take credit, he just wanted Motola to give him four hundred dollars. Motola didn't have four hundred dollars on him, but Marascalco, who was also at the session and is the credited producer, said he could get it for Belvin, and took the credit himself. That's the story, and it would fit with both the rumour that Marascalco had bought an entire song from Johnny Burnette and with Belvin's cavalier attitude towards credit. On the other hand, Marascalco was also apparently particularly good at rewriting and finishing other people's half-finished songs, and so it's entirely plausible that he could have done the finishing-up job himself. Either way, the finished song became one of the most well-known songs of the fifties: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin, "Goodnight My Love"] Belvin's version of the song went to number seven in the R&B charts, but its impact went beyond its immediate chart success. Alan Freed started to use the song as the outro music for his radio show, making it familiar to an entire generation of American music lovers. The result was that the song became a standard, recorded by everyone from James Brown to Gloria Estefan, the Four Seasons to Harry Connick Jr. If John Marascalco *did* buy Jesse Belvin's share of the songwriting, that was about the best four hundred dollars he could possibly have spent. Over the next year, Belvin recorded a host of other singles as a solo artist, none of which matched the level of success he'd seen with "Goodnight My Love”, but which are the artistic foundation on which his reputation now rests. The stylistic range of these records is quite astonishing, from Latin pop like "Senorita", to doo-wop novelty songs like "My Satellite", a song whose melody owes something to "Hound Dog", credited to Jesse Belvin and the Space Riders, and released to cash in on the space craze that had started with the launch of the Russian satellite Sputnik: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin and the Space Riders, "My Satellite"] That featured Alex Hodge of the Platters on backing vocals. Hodge's brother Gaynel Hodge, who like Belvin would form groups at the drop of a hat, joined Jesse in yet another of the many groups he formed. The Saxons consisted of Belvin, Gaynel Hodge, Eugene Church (who had been in the Cliques with Belvin) and another former Jefferson High student, Belvin's friend Johnny "Guitar" Watson. Watson would later become well known for his seventies "gangster of love" persona and funk records, but at this point he was mostly making hard electric blues records like "Three Hours Past Midnight": [Excerpt: "Three Hours Past Midnight", Johnny "Guitar" Watson] But when he worked with Belvin in the Saxons and other groups, he recorded much more straightforward doo-wop and rock and roll, like this example, "Is It True": [Excerpt: The Saxons, "Is It True"] The Saxons also recorded as the Capris (though with Alex Hodge rather than Gaynel in that lineup of the group) and, just to annoy everyone who cares about this stuff and drive us all into nervous breakdowns, there was another group, also called the Saxons, who also recorded as the Capris, on the same label -- at least one single actually came out with one of the groups on one side and the other on the other. Indeed, the side featuring our Saxons had previously been released as a Jesse Belvin solo record. Anyway, I hope in this first half of the story I've given some idea of just how many different groups Jesse Belvin recorded with, and under how many different names, though I haven't listed even half of them. This is someone who seemed to form a new group every time he crossed the street, and make records with most of them, and a surprising number of them had become hits -- and "Goodnight My Love" and "Earth Angel" had become the kind of monster perennial standard that most musicians dream of ever writing. And, of course, Belvin had become the kind of musician that most record companies and publishers dream of finding -- the kind who will happily make hit records and sell the rights for a handful of dollars. That was soon to change. Belvin was married; I haven't been able to find out exactly when he married, but his wife also became his songwriting partner and his manager, and in 1958 she seemed to finally take control of his career for him. But before she did, there was one last pickup group hit to make. Frankie Ervin had been Charles Brown's replacement in Johnny Moore's Three Blazers, and had also sung briefly with Johnny Otis and Preston Love. While with Brown's group, he'd developed a reputation for being able to perform novelty cash-in records -- he'd made "Dragnet Blues", which had resulted in a lawsuit from the makers of the TV show Dragnet, and he'd also done his Johnny Ace impression on "Johnny Ace's Last Letter", a single that had been rush-released by the Blazers after Johnny Ace's death: [Excerpt: Johnny Moore's Three Blazers, "Johnny Ace's Last Letter"] Ervin was looking for a solo career after leaving the Blazers, and he was put in touch with George Motola, who had a suggestion for him. A white group from Texas called The Slades had recorded a track called "You Cheated", which looked like it could possibly be a big hit -- except that the label it was on wasn't willing to come to terms with some of the big distributors over how much they were charging per record: [The Slades, "You Cheated"] Motola wanted to record a soundalike version of the song with Jesse Belvin as the lead singer, but Belvin had just signed a record contract with RCA, and didn't want to put out lead vocals on another label. Would Ervin like to put out the song as a solo record? Ervin hated the song -- he didn't like doo-wop generally, and he thought the song was a particularly bad example of the genre -- but a gig was a gig, and it'd be a solo record under his own name. Ervin agreed to do it, and Motola got Jesse Belvin to put together a scratch vocal group for the session. Belvin found Johnny "Guitar" Watson and Tommy "Buster" Williams at a local ballroom and got them to come along, and on the way to the session they ran into "Handsome" Mel Williams and pulled him in. They were just going to be the uncredited backing vocalists on a Frankie Ervin record, and didn't spend much time thinking about what was clearly a soundalike cash-in. But when it came out it was credited as "The Shields" rather than Frankie Ervin: [Excerpt: The Shields, "You Cheated"] That's Belvin singing that wonderful falsetto part. Frankie Ervin was naturally annoyed that he wasn't given the label credit for the record. The recording was made as an independent production but leased to Dot Records, and somewhere along the line someone decided that it was better to have a generic group name rather than promote it as by a solo singer who might get ideas about wanting money. In a nice bit of irony, the Shields managed to reverse the normal course of the music industry -- this time a soundalike record by a black group managed to outsell the original by a white group. "You Cheated" ended up making number twelve on the pop charts -- a massive hit for an unknown doo-wop group at the time. Ervin started touring and making TV appearances as the Shields, backed by some random singers the record label had pulled together -- the rest of the vocalists on the record had been people who were under contract to other labels, and so couldn't make TV appearances. But the original Shields members reunited for the followup single, "Nature Boy", where they were joined by the members of the Turks, who were yet another group that Belvin was recording with, and who included both Hodge brothers: [Excerpt: "Nature Boy", the Shields] That, according to Ervin, also sold a million copies, but it was nothing like as successful as "You Cheated". The record label were getting sick of Ervin wanting credit and royalties and other things they didn't like singers, especially black ones, asking for. So the third Shields record only featured Belvin out of the original lineup, and subsequent recordings didn't even feature him. But while Belvin had accidentally put together yet another million-selling group, he had also moved on to bigger things. His wife had now firmly taken control of his career, and they had a plan. Belvin had signed to a major label -- RCA, the same label that Elvis Presley was on -- and he was going to make a play for the big time. He could still keep making doo-wop records with Johnny "Guitar" Watson and Eugene Church and the Hodge brothers and whoever else, if he felt like it, but his solo career was going to be something else. He was going to go for the same market as Nat "King" Cole, and become a smooth ballad singer. He was going to be a huge star, and he actually got to record an album, Just Jesse Belvin. The first single off that album was "Guess Who?", a song written by his wife Jo Anne, based on a love letter she had written to him: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin, "Guess Who?"] That song made the top forty -- hitting number thirty-three on the pop chart and managed to reach number seven on the R&B charts. More importantly, it gained Grammy nominations for both best R&B performance and best male vocal performance. He lost to Dinah Washington and Frank Sinatra, and it's not as if losing to Dinah Washington or Frank Sinatra would have been an embarrassment. But by the time he lost those Grammies, Jesse was already dead, and so was Jo Anne. And here we get into the murkiest part of the story. There are a lot of rumours floating around about Jesse Belvin's death, and a lot of misinformation is out there, and frankly I've not been able to get to the bottom of exactly what happened. When someone you love dies young, especially if that someone is a public figure, there's a tendency to look for complex explanations, and there's also a tendency to exaggerate stories in the telling. That's just human nature. And in some cases, that tendency is exploited by people out to make money. And Jesse and Jo Anne Belvin were both black people who died in the deep South, and so no real investigation was ever carried out. That means that by now, with almost everyone who was involved dead, it's impossible to tell what really happened. Almost every single sentence of what follows may be false. It's my best guess as to the order of events and what happened, based on the limited information out there. On February the sixth, 1960, there was a concert in Little Rock Arkansas, at the Robinson Auditorium. Billed as "the first rock and roll show of 1960", the headliner was Jackie Wilson, a friend of Belvin's. Jesse had just recorded his second album, "Mr Easy", which would be coming out soon, and while he was still relatively low on the bill, he was a rising star. That album was the one that was going to consolidate Belvin's turn towards pop balladry in the Nat "King" Cole style, but it would end up being a posthumous release: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin with the Marty Paich Orchestra, "Blues in the Night"] It was an all-black lineup on stage, but according to some reports it was an integrated audience. In fact some reports go so far as to say it was the first integrated audience ever in Little Rock. Little Rock was not a place where the white people were fans of integration -- in fact they were so against it that the National Guard had had to be called in only two years earlier to protect black children when the first school in Little Rock had been integrated. And so apparently there was some racial abuse shouted by members of the audience. But it was nothing that the musicians hadn't dealt with before. After the show they all drove on towards Dallas. Jackie Wilson had some car problems on the way, and got to their stop in Dallas later than he was expecting to. The Belvins hadn't arrived yet, and so Wilson called Jesse's mother in LA, asking if she'd heard from them. She hadn't. Shortly after setting off, the car with Jesse and Jo Anne in had been in a crash. Jesse and the drivers of both cars had been killed instantly. Kirk Davis, Belvin's guitarist on that tour, who had apparently been asleep in the back seat, was seriously injured but eventually came out of his coma. And Jesse had apparently reacted fast enough to shield his wife from the worst of the accident. But she was still unconscious, and seriously injured. The survivors were rushed to the hospital, where, according to Etta James, who heard the story from Jackie Wilson, they refused to treat Jo Anne Belvin until they knew that they would get money. She remained untreated until someone got in touch with Wilson, who drove down from Dallas Texas to Hope, Arkansas, where the hospital was, with the cash. But she died of her injuries a few days later. Now, here's the thing -- within a fortnight of the accident, there were rumours circulating widely enough to have been picked up by the newspapers that Belvin's car had had its tyres slashed. There were also stories, never confirmed, that Belvin had received death threats before the show. And Jackie Wilson had also had car trouble that night -- and according to some sources so had at least one other musician on the bill. So it's possible that the car was sabotaged. On the other hand, Belvin's driver, Charles Shackleford, had got the job with Belvin after being fired by Ray Charles. He was fired, according to Charles, because he kept staying awake watching the late-night shows, not getting enough sleep, and driving dangerously enough to scare Ray Charles -- who was fearless enough that he used to ride motorbikes despite being totally blind. So when Jesse and Jo Anne Belvin died, they could have been the victims of a racist murder, or they could just have been horribly unlucky. But we'll never know for sure, because the institutional racism at the time meant that there was no investigation. When they died, they left behind two children under the age of five, who were brought up by Jesse's mother. The oldest, Jesse Belvin Jr, became a singer himself, often performing material written or made famous by his father: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin Jr, "Goodnight My Love"] Jesse Jr. devoted his life to finding out what actually happened to his parents, but never found any answers.

Welcome to episode thirty-one of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This one looks at "Only You" by the Platters. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. This episode ties into several others, but in particular you might want to relisten to the episode on Earth Angel, which features several of the same cast of characters. There are no books on the Platters, as far as I know, so as I so often do when talking about vocal groups I relied heavily on Marv Goldberg's website. For details of Buck Ram's life, I relied on The Magic Touch of Buck Ram: Songwriter, a self-published book credited to J. Patrick Carr but copyrighted in the name of Gayle Schreiber. Schreiber worked for Buck Ram for many years, and both she and Carr have put out multiple books with similar writing styles and layouts which heap fulsome praise both on Ram and on his assistant Jean Bennett. Those books are low on text and high on pictures from Bennett's personal collection, and they give a version of the story which is very slanted, but they also contain details not available elsewhere. This long YouTube interview with Gaynel Hodge was interesting in giving Hodge's side of the story. Some of the court case documents I read through to try to understand the legal ownership of the Platters name: Paul Robi and Tony Williams vs Five Platters Inc Martha Robi v. Five Platters Inc, Jean Bennett, and Buck Ram Martha Robi v. Herb Reed Herb Reed Enterprises v. Jean Bennett, Five Platters, Inc. and Personality Productions, Inc.   There are many cheap compilations of the Platters' hits. There are also many cheap compilations of rerecorded versions of the Platters' hits sung by people who weren't in the Platters. This is one of the former.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript The story of the Platters is intimately tied up with another story we've already talked about -- that of the Penguins and "Earth Angel". You might want to relisten to that episode -- or listen to it for the first time, if you're coming to this podcast for the first time -- before listening to this one, as this tells a lot of the same story from an alternative perspective. But in both cases Buck Ram ends up being the villain. As I mentioned in that episode, there was a lot of movement between different vocal groups, and the Platters were very far from an exception. It's hard to talk about how they formed in the way I normally would, where you talk about these three people meeting up and then getting a friend to join them, and their personalities, and so on, because none of the five people who sang on their biggest hits were among the six people who formed the original group they came from. The Platters started out as The Flamingos -- this isn't the same group as the more well-known Flamingos, but a different group, whose lineup was Cornell Gunter, Gaynel Hodge (who was also in the Hollywood Flames at the same time), Gaynel's brother Alex Hodge, Joe Jefferson, Richard Berry, and Curtis Williams. But very quickly, the Flamingos started to lose members to other, more popular, groups. The first to leave was Curtis Williams, who went on to join the Hollywood Flames, and from there joined the Penguins. Richard Berry, meanwhile formed a band called the Hollywood Bluejays and got Cornell Gunter into the group. They recorded one single for John Dolphin's record label, before renaming themselves the Flairs and moving over to Flare records: [Excerpt: "She Wants to Rock", the Flairs] Cornel Gunter would later go on to join the Coasters, and we've already heard some of what Richard Berry would do later on in the episode on "The Wallflower". So the Flamingos had produced some great talents, but those talents' departure left some gaping holes in the lineup. Eventually, the Flamingos settled into a new lineup, consisting of Gaynel Hodge, Alex Hodge, David Lynch (not the same one as the film director), and Herb Reed. That lineup was not very good, though, and they didn't have a single singer who was strong enough to sing lead. Even so, the demand for vocal groups at the time was so great that they got signed by Ralph Bass, who was currently working for Federal Records, producing among other artists a singer called Linda Hayes. We've heard quite a bit about Linda Hayes in this series already, though you might not recognise the name. She was one of the people who had tried to cash in on Johnny Ace's death with a tribute record, "Why Johnny Why", and she was also the one who had replaced Eunice in Gene and Eunice when she went on maternity leave. We find her popping up all over the place when there was a bandwagon to jump on, and at the time we're talking about she'd just had an actual hit because of doing this. Willie Mabon had just had a hit with "I Don't Know": [Excerpt: Willie Mabon, "I Don't Know"] That had reached number one on the R&B chart and had spawned a country cover version by Tennessee Ernie Ford. And so Hayes had put out an answer record, "Yes, I Know (What You're Putting Down)": [Excerpt: Linda Hayes, "Yes, I Know (What You're Putting Down)"] Hayes' answer went to number two on the R&B charts, and she was suddenly someone it was worth paying attention to. As it turned out, she would only have one other hit, in 1954. But she introduced Ralph Bass to her brother, Tony Williams, who wanted to be a singer himself. Williams joined the Flamingos as their lead singer, and their first recording was as the vocal chorus on "Nervous Man Nervous" by Big Jay McNeely, one of the all-time great saxophone honkers, who had previously played with Johnny Otis' band: [Excerpt: Big Jay McNeely, "Nervous Man Nervous"] Shortly after that, the Flamingos were due to have their own first recording session, when a problem hit. There were only so many names of birds that groups could use, and so it wasn't surprising that someone else was using the name "the Flamingos", and that group got a hit record out. So they decided that since records were often called "platters" by disc jockeys, they might as well call themselves that. The Platters' first single did absolutely nothing: [excerpt: The Platters: "Hey Now"] They put out a few more recordings, but nothing clicked, and nobody, Ralph Bass included, thought they were any good. Gaynel Hodge finally got sick of splitting his time between groups, and left the group, to continue with the Hollywood Flames. The group seemed like they might be on the way out, and so Tony Williams went to his sister's manager, Buck Ram, and asked him if he'd be Williams' manager as a solo singer. Ram listened to him, and said he was interested, but Williams should get himself a group to sing with. Williams said that, well, he did already have a group. Ram talked to Ralph Bass and took the Platters on as a project for himself. Ram is unusual among the managers of this time, in that he was actually a musician and songwriter of some ability himself. He had obtained a law degree, mostly to please his parents, but Ram was primarily a songwriter. Long before he went into music management Ram was writing songs, and was getting them performed by musicians that you have heard of. And he seems to have been part of the music scene in New York in the late thirties and early forties in a big way, having met Duke Ellington in a music arranging class both were taking, and having been introduced by Ellington to people like Chick Webb, Cab Calloway, and Ellington's publishers, Mills Music. Ram's first big success as a songwriter was "I'll Be Home For Christmas", which had been a hit for Bing Crosby and would later become a standard: [Excerpt: Bing Crosby, "I'll Be Home For Christmas"] The story of "I'll Be Home For Christmas" was a rather controversial one -- Ram had written, on his own, a song called "I'll Be Home For Christmas (Tho Just In Memory)", and had registered the copyright in December 1942, but hadn't had it recorded by anyone. A few months later, he talked to his acquaintances Walter Kent and Kim Gannon about it, and was shocked when Crosby released a single written by them which bore a strong resemblance to Ram's song. His publishers, Mills Music, sued and got Ram credited on future releases. Buck Ram would end up fighting a lot of lawsuits, with a lot of people. But while that biggest credit was the result of a lawsuit, Ram was also, as far as I can tell, an actual songwriter of great ability. Where other managers got themselves credited on songs that they didn't write and in some cases had never heard, to the best of my knowledge there has never been any suggestion that Buck Ram wasn't the sole author of the Platters songs he's credited for. I'm so used to this working the other way, with managers taking credit for work they didn't do, that I still find it difficult to state for certain that there wasn't *some* sort of scam going on, but Ram had songwriting credits long before getting into the business side of things. Here, for example, is a song he wrote with Chick Webb, sung by Ella Fitzgerald: [Excerpt: "Chew Chew Chew Your Bubblegum", Chick Webb and Ella Fitzgerald] He spent several years working as a songwriter and arranger in New York, but made the mistake of moving West in order to get into the film music business, only to find that he couldn't break into the market and had to move into management instead. But making music, rather than managing it, was his first love, and he saw the Platters as a means to that end -- raw material he could mould in his own image. Ram signed the Platters, now a four-piece consisting of Williams, Alex Hodge, David Lynch, and Herb Reed, to a seven-year contract, and started trying to mould them into a hit act. The first single they released after signing with Ram was one which, rather oddly, featured Herb Reed on lead vocals on both sides, rather than their normal lead Tony Williams: [Excerpt: The Platters, "Roses of Picardy"] They still had the problem, though, that they simply weren't very good at singing. At the time, they didn't know how to sing in harmony -- they'd just take turns singing lead, and often not be able to sing in the same key as each other. This didn't have much success, but Ram had an idea. In the forties, he'd managed and written for a group called the Quin-Tones. There were several groups of that name over the years, but this one had been a white vocal group with four men and one woman. They weren't very successful, but here's one of their few surviving recordings, "Midnight Jamboree", written and arranged by Ram: [Excerpt: the Quin-Tones, "Midnight Jamboree"] Working with the Quin-Tones had given Ram a taste for the particular vocal blend that comes from having four men and one woman. This had been a popular group style in the 1940s, thanks to the influence of the Modernaires -- the vocal group who sang with the Glenn Miller Orchestra -- but had largely fallen out of favour in the 50s. Ram decided to reform the Platters along these lines. The woman he chose to bring into the group was a singer Gaynel Hodge knew called Zola Taylor. Taylor had been recording as a solo artist, with little success, but she had a good sound on her recordings for RPM Records: [Excerpt: Zola Taylor, "Oh! My Dear"] With Zola in the group, Ram's ideal vocal sound was almost complete. But they hadn't quite got themselves together -- after all, there was still an original member left! But Alex Hodge wouldn't last long, as he was arrested for marijuana possession, and he was replaced by Paul Robi. Gaynel Hodge now claims that this wasn't the real reason that Alex Hodge was sacked – he says that Ram and Herb Reed conspired to get rid of Alex, who in Gaynel's telling had been the original founder of the group, because he knew too much about the music business and was getting suspicious that Ram was ripping him off. Either way, the last original member was now gone, and the Platters were Tony Williams, Zola Taylor, Herb Reed, Paul Robi, and David Lynch. This would now be the lineup that would stay together for the rest of the 1950s and beyond. Before that change though, the Platters had recorded a song that had sounded so bad that Ram had persuaded the label not to release it. "Only You" was a song that Ram had written with the intention of passing it on to the Ink Spots, but for whatever reason he had never got round to it, though he'd written for the Ink Spots before -- they'd released his "I'll Lose a Friend Tomorrow" in 1946: [Excerpt: The Ink Spots: "I'll Lose A Friend Tomorrow"] He later said that he'd decided against giving "Only You" to the Ink Spots because they'd split up before he had a chance. That's not accurate -- the Ink Spots were still around when the earliest recordings of the song by the Platters were made. More likely, he just didn't like the song. After he wrote it, he stuck the sheet music in a box, where it languished until Jean Bennett, his assistant, was moving things around and the box fell apart. Bennett looked at the song, and said she thought it looked interesting. Ram said it was rubbish, but Bennett put the sheet music on top of Ram's piano. When Tony Williams saw it, he insisted on recording it. But that initial recording seemed to confirm Ram's assessment that the song was terrible: [Excerpt: The Platters, "Only You" (original version), including the incredibly bad ending chord] During this period the band were also recording tracks backing Linda Hayes, and indeed there was also a brother-sister duet credited to Linda Hayes and Tony Williams (of the Platters): [Excerpt, Linda Hayes and Tony Williams, "Oochi Pachi"] And again, Hayes was trying to jump on the bandwagons, recording an "Annie" song with the Platters on backing vocals, in the hope of getting some of the money that was going to Hank Ballard and Etta James: [Excerpt: Linda Hayes and the Platters, "My Name Ain't Annie"] But none of those records sold at all, and despite Ram's best efforts it looked like the Platters were simply not going to be having any recording success any time soon. Federal dropped them, as it looked likely they were going to do nothing. But then, the group got very lucky. Buck Ram became the manager of the Penguins, another group that had formed out of the primal soup of singers around LA. The Penguins had just had what turned out to be their only big hit, with "Earth Angel", and Mercury Records were eager to sign them. Ram agreed to the deal, but only on the condition that Mercury signed the Platters as well. Once they were signed, Ram largely gave up on the Penguins, who never had any further success. They'd served his purpose, and got the group he really cared about signed to a major label. There was a six-month break between the last session the Platters did for Federal and the first they did for Mercury. During that time, there was only one session -- as backing vocalists for Joe Houston: [Excerpt: Joe Houston, "Shtiggy Boom"] But they spent that six months practising, and when they got into the studio to record for Mercury, they suddenly sounded *good*: [Excerpt: The Platters, "Only You"] Everything had fallen into place. They were now a slick, professional group. They'd even got good enough that they could incorporate mistakes when they worked -- on an early take, Williams' voice cracked on the word "only", and he apologised to Ram, who said, "no, it sounded good, use it". And "Only You" became one of those songs that defines an era. More than any of the doo-wop songs we've covered previously, it's the epitome of 1950s smooth balladry. It was a massive hit -- it spent thirty weeks on the R&B charts, seven of them at number one, and twenty-two weeks on the pop charts, peaking at number five. Federal rush-released the awful original recording to cash in, and Ram and Mercury took them to court, which eventually ruled in favour of Federal being allowed to put out their version, but the judge also said that that decision might well turn out to be more harmful to Federal than to Mercury. The Federal version didn't chart. The follow-up to “Only You”, also by Ram, was even bigger: [Excerpt: The Platters, "The Great Pretender"] And this started a whole string of hits -- "The Magic Touch", "Twilight Time", "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes"... most of these weren't quite as long-lasting as their first two massive hits, but they were regulars at the top of the pop charts. The Platters were, in many ways, the 1950s equivalent to the Ink Spots, and while they started off marketed as a rock and roll group, they soon transitioned into the more lucrative adult market, recording albums of standards. But having emulated the Ink Spots in their biggest hits, the Platters also, sadly, emulated the Ink Spots in the way they fell apart. Unfortunately, the only book I've been able to find that talks about the Platters in any depth is written by someone working for Buck Ram's organisation, and so it has a very particular biased take on the legal disputes that followed for the next sixty years. I've tried to counter this by at least skimming some of the court documents that are available online, but it's not really possible to get an accurate sense, either from court filings from 2011 or the mid-eighties, or from a self-published and self-defensive book from 2015, what actually happened between the five Platters, Ram, and Ram's assistant Jean Bennett back in the late 1950s. What everyone seems to agree on, though, is that soon after the Platters were signed to Mercury, a corporation was set up, "Five Platters Inc", which was controlled by Buck Ram and had all the members of the Platters as shareholders. The Platters, at the time, assigned any rights they had to the band's name to this corporation. But then, in 1959, Tony Williams, who had always wanted a solo career, decided he wanted to pursue one more vigorously. He was going to leave the group, and he put out a solo album: [Excerpt: Tony Williams, "Charmaine"] Indeed, it seems to have been Buck Ram's plan from the very start to get Williams to be a solo artist, while keeping the Platters as a hit group -- he tried to find a replacement for Williams as early as 1956, although that didn't work out. For a while, Williams continued in the Platters, while they looked for a replacement, but his solo career didn't go wonderfully at first. He wasn't helped by all four of the male Platters being arrested, allegedly as customers of sex workers, but in fact because they were sharing their hotel room with white women. All charges against everyone involved were later dropped, but this meant that it probably wasn't the best time for Williams to be starting a solo career. But by 1961, Williams had managed to extricate himself from the Platters, and had been replaced by a young singer called Sonny Turner, who could sound a little like Williams. The record company were so convinced that Williams was the important one in the Platters, though, that on many of their recordings for the next year or two Mercury would take completed recordings by the new Platters lineup and overdub new lead vocals from Williams. But one at a time the band members left, following Williams. And as each member left, they sold their shares in Five Platters Inc. to Buck Ram or to one of Ram's companies. By 1969 Herb Reed was the only member of the classic lineup still in the group, and then he left the group too, and Buck Ram and his companies continued putting out groups with no original members as the Platters. Now, this doesn't mean that the real members stopped touring as the Platters. After David Lynch left in 1967, for example, he formed a group called "The Original Platters", and got both Zola Taylor and Paul Robi into the group. Tony Williams, Herb Reed, and Sonny Turner all also formed their own groups which toured under the Platters name, competing with the "official" Buck Ram Platters. There followed forty years of litigation between Ram's companies and various Platters members. And the judgements went both ways, to the point that I can't make accurate judgements from the case documents I've been able to find online. As best as I can understand it, there was a court ruling back in 1974 that the whole purpose of Five Platters Inc. had been to illegally deprive the band members of their ownership in the band name, that it was a sham corporation, and that Buck Ram had illegally benefited from an unfair bargaining position. Shortly after that, it was ruled that FPI's trademark in the Platters name was void. But then there were other cases which went the other way, and Five Platters Inc. insisted that the band members had mostly left because they were alcoholics who didn't want to tour any more, and that they'd given up their rights to the band name of their own free will. Meanwhile, over a hundred fake Platters groups with no original members went out on the road at various points. There have been almost as many fake Platters as there have fake Ink Spots. The band name issues were finally resolved in 2011. By that point Buck Ram was long dead, as were all the members of the classic Platters lineup except Herb Reed. A judge finally ruled that Herb Reed had the rights to the name, and that Five Platters Inc. had never owned the name. Just before that ruling, Five Platters Inc., which was now run by Jean Bennett, announced that they were going to retire the name. Herb Reed died in 2012, shortly afterwards, though the company he licensed the name to still licenses a band to tour as the Platters. Gaynel Hodge, however, is still alive, the last surviving member of the original Platters, and he still performs with his own Platters group, performing songs the Platters recorded after he left. His website hasn't been updated since 2005, but at the time its most recent newsflash was that he had co-written this song with Dr. John for Shemekia Copeland: [Excerpt: Shemekia Copeland, "Too Close"] Gaynel Hodge was a major figure in the California music industry. He'll be turning up in all sorts of odd places in future episodes, as he was involved in a lot of very important records. And we'll definitely be seeing more of both Richard Berry and Cornell Gunter later as well. And meanwhile, somewhere out there are multiple groups of people who've never met anyone who sang on "Only You", singing that song right now and calling themselves the Platters.

Welcome to episode thirty-one of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This one looks at “Only You” by the Platters. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. This episode ties into several others, but in particular you might want to relisten to the episode on Earth Angel, which features several of the same cast of characters. There are no books on the Platters, as far as I know, so as I so often do when talking about vocal groups I relied heavily on Marv Goldberg’s website. For details of Buck Ram’s life, I relied on The Magic Touch of Buck Ram: Songwriter, a self-published book credited to J. Patrick Carr but copyrighted in the name of Gayle Schreiber. Schreiber worked for Buck Ram for many years, and both she and Carr have put out multiple books with similar writing styles and layouts which heap fulsome praise both on Ram and on his assistant Jean Bennett. Those books are low on text and high on pictures from Bennett’s personal collection, and they give a version of the story which is very slanted, but they also contain details not available elsewhere. This long YouTube interview with Gaynel Hodge was interesting in giving Hodge’s side of the story. Some of the court case documents I read through to try to understand the legal ownership of the Platters name: Paul Robi and Tony Williams vs Five Platters Inc Martha Robi v. Five Platters Inc, Jean Bennett, and Buck Ram Martha Robi v. Herb Reed Herb Reed Enterprises v. Jean Bennett, Five Platters, Inc. and Personality Productions, Inc.   There are many cheap compilations of the Platters’ hits. There are also many cheap compilations of rerecorded versions of the Platters’ hits sung by people who weren’t in the Platters. This is one of the former.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript The story of the Platters is intimately tied up with another story we’ve already talked about — that of the Penguins and “Earth Angel”. You might want to relisten to that episode — or listen to it for the first time, if you’re coming to this podcast for the first time — before listening to this one, as this tells a lot of the same story from an alternative perspective. But in both cases Buck Ram ends up being the villain. As I mentioned in that episode, there was a lot of movement between different vocal groups, and the Platters were very far from an exception. It’s hard to talk about how they formed in the way I normally would, where you talk about these three people meeting up and then getting a friend to join them, and their personalities, and so on, because none of the five people who sang on their biggest hits were among the six people who formed the original group they came from. The Platters started out as The Flamingos — this isn’t the same group as the more well-known Flamingos, but a different group, whose lineup was Cornell Gunter, Gaynel Hodge (who was also in the Hollywood Flames at the same time), Gaynel’s brother Alex Hodge, Joe Jefferson, Richard Berry, and Curtis Williams. But very quickly, the Flamingos started to lose members to other, more popular, groups. The first to leave was Curtis Williams, who went on to join the Hollywood Flames, and from there joined the Penguins. Richard Berry, meanwhile formed a band called the Hollywood Bluejays and got Cornell Gunter into the group. They recorded one single for John Dolphin’s record label, before renaming themselves the Flairs and moving over to Flare records: [Excerpt: “She Wants to Rock”, the Flairs] Cornel Gunter would later go on to join the Coasters, and we’ve already heard some of what Richard Berry would do later on in the episode on “The Wallflower”. So the Flamingos had produced some great talents, but those talents’ departure left some gaping holes in the lineup. Eventually, the Flamingos settled into a new lineup, consisting of Gaynel Hodge, Alex Hodge, David Lynch (not the same one as the film director), and Herb Reed. That lineup was not very good, though, and they didn’t have a single singer who was strong enough to sing lead. Even so, the demand for vocal groups at the time was so great that they got signed by Ralph Bass, who was currently working for Federal Records, producing among other artists a singer called Linda Hayes. We’ve heard quite a bit about Linda Hayes in this series already, though you might not recognise the name. She was one of the people who had tried to cash in on Johnny Ace’s death with a tribute record, “Why Johnny Why”, and she was also the one who had replaced Eunice in Gene and Eunice when she went on maternity leave. We find her popping up all over the place when there was a bandwagon to jump on, and at the time we’re talking about she’d just had an actual hit because of doing this. Willie Mabon had just had a hit with “I Don’t Know”: [Excerpt: Willie Mabon, “I Don’t Know”] That had reached number one on the R&B chart and had spawned a country cover version by Tennessee Ernie Ford. And so Hayes had put out an answer record, “Yes, I Know (What You’re Putting Down)”: [Excerpt: Linda Hayes, “Yes, I Know (What You’re Putting Down)”] Hayes’ answer went to number two on the R&B charts, and she was suddenly someone it was worth paying attention to. As it turned out, she would only have one other hit, in 1954. But she introduced Ralph Bass to her brother, Tony Williams, who wanted to be a singer himself. Williams joined the Flamingos as their lead singer, and their first recording was as the vocal chorus on “Nervous Man Nervous” by Big Jay McNeely, one of the all-time great saxophone honkers, who had previously played with Johnny Otis’ band: [Excerpt: Big Jay McNeely, “Nervous Man Nervous”] Shortly after that, the Flamingos were due to have their own first recording session, when a problem hit. There were only so many names of birds that groups could use, and so it wasn’t surprising that someone else was using the name “the Flamingos”, and that group got a hit record out. So they decided that since records were often called “platters” by disc jockeys, they might as well call themselves that. The Platters’ first single did absolutely nothing: [excerpt: The Platters: “Hey Now”] They put out a few more recordings, but nothing clicked, and nobody, Ralph Bass included, thought they were any good. Gaynel Hodge finally got sick of splitting his time between groups, and left the group, to continue with the Hollywood Flames. The group seemed like they might be on the way out, and so Tony Williams went to his sister’s manager, Buck Ram, and asked him if he’d be Williams’ manager as a solo singer. Ram listened to him, and said he was interested, but Williams should get himself a group to sing with. Williams said that, well, he did already have a group. Ram talked to Ralph Bass and took the Platters on as a project for himself. Ram is unusual among the managers of this time, in that he was actually a musician and songwriter of some ability himself. He had obtained a law degree, mostly to please his parents, but Ram was primarily a songwriter. Long before he went into music management Ram was writing songs, and was getting them performed by musicians that you have heard of. And he seems to have been part of the music scene in New York in the late thirties and early forties in a big way, having met Duke Ellington in a music arranging class both were taking, and having been introduced by Ellington to people like Chick Webb, Cab Calloway, and Ellington’s publishers, Mills Music. Ram’s first big success as a songwriter was “I’ll Be Home For Christmas”, which had been a hit for Bing Crosby and would later become a standard: [Excerpt: Bing Crosby, “I’ll Be Home For Christmas”] The story of “I’ll Be Home For Christmas” was a rather controversial one — Ram had written, on his own, a song called “I’ll Be Home For Christmas (Tho Just In Memory)”, and had registered the copyright in December 1942, but hadn’t had it recorded by anyone. A few months later, he talked to his acquaintances Walter Kent and Kim Gannon about it, and was shocked when Crosby released a single written by them which bore a strong resemblance to Ram’s song. His publishers, Mills Music, sued and got Ram credited on future releases. Buck Ram would end up fighting a lot of lawsuits, with a lot of people. But while that biggest credit was the result of a lawsuit, Ram was also, as far as I can tell, an actual songwriter of great ability. Where other managers got themselves credited on songs that they didn’t write and in some cases had never heard, to the best of my knowledge there has never been any suggestion that Buck Ram wasn’t the sole author of the Platters songs he’s credited for. I’m so used to this working the other way, with managers taking credit for work they didn’t do, that I still find it difficult to state for certain that there wasn’t *some* sort of scam going on, but Ram had songwriting credits long before getting into the business side of things. Here, for example, is a song he wrote with Chick Webb, sung by Ella Fitzgerald: [Excerpt: “Chew Chew Chew Your Bubblegum”, Chick Webb and Ella Fitzgerald] He spent several years working as a songwriter and arranger in New York, but made the mistake of moving West in order to get into the film music business, only to find that he couldn’t break into the market and had to move into management instead. But making music, rather than managing it, was his first love, and he saw the Platters as a means to that end — raw material he could mould in his own image. Ram signed the Platters, now a four-piece consisting of Williams, Alex Hodge, David Lynch, and Herb Reed, to a seven-year contract, and started trying to mould them into a hit act. The first single they released after signing with Ram was one which, rather oddly, featured Herb Reed on lead vocals on both sides, rather than their normal lead Tony Williams: [Excerpt: The Platters, “Roses of Picardy”] They still had the problem, though, that they simply weren’t very good at singing. At the time, they didn’t know how to sing in harmony — they’d just take turns singing lead, and often not be able to sing in the same key as each other. This didn’t have much success, but Ram had an idea. In the forties, he’d managed and written for a group called the Quin-Tones. There were several groups of that name over the years, but this one had been a white vocal group with four men and one woman. They weren’t very successful, but here’s one of their few surviving recordings, “Midnight Jamboree”, written and arranged by Ram: [Excerpt: the Quin-Tones, “Midnight Jamboree”] Working with the Quin-Tones had given Ram a taste for the particular vocal blend that comes from having four men and one woman. This had been a popular group style in the 1940s, thanks to the influence of the Modernaires — the vocal group who sang with the Glenn Miller Orchestra — but had largely fallen out of favour in the 50s. Ram decided to reform the Platters along these lines. The woman he chose to bring into the group was a singer Gaynel Hodge knew called Zola Taylor. Taylor had been recording as a solo artist, with little success, but she had a good sound on her recordings for RPM Records: [Excerpt: Zola Taylor, “Oh! My Dear”] With Zola in the group, Ram’s ideal vocal sound was almost complete. But they hadn’t quite got themselves together — after all, there was still an original member left! But Alex Hodge wouldn’t last long, as he was arrested for marijuana possession, and he was replaced by Paul Robi. Gaynel Hodge now claims that this wasn’t the real reason that Alex Hodge was sacked – he says that Ram and Herb Reed conspired to get rid of Alex, who in Gaynel’s telling had been the original founder of the group, because he knew too much about the music business and was getting suspicious that Ram was ripping him off. Either way, the last original member was now gone, and the Platters were Tony Williams, Zola Taylor, Herb Reed, Paul Robi, and David Lynch. This would now be the lineup that would stay together for the rest of the 1950s and beyond. Before that change though, the Platters had recorded a song that had sounded so bad that Ram had persuaded the label not to release it. “Only You” was a song that Ram had written with the intention of passing it on to the Ink Spots, but for whatever reason he had never got round to it, though he’d written for the Ink Spots before — they’d released his “I’ll Lose a Friend Tomorrow” in 1946: [Excerpt: The Ink Spots: “I’ll Lose A Friend Tomorrow”] He later said that he’d decided against giving “Only You” to the Ink Spots because they’d split up before he had a chance. That’s not accurate — the Ink Spots were still around when the earliest recordings of the song by the Platters were made. More likely, he just didn’t like the song. After he wrote it, he stuck the sheet music in a box, where it languished until Jean Bennett, his assistant, was moving things around and the box fell apart. Bennett looked at the song, and said she thought it looked interesting. Ram said it was rubbish, but Bennett put the sheet music on top of Ram’s piano. When Tony Williams saw it, he insisted on recording it. But that initial recording seemed to confirm Ram’s assessment that the song was terrible: [Excerpt: The Platters, “Only You” (original version), including the incredibly bad ending chord] During this period the band were also recording tracks backing Linda Hayes, and indeed there was also a brother-sister duet credited to Linda Hayes and Tony Williams (of the Platters): [Excerpt, Linda Hayes and Tony Williams, “Oochi Pachi”] And again, Hayes was trying to jump on the bandwagons, recording an “Annie” song with the Platters on backing vocals, in the hope of getting some of the money that was going to Hank Ballard and Etta James: [Excerpt: Linda Hayes and the Platters, “My Name Ain’t Annie”] But none of those records sold at all, and despite Ram’s best efforts it looked like the Platters were simply not going to be having any recording success any time soon. Federal dropped them, as it looked likely they were going to do nothing. But then, the group got very lucky. Buck Ram became the manager of the Penguins, another group that had formed out of the primal soup of singers around LA. The Penguins had just had what turned out to be their only big hit, with “Earth Angel”, and Mercury Records were eager to sign them. Ram agreed to the deal, but only on the condition that Mercury signed the Platters as well. Once they were signed, Ram largely gave up on the Penguins, who never had any further success. They’d served his purpose, and got the group he really cared about signed to a major label. There was a six-month break between the last session the Platters did for Federal and the first they did for Mercury. During that time, there was only one session — as backing vocalists for Joe Houston: [Excerpt: Joe Houston, “Shtiggy Boom”] But they spent that six months practising, and when they got into the studio to record for Mercury, they suddenly sounded *good*: [Excerpt: The Platters, “Only You”] Everything had fallen into place. They were now a slick, professional group. They’d even got good enough that they could incorporate mistakes when they worked — on an early take, Williams’ voice cracked on the word “only”, and he apologised to Ram, who said, “no, it sounded good, use it”. And “Only You” became one of those songs that defines an era. More than any of the doo-wop songs we’ve covered previously, it’s the epitome of 1950s smooth balladry. It was a massive hit — it spent thirty weeks on the R&B charts, seven of them at number one, and twenty-two weeks on the pop charts, peaking at number five. Federal rush-released the awful original recording to cash in, and Ram and Mercury took them to court, which eventually ruled in favour of Federal being allowed to put out their version, but the judge also said that that decision might well turn out to be more harmful to Federal than to Mercury. The Federal version didn’t chart. The follow-up to “Only You”, also by Ram, was even bigger: [Excerpt: The Platters, “The Great Pretender”] And this started a whole string of hits — “The Magic Touch”, “Twilight Time”, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”… most of these weren’t quite as long-lasting as their first two massive hits, but they were regulars at the top of the pop charts. The Platters were, in many ways, the 1950s equivalent to the Ink Spots, and while they started off marketed as a rock and roll group, they soon transitioned into the more lucrative adult market, recording albums of standards. But having emulated the Ink Spots in their biggest hits, the Platters also, sadly, emulated the Ink Spots in the way they fell apart. Unfortunately, the only book I’ve been able to find that talks about the Platters in any depth is written by someone working for Buck Ram’s organisation, and so it has a very particular biased take on the legal disputes that followed for the next sixty years. I’ve tried to counter this by at least skimming some of the court documents that are available online, but it’s not really possible to get an accurate sense, either from court filings from 2011 or the mid-eighties, or from a self-published and self-defensive book from 2015, what actually happened between the five Platters, Ram, and Ram’s assistant Jean Bennett back in the late 1950s. What everyone seems to agree on, though, is that soon after the Platters were signed to Mercury, a corporation was set up, “Five Platters Inc”, which was controlled by Buck Ram and had all the members of the Platters as shareholders. The Platters, at the time, assigned any rights they had to the band’s name to this corporation. But then, in 1959, Tony Williams, who had always wanted a solo career, decided he wanted to pursue one more vigorously. He was going to leave the group, and he put out a solo album: [Excerpt: Tony Williams, “Charmaine”] Indeed, it seems to have been Buck Ram’s plan from the very start to get Williams to be a solo artist, while keeping the Platters as a hit group — he tried to find a replacement for Williams as early as 1956, although that didn’t work out. For a while, Williams continued in the Platters, while they looked for a replacement, but his solo career didn’t go wonderfully at first. He wasn’t helped by all four of the male Platters being arrested, allegedly as customers of sex workers, but in fact because they were sharing their hotel room with white women. All charges against everyone involved were later dropped, but this meant that it probably wasn’t the best time for Williams to be starting a solo career. But by 1961, Williams had managed to extricate himself from the Platters, and had been replaced by a young singer called Sonny Turner, who could sound a little like Williams. The record company were so convinced that Williams was the important one in the Platters, though, that on many of their recordings for the next year or two Mercury would take completed recordings by the new Platters lineup and overdub new lead vocals from Williams. But one at a time the band members left, following Williams. And as each member left, they sold their shares in Five Platters Inc. to Buck Ram or to one of Ram’s companies. By 1969 Herb Reed was the only member of the classic lineup still in the group, and then he left the group too, and Buck Ram and his companies continued putting out groups with no original members as the Platters. Now, this doesn’t mean that the real members stopped touring as the Platters. After David Lynch left in 1967, for example, he formed a group called “The Original Platters”, and got both Zola Taylor and Paul Robi into the group. Tony Williams, Herb Reed, and Sonny Turner all also formed their own groups which toured under the Platters name, competing with the “official” Buck Ram Platters. There followed forty years of litigation between Ram’s companies and various Platters members. And the judgements went both ways, to the point that I can’t make accurate judgements from the case documents I’ve been able to find online. As best as I can understand it, there was a court ruling back in 1974 that the whole purpose of Five Platters Inc. had been to illegally deprive the band members of their ownership in the band name, that it was a sham corporation, and that Buck Ram had illegally benefited from an unfair bargaining position. Shortly after that, it was ruled that FPI’s trademark in the Platters name was void. But then there were other cases which went the other way, and Five Platters Inc. insisted that the band members had mostly left because they were alcoholics who didn’t want to tour any more, and that they’d given up their rights to the band name of their own free will. Meanwhile, over a hundred fake Platters groups with no original members went out on the road at various points. There have been almost as many fake Platters as there have fake Ink Spots. The band name issues were finally resolved in 2011. By that point Buck Ram was long dead, as were all the members of the classic Platters lineup except Herb Reed. A judge finally ruled that Herb Reed had the rights to the name, and that Five Platters Inc. had never owned the name. Just before that ruling, Five Platters Inc., which was now run by Jean Bennett, announced that they were going to retire the name. Herb Reed died in 2012, shortly afterwards, though the company he licensed the name to still licenses a band to tour as the Platters. Gaynel Hodge, however, is still alive, the last surviving member of the original Platters, and he still performs with his own Platters group, performing songs the Platters recorded after he left. His website hasn’t been updated since 2005, but at the time its most recent newsflash was that he had co-written this song with Dr. John for Shemekia Copeland: [Excerpt: Shemekia Copeland, “Too Close”] Gaynel Hodge was a major figure in the California music industry. He’ll be turning up in all sorts of odd places in future episodes, as he was involved in a lot of very important records. And we’ll definitely be seeing more of both Richard Berry and Cornell Gunter later as well. And meanwhile, somewhere out there are multiple groups of people who’ve never met anyone who sang on “Only You”, singing that song right now and calling themselves the Platters.

Welcome to episode thirty-one of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This one looks at “Only You” by the Platters. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. This episode ties into several others, but in particular you might want to relisten to the episode on Earth Angel, which features several of the same cast of characters. There are no books on the Platters, as far as I know, so as I so often do when talking about vocal groups I relied heavily on Marv Goldberg’s website. For details of Buck Ram’s life, I relied on The Magic Touch of Buck Ram: Songwriter, a self-published book credited to J. Patrick Carr but copyrighted in the name of Gayle Schreiber. Schreiber worked for Buck Ram for many years, and both she and Carr have put out multiple books with similar writing styles and layouts which heap fulsome praise both on Ram and on his assistant Jean Bennett. Those books are low on text and high on pictures from Bennett’s personal collection, and they give a version of the story which is very slanted, but they also contain details not available elsewhere. This long YouTube interview with Gaynel Hodge was interesting in giving Hodge’s side of the story. Some of the court case documents I read through to try to understand the legal ownership of the Platters name: Paul Robi and Tony Williams vs Five Platters Inc Martha Robi v. Five Platters Inc, Jean Bennett, and Buck Ram Martha Robi v. Herb Reed Herb Reed Enterprises v. Jean Bennett, Five Platters, Inc. and Personality Productions, Inc.   There are many cheap compilations of the Platters’ hits. There are also many cheap compilations of rerecorded versions of the Platters’ hits sung by people who weren’t in the Platters. This is one of the former.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript The story of the Platters is intimately tied up with another story we’ve already talked about — that of the Penguins and “Earth Angel”. You might want to relisten to that episode — or listen to it for the first time, if you’re coming to this podcast for the first time — before listening to this one, as this tells a lot of the same story from an alternative perspective. But in both cases Buck Ram ends up being the villain. As I mentioned in that episode, there was a lot of movement between different vocal groups, and the Platters were very far from an exception. It’s hard to talk about how they formed in the way I normally would, where you talk about these three people meeting up and then getting a friend to join them, and their personalities, and so on, because none of the five people who sang on their biggest hits were among the six people who formed the original group they came from. The Platters started out as The Flamingos — this isn’t the same group as the more well-known Flamingos, but a different group, whose lineup was Cornell Gunter, Gaynel Hodge (who was also in the Hollywood Flames at the same time), Gaynel’s brother Alex Hodge, Joe Jefferson, Richard Berry, and Curtis Williams. But very quickly, the Flamingos started to lose members to other, more popular, groups. The first to leave was Curtis Williams, who went on to join the Hollywood Flames, and from there joined the Penguins. Richard Berry, meanwhile formed a band called the Hollywood Bluejays and got Cornell Gunter into the group. They recorded one single for John Dolphin’s record label, before renaming themselves the Flairs and moving over to Flare records: [Excerpt: “She Wants to Rock”, the Flairs] Cornel Gunter would later go on to join the Coasters, and we’ve already heard some of what Richard Berry would do later on in the episode on “The Wallflower”. So the Flamingos had produced some great talents, but those talents’ departure left some gaping holes in the lineup. Eventually, the Flamingos settled into a new lineup, consisting of Gaynel Hodge, Alex Hodge, David Lynch (not the same one as the film director), and Herb Reed. That lineup was not very good, though, and they didn’t have a single singer who was strong enough to sing lead. Even so, the demand for vocal groups at the time was so great that they got signed by Ralph Bass, who was currently working for Federal Records, producing among other artists a singer called Linda Hayes. We’ve heard quite a bit about Linda Hayes in this series already, though you might not recognise the name. She was one of the people who had tried to cash in on Johnny Ace’s death with a tribute record, “Why Johnny Why”, and she was also the one who had replaced Eunice in Gene and Eunice when she went on maternity leave. We find her popping up all over the place when there was a bandwagon to jump on, and at the time we’re talking about she’d just had an actual hit because of doing this. Willie Mabon had just had a hit with “I Don’t Know”: [Excerpt: Willie Mabon, “I Don’t Know”] That had reached number one on the R&B chart and had spawned a country cover version by Tennessee Ernie Ford. And so Hayes had put out an answer record, “Yes, I Know (What You’re Putting Down)”: [Excerpt: Linda Hayes, “Yes, I Know (What You’re Putting Down)”] Hayes’ answer went to number two on the R&B charts, and she was suddenly someone it was worth paying attention to. As it turned out, she would only have one other hit, in 1954. But she introduced Ralph Bass to her brother, Tony Williams, who wanted to be a singer himself. Williams joined the Flamingos as their lead singer, and their first recording was as the vocal chorus on “Nervous Man Nervous” by Big Jay McNeely, one of the all-time great saxophone honkers, who had previously played with Johnny Otis’ band: [Excerpt: Big Jay McNeely, “Nervous Man Nervous”] Shortly after that, the Flamingos were due to have their own first recording session, when a problem hit. There were only so many names of birds that groups could use, and so it wasn’t surprising that someone else was using the name “the Flamingos”, and that group got a hit record out. So they decided that since records were often called “platters” by disc jockeys, they might as well call themselves that. The Platters’ first single did absolutely nothing: [excerpt: The Platters: “Hey Now”] They put out a few more recordings, but nothing clicked, and nobody, Ralph Bass included, thought they were any good. Gaynel Hodge finally got sick of splitting his time between groups, and left the group, to continue with the Hollywood Flames. The group seemed like they might be on the way out, and so Tony Williams went to his sister’s manager, Buck Ram, and asked him if he’d be Williams’ manager as a solo singer. Ram listened to him, and said he was interested, but Williams should get himself a group to sing with. Williams said that, well, he did already have a group. Ram talked to Ralph Bass and took the Platters on as a project for himself. Ram is unusual among the managers of this time, in that he was actually a musician and songwriter of some ability himself. He had obtained a law degree, mostly to please his parents, but Ram was primarily a songwriter. Long before he went into music management Ram was writing songs, and was getting them performed by musicians that you have heard of. And he seems to have been part of the music scene in New York in the late thirties and early forties in a big way, having met Duke Ellington in a music arranging class both were taking, and having been introduced by Ellington to people like Chick Webb, Cab Calloway, and Ellington’s publishers, Mills Music. Ram’s first big success as a songwriter was “I’ll Be Home For Christmas”, which had been a hit for Bing Crosby and would later become a standard: [Excerpt: Bing Crosby, “I’ll Be Home For Christmas”] The story of “I’ll Be Home For Christmas” was a rather controversial one — Ram had written, on his own, a song called “I’ll Be Home For Christmas (Tho Just In Memory)”, and had registered the copyright in December 1942, but hadn’t had it recorded by anyone. A few months later, he talked to his acquaintances Walter Kent and Kim Gannon about it, and was shocked when Crosby released a single written by them which bore a strong resemblance to Ram’s song. His publishers, Mills Music, sued and got Ram credited on future releases. Buck Ram would end up fighting a lot of lawsuits, with a lot of people. But while that biggest credit was the result of a lawsuit, Ram was also, as far as I can tell, an actual songwriter of great ability. Where other managers got themselves credited on songs that they didn’t write and in some cases had never heard, to the best of my knowledge there has never been any suggestion that Buck Ram wasn’t the sole author of the Platters songs he’s credited for. I’m so used to this working the other way, with managers taking credit for work they didn’t do, that I still find it difficult to state for certain that there wasn’t *some* sort of scam going on, but Ram had songwriting credits long before getting into the business side of things. Here, for example, is a song he wrote with Chick Webb, sung by Ella Fitzgerald: [Excerpt: “Chew Chew Chew Your Bubblegum”, Chick Webb and Ella Fitzgerald] He spent several years working as a songwriter and arranger in New York, but made the mistake of moving West in order to get into the film music business, only to find that he couldn’t break into the market and had to move into management instead. But making music, rather than managing it, was his first love, and he saw the Platters as a means to that end — raw material he could mould in his own image. Ram signed the Platters, now a four-piece consisting of Williams, Alex Hodge, David Lynch, and Herb Reed, to a seven-year contract, and started trying to mould them into a hit act. The first single they released after signing with Ram was one which, rather oddly, featured Herb Reed on lead vocals on both sides, rather than their normal lead Tony Williams: [Excerpt: The Platters, “Roses of Picardy”] They still had the problem, though, that they simply weren’t very good at singing. At the time, they didn’t know how to sing in harmony — they’d just take turns singing lead, and often not be able to sing in the same key as each other. This didn’t have much success, but Ram had an idea. In the forties, he’d managed and written for a group called the Quin-Tones. There were several groups of that name over the years, but this one had been a white vocal group with four men and one woman. They weren’t very successful, but here’s one of their few surviving recordings, “Midnight Jamboree”, written and arranged by Ram: [Excerpt: the Quin-Tones, “Midnight Jamboree”] Working with the Quin-Tones had given Ram a taste for the particular vocal blend that comes from having four men and one woman. This had been a popular group style in the 1940s, thanks to the influence of the Modernaires — the vocal group who sang with the Glenn Miller Orchestra — but had largely fallen out of favour in the 50s. Ram decided to reform the Platters along these lines. The woman he chose to bring into the group was a singer Gaynel Hodge knew called Zola Taylor. Taylor had been recording as a solo artist, with little success, but she had a good sound on her recordings for RPM Records: [Excerpt: Zola Taylor, “Oh! My Dear”] With Zola in the group, Ram’s ideal vocal sound was almost complete. But they hadn’t quite got themselves together — after all, there was still an original member left! But Alex Hodge wouldn’t last long, as he was arrested for marijuana possession, and he was replaced by Paul Robi. Gaynel Hodge now claims that this wasn’t the real reason that Alex Hodge was sacked – he says that Ram and Herb Reed conspired to get rid of Alex, who in Gaynel’s telling had been the original founder of the group, because he knew too much about the music business and was getting suspicious that Ram was ripping him off. Either way, the last original member was now gone, and the Platters were Tony Williams, Zola Taylor, Herb Reed, Paul Robi, and David Lynch. This would now be the lineup that would stay together for the rest of the 1950s and beyond. Before that change though, the Platters had recorded a song that had sounded so bad that Ram had persuaded the label not to release it. “Only You” was a song that Ram had written with the intention of passing it on to the Ink Spots, but for whatever reason he had never got round to it, though he’d written for the Ink Spots before — they’d released his “I’ll Lose a Friend Tomorrow” in 1946: [Excerpt: The Ink Spots: “I’ll Lose A Friend Tomorrow”] He later said that he’d decided against giving “Only You” to the Ink Spots because they’d split up before he had a chance. That’s not accurate — the Ink Spots were still around when the earliest recordings of the song by the Platters were made. More likely, he just didn’t like the song. After he wrote it, he stuck the sheet music in a box, where it languished until Jean Bennett, his assistant, was moving things around and the box fell apart. Bennett looked at the song, and said she thought it looked interesting. Ram said it was rubbish, but Bennett put the sheet music on top of Ram’s piano. When Tony Williams saw it, he insisted on recording it. But that initial recording seemed to confirm Ram’s assessment that the song was terrible: [Excerpt: The Platters, “Only You” (original version), including the incredibly bad ending chord] During this period the band were also recording tracks backing Linda Hayes, and indeed there was also a brother-sister duet credited to Linda Hayes and Tony Williams (of the Platters): [Excerpt, Linda Hayes and Tony Williams, “Oochi Pachi”] And again, Hayes was trying to jump on the bandwagons, recording an “Annie” song with the Platters on backing vocals, in the hope of getting some of the money that was going to Hank Ballard and Etta James: [Excerpt: Linda Hayes and the Platters, “My Name Ain’t Annie”] But none of those records sold at all, and despite Ram’s best efforts it looked like the Platters were simply not going to be having any recording success any time soon. Federal dropped them, as it looked likely they were going to do nothing. But then, the group got very lucky. Buck Ram became the manager of the Penguins, another group that had formed out of the primal soup of singers around LA. The Penguins had just had what turned out to be their only big hit, with “Earth Angel”, and Mercury Records were eager to sign them. Ram agreed to the deal, but only on the condition that Mercury signed the Platters as well. Once they were signed, Ram largely gave up on the Penguins, who never had any further success. They’d served his purpose, and got the group he really cared about signed to a major label. There was a six-month break between the last session the Platters did for Federal and the first they did for Mercury. During that time, there was only one session — as backing vocalists for Joe Houston: [Excerpt: Joe Houston, “Shtiggy Boom”] But they spent that six months practising, and when they got into the studio to record for Mercury, they suddenly sounded *good*: [Excerpt: The Platters, “Only You”] Everything had fallen into place. They were now a slick, professional group. They’d even got good enough that they could incorporate mistakes when they worked — on an early take, Williams’ voice cracked on the word “only”, and he apologised to Ram, who said, “no, it sounded good, use it”. And “Only You” became one of those songs that defines an era. More than any of the doo-wop songs we’ve covered previously, it’s the epitome of 1950s smooth balladry. It was a massive hit — it spent thirty weeks on the R&B charts, seven of them at number one, and twenty-two weeks on the pop charts, peaking at number five. Federal rush-released the awful original recording to cash in, and Ram and Mercury took them to court, which eventually ruled in favour of Federal being allowed to put out their version, but the judge also said that that decision might well turn out to be more harmful to Federal than to Mercury. The Federal version didn’t chart. The follow-up to “Only You”, also by Ram, was even bigger: [Excerpt: The Platters, “The Great Pretender”] And this started a whole string of hits — “The Magic Touch”, “Twilight Time”, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”… most of these weren’t quite as long-lasting as their first two massive hits, but they were regulars at the top of the pop charts. The Platters were, in many ways, the 1950s equivalent to the Ink Spots, and while they started off marketed as a rock and roll group, they soon transitioned into the more lucrative adult market, recording albums of standards. But having emulated the Ink Spots in their biggest hits, the Platters also, sadly, emulated the Ink Spots in the way they fell apart. Unfortunately, the only book I’ve been able to find that talks about the Platters in any depth is written by someone working for Buck Ram’s organisation, and so it has a very particular biased take on the legal disputes that followed for the next sixty years. I’ve tried to counter this by at least skimming some of the court documents that are available online, but it’s not really possible to get an accurate sense, either from court filings from 2011 or the mid-eighties, or from a self-published and self-defensive book from 2015, what actually happened between the five Platters, Ram, and Ram’s assistant Jean Bennett back in the late 1950s. What everyone seems to agree on, though, is that soon after the Platters were signed to Mercury, a corporation was set up, “Five Platters Inc”, which was controlled by Buck Ram and had all the members of the Platters as shareholders. The Platters, at the time, assigned any rights they had to the band’s name to this corporation. But then, in 1959, Tony Williams, who had always wanted a solo career, decided he wanted to pursue one more vigorously. He was going to leave the group, and he put out a solo album: [Excerpt: Tony Williams, “Charmaine”] Indeed, it seems to have been Buck Ram’s plan from the very start to get Williams to be a solo artist, while keeping the Platters as a hit group — he tried to find a replacement for Williams as early as 1956, although that didn’t work out. For a while, Williams continued in the Platters, while they looked for a replacement, but his solo career didn’t go wonderfully at first. He wasn’t helped by all four of the male Platters being arrested, allegedly as customers of sex workers, but in fact because they were sharing their hotel room with white women. All charges against everyone involved were later dropped, but this meant that it probably wasn’t the best time for Williams to be starting a solo career. But by 1961, Williams had managed to extricate himself from the Platters, and had been replaced by a young singer called Sonny Turner, who could sound a little like Williams. The record company were so convinced that Williams was the important one in the Platters, though, that on many of their recordings for the next year or two Mercury would take completed recordings by the new Platters lineup and overdub new lead vocals from Williams. But one at a time the band members left, following Williams. And as each member left, they sold their shares in Five Platters Inc. to Buck Ram or to one of Ram’s companies. By 1969 Herb Reed was the only member of the classic lineup still in the group, and then he left the group too, and Buck Ram and his companies continued putting out groups with no original members as the Platters. Now, this doesn’t mean that the real members stopped touring as the Platters. After David Lynch left in 1967, for example, he formed a group called “The Original Platters”, and got both Zola Taylor and Paul Robi into the group. Tony Williams, Herb Reed, and Sonny Turner all also formed their own groups which toured under the Platters name, competing with the “official” Buck Ram Platters. There followed forty years of litigation between Ram’s companies and various Platters members. And the judgements went both ways, to the point that I can’t make accurate judgements from the case documents I’ve been able to find online. As best as I can understand it, there was a court ruling back in 1974 that the whole purpose of Five Platters Inc. had been to illegally deprive the band members of their ownership in the band name, that it was a sham corporation, and that Buck Ram had illegally benefited from an unfair bargaining position. Shortly after that, it was ruled that FPI’s trademark in the Platters name was void. But then there were other cases which went the other way, and Five Platters Inc. insisted that the band members had mostly left because they were alcoholics who didn’t want to tour any more, and that they’d given up their rights to the band name of their own free will. Meanwhile, over a hundred fake Platters groups with no original members went out on the road at various points. There have been almost as many fake Platters as there have fake Ink Spots. The band name issues were finally resolved in 2011. By that point Buck Ram was long dead, as were all the members of the classic Platters lineup except Herb Reed. A judge finally ruled that Herb Reed had the rights to the name, and that Five Platters Inc. had never owned the name. Just before that ruling, Five Platters Inc., which was now run by Jean Bennett, announced that they were going to retire the name. Herb Reed died in 2012, shortly afterwards, though the company he licensed the name to still licenses a band to tour as the Platters. Gaynel Hodge, however, is still alive, the last surviving member of the original Platters, and he still performs with his own Platters group, performing songs the Platters recorded after he left. His website hasn’t been updated since 2005, but at the time its most recent newsflash was that he had co-written this song with Dr. John for Shemekia Copeland: [Excerpt: Shemekia Copeland, “Too Close”] Gaynel Hodge was a major figure in the California music industry. He’ll be turning up in all sorts of odd places in future episodes, as he was involved in a lot of very important records. And we’ll definitely be seeing more of both Richard Berry and Cornell Gunter later as well. And meanwhile, somewhere out there are multiple groups of people who’ve never met anyone who sang on “Only You”, singing that song right now and calling themselves the Platters.

Big Jay McNeely In Conversation with Mark "Frosty" McNeill Rhythm and Blues hero, Big Jay McNeely, was famous for whipping audiences into a frenzy. Known as the King of the Honkin’ Sax, his guttural, brassy blasts coupled with an intense onstage presence blew down walls the world over. McNeely’s hits on wax were equally potent. 1949’s “The Deacon’s Hop” is a lasting R&B instrumental and 1959’s “There Is Something on Your Mind” can eternally be found in cars cruising low and slow. Big Jay passed away in late 2018 at the age of 91 years old but just prior, Mark "Frosty" McNeill was fortunate enough to visit his home to conduct this career-spanning interview. In their hour-long conversation, Big Jay took us from his upbringing in the rustic Watts of the 1930s to the energetic peak of Los Angeles’ Central Avenue scene to the bustle of New York City’s Birdland circa 1957. Enjoy this visit with an iconic trailblazer. In Conversation is produced by dublab. Sound editing and theme music are by Matteah Baim. Due to rights reasons music from the original broadcast has been shortened. To hear more, please visit dublab.com.

Cecil James McNeely, better known as Big Jay McNeely, was an American rhythm and blues saxophonist. TJ takes the mic to talk about his life and the impact he had on genre. Support the show (https://rockandrollheavenl.wixsite.com/mysite)

Welcome to episode ten of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at "Double Crossin' Blues" by Johnny Otis, Little Esther, and the Robins. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.  ----more---- Resources Like last week, this episode talks about a musician losing the use of some fingers. If you want to help others like Johnny Otis, you might want to check out a charity called the One-Handed Musical Instrument Trust, which invents and provides instruments for one-handed musicians. As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. There are a lot of cheap compilations of Johnny Otis' material -- this one seems to be the best value for money, and contains two other songs I already have podcasts written about, and two more that I'm almost certainly going to cover. This CD covers Little Esther's first couple of years, including all her recordings for Savoy along with some of those from Federal. And this double-CD set contains almost everything the Robins recorded, though for some unknown reason it doesn't contain their three most well-known songs. Much of the biographical information about Johnny Otis comes from Midnight at the Barrelhouse: The Johnny Otis Story by George Lipsitz. Both Otis and Ralph Bass are interviewed in Honkers & Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues by Arnold Shaw, one of the most important books on early 50s rhythm and blues. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript We talked last week about playing an instrument with missing or damaged fingers. Today, we're going to talk about how a great musician losing the use of a couple of fingers led directly to several of the biggest careers in rhythm and blues.   When we think of the blues now, we mostly think of guitar-based music – people like Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters – rather than piano-based musicians and the more vaudeville style of what's called “classic blues”, people like Ma Rainey or Bessie Smith. And that tends to give a rather ahistorical perspective on the development of rock and roll.   Rock and roll when it started -- the music of the mid fifties -- is not really a guitar-based music. It's dominated by the piano and the saxophone, and that domination it takes from jump band rhythm and blues. We've already heard how blues shouters in jump bands were massively influential for the style, but of course the blues, along with the jump bands, fed into what was just becoming known as "rhythm and blues", and that in turn fed into rock and roll.   There were two real links in the chain between the blues and rock and roll. And we'll definitely talk about the Chess label soon. But to the extent that there was any influence at all from what we now think of as the blues, it was mostly down to one man, Johnny Otis. It's probably safe to say that if Johnny Otis had never lived, the whole of 1950s music would be totally different.   We're going to be talking about Johnny Otis *a hell of a lot* in this podcast, because to put it as simply as possible, Johnny Otis was responsible for basically every good record that came from the West Coast of the US between about 1947 and 1956. I have three more Johnny Otis-related records lined up between now and the middle of February, and no doubt there'll be several more after that.   Johnny Otis had his first hit in 1945, with "Harlem Nocturne", which featured his friend Bill Doggett on piano:   [excerpt of "Harlem Nocturne"]   After “Harlem Nocturne” became a hit, and partly through the connection with Doggett, he got the opportunity to tour backing the Ink Spots, which exposed him to a wider audience. He was on his way to being a big star.   At that time, he was a drummer and vibraphone player. And he was one of the great drummers of the period -- he played, for example, on Ilinois Jacquet's version of "Flying Home", and on "Jamming With Lester" by Lester Young.   He was leading a big band, and had been trying to sound like Count Basie, as you can hear if you listen to the records he made at that time, but that soon changed when the jump bands came in. Instead, Otis slimmed down his band to a much smaller one and started playing this new R&B music, but he still wanted to give the people a show. And so he started the Johnny Otis Show, and rather than devote the show to his own performances, he would tour with a variety of singers and groups, who'd all play with his band as well as perform in different combinations. These singers and groups would be backed by the Johnny Otis band, but would be able to put out their own records and put on their own shows. He was going to use his fame to boost others -- while also giving himself more stars for his show, which meant more people coming to the shows.   One thing that's very important to note here is that Otis was a white man who chose to live and work only with black people. We'll be talking more about his relationship with race as we go forward, but Johnny Otis was *not* the typical white man in the music industry -- in that he actually respected his black colleagues as friends and equals, rather than just exploiting them financially.   He also lived in the Watts area of LA, the black area, and did all sorts of things in the community, from having his own radio show (which was listened to by a lot of the white kids in the LA area as well as its intended black audience -- both Frank Zappa and Brian Wilson talked about listening to Johnny Otis' show as children) to running a pigeon-breeding club for the local children. One of the kids who went along to learn how to breed pigeons with Johnny Otis was Arthur Lee, who later went on to be the leader of the band Love.   He was always a bit of an entrepreneur, and someone who was doing twenty different things at the same time. For example, he kept chickens in coops outside his house in Watts, running The Progressive Poultry company with a friend of his, Mario Delagarde, who was a bass player who worked with Johnny “Guitar” Watson and who died fighting in Cuba with Castro against Batista. Apparently, the chickens they sold were too popular, as Otis lost the use of a couple of fingers on his right hand in a chainsaw accident while trying to build more chicken coops -- though as he said later, he was still able to play piano and vibraphone with only eight fingers. After a doctor botched an operation on his hand, though, he couldn't play drums easily.   But it was because of his damaged hand that he eventually discovered Little Esther. Otis prided himself on his ability at discovering artists, and in this case it was more or less by accident. One night he couldn't sleep from the pain in his hand, and he was scared of taking painkillers and becoming addicted, so he went for a walk.   He walked past a club, and saw that Big Jay McNeely was playing. McNeely – who died in September this year – was one of the great saxophone honkers and skronkers of rhythm and blues, and was a friend of Otis who'd played on several records with him. Otis went inside, and before the show started there was a talent show. These talent shows were often major parts of the show in black entertainment at this time, and were sometimes *hugely* impressive – Otis would later talk about one show he saw in Detroit, where he discovered Hank Ballard, Little Willie John, and Jackie Wilson all in the same night, and none of them were even the winner.   On this night, one girl was impressive, but didn't win, and went and cried in the back of the theatre. Johnny Otis went over to comfort her, and offered her a job with his band.   That girl was only fourteen when she became a professional blues singer after Otis discovered her (he had a knack for discovering teenage girls with exceptional vocal abilities -- we'll be looking at another one in a few weeks). She was born Esther Mae Washington, but later took the surname of her stepfather and became Esther Mae Jones. A few years from the time we're talking about, she took the name of a petrol station company and became Esther Phillips.   At first, Otis had trouble getting her a record deal, because of the similarity of her sound to that of Dinah Washington, who was Esther's biggest inspiration, and was the biggest female R&B star of the period. Anyone listening to her was instantly struck by the similarity, and so she was dismissed as a soundalike.   But Otis had a little more success with a vocal group he knew called the Robins.   We haven't talked much about doo-wop yet, but we're at the point where it starts to be a major factor. Doo-wop is a genre that mostly came from the East Coast of the US. Like many of the genres we've discussed so far, it was a primarily black genre, but it would soon also be taken up by Italian-American singers living in the same areas as black people -- this was a time when Italian-Americans weren't considered fully "white" according to the racial standards then prevalent in the US. (As an example, in the early 1960s, the great jazz bass player Charles Mingus was asked why, if he was so angry at white people, he played with Charlie Mariano. Mingus looked surprised and said "Charlie's not white, he's Italian!")   But at this point doo-wop was very much on the fringes of the music business. It was music that was made by people who were too poor to even afford instruments, standing around on street corners and singing with each other. Usually the lead singer would try to sound like Bill Kenny of the Ink Spots, though increasingly as the genre matured the lead vocalists would take on more and more aspects of gospel singing as well. The backing vocalists -- usually three or four of them -- would do the same kind of thing as the Mills Brothers had, and imitate instrumental parts.   And in the tradition of the Ink Spots' "top and bottom", these bands would also feature a very prominent bass vocal -- though the bass singer wouldn't speak the words like Hoppy Jones, but would instead sing wordless nonsense syllables. This is where the name "doo wop", which was only applied later, comes from -- from the singer singing things like this:   [excerpt "Count Every Star", by the Ravens]   That's the Ravens, one of the first and most successful of the new vocal groups that came along. We're not doing a whole episode on them, but they caused a huge explosion of black vocal groups in the late forties and early fifties -- and you can tell how influential they were just by looking at the names of many of these bands, which included the Orioles, the Penguins, the Flamingos and more.   And The Robins were another of these "bird groups". They started out as a vocal group called the A-Sharp Trio, who entered a talent contest at a nightclub owned by Johnny Otis and came second (the performer who came first, the guitarist Pete Lewis, Otis got into his band straight away). Otis gave the A-Sharp Trio a regular gig at his club, and soon decided to pair them with another singer who sang there solo, turning them into a quartet. They were originally called the Four Bluebirds, and under that name they recorded a single with Otis -- "My Baby Done Told Me":   [Excerpt: the Four Bluebirds "My Baby Done Told Me"]   However, they didn't like the name, and soon settled on the Robins.   The Robins recorded with Otis on various labels. Their first single, "Around About Midnight", was a remake of Roy Brown's earlier "Long About Midnight", and it's really rather good. Take a listen:   ["Around About Midnight"]   A quick note there -- that's noted as their first single on some discographies I've seen. Others, however, say that these original tracks weren't released until a few months after they were recorded. It's definitely from their first session under the name The Robins though.   That was recorded on the Aladdin label, a record label that also had recordings by Ilinois Jacquet, Louis Jordan, Wynonie Harris, and many, many more early R&B people who we've touched upon in this podcast and will touch upon again I'm sure. But soon after this Otis and the Robins -- and Esther Mae Washington -- would all go on to another label, Savoy.   Ralph Bass, the A&R man who signed Johnny Otis to Savoy, is another of those white back-room people who devoted their life to black music who keep showing up at this stage of the story, and he's another one we'll be seeing a lot of for the next few episodes. Born Ralph Basso, he'd been an amateur musician and had also worked for Shell. When he was working for Shell, one of his jobs had been to organise corporate events, and because of the war there was a lack of musicians to play them, and he'd taken to playing records through an amplifier, becoming one of the very first live DJs.   He'd always had a love of music -- he used to sneak into the Savoy Ballroom to watch Chick Webb as a teenager -- and when he was playing these records, he realised that many of them sounded awful. He was convinced he could make records that sounded better than the ones he was playing, and so he decided to write to every record company he could find, offering his services. Only one record company answered -- Black and White Records in Los Angeles. They weren't certain that they could use him, but they'd give him an interview in a few weeks if he flew to LA.   Bass flew to LA two weeks before his interview, and started preparing. He asked the musicians unions for a list of who they thought their most talented local musicians were, and went to see them all live, and chat to some of them. Then, when he went into the actual interview and was asked who he would record, he had an answer -- he was going to record Sammy Franklin and his Atomics doing "The Honeydripper".   But he still didn't actually know anything at all about how to make a record. He had a solution to that too. He booked the band and the studio, then got to the studio early and told the engineers that he didn't have a clue about how to record sound, but that his boss would be expecting him to, and to just go along with everything he said when the boss got there, and that the engineers would really be in charge. The boss of Black and White Records did get there, shortly afterward, and Bass spent the next half hour tweaking settings on the board, changing mic placements, and a thousand other tiny technical differences. The boss decided he knew what he was doing and left him to it. The engineers then put everything back the way it was originally. The record came out, and it didn't do wonderfully (for reasons we'll discuss next week) but it was enough to get Bass firmly in place in Black and White Records.   Over the next few years, he produced dozens of classics of jazz and blues, including "Stormy Monday" by T-Bone Walker and "Open the Door, Richard" by Jack McVea:   [excerpt: "Open the Door, Richard"]   That record was based on an old routine by the black comedian Dusty Fletcher, and it was Bass who suggested that the old routine be set to music by McVea, who had previously been a saxophone player with Lionel Hampton's band. It became a massive hit, and was covered by Count Basie and Louis Jordan, among others -- six different versions of the song made the R&B top ten more or less simultaneously in the first few months of 1947.   But the problem with "Open the Door, Richard" was that it was actually too successful -- the record label just assumed that any of its records would sell that well. And when they didn't, Bass had to find another label to work with.   Bass had proved his ability enough that he ended up working for Savoy. For most of its time, Savoy was a jazz label, but while Ralph Bass was in charge of A&R it was, instead, an R&B label, and one that put out some of the greatest R&B of its time. He had an eye for talent and a real love for good rhythm and blues music.   And so when Ralph Bass saw the Johnny Otis revue performing live, he decided that Savoy needed to sign *all of them* -- Otis and his band, Esther, the Robins, everyone. He got in touch with Herman Lubinsky, who was the owner of Savoy Records, and got Lubinsky to come down to see Otis' band. During intermission, Lubinsky met up with Otis, and got him to sign a record contact -- the contract only specified a one percent royalty, but Lubinsky promised he'd triple the royalty rate after Otis' first hit with Savoy. Like many of Lubinsky's promises, this proved to be false.   When the Otis band, Esther, and the Robins went into the studio together, Esther was so intimidated by the studio that she started giggling, and while they did manage to cut a few songs, they didn't get as much done as they wanted to in the session. But at almost literally the last minute -- twenty minutes before the end of the session, Otis came up with a song that was, like "Open the Door Richard", based around a comedy routine from a well-known black comedy act. In this case, a double act called Apus and Estrellita -- Esther and Bobby Nunn of the Robins engaged in some good-spirited comedy back and forth, copied from their routines.   [excerpt "Double Crossin' Blues"]   Those lines "How come you ain't in the forest?" "I'm a lady", "they got lady bears out there!" take on a bit of a different colour when you realise that "lady bear" was, at the time, slang for an ugly, sexually aggressive woman.   Herman Lubinsky, the head of Savoy Records, was not impressed with the record or with Esther Phillips, and according to Bass "I sent the record to Lubinsky and asked for five dollars to pay for the kid's expenses -- lunch and all that, coming to Hollywood from Watts. He shouted 'Whaddaya mean five bucks? For what?' He wouldn't give me the five bucks".   Lubinsky put the recording aside until a DJ in Newark asked him if he could look through the new recordings he had to see if there was anything that might be a hit. The DJ loved the record, and even ran a competition on his radio station to pick the song's name, which is where the title "Double Crossing Blues" comes from. Although as Bass said "Everybody who was involved with the record got double-crossed. The songwriter, Johnny and I, the Robins, everybody connected with it."   Lubinsky was suddenly so sure that the record was going to be a success that he phoned Bass at five in the morning, Bass' time, waking him up, and getting Bass to go and wake Johnny Otis up so they could both go and track down Esther and her mother, and get them to sign a contract immediately. It was around this point that Esther's stage name was decided upon -- Lubinsky said to Otis "you need a stage name for that girl," to which Otis replied "which girl? Little Esther?" and Lubinsky said "that's perfect!" And so for the next few years, Esther Washington, who would later be Esther Phillips, was Little Esther, and that was the name under which she became a phenomenon.   The record went to number one on the R&B charts, and was the biggest thing in the genre in years. In July 1950, Billboard published its annual listing of best-selling R&B acts. Johnny Otis came first, Little Esther second, and the Robins came fourth   But the record's success caused friction between Otis and the Robins, who he later described as the people "who hummed behind Little Esther". They decided that they were the big stars, not Little Esther, and that they were going to go on tour on their own. Otis had to find another male singer to sing the parts that Bobby Nunn had sung, and so he found his new singer Mel Walker, who would be the main lead vocalist on Otis' future records, and would duet with Little Esther on more than a few of them. The Robins offered Otis a job as musical director for twenty dollars a night, but Otis refused.   The Robins would go on to have many, many successes themselves, some of which we'll talk about later, but Otis, Mel Walker, and Little Esther went on to have a string of hits in various combinations as well -- "Mistrustin' Blues", "Deceivin' Blues", "Dreamin' Blues", "Wedding Boogie", "Rockin' Blues"... Otis also had a 1951 hit with "All Nite Long", which would later be referenced in records by both Frank Zappa and Talking Heads:   [excerpt "All Nite Long": Johnny Otis]   We'll be seeing much more of Johnny Otis, and of the Robins, as the story goes on, but this is the only time we'll be talking about Little Esther. In her first year, she had an amazing seven records make the R&B top ten, three of them (including "Double Crossin' Blues") going to number one. She was regarded as one of the finest R&B vocalists of her generation, and had a promising future.   She decided, after a year on Savoy with Johnny Otis, to go solo and to move with Ralph Bass to Federal Records, a new label Bass had joined after falling out with Herman Lubinsky. According to Bass, Lubinsky often blackmailed his employees, in order to get leverage over them. But he was unable to find any dirty secrets about Bass -- not that Bass didn't have them (and not necessarily that he did, either -- I don't know) -- but that he didn't mix his business and personal lives. He didn't hang out with the musicians he worked with or with his colleagues, and so there was no vector for Lubinsky to get any kind of leverage over him.   So Lubinsky sent Bass to a party for a distributor at the last minute, which ran until three or four AM, and then when Bass' wife phoned up to ask where he was, Lubinsky claimed not to know, causing Bass and his wife to have a row.   Bass instantly realised that Lubinsky was trying to mess with his marriage in order to get some leverage over him, and decided he was simply not going to go back to work the next day. Instead, he went to King Records, who set up a subsidiary, Federal, for Bass to run. Bass took Little Esther with him, but Johnny Otis and the Robins were both still on Savoy.   Over the next few years, Bass would produce a lot of records which would change the course of rhythm and blues and rock and roll music, but sadly his further collaborations with Little Esther simply weren't as successful as the work they'd done together with Johnny Otis. She stopped having hits, and started doing heroin.   She moved back in with her family in Houston, and played odd gigs around the area, including one with Otis, Big Mama Thornton, and Johnny Ace, which we'll talk about in a future episode but which must have traumatised her further. Eventually her career got a second wind, and she had a few minor hits in the 1960s and 70s under her new name Esther Phillips.   Most impressive of these was "Home is Where the Hatred is", a song by Gil Scott-Heron that she recorded in 1972:   [excerpt "Home is Where the Hatred is": Esther Phillips]   That song clearly meant a lot to her, given her own history with drugs, and the album it came from, From A Whisper to a Scream, was nominated for a Grammy for Best R&B Vocal Performance (Female). Aretha Franklin won the award, as she did every year from 1968 through 1975 inclusive -- and to be fair, that's one of the few examples of the Grammies actually recognising talent when they saw it, because if it's possible to give Aretha Franklin an award between 1968 and 1975, you give Aretha Franklin that award. But this time, Aretha said publicly that she didn't deserve the award, and gave it to Phillips. Sadly, Esther Phillips never won the award in her own right -- she was nominated four times, but all during that period of Aretha dominance.   She continued having minor hits into the 1980s, but she never recaptured that brief period when she was the biggest female star in R&B, back in 1950. She died in 1984, aged only 48. Johnny Otis, who by that time was ordained as a minister, performed her funeral.

Welcome to episode ten of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at “Double Crossin’ Blues” by Johnny Otis, Little Esther, and the Robins. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.  —-more—- Resources Like last week, this episode talks about a musician losing the use of some fingers. If you want to help others like Johnny Otis, you might want to check out a charity called the One-Handed Musical Instrument Trust, which invents and provides instruments for one-handed musicians. As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. There are a lot of cheap compilations of Johnny Otis’ material — this one seems to be the best value for money, and contains two other songs I already have podcasts written about, and two more that I’m almost certainly going to cover. This CD covers Little Esther’s first couple of years, including all her recordings for Savoy along with some of those from Federal. And this double-CD set contains almost everything the Robins recorded, though for some unknown reason it doesn’t contain their three most well-known songs. Much of the biographical information about Johnny Otis comes from Midnight at the Barrelhouse: The Johnny Otis Story by George Lipsitz. Both Otis and Ralph Bass are interviewed in Honkers & Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues by Arnold Shaw, one of the most important books on early 50s rhythm and blues. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript We talked last week about playing an instrument with missing or damaged fingers. Today, we’re going to talk about how a great musician losing the use of a couple of fingers led directly to several of the biggest careers in rhythm and blues.   When we think of the blues now, we mostly think of guitar-based music – people like Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters – rather than piano-based musicians and the more vaudeville style of what’s called “classic blues”, people like Ma Rainey or Bessie Smith. And that tends to give a rather ahistorical perspective on the development of rock and roll.   Rock and roll when it started — the music of the mid fifties — is not really a guitar-based music. It’s dominated by the piano and the saxophone, and that domination it takes from jump band rhythm and blues. We’ve already heard how blues shouters in jump bands were massively influential for the style, but of course the blues, along with the jump bands, fed into what was just becoming known as “rhythm and blues”, and that in turn fed into rock and roll.   There were two real links in the chain between the blues and rock and roll. And we’ll definitely talk about the Chess label soon. But to the extent that there was any influence at all from what we now think of as the blues, it was mostly down to one man, Johnny Otis. It’s probably safe to say that if Johnny Otis had never lived, the whole of 1950s music would be totally different.   We’re going to be talking about Johnny Otis *a hell of a lot* in this podcast, because to put it as simply as possible, Johnny Otis was responsible for basically every good record that came from the West Coast of the US between about 1947 and 1956. I have three more Johnny Otis-related records lined up between now and the middle of February, and no doubt there’ll be several more after that.   Johnny Otis had his first hit in 1945, with “Harlem Nocturne”, which featured his friend Bill Doggett on piano:   [excerpt of “Harlem Nocturne”]   After “Harlem Nocturne” became a hit, and partly through the connection with Doggett, he got the opportunity to tour backing the Ink Spots, which exposed him to a wider audience. He was on his way to being a big star.   At that time, he was a drummer and vibraphone player. And he was one of the great drummers of the period — he played, for example, on Ilinois Jacquet’s version of “Flying Home”, and on “Jamming With Lester” by Lester Young.   He was leading a big band, and had been trying to sound like Count Basie, as you can hear if you listen to the records he made at that time, but that soon changed when the jump bands came in. Instead, Otis slimmed down his band to a much smaller one and started playing this new R&B music, but he still wanted to give the people a show. And so he started the Johnny Otis Show, and rather than devote the show to his own performances, he would tour with a variety of singers and groups, who’d all play with his band as well as perform in different combinations. These singers and groups would be backed by the Johnny Otis band, but would be able to put out their own records and put on their own shows. He was going to use his fame to boost others — while also giving himself more stars for his show, which meant more people coming to the shows.   One thing that’s very important to note here is that Otis was a white man who chose to live and work only with black people. We’ll be talking more about his relationship with race as we go forward, but Johnny Otis was *not* the typical white man in the music industry — in that he actually respected his black colleagues as friends and equals, rather than just exploiting them financially.   He also lived in the Watts area of LA, the black area, and did all sorts of things in the community, from having his own radio show (which was listened to by a lot of the white kids in the LA area as well as its intended black audience — both Frank Zappa and Brian Wilson talked about listening to Johnny Otis’ show as children) to running a pigeon-breeding club for the local children. One of the kids who went along to learn how to breed pigeons with Johnny Otis was Arthur Lee, who later went on to be the leader of the band Love.   He was always a bit of an entrepreneur, and someone who was doing twenty different things at the same time. For example, he kept chickens in coops outside his house in Watts, running The Progressive Poultry company with a friend of his, Mario Delagarde, who was a bass player who worked with Johnny “Guitar” Watson and who died fighting in Cuba with Castro against Batista. Apparently, the chickens they sold were too popular, as Otis lost the use of a couple of fingers on his right hand in a chainsaw accident while trying to build more chicken coops — though as he said later, he was still able to play piano and vibraphone with only eight fingers. After a doctor botched an operation on his hand, though, he couldn’t play drums easily.   But it was because of his damaged hand that he eventually discovered Little Esther. Otis prided himself on his ability at discovering artists, and in this case it was more or less by accident. One night he couldn’t sleep from the pain in his hand, and he was scared of taking painkillers and becoming addicted, so he went for a walk.   He walked past a club, and saw that Big Jay McNeely was playing. McNeely – who died in September this year – was one of the great saxophone honkers and skronkers of rhythm and blues, and was a friend of Otis who’d played on several records with him. Otis went inside, and before the show started there was a talent show. These talent shows were often major parts of the show in black entertainment at this time, and were sometimes *hugely* impressive – Otis would later talk about one show he saw in Detroit, where he discovered Hank Ballard, Little Willie John, and Jackie Wilson all in the same night, and none of them were even the winner.   On this night, one girl was impressive, but didn’t win, and went and cried in the back of the theatre. Johnny Otis went over to comfort her, and offered her a job with his band.   That girl was only fourteen when she became a professional blues singer after Otis discovered her (he had a knack for discovering teenage girls with exceptional vocal abilities — we’ll be looking at another one in a few weeks). She was born Esther Mae Washington, but later took the surname of her stepfather and became Esther Mae Jones. A few years from the time we’re talking about, she took the name of a petrol station company and became Esther Phillips.   At first, Otis had trouble getting her a record deal, because of the similarity of her sound to that of Dinah Washington, who was Esther’s biggest inspiration, and was the biggest female R&B star of the period. Anyone listening to her was instantly struck by the similarity, and so she was dismissed as a soundalike.   But Otis had a little more success with a vocal group he knew called the Robins.   We haven’t talked much about doo-wop yet, but we’re at the point where it starts to be a major factor. Doo-wop is a genre that mostly came from the East Coast of the US. Like many of the genres we’ve discussed so far, it was a primarily black genre, but it would soon also be taken up by Italian-American singers living in the same areas as black people — this was a time when Italian-Americans weren’t considered fully “white” according to the racial standards then prevalent in the US. (As an example, in the early 1960s, the great jazz bass player Charles Mingus was asked why, if he was so angry at white people, he played with Charlie Mariano. Mingus looked surprised and said “Charlie’s not white, he’s Italian!”)   But at this point doo-wop was very much on the fringes of the music business. It was music that was made by people who were too poor to even afford instruments, standing around on street corners and singing with each other. Usually the lead singer would try to sound like Bill Kenny of the Ink Spots, though increasingly as the genre matured the lead vocalists would take on more and more aspects of gospel singing as well. The backing vocalists — usually three or four of them — would do the same kind of thing as the Mills Brothers had, and imitate instrumental parts.   And in the tradition of the Ink Spots’ “top and bottom”, these bands would also feature a very prominent bass vocal — though the bass singer wouldn’t speak the words like Hoppy Jones, but would instead sing wordless nonsense syllables. This is where the name “doo wop”, which was only applied later, comes from — from the singer singing things like this:   [excerpt “Count Every Star”, by the Ravens]   That’s the Ravens, one of the first and most successful of the new vocal groups that came along. We’re not doing a whole episode on them, but they caused a huge explosion of black vocal groups in the late forties and early fifties — and you can tell how influential they were just by looking at the names of many of these bands, which included the Orioles, the Penguins, the Flamingos and more.   And The Robins were another of these “bird groups”. They started out as a vocal group called the A-Sharp Trio, who entered a talent contest at a nightclub owned by Johnny Otis and came second (the performer who came first, the guitarist Pete Lewis, Otis got into his band straight away). Otis gave the A-Sharp Trio a regular gig at his club, and soon decided to pair them with another singer who sang there solo, turning them into a quartet. They were originally called the Four Bluebirds, and under that name they recorded a single with Otis — “My Baby Done Told Me”:   [Excerpt: the Four Bluebirds “My Baby Done Told Me”]   However, they didn’t like the name, and soon settled on the Robins.   The Robins recorded with Otis on various labels. Their first single, “Around About Midnight”, was a remake of Roy Brown’s earlier “Long About Midnight”, and it’s really rather good. Take a listen:   [“Around About Midnight”]   A quick note there — that’s noted as their first single on some discographies I’ve seen. Others, however, say that these original tracks weren’t released until a few months after they were recorded. It’s definitely from their first session under the name The Robins though.   That was recorded on the Aladdin label, a record label that also had recordings by Ilinois Jacquet, Louis Jordan, Wynonie Harris, and many, many more early R&B people who we’ve touched upon in this podcast and will touch upon again I’m sure. But soon after this Otis and the Robins — and Esther Mae Washington — would all go on to another label, Savoy.   Ralph Bass, the A&R man who signed Johnny Otis to Savoy, is another of those white back-room people who devoted their life to black music who keep showing up at this stage of the story, and he’s another one we’ll be seeing a lot of for the next few episodes. Born Ralph Basso, he’d been an amateur musician and had also worked for Shell. When he was working for Shell, one of his jobs had been to organise corporate events, and because of the war there was a lack of musicians to play them, and he’d taken to playing records through an amplifier, becoming one of the very first live DJs.   He’d always had a love of music — he used to sneak into the Savoy Ballroom to watch Chick Webb as a teenager — and when he was playing these records, he realised that many of them sounded awful. He was convinced he could make records that sounded better than the ones he was playing, and so he decided to write to every record company he could find, offering his services. Only one record company answered — Black and White Records in Los Angeles. They weren’t certain that they could use him, but they’d give him an interview in a few weeks if he flew to LA.   Bass flew to LA two weeks before his interview, and started preparing. He asked the musicians unions for a list of who they thought their most talented local musicians were, and went to see them all live, and chat to some of them. Then, when he went into the actual interview and was asked who he would record, he had an answer — he was going to record Sammy Franklin and his Atomics doing “The Honeydripper”.   But he still didn’t actually know anything at all about how to make a record. He had a solution to that too. He booked the band and the studio, then got to the studio early and told the engineers that he didn’t have a clue about how to record sound, but that his boss would be expecting him to, and to just go along with everything he said when the boss got there, and that the engineers would really be in charge. The boss of Black and White Records did get there, shortly afterward, and Bass spent the next half hour tweaking settings on the board, changing mic placements, and a thousand other tiny technical differences. The boss decided he knew what he was doing and left him to it. The engineers then put everything back the way it was originally. The record came out, and it didn’t do wonderfully (for reasons we’ll discuss next week) but it was enough to get Bass firmly in place in Black and White Records.   Over the next few years, he produced dozens of classics of jazz and blues, including “Stormy Monday” by T-Bone Walker and “Open the Door, Richard” by Jack McVea:   [excerpt: “Open the Door, Richard”]   That record was based on an old routine by the black comedian Dusty Fletcher, and it was Bass who suggested that the old routine be set to music by McVea, who had previously been a saxophone player with Lionel Hampton’s band. It became a massive hit, and was covered by Count Basie and Louis Jordan, among others — six different versions of the song made the R&B top ten more or less simultaneously in the first few months of 1947.   But the problem with “Open the Door, Richard” was that it was actually too successful — the record label just assumed that any of its records would sell that well. And when they didn’t, Bass had to find another label to work with.   Bass had proved his ability enough that he ended up working for Savoy. For most of its time, Savoy was a jazz label, but while Ralph Bass was in charge of A&R it was, instead, an R&B label, and one that put out some of the greatest R&B of its time. He had an eye for talent and a real love for good rhythm and blues music.   And so when Ralph Bass saw the Johnny Otis revue performing live, he decided that Savoy needed to sign *all of them* — Otis and his band, Esther, the Robins, everyone. He got in touch with Herman Lubinsky, who was the owner of Savoy Records, and got Lubinsky to come down to see Otis’ band. During intermission, Lubinsky met up with Otis, and got him to sign a record contact — the contract only specified a one percent royalty, but Lubinsky promised he’d triple the royalty rate after Otis’ first hit with Savoy. Like many of Lubinsky’s promises, this proved to be false.   When the Otis band, Esther, and the Robins went into the studio together, Esther was so intimidated by the studio that she started giggling, and while they did manage to cut a few songs, they didn’t get as much done as they wanted to in the session. But at almost literally the last minute — twenty minutes before the end of the session, Otis came up with a song that was, like “Open the Door Richard”, based around a comedy routine from a well-known black comedy act. In this case, a double act called Apus and Estrellita — Esther and Bobby Nunn of the Robins engaged in some good-spirited comedy back and forth, copied from their routines.   [excerpt “Double Crossin’ Blues”]   Those lines “How come you ain’t in the forest?” “I’m a lady”, “they got lady bears out there!” take on a bit of a different colour when you realise that “lady bear” was, at the time, slang for an ugly, sexually aggressive woman.   Herman Lubinsky, the head of Savoy Records, was not impressed with the record or with Esther Phillips, and according to Bass “I sent the record to Lubinsky and asked for five dollars to pay for the kid’s expenses — lunch and all that, coming to Hollywood from Watts. He shouted ‘Whaddaya mean five bucks? For what?’ He wouldn’t give me the five bucks”.   Lubinsky put the recording aside until a DJ in Newark asked him if he could look through the new recordings he had to see if there was anything that might be a hit. The DJ loved the record, and even ran a competition on his radio station to pick the song’s name, which is where the title “Double Crossing Blues” comes from. Although as Bass said “Everybody who was involved with the record got double-crossed. The songwriter, Johnny and I, the Robins, everybody connected with it.”   Lubinsky was suddenly so sure that the record was going to be a success that he phoned Bass at five in the morning, Bass’ time, waking him up, and getting Bass to go and wake Johnny Otis up so they could both go and track down Esther and her mother, and get them to sign a contract immediately. It was around this point that Esther’s stage name was decided upon — Lubinsky said to Otis “you need a stage name for that girl,” to which Otis replied “which girl? Little Esther?” and Lubinsky said “that’s perfect!” And so for the next few years, Esther Washington, who would later be Esther Phillips, was Little Esther, and that was the name under which she became a phenomenon.   The record went to number one on the R&B charts, and was the biggest thing in the genre in years. In July 1950, Billboard published its annual listing of best-selling R&B acts. Johnny Otis came first, Little Esther second, and the Robins came fourth   But the record’s success caused friction between Otis and the Robins, who he later described as the people “who hummed behind Little Esther”. They decided that they were the big stars, not Little Esther, and that they were going to go on tour on their own. Otis had to find another male singer to sing the parts that Bobby Nunn had sung, and so he found his new singer Mel Walker, who would be the main lead vocalist on Otis’ future records, and would duet with Little Esther on more than a few of them. The Robins offered Otis a job as musical director for twenty dollars a night, but Otis refused.   The Robins would go on to have many, many successes themselves, some of which we’ll talk about later, but Otis, Mel Walker, and Little Esther went on to have a string of hits in various combinations as well — “Mistrustin’ Blues”, “Deceivin’ Blues”, “Dreamin’ Blues”, “Wedding Boogie”, “Rockin’ Blues”… Otis also had a 1951 hit with “All Nite Long”, which would later be referenced in records by both Frank Zappa and Talking Heads:   [excerpt “All Nite Long”: Johnny Otis]   We’ll be seeing much more of Johnny Otis, and of the Robins, as the story goes on, but this is the only time we’ll be talking about Little Esther. In her first year, she had an amazing seven records make the R&B top ten, three of them (including “Double Crossin’ Blues”) going to number one. She was regarded as one of the finest R&B vocalists of her generation, and had a promising future.   She decided, after a year on Savoy with Johnny Otis, to go solo and to move with Ralph Bass to Federal Records, a new label Bass had joined after falling out with Herman Lubinsky. According to Bass, Lubinsky often blackmailed his employees, in order to get leverage over them. But he was unable to find any dirty secrets about Bass — not that Bass didn’t have them (and not necessarily that he did, either — I don’t know) — but that he didn’t mix his business and personal lives. He didn’t hang out with the musicians he worked with or with his colleagues, and so there was no vector for Lubinsky to get any kind of leverage over him.   So Lubinsky sent Bass to a party for a distributor at the last minute, which ran until three or four AM, and then when Bass’ wife phoned up to ask where he was, Lubinsky claimed not to know, causing Bass and his wife to have a row.   Bass instantly realised that Lubinsky was trying to mess with his marriage in order to get some leverage over him, and decided he was simply not going to go back to work the next day. Instead, he went to King Records, who set up a subsidiary, Federal, for Bass to run. Bass took Little Esther with him, but Johnny Otis and the Robins were both still on Savoy.   Over the next few years, Bass would produce a lot of records which would change the course of rhythm and blues and rock and roll music, but sadly his further collaborations with Little Esther simply weren’t as successful as the work they’d done together with Johnny Otis. She stopped having hits, and started doing heroin.   She moved back in with her family in Houston, and played odd gigs around the area, including one with Otis, Big Mama Thornton, and Johnny Ace, which we’ll talk about in a future episode but which must have traumatised her further. Eventually her career got a second wind, and she had a few minor hits in the 1960s and 70s under her new name Esther Phillips.   Most impressive of these was “Home is Where the Hatred is”, a song by Gil Scott-Heron that she recorded in 1972:   [excerpt “Home is Where the Hatred is”: Esther Phillips]   That song clearly meant a lot to her, given her own history with drugs, and the album it came from, From A Whisper to a Scream, was nominated for a Grammy for Best R&B Vocal Performance (Female). Aretha Franklin won the award, as she did every year from 1968 through 1975 inclusive — and to be fair, that’s one of the few examples of the Grammies actually recognising talent when they saw it, because if it’s possible to give Aretha Franklin an award between 1968 and 1975, you give Aretha Franklin that award. But this time, Aretha said publicly that she didn’t deserve the award, and gave it to Phillips. Sadly, Esther Phillips never won the award in her own right — she was nominated four times, but all during that period of Aretha dominance.   She continued having minor hits into the 1980s, but she never recaptured that brief period when she was the biggest female star in R&B, back in 1950. She died in 1984, aged only 48. Johnny Otis, who by that time was ordained as a minister, performed her funeral.

Sister label to Fury, it was also led by Bobby Robinson. You'll hear Bobby Marchan's version of "There Is Something On Your Mind, parts 1 and 2 (originally done by Big Jay McNeely), the harmonica of Buster Brown and the King of the Slide Guitar, Mr. Elmore James. These records are on fire, just burning out of my hands!

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Треклист программы: 01 Lechery - We're All Born Evil 02 Mile - Why Won't You (Die Motherf...Er) 03 Sonic Prophecy - Night Terror 04 Carvin Jones Band - Atm Blues 05 White Wizzard - Infernal Overdrive 06 Demolition Train - Dawn of the Necromancer 07 HollySiz - Karma 08 Howell Devine - PM Blues 09 Loud 'N' Proud - Merciless 10 Magnum - Glory to Ashes 11 Terror Universal - Dig You a Hole 12 Sugar Queen & The Straight Blues Band - Wanna Take My Man 13 Billy Thompson – That Devil 14 Death Keepers - Rock This World 15 Carolyn Gaines - I'm Your Cat, Baby (Feat. Big Jay McNeely) 16 Anthony Wright - Three Years Too Long 17 The Poodles - Soldier of Fortune

Billy Flynn cut his teeth with the likes of Jimmy Dawkins, Johnny Littlejohn and Big Jay McNeely. From sharing the Apollo Theater stage with Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, Billy Gibbons and others to backing Beyonce Knowles at Barack Obama's Neighborhood Inaugural Ball and on her Grammy winning single from the movie Cadillac Records; from his prolific sideman work to his ten albums as a leader, Billy Flynn is a true-blue heir of Delmark's storied legacy. His latest studio effort, Lonesome Highway features 16 new original songs and special guest vocalist Deitra Farr. Kim Wilson, who regularly calls Billy for sessions, observes calls Flynn 'one of the greatest blues guitarists alive and one of the greatest to ever live.'

"The Big Band Era is my era. People say, 'Where did you get your style from?' I did the Big Band Era on guitar. That's the best way I could explain it." - Chuck Berry This week, we have a special guest on the show - legendary saxophonist, Mitch Endick! Also featuring music by Chuck Berry, Blink 182, CHVRCHES, Bob Dylan, Jimmy Dorsey and His Orchestra, The JB's and Fred Wesley, The Shakers, Big Jay McNeely, and Chicago Transit Authority! SUBSCRIBE: iTunes TWITTER: @MusicFirstPcast FACEBOOK: Music First Podcast INSTAGRAM: MusicFirstPodcast EMAIL: MusicFirstPodcast@gmail.com

Podcast this week featuring The Rebels, Lee Morgan, Larry Harlow, Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons, Unit 4+2, The Wallflowers, Psychedelic Furs, Big Jay McNeely, Louis Armstrong, Dave Clark Five, The Bamboos, & Macklemore & Ryan Lewis As always you can find us a few places: Itunes: http://bit.ly/Hg2RdK Facebook: http://on.fb.me/IzhiJV Email us at MusicFirstPodcast@gmail.com