Podcasts about Bobby Fuller

The death of rocker Bobby Fuller is an enduring riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Who did it? Why? Where? And when? Everything was going Bobby's way. He was set to explode into international stardom. But suddenly out of nowhere... Listen in as Dr. Clarke leads you down a dark, winding path to arrive at one of rock's most bizarre deaths.

In 1966, Bobby Fuller was a rising rockstar. His eponymous band and their song "I Fought the Law" was climbing the charts when he suddenly died. As is the case with many rockstars, theories about his death abound. Was his death really an accident or suicide, or could it have been a hit from the LA mob…or even Charles Manson? Conspiracy Theories is on Instagram @theconspiracypod! Follow us to keep up with the show and get behind-the-scenes updates from Carter and the team. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

253. Bopping it right on a Tuesday night, here's America's favorite rockabilly werewolf, DJ Del Villarreal, at it once again with a near-lethal mix of vintage & modern roots rockin' sounds! Celebrating the 82nd birthday of Texas rock legend Bobby Fuller with a deep dive on this rockabilly-influenced singer-guitarist-songwriter -hear plenty of his hits and some killer kuts from deep within the Motorbilly vaults! We've unearthed a few spooky toons to dig as you get ready for Halloween 2024 and next week's annual "Boo Kat, BOO! The Spook-A-Billy Show!" There's new tunes to enjoy today from The Bullets, The Boppin' Kids, Glam Parson, Linda Gail Lewis, Jake Calypso, The Black Kat Boppers, Jane Rose and the Deadends as well as familiar fare from rockin' legends Esquerita, Billy Lee Riley, Charlie Feathers, Bob Luman, Mac Curtis, Jerry Lee Lewis and Roy Orbison, too.Three solid hours of the BEST 50's-styled rock & roll delivered commercial-free and at high volumes! Howl with the Aztec Werewolf™, DJ Del Villarreal and his award winning program, "Go Kat, GO! The Rock-A-Billy Show!" Good to the last bop!™Please follow on FaceBook, Instagram & Twitter!

National nut day. Entertainment from 1989. 1st parachute jump, FDA bans red M&M's, Scientists sentenced to prison for not predicting an earthquake in Itlay. Todays birthdays - Christopher Lloyd, Bobby Fuller, Annette Funicello, Jeff Goldblum, Shaggy, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Michael Fishman, Zack Hanson, Jonathon Lipnicki, Dylan Scott,Intro - Pour some sugar on me - Def Leppard     http://defleppard.com/I'm a nut - The KilboomersMiss you much - Janet JacksonHigh cotton - AlabamaBirthdays - In da club - 50 Cent      http://50cent.com/I fought the law - Bobby FullerTall Paul - Annette FunicelloIt wasn't me - ShaggyRoseanne TV themeMMM Bop - HansonMy girl - Dylan ScottExit - In my dreams - Dokken    https://www.dokken.net/Follow Jeff Stampka on facebook and cooolmedia.com 

Text us about this show.Terry Manning has a long and stellar history in the music business. His résumé reads like a Who's Who because of the sheer number of artists he's worked with over the past sixty-plus years. If you're a soul music fan, Terry worked on hits by Otis Redding, Al Green, Sam & Dave, and more. Classic rock fan? Albums like Led Zeppelin III, ZZ Top's Eliminator, and Big Star's #1 Record list Terry as engineer. Terry's worked in a wide variety of genres at studios like Stax Records, Ardent Studios, Compass Point Studio, and currently Sonic Ranch Studio and his talents aren't just in music, but he's an outstanding photographer, writer, athlete, and more. In other words, Terry's one-of-a-kind and on this episode of Into The Music we find out why.For more about Terry, make sure to visit terrymanning.com and themanninggallery.com."It's You (Beacon)" performed by Terry Manningwritten by Terry Manning℗ 2015 Lucky Seven Records under exclusive license to ECR Music Group. Used with permission of Terry Manning."I Am The Cosmos" performed by Terry Manningwritten by Chris Bell℗ 2019 Lucky Seven Records under exclusive license to ECR Music Group. Used with permission of Terry Manning."What's The Use?" performed by Terry Manningwritten by J.P. Richardson and Terry Manning℗ 2020 Lucky Seven Records under excluSupport the Show.Visit Into The Music at https://in2themusic.com or https://intothemusicpodcast.com!Support the show: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/intothemusic E-mail us at intothemusic@newprojectx.com YouTube Facebook Instagram INTO THE MUSIC is a production of Project X Productions, Appleton, WI.Host/producer: Rob MarnochaVoiceovers: Brad BordiniRecording, engineering, and post production: Rob MarnochaOpening theme: "Aerostar" by Los Straitjackets* (℗2013 Yep Roc Records)Closing theme: "Close to Champaign" by Los Straitjackets* (℗1999 Yep Roc Records)*Used with permission of Eddie Angel of Los StraitjacketsT...

Bobby Fuller was a rising star in the music world during the 1960s. He died under mysterious circumstances just before he was going to start a solo career. The police believed Bobby ended his own life, but his family and friends suspected foul play. Join Mike and Gibby as they discuss Bobby Fuller. The conclusion of suicide by authorities doesn't seem to fit with the details of this case. However, the ruling was made quickly, and no evidence was obtained. There are several theories about what happened to Bobby Fuller and who was involved. But there is no doubt that Bobby suffered a gruesome fate. You can help support the show at patreon.com/truecrimeallthetime Visit the show's website at truecrimeallthetime.com for contact, merchandise, and donation information An Emash Digital production

Get ready for a wild ride on RadioWilderLive.com, where we reveal the truth behind one of the hottest teen clubs in El Paso, Texas, Bobby Fuller's Teen Rendezvous. Tune in to hear the exclusive story that will blow your mind! But that's not all, folks. We also have some amazing music for you, including two requests from our loyal listeners Tera Kay and Lisa. Plus, we have a special treat: two of Brett W.'s Blasters, Come On Eileen and Dreams from Van Halen. Brett W. joined Harry in the studio for a chat and shared his favorite tunes with us. And if you think that's cool, wait until you hear the brand new track from Marc Ribler & Story Road. Marc is the musical director for Little Steven, who you may know from Bruce Springsteen, The Sopranos, or The Underground Garage. His new song, Armageddon, is a blast of pure rock'n'roll energy that will make you want to dance like there's no tomorrow. We also have some classic hits from The Zombies, who finally got their deserved spot in The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, The Beatles, James Gang, The Mothers of Invention, and our Sticky, Arrested Development. This is a show you don't want to miss, so tune in and rock out with the Radio Wilder Gang! And before we go, at RadioWilderLive.com, we want to give a big shout out to our new German Shepherd puppy, Mikey! He's the cutest and coolest dog in town, and we love him to bits. Thanks for hanging out with us, and stay wild!

Utilizza il codice belloasterisco per avere 60 giorni di prova gratuiti su Bookbeat https://tinyurl.com/5x42uje8I casi di oggi sono la tragica vicenda di Bobby Fuller e l'assurda scomparsa di Wong Ka Ting Trovi tutte le fonti sul nostro sito.

Sintonía: "Ram Charger" - The Del-Vettes"I´m In Pittsburgh (And It´s Raining)" - The Outcasts; "99th Floor" - The Moving Sidewalks; "You Rub Me The Wrong Way" - The Road; "So What" - The Lyrics; "Lost Innocence" - The Buddahs; "Bad Girl" - Zakary Thaks; "She´s Gone" - The Dovers; "It´s Cold Outside" - The Choir; "(Drinking) Wine Wine Wine" - Bobby Fuller; "Suzy Creamcheese" - Teddy & Patches; "Suicidal Flowers" - Chrystal Chandlier; "Swami" - William Penn; "Faces" - TC Atlantic; "No Good Woman" - Tree; "You Don´t Know Me" - Magi; "I Tell No Lies" - The Escapades; "Winning Ticket" - The Huns; "I Want Her Back" - The Todds; "Girl, I Need You" - Nobody´s ChildrenEscuchar audio

Bobby FullerI Fought the LawGeneral Noriega Pineapple FaceThe VaticanRock ConcertsStalingradCocaineUS Delta ForcePlaylistsAnd More

Lipiec, 1966. Młody muzyk Bobby Fuller w środku upalnej nocy wychodzi ze swojego mieszkania w Los Angeles. Kilkanaście godzin później jego samochód nagle znów pojawia się na podjeździe. Bobby siedzi w aucie – w piżamie, kapciach mamy, oblany benzyną i.... martwy. W jaki sposób trafił na podjazd? Od kogo otrzymał w nocy telefon? Kto mógł chcieć jego śmierci? ______ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kinolityka/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nagle.ostatniej.nocy/ TCP: https://www.facebook.com/truecrimepoland ______ Źródła: M. Linna, R. Fuller, “I fought the law. The Life and Strange Death of Bobby Fuller”, 2015 Unsolved Mysteries with Dennis Farina https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvjHcdOb1Ys E! Mysteries & Scandals https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w29I_-1OElQ Wywiady: http://www.classicbands.com/RandyFullerSecondInterview.html http://www.classicbands.com/RickStoneInterview.html http://www.classicbands.com/JimReeseInterview.html http://www.aaronpoehler.com/strangecase.html http://martinostimemachine.blogspot.com/2011/02/pjs-night-club.html https://eu.elpasotimes.com/story/news/history/2016/06/25/broken-melody-bobby-fuller-story-part-1/86139192/ https://eu.elpasotimes.com/story/life/2016/07/09/broken-melody-bobby-fuller-story-part-3/86308576/ https://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/l-a-confidential/ https://www.houstonpress.com/music/things-to-do-listen-to-gerry-beckleys-five-mile-road-11337081 https://elpasotimes.typepad.com/morgue/2011/07/1982-broken-melody-the-death-of-bobby-fuller.html https://books.google.pl/books?id=tmnYK4rTBA4C&pg=PA41-IA1&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=matches&f=false Fragmenty utworów należą do ich prawnych właścicieli i zostały wykorzystane wg prawa cytatu (art.29 ust.1 ustawy o prawie autorskim i prawach pokrewnych).   Nancy Sinatra & The Bobby Fuller Four – Geronimo | The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Es-8qKdYvsg ___ Posłuchaj na: Spotify: https://bit.ly/nagleostatniejnocySpotify YouTube: https://bit.ly/nagleostatniejnocyYouTube _______ Intro Cool Vibes - Film Noire by Kevin MacLeod Fragment filmu “Dom na Przeklętym Wzgórzu”, 1959 https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3553-cool-vibes https://filmmusic.io/standard-license _______ Muzyka: You have doubts by Kevin MacLeod Walking along by Kevin MacLeod License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Sacred - Haunting Atmospheric Soundscape by CO.AG Music _______ Kontakt: kinolityka@gmail.com

I Fought the LawBobby FullerGeneral NoriegaProud BoysA Mob of Moronsa Collective: an Anus of AssholesThe Sharpe RatioFederal Penitentiary & Sexual ViolationInvading the US CapitolNancy PelosiChinese Maxims

Bobby FullerI Fought The LawJussie SmollettFake LynchingKim FoxxMasked IntruderAnd More...

Bobby FullerI Fought the LawMo LevyTommy James & The ShondellsJohn LennonAdvanced Rigor MortisTrifecta of Ignorance & CorruptionAnd More...

National nut day. Entertainment from 1956. 1st parachute jump, FDA bans red M&M's, Scientists sentenced to prison for not predicting an earthquake in Itlay. Todays birthdays - Christopher Lloyd, Bobby Fuller, Annette Funicello, Jeff Goldblum, Shaggy, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Michael Fishman, Zack Hanson, Jonathon Lipnicki, Dylan Scott,Intro - Pour some sugar on me - Def Leppard http://defleppard.com/I'm a nut - The KilboomersHound dog - Elvis PresleyDon't be cruel - Elvis PresleyBirthdays - In da club - 50 Cent http://50cent.com/I fought the law - Bobby FullerTall Paul - Annette FunicelloIt wasn't me - ShaggyRoseanne TV themeMMM Bop - HansonMy girl - Dylan ScottExit - It's not love - Dokkenhttps://coolcasts.cooolmedia.com/

Bobby Fuller.  1966I Fought The Law.  Bill Board Charts SuicideAccidental AsphyxiationGeneral NoriegaLA Police InvestigatorsAnd More...

On this episode, Payton discusses the rising rockstar Bobby Fuller and how he, along with his band, almost reached the top before tragedy struck. https://linktr.ee/murderwithmyhusband “I Fought the Law: The Life and Strange Death of Bobby Fuller” by Randell Fuller and Miriam Linna The El Paso Times - https://www.elpasotimes.com/story/news/history/2016/06/25/broken-melody-bobby-fuller-story-part-1/86139192/ LA Times - https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/posts/la-et-ms-bobby-fuller-i-fought-the-law-death-book-signing-20150304-story.html#:~:text=Texas%20guitarist%20and%20singer%20Bobby,He%20was%2023. The Hollywood Reporter - https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/music-news/celebrating-a-disturbing-new-bio-780611/ Far Out Magazine - https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/the-strange-death-of-bobby-fuller/ Grunge.com - https://www.grunge.com/307646/the-biggest-mysteries-in-classic-rock-still-unsolved-today/ Loudersound.com - https://www.loudersound.com/features/the-death-of-bobby-fuller-an-untimely-tragedy-and-an-unsolved-mystery AllThatsInteresting.com - https://allthatsinteresting.com/bobby-fuller TheGuardian.com - https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jul/16/the-short-life-and-mysterious-death-of-bobby-fuller-rocknroll-king-of-texas UDiscovermusic.com - https://www.udiscovermusic.com/stories/bobby-fuller-short-life-strange-death/ Unsolved.com - https://unsolved.com/gallery/bobby-fuller/ MusicInfluence.com - https://musicinfluence.com/rock-and-roll-tales/the-unsolved-murder-of-bobby-fuller/ WayBackAttack.com - https://www.waybackattack.com/rodgersjimmie.html#:~:text=Yet%20his%20entire%20life%20took,though%20Jimmie%20has%20said%20he History.com - https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/sam-cooke-dies-under-suspicious-circumstances-in-la Wikipedia.com - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Fought_the_Law Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ens visita Jordi Many

Ens visita Jordi Many

How many times now have I gone into the backstory with a song and learned that the person who wrote it says something akin to, "Yeah, I knocked that one off in about fifteen minutes." Oftentimes they also think that the song isn't going to amount to very much, which I find kind of funny. But it also supports a working theory I have that it's not always the song itself, but the way it's presented. The Crickets (sans Buddy Holly) and a few others approached it one way, but Bobby Fuller and The Clash looked at it differently, and it paid off for them. Click here for a transcript of this episode. Click here to support the show as a Patron. 

At the height of the rock and roll revolution of the 1950's and 1960's, we lost so many great musicians. One that is consistently overlooked is Bobby Fuller, the man whose band popularized the song "I Fought the Law." Was his death an accident? A suicide? Or something more sinister?This show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/4106013/advertisement

This episode of Weekend Weird, RedNick and Pat discuss the deaths of “Television's first Man of Steel” George Reeves, “Colonel Hogan” Bob Crane and rising rock star Bobby Fuller. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/weekendweird2017/support

The Georgia supreme court rejected Donald Trump, a NY serial-killer was arrested, Bobby Fuller died on this day, extreme heat in the southwest, is Walt Disney rolling over in his grave, a proposed Lester river roundabout looms, and the air show has come and gone...See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this episode, I take a look at some incredible music that surprisingly was all recorded here in Texas. From Robert Johnson to Selena and Pantera, this episode delves into the back story of some of the amazing music that's been created here in the Lone Star State. We'll look at George Jones, Bobby Fuller, Harry Choates- the Godfather of Cajun Music, Lefty Frizzell, and many more. Hear samples of these classic songs and some of the interesting covers that they inspired. 

Nueva entrega de este coleccionable dedicado a recordar grandes canciones de todo el abanico de estilos que dieron forma a la música pop de la primera mitad de los años 60. (Foto del podcast; The Shangri-Las, 1964) Playlist; (sintonía) THE SHADOWS “Walkin’” BUDDY HOLLY “Crying waiting hoping” THE BOBBY FULLER 4 “Let her dance” SAM COOKE “Another Saturday night” THE ROLLING STONES “If you need me” FATS DOMINO “It keeps raining” CLARENCE “FROGMAN” HENRY “(I don't know why) but I do” JOE BROWN and THE BRUVVERS “It only took a minute” THE VIBRATIONS “Watusi” OSCAR BROWN JR “The work song” THE CONTOURS “Do you love me” THE ROYAL SHOWBAND WATERFORD “The huckle buck” SHARON MARIE “Run around lover” BERT KAEMPFERT “Chicken talk” BOBBY RYDELL “I wanna thank you” THE SHANGRI-LAS “Leader of the pack” HELEN SHAPIRO “Not responsable” THE SHARADES “Dumb head” ROY ORBISON “In dreams” Escuchar audio

Sintonía: "Hangin´ High" - Big Timers "I´m In Pittsburgh (And It´s Raining)" - The Outcasts; "99th Floor" - The Moving Sidewalks; "You Rub Me The Wrong Way" - The Road; "So What" - The Lyrics; "Lost Innocence" - The Buddhas; "She´s Gone" - The Dovers; "It´s Cold Outside" - The Choir; "(Drinking) Wine Wine Wine" - Bobby Fuller; "Suicidal Flowers" - Chrystal Chandlier; "Swami" - William Penn; "You Don´t Know Me" - Magi; "I Tell No Lies" - The Escapades; "Walking Shoes" - The Trolls; "You´re Lying" - John Wooley; "Look And You Will Find" - Just Born; "SuzyCreamCheese" - Teddy & Patches; "Faces" - TC Atlantic Escuchar audio

National Nut day. Pop culture from 1964. 1st parachute jump, Princeton founded, Xerox copy machine invented. Todays birthdays, Christopher Lloyd, Bobby Fuller, Annette Funicello, Shaggy, Jeff Goldblum, Dylan Scott, Michael Fishman, Jonathon Lipnicki, Zac Hanson, Jesse Tyler Ferguson.

Episode 152 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “For What It's Worth”, and the short but eventful career of Buffalo Springfield. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-five-minute bonus episode available, on "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" by Glen Campbell. 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 As usual, there's a Mixcloud mix containing all the songs excerpted in the episode. This four-CD box set is the definitive collection of Buffalo Springfield's work, while if you want the mono version of the second album, the stereo version of the first, and the final album as released, but no demos or outtakes, you want this more recent box set. For What It's Worth: The Story of Buffalo Springfield by Richey Furay and John Einarson is obviously Furay's version of the story, but all the more interesting for that. For information on Steve Stills' early life I used Stephen Stills: Change Partners by David Roberts.  Information on both Stills and Young comes from Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young by David Browne.  Jimmy McDonough's Shakey is the definitive biography of Neil Young, while Young's Waging Heavy Peace is his autobiography. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A quick note before we begin -- this episode deals with various disabilities. In particular, there are descriptions of epileptic seizures that come from non-medically-trained witnesses, many of whom took ableist attitudes towards the seizures. I don't know enough about epilepsy to know how accurate their descriptions and perceptions are, and I apologise if that means that by repeating some of their statements, I am inadvertently passing on myths about the condition. When I talk about this, I am talking about the after-the-fact recollections of musicians, none of them medically trained and many of them in altered states of consciousness, about events that had happened decades earlier. Please do not take anything said in a podcast about music history as being the last word on the causes or effects of epileptic seizures, rather than how those musicians remember them. Anyway, on with the show. One of the things you notice if you write about protest songs is that a lot of the time, the songs that people talk about as being important or impactful have aged very poorly. Even great songwriters like Bob Dylan or John Lennon, when writing material about the political events of the time, would write material they would later acknowledge was far from their best. Too often a song will be about a truly important event, and be powered by a real sense of outrage at injustice, but it will be overly specific, and then as soon as the immediate issue is no longer topical, the song is at best a curio. For example, the sentencing of the poet and rock band manager John Sinclair to ten years in prison for giving two joints to an undercover police officer was hugely controversial in the early seventies, but by the time John Lennon's song about it was released, Sinclair had been freed by the Supreme Court, and very, very few people would use the song as an example of why Lennon's songwriting still has lasting value: [Excerpt: John Lennon, "John Sinclair"] But there are exceptions, and those tend to be songs where rather than talking about specific headlines, the song is about the emotion that current events have caused. Ninety years on from its first success, for example, "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" still has resonance, because there are still people who are put out of work through no fault of their own, and even those of us who are lucky enough to be financially comfortable have the fear that all too soon it may end, and we may end up like Al begging on the streets: [Excerpt: Rudy Vallee, "Brother Can You Spare a Dime?"] And because of that emotional connection, sometimes the very best protest songs can take on new lives and new meanings, and connect with the way people feel about totally unrelated subjects. Take Buffalo Springfield's one hit. The actual subject of the song couldn't be any more trivial in the grand scheme of things -- a change in zoning regulations around the Sunset Strip that meant people under twenty-one couldn't go to the clubs after 10PM, and the subsequent reaction to that -- but because rather than talking about the specific incident, Steve Stills instead talked about the emotions that it called up, and just noted the fleeting images that he was left with, the song became adopted as an anthem by soldiers in Vietnam. Sometimes what a song says is nowhere near as important as how it says it. [Excerpt: Buffalo Springfield, "For What It's Worth"] Steve Stills seems almost to have been destined to be a musician, although the instrument he started on, the drums, was not the one for which he would become best known. According to Stills, though, he always had an aptitude for rhythm, to the extent that he learned to tapdance almost as soon as he had learned to walk. He started on drums aged eight or nine, after somebody gave him a set of drumsticks. After his parents got sick of him damaging the furniture by playing on every available surface, an actual drum kit followed, and that became his principal instrument, even after he learned to play the guitar at military school, as his roommate owned one. As a teenager, Stills developed an idiosyncratic taste in music, helped by the record collection of his friend Michael Garcia. He didn't particularly like most of the pop music of the time, but he was a big fan of pre-war country music, Motown, girl-group music -- he especially liked the Shirelles -- and Chess blues. He was also especially enamoured of the music of Jimmy Reed, a passion he would later share with his future bandmate Neil Young: [Excerpt: Jimmy Reed, "Baby, What You Want Me To Do?"] In his early teens, he became the drummer for a band called the Radars, and while he was drumming he studied their lead guitarist, Chuck Schwin.  He said later "There was a whole little bunch of us who were into kind of a combination of all the blues guys and others including Chet Atkins, Dick Dale, and Hank Marvin: a very weird cross-section of far-out guitar players." Stills taught himself to play like those guitarists, and in particular he taught himself how to emulate Atkins' Travis-picking style, and became remarkably proficient at it. There exists a recording of him, aged sixteen, singing one of his own songs and playing finger-picked guitar, and while the song is not exactly the strongest thing I've ever heard lyrically, it's clearly the work of someone who is already a confident performer: [Excerpt: Stephen Stills, "Travellin'"] But the main reason he switched to becoming a guitarist wasn't because of his admiration for Chet Atkins or Hank Marvin, but because he started driving and discovered that if you have to load a drum kit into your car and then drive it to rehearsals and gigs you either end up bashing up your car or bashing up the drum kit. As this is not a problem with guitars, Stills decided that he'd move on from the Radars, and join a band named the Continentals as their rhythm guitarist, playing with lead guitarist Don Felder. Stills was only in the Continentals for a few months though, before being replaced by another guitarist, Bernie Leadon, and in general Stills' whole early life is one of being uprooted and moved around. His father had jobs in several different countries, and while for the majority of his time Stills was in the southern US, he also ended up spending time in Costa Rica -- and staying there as a teenager even as the rest of his family moved to El Salvador. Eventually, aged eighteen, he moved to New Orleans, where he formed a folk duo with a friend, Chris Sarns. The two had very different tastes in folk music -- Stills preferred Dylan-style singer-songwriters, while Sarns liked the clean sound of the Kingston Trio -- but they played together for several months before moving to Greenwich Village, where they performed together and separately. They were latecomers to the scene, which had already mostly ended, and many of the folk stars had already gone on to do bigger things. But Stills still saw plenty of great performers there -- Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonius Monk in the jazz clubs, Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce, and Richard Pryor in the comedy ones, and Simon and Garfunkel, Richie Havens, Fred Neil and Tim Hardin in the folk ones -- Stills said that other than Chet Atkins, Havens, Neil, and Hardin were the people most responsible for his guitar style. Stills was also, at this time, obsessed with Judy Collins' third album -- the album which had featured Roger McGuinn on banjo and arrangements, and which would soon provide several songs for the Byrds to cover: [Excerpt: Judy Collins, "Turn, Turn, Turn"] Judy Collins would soon become a very important figure in Stills' life, but for now she was just the singer on his favourite record. While the Greenwich Village folk scene was no longer quite what it had been a year or two earlier, it was still a great place for a young talented musician to perform. As well as working with Chris Sarns, Stills also formed a trio with his friend John Hopkins and a banjo player called Peter Tork who everyone said looked just like Stills. Tork soon headed out west to seek his fortune, and then Stills got headhunted to join the Au Go Go Singers. This was a group that was being set up in the same style as the New Christy Minstrels -- a nine-piece vocal and instrumental group that would do clean-sounding versions of currently-popular folk songs. The group were signed to Roulette Records, and recorded one album, They Call Us Au-Go-Go Singers, produced by Hugo and Luigi, the production duo we've previously seen working with everyone from the Tokens to the Isley Brothers. Much of the album is exactly the same kind of thing that a million New Christy Minstrels soundalikes were putting out -- and Stills, with his raspy voice, was clearly intended to be the Barry McGuire of this group -- but there was one exception -- a song called "High Flyin' Bird", on which Stills was able to show off the sound that would later make him famous, and which became so associated with him that even though it was written by Billy Edd Wheeler, the writer of "Jackson", even the biography of Stills I used in researching this episode credits "High Flyin' Bird" as being a Stills original: [Excerpt: The Au-Go-Go Singers, "High Flyin' Bird"] One of the other members of the Au-Go-Go Singers, Richie Furay, also got to sing a lead vocal on the album, on the Tom Paxton song "Where I'm Bound": [Excerpt: The Au-Go-Go Singers, "Where I'm Bound"] The Au-Go-Go Singers got a handful of dates around the folk scene, and Stills and Furay became friendly with another singer playing the same circuit, Gram Parsons. Parsons was one of the few people they knew who could see the value in current country music, and convinced both Stills and Furay to start paying more attention to what was coming out of Nashville and Bakersfield. But soon the Au-Go-Go Singers split up. Several venues where they might otherwise have been booked were apparently scared to book an act that was associated with Morris Levy, and also the market for big folk ensembles dried up more or less overnight when the Beatles hit the music scene. But several of the group -- including Stills but not Furay -- decided they were going to continue anyway, and formed a group called The Company, and they went on a tour of Canada. And one of the venues they played was the Fourth Dimension coffee house in Fort William, Ontario, and there their support act was a rock band called The Squires: [Excerpt: The Squires, "(I'm a Man And) I Can't Cry"] The lead guitarist of the Squires, Neil Young, had a lot in common with Stills, and they bonded instantly. Both men had parents who had split up when they were in their teens, and had a successful but rather absent father and an overbearing mother. And both had shown an interest in music even as babies. According to Young's mother, when he was still in nappies, he would pull himself up by the bars  of his playpen and try to dance every time he heard "Pinetop's Boogie Woogie": [Excerpt: Pinetop Smith, "Pinetop's Boogie Woogie"] Young, though, had had one crucial experience which Stills had not had. At the age of six, he'd come down with polio, and become partially paralysed. He'd spent months in hospital before he regained his ability to walk, and the experience had also affected him in other ways. While he was recovering, he would draw pictures of trains -- other than music, his big interest, almost an obsession, was with electric train sets, and that obsession would remain with him throughout his life -- but for the first time he was drawing with his right hand rather than his left. He later said "The left-hand side got a little screwed. Feels different from the right. If I close my eyes, my left side, I really don't know where it is—but over the years I've discovered that almost one hundred percent for sure it's gonna be very close to my right side … probably to the left. That's why I started appearing to be ambidextrous, I think. Because polio affected my left side, and I think I was left-handed when I was born. What I have done is use the weak side as the dominant one because the strong side was injured." Both Young's father Scott Young -- a very famous Canadian writer and sports broadcaster, who was by all accounts as well known in Canada during his lifetime as his son -- and Scott's brother played ukulele, and they taught Neil how to play, and his first attempt at forming a group had been to get his friend Comrie Smith to get a pair of bongos and play along with him to Preston Epps' "Bongo Rock": [Excerpt: Preston Epps, "Bongo Rock"] Neil Young had liked all the usual rock and roll stars of the fifties  -- though in his personal rankings, Elvis came a distant third behind Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis -- but his tastes ran more to the more darkly emotional. He loved "Maybe" by the Chantels, saying "Raw soul—you cannot miss it. That's the real thing. She was believin' every word she was singin'." [Excerpt: The Chantels, "Maybe"] What he liked more than anything was music that had a mainstream surface but seemed slightly off-kilter. He was a major fan of Roy Orbison, saying, "it's almost impossible to comprehend the depth of that soul. It's so deep and dark it just keeps on goin' down—but it's not black. It's blue, deep blue. He's just got it. The drama. There's something sad but proud about Roy's music", and he would say similar things about Del Shannon, saying "He struck me as the ultimate dark figure—behind some Bobby Rydell exterior, y'know? “Hats Off to Larry,” “Runaway,” “Swiss Maid”—very, very inventive. The stuff was weird. Totally unaffected." More surprisingly, perhaps, he was a particular fan of Bobby Darin, who he admired so much because Darin could change styles at the drop of a hat, going from novelty rock and roll like "Splish Splash" to crooning "Mack The Knife" to singing Tim Hardin songs like "If I Were a Carpenter", without any of them seeming any less authentic. As he put it later "He just changed. He's completely different. And he's really into it. Doesn't sound like he's not there. “Dream Lover,” “Mack the Knife,” “If I Were a Carpenter,” “Queen of the Hop,” “Splish Splash”—tell me about those records, Mr. Darin. Did you write those all the same day, or what happened? He just changed so much. Just kinda went from one place to another. So it's hard to tell who Bobby Darin really was." And one record which Young was hugely influenced by was Floyd Cramer's country instrumental, "Last Date": [Excerpt: Floyd Cramer, "Last Date"] Now, that was a very important record in country music, and if you want to know more about it I strongly recommend listening to the episode of Cocaine and Rhinestones on the Nashville A-Team, which has a long section on the track, but the crucial thing to know about that track is that it's one of the earliest examples of what is known as slip-note playing, where the piano player, before hitting the correct note, briefly hits the note a tone below it, creating a brief discord. Young absolutely loved that sound, and wanted to make a sound like that on the guitar. And then, when he and his mother moved to Winnipeg after his parents' divorce, he found someone who was doing just that. It was the guitarist in a group variously known as Chad Allan and the Reflections and Chad Allan and the Expressions. That group had relatives in the UK who would send them records, and so where most Canadian bands would do covers of American hits, Chad Allan and the Reflections would do covers of British hits, like their version of Geoff Goddard's "Tribute to Buddy Holly", a song that had originally been produced by Joe Meek: [Excerpt: Chad Allan and the Reflections, "Tribute to Buddy Holly"] That would later pay off for them in a big way, when they recorded a version of Johnny Kidd and the Pirates' "Shakin' All Over", for which their record label tried to create an air of mystery by releasing it with no artist name, just "Guess Who?" on the label. It became a hit, the name stuck, and they became The Guess Who: [Excerpt: The Guess Who, "Shakin' All Over"] But at this point they, and their guitarist Randy Bachman, were just another group playing around Winnipeg. Bachman, though, was hugely impressive to Neil Young for a few reasons. The first was that he really did have a playing style that was a lot like the piano style of Floyd Cramer -- Young would later say "it was Randy Bachman who did it first. Randy was the first one I ever heard do things on the guitar that reminded me of Floyd. He'd do these pulls—“darrr darrrr,” this two-note thing goin' together—harmony, with one note pulling and the other note stayin' the same." Bachman also had built the first echo unit that Young heard a guitarist play in person. He'd discovered that by playing with the recording heads on a tape recorder owned by his mother, he could replicate the tape echo that Sam Phillips had used at Sun Studios -- and once he'd attached that to his amplifier, he realised how much the resulting sound sounded like his favourite guitarist, Hank Marvin of the Shadows, another favourite of Neil Young's: [Excerpt: The Shadows, "Man of Mystery"] Young soon started looking to Bachman as something of a mentor figure, and he would learn a lot of guitar techniques second hand from Bachman -- every time a famous musician came to the area, Bachman would go along and stand right at the front and watch the guitarist, and make note of the positions their fingers were in. Then Bachman would replicate those guitar parts with the Reflections, and Neil Young would stand in front of him and make notes of where *his* fingers were. Young joined a band on the local circuit called the Esquires, but soon either quit or was fired, depending on which version of the story you choose to believe. He then formed his own rival band, the Squires, with no "e", much to the disgust of his ex-bandmates. In July 1963, five months after they formed, the  Squires released their first record, "Aurora" backed with "The Sultan", on a tiny local label. Both tracks were very obviously influenced by the Shadows: [Excerpt: The Squires, "Aurora"] The Squires were a mostly-instrumental band for the first year or so they were together, and then the Beatles hit North America, and suddenly people didn't want to hear surf instrumentals and Shadows covers any more, they only wanted to hear songs that sounded a bit like the Beatles. The Squires started to work up the appropriate repertoire -- two songs that have been mentioned as in their set at this point are the Beatles album track "It Won't Be Long", and "Money" which the Beatles had also covered -- but they didn't have a singer, being an instrumental group. They could get in a singer, of course, but that would mean splitting the money with another person. So instead, the guitarist, who had never had any intention of becoming a singer, was more or less volunteered for the role. Over the next eighteen months or so the group's repertoire moved from being largely instrumental to largely vocal, and the group also seem to have shuttled around a bit between two different cities -- Winnipeg and Fort William, staying in one for a while and then moving back to the other. They travelled between the two in Young's car, a Buick Roadmaster hearse. In Winnipeg, Young first met up with a singer named Joni Anderson, who was soon to get married to Chuck Mitchell and would become better known by her married name. The two struck up a friendship, though by all accounts never a particularly close one -- they were too similar in too many ways; as Mitchell later said “Neil and I have a lot in common: Canadian; Scorpios; polio in the same epidemic, struck the same parts of our body; and we both have a black sense of humor". They were both also idiosyncratic artists who never fit very well into boxes. In Fort William the Squires made a few more records, this time vocal tracks like "I'll Love You Forever": [Excerpt: The Squires, "I'll Love You Forever"] It was also in Fort William that Young first encountered two acts that would make a huge impression on him. One was a group called The Thorns, consisting of Tim Rose, Jake Holmes, and Rich Husson. The Thorns showed Young that there was interesting stuff being done on the fringes of the folk music scene. He later said "One of my favourites was “Oh Susannah”—they did this arrangement that was bizarre. It was in a minor key, which completely changed everything—and it was rock and roll. So that idea spawned arrangements of all these other songs for me. I did minor versions of them all. We got into it. That was a certain Squires stage that never got recorded. Wish there were tapes of those shows. We used to do all this stuff, a whole kinda music—folk-rock. We took famous old folk songs like “Clementine,” “She'll Be Comin' 'Round the Mountain,” “Tom Dooley,” and we did them all in minor keys based on the Tim Rose arrangement of “Oh Susannah.” There are no recordings of the Thorns in existence that I know of, but presumably that arrangement that Young is talking about is the version that Rose also later did with the Big 3, which we've heard in a few other episodes: [Excerpt: The Big 3, "The Banjo Song"] The other big influence was, of course, Steve Stills, and the two men quickly found themselves influencing each other deeply. Stills realised that he could bring more rock and roll to his folk-music sound, saying that what amazed him was the way the Squires could go from "Cottonfields" (the Lead Belly song) to "Farmer John", the R&B song by Don and Dewey that was becoming a garage-rock staple. Young in turn was inspired to start thinking about maybe going more in the direction of folk music. The Squires even renamed themselves the High-Flying Birds, after the song that Stills had recorded with the Au Go Go Singers. After The Company's tour of Canada, Stills moved back to New York for a while. He now wanted to move in a folk-rock direction, and for a while he tried to persuade his friend John Sebastian to let him play bass in his new band, but when the Lovin' Spoonful decided against having him in the band, he decided to move West to San Francisco, where he'd heard there was a new music scene forming. He enjoyed a lot of the bands he saw there, and in particular he was impressed by the singer of a band called the Great Society: [Excerpt: The Great Society, "Somebody to Love"] He was much less impressed with the rest of her band, and seriously considered going up to her and asking if she wanted to work with some *real* musicians instead of the unimpressive ones she was working with, but didn't get his nerve up. We will, though, be hearing more about Grace Slick in future episodes. Instead, Stills decided to move south to LA, where many of the people he'd known in Greenwich Village were now based. Soon after he got there, he hooked up with two other musicians, a guitarist named Steve Young and a singer, guitarist, and pianist named Van Dyke Parks. Parks had a record contract at MGM -- he'd been signed by Tom Wilson, the same man who had turned Dylan electric, signed Simon and Garfunkel, and produced the first albums by the Mothers of Invention. With Wilson, Parks put out a couple of singles in 1966, "Come to the Sunshine": [Excerpt: The Van Dyke Parks, "Come to the Sunshine"] And "Number Nine", a reworking of the Ode to Joy from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony: [Excerpt: The Van Dyke Parks, "Number Nine"]Parks, Stills, and Steve Young became The Van Dyke Parks Band, though they didn't play together for very long, with their most successful performance being as the support act for the Lovin' Spoonful for a show in Arizona. But they did have a lasting resonance -- when Van Dyke Parks finally got the chance to record his first solo album, he opened it with Steve Young singing the old folk song "Black Jack Davy", filtered to sound like an old tape: [Excerpt: Steve Young, "Black Jack Davy"] And then it goes into a song written for Parks by Randy Newman, but consisting of Newman's ideas about Parks' life and what he knew about him, including that he had been third guitar in the Van Dyke Parks Band: [Excerpt: Van Dyke Parks, "Vine Street"] Parks and Stills also wrote a few songs together, with one of their collaborations, "Hello, I've Returned", later being demoed by Stills for Buffalo Springfield: [Excerpt: Steve Stills, "Hello, I've Returned"] After the Van Dyke Parks Band fell apart, Parks went on to many things, including a brief stint on keyboards in the Mothers of Invention, and we'll be talking more about him next episode. Stills formed a duo called the Buffalo Fish, with his friend Ron Long. That soon became an occasional trio when Stills met up again with his old Greenwich Village friend Peter Tork, who joined the group on the piano. But then Stills auditioned for the Monkees and was turned down because he had bad teeth -- or at least that's how most people told the story. Stills has later claimed that while he turned up for the Monkees auditions, it wasn't to audition, it was to try to pitch them songs, which seems implausible on the face of it. According to Stills, he was offered the job and turned it down because he'd never wanted it. But whatever happened, Stills suggested they might want his friend Peter, who looked just like him apart from having better teeth, and Peter Tork got the job. But what Stills really wanted to do was to form a proper band. He'd had the itch to do it ever since seeing the Squires, and he decided he should ask Neil Young to join. There was only one problem -- when he phoned Young, the phone was answered by Young's mother, who told Stills that Neil had moved out to become a folk singer, and she didn't know where he was. But then Stills heard from his old friend Richie Furay. Furay was still in Greenwich Village, and had decided to write to Stills. He didn't know where Stills was, other than that he was in California somewhere, so he'd written to Stills' father in El Salvador. The letter had been returned, because the postage had been short by one cent, so Furay had resent it with the correct postage. Stills' father had then forwarded the letter to the place Stills had been staying in San Francisco, which had in turn forwarded it on to Stills in LA. Furay's letter mentioned this new folk singer who had been on the scene for a while and then disappeared again, Neil Young, who had said he knew Stills, and had been writing some great songs, one of which Furay had added to his own set. Stills got in touch with Furay and told him about this great band he was forming in LA, which he wanted Furay to join. Furay was in, and travelled from New York to LA, only to be told that at this point there were no other members of this great band, but they'd definitely find some soon. They got a publishing deal with Columbia/Screen Gems, which gave them enough money to not starve, but what they really needed was to find some other musicians. They did, when driving down Hollywood Boulevard on April the sixth, 1966. There, stuck in traffic going the other way, they saw a hearse... After Steve Stills had left Fort William, so had Neil Young. He hadn't initially intended to -- the High-Flying Birds still had a regular gig, but Young and some of his friends had gone away for a few days on a road trip in his hearse. But unfortunately the transmission on the hearse had died, and Young and his friends had been stranded. Many years later, he would write a eulogy to the hearse, which he and Stills would record together: [Excerpt: The Stills-Young Band, "Long May You Run"] Young and his friends had all hitch-hiked in different directions -- Young had ended up in Toronto, where his dad lived, and had stayed with his dad for a while. The rest of his band had eventually followed him there, but Young found the Toronto music scene not to his taste -- the folk and rock scenes there were very insular and didn't mingle with each other, and the group eventually split up. Young even took on a day job for a while, for the only time in his life, though he soon quit. Young started basically commuting between Toronto and New York, a distance of several hundred miles, going to Greenwich Village for a while before ending up back in Toronto, and ping-ponging between the two. In New York, he met up with Richie Furay, and also had a disastrous audition for Elektra Records as a solo artist. One of the songs he sang in the audition was "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing", the song which Furay liked so much he started performing it himself. Young doesn't normally explain his songs, but as this was one of the first he ever wrote, he talked about it in interviews in the early years, before he decided to be less voluble about his art. The song was apparently about the sense of youthful hope being crushed. The instigation for it was Young seeing his girlfriend with another man, but the central image, of Clancy not singing, came from Young's schooldays. The Clancy in question was someone Young liked as one of the other weird kids at school. He was disabled, like Young, though with MS rather than polio, and he would sing to himself in the hallways at school. Sadly, of course, the other kids would mock and bully him for that, and eventually he ended up stopping. Young said about it "After awhile, he got so self-conscious he couldn't do his thing any more. When someone who is as beautiful as that and as different as that is actually killed by his fellow man—you know what I mean—like taken and sorta chopped down—all the other things are nothing compared to this." [Excerpt: Neil Young, "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing (Elektra demo)"] One thing I should say for anyone who listens to the Mixcloud for this episode, that song, which will be appearing in a couple of different versions, has one use of a term for Romani people that some (though not all) consider a slur. It's not in the excerpts I'll be using in this episode, but will be in the full versions on the Mixcloud. Sadly that word turns up time and again in songs of this era... When he wasn't in New York, Young was living in Toronto in a communal apartment owned by a folk singer named Vicki Taylor, where many of the Toronto folk scene would stay. Young started listening a lot to Taylor's Bert Jansch albums, which were his first real exposure to the British folk-baroque style of guitar fingerpicking, as opposed to the American Travis-picking style, and Young would soon start to incorporate that style into his own playing: [Excerpt: Bert Jansch, "Angie"] Another guitar influence on Young at this point was another of the temporary tenants of Taylor's flat, John Kay, who would later go on to be one of the founding members of Steppenwolf. Young credited Kay with having a funky rhythm guitar style that Young incorporated into his own. While he was in Toronto, he started getting occasional gigs in Detroit, which is "only" a couple of hundred miles away, set up by Joni and Chuck Mitchell, both of whom also sometimes stayed at Taylor's. And it was in Detroit that Neil Young became, albeit very briefly, a Motown artist. The Mynah Birds were a band in Toronto that had at one point included various future members of Steppenwolf, and they were unusual for the time in that they were a white band with a Black lead singer, Ricky Matthews. They also had a rich manager, John Craig Eaton, the heir to the Eaton's department store fortune, who basically gave them whatever money they wanted -- they used to go to his office and tell him they needed seven hundred dollars for lunch, and he'd hand it to them. They were looking for a new guitarist when Bruce Palmer, their bass player, bumped into Neil Young carrying an amp and asked if he was interested in joining. He was. The Mynah Birds quickly became one of the best bands in Toronto, and Young and Matthews became close, both as friends and as a performance team. People who saw them live would talk about things like a song called “Hideaway”, written by Young and Matthews, which had a spot in the middle where Young would start playing a harmonica solo, throw the harmonica up in the air mid-solo, Matthews would catch it, and he would then finish the solo. They got signed to Motown, who were at this point looking to branch out into the white guitar-group market, and they were put through the Motown star-making machine. They recorded an entire album, which remains unreleased, but they did release a single, "It's My Time": [Excerpt: The Mynah Birds, "It's My Time"] Or at least, they released a handful of promo copies. The single was pulled from release after Ricky Matthews got arrested. It turned out his birth name wasn't Ricky Matthews, but James Johnson, and that he wasn't from Toronto as he'd told everyone, but from Buffalo, New York. He'd fled to Canada after going AWOL from the Navy, not wanting to be sent to Vietnam, and he was arrested and jailed for desertion. After getting out of jail, he would start performing under yet another name, and as Rick James would have a string of hits in the seventies and eighties: [Excerpt: Rick James, "Super Freak"] Most of the rest of the group continued gigging as The Mynah Birds, but Young and Palmer had other plans. They sold the expensive equipment Eaton had bought the group, and Young bought a new hearse, which he named Mort 2 – Mort had been his first hearse. And according to one of the band's friends in Toronto, the crucial change in their lives came when Neil Young heard a song on a jukebox: [Excerpt: The Mamas and the Papas, "California Dreamin'"] Young apparently heard "California Dreamin'" and immediately said "Let's go to California and become rock stars". Now, Young later said of this anecdote that "That sounds like a Canadian story to me. That sounds too real to be true", and he may well be right. Certainly the actual wording of the story is likely incorrect -- people weren't talking about "rock stars" in 1966. Google's Ngram viewer has the first use of the phrase in print being in 1969, and the phrase didn't come into widespread usage until surprisingly late -- even granting that phrases enter slang before they make it to print, it still seems implausible. But even though the precise wording might not be correct, something along those lines definitely seems to have happened, albeit possibly less dramatically. Young's friend Comrie Smith independently said that Young told him “Well, Comrie, I can hear the Mamas and the Papas singing ‘All the leaves are brown, and the skies are gray …' I'm gonna go down to the States and really make it. I'm on my way. Today North Toronto, tomorrow the world!” Young and Palmer loaded up Mort 2 with a bunch of their friends and headed towards California. On the way, they fell out with most of the friends, who parted from them, and Young had an episode which in retrospect may have been his first epileptic seizure. They decided when they got to California that they were going to look for Steve Stills, as they'd heard he was in LA and neither of them knew anyone else in the state. But after several days of going round the Sunset Strip clubs asking if anyone knew Steve Stills, and sleeping in the hearse as they couldn't afford anywhere else, they were getting fed up and about to head off to San Francisco, as they'd heard there was a good music scene there, too. They were going to leave that day, and they were stuck in traffic on Sunset Boulevard, about to head off, when Stills and Furay came driving in the other direction. Furay happened to turn his head, to brush away a fly, and saw a hearse with Ontario license plates. He and Stills both remembered that Young drove a hearse, and so they assumed it must be him. They started honking at the hearse, then did a U-turn. They got Young's attention, and they all pulled into the parking lot at Ben Frank's, the Sunset Strip restaurant that attracted such a hip crowd the Monkees' producers had asked for "Ben Frank's types" in their audition advert. Young introduced Stills and Furay to Palmer, and now there *was* a group -- three singing, songwriting, guitarists and a bass player. Now all they needed was a drummer. There were two drummers seriously considered for the role. One of them, Billy Mundi, was technically the better player, but Young didn't like playing with him as much -- and Mundi also had a better offer, to join the Mothers of Invention as their second drummer -- before they'd recorded their first album, they'd had two drummers for a few months, but Denny Bruce, their second drummer, had become ill with glandular fever and they'd reverted to having Jimmy Carl Black play solo. Now they were looking for someone else, and Mundi took that role. The other drummer, who Young preferred anyway, was another Canadian, Dewey Martin. Martin was a couple of years older than the rest of the group, and by far the most experienced. He'd moved from Canada to Nashville in his teens, and according to Martin he had been taken under the wing of Hank Garland, the great session guitarist most famous for "Sugarfoot Rag": [Excerpt: Hank Garland, "Sugarfoot Rag"] We heard Garland playing with Elvis and others in some of the episodes around 1960, and by many reckonings he was the best session guitarist in Nashville, but in 1961 he had a car accident that left him comatose, and even though he recovered from the coma and lived another thirty-three years, he never returned to recording. According to Martin, though, Garland would still sometimes play jazz clubs around Nashville after the accident, and one day Martin walked into a club and saw him playing. The drummer he was playing with got up and took a break, taking his sticks with him, so Martin got up on stage and started playing, using two combs instead of sticks. Garland was impressed, and told Martin that Faron Young needed a drummer, and he could get him the gig. At the time Young was one of the biggest stars in country music. That year, 1961, he had three country top ten hits, including a number one with his version of Willie Nelson's "Hello Walls", produced by Ken Nelson: [Excerpt: Faron Young, "Hello Walls"] Martin joined Faron Young's band for a while, and also ended up playing short stints in the touring bands of various other Nashville-based country and rock stars, including Patsy Cline, Roy Orbison, and the Everly Brothers, before heading to LA for a while. Then Mel Taylor of the Ventures hooked him up with some musicians in the Pacific Northwest scene, and Martin started playing there under the name Sir Raleigh and the Coupons with various musicians. After a while he travelled back to LA where he got some members of the LA group Sons of Adam to become a permanent lineup of Coupons, and they recorded several singles with Martin singing lead, including the Tommy Boyce and Steve Venet song "Tomorrow's Gonna Be Another Day", later recorded by the Monkees: [Excerpt: Sir Raleigh and the Coupons, "Tomorrow's Gonna Be Another Day"] He then played with the Standells, before joining the Modern Folk Quartet for a short while, as they were transitioning from their folk sound to a folk-rock style. He was only with them for a short while, and it's difficult to get precise details -- almost everyone involved with Buffalo Springfield has conflicting stories about their own careers with timelines that don't make sense, which is understandable given that people were talking about events decades later and memory plays tricks. "Fast" Eddie Hoh had joined the Modern Folk Quartet on drums in late 1965, at which point they became the Modern Folk Quintet, and nothing I've read about that group talks about Hoh ever actually leaving, but apparently Martin joined them in February 1966, which might mean he's on their single "Night-Time Girl", co-written by Al Kooper and produced and arranged by Jack Nitzsche: [Excerpt: The Modern Folk Quintet, "Night-Time Girl"] After that, Martin was taken on by the Dillards, a bluegrass band who are now possibly most famous for having popularised the Arthur "Guitar Boogie" Smith song "Duellin' Banjos", which they recorded on their first album and played on the Andy Griffith Show a few years before it was used in Deliverance: [Excerpt: The Dillards, "Duellin' Banjos"] The Dillards had decided to go in a country-rock direction -- and Doug Dillard would later join the Byrds and make records with Gene Clark -- but they were hesitant about it, and after a brief period with Martin in the band they decided to go back to their drummerless lineup. To soften the blow, they told him about another band that was looking for a drummer -- their manager, Jim Dickson, who was also the Byrds' manager, knew Stills and his bandmates. Dewey Martin was in the group. The group still needed a name though. They eventually took their name from a brand of steam roller, after seeing one on the streets when some roadwork was being done. Everyone involved disagrees as to who came up with the name. Steve Stills at one point said it was a group decision after Neil Young and the group's manager Frazier Mohawk stole the nameplate off the steamroller, and later Stills said that Richey Furay had suggested the name while they were walking down the street, Dewey Martin said it was his idea, Neil Young said that he, Steve Sills, and Van Dyke Parks had been walking down the street and either Young or Stills had seen the nameplate and suggested the name, and Van Dyke Parks says that *he* saw the nameplate and suggested it to Dewey Martin: [Excerpt: Steve Stills and Van Dyke Parks on the name] For what it's worth, I tend to believe Van Dyke Parks in most instances -- he's an honest man, and he seems to have a better memory of the sixties than many of his friends who led more chemically interesting lives. Whoever came up with it, the name worked -- as Stills later put it "We thought it was pretty apt, because Neil Young is from Manitoba which is buffalo country, and  Richie Furay was from Springfield, Ohio -- and I'm the field!" It almost certainly also helped that the word "buffalo" had been in the name of Stills' previous group, Buffalo Fish. On the eleventh of April, 1966, Buffalo Springfield played their first gig, at the Troubadour, using equipment borrowed from the Dillards. Chris Hillman of the Byrds was in the audience and was impressed. He got the group a support slot on a show the Byrds and the Dillards were doing a few days later in San Bernardino. That show was compered by a Merseyside-born British DJ, John Ravenscroft, who had managed to become moderately successful in US radio by playing up his regional accent so he sounded more like the Beatles. He would soon return to the UK, and start broadcasting under the name John Peel. Hillman also got them a week-long slot at the Whisky A-Go-Go, and a bidding war started between record labels to sign the band. Dunhill offered five thousand dollars, Warners counted with ten thousand, and then Atlantic offered twelve thousand. Atlantic were *just* starting to get interested in signing white guitar groups -- Jerry Wexler never liked that kind of music, always preferring to stick with soul and R&B, but Ahmet Ertegun could see which way things were going. Atlantic had only ever signed two other white acts before -- Neil Young's old favourite Bobby Darin, who had since left the label, and Sonny and Cher. And Sonny and Cher's management and production team, Brian Stone and Charlie Greene, were also very interested in the group, who even before they had made a record had quickly become the hottest band on the circuit, even playing the Hollywood Bowl as the Rolling Stones' support act. Buffalo Springfield already had managers -- Frazier Mohawk and Richard Davis, the lighting man at the Troubadour (who was sometimes also referred to as Dickie Davis, but I'll use his full name so as not to cause unnecessary confusion in British people who remember the sports TV presenter of the same name), who Mohawk had enlisted to help him. But Stone and Greene weren't going to let a thing like that stop them. According to anonymous reports quoted without attribution in David Roberts' biography of Stills -- so take this with as many grains of salt as you want -- Stone and Greene took Mohawk for a ride around LA in a limo, just the three of them, a gun, and a used hotdog napkin. At the end of the ride, the hotdog napkin had Mohawk's scrawled signature, signing the group over to Stone and Greene. Davis stayed on, but was demoted to just doing their lights. The way things ended up, the group signed to Stone and Greene's production company, who then leased their masters to Atlantic's Atco subsidiary. A publishing company was also set up for the group's songs -- owned thirty-seven point five percent by Atlantic, thirty-seven point five percent by Stone and Greene, and the other twenty-five percent split six ways between the group and Davis, who they considered their sixth member. Almost immediately, Charlie Greene started playing Stills and Young off against each other, trying a divide-and-conquer strategy on the group. This was quite easy, as both men saw themselves as natural leaders, though Stills was regarded by everyone as the senior partner -- the back cover of their first album would contain the line "Steve is the leader but we all are". Stills and Young were the two stars of the group as far as the audience were concerned -- though most musicians who heard them play live say that the band's real strength was in its rhythm section, with people comparing Palmer's playing to that of James Jamerson. But Stills and Young would get into guitar battles on stage, one-upping each other, in ways that turned the tension between them in creative directions. Other clashes, though were more petty -- both men had very domineering mothers, who would actually call the group's management to complain about press coverage if their son was given less space than the other one. The group were also not sure about Young's voice -- to the extent that Stills was known to jokingly apologise to the audience before Young took a lead vocal -- and so while the song chosen as the group's first A-side was Young's "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing", Furay was chosen to sing it, rather than Young: [Excerpt: Buffalo Springfield, "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing"] On the group's first session, though, both Stills and Young realised that their producers didn't really have a clue -- the group had built up arrangements that had a complex interplay of instruments and vocals, but the producers insisted on cutting things very straightforwardly, with a basic backing track and then the vocals. They also thought that the song was too long so the group should play faster. Stills and Young quickly decided that they were going to have to start producing their own material, though Stone and Greene would remain the producers for the first album. There was another bone of contention though, because in the session the initial plan had been for Stills' song "Go and Say Goodbye" to be the A-side with Young's song as the B-side. It was flipped, and nobody seems quite sure why -- it's certainly the case that, whatever the merits of the two tracks as songs, Stills' song was the one that would have been more likely to become a hit. "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing" was a flop, but it did get some local airplay. The next single, "Burned", was a Young song as well, and this time did have Young taking the lead, though in a song dominated by harmonies: [Excerpt: Buffalo Springfield, "Burned"] Over the summer, though, something had happened that would affect everything for the group -- Neil Young had started to have epileptic seizures. At first these were undiagnosed episodes, but soon they became almost routine events, and they would often happen on stage, particularly at moments of great stress or excitement. Several other members of the group became convinced -- entirely wrongly -- that Young was faking these seizures in order to get women to pay attention to him. They thought that what he wanted was for women to comfort him and mop his brow, and that collapsing would get him that. The seizures became so common that Richard Davis, the group's lighting tech, learned to recognise the signs of a seizure before it happened. As soon as it looked like Young was about to collapse the lights would turn on, someone would get ready to carry him off stage, and Richie Furay would know to grab Young's guitar before he fell so that the guitar wouldn't get damaged. Because they weren't properly grounded and Furay had an electric guitar of his own, he'd get a shock every time. Young would later claim that during some of the seizures, he would hallucinate that he was another person, in another world, living another life that seemed to have its own continuity -- people in the other world would recognise him and talk to him as if he'd been away for a while -- and then when he recovered he would have to quickly rebuild his identity, as if temporarily amnesiac, and during those times he would find things like the concept of lying painful. The group's first album came out in December, and they were very, very, unhappy with it. They thought the material was great, but they also thought that the production was terrible. Stone and Greene's insistence that they record the backing tracks first and then overdub vocals, rather than singing live with the instruments, meant that the recordings, according to Stills and Young in particular, didn't capture the sound of the group's live performance, and sounded sterile. Stills and Young thought they'd fixed some of that in the mono mix, which they spent ten days on, but then Stone and Greene did the stereo mix without consulting the band, in less than two days, and the album was released at precisely the time that stereo was starting to overtake mono in the album market. I'm using the mono mixes in this podcast, but for decades the only versions available were the stereo ones, which Stills and Young both loathed. Ahmet Ertegun also apparently thought that the demo versions of the songs -- some of which were eventually released on a box set in 2001 -- were much better than the finished studio recordings. The album was not a success on release, but it did contain the first song any of the group had written to chart. Soon after its release, Van Dyke Parks' friend Lenny Waronker was producing a single by a group who had originally been led by Sly Stone and had been called Sly and the Mojo Men. By this time Stone was no longer involved in the group, and they were making music in a very different style from the music their former leader would later become known for. Parks was brought in to arrange a baroque-pop version of Stills' album track "Sit Down I Think I Love You" for the group, and it became their only top forty hit, reaching number thirty-six: [Excerpt: The Mojo Men, "Sit Down I Think I Love You"] It was shortly after the first Buffalo Springfield album was released, though, that Steve Stills wrote what would turn out to be *his* group's only top forty single. The song had its roots in both LA and San Francisco. The LA roots were more obvious -- the song was written about a specific experience Stills had had. He had been driving to Sunset Strip from Laurel Canyon on November the twelfth 1966, and he had seen a mass of young people and police in riot gear, and he had immediately turned round, partly because he didn't want to get involved in what looked to be a riot, and partly because he'd been inspired -- he had the idea for a lyric, which he pretty much finished in the car even before he got home: [Excerpt: The Buffalo Springfield, "For What it's Worth"] The riots he saw were what became known later as the Riot on Sunset Strip. This was a minor skirmish between the police and young people of LA -- there had been complaints that young people had been spilling out of the nightclubs on Sunset Strip into the street, causing traffic problems, and as a result the city council had introduced various heavy-handed restrictions, including a ten PM curfew for all young people in the area, removing the permits that many clubs had which allowed people under twenty-one to be present, forcing the Whisky A-Go-Go to change its name just to "the Whisk", and forcing a club named Pandora's Box, which was considered the epicentre of the problem, to close altogether. Flyers had been passed around calling for a "funeral" for Pandora's Box -- a peaceful gathering at which people could say goodbye to a favourite nightspot, and a thousand people had turned up. The police also turned up, and in the heavy-handed way common among law enforcement, they managed to provoke a peaceful party and turn it into a riot. This would not normally be an event that would be remembered even a year later, let alone nearly sixty years later, but Sunset Strip was the centre of the American rock music world in the period, and of the broader youth entertainment field. Among those arrested at the riot, for example, were Jack Nicholson and Peter Fonda, neither of whom were huge stars at the time, but who were making cheap B-movies with Roger Corman for American International Pictures. Among the cheap exploitation films that American International Pictures made around this time was one based on the riots, though neither Nicholson, Fonda, or Corman were involved. Riot on Sunset Strip was released in cinemas only four months after the riots, and it had a theme song by Dewey Martin's old colleagues The Standells, which is now regarded as a classic of garage rock: [Excerpt: The Standells, "Riot on Sunset Strip"] The riots got referenced in a lot of other songs, as well. The Mothers of Invention's second album, Absolutely Free, contains the song "Plastic People" which includes this section: [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Plastic People"] And the Monkees track "Daily Nightly", written by Michael Nesmith, was always claimed by Nesmith to be an impressionistic portrait of the riots, though the psychedelic lyrics sound to me more like they're talking about drug use and street-walking sex workers than anything to do with the riots: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Daily Nightly"] But the song about the riots that would have the most lasting effect on popular culture was the one that Steve Stills wrote that night. Although how much he actually wrote, at least of the music, is somewhat open to question. Earlier that month, Buffalo Springfield had spent some time in San Francisco. They hadn't enjoyed the experience -- as an LA band, they were thought of as a bunch of Hollywood posers by most of the San Francisco scene, with the exception of one band, Moby Grape -- a band who, like them had three guitarist/singer/songwriters, and with whom they got on very well. Indeed, they got on rather better with Moby Grape than they were getting on with each other at this point, because Young and Stills would regularly get into arguments, and every time their argument seemed to be settling down, Dewey Martin would manage to say the wrong thing and get Stills riled up again -- Martin was doing a lot of speed at this point and unable to stop talking, even when it would have been politic to do so. There was even some talk while they were in San Francisco of the bands doing a trade -- Young and Pete Lewis of Moby Grape swapping places -- though that came to nothing. But Stills, according to both Richard Davis and Pete Lewis, had been truly impressed by two Moby Grape songs. One of them was a song called "On the Other Side", which Moby Grape never recorded, but which apparently had a chorus that went "Stop, can't you hear the music ringing in your ear, right before you go, telling you the way is clear," with the group all pausing after the word "Stop". The other was a song called "Murder in my Heart for the Judge": [Excerpt: Moby Grape, "Murder in my Heart for the Judge"] The song Stills wrote had a huge amount of melodic influence from that song, and quite a bit from “On the Other Side”, though he apparently didn't notice until after the record came out, at which point he apologised to Moby Grape. Stills wasn't massively impressed with the song he'd written, and went to Stone and Greene's office to play it for them, saying "I'll play it, for what it's worth". They liked the song and booked a studio to get the song recorded and rush-released, though according to Neil Young neither Stone nor Greene were actually present at the session, and the song was recorded on December the fifth, while some outbursts of rioting were still happening, and released on December the twenty-third. [Excerpt: Buffalo Springfield, "For What it's Worth"] The song didn't have a title when they recorded it, or so Stills thought, but when he mentioned this to Greene and Stone afterwards, they said "Of course it does. You said, 'I'm going to play the song, 'For What It's Worth'" So that became the title, although Ahmet Ertegun didn't like the idea of releasing a single with a title that wasn't in the lyric, so the early pressings of the single had "Stop, Hey, What's That Sound?" in brackets after the title. The song became a big hit, and there's a story told by David Crosby that doesn't line up correctly, but which might shed some light on why. According to Crosby, "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing" got its first airplay because Crosby had played members of Buffalo Springfield a tape he'd been given of the unreleased Beatles track "A Day in the Life", and they'd told their gangster manager-producers about it. Those manager-producers had then hired a sex worker to have sex with Crosby and steal the tape, which they'd then traded to a radio station in return for airplay. That timeline doesn't work, unless the sex worker involved was also a time traveller,  because "A Day in the Life" wasn't even recorded until January 1967 while "Clancy" came out in August 1966, and there'd been two other singles released between then and January 1967. But it *might* be the case that that's what happened with "For What It's Worth", which was released in the last week of December 1966, and didn't really start to do well on the charts for a couple of months. Right after recording the song, the group went to play a residency in New York, of which Ahmet Ertegun said “When they performed there, man, there was no band I ever heard that had the electricity of that group. That was the most exciting group I've ever seen, bar none. It was just mind-boggling.” During that residency they were joined on stage at various points by Mitch Ryder, Odetta, and Otis Redding. While in New York, the group also recorded "Mr. Soul", a song that Young had originally written as a folk song about his experiences with epilepsy, the nature of the soul, and dealing with fame. However, he'd noticed a similarity to "Satisfaction" and decided to lean into it. The track as finally released was heavily overdubbed by Young a few months later, but after it was released he decided he preferred the original take, which by then only existed as a scratchy acetate, which got released on a box set in 2001: [Excerpt: Buffalo Springfield, "Mr. Soul (original version)"] Everyone has a different story of how the session for that track went -- at least one version of the story has Otis Redding turning up for the session and saying he wanted to record the song himself, as his follow-up to his version of "Satisfaction", but Young being angry at the idea. According to other versions of the story, Greene and Stills got into a physical fight, with Greene having to be given some of the valium Young was taking for his epilepsy to calm him down. "For What it's Worth" was doing well enough on the charts that the album was recalled, and reissued with "For What It's Worth" replacing Stills' song "Baby Don't Scold", but soon disaster struck the band. Bruce Palmer was arrested on drugs charges, and was deported back to Canada just as the song started to rise through the charts. The group needed a new bass player, fast. For a lipsynch appearance on local TV they got Richard Davis to mime the part, and then they got in Ken Forssi, the bass player from Love, for a couple of gigs. They next brought in Ken Koblun, the bass player from the Squires, but he didn't fit in with the rest of the group. The next replacement was Jim Fielder. Fielder was a friend of the group, and knew the material -- he'd subbed for Palmer a few times in 1966 when Palmer had been locked up after less serious busts. And to give some idea of how small a scene the LA scene was, when Buffalo Springfield asked him to become their bass player, he was playing rhythm guitar for the Mothers of Invention, while Billy Mundi was on drums, and had played on their second, as yet unreleased, album, Absolutely Free: [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Call any Vegetable"] And before joining the Mothers, Fielder and Mundi had also played together with Van Dyke Parks, who had served his own short stint as a Mother of Invention already, backing Tim Buckley on Buckley's first album: [Excerpt: Tim Buckley, "Aren't You the Girl?"] And the arrangements on that album were by Jack Nitzsche, who would soon become a very close collaborator with Young. "For What it's Worth" kept rising up the charts. Even though it had been inspired by a very local issue, the lyrics were vague enough that people in other situations could apply it to themselves, and it soon became regarded as an anti-war protest anthem -- something Stills did nothing to discourage, as the band were all opposed to the war. The band were also starting to collaborate with other people. When Stills bought a new house, he couldn't move in to it for a while, and so Peter Tork invited him to stay at his house. The two got on so well that Tork invited Stills to produce the next Monkees album -- only to find that Michael Nesmith had already asked Chip Douglas to do it. The group started work on a new album, provisionally titled "Stampede", but sessions didn't get much further than Stills' song "Bluebird" before trouble arose between Young and Stills. The root of the argument seems to have been around the number of songs each got on the album. With Richie Furay also writing, Young was worried that given the others' attitudes to his songwriting, he might get as few as two songs on the album. And Young and Stills were arguing over which song should be the next single, with Young wanting "Mr. Soul" to be the A-side, while Stills wanted "Bluebird" -- Stills making the reasonable case that they'd released two Neil Young songs as singles and gone nowhere, and then they'd released one of Stills', and it had become a massive hit. "Bluebird" was eventually chosen as the A-side, with "Mr. Soul" as the B-side: [Excerpt: Buffalo Springfield, "Bluebird"] The "Bluebird" session was another fraught one. Fielder had not yet joined the band, and session player Bobby West subbed on bass. Neil Young had recently started hanging out with Jack Nitzsche, and the two were getting very close and working on music together. Young had impressed Nitzsche not just with his songwriting but with his arrogance -- he'd played Nitzsche his latest song, "Expecting to Fly", and Nitzsche had said halfway through "That's a great song", and Young had shushed him and told him to listen, not interrupt. Nitzsche, who had a monstrous ego himself and was also used to working with people like Phil Spector, the Rolling Stones and Sonny Bono, none of them known for a lack of faith in their own abilities, was impressed. Shortly after that, Stills had asked Nitzsch

This episode is part of Pledge Week 2022. Every day this week, I'll be posting old Patreon bonus episodes of the podcast which will have this short intro. These are short, ten- to twenty-minute bonus podcasts which get posted to Patreon for my paying backers every time I post a new main episode -- there are well over a hundred of these in the archive now. If you like the sound of these episodes, then go to patreon.com/andrewhickey and subscribe for as little as a dollar a month or ten dollars a year to get access to all those bonus episodes, plus new ones as they appear. Click below for the transcript Transcript In today's main episode we look at the career of Bobby Fuller, who many have speculated died because of in some way upsetting the Mafia. So in this bonus episode we're going to look at someone who had a much longer, more successful, career, and did so because he managed *not* to upset the Mafia. We're going to look at the involvement of Morris Levy in the birth of bubblegum, and at "Hanky Panky" by Tommy James and the Shondells: [Excerpt: Tommy James and the Shondells, "Hanky Panky"] The original lineup of the Shondells started out when Tommy James was only twelve years old, and still going by his birth name Tommy Jackson. They performed for three years under various names before, in 1962, recording their first single, "Long Pony Tail", under the name Tom and the Tornadoes: [Excerpt: Tom and the Tornadoes, "Long Pony Tail"] That was actually a cover version of a song originally recorded by the Fireballs, a group that Norman Petty had produced a couple of minor hits for at that point, and who would go on to have a number one with "Sugar Shack", but who are now best known for being the group that Petty got to overdub new instrumental backing on Buddy Holly's acoustic demos so he could keep releasing posthumous hits. "Long Pony Tail" was not a hit, and soon the group had changed their name to the Shondells, inspired by the local one-hit wonder Troy Shondell, who had had a hit with "This Time": [Excerpt: Troy Shondell, "This Time"] The group continued making records on tiny labels with no promotional budget for several years, until they recorded a song called "Hanky Panky". That song had been written by Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, and released as a B-side by Barry and Greenwich's studio group The Raindrops: [Excerpt: The Raindrops, "Hanky Panky"] That record had never been a hit, supposedly because the song to which it was a B-side, “That Boy John”, made people think of John F Kennedy, who was killed shortly after the record's release. But a copy had been picked up by a musician in Michigan, who had added the song to his group's live set, and it had become popular. Another local group, the Spinners -- not the vocal group from Detroit, or the British folk group, but another group of the same name -- saw the reaction that band had from the song, and added it to their own sets. They hadn't got a copy of the record themselves, so they didn't know all the words, so they just made new ones up, other than "My baby does the hanky-panky". When Tommy James saw the reaction the Spinners had, he felt he had to grasp an opportunity. Back in 1960, Joe Jones had recorded "California Sun", a song written by Henry Glover, on Roulette Records: [Excerpt: Joe Jones, "California Sun"] Another group on the same local scene as the Shondells, the Princeton Five, had been playing that song in their sets -- and then a third local group, the Playmates, renamed themselves the Rivieras, ripped off the Princeton Five's arrangement of the song before the Princeton Five could record it, and made the national top ten with it: [Excerpt: The Rivieras, "California Sun"] The lesson was clear -- if a local band starts doing well with a song, it's winner-takes-all and whoever gets into the studio first gets the hit. So the Shondells went into the studio and quickly cut their version, based on what they could remember of what the Spinners could remember of someone else's live versions of “Hanky Panky”, making up new words where they didn't know the real ones. It was released on a tiny local label called Snap: [Excerpt: Tommy James and the Shondells, "Hanky Panky"] The record was a very minor local hit, but didn't get any airplay in major markets, and the Shondells split up, and James joined a new group, the Koachmen. The Koachmen toured for a while, playing dead-end gigs and scraping a living for many months, with constant lineup changes, until eventually also calling it quits. It was then that James got the shocking news that "Hanky Panky" was now number one in Pittsburgh. Somehow a local dance promoter had found the record and started playing it at club nights. It had gone down shockingly well, so a Pittsburgh company just started pressing up more copies from the single, and it sold eighty thousand copies in ten days. The company pressing the record got in touch with the owner of Snap Records, who told Tommy that he needed to put together a new Shondells quickly. As it turned out, there was another band in the area who were called the Shandells (according to James' autobiography -- other sources say they were called the Raconteurs). James became their lead singer and changed the group's name to the Shondells, James went to New York to try to get the newly-successful record national distribution, and to get his new Shondells signed. There was the start of a bidding war, with Red Bird, Atlantic, RCA and others all interested... until Morris Levy of Roulette Records phoned the owners of all the other labels and told them "This is my record". James was quickly persuaded that it wasn't a good idea to refuse offers made by someone with Levy's mob connections, and Tommy James and the Shondells signed to Roulette Records. "Hanky Panky" was reissued and went to number one. The group had a series of hits from 1966 through 1967, including "I Think We're Alone Now", written for the group by their producer Ritchie Cordell: [Excerpt: Tommy James and the Shondells, "I Think We're Alone Now"] And "Mony Mony", a group effort written by several people including Cordell and James, inspired by a large flashing neon sign advertising Mutual of New York: [Excerpt: Tommy James and the Shondells, "Mony Mony"] These early hits helped define bubblegum music, and were massively successful. Levy took a fatherly interest in James, and while he refused ever to pay the royalty rates in James' contract -- James estimates he is owed thirty to forty million dollars in unpaid royalties -- he did make sure that James got what Levy thought was a fair amount, and the two had a good relationship, though James resented much of Levy's attitude towards his music, and had very real qualms about working for a mobster. James particularly disliked the pressure he was under to produce hit singles rather than grow as an artist. James was, though, allowed to change styles as the times changed, and moved into psychedelic rock, co-writing and recording the number one hit "Crimson and Clover" with the group's drummer: [Excerpt: Tommy James and the Shondells, "Crimson and Clover"] And "Crystal Blue Persuasion", inspired by the Book of Revelation, with two other band members, which went to number two: [Excerpt: Tommy James and the Shondells, "Crystal Blue Persuasion"] In 1970, James went solo, having another major hit with "Draggin' the Line": [Excerpt: Tommy James, "Draggin' the Line"] He also co-wrote and produced the big hit "Tighter Tighter" for Alive N Kickin': [Excerpt: Alive N Kickin', "Tighter Tighter"] But two changes in the early seventies saw James lose his commercial momentum. The first was that he started more explicitly writing about his Christian faith, including titling a solo album "Christian of the World". The other, more serious, problem was that a mob war started in New York, with one of the families opposed to Levy's targeting Levy's friends. Levy made James get out of New York and move to Nashville to keep safe, and James moved into country music while he was there, but was unsuccessful in his new genre. James eventually escaped from Levy, as Levy's control over his music industry holdings slipped with his loss of dominance in the mob, but James never returned to commercial success, though his old hits continued to have influence on the next generation of bubblegum pop -- in 1987, Tiffany's cover version of "I Think We're Alone Now" was knocked off number one by Billy Idol's version of "Mony Mony". He currently tours as a nostalgia act, and finally receives royalties from his hits. He's often somewhat dismissed as a minor act, but James, with and without the Shondells, had a hugely impressive run of hit singles, and his catalogue is probably due reevaluation.

A Place For My Stuff - Yes I have/had another podcast.  A couple of podcasts actually.  With the rising price of everything, I opted not to pay to have Inside the Guest Studio available forever.   I have this convenient landing spot called My Alien Life Podcast which WILL remain forever - thus, this is part of my life, as will be the episodes of Inside the Guest Studio.  A podcast that is graced by some unique and very talented people that live slightly off the grid. Enjoy Cameron In 1982 I walked into a music store in Kalispell Montana and heard his hit Someday Some Way...  I was hooked.  From that day forward, the cassette I purchased before going to Bible camp, was in every car I ever owned until 2015.  I mailed the cassette to my friend who had gotten out of drug treatment.  We listened to that cassette so many times in my car during high school.  The cassette arrived in his mailbox, SMASHED...   I was crushed. It was my indeed pleasure to interview, Marshall Crenshaw.  My hero.   Marshall Howard Crenshaw (born November 11, 1953) is an American musician, singer, songwriter, and guitarist best known for hit songs such as "Someday, Someway," a US Top 40 hit in 1982, "Cynical Girl," and "Whenever You're on My Mind." He is also the co-author of one of the biggest radio hits of the ‘90s, the Gin Blossoms, "Til I Hear It From You." His music has roots in classic soul music and Buddy Holly, to whom Crenshaw was often compared in the early days of his career, and whom he portrayed in the 1987 film La Bamba. Born in Michigan, Crenshaw performed in the musical Beatlemania before releasing his self-titled album in 1982. Crenshaw could not replicate the commercial success of Marshall Crenshaw and follow-up Field Day (1983) with later albums. Crenshaw has also contributed songs to other artists, writing singles for Kirsty MacColl and the Gin Blossoms. A quote from Trouser Press summed up Marshall Crenshaw's early career: "Although he was seen as a latter-day Buddy Holly at the outset, he soon proved too talented and original to be anyone but himself."[   Marshall Crenshaw on Marshall Crenshaw — “One of the fundamental things about the project was that I set out to not make an album,” Marshall Crenshaw notes. “So I did this project, and now at the end of it, there's this album, for the album fans!….” The celebrated singer-songwriter-guitarist-producer is discussing #392: The EP Collection, his new CD on the Red River Entertainment label. The 14-track set collects a dozen standout tracks drawn from the innovative series of six 10” vinyl EPs that Crenshaw released between 2013 and 2015, plus a pair of never-before-heard rarities chosen especially for this collection. The EP series was the product of Crenshaw's decision to break away from the standard album/tour cycle by recording and releasing a steady stream of new music over an extended period. The endeavor proved wildly popular with his fans, and brought in lots of “I really did love the EP project, and I'm kind of sad that it's over,” Crenshaw comments. “I was looking for a different way of working that would keep me motivated; it was cool, because it had a sense of urgency; there was always something that had just come out and always something that was on the way. It was an inspiring way to work.” #392: The EP Collection's twelve studio recordings encompass six new Crenshaw originals and six cover songs. The former group includes the bittersweet and beautiful “Grab the Next Train,” the surging and howling “Move Now,” and the hypnotic and atmospheric “Driving and Dreaming”, while the cover numbers include a reverent remake of the Burt Bacharach/Hal David/Carpenters chestnut “Close to You,” James McMurtry's “Right Here Now,” longtime Crenshaw favorite Bobby Fuller's classic “Never to Be Forgotten” and vintage numbers by the Easybeats, the Move and the Lovin' Spoonful. Rounding out #392: The EP Collection are two previously unreleased tracks: a powerful live version of the Everly Brothers classic “Man with Money,” recorded with Crenshaw's frequent touring partners the Bottle Rockets, during the week after Phil Everly's passing, and the infectious “Front Page News,” a '90s recording of a previously-unheard original that Crenshaw wrote with noted country tunesmith Leroy Preston (“I can't remember when I did it, or why, but I like it!”, says Crenshaw). “I was fortunate to have lots of brilliant people helping me on these tracks, and they really lifted the proceedings,” Crenshaw reports. “I'm proud about the range of super-excellent musicians who came on board for these sessions.” #392: The EP Collection includes contributions from avant-jazz trumpet icon Stephen Bernstein, noted jazz vibraphonist Bryan Carrott, versatile Nashville bassist Byron House, Daniel Littleton of the band Ida, renowned composer/keyboardists Rob Morsberger and Jamie Saft, along with longstanding Crenshaw cohorts like guitarists Glen Burtnick and Andy York, bassist Graham Maby, Brian Wilson/Beach Boys sideman Jeffrey Foskett, and acclaimed indie troubadour Dan Bern, who co-wrote four songs with Crenshaw. Meanwhile, on several tracks, Crenshaw worked on his own in his home studio, overdubbing all or most of the instruments and vocal harmonies himself. Crenshaw states, “I've been into the Narcissist, solitary-genius thing for a long time. For instance, “‘Cynical Girl,' on my first album, is just me, and ‘Someday Someway' is my brother on drums and me on everything else. So working alone sometimes is standard procedure for Over the course of a recording career that's spanned three decades, 13 albums and hundreds of songs, the Michigan-bred artist's musical output has maintained a consistently high level of artistry, craftsmanship and passion, endearing him to a broad and loyal fan After getting an early break playing John Lennon in a touring company of the Broadway musical Beatlemania, Crenshaw began his recording career with the now-legendary indie single “Something's Gonna Happen.” His growing notoriety in his adopted hometown of New York City helped to win Crenshaw a deal with Warner Bros. Records, which released his self-titled 1982 debut album. That collection established Crenshaw as one of the era's preeminent rock ' n' rollers, and that was confirmed by such subsequent albums as Field Day, Downtown, Mary Jean & 9 Others, Good Evening, Life's Too Short, Miracle of Science, #447, What's in the Bag? and Jaggedland. Along the way, Crenshaw's compositions have been covered by a broad array of performers, including Bette Midler, Kelly Willis, Robert Gordon, Ronnie Spector, Marti Jones and the Gin Blossoms, with whom Crenshaw co-wrote the Top 10 single “Til I Hear It From You.” He's also provided music for several film soundtracks, appeared in the films La Bamba (in which he portrayed Buddy Holly) and Peggy Sue Got Married, and was nominated for Grammy and a Golden Globe awards for writing the title track for the film comedy Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. Since 2011, Crenshaw has hosted his own radio show, The Bottomless Pit, on New York's WFUV. He's currently working on Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger's much-anticipated HBO series Vinyl, doing “some session work, a little bit of songwriting..” His eclectic resume aside, songwriting and record-making remain at the center of Marshall Crenshaw's creative life, and #392: The EP Collection confirms that his musical flame continues to burn as brightly as ever. “I still love recorded music and believe in it as an art form, whether it's a single or album, or vinyl or CD,” Crenshaw asserts, adding, “I think I'll probably stick with it.”

This episode continues a monthly, ten-part series celebrating the tenth anniversary of TEMPEST, featuring the second track on the album, "Soon After Midnight," through songs that influenced its composition, live versions, cover versions, and also through a consideration of the song's meaning and allusions. In "20 Pounds of Headlines," we round up news from the world of Bob Dylan, which includes an overview of Dylan's tour itinerary for the upcoming week, a report on Dylan's sale of his Traveling Wilburys share of master royalties and neighboring rights royalties to Primary Wave Music, a report that T-Bone Burnett is still looking to release 20 more recordings by the New Basement Tapes of songs created from unfinished BASEMENT TAPES era lyrics, and a happy birthday to a special figure of cultural significance. In "Who Did It Better?" we ask you to vote this week to tell us who did "Soon After Midnight" better: Aoife O'Donovan or John Glase & The Burnt Remains? Listen to the episode, then go to our Twitter page @RainTrains to vote!

Playlist: The Green Reflectors - Sea-Esta by the SeaJohn Paul Jones - Kalani HoneyKenny & The Ho-Daddies - Goofy GuitarGeomungo Factory - I'm IntroSpies Who Surf - Hocus PocusThe Garry's - Devil's DipThe Surf Hermits - The RevolverEJ Brule - Killer Whale AttackThe 427's - The Blue CactusDick Dale & His Del-Tones - Death of A GremmieThe Pit Men - Surf BoredTee Tahs - Fun ForeverSurf Punks - My BeachThe Chantays - Killer DanaVince & The Waikiki Rumblers - Waikiki RumbleThe Jokers - Wing DingBobby Fuller & The Fanatics - StringerShadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet - JackpotE. Zane and The Dominion - Got Me StupidThe Islanders - King of the Surf

The Strange Death in Hollywood of Bobby Fuller with Journalist Albert Lanier. Twitter: @CriticInc Facebook: Albert Lanier Tiktok: @ImperiousReader Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Terry Manning may not be a household name but he's had an incredible journey that started at the age of 13 when he sat in with Bobby Fuller at a Junior High Dance. From there he went to work at the legendary STAX RECORDS when he was just 15 years old! We couldn't possibly cover everything so some things we talk about in this hour and a half interview are : Bobby Fuller, Stevie Nicks, Stax Records, Jimmy Page, Led Zeppelin III, NME magazine, Martin Luther King Jr., Chris Blackwell (founder of island records), Photography and more! It's an interview you have to hear to believe Terry's incredible stories.  A man who seemed to be at the right place at the right time and more than once.   ABOUT TERRY: Terry Manning is a music producer, songwriter, photographer, recording engineer and artist known for work in rock, rhythm and blues, and pop music genres.   Manning began in the music industry in El Paso, Texas, where he played guitar and sang with several local bands, notably The Wild Ones, and on a couple of occasions sat in with his friend Bobby Fuller. Upon leaving El Paso, he moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where he worked for years at both Stax Records and Ardent Studios as an engineer and producer, recording and mixing such artists as Isaac Hayes, Ike & Tina Turner, Booker T. & The MG's, Eddie Floyd, Al Green, Rufus Thomas, Sam & Dave, Billy Eckstine, Otis Redding, The Boxtops, Percy Sledge, The Staple Singers, Johnnie Taylor, Leon Russell, Ronnie Milsap, and many others. Manning was a principal part of Stax owner Al Bell's production team for The Staple Singers, responsible for such hit records as “Respect Yourself,” “I'll Take You There,” and "Heavy Makes You Happy.”   In 1970, Manning licensed release of his own solo album, Home Sweet Home, on Stax's Enterprise label (re-released with extra tracks by Sunbeam in 2006, and in original configuration on Four Men With Beards vinyl label in 2012).   Later working as an independent, Manning produced or engineered recordings by Joe Cocker, Wattstax, Alex Chilton, Big Star, James Taylor, Leon Russell, Led Zeppelin, ZZ Top, Jason & The Scorchers, Rhino Bucket, George Thorogood and The Destroyers, Joe Walsh, Johnny Winter, The Rainmakers, The Fabulous Thunderbirds, Molly Hatchet, The Angels, Johnny Diesel and The Injectors, Lenny Kravitz, Jimmy Buffett, Shakira, Crash Test Dummies, Shania Twain, Bryan Adams, Widespread Panic, and many others.   In the mid 1980s Manning moved to London, and worked for a year out of Abbey Road Studios.   As a photographer, Manning began with black and white in the mid-1960s, capturing street scenes and topics of his interest. He has continued his photography to this day. Adding color photography to his repertoire in the1970s, Manning amassed a large collection of private works over the following years. With the beginning of Gallery and Museum presentations in 2015, Manning's photography is now being presented in Exhibitions across the US, as well as world locations. Musically, he also photographed Chuck Berry, Terry Reid, Steppenwolf, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Dusty Springfield, Procol Harum and many other musical artists of the rock period as both an independent and as a writer/photographer for New Musical Express. Manning was one of the last to photograph his acquaintance, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on the day before the tragic assassination.   1991 saw him founding Lucas Engineering, a boutique audio company which makes professional audio recording gear; this company expanded in 2008, adding microphones to their arsenal of products. Lucas Microphones, under Manning's guidance, have since become amongst the top high end recording devices in the audio world.   In 1992, Chris Blackwell of Island Records fame sought out Manning as a partner to revitalize Blackwell's famous Compass Point Studios in Nassau, Bahamas, which Manning operated successfully for over 20 years.   Manning's newest music as an artist are the 2021 single "What's the Use",  the ECR Music Group/Lucky Seven Records releases of Manning's newest (2019) live album “Playin' In Elvis' House,” 2015's “Heaven Knows,” an emotional look into human emotion, and “West Texas Skyline,” A Tribute To Bobby Fuller, released in October 2013.   Be sure to visit Terry's website's at: (www.terrymanning.com and www.themanninggallery.com) Jim and Mike Talk Music can be found on Podbean, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Iheart Radio, Pandora and almost anywhere you listen to podcasts.   You can also view a portion of the video interview with Terry on YouTube (search Jim and MIke Talk Music to find our channel)   Thank you for listening!   COYRIGHT CLAIM: The songs "What's the Use", "I Ain't Got You", "Let Her Dance" and "West Texas Skyline" used with permission from Terry Manning.

No dia 18 de julho de 1966, Bobby Fuller, cantor de 23 anos, conhecido pelo sucesso I Fought The Law, foi encontrado morto dentro do seu carro.A polícia diz que foi suicídio e depois muda a versão oficial para uma asfixia acidental. Mas para fãs, amigos e familiares, a cena onde o corpo foi encontrado conta outra história. Crime sob o Holofote é um podcast sobre crimes reais e mistérios no mundo dos famosos.

                             The Inimitable Rod Crosby          The Intruders was a rock band formed in El Paso, Texas on 1960. The original members were Rod Crosby, Les Lockhart, Donnie Webb and Bobby Wilson. Bobby Wilson, younger brother of Bill Wilson, drummer for the Rock Kings, started the group. The Intruders first gig was a Texas Western Kappa Sigma dance at the Downtown Hilton Hotel. Their pay was $40  ($10 per person). From that time in 1960 until 1973, Rod Crosby emerged as the band's leader. The original members dropped out along the way. It became known as Rod Crosby & The Intruders, and Rod played full time until 1973, when Rod sought employment in the corporate world. In that 13 year period , the Intruders performed consistently, booked every weekend, and played hundreds of jobs at almost every high school in El Paso, all the NCO Officers Clubs on Fort Bliss, Biggs Air Field, McGregor Range and White Sands Missile Range, countless weddings, college parties, private parties and graduation parties. The group was fortunate to have evolved during a time when the Rock & Roll industry was thriving, growing leaps and bounds. The groups appeal was based off their ability to cover tunes precisely for dancing, always lending themselves to the desires of the audience, as opposed to the band.                     Having performed for thousands of people for the past 60 plus years - Rod Crosby & The Intruders is one of a very few that can make that claim.               In 2009, an entity called the Border Legends of El Paso was created to honor any and all local musicians with a body of performing work over a long period of time.                                          The Border Legends of El Paso entity staged a non-profit concert, annually, to pay tribute to El Paso's musicians, past & present, net proceeds going to charitable causes. The annual concert was produced by Rick Kern and Rod Crosby (co-producers).                      Rick and Rod both had connections to the Bobby Fuller Four. In 1965 Rod was asked by Bobby Fuller to consider joining his group. Rod painfully declined due to his many obligations. The Bobby Fuller Four went to Hollywood to make their mark which they did with I Fought The Law, and more.               However, Bobby was killed due to foul play, shrouded in mysterious circumstances, an unsolved murder to this day that remains on the E channels 10 Most Unsolved Murder Mysteries.                           Two members of the Bobby Fuller Four joined Rod's band not long after the tragedy. Rod picked up the bands musical torch and performs many of the Bobby Fuller Four songs to this day, as well as many of Buddy Holly songs, Buddy being Bobby's and Rod's greatest influence, unknown to either until it was discovered later as friends.                     Current members of Rod's Intruder band are drummer, Rick Benites, bassist, Ed Clore, guitarist, Paul Dillon, guitarist/keyboardist, Rick Armstrong and guitarist Rod Crosby. All members are vocalists, as well. They are still in great demand with many of El Paso's annual high school reunions. Long live Rod Crosby & The Intruders and Never to Be Forgotten!       #rodcrosby #rodcrosby&theintruders

This weeks playlist includes some early Tom Petty radio commercials hyping his new record and find out who wrote the original ‘Here Comes My Baby' which was a big hit!! We have a request from Canada and some brand new music, some old music and some classic stuff to fire you up for the first week of December!Shuggie Otis combines his talents with the mighty Carmine Appice on the drums, Pat Travers doing a little Statesboro Blues, Nick Waterhouse doing his thing with Minor Time,The Association with the famous Wrecking Crew backing them up!One Reublic, The Move, sprinkle in a little Zydeco for Mike L., Bobby Fuller for me, Wild Fire Woman for our Self Storage pals, Cleveland Rocks for Drew Carey and The Stabilizers for our South Korean fans!!Shout outs to Data Axel and WXMT The Mountain in Pennsylvania! Thanks for listening as always and send us your requests @ 602-935-0545 in the US!  Rock on at:  RadioWilderLive.com #hellodecember #musicrocks #rocknroll Harry and the Wilder Crew!

Episode one hundred and thirty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “I Fought the Law", and at the mysterious death of Bobby Fuller. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifteen-minute bonus episode available, on "Hanky Panky" by Tommy James and the Shondells. 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 No Mixcloud this week due to the large number of tracks by the Bobby Fuller Four Resources Information about the Crickets' post-Holly work comes from Buddy Holly: Learning the Game, by Spencer Leigh. There are two books available about Bobby Fuller -- the one I consulted most is Rock and Roll Mustangs by Stephen McParland, which can be bought as a PDF from https://payhip.com/cmusicbooks I also consulted I Fought the Law: The Life and Strange Death of Bobby Fuller by Miriam Linna and Randell Fuller. One minor note -- both these books spell Bob Keane's name Keene. Apparently he spelled it multiple ways, but I have chosen to use the spelling he used on his autobiography, which is also the spelling I have used for him previously. There are several compilations available of the Bobby Fuller Four's material, but the best collection of the hit singles is Magic Touch: The Complete Mustang Singles Collection.  And this is an expanded edition of the Crickets' In Style album. Erratum I say Sonny Curtis wrote "Oh Boy!" -- I meant Sonny West. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A warning, before I begin. This episode, more than most, deals with events you may find disturbing, including graphic descriptions of violent death. Please check the transcript on the podcast website at 500songs.com if you are worried that you might be upset by this. This episode will not be a pleasant listen. Now on with the episode... More than anything, Bobby Fuller wanted desperately to be Buddy Holly. His attitude is best summed up in a quote from Jim Reese, the guitarist with the Bobby Fuller Four, who said "Don't get me wrong, I thought the world of Bobby Fuller and I cared a lot for him, so I say this with the best intentions -- but he was into Buddy Holly so much that if Buddy Holly decided to wear one red sock and one blue sock and Bobby Fuller found out about it, Bobby Fuller would've had one red sock and one blue sock. He figured that the only way to accomplish whatever Buddy Holly had accomplished was to be as much like Buddy Holly as possible." And Reese was right -- Bobby Fuller really was as much like Buddy Holly as possible. Buddy Holly was from Texas, so was Bobby Fuller. Buddy Holly played a Fender Stratocaster, Bobby Fuller played a Fender Stratocaster. Buddy Holly performed with the Crickets, Bobby Fuller's biggest hit was with a Crickets song. Buddy Holly recorded with Norman Petty, Bobby Fuller recorded with Norman Petty. Of course, there was one big difference. Buddy Holly died in an accident when he was twenty-two. Bobby Fuller lived to be twenty-three. And his death was no accident... [Excerpt: The Bobby Fuller Four, "I Fought the Law"] After Buddy Holly quit the Crickets in 1958, they continued recording with Norman Petty, getting in guitarist Sonny Curtis, who had been an associate of the band members even before they were a band, and who had been a frequent collaborator with Buddy, and vocalist Earl Sinks. But while they kept recording, Petty didn't release any of the recordings, and the group became convinced that he wasn't really interested in doing so. Rather, they thought that he was just using them as leverage to try to get Buddy back. "Love's Made a Fool of You" was the record that made the Crickets lose their faith in Norman Petty. The song was one that Buddy Holly and Bob Montgomery had written way back in 1954, and Holly had revived it for a demo in 1958, recording it not as a potential song for himself but to give to the Everly Brothers, reworked in their style, though they never recorded it: [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, "Love's Made a Fool of You"] When Holly and the Crickets had parted ways, the Crickets had recorded their own version of the song with Petty producing, which remained unreleased like everything they'd recorded since Buddy left. But on the very day that Buddy Holly died, Petty shipped a copy of the tape to Decca, express mail, so that a single could be released as soon as possible: [Excerpt: The Crickets, "Love's Made a Fool of You"] The Crickets never worked with Norman Petty again after that, they were so disgusted at his determination to cash in on the death of their friend and colleague. Petty continued to exploit Holly's work, getting in a band called the Fireballs to add new instrumental backing to Holly's old demos so they could be released as new singles, but the split between Petty and Holly's living colleagues was permanent. But the Crickets didn't give up performing, and continued recording new material, mostly written either by Sonny Curtis or by the group's drummer Jerry Allison, who had co-written several of the group's earlier hits with Holly. "More Than I Can Say" was written by Curtis and Allison, and didn't make the top forty in the US, but did become a top thirty hit in the UK: [Excerpt: The Crickets, "More Than I Can Say"] That was later also covered in hit versions by Bobby Vee and Leo Sayer. The B-side, "Baby My Heart", wasn't a hit for the Crickets, but was covered by the Shadows on their first album, which made number one on the UK charts. That performance was one of the few Shadows records at this point to have vocals: [Excerpt: The Shadows, "Baby My Heart"] The group's first post-Holly album collected all their singles without Holly to that point, plus a few new filler tracks. The album, In Style With the Crickets, didn't chart in the US, but was a success in the UK. Around the time that album was released, Earl Sinks quit the group, and became a songwriter. He collaborated with Buddy Holly's old musical partner Bob Montgomery on a variety of hits for people like Brenda Lee, and in the seventies went back into performing for a while, having minor solo country hits as Earl Richards, and then bought a chain of abbatoirs. Allison and Curtis supplemented their income from the Crickets with session work -- Allison backed the Everly Brothers on "Til I Kissed You": [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Til I Kissed You"] and both of them played on Eddie Cochran's last studio session, playing on "Three Steps to Heaven", with Curtis playing the electric lead while Cochran played the acoustic: [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, "Three Steps to Heaven"] After that, the group went on tour in the UK as the backing band for the Everly Brothers, where they coincidentally bumped into Cochran, who told them "If I knew you guys were coming, I'd have asked you to bring me a bottle of American air.” They would never see Cochran again. Shortly after that tour, Sonny Curtis was drafted -- though while he was in the army, he wrote "Walk Right Back" for the Everly Brothers, as we discussed in the episode on "Cathy's Clown": [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Walk Right Back"] Joe Mauldin gave up on music for a while, and so for a while The Crickets consisted of just Jerry Allison, new singer Jerry Naylor, and guitarist Tommy Allsup, who had played with Holly after Holly left the Crickets. That lineup recorded the "Bobby Vee Meets the Crickets" album, with Bobby Vee singing lead: [Excerpt: Bobby Vee and the Crickets, "Well... All Right"] Curtis would return once his time in the army was over, and eventually, in the 1970s, the group would stabilise on a lineup of Curtis, Mauldin, and Allison,  who would play together more or less consistently until 2015. But for a few years in the early sixties there was a lot of lineup shuffling, especially as Allison got drafted not long after Curtis got out of the Army -- there was one UK tour where there were no original members at all, thanks to Allison's absence. When Curtis was out of the group around the time of the Bobby Vee album, Snuff Garrett tried to get a friend of his to join as the group's new lead singer, and brought him to LA, but it didn't work out. Garrett later said "He and Jerry didn't hit it off in the way I imagined. After a few months, it was over and the guy started playing clubs around LA. I did demos with him and took them to my boss, the president of Liberty, and he said, ‘You've got enough of your friends signed to the label. You've signed the Crickets and Buddy Knox and they're not doing much business, and this guy can hardly speak English.' I said, ‘Well, I think he's going to be something.' ‘Okay,' he said, ‘Drop one of the acts you've got and you can sign him.' I said, ‘Forget it.' A year later, he was an international star and his name was Trini Lopez" Lopez's big hit, "If I Had a Hammer", was recorded in a live show at a club called PJs: [Excerpt: Trini Lopez, "If I Had a Hammer"] PJs was owned by a gangster named Eddie Nash, who is now best known as the prime suspect in a notorious case known as the Wonderland Murders, when in 1981 four people were horribly beaten to death, either with the assistance of or to send a message to the porn star John Holmes, depending on which version of the story you believe. If you're unfamiliar with the case, I advise you not to google it, as it's very far from pretty. I bring this up because PJs would soon play a big part in the career of the Bobby Fuller Four. Bobby Fuller was born in the Gulf Coast of Texas, but his family moved about a lot during his formative years, mostly in the Southwestern US, living in Lubbock, Texas, Hobbs, New Mexico, and Salt Lake City, Utah, among other places, before finally settling down in El Paso. El Paso is a border town, right up close to the border with Mexico, and that meant that it had a complicated relationship with Juarez, the nearest large town on the Mexican side of the border. Between 1919 and 1933, the selling and consumption of alcohol had been made illegal in the United States, a period known as Prohibition, but of course it had not been criminalised in Mexico, and so during those years any time anyone from El Paso wanted to get drunk they'd travel to Juarez. Even after Prohibition ended, Juarez had a reputation as a party town, and Randy Fuller, Bobby's brother, would later tell a teen magazine "You can grow up in El Paso and get really bad -- it's Juarez that makes it that way. Whatever personality you have, you have it 100%. You can go to Juarez and get drunk, or stay in El Paso and get religion" Of course, from the outside, that sounds a whole lot like "now look what YOU made ME do". It's not the fault of those white people from Texas that they travel to someone else's city in someone else's country and get falling-down drunk and locked up in their jails every weekend, but it's the fault of those tempting Mexicans. And when Bobby and Randy Fuller's older brother Jack disappeared in 1961, while Bobby was off at university, that was at first what everyone thought had happened -- he'd gone to Juarez, got drunk, and got locked up until he could sleep it off. But when he didn't reappear after several days, everyone became more concerned. It turned out that Jack had met a man named Roy Handy at a bus depot and started chatting with him. They'd become friendly, and had gone off to do some target shooting together in the desert. But Handy had seen what looked like a wad of thousand-dollar bills in Jack's sun visor, and had decided to turn the gun on Jack rather than the target, killing him. The thousand-dollar bills had been play money, a gift bought for a small child who lived nearby. Because of the murder, Bobby Fuller moved back to El Paso from Denton in North Texas, where he had been studying music at university. He did enroll in a local college, but gave up his studies very quickly. Bobby had been something of a musical prodigy -- his original plan before going to North Texas State University had actually been to go to Juilliard, where he was going to study jazz drumming. Instead, while Bobby continued his drumming, he started living a party lifestyle, concentrating on his car, on women -- he got multiple women pregnant in his late teens and early twenties -- and on frequent trips to Juarez, where he would spend a lot of time watching a local blues musician, Long John Hunter: [Excerpt: Long John Hunter, "El Paso Rock"] Meanwhile, a music scene had been growing in El Paso since the late 1950s. A group called the Counts were at the forefront of it, with instrumentals like "Thunder": [Excerpt: The Counts, "Thunder"] The Counts splintered into various groups, and one of them became The Embers, who Bobby Fuller joined on drums. Fuller was also one of a tiny number of people at this time who actually had a home studio. Fuller had started out with a simple bedroom studio, but thanks to his parents' indulgence he had repurposed a big chunk of their house as a studio, including building, with his brother Randy, an echo chamber (though it didn't work very well and he stuck with tape echo). It was in that home studio that the Embers recorded their first single, "Jim's Jive", with Fuller on drums and Jim Reese on lead guitar: [Excerpt: Jerry Bright and The Embers, "Jim's Jive"] That was released on a tiny local label, Yucca Records, which also released the Embers' second single -- and also released two Bobby Fuller solo singles, starting with "You're in Love": [Excerpt: Bobby Fuller, "You're in Love"] That was recorded at Fuller's home studio, with the Embers backing him, and became the number one single locally, but Yucca Records had no national distribution, and the record didn't get a wider release. Fuller's second single, though, was the first time his Buddy Holly fixation came to the forefront. Fuller was, by many accounts, *only* interested in sounding like Buddy Holly -- though his musical tastes were broad enough that he also wanted to sound like Eddie Cochran, Ritchie Valens, and the Crickets. But that was the extent of Fuller's musical world, and so obviously he wanted to work with the people who had worked with Holly. So his second single was recorded at Norman Petty's studio in Clovis, New Mexico, with Petty's wife Vi, who had played keyboards on some Buddy Holly records, on keyboards and backing vocals: [Excerpt: Bobby Fuller, "Gently My Love"] But as it turned out, Fuller was very underwhelmed by the experience of working with Petty, and decided that he was going to go back to recording in his home studio. Fuller left the Embers and started performing on his own, playing rhythm guitar rather than drums, with a band that initially consisted of his brother Randy on bass, Gaylord Grimes on drums, and Jim Reese on lead guitar, though there would be constant lineup changes. Two of the many musicians who drifted in and out of Fuller's revolving band lineup, Larry Thompson and Jerry Miller, were from the Pacific Northwest, and were familiar with the scene that I talked about in the episode on "Louie, Louie". Thompson was a fan of one of the Pacific Northwest bands, the Frantics, who had hits with tracks like "Werewolf": [Excerpt: The Frantics, "Werewolf"] Thompson believed that the Frantics had split up, and so Fuller's group took on that name for themselves. When they found out that the group *hadn't* split up, they changed their name to the Fanatics, though the name on their bass drum still read "The Frantics" for quite a while. Jerry Miller later moved back to Seattle, where he actually joined the original Frantics, before going on to become a founder member of Moby Grape. Fuller started his own record label, Eastwood Records, and put out another solo single, which covered the full breadth of his influences. The B-side was "Oh Boy!", the song Sonny Curtis had written for Buddy Holly, while the A-side was "Nervous Breakdown", which had originally been recorded by Eddie Cochran: [Excerpt: Bobby Fuller, "Nervous Breakdown"] Everything was very fluid at this point, with musicians coming and going from different lineups, and none of these musicians were only playing in one band. For example, as well as being lead guitarist in the Fanatics, Jim Reese also played on "Surfer's Paradise" by Bobby Taylor and the Counts: [Excerpt: Bobby Taylor and the Counts, "Surfer's Paradise"] And Bobby's record label, renamed from Eastwood to Exeter, was releasing records  by other artists as well as Bobby and the Fanatics, though none of these records had any success. In early 1963 Fuller and his latest lineup of Fanatics -- Randy, drummer Jimmy Wagnon, and guitarist Tex Reed -- travelled to LA to see if they could become successful outside El Paso. They got a residency at the Hermosa Biltmore, and also regularly played the Rendezvous Ballroom in Balboa, where the Beach Boys and Dick Dale had both played not long before, and there they added some surf instrumentals to their repertoire. Bobby soon became almost as keen on surf music as he was on rockabilly. While in LA, they tried all the record companies, with no success. The most encouragement they got came from Bob Keane at Del-Fi, the label that had previously been Ritchie Valens' label, who told him that the tapes they brought him of their El Paso recordings sounded good but they needed better songs, and to come back to him when they had a hit song. Bobby determined to do just that. On their return to El Paso, Bobby Fuller and the Fanatics recorded "Stringer" for Todd Records, a small label owned by Paul Cohen, the former Decca executive who had signed Buddy Holly but not known what to do with him: [Excerpt: Bobby Fuller and the Fanatics, "Stringer"] Fuller also opened his own teen nightclub, the Teen Rendezvous, which he named after the Balboa ballroom. The Fanatics became the regular band there, and at this point they started to build up a serious reputation as live performers. The Teen Rendezvous only stayed open for a few months, though -- there were complaints about the noise, and also they booked Bobby Vee as a headliner one night. Vee charged a thousand dollars for his appearance, which the club couldn't really afford, and they didn't make it back on the doors. They'd hoped that having a prestigious act like Vee play there might get more people to come to the club regularly, but it turned out that Vee gave a sub-par performance, and the gamble didn't pay off. It was around this time that Fuller made his first recording of a song that would eventually define him, though it wasn't his idea. He was playing the Crickets In Style album to his brother Randy, and Randy picked up on one song, a Sonny Curtis composition which had never been released as a single: [Excerpt: The Crickets, "I Fought the Law"] Randy thought the Crickets' actual record sounded horrible, but he also thought the song had the potential to be a really big hit. He later explained "The James Dean movie Rebel Without a Cause had made a big impression on me, and I told Bobby, 'Man, let's do that one... it oughta sell a million copies'. Everyone was into the whole rebel thing, with switchblades and stuff like that. It just seemed like a natural thing for us to do." Fuller recorded his own version of the song, which once again became a local hit: [Excerpt: Bobby Fuller, "I Fought The Law (El Paso version)"] But even though the record did get some national distribution, from VeeJay Records, it didn't get any airplay outside the Southwest, and Fuller remained a local star with absolutely no national profile. Meanwhile, he was still trying to do what Bob Keane had asked and come up with a hit song, but he was stuck in a musical rut. As Jim Reese would later say, "Bobby was a great imitator. He could sing just like Holly, McCartney, Lennon, or Eddie Cochran. And he could imitate on the guitar, too. But Bobby never did Bobby". To make matters worse, the Beatles came on to the American musical scene, and caused an immediate shift in the public taste. And Bobby Fuller had a very complicated relationship with the Beatles. He had to play Beatles songs live because that's what the audiences wanted, but he felt that rock and roll was *American* music, and he resented British people trying to play it. He respected them as songwriters, but didn't actually like their original material. He could tell that they were huge Buddy Holly fans, like him, and he respected that, but he loathed Motown, and he could tell they were listening to that too. He ended up trying to compromise by playing Buddy Holly songs on stage but introducing them by talking about how much the Beatles loved Buddy Holly. Another person who was negatively affected by the British Invasion was Bob Keane, the man who had given Fuller some encouragement. Keane's Del-Fi Records had spent the previous few years making a steady income from churning out surf records like "Surf Rider" by the Lively Ones: [Excerpt: The Lively Ones, "Surf Rider"] And the Surfer's Pajama Party album by the Bruce Johnston Surfing Band: [Excerpt: Bruce Johnston, "The Surfer Stomp"] But as surf music had suddenly become yesterday's news, Del-Fi were in financial trouble, and Keane had had to take on a partner who gave the label some financial backing, Larry Nunes. Now, I am going to be very, very, careful about exactly what I say about Nunes here. I am aware that different people give very, very, different takes on Nunes' personality -- Barry White, for example, always said that knowing Nunes was the best thing that ever happened to him, credited Nunes with everything good in his career, and gave him credit on all his albums as his spiritual advisor. However, while White made Nunes out to be pretty much a saint, that is not the impression one gets from hearing Bob Keane or any of Bobby Fuller's circle talk about him. Nunes had started out in the music business as a "rack jobber", someone who ran a small distribution company, selling to small family-owned shops and to secondary markets like petrol stations and grocery stores. The business model for these organisations was to get a lot of stock of records that hadn't sold, and sell them at a discount, to be sold in discount bins. But they were also a perfect front for all sorts of criminal activity. Because these were bulk sales of remaindered records, dead stock, the artists weren't meant to get royalties on them, and no real accounting was done of the sales. So if a record label "accidentally" pressed up a few thousand extra copies of a hit record and sold it on to a rack jobber, the artists would never know. And if the Mafia made a deal with the record pressing plant to press up a few thousand extra copies, the *record label* would never know. And so very, very, quickly this part of the distribution system became dominated by organised crime. I have seen no proof, only rumours, that Nunes was directly involved in organised crime, but Bob Keane in particular later became absolutely convinced he was. Keane would later write in his autobiography: “I wondered if I had made a deal with the Devil. I had heard that Larry had a reputation for being associated with the Mob, and as it turned out three years later our relationship ended in deception, dishonesty, and murder. I consider myself very lucky to have come out of my relationship with Nunes in one piece, virtually unscathed." Again, this is Keane's interpretation of events. I am not saying that Larry Nunes was a mobster, I am saying that Bob Keane repeatedly made that accusation many times, and that other people in this story have said similar things. By late 1964, Bobby Fuller had come up with a song he was pretty sure *would* be a successful single, like Keane had wanted, a song called "Keep on Dancing" he'd written with Randy: [Excerpt: Bobby Fuller, “Keep On Dancing”] After some discussion he managed to persuade Randy, Jim Reese, and drummer DeWayne Quirico to move with him to LA -- Bobby and Randy's mother also moved with them, because after what had happened to her eldest son she was very protective of her other children. Jim Reese was less keen on the move than the others, as he thought that Fuller was only interested in himself, not in the rest of the Fanatics. As Reese would later say, "Bobby wanted us all to go to California, but I was leery because it always had been too one-sided with Bobby. He ran everything, hired and fired at the least whim, and didn't communicate well with other people. He was never able to understand that a musician, like other people, needs food, gasoline, clothes, a place to live, etc. I often felt that Bobby thought we should be following him anywhere just for the thrill of it." Eventually, Fuller got them to go by agreeing that when they got to LA, everything would be split equally -- one for all and all for one, though when they finally made a deal with Keane, Fuller was the only one who ended up receiving royalties. The rest of the group got union scale. Keane agreed that "Keep on Dancing" could be a hit, but that wasn't the first record the group put out through one of Keane's labels. The first was an instrumental titled "Thunder Reef": [Excerpt: The Shindigs, "Thunder Reef"] That wasn't released as by the Fanatics, but as by The Shindigs -- Keane had heard that Shindig! needed a house band and thought that naming the group after the show might be a way to get them the position. As it happened, the TV show went with another group, led by James Burton, who they called the Shindogs, and Keane's plan didn't work out. The Shindigs single was released on a new Del-Fi subsidiary, Mustang, on which most future records by the group would be released. Mustang was apparently set up specifically for the group, but the first record released on that label was actually by a studio group called The Surfettes: [Excerpt: The Surfettes, "Sammy the Sidewalk Surfer"] The Surfettes consisted of Carol Connors, the former lead singer of the Teddy Bears and writer of "Hey Little Cobra", and her sister Cheryl. Carol had written the single with Buzz Cason, of Brenda Lee's band, and the session musicians on that single included several other artists who were recording for Del-Fi at the time -- David Gates, Arthur Lee, and Johnny Echols, all of whom we'll be hearing more about in future episodes. Almost simultaneously with the Shindigs single, another single by the Fanatics was released, "Those Memories of You": [Excerpt: Bobby Fuller and the Fanatics, "Those Memories of You"] That single, backed by a surf instrumental called "Our Favourite Martian", was released on Donna Records, another Del-Fi subsidiary, as by Bobby Fuller and the Fanatics, which made the other group members furious -- what had happened to one for all and all for one? Randy Fuller, who was a very aggressive young man, was so annoyed that he stormed into Bob Keane's office and frisbeed one of the singles at his head. They didn't want to be Bobby's backing band, they wanted to be a proper group, so it was agreed the group's name would be changed. It was changed to The Bobby Fuller Four. Jim Reese claimed that Keane and Fuller formed The Bobby Fuller Four Inc, without the other three members having participation, and made them employees of the corporation. Reese said "this didn't fit in with my concept of the verbal agreement I had with Bobby, but at least it was better than nothing". The group became the house band at the Rendezvous, playing their own sets and backing people like Sonny and Cher. They then got a residency at the Ambassador Hotel in Hollywood, and then Jim Reese quit the band. Fuller phoned him and begged him to come back, and as Reese said later "I again repeated my conditions about equal treatment and he agreed, so I went back -- probably the biggest mistake I ever made." The group's first single as the Bobby Fuller Four, released on Mustang as all their future records were, was "Take My Word": [Excerpt: The Bobby Fuller Four, "Take My Word"] The record was unsuccessful -- Keane's various labels, while they were better distributed than Bobby's own labels back in El Paso, still only had spotty distribution, and Mustang being a new label it was even more difficult to get records in stores. But the group were getting a reputation as one of the best live acts in the LA area at the time. When the club Ciro's, on the Sunset Strip, closed and reopened under its new name It's Boss, the group were chosen to perform at its grand reopening, and they played multiple four- to six-week residencies at PJ's. The next record the group released, "Let Her Dance", was a slight rewrite of "Keep on Dancing", the song the Fuller brothers had written together, though Bobby was the only credited writer on the label: [Excerpt: The Bobby Fuller Four, "Let Her Dance"] That was the first single they recorded at a new state-of-the-art studio Keane had opened up. That studio had one of the first eight-track machines in LA, and a truly vast echo chamber, made up from a couple of unused vaults owned by a bank downstairs from the studio. But there were big arguments between Fuller and Keane, because Fuller wanted only to make music that could be reproduced live exactly as it was on the record, while Keane saw the record as the important thing. Keane put a percussion sound on the record, made by hitting a bottle, which Fuller detested as they couldn't do it live, and the two would only end up disagreeing more as they continued working together. There's a lot of argument among Fuller fans about this -- personally I can see both sides, but there are people who are very much Team Bobby and think that nothing he recorded for Mustang is as good as the El Paso recordings, because of Bob Keane diluting the raw power of his live sound. But in an era  where studio experimentation was soon to lead to records like "Strawberry Fields Forever" or "Good Vibrations", I think a bit of extra percussion is hardly an unforgivable dilution: [Excerpt: The Bobby Fuller Four, "Let Her Dance"] KRLA radio started playing "Let Her Dance" every hour, at the instigation of Larry Nunes -- and most of the people talking about this have implied that he bribed people in order to get this to happen, or that it was through his alleged Mob connections. Certainly, he knew exactly when they would start playing the record, and how frequently, before they did. As a result of this exposure, "Let Her Dance" became a massive local hit, but they still didn't have the distribution to make it a hit outside California. It did, though, do well enough that Liberty Records asked about putting the record out nationally. Keane came to a verbal agreement, which he thought was an agreement for Liberty to distribute the Mustang Records single, and Liberty thought was an agreement to put out the single on their own label and have an option on future Fuller recordings. Liberty put the record out on their own label, without Keane having signed anything, and Keane had to sue them. The result was that the record was out on two different labels, which were suing each other, and so it hardly had any chance at any kind of success. The legal action also affected the next single, "Never to Be Forgotten": [Excerpt: The Bobby Fuller Four, "Never to Be Forgotten"] That's often considered the best of the band's originals for Mustang, and was written by the Fuller brothers -- and both of them were credited this time -- but Liberty sued Keane, claiming that because they'd released "Let Her Dance", they also had an option on the next single. But even though the group still weren't selling records, they were getting other opportunities for exposure, like their appearance in a film which came out in April 1966. Though admittedly, this film was hardly A Hard Day's Night. Indeed, a lot of people have claimed that The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini was cursed. The film, which went through the working titles Pajama Party in a Haunted House, Slumber Party in a Haunted House, Bikini Party in a Haunted House, and Ghost in a Glass Bikini, was made by the cheapy exploitation company American International Pictures, and several people involved in it would die in the next four years, starting with Buster Keaton, who was meant to appear in the film, but had to back out due to his health problems and died before the film came out. Then on the first day of filming, a grip fell to his death. In the next four years, two of the film's young stars, Sue Hamilton and John Macchia, would die, as would Philip Bent, an actor with a minor role who died in July 1966 in a plane crash which also took the life of Peter Sachse, an extra on the film who was married to a cast member. Three more stars of the film, Francis X Bushman, Basil Rathbone, and Boris Karloff would also all be dead within a handful of years, but they were all elderly and unwell when filming started. I don't believe in curses myself, but it is a horrible run of bad luck for a single film. To make matters worse, the group weren't even playing their own music in the film, but lipsynching to tracks by other musicians. And they had to play Vox instruments in the film, because of a deal the filmmakers had made, when the group all hated Vox instruments, which Jim Reese thought of as only good for starting bonfires. For the next single, Keane had discussed with Fuller what songs the group had that were "different", but Fuller apparently didn't understand what he meant. So Keane went to the rest of the group and asked them what songs always went over well in live performances. All three band members said that "I Fought the Law" should be the next single. Bobby disagreed, and almost got into a fistfight with his brother over it -- they'd already released it as a single once, on his own label, and he didn't want to do it again. He also wanted to record his own material not cover versions. But the others prevailed, and "I Fought the Law" became the record that would define the group: [Excerpt: The Bobby Fuller Four, "I Fought the Law"] "I Fought the Law" became the group's breakthrough hit. It made the top ten, and turned the song, which had previously been one of the Crickets' most obscure songs, into a rock and country standard. In the seventies, the song would be recorded by Hank Williams Jr, the Clash, the Dead Kennedys and more, and all of them would be inspired by the Bobby Fuller Four's version of the song, not the Crickets' original. Around this time, the group also recorded a live album at PJs, in the hope of duplicating Trini Lopez's success with his earlier album. The album was shelved, though, because it didn't capture the powerhouse live act of the group's reputation, instead sounding rather dull and lifeless, with an unenthused audience: [Excerpt: The Bobby Fuller Four, "Oh Boy!"] While "I Fought the Law" was a huge success, it started a period of shifts within the band. Shortly after the PJs album was recorded, DeWayne Quirico quit the band and moved back to El Paso. He was temporarily replaced by Johnny Barbata, who would later become a member of the Turtles, before Fuller's preferred replacement Dalton Powell was able to get to LA to join the band. There seems to have been some shuffling about, as well, because as far as I can tell, Powell joined the band, then quit and was replaced by Barbata returning, and then rejoined again, all in about a six month period. Given the success of "I Fought the Law", it only made sense that at their first recording session with Powell, the group would record more tracks that had originally been on the Crickets' In Style album. One of these, their version of "Baby My Heart", went unreleased at the time, though to my taste it's the best thing the group ever did: [Excerpt: The Bobby Fuller Four, "Baby My Heart"] The other, "Love's Made a Fool of You", became the group's next single: [Excerpt: The Bobby Fuller Four, "Love's Made a Fool of You"] "Love's Made a Fool of You" was also a success, making number twenty-six in the charts, but the group's next session, which would produce their last single, was the cause of some conflict. Keane had noticed that soul music was getting bigger, and so he'd decided to open up a sister label to Mustang, Bronco, which would release soul and R&B music. As he didn't know much about that music himself, though of course he had worked with Sam Cooke, he decided to hire an A&R man to deal with that kind of music. The man he chose was a piano player named Barry White, still several years from making his own hit records. White had had some success as an arranger and producer already, having arranged "The Harlem Shuffle" for Bob and Earl, on which he also played piano: [Excerpt: Bob and Earl, "The Harlem Shuffle"] Despite White's remit, the records he produced for Bronco and Mustang weren't especially soulful. "Back Seat 38 Dodge" by Opus 1, for example, is a psychedelic updating of the kind of car songs that the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean had been doing a couple of years earlier: [Excerpt: Opus 1, "Back Seat 38 Dodge"] White was present at what became the final Bobby Fuller Four session, though accounts differ as to his involvement. Some have him arranging "The Magic Touch”, others have him playing drums on the session, some have him co-producing. Bob Keane always said that the record had no involvement from White whatsoever, that he was there but not participating, but various band members, while differing on other things, have insisted that White and Fuller got into huge rows, as Fuller thought that White was trying to turn his music into Motown, which he despised. The finished record does sound to me like it's got some of White's fingerprints on it: [Excerpt: The Bobby Fuller Four, "The Magic Touch"] But "The Magic Touch" flopped -- it departed too far from the updated Buddy Holly sound of the group's hit singles, and audiences weren't responding. “The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini” came out and was an embarrassment to the band – and on July the eleventh the next in that horrible series of deaths linked to the film happened, the plane crash that killed Philip Bent and Peter Sachse. On July the sixteenth, William Parker, the long-serving chief of the LAPD, had died. If, hypothetically, someone wanted to commit a crime in LA and not have it investigated too closely, the few days after Parker's death, when the entire department was in mourning and making preparations for a massive public funeral, would have been a good time to do so. Two days after Parker's death, July the eighteenth 1966, was going to be the crunch point for the Bobby Fuller Four. They had a recording session scheduled for 8:30AM, but they also were planning on having a band meeting after the session, at which it was likely the group were going to split up. Jim Reese had just got his draft notice, Bobby and Randy were getting on worse, and nobody was happy with the music they were making. They were going to finish the album they were working on, and then Bobby was going to go solo. Or at least that was what everyone assumed -- certainly Ahmet Ertegun had been sniffing round Bobby as a solo artist, though Bobby kept saying publicly he wanted to continue working with the band. There were also later rumours that Morris Levy had been after Bobby, and had even signed him to a deal, though no documentary evidence of such a deal has surfaced. It seemed that if there was to be a group at all, it would just be a name for any random musicians Bobby hired. Bobby also wanted to become a pure recording artist, and not tour any more -- he hated touring, thought people weren't listening to the band properly, and that being away from home meant he didn't have time to write songs, which in turn meant that he had to record what he thought of as substandard material by other people rather than his own original material. He wanted to stay in LA, play clubs, and make records. But even though making records was what he wanted to do, Bobby never turned up for the recording session, and nor did he turn up for the group meeting afterwards. The group's next single had been announced as "It's Love Come What May": [Excerpt: Randy Fuller, "It's Love Come What May"] When that was released, it was released as a Randy Fuller solo single, with Randy's voice overdubbed on top of Bobby's. Because there was no use putting out a record by a dead man. Here's what we actually know about Bobby Fuller's death, as far as I can tell. There are a lot of conflicting claims, a lot of counternarratives, and a lot of accusations that seek to tie in everyone from Charles Manson to Frank Sinatra, but this is as close as I can get to the truth. Bobby and Randy were living together, with their mother, though Randy was out a lot of the time, and the two brothers at that point could barely stand to be in the same room with each other, as often happens in bands where brothers work together. On the night of July the seventeenth, Bobby Fuller left the house for a couple of hours after getting a phone call -- some people who were around said he was going to see a girlfriend named Melody to buy some acid from her, but she says he didn't see her that night. Melody was a sex worker, who was also reputedly the girlfriend of a local nightclub owner who had Mob connections and was jealous of her attachments to other men -- though she denies this. Nobody has ever named which club owner, but it's generally considered to be Eddie Nash, the owner of PJs. Melody was also friends with Larry Nunes, and says she acted as a go-between for Nunes and Fuller. Fuller got back in around 2:30 AM and spent some time having beer with the building manager.  Then at some point he went out again -- Bobby was a night owl. When his mother, Lorraine, woke up, she noticed her car, which Bobby often used to borrow, wasn't there. She had a terrible bad feeling about her son's whereabouts -- though she often had such feelings, after the murder of her eldest son. She kept checking outside every half hour or so to see if he was coming home. At 5PM, two musicians from El Paso, Ty Grimes and Mike Ciccarelli, who'd come to LA to see Fuller, pulled into the parking lot near his apartment block. There were no other cars nearby. A car pulled in beside them, but they didn't pay any attention. They went up the stairs and rang the doorbell. While they were ringing the doorbell, Lorraine Fuller was out checking the mail, and noticed her car, which hadn't been there earlier. She opened the door. Ty Grimes later said "When we walked back to Mike's car, Bobby's car was now parked next to Mike's, and he was laying in the front seat already dead. We also saw his mom being helped toward the apartment." Fuller had been dead long enough for rigor mortis to have set in. While Lorraine Fuller later said that his hand had been on the ignition key, there was actually no key found in the car. He had apparently died from inhaling petrol. His body was covered in bruises, and the slippers he was wearing looked like they'd been dragged across the ground. His body was covered in petrol, and his right index finger was broken. Bob Keane has later said that Larry Nunes knew some details of the crime scene before he was told them. According to the other members of the band, there was an eight hundred thousand dollar life insurance policy on Bobby's life, held by the record company. Keane didn't get any money from any such policy, and stated that if such a policy existed it must have been taken out by Nunes, who soon stopped working with Keane, as Keane's labels collapsed without their one remaining star. The death was initially ruled a suicide, which would not pay out on an insurance claim, and later changed to accidental death, which would. Though remember, of course, we have only the word of Bobby's other band members that any insurance policy existed. No real police investigation was ever carried out, because it was such an open-and-shut case. At no point was it ever considered a murder by the famously corrupt LAPD. Bob Keane hired private investigators to investigate the case. One of them was shot at, and the others gave up on the investigation, scared to continue. The autopsy report that was issued months after the fact bore no resemblance to what any of the witnesses said they saw of the state of Fuller's body. More than thirty years later, Keane tried to get the information the LAPD held about the case, and was told that it could only be accessed by a family member. Keane contacted Randy Fuller, who was then told that the entire case file was missing. So all we can go on as far as the official records go is the death certificate. Which means that I lied to you at the start of the episode. Because officially, no matter what impression you might have got from everything I just said, Bobby Fuller's death *was* an accident.

In diesem Podcast geht es um tragische Todesfälle von Oldielegenden in den 60ern. Fünf spannende Fälle werden vorgestellt - Stu Sutcliffe von den Beatles, Brian Jones von den Stones, Sam Cooke, Bobby Fuller und Otis Redding. Unter anderem geht es um tödliche Schüsse in einem Hotel und einen seltsamen Leichenfund neben einem Benzinkanister. Außerdem um einen Song, der noch gar nicht fertig war und trotzdem zum Welthit wurde.

Los Angeles in the 1960s gave the world some of the greatest music in rock 'n' roll history: "California Dreamin'" by the Mamas and the Papas, "Mr. Tambourine Man" by the Byrds, and "Good Vibrations" by the Beach Boys, a song that magnificently summarized the joy and beauty of the era in three and a half minutes.But there was a dark flip side to the fun fun fun of the music, a nexus between naïve young musicians and the hangers-on who exploited the decade's peace, love, and flowers ethos, all fueled by sex, drugs, and overnight success. One surf music superstar unwittingly subsidized the kidnapping of Frank Sinatra Jr. The transplanted Texas singer Bobby Fuller might have been murdered by the Mob in what is still an unsolved case. And after hearing Charlie Manson sing, Neil Young recommended him to the president of Warner Bros. Records. Manson's ultimate rejection by the music industry likely led to the infamous murders that shocked a nation."Everybody Had an Ocean" chronicles the migration of the rock 'n' roll business to Southern California and how the artists flourished there. The cast of characters is astonishing—Brian and Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys, Jan and Dean, eccentric producer Phil Spector, Cass Elliot, Sam Cooke, Ike and Tina Turner, Joni Mitchell, and scores of others—and their stories form a modern epic of the battles between innocence and cynicism, joy and terror. You'll never hear that beautiful music in quite the same way.William McKeen is the author of nine books and the editor of four more. He teaches at Boston University, where he chairs the Department of Journalism and serves as associate dean of the College of Communication. He teaches literary journalism, history of journalism, reporting, feature writing and history of rock'n'roll. He's worked for several newspapers and magazines, including The Saturday Evening Post, The American Spectator, The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Kentucky, The Palm Beach Post in Florida and The St. Petersburg Times in Florida. His writing has appeared in Holiday, American History, Maxim, The Saturday Evening Post, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and many other newspapers and magazines. He has appeared on “The Today Show,” “The O'Reilly Factor,” “The CBS Evening News” and other news programs.Purchase a copy of "Everybody Had An Ocean: Music and Mayhem in 1960s Los Angeles" through Chicago Review Press: https://www.chicagoreviewpress.com/everybody-had-an-ocean-products-9781641605717.php?page_id=21Find out more about William McKeen at his official website: https://www.williammckeen.comListen to a playlist of the music discussed in this episode: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1ZCZOwSP6YrZL00WBlmKkT?si=66936c284ea340efRecommended Reading: “Glimpses” by Louis Shiner https://www.amazon.com/dp/B007JZ0EUK/refThe Booked On Rock Website: https://www.bookedonrock.comFollow The Booked On Rock with Eric Senich:FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/bookedonrockpodcastTWITTER: https://twitter.com/bookedonrockSupport Your Local Bookstore! Find your nearest independent book store here: https://www.indiebound.org/indie-store-finderContact The Booked On Rock Podcast:thebookedonrockpodcast@gmail.comThe Booked On Rock Theme Song: “Whoosh” by Crowander [ https://freemusicarchive.org/music/crowander]The Booked On Rock “Latest Books On Rock Releases” Song: “Slippery Rocks” by Crowander [ https://freemusicarchive.org/music/crowander]

USC/Clemson rivalry talk with the former players.

Mike Ciccarelli is an El Paso musician and a collaborator with Bobby Fuller. Ciccarelli first played with the band in the early 60s, filling in for Randy Fuller on bass at a Teen Club gig (Fuller had fallen ill at the time). In April of 1963, Ciccarelli became a full-fledged member of the band, playing guitar alongside Bobby, and recording in his homemade studio. Ciccarelli was forced to leave the band in June, as he was unable to make the trek to California with the rest of the band in hopes of getting signed to a major label. From then on, Billy Webb took over second guitar duties. In this episode of Rick Kern's TalkandRockRadio, Rick talks to Mike about his standout groups in El Paso and the time they were being considered to play Woodstock and how that played out.

Time for the King of Soul himself, the incredible Sam Cooke. His death raised some questions... Was it a mob hit? Did it have to do with Sam's voice in the Civil Rights Movement? Or was it truly self defense? Listen and let us know what you think. deathbypodcastteam@gmail.com .Listen to the accompanying playlist for this episode on Spotify at https://open.spotify.com/playlist/52mVpisuEiGxe5TyXHYcxo?si=fd7d7a4692b64742 .By Alex Motteler, Cassie Gardener, and Jake.  Music by Demons. Artwork by Mike Johnson.Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/deathbypodcastteam)

The mysterious death of Bobby Fuller of the Bobby Fuller Four on July 18th, 1966 leads to more questions than answers, and remains unsolved.Get your discount for Smile Brilliant now! https://www.smilebrilliant.com - promo code: GHOSTNew True Crime video: https://youtu.be/ps0HrNqSwO8Haunted Merch: http://bit.ly/ghosttownstuffPatreon: https://www.patreon.com/ghosttownpodInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/ghosttownpodSources: https://bit.ly/3kcwMyQ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode we invite beloved pop-rock singer-songwriter Marshall Crenshaw to reminisce about his long career, from the 40-year-old Shake single 'Something's Gonna Happen' to the documentary film he's producing about Dylan/Zappa/Velvets producer Tom Wilson. Along the way, Barney, Mark & Jasper ask Marshall about his Michigan upbringing, playing John Lennon in Beatlemania, signing to Warner Bros. Records, and his great influence Buddy Holly.Holly pops up in a clip from the week's new audio interview, a 1990 conversation with sometime Cricket Sonny Curtis, who tells John Tobler about his friendship with Buddy, the Clash's version of his timeless 'I Fought the Law' and the mysterious 1966 death of fellow Texan singer Bobby Fuller. Yet another Texan, the aforementioned Mr. Wilson, offers the perfect excuse to discuss Bob Dylan, the Velvet Underground and the Mothers of Invention.From there, we say goodbye to another deep Southerner, R&B legend Lloyd ('Lawdy Miss Clawdy') Price, referencing Wayne Robins' fascinating 2013 interview with the 80-year-old "Mr. Personality". Mark guides us through his favourite library additions of the week, including interviews with Carly Simon, Lamont Dozier and Mel & Kim, and Jasper concludes the episode with passing remarks on Wattstax, Björk and Charles Aznavour.Many thanks to special guest Marshall Crenshaw; visit his website at http://marshallcrenshaw.com/, and back the Kickstarter for the Tom Wilson documentary.Rock's Backpages is part of the Pantheon podcast network.Pieces discussed: Marshall Crenshaw by Iman Lababedi, Marshall Crenshaw by Laura Fissinger, Sonny Curtis audio, Lloyd Price by Bill Millar, Lloyd Price by Wayne Robins, Tom Wilson, Carly Simon, Lamont Dozier, The Replacements, Mel & Kim, Shaun Ryder, Wattstax, Björk and Charles Aznavour.

In this episode we invite beloved pop-rock singer-songwriter Marshall Crenshaw to reminisce about his long career, from the 40-year-old Shake single 'Something's Gonna Happen' to the documentary film he's producing about Dylan/Zappa/Velvets producer Tom Wilson. Along the way, Barney, Mark & Jasper ask Marshall about his Michigan upbringing, playing John Lennon in Beatlemania, signing to Warner Bros. Records, and his great influence Buddy Holly.Holly pops up in a clip from the week's new audio interview, a 1990 conversation with sometime Cricket Sonny Curtis, who tells John Tobler about his friendship with Buddy, the Clash's version of his timeless 'I Fought the Law' and the mysterious 1966 death of fellow Texan singer Bobby Fuller. Yet another Texan, the aforementioned Mr. Wilson, offers the perfect excuse to discuss Bob Dylan, the Velvet Underground and the Mothers of Invention.From there, we say goodbye to another deep Southerner, R&B legend Lloyd ('Lawdy Miss Clawdy') Price, referencing Wayne Robins' fascinating 2013 interview with the 80-year-old "Mr. Personality". Mark guides us through his favourite library additions of the week, including interviews with Carly Simon, Lamont Dozier and Mel & Kim, and Jasper concludes the episode with passing remarks on Wattstax, Björk and Charles Aznavour.Many thanks to special guest Marshall Crenshaw; visit his website at http://marshallcrenshaw.com/, and back the Kickstarter for the Tom Wilson documentary.Rock's Backpages is part of the Pantheon podcast network.Pieces discussed: Marshall Crenshaw by Iman Lababedi, Marshall Crenshaw by Laura Fissinger, Sonny Curtis audio, Lloyd Price by Bill Millar, Lloyd Price by Wayne Robins, Tom Wilson, Carly Simon, Lamont Dozier, The Replacements, Mel & Kim, Shaun Ryder, Wattstax, Björk and Charles Aznavour.

Bobby Fuller died at the young age of 24 under very mysterious circumstances. His death was ruled a suicide, but the facts of the case seem to point towards foul play. Who would douse themself in gasoline for no reason? deathbypodcastteam@gmail.comListen to the accompanying playlist for this episode on Spotify at https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4lGnOkNc7hXIg260CunUdC?si=jOAg8cR-QS2zHmSV7REcsg .By Alex Motteler, Cassie Gardener, and Drew Orton.  Music by Demons. Artwork by Mike Johnson.Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/deathbypodcastteam)

The Best of 2017 - 26 minutes of snippets of some of the policies, persons and personalities that defined the Soul of California this year. In the following order:  UCLA's Donald Shoup on why company parking is massively unjust:  Bassist Nathan East on picking up a guitar for the first time; Secretary Norman Mineta on being a “non-alien” of Japanese ancestry during WWII;  Mural Queen Judy Baca on “getting caught” painting on her boss's wall with gang members;  Rocker Chuck Prophet on Bobby Fuller's legacy and California Noir;  Stanford's Clayborne Carson on Martin Luther King, Jr's most memorable speech;  Betty Reid Soskin and the reaction that her park ranger uniform evokes; Literary statesman T.C. Boyle on human nature and the dying off of a species;  Jim Harris on the mythic ending of Route 66;  Poet Laureate Luis Rodriguez on what he would tell himself as a teen-ager;  UC Berkeley's Michael Dear on why walls don't work;  Biographer Earle Labor on Jack London's farcical struggles with immediate and ultimate happiness;  Writer Steven Provost on James Dean's last meal (and speeding ticket); Novelist Dana Johnson on how well-told accomplishments and not-so-well-told accomplishments make some immortal and some (undeservedly) forgotten.      Thanks for listening to the show this year. Please don't forget to share. After all, it's the holiday season. Grab a cup of something hot and strong and hit the play button…. Have a good holiday and a great new year.  Feed your soul. Keep listening.   

Chuck Prophet's new album “Bobby Fuller died for your sins” was just released to very solid reviews. In this 30-minute podcast, Chuck describes the album as California Noir, and discusses a few of the album's standout tracks. He then touches upon his recording and writing style and his collaboration with the poet klipschutz and many others.  Chuck also lays out the cultural tapestry that is San Francisco and how that culture shaped him in his formative years. Finally, he offers advice to himself as a teen-ager and closes with his desert island five (okay, three, one of which is depressingly brilliant and the other he characterises as a gateway drug, upon which the floodgates open to about 20) and wraps it up with the importance of staycations. Honest, humble and grateful to his cohorts, Chuck Prophet delivers. Next time: Clayborne Carson of Stanford's Martin Luther King Research and Education Institute.   Feed your soul. Keep listening.