Podcast appearances and mentions of Curtis Williams

Clouds In The Sky They Will Always Be There For Me', el nuevo disco de Porridge Radio, es un álbum curioso. Refleja más que ningun otro la fuerza del conjunto; logra capturar la amistad que les une y cómo han aprendido a tocar y crear juntos. Sin embargo, nace del momento de mayor soledad de su líder y vocalista Dana Margolin. Agotada, triste y con el corazón roto enfrentó el proceso de composición como si fuera la primera vez. El resultado es un disco poético, intenso, y perfecto para las tardes grises y cortas del otoño.Playlist:Ducks Ltd. - Grim SymmetryThe Drums - I (Still) Don't Know How To LoveLos Punsetes, Los Planetas - Tu Puto GrupoMk.gee - ROCKMANSaya Gray - SHELL (OF A MAN)Faye Webster, Lil Yachty - Lego RingBenjamin Booker - LWA IN THE TRAILER PARKCurtis Williams, Mura Masa - Here With MeFKA twigs - Perfect StrangerKelly Lee Owens - SunshineConfidence Man - FAR OUTThe Blessed Madonna, Joy Anonymous, Danielle Ponder - Carry Me HigherFred again..,Joy Anonymous - peace u needPorridge Radio - AnybodyBon Iver - THINGS BEHIND THINGS BEHIND THINGSSufjan Stevens, Katia Labèque, Marielle Labèque, David Chalmin, Bryce Dessner - ReflexionEscuchar audio

Bro. Curtis Williams  

Bro. Curtis Williams

Bro. Curtis Williams

Bro. Curtis Williams

Bro. Curtis Williams

Subscribe - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCT_JQHVrs_YqEf4nuIy9FBg @thesyarinotsorryshow In episode 8 "Edgewood Avenue" Sy Ari brings along special guest "Curtin Williams" of Two9 to discuss some of the legendary times on the different side of Atlanta and Edgewood avenue. https://linktr.ee/thesyarinotsorryshow To participate in WHYASKSY send your questions in a voice recording or video format from your phone to WHYASKSY@GMAIL.COM and also give us your name and city. Instagram & Tiktok: @TheSyAriNotSorryShow Twitter & Snapchat: @TheSyAriNSShow #SyAri

Dalton discusses the Louisville basketball team's 91-50 win over Simmons College in the first exhibition game, and what head coach Kenny Payne said in his postgame press conference. He also explains why each of the four freshmen (Dennis Evans, Curtis Williams, Kaleb Glenn, Ty-Laur Johnson) should play significant roles for the Cardinals this season. Title Sponsor- PrizePicks Go to PrizePicks.com/lockedoncollege and use code lockedoncollege for a first deposit match up to $100! Daily Fantasy Sports Made Easy! Support Us By Supporting Our Sponsors! Nutrafol Take the first step to visibly thicker, healthier hair. For a limited time, Nutrafol is offering our listeners ten dollars off your first month's subscription and free shipping when you go to Nutrafol.com/men and enter the promo code LOCKEDONCOLLEGE. DoorDash Get fifty percent off your first DoorDash order up to a twenty-dollar value when you use code lockedoncollege at checkout. Limited time offer, terms apply. PrizePicks Go to PrizePicks.com/lockedoncollege and use code lockedoncollege for a first deposit match up to $100! Daily Fantasy Sports Made Easy! Jase Medical Save more than $360 by getting these lifesaving antibiotics with Jase Medical plus an additional $20 off by using code LOCKEDON at checkout on jasemedical.com. Athletic Brewing Go to AthleticBrewing.com and enter code LOCKEDON to get 15% off your first online order or find a store near you! Athletic Brewing. Milford, CT and San Diego, CA. Near Beer. Gametime Download the Gametime app, create an account, and use code LOCKEDONCOLLEGE for $20 off your first purchase. LinkedIn LinkedIn Jobs helps you find the qualified candidates you want to talk to, faster. Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com/LOCKEDONCOLLEGE. Terms and conditions apply. FanDuel Make Every Moment More. Right now, NEW customers can bet FIVE DOLLARS and get TWO HUNDRED in BONUS BETS – GUARANTEED. Visit FanDuel.com/LOCKEDON to get started. FANDUEL DISCLAIMER: 21+ in select states. First online real money wager only. Bonus issued as nonwithdrawable free bets that expires in 14 days. Restrictions apply. See terms at sportsbook.fanduel.com. Gambling Problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER or visit FanDuel.com/RG (CO, IA, MD, MI, NJ, PA, IL, VA, WV), 1-800-NEXT-STEP or text NEXTSTEP to 53342 (AZ), 1-888-789-7777 or visit ccpg.org/chat (CT), 1-800-9-WITH-IT (IN), 1-800-522-4700 (WY, KS) or visit ksgamblinghelp.com (KS), 1-877-770-STOP (LA), 1-877-8-HOPENY or text HOPENY (467369) (NY), TN REDLINE 1-800-889-9789 (TN) eBay Motors A championship team is about each player being a perfect fit. Same with your vehicle. So, for parts that fit, head to eBay Motors and look for the green check. Stay in the game with eBay Guaranteed Fit. eBay Motors dot com. Let's ride. eBay Guaranteed Fit only available to US customers. Eligible items only. Exclusions apply. Follow & Subscribe on all Podcast platforms…

Dalton discusses the Louisville basketball team's 91-50 win over Simmons College in the first exhibition game, and what head coach Kenny Payne said in his postgame press conference. He also explains why each of the four freshmen (Dennis Evans, Curtis Williams, Kaleb Glenn, Ty-Laur Johnson) should play significant roles for the Cardinals this season.Title Sponsor-PrizePicksGo to PrizePicks.com/lockedoncollege and use code lockedoncollege for a first deposit match up to $100! Daily Fantasy Sports Made Easy!Support Us By Supporting Our Sponsors!NutrafolTake the first step to visibly thicker, healthier hair. For a limited time, Nutrafol is offering our listeners ten dollars off your first month's subscription and free shipping when you go to Nutrafol.com/men and enter the promo code LOCKEDONCOLLEGE.DoorDashGet fifty percent off your first DoorDash order up to a twenty-dollar value when you use code lockedoncollege at checkout. Limited time offer, terms apply.PrizePicksGo to PrizePicks.com/lockedoncollege and use code lockedoncollege for a first deposit match up to $100! Daily Fantasy Sports Made Easy!Jase MedicalSave more than $360 by getting these lifesaving antibiotics with Jase Medical plus an additional $20 off by using code LOCKEDON at checkout on jasemedical.com.Athletic BrewingGo to AthleticBrewing.com and enter code LOCKEDON to get 15% off your first online order or find a store near you! Athletic Brewing. Milford, CT and San Diego, CA. Near Beer.GametimeDownload the Gametime app, create an account, and use code LOCKEDONCOLLEGE for $20 off your first purchase.LinkedInLinkedIn Jobs helps you find the qualified candidates you want to talk to, faster. Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com/LOCKEDONCOLLEGE. Terms and conditions apply.FanDuelMake Every Moment More. Right now, NEW customers can bet FIVE DOLLARS and get TWO HUNDRED in BONUS BETS – GUARANTEED. Visit FanDuel.com/LOCKEDON to get started.FANDUEL DISCLAIMER: 21+ in select states. First online real money wager only. Bonus issued as nonwithdrawable free bets that expires in 14 days. Restrictions apply. See terms at sportsbook.fanduel.com. Gambling Problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER or visit FanDuel.com/RG (CO, IA, MD, MI, NJ, PA, IL, VA, WV), 1-800-NEXT-STEP or text NEXTSTEP to 53342 (AZ), 1-888-789-7777 or visit ccpg.org/chat (CT), 1-800-9-WITH-IT (IN), 1-800-522-4700 (WY, KS) or visit ksgamblinghelp.com (KS), 1-877-770-STOP (LA), 1-877-8-HOPENY or text HOPENY (467369) (NY), TN REDLINE 1-800-889-9789 (TN)eBay MotorsA championship team is about each player being a perfect fit. Same with your vehicle. So, for parts that fit, head to eBay Motors and look for the green check. Stay in the game with eBay Guaranteed Fit. eBay Motors dot com. Let's ride. eBay Guaranteed Fit only available to US customers. Eligible items only. Exclusions apply.Follow & Subscribe on all Podcast platforms…

- What Kenny Payne can take from Jeff Walz- A quick disclaimer for the debbie downers- Louisville is definitely improving- What Manny Okorafor is bringing to the table- Key El Ellis stats- Jae'Lyn Withers showing improvements- Shoutout to UofL fans- Giving Kamari Lands his flowers- What we learned from FSU and GT- Where can UofL win to finish the season?- Recruiting is heating up- Names to watch in the transfer portal?- On comments from Trentyn Flowers and Curtis Williams+ much moreSubscribe to be the first to listen!Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

- What Kenny Payne can take from Jeff Walz- A quick disclaimer for the debbie downers- Louisville is definitely improving- What Manny Okorafor is bringing to the table- Key El Ellis stats- Jae'Lyn Withers showing improvements- Shoutout to UofL fans- Giving Kamari Lands his flowers- What we learned from FSU and GT- Where can UofL win to finish the season?- Recruiting is heating up- Names to watch in the transfer portal?- On comments from Trentyn Flowers and Curtis Williams+ much moreSubscribe to be the first to listen!

Eight Akron police officers are currently under investigation for the June 27, 2022 killing of Jayland Walker, a 25-year-old African American young man. Officers fired more than 90 times at Jayland and his body was hit by 46 bullets.On Jan. 14, 2023 during MLK JFJ (#JusticeForJayland) weekend in Akron, OH, Rev. Mark moderated two panels on Where Do We Go From Here with Justice for Jayland Walker, Police Accountability, Police Violence, Black-on-Black Nonviolence, Trauma, Loss and Healing? The second panel included Bishop William J. Barber, founder of Repairers of the Breach ad the Poor People's Campaign; Dr. Lathardus Goggins, Principal Consultant at Applied Academic Solutions; Dr. Curtis Williams, II of the Minority Behavioral Health Group; Pastor Lori Porter of Love Akron; Pastor Kyle Early of the Cleveland Police Commission; Rev. Raymond Greene of Freeodom BLOC; Bishop Joey Johnson of Love and Justice Akron; Margo Sommerville, Akron City Council President; and Kenneth Brooks, youth activistAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Bills/Bengals postponed after Damar Hamlin's collapse. Donovan Mitchell scores 70. Plus, Rick Neuheisel of CBS Sports joins DA to reflect on the Damar Hamlin collapse as well as his memories of seeing Curtis Williams injured first hand in 2000.

HOUR 3: The latest on the condition of Damar Hamlin. Plus, Rick Neuheisel of CBS Sports joins DA to reflect on the Damar Hamlin collapse as well as his memories of seeing Curtis Williams injured first hand in 2000.

Andy and James discuss UK fans whining over the Ole Miss Kickoff time, Issel is mad at the show and there's a feud brewing, Stoops sound, UK football offense talk, the guys argue over Florida football, Emoni Bates talk, and Curtis Williams commits. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

2023 four-star small forward Curtis Williams Jr committed to the Louisville Cardinals on Monday over Alabama, Xavier, Providence, and others. Dalton explains why Williams' skill set fits Kenny Payne's scheme and how his perimeter shooting will be a breath of fresh air for this program.With Kaleb Glenn and Curtis Williams Jr committed in the 2023 cycle, Dalton explains that the next spots will likely be given to a lead guard and a big man. DJ Wagner, AJ Johnson, Aaron Bradshaw, and Isaiah Miranda are four of the top options on Louisville‘s radar.in the final segment, Dalton discusses the Cardinals offering the top combo-guard in the 2024 class, Boogie Fland. The five-star holds offers from North Carolina, Duke, Kansas, Kentucky, and others.Support Us By Supporting Our Sponsors!BetOnlineBetOnline.net has you covered this season with more props, odds and lines than ever before. BetOnline – Where The Game Starts! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

2023 four-star small forward Curtis Williams Jr committed to the Louisville Cardinals on Monday over Alabama, Xavier, Providence, and others. Dalton explains why Williams' skill set fits Kenny Payne's scheme and how his perimeter shooting will be a breath of fresh air for this program. With Kaleb Glenn and Curtis Williams Jr committed in the 2023 cycle, Dalton explains that the next spots will likely be given to a lead guard and a big man. DJ Wagner, AJ Johnson, Aaron Bradshaw, and Isaiah Miranda are four of the top options on Louisville‘s radar. in the final segment, Dalton discusses the Cardinals offering the top combo-guard in the 2024 class, Boogie Fland. The five-star holds offers from North Carolina, Duke, Kansas, Kentucky, and others. Support Us By Supporting Our Sponsors! BetOnline BetOnline.net has you covered this season with more props, odds and lines than ever before. BetOnline – Where The Game Starts! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Cardinal Authority's Jody Demling and Michael McCammon discuss the commitment of four-star forward Curtis Williams to Louisville To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

2023 four-star prospect Curtis Williams Jr has cut his list to four, with Louisville making the list alongside Florida State, Xavier, and Providence. He will be visiting the program in September ahead of his decision next month; the Cardinals' program is sitting in a great position in the recruitment.The Cardinals were also listed in the top-six for 2024 five-star Jamari Phillips. Kenny Payne and company have their work cut out for them in this recruitment, and the next step will be getting Phillips to visit.In the final segment, Dalton explains why he loves the San Antonio Spurs signing former Louisville star Gorgui Dieng to a one-year deal.Support Us By Supporting Our Sponsors!BetOnlineBetOnline.net has you covered this season with more props, odds and lines than ever before. BetOnline – Where The Game Starts! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

2023 four-star prospect Curtis Williams Jr has cut his list to four, with Louisville making the list alongside Florida State, Xavier, and Providence. He will be visiting the program in September ahead of his decision next month; the Cardinals' program is sitting in a great position in the recruitment. The Cardinals were also listed in the top-six for 2024 five-star Jamari Phillips. Kenny Payne and company have their work cut out for them in this recruitment, and the next step will be getting Phillips to visit. In the final segment, Dalton explains why he loves the San Antonio Spurs signing former Louisville star Gorgui Dieng to a one-year deal. Support Us By Supporting Our Sponsors! BetOnline BetOnline.net has you covered this season with more props, odds and lines than ever before. BetOnline – Where The Game Starts! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week I had the pleasure to speak with Kevin Brennan. He is the creator of the High Desert Dirt Blog. He is also a father, a runner, and a CPA. Kevin is someone I've been wanting to talk to for a while. When I started this podcast and would do my research, his blog would constantly come up. He did much of the leg work work that I have relied on when researching many of the New Mexican Runners that came before our current crop. He talked about his early days running and we both reminisced about high school running. He talks about the great Gallup teams and their coach, Curtis Williams. He talks about having fun running in the arroyos of Santa Fe. Kevin also turns the table on me and asks me about getting into the podcast and my build up to Houston last year. It was fun to hear the things he thought about and where his mind went when creating content. It all felt very familiar. So check out the blog and perhaps he will get the creative bug again and produce some more content. I hope you enjoy our talk. Cross Country season is officially a week away. I hope you are able to support your local school and kids. It is also almost marathon season. I hope all your training is going well. So listen to your body, be smart, be safe, and keep running, New Mexico.

In this episode we sat down with artist, Curtis Williams, for an exclusive 1 on 1 conversation. We discussed everything from his collective, TWO-9, to hanging around legends like Kanye West, Asap Rocky, Virgil Abloh and so much more. Follow Curtis on all major platforms @thatboycurtis and stream his music everywhere! PATREON LINK: patreon.com/ogsessions FOLLOW US Instagram: @ogsessionspod Twitter: @ogsessionspod TikTok: @ogsessions

2023 four-star small forward Curtis Williams Jr recently told zagsblog.com that Louisville was recruiting him the hardest; the Cardinals have been prioritizing Williams ahead of his planned September decision. The program also recently offered two 2024 five-star prospects: PG Elliot Cadeau and SF Carter Bryant. Decision timelines are unclear, but Kenny Payne and staff will look to get both players on campus for visits in the respective future. At the end, Dalton conducts the weekly mailbag segment. Support Us By Supporting Our Sponsors! BetOnline BetOnline.net has you covered this season with more props, odds and lines than ever before. BetOnline – Where The Game Starts! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

2023 four-star small forward Curtis Williams Jr recently told zagsblog.com that Louisville was recruiting him the hardest; the Cardinals have been prioritizing Williams ahead of his planned September decision.The program also recently offered two 2024 five-star prospects: PG Elliot Cadeau and SF Carter Bryant. Decision timelines are unclear, but Kenny Payne and staff will look to get both players on campus for visits in the respective future.At the end, Dalton conducts the weekly mailbag segment.Support Us By Supporting Our Sponsors!BetOnlineBetOnline.net has you covered this season with more props, odds and lines than ever before. BetOnline – Where The Game Starts! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

From Dollar General and Dollar Tree to Family Dollar, dollar stores are spreading rapidly throughout Louisiana and across the country, often strategically located in low-income communities and “food deserts.” But dollar store workers notoriously have to endure low pay, understaffing, and hazardous working conditions; some workers report frequently working alone in stores and having their air conditioning controlled from corporate headquarters in another state. That's why Step Up Louisiana, "a community based organization committed to building power to win education and economic justice for all," is organizing employees, customers, and community members to fight for safer stores and better pay and working conditions for dollar store workers. In this episode, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with Kenya Slaughter, who has been an organizer and frontline worker at Dollar General for a number of years, and Curtis Williams, a dollar store customer who has gotten involved in Step Up Louisiana's campaign.To read the transcript of this episode and read show notes, visit: https://therealnews.com/louisiana-dollar-store-workers-cant-control-air-conditioning-in-their-own-storesFeatured Music (all songs sourced from the Free Music Archive at freemusicarchive.org):Jules Taylor, "Working People Theme Song:Pre-Production/Studio: Maximillian AlvarezPost-Production: Jules TaylorHelp us continue producing radically independent news and in-depth analysis by following us and becoming a monthly sustainer: Donate: https://therealnews.com/donate-podSign up for our newsletter: https://therealnews.com/newsletter-podLike us on Facebook: https://facebook.com/therealnewsFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/therealnews

From Dollar General and Dollar Tree to Family Dollar, dollar stores are spreading rapidly throughout Louisiana and across the country, but dollar store workers notoriously have to endure low pay, understaffing, and hazardous working conditions. That's why Step Up Louisiana, "a community based organization committed to building power to win education and economic justice for all," is organizing employees, customers, and community members to fight for safer stores and better pay and working conditions for dollar store workers. In this episode, we speak with Kenya Slaughter, who has been an organizer and frontline worker at Dollar General for a number of years, and Curtis Williams, a dollar store customer who has gotten involved in Step Up Louisiana's campaign.  Additional links/info below... Step Up Louisiana's website and Twitter page Kenya Slaughter, The New York Times, "I Never Planned to Be a Front-Line Worker at Dollar General" Permanent links below... Working People Patreon page Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show! Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page Featured Music (all songs sourced from the Free Music Archive: freemusicarchive.org) Jules Taylor, "Working People Theme Song

I walked the Camino for this special 3 part Camino podcast series this year where I interviewed many interesting people including fellow walkers, pilgrims, guides and historians.The Camino is over 800kms from the Spanish border in the Pyrenees to Santiago de Compostela in Galicia and it typically takes a walker between 30 to 35 to complete.In part 2 today I talk to Catharine Murphy who has walked the Camino many times and she gives us a great guide to the many ways to do the Camino. We then hear from my guides Fran and Ursula and then we finish off with an insightful interview with the American writer Curtis Williams on the history of the Camino.The Camino is a truly magical pilgrimage and I hope these 3 episodes convey in some small way why the Camino is so special to so many people around the world. We will have the final 3rd part of this special next Tuesday. For more information on the Camino go to the website https://www.spain.info .I flew with Aer Lingus from Dublin to Bilbao and then from Santiago to Dublin. If you haven't already I'd ask you to give me a follow on whichever platform you listen to your podcasts and you will be the first to get a new episode every Tuesday for the rest of the year.Fergal O'Keeffe is the host of Ireland's No.1 Travel Podcast Travel Tales with Fergal which is now listened to in 90 countries. The podcast aims to share soul-lifting travel memoirs about daydream worthy destinations. To find out who is on every Tuesday please follow me onWebsite www.https://www.traveltaleswithfergal.ieInstagram @traveltaleswithfergalFacebook @traveltaleswithfergalTwitter @FergalTravelYouTube @traveltaleswithfergal See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I was fortunate to walk on the Camino in Spain in September for this special episode.The full Camino is over 800kms from the Spanish border in the Pyrenees to Santiago de Compostela in Galicia and it typically takes a walker between 30 to 35 days, walking around 25 km a day, to do the full Camino.The Camino is a truly magical experience that I would recommend to everyone but especially lovers of walking and history enthusiasts. The Camino brings you through four very different regions of Spain with four very distinct landscapes, culture, architecture, people, cuisine, weather and even language.The Camino is one of Christianity's most venerated and ancient pilgrimage walks and goes to the tomb of St James at the magnificent world heritage listed cathedral in Santiago de Compostela, which is the third most holy site in Christianity after Rome and Jerusalem.Today you will hear an interview from Fergal O'Keeffe on his Camino experiences, then Fergal interviews three writers John Connell, Mark O'Halloran and Curtis Williams about their Camino journeys.I hope these episodes convey in some small way why the Camino is so special to so many people around the world.There is an openness and camaraderie amongst fellow walkers, who share a passing “Buen Camino” greeting and they will often chat and exchange stories with you. Next Tuesday I will share those fascinating interviews with you and we will go a little deeper in the history and mystique of the Camino. For more information on the Camino go to the website https://www.spain.info.I flew with Aer Lingus from Dublin to Bilbao and then from Santiago to Dublin. If you haven't already I'd ask you to give me a follow on whichever platform you listen to your podcasts and you will be the first to get a new episode every Tuesday for the rest of the year.Fergal O'Keeffe is the host of Ireland's No.1 Travel Podcast Travel Tales with Fergal which is now listened to in 90 countries. The podcast aims to share soul-lifting travel memoirs about day-dream worthy destinations. To find out who is on every Tuesday please follow me onWebsite www.https://www.traveltaleswithfergal.ieInstagram @traveltaleswithfergalFacebook @traveltaleswithfergalTwitter @FergalTravelYouTube @traveltaleswithfergal See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

[2018 NACAMA National Academy Christian Acapella Music Artist Award] Stevie B. is playing the world's greatest acappella gospel music artists; the sweet sounds of voices.  On tonight's show my special guest is Curtis Williams from Nashville, Tennessee.  Curtis will be debuting some NEW Singles on the show tonight. "Song of the Week" featuring,... September (Monthly Triple Spin) featuring,... "Funny Bones" .... "Shout Outs" .... "Old One Hundreds" DATE: September 10, 2021

Taking a look at MSU's early Big Board for the 2023 class including prospects Braelon Green, Jeremy Fears, Jr., Jalen Hooks, Cam Christie, Curtis Williams, and Owen Freeman (among others).

In this episode, Bob hangs out with Curtis Williams, SDPL's Technology Resources Manager and Sam Cerrato, the Circulation Supervisor at the Central Library. They discuss the new city-wide initiative, SD Access for All and the City of San Diego's efforts to address digital equity by getting the community connected via computer labs, devices, and various Wi-Fi hotspots. SD Access for AllInternet Services @SDPL Outdoor Computer LabsMobile Hotspot User GuideInternet Access Services @SDPL Wireless Computing @SDPL  

Curtis Williams, an inmate at the Oklahoma County jail was fatally shot after a hostage situation on Saturday, March 27. Since then, the jail has faced backlash. The Oklahoman's reporters discuss.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Curtis Williams, an inmate at the Oklahoma County jail was fatally shot after a hostage situation on Saturday, March 27. Since then, the jail has faced backlash. The Oklahoman's reporters discuss.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this review, Kinge and Feefo discuss former Two-9 member Curtis Williams's 'Lightning McQueen' EP. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Curtis Williams has been a practicing Humanistic Astrologer for over 28 years. He has received formal astrological training and certifications through Glenn Perry’s Academy of Astro Psychology and Noel Tyl’s Master’s Degree Course. His life experience and personal growth are what brought him to Astrology. Having suffered a life-changing injury as a young man, he continued on the path of self-discovery and healing through Astrology. Curtis has local, national, as well as international clientele and has expertise in many of the different levels of astrology such as Natal Astrology, Relocation Astrology, Horary Astrology, Couples Synastry, Mundane Astrology, and Rectification Astrology. As a supplement to his other healing modalities Curtis is also a Certified Medical Astrologer, a Shamanic Practitioner, Ecstatic Body Posture Instructor, Subtle Energy Artist and Dream Analyst. Curtis has been a Reiki practitioner since 2002. He holds Master/Teacher certifications in both Usui and Karuna Reiki®. He is a volunteer Reiki facilitator at the Hearst Cancer Research Center and the Homeless Shelter in San Luis Obispo, California. He participates in healing days and various clinics as well as being involved with several Reiki circles on a regular basis. He received his Master certifications for both Usui and Karuna Reiki® through the International Center for Reiki Training, which was founded by William Lee Rand. He received his first two levels in Usui Shiki Ryoho through the late Charlie Iron Eyes along with his wife Fe’ Iron Eyes. Curtis has completed and received his certification in E3 in May of 2009 from Dr William Mehring. E3 is a psychological and energy healing modality that specifically relates to and helps redirect physical, emotional, and traumatic events through personal transformation. E3 is a highly personalized approach to readdressing and examining past events that we all have experienced in our lives through the use of muscle testing, and finding resolution to problematic episodes that have been holding us back from successful relationships, and jobs. Curtis uses E3 as a transactional tool to finding core issues that directly relate to the health and diet such as allergies or overeating.If you are interested in classes or any reading, healing etc... here is Curtis'website https://astrologyreiki.com/about.htmlDon't forget to mention Psychic Babes to get $10 off!!!Support the show (http://www.psychicbabes.com/podcast)

With a bunch of drama going down in the past week, including the Gamestop x AMC x Robinhood Short Squeeze issue, Dustin Diamond, who played Screech in Saved By The Bell, passed away, and Elon Musk hit Clubhouse, to name a few, we had to break it down for y'all. WhatD'YaReckon? received the first passes we've ever had, so clearly the questions are getting hectic. For the tunes, it was a big week. We got into new new from Sevana, M1llions, Westside Gunn x Armani Caesar, PartyNextDoor, Deanté Hitchcock x 6lack, Meek Mill x Leslie Grace x Boi-1da, Pink Sweat$ x Kehlani, Brent Faiyaz x DJ Dahi x Tyler, The Creator, 2 Eleven x Freddie Gibbs x Quincey White, Highup x Aryue x Snoop Dogg, Fredo x Dave, Eric Bellinger x Hitmaka, Curtis Williams x Sango x Palette, Michael Brun x Shay Lia, Rel McCoy, Ocean Wisdom x Maverick Sabre, FKA Twigs x Headie One x Fred Again, Jah Cure, Khurangbin x Knxwledge, Fat Joe x DJ Khaled x Amorphous, Lil' Wayne, Dave Hollister, Devin The Dude, and th1rt3en x Pharaohe Monch. Bam bam. ARTISTS: Contact info@illnotestudios.com for the production/mixing/mastering opportunity. Theme tune produced by Notion. Purchase beats: notionbeats.com Follow the team everywhere: @TheMovementFam @CeeFor @Notionbaby @iDahnJohnson

Louis The Child drops the last #PlaygroundRadio of 2020 featuring some amazing music from Kid Cudi, Machinedrum, Alison Wonderland & Valentino Khan, Whethan, Mia Gladstone and many more! 01. MIA GLADSTONE - GO [WEEKEND TRACK] 02. Louis The Child, COIN - Self Care 03. Death Cab for Cutie - I Dreamt We Spoke Again (Louis The Child Remix) 04. thomfjord - Interstellar 05. Alison Wonderland & Valentino Khan - Anything 06. Machinedrum - Kane Train (feat. Freddie Gibbs) 07. Kid Cudi - The Void 08. Amine, Unknown Mortal Orchestra - Buzzin 09. Jack Harlow - Funny Seeing You Here 10. Petit Biscuit - Parachute 11. Goth Babe - Moments / Tides 12. Curtis Williams, Palette, Mura Masa - A Rap About A Girl 13. Machinedrum - Wait 4 U (feat. Jesse Boykins III) 14. Whethan - In The Summer (feat. Jaymes Young) 15. Kid Cudi - Elsie's Baby Boy 16. Louis The Child - It's Strange (LeMarquis Remix) 17. Jim-E Stack - Be Long 2 18. Kid Cudi - Solo Dolo Pt III [PLAYGROUND PICK]

Episode 106 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Louie Louie” by the Kingsmen, and the story of how a band that had already split up accidentally had one of the biggest hits of the sixties and sparked a two-year FBI investigation. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have an eight-minute bonus episode available, on “It’s My Party” by Lesley Gore. 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 106 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Louie Louie” by the Kingsmen, and the story of how a band that had already split up accidentally had one of the biggest hits of the sixties and sparked a two-year FBI investigation. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have an eight-minute bonus episode available, on “It’s My Party” by Lesley Gore. 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 106 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Louie Louie" by the Kingsmen, and the story of how a band that had already split up accidentally had one of the biggest hits of the sixties and sparked a two-year FBI investigation. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have an eight-minute bonus episode available, on "It's My Party" by Lesley Gore. 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 As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. The single biggest resource I used in this episode was Dave Marsh's book on Louie Louie. Information on Richard Berry also came from Marv Goldberg's page, specifically his articles on the Flairs and Arthur Lee Maye and the Crowns.  This academic paper on the song is where I learned what the chord Richard Berry uses instead of the V is. The Coasters by Bill Millar also had some information about Berry. Love That Louie: The Louie Louie Files has the versions of the song by the Kingsmen, Berry, Rockin' Robin Roberts, and Paul Revere and the Raiders, plus many more, and also has the pre-"Louie" "Havana Moon" and "El Loco Cha Cha Cha" The Ultimate Flairs has twenty-nine tracks by the Flairs under various names. Yama Yama! The Modern Recordings 1954-56 contains twenty-eight tracks Richard Berry recorded for Modern Records in the mid-fifties, including the Etta James duets. And Have "Louie" Will Travel collects Berry's post-Modern recordings, including "Louie Louie" itself. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today we're going to look at what is arguably the most important three-chord rock and roll record ever made, a song written by someone who's been a bit-part player in many episodes so far, but who never had any success with it himself, and performed by a band that had split up before the record started to chart. We're going to look at how a minor LA R&B hit was picked up by garage rock bands in the Pacific Northwest and sparked a two-and-a-half-year FBI investigation, and was recorded by everyone from Barry White to Iggy Pop, from Motorhead to the Beach Boys, from Julie London to Frank Zappa. We're going to look at "Louie Louie" by the Kingsmen:   [Excerpt: The Kingsmen, "Louie Louie"] The story of "Louie Louie" begins with Richard Berry. We've seen Berry pop up here and there in several episodes -- most recently in the episode on the Crystals, where we looked at how he'd been involved in the early career of the Blossoms, but the only time he's been a signficant part of the story was in the episode on "The Wallflower", back in March 2019, and even there he wasn't the focus of the episode, so I should start by talking about his career. Some of this will be familiar from other episodes from a year or two ago, but here we're looking at Berry specifically. Richard Berry was one of the many, many, great musicians of the fifties to go to Jefferson High School in Los Angeles, and was very involved in music at that school. When he arrived in the school, he had an aggressive attitude, formed by a need to defend himself -- he walked with a limp, and had first started playing music at a camp for disabled kids, and he didn't want people to think he was soft because of his disability. But as soon as he found out that you had to behave well in order to join the school a capella choir he became a changed character -- he needed to be involved in music. And he soon was. He joined a group named The Flamingos, who were all students at Jefferson and proteges of Jesse Belvin, who was a couple of years older than them. That group consisted of Cornell Gunter on lead vocals, Gaynel Hodge on first tenor, Joe Jefferson on second tenor, Curtis Williams on baritone, and Berry on bass -- though Berry was one of those rare vocalists who could sing equally well in the bass and tenor ranges, and in every style from gritty blues to Jesse Belvin style crooning. But as we've seen before, the membership of these groups was ever changing, and soon Curtis Williams left, first to join the Hollywood Flames, and then to join the Penguins. He was replaced, but Gunter and Berry left soon afterwards, and the remaining members of the band renamed themselves to The Platters. Berry and Gunter joined another group, the Debonairs, which was originally led by Arthur Lee Maye, with whom Berry would make many records over the years in the off-season -- Maye was a major-league baseball player, and couldn't record in the months his main career was taking up his time. Maye soon left the group, and in 1952 The Debonairs, with a lineup of Berry, Gunter, Young Jessie, Thomas Fox and Beverly Thompson, visited John Dolphin and made their first record, for Dolphins of Hollywood. The A-side featured Gunter on lead: [Excerpt: The Hollywood Blue Jays, "I Had a Love"] While the B-side featured Berry: [Excerpt: The Hollywood Blue Jays, "Tell Me You Love Me"] The group were disappointed when the record came out to discover that it wasn't credited to the Debonairs, but instead to the Hollywood Blue Jays, a name Dolphin had also used for other groups. The record didn't have any success, and so the group started looking for other labels that might record them. Cornell Gunter sat down with a pile of records and looked for ones with a label in LA. They decided to go with Modern Records, and ended up signed to Flair records, one of Modern's subsidiaries. The label suggested they change their name to The Flairs, and they eagerly agreed, thinking that if their band had the same name as the label, the label would be more likely to promote them. Their first single for their new label was produced by Leiber and Stoller. One side was a remake of their first single, in better quality, with Gunter again singing lead, while the B-side was another Richard Berry song, "She Wants to Rock": [Excerpt: The Flairs, "She Wants to Rock"] Apparently in 1953, when that came out, the title was still considered racy enough that the DJ Hunter Hancock insisted on them going on his radio show and explaining that by "rock" they merely meant to dance, and not anything more suggestive. Over the next couple of years, the Flairs would record and release tracks under all sorts of names -- as well as many Flairs records they also released tracks as by The Hunters: [Excerpt: The Hunters, "Rabbit on a Log"] as Young Jessie solo records: [Excerpt: Young Jessie, "Lonesome Desert"] And as the Chimes. Several of these records were produced by Ike Turner, who by this point had moved on from working with Sam Phillips and was now working for the Bihari brothers, who owned Modern Records. Berry also released solo recordings, and recorded with a group led by Arthur Lee Maye, first as the Five Hearts (though there were only three of them at the time), then as the Rams, before the group settled down to become Arthur Lee Maye and the Crowns: [Excerpt: Arthur Lee Maye and the Crowns, "Set My Heart Free"] At one point in 1954, Berry was in three groups at the same time. He was in the Flairs, the Crowns, and the Dreamers -- the group who became the Blossoms, who we talked about two weeks ago. And on top of that he was also recording a lot of sessions both as a solo singer, and as a duo with Jenell Hawkins, who also sometimes sang with the Dreamers: [Excerpt: Rickey and Jenelle, "Each Step"] The reason Berry was working on so many records wasn't just that he loved singing, though he did, but because he'd learned from Jesse Belvin that it didn't matter what the contract said, you were never going to get any royalties when you made records. So he sang on as many sessions as he could, pocketed his fifty-dollar fee, and then tried to get on another session. The Flairs eventually got sick of Berry working on so many other people's records and singing with so many groups, and so he was out of the group -- but he just formed his own new group, the Pharaohs, and carried on. The Flairs continued for years, though one at a time they left for other groups -- Thomas Fox joined the Cadets, who had a hit with "Stranded in the Jungle", and most famously, Cornell Gunter went on to join the classic lineup of the Coasters. But Berry actually sang on a Coasters record even before Gunter. As we saw, the first Coasters album was padded out with several singles by the Robins, credited to the Coasters, and one of the sessions that Berry had sung on was the Robins' "Riot in Cell Block #9", where Leiber and Stoller had asked him to sing lead, subbing for the Robins' normal bass singer Bobby Nunn: [Excerpt: The Robins, "Riot in Cell Block #9"] The Bihari brothers were annoyed when they recognised Berry's voice on that record -- he was meant to be under contract to them, and even though he protested that it wasn't him, they knew better. But they got Berry to start a solo career with a sequel to "Riot", "The Big Break", which he wrote himself: [Excerpt: Richard Berry, "The Big Break"] And for the next few years, Berry was promoted as a solo artist, recording songs like the Little Richard knockoff "Yama Yama Pretty Mama": [Excerpt: Richard Berry, "Yama Yama Pretty Mama"] But of course that didn't stop him from working with everyone else he could. Most famously, he was Henry on Etta James' "The Wallflower", which we looked at eighteen months ago: [Excerpt: Etta James and the Peaches, "The Wallflower"] Berry collaborated with James on the sequel, "Hey! Henry", which was less successful: [Excerpt: Etta James, "Hey! Henry"] And he wrote "Good Rockin' Daddy" for her, which made the R&B top ten: [Excerpt: Etta James, "Good Rockin' Daddy"] This is all just scratching the surface. Between 1952 and the early sixties, Berry was on literally hundreds of records, under many names, and it's likely we will never accurately know all of them. A fair number of them were classics of the genre, many more were derivative hackwork -- quick knockoffs of the latest hit by Chuck Berry or Fats Domino, with the serial numbers not filed off all that well -- and more than a few managed to be derivative hackwork *and* classics of the genre. Berry's most famous song, "Louie Louie", was both. There is nothing original about "Louie Louie", yet it had an incalculable effect on popular music history, and Berry's original version is a genuinely great record. The song had its genesis in a piece that Berry heard played as an instrumental by a group he was singing with at a gig one night, the Rhythm Rockers. When he asked them what the song was, he found out it was "El Loco Cha Cha Cha", originally recorded by Rene Touzet. Berry loved the intro for the song, and immediately decided to rip it off: [Excerpt: Rene Touzet, "El Loco Cha Cha Cha"] That song is based around the same three-chord Latin groove as "La Bamba", "Twist and Shout", and roughly a million other songs, and so in keeping with the Latin feel of the song, Berry turned to another record as a model for his song. "Havana Moon" by Chuck Berry was the B-side to "You Can't Catch Me", and Richard Berry took its vocal melody, its lyrical theme of someone drinking while waiting for a ship to arrive and missing a girl who the narrator will see at the end of the boat journey, and its attempt at imitating Caribbean speech patterns by saying things like "Me stand and wait for boat to come": [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "Havana Moon"] Of course, nothing is original, and the Chuck Berry track itself was almost certainly inspired by Nat "King" Cole's "Calypso Blues": [Excerpt: Nat "King" Cole, "Calypso Blues"] Richard Berry took these influences, and turned them into "Louie Louie", which he originally intended to have a Latin feel. But the owners of his record label wanted something more straight-ahead R&B, so that's what they got: [Excerpt: Richard Berry and the Pharaohs, "Louie Louie"] While Berry's inspiration had been based on the I-IV-V-IV chord sequence that you get in "La Bamba", "Louie Louie" didn't actually use that precise sequence. I'm going to get into some music-theory stuff here, which I know some of you like and some of you detest, and so if you dislike that stuff skip forward a couple of minutes. If you take just the "Louie Louie" riff, and play it with the standard I-IV-V-IV chords, you get "Wild Thing": [Excerpt: "Wild Thing" riff, piano] But Berry, in his arrangement, incorporated a second melody part, a little standard motif you get in a lot of blues stuff, the fifth, sixth, flattened seventh, and sixth of the scale, repeating: [Excerpt: motif, piano] The problem is that the normal way to use that motif is over a single chord. Berry was using it over three chords, and the flattened seventh note clashes with the V chord -- if you're playing in C, you've got a G chord, which is the notes G, B, and D, but that little motif has a B-flat note. So you get a B and a B-flat played together, which doesn't sound great: [Excerpt: tonal clash, piano] Now, if you're a rock guitarist from the late sixties onwards, the way you'd resolve that problem is to play power chords -- power chords have just the root and fifth note, no third, so in this case you wouldn't be playing the B. Problem solved. But this was the 1950s, and while there were a handful of records using power chords, when Berry was making his record in 1957, they weren't particularly common. Also, Berry was a piano player rather than a guitarist, and so he went for a different option. Instead of playing the normal V chord, he used the I chord, with a seventh -- so if you were to play it in the key of C, it would be C7 -- but he played it in the second inversion, with the dominant in the bass. So if you were playing it in the key of C, the notes would be G-Bflat-C-E. So the bass riff is still the I-IV-V-IV riff, but the chords sound like this: [Excerpt: "Louie Louie" chords, piano] That wouldn't be the solution that many later cover versions would use, but it worked for Berry's record, which was released as the B-side to a version of "You Are My Sunshine", and became a minor local hit: [Excerpt: Richard Berry and the Pharaohs, "Louie Louie"] By this time, Berry had left Modern Records, and "Louie Louie" was on a small label, Flip Records. Berry was twenty-one, he'd been a professional musician since he was sixteen and was thinking of getting married, and he was making so little money from his music that he took a day job, working at a record-pressing plant, smashing returned records. When "Louie Louie" started getting played on local radio, people started giving him a hard time at work, asking why he needed that job when he had a hit record, not understanding that he was making no money from it. He ended up being treated so badly that he quit that job And Flip Records started pressuring him to make follow-ups to "Louie Louie" rather than do anything new. He did come up with a great follow-up, "Have Love Will Travel", but that wasn't a hit: [Excerpt: Richard Berry and the Pharaohs, "Have Love Will Travel"] He got a few big gigs for a while off the back of his local hit, but he ended up working at the docks with his father -- but he eventually had to quit that because his disability made it impossible for him to do it. In 1959, in order to pay for his wedding, he sold his songwriting rights to "Louie Louie" and several of his other songs to the owner of Flip Records, for $750 -- he wanted to hold out for a full thousand, but he ended up settling for a lower amount. From that point on, he would still get paid his BMI royalties when the song was played on the radio -- you couldn't sell those rights -- but he wouldn't receive anything from record sales or sheet music sales, or use in films, or anything like that. But that didn't matter. A song like "Louie Louie", a three-chord B-side to a flop single from two years earlier, was hardly going to earn any real money, and seven hundred and fifty dollars was a lot of money. Berry was a working man who needed money, and anyway he was moving into soul music. "Louie Louie" was just another song he'd written, no more important than "Look Out Miss James" or "Rockin' Man", and while R&B fans in LA loved it (if you listen to the later version by the Beach Boys, or to Frank Zappa's riffs on the song, you can tell they grew up listening to Berry's original, not the later versions) it wasn't going to ever be heard outside those people. And that would have been true, if it hadn't been for Ron Holden. We've not talked about the Pacific Northwest's music scene in the podcast so far, but it had one of the most vibrant and interesting music scenes in the US in the late fifties and early sixties, and much of the music that gets labelled garage rock or frat rock comes from that area. The closest parallel I can think of is Liverpool -- another place where mostly-white musicians were performing their own versions of music made by Black musicians, and performing it on electric guitars. But anyone who became big from the area immediately moved somewhere else and became "an LA musician" or "a New York musician", and the scene as a whole has never really had the attention it deserves. Ron Holden was one of the few Black musicians in that scene. In fact, he was a second-generation musician -- his father, Oscar Holden, was known as "the father of Seattle jazz", and had played with both Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton. Ron Holden led the most popular band in the Seattle area, the Thunderbirds, and in 1960, he had a top ten hit with a song called "Love You So": [Excerpt: Ron Holden, "Love You So"] He didn't have any follow-up hits, but as every musician from Seattle who had any success did, he moved away. He moved to LA, where he signed to Keen Records, where he recorded an entire album of songs written and produced by Keen's new staff producer Bruce Johnston, including "Gee, But I'm Lonesome", a song which was coincidentally also recorded around that time by Richard Berry's old collaborators the Blossoms: [Excerpt: Ron Holden, "Gee But I'm Lonesome"] Holden was also the MC for the Ritchie Valens Memorial Concert which was the Beach Boys' first major professional live performance. But before he left Seattle, he had introduced "Louie Louie" to the music scene there -- he'd heard it on the radio in 1957 and worked up an arrangement with his band, and it had been a highlight of his shows. Once he left the city, so he wasn't performing the song there, all the white bands in Seattle, and in nearby Tacoma, picked up on the song and added Holden's arrangement of the song to their own sets. Holden -- or rather his saxophone player Carlos Ward, who did the Thunderbirds' arrangements -- had made a crucial change to "Louie Louie", one that made it simpler to play on the guitar, and thus suitable for the guitar-heavy music that was starting to predominate in the Pacific Northwest. Remember that Richard Berry had that second-inversion major seventh chord in there? [Excerpt: "Louie Louie" chords, piano] Ward changed that chord for a simpler minor V chord, just flattening the third so there was no clash there: [Excerpt: "Louie Louie" chords, Pacific Northwest version] That would be how almost every version of "Louie Louie" from this point on would be performed, because it was how they played it in the Pacific Northwest, because it was how Ron Holden and the Thunderbirds played it, and few of those bands had heard Richard Berry's original record, just Ron Holden's live performances of the song. But one band who based their version on Holden's did listen to the original record -- once Holden had brought the song to their attention. The Wailers -- who are often referred to as "the Fabulous Wailers" to distinguish them from Bob Marley's later, more famous group -- were a group from Tacoma, which had a strong instrumental guitar band scene -- most famously, the Ventures came from Tacoma, and a lot of the bands in the area sounded like that.  In 1959, the Wailers recorded a self-penned instrumental, "Tall Cool One", which made the top forty: [Excerpt: The Wailers, "Tall Cool One"] They didn't have any other hits, but soon after recording that, they got in a local singer, Rockin Robin Roberts, who became one of the band's three lead singers. The group had a residence at a local venue, the Spanish Castle, and a live recording of one of their sets there, released as the "Live at the Castle" album, shows that they were a hugely exciting live band: [Excerpt: The Fabulous Wailers, "Since You Been Gone"] The shows at that venue were so good that several years later one of the regular audience members, Jimi Hendrix, would commemorate them in the song "Spanish Castle Magic": [Excerpt: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, "Spanish Castle Magic"] But it was their version of "Louie Louie" that became the template for almost every version that ever followed. For contractual reasons, it was released as a Rockin' Robin Roberts solo record, but it was the full Wailers playing on the track. No-one else in the Pacific Northwest knew what the lyrics were -- they'd all learned it from Ron Holden's live performances, but Roberts had actually tracked down a copy of the Richard Berry record and learned the words. Which, if you look at what happened later, is rather ironic. Their version of the song came out on their own label, and had few sales outside their home area, but it would be one of the most influential records ever, because everyone else in the Pacific Northwest started copying their version, right down to Roberts' ad-libbed shout as they go into the guitar solo: [Excerpt: Rockin' Robin Roberts, "Louie Louie"] The Wailers struggled on for a few more years, but never had any more commercial success. Rockin' Robin Roberts went on to become an associate professor of biochemistry, before dying far too young in a car crash in 1967. But while their version of "Louie Louie" wasn't a hit, a few copies made their way a couple of hours' drive south, to Oregon. Here the story becomes a little difficult, because different people had different recollections of what happened. I'm going to tell one version of the story, but there are others. The story goes that one copy made its way into a jukebox at a club called the Pypo Club, in Seaside, Oregon, a club frequented by surfers. And one day in the early sixties -- people seem to disagree whether it was summer 1961 or 62, two local bands played that club. During the intermission, the audience danced to the music on the jukebox -- indeed, they danced to just one record on the jukebox, over and over. They just kept playing "Louie Louie" by Rockin' Robin Roberts, no other records. Both bands immediately added the song to their sets, and it became a highlight of both band's shows. By far the bigger of the two bands was Paul Revere and the Raiders. The Raiders actually came from Idaho, and had had a top forty hit with "Like, Long Hair" a novelty surf-rock version of a Rachmaninoff piece that Kim Fowley had produced: [Excerpt: Paul Revere and the Raiders, "Like, Long Hair"] But their career had stalled and they had moved to Oregon, because Revere, the group's piano player and leader, had been drafted, and while he was allowed not to serve in the military because of his Mennonite faith, he had to do community service work there for two years instead. The Raiders were undoubtedly the best and most popular band in the Oregon area at the time, and their showmanship was on a whole other level from any other band -- they were one of the first bands to smash their instruments on stage, except they weren't smashing guitars -- Revere would buy cheap second-hand pianos and smash *those* on stage. A local DJ, Roger Hart, had become the group's manager, and he was going to start up his own label, and he wanted them to record "Louie Louie" as the label's first single. Revere wasn't keen -- he didn't like the song much, but Roger Hart insisted. He was sure it could be the hit that would restore the Raiders to the charts. So in April 1963, Paul Revere and the Raiders went into Northwest Recorders in Portland and recorded this: [Excerpt: Paul Revere and the Raiders, "Louie Louie"] Hart paid for the recording session and put the single out on his small label, Sande. It was soon picked up by Columbia Records, who put it out nationally. It started to get a bit of airplay, and started rising up the charts -- it didn't break the Hot One Hundred straight away, but it was clearly heading in the right direction. The Raiders signed to Columbia, and with Hart as their manager and occasional songwriter, and Terry Melcher as their producer, they became one of the biggest bands in the US, and had a string of hits stretching from 1965 to 1971. We won't be doing a full episode on them, but they became an integral part of the LA music scene in the sixties, and they're sure to turn up as background characters in future episodes. But note that I said their run of hits started in 1965. Because there had been two bands playing the Pypo Club, and they had both added "Louie Louie" to their set. And they'd both recorded versions of it in the same studio, in the same week. The Kingsmen were... not as big as the Raiders. They were a bunch of teenagers who had formed a group a few years earlier, and even on a good day they were at best the second-best band in Portland, with the Raiders far, far, ahead. The core of the group was based around the friendship of Jack Ely, the group's lead singer, and Lynn Easton, the drummer, whose parents were friends -- both families were Christian Scientists and actively involved in their local church -- and they had grown up together. Ely's parents didn't encourage the duo's music -- Ely's biological father had been a professional singer, but when the father died and Ely's mother remarried, his stepfather didn't want him to have anything to do with music -- but Easton's did, and Easton's father became the group's manager. Easton's mother even went to the local courthouse to register the group's name for them. Easton's father was replaced as their manager by Ken Chase, the owner of the radio station where Roger Hart was the most popular DJ, and they started pressuring him to make a record with them. Eventually he did -- and he booked them into the same studio as the Raiders, the same week. Different people have different stories about which was first and which was second, but there is no doubt that they were only two days or so apart. And there's also no doubt that they were very different in terms of professionalism.  The Kingsmen did their best to copy the Rockin' Robin Roberts version, right down to his shout of "Let's give it to them right now!" but it was shockingly amateurish. The night before, they'd done a live show which consisted of a single ninety-minute-long performance of "Louie Louie" with no breaks, and Ely's voice was shot. The mic was positioned too high for him and he had to strain his throat, and his braces were also making him slur the words. At one point early in the song, Easton clicks his drumsticks together by accident, and yells an obscenity loud enough to be captured on the tape: [Excerpt: The Kingsmen, "Louie Louie"] After the solo, Ely comes back in, wrongly thinks he's come in in the wrong place, and stops, leaving Easton to quickly improvise a drum fill before they pick up again: [Excerpt: The Kingsmen, "Louie Louie"] The difference with the Raiders can be summed up most succinctly by what happened next -- the Raiders' manager paid for their session, but when the engineer at this session asked who was paying, and the Kingsmen pointed to their manager, he said "No, I'm not. I've not got any money", and the members of the group had to dig through their pockets to get together the fifty dollars themselves. It's incompetent teenagers, who have no idea what they're doing, and it would become one of the most important records of all time. But when it was released... well, it was the second-best version of "Louie Louie" recorded in Portland that week, so while the Raiders were selling thousands, the Kingsmen only sold a couple of hundred copies. Jerry Dennon, the owner of the tiny label that released it, tried to get it picked up by Capitol Records, who rejected it saying it was the worst garbage they'd ever heard. He also sent it out to bigger indie labels, like Scepter, who stuck it in a drawer and forgot about it. And that was basically the end of the Kingsmen. In August, Easton decided that he was going to stop being the drummer and be the lead singer instead -- he told Ely that Ely was going to be the drummer now. The other band members were astonished, because Easton couldn't sing and Ely couldn't play the drums, and they said that wasn't going to happen. Easton then played his trump card -- when his mother had registered the band name, she'd registered it just in his name. If they didn't do things his way, they weren't going to be in the Kingsmen any more, and he was going to find new Kingsmen to replace them. Ely and a couple of other members quit, and that was the end of the group. And then, in October, as the Raiders' record was still slowly making some national progress, Arnie "Woo Woo" Ginsburg heard the Kingsmen's version. This Arnie Ginsburg isn't the Arnie Ginsburg we heard about in the episode on "LSD-25", and who we'll be meeting again briefly next week. This one was a DJ in Boston, and the most popular DJ in the area. And he *hated* the record. He hated it so much, he played it on his show, because he had a slot called The Worst Record Of The Week. He played it twice, and the next day, he had fifty calls from record shops -- customers had been coming in wanting to know where they could get "Louie Louie". Marv Schlachter at Scepter heard from the distributors how well the record was doing and picked it up for national distribution on their Wand subsidiary. In its first week on Wand, the single sold twenty-one thousand copies in Boston. [Excerpt: The Kingsmen, "Louie Louie"] For a few weeks, the Raiders and the Kingsmen both hung around the "bubbling under" section of the charts -- the Raiders selling and being played on the West Coast, and the Kingsmen on the East. By the ninth of November, the Kingsmen were at eighty-three in the charts, while the Raiders were at 108. By December the fourteenth, the Kingsmen were at number two, behind "Dominique" by the Singing Nun, a Belgian nun singing in French: [Excerpt: The Singing Nun, "Dominique"] You might think that there could not be two more different records at the top of the charts, and you'd mostly be right, but there was one thing that linked them -- the Singing Nun's song had a chorus that went "Dominique, nique, nique", and one of the reasons it had become popular was that in France, but not in Belgium where she lived, "nique" was a swear word, an expletive meaning "to fornicate", roughly the French equivalent of the word that Lynn Easton shouted when he clicked his drumsticks together. So a big part of its initial popularity was because of people finding an obscene meaning in the lyrics that simply wasn't there. And that was true of "Louie Louie" as well. Jack Ely had slurred the lyrics so badly that people started imagining that there must be dirty words in there, because otherwise why wouldn't he be singing it clearly? People started passing notes in schools and colleges, saying what the lyrics "really" were -- apparently you had to play the single at 33RPM to hear them properly.  These lyrics never made any actual sense, but they were things like "We'll take her and park all alone/She's never a girl I lay at home/At night at ten I lay her again" and "on that chair I'll lay her there/I felt my boner in her hair" -- the kind of thing, in short, that kids make up all the time. So obviously, they were reported to the FBI. And obviously the FBI spent two years investigating the song: [Excerpt: The Kingsmen, "Louie Louie"] They checked it anyway, of course, and reported "A comparison was made of the recording on the tape described above as specimen K1 with the recording on the disk, submitted by the Detroit Office and described as specimen Q3 in this case and no audible differences were noted." On the FBI website, you can read 119 pages of memos from FBI agents (with various bits blacked out for security reasons), and read about them shipping copies of "Louie Louie" to labs (under special seal, in case they'd be violating laws about transferring obscene material across state lines and breaking the very law they were investigating), listening to the record at 33, 45, and 78 RPM and trying to see if they could make out the lyrics, comparing them to the published words, to the various samizdat versions being shared by kids, and to Berry's record, and destroying the records after listening. They interviewed members of the Kingsmen and DJs, and they went to Scepter Records to get a copy of the original master tape, which they were surprised to discover was mono so left them no way of isolating the vocals. Meanwhile they were getting letters from concerned citizens doing things like playing the single at 78 RPM, making a tape recording of that at double speed, and then slowing it down, saying "at that speed the obscene articulation is clearer". This went on for two years. At no point does any of these highly trained FBI agents listening over and over to "Louie Louie" at different speeds appear to have heard Lynn Easton's yelled expletive, which unlike all these other things is actually on the record. Meanwhile, the Kingsmen went on to have one more top twenty hit, with only Easton and the lead guitarist left of the original lineup, and then continued to tour playing their hit. Jack Ely toured solo playing his one hit. The most successful member of the group was Don Gallucci, the keyboard player, who formed Don and the Goodtimes, who had a minor hit with "I Could Be So Good To You": [Excerpt: Don and the Goodtimes, "I Could Be So Good To You"] Gallucci went on to produce Fun House for the Stooges, who would also of course later record their own version of "Louie Louie", in which they sung those dirty lyrics: [Excerpt: the Stooges, "Louie Louie"] But then, nearly everyone did a version of the song -- there are at least two thousand recordings of it. But, other than from radio play, Richard Berry was receiving no money from any of these. After his marriage ended, he'd quit working as a musician to raise his daughter, gone back to school, and taken a day job -- but then he'd been further disabled in an accident and had ended up on welfare, while his song was making millions for the people who'd bought it from him for seven hundred and fifty dollars. He didn't even understand why the song was popular -- the only version that sounded like the record he'd wanted to make was the one by Barry White, another ex-Jefferson High student, who'd added the Latin percussion Berry had wanted to put on before he'd been told to make it more R&B. But in the eighties, things started to change. Some radio stations started doing all-Louie weekends, where for a whole weekend they'd just play different versions of the song, never repeating one. One of those stations invited Berry to do a live performance of the song with Jack Ely, backed by Bo Diddley's former rhythm player Lady Bo and her band: [Excerpt: Richard Berry and Jack Ely, "Louie Louie"] That was the first time Berry ever met the man who'd made his song famous. Soon after that, Berry's old friend Darlene Love, who had been one of the Dreamers who'd sung with Berry back in the fifties, introduced him to the man who would change his life -- Chuck Rubin. Rubin had, in the seventies, been the manager of the blues singer Wilbur Harrison, and had realised that not only was Harrison not getting any money from his old recordings, nor were many other Black musicians. He'd seen a business opportunity, and had started a company that helped get those artists what they deserved -- along with giving himself fifty percent of whatever they made. Which seems like a lot, but many people, including Berry, figured that fifty percent of a fortune was better than the hundred percent of nothing they were currently getting. Most of these artists had signed legally valid bad deals, which meant that while they were morally entitled to something, they weren't legally entitled. But Rubin had a way of getting round that, and he did the same thing with Berry that he did with many other people. He kept starting lawsuits that put off potential business partners, and in 1986 a company wanted to use "Louie Louie" in a TV advertising campaign that would earn huge amounts of money for its owners -- but they didn't want to use a song that was tied up in litigation. If the legal problems weren't sorted, they'd just use "Wild Thing" instead. In order to make sure the commercials used "Louie Louie", the song's owner gave Berry half the publishing rights and full songwriting rights (which Berry then split with Rubin). He didn't get any back payment from what the song had already earned, but he went from getting $240 a month on welfare in 1985, to making $160,000 from "Louie Louie" in 1989 alone. Richard Berry died in 1997, happy, respected, and wealthy. In the last decade of his life people started to explore his music again, and give him some of the credit he was due. Jack Ely continued performing "Louie Louie" until his death in 2015. Lynn Easton quit music in 1968, giving the Kingsmen's name to the lead guitarist Mike Mitchell, the only other original member still in the band. Easton died in April this year -- no-one's sure what of, as his religious beliefs meant he never saw a doctor. Mitchell's lineup of Kingsmen continued to perform until covid happened, and will presumably do so again once the pandemic is over. And somewhere out there, whenever you're listening to this, someone will be playing "duh-duh-duh, duh-duh, duh-duh-duh"

Episode 106 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Louie Louie” by the Kingsmen, and the story of how a band that had already split up accidentally had one of the biggest hits of the sixties and sparked a two-year FBI investigation. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have an eight-minute bonus episode available, on “It’s My Party” by Lesley Gore. 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 As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. The single biggest resource I used in this episode was Dave Marsh’s book on Louie Louie. Information on Richard Berry also came from Marv Goldberg’s page, specifically his articles on the Flairs and Arthur Lee Maye and the Crowns.  This academic paper on the song is where I learned what the chord Richard Berry uses instead of the V is. The Coasters by Bill Millar also had some information about Berry. Love That Louie: The Louie Louie Files has the versions of the song by the Kingsmen, Berry, Rockin’ Robin Roberts, and Paul Revere and the Raiders, plus many more, and also has the pre-“Louie” “Havana Moon” and “El Loco Cha Cha Cha” The Ultimate Flairs has twenty-nine tracks by the Flairs under various names. Yama Yama! The Modern Recordings 1954-56 contains twenty-eight tracks Richard Berry recorded for Modern Records in the mid-fifties, including the Etta James duets. And Have “Louie” Will Travel collects Berry’s post-Modern recordings, including “Louie Louie” itself. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today we’re going to look at what is arguably the most important three-chord rock and roll record ever made, a song written by someone who’s been a bit-part player in many episodes so far, but who never had any success with it himself, and performed by a band that had split up before the record started to chart. We’re going to look at how a minor LA R&B hit was picked up by garage rock bands in the Pacific Northwest and sparked a two-and-a-half-year FBI investigation, and was recorded by everyone from Barry White to Iggy Pop, from Motorhead to the Beach Boys, from Julie London to Frank Zappa. We’re going to look at “Louie Louie” by the Kingsmen:   [Excerpt: The Kingsmen, “Louie Louie”] The story of “Louie Louie” begins with Richard Berry. We’ve seen Berry pop up here and there in several episodes — most recently in the episode on the Crystals, where we looked at how he’d been involved in the early career of the Blossoms, but the only time he’s been a signficant part of the story was in the episode on “The Wallflower”, back in March 2019, and even there he wasn’t the focus of the episode, so I should start by talking about his career. Some of this will be familiar from other episodes from a year or two ago, but here we’re looking at Berry specifically. Richard Berry was one of the many, many, great musicians of the fifties to go to Jefferson High School in Los Angeles, and was very involved in music at that school. When he arrived in the school, he had an aggressive attitude, formed by a need to defend himself — he walked with a limp, and had first started playing music at a camp for disabled kids, and he didn’t want people to think he was soft because of his disability. But as soon as he found out that you had to behave well in order to join the school a capella choir he became a changed character — he needed to be involved in music. And he soon was. He joined a group named The Flamingos, who were all students at Jefferson and proteges of Jesse Belvin, who was a couple of years older than them. That group consisted of Cornell Gunter on lead vocals, Gaynel Hodge on first tenor, Joe Jefferson on second tenor, Curtis Williams on baritone, and Berry on bass — though Berry was one of those rare vocalists who could sing equally well in the bass and tenor ranges, and in every style from gritty blues to Jesse Belvin style crooning. But as we’ve seen before, the membership of these groups was ever changing, and soon Curtis Williams left, first to join the Hollywood Flames, and then to join the Penguins. He was replaced, but Gunter and Berry left soon afterwards, and the remaining members of the band renamed themselves to The Platters. Berry and Gunter joined another group, the Debonairs, which was originally led by Arthur Lee Maye, with whom Berry would make many records over the years in the off-season — Maye was a major-league baseball player, and couldn’t record in the months his main career was taking up his time. Maye soon left the group, and in 1952 The Debonairs, with a lineup of Berry, Gunter, Young Jessie, Thomas Fox and Beverly Thompson, visited John Dolphin and made their first record, for Dolphins of Hollywood. The A-side featured Gunter on lead: [Excerpt: The Hollywood Blue Jays, “I Had a Love”] While the B-side featured Berry: [Excerpt: The Hollywood Blue Jays, “Tell Me You Love Me”] The group were disappointed when the record came out to discover that it wasn’t credited to the Debonairs, but instead to the Hollywood Blue Jays, a name Dolphin had also used for other groups. The record didn’t have any success, and so the group started looking for other labels that might record them. Cornell Gunter sat down with a pile of records and looked for ones with a label in LA. They decided to go with Modern Records, and ended up signed to Flair records, one of Modern’s subsidiaries. The label suggested they change their name to The Flairs, and they eagerly agreed, thinking that if their band had the same name as the label, the label would be more likely to promote them. Their first single for their new label was produced by Leiber and Stoller. One side was a remake of their first single, in better quality, with Gunter again singing lead, while the B-side was another Richard Berry song, “She Wants to Rock”: [Excerpt: The Flairs, “She Wants to Rock”] Apparently in 1953, when that came out, the title was still considered racy enough that the DJ Hunter Hancock insisted on them going on his radio show and explaining that by “rock” they merely meant to dance, and not anything more suggestive. Over the next couple of years, the Flairs would record and release tracks under all sorts of names — as well as many Flairs records they also released tracks as by The Hunters: [Excerpt: The Hunters, “Rabbit on a Log”] as Young Jessie solo records: [Excerpt: Young Jessie, “Lonesome Desert”] And as the Chimes. Several of these records were produced by Ike Turner, who by this point had moved on from working with Sam Phillips and was now working for the Bihari brothers, who owned Modern Records. Berry also released solo recordings, and recorded with a group led by Arthur Lee Maye, first as the Five Hearts (though there were only three of them at the time), then as the Rams, before the group settled down to become Arthur Lee Maye and the Crowns: [Excerpt: Arthur Lee Maye and the Crowns, “Set My Heart Free”] At one point in 1954, Berry was in three groups at the same time. He was in the Flairs, the Crowns, and the Dreamers — the group who became the Blossoms, who we talked about two weeks ago. And on top of that he was also recording a lot of sessions both as a solo singer, and as a duo with Jenell Hawkins, who also sometimes sang with the Dreamers: [Excerpt: Rickey and Jenelle, “Each Step”] The reason Berry was working on so many records wasn’t just that he loved singing, though he did, but because he’d learned from Jesse Belvin that it didn’t matter what the contract said, you were never going to get any royalties when you made records. So he sang on as many sessions as he could, pocketed his fifty-dollar fee, and then tried to get on another session. The Flairs eventually got sick of Berry working on so many other people’s records and singing with so many groups, and so he was out of the group — but he just formed his own new group, the Pharaohs, and carried on. The Flairs continued for years, though one at a time they left for other groups — Thomas Fox joined the Cadets, who had a hit with “Stranded in the Jungle”, and most famously, Cornell Gunter went on to join the classic lineup of the Coasters. But Berry actually sang on a Coasters record even before Gunter. As we saw, the first Coasters album was padded out with several singles by the Robins, credited to the Coasters, and one of the sessions that Berry had sung on was the Robins’ “Riot in Cell Block #9”, where Leiber and Stoller had asked him to sing lead, subbing for the Robins’ normal bass singer Bobby Nunn: [Excerpt: The Robins, “Riot in Cell Block #9”] The Bihari brothers were annoyed when they recognised Berry’s voice on that record — he was meant to be under contract to them, and even though he protested that it wasn’t him, they knew better. But they got Berry to start a solo career with a sequel to “Riot”, “The Big Break”, which he wrote himself: [Excerpt: Richard Berry, “The Big Break”] And for the next few years, Berry was promoted as a solo artist, recording songs like the Little Richard knockoff “Yama Yama Pretty Mama”: [Excerpt: Richard Berry, “Yama Yama Pretty Mama”] But of course that didn’t stop him from working with everyone else he could. Most famously, he was Henry on Etta James’ “The Wallflower”, which we looked at eighteen months ago: [Excerpt: Etta James and the Peaches, “The Wallflower”] Berry collaborated with James on the sequel, “Hey! Henry”, which was less successful: [Excerpt: Etta James, “Hey! Henry”] And he wrote “Good Rockin’ Daddy” for her, which made the R&B top ten: [Excerpt: Etta James, “Good Rockin’ Daddy”] This is all just scratching the surface. Between 1952 and the early sixties, Berry was on literally hundreds of records, under many names, and it’s likely we will never accurately know all of them. A fair number of them were classics of the genre, many more were derivative hackwork — quick knockoffs of the latest hit by Chuck Berry or Fats Domino, with the serial numbers not filed off all that well — and more than a few managed to be derivative hackwork *and* classics of the genre. Berry’s most famous song, “Louie Louie”, was both. There is nothing original about “Louie Louie”, yet it had an incalculable effect on popular music history, and Berry’s original version is a genuinely great record. The song had its genesis in a piece that Berry heard played as an instrumental by a group he was singing with at a gig one night, the Rhythm Rockers. When he asked them what the song was, he found out it was “El Loco Cha Cha Cha”, originally recorded by Rene Touzet. Berry loved the intro for the song, and immediately decided to rip it off: [Excerpt: Rene Touzet, “El Loco Cha Cha Cha”] That song is based around the same three-chord Latin groove as “La Bamba”, “Twist and Shout”, and roughly a million other songs, and so in keeping with the Latin feel of the song, Berry turned to another record as a model for his song. “Havana Moon” by Chuck Berry was the B-side to “You Can’t Catch Me”, and Richard Berry took its vocal melody, its lyrical theme of someone drinking while waiting for a ship to arrive and missing a girl who the narrator will see at the end of the boat journey, and its attempt at imitating Caribbean speech patterns by saying things like “Me stand and wait for boat to come”: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Havana Moon”] Of course, nothing is original, and the Chuck Berry track itself was almost certainly inspired by Nat “King” Cole’s “Calypso Blues”: [Excerpt: Nat “King” Cole, “Calypso Blues”] Richard Berry took these influences, and turned them into “Louie Louie”, which he originally intended to have a Latin feel. But the owners of his record label wanted something more straight-ahead R&B, so that’s what they got: [Excerpt: Richard Berry and the Pharaohs, “Louie Louie”] While Berry’s inspiration had been based on the I-IV-V-IV chord sequence that you get in “La Bamba”, “Louie Louie” didn’t actually use that precise sequence. I’m going to get into some music-theory stuff here, which I know some of you like and some of you detest, and so if you dislike that stuff skip forward a couple of minutes. If you take just the “Louie Louie” riff, and play it with the standard I-IV-V-IV chords, you get “Wild Thing”: [Excerpt: “Wild Thing” riff, piano] But Berry, in his arrangement, incorporated a second melody part, a little standard motif you get in a lot of blues stuff, the fifth, sixth, flattened seventh, and sixth of the scale, repeating: [Excerpt: motif, piano] The problem is that the normal way to use that motif is over a single chord. Berry was using it over three chords, and the flattened seventh note clashes with the V chord — if you’re playing in C, you’ve got a G chord, which is the notes G, B, and D, but that little motif has a B-flat note. So you get a B and a B-flat played together, which doesn’t sound great: [Excerpt: tonal clash, piano] Now, if you’re a rock guitarist from the late sixties onwards, the way you’d resolve that problem is to play power chords — power chords have just the root and fifth note, no third, so in this case you wouldn’t be playing the B. Problem solved. But this was the 1950s, and while there were a handful of records using power chords, when Berry was making his record in 1957, they weren’t particularly common. Also, Berry was a piano player rather than a guitarist, and so he went for a different option. Instead of playing the normal V chord, he used the I chord, with a seventh — so if you were to play it in the key of C, it would be C7 — but he played it in the second inversion, with the dominant in the bass. So if you were playing it in the key of C, the notes would be G-Bflat-C-E. So the bass riff is still the I-IV-V-IV riff, but the chords sound like this: [Excerpt: “Louie Louie” chords, piano] That wouldn’t be the solution that many later cover versions would use, but it worked for Berry’s record, which was released as the B-side to a version of “You Are My Sunshine”, and became a minor local hit: [Excerpt: Richard Berry and the Pharaohs, “Louie Louie”] By this time, Berry had left Modern Records, and “Louie Louie” was on a small label, Flip Records. Berry was twenty-one, he’d been a professional musician since he was sixteen and was thinking of getting married, and he was making so little money from his music that he took a day job, working at a record-pressing plant, smashing returned records. When “Louie Louie” started getting played on local radio, people started giving him a hard time at work, asking why he needed that job when he had a hit record, not understanding that he was making no money from it. He ended up being treated so badly that he quit that job And Flip Records started pressuring him to make follow-ups to “Louie Louie” rather than do anything new. He did come up with a great follow-up, “Have Love Will Travel”, but that wasn’t a hit: [Excerpt: Richard Berry and the Pharaohs, “Have Love Will Travel”] He got a few big gigs for a while off the back of his local hit, but he ended up working at the docks with his father — but he eventually had to quit that because his disability made it impossible for him to do it. In 1959, in order to pay for his wedding, he sold his songwriting rights to “Louie Louie” and several of his other songs to the owner of Flip Records, for $750 — he wanted to hold out for a full thousand, but he ended up settling for a lower amount. From that point on, he would still get paid his BMI royalties when the song was played on the radio — you couldn’t sell those rights — but he wouldn’t receive anything from record sales or sheet music sales, or use in films, or anything like that. But that didn’t matter. A song like “Louie Louie”, a three-chord B-side to a flop single from two years earlier, was hardly going to earn any real money, and seven hundred and fifty dollars was a lot of money. Berry was a working man who needed money, and anyway he was moving into soul music. “Louie Louie” was just another song he’d written, no more important than “Look Out Miss James” or “Rockin’ Man”, and while R&B fans in LA loved it (if you listen to the later version by the Beach Boys, or to Frank Zappa’s riffs on the song, you can tell they grew up listening to Berry’s original, not the later versions) it wasn’t going to ever be heard outside those people. And that would have been true, if it hadn’t been for Ron Holden. We’ve not talked about the Pacific Northwest’s music scene in the podcast so far, but it had one of the most vibrant and interesting music scenes in the US in the late fifties and early sixties, and much of the music that gets labelled garage rock or frat rock comes from that area. The closest parallel I can think of is Liverpool — another place where mostly-white musicians were performing their own versions of music made by Black musicians, and performing it on electric guitars. But anyone who became big from the area immediately moved somewhere else and became “an LA musician” or “a New York musician”, and the scene as a whole has never really had the attention it deserves. Ron Holden was one of the few Black musicians in that scene. In fact, he was a second-generation musician — his father, Oscar Holden, was known as “the father of Seattle jazz”, and had played with both Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton. Ron Holden led the most popular band in the Seattle area, the Thunderbirds, and in 1960, he had a top ten hit with a song called “Love You So”: [Excerpt: Ron Holden, “Love You So”] He didn’t have any follow-up hits, but as every musician from Seattle who had any success did, he moved away. He moved to LA, where he signed to Keen Records, where he recorded an entire album of songs written and produced by Keen’s new staff producer Bruce Johnston, including “Gee, But I’m Lonesome”, a song which was coincidentally also recorded around that time by Richard Berry’s old collaborators the Blossoms: [Excerpt: Ron Holden, “Gee But I’m Lonesome”] Holden was also the MC for the Ritchie Valens Memorial Concert which was the Beach Boys’ first major professional live performance. But before he left Seattle, he had introduced “Louie Louie” to the music scene there — he’d heard it on the radio in 1957 and worked up an arrangement with his band, and it had been a highlight of his shows. Once he left the city, so he wasn’t performing the song there, all the white bands in Seattle, and in nearby Tacoma, picked up on the song and added Holden’s arrangement of the song to their own sets. Holden — or rather his saxophone player Carlos Ward, who did the Thunderbirds’ arrangements — had made a crucial change to “Louie Louie”, one that made it simpler to play on the guitar, and thus suitable for the guitar-heavy music that was starting to predominate in the Pacific Northwest. Remember that Richard Berry had that second-inversion major seventh chord in there? [Excerpt: “Louie Louie” chords, piano] Ward changed that chord for a simpler minor V chord, just flattening the third so there was no clash there: [Excerpt: “Louie Louie” chords, Pacific Northwest version] That would be how almost every version of “Louie Louie” from this point on would be performed, because it was how they played it in the Pacific Northwest, because it was how Ron Holden and the Thunderbirds played it, and few of those bands had heard Richard Berry’s original record, just Ron Holden’s live performances of the song. But one band who based their version on Holden’s did listen to the original record — once Holden had brought the song to their attention. The Wailers — who are often referred to as “the Fabulous Wailers” to distinguish them from Bob Marley’s later, more famous group — were a group from Tacoma, which had a strong instrumental guitar band scene — most famously, the Ventures came from Tacoma, and a lot of the bands in the area sounded like that.  In 1959, the Wailers recorded a self-penned instrumental, “Tall Cool One”, which made the top forty: [Excerpt: The Wailers, “Tall Cool One”] They didn’t have any other hits, but soon after recording that, they got in a local singer, Rockin Robin Roberts, who became one of the band’s three lead singers. The group had a residence at a local venue, the Spanish Castle, and a live recording of one of their sets there, released as the “Live at the Castle” album, shows that they were a hugely exciting live band: [Excerpt: The Fabulous Wailers, “Since You Been Gone”] The shows at that venue were so good that several years later one of the regular audience members, Jimi Hendrix, would commemorate them in the song “Spanish Castle Magic”: [Excerpt: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, “Spanish Castle Magic”] But it was their version of “Louie Louie” that became the template for almost every version that ever followed. For contractual reasons, it was released as a Rockin’ Robin Roberts solo record, but it was the full Wailers playing on the track. No-one else in the Pacific Northwest knew what the lyrics were — they’d all learned it from Ron Holden’s live performances, but Roberts had actually tracked down a copy of the Richard Berry record and learned the words. Which, if you look at what happened later, is rather ironic. Their version of the song came out on their own label, and had few sales outside their home area, but it would be one of the most influential records ever, because everyone else in the Pacific Northwest started copying their version, right down to Roberts’ ad-libbed shout as they go into the guitar solo: [Excerpt: Rockin’ Robin Roberts, “Louie Louie”] The Wailers struggled on for a few more years, but never had any more commercial success. Rockin’ Robin Roberts went on to become an associate professor of biochemistry, before dying far too young in a car crash in 1967. But while their version of “Louie Louie” wasn’t a hit, a few copies made their way a couple of hours’ drive south, to Oregon. Here the story becomes a little difficult, because different people had different recollections of what happened. I’m going to tell one version of the story, but there are others. The story goes that one copy made its way into a jukebox at a club called the Pypo Club, in Seaside, Oregon, a club frequented by surfers. And one day in the early sixties — people seem to disagree whether it was summer 1961 or 62, two local bands played that club. During the intermission, the audience danced to the music on the jukebox — indeed, they danced to just one record on the jukebox, over and over. They just kept playing “Louie Louie” by Rockin’ Robin Roberts, no other records. Both bands immediately added the song to their sets, and it became a highlight of both band’s shows. By far the bigger of the two bands was Paul Revere and the Raiders. The Raiders actually came from Idaho, and had had a top forty hit with “Like, Long Hair” a novelty surf-rock version of a Rachmaninoff piece that Kim Fowley had produced: [Excerpt: Paul Revere and the Raiders, “Like, Long Hair”] But their career had stalled and they had moved to Oregon, because Revere, the group’s piano player and leader, had been drafted, and while he was allowed not to serve in the military because of his Mennonite faith, he had to do community service work there for two years instead. The Raiders were undoubtedly the best and most popular band in the Oregon area at the time, and their showmanship was on a whole other level from any other band — they were one of the first bands to smash their instruments on stage, except they weren’t smashing guitars — Revere would buy cheap second-hand pianos and smash *those* on stage. A local DJ, Roger Hart, had become the group’s manager, and he was going to start up his own label, and he wanted them to record “Louie Louie” as the label’s first single. Revere wasn’t keen — he didn’t like the song much, but Roger Hart insisted. He was sure it could be the hit that would restore the Raiders to the charts. So in April 1963, Paul Revere and the Raiders went into Northwest Recorders in Portland and recorded this: [Excerpt: Paul Revere and the Raiders, “Louie Louie”] Hart paid for the recording session and put the single out on his small label, Sande. It was soon picked up by Columbia Records, who put it out nationally. It started to get a bit of airplay, and started rising up the charts — it didn’t break the Hot One Hundred straight away, but it was clearly heading in the right direction. The Raiders signed to Columbia, and with Hart as their manager and occasional songwriter, and Terry Melcher as their producer, they became one of the biggest bands in the US, and had a string of hits stretching from 1965 to 1971. We won’t be doing a full episode on them, but they became an integral part of the LA music scene in the sixties, and they’re sure to turn up as background characters in future episodes. But note that I said their run of hits started in 1965. Because there had been two bands playing the Pypo Club, and they had both added “Louie Louie” to their set. And they’d both recorded versions of it in the same studio, in the same week. The Kingsmen were… not as big as the Raiders. They were a bunch of teenagers who had formed a group a few years earlier, and even on a good day they were at best the second-best band in Portland, with the Raiders far, far, ahead. The core of the group was based around the friendship of Jack Ely, the group’s lead singer, and Lynn Easton, the drummer, whose parents were friends — both families were Christian Scientists and actively involved in their local church — and they had grown up together. Ely’s parents didn’t encourage the duo’s music — Ely’s biological father had been a professional singer, but when the father died and Ely’s mother remarried, his stepfather didn’t want him to have anything to do with music — but Easton’s did, and Easton’s father became the group’s manager. Easton’s mother even went to the local courthouse to register the group’s name for them. Easton’s father was replaced as their manager by Ken Chase, the owner of the radio station where Roger Hart was the most popular DJ, and they started pressuring him to make a record with them. Eventually he did — and he booked them into the same studio as the Raiders, the same week. Different people have different stories about which was first and which was second, but there is no doubt that they were only two days or so apart. And there’s also no doubt that they were very different in terms of professionalism.  The Kingsmen did their best to copy the Rockin’ Robin Roberts version, right down to his shout of “Let’s give it to them right now!” but it was shockingly amateurish. The night before, they’d done a live show which consisted of a single ninety-minute-long performance of “Louie Louie” with no breaks, and Ely’s voice was shot. The mic was positioned too high for him and he had to strain his throat, and his braces were also making him slur the words. At one point early in the song, Easton clicks his drumsticks together by accident, and yells an obscenity loud enough to be captured on the tape: [Excerpt: The Kingsmen, “Louie Louie”] After the solo, Ely comes back in, wrongly thinks he’s come in in the wrong place, and stops, leaving Easton to quickly improvise a drum fill before they pick up again: [Excerpt: The Kingsmen, “Louie Louie”] The difference with the Raiders can be summed up most succinctly by what happened next — the Raiders’ manager paid for their session, but when the engineer at this session asked who was paying, and the Kingsmen pointed to their manager, he said “No, I’m not. I’ve not got any money”, and the members of the group had to dig through their pockets to get together the fifty dollars themselves. It’s incompetent teenagers, who have no idea what they’re doing, and it would become one of the most important records of all time. But when it was released… well, it was the second-best version of “Louie Louie” recorded in Portland that week, so while the Raiders were selling thousands, the Kingsmen only sold a couple of hundred copies. Jerry Dennon, the owner of the tiny label that released it, tried to get it picked up by Capitol Records, who rejected it saying it was the worst garbage they’d ever heard. He also sent it out to bigger indie labels, like Scepter, who stuck it in a drawer and forgot about it. And that was basically the end of the Kingsmen. In August, Easton decided that he was going to stop being the drummer and be the lead singer instead — he told Ely that Ely was going to be the drummer now. The other band members were astonished, because Easton couldn’t sing and Ely couldn’t play the drums, and they said that wasn’t going to happen. Easton then played his trump card — when his mother had registered the band name, she’d registered it just in his name. If they didn’t do things his way, they weren’t going to be in the Kingsmen any more, and he was going to find new Kingsmen to replace them. Ely and a couple of other members quit, and that was the end of the group. And then, in October, as the Raiders’ record was still slowly making some national progress, Arnie “Woo Woo” Ginsburg heard the Kingsmen’s version. This Arnie Ginsburg isn’t the Arnie Ginsburg we heard about in the episode on “LSD-25”, and who we’ll be meeting again briefly next week. This one was a DJ in Boston, and the most popular DJ in the area. And he *hated* the record. He hated it so much, he played it on his show, because he had a slot called The Worst Record Of The Week. He played it twice, and the next day, he had fifty calls from record shops — customers had been coming in wanting to know where they could get “Louie Louie”. Marv Schlachter at Scepter heard from the distributors how well the record was doing and picked it up for national distribution on their Wand subsidiary. In its first week on Wand, the single sold twenty-one thousand copies in Boston. [Excerpt: The Kingsmen, “Louie Louie”] For a few weeks, the Raiders and the Kingsmen both hung around the “bubbling under” section of the charts — the Raiders selling and being played on the West Coast, and the Kingsmen on the East. By the ninth of November, the Kingsmen were at eighty-three in the charts, while the Raiders were at 108. By December the fourteenth, the Kingsmen were at number two, behind “Dominique” by the Singing Nun, a Belgian nun singing in French: [Excerpt: The Singing Nun, “Dominique”] You might think that there could not be two more different records at the top of the charts, and you’d mostly be right, but there was one thing that linked them — the Singing Nun’s song had a chorus that went “Dominique, nique, nique”, and one of the reasons it had become popular was that in France, but not in Belgium where she lived, “nique” was a swear word, an expletive meaning “to fornicate”, roughly the French equivalent of the word that Lynn Easton shouted when he clicked his drumsticks together. So a big part of its initial popularity was because of people finding an obscene meaning in the lyrics that simply wasn’t there. And that was true of “Louie Louie” as well. Jack Ely had slurred the lyrics so badly that people started imagining that there must be dirty words in there, because otherwise why wouldn’t he be singing it clearly? People started passing notes in schools and colleges, saying what the lyrics “really” were — apparently you had to play the single at 33RPM to hear them properly.  These lyrics never made any actual sense, but they were things like “We’ll take her and park all alone/She’s never a girl I lay at home/At night at ten I lay her again” and “on that chair I’ll lay her there/I felt my boner in her hair” — the kind of thing, in short, that kids make up all the time. So obviously, they were reported to the FBI. And obviously the FBI spent two years investigating the song: [Excerpt: The Kingsmen, “Louie Louie”] They checked it anyway, of course, and reported “A comparison was made of the recording on the tape described above as specimen K1 with the recording on the disk, submitted by the Detroit Office and described as specimen Q3 in this case and no audible differences were noted.” On the FBI website, you can read 119 pages of memos from FBI agents (with various bits blacked out for security reasons), and read about them shipping copies of “Louie Louie” to labs (under special seal, in case they’d be violating laws about transferring obscene material across state lines and breaking the very law they were investigating), listening to the record at 33, 45, and 78 RPM and trying to see if they could make out the lyrics, comparing them to the published words, to the various samizdat versions being shared by kids, and to Berry’s record, and destroying the records after listening. They interviewed members of the Kingsmen and DJs, and they went to Scepter Records to get a copy of the original master tape, which they were surprised to discover was mono so left them no way of isolating the vocals. Meanwhile they were getting letters from concerned citizens doing things like playing the single at 78 RPM, making a tape recording of that at double speed, and then slowing it down, saying “at that speed the obscene articulation is clearer”. This went on for two years. At no point does any of these highly trained FBI agents listening over and over to “Louie Louie” at different speeds appear to have heard Lynn Easton’s yelled expletive, which unlike all these other things is actually on the record. Meanwhile, the Kingsmen went on to have one more top twenty hit, with only Easton and the lead guitarist left of the original lineup, and then continued to tour playing their hit. Jack Ely toured solo playing his one hit. The most successful member of the group was Don Gallucci, the keyboard player, who formed Don and the Goodtimes, who had a minor hit with “I Could Be So Good To You”: [Excerpt: Don and the Goodtimes, “I Could Be So Good To You”] Gallucci went on to produce Fun House for the Stooges, who would also of course later record their own version of “Louie Louie”, in which they sung those dirty lyrics: [Excerpt: the Stooges, “Louie Louie”] But then, nearly everyone did a version of the song — there are at least two thousand recordings of it. But, other than from radio play, Richard Berry was receiving no money from any of these. After his marriage ended, he’d quit working as a musician to raise his daughter, gone back to school, and taken a day job — but then he’d been further disabled in an accident and had ended up on welfare, while his song was making millions for the people who’d bought it from him for seven hundred and fifty dollars. He didn’t even understand why the song was popular — the only version that sounded like the record he’d wanted to make was the one by Barry White, another ex-Jefferson High student, who’d added the Latin percussion Berry had wanted to put on before he’d been told to make it more R&B. But in the eighties, things started to change. Some radio stations started doing all-Louie weekends, where for a whole weekend they’d just play different versions of the song, never repeating one. One of those stations invited Berry to do a live performance of the song with Jack Ely, backed by Bo Diddley’s former rhythm player Lady Bo and her band: [Excerpt: Richard Berry and Jack Ely, “Louie Louie”] That was the first time Berry ever met the man who’d made his song famous. Soon after that, Berry’s old friend Darlene Love, who had been one of the Dreamers who’d sung with Berry back in the fifties, introduced him to the man who would change his life — Chuck Rubin. Rubin had, in the seventies, been the manager of the blues singer Wilbur Harrison, and had realised that not only was Harrison not getting any money from his old recordings, nor were many other Black musicians. He’d seen a business opportunity, and had started a company that helped get those artists what they deserved — along with giving himself fifty percent of whatever they made. Which seems like a lot, but many people, including Berry, figured that fifty percent of a fortune was better than the hundred percent of nothing they were currently getting. Most of these artists had signed legally valid bad deals, which meant that while they were morally entitled to something, they weren’t legally entitled. But Rubin had a way of getting round that, and he did the same thing with Berry that he did with many other people. He kept starting lawsuits that put off potential business partners, and in 1986 a company wanted to use “Louie Louie” in a TV advertising campaign that would earn huge amounts of money for its owners — but they didn’t want to use a song that was tied up in litigation. If the legal problems weren’t sorted, they’d just use “Wild Thing” instead. In order to make sure the commercials used “Louie Louie”, the song’s owner gave Berry half the publishing rights and full songwriting rights (which Berry then split with Rubin). He didn’t get any back payment from what the song had already earned, but he went from getting $240 a month on welfare in 1985, to making $160,000 from “Louie Louie” in 1989 alone. Richard Berry died in 1997, happy, respected, and wealthy. In the last decade of his life people started to explore his music again, and give him some of the credit he was due. Jack Ely continued performing “Louie Louie” until his death in 2015. Lynn Easton quit music in 1968, giving the Kingsmen’s name to the lead guitarist Mike Mitchell, the only other original member still in the band. Easton died in April this year — no-one’s sure what of, as his religious beliefs meant he never saw a doctor. Mitchell’s lineup of Kingsmen continued to perform until covid happened, and will presumably do so again once the pandemic is over. And somewhere out there, whenever you’re listening to this, someone will be playing “duh-duh-duh, duh-duh, duh-duh-duh”

According to the Detroit Free Press, Curtis Williams Sr. loved people and was a kind-hearted man known to do anything for anybody. He died April 21 due to COVID-19 complications. According to the Christian Post, Insight Church Pastor James E. Ward Jr. says he is on a mission to bring racial healing to the nation and “God’s blessing to black America” through 40 Days of Humility, Prayer, and Fasting. According to Daily Mail, Two suspects have been arrested on murder charges in the shooting death of a Florida pastor who got caught in the middle of a gun battle outside a Miami flea market last month. According to the The Charlotte Observer, At least nine cases of COVID-19 could be connected to a Charlotte church’s convocation events from last weekend, Mecklenburg County officials tweeted late Saturday. According to the Daily Post, American actor and producer, Tyler Perry, has joined the End SARS campaign. According to Mail Online, The new Archbishop of York has slammed Downing Street for snubbing his predecessor – Britain’s first black archbishop – of an automatic life peerage. According to Daily Mail, ESPN NFL reporter Vaughn McClure has been found dead at his apartment in Atlanta at age 48.

Breaking The Silence with Dr. Gregory Williams and guests Welby O'Brien and son, Curtis Williams

Bro. Curtis Williams

Breaking The Silence with Dr. Gregory Williams Guest, Curtis Williams

Bro. Curtis Williams

Bro. Curtis Williams  

A beloved New Hampshire couple dies together while vacationing at a South Texas beach. Family members say James and Michelle Butler were living out their dreams of traveling the country when they were attacked.Police find the Butlers buried on top of each other in a desolate sand dune. A manhunt is currently underway as the killers remain on the loose.Joining Nancy Grace to discuss the case:Julie Rendleman, NY Defense Attorney David Katz Former DEA, CEO Global Security Group Bethany Marshall ,Psychoanalyst Kris Sperry, Retired Chief Medical Examiner for the State of Georgia Dave Mack, Investigative Reporter for CrimeOnline

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

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

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

Curtis Williams, Coach @ Rebirth Body Transformation Center joins the show. Shares a wealth of information on fitness, nutrition & and mindset... As well as overcoming hurdles in his youth, and his journey into the coach he is today...

Ein Artikel von Curtis Williams mit Bezug auf „Gesetz, Eigentumsrechte und Luftverschmutzung“ von Murray N. Rothbard. Aus dem Englischen übersetzt von Martin Ziegner für das Ludwig von Mises Institut Deutschland.

Ein Artikel von Curtis Williams mit Bezug auf „Gesetz, Eigentumsrechte und Luftverschmutzung“ von Murray N. Rothbard. Aus dem Englischen übersetzt von Martin Ziegner für das Ludwig von Mises Institut Deutschland.

In this episode of The Too Black Too Nerdy Podcast, we have a brief talk about Shazam before getting into Avengers Endgame. Kris and I are also joined by fellow Black Nerd Alan Williams. Check it out!

Why do women go to church more than men? is it because men find the church boring or disingenuous? Myself, David Williams and Curtis Williams take on this issue as we try to figure out how and why this is happening more and more and we have a few laughs along the way

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

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

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

    Welcome to episode twenty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at “Earth Angel” by the Penguins. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Much of the information here comes from various articles on Marv Goldberg’s site, which is an essential resource for 50s vocal group information.  The quotes from Dootsie Williams are from Upside Your Head!: Rhythm and Blues on Central Ave by Johnny Otis. And this CD contains all the Penguins’ releases up to the point that they became just a name for Cleve Duncan. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript When you’re dealing with music whose power lies in its simplicity, as early rock and roll’s does, you end up with music that relies on a variety of formulae, and whose novelty relies on using those formulae in ever-so-slightly different ways. This is not to say that such music can’t be original — but that its originality relies on using the formulae in original ways, rather than in doing something completely unexpected. And one of the ways in which early rock and roll was formulaic was in the choice of chord sequence. When writing a fifties rock and roll song, you basically had four choices for chord sequence, and those four choices would cover more than ninety percent of all records in the genre. There was the twelve-bar blues — songs like “Hound Dog” or “Roll Over Beethoven” or “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” are all based around the twelve-bar blues. There’s the variant eight-bar blues, which most of the R&B we’ve talked about uses — that’s not actually one chord sequence but a bunch of related ones. Then there’s the three-chord trick, which is similar to the twelve bar blues but just cycles through the chords I IV V IV I IV V IV — this is the chord sequence for “La Bamba” and “Louie Louie” and “Twist and Shout” and “Hang On Sloopy”. And finally, there’s the doo-wop chord sequence. This is actually two very slightly different chord sequences — I , minor sixth, minor second, fifth: [demonstrates on guitar] and I, minor sixth, fourth, fifth: [demonstrates on guitar] But those two sequences are so similar that we’ll just lump them both in under the single heading of “the doo-wop chord sequence” from now on. When I talk about that in future episodes, that’s the chord sequence I mean. And that may be the most important chord sequence ever, just in terms of the number of songs which use it. It’s the progression that lies behind thirties songs like “Blue Moon”, and the version of “Heart and Soul” most people can play on the piano (the original song is slightly different), but it’s also in “Oliver’s Army” by Elvis Costello, “Enola Gay” by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, “Million Reasons” by Lady Gaga, “I’m the One” by DJ Khaled… whatever genre of music you like, you almost certainly know and love dozens of songs based on that progression. (And you almost certainly hate dozens more. It’s also been used in a *lot* of big ballads that get overplayed to death, and if you’re not the kind of person who likes those records, you might end up massively sick of them.) [Excerpt: “Blue Moon”, Elvis Presley, going into “I Will Always Love You” by Dolly Parton, going into “I’m the One” by DJ Khaled] But while it has been used in almost every genre of music, the reason why we call this progression the doo-wop progression is that it’s behind almost every doo-wop song of the fifties and early sixties. “Duke of Earl”, “Why Do Fools Fall In Love”, “In The Still of the Night”, “Sh’boom” — it forms the basis of more hit records in that genre than I could name even if I spent the whole of this podcast naming them. And today we’re going to talk about a song that cemented that sequence as the doo-wop standard, imitated by everyone, and which managed to become a massive hit despite containing almost nothing at all original. The Penguins were a vocal group, that formed out of the maelstrom of vocal groups in LA in the fifties, in the scene around Central Ave. One thing you’ll notice when we talk about vocal groups, especially in LA, is that it gets very confusing very fast with all the different bands swapping members and taking each others’ names. So for clarity, the Hollywood Flames, featuring Bobby Byrd, were different from the Famous Flames, who also featured Bobby Byrd, who wasn’t the same Bobby Byrd as the Bobby Byrd who was a Hollywood Flame. And when we talk about bird groups, we’re talking about groups named after birds, not groups featuring Bobby Byrd. And the two members of the Hollywood Flames who were previously in a bird group called the Flamingoes weren’t in the bird group called the Flamingoes that people normally mean when they talk about the Flamingoes, they were in a different band called the Flamingoes that went on to become the Platters. Got that? I’m sorry. I’ll now try to take you slowly through the convoluted history of the Penguins, in a way that will hopefully make sense to you. But if it doesn’t, just remember, not what I actually just said, but how hard it was to follow. Even the sources I’m consulting for this, written by experts who’ve spent decades trying to figure out who was in what band, often admit to being very unsure of their facts. Vocal groups on the West Coast in the US were far more fluid than on the East Coast, and membership could change from day to day and hour to hour. We’ll start with the Hollywood Flames. The Hollywood Flames initially formed in 1948, at one of the talent shows that were such important incubators of black musical talent in the 1950s. In this case, they all separately attended a talent show at the Largo Theatre in Los Angeles, where so many different singers turned up that instead of putting them all on separately, the theatre owner told them to split into a few vocal groups. Shortly after forming, the Hollywood Flames started performing at the Barrelhouse Club, owned by Johnny Otis, and started recording under a variety of different names. Their first release was as “The Flames”, and came out in January 1950: [excerpt: “Please Tell Me Now”, the Flames] Another track they recorded early on was this song by an aspiring songwriter named Murry Wilson: [excerpt “Tabarin”, the Hollywood Flames] Murry Wilson would never have much success as a songwriter, but we’ll be hearing about him a lot when we talk about his three sons, Brian, Carl, and Dennis, once we hit the 1960s and they form the Beach Boys. At some point in late 1954, Curtis Williams, one of the Hollywood Flames, left the group. It seems likely, in fact, that the Hollywood Flames split up in late 1954 or early 55, and reformed later — throughout 1955 there were a ton of records released featuring various vocalists from the Hollywood Flames in various combinations, under other band names, but in the crucial years of 1955 and 1956, when rock and roll broke out, the Hollywood Flames were not active, even though later on they would go on to have quite a few minor hits. But while the band wasn’t active, the individuals were, and Curtis Williams took with him a song he had been working on with another member, Gaynell Hodge. That song was called “Earth Angel”, and when he bumped into his old friend Cleve Duncan, Williams asked Duncan if he’d help him with it. Duncan agreed, and they worked out an arrangement for the song, and decided to form a new vocal group, each bringing in one old friend from their respective high schools. Duncan brought in Dexter Tisby, while Williams brought in Bruce Tate. They decided to call themselves The Penguins, after the mascot on Kool cigarettes. Williams and Tate had both attended Jefferson High School, and now is as good a time as any to talk about that school. Because Jefferson High School produced more great jazz and R&B musicians than you’d expect from a school ten times its size, or even a hundred. Etta James, Dexter Gordon, Art Farmer, Johnny “Guitar” Watson, Barry White, Richard Berry… The great jazz trumpeter Don Cherry actually got in trouble with his own school because he would play truant – in order to go and play with the music students at Jefferson High. And this abundance of talent was down to one good teacher — the music teacher Samuel Browne, who along with Hazel Whittaker and Marjorie Bright was one of the first three black teachers to be employed to teach secondary school classes in LA. Several of the white faculty at Jefferson asked to be transferred when he started working at Jefferson High, but Browne put together an astonishing programme of music lessons at the school, teaching the children about the music that they cared about — jazz and blues — while also teaching them to play classical music. He would have masterclasses taught by popular musicians like Lionel Hampton or Nat “King” Cole, and art musicians like William Grant Still, the most important black composer and conductor in the classical world in the mid-twentieth century. It was, quite simply, the greatest musical education it was possible to have at that time, and certainly an education far beyond anything that most poor black kids of the time could dream of. Half the great black musicians in California in the forties and fifties learned in Browne’s lessons. And that meant that there was a whole culture at Jefferson High of taking music seriously, which meant that even those who weren’t Browne’s star pupils knew it was possible for them to become successful singers and songwriters. Jesse Belvin, who had been a classmate of Curtis Williams and Gaynell Hodge when they were in the Hollywood Flames, was himself a minor R&B star already, and he would soon become a major one. He helped Williams and Hodge with their song “Earth Angel”, and you can see the resemblance to his first hit; a song called “Dream Girl”: [Excerpt: “Dream Girl”, Jesse and Marvin] Note how much that melody line sounds like this bit of “Earth Angel”: [Excerpt: “Earth Angel”, the Penguins] But that’s not the only part of “Earth Angel” that was borrowed. There’s the line “Will you be mine?”, which had been the title of a hit record by the Swallows: [Excerpt: “Will You Be Mine?”: The Swallows] Then there’s this song by the Hollywood Flames, recorded when Williams was still in the band with Hodge: [Excerpt: The Hollywood Flames, “I Know”] That sounds like a generic doo-wop song now, but that’s because every generic doo-wop song patterned itself after “Earth Angel”. It wasn’t generic when the Hollywood Flames recorded that. And finally, the Hollywood Flames had, a while earlier, been asked to record a demo for a local songwriter, Jessie Mae Robinson. That song, “I Went to Your Wedding”, later became a hit for the country singer Patti Page. Listen to the middle eight of that song: [Excerpt: “I Went to Your Wedding”, Patti Page] Now listen to the middle eight of “Earth Angel”: [Excerpt: “Earth Angel”, the Penguins] The song was a Frankenstein’s monster, bolted together out of bits of spare parts from other songs, But like the monster, it took on a life of its own. And the spark that gave it life came from Dootsie Williams. Dootsie Williams was the owner of Doo-Tone Records, and was a former musician, who had played trumpet in jazz and R&B bands for several years before realising that he could make more money by putting out records by other people. His first commercial successes came not from music at all, but from comedy. Williams was a fan of the comedian Red Foxx, and wanted to put out albums of Foxx’s live set. Foxx initially refused, because he thought that if he recorded anything then people wouldn’t pay to come and see his live shows. However, he became short of cash and agreed to make a record of his then-current live set. Laff of the Party became a massive hit, and more or less started the trend for comedy albums: [excerpt: Red Foxx: Laff of the Party] Williams wasn’t, primarily, a record-company owner, though. He was like Sam Phillips — someone who provided recording services — but his recordings were songwriters’ demos, and so meant to be for professionals, unlike the amateurs Phillips recorded. The Penguins would record some of those demos for him, performing the songs for the songwriters who couldn’t sing themselves, and as he put it “I had the Penguins doing some vocals and they begged me ‘Please record us so we can get a release and go on the road and get famous’ and all that. They kept buggin’ me ’til I said, ‘Okay, what have you got?'” Their first single, credited to “The Dootsie Williams Orchestra, with Vocal by The Penguins” didn’t even feature the Penguins on the other side. The song itself, “There Ain’t No News Today”, wasn’t an original to the band, and it bore more than a slight resemblance to records like Wynonie Harris’ “Who Threw the Whisky in the Well?” [Excerpt: The Dootsie Williams Orchestra with the Penguins, “There Ain’t No News Today”] But the “what have you got?” question had also been about songs. Williams was also a music publisher, and he was interested in finding songs he could exploit, not just recordings. As he put it, talking to Johnny Otis: “They said, ‘We got a song called ‘Earth Angel’ and a song called ‘Hey Senorita’.’ Of course, ‘Earth Angel’ was all messed up, you know how they come to you. So I straightened it out here and straightened it out there, and doggone, it sounded pretty good. “Earth Angel” was not even intended to be an A-side, originally. It was tossed off as a demo, and a demo for what was expected to be a B-side. The intended A-side was “Hey Senorita”: [excerpt: The Penguins, “Hey Senorita”] Both tracks were only meant to be demos, not the finished recordings, and several takes had to be scrapped because of a neighbour’s dog barking. But almost straight away, it became obvious that there was something special about “Earth Angel”. Dootsie Williams took the demo recording to Dolphin’s of Hollywood, the most important R&B record shop on the West Coast. We’ve talked about Dolphin’s last episode, but as a reminder, as well as being a record shop and the headquarters of a record label, Dolphin’s also broadcast R&B radio shows from the shop. And Dolphin’s radio station and record shop were aimed, not at the black adult buyers of R&B generally, but at teenagers. And this is something that needs to be noted about “Earth Angel” — it’s a song where the emphasis is definitely on the “Angel” rather than on the “Earth”. Most R&B songs at the time were rooted in the real world — they were aimed at adults and had adult concerns like sex, or paying the rent, or your partner cheating on you, or your partner cheating on you because you couldn’t pay the rent and so now you had no-one to have sex with. There were, of course, other topics covered, and we’ve talked about many of them, but the presumed audience was someone who had real problems in their life — and who therefore also needed escapist music to give them some relief from their problems. On the other hand, the romance being dealt with in “Earth Angel” is one that is absolutely based in teenage romantic idealisations rather than in anything like real world relationships. (This is, incidentally, one of the ways in which the song resembles “Dream Girl”, which again is about a fantasy of a woman rather than about a real woman). The girl in the song only exists in her effects on the male singer — she’s not described physically, or in terms of her personality, only in the emotional effect she has on the vocalist. But this non-specificity works well for this kind of song, as it allows the listener to project the song onto their own crush without having to deal with inconvenient differences in detail — and as the song is about longing for someone, rather than being in a relationship with someone, it’s likely that many of the adolescents who found themselves moved by the song knew almost as little about their crush as they did about the character in the song. The DJ who was on the air when Dootsie Williams showed up was Dick “Huggy Boy” Hugg, possibly the most popular DJ on the station. Huggy Boy played “Earth Angel” and “Hey Senorita”, and requests started to come in for the songs almost straight away. Williams didn’t want to waste time rerecording the songs when they’d gone down so well, and released it as the final record. Of course, as with all black records at this point in time, the big question was which white people would have the bigger hit with it? Would Georgia Gibbs get in with a bland white cover, or would it be Pat Boone? As it turns out, it was the Crew Cuts, who went to number one (or number three, I’ve seen different reports in different sources) on the pop charts with their version. After “Sh’Boom”, the Crew Cuts had briefly tried to go back to barbershop harmony with a version of “The Whiffenpoof Song”, but when that did nothing, in quick succession they knocked out hit, bland, covers first of “Earth Angel” and then of “Ko Ko Mo”, which restored them to the top of the charts at the expense of the black originals. [excerpt: The Crew Cuts, “Earth Angel”] But it shows how times were slowly changing that the Penguins’ version also made the top ten on the pop charts, as Johnny Ace had before them. The practice of white artists covering black artists’ songs would continue for a while, but within a couple of years it would have more-or-less disappeared, only to come back in a new form in the sixties. The Penguins recorded a follow-up single, “Ookey Ook”: [excerpt: the Penguins, “Ookey Ook”] That, however, wasn’t a hit. Dootsie Williams had been refusing to pay the band any advances on royalties, even as “Earth Angel” rose to number one on the R&B charts, and the Penguins were annoyed enough that they signed with Buck Ram, the songwriter and manager who also looked after the Platters, and got a new contract with Mercury. Williams warned them that they wouldn’t see a penny from him if they broke their contract, but they reasoned that they weren’t seeing any money from him anyway, and so decided it didn’t matter. They’d be big stars on Mercury, after all. They went into the studio to do the same thing that Gene and Eunice had done, rerecording their two singles and the B-sides, although these recordings didn’t end up getting released at the time. Unfortunately for the Penguins, they weren’t really the band that Ram was interested in. Ram had used the Penguins’ current success as a way to get a deal both for them *and* for the Platters, the group he really cared about. And once the Platters had a hit of their own — a hit written by Buck Ram — he stopped bothering with the Penguins. They made several records for Mercury, but with no lasting commercial success. And since they’d broken their contract with Dootone, they made no money at all from having sung “Earth Angel”. At the same time, the band started to fracture. Bruce Tate became mentally ill from the stress of fame, quit the band, and then killed someone in a hit-and-run accident while driving a stolen car. He was replaced by Randy Jones. Within a year Jones had left the band, as had Dexter Tisby. They returned a few months after that, and their replacements were sacked, but then Curtis Williams left to rejoin the Hollywood Flames, and Teddy Harper, who had been Dexter Tisby’s replacement, replaced Williams. The Penguins had basically become Cleve Duncan, who had sung lead on “Earth Angel”, and any selection of three other singers, and at one point there seem to have been two rival sets of Penguins recording. By 1963, Dexter Tisby, Randy Jones, and Teddy Harper were touring together as a fake version of the Coasters, along with Cornell Gunter who was actually a member of the Coasters who’d split from the other three members of *his* group. You perhaps see now why I said that stuff at the beginning about the vocal group lineups being confusing. At the same time, Cleve Duncan was singing with a whole other group of Penguins, recording a song that would never be a huge hit but would appear on many doo-wop compilations — so many that it’s as well known as many of the big hits: [excerpt: “Memories of El Monte”, the Penguins] It’s fascinating to listen to that song, and to realise that by the very early sixties, pre-British Invasion, the doo-wop and rock-and-roll eras were *already* the subject of nostalgia records. Pop not only will eat itself, but it has been doing almost since its inception. We’ll be talking about the co-writer of that song, Frank Zappa, a lot more when he starts making his own records. And meanwhile, there were lawsuits to contend with. “Earth Angel” had originally been credited to Curtis WIlliams and Gaynell Hodge, but they’d been helped out in the early stages of writing it by Jesse Belvin, and then Cleve Duncan had adjusted the melody, and Dootsie Williams claimed to have helped them fix up the song. Belvin had been drafted into the army when “Earth Angel” had hit, and when he got out he was broke, and he was persuaded by Dootsie Williams, who still seems to have held a grudge about the Penguins breaking their contract, to sue over the songwriting royalties. Belvin won sole credit in the lawsuit, and then signed over that sole credit to Dootsie Williams, so (according to Marv Goldberg) for a while Dootsie Williams was credited as the only writer. Luckily, for once, that injustice was eventually rectified. These days, thankfully, the writing credits are split between Curtis Williams, Jesse Belvin, and Gaynell Hodge, and in 2013 Hodge, the last surviving co-writer of the song, was given an award by BMI for the song having been played on the radio a million times, and Hodge and the estates of his co-writers receive royalties for its continued popularity. Curtis Williams and Bruce Tate both died in the 1970s. Jesse Belvin died earlier than that, but his story is for another podcast. Dexter Tisby seems to be still alive, as is Gaynell Hodge. And Cleve Duncan continued performing with various lineups of Penguins until his death in 2012, making a living as a performer from a song that sold twenty million copies but never paid its performers a penny. He always said that he was always happy to sing his hit, so long as the audiences were happy to hear it, and they always were.

Welcome to episode twenty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at “Earth Angel” by the Penguins. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. (more…)

    Welcome to episode twenty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at "Earth Angel" by the Penguins. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Much of the information here comes from various articles on Marv Goldberg's site, which is an essential resource for 50s vocal group information.  The quotes from Dootsie Williams are from Upside Your Head!: Rhythm and Blues on Central Ave by Johnny Otis. And this CD contains all the Penguins' releases up to the point that they became just a name for Cleve Duncan. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript When you're dealing with music whose power lies in its simplicity, as early rock and roll's does, you end up with music that relies on a variety of formulae, and whose novelty relies on using those formulae in ever-so-slightly different ways. This is not to say that such music can't be original -- but that its originality relies on using the formulae in original ways, rather than in doing something completely unexpected. And one of the ways in which early rock and roll was formulaic was in the choice of chord sequence. When writing a fifties rock and roll song, you basically had four choices for chord sequence, and those four choices would cover more than ninety percent of all records in the genre. There was the twelve-bar blues -- songs like "Hound Dog" or "Roll Over Beethoven" or "Shake, Rattle, and Roll" are all based around the twelve-bar blues. There's the variant eight-bar blues, which most of the R&B we've talked about uses -- that's not actually one chord sequence but a bunch of related ones. Then there's the three-chord trick, which is similar to the twelve bar blues but just cycles through the chords I IV V IV I IV V IV -- this is the chord sequence for "La Bamba" and "Louie Louie" and "Twist and Shout" and "Hang On Sloopy". And finally, there's the doo-wop chord sequence. This is actually two very slightly different chord sequences -- I , minor sixth, minor second, fifth: [demonstrates on guitar] and I, minor sixth, fourth, fifth: [demonstrates on guitar] But those two sequences are so similar that we'll just lump them both in under the single heading of "the doo-wop chord sequence" from now on. When I talk about that in future episodes, that's the chord sequence I mean. And that may be the most important chord sequence ever, just in terms of the number of songs which use it. It's the progression that lies behind thirties songs like "Blue Moon", and the version of "Heart and Soul" most people can play on the piano (the original song is slightly different), but it's also in "Oliver's Army" by Elvis Costello, "Enola Gay" by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, "Million Reasons" by Lady Gaga, "I'm the One" by DJ Khaled... whatever genre of music you like, you almost certainly know and love dozens of songs based on that progression. (And you almost certainly hate dozens more. It's also been used in a *lot* of big ballads that get overplayed to death, and if you're not the kind of person who likes those records, you might end up massively sick of them.) [Excerpt: "Blue Moon", Elvis Presley, going into "I Will Always Love You" by Dolly Parton, going into "I'm the One" by DJ Khaled] But while it has been used in almost every genre of music, the reason why we call this progression the doo-wop progression is that it's behind almost every doo-wop song of the fifties and early sixties. "Duke of Earl", "Why Do Fools Fall In Love", "In The Still of the Night", "Sh'boom" -- it forms the basis of more hit records in that genre than I could name even if I spent the whole of this podcast naming them. And today we're going to talk about a song that cemented that sequence as the doo-wop standard, imitated by everyone, and which managed to become a massive hit despite containing almost nothing at all original. The Penguins were a vocal group, that formed out of the maelstrom of vocal groups in LA in the fifties, in the scene around Central Ave. One thing you'll notice when we talk about vocal groups, especially in LA, is that it gets very confusing very fast with all the different bands swapping members and taking each others' names. So for clarity, the Hollywood Flames, featuring Bobby Byrd, were different from the Famous Flames, who also featured Bobby Byrd, who wasn't the same Bobby Byrd as the Bobby Byrd who was a Hollywood Flame. And when we talk about bird groups, we're talking about groups named after birds, not groups featuring Bobby Byrd. And the two members of the Hollywood Flames who were previously in a bird group called the Flamingoes weren't in the bird group called the Flamingoes that people normally mean when they talk about the Flamingoes, they were in a different band called the Flamingoes that went on to become the Platters. Got that? I'm sorry. I'll now try to take you slowly through the convoluted history of the Penguins, in a way that will hopefully make sense to you. But if it doesn't, just remember, not what I actually just said, but how hard it was to follow. Even the sources I'm consulting for this, written by experts who've spent decades trying to figure out who was in what band, often admit to being very unsure of their facts. Vocal groups on the West Coast in the US were far more fluid than on the East Coast, and membership could change from day to day and hour to hour. We'll start with the Hollywood Flames. The Hollywood Flames initially formed in 1948, at one of the talent shows that were such important incubators of black musical talent in the 1950s. In this case, they all separately attended a talent show at the Largo Theatre in Los Angeles, where so many different singers turned up that instead of putting them all on separately, the theatre owner told them to split into a few vocal groups. Shortly after forming, the Hollywood Flames started performing at the Barrelhouse Club, owned by Johnny Otis, and started recording under a variety of different names. Their first release was as "The Flames", and came out in January 1950: [excerpt: "Please Tell Me Now", the Flames] Another track they recorded early on was this song by an aspiring songwriter named Murry Wilson: [excerpt "Tabarin", the Hollywood Flames] Murry Wilson would never have much success as a songwriter, but we'll be hearing about him a lot when we talk about his three sons, Brian, Carl, and Dennis, once we hit the 1960s and they form the Beach Boys. At some point in late 1954, Curtis Williams, one of the Hollywood Flames, left the group. It seems likely, in fact, that the Hollywood Flames split up in late 1954 or early 55, and reformed later -- throughout 1955 there were a ton of records released featuring various vocalists from the Hollywood Flames in various combinations, under other band names, but in the crucial years of 1955 and 1956, when rock and roll broke out, the Hollywood Flames were not active, even though later on they would go on to have quite a few minor hits. But while the band wasn't active, the individuals were, and Curtis Williams took with him a song he had been working on with another member, Gaynell Hodge. That song was called "Earth Angel", and when he bumped into his old friend Cleve Duncan, Williams asked Duncan if he'd help him with it. Duncan agreed, and they worked out an arrangement for the song, and decided to form a new vocal group, each bringing in one old friend from their respective high schools. Duncan brought in Dexter Tisby, while Williams brought in Bruce Tate. They decided to call themselves The Penguins, after the mascot on Kool cigarettes. Williams and Tate had both attended Jefferson High School, and now is as good a time as any to talk about that school. Because Jefferson High School produced more great jazz and R&B musicians than you'd expect from a school ten times its size, or even a hundred. Etta James, Dexter Gordon, Art Farmer, Johnny "Guitar" Watson, Barry White, Richard Berry… The great jazz trumpeter Don Cherry actually got in trouble with his own school because he would play truant – in order to go and play with the music students at Jefferson High. And this abundance of talent was down to one good teacher -- the music teacher Samuel Browne, who along with Hazel Whittaker and Marjorie Bright was one of the first three black teachers to be employed to teach secondary school classes in LA. Several of the white faculty at Jefferson asked to be transferred when he started working at Jefferson High, but Browne put together an astonishing programme of music lessons at the school, teaching the children about the music that they cared about -- jazz and blues -- while also teaching them to play classical music. He would have masterclasses taught by popular musicians like Lionel Hampton or Nat "King" Cole, and art musicians like William Grant Still, the most important black composer and conductor in the classical world in the mid-twentieth century. It was, quite simply, the greatest musical education it was possible to have at that time, and certainly an education far beyond anything that most poor black kids of the time could dream of. Half the great black musicians in California in the forties and fifties learned in Browne's lessons. And that meant that there was a whole culture at Jefferson High of taking music seriously, which meant that even those who weren't Browne's star pupils knew it was possible for them to become successful singers and songwriters. Jesse Belvin, who had been a classmate of Curtis Williams and Gaynell Hodge when they were in the Hollywood Flames, was himself a minor R&B star already, and he would soon become a major one. He helped Williams and Hodge with their song “Earth Angel”, and you can see the resemblance to his first hit; a song called "Dream Girl": [Excerpt: "Dream Girl", Jesse and Marvin] Note how much that melody line sounds like this bit of "Earth Angel": [Excerpt: "Earth Angel", the Penguins] But that's not the only part of “Earth Angel” that was borrowed. There's the line "Will you be mine?", which had been the title of a hit record by the Swallows: [Excerpt: "Will You Be Mine?": The Swallows] Then there's this song by the Hollywood Flames, recorded when Williams was still in the band with Hodge: [Excerpt: The Hollywood Flames, "I Know"] That sounds like a generic doo-wop song now, but that's because every generic doo-wop song patterned itself after "Earth Angel". It wasn't generic when the Hollywood Flames recorded that. And finally, the Hollywood Flames had, a while earlier, been asked to record a demo for a local songwriter, Jessie Mae Robinson. That song, "I Went to Your Wedding", later became a hit for the country singer Patti Page. Listen to the middle eight of that song: [Excerpt: "I Went to Your Wedding", Patti Page] Now listen to the middle eight of "Earth Angel": [Excerpt: "Earth Angel", the Penguins] The song was a Frankenstein's monster, bolted together out of bits of spare parts from other songs, But like the monster, it took on a life of its own. And the spark that gave it life came from Dootsie Williams. Dootsie Williams was the owner of Doo-Tone Records, and was a former musician, who had played trumpet in jazz and R&B bands for several years before realising that he could make more money by putting out records by other people. His first commercial successes came not from music at all, but from comedy. Williams was a fan of the comedian Red Foxx, and wanted to put out albums of Foxx's live set. Foxx initially refused, because he thought that if he recorded anything then people wouldn't pay to come and see his live shows. However, he became short of cash and agreed to make a record of his then-current live set. Laff of the Party became a massive hit, and more or less started the trend for comedy albums: [excerpt: Red Foxx: Laff of the Party] Williams wasn't, primarily, a record-company owner, though. He was like Sam Phillips -- someone who provided recording services -- but his recordings were songwriters' demos, and so meant to be for professionals, unlike the amateurs Phillips recorded. The Penguins would record some of those demos for him, performing the songs for the songwriters who couldn't sing themselves, and as he put it "I had the Penguins doing some vocals and they begged me 'Please record us so we can get a release and go on the road and get famous' and all that. They kept buggin' me 'til I said, 'Okay, what have you got?'" Their first single, credited to "The Dootsie Williams Orchestra, with Vocal by The Penguins" didn't even feature the Penguins on the other side. The song itself, "There Ain't No News Today", wasn't an original to the band, and it bore more than a slight resemblance to records like Wynonie Harris' "Who Threw the Whisky in the Well?" [Excerpt: The Dootsie Williams Orchestra with the Penguins, "There Ain't No News Today"] But the "what have you got?" question had also been about songs. Williams was also a music publisher, and he was interested in finding songs he could exploit, not just recordings. As he put it, talking to Johnny Otis: "They said, 'We got a song called 'Earth Angel' and a song called 'Hey Senorita'.' Of course, 'Earth Angel' was all messed up, you know how they come to you. So I straightened it out here and straightened it out there, and doggone, it sounded pretty good. "Earth Angel" was not even intended to be an A-side, originally. It was tossed off as a demo, and a demo for what was expected to be a B-side. The intended A-side was "Hey Senorita": [excerpt: The Penguins, "Hey Senorita"] Both tracks were only meant to be demos, not the finished recordings, and several takes had to be scrapped because of a neighbour's dog barking. But almost straight away, it became obvious that there was something special about "Earth Angel". Dootsie Williams took the demo recording to Dolphin's of Hollywood, the most important R&B record shop on the West Coast. We've talked about Dolphin's last episode, but as a reminder, as well as being a record shop and the headquarters of a record label, Dolphin's also broadcast R&B radio shows from the shop. And Dolphin's radio station and record shop were aimed, not at the black adult buyers of R&B generally, but at teenagers. And this is something that needs to be noted about "Earth Angel" -- it's a song where the emphasis is definitely on the "Angel" rather than on the "Earth". Most R&B songs at the time were rooted in the real world -- they were aimed at adults and had adult concerns like sex, or paying the rent, or your partner cheating on you, or your partner cheating on you because you couldn't pay the rent and so now you had no-one to have sex with. There were, of course, other topics covered, and we've talked about many of them, but the presumed audience was someone who had real problems in their life -- and who therefore also needed escapist music to give them some relief from their problems. On the other hand, the romance being dealt with in "Earth Angel" is one that is absolutely based in teenage romantic idealisations rather than in anything like real world relationships. (This is, incidentally, one of the ways in which the song resembles "Dream Girl", which again is about a fantasy of a woman rather than about a real woman). The girl in the song only exists in her effects on the male singer -- she's not described physically, or in terms of her personality, only in the emotional effect she has on the vocalist. But this non-specificity works well for this kind of song, as it allows the listener to project the song onto their own crush without having to deal with inconvenient differences in detail -- and as the song is about longing for someone, rather than being in a relationship with someone, it's likely that many of the adolescents who found themselves moved by the song knew almost as little about their crush as they did about the character in the song. The DJ who was on the air when Dootsie Williams showed up was Dick "Huggy Boy" Hugg, possibly the most popular DJ on the station. Huggy Boy played "Earth Angel" and "Hey Senorita", and requests started to come in for the songs almost straight away. Williams didn't want to waste time rerecording the songs when they'd gone down so well, and released it as the final record. Of course, as with all black records at this point in time, the big question was which white people would have the bigger hit with it? Would Georgia Gibbs get in with a bland white cover, or would it be Pat Boone? As it turns out, it was the Crew Cuts, who went to number one (or number three, I've seen different reports in different sources) on the pop charts with their version. After "Sh'Boom", the Crew Cuts had briefly tried to go back to barbershop harmony with a version of "The Whiffenpoof Song", but when that did nothing, in quick succession they knocked out hit, bland, covers first of "Earth Angel" and then of "Ko Ko Mo", which restored them to the top of the charts at the expense of the black originals. [excerpt: The Crew Cuts, "Earth Angel"] But it shows how times were slowly changing that the Penguins' version also made the top ten on the pop charts, as Johnny Ace had before them. The practice of white artists covering black artists' songs would continue for a while, but within a couple of years it would have more-or-less disappeared, only to come back in a new form in the sixties. The Penguins recorded a follow-up single, "Ookey Ook": [excerpt: the Penguins, "Ookey Ook"] That, however, wasn't a hit. Dootsie Williams had been refusing to pay the band any advances on royalties, even as "Earth Angel" rose to number one on the R&B charts, and the Penguins were annoyed enough that they signed with Buck Ram, the songwriter and manager who also looked after the Platters, and got a new contract with Mercury. Williams warned them that they wouldn't see a penny from him if they broke their contract, but they reasoned that they weren't seeing any money from him anyway, and so decided it didn't matter. They'd be big stars on Mercury, after all. They went into the studio to do the same thing that Gene and Eunice had done, rerecording their two singles and the B-sides, although these recordings didn't end up getting released at the time. Unfortunately for the Penguins, they weren't really the band that Ram was interested in. Ram had used the Penguins' current success as a way to get a deal both for them *and* for the Platters, the group he really cared about. And once the Platters had a hit of their own -- a hit written by Buck Ram -- he stopped bothering with the Penguins. They made several records for Mercury, but with no lasting commercial success. And since they'd broken their contract with Dootone, they made no money at all from having sung "Earth Angel”. At the same time, the band started to fracture. Bruce Tate became mentally ill from the stress of fame, quit the band, and then killed someone in a hit-and-run accident while driving a stolen car. He was replaced by Randy Jones. Within a year Jones had left the band, as had Dexter Tisby. They returned a few months after that, and their replacements were sacked, but then Curtis Williams left to rejoin the Hollywood Flames, and Teddy Harper, who had been Dexter Tisby's replacement, replaced Williams. The Penguins had basically become Cleve Duncan, who had sung lead on "Earth Angel", and any selection of three other singers, and at one point there seem to have been two rival sets of Penguins recording. By 1963, Dexter Tisby, Randy Jones, and Teddy Harper were touring together as a fake version of the Coasters, along with Cornell Gunter who was actually a member of the Coasters who'd split from the other three members of *his* group. You perhaps see now why I said that stuff at the beginning about the vocal group lineups being confusing. At the same time, Cleve Duncan was singing with a whole other group of Penguins, recording a song that would never be a huge hit but would appear on many doo-wop compilations -- so many that it's as well known as many of the big hits: [excerpt: "Memories of El Monte", the Penguins] It's fascinating to listen to that song, and to realise that by the very early sixties, pre-British Invasion, the doo-wop and rock-and-roll eras were *already* the subject of nostalgia records. Pop not only will eat itself, but it has been doing almost since its inception. We'll be talking about the co-writer of that song, Frank Zappa, a lot more when he starts making his own records. And meanwhile, there were lawsuits to contend with. "Earth Angel" had originally been credited to Curtis WIlliams and Gaynell Hodge, but they'd been helped out in the early stages of writing it by Jesse Belvin, and then Cleve Duncan had adjusted the melody, and Dootsie Williams claimed to have helped them fix up the song. Belvin had been drafted into the army when "Earth Angel" had hit, and when he got out he was broke, and he was persuaded by Dootsie Williams, who still seems to have held a grudge about the Penguins breaking their contract, to sue over the songwriting royalties. Belvin won sole credit in the lawsuit, and then signed over that sole credit to Dootsie Williams, so (according to Marv Goldberg) for a while Dootsie Williams was credited as the only writer. Luckily, for once, that injustice was eventually rectified. These days, thankfully, the writing credits are split between Curtis Williams, Jesse Belvin, and Gaynell Hodge, and in 2013 Hodge, the last surviving co-writer of the song, was given an award by BMI for the song having been played on the radio a million times, and Hodge and the estates of his co-writers receive royalties for its continued popularity. Curtis Williams and Bruce Tate both died in the 1970s. Jesse Belvin died earlier than that, but his story is for another podcast. Dexter Tisby seems to be still alive, as is Gaynell Hodge. And Cleve Duncan continued performing with various lineups of Penguins until his death in 2012, making a living as a performer from a song that sold twenty million copies but never paid its performers a penny. He always said that he was always happy to sing his hit, so long as the audiences were happy to hear it, and they always were.

    Welcome to episode twenty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at “Earth Angel” by the Penguins. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Much of the information here comes from various articles on Marv Goldberg’s site, which is an essential resource for 50s vocal group information.  The quotes from Dootsie Williams are from Upside Your Head!: Rhythm and Blues on Central Ave by Johnny Otis. And this CD contains all the Penguins’ releases up to the point that they became just a name for Cleve Duncan. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript When you’re dealing with music whose power lies in its simplicity, as early rock and roll’s does, you end up with music that relies on a variety of formulae, and whose novelty relies on using those formulae in ever-so-slightly different ways. This is not to say that such music can’t be original — but that its originality relies on using the formulae in original ways, rather than in doing something completely unexpected. And one of the ways in which early rock and roll was formulaic was in the choice of chord sequence. When writing a fifties rock and roll song, you basically had four choices for chord sequence, and those four choices would cover more than ninety percent of all records in the genre. There was the twelve-bar blues — songs like “Hound Dog” or “Roll Over Beethoven” or “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” are all based around the twelve-bar blues. There’s the variant eight-bar blues, which most of the R&B we’ve talked about uses — that’s not actually one chord sequence but a bunch of related ones. Then there’s the three-chord trick, which is similar to the twelve bar blues but just cycles through the chords I IV V IV I IV V IV — this is the chord sequence for “La Bamba” and “Louie Louie” and “Twist and Shout” and “Hang On Sloopy”. And finally, there’s the doo-wop chord sequence. This is actually two very slightly different chord sequences — I , minor sixth, minor second, fifth: [demonstrates on guitar] and I, minor sixth, fourth, fifth: [demonstrates on guitar] But those two sequences are so similar that we’ll just lump them both in under the single heading of “the doo-wop chord sequence” from now on. When I talk about that in future episodes, that’s the chord sequence I mean. And that may be the most important chord sequence ever, just in terms of the number of songs which use it. It’s the progression that lies behind thirties songs like “Blue Moon”, and the version of “Heart and Soul” most people can play on the piano (the original song is slightly different), but it’s also in “Oliver’s Army” by Elvis Costello, “Enola Gay” by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, “Million Reasons” by Lady Gaga, “I’m the One” by DJ Khaled… whatever genre of music you like, you almost certainly know and love dozens of songs based on that progression. (And you almost certainly hate dozens more. It’s also been used in a *lot* of big ballads that get overplayed to death, and if you’re not the kind of person who likes those records, you might end up massively sick of them.) [Excerpt: “Blue Moon”, Elvis Presley, going into “I Will Always Love You” by Dolly Parton, going into “I’m the One” by DJ Khaled] But while it has been used in almost every genre of music, the reason why we call this progression the doo-wop progression is that it’s behind almost every doo-wop song of the fifties and early sixties. “Duke of Earl”, “Why Do Fools Fall In Love”, “In The Still of the Night”, “Sh’boom” — it forms the basis of more hit records in that genre than I could name even if I spent the whole of this podcast naming them. And today we’re going to talk about a song that cemented that sequence as the doo-wop standard, imitated by everyone, and which managed to become a massive hit despite containing almost nothing at all original. The Penguins were a vocal group, that formed out of the maelstrom of vocal groups in LA in the fifties, in the scene around Central Ave. One thing you’ll notice when we talk about vocal groups, especially in LA, is that it gets very confusing very fast with all the different bands swapping members and taking each others’ names. So for clarity, the Hollywood Flames, featuring Bobby Byrd, were different from the Famous Flames, who also featured Bobby Byrd, who wasn’t the same Bobby Byrd as the Bobby Byrd who was a Hollywood Flame. And when we talk about bird groups, we’re talking about groups named after birds, not groups featuring Bobby Byrd. And the two members of the Hollywood Flames who were previously in a bird group called the Flamingoes weren’t in the bird group called the Flamingoes that people normally mean when they talk about the Flamingoes, they were in a different band called the Flamingoes that went on to become the Platters. Got that? I’m sorry. I’ll now try to take you slowly through the convoluted history of the Penguins, in a way that will hopefully make sense to you. But if it doesn’t, just remember, not what I actually just said, but how hard it was to follow. Even the sources I’m consulting for this, written by experts who’ve spent decades trying to figure out who was in what band, often admit to being very unsure of their facts. Vocal groups on the West Coast in the US were far more fluid than on the East Coast, and membership could change from day to day and hour to hour. We’ll start with the Hollywood Flames. The Hollywood Flames initially formed in 1948, at one of the talent shows that were such important incubators of black musical talent in the 1950s. In this case, they all separately attended a talent show at the Largo Theatre in Los Angeles, where so many different singers turned up that instead of putting them all on separately, the theatre owner told them to split into a few vocal groups. Shortly after forming, the Hollywood Flames started performing at the Barrelhouse Club, owned by Johnny Otis, and started recording under a variety of different names. Their first release was as “The Flames”, and came out in January 1950: [excerpt: “Please Tell Me Now”, the Flames] Another track they recorded early on was this song by an aspiring songwriter named Murry Wilson: [excerpt “Tabarin”, the Hollywood Flames] Murry Wilson would never have much success as a songwriter, but we’ll be hearing about him a lot when we talk about his three sons, Brian, Carl, and Dennis, once we hit the 1960s and they form the Beach Boys. At some point in late 1954, Curtis Williams, one of the Hollywood Flames, left the group. It seems likely, in fact, that the Hollywood Flames split up in late 1954 or early 55, and reformed later — throughout 1955 there were a ton of records released featuring various vocalists from the Hollywood Flames in various combinations, under other band names, but in the crucial years of 1955 and 1956, when rock and roll broke out, the Hollywood Flames were not active, even though later on they would go on to have quite a few minor hits. But while the band wasn’t active, the individuals were, and Curtis Williams took with him a song he had been working on with another member, Gaynell Hodge. That song was called “Earth Angel”, and when he bumped into his old friend Cleve Duncan, Williams asked Duncan if he’d help him with it. Duncan agreed, and they worked out an arrangement for the song, and decided to form a new vocal group, each bringing in one old friend from their respective high schools. Duncan brought in Dexter Tisby, while Williams brought in Bruce Tate. They decided to call themselves The Penguins, after the mascot on Kool cigarettes. Williams and Tate had both attended Jefferson High School, and now is as good a time as any to talk about that school. Because Jefferson High School produced more great jazz and R&B musicians than you’d expect from a school ten times its size, or even a hundred. Etta James, Dexter Gordon, Art Farmer, Johnny “Guitar” Watson, Barry White, Richard Berry… The great jazz trumpeter Don Cherry actually got in trouble with his own school because he would play truant – in order to go and play with the music students at Jefferson High. And this abundance of talent was down to one good teacher — the music teacher Samuel Browne, who along with Hazel Whittaker and Marjorie Bright was one of the first three black teachers to be employed to teach secondary school classes in LA. Several of the white faculty at Jefferson asked to be transferred when he started working at Jefferson High, but Browne put together an astonishing programme of music lessons at the school, teaching the children about the music that they cared about — jazz and blues — while also teaching them to play classical music. He would have masterclasses taught by popular musicians like Lionel Hampton or Nat “King” Cole, and art musicians like William Grant Still, the most important black composer and conductor in the classical world in the mid-twentieth century. It was, quite simply, the greatest musical education it was possible to have at that time, and certainly an education far beyond anything that most poor black kids of the time could dream of. Half the great black musicians in California in the forties and fifties learned in Browne’s lessons. And that meant that there was a whole culture at Jefferson High of taking music seriously, which meant that even those who weren’t Browne’s star pupils knew it was possible for them to become successful singers and songwriters. Jesse Belvin, who had been a classmate of Curtis Williams and Gaynell Hodge when they were in the Hollywood Flames, was himself a minor R&B star already, and he would soon become a major one. He helped Williams and Hodge with their song “Earth Angel”, and you can see the resemblance to his first hit; a song called “Dream Girl”: [Excerpt: “Dream Girl”, Jesse and Marvin] Note how much that melody line sounds like this bit of “Earth Angel”: [Excerpt: “Earth Angel”, the Penguins] But that’s not the only part of “Earth Angel” that was borrowed. There’s the line “Will you be mine?”, which had been the title of a hit record by the Swallows: [Excerpt: “Will You Be Mine?”: The Swallows] Then there’s this song by the Hollywood Flames, recorded when Williams was still in the band with Hodge: [Excerpt: The Hollywood Flames, “I Know”] That sounds like a generic doo-wop song now, but that’s because every generic doo-wop song patterned itself after “Earth Angel”. It wasn’t generic when the Hollywood Flames recorded that. And finally, the Hollywood Flames had, a while earlier, been asked to record a demo for a local songwriter, Jessie Mae Robinson. That song, “I Went to Your Wedding”, later became a hit for the country singer Patti Page. Listen to the middle eight of that song: [Excerpt: “I Went to Your Wedding”, Patti Page] Now listen to the middle eight of “Earth Angel”: [Excerpt: “Earth Angel”, the Penguins] The song was a Frankenstein’s monster, bolted together out of bits of spare parts from other songs, But like the monster, it took on a life of its own. And the spark that gave it life came from Dootsie Williams. Dootsie Williams was the owner of Doo-Tone Records, and was a former musician, who had played trumpet in jazz and R&B bands for several years before realising that he could make more money by putting out records by other people. His first commercial successes came not from music at all, but from comedy. Williams was a fan of the comedian Red Foxx, and wanted to put out albums of Foxx’s live set. Foxx initially refused, because he thought that if he recorded anything then people wouldn’t pay to come and see his live shows. However, he became short of cash and agreed to make a record of his then-current live set. Laff of the Party became a massive hit, and more or less started the trend for comedy albums: [excerpt: Red Foxx: Laff of the Party] Williams wasn’t, primarily, a record-company owner, though. He was like Sam Phillips — someone who provided recording services — but his recordings were songwriters’ demos, and so meant to be for professionals, unlike the amateurs Phillips recorded. The Penguins would record some of those demos for him, performing the songs for the songwriters who couldn’t sing themselves, and as he put it “I had the Penguins doing some vocals and they begged me ‘Please record us so we can get a release and go on the road and get famous’ and all that. They kept buggin’ me ’til I said, ‘Okay, what have you got?'” Their first single, credited to “The Dootsie Williams Orchestra, with Vocal by The Penguins” didn’t even feature the Penguins on the other side. The song itself, “There Ain’t No News Today”, wasn’t an original to the band, and it bore more than a slight resemblance to records like Wynonie Harris’ “Who Threw the Whisky in the Well?” [Excerpt: The Dootsie Williams Orchestra with the Penguins, “There Ain’t No News Today”] But the “what have you got?” question had also been about songs. Williams was also a music publisher, and he was interested in finding songs he could exploit, not just recordings. As he put it, talking to Johnny Otis: “They said, ‘We got a song called ‘Earth Angel’ and a song called ‘Hey Senorita’.’ Of course, ‘Earth Angel’ was all messed up, you know how they come to you. So I straightened it out here and straightened it out there, and doggone, it sounded pretty good. “Earth Angel” was not even intended to be an A-side, originally. It was tossed off as a demo, and a demo for what was expected to be a B-side. The intended A-side was “Hey Senorita”: [excerpt: The Penguins, “Hey Senorita”] Both tracks were only meant to be demos, not the finished recordings, and several takes had to be scrapped because of a neighbour’s dog barking. But almost straight away, it became obvious that there was something special about “Earth Angel”. Dootsie Williams took the demo recording to Dolphin’s of Hollywood, the most important R&B record shop on the West Coast. We’ve talked about Dolphin’s last episode, but as a reminder, as well as being a record shop and the headquarters of a record label, Dolphin’s also broadcast R&B radio shows from the shop. And Dolphin’s radio station and record shop were aimed, not at the black adult buyers of R&B generally, but at teenagers. And this is something that needs to be noted about “Earth Angel” — it’s a song where the emphasis is definitely on the “Angel” rather than on the “Earth”. Most R&B songs at the time were rooted in the real world — they were aimed at adults and had adult concerns like sex, or paying the rent, or your partner cheating on you, or your partner cheating on you because you couldn’t pay the rent and so now you had no-one to have sex with. There were, of course, other topics covered, and we’ve talked about many of them, but the presumed audience was someone who had real problems in their life — and who therefore also needed escapist music to give them some relief from their problems. On the other hand, the romance being dealt with in “Earth Angel” is one that is absolutely based in teenage romantic idealisations rather than in anything like real world relationships. (This is, incidentally, one of the ways in which the song resembles “Dream Girl”, which again is about a fantasy of a woman rather than about a real woman). The girl in the song only exists in her effects on the male singer — she’s not described physically, or in terms of her personality, only in the emotional effect she has on the vocalist. But this non-specificity works well for this kind of song, as it allows the listener to project the song onto their own crush without having to deal with inconvenient differences in detail — and as the song is about longing for someone, rather than being in a relationship with someone, it’s likely that many of the adolescents who found themselves moved by the song knew almost as little about their crush as they did about the character in the song. The DJ who was on the air when Dootsie Williams showed up was Dick “Huggy Boy” Hugg, possibly the most popular DJ on the station. Huggy Boy played “Earth Angel” and “Hey Senorita”, and requests started to come in for the songs almost straight away. Williams didn’t want to waste time rerecording the songs when they’d gone down so well, and released it as the final record. Of course, as with all black records at this point in time, the big question was which white people would have the bigger hit with it? Would Georgia Gibbs get in with a bland white cover, or would it be Pat Boone? As it turns out, it was the Crew Cuts, who went to number one (or number three, I’ve seen different reports in different sources) on the pop charts with their version. After “Sh’Boom”, the Crew Cuts had briefly tried to go back to barbershop harmony with a version of “The Whiffenpoof Song”, but when that did nothing, in quick succession they knocked out hit, bland, covers first of “Earth Angel” and then of “Ko Ko Mo”, which restored them to the top of the charts at the expense of the black originals. [excerpt: The Crew Cuts, “Earth Angel”] But it shows how times were slowly changing that the Penguins’ version also made the top ten on the pop charts, as Johnny Ace had before them. The practice of white artists covering black artists’ songs would continue for a while, but within a couple of years it would have more-or-less disappeared, only to come back in a new form in the sixties. The Penguins recorded a follow-up single, “Ookey Ook”: [excerpt: the Penguins, “Ookey Ook”] That, however, wasn’t a hit. Dootsie Williams had been refusing to pay the band any advances on royalties, even as “Earth Angel” rose to number one on the R&B charts, and the Penguins were annoyed enough that they signed with Buck Ram, the songwriter and manager who also looked after the Platters, and got a new contract with Mercury. Williams warned them that they wouldn’t see a penny from him if they broke their contract, but they reasoned that they weren’t seeing any money from him anyway, and so decided it didn’t matter. They’d be big stars on Mercury, after all. They went into the studio to do the same thing that Gene and Eunice had done, rerecording their two singles and the B-sides, although these recordings didn’t end up getting released at the time. Unfortunately for the Penguins, they weren’t really the band that Ram was interested in. Ram had used the Penguins’ current success as a way to get a deal both for them *and* for the Platters, the group he really cared about. And once the Platters had a hit of their own — a hit written by Buck Ram — he stopped bothering with the Penguins. They made several records for Mercury, but with no lasting commercial success. And since they’d broken their contract with Dootone, they made no money at all from having sung “Earth Angel”. At the same time, the band started to fracture. Bruce Tate became mentally ill from the stress of fame, quit the band, and then killed someone in a hit-and-run accident while driving a stolen car. He was replaced by Randy Jones. Within a year Jones had left the band, as had Dexter Tisby. They returned a few months after that, and their replacements were sacked, but then Curtis Williams left to rejoin the Hollywood Flames, and Teddy Harper, who had been Dexter Tisby’s replacement, replaced Williams. The Penguins had basically become Cleve Duncan, who had sung lead on “Earth Angel”, and any selection of three other singers, and at one point there seem to have been two rival sets of Penguins recording. By 1963, Dexter Tisby, Randy Jones, and Teddy Harper were touring together as a fake version of the Coasters, along with Cornell Gunter who was actually a member of the Coasters who’d split from the other three members of *his* group. You perhaps see now why I said that stuff at the beginning about the vocal group lineups being confusing. At the same time, Cleve Duncan was singing with a whole other group of Penguins, recording a song that would never be a huge hit but would appear on many doo-wop compilations — so many that it’s as well known as many of the big hits: [excerpt: “Memories of El Monte”, the Penguins] It’s fascinating to listen to that song, and to realise that by the very early sixties, pre-British Invasion, the doo-wop and rock-and-roll eras were *already* the subject of nostalgia records. Pop not only will eat itself, but it has been doing almost since its inception. We’ll be talking about the co-writer of that song, Frank Zappa, a lot more when he starts making his own records. And meanwhile, there were lawsuits to contend with. “Earth Angel” had originally been credited to Curtis WIlliams and Gaynell Hodge, but they’d been helped out in the early stages of writing it by Jesse Belvin, and then Cleve Duncan had adjusted the melody, and Dootsie Williams claimed to have helped them fix up the song. Belvin had been drafted into the army when “Earth Angel” had hit, and when he got out he was broke, and he was persuaded by Dootsie Williams, who still seems to have held a grudge about the Penguins breaking their contract, to sue over the songwriting royalties. Belvin won sole credit in the lawsuit, and then signed over that sole credit to Dootsie Williams, so (according to Marv Goldberg) for a while Dootsie Williams was credited as the only writer. Luckily, for once, that injustice was eventually rectified. These days, thankfully, the writing credits are split between Curtis Williams, Jesse Belvin, and Gaynell Hodge, and in 2013 Hodge, the last surviving co-writer of the song, was given an award by BMI for the song having been played on the radio a million times, and Hodge and the estates of his co-writers receive royalties for its continued popularity. Curtis Williams and Bruce Tate both died in the 1970s. Jesse Belvin died earlier than that, but his story is for another podcast. Dexter Tisby seems to be still alive, as is Gaynell Hodge. And Cleve Duncan continued performing with various lineups of Penguins until his death in 2012, making a living as a performer from a song that sold twenty million copies but never paid its performers a penny. He always said that he was always happy to sing his hit, so long as the audiences were happy to hear it, and they always were.

Bro. Curtis Williams.   Technical note: About one minute of the sermon was not recorded around the 40 minute mark. 

The Curtis Williams Interview by Ultralight

Bro. Curtis Williams

Bro. Curtis Williams

Bro. Curtis Williams

Bro. Curtis Williams

Immigration attorney Kimberly Grant discusses how DACA emerged in 2001 as “The Dream Act” yet never passed both houses of Congress. In 2012 it became policy of the Department of Homeland Security under then Secretary Janet Napolitano.which was founded by teachers Curtis Williams and Paul Wilson, offers mentoring and academic support for about three dozen students.

Today is a first for the podcast - an entire episode devoted not to a film's underscore but its song soundtrack. It would be impossible to talk about the musical fabric of Back To The Future without exploring the wide variety of memorable songs featured in the film. From songs penned specifically for the movie to its many popular period hits, everything is covered on today's episode. Huey Lewis & The News? Check. Johnny B. Goode? Check. That Van Halen solo in Marty's tape player? Doc, we've got 'em all. And as we discovered, following the thread of these songs highlights a beautiful emotional arc hidden in the film - a story of a teenager coming to discover his own voice through the power of song. Heavy!Listen to episode 3m1 Back To The Future (Main Theme)Back To The Future - Alan Silvestri - 1985 - Universal Pictures (Robert Zemeckis, dir,)-The Power of Love (Huey Lewis, Chris Hayes, Johnny Colla) -The Washington Post March (John Philip Sousa)-Time Bomb Town (Lindsey Buckingham)-Mr. Sandman (Pat Ballard)-The Ballad of Davy Crockett (George Bruns, Thomas Blackburn)-Out the Window (Eddie Van Halen) from the film, The Wild Life (1984)-The Wallflower (Dance With Me Henry) (Hank Ballard, Johnny Otis, Jamesetta Rogers)-Night Train (Jimmy Forrest, Lewin Simpkins, Oscar Washington)-Pledging My Love(Ferdinand Washington, Don Robey)-Earth Angel (Jesse Belvin, Gaynel Hodge, Curtis Williams)-Johnny B. Goode (Chuck Berry)-Heaven is One Step Away (Eric Clapton)-Back in Time (Huey Lewis, Chris Hayes, Johnny Colla, Sean Hopper)-Back To The Future (End Credits) Alan SilvestriFor score reductions, additional links and more,the discussion continues at: www.underscorepodcast.com  

Bro. Curtis Williams

Another View Producer Lisa Godley investigates the Presidential Men’s Academy at Wilson High School. The program, which was founded by teachers Curtis Williams and Paul Wilson, offers mentoring and academic support for about three dozen students.

Bro. Curtis Williams continues - focusing on financial matters. 

Bro. Curtis Williams 

Bro. Curtis Williams

Le dernier album en date de Swae Lee et Slim Jimmy, SremmLife 2, a rythmé tout l’été 2016. En témoigne leur morceau Black Beatles qui s’impose comme numéro 1 des charts aux Etats-Unies et presque partout dans le monde. Derrière ce projet il y a un homme qui a sû s’imposer comme le producteur le plus endurant des années 2010, Mike Will. Alors quelle est la recette de la création de ce groupe ?Animé par Mehdi Maizi (@MehdiMouse) avec Raphaël Da Cruz (@RphlDC), Nicolas Pellion (@PureBakingSoda) et Aurélien Chapuis (@lecaptainnemo)RÉFÉRENCES CITÉES DANS L’ÉMISSIONSremmLife (Rae Sremmurd, EarDrummers / Interscope Records, 2015), Start a party (SremmLife II, Rae Sremmurd, EarDrummers / Interscope Records, 2015), Beastie Boys, Mannequin Challenge, No Flex Zone (SremmLife, Rae Sremmurd, EarDrummers / Interscope Records, 2015), Kris Kross, Jermain Dupri, No Type (SremmLife, Rae Sremmurd, EarDrummers / Interscope Records, 2015), Travis Scott, Dem Outta St8 Boyz, Future, Miley Cyrus, Robin Thicke, Bruno Mars, Justin Timberlake, Mark Ronson, Migos, Blink 182, Soulja Boy, Party Like a Rockstar (Rockstar Mentality, Shop Boyz, On Deck / Universal Motown, 2007), Set the Roof (SremmLife II, Rae Sremmurd ft. Lil Jon, EarDrummers / Interscope Records, 2015), Baby Baby (Organized Bass, Kilo Ali, Interscope Records, 1997), My Boo (So So Def Bass All-Stars, Ghost Town DJ’s, So So Def / Columbia Records, 1995), Take It or Leave It (SremmLife II, Rae Sremmurd, EarDrummers / Interscope Records, 2015), Drinks on Us (Ransom, Mike Will Made It ft. Swae Lee, Future & The Weeknd, 2015), Formation (Lemonade, Beyonce, Parkwood / Columbia Records, 2016), Gucci Mane, Shawty Redd, Zaytoven, Jace, Lex Luger, Tupac Back (Self Made Vol.1, Meek Mill ft. Rick Ross, Maybach Music Group, 2011), Dr. Dre, A+, Truth Gonna Hurts You (Pluto, Future, A-1 / Freebandz / Epic, 2012), Curtis Williams, 23 (Mike Will Made It ft. Miley Cyrus, Juicy J & Wiz Khalifa, Est. in 1989 Pt. 3 (The Album), Interscope Records, 2013), Timbaland, Missy Elliot, Rick Rock, The Federation, It’s Whateva (The Federation, Reprise, 2007), EearzCOUPS DE COEUR & RECOMMENDATIONSNicolas Pellion : le Tonite Show de Celly Ru. The Tonite Show est une série d’album lancée par le producteur DJ Fresh, comme un rite obligatoire de passage et de reconnaissance pour tous les rappeurs de la Bay Area.Raphaël Da Cruz : l’album Here d’Alicia Keys, comme une retour aux sources pour la chanteuse de New York. Le disque est produit par son mari, Swizz Beatz.Aurélien Chapuis : la mixtape Jace Tape de l’artiste Jace sortie début 2016, et tous les morceaux qu’il sort régulièrement. Et les projets de 2 Chainz, qui sont toujours très bon.CRÉDITSEnregistré le 24 novembre 2016 à l’Antenne Paris (10, rue la Vacquerie 11ème). Production : Joël Ronez. Moyens techniques : Binge Audio / L’antenne Paris. Réalisation : Sébastien Salis. Chargée de production et d’édition : Elsa Neves. Générique : extrait de "Tyra Banks" de Nodey (Atrahasis EP) par Nodey. NoFun est une production du réseau Binge Audio www.binge.audioPOUR ASSISTER AUX ENREGISTREMENTSProchain enregistrement en public le vendredi 16 décembre, à L'antenne Paris. Inscrivez-vous sur notre page bingeaudio.eventbrite.com See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The Radio Spotlight – Guest: Curtis Williams (12.6.16) Celebrity fitness trainer, Curtis Williams stopped by the “Radio Spotlight” To Talk about his football experiences in the NFL and shared the chanllenges he faced in competing for a spot on teams.  Listen as he talks about being cut and how he found his calling in fitness. Taking […]

dirtyswift.com facebook.com/dirtyswift twitter.com/dirtyswift soundcloud.com/dirtyswift youtube.com/djdirtyswift lemouv.fr Every Saturday 11pm on #Mouv 92.1fm in Paris or lemouv.fr - then every Mondays as a #MondayMix on mixcloud.com/dirtyswift 1. Blasé Intro 2. Ty Dolla $ign - Blase' (Feat. Future & Rae Sremmurd) 3. Travis Scott - 3500 - Yaldah Remix (ft. Future & 2 Chainz) 4. Keys N Krates - I Know U 5. Galantis - Runaway (U & I) - Ookay Trap Remix (Dirty) 6. Bro Safari & Boombox Cartel - Flip 7. Calvin Harris & Disciples - How Deep Is Your Love - DJ Snake Remix 8. Diplo - Set Me Free (ft. Liz) 9. Valentino Khan - Deep Down Low - G-Buck Remix 10. Hurricane Chris - Sections (ft. Ty Dolla $ign) 11. Mimosa - On Fleek (ft. Too Short & The Rej3ctz) 12. Rapp Nite - Funky Enuff 13. N.W.A. - Straight Outta Compton 14. N.W.A. - Straight Outta Compton - SB Remix 15. Kronic - Feel That - Kid Cut Up Acap Intro (ft. Raven Felix) 16. Jayceeoh - Turn Me Up Some - JayKode Remix (ft. Redman & Jay Psar) 17. Dillon Francis & Skrillex - Bun Up The Dance (feat. Maluca) 18. Boxinbox, Lionsize - Don't Stop 19. Aero Chord - 4U 20. Dillon Francis - What's Your Name 21. Diplo & Sleepy Tom - Be Right There 22. Eptic & Habstrakt - On The Block 23. LOUDPVCK - Switch Hitta 24. Skirllex & Jauz - Squad Out! (ft. Fatman Scoop) 25. Henry Fong - Wine Dem - FlipN'Gawd Remix 26. LOUDPVCK - Lit (feat. Curtis Williams) 27. Tchami - Missing You (ft. AC Slater & Kaleem Taylor) 28. Jauz & Pegboard Nerds - Get On Up 29. Pep - Rash Rumors (Sphynx Remix) 30. Lupe Fiasco x Jill Scott - Daydreamin (ANGELZ Edit) 31. Post Malone - White Iverson (Malaa Remix) 32. $1 Bin x Goldie Glo - T.U.B (Yeah Hoe) 33. Tino Cochino - Illegal (ft. Juicy J & Dozay) 34. Yo Gotti - Rihanna - Statik Link Remix (ft. Young Thug) 35. Travis Scott - Oh My Dis Side (feat. Quavo) 36. Machine Gun Kelly - Till I Die 37. The Weeknd - Real Life

Recorded live March 17, 2015 @ Dirty Blanket Studios, Marietta, GA / southernvangard.com / twitter/IG: @jondoeatl / twitter/IG: @southernvangard / twitter/IG: @cappuccinomeeks * Instrumentals by Jon Doe & DJ Premier/Prhyme / Back Again - Ras Kass & Shabaam Sahdeeq / Riot Starter - Akil the J5 MC The Culture - Rahzel Jr. / Pat La Fontaine - Westide Gunn x Conway / Overtime feat. Kay-R (prod. by Shortfyuz) - Termanology / Put Ya Head Out Remix Slaine feat. Ill Bill - Slaine / City Streets feat. Roc Marciano - Saga / Troublesome feat. Guilty Simpson - Vice Souletric / Four Times Raw feat. Diamond D, Kurious & Sadat X (Soundsci remix) - SpoxPhD / We On That feat. NBS, Edo.G & Akrobatik (Joining / Forces Remix by White Shadow) - ScarcityBP / Words Paint Pictures - Rapper Big Pooh / Atomic Misphilosophy (prod by 1500 Or Nothin) - Lupe Fiasco / Keep Running feat. Big K.R.I.T. & Curtis Williams (prod. By Childish Major & TryBishop) - Matik Estrada / Selfish feat. Kong T, Fashawn, Kurupt (K-Def Remix) - DJ EFN / Signz - Roga Raph / Friday The 13th (Imma Play Jason) - Dillon / Patina feat. Roc Marciano - The Purist / The Cycle/So Tired (Remix) feat. Davenport Grimes (Prod. By Audible Doctor) - The Audible Doctor / Life of the Fittest feat. Montage One, Killer Ben, and Killa Kali - DirtyDiggs / The Talented Tenth - Blueprint

Paris born, Miami-bred DZA is back with another Mad Decent mix, this time it's Rap N Bullshit. DZA, the founder and resident dj of downtown Miami's legendary weekly hip-hop party, Peachfuzz, solidifies his unofficial title of Miami's underground hip-hop ambassador with new exclusives from Eskeerdo, B. Way, Steven A. Clark and more... Some familiar voices stop by to bullshit with DZA, with drops from Sir Michael Rocks, Denzel Curry, and Diplo. Rap and Bullshit Intro Curtis williams- Automatic Sir Mikey Rocks- Memo Sdotbraddy ft Curtis Williams, Robb Bank$, Denzel Curry and Mikey Rocks- Can’t Tell Me Shit (remix) Eskeerdo- Uncle Luc Little Pain ft Jelz Much- Love Tears Curtis Williams ft Robb Bank$- Bare Essentials Denzel Curry- Denny Cascade Denzel/Mikey Rocks Skit UNRELEASED DENZEL FT Mike Dece J Nics- Anna Isiah Rashad- RIP Kevin Miller Drake- Too Much James Blake- Life Round Here Steven A Clark- Just Ride SZA- Euphraxia Jhene Aiko- Burning Man 3:16 Aluna George- Diver Drake- Come Thru Robb Bank$- HeartBreaker Yung Simmie- Lean with the Sprite Mr Alexis- FVLL!NG  Kilo Kish- Give it 2 you Aluna George- Friends to lovers B.Way- Never Fails Nik SB- O. (dose)