Podcasts about Chips Moman

For the first time since the third-ever episode of TCBCast, we're immersing ourselves fully in the music of the US Army's own Tulsa MacLean! Bec and Justin explore the three recording sessions in April & May 1960 that led to the iconic, bestselling #1 album. As it turns out, unusual for Elvis sessions, numerous songs had vastly different arrangements attempted as Elvis and the band struggled to find their footing with the material, as well as contend with external pressures that frustrated Elvis. With classic pop-tinged songs like "Wooden Heart," "Pocketful of Rainbows" and "Doin' the Best I Can" supplemented by material that alluded back to Elvis's earlier 1950s stylings like "Blue Suede Shoes," "Frankfort Special" and "Shoppin' Around," this was a ton of fun to explore. For Song of the Week, Justin decided to pick "Let's Be Friends," which was cut from the film "Change of Habit" and instead became the title track of a low-budget compilation the following year, and tries to puzzle out where it might have fit in the movie's story. Then Bec lays all her cards on the table, selecting "From A Jack to A King," the country classic that Elvis almost semi-jokingly laid down at Chips Moman's American Sound Studio. If you enjoy TCBCast, please consider supporting us with a donation at Patreon.com/TCBCast. Your support allows us to continue to provide thoughtful, provocative, challenging and well-researched perspectives on Elvis's career, his peers and influences, and his cultural impact and legacy.  

Ringo Starr is on the road! In August 1989 the All Star Band tour rolled across North America, featuring the talents of the many legendary rockers sharing the stage with Ringo...along with some special guests to boot. Chief amongst those special guests was none other than the boss himself, Bruce Sprringsteen, who joined two of his fellow E-Street Band members on stage before a crowd of star-struck fans. Ringo's comeback tour was a rousing success, but the ghosts of his past would continue to dog the former Beatle. This time in the form of a lawsuit from Chips Moman, alleging that Starr's drunken Nashville sessions were fit for public consumption. Ringo disagreed. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

John Heath of EAP Society joins Justin for an extensive (but still HIGHLY abbreviated!) discussion about the history of the music industry in Memphis before and during Elvis' career, from early blues recordings made by Ralph Peer to Sam Phillips' Sun Records, from indie labels inspired by Sun's success to the monumental Stax Records, how Chips Moman's American Sound came together, and up through Elvis's Jungle Room recordings as the city's music industry wound down in the late 70s. It's all explored through a playlist of about two dozen tracks compiled by John, linked below. If you've been exploring the 2024 Sony box set release "Memphis," you will find this a great supplemental discussion. There are no specific songs of the week this week, just a ton of amazing music history to delve into. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0a1G2qR6gFfQT13UzrBTLg?si=09505e6244c44da8&fbclid=IwY2xjawEdLxBleHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHTrNyBF-6SkoS9goKzglqEqOstRBysdp99mM1miKBy5StaEBDUZ1HVJJjw_aem_hAjH3ZILor4p4CAcxsoarw&nd=1&dlsi=f85c2bdb288d4a43 You can also find the final track intended for this playlist, which is not on Spotify, on YouTube at this link (current as of release): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ipqz1oIt4TA If you enjoy TCBCast, please consider supporting us with a donation at Patreon.com/TCBCast. Your support allows us to continue to provide thoughtful, provocative, challenging and well-researched perspectives on Elvis's career, his peers and influences, and his cultural impact and legacy. 

Justin is joined by John Michael Heath of EAP Society (youtube.com/EAPSociety) to give their first impressions of the new Sony Legacy box set, "Memphis" which released today, August 9, 2024.  Marketed as "a comprehensive collection" of 111 recordings of Elvis made in his adoptive hometown from his time at Sam Phillips's Sun Records through to Chips Moman's American Sound, the iconic Stax, live at the Mid-South Coliseum and at his home, Graceland, "Memphis" is said to contain "newly mixed versions of the select recordings, pure and without overdubs" overseen by award-winning engineer Matt Ross-Spang and producer Ernst Jorgensen.  Spoilers: there's good news for those who want to re-experience the 1973, 1974 and 1976 material in a different light than you may be familiar with, and a faithful collection of the Sun material... but this set's presentation of the 1969 American Sound music is a different story altogether. And that "pure and without overdubs" claim? Well, you'll hear. The guys also answer listener feedback on this episode, including several about a recent Song of the Week, but since this discussion ran long, Justin and John will be back later with a separate, full length episode for the main topic intended to supplement and compliment the "Memphis" set, focused on the history of the music industry in Memphis, how Elvis was influenced by it, and how he in turn helped reshape it. 

To Support the Channel:Patreon  https://www.patreon.com/AskZacTip jar:  https://paypal.me/AskZacVenmo @AskZac  Or check out my store for merch  - https://my-store-be0243.creator-spring.com/Today we look at forgotten R&B guitar greats Chips Moman, Tommy Cogbill, Booker T. Jones & Joe South. They each played on huge hits, yet are rarely hailed, and worse yet, many times their parts are credited to other players. We right this wrong by looking at Chip's part on "Respect," Tommy's on Seesaw," Booker's on "I Forgot To Be Your Lover," and Joe's work on "Chain Of Fools." CORRECTION Estelle, not Mae Axton founded STAX.Playlist Chips Moman, Tommy Cogbill, Booker T. Jones & Joe Southhttps://open.spotify.com/playlist/6m3jIsJDPv2YsxJaMDfZ23?si=b85ionyPTBekDoX20wYf0w&pi=u-fPRZ8oNKTjCz1967 Fender Telecaster - stock except for compensated saddles. Refret by Nick at Glaser InstrumentsMore on the 1967 Maplecap Telehttps://youtu.be/K62c9ycOTlUAmp:2023 Headstrong Lil' King with 12" Eminence GA-SC64 speakerhttps://headstrongamps.com/lil-king-ampStrings: D'Addario NYXL 95-44https://amzn.to/41rnl0V#askzac #r&bguitar #telecasterSupport the Show.

Justin and Bec explore Elvis' "marathon" sessions from June 1970, starting with laying the groundwork for the return to Nashville's RCA Studio B, pondering why Elvis may not have chosen to return to Chips Moman's American Sound in Memphis. Instead Elvis is joined this time by a new band led by his live guitarist James Burton but otherwise comprised largely of country-soul players who had worked alongside producer Felton Jarvis in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, including Chip Young, Jerry Carrigan, David Briggs, Norbert Putnam and Charlie McCoy, and rather than a meticulous planned session with Chips' guiding vision... they tear through dozens of songs across four nights, with a follow-up session later that September. Part 1 focuses on the establishing information and the first two nights, June 4-5 and June 5-6, 1970.  For Song of the Week, Bec highlights "I Met Her Today," the understated Don Robertson ballad that was cut in 1961's Pot Luck sessions but held until the hodgepodge Elvis For Everyone album four years later. Meanwhile, Justin goes way back to the Sun era, selecting the middle child single "Milkcow Blues Boogie" - couched between Good Rockin' Tonight and Baby Let's Play House, yet containing that same genius melding of blues (it was written and originated by Kokomo Arnold) and country (also highly popularized by western swing artists like Bob and Johnnie Lee Wills) in a new rockabilly style as anything else he did at Sun. If you enjoy TCBCast, please consider supporting us with a donation at Patreon.com/TCBCast. Your support allows us to continue to provide thoughtful, provocative, challenging and well-researched perspectives on Elvis's career, his peers and influences, and his cultural impact and legacy. 

Guest host Garrett Cash and Justin begin Part 4 of Elvis and Country Music journey right where they left off: Elvis' iconic 1969 sessions at Memphis producer Chips Moman's American Sound, which provide Elvis his first country hits – as the industry considered them – in a decade. They then trace Elvis' path from Las Vegas, where he brings together the finest country-rock band ever assembled in the TCB Band, back to Nashville where he not only embraces the “Countrypolitan” evolution of the Nashville sound, but pays homage to the genre's diverse pop, blues, and folk roots with his only concept album, an artistic triumph which fully showcased how Elvis viewed the history of country music, with its many lineages all under one banner: “Elvis Country.” Our hosts also take sidebars to reflect on women's rising voices in country music during this period, the development of a movement within Nashville that came to be dubbed “outlaw country,” and songwriters such as Mac Davis, Dallas Frazier, Lee Hazlewood, and Dennis Linde, whose “Burning Love” once again drives home the failings, inherent flaws and revealing biases in the way we discuss genre using the music industry's classifications; a “rock” hit from a “country” writer, originally recorded by “soul” singer Arthur Alexander. Finally, we arrive in Hawaii, where – as Jimmie Rodgers once reminded us – everybody does “it.” What is “it,” exactly? Sure seems like country music, since “Aloha from Hawaii” is jam-packed with it! And what to make of Elvis' interpretation of country writer Mickey Newbury's “An American Trilogy?” All that and more – next week's episode (we promise it'll be shorter!) will take us from Elvis' 1973 Stax Sessions all the way to the morning of August 16, 1977. You can find more of Garrett on "The Beat! With Garrett Cash" on SoundCloud at: https://soundcloud.com/garrett-cash-635212819 As well as on the Let It Roll Podcast miniseries "Holy Roll" at: https://letitrollpodcast.substack.com/p/let-it-roll-with-garrett-cash  In late October 2023 we will be releasing a YouTube and Spotify playlist with as many songs featured on this series as possible. Stay tuned to our social media pages for details. This series would not be possible without the support of TCBCast Patreon backers, thank you to all of our patrons! This is not remotely comprehensive or in any order whatsoever but among some of the key resources that we found useful for this 4th episode are: Ken Burns' Country Music - Documentary, Book & Soundtrack Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley by Peter Guralnick Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley by Peter Guralnick Elvis Presley: A Life in Music by Ernst Jorgensen How Nashville Became Music City USA by Michael Kosser Cocaine and Rhinestones: "Dallas Frazier: Can't Get There from Here" by Tyler Mahan Coe: https://cocaineandrhinestones.com/dallas-frazier Cocaine and Rhinestones: “Billy Sherill's Nashville Sound” by Tyler Mahan Coe: https://cocaineandrhinestones.com/billy-sherrill

To Support the Channel:https://www.patreon.com/AskZacTip jar:  https://paypal.me/AskZacVenmo @AskZac  Or check out my store for merch  - www.askzac.comSpotlight on the greatest unknown Memphis guitarist, Clarence Nelson. He was a major influence in both style and tone on Steve Cropper, Reggie Young, and Chips Moman. Clarence was an African-American guitarist who worked with bandleader, Ben Branch, and from there influenced the younger players that saw him live, or watched him in the studio on early Stax, American, and Hi/Royal sessions. Nelson also toured with both James Carr and William Bell in the 60s and 70s. He should be credited as an early adopter of the Telecaster in Memphis, and how he paved the way for others with his funky low string licks, and stuttering bends. Much thanks to Red Kelly's excellent detective work on Clarence which can be found here. http://souldetective.com/case8part1.htmlAlso, check out my interview with Reggie Young where we discuss Clarence Nelson later in the video   • Reggie Young | Tr...  Michael Ross mentioned Clarence in his piece on Reggiehttps://www.premierguitar.com/artists...Gear Used:1957 Fender Esquire with an added vintage neck pickup. Restoration and aging on the body by Dan "Danocaster" Strain. Rewind of bridge pickup by Ron Ellis.Strings: D'Addario NYXL 10-46 Amazon affiliate link https://amzn.to/3uD1WnZPick:D'Andrea Medium-HeavyAmp:2021 Fender Vibro Champ Reverb Effects used:amp verb#askzac #guitartech #telecasterSupport the show

During their brief lifespan, the Box Tops earned a reputation as one of the best blue-eyed soul groups of the '60s, even if their recorded legacy wasn't as large or consistent as, say, the Righteous Brothers or the Rascals. Today they're remembered not only for their smashes "The Letter" and "Cry Like a Baby," but as the launching pad for singer Alex Chilton, who went on to become one of rock's most revered cult figures thanks to his groundbreaking power pop unit Big Star. In his teenage years, Chilton was an amazingly gritty Memphis soul belter akin to an American version of the Spencer Davis Group's Stevie Winwood. The Box Tops' music also encompassed touches of pop and psychedelia, although the group's own lack of control over it eventually led to their split-up. The Box Tops began life as the Devilles, a white R&B group featuring guitarists Gary Talley and John Evans, bassist Bill Cunningham, and drummer Danny Smythe. After the band's local popularity blossomed, teenage singer Alex Chilton joined up, and the Devilles quickly caught the attention of songwriters/producers Chips Moman and Dan Penn, who were on the lookout for a Stevie Winwood-type white soul singer. Changing their name to the Box Tops to avoid confusion with a different group of the same name, they signed with Bell Records and began recording at Moman's Memphis-based American Studio. The first single the group cut, "The Letter," rocketed to the top of the charts in 1967, not only spending four weeks at number one but ending up as Billboard magazine's number one single of the year. (Chilton was all of 16 at the time.) With a hit on their hands, Penn began to exert more control over the group; in the wake of "The Letter," he frequently used session musicians on the Box Tops' recordings, sometimes replacing the whole band behind Chilton, sometimes just individual members. Frustrated, Evans and Smythe both left the band to return to school in early 1968, and were replaced by Rick Allen (ex-Gentrys) and Tom Boggs, respectively. The follow-up to "The Letter," "Neon Rainbow," didn't do nearly as well, but the Box Tops managed another massive hit in 1968 with the Dan Penn/Spooner Oldham tune "Cry Like a Baby," which went to number two on the pop charts. Although a couple of minor hits followed in "I Met Her in Church" and "Choo Choo Train," Chilton was rapidly growing dissatisfied with the inconsistency of the material the Box Tops were handed (which was clear on the three LPs the group had released through 1968). As a result, Chilton was chafing at Penn's extreme reluctance to allow him to record his own original compositions. By the time of the Box Tops' fourth and final LP, 1969's Dimensions (an attempt to make a more cohesive album), Penn had bowed out and moved on to other projects. Several Chilton songs appeared on Dimensions, including "I Must Be the Devil," and the group had one last minor hit with "Soul Deep." Cunningham subsequently departed, also to go back to school, and the Box Tops began to disintegrate. When their contract expired in February 1970, they officially disbanded, and Chilton moved to Greenwich Village for a while. Not finding the creative hospitality he'd hoped for, Chilton soon returned to Memphis and joined an Anglo-pop outfit run by his friend Chris Bell; they morphed into Big Star, one of the most revered and mercurial bands in power pop (or, for that matter, underground rock & roll) history.

Justin and Bec wrap their extensive exploration of Elvis' time at Chips Moman's American Sound Studio by covering the material recorded there in February 1969, from "Power of My Love" to "Kentucky Rain" and more, before pondering the many reasons, good and bad, why Elvis never returned to American. For Song of the Week, 1960's the year to focus on, as Justin picks "I'm Gonna Walk Dem Golden Stairs" from the His Hand in Mine album while Bec spotlights "Shoppin' Around" from the "G.I. Blues" soundtrack. Justin & Gurdip's initial impressions of Agent Elvis episodes 1-3 is out early at the TCBCast Patreon and will go up on the main feed in the near future, to be followed by a proper series review later.  Timestamps: Start 0:00 Listener Feedback 10:00 Main Topic 26:00 SotW: I'm Gonna Walk Dem Golden Stairs 1:37:48 SotW: Shoppin' Around 1:50:00 If you enjoy TCBCast, please consider supporting us with a donation at Patreon.com/TCBCast. If you are unable to support us via Patreon, but want to support us another way, please make sure to leave a positive review or mention our show to another like-minded music history and movie enthusiast.

This week, Justin and Bec go deep into the first portion of Elvis's iconic 1969 sessions at Chips Moman's American Sound studio in Memphis, starting from Long Black Limousine and concluding with what would become his first #1 hit since 1965. They also discuss what was so remarkable about Chips as producer, several of American Sound's other hit recordings, and the brilliance of the American house band, The Memphis Boys. Also explored are the five known songs released from Elvis influence Roy Hamilton's American Sound sessions from that same period as well. There are no Songs of the Week this week. We would like to encourage our listeners to consider donating to the GoFundMe for the Tyre Nichols Memorial Fund if you have not already. https://www.gofundme.com/f/tyre-nichols

The Box Tops is an American rock band formed in Memphis in 1967. They are best known for the hits "The Letter", "Cry Like a Baby", "Choo Choo Train," and "Soul Deep" and are considered a major blue-eyed soul group of the period. They performed a mixture of current soul music songs by artists such as James & Bobby Purify and Clifford Curry; pop tunes such as "A Whiter Shade of Pale" by Procol Harum; and songs written by their producers, Dan Penn, Spooner Oldham, and Chips Moman. Vocalist Alex Chilton went on to front the power pop band Big Star and to launch a career as a solo artist, during which he occasionally performed songs he had sung with the Box Tops.The Box Tops' music combined elements of soul music and light pop. Their records are prime examples of the styles made popular by Moman and Penn at American Sound Studio in Memphis. Many of their lesser known Top 40 hits, including "Neon Rainbow", "I Met Her in Church", and "Sweet Cream Ladies, Forward March", are considered minor classics. As rock critic Lester Bangs wrote in a review of the group's Super Hits album, "A song like 'Soul Deep' is obvious enough, a patented commercial sound, yet within these strictures it communicates with a depth and sincerity of feeling that holds the attention and brings you back often."Bill CunninghamBorn January 23, 1950, Memphis Tennessee.Plays bass (both bass guitar and upright bass), cello, piano, and organ.Bill's father was a SUN recording artist and worked with Sam Phillips at SUN studio intermittently from 1953-61. He first recorded under the name Buddy Cunningham and later under the name Buddy Blake. Buddy was inducted into the Rockabilly Hall of Fame as the first percussionist on an Elvis Presley record. That session at SUN took place September 10, 1954 and included the following songs:‘Tomorrow Night, Blue Moon Of Kentucky, I'll Never Let You Go (Little Darlin'), Just Because, Satisfied, Good Rockin' Tonight, I Don't Care If The Sun Don't Shine'Musicians: Elvis Presley, Scotty Moore, and Bill Black; Doug Poindexter – guitar, Buddy Cunningham – drum soundsBill's older brother, B.B. Cunningham Jr., was a member of The Hombres and sang and co-wrote the hit ‘Let It All Hang Out.' He played bass for Jerry Lee Lewis for almost 15 years.Bill played various instruments in a number of early 1960s Memphis bands, before joining the group that eventually became The Box Tops. One of these bands, The Jynx, included Chris Bell (who later founded Big Star). Between The Jynx and The Box Tops Bill played with another Memphis group called The Jokers, which included Richard Rosebrough who later would play on a number of Big Star, Alex Chilton, and Chris Bell recordings.Bill remained a member of the Box Tops until September of 1969, when he decided to return to school to get a music degree in performance (upright bass).Though Bill virtually vanished from the pop music scene after he left the Box Tops, he rose in the ranks of classical musicians, playing in many symphony orchestras and in ballet and opera companies throughout the Midsouth while attending university. During this period he backed in performance artists as diverse as Eddy Arnold, Van Cliburn, Isaac Hayes, the Romeros (Spanish guitarists), and Dionne Warwick.For a brief period Bill became a resident of Germany and worked, studied, and traveled in many European countries.During work on his Masters Degree in music (back in the United States), Bill worked with Chris Bell at Ardent Studio, providing the string arrangement for Chris' “You And Your Sister. ” Around this period, Bill competed with numerous bassists from across the country for an opening in the White House orchestra in Washington, DC. He won and moved to Washington. In the mid to late 1970s, he played for most White House dinners, receptions, and special quest performances for Presidents Ford and Carter and for many State Department celebrations for Secretaries of State Kissinger and Vance. During this period Bill played for numerous dignitaries, including the Queens of England and Holland, as well as various heads of states from around the world. Also, during this period Bill recorded sound tracks for a number of TV specials, including some with Jim Henson and the Muppets.Throughout his classical music career he played with many of the world's best known performers and conductors. For example, Bill's last classical-music public performance was backing Itzhak Perlman and Pinchas Zukerman in a White House celebration at the signing of the Camp David Accord ( the Middle East peace agreement signed by Sadat, Begin, and Carter).In 1979, Bill was studying in Philadelphia with Roger Scott, the principal bassist of the Philadelphia Philharmonic, when he decided to change professions. This shift led to a MBA (Master of Business Administration) degree in international business and to a profession that assists with U.S. bilateral and multilateral trade issues.In 1996, Bill played the principal role in reforming the original Box Tops. He played bass and shared responsibility for keyboard parts with John on the ‘Tear Off' album. Bill toured with the group from 1997-2010, holding down the bottom end on stage with his bass lines.In 2015, Bill teamed up with Gary to bring back The Box Tops' music to audiences, playing bass and sharing vocal responsibilities.

Kenny Rogers, Chips Moman, Larry Butler, and me.

Label: Scepter 12219Year: 1968Condition: M-Last Price: $15.00. Not currently available for sale.This recording is a personal favorite among B.J. Thomas hits. The ingredients are all perfect... the Chips Moman production, the American Studios musicians, the Mark James song, and the perfect B.J. Thomas touch. Plus that rhythm section that turns the whole thing into a Northern Soul dance-fest... Mmmm! I can almost fall for that New York woman myself! :-) The B side is a non-album cut. Note: This beautiful copy comes in a vintage Scepter Records factory sleeve. This 45's labels are almost Mint. The vinyl (styrene) looks untouched, and the grooves are blessed with pristine Mint audio! Have a listen to that powerful sound in the (admittedly pitiful compared with the original) mp3 "snippet" for this record.

Episode one hundred and fifty-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs is the last of our four-part mini-series on LA sunshine pop and folk-rock in summer 1967. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifteen-minute bonus episode available, on "Baby, Now That I've Found You" by the Foundations. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources There is no Mixcloud this week, because there were too many Turtles songs in the episode. There's relatively little information available about the Turtles compared to other bands of their era, and so apart from the sources on the general LA scene referenced in all these podcasts, the information here comes from a small number of sources. This DVD is a decent short documentary on the band's career. Howard Kaylan's autobiography, Shell Shocked: My Life with the Turtles, Flo and Eddie, and Frank Zappa, Etc.,  is a fun read, if inevitably biased towards his own viewpoint. Jim Pons' Hard Core Love: Sex, Football, and Rock and Roll in the Kingdom of God is much less fun, being as it is largely organised around how his life led up to his latter-day religious beliefs, but is the only other book I'm aware of with a substantial amount of coverage of the Turtles. There are many compilations of the Turtles' material available, of which All The Singles is by far and away the best. The box set of all their albums with bonus tracks is now out of print on CD, but can still be bought as MP3s. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript We've spent a lot of time recently in the LA of summer 1967, at the point where the sunshine pop sound that was created when the surf harmonies of the Beach Boys collided with folk rock was at its apex, right before fashions changed and tight sunny pop songs with harmonies from LA became yesterday's news, and extended blues-rock improvisations from San Francisco became the latest in thing. This episode is the last part of this four-episode sequence, and is going to be shorter than those others. In many ways this one is a bridge between this sequence and next episode, where we travel back to London, because we're saying goodbye for a while to the LA scene, and when we do return to LA it will be, for the most part, to look at music that's a lot less sunshine and a lot more shadow. So this is a brief fade-out while we sing ba-ba-ba, a three-minute pop-song of an episode, a last bit of sunshine pop before we return to longer, more complicated, stories  in two weeks' time, at which point the sun will firmly set. Like many musicians associated with LA, Howard Kaylan was born elsewhere and migrated there as a child, and he seems to have regarded his move from upstate New York to LA as essentially a move to Disneyland itself. That impression can only have been made stronger by the fact that soon after his family moved there he got his first childhood girlfriend -- who happened to be a Mouseketeer on the TV. And TV was how young Howard filtered most of his perceptions -- particularly TV comedy. By the age of fourteen he was the president of the Soupy Sales Fan Club, and he was also obsessed with the works of Ernie Kovacs, Sid Caesar, and the great satirist and parodist Stan Freberg: [Excerpt: Stan Freberg, "St. George and the Dragonet"] Second only to his love of comedy, though, was his love of music, and it was on the trip from New York to LA that he saw a show that would eventually change his life. Along the way, his family had gone to Las Vegas, and while there they had seen Louis Prima and Keeley Smith do their nightclub act. Prima is someone I would have liked to do a full podcast episode on when I was covering the fifties, and who I did do a Patreon bonus episode on. He's now probably best known for doing the voice of King Louis in the Jungle Book: [Excerpt: Louis Prima, "I Wanna Be Like You (the Monkey Song)"] But he was also a jump blues musician who made some very good records in a similar style to Louis Jordan, like "Jump, Jive, an' Wail" [Excerpt: Louis Prima, "Jump, Jive, an' Wail"] But like Jordan, Prima dealt at least as much in comedy as in music -- usually comedy involving stereotypes about his Italian-American ethnic origins. At the time young Howard Kaylan saw him, he was working a double act with his then-wife Keeley Smith. The act would consist of Smith trying to sing a song straight, while Prima would clown around, interject, and act like a fool, as Smith grew more and more exasperated, and would eventually start contemptuously mocking Prima. [Excerpt: Louis Prima and Keeley Smith, "Embraceable You/I've Got It Bad and That Ain't Good"] This is of course a fairly standard double-act format, as anyone who has suffered through an episode of The Little and Large Show will be all too painfully aware, but Prima and Smith did it better than most, and to young Howard Kaylan, this was the greatest entertainment imaginable. But while comedy was the closest thing to Kaylan's heart, music was a close second. He was a regular listener to Art Laboe's radio show, and in a brief period as a teenage shoplifter he obtained records like Ray Charles' album Genius + Soul = Jazz: [Excerpt: Ray Charles, "One Mint Julep"] and the single "Tossin' and Turnin'" by Bobby Lewis: [Excerpt: Bobby Lewis, "Tossin' and Turnin'"] "Tossin' and Turnin'" made a deep impression on Kaylan, because of the saxophone solo, which was actually a saxophone duet. On the record, baritone sax player Frank Henry played a solo, and it was doubled by the great tenor sax player King Curtis, who was just playing a mouthpiece rather than a full instrument, making a high-pitched squeaking sound: [Excerpt: Bobby Lewis, "Tossin' and Turnin'"] Curtis was of course also responsible for another great saxophone part a couple of years earlier, on a record that Kaylan loved because it combined comedy and rock and roll, "Yakety Yak": [Excerpt: The Coasters, "Yakety Yak"] Those two saxophone parts inspired Kaylan to become a rock and roller. He was already learning the clarinet and playing part time in an amateur Dixieland band, and it was easy enough to switch to saxophone, which has the same fingering. Within a matter of weeks of starting to play sax, he was invited to join a band called the Nightriders, who consisted of Chuck Portz on bass, Al Nichol on guitar, and Glen Wilson on drums. The Nightriders became locally popular, and would perform sets largely made up of Johnny and the Hurricanes and Ventures material. While he was becoming a budding King Curtis, Kaylan was still a schoolkid, and one of the classes he found most enjoyable was choir class. There was another kid in choir who Kaylan got on with, and one day that kid, Mark Volman came up to him, and had a conversation that Kaylan would recollect decades later in his autobiography: “So I hear you're in a rock 'n' roll band.” “Yep.” “Um, do you think I could join it?” “Well, what do you do?” “Nothing.” “Nothing?” “Nope.” “Sounds good to me. I'll ask Al.” Volman initially became the group's roadie and occasional tambourine player, and would also get on stage to sing a bit during their very occasional vocal numbers, but was mostly "in the band" in name only at first -- he didn't get a share of the group's money, but he was allowed to say he was in the group because that meant that his friends would come to the Nightriders' shows, and he was popular among the surfing crowd. Eventually, Volman's father started to complain that his son wasn't getting any money from being in the band, while the rest of the group were, and they explained to him that Volman was just carrying the instruments while they were all playing them. Volman's father said "if Mark plays an instrument, will you give him equal shares?" and they said that that was fair, so Volman got an alto sax to play along with Kaylan's tenor. Volman had also been taking clarinet lessons, and the two soon became a tight horn section for the group, which went through a few lineup changes and soon settled on a lineup of Volman and Kaylan on saxes, Nichol on lead guitar, Jim Tucker on rhythm guitar, Portz on bass, and Don Murray on drums. That new lineup became known as the Crossfires, presumably after the Johnny and the Hurricanes song of the same name: [Excerpt: Johnny and the Hurricanes, "Crossfire"] Volman and Kaylan worked out choreographed dance steps to do while playing their saxes, and the group even developed a group of obsessive fans who called themselves the Chunky Club, named after one of the group's originals: [Excerpt: The Crossfires, "Chunky"] At this point the group were pretty much only playing instrumentals, though they would do occasional vocals on R&B songs like "Money" or their version of Don and Dewey's "Justine", songs which required more enthusiasm than vocal ability. But their first single, released on a tiny label, was another surf instrumental, a song called "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde": [Excerpt: The Crossfires, "Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde"] The group became popular enough locally that they became the house band at the Revelaire Club in Redondo Beach. There as well as playing their own sets, they would also be the backing band for any touring acts that came through without their own band, quickly gaining the kind of performing ability that comes from having to learn a new artist's entire repertoire in a few days and be able to perform it with them live with little or no rehearsal. They backed artists like the Coasters, the Drifters, Bobby Vee, the Rivingtons, and dozens of other major acts, and as part of that Volman and Kaylan would, on songs that required backing vocals, sing harmonies rather than playing saxophone. And that harmony-singing ability became important when the British Invasion happened, and suddenly people didn't want to hear surf instrumentals, but vocals along the lines of the new British groups. The Crossfires' next attempt at a single was another original, this one an attempt at sounding like one of their favourite new British groups, the Kinks: [Excerpt: The Crossfires, "One Potato, Two Potato"] This change to vocals necessitated a change in the group dynamic. Volman and Kaylan ditched the saxophones, and discovered that between them they made one great frontman. The two have never been excessively close on a personal level, but both have always known that the other has qualities they needed. Frank Zappa would later rather dismissively say "I regard Howard as a fine singer, and Mark as a great tambourine player and fat person", and it's definitely true that Kaylan is one of the truly great vocalists to come out of the LA scene in this period, while Volman is merely a good harmony singer, not anything particularly special -- though he *is* a good harmony singer -- but it undersells Volman's contribution. There's a reason the two men performed together for nearly sixty years. Kaylan is a great singer, but also by nature rather reserved, and he always looked uncomfortable on stage, as well as, frankly, not exactly looking like a rock star (Kaylan describes himself not inaccurately as looking like a potato several times in his autobiography). Volman, on the other hand, is a merely good singer, but he has a naturally outgoing personality, and while he's also not the most conventionally good-looking of people he has a *memorable* appearance in a way that Kaylan doesn't. Volman could do all the normal frontman stuff, the stuff that makes a show an actual show -- the jokes, the dancing, the between-song patter, the getting the crowd going, while Kaylan could concentrate on the singing. They started doing a variation on the routine that had so enthralled Howard Kaylan when he'd seen Louis Prima and Keeley Smith do it as a child. Kaylan would stand more or less stock still, looking rather awkward, but singing like an angel, while Volman would dance around, clown, act the fool, and generally do everything he could to disrupt the performance -- short of actually disrupting it in reality. It worked, and Volman became one of that small but illustrious group of people -- the band member who makes the least contribution to the sound of the music but the biggest contribution to the feel of the band itself, and without whom they wouldn't be the same. After "One Potato, Two Potato" was a flop, the Crossfires were signed to their third label. This label, White Whale, was just starting out, and the Crossfires were to become their only real hit act. Or rather, the Turtles were. The owners of White Whale knew that they didn't have much promotional budget and that their label was not a known quantity -- it was a tiny label with no track record. But they thought of a way they could turn that to their advantage. Everyone knew that the Beatles, before Capitol had picked up their contracts, had had their records released on a bunch of obscure labels like Swan and Tollie. People *might* look for records on tiny independent labels if they thought it might be another British act who were unknown in the US but could be as good as the Beatles. So they chose a name for the group that they thought sounded as English as possible -- an animal name that started with "the", and ended in "les", just like the Beatles. The group, all teenagers at the time, were desperate enough that they agreed to change their name, and from that point on they became the Turtles. In order to try and jump on as many bandwagons as possible, the label wanted to position them as a folk-rock band, so their first single under the Turtles name was a cover of a Bob Dylan song, from Another Side of Bob Dylan: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "It Ain't Me Babe"] That song's hit potential had already been seen by Johnny Cash, who'd had a country hit with it a few months before. But the Turtles took the song in a different direction, inspired by Kaylan's *other* great influence, along with Prima and Smith. Kaylan was a big fan of the Zombies, one of the more interesting of the British Invasion groups, and particularly of their singer Colin Blunstone. Kaylan imitated Blunstone on the group's hit single, "She's Not There", on which Blunstone sang in a breathy, hushed, voice on the verses: [Excerpt: The Zombies, "She's Not There"] before the song went into a more stomping chorus on which Blunstone sang in a fuller voice: [Excerpt: The Zombies, "She's Not There"] Kaylan did this on the Turtles' version of "It Ain't Me Babe", starting off with a quiet verse: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "It Ain't Me Babe"] Before, like the Zombies, going into a foursquare, more uptempo, louder chorus: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "It Ain't Me Babe"] The single became a national top ten hit, and even sort of got the approval of Bob Dylan. On the group's first national tour, Dylan was at one club show, which they ended with "It Ain't Me Babe", and after the show the group were introduced to the great songwriter, who was somewhat the worse for wear. Dylan said “Hey, that was a great song you just played, man. That should be your single", and then passed out into his food. With the group's first single becoming a top ten hit, Volman and Kaylan got themselves a house in Laurel Canyon, which was not yet the rock star Mecca it was soon to become, but which was starting to get a few interesting residents. They would soon count Henry Diltz of the Modern Folk Quartet, Danny Hutton, and Frank Zappa among their neighbours. Soon Richie Furay would move in with them, and the house would be used by the future members of the Buffalo Springfield as their rehearsal space. The Turtles were rapidly becoming part of the in crowd. But they needed a follow-up single, and so Bones Howe, who was producing their records, brought in P.F. Sloan to play them a few of his new songs. They liked "Eve of Destruction" enough to earmark it as a possible album track, but they didn't think they would do it justice, and so it was passed on to Barry McGuire. But Sloan did have something for them -- a pseudo-protest song called "Let Me Be" that was very clearly patterned after their version of "It Ain't Me Babe", and which was just rebellious enough to make them seem a little bit daring, but which was far more teenage angst than political manifesto: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "Let Me Be"] That did relatively well, making the top thirty -- well enough for the group to rush out an album which was padded out with some sloppy cover versions of other Dylan songs, a version of "Eve of Destruction", and a few originals written by Kaylan. But the group weren't happy with the idea of being protest singers. They were a bunch of young men who were more motivated by having a good time than by politics, and they didn't think that it made sense for them to be posing as angry politicised rebels. Not only that, but there was a significant drop-off between "It Ain't Me Babe" and "Let Me Be". They needed to do better. They got the clue for their new direction while they were in New York. There they saw their friends in the Mothers of Invention playing their legendary residency at the Garrick Theatre, but they also saw a new band, the Lovin' Spoonful, who were playing music that was clearly related to the music the Turtles were doing -- full of harmonies and melody, and inspired by folk music -- but with no sense of rebelliousness at all. They called it "Good Time Music": [Excerpt: The Lovin' Spoonful, "Good Time Music"] As soon as they got back to LA, they told Bones Howe and the executives at White Whale that they weren't going to be a folk-rock group any more, they were going to be "good time music", just like the Lovin' Spoonful. They were expecting some resistance, but they were told that that was fine, and that PF Sloan had some good time music songs too. "You Baby" made the top twenty: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "You Baby"] The Turtles were important enough in the hierarchy of LA stars that Kaylan and Tucker were even invited by David Crosby to meet the Beatles at Derek Taylor's house when they were in LA on their last tour -- this may be the same day that the Beatles met Brian and Carl Wilson, as I talked about in the episode on "All You Need is Love", though Howard Kaylan describes this as being a party and that sounded like more of an intimate gathering. If it was that day, there was nearly a third Beach Boy there. The Turtles knew David Marks, the Beach Boys' former rhythm guitarist, because they'd played a lot in Inglewood where he'd grown up, and Marks asked if he could tag along with Kaylan and Tucker to meet the Beatles. They agreed, and drove up to the house, and actually saw George Harrison through the window, but that was as close as they got to the Beatles that day. There was a heavy police presence around the house because it was known that the Beatles were there, and one of the police officers asked them to drive back and park somewhere else and walk up, because there had been complaints from neighbours about the number of cars around. They were about to do just that, when Marks started yelling obscenities and making pig noises at the police, so they were all arrested, and the police claimed to find a single cannabis seed in the car. Charges were dropped, but now Kaylan was on the police's radar, and so he moved out of the Laurel Canyon home to avoid bringing police attention to Buffalo Springfield, so that Neil Young and Bruce Palmer wouldn't get deported. But generally the group were doing well. But there was a problem. And that problem was their record label. They rushed out another album to cash in on the success of "You Baby", one that was done so quickly that it had "Let Me Be" on it again, just as the previous album had, and which included a version of the old standard "All My Trials", with the songwriting credited to the two owners of White Whale records. And they pumped out a lot of singles. A LOT of singles, ranging from a song written for them by new songwriter Warren Zevon, to cover versions of Frank Sinatra's "It Was a Very Good Year" and the old standard "We'll Meet Again". Of the five singles after "You Baby", the one that charted highest was a song actually written by a couple of the band members. But for some reason a song with verses in 5/4 time and choruses in 6/4 with lyrics like "killing the living and living to kill, the grim reaper of love thrives on pain" didn't appeal to the group's good-time music pop audience and only reached number eighty-one: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "Grim Reaper of Love"] The group started falling apart. Don Murray became convinced that  the rest of the band were conspiring against him and wanted him out, so he walked out of the group in the middle of a rehearsal for a TV show. They got Joel Larson of the Grass Roots -- the group who had a number of hits with Sloan and Barri songs -- to sub for a few gigs before getting in a permanent replacement, Johnny Barbata, who came to them on the recommendation of Gene Clark, and who was one of the best drummers on the scene -- someone who was not only a great drummer but a great showman, who would twirl his drumsticks between his fingers with every beat, and who would regularly engage in drum battles with Buddy Rich. By the time they hit their fifth flop single in a row, they lost their bass player as well -- Chuck Portz decided he was going to quit music and become a fisherman instead. They replaced him with Chip Douglas of the Modern Folk Quartet. Then they very nearly lost their singers. Volman and Kaylan both got their draft notices at the same time, and it seemed likely they would end up having to go and fight in the Vietnam war. Kaylan was distraught, but his mother told him "Speak to your cousin Herb". Cousin Herb was Herb Cohen, the manager of the Mothers of Invention and numerous other LA acts, including the Modern Folk Quartet, and Kaylan only vaguely knew him at this time, but he agreed to meet up with them, and told them “Stop worrying! I got Zappa out, I got Tim Buckley out, and I'll get you out.” Cohen told Volman and Kaylan to not wash for a week before their induction, to take every drug of every different kind they could find right before going in, to deliberately disobey every order, to fail the logic tests, and to sexually proposition the male officers dealing with the induction. They followed his orders to the letter, and got marked as 4-F, unfit for service. They still needed a hit though, and eventually they found something by going back to their good-time music idea. It was a song from the Koppelman-Rubin publishing company -- the same company that did the Lovin Spoonful's management and production. The song in question was by Alan Gordon and Gary Bonner, two former members of a group called the Magicians, who had had a minor success with a single called "An Invitation to Cry": [Excerpt: The Magicians, "An Invitation to Cry"] The Magicians had split up, and Bonner and Gordon were trying to make a go of things as professional songwriters, but had had little success to this point. The song on the demo had been passed over by everyone, and the demo was not at all impressive, just a scratchy acetate with Bonner singing off-key and playing acoustic rhythm guitar and Gordon slapping his knees to provide rhythm, but the group heard something in it. They played the song live for months, refining the arrangement, before taking it into the studio. There are arguments to this day as to who deserves the credit for the sound on "Happy Together" -- Chip Douglas apparently did the bulk of the arrangement work while they were on tour, but the group's new producer, Joe Wissert, a former staff engineer for Cameo-Parkway, also claimed credit for much of it. Either way, "Happy Together" is a small masterpiece of dynamics. The song is structured much like the songs that had made the Turtles' name, with the old Zombies idea of the soft verse and much louder chorus: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "Happy Together"] But the track is really made by the tiny details of the arrangement, the way instruments and vocal parts come in and out as the track builds up, dies down, and builds again. If you listen to the isolated tracks, there are fantastic touches like the juxtaposition of the bassoon and oboe (which I think is played on a mellotron): [Excerpt: The Turtles, "Happy Together", isolated tracks] And a similar level of care and attention was put into the vocal arrangement by Douglas, with some parts just Kaylan singing solo, other parts having Volman double him, and of course the famous "bah bah bah" massed vocals: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "Happy Together", isolated vocals] At the end of the track, thinking he was probably going to do another take, Kaylan decided to fool around and sing "How is the weather?", which Bonner and Gordon had jokingly done on the demo. But the group loved it, and insisted that was the take they were going to use: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "Happy Together"] "Happy Together" knocked "Penny Lane" by the Beatles off the number one spot in the US, but by that point the group had already had another lineup change. The Monkees had decided they wanted to make records without the hit factory that had been overseeing them, and had asked Chip Douglas if he wanted to produce their first recordings as a self-contained band. Given that the Monkees were the biggest thing in the American music industry at the time, Douglas had agreed, and so the group needed their third bass player in a year. The one they went for was Jim Pons. Pons had seen the Beatles play at the Hollywood Bowl in 1964, and decided he wanted to become a pop star. The next day he'd been in a car crash, which had paid out enough insurance money that he was able to buy two guitars, a bass, drums, and amps, and use them to start his own band. That band was originally called The Rockwells, but quickly changed their name to the Leaves, and became a regular fixture at Ciro's on Sunset Strip, first as customers, then after beating Love in the auditions, as the new resident band when the Byrds left. For a while the Leaves had occasionally had guest vocals from a singer called Richard Marin, but Pons eventually decided to get rid of him, because, as he put it "I wanted us to look like The Beatles. There were no Mexicans in The Beatles". He is at pains in his autobiography to assure us that he's not a bigot, and that Marin understood. I'm sure he did. Marin went on to be better known as Cheech Marin of Cheech and Chong. The Leaves were signed by Pat Boone to his production company, and through that company they got signed to Mira Records. Their first single, produced by Nik Venet, had been a version of "Love Minus Zero (No Limit)", a song by Bob Dylan: [Excerpt: The Leaves, "Love Minus Zero (No Limit)"] That had become a local hit, though not a national one, and the Leaves had become one of the biggest bands on the Sunset Strip scene, hanging out with all the other bands. They had become friendly with the Doors before the Doors got a record deal, and Pat Boone had even asked for an introduction, as he was thinking of signing them, but unfortunately when he met Jim Morrison, Morrison had drunk a lot of vodka, and given that Morrison was an obnoxious drunk Boone had second thoughts, and so the world missed out on the chance of a collaboration between the Doors and Pat Boone. Their second single was "Hey Joe" -- as was their third and fourth, as we discussed in that episode: [Excerpt: The Leaves, "Hey Joe"] Their third version of "Hey Joe" had become a top forty hit, but they didn't have a follow-up, and their second album, All The Good That's Happening, while it's a good album, sold poorly. Various band members quit or fell out, and when Johnny Barbata knocked on Jim Pons' door it was an easy decision to quit and join a band that had a current number one hit. When Pons joined, the group had already recorded the Happy Together album. That album included the follow-up to "Happy Together", another Bonner and Gordon song, "She'd Rather Be With Me": [Excerpt: The Turtles, "She'd Rather Be With Me"] None of the group were tremendously impressed with that song, but it did very well, becoming the group's second-biggest hit in the US, reaching number three, and actually becoming a bigger hit than "Happy Together" in parts of Europe. Before "Happy Together" the group hadn't really made much impact outside the US. In the UK, their early singles had been released by Pye, the smallish label that had the Kinks and Donovan, but which didn't have much promotional budget, and they'd sunk without trace. For "You Baby" they'd switched to Immediate, the indie label that Andrew Oldham had set up, and it had done a little better but still not charted. But from "Happy Together" they were on Decca, a much bigger label, and "Happy Together" had made number twelve in the charts in the UK, and "She'd Rather Be With Me" reached number four. So the new lineup of the group went on a UK tour. As soon as they got to the hotel, they found they had a message from Graham Nash of the Hollies, saying he would like to meet up with them. They all went round to Nash's house, and found Donovan was also there, and Nash played them a tape he'd just been given of Sgt Pepper, which wouldn't come out for a few more days. At this point they were living every dream a bunch of Anglophile American musicians could possibly have. Jim Tucker mentioned that he would love to meet the Beatles, and Nash suggested they do just that. On their way out the door, Donovan said to them, "beware of Lennon". It was when they got to the Speakeasy club that the first faux-pas of the evening happened. Nash introduced them to Justin Hayward and John Lodge of the Moody Blues, and Volman said how much he loved their record "Go Now": [Excerpt: The Moody Blues, "Go Now"] The problem was that Hayward and Lodge had joined the group after that record had come out, to replace its lead singer Denny Laine. Oh well, they were still going to meet the Beatles, right? They got to the table where John, Paul, and Ringo were sat, at a tense moment -- Paul was having a row with Jane Asher, who stormed out just as the Turtles were getting there. But at first, everything seemed to go well. The Beatles all expressed their admiration for "Happy Together" and sang the "ba ba ba" parts at them, and Paul and Kaylan bonded over their shared love for "Justine" by Don and Dewey, a song which the Crossfires had performed in their club sets, and started singing it together: [Excerpt: Don and Dewey, "Justine"] But John Lennon was often a mean drunk, and he noticed that Jim Tucker seemed to be the weak link in the group, and soon started bullying him, mocking his clothes, his name, and everything he said. This devastated Tucker, who had idolised Lennon up to that point, and blurted out "I'm sorry I ever met you", to which Lennon just responded "You never did, son, you never did". The group walked out, hurt and confused -- and according to Kaylan in his autobiography, Tucker was so demoralised by Lennon's abuse that he quit music forever shortly afterwards, though Tucker says that this wasn't the reason he quit. From their return to LA on, the Turtles would be down to just a five-piece band. After leaving the club, the group went off in different directions, but then Kaylan (and this is according to Kaylan's autobiography, there are no other sources for this) was approached by Brian Jones, asking for his autograph because he loved the Turtles so much. Jones introduced Kaylan to the friend he was with, Jimi Hendrix, and they went out for dinner, but Jones soon disappeared with a girl he'd met. and left Kaylan and Hendrix alone. They were drinking a lot -- more than Kaylan was used to -- and he was tired, and the omelette that Hendrix had ordered for Kaylan was creamier than he was expecting... and Kaylan capped what had been a night full of unimaginable highs and lows by vomiting all over Jimi Hendrix's expensive red velvet suit. Rather amazingly after all this, the Moody Blues, the Beatles, and Hendrix, all showed up to the Turtles' London gig and apparently enjoyed it. After "She'd Rather Be With Me", the next single to be released wasn't really a proper single, it was a theme song they'd been asked to record for a dire sex comedy titled "Guide for the Married Man", and is mostly notable for being composed by John Williams, the man who would later go on to compose the music for Star Wars. That didn't chart, but the group followed it with two more top twenty hits written by Bonner and Gordon, "You Know What I Mean" and "She's My Girl". But then the group decided that Bonner and Gordon weren't giving them their best material, and started turning down their submissions, like a song called "Celebrity Ball" which they thought had no commercial potential, at least until the song was picked up by their friends Three Dog Night, retitled "Celebrate", and made the top twenty: [Excerpt: Three Dog Night, "Celebrate"] Instead, the group decided to start recording more of their own material. They were worried that in the fast-changing rock world bands that did other songwriters' material were losing credibility. But "Sound Asleep", their first effort in this new plan, only made number forty-seven on the charts. Clearly they needed a different plan. They called in their old bass player Chip Douglas, who was now an experienced hitmaker as a producer. He called in *his* friend Harry Nilsson, who wrote "The Story of Rock & Roll" for the group, but that didn't do much better, only making number forty-eight. But the group persevered, starting work on a new album produced by Douglas, The Turtles Present The Battle of the Bands, the conceit of which was that every track would be presented as being by a different band. So there were tracks by  Chief Kamanawanalea and his Royal Macadamia Nuts,  Fats Mallard and the Bluegrass Fireball, The Atomic Enchilada, and so on, all done in the styles suggested by those band names. There was even a track by "The Cross Fires": [Excerpt: The Cross Fires, "Surfer Dan"] It was the first time the group had conceived of an album as a piece, and nine of the twelve tracks were originals by the band -- there was a track written by their friend Bill Martin, and the opening track, by "The US Teens Featuring Raoul", was co-written by Chip Douglas and Harry Nilsson. But for the most part the songs were written by the band members themselves, and jointly credited to all of them. This was the democratic decision, but one that Howard Kaylan would later regret, because of the song for which the band name was just "Howie, Mark, Johnny, Jim & Al". Where all the other songs were parodies of other types of music, that one was, as the name suggests, a parody of the Turtles themselves. It was written by Kaylan in disgust at the record label, who kept pestering the group to "give us another 'Happy Together'". Kaylan got more and more angry at this badgering, and eventually thought "OK, you want another 'Happy Together'? I'll give you another 'Happy Together'" and in a few minutes wrote a song that was intended as an utterly vicious parody of that kind of song, with lyrics that nobody could possibly take seriously, and with music that was just mocking the whole structure of "Happy Together" specifically. He played it to the rest of the group, expecting them to fall about laughing, but instead they all insisted it was the group's next single. "Elenore" went to number six on the charts, becoming their biggest hit since "She'd Rather Be With Me": [Excerpt: The Turtles, "Elenore"] And because everything was credited to the group, Kaylan's songwriting royalties were split five ways. For the follow-up, they chose the one actual cover version on the album. "You Showed Me" is a song that Roger McGuinn and Gene Clark had written together in the very early days of the Byrds, and they'd recorded it as a jangly folk-rock tune in 1964: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "You Showed Me"] They'd never released that track, but Gene Clark had performed it solo after leaving the Byrds, and Douglas had been in Clark's band at the time, and liked the song. He played it for the Turtles, but when he played it for them the only instrument he had to hand was a pump organ with one of its bellows broken. Because of this, he had to play it slowly, and while he kept insisting that the song needed to be faster, the group were equally insistent that what he was playing them was the big ballad hit they wanted, and they recorded it at that tempo. "You Showed Me" became the Turtles' final top ten hit: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "You Showed Me"] But once again there were problems in the group. Johnny Barbata was the greatest drummer any of them had ever played with, but he didn't fit as a personality -- he didn't like hanging round with the rest of them when not on stage, and while there were no hard feelings, it was clear he could get a gig with pretty much anyone and didn't need to play with a group he wasn't entirely happy in. By mutual agreement, he left to go and play with Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, and was replaced by John Seiter from Spanky and Our Gang -- a good drummer, but not the best of the best like Barbata had been. On top of this, there were a whole host of legal problems to deal with. The Turtles were the only big act on White Whale records, though White Whale did put out some other records. For example, they'd released the single "Desdemona" by John's Children in the US: [Excerpt: John's Children, "Desdemona"] The group, being the Anglophiles they were, had loved that record, and were also among the very small number of Americans to like the music made by John's Children's guitarist's new folk duo, Tyrannosaurus Rex: [Excerpt: Tyrannosaurus Rex, "Debora"] When Tyrannosaurus Rex supported the Turtles, indeed, Volman and Kaylan became very close to Marc Bolan, and told him that the next time they were in England they'd have to get together, maybe even record together. That would happen not that many years later, with results we'll be getting to in... episode 201, by my current calculations. But John's Children hadn't had a hit, and indeed nobody on White Whale other than the Turtles had. So White Whale desperately wanted to stop the Turtles having any independence, and to make sure they continued to be their hit factory. They worked with the group's roadie, Dave Krambeck, to undermine the group's faith in their manager, Bill Utley, who supported the group in their desire for independence. Soon, Krambeck and White Whale had ousted Utley, and Krambeck had paid Utley fifty thousand dollars for their management contract, with the promise of another two hundred thousand later. That fifty thousand dollars had been taken by Krambeck as an advance against the Turtles' royalties, so they were really buying themselves out. Except that Krambeck then sold the management contract on to a New York management firm, without telling the group. He then embezzled as much of the group's ready cash as he could and ran off to Mexico, without paying Utley his two hundred thousand dollars. The Turtles were out of money, and they were being sued by Utley because he hadn't had the money he should have had, and by the big New York firm, because  since the Turtles hadn't known they were now legally their managers they were in breach of contract. They needed money quickly, and so they signed with another big management company, this one co-owned by Bill Cosby, in the belief that Cosby's star power might be able to get them some better bookings. It did -- one of the group's first gigs after signing with the new company was at the White House. It turned out they were Tricia Nixon's favourite group, and so they and the Temptations were booked at her request for a White House party. The group at first refused to play for a President they rightly thought of as a monster, but their managers insisted. That destroyed their reputation among the cool antiestablishment youth, of course, but it did start getting them well-paid corporate gigs. Right up until the point where Kaylan became sick at his own hypocrisy at playing these events, drank too much of the complimentary champagne at an event for the president of US Steel, went into a drunken rant about how sick the audience made him, and then about how his bandmates were a bunch of sellouts, threw his mic into a swimming pool, and quit while still on stage. He was out of the band for two months, during which time they worked on new material without him, before they made up and decided to work on a new album. This new album, though, was going to be more democratic. As well as being all original material, they weren't having any of this nonsense about the lead singer singing lead. This time, whoever wrote the song was going to sing lead, so Kaylan only ended up singing lead on six of the twelve songs on what turned out to be their final album, Turtle Soup. They wanted a truly great producer for the new album, and they all made lists of who they might call. The lists included a few big names like George Martin and Phil Spector, but one name kept turning up -- Ray Davies. As we'll hear in the next episode, the Kinks had been making some astonishing music since "You Really Got Me", but most of it had not been heard in the US. But the Turtles all loved the Kinks' 1968 album The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society, which they considered the best album ever made: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Animal Farm"] They got in touch with Davies, and he agreed to produce the album -- the first time he did any serious outside production work -- and eventually they were able to persuade White Whale, who had no idea who he was, to allow him to produce it. The resulting album is by far the group's strongest album-length work, though there were problems -- Davies' original mix of the album was dominated by the orchestral parts written by Wrecking Crew musician Ray Pohlman, while the group thought that their own instruments should be more audible, since they were trying to prove that they were a proper band. They remixed it themselves, annoying Davies, though reissues since the eighties have reverted to a mix closer to Davies' intentions. Some of the music, like Pons' "Dance This Dance With Me", perhaps has the group trying a little *too* hard to sound like the Kinks: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "Dance This Dance With Me"] But on the other hand, Kaylan's "You Don't Have to Walk in the Rain" is the group's last great pop single, and has one of the best lines of any single from the sixties -- "I look at your face, I love you anyway": [Excerpt: The Turtles, "You Don't Have to Walk in the Rain"] But the album produced no hits, and the group were getting more and more problems from their label. White Whale tried to get Volman and Kaylan to go to Memphis without the other band members to record with Chips Moman, but they refused -- the Turtles were a band, and they were proud of not having session players play their parts on the records. Instead, they started work with Jerry Yester producing on a new album, to be called Shell Shock. They did, though bow to pressure and record a terrible country track called "Who Would Ever Think That I Would Marry Margaret" backed by session players, at White Whale's insistence, but managed to persuade the label not to release it. They audited White Whale and discovered that in the first six months of 1969 alone -- a period where they hadn't sold that many records -- they'd been underpaid by a staggering six hundred and fifty thousand dollars. They sued the label for several million, and in retaliation, the label locked them out of the recording studio, locking their equipment in there. They basically begged White Whale to let them record one last great single, one last throw of the dice. Jim Pons had, for years, known a keyboard player named Bob Harris, and had recently got to know Harris' wife, Judee Sill. Sill had a troubled life -- she was a heroin addict, and had at times turned to streetwalking to earn money, and had spent time in prison for armed robbery -- but she was also an astonishing songwriter, whose music was as inspired by Bach as by any pop or folk composer. Sill had been signed to Blimp, the Turtles' new production and publishing company, and Pons was co-producing some tracks on her first album, with Graham Nash producing others. Pons thought one song from that album, "Lady-O", would be perfect for the Turtles: [Excerpt: Judee Sill, "Lady-O"] (music continues under) The Turtles stuck closely to Sill's vision of the song. So closely that you haven't noticed that before I started talking, we'd already switched from Sill's record to the Turtles' version. [Excerpt: The Turtles, "Lady-O"] That track, with Sill on guitar backing Kaylan, Volman, and Nichol's vocals, was the last Turtles single to be released while the band were together. Despite “Lady O” being as gorgeous a melody as has ever been produced in the rock world, it sank without trace, as did a single from the Shell Shock sessions released under a pseudonym, The Dedications. White Whale followed that up, to the group's disgust, with "Who Would Ever Think That I Would Marry Margaret?", and then started putting out whatever they had in the vaults, trying to get the last few pennies, even releasing their 1965 album track version of "Eve of Destruction" as if it were a new single. The band were even more disgusted when they discovered that, thanks to the flurry of suits and countersuits, they not only could no longer perform as the Turtles, but White Whale were laying legal claim to their own names. They couldn't perform under those names -- Howard Kaylan, Mark Volman, and the rest were the intellectual property of White Whale, according to the lawyers. The group split up, and Kaylan and Volman did some session work, including singing on a demo for a couple of new songwriters: [Excerpt: Steely Dan, "Everyone's Gone to the Movies"] When that demo got the songwriters a contract, one of them actually phoned up to see if Kaylan wanted a permanent job in their new band, but they didn't want Volman as well, so Kaylan refused, and Steely Dan had to do without him. Volman and Kaylan were despondent, washed-up, has-been ex-rock stars. But when they went to see a gig by their old friend Frank Zappa, it turned out that he was looking for exactly that. Of course, they couldn't use their own names, but the story of the Phlorescent Leech and Eddie is a story for another time...

Words and Music by Mark James 1968"Suspicious Minds" is a 1968 song written and first recorded by American songwriter Mark James. After this recording failed commercially, it was cut by Elvis Presley with producer Chips Moman, becoming a No. 1 song in 1969, and one of the most memorable hits of Presley's career. (Wikipedia)Elvis Presley Official YouTube channelhttps://www.youtube.com/c/elvispresleyThese selections and arrangements are for your listening pleasure only and not intended for any other purpose.Cover by Franco Cianflone at GS studios Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episode 149 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Respect", and the journey of Aretha Franklin from teenage gospel singer to the Queen of Soul. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifteen-minute bonus episode available, on "I'm Just a Mops" by the Mops. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Also, people may be interested in a Facebook discussion group for the podcast, run by a friend of mine (I'm not on FB myself) which can be found at https://www.facebook.com/groups/293630102611672/ Errata I say "Rock-a-Bye Your Baby to a Dixie Melody" instead of "Rock-a-Bye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody". Also I say Spooner Oldham co-wrote "Do Right Woman". I meant Chips Moman. Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by Aretha Franklin. My main biographical source for Aretha Franklin is Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin by David Ritz, and this is where most of the quotes from musicians come from. I also relied heavily on I Never Loved a Man the Way I Loved You by Matt Dobkin. Information on C.L. Franklin came from Singing in a Strange Land: C. L. Franklin, the Black Church, and the Transformation of America by Nick Salvatore. Rick Hall's The Man From Muscle Shoals: My Journey from Shame to Fame contains his side of the story. Country Soul by Charles L Hughes is a great overview of the soul music made in Muscle Shoals, Memphis, and Nashville in the sixties. Peter Guralnick's Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm And Blues And The Southern Dream Of Freedom is possibly less essential, but still definitely worth reading. And the I Never Loved a Man album is available in this five-album box set for a ludicrously cheap price. But it's actually worth getting this nineteen-CD set with her first sixteen Atlantic albums and a couple of bonus discs of demos and outtakes. There's barely a duff track in the whole nineteen discs. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start this episode,  I have to say that there are some things people may want to be aware of before listening to this. This episode has to deal, at least in passing, with subjects including child sexual abuse, intimate partner abuse, racism, and misogyny. I will of course try to deal with those subjects as tactfully as possible, but those of you who may be upset by those topics may want to check the episode transcript before or instead of listening. Those of you who leave comments or send me messages saying "why can't you just talk about the music instead of all this woke virtue-signalling?" may also want to skip this episode. You can go ahead and skip all the future ones as well, I won't mind. And one more thing to say before I get into the meat of the episode -- this episode puts me in a more difficult position than most other episodes of the podcast have. When I've talked about awful things that have happened in the course of this podcast previously, I have either been talking about perpetrators -- people like Phil Spector or Jerry Lee Lewis who did truly reprehensible things -- or about victims who have talked very publicly about the abuse they've suffered, people like Ronnie Spector or Tina Turner, who said very clearly "this is what happened to me and I want it on the public record". In the case of Aretha Franklin, she has been portrayed as a victim *by others*, and there are things that have been said about her life and her relationships which suggest that she suffered in some very terrible ways. But she herself apparently never saw herself as a victim, and didn't want some aspects of her private life talking about. At the start of David Ritz's biography of her, which is one of my main sources here, he recounts a conversation he had with her: "When I mentioned the possibility of my writing an independent biography, she said, “As long as I can approve it before it's published.” “Then it wouldn't be independent,” I said. “Why should it be independent?” “So I can tell the story from my point of view.” “But it's not your story, it's mine.” “You're an important historical figure, Aretha. Others will inevitably come along to tell your story. That's the blessing and burden of being a public figure.” “More burden than blessing,” she said." Now, Aretha Franklin is sadly dead, but I think that she still deserves the basic respect of being allowed privacy. So I will talk here about public matters, things she acknowledged in her own autobiography, and things that she and the people around her did in public situations like recording studios and concert venues. But there are aspects to the story of Aretha Franklin as that story is commonly told, which may well be true, but are of mostly prurient interest, don't add much to the story of how the music came to be made, and which she herself didn't want people talking about. So there will be things people might expect me to talk about in this episode, incidents where people in her life, usually men, treated her badly, that I'm going to leave out. That information is out there if people want to look for it, but I don't see myself as under any obligation to share it. That's not me making excuses for people who did inexcusable things, that's me showing some respect to one of the towering artistic figures of the latter half of the twentieth century. Because, of course, respect is what this is all about: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Respect"] One name that's come up a few times in this podcast, but who we haven't really talked about that much, is Bobby "Blue" Bland. We mentioned him as the single biggest influence on the style of Van Morrison, but Bland was an important figure in the Memphis music scene of the early fifties, which we talked about in several early episodes. He was one of the Beale Streeters, the loose aggregation of musicians that also included B.B. King and Johnny Ace, he worked with Ike Turner, and was one of the key links between blues and soul in the fifties and early sixties, with records like "Turn on Your Love Light": [Excerpt: Bobby "Blue" Bland, "Turn on Your Love Light"] But while Bland was influenced by many musicians we've talked about, his biggest influence wasn't a singer at all. It was a preacher he saw give a sermon in the early 1940s. As he said decades later: "Wasn't his words that got me—I couldn't tell you what he talked on that day, couldn't tell you what any of it meant, but it was the way he talked. He talked like he was singing. He talked music. The thing that really got me, though, was this squall-like sound he made to emphasize a certain word. He'd catch the word in his mouth, let it roll around and squeeze it with his tongue. When it popped on out, it exploded, and the ladies started waving and shouting. I liked all that. I started popping and shouting too. That next week I asked Mama when we were going back to Memphis to church. “‘Since when you so keen on church?' Mama asked. “‘I like that preacher,' I said. “‘Reverend Franklin?' she asked. “‘Well, if he's the one who sings when he preaches, that's the one I like.'" Bland was impressed by C.L. Franklin, and so were other Memphis musicians. Long after Franklin had moved to Detroit, they remembered him, and Bland and B.B. King would go to Franklin's church to see him preach whenever they were in the city. And Bland studied Franklin's records. He said later "I liked whatever was on the radio, especially those first things Nat Cole did with his trio. Naturally I liked the blues singers like Roy Brown, the jump singers like Louis Jordan, and the ballad singers like Billy Eckstine, but, brother, the man who really shaped me was Reverend Franklin." Bland would study Franklin's records, and would take the style that Franklin used in recorded sermons like "The Eagle Stirreth Her Nest": [Excerpt: C.L. Franklin, "The Eagle Stirreth Her Nest"] And you can definitely hear that preaching style on records like Bland's "I Pity the Fool": [Excerpt: Bobby "Blue" Bland, "I Pity the Fool"] But of course, that wasn't the only influence the Reverend C.L. Franklin had on the course of soul music. C.L. Franklin had grown up poor, on a Mississippi farm, and had not even finished grade school because he was needed to work behind the mule, ploughing the farm for his stepfather. But he had a fierce intelligence and became an autodidact, travelling regularly to the nearest library, thirty miles away, on a horse-drawn wagon, and reading everything he could get his hands on. At the age of sixteen he received what he believed to be a message from God, and decided to become an itinerant preacher. He would travel between many small country churches and build up audiences there -- and he would also study everyone else preaching there, analysing their sermons, seeing if he could anticipate their line of argument and get ahead of them, figuring out the structure. But unlike many people in the conservative Black Baptist churches of the time, he never saw the spiritual and secular worlds as incompatible. He saw blues music and Black church sermons as both being part of the same thing -- a Black culture and folklore that was worthy of respect in both its spiritual and secular aspects. He soon built up a small circuit of local churches where he would preach occasionally, but wasn't the main pastor at any of them. He got married aged twenty, though that marriage didn't last, and he seems to have been ambitious for a greater respectability. When that marriage failed, in June 1936, he married Barbara Siggers, a very intelligent, cultured, young single mother who had attended Booker T Washington High School, the best Black school in Memphis, and he adopted her son Vaughn. While he was mostly still doing churches in Mississippi, he took on one in Memphis as well, in an extremely poor area, but it gave him a foot in the door to the biggest Black city in the US. Barbara would later be called "one of the really great gospel singers" by no less than Mahalia Jackson. We don't have any recordings of Barbara singing, but Mahalia Jackson certainly knew what she was talking about when it came to great gospel singers: [Excerpt: Mahalia Jackson, "Precious Lord, Take My Hand"] Rev. Franklin was hugely personally ambitious, and he also wanted to get out of rural Mississippi, where the Klan were very active at this time, especially after his daughter Erma was born in 1938. They moved to Memphis in 1939, where he got a full-time position at New Salem Baptist Church, where for the first time he was able to earn a steady living from just one church and not have to tour round multiple churches. He soon became so popular that if you wanted to get a seat for the service at noon, you had to turn up for the 8AM Sunday School or you'd be forced to stand. He also enrolled for college courses at LeMoyne College. He didn't get a degree, but spent three years as a part-time student studying theology, literature, and sociology, and soon developed a liberal theology that was very different from the conservative fundamentalism he'd grown up in, though still very much part of the Baptist church. Where he'd grown up with a literalism that said the Bible was literally true, he started to accept things like evolution, and to see much of the Bible as metaphor. Now, we talked in the last episode about how impossible it is to get an accurate picture of the lives of religious leaders, because their life stories are told by those who admire them, and that's very much the case for C.L. Franklin. Franklin was a man who had many, many, admirable qualities -- he was fiercely intelligent, well-read, a superb public speaker, a man who was by all accounts genuinely compassionate towards those in need, and he became one of the leaders of the civil rights movement and inspired tens of thousands, maybe even millions, of people, directly and indirectly, to change the world for the better. He also raised several children who loved and admired him and were protective of his memory. And as such, there is an inevitable bias in the sources on Franklin's life. And so there's a tendency to soften the very worst things he did, some of which were very, very bad. For example in Nick Salvatore's biography of him, he talks about Franklin, in 1940, fathering a daughter with someone who is described as "a teenager" and "quite young". No details of her age other than that are given, and a few paragraphs later the age of a girl who was then sixteen *is* given, talking about having known the girl in question, and so the impression is given that the girl he impregnated was also probably in her late teens. Which would still be bad, but a man in his early twenties fathering a child with a girl in her late teens is something that can perhaps be forgiven as being a different time. But while the girl in question may have been a teenager when she gave birth, she was *twelve years old* when she became pregnant, by C.L. Franklin, the pastor of her church, who was in a position of power over her in multiple ways. Twelve years old. And this is not the only awful thing that Franklin did -- he was also known to regularly beat up women he was having affairs with, in public. I mention this now because everything else I say about him in this episode is filtered through sources who saw these things as forgivable character flaws in an otherwise admirable human being, and I can't correct for those biases because I don't know the truth. So it's going to sound like he was a truly great man. But bear those facts in mind. Barbara stayed with Franklin for the present, after discovering what he had done, but their marriage was a difficult one, and they split up and reconciled a handful of times. They had three more children together -- Cecil, Aretha, and Carolyn -- and remained together as Franklin moved on first to a church in Buffalo, New York, and then to New Bethel Church, in Detroit, on Hastings Street, a street which was the centre of Black nightlife in the city, as immortalised in John Lee Hooker's "Boogie Chillun": [Excerpt: John Lee Hooker, "Boogie Chillen"] Before moving to Detroit, Franklin had already started to get more political, as his congregation in Buffalo had largely been union members, and being free from the worst excesses of segregation allowed him to talk more openly about civil rights, but that only accelerated when he moved to Detroit, which had been torn apart just a couple of years earlier by police violence against Black protestors. Franklin had started building a reputation when in Memphis using radio broadcasts, and by the time he moved to Detroit he was able to command a very high salary, and not only that, his family were given a mansion by the church, in a rich part of town far away from most of his congregation. Smokey Robinson, who was Cecil Franklin's best friend and a frequent visitor to the mansion through most of his childhood, described it later, saying "Once inside, I'm awestruck -- oil paintings, velvet tapestries, silk curtains, mahogany cabinets filled with ornate objects of silver and gold. Man, I've never seen nothing like that before!" He made a lot of money, but he also increased church attendance so much that he earned that money. He had already been broadcasting on the radio, but when he started his Sunday night broadcasts in Detroit, he came up with a trick of having his sermons run long, so the show would end before the climax. People listening decided that they would have to start turning up in person to hear the end of the sermons, and soon he became so popular that the church would be so full that crowds would have to form on the street outside to listen. Other churches rescheduled their services so they wouldn't clash with Franklin's, and most of the other Black Baptist ministers in the city would go along to watch him preach. In 1948 though, a couple of years after moving to Detroit, Barbara finally left her husband. She took Vaughn with her and moved back to Buffalo, leaving the four biological children she'd had with C.L. with their father.  But it's important to note that she didn't leave her children -- they would visit her on a regular basis, and stay with her over school holidays. Aretha later said "Despite the fact that it has been written innumerable times, it is an absolute lie that my mother abandoned us. In no way, shape, form, or fashion did our mother desert us." Barbara's place in the home was filled by many women -- C.L. Franklin's mother moved up from Mississippi to help him take care of the children, the ladies from the church would often help out, and even stars like Mahalia Jackson would turn up and cook meals for the children. There were also the women with whom Franklin carried on affairs, including Anna Gordy, Ruth Brown, and Dinah Washington, the most important female jazz and blues singer of the fifties, who had major R&B hits with records like her version of "Cold Cold Heart": [Excerpt: Dinah Washington, "Cold Cold Heart"] Although my own favourite record of hers is "Big Long Slidin' Thing", which she made with arranger Quincy Jones: [Excerpt: Dinah Washington, "Big Long Slidin' Thing"] It's about a trombone. Get your minds out of the gutter. Washington was one of the biggest vocal influences on young Aretha, but the single biggest influence was Clara Ward, another of C.L. Franklin's many girlfriends. Ward was the longest-lasting of these, and there seems to have been a lot of hope on both her part and Aretha's that she and Rev. Franklin would marry, though Franklin always made it very clear that monogamy wouldn't suit him. Ward was one of the three major female gospel singers of the middle part of the century, and possibly even more technically impressive as a vocalist than the other two, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Mahalia Jackson. Where Jackson was an austere performer, who refused to perform in secular contexts at all for most of her life, and took herself and her music very seriously, and Tharpe was a raunchier, funnier, more down-to-earth performer who was happy to play for blues audiences and even to play secular music on occasion, Ward was a *glamorous* performer, who wore sequined dresses and piled her hair high on her head. Ward had become a singer in 1931 when her mother had what she later talked about as a religious epiphany, and decided she wasn't going to be a labourer any more, she was going to devote her life to gospel music. Ward's mother had formed a vocal group with her two daughters, and Clara quickly became the star and her mother's meal ticket -- and her mother was very possessive of that ticket, to the extent that Ward, who was a bisexual woman who mostly preferred men, had more relationships with women, because her mother wouldn't let her be alone with the men she was attracted to. But Ward did manage to keep a relationship going with C.L. Franklin, and Aretha Franklin talked about the moment she decided to become a singer, when she saw Ward singing "Peace in the Valley" at a funeral: [Excerpt: Clara Ward, "Peace in the Valley"] As well as looking towards Ward as a vocal influence, Aretha was also influenced by her as a person -- she became a mother figure to Aretha, who would talk later about watching Ward eat, and noting her taking little delicate bites, and getting an idea of what it meant to be ladylike from her. After Ward's death in 1973, a notebook was found in which she had written her opinions of other singers. For Aretha she wrote “My baby Aretha, she doesn't know how good she is. Doubts self. Some day—to the moon. I love that girl.” Ward's influence became especially important to Aretha and her siblings after their mother died of a heart attack a few years after leaving her husband, when Aretha was ten, and Aretha, already a very introverted child, became even more so. Everyone who knew Aretha said that her later diva-ish reputation came out of a deep sense of insecurity and introversion -- that she was a desperately private, closed-off, person who would rarely express her emotions at all, and who would look away from you rather than make eye contact. The only time she let herself express emotions was when she performed music. And music was hugely important in the Franklin household. Most preachers in the Black church at that time were a bit dismissive of gospel music, because they thought the music took away from their prestige -- they saw it as a necessary evil, and resented it taking up space when their congregations could have been listening to them. But Rev. Franklin was himself a rather good singer, and even made a few gospel records himself in 1950, recording for Joe Von Battle, who owned a record shop on Hastings Street and also put out records by blues singers: [Excerpt: C.L. Franklin, "I Am Climbing Higher Mountains" ] The church's musical director was James Cleveland, one of the most important gospel artists of the fifties and sixties, who sang with groups like the Caravans: [Excerpt: The Caravans, "What Kind of Man is This?" ] Cleveland, who had started out in the choir run by Thomas Dorsey, the writer of “Take My Hand Precious Lord” and “Peace in the Valley”, moved in with the Franklin family for a while, and he gave the girls tips on playing the piano -- much later he would play piano on Aretha's album Amazing Grace, and she said of him “He showed me some real nice chords, and I liked his deep, deep sound”. Other than Clara Ward, he was probably the single biggest musical influence on Aretha. And all the touring gospel musicians would make appearances at New Bethel Church, not least of them Sam Cooke, who first appeared there with the Highway QCs and would continue to do so after joining the Soul Stirrers: [Excerpt: The Soul Stirrers, "Touch the Hem of his Garment"] Young Aretha and her older sister Erma both had massive crushes on Cooke, and there were rumours that he had an affair with one or both of them when they were in their teens, though both denied it. Aretha later said "When I first saw him, all I could do was sigh... Sam was love on first hearing, love at first sight." But it wasn't just gospel music that filled the house. One of the major ways that C.L. Franklin's liberalism showed was in his love of secular music, especially jazz and blues, which he regarded as just as important in Black cultural life as gospel music. We already talked about Dinah Washington being a regular visitor to the house, but every major Black entertainer would visit the Franklin residence when they were in Detroit. Both Aretha and Cecil Franklin vividly remembered visits from Art Tatum, who would sit at the piano and play for the family and their guests: [Excerpt: Art Tatum, "Tiger Rag"] Tatum was such a spectacular pianist that there's now a musicological term, the tatum, named after him, for the smallest possible discernible rhythmic interval between two notes. Young Aretha was thrilled by his technique, and by that of Oscar Peterson, who also regularly came to the Franklin home, sometimes along with Ella Fitzgerald. Nat "King" Cole was another regular visitor. The Franklin children all absorbed the music these people -- the most important musicians of the time -- were playing in their home, and young Aretha in particular became an astonishing singer and also an accomplished pianist. Smokey Robinson later said: “The other thing that knocked us out about Aretha was her piano playing. There was a grand piano in the Franklin living room, and we all liked to mess around. We'd pick out little melodies with one finger. But when Aretha sat down, even as a seven-year-old, she started playing chords—big chords. Later I'd recognize them as complex church chords, the kind used to accompany the preacher and the solo singer. At the time, though, all I could do was view Aretha as a wonder child. Mind you, this was Detroit, where musical talent ran strong and free. Everyone was singing and harmonizing; everyone was playing piano and guitar. Aretha came out of this world, but she also came out of another far-off magical world none of us really understood. She came from a distant musical planet where children are born with their gifts fully formed.” C.L. Franklin became more involved in the music business still when Joe Von Battle started releasing records of his sermons, which had become steadily more politically aware: [Excerpt: C.L. Franklin, "Dry Bones in the Valley"] Franklin was not a Marxist -- he was a liberal, but like many liberals was willing to stand with Marxists where they had shared interests, even when it was dangerous. For example in 1954, at the height of McCarthyism, he had James and Grace Lee Boggs, two Marxist revolutionaries, come to the pulpit and talk about their support for the anti-colonial revolution in Kenya, and they sold four hundred copies of their pamphlet after their talk, because he saw that the struggle of Black Africans to get out from white colonial rule was the same struggle as that of Black Americans. And Franklin's powerful sermons started getting broadcast on the radio in areas further out from Detroit, as Chess Records picked up the distribution for them and people started playing the records on other stations. People like future Congressman John Lewis and the Reverend Jesse Jackson would later talk about listening to C.L. Franklin's records on the radio and being inspired -- a whole generation of Black Civil Rights leaders took their cues from him, and as the 1950s and 60s went on he became closer and closer to Martin Luther King in particular. But C.L. Franklin was always as much an ambitious showman as an activist, and he started putting together gospel tours, consisting mostly of music but with himself giving a sermon as the headline act. And he became very, very wealthy from these tours. On one trip in the south, his car broke down, and he couldn't find a mechanic willing to work on it. A group of white men started mocking him with racist terms, trying to provoke him, as he was dressed well and driving a nice car (albeit one that had broken down). Rather than arguing with them, he walked to a car dealership, and bought a new car with the cash that he had on him. By 1956 he was getting around $4000 per appearance, roughly equivalent to $43,000 today, and he was making a *lot* of appearances. He also sold half a million records that year. Various gospel singers, including the Clara Ward Singers, would perform on the tours he organised, and one of those performers was Franklin's middle daughter Aretha. Aretha had become pregnant when she was twelve, and after giving birth to the child she dropped out of school, but her grandmother did most of the child-rearing for her, while she accompanied her father on tour. Aretha's first recordings, made when she was just fourteen, show what an astonishing talent she already was at that young age. She would grow as an artist, of course, as she aged and gained experience, but those early gospel records already show an astounding maturity and ability. It's jaw-dropping to listen to these records of a fourteen-year-old, and immediately recognise them as a fully-formed Aretha Franklin. [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "There is a Fountain Filled With Blood"] Smokey Robinson's assessment that she was born with her gifts fully formed doesn't seem like an exaggeration when you hear that. For the latter half of the fifties, Aretha toured with her father, performing on the gospel circuit and becoming known there. But the Franklin sisters were starting to get ideas about moving into secular music. This was largely because their family friend Sam Cooke had done just that, with "You Send Me": [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "You Send Me"] Aretha and Erma still worshipped Cooke, and Aretha would later talk about getting dressed up just to watch Cooke appear on the TV. Their brother Cecil later said "I remember the night Sam came to sing at the Flame Show Bar in Detroit. Erma and Ree said they weren't going because they were so heartbroken that Sam had recently married. I didn't believe them. And I knew I was right when they started getting dressed about noon for the nine o'clock show. Because they were underage, they put on a ton of makeup to look older. It didn't matter 'cause Berry Gordy's sisters, Anna and Gwen, worked the photo concession down there, taking pictures of the party people. Anna was tight with Daddy and was sure to let my sisters in. She did, and they came home with stars in their eyes.” Moving from gospel to secular music still had a stigma against it in the gospel world, but Rev. Franklin had never seen secular music as sinful, and he encouraged his daughters in their ambitions. Erma was the first to go secular, forming a girl group, the Cleo-Patrettes, at the suggestion of the Four Tops, who were family friends, and recording a single for Joe Von Battle's J-V-B label, "No Other Love": [Excerpt: The Cleo-Patrettes, "No Other Love"] But the group didn't go any further, as Rev. Franklin insisted that his eldest daughter had to finish school and go to university before she could become a professional singer. Erma missed other opportunities for different reasons, though -- Berry Gordy, at this time still a jobbing songwriter, offered her a song he'd written with his sister and Roquel Davis, but Erma thought of herself as a jazz singer and didn't want to do R&B, and so "All I Could Do Was Cry" was given to Etta James instead, who had a top forty pop hit with it: [Excerpt: Etta James, "All I Could Do Was Cry"] While Erma's move into secular music was slowed by her father wanting her to have an education, there was no such pressure on Aretha, as she had already dropped out. But Aretha had a different problem -- she was very insecure, and said that church audiences "weren't critics, but worshippers", but she was worried that nightclub audiences in particular were just the kind of people who would just be looking for flaws, rather than wanting to support the performer as church audiences did. But eventually she got up the nerve to make the move. There was the possibility of her getting signed to Motown -- her brother was still best friends with Smokey Robinson, while the Gordy family were close to her father -- but Rev. Franklin had his eye on bigger things. He wanted her to be signed to Columbia, which in 1960 was the most prestigious of all the major labels. As Aretha's brother Cecil later said "He wanted Ree on Columbia, the label that recorded Mahalia Jackson, Duke Ellington, Johnny Mathis, Tony Bennett, Percy Faith, and Doris Day. Daddy said that Columbia was the biggest and best record company in the world. Leonard Bernstein recorded for Columbia." They went out to New York to see Phil Moore, a legendary vocal coach and arranger who had helped make Lena Horne and Dorothy Dandridge into stars, but Moore actually refused to take her on as a client, saying "She does not require my services. Her style has already been developed. Her style is in place. It is a unique style that, in my professional opinion, requires no alteration. It simply requires the right material. Her stage presentation is not of immediate concern. All that will come later. The immediate concern is the material that will suit her best. And the reason that concern will not be easily addressed is because I can't imagine any material that will not suit her." That last would become a problem for the next few years, but the immediate issue was to get someone at Columbia to listen to her, and Moore could help with that -- he was friends with John Hammond. Hammond is a name that's come up several times in the podcast already -- we mentioned him in the very earliest episodes, and also in episode ninety-eight, where we looked at his signing of Bob Dylan. But Hammond was a legend in the music business. He had produced sessions for Bessie Smith, had discovered Count Basie and Billie Holiday, had convinced Benny Goodman to hire Charlie Christian and Lionel Hampton, had signed Pete Seeger and the Weavers to Columbia, had organised the Spirituals to Swing concerts which we talked about in the first few episodes of this podcast, and was about to put out the first album of Robert Johnson's recordings. Of all the executives at Columbia, he was the one who had the greatest eye for talent, and the greatest understanding of Black musical culture. Moore suggested that the Franklins get Major Holley to produce a demo recording that he could get Hammond to listen to. Major Holley was a family friend, and a jazz bassist who had played with Oscar Peterson and Coleman Hawkins among others, and he put together a set of songs for Aretha that would emphasise the jazz side of her abilities, pitching her as a Dinah Washington style bluesy jazz singer. The highlight of the demo was a version of "Today I Sing the Blues", a song that had originally been recorded by Helen Humes, the singer who we last heard of recording “Be Baba Leba” with Bill Doggett: [Excerpt: Helen Humes, "Today I Sing the Blues"] That original version had been produced by Hammond, but the song had also recently been covered by Aretha's idol, Sam Cooke: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "Today I Sing the Blues"] Hammond was hugely impressed by the demo, and signed Aretha straight away, and got to work producing her first album. But he and Rev. Franklin had different ideas about what Aretha should do. Hammond wanted to make a fairly raw-sounding bluesy jazz album, the kind of recording he had produced with Bessie Smith or Billie Holiday, but Rev. Franklin wanted his daughter to make music that would cross over to the white pop market -- he was aiming for the same kind of audience that Nat "King" Cole or Harry Belafonte had, and he wanted her recording standards like "Over the Rainbow". This showed a lack of understanding on Rev. Franklin's part of how such crossovers actually worked at this point. As Etta James later said, "If you wanna have Black hits, you gotta understand the Black streets, you gotta work those streets and work those DJs to get airplay on Black stations... Or looking at it another way, in those days you had to get the Black audience to love the hell outta you and then hope the love would cross over to the white side. Columbia didn't know nothing 'bout crossing over.” But Hammond knew they had to make a record quickly, because Sam Cooke had been working on RCA Records, trying to get them to sign Aretha, and Rev. Franklin wanted an album out so they could start booking club dates for her, and was saying that if they didn't get one done quickly he'd take up that offer, and so they came up with a compromise set of songs which satisfied nobody, but did produce two R&B top ten hits, "Won't Be Long" and Aretha's version of "Today I Sing the Blues": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Today I Sing the Blues"] This is not to say that Aretha herself saw this as a compromise -- she later said "I have never compromised my material. Even then, I knew a good song from a bad one. And if Hammond, one of the legends of the business, didn't know how to produce a record, who does? No, the fault was with promotion." And this is something important to bear in mind as we talk about her Columbia records. Many, *many* people have presented those records as Aretha being told what to do by producers who didn't understand her art and were making her record songs that didn't fit her style. That's not what's happening with the Columbia records. Everyone actually involved said that Aretha was very involved in the choices made -- and there are some genuinely great tracks on those albums. The problem is that they're *unfocused*. Aretha was only eighteen when she signed to the label, and she loved all sorts of music -- blues, jazz, soul, standards, gospel, middle-of-the-road pop music -- and wanted to sing all those kinds of music. And she *could* sing all those kinds of music, and sing them well. But it meant the records weren't coherent. You didn't know what you were getting, and there was no artistic personality that dominated them, it was just what Aretha felt like recording. Around this time, Aretha started to think that maybe her father didn't know what he was talking about when it came to popular music success, even though she idolised him in most areas, and she turned to another figure, who would soon become both her husband and manager. Ted White. Her sister Erma, who was at that time touring with Lloyd Price, had introduced them, but in fact Aretha had first seen White years earlier, in her own house -- he had been Dinah Washington's boyfriend in the fifties, and her first sight of him had been carrying a drunk Washington out of the house after a party. In interviews with David Ritz, who wrote biographies of many major soul stars including both Aretha Franklin and Etta James, James had a lot to say about White, saying “Ted White was famous even before he got with Aretha. My boyfriend at the time, Harvey Fuqua, used to talk about him. Ted was supposed to be the slickest pimp in Detroit. When I learned that Aretha married him, I wasn't surprised. A lot of the big-time singers who we idolized as girls—like Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan—had pimps for boyfriends and managers. That was standard operating procedure. My own mother had made a living turning tricks. When we were getting started, that way of life was part of the music business. It was in our genes. Part of the lure of pimps was that they got us paid." She compared White to Ike Turner, saying "Ike made Tina, no doubt about it. He developed her talent. He showed her what it meant to be a performer. He got her famous. Of course, Ted White was not a performer, but he was savvy about the world. When Harvey Fuqua introduced me to him—this was the fifties, before he was with Aretha—I saw him as a super-hip extra-smooth cat. I liked him. He knew music. He knew songwriters who were writing hit songs. He had manners. Later, when I ran into him and Aretha—this was the sixties—I saw that she wasn't as shy as she used to be." White was a pimp, but he was also someone with music business experience -- he owned an unsuccessful publishing company, and also ran a chain of jukeboxes. He was also thirty, while Aretha was only eighteen. But White didn't like the people in Aretha's life at the time -- he didn't get on well with her father, and he also clashed with John Hammond. And Aretha was also annoyed at Hammond, because her sister Erma had signed to Epic, a Columbia subsidiary, and was releasing her own singles: [Excerpt: Erma Franklin, "Hello Again"] Aretha was certain that Hammond had signed Erma, even though Hammond had nothing to do with Epic Records, and Erma had actually been recommended by Lloyd Price. And Aretha, while for much of her career she would support her sister, was also terrified that her sister might have a big hit before her and leave Aretha in her shadow. Hammond was still the credited producer on Aretha's second album, The Electrifying Aretha Franklin, but his lack of say in the sessions can be shown in the choice of lead-off single. "Rock-a-Bye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody" was originally recorded by Al Jolson in 1918: [Excerpt: Al Jolson, "Rock-a-Bye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody"] Rev. Franklin pushed for the song, as he was a fan of Jolson -- Jolson, oddly, had a large Black fanbase, despite his having been a blackface performer, because he had *also* been a strong advocate of Black musicians like Cab Calloway, and the level of racism in the media of the twenties through forties was so astonishingly high that even a blackface performer could seem comparatively OK. Aretha's performance was good, but it was hardly the kind of thing that audiences were clamouring for in 1961: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Rock-a-Bye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody"] That single came out the month after _Down Beat_ magazine gave Aretha the "new-star female vocalist award", and it oddly made the pop top forty, her first record to do so, and the B-side made the R&B top ten, but for the next few years both chart success and critical acclaim eluded her. None of her next nine singles would make higher than number eighty-six on the Hot One Hundred, and none would make the R&B charts at all. After that transitional second album, she was paired with producer Bob Mersey, who was precisely the kind of white pop producer that one would expect for someone who hoped for crossover success. Mersey was the producer for many of Columbia's biggest stars at the time -- people like Barbra Streisand, Andy Williams, Julie Andrews, Patti Page, and Mel Tormé -- and it was that kind of audience that Aretha wanted to go for at this point. To give an example of the kind of thing that Mersey was doing, just the month before he started work on his first collaboration with Aretha, _The Tender, the Moving, the Swinging Aretha Franklin_, his production of Andy Williams singing "Moon River" was released: [Excerpt: Andy Williams, "Moon River"] This was the kind of audience Aretha was going for when it came to record sales – the person she compared herself to most frequently at this point was Barbra Streisand – though in live performances she was playing with a small jazz group in jazz venues, and going for the same kind of jazz-soul crossover audience as Dinah Washington or Ray Charles. The strategy seems to have been to get something like the success of her idol Sam Cooke, who could play to soul audiences but also play the Copacabana, but the problem was that Cooke had built an audience before doing that -- she hadn't. But even though she hadn't built up an audience, musicians were starting to pay attention. Ted White, who was still in touch with Dinah Washington, later said “Women are very catty. They'll see a girl who's dressed very well and they'll say, Yeah, but look at those shoes, or look at that hairdo. Aretha was the only singer I've ever known that Dinah had no negative comments about. She just stood with her mouth open when she heard Aretha sing.” The great jazz vocalist Carmen McRea went to see Aretha at the Village Vanguard in New York around this time, having heard the comparisons to Dinah Washington, and met her afterwards. She later said "Given how emotionally she sang, I expected her to have a supercharged emotional personality like Dinah. Instead, she was the shyest thing I've ever met. Would hardly look me in the eye. Didn't say more than two words. I mean, this bitch gave bashful a new meaning. Anyway, I didn't give her any advice because she didn't ask for any, but I knew goddamn well that, no matter how good she was—and she was absolutely wonderful—she'd have to make up her mind whether she wanted to be Della Reese, Dinah Washington, or Sarah Vaughan. I also had a feeling she wouldn't have minded being Leslie Uggams or Diahann Carroll. I remember thinking that if she didn't figure out who she was—and quick—she was gonna get lost in the weeds of the music biz." So musicians were listening to Aretha, even if everyone else wasn't. The Tender, the Moving, the Swinging Aretha Franklin, for example, was full of old standards like "Try a Little Tenderness": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Try a Little Tenderness"] That performance inspired Otis Redding to cut his own version of that song a few years later: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Try a Little Tenderness"] And it might also have inspired Aretha's friend and idol Sam Cooke to include the song in his own lounge sets. The Tender, the Moving, the Swinging Aretha Franklin also included Aretha's first original composition, but in general it wasn't a very well-received album. In 1963, the first cracks started to develop in Aretha's relationship with Ted White. According to her siblings, part of the strain was because Aretha's increasing commitment to the civil rights movement was costing her professional opportunities. Her brother Cecil later said "Ted White had complete sway over her when it came to what engagements to accept and what songs to sing. But if Daddy called and said, ‘Ree, I want you to sing for Dr. King,' she'd drop everything and do just that. I don't think Ted had objections to her support of Dr. King's cause, and he realized it would raise her visibility. But I do remember the time that there was a conflict between a big club gig and doing a benefit for Dr. King. Ted said, ‘Take the club gig. We need the money.' But Ree said, ‘Dr. King needs me more.' She defied her husband. Maybe that was the start of their marital trouble. Their thing was always troubled because it was based on each of them using the other. Whatever the case, my sister proved to be a strong soldier in the civil rights fight. That made me proud of her and it kept her relationship with Daddy from collapsing entirely." In part her increasing activism was because of her father's own increase in activity. The benefit that Cecil is talking about there is probably one in Chicago organised by Mahalia Jackson, where Aretha headlined on a bill that also included Jackson, Eartha Kitt, and the comedian Dick Gregory. That was less than a month before her father organised the Detroit Walk to Freedom, a trial run for the more famous March on Washington a few weeks later. The Detroit Walk to Freedom was run by the Detroit Council for Human Rights, which was formed by Rev. Franklin and Rev. Albert Cleage, a much more radical Black nationalist who often differed with Franklin's more moderate integrationist stance. They both worked together to organise the Walk to Freedom, but Franklin's stance predominated, as several white liberal politicians, like the Mayor of Detroit, Jerome Cavanagh, were included in the largely-Black March. It drew crowds of 125,000 people, and Dr. King called it "one of the most wonderful things that has happened in America", and it was the largest civil rights demonstration in American history up to that point. King's speech in Detroit was recorded and released on Motown Records: [Excerpt: Martin Luther King, "Original 'I Have a Dream' Speech”] He later returned to the same ideas in his more famous speech in Washington. During that civil rights spring and summer of 1963, Aretha also recorded what many think of as the best of her Columbia albums, a collection of jazz standards  called Laughing on the Outside, which included songs like "Solitude", "Ol' Man River" and "I Wanna Be Around": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Wanna Be Around"] The opening track, "Skylark", was Etta James' favourite ever Aretha Franklin performance, and is regarded by many as the definitive take on the song: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Skylark"] Etta James later talked about discussing the track with the great jazz singer Sarah Vaughan, one of Aretha's early influences, who had recorded her own version of the song: "Sarah said, ‘Have you heard of this Aretha Franklin girl?' I said, ‘You heard her do “Skylark,” didn't you?' Sarah said, ‘Yes, I did, and I'm never singing that song again.” But while the album got noticed by other musicians, it didn't get much attention from the wider public. Mersey decided that a change in direction was needed, and they needed to get in someone with more of a jazz background to work with Aretha. He brought in pianist and arranger Bobby Scott, who had previously worked with people like Lester Young, and Scott said of their first meeting “My first memory of Aretha is that she wouldn't look at me when I spoke. She withdrew from the encounter in a way that intrigued me. At first I thought she was just shy—and she was—but I also felt her reading me...For all her deference to my experience and her reluctance to speak up, when she did look me in the eye, she did so with a quiet intensity before saying, ‘I like all your ideas, Mr. Scott, but please remember I do want hits.'” They started recording together, but the sides they cut wouldn't be released for a few years. Instead, Aretha and Mersey went in yet another direction. Dinah Washington died suddenly in December 1963, and given that Aretha was already being compared to Washington by almost everyone, and that Washington had been a huge influence on her, as well as having been close to both her father and her husband/manager, it made sense to go into the studio and quickly cut a tribute album, with Aretha singing Washington's hits: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Cold Cold Heart"] Unfortunately, while Washington had been wildly popular, and one of the most important figures in jazz and R&B in the forties and fifties, her style was out of date. The tribute album, titled Unforgettable, came out in February 1964, the same month that Beatlemania hit the US. Dinah Washington was the past, and trying to position Aretha as "the new Dinah Washington" would doom her to obscurity. John Hammond later said "I remember thinking that if Aretha never does another album she will be remembered for this one. No, the problem was timing. Dinah had died, and, outside the black community, interest in her had waned dramatically. Popular music was in a radical and revolutionary moment, and that moment had nothing to do with Dinah Washington, great as she was and will always be.” At this point, Columbia brought in Clyde Otis, an independent producer and songwriter who had worked with artists like Washington and Sarah Vaughan, and indeed had written one of the songs on Unforgettable, but had also worked with people like Brook Benton, who had a much more R&B audience. For example, he'd written "Baby, You Got What It Takes" for Benton and Washington to do as a duet: [Excerpt: Brook Benton and Dinah Washington, "Baby, You Got What it Takes"] In 1962, when he was working at Mercury Records before going independent, Otis had produced thirty-three of the fifty-one singles the label put out that year that had charted. Columbia had decided that they were going to position Aretha firmly in the R&B market, and assigned Otis to do just that. At first, though, Otis had no more luck with getting Aretha to sing R&B than anyone else had. He later said "Aretha, though, couldn't be deterred from her determination to beat Barbra Streisand at Barbra's own game. I kept saying, ‘Ree, you can outsing Streisand any day of the week. That's not the point. The point is to find a hit.' But that summer she just wanted straight-up ballads. She insisted that she do ‘People,' Streisand's smash. Aretha sang the hell out of it, but no one's gonna beat Barbra at her own game." But after several months of this, eventually Aretha and White came round to the idea of making an R&B record. Otis produced an album of contemporary R&B, with covers of music from the more sophisticated end of the soul market, songs like "My Guy", "Every Little Bit Hurts", and "Walk on By", along with a few new originals brought in by Otis. The title track, "Runnin' Out of Fools", became her biggest hit in three years, making number fifty-seven on the pop charts and number thirty on the R&B charts: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Runnin' Out of Fools"] After that album, they recorded another album with Otis producing, a live-in-the-studio jazz album, but again nobody involved could agree on a style for her. By this time it was obvious that she was unhappy with Columbia and would be leaving the label soon, and they wanted to get as much material in the can as they could, so they could continue releasing material after she left. But her working relationship with Otis was deteriorating -- Otis and Ted White did not get on, Aretha and White were having their own problems, and Aretha had started just not showing up for some sessions, with nobody knowing where she was. Columbia passed her on to yet another producer, this time Bob Johnston, who had just had a hit with Patti Page, "Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte": [Excerpt: Patti Page, "Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte"] Johnston was just about to hit an incredible hot streak as a producer. At the same time as his sessions with Aretha, he was also producing Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited, and just after the sessions finished he'd go on to produce Simon & Garfunkel's Sounds of Silence album. In the next few years he would produce a run of classic Dylan albums like Blonde on Blonde, John Wesley Harding, and New Morning, Simon & Garfunkel's follow up Parsley, Sage, Rosemary & Thyme, Leonard Cohen's first three albums, and Johnny Cash's comeback with the Live at Folsom Prison album and its follow up At San Quentin. He also produced records for Marty Robbins, Flatt & Scruggs, the Byrds, and Burl Ives during that time period. But you may notice that while that's as great a run of records as any producer was putting out at the time, it has little to do with the kind of music that Aretha Franklin was making then, or would become famous with. Johnston produced a string-heavy session in which Aretha once again tried to sing old standards by people like Oscar Hammerstein and Jerome Kern. She then just didn't turn up for some more sessions, until one final session in August, when she recorded songs like "Swanee" and "You Made Me Love You". For more than a year, she didn't go into a studio. She also missed many gigs and disappeared from her family's life for periods of time. Columbia kept putting out records of things she'd already recorded, but none of them had any success at all. Many of the records she'd made for Columbia had been genuinely great -- there's a popular perception that she was being held back by a record company that forced her to sing material she didn't like, but in fact she *loved* old standards, and jazz tunes, and contemporary pop at least as much as any other kind of music. Truly great musicians tend to have extremely eclectic tastes, and Aretha Franklin was a truly great musician if anyone was. Her Columbia albums are as good as any albums in those genres put out in that time period, and she remained proud of them for the rest of her life. But that very eclecticism had meant that she hadn't established a strong identity as a performer -- everyone who heard her records knew she was a great singer, but nobody knew what "an Aretha Franklin record" really meant -- and she hadn't had a single real hit, which was the thing she wanted more than anything. All that changed when in the early hours of the morning, Jerry Wexler was at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals recording a Wilson Pickett track -- from the timeline, it was probably the session for "Mustang Sally", which coincidentally was published by Ted White's publishing company, as Sir Mack Rice, the writer, was a neighbour of White and Franklin, and to which Aretha had made an uncredited songwriting contribution: [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett, "Mustang Sally"] Whatever the session, it wasn't going well. Percy Sledge, another Atlantic artist who recorded at Muscle Shoals, had turned up and had started winding Pickett up, telling him he sounded just like James Brown. Pickett *hated* Brown -- it seems like almost every male soul singer of the sixties hated James Brown -- and went to physically attack Sledge. Wexler got between the two men to protect his investments in them -- both were the kind of men who could easily cause some serious damage to anyone they hit -- and Pickett threw him to one side and charged at Sledge. At that moment the phone went, and Wexler yelled at the two of them to calm down so he could talk on the phone. The call was telling him that Aretha Franklin was interested in recording for Atlantic. Rev. Louise Bishop, later a Democratic politician in Pennsylvania, was at this time a broadcaster, presenting a radio gospel programme, and she knew Aretha. She'd been to see her perform, and had been astonished by Aretha's performance of a recent Otis Redding single, "Respect": [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Respect"] Redding will, by the way, be getting his own episode in a few months' time, which is why I've not covered the making of that record here. Bishop thought that Aretha did the song even better than Redding -- something Bishop hadn't thought possible. When she got talking to Aretha after the show, she discovered that her contract with Columbia was up, and Aretha didn't really know what she was going to do -- maybe she'd start her own label or something. She hadn't been into the studio in more than a year, but she did have some songs she'd been working on. Bishop was good friends with Jerry Wexler, and she knew that he was a big fan of Aretha's, and had been saying for a while that when her contract was up he'd like to sign her. Bishop offered to make the connection, and then went back home and phoned Wexler's wife, waking her up -- it was one in the morning by this point, but Bishop was accustomed to phoning Wexler late at night when it was something important. Wexler's wife then phoned him in Muscle Shoals, and he phoned Bishop back and made the arrangements to meet up. Initially, Wexler wasn't thinking about producing Aretha himself -- this was still the period when he and the Ertegun brothers were thinking of selling Atlantic and getting out of the music business, and so while he signed her to the label he was originally going to hand her over to Jim Stewart at Stax to record, as he had with Sam and Dave. But in a baffling turn of events, Jim Stewart didn't actually want to record her, and so Wexler determined that he had better do it himself. And he didn't want to do it with slick New York musicians -- he wanted to bring out the gospel sound in her voice, and he thought the best way to do that was with musicians from what Charles Hughes refers to as "the country-soul triangle" of Nashville, Memphis, and Muscle Shoals. So he booked a week's worth of sessions at FAME studios, and got in FAME's regular rhythm section, plus a couple of musicians from American Recordings in Memphis -- Chips Moman and Spooner Oldham. Oldham's friend and songwriting partner Dan Penn came along as well -- he wasn't officially part of the session, but he was a fan of Aretha's and wasn't going to miss this. Penn had been the first person that Rick Hall, the owner of FAME, had called when Wexler had booked the studio, because Hall hadn't actually heard of Aretha Franklin up to that point, but didn't want to let Wexler know that. Penn had assured him that Aretha was one of the all-time great talents, and that she just needed the right production to become massive. As Hall put it in his autobiography, "Dan tended in those days to hate anything he didn't write, so I figured if he felt that strongly about her, then she was probably going to be a big star." Charlie Chalmers, a horn player who regularly played with these musicians, was tasked with putting together a horn section. The first song they recorded that day was one that the musicians weren't that impressed with at first. "I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You)" was written by a songwriter named Ronnie Shannon, who had driven from Georgia to Detroit hoping to sell his songs to Motown. He'd popped into a barber's shop where Ted White was having his hair cut to ask for directions to Motown, and White had signed him to his own publishing company and got him to write songs for Aretha. On hearing the demo, the musicians thought that the song was mediocre and a bit shapeless: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin "I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You) (demo)"] But everyone there was agreed that Aretha herself was spectacular. She didn't speak much to the musicians, just went to the piano and sat down and started playing, and Jerry Wexler later compared her playing to Thelonius Monk (who was indeed one of the jazz musicians who had influenced her). While Spooner Oldham had been booked to play piano, it was quickly decided to switch him to electric piano and organ, leaving the acoustic piano for Aretha to play, and she would play piano on all the sessions Wexler produced for her in future. Although while Wexler is the credited producer (and on this initial session Rick Hall at FAME is a credited co-producer), everyone involved, including Wexler, said that the musicians were taking their cues from Aretha rather than anyone else. She would outline the arrangements at the piano, and everyone else would fit in with what she was doing, coming up with head arrangements directed by her. But Wexler played a vital role in mediating between her and the musicians and engineering staff, all of whom he knew and she didn't. As Rick Hall said "After her brief introduction by Wexler, she said very little to me or anyone else in the studio other than Jerry or her husband for the rest of the day. I don't think Aretha and I ever made eye contact after our introduction, simply because we were both so totally focused on our music and consumed by what we were doing." The musicians started working on "I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You)", and at first found it difficult to get the groove, but then Oldham came up with an electric piano lick which everyone involved thought of as the key that unlocked the song for them: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You)"] After that, they took a break. Most of them were pleased with the track, though Rick Hall wasn't especially happy. But then Rick Hall wasn't especially happy about anything at that point. He'd always used mono for his recordings until then, but had been basically forced to install at least a two-track system by Tom Dowd, Atlantic's chief engineer, and was resentful of this imposition. During the break, Dan Penn went off to finish a song he and Spooner Oldham had been writing, which he hoped Aretha would record at the session: [Excerpt: Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham, "Do Right Woman, Do Right Man"] They had the basic structure of the song down, but hadn't quite finished the middle eight, and both Jerry Wexler and Aretha Franklin chipped in uncredited lyrical contributions -- Aretha's line was "as long as we're together baby, you'd better show some respect to me". Penn, Oldham, Chips Moman, Roger Hawkins, and Tommy Cogbill started cutting a backing track for the song, with Penn singing lead initially with the idea that Aretha would overdub her vocal. But while they were doing this, things had been going wrong with the other participants. All the FAME and American rhythm section players were white, as were Wexler, Hall, and Dowd, and Wexler had been very aware of this, and of the fact that they were recording in Alabama, where Aretha and her husband might not feel totally safe, so he'd specifically requested that the horn section at least contain some Black musicians. But Charlie Chalmers hadn't been able to get any of the Black musicians he would normally call when putting together a horn section, and had ended up with an all-white horn section as well, including one player, a trumpet player called Ken Laxton, who had a reputation as a good player but had never worked with any of the other musicians there -- he was an outsider in a group of people who regularly worked together and had a pre-existing relationship. As the two outsiders, Laxton and Ted White had, at first, bonded, and indeed had started drinking vodka together, passing a bottle between themselves, in a way that Rick Hall would normally not allow in a session -- at the time, the county the studio was in was still a dry county. But as Wexler said, “A redneck patronizing a Black man is a dangerous camaraderie,” and White and Laxton soon had a major falling out. Everyone involved tells a different story about what it was that caused them to start rowing, though it seems to have been to do with Laxton not showing the proper respect for Aretha, or even actually sexually assaulting her -- Dan Penn later said “I always heard he patted her on the butt or somethin', and what would have been wrong with that anyway?”, which says an awful lot about the attitudes of these white Southern men who thought of themselves as very progressive, and were -- for white Southern men in early 1967. Either way, White got very, very annoyed, and insisted that Laxton get fired from the session, which he was, but that still didn't satisfy White, and he stormed off to the motel, drunk and angry. The rest of them finished cutting a basic track for "Do Right Woman", but nobody was very happy with it. Oldham said later “She liked the song but hadn't had time to practice it or settle into it I remember there was Roger playing the drums and Cogbill playing the bass. And I'm on these little simplistic chords on organ, just holding chords so the song would be understood. And that was sort of where it was left. Dan had to sing the vocal, because she didn't know the song, in the wrong key for him. That's what they left with—Dan singing the wrong-key vocal and this little simplistic organ and a bass and a drum. We had a whole week to do everything—we had plenty of time—so there was no hurry to do anything in particular.” Penn was less optimistic, saying "But as I rem

James Carr, Dan Penn, and Chips Moman.

The History of Rock N Roll Part X - Soundtrack of the Century: 20 Feet from Stardom/Standing in the Shadows of Motown/Muscle Shoals On this week's episode of WatchThis W/RickRamos, Mr. Chavez & I continue our exploration of The World of Rock N Roll with a look at the foundation of any song . . . the bands and the background singers that give every song structure, power, and drive. This week we look at Morgan Neville's 20 Feet From Stardom (2019) - profiling Tata Vega, Judith Hill, Jo Lawry, Merry Clayton, Lisa Fischer, and the great Darlene Love - Paul Justman's Standing in the Shadows of Motown (2002) - profiling the great Motown backing band The Funk Brothers. composed of: Jack Ashford (percussion), Bob Babbitt (bass), Uriel Jones (drums), Joe Hunter (keyboards), Joe Messina (guitar), Richard "Pistol" Allen (drums), Benny "Papa Zita" Benjamin (drums), Eddie "Bongo" Brown (percussion), Johnny Griffith (keyboards), Earl Van Dyke (keyboards), and Robert White (guitar). Finally, we close out the show with an incredible film showcasing The Birth of the Deep South Soul & Rock N Roll Sound birthed by the great Alabama Producer Rick Hall and FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals Alabama . . . I'm talking about Greg "Freddy" Camalier's Muscle Shoals (2013). An incredible film that showcases the legacy of Hall and the Swampers including: Barry Beckett (keyboards), Roger Hawkins (drums), David Hood (bass), Jimmy Johnson (guitar), Chips Moman (guitar), Junior Lowe (guitar), Dan Penn, Tommy Cogbill, Pete Carr (guitar), and Spooner Oldham (organ and piano). This is a fun episode that will - hopefully - introduce three great films and a host of music that you owe it to yourself to embrace. Take a listen and let us know what you think. Questions, Comments, Complaints, & Suggestions can be directed to gondoramos@yahoo.com. Many Thanks. 

En Música de Contrabando, revista diaria de música en Onda Regional de Murcia ( orm.es, 00'00- 02,00h).Rolling Stones lanzan la edición del 40 aniversario de su álbum multi-platino Tattoo You, en formatos deluxe y con repertorio ampliado. El 12 de noviembre de 2021, Geffen/UMe comemoran el 30 aniversario de Nevermind con varias reediciones multiformato. Un total de 94 audios y pistas de video . Entre el material exclusivo e inédito de varias de las versiones de Nevermind 30th Anniversary Editions se encuentran cuatro conciertos en vivo completos que documentan la histórica ascensión de Nirvana en el escenario – Live in Amsterdam, Netherlands (grabado el 25 de noviembre de 1991 en el famoso club Paradiso); Live in Del Mar, California (grabado el 28 de Diciembre de 1991 en el Pabellón Pat O'Brien en Del Mar Fairgrounds); Live in Melbourne, Australia for triple j (grabado el 1 de febrero de 1992 en The Palace en St. Kilda); y Live in Tokyo, Japan (grabado en el Nakano Sunplaza el 19 de febrero de 1992).Como adelanto de su nuevo disco conjunto, Imposter, Dave Gahan y Soulsavers presentan su versión de “The dark end of the street”, canción compuesta en 1966 por Chips Moman y Dan Penn que han grabado, entre otros, Aretha Franklin, Dolly Parton, Fran Blak y Elvis Costello. Adele es número 1en las listas británicas con ‘Easy On Me'. The Sisters Of Mercy anuncian las fechas de su gira española para 2022. Parcels han compartido otro avance más extraído de Day/Night, su próximo álbum de estudio que verá la luz el 5 de noviembre. Inconformismo y serenidad. Estados de ánimo a priori incompatibles que Lori Meyers conjuga y equilibra en “Espacios infinitos”, su nuevo álbum. IZAL emprende hoy su #CaminoAlHogar . Un camino de una semana en el que la banda irá desvelando cada día una de las siete fotografías sonoras que, junto a los tres adelantos que ya vieron la luz ( Meiuqèr, Fotografías e Inercia) , conforman su nuevo álbum, "Hogar".Black Marble publica Fast idol, su romántico nuevo disco de cold wave. “Mañanita” es el último avance del nuevo disco de Depedro “Máquina de Piedad”. Fickle Friends adelantan "alone", festivo nuevo tema de Are we gonna be alright?, su nuevo disco. Alucinante es el nuevo adelanto del próximo EP de Boria, acompañado de la artista urbana Nebux. Katelyn Tarver calma el dolor de una ruptura transformándolo en la perfección pop-rock de "hurt like that", nuevo adelanto de Subject to change, su disco de debut. La Luz publican mañana La luz, su nuevo disco, y lo celebran surfeando la ola ondulada de "i won't hesitate", vintage último adelanto. Con “Los Años Líquidos” aún calentito bajo el brazo, y unas cuantas presentaciones pendientes por culpa de estos tiempos que tanto han golpeado la música independiente, LLUM mantienen el ritmo de publicaciones con dos nuevas composiciones. Un single digital que sirve como puente entre su disco anterior y las nuevas canciones que ya están de camino. AIKO EL GRUPO es la banda más loca y con menos prejuicios que hemos visto jamás. Lo suyo es el punk, en sonido y actitud. No hay límites, no hay barreras. Sólo su música y pasárselo bien. Y esa prueba definitiva es “Romantinski” su nuevo Single Digita. "Culpa" no solo es el primer single de adelanto de lo que será su nuevo álbum largo, sino que nos presenta a una Javiera Mena en estado de gracia y capaz de tener un pie en el electropop más melódico y cancionista y otro en la electrónica de club más pistera.Swedish House Mafia se ha asociado con la icónica superestrella The Weeknd en un nuevo single y video "Moth to a Flame. Si tuviera es la primera entrega de esta nueva etapa de Alondra Bentley. Una canción que desborda verdad y luz contagiosa. Al Dual reinventa la legendaria fórmula musical "Muro de Sonido" (Wall Of Sound) para su tercer single «When I Was Younger» extraído del que será su próximo trabajo "Reel to Reel”. Charlamos con el murciano Flavio, que prepara su segundo album y se ha estrenado en la literatura, poco antes de que vuelva subirse al escenario en su ciudad.

Episode 134 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “In the Midnight Hour", the links between Stax, Atlantic, and Detroit, and the career of Wilson Pickett. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifteen-minute bonus episode available, on "Mercy Mercy" by Don Covay. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata I say “After Arthur Alexander had moved on to Monument Records” – I meant to say “Dot Records” here, the label that Alexander moved to *before* Monument. I also misspeak at one point and say "keyboard player Chips Moman", when I mean to say "keyboard player Spooner Oldham". This is correct in the transcript/script, I just misread it. Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by Pickett. The main resource I used for the biographical details of Wilson Pickett was In the Midnight Hour: The Life and Soul of Wilson Pickett. Information about Stax comes primarily from two books: Soulsville USA: The Story of Stax by Rob Bowman, and Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion by Robert Gordon. Country Soul by Charles L Hughes is a great overview of the soul music made in Muscle Shoals, Memphis, and Nashville in the sixties. The episodes of Cocaine and Rhinestones I reference are the ones on Owen Bradley and the Nashville A-Team. And information on the Falcons comes from Marv Goldberg. Pickett's complete Atlantic albums can be found in this excellent ten-CD set. For those who just want the hits, this single-CD compilation is significantly cheaper. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A quick note before I start, just to say that this episode contains some discussion of domestic abuse, drug use, and abuse of employees by their employer, and one mention of an eating disorder. Also, this episode is much longer than normal, because we've got a lot to fit in. Today we're going to move away from Motown, and have a look at a record recorded in the studios of their great rival Stax records, though not released on that label. But the record we're going to look at is from an artist who was a bridge between the Detroit soul of Motown and the southern soul of Stax, an artist who had a foot in both camps, and whose music helped to define soul while also being closer than that of any other soul man to the music made by the white rock musicians of the period. We're going to look at Stax, and Muscle Shoals, and Atlantic Records, and at Wilson Pickett and "In the Midnight Hour" [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett: "In the Midnight Hour"] Wilson Pickett never really had a chance. His father, Wilson senior, was known in Alabama for making moonshine whisky, and spent time in prison for doing just that -- and his young son was the only person he told the location of his still. Eventually, Wilson senior moved to Detroit to start earning more money, leaving his family at home at first. Wilson junior and his mother moved up to Detroit to be with his father, but they had to leave his older siblings in Alabama, and his mother would shuttle between Michigan and Alabama, trying vainly to look after all her children. Eventually, Wilson's mother got pregnant while she was down in Alabama, which broke up his parents' marriage, and Wilson moved back down to Alabama permanently, to live on a farm with his mother. But he never got on with his mother, who was physically abusive to him -- as he himself would later be to his children, and to his partners, and to his bandmates. The one thing that Wilson did enjoy about his life in Alabama was the gospel music, and he became particularly enamoured of two gospel singers, Archie Brownlee of the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi: [Excerpt: The Mississippi Blind Boys, "Will My Jesus Be Waiting?"] And Julius Cheeks of the Sensational Nightingales: [Excerpt: The Sensational Nightingales, "God's World Will Never Pass Away"] Wilson determined to become a gospel singer himself, but he couldn't stand living with his mother in rural Alabama, and decided to move up to be with his father and his father's new girlfriend in Detroit.  Once he moved to Detroit, he started attending Northwestern High School, which at the time was also being attended by Norman Whitfield, Florence Ballard, and Melvin Franklin. Pickett also became friendly with Aretha Franklin, though she didn't attend the same school -- she went to school at Northern, with Smokey Robinson -- and he started attending services at New Bethel Church, the church where her father preached. This was partly because Rev. Franklin was one of the most dynamic preachers around, but also because New Bethel Church would regularly feature performances by the most important gospel performers of the time -- Pickett saw the Soul Stirrers perform there, with Sam Cooke singing lead, and of course also saw Aretha singing there. He joined a few gospel groups, first joining one called the Sons of Zion, but he was soon poached by a more successful group, the Violinaires. It was with the Violinaires that he made what is almost certainly his first recording -- a track that was released as a promo single, but never got a wide release at the time: [Excerpt: The Violinaires, "Sign of the Judgement"] The Violinaires were only moderately successful on the gospel circuit, but Pickett was already sure he was destined for bigger things. He had a rivalry with David Ruffin, in particular, constantly mocking Ruffin and saying that he would never amount to anything, while Wilson Pickett was the greatest. But after a while, he realised that gospel wasn't where he was going to make his mark. Partly his change in direction was motivated by financial concern -- he'd physically attacked his father and been kicked out of his home, and he was also married while still a teenager, and had a kid who needed feeding. But also, he was aware of a certain level of hypocrisy among his more religious acquaintances. Aretha Franklin had two kids, aged only sixteen, and her father, the Reverend Franklin, had fathered a child with a twelve-year-old, was having an affair with the gospel singer Clara Ward, and was hanging around blues clubs all the time. Most importantly, he realised that the audiences he was singing to in church on Sunday morning were mostly still drunk from Saturday night. As he later put it "I might as well be singing rock 'n' roll as singing to a drunken audience. I might as well make me some money." And this is where the Falcons came in. The Falcons were a doo-wop group that had been formed by a Black singer, Eddie Floyd, and a white singer, Bob Manardo. They'd both recruited friends, including bass singer Willie Schofield, and after performing locally they'd decided to travel to Chicago to audition for Mercury Records. When they got there, they found that you couldn't audition for Mercury in Chicago, you had to go to New York, but they somehow persuaded the label to sign them anyway -- in part because an integrated group was an unusual thing. They recorded one single for Mercury, produced by Willie Dixon who was moonlighting from Chess: [Excerpt: The Falcons, "Baby That's It"] But then Manardo was drafted, and the group's other white member, Tom Shetler, decided to join up along with him. The group went through some other lineup changes, and ended up as Eddie Floyd, Willie Schofield, Mack Rice, guitarist Lance Finnie, and lead singer Joe Stubbs, brother of Levi. The group released several singles on small labels owned by their manager, before having a big hit with "You're So Fine", the record we heard about them recording last episode: [Excerpt: The Falcons, "You're So Fine"] That made number two on the R&B charts and number seventeen on the pop charts. They recorded several follow-ups, including "Just For Your Love", which made number 26 on the R&B charts: [Excerpt: The Falcons, "Just For Your Love"] To give you some idea of just how interrelated all the different small R&B labels were at this point, that was originally recorded and released on Chess records. But as Roquel Davis was at that point working for Chess, he managed to get the rights to reissue it on Anna Records, the label he co-owned with the Gordy sisters -- and the re-released record was distributed by Gone Records, one of George Goldner's labels. The group also started to tour supporting Marv Johnson. But Willie Schofield was becoming dissatisfied. He'd written "You're So Fine", but he'd only made $500 from what he was told was a million-selling record. He realised that in the music business, the real money was on the business side, not the music side, so while staying in the Falcons he decided he was going to go into management too. He found the artist he was going to manage while he was walking to his car, and heard somebody in one of the buildings he passed singing Elmore James' then-current blues hit "The Sky is Crying": [Excerpt: Elmore James, "The Sky is Crying"] The person he heard singing that song, and accompanying himself on acoustic guitar, was of course Wilson Pickett, and Schofield signed him up to a management contract -- and Pickett was eager to sign, knowing that Schofield was a successful performer himself. The intention was at first that Schofield would manage Pickett as a solo performer, but then Joe Stubbs got ideas above his station, and started insisting that the group be called "Joe Stubbs and the Falcons", which put the others' backs up, and soon Stubbs was out of the group. This experience may have been something that his brother later had in mind -- in the late sixties, when Motown started trying to promote groups as Lead Singer and The Group, Levi Stubbs always refused to allow his name to go in front of the Four Tops. So the Falcons were without a lead singer. They tried a few other singers in their circle, including Marvin Gaye, but were turned down. So in desperation, they turned to Pickett. This wasn't a great fit -- the group, other than Schofield, thought that Pickett was "too Black", both in that he had too much gospel in his voice, and literally in that he was darker-skinned than the rest of the group (something that Schofield, as someone who was darker than the rest of the group but less dark than Pickett, took offence at). Pickett, in turn, thought that the Falcons were too poppy, and not really the kind of thing he was at all interested in doing. But they were stuck with each other, and had to make the most of it, even though Pickett's early performances were by all accounts fairly dreadful. He apparently came in in the wrong key on at least one occasion, and another time froze up altogether and couldn't sing. Even when he did sing, and in tune, he had no stage presence, and he later said “I would trip up, fall on the stage and the group would rehearse me in the dressing room after every show. I would get mad, ‘cos I wanted to go out and look at the girls as well! They said, ‘No, you got to rehearse, Oscar.' They called me Oscar. I don't know why they called me Oscar, I didn't like that very much.” Soon, Joe Stubbs was back in the group, and there was talk of the group getting rid of Pickett altogether. But then they went into the studio to record a song that Sam Cooke had written for the group, "Pow! You're in Love". The song had been written for Stubbs to sing, but at the last minute they decided to give Pickett the lead instead: [Excerpt: The Falcons, "Pow! You're in Love"] Pickett was now secure as the group's lead singer, but the group weren't having any success with records. They were, though, becoming a phenomenal live act -- so much so that on one tour, where James Brown was the headliner, Brown tried to have the group kicked off the bill, because he felt that Pickett was stealing his thunder. Eventually, the group's manager set up his own record label, Lu Pine Records, which would become best known as the label that released the first record by the Primettes, who later became the Supremes.  Lu Pine released the Falcons' single "I Found a Love",   after the group's management had first shopped it round to other labels to try to get them to put it out: [Excerpt: The Falcons, "I Found a Love"] That song, based on the old Pentecostal hymn "Yes Lord", was written by Pickett and Schofield, but the group's manager, Robert West, also managed to get his name on the credits. The backing group, the Ohio Untouchables, would later go on to become better known as The Ohio Players. One of the labels that had turned that record down was Atlantic Records, because Jerry Wexler hadn't heard any hit potential in the song. But then the record started to become successful locally, and Wexler realised his mistake. He got Lu Pine to do a distribution deal with Atlantic, giving Atlantic full rights to the record, and it became a top ten R&B hit. But by this point, Pickett was sick of working with the Falcons, and he'd decided to start trying for a solo career. His first solo single was on the small label Correc-Tone, and was co-produced by Robert Bateman, and featured the Funk Brothers as instrumental backing, and the Primettes on vocals. I've seen some claims that the Andantes are on there too, but I can't make them out -- but I can certainly make out the future Supremes: [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett, "Let Me Be Your Boy"] That didn't do anything, and Pickett kept recording with the Falcons for a while, as well as putting out his solo records. But then Willie Schofield got drafted, and the group split up. Their manager hired another group, The Fabulous Playboys, to be a new Falcons group, but in 1964 he got shot in a dispute over the management of Mary Wells, and had to give up working in the music industry. Pickett's next single, which he co-wrote with Robert Bateman and Sonny Schofield, was to be the record that changed his career forever. "If You Need Me" once again featured the Funk Brothers and the Andantes, and was recorded for Correc-Tone: [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett, "If You Need Me"] Jerry Wexler was again given the opportunity to put the record out on Atlantic, and once again decided against it. Instead, he offered to buy the song's publishing, and he got Solomon Burke to record it, in a version produced by Bert Berns: [Excerpt: Solomon Burke, "If You Need Me"] Burke wasn't fully aware, when he cut that version, that Wilson Pickett, who was his friend, had recorded his own version. He became aware, though, when Double-L Records, a label co-owned by Lloyd Price, bought the Correc-Tone master and released Pickett's version nationally, at the same time as Burke's version came out. The two men were annoyed that they'd been put into unwitting competition, and so started an unofficial nonaggression pact -- every time Burke was brought into a radio station to promote his record, he'd tell the listeners that he was there to promote Wilson Pickett's new single. Meanwhile, when Pickett went to radio stations, he'd take the opportunity to promote the new record he'd written for his good friend Solomon Burke, which the listeners should definitely check out. The result was that both records became hits -- Pickett's scraped the lower reaches of the R&B top thirty, while Burke, as he was the bigger star, made number two on the R&B chart and got into the pop top forty. Pickett followed it up with a soundalike, "It's Too Late", which managed to make the R&B top ten as there was no competition from Burke. At this point, Jerry Wexler realised that he'd twice had the opportunity to release a record with Wilson Pickett singing, twice he'd turned the chance down, and twice the record had become a hit. He realised that it was probably a good idea to sign Pickett directly to Atlantic and avoid missing out. He did check with Pickett if Pickett was annoyed about the Solomon Burke record -- Pickett's response was "I need the bread", and Wilson Pickett was now an Atlantic artist. This was at the point when Atlantic was in something of a commercial slump -- other than the records Bert Berns was producing for the Drifters and Solomon Burke, they were having no hits, and they were regarded as somewhat old-fashioned, rooted in a version of R&B that still showed its roots in jazz, rather than the new sounds that were taking over the industry in the early sixties. But they were still a bigger label than anything else Pickett had recorded for, and he seized the opportunity to move into the big time. To start with, Atlantic teamed Pickett up with someone who seemed like the perfect collaborator -- Don Covay, a soul singer and songwriter who had his roots in hard R&B and gospel music but had written hits for people like Chubby Checker.  The two got together and recorded a song they wrote together, "I'm Gonna Cry (Cry Baby)": [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett, "I'm Gonna Cry (Cry Baby)"] That did nothing commercially -- and gallingly for Pickett, on the same day, Atlantic released a single Covay had written for himself, "Mercy Mercy", and that ended up going to number one on the R&B chart and making the pop top forty. As "I'm Gonna Cry" didn't work out, Atlantic decided to try to change tack, and paired Pickett with their established hitmaker Bert Berns, and a duet partner, Tami Lyn, for what Pickett would later describe as "one of the weirdest sessions on me I ever heard in my life", a duet on a Mann and Weil song, "Come Home Baby": [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett and Tami Lyn, "Come Home Baby"] Pickett later said of that track, "it didn't sell two records", but while it wasn't a hit, it was very popular among musicians -- a few months later Mick Jagger would produce a cover version of it on Immediate Records, with Ronnie Wood, Keith Richards, and the Georgie Fame brass section backing a couple of unknown singers: [Excerpt: Rod Stewart and P.P. Arnold, "Come Home Baby"] Sadly for Rod Stewart and P.P. Arnold, that didn't get past being issued as a promotional record, and never made it to the shops. Meanwhile, Pickett went out on tour again, substituting on a package tour for Clyde McPhatter, who had to drop out when his sister died. Also on the tour was Pickett's old bandmate from the Falcons, Mack Rice, now performing as Sir Mack Rice, who was promoting a single he'd just released on a small label, which had been produced by Andre Williams. The song had originally been called "Mustang Mama", but Aretha Franklin had suggested he call it "Mustang Sally" instead: [Excerpt: Sir Mack Rice, "Mustang Sally"] Pickett took note of the song, though he didn't record it just yet -- and in the meantime, the song was picked up by the white rock group The Young Rascals, who released their version as the B-side of their number one hit, "Good Lovin'": [Excerpt: The Young Rascals, "Mustang Sally"] Atlantic's problems with having hits weren't only problems with records they made themselves -- they were also having trouble getting any big hits with Stax records. As we discussed in the episode on "Green Onions", Stax were being distributed by Atlantic, and in 1963 they'd had a minor hit with "These Arms of Mine" by Otis Redding: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "These Arms of Mine"] But throughout 1964, while the label had some R&B success with its established stars, it had no real major breakout hits, and it seemed to be floundering a bit -- it wasn't doing as badly as Atlantic itself, but it wasn't doing wonderfully. It wasn't until the end of the year when the label hit on what would become its defining sound, when for the first time Redding collaborated with Stax studio guitarist and producer Steve Cropper on a song: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Mr. Pitiful"] That record would point the way towards Redding's great artistic triumphs of the next couple of years, which we'll look at in a future episode. But it also pointed the way towards a possible future sound for Atlantic. Atlantic had signed a soul duo, Sam & Dave, who were wonderful live performers but who had so far not managed to translate those live performances to record. Jerry Wexler thought that perhaps Steve Cropper could help them do that, and made a suggestion to Jim Stewart at Stax -- Atlantic would loan out Sam & Dave to the label. They'd remain signed to Atlantic, but make their records at Stax studios, and they'd be released as Stax records. Their first single for Stax, "A Place Nobody Can Find", was produced by Cropper, and was written by Stax songwriter Dave Porter: [Excerpt: Sam and Dave, "A Place Nobody Can Find"] That wasn't a hit, but soon Porter would start collaborating with another songwriter, Isaac Hayes, and would write a string of hits for the duo. But in order to formalise the loan-out of Sam and Dave, Atlantic also wanted to formalise their arrangement with Stax. Previously they'd operated on a handshake basis -- Wexler and Stewart had a mutual respect, and they simply agreed that Stax would give Atlantic the option to distribute their stuff. But now they entered into a formal, long-term contract, and for a nominal sum of one dollar, Jim Stewart gave Atlantic the distribution rights to all past Stax records and to all future records they released for the next few years. Or at least, Stewart *thought* that the agreement he was making was formalising the distribution agreement. What the contract actually said -- and Stewart never bothered to have this checked over by an entertainment lawyer, because he trusted Wexler -- was that Stax would, for the sum of one dollar, give Atlantic *permanent ownership* of all their records, in return. The precise wording was "You hereby sell, assign and transfer to us, our successors or assigns, absolutely and forever and without any limitations or restrictions whatever, not specifically set forth herein, the entire right, title and interest in and to each of such masters and to each of the performances embodied thereon." Jerry Wexler would later insist that he had no idea that particular clause was in the contract, and that it had been slipped in there by the lawyers. Jim Stewart still thought of himself as the owner of an independent record label, but without realising it he'd effectively become an employee of Atlantic. Atlantic started to take advantage of this new arrangement by sending other artists down to Memphis to record with the Stax musicians. Unlike Sam and Dave, these would still be released as Atlantic records rather than Stax ones, and Jerry Wexler and Atlantic's engineer Tom Dowd would be involved  in the production, but the records would be made by the Stax team. The first artist to benefit from this new arrangement was Wilson Pickett, who had been wanting to work at Stax for a while, being a big fan of Otis Redding in particular. Pickett was teamed up with Steve Cropper, and together they wrote the song that would define Pickett's career. The seeds of "In the Midnight Hour" come from two earlier recordings. One is a line from his record with the Falcons, "I Found a Love": [Excerpt: The Falcons, "I Found a Love"] The other is a line from a record that Clyde McPhatter had made with Billy Ward and the Dominoes back in 1951: [Excerpt: Billy Ward and the Dominoes, "Do Something For Me"] Those lines about a "midnight hour" and "love come tumbling down" were turned into the song that would make Pickett's name, but exactly who did what has been the cause of some disagreement. The official story is that Steve Cropper took those lines and worked with Pickett to write the song, as a straight collaboration. Most of the time, though, Pickett would claim that he'd written the song entirely by himself, and that Cropper had stolen the credit for that and their other credited collaborations. But other times he would admit "He worked with me quite a bit on that one". Floyd Newman, a regular horn player at Stax, would back up Pickett, saying "Every artist that came in here, they'd have their songs all together, but when they leave they had to give up a piece of it, to a certain person. But this person, you couldn't be mad at him, because he didn't own Stax, Jim Stewart owned Stax. And this guy was doing what Jim Stewart told him to do, so you can't be mad at him." But on the other hand, Willie Schofield, who collaborated with Pickett on "I Found a Love", said of writing that "Pickett didn't have any chord pattern. He had a couple of lyrics. I'm working with him, giving him the chord change, the feel of it. Then we're going in the studio and I've gotta show the band how to play it because we didn't have arrangers. That's part of the songwriting. But he didn't understand. He felt he wrote the lyrics so that's it." Given that Cropper didn't take the writing credit on several other records he participated in, that he did have a consistent pattern of making classic hit records, that "In the Midnight Hour" is stylistically utterly different from Pickett's earlier work but very similar to songs like "Mr. Pitiful" cowritten by Cropper, and Pickett's longstanding habit of being dismissive of anyone else's contributions to his success, I think the most likely version of events is that Cropper did have a lot to do with how the song came together, and probably deserves his credit, but we'll never know for sure exactly what went on in their collaboration. Whoever wrote it, "In the Midnight Hour" became one of the all-time classics of soul: [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett, "In the Midnight Hour"] But another factor in making the record a success -- and in helping reinvent the Stax sound -- was actually Jerry Wexler. Wexler had started attending sessions at the Stax studios, and was astonished by how different the recording process was in the South. And Wexler had his own input into the session that produced "In the Midnight Hour". His main suggestion was that rather than play the complicated part that Cropper had come up with, the guitarist should simplify, and just play chords along with Al Jackson's snare drum. Wexler was enthusing about a new dance craze called the Jerk, which had recently been the subject of a hit record by a group called the Larks: [Excerpt: The Larks, "The Jerk"] The Jerk, as Wexler demonstrated it to the bemused musicians, involved accenting the second and fourth beats of the bar, and delaying them very slightly. And this happened to fit very well with the Stax studio sound. The Stax studio was a large room, with quite a lot of reverb, and the musicians played together without using headphones, listening to the room sound. Because of this, to stay in time, Steve Cropper had started taking his cue not just from the sound, but from watching Al Jackson's left hand going to the snare drum. This had led to him playing when he saw Jackson's hand go down on the two and four, rather than when the sound of the snare drum reached his ears -- a tiny, fraction-of-a-second, anticipation of the beat, before everyone would get back in sync on the one of the next bar, as Jackson hit the kick drum. This had in turn evolved into the whole group playing the backbeat with a fractional delay, hitting it a tiny bit late -- as if you're listening to the echo of those beats rather than to the beat itself. If anyone other than utterly exceptional musicians had tried this, it would have ended up as a car crash, but Jackson was one of the best timekeepers in the business, and many musicians would say that at this point in time Steve Cropper was *the* best rhythm guitarist in the world, so instead it gave the performances just enough sense of looseness to make them exciting. This slight delayed backbeat was something the musicians had naturally fallen into doing, but it fit so well with Wexler's conception of the Jerk that they started deliberately exaggerating it -- still only delaying the backbeat minutely, but enough to give the record a very different sound from anything that was out there: [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett, "In the Midnight Hour"] That delayed backbeat sound would become the signature sound of Stax for the next several years, and you will hear it on the run of classic singles they would put out for the next few years by Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, Carla Thomas, Booker T. and the MGs, Eddie Floyd and others. The sound of that beat is given extra emphasis by the utter simplicity of Al Jackson's playing. Jackson had a minimalist drum kit, but played it even more minimally -- other than the occasional fill, he never hit his tom at all, just using the kick drum, snare, and hi-hat -- and the hi-hat was not even miced, with any hi-hat on the actual records just being the result of leakage from the other mics. But that simplicity gave the Stax records a power that almost no other records from the period had: [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett, "In the Midnight Hour"] "In the Midnight Hour" made number one on the R&B charts, and made number twenty-one on the pop charts, instantly turning Pickett from an also-ran into one of the major stars of soul music. The follow-up, a soundalike called "Don't Fight It", also made the top five on the R&B charts. At his next session, Pickett was reunited with his old bandmate Eddie Floyd. Floyd would soon go on to have his own hits at Stax, most notably with "Knock on Wood", but at this point he was working as a staff songwriter at Stax, coming up with songs like "Comfort Me" for Carla Thomas: [Excerpt: Carla Thomas, "Comfort Me"] Floyd had teamed up with Steve Cropper, and they'd been... shall we say, "inspired"... by a hit for the Marvelettes, "Beechwood 45789", written by Marvin Gaye, Gwen Gordy and Mickey Stevenson: [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, "Beechwood 45789"] Cropper and Floyd had come up with their own song, "634-5789", which Pickett recorded, and which became an even bigger hit than "In the Midnight Hour", making number thirteen on the pop charts as well as being Pickett's second R&B number one: [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett, "634-5789"] At the same session, they cut another single. This one was inspired by an old gospel song, "Ninety-Nine and One Half Won't Do", recorded by Sister Rosetta Tharpe among others: [Excerpt: Sister Rosetta Tharpe, "Ninety-Nine and One Half Won't Do"] The song was rewritten by Floyd, Cropper, and Pickett, and was also a moderate R&B hit, though nowhere as big as "634-5789": [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett, "Ninety-Nine and One Half Won't Do"] That would be the last single that Pickett recorded at Stax, though -- though the reasoning has never been quite clear. Pickett was, to put it as mildly as possible, a difficult man to work with, and he seems to have had some kind of falling out with Jim Stewart -- though Stewart always said that the problem was actually that Pickett didn't get on with the musicians. But the musicians disagree, saying they had a good working relationship -- Pickett was often an awful person, but only when drunk, and he was always sober in the studio. It seems likely, actually, that Pickett's move away from the Stax studios was more to do with someone else -- Pickett's friend Don Covay was another Atlantic artist recording at Stax, and Pickett had travelled down with him when Covay had recorded "See Saw" there: [Excerpt: Don Covay, "See Saw"] Everyone involved agreed that Covay was an eccentric personality, and that he rubbed Jim Stewart up the wrong way. There is also a feeling among some that Stewart started to resent the way Stax's sound was being used for Atlantic artists, like he was "giving away" hits, even though Stax's company got the publishing on the songs Cropper was co-writing, and he was being paid for the studio time. Either way, after that session, Atlantic didn't send any of its artists down to Stax, other than Sam & Dave, who Stax regarded as their own artists. Pickett would never again record at Stax, and possibly coincidentally once he stopped writing songs with Steve Cropper he would also never again have a major hit record with a self-penned song. But Jerry Wexler still wanted to keep working in Southern studios, and with Southern musicians, and so he took Pickett to FAME studios, in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. We looked, back in the episode on Arthur Alexander, at the start of FAME studios, but after Arthur Alexander had moved on to Monument Records, Rick Hall had turned FAME into a home for R&B singers looking for crossover success. While Stax employed both Black and white musicians, FAME studios had an all-white rhythm section, with a background in country music, but that had turned out to be absolutely perfect for performers like the soul singer Joe Tex, who had himself started out in country before switching to soul, and who recorded classics like "Hold What You Got" at the studio: [Excerpt: Joe Tex, "Hold What You Got"] That had been released on FAME's record label, and Jerry Wexler had been impressed and had told Rick Hall to call him the next time he thought he had a hit. When Hall did call Wexler, Wexler was annoyed -- Hall phoned him in the middle of a party. But Hall was insistent. "You said to call you next time I've got a hit, and this is a number one". Wexler relented and listened to the record down the phone. This is what he heard: [Excerpt: Percy Sledge, "When a Man Loves a Woman"] Atlantic snapped up "When a Man Loves a Woman" by Percy Sledge, and it went to number one on the pop charts -- the first record from any of the Southern soul studios to do so. In Wexler's eyes, FAME was now the new Stax. Wexler had a bit of culture shock when working at FAME, as it was totally unlike anything he'd experienced before. The records he'd been involved with in New York had been mostly recorded by slumming jazz musicians, very technical players who would read the music from charts, and Stax had had Steve Cropper as de facto musical director, leading the musicians and working out their parts with them. By contrast, the process used at FAME, and at most of the other studios in what Charles Hughes describes as the "country-soul triangle" of Memphis, Muscle Shoals, and Nashville, was the process that had been developed by Owen Bradley and the Nashville A-Team in Nashville (and for a fuller description of this, see the excellent episodes on Bradley and the A-Team in the great country music podcast Cocaine and Rhinestones). The musicians would hear a play through of the song by its writer, or a demo, would note down the chord sequences using the Nashville number system rather than a more detailed score, do a single run-through to get the balance right, and then record. Very few songs required a second take. For Pickett's first session at FAME, and most subsequent ones, the FAME rhythm section of keyboard player Spooner Oldham, guitarist Jimmy Johnson, bass player Junior Lowe and drummer Roger Hawkins was augmented with a few other players -- Memphis guitarists Chips Moman and Tommy Cogbill, and the horn section who'd played on Pickett's Stax records, moonlighting. And for the first track they recorded there, Wexler wanted them to do something that would become a signature trick for Pickett over the next couple of years -- record a soul cover version of a rock cover version of a soul record. Wexler's thinking was that the best way for Pickett to cross over to a white audience was to do songs that were familiar to them from white pop cover versions, but songs that had originated in Pickett's soul style. At the time, as well, the hard backbeat sound on Pickett's hits was one that was more associated with white rock music than with soul, as was the emphasis on rhythm guitar. To modern ears, Pickett's records are almost the definition of soul music, but at the time they were absolutely considered crossover records. And so in the coming months Pickett would record cover versions of Don Covay's "Mercy Mercy", Solomon Burke's "Everybody Needs Somebody to Love", and Irma Thomas' "Time is on My Side", all of which had been previously covered by the Rolling Stones -- and two of which had their publishing owned by Atlantic's publishing subsidiary. For this single, though, he was recording a song which had started out as a gospel-inspired dance song by the R&B singer Chris Kenner: [Excerpt: Chris Kenner, "Land of a Thousand Dances"] That had been a minor hit towards the bottom end of the Hot One Hundred, but it had been taken up by a lot of other musicians, and become one of those songs everyone did as album filler -- Rufus Thomas had done a version at Stax, for example. But then a Chicano garage band called Cannibal and the Headhunters started performing it live, and their singer forgot the lyrics and just started singing "na na na na", giving the song a chorus it hadn't had in its original version. Their version, a fake-live studio recording, made the top thirty: [Excerpt: Cannibal and the Headhunters, "Land of a Thousand Dances"] Pickett's version was drastically rearranged, and included a guitar riff that Chips Moman had come up with, some new lyrics that Pickett introduced, and a bass intro that Jerry Wexler came up with, a run of semiquavers that Junior Lowe found very difficult to play. The musicians spent so long working on that intro that Pickett got annoyed and decided to take charge. He yelled "Come on! One-two-three!" and the horn players, with the kind of intuition that comes from working together for years, hit a chord in unison. He yelled "One-two-three!" again, and they hit another chord, and Lowe went into the bass part. They'd found their intro. They ran through that opening one more time, then recorded a take: [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett, "Land of a Thousand Dances"] At this time, FAME was still recording live onto a single-track tape, and so all the mistakes were caught on tape with no opportunity to fix anything, like when all but one of the horn players forget to come in on the first line of one verse: [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett, "Land of a Thousand Dances"] But that kind of mistake only added to the feel of the track, which became Pickett's biggest hit yet -- his third number one on the R&B chart, and his first pop top ten. As the formula of recording a soul cover version of a rock cover version of a soul song had clearly worked, the next single Pickett recorded was "Mustang Sally", which as we saw had originally been an R&B record by Pickett's friend Mack Rice, before being covered by the Young Rascals. Pickett's version, though, became the definitive version: [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett, "Mustang Sally"] But it very nearly wasn't. That was recorded in a single take, and the musicians went into the control room to listen to it -- and the metal capstan on the tape machine flew off while it was rewinding. The tape was cut into dozens of tiny fragments, which the machine threw all over the room in all directions. Everyone was horrified, and Pickett, who was already known for his horrific temper, looked as if he might actually kill someone. Tom Dowd, Atlantic's genius engineer who had been a physicist on the Manhattan Project while still a teenager, wasn't going to let something as minor as that stop him. He told everyone to take a break for half an hour, gathered up all the randomly-thrown bits of tape, and spliced them back together. The completed recording apparently has forty splices in it, which would mean an average of a splice every four seconds. Have a listen to this thirty-second segment and see if you can hear any at all: [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett, "Mustang Sally"] That segment has the one part where I *think* I can hear one splice in the whole track, a place where the rhythm hiccups very slightly -- and that might well just be the drummer trying a fill that didn't quite come off. "Mustang Sally" was another pop top thirty hit, and Wexler's crossover strategy seemed to have been proved right -- so much so that Pickett was now playing pretty much all-white bills. He played, for example, at Murray the K's last ever revue at the Brooklyn Paramount, where the other artists on the bill were Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, the Young Rascals, Al Kooper's Blues Project, Cream, and the Who. Pickett found the Who extremely unprofessional, with their use of smoke bombs and smashing their instruments, but they eventually became friendly. Pickett's next single was his version of "Everybody Needs Somebody to Love", the Solomon Burke song that the Rolling Stones had also covered, and that was a minor hit, but his next few records after that didn't do particularly well. He did though have a big hit with his cover version of a song by a group called Dyke and the Blazers. Pickett's version of "Funky Broadway" took him to the pop top ten: [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett, "Funky Broadway"] It did something else, as well. You may have noticed that two of the bands on that Paramount bill were groups that get called "blue-eyed soul". "Soul" had originally been a term used for music made by Black people, but increasingly the term was being used by white people for their music, just as rock and roll and rhythm and blues before it had been picked up on by white musicians. And so as in those cases, Black musicians were moving away from the term -- though it would never be abandoned completely -- and towards a new slang term, "funk". And Pickett was the first person to get a song with "funk" in the title onto the pop charts. But that would be the last recording Pickett would do at FAME for a couple of years. As with Stax, Pickett was moved away by Atlantic because of problems with another artist, this time to do with a session with Aretha Franklin that went horribly wrong, which we'll look at in a future episode. From this point on, Pickett would record at American Sound Studios in Memphis, a studio owned and run by Chips Moman, who had played on many of Pickett's records. Again, Pickett was playing with an all-white house band, but brought in a couple of Black musicians -- the saxophone player King Curtis, and Pickett's new touring guitarist, Bobby Womack, who had had a rough few years, being largely ostracised from the music community because of his relationship with Sam Cooke's widow. Womack wrote what might be Pickett's finest song, a song called "I'm in Love" which is a masterpiece of metrical simplicity disguised as complexity -- you could write it all down as being in straight four-four, but the pulse shifts and implies alternating bars of five and three at points: [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett, "I'm In Love"] Womack's playing on those sessions had two effects, one on music history and one on Pickett. The effect on music history was that he developed a strong working relationship with Reggie Young, the guitarist in the American Sound studio band, and Young and Womack learned each other's styles. Young would later go on to be one of the top country session guitarists, playing on records by Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, Kenny Rogers, Waylon Jennings and more, and he was using Womack's style of playing -- he said later "I didn't change a thing. I was playing that Womack style on country records, instead of the hillbilly stuff—it changed the whole bed of country music." The other effect, though, was a much more damaging one. Womack introduced Pickett to cocaine, and Pickett -- who was already an aggressive, violent, abusive, man, became much more so. "I'm in Love" went to number four on the R&B charts, but didn't make the pop top forty. The follow-up, a remake of "Stagger Lee", did decently on the pop charts but less well on the R&B charts. Pickett's audiences were diverging, and he was finding it more difficult to make the two come together. But he would still manage it, sporadically, throughout the sixties. One time when he did was in 1968, when he returned to Muscle Shoals and to FAME studios. In a session there, the guitarist was very insistent that Pickett should cut a version of the Beatles' most recent hit. Now obviously, this is a record that's ahead in our timeline, and which will be covered in a future episode, but I imagine that most of you won't find it too much of a spoiler when I tell you that "Hey Jude" by the Beatles was quite a big hit: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Hey Jude"] What that guitarist had realised was that the tag of the song gave the perfect opportunity for ad-libbing. You all know the tag: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Hey Jude"] And so on. That would be perfect for a guitar solo, and for Pickett to do some good soul shouting over. Neither Pickett nor Rick Hall were at all keen -- the Beatles record had only just dropped off number one, and it seemed like a ridiculous idea to both of them. But the guitarist kept pressing to do it, and by the time the other musicians returned from their lunch break, he'd convinced Pickett and Hall. The record starts out fairly straightforward: [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett, "Hey Jude"] But it's on the tag when it comes to life. Pickett later described recording that part -- “He stood right in front of me, as though he was playing every note I was singing. And he was watching me as I sang, and as I screamed, he was screaming with his guitar.”: [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett, "Hey Jude"] That was not Pickett's biggest hit, but it was one of the most influential. It made the career of the guitarist, Duane Allman, who Jerry Wexler insisted on signing to his own contract after that, and as Jimmy Johnson, the rhythm guitarist on the session said, "We realised then that Duane had created southern rock, in that vamp." It was big enough that Wexler pushed Pickett to record a whole series of cover versions of rock songs -- he put out versions of "Hey Joe", "Born to be Wild" and "You Keep Me Hangin' On" -- the latter going back to his old technique of covering a white cover version of a Black record, as his version copied the Vanilla Fudge's arrangement rather than the Supremes' original. But these only had very minor successes -- the most successful of them was his version of "Sugar Sugar" by the Archies. As the sixties turned into the seventies, Pickett continued having some success, but it was more erratic and less consistent. The worlds of Black and white music were drifting apart, and Pickett, who more than most had straddled both worlds, now found himself having success in neither. It didn't help that his cocaine dependency had made him into an egomaniac. At one point in the early seventies, Pickett got a residency in Las Vegas, and was making what by most standards was a great income from it. But he would complain bitterly that he was only playing the small room, not the big one in the same hotel, and that the artist playing the big room was getting better billing than him on the posters. Of course, the artist playing the big room was Elvis Presley, but that didn't matter to Pickett -- he thought he deserved to be at least that big. He was also having regular fights with his record label. Ahmet Ertegun used to tell a story -- and I'm going to repeat it here with one expletive cut out in order to get past Apple's ratings system. In Ertegun's words “Jerry Wexler never liked Crosby, Stills & Nash because they wanted so much freaking artistic autonomy. While we were arguing about this, Wilson Pickett walks in the room and comes up to Jerry and says, ‘Jerry,' and he goes, ‘Wham!' And he puts a pistol on the table. He says, ‘If that [Expletive] Tom Dowd walks into where I'm recording, I'm going to shoot him. And if you walk in, I'm going to shoot you. ‘Oh,' Jerry said. ‘That's okay, Wilson.' Then he walked out. So I said, ‘You want to argue about artistic autonomy?' ” As you can imagine, Atlantic were quite glad to get rid of Pickett when he decided he wanted to move to RCA records, who were finally trying to break into the R&B market. Unfortunately for Pickett, the executive who'd made the decision to sign him soon left the company, and as so often happens when an executive leaves, his pet project becomes the one that everyone's desperate to get rid of.  RCA didn't know how to market records to Black audiences, and didn't really try, and Pickett's voice was becoming damaged from all the cocaine use. He spent the seventies, and eighties going from label to label, trying things like going disco, with no success. He also went from woman to woman, beating them up, and went through band members more and more quickly as he attacked them, too. The guitarist Marc Ribot was in Pickett's band for a short time and said, (and here again I'm cutting out an expletive) " You can write about all the extenuating circumstances, and maybe it needs to be put in historical context, but … You know why guys beat women? Because they can. And it's abuse. That's why employers beat employees, when they can. I've worked with black bandleaders and white bandleaders who are respectful, courteous and generous human beings—and then I've worked with Wilson Pickett." He was becoming more and more paranoid. He didn't turn up for his induction in the rock and roll hall of fame, where he was scheduled to perform -- instead he hid in his house, scared to leave. Pickett was repeatedly arrested throughout this time, and into the nineties, spending some time in prison, and then eventually going into rehab in 1997 after being arrested for beating up his latest partner. She dropped the charges, but the police found the cocaine in his possession and charged him with that. After getting out, he apparently mellowed out somewhat and became much easier to get along with -- still often unpleasant, especially after he'd had a drink, which he never gave up, but far less violent and more easy-going than he had been. He also had something of a comeback, sparked by an appearance in the flop film Blues Brothers 2000. He recorded a blues album, It's Harder Now, and also guested on Adlib, the comeback duets album by his old friend Don Covay, singing with him and cowriting on several songs, including "Nine Times a Man": [Excerpt: Don Covay and Wilson Pickett, "Nine Times a Man"] It's Harder Now was a solid blues-based album, in the vein of similar albums from around that time by people like Solomon Burke, and could have led to Pickett having the same kind of late-career resurgence as Johnny Cash. It was nominated for a Grammy, but lost in the category for which it was nominated to Barry White. Pickett was depressed by the loss and just decided to give up making new music, and just played the oldies circuit until 2004, at which point he became too ill to continue. The duet with Covay would be the last time he went into the studio. The story of Pickett's last year or so is a painful one, with squabbles between his partner and his children over his power of attorney while he spent long periods in hospital, suffering from kidney problems caused by his alcoholism, and also at this point from bulimia, diabetes, and more. He was ill enough that he tried to make amends with his children and his ex-wife, and succeeded as well as anyone can in that situation. On the eighteenth of January 2006, two months before his sixty-fifth birthday, his partner took him to get his hair cut and his moustache shaped, so he'd look the way he wanted to look, they ate together at his assisted living facility, and prayed together, and she left around eleven o'clock that night. Shortly thereafter, Pickett had a heart attack and died, alone, some time close to the midnight hour.

In this episode, author Robert Gordon and host Nate Wilcox discuss Memphis music in the 1960s, the cultural collisions that produced so much amazing music, Chips Moman and American Sound Studios, Dan Penn, Alex Chilton, the Box Tops and Big Star.Let It Roll is proud to be part of Pantheon Podcasts.

In this episode, author Robert Gordon and host Nate Wilcox discuss Memphis music in the 1960s, the cultural collisions that produced so much amazing music, Chips Moman and American Sound Studios, Dan Penn, Alex Chilton, the Box Tops and Big Star. Let It Roll is proud to be part of Pantheon Podcasts.

Twitter: @podgaverockInsta: @podgaverockTownes Van Zandt 1972 “Pancho and Lefty”  from The Late Great Townes Van Zandt released on Tomato. Written by Townes Van Zandt. Produced by Kevin Eggers and Jack Clement.Personel:Townes Van Zandt acoustic guitar & vocalsJoe Allan – bassJack Clement mandolinVassar Clements – fiddleChuck Cochran – piano keyboards & arrangementsJim Colvard – acoustic guitar, electric guitarRocky Hill– slide guitarKenny Malone -  drumsWillie Nelson and Merle Haggard 1983 " Pancho and Lefty" from Pancho and Lefty released on  Epic. Produced by Chips Moman, Willie Nelson, and Merle Haggard.Personel:Merle Haggard - vocals, guitarWillie Nelson - vocals, guitarLewis Talley – guitarGrady Martin - guitarDon Markham – saxophone, trumpetJohnny Gimble - fiddle, mandolinMickey Raphael -harmonicaReggie Young - guitarChips Moman - guitarJohnny Christopher – guitarBobby Emmons - keyboardsBobby Wood – keyboardsMike Leech – bassGene Chrisman – drumsCover:Performed by Josh Bond and Jonathan HortonIntro Music:"Shithouse" 2010 release from "A Collection of Songs for the Kings". Writer Josh Bond. Produced by Frank Charlton.Other Artists Mentioned:Jimi HendrixMichael JacksonThe Rolling StonesKeith RichardsJim MorrisonVan MorrisonThe Last WaltzGuns n RosesAxl RoseMick JaggerJimi PageElvisJohnny CashBob Dylan “Rolling Thunder Revue”John MaherStevie Ray Vaughn The Grateful DeadLittle RichardJames BrownPrince    The Drifters “Under the Boardwalk”Townes Van Zandt “Dead Flowers”The Big LebowskiSantana   Waylon JenningsBon Jovi “Living on a Prayer”Frances McDormandNomadlandBob Dylan “All Along the Watchtower”UnforgivenSteve JobsBill GatesHewlett PackardThe Beatles “Rocky Raccoon”Leonard CohenHank Williams, Sr.WilcoKings of LeonSon VoltPatty GriffinSteve EarleGillian WelchJason IsbellFather John MistyAngel OlsenDierks BentleyLuke BryanEmmylou HarridsTownes Van Zandt “Rearview Mirror”Freddie FenderElizabeth CookeFrank TurnerDwayne MesserTennessee JetErnest TubTownes Van Zandt “Frauline”Townes Van Zandt “For the Sake of the Song”Townes Van Zandt “If I Needed You”

Shane figured out how to play "Mary Had a Little Lamb" at age three. Too tiny to actually reach the piano keys, he picked out the notes by reaching up and feeling for them with his fingertips. Thus began his lifetime of music. He's created music hand in hand with legends of the recording industry, ranging from Elvis Presley and Paul McCartney to Arif Mardin and Ahmet Ertegun. His diversity as a player, arranger, producer and composer is amazing: pop to classical, jazz to R & B, country to alternative, appearing in one form or another on many thousands of recordings. Born in Huntington WV, Shane began formal classical piano training with Edith Sweeney before reaching his fourth birthday and moved to Portsmouth, Ohio when he was 7. There he continued piano studies in the years to follow with his adored teacher, Dorothy Knost. With her guidance, he began winning the coveted "Guild" piano competition awards year after year. At age twelve, while beginning junior high school, he met the inspirational Ralph Harrison, the McKinley Junior High School Band Director. Ralph asked Shane to join the school's orchestra and the big-band swing band. He also studied and performed choral music with another wonderful teacher and friend, Charles Varney, and with Bob McCoy at Portsmouth High School. Shane also began playing with many local musicians and bands in the Tri-State area. His family moved back to Huntington for his senior year, where he attended Huntington High School and enrolled at Marshall University, where he studied with Mary Shepp Mann. At the end of his freshman year, he left Huntington to "...travel and play music!...". He eventually moved to Dallas TX and soon enrolled in the jazz program at North Texas State University. By age nineteen, he was working in Dallas music production houses and studios, playing piano and organ two to three days a week on everything from film scores and records to radio libraries and jingles. He withdrew from NTSU and, seeking work as a studio musician, moved to Memphis. Within just a few weeks, he was blessed by reuniting with the legendary Jim Stewart of Stax Records and began working as a staff pianist/keyboardist in the Stax Rhythm Section. He also worked as a session pianist at Pepper/Tanner and with producers Al Jackson Jr., Willie Mitchell and Chips Moman. In 1971, Chips asked Shane to join the American Studios Rhythm Section as a staff pianist, where he worked with music icons such as Arif Mardin and many others. Learn more about creating financial and emotional freedom at www.freedomhacknow.com In 1972, Shane was in such demand as a pianist/session keyboardist from his work in Dallas and Memphis that he moved to Nashville. Word of his talent and abilities spread rapidly and he was soon working constantly. In 1974, he was contacted by Paul McCartney and performed on the "Junior's Farm/Sally G" sessions. Subsequently, Shane was called to play on several tracks on Elvis Presley's "Promised Land" album. Presley was so impressed with Shane's keyboard work that he personally requested Shane accompany him as pianist on the forthcoming '76 tour. His studio career continued at lightning speed, as he performed on and arranged hundreds of records for major artists. He also became an early explorer of synthesis and digital recording, purchasing a Mini-Moog in 1971 and purchasing his first digital audio recording system in 1981. In the late 80's, Shane had the great fortune of meeting legendary record mogul Ahmet Ertegun. Ahmet realized Shane's abilities and versatility and recruited him as a staff producer. He worked closely with Ahmet and with many of Atlantic's artists until April 2001, when he started his own independent production company. He returned to Nashville, TN in 2004 and continues to reside there. Shane currently performs live with Lynda Carter and is a member of the Musician's Hall Of Fame. As a producer/arranger, he's been twice nominated for a Grammy and received two Dove awards and one Cleo award. Shane is able to enrich any project he's part of, and he continues to be one of the most sought after talents in the industry.   Break free from whats holding you back from creating financial and emotional freedom! www.freedomhacknow.com    

In 1968, Elvis Presley walked down Sunset Strip in broad daylight. No one recognized him. He was worse than dead, he was irrelevant. Changes had to be made. So Elvis staged rock's first and greatest comeback in "Elvis '68," widely known as The Comeback Special. With this show, he resurrected himself— at the age of 33, no less — from the ashes of a career mired in bad movies and soundtracks. So where to go from here? Back home, of course.Author Eric Wolfson joins us to break down "From Elvis In Memphis." The music and cultural landscape had changed, and bands such as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Beach Boys were now all the rage. But, as Wolfson tell us, The Memphis Boys and Chips Moman give the King a kick in the behind, and he delivers one of his greatest albums ever!AllMusicBooks is a proud member of the Pantheon Media Network.

In 1968, Elvis Presley walked down Sunset Strip in broad daylight. No one recognized him. He was worse than dead, he was irrelevant. Changes had to be made. So Elvis staged rock's first and greatest comeback in "Elvis '68," widely known as The Comeback Special. With this show, he resurrected himself— at the age of 33, no less — from the ashes of a career mired in bad movies and soundtracks. So where to go from here? Back home, of course. Author Eric Wolfson joins us to break down "From Elvis In Memphis." The music and cultural landscape had changed, and bands such as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Beach Boys were now all the rage. But, as Wolfson tell us, The Memphis Boys and Chips Moman give the King a kick in the behind, and he delivers one of his greatest albums ever!

When I saw the recent purchase of Sun Records by Primary Wave, it reminded me of a conversation I had with an early Sun session man. As it turns out, there wasn’t just one Jerry Lee at Sun. There were two. I’m talking about “Honky Tonk” piano session man Jerry Lee “Smoochy” Smith. Smoochy has some great stories to tell about what The Stage Stop in Memphis was like before it was the Stage Stop. Back then, it was Smoochy’s Steak House and Lounge, a steak house fit for a king. You see where I’m going here, right? The King of Rock and Roll was served there. Who knew? Nobody and Smoochy told me why. Smoochy was also a member of the Mar-keys with Don Nix and Duck Dunn. He has stories to tell about Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Sam Phillips, Carl Perkins, Chips Moman, and a few more. We started by talking about his Sun Sessions.

Episode 105 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Green Onions”, and how a company started by a Western Swing fiddle player ended up making the most important soul records of the sixties. 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 “He’s So Fine” by the Chiffons. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

Episode 105 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Green Onions”, and how a company started by a Western Swing fiddle player ended up making the most important soul records of the sixties. 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 “He’s So Fine” by the Chiffons. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

Episode 105 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Green Onions”, and how a company started by a Western Swing fiddle player ended up making the most important soul records of the sixties. 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 “He’s So Fine” by the Chiffons. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—- Resources I used three main books when creating this episode. Two were histories of Stax — Soulsville USA: The Story of Stax by Rob Bowman, and Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion by Robert Gordon.  Country Soul by Charles L Hughes is a more general overview of soul music made in Tennessee and Alabama in the sixties, but is useful as it’s less likely to take statements about racial attitudes entirely at face value. This is a good cheap compilation of Booker T and the MGs’ music. If the Erwin Records tracks here interest you, they’re all available on this compilation. The Complete Stax-Volt Singles vol. 1: 1959-1968 is a nine-CD box set containing much of the rest of the music in this episode. It’s out of print physically, but the MP3 edition, while pricey, is worth it. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   And now we come to the end of the backfilling portion of the story. Since “Telstar” we’ve been looking at records from 1962 that came out just before “Love Me Do” — we’ve essentially been in an extended flashback. This is the last of those flashback episodes, and from next week on we’re moving forward into 1963. Today we’re going to look at a record by a group of musicians who would be as important to the development of music in the 1960s as any, and at the early years of Stax Records, a label that would become as important as Chess, Motown, or Sun. Today, we’re looking at “Green Onions” by Booker T. and the MGs, and how a white country fiddle player accidentally kickstarted the most important label in soul music: [Excerpt: Booker T. and the MGs, “Green Onions”] Our story starts in Memphis, with Jim Stewart, a part-time fiddle player. Stewart was in a Western Swing band, and was hugely influenced by Bob Wills, but he wasn’t making any real money from music. Instead, he was working a day job at a bank. But he was still interested in music, and wanted to be involved in the industry. One of the gigs he’d had was in the house band at a venue where Elvis sometimes played in his early years, and he’d seen how Elvis had gone from an obscure local boy all the way to the biggest star in the world. He knew he couldn’t do that himself, but he was irresistibly attracted to any field where that was *possible*. He found his way into the industry, and into music history as a result of a tip from his barber. The barber in question, Erwin Ellis, was another country fiddle player, but he owned his own record label, Erwin Records. Erwin Records was a tiny label — it was so tiny that its first release, by Ellis himself, seems not to exist anywhere. Even on compilations of Erwin Records material, it’s not present, which is a shame, as it would be interesting from a historical perspective to hear Ellis’ own playing. But while Ellis was unsuccessful both as a fiddle player and as a record company owner, he did manage to release a handful of rockabilly classics on Erwin Records, like Hoyt Jackson’s “Enie Meanie Minie Moe”: [Excerpt: Hoyt Jackson, “Enie Meanie Minie Moe”] and “Boppin’ Wig Wam Willie” by Ray Scott, who had written “Flyin’ Saucers Rock & Roll” for Billy Lee Riley, and who was backed by Riley’s Little Green Men on this single: [Excerpt: Ray Scott, “Boppin’ Wig Wam WIllie”] Ellis’ label wasn’t hugely successful, but he made some decent money from it, and he explained the realities of the music industry to Stewart as Stewart was sat in his barber’s chair. He told Stewart that you didn’t make money from the records themselves — small labels didn’t sell much — but that he was making some good money from the songs. The formula for success in the music business, Ellis explained, was that when you got a new artist through the door, you told them they could only record originals, not cover versions — and then you made sure they signed the publishing over to you. If you sold a record, you were just selling a bit of plastic, and you’d already paid to make the bit of plastic. There was no real money in that. But if you owned the song, every time that record was played on the radio, you got a bit of money with no extra outlay — and if you owned enough songs, then some of them might get covered by a big star, and then you’d get some real money. Hoyt Jackson, Ellis’ biggest act, hadn’t had any hits himself, but he’d written “It’s A Little More Like Heaven (Where You Are)”: [Excerpt: Hoyt Jackson, “It’s A Little More Like Heaven (Where You Are)”] Hank Locklin had recorded a cover version of it, which had gone to number three on the country charts: [Excerpt: Hank Locklin “It’s a Little More Like Heaven”] And Johnny Cash had rewritten it a bit, as “You’re the Nearest Thing to Heaven”, and had also had a top five country hit with it: [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, “You’re the Nearest Thing to Heaven”] Ellis explained to Stewart that he was still getting cheques every few months because he owned the publishing for this song that someone else had written and brought to him. If you owned the publishing for a song that became a hit, then you had a steady source of income without having to lift a finger. And people would just give you the publishing on their songs if you agreed to put a record of them out. For someone like Stewart, who worked in a bank and knew a little bit about finance, that sounded just about perfect. He pulled together a singing DJ, a piano player, and a rhythm guitarist he knew, and they pooled their savings and raised a thousand dollars to put out a record. Stewart wrote a song — the only song he’d ever write — Fred Byler, the DJ, sang it, and they hired Ellis and his tape recorder to record it in Jim’s wife’s uncle’s garage. They came up with the name Satellite Records for their label — nobody liked it, but they couldn’t think of anything better, and satellites were in the news with the recent launch of Sputnik. “Blue Roses” by Fred Byler, came out to pretty much no sales or airplay: [Excerpt: Fred Byler, “Blue Roses”] The next record was more interesting — “Boppin’ High School Baby” by Don Willis is a prime slice of Memphis rockabilly, though one with so much slapback echo that even Joe Meek might have said “hang on, isn’t that a bit much?”: [Excerpt: Don Willis, “Boppin’ High School Baby”] That also didn’t sell — Stewart and his partners knew nothing about the music business. They didn’t know how to get the records distributed to shops, and they had no money left. And then Erwin Ellis moved away and took his tape recorder with him, and Stewart’s wife’s uncle wanted to use his garage again and so wouldn’t let them record there any more. It looked like that would be the end of Satellite Records. But then three things changed everything for Jim Stewart, and for music history. The first of these was that Stewart’s new barber was also interested in music — he had a daughter who he thought could sing, and he had a large storage space he wasn’t using, in Brunswick on the outskirts of the city. If they’d record his daughter, they could use the storage space as a studio. The second was Chips Moman. Chips was a teenage guitarist who had been playing a friend’s guitar at a drugstore in Memphis, just hanging around after work, when Warren Smith walked in. Smith was a Sun Records rockabilly artist, who’d had a minor hit with “Rock and Roll Ruby”: [Excerpt: Warren Smith, “Rock and Roll Ruby”] Smith liked Moman’s playing, and offered him a job — Moman’s initial response was “doing what?” Moman had joined Smith’s band on guitar, then played with Johnny and Dorsey Burnette. He went with the Burnettes to California, where he was a session player for a time — though I’ve never been able to find a list of any of the records he played on, just people saying he played at Gold Star Studios. He’d then joined Gene Vincent’s Blue Caps, before being in an accident which had led him to come back to Memphis. He’d played guitar on the Don Willis session, and he’d essentially produced it, applying some of the techniques he’d learned in Californian studios. He was young, he was eager to make records, and he knew what he was doing. And the third event was that Stewart managed to persuade his sister, Estelle Axton, to buy out his business partners. Estelle was a naturally business-minded person who also had a yearning to do something involving music, and had been doing things in little ways. For example, the people where she worked all liked music but found they were too busy to go to the record shop — so Estelle would make a list of records they liked, go to one of the wholesalers that distributed music to record shops, buy records there for seventy-six cents, and sell them to her colleagues for a dollar. Estelle persuaded her husband, against his better judgement, to remortgage their house, and she used the money to buy recording equipment. Moman helped them set it up in the barber’s storage space, and Satellite Records started up again, restarting their numbering as if from scratch with what they were now considering their first real release — a song that Moman had co-written, sung by a black vocal group, the Vel-Tones: [Excerpt: The Vel-Tones, “Fool in Love”] The record was pretty much in the style of the white pop semi-doo-wop that was charting at the time, but the singers were black, and so it had to be promoted as R&B, and Jim Stewart made visits to Black DJs like Al Bell and Rufus Thomas, and managed to get the record some airplay. It was popular enough that the record got picked up for distribution by Mercury, and actually brought Satellite a small profit. But the label still wasn’t doing well, and they were finding it difficult to persuade musicians to trek all the way out to Brunswick. And the studio space was bad in other ways — it was right near a train track, and the noise of the trains would disrupt the sessions. And while it was free, at some point they would actually have to make a record featuring Stewart’s barber’s daughter, which nobody actually fancied doing.  So they decided to move studios again, and in doing so they were inspired by another Memphis record label. Hi Records had started around the same time as Satellite, and it had had a few big hits, most notably “Smokie (Part 2)” by the Bill Black Combo, the group that Elvis’ former bass player had formed when Elvis had joined the army: [Excerpt: Bill Black Combo: “Smokie (Part 2)”] For their studio, Hi used an old cinema — a lot of cinemas were closing down in the late fifties, due to the combination of television and the drive-in making indoor cinemas less appealing, and because white flight to the suburbs meant that people with money no longer lived in walking distance of cinemas the way they used to. The Satellite team found an old cinema on East McLemore Avenue, much closer to the centre of Memphis and easier for musicians to get to. That cinema had stopped showing films a year or two earlier, and there’d been a brief period where it had been used for country music performances, but the area was becoming increasingly Black, as white people moved away, and while plenty of Black people liked country music, they weren’t exactly welcomed to the performances in segregated 1950s Memphis, and so the building was abandoned, and available cheap. Meanwhile, Estelle’s son Charles was trying to get into the music business, too. Before I go any further in talking about him, I should say that I’ve had to depart from my normal policy when talking about him. Normally, I refer to people by the name they chose to go by, but in his case he was known by a nickname which was harmless in that time and place, but later became an extremely offensive racist slur in the UK, used against people of Pakistani descent. The word didn’t have those connotations in the US at the time, and he died before its use as a slur became widely known over there, but I’m just going to call him Charles. And speaking of words which might be considered racial slurs, the band that Charles joined — an all-white group who loved to play R&B — was called the Royal Spades. This was supposedly because of their love of playing cards, but there’s more than a suspicion that the racial connotations of the term were used deliberately, and that these white teenage boys were giggling at their naughty racial transgressiveness. The group had originally just been a guitar/bass/drum band, but Charles Axton had approached them and suggested they should get a horn section, offering his services as a tenor player. They’d laughed when he told them he’d only been playing a couple of weeks, but once he explained that his mother and uncle owned a record label, he was in the group, and they’d expanded to have a full horn section. The group was led by guitarist Steve Cropper and also included his friend, the bass player Duck Dunn, and Cropper and Charles Axton helped with the refurbishing of the cinema into a recording studio. The cinema had another advantage, too — as well as the auditorium, which became the studio, it had a lobby and concession stand. Estelle Axton turned that into a record shop, which she ran herself — with Cropper often helping out behind the counter. She instituted a policy that, unlike other record shops, people could hang around all day listening to music, without necessarily buying anything. She also brought in a loyalty card scheme — buy nine records and get a tenth record for free — which allowed her to track what individual customers were buying. She soon became so knowledgeable about what was selling to the Black teenagers of the area that she boasted that if you came into the shop with twenty dollars, she’d have sold you nineteen dollars’ worth of records before you left — she’d leave you with a dollar so you could pay for your transport home, to make sure you could come back with more money. By having a record shop in the record studio itself, they knew what was selling and could make more music that sounded like that. By having a crowd around all day listening to music, they could put the new recordings on and gauge the response before pressing a single copy. Satellite Records suddenly had a market research department. And they soon had an ally in getting them airplay. Rufus Thomas was the most important man in Black entertainment in Memphis. He was a popular DJ and comedian, he was the compere at almost every chitlin’ circuit show in the area, and he was also a popular singer. He’d been the one to record the first hit on Sun Records, “Bear Cat”, the answer record to “Hound Dog” we talked about way back in episode fifteen: [Excerpt: Rufus Thomas, “Bear Cat”] Rufus Thomas knew Jim Stewart from when Stewart had been promoting the Vel-Tones single, and so he came into the newly opened studio and suggested he cut a few tracks. If you’ve got a record label, and a DJ wants to make a record with you, that’s a godsend — you’re guaranteed airplay, not only for that record, but for a few of your others. And if that DJ also happens to be a genuine talent who’d made hit records before, you jump at the chance. Thomas also brought in his daughter, Carla, who happened to have an astonishing voice.  For the first session in the new studio, they recorded a song Rufus had written, “‘Cause I Love You”, with a few musicians that he knew, including a bass player called Wilbur Steinberg, and with Steve Cropper sitting in on guitar and Chips Moman producing. Also in the studio was David Porter, a teenager who sang in a band with Bob Tally, the trumpet player on the session — Porter was skipping school so he could be in a real recording studio, even though he wasn’t going to be singing on the session. When they started playing the song, Tally decided that it would sound good with a baritone sax on it. Nobody in the studio played saxophone, but then Porter remembered one of his classmates at Booker T Washington High School. This classmate was also called Booker T. — Booker T. Jones — and he could play everything. He played oboe, sax, trombone, double bass, guitar, and keyboards, and played them all to a professional standard. Porter popped over to the school, walked into the classroom Jones was in, told the teacher that another teacher wanted to see Jones, pulled him out of the class, and told him he was going to make a record. They borrowed a baritone sax from the school’s music room, went back to the studio, and Jones played on “‘Cause I Love You” by Rufus and Carla Thomas: [Excerpt: Rufus and Carla Thomas, “‘Cause I Love You”] “‘Cause I Love You” became a local hit, and soon Jim Stewart got a call from Jerry Wexler at Atlantic, offering to start distributing it, and any future records by Rufus and Carla Thomas. Stewart didn’t really know anything about the business, but when Wexler explained to Stewart that he was the producer of “What’d I Say” by Ray Charles, Stewart knew that was someone he needed to work with — he’d recently had a sort of Damascene conversion after hearing that record, and was now fully committed to his company’s new R&B style. For a five thousand dollar advance, Atlantic ended up with the rights to press and distribute all future masters from Satellite. The next single from the label was a Carla Thomas solo record, “Gee Whizz, Look at His Eyes”. For that session, they booked in some string players, and Bob Tally was meant to write an arrangement for them. However, he didn’t turn up to the session, and when Stewart went round to his house to find him, he discovered that Tally hadn’t written the arrangement, and had been up all night playing at a gig and was in no fit state to write one. Stewart had to make the string players play from a head arrangement — something string players normally never do — and ended up giving them directions like “just play donuts!”, meaning semibreves or whole notes, which are drawn as ovals with a hole in the middle, like a donut. Despite this, “Gee Whizz” went to number five on the R&B charts and ten on the pop charts. Satellite Records had a real hit: [Excerpt: Carla Thomas, “Gee Whizz, Look at His Eyes”] Satellite were starting to build up a whole team of people they could call on. Steve Cropper was working in the record shop, so he was available whenever they needed a guitar part playing or a second keyboard adding. David Porter was working at Big Star, the grocery store across the road, and he turned out to be a talented songwriter and backing vocalist. And of course there was the band that Cropper and Charles Axton were in, which had now been renamed to the Mar-Keys, a pun on “marquis” as in the noble title, and “keys” as in keyboards, as Estelle Axton thought — entirely correctly — that their original name was inappropriate. They also had a pool of Black session players they could call on, mostly older people who’d been brought to them by Rufus Thomas, and there were always eager teenagers turning up wanting to do anything they could in order to make a record. It was the Mar-Keys who finally gave Satellite the distinctive sound they were looking for. Or, at least, it was under the Mar-Keys’ name that the record was released. An instrumental, “Last Night”, was recorded at several sessions run by Moman, often with different lineups of musicians. The Mar-Keys at this point consisted of Steve Cropper, Duck Dunn, Charles Axton, Wayne Jackson, Terry Johnson, Smoochy Smith, and Don Nix, but the lineup on the finished recording had Smith on keyboards, Axton on sax and Jackson on trumpet, with some sources saying that Cropper provided the second keyboard part while others say he only played on outtakes, not on the final version. The other four musicians were Black session players — Lewie Steinberg, Wilbur’s brother, on bass, Gilbert Caples and Floyd Newman on saxes, and Curtis Green on drums. Floyd Newman also did the spoken “Ooh, last night!” that punctuated the record: [Excerpt: The Mar-Keys, “Last Night”] Jim Stewart and Chips Moman were both convinced that would be a flop, as was Jerry Wexler when he heard it. But Estelle Axton believed in its potential — and also believed in her son, who Stewart had little time for. Jim Stewart didn’t want his useless nephew’s band on his label at all if he could help it, but Estelle Axton wanted her son to have a hit. She got a test pressing to a DJ, who started playing it, and people started coming into the shop asking for the record. Eventually, Stewart gave in to his sister’s pressure, and agreed to release the record. There was only one problem — when they pulled the tape out, they found that the first section of the track had somehow been erased. They had to hunt through the rubbish, looking through discarded bits of tape, until they found another take of the song that had a usable beginning they could splice in. They did a very good job — I *think* I can hear the splice, but if it’s where I think it is, it’s about the cleanest editing job on analogue tape I’ve ever heard. If I’m right, the edit comes right in the middle of this passage: [Excerpt: The Mar-Keys, “Last Night”] Did you hear it? The song’s authorship has been debated over the years, because the horn part and the keyboard part were written separately. Caples and Newman, the session sax players, had come up with the horn part, and so always said they should get solo composition credit. Smoochy Smith had separately written the keyboard part, which came from something he’d been working on on his own, so he got credit too. Chips Moman had suggested combining the keyboard and horn lines, and so he got songwriting credit as well. And Charles Axton didn’t contribute anything to the song other than playing on the record, but because his family owned the record label, he got credit as well. The record became a big hit, and there are a couple of hypotheses as to why. Steve Cropper always argued that it was because you could dance the Twist to it, and so it rode the Twist craze, while others have pointed out that at one point in the record they leave a gap instead of saying “Ooh last night” as they do the rest of the way through. That gap allowed DJs to do the interjection themselves, which encouraged them to play it a lot. It made number three on the pop charts and number two on the R&B charts, and it led to Satellite Records coming to the attention of another label, also called Satellite, in California, who offered to sell the Memphis label the rights to use the name. Jim Stewart had never liked Satellite as a name anyway, and so they quickly reissued the record with a new label, named after the first letters of Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton’s surnames. Stax Records was born. The Mar-Keys immediately hit the road to promote the single — which brought resentment from the Black session players, some of whom claim that during the session it hadn’t even been intended as a Mar-Keys record, and who were annoyed that even though the record was primarily their work they weren’t getting the recognition and a bunch of white boys were.  Cropper soon got tired of the tour, quit the group and came back to Memphis — he was annoyed partly because the other band members, being teenage boys, many of them away from home for the first time, acted like wild animals, and partly because Cropper and Charles Axton both believed themselves to be the band’s leader and that the other should obey them. Cropper went back to working in the record shop, and playing on sessions at Stax. The second Mar-Keys single was recorded by the studio musicians while the group were out on tour — the first they even knew about it was when they saw it in the shop: [Excerpt: The Mar-Keys, “The Morning After”] That was much less successful, but the label was still interested in making instrumentals. They started a subsidiary label, Volt — if you put records out with two different label names, it was more likely that radio stations would play more of your records, because it wouldn’t seem like they were playing one label too much — and the first single on it was an instrumental that Chips Moman wrote, “Burnt Biscuits”, by a group consisting of Moman, Rufus Thomas’ son Mavell, Lewie Steinberg, and Howard Grimes: [Excerpt: The Triumphs, “Burnt Biscuits”] That wasn’t a hit, though Moman thought it had the potential to become as big as “Last Night”. It was released under the name “the Triumphs”, after the sports car Moman drove. Shortly after that, Moman produced what would be the last classic record he’d make for Stax, when he produced “You Don’t Miss Your Water” by a new singer, William Bell, who had previously been one of the backing vocalists on “Gee Whiz”. That track had Mavell Thomas on piano, Lewie Steinberg on bass, Ron Capone on drums, and Booker T. Jones on organ — by this point Booker T. was being called on a lot to play keyboards, as Floyd Newman recommended him as a reliable piano player in the hopes that if Jones was on keyboards, he wouldn’t be playing baritone sax, so Newman would get more of those gigs: [Excerpt: William Bell, “You Don’t Miss Your Water”] That was a great record, one of the defining records of the new country-soul genre along with Arthur Alexander’s records, but it would be the last thing Moman would do at Stax. He’d not been getting on with Estelle Axton, and he also claims that he had been promised a third of the company, but Jim Stewart changed his mind and refused to cut him in. Everyone has a different story about what happened, but the upshot was that Moman left the company, went to Nashville for a while, and then founded his own studio, American, in another part of Memphis. Moman would become responsible for writing and producing a whole string of soul, country, and rock classics, and I’m sure we’ll be hearing more from him in the next couple of years. After Moman left, the label floundered a little bit for a few months. Jim Stewart and Steve Cropper split the production duties that Moman had had between them. Stewart had already produced several records for Carla Thomas, and Cropper was a great musician who had been spending every second he could learning how to make records, so they could cope, but they released a mixture of really good soul records that failed to hit the charts, and truly dire novelty country songs like “The Three Dogwoods” by Nick Charles, a song from the perspective of the tree that became the cross on which Jesus was crucified: [Excerpt: Nick Charles, “The Three Dogwoods”] That was co-written by Cropper, which shows that even the man who co-wrote “In the Midnight Hour”, “Dock of the Bay” and “Knock on Wood” had his off days. The record that would prove Stax to be capable of doing great things without Chips Moman came about by accident. Stax was still not exclusively a soul label, and it was cutting the odd country and rockabilly record, and one of the people who was going to use the studio was Billy Lee Riley. You might remember Riley from a year ago, when we looked at his “Flyin’ Saucers Rock ‘n’ Roll”: [Excerpt: Billy Lee Riley and the Little Green Men, “Flyin’ Saucers Rock ‘n’ Roll”] Riley was running his own label at the time, and doing various bits of session work and singing for other people. No-one’s quite sure what he was using the studio for in early 1962 — some say he was cutting a jingle, some say he cut a few actual tracks but that they were awful, and others that he turned up too drunk to record. Either way, the session ended early, and the musicians were at a loose end. The musicians on this session were three of the regular Stax musicians — Steve Cropper, who had just turned twenty, on guitar, Booker T. Jones, who was still a teenager, on organ, and Lewie Steinberg, a decade older than either, on bass. The fourth musician was Al Jackson, who like Steinberg was an older Black man who had cut his teeth playing jazz and R&B throughout the fifties. Booker had played with Jackson in Willie Mitchell’s band, and had insisted to everyone at Stax that they needed to get this man in, as he was the best drummer Jones had ever heard. Jackson was making money from gigging, and didn’t want to waste his time playing sessions, which he thought would not be as lucrative as his regular gigs with Willie Mitchell. Eventually, Stax agreed to take him on on a salary, rather than just paying him one-off session fees, and so he became the first musician employed by Stax as a full-time player — Cropper was already on salary, but that was for his production work and his work at the record shop. As the session had ended rather disappointingly, the four were noodling on some blues as they had nothing better to do. Jim Stewart clicked on the talkback from the control room to tell them to go home, but then heard what they were playing, and told them to start it again so he could get it down on tape: [Excerpt: Booker T and the MGs, “Behave Yourself”] Stewart was happy with that track, but singles needed two sides, and so they needed to come up with something else. Cropper remembered a little musical lick he’d heard on the radio one day when he’d been driving with Booker — they’d both been fascinated by that lick, but neither could remember anything else about the song (and to this day no-one’s figured out what the song they’d heard was). They started noodling around with that lick, and shaped it into a twelve-bar instrumental: [Excerpt: Booker T. and the MGs, “Green Onions”] That was even better than the other track, and they needed a funky name to go with such a funky track. Lewie Steinberg thought that onions were the funkiest thing he could think of, and so the track became “Green Onions”. As the last instrumental they’d released with food as a title, “Burnt Biscuits”, had been by the Triumphs, they thought the group name should be another sports car name, and so it came out as by Booker T and the MGs. (They later said that MG stood either for Memphis Group or for Mixed Group, because they had both Black and white members, but the original idea was definitely the car – they just didn’t want to have a trademark lawsuit on their hands). “Green Onions” went to number one on the R&B charts and number three on the pop charts, and became the biggest thing Stax had ever recorded. That core group became the Stax house band, playing on every session from that point on. If they recorded an instrumental on their own, it went out as by Booker T and the MGs. If they recorded an instrumental with horn players, it went out as by the Mar-Keys, and they also played backing all the singers who came through the door of Stax, and there would be a lot of them over the next few years. There were a couple of changes — Booker T actually went off to university soon after recording “Green Onions”, so for a couple of years he could only play on weekends and during holidays — on weekdays, the studio used another keyboard player, again suggested by Floyd Newman, who had hired a young man for his bar band when the young man could only play piano with one hand, just because he seemed to have a feel for the music. Luckily, Isaac Hayes had soon learned to play with both hands, and he fit right in while Booker was away at university. The other change came a couple of years later, when after the MGs had had a few hits, Lewie Steinberg was replaced by Duck Dunn. Steinberg always claimed that the main reason he was dropped from the MGs was because he was Black and Steve Cropper wanted another white man. Cropper has always said it was because Duck Dunn had a harder-edged style that fit their music better than Steinberg’s looser feel, but also that Dunn had been his best friend for years and he wanted to play more with him. The two Black members of the MGs have never commented publicly, as far as I can tell, on the change. But whether with Jones or Hayes, Steinberg or Dunn, the MGs would be the foundation of Stax’s records for the rest of the sixties, as well as producing a string of instrumental hits. And it was those instrumental hits that led to the arrival of the person who would make Stax a legendary label. Joe Galkin, a record promoter to whom Jim Stewart owed a favour, was managing a local guitarist, Johnny Jenkins, and brought him into the studio to see if Stax could get him an instrumental hit, since they’d had a few of those. Jenkins did eventually release a single on Stax, but it wasn’t particularly special, and didn’t have any success: [Excerpt: Johnny Jenkins, “Spunky”] The day of Jenkins’ first session was a flop, they’d not been able to get anything decent recorded, and the musicians started to pack up. But Galkin had made a deal with the singer in Jenkins’ band — if he’d drive Jenkins to the studio, since Jenkins couldn’t drive, he’d try to get a record cut with him as well. Nobody was interested, but Galkin wore Jim Stewart down and he agreed to listen to this person who he just thought of as Johnny Jenkins’ driver. After hearing him, Steve Cropper ran out to get Lewie Steinberg, who was packing his bass away, and tell him to bring it back into the studio. Cropper played piano, Jenkins stayed on guitar, and Booker, Al, and Lewie played their normal instruments. Jim Stewart wasn’t particularly impressed with the results, but he owed Galkin a favour, so he released the record, a fun but unoriginal Little Richard soundalike: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, “Hey Hey Baby”] But soon DJs flipped the record, and it was the B-side that became the hit: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, “These Arms of Mine”] Otis Redding would never again be thought of as just Johnny Jenkins’ driver, and Stax Records was about to hit the big time.  

Episode 105 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Green Onions", and how a company started by a Western Swing fiddle player ended up making the most important soul records of the sixties. 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 "He's So Fine" by the Chiffons. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more---- Resources I used three main books when creating this episode. Two were histories of Stax -- Soulsville USA: The Story of Stax by Rob Bowman, and Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion by Robert Gordon.  Country Soul by Charles L Hughes is a more general overview of soul music made in Tennessee and Alabama in the sixties, but is useful as it's less likely to take statements about racial attitudes entirely at face value. This is a good cheap compilation of Booker T and the MGs' music. If the Erwin Records tracks here interest you, they're all available on this compilation. The Complete Stax-Volt Singles vol. 1: 1959-1968 is a nine-CD box set containing much of the rest of the music in this episode. It's out of print physically, but the MP3 edition, while pricey, is worth it. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   And now we come to the end of the backfilling portion of the story. Since "Telstar" we've been looking at records from 1962 that came out just before "Love Me Do" -- we've essentially been in an extended flashback. This is the last of those flashback episodes, and from next week on we're moving forward into 1963. Today we're going to look at a record by a group of musicians who would be as important to the development of music in the 1960s as any, and at the early years of Stax Records, a label that would become as important as Chess, Motown, or Sun. Today, we're looking at "Green Onions" by Booker T. and the MGs, and how a white country fiddle player accidentally kickstarted the most important label in soul music: [Excerpt: Booker T. and the MGs, "Green Onions"] Our story starts in Memphis, with Jim Stewart, a part-time fiddle player. Stewart was in a Western Swing band, and was hugely influenced by Bob Wills, but he wasn't making any real money from music. Instead, he was working a day job at a bank. But he was still interested in music, and wanted to be involved in the industry. One of the gigs he'd had was in the house band at a venue where Elvis sometimes played in his early years, and he'd seen how Elvis had gone from an obscure local boy all the way to the biggest star in the world. He knew he couldn't do that himself, but he was irresistibly attracted to any field where that was *possible*. He found his way into the industry, and into music history as a result of a tip from his barber. The barber in question, Erwin Ellis, was another country fiddle player, but he owned his own record label, Erwin Records. Erwin Records was a tiny label -- it was so tiny that its first release, by Ellis himself, seems not to exist anywhere. Even on compilations of Erwin Records material, it's not present, which is a shame, as it would be interesting from a historical perspective to hear Ellis' own playing. But while Ellis was unsuccessful both as a fiddle player and as a record company owner, he did manage to release a handful of rockabilly classics on Erwin Records, like Hoyt Jackson's "Enie Meanie Minie Moe": [Excerpt: Hoyt Jackson, "Enie Meanie Minie Moe"] and "Boppin' Wig Wam Willie" by Ray Scott, who had written "Flyin' Saucers Rock & Roll" for Billy Lee Riley, and who was backed by Riley's Little Green Men on this single: [Excerpt: Ray Scott, "Boppin' Wig Wam WIllie"] Ellis' label wasn't hugely successful, but he made some decent money from it, and he explained the realities of the music industry to Stewart as Stewart was sat in his barber's chair. He told Stewart that you didn't make money from the records themselves -- small labels didn't sell much -- but that he was making some good money from the songs. The formula for success in the music business, Ellis explained, was that when you got a new artist through the door, you told them they could only record originals, not cover versions -- and then you made sure they signed the publishing over to you. If you sold a record, you were just selling a bit of plastic, and you'd already paid to make the bit of plastic. There was no real money in that. But if you owned the song, every time that record was played on the radio, you got a bit of money with no extra outlay -- and if you owned enough songs, then some of them might get covered by a big star, and then you'd get some real money. Hoyt Jackson, Ellis' biggest act, hadn't had any hits himself, but he'd written "It's A Little More Like Heaven (Where You Are)": [Excerpt: Hoyt Jackson, "It's A Little More Like Heaven (Where You Are)"] Hank Locklin had recorded a cover version of it, which had gone to number three on the country charts: [Excerpt: Hank Locklin "It's a Little More Like Heaven"] And Johnny Cash had rewritten it a bit, as "You're the Nearest Thing to Heaven", and had also had a top five country hit with it: [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, "You're the Nearest Thing to Heaven"] Ellis explained to Stewart that he was still getting cheques every few months because he owned the publishing for this song that someone else had written and brought to him. If you owned the publishing for a song that became a hit, then you had a steady source of income without having to lift a finger. And people would just give you the publishing on their songs if you agreed to put a record of them out. For someone like Stewart, who worked in a bank and knew a little bit about finance, that sounded just about perfect. He pulled together a singing DJ, a piano player, and a rhythm guitarist he knew, and they pooled their savings and raised a thousand dollars to put out a record. Stewart wrote a song -- the only song he'd ever write -- Fred Byler, the DJ, sang it, and they hired Ellis and his tape recorder to record it in Jim's wife's uncle's garage. They came up with the name Satellite Records for their label -- nobody liked it, but they couldn't think of anything better, and satellites were in the news with the recent launch of Sputnik. "Blue Roses" by Fred Byler, came out to pretty much no sales or airplay: [Excerpt: Fred Byler, "Blue Roses"] The next record was more interesting -- "Boppin' High School Baby" by Don Willis is a prime slice of Memphis rockabilly, though one with so much slapback echo that even Joe Meek might have said "hang on, isn't that a bit much?": [Excerpt: Don Willis, "Boppin' High School Baby"] That also didn't sell -- Stewart and his partners knew nothing about the music business. They didn't know how to get the records distributed to shops, and they had no money left. And then Erwin Ellis moved away and took his tape recorder with him, and Stewart's wife's uncle wanted to use his garage again and so wouldn't let them record there any more. It looked like that would be the end of Satellite Records. But then three things changed everything for Jim Stewart, and for music history. The first of these was that Stewart's new barber was also interested in music -- he had a daughter who he thought could sing, and he had a large storage space he wasn't using, in Brunswick on the outskirts of the city. If they'd record his daughter, they could use the storage space as a studio. The second was Chips Moman. Chips was a teenage guitarist who had been playing a friend's guitar at a drugstore in Memphis, just hanging around after work, when Warren Smith walked in. Smith was a Sun Records rockabilly artist, who'd had a minor hit with "Rock and Roll Ruby": [Excerpt: Warren Smith, "Rock and Roll Ruby"] Smith liked Moman's playing, and offered him a job -- Moman's initial response was "doing what?" Moman had joined Smith's band on guitar, then played with Johnny and Dorsey Burnette. He went with the Burnettes to California, where he was a session player for a time -- though I've never been able to find a list of any of the records he played on, just people saying he played at Gold Star Studios. He'd then joined Gene Vincent's Blue Caps, before being in an accident which had led him to come back to Memphis. He'd played guitar on the Don Willis session, and he'd essentially produced it, applying some of the techniques he'd learned in Californian studios. He was young, he was eager to make records, and he knew what he was doing. And the third event was that Stewart managed to persuade his sister, Estelle Axton, to buy out his business partners. Estelle was a naturally business-minded person who also had a yearning to do something involving music, and had been doing things in little ways. For example, the people where she worked all liked music but found they were too busy to go to the record shop -- so Estelle would make a list of records they liked, go to one of the wholesalers that distributed music to record shops, buy records there for seventy-six cents, and sell them to her colleagues for a dollar. Estelle persuaded her husband, against his better judgement, to remortgage their house, and she used the money to buy recording equipment. Moman helped them set it up in the barber's storage space, and Satellite Records started up again, restarting their numbering as if from scratch with what they were now considering their first real release -- a song that Moman had co-written, sung by a black vocal group, the Vel-Tones: [Excerpt: The Vel-Tones, "Fool in Love"] The record was pretty much in the style of the white pop semi-doo-wop that was charting at the time, but the singers were black, and so it had to be promoted as R&B, and Jim Stewart made visits to Black DJs like Al Bell and Rufus Thomas, and managed to get the record some airplay. It was popular enough that the record got picked up for distribution by Mercury, and actually brought Satellite a small profit. But the label still wasn't doing well, and they were finding it difficult to persuade musicians to trek all the way out to Brunswick. And the studio space was bad in other ways -- it was right near a train track, and the noise of the trains would disrupt the sessions. And while it was free, at some point they would actually have to make a record featuring Stewart's barber's daughter, which nobody actually fancied doing.  So they decided to move studios again, and in doing so they were inspired by another Memphis record label. Hi Records had started around the same time as Satellite, and it had had a few big hits, most notably "Smokie (Part 2)" by the Bill Black Combo, the group that Elvis' former bass player had formed when Elvis had joined the army: [Excerpt: Bill Black Combo: "Smokie (Part 2)"] For their studio, Hi used an old cinema -- a lot of cinemas were closing down in the late fifties, due to the combination of television and the drive-in making indoor cinemas less appealing, and because white flight to the suburbs meant that people with money no longer lived in walking distance of cinemas the way they used to. The Satellite team found an old cinema on East McLemore Avenue, much closer to the centre of Memphis and easier for musicians to get to. That cinema had stopped showing films a year or two earlier, and there'd been a brief period where it had been used for country music performances, but the area was becoming increasingly Black, as white people moved away, and while plenty of Black people liked country music, they weren't exactly welcomed to the performances in segregated 1950s Memphis, and so the building was abandoned, and available cheap. Meanwhile, Estelle's son Charles was trying to get into the music business, too. Before I go any further in talking about him, I should say that I've had to depart from my normal policy when talking about him. Normally, I refer to people by the name they chose to go by, but in his case he was known by a nickname which was harmless in that time and place, but later became an extremely offensive racist slur in the UK, used against people of Pakistani descent. The word didn't have those connotations in the US at the time, and he died before its use as a slur became widely known over there, but I'm just going to call him Charles. And speaking of words which might be considered racial slurs, the band that Charles joined -- an all-white group who loved to play R&B -- was called the Royal Spades. This was supposedly because of their love of playing cards, but there's more than a suspicion that the racial connotations of the term were used deliberately, and that these white teenage boys were giggling at their naughty racial transgressiveness. The group had originally just been a guitar/bass/drum band, but Charles Axton had approached them and suggested they should get a horn section, offering his services as a tenor player. They'd laughed when he told them he'd only been playing a couple of weeks, but once he explained that his mother and uncle owned a record label, he was in the group, and they'd expanded to have a full horn section. The group was led by guitarist Steve Cropper and also included his friend, the bass player Duck Dunn, and Cropper and Charles Axton helped with the refurbishing of the cinema into a recording studio. The cinema had another advantage, too -- as well as the auditorium, which became the studio, it had a lobby and concession stand. Estelle Axton turned that into a record shop, which she ran herself -- with Cropper often helping out behind the counter. She instituted a policy that, unlike other record shops, people could hang around all day listening to music, without necessarily buying anything. She also brought in a loyalty card scheme -- buy nine records and get a tenth record for free -- which allowed her to track what individual customers were buying. She soon became so knowledgeable about what was selling to the Black teenagers of the area that she boasted that if you came into the shop with twenty dollars, she'd have sold you nineteen dollars' worth of records before you left -- she'd leave you with a dollar so you could pay for your transport home, to make sure you could come back with more money. By having a record shop in the record studio itself, they knew what was selling and could make more music that sounded like that. By having a crowd around all day listening to music, they could put the new recordings on and gauge the response before pressing a single copy. Satellite Records suddenly had a market research department. And they soon had an ally in getting them airplay. Rufus Thomas was the most important man in Black entertainment in Memphis. He was a popular DJ and comedian, he was the compere at almost every chitlin' circuit show in the area, and he was also a popular singer. He'd been the one to record the first hit on Sun Records, "Bear Cat", the answer record to "Hound Dog" we talked about way back in episode fifteen: [Excerpt: Rufus Thomas, "Bear Cat"] Rufus Thomas knew Jim Stewart from when Stewart had been promoting the Vel-Tones single, and so he came into the newly opened studio and suggested he cut a few tracks. If you've got a record label, and a DJ wants to make a record with you, that's a godsend -- you're guaranteed airplay, not only for that record, but for a few of your others. And if that DJ also happens to be a genuine talent who'd made hit records before, you jump at the chance. Thomas also brought in his daughter, Carla, who happened to have an astonishing voice.  For the first session in the new studio, they recorded a song Rufus had written, "'Cause I Love You", with a few musicians that he knew, including a bass player called Wilbur Steinberg, and with Steve Cropper sitting in on guitar and Chips Moman producing. Also in the studio was David Porter, a teenager who sang in a band with Bob Tally, the trumpet player on the session -- Porter was skipping school so he could be in a real recording studio, even though he wasn't going to be singing on the session. When they started playing the song, Tally decided that it would sound good with a baritone sax on it. Nobody in the studio played saxophone, but then Porter remembered one of his classmates at Booker T Washington High School. This classmate was also called Booker T. -- Booker T. Jones -- and he could play everything. He played oboe, sax, trombone, double bass, guitar, and keyboards, and played them all to a professional standard. Porter popped over to the school, walked into the classroom Jones was in, told the teacher that another teacher wanted to see Jones, pulled him out of the class, and told him he was going to make a record. They borrowed a baritone sax from the school's music room, went back to the studio, and Jones played on "'Cause I Love You" by Rufus and Carla Thomas: [Excerpt: Rufus and Carla Thomas, "'Cause I Love You"] "'Cause I Love You" became a local hit, and soon Jim Stewart got a call from Jerry Wexler at Atlantic, offering to start distributing it, and any future records by Rufus and Carla Thomas. Stewart didn't really know anything about the business, but when Wexler explained to Stewart that he was the producer of "What'd I Say" by Ray Charles, Stewart knew that was someone he needed to work with -- he'd recently had a sort of Damascene conversion after hearing that record, and was now fully committed to his company's new R&B style. For a five thousand dollar advance, Atlantic ended up with the rights to press and distribute all future masters from Satellite. The next single from the label was a Carla Thomas solo record, "Gee Whizz, Look at His Eyes". For that session, they booked in some string players, and Bob Tally was meant to write an arrangement for them. However, he didn't turn up to the session, and when Stewart went round to his house to find him, he discovered that Tally hadn't written the arrangement, and had been up all night playing at a gig and was in no fit state to write one. Stewart had to make the string players play from a head arrangement -- something string players normally never do -- and ended up giving them directions like "just play donuts!", meaning semibreves or whole notes, which are drawn as ovals with a hole in the middle, like a donut. Despite this, "Gee Whizz" went to number five on the R&B charts and ten on the pop charts. Satellite Records had a real hit: [Excerpt: Carla Thomas, "Gee Whizz, Look at His Eyes"] Satellite were starting to build up a whole team of people they could call on. Steve Cropper was working in the record shop, so he was available whenever they needed a guitar part playing or a second keyboard adding. David Porter was working at Big Star, the grocery store across the road, and he turned out to be a talented songwriter and backing vocalist. And of course there was the band that Cropper and Charles Axton were in, which had now been renamed to the Mar-Keys, a pun on "marquis" as in the noble title, and "keys" as in keyboards, as Estelle Axton thought -- entirely correctly -- that their original name was inappropriate. They also had a pool of Black session players they could call on, mostly older people who'd been brought to them by Rufus Thomas, and there were always eager teenagers turning up wanting to do anything they could in order to make a record. It was the Mar-Keys who finally gave Satellite the distinctive sound they were looking for. Or, at least, it was under the Mar-Keys' name that the record was released. An instrumental, "Last Night", was recorded at several sessions run by Moman, often with different lineups of musicians. The Mar-Keys at this point consisted of Steve Cropper, Duck Dunn, Charles Axton, Wayne Jackson, Terry Johnson, Smoochy Smith, and Don Nix, but the lineup on the finished recording had Smith on keyboards, Axton on sax and Jackson on trumpet, with some sources saying that Cropper provided the second keyboard part while others say he only played on outtakes, not on the final version. The other four musicians were Black session players -- Lewie Steinberg, Wilbur's brother, on bass, Gilbert Caples and Floyd Newman on saxes, and Curtis Green on drums. Floyd Newman also did the spoken "Ooh, last night!" that punctuated the record: [Excerpt: The Mar-Keys, "Last Night"] Jim Stewart and Chips Moman were both convinced that would be a flop, as was Jerry Wexler when he heard it. But Estelle Axton believed in its potential -- and also believed in her son, who Stewart had little time for. Jim Stewart didn't want his useless nephew's band on his label at all if he could help it, but Estelle Axton wanted her son to have a hit. She got a test pressing to a DJ, who started playing it, and people started coming into the shop asking for the record. Eventually, Stewart gave in to his sister's pressure, and agreed to release the record. There was only one problem -- when they pulled the tape out, they found that the first section of the track had somehow been erased. They had to hunt through the rubbish, looking through discarded bits of tape, until they found another take of the song that had a usable beginning they could splice in. They did a very good job -- I *think* I can hear the splice, but if it's where I think it is, it's about the cleanest editing job on analogue tape I've ever heard. If I'm right, the edit comes right in the middle of this passage: [Excerpt: The Mar-Keys, "Last Night"] Did you hear it? The song's authorship has been debated over the years, because the horn part and the keyboard part were written separately. Caples and Newman, the session sax players, had come up with the horn part, and so always said they should get solo composition credit. Smoochy Smith had separately written the keyboard part, which came from something he'd been working on on his own, so he got credit too. Chips Moman had suggested combining the keyboard and horn lines, and so he got songwriting credit as well. And Charles Axton didn't contribute anything to the song other than playing on the record, but because his family owned the record label, he got credit as well. The record became a big hit, and there are a couple of hypotheses as to why. Steve Cropper always argued that it was because you could dance the Twist to it, and so it rode the Twist craze, while others have pointed out that at one point in the record they leave a gap instead of saying "Ooh last night" as they do the rest of the way through. That gap allowed DJs to do the interjection themselves, which encouraged them to play it a lot. It made number three on the pop charts and number two on the R&B charts, and it led to Satellite Records coming to the attention of another label, also called Satellite, in California, who offered to sell the Memphis label the rights to use the name. Jim Stewart had never liked Satellite as a name anyway, and so they quickly reissued the record with a new label, named after the first letters of Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton's surnames. Stax Records was born. The Mar-Keys immediately hit the road to promote the single -- which brought resentment from the Black session players, some of whom claim that during the session it hadn't even been intended as a Mar-Keys record, and who were annoyed that even though the record was primarily their work they weren't getting the recognition and a bunch of white boys were.  Cropper soon got tired of the tour, quit the group and came back to Memphis -- he was annoyed partly because the other band members, being teenage boys, many of them away from home for the first time, acted like wild animals, and partly because Cropper and Charles Axton both believed themselves to be the band's leader and that the other should obey them. Cropper went back to working in the record shop, and playing on sessions at Stax. The second Mar-Keys single was recorded by the studio musicians while the group were out on tour -- the first they even knew about it was when they saw it in the shop: [Excerpt: The Mar-Keys, "The Morning After"] That was much less successful, but the label was still interested in making instrumentals. They started a subsidiary label, Volt -- if you put records out with two different label names, it was more likely that radio stations would play more of your records, because it wouldn't seem like they were playing one label too much -- and the first single on it was an instrumental that Chips Moman wrote, "Burnt Biscuits", by a group consisting of Moman, Rufus Thomas' son Mavell, Lewie Steinberg, and Howard Grimes: [Excerpt: The Triumphs, "Burnt Biscuits"] That wasn't a hit, though Moman thought it had the potential to become as big as "Last Night". It was released under the name "the Triumphs", after the sports car Moman drove. Shortly after that, Moman produced what would be the last classic record he'd make for Stax, when he produced "You Don't Miss Your Water" by a new singer, William Bell, who had previously been one of the backing vocalists on "Gee Whiz". That track had Mavell Thomas on piano, Lewie Steinberg on bass, Ron Capone on drums, and Booker T. Jones on organ -- by this point Booker T. was being called on a lot to play keyboards, as Floyd Newman recommended him as a reliable piano player in the hopes that if Jones was on keyboards, he wouldn't be playing baritone sax, so Newman would get more of those gigs: [Excerpt: William Bell, "You Don't Miss Your Water"] That was a great record, one of the defining records of the new country-soul genre along with Arthur Alexander's records, but it would be the last thing Moman would do at Stax. He'd not been getting on with Estelle Axton, and he also claims that he had been promised a third of the company, but Jim Stewart changed his mind and refused to cut him in. Everyone has a different story about what happened, but the upshot was that Moman left the company, went to Nashville for a while, and then founded his own studio, American, in another part of Memphis. Moman would become responsible for writing and producing a whole string of soul, country, and rock classics, and I'm sure we'll be hearing more from him in the next couple of years. After Moman left, the label floundered a little bit for a few months. Jim Stewart and Steve Cropper split the production duties that Moman had had between them. Stewart had already produced several records for Carla Thomas, and Cropper was a great musician who had been spending every second he could learning how to make records, so they could cope, but they released a mixture of really good soul records that failed to hit the charts, and truly dire novelty country songs like "The Three Dogwoods" by Nick Charles, a song from the perspective of the tree that became the cross on which Jesus was crucified: [Excerpt: Nick Charles, "The Three Dogwoods"] That was co-written by Cropper, which shows that even the man who co-wrote "In the Midnight Hour", "Dock of the Bay" and "Knock on Wood" had his off days. The record that would prove Stax to be capable of doing great things without Chips Moman came about by accident. Stax was still not exclusively a soul label, and it was cutting the odd country and rockabilly record, and one of the people who was going to use the studio was Billy Lee Riley. You might remember Riley from a year ago, when we looked at his "Flyin' Saucers Rock 'n' Roll": [Excerpt: Billy Lee Riley and the Little Green Men, "Flyin' Saucers Rock 'n' Roll"] Riley was running his own label at the time, and doing various bits of session work and singing for other people. No-one's quite sure what he was using the studio for in early 1962 -- some say he was cutting a jingle, some say he cut a few actual tracks but that they were awful, and others that he turned up too drunk to record. Either way, the session ended early, and the musicians were at a loose end. The musicians on this session were three of the regular Stax musicians -- Steve Cropper, who had just turned twenty, on guitar, Booker T. Jones, who was still a teenager, on organ, and Lewie Steinberg, a decade older than either, on bass. The fourth musician was Al Jackson, who like Steinberg was an older Black man who had cut his teeth playing jazz and R&B throughout the fifties. Booker had played with Jackson in Willie Mitchell's band, and had insisted to everyone at Stax that they needed to get this man in, as he was the best drummer Jones had ever heard. Jackson was making money from gigging, and didn't want to waste his time playing sessions, which he thought would not be as lucrative as his regular gigs with Willie Mitchell. Eventually, Stax agreed to take him on on a salary, rather than just paying him one-off session fees, and so he became the first musician employed by Stax as a full-time player -- Cropper was already on salary, but that was for his production work and his work at the record shop. As the session had ended rather disappointingly, the four were noodling on some blues as they had nothing better to do. Jim Stewart clicked on the talkback from the control room to tell them to go home, but then heard what they were playing, and told them to start it again so he could get it down on tape: [Excerpt: Booker T and the MGs, "Behave Yourself"] Stewart was happy with that track, but singles needed two sides, and so they needed to come up with something else. Cropper remembered a little musical lick he'd heard on the radio one day when he'd been driving with Booker -- they'd both been fascinated by that lick, but neither could remember anything else about the song (and to this day no-one's figured out what the song they'd heard was). They started noodling around with that lick, and shaped it into a twelve-bar instrumental: [Excerpt: Booker T. and the MGs, "Green Onions"] That was even better than the other track, and they needed a funky name to go with such a funky track. Lewie Steinberg thought that onions were the funkiest thing he could think of, and so the track became "Green Onions". As the last instrumental they'd released with food as a title, "Burnt Biscuits", had been by the Triumphs, they thought the group name should be another sports car name, and so it came out as by Booker T and the MGs. (They later said that MG stood either for Memphis Group or for Mixed Group, because they had both Black and white members, but the original idea was definitely the car – they just didn't want to have a trademark lawsuit on their hands). "Green Onions" went to number one on the R&B charts and number three on the pop charts, and became the biggest thing Stax had ever recorded. That core group became the Stax house band, playing on every session from that point on. If they recorded an instrumental on their own, it went out as by Booker T and the MGs. If they recorded an instrumental with horn players, it went out as by the Mar-Keys, and they also played backing all the singers who came through the door of Stax, and there would be a lot of them over the next few years. There were a couple of changes -- Booker T actually went off to university soon after recording "Green Onions", so for a couple of years he could only play on weekends and during holidays -- on weekdays, the studio used another keyboard player, again suggested by Floyd Newman, who had hired a young man for his bar band when the young man could only play piano with one hand, just because he seemed to have a feel for the music. Luckily, Isaac Hayes had soon learned to play with both hands, and he fit right in while Booker was away at university. The other change came a couple of years later, when after the MGs had had a few hits, Lewie Steinberg was replaced by Duck Dunn. Steinberg always claimed that the main reason he was dropped from the MGs was because he was Black and Steve Cropper wanted another white man. Cropper has always said it was because Duck Dunn had a harder-edged style that fit their music better than Steinberg's looser feel, but also that Dunn had been his best friend for years and he wanted to play more with him. The two Black members of the MGs have never commented publicly, as far as I can tell, on the change. But whether with Jones or Hayes, Steinberg or Dunn, the MGs would be the foundation of Stax's records for the rest of the sixties, as well as producing a string of instrumental hits. And it was those instrumental hits that led to the arrival of the person who would make Stax a legendary label. Joe Galkin, a record promoter to whom Jim Stewart owed a favour, was managing a local guitarist, Johnny Jenkins, and brought him into the studio to see if Stax could get him an instrumental hit, since they'd had a few of those. Jenkins did eventually release a single on Stax, but it wasn't particularly special, and didn't have any success: [Excerpt: Johnny Jenkins, "Spunky"] The day of Jenkins' first session was a flop, they'd not been able to get anything decent recorded, and the musicians started to pack up. But Galkin had made a deal with the singer in Jenkins' band -- if he'd drive Jenkins to the studio, since Jenkins couldn't drive, he'd try to get a record cut with him as well. Nobody was interested, but Galkin wore Jim Stewart down and he agreed to listen to this person who he just thought of as Johnny Jenkins' driver. After hearing him, Steve Cropper ran out to get Lewie Steinberg, who was packing his bass away, and tell him to bring it back into the studio. Cropper played piano, Jenkins stayed on guitar, and Booker, Al, and Lewie played their normal instruments. Jim Stewart wasn't particularly impressed with the results, but he owed Galkin a favour, so he released the record, a fun but unoriginal Little Richard soundalike: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Hey Hey Baby"] But soon DJs flipped the record, and it was the B-side that became the hit: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "These Arms of Mine"] Otis Redding would never again be thought of as just Johnny Jenkins' driver, and Stax Records was about to hit the big time.  

In part 1 of our Truetone Lounge interview, we cover Reggie Young's early years in Memphis playing with the Bill Black Combo and sessions at Royal Studios, all the way up to his early work with Chips Moman at American Sound Studios.

This week’s show is my conversation with Robby Turner and what an Inner View it was. Robby has toured with the Highwaymen, Waylon Jennings, the Dixie Chicks, and he has worked with Sam Phillips, Chips Moman, Reggie Young, Tony Joe White, and Sun Records, to name a few. Although he is known for his steel guitar playing, he also plays drums, bass guitar, and many more instruments. If you have heard the podcast and would like to review it, just go to RateThisPodcast.com/memphismusic

Just ahead of Halloween, Gurdip, Ryan and Justin wrap their review of the spookiest film in Elvis' movie oeuvre: 1965's "Tickle Me." With the back half of the film set in a haunted hotel aesthetically ripped right out of a Scooby-Doo cartoon, the guys finally settle on where this slightly outdated movie rests in Elvis' filmography before diving into their Songs of the Week. Apropos for the review of a movie about Elvis surrounded by women, Ryan selects the title track of "Girls! Girls! Girls." In a bizarre coincidence, Gurdip ALSO selects a song from that same 1962 film, "We're Coming in Loaded." Finally, Justin highlights the interesting backstory behind a rarely heard studio snippet of Elvis singing the Chips Moman-penned "This Time."

Label: MGM 13501Year: 1966Condition: M-Price: $16.00I just don't hear this great tune enough, so I've socked a clip into the "jukebox" ... I'll admit I didn't learn to love this one until after hearing Nick Lowe's version, circa 1979. But after that, I discovered the Sandy Posey original, which is a very special slice of southern girl-pop bliss. From the American Studios in Memphis, Chips Moman conjured more than a little bit of magic from Posey's vocals and a simple, but powerful arrangement... just as he had with James Carr and "Dark End of the Street," and many, many others. This isn't the only magic he conjured from Sandy Posey, either. If you like this one as much as I do, you'll find that most of her other MGM singles are well worth seeking out. Collector Nerd Alert: For those of you keeping track, here's another just-over-2-minute classic: It times at 2:06. Talk about brilliant! Note: This copy has a drillhole comes in a vintage MGM Records factory sleeve. The vinyl looks untouched, and the audio is very close to Mint. (This scan is a representative image from our archives... the drillhole on this copy is on the left above publisher credits.)

Label: Scepter 12219Year: 1968Condition: MPrice: $14.00From a warehouse find, this is a new, unplayed stock copy, in its original Scepter Records factory sleeve. This recording is a personal favorite among B.J. Thomas hits. The ingredients are all perfect... the Chips Moman production, the American Studios musicians, the Mark James song, and the perfect B.J. Thomas touch. Plus that rhythm section that turns the whole thing into a Northern Soul dance-fest... Mmmm! I can almost fall for that New York woman myself! :-) The B side is a non-album cut. Note: This beautiful copy has a small gold sticker on the labels (see scan). The vinyl (styrene) looks untouched, and the grooves are blessed with pristine Mint audio! Have a listen to that powerful sound in the (admittedly pitiful compared with the original) mp3 "snippet" for this record.

“Suspicious Minds” signalled the return of The KingSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

“Suspicious Minds” signalled the return of The King See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Devon Allman y Duane Betts son la base vital de la Allman Betts Band, cuyos sonidos afilados reflejan la herencia de dos de los mejores músicos de Southern Rock, Gregg Allman y Dickey Betts personificada en sus hijos, que decidieron unir fuerzas tras un concierto de homenaje a Gregg un año después de su muerte en Phoenix. A la aventura también se unió bajista Berry Oakley Jr. — hijo de Berry Oakley, el que fuera miembro de The Allman Brothers Band. El año pasado debutaron con Down to the River y ahora anticipan un segundo registro gracias a “Magnolia Road”, que evoca los sonidos de sus padres respectivos. Procedentes del sur de California, Robert Jon & The Wreck está formada por cinco músicos veteranos músicos que un día decidieron unir sus fuerzas para crear un sonido propio como resultado de enredar el rock más clásico y el southern rock con la frescura del punk californiano. Hace cinco años apareció Glory Bound, su primer larga duración, tras debutar en 2013 con un EP titulado Rhythm Of The Road. El carisma de Robert Jon & The Wreck, la enorme calidad de sus canciones y la energía de sus directos, les hicieron crecer rápidamente y conseguir la tutela de Rival Sons, con quienes terminan compartiendo gira y a los que les une una gran amistad. Su nuevo trabajo es Last Light On The Highway, con mucho de blues, rock y soul pasados por el filtro del Orange County californiano y canciones tan motivadoras como “Do You Remember”. Ross Cooper llegó a Nashville tras abandonar los circuitos del rodeo y empezó a combinar de forma natural country y folk para completar un par de álbumes muy recomendables que ahora tendrán continuación con Chasing Old Highs, su tercer disco de estudio. Tejano de Lubbock y a medio camino entre Sam Outlaw y Ryan Adams, Ross Cooper cabalga, nunca mejor dicho, entre el regusto por la tradición de su estado y los nuevos paisajes sonoros de la country music como ha demostrado componiendo temas que han grabado Randy Rogers, Wade Bowen y William Clark Green, entre otros. Chasing Old Highs sigue la temática de su trabajo anterior, pero continúa ampliando horizontes. Además, su guitarra Gibson J-50, regalo de un amigo de la familia fallecido, ha tomado un papel protagonista en la construcción sonora del álbum. Hay canciones como “Hello Sunshine”, que abre el álbum, que traen a la memoria sonidos propios de John Hartford o Roger Miller y que dejan un mensaje de positividad sobre cómo los días no son inútiles aunque a veces no sean felices. Corb Lund tiene un nuevo álbum titulado Agricultural Tragic. Es un proyecto para honrar el pasado, compartiendo las lecciones aprendidas y las historias escuchadas en su rancho familiar en la provincia canadiense de Alberta, donde nació. Su personalidad artística siempre le ha derivado a publicar canciones que mezclan sus orígenes rurales y los nuevos tiempos. Compuesta junto a la cantautora Jaida Dreyer, "Never Not Had Horses" pasó de ser una tonalidad divertida de principio a terminar convirtiéndose en un lamento por la pérdida y la desesperación. Tiene que ver con el dicho popular de tener demasiados caballos y poco dinero y trata de aferrarse a pequeños hilos de esperanza. Como viene ocurriendo en los últimos tiempos, las nuevas canciones visitan muchos más paisajes reales de y se acercan a un estilo de vida agrícola y rural, al margen de los estereotipos, tantas veces irreales. Dale Watson se acogió al término Ameripolitan para diferenciarse de la industria de Nashville, como un rebelde de la country music, mezclando Outlaw Country, rockabilly, honky-tonk e incluso Western swing. Nacido en Alabama y criado en Texas, la constancia ha sido una de las características de su personalidad hasta convertirse en un músico con tintes de leyenda. Un verdadero forajido. Lo último que hemos conocido de él es esta versión a "Chevy Van", una canción de Sammy Johns, que compuso y cantó en 1973 junto a los miembros de la la mítica Wrecking Crew de Los Angeles. La canción detalla el encuentro fugaz de una pareja en la parte trasera de una Chevrolet Van. En First Rose of Spring, el último álbum de Willie Nelson, no hay demasiadas referencias al paso del tiempo, como había sido costumbre en sus últimos trabajos, ni tantas canciones propias. Tan solo ha compuesto dos temas junto a su viejo amigo y productor Buddy Cannon, y uno de ellos es “Blue Star”. Es una canción de amor donde él promete a su pareja que se encontrarán nuevamente en el cielo. Será “la estrella azul a la derecha”. Willie impone su impacto emocional con una voz entregada que se arropa en su legendaria guitarra Trigger, provocando una sensación relajante de abrazo cálido y seguro. Johnny Cash regresa a la actualidad con la recuperación de sus álbumes grabado en el sello Mercury en la segunda mitad de los años 80. Columbia Records decidió no contar con él y el legendario Hombre de Negro se marchó a mediados de 1986. Pero Mercury Records decidió firmarle un contrato y aquella relación duró cinco años y dejó para la historia seis álbumes. Ahora se edita The Complete Mercury Recordings 1986-1991, una caja de siete discos y el recopilatorio Easy Rider: The Best of the Mercury Recordings, con 24 de aquellos temas. Todos ellos han sido remasterizados de las cintas originales. La versión en CD incluye varias pistas inéditas e incluso un disco adicional de mezclas primitivas de las 20 canciones de su álbum, Classic Cash: Hall of Fame Series. Por supuesto una colección así no podíamos dejarla pasar por alto. Chips Moman fue el productor de Class of ’55: Memphis Rock & Roll Homecoming, un disco grabado conjuntamente por Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis y Roy Orbison recordando sus comienzos en Sun Records durante los 50. En cierta forma, también era un homenaje a su antiguo compañero en el sello Elvis Presley. El disco fue grabado en los Sun Studios y culminado en los American Sound Studios, ambos localizados en Memphis, en tan solo cuatro jornadas de septiembre de 1985. Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins y Jerry Lee Lewis había colaborado juntos previamente en un par de ocasiones. El 1956 fueron protagonista junto a Elvis Presley del mítico Million Dollar Quartet y en 1982 publicaron a trío The Survivors grabado en vivo en Alemania. Johnny Cash fue solista en un par de temas de Class of ’55: Memphis Rock & Roll Homecoming, “We Remember the King” de Paul Kennerly y “I Will Rock and Roll with You”, un tema propio en el que se dejaba acompañar por un cuarteto de metal. Había problemas legales con el Hombre de Negro, ya que aún tenía contrato con Columbia. De tal forma que Chips Moman tuvo que pagar 100.000 dólares a la compañía por el permiso de grabación. Johnny Cash firmó con Mercury muy poco después. Johnny Cash siempre supo rodearse de grandes amigos y en, Johnny Cash Is Coming To Town, su debut en solitario para Mercury en 1987, no dejó de hacerlo. Se puso en manos de "Cowboy" Jack Clement para el trabajo de producción y se reunió con sus artistas más cercanos y familiares como June, Anita, Helen y Carlene Carter, su entonces yerno Marty Stuart y su compañero Waylon Jennings. Con este último cantó “The Night Hank Williams Came to Town”, que fue el único single extraído. Era una canción compuesta por Bobby Braddock, autor de algunos de los mayores éxitos para George Jones y Tammy Wynette, y Charlie Williams, que hizo la locución final. El tema describe la visita de Hank Williams a una pequeña ciudad para dar un concierto en 1951, con Harry Truman de presidente. En el año 1988, Johnny Cash lanzaba el álbum Water From The Wells Of Home, una vez más producido por Jack Clement, con un buen número de colaboraciones con otros artistas, algunas especialmente brillantes, y que abarcaban desde su hija Rosanne, su hijo John, Glen Campbell, Jessi Colter, los Everly Brothers, Tom T. Hall, Waylon Jennings, Hank Williams, Jr., y Paul y Linda McCartney y Emmylou Harris, con quien interpretó un tema del legendario Roy Acuff como “As Long As I Live", en el que encontramos a Waylon, su mujer Jessi y al propio Roy Acuff en los coros. Publicado en formato de doble Lp coincidiendo con el Record Store Day, Classic Cash: Hall of Fame (Early Mixes) es uno de los regalos de esta caja de siete CDs del Hombre de Negro. Contiene las mezclas originales de las 20 canciones que conformaron en 1988 el álbum Classic Cash: Hall of Fame Series y cuyas cintas fueron descubiertas recientemente en los archivos de Mercury. Johnny Cash decidió grabar de nuevo temas emblemáticos de sus años en Sun y Columbia aprovechando las nuevas técnicas de producción, algo que no terminó de contentar a ciertos puristas, aunque el guitarrista Bob Wootton y el batería W.S. Holland seguían a su lado. Entre aquellos viejos éxitos resucitados se encontraba “Sunday Morning Coming Down”, que este pasado viernes cumplió medio siglo desde que fue grabada por primera vez. Era el 10 de Julio de 1970. Estaba escrita por Kris Kristofferson, a quien conoció en los estudios de Columbia un año antes y al que introdujo en los círculos musicales. En 1990 apareció en el mercado Boom Chicka Boom, cuyo título hacía referencia al sonido de los Tennessee Three, la banda de acompañamiento de Johnny Cash. En este caso, se han añadido seis cortes con cuatro primitivas versiones de otros tantos temas y dos canciones que se publicaron como caras B de un par de singles. Entre lo más destacado encontramos “Hidden Shame”, una canción que Elvis Costello compuso expresamente para el veterano artista. Costello ya había visto como uno de los temas de su álbum King of America, "The Big Light", sirvió de apertura tres años antes en Johnny Cash Is Coming to Town. Con el regreso de “Cowboy” Clement a la producción, The Mystery of Life fue el último disco de Johnny Cash para Mercury y, lo cierto, es que no se esforzó demasiado. El artista ya había iniciado la aventura de los Highwayman con Waylon, Willie y Kristofferson y este disco contenía temas de algunas sesiones de grabación muy recientes y de sobras de su primer disco en la compañía, en 1986, Johnny Cash is Coming to Town. The Mystery of Life fue el último disco de estudio en el que participó el mítico batería W.S. Holland, bien conocido como "Fluke", aunque siguió acompañándole en los conciertos. Aquel disco lo cerraba la versión larga de “The Wanderer” que aparecería en la banda sonora de la película de Wim Wenders Faraway, So Close! con Johnny Cash y U2. El cuarteto británico la incluiría en su álbum Zooropa del 94. Menos mal que tres años después comenzaron los American Recordings. En cualquier caso, el Hombre de Negro casi nunca defrauda y al margen de volver a grabar “Hey Porter” y “Wanted Man” de sus años en Sun y Columbia, nos dejó “I’ll Go Somewhere and Sing My Songs Again” con Tom T. Hall. Escuchar audio

Hoy comienza el verano y nosotros iniciamos TOMA UNO ni más ni menos que con Neil Young por partida doble. Primero recordando que, aunque casi todo aquel disco se había grabado a finales de agosto de 1973, fue el 20 de Junio de 1975, hace exactamente 45 años, cuando el canadiense publicaba su sexto álbum de estudio, Tonight's the Night. El disco es toda una explosión emocional por las muertes por sobredosis de Danny Whitten y Bruce Berry en los meses previos a la grabación. El disco es tan personal y complicado de asimilar que lo dejaron guardado y por medio aparecieron trabajos como Times Fades Away y On the Beach, donde reflejó las inseguridades de la América posterior al Watergate. Con los Santa Monica Flyers como banda de acompañamiento, es decir Ben Keith, Nils Lofgren y la base de ritmo de Crazy Horse, Billy Talbot y Ralph Molina, “Albuquerque” fue una de las canciones más distinguidas de aquel registro desolador. Y ayer mismo, 46 años después de ser concebido, ha salido a la luz aquel Homegrown, con una selección de 12 cortes, de los que siete son inéditos y otros cinco que hemos conocido a lo largo del tiempo, repartidos por diferentes álbumes. Una de las canciones desconocidas hasta ahora es "Vacancy", grabada en el Broken Arrow Ranch Studio del propio Young en enero de 1975, con Stan Szelest al órgano Wurlitzer, Ben Keith en el lap Steel, el bajista Tim Drummond y Karl T. Himmel a la batería. En ocasiones tenemos la enorme suerte de poder compartir el regreso discográfico de unos de los grandes baluartes de la música popular, con una relación muy directa con la Americana. Me refiero al legendario Dan Penn, cuyo nombre tiene una relación directa con los mejores momentos del FAME Studio de Rick Hall en Muscle Shoals y los American Studios de Chips Moman en Memphis. Si recordamos canciones como “The Letter”, “Dark End Of The Street”, "Always on My Mind" o "She's Actin' Single (I'm Drinkin' Doubles)" encontraremos su nombre, además de ser uno de los artífices de la eclosión del mejor country-soul. Saltando entre Muscle Shoals y Nashville, el músico de Vernon, en Alabama, ha decidido volver a primera línea con el lanzamiento el 28 de agosto de Living on Mercy, su primer álbum en solitario en 26 años. En ese disco recopila canciones antiguas e inéditas junto a material más cercano en el tiempo. Lo primero que hemos escuchado es su tema central, un punto de encuentro entre el gospel y el soul. La compuso con Wayne Carson, una leyenda de Denver con el que ha creado canciones desde hace décadas y que lamentablemente murió hace casi cinco años. Eso supone un homenaje a uno de sus mejores socios y amigos. Asterisk the Universe parece ser una reflexión de su autor, John Craigie sobre la América del siglo XXI en la que le ha tocado vivir, aunque los últimos 100 días pudieran haber distorsionado su impresión viajera de la realidad. En cualquier caso, el disco de este californiano de Los Angeles con tintes de moderno trovador expone un ambiente acogedor en el que participan sus amigos de los Coffis Brothers, las Rainbow Girls, los Honeydrops y Old Soul Orchestra con actores presenciales, algo que ahora nos provoca un sentimiento de nostalgia. En un ambiente etéreo que deambula por el folk, la psicodelia y, una vez más, los sonidos de rhythm and blues clásicos. Asterisk the Universe da la impresión de que nos podemos tomar un respiro. "Part Wolf" es un ejemplo perfecto de una posible versión irónica de la cultura estadounidense del presente. La canción comienza animando a sus compatriotas a levantarse y votar en noviembre. Las distintas situaciones personales creadas por esta pandemia ha permitido descubrir algunas rutas alternativas que, por ejemplo, nos lleven hasta Jeff Crosby, un músico con cinco álbumes en su curriculum convertido en nuevo miembro de Reckless Kelly tras la marcha del guitarrista David Abeyta. Originario del norte de Idaho, pasó una dura etapa en Los Angeles mientras mostraba al mundo su capacidad como compositor, escribiendo algunas canciones que formaron parte de la banda sonora de Sons of Anarchy. Su nuevo álbum es Northstar, donde parece haber dividido su propuesta sonora en dos partes. La primera tiene un acento más cercano a la resignación, mientras la segunda se asienta en propuesta tan sugerentes como el melancólico “Born To be Lonely”. Es bastante fácil que los seguidores de Turnpike Troubadours reconozcan la sonoridad del violín de Kyle Nix, miembro de la banda de Oklahoma convertida en referente de la Red Dirt Music. Su álbum en solitario, Lightning on the Mountain & Other Short Stories, que verá la luz la próxima semana, deja tonadas tan entrañables como "Sweet Delta Rose", inspirada en una relación de ensueño a larga distancia como la vivida con su ahora mujer. Una prueba de que en ocasiones vale la pena esperar. Kyle se unió a Turnpike Troubadours poco después de que se formara la banda, cuando conoció a Evan Felker y RC Edwards en un concierto. Colter Wall es el más reconocible de los cowboy singers canadienses del momento y en un par de meses lanzará al mercado su tercer álbum, Western Swing & Waltzes y Other Punchy Songs, como continuación del magnífico Songs of the Plains de hace un par de temporadas. "Western Swing & Waltzes" es la primera muestra sonora de un trabajo muy esperado que nos permite intuir que el músico de Saskatchewan sigue recorriendo las sendas de la tradición vaquera. De hecho, sabemos que entre los temas elegidos para completar el nuevo álbum vamos a encontrarnos con clásicos como "I Ride an Old Paint" y "Big Iron". Grabado en los Yellow Dog Studios de Wimberley, en Texas, Adam Odor y David Percefull vuelven a estar a su lado, al igual que su banda de acompañamiento habitual en las giras. Las colinas del country están repartidas por los estados de Tennessee, Texas, Georgia, California o Nueva York, dando un tono de universalidad a un estilo tan enraizado. Hill Country es un buen ejemplo, convertido en quinteto bajo el liderazgo de Zane Williams para seguir explorando territorios sonoros que se exponen en su álbum de debut, con el nombre del grupo como título y grabado entre Austin y Houston durante un año. A lo largo del disco se hacen evidentes sus inclinaciones por las formas de James Taylor, los SteelDrivers, Michael Martin Murphey o Jerry Jeff Walker, como ocurre en “Dixie Darlin’” con ecos de esos veteranos trovadores del Lone Star State. La próxima semana se publica On The Road: A Tribute To John Hartford, un álbum que celebra el legado del desaparecido músico neoyorquino que elevó a las más altas cotas su dedicación al folk, el country y el bluegrass. La colección de 14 canciones ha reunido a un grupo muy diverso de artistas que crecieron a partir de las semillas plantadas por John Hartford durante cinco décadas. Allí encontramos, entre otros, a su hijo Jamie, Todd Snider, Sam Bush, John Carter Cash, The Travelin' McCourys, Jerry Douglas, The Band Of Heathens, Norman Blake o The Infamous Stringdusters. Estos últimos han sido los encargados de recrearse en "Gentle On My Mind", que le propició dos premios Grammy a nivel personal y otros tantos a Glen Campbell por su versión que se ha convertido en un clásico. John Hartford fue imprescindible en el desarrollo del bluegrass y pionero en su experimentación, para hacerle progresar y convertirlo en lo que conocemos como Newgrass. Estas fechas de aislamiento forzoso nos están dejando algunas sorpresas y curiosidades que merecen mucho la pena. La mayor parte de los shows televisivos se hacen desde platós sin público y con la participación de invitados desde casa. Hace una semana, Margo Price estuvo presentando su nuevo álbum, That’s How Rumors Get Started, producido por Sturgill Simpson en el programa This Morning: Saturday interpretando un par de temas de este trabajo que se editará el 10 de julio. Como regalo inesperado, Margo hizo una versión de "Things Have Changed" de Bob Dylan, una canción que apareció hace 20 años en la fantástica banda sonora de la película Wonder Boys, protagonizada por Michael Douglas y titulada en España Jóvenes prodigiosos. Dylan ganó el Oscar y el Globo de Oro a mejor canción original. Hoy la despedida de nuestro tiempo de radio hasta mañana viene de la mano de India Ramey, cantautora de Nashville, que anticipa su nuevo disco, Shallow Graves, con "King of the Ashes", una canción de tintes casi apocalípticos sobre la llamada era Trump y el aprovechamiento de los temerosos y los débiles. Lejos de conformarse y desesperarse, India invita a la acción contra el odio y el silencio. Escuchar audio

Rare Earth [00:32] "Get Ready" Rare Earth R 5012 1969 Rare Earth were one of the artists name checked by Gil Scott Heron as not being the sound of the revolution. The Rolling Stones [03:20] "Paint It Black" London Records 45 LON 901 1966 Proto-Goth. Gary Lewis & the Playboys [06:46] "Jill" Liberty 55985 1967 An opening timpani bounce?! Could this be of the Popcorn genre from Jerry Lewis' kid? Sly & the Family Stone [09:04] "Family Affiar" Epic Records 5-10805 1971 The last number one single from Sly & the Family Stone. And actually it's just Sly on all the instruments, except the keys which are played by Billy Preson, and backing vox by his sister Rose. Merrilee Rush & the Turnabouts [13:15] "Angel of the Morning" Bell Records 705 1968 This version made it all the way to number 7, recorded by Chips Moman in Memphis. Sandy Posey [16:26] "I Take It Back" MGM Records K 13744 1967 Another Chips Moman produced single, which reached number 12. Shorty Long [18:44] "Here Comes the Judge" Soul S-35044 1968 This Laugh-In inspired single made it all the way up to number 8. Release exactly two weeks before my birthday. How's your shing-a-ling? Paul Mauriat and his Orchestra [21:19] "Love Is Blue" Philips 40475 1967 Aw yeah... pop harpsichord, it doesn't get much better than that. Orginally performed with lyrics by Vicky as a Eurovision entry from Luxembourg. Jimmy Jules [25:22] "Talk About You" Atlantic Records 45-2120 1961 Some mighty fine New Orleans soul, with excellent arrangement by Harold Batiste. Jules would later go on to start a record label called Jim Gem Records. Sly & the Family Stone [28:03] "If You Want Me to Stay" Epic 5-11017 1973 And this one was Sly's last appearance in the Top 20, reaching number 12 on the pop charts. It does feature a fine bass groove by Larry Graham's hand-picked replacement Rustee Allen. Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen [31:04] "Hot Rod Lincoln" Paramount Records PAA-0146 1972 The souped up classic featuring the deft clutching of Bill Kirchen. Bobbie Gentry [33:48] "Ode to Billie Joe" Capitol Records 5950 1967 And what an ode it is. If you'd like to know more about the now mysterious and amazing Bobbie Gentry, I strongly recommend the 33 1/3 series book on her first album, titled Ode to Billie Joe of course (https://amzn.to/38iqGUr). Merle Kilgore with The Merry Melody Singers [39:22] "A Girl Named Liz" Mercury Records 71978 1962 This is a new one by me. Kilgore was better known as a songwriter and would later become Hank Williams Jr's manager. Gallery [41:38] "Nice to Be with You" Sussex SUX-232 1972 Oh yeah... that one! Some might nice jaunty country pop from Detroit. Made it all the way to number 4 on the hot 100. Otis Redding [44:17] "Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay" Volt Records VLT-13684 Sure this copy is well used, but it's in waaay better shape than the one we heard not too long ago in the last season of Vinyl-O-Matic. Jr. Walker and the All Stars [46:56] "Do the Boomerang" Soul S-35012 1965 I am definitely going to do the boomerang next time I'm out on the dance floor. This skronkity tune made it to number 36 on the hot 100 and number 10 on the r&b charts. Music behind the DJ: "Theme from the Thomas Crown Affair" by Michel Legrand.

Episode fifty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Flying Saucers Rock ‘n’ Roll” by Billy Lee Riley and the Little Green Men, and at the flying saucer craze of the fifties. 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 “Silhouettes” by the Rays, and the power of subliminal messages. (more…)

    Episode fifty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Flying Saucers Rock ‘n’ Roll” by Billy Lee Riley and the Little Green Men, and at the flying saucer craze of the fifties. 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 “Silhouettes” by the Rays, and the power of subliminal messages. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I’m relying heavily on Sam Phillips: the Man Who Invented Rock and Roll by Peter Guralnick for all the episodes dealing with Phillips and Sun Records. I’ve also relied on a lot of websites for this one, including this very brief outline of Riley’s life in his own words.   There are many compilations of Riley’s music. This one, from Bear Family, is probably the most comprehensive collection of his fifties work.  The Patreon episode on “The Flying Saucer”, for backers who’ve not heard it, is at https://www.patreon.com/posts/27855307 Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?   ERRATUM I mistakenly said “Jack Earl” instead of Jack Earls at one point.   Transcript   Let’s talk about flying saucers for a minute. One aspect of 1950s culture that probably requires a little discussion at this point is the obsession in many quarters with the idea of alien invasion. Of course, there were the many, many, films on the subject that filled out the double bills and serials, things like “Flying Disc Man From Mars”, “Radar Men From The Moon”, “It Came From Outer Space”, “Earth vs. the Flying Saucers”, and so on. But those films, campy as they are, reveal a real fascination with the idea that was prevalent throughout US culture at the time. While the term “flying saucer” had been coined in 1930, it really took off in June 1947 when Kenneth Arnold, a Minnesotan pilot, saw nine disc-shaped objects in the air while he was flying. Arnold’s experience has entered into legend as the canonical “first flying saucer sighting”, mostly because Arnold seems to have been, before the incident, a relatively stable person — or at least someone who gave off all the signals that were taken as signs of stability in the 1940s. Arnold seems to have just been someone who saw something odd, and wanted to find out what it was that he’d seen. But eventually two different groups of people seem to have dominated the conversation — religious fanatics who saw in Arnold’s vision a confirmation of their own idiosyncratic interpretation of the Bible, and people who believed that the things Arnold had seen came from another planet. With no other explanations forthcoming, he turned to the people who held to the extraterrestrial hypothesis as being comparatively the saner option. Over the next few years, so did a significant proportion of the American population. The same month as Kenneth Arnold saw his saucers, a nuclear test monitoring balloon crashed in Roswell, New Mexico. A farmer who found some of the debris had heard reports of Arnold’s sightings, and put two and two together and made space aliens. The Government didn’t want to admit that the balloon had been monitoring nuclear tests, and so various cover stories were put out, which in turn led to the belief in aliens becoming ever more widespread. And this tied in with the nuclear paranoia that was sweeping the nation. It was widely known, of course, that both the USA and Russia were working on space programmes — and that those space programmes were intimately tied in with the nuclear missiles they were also developing. While it was never stated specifically, it was common knowledge that the real reason for the competition between the two nations to build rockets was purely about weapons delivery, and that the civilian space programme was, in the eyes of both governments if not the people working on it, merely a way of scaring the other side with how good the rockets were, without going so far that they might accidentally instigate a nuclear conflict. When you realise this, Little Richard’s terror at the launch of Sputnik seems a little less irrational, and so does the idea that there might be aliens from outer space. So, why am I talking about flying saucers? Well, there are two reasons. The first is that, among other things, this podcast is a cultural history of the latter part of the twentieth century, and you can’t understand anything about the mid twentieth century without understanding the deeply weird paranoid ideas that would sweep the culture. The second is that it inspired a whole lot of records. One of those, “the Flying Saucer”, I’ve actually already looked at briefly in one of the Patreon bonus episodes, but is worth a mention here — it was a novelty record that was a very early example of sampling: [Excerpt: Buchanan and Goodman, “The Flying Saucer”] And there’d been “Two Little Men in a Flying Saucer” by Ella Fitzgerald: [Excerpt: Ella Fitzgerald, “Two Little Men in a Flying Saucer”] But today we’re going to look at one of the great rockabilly records, by someone who was one of the great unsung acts on Sun Records: [Excerpt: Billy Lee Riley and the Little Green Men, “Flying Saucers Rock and Roll”] Billy Lee Riley was someone who was always in the wrong place at the wrong time — for example, when he got married after leaving the army, he decided to move with his new wife to Memphis, and open a restaurant. The problem was that neither of them knew Memphis particularly well, and didn’t know how bad the area they were opening it in was. The restaurant was eventually closed down by the authorities after only three months, after a gunfight between two of their customers. But there was one time when he was in precisely the right place at the right time. He was an unsuccessful, down on his luck, country singer in 1955, when he was driving on Christmas morning, from his in-laws’ house in Arkansas to his parents’ house three miles away, and he stopped to pick up two hitch-hikers. Those two hitch-hikers were Cowboy Jack Clement and Ronald “Slim” Wallace, two musicians who were planning on setting up their own record company. Riley was so interested in their conversation that while he’d started out just expecting to drive them the three miles he was going, he ended up driving them the more than seventy miles to Memphis. Clement and Wallace invited Riley to join their label. They actually had little idea of how to get into the record business — Clement was an ex-Marine and aspiring writer, who was also a dance instructor — he had no experience or knowledge of dancing when he became a dance instructor, but had decided that it couldn’t be that difficult. He also played pedal steel in a Western Swing band led by someone called Sleepy-Eyed John Epley. Wallace, meanwhile, was a truck driver who worked weekends as a bass player and bandleader, and Clement had joined Wallace’s band as well as Epley’s. They regularly commuted between Arkansas, where Wallace owned a club, and Memphis, where Clement was based, and on one of their journeys, Clement, who had been riding in the back seat, had casually suggested to Wallace that they should get into the record business. Wallace would provide the resources — they’d use his garage as a studio, and finance it with his truck-driving money — while Clement would do the work of actually converting the garage into a studio. But before they were finished, they’d been out drinking in Arkansas on Christmas Eve with Wallace’s wife and a friend, and Clement and the friend had been arrested for drunkenness. Wallace’s wife had driven back to Memphis to be home for Christmas day, while Wallace had stayed on to bail out Clement and hitch-hike back with him. They hadn’t actually built their studio yet, as such, but they were convinced it was going to be great when they did, and when Riley picked them up he told them what a great country singer he was, and they all agreed that when they did get the studio built they were going to have Riley be the first artist on their new label, Fernwood Records. In the meantime, Riley was going to be the singer in their band, because he needed the ten or twelve dollars a night he could get from them. So for a few months, Riley performed with Clement and Wallace in their band, and they slowly worked out an act that would show Riley’s talents off to their best advantage. By May, Clement still hadn’t actually built the studio — he’d bought a tape recorder and a mixing board from Sleepy-Eyed John Epley, but he hadn’t quite got round to making Wallace’s garage into a decent space for recording in. So Clement and Wallace pulled together a group of musicians, including a bass player, because Clement didn’t think Wallace was good enough, Johnny Bernero, the drummer who’d played on Elvis’ last Sun session, and a guitarist named Roland Janes, and rented some studio time from a local radio station. They recorded the two sides of what was intended to be the first single on Fernwood Records, “Rock With Me Baby”: [Excerpt: Billy Lee RIley, “Rock With Me Baby”] So they had a tape, but they needed to get it properly mastered to release it as a single. The best place in town to do that was at Memphis Recording Services, which Sam Phillips was still keeping going even though he was now having a lot of success with Sun. Phillips listened to the track while he was mastering it, and he liked it a lot. He liked it enough, in fact, that he made an offer to Clement — rather than Clement starting up his own label, would he sell the master to Phillips, and come and work for Sun records instead? He did, leaving Slim Wallace to run Fernwood on his own, and for the last few years that Sun was relevant, Cowboy Jack Clement was one of the most important people working for the label — second only to Sam Phillips himself. Clement would end up producing sessions by Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, and others. But his first session was to produce the B-side to the Billy Lee Riley record. Sam Phillips hadn’t liked their intended B-side, so they went back into the studio with the same set of musicians to record a “Heartbreak Hotel” knockoff called “Trouble Bound”: [Excerpt: Billy Lee Riley, “Trouble Bound”] That was much more to Sam’s liking, and the result was released as Billy Lee Riley’s first single. Riley and the musicians who had played on that initial record became the go-to people for Clement when he wanted musicians to back Sun’s stars. Roland Janes, in particular, is someone whose name you will see on the credits for all sorts of Sun records from mid-56 onwards. Riley, too, would play on sessions — usually on harmonica, but occasionally on guitar, bass, or piano. There’s one particularly memorable moment of Riley on guitar at the end of Jerry Lee Lewis’ first single, a cover version of Ray Price’s “Crazy Arms”. That song had been cut more as a joke than anything else, with Janes, who couldn’t play bass, on bass. Right at the end of the song, Riley picked up a guitar, and hit a single wrong chord, just after everyone else had finished playing, and while their sound was dying away: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Crazy Arms”] Sam Phillips loved that track, and released it as it was, with Riley’s guitar chord on it. Riley, meanwhile, started gigging regularly, with a band consisting of Janes on guitar, new drummer Jimmy Van Eaton, and, at first, Jerry Lee Lewis on piano, all of whom would play regularly on any Sun sessions that needed musicians. Now, we’re going to be talking about Jerry Lee Lewis in a couple of weeks, so I don’t want to talk too much about him here, but you’ll have noticed that we already talked about him quite a bit in the episode on “Matchbox”. Jerry Lee Lewis was one of those characters who turn up everywhere, and even before he was a star, he was making a huge impression on other people’s lives. So while this isn’t an episode about him, you will see his effect on Riley’s career. He’s just someone who insists on pushing into the story before it’s his turn. Jerry Lee was the piano player on Riley’s first session for Sun proper. The song on that session was brought in by Roland Janes, who had a friend, Ray Scott, who had written a rock and roll song about flying saucers. Riley loved the song, but Phillips thought it needed something more — it needed to sound like it came from outer space. They still didn’t have much in the way of effects at the Sun studios — just the reverb system Phillips had cobbled together — but Janes had a tremolo bar on his guitar. These were a relatively new invention — they’d only been introduced on the Fender Stratocaster a little over two years earlier, and they hadn’t seen a great deal of use on records yet. Phillips got Janes to play making maximum use of the tremolo arm, and also added a ton of reverb, and this was the result: [Excerpt: Billy Lee Riley and the Little Green Men, “Flying Saucers Rock and Roll”] Greil Marcus later said of that track that it was “one of the weirdest of early rock ‘n’ roll records – and early rock ‘n’ roll records were weird!” — and he’s right. “Flying Saucers Rock & Roll” is a truly odd recording, even by the standards of Sun Records in 1957. When Phillips heard that back, he said “Man that’s it. You sound like a bunch of little green men from Mars!” — and then immediately realised that that should be the name of Riley’s backing band. So the single came out as by Billy Lee Riley and the Little Green Men, and the musicians got themselves a set of matching green suits to wear at gigs, which they bought at Lansky’s on Beale Street. Those suits caused problems, though, as they were made of a material which soaked up sweat, which was a problem given how frantically active Riley’s stage show was — at one show at the Arkansas State University Riley jumped on top of the piano and started dancing — except the piano turned out to be on wheels, and rolled off the stage. Riley had to jump up and cling on to a steel girder at the top of the stage, dangling from it by one arm, while holding the mic in the other, and gesturing frantically for people to get him down. You can imagine that with a show like that, absorbent material would be a problem, and sometimes the musicians would lie on their backs to play solos and get the audiences excited, and then find it difficult to get themselves back to their feet again, because their suits were so heavy. Riley’s next single was a cover of a blues song first recorded by another Sun artist, Billy “the Kid” Emerson, in 1955. “Red Hot” had been based on a schoolyard chant: [Excerpt: Billy “the Kid” Emerson, “Red Hot”] While “Flying Saucers Rock and Roll” had been a local hit, but not a national one, Billy was confident that his version of “Red Hot” would be the record that would make him into a national star: [Excerpt: Billy Lee Riley and the Little Green Men, “Red Hot”] The song was recorded either at the same session as “Flying Saucers Rock and Roll” or at one a couple of weeks later with a different pianist — accounts vary — but it was put on the shelf for six months, and in that six months Riley toured promoting “Flying Saucers Rock and Roll”, and also carried on playing on sessions for Sun. He played bass on “Take Me To That Place” by Jack Earls: [Excerpt: Jack Earls, “Take Me To That Place”]  Rhythm guitar on “Miracle of You” by Hannah Fay: [Excerpt: Hannah Fay, “Miracle of You”] And much more. But he was still holding out hopes for the success of “Red Hot”, which Sam Phillips kept telling him was going to be his big hit. And for a while it looked like that might be the case. Dewey Phillips played the record constantly, and Alan Freed tipped it to be a big hit. But for some reason, while it was massive in Memphis, the track did nothing at all outside the area — the Memphis musician Jim Dickinson once said that he had never actually realised that “Red Hot” hadn’t been a hit until he moved to Texas and nobody there had heard it, because everyone in Memphis knew the song. Riley and his band continued recording for Sun, both recording for themselves and as backup musicians for other artists. For example Hayden Thompson’s version of Little Junior Parker’s “Love My Baby”, another rockabilly cover of an old Sun blues track, was released shortly after “Red Hot”, credited to Thompson “with Billy Lee Riley’s band [and] Jerry Lee Lewis’ ‘pumping piano'”: [Excerpt: Hayden Thompson, “Love My Baby”]  But Riley was starting to get suspicious. “Red Hot” should have been a hit, it was obvious to him. So why hadn’t it been? Riley became convinced that what had happened was that Sam Phillips had decided that Riley and his band were more valuable to him as session musicians, backing Jerry Lee Lewis and whoever else came into the studio, than as stars themselves. He would later claim that he had actually seen piles of orders for “Red Hot” come in from record shops around the country, and Sam Phillips phoning the stores up and telling them he was sending them Jerry Lee Lewis records instead. He also remembered that Sam had told him to come off the road from a package tour to record an album — and had sent Jerry Lee out on the tour in his place. He became convinced that Sam Phillips was deliberately trying to sabotage his career. He got drunk, and he got mad. He went to Sun studios, where Sam Phillips’ latest girlfriend, Sally, was working, and started screaming at her, and kicked a hole in a double bass. Sally, terrified, called Sam, who told her to lock the doors, and to on no account let Riley leave the building. Sam came to the studio and talked Riley down, explaining to him calmly that there was no way he would sabotage a record on his own label — that just wouldn’t make any sense. He said ““Red Hot” ain’t got it. We’re saving you for something good.’ ” By the time Sam had finished talking, according to Riley, “I felt like I was the biggest star on Sun Records!” But that feeling didn’t last, and Riley, like so many Sun artists before, decided he had a better chance at stardom elsewhere. He signed with Brunswick Records, and recorded a single with Owen Bradley, a follow-up to “Flying Saucers Rock & Roll” called “Rockin’ on the Moon”, which I wouldn’t be at all surprised to hear had been an influence on Joe Meek: [Excerpt: Billy Lee Riley, “Rockin’ on the Moon”] But that wasn’t a success either, and Riley came crawling back to Sun, though he never trusted Phillips again. He carried on as a Sun artist for a while, and then started recording for other labels based around Memphis, under a variety of different names. with a variety of different bands. For example he played harmonica on “Shimmy Shimmy Walk” by the Megatons, a great instrumental knock-off of “You Don’t Love Me”: [Excerpt: The Megatons, “Shimmy Shimmy Walk Part 1”] Indeed, he had a part to play in the development of another classic Memphis instrumental, though he didn’t play on it. Riley was recording a session under one of his pseudonyms at the Stax studio, in 1962, and he was in the control room after the session when the other musicians started jamming on a twelve-bar blues: [Excerpt: Booker T and the MGs, “Green Onions”] But we’ll talk more about Booker T and the MGs in a few months’ time. After failing to make it as a rock and roll star, Billy Riley decided he might as well go with what he’d been most successful at, and become a full-time session musician. He moved to LA, where he was one of the large number of people who were occasional parts of the group of session players known as the Wrecking Crew. He played harmonica, for example, on the album version of the Beach Boys’ “Help Me Ronda”: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Help Me, Ronda”] And on Dean Martin’s “Houston”: [Excerpt: Dean Martin, “Houston”] After a couple of years of this, he went back to the south, and started recording again for anyone who would have him. But again, he was unlucky in sales — and songs he recorded would tend to get recorded by other artists. For example, in 1971 he recorded a single produced by Chips Moman, the great Memphis country-soul producer and songwriter who had recently revitalised Elvis’ career. That song, Tony Joe White’s “I’ve Got a Thing About You Baby” started rising up the charts: [Excerpt: Billy Lee Riley, “I’ve Got A Thing About You Baby”] But then Elvis released his own version of the song, and Riley’s version stalled at number ninety-three. In 1973, Riley decided to retire from the music business, and go to work in the construction industry instead. He would eventually be dragged back onto the stage in 1979, and he toured Europe after that, playing to crowds of rockabilly fans In 1992, Bob Dylan came calling. It turned out that Bob Dylan was a massive Billy Lee Riley fan, and had spent six years trying to track Riley down, even going so far as to visit Riley’s old home in Tennessee to see if he could find him. Eventually he did, and he got Riley to open for him on a few shows in Arkansas and Tennessee, and in Little Rock he got Riley to come out on stage and perform “Red Hot” with him and his band: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan and Billy Lee Riley, “Red Hot”] In 2015, when Dylan was awarded the “Musicares person of the year” award, he spent most of his speech attacking anyone in the music industry who had ever said a bad word about Bob Dylan. It’s one of the most extraordinarily, hilariously, petty bits of score-settling you’ll ever hear, and I urge you to seek it out online if you ever start to worry that your own ego bruises too easily. But in that speech Dylan does say good things about some people.He talks for a long time about Riley, and I won’t quote all of it, but I’ll quote a short section: “He was a true original. He did it all: He played, he sang, he wrote. He would have been a bigger star but Jerry Lee came along. And you know what happens when someone like that comes along. You just don’t stand a chance. So Billy became what is known in the industry—a condescending term—as a one-hit wonder. But sometimes, just sometimes, once in a while, a one-hit wonder can make a more powerful impact than a recording star who’s got 20 or 30 hits behind him.” Dylan went on to talk about his long friendship with Riley, and to say that the reason he was proud to accept the Musicares award was that in his last years, Musicares had helped Billy Lee Riley pay his doctor’s bills and keep comfortable, and that Dylan considered that a debt that couldn’t be repaid. Billy Lee Riley gave his final performance in June 2009, on Beale Street in Memphis, using a walking frame for support. He died of colon cancer in August 2009, aged 75.

    Episode fifty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Flying Saucers Rock ‘n’ Roll” by Billy Lee Riley and the Little Green Men, and at the flying saucer craze of the fifties. 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 “Silhouettes” by the Rays, and the power of subliminal messages. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I’m relying heavily on Sam Phillips: the Man Who Invented Rock and Roll by Peter Guralnick for all the episodes dealing with Phillips and Sun Records. I’ve also relied on a lot of websites for this one, including this very brief outline of Riley’s life in his own words.   There are many compilations of Riley’s music. This one, from Bear Family, is probably the most comprehensive collection of his fifties work.  The Patreon episode on “The Flying Saucer”, for backers who’ve not heard it, is at https://www.patreon.com/posts/27855307 Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?   ERRATUM I mistakenly said “Jack Earl” instead of Jack Earls at one point.   Transcript   Let’s talk about flying saucers for a minute. One aspect of 1950s culture that probably requires a little discussion at this point is the obsession in many quarters with the idea of alien invasion. Of course, there were the many, many, films on the subject that filled out the double bills and serials, things like “Flying Disc Man From Mars”, “Radar Men From The Moon”, “It Came From Outer Space”, “Earth vs. the Flying Saucers”, and so on. But those films, campy as they are, reveal a real fascination with the idea that was prevalent throughout US culture at the time. While the term “flying saucer” had been coined in 1930, it really took off in June 1947 when Kenneth Arnold, a Minnesotan pilot, saw nine disc-shaped objects in the air while he was flying. Arnold’s experience has entered into legend as the canonical “first flying saucer sighting”, mostly because Arnold seems to have been, before the incident, a relatively stable person — or at least someone who gave off all the signals that were taken as signs of stability in the 1940s. Arnold seems to have just been someone who saw something odd, and wanted to find out what it was that he’d seen. But eventually two different groups of people seem to have dominated the conversation — religious fanatics who saw in Arnold’s vision a confirmation of their own idiosyncratic interpretation of the Bible, and people who believed that the things Arnold had seen came from another planet. With no other explanations forthcoming, he turned to the people who held to the extraterrestrial hypothesis as being comparatively the saner option. Over the next few years, so did a significant proportion of the American population. The same month as Kenneth Arnold saw his saucers, a nuclear test monitoring balloon crashed in Roswell, New Mexico. A farmer who found some of the debris had heard reports of Arnold’s sightings, and put two and two together and made space aliens. The Government didn’t want to admit that the balloon had been monitoring nuclear tests, and so various cover stories were put out, which in turn led to the belief in aliens becoming ever more widespread. And this tied in with the nuclear paranoia that was sweeping the nation. It was widely known, of course, that both the USA and Russia were working on space programmes — and that those space programmes were intimately tied in with the nuclear missiles they were also developing. While it was never stated specifically, it was common knowledge that the real reason for the competition between the two nations to build rockets was purely about weapons delivery, and that the civilian space programme was, in the eyes of both governments if not the people working on it, merely a way of scaring the other side with how good the rockets were, without going so far that they might accidentally instigate a nuclear conflict. When you realise this, Little Richard’s terror at the launch of Sputnik seems a little less irrational, and so does the idea that there might be aliens from outer space. So, why am I talking about flying saucers? Well, there are two reasons. The first is that, among other things, this podcast is a cultural history of the latter part of the twentieth century, and you can’t understand anything about the mid twentieth century without understanding the deeply weird paranoid ideas that would sweep the culture. The second is that it inspired a whole lot of records. One of those, “the Flying Saucer”, I’ve actually already looked at briefly in one of the Patreon bonus episodes, but is worth a mention here — it was a novelty record that was a very early example of sampling: [Excerpt: Buchanan and Goodman, “The Flying Saucer”] And there’d been “Two Little Men in a Flying Saucer” by Ella Fitzgerald: [Excerpt: Ella Fitzgerald, “Two Little Men in a Flying Saucer”] But today we’re going to look at one of the great rockabilly records, by someone who was one of the great unsung acts on Sun Records: [Excerpt: Billy Lee Riley and the Little Green Men, “Flying Saucers Rock and Roll”] Billy Lee Riley was someone who was always in the wrong place at the wrong time — for example, when he got married after leaving the army, he decided to move with his new wife to Memphis, and open a restaurant. The problem was that neither of them knew Memphis particularly well, and didn’t know how bad the area they were opening it in was. The restaurant was eventually closed down by the authorities after only three months, after a gunfight between two of their customers. But there was one time when he was in precisely the right place at the right time. He was an unsuccessful, down on his luck, country singer in 1955, when he was driving on Christmas morning, from his in-laws’ house in Arkansas to his parents’ house three miles away, and he stopped to pick up two hitch-hikers. Those two hitch-hikers were Cowboy Jack Clement and Ronald “Slim” Wallace, two musicians who were planning on setting up their own record company. Riley was so interested in their conversation that while he’d started out just expecting to drive them the three miles he was going, he ended up driving them the more than seventy miles to Memphis. Clement and Wallace invited Riley to join their label. They actually had little idea of how to get into the record business — Clement was an ex-Marine and aspiring writer, who was also a dance instructor — he had no experience or knowledge of dancing when he became a dance instructor, but had decided that it couldn’t be that difficult. He also played pedal steel in a Western Swing band led by someone called Sleepy-Eyed John Epley. Wallace, meanwhile, was a truck driver who worked weekends as a bass player and bandleader, and Clement had joined Wallace’s band as well as Epley’s. They regularly commuted between Arkansas, where Wallace owned a club, and Memphis, where Clement was based, and on one of their journeys, Clement, who had been riding in the back seat, had casually suggested to Wallace that they should get into the record business. Wallace would provide the resources — they’d use his garage as a studio, and finance it with his truck-driving money — while Clement would do the work of actually converting the garage into a studio. But before they were finished, they’d been out drinking in Arkansas on Christmas Eve with Wallace’s wife and a friend, and Clement and the friend had been arrested for drunkenness. Wallace’s wife had driven back to Memphis to be home for Christmas day, while Wallace had stayed on to bail out Clement and hitch-hike back with him. They hadn’t actually built their studio yet, as such, but they were convinced it was going to be great when they did, and when Riley picked them up he told them what a great country singer he was, and they all agreed that when they did get the studio built they were going to have Riley be the first artist on their new label, Fernwood Records. In the meantime, Riley was going to be the singer in their band, because he needed the ten or twelve dollars a night he could get from them. So for a few months, Riley performed with Clement and Wallace in their band, and they slowly worked out an act that would show Riley’s talents off to their best advantage. By May, Clement still hadn’t actually built the studio — he’d bought a tape recorder and a mixing board from Sleepy-Eyed John Epley, but he hadn’t quite got round to making Wallace’s garage into a decent space for recording in. So Clement and Wallace pulled together a group of musicians, including a bass player, because Clement didn’t think Wallace was good enough, Johnny Bernero, the drummer who’d played on Elvis’ last Sun session, and a guitarist named Roland Janes, and rented some studio time from a local radio station. They recorded the two sides of what was intended to be the first single on Fernwood Records, “Rock With Me Baby”: [Excerpt: Billy Lee RIley, “Rock With Me Baby”] So they had a tape, but they needed to get it properly mastered to release it as a single. The best place in town to do that was at Memphis Recording Services, which Sam Phillips was still keeping going even though he was now having a lot of success with Sun. Phillips listened to the track while he was mastering it, and he liked it a lot. He liked it enough, in fact, that he made an offer to Clement — rather than Clement starting up his own label, would he sell the master to Phillips, and come and work for Sun records instead? He did, leaving Slim Wallace to run Fernwood on his own, and for the last few years that Sun was relevant, Cowboy Jack Clement was one of the most important people working for the label — second only to Sam Phillips himself. Clement would end up producing sessions by Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, and others. But his first session was to produce the B-side to the Billy Lee Riley record. Sam Phillips hadn’t liked their intended B-side, so they went back into the studio with the same set of musicians to record a “Heartbreak Hotel” knockoff called “Trouble Bound”: [Excerpt: Billy Lee Riley, “Trouble Bound”] That was much more to Sam’s liking, and the result was released as Billy Lee Riley’s first single. Riley and the musicians who had played on that initial record became the go-to people for Clement when he wanted musicians to back Sun’s stars. Roland Janes, in particular, is someone whose name you will see on the credits for all sorts of Sun records from mid-56 onwards. Riley, too, would play on sessions — usually on harmonica, but occasionally on guitar, bass, or piano. There’s one particularly memorable moment of Riley on guitar at the end of Jerry Lee Lewis’ first single, a cover version of Ray Price’s “Crazy Arms”. That song had been cut more as a joke than anything else, with Janes, who couldn’t play bass, on bass. Right at the end of the song, Riley picked up a guitar, and hit a single wrong chord, just after everyone else had finished playing, and while their sound was dying away: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Crazy Arms”] Sam Phillips loved that track, and released it as it was, with Riley’s guitar chord on it. Riley, meanwhile, started gigging regularly, with a band consisting of Janes on guitar, new drummer Jimmy Van Eaton, and, at first, Jerry Lee Lewis on piano, all of whom would play regularly on any Sun sessions that needed musicians. Now, we’re going to be talking about Jerry Lee Lewis in a couple of weeks, so I don’t want to talk too much about him here, but you’ll have noticed that we already talked about him quite a bit in the episode on “Matchbox”. Jerry Lee Lewis was one of those characters who turn up everywhere, and even before he was a star, he was making a huge impression on other people’s lives. So while this isn’t an episode about him, you will see his effect on Riley’s career. He’s just someone who insists on pushing into the story before it’s his turn. Jerry Lee was the piano player on Riley’s first session for Sun proper. The song on that session was brought in by Roland Janes, who had a friend, Ray Scott, who had written a rock and roll song about flying saucers. Riley loved the song, but Phillips thought it needed something more — it needed to sound like it came from outer space. They still didn’t have much in the way of effects at the Sun studios — just the reverb system Phillips had cobbled together — but Janes had a tremolo bar on his guitar. These were a relatively new invention — they’d only been introduced on the Fender Stratocaster a little over two years earlier, and they hadn’t seen a great deal of use on records yet. Phillips got Janes to play making maximum use of the tremolo arm, and also added a ton of reverb, and this was the result: [Excerpt: Billy Lee Riley and the Little Green Men, “Flying Saucers Rock and Roll”] Greil Marcus later said of that track that it was “one of the weirdest of early rock ‘n’ roll records – and early rock ‘n’ roll records were weird!” — and he’s right. “Flying Saucers Rock & Roll” is a truly odd recording, even by the standards of Sun Records in 1957. When Phillips heard that back, he said “Man that’s it. You sound like a bunch of little green men from Mars!” — and then immediately realised that that should be the name of Riley’s backing band. So the single came out as by Billy Lee Riley and the Little Green Men, and the musicians got themselves a set of matching green suits to wear at gigs, which they bought at Lansky’s on Beale Street. Those suits caused problems, though, as they were made of a material which soaked up sweat, which was a problem given how frantically active Riley’s stage show was — at one show at the Arkansas State University Riley jumped on top of the piano and started dancing — except the piano turned out to be on wheels, and rolled off the stage. Riley had to jump up and cling on to a steel girder at the top of the stage, dangling from it by one arm, while holding the mic in the other, and gesturing frantically for people to get him down. You can imagine that with a show like that, absorbent material would be a problem, and sometimes the musicians would lie on their backs to play solos and get the audiences excited, and then find it difficult to get themselves back to their feet again, because their suits were so heavy. Riley’s next single was a cover of a blues song first recorded by another Sun artist, Billy “the Kid” Emerson, in 1955. “Red Hot” had been based on a schoolyard chant: [Excerpt: Billy “the Kid” Emerson, “Red Hot”] While “Flying Saucers Rock and Roll” had been a local hit, but not a national one, Billy was confident that his version of “Red Hot” would be the record that would make him into a national star: [Excerpt: Billy Lee Riley and the Little Green Men, “Red Hot”] The song was recorded either at the same session as “Flying Saucers Rock and Roll” or at one a couple of weeks later with a different pianist — accounts vary — but it was put on the shelf for six months, and in that six months Riley toured promoting “Flying Saucers Rock and Roll”, and also carried on playing on sessions for Sun. He played bass on “Take Me To That Place” by Jack Earls: [Excerpt: Jack Earls, “Take Me To That Place”]  Rhythm guitar on “Miracle of You” by Hannah Fay: [Excerpt: Hannah Fay, “Miracle of You”] And much more. But he was still holding out hopes for the success of “Red Hot”, which Sam Phillips kept telling him was going to be his big hit. And for a while it looked like that might be the case. Dewey Phillips played the record constantly, and Alan Freed tipped it to be a big hit. But for some reason, while it was massive in Memphis, the track did nothing at all outside the area — the Memphis musician Jim Dickinson once said that he had never actually realised that “Red Hot” hadn’t been a hit until he moved to Texas and nobody there had heard it, because everyone in Memphis knew the song. Riley and his band continued recording for Sun, both recording for themselves and as backup musicians for other artists. For example Hayden Thompson’s version of Little Junior Parker’s “Love My Baby”, another rockabilly cover of an old Sun blues track, was released shortly after “Red Hot”, credited to Thompson “with Billy Lee Riley’s band [and] Jerry Lee Lewis’ ‘pumping piano'”: [Excerpt: Hayden Thompson, “Love My Baby”]  But Riley was starting to get suspicious. “Red Hot” should have been a hit, it was obvious to him. So why hadn’t it been? Riley became convinced that what had happened was that Sam Phillips had decided that Riley and his band were more valuable to him as session musicians, backing Jerry Lee Lewis and whoever else came into the studio, than as stars themselves. He would later claim that he had actually seen piles of orders for “Red Hot” come in from record shops around the country, and Sam Phillips phoning the stores up and telling them he was sending them Jerry Lee Lewis records instead. He also remembered that Sam had told him to come off the road from a package tour to record an album — and had sent Jerry Lee out on the tour in his place. He became convinced that Sam Phillips was deliberately trying to sabotage his career. He got drunk, and he got mad. He went to Sun studios, where Sam Phillips’ latest girlfriend, Sally, was working, and started screaming at her, and kicked a hole in a double bass. Sally, terrified, called Sam, who told her to lock the doors, and to on no account let Riley leave the building. Sam came to the studio and talked Riley down, explaining to him calmly that there was no way he would sabotage a record on his own label — that just wouldn’t make any sense. He said ““Red Hot” ain’t got it. We’re saving you for something good.’ ” By the time Sam had finished talking, according to Riley, “I felt like I was the biggest star on Sun Records!” But that feeling didn’t last, and Riley, like so many Sun artists before, decided he had a better chance at stardom elsewhere. He signed with Brunswick Records, and recorded a single with Owen Bradley, a follow-up to “Flying Saucers Rock & Roll” called “Rockin’ on the Moon”, which I wouldn’t be at all surprised to hear had been an influence on Joe Meek: [Excerpt: Billy Lee Riley, “Rockin’ on the Moon”] But that wasn’t a success either, and Riley came crawling back to Sun, though he never trusted Phillips again. He carried on as a Sun artist for a while, and then started recording for other labels based around Memphis, under a variety of different names. with a variety of different bands. For example he played harmonica on “Shimmy Shimmy Walk” by the Megatons, a great instrumental knock-off of “You Don’t Love Me”: [Excerpt: The Megatons, “Shimmy Shimmy Walk Part 1”] Indeed, he had a part to play in the development of another classic Memphis instrumental, though he didn’t play on it. Riley was recording a session under one of his pseudonyms at the Stax studio, in 1962, and he was in the control room after the session when the other musicians started jamming on a twelve-bar blues: [Excerpt: Booker T and the MGs, “Green Onions”] But we’ll talk more about Booker T and the MGs in a few months’ time. After failing to make it as a rock and roll star, Billy Riley decided he might as well go with what he’d been most successful at, and become a full-time session musician. He moved to LA, where he was one of the large number of people who were occasional parts of the group of session players known as the Wrecking Crew. He played harmonica, for example, on the album version of the Beach Boys’ “Help Me Ronda”: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Help Me, Ronda”] And on Dean Martin’s “Houston”: [Excerpt: Dean Martin, “Houston”] After a couple of years of this, he went back to the south, and started recording again for anyone who would have him. But again, he was unlucky in sales — and songs he recorded would tend to get recorded by other artists. For example, in 1971 he recorded a single produced by Chips Moman, the great Memphis country-soul producer and songwriter who had recently revitalised Elvis’ career. That song, Tony Joe White’s “I’ve Got a Thing About You Baby” started rising up the charts: [Excerpt: Billy Lee Riley, “I’ve Got A Thing About You Baby”] But then Elvis released his own version of the song, and Riley’s version stalled at number ninety-three. In 1973, Riley decided to retire from the music business, and go to work in the construction industry instead. He would eventually be dragged back onto the stage in 1979, and he toured Europe after that, playing to crowds of rockabilly fans In 1992, Bob Dylan came calling. It turned out that Bob Dylan was a massive Billy Lee Riley fan, and had spent six years trying to track Riley down, even going so far as to visit Riley’s old home in Tennessee to see if he could find him. Eventually he did, and he got Riley to open for him on a few shows in Arkansas and Tennessee, and in Little Rock he got Riley to come out on stage and perform “Red Hot” with him and his band: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan and Billy Lee Riley, “Red Hot”] In 2015, when Dylan was awarded the “Musicares person of the year” award, he spent most of his speech attacking anyone in the music industry who had ever said a bad word about Bob Dylan. It’s one of the most extraordinarily, hilariously, petty bits of score-settling you’ll ever hear, and I urge you to seek it out online if you ever start to worry that your own ego bruises too easily. But in that speech Dylan does say good things about some people.He talks for a long time about Riley, and I won’t quote all of it, but I’ll quote a short section: “He was a true original. He did it all: He played, he sang, he wrote. He would have been a bigger star but Jerry Lee came along. And you know what happens when someone like that comes along. You just don’t stand a chance. So Billy became what is known in the industry—a condescending term—as a one-hit wonder. But sometimes, just sometimes, once in a while, a one-hit wonder can make a more powerful impact than a recording star who’s got 20 or 30 hits behind him.” Dylan went on to talk about his long friendship with Riley, and to say that the reason he was proud to accept the Musicares award was that in his last years, Musicares had helped Billy Lee Riley pay his doctor’s bills and keep comfortable, and that Dylan considered that a debt that couldn’t be repaid. Billy Lee Riley gave his final performance in June 2009, on Beale Street in Memphis, using a walking frame for support. He died of colon cancer in August 2009, aged 75.

    Episode fifty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Flying Saucers Rock 'n' Roll" by Billy Lee Riley and the Little Green Men, and at the flying saucer craze of the fifties. 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 "Silhouettes" by the Rays, and the power of subliminal messages. ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I'm relying heavily on Sam Phillips: the Man Who Invented Rock and Roll by Peter Guralnick for all the episodes dealing with Phillips and Sun Records. I've also relied on a lot of websites for this one, including this very brief outline of Riley's life in his own words.   There are many compilations of Riley's music. This one, from Bear Family, is probably the most comprehensive collection of his fifties work.  The Patreon episode on "The Flying Saucer", for backers who've not heard it, is at https://www.patreon.com/posts/27855307 Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?   ERRATUM I mistakenly said “Jack Earl” instead of Jack Earls at one point.   Transcript   Let's talk about flying saucers for a minute. One aspect of 1950s culture that probably requires a little discussion at this point is the obsession in many quarters with the idea of alien invasion. Of course, there were the many, many, films on the subject that filled out the double bills and serials, things like "Flying Disc Man From Mars", "Radar Men From The Moon", "It Came From Outer Space", "Earth vs. the Flying Saucers", and so on. But those films, campy as they are, reveal a real fascination with the idea that was prevalent throughout US culture at the time. While the term "flying saucer" had been coined in 1930, it really took off in June 1947 when Kenneth Arnold, a Minnesotan pilot, saw nine disc-shaped objects in the air while he was flying. Arnold's experience has entered into legend as the canonical "first flying saucer sighting", mostly because Arnold seems to have been, before the incident, a relatively stable person -- or at least someone who gave off all the signals that were taken as signs of stability in the 1940s. Arnold seems to have just been someone who saw something odd, and wanted to find out what it was that he'd seen. But eventually two different groups of people seem to have dominated the conversation -- religious fanatics who saw in Arnold's vision a confirmation of their own idiosyncratic interpretation of the Bible, and people who believed that the things Arnold had seen came from another planet. With no other explanations forthcoming, he turned to the people who held to the extraterrestrial hypothesis as being comparatively the saner option. Over the next few years, so did a significant proportion of the American population. The same month as Kenneth Arnold saw his saucers, a nuclear test monitoring balloon crashed in Roswell, New Mexico. A farmer who found some of the debris had heard reports of Arnold's sightings, and put two and two together and made space aliens. The Government didn't want to admit that the balloon had been monitoring nuclear tests, and so various cover stories were put out, which in turn led to the belief in aliens becoming ever more widespread. And this tied in with the nuclear paranoia that was sweeping the nation. It was widely known, of course, that both the USA and Russia were working on space programmes -- and that those space programmes were intimately tied in with the nuclear missiles they were also developing. While it was never stated specifically, it was common knowledge that the real reason for the competition between the two nations to build rockets was purely about weapons delivery, and that the civilian space programme was, in the eyes of both governments if not the people working on it, merely a way of scaring the other side with how good the rockets were, without going so far that they might accidentally instigate a nuclear conflict. When you realise this, Little Richard's terror at the launch of Sputnik seems a little less irrational, and so does the idea that there might be aliens from outer space. So, why am I talking about flying saucers? Well, there are two reasons. The first is that, among other things, this podcast is a cultural history of the latter part of the twentieth century, and you can't understand anything about the mid twentieth century without understanding the deeply weird paranoid ideas that would sweep the culture. The second is that it inspired a whole lot of records. One of those, "the Flying Saucer", I've actually already looked at briefly in one of the Patreon bonus episodes, but is worth a mention here -- it was a novelty record that was a very early example of sampling: [Excerpt: Buchanan and Goodman, "The Flying Saucer"] And there'd been "Two Little Men in a Flying Saucer" by Ella Fitzgerald: [Excerpt: Ella Fitzgerald, "Two Little Men in a Flying Saucer"] But today we're going to look at one of the great rockabilly records, by someone who was one of the great unsung acts on Sun Records: [Excerpt: Billy Lee Riley and the Little Green Men, "Flying Saucers Rock and Roll"] Billy Lee Riley was someone who was always in the wrong place at the wrong time -- for example, when he got married after leaving the army, he decided to move with his new wife to Memphis, and open a restaurant. The problem was that neither of them knew Memphis particularly well, and didn't know how bad the area they were opening it in was. The restaurant was eventually closed down by the authorities after only three months, after a gunfight between two of their customers. But there was one time when he was in precisely the right place at the right time. He was an unsuccessful, down on his luck, country singer in 1955, when he was driving on Christmas morning, from his in-laws' house in Arkansas to his parents' house three miles away, and he stopped to pick up two hitch-hikers. Those two hitch-hikers were Cowboy Jack Clement and Ronald "Slim" Wallace, two musicians who were planning on setting up their own record company. Riley was so interested in their conversation that while he'd started out just expecting to drive them the three miles he was going, he ended up driving them the more than seventy miles to Memphis. Clement and Wallace invited Riley to join their label. They actually had little idea of how to get into the record business -- Clement was an ex-Marine and aspiring writer, who was also a dance instructor -- he had no experience or knowledge of dancing when he became a dance instructor, but had decided that it couldn't be that difficult. He also played pedal steel in a Western Swing band led by someone called Sleepy-Eyed John Epley. Wallace, meanwhile, was a truck driver who worked weekends as a bass player and bandleader, and Clement had joined Wallace's band as well as Epley's. They regularly commuted between Arkansas, where Wallace owned a club, and Memphis, where Clement was based, and on one of their journeys, Clement, who had been riding in the back seat, had casually suggested to Wallace that they should get into the record business. Wallace would provide the resources -- they'd use his garage as a studio, and finance it with his truck-driving money -- while Clement would do the work of actually converting the garage into a studio. But before they were finished, they'd been out drinking in Arkansas on Christmas Eve with Wallace's wife and a friend, and Clement and the friend had been arrested for drunkenness. Wallace's wife had driven back to Memphis to be home for Christmas day, while Wallace had stayed on to bail out Clement and hitch-hike back with him. They hadn't actually built their studio yet, as such, but they were convinced it was going to be great when they did, and when Riley picked them up he told them what a great country singer he was, and they all agreed that when they did get the studio built they were going to have Riley be the first artist on their new label, Fernwood Records. In the meantime, Riley was going to be the singer in their band, because he needed the ten or twelve dollars a night he could get from them. So for a few months, Riley performed with Clement and Wallace in their band, and they slowly worked out an act that would show Riley's talents off to their best advantage. By May, Clement still hadn't actually built the studio -- he'd bought a tape recorder and a mixing board from Sleepy-Eyed John Epley, but he hadn't quite got round to making Wallace's garage into a decent space for recording in. So Clement and Wallace pulled together a group of musicians, including a bass player, because Clement didn't think Wallace was good enough, Johnny Bernero, the drummer who'd played on Elvis' last Sun session, and a guitarist named Roland Janes, and rented some studio time from a local radio station. They recorded the two sides of what was intended to be the first single on Fernwood Records, "Rock With Me Baby": [Excerpt: Billy Lee RIley, "Rock With Me Baby"] So they had a tape, but they needed to get it properly mastered to release it as a single. The best place in town to do that was at Memphis Recording Services, which Sam Phillips was still keeping going even though he was now having a lot of success with Sun. Phillips listened to the track while he was mastering it, and he liked it a lot. He liked it enough, in fact, that he made an offer to Clement -- rather than Clement starting up his own label, would he sell the master to Phillips, and come and work for Sun records instead? He did, leaving Slim Wallace to run Fernwood on his own, and for the last few years that Sun was relevant, Cowboy Jack Clement was one of the most important people working for the label -- second only to Sam Phillips himself. Clement would end up producing sessions by Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, and others. But his first session was to produce the B-side to the Billy Lee Riley record. Sam Phillips hadn't liked their intended B-side, so they went back into the studio with the same set of musicians to record a "Heartbreak Hotel" knockoff called "Trouble Bound": [Excerpt: Billy Lee Riley, "Trouble Bound"] That was much more to Sam's liking, and the result was released as Billy Lee Riley's first single. Riley and the musicians who had played on that initial record became the go-to people for Clement when he wanted musicians to back Sun's stars. Roland Janes, in particular, is someone whose name you will see on the credits for all sorts of Sun records from mid-56 onwards. Riley, too, would play on sessions -- usually on harmonica, but occasionally on guitar, bass, or piano. There's one particularly memorable moment of Riley on guitar at the end of Jerry Lee Lewis' first single, a cover version of Ray Price's "Crazy Arms". That song had been cut more as a joke than anything else, with Janes, who couldn't play bass, on bass. Right at the end of the song, Riley picked up a guitar, and hit a single wrong chord, just after everyone else had finished playing, and while their sound was dying away: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Crazy Arms"] Sam Phillips loved that track, and released it as it was, with Riley's guitar chord on it. Riley, meanwhile, started gigging regularly, with a band consisting of Janes on guitar, new drummer Jimmy Van Eaton, and, at first, Jerry Lee Lewis on piano, all of whom would play regularly on any Sun sessions that needed musicians. Now, we're going to be talking about Jerry Lee Lewis in a couple of weeks, so I don't want to talk too much about him here, but you'll have noticed that we already talked about him quite a bit in the episode on "Matchbox". Jerry Lee Lewis was one of those characters who turn up everywhere, and even before he was a star, he was making a huge impression on other people's lives. So while this isn't an episode about him, you will see his effect on Riley's career. He's just someone who insists on pushing into the story before it's his turn. Jerry Lee was the piano player on Riley's first session for Sun proper. The song on that session was brought in by Roland Janes, who had a friend, Ray Scott, who had written a rock and roll song about flying saucers. Riley loved the song, but Phillips thought it needed something more -- it needed to sound like it came from outer space. They still didn't have much in the way of effects at the Sun studios -- just the reverb system Phillips had cobbled together -- but Janes had a tremolo bar on his guitar. These were a relatively new invention -- they'd only been introduced on the Fender Stratocaster a little over two years earlier, and they hadn't seen a great deal of use on records yet. Phillips got Janes to play making maximum use of the tremolo arm, and also added a ton of reverb, and this was the result: [Excerpt: Billy Lee Riley and the Little Green Men, "Flying Saucers Rock and Roll"] Greil Marcus later said of that track that it was "one of the weirdest of early rock 'n' roll records - and early rock 'n' roll records were weird!" -- and he's right. "Flying Saucers Rock & Roll" is a truly odd recording, even by the standards of Sun Records in 1957. When Phillips heard that back, he said "Man that’s it. You sound like a bunch of little green men from Mars!" -- and then immediately realised that that should be the name of Riley's backing band. So the single came out as by Billy Lee Riley and the Little Green Men, and the musicians got themselves a set of matching green suits to wear at gigs, which they bought at Lansky's on Beale Street. Those suits caused problems, though, as they were made of a material which soaked up sweat, which was a problem given how frantically active Riley's stage show was -- at one show at the Arkansas State University Riley jumped on top of the piano and started dancing -- except the piano turned out to be on wheels, and rolled off the stage. Riley had to jump up and cling on to a steel girder at the top of the stage, dangling from it by one arm, while holding the mic in the other, and gesturing frantically for people to get him down. You can imagine that with a show like that, absorbent material would be a problem, and sometimes the musicians would lie on their backs to play solos and get the audiences excited, and then find it difficult to get themselves back to their feet again, because their suits were so heavy. Riley's next single was a cover of a blues song first recorded by another Sun artist, Billy "the Kid" Emerson, in 1955. "Red Hot" had been based on a schoolyard chant: [Excerpt: Billy "the Kid" Emerson, "Red Hot"] While "Flying Saucers Rock and Roll" had been a local hit, but not a national one, Billy was confident that his version of "Red Hot" would be the record that would make him into a national star: [Excerpt: Billy Lee Riley and the Little Green Men, "Red Hot"] The song was recorded either at the same session as "Flying Saucers Rock and Roll" or at one a couple of weeks later with a different pianist -- accounts vary -- but it was put on the shelf for six months, and in that six months Riley toured promoting "Flying Saucers Rock and Roll", and also carried on playing on sessions for Sun. He played bass on "Take Me To That Place" by Jack Earls: [Excerpt: Jack Earls, "Take Me To That Place"]  Rhythm guitar on "Miracle of You" by Hannah Fay: [Excerpt: Hannah Fay, "Miracle of You"] And much more. But he was still holding out hopes for the success of "Red Hot", which Sam Phillips kept telling him was going to be his big hit. And for a while it looked like that might be the case. Dewey Phillips played the record constantly, and Alan Freed tipped it to be a big hit. But for some reason, while it was massive in Memphis, the track did nothing at all outside the area -- the Memphis musician Jim Dickinson once said that he had never actually realised that "Red Hot" hadn't been a hit until he moved to Texas and nobody there had heard it, because everyone in Memphis knew the song. Riley and his band continued recording for Sun, both recording for themselves and as backup musicians for other artists. For example Hayden Thompson's version of Little Junior Parker's "Love My Baby", another rockabilly cover of an old Sun blues track, was released shortly after "Red Hot", credited to Thompson "with Billy Lee Riley's band [and] Jerry Lee Lewis' 'pumping piano'": [Excerpt: Hayden Thompson, "Love My Baby"]  But Riley was starting to get suspicious. "Red Hot" should have been a hit, it was obvious to him. So why hadn't it been? Riley became convinced that what had happened was that Sam Phillips had decided that Riley and his band were more valuable to him as session musicians, backing Jerry Lee Lewis and whoever else came into the studio, than as stars themselves. He would later claim that he had actually seen piles of orders for "Red Hot" come in from record shops around the country, and Sam Phillips phoning the stores up and telling them he was sending them Jerry Lee Lewis records instead. He also remembered that Sam had told him to come off the road from a package tour to record an album -- and had sent Jerry Lee out on the tour in his place. He became convinced that Sam Phillips was deliberately trying to sabotage his career. He got drunk, and he got mad. He went to Sun studios, where Sam Phillips' latest girlfriend, Sally, was working, and started screaming at her, and kicked a hole in a double bass. Sally, terrified, called Sam, who told her to lock the doors, and to on no account let Riley leave the building. Sam came to the studio and talked Riley down, explaining to him calmly that there was no way he would sabotage a record on his own label -- that just wouldn't make any sense. He said "“Red Hot” ain’t got it. We’re saving you for something good.’ ” By the time Sam had finished talking, according to Riley, "I felt like I was the biggest star on Sun Records!” But that feeling didn't last, and Riley, like so many Sun artists before, decided he had a better chance at stardom elsewhere. He signed with Brunswick Records, and recorded a single with Owen Bradley, a follow-up to "Flying Saucers Rock & Roll" called "Rockin' on the Moon", which I wouldn't be at all surprised to hear had been an influence on Joe Meek: [Excerpt: Billy Lee Riley, "Rockin' on the Moon"] But that wasn't a success either, and Riley came crawling back to Sun, though he never trusted Phillips again. He carried on as a Sun artist for a while, and then started recording for other labels based around Memphis, under a variety of different names. with a variety of different bands. For example he played harmonica on "Shimmy Shimmy Walk" by the Megatons, a great instrumental knock-off of "You Don't Love Me": [Excerpt: The Megatons, "Shimmy Shimmy Walk Part 1"] Indeed, he had a part to play in the development of another classic Memphis instrumental, though he didn't play on it. Riley was recording a session under one of his pseudonyms at the Stax studio, in 1962, and he was in the control room after the session when the other musicians started jamming on a twelve-bar blues: [Excerpt: Booker T and the MGs, "Green Onions"] But we'll talk more about Booker T and the MGs in a few months' time. After failing to make it as a rock and roll star, Billy Riley decided he might as well go with what he'd been most successful at, and become a full-time session musician. He moved to LA, where he was one of the large number of people who were occasional parts of the group of session players known as the Wrecking Crew. He played harmonica, for example, on the album version of the Beach Boys' "Help Me Ronda": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Help Me, Ronda"] And on Dean Martin's "Houston": [Excerpt: Dean Martin, "Houston"] After a couple of years of this, he went back to the south, and started recording again for anyone who would have him. But again, he was unlucky in sales -- and songs he recorded would tend to get recorded by other artists. For example, in 1971 he recorded a single produced by Chips Moman, the great Memphis country-soul producer and songwriter who had recently revitalised Elvis' career. That song, Tony Joe White's "I've Got a Thing About You Baby" started rising up the charts: [Excerpt: Billy Lee Riley, "I've Got A Thing About You Baby"] But then Elvis released his own version of the song, and Riley's version stalled at number ninety-three. In 1973, Riley decided to retire from the music business, and go to work in the construction industry instead. He would eventually be dragged back onto the stage in 1979, and he toured Europe after that, playing to crowds of rockabilly fans In 1992, Bob Dylan came calling. It turned out that Bob Dylan was a massive Billy Lee Riley fan, and had spent six years trying to track Riley down, even going so far as to visit Riley's old home in Tennessee to see if he could find him. Eventually he did, and he got Riley to open for him on a few shows in Arkansas and Tennessee, and in Little Rock he got Riley to come out on stage and perform "Red Hot" with him and his band: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan and Billy Lee Riley, "Red Hot"] In 2015, when Dylan was awarded the "Musicares person of the year" award, he spent most of his speech attacking anyone in the music industry who had ever said a bad word about Bob Dylan. It's one of the most extraordinarily, hilariously, petty bits of score-settling you'll ever hear, and I urge you to seek it out online if you ever start to worry that your own ego bruises too easily. But in that speech Dylan does say good things about some people.He talks for a long time about Riley, and I won't quote all of it, but I'll quote a short section: "He was a true original. He did it all: He played, he sang, he wrote. He would have been a bigger star but Jerry Lee came along. And you know what happens when someone like that comes along. You just don't stand a chance. So Billy became what is known in the industry—a condescending term—as a one-hit wonder. But sometimes, just sometimes, once in a while, a one-hit wonder can make a more powerful impact than a recording star who's got 20 or 30 hits behind him.” Dylan went on to talk about his long friendship with Riley, and to say that the reason he was proud to accept the Musicares award was that in his last years, Musicares had helped Billy Lee Riley pay his doctor's bills and keep comfortable, and that Dylan considered that a debt that couldn't be repaid. Billy Lee Riley gave his final performance in June 2009, on Beale Street in Memphis, using a walking frame for support. He died of colon cancer in August 2009, aged 75.

Named by Rolling Stone magazine as one of the 100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time, Dann Penn’s impact on the Southern music triangle of Muscle Shoals, Memphis, and Nashville cannot be overstated. In the 1960s he teamed with Chips Moman to create two of Southern soul’s most revered standards: “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man,” which was recorded by Aretha Franklin, and “The Dark End of the Street,” which was first cut by James Carr. Along with his frequent collaborator, Spooner Oldham, Penn has crafted R&B classics such as James and Bobby Purify’s “I’m Your Puppet,” Otis Redding’s “You Left the Water Running,” Percy Sledge’s “It Tears Me Up” and “Out of Left Field,” Solomon Burke’s “Take Me (Just As I Am),” and The Sweet Inspirations’ “Sweet Inspiration.” Additionally, the pair found pop success with Janis Joplin’s recording of “A Woman Left Lonely,” as well as hits such as “Cry Like a Baby” and “I Met Her in Church” that were recorded by The Box Tops, who first broke through to national prominence with the Penn-produced hit “The Letter.” Other artists who’ve recorded songs from the Dan Penn songbook include  Bobby “Blue” Bland,  Jerry Lee Lewis, Clarence Carter, Joe Cocker, Cher, Arthur Alexander, Ruth Brown, Irma Thomas, Bobby Womack, Esther Phillips, Joe Tex, Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, Gregg Allman, Etta James, Dionne Warwick, Brenda Lee, Willie Nelson, Patti LaBelle, Elvis Costello, Buddy Guy, Arthur Conley, Sam & Dave, Elton John, Wilson Pickett, Roger McGuinn, John Prine, and many more. 

In part 1 of our Truetone Lounge interview, we cover Reggie Young's early years in Memphis playing with the Bill Black Combo and sessions at Royal Studios, all the way up to his early work with Chips Moman at American Sound Studios.

Podcast della puntata andata in onda il 25/06/216. Live cover: I put a spell on you.

Podcast della puntata andata in onda il 26/06/2016. Live cover: Tracks of my tears

Dags för den avslutande delen i berättelsen om Chaka. Som svart panter hade hon blivit bryskt medveten om sin sårbarhet i det amerikanska samhället. Hon var inte redo att dö, och bestämde sig för att satsa på något som hon kunde leva på. Chaka lät sig omgärdas av det tidiga 70-talets feminism i dyningarna av hippieeran. Men samtidigt började en tärande ensamhet att göra sig påmind.I timme två: 2016 var ett svart år, och vi blev alla påminda om vår egen dödlighet.Vila i frid Billy Paul, Maurice White, Bernie Worrell, David Bowie, Phife Dawg, Sharon Jones, Kashif, Leon Haywood, Muhammad Ali, Afeni Shakur, Blowfly(Clarence Reid), Chips Moman, Robert Edwards i Intruders, Nicholas Caldwell i Whispers, William Guest i The Pips, Lee Andrews, Natalie Cole, Prince Be, Prince Buster,  Leon Russell, Mose Allison, Shawty Lo, Otis Clay, Rod Temperton,  Vanity och . Prince.