Podcasts about carl gardner

Today my co-host is Shae, half of the History Unhinged:  Rainy Days Rabbit Holes podcast.  One of the best podcasts available.  Check out their website  http://www.rainydayrabbitholes.com/  They have really cool Merch also.  Rainy Day Rabbit Holes PodcastYour deep dive into Pacific Northwest history...with a laugh along the way!Visit our website! Rainy Day Rabbit HolesListen on AppleListen on SpotifyFollow us on InstagramShae an I talked about -World Wish Day. National Zipper day.  Entertainment from 1986.  Saigon evacuated as it fell, Rodney King LA riots started, Desmond Doss saved 75 injured soldiers, Dachau concentration camp liberated.  Todays birhdays - Duke Ellington, Carl Gardner, Willie Nelson, Tommy James, Jerry Seinfeld, Daniel, Day-Lewis, Eve Plumb, Michelle Pfeiffer, Carnie Wilson, Uma Thurman.  Alfred Hitchcock died.Intro - God did good - Dianna Corcoran  https://www.diannacorcoran.com/ Zipper - Jason DeruloKiss - Prince and the RevolutionOnce in a blue moon - Earl Thomas ConleyWhite Chrstmas - Bing CrosbyBirthdays - In da club - 50 Cent     https://www.50cent.comTake the A Train - Duke EllingtonYakety Yak - The CoastersOn the road again - Willie NelsonMony Mony - Tom James & the ShondellsBrady Bunch TV themeCool Rider - Michelle PfeifferHold on - Wilson PhillipsExit - Cigerettes and Bad Decisions - Timothy Craig    https://www.timothycraig.com/cooolmedia.com

! Turn On - Choon In - Zig Zag ! - ! What's Past - Is Prologue ! ! !   Callin'  ALL  The  Boom Booms  &  The Zoom Zooms   ! ! . . .   GROUND  DOWN  TO  THE  REAL UNDERGROUND   . . . * * *  GROOVIN'  BLUE   25 - 04  * * * Groovin' Blue is dedicated to Dr. Li Wenliang 1.  (4:14)  WAGRadio GB 25 - 04 Intro - Produced by WAGRadio Vinyl Librarian William "Fats Is Back" Reiter (formerly CKLG-FM 96.9 Boss Jock - 'Bill Reiter - The All-Niter') 2.  (4:13)  "Mi Salsa (DJZigZag Phig Pat EdiT)" - LENNON VIBES, OMAR CARDOSA, AFRO DRUMZ [Xumba] 3.  (2:59)  "Shoppin' For Clothes" - THE COASTERS [Atco 45rpm No. 6178] 1960 - The Coasters were Carl Gardner (ld tenor), Cornel Gunter (ten), Billy Guy (bar), Will "Dub" Jones (bs) - King Curtis (tn sx),  Mike Stoller (pn), Sonny Forriest, Phil Spector (gtr), Wendell Marshall (bs), Gary Chester (dm) A Leiber - Stoller Production 4.  (1:26)  "I'm Ready (Quick Hit Version)" - JENN EM [Death Row] 5.  (3:36)  "Wants And Needs (DJZigZag Hubb & Chub EdiT)" - JAKE ANTONIO [AH:Vision] 6.  (  :18)  WAGRadio Gathur Round Id 7.  (4:27)  "Love Is Free" - BRENTON WOOD [Cream Records Lp No. CR-1006] 1977 Prod. Hal Winn & Brenton Wood 8.  (1:10)  WAGRadio UndaGroun' Id 9.  (3:07)  "Way People (DJZigZag Deter The Tires Wisom EdiT)" - ANGELO FERRERI, HATIRAS [Spacedisco Records Promo] 10.(  :43)  WAGRadio SoundIntro Id 11.(2:58)  "Over Under" - JOE LEONE [JBR Entertainment] 12.(5:53)  "With Just A Word" - DIEGO RIVERA [Posi-Tone Cd No. 1644 "With Just A Word"] 2024 13.(4:35)  "Freak Out For Fitness (DJZigZag Fatnuz EdiT)" - FSQ [Soul Clap Records] 14.(5:06)  "Would You (go to bed with me) vs. Jazzed Fusion (Muzikman Original Mix) [DJZigZag MashEdiT Pt.1]"  - CAMPBELL, ALCEMIST, DANIELE BUSCIALA, MUZIKMAN EDITION [Atlantic Records UK] / Merecumbe Records] 2023 15.(  :31)  WAGRadio SNAPP 2025 Id 16.(2:13)  "Must (Acapella)" - BOYPEE, BROWN JOEL, HYCE [Azuri] Nigeria 17.(4:53)  "Machete" - DIEGO RIVERA [Posi-Tone Cd No. 1644 "With Just A Word"] 2024 18.(3:50)  "The Inner World vs. I'm Ready (DJZigZag MashEd EdiT)" - ENRICO SANGIULIANO, GMS, JENN EMM [Ninetozero] / [Death Row] 19.(6:27)  "No Words (DJZigZag Doodle Whang EdiT Pt.1 of the Terry Hunter Club Mix)" - HBCU SYMPHONY, TARREY TORAE, ANTHONY HAMILTON, J. IVY [Mirror Ball] 20.(3:47)  "Risk It All" - oH! The Artist [S.O.G. Entertainment] 21.(  :34)  WAGRadio Dream Perspective Id 22.(6:13)  "Skyz (The Afro Disco Jam)" - BAD LIEUTENANT [Jolly Jams] 23.(7:14)  "What About My Love (DJZigZag EdiT)" - DAVE & MAURISSA, MAURISSA ROSE, DAVE LEE ZR [Z Records] 24.(  :07)  Nu GB End 79:37    

National Zipper day.  Entertainment from 1994.  Saigon evacuated as it fell, Rodney King LA riots started, Desmond Doss saved 75 injured soldiers, Dachau concentration camp liberated.  Todays birhdays - Duke Ellington, Carl Gardner, Willie Nelson, Tommy James, Jerry Seinfeld, Daniel, Day-Lewis, Eve Plumb, Michelle Pfeiffer, Carnie Wilson, Uma Thurman.  Alfred Hitchcock died.Intro - Pour some sugar on me  - Def Leppard   http://defleppard.com/Monaday - Imagine DragonsZipper - Jason DeruloBump & Grind - R. KellyPiece of my heart - Faith HillWhite Chrstmas - Bing CrosbyBirthdays - In da club - 50 Cent     http://50cent.com/Take the A Train - Duke EllingtonYakety Yak - The CoastersOn the road again - Willie NelsonMony Mony - Tom James & the ShondellsBrady Bunch TV themeCool Rider - Michelle PfeifferHold on - Wilson PhillipsExit - Its not love - Dokken   http://dokken.net/Follow Jeff Stampka on Facebook 

National zipper day. Pop culture from 1961. Saigon fell, Dachau liberated, Desmond Doss saves 75, Rodney King riots begin. Todays birthdays - Duke Ellington, Carl Gardner, Willie Nelson, Tommy James, Jerry Seinfeld, Daniel Day Lewis, Eve Plumb, Michelle Pfeiffer, Carnie Wilson, Uma Thurman. Alfred Hitchcock died.

Episode sixty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Searchin'" by The Coasters, and at the group's greatest success and split, and features discussion of racism, plagiarism, STDs and Phil Spector. 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 "Tears on My Pillow" by Little Anthony and the Imperials.   ----more----   Resources As always, I've created Mixcloud streaming playlists with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Because of the limit on the number of songs by one artist, I have posted them as two playlists -- part one, part two.  I've used multiple sources to piece together the information here. Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz tells Leiber and Stoller's side of the story well. Yakety Yak, I Fought Back: My Life With the Coasters by Carl and Veta Gardner is a self-published, rather short, autobiography, which gives Gardner's take on the formation of the Coasters. Those Hoodlum Friends is a Coasters fansite, with a very nineties aesthetic (frames! angelfire domain name! Actual information rather than pretty, empty, layouts!)   The Coasters by Bill Millar is an excellent, long out-of-print, book which provided a lot of useful information. And The Definitive Coasters is a double-CD set that has the A- and B-sides of all the group's hits. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?   Transcript When we last left the Coasters, they'd just taken on two new singers -- Cornell Gunter and Dub Jones -- to replace Leon Hughes and Bobby Nunn. The classic lineup of the Coasters had finally fallen into place, but it had been a year since they had had a hit -- for most of 1957, their writing and production team, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, had been concentrating on more lucrative work, with Elvis Presley among others.   Leiber and Stoller had a rather unique setup, which very few other people in the business had at that point. They were independent writer/producers -- an unusual state in itself in the 1950s -- but they were effectively under contract to two different labels, whose markets and audiences didn't overlap very much. They were contracted to RCA to work with white pop stars -- not just Elvis, though he was obviously important to them, but people like Perry Como, who were very far from Leiber and Stoller's normal music. That contract with RCA produced a few hits outside Elvis, but didn't end up being comfortable for either party, and ended after a year or so, but it was still remarkable that they would be working as producers for a major label while remaining independent contractors. And at the same time, they were also attached to Atlantic, where they were recording almost exclusively with the black performers that they admired, such as Ruth Brown, LaVern Baker, and the Drifters. And it was, of course, also at Atlantic that they were working with the Coasters, who unlike those other artists were Leiber and Stoller's own personal project, and the one with whom they were most identified, and for whom they were about to write the group's biggest hit: [Excerpt: The Coasters, "Yakety Yak"] For the most part, Leiber and Stoller had the classic songwriting split of one lyricist and one composer. Leiber had started out as a songwriter who couldn't play an instrument or write music -- he'd just written lyrics down and remembered the tune in his head -- while Stoller was already an accomplished and sophisticated jazz pianist by the time the two started collaborating. But they wrote together, and so occasionally one would contribute ideas to the other's sphere. Normally, we don't know exactly how much each contributed to the other's work, because they didn't go into that much detail about how they wrote songs, but in the case of "Yakety Yak" we know exactly how the song was written -- everyone who has had a certain amount of success in the music business tends to have a store of anecdotes that they pull out in every interview, and one of Leiber and Stoller's was how they wrote "Yakety Yak". According to the anecdote, they were in Leiber's house, in a writing session, and Stoller started playing a piano rhythm, with the idea it might be suitable for the Coasters, while Leiber was in the kitchen. Leiber heard him playing and called out the first line, "Take out the papers and the trash!", and Stoller immediately replied "Or you don't get no spending cash". They traded off lines and had the song written in about ten minutes. "Yakety Yak" featured a new style for the Coasters' records. Where their earlier singles had usually alternated between a single lead vocalist -- usually Carl Gardner -- on the verses, and the group taking the chorus, with occasional solo lines by the other members, here the lead vocal was taken in unison by the two longest-serving members of the group, Gardner and Billy Guy, with Cornell Gunter harmonising with them. Leiber and Stoller, in their autobiography, actually call it a duet between Gardner and Guy, but I'm pretty sure I hear three voices on the verses, not two, although Gardner's voice is the most prominent. Then, at the end of each verse, there's the chorus line, where the group sing "Yakety Yak", and then Dub Jones takes the single line "Don't talk back": [Excerpt: The Coasters, "Yakety Yak"] This formula would be one they would come back to again and again -- and there was one more element of the record that became part of the Coasters' formula -- King Curtis' saxophone part: [Excerpt: The Coasters, "Yakety Yak"] While “Yakety Yak” seems in retrospect to be an obvious hit record, it didn't seem so at the time, at least to Jerry Leiber. Mike Stoller was convinced from the start that it would be a massive success, and wanted to put another Leiber and Stoller song on the B-side, so they'd be able to get royalties for both sides when the record became as big as he knew it would. Leiber, though, thought they needed a proven song for the B-side -- something safe for if "Yakety Yak" was a flop. They went with Leiber's plan, and the B-side was a version of the old song "Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart", performed as a duet by Dub Jones and Cornell Gunter: [Excerpt: The Coasters, "Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart"] Leiber shouldn't have worried -- "Yakety Yak" was, of course, a number one hit single. The song was successful enough that it spawned a few answer records, including one by Cornell Gunter's sister Gloria, which Cornell sang backing vocals on: [Excerpt: Gloria Gunter, "Move on Out"] With the new lineup of the group in place, they quickly settled into a hit-making machine. Everyone had a role to play. Leiber and Stoller would write the songs and take them into the studio. Stoller would write the parts for the musicians and play the piano, while Leiber supervised in the control room. Cornell Gunter would work out the group's vocal arrangements, Dub Jones would always take his bass solo lines, and either Carl Gardner or Billy Guy would take the lead vocal -- but when they did, they'd be copying, as exactly as they could, a performance they'd been shown by Leiber. From the very start of Leiber and Stoller's career, Leiber had always directed the lead vocalist and told them how to sing his lines -- you may remember from the episode on "Hound Dog", one of the very first songs they wrote, that Big Mama Thornton was annoyed at him for telling her how to sing the song. When Leiber and Stoller produced an artist, whether it was Elvis or Ruth Brown or the Coasters or whoever, they would get them to follow Leiber's phrasing as closely as possible. And this brings me to a thing that we need to deal with when talking about the Coasters, and that is the criticism that is often levelled against their records that they perpetuate racist stereotypes. Johnny Otis, in particular, would make this criticism of the group's records, and it's one that must be taken seriously -- though of course Otis had personal issues with Leiber and Stoller, resulting from the credits on "Hound Dog". But other people, such as Charlie Gillett, have also raised it. It's also a charge that, genuinely, I am not in any position to come to a firm conclusion on. I'm a white man, and so my instincts as to what is and isn't racist are likely to be extremely flawed. What I'd say is this -- the Coasters' performances, and *especially* Dub Jones' vocal parts, are very clearly rooted in particular traditions of African-American comedy, and the way that that form of comedy plays with black culture, and reappropriates stereotypes of black people. If black people were performing, just like this, songs just like this that they had written themselves, there would be no question -- it wouldn't be racist. Equally, if white people were performing these songs, using the same arrangements, in the same voices, it would undoubtedly be racist -- it would be an Amos and Andy style audio blackface performance, and an absolute travesty. The problem comes with the fact that the Coasters were black people, but they were performing songs written for them by two white people -- Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller -- and that Leiber and Stoller were directing how they should perform those songs. To continue the Amos 'n' Andy analogy, is this like when Amos and Andy transferred from the radio to the TV, and the characters were played by black actors imitating the voices of the white comedians who had created the characters? I can't answer that. Nor can I say if it makes a difference that Leiber and Stoller were Jewish, and so were only on the borders of whiteness themselves at the time, or that they were deeply involved in black culture themselves -- though that said, they also claimed on several occasions that they weren't writing about black people in particular in any of their songs. Leiber said of "Riot in Cell Block #9" "It was inspired by the Gangbusters radio drama. Those voices just happened to be black. But they could have been white actors on radio, saying, “Pass the dynamite, because the fuse is lit.”" [Excerpt: The Robins, “Riot in Cell Block #9”] That may be the case as well -- their intent may not have been to write about specifically black experiences at all. And certainly, the Coasters' biggest hits seem to me to be less about black culture, and more about generic teenage concerns. But still, it's very obvious that a large number of people did interpret the Coasters' songs as being about black experiences specifically -- and about a specific type of black experience. Otis said of Leiber and Stoller, "They weren't racist in the true sense of the word, but they dwelled entirely on a sort of street society. It's a very fine point -- sure, the artist who performed and created these things, that's where he was. He wasn't a family person going to a gig, he was in the alleys, he was out there in the street trying to make it with his guitar. But while it might be a true reflection of life, it's not invariably a typical reflection of the typical life in the black community". The thing is, as well, a lot of this isn't in the songwriting, but in the performance -- and that performance was clearly directed by Leiber. I think it makes a difference, as well, that the Coasters had two different audiences -- they had an R&B audience, who were mostly older black people, and they had a white teenage audience. Different audiences preferred different songs, and again, there's a difference between black performers singing for a black audience and singing for a white one. I don't have any easy answers on this one. I don't think that whether something is racist or not is a clear binary, and I'm not the right person to judge whether the Coasters' music crosses any lines. But I thought it was important that I at least mention that there is a debate to be had there, and not just leave the subject alone as being too difficult. The song Johnny Otis singled out in the interview was "Charlie Brown", which most people refer to as the follow-up to "Yakety Yak". In fact, after "Yakety Yak" came a blues song called "The Shadow Knows", based on the radio mystery series that starred Orson Welles. While Leiber and Stoller often talked about the inspiration that radio plays gave them for their songs for the group, that didn't translate to chart success -- several online discographies even fail to mention the existence of "The Shadow Knows". It's a more adult record than "Yakety Yak", and seems to have been completely ignored by the Coasters' white teenage audience -- and in Leiber and Stoller's autobiography, they skip over it completely, and talk about "Charlie Brown" as being immediately after "Yakety Yak". "Charlie Brown" took significantly longer to come up with than the ten minutes that "Yakety Yak" had taken -- while Stoller came up with some appropriate music almost straight away, it took Leiber weeks of agonising before he hit on the title "Charlie Brown", and came up with the basic idea for the lyric -- which, again, Stoller helped with. It's clear, listening to it, that they were trying very deliberately to replicate the sound of "Yakety Yak": [Excerpt: The Coasters, "Charlie Brown"] "Charlie Brown" was almost as big a hit as "Yakety Yak", reaching number two on the pop charts, so of course they followed it with a third song along the same lines, "Along Came Jones". This time, the song was making fun of the plethora of Western TV series: [Excerpt: The Coasters, "Along Came Jones"] While that's a fun record, it “only” reached number nine in the pop charts – still a big success, but nowhere near as big as “Charlie Brown” or “Yakety Yak”. Possibly "Along Came Jones" did less well than it otherwise would have because The Olympics had had a recent hit with a similar record, "Western Movies": [Excerpt: The Olympics, "Western Movies"] Either way, the public seemed to tire of the unison-vocals-and-honking-sax formula -- while the next single was meant to be a song called "I'm a Hog For You Baby" which was another iteration of the same formula (although with a more bluesy feel, and a distinctly more adult tone to the lyrics) listeners instead picked up on the B-side, which became their biggest hit among black audiences, becoming their fourth and final R&B number one, as well as their last top ten pop hit. This one was a song called "Poison Ivy", and it's frankly amazing that it was even released, given that it's blatantly about sexually transmitted diseases -- the song is about a woman called "Poison Ivy", and it talks about mumps, measles, chicken pox and more, before saying that "Poison Ivy will make you itch" and "you can look but you'd better not touch". It's hardly subtle: [Excerpt: The Coasters, "Poison Ivy"] Shortly after that, Adolph Jacobs left the group. While he'd always been an official member, it had always seemed somewhat strange that the group had one non-singing instrumental member -- and that that member wasn't even a particularly prominent instrumentalist on the records, with Mike Stoller's piano and King Curtis' saxophone being more important to the sound of the records. "Poison Ivy" would be the group's last top ten hit, and it seemed to signal Leiber and Stoller getting bored with writing songs aimed at an audience of teenagers. From that point on, most of the group's songs would be in the older style that they'd used with the Robins -- songs making social comments, and talking about adult topics. The next single, "What About Us?", which was a protest song about how rich (and by implication) white people had an easy life while the singers didn't have anything, "only" reached number seventeen, and there seems to have been a sort of desperate flailing about to try new styles. They released a single of the old standard "Besame Mucho", which extended over two sides -- the second side mostly being a King Curtis saxophone solo. That only went to number seventy. Then they released the first single written by a member of the group -- "Wake Me, Shake Me", which was written by Billy Guy. That was backed by the old folk song "Stewball", and didn't do much better, reaching number fifty-one on the charts. The song after that was an attempt at yet another style, and that did even worse in the charts, but it's now considered one of the Coasters' great classics. "Clothes Line (Wrap It Up)" was a comedy blues song written by a singer called Kent Harris and performed by him under the name Boogaloo and His Solid Crew, and it seems to have been modelled both on the early Robins songs that Leiber and Stoller had written, and on Chuck Berry's "No Money Down": [Excerpt: Boogaloo and His Solid Crew: "Clothes Line (Wrap it Up)"] Leiber and Stoller told various different stories over the years about how the Coasters came to record what they titled "Shopping For Clothes", but the one they seem to have settled on was that Billy Guy vaguely remembered hearing the original record, and knew about half the lyrics, and they'd reconstructed the song from what he remembered. They'd been unable to find out who had written it, so had just credited it to "Elmo Glick", a pseudonym they sometimes used. The new version of the song was reworked significantly, and in particular it became a dialogue, with Billy Guy playing the shopper and Dub Jones playing the sales assistant: [Excerpt: The Coasters, "Shopping For Clothes"] The record only reached number eighty-three on the charts, and of course Kent Harris sued and was awarded joint writing credit with Leiber and Stoller. While it didn't chart, it is usually regarded as one of the Coasters' very best records. It's also notable for being the first Coasters record to feature a young session musician that Leiber and Stoller were mentoring at the time. Lester Sill, who had been Leiber and Stoller's mentor in their early years, had partnered with them in several business ventures, and was currently the Coasters' manager, phoned them up out of the blue one day, and told them about a kid he knew who'd had a big hit with a song called "To Know Him Is To Love Him", which he'd written for his group the Teddy Bears: [Excerpt: The Teddy Bears, "To Know Him Is To Love Him"] That record had been released on Trey Records, a new label that Sill had set up with another producer, Lee Hazlewood. Sill said that the kid in question was a huge admirer of Leiber and Stoller, and wanted to learn from them. Would they give him some kind of job with them, so he could be like an apprentice? So, as a favour to Sill, and even though they found they disliked the kid once he got to New York, they signed him to a publishing contract, gave him jobs as a session guitarist, and even let him sleep in their office or in Leiber's spare room for a while. We'll be hearing more about how their collaboration with Phil Spector worked out in future episodes. Around the time that "Shopping For Clothes" came out, the group became conscious that their time as a pop chart act with a teenage fanbase was probably close to its end, and they decided to do something that Carl Gardner had wanted to do for a while, and try to transition into the adult white market -- the kind of people who were buying records by Tony Bennett or Andy Williams. Gardner had wanted, from the start, to be a big band singer, and his friend Johnny Otis had always encouraged him to try to sing the material he really loved, rather than the stuff he was doing with the Coasters. So eventually it was agreed that the group would do their first proper album -- something recorded with the intention of being an LP, rather than a collection of singles shoved together. This record was to be titled "One By One", and would have the group backed by an orchestra, singing old standards. Each song would have a single lead vocalist, with the others relegated to backing vocal parts. Gardner took lead on four songs, and seems to have believed that this would be his big chance to transition into being a solo singer, but it didn't work out like that. The album wasn't a particular success, either commercially or critically, but to the extent that anyone noticed it at all, they mostly commented on how good Cornell Gunter sounded. Gunter had always been relegated to backing roles in the group -- he was an excellent singer, and a very strong physical comedian, but his sweeter voice didn't really suit being lead on the material that made the group famous. Gunter had always admired the singer Dinah Washington, and he used to do imitations of her in the group's shows. Getting the chance to take a solo lead on three songs, he shone with his imitation of her style: [Excerpt: The Coasters, "Easy Living"] For comparison, this is Washington's version of the same song: [Excerpt: Dinah Washington, "Easy Living"] Despite the record showing what strong vocalists the group were, it did nothing, and by this time the group's commercial fortunes seemed to be in terminal decline. Looking at their releases around this period, it's noticeable as well that the Coasters stop being produced exclusively by Leiber and Stoller -- several of their recordings are credited instead to Sill and Hazlewood as producers. There could be several explanations for this -- it could be that Leiber and Stoller were bored of working with the Coasters, or it could be that they thought that getting in another production team might give the group a boost -- after all, Sill and Hazlewood had recently had a few hits of their own, producing records like "Rebel Rouser" by Duane Eddy: [Excerpt: Duane Eddy, "Rebel Rouser"] But nothing they produced for the group had any great commercial success either. The group's last top thirty hit was another Leiber and Stoller song -- one that once again shows the more adult turn their writing for the group had taken: [Excerpt: The Coasters, "Little Egypt"] "Little Egypt" was originally the stage name for three different belly-dancers, two of whom performed in Chicago in the mid-1890s and introduced the belly dance to the American public, and another who performed in New York a few years later and was the subject of a scandal when a party she was performing at was raided and it was discovered she planned to perform nude. These dancers had been so notorious that as late as the early 1950s -- nearly sixty years after their careers -- there was a highly fictionalised film supposedly based on the life of one of them. Whether Leiber and Stoller were inspired by the film, or just by the many exotic dancers who continued using variations of the name, their song about a stripper would be the last time the Coasters would have a significant hit. Shortly after its release, Cornell Gunter decided to leave the group and take up an opportunity to sing in Dinah Washington's backing group. He was replaced by Earl "Speedo" Carroll, who had previously sung with a group called the Cadillacs, whose big hit was "Speedoo": [Excerpt: The Cadillacs, "Speedoo"] Carroll, according to Leiber and Stoller, was so concerned about job security that he kept his day job as a school janitor after joining the Coasters. Unfortunately, Gunter was soon sacked by Dinah Washington, and he decided to form his own group, and to call it the Coasters. A more accurate name might have been the Penguins, since the other three members of his new group had been members of the Penguins previously -- Gunter had come out of the same stew of vocal groups as the Penguins had, and had known them for years. Gunter's group weren't allowed to record as the Coasters, so they made records just under Gunter's own name, or as "Cornell Gunter and the Cornells": [Excerpt: Cornell Gunter, “In a Dream of Love”] But while he couldn't make records as the Coasters, his group could tour under that name -- and they were cheaper than the other group. Gunter was friends with Dick Clark, and so Clark started to book Gunter's version of the group, rather than the version that was in the studio. Not that the group in the studio was exactly the same as the group you'd see live, even if you did go and see the main group. Billy Guy decided he wanted to try a solo career, but unlike Gunter he didn't quit the group. Instead, he had a replacement go out on the road for him, but still sang with them in the studio. None of Guy's solo records did particularly well, and several of them ended up getting reissued under the Coasters name, even though no other Coasters were involved: [Excerpt: Billy Guy, "It Doesn't Take Much"] The band membership kept changing, and the hits stopped altogether. Over the next few decades, pretty much everyone who'd been involved with the Coasters started up their own rival version of the group. Carl Gardner apparently retained the legal rights to the name "the Coasters", and would sue people using it without his permission, but that didn't stop other members performing under names like "Cornel Gunter's Coasters", which isn't precisely the same. Sadly, several people associated with the Coasters ended up dying violently. King Curtis was stabbed to death in the street in 1971, outside his apartment building. Two people were making a drug deal outside his door, and he asked them to move, as he was trying to carry a heavy air-conditioning unit in. They refused, a fight broke out, and he ended up dead, aged only thirty-seven. One of Cornell Gunter's Coasters was murdered by Gunter's manager in 1980, after threatening to expose some of the manager's criminal activities. And finally Gunter himself was shot dead in 1990, and his killer has never been found. These days there are three separate Coasters groups touring. "Cornell Gunter's Coasters" is a continuation of the group that Gunter led before his death. "The Coasters" is managed by Carl Gardner's widow. And Leon Hughes, who is the only surviving original member of the Coasters but was gone by the time of "Yakety Yak", tours as "Leon Hughes and His Coasters". The Coasters are now all gone, other than Hughes, but their records are still remembered. They created a sound that influenced many, many, other groups, but has never been replicated by anyone. They were often dismissed as just a comedy group, but as anyone who has ever tried it knows, making music that is both funny and musically worthwhile is one of the hardest things you can do. And making comedy music that's still enjoyable more than sixty years later? No-one else in rock and roll has ever done that.

Episode sixty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Searchin'” by The Coasters, and at the group’s greatest success and split, and features discussion of racism, plagiarism, STDs and Phil Spector. 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 “Tears on My Pillow” by Little Anthony and the Imperials.   —-more—-   Resources As always, I’ve created Mixcloud streaming playlists with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Because of the limit on the number of songs by one artist, I have posted them as two playlists — part one, part two.  I’ve used multiple sources to piece together the information here. Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz tells Leiber and Stoller’s side of the story well. Yakety Yak, I Fought Back: My Life With the Coasters by Carl and Veta Gardner is a self-published, rather short, autobiography, which gives Gardner’s take on the formation of the Coasters. Those Hoodlum Friends is a Coasters fansite, with a very nineties aesthetic (frames! angelfire domain name! Actual information rather than pretty, empty, layouts!)   The Coasters by Bill Millar is an excellent, long out-of-print, book which provided a lot of useful information. And The Definitive Coasters is a double-CD set that has the A- and B-sides of all the group’s hits. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?   Transcript When we last left the Coasters, they’d just taken on two new singers — Cornell Gunter and Dub Jones — to replace Leon Hughes and Bobby Nunn. The classic lineup of the Coasters had finally fallen into place, but it had been a year since they had had a hit — for most of 1957, their writing and production team, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, had been concentrating on more lucrative work, with Elvis Presley among others.   Leiber and Stoller had a rather unique setup, which very few other people in the business had at that point. They were independent writer/producers — an unusual state in itself in the 1950s — but they were effectively under contract to two different labels, whose markets and audiences didn’t overlap very much. They were contracted to RCA to work with white pop stars — not just Elvis, though he was obviously important to them, but people like Perry Como, who were very far from Leiber and Stoller’s normal music. That contract with RCA produced a few hits outside Elvis, but didn’t end up being comfortable for either party, and ended after a year or so, but it was still remarkable that they would be working as producers for a major label while remaining independent contractors. And at the same time, they were also attached to Atlantic, where they were recording almost exclusively with the black performers that they admired, such as Ruth Brown, LaVern Baker, and the Drifters. And it was, of course, also at Atlantic that they were working with the Coasters, who unlike those other artists were Leiber and Stoller’s own personal project, and the one with whom they were most identified, and for whom they were about to write the group’s biggest hit: [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Yakety Yak”] For the most part, Leiber and Stoller had the classic songwriting split of one lyricist and one composer. Leiber had started out as a songwriter who couldn’t play an instrument or write music — he’d just written lyrics down and remembered the tune in his head — while Stoller was already an accomplished and sophisticated jazz pianist by the time the two started collaborating. But they wrote together, and so occasionally one would contribute ideas to the other’s sphere. Normally, we don’t know exactly how much each contributed to the other’s work, because they didn’t go into that much detail about how they wrote songs, but in the case of “Yakety Yak” we know exactly how the song was written — everyone who has had a certain amount of success in the music business tends to have a store of anecdotes that they pull out in every interview, and one of Leiber and Stoller’s was how they wrote “Yakety Yak”. According to the anecdote, they were in Leiber’s house, in a writing session, and Stoller started playing a piano rhythm, with the idea it might be suitable for the Coasters, while Leiber was in the kitchen. Leiber heard him playing and called out the first line, “Take out the papers and the trash!”, and Stoller immediately replied “Or you don’t get no spending cash”. They traded off lines and had the song written in about ten minutes. “Yakety Yak” featured a new style for the Coasters’ records. Where their earlier singles had usually alternated between a single lead vocalist — usually Carl Gardner — on the verses, and the group taking the chorus, with occasional solo lines by the other members, here the lead vocal was taken in unison by the two longest-serving members of the group, Gardner and Billy Guy, with Cornell Gunter harmonising with them. Leiber and Stoller, in their autobiography, actually call it a duet between Gardner and Guy, but I’m pretty sure I hear three voices on the verses, not two, although Gardner’s voice is the most prominent. Then, at the end of each verse, there’s the chorus line, where the group sing “Yakety Yak”, and then Dub Jones takes the single line “Don’t talk back”: [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Yakety Yak”] This formula would be one they would come back to again and again — and there was one more element of the record that became part of the Coasters’ formula — King Curtis’ saxophone part: [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Yakety Yak”] While “Yakety Yak” seems in retrospect to be an obvious hit record, it didn’t seem so at the time, at least to Jerry Leiber. Mike Stoller was convinced from the start that it would be a massive success, and wanted to put another Leiber and Stoller song on the B-side, so they’d be able to get royalties for both sides when the record became as big as he knew it would. Leiber, though, thought they needed a proven song for the B-side — something safe for if “Yakety Yak” was a flop. They went with Leiber’s plan, and the B-side was a version of the old song “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart”, performed as a duet by Dub Jones and Cornell Gunter: [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart”] Leiber shouldn’t have worried — “Yakety Yak” was, of course, a number one hit single. The song was successful enough that it spawned a few answer records, including one by Cornell Gunter’s sister Gloria, which Cornell sang backing vocals on: [Excerpt: Gloria Gunter, “Move on Out”] With the new lineup of the group in place, they quickly settled into a hit-making machine. Everyone had a role to play. Leiber and Stoller would write the songs and take them into the studio. Stoller would write the parts for the musicians and play the piano, while Leiber supervised in the control room. Cornell Gunter would work out the group’s vocal arrangements, Dub Jones would always take his bass solo lines, and either Carl Gardner or Billy Guy would take the lead vocal — but when they did, they’d be copying, as exactly as they could, a performance they’d been shown by Leiber. From the very start of Leiber and Stoller’s career, Leiber had always directed the lead vocalist and told them how to sing his lines — you may remember from the episode on “Hound Dog”, one of the very first songs they wrote, that Big Mama Thornton was annoyed at him for telling her how to sing the song. When Leiber and Stoller produced an artist, whether it was Elvis or Ruth Brown or the Coasters or whoever, they would get them to follow Leiber’s phrasing as closely as possible. And this brings me to a thing that we need to deal with when talking about the Coasters, and that is the criticism that is often levelled against their records that they perpetuate racist stereotypes. Johnny Otis, in particular, would make this criticism of the group’s records, and it’s one that must be taken seriously — though of course Otis had personal issues with Leiber and Stoller, resulting from the credits on “Hound Dog”. But other people, such as Charlie Gillett, have also raised it. It’s also a charge that, genuinely, I am not in any position to come to a firm conclusion on. I’m a white man, and so my instincts as to what is and isn’t racist are likely to be extremely flawed. What I’d say is this — the Coasters’ performances, and *especially* Dub Jones’ vocal parts, are very clearly rooted in particular traditions of African-American comedy, and the way that that form of comedy plays with black culture, and reappropriates stereotypes of black people. If black people were performing, just like this, songs just like this that they had written themselves, there would be no question — it wouldn’t be racist. Equally, if white people were performing these songs, using the same arrangements, in the same voices, it would undoubtedly be racist — it would be an Amos and Andy style audio blackface performance, and an absolute travesty. The problem comes with the fact that the Coasters were black people, but they were performing songs written for them by two white people — Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller — and that Leiber and Stoller were directing how they should perform those songs. To continue the Amos ‘n’ Andy analogy, is this like when Amos and Andy transferred from the radio to the TV, and the characters were played by black actors imitating the voices of the white comedians who had created the characters? I can’t answer that. Nor can I say if it makes a difference that Leiber and Stoller were Jewish, and so were only on the borders of whiteness themselves at the time, or that they were deeply involved in black culture themselves — though that said, they also claimed on several occasions that they weren’t writing about black people in particular in any of their songs. Leiber said of “Riot in Cell Block #9” “It was inspired by the Gangbusters radio drama. Those voices just happened to be black. But they could have been white actors on radio, saying, “Pass the dynamite, because the fuse is lit.”” [Excerpt: The Robins, “Riot in Cell Block #9”] That may be the case as well — their intent may not have been to write about specifically black experiences at all. And certainly, the Coasters’ biggest hits seem to me to be less about black culture, and more about generic teenage concerns. But still, it’s very obvious that a large number of people did interpret the Coasters’ songs as being about black experiences specifically — and about a specific type of black experience. Otis said of Leiber and Stoller, “They weren’t racist in the true sense of the word, but they dwelled entirely on a sort of street society. It’s a very fine point — sure, the artist who performed and created these things, that’s where he was. He wasn’t a family person going to a gig, he was in the alleys, he was out there in the street trying to make it with his guitar. But while it might be a true reflection of life, it’s not invariably a typical reflection of the typical life in the black community”. The thing is, as well, a lot of this isn’t in the songwriting, but in the performance — and that performance was clearly directed by Leiber. I think it makes a difference, as well, that the Coasters had two different audiences — they had an R&B audience, who were mostly older black people, and they had a white teenage audience. Different audiences preferred different songs, and again, there’s a difference between black performers singing for a black audience and singing for a white one. I don’t have any easy answers on this one. I don’t think that whether something is racist or not is a clear binary, and I’m not the right person to judge whether the Coasters’ music crosses any lines. But I thought it was important that I at least mention that there is a debate to be had there, and not just leave the subject alone as being too difficult. The song Johnny Otis singled out in the interview was “Charlie Brown”, which most people refer to as the follow-up to “Yakety Yak”. In fact, after “Yakety Yak” came a blues song called “The Shadow Knows”, based on the radio mystery series that starred Orson Welles. While Leiber and Stoller often talked about the inspiration that radio plays gave them for their songs for the group, that didn’t translate to chart success — several online discographies even fail to mention the existence of “The Shadow Knows”. It’s a more adult record than “Yakety Yak”, and seems to have been completely ignored by the Coasters’ white teenage audience — and in Leiber and Stoller’s autobiography, they skip over it completely, and talk about “Charlie Brown” as being immediately after “Yakety Yak”. “Charlie Brown” took significantly longer to come up with than the ten minutes that “Yakety Yak” had taken — while Stoller came up with some appropriate music almost straight away, it took Leiber weeks of agonising before he hit on the title “Charlie Brown”, and came up with the basic idea for the lyric — which, again, Stoller helped with. It’s clear, listening to it, that they were trying very deliberately to replicate the sound of “Yakety Yak”: [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Charlie Brown”] “Charlie Brown” was almost as big a hit as “Yakety Yak”, reaching number two on the pop charts, so of course they followed it with a third song along the same lines, “Along Came Jones”. This time, the song was making fun of the plethora of Western TV series: [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Along Came Jones”] While that’s a fun record, it “only” reached number nine in the pop charts – still a big success, but nowhere near as big as “Charlie Brown” or “Yakety Yak”. Possibly “Along Came Jones” did less well than it otherwise would have because The Olympics had had a recent hit with a similar record, “Western Movies”: [Excerpt: The Olympics, “Western Movies”] Either way, the public seemed to tire of the unison-vocals-and-honking-sax formula — while the next single was meant to be a song called “I’m a Hog For You Baby” which was another iteration of the same formula (although with a more bluesy feel, and a distinctly more adult tone to the lyrics) listeners instead picked up on the B-side, which became their biggest hit among black audiences, becoming their fourth and final R&B number one, as well as their last top ten pop hit. This one was a song called “Poison Ivy”, and it’s frankly amazing that it was even released, given that it’s blatantly about sexually transmitted diseases — the song is about a woman called “Poison Ivy”, and it talks about mumps, measles, chicken pox and more, before saying that “Poison Ivy will make you itch” and “you can look but you’d better not touch”. It’s hardly subtle: [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Poison Ivy”] Shortly after that, Adolph Jacobs left the group. While he’d always been an official member, it had always seemed somewhat strange that the group had one non-singing instrumental member — and that that member wasn’t even a particularly prominent instrumentalist on the records, with Mike Stoller’s piano and King Curtis’ saxophone being more important to the sound of the records. “Poison Ivy” would be the group’s last top ten hit, and it seemed to signal Leiber and Stoller getting bored with writing songs aimed at an audience of teenagers. From that point on, most of the group’s songs would be in the older style that they’d used with the Robins — songs making social comments, and talking about adult topics. The next single, “What About Us?”, which was a protest song about how rich (and by implication) white people had an easy life while the singers didn’t have anything, “only” reached number seventeen, and there seems to have been a sort of desperate flailing about to try new styles. They released a single of the old standard “Besame Mucho”, which extended over two sides — the second side mostly being a King Curtis saxophone solo. That only went to number seventy. Then they released the first single written by a member of the group — “Wake Me, Shake Me”, which was written by Billy Guy. That was backed by the old folk song “Stewball”, and didn’t do much better, reaching number fifty-one on the charts. The song after that was an attempt at yet another style, and that did even worse in the charts, but it’s now considered one of the Coasters’ great classics. “Clothes Line (Wrap It Up)” was a comedy blues song written by a singer called Kent Harris and performed by him under the name Boogaloo and His Solid Crew, and it seems to have been modelled both on the early Robins songs that Leiber and Stoller had written, and on Chuck Berry’s “No Money Down”: [Excerpt: Boogaloo and His Solid Crew: “Clothes Line (Wrap it Up)”] Leiber and Stoller told various different stories over the years about how the Coasters came to record what they titled “Shopping For Clothes”, but the one they seem to have settled on was that Billy Guy vaguely remembered hearing the original record, and knew about half the lyrics, and they’d reconstructed the song from what he remembered. They’d been unable to find out who had written it, so had just credited it to “Elmo Glick”, a pseudonym they sometimes used. The new version of the song was reworked significantly, and in particular it became a dialogue, with Billy Guy playing the shopper and Dub Jones playing the sales assistant: [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Shopping For Clothes”] The record only reached number eighty-three on the charts, and of course Kent Harris sued and was awarded joint writing credit with Leiber and Stoller. While it didn’t chart, it is usually regarded as one of the Coasters’ very best records. It’s also notable for being the first Coasters record to feature a young session musician that Leiber and Stoller were mentoring at the time. Lester Sill, who had been Leiber and Stoller’s mentor in their early years, had partnered with them in several business ventures, and was currently the Coasters’ manager, phoned them up out of the blue one day, and told them about a kid he knew who’d had a big hit with a song called “To Know Him Is To Love Him”, which he’d written for his group the Teddy Bears: [Excerpt: The Teddy Bears, “To Know Him Is To Love Him”] That record had been released on Trey Records, a new label that Sill had set up with another producer, Lee Hazlewood. Sill said that the kid in question was a huge admirer of Leiber and Stoller, and wanted to learn from them. Would they give him some kind of job with them, so he could be like an apprentice? So, as a favour to Sill, and even though they found they disliked the kid once he got to New York, they signed him to a publishing contract, gave him jobs as a session guitarist, and even let him sleep in their office or in Leiber’s spare room for a while. We’ll be hearing more about how their collaboration with Phil Spector worked out in future episodes. Around the time that “Shopping For Clothes” came out, the group became conscious that their time as a pop chart act with a teenage fanbase was probably close to its end, and they decided to do something that Carl Gardner had wanted to do for a while, and try to transition into the adult white market — the kind of people who were buying records by Tony Bennett or Andy Williams. Gardner had wanted, from the start, to be a big band singer, and his friend Johnny Otis had always encouraged him to try to sing the material he really loved, rather than the stuff he was doing with the Coasters. So eventually it was agreed that the group would do their first proper album — something recorded with the intention of being an LP, rather than a collection of singles shoved together. This record was to be titled “One By One”, and would have the group backed by an orchestra, singing old standards. Each song would have a single lead vocalist, with the others relegated to backing vocal parts. Gardner took lead on four songs, and seems to have believed that this would be his big chance to transition into being a solo singer, but it didn’t work out like that. The album wasn’t a particular success, either commercially or critically, but to the extent that anyone noticed it at all, they mostly commented on how good Cornell Gunter sounded. Gunter had always been relegated to backing roles in the group — he was an excellent singer, and a very strong physical comedian, but his sweeter voice didn’t really suit being lead on the material that made the group famous. Gunter had always admired the singer Dinah Washington, and he used to do imitations of her in the group’s shows. Getting the chance to take a solo lead on three songs, he shone with his imitation of her style: [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Easy Living”] For comparison, this is Washington’s version of the same song: [Excerpt: Dinah Washington, “Easy Living”] Despite the record showing what strong vocalists the group were, it did nothing, and by this time the group’s commercial fortunes seemed to be in terminal decline. Looking at their releases around this period, it’s noticeable as well that the Coasters stop being produced exclusively by Leiber and Stoller — several of their recordings are credited instead to Sill and Hazlewood as producers. There could be several explanations for this — it could be that Leiber and Stoller were bored of working with the Coasters, or it could be that they thought that getting in another production team might give the group a boost — after all, Sill and Hazlewood had recently had a few hits of their own, producing records like “Rebel Rouser” by Duane Eddy: [Excerpt: Duane Eddy, “Rebel Rouser”] But nothing they produced for the group had any great commercial success either. The group’s last top thirty hit was another Leiber and Stoller song — one that once again shows the more adult turn their writing for the group had taken: [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Little Egypt”] “Little Egypt” was originally the stage name for three different belly-dancers, two of whom performed in Chicago in the mid-1890s and introduced the belly dance to the American public, and another who performed in New York a few years later and was the subject of a scandal when a party she was performing at was raided and it was discovered she planned to perform nude. These dancers had been so notorious that as late as the early 1950s — nearly sixty years after their careers — there was a highly fictionalised film supposedly based on the life of one of them. Whether Leiber and Stoller were inspired by the film, or just by the many exotic dancers who continued using variations of the name, their song about a stripper would be the last time the Coasters would have a significant hit. Shortly after its release, Cornell Gunter decided to leave the group and take up an opportunity to sing in Dinah Washington’s backing group. He was replaced by Earl “Speedo” Carroll, who had previously sung with a group called the Cadillacs, whose big hit was “Speedoo”: [Excerpt: The Cadillacs, “Speedoo”] Carroll, according to Leiber and Stoller, was so concerned about job security that he kept his day job as a school janitor after joining the Coasters. Unfortunately, Gunter was soon sacked by Dinah Washington, and he decided to form his own group, and to call it the Coasters. A more accurate name might have been the Penguins, since the other three members of his new group had been members of the Penguins previously — Gunter had come out of the same stew of vocal groups as the Penguins had, and had known them for years. Gunter’s group weren’t allowed to record as the Coasters, so they made records just under Gunter’s own name, or as “Cornell Gunter and the Cornells”: [Excerpt: Cornell Gunter, “In a Dream of Love”] But while he couldn’t make records as the Coasters, his group could tour under that name — and they were cheaper than the other group. Gunter was friends with Dick Clark, and so Clark started to book Gunter’s version of the group, rather than the version that was in the studio. Not that the group in the studio was exactly the same as the group you’d see live, even if you did go and see the main group. Billy Guy decided he wanted to try a solo career, but unlike Gunter he didn’t quit the group. Instead, he had a replacement go out on the road for him, but still sang with them in the studio. None of Guy’s solo records did particularly well, and several of them ended up getting reissued under the Coasters name, even though no other Coasters were involved: [Excerpt: Billy Guy, “It Doesn’t Take Much”] The band membership kept changing, and the hits stopped altogether. Over the next few decades, pretty much everyone who’d been involved with the Coasters started up their own rival version of the group. Carl Gardner apparently retained the legal rights to the name “the Coasters”, and would sue people using it without his permission, but that didn’t stop other members performing under names like “Cornel Gunter’s Coasters”, which isn’t precisely the same. Sadly, several people associated with the Coasters ended up dying violently. King Curtis was stabbed to death in the street in 1971, outside his apartment building. Two people were making a drug deal outside his door, and he asked them to move, as he was trying to carry a heavy air-conditioning unit in. They refused, a fight broke out, and he ended up dead, aged only thirty-seven. One of Cornell Gunter’s Coasters was murdered by Gunter’s manager in 1980, after threatening to expose some of the manager’s criminal activities. And finally Gunter himself was shot dead in 1990, and his killer has never been found. These days there are three separate Coasters groups touring. “Cornell Gunter’s Coasters” is a continuation of the group that Gunter led before his death. “The Coasters” is managed by Carl Gardner’s widow. And Leon Hughes, who is the only surviving original member of the Coasters but was gone by the time of “Yakety Yak”, tours as “Leon Hughes and His Coasters”. The Coasters are now all gone, other than Hughes, but their records are still remembered. They created a sound that influenced many, many, other groups, but has never been replicated by anyone. They were often dismissed as just a comedy group, but as anyone who has ever tried it knows, making music that is both funny and musically worthwhile is one of the hardest things you can do. And making comedy music that’s still enjoyable more than sixty years later? No-one else in rock and roll has ever done that.

Episode sixty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Searchin'” by The Coasters, and at the group’s greatest success and split, and features discussion of racism, plagiarism, STDs and Phil Spector. 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 “Tears on My Pillow” by Little Anthony and the Imperials.   —-more—-   Resources As always, I’ve created Mixcloud streaming playlists with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Because of the limit on the number of songs by one artist, I have posted them as two playlists — part one, part two.  I’ve used multiple sources to piece together the information here. Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz tells Leiber and Stoller’s side of the story well. Yakety Yak, I Fought Back: My Life With the Coasters by Carl and Veta Gardner is a self-published, rather short, autobiography, which gives Gardner’s take on the formation of the Coasters. Those Hoodlum Friends is a Coasters fansite, with a very nineties aesthetic (frames! angelfire domain name! Actual information rather than pretty, empty, layouts!)   The Coasters by Bill Millar is an excellent, long out-of-print, book which provided a lot of useful information. And The Definitive Coasters is a double-CD set that has the A- and B-sides of all the group’s hits. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?   Transcript When we last left the Coasters, they’d just taken on two new singers — Cornell Gunter and Dub Jones — to replace Leon Hughes and Bobby Nunn. The classic lineup of the Coasters had finally fallen into place, but it had been a year since they had had a hit — for most of 1957, their writing and production team, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, had been concentrating on more lucrative work, with Elvis Presley among others.   Leiber and Stoller had a rather unique setup, which very few other people in the business had at that point. They were independent writer/producers — an unusual state in itself in the 1950s — but they were effectively under contract to two different labels, whose markets and audiences didn’t overlap very much. They were contracted to RCA to work with white pop stars — not just Elvis, though he was obviously important to them, but people like Perry Como, who were very far from Leiber and Stoller’s normal music. That contract with RCA produced a few hits outside Elvis, but didn’t end up being comfortable for either party, and ended after a year or so, but it was still remarkable that they would be working as producers for a major label while remaining independent contractors. And at the same time, they were also attached to Atlantic, where they were recording almost exclusively with the black performers that they admired, such as Ruth Brown, LaVern Baker, and the Drifters. And it was, of course, also at Atlantic that they were working with the Coasters, who unlike those other artists were Leiber and Stoller’s own personal project, and the one with whom they were most identified, and for whom they were about to write the group’s biggest hit: [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Yakety Yak”] For the most part, Leiber and Stoller had the classic songwriting split of one lyricist and one composer. Leiber had started out as a songwriter who couldn’t play an instrument or write music — he’d just written lyrics down and remembered the tune in his head — while Stoller was already an accomplished and sophisticated jazz pianist by the time the two started collaborating. But they wrote together, and so occasionally one would contribute ideas to the other’s sphere. Normally, we don’t know exactly how much each contributed to the other’s work, because they didn’t go into that much detail about how they wrote songs, but in the case of “Yakety Yak” we know exactly how the song was written — everyone who has had a certain amount of success in the music business tends to have a store of anecdotes that they pull out in every interview, and one of Leiber and Stoller’s was how they wrote “Yakety Yak”. According to the anecdote, they were in Leiber’s house, in a writing session, and Stoller started playing a piano rhythm, with the idea it might be suitable for the Coasters, while Leiber was in the kitchen. Leiber heard him playing and called out the first line, “Take out the papers and the trash!”, and Stoller immediately replied “Or you don’t get no spending cash”. They traded off lines and had the song written in about ten minutes. “Yakety Yak” featured a new style for the Coasters’ records. Where their earlier singles had usually alternated between a single lead vocalist — usually Carl Gardner — on the verses, and the group taking the chorus, with occasional solo lines by the other members, here the lead vocal was taken in unison by the two longest-serving members of the group, Gardner and Billy Guy, with Cornell Gunter harmonising with them. Leiber and Stoller, in their autobiography, actually call it a duet between Gardner and Guy, but I’m pretty sure I hear three voices on the verses, not two, although Gardner’s voice is the most prominent. Then, at the end of each verse, there’s the chorus line, where the group sing “Yakety Yak”, and then Dub Jones takes the single line “Don’t talk back”: [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Yakety Yak”] This formula would be one they would come back to again and again — and there was one more element of the record that became part of the Coasters’ formula — King Curtis’ saxophone part: [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Yakety Yak”] While “Yakety Yak” seems in retrospect to be an obvious hit record, it didn’t seem so at the time, at least to Jerry Leiber. Mike Stoller was convinced from the start that it would be a massive success, and wanted to put another Leiber and Stoller song on the B-side, so they’d be able to get royalties for both sides when the record became as big as he knew it would. Leiber, though, thought they needed a proven song for the B-side — something safe for if “Yakety Yak” was a flop. They went with Leiber’s plan, and the B-side was a version of the old song “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart”, performed as a duet by Dub Jones and Cornell Gunter: [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart”] Leiber shouldn’t have worried — “Yakety Yak” was, of course, a number one hit single. The song was successful enough that it spawned a few answer records, including one by Cornell Gunter’s sister Gloria, which Cornell sang backing vocals on: [Excerpt: Gloria Gunter, “Move on Out”] With the new lineup of the group in place, they quickly settled into a hit-making machine. Everyone had a role to play. Leiber and Stoller would write the songs and take them into the studio. Stoller would write the parts for the musicians and play the piano, while Leiber supervised in the control room. Cornell Gunter would work out the group’s vocal arrangements, Dub Jones would always take his bass solo lines, and either Carl Gardner or Billy Guy would take the lead vocal — but when they did, they’d be copying, as exactly as they could, a performance they’d been shown by Leiber. From the very start of Leiber and Stoller’s career, Leiber had always directed the lead vocalist and told them how to sing his lines — you may remember from the episode on “Hound Dog”, one of the very first songs they wrote, that Big Mama Thornton was annoyed at him for telling her how to sing the song. When Leiber and Stoller produced an artist, whether it was Elvis or Ruth Brown or the Coasters or whoever, they would get them to follow Leiber’s phrasing as closely as possible. And this brings me to a thing that we need to deal with when talking about the Coasters, and that is the criticism that is often levelled against their records that they perpetuate racist stereotypes. Johnny Otis, in particular, would make this criticism of the group’s records, and it’s one that must be taken seriously — though of course Otis had personal issues with Leiber and Stoller, resulting from the credits on “Hound Dog”. But other people, such as Charlie Gillett, have also raised it. It’s also a charge that, genuinely, I am not in any position to come to a firm conclusion on. I’m a white man, and so my instincts as to what is and isn’t racist are likely to be extremely flawed. What I’d say is this — the Coasters’ performances, and *especially* Dub Jones’ vocal parts, are very clearly rooted in particular traditions of African-American comedy, and the way that that form of comedy plays with black culture, and reappropriates stereotypes of black people. If black people were performing, just like this, songs just like this that they had written themselves, there would be no question — it wouldn’t be racist. Equally, if white people were performing these songs, using the same arrangements, in the same voices, it would undoubtedly be racist — it would be an Amos and Andy style audio blackface performance, and an absolute travesty. The problem comes with the fact that the Coasters were black people, but they were performing songs written for them by two white people — Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller — and that Leiber and Stoller were directing how they should perform those songs. To continue the Amos ‘n’ Andy analogy, is this like when Amos and Andy transferred from the radio to the TV, and the characters were played by black actors imitating the voices of the white comedians who had created the characters? I can’t answer that. Nor can I say if it makes a difference that Leiber and Stoller were Jewish, and so were only on the borders of whiteness themselves at the time, or that they were deeply involved in black culture themselves — though that said, they also claimed on several occasions that they weren’t writing about black people in particular in any of their songs. Leiber said of “Riot in Cell Block #9” “It was inspired by the Gangbusters radio drama. Those voices just happened to be black. But they could have been white actors on radio, saying, “Pass the dynamite, because the fuse is lit.”” [Excerpt: The Robins, “Riot in Cell Block #9”] That may be the case as well — their intent may not have been to write about specifically black experiences at all. And certainly, the Coasters’ biggest hits seem to me to be less about black culture, and more about generic teenage concerns. But still, it’s very obvious that a large number of people did interpret the Coasters’ songs as being about black experiences specifically — and about a specific type of black experience. Otis said of Leiber and Stoller, “They weren’t racist in the true sense of the word, but they dwelled entirely on a sort of street society. It’s a very fine point — sure, the artist who performed and created these things, that’s where he was. He wasn’t a family person going to a gig, he was in the alleys, he was out there in the street trying to make it with his guitar. But while it might be a true reflection of life, it’s not invariably a typical reflection of the typical life in the black community”. The thing is, as well, a lot of this isn’t in the songwriting, but in the performance — and that performance was clearly directed by Leiber. I think it makes a difference, as well, that the Coasters had two different audiences — they had an R&B audience, who were mostly older black people, and they had a white teenage audience. Different audiences preferred different songs, and again, there’s a difference between black performers singing for a black audience and singing for a white one. I don’t have any easy answers on this one. I don’t think that whether something is racist or not is a clear binary, and I’m not the right person to judge whether the Coasters’ music crosses any lines. But I thought it was important that I at least mention that there is a debate to be had there, and not just leave the subject alone as being too difficult. The song Johnny Otis singled out in the interview was “Charlie Brown”, which most people refer to as the follow-up to “Yakety Yak”. In fact, after “Yakety Yak” came a blues song called “The Shadow Knows”, based on the radio mystery series that starred Orson Welles. While Leiber and Stoller often talked about the inspiration that radio plays gave them for their songs for the group, that didn’t translate to chart success — several online discographies even fail to mention the existence of “The Shadow Knows”. It’s a more adult record than “Yakety Yak”, and seems to have been completely ignored by the Coasters’ white teenage audience — and in Leiber and Stoller’s autobiography, they skip over it completely, and talk about “Charlie Brown” as being immediately after “Yakety Yak”. “Charlie Brown” took significantly longer to come up with than the ten minutes that “Yakety Yak” had taken — while Stoller came up with some appropriate music almost straight away, it took Leiber weeks of agonising before he hit on the title “Charlie Brown”, and came up with the basic idea for the lyric — which, again, Stoller helped with. It’s clear, listening to it, that they were trying very deliberately to replicate the sound of “Yakety Yak”: [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Charlie Brown”] “Charlie Brown” was almost as big a hit as “Yakety Yak”, reaching number two on the pop charts, so of course they followed it with a third song along the same lines, “Along Came Jones”. This time, the song was making fun of the plethora of Western TV series: [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Along Came Jones”] While that’s a fun record, it “only” reached number nine in the pop charts – still a big success, but nowhere near as big as “Charlie Brown” or “Yakety Yak”. Possibly “Along Came Jones” did less well than it otherwise would have because The Olympics had had a recent hit with a similar record, “Western Movies”: [Excerpt: The Olympics, “Western Movies”] Either way, the public seemed to tire of the unison-vocals-and-honking-sax formula — while the next single was meant to be a song called “I’m a Hog For You Baby” which was another iteration of the same formula (although with a more bluesy feel, and a distinctly more adult tone to the lyrics) listeners instead picked up on the B-side, which became their biggest hit among black audiences, becoming their fourth and final R&B number one, as well as their last top ten pop hit. This one was a song called “Poison Ivy”, and it’s frankly amazing that it was even released, given that it’s blatantly about sexually transmitted diseases — the song is about a woman called “Poison Ivy”, and it talks about mumps, measles, chicken pox and more, before saying that “Poison Ivy will make you itch” and “you can look but you’d better not touch”. It’s hardly subtle: [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Poison Ivy”] Shortly after that, Adolph Jacobs left the group. While he’d always been an official member, it had always seemed somewhat strange that the group had one non-singing instrumental member — and that that member wasn’t even a particularly prominent instrumentalist on the records, with Mike Stoller’s piano and King Curtis’ saxophone being more important to the sound of the records. “Poison Ivy” would be the group’s last top ten hit, and it seemed to signal Leiber and Stoller getting bored with writing songs aimed at an audience of teenagers. From that point on, most of the group’s songs would be in the older style that they’d used with the Robins — songs making social comments, and talking about adult topics. The next single, “What About Us?”, which was a protest song about how rich (and by implication) white people had an easy life while the singers didn’t have anything, “only” reached number seventeen, and there seems to have been a sort of desperate flailing about to try new styles. They released a single of the old standard “Besame Mucho”, which extended over two sides — the second side mostly being a King Curtis saxophone solo. That only went to number seventy. Then they released the first single written by a member of the group — “Wake Me, Shake Me”, which was written by Billy Guy. That was backed by the old folk song “Stewball”, and didn’t do much better, reaching number fifty-one on the charts. The song after that was an attempt at yet another style, and that did even worse in the charts, but it’s now considered one of the Coasters’ great classics. “Clothes Line (Wrap It Up)” was a comedy blues song written by a singer called Kent Harris and performed by him under the name Boogaloo and His Solid Crew, and it seems to have been modelled both on the early Robins songs that Leiber and Stoller had written, and on Chuck Berry’s “No Money Down”: [Excerpt: Boogaloo and His Solid Crew: “Clothes Line (Wrap it Up)”] Leiber and Stoller told various different stories over the years about how the Coasters came to record what they titled “Shopping For Clothes”, but the one they seem to have settled on was that Billy Guy vaguely remembered hearing the original record, and knew about half the lyrics, and they’d reconstructed the song from what he remembered. They’d been unable to find out who had written it, so had just credited it to “Elmo Glick”, a pseudonym they sometimes used. The new version of the song was reworked significantly, and in particular it became a dialogue, with Billy Guy playing the shopper and Dub Jones playing the sales assistant: [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Shopping For Clothes”] The record only reached number eighty-three on the charts, and of course Kent Harris sued and was awarded joint writing credit with Leiber and Stoller. While it didn’t chart, it is usually regarded as one of the Coasters’ very best records. It’s also notable for being the first Coasters record to feature a young session musician that Leiber and Stoller were mentoring at the time. Lester Sill, who had been Leiber and Stoller’s mentor in their early years, had partnered with them in several business ventures, and was currently the Coasters’ manager, phoned them up out of the blue one day, and told them about a kid he knew who’d had a big hit with a song called “To Know Him Is To Love Him”, which he’d written for his group the Teddy Bears: [Excerpt: The Teddy Bears, “To Know Him Is To Love Him”] That record had been released on Trey Records, a new label that Sill had set up with another producer, Lee Hazlewood. Sill said that the kid in question was a huge admirer of Leiber and Stoller, and wanted to learn from them. Would they give him some kind of job with them, so he could be like an apprentice? So, as a favour to Sill, and even though they found they disliked the kid once he got to New York, they signed him to a publishing contract, gave him jobs as a session guitarist, and even let him sleep in their office or in Leiber’s spare room for a while. We’ll be hearing more about how their collaboration with Phil Spector worked out in future episodes. Around the time that “Shopping For Clothes” came out, the group became conscious that their time as a pop chart act with a teenage fanbase was probably close to its end, and they decided to do something that Carl Gardner had wanted to do for a while, and try to transition into the adult white market — the kind of people who were buying records by Tony Bennett or Andy Williams. Gardner had wanted, from the start, to be a big band singer, and his friend Johnny Otis had always encouraged him to try to sing the material he really loved, rather than the stuff he was doing with the Coasters. So eventually it was agreed that the group would do their first proper album — something recorded with the intention of being an LP, rather than a collection of singles shoved together. This record was to be titled “One By One”, and would have the group backed by an orchestra, singing old standards. Each song would have a single lead vocalist, with the others relegated to backing vocal parts. Gardner took lead on four songs, and seems to have believed that this would be his big chance to transition into being a solo singer, but it didn’t work out like that. The album wasn’t a particular success, either commercially or critically, but to the extent that anyone noticed it at all, they mostly commented on how good Cornell Gunter sounded. Gunter had always been relegated to backing roles in the group — he was an excellent singer, and a very strong physical comedian, but his sweeter voice didn’t really suit being lead on the material that made the group famous. Gunter had always admired the singer Dinah Washington, and he used to do imitations of her in the group’s shows. Getting the chance to take a solo lead on three songs, he shone with his imitation of her style: [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Easy Living”] For comparison, this is Washington’s version of the same song: [Excerpt: Dinah Washington, “Easy Living”] Despite the record showing what strong vocalists the group were, it did nothing, and by this time the group’s commercial fortunes seemed to be in terminal decline. Looking at their releases around this period, it’s noticeable as well that the Coasters stop being produced exclusively by Leiber and Stoller — several of their recordings are credited instead to Sill and Hazlewood as producers. There could be several explanations for this — it could be that Leiber and Stoller were bored of working with the Coasters, or it could be that they thought that getting in another production team might give the group a boost — after all, Sill and Hazlewood had recently had a few hits of their own, producing records like “Rebel Rouser” by Duane Eddy: [Excerpt: Duane Eddy, “Rebel Rouser”] But nothing they produced for the group had any great commercial success either. The group’s last top thirty hit was another Leiber and Stoller song — one that once again shows the more adult turn their writing for the group had taken: [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Little Egypt”] “Little Egypt” was originally the stage name for three different belly-dancers, two of whom performed in Chicago in the mid-1890s and introduced the belly dance to the American public, and another who performed in New York a few years later and was the subject of a scandal when a party she was performing at was raided and it was discovered she planned to perform nude. These dancers had been so notorious that as late as the early 1950s — nearly sixty years after their careers — there was a highly fictionalised film supposedly based on the life of one of them. Whether Leiber and Stoller were inspired by the film, or just by the many exotic dancers who continued using variations of the name, their song about a stripper would be the last time the Coasters would have a significant hit. Shortly after its release, Cornell Gunter decided to leave the group and take up an opportunity to sing in Dinah Washington’s backing group. He was replaced by Earl “Speedo” Carroll, who had previously sung with a group called the Cadillacs, whose big hit was “Speedoo”: [Excerpt: The Cadillacs, “Speedoo”] Carroll, according to Leiber and Stoller, was so concerned about job security that he kept his day job as a school janitor after joining the Coasters. Unfortunately, Gunter was soon sacked by Dinah Washington, and he decided to form his own group, and to call it the Coasters. A more accurate name might have been the Penguins, since the other three members of his new group had been members of the Penguins previously — Gunter had come out of the same stew of vocal groups as the Penguins had, and had known them for years. Gunter’s group weren’t allowed to record as the Coasters, so they made records just under Gunter’s own name, or as “Cornell Gunter and the Cornells”: [Excerpt: Cornell Gunter, “In a Dream of Love”] But while he couldn’t make records as the Coasters, his group could tour under that name — and they were cheaper than the other group. Gunter was friends with Dick Clark, and so Clark started to book Gunter’s version of the group, rather than the version that was in the studio. Not that the group in the studio was exactly the same as the group you’d see live, even if you did go and see the main group. Billy Guy decided he wanted to try a solo career, but unlike Gunter he didn’t quit the group. Instead, he had a replacement go out on the road for him, but still sang with them in the studio. None of Guy’s solo records did particularly well, and several of them ended up getting reissued under the Coasters name, even though no other Coasters were involved: [Excerpt: Billy Guy, “It Doesn’t Take Much”] The band membership kept changing, and the hits stopped altogether. Over the next few decades, pretty much everyone who’d been involved with the Coasters started up their own rival version of the group. Carl Gardner apparently retained the legal rights to the name “the Coasters”, and would sue people using it without his permission, but that didn’t stop other members performing under names like “Cornel Gunter’s Coasters”, which isn’t precisely the same. Sadly, several people associated with the Coasters ended up dying violently. King Curtis was stabbed to death in the street in 1971, outside his apartment building. Two people were making a drug deal outside his door, and he asked them to move, as he was trying to carry a heavy air-conditioning unit in. They refused, a fight broke out, and he ended up dead, aged only thirty-seven. One of Cornell Gunter’s Coasters was murdered by Gunter’s manager in 1980, after threatening to expose some of the manager’s criminal activities. And finally Gunter himself was shot dead in 1990, and his killer has never been found. These days there are three separate Coasters groups touring. “Cornell Gunter’s Coasters” is a continuation of the group that Gunter led before his death. “The Coasters” is managed by Carl Gardner’s widow. And Leon Hughes, who is the only surviving original member of the Coasters but was gone by the time of “Yakety Yak”, tours as “Leon Hughes and His Coasters”. The Coasters are now all gone, other than Hughes, but their records are still remembered. They created a sound that influenced many, many, other groups, but has never been replicated by anyone. They were often dismissed as just a comedy group, but as anyone who has ever tried it knows, making music that is both funny and musically worthwhile is one of the hardest things you can do. And making comedy music that’s still enjoyable more than sixty years later? No-one else in rock and roll has ever done that.

Episode fifty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Searchin'” by The Coasters, and at the lineup changes and conflicts that led to them becoming the perfect vehicle for Leiber and Stoller. 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 “Raunchy” by Bill Justis.   —-more—-   Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.   I’ve used multiple sources to piece together the information here. Marv Goldberg’s page is always the go-to for fifties R&B groups, and his piece on the Robins is essential. Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz tells Leiber and Stoller’s side of the story well. Yakety Yak, I Fought Back: My Life With the Coasters by Carl and Veta Gardner is a self-published, rather short, autobiography, which gives Gardner’s take on the formation of the Coasters. Those Hoodlum Friends is a Coasters fansite, with a very nineties aesthetic (frames! angelfire domain name! Actual information rather than pretty, empty, layouts!) Lonely Avenue, a biography of Doc Pomus by Alex Halberstadt, helped me with the information on Pomus. I Must Be Dreamin’: The Robins on RCA, Crown, and Spark 1953-55 compiles all the material from the last couple of years of the Robins’ career before Nunn and Gardner departed. And The Definitive Coasters is a double-CD set that has some overlap with the Robins CD, as it contains all the Robins tracks on Sparks, which were later reissued as Coasters tracks. But it also contains all the group’s classic hits. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Erratum I call “Ding Dong Ding” “Ding A Ling”. Also at one point I say “sunk” when I mean “sank”, but didn’t think it worth retaking to fix that.   Transcript It’s been a while since we last looked at the careers of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller — the last we heard of them, they had just put out a hit record with “Riot in Cell Block Number Nine” by the Robins, and they had seen Elvis Presley put out a cover version of a song they had written for Big Mama Thornton, “Hound Dog”. That hit record had caused a permanent breach between them and Johnny Otis, who had been credited as a co-writer on “Hound Dog” right up until the point it looked like becoming a big hit, but then had been eased out of the songwriting credits. But Leiber and Stoller were, with the help of Lester Sill, starting to establish themselves as some of the preeminent songwriters and producers in the R&B field. Their production career started as a result of the original “Hound Dog” — Big Mama Thornton’s version. That record had sold a million or so copies, according to the notoriously dodgy statistics of the time, but Leiber and Stoller had seen no money from it. Mike Stoller’s father, Abe, had been furious at how little they’d made for writing it, and had suggested that they should form their own record company, so they could make sure that if they had any more hits they would get their fair share of the money. Lester Sill, their business associate, suggested that as well as a record company they should form a publishing company. Abe Stoller had recently inherited some money from his father, and while Sill was broke himself, he had a friend, Jack “Jake the Snake” Levy, who would happily chip in money for an equal share of the company. So they formed Spark Records and Quintet Publishing, with Leiber, Mike Stoller, and Sill handling the music side of the business and Jake the Snake and Abe Stoller providing the money, with each of the five partners having an equal share in the companies. The first record the new label put out was a record by a duo called Willy and Ruth, in the Gene and Eunice mould. The song was a Leiber and Stoller original — as almost everything released on Spark was — although it was based around the old “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It” melody: [Excerpt: Willy and Ruth, “Come a Little Bit Closer”] But the act that had the most success on Spark, and to which Leiber and Stoller were devoting the most attention, was the Robins. Now we’ve already talked, back in the episode on “The Wallflower” about one of the Robins’ hits on Spark Records, “Riot in Cell Block Number Nine”, but Leiber and Stoller did a lot more work with them than just that one hit. They’d worked with the group before forming Spark – indeed the very first song they’d had released was “That’s What The Good Book Says” by the Robins – and were eager to sign them once they got their label up and running. While the Robins had started as a four-piece group, their lineup had slowly expanded. Grady Chapman had joined them as a fifth member in 1953, becoming their joint lead singer with Bobby Nunn, and singing leads on tracks like “Ten Days in Jail”: [Excerpt: The Robins, “Ten Days in Jail”] But Chapman himself ended up in jail, and so they took on Carl Gardner as a lead vocalist in Chapman’s place. Gardner didn’t really want to be in a vocal group — he was a solo singer, and had moved to LA to become a pop singer with the big bands. But Johnny Otis had explained to him that there was no longer much of a market for solo singers in the big band style, and that if he was going to make it as a singer in the current market he was going to have to join a vocal group. Gardner originally only joined for ten days, while Chapman was serving a short jail sentence, but then Chapman didn’t come back straight away, and by the time he did Gardner was firmly established in the group, and the Robins became a sextet for a while. While Chapman was out of the group, the rest of them had recorded not only “Riot in Cell Block Number Nine”, but also several other hits, most notably “Smokey Joe’s Cafe”, which featured Gardner on lead vocals, and was also written by Leiber and Stoller: [Excerpt: The Robins, “Smokey Joe’s Cafe”] But when Chapman returned, Gardner and Chapman started sharing the lead vocals between them. But they only had one recording session where this was the case, before problems started to surface in the group. Gardner was, by his own account at least, far more ambitious than the rest of the group, who were quite reluctant to have any greater level of success than they were already getting, while Gardner wanted to become a major star. Gardner claimed in his autobiography that one of the reasons for this reluctance was that most of the Robins were also pimps, and were making more money from that than from singing, and that they didn’t want to give up that money. Whatever the reason, there were tensions within the group, and not only about their relative levels of ambition. Gardner believed that R&B was going to be a passing fad, and was pushing for the group to go more in the big band style, which he was convinced was going to make a comeback. But there were other problems. Abe Stoller was disappointed to see that the venture he had invested in, which he’d believed was going to make everyone rich, was losing money like most other independent labels. Despite this, Leiber and Stoller continued to pump out great records for the Robins, including records like “The Hatchet Man”, a response to Billy Ward and the Dominoes’ “Sixty Minute Man”: [Excerpt: The Robins, “The Hatchet Man”] Many of the other songs they recorded had a certain amount of social commentary mixed in with the humour, as in “Framed”, which was for the time a rather pointed look at the way the law treated — and still treats — black men: [Excerpt: The Robins, “Framed”] But no matter how good the records they put out were, there was still the fact that the label wasn’t bringing in money. And Leiber and Stoller were having other problems. Stoller’s mother had died from what seemed to be suicide, while Leiber had been the driver in a car accident that had left one woman dead. Both were sunk in depression. But then Jerry Leiber bumped into Neshui Ertegun at the home of a mutual friend. Ertegun was an admirer of Leiber and Stoller’s writing, and said he wanted to get to know Leiber better — and invited Leiber along on his honeymoon. Ertegun was about to get married, and he was planning to spend much of his honeymoon playing tennis while his wife went swimming. He invited Leiber to join them on their honeymoon, so he would always have a tennis partner. The two quickly became good friends, and Ertegun made Leiber and Stoller a proposition. It was clear to Ertegun that Leiber and Stoller made great records, but that Spark Records had no understanding of how to get those records out to the public. So he put them in touch with his brother, Ahmet Ertegun, at Atlantic Records, who agreed to give Leiber and Stoller a freelance contract with Atlantic. They became, according to everything I’ve read, the first freelance production team *ever* in the US — though I strongly suspect that that depends on how you define “freelance production team”. They had contracts to make whatever records they wanted, independently of Atlantic’s organisation, and Atlantic would then release and distribute those records on their new label, Atco. And they took the Robins with them – or at least some of the Robins. The group found out that it was losing two of its members in the middle of the session for the song that was going to be the follow-up to “Smokey Joe’s Cafe”, “Cherry Lips”: [Excerpt: The Robins, “Cherry Lips”] That song was going to be a lead vocal for Carl Gardner, but just as the session started, Leiber and Stoller walked in with some legal documents. No-one has ever been clear as to what exactly those documents were — and Gardner later claimed that they were faked, while Leiber and Stoller always said that wasn’t the case, and that Gardner had already signed to Atco — but the documents were enough to extricate Gardner from the session. Grady Martin sang lead on the song instead. Carl Gardner and Bobby Nunn were now part of Leiber, Stoller, and Sill’s new project with Atco. The rest of the Robins weren’t There has been quite a bit of confusion as to exactly why Leiber and Stoller only wanted two of the Robins to come across with them. Carl Gardner claimed that Leiber and Stoller wanted to get him away from the rest of the group, who he and they considered unhealthy influences. Ty Terrell, one of the other Robins, always claimed that Leiber and Stoller wanted people who would be easier to control, and that they were paying Gardner and Nunn far less money than the other Robins wanted. And Leiber and Stoller claimed that they just thought the others weren’t very good — Mike Stoller said, “The Richard brothers and Ty Terrell didn’t sing lead at all. They usually sang ‘do-wah,’ ‘do-wah’ and had their hands up in the air.” I suspect, myself, that it’s a combination of reasons, but whatever caused the split, Gardner and Nunn were off into the new group, leaving the other four to carry on without them. Without Gardner and Nunn, the Robins continued recording for several years, but stopped having hits. To add insult to injury, many of the Robins’ last few singles on Spark were included on the first album by the new group, “the Coasters”, listed as Coasters recordings. To this day, if you buy a Coasters compilation, you’re likely to find “Riot in Cell Block #9” and “Smokey Joe’s Cafe” on there. For their new group Gardner and Nunn teamed up with new singers Leon Hughes and Billy Guy, along with the guitarist Adolph Jacobs. Billy Guy had been part of a duo known as “Bip and Bop”, who had recorded a “Ko Ko Mo” knock-off, “Ding a Ling”, backed by “Johnny’s Combo” — the name Johnny Otis had used when backing Gene and Eunice on “Ko Ko Mo”: [Excerpt: Bip and Bop”, “Ding Dong Ding”] Hughes, meanwhile, had been one of the many, many, singers who had been in the stew of different groups that had formed the Hollywood Flames, the Penguins, and the Platters. He had been in the Hollywood Flames for a while, at a time when their lineup was in constant flux — he had been in the group when Curtis Williams, who formed the Penguins, was still in the group, and when he left the Flames he was replaced by Gaynel Hodge, who had just quit the Platters. While he was in the Hollywood Flames, they recorded songs like this: [Excerpt: The Flames, “Keep on Smiling”] So this new group had the two strongest vocalists from the Robins, plus two other experienced singers. Carl Gardner was still in two minds about this, because he still wanted to be a solo artist, not part of a group, and when they came together he seems to have been under the impression that they were being formed as his backing group, rather than as a group that would include him as just one of the members. Lester Sill became the new group’s manager, and largely took charge of their career. The group became known as “the Coasters”, supposedly because they were from the West Coast but recording for a label on the East Coast. Carl Gardner would later claim that the group’s name was his idea, and that it was originally intended that they be promoted as “Carl Gardner and the Coasters”, but that when he saw the label on the first record he was horrified to see that it just said “the Coasters”, with no mention of Gardner’s name as the lead singer: [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Down in Mexico”] Everything seemed, at first, to be looking good for the Coasters. Carl Gardner was happy with the other members, as they seemed to be as hungry for success as he was, and they went out on tour, while Stoller went on holiday in Europe — and the boat he was on sunk on the way back. He and his wife survived, however, and when he got off the rescue boat he was greeted by Leiber, who informed him that Elvis Presley had just recorded “Hound Dog”, and they were going to make a lot of money as a result. But the distraction caused by that, and by the other factors in Leiber and Stoller’s life, meant that for much of the rest of the year they were occupied with things other than the Coasters. The Coasters kept touring, and Leiber and Stoller relocated to New York, where they started making records for other Atlantic acts. They started a relationship with the Drifters that would last for years, and through many different lineups of the group. This one, by the Drifters’ tenth lineup, became a top ten R&B single: [Excerpt: The Drifters, “Fools Fall in Love”] They also recorded “Lucky Lips” with Ruth Brown: [Excerpt: Ruth Brown, “Lucky Lips”] That became her first single to hit the pop charts since “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean”, four years earlier. But Leiber and Stoller were still going through all sorts of personal problems, ping-ponging from coast to coast, and apart from each other for months at a time. At one point Leiber relocated again, to LA, and Stoller stayed behind in New York, playing piano on records like Big Joe Turner’s “Teenage Letter”; [Excerpt: Big Joe Turner, “Teenage Letter”] But eventually they were together for long enough to write more songs for the Coasters. Their next work with the group was a double-sided smash hit. “Young Blood”, was a collaboration with another writer. Doc Pomus’ birth name was Jerome Felder, but he’d taken on his stage name when he decided to become a blues shouter in the style of Big Joe Turner or Jimmy Rushing. Pomus was not a normal blues shouter — he was an extremely fat Jewish man, who used crutches to get around as his legs were paralysed with post-polio syndrome. Pomus had been recording for labels like Chess since 1944, and many of the records were very good: [Excerpt: Doc Pomus, “Send For the Doctor”] Pomus had become a central figure in the group of musicians around Atlantic Records, performing regularly with people like Mickey Baker, King Curtis, and the jazz vibraphone player Milt Jackson. But no matter how many records he made, he’d not had any success as a singer, and he’d fairly recently decided to move into songwriting instead. The year before, he’d written “Lonely Avenue”, which had been a minor hit for Ray Charles: [Excerpt: Ray Charles, “Lonely Avenue”] But he didn’t really understand this new rock and roll music — he was a fan of jump blues, and swing bands like Count Basie’s, not this newer music aimed at a younger audience, and so his songwriting hadn’t been massively successful either. He was casting around for a songwriting partner who did understand the new music, so far without success. But Leiber and Stoller liked Pomus a lot — not only did they like “Lonely Avenue” and the records he’d been making recently, but Stoller even had fond memories of a radio jingle Pomus had written and recorded for a pants shop in Brooklyn, which he remembered from growing up. Pomus had written a song called “Young Blood”, which he thought had potential, but it wasn’t quite right. Depending on what version of events you believe, Leiber and Stoller either radically reworked the song, or threw away everything except the title, which they thought had immense commercial potential, and wrote a whole new song around it. Either way, the song was a huge success, and Pomus was grateful for his share of the credit and royalties, while Leiber and Stoller were happy to give someone they admired a boost. [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Young Blood”] “Young Blood” was ostensibly the A-side of the single that resulted, but the record that actually made the biggest splash was the B-side, “Searchin'”, which had Billy Guy singing lead. The song was one of Leiber and Stoller’s best, and showed Leiber’s sense of humour to its best effect, as Guy sang about how he was going to be a better detective than Charlie Chan or Sam Spade in tracking down his missing girlfriend: [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Searchin'”] On this session, Leon Hughes wasn’t present — I’ve not seen any explanation from anyone involved as to why he was absent, but his place was taken by Young Jessie. Young Jessie was a singer who had previously been a member of the Flairs, with Richard Berry, and had later recorded a handful of solo records for Modern Records, and had signed a contract with Leiber and Stoller. Around the time of the session Young Jessie released this, with Leiber and Stoller producing, for Atco: [Excerpt: Young Jessie, “Shuffle in the Gravel”] Despite what some people have said, Young Jessie never became a full-time member of the Coasters (though he did later tour with a group calling itself the Coasters, led by Leon Hughes) and the original lineup of the group continued touring for a while. After the success of “Searchin'” and “Young Blood”, Atco released a series of flop singles, all of which were recorded by the original lineup, and all of which, like the hit, featured one side with a Carl Gardner lead vocal and the other with a Billy Guy lead. Some of these, like “Idol With the Golden Head”, were classic Leiber and Stoller story songs along the lines of the earlier Robins records, but they didn’t yet, quite, have the classic Coasters sound: [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Idol With the Golden Head”] But then, towards the end of the year, the group split up. It’s hard to tell exactly what happened, as most of the stories about who left the group and why have been told by people who were involved, most of whom wanted to bolster their own later legal cases for ownership of the Coasters name. But whatever actually happened, Leon Hughes and Bobby Nunn were out of the group, suddenly. Depending on which version of the story you believe, they either got tired of the road and wanted to see their families, or they were sacked mid-tour because of their behaviour. For one recording session, Tommy Evans from the Drifters substituted for Hughes and Nunn, until Lester Sill went out and found two replacement members, Cornell Gunter and Dub Jones. We’ve met Gunter before — he was part of the collection of singers who were all in half a dozen different groups, centered around Gaynel Hodge. He had been an early member of the Platters, and had also been in the Flairs with Richard Berry and Young Jessie, and had recorded a handful of solo singles: [Excerpt: Cornell Gunter, “Neighborhood Dance”] Gunter was also unusual for the time in being an out gay man, and was initially apprehensive about joining the group in case the other members were homophobic. For the time, they weren’t especially — Carl Gardner apparently felt the need to let Gunter know that he was straight himself and wouldn’t be interested, but they took a live and let live attitude, and Gunter quickly became friendly with the rest of the group. Dub Jones, meanwhile, had been the bass singer for the Cadets, and had done the spoken-word vocals on their biggest hit, “Stranded in the Jungle”: [Excerpt: The Cadets, “Stranded in the Jungle”] Jones would quickly become an integral part of the group’s sound. This new lineup met for the first time on the plane to a gig in Hawaii, and Gardner at least was very worried that these new singers would not be able to fit in with the routines the others had already worked out. He had no need to worry. It only took one quick rehearsal before the show for Gunter and Jones to slot in perfectly, and the classic lineup of the Coasters was now in place. Leiber and Stoller loved working with the Coasters, but it had been almost a year since they’d written the group a hit at this point. “Hound Dog” had been a big enough success for Elvis that his management team wanted more from Leiber and Stoller, and fast, and most of their most commercial work in 1957 went to Elvis. But that changed in 1958, and the Coasters were the beneficiaries. We’ll be picking up with Leiber, Stoller, and Elvis, in a few weeks’ time. And a few weeks after that, we’ll see what happened when they got back into the studio with the Coasters…  

Episode fifty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Searchin'” by The Coasters, and at the lineup changes and conflicts that led to them becoming the perfect vehicle for Leiber and Stoller. 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 “Raunchy” by Bill Justis.   —-more—-   Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.   I’ve used multiple sources to piece together the information here. Marv Goldberg’s page is always the go-to for fifties R&B groups, and his piece on the Robins is essential. Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz tells Leiber and Stoller’s side of the story well. Yakety Yak, I Fought Back: My Life With the Coasters by Carl and Veta Gardner is a self-published, rather short, autobiography, which gives Gardner’s take on the formation of the Coasters. Those Hoodlum Friends is a Coasters fansite, with a very nineties aesthetic (frames! angelfire domain name! Actual information rather than pretty, empty, layouts!) Lonely Avenue, a biography of Doc Pomus by Alex Halberstadt, helped me with the information on Pomus. I Must Be Dreamin’: The Robins on RCA, Crown, and Spark 1953-55 compiles all the material from the last couple of years of the Robins’ career before Nunn and Gardner departed. And The Definitive Coasters is a double-CD set that has some overlap with the Robins CD, as it contains all the Robins tracks on Sparks, which were later reissued as Coasters tracks. But it also contains all the group’s classic hits. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Erratum I call “Ding Dong Ding” “Ding A Ling”. Also at one point I say “sunk” when I mean “sank”, but didn’t think it worth retaking to fix that.   Transcript It’s been a while since we last looked at the careers of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller — the last we heard of them, they had just put out a hit record with “Riot in Cell Block Number Nine” by the Robins, and they had seen Elvis Presley put out a cover version of a song they had written for Big Mama Thornton, “Hound Dog”. That hit record had caused a permanent breach between them and Johnny Otis, who had been credited as a co-writer on “Hound Dog” right up until the point it looked like becoming a big hit, but then had been eased out of the songwriting credits. But Leiber and Stoller were, with the help of Lester Sill, starting to establish themselves as some of the preeminent songwriters and producers in the R&B field. Their production career started as a result of the original “Hound Dog” — Big Mama Thornton’s version. That record had sold a million or so copies, according to the notoriously dodgy statistics of the time, but Leiber and Stoller had seen no money from it. Mike Stoller’s father, Abe, had been furious at how little they’d made for writing it, and had suggested that they should form their own record company, so they could make sure that if they had any more hits they would get their fair share of the money. Lester Sill, their business associate, suggested that as well as a record company they should form a publishing company. Abe Stoller had recently inherited some money from his father, and while Sill was broke himself, he had a friend, Jack “Jake the Snake” Levy, who would happily chip in money for an equal share of the company. So they formed Spark Records and Quintet Publishing, with Leiber, Mike Stoller, and Sill handling the music side of the business and Jake the Snake and Abe Stoller providing the money, with each of the five partners having an equal share in the companies. The first record the new label put out was a record by a duo called Willy and Ruth, in the Gene and Eunice mould. The song was a Leiber and Stoller original — as almost everything released on Spark was — although it was based around the old “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It” melody: [Excerpt: Willy and Ruth, “Come a Little Bit Closer”] But the act that had the most success on Spark, and to which Leiber and Stoller were devoting the most attention, was the Robins. Now we’ve already talked, back in the episode on “The Wallflower” about one of the Robins’ hits on Spark Records, “Riot in Cell Block Number Nine”, but Leiber and Stoller did a lot more work with them than just that one hit. They’d worked with the group before forming Spark – indeed the very first song they’d had released was “That’s What The Good Book Says” by the Robins – and were eager to sign them once they got their label up and running. While the Robins had started as a four-piece group, their lineup had slowly expanded. Grady Chapman had joined them as a fifth member in 1953, becoming their joint lead singer with Bobby Nunn, and singing leads on tracks like “Ten Days in Jail”: [Excerpt: The Robins, “Ten Days in Jail”] But Chapman himself ended up in jail, and so they took on Carl Gardner as a lead vocalist in Chapman’s place. Gardner didn’t really want to be in a vocal group — he was a solo singer, and had moved to LA to become a pop singer with the big bands. But Johnny Otis had explained to him that there was no longer much of a market for solo singers in the big band style, and that if he was going to make it as a singer in the current market he was going to have to join a vocal group. Gardner originally only joined for ten days, while Chapman was serving a short jail sentence, but then Chapman didn’t come back straight away, and by the time he did Gardner was firmly established in the group, and the Robins became a sextet for a while. While Chapman was out of the group, the rest of them had recorded not only “Riot in Cell Block Number Nine”, but also several other hits, most notably “Smokey Joe’s Cafe”, which featured Gardner on lead vocals, and was also written by Leiber and Stoller: [Excerpt: The Robins, “Smokey Joe’s Cafe”] But when Chapman returned, Gardner and Chapman started sharing the lead vocals between them. But they only had one recording session where this was the case, before problems started to surface in the group. Gardner was, by his own account at least, far more ambitious than the rest of the group, who were quite reluctant to have any greater level of success than they were already getting, while Gardner wanted to become a major star. Gardner claimed in his autobiography that one of the reasons for this reluctance was that most of the Robins were also pimps, and were making more money from that than from singing, and that they didn’t want to give up that money. Whatever the reason, there were tensions within the group, and not only about their relative levels of ambition. Gardner believed that R&B was going to be a passing fad, and was pushing for the group to go more in the big band style, which he was convinced was going to make a comeback. But there were other problems. Abe Stoller was disappointed to see that the venture he had invested in, which he’d believed was going to make everyone rich, was losing money like most other independent labels. Despite this, Leiber and Stoller continued to pump out great records for the Robins, including records like “The Hatchet Man”, a response to Billy Ward and the Dominoes’ “Sixty Minute Man”: [Excerpt: The Robins, “The Hatchet Man”] Many of the other songs they recorded had a certain amount of social commentary mixed in with the humour, as in “Framed”, which was for the time a rather pointed look at the way the law treated — and still treats — black men: [Excerpt: The Robins, “Framed”] But no matter how good the records they put out were, there was still the fact that the label wasn’t bringing in money. And Leiber and Stoller were having other problems. Stoller’s mother had died from what seemed to be suicide, while Leiber had been the driver in a car accident that had left one woman dead. Both were sunk in depression. But then Jerry Leiber bumped into Neshui Ertegun at the home of a mutual friend. Ertegun was an admirer of Leiber and Stoller’s writing, and said he wanted to get to know Leiber better — and invited Leiber along on his honeymoon. Ertegun was about to get married, and he was planning to spend much of his honeymoon playing tennis while his wife went swimming. He invited Leiber to join them on their honeymoon, so he would always have a tennis partner. The two quickly became good friends, and Ertegun made Leiber and Stoller a proposition. It was clear to Ertegun that Leiber and Stoller made great records, but that Spark Records had no understanding of how to get those records out to the public. So he put them in touch with his brother, Ahmet Ertegun, at Atlantic Records, who agreed to give Leiber and Stoller a freelance contract with Atlantic. They became, according to everything I’ve read, the first freelance production team *ever* in the US — though I strongly suspect that that depends on how you define “freelance production team”. They had contracts to make whatever records they wanted, independently of Atlantic’s organisation, and Atlantic would then release and distribute those records on their new label, Atco. And they took the Robins with them – or at least some of the Robins. The group found out that it was losing two of its members in the middle of the session for the song that was going to be the follow-up to “Smokey Joe’s Cafe”, “Cherry Lips”: [Excerpt: The Robins, “Cherry Lips”] That song was going to be a lead vocal for Carl Gardner, but just as the session started, Leiber and Stoller walked in with some legal documents. No-one has ever been clear as to what exactly those documents were — and Gardner later claimed that they were faked, while Leiber and Stoller always said that wasn’t the case, and that Gardner had already signed to Atco — but the documents were enough to extricate Gardner from the session. Grady Martin sang lead on the song instead. Carl Gardner and Bobby Nunn were now part of Leiber, Stoller, and Sill’s new project with Atco. The rest of the Robins weren’t There has been quite a bit of confusion as to exactly why Leiber and Stoller only wanted two of the Robins to come across with them. Carl Gardner claimed that Leiber and Stoller wanted to get him away from the rest of the group, who he and they considered unhealthy influences. Ty Terrell, one of the other Robins, always claimed that Leiber and Stoller wanted people who would be easier to control, and that they were paying Gardner and Nunn far less money than the other Robins wanted. And Leiber and Stoller claimed that they just thought the others weren’t very good — Mike Stoller said, “The Richard brothers and Ty Terrell didn’t sing lead at all. They usually sang ‘do-wah,’ ‘do-wah’ and had their hands up in the air.” I suspect, myself, that it’s a combination of reasons, but whatever caused the split, Gardner and Nunn were off into the new group, leaving the other four to carry on without them. Without Gardner and Nunn, the Robins continued recording for several years, but stopped having hits. To add insult to injury, many of the Robins’ last few singles on Spark were included on the first album by the new group, “the Coasters”, listed as Coasters recordings. To this day, if you buy a Coasters compilation, you’re likely to find “Riot in Cell Block #9” and “Smokey Joe’s Cafe” on there. For their new group Gardner and Nunn teamed up with new singers Leon Hughes and Billy Guy, along with the guitarist Adolph Jacobs. Billy Guy had been part of a duo known as “Bip and Bop”, who had recorded a “Ko Ko Mo” knock-off, “Ding a Ling”, backed by “Johnny’s Combo” — the name Johnny Otis had used when backing Gene and Eunice on “Ko Ko Mo”: [Excerpt: Bip and Bop”, “Ding Dong Ding”] Hughes, meanwhile, had been one of the many, many, singers who had been in the stew of different groups that had formed the Hollywood Flames, the Penguins, and the Platters. He had been in the Hollywood Flames for a while, at a time when their lineup was in constant flux — he had been in the group when Curtis Williams, who formed the Penguins, was still in the group, and when he left the Flames he was replaced by Gaynel Hodge, who had just quit the Platters. While he was in the Hollywood Flames, they recorded songs like this: [Excerpt: The Flames, “Keep on Smiling”] So this new group had the two strongest vocalists from the Robins, plus two other experienced singers. Carl Gardner was still in two minds about this, because he still wanted to be a solo artist, not part of a group, and when they came together he seems to have been under the impression that they were being formed as his backing group, rather than as a group that would include him as just one of the members. Lester Sill became the new group’s manager, and largely took charge of their career. The group became known as “the Coasters”, supposedly because they were from the West Coast but recording for a label on the East Coast. Carl Gardner would later claim that the group’s name was his idea, and that it was originally intended that they be promoted as “Carl Gardner and the Coasters”, but that when he saw the label on the first record he was horrified to see that it just said “the Coasters”, with no mention of Gardner’s name as the lead singer: [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Down in Mexico”] Everything seemed, at first, to be looking good for the Coasters. Carl Gardner was happy with the other members, as they seemed to be as hungry for success as he was, and they went out on tour, while Stoller went on holiday in Europe — and the boat he was on sunk on the way back. He and his wife survived, however, and when he got off the rescue boat he was greeted by Leiber, who informed him that Elvis Presley had just recorded “Hound Dog”, and they were going to make a lot of money as a result. But the distraction caused by that, and by the other factors in Leiber and Stoller’s life, meant that for much of the rest of the year they were occupied with things other than the Coasters. The Coasters kept touring, and Leiber and Stoller relocated to New York, where they started making records for other Atlantic acts. They started a relationship with the Drifters that would last for years, and through many different lineups of the group. This one, by the Drifters’ tenth lineup, became a top ten R&B single: [Excerpt: The Drifters, “Fools Fall in Love”] They also recorded “Lucky Lips” with Ruth Brown: [Excerpt: Ruth Brown, “Lucky Lips”] That became her first single to hit the pop charts since “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean”, four years earlier. But Leiber and Stoller were still going through all sorts of personal problems, ping-ponging from coast to coast, and apart from each other for months at a time. At one point Leiber relocated again, to LA, and Stoller stayed behind in New York, playing piano on records like Big Joe Turner’s “Teenage Letter”; [Excerpt: Big Joe Turner, “Teenage Letter”] But eventually they were together for long enough to write more songs for the Coasters. Their next work with the group was a double-sided smash hit. “Young Blood”, was a collaboration with another writer. Doc Pomus’ birth name was Jerome Felder, but he’d taken on his stage name when he decided to become a blues shouter in the style of Big Joe Turner or Jimmy Rushing. Pomus was not a normal blues shouter — he was an extremely fat Jewish man, who used crutches to get around as his legs were paralysed with post-polio syndrome. Pomus had been recording for labels like Chess since 1944, and many of the records were very good: [Excerpt: Doc Pomus, “Send For the Doctor”] Pomus had become a central figure in the group of musicians around Atlantic Records, performing regularly with people like Mickey Baker, King Curtis, and the jazz vibraphone player Milt Jackson. But no matter how many records he made, he’d not had any success as a singer, and he’d fairly recently decided to move into songwriting instead. The year before, he’d written “Lonely Avenue”, which had been a minor hit for Ray Charles: [Excerpt: Ray Charles, “Lonely Avenue”] But he didn’t really understand this new rock and roll music — he was a fan of jump blues, and swing bands like Count Basie’s, not this newer music aimed at a younger audience, and so his songwriting hadn’t been massively successful either. He was casting around for a songwriting partner who did understand the new music, so far without success. But Leiber and Stoller liked Pomus a lot — not only did they like “Lonely Avenue” and the records he’d been making recently, but Stoller even had fond memories of a radio jingle Pomus had written and recorded for a pants shop in Brooklyn, which he remembered from growing up. Pomus had written a song called “Young Blood”, which he thought had potential, but it wasn’t quite right. Depending on what version of events you believe, Leiber and Stoller either radically reworked the song, or threw away everything except the title, which they thought had immense commercial potential, and wrote a whole new song around it. Either way, the song was a huge success, and Pomus was grateful for his share of the credit and royalties, while Leiber and Stoller were happy to give someone they admired a boost. [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Young Blood”] “Young Blood” was ostensibly the A-side of the single that resulted, but the record that actually made the biggest splash was the B-side, “Searchin'”, which had Billy Guy singing lead. The song was one of Leiber and Stoller’s best, and showed Leiber’s sense of humour to its best effect, as Guy sang about how he was going to be a better detective than Charlie Chan or Sam Spade in tracking down his missing girlfriend: [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Searchin'”] On this session, Leon Hughes wasn’t present — I’ve not seen any explanation from anyone involved as to why he was absent, but his place was taken by Young Jessie. Young Jessie was a singer who had previously been a member of the Flairs, with Richard Berry, and had later recorded a handful of solo records for Modern Records, and had signed a contract with Leiber and Stoller. Around the time of the session Young Jessie released this, with Leiber and Stoller producing, for Atco: [Excerpt: Young Jessie, “Shuffle in the Gravel”] Despite what some people have said, Young Jessie never became a full-time member of the Coasters (though he did later tour with a group calling itself the Coasters, led by Leon Hughes) and the original lineup of the group continued touring for a while. After the success of “Searchin'” and “Young Blood”, Atco released a series of flop singles, all of which were recorded by the original lineup, and all of which, like the hit, featured one side with a Carl Gardner lead vocal and the other with a Billy Guy lead. Some of these, like “Idol With the Golden Head”, were classic Leiber and Stoller story songs along the lines of the earlier Robins records, but they didn’t yet, quite, have the classic Coasters sound: [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Idol With the Golden Head”] But then, towards the end of the year, the group split up. It’s hard to tell exactly what happened, as most of the stories about who left the group and why have been told by people who were involved, most of whom wanted to bolster their own later legal cases for ownership of the Coasters name. But whatever actually happened, Leon Hughes and Bobby Nunn were out of the group, suddenly. Depending on which version of the story you believe, they either got tired of the road and wanted to see their families, or they were sacked mid-tour because of their behaviour. For one recording session, Tommy Evans from the Drifters substituted for Hughes and Nunn, until Lester Sill went out and found two replacement members, Cornell Gunter and Dub Jones. We’ve met Gunter before — he was part of the collection of singers who were all in half a dozen different groups, centered around Gaynel Hodge. He had been an early member of the Platters, and had also been in the Flairs with Richard Berry and Young Jessie, and had recorded a handful of solo singles: [Excerpt: Cornell Gunter, “Neighborhood Dance”] Gunter was also unusual for the time in being an out gay man, and was initially apprehensive about joining the group in case the other members were homophobic. For the time, they weren’t especially — Carl Gardner apparently felt the need to let Gunter know that he was straight himself and wouldn’t be interested, but they took a live and let live attitude, and Gunter quickly became friendly with the rest of the group. Dub Jones, meanwhile, had been the bass singer for the Cadets, and had done the spoken-word vocals on their biggest hit, “Stranded in the Jungle”: [Excerpt: The Cadets, “Stranded in the Jungle”] Jones would quickly become an integral part of the group’s sound. This new lineup met for the first time on the plane to a gig in Hawaii, and Gardner at least was very worried that these new singers would not be able to fit in with the routines the others had already worked out. He had no need to worry. It only took one quick rehearsal before the show for Gunter and Jones to slot in perfectly, and the classic lineup of the Coasters was now in place. Leiber and Stoller loved working with the Coasters, but it had been almost a year since they’d written the group a hit at this point. “Hound Dog” had been a big enough success for Elvis that his management team wanted more from Leiber and Stoller, and fast, and most of their most commercial work in 1957 went to Elvis. But that changed in 1958, and the Coasters were the beneficiaries. We’ll be picking up with Leiber, Stoller, and Elvis, in a few weeks’ time. And a few weeks after that, we’ll see what happened when they got back into the studio with the Coasters…  

Episode fifty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Searchin'" by The Coasters, and at the lineup changes and conflicts that led to them becoming the perfect vehicle for Leiber and Stoller. 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 "Raunchy" by Bill Justis.   ----more----   Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.   I've used multiple sources to piece together the information here. Marv Goldberg's page is always the go-to for fifties R&B groups, and his piece on the Robins is essential. Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz tells Leiber and Stoller's side of the story well. Yakety Yak, I Fought Back: My Life With the Coasters by Carl and Veta Gardner is a self-published, rather short, autobiography, which gives Gardner's take on the formation of the Coasters. Those Hoodlum Friends is a Coasters fansite, with a very nineties aesthetic (frames! angelfire domain name! Actual information rather than pretty, empty, layouts!) Lonely Avenue, a biography of Doc Pomus by Alex Halberstadt, helped me with the information on Pomus. I Must Be Dreamin': The Robins on RCA, Crown, and Spark 1953-55 compiles all the material from the last couple of years of the Robins' career before Nunn and Gardner departed. And The Definitive Coasters is a double-CD set that has some overlap with the Robins CD, as it contains all the Robins tracks on Sparks, which were later reissued as Coasters tracks. But it also contains all the group's classic hits. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Erratum I call “Ding Dong Ding” “Ding A Ling”. Also at one point I say “sunk” when I mean “sank”, but didn't think it worth retaking to fix that.   Transcript It's been a while since we last looked at the careers of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller -- the last we heard of them, they had just put out a hit record with "Riot in Cell Block Number Nine" by the Robins, and they had seen Elvis Presley put out a cover version of a song they had written for Big Mama Thornton, "Hound Dog". That hit record had caused a permanent breach between them and Johnny Otis, who had been credited as a co-writer on "Hound Dog" right up until the point it looked like becoming a big hit, but then had been eased out of the songwriting credits. But Leiber and Stoller were, with the help of Lester Sill, starting to establish themselves as some of the preeminent songwriters and producers in the R&B field. Their production career started as a result of the original "Hound Dog" -- Big Mama Thornton's version. That record had sold a million or so copies, according to the notoriously dodgy statistics of the time, but Leiber and Stoller had seen no money from it. Mike Stoller's father, Abe, had been furious at how little they'd made for writing it, and had suggested that they should form their own record company, so they could make sure that if they had any more hits they would get their fair share of the money. Lester Sill, their business associate, suggested that as well as a record company they should form a publishing company. Abe Stoller had recently inherited some money from his father, and while Sill was broke himself, he had a friend, Jack "Jake the Snake" Levy, who would happily chip in money for an equal share of the company. So they formed Spark Records and Quintet Publishing, with Leiber, Mike Stoller, and Sill handling the music side of the business and Jake the Snake and Abe Stoller providing the money, with each of the five partners having an equal share in the companies. The first record the new label put out was a record by a duo called Willy and Ruth, in the Gene and Eunice mould. The song was a Leiber and Stoller original -- as almost everything released on Spark was -- although it was based around the old "My Bucket's Got a Hole in It" melody: [Excerpt: Willy and Ruth, "Come a Little Bit Closer"] But the act that had the most success on Spark, and to which Leiber and Stoller were devoting the most attention, was the Robins. Now we've already talked, back in the episode on "The Wallflower" about one of the Robins' hits on Spark Records, "Riot in Cell Block Number Nine", but Leiber and Stoller did a lot more work with them than just that one hit. They'd worked with the group before forming Spark – indeed the very first song they'd had released was “That's What The Good Book Says” by the Robins – and were eager to sign them once they got their label up and running. While the Robins had started as a four-piece group, their lineup had slowly expanded. Grady Chapman had joined them as a fifth member in 1953, becoming their joint lead singer with Bobby Nunn, and singing leads on tracks like "Ten Days in Jail": [Excerpt: The Robins, "Ten Days in Jail"] But Chapman himself ended up in jail, and so they took on Carl Gardner as a lead vocalist in Chapman's place. Gardner didn't really want to be in a vocal group -- he was a solo singer, and had moved to LA to become a pop singer with the big bands. But Johnny Otis had explained to him that there was no longer much of a market for solo singers in the big band style, and that if he was going to make it as a singer in the current market he was going to have to join a vocal group. Gardner originally only joined for ten days, while Chapman was serving a short jail sentence, but then Chapman didn't come back straight away, and by the time he did Gardner was firmly established in the group, and the Robins became a sextet for a while. While Chapman was out of the group, the rest of them had recorded not only "Riot in Cell Block Number Nine", but also several other hits, most notably "Smokey Joe's Cafe", which featured Gardner on lead vocals, and was also written by Leiber and Stoller: [Excerpt: The Robins, "Smokey Joe's Cafe"] But when Chapman returned, Gardner and Chapman started sharing the lead vocals between them. But they only had one recording session where this was the case, before problems started to surface in the group. Gardner was, by his own account at least, far more ambitious than the rest of the group, who were quite reluctant to have any greater level of success than they were already getting, while Gardner wanted to become a major star. Gardner claimed in his autobiography that one of the reasons for this reluctance was that most of the Robins were also pimps, and were making more money from that than from singing, and that they didn't want to give up that money. Whatever the reason, there were tensions within the group, and not only about their relative levels of ambition. Gardner believed that R&B was going to be a passing fad, and was pushing for the group to go more in the big band style, which he was convinced was going to make a comeback. But there were other problems. Abe Stoller was disappointed to see that the venture he had invested in, which he'd believed was going to make everyone rich, was losing money like most other independent labels. Despite this, Leiber and Stoller continued to pump out great records for the Robins, including records like "The Hatchet Man", a response to Billy Ward and the Dominoes' "Sixty Minute Man": [Excerpt: The Robins, "The Hatchet Man"] Many of the other songs they recorded had a certain amount of social commentary mixed in with the humour, as in "Framed", which was for the time a rather pointed look at the way the law treated -- and still treats -- black men: [Excerpt: The Robins, "Framed"] But no matter how good the records they put out were, there was still the fact that the label wasn't bringing in money. And Leiber and Stoller were having other problems. Stoller's mother had died from what seemed to be suicide, while Leiber had been the driver in a car accident that had left one woman dead. Both were sunk in depression. But then Jerry Leiber bumped into Neshui Ertegun at the home of a mutual friend. Ertegun was an admirer of Leiber and Stoller's writing, and said he wanted to get to know Leiber better -- and invited Leiber along on his honeymoon. Ertegun was about to get married, and he was planning to spend much of his honeymoon playing tennis while his wife went swimming. He invited Leiber to join them on their honeymoon, so he would always have a tennis partner. The two quickly became good friends, and Ertegun made Leiber and Stoller a proposition. It was clear to Ertegun that Leiber and Stoller made great records, but that Spark Records had no understanding of how to get those records out to the public. So he put them in touch with his brother, Ahmet Ertegun, at Atlantic Records, who agreed to give Leiber and Stoller a freelance contract with Atlantic. They became, according to everything I've read, the first freelance production team *ever* in the US -- though I strongly suspect that that depends on how you define "freelance production team". They had contracts to make whatever records they wanted, independently of Atlantic's organisation, and Atlantic would then release and distribute those records on their new label, Atco. And they took the Robins with them – or at least some of the Robins. The group found out that it was losing two of its members in the middle of the session for the song that was going to be the follow-up to “Smokey Joe's Cafe”, "Cherry Lips": [Excerpt: The Robins, "Cherry Lips"] That song was going to be a lead vocal for Carl Gardner, but just as the session started, Leiber and Stoller walked in with some legal documents. No-one has ever been clear as to what exactly those documents were -- and Gardner later claimed that they were faked, while Leiber and Stoller always said that wasn't the case, and that Gardner had already signed to Atco -- but the documents were enough to extricate Gardner from the session. Grady Martin sang lead on the song instead. Carl Gardner and Bobby Nunn were now part of Leiber, Stoller, and Sill's new project with Atco. The rest of the Robins weren't There has been quite a bit of confusion as to exactly why Leiber and Stoller only wanted two of the Robins to come across with them. Carl Gardner claimed that Leiber and Stoller wanted to get him away from the rest of the group, who he and they considered unhealthy influences. Ty Terrell, one of the other Robins, always claimed that Leiber and Stoller wanted people who would be easier to control, and that they were paying Gardner and Nunn far less money than the other Robins wanted. And Leiber and Stoller claimed that they just thought the others weren't very good -- Mike Stoller said, "The Richard brothers and Ty Terrell didn't sing lead at all. They usually sang 'do-wah,' 'do-wah' and had their hands up in the air." I suspect, myself, that it's a combination of reasons, but whatever caused the split, Gardner and Nunn were off into the new group, leaving the other four to carry on without them. Without Gardner and Nunn, the Robins continued recording for several years, but stopped having hits. To add insult to injury, many of the Robins' last few singles on Spark were included on the first album by the new group, "the Coasters", listed as Coasters recordings. To this day, if you buy a Coasters compilation, you're likely to find "Riot in Cell Block #9" and "Smokey Joe's Cafe" on there. For their new group Gardner and Nunn teamed up with new singers Leon Hughes and Billy Guy, along with the guitarist Adolph Jacobs. Billy Guy had been part of a duo known as "Bip and Bop", who had recorded a "Ko Ko Mo" knock-off, "Ding a Ling", backed by "Johnny's Combo" -- the name Johnny Otis had used when backing Gene and Eunice on "Ko Ko Mo": [Excerpt: Bip and Bop", "Ding Dong Ding"] Hughes, meanwhile, had been one of the many, many, singers who had been in the stew of different groups that had formed the Hollywood Flames, the Penguins, and the Platters. He had been in the Hollywood Flames for a while, at a time when their lineup was in constant flux -- he had been in the group when Curtis Williams, who formed the Penguins, was still in the group, and when he left the Flames he was replaced by Gaynel Hodge, who had just quit the Platters. While he was in the Hollywood Flames, they recorded songs like this: [Excerpt: The Flames, "Keep on Smiling"] So this new group had the two strongest vocalists from the Robins, plus two other experienced singers. Carl Gardner was still in two minds about this, because he still wanted to be a solo artist, not part of a group, and when they came together he seems to have been under the impression that they were being formed as his backing group, rather than as a group that would include him as just one of the members. Lester Sill became the new group's manager, and largely took charge of their career. The group became known as "the Coasters", supposedly because they were from the West Coast but recording for a label on the East Coast. Carl Gardner would later claim that the group's name was his idea, and that it was originally intended that they be promoted as "Carl Gardner and the Coasters", but that when he saw the label on the first record he was horrified to see that it just said "the Coasters", with no mention of Gardner's name as the lead singer: [Excerpt: The Coasters, "Down in Mexico"] Everything seemed, at first, to be looking good for the Coasters. Carl Gardner was happy with the other members, as they seemed to be as hungry for success as he was, and they went out on tour, while Stoller went on holiday in Europe -- and the boat he was on sunk on the way back. He and his wife survived, however, and when he got off the rescue boat he was greeted by Leiber, who informed him that Elvis Presley had just recorded "Hound Dog", and they were going to make a lot of money as a result. But the distraction caused by that, and by the other factors in Leiber and Stoller's life, meant that for much of the rest of the year they were occupied with things other than the Coasters. The Coasters kept touring, and Leiber and Stoller relocated to New York, where they started making records for other Atlantic acts. They started a relationship with the Drifters that would last for years, and through many different lineups of the group. This one, by the Drifters' tenth lineup, became a top ten R&B single: [Excerpt: The Drifters, "Fools Fall in Love"] They also recorded "Lucky Lips" with Ruth Brown: [Excerpt: Ruth Brown, "Lucky Lips"] That became her first single to hit the pop charts since "Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean", four years earlier. But Leiber and Stoller were still going through all sorts of personal problems, ping-ponging from coast to coast, and apart from each other for months at a time. At one point Leiber relocated again, to LA, and Stoller stayed behind in New York, playing piano on records like Big Joe Turner's "Teenage Letter"; [Excerpt: Big Joe Turner, "Teenage Letter"] But eventually they were together for long enough to write more songs for the Coasters. Their next work with the group was a double-sided smash hit. "Young Blood", was a collaboration with another writer. Doc Pomus' birth name was Jerome Felder, but he'd taken on his stage name when he decided to become a blues shouter in the style of Big Joe Turner or Jimmy Rushing. Pomus was not a normal blues shouter -- he was an extremely fat Jewish man, who used crutches to get around as his legs were paralysed with post-polio syndrome. Pomus had been recording for labels like Chess since 1944, and many of the records were very good: [Excerpt: Doc Pomus, "Send For the Doctor"] Pomus had become a central figure in the group of musicians around Atlantic Records, performing regularly with people like Mickey Baker, King Curtis, and the jazz vibraphone player Milt Jackson. But no matter how many records he made, he'd not had any success as a singer, and he'd fairly recently decided to move into songwriting instead. The year before, he'd written "Lonely Avenue", which had been a minor hit for Ray Charles: [Excerpt: Ray Charles, "Lonely Avenue"] But he didn't really understand this new rock and roll music -- he was a fan of jump blues, and swing bands like Count Basie's, not this newer music aimed at a younger audience, and so his songwriting hadn't been massively successful either. He was casting around for a songwriting partner who did understand the new music, so far without success. But Leiber and Stoller liked Pomus a lot -- not only did they like "Lonely Avenue" and the records he'd been making recently, but Stoller even had fond memories of a radio jingle Pomus had written and recorded for a pants shop in Brooklyn, which he remembered from growing up. Pomus had written a song called "Young Blood", which he thought had potential, but it wasn't quite right. Depending on what version of events you believe, Leiber and Stoller either radically reworked the song, or threw away everything except the title, which they thought had immense commercial potential, and wrote a whole new song around it. Either way, the song was a huge success, and Pomus was grateful for his share of the credit and royalties, while Leiber and Stoller were happy to give someone they admired a boost. [Excerpt: The Coasters, "Young Blood"] "Young Blood" was ostensibly the A-side of the single that resulted, but the record that actually made the biggest splash was the B-side, "Searchin'", which had Billy Guy singing lead. The song was one of Leiber and Stoller's best, and showed Leiber's sense of humour to its best effect, as Guy sang about how he was going to be a better detective than Charlie Chan or Sam Spade in tracking down his missing girlfriend: [Excerpt: The Coasters, "Searchin'"] On this session, Leon Hughes wasn't present -- I've not seen any explanation from anyone involved as to why he was absent, but his place was taken by Young Jessie. Young Jessie was a singer who had previously been a member of the Flairs, with Richard Berry, and had later recorded a handful of solo records for Modern Records, and had signed a contract with Leiber and Stoller. Around the time of the session Young Jessie released this, with Leiber and Stoller producing, for Atco: [Excerpt: Young Jessie, "Shuffle in the Gravel"] Despite what some people have said, Young Jessie never became a full-time member of the Coasters (though he did later tour with a group calling itself the Coasters, led by Leon Hughes) and the original lineup of the group continued touring for a while. After the success of "Searchin'" and "Young Blood", Atco released a series of flop singles, all of which were recorded by the original lineup, and all of which, like the hit, featured one side with a Carl Gardner lead vocal and the other with a Billy Guy lead. Some of these, like "Idol With the Golden Head", were classic Leiber and Stoller story songs along the lines of the earlier Robins records, but they didn't yet, quite, have the classic Coasters sound: [Excerpt: The Coasters, "Idol With the Golden Head"] But then, towards the end of the year, the group split up. It's hard to tell exactly what happened, as most of the stories about who left the group and why have been told by people who were involved, most of whom wanted to bolster their own later legal cases for ownership of the Coasters name. But whatever actually happened, Leon Hughes and Bobby Nunn were out of the group, suddenly. Depending on which version of the story you believe, they either got tired of the road and wanted to see their families, or they were sacked mid-tour because of their behaviour. For one recording session, Tommy Evans from the Drifters substituted for Hughes and Nunn, until Lester Sill went out and found two replacement members, Cornell Gunter and Dub Jones. We've met Gunter before -- he was part of the collection of singers who were all in half a dozen different groups, centered around Gaynel Hodge. He had been an early member of the Platters, and had also been in the Flairs with Richard Berry and Young Jessie, and had recorded a handful of solo singles: [Excerpt: Cornell Gunter, “Neighborhood Dance”] Gunter was also unusual for the time in being an out gay man, and was initially apprehensive about joining the group in case the other members were homophobic. For the time, they weren't especially -- Carl Gardner apparently felt the need to let Gunter know that he was straight himself and wouldn't be interested, but they took a live and let live attitude, and Gunter quickly became friendly with the rest of the group. Dub Jones, meanwhile, had been the bass singer for the Cadets, and had done the spoken-word vocals on their biggest hit, "Stranded in the Jungle": [Excerpt: The Cadets, "Stranded in the Jungle"] Jones would quickly become an integral part of the group's sound. This new lineup met for the first time on the plane to a gig in Hawaii, and Gardner at least was very worried that these new singers would not be able to fit in with the routines the others had already worked out. He had no need to worry. It only took one quick rehearsal before the show for Gunter and Jones to slot in perfectly, and the classic lineup of the Coasters was now in place. Leiber and Stoller loved working with the Coasters, but it had been almost a year since they'd written the group a hit at this point. "Hound Dog" had been a big enough success for Elvis that his management team wanted more from Leiber and Stoller, and fast, and most of their most commercial work in 1957 went to Elvis. But that changed in 1958, and the Coasters were the beneficiaries. We'll be picking up with Leiber, Stoller, and Elvis, in a few weeks' time. And a few weeks after that, we'll see what happened when they got back into the studio with the Coasters...  

Carl Gardner, a former government lawyer, talks to Toby Young about Boris Johnson's decision to prorogue parliament, whether it's constitutionally legitimate, and what the political ramifications are.

Carl Gardner, a former government lawyer, talks to Toby Young about Boris Johnson's decision to prorogue parliament, whether it's constitutionally legitimate, and what the political ramifications are.

This is a special edition of Pod's law for the 2015 General Election, concerning the law and conventions concerning who governs the country in the event of a hung parliament. If you wish to read more about what we discuss during the show, you might like to look at the following links: Carl Gardner's Blog: "Ed can enter No. 10 without Nicola’s keys": www.headoflegal.com/2015/04/19/ed-can-enter-no-10-without-nicolas-keys/ The Guardian, "Alex Salmond threatens to call election after Scottish parliament rejects SNP's budget": www.theguardian.com/politics/2009/jan/28/scotland-snp Fixed Term Parliaments Act 2011: www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2011/14/contents/enacted House of Commons Library, "Hung Parliaments": http://tinyurl.com/HCL-hung-parliament Election Forecast website: www.electionforecast.co.uk =ABOUT CARL GARDNER= My guest is Carl Gardner, previously a practicing barrister and government lawyer, presently lecturer at the Open University and legal blogger at www.headoflegal.com. Carl tweets at www.twitter.com/carlgardner =ABOUT JULIUS KOMOROWSKI= I am a practising member of the Scottish bar (an Advocate). I am a member of Terra Firma Chambers. You can find out details about me here: www.tinyurl.com/JuliusKo You can follow me on twitter here: www.twitter.com/podslaw

Happy New Year! The group in 1961: Dub Jones, Carl Gardner, Cornell Gunter, Billy Guy. This was the configuration that was inducted into the Rock Hall. While they're often mistaken for a doo-wop group, The Coasters were actually a rhythm-and-blues vocal group, whose greatest successes came when they were teamed with the composers Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, and when they had humorous material to work with.They made such an impression on other artists that it was a small wonder when, in 1987, they became the first group inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. (Yeah, I know I'm kinda splitting hairs, here: the previous year was all individuals plus the Everly Brothers. But I'm sticking by this assessment.) One of the posters for the movie, which inspired the Coasters' song (but the song isn't based on the movie). This ain't a bad place to be, if you're Gary Cooper. Their peak years, chart-wise, were between 1958 and 1960, when all of their Top 40 singles were released. In today's episode we talk about three of them: Yakety Yak, Charlie Brown, and Along Came Jones. After these three came two more: Poison Ivy and Little Egypt, which were more clever than funny. There have been numerous configurations of the group since the first day, so you could argue that the one in the photo above, which is responsible for most of the hits, was the magic bullet. Through many personnel changes, The Coasters never quite reached the same level of success. As if you didn't know this already: you can listen to the show via your favorite podcatcher, or you can  just click on the player right here for listening or downloading: And a kind word in iTunes, or Spotify, or wherever better podcasts are sold, goes a long way toward making this show more visible to the world at large. Thanks for your continued support!

The first group inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame went through many configurations, but it was the combination of Dub Jones, Carl Gardner, Cornell Gunter, and Billy Guy that scored most of the biggest hits for this group. This week we take a closer look at three of them.

Light of Life | John 8:3-12, 15 What is that compulsion in me to pick up stones? When others fall, what makes me want to go over and kick them while they're down? And why isn't Jesus like me? Peter Sung, preaching. Carl Gardner, storyteller.

Matthew Sweet talks to Stephen Baxter about his sequel to HG Wells's novel War Of The Worlds, which was first serialised in 1897 and imagined an England invaded by Martians. Stephen Baxter's novel, which has been authorised by the HG Wells estate, is called The Massacre of Mankind and it sets the action 14 years after a Martian invasion. Eimear McBride's novels are noted for their 'experimental' approach. She joins Matthew with the academic and writer Mark Blacklock to discuss what 'experimental' can mean when applied to the novel. And, recently posters have appeared all over the UK with the following words: 'Legal Name Fraud, The Truth, It's Illegal To Use A Legal Name'. Matthew is joined by the barrister and legal blogger Carl Gardner to discuss the legal ideas behind the campaign. Producer: Luke Mulhall

Episode 42 – Tiernan interviews Carl Gardner about the government’s Supreme Court Brexit appeal, and there’s a look at Trump’s relationship with Russia and ‘Gina.Follow us on Twitter @parpolbro, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/groups/ParPolBro/ and our webpage at http://www.tiernandouieb.co.uk/podcast See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Host Deardra Shuler talks with JW Lance (a.k.a. Joe Lance Williams) of the COASTERS, an R&B group originally formed in 1955 in Los Angeles, California.  The Coasters occupy a special niche in the music world.  With ten Top 40 hits like “Young Blood,”  “Along Came Jones,” “Poison Ivy,” “Charley Brown” and “Yakety Yak,” they were called “the clown princes of rock and roll” and were the first group inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987. The Coasters’ current line-up were all hand-picked by the group’s original lead singer Carl Gardner before his death in 2011 and are managed by Veta Gardner, Carl’s wife. In November 2015, The Coasters released their latest album: Christmas with the Coasters.    The Coasters will appear at Lehman Center for the Performing Arts on Saturday, January 30 at 8pm.  They will be appearing with The Drifters, The Platters, Shirley Aston Reeves, The Chiffons and Good Vibration.

04-26-15 "Always Open" - Carl Gardner by Evergreen Church

Charon QC, David Allen Green and Carl Gardner discuss Labour’s press standards bill, equal marriage and the church, the Justice and Security Bill, government changes to judicial review and the Law Commission on contempt of court and the de Silva review into Pat Finucane’s murder.

Law blogger Charon QC talks to media lawyer and journalist David Allen Green, former government lawyer Carl Gardner and mature law student and Without Prejudice sound consultant Jez Hindmarsh about Lord Justice Leveson’s eagerly awaited report on the culture, practice and ethics of the press, his recommendations for independent self-regulation underpinned by statutory recognition, and […]

Charon QC chairs as Kim Evans, commissioning editor of The Justice Gap, and Carl Gardner discuss the conviction of the Spectator over the Rod Liddle piece on the Stephen Lawrence retrial, Hunt, Warsi and the ministerial code, the meaning of quasi-judicial, and Richard Moorhead's plea for simpler laws.

Law blogger Charon QC talks to David Allen Green, Jessica Vautier and Carl Gardner about Julian Assange’s Supreme Court judgment, Abu Qatada, the Twitter joke appeal, social mobility and pay for trainee solicitors, and whether Britain should be a republic.

Law blogger Charon QC talks to Carl Gardner about the recent legal clockup about Abu Qatada and his reference to the European Court of Human Rights, Jeremy Hunt, Parliament and the Leveson inquiry, Lord Sumption's recent speech about judicial scrutiny of government foreign policy, the quashing of Sam Hallam's conviction, secret justice and whether the […]

Law blogger Charon QC chairs as Nick Cohen, writer, journalist and author of You Can’t Read This Book joins Joanne Cash, David Allen Green and Carl Gardner to talk about free speech in Britain today including threats to it from extreme religion, libel and privacy law, whether Britain needs its own First Amendment, and government […]

Law blogger Charon QC chairs as Times law columnist Gary Slapper joins David Allen Green and Carl Gardner to talk about civil disobedience and the rule of law, the Sedley v Sumption debate about whether judges are becoming too political, whether the News of the World tried to undermine a murder investigation, and whether QCs […]