Podcasts about diddley

Un paseo por la huerta ibérica en busca de novedades de dispares pelajes estilísticos.(Foto del podcast; Tito Ramírez)Playlist;TITO RAMIREZ “Milly Malone”THE DEALERS “Last night” (Tabula rasa)KOKO JEAN and THE TONICS “The spin” (Love child)AIRBAG “Tus rechazos golpean dos veces” (Alto disco)EXFAN “Star”JÍBAROS “La mitad de un segundo” (No funciona)CAMPAMENTO RUMANO “Clase media aspiracional” (Amenaza de paz)CAMPAMENTO RUMANO “Ensalada de papaya” (Amenaza de paz)BETA MÁXIMO “Danzad malditos” (Ataque frontal EP)NUEVO CATECISMO CATÓLICO “Perdida de control” (1530 segundos de…)LIE DETECTORS “Masaje Uzbeko”LOS PANIKS “Bluee moon baby” (The Panik Kontroversy)Versión y Original; DAVE “DIDDLEY” DAY “Blue moon baby” (1957)DÉCIMA VÍCTIMA “Detrás de la mirada” (ST)JOSÉ IGNACIO LAPIDO “Hablando en sueños” (Ladridos del perro mágico)TWANGUERO feat ALIH JEY “Pupilas” (Panamericana)Escuchar audio

Appreciation?In 30 parts, By FinalStand. Listen to the podcast at Explicit Novels.             “Children must face the scrutiny of their parents”   The Dining Hall was almost a relief. That relief died the moment I saw the banner over the front of the serving area in the Hall. 'Zane Appreciation Day'. Since every word was spelled correctly, it wasn't some stunt of Rio's, but beyond that, the list of suspects was too large to consider. This could be a genuine outpouring of acceptance and sympathy for what I had endured here. If you believe that, I have to ask you: 'Do you want your leprechaun pissing Guinness or Irish Malt?' Most likely, this was going to be some sort of humiliation, and I think I knew the flavor, and I definitely knew how to find out. See, in every seat of the Dining Hall was a big, bowling ball sized white box with a name and secured with a gold and green ribbon, so no cheating; no peeking. That last bit didn't deter me, though. I snuck up on the box marked for Holiday Carpenter. "Zane, does that have your name on it?" Virginia Goodswell asked me, my English teacher and Spiritual Advisor. Hell, if it had been Mrs. Marlowe, I would have opened it anyway, but Virginia was my buddy so her next question didn't mean to stab a stake of regret through my heart. "Where is Vivian?" "I left my room before she was done." I looked to the ground while I kicked some imaginary dust off the slate floor. "Why don't you see if she's been calling you?" she suggested. "She's probably worried." Worried, or homicidal because, ya know, I had sort of run off without my phone, wallet, watch, book bag, or anything else a 21st century student might need. "I ran away like a big, fat chicken," I confessed. "Anything not glued to my body I left behind." "I'll give her a call." She pulled out her phone and hit speed dial #2. I crap since her sick mother is probably #1. I am such a big problem for her, she has my guardian on speed dial! "That is Holiday Carpenter's box, Zane, not yours. Besides, there are strict instructions to not open the boxes until instructed." The panicky response I overheard from Virginia's conversation with Vivian hardly helped my mood. She wanted to know if Virginia knew where I was, she did; that I was okay, I was; and finally, what upset me, because the other girls weren't talking but apparently Mercy had started slapping Barbie Lynn around until Rio and Val pulled her off. Now, that made less than no sense. Wasn't that supposed to work the other way around? Virginia did a double check and sure enough, Mercy had slammed Barbie Lynn into an open wardrobe on my behalf, and Rio and Val had pulled her back. WTF! I am sure that Rio was right beside me on that one. Vivian triple checked that I was physically and mentally okay and she sounded so disappointed, in herself, as she did so. She was bringing my stuff; yes, I am an earthworm. Virginia promised for me that I would remain here until she arrived. Some stupid gesture like a loud public apology, done on bended knee, was blatantly unfair to Vivian, who only meant the best for me. I made a quick apology, not trying to meet her eyes as I said the words and took my stuff. All of 'my' girls seemed equally subdued. A minute after we had garnered our victuals, Vivian put a hand on my elbow. "Don't be so hard on yourself, Zane," Vivian smiled warmly at me. "You take a lot of stress and pressure on yourself. I understand that from time to time you need to take in a tiny bit of private space for yourself. Clearly, you can't schedule any such time because nothing around you stays a secret for very long and no one respects your privacy or even asks what you need." "Vivian," I was puzzled, "you deserve to be righteously pissed with me. You are my Guardian and I promised to stay by you or at least tell you where I was." "Zane, we let you down," Vivian assured me. "It is your dorm room and we are your guests, and we have been rather poor guests at that." "How about we call a truce?" I offer. "I can live with that," Vivian smiled. "Cut the Kumbaya-time, kids," Rio snorted derisively. "Zane, what the fuck happened with Mercy?" Rio playfully punched Mercy's arm to emphasize her uncertainty. "Rio, Bro, drop it," I asked sincerely. "Act like it didn't happen." Rio studied me a second, then got this wickedly evil grin. "What the hell are you talking about, Glenda?" she hefted the box up then shook it. "It seems my damn box is glued shut. Are we celebrating one thousand cunts licked by you, or what?" Because Rio rarely expounded at a level below full volume, next thing we hear is Mrs. Marlow snapping, "Ms. Talon, watch your language; there are good Christian women being forced to sit within the sound of your voice!" "Gotcha, Ms. Mouthful," Rio snapped off with a snap and a finger raised up like a pistol in the air. "What did you say?" Marlowe closed the distance. "She was repeating what I pointed out," I turned and smiled. "I said that you really had it going together this morning; that you were more than a mouthful. That's a hip/trending term to describe someone who is expressing themselves through clothing and make-up." "You are lying, Mr. Braxton," she snarled. "You are probably right, as I do so to you on general principle, but good luck proving it in student court," I grinned right back. We locked wills and she blinked first. "Ms. Phillips," Marlowe turned on Vivian, "what are you going to do about this?" "Zane and Rio, would you please apologize for being rude and insensitive to an educator who only wishes the best for the student body?" Vivian requested. "I so apologize," I bowed my head. "I so apologize as well," Rio tacked on. Only after Marlowe had gone to spread love and sunshine somewhere else did Rio lean across me and whisper to Vivian. "You rock!" Rio giggled gleefully. After all, Rio and I had not apologized to Mrs. Marlowe because neither one of us believed for a minute that she was 'an educator who only wishes the best for the student body'. To that nameless entity, we owed a debt, and to Mrs. Marlow we owed a generous 'fuck you,' and Vivian had made it all possible. "Why, thank you, Rio," Vivian nodded her acceptance of Rio's praise. "Jesus is the Peacemaker and we all should attempt to emulate his teachings." "So, I still don't get to lick you senseless?" Rio snickered. "No, no, you don't," Vivian smiled, even though she didn't look at either of us. Vivian's going to rock as a mom. The next half hour passed quietly. Everyone was curious about the boxes but no one was too worried until a rumor suddenly appeared. When it was suggested that they might have to put on bikinis, the fear set in. I blamed, I don't know but I wish I had thought of it. I was still kicking myself for the missed opportunity when my alien with the right face black and left face white shows up with the right face white and left face black, Mhain and Millicent. "Death Match and you get to referee," Rio teased me. "I'm so jealous; 500 bucks on the one with the soul." Mhain glared hate at us while Millicent looked more than amused. "Zane, come with us," Mhain gloated. I figured that somehow my ordeal was coming to an end so I'd play along. I rose and they steered me to the largest exit, flanking me. Christina and Company grabbed their boxes and jumped up quickly to follow me, though they looked as confused as I was, confirming none of them were the architect of my discomfort. No sooner had we stepped into the cool, sunlit lawn than everyone's phone rang, except mine. I was loving this, right up there with having sandpaper buffing my sunburned abs. "Open the box and follow the instructions," Christina informed me. "Is anyone going to do this?" My phone vibrated once, then my whole body tingled before I could respond to the call. "I am," Mhain gloated. "I was promised something." She knelt and opened her box with enthusiasm; the others did likewise but at a more sedate pace. What came out of each box was almost identical, different only in the anatomical part of the body indicated by the instructions. The objects were all grapefruit-sized fur-balls that made darling little squeaks, squeals and murmurs, amongst other sympathetic noises, all in tiny little voices. They were to be placed on my body, but I didn't know how that would work. "Are we going to do this?" Chastity began to say. "It isn't sticky," Hope was also saying when Mhain's flew out of her hand and hit the side of my left knee. She reached out carefully to retrieve hers while the other girls circled in. The little darlings were proving to be resilient little bastards. Several more leapt at me from the hands of their owners. All this time the furry grapefruit were giving little 'wee!' noises when they shot at me and screeched like demons when they were removed, which was painful when they were on my flesh. I knew who was responsible and she was going to pay, but not right now. I saw my closest allies pulling back. "TLM, Christina," I sighed in resignation. "Let's get this over with." I was being totally self-sacrificial; girls were starting to pile-up on us coming out of the Dining Hall. I didn't want a riot. Mhain had technically tagged me first but not in the designated spot, so I had Christina go first, she put one over my heart, not that I thought Cordelia was stupid, but now she was just piling it on. Mhain went next and she was sizzling and excited, she put it on my lips, shutting me up. At least the girls were polite and organized enough to come at me patiently. A few didn't get the 'memo' and their little rug rats slipped out of their owner's grasp and got to play gleeful kamikaze as they plowed into me. It didn't hurt but I had this secret fear that the tiny terrors would sprout fangs and tear into me. These little guys were murmuring and mumbling and it wasn't until I was truly buried that a horrific realization was made, the more that were on me, the greater their clinging power. In retrospect, this would have been more useful if we hadn't passed the 700 mark. I looked like a puffy, overweight, Sasquatch baby. I could move but sitting down was a dream, as was running or going to the bathroom. The damn things wouldn't shut up either. It fell to Hope and Iona to hurry me (as much as possible) to Assembly; you know that place where I 'sit' in front. At least no one could ask me anything

Picoteamos en las compilaciones Born Bad, recopilatorios piratas lanzados a mediados de los 80 y construídos con muchas de las canciones que inspiraron e influenciaron al grupo The Cramps y a las emergentes bandas del psychobilly. Grupos y artistas que por sonido, temática o actitud eran mal vistos según los cánones de su tiempo. Chicos y chicas malas, ya sabes.Playlist;(sintonía) LINK WRAY and HIS RAY MEN “Fat back”DWIGHT PULLEN “Sunglasses after dark”WARREN SMITH “Uranium rock”ROY ORBISON “Domino”MEL ROBBINS “Save it”RONNIE DAWSON “Rockin’ bones”GLEN GLENN “Everybody’s movin’”WANDA JACKSON “Funnel of love”RONNIE COCK and THE GAYLADS “Goo goo muck”THE PHANTOM “Love me”JIMMY LLOYD “Rocket in my pocket”JIMMY STEWART “Rock on the moon”HASIL ADKINS “She said”DALE HAWKINS “Tornado”CHARLIE FEATHERS “I can’t hardly stand it”JODY REYNOLDS “Fire of love”LITTLE WILLIE JOHN “Fever”ANDRE WILLIAMS “Jail bait”ANDY STARR “Give me a woman”JACK SCOTT “The way I walk”DAVE “DIDDLEY” DAY “Blue moon baby”RICKY NELSON “Lonesome town”Escuchar audio

We're back with another AFTN Soccer Show packed full of Vancouver Whitecaps, Major League Soccer, Canadian Championship, Canadian Premier League, and Canadian national team chat. The football keeps coming and so do the podcasts! The Whitecaps' two games a week schedule saw them come away with nothing in Colorado, in a game in which they should have gotten something, and then with a point in Seattle, in a game in which they didn't really deserve anything. Football, eh! We pick over the bones of both of those matches, look at what they've taught us about the current state of the 'Caps, round up the latest action across MLS, and look ahead to the circus coming to town this weekend - aka Lionel Messi and his Miami maestros. Before that Miami game there's the small matter of the Canadian Championship and a quarter-final second leg clash with Cavalry FC. We chat about that, hear from Cavs' head coach Tommy Wheeldon Jr, and chat about Vancouver FC first away win of the season in the CPL. Plus there's a new sheriff in town as Canada Soccer appoint Jesse Marsch as the new Canadian men's national team coach. Was it the right appointment, what does it mean to the program, and how about that funding of the position by the three Canadian MLS clubs? We chat about all of that and more. This episode of the podcast is brought to you by Recovery Family Law, family law lawyers in Surrey, working with clients to get excellent results. They support AFTN, go and support them for all your family legal needs. Here's the rundown for the main segments from the episode: 02.12: Intro - the business end of various seasons 16.30: Whitecaps pay penalty in Colorado 28.53: Whitecaps' highway robbery in Seattle! 51.33: The Whitecaps need fixing 63.17: MLS Round-up 82.41: The circus is coming to town - Messi mayhem awaits 92.30: Canadian Championship and US Open Cup chat 102.30: Tommy Wheeldon Jr audio 115.53: This Week in Whitecapsland 1974 122.25: Jesse Marsch named new CanMNT head coach 146.08: Vancouver FC get first away win of season 159.15: Wavelength - Number 8 - Phoenix Rising 165.25: Goodbyes and German nonsense

Dippin' Dots, cool "Irish" dads, rasin toast fried bologna sandwiches, flashbang flashmobs, hurdy-gurdy and her legacy, and virgin boy eggs. Come see the boys LIVE the first Tuesday of every month at Tallboys Craft Beer House in Toronto. TICKETS HERE-Tiff xoxo Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episode 150! In this episode I'm taking you through this blues classic! Mannish Boy by Muddy Waters. This is one of my absolute favourite 'zone out' songs and we go through the main riff and lead parts to this awesome live version of the 1955 standard.Mannish Boy" (or "Manish Boy" as it was first labeled) is a blues standard written by Muddy Waters, Mel London, and Bo Diddley (with Waters and Diddley being credited under their birth names). First recorded in 1955 by Waters, it serves as an "answer song" to Bo Diddley's "I'm a Man", which was in turn inspired by Waters' and Willie Dixon's "Hoochie Coochie Man. Mannish Boy" features a repeating stop-time figure on one chord throughout the song.Grab your guitar and join me in learning the whole of this fantastic Beatles tune. An absolute classic riff and really fun solo to play. This is one I always reccomend my students to learn.If you find this stuff useful leave me a review on Spotify or Apple PodcastsBecome a Blues Guitar Show Member: https://www.buzzsprout.com/950998/subscribeShoot me a question to cover in the upcoming episodes by emailing ben@thebluesguitarshow.comFollow me on instagram @bluesguitarshowpodcastSupport the show

Bo Jackson knows football and baseball, but does Bo know Diddley about the portion of the book of Exodus that's in Hebrew called Bo? Either way, here's a recently uncovered biblical chapter that recounts one of the greatest turnabouts to ever occur on a field of battle. Known by some as "Wrong Way Bo," these 21 verses reveal the divine source that recaps this rousing Roll Tide victory in the 1984 Iron Bowl. #CrimsonTide #RollTide #BoJackson #IronBowl #RearPewMirror #JewishHumor

We're BMBT, and you're watching Diddley Channel

Best of the underground, week of July 12, 2022: Liv Kennedy guest stars, revealing all about growing up Kennedy. Plus, summertime mixtape: six great songs. (All podcasts and reviews are on www.hlycrp.com, and you can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.)

Bo Diddley dies, but his signature beat lives on

In this week's episode of 36 From The Vault we find the band prepping for their Europe ‘72 tour with a run of shows at the Academy of Music in New York City. Featuring a set with Bo Diddley, this volume highlights the emergence of Keith Godchaux in the band + showcases some of the best Pigpen we've ever heard through the Dick's Picks series. Disc One features the majority of The Dead's set with Bo Diddley on March 25. Showcasing their brilliance as a backing band, we hear them dip into the Blues for perhaps the last time in the 70s. Highlighted by a stunning “Jam” between Diddley and The Dead we see an alternate path for the band + their ability to linger in a variety of American styles throughout their career. The disc ends with a few one-off covers for the band + an excellent “Playin In The Band” from March 27.The final three discs encompass the entire May 28th show. Featuring a number of rarities through the Dick's Picks series, it's a great peek into the band during this period. On Disc Two, Pigpen shines on “Chinatown Shuffle, “Mr. Charlie,” and “Next Time You See Me.” Jerry's vocals on “You Win Again” showcase his ability to be as much a Blues man as he is a psych master, and “Cumberland Blues” rivals the version on the Europe ‘72 release. On Disc Three we hear perhaps the greatest “Looks Like Rain” ever played, plus we hear another excellent, early cut on “Playin In The Band,” before Pigpen highlights his emotional side with “The Stranger (Two Souls In Communion).” Disc Four displays the band's experimentation with a lengthy “The Other One,” before closing the set out with a laid back “Not Fade Away -> Going Down The Road Feelin Bad -> Not Fade Away.” It's a great snapshot of The Dead ahead of a transformative period in their career. By year's end they'd be a completely different band. 36 from the Vault is a production of Osiris Media. It is edited, produced and mastered by Brian Brinkman. All music composed by Amar Sastry, unless otherwise noted. Logo design by Liz Bee Art & Design. The executive producer of 36 from the Vault is RJ Bee. ---We're thrilled to be sponsored by Grady's Cold Brew. Use Promo Code: VAULT for 20% off your first orderVisit Sunset Lake CBD and use promo code VAULT for 20% off your purchase---Please consider reviewing this podcast on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We invite you to listen to Dick's Picks Vol. 31 in anticipation of our next episode, which will drop on Monday, May 23! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

It wasn't nepotism that got him to the top of the studio...it was his dad! On this episode of "How's LA", Jake and Alan talk with executive producer and former garbageman Syd Diddley (@rosstaylornyc). Topics include the acting career of noted Chicago writer Studs Terkel, having Sam Peckinpah as a father figure, buying too tall of a house from a former NBA player and more!Theme song by Danny KelleherArtwork by Sean McGuireAd segment by Lucas PrizantProduced by Ben HertelThis podcast is a part of Audio Mint. If you want to follow us, check us out on Instagram (@audiomintchi) or on Facebook. If you want to support us even more, check out our Patreon by searching Audio Mint on the app or the website.

Episode 144 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Last Train to Clarksville" and the beginnings of the career of the Monkees, along with a short primer on the origins of the Vietnam War.  Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a seventeen-minute bonus episode available, on "These Boots Are Made For Walking" by Nancy Sinatra, which I mispronounce at the end of this episode as "These Boots Were Made For Walking", so no need to correct me here. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources As usual, all the songs excerpted in the podcast can be heard in full at Mixcloud. The best versions of the Monkees albums are the triple-CD super-deluxe versions that used to be available from monkees.com , and I've used Andrew Sandoval's liner notes for them extensively in this episode. Sadly, though, the only one of those that is still in print is More of the Monkees. For those just getting into the group, my advice is to start with this five-CD set, which contains their first five albums along with bonus tracks. The single biggest source of information I used in this episode is the first edition of Andrew Sandoval's The Monkees; The Day-By-Day Story. Sadly that is now out of print and goes for hundreds of pounds. Sandoval released a second edition of the book last year, which I was unfortunately unable to obtain, but that too is now out of print. If you can find a copy of either, do get one. Other sources used were Monkee Business by Eric Lefcowitz, and the autobiographies of three of the band members and one of the songwriters -- Infinite Tuesday by Michael Nesmith, They Made a Monkee Out of Me by Davy Jones, I'm a Believer by Micky Dolenz, and Psychedelic Bubble-Gum by Bobby Hart. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript We've obviously talked in this podcast about several of the biggest hits of 1966 already, but we haven't mentioned the biggest hit of the year, one of the strangest records ever to make number one in the US -- "The Ballad of the Green Berets" by Sgt Barry Sadler: [Excerpt: Barry Sadler, "The Ballad of the Green Berets"] Barry Sadler was an altogether odd man, and just as a brief warning his story, which will last a minute or so, involves gun violence. At the time he wrote and recorded that song, he was on active duty in the military -- he was a combat medic who'd been fighting in the Vietnam War when he'd got a wound that had meant he had to be shipped back to the USA, and while at Fort Bragg he decided to write and record a song about his experiences, with the help of Robin Moore, a right-wing author of military books, both fiction and nonfiction, who wrote the books on which the films The Green Berets and The French Connection were based. Sadler's record became one of those massive fluke hits, selling over nine million copies and getting him appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show, but other than one top thirty hit, he never had another hit single. Instead, he tried and failed to have a TV career, then became a writer of pulp fiction himself, writing a series of twenty-one novels about the centurion who thrust his spear into Jesus' side when Jesus was being crucified, and is thus cursed to be a soldier until the second coming. He moved to Nashville, Tennessee, where he lived until he shot Lee Emerson, a country songwriter who had written songs for Marty Robbins, in the head, killing him, in an argument over a woman. He was sentenced to thirty days in jail for this misdemeanour, of which he served twenty-eight. Later he moved to Guatemala City, where he was himself shot in the head. The nearest Army base to Nashville, where Sadler lived after his discharge, is Fort Campbell, in Clarksville: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Last Train to Clarksville"] The Vietnam War was a long and complicated war, one which affected nearly everything we're going to see in the next year or so of this podcast, and we're going to talk about it a lot, so it's worth giving a little bit of background here. In doing so, I'm going to use quite a flippant tone, but I want to make it clear that I'm not mocking the very real horrors that people suffered in the wars I'm talking about -- it's just that to sum up multiple decades of unimaginable horrors in a few sentences requires glossing over so much that you have to either laugh or cry. The origin of the Vietnam War, as in so many things in twentieth century history, can be found in European colonialism. France had invaded much of Southeast Asia in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, and created a territory known as French Indo-China, which became part of the French colonial Empire. But in 1940 France was taken over by Germany, and Japan was at war with China. Germany and Japan were allies, and the Japanese were worried that French Indo-China would be used to import fuel and arms to China -- plus, they quite fancied the idea of having a Japanese empire. So Vichy France let Japan take control of French Indo-China. But of course the *reason* that France had been taken over by Germany was that pretty much the whole world was at war in 1940, and obviously the countries that were fighting Germany and Japan -- the bloc led by Britain, soon to be joined by America and Russia -- weren't very keen on the idea of Japan getting more territory. But they were also busy with the whole "fighting a world war" thing, so they did what governments in this situation always do -- they funded local guerilla insurgent fighters on the basis that "my enemy's enemy is my friend", something that has luckily never had any negative consequences whatsoever, except for occasionally. Those local guerilla fighters were an anti-imperialist popular front, the Việt Minh, led by Hồ Chí Minh, a revolutionary Communist. They were dedicated to overthrowing foreign imperialist occupiers and gaining independence for Vietnam, and Hồ Chí Minh further wanted to establish a Soviet-style Communist government in the newly-independent country. The Allies funded the Việt Minh in their fight against the Japanese occupiers until the end of the Second World War, at which point France was liberated from German occupation, Vietnam was liberated from Japanese occupation, and the French basically said "Hooray! We get our Empire back!", to which Hồ Chí Minh's response was, more or less, "what part of anti-imperialist Marxist dedicated to overthrowing foreign occupation of Vietnam did you not understand, exactly?" Obviously, the French weren't best pleased with this, and so began what was the first of a series of wars in the region. The First Indochina War lasted for years and ended in a negotiated peace of a sort. Of course, this led to the favoured tactic of the time, partition -- splitting a formerly-occupied country into two, at an arbitrary dividing line, a tactic which was notably successful in securing peace everywhere it was tried. Apart from Ireland, India, Korea, and a few other places, but surely it wouldn't be a problem in Vietnam, right? North Vietnam was controlled by the Communists, led by Hồ Chí Minh, and recognised by China and the USSR but not by the Western states. South Vietnam was nominally independent but led by the former puppet emperor who owed his position to France, soon replaced by a right-wing dictatorship. And both the right-wing dictatorship and the left-wing dictatorship were soon busily oppressing their own citizens and funding military opposition groups in the other country. This soon escalated into full-blown war, with the North backed by China and Russia and the South backed by America. This was one of a whole series of wars in small countries which were really proxy wars between the two major powers, the USA and the USSR, both of which were vying for control, but which couldn't confront each other directly because either country had enough nuclear weapons to destroy the whole world multiple times over. But the Vietnam War quickly became more than a small proxy war. The US started sending its own troops over, and more and more of them. The US had never ended the draft after World War II, and by the mid sixties significant numbers of young men were being called up and sent over to fight in a war that had by that point lasted a decade (depending on exactly when you count the war as starting from) between two countries they didn't care about, over things few of them understood, and at an exorbitant cost in lives. As you might imagine, this started to become unpopular among those likely to be drafted, and as the people most affected (other, of course, than the Vietnamese people, whose opinions on being bombed and shot at by foreigners supporting one of other of the dictators vying to rule over them nobody else was much interested in) were also of the generation who were the main audience for popular music, slowly this started to seep into the lyrics of songs -- a seepage which had already been prompted by the appearance in the folk and soul worlds of many songs against other horrors, like segregation. This started to hit the pop charts with songs like "The Universal Soldier" by Buffy Saint-Marie, which made the UK top five in a version by Donovan: [Excerpt: Donovan, "The Universal Soldier"] That charted in the lower regions of the US charts, and a cover version by Glen Campbell did slightly better: [Excerpt: Glen Campbell, "The Universal Soldier"] That was even though Campbell himself was a supporter of the war in Vietnam, and rather pro-military. Meanwhile, as we've seen a couple of times, Jan Berry of Jan and Dean recorded a pro-war answer song to that, "The Universal Coward": [Excerpt: Jan Berry, "The Universal Coward"] This, of course, was even though Berry was himself avoiding the draft. And I've not been able to find the credits for that track, but Glen Campbell regularly played guitar on Berry's sessions, so it's entirely possible that he played guitar on that record made by a coward, attacking his own record, which he disagreed with, for its cowardice. This is, of course, what happens when popular culture tries to engage with social and political issues -- pop culture is motivated by money, not ideological consistency, and so if there's money to be made from anti-war songs or from pro-war songs, someone will take that money. And so on October the ninth 1965, Billboard magazine ran a report: "Colpix Enters Protest Field HOLLYWOOD -Colpix has secured its first protest lyric disk, "The Willing Conscript,"as General Manager Bud Katzel initiates relationships with independent producers. The single features Lauren St. Davis. Katzel says the song was written during the Civil War, rewritten during World War I and most recently updated by Bob Krasnow and Sam Ashe. Screen Gems Music, the company's publishing wing, is tracing the song's history, Katzel said. Katzel's second single is "(You Got the Gamma Goochee" by an artist with that unusual stage name. The record is a Screen Gems production and was in the house when Katzel arrived one month ago. The executive said he was expressly looking for material for two contract artists, David Jones and Hoyt Axton. The company is also working on getting Axton a role in a television series, "Camp Runamuck." " To unpack this a little, Colpix was a record label, owned by Columbia Pictures, and we talked about that a little bit in the episode on "The Loco-Motion" -- the film and TV companies were getting into music, and Columbia had recently bought up Don Kirshner's Aldon publishing and Dimension Records as part of their strategy of tying in music with their TV shows. This is a company trying desperately to jump on a bandwagon -- Colpix at this time was not exactly having huge amounts of success with its records. Hoyt Axton, meanwhile, was a successful country singer and songwriter. We met his mother many episodes back -- Mae Axton was the writer of "Heartbreak Hotel". Axton himself is now best known as the dad in the 80s film Gremlins. David Jones will be coming up shortly. Bob Krasnow and Sam Ashe were record executives then at Kama Sutra records, but soon to move on -- we'll be hearing about Krasnow more in future episodes. Neither of them were songwriters, and while I have no real reason to disbelieve the claim that "The Willing Conscript" dates back to the Civil War, the earliest version *I* have been able to track down was its publication in issue 28 of Broadside Magazine in June 1963 -- nearly a hundred years after the American Civil War -- with the credit "by Tom Paxton" -- Paxton was a popular singer-songwriter of the time, and it certainly sounds like his writing. The first recording of it I know of was by Pete Seeger: [Excerpt: Pete Seeger, "The Willing Conscript"] But the odd thing is that by the time this was printed, the single had already been released the previous month, and it was not released under the name Lauren St Davis, or under the title "The Willing Conscript" -- there are precisely two differences between the song copyrighted as by Krasnow and Ashe and the one copyrighted two years earlier as by Paxton. One is that verses three and four are swapped round, the other is that it's now titled "The New Recruit". And presumably because they realised that the pseudonym "Lauren St. Davis" was trying just a bit too hard to sound cool and drug culture, they reverted to another stage name the performer had been using, Michael Blessing: [Excerpt: Michael Blessing, "The New Recruit"] Blessing's name was actually Michael Nesmith, and before we go any further, yes his mother, Bette Nesmith Graham, did invent the product that later became marketed in the US as Liquid Paper. At this time, though, that company wasn't anywhere near as successful as it later became, and was still a tiny company. I only mention it to forestall the ten thousand comments and tweets I would otherwise get asking why I didn't mention it. In Nesmith's autobiography, while he talks a lot about his mother, he barely mentions her business and says he was uninterested in it -- he talks far more about the love of art she instilled in him, as well as her interest in the deep questions of philosophy and religion, to which in her case and his they found answers in Christian Science, but both were interested in conversations about ideas, in a way that few other people in Nesmith's early environment were. Nesmith's mother was also responsible for his music career. He had spent two years in the Air Force in his late teens, and the year he got out, his mother and stepfather bought him a guitar for Christmas, after he was inspired by seeing Hoyt Axton performing live and thinking he could do that himself: [Excerpt: Hoyt Axton, "Greenback Dollar"] As he put it in his autobiography, "What did it matter that I couldn't play the guitar, couldn't sing very well, and didn't know any folk songs? I would be going to college and hanging out at the student union with pretty girls and singing folk songs. They would like me. I might even figure out a way to get a cool car." This is, of course, the thought process that pretty much every young man to pick up a guitar goes through, but Nesmith was more dedicated than most. He gave his first performance as a folk singer ten days after he first got a guitar, after practising the few chords in most folk songs for twelve hours a day every day in that time. He soon started performing as a folk singer, performing around Dallas both on his own and with his friend John London, performing the standard folk repertoire of Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly songs, things like "Pick a Bale of Cotton": [Excerpt: Michael Nesmith, "Pick a Bale of Cotton"] He also started writing his own songs, and put out a vanity record of one of them in 1963: [Excerpt: Mike Nesmith, "Wanderin'"] London moved to California, and Nesmith soon followed, with his first wife Phyllis and their son Christian. There Nesmith and London had the good fortune to be neighbours with someone who was a business associate of Frankie Laine, and they were signed to Laine's management company as a folk duo. However, Nesmith's real love was rock and roll, especially the heavier R&B end of the genre -- he was particularly inspired by Bo Diddley, and would always credit seeing Diddley live as a teenager as being his biggest musical influence. Soon Nesmith and London had formed a folk-rock trio with their friend Bill Sleeper. As Mike & John & Bill, they put out a single, "How Can You Kiss Me?", written by Nesmith: [Excerpt: Mike & John & Bill, "How Can You Kiss Me?"] They also recorded more of Nesmith's songs, like "All the King's Horses": [Excerpt: Mike & John & Bill, "All the King's Horses"] But that was left unreleased, as Bill was drafted, and Nesmith and London soon found themselves in The Survivors, one of several big folk groups run by Randy Sparks, the founder of the New Christie Minstrels. Nesmith was also writing songs throughout 1964 and 1965, and a few of those songs would be recorded by other people in 1966, like "Different Drum", which was recorded by the bluegrass band The Greenbriar Boys: [Excerpt: The Greenbriar Boys, "Different Drum"] That would more successfully be recorded by the Stone Poneys later of course. And Nesmith's "Mary Mary" was also picked up by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band: [Excerpt: The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, "Mary Mary"] But while Nesmith had written these songs by late 1965, he wasn't able to record them himself. He was signed by Bob Krasnow, who insisted he change his name to Michael Blessing, and recorded two singles for Colpix -- "The New Recruit", which we heard earlier, and a version of Buffy Saint-Marie's "Until It's Time For You To Go", sung in a high tenor range very far from Nesmith's normal singing voice: [Excerpt: Michael Blessing, "Until It's Time For You To Go"] But to my mind by far the best thing Nesmith recorded in this period is the unissued third Michael Blessing single, where Nesmith seems to have been given a chance to make the record he really wanted to make. The B-side, a version of Allen Toussaint's swamp-rocker "Get Out of My Life, Woman", is merely a quite good version of the song, but the A-side, a version of his idol Bo Diddley's classic "Who Do You Love?" is utterly extraordinary, and it's astonishing that it was never released at the time: [Excerpt: Michael Blessing, "Who Do You Love?"] But the Michael Blessing records did no better than anything else Colpix were putting out. Indeed, the only record they got onto the hot one hundred at all in a three and a half year period was a single by one David Jones, which reached the heady heights of number ninety-eight: [Excerpt: David Jones, "What Are We Going to Do?"] Jones had been brought up in extreme poverty in Openshaw in Manchester, but had been encouraged by his mother, who died when he was fourteen, to go into acting. He'd had a few parts on local radio, and had appeared as a child actor on TV shows made in Manchester, like appearing in the long-running soap opera Coronation Street (still on today) as Ena Sharples' grandson Colin: [Excerpt: Coronation St https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FDEvOs1imc , 13:30] He also had small roles in Z-Cars and Bill Naughton's TV play "June Evening", and a larger role in Keith Waterhouse's radio play "There is a Happy Land". But when he left school, he decided he was going to become a jockey rather than an actor -- he was always athletic, he loved horses, and he was short -- I've seen his height variously cited as five foot three and five foot four. But it turned out that the owner of the stables in which he was training had showbusiness connections, and got him the audition that changed his life, for the part of the Artful Dodger in Lionel Bart's West End musical Oliver! We've encountered Lionel Bart before a couple of times, but if you don't remember him, he was the songwriter who co-wrote Tommy Steele's hits, and who wrote "Living Doll" for Cliff Richard. He also discovered both Steele and Marty Wilde, and was one of the major figures in early British rock and roll. But after the Tommy Steele records, he'd turned his attention to stage musicals, writing book, music, and lyrics for a string of hits, and more-or-less singlehandedly inventing the modern British stage musical form -- something Andrew Lloyd Webber, for example, always credits him with. Oliver!, based on Oliver Twist, was his biggest success, and they were looking for a new Artful Dodger. This was *the* best role for a teenage boy in the UK at the time -- later performers to take the role on the London stage include Steve Marriott and Phil Collins, both of whom we'll no doubt encounter in future episodes -- and Jones got the job, although they were a bit worried at first about his Manchester vowels. He assured them though that he could learn to do a Cockney accent, and they took him on. Jones not having a natural Cockney accent ended up doing him the biggest favour of his career. While he could put on a relatively convincing one, he articulated quite carefully because it wasn't his natural accent. And so when the North American version found  in previews that their real Cockney Dodger wasn't being understood perfectly, the fake Cockney Jones was brought over to join the show on Broadway, and was there from opening night on. On February the ninth, 1964, Jones found himself, as part of the Broadway cast of Oliver!, on the Ed Sullivan Show: [Excerpt: Davy Jones and Georgia Brown, "I'd Do Anything"] That same night, there were some other British people, who got a little bit more attention than Jones did: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I Want to Hold Your Hand (live on Ed Sullivan)"] Davy Jones wasn't a particular fan of pop music at that point, but he knew he liked what he saw, and he wanted some of the same reaction. Shortly after this, Jones was picked up for management by Ward Sylvester, of Columbia Pictures, who was going to groom Jones for stardom. Jones continued in Oliver! for a while, and also had a brief run in a touring version of Pickwick, another musical based on a Dickens novel, this time starring Harry Secombe, the British comedian and singer who had made his name with the Goon Show. Jones' first single, "Dream Girl", came out in early 1965: [Excerpt: Davy Jones, "Dream Girl"] It was unsuccessful, as was his one album, David Jones, which seemed to be aiming at the teen idol market, but failing miserably. The second single, "What Are  We Going to Do?" did make the very lowest regions of the Hot One Hundred, but the rest of the album was mostly attempts to sound a bit like Herman's Hermits -- a band whose lead singer, coincidentally, also came from Manchester, had appeared in Coronation Street, and was performing with a fake Cockney accent. Herman's Hermits had had a massive US hit with the old music hall song "I'm Henry VIII I Am": [Excerpt: Herman's Hermits, "I'm Henry VIII I Am"] So of course Davy had his own old music-hall song, "Any Old Iron": [Excerpt: Davy Jones, "Any Old Iron"] Also, the Turtles had recently had a hit with a folk-rock version of Dylan's "It Ain't Me Babe", and Davy cut his own version of their arrangement, in the one concession to rock music on the album: [Excerpt: Davy Jones, "It Ain't Me Babe"] The album was, unsurprisingly, completely unsuccessful, but Ward Sylvester was not disheartened. He had the perfect job for a young British teen idol who could sing and act. The Monkees was the brainchild of two young TV producers, Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider, who had come up with the idea of doing a TV show very loosely based on the Beatles' film A Hard Day's Night (though Rafelson would later claim that he'd had the idea many years before A Hard Day's Night and was inspired by his youth touring with folk bands -- Schneider always admitted the true inspiration though). This was not a particularly original idea -- there were a whole bunch of people trying to make TV shows based in some way around bands. Jan and Dean were working on a possible TV series, there was talk of a TV series starring The Who, there was a Beatles cartoon series, Hanna-Barbera were working on a cartoon series about a band called The Bats, and there was even another show proposed to Screen Gems, Columbia's TV department, titled Liverpool USA, which was meant to star Davy Jones, another British performer, and two American musicians, and to have songs provided by Don Kirshner's songwriters. That The Monkees, rather than these other series, was the one that made it to the TV (though obviously the Beatles cartoon series did too) is largely because Rafelson and Schneider's independent production company, Raybert, which they had started after leaving Screen Gems, was given two hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars to develop the series by their former colleague, Screen Gems' vice president in charge of programme development, the former child star Jackie Cooper. Of course, as well as being their former colleague, Cooper may have had some more incentive to give Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider that money in that the head of Columbia Pictures, and thus Cooper's boss' boss, was one Abe Schneider. The original idea for the show was to use the Lovin' Spoonful, but as we heard last week they weren't too keen, and it was quickly decided instead that the production team would put together a group of performers. Davy Jones was immediately attached to the project, although Rafelson was uncomfortable with Jones, thinking he wasn't as rock and roll as Rafelson was hoping for -- he later conceded, though, that Jones was absolutely right for the group. As for everyone else, to start with Rafelson and Schneider placed an ad in a couple of the trade papers which read "Madness!! Auditions Folk and Roll Musicians-Singers for acting roles in new TV series. Running parts for 4 insane boys ages 17-21. Want spirited Ben Frank's types. Have courage to work. Must come down for interview" There were a couple of dogwhistles in there, to appeal to the hip crowd -- Ben Frank's was a twenty-four-hour restaurant on the Sunset Strip, where people including Frank Zappa and Jim Morrison used to hang out, and which was very much associated with the freak scene we've looked at in episodes on Zappa and the Byrds. Meanwhile "Must come down for interview" was meant to emphasise that you couldn't actually be high when you turned up -- but you were expected to be the kind of person who would at least at some points have been high. A lot of people answered that ad -- including Paul Williams, Harry Nilsson, Van Dyke Parks, and many more we'll be seeing along the way. But oddly, the only person actually signed up for the show because of that ad was Michael Nesmith -- who was already signed to Colpix Records anyway. According to Davy Jones, who was sitting in at the auditions, Schneider and Rafelson were deliberately trying to disorient the auditioners with provocative behaviour like just ignoring them, to see how they'd react. Nesmith was completely unfazed by this, and apparently walked in wearing a  green wool hat and carrying a bag of laundry, saying that he needed to get this over with quickly so he could go and do his washing. John London, who came along to the audition as well, talked later about seeing Nesmith fill in a questionnaire that everyone had to fill in -- in a space asking about previous experience Nesmith just wrote "Life" and drew a big diagonal line across the rest of the page. That attitude certainly comes across in Nesmith's screen test: [Excerpt: Michael Nesmith screen test] Meanwhile, Rafelson and Schneider were also scouring the clubs for performers who might be useful, and put together a shortlist of people including Jerry Yester and Chip Douglas of the Modern Folk Quartet, Bill Chadwick, who was in the Survivors with Nesmith and London, and one Micky Braddock, whose agent they got in touch with and who was soon signed up. Braddock was the stage name of Micky Dolenz, who soon reverted to his birth surname, and it's the name by which he went in his first bout of fame. Dolenz was the son of two moderately successful Hollywood actors, George Dolenz and Janelle Johnson, and their connections had led to Dolenz, as Braddock, getting the lead role in the 1958 TV series Circus Boy, about a child named Corky who works in a circus looking after an elephant after his parents, the Flying Falcons, were killed in a trapeze accident. [Excerpt: Circus Boy, "I can't play a drum"] Oddly, one of the other people who had been considered for that role was Paul Williams, who was also considered for the Monkees but ultimately turned down, and would later write one of the Monkees' last singles. Dolenz had had a few minor TV appearances after that series had ended, including a recurring role on Peyton Place, but he had also started to get interested in music. He'd performed a bit as a folk duo with his sister Coco, and had also been the lead singer of a band called Micky and the One-Nighters, who later changed their name to the Missing Links, who'd played mostly covers of Little Richard and Chuck Berry songs and later British Invasion hits. He'd also recorded two tracks with Wrecking Crew backing, although neither track got released until after his later fame -- "Don't Do It": [Excerpt: Micky Dolenz, "Don't Do It"] and "Huff Puff": [Excerpt: Micky Dolenz, "Huff Puff"] Dolenz had a great singing voice, an irrepressible personality, and plenty of TV experience. He was obviously in. Rafelson and Schneider took quite a while whittling down the shortlist to the final four, and they *were* still considering people who'd applied through the ads. One they actually offered the role to was Stephen Stills, but he decided not to take the role. When he turned the role down, they asked if he knew anyone else who had a similar appearance to him, and as it happened he did. Steve Stills and Peter Tork had known of each other before they actually met on the streets of Greenwich Village -- the way they both told the story, on their first meeting they'd each approached the other and said "You must be the guy everyone says looks like me!" The two had become fast friends, and had played around the Greenwich Village folk scene together for a while, before going their separate ways -- Stills moving to California while Tork joined another of those big folk ensembles of the New Christie Minstrels type, this one called the Phoenix Singers. Tork had later moved to California himself, and reconnected with his old friend, and they had performed together for a while in a trio called the Buffalo Fish, with Tork playing various instruments, singing, and doing comedy bits. Oddly, while Tork was the member of the Monkees with the most experience as a musician, he was the only one who hadn't made a record when the TV show was put together. But he was by far the most skilled instrumentalist of the group -- as distinct from best musician, a distinction Tork was always scrupulous about making -- and could play guitar, bass, and keyboards, all to a high standard -- and I've also seen him in more recent years play French horn live. His great love, though, was the banjo, and you can hear how he must have sounded on the Greenwich Village folk scene in his solo spots on Monkees shows, where he would show off his banjo skills: [Excerpt: Peter Tork, "Cripple Creek"] Tork wouldn't get to use his instrumental skills much at first though, as most of the backing tracks for the group's records were going to be performed by other people. More impressive for the TV series producers was his gift for comedy, especially physical comedy -- having seen Tork perform live a few times, the only comparison I can make to his physical presence is to Harpo Marx, which is about as high a compliment as one can give. Indeed, Micky Dolenz has often pointed out that while there were intentional parallels to the Beatles in the casting of the group, the Marx Brothers are a far better parallel, and it's certainly easy to see Tork as Harpo, Dolenz as Chico, Nesmith as Groucho, and Jones as Zeppo. (This sounds like an insult to Jones, unless you're aware of how much the Marx Brothers films actually depended on Zeppo as the connective tissue between the more outrageous brothers and the more normal environment they were operating in, and how much the later films suffered for the lack of Zeppo). The new cast worked well together, even though there were obvious disagreements between them right from the start. Dolenz, at least at this point, seems to have been the gel that held the four together -- he had the experience of being a child star in common with Jones, he was a habitue of the Sunset Strip clubs where Nesmith and Tork had been hanging out, and he had personality traits in common with all of them. Notably, in later years, Dolenz would do duo tours with each of his three bandmates without the participation of the others. The others, though, didn't get on so well with each other. Jones and Tork seem to have got on OK, but they were very different people -- Jones was a showbiz entertainer, whose primary concern was that none of the other stars of the show be better looking than him, while Tork was later self-diagnosed as neurodivergent, a folkie proto-hippie who wanted to drift from town to town playing his banjo. Tork and Nesmith had similar backgrounds and attitudes in some respects -- and were united in their desire to have more musical input into the show than was originally intended -- but they were such different personalities in every aspect of their lives from their religious views to their politics to their taste in music they came into conflict. Nesmith would later say of Tork "I never liked Peter, he never liked me. So we had an uneasy truce between the two of us. As clear as I could tell, among his peers he was very well liked. But we rarely had a civil word to say to each other". Nesmith also didn't get on well with Jones, both of them seeming to view themselves as the natural leader of the group, with all the clashes that entails. The four Monkees were assigned instruments for their characters based not on instrumental skill, but on what suited their roles better. Jones was the teen idol character, so he was made the maraca-playing frontman who could dance without having to play an instrument, though Dolenz took far more of the lead vocals. Nesmith was made the guitarist, while Tork was put on bass, though Tork was by far the better guitarist of the two. And Dolenz was put on drums, even though he didn't play the drums -- Tork would always say later that if the roles had been allocated by actual playing ability, Jones would have been the drummer. Dolenz did, though, become a good drummer, if a rather idiosyncratic one. Tork would later say "Micky played the drums but Mike kept time, on that one record we all made, Headquarters. Mike was the timekeeper. I don't know that Micky relied on him but Mike had a much stronger sense of time. And Davy too, Davy has a much stronger sense of time. Micky played the drums like they were a musical instrument, as a colour. He played the drum colour.... as a band, there was a drummer and there was a timekeeper and they were different people." But at first, while the group were practising their instruments so they could mime convincingly on the TV and make personal appearances, they didn't need to play on their records. Indeed, on the initial pilot, they didn't even sing -- the recordings had been made before the cast had been finalised: [Excerpt: Boyce & Hart, "Monkees Theme (pilot version)"] The music was instead performed by two songwriters, Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, who would become hugely important in the Monkees project. Boyce and Hart were not the first choice for the project. Don Kirshner, the head of Screen Gems Music, had initially suggested Roger Atkins, a Brill Building songwriter working for his company, as the main songwriter for The Monkees. Atkins is best known for writing "It's My Life", a hit for the Animals: [Excerpt: The Animals, "It's My Life"] But Atkins didn't work out, though he would collaborate later on one song with Nesmith, and reading between the lines, it seems that there was some corporate infighting going on, though I've not seen it stated in so many words. There seems to have been a turf war between Don Kirshner, the head of Screen Gems' music publishing, who was based in the Brill Building, and Lester Sill, the West Coast executive we've seen so many times before, the mentor to Leiber and Stoller, Duane Eddy, and Phil Spector, who was now the head of Screen Gems music on the West Coast. It also seems to be the case that none of the top Brill Building songwriters were all that keen on being involved at this point -- writing songs for an unsold TV pilot wasn't exactly a plum gig. Sill ended up working closely with the TV people, and it seems to have been him who put forward Boyce and Hart, a songwriting team he was mentoring. Boyce and Hart had been working in the music industry for years, both together and separately, and had had some success, though they weren't one of the top-tier songwriting teams like Goffin and King. They'd both started as performers -- Boyce's first single, "Betty Jean", had come out in 1958: [Excerpt: Tommy Boyce, "Betty Jean"] And Hart's, "Love Whatcha Doin' to Me", under his birth name Robert Harshman, a year later: [Excerpt: Robert Harshman, "Love Whatcha Doin' to Me"] Boyce had been the first one to have real songwriting success, writing Fats Domino's top ten hit "Be My Guest" in 1959: [Excerpt: Fats Domino, "Be My Guest"] and cowriting two songs with singer Curtis Lee, both of which became singles produced by Phil Spector -- "Under the Moon of Love" and the top ten hit "Pretty Little Angel Eyes": [Excerpt: Curtis Lee, "Pretty Little Angel Eyes"] Boyce and Hart together, along with Wes Farrell, who had co-written "Twist and Shout" with Bert Berns, wrote "Lazy Elsie Molly" for Chubby Checker, and the number three hit "Come a Little Bit Closer" for Jay and the Americans: [Excerpt: Jay and the Americans, "Come a Little Bit Closer"] At this point they were both working in the Brill Building, but then Boyce moved to the West Coast, where he was paired with Steve Venet, the brother of Nik Venet, and they co-wrote and produced "Peaches and Cream" for the Ikettes: [Excerpt: The Ikettes, "Peaches and Cream"] Hart, meanwhile, was playing in the band of Teddy Randazzo, the accordion-playing singer who had appeared in The Girl Can't Help It, and with Randazzo and Bobby Weinstein he wrote "Hurts So Bad", which became a big hit for Little Anthony and the Imperials: [Excerpt: Little Anthony and the Imperials, "Hurts So Bad"] But Hart soon moved over to the West Coast, where he joined his old partner Boyce, who had been busy writing TV themes with Venet for shows like "Where the Action Is". Hart soon replaced Venet in the team, and the two soon wrote what would become undoubtedly their most famous piece of music ever, a theme tune that generations of TV viewers would grow to remember: [Excerpt: "Theme from Days of Our Lives"] Well, what did you *think* I meant? Yes, just as Davy Jones had starred in an early episode of Britain's longest-running soap opera, one that's still running today, so Boyce and Hart wrote the theme music for *America's* longest-running soap opera, which has been running every weekday since 1965, and has so far aired well in excess of fourteen thousand episodes. Meanwhile, Hart had started performing in a band called the Candy Store Prophets, with Larry Taylor  -- who we last saw with the Gamblers, playing on "LSD-25" and "Moon Dawg" -- on bass, Gerry McGee on guitar, and Billy Lewis on drums. It was this band that Boyce and Hart used -- augmented by session guitarists Wayne Erwin and Louie Shelton and Wrecking Crew percussionist Gene Estes on tambourine, plus Boyce and session singer Ron Hicklin on backing vocals, to record first the demos and then the actual tracks that would become the Monkees hits. They had a couple of songs already that would be suitable for the pilot episode, but they needed something that would be usable as a theme song for the TV show. Boyce and Hart's usual working method was to write off another hit -- they'd try to replicate the hook or the feel or the basic sound of something that was already popular. In this case, they took inspiration from the song "Catch Us If You Can", the theme from the film that was the Dave Clark Five's attempt at their own A Hard Day's Night: [Excerpt: The Dave Clark Five, "Catch Us If You Can"] Boyce and Hart turned that idea into what would become the Monkees theme. We heard their performance of it earlier of course, but when the TV show finally came out, it was rerecorded with Dolenz singing: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Monkees Theme"] For a while, Boyce and Hart hoped that they would get to perform all the music for the TV show, and there was even apparently some vague talk of them being cast in it, but it was quickly decided that they would just be songwriters. Originally, the intent was that they wouldn't even produce the records, that instead the production would be done by a name producer. Micky Most, the Animals' producer, was sounded out for the role but wasn't interested. Snuff Garrett was brought in, but quickly discovered he didn't get on with the group at all -- in particular, they were all annoyed at the idea that Davy would be the sole lead vocalist, and the tracks Garrett cut with Davy on lead and the Wrecking Crew backing were scrapped. Instead, it was decided that Boyce and Hart would produce most of the tracks, initially with the help of the more experienced Jack Keller, and that they would only work with one Monkee at a time to minimise disruption -- usually Micky and sometimes Davy. These records would be made the same way as the demos had been, by the same set of musicians, just with one of the Monkees taking the lead. Meanwhile, as Nesmith was seriously interested in writing and production, and Rafelson and Schneider wanted to encourage the cast members, he was also assigned to write and produce songs for the show. Unlike Boyce and Hart, Nesmith wanted to use his bandmates' talents -- partly as a way of winning them over, as it was already becoming clear that the show would involve several competing factions. Nesmith's songs were mostly country-rock tracks that weren't considered suitable as singles, but they would be used on the TV show and as album tracks, and on Nesmith's songs Dolenz and Tork would sing backing vocals, and Tork would join the Wrecking Crew as an extra guitarist -- though he was well aware that his part on records like "Sweet Young Thing" wasn't strictly necessary when Glen Campbell, James Burton, Al Casey and Mike Deasy were also playing guitar: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Sweet Young Thing"] That track was written by Nesmith with Goffin and King, and there seems to have been some effort to pair Nesmith, early on, with more commercial songwriters, though this soon fell by the wayside and Nesmith was allowed to keep making his own idiosyncratic records off to the side while Boyce and Hart got on with making the more commercial records. This was not, incidentally, something that most of the stars of the show objected to or even thought was a problem at the time. Tork was rather upset that he wasn't getting to have much involvement with the direction of the music, as he'd thought he was being employed as a musician, but Dolenz and Jones were actors first and foremost, while Nesmith was happily making his own tracks. They'd all known going in that most of the music for the show would be created by other people -- there were going to be two songs every episode, and there was no way that four people could write and record that much material themselves while also performing in a half-hour comedy show every week. Assuming, of course, that the show even aired. Initial audience response to the pilot was tepid at best, and it looked for a while like the show wasn't going to be green-lit. But Rafelson and Schneider -- and director James Frawley who played a crucial role in developing the show -- recut the pilot, cutting out one character altogether -- a manager who acted as an adult supervisor -- and adding in excerpts of the audition tapes, showing the real characters of some of the actors. As three of the four were playing characters loosely based on themselves -- Peter's "dummy" character wasn't anything like he was in real life, but was like the comedy character he'd developed in his folk-club performances -- this helped draw the audience in. It also, though, contributed to some line-blurring that became a problem. The re-edited pilot was a success, and the series sold. Indeed, the new format for the series was a unique one that had never been done on TV before -- it was a sitcom about four young men living together, without any older adult supervision, getting into improbable adventures, and with one or two semi-improvised "romps", inspired by silent slapstick, over which played original songs. This became strangely influential in British sitcom when the series came out over here  -- two of the most important sitcoms of the next couple of decades, The Goodies and The Young Ones, are very clearly influenced by the Monkees. And before the broadcast of the first episode, they were going to release a single to promote it. The song chosen as the first single was one Boyce and Hart had written, inspired by the Beatles. Specifically inspired by this: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Paperback Writer"] Hart heard that tag on the radio, and thought that the Beatles were singing "take the last train". When he heard the song again the next day and realised that the song had nothing to do with trains, he and Boyce sat down and wrote their own song inspired by his mishearing. "Last Train to Clarksville" is structured very, very, similarly to "Paperback Writer" -- both of them stay on one chord, a G7, for an eight-bar verse before changing to C7 for a chorus line -- the word "writer" for the Beatles, the "no no no" (inspired by the Beatles "yeah yeah yeah") for the Monkees. To show how close the parallels are, I've sped up the vocals from the Beatles track slightly to match the tempo with a karaoke backing track version of "Last Train to Clarksville" I found, and put the two together: [Excerpt: "Paperback Clarksville"] Lyrically, there was one inspiration I will talk about in a minute, but I think I've identified another inspiration that nobody has ever mentioned. The classic country song "Night Train to Memphis", co-written by Owen Bradley, and made famous by Roy Acuff, has some slight melodic similarity to "Last Train to Clarksville", and parallels the lyrics fairly closely -- "take the night train to Memphis" against "take the last train to Clarksville", both towns in Tennessee, and "when you arrive at the station, I'll be right there to meet you I'll be right there to greet you, So don't turn down my invitation" is clearly close to "and I'll meet you at the station, you can be here by 4:30 'cos I've made your reservation": [Excerpt: Roy Acuff, "Night Train to Memphis"] Interestingly, in May 1966, the same month that "Paperback Writer" was released, and so presumably the time that Hart heard the song on the radio for the first time, Rick Nelson, the teen idol formerly known as Ricky Nelson, who had started his own career as a performer in a sitcom, had released an album called Bright Lights and Country Music. He'd had a bit of a career downslump and was changing musical direction, and recording country songs. The last track on that album was a version of "Night Train to Memphis": [Excerpt: Rick Nelson, "Night Train to Memphis"] Now, I've never seen either Boyce or Hart ever mention even hearing that song, it's pure speculation on my part that there's any connection there at all, but I thought the similarity worth mentioning. The idea of the lyric, though, was to make a very mild statement about the Vietnam War. Clarksville was, as mentioned earlier, the site of Fort Campbell, a military training base, and they crafted a story about a young soldier being shipped off to war, calling his girlfriend to come and see him for one last night. This is left more-or-less ambiguous -- this was a song being written for a TV show intended for children, after all -- but it's still very clear on the line "and I don't know if I'm ever coming home". Now, Boyce and Hart were songwriters first and foremost, and as producers they were quite hands-off and would let the musicians shape the arrangements. They knew they wanted a guitar riff in the style of the Beatles' recent singles, and Louie Shelton came up with one based around the G7 chord that forms the basis of the song, starting with an octave leap: Shelton's riff became the hook that drove the record, and engineer Dave Hassinger added the final touch, manually raising the volume on the hi-hat mic for a fraction of a second every bar, creating a drum sound like a hissing steam brake: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Last Train to Clarksville"] Now all that was needed was to get the lead vocals down. But Micky Dolenz was tired, and hungry, and overworked -- both Dolenz and Jones in their separate autobiographies talk about how it was normal for them to only get three hours' sleep a night between working twelve hour days filming the series, three-hour recording sessions, and publicity commitments. He got the verses down fine, but he just couldn't sing the middle eight. Boyce and Hart had written a complicated, multisyllabic, patter bridge, and he just couldn't get his tongue around that many syllables when he was that tired. He eventually asked if he could just sing "do do do" instead of the words, and the producers agreed. Surprisingly, it worked: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Last Train to Clarksville"] "Last Train to Clarksville" was released in advance of the TV series, on a new label, Colgems, set up especially for the Monkees to replace Colpix, with a better distribution deal, and it went to number one. The TV show started out with mediocre ratings, but soon that too became a hit. And so did the first album released from the TV series. And that album was where some of the problems really started. The album itself was fine -- ten tracks produced by Boyce and Hart with the Candy Store Prophets playing and either Micky or Davy singing, mostly songs Boyce and Hart wrote, with a couple of numbers by Goffin and King and other Kirshner staff songwriters, plus two songs produced by Nesmith with the Wrecking Crew, and with token participation from Tork and Dolenz. The problem was the back cover, which gave little potted descriptions of each of them, with their height, eye colour, and so on. And under three of them it said "plays guitar and sings", while under Dolenz it said "plays drums and sings". Now this was technically accurate -- they all did play those instruments. They just didn't play them on the record, which was clearly the impression the cover was intended to give. Nesmith in particular was incandescent. He believed that people watching the TV show understood that the group weren't really performing that music, any more than Adam West was really fighting crime or William Shatner travelling through space. But crediting them on the record was, he felt, crossing a line into something close to con artistry. To make matters worse, success was bringing more people trying to have a say. Where before, the Monkees had been an irrelevance, left to a couple of B-list producer-songwriters on the West Coast, now they were a guaranteed hit factory, and every songwriter working for Kirshner wanted to write and produce for them -- which made sense because of the sheer quantity of material they needed for the TV show, but it made for a bigger, less democratic, organisation -- one in which Kirshner was suddenly in far more control. Suddenly as well as Boyce and Hart with the Candy Store Prophets and Nesmith with the Wrecking Crew, both of whom had been operating without much oversight from Kirshner, there were a bunch of tracks being cut on the East Coast by songwriting and production teams like Goffin and King, and Neil Sedaka and Carole Bayer. On the second Monkees album, released only a few months after the first, there were nine producers credited -- as well as Boyce, Hart, Jack Keller, and Nesmith, there were now also Goffin, King, Sedaka, Bayer, and Jeff Barry, who as well as cutting tracks on the east coast was also flying over to the West Coast, cutting more tracks with the Wrecking Crew, and producing vocal sessions while there. As well as producing songs he'd written himself, Barry was also supervising songs written by other people. One of those was a new songwriter he'd recently discovered and been co-producing for Bang Records, Neil Diamond, who had just had a big hit of his own with "Cherry Cherry": [Excerpt: Neil Diamond, "Cherry Cherry"] Diamond was signed with Screen Gems, and had written a song which Barry thought would be perfect for the Monkees, an uptempo song called "I'm a Believer", which he'd demoed with the regular Bang musicians -- top East Coast session players like Al Gorgoni, the guitarist who'd played on "The Sound of Silence": [Excerpt: Neil Diamond, "I'm a Believer"] Barry had cut a backing track for the Monkees using those same musicians, including Diamond on acoustic guitar, and brought it over to LA. And that track would indirectly lead to the first big crisis for the group. Barry, unlike Boyce and Hart, was interested in working with the whole group, and played all of them the backing track. Nesmith's reaction was a blunt "I'm a producer too, and that ain't no hit". He liked the song -- he wanted to have a go at producing a track on it himself, as it happened -- but he didn't think the backing track worked. Barry, trying to lighten the mood, joked that it wasn't finished and you needed to imagine it with strings and horns. Unfortunately, Nesmith didn't get that he was joking, and started talking about how that might indeed make a difference -- at which point everyone laughed and Nesmith took it badly -- his relationship with Barry quickly soured. Nesmith was getting increasingly dissatisfied with the way his songs and his productions were being sidelined, and was generally getting unhappy, and Tork was wanting more musical input too. They'd been talking with Rafelson and Schneider, who'd agreed that the group were now good enough on their instruments that they could start recording some tracks by themselves, an idea which Kirshner loathed. But for now they were recording Neil Diamond's song to Jeff Barry's backing track. Given that Nesmith liked the song, and given that he had some slight vocal resemblance to Diamond, the group suggested that Nesmith be given the lead vocal, and Kirshner and Barry agreed, although Kirshner at least apparently always intended for Dolenz to sing lead, and was just trying to pacify Nesmith. In the studio, Kirshner kept criticising Nesmith's vocal, and telling him he was doing it wrong, until eventually he stormed out, and Kirshner got what he wanted -- another Monkees hit with Micky Dolenz on lead, though this time it did at least have Jones and Tork on backing vocals: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "I'm a Believer"] That was released on November 23rd, 1966, as their second single, and became their second number one. And in January 1967, the group's second album, More of the Monkees, was released. That too went to number one. There was only one problem. The group weren't even told about the album coming out beforehand -- they had to buy their own copies from a record shop to even see what tracks were on it. Nesmith had his two tracks, but even Boyce and Hart were only given two, with the rest of the album being made up of tracks from the Brill Building songwriters Kirshner preferred. Lots of great Nesmith and Boyce and Hart tracks were left off the album in favour of some astonishingly weak material, including the two worst tracks the group ever recorded, "The Day We Fall in Love" and "Laugh", and a novelty song they found embarrassing, "Your Auntie Grizelda", included to give Tork a vocal spot. Nesmith called it "probably the worst album in the history of the world", though in truth seven of the twelve tracks are really very strong, though some of the other material is pretty poor. The group were also annoyed by the packaging. The liner notes were by Don Kirshner, and read to the group at least like a celebration of Kirshner himself as the one person responsible for everything on the record. Even the photo was an embarrassment -- the group had taken a series of photos in clothes from the department store J. C. Penney as part of an advertising campaign, and the group thought the clothes were ridiculous, but one of those photos was the one chosen for the cover. Nesmith and Tork made a decision, which the other two agreed to with varying degrees of willingness. They'd been fine miming to other people's records when it was clearly just for a TV show. But if they were being promoted as a real band, and having to go on tour promoting albums credited to them, they were going to *be* a real band, and take some responsibility for the music that was being put out in their name.  With the support of Rafelson and Schneider, they started making preparations to do just that. But Don Kirshner had other ideas, and told them so in no uncertain terms. As far as he was concerned, they were a bunch of ungrateful, spoiled, kids who were very happy cashing the ridiculously large cheques they were getting, but now wanted to kill the goose that laid the golden egg. They were going to keep doing what they were told. Things came to a head in a business meeting in January 1967, when Nesmith gave an ultimatum. Either the group got to start playing on their own records, or he was quitting. Herb Moelis, Kirshner's lawyer, told Nesmith that he should read his contract more carefully, at which point Nesmith got up, punched a hole in the wall of the hotel suite they were in, and told Moelis "That could have been your face". So as 1967 began, the group were at a turning point. Would they be able to cut the puppet strings, or would they have to keep living a lie? We'll find out in a few weeks' time...

Talking with Bindy Bitterman is full of laughter and humor. She recently published her first children's book, Skiddley, Diddley, Skat, a beautifully illustrated limerick and has returned to frequently writing limericks to the delight of all who know her. Even as a full time business woman, owning and running an antique store in Evanston IL, Bindy was successful because her customers knew they would feel better after shopping there. As she gets ready to turn 91, Bindy is grateful for finding a retirement community that adores her sense of play. Never bored, never at a lack for friendship and fun, she thrives on living, playing and creating. "I can't figure out how I got to be 90. It seems my sense of humor and play have developed since I've retired and moved to a retirement community." - Bindy Bittermanhttps://video.wttw.com/video/childrens-author-bindy-bitterman-writing-limericks-aufkbw/Connect with Bindy:Website: BindysVerses.comEmail: Bindy@eurekaevanston.comBook: Skiddley Diddley Skat - Children's BookAvailable at (temporarily out of stock until early February, 2022) :  Unabridged Book Store, Lake ViewBooked, EvanstonBook Stall, WinnetkaBook Cellar, ChicagoTown House Books, St. CharlesSee Bindy's interview on Chicago TonightEmail: Bindy@eurekaevanston.com

John Paul Hammond (Nova York)

Brian and Bux look back on a busy GW3 featuring Ferran the Ferrari, Antonio the amazing, and Salah the slotter. And of course, the lads address the impact of Ronaldo rejoining Manchester United. Given his steep 12.5M price tag, should the GOAT enter FPL manager's squads straightaway? Is he worth a hit to bring in vs NEW? Bux also reveals a potential GW4 wildcard given the community's desire to fit in heavy hitters upfront like Ron, Rom, & Kane. Please give us a follow us on social @FPLBluesPodcast and join our free FPL Blues Podcast Super League to test your luck against us and win prizes! --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/fplusapressplay/support

This week we look into why blues music makes us happy, whether the devil did a deal and Amaretto songs.We also learn about Robert Johnson, the diddley bow and Glamour Puss BluesPlease join our Patreon hereSources:https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/25/obituaries/robert-johnson-overlooked.htmlhttps://studionotesonline.com/facts-about-the-blues/https://www.visittheusa.ca/experience/deep-roots-5-us-cities-discover-blues-historyhttps://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/blues-alley-153293421/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diddley_bow Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hollis Brown has been described as "fizz and pop like fatback on a greasy skillet"--and that is accurate. The genre-defying band from Brooklyn is coming to Rams Head On Stage in Annapolis on Friday, August 27th for one show in support of their latest album, Ozone Park! We sat down with Mike Montali, the founder of the band about the past year, what it is like to get back on the road, the amazing tribute to Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, the un-released Bo Diddley riff he was able to use with permission from Diddley's estate, and a whole lot more! Have a listen, and then get your tickets! LINKS: Hollis Brown (Website) Hollis Brown (Facebook) Hollis Brown (Twitter) Hollis Brown (YouTube) Hollis Brown (Instagram) Hollis Brown (Spotify) Rams Head On Stage (Tickets)

Episode 129 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones, and how they went from being a moderately successful beat group to being the only serious rivals to the Beatles. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have an eleven-minute bonus episode available, on "I'll Never Find Another You" by the Seekers. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources As usual I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. i used a lot of resources for this episode. Two resources that I've used for this and all future Stones episodes — The Rolling Stones: All The Songs by Phillipe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesden is an invaluable reference book, while Old Gods Almost Dead by Stephen Davis is the least inaccurate biography. When in doubt, the version of the narrative I've chosen to use is the one from Davis' book. I've also used Andrew Loog Oldham's autobiography Stoned, and Keith Richards' Life, though be warned that both casually use slurs. Sympathy for the Devil: The Birth of the Rolling Stones and the Death of Brian Jones by Paul Trynka is, as the title might suggest, essentially special pleading for Jones. It's as well-researched and well-written as a pro-Jones book can be, and is worth reading for balance, though I find it unconvincing. This web page seems to have the most accurate details of the precise dates of sessions and gigs. And this three-CD set contains the A and B sides of all the Stones' singles up to 1971, including every Stones track I excerpt in this episode. 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 one of the most important riffs in rock and roll history -- the record that turned the distorted guitar riff into the defining feature of the genre, even though the man who played that riff never liked it. We're going to look at a record that took the social protest of the folk-rock movement, aligned it with the misogyny its singer had found in many blues songs, and turned it into the most powerful expression of male adolescent frustration ever recorded to that point. We're going to look at "Satisfaction" by the Rolling Stones: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Satisfaction"] A note before we start this -- this episode deals with violence against women, and with rape. If you're likely to be upset hearing about those things, you might want to either skip this episode, or read the transcript on the website first. The relevant section comes right at the end of the episode, so you can also listen through to the point where I give another warning, without missing any of the rest of the episode. Another point I should make here -- most of the great sixties groups have very accurate biographies written about them. The Stones, even more than the Beatles, have kept a surprising amount of control over their public image, with the result that the only sources about them are either rather sanitised things made with their co-operation, or rather tabloidy things whose information mostly comes from people who are holding a grudge or have a particular agenda. I believe that everything in this episode is the most likely of the various competing narratives, but if you check out the books I used, which are listed on the blog post associated with this episode, you'll see that there are several different tellings of almost every bit of this story. So bear that in mind as you're listening. I've done my best. Anyway, on with the episode.  When we left the Rolling Stones, they were at the very start of their recording career, having just released their first big hit single, a version of "I Wanna Be Your Man", which had been written for them by Lennon and McCartney.  The day after they first appeared on Top of the Pops, they were back in the recording studio, but not to record for themselves. The five Stones, plus Ian Stewart, were being paid two pounds a head by their manager/producer Andrew Oldham to be someone else's backing group. Oldham was producing a version of "To Know Him is to Love Him", the first hit by his idol Phil Spector, for a new singer he was managing named Cleo Sylvester: [Excerpt: Cleo, "To Know Him is to Love Him"] In a further emulation of Spector, the B-side was a throwaway instrumental. Credited to "the Andrew Oldham Orchestra", and with Mike Leander supervising, the song's title, "There Are But Five Rolling Stones", gave away who the performers actually were: [Excerpt: The Andrew Oldham Orchestra, "There Are But Five Rolling Stones"] At this point, the Stones were still not writing their own material, but Oldham had already seen the writing on the wall -- there was going to be no place in the new world opened up by the Beatles for bands that couldn't generate their own hits, and he had already decided who was going to be doing that for his group.  It would have been natural for him to turn to Brian Jones, still at this point the undisputed leader of the group, and someone who had a marvellous musical mind. But possibly in order to strengthen the group's identity as a group rather than a leader and his followers -- Oldham has made different statements about this at different points -- or possibly just because they were living in the same flat as him at the time, while Jones was living elsewhere, he decided that the Rolling Stones' equivalent of Lennon and McCartney was going to be Jagger and Richards. There are several inconsistencies in the stories of how Jagger and Richards started writing together -- and things like what the actual first song they wrote together was, or when they wrote it, will probably always be lost to the combination of self-aggrandisement and drug-fuelled memory loss that makes it difficult to say anything definitive about much of their career. But we do know that one of the earliest songs they wrote together was "As Tears Go By", a song that wasn't considered suitable for the group -- though they did later record a version of it -- and was given instead to Marianne Faithfull, a young singer with whom Jagger was about to enter into a relationship: [Excerpt: Marianne Faithfull, "As Tears Go By"] It's not entirely clear who wrote what on that song -- it's usually referred to as a Jagger/Richards collaboration, but it's credited to Jagger, Richards, and Oldham, and at least one source claims it was actually written by Jagger and the session guitarist Big Jim Sullivan -- and if so, this would be the first time of many that a song written by Jagger or Richards in collaboration with someone else would be credited to Jagger and Richards without any credit going to their co-writer. But the consensus story, as far as there is a consensus, seems to be that Oldham locked Jagger and Richards into a kitchen, and told them they weren't coming out until they had a song written. And it had to be a proper song, not a pastiche of something else, and it had to be the kind of song you could release as a single, not a blues song. After spending all night in the kitchen, Richards eventually got bored of being stuck in there, and started strumming his guitar and singing "it is the evening of the day", and the two of them quickly came up with the rest of the song. After "As Tears Go By", they wrote a lot of songs that they didn't feel were right for the group, but gave them away to other people, like Gene Pitney, who recorded "That Girl Belongs to Yesterday": [Excerpt: Gene Pitney, "That Girl Belongs to Yesterday"] Pitney, and his former record producer Phil Spector, had visited the Stones during the sessions for their first album, which started the day after that Cleo session, and had added a little piano and percussion to a blues jam called "Little by Little", which also featured Allan Clarke and Graham Nash of the Hollies on backing vocals. The songwriting on that track was credited to Spector and Nanker Phelge, a group pseudonym that was used for jam sessions and instrumentals. It was one of two Nanker Phelge songs on the album, and there was also an early Jagger and Richards song, "Tell Me", an unoriginal Merseybeat pastiche: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Tell Me"] But the bulk of the album was made up of cover versions of songs by Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Rufus Thomas, Marvin Gaye, and other Black American musicians. The album went to number one in the UK album charts, which is a much more impressive achievement than it might sound. At this point, albums sold primarily to adults with spending money, and the album charts changed very slowly. Between May 1963 and February 1968, the *only* artists to have number one albums in the UK were the Beatles, the Stones, Dylan, the Monkees, the cast of The Sound of Music, and Val Doonican. And between May 63 and April 65 it was *only* the Beatles and the Stones. But while they'd had a number one album, they'd still not had a number one single, or even a top ten one. "I Wanna Be Your Man" had been written for them and had hit number twelve, but they were still not writing songs that they thought were suited for release as singles, and they couldn't keep asking the Beatles to help them out, so while Jagger and Richards kept improving as songwriters, for their next single they chose a Buddy Holly B-side: [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, "Not Fade Away"] The group had latched on to the Bo Diddley rhythm in that song, along with its machismo -- many of the cover versions they chose in this period seem to have not just a sexual subtext but to be overtly bragging, and if Little Richard is to be believed on the subject, Holly's line "My love is bigger than a Cadillac" isn't that much of an exaggeration. It's often claimed that the Stones exaggerated and emphasised the Bo Diddley sound, and made their version more of an R&B number than Holly's, but if anything their version owes more to someone else.  The Stones' first real UK tour had been on a bill with Mickie Most, Bo Diddley, Little Richard, and the Everly Brothers, and Keith Richards in particular had been amazed by the Everlys. He said later "The best rhythm guitar playing I ever heard was from Don Everly. Nobody ever thinks about that, but their rhythm guitar playing is perfect". Don Everly, of course, was himself very influenced by Bo Diddley, and learned to play in open-G tuning from Diddley -- and several years later, Keith Richards would make that tuning his own, after being inspired by Everly and Ry Cooder.  The Stones' version of "Not Fade Away" owes at least as much to Don Everly's rhythm guitar style as to that of Holly or Diddley. Compare, say, the opening of "Wake Up Little Suzie": [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Wake Up Little Suzie"] The rhythm guitar on the Stones version of "Not Fade Away" is definitely Keith Richards doing Don Everly doing Bo Diddley: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Not Fade Away"] That was recorded during the sessions for their first album, and was, depending on whose story you believe, another track that featured Phil Spector and Gene Pitney on percussion, recorded at the same session as "Little by Little", which became its B-side. Bill Wyman, who kept copious notes of the group's activities, has always said that the idea that it was recorded at that session was nonsense, and that it was recorded weeks later, and Oldham merely claimed Spector was on the record for publicity purposes. On the other hand, Gene Pitney had a very strong memory of being at that session. Spector had been in the country because the Ronettes had been touring the UK with the Stones as one of their support acts, along with the Swinging Blue Jeans and Marty Wilde, and Spector was worried that Ronnie might end up with one of the British musicians. He wasn't wrong to worry -- according to Ronnie's autobiography, there were several occasions when she came very close to sleeping with John Lennon, though they never ended up doing anything and remained just friends, while according to Keith Richards' autobiography he and Ronnie had a chaste affair on that tour which became less chaste when the Stones later hit America. But Spector had flown over to the UK to make sure that he remained in control of the young woman who he considered his property. Pitney, meanwhile, according to his recollection, turned up to the session at the request of Oldham, as the group were fighting in the studio and not getting the track recorded. Pitney arrived with cognac, telling the group that it was his birthday and that they all needed to get drunk with him. They did, they stopped fighting, and they recorded the track: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Not Fade Away"] "Not Fade Away" made number three on the UK charts, and also became the first Stones record to chart in the US at all, though it only scraped its way to number forty-eight, not any higher. But in itself that was a lot -- it meant that the Stones had a record doing well enough to justify them going to the US for their first American tour.  But before that, they had to go through yet another UK tour -- though this isn't counted as an official tour in the listings of their tours, it's just a bunch of shows, in different places, that happened to be almost every night for a couple of months. By this time, the audience response was getting overwhelming, and shows often had to be cut short to keep the group safe. At one show, in Birkenhead, the show had to be stopped after the band played *three bars*, with the group running off stage after that as the audience invaded the stage. And then it was off to the US, where they were nowhere near as big, though while they were over there, "Tell Me" was also released as a single to tie in with the tour, and that did surprisingly well, making number twenty-four. The group's first experience of the US wasn't an entirely positive one -- there was a disastrous appearance on the Dean Martin Show on TV, with Martin mocking the group both before and after their performance, to the extent that Bob Dylan felt moved to write in the liner notes to his next album “Dean Martin should apologise t'the Rolling Stones”. But on the other hand, there were some good experiences. They got to see James Brown at the Apollo, and Jagger started taking notes -- though Richards also noted *what* Jagger was noting, saying "James wanted to show off to these English folk. He's got the Famous Flames, and he's sending one out for a hamburger, he's ordering another to polish his shoes and he's humiliating his own band. To me, it was the Famous Flames, and James Brown happened to be the lead singer. But the way he lorded it over his minions, his minders and the actual band, to Mick was fascinating" They also met up with Murray the K, the DJ who had started the career of the Ronettes among others. Murray had unilaterally declared himself "the fifth Beatle", and was making much of his supposed connections with British pop stars, most of whom either had no idea who he was or actively disliked him (Richards, when talking about him, would often replace the K with a four-letter word usually spelled with a "c"). The Stones didn't like him any more than any of the other groups did, but Murray played them a record he thought they'd be interested in -- "It's All Over Now" by the Valentinos, the song that Bobby Womack had written and which was on Sam Cooke's record label: [Excerpt: The Valentinos, "It's All Over Now"] They decided that they were going to record that, and handily Oldham had already arranged some studio time for them. As Giorgio Gomelsky would soon find with the Yardbirds, Oldham was convinced that British studios were simply unsuitable for recording loud blues-based rock and roll music, and Phil Spector had suggested to him that if the Stones loved Chess records so much, they might as well record at Chess studios.  So while the group were in Chicago, they were booked in for a couple of days in the studio at Chess, where they were horrified to discover that their musical idol Muddy Waters was earning a little extra cash painting the studio ceiling and acting as a roadie, helping them in with their equipment.  (It should be noted here that Marshall Chess, Leonard Chess' son who worked with the Stones in the seventies, has denied this happened. Keith Richards insists it did.) But after that shock, they found working at Chess a great experience. Not only did various of their musical idols, like Willie Dixon and Chuck Berry, as well as Waters, pop in to encourage them, and not only were they working with the same engineer who had recorded many of those people's records, but they were working in a recording studio with an actual multi-track system rather than a shoddy two-track tape recorder. From this point on, while they would still record in the UK on occasion, they increasingly chose to use American studios.  The version of "It's All Over Now" they recorded there was released as their next single. It only made the top thirty in the US -- they had still not properly broken through there -- but it became their first British number one: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "It's All Over Now"] Bobby Womack was furious that the Stones had recorded his song while his version was still new, but Sam Cooke talked him down, explaining that if Womack played his cards right he could have a lot of success through his connection with these British musicians. Once the first royalty cheques came in, Womack wasn't too upset any more. When they returned to the UK, they had another busy schedule of touring and recording -- and not all of it just for Rolling Stones work. There was, for example, an Andrew Oldham Orchestra session, featuring many people from the British session world who we've noted before -- Joe Moretti from Vince Taylor's band, John Paul Jones, Jimmy Page, Andy White, Mike Leander, and more. Mick Jagger added vocals to their version of "I Get Around": [Excerpt: The Andrew Oldham Orchestra, "I Get Around"] It's possible that Oldham had multiple motives for recording that -- Oldham was always a fan of Beach Boys style pop music more than he was of R&B, but he also was in the process of setting up his own publishing company, and knew that the Beach Boys' publishers didn't operate in the UK. In 1965, Oldham's company would become the Beach Boys' UK publishers, and he would get a chunk of every cover version of their songs, including his own. There were also a lot of demo sessions for Jagger/Richards songs intended for other artists, with Mick and Keith working with those same session musicians -- like this song that they wrote for the comedian Jimmy Tarbuck, demoed by Jagger and Richards with Moretti, Page, Jones, John McLaughlin, Big Jim Sullivan, and Andy White: [Excerpt: Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, "We're Wastin' Time"] But of course there were also sessions for Rolling Stones records, like their next UK number one single, "Little Red Rooster": [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Little Red Rooster"] "Little Red Rooster" is a song that is credited to Willie Dixon, but which actually combines several elements from earlier blues songs, including a riff inspired by the one from Son House's "Death Letter Blues": [Excerpt: Son House, "Death Letter Blues"] A melody line and some lines of lyric from Memphis Minnie's "If You See My Rooster": [Excerpt: Memphis Minnie, "If You See My Rooster"] And some lines from Charley Patton's "Banty Rooster Blues": [Excerpt: Charley Patton, "Banty Rooster Blues"] Dixon's resulting song had been recorded by Howlin' Wolf in 1961: [Excerpt: Howlin' Wolf, "Little Red Rooster"] That hadn't been a hit, but Sam Cooke had recorded a cover version, in a very different style, that made the US top twenty and proved the song had chart potential: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "Little Red Rooster"] The Rolling Stones version followed Howlin' Wolf's version very closely, except that Jagger states that he *is* a cock -- I'm sorry, a rooster -- rather than that he merely has one. And this would normally be something that would please Brian Jones immensely -- that the group he had formed to promote Delta and Chicago blues had managed to get a song like that to number one in the UK charts, especially as it was dominated by his slide playing. But in fact the record just symbolised the growing estrangement between Jones and the rest of his band. When he turned up at the session to record "Little Red Rooster", he was dismayed to find out that the rest of the group had deliberately told him the wrong date. They'd recorded the track the day before, without him, and just left a note from Jagger to tell him where to put his slide fills. They spent the next few months ping-ponging between the UK and the US. In late 1964 they made another US tour, during which at one point Brian Jones collapsed with what has been variously reported as stress and alcohol poisoning, and had to miss several shows, leaving the group to carry on without him. There was much discussion at this point of just kicking him out of the band, but they decided against it -- he was still perceived as the group's leader and most popular member. They also appeared on the TAMI show, which we've mentioned before, and which we'll look at in more detail when we next look at James Brown, but which is notable here for two things. The first is that they once again saw how good James Brown was, and at this point Jagger decided that he was going to do his best to emulate Brown's performance -- to the extent that he asked a choreographer to figure out what Brown was doing and teach it to him, but the choreographer told Jagger that Brown moved too fast to figure out all his steps. The other is that the musical director for the TAMI Show was Jack Nitzsche, and this would be the start of a professional relationship that would last for many years. We've seen Nitzsche before in various roles -- he was the co-writer of "Needles and Pins", and he was also the arranger on almost all of Phil Spector's hits. He was so important to Spector's sound that Keith Richards has said “Jack was the Genius, not Phil. Rather, Phil took on Jack's eccentric persona and sucked his insides out.” Nitzsche guested on piano when the Stones went into the studio in LA to record a chunk of their next album, including the ballad "Heart of Stone", which would become a single in the US. From that point on, whenever the Stones recorded in LA, Nitzsche would be there, adding keyboards and percussion and acting as an uncredited co-producer and arranger. He was apparently unpaid for this work, which he did just because he enjoyed being around the band. Nitzsche would also play on the group's next UK single, recorded a couple of months later. This would be their third UK number one, and the first one credited to Jagger and Richards as songwriters, though the credit is a rather misleading one in this case, as the chorus is taken directly from a gospel song by Pops Staples, recorded by the Staple Singers: [Excerpt: The Staple Singers, "This May Be The Last Time"] Jagger and Richards took that chorus and reworked it into a snarling song whose lyrics were based around Jagger's then favourite theme -- how annoying it is when women want to do things other than whatever their man wants them to do: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "The Last Time"] There is a deep, deep misogyny in the Stones' lyrics in the mid sixties, partly inspired by the personas taken on by some blues men (though there are very few blues singers who stuck so unrelentingly to a single theme), and partly inspired by Jagger's own relationship with Chrissie Shrimpton, who he regarded as his inferior, even though she was his superior in terms of the British class system. That's even more noticeable on "Play With Fire", the B-side to "The Last Time". "The Last Time" had been recorded in such a long session that Jones, Watts, and Wyman went off to bed, exhausted. But Jagger and Richards wanted to record a demo of another song, which definitely seems to have been inspired by Shrimpton, so they got Jack Nitzsche to play harpsichord and Phil Spector to play (depending on which source you believe) either a bass or a detuned electric guitar: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Play With Fire"] The demo was considered good enough to release, and put out as the B-side without any contribution from the other three Stones. Other songs Chrissie Shrimpton would inspire over the next couple of years would include "Under My Thumb", "19th Nervous Breakdown", and "Stupid Girl". It's safe to say that Mick Jagger wasn't going to win any boyfriend of the year awards. "The Last Time" was a big hit, but the follow-up was the song that turned the Stones from being one of several British bands who were very successful to being the only real challengers to the Beatles for commercial success. And it was a song whose main riff came to Keith Richards in a dream: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction)"] Richards apparently had a tape recorder by the side of his bed, and when the riff came to him he woke up enough to quickly record it before falling back to sleep with the tape running. When he woke up, he'd forgotten the riff, but found it at the beginning of a recording that was otherwise just snoring. For a while Richards was worried he'd ripped the riff off from something else, and he's later said that he thinks that it was inspired by "Dancing in the Street". In fact, it's much closer to the horn line from another Vandellas record, "Nowhere to Run", which also has a similar stomping rhythm: [Excerpt: Martha and the Vandellas, "Nowhere to Run"] You can see how similar the two songs are by overlaying the riff from “Satisfaction” on the chorus to “Nowhere to Run”: [Excerpt “Nowhere to Run”/”Satisfaction”] "Nowhere to Run" also has a similar breakdown. Compare the Vandellas: [Excerpt: Martha and the Vandellas, "Nowhere to Run"] to the Stones: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"] So it's fairly clear where the song's inspiration came from, but it's also clear that unlike a song like "The Last Time" this *was* just inspiration, rather than plagiarism.  The recorded version of "Satisfaction" was never one that its main composer was happy with. The group, apart from Brian Jones, who may have added a harmonica part that was later wiped, depending on what sources you read, but is otherwise absent from the track, recorded the basic track at Chess studios, and at this point it was mostly acoustic. Richards thought it had come out sounding too folk-rock, and didn't work at all. At this point Richards was still thinking of the track as a demo -- though by this point he was already aware of Andrew Oldham's tendency to take things that Richards thought were demos and release them. When Richards had come up with the riff, he had imagined it as a horn line, something like the version that Otis Redding eventually recorded: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"] So when they went into the studio in LA with Jack Nitzsche to work on some tracks there including some more work on the demo for “Satisfaction”, as well as Nitzsche adding some piano, Richards also wanted to do something to sketch out what the horn part would be. He tried playing it on his guitar, and it didn't sound right, and so Ian Stewart had an idea, went to a music shop, and got one of the first ever fuzz pedals, to see if Richards' guitar could sound like a horn. Now, people have, over the years, said that "Satisfaction" was the first record ever to use a fuzz tone. This is nonsense. We saw *way* back in the episode on “Rocket '88” a use of a damaged amp as an inspired accident, getting a fuzzy tone, though nobody picked up on that and it was just a one-off thing. Paul Burlison, the guitarist with the Rock 'n' Roll Trio, had a similar accident a few years later, as we also saw, and went with it, deliberately loosening tubes in his amp to get the sound audible on their version of "Train Kept A-Rollin'": [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette and the Rock 'n' Roll Trio, "Train Kept A-Rollin'"] A few years later, Grady Martin, the Nashville session player who was the other guitarist on that track, got a similar effect on his six-string bass solo on Marty Robbins' "Don't Worry", possibly partly inspired by Burlison's sound: [Excerpt: Marty Robbins, "Don't Worry"] That tends to be considered the real birth of fuzz, because that time it was picked up by the whole industry. Martin recorded an instrumental showing off the technique: [Excerpt: Grady Martin, "The Fuzz"] And more or less simultaneously, Wrecking Crew guitarist Al Casey used an early fuzz tone on a country record by Sanford Clark: [Excerpt: Sanford Clark, "Go On Home"] And the pedal steel player Red Rhodes had invented his own fuzz box, which he gave to another Wrecking Crew player, Billy Strange, who used it on records like Ann-Margret's "I Just Don't Understand": [Excerpt: Ann-Margret, "I Just Don't Understand"] All those last four tracks, and many more, were from 1960 or 1961. So far from being something unprecedented in recording history, as all too many rock histories will tell you, fuzz guitar was somewhat passe by 1965 -- it had been the big thing on records made by the Nashville A-Team and the Wrecking Crew four or five years earlier, and everyone had moved on to the next gimmick long ago. But it was good enough to use to impersonate a horn to sketch out a line for a demo. Except, of course, that while Jagger and Richards disliked the track as recorded, the other members of the band, and Ian Stewart (who still had a vote even though he was no longer a full member) and Andrew Oldham all thought it was a hit single as it was. They overruled Jagger and Richards and released it complete with fuzz guitar riff, which became one of the most well-known examples of the sound in rock history. To this day, though, when Richards plays the song live, he plays it without the fuzztone effect. Lyrically, the song sees Mick Jagger reaching for the influence of Bob Dylan and trying to write a piece of social commentary. The title line seems, appropriately for a song partly recorded at Chess studios, to have come from a line in a Chuck Berry record, "Thirty Days": [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "Thirty Days"] But the sentiment also owes more than a little to another record by a Chess star, one recorded so early that it was originally released when Chess was still called Aristocrat Records -- Muddy Waters'  "I Can't Be Satisfied": [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, "I Can't Be Satisfied"] “Satisfaction” is the ultimate exercise in adolescent male frustration. I once read something, and I can't for the life of me remember where or who the author was, that struck me as the most insightful critique of the sixties British blues bands I've ever heard. That person said that by taking the blues out of the context in which the music had been created, they fundamentally changed the meaning of it -- that when Bo Diddley sang "I'm a Man", the subtext was "so don't call me 'boy', cracker". Meanwhile, when some British white teenagers from Essex sang the same words, in complete ignorance of the world in which Diddley lived, what they were singing was "I'm a man now, mummy, so you can't make me tidy my room if I don't want to". But the thing is, there are a lot of teenagers out there who don't want to tidy their rooms, and that kind of message does resonate. And here, Jagger is expressing the kind of aggressive sulk that pretty much every teenager, especially every frustrated male teenager will relate to. The protagonist is dissatisfied with everything in his life, so criticism of the vapidity of advertising is mixed in with sexual frustration because women won't sleep with the protagonist when they're menstruating: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"] It is the most adolescent lyric imaginable, but pop music is an adolescent medium. The song went to number one in the UK, and also became the group's first American number one. But Brian Jones resented it, so much so that when they performed the song live, he'd often start playing “I'm Popeye the Sailor Man”. This was partly because it wasn't the blues he loved, but also because it was the first Stones single he wasn't on (again, at least according to most sources. Some say he played acoustic rhythm guitar, but most say he's not on it and that Richards plays all the guitar parts). And to explain why, I have to get into the unpleasant details I talked about at the start. If you're likely to be upset by discussion of rape or domestic violence, stop the episode now. Now, there are a number of different versions of this story. This is the one that seems most plausible to me, based on what else I know about the Stones, and the different accounts, but some of the details might be wrong, so I don't want anyone to think that I'm saying that this is absolutely exactly what happened. But if it isn't, it's the *kind* of thing that happened many times, and something very like it definitely happened. You see, Brian Jones was a sadist, and not in a good way. There are people who engage in consensual BDSM, in which everyone involved is having a good time, and those people include some of my closest friends. This will never be a podcast that engages in kink-shaming of consensual kinks, and I want to make clear that what I have to say about Jones has nothing to do with that. Because Jones was not into consent. He was into physically injuring non-consenting young women, and he got his sexual kicks from things like beating them with chains. Again, if everyone is involved is consenting, this is perfectly fine, but Jones didn't care about anyone other than himself. At a hotel in Clearwater, Florida, on the sixth of May 1965, the same day that Jagger and Richards finished writing "Satisfaction", a girl that Bill Wyman had slept with the night before came to him in tears. She'd been with a friend the day before, and the friend had gone off with Jones while she'd gone off with Wyman. Jones had raped her friend, and had beaten her up -- he'd blackened both her eyes and done other damage. Jones had hurt this girl so badly that even the other Stones, who as we have seen were very far from winning any awards for being feminists of the year, were horrified. There was some discussion of calling the police on him, but eventually they decided to take matters into their own hands, or at least into one of their employees' hands. They got their roadie Mike Dorsey to teach him a lesson, though Oldham was insistent that Dorsey not mess up Jones' face. Dorsey dangled Jones by his collar and belt out of an upstairs window and told Jones that if he ever did anything like that again, he'd drop him. He also beat him up, cracking two of Jones' ribs. And so Jones was not in any state to play on the group's first US number one, or to play much at all at the session, because of the painkillers he was on for the cracked ribs.  Jones would remain in the band for the next few years, but he had gone from being the group's leader to someone they disliked and were disgusted by. And as we'll see the next couple of times we look at the Stones, he would only get worse.

Episode 126 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “For Your Love", the Yardbirds, and the beginnings of heavy rock and the guitar hero.  Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-minute bonus episode available, on "A Lover's Concerto" by the Toys. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources As usual, I've created a Mixcloud playlist, with full versions of all the songs excerpted in this episode. The Yardbirds have one of the most mishandled catalogues of all the sixties groups, possibly the most mishandled. Their recordings with Giorgio Gomelsky, Simon Napier-Bell and Mickie Most are all owned by different people, and all get compiled separately, usually with poor-quality live recordings, demos, and other odds and sods to fill up a CD's running time. The only actual authoritative compilation is the long out-of-print Ultimate! . Information came from a variety of sources. Most of the general Yardbirds information came from The Yardbirds by Alan Clayson and Heart Full of Soul: Keith Relf of the Yardbirds by David French. Simon Napier-Bell's You Don't Have to Say You Love Me is one of the most entertaining books about the sixties music scene, and contains several anecdotes about his time working with the Yardbirds, some of which may even be true. Some information about Immediate Records came from Immediate Records by Simon Spence, which I'll be using more in future episodes. Information about Clapton came from Motherless Child by Paul Scott, while information on Jeff Beck came from Hot Wired Guitar: The Life of Jeff Beck by Martin Power. 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 take a look at the early career of the band that, more than any other band, was responsible for the position of lead guitarist becoming as prestigious as that of lead singer. We're going to look at how a blues band launched the careers of several of the most successful guitarists of all time, and also one of the most successful pop songwriters of the sixties and seventies. We're going to look at "For Your Love" by the Yardbirds: [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "For Your Love"] The roots of the Yardbirds lie in a group of schoolfriends in Richmond, a leafy suburb of London. Keith Relf, Laurie Gane, Paul Samwell-Smith and Jim McCarty were art-school kids who were obsessed with Sonny Terry and Jimmy Reed, and who would hang around the burgeoning London R&B scene, going to see the Rolling Stones and Alexis Korner in Twickenham and at Eel Pie Island, and starting up their own blues band, the Metropolis Blues Quartet. However, Gane soon left the group to go off to university, and he was replaced by two younger guitarists, Top Topham and Chris Dreja, with Samwell-Smith moving from guitar to bass. As they were no longer a quartet, they renamed themselves the Yardbirds, after a term Relf had found on the back of an album cover, meaning a tramp or hobo. The newly-named Yardbirds quickly developed their own unique style -- their repertoire was the same mix of Howlin' Wolf, Bo Diddley, Jimmy Reed and Chuck Berry as every other band on the London scene, but they included long extended improvisatory  instrumental sequences with Relf's harmonica playing off Topham's lead guitar. The group developed a way of extending songs, which they described as a “rave-up” and would become the signature of their live act – in the middle of a song they would go into a long instrumental solo in double-time, taking the song twice as fast and improvising heavily, before dropping back to the original tempo to finish the song off. These “rave-up” sections would often be much longer than the main song, and were a chance for everyone to show off their instrumental skills, with Topham and Relf trading phrases on guitar and harmonica. They were mentored by Cyril Davies, who gave them the interval spots at some of his shows -- and then one day asked them to fill in for him in a gig he couldn't make -- a residency at a club in Harrow, where the Yardbirds went down so well that they were asked to permanently take over the residency from Davies, much to his disgust. But the group's big break came when the Rolling Stones signed with Andrew Oldham, leaving Giorgio Gomelsky with no band to play the Crawdaddy Club every Sunday. Gomelsky was out of the country at his father's funeral when the Stones quit on him, and so it was up to Gomelsky's assistant Hamish Grimes to find a replacement. Grimes looked at the R&B scene and the choice came down to two bands -- the Yardbirds and Them. Grimes said it was a toss-up, but he eventually went for the Yardbirds, who eagerly agreed. When Gomelsky got back, the group were packing audiences in at the Crawdaddy and doing even better than the Stones had been. Soon Gomelsky wanted to become the Yardbirds' manager and turn the group into full-time musicians, but there was a problem -- the new school term was starting, Top Topham was only fifteen, and his parents didn't want him to quit school. Topham had to leave the group. Luckily, there was someone waiting in the wings. Eric Clapton was well known on the local scene as someone who was quite good on guitar, and he and Topham had played together for a long time as an informal duo, so he knew the parts -- and he was also acquainted with Dreja. Everyone on the London blues scene knew everyone else, although the thing that stuck in most of the Yardbirds' minds about Clapton was the time he'd seen the Metropolis Blues Quartet play and gone up to Samwell-Smith and said "Could you do me a favour?" When Samwell-Smith had nodded his assent, Clapton had said "Don't play any more guitar solos". Clapton was someone who worshipped the romantic image of the Delta bluesman, solitary and rootless, without friends or companions, surviving only on his wits and weighed down by troubles, and he would imagine himself that way as he took guitar lessons from Dave Brock, later of Hawkwind, or as he hung out with Top Topham and Chris Dreja in Richmond on weekends, complaining about the burdens he had to bear, such as the expensive electric guitar his grandmother had bought him not being as good as he'd hoped. Clapton had hung around with Topham and Dreja, but they'd never been really close, and he hadn't been considered for a spot in the Yardbirds when the group had formed. Instead he had joined the Roosters with Tom McGuinness, who had introduced Clapton to the music of Freddie King, especially a B-side called "I Love the Woman", which showed Clapton for the first time how the guitar could be more than just an accompaniment to vocals, but a featured instrument in its own right: [Excerpt: Freddie King, "I Love the Woman"] The Roosters had been blues purists, dedicated to a scholarly attitude to American Black music and contemptuous of pop music -- when Clapton met the Beatles for the first time, when they came along to an early Rolling Stones gig Clapton was also at, he had thought of them as "a bunch of wankers" and despised them as sellouts. After the Roosters had broken up, Clapton and McGuinness had joined the gimmicky Merseybeat group Casey Jones and his Engineers, who had a band uniform of black suits and cardboard Confederate army caps, before leaving that as well. McGuinness had gone on to join Manfred Mann, and Clapton was left without a group, until the Yardbirds called on him. The new lineup quickly gelled as musicians -- though the band did become frustrated with one quirk of Clapton's. He liked to bend strings, and so he used very light gauge strings on his guitar, which often broke, meaning that a big chunk of time would be taken up each show with Clapton restringing his guitar, while the audience gave a slow hand clap -- leading to his nickname, "Slowhand" Clap-ton. Two months after Clapton joined the group, Gomelsky got them to back Sonny Boy Williamson II on a UK tour, recording a show at the Crawdaddy Club which was released as a live album three years later: [Excerpt: The Yardbirds and Sonny Boy Williamson II, "Twenty-three Hours Too Long"] Williamson and the Yardbirds didn't get along though, either as people or as musicians. Williamson's birth name was Rice Miller, and he'd originally taken the name "Sonny Boy Williamson" to cash in on the fame of another musician who used that name, though he'd gone on to much greater success than the original, who'd died not long after the former Miller started using the name. Clapton, wanting to show off, had gone up to Williamson when they were introduced and said "Isn't your real name Rice Miller?" Williamson had pulled a knife on Clapton, and his relationship with the group didn't get much better from that point on. The group were annoyed that Williamson was drunk on stage and would call out songs they hadn't rehearsed, while Williamson later summed up his view of the Yardbirds to Robbie Robertson, saying "Those English boys want to play the blues so bad -- and they play the blues *so bad*!" Shortly after this, the group cut some demos on their own, which were used to get them a deal with Columbia, a subsidiary of EMI. Their first single was a version of Billy Boy Arnold's "I Wish You Would": [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "I Wish You Would"] This was as pure R&B as a British group would get at this point, but Clapton was unhappy with the record -- partly because hearing the group in the studio made him realise how comparatively thin they sounded as players, and partly just because he was worried that even going into a recording studio at all was selling out and not something that any of the Delta bluesmen whose records he loved would do. He was happier with the group's first album, a live recording called Five Live Yardbirds that captured the sound of the group at the Marquee Club. The repertoire on that album was precisely the same as any of the other British R&B bands of the time -- songs by Howlin' Wolf, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, John Lee Hooker, Slim Harpo, Sonny Boy Williamson and the Isley Brothers -- but they were often heavily extended versions, with a lot of interplay between Samwell-Smith's bass, Clapton's guitar, and Relf's harmonica, like their five-and-a-half-minute version of Howlin' Wolf's "Smokestack Lightning": [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "Smokestack Lightning"] "I Wish You Would" made number twenty-six on the NME chart, but it didn't make the Record Retailer chart which is the basis of modern chart compilations. The group were just about to go into the studio to cut their second single, a version of "Good Morning Little Schoolgirl", when Keith Relf collapsed. Relf had severe asthma and was also a heavy smoker, and his lung collapsed and he had to be hospitalised for several weeks, and it looked for a while as if he might never be able to sing or play harmonica again. In his absence, various friends and hangers-on from the R&B scene deputised for him -- Ronnie Wood has recalled being at a gig and the audience being asked "Can anyone play harmonica?", leading to Wood getting on stage with them, and other people who played a gig or two, or sometimes just a song or two, with them include Mick Jagger, Brian Jones, and Rod Stewart. Stewart was apparently a big fan, and would keep trying to get on stage with them -- according to Keith Relf's wife, "Rod Stewart would be sitting in the backroom begging to go on—‘Oh give us a turn, give us a turn.'” Luckily, Relf's lung was successfully reinflated, and he returned to singing, harmonica playing... and smoking. In the early months back with the group, he would sometimes have to pull out his inhaler in the middle of a word to be able to continue singing, and he would start seeing stars on stage. Relf's health would never be good, but he was able to carry on performing, and the future of the group was secured. What wasn't secure was the group's relationship with their guitarist. While Relf and Dreja had for a time shared a flat with Eric Clapton, he was becoming increasingly distant from the other members. Partly this was because Relf felt somewhat jealous of the fact that the audiences seemed more impressed with the group's guitarist than with him, the lead singer; partly it was because Giorgio Gomelsky had made Paul Samwell-Smith the group's musical director, and Clapton had never got on with Samwell-Smith and distrusted his musical instincts; but mostly it was just that the rest of the group found Clapton rather petty, cold, and humourless, and never felt any real connection to him. Their records still weren't selling, but they were popular enough on the local scene that they were invited to be one of the support acts for the Beatles' run of Christmas shows at the end of 1964, and hung out with the group backstage. Paul McCartney played them a new song he was working on, which didn't have lyrics yet, but which would soon become "Yesterday", but it was another song they heard that would change the group's career. A music publisher named Ronnie Beck turned up backstage with a demo he wanted the Beatles to hear. Obviously, the Beatles weren't interested in hearing any demos -- they were writing so many hits they were giving half of them away to other artists, why would they need someone else's song? But the Yardbirds were looking for a hit, and after listening to the demo, Samwell-Smith was convinced that a hit was what this demo was. The demo was by a Manchester-based songwriter named Graham Gouldman. Gouldman had started his career in a group called the Whirlwinds, who had released one single -- a version of Buddy Holly's "Look at Me" backed with a song called "Baby Not Like You", written by Gouldman's friend Lol Creme: [Excerpt: The Whirlwinds, "Baby Not Like You"] The Whirlwinds had split up by this point, and Gouldman was in the process of forming a new band, the Mockingbirds, which included drummer Kevin Godley. The song on the demo had been intended as the Mockingbirds' first single, but their label had decided instead to go with "That's How (It's Gonna Stay)": [Excerpt: The Mockingbirds, "That's How (It's Gonna Stay)"] So the song, "For Your Love", was free, and Samwell-Smith was insistent -- this was going to be the group's first big hit. The record was a total departure from their blues sound. Gouldman's version had been backed by bongos and acoustic guitar, and Samwell-Smith decided that he would keep the bongo part, and add, not the normal rock band instruments, but harpsichord and bowed double bass: [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "For Your Love"] The only part of the song where the group's normal electric instrumentation is used is the brief middle-eight, which feels nothing like the rest of the record: [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "For Your Love"] But on the rest of the record, none of the Yardbirds other than Jim McCarty play -- the verses have Relf on vocals, McCarty on drums, Brian Auger on harpsichord, Ron Prentice on double bass and Denny Piercy on bongos, with Samwell-Smith in the control room producing. Clapton and Dreja only played on the middle eight. The record went to number three, and became the group's first real hit, and it led to an odd experience for Gouldman, as the Mockingbirds were by this time employed as the warm-up act on the BBC's Top of the Pops, which was recorded in Manchester, so Gouldman got to see mobs of excited fans applauding the Yardbirds for performing a song he'd written, while he was completely ignored. Most of the group were excited about their newfound success, but Clapton was not happy. He hadn't signed up to be a member of a pop group -- he wanted to be in a blues band. He made his displeasure about playing on material like "For Your Love"  very clear, and right after the recording session he resigned from the group. He was convinced that they would be nothing without him -- after all, wasn't he the undisputed star of the group? -- and he immediately found work with a group that was more suited to his talents, John Mayall's Bluesbreakers. The Bluesbreakers at this point consisted of Mayall on keyboards and vocals, Clapton on guitar, John McVie on bass, and Hughie Flint on drums. For their first single with this lineup, they signed a one-record deal with Immediate Records, a new independent label started by the Rolling Stones' manager Andrew Oldham. That single was produced by Immediate's young staff producer, the session guitarist Jimmy Page: [Excerpt: John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, "I'm Your Witch Doctor"] The Bluesbreakers had something of a fluid lineup -- shortly after that recording, Clapton left the group to join another group, and was replaced by a guitarist named Peter Green. Then Clapton came back, for the recording of what became known as the "Beano album", because Clapton was in a mood when they took the cover photo, and so read the children's comic the Beano rather than looking at the camera: [Excerpt: John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, "Bernard Jenkins"] Shortly after that, Mayall fired John McVie, who was replaced by Jack Bruce, formerly of the Graham Bond Organisation, but then Bruce left to join Manfred Mann and McVie was rehired. While Clapton was in the Bluesbreakers, he gained a reputation for being the best guitarist in London -- a popular graffito at the time was "Clapton is God" -- and he was at first convinced that without him the Yardbirds would soon collapse. But Clapton had enough self-awareness to know that even though he was very good, there were a handful of guitarists in London who were better than him. One he always acknowledged was Albert Lee, who at the time was playing in Chris Farlowe's backing band but would later become known as arguably the greatest country guitarist of his generation. But another was the man that the Yardbirds got in to replace him. The Yardbirds had originally asked Jimmy Page if he wanted to join the group, and he'd briefly been tempted, but he'd decided that his talents were better used in the studio, especially since he'd just been given the staff job at Immediate. Instead he recommended his friend Jeff Beck. The two had known each other since their teens, and had grown up playing guitar together, and sharing influences as they delved deeper into music. While both men admired the same blues musicians that Clapton did, people like Hubert Sumlin and Buddy Guy, they both had much more eclectic tastes than Clapton -- both loved rockabilly, and admired Scotty Moore and James Burton, and Beck was a huge devotee of Cliff Gallup, the original guitarist from Gene Vincent's Blue Caps. Beck also loved Les Paul and the jazz guitarist Barney Kessel, while Page was trying to incorporate some of the musical ideas of the sitar player Ravi Shankar into his playing. While Page was primarily a session player, Beck was a gigging musician, playing with a group called the Tridents, but as Page rapidly became one of the two first-call session guitarists along with Big Jim Sullivan, he would often recommend his friend for sessions he couldn't make, leading to Beck playing on records like "Dracula's Daughter", which Joe Meek produced for Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages: [Excerpt: Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages, "Dracula's Daughter"] While Clapton had a very straightforward tone, Beck was already experimenting with the few effects that were available at the time, like echoes and fuzztone. While there would always be arguments about who was the first to use feedback as a controlled musical sound, Beck is one of those who often gets the credit, and Keith Relf would describe Beck's guitar playing as being almost musique concrete. You can hear the difference on the group's next single. "Heart Full of Soul" was again written by Gouldman, and was originally recorded with a sitar, which would have made it one of the first pop singles to use the instrument. However, they decided to replace the sitar part with Beck playing the same Indian-sounding riff on a heavily-distorted guitar: [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "Heart Full of Soul"] That made number two in the UK and the top ten in the US, and suddenly the world had a new guitar god, one who was doing things on records that nobody else had been doing. The group's next single was a double A-side, a third song written by Gouldman, "Evil Hearted You", coupled with an original by the group, "Still I'm Sad". Neither track was quite up to the standard of their previous couple of singles, but it still went to number three on the charts. From this point on, the group stopped using Gouldman's songs as singles, preferring to write their own material, but Gouldman had already started providing hits for other groups like the Hollies, for whom he wrote songs like “Bus Stop”: [Excerpt: The Hollies, “Bus Stop”] His group The Mockingbirds had also signed to Immediate Records, who put out their classic pop-psych single “You Stole My Love”: [Excerpt: The Mockingbirds, “You Stole My Love”] We will hear more of Gouldman later. In the Yardbirds, meanwhile, the pressure was starting to tell on Keith. He was a deeply introverted person who didn't have the temperament for stardom, and he was uncomfortable with being recognised on the street. It also didn't help that his dad was also the band's driver and tour manager, which meant he always ended up feeling somewhat inhibited, and he started drinking heavily to try to lose some of those inhibitions. Shortly after the recording of "Evil Hearted You", the group went on their first American tour, though on some dates they were unable to play as Gomelsky had messed up their work permits -- one of several things about Gomelsky's management of the group that irritated them. But they were surprised to find that they were much bigger in the US than in the UK. While the group had only released singles, EPs, and the one live album in the UK, and would only ever put out one UK studio album, they'd recorded enough that they'd already had an album out in the US, a compilation of singles, B-sides, and even a couple of demos, and that had been picked up on by almost every garage band in the country. On one of the US gigs, their opening act, a teenage group called the Spiders, were in trouble. They'd learned every song on that Yardbirds album, and their entire set was made up of covers of that material. They'd gone down well supporting every other major band that came to town, but they had a problem when it came to the Yardbirds. Their singer described what happened next: "We thought about it and we said, 'Look, we're paying tribute to them—let's just do our set.' And so, we opened for the Yardbirds and did all of their songs. We could see them in the back and they were smiling and giving us the thumbs up. And then they got up and just blew us off the stage—because they were the Yardbirds! And we just stood there going, 'Oh…. That's how it's done.' The Yardbirds were one of the best live bands I ever heard and we learned a lot that night." That band, and later that lead singer, both later changed their name to Alice Cooper. The trip to the US also saw a couple of recording sessions. Gomelsky had been annoyed at the bad drum sound the group had got in UK studios, and had loved Sam Phillips' drum sound on the old Sun records, so had decided to get in touch with Phillips and ask him to produce the group. He hadn't had a reply, but the group turned up at Phillips' new studio anyway, knowing that he lived in a flat above the studio. Phillips wasn't in, but eventually turned up at midnight, after a fishing trip, drunk. He wasn't interested in producing some group of British kids, but Gomelsky waved six hundred dollars at him, and he agreed. He produced two tracks for the group. One of those, "Mr. You're a Better Man Than I", was written by Mike Hugg of Manfred Mann and his brother: [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "Mister, You're a Better Man Than I"] The backing track there was produced by Phillips, but the lead vocal was redone in New York, as Relf was also drunk and wasn't singing well -- something Phillips pointed out, and which devastated Relf, who had grown up on records Phillips produced. Phillips' dismissal of Relf also grated on Beck -- even though Beck wasn't close to Relf, as the two competed for prominence on stage while the rest of the band kept to the backline, Beck had enormous respect for Relf's talents as a frontman, and thought Phillips horribly unprofessional for his dismissive attitude, though the other Yardbirds had happier memories of the session, not least because Phillips caught their live sound better than anyone had. You can hear Relf's drunken incompetence on the other track they recorded at the session, their version of "Train Kept A-Rollin'", the song we covered way back in episode forty-four. Rearranged by Samwell-Smith and Beck, the Yardbirds' version built on the Johnny Burnette recording and turned it into one of the hardest rock tracks ever recorded to that point -- but Relf's drunk, sloppy, vocal was caught on the backing track. He later recut the vocal more competently, with Roy Halee engineering in New York, but the combination of the two vocals gives the track an unusual feel which inspired many future garage bands: [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "Train Kept A-Rollin'"] On that first US tour, they also recorded a version of Bo Diddley's "I'm a Man" at Chess Studios, where Diddley had recorded his original. Only a few weeks after the end of that tour they were back for a second tour, in support of their second US album, and they returned to Chess to record what many consider their finest original. "Shapes of Things" had been inspired by the bass part on Dave Brubeck's "Pick Up Sticks": [Excerpt: Dave Brubeck Quartet, "Pick Up Sticks"] Samwell-Smith and McCarty had written the music for the song, Relf and Samwell-Smith added lyrics, and Beck experimented with feedback, leading to one of the first psychedelic records to become a big hit, making number three in the UK and number eleven in the US: [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "Shapes of Things"] That would be the group's last record with Giorgio Gomelsky as credited producer -- although Samwell-Smith had been doing all the actual production work -- as the group were becoming increasingly annoyed at Gomelsky's ideas for promoting them, which included things like making them record songs in Italian so they could take part in an Italian song contest. Gomelsky was also working them so hard that Beck ended up being hospitalised with what has been variously described as meningitis and exhaustion. By the time he was out of the hospital, Gomelsky was fired. His replacement as manager and co-producer was Simon Napier-Bell, a young dilettante and scenester who was best known for co-writing the English language lyrics for Dusty Springfield's "You Don't Have to Say You Love Me": [Excerpt: Dusty Springfield, "You Don't Have to Say You Love Me"] The way Napier-Bell tells the story -- and Napier-Bell is an amusing raconteur, and his volumes of autobiography are enjoyable reads, but one gets the feeling that he will not tell the truth if a lie seems more entertaining -- is that the group chose him because of his promotion of a record he'd produced for a duo called Diane Ferraz and Nicky Scott: [Excerpt: Diane Ferraz and Nicky Scott, "Me and You"] According to Napier-Bell, both Ferraz and Scott were lovers of his, who were causing him problems, and he decided to get rid of the problem by making them both pop stars. As Ferraz was Black and Scott white, Napier-Bell sent photos of them to every DJ and producer in the country, and then when they weren't booked on TV shows or playlisted on the radio, he would accuse the DJs and producers of racism and threaten to go to the newspapers about it. As a result, they ended up on almost every TV show and getting regular radio exposure, though it wasn't enough to make the record a hit. The Yardbirds had been impressed by how much publicity Ferraz and Scott had got, and asked Napier-Bell to manage them. He immediately set about renegotiating their record contract and getting them a twenty-thousand-pound advance -- a fortune in the sixties. He also moved forward with a plan Gomelsky had had of the group putting out solo records, though only Relf ended up doing so. Relf's first solo single was a baroque pop song, "Mr. Zero", written by Bob Lind, who had been a one-hit wonder with "Elusive Butterfly", and produced by Samwell-Smith: [Excerpt: Keith Relf, "Mr. Zero"] Beck, meanwhile, recorded a solo instrumental, intended for his first solo single but not released until nearly a year later.  "Beck's Bolero" has Jimmy Page as its credited writer, though Beck claims to be a co-writer, and features Beck and Page on guitars, session pianist Nicky Hopkins, and Keith Moon of the Who on drums. John Entwistle of the Who was meant to play bass, but when he didn't show to the session, Page's friend, session bass player John Paul Jones, was called up: [Excerpt: Jeff Beck, "Beck's Bolero"] The five players were so happy with that recording that they briefly discussed forming a group together, with Moon saying of the idea "That will go down like a lead zeppelin". They all agreed that it wouldn't work and carried on with their respective careers. The group's next single was their first to come from a studio album -- their only UK studio album, variously known as Yardbirds or Roger the Engineer. "Over Under Sideways Down" was largely written in the studio and is credited to all five group members, though Napier-Bell has suggested he came up with the chorus lyrics: [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "Over Under Sideways Down"] That became the group's fifth top ten single in a row, but it would be their last, because they were about to lose the man who, more than anyone else, had been responsible for their musical direction. The group had been booked to play an upper-class black-tie event, and Relf had turned up drunk. They played three sets, and for the first, Relf started to get freaked out by the fact that the audience were just standing there, not dancing, and started blowing raspberries at them. He got more drunk in the interval, and in the second set he spent an entire song just screaming at the audience that they could copulate with themselves, using a word I'm not allowed to use without this podcast losing its clean rating. They got him offstage and played the rest of the set just doing instrumentals. For the third set, Relf was even more drunk. He came onstage and immediately fell backwards into the drum kit. Only one person in the audience was at all impressed -- Beck's friend Jimmy Page had come along to see the show, and had thought it great anarchic fun. He went backstage to tell them so, and found Samwell-Smith in the middle of quitting the group, having finally had enough. Page, who had turned down the offer to join the group two years earlier, was getting bored of just being a session player and decided that being a pop star seemed more fun. He immediately volunteered himself as the group's new bass player, and we'll see how that played out in a future episode...

You’re part eggplant. Don’t condescend Floyd and Alabama WOULD BE a great name for Garrick’s daughter. All this is up for debate as the boys dive deep into the Tony Scott/Quentin Tarantino classic, True Romance. Garrick dislikes Brokeback, Doug loves Reservoir Dogs and Lee tries to be nice to Garrick. All this and more on this weeks show. THEE MAD TEA PARTY ANIMATION STUDIO & TABLE ROCK MEDIA presents….TALES FROM THE VIDEO STOREA podcast about the movies you have never heard about and….. Well the decay of the video store era, good 80s movies and all the other stuff that we don’t have NOW!The filmmaker, the film archivist and the film lover converse each week about great films that you must see that you may have missed if you were/are not exposed to Independent and Alternative Cinema. It gets raw, funny, informative and sometimes very serious. Between their over the top personalities and their unpredictable openers this hour long podcast is worth checking out!!!Websitehttp://videostoretales.comPatreonhttps://www.patreon.com/videostoretalesApple iTuneshttps://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tales-from-the-video-store/id1436130060Spreakerhttps://www.spreaker.com/show/3112390?fbclid=IwAR3Y7qtIZ-MX5RwhULoUalojORH3piE7cKSlf-xNdUexwwy2ZIuuiYxbRecYouTubehttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCc6bAKbgk8KCQnWicerpzKg?view_as=subscriberOur Facebook Pagehttps://www.facebook.com/talesfromthevideostore/Our Facebook Grouphttps://www.facebook.com/groups/241930069812546/?source_id=261465671140460Sponsors LinksGolden Ticket Cinemashttp://www.gtcinemas.comThe Spot Toys & Comicshttps://www.facebook.com/thespottoysRidge Journalhttp://ridgejournal.comTable Rock Creative - Video Marketing - Full Audio Video Marketing Firmhttps://www.tablerockcreative.com

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Episode one hundred and three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Hitch-Hike” by Marvin Gaye, and the early career of one of Motown’s defining artists. 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 “Any Other Way” by Jackie Shane. 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—- Erratum I say that Smokey Robinson was the only person allowed to be both a writer/producer and performer at Motown. That was Marvin Gaye’s later statement, but at this point Eddie Holland was also still doing all those things.   Resources As usual, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.  For Motown-related information in this and other Motown episodes, I’ve used the following resources: Where Did Our Love Go? The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound by Nelson George is an excellent popular history of the various companies that became Motown.  To Be Loved by Berry Gordy is Gordy’s own, understandably one-sided, but relatively well-written, autobiography. Women of Motown: An Oral History by Susan Whitall is a collection of interviews with women involved in Motown. I Hear a Symphony: Motown and Crossover R&B by J. Andrew Flory is an academic look at Motown. The Motown Encyclopaedia by Graham Betts is an exhaustive look at the people and records involved in Motown’s thirty-year history. And Motown Junkies is an infrequently-updated blog looking at (so far) the first 693 tracks released on Motown singles. There is a Complete Motown Singles 1959-62 box available from Hip-O-Select with comprehensive liner notes, but if you just want the music, I recommend instead this much cheaper bare-bones box from Real Gone Music. For information on Gaye specifically, I relied on Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye by David Ritz. The best collection of Gaye’s music is The Master, a four-disc box covering his recordings from “Stubborn Kind of Fellow” to the very last recordings of his life.   Transcript A brief note — this week’s episode contains some minor mentions of parental and domestic abuse, and some discussions of homophobia. I don’t think those mentions will be upsetting for anyone, but if you’re unsure you might want to check the transcript before listening. Today we’re going to look at the start of one of the great careers in soul music, and one of the great artists to come out of the Motown hit factory. We’re going to look at the continued growth of the Motown company, and at the personal relationships that would drive it in the 1960s, but would also eventually lead to its downfall. We’re going to look at “Hitch-Hike”, and the early career of Marvin Gaye: [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, “Hitch-Hike”] One thing we’ve not talked about much in the podcast so far is the way that the entertainment industry, until relatively recently, acted as a safety valve for society, a place where people who didn’t fit in anywhere could build themselves a life and earn a living without playing along with the normal social conventions. And by instinct, temperament, and upbringing, Marvin Gaye was one of those people. He was always someone who rubbed up against authority. He spent his youth fighting with his abusive father, and eventually left home to join the Air Force just to get away from his father. But he didn’t stay long in the Air Force either — he was discharged due to mental problems, which he later claimed he’d faked, with his honourable discharge stating “Marvin Gay cannot adjust to regimentation and authority”. Back in Washington DC, where he’d grown up, and feeling like a failure, he formed a doo-wop group called the Marquees — in later years, Gaye would state that he’d come up with the name as a reference to the Marquis de Sade, but in fact Gaye hadn’t heard of de Sade at the time. The Marquees were like a million doo-wop groups of the time, and leaned towards the sweeter end of doo-wop, particularly modelling themselves on the Moonglows. The group performed around Washington, and came to the attention of Bo Diddley, who was living in the area and friends with a neighbour of the group. Diddley took them under his wing and wrote and produced both sides of their first single, which had another member, Reese Palmer, singing lead — Palmer also claimed that he wrote both songs, but Diddley is credited and they certainly sound like Diddley’s work to me. The tracks were originally backed by Diddley’s band, but Okeh, the record label for whom they were recording, asked that one of the two sides, “Wyatt Earp”, be rerecorded with session musicians like Panama Francis who played on almost every R&B record made on the East Coast at the time. Oddly, listening to both versions, the version with the session musicians sounds rather more raw and Bo-Diddleyesque than the one with Diddley’s band. The result had a lot of the sound of the records the Coasters were making around the same time: [Excerpt: The Marquees, “Wyatt Earp”] At the same initial session, the Marquees also sang backing vocals on a record by Billy Stewart. We’ve encountered Stewart briefly before — his first single, “Billy’s Blues”, was the first appearance of the guitar figure that later became the basis for “Love is Strange”, and he played piano in Diddley’s band. With Diddley’s band and the Marquees he recorded “Billy’s Heartache”: [Excerpt: Billy Stewart, “Billy’s Heartache”] However, the Marquees’ first record did nothing, and the group were dropped by the label and went back to just playing clubs around Washington DC. It looked like their dreams of stardom were over. But one of the group’s members, Chester Simmons, took a job as Bo Diddley’s driver, and that was to lead to the group’s second big break. Diddley was on a tour with the Moonglows, who as well as being fellow Chess artists had also backed Diddley on records like “Diddley Daddy”: [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, “Diddley Daddy”] Harvey Fuqua, the group’s leader, was complaining to Diddley about the rest of the group, and in particular about Bobby Lester, the group’s tenor singer. He was thinking of dropping the entire group and getting a new, better, set of Moonglows to work with. Simmons heard Fuqua talking with Diddley about this, and suggested that the Marquees might be suitable for the job. When the tour hit DC, Fuqua auditioned the Marquees, and started working with them to get them up to the standard he needed, even while he was still continuing to tour with the original Moonglows. Fuqua trained the Marquees in things like breath control. In particular, he had a technique he called “blow harmony”, getting the group to sing with gentle, breathy, “whoo” sounds rather than the harder-edged “doo” sounds that most doo-wop groups used — Fuqua was contemptuous of most doo-wop groups, calling them “gang groups”. He taught the Marquees how to shape their mouths, how to use the muscles in their throats, and all the other techniques that most singers have to pick up intuitively or never learn at all. The breathy sound that Fuqua taught them was to become one of the most important techniques that Gaye would use as a vocalist throughout his career. Fuqua took the group back with him to Chicago, and they added a sixth singer, Chuck Barkside, who doubled Simmons on the bass. There were attempts at expanding the group still further, as well — David Ruffin, later the lead singer of the Temptations, auditioned for the group, but was turned down by Fuqua.  The group, now renamed Harvey and the Moonglows, cut a few tracks for Chess, but most were never released, but they did better as backing vocalists. Along with Etta James, they sang the backing vocals on two hits by Chuck Berry, “Almost Grown” and “Back in the USA”: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Back in the USA”] At the time, Etta and Harvey were in a relationship, and Marvin took note — being in a relationship with someone else in the industry could be good for your career. Marvin was starting to discover some other things, as well — like that he really didn’t enjoy being on stage, even though he loved singing, and that the strain of touring could be eased with the use of cannabis. Marvin didn’t want to be on the stage at all — he wanted to be making records. The studio was where he was comfortable. The new Moonglows did release some recordings of their own, one of which, “Mama Loochie”, had Marvin on lead vocals, and was cowritten by Marvin and Harvey: [Excerpt: Harvey and the Moonglows, “Mama Loochie”] Another record that featured Marvin, though not as lead vocalist, was “Twelve Months of the Year”, an attempt to recapture the success of the original Moonglows’ “Ten Commandments of Love”. On that one, Marvin does the spoken recitation at the beginning and end, as well as singing backing vocals: [Excerpt: Harvey and the Moonglows, “Twelve Months of the Year”] But the Moonglows were coming to the end of their career — and Harvey was also coming to the end of his relationship with Etta James. Anna Records, one of the labels owned by members of the Gordy family, had made a distribution agreement with Chess Records, and Leonard Chess suggested to Harvey that he move to Detroit and work with Anna as a Chess liaison. Soon Harvey Fuqua was fully part of the Gordy family, and he split up with Etta James and got into a relationship with Gwen Gordy. Gwen had split up with her own partner to be with Harvey — and then Gwen and her ex, Roquel Davis, co-wrote a song about the split, which Etta James sang: [Excerpt: Etta James, “All I Could Do Was Cry”] Marvin had come with Harvey — he’d signed with him as a solo artist, and Harvey thought that Marvin could become a Black Frank Sinatra, or better. Marvin was signed to Harvey Records, Harvey’s label, but after Harvey and Gwen got together romantically, their various labels all got rolled up in the Motown family. At first, Marvin wasn’t sure whether he would be recording at all once Harvey Records was shut down, but he made an impression on Berry Gordy by gatecrashing the Motown Christmas party in 1960 and performing “Mr. Sandman” at the piano. Soon he found that Berry Gordy had bought out his recording contract, as well as a fifty percent share of his management, and he was now signed with Tamla. Marvin was depressed by this to an extent — he saw Fuqua as a father figure — but he soon came to respect Gordy. He also found that Gordy’s sister Anna was very interested in him, and while she was seventeen years older than him, he didn’t see that as something that should stand in the way of his getting together with the boss’ sister. There was a real love between the twenty year old Marvin Gaye and the thirty-seven-year-old Anna Gordy, but Gaye also definitely realised that there was an advantage to becoming part of the family — and Berry Gordy, in turn, thought that having his artists be part of his family would be an advantage in controlling them. But right from the start, Marvin and Berry had different ideas about where Marvin’s career should go. Marvin saw himself becoming a singer in the same style as Nat “King” Cole or Jesse Belvin, while Gordy wanted him to be an R&B singer like everyone else at Motown. While Marvin liked singers like Sam Cooke, he was also an admirer of people like Dean Martin and Perry Como — he would later say that the sweaters he wore in many photos in the sixties were inspired by Como, and that “I always felt like my personality and Perry’s had a lot in common”. They eventually compromised — Marvin would record an album of old standards, but there would be an R&B single on it, one side written by Berry, and the other written by Harvey and Anna. The Soulful Moods of Marvin Gaye was only the second album released by Motown, which otherwise concentrated on singles, but neither it nor the single Berry wrote, “Let Your Conscience Be Your Guide”, had any commercial success: [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, “Let Your Conscience Be Your Guide”] As well as singing on the album, Marvin also played drums and piano, and while his singing career wasn’t doing wonderfully at this point, he was becoming known around Motown for turning his hand to whatever was needed, from drumming on a session to sweeping the floor. The most notable thing about the album, though, was that he changed the spelling of his surname, from Gay spelled G-a-y to G-a-y-e. He gave three different reasons for this, at least two of which were connected.  The first one was that he was inspired by Sam Cooke, whose career he wanted to emulate. Cooke had added an “e” to his surname, and so Marvin was doing the same. The second reason, though, was that by this time the word “gay” was already being used to refer to sexuality, and there were rumours floating around about Marvin’s sexuality which he didn’t want to encourage. He did like to wear women’s clothing in private, and he said some things about his experience of gender which might suggest that he wasn’t entirely cis, but he was only interested in women sexually, and was (like many people at the time) at least mildly homophobic. And like many people he confused sexuality and gender, and he desperately didn’t want to be thought of as anything other than heterosexual. But there was another aspect to this as well. His father was also someone who wore women’s clothing, and tied in with Marvin’s wish not to be thought of as gay was a wish not to be thought of as like his father, who was physically and emotionally abusive of him throughout his life. And his father was Marvin Gay senior. By adding the “e”, as well as trying to avoid being thought of as gay, he was also trying to avoid being thought of as like his father. While Marvin’s first album was not a success, he was doing everything he could to get more involved with the label as a whole. He played drums on records, despite never having played the instrument before, simply because he wanted to be around the studio — he played on a record we’ve already looked at, “Please Mr. Postman” by the Marvelettes: [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, “Please Mr. Postman”] He played with the Miracles on occasion, and he also played on “I Call It Pretty Music, But the Old People Call it the Blues” by Little Stevie Wonder: [Excerpt, Little Stevie Wonder, “I Call It Pretty Music, But the Old People Call it the Blues”] And on “That’s What Girls are Made For”by the Spinners (the group known in the UK as the Detroit Spinners): [Excerpt: The Spinners, “That’s What Girls are Made For”] And he both co-wrote and played drums on “Beechwood 4-5789” by the Marvelettes, which made the top twenty:  [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, “Beechwood 4-5789”] But this kind of thing ended up with Gaye being pushed by Berry Gordy in the direction of writing, which was not something he wanted to do. At that time in Motown, there was a strict demarcation, and the only person who was allowed to write *and* perform *and* produce was Smokey Robinson — everyone else was either a writer/producer or a singer, and Marvin knew he wanted to be a singer first and foremost. But Marvin’s own records were flopping, and it was only because of Anna Gordy’s encouragement that he was able to continue releasing records at all  — if he hadn’t given up himself, he would almost certainly have been dropped by the label. And indirectly, his first hit was inspired by Anna. Marvin’s attitude to authority was coming out again in his attitude towards Motown and Berry Gordy. By this point, Motown had set up its famous charm school — a department of the label that taught its singers things like elocution, posture, how to dress and how to dance. Marvin absolutely refused to do any of that, although he later said he regretted it.  Anna told him all the time that he was stubborn, and he started thinking about this, and jamming with Mickey Stevenson, the Motown staff songwriter and producer with whom he worked most closely, and who had started out as a singer with Lionel Hampton. The two of them came up with what Marvin later described as a “basic jazz feeling”, and then Berry Gordy suggested a few extra chords they could stick in, and the result was “Stubborn Kind of Fellow”: [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, “Stubborn Kind of Fellow”] You can hear what he meant about that starting out with a jazz feel, most notably with Beans Bowles’ flute part, but the finished product was very much an R&B record — Marvin sounds more like Ray Charles than Sinatra or Como, and the backing vocals by Martha and the Vandellas are certainly not anything that you would have got behind a crooner. The record went right up the R&B chart, making the R&B top ten, but it didn’t cross over to the pop audience that Gaye was after. He was disappointed, because what he wanted more than anything else was to get a white audience, because he knew that was where the money was, but after getting an R&B hit, he knew he would have to do as so many other Black entertainers had, and play to Black audiences for a long time before he crossed over. And that also meant going out on tour, something he hated. At the end of 1962 he was put on the bill of the Motortown Revue, along with the Contours, the Supremes, the Marvelettes, Little Stevie Wonder, Mary Wells, and the Miracles. On the live album from that tour, recorded at the Apollo, you can hear Gaye still trying to find a balance between his desire to be a Sinatra-type crooner appealing to a white audience, and his realisation that he was going to have to appeal to a Black audience. The result has him singing “What Kind of Fool Am I?”, the Anthony Newley show tune, but sticking in interpolations inspired by Ray Charles: [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, “What Kind of Fool Am I?”] This was a real concern for him. He would later say “Commercially, though, I learned quickly that it was primarily my people who were going to support me. I vowed always to take care of them, give ’em the funk they wanted. It wasn’t my first choice, but there’s integrity in the idea of pleasing your own people. Secretly, I yearned to sing for rich Republicans in tuxes and tails at the Copacabana. No matter.” He hated that tour, but some of the musicians on the tour thought it was what made him into a star — specifically, they knew that Gaye had stage fright, hated being on stage, and would not put his all into a live performance. Unless they put Little Stevie Wonder on before him. Wonder’s performances were so exciting that Gaye had to give the audience everything he had or he’d get booed off the stage, and Gaye started to rise to the challenge. He would still get stage fright, and try to get out of performing live at all, but when he turned up and went on stage he became a captivating performer. And that was something that was very evident on the first recording he made after coming off the tour. The Apollo recording we just heard was from the last week of the tour, and two days after it concluded, on December 19th 1962, Marvin Gaye was back in the studio, where he felt most comfortable, writing a song with Mickey Stevenson and Clarence Paul. While there were three writers of the song, the bulk of it was written by Gaye, who came up with the basic groove before the other writers got involved, and who played both piano and drums on the record: [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, “Hitch-Hike”] “Hitch-Hike” became Gaye’s first real crossover hit — it made number twelve on the R&B chart, but also made the top forty on the pop chart, largely because of his appearances on American Bandstand, where he demonstrated a new dance he’d made up, involving sticking your thumb out like a hitch-hiker, which became a minor craze among Bandstand’s audiences — we’re still in the period where a novelty dance was the most important thing in having a hit. The song also became the first Marvin Gaye song to get covered on a regular basis. The first cover version of it was by the Vandellas, who sang backing vocals on Marvin’s version, and who used the same backing track for their own recording — this was something that happened often with Motown, and if you listen to albums by Motown artists in the sixties, you’ll frequently hear a hit single with different vocals on it: [Excerpt: Martha and the Vandellas, “Hitch-Hike”] But while Martha and the Vandellas were the first to cover “Hitch-Hike”, they were far from the only ones — it became a favourite for white rock groups like the Sonics or the Rolling Stones to cover, and it would be the inspiration for many more rock records by people who wanted to show they could play soul. By June 1963, Marvin Gaye was a bona fide star, and married to Anna Gordy. He was even able to buy his mother a house. But while everything seemed to be going swimmingly as far as the public were concerned, there were already problems — at their wedding reception, Gaye and Anna got into a huge row which ended up with Anna hitting Gaye on the head with her shoe heel. And while he’d bought the house for his mother, his father was still living with her, and still as toxic as he had ever been.  But for the moment, those things didn’t matter. Marvin Gaye was on top of the world, and had started a run of singles that would come to define the Motown sound, and he was also becoming a successful songwriter — and the next time we look at him, it’ll be for a classic song he wrote for someone else.

Episode one hundred and three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Hitch-Hike" by Marvin Gaye, and the early career of one of Motown's defining artists. 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 "Any Other Way" by Jackie Shane. 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---- Erratum I say that Smokey Robinson was the only person allowed to be both a writer/producer and performer at Motown. That was Marvin Gaye's later statement, but at this point Eddie Holland was also still doing all those things.   Resources As usual, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.  For Motown-related information in this and other Motown episodes, I've used the following resources: Where Did Our Love Go? The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound by Nelson George is an excellent popular history of the various companies that became Motown.  To Be Loved by Berry Gordy is Gordy's own, understandably one-sided, but relatively well-written, autobiography. Women of Motown: An Oral History by Susan Whitall is a collection of interviews with women involved in Motown. I Hear a Symphony: Motown and Crossover R&B by J. Andrew Flory is an academic look at Motown. The Motown Encyclopaedia by Graham Betts is an exhaustive look at the people and records involved in Motown's thirty-year history. And Motown Junkies is an infrequently-updated blog looking at (so far) the first 693 tracks released on Motown singles. There is a Complete Motown Singles 1959-62 box available from Hip-O-Select with comprehensive liner notes, but if you just want the music, I recommend instead this much cheaper bare-bones box from Real Gone Music. For information on Gaye specifically, I relied on Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye by David Ritz. The best collection of Gaye's music is The Master, a four-disc box covering his recordings from "Stubborn Kind of Fellow" to the very last recordings of his life.   Transcript A brief note -- this week's episode contains some minor mentions of parental and domestic abuse, and some discussions of homophobia. I don't think those mentions will be upsetting for anyone, but if you're unsure you might want to check the transcript before listening. Today we're going to look at the start of one of the great careers in soul music, and one of the great artists to come out of the Motown hit factory. We're going to look at the continued growth of the Motown company, and at the personal relationships that would drive it in the 1960s, but would also eventually lead to its downfall. We're going to look at "Hitch-Hike", and the early career of Marvin Gaye: [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, "Hitch-Hike"] One thing we've not talked about much in the podcast so far is the way that the entertainment industry, until relatively recently, acted as a safety valve for society, a place where people who didn't fit in anywhere could build themselves a life and earn a living without playing along with the normal social conventions. And by instinct, temperament, and upbringing, Marvin Gaye was one of those people. He was always someone who rubbed up against authority. He spent his youth fighting with his abusive father, and eventually left home to join the Air Force just to get away from his father. But he didn't stay long in the Air Force either -- he was discharged due to mental problems, which he later claimed he'd faked, with his honourable discharge stating "Marvin Gay cannot adjust to regimentation and authority". Back in Washington DC, where he'd grown up, and feeling like a failure, he formed a doo-wop group called the Marquees -- in later years, Gaye would state that he'd come up with the name as a reference to the Marquis de Sade, but in fact Gaye hadn't heard of de Sade at the time. The Marquees were like a million doo-wop groups of the time, and leaned towards the sweeter end of doo-wop, particularly modelling themselves on the Moonglows. The group performed around Washington, and came to the attention of Bo Diddley, who was living in the area and friends with a neighbour of the group. Diddley took them under his wing and wrote and produced both sides of their first single, which had another member, Reese Palmer, singing lead -- Palmer also claimed that he wrote both songs, but Diddley is credited and they certainly sound like Diddley's work to me. The tracks were originally backed by Diddley's band, but Okeh, the record label for whom they were recording, asked that one of the two sides, "Wyatt Earp", be rerecorded with session musicians like Panama Francis who played on almost every R&B record made on the East Coast at the time. Oddly, listening to both versions, the version with the session musicians sounds rather more raw and Bo-Diddleyesque than the one with Diddley's band. The result had a lot of the sound of the records the Coasters were making around the same time: [Excerpt: The Marquees, "Wyatt Earp"] At the same initial session, the Marquees also sang backing vocals on a record by Billy Stewart. We've encountered Stewart briefly before -- his first single, "Billy's Blues", was the first appearance of the guitar figure that later became the basis for "Love is Strange", and he played piano in Diddley's band. With Diddley's band and the Marquees he recorded "Billy's Heartache": [Excerpt: Billy Stewart, "Billy's Heartache"] However, the Marquees' first record did nothing, and the group were dropped by the label and went back to just playing clubs around Washington DC. It looked like their dreams of stardom were over. But one of the group's members, Chester Simmons, took a job as Bo Diddley's driver, and that was to lead to the group's second big break. Diddley was on a tour with the Moonglows, who as well as being fellow Chess artists had also backed Diddley on records like "Diddley Daddy": [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, "Diddley Daddy"] Harvey Fuqua, the group's leader, was complaining to Diddley about the rest of the group, and in particular about Bobby Lester, the group's tenor singer. He was thinking of dropping the entire group and getting a new, better, set of Moonglows to work with. Simmons heard Fuqua talking with Diddley about this, and suggested that the Marquees might be suitable for the job. When the tour hit DC, Fuqua auditioned the Marquees, and started working with them to get them up to the standard he needed, even while he was still continuing to tour with the original Moonglows. Fuqua trained the Marquees in things like breath control. In particular, he had a technique he called "blow harmony", getting the group to sing with gentle, breathy, "whoo" sounds rather than the harder-edged "doo" sounds that most doo-wop groups used -- Fuqua was contemptuous of most doo-wop groups, calling them "gang groups". He taught the Marquees how to shape their mouths, how to use the muscles in their throats, and all the other techniques that most singers have to pick up intuitively or never learn at all. The breathy sound that Fuqua taught them was to become one of the most important techniques that Gaye would use as a vocalist throughout his career. Fuqua took the group back with him to Chicago, and they added a sixth singer, Chuck Barkside, who doubled Simmons on the bass. There were attempts at expanding the group still further, as well -- David Ruffin, later the lead singer of the Temptations, auditioned for the group, but was turned down by Fuqua.  The group, now renamed Harvey and the Moonglows, cut a few tracks for Chess, but most were never released, but they did better as backing vocalists. Along with Etta James, they sang the backing vocals on two hits by Chuck Berry, "Almost Grown" and "Back in the USA": [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "Back in the USA"] At the time, Etta and Harvey were in a relationship, and Marvin took note -- being in a relationship with someone else in the industry could be good for your career. Marvin was starting to discover some other things, as well -- like that he really didn't enjoy being on stage, even though he loved singing, and that the strain of touring could be eased with the use of cannabis. Marvin didn't want to be on the stage at all -- he wanted to be making records. The studio was where he was comfortable. The new Moonglows did release some recordings of their own, one of which, "Mama Loochie", had Marvin on lead vocals, and was cowritten by Marvin and Harvey: [Excerpt: Harvey and the Moonglows, "Mama Loochie"] Another record that featured Marvin, though not as lead vocalist, was "Twelve Months of the Year", an attempt to recapture the success of the original Moonglows' "Ten Commandments of Love". On that one, Marvin does the spoken recitation at the beginning and end, as well as singing backing vocals: [Excerpt: Harvey and the Moonglows, "Twelve Months of the Year"] But the Moonglows were coming to the end of their career -- and Harvey was also coming to the end of his relationship with Etta James. Anna Records, one of the labels owned by members of the Gordy family, had made a distribution agreement with Chess Records, and Leonard Chess suggested to Harvey that he move to Detroit and work with Anna as a Chess liaison. Soon Harvey Fuqua was fully part of the Gordy family, and he split up with Etta James and got into a relationship with Gwen Gordy. Gwen had split up with her own partner to be with Harvey -- and then Gwen and her ex, Roquel Davis, co-wrote a song about the split, which Etta James sang: [Excerpt: Etta James, "All I Could Do Was Cry"] Marvin had come with Harvey -- he'd signed with him as a solo artist, and Harvey thought that Marvin could become a Black Frank Sinatra, or better. Marvin was signed to Harvey Records, Harvey's label, but after Harvey and Gwen got together romantically, their various labels all got rolled up in the Motown family. At first, Marvin wasn't sure whether he would be recording at all once Harvey Records was shut down, but he made an impression on Berry Gordy by gatecrashing the Motown Christmas party in 1960 and performing "Mr. Sandman" at the piano. Soon he found that Berry Gordy had bought out his recording contract, as well as a fifty percent share of his management, and he was now signed with Tamla. Marvin was depressed by this to an extent -- he saw Fuqua as a father figure -- but he soon came to respect Gordy. He also found that Gordy's sister Anna was very interested in him, and while she was seventeen years older than him, he didn't see that as something that should stand in the way of his getting together with the boss' sister. There was a real love between the twenty year old Marvin Gaye and the thirty-seven-year-old Anna Gordy, but Gaye also definitely realised that there was an advantage to becoming part of the family -- and Berry Gordy, in turn, thought that having his artists be part of his family would be an advantage in controlling them. But right from the start, Marvin and Berry had different ideas about where Marvin's career should go. Marvin saw himself becoming a singer in the same style as Nat "King" Cole or Jesse Belvin, while Gordy wanted him to be an R&B singer like everyone else at Motown. While Marvin liked singers like Sam Cooke, he was also an admirer of people like Dean Martin and Perry Como -- he would later say that the sweaters he wore in many photos in the sixties were inspired by Como, and that "I always felt like my personality and Perry's had a lot in common". They eventually compromised -- Marvin would record an album of old standards, but there would be an R&B single on it, one side written by Berry, and the other written by Harvey and Anna. The Soulful Moods of Marvin Gaye was only the second album released by Motown, which otherwise concentrated on singles, but neither it nor the single Berry wrote, "Let Your Conscience Be Your Guide", had any commercial success: [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, "Let Your Conscience Be Your Guide"] As well as singing on the album, Marvin also played drums and piano, and while his singing career wasn't doing wonderfully at this point, he was becoming known around Motown for turning his hand to whatever was needed, from drumming on a session to sweeping the floor. The most notable thing about the album, though, was that he changed the spelling of his surname, from Gay spelled G-a-y to G-a-y-e. He gave three different reasons for this, at least two of which were connected.  The first one was that he was inspired by Sam Cooke, whose career he wanted to emulate. Cooke had added an "e" to his surname, and so Marvin was doing the same. The second reason, though, was that by this time the word "gay" was already being used to refer to sexuality, and there were rumours floating around about Marvin's sexuality which he didn't want to encourage. He did like to wear women's clothing in private, and he said some things about his experience of gender which might suggest that he wasn't entirely cis, but he was only interested in women sexually, and was (like many people at the time) at least mildly homophobic. And like many people he confused sexuality and gender, and he desperately didn't want to be thought of as anything other than heterosexual. But there was another aspect to this as well. His father was also someone who wore women's clothing, and tied in with Marvin's wish not to be thought of as gay was a wish not to be thought of as like his father, who was physically and emotionally abusive of him throughout his life. And his father was Marvin Gay senior. By adding the "e", as well as trying to avoid being thought of as gay, he was also trying to avoid being thought of as like his father. While Marvin's first album was not a success, he was doing everything he could to get more involved with the label as a whole. He played drums on records, despite never having played the instrument before, simply because he wanted to be around the studio -- he played on a record we've already looked at, "Please Mr. Postman" by the Marvelettes: [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, "Please Mr. Postman"] He played with the Miracles on occasion, and he also played on "I Call It Pretty Music, But the Old People Call it the Blues" by Little Stevie Wonder: [Excerpt, Little Stevie Wonder, "I Call It Pretty Music, But the Old People Call it the Blues"] And on "That's What Girls are Made For”by the Spinners (the group known in the UK as the Detroit Spinners): [Excerpt: The Spinners, "That's What Girls are Made For"] And he both co-wrote and played drums on "Beechwood 4-5789" by the Marvelettes, which made the top twenty:  [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, "Beechwood 4-5789"] But this kind of thing ended up with Gaye being pushed by Berry Gordy in the direction of writing, which was not something he wanted to do. At that time in Motown, there was a strict demarcation, and the only person who was allowed to write *and* perform *and* produce was Smokey Robinson -- everyone else was either a writer/producer or a singer, and Marvin knew he wanted to be a singer first and foremost. But Marvin's own records were flopping, and it was only because of Anna Gordy's encouragement that he was able to continue releasing records at all  -- if he hadn't given up himself, he would almost certainly have been dropped by the label. And indirectly, his first hit was inspired by Anna. Marvin's attitude to authority was coming out again in his attitude towards Motown and Berry Gordy. By this point, Motown had set up its famous charm school -- a department of the label that taught its singers things like elocution, posture, how to dress and how to dance. Marvin absolutely refused to do any of that, although he later said he regretted it.  Anna told him all the time that he was stubborn, and he started thinking about this, and jamming with Mickey Stevenson, the Motown staff songwriter and producer with whom he worked most closely, and who had started out as a singer with Lionel Hampton. The two of them came up with what Marvin later described as a "basic jazz feeling", and then Berry Gordy suggested a few extra chords they could stick in, and the result was "Stubborn Kind of Fellow": [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, "Stubborn Kind of Fellow"] You can hear what he meant about that starting out with a jazz feel, most notably with Beans Bowles' flute part, but the finished product was very much an R&B record -- Marvin sounds more like Ray Charles than Sinatra or Como, and the backing vocals by Martha and the Vandellas are certainly not anything that you would have got behind a crooner. The record went right up the R&B chart, making the R&B top ten, but it didn't cross over to the pop audience that Gaye was after. He was disappointed, because what he wanted more than anything else was to get a white audience, because he knew that was where the money was, but after getting an R&B hit, he knew he would have to do as so many other Black entertainers had, and play to Black audiences for a long time before he crossed over. And that also meant going out on tour, something he hated. At the end of 1962 he was put on the bill of the Motortown Revue, along with the Contours, the Supremes, the Marvelettes, Little Stevie Wonder, Mary Wells, and the Miracles. On the live album from that tour, recorded at the Apollo, you can hear Gaye still trying to find a balance between his desire to be a Sinatra-type crooner appealing to a white audience, and his realisation that he was going to have to appeal to a Black audience. The result has him singing "What Kind of Fool Am I?", the Anthony Newley show tune, but sticking in interpolations inspired by Ray Charles: [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, "What Kind of Fool Am I?"] This was a real concern for him. He would later say "Commercially, though, I learned quickly that it was primarily my people who were going to support me. I vowed always to take care of them, give 'em the funk they wanted. It wasn't my first choice, but there's integrity in the idea of pleasing your own people. Secretly, I yearned to sing for rich Republicans in tuxes and tails at the Copacabana. No matter." He hated that tour, but some of the musicians on the tour thought it was what made him into a star -- specifically, they knew that Gaye had stage fright, hated being on stage, and would not put his all into a live performance. Unless they put Little Stevie Wonder on before him. Wonder's performances were so exciting that Gaye had to give the audience everything he had or he'd get booed off the stage, and Gaye started to rise to the challenge. He would still get stage fright, and try to get out of performing live at all, but when he turned up and went on stage he became a captivating performer. And that was something that was very evident on the first recording he made after coming off the tour. The Apollo recording we just heard was from the last week of the tour, and two days after it concluded, on December 19th 1962, Marvin Gaye was back in the studio, where he felt most comfortable, writing a song with Mickey Stevenson and Clarence Paul. While there were three writers of the song, the bulk of it was written by Gaye, who came up with the basic groove before the other writers got involved, and who played both piano and drums on the record: [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, "Hitch-Hike"] "Hitch-Hike" became Gaye's first real crossover hit -- it made number twelve on the R&B chart, but also made the top forty on the pop chart, largely because of his appearances on American Bandstand, where he demonstrated a new dance he'd made up, involving sticking your thumb out like a hitch-hiker, which became a minor craze among Bandstand's audiences -- we're still in the period where a novelty dance was the most important thing in having a hit. The song also became the first Marvin Gaye song to get covered on a regular basis. The first cover version of it was by the Vandellas, who sang backing vocals on Marvin's version, and who used the same backing track for their own recording -- this was something that happened often with Motown, and if you listen to albums by Motown artists in the sixties, you'll frequently hear a hit single with different vocals on it: [Excerpt: Martha and the Vandellas, "Hitch-Hike"] But while Martha and the Vandellas were the first to cover "Hitch-Hike", they were far from the only ones -- it became a favourite for white rock groups like the Sonics or the Rolling Stones to cover, and it would be the inspiration for many more rock records by people who wanted to show they could play soul. By June 1963, Marvin Gaye was a bona fide star, and married to Anna Gordy. He was even able to buy his mother a house. But while everything seemed to be going swimmingly as far as the public were concerned, there were already problems -- at their wedding reception, Gaye and Anna got into a huge row which ended up with Anna hitting Gaye on the head with her shoe heel. And while he'd bought the house for his mother, his father was still living with her, and still as toxic as he had ever been.  But for the moment, those things didn't matter. Marvin Gaye was on top of the world, and had started a run of singles that would come to define the Motown sound, and he was also becoming a successful songwriter -- and the next time we look at him, it'll be for a classic song he wrote for someone else.

Halloweeny songs. Mental health tips! Ode to Chad Nance. Also, great great music. (All podcasts and reviews are on www.hlycrp.com, and you can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.)

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Today we have the wonderful and very funny Miles Francis. Miles hosts the Best Darn Diddley podcast, about the Simpsons and anything associated with it. We had a great time getting to know Miles and just kinda talking about what's going on in our individual and shared worlds. Just listen and laugh, and have a great time. Cheers The podcast and a lot of other content for Miles can be found here: www.MrMostDaysOff.com Always check the website to keep current and connected easier: www.albinorhino.me --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/adventuresofalbinorhino/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/adventuresofalbinorhino/support

How to aim your life in a more gamelike direction. Also, how the Kennedys will save global economics. Also, tons of great music. (All podcasts and reviews are on www.hlycrp.com, and you can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.)

On Episode 05 of the “It's Only Rock And Roll PODCAST”, Don DiMuccio and co-host Dave Tate mark the 12th anniversary of the passing of rock pioneer Bo Diddley, by revisiting Don's 2006 phone interview with the rock legend. Diddley holds little back while discussing racism in the music business, being cheated out of royalties, and more. Visit the 'It's Only Rock And Roll PODCAST' online at: ° Homepage – www.ItsOnlyRockAndRollPodcast.com ° Facebook - facebook.com/ItsOnlyRockAndRollPodcast/ ° Twitter – twitter.com/ItsOnlyRockAnd2 © 2020 Howlaround Productions. All rights reserved.

Your hungry hosts start with Chicken Sandwich Showdown: Part 3! After chowing down on two more contenders, Mark and Jana welcome their Irish correspondent, Ian, for some CORONAVIRUS!!! news from the Emerald Isle. They also bring Ian into Paranormal Corner, for an event that he experienced.

Sandy Gennaro was born and raised in NYC and currently resides in Nashville, TN. Throughout his career as a world class rock and roll drummer, Sandy has toured the globe and recorded with world renowned artists: Cyndi Lauper, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, Bo Diddley, Johnny Winter, The Monkees, Joe Lynn Turner, Michael Bolton, Benny Mardones, Craaft, The Mamas and Papas and Jon Paris.    ****Watch this episode and subscribe!   The Rich Redmond Show is sponsored by The School of Rock Nashville and Franklin! https://locations.schoolofrock.com/nashville https://locations.schoolofrock.com/franklin   Sandy has recorded several Top 10 singles and has performed for for over a billion fans spanning his over 50 year career!  He has also made numerous TV appearances including The Tonight Show, The Grammy Awards, The American Music Awards, The MTV New Years Ball, and The Late Show with David Letterman. A few things that came up: -Playing drums shirtless -Playing with Pat Travers, Cindi Lauper, Joan Jett -Meeting Rich through MSG -Moving to Nashville -Hanging at a bar -1976 moving from NY to Cali -Meeting Carmine Appice -Wanting to play on his own kit -"They better sound good, mate" Rod Stewart -Carmine vouching for Sandy to start BlackJack -Story of Cindi's Money Changes Everything video -Headphone click blowing up -Time after time cross-stick -The story behind "Into the Night" drum hook -Taking a day gig to keep the lights on -Relationships with Drum Tech -Playing with Joan Jett....recording in NY -Sandy's daughter meeting Steven Tyler and not name dropping -Sandy's speaking gigs....B.E.A.T.S. -Odds of a musician to play just their instrument for more than one year...1 in a million -Each step of Sandy's success has been a result of helping someone else -Atheists -Don't let your phone replace your family -Meeting his wife -Signing an autograph led to Cindi and a MASSIVE change in life -Sandy's photography side gig and hotel key hobby -Everyday is Christmas -Patience is necessary -When you're green you grow Follow Sandy: @sandygennaro www.sandygennaro.com The Rich Redmond Show is about all things music, motivation and success. Candid conversations with musicians, actors, comedians, authors and thought leaders about their lives and the stories that shaped them. Rich Redmond is the longtime drummer with Jason Aldean and many other veteran musicians and artists. Rich is also an actor, speaker, author, producer and educator. Rich has been heard on thousands of songs, over 25 of which have been #1 hits!   Rich can also be seen in several films and TV shows and has also written an Amazon Best-Selling book, "CRASH! Course for Success: 5 Ways to Supercharge Your Personal and Professional Life" currently available at:   https://www.amazon.com/CRASH-Course-Success-Supercharge-Professional/dp/B07YTCG5DS/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=crash+redmond&qid=1576602865&sr=8-1   One Book: Three Ways to consume....Physical (delivered to your front door, Digital (download to your kindle, ipad or e-reader), or Audio (read to you by me on your device...on the go)!   Follow Rich: @richredmond www.richredmond.com   Jim McCarthy is the quintessential Blue Collar Voice Guy. Honing his craft since 1996 with radio stations in Illinois, South Carolina, Connecticut, New York, Las Vegas and Nashville, Jim has voiced well over 10,000 pieces since and garnered an ear for audio production which he now uses for various podcasts, commercials and promos. Jim is also an accomplished video producer, content creator, writer and overall entrepreneur. Follow Jim: @jimmccarthy www.jimmccarthyvoiceovers.com  

Note: This is a new version because I uploaded the wrong file originally   Episode seventy-one of A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs continues our look at British music TV by looking at the first time it affected American R&B, and is also our final look at Johnny Otis. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Short Shorts" by the Royal Teens, a group whose members went on to be far more important than one might expect.  Also, this is the first of hopefully many podcasts to come where 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.  Much of the information on Otis comes from Midnight at the Barrelhouse: The Johnny Otis Story by George Lipsitz.  I've also referred extensively to two books by Otis himself, Listen to the Lambs, and Upside Your Head! Rhythm and Blues on Central Avenue. I've used two main books on the British side of things:  Pete Frame's The Restless Generation is the best book available looking at British 50s rock and roll from a historical perspective. Be warned, though -- his jokey and irreverent style can, when dealing with people like Larry Parnes (who was gay and Jewish) very occasionally tip over into reinforcing homophobic and anti-semitic stereotypes for an easy laugh. Billy Bragg's Roots, Radicals, and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World is one of the best books I've read on music at all, and talks about the problems between the musicians' unions. This three-CD set provides a great overview of Otis' forties and fifties work, both as himself and with other artists. Many of the titles will be very familiar to listeners of this podcast.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript And so we come to our last look at Johnny Otis, one of those people who has been turning up throughout the early episodes of the podcast. Indeed, he may continue to appear intermittently until at least the late sixties, as an influence and occasional collaborator. But the days of his influence on rock and roll music more or less came to an end with the rise of the rockabillies in the mid fifties, and from this point on he was not really involved in the mainstream of rock and roll. But in one of those curious events that happens sometimes, just as Otis was coming to the end of the run of hits he produced or arranged or performed on for other people, and the run of discoveries that changed music, he had a rock and roll hit under his own name for the first and only time. And that hit was because of the Six-Five Special, the British TV show we talked about last week: [Excerpt: Johnny Otis, "Willie and the Hand Jive"] The way this podcast works, telling stories chronologically and introducing new artists as they come along, can sometimes make it seem like the music business in the fifties was in a constant state of revolution, with a new year zero coming up every year or two. "First-wave rockabilly is *so* January through August 1956, we're into late 1958 and everything's prototype soul now, granddad!" But of course the majority of the podcast so far has looked at a very small chunk of time, concentrating on the mid 1950s, and plenty of people who were making hits in 1955 were still having very active careers as of 1958, and that's definitely the case for Johnny Otis. While he didn't have that many big hits after rockabilly took over from R&B as the predominant form of rock and roll music, he was still making important records. For example, in 1957 he produced and co-wrote "Lonely, Lonely Nights" for Little Julian Herrera and the Tigers, which became a local hit, and which he thought at the time was the first big record to feature a Chicano singer. We're going to talk about the Chicano identity in future episodes of the show, but Chicano (or Chicana or Chicanx) is a term that is usually used for Americans of Mexican origin. It can be both an ethnic and a cultural identifier, and it has also been used in the past as a racial slur. It's still seen as that by some people, but it's also the chosen identifier for a lot of people who reject other labels like Hispanic or Latino. To the best of my knowledge, it's a word that is considered acceptable and correct for white people to use when talking about people who identify that way -- which, to be clear, not all Americans of Mexican descent do, by any means -- but I'm very happy to have feedback about this from people who are affected by the word. And Little Julian Herrera did identify that way, and he became a hero among the Chicano population in LA when "Lonely Lonely Nights" came out on Dig Records, a label Otis owned: [Excerpt: Little Julian Herrera and the Tigers, "Lonely, Lonely Nights"] But it turned out shortly afterwards that Herrera wasn't exactly what he seemed. Police came to Otis' door, and told him that the person he knew as Julian Herrera was wanted on charges of rape. And not only that, his birth name was Ron Gregory, and he was of Jewish ethnicity, and from a Hungarian-American family from Massachusetts. Apparently at some point he had run away from home and travelled to LA, where he had been taken in by a Mexican-American woman who had raised him as if he were her own son. That was pretty much the end of Little Julian Herrera's career -- and indeed shortly after that, Dig Records itself closed down, and Otis had no record contract. But then fate intervened, in the form of Mickey Katz. Mickey Katz was a comedian, who is now probably best known for his famous family -- his son is Joel Grey, the star of Cabaret, while his granddaughter, Jennifer Grey, starred in Dirty Dancing and Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Katz's comedy consisted of him performing parodies of currently-popular songs, giving them new lyrics referencing Jewish culture. A typical example is his version of "Sixteen Tons", making it about working at a deli instead of down a mine: [Excerpt: Mickey Katz, "Sixteen Tons"] Even though Katz's music was about as far from Otis' as one can imagine, Katz had been a serious musician before he went into comedy, and when he went to see Otis perform live, he recognised his talent as a bandleader, and called his record label, urging them to sign him. Katz was on Capitol, one of the biggest labels in the country, and so for the first time in many years, Otis had guaranteed major-label distribution for his records. In October 1957, Capitol took the unusual step of releasing four Johnny Otis singles at the same time, each of them featuring a different vocalist from his large stable of performers. None did especially well on the American charts at the time, but one, featuring Marie Adams and the Three Tons of Joy, would have a major impact on Otis' career. Marie Adams was someone who had been on the R&B scene for many years, and had been working with Otis in his show since 1953. She'd been born Ollie Marie Givens, but dropped the Ollie early on. She was a shy woman, who had to be pushed by her husband to audition for Don Robey at Peacock Records. Robey had challenged her to sing along with Dinah Washington's record "Harbor Lights": [Excerpt: Dinah Washington, "Harbor Lights"] When she'd proved she could sing that, Robey signed her, hoping that he'd have a second Big Mama Thornton on his hands. And her first single seemed to confirm him in that hope -- "I'm Gonna Play the Honky Tonks" went to number three on the R&B chart and became one of the biggest hit records Peacock had ever released: [Excerpt: Marie Adams, "I'm Gonna Play the Honky Tonks"] But her later career with Peacock was less successful. The follow-up was a version of Johnny Ace's "My Song", which seems to have been chosen more because Don Robey owned the publishing than because the song and arrangement were a good fit for her voice, and it didn't do anything much commercially: [Excerpt: Marie Adams, "My Song" Like many of Peacock's artists who weren't selling wonderfully she was handed over to Johnny Otis to produce, in the hopes that he could get her making hits. Sadly, he couldn't, and her final record for Peacock came in 1955, when Otis produced her on one of many records recorded to cash in on Johnny Ace's death, "In Memory": [Excerpt: Marie Adams, "In Memory"] But that did so poorly that it's never had an official rerelease, not even on a digital compilation I have which has half a dozen other tributes to Ace on it by people like Vanetta Dillard and Linda Hayes. Adams was dropped by her record label, but she was impressive enough as a vocalist that Otis -- who always had an ear for great singing -- kept her in his band, as the lead singer of a vocal trio, the Three Tons of Joy, who were so called because they were all extremely fat. (I say this not as a criticism of them. I'm fat myself and absolutely fat-positive. Fat isn't a term of abuse in my book). There seems to be some debate about the identity of the other two in the Three Tons of Joy. I've seen reliable sources refer to them as two sisters, Sadie and Francine McKinley, and as *Adams'* two sisters, Doris and Francine, and have no way of determining which of these is correct. The three of them would do synchronised dancing, even when they weren't singing, and they remained with Otis' show until 1960. And so when Capitol came to release its first batch of Johnny Otis records, one of them had vocals by Marie Adams and the Three Tons of Joy. The song in question was "Ma! He's Making Eyes At Me", a vaudeville song which dated back to 1921, and had originally sounded like this: [Excerpt: Billy Jones, "Ma! She's Making Eyes at Me"] In the hands of the Otis band and the Three Tons of Joy, it was transformed into something that owed more to Ruth Brown (especially with Marie Adams' pronunciation of "mama") than to any of the other performers who had recorded versions of the song over the decades: [Excerpt: Johnny Otis and his Orchestra with Marie Adams and the Three Tons of Joy: "Ma, He's Making Eyes At Me"] In the US, that did nothing at all on the charts, but for some reason it took off massively in the UK, and went to number two on the pop charts over here. It was so successful, in fact, that there were plans for a Johnny Otis Show tour of the UK in 1958. Those plans failed, because of something I've not mentioned in this podcast before, but which radically shaped British music culture, and to a lesser extent American music culture, for decades. Both the American Federation of Musicians and their British equivalent, the Musicians' Union, had since the early 1930s had a mutual protectionist agreement which prevented musicians from one of the countries playing in the other. After the Duke Ellington band toured the UK in 1933, the ban came into place on both sides. Certain individual non-instrumental performers from one country could perform in the other, but only if they employed musicians from the other country. So for example Glenn Miller got his first experience of putting together a big band because Ray Noble, a British bandleader, had had hits in the US in the mid thirties. Noble and his vocalist Al Bowlly were allowed to travel to the US, but Noble's band wasn't, and so he had to get an American musician, Miller, to put together a new band. Similarly, when Johnnie Ray had toured the UK in the early fifties, he'd had to employ British musicians, and when Lonnie Donegan had toured the US on the back of "Rock Island Line"'s success, he was backed by Johnny Burnette and the Rock and Roll Trio -- Donegan was allowed to sing, but not allowed to play guitar. In 1955, the two unions finally came to a one-in-one-out agreement, which would last for the next few decades, where musicians from each country could tour, but only as a like-for-like swap. So Louis Armstrong was allowed to tour the UK, but only on condition that Freddie Randall, a trumpet player from Devon, got to tour the US. Stan Kenton's band toured the UK, while the Ted Heath Orchestra (which was not, I should point out, led by the Prime Minister of the same name) toured the US. We can argue over whether Freddie Randall was truly an adequate substitute for Louis Armstrong, but I'm sure you can see the basic idea. The union was making sure that Armstrong wasn't taking a job that would otherwise have gone to a British trumpeter. Similarly, when Bill Haley and the Comets became the first American rock and roll group to tour the UK, in 1957, Lonnie Donegan was allowed to tour the US again, and this time he could play his guitar. The Three Tons of Joy went over to the UK to appear on the Six-Five Special, backed by British musicians and to scout out some possible tour venues with Otis' manager, but the plans fell through because of the inability to find a British group who could reasonably do a swap with Otis' band. They came back to the US, and cut a follow-up to "Ma, He's Making Eyes at Me", with vocals by Marie and Johnny Otis: [Excerpt: Johnny Otis and Marie Adams, "Bye Bye Baby"] That's an example of what Johnny Otis meant when he said later that he didn't like most of his Capitol recordings, because he was being pushed too far in a commercial rock and roll direction, while he saw himself as far closer in spirit to Count Basie, Lionel Hampton, or Louis Jordan than to Elvis Presley or Buddy Holly. The song is just an endless litany of the titles of recentish rock and roll hits, with little to recommend it. It made the top twenty in the UK, mostly on the strength of people having bought the previous single. The record after that was an attempt to capitalise on "Ma! He's Making Eyes At Me" -- it was another oldie, this time from 1916, and another song about making eyes at someone. Surely it would give them another UK hit, right?: [Excerpt: Marie Adams, "What Do You Want To Make Those Eyes At Me For?"] Sadly, it sank without a trace -- at least until it was picked up by Emile Ford and the Checkmates, who released a soundalike cover version, which became the last British number one of the fifties and first of the sixties, and was also the first number one hit by a black British artist and the first record by a black British person to sell a million copies: [Excerpt: Emile Ford and the Checkmates, "What Do You Want To Make Those Eyes At Me For?"] We'll be hearing more from Ford's co-producer on that record, a young engineer named Joe Meek, later in the series. But Otis had another idea for how to crack the British market. While the Three Tons of Joy had been performing on Six-Five Special, they had seen the British audiences doing a weird dance that only used their arms. It was a dance that was originally popularised by a British group that was so obscure that they never made a record, and the only trace they left on posterity was this dance and three photos, all taken on the same night by, of all people, Ken Russell. From those photos, the Bell Cats were one of the many British bands trying to sound like Bill Haley and the Comets. Their regular gig was at a coffee house called The Cat's Whisker, where they were popular enough that the audience were packed in like sardines -- the venue was so often dangerously overcrowded that the police eventually shut it down, and the owner reopened it as the first Angus Steak House, an infamous London restaurant chain. In those Bell Cats performances, the audience were packed so tightly that they couldn't dance properly, and so a new dance developed among the customers, and spread -- a dance where you only moved your hands. The hand jive. That dance spread to the audiences of the Six-Five Special, so much that Don Lang and his Frantic Five released "Six-Five Hand Jive" in March 1958: [Excerpt: Don Lang and His Frantic Five, "Six-Five Hand Jive"] Oddly, despite Six-Five Special not being shown in Sweden, that song saw no less than three Swedish soundalike cover versions, from (and I apologise if I mangle these names) Inger Bergrenn, Towa Carson, and the Monn-Keys. The Three Tons of Joy demonstrated the hand jive to Otis, and he decided to write a song about the dance. There was a fad for dance songs in 1958, and he believed that writing a song about a dance that was popular in Britain, where he'd just had a big hit -- and namechecking those other dances, like the Walk and the Stroll -- could lead to a hit followup to "Ma He's Making Eyes At Me". The dance also appealed to Otis because, oddly, it was very reminiscent of some of the moves that black American people would do when performing "Hambone", the folk dance-cum-song-cum-game that we discussed way back in episode thirty, and which inspired Bo Diddley's song "Bo Didlley". Otis coupled lyrics about hand-jiving to the Bo Diddley rhythm -- though he would always claim, for the rest of his life, that he'd heard that rhythm from convicts on a chain gang before Diddley ever made a record: [Excerpt: Johnny Otis, "Willie and the Hand Jive"] Surprisingly, the record did nothing at all commercially in the UK. In fact, its biggest impact over here was that it inspired another famous dance. Cliff Richard cut his own version of "Willie and the Hand Jive" in 1959: [Excerpt: Cliff Richard and the Shadows, "Willie and the Hand Jive"] His backing band, the Shadows, were looking for a way to liven up the visual presentation of that song when they performed it live, and they decided that moving in unison would work well for the song, and worked out a few dance steps. The audience reaction was so great that they started doing it on every song. The famous -- or infamous -- Shadows Walk had developed. But while "Willie and the Hand Jive" didn't have any success in the UK, in the US it became Otis' only top ten pop hit, and his first R&B top ten hit as a performer in six years, reaching number nine on the pop charts and number one on the R&B charts. This was despite several radio stations banning it, as they assumed the "hand jive" was a reference to masturbation -- even though on Otis' TV shows and his stage performances, the Three Tons of Joy would demonstrate the dance as Otis sang. As late as the nineties, Otis was still having to deal with questions about whether "Willie and the Hand Jive" had some more lascivious meaning. Of course, with him now being on a major label, he had to do follow-ups to his big hit, like "Willie Did The Cha-Cha": [Excerpt: Johnny Otis, "Willie Did The Cha-Cha"] But chart success remained elusive, and nothing he did after this point got higher than number fifty-two on the pop charts. The music industry was slowly moving away from the kind of music that Otis had always made -- as genres got narrower, his appreciation for all forms of black American music meant that he no longer appealed to people who wanted one specific style of music. He was also becoming increasingly involved in the civil rights movement, writing a weekly newspaper column decrying racism, helping his friend Mervyn Dymally who became the joint first black person elected to statewide office in the USA since the reconstruction, and working with Malcolm X and others. He had to deal with crosses burning on his lawn, and with death threats to his family -- while Otis was white, his wife was black. The result was that Otis recorded and toured only infrequently during the sixties, and at one point was making so little as a musician that his wife became the main breadwinner of the family while he was a stay-at-home father. After the Watts riots in 1965, which we'll talk about much more when we get to that time period, Otis wrote the book Listen to the Lambs, a combination political essay, autobiography, and mixture of eyewitness accounts of the riots that made a radical case that the first priority for the black community in which he lived wasn't so much social integration, which he believed impossible in the short term due to white racism, as economic equality -- he thought it was in the best interests, not only of black people but of white people as well, if black people were made equal economic participants in America as rapidly as humanly possible, and if they should be given economic and political control over their own lives and destinies. The book is fierce in its anger at systemic racism, at colonialism, at anglocentric beauty standards that made black people hate their own bodies and faces, at police brutality, at the war in Vietnam, and at the systemic inequalities keeping black people down. And over and again he makes one point, and I'll quote from the book here: "A newborn Negro baby has less chance of survival than a white. A Negro baby will have its life ended seven years sooner. This is not some biological phenomenon linked to skin colour, like sickle-cell anaemia; this is a national crime, linked to a white-supremacist way of life and compounded by indifference". Just to remind you, the word he uses there was the correct word for black people at the time he was writing. Some of the book is heartrending, like the description from a witness -- Otis gives over thirty pages of the book to the voices of black witnesses of the riots -- talking about seeing white police officers casually shoot black teenagers on the street and make bullseye signals to their friends as if they'd been shooting tin cans. Some is, more than fifty years later, out of date or "of its time", but the sad thing is that so many of the arguments are as timely now as they were then. Otis wrote a follow-up, Upside Your Head, in the early nineties inspired by the LA riots that followed the Rodney King beating, and no doubt were he alive today he would be completing the trilogy. But while politics had become Otis' main occupation, he hadn't stopped making music altogether, and in the late sixties he was contacted by Frank Zappa, who was such a fan of Otis that he copied his trademark beard from Otis. Otis and Zappa worked together in a casual way, with Otis mostly helping Zappa get in touch with musicians he knew who Zappa wanted to work with, like Don "Sugarcane" Harris. Otis also conducted the Mothers of Invention in the studio on a few songs while Zappa was in the control room, helping him get the greasy fifties sound he wanted on songs like "Holiday in Berlin": [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Holiday in Berlin, Full Blown"] Apparently while they were recording that, Otis was clapping his hands in the face of the bass player, Roy Estrada, who didn't like it at all. Given what I know of Estrada that's a good thing. Otis' teenage son Shuggie also played with Zappa, playing bass on "Son of Mr. Green Genes" from Zappa's Hot Rats album. Zappa then persuaded a small blues label, Kent Records, which was owned by two other veterans of the fifties music industry, the Bihari brothers, to sign Otis to make an album. "Cold Shot" by the New Johnny Otis Show featured a core band of just three people -- Otis himself on piano and drums, Delmar "Mighty Mouth" Evans on vocals, and Shuggie playing all the guitar and bass parts. Shuggie was only fifteen at the time, but had been playing with his father's band since he was eleven, often wearing false moustaches and sunglasses to play in venues serving alcohol. The record brought Otis his first R&B hit since "Willie and the Hand Jive", more than a decade earlier, "Country Girl": [Excerpt: The Johnny Otis Show, "Country Girl"] Around the same time, that trio also recorded another album, called "For Adults Only", under the name Snatch and the Poontangs, and with a cover drawn by Otis in a spot-on imitation of the style of Robert Crumb. For obvious reasons I won't be playing any of that record here, but even that had a serious sociological purpose along with the obscene humour -- Otis wanted to preserve bits of black folklore. Songs like "The Signifying Monkey" had been performed for years, and had even been recorded by people like Chuck Berry and Willie Dixon, but they'd always stripped out the sexual insults that make up much of the piece's appeal. Otis would in later years laugh that he'd received accusations of obscenity for "Roll With Me Henry" and for "Willie and the Hand Jive", but nobody had seemed bothered in the slightest by the records of Snatch and the Poontangs with their constant sexual insults. "Cold Shot" caused a career renaissance for Otis, and he put together a new lineup of the Johnny Otis Show, one that would feature as many as possible of the veteran musicians who he thought deserved exposure to a new audience. Probably the highest point of Otis' later career was a 1970 performance at the Monterey Jazz Festival, where his band featured, along with Johnny and Shuggie, Esther Phillips, Big Joe Turner, Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson, Roy Milton, Pee Wee Crayton, Ivory Joe Hunter, and Roy Brown: [Excerpt: The Johnny Otis Show featuring Roy Brown, "Good Rocking Tonight"] That performance was released as a live album, and Clint Eastwood featured footage of that show -- the band performing "Willie and the Hand Jive" -- in his classic film Play Misty For Me. It was probably the greatest example of Otis' belief that all the important strands of black American music shared a commonality and could work in combination with each other. For the next few decades, Otis combined touring with as many of his old collaborators as possible -- Marie Adams, for example, rejoined the band in 1972 -- with having his own radio show in which he told people about black musical history and interviewed as many old musicians as he could, writing more books, including a cookbook and a collection of his art, running an organic apple juice company and food store, painting old blues artists in a style equally inspired by African art and Picasso, and being the pastor of a Pentecostal church -- but one with a theology so broadminded that it was not only LGBT-affirming but had Buddhist and Jewish congregants. He ran Blues Spectrum Records in the seventies, which put out late-career recordings by people like Charles Brown, Big Joe Turner, and Louis Jordan, some of them their last ever recordings. And he lectured in the history of black music at Berkeley. Johnny Otis died in 2012, aged ninety, having achieved more than most of us could hope to achieve if we lived five times that long, and having helped many, many more people to make the most of their talents. He died three days before the discovery of whom he was most proud, Etta James, and she overshadowed him in the obituaries, as he would have wanted.

Note: This is a new version because I uploaded the wrong file originally   Episode seventy-one of A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs continues our look at British music TV by looking at the first time it affected American R&B, and is also our final look at Johnny Otis. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Short Shorts” by the Royal Teens, a group whose members went on to be far more important than one might expect.  Also, this is the first of hopefully many podcasts to come where 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.  Much of the information on Otis comes from Midnight at the Barrelhouse: The Johnny Otis Story by George Lipsitz.  I’ve also referred extensively to two books by Otis himself, Listen to the Lambs, and Upside Your Head! Rhythm and Blues on Central Avenue. I’ve used two main books on the British side of things:  Pete Frame’s The Restless Generation is the best book available looking at British 50s rock and roll from a historical perspective. Be warned, though — his jokey and irreverent style can, when dealing with people like Larry Parnes (who was gay and Jewish) very occasionally tip over into reinforcing homophobic and anti-semitic stereotypes for an easy laugh. Billy Bragg’s Roots, Radicals, and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World is one of the best books I’ve read on music at all, and talks about the problems between the musicians’ unions. This three-CD set provides a great overview of Otis’ forties and fifties work, both as himself and with other artists. Many of the titles will be very familiar to listeners of this podcast.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript And so we come to our last look at Johnny Otis, one of those people who has been turning up throughout the early episodes of the podcast. Indeed, he may continue to appear intermittently until at least the late sixties, as an influence and occasional collaborator. But the days of his influence on rock and roll music more or less came to an end with the rise of the rockabillies in the mid fifties, and from this point on he was not really involved in the mainstream of rock and roll. But in one of those curious events that happens sometimes, just as Otis was coming to the end of the run of hits he produced or arranged or performed on for other people, and the run of discoveries that changed music, he had a rock and roll hit under his own name for the first and only time. And that hit was because of the Six-Five Special, the British TV show we talked about last week: [Excerpt: Johnny Otis, “Willie and the Hand Jive”] The way this podcast works, telling stories chronologically and introducing new artists as they come along, can sometimes make it seem like the music business in the fifties was in a constant state of revolution, with a new year zero coming up every year or two. “First-wave rockabilly is *so* January through August 1956, we’re into late 1958 and everything’s prototype soul now, granddad!” But of course the majority of the podcast so far has looked at a very small chunk of time, concentrating on the mid 1950s, and plenty of people who were making hits in 1955 were still having very active careers as of 1958, and that’s definitely the case for Johnny Otis. While he didn’t have that many big hits after rockabilly took over from R&B as the predominant form of rock and roll music, he was still making important records. For example, in 1957 he produced and co-wrote “Lonely, Lonely Nights” for Little Julian Herrera and the Tigers, which became a local hit, and which he thought at the time was the first big record to feature a Chicano singer. We’re going to talk about the Chicano identity in future episodes of the show, but Chicano (or Chicana or Chicanx) is a term that is usually used for Americans of Mexican origin. It can be both an ethnic and a cultural identifier, and it has also been used in the past as a racial slur. It’s still seen as that by some people, but it’s also the chosen identifier for a lot of people who reject other labels like Hispanic or Latino. To the best of my knowledge, it’s a word that is considered acceptable and correct for white people to use when talking about people who identify that way — which, to be clear, not all Americans of Mexican descent do, by any means — but I’m very happy to have feedback about this from people who are affected by the word. And Little Julian Herrera did identify that way, and he became a hero among the Chicano population in LA when “Lonely Lonely Nights” came out on Dig Records, a label Otis owned: [Excerpt: Little Julian Herrera and the Tigers, “Lonely, Lonely Nights”] But it turned out shortly afterwards that Herrera wasn’t exactly what he seemed. Police came to Otis’ door, and told him that the person he knew as Julian Herrera was wanted on charges of rape. And not only that, his birth name was Ron Gregory, and he was of Jewish ethnicity, and from a Hungarian-American family from Massachusetts. Apparently at some point he had run away from home and travelled to LA, where he had been taken in by a Mexican-American woman who had raised him as if he were her own son. That was pretty much the end of Little Julian Herrera’s career — and indeed shortly after that, Dig Records itself closed down, and Otis had no record contract. But then fate intervened, in the form of Mickey Katz. Mickey Katz was a comedian, who is now probably best known for his famous family — his son is Joel Grey, the star of Cabaret, while his granddaughter, Jennifer Grey, starred in Dirty Dancing and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Katz’s comedy consisted of him performing parodies of currently-popular songs, giving them new lyrics referencing Jewish culture. A typical example is his version of “Sixteen Tons”, making it about working at a deli instead of down a mine: [Excerpt: Mickey Katz, “Sixteen Tons”] Even though Katz’s music was about as far from Otis’ as one can imagine, Katz had been a serious musician before he went into comedy, and when he went to see Otis perform live, he recognised his talent as a bandleader, and called his record label, urging them to sign him. Katz was on Capitol, one of the biggest labels in the country, and so for the first time in many years, Otis had guaranteed major-label distribution for his records. In October 1957, Capitol took the unusual step of releasing four Johnny Otis singles at the same time, each of them featuring a different vocalist from his large stable of performers. None did especially well on the American charts at the time, but one, featuring Marie Adams and the Three Tons of Joy, would have a major impact on Otis’ career. Marie Adams was someone who had been on the R&B scene for many years, and had been working with Otis in his show since 1953. She’d been born Ollie Marie Givens, but dropped the Ollie early on. She was a shy woman, who had to be pushed by her husband to audition for Don Robey at Peacock Records. Robey had challenged her to sing along with Dinah Washington’s record “Harbor Lights”: [Excerpt: Dinah Washington, “Harbor Lights”] When she’d proved she could sing that, Robey signed her, hoping that he’d have a second Big Mama Thornton on his hands. And her first single seemed to confirm him in that hope — “I’m Gonna Play the Honky Tonks” went to number three on the R&B chart and became one of the biggest hit records Peacock had ever released: [Excerpt: Marie Adams, “I’m Gonna Play the Honky Tonks”] But her later career with Peacock was less successful. The follow-up was a version of Johnny Ace’s “My Song”, which seems to have been chosen more because Don Robey owned the publishing than because the song and arrangement were a good fit for her voice, and it didn’t do anything much commercially: [Excerpt: Marie Adams, “My Song” Like many of Peacock’s artists who weren’t selling wonderfully she was handed over to Johnny Otis to produce, in the hopes that he could get her making hits. Sadly, he couldn’t, and her final record for Peacock came in 1955, when Otis produced her on one of many records recorded to cash in on Johnny Ace’s death, “In Memory”: [Excerpt: Marie Adams, “In Memory”] But that did so poorly that it’s never had an official rerelease, not even on a digital compilation I have which has half a dozen other tributes to Ace on it by people like Vanetta Dillard and Linda Hayes. Adams was dropped by her record label, but she was impressive enough as a vocalist that Otis — who always had an ear for great singing — kept her in his band, as the lead singer of a vocal trio, the Three Tons of Joy, who were so called because they were all extremely fat. (I say this not as a criticism of them. I’m fat myself and absolutely fat-positive. Fat isn’t a term of abuse in my book). There seems to be some debate about the identity of the other two in the Three Tons of Joy. I’ve seen reliable sources refer to them as two sisters, Sadie and Francine McKinley, and as *Adams’* two sisters, Doris and Francine, and have no way of determining which of these is correct. The three of them would do synchronised dancing, even when they weren’t singing, and they remained with Otis’ show until 1960. And so when Capitol came to release its first batch of Johnny Otis records, one of them had vocals by Marie Adams and the Three Tons of Joy. The song in question was “Ma! He’s Making Eyes At Me”, a vaudeville song which dated back to 1921, and had originally sounded like this: [Excerpt: Billy Jones, “Ma! She’s Making Eyes at Me”] In the hands of the Otis band and the Three Tons of Joy, it was transformed into something that owed more to Ruth Brown (especially with Marie Adams’ pronunciation of “mama”) than to any of the other performers who had recorded versions of the song over the decades: [Excerpt: Johnny Otis and his Orchestra with Marie Adams and the Three Tons of Joy: “Ma, He’s Making Eyes At Me”] In the US, that did nothing at all on the charts, but for some reason it took off massively in the UK, and went to number two on the pop charts over here. It was so successful, in fact, that there were plans for a Johnny Otis Show tour of the UK in 1958. Those plans failed, because of something I’ve not mentioned in this podcast before, but which radically shaped British music culture, and to a lesser extent American music culture, for decades. Both the American Federation of Musicians and their British equivalent, the Musicians’ Union, had since the early 1930s had a mutual protectionist agreement which prevented musicians from one of the countries playing in the other. After the Duke Ellington band toured the UK in 1933, the ban came into place on both sides. Certain individual non-instrumental performers from one country could perform in the other, but only if they employed musicians from the other country. So for example Glenn Miller got his first experience of putting together a big band because Ray Noble, a British bandleader, had had hits in the US in the mid thirties. Noble and his vocalist Al Bowlly were allowed to travel to the US, but Noble’s band wasn’t, and so he had to get an American musician, Miller, to put together a new band. Similarly, when Johnnie Ray had toured the UK in the early fifties, he’d had to employ British musicians, and when Lonnie Donegan had toured the US on the back of “Rock Island Line”‘s success, he was backed by Johnny Burnette and the Rock and Roll Trio — Donegan was allowed to sing, but not allowed to play guitar. In 1955, the two unions finally came to a one-in-one-out agreement, which would last for the next few decades, where musicians from each country could tour, but only as a like-for-like swap. So Louis Armstrong was allowed to tour the UK, but only on condition that Freddie Randall, a trumpet player from Devon, got to tour the US. Stan Kenton’s band toured the UK, while the Ted Heath Orchestra (which was not, I should point out, led by the Prime Minister of the same name) toured the US. We can argue over whether Freddie Randall was truly an adequate substitute for Louis Armstrong, but I’m sure you can see the basic idea. The union was making sure that Armstrong wasn’t taking a job that would otherwise have gone to a British trumpeter. Similarly, when Bill Haley and the Comets became the first American rock and roll group to tour the UK, in 1957, Lonnie Donegan was allowed to tour the US again, and this time he could play his guitar. The Three Tons of Joy went over to the UK to appear on the Six-Five Special, backed by British musicians and to scout out some possible tour venues with Otis’ manager, but the plans fell through because of the inability to find a British group who could reasonably do a swap with Otis’ band. They came back to the US, and cut a follow-up to “Ma, He’s Making Eyes at Me”, with vocals by Marie and Johnny Otis: [Excerpt: Johnny Otis and Marie Adams, “Bye Bye Baby”] That’s an example of what Johnny Otis meant when he said later that he didn’t like most of his Capitol recordings, because he was being pushed too far in a commercial rock and roll direction, while he saw himself as far closer in spirit to Count Basie, Lionel Hampton, or Louis Jordan than to Elvis Presley or Buddy Holly. The song is just an endless litany of the titles of recentish rock and roll hits, with little to recommend it. It made the top twenty in the UK, mostly on the strength of people having bought the previous single. The record after that was an attempt to capitalise on “Ma! He’s Making Eyes At Me” — it was another oldie, this time from 1916, and another song about making eyes at someone. Surely it would give them another UK hit, right?: [Excerpt: Marie Adams, “What Do You Want To Make Those Eyes At Me For?”] Sadly, it sank without a trace — at least until it was picked up by Emile Ford and the Checkmates, who released a soundalike cover version, which became the last British number one of the fifties and first of the sixties, and was also the first number one hit by a black British artist and the first record by a black British person to sell a million copies: [Excerpt: Emile Ford and the Checkmates, “What Do You Want To Make Those Eyes At Me For?”] We’ll be hearing more from Ford’s co-producer on that record, a young engineer named Joe Meek, later in the series. But Otis had another idea for how to crack the British market. While the Three Tons of Joy had been performing on Six-Five Special, they had seen the British audiences doing a weird dance that only used their arms. It was a dance that was originally popularised by a British group that was so obscure that they never made a record, and the only trace they left on posterity was this dance and three photos, all taken on the same night by, of all people, Ken Russell. From those photos, the Bell Cats were one of the many British bands trying to sound like Bill Haley and the Comets. Their regular gig was at a coffee house called The Cat’s Whisker, where they were popular enough that the audience were packed in like sardines — the venue was so often dangerously overcrowded that the police eventually shut it down, and the owner reopened it as the first Angus Steak House, an infamous London restaurant chain. In those Bell Cats performances, the audience were packed so tightly that they couldn’t dance properly, and so a new dance developed among the customers, and spread — a dance where you only moved your hands. The hand jive. That dance spread to the audiences of the Six-Five Special, so much that Don Lang and his Frantic Five released “Six-Five Hand Jive” in March 1958: [Excerpt: Don Lang and His Frantic Five, “Six-Five Hand Jive”] Oddly, despite Six-Five Special not being shown in Sweden, that song saw no less than three Swedish soundalike cover versions, from (and I apologise if I mangle these names) Inger Bergrenn, Towa Carson, and the Monn-Keys. The Three Tons of Joy demonstrated the hand jive to Otis, and he decided to write a song about the dance. There was a fad for dance songs in 1958, and he believed that writing a song about a dance that was popular in Britain, where he’d just had a big hit — and namechecking those other dances, like the Walk and the Stroll — could lead to a hit followup to “Ma He’s Making Eyes At Me”. The dance also appealed to Otis because, oddly, it was very reminiscent of some of the moves that black American people would do when performing “Hambone”, the folk dance-cum-song-cum-game that we discussed way back in episode thirty, and which inspired Bo Diddley’s song “Bo Didlley”. Otis coupled lyrics about hand-jiving to the Bo Diddley rhythm — though he would always claim, for the rest of his life, that he’d heard that rhythm from convicts on a chain gang before Diddley ever made a record: [Excerpt: Johnny Otis, “Willie and the Hand Jive”] Surprisingly, the record did nothing at all commercially in the UK. In fact, its biggest impact over here was that it inspired another famous dance. Cliff Richard cut his own version of “Willie and the Hand Jive” in 1959: [Excerpt: Cliff Richard and the Shadows, “Willie and the Hand Jive”] His backing band, the Shadows, were looking for a way to liven up the visual presentation of that song when they performed it live, and they decided that moving in unison would work well for the song, and worked out a few dance steps. The audience reaction was so great that they started doing it on every song. The famous — or infamous — Shadows Walk had developed. But while “Willie and the Hand Jive” didn’t have any success in the UK, in the US it became Otis’ only top ten pop hit, and his first R&B top ten hit as a performer in six years, reaching number nine on the pop charts and number one on the R&B charts. This was despite several radio stations banning it, as they assumed the “hand jive” was a reference to masturbation — even though on Otis’ TV shows and his stage performances, the Three Tons of Joy would demonstrate the dance as Otis sang. As late as the nineties, Otis was still having to deal with questions about whether “Willie and the Hand Jive” had some more lascivious meaning. Of course, with him now being on a major label, he had to do follow-ups to his big hit, like “Willie Did The Cha-Cha”: [Excerpt: Johnny Otis, “Willie Did The Cha-Cha”] But chart success remained elusive, and nothing he did after this point got higher than number fifty-two on the pop charts. The music industry was slowly moving away from the kind of music that Otis had always made — as genres got narrower, his appreciation for all forms of black American music meant that he no longer appealed to people who wanted one specific style of music. He was also becoming increasingly involved in the civil rights movement, writing a weekly newspaper column decrying racism, helping his friend Mervyn Dymally who became the joint first black person elected to statewide office in the USA since the reconstruction, and working with Malcolm X and others. He had to deal with crosses burning on his lawn, and with death threats to his family — while Otis was white, his wife was black. The result was that Otis recorded and toured only infrequently during the sixties, and at one point was making so little as a musician that his wife became the main breadwinner of the family while he was a stay-at-home father. After the Watts riots in 1965, which we’ll talk about much more when we get to that time period, Otis wrote the book Listen to the Lambs, a combination political essay, autobiography, and mixture of eyewitness accounts of the riots that made a radical case that the first priority for the black community in which he lived wasn’t so much social integration, which he believed impossible in the short term due to white racism, as economic equality — he thought it was in the best interests, not only of black people but of white people as well, if black people were made equal economic participants in America as rapidly as humanly possible, and if they should be given economic and political control over their own lives and destinies. The book is fierce in its anger at systemic racism, at colonialism, at anglocentric beauty standards that made black people hate their own bodies and faces, at police brutality, at the war in Vietnam, and at the systemic inequalities keeping black people down. And over and again he makes one point, and I’ll quote from the book here: “A newborn Negro baby has less chance of survival than a white. A Negro baby will have its life ended seven years sooner. This is not some biological phenomenon linked to skin colour, like sickle-cell anaemia; this is a national crime, linked to a white-supremacist way of life and compounded by indifference”. Just to remind you, the word he uses there was the correct word for black people at the time he was writing. Some of the book is heartrending, like the description from a witness — Otis gives over thirty pages of the book to the voices of black witnesses of the riots — talking about seeing white police officers casually shoot black teenagers on the street and make bullseye signals to their friends as if they’d been shooting tin cans. Some is, more than fifty years later, out of date or “of its time”, but the sad thing is that so many of the arguments are as timely now as they were then. Otis wrote a follow-up, Upside Your Head, in the early nineties inspired by the LA riots that followed the Rodney King beating, and no doubt were he alive today he would be completing the trilogy. But while politics had become Otis’ main occupation, he hadn’t stopped making music altogether, and in the late sixties he was contacted by Frank Zappa, who was such a fan of Otis that he copied his trademark beard from Otis. Otis and Zappa worked together in a casual way, with Otis mostly helping Zappa get in touch with musicians he knew who Zappa wanted to work with, like Don “Sugarcane” Harris. Otis also conducted the Mothers of Invention in the studio on a few songs while Zappa was in the control room, helping him get the greasy fifties sound he wanted on songs like “Holiday in Berlin”: [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, “Holiday in Berlin, Full Blown”] Apparently while they were recording that, Otis was clapping his hands in the face of the bass player, Roy Estrada, who didn’t like it at all. Given what I know of Estrada that’s a good thing. Otis’ teenage son Shuggie also played with Zappa, playing bass on “Son of Mr. Green Genes” from Zappa’s Hot Rats album. Zappa then persuaded a small blues label, Kent Records, which was owned by two other veterans of the fifties music industry, the Bihari brothers, to sign Otis to make an album. “Cold Shot” by the New Johnny Otis Show featured a core band of just three people — Otis himself on piano and drums, Delmar “Mighty Mouth” Evans on vocals, and Shuggie playing all the guitar and bass parts. Shuggie was only fifteen at the time, but had been playing with his father’s band since he was eleven, often wearing false moustaches and sunglasses to play in venues serving alcohol. The record brought Otis his first R&B hit since “Willie and the Hand Jive”, more than a decade earlier, “Country Girl”: [Excerpt: The Johnny Otis Show, “Country Girl”] Around the same time, that trio also recorded another album, called “For Adults Only”, under the name Snatch and the Poontangs, and with a cover drawn by Otis in a spot-on imitation of the style of Robert Crumb. For obvious reasons I won’t be playing any of that record here, but even that had a serious sociological purpose along with the obscene humour — Otis wanted to preserve bits of black folklore. Songs like “The Signifying Monkey” had been performed for years, and had even been recorded by people like Chuck Berry and Willie Dixon, but they’d always stripped out the sexual insults that make up much of the piece’s appeal. Otis would in later years laugh that he’d received accusations of obscenity for “Roll With Me Henry” and for “Willie and the Hand Jive”, but nobody had seemed bothered in the slightest by the records of Snatch and the Poontangs with their constant sexual insults. “Cold Shot” caused a career renaissance for Otis, and he put together a new lineup of the Johnny Otis Show, one that would feature as many as possible of the veteran musicians who he thought deserved exposure to a new audience. Probably the highest point of Otis’ later career was a 1970 performance at the Monterey Jazz Festival, where his band featured, along with Johnny and Shuggie, Esther Phillips, Big Joe Turner, Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson, Roy Milton, Pee Wee Crayton, Ivory Joe Hunter, and Roy Brown: [Excerpt: The Johnny Otis Show featuring Roy Brown, “Good Rocking Tonight”] That performance was released as a live album, and Clint Eastwood featured footage of that show — the band performing “Willie and the Hand Jive” — in his classic film Play Misty For Me. It was probably the greatest example of Otis’ belief that all the important strands of black American music shared a commonality and could work in combination with each other. For the next few decades, Otis combined touring with as many of his old collaborators as possible — Marie Adams, for example, rejoined the band in 1972 — with having his own radio show in which he told people about black musical history and interviewed as many old musicians as he could, writing more books, including a cookbook and a collection of his art, running an organic apple juice company and food store, painting old blues artists in a style equally inspired by African art and Picasso, and being the pastor of a Pentecostal church — but one with a theology so broadminded that it was not only LGBT-affirming but had Buddhist and Jewish congregants. He ran Blues Spectrum Records in the seventies, which put out late-career recordings by people like Charles Brown, Big Joe Turner, and Louis Jordan, some of them their last ever recordings. And he lectured in the history of black music at Berkeley. Johnny Otis died in 2012, aged ninety, having achieved more than most of us could hope to achieve if we lived five times that long, and having helped many, many more people to make the most of their talents. He died three days before the discovery of whom he was most proud, Etta James, and she overshadowed him in the obituaries, as he would have wanted.

Note: This is a new version because I uploaded the wrong file originally   Episode seventy-one of A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs continues our look at British music TV by looking at the first time it affected American R&B, and is also our final look at Johnny Otis. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Short Shorts” by the Royal Teens, a group whose members went on to be far more important than one might expect.  Also, this is the first of hopefully many podcasts to come where 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.  Much of the information on Otis comes from Midnight at the Barrelhouse: The Johnny Otis Story by George Lipsitz.  I’ve also referred extensively to two books by Otis himself, Listen to the Lambs, and Upside Your Head! Rhythm and Blues on Central Avenue. I’ve used two main books on the British side of things:  Pete Frame’s The Restless Generation is the best book available looking at British 50s rock and roll from a historical perspective. Be warned, though — his jokey and irreverent style can, when dealing with people like Larry Parnes (who was gay and Jewish) very occasionally tip over into reinforcing homophobic and anti-semitic stereotypes for an easy laugh. Billy Bragg’s Roots, Radicals, and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World is one of the best books I’ve read on music at all, and talks about the problems between the musicians’ unions. This three-CD set provides a great overview of Otis’ forties and fifties work, both as himself and with other artists. Many of the titles will be very familiar to listeners of this podcast.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript And so we come to our last look at Johnny Otis, one of those people who has been turning up throughout the early episodes of the podcast. Indeed, he may continue to appear intermittently until at least the late sixties, as an influence and occasional collaborator. But the days of his influence on rock and roll music more or less came to an end with the rise of the rockabillies in the mid fifties, and from this point on he was not really involved in the mainstream of rock and roll. But in one of those curious events that happens sometimes, just as Otis was coming to the end of the run of hits he produced or arranged or performed on for other people, and the run of discoveries that changed music, he had a rock and roll hit under his own name for the first and only time. And that hit was because of the Six-Five Special, the British TV show we talked about last week: [Excerpt: Johnny Otis, “Willie and the Hand Jive”] The way this podcast works, telling stories chronologically and introducing new artists as they come along, can sometimes make it seem like the music business in the fifties was in a constant state of revolution, with a new year zero coming up every year or two. “First-wave rockabilly is *so* January through August 1956, we’re into late 1958 and everything’s prototype soul now, granddad!” But of course the majority of the podcast so far has looked at a very small chunk of time, concentrating on the mid 1950s, and plenty of people who were making hits in 1955 were still having very active careers as of 1958, and that’s definitely the case for Johnny Otis. While he didn’t have that many big hits after rockabilly took over from R&B as the predominant form of rock and roll music, he was still making important records. For example, in 1957 he produced and co-wrote “Lonely, Lonely Nights” for Little Julian Herrera and the Tigers, which became a local hit, and which he thought at the time was the first big record to feature a Chicano singer. We’re going to talk about the Chicano identity in future episodes of the show, but Chicano (or Chicana or Chicanx) is a term that is usually used for Americans of Mexican origin. It can be both an ethnic and a cultural identifier, and it has also been used in the past as a racial slur. It’s still seen as that by some people, but it’s also the chosen identifier for a lot of people who reject other labels like Hispanic or Latino. To the best of my knowledge, it’s a word that is considered acceptable and correct for white people to use when talking about people who identify that way — which, to be clear, not all Americans of Mexican descent do, by any means — but I’m very happy to have feedback about this from people who are affected by the word. And Little Julian Herrera did identify that way, and he became a hero among the Chicano population in LA when “Lonely Lonely Nights” came out on Dig Records, a label Otis owned: [Excerpt: Little Julian Herrera and the Tigers, “Lonely, Lonely Nights”] But it turned out shortly afterwards that Herrera wasn’t exactly what he seemed. Police came to Otis’ door, and told him that the person he knew as Julian Herrera was wanted on charges of rape. And not only that, his birth name was Ron Gregory, and he was of Jewish ethnicity, and from a Hungarian-American family from Massachusetts. Apparently at some point he had run away from home and travelled to LA, where he had been taken in by a Mexican-American woman who had raised him as if he were her own son. That was pretty much the end of Little Julian Herrera’s career — and indeed shortly after that, Dig Records itself closed down, and Otis had no record contract. But then fate intervened, in the form of Mickey Katz. Mickey Katz was a comedian, who is now probably best known for his famous family — his son is Joel Grey, the star of Cabaret, while his granddaughter, Jennifer Grey, starred in Dirty Dancing and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Katz’s comedy consisted of him performing parodies of currently-popular songs, giving them new lyrics referencing Jewish culture. A typical example is his version of “Sixteen Tons”, making it about working at a deli instead of down a mine: [Excerpt: Mickey Katz, “Sixteen Tons”] Even though Katz’s music was about as far from Otis’ as one can imagine, Katz had been a serious musician before he went into comedy, and when he went to see Otis perform live, he recognised his talent as a bandleader, and called his record label, urging them to sign him. Katz was on Capitol, one of the biggest labels in the country, and so for the first time in many years, Otis had guaranteed major-label distribution for his records. In October 1957, Capitol took the unusual step of releasing four Johnny Otis singles at the same time, each of them featuring a different vocalist from his large stable of performers. None did especially well on the American charts at the time, but one, featuring Marie Adams and the Three Tons of Joy, would have a major impact on Otis’ career. Marie Adams was someone who had been on the R&B scene for many years, and had been working with Otis in his show since 1953. She’d been born Ollie Marie Givens, but dropped the Ollie early on. She was a shy woman, who had to be pushed by her husband to audition for Don Robey at Peacock Records. Robey had challenged her to sing along with Dinah Washington’s record “Harbor Lights”: [Excerpt: Dinah Washington, “Harbor Lights”] When she’d proved she could sing that, Robey signed her, hoping that he’d have a second Big Mama Thornton on his hands. And her first single seemed to confirm him in that hope — “I’m Gonna Play the Honky Tonks” went to number three on the R&B chart and became one of the biggest hit records Peacock had ever released: [Excerpt: Marie Adams, “I’m Gonna Play the Honky Tonks”] But her later career with Peacock was less successful. The follow-up was a version of Johnny Ace’s “My Song”, which seems to have been chosen more because Don Robey owned the publishing than because the song and arrangement were a good fit for her voice, and it didn’t do anything much commercially: [Excerpt: Marie Adams, “My Song” Like many of Peacock’s artists who weren’t selling wonderfully she was handed over to Johnny Otis to produce, in the hopes that he could get her making hits. Sadly, he couldn’t, and her final record for Peacock came in 1955, when Otis produced her on one of many records recorded to cash in on Johnny Ace’s death, “In Memory”: [Excerpt: Marie Adams, “In Memory”] But that did so poorly that it’s never had an official rerelease, not even on a digital compilation I have which has half a dozen other tributes to Ace on it by people like Vanetta Dillard and Linda Hayes. Adams was dropped by her record label, but she was impressive enough as a vocalist that Otis — who always had an ear for great singing — kept her in his band, as the lead singer of a vocal trio, the Three Tons of Joy, who were so called because they were all extremely fat. (I say this not as a criticism of them. I’m fat myself and absolutely fat-positive. Fat isn’t a term of abuse in my book). There seems to be some debate about the identity of the other two in the Three Tons of Joy. I’ve seen reliable sources refer to them as two sisters, Sadie and Francine McKinley, and as *Adams’* two sisters, Doris and Francine, and have no way of determining which of these is correct. The three of them would do synchronised dancing, even when they weren’t singing, and they remained with Otis’ show until 1960. And so when Capitol came to release its first batch of Johnny Otis records, one of them had vocals by Marie Adams and the Three Tons of Joy. The song in question was “Ma! He’s Making Eyes At Me”, a vaudeville song which dated back to 1921, and had originally sounded like this: [Excerpt: Billy Jones, “Ma! She’s Making Eyes at Me”] In the hands of the Otis band and the Three Tons of Joy, it was transformed into something that owed more to Ruth Brown (especially with Marie Adams’ pronunciation of “mama”) than to any of the other performers who had recorded versions of the song over the decades: [Excerpt: Johnny Otis and his Orchestra with Marie Adams and the Three Tons of Joy: “Ma, He’s Making Eyes At Me”] In the US, that did nothing at all on the charts, but for some reason it took off massively in the UK, and went to number two on the pop charts over here. It was so successful, in fact, that there were plans for a Johnny Otis Show tour of the UK in 1958. Those plans failed, because of something I’ve not mentioned in this podcast before, but which radically shaped British music culture, and to a lesser extent American music culture, for decades. Both the American Federation of Musicians and their British equivalent, the Musicians’ Union, had since the early 1930s had a mutual protectionist agreement which prevented musicians from one of the countries playing in the other. After the Duke Ellington band toured the UK in 1933, the ban came into place on both sides. Certain individual non-instrumental performers from one country could perform in the other, but only if they employed musicians from the other country. So for example Glenn Miller got his first experience of putting together a big band because Ray Noble, a British bandleader, had had hits in the US in the mid thirties. Noble and his vocalist Al Bowlly were allowed to travel to the US, but Noble’s band wasn’t, and so he had to get an American musician, Miller, to put together a new band. Similarly, when Johnnie Ray had toured the UK in the early fifties, he’d had to employ British musicians, and when Lonnie Donegan had toured the US on the back of “Rock Island Line”‘s success, he was backed by Johnny Burnette and the Rock and Roll Trio — Donegan was allowed to sing, but not allowed to play guitar. In 1955, the two unions finally came to a one-in-one-out agreement, which would last for the next few decades, where musicians from each country could tour, but only as a like-for-like swap. So Louis Armstrong was allowed to tour the UK, but only on condition that Freddie Randall, a trumpet player from Devon, got to tour the US. Stan Kenton’s band toured the UK, while the Ted Heath Orchestra (which was not, I should point out, led by the Prime Minister of the same name) toured the US. We can argue over whether Freddie Randall was truly an adequate substitute for Louis Armstrong, but I’m sure you can see the basic idea. The union was making sure that Armstrong wasn’t taking a job that would otherwise have gone to a British trumpeter. Similarly, when Bill Haley and the Comets became the first American rock and roll group to tour the UK, in 1957, Lonnie Donegan was allowed to tour the US again, and this time he could play his guitar. The Three Tons of Joy went over to the UK to appear on the Six-Five Special, backed by British musicians and to scout out some possible tour venues with Otis’ manager, but the plans fell through because of the inability to find a British group who could reasonably do a swap with Otis’ band. They came back to the US, and cut a follow-up to “Ma, He’s Making Eyes at Me”, with vocals by Marie and Johnny Otis: [Excerpt: Johnny Otis and Marie Adams, “Bye Bye Baby”] That’s an example of what Johnny Otis meant when he said later that he didn’t like most of his Capitol recordings, because he was being pushed too far in a commercial rock and roll direction, while he saw himself as far closer in spirit to Count Basie, Lionel Hampton, or Louis Jordan than to Elvis Presley or Buddy Holly. The song is just an endless litany of the titles of recentish rock and roll hits, with little to recommend it. It made the top twenty in the UK, mostly on the strength of people having bought the previous single. The record after that was an attempt to capitalise on “Ma! He’s Making Eyes At Me” — it was another oldie, this time from 1916, and another song about making eyes at someone. Surely it would give them another UK hit, right?: [Excerpt: Marie Adams, “What Do You Want To Make Those Eyes At Me For?”] Sadly, it sank without a trace — at least until it was picked up by Emile Ford and the Checkmates, who released a soundalike cover version, which became the last British number one of the fifties and first of the sixties, and was also the first number one hit by a black British artist and the first record by a black British person to sell a million copies: [Excerpt: Emile Ford and the Checkmates, “What Do You Want To Make Those Eyes At Me For?”] We’ll be hearing more from Ford’s co-producer on that record, a young engineer named Joe Meek, later in the series. But Otis had another idea for how to crack the British market. While the Three Tons of Joy had been performing on Six-Five Special, they had seen the British audiences doing a weird dance that only used their arms. It was a dance that was originally popularised by a British group that was so obscure that they never made a record, and the only trace they left on posterity was this dance and three photos, all taken on the same night by, of all people, Ken Russell. From those photos, the Bell Cats were one of the many British bands trying to sound like Bill Haley and the Comets. Their regular gig was at a coffee house called The Cat’s Whisker, where they were popular enough that the audience were packed in like sardines — the venue was so often dangerously overcrowded that the police eventually shut it down, and the owner reopened it as the first Angus Steak House, an infamous London restaurant chain. In those Bell Cats performances, the audience were packed so tightly that they couldn’t dance properly, and so a new dance developed among the customers, and spread — a dance where you only moved your hands. The hand jive. That dance spread to the audiences of the Six-Five Special, so much that Don Lang and his Frantic Five released “Six-Five Hand Jive” in March 1958: [Excerpt: Don Lang and His Frantic Five, “Six-Five Hand Jive”] Oddly, despite Six-Five Special not being shown in Sweden, that song saw no less than three Swedish soundalike cover versions, from (and I apologise if I mangle these names) Inger Bergrenn, Towa Carson, and the Monn-Keys. The Three Tons of Joy demonstrated the hand jive to Otis, and he decided to write a song about the dance. There was a fad for dance songs in 1958, and he believed that writing a song about a dance that was popular in Britain, where he’d just had a big hit — and namechecking those other dances, like the Walk and the Stroll — could lead to a hit followup to “Ma He’s Making Eyes At Me”. The dance also appealed to Otis because, oddly, it was very reminiscent of some of the moves that black American people would do when performing “Hambone”, the folk dance-cum-song-cum-game that we discussed way back in episode thirty, and which inspired Bo Diddley’s song “Bo Didlley”. Otis coupled lyrics about hand-jiving to the Bo Diddley rhythm — though he would always claim, for the rest of his life, that he’d heard that rhythm from convicts on a chain gang before Diddley ever made a record: [Excerpt: Johnny Otis, “Willie and the Hand Jive”] Surprisingly, the record did nothing at all commercially in the UK. In fact, its biggest impact over here was that it inspired another famous dance. Cliff Richard cut his own version of “Willie and the Hand Jive” in 1959: [Excerpt: Cliff Richard and the Shadows, “Willie and the Hand Jive”] His backing band, the Shadows, were looking for a way to liven up the visual presentation of that song when they performed it live, and they decided that moving in unison would work well for the song, and worked out a few dance steps. The audience reaction was so great that they started doing it on every song. The famous — or infamous — Shadows Walk had developed. But while “Willie and the Hand Jive” didn’t have any success in the UK, in the US it became Otis’ only top ten pop hit, and his first R&B top ten hit as a performer in six years, reaching number nine on the pop charts and number one on the R&B charts. This was despite several radio stations banning it, as they assumed the “hand jive” was a reference to masturbation — even though on Otis’ TV shows and his stage performances, the Three Tons of Joy would demonstrate the dance as Otis sang. As late as the nineties, Otis was still having to deal with questions about whether “Willie and the Hand Jive” had some more lascivious meaning. Of course, with him now being on a major label, he had to do follow-ups to his big hit, like “Willie Did The Cha-Cha”: [Excerpt: Johnny Otis, “Willie Did The Cha-Cha”] But chart success remained elusive, and nothing he did after this point got higher than number fifty-two on the pop charts. The music industry was slowly moving away from the kind of music that Otis had always made — as genres got narrower, his appreciation for all forms of black American music meant that he no longer appealed to people who wanted one specific style of music. He was also becoming increasingly involved in the civil rights movement, writing a weekly newspaper column decrying racism, helping his friend Mervyn Dymally who became the joint first black person elected to statewide office in the USA since the reconstruction, and working with Malcolm X and others. He had to deal with crosses burning on his lawn, and with death threats to his family — while Otis was white, his wife was black. The result was that Otis recorded and toured only infrequently during the sixties, and at one point was making so little as a musician that his wife became the main breadwinner of the family while he was a stay-at-home father. After the Watts riots in 1965, which we’ll talk about much more when we get to that time period, Otis wrote the book Listen to the Lambs, a combination political essay, autobiography, and mixture of eyewitness accounts of the riots that made a radical case that the first priority for the black community in which he lived wasn’t so much social integration, which he believed impossible in the short term due to white racism, as economic equality — he thought it was in the best interests, not only of black people but of white people as well, if black people were made equal economic participants in America as rapidly as humanly possible, and if they should be given economic and political control over their own lives and destinies. The book is fierce in its anger at systemic racism, at colonialism, at anglocentric beauty standards that made black people hate their own bodies and faces, at police brutality, at the war in Vietnam, and at the systemic inequalities keeping black people down. And over and again he makes one point, and I’ll quote from the book here: “A newborn Negro baby has less chance of survival than a white. A Negro baby will have its life ended seven years sooner. This is not some biological phenomenon linked to skin colour, like sickle-cell anaemia; this is a national crime, linked to a white-supremacist way of life and compounded by indifference”. Just to remind you, the word he uses there was the correct word for black people at the time he was writing. Some of the book is heartrending, like the description from a witness — Otis gives over thirty pages of the book to the voices of black witnesses of the riots — talking about seeing white police officers casually shoot black teenagers on the street and make bullseye signals to their friends as if they’d been shooting tin cans. Some is, more than fifty years later, out of date or “of its time”, but the sad thing is that so many of the arguments are as timely now as they were then. Otis wrote a follow-up, Upside Your Head, in the early nineties inspired by the LA riots that followed the Rodney King beating, and no doubt were he alive today he would be completing the trilogy. But while politics had become Otis’ main occupation, he hadn’t stopped making music altogether, and in the late sixties he was contacted by Frank Zappa, who was such a fan of Otis that he copied his trademark beard from Otis. Otis and Zappa worked together in a casual way, with Otis mostly helping Zappa get in touch with musicians he knew who Zappa wanted to work with, like Don “Sugarcane” Harris. Otis also conducted the Mothers of Invention in the studio on a few songs while Zappa was in the control room, helping him get the greasy fifties sound he wanted on songs like “Holiday in Berlin”: [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, “Holiday in Berlin, Full Blown”] Apparently while they were recording that, Otis was clapping his hands in the face of the bass player, Roy Estrada, who didn’t like it at all. Given what I know of Estrada that’s a good thing. Otis’ teenage son Shuggie also played with Zappa, playing bass on “Son of Mr. Green Genes” from Zappa’s Hot Rats album. Zappa then persuaded a small blues label, Kent Records, which was owned by two other veterans of the fifties music industry, the Bihari brothers, to sign Otis to make an album. “Cold Shot” by the New Johnny Otis Show featured a core band of just three people — Otis himself on piano and drums, Delmar “Mighty Mouth” Evans on vocals, and Shuggie playing all the guitar and bass parts. Shuggie was only fifteen at the time, but had been playing with his father’s band since he was eleven, often wearing false moustaches and sunglasses to play in venues serving alcohol. The record brought Otis his first R&B hit since “Willie and the Hand Jive”, more than a decade earlier, “Country Girl”: [Excerpt: The Johnny Otis Show, “Country Girl”] Around the same time, that trio also recorded another album, called “For Adults Only”, under the name Snatch and the Poontangs, and with a cover drawn by Otis in a spot-on imitation of the style of Robert Crumb. For obvious reasons I won’t be playing any of that record here, but even that had a serious sociological purpose along with the obscene humour — Otis wanted to preserve bits of black folklore. Songs like “The Signifying Monkey” had been performed for years, and had even been recorded by people like Chuck Berry and Willie Dixon, but they’d always stripped out the sexual insults that make up much of the piece’s appeal. Otis would in later years laugh that he’d received accusations of obscenity for “Roll With Me Henry” and for “Willie and the Hand Jive”, but nobody had seemed bothered in the slightest by the records of Snatch and the Poontangs with their constant sexual insults. “Cold Shot” caused a career renaissance for Otis, and he put together a new lineup of the Johnny Otis Show, one that would feature as many as possible of the veteran musicians who he thought deserved exposure to a new audience. Probably the highest point of Otis’ later career was a 1970 performance at the Monterey Jazz Festival, where his band featured, along with Johnny and Shuggie, Esther Phillips, Big Joe Turner, Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson, Roy Milton, Pee Wee Crayton, Ivory Joe Hunter, and Roy Brown: [Excerpt: The Johnny Otis Show featuring Roy Brown, “Good Rocking Tonight”] That performance was released as a live album, and Clint Eastwood featured footage of that show — the band performing “Willie and the Hand Jive” — in his classic film Play Misty For Me. It was probably the greatest example of Otis’ belief that all the important strands of black American music shared a commonality and could work in combination with each other. For the next few decades, Otis combined touring with as many of his old collaborators as possible — Marie Adams, for example, rejoined the band in 1972 — with having his own radio show in which he told people about black musical history and interviewed as many old musicians as he could, writing more books, including a cookbook and a collection of his art, running an organic apple juice company and food store, painting old blues artists in a style equally inspired by African art and Picasso, and being the pastor of a Pentecostal church — but one with a theology so broadminded that it was not only LGBT-affirming but had Buddhist and Jewish congregants. He ran Blues Spectrum Records in the seventies, which put out late-career recordings by people like Charles Brown, Big Joe Turner, and Louis Jordan, some of them their last ever recordings. And he lectured in the history of black music at Berkeley. Johnny Otis died in 2012, aged ninety, having achieved more than most of us could hope to achieve if we lived five times that long, and having helped many, many more people to make the most of their talents. He died three days before the discovery of whom he was most proud, Etta James, and she overshadowed him in the obituaries, as he would have wanted.

Intimidating mustaches, unnecessary glasses, and all forms of ugliness-as-power. Plus great music. (All podcasts are on itunes and spotify, and reviews plus podcasts are on our website, www.hlycrp.com. And you can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and, reluctantly and occasionally, Twitter.) We love you artists

Episode fifty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Bye Bye Love” by The Everly Brotherss, and at the history of country close harmony. 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 “Short Fat Fannie” by Larry Williams.  —-more—-   Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. There are no first-rate biographies of the Everly Brothers in print, at least in English (apparently there’s a decent one in French, but I don’t speak French well enough for that). Ike’s Boys by Phyllis Karp is the only full-length bio,  and I relied on that in the absence of anything else, but it’s been out of print for nearly thirty years, and is not worth the exorbitant price it goes for second-hand. How Nashville Became Music City by Michael Kosser has a good amount of information on the Bryants. The Everlypedia is a series of PDFs containing articles on anything related to the Everly Brothers, in alphabetical order. There are many, many cheap compilations of the Everly Brothers’ early material available. I’d recommend this one, because as well as all the hits up to 1962 it has the complete Songs our Daddy Taught Us.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?   Transcript [Intro: Ike Everly introducing the Everly Brothers] We’ve talked before about how vocal harmonies are no longer a big part of rock music, but were essential to it in the fifties and sixties. But what we’ve not discussed is that there are multiple different types of harmony that we see in the music of that period. One, which we’ve already seen, is the vocal group sound — the sound of doo-wop. There, there might be a lead singer, but everyone involved has their own important role to play, singing separate backing vocal lines that intertwine. One singer will be taking a bass melody, another will be singing a falsetto line, and so on. It’s the sound of a collection of individual personalities, working together but to their own agendas. Another style which we’re going to look at soon is the girl group sound. There you have a lead singer singing a line on her own, and two or three backing vocalists echoing lines on the chorus — it’s the sound of a couple of friends providing support for someone who’s in trouble. The lead singer will sing her problems, and the friends will respond with something supportive. Then there’s the style which Elvis used — a single lead vocalist over a group of backing vocalists, mostly providing “oohs” and “aahs”. The backing vocals here just work as another instrumental texture. But there’s one style which would be as influential as any of these, and which was brought into rock and roll by a single act — a duo who, more than anyone else in rock music, epitomised vocal harmony: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Bye Bye Love”] Don and Phil Everly were brought up in music. Their father, Ike Everly, had been a coalminer in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky, but decided to quit coal mining and become a professional musician when he was trapped in his second cave-in, deciding he wasn’t ever going to go through that a third time. He had learned a particular guitar style, which would later become known as “Travis picking” after its most famous exponent, Merle Travis — though Travis himself usually referred to it as “Muhlenberg picking”. Travis and Ike Everly knew each other, and it was Ike Everly, and Ike’s friend Mose Rager, who taught Travis how to play in that style, which they had learned from another friend, Kennedy Jones, who in turn learned it from a black country-blues player named Arnold Schultz, who had invented the style: [Excerpt, Ike Everly, “Blue Smoke”] Ike Everly was widely regarded as one of the greatest country guitarists of all time, and his “Ike Everly’s Rag” was later recorded by Merle Travis and Joe Maphis: [Excerpt: Merle Travis and Joe Maphis, “Ike Everly’s Rag”] But while Ike Everly was known as a country player, Don Everly would always later claim that deep down Ike was a blues man. He played country because that was what the audiences wanted to hear, but his first love was the blues. But even when playing country, he wasn’t just playing the kind of music that was becoming popular at the time, but he was also playing the old Appalachian folk songs, and teaching them to his sons. He would play songs like “Who’s Going to Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet?”, which was most famously recorded by Woody Guthrie: [Excerpt: Woody Guthrie, “Who’s Gonna Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet?”] The Everly family travelled all over the South and Midwest, moving between radio stations on which Ike Everly would get himself shows. As they grew old enough, his two sons, Don and Phil, would join him, as would his wife, though Margaret Everly was more of a manager than a performer. Don soon became good enough that he got his own fifteen-minute show, performing as “Little Donnie”, as well as performing with his family. The Everly family would perform their show live, first thing in the morning — they were playing country music and so they were supposed to be playing for the farmers, and their show began at 5AM, with the young boys heading off to school, still in the dark, after the show had finished. The radio show continued for many years, and the boys developed all sorts of tricks for keeping an audience entertained, which would stand them in good stead in future years. One thing they used to do was to have both brothers and their father play the same guitar simultaneously, with Phil fretting the bass notes, Ike Everly playing those notes, and Don playing lead on the top strings. I’ve not found a recording of them doing that together, but some footage does exist of them doing this with Tennessee Ernie Ford on his TV show — Ford, of course, being someone whose biggest hit had been written by Ike Everly’s old friend Merle Travis: [Excerpt: Tennessee Ernie Ford and the Everly Brothers, “Rattlesnake Daddy”] That kind of trick was fairly common among country acts at the time — Buck Owens and Don Rich would do pretty much the same act together in the 1960s, and like the Everlys would play fairly straightforward blues licks while doing it. But while Ike Everly was primarily an instrumentalist, his sons would become known mostly as singers. People often, incorrectly, describe the Everly Brothers as singing “bluegrass harmonies”. This is understandable, as bluegrass music comes from Kentucky, and does often have close harmonies in it. But the Everlys were actually singing in a style that was around for years before Bill Monroe started performing the music that would become known as bluegrass. There was a whole tradition of close harmony in country music that is usually dated back to the 1920s. The first people to really popularise it were a duo who were known as “Mac and Bob” — Lester McFarland and Robert Gardner. The two men met in Kentucky, at the Kentucky School for the Blind, where they were both studying music, in 1916. They started singing close harmony together in the early 1920s, and while they sang in the overly-enunciated way that was popular at the time, you can hear the roots of the Everlys’ style in their harmonies: [Excerpt: McFarland and Gardner, “That Silver Haired Daddy of Mine”] The style is known as “close harmony” because the singers are singing notes that are close to each other in the scale, and it was the foundation of country vocal harmonies. Usually in this style, there are two singers, singing about a third apart. The lower singer will sing the melody, while the higher singer will harmonise, following the melody line closely. This style of harmony was particularly suited to the vocal blend you can get from siblings, who tend to have extremely similar voices — and if done well it can sound like one voice harmonising with itself. And so from the 1930s on there were a lot of brother acts who performed this kind of music. One duo who the Everlys would often point to as a particular influence was the Bailes Brothers: [Excerpt: the Bailes Brothers, “Oh So Many Years”] But at the time the Everly Brothers were coming up, there was one duo, more than any other, who were immensely popular in the close harmony style — the Louvin Brothers: [Excerpt: The Louvin Brothers, “Midnight Special”] The Louvin Brothers, Charlie and Ira, were cousins of John D. Loudermilk, whose “Sittin’ in the Balcony” we heard in the Eddie Cochran episode a few weeks ago. They were country and gospel singers, who are nowadays probably sadly best known for the cover of their album “Satan is Real”, which often makes those Internet listicles about the most ridiculous album covers. But in the mid fifties, they were one of the most popular groups in country music, and influenced everyone — they were particular favourites of Elvis, and regular performers on the Grand Ole Opry. Their style was a model for the Everlys, but sadly so was their personal relationship. Ira and Charlie never got on, and would often get into fights on stage, and the same was true of the Everly Brothers. In 1970, Phil Everly said “We’ve only ever had one argument. It’s lasted twenty-five years”, and that argument would continue for the rest of their lives. There were various explanations offered for their enmity over the years, ranging from them vying to be their father’s favourite, to Don resenting Phil’s sweeter voice upstaging him — he was once quoted as saying “I’ve been a has-been since I was ten”. But fundamentally the two brothers were just too different in everything from temperament to politics — Don is a liberal Democrat, while Phil was a conservative Republican — and their views on how life should be lived. It seems most likely that two such different people resented being forced into constant proximity with each other, and reacted against it. And so the Everlys became another of those sibling rivalries that have recurred throughout rock and roll history. But despite their personal differences, they had a vocal blend that was possibly even better than that of the Louvins, if that’s possible. But talent on its own doesn’t necessarily bring success, and for a while it looked like the Everlys were going to be washed up before the brothers got out of their teens. While they had some success with their radio show, by 1955 there was much less of a market for live music on the radio — it was much cheaper for the radio stations to employ DJs to play records, now that the legal ban on broadcasting recordings had been lifted. The Everly family’s radio show ended, and both Ike and Margaret got jobs cutting hair, while encouraging their sons in their music career. After a few months of this, Margaret decided she was going to move the boys to Nashville, to try to get them a record deal, while Ike remained in nearby Knoxville working as a barber. While the family had not had much success in the music industry, they had made contacts with several people, and Chet Atkins, in particular, was an admirer, not only of Ike Everly’s guitar playing, but of his barbering skills as well — according to at least one account I’ve read, Atkins was a regular customer of Ike’s. Atkins seems to have been, at first, mostly interested in Don Everly as a songwriter and maybe a solo performer — he carried out some correspondence with Don while Don was still in school, and got Kitty Wells, one of the biggest country stars of the fifties, to record one of Don’s songs, “Thou Shalt Not Steal”, when Don was only sixteen: [Excerpt: Kitty Wells, “Thou Shalt Not Steal”] That became a top twenty country hit, and Don looked like he might be on his way to a successful career, especially after another of his songs, “Here We Are Again”, was recorded by Anita Carter of the famous Carter family: [Excerpt: Anita Carter, “Here We Are Again”] But Margaret Everly, the Everlys’ mother and the person who seemed to have the ambition that drove them, didn’t want Don to be a solo star — she wanted the two brothers to be equal in every way, and would make sure they wore the same clothes, had the same toys growing up, and so on. She took Don’s royalties from songwriting, and used them to get both brothers Musicians’ union cards — in the same way, when Don had had his own radio show, Margaret had made Don give Phil half of his five-dollar fee. So solo stardom was never going to be in Don Everly’s future. Margaret wanted the Everly Brothers to be a successful duo, and that was that. Chet Atkins was going to help *both* her sons. Atkins got them a deal with Columbia Records in 1956 for a single, “Keep A-Lovin’ Me”, written by Don: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Keep A-Lovin’ Me”] That record flopped, and the Everlys were later very dismissive of it — Phil said of the two songs on that single “they were stinko, boy! Really stinko!” Columbia weren’t interested in putting out anything else by the Everlys, and quickly dropped them. Part of the reason was that they were signed as a country act, but they already wanted to do more, and in particular to incorporate more influence from the rhythm and blues music they were listening to. Don worshipped Hank Williams, and Phil loved Lefty Frizzell, but they both also adored Bo Diddley, and were obsessed with his style. Don, in particular — who was the more accomplished instrumentalist of the two, and who unlike Phil would play rhythm guitar on their records — wanted to learn how Diddley played guitar, and would spend a lot of time with Chet Atkins, who taught him how to play in the open tunings Diddley used, and some of the rhythms he was playing with. Despite the brothers’ lack of success on Columbia, Atkins still had faith in them, and he got in touch with his friend Wesley Rose, who was the president of Acuff-Rose publishing, the biggest music publishing company in Nashville at the time. Rose made a deal with the brothers. If they would sign to Acuff-Rose as songwriters, and if they’d agree to record only Acuff-Rose songs, he would look after their career and get them a record deal. They agreed, and Rose got them signed to Cadence Records, a mid-sized indie label whose biggest star at the time was Andy Williams. The first single they recorded for Cadence was a song that had been rejected by thirty other artists before it was passed on to the Everlys as a last resort. “Bye Bye Love” was written by the husband and wife team Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, who had been writing for a decade, for people such as Carl Smith and Moon Mullican. Their first hit had come in 1948, with “Country Boy”, a song which Little Jimmy Dickens took to number seven on the country charts: [Excerpt: Little Jimmy Dickens, “Country Boy”] But they had not had much chart success after that, though they’d placed songs with various Nashville-based country singers. They were virtual unknowns, and their most recent song, “Bye Bye Love”, had been written for a duo called Johnny and Jack. They hadn’t been interested, so the Bryants had passed the song along to their friend Chet Atkins, who had tried to record it with Porter Wagoner, who had recorded other songs by the Bryants, like “Tryin’ to Forget the Blues”: [Excerpt: Porter Wagoner, “Tryin’ to Forget the Blues”] But when Atkins took the song into the studio, he decided it wasn’t strong enough for Wagoner. Atkins wanted to change a few chords, and Boudleaux Bryant told him that if the song wasn’t strong enough as it was, he just shouldn’t record it at all. But while the song might not have been strong enough for a big country star like Porter Wagoner, it was strong enough for Chet Atkins’ new proteges, who were, after all, hardly going to have a big hit. So Atkins took the multiply-rejected song in for the duo to record as their first single for Cadence. In one of those coincidences that seems too good to be true, Ike Everly was Boudleaux Bryant’s barber, and had been bragging to him for years about how talented his sons were, but Bryant had just dismissed this — around Nashville, everyone is a major talent, or their son or daughter or husband or wife is. Two things happened to change the rather mediocre song into a classic that would change the face of popular music. The first was, simply, the brothers’ harmonies. They had by this point developed an intuitive understanding of each other’s voices, and a superb musicality. It’s interesting to listen to the very first take of the song: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Bye Bye Love (take 1)”] That’s Don singing the low lead and Phil taking the high harmony. Now, if you’re familiar with the finished record, you can tell that what Phil’s singing there isn’t the closer harmony part he ended up singing on the final version. There are some note choices there that he decided against for the final record. But what you can tell is that they are instinctively great harmony singers. It’s not the harmony part that would become famous, but it’s a *good* one in its own right. The second thing is that they changed the song from the rather sedate country song the Bryants had come up with, radically rearranging it. Don had written a song called “Give Me a Future”, which he’d intended to be in the Bo Diddley style, and one can hear something of Diddley’s rhythm in the stop-start guitar part: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Give Me a Future”] Don took that guitar part, and attached it to the Bryants’ song, and with the help of Chet Atkins’ lead guitar fills turned it into something quite new — a record with a rockabilly feel, but with country close harmony vocals: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Bye Bye Love”] The brothers were, at first, worried because almost as soon as it came out, a cover version by Webb Pierce, one of the biggest names in country music, came out: [Excerpt: Webb Pierce, “Bye Bye Love”] But they were surprised to discover that while Pierce’s version did chart — reaching the top ten in the country charts — it was nowhere near as successful as their own version, which went to number one on the country charts and number two in pop, and charted on the R&B charts as well. After that success, the Bryants wrote a string of hits for the brothers, a run of classics starting with “Wake Up Little Suzie”, a song which was banned on many stations because it suggested impropriety — even though, listening to the lyrics, it very clearly states that no impropriety has gone on, and indeed that the protagonist is horrified at the suggestion that it might have: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Wake Up Little Suzie”] These records would usually incorporate some of Don’s Bo Diddley influence, while remaining firmly in the country end of rock and roll. The Bryants also started to give the brothers ballads like “Devoted to You” and “All I Have to Do is Dream”, which while they still deal with adolescent concerns, have a sweetness and melody to them quite unlike anything else that was being recorded by rock and roll artists of the time. After the first single, everything else that the Bryants wrote for the Everlys was tailored specifically to them — Boudleaux Bryant, who would attend more of the sessions, would have long conversations with the brothers and try to write songs that fit with their lives and musical tastes, as well as fitting them to their voices. One of the things that’s very noticeable about interviews with the brothers is that they both tend to credit Boudleaux alone with having written the songs that he co-wrote with his wife, even though everything suggests that the Bryants were a true partnership, and both have solo credits for songs that are stylistically indistinguishable from those written as a team. Whether this is pure sexism, or it’s just because Boudleaux is the one who used to demo the songs for them and so they think of him as the primary author, is hard to tell — probably a combination. This was also a perception that Boudleaux Bryant encouraged. While Felice was the person who had originally decided to go into songwriting, and was the one who came up with most of the ideas, Boudleaux was only interested in making money — and he’d often sneak off to write songs by himself so he would get all the money rather than have to share it with his wife. Boudleaux would also on occasion be given incomplete songs by friends like Atkins, and finish them up with Felice — but only Boudleaux and the original writer would get their names on it. The result was that Boudleaux got the credit from people around him, even when they knew better. One of my sources for this episode is an interview with the Bryants’ son, Dane, and at one point in that interview he says “Now, lots of times I will say, ‘My father.’ I mean Dad and Mom”. As the Everly brothers disagreed about almost everything, they of course disagreed about the quality of the material that the Bryants were bringing them. Phil Everly was always utterly unstinting in his praise of them, saying that the Bryants’ songs were some of the best songs ever written. Don, on the other hand, while he definitely appreciated material like “All I Have to Do is Dream”, wasn’t so keen on their writing in general, mostly because it dealt primarily with adolescent concerns. He thought that the material the brothers were writing for themselves — though still immature, as one would expect from people who were still in their teens at the start of their career — was aiming at a greater emotional maturity than the material the Bryants wrote. And on the evidence of their first album, that’s certainly true. The first album is, like many albums of the time, a patchy affair. It pulls together the hit singles the brothers had already released, together with a bunch of rather mediocre cover versions of then-current hits. Those cover versions tend to support Don’s repeated claims that the brothers were as interested in R&B and blues as in country — apart from a version of “Be-Bop-A-Lula”, all the covers are of R&B hits of the time — two by Little Richard, two by Ray Charles, and one by the relatively obscure blues singer Titus Turner. But among those songs, there are also a handful of Don Everly originals, and one in particular, “I Wonder if I Care as Much”, is quite an astonishing piece of songwriting: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “I Wonder If I Care As Much”] Don’s songs were often B-sides – that one was the B-side to “Bye Bye Love” – and to my mind they’re often rather more interesting than the A-sides. While that first album is rather patchy, the second album, Songs Our Daddy Taught Us, is a minor revelation, and one of the pillars on which the Everly Brothers’ artistic reputation rests. It’s been suggested that the album was done as a way of getting back at the record company for some slight or other, by making a record that was completely uncommercial. That might be the case, but I don’t think so — and if it was, it was a gesture that backfired magnificently, as it’s still, sixty years on, a consistent seller. Songs Our Daddy Taught Us is precisely what it sounds like — an album consisting of songs the brothers had been taught by their father. It’s a mixture of Appalachian folk songs and country standards, performed by the brothers accompanied just by Don’s acoustic guitar and Floyd Chance on upright bass: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Who’s Gonna Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet?”] It’s quite possibly the most artistically satisfying album made in the fifties by a rock and roll act, and it’s had such an influence that as recently as 2013 Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day and the jazz-pop singer Norah Jones recorded an album, Foreverly, that’s just a cover version of the whole album: [Excerpt: Billie Joe Armstrong and Norah Jones, “Who’s Gonna Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet?”] So as the 1950s drew to a close, the Everly Brothers were on top of the world. They’d had a run of classic singles, and they’d just released one of the greatest albums of all time. But there was trouble ahead, and when we pick up on their career again, we’ll see exactly how wrong things could go for them.  

Episode fifty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Bye Bye Love” by The Everly Brotherss, and at the history of country close harmony. 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 “Short Fat Fannie” by Larry Williams.  —-more—-   Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. There are no first-rate biographies of the Everly Brothers in print, at least in English (apparently there’s a decent one in French, but I don’t speak French well enough for that). Ike’s Boys by Phyllis Karp is the only full-length bio,  and I relied on that in the absence of anything else, but it’s been out of print for nearly thirty years, and is not worth the exorbitant price it goes for second-hand. How Nashville Became Music City by Michael Kosser has a good amount of information on the Bryants. The Everlypedia is a series of PDFs containing articles on anything related to the Everly Brothers, in alphabetical order. There are many, many cheap compilations of the Everly Brothers’ early material available. I’d recommend this one, because as well as all the hits up to 1962 it has the complete Songs our Daddy Taught Us.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?   Transcript [Intro: Ike Everly introducing the Everly Brothers] We’ve talked before about how vocal harmonies are no longer a big part of rock music, but were essential to it in the fifties and sixties. But what we’ve not discussed is that there are multiple different types of harmony that we see in the music of that period. One, which we’ve already seen, is the vocal group sound — the sound of doo-wop. There, there might be a lead singer, but everyone involved has their own important role to play, singing separate backing vocal lines that intertwine. One singer will be taking a bass melody, another will be singing a falsetto line, and so on. It’s the sound of a collection of individual personalities, working together but to their own agendas. Another style which we’re going to look at soon is the girl group sound. There you have a lead singer singing a line on her own, and two or three backing vocalists echoing lines on the chorus — it’s the sound of a couple of friends providing support for someone who’s in trouble. The lead singer will sing her problems, and the friends will respond with something supportive. Then there’s the style which Elvis used — a single lead vocalist over a group of backing vocalists, mostly providing “oohs” and “aahs”. The backing vocals here just work as another instrumental texture. But there’s one style which would be as influential as any of these, and which was brought into rock and roll by a single act — a duo who, more than anyone else in rock music, epitomised vocal harmony: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Bye Bye Love”] Don and Phil Everly were brought up in music. Their father, Ike Everly, had been a coalminer in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky, but decided to quit coal mining and become a professional musician when he was trapped in his second cave-in, deciding he wasn’t ever going to go through that a third time. He had learned a particular guitar style, which would later become known as “Travis picking” after its most famous exponent, Merle Travis — though Travis himself usually referred to it as “Muhlenberg picking”. Travis and Ike Everly knew each other, and it was Ike Everly, and Ike’s friend Mose Rager, who taught Travis how to play in that style, which they had learned from another friend, Kennedy Jones, who in turn learned it from a black country-blues player named Arnold Schultz, who had invented the style: [Excerpt, Ike Everly, “Blue Smoke”] Ike Everly was widely regarded as one of the greatest country guitarists of all time, and his “Ike Everly’s Rag” was later recorded by Merle Travis and Joe Maphis: [Excerpt: Merle Travis and Joe Maphis, “Ike Everly’s Rag”] But while Ike Everly was known as a country player, Don Everly would always later claim that deep down Ike was a blues man. He played country because that was what the audiences wanted to hear, but his first love was the blues. But even when playing country, he wasn’t just playing the kind of music that was becoming popular at the time, but he was also playing the old Appalachian folk songs, and teaching them to his sons. He would play songs like “Who’s Going to Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet?”, which was most famously recorded by Woody Guthrie: [Excerpt: Woody Guthrie, “Who’s Gonna Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet?”] The Everly family travelled all over the South and Midwest, moving between radio stations on which Ike Everly would get himself shows. As they grew old enough, his two sons, Don and Phil, would join him, as would his wife, though Margaret Everly was more of a manager than a performer. Don soon became good enough that he got his own fifteen-minute show, performing as “Little Donnie”, as well as performing with his family. The Everly family would perform their show live, first thing in the morning — they were playing country music and so they were supposed to be playing for the farmers, and their show began at 5AM, with the young boys heading off to school, still in the dark, after the show had finished. The radio show continued for many years, and the boys developed all sorts of tricks for keeping an audience entertained, which would stand them in good stead in future years. One thing they used to do was to have both brothers and their father play the same guitar simultaneously, with Phil fretting the bass notes, Ike Everly playing those notes, and Don playing lead on the top strings. I’ve not found a recording of them doing that together, but some footage does exist of them doing this with Tennessee Ernie Ford on his TV show — Ford, of course, being someone whose biggest hit had been written by Ike Everly’s old friend Merle Travis: [Excerpt: Tennessee Ernie Ford and the Everly Brothers, “Rattlesnake Daddy”] That kind of trick was fairly common among country acts at the time — Buck Owens and Don Rich would do pretty much the same act together in the 1960s, and like the Everlys would play fairly straightforward blues licks while doing it. But while Ike Everly was primarily an instrumentalist, his sons would become known mostly as singers. People often, incorrectly, describe the Everly Brothers as singing “bluegrass harmonies”. This is understandable, as bluegrass music comes from Kentucky, and does often have close harmonies in it. But the Everlys were actually singing in a style that was around for years before Bill Monroe started performing the music that would become known as bluegrass. There was a whole tradition of close harmony in country music that is usually dated back to the 1920s. The first people to really popularise it were a duo who were known as “Mac and Bob” — Lester McFarland and Robert Gardner. The two men met in Kentucky, at the Kentucky School for the Blind, where they were both studying music, in 1916. They started singing close harmony together in the early 1920s, and while they sang in the overly-enunciated way that was popular at the time, you can hear the roots of the Everlys’ style in their harmonies: [Excerpt: McFarland and Gardner, “That Silver Haired Daddy of Mine”] The style is known as “close harmony” because the singers are singing notes that are close to each other in the scale, and it was the foundation of country vocal harmonies. Usually in this style, there are two singers, singing about a third apart. The lower singer will sing the melody, while the higher singer will harmonise, following the melody line closely. This style of harmony was particularly suited to the vocal blend you can get from siblings, who tend to have extremely similar voices — and if done well it can sound like one voice harmonising with itself. And so from the 1930s on there were a lot of brother acts who performed this kind of music. One duo who the Everlys would often point to as a particular influence was the Bailes Brothers: [Excerpt: the Bailes Brothers, “Oh So Many Years”] But at the time the Everly Brothers were coming up, there was one duo, more than any other, who were immensely popular in the close harmony style — the Louvin Brothers: [Excerpt: The Louvin Brothers, “Midnight Special”] The Louvin Brothers, Charlie and Ira, were cousins of John D. Loudermilk, whose “Sittin’ in the Balcony” we heard in the Eddie Cochran episode a few weeks ago. They were country and gospel singers, who are nowadays probably sadly best known for the cover of their album “Satan is Real”, which often makes those Internet listicles about the most ridiculous album covers. But in the mid fifties, they were one of the most popular groups in country music, and influenced everyone — they were particular favourites of Elvis, and regular performers on the Grand Ole Opry. Their style was a model for the Everlys, but sadly so was their personal relationship. Ira and Charlie never got on, and would often get into fights on stage, and the same was true of the Everly Brothers. In 1970, Phil Everly said “We’ve only ever had one argument. It’s lasted twenty-five years”, and that argument would continue for the rest of their lives. There were various explanations offered for their enmity over the years, ranging from them vying to be their father’s favourite, to Don resenting Phil’s sweeter voice upstaging him — he was once quoted as saying “I’ve been a has-been since I was ten”. But fundamentally the two brothers were just too different in everything from temperament to politics — Don is a liberal Democrat, while Phil was a conservative Republican — and their views on how life should be lived. It seems most likely that two such different people resented being forced into constant proximity with each other, and reacted against it. And so the Everlys became another of those sibling rivalries that have recurred throughout rock and roll history. But despite their personal differences, they had a vocal blend that was possibly even better than that of the Louvins, if that’s possible. But talent on its own doesn’t necessarily bring success, and for a while it looked like the Everlys were going to be washed up before the brothers got out of their teens. While they had some success with their radio show, by 1955 there was much less of a market for live music on the radio — it was much cheaper for the radio stations to employ DJs to play records, now that the legal ban on broadcasting recordings had been lifted. The Everly family’s radio show ended, and both Ike and Margaret got jobs cutting hair, while encouraging their sons in their music career. After a few months of this, Margaret decided she was going to move the boys to Nashville, to try to get them a record deal, while Ike remained in nearby Knoxville working as a barber. While the family had not had much success in the music industry, they had made contacts with several people, and Chet Atkins, in particular, was an admirer, not only of Ike Everly’s guitar playing, but of his barbering skills as well — according to at least one account I’ve read, Atkins was a regular customer of Ike’s. Atkins seems to have been, at first, mostly interested in Don Everly as a songwriter and maybe a solo performer — he carried out some correspondence with Don while Don was still in school, and got Kitty Wells, one of the biggest country stars of the fifties, to record one of Don’s songs, “Thou Shalt Not Steal”, when Don was only sixteen: [Excerpt: Kitty Wells, “Thou Shalt Not Steal”] That became a top twenty country hit, and Don looked like he might be on his way to a successful career, especially after another of his songs, “Here We Are Again”, was recorded by Anita Carter of the famous Carter family: [Excerpt: Anita Carter, “Here We Are Again”] But Margaret Everly, the Everlys’ mother and the person who seemed to have the ambition that drove them, didn’t want Don to be a solo star — she wanted the two brothers to be equal in every way, and would make sure they wore the same clothes, had the same toys growing up, and so on. She took Don’s royalties from songwriting, and used them to get both brothers Musicians’ union cards — in the same way, when Don had had his own radio show, Margaret had made Don give Phil half of his five-dollar fee. So solo stardom was never going to be in Don Everly’s future. Margaret wanted the Everly Brothers to be a successful duo, and that was that. Chet Atkins was going to help *both* her sons. Atkins got them a deal with Columbia Records in 1956 for a single, “Keep A-Lovin’ Me”, written by Don: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Keep A-Lovin’ Me”] That record flopped, and the Everlys were later very dismissive of it — Phil said of the two songs on that single “they were stinko, boy! Really stinko!” Columbia weren’t interested in putting out anything else by the Everlys, and quickly dropped them. Part of the reason was that they were signed as a country act, but they already wanted to do more, and in particular to incorporate more influence from the rhythm and blues music they were listening to. Don worshipped Hank Williams, and Phil loved Lefty Frizzell, but they both also adored Bo Diddley, and were obsessed with his style. Don, in particular — who was the more accomplished instrumentalist of the two, and who unlike Phil would play rhythm guitar on their records — wanted to learn how Diddley played guitar, and would spend a lot of time with Chet Atkins, who taught him how to play in the open tunings Diddley used, and some of the rhythms he was playing with. Despite the brothers’ lack of success on Columbia, Atkins still had faith in them, and he got in touch with his friend Wesley Rose, who was the president of Acuff-Rose publishing, the biggest music publishing company in Nashville at the time. Rose made a deal with the brothers. If they would sign to Acuff-Rose as songwriters, and if they’d agree to record only Acuff-Rose songs, he would look after their career and get them a record deal. They agreed, and Rose got them signed to Cadence Records, a mid-sized indie label whose biggest star at the time was Andy Williams. The first single they recorded for Cadence was a song that had been rejected by thirty other artists before it was passed on to the Everlys as a last resort. “Bye Bye Love” was written by the husband and wife team Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, who had been writing for a decade, for people such as Carl Smith and Moon Mullican. Their first hit had come in 1948, with “Country Boy”, a song which Little Jimmy Dickens took to number seven on the country charts: [Excerpt: Little Jimmy Dickens, “Country Boy”] But they had not had much chart success after that, though they’d placed songs with various Nashville-based country singers. They were virtual unknowns, and their most recent song, “Bye Bye Love”, had been written for a duo called Johnny and Jack. They hadn’t been interested, so the Bryants had passed the song along to their friend Chet Atkins, who had tried to record it with Porter Wagoner, who had recorded other songs by the Bryants, like “Tryin’ to Forget the Blues”: [Excerpt: Porter Wagoner, “Tryin’ to Forget the Blues”] But when Atkins took the song into the studio, he decided it wasn’t strong enough for Wagoner. Atkins wanted to change a few chords, and Boudleaux Bryant told him that if the song wasn’t strong enough as it was, he just shouldn’t record it at all. But while the song might not have been strong enough for a big country star like Porter Wagoner, it was strong enough for Chet Atkins’ new proteges, who were, after all, hardly going to have a big hit. So Atkins took the multiply-rejected song in for the duo to record as their first single for Cadence. In one of those coincidences that seems too good to be true, Ike Everly was Boudleaux Bryant’s barber, and had been bragging to him for years about how talented his sons were, but Bryant had just dismissed this — around Nashville, everyone is a major talent, or their son or daughter or husband or wife is. Two things happened to change the rather mediocre song into a classic that would change the face of popular music. The first was, simply, the brothers’ harmonies. They had by this point developed an intuitive understanding of each other’s voices, and a superb musicality. It’s interesting to listen to the very first take of the song: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Bye Bye Love (take 1)”] That’s Don singing the low lead and Phil taking the high harmony. Now, if you’re familiar with the finished record, you can tell that what Phil’s singing there isn’t the closer harmony part he ended up singing on the final version. There are some note choices there that he decided against for the final record. But what you can tell is that they are instinctively great harmony singers. It’s not the harmony part that would become famous, but it’s a *good* one in its own right. The second thing is that they changed the song from the rather sedate country song the Bryants had come up with, radically rearranging it. Don had written a song called “Give Me a Future”, which he’d intended to be in the Bo Diddley style, and one can hear something of Diddley’s rhythm in the stop-start guitar part: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Give Me a Future”] Don took that guitar part, and attached it to the Bryants’ song, and with the help of Chet Atkins’ lead guitar fills turned it into something quite new — a record with a rockabilly feel, but with country close harmony vocals: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Bye Bye Love”] The brothers were, at first, worried because almost as soon as it came out, a cover version by Webb Pierce, one of the biggest names in country music, came out: [Excerpt: Webb Pierce, “Bye Bye Love”] But they were surprised to discover that while Pierce’s version did chart — reaching the top ten in the country charts — it was nowhere near as successful as their own version, which went to number one on the country charts and number two in pop, and charted on the R&B charts as well. After that success, the Bryants wrote a string of hits for the brothers, a run of classics starting with “Wake Up Little Suzie”, a song which was banned on many stations because it suggested impropriety — even though, listening to the lyrics, it very clearly states that no impropriety has gone on, and indeed that the protagonist is horrified at the suggestion that it might have: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Wake Up Little Suzie”] These records would usually incorporate some of Don’s Bo Diddley influence, while remaining firmly in the country end of rock and roll. The Bryants also started to give the brothers ballads like “Devoted to You” and “All I Have to Do is Dream”, which while they still deal with adolescent concerns, have a sweetness and melody to them quite unlike anything else that was being recorded by rock and roll artists of the time. After the first single, everything else that the Bryants wrote for the Everlys was tailored specifically to them — Boudleaux Bryant, who would attend more of the sessions, would have long conversations with the brothers and try to write songs that fit with their lives and musical tastes, as well as fitting them to their voices. One of the things that’s very noticeable about interviews with the brothers is that they both tend to credit Boudleaux alone with having written the songs that he co-wrote with his wife, even though everything suggests that the Bryants were a true partnership, and both have solo credits for songs that are stylistically indistinguishable from those written as a team. Whether this is pure sexism, or it’s just because Boudleaux is the one who used to demo the songs for them and so they think of him as the primary author, is hard to tell — probably a combination. This was also a perception that Boudleaux Bryant encouraged. While Felice was the person who had originally decided to go into songwriting, and was the one who came up with most of the ideas, Boudleaux was only interested in making money — and he’d often sneak off to write songs by himself so he would get all the money rather than have to share it with his wife. Boudleaux would also on occasion be given incomplete songs by friends like Atkins, and finish them up with Felice — but only Boudleaux and the original writer would get their names on it. The result was that Boudleaux got the credit from people around him, even when they knew better. One of my sources for this episode is an interview with the Bryants’ son, Dane, and at one point in that interview he says “Now, lots of times I will say, ‘My father.’ I mean Dad and Mom”. As the Everly brothers disagreed about almost everything, they of course disagreed about the quality of the material that the Bryants were bringing them. Phil Everly was always utterly unstinting in his praise of them, saying that the Bryants’ songs were some of the best songs ever written. Don, on the other hand, while he definitely appreciated material like “All I Have to Do is Dream”, wasn’t so keen on their writing in general, mostly because it dealt primarily with adolescent concerns. He thought that the material the brothers were writing for themselves — though still immature, as one would expect from people who were still in their teens at the start of their career — was aiming at a greater emotional maturity than the material the Bryants wrote. And on the evidence of their first album, that’s certainly true. The first album is, like many albums of the time, a patchy affair. It pulls together the hit singles the brothers had already released, together with a bunch of rather mediocre cover versions of then-current hits. Those cover versions tend to support Don’s repeated claims that the brothers were as interested in R&B and blues as in country — apart from a version of “Be-Bop-A-Lula”, all the covers are of R&B hits of the time — two by Little Richard, two by Ray Charles, and one by the relatively obscure blues singer Titus Turner. But among those songs, there are also a handful of Don Everly originals, and one in particular, “I Wonder if I Care as Much”, is quite an astonishing piece of songwriting: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “I Wonder If I Care As Much”] Don’s songs were often B-sides – that one was the B-side to “Bye Bye Love” – and to my mind they’re often rather more interesting than the A-sides. While that first album is rather patchy, the second album, Songs Our Daddy Taught Us, is a minor revelation, and one of the pillars on which the Everly Brothers’ artistic reputation rests. It’s been suggested that the album was done as a way of getting back at the record company for some slight or other, by making a record that was completely uncommercial. That might be the case, but I don’t think so — and if it was, it was a gesture that backfired magnificently, as it’s still, sixty years on, a consistent seller. Songs Our Daddy Taught Us is precisely what it sounds like — an album consisting of songs the brothers had been taught by their father. It’s a mixture of Appalachian folk songs and country standards, performed by the brothers accompanied just by Don’s acoustic guitar and Floyd Chance on upright bass: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Who’s Gonna Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet?”] It’s quite possibly the most artistically satisfying album made in the fifties by a rock and roll act, and it’s had such an influence that as recently as 2013 Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day and the jazz-pop singer Norah Jones recorded an album, Foreverly, that’s just a cover version of the whole album: [Excerpt: Billie Joe Armstrong and Norah Jones, “Who’s Gonna Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet?”] So as the 1950s drew to a close, the Everly Brothers were on top of the world. They’d had a run of classic singles, and they’d just released one of the greatest albums of all time. But there was trouble ahead, and when we pick up on their career again, we’ll see exactly how wrong things could go for them.  

Episode fifty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Bye Bye Love" by The Everly Brotherss, and at the history of country close harmony. 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 "Short Fat Fannie" by Larry Williams.  ----more----   Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. There are no first-rate biographies of the Everly Brothers in print, at least in English (apparently there's a decent one in French, but I don't speak French well enough for that). Ike's Boys by Phyllis Karp is the only full-length bio,  and I relied on that in the absence of anything else, but it's been out of print for nearly thirty years, and is not worth the exorbitant price it goes for second-hand. How Nashville Became Music City by Michael Kosser has a good amount of information on the Bryants. The Everlypedia is a series of PDFs containing articles on anything related to the Everly Brothers, in alphabetical order. There are many, many cheap compilations of the Everly Brothers' early material available. I'd recommend this one, because as well as all the hits up to 1962 it has the complete Songs our Daddy Taught Us.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?   Transcript [Intro: Ike Everly introducing the Everly Brothers] We've talked before about how vocal harmonies are no longer a big part of rock music, but were essential to it in the fifties and sixties. But what we've not discussed is that there are multiple different types of harmony that we see in the music of that period. One, which we've already seen, is the vocal group sound -- the sound of doo-wop. There, there might be a lead singer, but everyone involved has their own important role to play, singing separate backing vocal lines that intertwine. One singer will be taking a bass melody, another will be singing a falsetto line, and so on. It's the sound of a collection of individual personalities, working together but to their own agendas. Another style which we're going to look at soon is the girl group sound. There you have a lead singer singing a line on her own, and two or three backing vocalists echoing lines on the chorus -- it's the sound of a couple of friends providing support for someone who's in trouble. The lead singer will sing her problems, and the friends will respond with something supportive. Then there's the style which Elvis used -- a single lead vocalist over a group of backing vocalists, mostly providing "oohs" and "aahs". The backing vocals here just work as another instrumental texture. But there's one style which would be as influential as any of these, and which was brought into rock and roll by a single act -- a duo who, more than anyone else in rock music, epitomised vocal harmony: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Bye Bye Love"] Don and Phil Everly were brought up in music. Their father, Ike Everly, had been a coalminer in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky, but decided to quit coal mining and become a professional musician when he was trapped in his second cave-in, deciding he wasn't ever going to go through that a third time. He had learned a particular guitar style, which would later become known as "Travis picking" after its most famous exponent, Merle Travis -- though Travis himself usually referred to it as "Muhlenberg picking". Travis and Ike Everly knew each other, and it was Ike Everly, and Ike's friend Mose Rager, who taught Travis how to play in that style, which they had learned from another friend, Kennedy Jones, who in turn learned it from a black country-blues player named Arnold Schultz, who had invented the style: [Excerpt, Ike Everly, "Blue Smoke"] Ike Everly was widely regarded as one of the greatest country guitarists of all time, and his "Ike Everly's Rag" was later recorded by Merle Travis and Joe Maphis: [Excerpt: Merle Travis and Joe Maphis, "Ike Everly's Rag"] But while Ike Everly was known as a country player, Don Everly would always later claim that deep down Ike was a blues man. He played country because that was what the audiences wanted to hear, but his first love was the blues. But even when playing country, he wasn't just playing the kind of music that was becoming popular at the time, but he was also playing the old Appalachian folk songs, and teaching them to his sons. He would play songs like "Who's Going to Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet?", which was most famously recorded by Woody Guthrie: [Excerpt: Woody Guthrie, "Who's Gonna Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet?"] The Everly family travelled all over the South and Midwest, moving between radio stations on which Ike Everly would get himself shows. As they grew old enough, his two sons, Don and Phil, would join him, as would his wife, though Margaret Everly was more of a manager than a performer. Don soon became good enough that he got his own fifteen-minute show, performing as "Little Donnie", as well as performing with his family. The Everly family would perform their show live, first thing in the morning -- they were playing country music and so they were supposed to be playing for the farmers, and their show began at 5AM, with the young boys heading off to school, still in the dark, after the show had finished. The radio show continued for many years, and the boys developed all sorts of tricks for keeping an audience entertained, which would stand them in good stead in future years. One thing they used to do was to have both brothers and their father play the same guitar simultaneously, with Phil fretting the bass notes, Ike Everly playing those notes, and Don playing lead on the top strings. I've not found a recording of them doing that together, but some footage does exist of them doing this with Tennessee Ernie Ford on his TV show -- Ford, of course, being someone whose biggest hit had been written by Ike Everly's old friend Merle Travis: [Excerpt: Tennessee Ernie Ford and the Everly Brothers, "Rattlesnake Daddy"] That kind of trick was fairly common among country acts at the time -- Buck Owens and Don Rich would do pretty much the same act together in the 1960s, and like the Everlys would play fairly straightforward blues licks while doing it. But while Ike Everly was primarily an instrumentalist, his sons would become known mostly as singers. People often, incorrectly, describe the Everly Brothers as singing "bluegrass harmonies". This is understandable, as bluegrass music comes from Kentucky, and does often have close harmonies in it. But the Everlys were actually singing in a style that was around for years before Bill Monroe started performing the music that would become known as bluegrass. There was a whole tradition of close harmony in country music that is usually dated back to the 1920s. The first people to really popularise it were a duo who were known as "Mac and Bob" -- Lester McFarland and Robert Gardner. The two men met in Kentucky, at the Kentucky School for the Blind, where they were both studying music, in 1916. They started singing close harmony together in the early 1920s, and while they sang in the overly-enunciated way that was popular at the time, you can hear the roots of the Everlys' style in their harmonies: [Excerpt: McFarland and Gardner, "That Silver Haired Daddy of Mine"] The style is known as "close harmony" because the singers are singing notes that are close to each other in the scale, and it was the foundation of country vocal harmonies. Usually in this style, there are two singers, singing about a third apart. The lower singer will sing the melody, while the higher singer will harmonise, following the melody line closely. This style of harmony was particularly suited to the vocal blend you can get from siblings, who tend to have extremely similar voices -- and if done well it can sound like one voice harmonising with itself. And so from the 1930s on there were a lot of brother acts who performed this kind of music. One duo who the Everlys would often point to as a particular influence was the Bailes Brothers: [Excerpt: the Bailes Brothers, "Oh So Many Years"] But at the time the Everly Brothers were coming up, there was one duo, more than any other, who were immensely popular in the close harmony style -- the Louvin Brothers: [Excerpt: The Louvin Brothers, "Midnight Special"] The Louvin Brothers, Charlie and Ira, were cousins of John D. Loudermilk, whose "Sittin' in the Balcony" we heard in the Eddie Cochran episode a few weeks ago. They were country and gospel singers, who are nowadays probably sadly best known for the cover of their album "Satan is Real", which often makes those Internet listicles about the most ridiculous album covers. But in the mid fifties, they were one of the most popular groups in country music, and influenced everyone -- they were particular favourites of Elvis, and regular performers on the Grand Ole Opry. Their style was a model for the Everlys, but sadly so was their personal relationship. Ira and Charlie never got on, and would often get into fights on stage, and the same was true of the Everly Brothers. In 1970, Phil Everly said "We've only ever had one argument. It's lasted twenty-five years", and that argument would continue for the rest of their lives. There were various explanations offered for their enmity over the years, ranging from them vying to be their father's favourite, to Don resenting Phil's sweeter voice upstaging him -- he was once quoted as saying "I've been a has-been since I was ten". But fundamentally the two brothers were just too different in everything from temperament to politics -- Don is a liberal Democrat, while Phil was a conservative Republican -- and their views on how life should be lived. It seems most likely that two such different people resented being forced into constant proximity with each other, and reacted against it. And so the Everlys became another of those sibling rivalries that have recurred throughout rock and roll history. But despite their personal differences, they had a vocal blend that was possibly even better than that of the Louvins, if that's possible. But talent on its own doesn't necessarily bring success, and for a while it looked like the Everlys were going to be washed up before the brothers got out of their teens. While they had some success with their radio show, by 1955 there was much less of a market for live music on the radio -- it was much cheaper for the radio stations to employ DJs to play records, now that the legal ban on broadcasting recordings had been lifted. The Everly family's radio show ended, and both Ike and Margaret got jobs cutting hair, while encouraging their sons in their music career. After a few months of this, Margaret decided she was going to move the boys to Nashville, to try to get them a record deal, while Ike remained in nearby Knoxville working as a barber. While the family had not had much success in the music industry, they had made contacts with several people, and Chet Atkins, in particular, was an admirer, not only of Ike Everly's guitar playing, but of his barbering skills as well -- according to at least one account I've read, Atkins was a regular customer of Ike's. Atkins seems to have been, at first, mostly interested in Don Everly as a songwriter and maybe a solo performer -- he carried out some correspondence with Don while Don was still in school, and got Kitty Wells, one of the biggest country stars of the fifties, to record one of Don's songs, "Thou Shalt Not Steal", when Don was only sixteen: [Excerpt: Kitty Wells, "Thou Shalt Not Steal"] That became a top twenty country hit, and Don looked like he might be on his way to a successful career, especially after another of his songs, "Here We Are Again", was recorded by Anita Carter of the famous Carter family: [Excerpt: Anita Carter, "Here We Are Again"] But Margaret Everly, the Everlys' mother and the person who seemed to have the ambition that drove them, didn't want Don to be a solo star -- she wanted the two brothers to be equal in every way, and would make sure they wore the same clothes, had the same toys growing up, and so on. She took Don's royalties from songwriting, and used them to get both brothers Musicians' union cards -- in the same way, when Don had had his own radio show, Margaret had made Don give Phil half of his five-dollar fee. So solo stardom was never going to be in Don Everly's future. Margaret wanted the Everly Brothers to be a successful duo, and that was that. Chet Atkins was going to help *both* her sons. Atkins got them a deal with Columbia Records in 1956 for a single, "Keep A-Lovin' Me", written by Don: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Keep A-Lovin' Me"] That record flopped, and the Everlys were later very dismissive of it -- Phil said of the two songs on that single "they were stinko, boy! Really stinko!" Columbia weren't interested in putting out anything else by the Everlys, and quickly dropped them. Part of the reason was that they were signed as a country act, but they already wanted to do more, and in particular to incorporate more influence from the rhythm and blues music they were listening to. Don worshipped Hank Williams, and Phil loved Lefty Frizzell, but they both also adored Bo Diddley, and were obsessed with his style. Don, in particular -- who was the more accomplished instrumentalist of the two, and who unlike Phil would play rhythm guitar on their records -- wanted to learn how Diddley played guitar, and would spend a lot of time with Chet Atkins, who taught him how to play in the open tunings Diddley used, and some of the rhythms he was playing with. Despite the brothers' lack of success on Columbia, Atkins still had faith in them, and he got in touch with his friend Wesley Rose, who was the president of Acuff-Rose publishing, the biggest music publishing company in Nashville at the time. Rose made a deal with the brothers. If they would sign to Acuff-Rose as songwriters, and if they'd agree to record only Acuff-Rose songs, he would look after their career and get them a record deal. They agreed, and Rose got them signed to Cadence Records, a mid-sized indie label whose biggest star at the time was Andy Williams. The first single they recorded for Cadence was a song that had been rejected by thirty other artists before it was passed on to the Everlys as a last resort. "Bye Bye Love" was written by the husband and wife team Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, who had been writing for a decade, for people such as Carl Smith and Moon Mullican. Their first hit had come in 1948, with "Country Boy", a song which Little Jimmy Dickens took to number seven on the country charts: [Excerpt: Little Jimmy Dickens, "Country Boy"] But they had not had much chart success after that, though they'd placed songs with various Nashville-based country singers. They were virtual unknowns, and their most recent song, "Bye Bye Love", had been written for a duo called Johnny and Jack. They hadn't been interested, so the Bryants had passed the song along to their friend Chet Atkins, who had tried to record it with Porter Wagoner, who had recorded other songs by the Bryants, like "Tryin' to Forget the Blues": [Excerpt: Porter Wagoner, "Tryin' to Forget the Blues"] But when Atkins took the song into the studio, he decided it wasn't strong enough for Wagoner. Atkins wanted to change a few chords, and Boudleaux Bryant told him that if the song wasn't strong enough as it was, he just shouldn't record it at all. But while the song might not have been strong enough for a big country star like Porter Wagoner, it was strong enough for Chet Atkins' new proteges, who were, after all, hardly going to have a big hit. So Atkins took the multiply-rejected song in for the duo to record as their first single for Cadence. In one of those coincidences that seems too good to be true, Ike Everly was Boudleaux Bryant's barber, and had been bragging to him for years about how talented his sons were, but Bryant had just dismissed this -- around Nashville, everyone is a major talent, or their son or daughter or husband or wife is. Two things happened to change the rather mediocre song into a classic that would change the face of popular music. The first was, simply, the brothers' harmonies. They had by this point developed an intuitive understanding of each other's voices, and a superb musicality. It's interesting to listen to the very first take of the song: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Bye Bye Love (take 1)"] That's Don singing the low lead and Phil taking the high harmony. Now, if you're familiar with the finished record, you can tell that what Phil's singing there isn't the closer harmony part he ended up singing on the final version. There are some note choices there that he decided against for the final record. But what you can tell is that they are instinctively great harmony singers. It's not the harmony part that would become famous, but it's a *good* one in its own right. The second thing is that they changed the song from the rather sedate country song the Bryants had come up with, radically rearranging it. Don had written a song called "Give Me a Future", which he'd intended to be in the Bo Diddley style, and one can hear something of Diddley's rhythm in the stop-start guitar part: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Give Me a Future"] Don took that guitar part, and attached it to the Bryants' song, and with the help of Chet Atkins' lead guitar fills turned it into something quite new -- a record with a rockabilly feel, but with country close harmony vocals: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Bye Bye Love"] The brothers were, at first, worried because almost as soon as it came out, a cover version by Webb Pierce, one of the biggest names in country music, came out: [Excerpt: Webb Pierce, "Bye Bye Love"] But they were surprised to discover that while Pierce's version did chart -- reaching the top ten in the country charts -- it was nowhere near as successful as their own version, which went to number one on the country charts and number two in pop, and charted on the R&B charts as well. After that success, the Bryants wrote a string of hits for the brothers, a run of classics starting with "Wake Up Little Suzie", a song which was banned on many stations because it suggested impropriety -- even though, listening to the lyrics, it very clearly states that no impropriety has gone on, and indeed that the protagonist is horrified at the suggestion that it might have: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Wake Up Little Suzie"] These records would usually incorporate some of Don's Bo Diddley influence, while remaining firmly in the country end of rock and roll. The Bryants also started to give the brothers ballads like "Devoted to You" and "All I Have to Do is Dream", which while they still deal with adolescent concerns, have a sweetness and melody to them quite unlike anything else that was being recorded by rock and roll artists of the time. After the first single, everything else that the Bryants wrote for the Everlys was tailored specifically to them -- Boudleaux Bryant, who would attend more of the sessions, would have long conversations with the brothers and try to write songs that fit with their lives and musical tastes, as well as fitting them to their voices. One of the things that's very noticeable about interviews with the brothers is that they both tend to credit Boudleaux alone with having written the songs that he co-wrote with his wife, even though everything suggests that the Bryants were a true partnership, and both have solo credits for songs that are stylistically indistinguishable from those written as a team. Whether this is pure sexism, or it's just because Boudleaux is the one who used to demo the songs for them and so they think of him as the primary author, is hard to tell -- probably a combination. This was also a perception that Boudleaux Bryant encouraged. While Felice was the person who had originally decided to go into songwriting, and was the one who came up with most of the ideas, Boudleaux was only interested in making money -- and he'd often sneak off to write songs by himself so he would get all the money rather than have to share it with his wife. Boudleaux would also on occasion be given incomplete songs by friends like Atkins, and finish them up with Felice -- but only Boudleaux and the original writer would get their names on it. The result was that Boudleaux got the credit from people around him, even when they knew better. One of my sources for this episode is an interview with the Bryants' son, Dane, and at one point in that interview he says "Now, lots of times I will say, 'My father.' I mean Dad and Mom". As the Everly brothers disagreed about almost everything, they of course disagreed about the quality of the material that the Bryants were bringing them. Phil Everly was always utterly unstinting in his praise of them, saying that the Bryants' songs were some of the best songs ever written. Don, on the other hand, while he definitely appreciated material like "All I Have to Do is Dream", wasn't so keen on their writing in general, mostly because it dealt primarily with adolescent concerns. He thought that the material the brothers were writing for themselves -- though still immature, as one would expect from people who were still in their teens at the start of their career -- was aiming at a greater emotional maturity than the material the Bryants wrote. And on the evidence of their first album, that's certainly true. The first album is, like many albums of the time, a patchy affair. It pulls together the hit singles the brothers had already released, together with a bunch of rather mediocre cover versions of then-current hits. Those cover versions tend to support Don's repeated claims that the brothers were as interested in R&B and blues as in country -- apart from a version of "Be-Bop-A-Lula", all the covers are of R&B hits of the time -- two by Little Richard, two by Ray Charles, and one by the relatively obscure blues singer Titus Turner. But among those songs, there are also a handful of Don Everly originals, and one in particular, "I Wonder if I Care as Much", is quite an astonishing piece of songwriting: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "I Wonder If I Care As Much"] Don's songs were often B-sides – that one was the B-side to “Bye Bye Love” – and to my mind they're often rather more interesting than the A-sides. While that first album is rather patchy, the second album, Songs Our Daddy Taught Us, is a minor revelation, and one of the pillars on which the Everly Brothers' artistic reputation rests. It's been suggested that the album was done as a way of getting back at the record company for some slight or other, by making a record that was completely uncommercial. That might be the case, but I don't think so -- and if it was, it was a gesture that backfired magnificently, as it's still, sixty years on, a consistent seller. Songs Our Daddy Taught Us is precisely what it sounds like -- an album consisting of songs the brothers had been taught by their father. It's a mixture of Appalachian folk songs and country standards, performed by the brothers accompanied just by Don's acoustic guitar and Floyd Chance on upright bass: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Who's Gonna Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet?”] It's quite possibly the most artistically satisfying album made in the fifties by a rock and roll act, and it's had such an influence that as recently as 2013 Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day and the jazz-pop singer Norah Jones recorded an album, Foreverly, that's just a cover version of the whole album: [Excerpt: Billie Joe Armstrong and Norah Jones, “Who's Gonna Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet?”] So as the 1950s drew to a close, the Everly Brothers were on top of the world. They'd had a run of classic singles, and they'd just released one of the greatest albums of all time. But there was trouble ahead, and when we pick up on their career again, we'll see exactly how wrong things could go for them.  

Ant Diddley Dog talks about his life and career with now deceased group member Rappin Ron. The two formed a legendary duo known as Bad N Fluenz who were signed to Too $hort's Dangerous Music. From legendary battles with fellow Oakland group The Luniz to rap beef spilling over into the streets with former crew member MC Pooh Ant's career has been a rollercoaster. No longer doing secular music because of his strong Christian faith and going by the name A. Doulos Ant has had a huge change but maintain's his lyrical fire. Listen to his story on NO VULTURES

Rockula (1990) is our Rocktober finale and it sure is something. A vampire virgin (Dean Cameron) has to do tasks in order to woo the girl that’ll release him from his curse. Toni Basil and Thomas Dolby are here to be great, and Bo Diddley is here to cash checks. In the second half, Harlo […]

Welcome to episode forty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This one looks at "Love is Strange" by Mickey and Sylvia, and how a reluctant bluesman who wrote books on jazz guitar, and a failed child star who would later become the mother of hip-hop, made a classic. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a bonus episode available. This one's on "Ain't Nobody's Business" by Jimmy Witherspoon, and is about blues shouting and the ambition to have a polyester suit.  ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. The information here was pulled together from bits of pieces all over the place, as neither Mickey Baker nor Sylvia Robinson have ever had a biography published. As well as their obituaries on various news sites, my principal sources were Bo Diddley: Living Legend by George R. White, which tells Diddley's side of how the song came about, Honkers and Shouters by Arnold Shaw, which has a six-page interview with Bob Rolontz , and The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop by Dan Charnan. This double-CD set contains all of Mickey and Sylvia's releases as a duo, plus several Little Sylvia singles. And Mississippi Delta Dues is an album that all blues lovers should have. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript We've talked before, of course, about the great Bo Diddley, and his main contributions to rock and roll, but today we're going to talk about a song he co-wrote which ended up, in a roundabout way, contributing to many other genres, in ways that we won't properly see until we reach the 1970s. A song that, for all that it is a classic that almost everyone knows, is still rarely treated as an important song in music history. Yet this is a song that's a nexus of all sorts of music, which connects the birth of hip-hop to the compositions of Iannis Xenakis, by way of Doc Pomus, Bo Diddley, and Ike and Tina Turner. The story of this song starts with Billy Stewart. These days, Billy Stewart is a largely unknown figure -- a minor blues man on Chess who was too close to soul music for the Chess Chicago blues fans to take him to heart. Stewart, like many of the musicians we're looking at at the moment, started out in the gospel field, but moved over to vocal group R&B. In his case, he did so by occasionally filling in for a group called the Rainbows, which featured Don Covay, who would later go on to become a very well-known soul singer. There are no recordings of Stewart with the Rainbows, but this recording of the group a few years later should give you some sort of idea what they sounded like: [Excerpt: The Rainbows, "If You See Mary Lee"] Through his work with the group, Stewart got to know Bo Diddley, whose band he joined as a piano player. Stewart also signed with Chess, and his first record, "Billy's Blues", featured both Diddley and Diddley's guitarist Jody Williams on guitar: [Billy Stewart, "Billy's Blues"] Williams came up with that guitar part, and that would lead to a lot of trouble in the future. And that trouble would come because of Mickey Baker. Mickey Baker's birth name was McHouston Baker. Baker had a rough, impoverished, upbringing. He didn't know the identity of his father, and his mother was in and out of prison. He started out as a serious jazz musician, playing bebop, up until the point he saw the great blues musician Pee Wee Crayton: [Excerpt: Pee Wee Crayton: "Blues After Hours"] Or, more precisely, when he saw Crayton's Cadillac. Baker was playing difficult, complex, music that required a great amount of skill and precision. What Crayton was doing was technically far, far, easier than anything Baker was doing, and he was making far more money. So, as Baker put it, "I started bending strings. I was starving to death, and the blues was just a financial thing for me then." Baker became part of an informal group of people around Atlantic Records, centred around Doc Pomus, a blues songwriter who we will hear more about in the future, along with Big Joe Turner and the saxophone player King Curtis. They were playing sophisticated city blues and R&B, and rather looked down on the country bluesmen who are now much better known, as being comparatively unsophisticated musicians. Baker's comments about “bending strings” come from this attitude, that real good music involved horns and pianos and rhythmic sophistication, and that what the Delta bluesmen were doing was something anyone can do. Baker became one of the most sought-after studio guitarists in the R&B field, and for example played the staggering lead guitar on "Need Your Love So Bad" by Little Willie John: [Excerpt, Little Willie John, "Need Your Love So Bad"] That's some pretty good string-bending. He was also on a lot of other songs we've talked about in previous episodes. That's him on guitar on "Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean": [Excerpt: Ruth Brown, "Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean"] And "Shake, Rattle, and Roll": [Excerpt: Big Joe Turner, "Shake, Rattle, and Roll"] and "Money Honey" [Excerpt: Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, "Money Honey"] And records by Louis Jordan, LaVern Baker, Ray Charles and more. Baker was also a guitar teacher, and one of his students was a young woman named Sylvia Vanterpool. Sylvia was, at the time, a singer who was just starting out in her career. She had recorded several unsuccessful tracks on Savoy and Jubilee records. A typical example is her version of "I Went to Your Wedding": [Excerpt: Little Sylvia, "I Went to Your Wedding"] Sylvia was only thirteen when she started her career, using the name "Little Sylvia" -- inspired by "Little Esther", who like her was making records for Savoy records -- and her early recordings are a strange mix of different styles. For every syrupy ballad like "I Went to Your Wedding" there was a hard R&B number, more in the Little Esther style, like "Drive, Daddy, Drive": [Excerpt: Little Sylvia, "Drive Daddy Drive"] That was the other side of the same single as "I Went to Your Wedding", and you can hear that while she had some vocal talent, she was not keeping to a coherent enough, distinctive enough, sound to make her into a star. By the time she was twenty, Sylvia was holding down a day job as a typist, trying and failing to earn enough money to live on as a singer. But she'd been taking guitar lessons from Mickey Baker and had got pretty good. But then Sylvia started dating a man named Joe Robinson. Joe Robinson was involved in some way with gangsters -- nobody has written enough detail for me to get an exact sense of what it was he did with the mob, but he had connections. And he decided he was going to become Sylvia's manager. While Sylvia's career was floundering, Joe thought he could beef it up. All that was needed was a gimmick. Different sources tell different stories about who thought of the idea, but eventually it was decided that Sylvia should join with her guitar teacher and form a duo. Some sources say that the duo was Joe Robinson's idea, and that it was inspired by the success of Gene and Eunice, Shirley and Lee, and the other vocal duos around the time. Other sources, on the other hand, talk about how Mickey Baker, who had started out as a jazz guitarist very much in the Les Paul mode, had wanted to form his own version of Les Paul and Mary Ford. Either way, the gimmick was a solid one -- a male/female duo, both of whom could sing and play the guitar, but playing that string-bending music that Mickey was making money from. And the two of them had chemistry -- at least on stage and on recordings. Off stage, they soon began to grate on each other. Mickey was a man who had no interest in stardom or financial success -- he was a rather studious, private, man who just wanted to make music and get better at his instrument, while Sylvia had a razor-sharp business mind, a huge amount of ambition, and a desire for stardom. But they worked well as a musical team, even if they were never going to be the best of friends. Originally, they signed with a label called Rainbow Records, a medium-sized indie label in New York, where they put out their first single, "I'm So Glad". It's not an especially good record, and it does seem to have a bit of Gene and Eunice to it, and almost none of the distinctive guitar that would characterise their later work -- just some stabbing punctuation on the middle eight and a rather perfunctory solo. The B-side, though, "Se De Boom Run Dun", while it's also far from a wonderful song, does have the semi-calypso rhythm that would later make them famous: [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, "Se De Boom Run Dun"] Unsurprisingly, it didn't sell, and nor did the follow-ups. But the records did get some airplay in New York, if nowhere else, and that brought them to the attention of Bob Rolontz at Groove Records. Groove Records was a subsidiary of RCA, set up in 1953. At that time, the major record labels had a problem, which we've talked about before. For years, none of them had put out R&B records, and the small labels that did put out R&B had been locked out of the distribution networks that the major labels dominated. The result had been that a whole independent network of shops -- usually black-owned businesses selling to black customers -- had sprung up that only sold R&B records. Those shops had no interest in selling the records put out by the major labels -- their customers weren't interested in Doris Day or Frank Sinatra, they wanted Wynonie Harris and Johnny Otis, so why would the shop want to stock anything by Columbia or Decca or RCA, when there was Modern and Chess and Federal and King and Sun and RPM out there making the kind of records their customers liked? But, of course, the major labels still wanted to sell to those customers. After all, there was money out there in the pockets of people who weren't shareholders in RCA or Columbia, and in the eyes of those shareholders that was the greatest injustice in the world, and one that needed to be rectified forthwith. And so those labels set up their own mini-divisions, to sell to those shops. They had different labels, because the shops wouldn't buy from the majors, but they were wholly-owned subsidiaries. Fake indie labels. And Groove was one of them. Groove Records had had a minor hit in 1955 with the piano player Piano Red, and his "Jump Man Jump": [Excerpt: Piano Red, "Jump Man Jump"] They hadn't had a huge amount of commercial success since, but Rolontz thought that Mickey and Sylvia could be the ones to bring him that success. Rolontz put them together with the saxophonist and arranger King Curtis, who Mickey already knew from his work with Doc Pomus, and Curtis put together a team of the best R&B musicians in New York, many of them the same people who would play on most of Atlantic's sessions. Mickey and Sylvia's first single on Groove, "Walking in the Rain", had the potential to be a big hit in the eyes of the record company: [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, "Walking in the Rain"] But unfortunately for them, Johnnie Ray put out this at around the same time: [Excerpt: Johnnie Ray, "Just Walking in the Rain"] That's a totally different song, of course -- it's a cover version of one of the first records ever released on Sun Records, a few years earlier, originally by a vocal group called the Prisonaires. But customers were understandably confused by the presence of two songs with almost identical titles in the market, and so Mickey and Sylvia's song tanked. They still didn't have that hit they needed. But at that point, fate intervened in the form of Bo Diddley. In May 1956, Diddley had written and recorded a song called "Love is Strange", and not got round to releasing it. Jody Williams, who was in Diddley's band at the time, had played the lead guitar on the session, and he'd reused the licks he had used for "Billy's Blues" on the song: [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, "Love is Strange"] At the time, Diddley was friendly with Mickey Baker, and was using Baker as a session guitarist on outside recordings he was producing for other artists, including recordings with Billy Stewart and with the Marquees, a vocal group which featured a young singer named Marvin Gaye: [Excerpt: The Marquees, "Wyatt Earp"] As a result, Mickey and Sylvia ended up playing a few shows on the same bill as Diddley, and at one of the shows, Williams, who was attracted to Sylvia, decided to play "Love is Strange" for her. Sylvia liked the song, and Mickey and Sylvia decided to record it. [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, "Love is Strange"] Now, Diddley claimed that what he told the song's publishers was that Jody Williams wrote the music, while he wrote the lyrics, but he asked that the credit for the lyrics be put in the name of his wife Ethel Smith. While Smith's name made the credits, Williams' didn't, and Williams blamed Diddley for the omission, while Diddley just said (with some evidence) that most of the people he signed contracts with were liars and thieves, and that it didn't surprise him that they'd missed Williams' name off. We'll never know for sure what was actually in Diddley's contracts because, again according to Diddley, just before he and Smith divorced she burned all his papers so she could claim that he never gave her any money and he couldn't prove otherwise. Williams never believed him, and the two didn't speak for decades. Meanwhile, two other people were credited as writers on the song -- Mickey and Sylvia themselves. This is presumably for the changes that were made between Diddley's demo and the finished song, which mostly amount to Baker's lead guitar part and to the famous spoken-word section of the song in the middle: [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, "Love is Strange", spoken word section] According to Diddley, he also later sold his own share in the song to Sylvia, some time in the early sixties. This may well be the case, because Sylvia Vanterpool went on to become a very, very successful businesswoman, who made a lot of very wise business decisions. Either way, "Love is Strange" was a big hit. It went to number eleven in the pop charts and number one on the R&B chart. It's one of those records that everyone knows, and it went on to be covered by dozens upon dozens of performers, including The Maddox Brothers and Rose: [Excerpt: The Maddox Brothers and Rose, "Love is Strange". All very short excerpts here] The Everly Brothers: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Love is Strange"] And Paul McCartney and Wings: [Excerpt: Wings, "Love is Strange"] And Jody Williams never saw a penny from it. But after Groove Records had had this breakthrough big hit, RCA decided to close the label down, and move the acts on the label, and their producer Rolontz, to another subsidiary, Vik. Vik Records had, according to Rolontz, "probably the worst collection of talent in the history of the world", and was severely in debt. All the momentum for their career was gone. Mickey and Sylvia would release many more records, but they would have diminishing returns. Their next record went top ten R&B, but only number forty-seven on the pop charts, and the record after that did even worse, only reaching number eighty-five in the hot one hundred, even though it was another Bo Diddley ballad very much in the same vein as "Love is Strange": [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, "Dearest"] But even though that wasn't a big hit record, it was a favourite of Buddy Holly -- a singer who at this time was just starting out in his own career. You can tell how much Holly liked Mickey and Sylvia, though, just by comparing the way he sings the word “baby” on many of his records to the way Sylvia sings it in “Love is Strange”, and he recorded his own home demos of both "Love is Strange" and "Dearest" -- demos which were released on singles after his death: [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, "Dearest"] But "Dearest" was so obscure that when Holly's single came out, the song was titled "Umm Oh Yeah", and credited to "unknown" for many years, because no-one at the record label had heard the earlier record. Mickey and Sylvia would have several more records in the hot one hundred, but the highest would only reach number forty-six. But while they had no more hits under their own names, they did have another hit... as Ike Turner. After Mickey and Sylvia were dropped along with the rest of the Vik artists, they split up temporarily, but then got back together to start their own company, Willow Records, to release their material. Ike Turner played on some of their records, and to return the favour they agreed to produce a record for Ike and Tina Turner. The song chosen was called "It's Gonna Work Out Fine", and it was co-written by the great R&B songwriter Rose Marie McCoy, who had written for Elvis, Nat "King" Cole, Nappy Brown, and many others. The other credited co-writer is one Sylvia McKinney, who some sources suggest is the same person as Sylvia Vanterpool -- who had by this point married Joe Robinson and changed her name to Sylvia Robinson. Whether she was the other co-writer or not, Mickey and Sylvia had recorded a version of the song for Vik Records, but it hadn't been released, and so they suggested to Ike that the song would work as an Ike and Tina Turner record -- and they would produce and arrange it for them. Indeed they did more than that. They *were* Ike Turner on the record -- Sylvia played the lead guitar part, while Mickey did the spoken "Ike" vocals, which Ike would do live. Sylvia also joined the Ikettes on backing vocals, and while Mickey and Sylvia aren't the credited producers, the end result is essentially a Mickey and Sylvia record with guest vocals from Tina Turner: [Excerpt: Ike and Tina Turner, "It's Gonna Work Out Fine"] That record sold over a million copies, and got a Grammy nomination. However, Mickey and Sylvia's recordings under their own name were still having no success, and Mickey was also having problems because his then-wife was white, and with the particularly virulent form of racism the US was suffering through at the time, he didn't want to be in the country any more. He was also becoming more and more interested in the academic side of music. He had already, in 1955, written a book, the Complete Course in Jazz Guitar, which is still available today and highly regarded. So he moved to Europe, and went back into jazz, performing with people like Coleman Hawkins: [Excerpt: Mickey Baker and Coleman Hawkins: "South of France Blues"] But he did more than just jazz. He studied composition with Iannis Xennakis and started writing fugues and a concerto for guitar and orchestra, "The Blues Suite". Unfortunately, while some of that music was recorded, it only appears to have been released on now out of print and expensive vinyl which no-one has uploaded to the Internet, so I can't excerpt it for you here. What I *can* excerpt is a project he did in the mid-1970s, an album called "Mississippi Delta Dues", released under his birth name McHouston Baker, where he paid tribute to the country bluesmen he'd looked down on early on by performing their songs, along with some of his own in a similar style. It's an odd album, in which sometimes he does a straight soundalike, like this version of Robert Johnson's "Terraplane Blues": [Excerpt: McHouston Baker, "Terraplane Blues"] And sometimes he uses strings. Sometimes this is just as a standard pop-style string section, but sometimes he's using them in ways he learned from Xenakkis, like on this version of J.B. Lenoir's "Alabama Blues", rewritten as "Alabama March", which ends up sounding like nothing as much as Scott Walker: [Excerpt: McHouston Baker, "Alabama March"] Baker carried on performing music of all kinds around Europe until his death in 2011. He died massively respected for his contributions to blues, jazz, R&B, and the technical proficiency of generations of guitarists. Sylvia Robinson made even more of a contribution. After a few years off to have kids after the duo split up, she set up her own record label, All Platinum. For All Platinum she wrote and produced a number of proto-disco hits for other people in the late sixties and early seventies. Those included "Shame Shame Shame" for Shirley and Company: [Excerpt: Shirley and Company, "Shame Shame Shame"] That's the song that inspired David Bowie, John Lennon, and Carlos Alomar to rework a song Bowie and Alomar had been working on, called "Footstompin'", into "Fame". Sylvia also had a hit of her own, with a song called "Pillow Talk" that she'd written for Al Green, but which he'd turned down due to its blatant sexuality conflicting with his newfound religion: [Excerpt: Sylvia, "Pillow Talk"] But I'm afraid we're going to have to wait more than two years before we find out more about Sylvia's biggest contribution to music, because Sylvia Robinson, who had been Little Sylvia and the woman calling her lover-boy, became to hip-hop what Sam Phillips was to rock and roll, and when we get to 1979 we will be looking at how, with financing from her husband's gangster friend Morris Levy, someone from the first wave of rock and roll stars was more responsible than anyone for seeing commercial potential in the music that eventually took rock's cultural place.

Welcome to episode forty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This one looks at “Love is Strange” by Mickey and Sylvia, and how a reluctant bluesman who wrote books on jazz guitar, and a failed child star who would later become the mother of hip-hop, made a classic. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a bonus episode available. This one’s on “Ain’t Nobody’s Business” by Jimmy Witherspoon, and is about blues shouting and the ambition to have a polyester suit.  —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. The information here was pulled together from bits of pieces all over the place, as neither Mickey Baker nor Sylvia Robinson have ever had a biography published. As well as their obituaries on various news sites, my principal sources were Bo Diddley: Living Legend by George R. White, which tells Diddley’s side of how the song came about, Honkers and Shouters by Arnold Shaw, which has a six-page interview with Bob Rolontz , and The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop by Dan Charnan. This double-CD set contains all of Mickey and Sylvia’s releases as a duo, plus several Little Sylvia singles. And Mississippi Delta Dues is an album that all blues lovers should have. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript We’ve talked before, of course, about the great Bo Diddley, and his main contributions to rock and roll, but today we’re going to talk about a song he co-wrote which ended up, in a roundabout way, contributing to many other genres, in ways that we won’t properly see until we reach the 1970s. A song that, for all that it is a classic that almost everyone knows, is still rarely treated as an important song in music history. Yet this is a song that’s a nexus of all sorts of music, which connects the birth of hip-hop to the compositions of Iannis Xenakis, by way of Doc Pomus, Bo Diddley, and Ike and Tina Turner. The story of this song starts with Billy Stewart. These days, Billy Stewart is a largely unknown figure — a minor blues man on Chess who was too close to soul music for the Chess Chicago blues fans to take him to heart. Stewart, like many of the musicians we’re looking at at the moment, started out in the gospel field, but moved over to vocal group R&B. In his case, he did so by occasionally filling in for a group called the Rainbows, which featured Don Covay, who would later go on to become a very well-known soul singer. There are no recordings of Stewart with the Rainbows, but this recording of the group a few years later should give you some sort of idea what they sounded like: [Excerpt: The Rainbows, “If You See Mary Lee”] Through his work with the group, Stewart got to know Bo Diddley, whose band he joined as a piano player. Stewart also signed with Chess, and his first record, “Billy’s Blues”, featured both Diddley and Diddley’s guitarist Jody Williams on guitar: [Billy Stewart, “Billy’s Blues”] Williams came up with that guitar part, and that would lead to a lot of trouble in the future. And that trouble would come because of Mickey Baker. Mickey Baker’s birth name was McHouston Baker. Baker had a rough, impoverished, upbringing. He didn’t know the identity of his father, and his mother was in and out of prison. He started out as a serious jazz musician, playing bebop, up until the point he saw the great blues musician Pee Wee Crayton: [Excerpt: Pee Wee Crayton: “Blues After Hours”] Or, more precisely, when he saw Crayton’s Cadillac. Baker was playing difficult, complex, music that required a great amount of skill and precision. What Crayton was doing was technically far, far, easier than anything Baker was doing, and he was making far more money. So, as Baker put it, “I started bending strings. I was starving to death, and the blues was just a financial thing for me then.” Baker became part of an informal group of people around Atlantic Records, centred around Doc Pomus, a blues songwriter who we will hear more about in the future, along with Big Joe Turner and the saxophone player King Curtis. They were playing sophisticated city blues and R&B, and rather looked down on the country bluesmen who are now much better known, as being comparatively unsophisticated musicians. Baker’s comments about “bending strings” come from this attitude, that real good music involved horns and pianos and rhythmic sophistication, and that what the Delta bluesmen were doing was something anyone can do. Baker became one of the most sought-after studio guitarists in the R&B field, and for example played the staggering lead guitar on “Need Your Love So Bad” by Little Willie John: [Excerpt, Little Willie John, “Need Your Love So Bad”] That’s some pretty good string-bending. He was also on a lot of other songs we’ve talked about in previous episodes. That’s him on guitar on “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean”: [Excerpt: Ruth Brown, “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean”] And “Shake, Rattle, and Roll”: [Excerpt: Big Joe Turner, “Shake, Rattle, and Roll”] and “Money Honey” [Excerpt: Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, “Money Honey”] And records by Louis Jordan, LaVern Baker, Ray Charles and more. Baker was also a guitar teacher, and one of his students was a young woman named Sylvia Vanterpool. Sylvia was, at the time, a singer who was just starting out in her career. She had recorded several unsuccessful tracks on Savoy and Jubilee records. A typical example is her version of “I Went to Your Wedding”: [Excerpt: Little Sylvia, “I Went to Your Wedding”] Sylvia was only thirteen when she started her career, using the name “Little Sylvia” — inspired by “Little Esther”, who like her was making records for Savoy records — and her early recordings are a strange mix of different styles. For every syrupy ballad like “I Went to Your Wedding” there was a hard R&B number, more in the Little Esther style, like “Drive, Daddy, Drive”: [Excerpt: Little Sylvia, “Drive Daddy Drive”] That was the other side of the same single as “I Went to Your Wedding”, and you can hear that while she had some vocal talent, she was not keeping to a coherent enough, distinctive enough, sound to make her into a star. By the time she was twenty, Sylvia was holding down a day job as a typist, trying and failing to earn enough money to live on as a singer. But she’d been taking guitar lessons from Mickey Baker and had got pretty good. But then Sylvia started dating a man named Joe Robinson. Joe Robinson was involved in some way with gangsters — nobody has written enough detail for me to get an exact sense of what it was he did with the mob, but he had connections. And he decided he was going to become Sylvia’s manager. While Sylvia’s career was floundering, Joe thought he could beef it up. All that was needed was a gimmick. Different sources tell different stories about who thought of the idea, but eventually it was decided that Sylvia should join with her guitar teacher and form a duo. Some sources say that the duo was Joe Robinson’s idea, and that it was inspired by the success of Gene and Eunice, Shirley and Lee, and the other vocal duos around the time. Other sources, on the other hand, talk about how Mickey Baker, who had started out as a jazz guitarist very much in the Les Paul mode, had wanted to form his own version of Les Paul and Mary Ford. Either way, the gimmick was a solid one — a male/female duo, both of whom could sing and play the guitar, but playing that string-bending music that Mickey was making money from. And the two of them had chemistry — at least on stage and on recordings. Off stage, they soon began to grate on each other. Mickey was a man who had no interest in stardom or financial success — he was a rather studious, private, man who just wanted to make music and get better at his instrument, while Sylvia had a razor-sharp business mind, a huge amount of ambition, and a desire for stardom. But they worked well as a musical team, even if they were never going to be the best of friends. Originally, they signed with a label called Rainbow Records, a medium-sized indie label in New York, where they put out their first single, “I’m So Glad”. It’s not an especially good record, and it does seem to have a bit of Gene and Eunice to it, and almost none of the distinctive guitar that would characterise their later work — just some stabbing punctuation on the middle eight and a rather perfunctory solo. The B-side, though, “Se De Boom Run Dun”, while it’s also far from a wonderful song, does have the semi-calypso rhythm that would later make them famous: [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, “Se De Boom Run Dun”] Unsurprisingly, it didn’t sell, and nor did the follow-ups. But the records did get some airplay in New York, if nowhere else, and that brought them to the attention of Bob Rolontz at Groove Records. Groove Records was a subsidiary of RCA, set up in 1953. At that time, the major record labels had a problem, which we’ve talked about before. For years, none of them had put out R&B records, and the small labels that did put out R&B had been locked out of the distribution networks that the major labels dominated. The result had been that a whole independent network of shops — usually black-owned businesses selling to black customers — had sprung up that only sold R&B records. Those shops had no interest in selling the records put out by the major labels — their customers weren’t interested in Doris Day or Frank Sinatra, they wanted Wynonie Harris and Johnny Otis, so why would the shop want to stock anything by Columbia or Decca or RCA, when there was Modern and Chess and Federal and King and Sun and RPM out there making the kind of records their customers liked? But, of course, the major labels still wanted to sell to those customers. After all, there was money out there in the pockets of people who weren’t shareholders in RCA or Columbia, and in the eyes of those shareholders that was the greatest injustice in the world, and one that needed to be rectified forthwith. And so those labels set up their own mini-divisions, to sell to those shops. They had different labels, because the shops wouldn’t buy from the majors, but they were wholly-owned subsidiaries. Fake indie labels. And Groove was one of them. Groove Records had had a minor hit in 1955 with the piano player Piano Red, and his “Jump Man Jump”: [Excerpt: Piano Red, “Jump Man Jump”] They hadn’t had a huge amount of commercial success since, but Rolontz thought that Mickey and Sylvia could be the ones to bring him that success. Rolontz put them together with the saxophonist and arranger King Curtis, who Mickey already knew from his work with Doc Pomus, and Curtis put together a team of the best R&B musicians in New York, many of them the same people who would play on most of Atlantic’s sessions. Mickey and Sylvia’s first single on Groove, “Walking in the Rain”, had the potential to be a big hit in the eyes of the record company: [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, “Walking in the Rain”] But unfortunately for them, Johnnie Ray put out this at around the same time: [Excerpt: Johnnie Ray, “Just Walking in the Rain”] That’s a totally different song, of course — it’s a cover version of one of the first records ever released on Sun Records, a few years earlier, originally by a vocal group called the Prisonaires. But customers were understandably confused by the presence of two songs with almost identical titles in the market, and so Mickey and Sylvia’s song tanked. They still didn’t have that hit they needed. But at that point, fate intervened in the form of Bo Diddley. In May 1956, Diddley had written and recorded a song called “Love is Strange”, and not got round to releasing it. Jody Williams, who was in Diddley’s band at the time, had played the lead guitar on the session, and he’d reused the licks he had used for “Billy’s Blues” on the song: [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, “Love is Strange”] At the time, Diddley was friendly with Mickey Baker, and was using Baker as a session guitarist on outside recordings he was producing for other artists, including recordings with Billy Stewart and with the Marquees, a vocal group which featured a young singer named Marvin Gaye: [Excerpt: The Marquees, “Wyatt Earp”] As a result, Mickey and Sylvia ended up playing a few shows on the same bill as Diddley, and at one of the shows, Williams, who was attracted to Sylvia, decided to play “Love is Strange” for her. Sylvia liked the song, and Mickey and Sylvia decided to record it. [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, “Love is Strange”] Now, Diddley claimed that what he told the song’s publishers was that Jody Williams wrote the music, while he wrote the lyrics, but he asked that the credit for the lyrics be put in the name of his wife Ethel Smith. While Smith’s name made the credits, Williams’ didn’t, and Williams blamed Diddley for the omission, while Diddley just said (with some evidence) that most of the people he signed contracts with were liars and thieves, and that it didn’t surprise him that they’d missed Williams’ name off. We’ll never know for sure what was actually in Diddley’s contracts because, again according to Diddley, just before he and Smith divorced she burned all his papers so she could claim that he never gave her any money and he couldn’t prove otherwise. Williams never believed him, and the two didn’t speak for decades. Meanwhile, two other people were credited as writers on the song — Mickey and Sylvia themselves. This is presumably for the changes that were made between Diddley’s demo and the finished song, which mostly amount to Baker’s lead guitar part and to the famous spoken-word section of the song in the middle: [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, “Love is Strange”, spoken word section] According to Diddley, he also later sold his own share in the song to Sylvia, some time in the early sixties. This may well be the case, because Sylvia Vanterpool went on to become a very, very successful businesswoman, who made a lot of very wise business decisions. Either way, “Love is Strange” was a big hit. It went to number eleven in the pop charts and number one on the R&B chart. It’s one of those records that everyone knows, and it went on to be covered by dozens upon dozens of performers, including The Maddox Brothers and Rose: [Excerpt: The Maddox Brothers and Rose, “Love is Strange”. All very short excerpts here] The Everly Brothers: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Love is Strange”] And Paul McCartney and Wings: [Excerpt: Wings, “Love is Strange”] And Jody Williams never saw a penny from it. But after Groove Records had had this breakthrough big hit, RCA decided to close the label down, and move the acts on the label, and their producer Rolontz, to another subsidiary, Vik. Vik Records had, according to Rolontz, “probably the worst collection of talent in the history of the world”, and was severely in debt. All the momentum for their career was gone. Mickey and Sylvia would release many more records, but they would have diminishing returns. Their next record went top ten R&B, but only number forty-seven on the pop charts, and the record after that did even worse, only reaching number eighty-five in the hot one hundred, even though it was another Bo Diddley ballad very much in the same vein as “Love is Strange”: [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, “Dearest”] But even though that wasn’t a big hit record, it was a favourite of Buddy Holly — a singer who at this time was just starting out in his own career. You can tell how much Holly liked Mickey and Sylvia, though, just by comparing the way he sings the word “baby” on many of his records to the way Sylvia sings it in “Love is Strange”, and he recorded his own home demos of both “Love is Strange” and “Dearest” — demos which were released on singles after his death: [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, “Dearest”] But “Dearest” was so obscure that when Holly’s single came out, the song was titled “Umm Oh Yeah”, and credited to “unknown” for many years, because no-one at the record label had heard the earlier record. Mickey and Sylvia would have several more records in the hot one hundred, but the highest would only reach number forty-six. But while they had no more hits under their own names, they did have another hit… as Ike Turner. After Mickey and Sylvia were dropped along with the rest of the Vik artists, they split up temporarily, but then got back together to start their own company, Willow Records, to release their material. Ike Turner played on some of their records, and to return the favour they agreed to produce a record for Ike and Tina Turner. The song chosen was called “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine”, and it was co-written by the great R&B songwriter Rose Marie McCoy, who had written for Elvis, Nat “King” Cole, Nappy Brown, and many others. The other credited co-writer is one Sylvia McKinney, who some sources suggest is the same person as Sylvia Vanterpool — who had by this point married Joe Robinson and changed her name to Sylvia Robinson. Whether she was the other co-writer or not, Mickey and Sylvia had recorded a version of the song for Vik Records, but it hadn’t been released, and so they suggested to Ike that the song would work as an Ike and Tina Turner record — and they would produce and arrange it for them. Indeed they did more than that. They *were* Ike Turner on the record — Sylvia played the lead guitar part, while Mickey did the spoken “Ike” vocals, which Ike would do live. Sylvia also joined the Ikettes on backing vocals, and while Mickey and Sylvia aren’t the credited producers, the end result is essentially a Mickey and Sylvia record with guest vocals from Tina Turner: [Excerpt: Ike and Tina Turner, “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine”] That record sold over a million copies, and got a Grammy nomination. However, Mickey and Sylvia’s recordings under their own name were still having no success, and Mickey was also having problems because his then-wife was white, and with the particularly virulent form of racism the US was suffering through at the time, he didn’t want to be in the country any more. He was also becoming more and more interested in the academic side of music. He had already, in 1955, written a book, the Complete Course in Jazz Guitar, which is still available today and highly regarded. So he moved to Europe, and went back into jazz, performing with people like Coleman Hawkins: [Excerpt: Mickey Baker and Coleman Hawkins: “South of France Blues”] But he did more than just jazz. He studied composition with Iannis Xennakis and started writing fugues and a concerto for guitar and orchestra, “The Blues Suite”. Unfortunately, while some of that music was recorded, it only appears to have been released on now out of print and expensive vinyl which no-one has uploaded to the Internet, so I can’t excerpt it for you here. What I *can* excerpt is a project he did in the mid-1970s, an album called “Mississippi Delta Dues”, released under his birth name McHouston Baker, where he paid tribute to the country bluesmen he’d looked down on early on by performing their songs, along with some of his own in a similar style. It’s an odd album, in which sometimes he does a straight soundalike, like this version of Robert Johnson’s “Terraplane Blues”: [Excerpt: McHouston Baker, “Terraplane Blues”] And sometimes he uses strings. Sometimes this is just as a standard pop-style string section, but sometimes he’s using them in ways he learned from Xenakkis, like on this version of J.B. Lenoir’s “Alabama Blues”, rewritten as “Alabama March”, which ends up sounding like nothing as much as Scott Walker: [Excerpt: McHouston Baker, “Alabama March”] Baker carried on performing music of all kinds around Europe until his death in 2011. He died massively respected for his contributions to blues, jazz, R&B, and the technical proficiency of generations of guitarists. Sylvia Robinson made even more of a contribution. After a few years off to have kids after the duo split up, she set up her own record label, All Platinum. For All Platinum she wrote and produced a number of proto-disco hits for other people in the late sixties and early seventies. Those included “Shame Shame Shame” for Shirley and Company: [Excerpt: Shirley and Company, “Shame Shame Shame”] That’s the song that inspired David Bowie, John Lennon, and Carlos Alomar to rework a song Bowie and Alomar had been working on, called “Footstompin'”, into “Fame”. Sylvia also had a hit of her own, with a song called “Pillow Talk” that she’d written for Al Green, but which he’d turned down due to its blatant sexuality conflicting with his newfound religion: [Excerpt: Sylvia, “Pillow Talk”] But I’m afraid we’re going to have to wait more than two years before we find out more about Sylvia’s biggest contribution to music, because Sylvia Robinson, who had been Little Sylvia and the woman calling her lover-boy, became to hip-hop what Sam Phillips was to rock and roll, and when we get to 1979 we will be looking at how, with financing from her husband’s gangster friend Morris Levy, someone from the first wave of rock and roll stars was more responsible than anyone for seeing commercial potential in the music that eventually took rock’s cultural place.