Podcasts about bobby troup

This cut, from Julie London's album of the same name, became a camp classic. It's undeniably bawdy, with the torch songstress purring like a mod Mae West, with tongue solidly in cheek. The original, generated by neutered, pre-fab bobble heads, The Ohio Express, is a prepubescent rocker, lacking any lubriciousness whatsoever, but, emanating from Julie's throat it's an open invitation to bed, or a post-coital pillow declaration.Julie is Her Name, her first album, was released in 1955, and YUMMY YUMMY YUMMY was her last, arriving in 1969, when she was 43 years old. Being an aging sex star is hard, but doing it in the 1960s during the youth movement must have been agonizing. Following this, she retired from recording altogether to concentrate on her acting career, which served her well. In '72, her ex-husband, Jack Webb, cast her in the tv show Emergency! alongside her current spouse Bobby Troup,- (the composer of Route 66) - and that show lasted 6 years.In 2000, throat cancer claimed the life of the sultry voiced siren, after a lifetime of dedicated smoking. She was 74, leaving behind a discography full of yearning and heartache. I discovered her decades after her Hey Day, on a collection of Lounge numbers, and was smitten.  

This week, we talk to Bobby Troup, who at 7 p.m. Friday at the Powerhouse Theatre in Waveny is performing “The Life and Times of Poppa Blue.” Presented by the Town Players of New Canaan, the show includes anecdotes shared by Troup about his own father, Robert Troup or “Poppa Blue” as scores of New Canaanites knew him. 

Welcome to Season 03 Episode 17 - the "Flower Moon" edition - of Notes from the Aisle Seat, the podcast featuring news and information about the arts in northern Chautauqua County NY, sponsored by the 1891 Fredonia Opera House. Your host is Tom Loughlin, SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor and Chair Emeritus of Theatre and Dance at SUNY Fredonia. Guests on this episode include: Ms. Kelly Hayes McAlonie on Louise Blanchard Bethune; Mr. Jefferson Westwood on the Commencement Eve Pops Concert; and Ms. Jennifer Davis on the production of A.R. Guerney's Ancestral Voices at Lakeshore Center for the Arts in Westfield. Notes from the Aisle Seat is available from most of your favorite podcast sites, including Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Stitcher, Spotify, and Amazon Prime Music, as well as on the Opera House YouTube Channel. If you enjoy this podcast, please spread the word through your social media feeds, give us a link on your website, and consider becoming a follower by clicking the "Follow" button in the upper right-hand corner of our home page. If you have an arts event you'd like to publicize, hit us up at operahouse@fredopera.org and let us know what you have! Please give us at least one month's notice to facilitate timely scheduling. Thanks for listening! Time Stamps Kelly Hayes McAlonie/Louise Bethune  02:28 Jefferson Westwood/Commencement Eve Pops  20:50 Arts Calendar  36:57 Jennifer Davis/Ancient Voices 38:50 Media excerpts from Symphony #6 Opus 68 "Pastorale", Ludwig von Beethoven, composer; performed by Frankfurt Symphony Radio Orchestra, October 2021 "So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright", Paul Simon, composer, from the album Bridge Over Troubled Water, January 1970, Columbia Records "Route 66", Bobby Troup, composer (1946); performed by The Manhattan Transfer, August 2016. Artist Links Kelly Hayes McAlonie Jefferson Westwood Jennifer Davis North Shore Arts Alliance Art Trail Information May 25-26 10AM-5PM   BECOME AN OPERA HOUSE MEMBER!  

rWotD Episode 2556: Peter "Mars" Cowling Welcome to random Wiki of the Day where we read the summary of a random Wikipedia page every day.The random article for Friday, 3 May 2024 is Peter "Mars" Cowling.Peter "Mars" Cowling (May 26, 1946 – March 20, 2018) was an English bass guitarist, best known for his work with Canadian blues rock guitarist Pat Travers.Cowling for many years lived in Grimsby where, in 1962, he formed The Syndicate with Steve Mills on vocals, Frank Singleton on lead guitar, Doug Hollingworth rhythm guitar, Geoff Smith on piano, and John Smith on drums. This band played covers of tracks by Elmore James, Ray Charles, Rufus Thomas, Bobby Troup, and John Lee Hooker. After that, Cowling played in British groups including Gnidrolog and the Flying Hat Band, before joining forces with Pat Travers in 1975.Cowling recorded eight albums for Travers from 1976 to 1982. He left Travers that year and later in the 1980s joined sisters Pam and Paula Mattioli in US AOR band Gypsy Queen (later to become Cell Mates in the early 1990s after Cowling's time in the band), appearing at the 1987 Reading Rock Festival and on Gypsy Queen's debut album before leaving the band later the same year. He rejoined Travers in 1989, and remained until 1993. He performed on Travers' singles "Boom Boom (Out Go The Lights)" and "Snortin' Whiskey". Cowling was also featured on two video releases. The first was Hooked On Music, a live performance originally shot for the German television programme, Rockpalast in 1976, which showcased an early line-up that also included Nicko McBrain. Cowling's other video appearance was Boom Boom-Live At The Diamond Club, a 1991 concert filmed in Toronto, that also featured Jerry Riggs.Cowling died on March 20, 2018, after having been diagnosed in February with an aggressive form of Leukemia.This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 00:24 UTC on Friday, 3 May 2024.For the full current version of the article, see Peter "Mars" Cowling on Wikipedia.This podcast uses content from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.Visit our archives at wikioftheday.com and subscribe to stay updated on new episodes.Follow us on Mastodon at @wikioftheday@masto.ai.Also check out Curmudgeon's Corner, a current events podcast.Until next time, I'm Brian Neural.

Avec les Beach Boys et les Rolling Stones. Le 11 mai 1964 sort l'un des plus grands succès de l'histoire des Beach Boys, "I Get Around" qui sert un peu de réponses de Brian Wilson au triomphe des Beatles. L'année 1964, c'est aussi la sortie du premier album des Rolling Stones le 16 avril "The Rolling Stones" en Grande Bretagne et "The Rolling Stones : England's Newest Hit Makers" dans sa version américaine avec une très belle interprétation d'un classique de Buddy Holly et ses Crickets de 1957 "Not Fade Away", hommage à Chuck Berry, l'une des influences clefs de Mick Jagger et Keith Richards avec leur reprise de "Carol". Il y a "Route 66" du compositeur et pianiste américain Bobby Troup de 1946 et popularisé par Nat King Cole. Le son des Stones fait déjà des ravages et ce n'est que le tout début de l'aventure… --- Du lundi au vendredi, Fanny Gillard et Laurent Rieppi vous dévoilent l'univers rock, au travers de thèmes comme ceux de l'éducation, des rockers en prison, les objets de la culture rock, les groupes familiaux et leurs déboires, et bien d'autres, chaque matin dans Coffee on the Rocks à 6h30 et rediffusion à 13h30 dans Lunch Around The Clock. Merci pour votre écoute Pour écouter Classic 21 à tout moment : www.rtbf.be/classic21 Retrouvez tous les contenus de la RTBF sur notre plateforme Auvio.be Et si vous avez apprécié ce podcast, n'hésitez pas à nous donner des étoiles ou des commentaires, cela nous aide à le faire connaître plus largement.

Food and Travel Nation with Elizabeth Dougherty TOP 12 THINGS TO SEE ON ROUTE 66 The TRUTH about Food and Travel Original Broadcast Date:  1/8/2024 On this episode of RV Tips & Tales, as you sing along with the song Route 66, here are a list of a dozen spots along the route from Chicago to Santa Monica that are STILL in operation after all these years. (Get Your Kicks on) Route 66 written by Bobby Troup performed by Nat King Cole Well if you ever plan to motor west Just take my way that's the highway that's the best Get your kicks on Route 66 Well it winds from Chicago to L.A. More than 2000 miles all the way Get your kicks on Route 66 Well goes from St. Louie down to Missouri, Oklahoma city looks oh so pretty You'll see Amarillo and Gallup New Mexico Flagstaff, Arizona don't forget Winona Kingman, Barstow, San Bernardino Would you get hip to this kindly tip And go take that California trip Get your kicks on Route 66 Well goes from St. Louie down to Missouri, Oklahoma city looks oh so pretty You'll see Amarillo and Gallup, New Mexico Flagstaff, Arizona don't forget Winona Kingman, Barstow, San Bernardino Would you get hip to this kindly tip And go take that California trip Get your kicks on Route 66 ### About the show:  Food And Travel Nation with Elizabeth Dougherty is the fusion of food and travel. This fresh, compelling nationally-syndicated weekend program includes information for homesteading, traveling, gardening, taste tests, and in a twist, listeners hear what restaurant servers say about customers. Each week our listeners get the very latest food and travel information We produce homemade videos of healthy, easy to make recipes We feature no-holds barred interviews in a LIVE, fast-paced, nationwide call-in show. Elizabeth Dougherty is a writer, trained chef, world traveler and now an award-winning talk show host. Food Nation Radio was on the forefront of presenting expert guests with vital information about GMOs, at a time when no one was talking about or even knew about the subject. We give our listeners, advertisers and stations a LIVE SHOW. (NO “BEST OF'S” EVER!) We present hard-hitting topics and interviews without the same old political spin. We are very social media conscious and stay in touch with our audience. (200,000 plus) We work closely with advertisers and stations to ensure their success. We are ready to deliver a fresh, tight, first-class show to your station from our digital studio utilizing Comrex Access and our own automation system. Executive Producer – Michael Serio Requests: Sammone@proton.me FOOD AND TRAVEL NATION FAST FACTS Website: Food And Travel Nation.com Social Media Sites: Facebook | Twitter website:  FoodAndTravelNation.com email:  Elizabeth@FoodAndTravelNation.com

Más vientos, metales, cuernos, trombones y trompetas, saxos clarinetes y trompas… De Berlín a Sevilla, de Nueva Orleans a Honolulu, de Lennoxtwon (Escocia) a Burdeos y París. De Harrisburg o Los Ángeles - el recorrido de Bobby Troup - en California, de Sao Paulo, Brasil, o a Berlín o Madrid. Arreglos orquestales que elevan espíritus, melodías para la eternidad. Más vientos y metales para la vida misma. DISCO 1 DARREN HAYMAN & The Secondary Modern Civil Pride DISCO 2 LULÚ Feelin’ Alright DISCO 3 ALEXIS EVANS Mister Right On Time DISCO 4 QUANTIC AND HIS COMBO BARBARO Wandering Star DISCO 5 BOBBY TROUP & His Stars Of Jazz Free And Easy DISCO 6 YVONNE ELLIMAN & DR. JOHN If It Hit The Road Jack/Stick & Stones DISCO 7 LARRY JOHN McNALLY Don’t Let Johnny Walker Do Your Talkin’ For Ya DISCO 8 SOULTUNE ALL STARS Drop It DISCO 9 MASHA OCEAN QUARTET Tolox DISCO 10 TRIO MOCOTÓ Consuegro Verde DISCO 11 MENAGERIE Earthrise DISCO 12 DE PHAZZ Jeunesse Dorée - Slap Bossa Mix DISCO 13 FINISH AFRICAE Dança Do Corpo Escuchar audio

Todos tenemos secretos, cosas que escondemos y un día tememos que puedan salir a la luz y destruirnos. Jesús dice en el Evangelio según Lucas que "no hay nada oculto, que no haya de ser manifestado" (8:17). ¿Cómo puede ser esto una Buena Noticia?, cuando hay tantas cosas de las que nos avergonzamos. Sobre ello pensamos en esta parada en el viaje de la vida a la luz de este capítulo de uno de los 66 libros que iluminan nuestra Ruta. La sintonía está a cargo esta vez de una actriz, comediante, escritora, guionista y directora feminista argentina, Malena Pichot, que interpreta en inglés, el clásico que escribió Bobby Troup cuando iba por la carretera de Pensilvania a California con su esposa, la cantante Julie London. A continuación oímos la canción de John Mellencamp, entonces llamado Cougar, "Jack & Diane" (1982), que era originalmente la historia de una pareja interracial basada en la obra de Tennesee Williams, "Dulce pájaro de juventud", pero la compañía discográfica se la hizo cambiar para que pareciera una balada de amor más convencional entre chicos del "Cinturón Bíblico", cuya "vida sigue / mucho después de que la emoción de vivir se haya ido". El cantautor se pregunta si habrá salvación para ellos. La influencia que la semilla de la Palabra del Buen Libro (vv. 4-15) ha tenido en jóvenes como ellos, bajo la influencia del Evangelio (Mellencamp creció con su abuela en la iglesia nazarena) parece a veces no dar fruto. Como la cantante americana Audrey Assad, hija de refugiado sirio, criada en una Asamblea de Hermanos, pasa del mundillo de la "música cristiana contemporánea" a una crisis, que le lleva al catolicismo, para acabar diciendo en 2021 que ha perdido la fe, tras su divorcio. La canción "Incluso el invierno" (Even The Winter 2012) espera que "la semilla plantada en la tierra con amor", germine a su tiempo. El secreto del que habla el film que hemos elegido para comentar, sucede en Hungría durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial, pero la historia se desarrolla en la América de finales de los 80. "La caja de música", que se llama en Argentina "Mucho más que un crimen", es una obra magistral del griego Costa-Gavras, huido a Francia durante la dictadura de los coroneles y autor de impresionantes películas como "Missing" sobre el golpe de estado en Chile, ya en Estados Unidos. "Music Box" (1989) es la impresionante historia de una abogado de Chicago, maravillosamente encarnada por Jessica Lange, que se ha criado con un padre húngaro, tras la muerte de su madre. A este militante anticomunista, interpretado por el alemán Armin Mueller-Stahl se le amenaza de repente con extraditarle por "crímenes de guerra", ante la perplejidad de su hija, que defiende su caso en los tribunales. Escuchamos algunos diálogos de la versión doblada, que José de Segovia comenta a la luz de las palabras de Jesús (vv. 17) con la música de fondo de la banda sonora original del francés Philippe Sarde. El popular dúo londinense de tecno-pop recuperó a la veterana cantante británica de los 60, Dusty Springfield, para interpretar la composición que hicieron para la película basada en el Caso Profumo,en 1988. El "Escándalo" que da nombre a la película fue la relación del ministro de guerra Profumo con una corista llamada Christine Keeler, relacionada con un espía soviético. Si nos inquieta que todo finalmente pueda salir a la luz, más nos choca la reacción de Jesús cuando su madre y sus hermanos quieren verle (vv. 19-21). Randy Stonehill escribió una "Carta a su familia" en 1980 para "El cielo que se cae" (The Sky Is Falling) como "Postal desde el corazón" (Postcards From The Heart), cuando dejó la droga y se convirtió en la "pequeña casa blanca" de Larry Norman junto a la Iglesia Presbiteriana de Hollywood, donde comienza la Revolución por Jesús. La volvió a grabar en 1994, después de su ruptura con Larry, para volver a decir a su padre y a su hermano que oigan la Palabra, pero que actúen en consecuencia, volviéndose a Aquel que nos da la vida por la que podemos nacer dos veces por Su sola voluntad. Seguiremos hablando de este capítulo en nuestra próxima parada...

durée : 00:58:00 - "Route 66" (Bobby Troup) (1946) - par : Laurent Valero - "Composé en 1946 par Bobby Troup chanteur, pianiste, auteur-compositeur, qui en eu l'idée en partant en road trip sur la route 66 avec son épouse. Cela donnera ce classique du jazz et du rythm'n' blues, avec énumération des villes traversées qui invite au plaisir de voir défiler les paysages..." - réalisé par : Antoine Courtin

Welcome to the Instant Trivia podcast episode 739, where we ask the best trivia on the Internet. Round 1. Category: Singers 1: In 1957 both Steve Lawrence and Harry Belafonte sang about this type of ship. banana boat. 2: Current Biography called him the most famous British singer-drummer since Ringo Starr. Phil Collins. 3: Born Annie Mae Bullock in Nutbush, Tenn., in 1976, she told Ike to take a hike. Tina Turner. 4: She was nominated for a 1962 Tony for her Broadway debut in "I Can Get It for You Wholesale". Barbra Streisand. 5: 1st husband Jack Webb co-starred her with 2nd husband Bobby Troup in TV's "Emergency!". Julie London. Round 2. Category: Rhyming Brands 1: An Alpine village is on the label of this hot cocoa mix. Swiss Miss. 2: One slogan said, "Me-Hee for" this chocolate drink. Yoo-Hoo. 3: This line of healthier frozen entrees was introduced in 1981. Lean Cuisine. 4: This "gourmet" candy brand has flavors like buttered popcorn and has only 4 calories per bean. Jelly Belly. 5: Walter Deimer invented this pink chewing gum in 1928. Dubble Bubble. Round 3. Category: Pig-Out 1: Anguagelay okenspay isthay ayway. Pig Latin. 2: In 1982 this Muppet was featured in her own "Great Lovers Of The Silver Screen" calendar. Miss Piggy. 3: This "Peanuts" character is usually illustrated enveloped in a cloud of dust. Pig-Pen. 4: This porcine "Green Acres" star was a real ham; he won 2 Patsy Awards as TV Animal Of The Year. Arnold. 5: The Walrus said it was time "To talk of many things", about "why the sea is boiling hot and whether" this. Pigs have wings. Round 4. Category: Product Placement 1: Austin Powers' warning "Get your hands off my Heinie, baby" referred to this beer. Heineken. 2: In 2000's "Hamlet", Ethan Hawke soliloquizes in one of this chain's video stores. Blockbuster. 3: Sales for these candies rocketed after being featured in "E.T.". Reese's Pieces. 4: Business for these sunglasses wasn't risky after Tom Cruise wore them in "Risky Business". Ray-Ban. 5: This company's Powerbook helps Jeff Goldblum save the planet in "Independence Day". Apple. Round 5. Category: 1990s Fashion 1: In 1995 fashion magazines Elle and Vogue claimed this bright color was moving from lipstick to dresses. Red. 2: This chain of stores received good PR when Sharon Stone wore one of its T-shirts to the Oscars. The Gap. 3: Because of Spike Lee's 1992 film, baseball caps bearing this letter were in vogue in 1993. X (for Malcolm X). 4: "I'd Rather Go Naked Than Wear" this was the slogan of a high-profile campaign by PETA. Fur. 5: These sexy yet "infantile" dresses have been worn over bicycle shorts. babydolls. Thanks for listening! Come back tomorrow for more exciting trivia! Special thanks to https://blog.feedspot.com/trivia_podcasts/

It was the Dragnet Christmas story that kept on giving."The Big Little Jesus" first debuted on the Dragnet radio program that preceded the television show. "The Big Little Jesus" first ran on December 22, 1953. It was re-broadcast on December 21, 1954 and December 25, 1956. It made its television debut on December 24, 1953, as the seventeenth episode of the show's third season. It starred Jack Webb, Ben Alexander, Harry Bartell, Joe Carioca Jr., James Griffith, Ralph Moody, Herb Vigran, Walter Sande, and Billy Chapin. In the show's successor series, Dragnet 1967, it was redone and re-christened "The Christmas Story." That aired on December 21, 1967, and starred Jack Webb and Harry Morgan, and then practically the same cast! Bartell, Moody, and Vigran return, along with newcomers Bobby Troup, Byron Morrow, William Challee, Fernando Vásquez, Craig Huxley, and The Brady Bunch's Barry Williams.It's all about a missing statue of the Christ child that goes away from its manger right on the eve of ... well, Christmas Eve. We also review "The Big .22" Rifle for Christmas." It's the seventh episode of Dragnet's second season, and it aired on December 18, 1952. Like "The Big Little Jesus," it was repeatedly aired in the radio version of the show as well. It was first broadcast December 22, 1949, and then re-recorded and put out again on December 21, 1950. That second version also aired on December 20, 1951. It was re-recorded a third time and aired again on December 21, 1952. Versions also ran on December 20, 1955 and March 20, 1956.The television version stars Jack Webb, Herbert Ellis, John Martin, June Whitley Taylor, Sammy Ogg, Virginia Christine, Renny McEvoy, and Olan Soule. This is a tragic, gutting Dragnet Christmas tale about a gift that goes awry for two families. It's well-written, gripping, and not funny at all. But it gets at the themes of loss and forgiveness and family far better than its sillier counterpart.Listen to Áine and Kevin carol on about twenty dollar gold pieces, M*A*S*H, Áine's jealousy of Julie London, and Jack Webb's podcasting career.Merry Christmas to all those who celebrate, and happy holidays to you all!Follow us on the usual social media suspects:FacebookTwitterInstagramAnd send your chess moves to mysterytomepodcast@gmail.com.Mystery to Me is a production of Mystery Sheet LLC.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Episode #246 is up- This week Matt sits down with Manny Hernandez & Rob Maebe, just minutes before they took the stage at The Orpheum Theater, Flagstaff, AZ. The two were in Flagstaff for the Anger Management- Jester Comedy Monthly Comedy Show at The Orpheum. Recorded at Alpine Pizza in Flagstaff, the best pizza in town! Catch Manny all over the state of AZ, dates at www.mannyhernandezcomedy.com, catch Rob this weekend headlining at JP's Comedy Club in Gilbert, AZ. The Intro & Outro music is “Route 66” performed by Bobby Troup- yes…the same Bobby Troup that played Dr. Joe Early on “Emergency”. He can cut you open then sing to you. This episode is brought to you by Bullydog Coffee Company & you have the chance to get a FREE 1-lb bag-o-beans & a coffee mug by posting a Rate & Review of our show on iTunes or by tagging our show & Bullydog Coffee on a social media post- We are pleased to announce our partnership with BarkBox- Delivering 4 to 6 natural treats and super fun toys built around a surprise theme each month. Use our LINK or go to getbarkbox.com/milehigh and get a FREE MONTH of treats! The Mile High Show is brought to you by Amazon- use the Mile High Show link to do all of your online shopping.

Several years ago, I wrote a time-travel film treatment called “Song Trippers” about a quartet of lonely, damaged people who found solace through music. Each lost soul connects to a song that transports them back in time to the place in their youth when they were the happiest. Of course, we all know that music has magic power. There are songs that can trip my memory far from the here and now to earlier states of joyful wonderment, and sadness, too, if that's what's called for. It's strong medicine.For each episode in this series, I'll take an 8 Track down from the shelf and share it with you, along with some special memories, bonded by that spiritual epoxy that has forged the framework of my life's scaffold. - Captain Billy"CARRYING A TORCH"THE END OF THE WORLD by Julie London (Liberty, 1963)That indelible contralto voice… smoky, sultry, and so sexy: the quintessential “torch” singer, Julie London's singing career almost didn't happen. She had given up show business for her first husband, Jack Webb (Sgt. Friday in Dragnet, and successful Hollywood producer). When the marriage broke up she linked up with their friend, Bobby Troup, the musician and composer of Route 66, and great things started happening for the vocalist.In 1956 she recorded Cry Me a River, produced by Troup, for the film The Girl Can't Help it, and the tune entered the ledger of all time classic jazz standards (#48 in NPR's 50 Greatest Jazz Vocals). She went on to make over 30 albums, and this one, released in 1963, though more heavily orchestrated, features her blasé, no frills approach, standing unperturbed at the center of the lush arrangements. Adaptation was easy for this singer - check out her insouciant cover of Yummy Yummy Yummy I Got Love in My Tummy. (MUCH BETTER than the original).In legendary fashion, the gorgeous Julie Peck was discovered in 1945, running an elevator in Los Angeles, and an acting career was inevitable. 30 years later, still alluring, Julie was nominated for a Golden Globe for her portrayal of Dixie McCall in Emergency! (Produced by ex-husband Webb). Troup was also in the series: they all stayed friends.I'm melting as I enjoy this lounge classic, and in full agreement with record producer Simon Waronker's observation: “the lyrics poured out of her like a hurt bird”. Julie was a chain smoker from the age of 16, and it was lung cancer that brought her down in 1999. Was it a “Faustian” bargain: to trade the ravages of tar and nicotine for an eternally immortal sound? I'll let the philosophers puzzle that out.

Duke Ellington and John Coltrane: Duke Ellington & John Coltrane (Impulse!, 1963) Aaron Bell, John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, Sam Woodyard. El tema es una composición de Ellington, Bobby Troup, George T. Simon. ¿Sabías que? Aaron Bell nació el 24 de abril de 1922 en Muskogee, Oklahoma, USA. En https://www.tomajazz.com/web/?p=63076 repasamos su carrera. © Pachi Tapiz, 2022 En anteriores episodios de JazzX5/HDO/LODLMA/Maltidos Jazztardos/Tomajazz Remembers/JazzX5 Centennial… https://www.tomajazz.com/web/?p=63023 https://www.tomajazz.com/web/?p=63001 https://www.tomajazz.com/web/?p=62716 https://www.tomajazz.com/web/?p=62511 https://www.tomajazz.com/web/?p=62266 https://www.tomajazz.com/web/?p=62200 https://www.tomajazz.com/web/?p=61576 https://www.tomajazz.com/web/?p=47859 https://www.tomajazz.com/web/?p=59944 https://www.tomajazz.com/web/?p=60399 Más información sobre Aaron Bell https://wbssmedia.com/artists/detail/721 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Bell Más información sobre JazzX5 JazzX5 es un minipodcast de HDO de la Factoría Tomajazz presentado, editado y producido por Pachi Tapiz. JazzX5 comenzó su andadura el 24 de junio de 2019. Todas las entregas de JazzX5 están disponibles en https://www.tomajazz.com/web/?cat=23120 / https://www.ivoox.com/jazzx5_bk_list_642835_1.html. Las sugerencias, quejas, felicitaciones, opiniones y el contacto en general en jazzx5 @ tomajazz.com También por WhatsApp en el teléfono de contacto. JazzX5 y los podcast de Tomajazz en Telegram En Tomajazz hemos abierto un canal de Telegram para que estés al tanto, al instante, de los nuevos podcast. Puedes suscribirte en https://t.me/TomajazzPodcast. Pachi Tapiz en Tomajazz https://www.tomajazz.com/web/?cat=17847

This is not you're daddy's route. Not the "Mother Road" as Route 66 was once known. Certainly not a place to "get your kicks" as songwriter Bobby Troup once wrote in his famous song. This is more the Highway to Hell, as crooned about by famed Australian troubadours, AC/DC. But not the movie Highway to Hell, which is a different movie.  When the aptly named criminal Rabbit flees protective custody he's brought back in by the two toughest names in action movies. Lou Diamond Phillips and Lori Petty. They run from some Russian assassins and find their way to a haunted highway that isn't on any new maps...for reasons. Ghost reasons. There's twists and turns, dated stereotypes, and really incompetent civil servants and maybe a few...ggggghosts??? So grab your Macguffin dog tags, rev up your cardboard jackhammer, and jump into the haunted asphalt with Matt and Tristan for 2001's Route 666. 

In this Episode Nick and Simon discuss Stars of Jazz  which was an American television program that ran between 1956 and 1958 and featured performances and interviews with many leading jazz performers of the time. The innovative program started on KABC-TV in Los Angeles in June 1956. It was produced by Jimmie Baker, and presented by pianist and songwriter Bobby Troup. Musicians who appeared on the show included Oscar Peterson, Billie Holiday, Art Blakey, Dave Brubeck, Stan Getz, Kid Ory, Chet Baker, and Troup's wife Julie London.  All 130 shows were filmed as kinescopes, but all but 45 were later lost. The remaining films were donated to the UCLA Film and Television Archive, where they are gradually being restored.

Tony remembers Emergency! (NBC, 1972-1977), the long-running medical drama/action-adventure series about emergency room doctors and paramedics in Los Angeles. Co-created and produced by Jack Webb, Emergency! starred Robert Fuller, Julie London, Bobby Troup, Randolph Mantooth, and Kevin Tighe and premiered on Jan. 15, 1972. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“Route 66" Ray Anthony and His Big Swing Band: The Swing Club (Aero Space Records, 1999) El tema es una composición de Bobby Troup. Tomajazz: © Pachi Tapiz, 2022 ¿Sabías que? Ray Anthony nació el 20 de enero de 1921. Por tanto, el 20 de enero de 2021 se convertirá en centenario: ¡felicidades! Happy Birthday! Su apellido original era Antonini, puesto que sus orígenes eran italianos. Posteriormente lo cambió por Anthony. En su carrera ejerció de líder de banda, trompetista, compositor y actor de cine y televisión. Es el único músico superviviente de la Glenn Miller Orchestra: actuó con esta formación entre 1940 y 1941. Juan F. Trillo relató en la cuarta entrega de Tomajazz Remembers la historia de Glenn Miller, cuyo cadáver nunca se llegó a encontrar, pero que dio lugar a distintas historias. En los años 50 y 60 grabó en Capitol Records. A partir de la década de los años 70 fundó su discográfica Aero Space Records, en la que publicó una gran parte de sus grabaciones. Ray Anthony fue considerado como uno de los líder de big band más modernos, aunque en los trabajos finales de su carrera orientó su música hacia el blues, temas populares de películas y series de televisión, así como a las músicas lounge y MOR. En anteriores episodios de JazzX5/HDO/LODLMA/Maltidos Jazztardos… https://www.tomajazz.com/web/?p=35605 Más información sobre JazzX5 JazzX5 es un minipodcast de HDO de la Factoría Tomajazz presentado, editado y producido por Pachi Tapiz. JazzX5 comenzó su andadura el 24 de junio de 2019. Todas las entregas de JazzX5 están disponibles en https://www.tomajazz.com/web/?cat=23120 / https://www.ivoox.com/jazzx5_bk_list_642835_1.html. JazzX5 y los podcast de Tomajazz en Telegram En Tomajazz hemos abierto un canal de Telegram para que estés al tanto, al instante, de los nuevos podcast. Puedes suscribirte en https://t.me/TomajazzPodcast. Pachi Tapiz en Tomajazz https://www.tomajazz.com/web/?cat=17847

The Creative Forces Behind The Patriots InTune Show Join Us For The 2nd Half To Discuss It All! @LWinter (gab),  @NIKTWIT1 (Twitter) & @LankLondon (Instagram) #TuneIn2InTune Join US For The 1st Hour Of BREAKING NEWS Stories and then stick around so we can introduce you to the creative forces behind the Patriots InTune Show. Tonight, LWinter/@LWinter (gab). LWinter is our incredibly talented promotional video director. She has created videos for some of the most recognized names in the movement and she does a fabulous job of introducing our audience to them with her creative and spirited videos. We will be joined by NIKTWIT, Twitter: @NIKTWITS1, Gab: @NIKTwit Born & raised in Calizuela (California), NIKTWIT is an LA Underground Conservative Artist, Pianist/Composer/Actor whose caricatures capture the absurd & often sinister characters on the world stage. Visit his website: https://niktwit.com/ Lank London/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/londonlank/Gab:@LankLondon Father, Researcher, Artistic Collaborator, Influencer & something good that came out of "Old Hollywood" joins us. Lank coordinates & collaborates with NIKTWIT. They have been friends since elementary school and are both very much engaged in the creative scene here in Hollywood. Lanks parents are Julie London and Bobby Troup.

Dan Rice operates one of the most famous Route 66 souvenir shops along Route 66, located on The Santa Monica Pier.  Dan is a past president of the California Route 66 Association and was instrumental in placing the famous End of the Trail sign on the Santa Monica Pier.   This is the final episode in a 3 part series featuring The Beginning, The Middle, and The End of Route 66. Join host Anthony Arno as he talks with Dan about: Earliest memory of Route 66 Background in Family Therapy Surviving a traumatic brain injury Selling American made Route 66 t-shirts Origin of End of the Trail sign Convincing Santa Monica Pier to erect a historical Route 66 sign Does Route 66 officially end on the Santa Monica Pier? Transitioning from a shop on wheels to a permanent shop on the Pier Early history of the Santa Monica Pier The 1939 Battle for Santa Monica Bay with mobster Tony Cornero Suggested sights for travelers arriving into Santa Monica Pier The Georgian Hotel Where is the original mobile vendor cart that Dan started his business with? The day Bobby Troup's daughter Cindy stopped at the shop President of California Route 66 Association Traveling the road today Similarities between Route 66 and Dan's life Website: 66 to Cali Facebook: 66 to Cali Thank you to Route 66 Podcast & Scholarship supporters! MidPoint Cafe, Adrian, TX – Featuring both their Ugly Crust Pie and one of the most popular photo ops along Route 66, located exactly halfway between Chicago and Santa Monica in Adrian, Texas. Gilligan's Route 66 Tours featuring tours of Route 66 in Ford Mustang convertibles, stays at historic Route 66 motels, and daily breakfast. Jon B – Rhode Island Mary Beth Busutil – Florida Jim Crabtree – California Mike Fort  Route 66 author and photographer – Shellee Graham and also my guest on Episode # 10 where she talks about her book, Tales from the Coral Court Motel. Kristin Haakenson – Washington  Rich Havlik – Minnesota Mary Nicholson – Pennsylvania Brian Sawyer – Indiana And from the United Kingdom Charli Beeton Please consider supporting both The Route 66 Podcast and Scholarship Program through Patreon.  This episodes Patreon supporters will have access to an additional 25 minutes of conversation with Dan, including Dan discussing: First road trip on Route 66 Publishing End of the Trail, an autobiography featuring the recovery from a near fatal car crash Business lessons learned while driving around Los Angeles International News covers the placing of the famous Route 66 sign on the Pier Suggestions for famous Route 66 attractions in California Suggestion for nearby budget accommodations Original hints of Route 66 in Los Angeles and current resurgence taking place in LA Celebrity customers visiting the shop Memorable everyday people to visit the shop Potential business opportunities along Route 66 Details about the progression of the California Route 66 Association Other popular stops along Route 66 in California Congratulations to this months Patreon winner, Kristin Haackenson,  from Washington, who has won a bag of Route 66 brand Santa Monica flavored snack mix.

I am totally psyched to welcome today’s guest. He is a Grammy award-winning mixer, and owner of the beautiful (and newly relocated) Sputnik Sound.  He has a long discography of accomplished records including artists like Keb Mo, Jars Of Clay, Jack White and 3rd Man Records, Buddy Guy, Kings Of Leon, Danger Mouse, Sturgill Simpson and some well known local artists: Moon Taxi, Bobby Bare Jr, and Jeff The Brotherhood (who lives right down the street from me in fact). Our guest originally hails from the town of Joplin MO which most people mistake as being named after the Ragtime Pianist Scott Joplin, but was in fact named after its founder the Reverend Joplin.  And other than being mentioned in Bobby Troup’s legendary song “Route 66”, the town of Joplin MO, which gained notoriety for mining Zinc, may owe its biggest musical credit to our guest on today’s show.  I met him back in 2002 when he became the head engineer for the incredible Blackbird Studios, right here in the city of Berry Hill a part of Nashville often referred to as the new music row with over 20 recording studios in a 3 mile radius.  I am honoured to be here at Sputnik Sound for this episode of Recording Studio Rockstars. Get access to FREE mixing mini-course: http://MixMasterBundle.com THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS! https://www.SoundPorter.com Get your free mastering demo. https://JZmic.com Use coupon ROCKSTARS to get 20% off The Pop Filter https://www.Spectra1964.com http://MacSales.com/Rockstars http://iZotope.com/Rockstars use code ROCK10 for 10% off https://www.Adam-Audio.com/Education https://www.APIaudio.com http://UltimateMixingMasterclass.com Hear guests discography on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2eFssqoA3h4k2SzXLAsSws?si=XOLcGxADQk6x3aZMaByr3Q If you love the podcast, then please leave a review: https://RSRockstars.com/Review CLICK HERE FOR COMPLETE SHOW NOTES AT: http://RSRockstars.com/293

Chapter 5In this segment of Chapters we have Rick Antonson, Author of "Route 66 Still Kicks: Driving America's Main Street". This travelogue follows Rick and his travel companion Peter along 2,400 miles through eight states from Chicago to Los Angeles as they discover the old Route 66. With surprising and obscure stories about Route 66 personalities like Woody Guthrie, John Steinbeck, Al Capone, Salvador Dali, Dorothea Lange, Cyrus Avery (the Father of Route 66), the Harvey Girls, Mickey Mantle, and Bobby Troup (songwriter of “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66”), Antonson’s fresh perspective reads like an easy drive down a forgotten road: winding, stopping now and then to mingle with the locals and reminisce about times gone by, and then getting stuck in the mud, sucked into its charms. Rick mixes hilarious anecdotes of happenstance travel with the route’s difficult history, its rise and fall in popularity, and above all, its place in legend. The author has committed part of his book’s proceeds to the preservation work of the National Route 66 Federation.Special Thanks to our Sponsors: Tobacco Motorwear / Shinko Tires / Scorpion Helmets / Wild-Ass Seats / UClear Digital CommunicationsThe Motorcycle Men Support David's Dream and Believe Cancer FoundationThe Gold Star Ride Foundation GET YOUR MOTORCYCLE MEN SHIRTS HERE!!! / Get your Motorcycle Men Neck Gator and Mug here!!Don't forget to get over and check out Ride With Ted over on the Motorcycle Men Channel on YouTube. ​​​​​​​Thanks for listening, we greatly appreciate you support. Ride Safe and remember.... We say stupid crap so you don't have to.Support the show (https://www.paypal.com/donate/?token=zPl7v5FjoO6fCov5rwbFo35sxmoOIUqUhcR1q1UVtP34xAVolJzW0aJ6GNSdljsPAT4MC0&fromUL=true&country.x=US&locale.x=en_US)

La Fiesta Tomatito, Michel Camino, Ray Charles Rare Genius undiscovered, The Platters, Hugues Aufray les crayons de couleurs, Sisiter Sadie par le trio de Joe de Francesco, Bobby Troup, Otis Taylor, Hubert Felix Thiefaine & Paul Personne et Anna Popovic tous sur la route du Blues.

In our second chapter, we explore the creation myth surrounding the song, Eleanor Rigby. Travel back in time with us to the very moment of formation of … the Beatles.Why this moment in time? Because it provides fascinating clues about the creation of this song. Join us in our investigation as we discover what in the world a psychological phenomenon known as cryptomnesia, has to do with the creation of Eleanor Rigby.Buckle up, for we are going to visit a very specific graveyard just outside Liverpool where everything will be revealed. Well, almost everything. Try to figure out now, in advance if you can, what the film “Psycho” has to do with the song Eleanor Rigby!SongsEleanor Rigby; Lennon and McCartney; performed by Joe Anastasi, Mike Sugar, and Winter, of SDPLYesterday, Lennon and McCartney; performed by Joe Anastasi, of SDPLOla-na Tung-eee; Paul McCartney, performed by Joe Anastasi and Mike Sugar, of SDPLA Day in the Life; Lennon and McCartney, ‘outro,' performed by Mike Sugar, of SDPLMellow Yellow; Donovan; performed by Joe Anastasi and Mike Sugar, of SDPLDa-Zi-Di-Da-Zu; Paul McCartney, performed by Joe Anastasi and Mike Sugar, of SDPLA Hard Day's Night, Lennon and McCartney; ‘intro,' performed by Mike Sugar, of SDPLAlso Sprach Zarathustra, Op. 30; Richard Strauss"Think!," Merv Griffin; mangled by Mike Sugar, of SDPLTwilight Zone Theme, Bernard Herrmann and Marius Constant, original recording cue, mangled by Mike Sugar, of SDPLSgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band; Lennon and McCartney; performed by Joe Anastasi and Mike Sugar, of SDPL1985, Paul McCartney: ‘outro,' performed by SDPL (Joe Anastasi, Mike Sugar, Winter, Mark Abbott, and Matt Twain)The Girl Can't Help It; Bobby Troup; performed by Little RichardTwenty Flight Rock; Ned Fairchild and Eddie Cochran; performed by Joe Anastasi and Mike Sugar, of SDPLPenny Lane, Lennon and McCartney; performed by SDPL (Joe Anastasi, Mike Sugar, Winter, Mark Abbott, and Matt Twain)Cry Me a River; Arthur Hamilton; performed by Joe Anastasi and Mike Sugar, of SDPLShake It Off; Taylor Swift, Max Martin, and Shellbac; performed by Joe Anastasi and Mike Sugar, of SDPLMoonlight Sonata, Piano Sonata No. 14, Ludwig van Beethoven, performed by Mike Sugar, of SDPLEasier Said Than Done; William Linton and Larry Huff; performed by Joe Anastasi and Mike Sugar, of SDPLBarracuda; Ann and Nancy Wilson, Roger Fisher and Michael DeRosier; performed by Mike Sugar, of SDPLManiac; Michael Sembello; performed by Joe Anastasi and Mike Sugar, of SDPLString Concerto, Vivaldi; performed by Baroque BandBad Idea, Ariana Grande, Peter Svensson, Savan Kotecha, Max Martin and Ilya Salmanzadeh; performed by Joe Anastasi and Mike Sugar, of SDPLPsycho!, Bernard Herrmann, original recording cue, mangled by Mike Sugar, of SDPLThe End, Lennon and McCartney; performed by SDPL (Joe Anastasi, Mike Sugar, Winter, Mark Abbott, Matt Twain)SourcesMcCartney, Christopher Sandford; Carroll and Graf Publishers; 2006Paul McCartney, the Life, Philip Norman; Little Brown and Company; 2016Songwriting Secrets of the Beatles, Dominic Pedler; Omnibus Press; 2003This is Your Brain on Music, The Science of a Human Obsession; Daniel J. Levitin; Plume; 2007Recording the Beatles, Kevin Ryan & Brian Kehew, Curvebender Publishing; 2006The Beatles Anthology; Chronicle Books; 2000www.merriam-webster.com/medical/cryptomnesiawww.dictionary.apa.org/cryptomnesiaSunbeams Music Trust; Annie Mawson, Director;The Girl Can't Help It; produced and directed by Frank Tashlin, screenplay adapted by Frank Tashlin and Herbert Baker; 1956Psycho! directed and produced by Alfred Hitchcock; written by Joseph Stefano; 1960Voice Actors Joe AnastasiMike SugarAnnie Mawson -- as herself.This show is part of Pantheon Podcasts.

In our second chapter, we explore the creation myth surrounding the song, Eleanor Rigby. Travel back in time with us to the very moment of formation of … the Beatles. Why this moment in time? Because it provides fascinating clues about the creation of this song. Join us in our investigation as we discover what in the world a psychological phenomenon known as cryptomnesia, has to do with the creation of Eleanor Rigby. Buckle up, for we are going to visit a very specific graveyard just outside Liverpool where everything will be revealed. Well, almost everything. Try to figure out now, in advance if you can, what the film “Psycho” has to do with the song Eleanor Rigby! Songs Eleanor Rigby; Lennon and McCartney; performed by Joe Anastasi, Mike Sugar, and Winter, of SDPL Yesterday, Lennon and McCartney; performed by Joe Anastasi, of SDPL Ola-na Tung-eee; Paul McCartney, performed by Joe Anastasi and Mike Sugar, of SDPL A Day in the Life; Lennon and McCartney, ‘outro,’ performed by Mike Sugar, of SDPL Mellow Yellow; Donovan; performed by Joe Anastasi and Mike Sugar, of SDPL Da-Zi-Di-Da-Zu; Paul McCartney, performed by Joe Anastasi and Mike Sugar, of SDPL A Hard Day’s Night, Lennon and McCartney; ‘intro,’ performed by Mike Sugar, of SDPL Also Sprach Zarathustra, Op. 30; Richard Strauss "Think!," Merv Griffin; mangled by Mike Sugar, of SDPL Twilight Zone Theme, Bernard Herrmann and Marius Constant, original recording cue, mangled by Mike Sugar, of SDPL Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band; Lennon and McCartney; performed by Joe Anastasi and Mike Sugar, of SDPL 1985, Paul McCartney: ‘outro,’ performed by SDPL (Joe Anastasi, Mike Sugar, Winter, Mark Abbott, and Matt Twain) The Girl Can’t Help It; Bobby Troup; performed by Little Richard Twenty Flight Rock; Ned Fairchild and Eddie Cochran; performed by Joe Anastasi and Mike Sugar, of SDPL Penny Lane, Lennon and McCartney; performed by SDPL (Joe Anastasi, Mike Sugar, Winter, Mark Abbott, and Matt Twain) Cry Me a River; Arthur Hamilton; performed by Joe Anastasi and Mike Sugar, of SDPL Shake It Off; Taylor Swift, Max Martin, and Shellbac; performed by Joe Anastasi and Mike Sugar, of SDPL Moonlight Sonata, Piano Sonata No. 14, Ludwig van Beethoven, performed by Mike Sugar, of SDPL Easier Said Than Done; William Linton and Larry Huff; performed by Joe Anastasi and Mike Sugar, of SDPL Barracuda; Ann and Nancy Wilson, Roger Fisher and Michael DeRosier; performed by Mike Sugar, of SDPL Maniac; Michael Sembello; performed by Joe Anastasi and Mike Sugar, of SDPL String Concerto, Vivaldi; performed by Baroque Band Bad Idea, Ariana Grande, Peter Svensson, Savan Kotecha, Max Martin and Ilya Salmanzadeh; performed by Joe Anastasi and Mike Sugar, of SDPL Psycho!, Bernard Herrmann, original recording cue, mangled by Mike Sugar, of SDPL The End, Lennon and McCartney; performed by SDPL (Joe Anastasi, Mike Sugar, Winter, Mark Abbott, Matt Twain) Sources McCartney, Christopher Sandford; Carroll and Graf Publishers; 2006 Paul McCartney, the Life, Philip Norman; Little Brown and Company; 2016 Songwriting Secrets of the Beatles, Dominic Pedler; Omnibus Press; 2003 This is Your Brain on Music, The Science of a Human Obsession; Daniel J. Levitin; Plume; 2007 Recording the Beatles, Kevin Ryan & Brian Kehew, Curvebender Publishing; 2006 The Beatles Anthology; Chronicle Books; 2000 www.merriam-webster.com/medical/cryptomnesia www.dictionary.apa.org/cryptomnesia Sunbeams Music Trust; Annie Mawson, Director; The Girl Can’t Help It; produced and directed by Frank Tashlin, screenplay adapted by Frank Tashlin and Herbert Baker; 1956 Psycho! directed and produced by Alfred Hitchcock; written by Joseph Stefano; 1960 Voice Actors  Joe Anastasi Mike Sugar Annie Mawson -- as herself. This show is part of Pantheon Podcasts.

Episode 2: Eleanor Rigby – The Counter-Narrative!In our second chapter, we explore the creation myth surrounding the song, Eleanor Rigby. Travel back in time with us to the very moment of formation of … the Beatles.Why this moment in time? Because it provides fascinating clues about the creation of this song. Join us in our investigation as we discover what in the world a psychological phenomenon known as cryptomnesia, has to do with the creation of Eleanor Rigby.Buckle up, for we are going to visit a very specific graveyard just outside Liverpool where everything will be revealed. Well, almost everything. Try to figure out now, in advance if you can, what the film “Psycho” has to do with the song Eleanor Rigby!SongsEleanor Rigby; Lennon and McCartney; performed by Joe Anastasi, Mike Sugar, and Winter, of SDPLYesterday, Lennon and McCartney; performed by Joe Anastasi, of SDPLOla-na Tung-eee; Paul McCartney, performed by Joe Anastasi and Mike Sugar, of SDPLA Day in the Life; Lennon and McCartney, ‘outro,' performed by Mike Sugar, of SDPLMellow Yellow; Donovan; performed by Joe Anastasi and Mike Sugar, of SDPLDa-Zi-Di-Da-Zu; Paul McCartney, performed by Joe Anastasi and Mike Sugar, of SDPLA Hard Day's Night, Lennon and McCartney; ‘intro,' performed by Mike Sugar, of SDPLAlso Sprach Zarathustra, Op. 30; Richard Strauss"Think!," Merv Griffin; mangled by Mike Sugar, of SDPLTwilight Zone Theme, Bernard Herrmann and Marius Constant, original recording cue, mangled by Mike Sugar, of SDPLSgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band; Lennon and McCartney; performed by Joe Anastasi and Mike Sugar, of SDPL1985, Paul McCartney: ‘outro,' performed by SDPL (Joe Anastasi, Mike Sugar, Winter, Mark Abbott, and Matt Twain)The Girl Can't Help It; Bobby Troup; performed by Little RichardTwenty Flight Rock; Ned Fairchild and Eddie Cochran; performed by Joe Anastasi and Mike Sugar, of SDPLPenny Lane, Lennon and McCartney; performed by SDPL (Joe Anastasi, Mike Sugar, Winter, Mark Abbott, and Matt Twain)Cry Me a River; Arthur Hamilton; performed by Joe Anastasi and Mike Sugar, of SDPLShake It Off; Taylor Swift, Max Martin, and Shellbac; performed by Joe Anastasi and Mike Sugar, of SDPLMoonlight Sonata, Piano Sonata No. 14, Ludwig van Beethoven, performed by Mike Sugar, of SDPLEasier Said Than Done; William Linton and Larry Huff; performed by Joe Anastasi and Mike Sugar, of SDPLBarracuda; Ann and Nancy Wilson, Roger Fisher and Michael DeRosier; performed by Mike Sugar, of SDPLManiac; Michael Sembello; performed by Joe Anastasi and Mike Sugar, of SDPLString Concerto, Vivaldi; performed by Baroque BandBad Idea, Ariana Grande, Peter Svensson, Savan Kotecha, Max Martin and Ilya Salmanzadeh; performed by Joe Anastasi and Mike Sugar, of SDPLPsycho!, Bernard Herrmann, original recording cue, mangled by Mike Sugar, of SDPLThe End, Lennon and McCartney; performed by SDPL (Joe Anastasi, Mike Sugar, Winter, Mark Abbott, Matt Twain)SourcesMcCartney, Christopher Sandford; Carroll and Graf Publishers; 2006Paul McCartney, the Life, Philip Norman; Little Brown and Company; 2016Songwriting Secrets of the Beatles, Dominic Pedler; Omnibus Press; 2003This is Your Brain on Music, The Science of a Human Obsession; Daniel J. Levitin; Plume; 2007Recording the Beatles, Kevin Ryan & Brian Kehew, Curvebender Publishing; 2006The Beatles Anthology; Chronicle Books; 2000www.merriam-webster.com/medical/cryptomnesiawww.dictionary.apa.org/cryptomnesiaSunbeams Music Trust; Annie Mawson, Director;The Girl Can't Help It; produced and directed by Frank Tashlin, screenplay adapted by Frank Tashlin and Herbert Baker; 1956Psycho! directed and produced by Alfred Hitchcock; written by Joseph Stefano; 1960Voice Actors Joe AnastasiMike SugarAnnie Mawson -- as herself.This show is part of Pantheon Podcasts.

Stroll Down Penny Lane Episode 2: Eleanor Rigby – The Counter-Narrative! In our second chapter, we explore the creation myth surrounding the song, Eleanor Rigby. Travel back in time with us to the very moment of formation of … the Beatles. Why this moment in time? Because it provides fascinating clues about the creation of this song. Join us in our investigation as we discover what in the world a psychological phenomenon known as cryptomnesia, has to do with the creation of Eleanor Rigby. Buckle up, for we are going to visit a very specific graveyard just outside Liverpool where everything will be revealed. Well, almost everything. Try to figure out now, in advance if you can, what the film “Psycho” has to do with the song Eleanor Rigby! Songs Eleanor Rigby; Lennon and McCartney; performed by Joe Anastasi, Mike Sugar, and Winter, of SDPL Yesterday, Lennon and McCartney; performed by Joe Anastasi, of SDPL Ola-na Tung-eee; Paul McCartney, performed by Joe Anastasi and Mike Sugar, of SDPL A Day in the Life; Lennon and McCartney, ‘outro,’ performed by Mike Sugar, of SDPL Mellow Yellow; Donovan; performed by Joe Anastasi and Mike Sugar, of SDPL Da-Zi-Di-Da-Zu; Paul McCartney, performed by Joe Anastasi and Mike Sugar, of SDPL A Hard Day’s Night, Lennon and McCartney; ‘intro,’ performed by Mike Sugar, of SDPL Also Sprach Zarathustra, Op. 30; Richard Strauss "Think!," Merv Griffin; mangled by Mike Sugar, of SDPL Twilight Zone Theme, Bernard Herrmann and Marius Constant, original recording cue, mangled by Mike Sugar, of SDPL Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band; Lennon and McCartney; performed by Joe Anastasi and Mike Sugar, of SDPL 1985, Paul McCartney: ‘outro,’ performed by SDPL (Joe Anastasi, Mike Sugar, Winter, Mark Abbott, and Matt Twain) The Girl Can’t Help It; Bobby Troup; performed by Little Richard Twenty Flight Rock; Ned Fairchild and Eddie Cochran; performed by Joe Anastasi and Mike Sugar, of SDPL Penny Lane, Lennon and McCartney; performed by SDPL (Joe Anastasi, Mike Sugar, Winter, Mark Abbott, and Matt Twain) Cry Me a River; Arthur Hamilton; performed by Joe Anastasi and Mike Sugar, of SDPL Shake It Off; Taylor Swift, Max Martin, and Shellbac; performed by Joe Anastasi and Mike Sugar, of SDPL Moonlight Sonata, Piano Sonata No. 14, Ludwig van Beethoven, performed by Mike Sugar, of SDPL Easier Said Than Done; William Linton and Larry Huff; performed by Joe Anastasi and Mike Sugar, of SDPL Barracuda; Ann and Nancy Wilson, Roger Fisher and Michael DeRosier; performed by Mike Sugar, of SDPL Maniac; Michael Sembello; performed by Joe Anastasi and Mike Sugar, of SDPL String Concerto, Vivaldi; performed by Baroque Band Bad Idea, Ariana Grande, Peter Svensson, Savan Kotecha, Max Martin and Ilya Salmanzadeh; performed by Joe Anastasi and Mike Sugar, of SDPL Psycho!, Bernard Herrmann, original recording cue, mangled by Mike Sugar, of SDPL The End, Lennon and McCartney; performed by SDPL (Joe Anastasi, Mike Sugar, Winter, Mark Abbott, Matt Twain) Sources McCartney, Christopher Sandford; Carroll and Graf Publishers; 2006 Paul McCartney, the Life, Philip Norman; Little Brown and Company; 2016 Songwriting Secrets of the Beatles, Dominic Pedler; Omnibus Press; 2003 This is Your Brain on Music, The Science of a Human Obsession; Daniel J. Levitin; Plume; 2007 Recording the Beatles, Kevin Ryan & Brian Kehew, Curvebender Publishing; 2006 The Beatles Anthology; Chronicle Books; 2000 www.merriam-webster.com/medical/cryptomnesia www.dictionary.apa.org/cryptomnesia Sunbeams Music Trust; Annie Mawson, Director; The Girl Can’t Help It; produced and directed by Frank Tashlin, screenplay adapted by Frank Tashlin and Herbert Baker; 1956 Psycho! directed and produced by Alfred Hitchcock; written by Joseph Stefano; 1960 Voice Actors  Joe Anastasi Mike Sugar Annie Mawson -- as herself. This show is part of Pantheon Podcasts.

In the twenty-first episode of MashUpheaval - your all-request, live performance mashup podcast - Amelia Ray performs two mashups: one of Exposé’s "Point of No Return" (written by Lewis Martinée) and Nu Shooz’s "Point of No Return" (written by John Smith and Valerie Day) and another of  Bill Wither's "Use Me" (written by Bill Withers) and Nat King Cole's "(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66," (written by Bobby Troup).Episode video: https://youtu.be/HZyi-5oKDwYSong List:(1) “Points of No Return” - a mashup of "Point of No Return" (written by Lewis Martinée) and "Point of No Return" (written by John Smith and Valerie Day)(2) “Use Me to Get Your Kicks” - a mashup of "Use Me" (written by Bill Withers) and "(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66," (written by Bobby Troup)If you would like to request a mashup, send an email to: mashupheaval@ameliaray.netSupport this podcast: www.patreon.com/ameliaraywww.ameliaray.net

The Hit Parade Jukebox series highlights the music from the days when the jukebox dominated our after-school social activities. And the songs we played with our nickels, dimes, and quarters determined the “hits” of the day. This episode features: (1) Music, Music, Music by Teresa Brewer (w/ The Dixieland All-Stars) (2) L-O-V-E by Peggy Lee (3) Oh Baby Mine by The Four Knights (4) You'd Be So Nice To Come Home To by Nancy Wilson (5) Round And Round by Perry Como (6) Sweet Pumpkin by Freda Payne (7) Snootie Little Cutie by Bobby Troup (8) Are You Certain by Sarah Vaughan (9) Teach Me Tonight by The DeCastro Sisters (10) Come Fly With Me by Frank Sinatra (11) Opus No. 1 by The Mills Brothers (12) Heart Of My Heart by The Four Aces (13) Bugle Call Rag by The Modernaires (14) Midnight Flyer by Nat King Cole (15) Just for Old Time's Sake by The McGuire Sisters (16) Comes Love by Billie Holiday & Her Orchestra (17) Route 66 by The Four Freshmen (18) Melodie D'Amour by The Ames Brothers (19) The Lady Is A Tramp by Sammy Davis Jr (20) Send Me The Pillow You Dream On by Dean Martin (21) Allegheny Moon by Patti Page (22) Where The Blue Of The Night (Meets The Gold Of The Day) by Tommy Mara

Con Nat King Cole, Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Stitt y Sonny Rollins y Ramón Cardo & The Nyora Boppers entre otros. "2º jueves de mes: Míticos y Referentes" en Ahora Jazz. "Route 66" de Bobby Troup, en grabación de N.K.Cole, es nuestro "Estándar de la semana" y "A fer la má", del saxofonista valenciano Ramón Cardo y sus "Nyora Boppers", nuestro "Favorito". Ahora Jazz, Ed.1972 - Jueves 9 Julio.

What do Jim O’Kane, Julie London, and Harold E. Stine all have in common? They’re all incredibly important to this minute of MASH. As the trip to Japan begins, we meet Bobby Troup and his boss ring before being whisked into the hospital to find the congressman’s son. In this vignette, the role of the loudspeaker will be performed by a gong. Side discussions: the sideburn wars of Emergency!, wedding rings on All in the Family and The X-Files, and the startling realization that they made a tv series out of Casablanca.

Episode fifty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Twenty Flight Rock” by Eddie Cochran, and at the first great rock and roll film Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Teen-Age Crush” by Tommy Sands.  —-more—- Resources There are several books available on Cochran, but for this episode I mostly relied on Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran: Rock and Roll Revolutionaries by John Collis. I’ll be using others as well in forthcoming episodes. While there are dozens of compilations of Cochran’s music available, many of them are flawed in one way or another (including the Real Gone Music four-CD set, which is what I would normally recommend). This one is probably the best you can get for Cochran novices. And as always there’s a Mixcloud with the full versions of all the songs featured in today’s episode. Patreon   This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript To tell the story of rock music, it’s important to tell the story of the music’s impact on other media. Rock and roll was a cultural phenomenon that affected almost everything, and it affected TV, film, clothing and more. So today, we’re going to look at how a film made the career of one of the greats of rock and roll music: [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, “Twenty Flight Rock”] Eddie Cochran was born in Albert Lea, Minnesota, though in later life he would always claim to be an Okie rather than from Albert Lea. His parents were from Oklahoma, they moved to Minnesota shortly before Eddie was born, and they moved back to Oklahoma City when he was small, moved back again to Minnesota, and then moved off to California with the rest of the Okies. Cochran was a staggeringly precocious guitarist. On the road trip to California from Albert Lea, he had held his guitar on his lap for the entire journey, referring to it as his best friend. And once he hit California he quickly struck up a musical relationship with two friends — Guybo Smith, who played bass, and Chuck Foreman, who played steel guitar. The three of them got hold of a couple of tape recorders, which allowed them not only to record themselves, but to experiment with overdubbing in the style of Les Paul. Some of those recordings have seen release in recent years, and they’re quite astonishing: [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran and Chuck Foreman, “Rockin’ It”] Cochran plays all the guitars on that (except the steel guitar, which is Foreman) and he was only fourteen years old at the time. He played with several groups who were playing the Okie Western Swing and proto-rockabilly that was popular in California at the time, and eventually hooked up with a singer from Mississippi who was born Garland Perry, but who changed his name to Hank Cochran, allowing the duo to perform under the name “the Cochran Brothers”. The Cochran Brothers soon got a record deal. When they started out, they were doing pure country music, and their first single was a Louvin Brothers style close harmony song, about Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams: [Excerpt: The Cochran Brothers, “Two Blue Singing Stars”] But while Hank was perfectly happy making this kind of music, Eddie was getting more and more interested in the new rock and roll music that was starting to become popular, and the two of them eventually split up over actual musical differences. Hank Cochran would go on to have a long and successful career in the country industry, but Eddie was floundering. He knew that this new music was what he should be playing, and he was one of the best guitarists around, but he wasn’t sure how to become a rock and roller, or even if he wanted to be a singer at all, rather than just a guitar player. He hooked up with Jerry Capehart, a singer and songwriter who the Cochran Brothers had earlier backed on a single: [Excerpt: Jerry Capehart and the Cochran Brothers, “Walkin’ Stick Boogie”] The two of them started writing songs together, and Eddie also started playing as a session musician. He played on dozens of sessions in the mid-fifties, mostly uncredited, and scholars are still trying to establish a full list of the records he played on. But while he was doing this, he still hadn’t got himself a record contract, other than for a single record on an independent label: [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, “Skinny Jim”] Cochran was in the studio recording demos for consideration by record labels when Boris Petroff, a B-movie director who was a friend of Cochran’s collaborator Jerry Capehart, dropped in. Petroff decided that Cochran had the looks to be a film star, and right there offered him a part in a film that was being made under the working title Do-Re-Mi. Quite how Petroff had the ability to give Cochran a part in a film he wasn’t working on, I don’t know, but he did, and the offer was a genuine one, as Cochran confirmed the next day. There were many, many, rock and roll films made in the 1950s, and most of them were utterly terrible. It says something about the genre as a whole when I tell you that Elvis’ early films, which are not widely regarded as cinematic masterpieces, are among the very best rock and roll films of the decade. The 1950s were the tipping point for television ownership in both the US and the UK, but while TV was quickly becoming a mass medium, cinema-going was still at levels that would stagger people today — *everyone* went to the cinema. And when you went to the cinema, you didn’t go just to see one film. There’d be a main film, a shorter film called a B-movie that lasted maybe an hour, and short features like cartoons and newsreels. That meant that there was a much greater appetite for cheap films that could be used to fill out a programme, despite their total lack of quality. This is where, for example, all the films that appear in Mystery Science Theater 3000 come from, or many of them. And these B-movies would be made in a matter of weeks, or even days, and so would quickly be turned round to cash in on whatever trend was happening right at that minute. And so between 1956 and 1958 there were several dozen films, with titles like “Rock! Rock! Rock!”, “Don’t Knock The Rock” and so on. [Excerpt: Bill Haley and the Comets, “Don’t Knock the Rock”] In every case, these films were sold entirely on the basis of the musical performances therein, with little or no effort to sell them as narratives, even though they all had plots of sorts. They were just excuses to get footage of as many different hit acts as possible into the cinemas, ideally before their songs dropped off the charts. (Many of them also contained non-hit acts, like Teddy Randazzo, who seemed to appear in all of them despite never having a single make the top fifty. Randazzo did, though, go on to write a number of classic hits for other artists). Very few of the rock and roll films of the fifties were even watchable at all. We talked in the episode on “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” about the film “Rock! Rock! Rock!” which Chuck Berry appeared in — that was actually towards the more watchable end of these films, terrible as it was. The film that Cochran was signed to appear in, which was soon renamed The Girl Can’t Help It, is different. There are plenty of points at which the action stops for a musical performance, but there is an actual plot, and actual dialogue and acting. While the film isn’t a masterpiece or anything like that, it is a proper film. And it’s made by a proper studio. While, for example, Rock! Rock! Rock! was made by a fly-by-night company called Vanguard Productions, The Girl Can’t Help It was made by Twentieth Century Fox. And it was made in both colour and Cinemascope. The budget for Rock! Rock! Rock! was seventy-five thousand dollars compared to the 1.3 million dollars spent on The Girl Can’t Help It. [Excerpt: Little Richard, “The Girl Can’t Help It”] Indeed, it seems to be as much an attempt to cash in on a Billy Wilder film as it is an attempt to cash in on rock and roll. The previous year, The Seven-Year Itch had been a big hit, with Tom Ewell playing an unassuming middle-aged man who becomes worryingly attracted to a much younger woman, played by Marilyn Monroe. The film had been a massive success (and it’s responsible for the famous scene with Monroe on the air grate, which is still homaged and parodied to this day) and so the decision was taken to cast Tom Ewell as an unassuming middle-aged man who becomes worryingly attracted to a much younger woman, played by Jayne Mansfield doing her usual act of being a Marilyn Monroe impersonator. Just as the film was attempting to sell itself on the back of a more successful hit film, the story also bears a certain amount of resemblance to one by someone else. The playwright Garson Kanin had been inspired in 1955 by the tales of the jukebox wars — he’d discovered that most of the jukeboxes in the country were being run by the Mafia, and that which records got stocked and played depended very much on who would do favours for the various gangsters involved. Gangsters would often destroy rivals’ jukeboxes, and threaten bar owners if they were getting their jukeboxes from the wrong set of mobsters. Kanin took this idea and turned it into a novella, Do-Re-Mi, about a helpless schlub who teams up with a gangster named “Fatso” to enter the record business, and on the way more or less accidentally makes a young woman into a singing star. Do-Re-Mi later became a moderately successful stage musical, which introduced the song “Make Someone Happy”. [Excerpt: Doris Day, “Make Someone Happy”] Meanwhile the plot of The Girl Can’t Help It has a helpless schlub team up with a mobster named “Fats”, and the two of them working together to make the mobster’s young girlfriend into a singing star. I’ve seen varying accounts as to why The Girl Can’t Help It was renamed from Do-Re-Mi and wasn’t credited as being based on Kanin’s novella. Some say that the film was made without the rights having been acquired, and changed to the point that Kanin wouldn’t sue. Others say that Twentieth Century Fox acquired the rights perfectly legally, but that the director, Frank Tashlin changed the script around so much that Kanin asked that his credit be removed, because it was now so different from his novella that he could probably resell the rights at some future point. The latter seems fairly likely to me, given that Tashlin’s next film, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, which also starred Jayne Mansfield, contained almost nothing from the play on which it was based. Indeed, the original play Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? was by the author of the original play on which The Seven-Year Itch was based. The playwright had been so annoyed at the way in which his vision had been messed with for the screen that he wrote Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? as a satire about the way the film industry changes writers’ work, and Mansfield was cast in the play. When Tashlin wanted Mansfield to star in The Girl Can’t Help It but she was contractually obliged to appear in the play, Fox decided the easiest thing to do was just to buy up the rights to the play and relieve Mansfield of her obligation so she could star in The Girl Can’t Help It. They then, once The Girl Can’t Help It finished, got Frank Tashlin to write a totally new film with the title Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, keeping only the title and Mansfield’s character. While The Girl Can’t Help It has a reputation for satirising rock and roll, it actually pulls its punches to a surprising extent. For example, there’s a pivotal scene where the main mobster character, Fats, calls our hero after seeing Eddie Cochran on TV: [excerpt: dialogue from “The Girl Can’t Help It”] Note the wording there, and what he doesn’t say. He doesn’t say that Cochran can’t sing, merely that he “ain’t got a trained voice”. The whole point of this scene is to set up that Jerry Jordan, Mansfield’s character, could become a rock and roll star even though she can’t sing at all, and yet when dealing with a real rock and roll star they are careful to be more ambiguous. Because, of course, the main thing that sold the film was the appearance of multiple rock and roll stars — although “stars” is possibly overstating it for many of those present in the film. One thing it shared with most of the exploitation films was a rather slapdash attitude to which musicians the film would actually feature. And so it has the genuinely big rock and roll stars of the time Little Richard, the Platters, and Fats Domino, the one-hit wonder Gene Vincent (but what a one hit to have), and a bunch of… less well-known people, like the Treniers — a jump band who’d been around since the forties and never really made a major impact, or Eddie Fontaine (about whom the less said the better), or the ubiquitous Teddy Randazzo, performing here with an accordion accompaniment. [Excerpt: Teddy Randazzo and the Three Chuckles, “Cinnamon Sinner”] And Cochran was to be one of those lesser-known acts, so he and Capehart had to find a song that might be suitable for him to perform in the film. Very quickly they decided on a song called “Twenty Flight Rock”, written by a songwriter called Nelda Fairchild. There has been a lot of controversy as to who actually contributed what to the song, which is copyrighted in the names of both Fairchild and Cochran. Fairchild always claimed that she wrote the whole thing entirely by herself, and that Cochran got his co-writing credit for performing the demo, while Cochran’s surviving relatives are equally emphatic in their claims that he was an equal contributor as a songwriter. We will almost certainly never know the truth. Cochran is credited as the co-writer of several other hit songs, usually with Capehart, but never as the sole writer of a hit. Fairchild, meanwhile, was a professional songwriter, but pieces like “Freddie the Little Fir Tree” don’t especially sound like the work of the same person who wrote “Twenty Flight Rock”. As both credited writers are now dead, the best we can do is use our own judgment, and my personal judgment is that Cochran probably contributed at least something to the song’s writing. The original version of “Twenty Flight Rock”, as featured in the film, was little more than a demo — it featured Cochran on guitar, Guybo Smith on double bass, and Capehart slapping a cardboard box to add percussion. Cochran later recorded a more fully-arranged version of the song, which came out after the film, but the extra elements, notably the backing vocals, added little to the simplistic original: [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, “Twenty Flight Rock”] It was that simpler version that appeared in the film, and which took its place alongside several other classic tracks in the film’s soundtrack. The film was originally intended to have a theme tune recorded by Fats Domino, who appeared in the film performing his hit “Blue Monday”, but when Bobby Troup mentioned this to Art Rupe, Rupe suggested that Little Richard would be a more energetic star to perform the song (and I’m sure this was entirely because of his belief that Richard would be the better talent, and nothing to do with Rupe owning Richard’s label, but not Domino’s). As a result, Domino’s role in the film was cut down to a single song, while Richard ended up doing three — the title song, written by Troup, “Ready Teddy” by John Marascalco and Bumps Blackwell, and “She’s Got It”. We’ve mentioned before that John Marascalco’s writing credits sometimes seem to be slightly exaggerated, and “She’s Got It” is one record that tends to bear that out. Listen to “She’s Got It”, which has Marascalco as the sole credited writer: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “She’s Got It”] And now listen to “I Got It”, an earlier record by Richard, which has Little Richard credited as the sole writer: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “I Got It”] Hmm… The Girl Can’t Help It was rather poorly reviewed in America. In France it was a different story. There’s a pervasive legend that the people of France revere Jerry Lewis as a genius. This is nonsense. But the grain of truth in it is that Cahiers du Cinema, the most important film magazine in France by a long way — the magazine for which Godard, Truffaut, and others wrote, and which popularised the concept of auteur theory, absolutely loved Frank Tashlin. In 1957, Tashlin was the only director to get two films on their top ten films of the year list — The Girl Can’t Help It at number eight, and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter at number two. The other eight films on the list were directed by Chaplin, Fellini, Hitchcock, Bunuel, Ingmar Bergman, Nicholas Ray, Fritz Lang and Sidney Lumet. Tashlin directed several films starring Jerry Lewis, and those films, like Tashlin’s other work, got a significant amount of praise in the magazine. And that’s where that legend actually comes from, though Cahiers did also give some more guarded praise to some of the films Lewis directed himself later. Tashlin wasn’t actually that good a director, but what he did have is a visual style that came from a different area of filmmaking than most of his competitors. Tashlin had started out as a cartoon director, working on Warner Brothers cartoons. He wasn’t one of the better directors for Warners, and didn’t direct any of the classics people remember from the studio — he mostly made forgettable Porky Pig shorts. But this meant he had an animator’s sense for a visual gag, and thus gave his films a unique look. For advocates of auteur theory, that was enough to push him into the top ranks. And so The Girl Can’t Help It became a classic film, and Cochran got a great deal of attention, and a record deal. According to Si Waronker, the head of Liberty Records, Eddie Cochran getting signed to the label had nothing to do with him being cast in The Girl Can’t Help It, and Waronker had no idea the film was being made when Cochran got signed. This seems implausible, to say the least. Johnny Olenn, Abbey Lincoln and Julie London, three other Liberty Records artists, appeared in the film — and London was by some way Liberty’s biggest star. Not only that, but London’s husband, Bobby Troup, wrote the theme song and was musical director for the film. But whether or not Cochran was signed on account of his film appearance, “Twenty Flight Rock” wasn’t immediately released as a single. Indeed, by the time it came out Cochran had already appeared in another film, in which he had backed Mamie Van Doren — another Marilyn Monroe imitator in the same vein as Mansfield — on several songs, as well as having a small role and a featured song himself. Oddly, when that film, Untamed Youth, came out, Cochran’s backing on Van Doren’s recordings had been replaced by different instrumentalists. But he still appears on the EP that was released of the songs, including this one, which Cochran co-wrote with Capehart: [Excerpt: Mamie Van Doren, “Ooh Ba La Baby”] It had originally been planned to release “Twenty Flight Rock” as Cochran’s first single on Liberty, to coincide with the film’s release but then it was put back for several months, as Si Waronker wanted Cochran to release “Sitting in the Balcony” instead. That song had been written and originally recorded by John D Loudermilk: [Excerpt: John D Loudermilk, “Sitting in the Balcony”] Waronker had wanted to release Loudermilk’s record, but he hadn’t been able to get the rights, so he decided to get Cochran to record a note-for-note cover version and release that instead: [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, “Sitting in the Balcony”] Cochran was not particularly happy with that record, though he was happy enough once the record started selling in comparatively vast quantities, spurred by his appearance in The Girl Can’t Help It, and reached number eighteen in the charts. The problem was that Cochran and Waronker had fundamentally different ideas about what Cochran actually was as an artist. Cochran thought of himself primarily as a guitarist — and the guitar solo on “Sittin’ in the Balcony” was the one thing about Cochran’s record which distinguished it from Loudermilk’s original — and also as a rock and roller. Waronker, on the other hand, was convinced that someone with Cochran’s good looks and masculine voice could easily be another Pat Boone. Liberty was fundamentally not geared towards making rock and roll records. Its other artists included the Hollywood composer Lionel Newman, the torch singer Julie London, and a little later novelty acts like the Chipmunks — the three Chipmunks, Alvin, Simon, and Theodore, being named after Al Bennett, Si Waronker, and Theodore Keep, the three men in charge of the label. And their attempts to force Cochran into the mould of a light-entertainment crooner produced a completely forgettable debut album, Singin’ to My Baby, which has little of the rock and roll excitement that would characterise Cochran’s better work. (And a warning for anyone who decides to go out and listen to that album anyway — one of the few tracks on there that *is* in Cochran’s rock and roll style is a song called “Mean When I’m Mad”, which is one of the most misogynist things I have heard, and I’ve heard quite a lot — it’s basically an outright rape threat. So if that’s something that will upset you, please steer clear of Cochran’s first album, while knowing you’re missing little artistically.) “Twenty Flight Rock” was eventually released as a single, in its remade version, in November 1957, almost a year after The Girl Can’t Help It came out. Unsurprisingly, coming out so late after the film, it didn’t chart, and it would be a while yet before Cochran would have his biggest hit. But just because it didn’t chart, doesn’t mean it didn’t make an impression. There’s one story, more than any other, that sums up the impact both of “The Girl Can’t Help It” and of “Twenty Flight Rock” itself. In July 1957, a skiffle group called the Quarrymen, led by a teenager called John Lennon, played a village fete in Woolton, a suburb of Liverpool. After the show, they were introduced to a young boy named Paul McCartney by a mutual friend. Lennon and McCartney hit it off, but the thing that persuaded Lennon to offer McCartney a place in the group was when McCartney demonstrated that he knew all the words to “Twenty Flight Rock”. Lennon wasn’t great at remembering lyrics, and was impressed enough by this that he decided that this new kid needed to be in the group. [Excerpt: Paul McCartney, “Twenty Flight Rock”] That’s the impact that The Girl Can’t Help It had, and the impact that “Twenty Flight Rock” had. But Eddie Cochran’s career was just starting, and we’ll see more of him in future episodes…

Episode fifty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Twenty Flight Rock” by Eddie Cochran, and at the first great rock and roll film Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Teen-Age Crush” by Tommy Sands.  —-more—- Resources There are several books available on Cochran, but for this episode I mostly relied on Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran: Rock and Roll Revolutionaries by John Collis. I’ll be using others as well in forthcoming episodes. While there are dozens of compilations of Cochran’s music available, many of them are flawed in one way or another (including the Real Gone Music four-CD set, which is what I would normally recommend). This one is probably the best you can get for Cochran novices. And as always there’s a Mixcloud with the full versions of all the songs featured in today’s episode. Patreon   This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript To tell the story of rock music, it’s important to tell the story of the music’s impact on other media. Rock and roll was a cultural phenomenon that affected almost everything, and it affected TV, film, clothing and more. So today, we’re going to look at how a film made the career of one of the greats of rock and roll music: [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, “Twenty Flight Rock”] Eddie Cochran was born in Albert Lea, Minnesota, though in later life he would always claim to be an Okie rather than from Albert Lea. His parents were from Oklahoma, they moved to Minnesota shortly before Eddie was born, and they moved back to Oklahoma City when he was small, moved back again to Minnesota, and then moved off to California with the rest of the Okies. Cochran was a staggeringly precocious guitarist. On the road trip to California from Albert Lea, he had held his guitar on his lap for the entire journey, referring to it as his best friend. And once he hit California he quickly struck up a musical relationship with two friends — Guybo Smith, who played bass, and Chuck Foreman, who played steel guitar. The three of them got hold of a couple of tape recorders, which allowed them not only to record themselves, but to experiment with overdubbing in the style of Les Paul. Some of those recordings have seen release in recent years, and they’re quite astonishing: [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran and Chuck Foreman, “Rockin’ It”] Cochran plays all the guitars on that (except the steel guitar, which is Foreman) and he was only fourteen years old at the time. He played with several groups who were playing the Okie Western Swing and proto-rockabilly that was popular in California at the time, and eventually hooked up with a singer from Mississippi who was born Garland Perry, but who changed his name to Hank Cochran, allowing the duo to perform under the name “the Cochran Brothers”. The Cochran Brothers soon got a record deal. When they started out, they were doing pure country music, and their first single was a Louvin Brothers style close harmony song, about Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams: [Excerpt: The Cochran Brothers, “Two Blue Singing Stars”] But while Hank was perfectly happy making this kind of music, Eddie was getting more and more interested in the new rock and roll music that was starting to become popular, and the two of them eventually split up over actual musical differences. Hank Cochran would go on to have a long and successful career in the country industry, but Eddie was floundering. He knew that this new music was what he should be playing, and he was one of the best guitarists around, but he wasn’t sure how to become a rock and roller, or even if he wanted to be a singer at all, rather than just a guitar player. He hooked up with Jerry Capehart, a singer and songwriter who the Cochran Brothers had earlier backed on a single: [Excerpt: Jerry Capehart and the Cochran Brothers, “Walkin’ Stick Boogie”] The two of them started writing songs together, and Eddie also started playing as a session musician. He played on dozens of sessions in the mid-fifties, mostly uncredited, and scholars are still trying to establish a full list of the records he played on. But while he was doing this, he still hadn’t got himself a record contract, other than for a single record on an independent label: [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, “Skinny Jim”] Cochran was in the studio recording demos for consideration by record labels when Boris Petroff, a B-movie director who was a friend of Cochran’s collaborator Jerry Capehart, dropped in. Petroff decided that Cochran had the looks to be a film star, and right there offered him a part in a film that was being made under the working title Do-Re-Mi. Quite how Petroff had the ability to give Cochran a part in a film he wasn’t working on, I don’t know, but he did, and the offer was a genuine one, as Cochran confirmed the next day. There were many, many, rock and roll films made in the 1950s, and most of them were utterly terrible. It says something about the genre as a whole when I tell you that Elvis’ early films, which are not widely regarded as cinematic masterpieces, are among the very best rock and roll films of the decade. The 1950s were the tipping point for television ownership in both the US and the UK, but while TV was quickly becoming a mass medium, cinema-going was still at levels that would stagger people today — *everyone* went to the cinema. And when you went to the cinema, you didn’t go just to see one film. There’d be a main film, a shorter film called a B-movie that lasted maybe an hour, and short features like cartoons and newsreels. That meant that there was a much greater appetite for cheap films that could be used to fill out a programme, despite their total lack of quality. This is where, for example, all the films that appear in Mystery Science Theater 3000 come from, or many of them. And these B-movies would be made in a matter of weeks, or even days, and so would quickly be turned round to cash in on whatever trend was happening right at that minute. And so between 1956 and 1958 there were several dozen films, with titles like “Rock! Rock! Rock!”, “Don’t Knock The Rock” and so on. [Excerpt: Bill Haley and the Comets, “Don’t Knock the Rock”] In every case, these films were sold entirely on the basis of the musical performances therein, with little or no effort to sell them as narratives, even though they all had plots of sorts. They were just excuses to get footage of as many different hit acts as possible into the cinemas, ideally before their songs dropped off the charts. (Many of them also contained non-hit acts, like Teddy Randazzo, who seemed to appear in all of them despite never having a single make the top fifty. Randazzo did, though, go on to write a number of classic hits for other artists). Very few of the rock and roll films of the fifties were even watchable at all. We talked in the episode on “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” about the film “Rock! Rock! Rock!” which Chuck Berry appeared in — that was actually towards the more watchable end of these films, terrible as it was. The film that Cochran was signed to appear in, which was soon renamed The Girl Can’t Help It, is different. There are plenty of points at which the action stops for a musical performance, but there is an actual plot, and actual dialogue and acting. While the film isn’t a masterpiece or anything like that, it is a proper film. And it’s made by a proper studio. While, for example, Rock! Rock! Rock! was made by a fly-by-night company called Vanguard Productions, The Girl Can’t Help It was made by Twentieth Century Fox. And it was made in both colour and Cinemascope. The budget for Rock! Rock! Rock! was seventy-five thousand dollars compared to the 1.3 million dollars spent on The Girl Can’t Help It. [Excerpt: Little Richard, “The Girl Can’t Help It”] Indeed, it seems to be as much an attempt to cash in on a Billy Wilder film as it is an attempt to cash in on rock and roll. The previous year, The Seven-Year Itch had been a big hit, with Tom Ewell playing an unassuming middle-aged man who becomes worryingly attracted to a much younger woman, played by Marilyn Monroe. The film had been a massive success (and it’s responsible for the famous scene with Monroe on the air grate, which is still homaged and parodied to this day) and so the decision was taken to cast Tom Ewell as an unassuming middle-aged man who becomes worryingly attracted to a much younger woman, played by Jayne Mansfield doing her usual act of being a Marilyn Monroe impersonator. Just as the film was attempting to sell itself on the back of a more successful hit film, the story also bears a certain amount of resemblance to one by someone else. The playwright Garson Kanin had been inspired in 1955 by the tales of the jukebox wars — he’d discovered that most of the jukeboxes in the country were being run by the Mafia, and that which records got stocked and played depended very much on who would do favours for the various gangsters involved. Gangsters would often destroy rivals’ jukeboxes, and threaten bar owners if they were getting their jukeboxes from the wrong set of mobsters. Kanin took this idea and turned it into a novella, Do-Re-Mi, about a helpless schlub who teams up with a gangster named “Fatso” to enter the record business, and on the way more or less accidentally makes a young woman into a singing star. Do-Re-Mi later became a moderately successful stage musical, which introduced the song “Make Someone Happy”. [Excerpt: Doris Day, “Make Someone Happy”] Meanwhile the plot of The Girl Can’t Help It has a helpless schlub team up with a mobster named “Fats”, and the two of them working together to make the mobster’s young girlfriend into a singing star. I’ve seen varying accounts as to why The Girl Can’t Help It was renamed from Do-Re-Mi and wasn’t credited as being based on Kanin’s novella. Some say that the film was made without the rights having been acquired, and changed to the point that Kanin wouldn’t sue. Others say that Twentieth Century Fox acquired the rights perfectly legally, but that the director, Frank Tashlin changed the script around so much that Kanin asked that his credit be removed, because it was now so different from his novella that he could probably resell the rights at some future point. The latter seems fairly likely to me, given that Tashlin’s next film, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, which also starred Jayne Mansfield, contained almost nothing from the play on which it was based. Indeed, the original play Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? was by the author of the original play on which The Seven-Year Itch was based. The playwright had been so annoyed at the way in which his vision had been messed with for the screen that he wrote Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? as a satire about the way the film industry changes writers’ work, and Mansfield was cast in the play. When Tashlin wanted Mansfield to star in The Girl Can’t Help It but she was contractually obliged to appear in the play, Fox decided the easiest thing to do was just to buy up the rights to the play and relieve Mansfield of her obligation so she could star in The Girl Can’t Help It. They then, once The Girl Can’t Help It finished, got Frank Tashlin to write a totally new film with the title Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, keeping only the title and Mansfield’s character. While The Girl Can’t Help It has a reputation for satirising rock and roll, it actually pulls its punches to a surprising extent. For example, there’s a pivotal scene where the main mobster character, Fats, calls our hero after seeing Eddie Cochran on TV: [excerpt: dialogue from “The Girl Can’t Help It”] Note the wording there, and what he doesn’t say. He doesn’t say that Cochran can’t sing, merely that he “ain’t got a trained voice”. The whole point of this scene is to set up that Jerry Jordan, Mansfield’s character, could become a rock and roll star even though she can’t sing at all, and yet when dealing with a real rock and roll star they are careful to be more ambiguous. Because, of course, the main thing that sold the film was the appearance of multiple rock and roll stars — although “stars” is possibly overstating it for many of those present in the film. One thing it shared with most of the exploitation films was a rather slapdash attitude to which musicians the film would actually feature. And so it has the genuinely big rock and roll stars of the time Little Richard, the Platters, and Fats Domino, the one-hit wonder Gene Vincent (but what a one hit to have), and a bunch of… less well-known people, like the Treniers — a jump band who’d been around since the forties and never really made a major impact, or Eddie Fontaine (about whom the less said the better), or the ubiquitous Teddy Randazzo, performing here with an accordion accompaniment. [Excerpt: Teddy Randazzo and the Three Chuckles, “Cinnamon Sinner”] And Cochran was to be one of those lesser-known acts, so he and Capehart had to find a song that might be suitable for him to perform in the film. Very quickly they decided on a song called “Twenty Flight Rock”, written by a songwriter called Nelda Fairchild. There has been a lot of controversy as to who actually contributed what to the song, which is copyrighted in the names of both Fairchild and Cochran. Fairchild always claimed that she wrote the whole thing entirely by herself, and that Cochran got his co-writing credit for performing the demo, while Cochran’s surviving relatives are equally emphatic in their claims that he was an equal contributor as a songwriter. We will almost certainly never know the truth. Cochran is credited as the co-writer of several other hit songs, usually with Capehart, but never as the sole writer of a hit. Fairchild, meanwhile, was a professional songwriter, but pieces like “Freddie the Little Fir Tree” don’t especially sound like the work of the same person who wrote “Twenty Flight Rock”. As both credited writers are now dead, the best we can do is use our own judgment, and my personal judgment is that Cochran probably contributed at least something to the song’s writing. The original version of “Twenty Flight Rock”, as featured in the film, was little more than a demo — it featured Cochran on guitar, Guybo Smith on double bass, and Capehart slapping a cardboard box to add percussion. Cochran later recorded a more fully-arranged version of the song, which came out after the film, but the extra elements, notably the backing vocals, added little to the simplistic original: [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, “Twenty Flight Rock”] It was that simpler version that appeared in the film, and which took its place alongside several other classic tracks in the film’s soundtrack. The film was originally intended to have a theme tune recorded by Fats Domino, who appeared in the film performing his hit “Blue Monday”, but when Bobby Troup mentioned this to Art Rupe, Rupe suggested that Little Richard would be a more energetic star to perform the song (and I’m sure this was entirely because of his belief that Richard would be the better talent, and nothing to do with Rupe owning Richard’s label, but not Domino’s). As a result, Domino’s role in the film was cut down to a single song, while Richard ended up doing three — the title song, written by Troup, “Ready Teddy” by John Marascalco and Bumps Blackwell, and “She’s Got It”. We’ve mentioned before that John Marascalco’s writing credits sometimes seem to be slightly exaggerated, and “She’s Got It” is one record that tends to bear that out. Listen to “She’s Got It”, which has Marascalco as the sole credited writer: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “She’s Got It”] And now listen to “I Got It”, an earlier record by Richard, which has Little Richard credited as the sole writer: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “I Got It”] Hmm… The Girl Can’t Help It was rather poorly reviewed in America. In France it was a different story. There’s a pervasive legend that the people of France revere Jerry Lewis as a genius. This is nonsense. But the grain of truth in it is that Cahiers du Cinema, the most important film magazine in France by a long way — the magazine for which Godard, Truffaut, and others wrote, and which popularised the concept of auteur theory, absolutely loved Frank Tashlin. In 1957, Tashlin was the only director to get two films on their top ten films of the year list — The Girl Can’t Help It at number eight, and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter at number two. The other eight films on the list were directed by Chaplin, Fellini, Hitchcock, Bunuel, Ingmar Bergman, Nicholas Ray, Fritz Lang and Sidney Lumet. Tashlin directed several films starring Jerry Lewis, and those films, like Tashlin’s other work, got a significant amount of praise in the magazine. And that’s where that legend actually comes from, though Cahiers did also give some more guarded praise to some of the films Lewis directed himself later. Tashlin wasn’t actually that good a director, but what he did have is a visual style that came from a different area of filmmaking than most of his competitors. Tashlin had started out as a cartoon director, working on Warner Brothers cartoons. He wasn’t one of the better directors for Warners, and didn’t direct any of the classics people remember from the studio — he mostly made forgettable Porky Pig shorts. But this meant he had an animator’s sense for a visual gag, and thus gave his films a unique look. For advocates of auteur theory, that was enough to push him into the top ranks. And so The Girl Can’t Help It became a classic film, and Cochran got a great deal of attention, and a record deal. According to Si Waronker, the head of Liberty Records, Eddie Cochran getting signed to the label had nothing to do with him being cast in The Girl Can’t Help It, and Waronker had no idea the film was being made when Cochran got signed. This seems implausible, to say the least. Johnny Olenn, Abbey Lincoln and Julie London, three other Liberty Records artists, appeared in the film — and London was by some way Liberty’s biggest star. Not only that, but London’s husband, Bobby Troup, wrote the theme song and was musical director for the film. But whether or not Cochran was signed on account of his film appearance, “Twenty Flight Rock” wasn’t immediately released as a single. Indeed, by the time it came out Cochran had already appeared in another film, in which he had backed Mamie Van Doren — another Marilyn Monroe imitator in the same vein as Mansfield — on several songs, as well as having a small role and a featured song himself. Oddly, when that film, Untamed Youth, came out, Cochran’s backing on Van Doren’s recordings had been replaced by different instrumentalists. But he still appears on the EP that was released of the songs, including this one, which Cochran co-wrote with Capehart: [Excerpt: Mamie Van Doren, “Ooh Ba La Baby”] It had originally been planned to release “Twenty Flight Rock” as Cochran’s first single on Liberty, to coincide with the film’s release but then it was put back for several months, as Si Waronker wanted Cochran to release “Sitting in the Balcony” instead. That song had been written and originally recorded by John D Loudermilk: [Excerpt: John D Loudermilk, “Sitting in the Balcony”] Waronker had wanted to release Loudermilk’s record, but he hadn’t been able to get the rights, so he decided to get Cochran to record a note-for-note cover version and release that instead: [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, “Sitting in the Balcony”] Cochran was not particularly happy with that record, though he was happy enough once the record started selling in comparatively vast quantities, spurred by his appearance in The Girl Can’t Help It, and reached number eighteen in the charts. The problem was that Cochran and Waronker had fundamentally different ideas about what Cochran actually was as an artist. Cochran thought of himself primarily as a guitarist — and the guitar solo on “Sittin’ in the Balcony” was the one thing about Cochran’s record which distinguished it from Loudermilk’s original — and also as a rock and roller. Waronker, on the other hand, was convinced that someone with Cochran’s good looks and masculine voice could easily be another Pat Boone. Liberty was fundamentally not geared towards making rock and roll records. Its other artists included the Hollywood composer Lionel Newman, the torch singer Julie London, and a little later novelty acts like the Chipmunks — the three Chipmunks, Alvin, Simon, and Theodore, being named after Al Bennett, Si Waronker, and Theodore Keep, the three men in charge of the label. And their attempts to force Cochran into the mould of a light-entertainment crooner produced a completely forgettable debut album, Singin’ to My Baby, which has little of the rock and roll excitement that would characterise Cochran’s better work. (And a warning for anyone who decides to go out and listen to that album anyway — one of the few tracks on there that *is* in Cochran’s rock and roll style is a song called “Mean When I’m Mad”, which is one of the most misogynist things I have heard, and I’ve heard quite a lot — it’s basically an outright rape threat. So if that’s something that will upset you, please steer clear of Cochran’s first album, while knowing you’re missing little artistically.) “Twenty Flight Rock” was eventually released as a single, in its remade version, in November 1957, almost a year after The Girl Can’t Help It came out. Unsurprisingly, coming out so late after the film, it didn’t chart, and it would be a while yet before Cochran would have his biggest hit. But just because it didn’t chart, doesn’t mean it didn’t make an impression. There’s one story, more than any other, that sums up the impact both of “The Girl Can’t Help It” and of “Twenty Flight Rock” itself. In July 1957, a skiffle group called the Quarrymen, led by a teenager called John Lennon, played a village fete in Woolton, a suburb of Liverpool. After the show, they were introduced to a young boy named Paul McCartney by a mutual friend. Lennon and McCartney hit it off, but the thing that persuaded Lennon to offer McCartney a place in the group was when McCartney demonstrated that he knew all the words to “Twenty Flight Rock”. Lennon wasn’t great at remembering lyrics, and was impressed enough by this that he decided that this new kid needed to be in the group. [Excerpt: Paul McCartney, “Twenty Flight Rock”] That’s the impact that The Girl Can’t Help It had, and the impact that “Twenty Flight Rock” had. But Eddie Cochran’s career was just starting, and we’ll see more of him in future episodes…

Episode fifty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Twenty Flight Rock" by Eddie Cochran, and at the first great rock and roll film Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Teen-Age Crush" by Tommy Sands.  ----more---- Resources There are several books available on Cochran, but for this episode I mostly relied on Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran: Rock and Roll Revolutionaries by John Collis. I'll be using others as well in forthcoming episodes. While there are dozens of compilations of Cochran's music available, many of them are flawed in one way or another (including the Real Gone Music four-CD set, which is what I would normally recommend). This one is probably the best you can get for Cochran novices. And as always there's a Mixcloud with the full versions of all the songs featured in today's episode. Patreon   This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript To tell the story of rock music, it's important to tell the story of the music's impact on other media. Rock and roll was a cultural phenomenon that affected almost everything, and it affected TV, film, clothing and more. So today, we're going to look at how a film made the career of one of the greats of rock and roll music: [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, "Twenty Flight Rock"] Eddie Cochran was born in Albert Lea, Minnesota, though in later life he would always claim to be an Okie rather than from Albert Lea. His parents were from Oklahoma, they moved to Minnesota shortly before Eddie was born, and they moved back to Oklahoma City when he was small, moved back again to Minnesota, and then moved off to California with the rest of the Okies. Cochran was a staggeringly precocious guitarist. On the road trip to California from Albert Lea, he had held his guitar on his lap for the entire journey, referring to it as his best friend. And once he hit California he quickly struck up a musical relationship with two friends -- Guybo Smith, who played bass, and Chuck Foreman, who played steel guitar. The three of them got hold of a couple of tape recorders, which allowed them not only to record themselves, but to experiment with overdubbing in the style of Les Paul. Some of those recordings have seen release in recent years, and they're quite astonishing: [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran and Chuck Foreman, "Rockin' It"] Cochran plays all the guitars on that (except the steel guitar, which is Foreman) and he was only fourteen years old at the time. He played with several groups who were playing the Okie Western Swing and proto-rockabilly that was popular in California at the time, and eventually hooked up with a singer from Mississippi who was born Garland Perry, but who changed his name to Hank Cochran, allowing the duo to perform under the name "the Cochran Brothers". The Cochran Brothers soon got a record deal. When they started out, they were doing pure country music, and their first single was a Louvin Brothers style close harmony song, about Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams: [Excerpt: The Cochran Brothers, "Two Blue Singing Stars"] But while Hank was perfectly happy making this kind of music, Eddie was getting more and more interested in the new rock and roll music that was starting to become popular, and the two of them eventually split up over actual musical differences. Hank Cochran would go on to have a long and successful career in the country industry, but Eddie was floundering. He knew that this new music was what he should be playing, and he was one of the best guitarists around, but he wasn't sure how to become a rock and roller, or even if he wanted to be a singer at all, rather than just a guitar player. He hooked up with Jerry Capehart, a singer and songwriter who the Cochran Brothers had earlier backed on a single: [Excerpt: Jerry Capehart and the Cochran Brothers, "Walkin' Stick Boogie"] The two of them started writing songs together, and Eddie also started playing as a session musician. He played on dozens of sessions in the mid-fifties, mostly uncredited, and scholars are still trying to establish a full list of the records he played on. But while he was doing this, he still hadn't got himself a record contract, other than for a single record on an independent label: [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, "Skinny Jim"] Cochran was in the studio recording demos for consideration by record labels when Boris Petroff, a B-movie director who was a friend of Cochran's collaborator Jerry Capehart, dropped in. Petroff decided that Cochran had the looks to be a film star, and right there offered him a part in a film that was being made under the working title Do-Re-Mi. Quite how Petroff had the ability to give Cochran a part in a film he wasn't working on, I don't know, but he did, and the offer was a genuine one, as Cochran confirmed the next day. There were many, many, rock and roll films made in the 1950s, and most of them were utterly terrible. It says something about the genre as a whole when I tell you that Elvis' early films, which are not widely regarded as cinematic masterpieces, are among the very best rock and roll films of the decade. The 1950s were the tipping point for television ownership in both the US and the UK, but while TV was quickly becoming a mass medium, cinema-going was still at levels that would stagger people today -- *everyone* went to the cinema. And when you went to the cinema, you didn't go just to see one film. There'd be a main film, a shorter film called a B-movie that lasted maybe an hour, and short features like cartoons and newsreels. That meant that there was a much greater appetite for cheap films that could be used to fill out a programme, despite their total lack of quality. This is where, for example, all the films that appear in Mystery Science Theater 3000 come from, or many of them. And these B-movies would be made in a matter of weeks, or even days, and so would quickly be turned round to cash in on whatever trend was happening right at that minute. And so between 1956 and 1958 there were several dozen films, with titles like "Rock! Rock! Rock!", "Don't Knock The Rock" and so on. [Excerpt: Bill Haley and the Comets, “Don't Knock the Rock”] In every case, these films were sold entirely on the basis of the musical performances therein, with little or no effort to sell them as narratives, even though they all had plots of sorts. They were just excuses to get footage of as many different hit acts as possible into the cinemas, ideally before their songs dropped off the charts. (Many of them also contained non-hit acts, like Teddy Randazzo, who seemed to appear in all of them despite never having a single make the top fifty. Randazzo did, though, go on to write a number of classic hits for other artists). Very few of the rock and roll films of the fifties were even watchable at all. We talked in the episode on "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man" about the film "Rock! Rock! Rock!" which Chuck Berry appeared in -- that was actually towards the more watchable end of these films, terrible as it was. The film that Cochran was signed to appear in, which was soon renamed The Girl Can't Help It, is different. There are plenty of points at which the action stops for a musical performance, but there is an actual plot, and actual dialogue and acting. While the film isn't a masterpiece or anything like that, it is a proper film. And it's made by a proper studio. While, for example, Rock! Rock! Rock! was made by a fly-by-night company called Vanguard Productions, The Girl Can't Help It was made by Twentieth Century Fox. And it was made in both colour and Cinemascope. The budget for Rock! Rock! Rock! was seventy-five thousand dollars compared to the 1.3 million dollars spent on The Girl Can't Help It. [Excerpt: Little Richard, “The Girl Can't Help It”] Indeed, it seems to be as much an attempt to cash in on a Billy Wilder film as it is an attempt to cash in on rock and roll. The previous year, The Seven-Year Itch had been a big hit, with Tom Ewell playing an unassuming middle-aged man who becomes worryingly attracted to a much younger woman, played by Marilyn Monroe. The film had been a massive success (and it's responsible for the famous scene with Monroe on the air grate, which is still homaged and parodied to this day) and so the decision was taken to cast Tom Ewell as an unassuming middle-aged man who becomes worryingly attracted to a much younger woman, played by Jayne Mansfield doing her usual act of being a Marilyn Monroe impersonator. Just as the film was attempting to sell itself on the back of a more successful hit film, the story also bears a certain amount of resemblance to one by someone else. The playwright Garson Kanin had been inspired in 1955 by the tales of the jukebox wars -- he'd discovered that most of the jukeboxes in the country were being run by the Mafia, and that which records got stocked and played depended very much on who would do favours for the various gangsters involved. Gangsters would often destroy rivals' jukeboxes, and threaten bar owners if they were getting their jukeboxes from the wrong set of mobsters. Kanin took this idea and turned it into a novella, Do-Re-Mi, about a helpless schlub who teams up with a gangster named "Fatso" to enter the record business, and on the way more or less accidentally makes a young woman into a singing star. Do-Re-Mi later became a moderately successful stage musical, which introduced the song "Make Someone Happy". [Excerpt: Doris Day, “Make Someone Happy”] Meanwhile the plot of The Girl Can't Help It has a helpless schlub team up with a mobster named "Fats", and the two of them working together to make the mobster's young girlfriend into a singing star. I've seen varying accounts as to why The Girl Can't Help It was renamed from Do-Re-Mi and wasn't credited as being based on Kanin's novella. Some say that the film was made without the rights having been acquired, and changed to the point that Kanin wouldn't sue. Others say that Twentieth Century Fox acquired the rights perfectly legally, but that the director, Frank Tashlin changed the script around so much that Kanin asked that his credit be removed, because it was now so different from his novella that he could probably resell the rights at some future point. The latter seems fairly likely to me, given that Tashlin's next film, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, which also starred Jayne Mansfield, contained almost nothing from the play on which it was based. Indeed, the original play Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? was by the author of the original play on which The Seven-Year Itch was based. The playwright had been so annoyed at the way in which his vision had been messed with for the screen that he wrote Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? as a satire about the way the film industry changes writers' work, and Mansfield was cast in the play. When Tashlin wanted Mansfield to star in The Girl Can't Help It but she was contractually obliged to appear in the play, Fox decided the easiest thing to do was just to buy up the rights to the play and relieve Mansfield of her obligation so she could star in The Girl Can't Help It. They then, once The Girl Can't Help It finished, got Frank Tashlin to write a totally new film with the title Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, keeping only the title and Mansfield's character. While The Girl Can't Help It has a reputation for satirising rock and roll, it actually pulls its punches to a surprising extent. For example, there's a pivotal scene where the main mobster character, Fats, calls our hero after seeing Eddie Cochran on TV: [excerpt: dialogue from "The Girl Can't Help It"] Note the wording there, and what he doesn't say. He doesn't say that Cochran can't sing, merely that he "ain't got a trained voice". The whole point of this scene is to set up that Jerry Jordan, Mansfield's character, could become a rock and roll star even though she can't sing at all, and yet when dealing with a real rock and roll star they are careful to be more ambiguous. Because, of course, the main thing that sold the film was the appearance of multiple rock and roll stars -- although "stars" is possibly overstating it for many of those present in the film. One thing it shared with most of the exploitation films was a rather slapdash attitude to which musicians the film would actually feature. And so it has the genuinely big rock and roll stars of the time Little Richard, the Platters, and Fats Domino, the one-hit wonder Gene Vincent (but what a one hit to have), and a bunch of… less well-known people, like the Treniers -- a jump band who'd been around since the forties and never really made a major impact, or Eddie Fontaine (about whom the less said the better), or the ubiquitous Teddy Randazzo, performing here with an accordion accompaniment. [Excerpt: Teddy Randazzo and the Three Chuckles, “Cinnamon Sinner”] And Cochran was to be one of those lesser-known acts, so he and Capehart had to find a song that might be suitable for him to perform in the film. Very quickly they decided on a song called "Twenty Flight Rock", written by a songwriter called Nelda Fairchild. There has been a lot of controversy as to who actually contributed what to the song, which is copyrighted in the names of both Fairchild and Cochran. Fairchild always claimed that she wrote the whole thing entirely by herself, and that Cochran got his co-writing credit for performing the demo, while Cochran's surviving relatives are equally emphatic in their claims that he was an equal contributor as a songwriter. We will almost certainly never know the truth. Cochran is credited as the co-writer of several other hit songs, usually with Capehart, but never as the sole writer of a hit. Fairchild, meanwhile, was a professional songwriter, but pieces like "Freddie the Little Fir Tree" don't especially sound like the work of the same person who wrote "Twenty Flight Rock". As both credited writers are now dead, the best we can do is use our own judgment, and my personal judgment is that Cochran probably contributed at least something to the song's writing. The original version of "Twenty Flight Rock", as featured in the film, was little more than a demo -- it featured Cochran on guitar, Guybo Smith on double bass, and Capehart slapping a cardboard box to add percussion. Cochran later recorded a more fully-arranged version of the song, which came out after the film, but the extra elements, notably the backing vocals, added little to the simplistic original: [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, "Twenty Flight Rock"] It was that simpler version that appeared in the film, and which took its place alongside several other classic tracks in the film's soundtrack. The film was originally intended to have a theme tune recorded by Fats Domino, who appeared in the film performing his hit "Blue Monday", but when Bobby Troup mentioned this to Art Rupe, Rupe suggested that Little Richard would be a more energetic star to perform the song (and I'm sure this was entirely because of his belief that Richard would be the better talent, and nothing to do with Rupe owning Richard's label, but not Domino's). As a result, Domino's role in the film was cut down to a single song, while Richard ended up doing three -- the title song, written by Troup, "Ready Teddy" by John Marascalco and Bumps Blackwell, and "She's Got It". We've mentioned before that John Marascalco's writing credits sometimes seem to be slightly exaggerated, and “She's Got It” is one record that tends to bear that out. Listen to “She's Got It”, which has Marascalco as the sole credited writer: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “She's Got It”] And now listen to “I Got It”, an earlier record by Richard, which has Little Richard credited as the sole writer: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “I Got It”] Hmm… The Girl Can't Help It was rather poorly reviewed in America. In France it was a different story. There's a pervasive legend that the people of France revere Jerry Lewis as a genius. This is nonsense. But the grain of truth in it is that Cahiers du Cinema, the most important film magazine in France by a long way -- the magazine for which Godard, Truffaut, and others wrote, and which popularised the concept of auteur theory, absolutely loved Frank Tashlin. In 1957, Tashlin was the only director to get two films on their top ten films of the year list -- The Girl Can't Help It at number eight, and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter at number two. The other eight films on the list were directed by Chaplin, Fellini, Hitchcock, Bunuel, Ingmar Bergman, Nicholas Ray, Fritz Lang and Sidney Lumet. Tashlin directed several films starring Jerry Lewis, and those films, like Tashlin's other work, got a significant amount of praise in the magazine. And that's where that legend actually comes from, though Cahiers did also give some more guarded praise to some of the films Lewis directed himself later. Tashlin wasn't actually that good a director, but what he did have is a visual style that came from a different area of filmmaking than most of his competitors. Tashlin had started out as a cartoon director, working on Warner Brothers cartoons. He wasn't one of the better directors for Warners, and didn't direct any of the classics people remember from the studio -- he mostly made forgettable Porky Pig shorts. But this meant he had an animator's sense for a visual gag, and thus gave his films a unique look. For advocates of auteur theory, that was enough to push him into the top ranks. And so The Girl Can't Help It became a classic film, and Cochran got a great deal of attention, and a record deal. According to Si Waronker, the head of Liberty Records, Eddie Cochran getting signed to the label had nothing to do with him being cast in The Girl Can't Help It, and Waronker had no idea the film was being made when Cochran got signed. This seems implausible, to say the least. Johnny Olenn, Abbey Lincoln and Julie London, three other Liberty Records artists, appeared in the film -- and London was by some way Liberty's biggest star. Not only that, but London's husband, Bobby Troup, wrote the theme song and was musical director for the film. But whether or not Cochran was signed on account of his film appearance, "Twenty Flight Rock" wasn't immediately released as a single. Indeed, by the time it came out Cochran had already appeared in another film, in which he had backed Mamie Van Doren -- another Marilyn Monroe imitator in the same vein as Mansfield -- on several songs, as well as having a small role and a featured song himself. Oddly, when that film, Untamed Youth, came out, Cochran's backing on Van Doren's recordings had been replaced by different instrumentalists. But he still appears on the EP that was released of the songs, including this one, which Cochran co-wrote with Capehart: [Excerpt: Mamie Van Doren, "Ooh Ba La Baby"] It had originally been planned to release "Twenty Flight Rock" as Cochran's first single on Liberty, to coincide with the film's release but then it was put back for several months, as Si Waronker wanted Cochran to release "Sitting in the Balcony" instead. That song had been written and originally recorded by John D Loudermilk: [Excerpt: John D Loudermilk, "Sitting in the Balcony"] Waronker had wanted to release Loudermilk's record, but he hadn't been able to get the rights, so he decided to get Cochran to record a note-for-note cover version and release that instead: [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, "Sitting in the Balcony"] Cochran was not particularly happy with that record, though he was happy enough once the record started selling in comparatively vast quantities, spurred by his appearance in The Girl Can't Help It, and reached number eighteen in the charts. The problem was that Cochran and Waronker had fundamentally different ideas about what Cochran actually was as an artist. Cochran thought of himself primarily as a guitarist -- and the guitar solo on "Sittin' in the Balcony" was the one thing about Cochran's record which distinguished it from Loudermilk's original -- and also as a rock and roller. Waronker, on the other hand, was convinced that someone with Cochran's good looks and masculine voice could easily be another Pat Boone. Liberty was fundamentally not geared towards making rock and roll records. Its other artists included the Hollywood composer Lionel Newman, the torch singer Julie London, and a little later novelty acts like the Chipmunks -- the three Chipmunks, Alvin, Simon, and Theodore, being named after Al Bennett, Si Waronker, and Theodore Keep, the three men in charge of the label. And their attempts to force Cochran into the mould of a light-entertainment crooner produced a completely forgettable debut album, Singin' to My Baby, which has little of the rock and roll excitement that would characterise Cochran's better work. (And a warning for anyone who decides to go out and listen to that album anyway -- one of the few tracks on there that *is* in Cochran's rock and roll style is a song called "Mean When I'm Mad", which is one of the most misogynist things I have heard, and I've heard quite a lot -- it's basically an outright rape threat. So if that's something that will upset you, please steer clear of Cochran's first album, while knowing you're missing little artistically.) “Twenty Flight Rock” was eventually released as a single, in its remade version, in November 1957, almost a year after The Girl Can't Help It came out. Unsurprisingly, coming out so late after the film, it didn't chart, and it would be a while yet before Cochran would have his biggest hit. But just because it didn't chart, doesn't mean it didn't make an impression. There's one story, more than any other, that sums up the impact both of "The Girl Can't Help It" and of "Twenty Flight Rock" itself. In July 1957, a skiffle group called the Quarrymen, led by a teenager called John Lennon, played a village fete in Woolton, a suburb of Liverpool. After the show, they were introduced to a young boy named Paul McCartney by a mutual friend. Lennon and McCartney hit it off, but the thing that persuaded Lennon to offer McCartney a place in the group was when McCartney demonstrated that he knew all the words to "Twenty Flight Rock". Lennon wasn't great at remembering lyrics, and was impressed enough by this that he decided that this new kid needed to be in the group. [Excerpt: Paul McCartney, “Twenty Flight Rock”] That's the impact that The Girl Can't Help It had, and the impact that "Twenty Flight Rock" had. But Eddie Cochran's career was just starting, and we'll see more of him in future episodes...

Welcome to episode twenty-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This is the second of our three-part look at Chess Records, and focuses on “Maybellene” by Chuck Berry. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.  —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I reference three previous episodes here — last week’s, the disclaimer episode, and the episode on Ida Red. I used three main books as reference here: Brown Eyed Handsome Man: The Life and Hard Times of Chuck Berry by Bruce Pegg is a good narrative biography of Berry, which doesn’t shy away from the less salubrious aspects of his personality, but is clearly written by an admirer. Long Distance Information: Chuck Berry’s Recorded Legacy by Fred Rothwell is an extraordinarily researched look at every single recording session of Berry’s career up to 2001. And for information on Chess, I used The Record Men: Chess Records and the Birth of Rock and Roll by Richard Cohen. I wouldn’t recommend that book, however — while it has some useful interview material and anecdotes from those involved, Cohen gets some basic matters of fact laughably wrong, and generally seems to be more interested in showing off his prose style than fact-checking. There are a myriad Chuck Berry compilations available. The one I’d recommend if you don’t have a spare couple of hundred quid for the complete works box set is the double-CD Gold, which has every major track without any of the filler. And if you want to check out more of Willie Dixon’s material, this four-CD set contains a hundred records he either performed on as an artist, played on as a session player, wrote, or produced. It’s the finest body of work in post-war blues.     Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   [Intro: Alan Freed introducing Chuck Berry and Maybellene] Welcome to the second part of our trilogy on Chess Records. This week, we’re going to talk about the most important single record Chess ever put out, and arguably the most important artist in the whole history of rock music. But first, we’re going to talk about something a lot more recent. We’re going to talk about “Old Town Road,” by Lil Nas X. For those of you who don’t follow the charts and the music news in general, “Old Town Road” is a song put out late last year by a rapper, but it reached number nineteen in the country charts. Because it’s a country song: [Excerpt: “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X] That’s a song with banjo and mandolin, with someone singing in a low Johnny Cash style voice about riding a horse while wearing a cowboy hat. It’s clearly country music if anything at all is country music. But it was taken off the country music charts the week it would otherwise have made number one, in a decision that Billboard was at pains to say was nothing at all to do with his race. A hint — if you have to go to great lengths to say that the thing you’re doing isn’t racist, it’s probably racist. Because genre labels have always been about race, and about policing racial boundaries in the US, since the very beginning. Remember that when Billboard started the R&B charts they were called the “race music” charts. You had the race music charts for black people, the country charts for lower-class whites, and the pop charts for the respectable white people. That was the demarcation, and that still is the demarcation. But people will always want to push against those constraints. And in the 1950s, just like today, there were black people who wanted to make country music. But in the 1950s, unlike today, there was a term for the music those people were making. It was called rock and roll. For about a decade, from roughly 1955 through 1965, “rock and roll” became a term for the music which disregarded those racial boundaries. And since then there has been a slow but sure historical revisionism. The lines of rock and roll expand to let in any white man, but they constrict to push out the women and black men who were already there. But there’s one they haven’t yet been able to push out, because this particular black man playing country music was more or less the embodiment of rock and roll. Chuck Berry was, in many ways, not at all an admirable man. He was one of all too many rock and roll pioneers to be a sex offender (and again, please see the disclaimer episode I did close to the start of this series, for my thoughts about that — nothing I say about his work should be taken to imply that I think that work mitigates some of the awful things he did) and he was also by all accounts an unpleasant person in a myriad other ways. As I talked about in the disclaimer episode, we will be dealing with many awful people in this series, because that’s the nature of the history of rock and roll, but Chuck Berry was one of the most fundamentally unpleasant, unlikeable, people we’ll be looking at. Nobody has a good word to say about him as a human being, and he hurt a lot of people over his long life. When I talk about his work, or the real injustices that were also done to him, I don’t want to forget that. But when it comes to rock and roll, Chuck Berry may be the single most important figure who ever lived, and a model for everyone who followed. [Excerpt: “Maybellene”, just the intro] To talk about Chuck Berry, we first of all have to talk about Johnnie Johnson. Johnnie Johnson was a blues piano player, who had got a taste of life as a professional musician in the Marines, where he’d played in a military band led by Bobby Troup, the writer of “Route 66” among many other songs. After leaving the Marines, he’d moved around the Midwest, playing blues in various bands, before forming his own trio, the Johnnie Johnson Trio, in St Louis. That trio consisted of piano, saxophone, and drums — until New Year’s Eve 1952, when the saxophone player had a stroke and couldn’t play. Johnson needed another musician to play with the trio, and needed someone quick, but it was New Year’s Eve — every musician he could think of would be booked up. Except for Chuck Berry. Berry was a guitarist he vaguely knew, and was different in every way from Johnson. Where Johnson was an easy-going, fat, jovial, man, who had no ambitions other than to make a living playing boogie-woogie piano, Chuck Berry had already served a term in prison for armed robbery, was massively ambitious, and was skinny as a rake. But he could play the guitar and sing well enough, and the customers had hired a trio, not a duo, and so Chuck Berry joined the Johnnie Johnson Trio. Berry soon took over the band, as Johnson, a relatively easy-going person, saw that Berry was so ambitious that he would be able to bring the band greater success than they would otherwise have had. And also, Berry owned a car, which was useful for transporting the band to gigs. And so the Johnnie Johnson trio became the Chuck Berry Trio. Berry would also play gigs on the side with other musicians, and in 1954 he played guitar on a session for a calypso record on a local independent label: [Excerpt: “Oh Maria”, Joe Alexander and the Cubans] However, when Berry tried to get that label to record the Chuck Berry Trio, they weren’t interested. But then Berry drove to Chicago to see one of his musical heroes, Muddy Waters. We’ve talked about Waters before, but only in passing — but Waters was, by far, the biggest star in the Chicago electric blues style, whose driving, propulsive, records were more accessible than Howlin’ Wolf but still had some of the Delta grit that was missing from the cleaner sounds of people like T-Bone Walker. Berry stayed after the show to talk to his idol, and asked him how he could make records like Waters did. Waters told him to go and see Leonard Chess at Chess Records. Berry went to see Chess, who asked if Berry had a demo tape. He didn’t, but he went back to St Louis and came back the next week with a wire recording of four newly-recorded songs. The first thing he played was a blues song he’d written called “The Wee Wee Hours”: [excerpt: Chuck Berry, “The Wee Wee Hours”] That was too generic for Chess — and the blues they put out tended to be more electric Chicago blues, rather than the Nat Cole or Charles Brown style Berry was going for there. But the next song he played had them interested. Berry had always been interested in playing as many different styles of music as he could — he was someone who was trying to incorporate the sounds of Louis Jordan, Muddy Waters, Charlie Christian, and Nat “King” Cole, among others. And so as well as performing blues, jazz, and rhythm and blues music, he’d also incorporated a fair amount of country and western music in his shows. And in particular, he was an admirer of Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, and he would perform their song “Ida Red” in shows, where it always went down well. We already had an entire episode of the podcast on “Ida Red”, which I’ll link in the liner notes to this, but as a quick reminder, it’s an old folk song, or collection of folk songs, that had become a big hit for Bob Wills, the Western Swing fiddle player: [Excerpt: “Ida Red”, Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys] Berry would perform that song live, but messed around and changed the lyrics a lot — he eventually changed the title to “Ida May”, for a start — and when he performed the song for Leonard Chess, Chess thought it sounded great. There was only one problem — he thought the name made it too obvious where Berry had got the idea, and he wanted it to sound more original. They tried several names and eventually hit on “Maybellene”, after the popular cosmetics brand, though they changed the spelling. “Ida Red” wasn’t the only influence on “Maybellene” though, there was another song called “Oh Red”, a hokum song by the Harlem Hamfats: [Excerpt: “Oh Red”, the Harlem Hamfats] Larry Birnbaum, in “Before Elvis”, suggests that this was the *only* influence on “Maybellene”, and that Berry was misremembering the song, as both songs have “Red” in the titles. I disagree — I think it’s fairly clear that “Maybellene” is inspired both by “Ida Red”s structure and patter-lyric verse and by “Oh Red”s chorus melody. And it wasn’t just Bob Wills’ version of “Ida Red” that inspired Berry. There’s a blues version, by Bumble Bee Slim, which has a guitar break that isn’t a million miles away from what Berry was doing: [Excerpt: “Ida Red”, Bumble Bee Slim] And there’s another influence as well. Berry’s lyrics were about a car chase — to try to catch up with a cheating girlfriend — and are the thing that makes the song so unique. They — and the car-horn sound of the guitar — seem to have been inspired by a hillbilly boogie song called “Hot Rod Racer” by Arkie Shibley and his Mountain Dew Boys: [Excerpt: “Hot Rod Racer”, Arkie Shibley and his Mountain Dew Boys] That had been a successful enough country song that it spawned at least three hit cover versions, including one by Red Foley. Berry took all these Western Swing, blues, and hillbilly boogie influences and turned them into something new: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Maybellene”] Even this early, you can already see the Chuck Berry style fully formed. Clean blues guitar, as clean as someone like T-Bone Walker, but playing almost rockabilly phrases — this is closer to the style of Elvis’ Sun records than it is to anything else that Chess were putting out — and punning, verbose, witty lyrics talking about something that would have a clear appeal to people half his age. All of future rock is right there. The lineup on the record was the Chuck Berry trio — Berry on guitar, Johnson on piano, and Ebby Hardy on drums — augmented by two other musicians. Jerome Green, the maraca player, is someone we’ll be talking about next week, but we should here talk a bit about Willie Dixon, the bass player, because he is probably the single most important figure in the whole Chess Records story. Dixon had started out as a boxer — he’d been Joe Louis’ sparring partner — before starting to play a bass made out of a tin can and a single string for him by the blues pianist Leonard Caston. Dixon and Caston formed an Ink Spots-style group, “The Five Breezes”: [Excerpt: “Sweet Louise”, the Five Breezes] But when America joined in World War II, Dixon’s music career went on hold, as he was a conscientious objector, unwilling to fight in defence of a racist state, and so he spent ten months in prison. He joined Chess in 1951 shortly after Leonard Chess took over full control of the company by buying out its original owner — right after the club Chess had been running had mysteriously burned down, on a day it was closed, giving him enough insurance money to buy the whole record company. And Dixon was necessary because among Leonard Chess’ flaws was one fatal one — he had no idea what real musical talent was or how to find it. But he *did* have the second-order ability to find people who could recognise real musical talent when they heard it, and the willingness to trust those people’s judgment. And Dixon was not only a real talent himself, but he could bring out the best in others, too. Dixon was, effectively, the auteur behind almost everything that Chess Records put out. As well as a session bass player who played on almost every Chess release that wasn’t licensed from someone else, he was also their staff producer, talent scout, and staff songwriter, as well as a solo artist under his own name. He wrote and played on hits for Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson II, Little Walter, Koko Taylor, Bo Diddley, Elmore James… to all intents and purposes, Willie Dixon *was* the Chicago blues, and when the second generation of rock and rollers started up in the 1960s — white boys with guitars from England — it was Willie Dixon’s songs that formed the backbone of their repertoire. Just a few of the songs he wrote that became classics include “Little Red Rooster” for Howlin’ Wolf: [Excerpt: Howlin’ Wolf, “Little Red Rooster”] “Bring it on Home” for Sonny Boy Williamson II [Excerpt: Sonny Boy Williamson II, “Bring it on Home”] “You Need Love” for Muddy Waters [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, “You Need Love”] You get the idea. In any other session he played on — in any other room he ever entered — Dixon would be the most important songwriter in the room. But as it turned out, on this occasion, he was only the second-most important and influential songwriter there, as “Maybellene” would be the start of a run of singles that is unparalleled for its influence on rock and roll music. It was the debut of the single most important songwriter in rock and roll history. Of course, Chuck Berry isn’t the only credited songwriter — and, separately, he may not have been the song’s only writer. But these two things aren’t linked. Leonard Chess was someone who had a reputation for not being particularly fair with his artists when it came to contracts. A favourite technique for him was to call an artist and tell him that he had some new papers to sign. He would then leave a bottle of whisky in the office, and not be in when the musician turned up. His secretary would say “Mr. Chess has been delayed. Help yourself to a drink while you wait in the office”. Chess would only return when the musician was totally drunk, and then get him to sign the contract. That wouldn’t work on Berry, who didn’t drink, but Chess did manage to get Berry to sign two thirds of the rights to “Maybellene” over to people who had nothing to do with writing it — Russ Fratto and Alan Freed. Freed had already taken the songwriting credit for several songs by bands that he managed, none of which he wrote, but now he was going to take the credit for a song by someone he had never met — Chess added his name to the credits as a bribe, in order to persuade him to play the song on his radio show. Russ Fratto, meanwhile, was the landlord of Chess Records’ offices and owned the stationery company that printed the labels Chess used on their records. It’s been said in a few places that Fratto was given the credit because the Chess brothers owed him money, so they gave him a cut of Berry’s royalties to pay off their own debt. But while Freed and Fratto took unearned credit for the song, it’s at least arguable that so did Chuck Berry. We’ll be looking at several Chuck Berry songs over the course of this podcast, and the question of authorship comes up for all of them. After they stopped working together, Johnnie Johnson started to claim that he deserved co-writing credit for everything that was credited to Berry on his own. Johnson claimed that while Berry wrote the lyrics by himself, the band as a whole worked out the music, and that Berry’s melody lines would be based on Johnson’s piano parts. To get an idea of what Johnson brought to the mix, here’s a performance from Johnson, without Berry, many years later: [Excerpt: Johnnie Johnson, “Johnny’s Boogie”] It’s impossible to say with certainty who did what — Johnson sued Berry in 2000, but the case was dismissed because of the length of time between the songs being written and the case being brought. And Johnson worked with Berry on almost all his albums before that so we don’t have any clear guides as to what Berry’s music sounded like without Johnson. Given Berry’s money-grubbing, grasping, nature, and his willingness to see every single interaction as about how many dollars and cents were in it for Chuck Berry, I have no trouble believing that Berry would take the credit for other people’s work and not think twice about it, so I can fully believe that Johnson worked with him on the music for the songs. On the other hand, most of the songs in question were based around very basic blues chord changes, and the musical interest in them comes almost solely from Berry’s guitar licks — Johnnie Johnson was a very good blues piano player just like a thousand other very good blues piano players, but Chuck Berry’s guitar style is absolutely distinctive, and unlike anything ever recorded before. But the crucial evidence as to how much input or lack of it Johnson had on the writing process comes with the keys Berry chose. Maybellene is in B-flat. A lot of his other songs are in E-flat. These are *not* keys that any guitarist would normally choose to write in. If you’re a guitarist, writing for the guitar, you’d probably choose to write in E or A if you’re playing the blues, D if you’re doing folkier stuff, maybe G or C if you’re doing something poppier and more melodic. These are easy keys for the guitar, the keys that every guitarist’s fingers will automatically fall into unless they have a good reason not to. E-flat and B-flat, though, are fairly straightforward keys on the piano if you’re playing the blues. And they’re keys that are *absolutely* standard for a saxophone player — alto saxes are tuned to an E-flat, tenor saxes to B-flat, so if you’re a band where the sax player is the most important instrumentalist, those are the keys you’re most likely to choose, all else being equal. Now, remember that Chuck Berry replaced the saxophone player in Johnnie Johnson’s band. Once you know that it seems obvious what’s happened — Berry has fit himself in around arrangements and repertoire that Johnson had originally worked up with a sax player, playing in the keys that Johnson was already used to. When they worked out the music for Berry’s songs, that was the pattern they fell into. So, I tend to believe Johnson that the backings were worked out between them after Berry wrote the lyrics. Johnson’s contribution seems to have come somewhere between that of an arranger and of a songwriter, and he deserves some credit at least morally, if not under the ridiculous legal situation that made arrangements uncopyrightable. [Excerpt: “Maybellene” guitar solo showing interplay of Berry and Johnson] “Maybellene”’s success was in part because of a very deliberate decision Berry had made years earlier, having noted the success of white performers singing black musicians’ material, and deciding that he was going to try to get the white people to buy his recordings rather than the cover versions, by singing in a voice that was closer to white singers than the typical blues vocalist. While it caused him problems in early days, notably with him turning up to gigs only to be told, often with accompanying racial slurs, that they’d expected the performer of “Maybellene” to be a white man and he wasn’t allowed to play, his playing-down of his own blackness also caused a major benefit — he became one of the only black musicians to chart higher than the white cover version. It would normally be expected that “Maybellene” would be overshadowed on the charts by Marty Robbins’ version, especially since Marty Robbins was a hugely popular star, and Berry was an unknown on a small blues label: [excerpt: Marty Robbins, “Maybellene”] Instead, as well as going to number one on the R&B charts, Berry’s recording went to number five on the pop charts. And other recordings by him would follow over the next few years. He was never a consistent chart success — in fact he did significantly less well than his reputation in rock and roll history would suggest — but he notched several top ten hits on the pop charts. “Maybellene” did so well that even “Wee Wee Hours”, released as the B-side, went to number ten on the R&B charts. And Berry’s next single was a “Maybellene” soundalike — “Thirty Days” [Excerpt: “Thirty Days”, Chuck Berry] It’s a great track, but it didn’t do quite so well on the charts — it went to number two on the R&B charts, and didn’t hit the pop charts at all. The single after that, “No Money Down”, did less well again. But Berry was about to turn things around again with his next single: [excerpt: *just the guitar intro* of “Roll Over Beethoven” by Chuck Berry] You don’t need anything more, do you? That’s the Chuck Berry formula, right there. You don’t even need to hear the vocals to know exactly what the record is. That record is, of course, “Roll Over Beethoven”. It’s worth listening to the lyrics again just to see what Berry is doing here. [Excerpt: “Roll Over Beethoven”, Chuck Berry] What we have here is, as far as I can tell, the first time that rock and roll started the pattern of self-mythologising that would continue throughout the genre’s history. Of course, there had been plenty of records before this that had talked about the power of music or how much the singer wanted to make you dance, or whatever, but this one is different in a couple of ways. Firstly, it’s talking about *recorded* music specifically — Berry isn’t wanting to go out and listen to a band play live, but he wants to listen to the DJ play his favourite record instead. And secondly, he’s explicitly making a link between his music — “these rhythm and blues” — and the music of the rockabilly artists from Memphis — “don’t step on my blue suede shoes”. And Berry’s music did resemble the Memphis rockabilly more than it resembled anything else. Both had electric lead guitars, double bass, drums, and reverb, and no saxophone and little piano. Both sang sped-up hillbilly boogies with a hard backbeat. Rock and roll was, as we have seen, a disparate genre at first, and people would continue to pull from a whole variety of different sources. But working independently and with no knowledge of each other, a white country hick from Tennessee and a sophisticated black urbanite from the Midwest had hit upon almost exactly the same formula, and Berry was going to make sure that he made the connection as clear as possible. If there’s a moment that rock and roll culture coalesced into a single thing, it was with “Roll Over Beethoven”. And Berry now had his formula worked out. The next thing to do was to get rid of the band. “Roll Over Beethoven” was the penultimate single credited to Chuck Berry & His Combo, rather than to just Chuck Berry. We’ll look at the last one, recorded at the same session, in a few weeks’ time.

Welcome to episode twenty-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This is the second of our three-part look at Chess Records, and focuses on "Maybellene" by Chuck Berry. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.  ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I reference three previous episodes here -- last week's, the disclaimer episode, and the episode on Ida Red. I used three main books as reference here: Brown Eyed Handsome Man: The Life and Hard Times of Chuck Berry by Bruce Pegg is a good narrative biography of Berry, which doesn't shy away from the less salubrious aspects of his personality, but is clearly written by an admirer. Long Distance Information: Chuck Berry's Recorded Legacy by Fred Rothwell is an extraordinarily researched look at every single recording session of Berry's career up to 2001. And for information on Chess, I used The Record Men: Chess Records and the Birth of Rock and Roll by Richard Cohen. I wouldn't recommend that book, however -- while it has some useful interview material and anecdotes from those involved, Cohen gets some basic matters of fact laughably wrong, and generally seems to be more interested in showing off his prose style than fact-checking. There are a myriad Chuck Berry compilations available. The one I'd recommend if you don't have a spare couple of hundred quid for the complete works box set is the double-CD Gold, which has every major track without any of the filler. And if you want to check out more of Willie Dixon's material, this four-CD set contains a hundred records he either performed on as an artist, played on as a session player, wrote, or produced. It's the finest body of work in post-war blues.     Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   [Intro: Alan Freed introducing Chuck Berry and Maybellene] Welcome to the second part of our trilogy on Chess Records. This week, we're going to talk about the most important single record Chess ever put out, and arguably the most important artist in the whole history of rock music. But first, we're going to talk about something a lot more recent. We're going to talk about "Old Town Road," by Lil Nas X. For those of you who don't follow the charts and the music news in general, "Old Town Road" is a song put out late last year by a rapper, but it reached number nineteen in the country charts. Because it's a country song: [Excerpt: "Old Town Road" by Lil Nas X] That's a song with banjo and mandolin, with someone singing in a low Johnny Cash style voice about riding a horse while wearing a cowboy hat. It's clearly country music if anything at all is country music. But it was taken off the country music charts the week it would otherwise have made number one, in a decision that Billboard was at pains to say was nothing at all to do with his race. A hint -- if you have to go to great lengths to say that the thing you're doing isn't racist, it's probably racist. Because genre labels have always been about race, and about policing racial boundaries in the US, since the very beginning. Remember that when Billboard started the R&B charts they were called the "race music" charts. You had the race music charts for black people, the country charts for lower-class whites, and the pop charts for the respectable white people. That was the demarcation, and that still is the demarcation. But people will always want to push against those constraints. And in the 1950s, just like today, there were black people who wanted to make country music. But in the 1950s, unlike today, there was a term for the music those people were making. It was called rock and roll. For about a decade, from roughly 1955 through 1965, "rock and roll" became a term for the music which disregarded those racial boundaries. And since then there has been a slow but sure historical revisionism. The lines of rock and roll expand to let in any white man, but they constrict to push out the women and black men who were already there. But there's one they haven't yet been able to push out, because this particular black man playing country music was more or less the embodiment of rock and roll. Chuck Berry was, in many ways, not at all an admirable man. He was one of all too many rock and roll pioneers to be a sex offender (and again, please see the disclaimer episode I did close to the start of this series, for my thoughts about that -- nothing I say about his work should be taken to imply that I think that work mitigates some of the awful things he did) and he was also by all accounts an unpleasant person in a myriad other ways. As I talked about in the disclaimer episode, we will be dealing with many awful people in this series, because that's the nature of the history of rock and roll, but Chuck Berry was one of the most fundamentally unpleasant, unlikeable, people we'll be looking at. Nobody has a good word to say about him as a human being, and he hurt a lot of people over his long life. When I talk about his work, or the real injustices that were also done to him, I don't want to forget that. But when it comes to rock and roll, Chuck Berry may be the single most important figure who ever lived, and a model for everyone who followed. [Excerpt: “Maybellene”, just the intro] To talk about Chuck Berry, we first of all have to talk about Johnnie Johnson. Johnnie Johnson was a blues piano player, who had got a taste of life as a professional musician in the Marines, where he'd played in a military band led by Bobby Troup, the writer of "Route 66" among many other songs. After leaving the Marines, he'd moved around the Midwest, playing blues in various bands, before forming his own trio, the Johnnie Johnson Trio, in St Louis. That trio consisted of piano, saxophone, and drums -- until New Year's Eve 1952, when the saxophone player had a stroke and couldn't play. Johnson needed another musician to play with the trio, and needed someone quick, but it was New Year's Eve -- every musician he could think of would be booked up. Except for Chuck Berry. Berry was a guitarist he vaguely knew, and was different in every way from Johnson. Where Johnson was an easy-going, fat, jovial, man, who had no ambitions other than to make a living playing boogie-woogie piano, Chuck Berry had already served a term in prison for armed robbery, was massively ambitious, and was skinny as a rake. But he could play the guitar and sing well enough, and the customers had hired a trio, not a duo, and so Chuck Berry joined the Johnnie Johnson Trio. Berry soon took over the band, as Johnson, a relatively easy-going person, saw that Berry was so ambitious that he would be able to bring the band greater success than they would otherwise have had. And also, Berry owned a car, which was useful for transporting the band to gigs. And so the Johnnie Johnson trio became the Chuck Berry Trio. Berry would also play gigs on the side with other musicians, and in 1954 he played guitar on a session for a calypso record on a local independent label: [Excerpt: "Oh Maria", Joe Alexander and the Cubans] However, when Berry tried to get that label to record the Chuck Berry Trio, they weren't interested. But then Berry drove to Chicago to see one of his musical heroes, Muddy Waters. We've talked about Waters before, but only in passing -- but Waters was, by far, the biggest star in the Chicago electric blues style, whose driving, propulsive, records were more accessible than Howlin' Wolf but still had some of the Delta grit that was missing from the cleaner sounds of people like T-Bone Walker. Berry stayed after the show to talk to his idol, and asked him how he could make records like Waters did. Waters told him to go and see Leonard Chess at Chess Records. Berry went to see Chess, who asked if Berry had a demo tape. He didn't, but he went back to St Louis and came back the next week with a wire recording of four newly-recorded songs. The first thing he played was a blues song he'd written called "The Wee Wee Hours": [excerpt: Chuck Berry, "The Wee Wee Hours"] That was too generic for Chess -- and the blues they put out tended to be more electric Chicago blues, rather than the Nat Cole or Charles Brown style Berry was going for there. But the next song he played had them interested. Berry had always been interested in playing as many different styles of music as he could -- he was someone who was trying to incorporate the sounds of Louis Jordan, Muddy Waters, Charlie Christian, and Nat "King" Cole, among others. And so as well as performing blues, jazz, and rhythm and blues music, he'd also incorporated a fair amount of country and western music in his shows. And in particular, he was an admirer of Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, and he would perform their song "Ida Red" in shows, where it always went down well. We already had an entire episode of the podcast on "Ida Red", which I'll link in the liner notes to this, but as a quick reminder, it's an old folk song, or collection of folk songs, that had become a big hit for Bob Wills, the Western Swing fiddle player: [Excerpt: "Ida Red", Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys] Berry would perform that song live, but messed around and changed the lyrics a lot -- he eventually changed the title to "Ida May", for a start -- and when he performed the song for Leonard Chess, Chess thought it sounded great. There was only one problem -- he thought the name made it too obvious where Berry had got the idea, and he wanted it to sound more original. They tried several names and eventually hit on "Maybellene", after the popular cosmetics brand, though they changed the spelling. "Ida Red" wasn't the only influence on "Maybellene" though, there was another song called "Oh Red", a hokum song by the Harlem Hamfats: [Excerpt: "Oh Red", the Harlem Hamfats] Larry Birnbaum, in "Before Elvis", suggests that this was the *only* influence on "Maybellene", and that Berry was misremembering the song, as both songs have "Red" in the titles. I disagree -- I think it's fairly clear that "Maybellene" is inspired both by "Ida Red"s structure and patter-lyric verse and by "Oh Red"s chorus melody. And it wasn't just Bob Wills' version of “Ida Red” that inspired Berry. There's a blues version, by Bumble Bee Slim, which has a guitar break that isn't a million miles away from what Berry was doing: [Excerpt: "Ida Red", Bumble Bee Slim] And there's another influence as well. Berry's lyrics were about a car chase -- to try to catch up with a cheating girlfriend -- and are the thing that makes the song so unique. They -- and the car-horn sound of the guitar -- seem to have been inspired by a hillbilly boogie song called "Hot Rod Racer" by Arkie Shibley and his Mountain Dew Boys: [Excerpt: "Hot Rod Racer", Arkie Shibley and his Mountain Dew Boys] That had been a successful enough country song that it spawned at least three hit cover versions, including one by Red Foley. Berry took all these Western Swing, blues, and hillbilly boogie influences and turned them into something new: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "Maybellene"] Even this early, you can already see the Chuck Berry style fully formed. Clean blues guitar, as clean as someone like T-Bone Walker, but playing almost rockabilly phrases -- this is closer to the style of Elvis' Sun records than it is to anything else that Chess were putting out -- and punning, verbose, witty lyrics talking about something that would have a clear appeal to people half his age. All of future rock is right there. The lineup on the record was the Chuck Berry trio -- Berry on guitar, Johnson on piano, and Ebby Hardy on drums -- augmented by two other musicians. Jerome Green, the maraca player, is someone we'll be talking about next week, but we should here talk a bit about Willie Dixon, the bass player, because he is probably the single most important figure in the whole Chess Records story. Dixon had started out as a boxer -- he'd been Joe Louis' sparring partner -- before starting to play a bass made out of a tin can and a single string for him by the blues pianist Leonard Caston. Dixon and Caston formed an Ink Spots-style group, "The Five Breezes": [Excerpt: "Sweet Louise", the Five Breezes] But when America joined in World War II, Dixon's music career went on hold, as he was a conscientious objector, unwilling to fight in defence of a racist state, and so he spent ten months in prison. He joined Chess in 1951 shortly after Leonard Chess took over full control of the company by buying out its original owner -- right after the club Chess had been running had mysteriously burned down, on a day it was closed, giving him enough insurance money to buy the whole record company. And Dixon was necessary because among Leonard Chess' flaws was one fatal one -- he had no idea what real musical talent was or how to find it. But he *did* have the second-order ability to find people who could recognise real musical talent when they heard it, and the willingness to trust those people's judgment. And Dixon was not only a real talent himself, but he could bring out the best in others, too. Dixon was, effectively, the auteur behind almost everything that Chess Records put out. As well as a session bass player who played on almost every Chess release that wasn't licensed from someone else, he was also their staff producer, talent scout, and staff songwriter, as well as a solo artist under his own name. He wrote and played on hits for Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson II, Little Walter, Koko Taylor, Bo Diddley, Elmore James... to all intents and purposes, Willie Dixon *was* the Chicago blues, and when the second generation of rock and rollers started up in the 1960s -- white boys with guitars from England -- it was Willie Dixon's songs that formed the backbone of their repertoire. Just a few of the songs he wrote that became classics include "Little Red Rooster" for Howlin' Wolf: [Excerpt: Howlin' Wolf, "Little Red Rooster"] "Bring it on Home" for Sonny Boy Williamson II [Excerpt: Sonny Boy Williamson II, "Bring it on Home"] "You Need Love" for Muddy Waters [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, "You Need Love"] You get the idea. In any other session he played on -- in any other room he ever entered -- Dixon would be the most important songwriter in the room. But as it turned out, on this occasion, he was only the second-most important and influential songwriter there, as "Maybellene" would be the start of a run of singles that is unparalleled for its influence on rock and roll music. It was the debut of the single most important songwriter in rock and roll history. Of course, Chuck Berry isn't the only credited songwriter -- and, separately, he may not have been the song's only writer. But these two things aren't linked. Leonard Chess was someone who had a reputation for not being particularly fair with his artists when it came to contracts. A favourite technique for him was to call an artist and tell him that he had some new papers to sign. He would then leave a bottle of whisky in the office, and not be in when the musician turned up. His secretary would say "Mr. Chess has been delayed. Help yourself to a drink while you wait in the office". Chess would only return when the musician was totally drunk, and then get him to sign the contract. That wouldn't work on Berry, who didn't drink, but Chess did manage to get Berry to sign two thirds of the rights to "Maybellene" over to people who had nothing to do with writing it -- Russ Fratto and Alan Freed. Freed had already taken the songwriting credit for several songs by bands that he managed, none of which he wrote, but now he was going to take the credit for a song by someone he had never met -- Chess added his name to the credits as a bribe, in order to persuade him to play the song on his radio show. Russ Fratto, meanwhile, was the landlord of Chess Records' offices and owned the stationery company that printed the labels Chess used on their records. It's been said in a few places that Fratto was given the credit because the Chess brothers owed him money, so they gave him a cut of Berry's royalties to pay off their own debt. But while Freed and Fratto took unearned credit for the song, it's at least arguable that so did Chuck Berry. We'll be looking at several Chuck Berry songs over the course of this podcast, and the question of authorship comes up for all of them. After they stopped working together, Johnnie Johnson started to claim that he deserved co-writing credit for everything that was credited to Berry on his own. Johnson claimed that while Berry wrote the lyrics by himself, the band as a whole worked out the music, and that Berry's melody lines would be based on Johnson's piano parts. To get an idea of what Johnson brought to the mix, here's a performance from Johnson, without Berry, many years later: [Excerpt: Johnnie Johnson, “Johnny's Boogie”] It's impossible to say with certainty who did what -- Johnson sued Berry in 2000, but the case was dismissed because of the length of time between the songs being written and the case being brought. And Johnson worked with Berry on almost all his albums before that so we don't have any clear guides as to what Berry's music sounded like without Johnson. Given Berry's money-grubbing, grasping, nature, and his willingness to see every single interaction as about how many dollars and cents were in it for Chuck Berry, I have no trouble believing that Berry would take the credit for other people's work and not think twice about it, so I can fully believe that Johnson worked with him on the music for the songs. On the other hand, most of the songs in question were based around very basic blues chord changes, and the musical interest in them comes almost solely from Berry's guitar licks -- Johnnie Johnson was a very good blues piano player just like a thousand other very good blues piano players, but Chuck Berry's guitar style is absolutely distinctive, and unlike anything ever recorded before. But the crucial evidence as to how much input or lack of it Johnson had on the writing process comes with the keys Berry chose. Maybellene is in B-flat. A lot of his other songs are in E-flat. These are *not* keys that any guitarist would normally choose to write in. If you're a guitarist, writing for the guitar, you'd probably choose to write in E or A if you're playing the blues, D if you're doing folkier stuff, maybe G or C if you're doing something poppier and more melodic. These are easy keys for the guitar, the keys that every guitarist's fingers will automatically fall into unless they have a good reason not to. E-flat and B-flat, though, are fairly straightforward keys on the piano if you're playing the blues. And they're keys that are *absolutely* standard for a saxophone player -- alto saxes are tuned to an E-flat, tenor saxes to B-flat, so if you're a band where the sax player is the most important instrumentalist, those are the keys you're most likely to choose, all else being equal. Now, remember that Chuck Berry replaced the saxophone player in Johnnie Johnson's band. Once you know that it seems obvious what's happened -- Berry has fit himself in around arrangements and repertoire that Johnson had originally worked up with a sax player, playing in the keys that Johnson was already used to. When they worked out the music for Berry's songs, that was the pattern they fell into. So, I tend to believe Johnson that the backings were worked out between them after Berry wrote the lyrics. Johnson's contribution seems to have come somewhere between that of an arranger and of a songwriter, and he deserves some credit at least morally, if not under the ridiculous legal situation that made arrangements uncopyrightable. [Excerpt: “Maybellene” guitar solo showing interplay of Berry and Johnson] “Maybellene”'s success was in part because of a very deliberate decision Berry had made years earlier, having noted the success of white performers singing black musicians' material, and deciding that he was going to try to get the white people to buy his recordings rather than the cover versions, by singing in a voice that was closer to white singers than the typical blues vocalist. While it caused him problems in early days, notably with him turning up to gigs only to be told, often with accompanying racial slurs, that they'd expected the performer of "Maybellene" to be a white man and he wasn't allowed to play, his playing-down of his own blackness also caused a major benefit -- he became one of the only black musicians to chart higher than the white cover version. It would normally be expected that "Maybellene" would be overshadowed on the charts by Marty Robbins' version, especially since Marty Robbins was a hugely popular star, and Berry was an unknown on a small blues label: [excerpt: Marty Robbins, "Maybellene"] Instead, as well as going to number one on the R&B charts, Berry's recording went to number five on the pop charts. And other recordings by him would follow over the next few years. He was never a consistent chart success -- in fact he did significantly less well than his reputation in rock and roll history would suggest -- but he notched several top ten hits on the pop charts. "Maybellene" did so well that even "Wee Wee Hours", released as the B-side, went to number ten on the R&B charts. And Berry's next single was a "Maybellene" soundalike -- "Thirty Days" [Excerpt: "Thirty Days", Chuck Berry] It's a great track, but it didn't do quite so well on the charts -- it went to number two on the R&B charts, and didn't hit the pop charts at all. The single after that, "No Money Down", did less well again. But Berry was about to turn things around again with his next single: [excerpt: *just the guitar intro* of "Roll Over Beethoven" by Chuck Berry] You don't need anything more, do you? That's the Chuck Berry formula, right there. You don't even need to hear the vocals to know exactly what the record is. That record is, of course, "Roll Over Beethoven". It's worth listening to the lyrics again just to see what Berry is doing here. [Excerpt: "Roll Over Beethoven", Chuck Berry] What we have here is, as far as I can tell, the first time that rock and roll started the pattern of self-mythologising that would continue throughout the genre's history. Of course, there had been plenty of records before this that had talked about the power of music or how much the singer wanted to make you dance, or whatever, but this one is different in a couple of ways. Firstly, it's talking about *recorded* music specifically -- Berry isn't wanting to go out and listen to a band play live, but he wants to listen to the DJ play his favourite record instead. And secondly, he's explicitly making a link between his music -- "these rhythm and blues" -- and the music of the rockabilly artists from Memphis -- "don't step on my blue suede shoes". And Berry's music did resemble the Memphis rockabilly more than it resembled anything else. Both had electric lead guitars, double bass, drums, and reverb, and no saxophone and little piano. Both sang sped-up hillbilly boogies with a hard backbeat. Rock and roll was, as we have seen, a disparate genre at first, and people would continue to pull from a whole variety of different sources. But working independently and with no knowledge of each other, a white country hick from Tennessee and a sophisticated black urbanite from the Midwest had hit upon almost exactly the same formula, and Berry was going to make sure that he made the connection as clear as possible. If there's a moment that rock and roll culture coalesced into a single thing, it was with "Roll Over Beethoven". And Berry now had his formula worked out. The next thing to do was to get rid of the band. "Roll Over Beethoven" was the penultimate single credited to Chuck Berry & His Combo, rather than to just Chuck Berry. We'll look at the last one, recorded at the same session, in a few weeks' time.

Welcome to episode twenty-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This is the second of our three-part look at Chess Records, and focuses on “Maybellene” by Chuck Berry. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.  —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I reference three previous episodes here — last week’s, the disclaimer episode, and the episode on Ida Red. I used three main books as reference here: Brown Eyed Handsome Man: The Life and Hard Times of Chuck Berry by Bruce Pegg is a good narrative biography of Berry, which doesn’t shy away from the less salubrious aspects of his personality, but is clearly written by an admirer. Long Distance Information: Chuck Berry’s Recorded Legacy by Fred Rothwell is an extraordinarily researched look at every single recording session of Berry’s career up to 2001. And for information on Chess, I used The Record Men: Chess Records and the Birth of Rock and Roll by Richard Cohen. I wouldn’t recommend that book, however — while it has some useful interview material and anecdotes from those involved, Cohen gets some basic matters of fact laughably wrong, and generally seems to be more interested in showing off his prose style than fact-checking. There are a myriad Chuck Berry compilations available. The one I’d recommend if you don’t have a spare couple of hundred quid for the complete works box set is the double-CD Gold, which has every major track without any of the filler. And if you want to check out more of Willie Dixon’s material, this four-CD set contains a hundred records he either performed on as an artist, played on as a session player, wrote, or produced. It’s the finest body of work in post-war blues.     Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   [Intro: Alan Freed introducing Chuck Berry and Maybellene] Welcome to the second part of our trilogy on Chess Records. This week, we’re going to talk about the most important single record Chess ever put out, and arguably the most important artist in the whole history of rock music. But first, we’re going to talk about something a lot more recent. We’re going to talk about “Old Town Road,” by Lil Nas X. For those of you who don’t follow the charts and the music news in general, “Old Town Road” is a song put out late last year by a rapper, but it reached number nineteen in the country charts. Because it’s a country song: [Excerpt: “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X] That’s a song with banjo and mandolin, with someone singing in a low Johnny Cash style voice about riding a horse while wearing a cowboy hat. It’s clearly country music if anything at all is country music. But it was taken off the country music charts the week it would otherwise have made number one, in a decision that Billboard was at pains to say was nothing at all to do with his race. A hint — if you have to go to great lengths to say that the thing you’re doing isn’t racist, it’s probably racist. Because genre labels have always been about race, and about policing racial boundaries in the US, since the very beginning. Remember that when Billboard started the R&B charts they were called the “race music” charts. You had the race music charts for black people, the country charts for lower-class whites, and the pop charts for the respectable white people. That was the demarcation, and that still is the demarcation. But people will always want to push against those constraints. And in the 1950s, just like today, there were black people who wanted to make country music. But in the 1950s, unlike today, there was a term for the music those people were making. It was called rock and roll. For about a decade, from roughly 1955 through 1965, “rock and roll” became a term for the music which disregarded those racial boundaries. And since then there has been a slow but sure historical revisionism. The lines of rock and roll expand to let in any white man, but they constrict to push out the women and black men who were already there. But there’s one they haven’t yet been able to push out, because this particular black man playing country music was more or less the embodiment of rock and roll. Chuck Berry was, in many ways, not at all an admirable man. He was one of all too many rock and roll pioneers to be a sex offender (and again, please see the disclaimer episode I did close to the start of this series, for my thoughts about that — nothing I say about his work should be taken to imply that I think that work mitigates some of the awful things he did) and he was also by all accounts an unpleasant person in a myriad other ways. As I talked about in the disclaimer episode, we will be dealing with many awful people in this series, because that’s the nature of the history of rock and roll, but Chuck Berry was one of the most fundamentally unpleasant, unlikeable, people we’ll be looking at. Nobody has a good word to say about him as a human being, and he hurt a lot of people over his long life. When I talk about his work, or the real injustices that were also done to him, I don’t want to forget that. But when it comes to rock and roll, Chuck Berry may be the single most important figure who ever lived, and a model for everyone who followed. [Excerpt: “Maybellene”, just the intro] To talk about Chuck Berry, we first of all have to talk about Johnnie Johnson. Johnnie Johnson was a blues piano player, who had got a taste of life as a professional musician in the Marines, where he’d played in a military band led by Bobby Troup, the writer of “Route 66” among many other songs. After leaving the Marines, he’d moved around the Midwest, playing blues in various bands, before forming his own trio, the Johnnie Johnson Trio, in St Louis. That trio consisted of piano, saxophone, and drums — until New Year’s Eve 1952, when the saxophone player had a stroke and couldn’t play. Johnson needed another musician to play with the trio, and needed someone quick, but it was New Year’s Eve — every musician he could think of would be booked up. Except for Chuck Berry. Berry was a guitarist he vaguely knew, and was different in every way from Johnson. Where Johnson was an easy-going, fat, jovial, man, who had no ambitions other than to make a living playing boogie-woogie piano, Chuck Berry had already served a term in prison for armed robbery, was massively ambitious, and was skinny as a rake. But he could play the guitar and sing well enough, and the customers had hired a trio, not a duo, and so Chuck Berry joined the Johnnie Johnson Trio. Berry soon took over the band, as Johnson, a relatively easy-going person, saw that Berry was so ambitious that he would be able to bring the band greater success than they would otherwise have had. And also, Berry owned a car, which was useful for transporting the band to gigs. And so the Johnnie Johnson trio became the Chuck Berry Trio. Berry would also play gigs on the side with other musicians, and in 1954 he played guitar on a session for a calypso record on a local independent label: [Excerpt: “Oh Maria”, Joe Alexander and the Cubans] However, when Berry tried to get that label to record the Chuck Berry Trio, they weren’t interested. But then Berry drove to Chicago to see one of his musical heroes, Muddy Waters. We’ve talked about Waters before, but only in passing — but Waters was, by far, the biggest star in the Chicago electric blues style, whose driving, propulsive, records were more accessible than Howlin’ Wolf but still had some of the Delta grit that was missing from the cleaner sounds of people like T-Bone Walker. Berry stayed after the show to talk to his idol, and asked him how he could make records like Waters did. Waters told him to go and see Leonard Chess at Chess Records. Berry went to see Chess, who asked if Berry had a demo tape. He didn’t, but he went back to St Louis and came back the next week with a wire recording of four newly-recorded songs. The first thing he played was a blues song he’d written called “The Wee Wee Hours”: [excerpt: Chuck Berry, “The Wee Wee Hours”] That was too generic for Chess — and the blues they put out tended to be more electric Chicago blues, rather than the Nat Cole or Charles Brown style Berry was going for there. But the next song he played had them interested. Berry had always been interested in playing as many different styles of music as he could — he was someone who was trying to incorporate the sounds of Louis Jordan, Muddy Waters, Charlie Christian, and Nat “King” Cole, among others. And so as well as performing blues, jazz, and rhythm and blues music, he’d also incorporated a fair amount of country and western music in his shows. And in particular, he was an admirer of Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, and he would perform their song “Ida Red” in shows, where it always went down well. We already had an entire episode of the podcast on “Ida Red”, which I’ll link in the liner notes to this, but as a quick reminder, it’s an old folk song, or collection of folk songs, that had become a big hit for Bob Wills, the Western Swing fiddle player: [Excerpt: “Ida Red”, Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys] Berry would perform that song live, but messed around and changed the lyrics a lot — he eventually changed the title to “Ida May”, for a start — and when he performed the song for Leonard Chess, Chess thought it sounded great. There was only one problem — he thought the name made it too obvious where Berry had got the idea, and he wanted it to sound more original. They tried several names and eventually hit on “Maybellene”, after the popular cosmetics brand, though they changed the spelling. “Ida Red” wasn’t the only influence on “Maybellene” though, there was another song called “Oh Red”, a hokum song by the Harlem Hamfats: [Excerpt: “Oh Red”, the Harlem Hamfats] Larry Birnbaum, in “Before Elvis”, suggests that this was the *only* influence on “Maybellene”, and that Berry was misremembering the song, as both songs have “Red” in the titles. I disagree — I think it’s fairly clear that “Maybellene” is inspired both by “Ida Red”s structure and patter-lyric verse and by “Oh Red”s chorus melody. And it wasn’t just Bob Wills’ version of “Ida Red” that inspired Berry. There’s a blues version, by Bumble Bee Slim, which has a guitar break that isn’t a million miles away from what Berry was doing: [Excerpt: “Ida Red”, Bumble Bee Slim] And there’s another influence as well. Berry’s lyrics were about a car chase — to try to catch up with a cheating girlfriend — and are the thing that makes the song so unique. They — and the car-horn sound of the guitar — seem to have been inspired by a hillbilly boogie song called “Hot Rod Racer” by Arkie Shibley and his Mountain Dew Boys: [Excerpt: “Hot Rod Racer”, Arkie Shibley and his Mountain Dew Boys] That had been a successful enough country song that it spawned at least three hit cover versions, including one by Red Foley. Berry took all these Western Swing, blues, and hillbilly boogie influences and turned them into something new: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Maybellene”] Even this early, you can already see the Chuck Berry style fully formed. Clean blues guitar, as clean as someone like T-Bone Walker, but playing almost rockabilly phrases — this is closer to the style of Elvis’ Sun records than it is to anything else that Chess were putting out — and punning, verbose, witty lyrics talking about something that would have a clear appeal to people half his age. All of future rock is right there. The lineup on the record was the Chuck Berry trio — Berry on guitar, Johnson on piano, and Ebby Hardy on drums — augmented by two other musicians. Jerome Green, the maraca player, is someone we’ll be talking about next week, but we should here talk a bit about Willie Dixon, the bass player, because he is probably the single most important figure in the whole Chess Records story. Dixon had started out as a boxer — he’d been Joe Louis’ sparring partner — before starting to play a bass made out of a tin can and a single string for him by the blues pianist Leonard Caston. Dixon and Caston formed an Ink Spots-style group, “The Five Breezes”: [Excerpt: “Sweet Louise”, the Five Breezes] But when America joined in World War II, Dixon’s music career went on hold, as he was a conscientious objector, unwilling to fight in defence of a racist state, and so he spent ten months in prison. He joined Chess in 1951 shortly after Leonard Chess took over full control of the company by buying out its original owner — right after the club Chess had been running had mysteriously burned down, on a day it was closed, giving him enough insurance money to buy the whole record company. And Dixon was necessary because among Leonard Chess’ flaws was one fatal one — he had no idea what real musical talent was or how to find it. But he *did* have the second-order ability to find people who could recognise real musical talent when they heard it, and the willingness to trust those people’s judgment. And Dixon was not only a real talent himself, but he could bring out the best in others, too. Dixon was, effectively, the auteur behind almost everything that Chess Records put out. As well as a session bass player who played on almost every Chess release that wasn’t licensed from someone else, he was also their staff producer, talent scout, and staff songwriter, as well as a solo artist under his own name. He wrote and played on hits for Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson II, Little Walter, Koko Taylor, Bo Diddley, Elmore James… to all intents and purposes, Willie Dixon *was* the Chicago blues, and when the second generation of rock and rollers started up in the 1960s — white boys with guitars from England — it was Willie Dixon’s songs that formed the backbone of their repertoire. Just a few of the songs he wrote that became classics include “Little Red Rooster” for Howlin’ Wolf: [Excerpt: Howlin’ Wolf, “Little Red Rooster”] “Bring it on Home” for Sonny Boy Williamson II [Excerpt: Sonny Boy Williamson II, “Bring it on Home”] “You Need Love” for Muddy Waters [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, “You Need Love”] You get the idea. In any other session he played on — in any other room he ever entered — Dixon would be the most important songwriter in the room. But as it turned out, on this occasion, he was only the second-most important and influential songwriter there, as “Maybellene” would be the start of a run of singles that is unparalleled for its influence on rock and roll music. It was the debut of the single most important songwriter in rock and roll history. Of course, Chuck Berry isn’t the only credited songwriter — and, separately, he may not have been the song’s only writer. But these two things aren’t linked. Leonard Chess was someone who had a reputation for not being particularly fair with his artists when it came to contracts. A favourite technique for him was to call an artist and tell him that he had some new papers to sign. He would then leave a bottle of whisky in the office, and not be in when the musician turned up. His secretary would say “Mr. Chess has been delayed. Help yourself to a drink while you wait in the office”. Chess would only return when the musician was totally drunk, and then get him to sign the contract. That wouldn’t work on Berry, who didn’t drink, but Chess did manage to get Berry to sign two thirds of the rights to “Maybellene” over to people who had nothing to do with writing it — Russ Fratto and Alan Freed. Freed had already taken the songwriting credit for several songs by bands that he managed, none of which he wrote, but now he was going to take the credit for a song by someone he had never met — Chess added his name to the credits as a bribe, in order to persuade him to play the song on his radio show. Russ Fratto, meanwhile, was the landlord of Chess Records’ offices and owned the stationery company that printed the labels Chess used on their records. It’s been said in a few places that Fratto was given the credit because the Chess brothers owed him money, so they gave him a cut of Berry’s royalties to pay off their own debt. But while Freed and Fratto took unearned credit for the song, it’s at least arguable that so did Chuck Berry. We’ll be looking at several Chuck Berry songs over the course of this podcast, and the question of authorship comes up for all of them. After they stopped working together, Johnnie Johnson started to claim that he deserved co-writing credit for everything that was credited to Berry on his own. Johnson claimed that while Berry wrote the lyrics by himself, the band as a whole worked out the music, and that Berry’s melody lines would be based on Johnson’s piano parts. To get an idea of what Johnson brought to the mix, here’s a performance from Johnson, without Berry, many years later: [Excerpt: Johnnie Johnson, “Johnny’s Boogie”] It’s impossible to say with certainty who did what — Johnson sued Berry in 2000, but the case was dismissed because of the length of time between the songs being written and the case being brought. And Johnson worked with Berry on almost all his albums before that so we don’t have any clear guides as to what Berry’s music sounded like without Johnson. Given Berry’s money-grubbing, grasping, nature, and his willingness to see every single interaction as about how many dollars and cents were in it for Chuck Berry, I have no trouble believing that Berry would take the credit for other people’s work and not think twice about it, so I can fully believe that Johnson worked with him on the music for the songs. On the other hand, most of the songs in question were based around very basic blues chord changes, and the musical interest in them comes almost solely from Berry’s guitar licks — Johnnie Johnson was a very good blues piano player just like a thousand other very good blues piano players, but Chuck Berry’s guitar style is absolutely distinctive, and unlike anything ever recorded before. But the crucial evidence as to how much input or lack of it Johnson had on the writing process comes with the keys Berry chose. Maybellene is in B-flat. A lot of his other songs are in E-flat. These are *not* keys that any guitarist would normally choose to write in. If you’re a guitarist, writing for the guitar, you’d probably choose to write in E or A if you’re playing the blues, D if you’re doing folkier stuff, maybe G or C if you’re doing something poppier and more melodic. These are easy keys for the guitar, the keys that every guitarist’s fingers will automatically fall into unless they have a good reason not to. E-flat and B-flat, though, are fairly straightforward keys on the piano if you’re playing the blues. And they’re keys that are *absolutely* standard for a saxophone player — alto saxes are tuned to an E-flat, tenor saxes to B-flat, so if you’re a band where the sax player is the most important instrumentalist, those are the keys you’re most likely to choose, all else being equal. Now, remember that Chuck Berry replaced the saxophone player in Johnnie Johnson’s band. Once you know that it seems obvious what’s happened — Berry has fit himself in around arrangements and repertoire that Johnson had originally worked up with a sax player, playing in the keys that Johnson was already used to. When they worked out the music for Berry’s songs, that was the pattern they fell into. So, I tend to believe Johnson that the backings were worked out between them after Berry wrote the lyrics. Johnson’s contribution seems to have come somewhere between that of an arranger and of a songwriter, and he deserves some credit at least morally, if not under the ridiculous legal situation that made arrangements uncopyrightable. [Excerpt: “Maybellene” guitar solo showing interplay of Berry and Johnson] “Maybellene”’s success was in part because of a very deliberate decision Berry had made years earlier, having noted the success of white performers singing black musicians’ material, and deciding that he was going to try to get the white people to buy his recordings rather than the cover versions, by singing in a voice that was closer to white singers than the typical blues vocalist. While it caused him problems in early days, notably with him turning up to gigs only to be told, often with accompanying racial slurs, that they’d expected the performer of “Maybellene” to be a white man and he wasn’t allowed to play, his playing-down of his own blackness also caused a major benefit — he became one of the only black musicians to chart higher than the white cover version. It would normally be expected that “Maybellene” would be overshadowed on the charts by Marty Robbins’ version, especially since Marty Robbins was a hugely popular star, and Berry was an unknown on a small blues label: [excerpt: Marty Robbins, “Maybellene”] Instead, as well as going to number one on the R&B charts, Berry’s recording went to number five on the pop charts. And other recordings by him would follow over the next few years. He was never a consistent chart success — in fact he did significantly less well than his reputation in rock and roll history would suggest — but he notched several top ten hits on the pop charts. “Maybellene” did so well that even “Wee Wee Hours”, released as the B-side, went to number ten on the R&B charts. And Berry’s next single was a “Maybellene” soundalike — “Thirty Days” [Excerpt: “Thirty Days”, Chuck Berry] It’s a great track, but it didn’t do quite so well on the charts — it went to number two on the R&B charts, and didn’t hit the pop charts at all. The single after that, “No Money Down”, did less well again. But Berry was about to turn things around again with his next single: [excerpt: *just the guitar intro* of “Roll Over Beethoven” by Chuck Berry] You don’t need anything more, do you? That’s the Chuck Berry formula, right there. You don’t even need to hear the vocals to know exactly what the record is. That record is, of course, “Roll Over Beethoven”. It’s worth listening to the lyrics again just to see what Berry is doing here. [Excerpt: “Roll Over Beethoven”, Chuck Berry] What we have here is, as far as I can tell, the first time that rock and roll started the pattern of self-mythologising that would continue throughout the genre’s history. Of course, there had been plenty of records before this that had talked about the power of music or how much the singer wanted to make you dance, or whatever, but this one is different in a couple of ways. Firstly, it’s talking about *recorded* music specifically — Berry isn’t wanting to go out and listen to a band play live, but he wants to listen to the DJ play his favourite record instead. And secondly, he’s explicitly making a link between his music — “these rhythm and blues” — and the music of the rockabilly artists from Memphis — “don’t step on my blue suede shoes”. And Berry’s music did resemble the Memphis rockabilly more than it resembled anything else. Both had electric lead guitars, double bass, drums, and reverb, and no saxophone and little piano. Both sang sped-up hillbilly boogies with a hard backbeat. Rock and roll was, as we have seen, a disparate genre at first, and people would continue to pull from a whole variety of different sources. But working independently and with no knowledge of each other, a white country hick from Tennessee and a sophisticated black urbanite from the Midwest had hit upon almost exactly the same formula, and Berry was going to make sure that he made the connection as clear as possible. If there’s a moment that rock and roll culture coalesced into a single thing, it was with “Roll Over Beethoven”. And Berry now had his formula worked out. The next thing to do was to get rid of the band. “Roll Over Beethoven” was the penultimate single credited to Chuck Berry & His Combo, rather than to just Chuck Berry. We’ll look at the last one, recorded at the same session, in a few weeks’ time.

1956: Julie London chante pour la première fois à la télévision "Cry Me A River".   Actrice à la notoriété déjà établie dans la première moitié des années 50 qui imprime son physique de pin-up classieuse, Julie London devint chanteuse presque malgré elle. C'est son deuxième mari, le pianiste et compositeur Bobby Troup, à qui Nat King Cole dut son tube "Route 66", qui la pousse sur la scène des clubs de Los Angeles. Mais c'est grâce à "Julie is Her Name", un premier album LP publié sur le label Liberty en 1955 que Julie London accède à une popularité sans précédent. Avec "Cry Me a River", la chanteuse impose un style nouveau. Sur un accompagnement minimaliste donné par la table d'harmonie d'une guitare cristalline et la pulsation d'une contrebasse féline, Julie London posait sa voix dans un souffle voilé et sensuel, comme une confidence adressée directement à l'auditeur, forcément troublé. "Julie is her Name" sera suivi d'une trentaine albums qui pour la plupart marqueront leur époque et dont le succès éloignera progressivement l'actrice des plateaux de cinéma. Un peu à la manière du "My Funny Valentine" de Chet Baker, "Cry Me a River" de Julie London marquera des générations de vocalistes, bien au-delà des horizons de la West Coast, jusqu'en Europe ou en Amérique du sud (la bossa nova retiendra la leçon). Et jusqu'à aujourd'hui où il est bien difficile de ne pas reconnaitre l'influence de Julie London dans le jazz et la pop contemporains. Étagère n°6… Boite n°2… Dossier JL1926… Julie London, l'Ambassadrice du Cool.Hébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

Another show as programmed by James Spencer this week as he brings some Bobby Troup to the table! www.cocktailnation.net   Bobby Troup-Get Your Kicks on Route 66 Bobby Troup-It Happened Once Before Bobby Troup-I Can't Get Started Bobby Troup-Lemon Twist Bobby Troup-Little Girl Blue  Bobby Troup-Please Belong To Me Bobby Troup-Skylark Bobby Troup-Free And Easy Bobby Troup-Tenderly Bobby Troup-The Three Bears Bobby Troup-Girl Talk Bobby Troup-Midnight Sun Bobby Troup-Like It Or Not (live)    

General Motors • Lyft Autonomous Cars • Bobby Troup • The Challenge: Nature • @anchorLApodcast --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/outlookinreview/support

Was Anita O’Day referring to Uptown Normal when she recorded “Let Me Off Uptown?” Probably not, but the question provides some fodder for discussion and the playing of Anita’s famous duet with trumpeter Roy Eldridge on this week’s Radio Munson. The exciting Buddy Rich band is also on Don’s playlist along with Chick Webb, Bobby Troup, and a new duet with vibraphonist Terry Gibbs and Bloomington-Normal pianist John Campbell.

This week we travel in a time machine back to 1956 and check out a very cool club that has a couple of star performers playing…Julie London and Bobby Troup, do you remember when there were no tv commercials in existence? No well I'll let you know about the good old days of tv! Cherry Capri talks about cell phone addiction and her solutions are revolutionary! www.cocktailnation.podbean.com Los Shimmy Shakers-Private Dick For Hire Out Of Abingdon-Three Piece Suit Julie London and Bobby Troup Live at the Cameo Ellen La Furn-When Sunny Gets Blue Ricki Derek-Sunny Les Baxter -Unchained Melody Sergio Mendes -Monday Monday Martini Kings-Lost In Paradise Roland Remington- Babalu Arthur Lyman-Havah  Nagilah Martin Denny-Jungle River Boat Janet Seidel-When Lights Are Low Gene Rains-Harbour Lights Barbara Lusch-Light My Fire Perry Beekman-But Not For Me Stan Getz- O Grande Amor

The birth of the Main Street of America—songwriter Bobby Troup tells the story of his 1946 hit Get Your Kicks on Route 66; Gladys Cutberth, aka Mrs. 66 and members of the old “66 Association” talk about the early years of the road. Mickey Mantle explains “If it hadn’t been for US 66 I wouldn’t have been a Yankee.” Stirling Silliphant, creator of the TV series “Route 66” talks about the program and its place in American folklore of the 60s.

Switch the oven on and get your peelers ready, dear listener, as we bring you a show dedicated to those hearty members of the plant kingdom, root vegetables. Thanks to Space Disco Jeff for suggesting this week’s theme which has … Continue reading →

show#49406.15.13 Tip Jar Time!!! 1. Rick Estrin & The Nightcats - Desperation Perspiration - 2012 - from One Wrong Turn (3:33)2. Kid Andersen - Jumping at Shadows - 2006 - from Greaseland (4:08)3. Finis Tasby & Kid Andersen - Thank You, Pretty Baby - - from Snap! Your Fingers (4:06) Help defray Finas medical bills and buy this great CD!! HERE!!4. Lucinda Williams - Wrap My Head Around That - 2007 - from West (9:06)Spinner's Section....straight from The Hague:5. Johnny Nocturne Band: lemon twist (3:00) (Wild & Cool, Bullseye, 1998)6. Rolling Stones: route 66 (2:20) (-, Decca, 1964)7. Bobby Troup: route 66 (2:16) (The Julie London Show, Live in Japan, May 1964)8. Julie London: cry me a river (2:44) (In Person At The Americana, Liberty, 1964)9. Jimi Hendrix: freedom (3:26) (Experience Hendrix, MCA, 1997)10. Studebaker John & the Hawks: dirty business (5:00) (Nothin' But Fun, Double Trouble, 1990)11. Dunn-Packer Band: I don't care (3:31) (Love Against The Wall, Tramp, 1990)12. Otis Spann: evil ways (3:53) (Delta Blues, WG, 2005)13. Jim Wake & Sleepwalker: don't shout (3:23) (Whatever It Is I'm Against It, self-release, 2012)14. Tim Elliott & the Troublemakers: hobo blues (3:21) (-, Tramp, 1993)15. Eddie Boyd: be careful (5:25) (7936 South Rhodes, Blue Horizon, 1968)16. Duster Bennett: risk it for a biscuit [1974] (3:10) (Comin' Home, Indigo, 1999)Back To Beardo:17. Paul Filipowicz - "Fat Richards" Blues - 2013 - from Saints And Sinners (3:50)18. Davina and the Vagabonds - Black Cloud - 2011 - from Black Cloud (2:24)19. Hazmat Modine - Cicada - 2011 - from Cicada (4:52)20. Guitar Mikey & The Real Thing - It's Goin' Down - 2012 - from Out Of The Box (6:01)21. James Hunter - Strange But True - 2008 - from The Hard Way (3:16)22. Maurizio Pugno - Drownin' on Dry Land - 2010 - from Kill the Coffee (3:20)23. Roomful Of Blues - Blind Love - 1995 - from Turn It On! Turn It Up! (4:06)24. Monster Mike Welch - Linda Lou - 2003 - from Sugar Ray & the Bluetones Featuring Monster Mike Welch (4:53)25. The Nighthawks - Bring Your Sister - 2012 - from Damn Good Time (2:35)26. Johnny Dyer - TWO HOUND DOGS - 1995 - from JUKIN' (3:44)27. Barry Levenson Featuing Johnny Dyer - Chasing the Monay - 2003 - from Hard Times Won (4:56)

Lee Sklar returns to discuss the relationship between automotive imagery and rock music.