American songwriter, publisher, music producer, and manager
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21 episodes with Don Kirshner
3 episodes with Don Kirshner
3 episodes with Don Kirshner
3 episodes with Don Kirshner
5 episodes with Don Kirshner
3 episodes with Don Kirshner
2 episodes with Don Kirshner
2 episodes with Don Kirshner
2 episodes with Don Kirshner
May 19-25, 1979 This week Ken welcomes comedian and old buddy Allen Strickland Williams to the show. Ken and Allen discuss Nick at Nite, Laverse and Shirley, Barney Miller, what kids watch now, Perfect Strangers, Doral II, no tar = small junk, Pall Mall decisions, disco and pyschotic breaks, Fresh sexy t-shirts, AYDS, PBS funding, Mr. Rogers, Jimmy Carter's press secretary's thoughts on Reagan, Dick Cavett, Ed McMahon, Carson, The Amazing Randi, Rubes, miracle secrets for your less attractive wife, El Producto Cigars, CHiPs, Evil Evel Kinevel, Ghost Rider, Ralph Bakshi's The Hobbit sponsored by Xerox, Cool World, faking it til you makin it, Glenn Supper, prog rock, The New Riders of the Purple Sage, Don Kirshner's Rock Concert, The Brothers Johnson, Ruth Buzzy on Wayne Newston's having a good time, Guiness Book of World Records, the most women kissed in an 8 hour period, the debut of This Old House, Scared Straight, Oscar Winners, The Golden Age of Variety Shows, Quiz Show, Joker's Wild, A Vacation In Hell, Maureen McCormick, After the Bomb, documentaries on Human Sexuality, Benny Hill Street Blues, In Search of..., Gary Marshall, Lenny and the Squigtones, Ralph Nader, when Tongues Start Wagging, Friends of Eddie Coyle, Dinah Shore, the Beegees parents, That's Incredible!, Real People, Vega$, "Dan Tanna", Barney Miller's terrible font, failed pilots, being terrified of Alan King, loving Robert Mitchum, Gallagher, Bridgetown Comedy Festival, The Rockford Files, drag races with James Garner, Candlepins for Cash, Candlepin Bowling, Eric Estrada: Aztec God, creepy K-Mart ads, not getting the joke "This Beats Flying", and creepy sexy ads.
An encore episode with number one hit-making singer/composer/producer RON DANTE of The Archies, The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan, and The Cuff Links, sharing stories about hits like "Sugar, Sugar" and "Tracy," as well as legends like Barry Manilow, Mick Jagger, Micky Dolenz, Davy Jones, Don Kirshner, Carole King, and many others.
On the January 17 edition of the Music History Today podcast, there's Juice, Sugarland, Don Kirshner, Garth Brooks, Eartha Kitt, & Kid Rock For more music history, subscribe to my Spotify Channel or subscribe to the audio version of my music history podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts from ALL MUSIC HISTORY TODAY PODCAST NETWORK LINKS - https://allmylinks.com/musichistorytoday
December 8-14, 1979 This week Ken welcomes former Farside singer/guitarist, voice actor, and all around good dude Popeye Vogelsang to the show. Ken and Popeye discuss disrespecting the Fonz, leaving a legacy, where Potsy and Ralph Malph ended up, knocking out Paulie Shore, nicknames, ADR, voicing for video games, smoking, putting allen wrenches in cigarette filters, low tar, lower tar, even lower tar, growing up in Orange County, 80s SoCal punk rock, Watt, being innocent, Dick Cavett, SCTV, the greatness of Dave Thomas, Christmas with Cigarettes, how all women love Robert Redford, The Jane Fonda Workout, piledriving, non-sequitur movie ads, "coming this Christmas", Norman Fell, putting two names in alphabetical order incorrectly, Hanna Barbera characters singing We Are Family, Farrah Fawcett and Jeff Bridges in the beloved Christmas classic "Somebody Killed Her Husband", candlepin bowling, The Return of the Pink Panther, Don Kirshner's Rock Concert, being confused by Heart playing with Smokey Robinson and Olivia Newton John, A Charlie Brown Christmas, 8-Tracks, menthol, getting interviewed by Ali G, Surgeon General C. Everett Coop, Happy Days, The Wild Wild World of Animals, Fight or Flight, Lorenzo Lamas, Chuck Berry's weirdness, Real People vs That's Incredible, whistling through your navel, washing coins, Donahue after dark, Doug Henning, how you can't top Martin Short, boxing head injuries, Laverne and Shirley, the god like powers of Michael McKeon, Lenny and the Squigtones, Dom DeLuise, renting VHS tapes to Donny Osmond, Rockford Files, Jaws 2, Summer Without Boys, 30 Minutes: the kids version of 60 minutes, the Christmas miracle of Adam Rich, subversion on television, how massive Hart to Hart was in the UK, being a Presto household, never having to do laundry thanks to promotional t-shirts, and the value of just screwing around.
A finales de los 50, principios de los 60, hacer llegar al público una cancion en EEUU tan sencillo como acercarte a un edificio en el 1619 de Broadway en la calle 49 de Manhattan, en Nueva York. Once pisos con todo lo necesario, músicos, autores, editores, salas de ensayo...una autentica "fabrica de sueños" comandada por Don Kirshner. Nombres establecidos como Jerry Leiber y Mike Stoller o jovenes promesas como Goffin&King , autores de “¿Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow ?“ para las Shirelles como Jeff Barry y Ellie Greenwich de ”Be My Baby” para las Ronettes.Una miriada de famosos desconocidos como Barry Mann-Cynthia Weil, Doc Pomus-Mort Shuman o Bacharach y David, la inequívoca señal de que estabas en el lugar adecuado. Te asombrará saber las maravillas que produjeron y cómo. Puedes hacerte socio del Club Babel y apoyar este podcast: mundobabel.com/club Si te gusta Mundo Babel puedes colaborar a que llegue a más oyentes compartiendo en tus redes sociales y dejar una valoración de 5 estrellas en Apple Podcast o un comentario en Ivoox. Para anunciarte en este podcast, ponte en contacto con: mundobabelpodcast@gmail.com.
A finales de los 50, principios de los 60, hacer llegar al público una cancion en EEUU tan sencillo como acercarte a un edificio en el 1619 de Broadway en la calle 49 de Manhattan, en Nueva York. Once pisos con todo lo necesario, músicos, autores, editores, salas de ensayo...una autentica "fabrica de sueños" comandada por Don Kirshner. Nombres establecidos como Jerry Leiber y Mike Stoller o jovenes promesas como Goffin&King , autores de “¿Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow ?“ para las Shirelles como Jeff Barry y Ellie Greenwich de ”Be My Baby” para las Ronettes.Una miriada de famosos desconocidos como Barry Mann-Cynthia Weil, Doc Pomus-Mort Shuman o Bacharach y David, la inequívoca señal de que estabas en el lugar adecuado. Te asombrará saber las maravillas que produjeron y cómo. Puedes hacerte socio del Club Babel y apoyar este podcast: mundobabel.com/club Si te gusta Mundo Babel puedes colaborar a que llegue a más oyentes compartiendo en tus redes sociales y dejar una valoración de 5 estrellas en Apple Podcast o un comentario en Ivoox. Para anunciarte en este podcast, ponte en contacto con: mundobabelpodcast@gmail.com.
KABC's Curt Sandoval, NY sportscaster Warner Wolf and Don Kirshner's Sugar Sugar.
Leon Medica, bassist and producer of LeRoux, co-founded the band in 1977. Throughout the years the band was featured on music television shows including Solid Gold, The Midnight Special and Don Kirshner's Rock Concert. They had 7 songs land on Billboard's Top 100 chart. Leon won an American Music Award for producing a song from the movie "Dirty Dancing" and also is a Grammy nominated musician who played on an album with blues great Tab Benoit. This tribute to Leon, who passed away on June 9, 2024, includes our interview with him from July of 2008 which touched on LeRoux, the Louisiana rock sound and LeRoux's album, Ain't Nothing But A Gris Gris. In our showcase segment, we feature Leon's friend and frontman for Wet Willie, Jimmy Hall. His latest album is Ready Now. Sounds of the deep south on this special edition of the CAT!
GGACP celebrates the 55th anniversary of one of the most successful pop tunes of all time, the Archies' "Sugar, Sugar" (released May 24, 1969) by revisiting this 2017 interview with vocalist, record producer and Archies lead singer Ron Dante. In this episode, Ron joins Gilbert and Frank for an engaging conversation about the history of the legendary Brill Building, the birth of bubblegum music, the magic touch of Don Kirshner (and Barry Manilow) and the lost art of commercial jingles. Also, Ron mimics Donovan, Larry Fine throws in the towel, Paul Shaffer goes deep-sea fishing and Carole King's babysitter tops the charts. PLUS: “Leader of the Laundromat”! The fabulous Toni Wine! The 1910 Fruitgum Company! “The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan”! And the return of “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep”! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Music legend RON DANTE (The Chan Clan) recalls working with Don Kirshner, Screen Gems Music, and being the lead singer of The Archies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
RATB:n Sami Ruokangas ja Pauli Kauppila käsittelevät kolme albumia 50 vuoden takaa. Ne ovat Bad Companyn nimikkoesikoinen, Nazarethin Rampant ja Lynyrd Skynyrdin Second Helping. Kuuntele, viihdy ja sivisty! Jakson soittolista: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/61i35pmUESfumfmA4rrnA9?si=576673d881924336 Menossa ja meiningissä ovat mukana Bob Dylan, Deep Purple, Robin Trower, The Band, David Coverdale, Jon Lord, Free, Paul Rodgers, Simon Kirke, Paul Kossoff, Louder, Heavy Metal Kids, Gary Holton, Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, Mick Ralphs, Jason Bonham, Led Zeppelin, Andy Fraser, UFO, Thin Lizzy, Don Kirshner, Wishbone Ash, Iron Maiden, David Bowie, Ian Hunter, Kari Pyrhönen, Aki Blomberg, Mika Järvinen, Queen, Freddie Mercury, Adam Lambert, Five Finger Death Punch, Peter Grant, Swan Song, The Pretty Things, Yes, Genesis, Boz Burrell, King Crimson, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, Rolling Stones, Hipgnosis, Joni Mitchell, Dan McCafferty, Uriah Heep, Roger Glover, The Yardbirds, Jeff Beck Group, Rod Stewart, Ronnie Wood, Gary Moore, Ennio Morricone, Quentin Tarantino, Manny Charlton, Aerosmith, Ted Nugent, Blue Öyster Cult, AC/DC, Salvo Records, Woody Guthrie, Ry Cooder, Pete Agnew, Little Feat, Guns N' Roses, Ian Gillan, Lemmy Kilmister, Motörhead, Janne Rönkkö, Ed King, J. J. Cale, Allen Collins, Steve Gaines, Ronnie Van Zant, The Who, Gary Rossington, Billy Powell, Al Kooper, The Beatles, Neil Young, Jason Isbell. Rickey Medlocke, Shorty Medlocke, Eric Clapton, Cream, Duane Allman, The Allman Brothers Band, The Outlaws, The Marshall Tucker Band, Puistoblues, Leon Wilkeson, Jimmy Murrison, ZZ Top ja Dusty Hill.
TVC 639.2: Music legend Harvey Lisberg talks to Ed about his gift for recognizing the hit potential of any given song; the art of matching a song to a particular artist; and the great compliment that music impresario Don Kirshner once paid him. Harvey's memoir, I'm Into Something Good, is available wherever books are sold. Want to advertise/sponsor our show? TV Confidential has partnered with AdvertiseCast to handle advertising/sponsorship requests for the podcast edition of our program. They're great to work with and will help you advertise on our show. Please email sales@advertisecast.com or click the link below to get started: https://www.advertisecast.com/TVConfidentialAradiotalkshowabout Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
On the January 17 edition of the Music History Today podcast, there's Juice, Sugarland, Don Kirshner, Garth Brooks, Eartha Kitt, & Kid Rock. ALL MY MUSIC HISTORY TODAY PODCAST LINKS - https://allmylinks.com/musichistorytoday --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/musichistorytodaypodcast/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/musichistorytodaypodcast/support
From October 10th-15th, North Carolina Theatre will be presenting BEAUTIFUL: THE CAROLE KING MUSICAL at Raleigh Memorial Auditorium, which is located inside the Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts. I had the great pleasure of interviewing actor Noah Weisberg, who will be taking on the role of real-life music publisher and producer Don Kirshner. He has appeared on Broadway in LEGALLY BLONDE, SOUTH PACIFIC, ENRON, and ELF. Some of his film and TV credits include LAW & ORDER, ACROSS THE UNIVERSE, THE GOOD WIFE, MODERN FAMILY, LUCKY STIFF, and ZOEY'S EXTRAORDINARY PLAYLIST. Be sure to catch North Carolina Theatre's production of BEAUTIFUL: THE CAROLE KING MUSICAL from October 10th-15th. For more information, please visit: www.nctheatre.com/event/event-beautiful-the-carole-king-musical/ Follow Noah Weisberg at www.noahweisberg.com and on Instagram: @noahweisberg If you love this show, please leave us a review. Go to RateThisPodcast.com/karereviewspodcast and follow the simple instructions. Follow Kare Reviews at www.karereviews.net and on Twitter: @KareReviews Also please visit the newly launched Patreon page:https://www.patreon.com/jeffreykare?fan_landing=true Follow Jeffrey Kare on Twitter: @JeffreyKare If you like what you've heard here, please subscribe to any one of the following places where the Kare Reviews Podcast is available. AnchorAppleGoogleSpotifyBreakerOvercastPocket CastsRadioPublic --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/jeffrey-kare/support
Today's guest is a songwriting legend who helped shape the sound of American pop music. Originally setting out to be a recording star, this guest became one of the most respected pop songwriters within the Brill Building complex of the '60s. A struggling New Yorker, this writer's fortunes changed considerably when he met his future wife and songwriting partner, Ellie Greenwich, at a party in 1962. Within a short time of teaming up, the duo had an appointment at Don Kirshner's songwriting factory, New York City's famous Brill Building. Ushered into the business by Leiber & Stoller, this duo began writing and arranging for the groups signed to Phil Spector's Philles label. The smash hits “Da Do Ron Ron” and “Be My Baby” resulted from the time spent with Spector and, by 1964, the duo were an integral part of the staff at Leiber and Stoller's newly formed Redbird Records. Largely regarded by pop aficionados as the mecca for the “girl group” sound, the staff at Redbird, produced tightly crafted, musically sophisticated songs. The duo also penned “Leader of the Pack,” which became a number one hit. They continued to write hit records throughout the '60s, such as the seminal “River Deep, Mountain High” and the Beach Boys' 1969 hit “I Can Hear Music,” their songs changing with the times, but still retaining the essence of their earlier Brill Building days. After the marriage broke up, their creative partnership did as well and while Greenwich went on to become a session vocalist, our guest became a staff producer at A&M Records. Throughout the '70s, he worked with Neil Diamond, the Monkees, and Van Morrison, among other. Overall, this guest's credits—as a writer, co-writer, producer, or a combination—extend to a mix of different genres. His song "Out of Hand" by Gary Stewart was the longest-charted country record of its year. He also wrote many other country tunes, including "If It Ain't Love by Now," sung by Jim Ed Brown and Helen Cornelius, who later won the Country Music Association's Best Country Duo award. One of this writer's most successful songs of all was Olivia Newton-John's 1974 worldwide smash hit "I Honestly Love You," which won "Song of the Year" at the American Music Awards, and, for Newton-John, GRAMMY Awards for Record of the Year and Best Female Pop Performance. While mainly influential to the pop world, this writer's impact spans throughout all genres and all corners of the music industry. #AndTheWriterIs... Jeff Barry !!Watercolor by: @artofmrw Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Anne Phillips is a Triple Threat lady - singer, songwriter, arranger. She started off studying and playing jazz, then performing on demos for Don Kirshner with early ‘60s songwriters like Carole King and Ellie Greenwich, and then moving into commercials for Pepsi, Sheraton and others. A true Renaissance Lady!My featured song is “Hey Jake” from the album East Side Sessions by my band Project Grand Slam. Spotify link.---------------------------------------------The Follow Your Dream Podcast:Top 1% of all podcasts with Listeners in 200 countries!For more information and other episodes of the podcast click here. To subscribe to the podcast click here.To subscribe to our weekly Follow Your Dream Podcast email click here.To Rate and Review the podcast click here.“Dream With Robert”. Click here.—----------------------------------------“IT'S ALIVE!” is Robert's new Project Grand Slam album. Featuring 13 of the band's Greatest Hits performed “live” at festivals in Pennsylvania and Serbia.Reviews:"An instant classic!" (Melody Maker)"Amazing record...Another win for the one and only Robert Miller!" (Hollywood Digest)"Close to perfect!" (Pop Icon)"A Masterpiece!" (Big Celebrity Buzz)"Sterling effort!" (Indie Pulse)"Another fusion wonder for Project Grand Slam!" (MobYorkCity)Click here for all links.Click here for song videos—-----------------------------------------Audio production:Jimmy RavenscroftKymera Films Connect with Anne:www.annephillips.com Connect with the Follow Your Dream Podcast:Website - www.followyourdreampodcast.comEmail Robert - robert@followyourdreampodcast.com Follow Robert's band, Project Grand Slam, and his music:Website - www.projectgrandslam.comPGS Store - www.thePGSstore.comYouTubeSpotify MusicApple MusicEmail - pgs@projectgrandslam.com
This week Tom & Zeus breakdown KISS' 1977 appearance on Don Kirshner's Rock Concert. Don Kirshner was a producer of ABC In Concert. He left and created his own syndicated show, Don Kirshner's Rock Concert. KISS performed on ABC In Concert previously in 1974 so it was natural for them to also go onto Don Kirshner's Rock Concert in 1977. The band performed three videos for songs off of their most recent album, Rock And Roll Over. These were early forms of videos pre-MTV for I Want You, Hard Luck Woman and Love 'Em And Leave 'Em. These performances were with the Spirit of 76 costumes and stage. The band may have been at its greatest height at this time. The guys then rank this KISS TV appearance against the previous KISS TV appearances they have reviewed so far. This episode answers the question whether the guys REALLY LIKE KISS? For all things Shout It Out Loudcast check out our amazing website by clicking below: www.ShoutItOutLoudcast.com Interested in more Shout It Out Loudcast content? Care to help us out? Come join us on Patreon by clicking below: SIOL Patreon Get all your Shout It Out Loudcast Merchandise by clicking below: Shout It Out Loudcast Merchandise at AMAZON Shop At Our Amazon Store by clicking below: Shout It Out Loudcast Amazon Store Please Email us comments or suggestions by clicking below: ShoutItOutLoudcast@Gmail.com Please subscribe to us and give us a 5 Star (Child) review on the following places below: iTunes Podchaser Stitcher iHeart Radio Spotify Please follow us and like our social media pages clicking below: Twitter Facebook Page Facebook Group Page Shout It Out Loudcasters Instagram YouTube Proud Member of the Pantheon Podcast click below to see the website: Pantheon Podcast Network Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
This week Tom & Zeus breakdown KISS' 1977 appearance on Don Kirshner's Rock Concert. Don Kirshner was a producer of ABC In Concert. He left and created his own syndicated show, Don Kirshner's Rock Concert. KISS performed on ABC In Concert previously in 1974 so it was natural for them to also go onto Don Kirshner's Rock Concert in 1977. The band performed three videos for songs off of their most recent album, Rock And Roll Over. These were early forms of videos pre-MTV for I Want You, Hard Luck Woman and Love 'Em And Leave 'Em. These performances were with the Spirit of 76 costumes and stage. The band may have been at its greatest height at this time. The guys then rank this KISS TV appearance against the previous KISS TV appearances they have reviewed so far. This episode answers the question whether the guys REALLY LIKE KISS? For all things Shout It Out Loudcast check out our amazing website by clicking below: www.ShoutItOutLoudcast.com Interested in more Shout It Out Loudcast content? Care to help us out? Come join us on Patreon by clicking below: SIOL Patreon Get all your Shout It Out Loudcast Merchandise by clicking below: Shout It Out Loudcast Merchandise at AMAZON Shop At Our Amazon Store by clicking below: Shout It Out Loudcast Amazon Store Please Email us comments or suggestions by clicking below: ShoutItOutLoudcast@Gmail.com Please subscribe to us and give us a 5 Star (Child) review on the following places below: iTunes Podchaser Stitcher iHeart Radio Spotify Please follow us and like our social media pages clicking below: Twitter Facebook Page Facebook Group Page Shout It Out Loudcasters Instagram YouTube Proud Member of the Pantheon Podcast click below to see the website: Pantheon Podcast Network Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The biggest hit of 1969, bubblegum pop song “Sugar, Sugar” was released on 24th May. The songwriters, Jeff Barry and Andy Kim, had a strong pedigree in penning 60s anthems. But the band itself was fictional - simply studio musicians providing a soundtrack to the Saturday morning TV cartoon ‘The Archie Show', inspired by the Archie Comics. The brainchild of promoter Don Kirshner, creator of the Monkees, the concept of establishing a band based on cartoon characters meant he could better control his performers. But it did present problems when they were called upon to perform live! In this episode, Arion, Rebecca and Olly consider why this classic earworm is so naggingly addictive; explain why DJs were initially loathe to play it; and uncover The Archies' more ‘adult' follow-on album… Further Reading: ‘The Surprising Origins of the Archies' 'Sugar Sugar'' (CBR, 2018): https://www.cbr.com/archies-sugar-sugar-origins/ ‘Were the Archies Decades Ahead of Their Time?' (Rolling Stone, 2021): https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/were-the-archies-review-1272309/ ‘The Archies - Sugar, Sugar' (Calendar RCA Records, 1969): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eX28cgKHHyc #60s #music #comics #TV Love the show? Join
Pat talks about California's three largest power companies submitting a joint proposal to the state's Public Utilities Commission to simplify electricity bills to include a fixed-rate billing system based on household income, news of the day, your phone calls, bubble gum pop and Pat pays tribute to the late Don Kirshner who was born on this day...
In 1973, the “garage band” from Topeka was discovered by Wally Gold, signed by Don Kirshner, and released their debut album in 1974. KANSAS has gone on to compile a catalogue that includes sixteen studio albums and five live albums. KANSAS has produced eight gold albums, three sextuple-Platinum albums (Leftoverture, Point of Know Return, Best of KANSAS), one platinum live album (Two for the Show), one quadruple-Platinum single ‘Carry On Wayward Son,' and another triple-Platinum single ‘Dust in the Wind.' Most recently, KANSAS has released two Billboard charting albums with 2016's The Prelude Implicit and 2020's The Absence of Presence. Kown as America's preeminent progressive rock band, KANSAS, will be touring 50 select North American cities to celebrate the band's 50th Anniversary. KANSAS 50th Anniversary Tour – Another Fork in the Road will showcase music spanning all 50 years of the band's illustrious history. The tour will showcase two hours of hits, fan favorites, and deep cuts rarely performed live. KANSAS 50th Anniversary Tour – Another Fork in the Road is scheduled to premiere on June 2, 2023 in Pittsburgh, PA and conclude on January 28, 2024 in Fort Lauderdale, FL. Tickets and KANSAS VIP Packages for most dates go are on sale now and Ticket information can be found at www.kansasband.com & https://bnds.us/7g0lja. (links for those are in the show notes if you are on audio and in the video decryption if you are on YouTube) To further celebrate the band's 50th Anniversary, InsideOutMusic has released Another Fork in the Road – 50 Years of KANSAS. The 3-CD career-spanning collection features carefully selected tracks from across KANSAS's sizable discography. It also includes a new version of the song ‘Can I Tell You.' Originally released on their 1974 debut album, the song is updated by the current lineup. Another Fork in the Road – 50 Years of KANSAS is available now. Fans can order it here - https://kansas.lnk.to/AnotherForkInTheRoad-50YearsOfKansas “I'm incredibly excited about the 50th Anniversary Tour,” adds lead vocalist Ronnie Platt. “I tell people I'm not allowed to create a setlist, because it would be five hours long. There are so many songs I want to perform live. I think fans will be excited not only to hear our hits and fan favorites spanning 50 years of KANSAS, but also some songs that haven't been performed live in decades.” KANSAS is currently comprised of original drummer Phil Ehart, bassist/vocalist Billy Greer, vocalist/keyboardist Ronnie Platt, violinist/guitarist David Ragsdale, keyboardist/vocalist Tom Brislin, and original guitarist Richard Williams. With no signs of slowing down, KANSAS continues to perform in front of large and enthusiastic audiences. KANSAS is set to perform its “KANSAS Classics” set during concert dates in March, April, and May of 2023. KANSAS 50th ANNIVERSARY TOUR – ANOTHER FORK IN THE ROAD CONFIRMED DATES*: DATE CITY VENUE June 2, 2023 Pittsburgh, PA Benedum Center for the Performing Arts June 3, 2023 Baltimore, MD The Lyric Baltimore June 9, 2023 Glenside, PA Keswick Theatre June 10, 2023 Glenside, PA Keswick Theatre June 16, 2023 Fort Wayne, IN Embassy Theatre June 17, 2023 Detroit, MI Fisher Theatre June 29, 2023 Toronto, ON Massey Hall July 1, 2023 Rochester, NY Kodak Center July 7, 2023 Cincinnati, OH Taft Theatre July 8, 2023 Indianapolis, IN Clowes Memorial Hall July 14, 2023 Minneapolis, MN State Theatre July 15, 2023 Chicago, IL The Chicago Theatre July 21, 2023 Wausau, WI The Grand Theater July 22, 2023 Milwaukee, WI The Riverside Theater July 27, 2023 Kansas City, MO The Midland Theatre July 29, 2023 St. Louis, MO The Fabulous Fox Theatre August 4, 2023 Des Moines, IA Hoyt Sherman Place August 5, 2023 Omaha, NE Orpheum Theater August 18, 2023 Knoxville, TN Tennessee Theatre August 19, 2023 Nashville, TN Ryman Auditorium August 25, 2023 Denver, CO The Paramount Theatre August 26, 2023 Salt Lake City, UT Eccles Theater September 6, 2023 Vancouver, BC Queen Elizabeth Theatre September 8, 2023 Seattle, WA The Paramount Theater September 9, 2023 Portland, OR Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall September 12, 2023 Boise, ID Morrison Center for the Performing Arts September 14, 2023 San Francisco, CA Golden Gate Theatre September 16, 2023 Los Angeles, CA The Orpheum Theatre September 17, 2023 San Diego, CA Balboa Theatre September 20, 2023 To Be Announced September 22, 2023 Albuquerque, NM Kiva Auditorium September 24, 2023 El Paso, TX The Plaza Theatre October 12, 2023 Worcester, MA The Hanover Theatre October 13, 2023 Brookville, NY Tilles Center for the Performing Arts October 20, 2023 San Antonio, TX Tobin Center for the Performing Arts October 21, 2023 Sugar Land, TX Smart Financial Centre at Sugar Land October 26, 2023 Huntsville, AL Von Braun Center – Mark C. Smith Concert Hall October 27, 2023 Memphis, TN Orpheum Theatre November 3, 2023 Charlotte, NC Ovens Auditorium November 4, 2023 Durham, NC Durham Performing Arts Center December 1, 2023 Savannah, GA Johnny Mercer Theatre December 2, 2023 Atlanta, GA Fox Theatre January 12, 2024 Jacksonville, FL Florida Theatre January 13, 2024 North Charleston, SC North Charleston Performing Arts Center January 19, 2024 Fort Myers, FL Barbara B. Mann Performing Arts Hall January 20, 2024 Clearwater, FL Ruth Eckerd Hall January 27, 2024 Melbourne, FL Maxwell C. King Center for the Performing Arts January 28, 2024 Fort Lauderdale, FL Broward Center for the Performing Arts *Two additional dates to be announced KANSAS CLASSICS TOUR DATES**: DATE CITY VENUE March 11, 2023 Tampa, FL Busch Gardens March 17, 2023 Shawnee, OK Heart of Oklahoma Exposition Center March 23, 2023 Winterhaven, CA Quechan Casino March 24, 2023 Pala, CA Pala Casino March 25, 2023 Queen Creek, AZ The Good Life Festival April 1, 2023 Lincoln, CA Thunder Valley Casino Resort with Blue Oyster Cult April 20, 2023 Marion, IL Marion Cultural & Civic Center April 22, 2023 Forrest City, AR EACC Fine Arts Center May 19, 2023 Decatur, IL The Devon Lakeshore Amphitheater May 21, 2023 Louisville, KY Iroquois Amphitheater ** More dates to be announced For more information on KANSAS and the Another Fork in the Road – 50th Anniversary Tour please visit: www.kansasband.com www.facebook.com/kansasband www.twitter.com/kansasband www.instagram.com/kansasband www.youtube.com/kansas
Thank you for being part of the conversation. This is Play It Forward. Real people. Real stories. The struggle to Play It Forward Episode 556 With Richard Williams From The Group Kansas In 1973, the “garage band” from Topeka was discovered by Wally Gold, signed by Don Kirshner, and released their debut album in 1974. KANSAS has gone on to compile a catalogue that includes sixteen studio albums and five live albums. KANSAS has produced eight gold albums, three sextuple-Platinum albums (Leftoverture, Point of Know Return, Best of KANSAS), one platinum live album (Two for the Show), one quadruple-Platinum single ‘Carry On Wayward Son,' and another triple-Platinum single ‘Dust in the Wind.' Most recently, KANSAS has released two Billboard charting albums with 2016's The Prelude Implicit and 2020's The Absence of Presence. “Our entire career has been a winding journey,” comments KANSAS guitarist and original member Richard Williams. “Whether it's been the ‘original' lineup signing with Don Kirshner, years on the bus, touring with Queen, worldwide success peaking with Leftoverture & Point of Know Return, the valleys of the 90's and ‘dinosaur bands' losing steam, various lineup changes, to our most recent ‘rebirth' and success of our latest new music over the last eight years; there have been several forks in the road of that journey. This 50th Anniversary Tour and release will represent that journey and the forks along that road.” To further celebrate the band's 50th Anniversary, InsideOutMusic has released Another Fork in the Road – 50 Years of KANSAS. The 3-CD career-spanning collection features carefully selected tracks from across KANSAS's sizable discography. It also includes a new version of the song ‘Can I Tell You.' Originally released on their 1974 debut album, the song is updated by the current lineup. Another Fork in the Road – 50 Years of KANSAS is available now. Fans can order it here - https://kansas.lnk.to/AnotherForkInTheRoad-50YearsOfKansas
Episode 162 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Daydream Believer", and the later career of the Monkees, and how four Pinocchios became real boys. 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 "Born to be Wild" by Steppenwolf. 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 No Mixcloud this time, as even after splitting it into multiple files, there are simply too many Monkees tracks excerpted. 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, none of those are in print. However, at the time of writing there is a new four-CD super-deluxe box set of Headquarters (with a remixed version of the album rather than the original mixes I've excerpted here) available from that site, and I used the liner notes for that here. Monkees.com also currently has the intermittently-available BluRay box set of the entire Monkees TV series, which also has Head and 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee. 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 in 2021, 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 When we left the Monkees, they were in a state of flux. To recap what we covered in that episode, the Monkees were originally cast as actors in a TV show, and consisted of two actors with some singing ability -- the former child stars Davy Jones and Micky Dolenz -- and two musicians who were also competent comic actors, Michael Nesmith and Peter Tork. The show was about a fictional band whose characters shared names with their actors, and there had quickly been two big hit singles, and two hit albums, taken from the music recorded for the TV show's soundtrack. But this had caused problems for the actors. The records were being promoted as being by the fictional group in the TV series, blurring the line between the TV show and reality, though in fact for the most part they were being made by session musicians with only Dolenz or Jones adding lead vocals to pre-recorded backing tracks. Dolenz and Jones were fine with this, but Nesmith, who had been allowed to write and produce a few album tracks himself, wanted more creative input, and more importantly felt that he was being asked to be complicit in fraud because the records credited the four Monkees as the musicians when (other than a tiny bit of inaudible rhythm guitar by Tork on a couple of Nesmith's tracks) none of them played on them. Tork, meanwhile, believed he had been promised that the group would be an actual group -- that they would all be playing on the records together -- and felt hurt and annoyed that this wasn't the case. They were by now playing live together to promote the series and the records, with Dolenz turning out to be a perfectly competent drummer, so surely they could do the same in the studio? So in January 1967, things came to a head. It's actually quite difficult to sort out exactly what happened, because of conflicting recollections and opinions. What follows is my best attempt to harmonise the different versions of the story into one coherent narrative, but be aware that I could be wrong in some of the details. Nesmith and Tork, who disliked each other in most respects, were both agreed that this couldn't continue and that if there were going to be Monkees records released at all, they were going to have the Monkees playing on them. Dolenz, who seems to have been the one member of the group that everyone could get along with, didn't really care but went along with them for the sake of group harmony. And Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider, the production team behind the series, also took Nesmith and Tork's side, through a general love of mischief. But on the other side was Don Kirshner, the music publisher who was in charge of supervising the music for the TV show. Kirshner was adamantly, angrily, opposed to the very idea of the group members having any input at all into how the records were made. He considered that they should be grateful for the huge pay cheques they were getting from records his staff writers and producers were making for them, and stop whinging. And Davy Jones was somewhere in the middle. He wanted to support his co-stars, who he genuinely liked, but also, he was a working actor, he'd had other roles before, he'd have other roles afterwards, and as a working actor you do what you're told if you don't want to lose the job you've got. Jones had grown up in very severe poverty, and had been his family's breadwinner from his early teens, and artistic integrity is all very nice, but not as nice as a cheque for a quarter of a million dollars. Although that might be slightly unfair -- it might be fairer to say that artistic integrity has a different meaning to someone like Jones, coming from musical theatre and a tradition of "the show must go on", than it does to people like Nesmith and Tork who had come up through the folk clubs. Jones' attitude may also have been affected by the fact that his character in the TV show didn't play an instrument other than the occasional tambourine or maracas. The other three were having to mime instrumental parts they hadn't played, and to reproduce them on stage, but Jones didn't have that particular disadvantage. Bert Schneider, one of the TV show's producers, encouraged the group to go into the recording studio themselves, with a producer of their choice, and cut a couple of tracks to prove what they could do. Michael Nesmith, who at this point was the one who was most adamant about taking control of the music, chose Chip Douglas to produce. Douglas was someone that Nesmith had known a little while, as they'd both played the folk circuit -- in Douglas' case as a member of the Modern Folk Quartet -- but Douglas had recently joined the Turtles as their new bass player. At this point, Douglas had never officially produced a record, but he was a gifted arranger, and had just arranged the Turtles' latest single, which had just been released and was starting to climb the charts: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "Happy Together"] Douglas quit the Turtles to work with the Monkees, and took the group into the studio to cut two demo backing tracks for a potential single as a proof of concept. These initial sessions didn't have any vocals, but featured Nesmith on guitar, Tork on piano, Dolenz on drums, Jones on tambourine, and an unknown bass player -- possibly Douglas himself, possibly Nesmith's friend John London, who he'd played with in Mike and John and Bill. They cut rough tracks of two songs, "All of Your Toys", by another friend of Nesmith's, Bill Martin, and Nesmith's "The Girl I Knew Somewhere": [Excerpt: The Monkees, "The Girl I Knew Somewhere (Gold Star Demo)"] Those tracks were very rough and ready -- they were garage-band tracks rather than the professional studio recordings that the Candy Store Prophets or Jeff Barry's New York session players had provided for the previous singles -- but they were competent in the studio, thanks largely to Chip Douglas' steadying influence. As Douglas later said "They could hardly play. Mike could play adequate rhythm guitar. Pete could play piano but he'd make mistakes, and Micky's time on drums was erratic. He'd speed up or slow down." But the takes they managed to get down showed that they *could* do it. Rafelson and Schneider agreed with them that the Monkees could make a single together, and start recording at least some of their own tracks. So the group went back into the studio, with Douglas producing -- and with Lester Sill from the music publishers there to supervise -- and cut finished versions of the two songs. This time the lineup was Nesmith on guitar, Tork on electric harpsichord -- Tork had always been a fan of Bach, and would in later years perform Bach pieces as his solo spot in Monkees shows -- Dolenz on drums, London on bass, and Jones on tambourine: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "The Girl I Knew Somewhere (first recorded version)"] But while this was happening, Kirshner had been trying to get new Monkees material recorded without them -- he'd not yet agreed to having the group play on their own records. Three days after the sessions for "All of Your Toys" and "The Girl I Knew Somewhere", sessions started in New York for an entire album's worth of new material, produced by Jeff Barry and Denny Randell, and largely made by the same Red Bird Records team who had made "I'm a Believer" -- the same musicians who in various combinations had played on everything from "Sherry" by the Four Seasons to "Like a Rolling Stone" by Dylan to "Leader of the Pack", and with songs by Neil Diamond, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, Leiber and Stoller, and the rest of the team of songwriters around Red Bird. But at this point came the meeting we talked about towards the end of the "Last Train to Clarksville" episode, in which Nesmith punched a hole in a hotel wall in frustration at what he saw as Kirshner's obstinacy. Kirshner didn't want to listen to the recordings the group had made. He'd promised Jeff Barry and Neil Diamond that if "I'm a Believer" went to number one, Barry would get to produce, and Diamond write, the group's next single. Chip Douglas wasn't a recognised producer, and he'd made this commitment. But the group needed a new single out. A compromise was offered, of sorts, by Kirshner -- how about if Barry flew over from New York to LA to produce the group, they'd scrap the tracks both the group and Barry had recorded, and Barry would produce new tracks for the songs he'd recorded, with the group playing on them? But that wouldn't work either. The group members were all due to go on holiday -- three of them were going to make staggered trips to the UK, partly to promote the TV series, which was just starting over here, and partly just to have a break. They'd been working sixty-plus hour weeks for months between the TV series, live performances, and the recording studio, and they were basically falling-down tired, which was one of the reasons for Nesmith's outburst in the meeting. They weren't accomplished enough musicians to cut tracks quickly, and they *needed* the break. On top of that, Nesmith and Barry had had a major falling-out at the "I'm a Believer" session, and Nesmith considered it a matter of personal integrity that he couldn't work with a man who in his eyes had insulted his professionalism. So that was out, but there was also no way Kirshner was going to let the group release a single consisting of two songs he hadn't heard, produced by a producer with no track record. At first, the group were insistent that "All of Your Toys" should be the A-side for their next single: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "All Of Your Toys"] But there was an actual problem with that which they hadn't foreseen. Bill Martin, who wrote the song, was under contract to another music publisher, and the Monkees' contracts said they needed to only record songs published by Screen Gems. Eventually, it was Micky Dolenz who managed to cut the Gordian knot -- or so everyone thought. Dolenz was the one who had the least at stake of any of them -- he was already secure as the voice of the hits, he had no particular desire to be an instrumentalist, but he wanted to support his colleagues. Dolenz suggested that it would be a reasonable compromise to put out a single with one of the pre-recorded backing tracks on one side, with him or Jones singing, and with the version of "The Girl I Knew Somewhere" that the band had recorded together on the other. That way, Kirshner and the record label would get their new single without too much delay, the group would still be able to say they'd started recording their own tracks, everyone would get some of what they wanted. So it was agreed -- though there was a further stipulation. "The Girl I Knew Somewhere" had Nesmith singing lead vocals, and up to that point every Monkees single had featured Dolenz on lead on both sides. As far as Kirshner and the other people involved in making the release decisions were concerned, that was the way things were going to continue. Everyone was fine with this -- Nesmith, the one who was most likely to object in principle, in practice realised that having Dolenz sing his song would make it more likely to be played on the radio and used in the TV show, and so increase his royalties. A vocal session was arranged in New York for Dolenz and Jones to come and cut some vocal tracks right before Dolenz and Nesmith flew over to the UK. But in the meantime, it had become even more urgent for the group to be seen to be doing their own recording. An in-depth article on the group in the Saturday Evening Post had come out, quoting Nesmith as saying "It was what Kirshner wanted to do. Our records are not our forte. I don't care if we never sell another record. Maybe we were manufactured and put on the air strictly with a lot of hoopla. Tell the world we're synthetic because, damn it, we are. Tell them the Monkees are wholly man-made overnight, that millions of dollars have been poured into this thing. Tell the world we don't record our own music. But that's us they see on television. The show is really a part of us. They're not seeing something invalid." The press immediately jumped on the band, and started trying to portray them as con artists exploiting their teenage fans, though as Nesmith later said "The press decided they were going to unload on us as being somehow illegitimate, somehow false. That we were making an attempt to dupe the public, when in fact it was me that was making the attempt to maintain the integrity. So the press went into a full-scale war against us." Tork, on the other hand, while he and Nesmith were on the same side about the band making their own records, blamed Nesmith for much of the press reaction, later saying "Michael blew the whistle on us. If he had gone in there with pride and said 'We are what we are and we have no reason to hang our heads in shame' it never would have happened." So as far as the group were concerned, they *needed* to at least go with Dolenz's suggested compromise. Their personal reputations were on the line. When Dolenz arrived at the session in New York, he was expecting to be asked to cut one vocal track, for the A-side of the next single (and presumably a new lead vocal for "The Girl I Knew Somewhere"). When he got there, though, he found that Kirshner expected him to record several vocals so that Kirshner could choose the best. That wasn't what had been agreed, and so Dolenz flat-out refused to record anything at all. Luckily for Kirshner, Jones -- who was the most co-operative member of the band -- was willing to sing a handful of songs intended for Dolenz as well as the ones he was meant to sing. So the tape of "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You", the song intended for the next single, was slowed down so it would be in a suitable key for Jones instead, and he recorded the vocal for that: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You"] Incidentally, while Jones recorded vocals for several more tracks at the session -- and some would later be reused as album tracks a few years down the line -- not all of the recorded tracks were used for vocals, and this later gave rise to a rumour that has been repeated as fact by almost everyone involved, though it was a misunderstanding. Kirshner's next major success after the Monkees was another made-for-TV fictional band, the Archies, and their biggest hit was "Sugar Sugar", co-written and produced by Jeff Barry: [Excerpt: The Archies, "Sugar Sugar"] Both Kirshner and the Monkees have always claimed that the Monkees were offered "Sugar, Sugar" and turned it down. To Kirshner the moral of the story was that since "Sugar, Sugar" was a massive hit, it proved his instincts right and proved that the Monkees didn't know what would make a hit. To the Monkees, on the other hand, it showed that Kirshner wanted them to do bubblegum music that they considered ridiculous. This became such an established factoid that Dolenz regularly tells the story in his live performances, and includes a version of "Sugar, Sugar" in them, rearranged as almost a torch song: [Excerpt: Micky Dolenz, "Sugar, Sugar (live)"] But in fact, "Sugar, Sugar" wasn't written until long after Kirshner and the Monkees had parted ways. But one of the songs for which a backing track was recorded but no vocals were ever completed was "Sugar Man", a song by Denny Randell and Sandy Linzer, which they would later release themselves as an unsuccessful single: [Excerpt: Linzer and Randell, "Sugar Man"] Over the years, the Monkees not recording "Sugar Man" became the Monkees not recording "Sugar, Sugar". Meanwhile, Dolenz and Nesmith had flown over to the UK to do some promotional work and relax, and Jones soon also flew over, though didn't hang out with his bandmates, preferring to spend more time with his family. Both Dolenz and Nesmith spent a lot of time hanging out with British pop stars, and were pleased to find that despite the manufactured controversy about them being a manufactured group, none of the British musicians they admired seemed to care. Eric Burdon, for example, was quoted in the Melody Maker as saying "They make very good records, I can't understand how people get upset about them. You've got to make up your minds whether a group is a record production group or one that makes live appearances. For example, I like to hear a Phil Spector record and I don't worry if it's the Ronettes or Ike and Tina Turner... I like the Monkees record as a grand record, no matter how people scream. So somebody made a record and they don't play, so what? Just enjoy the record." Similarly, the Beatles were admirers of the Monkees, especially the TV show, despite being expected to have a negative opinion of them, as you can hear in this contemporary recording of Paul McCartney answering a fan's questions: Excerpt: Paul McCartney talks about the Monkees] Both Dolenz and Nesmith hung out with the Beatles quite a bit -- they both visited Sgt. Pepper recording sessions, and if you watch the film footage of the orchestral overdubs for "A Day in the Life", Nesmith is there with all the other stars of the period. Nesmith and his wife Phyllis even stayed with the Lennons for a couple of days, though Cynthia Lennon seems to have thought of the Nesmiths as annoying intruders who had been invited out of politeness and not realised they weren't wanted. That seems plausible, but at the same time, John Lennon doesn't seem the kind of person to not make his feelings known, and Michael Nesmith's reports of the few days they stayed there seem to describe a very memorable experience, where after some initial awkwardness he developed a bond with Lennon, particularly once he saw that Lennon was a fan of Captain Beefheart, who was a friend of Nesmith, and whose Safe as Milk album Lennon was examining when Nesmith turned up, and whose music at this point bore a lot of resemblance to the kind of thing Nesmith was doing: [Excerpt: Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band, "Yellow Brick Road"] Or at least, that's how Nesmith always told the story later -- though Safe as Milk didn't come out until nearly six months later. It's possible he's conflating memories from a later trip to the UK in June that year -- where he also talked about how Lennon was the only person he'd really got on with on the previous trip, because "he's a compassionate person. I know he has a reputation for being caustic, but it is only a cover for the depth of his feeling." Nesmith and Lennon apparently made some experimental music together during the brief stay, with Nesmith being impressed by Lennon's Mellotron and later getting one himself. Dolenz, meanwhile, was spending more time with Paul McCartney, and with Spencer Davis of his current favourite band The Spencer Davis Group. But even more than that he was spending a lot of time with Samantha Juste, a model and TV presenter whose job it was to play the records on Top of the Pops, the most important British TV pop show, and who had released a record herself a couple of months earlier, though it hadn't been a success: [Excerpt: Samantha Juste, "No-one Needs My Love Today"] The two quickly fell deeply in love, and Juste would become Dolenz's first wife the next year. When Nesmith and Dolenz arrived back in the US after their time off, they thought the plan was still to release "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You" with "The Girl I Knew Somewhere" on the B-side. So Nesmith was horrified to hear on the radio what the announcer said were the two sides of the new Monkees single -- "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You", and "She Hangs Out", another song from the Jeff Barry sessions with a Davy vocal. Don Kirshner had gone ahead and picked two songs from the Jeff Barry sessions and delivered them to RCA Records, who had put a single out in Canada. The single was very, *very* quickly withdrawn once the Monkees and the TV producers found out, and only promo copies seem to circulate -- rather than being credited to "the Monkees", both sides are credited to '"My Favourite Monkee" Davy Jones Sings'. The record had been withdrawn, but "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You" was clearly going to have to be the single. Three days after the record was released and pulled, Nesmith, Dolenz and Tork were back in the studio with Chip Douglas, recording a new B-side -- a new version of "The Girl I Knew Somewhere", this time with Dolenz on vocals. As Jones was still in the UK, John London added the tambourine part as well as the bass: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "The Girl I Knew Somewhere (single version)"] As Nesmith told the story a couple of months later, "Bert said 'You've got to get this thing in Micky's key for Micky to sing it.' I said 'Has Donnie made a commitment? I don't want to go there and break my neck in order to get this thing if Donnie hasn't made a commitment. And Bert refused to say anything. He said 'I can't tell you anything except just go and record.'" What had happened was that the people at Columbia had had enough of Kirshner. As far as Rafelson and Schneider were concerned, the real problem in all this was that Kirshner had been making public statements taking all the credit for the Monkees' success and casting himself as the puppetmaster. They thought this was disrespectful to the performers -- and unstated but probably part of it, that it was disrespectful to Rafelson and Schneider for their work putting the TV show together -- and that Kirshner had allowed his ego to take over. Things like the liner notes for More of the Monkees which made Kirshner and his stable of writers more important than the performers had, in the view of the people at Raybert Productions, put the Monkees in an impossible position and forced them to push back. Schneider later said "Kirshner had an ego that transcended everything else. As a matter of fact, the press issue was probably magnified a hundred times over because of Kirshner. He wanted everybody thinking 'Hey, he's doing all this, not them.' In the end it was very self-destructive because it heightened the whole press issue and it made them feel lousy." Kirshner was out of a job, first as the supervisor for the Monkees and then as the head of Columbia/Screen Gems Music. In his place came Lester Sill, the man who had got Leiber and Stoller together as songwriters, who had been Lee Hazelwood's production partner on his early records with Duane Eddy, and who had been the "Les" in Philles Records until Phil Spector pushed him out. Sill, unlike Kirshner, was someone who was willing to take a back seat and just be a steadying hand where needed. The reissued version of "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You" went to number two on the charts, behind "Somethin' Stupid" by Frank and Nancy Sinatra, produced by Sill's old colleague Hazelwood, and the B-side, "The Girl I Knew Somewhere", also charted separately, making number thirty-nine on the charts. The Monkees finally had a hit that they'd written and recorded by themselves. Pinocchio had become a real boy: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "The Girl I Knew Somewhere (single version)"] At the same session at which they'd recorded that track, the Monkees had recorded another Nesmith song, "Sunny Girlfriend", and that became the first song to be included on a new album, which would eventually be named Headquarters, and on which all the guitar, keyboard, drums, percussion, banjo, pedal steel, and backing vocal parts would for the first time be performed by the Monkees themselves. They brought in horn and string players on a couple of tracks, and the bass was variously played by John London, Chip Douglas, and Jerry Yester as Tork was more comfortable on keyboards and guitar than bass, but it was in essence a full band album. Jones got back the next day, and sessions began in earnest. The first song they recorded after his return was "Mr. Webster", a Boyce and Hart song that had been recorded with the Candy Store Prophets in 1966 but hadn't been released. This was one of three tracks on the album that were rerecordings of earlier outtakes, and it's fascinating to compare them, to see the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches. In the case of "Mr. Webster", the instrumental backing on the earlier version is definitely slicker: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Mr. Webster (1st Recorded Version)"] But at the same time, there's a sense of dynamics in the group recording that's lacking from the original, like the backing dropping out totally on the word "Stop" -- a nice touch that isn't in the original. I am only speculating, but this may have been inspired by the similar emphasis on the word "stop" in "For What It's Worth" by Tork's old friend Stephen Stills: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Mr. Webster (album version)"] Headquarters was a group album in another way though -- for the first time, Tork and Dolenz were bringing in songs they'd written -- Nesmith of course had supplied songs already for the two previous albums. Jones didn't write any songs himself yet, though he'd start on the next album, but he was credited with the rest of the group on two joke tracks, "Band 6", a jam on the Merrie Melodies theme “Merrily We Roll Along”, and "Zilch", a track made up of the four band members repeating nonsense phrases: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Zilch"] Oddly, that track had a rather wider cultural resonance than a piece of novelty joke album filler normally would. It's sometimes covered live by They Might Be Giants: [Excerpt: They Might Be Giants, "Zilch"] While the rapper Del Tha Funkee Homosapien had a worldwide hit in 1991 with "Mistadobalina", built around a sample of Peter Tork from the track: [Excerpt: Del Tha Funkee Homosapien,"Mistadobalina"] Nesmith contributed three songs, all of them combining Beatles-style pop music and country influences, none more blatantly than the opening track, "You Told Me", which starts off parodying the opening of "Taxman", before going into some furious banjo-picking from Tork: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "You Told Me"] Tork, meanwhile, wrote "For Pete's Sake" with his flatmate of the time, and that became the end credits music for season two of the TV series: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "For Pete's Sake"] But while the other band members made important contributions, the track on the album that became most popular was the first song of Dolenz's to be recorded by the group. The lyrics recounted, in a semi-psychedelic manner, Dolenz's time in the UK, including meeting with the Beatles, who the song refers to as "the four kings of EMI", but the first verse is all about his new girlfriend Samantha Juste: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Randy Scouse Git"] The song was released as a single in the UK, but there was a snag. Dolenz had given the song a title he'd heard on an episode of the BBC sitcom Til Death Us Do Part, which he'd found an amusing bit of British slang. Til Death Us Do Part was written by Johnny Speight, a writer with Associated London Scripts, and was a family sitcom based around the character of Alf Garnett, an ignorant, foul-mouthed reactionary bigot who hated young people, socialists, and every form of minority, especially Black people (who he would address by various slurs I'm definitely not going to repeat here), and was permanently angry at the world and abusive to his wife. As with another great sitcom from ALS, Steptoe and Son, which Norman Lear adapted for the US as Sanford and Son, Til Death Us Do Part was also adapted by Lear, and became All in the Family. But while Archie Bunker, the character based on Garnett in the US version, has some redeeming qualities because of the nature of US network sitcom, Alf Garnett has absolutely none, and is as purely unpleasant and unsympathetic a character as has ever been created -- which sadly didn't stop a section of the audience from taking him as a character to be emulated. A big part of the show's dynamic was the relationship between Garnett and his socialist son-in-law from Liverpool, played by Anthony Booth, himself a Liverpudlian socialist who would later have a similarly contentious relationship with his own decidedly non-socialist son-in-law, the future Prime Minister Tony Blair. Garnett was as close to foul-mouthed as was possible on British TV at the time, with Speight regularly negotiating with the BBC bosses to be allowed to use terms that were not otherwise heard on TV, and used various offensive terms about his family, including referring to his son-in-law as a "randy Scouse git". Dolenz had heard the phrase on TV, had no idea what it meant but loved the sound of it, and gave the song that title. But when the record came out in the UK, he was baffled to be told that the phrase -- which he'd picked up from a BBC TV show, after all -- couldn't be said normally on BBC broadcasts, so they would need to retitle the track. The translation into American English that Dolenz uses in his live shows to explain this to Americans is to say that "randy Scouse git" means "horny Liverpudlian putz", and that's more or less right. Dolenz took the need for an alternative title literally, and so the track that went to number two in the UK charts was titled "Alternate Title": [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Randy Scouse Git"] The album itself went to number one in both the US and the UK, though it was pushed off the top spot almost straight away by the release of Sgt Pepper. As sessions for Headquarters were finishing up, the group were already starting to think about their next album -- season two of the TV show was now in production, and they'd need to keep generating yet more musical material for it. One person they turned to was a friend of Chip Douglas'. Before the Turtles, Douglas had been in the Modern Folk Quartet, and they'd recorded "This Could Be the Night", which had been written for them by Harry Nilsson: [Excerpt: The MFQ, "This Could Be The Night"] Nilsson had just started recording his first solo album proper, at RCA Studios, the same studios that the Monkees were using. At this point, Nilsson still had a full-time job in a bank, working a night shift there while working on his album during the day, but Douglas knew that Nilsson was a major talent, and that assessment was soon shared by the group when Nilsson came in to demo nine of his songs for them: [Excerpt: Harry Nilsson, "1941 (demo)"] According to Nilsson, Nesmith said after that demo session "You just sat down there and blew our minds. We've been looking for songs, and you just sat down and played an *album* for us!" While the Monkees would attempt a few of Nilsson's songs over the next year or so, the first one they chose to complete was the first track recorded for their next album, Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn, and Jones, Ltd., a song which from the talkback at the beginning of the demo was always intended for Davy Jones to sing: [Excerpt: Harry Nilsson, "Cuddly Toy (demo)"] Oddly, given his romantic idol persona, a lot of the songs given to Jones to sing were anti-romantic, and often had a cynical and misogynistic edge. This had started with the first album's "I Want to Be Free", but by Pisces, it had gone to ridiculous extremes. Of the four songs Jones sings on the album, "Hard to Believe", the first song proper that he ever co-wrote, is a straightforward love song, but the other three have a nasty edge to them. A remade version of Jeff Barry's "She Hangs Out" is about an underaged girl, starts with the lines "How old d'you say your sister was? You know you'd better keep an eye on her" and contains lines like "she could teach you a thing or two" and "you'd better get down here on the double/before she gets her pretty little self in trouble/She's so fine". Goffin and King's "Star Collector" is worse, a song about a groupie with lines like "How can I love her, if I just don't respect her?" and "It won't take much time, before I get her off my mind" But as is so often the way, these rather nasty messages were wrapped up in some incredibly catchy music, and that was even more the case with "Cuddly Toy", a song which at least is more overtly unpleasant -- it's very obvious that Nilsson doesn't intend the protagonist of the song to be at all sympathetic, which is possibly not the case in "She Hangs Out" or "Star Collector". But the character Jones is singing is *viciously* cruel here, mocking and taunting a girl who he's coaxed to have sex with him, only to scorn her as soon as he's got what he wanted: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Cuddly Toy"] It's a great song if you like the cruelest of humour combined with the cheeriest of music, and the royalties from the song allowed Nilsson to quit the job at the bank. "Cuddly Toy", and Chip Douglas and Bill Martin's song "The Door Into Summer", were recorded the same way as Headquarters, with the group playing *as a group*, but as recordings for the album progressed the group fell into a new way of working, which Peter Tork later dubbed "mixed-mode". They didn't go back to having tracks cut for them by session musicians, apart from Jones' song "Hard to Believe", for which the entire backing track was created by one of his co-writers overdubbing himself, but Dolenz, who Tork always said was "incapable of repeating a triumph", was not interested in continuing to play drums in the studio. Instead, a new hybrid Monkees would perform most of the album. Nesmith would still play the lead guitar, Tork would provide the keyboards, Chip Douglas would play all the bass and add some additional guitar, and "Fast" Eddie Hoh, the session drummer who had been a touring drummer with the Modern Folk Quartet and the Mamas and the Papas, among others, would play drums on the records, with Dolenz occasionally adding a bit of acoustic guitar. And this was the lineup that would perform on the hit single from Pisces. "Pleasant Valley Sunday" was written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King, who had written several songs for the group's first two albums (and who would continue to provide them with more songs). As with their earlier songs for the group, King had recorded a demo: [Excerpt: Carole King, "Pleasant Valley Sunday (demo)"] Previously -- and subsequently -- when presented with a Carole King demo, the group and their producers would just try to duplicate it as closely as possible, right down to King's phrasing. Bob Rafelson has said that he would sometimes hear those demos and wonder why King didn't just make records herself -- and without wanting to be too much of a spoiler for a few years' time, he wasn't the only one wondering that. But this time, the group had other plans. In particular, they wanted to make a record with a strong guitar riff to it -- Nesmith has later referenced their own "Last Train to Clarksville" and the Beatles' "Day Tripper" as two obvious reference points for the track. Douglas came up with a riff and taught it to Nesmith, who played it on the track: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Pleasant Valley Sunday"] The track also ended with the strongest psychedelic -- or "psycho jello" as the group would refer to it -- freak out that they'd done to this point, a wash of saturated noise: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Pleasant Valley Sunday"] King was unhappy with the results, and apparently glared at Douglas the next time they met. This may be because of the rearrangement from her intentions, but it may also be for a reason that Douglas later suspected. When recording the track, he hadn't been able to remember all the details of her demo, and in particular he couldn't remember exactly how the middle eight went. This is the version on King's demo: [Excerpt: Carole King, "Pleasant Valley Sunday (demo)"] While here's how the Monkees rendered it, with slightly different lyrics: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Pleasant Valley Sunday"] I also think there's a couple of chord changes in the second verse that differ between King and the Monkees, but I can't be sure that's not my ears deceiving me. Either way, though, the track was a huge success, and became one of the group's most well-known and well-loved tracks, making number three on the charts behind "All You Need is Love" and "Light My Fire". And while it isn't Dolenz drumming on the track, the fact that it's Nesmith playing guitar and Tork on the piano -- and the piano part is one of the catchiest things on the record -- meant that they finally had a proper major hit on which they'd played (and it seems likely that Dolenz contributed some of the acoustic rhythm guitar on the track, along with Bill Chadwick, and if that's true all three Monkee instrumentalists did play on the track). Pisces is by far and away the best album the group ever made, and stands up well against anything else that came out around that time. But cracks were beginning to show in the group. In particular, the constant battle to get some sort of creative input had soured Nesmith on the whole project. Chip Douglas later said "When we were doing Pisces Michael would come in with three songs; he knew he had three songs coming on the album. He knew that he was making a lot of money if he got his original songs on there. So he'd be real enthusiastic and cooperative and real friendly and get his three songs done. Then I'd say 'Mike, can you come in and help on this one we're going to do with Micky here?' He said 'No, Chip, I can't. I'm busy.' I'd say, 'Mike, you gotta come in the studio.' He'd say 'No Chip, I'm afraid I'm just gonna have to be ornery about it. I'm not comin' in.' That's when I started not liking Mike so much any more." Now, as is so often the case with the stories from this period, this appears to be inaccurate in the details -- Nesmith is present on every track on the album except Jones' solo "Hard to Believe" and Tork's spoken-word track "Peter Percival Patterson's Pet Pig Porky", and indeed this is by far the album with *most* Nesmith input, as he takes five lead vocals, most of them on songs he didn't write. But Douglas may well be summing up Nesmith's *attitude* to the band at this point -- listening to Nesmith's commentaries on episodes of the TV show, by this point he felt disengaged from everything that was going on, like his opinions weren't welcome. That said, Nesmith did still contribute what is possibly the single most innovative song the group ever did, though the innovations weren't primarily down to Nesmith: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Daily Nightly"] Nesmith always described the lyrics to "Daily Nightly" as being about the riots on Sunset Strip, but while they're oblique, they seem rather to be about streetwalking sex workers -- though it's perhaps understandable that Nesmith would never admit as much. What made the track innovative was the use of the Moog synthesiser. We talked about Robert Moog in the episode on "Good Vibrations" -- he had started out as a Theremin manufacturer, and had built the ribbon synthesiser that Mike Love played live on "Good Vibrations", and now he was building the first commercially available easily usable synthesisers. Previously, electronic instruments had either been things like the clavioline -- a simple monophonic keyboard instrument that didn't have much tonal variation -- or the RCA Mark II, a programmable synth that could make a wide variety of sounds, but took up an entire room and was programmed with punch cards. Moog's machines were bulky but still transportable, and they could be played in real time with a keyboard, but were still able to be modified to make a wide variety of different sounds. While, as we've seen, there had been electronic keyboard instruments as far back as the 1930s, Moog's instruments were for all intents and purposes the first synthesisers as we now understand the term. The Moog was introduced in late spring 1967, and immediately started to be used for making experimental and novelty records, like Hal Blaine's track "Love In", which came out at the beginning of June: [Excerpt: Hal Blaine, "Love In"] And the Electric Flag's soundtrack album for The Trip, the drug exploitation film starring Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper and written by Jack Nicholson we talked about last time, when Arthur Lee moved into a house used in the film: [Excerpt: The Electric Flag, "Peter's Trip"] In 1967 there were a total of six albums released with a Moog on them (as well as one non-album experimental single). Four of the albums were experimental or novelty instrumental albums of this type. Only two of them were rock albums -- Strange Days by the Doors, and Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn, & Jones Ltd by the Monkees. The Doors album was released first, but I believe the Monkees tracks were recorded before the Doors overdubbed the Moog on the tracks on their album, though some session dates are hard to pin down exactly. If that's the case it would make the Monkees the very first band to use the Moog on an actual rock record (depending on exactly how you count the Trip soundtrack -- this gets back again to my old claim that there's no first anything). But that's not the only way in which "Daily Nightly" was innovative. All the first seven albums to feature the Moog featured one man playing the instrument -- Paul Beaver, the Moog company's West Coast representative, who played on all the novelty records by members of the Wrecking Crew, and on the albums by the Electric Flag and the Doors, and on The Notorious Byrd Brothers by the Byrds, which came out in early 1968. And Beaver did play the Moog on one track on Pisces, "Star Collector". But on "Daily Nightly" it's Micky Dolenz playing the Moog, making him definitely the second person ever to play a Moog on a record of any kind: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Daily Nightly"] Dolenz indeed had bought his own Moog -- widely cited as being the second one ever in private ownership, a fact I can't check but which sounds plausible given that by 1970 less than thirty musicians owned one -- after seeing Beaver demonstrate the instrument at the Monterey Pop Festival. The Monkees hadn't played Monterey, but both Dolenz and Tork had attended the festival -- if you watch the famous film of it you see Dolenz and his girlfriend Samantha in the crowd a *lot*, while Tork introduced his friends in the Buffalo Springfield. As well as discovering the Moog there, Dolenz had been astonished by something else: [Excerpt: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, "Hey Joe (Live at Monterey)"] As Peter Tork later put it "I didn't get it. At Monterey Jimi followed the Who and the Who busted up their things and Jimi bashed up his guitar. I said 'I just saw explosions and destruction. Who needs it?' But Micky got it. He saw the genius and went for it." Dolenz was astonished by Hendrix, and insisted that he should be the support act on the group's summer tour. This pairing might sound odd on paper, but it made more sense at the time than it might sound. The Monkees were by all accounts a truly astonishing live act at this point -- Frank Zappa gave them a backhanded compliment by saying they were the best-sounding band in LA, before pointing out that this was because they could afford the best equipment. That *was* true, but it was also the case that their TV experience gave them a different attitude to live performance than anyone else performing at the time. A handful of groups had started playing stadiums, most notably of course the Beatles, but all of these acts had come up through playing clubs and theatres and essentially just kept doing their old act with no thought as to how the larger space worked, except to put their amps through a louder PA. The Monkees, though, had *started* in stadiums, and had started out as mass entertainers, and so their live show was designed from the ground up to play to those larger spaces. They had costume changes, elaborate stage sets -- like oversized fake Vox amps they burst out of at the start of the show -- a light show and a screen on which film footage was projected. In effect they invented stadium performances as we now know them. Nesmith later said "In terms of putting on a show there was never any question in my mind, as far as the rock 'n' roll era is concerned, that we put on probably the finest rock and roll stage show ever. It was beautifully lit, beautifully costumed, beautifully produced. I mean, for Christ sakes, it was practically a revue." The Monkees were confident enough in their stage performance that at a recent show at the Hollywood Bowl they'd had Ike and Tina Turner as their opening act -- not an act you'd want to go on after if you were going to be less than great, and an act from very similar chitlin' circuit roots to Jimi Hendrix. So from their perspective, it made sense. If you're going to be spectacular yourselves, you have no need to fear a spectacular opening act. Hendrix was less keen -- he was about the only musician in Britain who *had* made disparaging remarks about the Monkees -- but opening for the biggest touring band in the world isn't an opportunity you pass up, and again it isn't such a departure as one might imagine from the bills he was already playing. Remember that Monterey is really the moment when "pop" and "rock" started to split -- the split we've been talking about for a few months now -- and so the Jimi Hendrix Experience were still considered a pop band, and as such had played the normal British pop band package tours. In March and April that year, they'd toured on a bill with the Walker Brothers, Cat Stevens, and Englebert Humperdinck -- and Hendrix had even filled in for Humperdinck's sick guitarist on one occasion. Nesmith, Dolenz, and Tork all loved having Hendrix on tour with them, just because it gave them a chance to watch him live every night (Jones, whose musical tastes were more towards Anthony Newley, wasn't especially impressed), and they got on well on a personal level -- there are reports of Hendrix jamming with Dolenz and Steve Stills in hotel rooms. But there was one problem, as Dolenz often recreates in his live act: [Excerpt: Micky Dolenz, "Purple Haze"] The audience response to Hendrix from the Monkees' fans was so poor that by mutual agreement he left the tour after only a handful of shows. After the summer tour, the group went back to work on the TV show and their next album. Or, rather, four individuals went back to work. By this point, the group had drifted apart from each other, and from Douglas -- Tork, the one who was still keenest on the idea of the group as a group, thought that Pisces, good as it was, felt like a Chip Douglas album rather than a Monkees album. The four band members had all by now built up their own retinues of hangers-on and collaborators, and on set for the TV show they were now largely staying with their own friends rather than working as a group. And that was now reflected in their studio work. From now on, rather than have a single producer working with them as a band, the four men would work as individuals, producing their own tracks, occasionally with outside help, and bringing in session musicians to work on them. Some tracks from this point on would be genuine Monkees -- plural -- tracks, and all tracks would be credited as "produced by the Monkees", but basically the four men would from now on be making solo tracks which would be combined into albums, though Dolenz and Jones would occasionally guest on tracks by the others, especially when Nesmith came up with a song he thought would be more suited to their voices. Indeed the first new recording that happened after the tour was an entire Nesmith solo album -- a collection of instrumental versions of his songs, called The Wichita Train Whistle Sings, played by members of the Wrecking Crew and a few big band instrumentalists, arranged by Shorty Rogers. [Excerpt: Michael Nesmith, "You Told Me"] Hal Blaine in his autobiography claimed that the album was created as a tax write-off for Nesmith, though Nesmith always vehemently denied it, and claimed it was an artistic experiment, though not one that came off well. Released alongside Pisces, though, came one last group-recorded single. The B-side, "Goin' Down", is a song that was credited to the group and songwriter Diane Hildebrand, though in fact it developed from a jam on someone else's song. Nesmith, Tork, Douglas and Hoh attempted to record a backing track for a version of Mose Allison's jazz-blues standard "Parchman Farm": [Excerpt: Mose Allison, "Parchman Farm"] But after recording it, they'd realised that it didn't sound that much like the original, and that all it had in common with it was a chord sequence. Nesmith suggested that rather than put it out as a cover version, they put a new melody and lyrics to it, and they commissioned Hildebrand, who'd co-written songs for the group before, to write them, and got Shorty Rogers to write a horn arrangement to go over their backing track. The eventual songwriting credit was split five ways, between Hildebrand and the four Monkees -- including Davy Jones who had no involvement with the recording, but not including Douglas or Hoh. The lyrics Hildebrand came up with were a funny patter song about a failed suicide, taken at an extremely fast pace, which Dolenz pulls off magnificently: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Goin' Down"] The A-side, another track with a rhythm track by Nesmith, Tork, Douglas, and Hoh, was a song that had been written by John Stewart of the Kingston Trio, who you may remember from the episode on "San Francisco" as being a former songwriting partner of John Phillips. Stewart had written the song as part of a "suburbia trilogy", and was not happy with the finished product. He said later "I remember going to bed thinking 'All I did today was write 'Daydream Believer'." Stewart used to include the song in his solo sets, to no great approval, and had shopped the song around to bands like We Five and Spanky And Our Gang, who had both turned it down. He was unhappy with it himself, because of the chorus: [Excerpt: John Stewart, "Daydream Believer"] Stewart was ADHD, and the words "to a", coming as they did slightly out of the expected scansion for the line, irritated him so greatly that he thought the song could never be recorded by anyone, but when Chip Douglas asked if he had any songs, he suggested that one. As it turned out, there was a line of lyric that almost got the track rejected, but it wasn't the "to a". Stewart's original second verse went like this: [Excerpt: John Stewart, "Daydream Believer"] RCA records objected to the line "now you know how funky I can be" because funky, among other meanings, meant smelly, and they didn't like the idea of Davy Jones singing about being smelly. Chip Douglas phoned Stewart to tell him that they were insisting on changing the line, and suggesting "happy" instead. Stewart objected vehemently -- that change would reverse the entire meaning of the line, and it made no sense, and what about artistic integrity? But then, as he later said "He said 'Let me put it to you this way, John. If he can't sing 'happy' they won't do it'. And I said 'Happy's working real good for me now.' That's exactly what I said to him." He never regretted the decision -- Stewart would essentially live off the royalties from "Daydream Believer" for the rest of his life -- though he seemed always to be slightly ambivalent and gently mocking about the song in his own performances, often changing the lyrics slightly: [Excerpt: John Stewart, "Daydream Believer"] The Monkees had gone into the studio and cut the track, again with Tork on piano, Nesmith on guitar, Douglas on bass, and Hoh on drums. Other than changing "funky" to "happy", there were two major changes made in the studio. One seems to have been Douglas' idea -- they took the bass riff from the pre-chorus to the Beach Boys' "Help Me Rhonda": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Help Me Rhonda"] and Douglas played that on the bass as the pre-chorus for "Daydream Believer", with Shorty Rogers later doubling it in the horn arrangement: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Daydream Believer"] And the other is the piano intro, which also becomes an instrumental bridge, which was apparently the invention of Tork, who played it: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Daydream Believer"] The track went to number one, becoming the group's third and final number one hit, and their fifth of six million-sellers. It was included on the next album, The Birds, The Bees, and the Monkees, but that piano part would be Tork's only contribution to the album. As the group members were all now writing songs and cutting their own tracks, and were also still rerecording the odd old unused song from the initial 1966 sessions, The Birds, The Bees, and the Monkees was pulled together from a truly astonishing amount of material. The expanded triple-CD version of the album, now sadly out of print, has multiple versions of forty-four different songs, ranging from simple acoustic demos to completed tracks, of which twelve were included on the final album. Tork did record several tracks during the sessions, but he spent much of the time recording and rerecording a single song, "Lady's Baby", which eventually stretched to five different recorded versions over multiple sessions in a five-month period. He racked up huge studio bills on the track, bringing in Steve Stills and Dewey Martin of the Buffalo Springfield, and Buddy Miles, to try to help him capture the sound in his head, but the various takes are almost indistinguishable from one another, and so it's difficult to see what the problem was: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Lady's Baby"] Either way, the track wasn't finished by the time the album came out, and the album that came out was a curiously disjointed and unsatisfying effort, a mixture of recycled old Boyce and Hart songs, some songs by Jones, who at this point was convinced that "Broadway-rock" was going to be the next big thing and writing songs that sounded like mediocre showtunes, and a handful of experimental songs written by Nesmith. You could pull together a truly great ten- or twelve-track album from the masses of material they'd recorded, but the one that came out was mediocre at best, and became the first Monkees album not to make number one -- though it still made number three and sold in huge numbers. It also had the group's last million-selling single on it, "Valleri", an old Boyce and Hart reject from 1966 that had been remade with Boyce and Hart producing and their old session players, though the production credit was still now given to the Monkees: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Valleri"] Nesmith said at the time he considered it the worst song ever written. The second season of the TV show was well underway, and despite -- or possibly because of -- the group being clearly stoned for much of the filming, it contains a lot of the episodes that fans of the group think of most fondly, including several episodes that break out of the formula the show had previously established in interesting ways. Tork and Dolenz were both also given the opportunity to direct episodes, and Dolenz also co-wrote his episode, which ended up being the last of the series. In another sign of how the group were being given more creative control over the show, the last three episodes of the series had guest appearances by favourite musicians of the group members who they wanted to give a little exposure to, and those guest appearances sum up the character of the band members remarkably well. Tork, for whatever reason, didn't take up this option, but the other three did. Jones brought on his friend Charlie Smalls, who would later go on to write the music for the Broadway musical The Wiz, to demonstrate to Jones the difference between Smalls' Black soul and Jones' white soul: [Excerpt: Davy Jones and Charlie Smalls] Nesmith, on the other hand, brought on Frank Zappa. Zappa put on Nesmith's Monkee shirt and wool hat and pretended to be Nesmith, and interviewed Nesmith with a false nose and moustache pretending to be Zappa, as they both mercilessly mocked the previous week's segment with Jones and Smalls: [Excerpt: Michael Nesmith and Frank Zappa] Nesmith then "conducted" Zappa as Zappa used a sledgehammer to "play" a car, parodying his own appearance on the Steve Allen Show playing a bicycle, to the presumed bemusement of the Monkees' fanbase who would not be likely to remember a one-off performance on a late-night TV show from five years earlier. And the final thing ever to be shown on an episode of the Monkees didn't feature any of the Monkees at all. Micky Dolenz, who directed and co-wrote that episode, about an evil wizard who was using the power of a space plant (named after the group's slang for dope) to hypnotise people through the TV, chose not to interact with his guest as the others had, but simply had Tim Buckley perform a solo acoustic version of his then-unreleased song "Song to the Siren": [Excerpt: Tim Buckley, "Song to the Siren"] By the end of the second season, everyone knew they didn't want to make another season of the TV show. Instead, they were going to do what Rafelson and Schneider had always wanted, and move into film. The planning stages for the film, which was initially titled Changes but later titled Head -- so that Rafelson and Schneider could bill their next film as "From the guys who gave you Head" -- had started the previous summer, before the sessions that produced The Birds, The Bees, and the Monkees. To write the film, the group went off with Rafelson and Schneider for a short holiday, and took with them their mutual friend Jack Nicholson. Nicholson was at this time not the major film star he later became. Rather he was a bit-part actor who was mostly associated with American International Pictures, the ultra-low-budget film company that has come up on several occasions in this podcast. Nicholson had appeared mostly in small roles, in films like The Little Shop of Horrors: [Excerpt: The Little Shop of Horrors] He'd appeared in multiple films made by Roger Corman, often appearing with Boris Karloff, and by Monte Hellman, but despite having been a working actor for a decade, his acting career was going nowhere, and by this point he had basically given up on the idea of being an actor, and had decided to start working behind the camera. He'd written the scripts for a few of the low-budget films he'd appeared in, and he'd recently scripted The Trip, the film we mentioned earlier: [Excerpt: The Trip trailer] So the group, Rafelson, Schneider, and Nicholson all went away for a weekend, and they all got extremely stoned, took acid, and talked into a tape recorder for hours on end. Nicholson then transcribed those recordings, cleaned them up, and structured the worthwhile ideas into something quite remarkable: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Ditty Diego"] If the Monkees TV show had been inspired by the Marx Brothers and Three Stooges, and by Richard Lester's directorial style, the only precursor I can find for Head is in the TV work of Lester's colleague Spike Milligan, but I don't think there's any reasonable way in which Nicholson or anyone else involved could have taken inspiration from Milligan's series Q. But what they ended up with is something that resembles, more than anything else, Monty Python's Flying Circus, a TV series that wouldn't start until a year after Head came out. It's a series of ostensibly unconnected sketches, linked by a kind of dream logic, with characters wandering from one loose narrative into a totally different one, actors coming out of character on a regular basis, and no attempt at a coherent narrative. It contains regular examples of channel-zapping, with excerpts from old films being spliced in, and bits of news footage juxtaposed with comedy sketches and musical performances in ways that are sometimes thought-provoking, sometimes distasteful, and occasionally both -- as when a famous piece of footage of a Vietnamese prisoner of war being shot in the head hard-cuts to screaming girls in the audience at a Monkees concert, a performance which ends with the girls tearing apart the group and revealing that they're really just cheap-looking plastic mannequins. The film starts, and ends, with the Monkees themselves attempting suicide, jumping off a bridge into the ocean -- but the end reveals that in fact the ocean they're in is just water in a glass box, and they're trapped in it. And knowing this means that when you watch the film a second time, you find that it does have a story. The Monkees are trapped in a box which in some ways represents life, the universe, and one's own mind, and in other ways represents the TV and their TV careers. Each of them is trying in his own way to escape, and each ends up trapped by his own limitations, condemned to start the cycle over and over again. The film features parodies of popular film genres like the boxing film (Davy is supposed to throw a fight with Sonny Liston at the instruction of gangsters), the Western, and the war film, but huge chunks of the film take place on a film studio backlot, and characters from one segment reappear in another, often commenting negatively on the film or the band, as when Frank Zappa as a critic calls Davy Jones' soft-shoe routine to a Harry Nilsson song "very white", or when a canteen worker in the studio calls the group "God's gift to the eight-year-olds". The film is constantly deconstructing and commenting on itself and the filmmaking process -- Tork hits that canteen worker, whose wig falls off revealing the actor playing her to be a man, and then it's revealed that the "behind the scenes" footage is itself scripted, as director Bob Rafelson and scriptwriter Jack Nicholson come into frame and reassure Tork, who's concerned that hitting a woman would be bad for his image. They tell him they can always cut it from the finished film if it doesn't work. While "Ditty Diego", the almost rap rewriting of the Monkees theme we heard earlier, sets out a lot of how the film asks to be interpreted and how it works narratively, the *spiritual* and thematic core of the film is in another song, Tork's "Long Title (Do I Have to Do This All Over Again?)", which in later solo performances Tork would give the subtitle "The Karma Blues": [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Long Title (Do I Have To Do This All Over Again?)"] Head is an extraordinary film, and one it's impossible to sum up in anything less than an hour-long episode of its own. It's certainly not a film that's to everyone's taste, and not every aspect of it works -- it is a film that is absolutely of its time, in ways that are both good and bad. But it's one of the most inventive things ever put out by a major film studio, and it's one that rightly secured the Monkees a certain amount of cult credibility over the decades. The soundtrack album is a return to form after the disappointing Birds, Bees, too. Nicholson put the album together, linking the eight songs in the film with collages of dialogue and incidental music, repurposing and recontextualising the dialogue to create a new experience, one that people have compared with Frank Zappa's contemporaneous We're Only In It For The Money, though while t
ALVIN TAYLOR Legendary Drummer, Musical Director, Producer Alvin has been a lover of drums since the age of five, and his professional career began at the age of fourteen, when he was discovered by, and toured with Little Richard. His most amazing experience came when he was invited to London by George Harrison (of the Beatles) to both live in his castle and to record the “33 1/3” album … and that album went platinum. Further evidence of Alvin's unique talent is his on-going list of credits and tours with other legendary artists such as: Elton John, Tina Turner, Bob Dylan, Bob Welch, Stevie Wonder, Natalie Cole, Gil Scott Heron, Diana Ross, Barry White, Sly Stone, Leo Sayer, Bill Withers, Andre' Crouch, Ronnie Woods, who is the guitarist with the Rolling Stones, and so many others. While working with Little Richard, Alvin played on the hit album “King of Rock & Roll.” He was then asked to join a band called PG&E (Pacific, Gas & Electric) with lead singer Charlie Allen and guitarist Steve Beckmeier. They went on to record a hit song called “Are You Ready” and also did a remake of the hit song“Stagger-Lee.” Billy Preston, also known as, the 5th Beatle and a Beatles' favorite, was initially responsible for Alvin's introduction to studio dates. Alvin went on to tour and record with Billy Preston on many occasions. He also recorded “I'm Just a Sucker For Your Love” with Tina Marie and Rick James. Shortly after that, Alvin's demand as a studio musician by the best producers in the music industry such as Robert Margouleff, Richard Perry, George Martin, the legendary Motown producer Frank Wilson and Norman Whitfield was relentless, and his calendar was never short of dates. He was a constant guest on hit musical television shows such as the Midnight Special, In Concert, Solid Gold, Don Kirshner's Rock Concert, The Real Don Steele and Soul Train. Alvin was then asked by Jerry Goldstein to play with the famous and long- standing group War. Goldstein produced, managed, and owned the group as well as the record label Avenue Records. Alvin turned down the offer, however, he then joined the Eric Burdon band. They recorded the albums, “Sun Secrets,” “Stop,” and a double album conceived for a movie sound track titled “Mirage.” He also did a world tour with the Eric Burdon Band. While Alvin was touring with Eric Burdon, an A&R man from Capitol Records named John Carter, one of Alvin's biggest fans, signed Bob Welch, the original guitarist with Fleetwood Mac, to a long-term contract with Capitol Records. He then asked Alvin to put a band together for Welch's album project. After Alvin listened to Welch's demos, he asked Carter, “Who are the musicians playing on the demo?” – Carter's response was “That is all Bob Welch, playing the bass, the keyboards and guitars.” Alvin then informed Carter that he had found a band that could do the recording for Bob Welch's solo album called “French Kiss.” That band consisted of Alvin Taylor and Bob Welch, featuring the hit single “Ebony Eyes,” and the album went gold and then platinum. This was the first tangible proof that Alvin has incredible musical direction and production skills in addition to his dynamic drumming talent. Today, he is still an active and passionate drummer, as well as a music director and producer. He continues to do miscellaneous dates and tours with various artists. He is currently working in pre-production as a musical director for a major television show. His life has been so enriched by his musical craft and astounding career as a successful artist, that he is now in the process of writing a book about his life story. He is always seeking to create and develop new artists, and he has a never-ending artistic mind and enduring love for music. MORE KELLY EXECUTIVE PRODUCER BROOKLYN CARDENAS
On the January 17 edition of the Music History Today podcast, there's Juice, Sugarland, Don Kirshner, Garth Brooks, Eartha Kitt, & Kid Rock. ALL MY MUSIC HISTORY TODAY PODCAST LINKS - https://allmylinks.com/musichistorytoday CHECK OUT MY OTHER PODCAST, THE MUSIC HALLS OF FAME PODCAST: LINKS - https://allmylinks.com/musichallsoffamepodcast --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/musichistorytodaypodcast/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/musichistorytodaypodcast/support
Welcome to another edition of Interviewing the Legends I'm your host Ray Shasho KANSAS, America's legendary progressive rock band, will celebrate their 50th anniversary in 2023. To commemorate this landmark occasion, current label InsideOutMusic are pleased to announce Another Fork In The Road – 50 Years Of Kansas for was released on December 9th in Europe & today in North America. A career-spanning collection, it features carefully selected tracks from across the band's sizable discography, as well as a new version of ‘Can I Tell You'. Originally recorded and released on their 1974 debut, the song is updated by the current line-up. It provides a full-circle perspective on the band's long and continuing history that has seen them release 16 studio albums and sell in excess of 30 million albums worldwide. "The song 'Can I Tell You' may not have been our biggest 'hit,' but it is one of the most important songs in the career of the band KANSAS." says original member and guitarist Richard Williams. "'Can I Tell You' was the first song on the demo reel we sent to Don Kirshner. Hearing that demo is what led to KANSAS getting a record deal. It felt appropriate, after fifty years, to come full circle and record it with the current lineup." Kansas will celebrate their 50th anniversary with extensive touring in North America in 2023. Please welcome legendary original guitarist and member of the classic rock group KANSAS… RICHARD WILLIAMS to Interviewing the Legends … PURCHASE Another Fork in the Road 50 Years of KANSAS at https://kansas.lnk.to/AnotherForkInTheRoad-50YearsOfKansas or amazon.com With a legendary career spanning five decades, KANSAS has firmly established itself as one of America's iconic classic rock bands. This "garage band" from Topeka released their debut album in 1974 after being discovered by Wally Gold, who worked for Don Kirshner, and have gone on to sell more than 30 million albums worldwide. Another Fork In The Road – 50 Years Of Kansas arrives as a 3CD Digipak collection, including extensive liner notes by journalist Jeff Wagner, as well as pictures of rarely-seen memorabilia and archive material, all overseen by founding member Phil Ehart. TRACKLISTING CD-1 Can I Tell You (new 2022 version) The Absence of Presence (The Absence of Presence, 2020) Throwing Mountains (The Absence of Presence, 2020) Crowded Isolation (The Prelude Implicit, 2016) Summer (The Prelude Implicit, 2016) The Voyage of Eight Eighteen (The Prelude Implicit, 2016) Icarus II (Somewhere to Elsewhere, 2000) The Coming Dawn (Thanatopsis) (Somewhere to Elsewhere, 2000) Distant Vision (Somewhere to Elsewhere, 2000) The Wall (Always Never the Same, 1998) Dust in the Wind (Always Never the Same, 1998) Desperate Times (Freaks of Nature, 1995) Under the Knife (Freaks of Nature, 1995) CD-2 (North American Version) Fight Fire With Fire (Drastic Measures, 1983) End of the Age (Drastic Measures, 1983) Incident on a Bridge (Drastic Measures, 1983) Play the Game Tonight (Vinyl Confessions, 1982) Crossfire (Vinyl Confessions, 1982) Windows (Vinyl Confessions, 1982) Hold On (Audio-Visions, 1980) Loner (Audio-Visions, 1980) Curtain of Iron (Audio-Visions, 1980) No One Together (Audio-Visions, 1980) On the Other Side (Monolith, 1979) Angels Have Fallen (Monolith, 1979) How My Soul Cries Out For You (Monolith, 1979) CD-3 Carry On Wayward Son (Live) (Two for the Show, 1978) Portrait (He Knew) (Point of Know Return, 1977) Sparks of the Tempest (Point of Know Return, 1977) Miracles out of Nowhere (Leftoverture, 1976) Magnum Opus (Leftoverture, 1976) Icarus - Borne on Wings of Steel (Masque, 1975) Child of Innocence (Masque, 1975) Down the Road (Song for America, 1975) Song for America (Song for America, 1975) The Devil Game (Song for America, 1975) Death of Mother Nature Suite (Kansas, 1974) Belexes (Kansas, 1974) Journey from Mariabronn (Kansas, 1974) FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT K A N S A S VISIT KANSAS online: www.kansasband.com Official website www.facebook.com/kansasband Facebook www.twitter.com/kansasband Twitter www.instagram.com/kansasband/?hl=en Instagram INSIDEOUTMUSIC online: www.insideoutmusic.com www.youtube.com/InsideOutMusicTV www.facebook.com/InsideOutMusic K A N S A S UPCOMING CONCERTS 2023 Kansas Classics March 11, 2023 Tampa, FL Busch Gardens Kansas Classics March 17, 2023 Shawnee, OK Heart of Oklahoma Exposition Center Kansas Classics March 24, 2023 Pala, CA Pala Casino Kansas Classics April 1, 2023 Lincoln, CA The Venue at Thunder Valley Casino Resort Kansas Classics April 20, 2023 Marion, IL Marion Cultural & Civic Center Kansas Classics May 19, 2023 Decatur, IL The Devon Lakeshore Amphitheater Kansas Classics May 21, 2023 Louisville, KY Iroquois Amphitheater KANSAS DISCOGRAPHY Kansas (1974) Song for America (1975) Masque (1975) Leftoverture (1976) Point of Know Return (1977) Monolith (1979) Audio-Visions (1980) Vinyl Confessions (1982) Drastic Measures (1983) Power (1986) In the Spirit of Things (1988) Freaks of Nature (1995) Always Never the Same (1998) Somewhere to Elsewhere (2000) The Prelude Implicit (2016) The Absence of Presence (2020) Support us!
Ron Dante was born in Staten Island, NY. He was a member of the Detergents, whose “Leader of the Laundromat” made the Top 40 when he was just 20 years old. He was working with Don Kirshner and singing and songwriting with the Brill Building group of artists such as Carole King, Tony Orlando, and Neil Sedaka before most of them became household names. He's produced several Broadway musicals, including the Tony Award-winning Ain't Misbehavin'. He produced Barry Manilow's hit albums, sang backup on “Mandy,” basically discovered Pat Benatar, and then, of course, there's work as the voice of the Archies and the Cuff Links. The question shouldn't be who was he — it should be who wasn't he. He's done everything, and he's still doing it. He's the one and only Ron Dante. REBEAT: I read that you were from a musical family and your dad sang around the house a lot and that's where your love of music came from. RON DANTE: Yes, my dad wasn't a professional singer but he loved to sing as did his six brothers. When we'd go to a wedding, everybody would get up and sing, everybody was a ham. I heard music very early in my life. My dad loved his records and had a big stack of 78s on the record player. He'd run a string to the couch so he could change the records and listen to six or seven records in a row. I listened to the Platters, Patti Page, and then I discovered Elvis when I was 10, and that changed my life completely. A few years later, I fell from a tree and injured my arm, and the doctor said I needed to exercise it, to do something to work the arm. I decided I'd play the guitar, so Dad bought me one. Then when I was about 14, I put my first band together, the Persuaders. One New Year's Eve, I made $75 playing, so I said, “Well, this is the profession I want to be in!” I mean, I'm 14 and made $75 for one gig, and my dad worked all week for $50. I said, “This is something I can do.” You made the Detergents record, “Leader of the Laundromat,” in 1965. But before that had you already started working with Don Kirshner? How did all of that play out? Even before the Detergents record, I got a job as a staff singer and demo-maker with Don Kirshner when I was 17 years old. I was signed to a publishing contract and told to write songs. I was in the New York office with artists like Carole King and Tony Orlando and Neil Sedaka. It was amazing. This publishing company was one of the hottest in the world. Don Kirshner gave me my start in the business. I'll forever be grateful to him for that opportunity. I got to see all these writers, the way they produced their demos, I got to see the singers, I actually got to sing background on some of Neil Sedaka's early hits. As a teenager out of Staten Island, I had the opportunity of a lifetime. The Detergents song did well, but tell me about the years between that song and your time as the voice of the Archies. As the Detergents song peaked, we went on the road with the Dick Clark Caravan of Stars and toured for about a year then came back home and set up an office where I was going to be a songwriter and producer. I started doing commercials and any odd job I could just to stay in the music business. I actually ended up writing a Broadway show. I had done backgrounds for a friend of mine named Jeff Barry, who was writing the score for a Broadway production. He said, “You should be the voice of this rock band that's in the show.” I did it but the show closed after a couple of weeks, but I had the chance to meet a variety of people, and some of them said, “You're a songwriter. We have this property we want to do, a version of Billy Budd by Herman Melville. We want to make it a rock opera.” So at 20 years old, I wrote a rock opera that was on Broadway. It was unbelievable and a great opportunity. We raised about half a million dollars to put that show on. We didn't get good reviews, but it was a learning experience. But I must say that everything that happens to me either I'm a winner, or I learn. I met a lot of great people who were important to know along the way. Ten years after Billy Budd, my Ain't Misbehavin show came along. Everything happens for a reason. So you're working with Broadway shows, but we're moving into that period where “Sugar, Sugar” comes along. I read somewhere that because of your connections to Don Kirshner, you heard they were looking for a voice for the lead on the Archies and asked for an audition. Is that basically what happened? Actually, a friend of mine was playing keyboard in the band doing the tracks for the new Archies show that Jeff Barry and Don Kirshner were putting together. They didn't have any singers, but they had musicians, and one of the musicians was the best man at my wedding. He said, “You know Don Kirshner. You should call him and come over and be the voice.” So I told him I would, and I called and went in for an audition, sang one of the songs, and got the job of being the voice of Archie on the songs. It was great working with people I knew; it was like a homecoming. Jeff Barry and Andy Kim wrote “Sugar, Sugar,” but did they write it for the program or was the song already written and just used for the program? The word I got from Andy was that Jeff called him and said, ”We need a single for the show, we need a hit. What do you think we should do?” and over the phone, Andy said, “Why don't you do something like this? [Sings] ‘Sugar, dah da dah dah da dah, aww honey, honey…'” and that was the beginning of that song. Have you ever asked Andy Kim how he felt about not doing that great song himself? He was still a year away from his first big hit with “Baby, I Love You.” I think Andy — and we're close friends — I think he appreciates and knows I was the right voice for that song. That was the right platform, the television show, to deliver the song. He's done well financially from the show and does it in his own show when he performs. I think his songs were more elevated and for a more mature market than ours. We were shooting for teenagers and preteenagers, kids who chewed bubblegum. That's how the term “bubblegum music” came about. The songs were aimed at a very young audience. He's fine with it. The Detergents song did well, but tell me about the years between that song and your time as the voice of the Archies. As the Detergents song peaked, we went on the road with the Dick Clark Caravan of Stars and toured for about a year then came back home and set up an office where I was going to be a songwriter and producer. I started doing commercials and any odd job I could just to stay in the music business. I actually ended up writing a Broadway show. I had done backgrounds for a friend of mine named Jeff Barry, who was writing the score for a Broadway production. He said, “You should be the voice of this rock band that's in the show.” I did it but the show closed after a couple of weeks, but I had the chance to meet a variety of people, and some of them said, “You're a songwriter. We have this property we want to do, a version of Billy Budd by Herman Melville. We want to make it a rock opera.” So at 20 years old, I wrote a rock opera that was on Broadway. It was unbelievable and a great opportunity. We raised about half a million dollars to put that show on. We didn't get good reviews, but it was a learning experience. But I must say that everything that happens to me either I'm a winner, or I learn. I met a lot of great people who were important to know along the way. Ten years after Billy Budd, my Ain't Misbehavin show came along. Everything happens for a reason. So you're working with Broadway shows, but we're moving into that period where “Sugar, Sugar” comes along. I read somewhere that because of your connections to Don Kirshner, you heard they were looking for a voice for the lead on the Archies and asked for an audition. Is that basically what happened? Actually, a friend of mine was playing keyboard in the band doing the tracks for the new Archies show that Jeff Barry and Don Kirshner were putting together. They didn't have any singers, but they had musicians, and one of the musicians was the best man at my wedding. He said, “You know Don Kirshner. You should call him and come over and be the voice.” So I told him I would, and I called and went in for an audition, sang one of the songs, and got the job of being the voice of Archie on the songs. It was great working with people I knew; it was like a homecoming. Jeff Barry and Andy Kim wrote “Sugar, Sugar,” but did they write it for the program or was the song already written and just used for the program? The word I got from Andy was that Jeff called him and said, ”We need a single for the show, we need a hit. What do you think we should do?” and over the phone, Andy said, “Why don't you do something like this? [Sings] ‘Sugar, dah da dah dah da dah, aww honey, honey…'” and that was the beginning of that song. Have you ever asked Andy Kim how he felt about not doing that great song himself? He was still a year away from his first big hit with “Baby, I Love You.” I think Andy — and we're close friends — I think he appreciates and knows I was the right voice for that song. That was the right platform, the television show, to deliver the song. He's done well financially from the show and does it in his own show when he performs. I think his songs were more elevated and for a more mature market than ours. We were shooting for teenagers and preteenagers, kids who chewed bubblegum. That's how the term “bubblegum music” came about. The songs were aimed at a very young audience. He's fine with it. This bio was used from an article done by Rebeat.
We start season four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs with an extra-long look at "San Francisco" by Scott McKenzie, and at the Monterey Pop Festival, and the careers of the Mamas and the Papas and P.F. Sloan. 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 "Up, Up, and Away" by the 5th Dimension. 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. Scott McKenzie's first album is available here. There are many compilations of the Mamas and the Papas' music, but sadly none that are in print in the UK have the original mono mixes. This set is about as good as you're going to find, though, for the stereo versions. Information on the Mamas and the Papas came from Go Where You Wanna Go: The Oral History of The Mamas and the Papas by Matthew Greenwald, California Dreamin': The True Story Of The Mamas and Papas by Michelle Phillips, and Papa John by John Phillips and Jim Jerome. Information on P.F. Sloan came from PF - TRAVELLING BAREFOOT ON A ROCKY ROAD by Stephen McParland and What's Exactly the Matter With Me? by P.F. Sloan and S.E. Feinberg. The film of the Monterey Pop Festival is available on this Criterion Blu-Ray set. Sadly the CD of the performances seems to be deleted. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Welcome to season four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. It's good to be back. Before we start this episode, I just want to say one thing. I get a lot of credit at times for the way I don't shy away from dealing with the more unsavoury elements of the people being covered in my podcast -- particularly the more awful men. But as I said very early on, I only cover those aspects of their life when they're relevant to the music, because this is a music podcast and not a true crime podcast. But also I worry that in some cases this might mean I'm giving a false impression of some people. In the case of this episode, one of the central figures is John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas. Now, Phillips has posthumously been accused of some truly monstrous acts, the kind of thing that is truly unforgivable, and I believe those accusations. But those acts didn't take place during the time period covered by most of this episode, so I won't be covering them here -- but they're easily googlable if you want to know. I thought it best to get that out of the way at the start, so no-one's either anxiously waiting for the penny to drop or upset that I didn't acknowledge the elephant in the room. Separately, this episode will have some discussion of fatphobia and diet culture, and of a death that is at least in part attributable to those things. Those of you affected by that may want to skip this one or read the transcript. There are also some mentions of drug addiction and alcoholism. Anyway, on with the show. One of the things that causes problems with rock history is the tendency of people to have selective memories, and that's never more true than when it comes to the Summer of Love, summer of 1967. In the mythology that's built up around it, that was a golden time, the greatest time ever, a period of peace and love where everything was possible, and the world looked like it was going to just keep on getting better. But what that means, of course, is that the people remembering it that way do so because it was the best time of their lives. And what happens when the best time of your life is over in one summer? When you have one hit and never have a second, or when your band splits up after only eighteen months, and you have to cope with the reality that your best years are not only behind you, but they weren't even best years, but just best months? What stories would you tell about that time? Would you remember it as the eve of destruction, the last great moment before everything went to hell, or would you remember it as a golden summer, full of people with flowers in their hair? And would either really be true? [Excerpt: Scott McKenzie, "San Francisco"] Other than the city in which they worked, there are a few things that seem to characterise almost all the important figures on the LA music scene in the middle part of the 1960s. They almost all seem to be incredibly ambitious, as one might imagine. There seem to be a huge number of fantasists among them -- people who will not only choose the legend over reality when it suits them, but who will choose the legend over reality even when it doesn't suit them. And they almost all seem to have a story about being turned down in a rude and arrogant manner by Lou Adler, usually more or less the same story. To give an example, I'm going to read out a bit of Ray Manzarek's autobiography here. Now, Manzarek uses a few words that I can't use on this podcast and keep a clean rating, so I'm just going to do slight pauses when I get to them, but I'll leave the words in the transcript for those who aren't offended by them: "Sometimes Jim and Dorothy and I went alone. The three of us tried Dunhill Records. Lou Adler was the head man. He was shrewd and he was hip. He had the Mamas and the Papas and a big single with Barry McGuire's 'Eve of Destruction.' He was flush. We were ushered into his office. He looked cool. He was California casually disheveled and had the look of a stoner, but his eyes were as cold as a shark's. He took the twelve-inch acetate demo from me and we all sat down. He put the disc on his turntable and played each cut…for ten seconds. Ten seconds! You can't tell jack [shit] from ten seconds. At least listen to one of the songs all the way through. I wanted to rage at him. 'How dare you! We're the Doors! This is [fucking] Jim Morrison! He's going to be a [fucking] star! Can't you see that? Can't you see how [fucking] handsome he is? Can't you hear how groovy the music is? Don't you [fucking] get it? Listen to the words, man!' My brain was a boiling, lava-filled Jell-O mold of rage. I wanted to eviscerate that shark. The songs he so casually dismissed were 'Moonlight Drive,' 'Hello, I Love You,' 'Summer's Almost Gone,' 'End of the Night,' 'I Looked at You,' 'Go Insane.' He rejected the whole demo. Ten seconds on each song—maybe twenty seconds on 'Hello, I Love You' (I took that as an omen of potential airplay)—and we were dismissed out of hand. Just like that. He took the demo off the turntable and handed it back to me with an obsequious smile and said, 'Nothing here I can use.' We were shocked. We stood up, the three of us, and Jim, with a wry and knowing smile on his lips, cuttingly and coolly shot back at him, 'That's okay, man. We don't want to be *used*, anyway.'" Now, as you may have gathered from the episode on the Doors, Ray Manzarek was one of those print-the-legend types, and that's true of everyone who tells similar stories about Lou Alder. But... there are a *lot* of people who tell similar stories about Lou Adler. One of those was Phil Sloan. You can get an idea of Sloan's attitude to storytelling from a story he always used to tell. Shortly after he and his family moved to LA from New York, he got a job selling newspapers on a street corner on Hollywood Boulevard, just across from Schwab's Drug Store. One day James Dean drove up in his Porsche and made an unusual request. He wanted to buy every copy of the newspaper that Sloan had -- around a hundred and fifty copies in total. But he only wanted one article, something in the entertainment section. Sloan didn't remember what the article was, but he did remember that one of the headlines was on the final illness of Oliver Hardy, who died shortly afterwards, and thought it might have been something to do with that. Dean was going to just clip that article from every copy he bought, and then he was going to give all the newspapers back to Sloan to sell again, so Sloan ended up making a lot of extra money that day. There is one rather big problem with that story. Oliver Hardy died in August 1957, just after the Sloan family moved to LA. But James Dean died in September 1955, two years earlier. Sloan admitted that, and said he couldn't explain it, but he was insistent. He sold a hundred and fifty newspapers to James Dean two years after Dean's death. When not selling newspapers to dead celebrities, Sloan went to Fairfax High School, and developed an interest in music which was mostly oriented around the kind of white pop vocal groups that were popular at the time, groups like the Kingston Trio, the Four Lads, and the Four Aces. But the record that made Sloan decide he wanted to make music himself was "Just Goofed" by the Teen Queens: [Excerpt: The Teen Queens, "Just Goofed"] In 1959, when he was fourteen, he saw an advert for an open audition with Aladdin Records, a label he liked because of Thurston Harris. He went along to the audition, and was successful. His first single, released as by Flip Sloan -- Flip was a nickname, a corruption of "Philip" -- was produced by Bumps Blackwell and featured several of the musicians who played with Sam Cooke, plus Larry Knechtel on piano and Mike Deasey on guitar, but Aladdin shut down shortly after releasing it, and it may not even have had a general release, just promo copies. I've not been able to find a copy online anywhere. After that, he tried Arwin Records, the label that Jan and Arnie recorded for, which was owned by Marty Melcher (Doris Day's husband and Terry Melcher's stepfather). Melcher signed him, and put out a single, "She's My Girl", on Mart Records, a subsidiary of Arwin, on which Sloan was backed by a group of session players including Sandy Nelson and Bruce Johnston: [Excerpt: Philip Sloan, "She's My Girl"] That record didn't have any success, and Sloan was soon dropped by Mart Records. He went on to sign with Blue Bird Records, which was as far as can be ascertained essentially a scam organisation that would record demos for songwriters, but tell the performers that they were making a real record, so that they would record it for the royalties they would never get, rather than for a decent fee as a professional demo singer would get. But Steve Venet -- the brother of Nik Venet, and occasional songwriting collaborator with Tommy Boyce -- happened to come to Blue Bird one day, and hear one of Sloan's original songs. He thought Sloan would make a good songwriter, and took him to see Lou Adler at Columbia-Screen Gems music publishing. This was shortly after the merger between Columbia-Screen Gems and Aldon Music, and Adler was at this point the West Coast head of operations, subservient to Don Kirshner and Al Nevins, but largely left to do what he wanted. The way Sloan always told the story, Venet tried to get Adler to sign Sloan, but Adler said his songs stunk and had no commercial potential. But Sloan persisted in trying to get a contract there, and eventually Al Nevins happened to be in the office and overruled Adler, much to Adler's disgust. Sloan was signed to Columbia-Screen Gems as a songwriter, though he wasn't put on a salary like the Brill Building songwriters, just told that he could bring in songs and they would publish them. Shortly after this, Adler suggested to Sloan that he might want to form a writing team with another songwriter, Steve Barri, who had had a similar non-career non-trajectory, but was very slightly further ahead in his career, having done some work with Carol Connors, the former lead singer of the Teddy Bears. Barri had co-written a couple of flop singles for Connors, before the two of them had formed a vocal group, the Storytellers, with Connors' sister. The Storytellers had released a single, "When Two People (Are in Love)" , which was put out on a local independent label and which Adler had licensed to be released on Dimension Records, the label associated with Aldon Music: [Excerpt: The Storytellers "When Two People (Are in Love)"] That record didn't sell, but it was enough to get Barri into the Columbia-Screen Gems circle, and Adler set him and Sloan up as a songwriting team -- although the way Sloan told it, it wasn't so much a songwriting team as Sloan writing songs while Barri was also there. Sloan would later claim "it was mostly a collaboration of spirit, and it seemed that I was writing most of the music and the lyric, but it couldn't possibly have ever happened unless both of us were present at the same time". One suspects that Barri might have a different recollection of how it went... Sloan and Barri's first collaboration was a song that Sloan had half-written before they met, called "Kick That Little Foot Sally Ann", which was recorded by a West Coast Chubby Checker knockoff who went under the name Round Robin, and who had his own dance craze, the Slauson, which was much less successful than the Twist: [Excerpt: Round Robin, "Kick that Little Foot Sally Ann"] That track was produced and arranged by Jack Nitzsche, and Nitzsche asked Sloan to be one of the rhythm guitarists on the track, apparently liking Sloan's feel. Sloan would end up playing rhythm guitar or singing backing vocals on many of the records made of songs he and Barri wrote together. "Kick That Little Foot Sally Ann" only made number sixty-one nationally, but it was a regional hit, and it meant that Sloan and Barri soon became what Sloan later described as "the Goffin and King of the West Coast follow-ups." According to Sloan "We'd be given a list on Monday morning by Lou Adler with thirty names on it of the groups who needed follow-ups to their hit." They'd then write the songs to order, and they started to specialise in dance craze songs. For example, when the Swim looked like it might be the next big dance, they wrote "Swim Swim Swim", "She Only Wants to Swim", "Let's Swim Baby", "Big Boss Swimmer", "Swim Party" and "My Swimmin' Girl" (the last a collaboration with Jan Berry and Roger Christian). These songs were exactly as good as they needed to be, in order to provide album filler for mid-tier artists, and while Sloan and Barri weren't writing any massive hits, they were doing very well as mid-tier writers. According to Sloan's biographer Stephen McParland, there was a three-year period in the mid-sixties where at least one song written or co-written by Sloan was on the national charts at any given time. Most of these songs weren't for Columbia-Screen Gems though. In early 1964 Lou Adler had a falling out with Don Kirshner, and decided to start up his own company, Dunhill, which was equal parts production company, music publishers, and management -- doing for West Coast pop singers what Motown was doing for Detroit soul singers, and putting everything into one basket. Dunhill's early clients included Jan and Dean and the rockabilly singer Johnny Rivers, and Dunhill also signed Sloan and Barri as songwriters. Because of this connection, Sloan and Barri soon became an important part of Jan and Dean's hit-making process. The Matadors, the vocal group that had provided most of the backing vocals on the duo's hits, had started asking for more money than Jan Berry was willing to pay, and Jan and Dean couldn't do the vocals themselves -- as Bones Howe put it "As a singer, Dean is a wonderful graphic artist" -- and so Sloan and Barri stepped in, doing session vocals without payment in the hope that Jan and Dean would record a few of their songs. For example, on the big hit "The Little Old Lady From Pasadena", Dean Torrence is not present at all on the record -- Jan Berry sings the lead vocal, with Sloan doubling him for much of it, Sloan sings "Dean"'s falsetto, with the engineer Bones Howe helping out, and the rest of the backing vocals are sung by Sloan, Barri, and Howe: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "The Little Old Lady From Pasadena"] For these recordings, Sloan and Barri were known as The Fantastic Baggys, a name which came from the Rolling Stones' manager Andrew Oldham and Mick Jagger, when the two were visiting California. Oldham had been commenting on baggys, the kind of shorts worn by surfers, and had asked Jagger what he thought of The Baggys as a group name. Jagger had replied "Fantastic!" and so the Fantastic Baggys had been born. As part of this, Sloan and Barri moved hard into surf and hot-rod music from the dance songs they had been writing previously. The Fantastic Baggys recorded their own album, Tell 'Em I'm Surfin', as a quickie album suggested by Adler: [Excerpt: The Fantastic Baggys, "Tell 'Em I'm Surfin'"] And under the name The Rally Packs they recorded a version of Jan and Dean's "Move Out Little Mustang" which featured Berry's girlfriend Jill Gibson doing a spoken section: [Excerpt: The Rally Packs, "Move Out Little Mustang"] They also wrote several album tracks for Jan and Dean, and wrote "Summer Means Fun" for Bruce and Terry -- Bruce Johnston, later of the Beach Boys, and Terry Melcher: [Excerpt: Bruce and Terry, "Summer Means Fun"] And they wrote the very surf-flavoured "Secret Agent Man" for fellow Dunhill artist Johnny Rivers: [Excerpt: Johnny Rivers, "Secret Agent Man"] But of course, when you're chasing trends, you're chasing trends, and soon the craze for twangy guitars and falsetto harmonies had ended, replaced by a craze for jangly twelve-string guitars and closer harmonies. According to Sloan, he was in at the very beginning of the folk-rock trend -- the way he told the story, he was involved in the mastering of the Byrds' version of "Mr. Tambourine Man". He later talked about Terry Melcher getting him to help out, saying "He had produced a record called 'Mr. Tambourine Man', and had sent it into the head office, and it had been rejected. He called me up and said 'I've got three more hours in the studio before I'm being kicked out of Columbia. Can you come over and help me with this new record?' I did. I went over there. It was under lock and key. There were two guards outside the door. Terry asked me something about 'Summer Means Fun'. "He said 'Do you remember the guitar that we worked on with that? How we put in that double reverb?' "And I said 'yes' "And he said 'What do you think if we did something like that with the Byrds?' "And I said 'That sounds good. Let's see what it sounds like.' So we patched into all the reverb centres in Columbia Music, and mastered the record in three hours." Whether Sloan really was there at the birth of folk rock, he and Barri jumped on the folk-rock craze just as they had the surf and hot-rod craze, and wrote a string of jangly hits including "You Baby" for the Turtles: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "You Baby"] and "I Found a Girl" for Jan and Dean: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "I Found a Girl"] That song was later included on Jan and Dean's Folk 'n' Roll album, which also included... a song I'm not even going to name, but long-time listeners will know the one I mean. It was also notable in that "I Found a Girl" was the first song on which Sloan was credited not as Phil Sloan, but as P.F. Sloan -- he didn't have a middle name beginning with F, but rather the F stood for his nickname "Flip". Sloan would later talk of Phil Sloan and P.F. Sloan as almost being two different people, with P.F. being a far more serious, intense, songwriter. Folk 'n' Roll also contained another Sloan song, this one credited solely to Sloan. And that song is the one for which he became best known. There are two very different stories about how "Eve of Destruction" came to be written. To tell Sloan's version, I'm going to read a few paragraphs from his autobiography: "By late 1964, I had already written ‘Eve Of Destruction,' ‘The Sins Of A Family,' ‘This Mornin',' ‘Ain't No Way I'm Gonna Change My Mind,' and ‘What's Exactly The Matter With Me?' They all arrived on one cataclysmic evening, and nearly at the same time, as I worked on the lyrics almost simultaneously. ‘Eve Of Destruction' came about from hearing a voice, perhaps an angel's. The voice instructed me to place five pieces of paper and spread them out on my bed. I obeyed the voice. The voice told me that the first song would be called ‘Eve Of Destruction,' so I wrote the title at the top of the page. For the next few hours, the voice came and went as I was writing the lyric, as if this spirit—or whatever it was—stood over me like a teacher: ‘No, no … not think of all the hate there is in Red Russia … Red China!' I didn't understand. I thought the Soviet Union was the mortal threat to America, but the voice went on to reveal to me the future of the world until 2024. I was told the Soviet Union would fall, and that Red China would continue to be communist far into the future, but that communism was not going to be allowed to take over this Divine Planet—therefore, think of all the hate there is in Red China. I argued and wrestled with the voice for hours, until I was exhausted but satisfied inside with my plea to God to either take me out of the world, as I could not live in such a hypocritical society, or to show me a way to make things better. When I was writing ‘Eve,' I was on my hands and knees, pleading for an answer." Lou Adler's story is that he gave Phil Sloan a copy of Bob Dylan's Bringing it All Back Home album and told him to write a bunch of songs that sounded like that, and Sloan came back a week later as instructed with ten Dylan knock-offs. Adler said "It was a natural feel for him. He's a great mimic." As one other data point, both Steve Barri and Bones Howe, the engineer who worked on most of the sessions we're looking at today, have often talked in interviews about "Eve of Destruction" as being a Sloan/Barri collaboration, as if to them it's common knowledge that it wasn't written alone, although Sloan's is the only name on the credits. The song was given to a new signing to Dunhill Records, Barry McGuire. McGuire was someone who had been part of the folk scene for years, He'd been playing folk clubs in LA while also acting in a TV show from 1961. When the TV show had finished, he'd formed a duo, Barry and Barry, with Barry Kane, and they performed much the same repertoire as all the other early-sixties folkies: [Excerpt: Barry and Barry, "If I Had a Hammer"] After recording their one album, both Barrys joined the New Christy Minstrels. We've talked about the Christys before, but they were -- and are to this day -- an ultra-commercial folk group, led by Randy Sparks, with a revolving membership of usually eight or nine singers which included several other people who've come up in this podcast, like Gene Clark and Jerry Yester. McGuire became one of the principal lead singers of the Christys, singing lead on their version of the novelty cowboy song "Three Wheels on My Wagon", which was later released as a single in the UK and became a perennial children's favourite (though it has a problematic attitude towards Native Americans): [Excerpt: The New Christy Minstrels, "Three Wheels on My Wagon"] And he also sang lead on their big hit "Green Green", which he co-wrote with Randy Sparks: [Excerpt: The New Christy Minstrels, "Green Green"] But by 1965 McGuire had left the New Christy Minstrels. As he said later "I'd sung 'Green Green' a thousand times and I didn't want to sing it again. This is January of 1965. I went back to LA to meet some producers, and I was broke. Nobody had the time of day for me. I was walking down street one time to see Dr. Strangelove and I walked by the music store, and I heard "Green Green" comin' out of the store, ya know, on Hollywood Boulevard. And I heard my voice, and I thought, 'I got four dollars in my pocket!' I couldn't believe it, my voice is comin' out on Hollywood Boulevard, and I'm broke. And right at that moment, a car pulls up, and the radio is playing 'Chim Chim Cherie" also by the Minstrels. So I got my voice comin' at me in stereo, standin' on the sidewalk there, and I'm broke, and I can't get anyone to sign me!" But McGuire had a lot of friends who he'd met on the folk scene, some of whom were now in the new folk-rock scene that was just starting to spring up. One of them was Roger McGuinn, who told him that his band, the Byrds, were just about to put out a new single, "Mr. Tambourine Man", and that they were about to start a residency at Ciro's on Sunset Strip. McGuinn invited McGuire to the opening night of that residency, where a lot of other people from the scene were there to see the new group. Bob Dylan was there, as was Phil Sloan, and the actor Jack Nicholson, who was still at the time a minor bit-part player in low-budget films made by people like American International Pictures (the cinematographer on many of Nicholson's early films was Floyd Crosby, David Crosby's father, which may be why he was there). Someone else who was there was Lou Adler, who according to McGuire recognised him instantly. According to Adler, he actually asked Terry Melcher who the long-haired dancer wearing furs was, because "he looked like the leader of a movement", and Melcher told him that he was the former lead singer of the New Christy Minstrels. Either way, Adler approached McGuire and asked if he was currently signed -- Dunhill Records was just starting up, and getting someone like McGuire, who had a proven ability to sing lead on hit records, would be a good start for the label. As McGuire didn't have a contract, he was signed to Dunhill, and he was given some of Sloan's new songs to pick from, and chose "What's Exactly the Matter With Me?" as his single: [Excerpt: Barry McGuire, "What's Exactly the Matter With Me?"] McGuire described what happened next: "It was like, a three-hour session. We did two songs, and then the third one wasn't turning out. We only had about a half hour left in the session, so I said 'Let's do this tune', and I pulled 'Eve of Destruction' out of my pocket, and it just had Phil's words scrawled on a piece of paper, all wrinkled up. Phil worked the chords out with the musicians, who were Hal Blaine on drums and Larry Knechtel on bass." There were actually more musicians than that at the session -- apparently both Knechtel and Joe Osborn were there, so I'm not entirely sure who's playing bass -- Knechtel was a keyboard player as well as a bass player, but I don't hear any keyboards on the track. And Tommy Tedesco was playing lead guitar, and Steve Barri added percussion, along with Sloan on rhythm guitar and harmonica. The chords were apparently scribbled down for the musicians on bits of greasy paper that had been used to wrap some takeaway chicken, and they got through the track in a single take. According to McGuire "I'm reading the words off this piece of wrinkled paper, and I'm singing 'My blood's so mad, feels like coagulatin'", that part that goes 'Ahhh you can't twist the truth', and the reason I'm going 'Ahhh' is because I lost my place on the page. People said 'Man, you really sounded frustrated when you were singing.' I was. I couldn't see the words!" [Excerpt: Barry McGuire, "Eve of Destruction"] With a few overdubs -- the female backing singers in the chorus, and possibly the kettledrums, which I've seen differing claims about, with some saying that Hal Blaine played them during the basic track and others saying that Lou Adler suggested them as an overdub, the track was complete. McGuire wasn't happy with his vocal, and a session was scheduled for him to redo it, but then a record promoter working with Adler was DJing a birthday party for the head of programming at KFWB, the big top forty radio station in LA at the time, and he played a few acetates he'd picked up from Adler. Most went down OK with the crowd, but when he played "Eve of Destruction", the crowd went wild and insisted he play it three times in a row. The head of programming called Adler up and told him that "Eve of Destruction" was going to be put into rotation on the station from Monday, so he'd better get the record out. As McGuire was away for the weekend, Adler just released the track as it was, and what had been intended to be a B-side became Barry McGuire's first and only number one record: [Excerpt: Barry McGuire, "Eve of Destruction"] Sloan would later claim that that song was a major reason why the twenty-sixth amendment to the US Constitution was passed six years later, because the line "you're old enough to kill but not for votin'" shamed Congress into changing the constitution to allow eighteen-year-olds to vote. If so, that would make "Eve of Destruction" arguably the single most impactful rock record in history, though Sloan is the only person I've ever seen saying that As well as going to number one in McGuire's version, the song was also covered by the other artists who regularly performed Sloan and Barri songs, like the Turtles: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "Eve of Destruction"] And Jan and Dean, whose version on Folk & Roll used the same backing track as McGuire, but had a few lyrical changes to make it fit with Jan Berry's right-wing politics, most notably changing "Selma, Alabama" to "Watts, California", thus changing a reference to peaceful civil rights protestors being brutally attacked and murdered by white supremacist state troopers to a reference to what was seen, in the popular imaginary, as Black people rioting for no reason: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "Eve of Destruction"] According to Sloan, he worked on the Folk & Roll album as a favour to Berry, even though he thought Berry was being cynical and exploitative in making the record, but those changes caused a rift in their friendship. Sloan said in his autobiography "Where I was completely wrong was in helping him capitalize on something in which he didn't believe. Jan wanted the public to perceive him as a person who was deeply concerned and who embraced the values of the progressive politics of the day. But he wasn't that person. That's how I was being pulled. It was when he recorded my actual song ‘Eve Of Destruction' and changed a number of lines to reflect his own ideals that my principles demanded that I leave Folk City and never return." It's true that Sloan gave no more songs to Jan and Dean after that point -- but it's also true that the duo would record only one more album, the comedy concept album Jan and Dean Meet Batman, before Jan's accident. Incidentally, the reference to Selma, Alabama in the lyric might help people decide on which story about the writing of "Eve of Destruction" they think is more plausible. Remember that Lou Adler said that it was written after Adler gave Sloan a copy of Bringing it All Back Home and told him to write a bunch of knock-offs, while Sloan said it was written after a supernatural force gave him access to all the events that would happen in the world for the next sixty years. Sloan claimed the song was written in late 1964. Selma, Alabama, became national news in late February and early March 1965. Bringing it All Back Home was released in late March 1965. So either Adler was telling the truth, or Sloan really *was* given a supernatural insight into the events of the future. Now, as it turned out, while "Eve of Destruction" went to number one, that would be McGuire's only hit as a solo artist. His next couple of singles would reach the very low end of the Hot One Hundred, and that would be it -- he'd release several more albums, before appearing in the Broadway musical Hair, most famous for its nude scenes, and getting a small part in the cinematic masterpiece Werewolves on Wheels: [Excerpt: Werewolves on Wheels trailer] P.F. Sloan would later tell various stories about why McGuire never had another hit. Sometimes he would say that Dunhill Records had received death threats because of "Eve of Destruction" and so deliberately tried to bury McGuire's career, other times he would say that Lou Adler had told him that Billboard had said they were never going to put McGuire's records on the charts no matter how well they sold, because "Eve of Destruction" had just been too powerful and upset the advertisers. But of course at this time Dunhill were still trying for a follow-up to "Eve of Destruction", and they thought they might have one when Barry McGuire brought in a few friends of his to sing backing vocals on his second album. Now, we've covered some of the history of the Mamas and the Papas already, because they were intimately tied up with other groups like the Byrds and the Lovin' Spoonful, and with the folk scene that led to songs like "Hey Joe", so some of this will be more like a recap than a totally new story, but I'm going to recap those parts of the story anyway, so it's fresh in everyone's heads. John Phillips, Scott McKenzie, and Cass Elliot all grew up in Alexandria, Virginia, just a few miles south of Washington DC. Elliot was a few years younger than Phillips and McKenzie, and so as is the way with young men they never really noticed her, and as McKenzie later said "She lived like a quarter of a mile from me and I never met her until New York". While they didn't know who Elliot was, though, she was aware who they were, as Phillips and McKenzie sang together in a vocal group called The Smoothies. The Smoothies were a modern jazz harmony group, influenced by groups like the Modernaires, the Hi-Los, and the Four Freshmen. John Phillips later said "We were drawn to jazz, because we were sort of beatniks, really, rather than hippies, or whatever, flower children. So we used to sing modern harmonies, like Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross. Dave Lambert did a lot of our arrangements for us as a matter of fact." Now, I've not seen any evidence other than Phillips' claim that Dave Lambert ever arranged for the Smoothies, but that does tell you a lot about the kind of music that they were doing. Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross were a vocalese trio whose main star was Annie Ross, who had a career worthy of an episode in itself -- she sang with Paul Whiteman, appeared in a Little Rascals film when she was seven, had an affair with Lenny Bruce, dubbed Britt Ekland's voice in The Wicker Man, played the villain's sister in Superman III, and much more. Vocalese, you'll remember, was a style of jazz vocal where a singer would take a jazz instrumental, often an improvised one, and add lyrics which they would sing, like Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross' version of "Cloudburst": [Excerpt: Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross, "Cloudburst"] Whether Dave Lambert ever really did arrange for the Smoothies or not, it's very clear that the trio had a huge influence on John Phillips' ideas about vocal arrangement, as you can hear on Mamas and Papas records like "Once Was a Time I Thought": [Excerpt: The Mamas and the Papas, "Once Was a Time I Thought"] While the Smoothies thought of themselves as a jazz group, when they signed to Decca they started out making the standard teen pop of the era, with songs like "Softly": [Excerpt, The Smoothies, "Softly"] When the folk boom started, Phillips realised that this was music that he could do easily, because the level of musicianship among the pop-folk musicians was so much lower than in the jazz world. The Smoothies made some recordings in the style of the Kingston Trio, like "Ride Ride Ride": [Excerpt: The Smoothies, "Ride Ride Ride"] Then when the Smoothies split, Phillips and McKenzie formed a trio with a banjo player, Dick Weissman, who they met through Izzy Young's Folklore Centre in Greenwich Village after Phillips asked Young to name some musicians who could make a folk record with him. Weissman was often considered the best banjo player on the scene, and was a friend of Pete Seeger's, to whom Seeger sometimes turned for banjo tips. The trio, who called themselves the Journeymen, quickly established themselves on the folk scene. Weissman later said "we had this interesting balance. John had all of this charisma -- they didn't know about the writing thing yet -- John had the personality, Scott had the voice, and I could play. If you think about it, all of those bands like the Kingston Trio, the Brothers Four, nobody could really *sing* and nobody could really *play*, relatively speaking." This is the take that most people seemed to have about John Phillips, in any band he was ever in. Nobody thought he was a particularly good singer or instrumentalist -- he could sing on key and play adequate rhythm guitar, but nobody would actually pay money to listen to him do those things. Mark Volman of the Turtles, for example, said of him "John wasn't the kind of guy who was going to be able to go up on stage and sing his songs as a singer-songwriter. He had to put himself in the context of a group." But he was charismatic, he had presence, and he also had a great musical mind. He would surround himself with the best players and best singers he could, and then he would organise and arrange them in ways that made the most of their talents. He would work out the arrangements, in a manner that was far more professional than the quick head arrangements that other folk groups used, and he instigated a level of professionalism in his groups that was not at all common on the scene. Phillips' friend Jim Mason talked about the first time he saw the Journeymen -- "They were warming up backstage, and John had all of them doing vocal exercises; one thing in particular that's pretty famous called 'Seiber Syllables' -- it's a series of vocal exercises where you enunciate different vowel and consonant sounds. It had the effect of clearing your head, and it's something that really good operetta singers do." The group were soon signed by Frank Werber, the manager of the Kingston Trio, who signed them as an insurance policy. Dave Guard, the Kingston Trio's banjo player, was increasingly having trouble with the other members, and Werber knew it was only a matter of time before he left the group. Werber wanted the Journeymen as a sort of farm team -- he had the idea that when Guard left, Phillips would join the Kingston Trio in his place as the third singer. Weissman would become the Trio's accompanist on banjo, and Scott McKenzie, who everyone agreed had a remarkable voice, would be spun off as a solo artist. But until that happened, they might as well make records by themselves. The Journeymen signed to MGM records, but were dropped before they recorded anything. They instead signed to Capitol, for whom they recorded their first album: [Excerpt: The Journeymen, "500 Miles"] After recording that album, the Journeymen moved out to California, with Phillips' wife and children. But soon Phillips' marriage was to collapse, as he met and fell in love with Michelle Gilliam. Gilliam was nine years younger than him -- he was twenty-six and she was seventeen -- and she had the kind of appearance which meant that in every interview with an older heterosexual man who knew her, that man will spend half the interview talking about how attractive he found her. Phillips soon left his wife and children, but before he did, the group had a turntable hit with "River Come Down", the B-side to "500 Miles": [Excerpt: The Journeymen, "River Come Down"] Around the same time, Dave Guard *did* leave the Kingston Trio, but the plan to split the Journeymen never happened. Instead Phillips' friend John Stewart replaced Guard -- and this soon became a new source of income for Phillips. Both Phillips and Stewart were aspiring songwriters, and they collaborated together on several songs for the Trio, including "Chilly Winds": [Excerpt: The Kingston Trio, "Chilly Winds"] Phillips became particularly good at writing songs that sounded like they could be old traditional folk songs, sometimes taking odd lines from older songs to jump-start new ones, as in "Oh Miss Mary", which he and Stewart wrote after hearing someone sing the first line of a song she couldn't remember the rest of: [Excerpt: The Kingston Trio, "Oh Miss Mary"] Phillips and Stewart became so close that Phillips actually suggested to Stewart that he quit the Kingston Trio and replace Dick Weissman in the Journeymen. Stewart did quit the Trio -- but then the next day Phillips suggested that maybe it was a bad idea and he should stay where he was. Stewart went back to the Trio, claimed he had only pretended to quit because he wanted a pay-rise, and got his raise, so everyone ended up happy. The Journeymen moved back to New York with Michelle in place of Phillips' first wife (and Michelle's sister Russell also coming along, as she was dating Scott McKenzie) and on New Year's Eve 1962 John and Michelle married -- so from this point on I will refer to them by their first names, because they both had the surname Phillips. The group continued having success through 1963, including making appearances on "Hootenanny": [Excerpt: The Journeymen, "Stack O'Lee (live on Hootenanny)"] By the time of the Journeymen's third album, though, John and Scott McKenzie were on bad terms. Weissman said "They had been the closest of friends and now they were the worst of enemies. They talked through me like I was a medium. It got to the point where we'd be standing in the dressing room and John would say to me 'Tell Scott that his right sock doesn't match his left sock...' Things like that, when they were standing five feet away from each other." Eventually, the group split up. Weissman was always going to be able to find employment given his banjo ability, and he was about to get married and didn't need the hassle of dealing with the other two. McKenzie was planning on a solo career -- everyone was agreed that he had the vocal ability. But John was another matter. He needed to be in a group. And not only that, the Journeymen had bookings they needed to complete. He quickly pulled together a group he called the New Journeymen. The core of the lineup was himself, Michelle on vocals, and banjo player Marshall Brickman. Brickman had previously been a member of a folk group called the Tarriers, who had had a revolving lineup, and had played on most of their early-sixties recordings: [Excerpt: The Tarriers, "Quinto (My Little Pony)"] We've met the Tarriers before in the podcast -- they had been formed by Erik Darling, who later replaced Pete Seeger in the Weavers after Seeger's socialist principles wouldn't let him do advertising, and Alan Arkin, later to go on to be a film star, and had had hits with "Cindy, O Cindy", with lead vocals from Vince Martin, who would later go on to be a major performer in the Greenwich Village scene, and with "The Banana Boat Song". By the time Brickman had joined, though, Darling, Arkin, and Martin had all left the group to go on to bigger things, and while he played with them for several years, it was after their commercial peak. Brickman would, though, also go on to a surprising amount of success, but as a writer rather than a musician -- he had a successful collaboration with Woody Allen in the 1970s, co-writing four of Allen's most highly regarded films -- Sleeper, Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Manhattan Murder Mystery -- and with another collaborator he later co-wrote the books for the stage musicals Jersey Boys and The Addams Family. Both John and Michelle were decent singers, and both have their admirers as vocalists -- P.F. Sloan always said that Michelle was the best singer in the group they eventually formed, and that it was her voice that gave the group its sound -- but for the most part they were not considered as particularly astonishing lead vocalists. Certainly, neither had a voice that stood out the way that Scott McKenzie's had. They needed a strong lead singer, and they found one in Denny Doherty. Now, we covered Denny Doherty's early career in the episode on the Lovin' Spoonful, because he was intimately involved in the formation of that group, so I won't go into too much detail here, but I'll give a very abbreviated version of what I said there. Doherty was a Canadian performer who had been a member of the Halifax Three with Zal Yanovsky: [Excerpt: The Halifax Three, "When I First Came to This Land"] After the Halifax Three had split up, Doherty and Yanovsky had performed as a duo for a while, before joining up with Cass Elliot and her husband Jim Hendricks, who both had previously been in the Big Three with Tim Rose: [Excerpt: Cass Elliot and the Big 3, "The Banjo Song"] Elliot, Hendricks, Yanovsky, and Doherty had formed The Mugwumps, sometimes joined by John Sebastian, and had tried to go in more of a rock direction after seeing the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. They recorded one album together before splitting up: [Excerpt: The Mugwumps, "Searchin'"] Part of the reason they split up was that interpersonal relationships within the group were put under some strain -- Elliot and Hendricks split up, though they would remain friends and remain married for several years even though they were living apart, and Elliot had an unrequited crush on Doherty. But since they'd split up, and Yanovsky and Sebastian had gone off to form the Lovin' Spoonful, that meant that Doherty was free, and he was regarded as possibly the best male lead vocalist on the circuit, so the group snapped him up. The only problem was that the Journeymen still had gigs booked that needed to be played, one of them was in just three days, and Doherty didn't know the repertoire. This was a problem with an easy solution for people in their twenties though -- they took a huge amount of amphetamines, and stayed awake for three days straight rehearsing. They made the gig, and Doherty was now the lead singer of the New Journeymen: [Excerpt: The New Journeymen, "The Last Thing on My Mind"] But the New Journeymen didn't last in that form for very long, because even before joining the group, Denny Doherty had been going in a more folk-rock direction with the Mugwumps. At the time, John Phillips thought rock and roll was kids' music, and he was far more interested in folk and jazz, but he was also very interested in making money, and he soon decided it was an idea to start listening to the Beatles. There's some dispute as to who first played the Beatles for John in early 1965 -- some claim it was Doherty, others claim it was Cass Elliot, but everyone agrees it was after Denny Doherty had introduced Phillips to something else -- he brought round some LSD for John and Michelle, and Michelle's sister Rusty, to try. And then he told them he'd invited round a friend. Michelle Phillips later remembered, "I remember saying to the guys "I don't know about you guys, but this drug does nothing for me." At that point there was a knock on the door, and as I opened the door and saw Cass, the acid hit me *over the head*. I saw her standing there in a pleated skirt, a pink Angora sweater with great big eyelashes on and her hair in a flip. And all of a sudden I thought 'This is really *quite* a drug!' It was an image I will have securely fixed in my brain for the rest of my life. I said 'Hi, I'm Michelle. We just took some LSD-25, do you wanna join us?' And she said 'Sure...'" Rusty Gilliam's description matches this -- "It was mind-boggling. She had on a white pleated skirt, false eyelashes. These were the kind of eyelashes that when you put them on you were supposed to trim them to an appropriate length, which she didn't, and when she blinked she looked like a cow, or those dolls you get when you're little and the eyes open and close. And we're on acid. Oh my God! It was a sight! And everything she was wearing were things that you weren't supposed to be wearing if you were heavy -- white pleated skirt, mohair sweater. You know, until she became famous, she suffered so much, and was poked fun at." This gets to an important point about Elliot, and one which sadly affected everything about her life. Elliot was *very* fat -- I've seen her weight listed at about three hundred pounds, and she was only five foot five tall -- and she also didn't have the kind of face that gets thought of as conventionally attractive. Her appearance would be cruelly mocked by pretty much everyone for the rest of her life, in ways that it's genuinely hurtful to read about, and which I will avoid discussing in detail in order to avoid hurting fat listeners. But the two *other* things that defined Elliot in the minds of those who knew her were her voice -- every single person who knew her talks about what a wonderful singer she was -- and her personality. I've read a lot of things about Cass Elliot, and I have never read a single negative word about her as a person, but have read many people going into raptures about what a charming, loving, friendly, understanding person she was. Michelle later said of her "From the time I left Los Angeles, I hadn't had a friend, a buddy. I was married, and John and I did not hang out with women, we just hung out with men, and especially not with women my age. John was nine years older than I was. And here was a fun-loving, intelligent woman. She captivated me. I was as close to in love with Cass as I could be to any woman in my life at that point. She also represented something to me: freedom. Everything she did was because she wanted to do it. She was completely independent and I admired her and was in awe of her. And later on, Cass would be the one to tell me not to let John run my life. And John hated her for that." Either Elliot had brought round Meet The Beatles, the Beatles' first Capitol album, for everyone to listen to, or Denny Doherty already had it, but either way Elliot and Doherty were by this time already Beatles fans. Michelle, being younger than the rest and not part of the folk scene until she met John, was much more interested in rock and roll than any of them, but because she'd been married to John for a couple of years and been part of his musical world she hadn't really encountered the Beatles music, though she had a vague memory that she might have heard a track or two on the radio. John was hesitant -- he didn't want to listen to any rock and roll, but eventually he was persuaded, and the record was put on while he was on his first acid trip: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I Want to Hold Your Hand"] Within a month, John Phillips had written thirty songs that he thought of as inspired by the Beatles. The New Journeymen were going to go rock and roll. By this time Marshall Brickman was out of the band, and instead John, Michelle, and Denny recruited a new lead guitarist, Eric Hord. Denny started playing bass, with John on rhythm guitar, and a violinist friend of theirs, Peter Pilafian, knew a bit of drums and took on that role. The new lineup of the group used the Journeymen's credit card, which hadn't been stopped even though the Journeymen were no more, to go down to St. Thomas in the Caribbean, along with Michelle's sister, John's daughter Mackenzie (from whose name Scott McKenzie had taken his stage name, as he was born Philip Blondheim), a pet dog, and sundry band members' girlfriends. They stayed there for several months, living in tents on the beach, taking acid, and rehearsing. While they were there, Michelle and Denny started an affair which would have important ramifications for the group later. They got a gig playing at a club called Duffy's, whose address was on Creeque Alley, and soon after they started playing there Cass Elliot travelled down as well -- she was in love with Denny, and wanted to be around him. She wasn't in the group, but she got a job working at Duffy's as a waitress, and she would often sing harmony with the group while waiting at tables. Depending on who was telling the story, either she didn't want to be in the group because she didn't want her appearance to be compared to Michelle's, or John wouldn't *let* her be in the group because she was so fat. Later a story would be made up to cover for this, saying that she hadn't been in the group at first because she couldn't sing the highest notes that were needed, until she got hit on the head with a metal pipe and discovered that it had increased her range by three notes, but that seems to be a lie. One of the songs the New Journeymen were performing at this time was "Mr. Tambourine Man". They'd heard that their old friend Roger McGuinn had recorded it with his new band, but they hadn't yet heard his version, and they'd come up with their own arrangement: [Excerpt: The New Journeymen, "Mr. Tambourine Man"] Denny later said "We were doing three-part harmony on 'Mr Tambourine Man', but a lot slower... like a polka or something! And I tell John, 'No John, we gotta slow it down and give it a backbeat.' Finally we get the Byrds 45 down here, and we put it on and turn it up to ten, and John says 'Oh, like that?' Well, as you can tell, it had already been done. So John goes 'Oh, ah... that's it...' a light went on. So we started doing Beatles stuff. We dropped 'Mr Tambourine Man' after hearing the Byrds version, because there was no point." Eventually they had to leave the island -- they had completely run out of money, and were down to fifty dollars. The credit card had been cut up, and the governor of the island had a personal vendetta against them because they gave his son acid, and they were likely to get arrested if they didn't leave the island. Elliot and her then-partner had round-trip tickets, so they just left, but the rest of them were in trouble. By this point they were unwashed, they were homeless, and they'd spent their last money on stage costumes. They got to the airport, and John Phillips tried to write a cheque for eight air fares back to the mainland, which the person at the check-in desk just laughed at. So they took their last fifty dollars and went to a casino. There Michelle played craps, and she rolled seventeen straight passes, something which should be statistically impossible. She turned their fifty dollars into six thousand dollars, which they scooped up, took to the airport, and paid for their flights out in cash. The New Journeymen arrived back in New York, but quickly decided that they were going to try their luck in California. They rented a car, using Scott McKenzie's credit card, and drove out to LA. There they met up with Hoyt Axton, who you may remember as the son of Mae Axton, the writer of "Heartbreak Hotel", and as the performer who had inspired Michael Nesmith to go into folk music: [Excerpt: Hoyt Axton, "Greenback Dollar"] Axton knew the group, and fed them and put them up for a night, but they needed somewhere else to stay. They went to stay with one of Michelle's friends, but after one night their rented car was stolen, with all their possessions in it. They needed somewhere else to stay, so they went to ask Jim Hendricks if they could crash at his place -- and they were surprised to find that Cass Elliot was there already. Hendricks had another partner -- though he and Elliot wouldn't have their marriage annulled until 1968 and were still technically married -- but he'd happily invited her to stay with them. And now all her friends had turned up, he invited them to stay as well, taking apart the beds in his one-bedroom apartment so he could put down a load of mattresses in the space for everyone to sleep on. The next part becomes difficult, because pretty much everyone in the LA music scene of the sixties was a liar who liked to embellish their own roles in things, so it's quite difficult to unpick what actually happened. What seems to have happened though is that first this new rock-oriented version of the New Journeymen went to see Frank Werber, on the recommendation of John Stewart. Werber was the manager of the Kingston Trio, and had also managed the Journeymen. He, however, was not interested -- not because he didn't think they had talent, but because he had experience of working with John Phillips previously. When Phillips came into his office Werber picked up a tape that he'd been given of the group, and said "I have not had a chance to listen to this tape. I believe that you are a most talented individual, and that's why we took you on in the first place. But I also believe that you're also a drag to work with. A pain in the ass. So I'll tell you what, before whatever you have on here sways me, I'm gonna give it back to you and say that we're not interested." Meanwhile -- and this part of the story comes from Kim Fowley, who was never one to let the truth get in the way of him taking claim for everything, but parts of it at least are corroborated by other people -- Cass Elliot had called Fowley, and told him that her friends' new group sounded pretty good and he should sign them. Fowley was at that time working as a talent scout for a label, but according to him the label wouldn't give the group the money they wanted. So instead, Fowley got in touch with Nik Venet, who had just produced the Leaves' hit version of "Hey Joe" on Mira Records: [Excerpt: The Leaves, "Hey Joe"] Fowley suggested to Venet that Venet should sign the group to Mira Records, and Fowley would sign them to a publishing contract, and they could both get rich. The trio went to audition for Venet, and Elliot drove them over -- and Venet thought the group had a great look as a quartet. He wanted to sign them to a record contract, but only if Elliot was in the group as well. They agreed, he gave them a one hundred and fifty dollar advance, and told them to come back the next day to see his boss at Mira. But Barry McGuire was also hanging round with Elliot and Hendricks, and decided that he wanted to have Lou Adler hear the four of them. He thought they might be useful both as backing vocalists on his second album and as a source of new songs. He got them to go and see Lou Adler, and according to McGuire Phillips didn't want Elliot to go with them, but as Elliot was the one who was friends with McGuire, Phillips worried that they'd lose the chance with Adler if she didn't. Adler was amazed, and decided to sign the group right then and there -- both Bones Howe and P.F. Sloan claimed to have been there when the group auditioned for him and have said "if you won't sign them, I will", though exactly what Sloan would have signed them to I'm not sure. Adler paid them three thousand dollars in cash and told them not to bother with Nik Venet, so they just didn't turn up for the Mira Records audition the next day. Instead, they went into the studio with McGuire and cut backing vocals on about half of his new album: [Excerpt: Barry McGuire with the Mamas and the Papas, "Hide Your Love Away"] While the group were excellent vocalists, there were two main reasons that Adler wanted to sign them. The first was that he found Michelle Phillips extremely attractive, and the second is a song that John and Michelle had written which he thought might be very suitable for McGuire's album. Most people who knew John Phillips think of "California Dreamin'" as a solo composition, and he would later claim that he gave Michelle fifty percent just for transcribing his lyric, saying he got inspired in the middle of the night, woke her up, and got her to write the song down as he came up with it. But Michelle, who is a credited co-writer on the song, has been very insistent that she wrote the lyrics to the second verse, and that it's about her own real experiences, saying that she would often go into churches and light candles even though she was "at best an agnostic, and possibly an atheist" in her words, and this would annoy John, who had also been raised Catholic, but who had become aggressively opposed to expressions of religion, rather than still having nostalgia for the aesthetics of the church as Michelle did. They were out walking on a particularly cold winter's day in 1963, and Michelle wanted to go into St Patrick's Cathedral and John very much did not want to. A couple of nights later, John woke her up, having written the first verse of the song, starting "All the leaves are brown and the sky is grey/I went for a walk on a winter's day", and insisting she collaborate with him. She liked the song, and came up with the lines "Stopped into a church, I passed along the way/I got down on my knees and I pretend to pray/The preacher likes the cold, he knows I'm going to stay", which John would later apparently dislike, but which stayed in the song. Most sources I've seen for the recording of "California Dreamin'" say that the lineup of musicians was the standard set of players who had played on McGuire's other records, with the addition of John Phillips on twelve-string guitar -- P.F. Sloan on guitar and harmonica, Joe Osborn on bass, Larry Knechtel on keyboards, and Hal Blaine on drums, but for some reason Stephen McParland's book on Sloan has Bones Howe down as playing drums on the track while engineering -- a detail so weird, and from such a respectable researcher, that I have to wonder if it might be true. In his autobiography, Sloan claims to have rewritten the chord sequence to "California Dreamin'". He says "Barry Mann had unintentionally showed me a suspended chord back at Screen Gems. I was so impressed by this beautiful, simple chord that I called Brian Wilson and played it for him over the phone. The next thing I knew, Brian had written ‘Don't Worry Baby,' which had within it a number suspended chords. And then the chord heard 'round the world, two months later, was the opening suspended chord of ‘A Hard Day's Night.' I used these chords throughout ‘California Dreamin',' and more specifically as a bridge to get back and forth from the verse to the chorus." Now, nobody else corroborates this story, and both Brian Wilson and John Phillips had the kind of background in modern harmony that means they would have been very aware of suspended chords before either ever encountered Sloan, but I thought I should mention it. Rather more plausible is Sloan's other claim, that he came up with the intro to the song. According to Sloan, he was inspired by "Walk Don't Run" by the Ventures: [Excerpt: The Ventures, "Walk Don't Run"] And you can easily see how this: [plays "Walk Don't Run"] Can lead to this: [plays "California Dreamin'"] And I'm fairly certain that if that was the inspiration, it was Sloan who was the one who thought it up. John Phillips had been paying no attention to the world of surf music when "Walk Don't Run" had been a hit -- that had been at the point when he was very firmly in the folk world, while Sloan of course had been recording "Tell 'Em I'm Surfin'", and it had been his job to know surf music intimately. So Sloan's intro became the start of what was intended to be Barry McGuire's next single: [Excerpt: Barry McGuire, "California Dreamin'"] Sloan also provided the harmonica solo on the track: [Excerpt: Barry McGuire, "California Dreamin'"] The Mamas and the Papas -- the new name that was now given to the former New Journeymen, now they were a quartet -- were also signed to Dunhill as an act on their own, and recorded their own first single, "Go Where You Wanna Go", a song apparently written by John about Michelle, in late 1963, after she had briefly left him to have an affair with Russ Titelman, the record producer and songwriter, before coming back to him: [Excerpt: The Mamas and the Papas, "Go Where You Wanna Go"] But while that was put out, they quickly decided to scrap it and go with another song. The "Go Where You Wanna Go" single was pulled after only selling a handful of copies, though its commercial potential was later proved when in 1967 a new vocal group, the 5th Dimension, released a soundalike version as their second single. The track was produced by Lou Adler's client Johnny Rivers, and used the exact same musicians as the Mamas and the Papas version, with the exception of Phillips. It became their first hit, reaching number sixteen on the charts: [Excerpt: The 5th Dimension, "Go Where You Wanna Go"] The reason the Mamas and the Papas version of "Go Where You Wanna Go" was pulled was because everyone became convinced that their first single should instead be their own version of "California Dreamin'". This is the exact same track as McGuire's track, with just two changes. The first is that McGuire's lead vocal was replaced with Denny Doherty: [Excerpt: The Mamas and the Papas, "California Dreamin'"] Though if you listen to the stereo mix of the song and isolate the left channel, you can hear McGuire singing the lead on the first line, and occasional leakage from him elsewhere on the backing vocal track: [Excerpt: The Mamas and the Papas, "California Dreamin'"] The other change made was to replace Sloan's harmonica solo with an alto flute solo by Bud Shank, a jazz musician who we heard about in the episode on "Light My Fire", when he collaborated with Ravi Shankar on "Improvisations on the Theme From Pather Panchali": [Excerpt: Ravi Shankar, "Improvisation on the Theme From Pather Panchali"] Shank was working on another session in Western Studios, where they were recording the Mamas and Papas track, and Bones Howe approached him while he was packing his instrument and asked if he'd be interested in doing another session. Shank agreed, though the track caused problems for him. According to Shank "What had happened was that whe
It wasn't as easy to communicate back in the 70's as it is now. At best, you could get in touch via the telephone line, but perhaps you had to resort to something more primitive strawberry letter. Perhaps the only thing you could see was the smoke from a distant fire that just seemed to float and float on. You told your love that you just want to be your everything, your handy man, your telephone man, so don't worry baby. We are just here to take it easy and sway to the music of the Billboard chart from the week ending August 27, 1977. Is there another podcast that does this same thing? If there is, nobody does it better than us. Link to a listing of the songs in this week's episode: https://top40weekly.com/1977-all-charts/#US_Top_40_Singles_Week_Ending_27th_August_1977 Also, a few interesting links to things we talked about in the episode: Riedlbauer's Resort & Nussy's Bier Garten: http://www.riedlbauersresort.com/ Billy Carter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Carter Saturday Night Live S03E18, Paul Shaffer does Don Kirshner: https://archive.org/details/saturday-night-live-s-03-e-18-steve-martin-4-22-1978-emmy-nominated-show Lamont Dozier obituary: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/aug/09/lamont-dozier-obituary Joel Whitburn Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_Whitburn Carol King's Website: https://www.caroleking.com/ Wings of Pegasus' excellent analysis of the Bay City Rollers' exploitation by their record label: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= TnA7A_pUbXE "You're My World" Cilla Black version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7-QBw862zk Ram Jam - Black Betty Video (filmed in Pete's backyard?): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_2D8Eo15wE Leo Sayer “Endless Flight” Album Cover: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endless_Flight#/media/File:Leo_Sayer_-_Endless_Flight.jpg Jimmy Jones Version of Handyman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wf6ZuwccJ48
Did you ever get to the end of the work week and feel like you were turning bluer than blue due to lack of oxygen? Like you barely had enough energy to do a last dance with your own shadow? Yet as darkness started to fall because the night was closing in, you had that sudden realization that it was the weekend and you felt your brain scream “thank god it's Friday”! It was a heartache as you longed for your significant other and thought “god how I miss you”. The thought of seeing them tonight would be wonderful. You'd get the chance to remind them that yes, you belong to me. Of course there was that danger that it could be too much, too little, and too late. Still, work was done and you would get to see them, so two out of three ain't bad. In this episode we take a chance with the songs on the Billboard top 40 from the week of June 24, 1978. With a little luck it won't be the same old songs. Link to a listing of the songs in this week's episode: https://top40weekly.com/1978-all-charts/#US_Top_40_Singles_Week_Ending_24th_June_1978 Also, a few interesting links to things we talked about in the episode: Retro Foghat Hat:https://www.foghat.biz/collections/hats/products/retro-fog-hat June 20,1978 Grace Slick splits with Jefferson Starship the day after a disastrous concert in Hamburg, Germany: https://ultimateclassicrock.com/grace-slick-quits-jefferson-starship/ Thank God It's Friday 1978 Movie Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QyAyvg0maA Deacon Jones Light Beer from Miller Commercial 1977: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZDGdO4miN0 Van Morrison, George Benson, Dr John, Santana, Etta James & Tom Scott, Moondance - April 1977:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdSxAa_kcJA The O'Jays - Live From Daryl's House 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzWRT-PAGQk ABBA backstage with Rory Gallagher at the Whiskey A Go Go filming Don Kirshner's Rock Concert November 1977: https://www.pinterest.com.mx/pin/452682200031699203/
The Yale Brothers welcome pioneering rocker and singer/songwriter Cidny Bullens for part one of a two-part conversation. Cidny is a two-time Grammy nominee with 9 albums spanning more than 40 years. He was a backup singer for Elton John and performed two lead vocals on the Grease movie soundtrack. He is one-third of a group called The Refugees with fellow singer/songwriters. Wendy Waldman and Deborah Holland. Cidny – or Cid – began the transition process from Cindy to Cidny in 2011 – and "Walkin' Through This World" is his first album as a man. A documentary about Cidny's life – also called "The Gender Line" – was screened at more than 20 film festivals around the world in 2019. He created a one-person show, "Somewhere Between: Not an Ordinary Life" in 2016 – and he's currently working on his memoir, "TransElectric." Cidny will be speaking Thursday, February 24, at Horry-Georgetown Technical College's Addiction and Recovery Lecture Series – in a virtual setting. SHOW NOTES: 0:00 - "The Gender Line" by Cidny Bullens from his 2020 album, "Walkin' Through This World" 4;17 - Greetings, about the song and about Cidny 5:44 - Cidny (then Cindy) meets Elton John / Cherokee Recording Studios Hollywood / Robb Brothers / Bob Crewe / Neil Sedaka / John Reid 11:54 - "My name is Elton" / Initial Conversation / Connie Papas Hillman invites Bullens on the road with Elton as backup singer. 15:47 - "The hovel" at 8000 Honey Drive, Hollywood / On the road with Elton / "Rock of the Westies" album - West of the Rockies tour / "Don't Go Breaking My Heart" / "Blue Moves" / Still friends to this day 19:10 - Early life - Boston / West Newberry, MA , Maine / Family and music / Albums and 45s / Jazz / Gospel / Black Music 21:56 - First exposure to Little Richard - "Tutti Frutti" - was a pivotal moment / The decision to become a rocker / Chuck Berry / Blues / Jerry Lee Lewis / The "rawness" of rock 'n' roll meets the melody and harmony of The Everly Brothers 24:25 - Trip to Hollywood with $100, a guitar and a backpack / couch surfing / looking for music work / Meeting Bob Crewe (Four Seasons producer) / Fate / Seven years in Los Angeles / Married Dan Crewe in 1979 28:32 - About first album: "Desire Wire" / Challenges surrounding being a woman in rock 'n' roll / Shopping the record / Resistance / First manager Tony Defries / Androgynous / Album recorded on spec / Deal with United Artists Records / "Grease" movie soundtrack 35:26 - First single: "Survivor" - garnered Grammy nomination for Best Rock Vocal Performance, Female (1980) / Vocals / "Sonic Attention" / UA Records folded in 1980 / Don Kirshner's Rock Concert / American Bandstand 39:12 - The Casablanca era / "Tomfoolery"at the label / Not a KISS fan / Neil Bogart / First KISS showcase 42:21 - "Desire Wire" album photo / Taken by Norman Seef's assistant, Georgina Karvellas 44:15 - Bruce Bird's demands at Casablanca and Bullens' eventual departure from the label. 46:25 - Appearances on Bob Dylan Rolling Thunder Revue tour / Bob Neuwirth 50:08 - First marriage to Dan Crewe / 22 years / Daughters Reid and Jessie / Eventual move to Maine 53:05 - Returning to music in 1985 / Roy Orbison Tribute 1990 was life-changing / "Pretty Woman" with Bonnie Raitt, K.D. Lang,, Emmylou Harris / Debbi Peterson / Wendy & Lisa / Tina Weymouth / Carla Azar / Solo song at tribute / T Bone Burnett / Don Was 56:31 - Call from Don Was - "Send Me an Angel" - Turning point in songwriting career, 1990 / Cidny discusses 1989 MCA Album, "Cindy Bullens" / More about Send Me an Angel" and new songwriting approach / Nashville beckons / Emmylou Harris / Radney Foster / Bill Lloyd / Embraced in Nashville: "Saved my musical soul" 1:00:45 - Horry-Georgetown Technical College Addiction and Recovery Lecture Series / Casey King / Cidny's story / 45 years clean and sober 1:02:44 - Forthcoming memoir, "TransElectric"/ 50 years of journals a blessing and a curse 1:05:26 - Wrapping up Part One / "Walkin' Through This World" by Cidny Bullens from his 2020 album of the same name.
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...
This week we get spooky as the boys find themselves in a haunted castle trying to save Davy from a whole slew of monsters like Dracula, Wolfman and Don Kirshner! (well, maybe not Don). Borrowing stock footage and costumes from past episodes, Monstrous Monkee Mash is full of great easter eggs for the Monkee fan. Be sure to stick around for the latest round of the Randomatic Countdown Featuring The Woolhat Of Mystery where three new Monkees songs are randomly pulled out of a green woolhat and placed into our ongoing Monkees list!
Episode 143 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Summer in the City'”, and at the short but productive career of the Lovin' Spoonful. 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 "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Any More" by the Walker Brothers and the strange career of Scott Walker. 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. This box set contains all four studio albums by the Lovin' Spoonful, plus the one album by "The Lovin' Spoonful featuring Joe Butler", while this CD contains their two film soundtracks (mostly inessential instrumental filler, apart from "Darling Be Home Soon") Information about harmonicas and harmonicists comes from Harmonicas, Harps, and Heavy Breathers by Kim Field. There are only three books about the Lovin' Spoonful, but all are worth reading. Do You Believe in Magic? by Simon Wordsworth is a good biography of the band, while his The Magic's in the Music is a scrapbook of press cuttings and reminiscences. Meanwhile Steve Boone's Hotter Than a Match Head: My Life on the Run with the Lovin' Spoonful has rather more discussion of the actual music than is normal in a musician's autobiography. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Let's talk about the harmonica for a while. The harmonica is an instrument that has not shown up a huge amount in the podcast, but which was used in a fair bit of the music we've covered. We've heard it for example on records by Bo Diddley: [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, "I'm a Man"] and by Bob Dylan: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Blowin' in the Wind"] and the Rolling Stones: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Little Red Rooster"] In most folk and blues contexts, the harmonicas used are what is known as a diatonic harmonica, and these are what most people think of when they think of harmonicas at all. Diatonic harmonicas have the notes of a single key in them, and if you want to play a note in another key, you have to do interesting tricks with the shape of your mouth to bend the note. There's another type of harmonica, though, the chromatic harmonica. We've heard that a time or two as well, like on "Love Me Do" by the Beatles: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Love Me Do"] Chromatic harmonicas have sixteen holes, rather than the diatonic harmonica's ten, and they also have a slide which you can press to raise the note by a semitone, meaning you can play far more notes than on a diatonic harmonica -- but they're also physically harder to play, requiring a different kind of breathing to pull off playing one successfully. They're so different that John Lennon would distinguish between the two instruments -- he'd describe a chromatic harmonica as a harmonica, but a diatonic harmonica he would call a harp, like blues musicians often did: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Love These Goon Shows"] While the chromatic harmonica isn't a particularly popular instrument in rock music, it is one that has had some success in other fields. There have been some jazz and light-orchestral musicians who have become famous playing the instrument, like the jazz musician Max Geldray, who played in those Goon Shows the Beatles loved so much: [Excerpt: Max Geldray, "C-Jam Blues"] And in the middle of the twentieth century there were a few musicians who succeeded in making the harmonica into an instrument that was actually respected in serious classical music. By far the most famous of these was Larry Adler, who became almost synonymous with the instrument in the popular consciousness, and who reworked many famous pieces of music for the instrument: [Excerpt: Larry Adler, "Rhapsody in Blue"] But while Adler was the most famous classical harmonicist of his generation, he was not generally considered the best by other musicians. That was, rather, a man named John Sebastian. Sebastian, who chose to take his middle name as a surname partly to Anglicise his name but also, it seems, at least in part as tribute to Johann Sebastian Bach (which incidentally now makes it really, really difficult to search for copies of his masterwork "John Sebastian Plays Bach", as Internet searches uniformly think you're searching just for the composer...) started out like almost all harmonica players as an amateur playing popular music. But he quickly got very, very, good, and by his teens he was already teaching other children, including at a summer camp run by Albert Hoxie, a musician and entrepreneur who was basically single-handedly responsible for the boom in harmonica sales in the 1920s and 1930s, by starting up youth harmonica orchestras -- dozens or even hundreds of kids, all playing harmonica together, in a semi-militaristic youth organisation something like the scouts, but with harmonicas instead of woggles and knots. Hoxie's group and the various organisations copying it led to there being over a hundred and fifty harmonica orchestras in Chicago alone, and in LA in the twenties and thirties a total of more than a hundred thousand children passed through harmonica orchestras inspired by Hoxie. Hoxie's youth orchestras were largely responsible for the popularity of the harmonica as a cheap instrument for young people, and thus for its later popularity in the folk and blues worlds. That was only boosted in the Second World War by the American Federation of Musicians recording ban, which we talked about in the early episodes of the podcast -- harmonicas had never been thought of as a serious instrument, and so most professional harmonica players were not members of the AFM, but were considered variety performers and were part of the American Guild of Variety Artists, along with singers, ukulele players, and musical saw players. Of course, the war did also create a problem, because the best harmonicas were made in Germany by the Hohner company, but soon a lot of American companies started making cheap harmonicas to fill the gap in the market. There's a reason the cliche of the GI in a war film playing a harmonica in the trenches exists, and it's largely because of Hoxie. And Hoxie was based in Philadelphia, where John Sebastian lived as a kid, and he mentored the young player, who soon became a semi-professional performer. Sebastian's father was a rich banker, and discouraged him from becoming a full-time musician -- the plan was that after university, Sebastian would become a diplomat. But as part of his preparation for that role, he was sent to spend a couple of years studying at the universities of Rome and Florence, learning about Italian culture. On the boat back, though, he started talking to two other passengers, who turned out to be the legendary Broadway songwriting team Rodgers and Hart, the writers of such classic songs as "Blue Moon" and "My Funny Valentine": [Excerpt: Ella Fitzgerald, "My Funny Valentine"] Sebastian talked to his new friends, and told them that he was feeling torn between being a musician and being in the foreign service like his father wanted. They both told him that in their experience some people were just born to be artists, and that those people would never actually find happiness doing anything else. He took their advice, and decided he was going to become a full-time harmonica player. He started out playing in nightclubs, initially playing jazz and swing, but only while he built up a repertoire of classical music. He would rehearse with a pianist for three hours every day, and would spend the rest of his time finding classical works, especially baroque ones, and adapting them for the harmonica. As he later said “I discovered sonatas by Telemann, Veracini, Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, Hasse, Marcello, Purcell, and many others, which were written to be played on violin, flute, oboe, musette, even bagpipes... The composer seemed to be challenging each instrument to create the embellishments and ornaments to suit its particular voice. . . . I set about choosing works from this treasure trove that would best speak through my instrument.” Soon his nightclub repertoire was made up entirely of these classical pieces, and he was making records like John Sebastian Plays Bach: [Excerpt: John Sebastian, "Flute Sonata in B Minor BWV1030 (J.S. Bach)"] And while Sebastian was largely a lover of baroque music above all other forms, he realised that he would have to persuade new composers to write new pieces for the instrument should he ever hope for it to have any kind of reputation as a concert instrument, so he persuaded contemporary composers to write pieces like George Kleinsinger's "Street Corner Concerto", which Sebastian premiered with the New York Philharmonic: [Excerpt: John Sebastian, "Street Corner Concerto"] He became the first harmonica player to play an entirely classical repertoire, and regarded as the greatest player of his instrument in the world. The oboe player Jay S Harrison once wrote of seeing him perform "to accomplish with success a program of Mr. Sebastian's scope is nothing short of wizardry. . . . He has vast technical facility, a bulging range of colors, and his intentions are ever musical and sophisticated. In his hands the harmonica is no toy, no simple gadget for the dispensing of homespun tunes. Each single number of the evening was whittled, rounded, polished, and poised. . . . Mr. Sebastian's playing is uncanny." Sebastian came from a rich background, and he managed to earn enough as a classical musician to live the lifestyle of a rich artistic Bohemian. During the forties and fifties he lived in Greenwich Village with his family -- apart from a four-year period living in Rome from 1951 to 55 -- and Eleanor Roosevelt was a neighbour, while Vivian Vance, who played Ethel Mertz on I Love Lucy, was the godmother of his eldest son. But while Sebastian's playing was entirely classical, he was interested in a wider variety of music. When he would tour Europe, he would often return having learned European folk songs, and while he was living in Greenwich Village he would often be visited by people like Burl Ives, Woody Guthrie, and other folk singers living in the area. And that early influence rubbed off on Sebastian's son, John Benson Sebastian, although young John gave up trying to learn the harmonica the first time he tried, because he didn't want to be following too closely in his father's footsteps. Sebastian junior did, though, take up the guitar, inspired by the first wave rock and rollers he was listening to on Alan Freed's show, and he would later play the harmonica, though the diatonic harmonica rather than the chromatic. In case you haven't already figured it out, John Benson Sebastian, rather than his father, is a principal focus of this episode, and so to avoid confusion, from this point on, when I refer to "John Sebastian" or "Sebastian" without any qualifiers, I'm referring to the younger man. When I refer to "John Sebastian Sr" I'm talking about the father. But it was John Sebastian Sr's connections, in particular to the Bohemian folk and blues scenes, which gave his more famous son his first connection to that world of his own, when Sebastian Sr appeared in a TV show, in November 1960, put together by Robert Herridge, a TV writer and producer who was most famous for his drama series but who had also put together documentaries on both classical music and jazz, including the classic performance documentary The Sound of Jazz. Herridge's show featured both Sebastian Sr and the country-blues player Lightnin' Hopkins: [Excerpt: Lightnin' Hopkins, "Blues in the Bottle"] Hopkins was one of many country-blues players whose career was having a second wind after his discovery by the folk music scene. He'd been recording for fourteen years, putting out hundreds of records, but had barely performed outside Houston until 1959, when the folkies had picked up on his work, and in October 1960 he had been invited to play Carnegie Hall, performing with Pete Seeger and Joan Baez. Young John Sebastian had come along with his dad to see the TV show be recorded, and had an almost Damascene conversion -- he'd already heard Hopkins' recordings, but had never seen anything like his live performances. He was at that time attending a private boarding school, Blair Academy, and his roommate at the school also had his own apartment, where Sebastian would sometimes stay. Soon Lightnin' Hopkins was staying there as well, as somewhere he could live rent-free while he was in New York. Sebastian started following Hopkins around and learning everything he could, being allowed by the older man to carry his guitar and buy him gin, though the two never became close. But eventually, Hopkins would occasionally allow Sebastian to play with him when he played at people's houses, which he did on occasion. Sebastian became someone that Hopkins trusted enough that when he was performing on a bill with someone else whose accompanist wasn't able to make the gig and Sebastian put himself forward, Hopkins agreed that Sebastian would be a suitable accompanist for the evening. The singer he accompanied that evening was a performer named Valentine Pringle, who was a protege of Harry Belafonte, and who had a similar kind of sound to Paul Robeson. Sebastian soon became Pringle's regular accompanist, and played on his first album, I Hear America Singing, which was also the first record on which the great trumpet player Hugh Masakela played. Sadly, Paul Robeson style vocals were so out of fashion by that point that that album has never, as far as I can tell, been issued in a digital format, and hasn't even been uploaded to YouTube. But this excerpt from a later recording by Pringle should give you some idea of the kind of thing he was doing: [Excerpt: Valentine Pringle, "Go 'Way From My Window"] After these experiences, Sebastian started regularly going to shows at Greenwich Village folk clubs, encouraged by his parents -- he had an advantage over his peers because he'd grown up in the area and had artistic parents, and so he was able to have a great deal of freedom that other people in their teens weren't. In particular, he would always look out for any performances by the great country blues performer Mississippi John Hurt. Hurt had made a few recordings for Okeh records in 1928, including an early version of "Stagger Lee", titled "Stack O'Lee": [Excerpt: Mississippi John Hurt, "Stack O'Lee Blues"] But those records had been unsuccessful, and he'd carried on working on a farm. and not performed other than in his tiny home town of Avalon, Mississippi, for decades. But then in 1952, a couple of his tracks had been included on the Harry Smith Anthology, and as a result he'd come to the attention of the folk and blues scholar community. They'd tried tracking him down, but been unable to until in the early sixties one of them had discovered a track on one of Hurt's records, "Avalon Blues", and in 1963, thirty-five years after he'd recorded six flop singles, Mississippi John Hurt became a minor star, playing the Newport Folk Festival and appearing on the Tonight Show. By this time, Sebastian was a fairly well-known figure in Greenwich Village, and he had become quite a virtuoso on the harmonica himself, and would walk around the city wearing a holster-belt containing harmonicas in a variety of different keys. Sebastian became a huge fan of Hurt, and would go and see him perform whenever Hurt was in New York. He soon found himself first jamming backstage with Hurt, and then performing with him on stage for the last two weeks of a residency. He was particularly impressed with what he called Hurt's positive attitude in his music -- something that Sebastian would emulate in his own songwriting. Sebastian was soon invited to join a jug band, called the Even Dozen Jug Band. Jug band music was a style of music that first became popular in the 1920s, and had many of the same musical elements as the music later known as skiffle. It was played on a mixture of standard musical instruments -- usually portable, "folky" ones like guitar and harmonica -- and improvised homemade instruments, like the spoons, the washboard, and comb and paper. The reason they're called jug bands is because they would involve someone blowing into a jug to make a noise that sounded a bit like a horn -- much like the coffee pot groups we talked about way back in episode six. The music was often hokum music, and incorporated elements of what we'd now call blues, vaudeville, and country music, though at the time those genres were nothing like as distinct as they're considered today: [Excerpt: Cincinnati Jug Band, "Newport Blues"] The Even Dozen Jug Band actually ended up having thirteen members, and it had a rather remarkable lineup. The leader was Stefan Grossman, later regarded as one of the greatest fingerpicking guitarists in America, and someone who will be coming up in other contexts in future episodes I'm sure, and they also featured David Grisman, a mandolin player who would later play with the Grateful Dead among many others; Steve Katz, who would go on to be a founder member of Blood, Sweat and Tears and produce records for Lou Reed; Maria D'Amato, who under her married name Maria Muldaur would go on to have a huge hit with "Midnight at the Oasis"; and Joshua Rifkin, who would later go on to become one of the most important scholars of Bach's music of the latter half of the twentieth century, but who is best known for his recordings of Scott Joplin's piano rags, which more or less single-handedly revived Joplin's music from obscurity and created the ragtime revival of the 1970s: [Excerpt: Joshua Rifkin, "Maple Leaf Rag"] Unfortunately, despite the many talents involved, a band as big as that was uneconomical to keep together, and the Even Dozen Jug Band only played four shows together -- though those four shows were, as Muldaur later remembered, "Carnegie Hall twice, the Hootenanny television show and some church". The group did, though, make an album for Elektra records, produced by Paul Rothchild. Indeed, it was Rothchild who was the impetus for the group forming -- he wanted to produce a record of a jug band, and had told Grossman that if he got one together, he'd record it: [Excerpt: The Even Dozen Jug Band, "On the Road Again"] On that album, Sebastian wasn't actually credited as John Sebastian -- because he was playing harmonica on the album, and his father was such a famous harmonica player, he thought it better if he was credited by his middle name, so he was John Benson for this one album. The Even Dozen Jug Band split up after only a few months, with most of the band more interested in returning to university than becoming professional musicians, but Sebastian remained in touch with Rothchild, as they both shared an interest in the drug culture, and Rothchild started using him on sessions for other artists on Elektra, which was rapidly becoming one of the biggest labels for the nascent counterculture. The first record the two worked together on after the Even Dozen Jug Band was sparked by a casual conversation. Vince Martin and Fred Neil saw Sebastian walking down the street wearing his harmonica holster, and were intrigued and asked him if he played. Soon he and his friend Felix Pappalardi were accompanying Martin and Neil on stage, and the two of them were recording as the duo's accompanists: [Excerpt: Vince Martin and Fred Neil, "Tear Down the Walls"] We've mentioned Neil before, but if you don't remember him, he was one of the people around whom the whole Greenwich Village scene formed -- he was the MC and organiser of bills for many of the folk shows of the time, but he's now best known for writing the songs "Everybody's Talkin'", recorded famously by Harry Nilsson, and "The Dolphins", recorded by Tim Buckley. On the Martin and Neil album, Tear Down The Walls, as well as playing harmonica, Sebastian acted essentially as uncredited co-producer with Rothchild, but Martin and Neil soon stopped recording for Elektra. But in the meantime, Sebastian had met the most important musical collaborator he would ever have, and this is the start of something that will become a minor trend in the next few years, of important musical collaborations happening because of people being introduced by Cass Elliot. Cass Elliot had been a singer in a folk group called the Big 3 -- not the same group as the Merseybeat group -- with Tim Rose, and the man who would be her first husband, Jim Hendricks (not the more famous guitarist of a similar name): [Excerpt: Cass Elliot and the Big 3, "The Banjo Song"] The Big 3 had split up when Elliot and Hendricks had got married, and the two married members had been looking around for other musicians to perform with, when coincidentally another group they knew also split up. The Halifax Three were a Canadian group who had originally started out as The Colonials, with a lineup of Denny Doherty, Pat LaCroix and Richard Byrne. Byrne didn't turn up for a gig, and a homeless guitar player, Zal Yanovsky, who would hang around the club the group were playing at, stepped in. Doherty and LaCroix, much to Yanovsky's objections, insisted he bathe and have a haircut, but soon the newly-renamed Halifax Three were playing Carnegie Hall and recording for Epic Records: [Excerpt: The Halifax Three, "When I First Came to This Island"] But then a plane they were in crash-landed, and the group took that as a sign that they should split up. So they did, and Doherty and Yanovsky continued as a duo, until they hooked up with Hendricks and Elliot and formed a new group, the Mugwumps. A name which may be familiar if you recognise one of the hits of a group that Doherty and Elliot were in later: [Excerpt: The Mamas and the Papas, "Creeque Alley"] But we're skipping ahead a bit there. Cass Elliot was one of those few people in the music industry about whom it is impossible to find anyone with a bad word to say, and she was friendly with basically everyone, and particularly good at matching people up with each other. And on February the 7th 1964, she invited John Sebastian over to watch the Beatles' first performance on the Ed Sullivan Show. Like everyone in America, he was captivated by the performance: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I Want to Hold Your Hand (live on the Ed Sullivan Show)"] But Yanovsky was also there, and the two played guitar together for a bit, before retreating to opposite sides of the room. And then Elliot spent several hours as a go-between, going to each man and telling him how much the other loved and admired his playing and wanted to play more with him. Sebastian joined the Mugwumps for a while, becoming one of the two main instrumentalists with Yanovsky, as the group pivoted from performing folk music to performing Beatles-inspired rock. But the group's management team, Bob Cavallo and Roy Silver, who weren't particularly musical people, and whose main client was the comedian Bill Cosby, got annoyed at Sebastian, because he and Yanovsky were getting on *too* well musically -- they were trading blues licks on stage, rather than sticking to the rather pedestrian arrangements that the group was meant to be performing -- and so Silver fired Sebastian fired from the group. When the Mugwumps recorded their one album, Sebastian had to sit in the control room while his former bandmates recorded with session musicians, who he thought were nowhere near up to his standard: [Excerpt: The Mugwumps, "Searchin'"] By the time that album was released, the Mugwumps had already split up. Sebastian had continued working as a session musician for Elektra, including playing on the album The Blues Project, which featured white Greenwich Village folk musicians like Eric Von Schmidt, Dave Van Ronk, and Spider John Koerner playing their versions of old blues records, including this track by Geoff Muldaur, which features Sebastian on harmonica and "Bob Landy" on piano -- a fairly blatant pseudonym: [Excerpt: Geoff Muldaur, "Downtown Blues"] Sebastian also played rhythm guitar and harmonica on the demos that became a big part of Tim Hardin's first album -- and his fourth, when the record company released the remaining demos. Sebastian doesn't appear to be on the orchestrated ballads that made Hardin's name -- songs like "Reason to Believe" and "Misty Roses" -- but he is on much of the more blues-oriented material, which while it's not anything like as powerful as Hardin's greatest songs, made up a large part of his repertoire: [Excerpt: Tim Hardin, "Ain't Gonna Do Without"] Erik Jacobsen, the producer of Hardin's records, was impressed enough by Sebastian that he got Sebastian to record lead vocals, for a studio group consisting of Sebastian, Felix Pappalardi, Jerry Yester and Henry Diltz of the Modern Folk Quartet, and a bass singer whose name nobody could later remember. The group, under the name "Pooh and the Heffalumps", recorded two Beach Boys knockoffs, "Lady Godiva" and "Rooty Toot", the latter written by Sebastian, though he would later be embarrassed by it and claim it was by his cousin: [Excerpt: Pooh and the Heffalumps, "Rooty Toot"] After that, Jacobsen became convinced that Sebastian should form a group to exploit his potential as a lead singer and songwriter. By this point, the Mugwumps had split up, and their management team had also split, with Silver taking Bill Cosby and Cavallo taking the Mugwumps, and so Sebastian was able to work with Yanovsky, and the putative group could be managed by Cavallo. But Sebastian and Yanovsky needed a rhythm section. And Erik Jacobsen knew a band that might know some people. Jacobsen was a fan of a Beatles soundalike group called the Sellouts, who were playing Greenwich Village and who were co-managed by Herb Cohen, the manager of the Modern Folk Quartet (who, as we heard a couple of episodes ago, would soon go on to be the manager of the Mothers of Invention). The Sellouts were ultra-professional by the standards of rock groups of the time -- they even had a tape echo machine that they used on stage to give them a unique sound -- and they had cut a couple of tracks with Jacobsen producing, though I've not been able to track down copies of them. Their leader Skip Boone, had started out playing guitar in a band called the Blue Suedes, and had played in 1958 on a record by their lead singer Arthur Osborne: [Excerpt: Arthur Osborne, "Hey Ruby"] Skip Boone's brother Steve in his autobiography says that that was produced by Chet Atkins for RCA, but it was actually released on Brunswick records. In the early sixties, Skip Boone joined a band called the Kingsmen -- not the same one as the band that recorded "Louie Louie" -- playing lead guitar with his brother Steve on rhythm, a singer called Sonny Bottari, a saxophone player named King Charles, bass player Clay Sonier, and drummer Joe Butler. Sometimes Butler would get up front and sing, and then another drummer, Jan Buchner, would sit in in his place. Soon Steve Boone would replace Bonier as the bass player, but the Kingsmen had no success, and split up. From the ashes of the Kingsmen had formed the Sellouts, Skip Boone, Jerry Angus, Marshall O'Connell, and Joe Butler, who had switched from playing "Peppermint Twist" to playing "I Want to Hold Your Hand" in February 1964. Meanwhile Steve Boone went on a trip to Europe before starting at university in New York, where he hooked up again with Butler, and it was Butler who introduced him to Sebastian and Yanovsky. Sebastian and Yanovsky had been going to see the Sellouts at the behest of Jacobsen, and they'd been asking if they knew anyone else who could play that kind of material. Skip Boone had mentioned his little brother, and as soon as they met him, even before they first played together, they knew from his appearance that he would be the right bass player for them. So now they had at least the basis for a band. They hadn't played together, but Erik Jacobsen was an experienced record producer and Cavallo an experienced manager. They just needed to do some rehearsals and get a drummer, and a record contract was more or less guaranteed. Boone suggested Jan Buchner, the backup drummer from the Kingsmen, and he joined them for rehearsals. It was during these early rehearsals that Boone got to play on his first real record, other than some unreleased demos the Kingsmen had made. John Sebastian got a call from that "Bob Landy" we mentioned earlier, asking if he'd play bass on a session. Boone tagged along, because he was a fan, and when Sebastian couldn't get the parts down for some songs, he suggested that Boone, as an actual bass player, take over: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Maggie's Farm"] But the new group needed a name, of course. It was John Sebastian who came up with the name they eventually chose, The Lovin' Spoonful, though Boone was a bit hesitant about it at first, worrying that it might be a reference to heroin -- Boone was from a very conservative, military, background, and knew little of drug culture and didn't at that time make much of a distinction between cannabis and heroin, though he'd started using the former -- but Sebastian was insistent. The phrase actually referred to coffee -- the name came from "Coffee Blues" by Sebastian's old idol Mississippi John Hurt – or at least Hurt always *said* it was about coffee, though in live performance he apparently made it clear that it was about cunnilingus: [Excerpt: Mississippi John Hurt, "Coffee Blues"] Their first show, at the Night Owl Club, was recorded, and there was even an attempt to release it as a CD in the 1990s, but it was left unreleased and as far as I can tell wasn't even leaked. There have been several explanations for this, but perhaps the most accurate one is just the comment from the manager of the club, who came up to the group after their two sets and told them “Hey, I don't know how to break this to you, but you guys suck.” There were apparently three different problems. They were underrehearsed -- which could be fixed with rehearsal -- they were playing too loud and hurting the patrons' ears -- which could be fixed by turning down the amps -- and their drummer didn't look right, was six years older than the rest of the group, and was playing in an out-of-date fifties style that wasn't suitable for the music they were playing. That was solved by sacking Buchner. By this point Joe Butler had left the Sellouts, and while Herb Cohen was interested in managing him as a singer, he was willing to join this new group at least for the moment. By now the group were all more-or-less permanent residents at the Albert Hotel, which was more or less a doss-house where underemployed musicians would stay, and which had its own rehearsal rooms. As well as the Spoonful, Cass Elliot and Denny Doherty lived there, as did the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Joe Butler quickly fit into the group, and soon they were recording what became their first single, produced by Jacobsen, an original of Sebastian's called "Do You Believe in Magic?", with Sebastian on autoharp and vocals, Yanovsky on lead guitar and backing vocals, Boone on bass, Butler on drums, and Jerry Yester adding piano and backing vocals: [Excerpt: The Lovin' Spoonful, "Do You Believe in Magic?"] For a long time, the group couldn't get a deal -- the record companies all liked the song, but said that unless the group were English they couldn't sell them at the moment. Then Phil Spector walked into the Night Owl Cafe, where the new lineup of the group had become popular, and tried to sign them up. But they turned him down -- they wanted Erik Jacobsen to produce them; they were a team. Spector's interest caused other labels to be interested, and the group very nearly signed to Elektra. But again, signing to Elektra would have meant being produced by Rothchild, and also Elektra were an album label who didn't at that time have any hit single acts, and the group knew they had hit single potential. They did record a few tracks for Elektra to stick on a blues compilation, but they knew that Elektra wouldn't be their real home. Eventually the group signed with Charley Koppelman and Don Rubin, who had started out as songwriters themselves, working for Don Kirshner. When Kirshner's organisation had been sold to Columbia, Koppelman and Rubin had gone along and ended up working for Columbia as executives. They'd then worked for Morris Levy at Roulette Records, before forming their own publishing and record company. Rather than put out records themselves, they had a deal to license records to Kama Sutra Records, who in turn had a distribution deal with MGM Records. Koppelman and Rubin were willing to take the group and their manager and producer as a package deal, and they released the group's demo of "Do You Believe In Magic?" unchanged as their first single: [Excerpt: The Lovin' Spoonful, "Do You Believe in Magic?"] The single reached the top ten, and the group were soon in the studio cutting their first album, also titled Do You Believe In Magic? The album was a mix of songs that were part of the standard Greenwich Village folkie repertoire -- songs like Mississippi John Hurt's "Blues in the Bottle" and Fred Neil's "The Other Side of This Life" -- and a couple more originals. The group's second single was the first song that Steve Boone had co-written. It was inspired by a date he'd gone on with the photographer Nurit Wilde, who sadly for him didn't go on a second date, and who would later be the mother of Mike Nesmith's son Jason, but who he was very impressed by. He thought of her when he came up with the line "you didn't have to be so nice, I would have liked you anyway", and he and Sebastian finished up a song that became another top ten hit for the group: [Excerpt: (The Good Time Music of) The Lovin' Spoonful, "You Didn't Have to Be So Nice"] Shortly after that song was recorded, but before it was released, the group were called into Columbia TV with an intriguing proposition. Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson, two young TV producers, were looking at producing a TV show inspired by A Hard Day's Night, and were looking for a band to perform in it. Would the Lovin' Spoonful be up for it? They were interested at first, but Boone and Sebastian weren't sure they wanted to be actors, and also it would involve the group changing its name. They'd already made a name for themselves as the Lovin' Spoonful, did they really want to be the Monkees instead? They passed on the idea. Instead, they went on a tour of the deep South as the support act to the Supremes, a pairing that they didn't feel made much sense, but which did at least allow them to watch the Supremes and the Funk Brothers every night. Sebastian was inspired by the straight four-on-the-floor beat of the Holland-Dozier-Holland repertoire, and came up with his own variation on it, though as this was the Lovin' Spoonful the end result didn't sound very Motown at all: [Excerpt: The Lovin' Spoonful, "Daydream"] It was only after the track was recorded that Yanovsky pointed out to Sebastian that he'd unconsciously copied part of the melody of the old standard "Got a Date With an Angel": [Excerpt: Al Bowlly, "Got a Date With an Angel"] "Daydream" became the group's third top ten hit in a row, but it caused some problems for the group. The first was Kama Sutra's advertising campaign for the record, which had the words "Lovin' Spoonful Daydream", with the initials emphasised. While the group were drug users, they weren't particularly interested in being promoted for that rather than their music, and had strong words with the label. The other problem came with the Beach Boys. The group were supporting the Beach Boys on a tour in spring of 1966, when "Daydream" came out and became a hit, and they got on with all the band members except Mike Love, who they definitely did not get on with. Almost fifty years later, in his autobiography, Steve Boone would have nothing bad to say about the Wilson brothers, but calls Love "an obnoxious, boorish braggart", a "marginally talented hack" and worse, so it's safe to say that Love wasn't his favourite person in the world. Unfortunately, when "Daydream" hit the top ten, one of the promoters of the tour decided to bill the Lovin' Spoonful above the Beach Boys, and this upset Love, who understandably thought that his group, who were much better known and had much more hits, should be the headliners. If this had been any of the other Beach Boys, there would have been no problem, but because it was Love, who the Lovin' Spoonful despised, they decided that they were going to fight for top billing, and the managers had to get involved. Eventually it was agreed that the two groups would alternate the top spot on the bill for the rest of the tour. "Daydream" eventually reached number two on the charts (and number one on Cashbox) and also became the group's first hit in the UK, reaching number two here as well, and leading to the group playing a short UK tour. During that tour, they had a similar argument over billing with Mick Jagger as they'd had with Mike Love, this time over who was headlining on an appearance on Top of the Pops, and the group came to the same assessment of Jagger as they had of Love. The performance went OK, though, despite them being so stoned on hash given them by the wealthy socialite Tara Browne that Sebastian had to be woken up seconds before he started playing. They also played the Marquee Club -- Boone notes in his autobiography that he wasn't impressed by the club when he went to see it the day before their date there, because some nobody named David Bowie was playing there. But in the audience that day were George Harrison, John Lennon, Eric Clapton, Steve Winwood, Spencer Davis, and Brian Jones, most of whom partied with the group afterwards. The Lovin' Spoonful made a big impression on Lennon in particular, who put "Daydream" and "Do You Believe in Magic" in his jukebox at home, and who soon took to wearing glasses in the same round, wiry, style as the ones that Sebastian wore. They also influenced Paul McCartney, who wasn't at that gig, but who soon wrote this, inspired by "Daydream": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Good Day Sunshine"] Unfortunately, this was more or less the high point of the group's career. Shortly after that brief UK tour, Zal Yanovsky and Steve Boone went to a party where they were given some cannabis -- and they were almost immediately stopped by the police, subjected to an illegal search of their vehicle, and arrested. They would probably have been able to get away with this -- after all, it was an illegal search, even though of course the police didn't admit to that -- were it not for the fact that Yanovsky was a Canadian citizen, and he could be deported and barred from ever re-entering the US just for being arrested. This was the first major drug bust of a rock and roll group, and there was no precedent for the group, their managers, their label or their lawyers to deal with this. And so they agreed to something they would regret for the rest of their lives. In return for being let off, Boone and Yanovsky agreed to take an undercover police officer to a party and introduce him to some of their friends as someone they knew in the record business, so he would be able to arrest one of the bigger dealers. This was, of course, something they knew was a despicable thing to do, throwing friends under the bus to save themselves, but they were young men and under a lot of pressure, and they hoped that it wouldn't actually lead to any arrests. And for almost a year, there were no serious consequences, although both Boone and Yanovsky were shaken up by the event, and Yanovsky's behaviour, which had always been erratic, became much, much worse. But for the moment, the group remained very successful. After "Daydream", an album track from their first album, "Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind?" had been released as a stopgap single, and that went to number two as well. And right before the arrest, the group had been working on what would be an even bigger hit. The initial idea for "Summer in the City" actually came from John Sebastian's fourteen-year-old brother Mark, who'd written a bossa nova song called "It's a Different World". The song was, by all accounts, the kind of thing that a fourteen-year-old boy writes, but part of it had potential, and John Sebastian took that part -- giving his brother full credit -- and turned it into the chorus of a new song: [Excerpt: The Lovin' Spoonful, "Summer in the City"] To this, Sebastian added a new verse, inspired by a riff the session player Artie Schroeck had been playing while the group recorded their songs for the Woody Allen film What's Up Tiger Lily, creating a tenser, darker, verse to go with his younger brother's chorus: [Excerpt: The Lovin' Spoonful, "Summer in the City"] In the studio, Steve Boone came up with the instrumental arrangement, which started with drums, organ, electric piano, and guitar, and then proceeded to bass, autoharp, guitar, and percussion overdubs. The drum sound on the record was particularly powerful thanks to the engineer Roy Halee, who worked on most of Simon & Garfunkel's records. Halee put a mic at the top of a stairwell, a giant loudspeaker at the bottom, and used the stairwell as an echo chamber for the drum part. He would later use a similar technique on Simon and Garfunkel's "The Boxer". The track still needed another section though, and Boone suggested an instrumental part, which led to him getting an equal songwriting credit with the Sebastian brothers. His instrumental piano break was inspired by Gershwin, and the group topped it off with overdubbed city noises: [Excerpt: The Lovin' Spoonful, "Summer in the City"] The track went to number one, becoming the group's only number one record, and it was the last track on what is by far their best album, Hums of the Lovin' Spoonful. That album produced two more top ten hits for the group, "Nashville Cats", a tribute to Nashville session players (though John Sebastian seems to have thought that Sun Records was a Nashville, rather than a Memphis, label), and the rather lovely "Rain on the Roof": [Excerpt: The Lovin' Spoonful, "Rain on the Roof"] But that song caused friction with the group, because it was written about Sebastian's relationship with his wife who the other members of the band despised. They also felt that the songs he was writing about their relationship were giving the group a wimpy image, and wanted to make more rockers like "Summer in the City" -- some of them had been receiving homophobic abuse for making such soft-sounding music. The group were also starting to resent Sebastian for other reasons. In a recent contract renegotiation, a "key member" clause had been put into the group's record contract, which stated that Sebastian, as far as the label was concerned, was the only important member of the group. While that didn't affect decision-making in the group, it did let the group know that if the other members did anything to upset Sebastian, he was able to take his ball away with him, and even just that potential affected the way the group thought about each other. All these factors came into play with a song called "Darling Be Home Soon", which was a soft ballad that Sebastian had written about his wife, and which was written for another film soundtrack -- this time for a film by a new director named Francis Ford Coppola. When the other band members came in to play on the soundtrack, including that track, they found that rather than being allowed to improvise and come up with their own parts as they had previously, they had to play pre-written parts to fit with the orchestration. Yanovsky in particular was annoyed by the simple part he had to play, and when the group appeared on the Ed Sullivan show to promote the record, he mugged, danced erratically, and mimed along mocking the lyrics as Sebastian sang. The song -- one of Sebastian's very best -- made a perfectly respectable number fifteen, but it was the group's first record not to make the top ten: [Excerpt: The Lovin' Spoonful, "Darling Be Home Soon"] And then to make matters worse, the news got out that someone had been arrested as a result of Boone and Yanovsky's efforts to get themselves out of trouble the year before. This was greeted with horror by the counterculture, and soon mimeographed newsletters and articles in the underground papers were calling the group part of the establishment, and calling for a general boycott of the group -- if you bought their records, attended their concerts, or had sex with any of the band members, you were a traitor. Yanovsky and Boone had both been in a bad way mentally since the bust, but Yanovsky was far worse, and was making trouble for the other members in all sorts of ways. The group decided to fire Yanovsky, and brought in Jerry Yester to replace him, giving him a severance package that ironically meant that he ended up seeing more money from the group's records than the rest of them, as their records were later bought up by a variety of shell companies that passed through the hands of Morris Levy among others, and so from the late sixties through the early nineties the group never got any royalties. For a while, this seemed to benefit everyone. Yanovsky had money, and his friendship with the group members was repaired. He released a solo single, arranged by Jack Nitzsche, which just missed the top one hundred: [Excerpt: Zal Yanovsky, "Just as Long as You're Here"] That song was written by the Bonner and Gordon songwriting team who were also writing hits for the Turtles at this time, and who were signed to Koppelman and Rubin's company. The extent to which Yanovsky's friendship with his ex-bandmates was repaired by his firing was shown by the fact that Jerry Yester, his replacement in the group, co-produced his one solo album, Alive and Well in Argentina, an odd mixture of comedy tracks, psychedelia, and tributes to the country music he loved. His instrumental version of Floyd Cramer's "Last Date" is fairly listenable -- Cramer's piano playing was a big influence on Yanovsky's guitar -- but his version of George Jones' "From Brown to Blue" makes it very clear that Zal Yanovsky was no George Jones: [Excerpt: Zal Yanovsky, "From Brown to Blue"] Yanovsky then quit music, and went into the restaurant business. The Lovin' Spoonful, meanwhile, made one further album, but the damage had been done. Everything Playing is actually a solid album, though not as good as the album before, and it produced three top forty hits, but the highest-charting was "Six O'Clock", which only made number eighteen, and the album itself made a pitiful one hundred and eighteen on the charts. The song on the album that in retrospect has had the most impact was the rather lovely "Younger Generation", which Sebastian later sang at Woodstock: [Excerpt: John Sebastian, "Younger Generation (Live at Woodstock)"] But at Woodstock he performed that alone, because by then he'd quit the group. Boone, Butler, and Yester decided to continue, with Butler singing lead, and recorded a single, "Never Going Back", produced by Yester's old bandmate from the Modern Folk Quartet Chip Douglas, who had since become a successful producer for the Monkees and the Turtles, and written by John Stewart of the Kingston Trio, who had written "Daydream Believer" for the Monkees, but the record only made number seventy-eight on the charts: [Excerpt: The Lovin' Spoonful featuring Joe Butler, "Never Going Back"] That was followed by an album by "The Lovin' Spoonful Featuring Joe Butler", Revelation: Revolution 69, a solo album by Butler in all but name -- Boone claims not to have played on it, and Butler is the only one featured on the cover, which shows a naked Butler being chased by a naked woman with a lion in front of them covering the naughty bits. The biggest hit other than "Never Going Back" from the album was "Me About You", a Bonner and Gordon song which only made number ninety-one: [Excerpt: The Lovin' Spoonful Featuring Joe Butler, "Me About You"] John Sebastian went on to have a moderately successful solo career -- as well as his appearance at Woodstock, he released several solo albums, guested on harmonica on records by the Doors, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young and others, and had a solo number one hit in 1976 with "Welcome Back", the theme song from the TV show Welcome Back, Kotter: [Excerpt: John Sebastian, "Welcome Back"] Sebastian continues to perform, though he's had throat problems for several decades that mean he can't sing many of the songs he's best known for. The original members of the Lovin' Spoonful reunited for two performances -- an appearance in Paul Simon's film One Trick Pony in 1980, and a rather disastrous induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2000. Zal Yanovsky died of a heart attack in 2002. The remaining band members remained friendly, and Boone, Butler, and Yester reunited as the Lovin' Spoonful in 1991, initially with Yester's brother Jim, who had played in The Association, latterly with other members. One of those other members in the 1990s was Yester's daughter Lena, who became Boone's fourth wife (and is as far as I can discover still married to him). Yester, Boone, and Butler continued touring together as the Lovin' Spoonful until 2017, when Jerry Yester was arrested on thirty counts of child pornography possession, and was immediately sacked from the group. The other two carried on, and the three surviving original members reunited on stage for a performance at one of the Wild Honey Orchestra's benefit concerts in LA in 2020, though that was just a one-off performance, not a full-blown reunion. It was also the last Lovin' Spoonful performance to date, as that was in February 2020, but Steve Boone has performed with John Sebastian's most recent project, John Sebastian's Jug Band Village, a tribute to the Greenwich Village folk scene the group originally formed in, and the two played together most recently in December 2021. The three surviving original members of the group all seem to be content with their legacy, doing work they enjoy, and basically friendly, which is more than can be said for most of their contemporaries, and which is perhaps appropriate for a band whose main songwriter had been inspired, more than anything else, to make music with a positive attitude.
On the January 17 edition of the Music History Today podcast, there's Juice, Sugarland, Don Kirshner, Garth Brooks, Eartha Kitt, & Kid Rock. ALL MY LINKS - https://allmylinks.com/musichistorytoday --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/musichistorytodaypodcast/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/musichistorytodaypodcast/support
What is the purpose of this podcast if not to help Damian rekindle old friendships? Today on the show, Mayans M.C. co-creator and Righteous Jammer Elgins James sits down for one of the most fascinating episodes yet. Listen in as two friends reconnect and discuss Elgin's harrowing journey from homeless punk to writing a hit tv show. THIS IS NOT TO BE MISSED AT ALL COSTS. Also, lookout for Mayans M.C. season 4 coming in 2022 and catch up on past seasons on FX now! Also touched on: Don Kirshner's Rock Concert The Billy Squier/ Dead Kennedys connection The Sex Pistols rule Catching MRR radio by chance Molly Shannon: New Waver The Clash vs. The Pistols Rainbow and The Scorpions Adventure Jukebox on WXEI No Milk On Tuesday Husker Du Going to the Anthrax and seeing Mental Abuse Chronic Disorder Starting a zine Following Rollins around on the Lifetime Tour Rage Of Discipline: the band “Stay out of prison”: advice from Hank Believing it and living it A little boy never learning to be a man Blackout Bar Meeting Kira from Black Flag…. kinda The changing of the guard in Connecticut Forced Reality Roger and Agnostic Front: the realest Getting banned from the Anthrax every other weekend Skeletal Ambitions Helping out Jill Heath and DRI Being a punk rock filmmaker Julian Temple on Crass Playing with GG Allin The skinheads going to see Suckdog Nancy and Al Barile Hating Youth Of Today The lost Boston scene of the late 80's Tree B'zrker Sam Black Church Inheriting the Boston VS New York beef Metal as fantasy The power of the phrase: “I love you”. The delicate Art School/ Street Rock 'N' Roll balance Fighting onstage during Black Flag Joey C and Righteous Jams Gibby and the invention of social media Everything comes down to sadness And so much more!! Brought to you by VANS
This second studio album from The Monkees was number 1 on the Billboard 200 for 18 weeks, displacing their debut album to get there. More of the Monkees has been certified quintuple platinum, was the first pop/rock album to be the best selling album of the year in the U.S. – and the third best-selling album of the 60's.It is also the one that Monkee Michael Nesmith said was “probably the worst album in the history of the world."The Monkees were originally Micky Dolenz, Michael Nesmith, Peter Tork, and Davy Jones. The group was conceived for the TV series “The Monkees” which aired from 1966 to 1968, and the band members primarily contributed lead vocals and only limited roles in the studio, as they were expected to spend their time filming the television series. Michael Nesmith composed and produced some songs, and Peter Tork did some guitar work, but it was mainly session musicians. The Candy Store Prophets were the studio band for the first album, and other session musicians including The Wrecking Crew were involved in the second album. Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider had the idea for the show. They interviewed musicians for the job, first recruiting Davy Jones, who had been working in Broadway. The instruments played were driven by what looked good on camera rather than what they actually played. Davy Jones was the only one with experience playing drums, but he was considered too short so Dolenz was assigned to the drums. Nesmith was on guitar, Tork on bass, and Jones was the front man. The more natural lineup for concerts would be Jones on drums, Tork on guitar, Nesmith on bass and Donlenz as front man.The show was a hit, but the music was a bigger hit, with album sales outstripping Nielsen ratings. That pushed the producers to pay more attention to the music. It also encouraged the studio to send the Monkees out to play live concerts. These guys were recording the TV show by day, recording songs by night, and doing special appearances on the weekend, then they had to figure out how to rehearse for live performances. It was all very confusing for the “band,” with Nesmith shocked to see the first album presenting them as an actual band. That was October 1966. But the second album was released while they were on tour as a real band in January of 1967. They hadn't selected the songs, and it went out without their permission or knowledge. They weren't even given a copy, but had to buy it in a record store. The album cover was a picture of the band originally taken for a JC Penny commercial. This would eventually lead to the band being able to take creative control, and Don Kirshner being dismissed. Despite the controversy, this is quite a good album, and quite representative of the music at the time. (I'm Not Your) Steppin' StoneThis track was written by Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, and Micky Dolenz is on lead. Paul Revere & the Raiders originally recorded it, but the Monkees' version is the best known. It was also the first song from the Monkees' to chart as a B-side.Mary, MaryAlso featuring Micky Dolenz on lead, this track was written by Michael Nesmith. It was originally recorded by The Butterfield Blues Band in 1966, and in the summer of the same year Nesmith produced and recorded the song for The Monkees with Dolenz on lead and the Wrecking Crew on backing instruments. It was never released as a single in the U.S., but was given away as a cut-out cereal box prize in 1969.When Love Comes Knockin' (At Your Door)Davy Jones takes lead duties here, and the song was written by Carole Bayer Sager and Neil Sedaka. I'm A BelieverThis is the big hit from the album. Micky Dolenz returns to lead, and the song was written by Neil Diamond. It hit number 1 for the week ending December 31st, 1966, and would be the biggest selling single for all of 1967. It went gold within two days of its release because of advance orders. ENTERTAINMENT TRACK:Main theme from the television series The Green Hornet)This was the last month for a short-lived series was famous for co-starring Bruce Lee as Kato. It also had a crossover with the Batman TV series. STAFF PICKS:Happenings Ten Years Time Ago by the YardbirdsBrian's brings us the psychedelic sensibilities of the Yardbirds. The singer is looking back on the time from a perspective of reincarnation. This song has participation from both Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page. John Paul Jones also contributed the bass lines for this one. Look What You've Done by Pozo-Seco SingersRob features a folk-oriented piece from Don Williams before his solo career. Williams would go on to have 17 number one country hits. His hits would be covered by everyone from Eric Clapton to Pete Townshend...to Telly Savalas.(We Ain't Got) Nothin' Yet by The Blues MagoosWayne's staff pick returns to the psychedelic genre. This is the best known song for The Blues Magoos. While not very successful commercially as a band, the Blues Magoos was a big influence on many bands including Pink Floyd.Good Vibrations by The Beach BoysBruce brings us the high water mark song of The Beach Boys' discography. Good Vibrations was the costliest single ever recorded. Brian Wilson recorded a bunch of short musical modules with his bandmates and with session musicians at four different Hollywood studios. He had more than 90 hours of tape to make this 3.5-minute single. Wilson's mother was the inspiration for this song. COMEDY TRACK:Snoopy vs. The Red Baron by The Royal GuardsmenA novelty song inspired by the comic serial "Peanuts," in which Snoopy often daydreams of fighting the Red Baron in his doghouse - re-envisioned as a Sopwith Camel.
From stickball with baseball legend Joe Torre to performing alongside some of the biggest names in show business, Tony Orlando shares a never-before-seen look at his fascinating life story!Sit back as an epic journey unfolds that includes the likes of Don Kirshner, Pedro Guerrero, Tommy Lasorda, Bobby Darin, Sonny & Cher, Elvis Presley, Ethel Kennedy, Jackie Gleason, Adam Sandler, Lionel Richie, and many more. Jon Orlando and Bill Krackomberger are proud to bring you a very special interview that you definitely can't watch anywhere else!!FOLLOW US ON:TwitterFacebookInstagramApple PodcastsSpotifyYouTubeSupport the show (https://www.wsn.com/podcast/)
Episode one hundred and thirty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “The Sound of Silence" by Simon and Garfunkel, and the many records they made, together and apart, before their success. 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 "Blues Run the Game" by Jackson C. Frank. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata I talk about a tour of Lancashire towns, but some of the towns I mention were in Cheshire at the time, and some are in Greater Manchester or Merseyside now. They're all very close together though. I say Mose Rager was Black. I was misremembering, confusing Mose Rager, a white player in the Muhlenberg style, with Arnold Schultz, a Black player who invented it. I got this right in the episode on "Bye Bye Love". Also, I couldn't track down a copy of the Paul Kane single version of “He Was My Brother” in decent quality, so I used the version on The Paul Simon Songbook instead, as they're basically identical performances. Resources As usual, I've created a Mixcloud playlist of the music excerpted here. This compilation collects all Simon and Garfunkel's studio albums, with bonus tracks, plus a DVD of their reunion concert. There are many collections of the pre-S&G recordings by the two, as these are now largely in the public domain. This one contains a good selection. I've referred to several books for this episode: Simon and Garfunkel: Together Alone by Spencer Leigh is a breezy, well-researched, biography of the duo. Paul Simon: The Life by Robert Hilburn is the closest thing there is to an authorised biography of Simon. And What is it All But Luminous? is Art Garfunkel's memoir. It's not particularly detailed, being more a collection of thoughts and poetry than a structured narrative, but gives a good idea of Garfunkel's attitude to people and events in his life. Roots, Radicals, and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World by Billy Bragg has some great information on the British folk scene of the fifties and sixties. And Singing From the Floor is an oral history of British folk clubs, including a chapter on Dylan's 1962 visit to London. 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 a hit record that almost never happened -- a record by a duo who had already split up, twice, by the time it became a hit, and who didn't know it was going to come out. We're going to look at how a duo who started off as an Everly Brothers knockoff, before becoming unsuccessful Greenwich Village folkies, were turned into one of the biggest acts of the sixties by their producer. We're going to look at Simon and Garfunkel, and at "The Sound of Silence": [Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, "The Sound of Silence"] The story of Simon and Garfunkel starts with two children in a school play. Neither Paul Simon or Art Garfunkel had many friends when they met in a school performance of Alice in Wonderland, where Simon was playing the White Rabbit and Garfunkel the Cheshire Cat. Simon was well-enough liked, by all accounts, but he'd been put on an accelerated programme for gifted students which meant he was progressing through school faster than his peers. He had a small social group, mostly based around playing baseball, but wasn't one of the popular kids. Art Garfunkel, another gifted student, had no friends at all until he got to know Simon, who he described later as his "one and only friend" in this time period. One passage in Garfunkel's autobiography seems to me to sum up everything about Garfunkel's personality as a child -- and indeed a large part of his personality as it comes across in interviews to this day. He talks about the pleasure he got from listening to the chart rundown on the radio -- "It was the numbers that got me. I kept meticulous lists—when a new singer like Tony Bennett came onto the charts with “Rags to Riches,” I watched the record jump from, say, #23 to #14 in a week. The mathematics of the jumps went to my sense of fun." Garfunkel is, to this day, a meticulous person -- on his website he has a list of every book he's read since June 1968, which is currently up to one thousand three hundred and ten books, and he has always had a habit of starting elaborate projects and ticking off every aspect of them as he goes. Both Simon and Garfunkel were outsiders at this point, other than their interests in sport, but Garfunkel was by far the more introverted of the two, and as a result he seems to have needed their friendship more than Simon did. But the two boys developed an intense, close, friendship, initially based around their shared sense of humour. Both of them were avid readers of Mad magazine, which had just started publishing when the two of them had met up, and both could make each other laugh easily. But they soon developed a new interest, when Martin Block on the middle-of-the-road radio show Make Believe Ballroom announced that he was going to play the worst record he'd ever heard. That record was "Gee" by the Crows: [Excerpt: The Crows, "Gee"] Paul Simon later said that that record was the first thing he'd ever heard on that programme that he liked, and soon he and Garfunkel had become regular listeners to Alan Freed's show on WINS, loving the new rock and roll music they were discovering. Art had already been singing in public from an early age -- his first public performance had been singing Nat "King" Cole's hit "Too Young" in a school talent contest when he was nine -- but the two started singing together. The first performance by Simon and Garfunkel was at a high school dance and, depending on which source you read, was a performance either of "Sh'Boom" or of Big Joe Turner's "Flip, Flop, and Fly": [Excerpt: Big Joe Turner, "Flip, Flop, and Fly"] The duo also wrote at least one song together as early as 1955 -- or at least Garfunkel says they wrote it together. Paul Simon describes it as one he wrote. They tried to get a record deal with the song, but it was never recorded at the time -- but Simon has later performed it: [Excerpt: Paul Simon, "The Girl For Me"] Even at this point, though, while Art Garfunkel was putting all his emotional energy into the partnership with Simon, Simon was interested in performing with other people. Al Kooper was another friend of Simon's at the time, and apparently Simon and Kooper would also perform together. Once Elvis came on to Paul's radar, he also bought a guitar, but it was when the two of them first heard the Everly Brothers that they realised what it was that they could do together. Simon fell in love with the Everly Brothers as soon as he heard "Bye Bye Love": [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Bye Bye Love"] Up to this point, Paul hadn't bought many records -- he spent his money on baseball cards and comic books, and records just weren't good value. A pack of baseball cards was five cents, a comic book was ten cents, but a record was a dollar. Why buy records when you could hear music on the radio for free? But he needed that record, he couldn't just wait around to hear it on the radio. He made an hour-long two-bus journey to a record shop in Queens, bought the record, took it home, played it... and almost immediately scratched it. So he got back on the bus, travelled for another hour, bought another copy, took it home, and made sure he didn't scratch that one. Simon and Garfunkel started copying the Everlys' harmonies, and would spend hours together, singing close together watching each other's mouths and copying the way they formed words, eventually managing to achieve a vocal blend through sheer effort which would normally only come from familial closeness. Paul became so obsessed with music that he sold his baseball card collection and bought a tape recorder for two hundred dollars. They would record themselves singing, and then sing back along with it, multitracking themselves, but also critiquing the tape, refining their performances. Paul's father was a bass player -- "the family bassman", as he would later sing -- and encouraged his son in his music, even as he couldn't see the appeal in this new rock and roll music. He would critique Paul's songs, saying things like "you went from four-four to a bar of nine-eight, you can't do that" -- to which his son would say "I just did" -- but this wasn't hostile criticism, rather it was giving his son a basic grounding in song construction which would prove invaluable. But the duo's first notable original song -- and first hit -- came about more or less by accident. In early 1956, the doo-wop group the Clovers had released the hit single "Devil or Angel". Its B-side had a version of "Hey Doll Baby", a song written by the blues singer Titus Turner, and which sounds to me very inspired by Hank Williams' "Hey, Good Lookin'": [Excerpt: The Clovers, "Hey, Doll Baby"] That song was picked up by the Everly Brothers, who recorded it for their first album: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Hey Doll Baby"] Here is where the timeline gets a little confused for me, because that album wasn't released until early 1958, although the recording session for that track was in August 1957. Yet that track definitely influenced Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel to record a song that they released in November 1957. All I can imagine is that they heard the brothers perform it live, or maybe a radio station had an acetate copy. Because the way everyone has consistently told the story is that at the end of summer 1957, Simon and Garfunkel had both heard the Everly Brothers perform "Hey Doll Baby", but couldn't remember how it went. The two of them tried to remember it, and to work a version of it out together, and their hazy memories combined to reconstruct something that was completely different, and which owed at least as much to "Wake Up Little Suzie" as to "Hey Doll Baby". Their new song, "Hey Schoolgirl", was catchy enough that they thought if they recorded a demo of it, maybe the Everly Brothers themselves would record the song. At the demo studio they happened to encounter Sid Prosen, who owned a small record label named Big Records. He heard the duo perform and realised he might have his own Everly Brothers here. He signed the duo to a contract, and they went into a professional studio to rerecord "Hey Schoolgirl", this time with Paul's father on bass, and a couple of other musicians to fill out the sound: [Excerpt: Tom and Jerry, "Hey Schoolgirl"] Of course, the record couldn't be released under their real names -- there was no way anyone was going to buy a record by Simon and Garfunkel. So instead they became Tom and Jerry. Paul Simon was Jerry Landis -- a surname he chose because he had a crush on a girl named Sue Landis. Art became Tom Graff, because he liked drawing graphs. "Hey Schoolgirl" became a local hit. The two were thrilled to hear it played on Alan Freed's show (after Sid Prosen gave Freed two hundred dollars), and were even more thrilled when they got to perform on American Bandstand, on the same show as Jerry Lee Lewis. When Dick Clark asked them where they were from, Simon decided to claim he was from Macon, Georgia, where Little Richard came from, because all his favourite rock and roll singers were from the South. "Hey Schoolgirl" only made number forty-nine nationally, because the label didn't have good national distribution, but it sold over a hundred thousand copies, mostly in the New York area. And Sid Prosen seems to have been one of a very small number of independent label owners who wasn't a crook -- the two boys got about two thousand dollars each from their hit record. But while Tom and Jerry seemed like they might have a successful career, Simon and Garfunkel were soon to split up, and the reason for their split was named True Taylor. Paul had been playing some of his songs for Sid Prosen, to see what the duo's next single should be, and Prosen had noticed that while some of them were Everly Brothers soundalikes, others were Elvis soundalikes. Would Paul be interested in recording some of those, too? Obviously Art couldn't sing on those, so they'd use a different name, True Taylor. The single was released around the same time as the second Tom and Jerry record, and featured an Elvis-style ballad by Paul on one side, and a rockabilly song written by his father on the other: [Excerpt: True Taylor, "True or False"] But Paul hadn't discussed that record with Art before doing it, and the two had vastly different ideas about their relationship. Paul was Art's only friend, and Art thought they had an indissoluble bond and that they would always work together. Paul, on the other hand, thought of Art as one of his friends and someone he made music with, but he could play at being Elvis if he wanted, as well as playing at being an Everly brother. Garfunkel, in his memoir published in 2017, says "the friendship was shattered for life" -- he decided then and there that Paul Simon was a "base" person, a betrayer. But on the other hand, he still refers to Simon, over and over again, in that book as still being his friend, even as Simon has largely been disdainful of him since their last performance together in 2010. Friendships are complicated. Tom and Jerry struggled on for a couple more singles, which weren't as successful as "Hey Schoolgirl" had been, with material like "Two Teenagers", written by Rose Marie McCoy: [Excerpt: Tom and Jerry, "Two Teenagers"] But as they'd stopped being friends, and they weren't selling records, they drifted apart and didn't really speak for five years, though they would occasionally run into one another. They both went off to university, and Garfunkel basically gave up on the idea of having a career in music, though he did record a couple of singles, under the name "Artie Garr": [Excerpt: Artie Garr, "Beat Love"] But for the most part, Garfunkel concentrated on his studies, planning to become either an architect or maybe an academic. Paul Simon, on the other hand, while he was technically studying at university too, was only paying minimal attention to his studies. Instead, he was learning the music business. Every afternoon, after university had finished, he'd go around the Brill Building and its neighbouring buildings, offering his services both as a songwriter and as a demo performer. As Simon was competent on guitar, bass, and drums, could sing harmonies, and could play a bit of piano if it was in the key of C, he could use primitive multitracking to play and sing all the parts on a demo, and do it well: [Excerpt: Paul Simon, "Boys Were Made For Girls"] That's an excerpt from a demo Simon recorded for Burt Bacharach, who has said that he tried to get Simon to record as many of his demos as possible, though only a couple of them have surfaced publicly. Simon would also sometimes record demos with his friend Carole Klein, sometimes under the name The Cosines: [Excerpt: The Cosines, "Just to Be With You"] As we heard back in the episode on "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?", Carole Klein went on to change her name to Carole King, and become one of the most successful songwriters of the era -- something which spurred Paul Simon on, as he wanted to emulate her success. Simon tried to get signed up by Don Kirshner, who was publishing Goffin and King, but Kirshner turned Simon down -- an expensive mistake for Kirshner, but one that would end up benefiting Simon, who eventually figured out that he should own his own publishing. Simon was also getting occasional work as a session player, and played lead guitar on "The Shape I'm In" by Johnny Restivo, which made the lower reaches of the Hot One Hundred: [Excerpt: Johnny Restivo, "The Shape I'm In"] Between 1959 and 1963 Simon recorded a whole string of unsuccessful pop singles. including as a member of the Mystics: [Excerpt: The Mystics, "All Through the Night"] He even had a couple of very minor chart hits -- he got to number 99 as Tico and the Triumphs: [Excerpt: Tico and the Triumphs, "Motorcycle"] and number ninety-seven as Jerry Landis: [Excerpt: Jerry Landis, "The Lone Teen Ranger"] But he was jumping around, hopping onto every fad as it passed, and not getting anywhere. And then he started to believe that he could do something more interesting in music. He first became aware that the boundaries of what could be done in music extended further than "ooh-bop-a-loochy-ba" when he took a class on modern music at university, which included a trip to Carnegie Hall to hear a performance of music by the avant-garde composer Edgard Varese: [Excerpt: Edgard Varese, "Ionisation"] Simon got to meet Varese after the performance, and while he would take his own music in a very different, and much more commercial, direction than Varese's, he was nonetheless influenced by what Varese's music showed about the possibilities that existed in music. The other big influence on Simon at this time was when he heard The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Girl From the North Country"] Simon immediately decided to reinvent himself as a folkie, despite at this point knowing very little about folk music other than the Everly Brothers' Songs Our Daddy Taught Us album. He tried playing around Greenwich Village, but found it an uncongenial atmosphere, and inspired by the liner notes to the Dylan album, which talked about Dylan's time in England, he made what would be the first of several trips to the UK, where he was given a rapturous reception simply on the grounds of being an American and owning a better acoustic guitar -- a Martin -- than most British people owned. He had the showmanship that he'd learned from watching his father on stage and sometimes playing with him, and from his time in Tom and Jerry and working round the studios, and so he was able to impress the British folk-club audiences, who were used to rather earnest, scholarly, people, not to someone like Simon who was clearly ambitious and very showbiz. His repertoire at this point consisted mostly of songs from the first two Dylan albums, a Joan Baez record, Little Willie John's "Fever", and one song he'd written himself, an attempt at a protest song called "He Was My Brother", which he would release on his return to the US under yet another stage name, Paul Kane: [Excerpt: Paul Kane, "He Was My Brother"] Simon has always stated that that song was written about a friend of his who was murdered when he went down to Mississippi with the Freedom Riders -- but while Simon's friend was indeed murdered, it wasn't until about a year after he wrote the song, and Simon has confused the timelines in his subsequent recollections. At the time he recorded that, when he had returned to New York at the end of the summer, Simon had a job as a song plugger for a publishing company, and he gave the publishing company the rights to that song and its B-side, which led to that B-side getting promoted by the publisher, and ending up covered on one of the biggest British albums of 1964, which went to number two in the UK charts: [Excerpt: Val Doonican, "Carlos Dominguez"] Oddly, that may not end up being the only time we feature a Val Doonican track on this podcast. Simon continued his attempts to be a folkie, even teaming up again with Art Garfunkel, with whom he'd re-established contact, to perform in Greenwich Village as Kane and Garr, but they went down no better as a duo than Simon had as a solo artist. Simon went back to the UK again over Christmas 1963, and while he was there he continued work on a song that would become such a touchstone for him that of the first six albums he would be involved in, four would feature the song while a fifth would include a snippet of it. "The Sound of Silence" was apparently started in November 1963, but not finished until February 1964, by which time he was once again back in the USA, and back working as a song plugger. It was while working as a song plugger that Simon first met Tom Wilson, Bob Dylan's producer at Columbia. Simon met up with Wilson trying to persuade him to use some of the songs that the publishing company were putting out. When Wilson wasn't interested, Simon played him a couple of his own songs. Wilson took one of them, "He Was My Brother", for the Pilgrims, a group he was producing who were supposed to be the Black answer to Peter, Paul, and Mary: [Excerpt: The Pilgrims, "He Was My Brother"] Wilson was also interested in "The Sound of Silence", but Simon was more interested in getting signed as a performer than in having other acts perform his songs. Wilson was cautious, though -- he was already producing one folkie singer-songwriter, and he didn't really need a second one. But he *could* probably do with a vocal group... Simon mentioned that he had actually made a couple of records before, as part of a duo. Would Wilson be at all interested in a vocal *duo*? Wilson would be interested. Simon and Garfunkel auditioned for him, and a few days later were in the Columbia Records studio on Seventh Avenue recording their first album as a duo, which was also the first time either of them would record under their own name. Wednesday Morning, 3AM, the duo's first album, was a simple acoustic album, and the only instrumentation was Simon and Barry Kornfeld, a Greenwich Village folkie, on guitars, and Bill Lee, the double bass player who'd played with Dylan and others, on bass. Tom Wilson guided the duo in their song selection, and the eventual album contained six cover versions and six originals written by Simon. The cover versions were a mixture of hootenanny staples like "Go Tell it on the Mountain", plus Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin'", included to cross-promote Dylan's new album and to try to link the duo with the more famous writer, and one unusual one, "The Sun is Burning", written by Ian Campbell, a Scottish folk singer who Simon had got to know on his trips to the UK: [Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, "The Sun is Burning"] But the song that everyone was keenest on was "The Sound of Silence", the first song that Simon had written that he thought would stand up in comparison with the sort of song that Dylan was writing: [Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, "The Sound of Silence (Wednesday Morning 3AM version)"] In between sessions for the album, Simon and Garfunkel also played a high-profile gig at Gerde's Folk City in the Village, and a couple of shows at the Gaslight Cafe. The audiences there, though, regarded them as a complete joke -- Dave Van Ronk would later relate that for weeks afterwards, all anyone had to do was sing "Hello darkness, my old friend", for everyone around to break into laughter. Bob Dylan was one of those who laughed at the performance -- though Robert Shelton later said that Dylan hadn't been laughing at them, specifically, he'd just had a fit of the giggles -- and this had led to a certain amount of anger from Simon towards Dylan. The album was recorded in March 1964, and was scheduled for release in October. In the meantime, they both made plans to continue with their studies and their travels. Garfunkel was starting to do postgraduate work towards his doctorate in mathematics, while Simon was now enrolled in Brooklyn Law School, but was still spending most of his time travelling, and would drop out after one semester. He would spend much of the next eighteen months in the UK. While he was occasionally in the US between June 1964 and November 1965, Simon now considered himself based in England, where he made several acquaintances that would affect his life deeply. Among them were a young woman called Kathy Chitty, with whom he would fall in love and who would inspire many of his songs, and an older woman called Judith Piepe (and I apologise if I'm mispronouncing her name, which I've only ever seen written down, never heard) who many people believed had an unrequited crush on Simon. Piepe ran her London flat as something of a commune for folk musicians, and Simon lived there for months at a time while in the UK. Among the other musicians who stayed there for a time were Sandy Denny, Cat Stevens, and Al Stewart, whose bedroom was next door to Simon's. Piepe became Simon's de facto unpaid manager and publicist, and started promoting him around the British folk scene. Simon also at this point became particularly interested in improving his guitar playing. He was spending a lot of time at Les Cousins, the London club that had become the centre of British acoustic guitar. There are, roughly, three styles of acoustic folk guitar -- to be clear, I'm talking about very broad-brush categorisations here, and there are people who would disagree and say there are more, but these are the main ones. Two of these are American styles -- there's the simple style known as Carter scratching, popularised by Mother Maybelle Carter of the Carter family, and for this all you do is alternate bass notes with your thumb while scratching the chord on the treble strings with one finger, like this: [Excerpt: Carter picking] That's the style played by a lot of country and folk players who were primarily singers accompanying themselves. In the late forties and fifties, though, another style had become popularised -- Travis picking. This is named after Merle Travis, the most well-known player in the style, but he always called it Muhlenberg picking, after Muhlenberg County, where he'd learned the style from Ike Everly -- the Everly Brothers' father -- and Mose Rager, a Black guitarist. In Travis picking, the thumb alternates between two bass notes, but rather than strumming a chord, the index and middle fingers play simple patterns on the treble strings, like this: [Excerpt: Travis picking] That's, again, a style primarily used for accompaniment, but it can also be used to play instrumentals by oneself. As well as Travis and Ike Everly, it's also the style played by Donovan, Chet Atkins, James Taylor, and more. But there's a third style, British baroque folk guitar, which was largely the invention of Davey Graham. Graham, you might remember, was a folk guitarist who had lived in the same squat as Lionel Bart when Bart started working with Tommy Steele, and who had formed a blues duo with Alexis Korner. Graham is now best known for one of his simpler pieces, “Anji”, which became the song that every British guitarist tried to learn: [Excerpt: Davey Graham, "Anji"] Dozens of people, including Paul Simon, would record versions of that. Graham invented an entirely new style of guitar playing, influenced by ragtime players like Blind Blake, but also by Bach, by Moroccan oud music, and by Celtic bagpipe music. While it was fairly common for players to retune their guitar to an open major chord, allowing them to play slide guitar, Graham retuned his to a suspended fourth chord -- D-A-D-G-A-D -- which allowed him to keep a drone going on some strings while playing complex modal counterpoints on others. While I demonstrated the previous two styles myself, I'm nowhere near a good enough guitarist to demonstrate British folk baroque, so here's an excerpt of Davey Graham playing his own arrangement of the traditional ballad "She Moved Through the Fair", recast as a raga and retitled "She Moved Thru' the Bizarre": [Excerpt: Davey Graham, "She Moved Thru' the Bizarre"] Graham's style was hugely influential on an entire generation of British guitarists, people who incorporated world music and jazz influences into folk and blues styles, and that generation of guitarists was coming up at the time and playing at Les Cousins. People who started playing in this style included Jimmy Page, Bert Jansch, Roy Harper, John Renbourn, Richard Thompson, Nick Drake, and John Martyn, and it also had a substantial influence on North American players like Joni Mitchell, Tim Buckley, and of course Paul Simon. Simon was especially influenced at this time by Martin Carthy, the young British guitarist whose style was very influenced by Graham -- but while Graham applied his style to music ranging from Dave Brubeck to Lutheran hymns to Big Bill Broonzy songs, Carthy mostly concentrated on traditional English folk songs. Carthy had a habit of taking American folk singers under his wing, and he taught Simon several songs, including Carthy's own arrangement of the traditional "Scarborough Fair": [Excerpt: Martin Carthy, "Scarborough Fair"] Simon would later record that arrangement, without crediting Carthy, and this would lead to several decades of bad blood between them, though Carthy forgave him in the 1990s, and the two performed the song together at least once after that. Indeed, Simon seems to have made a distinctly negative impression on quite a few of the musicians he knew in Britain at this time, who seem to, at least in retrospect, regard him as having rather used and discarded them as soon as his career became successful. Roy Harper has talked in liner notes to CD reissues of his work from this period about how Simon used to regularly be a guest in his home, and how he has memories of Simon playing with Harper's baby son Nick (now himself one of the greats of British guitar) but how as soon as he became successful he never spoke to Harper again. Similarly, in 1965 Simon started a writing partnership with Bruce Woodley of the Seekers, an Australian folk-pop band based in the UK, best known for "Georgy Girl". The two wrote "Red Rubber Ball", which became a hit for the Cyrkle: [Excerpt: The Cyrke, "Red Rubber Ball"] and also "Cloudy", which the Seekers recorded as an album track: [Excerpt: The Seekers, "Cloudy"] When that was recorded by Simon and Garfunkel, Woodley's name was removed from the writing credits, though Woodley still apparently received royalties for it. But at this point there *was* no Simon and Garfunkel. Paul Simon was a solo artist working the folk clubs in Britain, and Simon and Garfunkel's one album had sold a minuscule number of copies. They did, when Simon briefly returned to the US in March, record two tracks for a prospective single, this time with an electric backing band. One was a rewrite of the title track of their first album, now titled "Somewhere They Can't Find Me" and with a new chorus and some guitar parts nicked from Davey Graham's "Anji"; the other a Twist-beat song that could almost be Manfred Mann or Georgie Fame -- "We Got a Groovy Thing Goin'". That was also influenced by “Anji”, though by Bert Jansch's version rather than Graham's original. Jansch rearranged the song and stuck in this phrase: [Excerpt: Bert Jansch, “Anji”] Which became the chorus to “We Got a Groovy Thing Goin'”: [Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, "We Got a Groovy Thing Goin'"] But that single was never released, and as far as Columbia were concerned, Simon and Garfunkel were a defunct act, especially as Tom Wilson, who had signed them, was looking to move away from Columbia. Art Garfunkel did come to visit Simon in the UK a couple of times, and they'd even sing together occasionally, but it was on the basis of Paul Simon the successful club act occasionally inviting his friend on stage during the encore, rather than as a duo, and Garfunkel was still seeing music only as a sideline while Simon was now utterly committed to it. He was encouraged in this commitment by Judith Piepe, who considered him to be the greatest songwriter of his generation, and who started a letter-writing campaign to that effect, telling the BBC they needed to put him on the radio. Eventually, after a lot of pressure, they agreed -- though they weren't exactly sure what to do with him, as he didn't fit into any of the pop formats they had. He was given his own radio show -- a five-minute show in a religious programming slot. Simon would perform a song, and there would be an introduction tying the song into some religious theme or other. Two series of four episodes of this were broadcast, in a plum slot right after Housewives' Choice, which got twenty million listeners, and the BBC were amazed to find that a lot of people phoned in asking where they could get hold of the records by this Paul Simon fellow. Obviously he didn't have any out yet, and even the Simon and Garfunkel album, which had been released in the US, hadn't come out in Britain. After a little bit of negotiation, CBS, the British arm of Columbia Records, had Simon come in and record an album of his songs, titled The Paul Simon Songbook. The album, unlike the Simon and Garfunkel album, was made up entirely of Paul Simon originals. Two of them were songs that had previously been recorded for Wednesday Morning 3AM -- "He Was My Brother" and a new version of "The Sound of Silence": [Excerpt: Paul Simon, "The Sound of Silence"] The other ten songs were newly-written pieces like "April Come She Will", "Kathy's Song", a parody of Bob Dylan entitled "A Simple Desultory Philippic", and the song that was chosen as the single, "I am a Rock": [Excerpt: Paul Simon, "I am a Rock"] That song was also the one that was chosen for Simon's first TV appearance since Tom and Jerry had appeared on Bandstand eight years earlier. The appearance on Ready, Steady, Go, though, was not one that anyone was happy with. Simon had been booked to appear on a small folk music series, Heartsong, but that series was cancelled before he could appear. Rediffusion, the company that made the series, also made Ready, Steady, Go, and since they'd already paid Simon they decided they might as well stick him on that show and get something for their money. Unfortunately, the episode in question was already running long, and it wasn't really suited for introspective singer-songwriter performances -- the show was geared to guitar bands and American soul singers. Michael Lindsay-Hogg, the director, insisted that if Simon was going to do his song, he had to cut at least one verse, while Simon was insistent that he needed to perform the whole thing because "it's a story". Lindsay-Hogg got his way, but nobody was happy with the performance. Simon's album was surprisingly unsuccessful, given the number of people who'd called the BBC asking about it -- the joke went round that the calls had all been Judith Piepe doing different voices -- and Simon continued his round of folk clubs, pubs, and birthday parties, sometimes performing with Garfunkel, when he visited for the summer, but mostly performing on his own. One time he did perform with a full band, singing “Johnny B Goode” at a birthday party, backed by a band called Joker's Wild who a couple of weeks later went into the studio to record their only privately-pressed five-song record, of them performing recent hits: [Excerpt: Joker's Wild, "Walk Like a Man"] The guitarist from Joker's Wild would later join the other band who'd played at that party, but the story of David Gilmour joining Pink Floyd is for another episode. During this time, Simon also produced his first record for someone else, when he was responsible for producing the only album by his friend Jackson C Frank, though there wasn't much production involved as like Simon's own album it was just one man and his guitar. Al Stewart and Art Garfunkel were also in the control room for the recording, but the notoriously shy Frank insisted on hiding behind a screen so they couldn't see him while he recorded: [Excerpt: Jackson C Frank, "Blues Run the Game"] It seemed like Paul Simon was on his way to becoming a respected mid-level figure on the British folk scene, releasing occasional albums and maybe having one or two minor hits, but making a steady living. Someone who would be spoken of in the same breath as Ralph McTell perhaps. Meanwhile, Art Garfunkel would be going on to be a lecturer in mathematics whose students might be surprised to know he'd had a minor rock and roll hit as a kid. But then something happened that changed everything. Wednesday Morning 3AM hadn't sold at all, and Columbia hadn't promoted it in the slightest. It was too collegiate and polite for the Greenwich Village folkies, and too intellectual for the pop audience that had been buying Peter, Paul, and Mary, and it had come out just at the point that the folk boom had imploded. But one DJ in Boston, Dick Summer, had started playing one song from it, "The Sound of Silence", and it had caught on with the college students, who loved the song. And then came spring break 1965. All those students went on holiday, and suddenly DJs in places like Cocoa Beach, Florida, were getting phone calls requesting "The Sound of Silence" by Simon and Garfunkel. Some of them with contacts at Columbia got in touch with the label, and Tom Wilson had an idea. On the first day of what turned out to be his last session with Dylan, the session for "Like a Rolling Stone", Wilson asked the musicians to stay behind and work on something. He'd already experimented with overdubbing new instruments on an acoustic recording with his new version of Dylan's "House of the Rising Sun", now he was going to try it with "The Sound of Silence". He didn't bother asking the duo what they thought -- record labels messed with people's records all the time. So "The Sound of Silence" was released as an electric folk-rock single: [Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, "The Sound of Silence"] This is always presented as Wilson massively changing the sound of the duo without their permission or knowledge, but the fact is that they had *already* gone folk-rock, back in March, so they were already thinking that way. The track was released as a single with “We Got a Groovy Thing Going” on the B-side, and was promoted first in the Boston market, and it did very well. Roy Harper later talked about Simon's attitude at this time, saying "I can remember going into the gents in The Three Horseshoes in Hempstead during a gig, and we're having a pee together. He was very excited, and he turns round to me and and says, “Guess what, man? We're number sixteen in Boston with The Sound of Silence'”. A few days later I was doing another gig with him and he made a beeline for me. “Guess what?” I said “You're No. 15 in Boston”. He said, “No man, we're No. 1 in Boston”. I thought, “Wow. No. 1 in Boston, eh?” It was almost a joke, because I really had no idea what that sort of stuff meant at all." Simon was even more excited when the record started creeping up the national charts, though he was less enthused when his copy of the single arrived from America. He listened to it, and thought the arrangement was a Byrds rip-off, and cringed at the way the rhythm section had to slow down and speed up in order to stay in time with the acoustic recording: [Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, "The Sound of Silence"] I have to say that, while the tempo fluctuations are noticeable once you know to look for them, it's a remarkably tight performance given the circumstances. As the record went up the charts, Simon was called back to America, to record an album to go along with it. The Paul Simon Songbook hadn't been released in the US, and they needed an album *now*, and Simon was a slow songwriter, so the duo took six songs from that album and rerecorded them in folk-rock versions with their new producer Bob Johnston, who was also working with Dylan now, since Tom Wilson had moved on to Verve records. They filled out the album with "The Sound of Silence", the two electric tracks from March, one new song, "Blessed", and a version of "Anji", which came straight after "Somewhere They Can't Find Me", presumably to acknowledge Simon lifting bits of it. That version of “Anji” also followed Jansch's arrangement, and so included the bit that Simon had taken for “We Got a Groovy Thing Going” as well. They also recorded their next single, which was released on the British version of the album but not the American one, a song that Simon had written during a thoroughly depressing tour of Lancashire towns (he wrote it in Widnes, but a friend of Simon's who lived in Widnes later said that while it was written in Widnes it was written *about* Birkenhead. Simon has also sometimes said it was about Warrington or Wigan, both of which are so close to Widnes and so similar in both name and atmosphere that it would be the easiest thing in the world to mix them up.) [Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, "Homeward Bound"] These tracks were all recorded in December 1965, and they featured the Wrecking Crew -- Bob Johnston wanted the best, and didn't rate the New York players that Wilson had used, and so they were recorded in LA with Glen Campbell, Joe South, Hal Blaine, Larry Knechtel, and Joe Osborne. I've also seen in some sources that there were sessions in Nashville with A-team players Fred Carter and Charlie McCoy. By January, "The Sound of Silence" had reached number one, knocking "We Can Work it Out" by the Beatles off the top spot for two weeks, before the Beatles record went back to the top. They'd achieved what they'd been trying for for nearly a decade, and I'll give the last word here to Paul Simon, who said of the achievement: "I had come back to New York, and I was staying in my old room at my parents' house. Artie was living at his parents' house, too. I remember Artie and I were sitting there in my car one night, parked on a street in Queens, and the announcer said, "Number one, Simon & Garfunkel." And Artie said to me, "That Simon & Garfunkel, they must be having a great time.""
Episode one hundred and twenty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Mr. Tambourine Man" by the Byrds, and the start of LA folk-rock. 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 "I Got You Babe" by Sonny and Cher. 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/ Erratum The version of this originally uploaded got the date of the Dylan tour filmed for Don't Look Back wrong. I edited out the half-sentence in question when this was pointed out to me very shortly after uploading. Resources As usual, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode (with the exception of the early Gene Clark demo snippet, which I've not been able to find a longer version of). For information on Dylan and the song, I've mostly used these books: Bob Dylan: All The Songs by Phillipe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon is a song-by-song look at every song Dylan ever wrote, as is Revolution in the Air, by Clinton Heylin. Heylin also wrote the most comprehensive and accurate biography of Dylan, Behind the Shades. I've also used Robert Shelton's No Direction Home, which is less accurate, but which is written by someone who knew Dylan. While for the Byrds, I relied mostly on Timeless Flight Revisited by Johnny Rogan, with some information from Chris Hillman's autobiography. This three-CD set is a reasonable way of getting most of the Byrds' important recordings, while this contains the pre-Byrds recordings the group members did with Jim Dickson. 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 one of the pivotal recordings in folk-rock music, a track which, though it was not by any means the first folk-rock record, came to define the subgenre in the minds of the listening public, and which by bringing together the disparate threads of influence from Bob Dylan, the Searchers, the Beatles, and the Beach Boys, manages to be arguably the record that defines early 1965. We're going to look at "Mr. Tambourine Man" by the Byrds: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Mr. Tambourine Man"] Folk-rock as a genre was something that was bound to happen sooner rather than later. We've already seen how many of the British R&B bands that were becoming popular in the US were influenced by folk music, with records like "House of the Rising Sun" taking traditional folk songs and repurposing them for a rock idiom. And as soon as British bands started to have a big influence on American music, that would have to inspire a reassessment by American musicians of their own folk music. Because of course, while the British bands were inspired by rock and roll, they were all also coming from a skiffle tradition which saw Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Big Bill Broonzy, and the rest as being the people to emulate, and that would show up in their music. Most of the British bands came from the bluesier end of the folk tradition -- with the exception of the Liverpool bands, who pretty much all liked their Black music on the poppy side and their roots music to be more in a country vein -- but they were still all playing music which showed the clear influence of country and folk as well as blues. And that influence was particularly obvious to those American musicians who were suddenly interested in becoming rock and roll stars, but who had previously been folkies. Musicians like Gene Clark. Gene Clark was born in Missouri, and had formed a rock and roll group in his teens called Joe Meyers and the Sharks. According to many biographies, the Sharks put out a record of Clark's song "Blue Ribbons", but as far as I've been able to tell, this was Clark embellishing things a great deal -- the only evidence of this song that anyone has been able to find is a home recording from this time, of which a few seconds were used in a documentary on Clark: [Excerpt: Gene Clark, "Blue Ribbons"] After his period in the Sharks, Clark became a folk singer, starting out in a group called the Surf Riders. But in August 1963 he was spotted by the New Christy Minstrels, a fourteen-piece ultra-commercial folk group who had just released a big hit single, "Green Green", with a lead sung by one of their members, Barry McGuire: [Excerpt: The New Christy Minstrels, "Green Green"] Clark was hired to replace a departing member, and joined the group, who as well as McGuire at that time also included Larry Ramos, who would later go on to join The Association and sing joint lead on their big hit "Never My Love": [Excerpt: The Association, "Never My Love"] Clark was only in the New Christy Minstrels for a few months, but he appeared on several of their albums -- they recorded four albums during the months he was with the group, but there's some debate as to whether he appeared on all of them, as he may have missed some recording sessions when he had a cold. Clark didn't get much opportunity to sing lead on the records, but he was more prominent in live performances, and can be seen and heard in the many TV appearances the group did in late 1963: [Excerpt: The New Christy Minstrels, "Julianne"] But Clark was not a good fit for the group -- he didn't put himself forward very much, which meant he didn't get many lead vocals, which meant in turn that he seemed not to be pulling his weight. But the thing that really changed his mind came in late 1963, on tour in Canada, when he heard this: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "She Loves You"] Clark knew instantly that that was the kind of music he wanted to be making, and when "I Want to Hold Your Hand" came out in the US soon afterwards, it was the impetus that Clark needed in order to quit the group and move to California. There he visited the Troubadour club in Los Angeles, and saw another performer who had been in an ultra-commercial folk group until he had been bitten by the Beatle bug -- Roger McGuinn. One note here -- Roger McGuinn at this point used his birth name, but he changed it for religious reasons in 1967. I've been unable to find out his views on his old name -- whether he considers it closer to a trans person's deadname which would be disrespectful to mention, or to something like Reg Dwight becoming Elton John or David Jones becoming David Bowie. As I presume everyone listening to this has access to a search engine and can find out his birth name if at all interested, I'll be using "Roger McGuinn" throughout this episode, and any other episodes that deal with him, at least until I find out for certain how he feels about the use of that name. McGuinn had grown up in Chicago, and become obsessed with the guitar after seeing Elvis on TV in 1956, but as rockabilly had waned in popularity he had moved into folk music, taking lessons from Frank Hamilton, a musician who had played in a group with Ramblin' Jack Elliot, and who would later go on to join a 1960s lineup of the Weavers. Hamilton taught McGuinn Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie songs, and taught him how to play the banjo. Hamilton also gave McGuinn an enthusiasm for the twelve-string guitar, an instrument that had been popular among folk musicians like Lead Belly, but which had largely fallen out of fashion. McGuinn became a regular in the audience at the Gate of Horn, a folk club owned by Albert Grossman, who would later become Bob Dylan's manager, and watched performers like Odetta and Josh White. He also built up his own small repertoire of songs by people like Ewan MacColl, which he would perform at coffee shops. At one of those coffee shops he was seen by a member of the Limeliters, one of the many Kingston Trio-alike groups that had come up during the folk boom. The Limeliters were after a guitarist to back them, and offered McGuinn the job. He turned it down at first, as he was still in school, but as it turned out the job was still open when he graduated, and so young McGuinn found himself straight out of school playing the Hollywood Bowl on a bill including Eartha Kitt. McGuinn only played with the Limeliters for six weeks, but in that short time he ended up playing on a top five album, as he was with them at the Ash Grove when they recorded their live album Tonight in Person: [Excerpt: The Limeliters, "Madeira, M'Dear"] After being sacked by the Limeliters, McGuinn spent a short while playing the clubs around LA, before being hired by another commercial folk group, the Chad Mitchell Trio, who like the Limeliters before them needed an accompanist. McGuinn wasn't particularly happy working with the trio, who in his telling regarded themselves as the stars and McGuinn very much as the hired help. He also didn't respect them as musicians, and thought they were little to do with folk music as he understood the term. Despite this, McGuinn stayed with the Chad Mitchell Trio for two and a half years, and played on two albums with them -- Mighty Day on Campus, and Live at the Bitter End: [Excerpt: The Chad Mitchell Trio, "The John Birch Society" ] McGuinn stuck it out with the Chad Mitchell trio until his twentieth birthday, and he was just about to accept an offer to join the New Christy Minstrels himself when he got a better one. Bobby Darin was in the audience at a Chad Mitchell Trio show, and approached McGuinn afterwards. Darin had started out in the music business as a songwriter, working with his friend Don Kirshner, but had had some success in the late fifties and early sixties as one of the interchangeable teen idol Bobbies who would appear on American Bandstand, with records like "Dream Lover" and "Splish Splash": [Excerpt: Bobby Darin, "Splish Splash"] But Darin had always been more musically adventurous than most of his contemporaries, and with his hit version of "Mack the Knife" he had successfully moved into the adult cabaret market. And like other singers breaking into that market, like Sam Cooke, he had decided to incorporate folk music into his act. He would do his big-band set, then there would be a fifteen-minute set of folk songs, backed just by guitar and stand-up bass. Darin wanted McGuinn to be his guitarist and backing vocalist for these folk sets, and offered to double what the Chad Mitchell Trio was paying him. Darin wasn't just impressed with McGuinn's musicianship -- he also liked his showmanship, which came mostly from McGuinn being bored and mildly disgusted with the music he was playing on stage. He would pull faces behind the Chad Mitchell Trio's back, the audience would laugh, and the trio would think the laughter was for them. For a while, McGuinn was happy playing with Darin, who he later talked about as being a mentor. But then Darin had some vocal problems and had to take some time off the road. However, he didn't drop McGuinn altogether -- rather, he gave him a job in the Brill Building, writing songs for Darin's publishing company. One of the songs he wrote there was "Beach Ball", co-written with Frank Gari. A knock-off of "Da Doo Ron Ron", retooled as a beach party song, the recording released as by the City Surfers apparently features McGuinn, Gari, Darin on drums and Terry Melcher on piano: [Excerpt: The City Surfers, "Beach Ball"] That wasn't a hit, but a cover version by Jimmy Hannan was a local hit in Melbourne, Australia: [Excerpt: Jimmy Hannan “Beach Ball”] That record is mostly notable for its backing vocalists, three brothers who would soon go on to become famous as the Bee Gees. Darin soon advised McGuinn that if he really wanted to become successful, he should become a rock and roll singer, and so McGuinn left Darin's employ and struck out as a solo performer, playing folk songs with a rock backbeat around Greenwich Village, before joining a Beatles tribute act playing clubs around New York. He was given further encouragement by Dion DiMucci, another late-fifties singer who like Darin was trying to make the transition to playing for adult crowds. DiMucci had been lead singer of Dion and the Belmonts, but had had more success as a solo act with records like "The Wanderer": [Excerpt: Dion, "The Wanderer"] Dion was insistent that McGuinn had something -- that he wasn't just imitating the Beatles, as he thought, but that he was doing something a little more original. Encouraged by Dion, McGuinn made his way west to LA, where he was playing the Troubadour supporting Roger Miller, when Gene Clark walked in. Clark saw McGuinn as a kindred spirit -- another folkie who'd had his musical world revolutionised by the Beatles -- and suggested that the two become a duo, performing in the style of Peter and Gordon, the British duo who'd recently had a big hit with "World Without Love", a song written for them by Paul McCartney: [Excerpt: Peter and Gordon, "World Without Love"] The duo act didn't last long though, because they were soon joined by a third singer, David Crosby. Crosby had grown up in LA -- his father, Floyd Crosby, was an award-winning cinematographer, who had won an Oscar for his work on Tabu: A Story of the South Seas, and a Golden Globe for High Noon, but is now best known for his wonderfully lurid work on a whole series of films starring Vincent Price, including The Pit and the Pendulum, House of Usher, Tales of Terror, and Comedy of Terrors. Like many children of privilege, David had been a spoiled child, and he had taken to burglary for kicks, and had impregnated a schoolfriend and then run off rather than take responsibility for the child. Travelling across the US as a way to escape the consequences of his actions, he had spent some time hanging out with musicians like Fred Neil, Paul Kantner, and Travis Edmondson, the latter of whom had recorded a version of Crosby's first song, "Cross the Plains": [Excerpt: Travis Edmondson, "Cross the Plains"] Edmondson had also introduced Crosby to cannabis, and Crosby soon took to smoking everything he could, even once smoking aspirin to see if he could get high from that. When he'd run out of money, Crosby, like Clark and McGuinn, had joined an ultra-commercial folk group. In Crosby's case it was Les Baxter's Balladeers, put together by the bandleader who was better known for his exotica recordings. While Crosby was in the Balladeers, they were recorded for an album called "Jack Linkletter Presents A Folk Festival", a compilation of live recordings hosted by the host of Hootenanny: [Excerpt: Les Baxter's Balladeers, "Ride Up"] It's possible that Crosby got the job with Baxter through his father's connections -- Baxter did the music for many films made by Roger Corman, the producer and director of those Vincent Price films. Either way, Crosby didn't last long in the Balladeers. After he left the group, he started performing solo sets, playing folk music but with a jazz tinge to it -- Crosby was already interested in pushing the boundaries of what chords and melodies could be used in folk. Crosby didn't go down particularly well with the folk-club crowds, but he did impress one man. Jim Dickson had got into the music industry more or less by accident -- he had seen the comedian Lord Buckley, a white man who did satirical routines in a hipsterish argot that owed more than a little to Black slang, and had been impressed by him. He had recorded Buckley with his own money, and had put out Buckley's first album Hipsters, Flipsters and Finger Poppin' Daddies, Knock Me Your Lobes on his own label, before selling the rights of the album to Elektra records: [Excerpt: Lord Buckley, "Friends, Romans, Countrymen"] Dickson had gone on to become a freelance producer, often getting his records put out by Elektra, making both jazz records with people like Red Mitchell: [Excerpt: Red Mitchell, "Jim's Blues"] And country, folk, and bluegrass records, with people like the Dillards, whose first few albums he produced: [Excerpt: The Dillards, "Duelling Banjos"] Dickson had also recently started up a publishing company, Tickson Music, with a partner, and the first song they had published had been written by a friend of Crosby's, Dino Valenti, with whom at one point Crosby had shared a houseboat: [Excerpt: Dino Valenti, "Get Together"] Unfortunately for Dickson, before that song became a big hit for the Youngbloods, he had had to sell the rights to it, to the Kingston Trio's managers, as Valenti had been arrested and needed bail money, and it was the only way to raise the funds required. Dickson liked Crosby's performance, and became his manager. Dickson had access to a recording studio, and started recording Crosby singing traditional songs and songs to which Dickson owned the copyright -- at this point Crosby wasn't writing much, and so Dickson got him to record material like "Get Together": [Excerpt: David Crosby, "Get Together"] Unfortunately for Crosby, Dickson's initial idea, to get him signed to Warner Brothers records as a solo artist using those recordings, didn't work out. But Gene Clark had seen Crosby perform live and thought he was impressive. He told McGuinn about him, and the three men soon hit it off -- they were able to sing three-part harmony together as soon as they met. ( This is one characteristic of Crosby that acquaintances often note -- he's a natural harmony singer, and is able to fit his voice into pre-existing groups of other singers very easily, and make it sound natural). Crosby introduced the pair to Dickson, who had a brainwave. These were folkies, but they didn't really sing like folkies -- they'd grown up on rock and roll, and they were all listening to the Beatles now. There was a gap in the market, between the Beatles and Peter, Paul, and Mary, for something with harmonies, a soft sound, and a social conscience, but a rock and roll beat. Something that was intelligent, but still fun, and which could appeal to the screaming teenage girls and to the college kids who were listening to Dylan. In Crosby, McGuinn, and Clark, Dickson thought he had found the people who could do just that. The group named themselves The Jet Set -- a name thought up by McGuinn, who loved flying and everything about the air, and which they also thought gave them a certain sophistication -- and their first demo recording, with all three of them on twelve-string guitars, shows the direction they were going in. "The Only Girl I Adore", written by McGuinn and Clark, has what I can only assume is the group trying for Liverpool accents and failing miserably, and call and response and "yeah yeah" vocals that are clearly meant to evoke the Beatles. It actually does a remarkably good job of evoking some of Paul McCartney's melodic style -- but the rhythm guitar is pure Don Everly: [Excerpt: The Jet Set, "The Only Girl I Adore"] The Jet Set jettisoned their folk instruments for good after watching A Hard Day's Night -- Roger McGuinn traded in his banjo and got an electric twelve-string Rickenbacker just like the one that George Harrison played, and they went all-in on the British Invasion sound, copying the Beatles but also the Searchers, whose jangly sound was perfect for the Rickenbacker, and who had the same kind of solid harmony sound the Jet Set were going for. Of course, if you're going to try to sound like the Beatles and the Searchers, you need a drummer, and McGuinn and Crosby were both acquainted with a young man who had been born Michael Dick, but who had understandably changed his name to Michael Clarke. He was only eighteen, and wasn't a particularly good drummer, but he did have one huge advantage, which is that he looked exactly like Brian Jones. So the Jet Set now had a full lineup -- Roger McGuinn on lead guitar, Gene Clark on rhythm guitar, David Crosby was learning bass, and Michael Clarke on drums. But that wasn't the lineup on their first recordings. Crosby was finding it difficult to learn the bass, and Michael Clarke wasn't yet very proficient on drums, so for what became their first record Dickson decided to bring in a professional rhythm section, hiring two of the Wrecking Crew, bass player Ray Pohlman and drummer Earl Palmer, to back the three singers, with McGuinn and Gene Clark on guitars: [Excerpt: The Beefeaters, "Please Let Me Love You"] That was put out on a one-single deal with Elektra Records, and Jim Dickson made the deal under the condition that it couldn't be released under the group's real name -- he wanted to test what kind of potential they had without spoiling their reputation. So instead of being put out as by the Jet Set, it was put out as by the Beefeaters -- the kind of fake British name that a lot of American bands were using at the time, to try and make themselves seem like they might be British. The record did nothing, but nobody was expecting it to do much, so they weren't particularly bothered. And anyway, there was another problem to deal with. David Crosby had been finding it difficult to play bass and sing -- this was one reason that he only sang, and didn't play, on the Beefeaters single. His bass playing was wooden and rigid, and he wasn't getting better. So it was decided that Crosby would just sing, and not play anything at all. As a result, the group needed a new bass player, and Dickson knew someone who he thought would fit the bill, despite him not being a bass player. Chris Hillman had become a professional musician in his teens, playing mandolin in a bluegrass group called the Scottsville Squirrel Barkers, who made one album of bluegrass standards for sale through supermarkets: [Excerpt: The Scottsville Squirrel Barkers, "Shady Grove"] Hillman had moved on to a group called the Golden State Boys, which featured two brothers, Vern and Rex Gosdin. The Golden State Boys had been signed to a management contract by Dickson, who had renamed the group the Hillmen after their mandolin player -- Hillman was very much in the background in the group, and Dickson believed that he would be given a little more confidence if he was pushed to the front. The Hillmen had recorded one album, which wasn't released until many years later, and which had featured Hillman singing lead on the Bob Dylan song "When the Ship Comes In": [Excerpt: The Hillmen, "When the Ship Comes In"] Hillman had gone on from there to join a bluegrass group managed by Randy Sparks, the same person who was in charge of the New Christy Minstrels, and who specialised in putting out ultra-commercialised versions of roots music for pop audiences. But Dickson knew that Hillman didn't like playing with that group, and would be interested in doing something very different, so even though Hillman didn't play bass, Dickson invited him to join the group. There was almost another lineup change at this point, as well. McGuinn and Gene Clark were getting sick of David Crosby's attitude -- Crosby was the most technically knowledgeable musician in the group, but was at this point not much of a songwriter. He was not at all shy about pointing out what he considered flaws in the songs that McGuinn and Clark were writing, but he wasn't producing anything better himself. Eventually McGuinn and Clark decided to kick Crosby out of the group altogether, but they reconsidered when Dickson told them that if Crosby went he was going too. As far as Dickson was concerned, the group needed Crosby's vocals, and that was an end of the matter. Crosby was back in the group, and all was forgotten. But there was another problem related to Crosby, as the Jet Set found out when they played their first gig, an unannounced spot at the Troubadour. The group had perfected their image, with their Beatles suits and pose of studied cool, but Crosby had never performed without an instrument before. He spent the gig prancing around the stage, trying to act like a rock star, wiggling his bottom in what he thought was a suggestive manner. It wasn't, and the audience found it hilarious. Crosby, who took himself very seriously at this point in time, felt humiliated, and decided that he needed to get an instrument to play. Obviously he couldn't go back to playing bass, so he did the only thing that seemed possible -- he started undermining Gene Clark's confidence as a player, telling him he was playing behind the beat. Clark -- who was actually a perfectly reasonable rhythm player -- was non-confrontational by nature and believed Crosby's criticisms. Soon he *was* playing behind the beat, because his confidence had been shaken. Crosby took over the rhythm guitar role, and from that point on it would be Gene Clark, not David Crosby, who would have to go on stage without an instrument. The Jet Set were still not getting very many gigs, but they were constantly in the studio, working on material. The most notable song they recorded in this period is "You Showed Me", a song written by Gene Clark and McGuinn, which would not see release at the time but which would later become a hit for both the Turtles and the Lightning Seeds: [Excerpt: The Jet Set, "You Showed Me"] Clark in particular was flourishing as a songwriter, and becoming a genuine talent. But Jim Dickson thought that the song that had the best chance of being the Jet Set's breakout hit wasn't one that they were writing themselves, but one that he'd heard Bob Dylan perform in concert, but which Dylan had not yet released himself. In 1964, Dylan was writing far more material than he could reasonably record, even given the fact that his albums at this point often took little more time to record than to listen to. One song he'd written but not yet put out on an album was "Mr. Tambourine Man". Dylan had written the song in April 1964, and started performing it live as early as May, when he was on a UK tour that would later be memorialised in D.A. Pennebaker's film Don't Look Back. That performance was later released in 2014 for copyright extension purposes on vinyl, in a limited run of a hundred copies. I *believe* this recording is from that: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Mr. Tambourine Man (live Royal Festival Hall 1964)"] Jim Dickson remembered the song after seeing Dylan perform it live, and started pushing Witmark Music, Dylan's publishers, to send him a demo of the song. Dylan had recorded several demos, and the one that Witmark sent over was a version that was recorded with Ramblin' Jack Elliot singing harmony, recorded for Dylan's album Another Side of Bob Dylan, but left off the album as Elliot had been off key at points: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan and Ramblin' Jack Elliot, "Mr. Tambourine Man" (from Bootleg Series vol 7)] There have been all sorts of hypotheses about what "Mr. Tambourine Man" is really about. Robert Shelton, for example, suspects the song is inspired by Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an Opium Eater. de Quincey uses a term for opium, "the dark idol", which is supposedly a translation of the Latin phrase "mater tenebrarum", which actually means "mother of darkness" (or mother of death or mother of gloom). Shelton believes that Dylan probably liked the sound of "mater tenebrarum" and turned it into "Mister Tambourine Man". Others have tried to find links to the Pied Piper of Hamelin, or claimed that Mr. Tambourine Man is actually Jesus. Dylan, on the other hand, had a much more prosaic explanation -- that Mr. Tambourine Man was a friend of his named Bruce Langhorne, who was prominent in the Greenwich Village folk scene. As well as being a guitarist, Langhorne was also a percussionist, and played a large Turkish frame drum, several feet in diameter, which looked and sounded quite like a massively oversized tambourine. Dylan got that image in his head and wrote a song about it. Sometimes a tambourine is just a tambourine. (Also, in a neat little coincidence, Dylan has acknowledged that he took the phrase “jingle jangle” from a routine by Jim Dickson's old client, Lord Buckley.) Dickson was convinced that "Mr. Tambourine Man" would be a massive hit, but the group didn't like it. Gene Clark, who was at this point the group's only lead singer, didn't think it fit his voice or had anything in common with the songs he was writing. Roger McGuinn was nervous about doing a Dylan song, because he'd played at the same Greenwich Village clubs as Dylan when both were starting out -- he had felt a rivalry with Dylan then, and wasn't entirely comfortable with inviting comparisons with someone who had grown so much as an artist while McGuinn was still very much at the beginning of his career. And David Crosby simply didn't think that such a long, wordy, song had a chance of being a hit. So Dickson started to manipulate the group. First, since Clark didn't like singing the song, he gave the lead to McGuinn. The song now had one champion in the band, and McGuinn was also a good choice as he had a hypothesis that there was a space for a vocal sound that split the difference between John Lennon and Bob Dylan, and was trying to make himself sound like that -- not realising that Lennon himself was busily working on making his voice more Dylanesque at the same time. But that still wasn't enough -- even after Dickson worked with the group to cut the song down so it was only two choruses and one verse, and so came in under two minutes, rather than the five minutes that Dylan's original version lasted, Crosby in particular was still agitating that the group should just drop the song. So Dickson decided to bring in Dylan himself. Dickson was acquainted with Dylan, and told him that he was managing a Beatles-style group who were doing one of Dylan's songs, and invited him to come along to a rehearsal. Dylan came, partly out of politeness, but also because Dylan was as aware as anyone of the commercial realities of the music business. Dylan was making most of his money at this point as a songwriter, from having other people perform his songs, and he was well aware that the Beatles had changed what hit records sounded like. If the kids were listening to beat groups instead of to Peter, Paul, and Mary, then Dylan's continued commercial success relied on him getting beat groups to perform his songs. So he agreed to come and hear Jim Dickson's beat group, and see what he thought of what they were doing with his song. Of course, once the group realised that Dylan was going to be coming to listen to them, they decided that they had better actually work on their arrangement of the song. They came up with something that featured McGuinn's Searchers-style twelve-string playing, the group's trademark harmonies, and a rather incongruous-sounding marching beat: [Excerpt: The Jet Set, "Mr. Tambourine Man (early version)"] Dylan heard their performance, and was impressed, telling them "You can DANCE to it!" Dylan went on a charm offensive with the group, winning all of them round except Crosby -- but even Crosby stopped arguing the point, realising he'd lost. "Mr. Tambourine Man" was now a regular part of their repertoire. But they still didn't have a record deal, until one came from an unexpected direction. The group were playing their demos to a local promoter, Benny Shapiro, when Shapiro's teenage daughter came in to the room, excited because the music sounded so much like the Beatles. Shapiro later joked about this to the great jazz trumpet player Miles Davis, and Davis told his record label about this new group, and suddenly they were being signed to Columbia Records. "Mr. Tambourine Man" was going to be their first single, but before that they had to do something about the group's name, as Columbia pointed out that there was already a British group called the Jet Set. The group discussed this over Thanksgiving turkey, and the fact that they were eating a bird reminded Gene Clark of a song by the group's friend Dino Valenti, "Birdses": [Excerpt: Dino Valenti, "Birdses"] Clark suggested "The Birdses", but the group agreed it wasn't quite right -- though McGuinn, who was obsessed with aviation, did like the idea of a name that was associated with flight. Dickson's business partner Eddie Tickner suggested that they just call themselves "The Birds", but the group saw a problem with that, too -- "bird" being English slang for "girl", they worried that if they called themselves that people might think they were gay. So how about messing with the vowels, the same way the Beatles had changed the spelling of their name? They thought about Burds with a "u" and Berds with an "e", before McGuinn hit on Byrds with a y, which appealed to him because of Admiral Byrd, an explorer and pioneering aviator. They all agreed that the name was perfect -- it began with a "b", just like Beatles and Beach Boys, it was a pun like the Beatles, and it signified flight, which was important to McGuinn. As the group entered 1965, another major event happened in McGuinn's life -- the one that would lead to him changing his name. A while earlier, McGuinn had met a friend in Greenwich Village and had offered him a joint. The friend had refused, saying that he had something better than dope. McGuinn was intrigued to try this "something better" and went along with his friend to what turned out to be a religious meeting, of the new religious movement Subud, a group which believes, among other things, that there are seven levels of existence from gross matter to pure spirit, and which often encourages members to change their names. McGuinn was someone who was very much looking for meaning in his life -- around this time he also became a devotee of the self-help writer Norman Vincent Peale thanks to his mother sending him a copy of Peale's book on positive thinking -- and so he agreed to give the organisation a go. Subud involves a form of meditation called the laithan, and on his third attempt at doing this meditation, McGuinn had experienced what he believed was contact with God -- an intense hallucinatory experience which changed his life forever. McGuinn was initiated into Subud ten days before going into the studio to record "Mr. Tambourine Man", and according to his self-description, whatever Bob Dylan thought the song was about, he was singing to God when he sang it -- in earlier interviews he said he was singing to Allah, but now he's a born-again Christian he tends to use "God". The group had been assigned by CBS to Terry Melcher, mostly because he was the only staff producer they had on the West Coast who had any idea at all about rock and roll music, and Melcher immediately started to mould the group into his idea of what a pop group should be. For their first single, Melcher decided that he wasn't going to use the group, other than McGuinn, for anything other than vocals. Michael Clarke in particular was still a very shaky drummer (and would never be the best on his instrument) while Hillman and Crosby were adequate but not anything special on bass and guitar. Melcher knew that the group's sound depended on McGuinn's electric twelve-string sound, so he kept that, but other than that the Byrds' only contribution to the A-side was McGuinn, Crosby, and Clark on vocals. Everything else was supplied by members of the Wrecking Crew -- Jerry Cole on guitar, Larry Knechtel on bass, Leon Russell on electric piano, and Hal Blaine on drums: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Mr. Tambourine Man"] Indeed, not everyone who performed at the session is even clearly audible on the recording. Both Gene Clark and Leon Russell were actually mixed out by Melcher -- both of them are audible, Clark more than Russell, but only because of leakage onto other people's microphones. The final arrangement was a mix of influences. McGuinn's twelve-string sound was clearly inspired by the Searchers, and the part he's playing is allegedly influenced by Bach, though I've never seen any noticeable resemblance to anything Bach ever wrote. The overall sound was an attempt to sound like the Beatles, while Melcher always said that the arrangement and feel of the track was inspired by "Don't Worry Baby" by the Beach Boys. This is particularly noticeable in the bass part -- compare the part on the Beach Boys record: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Don't Worry Baby (instrumental mix with backing vocals)"] to the tag on the Byrds record: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Mr. Tambourine Man"] Five days before the Byrds recorded their single, Bob Dylan had finally recorded his own version of the song, with the tambourine man himself, Bruce Langhorne, playing guitar, and it was released three weeks before the Byrds' version, as an album track on Dylan's Bringing it All Back Home: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Mr. Tambourine Man"] Dylan's album would become one of the most important of his career, as we'll discuss in a couple of weeks, when we next look at Dylan. But it also provided an additional publicity boost for the Byrds, and as a result their record quickly went to number one in both the UK and America, becoming the first record of a Dylan song to go to number one on any chart. Dylan's place in the new pop order was now secured; the Byrds had shown that American artists could compete with the British Invasion on its own terms -- that the new wave of guitar bands still had a place for Americans; and folk-rock was soon identified as the next big commercial trend. And over the next few weeks we'll see how all those things played out throughout the mid sixties.
Episode 122 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs is a double-length (over an hour) look at “A Change is Gonna Come” by Sam Cooke, at Cooke's political and artistic growth, and at the circumstances around his death. This one has a long list of content warnings at the beginning of the episode, for good reason... 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 "My Guy" by Mary Wells. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. For this episode, he also did the re-edit of the closing theme. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources No Mixcloud this week due to the number of songs by one artist. My main source for this episode is Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke by Peter Guralnick. Like all Guralnick's work, it's an essential book if you're even slightly interested in the subject. Information on Allen Klein comes from Fred Goodman's book on Klein. The Netflix documentary I mention can be found here. This is the best compilation of Sam Cooke's music for the beginner, and the only one to contain recordings from all four labels (Specialty, Keen, RCA, and Tracey) he recorded for. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start this episode, a brief acknowledgement -- Lloyd Price plays a minor role in this story, and I heard as I was in the middle of writing it that he had died on May the third, aged eighty-eight. Price was one of the great pioneers of rock and roll -- I first looked at him more than a hundred episodes ago, back in episode twelve -- and he continued performing live right up until the start of the coronavirus outbreak in March last year. He'll be missed. Today we're going to look at one of the great soul protest records of all time, a record that was the high point in the career of its singer and songwriter, and which became a great anthem of the Civil Rights movement. But we're also going to look at the dark side of its creator, and the events that led to his untimely death. More than most episodes of the podcast, this requires a content warning. Indeed, it requires more than just content warnings. Those warnings are necessary -- this episode will deal with not only a murder, but also sexual violence, racialised violence, spousal abuse, child sexual abuse, drug use and the death of a child, as well as being about a song which is in itself about the racism that pervaded American society in the 1960s as it does today. This is a story from which absolutely nobody comes out well, which features very few decent human beings, and which I find truly unpleasant to write about. But there is something else that I want to say, before getting into the episode -- more than any other episode I have done, and I think more than any other episode that I am *going* to do, this is an episode where my position as a white British man born fourteen years after Sam Cooke's death might mean that my perspective is flawed in ways that might actually make it impossible for me to tell the story properly, and in ways that might mean that my telling of the story is doing a grave, racialised, injustice. Were this song and this story not so important to the ongoing narrative, I would simply avoid telling it altogether, but there is simply no way for me to avoid it and tell the rest of the story without doing equally grave injustices. So I will say this upfront. There are two narratives about Sam Cooke's death -- the official one, and a more conspiratorial one. Everything I know about the case tells me that the official account is the one that is actually correct, and *as far as I can tell*, I have good reason for thinking that way. But here's the thing. The other narrative is one that is held by a lot of people who knew Cooke, and they claim that the reason their narrative is not the officially-accepted one is because of racism. I do not think that is the case myself. In fact, all the facts I have seen about the case lead to the conclusion that the official narrative is correct. But I am deeply, deeply, uncomfortable with saying that. Because I have an obligation to be honest, but I also have an obligation not to talk over Black people about their experiences of racism. So what I want to say now, before even starting the episode, is this. Listen to what I have to say, by all means, but then watch the Netflix documentary Remastered: The Two Killings of Sam Cooke, and *listen* to what the people saying otherwise have to say. I can only give my own perspective, and my perspective is far more likely to be flawed here than in any other episode of this podcast. I am truly uncomfortable writing and recording this episode, and were this any other record at all, I would have just skipped it. But that was not an option. Anyway, all that said, let's get on with the episode proper, which is on one of the most important records of the sixties -- "A Change is Gonna Come": [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "A Change is Gonna Come"] It's been almost eighteen months since we last looked properly at Sam Cooke, way back in episode sixty, and a lot has happened in the story since then, so a brief recap -- Sam Cooke started out as a gospel singer, first with a group called the Highway QCs, and then joining the Soul Stirrers, the most popular gospel group on the circuit, replacing their lead singer. The Soul Stirrers had signed to Specialty Records, and released records like "Touch the Hem of His Garment", written by Cooke in the studio: [Excerpt: The Soul Stirrers, "Touch the Hem of His Garment"] Cooke had eventually moved away from gospel music to secular, starting with a rewrite of a gospel song he'd written, changing "My God is so wonderful" to "My girl is so lovable", but he'd released that under the name Dale Cook, rather than his own name, in case of a backlash from gospel fans: [Excerpt: Dale Cook, "Lovable"] No-one was fooled, and he started recording under his own name. Shortly after this, Cooke had written his big breakthrough hit, "You Send Me", and when Art Rupe at Specialty Records was unimpressed with it, Cooke and his producer Bumps Blackwell had both moved from Specialty to a new label, Keen Records. Cooke's first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show was a disaster -- cutting him off half way through the song -- but his second was a triumph, and "You Send Me" went to number one on both the pop and R&B charts, and sold over a million copies, while Specialty put out unreleased earlier recordings and sold over half a million copies of some of those. Sam Cooke was now one of the biggest things in the music business. And he had the potential to become even bigger. He had the looks of a teen idol, and was easily among the two or three best-looking male singing stars of the period. He had a huge amount of personal charm, he was fiercely intelligent, and had an arrogant selfishness that came over as self-confidence -- he believed he deserved everything the world could offer to him, and he was charming enough that everyone he met believed it too. He had an astonishing singing voice, and he was also prodigiously talented as a songwriter -- he'd written "Touch the Hem of His Garment" on the spot in the studio after coming in with no material prepared for the session. Not everything was going entirely smoothly for him, though -- he was in the middle of getting divorced from his first wife, and he was arrested backstage after a gig for non-payment of child support for a child he'd fathered with another woman he'd abandoned. This was a regular occurrence – he was as self-centred in his relationships with women as in other aspects of his life -- though as in those other aspects, the women in question were generally so smitten with him that they forgave him everything. Cooke wanted more than to be a pop star. He had his sights set on being another Harry Belafonte. At this point Belafonte was probably the most popular Black all-round entertainer in the world, with his performances of pop arrangements of calypso and folk songs: [Excerpt: Harry Belafonte, "Jamaica Farewell"] Belafonte had nothing like Cooke's chart success, but he was playing prestigious dates in Las Vegas and at high-class clubs, and Cooke wanted to follow his example. Most notably, at a time when almost all notable Black performers straightened their hair, Belafonte left his hair natural and cut it short. Cooke thought that this was very, very shrewd on Belafonte's part, copying him and saying to his brother L.C. that this would make him less threatening to the white public -- he believed that if a Black man slicked his hair back and processed it, he would come across as slick and dishonest, white people wouldn't trust him around their daughters. But if he just kept his natural hair but cut it short, then he'd come across as more honest and trustworthy, just an all-American boy. Oddly, the biggest effect of this decision wasn't on white audiences, but on Black people watching his appearances on TV. People like Smokey Robinson have often talked about how seeing Cooke perform on TV with his natural hair made a huge impression on them -- showing them that it was possible to be a Black man and not be ashamed of it. It was a move to appeal to the white audience that also had the effect of encouraging Black pride. But Cooke's first attempt at appealing to the mainstream white audience that loved Belafonte didn't go down well. He was booked in for a three-week appearance at the Copacabana, one of the most prestigious nightclubs in the country, and right from the start it was a failure. Bumps Blackwell had written the arrangements for the show on the basis that there would be a small band, and when they discovered Cooke would be backed by a sixteen-piece orchestra he and his assistant Lou Adler had to frantically spend a couple of days copying out sheet music for a bigger group. And Cooke's repertoire for those shows stuck mostly to old standards like "Begin the Beguine", "Ol' Man River", and "I Love You For Sentimental Reasons", with the only new song being "Mary, Mary Lou", a song written by a Catholic priest which had recently been a flop single for Bill Haley: [Excerpt: Bill Haley and the Comets, "Mary, Mary Lou"] Cooke didn't put over those old standards with anything like the passion he had dedicated to his gospel and rock and roll recordings, and audiences were largely unimpressed. Cooke gave up for the moment on trying to win over the supper-club audiences and returned to touring on rock and roll package tours, becoming so close with Clyde McPhatter and LaVern Baker on one tour that they seriously considered trying to get their record labels to agree to allow them to record an album of gospel songs together as a trio, although that never worked out. Cooke looked up immensely to McPhatter in particular, and listened attentively as McPhatter explained his views of the world -- ones that were very different to the ones Cooke had grown up with. McPhatter was an outspoken atheist who saw religion as a con, and who also had been a lifelong member of the NAACP and was a vocal supporter of civil rights. Cooke listened closely to what McPhatter had to say, and thought long and hard about it. Cooke was also dealing with lawsuits from Art Rupe at Specialty Records. When Cooke had left Specialty, he'd agreed that Rupe would own the publishing on any future songs he'd written, but he had got round this by crediting "You Send Me" to his brother, L.C. Rupe was incensed, and obviously sued, but he had no hard evidence that Cooke had himself written the song. Indeed, Rupe at one point even tried to turn the tables on Cooke, by getting Lloyd Price's brother Leo, a songwriter himself who had written "Send Me Some Lovin'", to claim that *he* had written "You Send Me", but Leo Price quickly backed down from the claim, and Rupe was left unable to prove anything. It didn't hurt Cooke's case that L.C., while not a talent of his brother's stature, was at least a professional singer and songwriter himself, who was releasing records on Checker Records that sounded very like Sam's work: [Excerpt: L.C. Cooke, "Do You Remember?"] For much of the late 1950s, Sam Cooke seemed to be trying to fit into two worlds simultaneously. He was insistent that he wanted to move into the type of showbusiness that was represented by the Rat Pack -- he cut an album of Billie Holiday songs, and he got rid of Bumps Blackwell as his manager, replacing him with a white man who had previously been Sammy Davis Jr.'s publicist. But on the other hand, he was hanging out with the Central Avenue music scene in LA, with Johnny "Guitar" Watson, Eugene Church, Jesse Belvin, and Alex and Gaynel Hodge. While his aspirations towards Rat Packdom faltered, he carried on having hits -- his own "Only Sixteen" and "Everybody Loves to Cha-Cha-Cha", and he recorded, but didn't release yet, a song that Lou Adler had written with his friend Herb Alpert, and whose lyrics Sam revised, "Wonderful World". Cooke was also starting a relationship with the woman who would become his second wife, Barbara. He'd actually had an affair with her some years earlier, and they'd had a daughter, Linda, who Cooke had initially not acknowledged as his own -- he had many children with other women -- but they got together in 1958, around the time of Cooke's divorce from his first wife. Tragically, that first wife then died in a car crash in 1959 -- Cooke paid her funeral expenses. He was also getting dissatisfied with Keen Records, which had been growing too fast to keep up with its expenses -- Bumps Blackwell, Lou Adler, and Herb Alpert, who had all started at the label with him, all started to move away from it to do other things, and Cooke was sure that Keen weren't paying him the money they owed as fast as they should. He also wanted to help some of his old friends out -- while Cooke was an incredibly selfish man, he was also someone who believed in not leaving anyone behind, so long as they paid him what he thought was the proper respect, and so he started his own record label, with his friends J.W. Alexander and Roy Crain, called SAR Records (standing for Sam, Alex, and Roy), to put out records by his old group The Soul Stirrers, for whom he wrote "Stand By Me, Father", a song inspired by an old gospel song by Charles Tindley, and with a lead sung by Johnnie Taylor, the Sam Cooke soundalike who had replaced Cooke as the group's lead singer: [Excerpt: The Soul Stirrers, "Stand By Me, Father"] Of course, that became, as we heard a few months back, the basis for Ben E. King's big hit "Stand By Me". Cooke and Alexander had already started up their own publishing company, and were collaborating on songs for other artists, too. They wrote "I Know I'll Always Be In Love With You", which was recorded first by the Hollywood Flames and then by Jackie Wilson: [Excerpt: Jackie Wilson, "I Know I'll Always Be in Love With You"] And "I'm Alright", which Little Anthony and the Imperials released as a single: [Excerpt: Little Anthony and the Imperials, "I'm Alright"] But while he was working on rock and roll and gospel records, he was also learning to tap-dance for his performances at the exclusive white nightclubs he wanted to play -- though when he played Black venues he didn't include those bits in the act. He did, though, perform seated on a stool in imitation of Perry Como, having decided that if he couldn't match the energetic performances of people like Jackie Wilson (who had been his support act at a run of shows where Wilson had gone down better than Cooke) he would go in a more casual direction. He was also looking to move into the pop market when it came to his records, and he eventually signed up with RCA Records, and specifically with Hugo and Luigi. We've talked about Hugo and Luigi before, a couple of times -- they were the people who had produced Georgia Gibbs' soundalike records that had ripped off Black performers, and we talked about their production of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight", though at this point they hadn't yet made that record. They had occasionally produced records that were more R&B flavoured -- they produced "Shout!" for the Isley Brothers, for example -- but they were in general about as bland and middle-of-the-road a duo as one could imagine working in the music industry. The first record that Hugo and Luigi produced for Cooke was a song that the then-unknown Jeff Barry had written, "Teenage Sonata". That record did nothing, and the label were especially annoyed when a recording Cooke had done while he was still at Keen, "Wonderful World", was released on his old label and made the top twenty: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "Wonderful World"] Cooke's collaboration with Hugo and Luigi would soon turn into one that bore a strong resemblance to their collaboration with the Isley Brothers -- they would release great singles, but albums that fundamentally misunderstood Cooke's artistry; though some of that misunderstanding may have come from Cooke himself, who never seemed to be sure which direction to go in. Many of the album tracks they released have Cooke sounding unsure of himself, and hesitant, but that's not something that you can say about the first real success that Cooke came out with on RCA, a song he wrote after driving past a group of prisoners working on a chain gang. He'd originally intended that song to be performed by his brother Charles, but he'd half-heartedly played it for Hugo and Luigi when they'd not seen much potential in any of his other recent originals, and they'd decided that that was the hit: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "Chain Gang"] That made number two on the charts, becoming his biggest hit since "You Send Me". Meanwhile Cooke was also still recording other artists for SAR -- though by this point Roy Crain had been eased out and SAR now stood for Sam and Alex Records. He got a group of Central Avenue singers including Alex and Gaynel Hodge to sing backing vocals on a song he gave to a friend of his named Johnny Morisette, who was known professionally as "Johnny Two-Voice" because of the way he could sound totally different in his different ranges, but who was known to his acquaintances as "the singing pimp", because of his other occupation: [Excerpt: Johnny Morisette, "I'll Never Come Running Back to You"] They also thought seriously about signing up a young gospel singer they knew called Aretha Franklin, who was such an admirer of Sam's that she would try to copy him -- she changed her brand of cigarettes to match the ones he smoked, and when she saw him on tour reading William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich -- Cooke was an obsessive reader, especially of history -- she bought her own copy. She never read it, but she thought she should have a copy if Cooke had one. But they decided that Franklin's father, the civil rights leader Rev. C.L. Franklin, was too intimidating, and so it would probably not be a good idea to get involved. The tour on which Franklin saw Cooke read Shirer's book was also the one on which Cooke made his first public stance in favour of civil rights -- that tour, which was one of the big package tours of the time, was meant to play a segregated venue, but the artists hadn't been informed just how segregated it was. While obviously none of them supported segregation, they would mostly accept playing to segregated crowds, because there was no alternative, if at least Black people were allowed in in roughly equal numbers. But in this case, Black people were confined to a tiny proportion of the seats, in areas with extremely restricted views, and both Cooke and Clyde McPhatter refused to go on stage, though the rest of the acts didn't join in their boycott. Cooke's collaboration with Hugo and Luigi remained hit and miss, and produced a few more flop singles, but then Cooke persuaded them to allow him to work in California, with the musicians he'd worked with at Keen, and with René Hall arranging rather than the arrangers they'd employed previously. While the production on Cooke's California sessions was still credited to Hugo and Luigi, Luigi was the only one actually attending those sessions -- Hugo was afraid of flying and wouldn't come out to the West Coast. The first record that came out under this new arrangement was another big hit, "Cupid", which had vocal sound effects supplied by a gospel act Cooke knew, the Sims twins -- Kenneth Sims made the sound of an arrow flying through the air, and Bobbie Sims made the thwacking noise of it hitting a target: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "Cupid"] Cooke became RCA's second-biggest artist, at least in terms of singles sales, and had a string of hits like "Twistin' the Night Away", "Another Saturday Night", and "Bring it On Home to Me", though he was finding it difficult to break the album market. He was frustrated that he wasn't having number one records, but Luigi reassured him that that was actually the best position to be in: “We're getting number four, number six on the Billboard charts, and as long as we get that, nobody's gonna bother you. But if you get two or three number ones in a row, then you got no place to go but down. Then you're competition, and they're just going to do everything they can to knock you off.” But Cooke's personal life had started to unravel. After having two daughters, his wife gave birth to a son. Cooke had desperately wanted a male heir, but he didn't bond with his son, Vincent, who he insisted didn't look like him. He became emotionally and physically abusive towards his wife, beating her up on more than one occasion, and while she had been a regular drug user already, her use increased to try to dull the pain of being married to someone who she loved but who was abusing her so appallingly. Things became much, much worse, when the most tragic thing imaginable happened. Cooke had a swim in his private pool and then went out, leaving the cover off. His wife, Barbara, then let the children play outside, thinking that their three-year-old daughter Tracey would be able to look after the baby for a few minutes. Baby Vincent fell into the pool and drowned. Both parents blamed the other, and Sam was devastated at the death of the child he only truly accepted as his son once the child was dead. You can hear some of that devastation in a recording he made a few months later of an old Appalachian folk song: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "The Riddle Song"] Friends worried that Cooke was suicidal, but Cooke held it together, in part because of the intervention of his new manager, Allen Klein. Klein had had a hard life growing up -- his mother had died when he was young, and his father had sent him to an orphanage for a while. Eventually, his father remarried, and young Allen came back to the family home, but his father was still always distant. He grew close to his stepmother, but then she died as well. Klein turned up at Cooke's house two days after the baby's funeral with his own daughter, and insisted on taking Cooke and his surviving children to Disneyland, telling him "You always had your mother and father, but I lost my mother when I was nine months old. You've got two other children. Those two girls need you even more now. You're their only father, and you've got to take care of them." Klein was very similar to Cooke in many ways. He had decided from a very early age that he couldn't trust anyone but himself, and that he had to make his own way in the world. He became hugely ambitious, and wanted to reach the very top. Klein had become an accountant, and gone to work for Joe Fenton, an accountant who specialised in the entertainment industry. One of the first jobs Klein did in his role with Fenton was to assist him with an audit of Dot Records in 1957, called for by the Harry Fox Agency. We've not talked about Harry Fox before, but they're one of the most important organisations in the American music industry -- they're a collection agency like ASCAP or BMI, who collect songwriting royalties for publishing companies and songwriters. But while ASCAP and BMI collect performance royalties -- they collect payments for music played on the radio or TV, or in live performance -- Harry Fox collect the money for mechanical reproduction, the use of songs on records. It's a gigantic organisation, and it has the backing of all the major music publishers. To do this audit, Klein and Fenton had to travel from New York to LA, and as they were being paid by a major entertainment industry organisation, they were put up in the Roosevelt Hotel, where at the time the other guests included Elvis, Claude Rains, and Sidney Poitier. Klein, who had grown up in comparative poverty, couldn't help but be impressed at the money that you could make by working in entertainment. The audit of Dot Records found some serious discrepancies -- they were severely underpaying publishers and songwriters. While they were in LA, Klein and Fenton also audited several other labels, like Liberty, and they found the same thing at all of them. The record labels were systematically conning publishing companies out of money they were owed. Klein immediately realised that if they were doing this to the major publishing companies that Harry Fox represented, they must be doing the same kind of thing to small songwriters and artists, the kind of people who didn't have a huge organisation to back them up. Unfortunately for Klein, soon after he started working for Fenton, he was fired -- he was someone who was chronically unable to get to work on time in the morning, and while he didn't mind working ridiculously long hours, he could not, no matter how hard he tried, get himself into the office for nine in the morning. He was fired after only four months, and Fenton even recommended to the State of New Jersey that they not allow Klein to become a Certified Public Accountant -- a qualification which, as a result, Klein never ended up getting. He set up his own company to perform audits of record companies for performers, and he got lucky by bumping in to someone he'd been at school with -- Don Kirshner. Kirshner agreed to start passing clients Klein's way, and his first client was Ersel Hickey (no relation), the rockabilly singer we briefly discussed in the episode on "Twist and Shout", who had a hit with "Bluebirds Over the Mountain": [Excerpt: Ersel Hickey, "Bluebirds Over the Mountain"] Klein audited Hickey's record label, but was rather surprised to find out that they didn't actually owe Hickey a penny. It turned out that record contracts were written so much in the company's favour that they didn't have to use any dodgy accounting to get out of paying the artists anything. But sometimes, the companies would rip the artists off anyway, if they were particularly unscrupulous. Kirshner had also referred the rockabilly singer/songwriter duo Buddy Knox and Jimmy Bowen to Klein. Their big hit, "Party Doll", had come out on Roulette Records: [Excerpt: Buddy Knox, "Party Doll"] Klein found out that in the case of Roulette, the label *were* actually not paying the artists what they were contractually owed, largely because Morris Levy didn't like paying people money. After the audit, Levy did actually agree to pay Knox and Bowen what they were owed, but he insisted that he would only pay it over four years, at a rate of seventy dollars a week -- if Klein wanted it any sooner, he'd have to sue, and the money would all be eaten up in lawyers' fees. That was still better than nothing, and Klein made enough from his cut that he was able to buy himself a car. Klein and Levy actually became friends -- the two men were very similar in many ways -- and Klein learned a big lesson from negotiating with him. That lesson was that you take what you can get, because something is better than nothing. If you discover a company owes your client a hundred thousand dollars that your client didn't know about, and they offer you fifty thousand to settle, you take the fifty thousand. Your client still ends up much better off than they would have been, you've not burned any bridges with the company, and you get your cut. And Klein's cut was substantial -- his standard was to take fifty percent of any extra money he got for the artist. And he prided himself on always finding something -- though rarely as much as he would suggest to his clients before getting together with them. One particularly telling anecdote about Klein's attitude is that when he was at Don Kirshner's wedding he went up to Kirshner's friend Bobby Darin and told him he could get him a hundred thousand dollars. Darin signed, but according to Darin's manager, Klein only actually found one underpayment, for ten thousand copies of Darin's hit "Splish Splash" which Atlantic hadn't paid for: [Excerpt: Bobby Darin, "Splish Splash"] However, at the time singles sold for a dollar, Darin was on a five percent royalty, and he only got paid for ninety percent of the records sold (because of a standard clause in contracts at that time to allow for breakages). The result was that Klein found an underpayment of just four hundred and fifty dollars, a little less than the hundred thousand he'd promised the unimpressed Darin. But Klein used the connection to Darin to get a lot more clients, and he did significantly better for some of them. For Lloyd Price, for example, he managed to get an extra sixty thousand dollars from ABC/Paramount, and Price and Klein became lifelong friends. And Price sang Klein's praises to Sam Cooke, who became eager to meet him. He got the chance when Klein started up a new business with a DJ named Jocko Henderson. Henderson was one of the most prominent DJs in Philadelphia, and was very involved in all aspects of the music industry. He had much the same kind of relationship with Scepter Records that Alan Freed had with Chess, and was cut in on most of the label's publishing on its big hits -- rights he would later sell to Klein in order to avoid the kind of investigation that destroyed Freed's career. Henderson had also been the DJ who had first promoted "You Send Me" on the radio, and Cooke owed him a favour. Cooke was also at the time being courted by Scepter Records, who had offered him a job as the Shirelles' writer and producer once Florence Greenberg had split up with Luther Dixon. He'd written them one song, which referenced many of their earlier hits: [Excerpt: The Shirelles, "Only Time Will Tell"] However, Cooke didn't stick with Scepter -- he figured out that Greenberg wasn't interested in him as a writer/producer, but as a singer, and he wasn't going to record for an indie like them when he could work with RCA. But when Henderson and Klein started running a theatre together, putting on R&B shows, those shows obviously featured a lot of Scepter acts like the Shirelles and Dionne Warwick, but they also featured Sam Cooke on the top of the bill, and towards the bottom of the bill were the Valentinos, a band featuring Cooke's touring guitarist, Bobby Womack, who were signed to SAR Records: [Excerpt: The Valentinos, "It's All Over Now"] Klein was absolutely overawed with Cooke's talent when he first saw him on stage, realising straight away that this was one of the major artists of his generation. Whereas most of the time, Klein would push himself forward straight away and try to dominate artists, here he didn't even approach Cooke at all, just chatted to Cooke's road manager and found out what Cooke was like as a person. This is something one sees time and again when it comes to Cooke -- otherwise unflappable people just being absolutely blown away by his charisma, talent, and personality, and behaving towards him in ways that they behaved to nobody else. At the end of the residency, Cooke had approached Klein, having heard good things about him from Price, Henderson, and his road manager. The two had several meetings over the next few months, so Klein could get an idea of what it was that was bothering Cooke about his business arrangements. Eventually, after a few months, Cooke asked Klein for his honest opinion. Klein was blunt. "I think they're treating you like a " -- and here he used the single most offensive anti-Black slur there is -- "and you shouldn't let them." Cooke agreed, and said he wanted Klein to take control of his business arrangements. The first thing Klein did was to get Cooke a big advance from BMI against his future royalties as a songwriter and publisher, giving him seventy-nine thousand dollars up front to ease his immediate cash problems. He then started working on getting Cooke a better recording contract. The first thing he did was go to Columbia records, who he thought would be a better fit for Cooke than RCA were, and with whom Cooke already had a relationship, as he was at that time working with his friend, the boxer Muhammad Ali, on an album that Ali was recording for Columbia: [Excerpt: Muhammad Ali, "The Gang's All Here"] Cooke was very friendly with Ali, and also with Ali's spiritual mentor, the activist Malcolm X, and both men tried to get him to convert to the Nation of Islam. Cooke declined -- while he respected both men, he had less respect for Elijah Mohammed, who he saw as a con artist, and he was becoming increasingly suspicious of religion in general. He did, though, share the Nation of Islam's commitment to Black people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and presenting themselves in a clean-cut way, having the same vision of Black capitalism that many of his contemporaries like James Brown shared. Unfortunately, negotiations with Columbia quickly failed. Klein believed, probably correctly, that record labels didn't have to do anything to sell Sam Cooke's records, and that Cooke was in a unique position as one of the very few artists at that time who could write, perform, and produce hit records without any outside assistance. Klein therefore thought that Cooke deserved a higher royalty rate than the five percent industry standard, and said that Cooke wouldn't sign with anyone for that rate. The problem was that Columbia had most-favoured-nations clauses written into many other artists' contracts. These clauses meant that if any artist signed with Columbia for a higher royalty rate, those other artists would also have to get that royalty rate, so if Cooke got the ten percent that Klein was demanding, a bunch of other performers like Tony Bennett would also have to get the ten percent, and Columbia were simply not willing to do that. So Klein decided that Cooke was going to stay with RCA, but he found a way to make sure that Cooke would get a much better deal from RCA, and in a way which didn't affect any of RCA's own favoured-nations contracts. Klein had had some involvement in filmmaking, and knew that independent production companies were making films without the studios, and just letting the studios distribute them. He also knew that in the music business plenty of songwriters and producers like Leiber and Stoller and Phil Spector owned their own record labels. But up to that point, no performers did, that Klein was aware of, because it was the producers who generally made the records, and the contracts were set up with the assumption that the performer would just do what the producer said. That didn't apply to Sam Cooke, and so Klein didn't see why Cooke couldn't have his own label. Klein set up a new company, called Tracey Records, which was named after Cooke's daughter, and whose president was Cooke's old friend J.W. Alexander. Tracey Records would, supposedly to reduce Cooke's tax burden, be totally owned by Klein, but it would be Cooke's company, and Cooke would be paid in preferred stock in the company, though Cooke would get the bulk of the money -- it would be a mere formality that the company was owned by Klein. While this did indeed have the effect of limiting the amount of tax Cooke had to pay, it also fulfilled a rule that Klein would later state -- "never take twenty percent of an artist's earnings. Instead give them eighty percent of yours". What mattered wasn't the short-term income, but the long-term ownership. And that's what Klein worked out with RCA. Tracey Records would record and manufacture all Cooke's records from that point on, but RCA would have exclusive distribution rights for thirty years, and would pay Tracey a dollar per album. After thirty years, Tracey records would get all the rights to Cooke's recordings back, and in the meantime, Cooke would effectively be on a much higher royalty rate than he'd received before, in return for taking a much larger share of the risk. There were also changes at SAR. Zelda Sands, who basically ran the company for Sam and J.W., was shocked to receive a phone call from Sam and Barbara, telling her to immediately come to Chicago, where Sam was staying while he was on tour. She went up to their hotel room, where Barbara angrily confronted her, saying that she knew that Sam had always been attracted to Zelda -- despite Zelda apparently being one of the few women Cooke met who he never slept with -- and heavily implied that the best way to sort this would be for them to have a threesome. Zelda left and immediately flew back to LA. A few days later, Barbara turned up at the SAR records offices and marched Zelda out at gunpoint. Through all of this turmoil, though, Cooke managed to somehow keep creating music. And indeed he soon came up with the song that would be his most important legacy. J.W. Alexander had given Cooke a copy of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, and Cooke had been amazed at "Blowin' in the Wind": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Blowin' in the Wind"] But more than being amazed at the song, Cooke was feeling challenged. This was a song that should have been written by a Black man. More than that, it was a song that should have been written by *him*. Black performers needed to be making music about their own situation. He added "Blowin' in the Wind" to his own live set, but he also started thinking about how he could write a song like that himself. As is often the case with Cooke's writing, he took inspiration from another song, this time "Ol' Man River", the song from the musical Showboat that had been made famous by the actor, singer, and most importantly civil rights activist Paul Robeson: [Excerpt: Paul Robeson, "Ol' Man River"] Cooke had recorded his own version of that in 1958, but now in early 1964 he took the general pace, some melodic touches, the mention of the river, and particularly the lines "I'm tired of livin' and scared of dyin'", and used them to create something new. Oddly for a song that would inspire a civil rights anthem -- or possibly just appropriately, in the circumstances, "Ol' Man River" in its original form featured several racial slurs included by the white lyricist, Oscar Hammerstein, and indeed Robeson himself in later live performances changed the very lines that Cooke would later appropriate, changing them as he thought they were too defeatist for a Black activist to sing: [Excerpt: Paul Robeson, "Ol' Man River (alternative lyrics)"] Cooke's song would keep the original sense, in his lines "It's been too hard livin' but I'm afraid to die", but the most important thing was the message -- "a change is gonna come". The session at which he recorded it was to be his last with Luigi, whose contract with RCA was coming to an end, and Cooke knew it had to be something special. Rene Hall came up with an arrangement for a full orchestra, which so overawed Cooke's regular musicians that his drummer found himself too nervous to play on the session. Luckily, Earl Palmer was recording next door, and was persuaded to come and fill in for him. Hall's arrangement starts with an overture played by the whole orchestra: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "A Change is Gonna Come"] And then each verse features different instrumentation, with the instruments changing at the last line of each verse -- "a change is gonna come". The first verse is dominated by the rhythm section: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "A Change is Gonna Come"] Then for the second verse, the strings come in, for the third the strings back down and are replaced by horns, and then at the end the whole orchestra swells up behind Cooke: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "A Change is Gonna Come"] Cooke was surprised when Luigi, at the end of the session, told him how much he liked the song, which Cooke thought wouldn't have been to Luigi's taste, as Luigi made simple pop confections, not protest songs. But as Luigi later explained, "But I did like it. It was a serious piece, but still it was him. Some of the other stuff was throwaway, but this was very deep. He was really digging into himself for this one." Cooke was proud of his new record, but also had something of a bad feeling about it, something that was confirmed when he played the record for Bobby Womack, who told him "it sounds like death". Cooke agreed, there was something premonitory about the record, something ominous. Allen Klein, on the other hand, was absolutely ecstatic. The track was intended to be used only as an album track -- they were going in a more R&B direction with Cooke's singles at this point. His previous single was a cover version of Howlin' Wolf's "Little Red Rooster”: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "Little Red Rooster"] And his next two singles were already recorded -- a secularised version of the old spiritual "Ain't That Good News", and a rewrite of an old Louis Jordan song. Cooke was booked on to the Johnny Carson show, where he was meant to perform both sides of his new single, but Allen Klein was so overwhelmed by "A Change is Gonna Come" that he insisted that Cooke drop "Ain't That Good News" and perform his new song instead. Cooke said that he was meant to be on there to promote his new record. Klein insisted that he was meant to be promoting *himself*, and that the best promotion for himself would be this great song. Cooke then said that the Tonight Show band didn't have all the instruments needed to reproduce the orchestration. Klein said that if RCA wouldn't pay for the additional eighteen musicians, he would pay for them out of his own pocket. Cooke eventually agreed. Unfortunately, there seems to exist no recording of that performance, the only time Cooke would ever perform "A Change is Gonna Come" live, but reports from people who watched it at the time suggest that it made as much of an impact on Black people watching as the Beatles' appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show two days later made on white America. "A Change is Gonna Come" became a standard of the soul repertoire, recorded by Aretha Franklin: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "A Change is Gonna Come"] Otis Redding: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "A Change is Gonna Come"] The Supremes and more. Cooke licensed it to a compilation album released as a fundraiser for Martin Luther King's campaigning, and when King was shot in 1968, Rosa Parks spent the night crying in her mother's arms, and they listened to "A Change is Gonna Come". She said ”Sam's smooth voice was like medicine to the soul. It was as if Dr. King was speaking directly to me.” After his Tonight Show appearance, Cooke was in the perfect position to move into the real big time. Allen Klein had visited Brian Epstein on RCA's behalf to see if Epstein would sign the Beatles to RCA for a million-dollar advance. Epstein wasn't interested, but he did suggest to Klein that possibly Cooke could open for the Beatles when they toured the US in 1965. And Cooke was genuinely excited about the British Invasion and the possibilities it offered for the younger musicians he was mentoring. When Bobby Womack complained that the Rolling Stones had covered his song "It's All Over Now" and deprived his band of a hit, Cooke explained to Womack first that he'd be making a ton of money from the songwriting royalties, but also that Womack and his brothers were in a perfect position -- they were young men with long hair who played guitars and drums. If the Valentinos jumped on the bandwagon they could make a lot of money from this new style. But Cooke was going to make a lot of money from older styles. He'd been booked into the Copacabana again, and this time he was going to be a smash hit, not the failure he had been the first time. His residency at the club was advertised with a billboard in Times Square, and he came on stage every night to a taped introduction from Sammy Davis Jr.: [Excerpt: Sammy Davis Jr. introducing Sam Cooke] Listening to the live album from that residency and comparing it to the live recordings in front of a Black audience from a year earlier is astonishing proof of Cooke's flexibility as a performer. The live album from the Harlem Square Club in Florida is gritty and gospel-fuelled, while the Copacabana show has Cooke as a smooth crooner in the style of Nat "King" Cole -- still with a soulful edge to his vocals, but completely controlled and relaxed. The repertoire is almost entirely different as well -- other than "Twistin' the Night Away" and a ballad medley that included "You Send Me", the material was a mixture of old standards like "Bill Bailey" and "When I Fall In Love" and new folk protest songs like "If I Had a Hammer" and "Blowin' in the Wind", the song that had inspired "A Change is Gonna Come": [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "Blowin' in the Wind"] What's astonishing is that both live albums, as different as they are, are equally good performances. Cooke by this point was an artist who could perform in any style, and for any audience, and do it well. In November 1964, Cooke recorded a dance song, “Shake”, and he prepared a shortened edit of “A Change is Gonna Come” to release as its B-side. The single was scheduled for release on December 22nd. Both sides charted, but by the time the single came out, Sam Cooke was dead. And from this point on, the story gets even more depressing and upsetting than it has been. On December the eleventh, 1964, Sam Cooke drove a woman he'd picked up to an out-of the-way motel. According to the woman, he tore off most of her clothes against her will, as well as getting undressed himself, and she was afraid he was going to rape her. When he went to the toilet, she gathered up all of her clothes and ran out, and in her hurry she gathered up his clothes as well. Some of Cooke's friends have suggested that she was in fact known for doing this and stealing men's money, and that Cooke had been carrying a large sum of money which disappeared, but this seems unlikely on the face of it, given that she ran to a phone box and called the police, telling them that she had been kidnapped and didn't know where she was, and could they please help her? Someone else was on the phone at the same time. Bertha Lee Franklin, the motel's manager, was on the phone to the owner of the motel when Sam Cooke found out that his clothes were gone, and the owner heard everything that followed. Cooke turned up at the manager's office naked except for a sports jacket and shoes, drunk, and furious. He demanded to know where the girl was. Franklin told him she didn't know anything about any girl. Cooke broke down the door to the manager's office, believing that she must be hiding in there with his clothes. Franklin grabbed the gun she had to protect herself. Cooke struggled with her, trying to get the gun off her. The gun went off three times. The first bullet went into the ceiling, the next two into Cooke. Cooke's last words were a shocked "Lady, you shot me". Cooke's death shocked everyone, and immediately many of his family and friends started questioning the accepted version of the story. And it has to be said that they had good reason to question it. Several people stood to benefit from Cooke's death -- he was talking about getting a divorce from his wife, who would inherit his money; he was apparently questioning his relationship with Klein, who gained complete ownership of his catalogue after his death, and Klein after all had mob connections in the person of Morris Levy; he had remained friendly with Malcolm X after X's split from the Nation of Islam and it was conceivable that Elijah Muhammad saw Cooke as a threat; while both Elvis and James Brown thought that Cooke setting up his own label had been seen as a threat by RCA, and that *they* had had something to do with it. And you have to understand that while false rape accusations basically never happen -- and I have to emphasise that here, women just *do not* make false rape accusations in any real numbers -- false rape accusations *had* historically been weaponised against Black men in large numbers in the early and mid twentieth century. Almost all lynchings followed a pattern -- a Black man owned a bit of land a white man wanted, a white woman connected to the white man accused the Black man of rape, the Black man was lynched, and his property was sold off at far less than cost to the white man who wanted it. The few lynchings that didn't follow that precise pattern still usually involved an element of sexualising the murdered Black men, as when only a few years earlier Emmett Till, a teenager, had been beaten to death, supposedly for whistling at a white woman. So Cooke's death very much followed the pattern of a lynching. Not exactly -- for a start, the woman he attacked was Black, and so was the woman who shot him -- but it was close enough that it rang alarm bells, completely understandably. But I think we have to set against that Cooke's history of arrogant entitlement to women's bodies, and his history of violence, both against his wife and, more rarely, against strangers who caught him in the wrong mood. Fundamentally, if you read enough about his life and behaviour, the official story just rings absolutely true. He seems like someone who would behave exactly in the way described. Or at least, he seems that way to me. But of course, I didn't know him, and I have never had to live with the threat of murder because of my race. And many people who did know him and have had to live with that threat have a different opinion, and that needs to be respected. The story of Cooke's family after his death is not one from which anyone comes out looking very good. His brother, L.C., pretty much immediately recorded a memorial album and went out on a tribute tour, performing his brother's hits: [Excerpt: L.C. Cooke, "Wonderful World"] Cooke's best friend, J.W. Alexander, also recorded a tribute album. Bertha Franklin sued the family of the man she had killed, because her own life had been ruined and she'd had to go into hiding, thanks to threats from his fans. Cooke's widow, Barbara, married Bobby Womack less than three months after Cooke's death -- and the only reason it wasn't sooner was that Womack had not yet turned twenty-one, and so they were not able to get married without Womack's parents' permission. They married the day after Womack's twenty-first birthday, and Womack was wearing one of Sam's suits at the ceremony. Womack was heard regularly talking about how much he looked like Sam. Two of Cooke's brothers were so incensed at the way that they thought Womack was stepping into their brother's life that they broke Womack's jaw -- and Barbara Cooke pulled a gun on them and tried to shoot them. Luckily for them, Womack had guessed that a confrontation was coming, and had removed the bullets from Barbara's gun, so there would be no more deaths in his mentor's family. Within a few months, Barbara was pregnant, and the baby, when he was born, was named Vincent, the same name as Sam and Barbara's dead son. Five years later, Barbara discovered that Womack had for some time been sexually abusing Linda, her and Sam's oldest child, who was seventeen at the time Barbara discovered this. She kicked Womack out, but Linda sided with Womack and never spoke to her mother again. Linda carried on a consensual relationship with Bobby Womack for some time, and then married Bobby's brother Cecil (or maybe it's pronounced Cee-cil in his case? I've never heard him spoken about), who also became her performing and songwriting partner. They wrote many songs for other artists, as well as having hits themselves as Womack and Womack: [Excerpt: Womack and Womack, "Teardrops"] The duo later changed their names to Zek and Zeriiya Zekkariyas, in recognition of their African heritage. Sam Cooke left behind a complicated legacy. He hurt almost everyone who was ever involved in his life, and yet all of them seem not only to have forgiven him but to have loved him in part because of the things he did that hurt them the most. What effect that has on one's view of his art must in the end be a matter for individual judgement, and I never, ever, want to suggest that great art in any way mitigates appalling personal behaviour. But at the same time, "A Change is Gonna Come" stands as perhaps the most important single record we'll look at in this history, one that marked the entry into the pop mainstream of Black artists making political statements on their own behalf, rather than being spoken for and spoken over by well-meaning white liberals like me. There's no neat conclusion I can come to here, no great lesson that can be learned and no pat answer that will make everything make sense. There's just some transcendent, inspiring, music, a bunch of horribly hurt people, and a young man dying, almost naked, in the most squalid circumstances imaginable.
In this episode we're revisiting the first ever Cowsill's tour as a family, flying out to Los Angeles to stay and perform at the Century City Plaza. We reminisce about the games we played, competitions we started, and the trouble we would get into on the road.We have Ron Dante and Toni Wine on the show, and you may not know them by name, but you definitely know them by voice. They're the anonymous vocals behind the fictional band, The Archies. The animated cartoon phenomenon that put out records that achieved worldwide success, including one of their greatest hits, “Sugar, Sugar”!As the youngest performers on Don Kirshner's label, just 13 and 14 years old, they sang back up for many bands, cartoons, tv and radio commercials throughout the 60s and 70s. We're talking to them about what it was like growing up together in the music business and how they felt about their anonymity! To this day they are the only band in history to have a number one hit without ever performing for an audience! Song of the Week: "Sugar Sugar"
KABC's Curt Sandoval, NY sportscaster Warner Wolf and Don Kirshner's Sugar Sugar.
So many musicians have become popular based on one thing the caught the public's imagination. Daring to try something different artistically could be a “bad career move”. Of course, some musicians might have been “hiding in plain sight” with their real artistic ambitions all along.Welcome to episode 142 of Love That Album, the first episode for 2021.Michael Nesmith along with Peter Tork, Davy Jones and Micky Dolenz spent the latter half of the sixties rallying against the image bequeathed on them by NBC and Don Kirshner. The Monkees wanted to show that they could be (and were) a real band. Right from the start, Mike would infuse his own songwriting with his love of country music.However, country is only a small part of the Monkees' own sound. When he announced he was quitting (4 days after McCartney announced The Beatles were no more), he already had plans for his next ensemble, The First National Band. Over a period of a little over a year, they released three brilliant albums, allowing Nesmith to finally make his approach to country music the focus.I am joined by musician, songwriter, comedian and regular co host on All Time Top Ten Podcast, Joe Lavelle to look at the first of those First National Band albums, Magnetic South. Of course we look at a range of things peripheral to the album like The Monkees (duh!), the real origins of country rock, being a musician known for comedy (and a pioneer in music video), Brazil and the link between Magnetic South and Star Trek.It took a year to get around to this episode (I move slower than zombies in a George Romero film), but it was worth it. Joe is a great conversation partner – something you'd know if you've heard him on the ATTT podcast. It was a pleasure and privilege for me to finally have him on the show.You can find the music for his jazz ensemble Brandy Sidecar at https://brandysidecar.bandcamp.com/album/the-christmas-3-epBen Eisen's All Time Top Ten podcast can be found at https://alltimetoptenpod.com/Download this episode of LTA from Spotify, Stitcher or iTunes (search for “Love That Album podcast”).Love That Album is proudly part of the Pantheon Podcast network. Go to http://pantheonpodcasts.com to check out all their great shows.You can send me feedback at rrrkitchen@yahoo.com.au (written or mp3 voicemail) or join the Facebook group at http://www.facebook.com/groups/lovethatalbumIf you'd consider writing an iTunes review I'd be immensely grateful. However, it'd be even better if you told a friend about the podcast and Pantheon – at a (socially distanced) barbecue, over coffee (on Skype), on social media….whatever way you choose, consider me grateful.
So many musicians have become popular based on one thing the caught the public's imagination. Daring to try something different artistically could be a “bad career move”. Of course, some musicians might have been “hiding in plain sight” with their real artistic ambitions all along. Welcome to episode 142 of Love That Album, the first episode for 2021. Michael Nesmith along with Peter Tork, Davy Jones and Micky Dolenz spent the latter half of the sixties rallying against the image bequeathed on them by NBC and Don Kirshner. The Monkees wanted to show that they could be (and were) a real band. Right from the start, Mike would infuse his own songwriting with his love of country music. However, country is only a small part of the Monkees' own sound. When he announced he was quitting (4 days after McCartney announced The Beatles were no more), he already had plans for his next ensemble, The First National Band. Over a period of a little over a year, they released three brilliant albums, allowing Nesmith to finally make his approach to country music the focus. I am joined by musician, songwriter, comedian and regular co host on All Time Top Ten Podcast, Joe Lavelle to look at the first of those First National Band albums, Magnetic South. Of course we look at a range of things peripheral to the album like The Monkees (duh!), the real origins of country rock, being a musician known for comedy (and a pioneer in music video), Brazil and the link between Magnetic South and Star Trek. It took a year to get around to this episode (I move slower than zombies in a George Romero film), but it was worth it. Joe is a great conversation partner – something you'd know if you've heard him on the ATTT podcast. It was a pleasure and privilege for me to finally have him on the show. You can find the music for his jazz ensemble Brandy Sidecar at https://brandysidecar.bandcamp.com/album/the-christmas-3-ep Ben Eisen's All Time Top Ten podcast can be found at https://alltimetoptenpod.com/ Download this episode of LTA from Spotify, Stitcher or iTunes (search for “Love That Album podcast”). Love That Album is proudly part of the Pantheon Podcast network. Go to http://pantheonpodcasts.com to check out all their great shows. You can send me feedback at rrrkitchen@yahoo.com.au (written or mp3 voicemail) or join the Facebook group at http://www.facebook.com/groups/lovethatalbum If you’d consider writing an iTunes review I’d be immensely grateful. However, it’d be even better if you told a friend about the podcast and Pantheon – at a (socially distanced) barbecue, over coffee (on Skype), on social media….whatever way you choose, consider me grateful.
So many musicians have become popular based on one thing the caught the public's imagination. Daring to try something different artistically could be a “bad career move”. Of course, some musicians might have been “hiding in plain sight” with their real artistic ambitions all along. Welcome to episode 142 of Love That Album, the first episode for 2021. Michael Nesmith along with Peter Tork, Davy Jones and Micky Dolenz spent the latter half of the sixties rallying against the image bequeathed on them by NBC and Don Kirshner. The Monkees wanted to show that they could be (and were) a real band. Right from the start, Mike would infuse his own songwriting with his love of country music. However, country is only a small part of the Monkees' own sound. When he announced he was quitting (4 days after McCartney announced The Beatles were no more), he already had plans for his next ensemble, The First National Band. Over a period of a little over a year, they released three brilliant albums, allowing Nesmith to finally make his approach to country music the focus. I am joined by musician, songwriter, comedian and regular co host on All Time Top Ten Podcast, Joe Lavelle to look at the first of those First National Band albums, Magnetic South. Of course we look at a range of things peripheral to the album like The Monkees (duh!), the real origins of country rock, being a musician known for comedy (and a pioneer in music video), Brazil and the link between Magnetic South and Star Trek. It took a year to get around to this episode (I move slower than zombies in a George Romero film), but it was worth it. Joe is a great conversation partner – something you'd know if you've heard him on the ATTT podcast. It was a pleasure and privilege for me to finally have him on the show. You can find the music for his jazz ensemble Brandy Sidecar at https://brandysidecar.bandcamp.com/album/the-christmas-3-ep Ben Eisen's All Time Top Ten podcast can be found at https://alltimetoptenpod.com/ Download this episode of LTA from Spotify, Stitcher or iTunes (search for “Love That Album podcast”). Love That Album is proudly part of the Pantheon Podcast network. Go to http://pantheonpodcasts.com to check out all their great shows. You can send me feedback at rrrkitchen@yahoo.com.au (written or mp3 voicemail) or join the Facebook group at http://www.facebook.com/groups/lovethatalbum If you'd consider writing an iTunes review I'd be immensely grateful. However, it'd be even better if you told a friend about the podcast and Pantheon – at a (socially distanced) barbecue, over coffee (on Skype), on social media….whatever way you choose, consider me grateful.
So many musicians have become popular based on one thing the caught the public's imagination. Daring to try something different artistically could be a “bad career move”. Of course, some musicians might have been “hiding in plain sight” with their real artistic ambitions all along.Welcome to episode 142 of Love That Album, the first episode for 2021.Michael Nesmith along with Peter Tork, Davy Jones and Micky Dolenz spent the latter half of the sixties rallying against the image bequeathed on them by NBC and Don Kirshner. The Monkees wanted to show that they could be (and were) a real band. Right from the start, Mike would infuse his own songwriting with his love of country music. However, country is only a small part of the Monkees' own sound. When he announced he was quitting (4 days after McCartney announced The Beatles were no more), he already had plans for his next ensemble, The First National Band. Over a period of a little over a year, they released three brilliant albums, allowing Nesmith to finally make his approach to country music the focus.I am joined by musician, songwriter, comedian and regular co host on All Time Top Ten Podcast, Joe Lavelle to look at the first of those First National Band albums, Magnetic South. Of course we look at a range of things peripheral to the album like The Monkees (duh!), the real origins of country rock, being a musician known for comedy (and a pioneer in music video), Brazil and the link between Magnetic South and Star Trek.It took a year to get around to this episode (I move slower than zombies in a George Romero film), but it was worth it. Joe is a great conversation partner – something you'd know if you've heard him on the ATTT podcast. It was a pleasure and privilege for me to finally have him on the show.You can find the music for his jazz ensemble Brandy Sidecar at https://brandysidecar.bandcamp.com/album/the-christmas-3-epBen Eisen's All Time Top Ten podcast can be found at https://alltimetoptenpod.com/Download this episode of LTA from Spotify, Stitcher or iTunes (search for “Love That Album podcast”).Love That Album is proudly part of the Pantheon Podcast network. Go to http://pantheonpodcasts.com to check out all their great shows.You can send me feedback at rrrkitchen@yahoo.com.au (written or mp3 voicemail) or join the Facebook group at http://www.facebook.com/groups/lovethatalbumIf you'd consider writing an iTunes review I'd be immensely grateful. However, it'd be even better if you told a friend about the podcast and Pantheon – at a (socially distanced) barbecue, over coffee (on Skype), on social media….whatever way you choose, consider me grateful.
On the January 17 edition of Music History Today, there's Juice, Sugarland, Don Kirshner, Garth Brooks, Eartha Kitt, & Kid Rock. Website - CJBTProductions.com Onlyfans - onlyfans.com/MusicHistoryToday Patreon - Patreon.com/MusicHistoryToday
Episode 104 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “He’s a Rebel”, and how a song recorded by the Blossoms was released under the name of the Crystals. 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 “Sukiyaki” by Kyu Sakamoto. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)
Episode 104 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "He's a Rebel", and how a song recorded by the Blossoms was released under the name of the Crystals. 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 "Sukiyaki" by Kyu Sakamoto. 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. A lot of resources were used for this episode. The material on Gene Pitney mostly comes from his page on This is My Story. Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era by Ken Emerson is a good overview of the Brill Building scene. Girl Groups by John Clemente contains potted biographies of many groups of the era, including articles on both The Crystals and the Blossoms. I've referred to two biographies of Spector in this episode, Phil Spector: Out of His Head by Richard Williams and He's a Rebel by Mark Ribkowsky. And information on the Wrecking Crew largely comes from The Wrecking Crew by Kent Hartman. There are many compilations available with some of the hits Spector produced, but I recommend getting Back to Mono, a four-CD overview of his career containing all the major singles put out by Philles. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A brief note -- there are some very brief mentions of domestic abuse here. Nothing I think will upset anyone, but you might want to check the transcript if you're at all unsure. Up to this point, whenever we've looked at a girl group, it's been at one that had, to a greater or lesser extent, some control over their own career. Groups like the Marvelettes, the Chantels, and the Bobbettes all wrote their own material, at least at first, and had distinctive personalities before they ever made a record. But today, we're going to look at a group whose identity was so subsumed in that of their producer that the record we're looking at was released under the name of a different group from the one that recorded it. We're going to look at "He's a Rebel", which was recorded by the Blossoms and released by the Crystals. [Excerpt: “The Crystals” (The Blossoms), "He's a Rebel"] The Crystals, from their very beginnings, were intended as a vehicle for the dreams of men, rather than for their own ambitions. Whereas the girl groups we've looked at so far all formed as groups of friends at school before they moved into professional singing, the Crystals were put together by a man named Benny Wells. Wells had a niece, Barbara Alston, who sang with a couple of her schoolfriends, Mary Thomas and Myrna Giraud. Wells put those three together with two other girls, Dee Dee Kenniebrew and Patsy Wright, to form a five-piece vocal group. Wells seems not to have had much concept of what was in the charts at the time -- the descriptions of the music he had the girls singing talk about him wanting them to sound like the Modernaires, the vocal group who sang with Glenn Miller's band in the early 1940s. But the girls went along with Wells, and Wells had good enough ears to recognise a hit when one was brought to him -- and one was brought to him by Patsy Wright's brother-in-law, Leroy Bates. Bates had written a song called "There's No Other Like My Baby", and Wells could tell it had potential. Incidentally, some books say that the song was based on a gospel song called "There's No Other Like My Jesus", and that claim is repeated on Wikipedia, but I can't find any evidence of a song of that name other than people talking about "There's No Other Like My Baby". There is a gospel song called "There's No Other Name Like Jesus", but that has no obvious resemblance to Bates' song, and so I'm going to assume that the song was totally original. As well as bringing the song, Bates also brought the fledgling group a name -- he had a daughter, Crystal Bates, after whom the group named themselves. The newly-named Crystals took their song to the offices of Hill and Range Music, which as well as being a publishing company also owned Big Top Records, the label that had put out the original version of "Twist and Shout", which had so annoyed Bert Berns. And it was there that they ended up meeting up with Phil Spector. After leaving his role at Atlantic, Spector had started working as a freelance producer, including working for Big Top. According to Spector -- a notorious liar, it's important to remember -- he worked during this time on dozens of hits for which he didn't get any credit, just to earn money. But we do know about some of the records he produced during this time. For example, there was one by a new singer called Gene Pitney. Pitney had been knocking around for years, recording for Decca as part of a duo called Jamie and Jane: [Excerpt: Jamie and Jane, "Faithful Our Love"] And for Blaze Records as Billy Bryan: [Excerpt: Billy Bryan, "Going Back to My Love"] But he'd recently signed to Musicor, a label owned by Aaron Schroeder, and had recorded a hit under his own name. Pitney had written "(I Wanna) Love My Life Away", and had taken advantage of the new multitracking technology to record his vocals six times over, creating a unique sound that took the record into the top forty: [Excerpt: Gene Pitney, "(I Wanna) Love My Life Away"] But while that had been a hit, his second single for Musicor was a flop, and so for the third single, Musicor decided to pull out the big guns. They ran a session at which basically the whole of the Brill Building turned up. Leiber and Stoller were to produce a song they'd written for Pitney, the new hot husband-and-wife songwriting team of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil were there, as was Burt Bacharach, and so were Goffin and King, who wrote the song that *Spector* was to produce for Pitney. All of them were in the control booth, and all of them were chipping in ideas. As you might expect with that many cooks, the session did not go smoothly, and to make matters worse, Pitney was suffering from a terrible cold. The session ended up costing thirteen thousand dollars, at a time when an average recording session cost five hundred dollars. On the song Spector was producing on that session, Goffin and King's "Every Breath I Take", Pitney knew that with the cold he would be completely unable to hit the last note in full voice, and went into falsetto. Luckily, everyone thought it sounded good, and he could pretend it was deliberate, rather than the result of necessity: [Excerpt: Gene Pitney, "Every Breath I Take"] The record only went to number forty-two, but it resuscitated Pitney's singing career, and forged a working relationship between the two men. But soon after that, Spector had flown back to LA to work with his old friend Lester Sill. Sill and producer/songwriter, Lee Hazelwood, had been making records with the guitarist Duane Eddy, producing a string of hits like “Rebel Rouser”: [Excerpt: Duane Eddy, "Rebel Rouser"] But Eddy had recently signed directly to a label, rather than going through Sill and Hazelwood's company as before, and so Sill and Hazelwood had been looking for new artists, and they'd recently signed a group called the Paris Sisters to their production company. Sill had decided to get Spector in to produce the group, and Spector came up with a production that Sill was sure would be a hit, on a song called "I Love How You Love Me", written by Barry Mann with another writer called Jack Keller: [Excerpt: The Paris Sisters, "I Love How You Love Me"] Spector was becoming a perfectionist -- he insisted on recording the rhythm track for that record at one studio, and the string part at another, and apparently spent fifty hours on the mix -- and Sill was spending more and more time in the studio with Spector, fascinated at his attitude to the work he was doing. This led to a breakup between Sill and Hazelwood -- their business relationship was already strained, but Hazelwood got jealous of all the time that Sill was spending with Spector, and decided to split their partnership and go and produce Duane Eddy, without Sill, at Eddy's new label. So Sill was suddenly in the market for a new business partner, and he and Spector decided that they were going to start up their own label, Philles, although by this point everyone who had ever worked with Spector was warning Sill that it was a bad idea to go into business with him. But Spector and Sill kept their intentions secret for a while, and so when Spector met the Crystals at Hill and Range's offices, everyone at Hill and Range just assumed that he was still working for them as a freelance producer, and that the Crystals were going to be recording for Big Top. Freddie Bienstock of Hill & Range later said, "We were very angry because we felt they were Big Top artists. He was merely supposed to produce them for us. There was no question about the fact that he was just rehearsing them for Big Top—hell, he rehearsed them for weeks in our offices. And then he just stole them right out of here. That precipitated a breach of contract with us. We were just incensed because that was a terrific group, and for him to do that shows the type of character he was. We felt he was less than ethical, and, obviously, he was then shown the door.” Bienstock had further words for Spector too, ones I can't repeat here because of content rules about adult language, but they weren't flattering. Spector had been dating Bienstock's daughter, with Bienstock's approval, but that didn't last once Spector betrayed Bienstock. But Spector didn't care. He had his own New York girl group, one that could compete with the Bobbettes or the Chantels or the Shirelles, and he was going to make the Crystals as big as any of them, and he wasn't going to cut Big Top in. He slowed down "There's No Other Like My Baby" and it became the first release on Philles Records, with Barbara Alston singing lead: [Excerpt: The Crystals, "There's No Other Like My Baby"] That record was cut late at night in June 1961. In fact it was cut on Prom Night -- three of the girls came straight to the session from their High School prom, still wearing their prom dresses. Spector wrote the B-side, a song that was originally intended to be the A-side called "Oh Yeah, Maybe Baby", but everyone quickly realised that "There's No Other Like My Baby" was the hit, and it made the top twenty. While Spector was waiting for the money to come in on the first Philles record, he took another job, with Liberty Records, working for his friend Snuff Garrett. He got a thirty thousand dollar advance, made a single flop record with them with an unknown singer named Obrey Wilson, and then quit, keeping his thirty thousand dollars. Once "There's No Other" made the charts, Spector took the Crystals into the studio again, to record a song by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil that he'd got from Aldon Music. Spector was becoming increasingly convinced that he'd made a mistake in partnering with Lester Sill, and he should really have been working with Don Kirshner, and he was in discussions with Kirshner which came to nothing about them having some sort of joint project. While those discussions fell through, almost all the songs that Spector would use for the next few years would come from Aldon songwriters, and "Uptown" was a perfect example of the new kind of socially-relevant pop songwriting that had been pioneered by Goffin and King, but which Mann and Weil were now making their own. Before becoming a professional songwriter, Weil had been part of the Greenwich Village folk scene, and while she wasn't going to write anything as explicitly political as the work of Pete Seeger, she thought that songs should at least try to be about the real world. "Uptown" was the first example of a theme which would become a major motif for the Crystals' records -- a song about a man who is looked down upon by society, but who the singer believes is better than his reputation. Mann and Weil's song combined that potent teen emotion with an inspiration Weil had had, seeing a handsome Black man pushing a hand truck in the Garment District, and realising that even though he was oppressed by his job, and "a nobody" when he was working downtown, he was still somebody when he was at home. They originally wrote the song for Tony Orlando to sing, but Spector insisted, rightly, that the song worked better with female voices, and that the Crystals should do it. Spector took Mann and Weil's song and gave it a production that evoked the Latin feel of Leiber and Stoller's records for the Drifters: [Excerpt: The Crystals, "Uptown"] By the time of this second record, the Crystals had already been through one lineup change. As soon as she left school, Myrna Giraud got married, and she didn't want to perform on stage any more. She would still sing with the girls in the studio for a little while -- she's on every track of their first album, though she left altogether soon after this recording -- but she was a married woman now and didn't want to be in a group. The girls needed a replacement, and they also needed something else -- a lead singer. All the girls loved singing, but none of them wanted to be out in front singing lead. Luckily, Dee Dee Kenniebrew's mother was a secretary at the school attended by a fourteen-year-old gospel singer named La La Brooks, and she heard Brooks singing and invited her to join the group. Brooks soon became the group's lead vocalist on stage. But in the studio, Spector didn't want to use her as the lead vocalist. He insisted on Barbara singing the lead on "Uptown", but in a sign of things to come, Mann and Weil weren't happy with her performance -- Spector had to change parts of the melody to accommodate her range -- and they begged Spector to rerecord the lead vocal with Little Eva singing. However, Eva became irritated with Spector's incessant demands for more takes and his micromanagement, cursed him out, and walked out of the studio. The record was released with Barbara's original lead vocal, and while Mann and Weil weren't happy with that, listeners were, as it went to number thirteen on the charts: [Excerpt: The Crystals, "Uptown"] Little Eva later released her own version of the song, on the Dimension Dolls compilation we talked about in the episode on "The Loco-Motion": [Excerpt: Little Eva, "Uptown"] It was Little Eva who inspired the next Crystals single, as well -- as we talked about in the episode on her, she inspired a truly tasteless Goffin and King song called "He Hit Me And It Felt Like A Kiss", which I will not be excerpting, but which was briefly released as the Crystals' third single, before being withdrawn after people objected to hearing teenage girls sing about how romantic and loving domestic abuse is. There seems to be some suggestion that the record was released partly as a way for Spector to annoy Lester Sill, who by all accounts was furious at the release. Spector was angry at Sill over the amount of money he'd made from the Paris Sisters recordings, and decided that he was being treated unfairly and wanted to force Sill out of their partnership. Certainly the next recording by the Crystals was meant to get rid of some other business associates. Two of Philles' distributors had a contract which said they were entitled to the royalties on two Crystals singles. So the second one was a ten-minute song called "The Screw", split over two sides of a disc, which sounded like this: [Excerpt: The Crystals, "The Screw"] Only a handful of promotional copies of that were ever produced. One went to Lester Sill, who by this point had been bought out of his share of the company for a small fraction of what it was worth. The last single Spector recorded for Philles while Sill was still involved with the label was another Crystals record, one that had the involvement of many people Sill had brought into Spector's orbit, and who would continue working with him long after the two men stopped working together. Spector had decided he was going to start recording in California again, and two of Sill's assistants would become regular parts of Spector's new hit-making machine. The first of these was a composer and arranger called Jack Nitzsche, who we'll be seeing a lot more of in this podcast over the next couple of years, in some unexpected places. Nitzsche was a young songwriter, whose biggest credit up to this point was a very minor hit for Preston Epps, "Bongo, Bongo, Bongo": [Excerpt: Preston Epps, "Bongo Bongo Bongo"] Nitzsche would become Spector's most important collaborator, and his arrangements, as much as Spector's production, are what characterise the "Wall of Sound" for which Spector would become famous. The other assistant of Sill's who became important to Spector's future was a saxophone player named Steve Douglas. We've seen Douglas before, briefly, in the episode on "LSD-25" -- he played in the original lineup of Kip and the Flips, one of the groups we talked about in that episode. He'd left Kip and the Flips to join Duane Eddy's band, and it was through Eddy that he had started working with Sill, when he played on many of Eddy's hits, most famously "Peter Gunn": [Excerpt: Duane Eddy, "Peter Gunn"] Douglas was the union contractor for the session, and for most of the rest of Spector's sixties sessions. This is something we've not talked about previously, but when we look at records produced in LA for the next few years, in particular, it's something that will come up a lot. When a producer wanted to make records at the time, he (for they were all men) would not contact all the musicians himself. Instead, he'd get in touch with a trusted musician and say "I have a session at three o'clock. I need two guitars, bass, drums, a clarinet and a cello" (or whatever combination of instruments), and sometimes might say, "If you can get this particular player, that would be good". The musician would then find out which other musicians were available, get them into the studio, and file the forms which made sure they got paid according to union rules. The contractor, not the producer, decided who was going to play on the session. In the case of this Crystals session, Spector already had a couple of musicians in mind -- a bass player named Ray Pohlman, and his old guitar teacher Howard Roberts, a jazz guitarist who had played on "To Know Him is to Love Him" and "I Love How You Love Me" for Spector already. But Spector wanted a *big* sound -- he wanted the rhythm instruments doubled, so there was a second bass player, Jimmy Bond, and a second guitarist, Tommy Tedesco. Along with them and Douglas were piano player Al de Lory and drummer Hal Blaine. This was the first session on which Spector used any of these musicians, and with the exception of Roberts, who hated working on Spector's sessions and soon stopped, this group put together by Douglas would become the core of what became known as "The Wrecking Crew", a loose group of musicians who would play on a large number of the hit records that would come out of LA in the sixties. Spector also had a guaranteed hit song -- one by Gene Pitney. While Pitney wrote few of his own records, he'd established himself a parallel career as a writer for other people. He'd written "Today's Teardrops", the B-side of Roy Orbison's hit "Blue Angel": [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, "Today's Teardrops"] And had followed that up with a couple of the biggest hits of the early sixties, Bobby Vee's "Rubber Ball": [Excerpt: Bobby Vee, "Rubber Ball"] And Ricky Nelson's "Hello Mary Lou": [Excerpt: Ricky Nelson, "Hello, Mary Lou"] Pitney had written a song, "He's a Rebel", that was very strongly inspired by "Uptown", and Aaron Schroeder, Pitney's publisher, had given the song to Spector. But Spector knew Schroeder, and knew that when he gave you a song, he was going to give it to every other producer who came knocking as well. "He's a Rebel" was definitely going to be a massive hit for someone, and he wanted it to be for the Crystals. He phoned them up and told them to come out to LA to record the song. And they said no. The Crystals had become sick of Spector. He'd made them record songs like "He Hit Me and it Felt Like a Kiss", he'd refused to let their lead singer sing lead, and they'd not seen any money from their two big hits. They weren't going to fly from New York to LA just because he said so. Spector needed a new group, in LA, that he could record doing the song before someone else did it. He could use the Crystals' name -- Philles had the right to put out records by whoever they liked and call it the Crystals -- he just needed a group. He found one in the Blossoms, a group who had connections to many of the people Spector was working with. Jack Nitzsche's wife sometimes sang with them on sessions, and they'd also sung on a Duane Eddy record that Lester Sill had worked on, "Dance With the Guitar Man", where they'd been credited as the Rebelettes: [Excerpt: Duane Eddy, "Dance With the Guitar Man"] The Blossoms had actually been making records in LA for nearly eight years at this point. They'd started out as the Dreamers one of the many groups who'd been discovered by Johnny Otis, back in the early fifties, and had also been part of the scene around the Penguins, one of whom went to school with some of the girls. They started out as a six-piece group, but slimmed down to a quartet after their first record, on which they were the backing group for Richard Berry: [Excerpt: Richard Berry, "At Last"] The first stable lineup of the Dreamers consisted of Fanita James, Gloria Jones (not the one who would later record "Tainted Love"), and the twin sisters Annette and Nanette Williams. They worked primarily with Berry, backing him on five singles in the mid fifties, and also recording songs he wrote for them under their own name, like "Do Not Forget", which actually featured another singer, Jennell Hawkins, on lead: [Excerpt: The Dreamers, "Do Not Forget"] They also sang backing vocals on plenty of other R&B records from people in the LA R&B scene -- for example it's them singing backing vocals, with Jesse Belvin, on Etta James' "Good Rocking Daddy": [Excerpt: Etta James, "Good Rocking Daddy"] The group signed to Capitol Records in 1957, but not under the name The Dreamers -- an executive there said that they all had different skin tones and it made them look like flowers, so they became the Blossoms. They were only at Capitol for a year, but during that time an important lineup change happened -- Nanette quit the group and was replaced by a singer called Darlene Wright. From that point on The Blossoms was the main name the group went under, though they also recorded under other names, for example using the name The Playgirls to record "Gee But I'm Lonesome", a song written by Bruce Johnston, who was briefly dating Annette Williams at the time: [Excerpt: The Playgirls, "Gee But I'm Lonesome"] By 1961 Annette had left the group, and they were down to a trio of Fanita, Gloria, and Darlene. Their records, under whatever name, didn't do very well, but they became the first-call session singers in LA, working on records by everyone from Sam Cooke to Gene Autry. So it was the Blossoms who were called on in late 1962 to record "He's a Rebel", and it was Darlene Wright who earned her session fee, and no royalties, for singing the lead on a number one record: [Excerpt: The "Crystals" (The Blossoms), "He's a Rebel"] From that point on, the Blossoms would sing on almost every Spector session for the next three years, and Darlene, who he renamed Darlene Love, would become Spector's go-to lead vocalist for records under her own name, the Blossoms, Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans, and the Crystals. It was lucky for Spector that he decided to go this route rather than wait for the Crystals, not only because it introduced him to the Blossoms, but because he'd been right about Aaron Schroeder. As Spector and Sill sat together in the studio where they were mastering the record, some musicians on a break from the studio next door wandered in, and said, "Hey man. we were just playing the same goddam song!" Literally in the next room as Spector mastered the record, his friend Snuff Garrett was producing Vicki Carr singing "He's a Rebel": [Excerpt: Vicki Carr, "He's a Rebel"] Philles got their version out first, and Carr's record sank without trace, while "The Crystals" went to number one, keeping the song's writer off the top spot, as Gene Pitney sat at number two with a Bacharach and David song, "Only Love Can Break a Heart": [Excerpt: Gene Pitney, "Only Love Can Break a Heart"] The Crystals were shocked that Spector released a Crystals record without any of them on it, but La La Brooks had a similar enough voice to Darlene Love's that they were able to pull the song off live. They had a bit more of a problem with the follow-up, also by the Blossoms but released as the Crystals: [Excerpt: "The Crystals"/The Blossoms, "He's Sure the Boy I Love"] La La could sing that fine, but she had to work on the spoken part -- Darlene was from California and La La had a thick Brooklyn accent. She managed it, just about. As La La was doing such a good job of singing Darlene Love's parts live -- and, more importantly, as she was only fifteen and so didn't complain about things like royalties -- the Crystals finally did get their way and have La La start singing the leads on their singles, starting with "Da Doo Ron Ron". The problem is, none of the other Crystals were on those records -- it was La La singing with the Blossoms, plus other session singers. Listen out for the low harmony in "Da Doo Ron Ron" and see if you recognise the voice: [Excerpt: The Crystals, "Da Doo Ron Ron"] Cher would later move on to bigger things than being a fill-in Crystal. "Da Doo Ron Ron" became another big hit, making number three in the charts, and the follow-up, "Then He Kissed Me", with La La once again on lead vocals, also made the top ten, but the group were falling apart -- Spector was playing La La off against the rest of the group, just to cause trouble, and he'd also lost interest in them once he discovered another group, The Ronettes, who we'll be hearing more about in future episodes. The singles following "Then He Kissed Me" barely scraped the bottom of the Hot One Hundred, and the group left Philles in 1964. They got a payoff of five thousand dollars, in lieu of all future royalties on any of their recordings. They had no luck having hits without Spector, and one by one the group members left, and the group split up by 1966. Mary, Barbara, and Dee Dee briefly reunited as the Crystals in 1971, and La La and Dee Dee made an album together in the eighties of remakes of the group's hits, but nothing came of any of these. Dee Dee continues to tour under the Crystals name in North America, while La La performs solo in America and under the Crystals name in Europe. Barbara, the lead singer on the group's first hits, died in 2018. Darlene Love continues to perform, but we'll hear more about her and the Blossoms in future episodes, I'm sure. The Crystals were treated appallingly by Spector, and are not often treated much better by the fans, who see them as just interchangeable parts in a machine created by a genius. But it should be remembered that they were the ones who brought Spector the song that became the first Philles hit, that both Barbara and La La were fine singers who sang lead on classic hit records, and that Spector taking all the credit for a team effort doesn't mean he deserved it. Both the Crystals and the Blossoms deserved better than to have their identities erased in return for a flat session fee, in order to service the ego of one man.
Episode 104 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “He’s a Rebel”, and how a song recorded by the Blossoms was released under the name of the Crystals. 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 “Sukiyaki” by Kyu Sakamoto. 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. A lot of resources were used for this episode. The material on Gene Pitney mostly comes from his page on This is My Story. Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era by Ken Emerson is a good overview of the Brill Building scene. Girl Groups by John Clemente contains potted biographies of many groups of the era, including articles on both The Crystals and the Blossoms. I’ve referred to two biographies of Spector in this episode, Phil Spector: Out of His Head by Richard Williams and He’s a Rebel by Mark Ribkowsky. And information on the Wrecking Crew largely comes from The Wrecking Crew by Kent Hartman. There are many compilations available with some of the hits Spector produced, but I recommend getting Back to Mono, a four-CD overview of his career containing all the major singles put out by Philles. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A brief note — there are some very brief mentions of domestic abuse here. Nothing I think will upset anyone, but you might want to check the transcript if you’re at all unsure. Up to this point, whenever we’ve looked at a girl group, it’s been at one that had, to a greater or lesser extent, some control over their own career. Groups like the Marvelettes, the Chantels, and the Bobbettes all wrote their own material, at least at first, and had distinctive personalities before they ever made a record. But today, we’re going to look at a group whose identity was so subsumed in that of their producer that the record we’re looking at was released under the name of a different group from the one that recorded it. We’re going to look at “He’s a Rebel”, which was recorded by the Blossoms and released by the Crystals. [Excerpt: “The Crystals” (The Blossoms), “He’s a Rebel”] The Crystals, from their very beginnings, were intended as a vehicle for the dreams of men, rather than for their own ambitions. Whereas the girl groups we’ve looked at so far all formed as groups of friends at school before they moved into professional singing, the Crystals were put together by a man named Benny Wells. Wells had a niece, Barbara Alston, who sang with a couple of her schoolfriends, Mary Thomas and Myrna Giraud. Wells put those three together with two other girls, Dee Dee Kenniebrew and Patsy Wright, to form a five-piece vocal group. Wells seems not to have had much concept of what was in the charts at the time — the descriptions of the music he had the girls singing talk about him wanting them to sound like the Modernaires, the vocal group who sang with Glenn Miller’s band in the early 1940s. But the girls went along with Wells, and Wells had good enough ears to recognise a hit when one was brought to him — and one was brought to him by Patsy Wright’s brother-in-law, Leroy Bates. Bates had written a song called “There’s No Other Like My Baby”, and Wells could tell it had potential. Incidentally, some books say that the song was based on a gospel song called “There’s No Other Like My Jesus”, and that claim is repeated on Wikipedia, but I can’t find any evidence of a song of that name other than people talking about “There’s No Other Like My Baby”. There is a gospel song called “There’s No Other Name Like Jesus”, but that has no obvious resemblance to Bates’ song, and so I’m going to assume that the song was totally original. As well as bringing the song, Bates also brought the fledgling group a name — he had a daughter, Crystal Bates, after whom the group named themselves. The newly-named Crystals took their song to the offices of Hill and Range Music, which as well as being a publishing company also owned Big Top Records, the label that had put out the original version of “Twist and Shout”, which had so annoyed Bert Berns. And it was there that they ended up meeting up with Phil Spector. After leaving his role at Atlantic, Spector had started working as a freelance producer, including working for Big Top. According to Spector — a notorious liar, it’s important to remember — he worked during this time on dozens of hits for which he didn’t get any credit, just to earn money. But we do know about some of the records he produced during this time. For example, there was one by a new singer called Gene Pitney. Pitney had been knocking around for years, recording for Decca as part of a duo called Jamie and Jane: [Excerpt: Jamie and Jane, “Faithful Our Love”] And for Blaze Records as Billy Bryan: [Excerpt: Billy Bryan, “Going Back to My Love”] But he’d recently signed to Musicor, a label owned by Aaron Schroeder, and had recorded a hit under his own name. Pitney had written “(I Wanna) Love My Life Away”, and had taken advantage of the new multitracking technology to record his vocals six times over, creating a unique sound that took the record into the top forty: [Excerpt: Gene Pitney, “(I Wanna) Love My Life Away”] But while that had been a hit, his second single for Musicor was a flop, and so for the third single, Musicor decided to pull out the big guns. They ran a session at which basically the whole of the Brill Building turned up. Leiber and Stoller were to produce a song they’d written for Pitney, the new hot husband-and-wife songwriting team of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil were there, as was Burt Bacharach, and so were Goffin and King, who wrote the song that *Spector* was to produce for Pitney. All of them were in the control booth, and all of them were chipping in ideas. As you might expect with that many cooks, the session did not go smoothly, and to make matters worse, Pitney was suffering from a terrible cold. The session ended up costing thirteen thousand dollars, at a time when an average recording session cost five hundred dollars. On the song Spector was producing on that session, Goffin and King’s “Every Breath I Take”, Pitney knew that with the cold he would be completely unable to hit the last note in full voice, and went into falsetto. Luckily, everyone thought it sounded good, and he could pretend it was deliberate, rather than the result of necessity: [Excerpt: Gene Pitney, “Every Breath I Take”] The record only went to number forty-two, but it resuscitated Pitney’s singing career, and forged a working relationship between the two men. But soon after that, Spector had flown back to LA to work with his old friend Lester Sill. Sill and producer/songwriter, Lee Hazelwood, had been making records with the guitarist Duane Eddy, producing a string of hits like “Rebel Rouser”: [Excerpt: Duane Eddy, “Rebel Rouser”] But Eddy had recently signed directly to a label, rather than going through Sill and Hazelwood’s company as before, and so Sill and Hazelwood had been looking for new artists, and they’d recently signed a group called the Paris Sisters to their production company. Sill had decided to get Spector in to produce the group, and Spector came up with a production that Sill was sure would be a hit, on a song called “I Love How You Love Me”, written by Barry Mann with another writer called Jack Keller: [Excerpt: The Paris Sisters, “I Love How You Love Me”] Spector was becoming a perfectionist — he insisted on recording the rhythm track for that record at one studio, and the string part at another, and apparently spent fifty hours on the mix — and Sill was spending more and more time in the studio with Spector, fascinated at his attitude to the work he was doing. This led to a breakup between Sill and Hazelwood — their business relationship was already strained, but Hazelwood got jealous of all the time that Sill was spending with Spector, and decided to split their partnership and go and produce Duane Eddy, without Sill, at Eddy’s new label. So Sill was suddenly in the market for a new business partner, and he and Spector decided that they were going to start up their own label, Philles, although by this point everyone who had ever worked with Spector was warning Sill that it was a bad idea to go into business with him. But Spector and Sill kept their intentions secret for a while, and so when Spector met the Crystals at Hill and Range’s offices, everyone at Hill and Range just assumed that he was still working for them as a freelance producer, and that the Crystals were going to be recording for Big Top. Freddie Bienstock of Hill & Range later said, “We were very angry because we felt they were Big Top artists. He was merely supposed to produce them for us. There was no question about the fact that he was just rehearsing them for Big Top—hell, he rehearsed them for weeks in our offices. And then he just stole them right out of here. That precipitated a breach of contract with us. We were just incensed because that was a terrific group, and for him to do that shows the type of character he was. We felt he was less than ethical, and, obviously, he was then shown the door.” Bienstock had further words for Spector too, ones I can’t repeat here because of content rules about adult language, but they weren’t flattering. Spector had been dating Bienstock’s daughter, with Bienstock’s approval, but that didn’t last once Spector betrayed Bienstock. But Spector didn’t care. He had his own New York girl group, one that could compete with the Bobbettes or the Chantels or the Shirelles, and he was going to make the Crystals as big as any of them, and he wasn’t going to cut Big Top in. He slowed down “There’s No Other Like My Baby” and it became the first release on Philles Records, with Barbara Alston singing lead: [Excerpt: The Crystals, “There’s No Other Like My Baby”] That record was cut late at night in June 1961. In fact it was cut on Prom Night — three of the girls came straight to the session from their High School prom, still wearing their prom dresses. Spector wrote the B-side, a song that was originally intended to be the A-side called “Oh Yeah, Maybe Baby”, but everyone quickly realised that “There’s No Other Like My Baby” was the hit, and it made the top twenty. While Spector was waiting for the money to come in on the first Philles record, he took another job, with Liberty Records, working for his friend Snuff Garrett. He got a thirty thousand dollar advance, made a single flop record with them with an unknown singer named Obrey Wilson, and then quit, keeping his thirty thousand dollars. Once “There’s No Other” made the charts, Spector took the Crystals into the studio again, to record a song by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil that he’d got from Aldon Music. Spector was becoming increasingly convinced that he’d made a mistake in partnering with Lester Sill, and he should really have been working with Don Kirshner, and he was in discussions with Kirshner which came to nothing about them having some sort of joint project. While those discussions fell through, almost all the songs that Spector would use for the next few years would come from Aldon songwriters, and “Uptown” was a perfect example of the new kind of socially-relevant pop songwriting that had been pioneered by Goffin and King, but which Mann and Weil were now making their own. Before becoming a professional songwriter, Weil had been part of the Greenwich Village folk scene, and while she wasn’t going to write anything as explicitly political as the work of Pete Seeger, she thought that songs should at least try to be about the real world. “Uptown” was the first example of a theme which would become a major motif for the Crystals’ records — a song about a man who is looked down upon by society, but who the singer believes is better than his reputation. Mann and Weil’s song combined that potent teen emotion with an inspiration Weil had had, seeing a handsome Black man pushing a hand truck in the Garment District, and realising that even though he was oppressed by his job, and “a nobody” when he was working downtown, he was still somebody when he was at home. They originally wrote the song for Tony Orlando to sing, but Spector insisted, rightly, that the song worked better with female voices, and that the Crystals should do it. Spector took Mann and Weil’s song and gave it a production that evoked the Latin feel of Leiber and Stoller’s records for the Drifters: [Excerpt: The Crystals, “Uptown”] By the time of this second record, the Crystals had already been through one lineup change. As soon as she left school, Myrna Giraud got married, and she didn’t want to perform on stage any more. She would still sing with the girls in the studio for a little while — she’s on every track of their first album, though she left altogether soon after this recording — but she was a married woman now and didn’t want to be in a group. The girls needed a replacement, and they also needed something else — a lead singer. All the girls loved singing, but none of them wanted to be out in front singing lead. Luckily, Dee Dee Kenniebrew’s mother was a secretary at the school attended by a fourteen-year-old gospel singer named La La Brooks, and she heard Brooks singing and invited her to join the group. Brooks soon became the group’s lead vocalist on stage. But in the studio, Spector didn’t want to use her as the lead vocalist. He insisted on Barbara singing the lead on “Uptown”, but in a sign of things to come, Mann and Weil weren’t happy with her performance — Spector had to change parts of the melody to accommodate her range — and they begged Spector to rerecord the lead vocal with Little Eva singing. However, Eva became irritated with Spector’s incessant demands for more takes and his micromanagement, cursed him out, and walked out of the studio. The record was released with Barbara’s original lead vocal, and while Mann and Weil weren’t happy with that, listeners were, as it went to number thirteen on the charts: [Excerpt: The Crystals, “Uptown”] Little Eva later released her own version of the song, on the Dimension Dolls compilation we talked about in the episode on “The Loco-Motion”: [Excerpt: Little Eva, “Uptown”] It was Little Eva who inspired the next Crystals single, as well — as we talked about in the episode on her, she inspired a truly tasteless Goffin and King song called “He Hit Me And It Felt Like A Kiss”, which I will not be excerpting, but which was briefly released as the Crystals’ third single, before being withdrawn after people objected to hearing teenage girls sing about how romantic and loving domestic abuse is. There seems to be some suggestion that the record was released partly as a way for Spector to annoy Lester Sill, who by all accounts was furious at the release. Spector was angry at Sill over the amount of money he’d made from the Paris Sisters recordings, and decided that he was being treated unfairly and wanted to force Sill out of their partnership. Certainly the next recording by the Crystals was meant to get rid of some other business associates. Two of Philles’ distributors had a contract which said they were entitled to the royalties on two Crystals singles. So the second one was a ten-minute song called “The Screw”, split over two sides of a disc, which sounded like this: [Excerpt: The Crystals, “The Screw”] Only a handful of promotional copies of that were ever produced. One went to Lester Sill, who by this point had been bought out of his share of the company for a small fraction of what it was worth. The last single Spector recorded for Philles while Sill was still involved with the label was another Crystals record, one that had the involvement of many people Sill had brought into Spector’s orbit, and who would continue working with him long after the two men stopped working together. Spector had decided he was going to start recording in California again, and two of Sill’s assistants would become regular parts of Spector’s new hit-making machine. The first of these was a composer and arranger called Jack Nitzsche, who we’ll be seeing a lot more of in this podcast over the next couple of years, in some unexpected places. Nitzsche was a young songwriter, whose biggest credit up to this point was a very minor hit for Preston Epps, “Bongo, Bongo, Bongo”: [Excerpt: Preston Epps, “Bongo Bongo Bongo”] Nitzsche would become Spector’s most important collaborator, and his arrangements, as much as Spector’s production, are what characterise the “Wall of Sound” for which Spector would become famous. The other assistant of Sill’s who became important to Spector’s future was a saxophone player named Steve Douglas. We’ve seen Douglas before, briefly, in the episode on “LSD-25” — he played in the original lineup of Kip and the Flips, one of the groups we talked about in that episode. He’d left Kip and the Flips to join Duane Eddy’s band, and it was through Eddy that he had started working with Sill, when he played on many of Eddy’s hits, most famously “Peter Gunn”: [Excerpt: Duane Eddy, “Peter Gunn”] Douglas was the union contractor for the session, and for most of the rest of Spector’s sixties sessions. This is something we’ve not talked about previously, but when we look at records produced in LA for the next few years, in particular, it’s something that will come up a lot. When a producer wanted to make records at the time, he (for they were all men) would not contact all the musicians himself. Instead, he’d get in touch with a trusted musician and say “I have a session at three o’clock. I need two guitars, bass, drums, a clarinet and a cello” (or whatever combination of instruments), and sometimes might say, “If you can get this particular player, that would be good”. The musician would then find out which other musicians were available, get them into the studio, and file the forms which made sure they got paid according to union rules. The contractor, not the producer, decided who was going to play on the session. In the case of this Crystals session, Spector already had a couple of musicians in mind — a bass player named Ray Pohlman, and his old guitar teacher Howard Roberts, a jazz guitarist who had played on “To Know Him is to Love Him” and “I Love How You Love Me” for Spector already. But Spector wanted a *big* sound — he wanted the rhythm instruments doubled, so there was a second bass player, Jimmy Bond, and a second guitarist, Tommy Tedesco. Along with them and Douglas were piano player Al de Lory and drummer Hal Blaine. This was the first session on which Spector used any of these musicians, and with the exception of Roberts, who hated working on Spector’s sessions and soon stopped, this group put together by Douglas would become the core of what became known as “The Wrecking Crew”, a loose group of musicians who would play on a large number of the hit records that would come out of LA in the sixties. Spector also had a guaranteed hit song — one by Gene Pitney. While Pitney wrote few of his own records, he’d established himself a parallel career as a writer for other people. He’d written “Today’s Teardrops”, the B-side of Roy Orbison’s hit “Blue Angel”: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, “Today’s Teardrops”] And had followed that up with a couple of the biggest hits of the early sixties, Bobby Vee’s “Rubber Ball”: [Excerpt: Bobby Vee, “Rubber Ball”] And Ricky Nelson’s “Hello Mary Lou”: [Excerpt: Ricky Nelson, “Hello, Mary Lou”] Pitney had written a song, “He’s a Rebel”, that was very strongly inspired by “Uptown”, and Aaron Schroeder, Pitney’s publisher, had given the song to Spector. But Spector knew Schroeder, and knew that when he gave you a song, he was going to give it to every other producer who came knocking as well. “He’s a Rebel” was definitely going to be a massive hit for someone, and he wanted it to be for the Crystals. He phoned them up and told them to come out to LA to record the song. And they said no. The Crystals had become sick of Spector. He’d made them record songs like “He Hit Me and it Felt Like a Kiss”, he’d refused to let their lead singer sing lead, and they’d not seen any money from their two big hits. They weren’t going to fly from New York to LA just because he said so. Spector needed a new group, in LA, that he could record doing the song before someone else did it. He could use the Crystals’ name — Philles had the right to put out records by whoever they liked and call it the Crystals — he just needed a group. He found one in the Blossoms, a group who had connections to many of the people Spector was working with. Jack Nitzsche’s wife sometimes sang with them on sessions, and they’d also sung on a Duane Eddy record that Lester Sill had worked on, “Dance With the Guitar Man”, where they’d been credited as the Rebelettes: [Excerpt: Duane Eddy, “Dance With the Guitar Man”] The Blossoms had actually been making records in LA for nearly eight years at this point. They’d started out as the Dreamers one of the many groups who’d been discovered by Johnny Otis, back in the early fifties, and had also been part of the scene around the Penguins, one of whom went to school with some of the girls. They started out as a six-piece group, but slimmed down to a quartet after their first record, on which they were the backing group for Richard Berry: [Excerpt: Richard Berry, “At Last”] The first stable lineup of the Dreamers consisted of Fanita James, Gloria Jones (not the one who would later record “Tainted Love”), and the twin sisters Annette and Nanette Williams. They worked primarily with Berry, backing him on five singles in the mid fifties, and also recording songs he wrote for them under their own name, like “Do Not Forget”, which actually featured another singer, Jennell Hawkins, on lead: [Excerpt: The Dreamers, “Do Not Forget”] They also sang backing vocals on plenty of other R&B records from people in the LA R&B scene — for example it’s them singing backing vocals, with Jesse Belvin, on Etta James’ “Good Rocking Daddy”: [Excerpt: Etta James, “Good Rocking Daddy”] The group signed to Capitol Records in 1957, but not under the name The Dreamers — an executive there said that they all had different skin tones and it made them look like flowers, so they became the Blossoms. They were only at Capitol for a year, but during that time an important lineup change happened — Nanette quit the group and was replaced by a singer called Darlene Wright. From that point on The Blossoms was the main name the group went under, though they also recorded under other names, for example using the name The Playgirls to record “Gee But I’m Lonesome”, a song written by Bruce Johnston, who was briefly dating Annette Williams at the time: [Excerpt: The Playgirls, “Gee But I’m Lonesome”] By 1961 Annette had left the group, and they were down to a trio of Fanita, Gloria, and Darlene. Their records, under whatever name, didn’t do very well, but they became the first-call session singers in LA, working on records by everyone from Sam Cooke to Gene Autry. So it was the Blossoms who were called on in late 1962 to record “He’s a Rebel”, and it was Darlene Wright who earned her session fee, and no royalties, for singing the lead on a number one record: [Excerpt: The “Crystals” (The Blossoms), “He’s a Rebel”] From that point on, the Blossoms would sing on almost every Spector session for the next three years, and Darlene, who he renamed Darlene Love, would become Spector’s go-to lead vocalist for records under her own name, the Blossoms, Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans, and the Crystals. It was lucky for Spector that he decided to go this route rather than wait for the Crystals, not only because it introduced him to the Blossoms, but because he’d been right about Aaron Schroeder. As Spector and Sill sat together in the studio where they were mastering the record, some musicians on a break from the studio next door wandered in, and said, “Hey man. we were just playing the same goddam song!” Literally in the next room as Spector mastered the record, his friend Snuff Garrett was producing Vicki Carr singing “He’s a Rebel”: [Excerpt: Vicki Carr, “He’s a Rebel”] Philles got their version out first, and Carr’s record sank without trace, while “The Crystals” went to number one, keeping the song’s writer off the top spot, as Gene Pitney sat at number two with a Bacharach and David song, “Only Love Can Break a Heart”: [Excerpt: Gene Pitney, “Only Love Can Break a Heart”] The Crystals were shocked that Spector released a Crystals record without any of them on it, but La La Brooks had a similar enough voice to Darlene Love’s that they were able to pull the song off live. They had a bit more of a problem with the follow-up, also by the Blossoms but released as the Crystals: [Excerpt: “The Crystals”/The Blossoms, “He’s Sure the Boy I Love”] La La could sing that fine, but she had to work on the spoken part — Darlene was from California and La La had a thick Brooklyn accent. She managed it, just about. As La La was doing such a good job of singing Darlene Love’s parts live — and, more importantly, as she was only fifteen and so didn’t complain about things like royalties — the Crystals finally did get their way and have La La start singing the leads on their singles, starting with “Da Doo Ron Ron”. The problem is, none of the other Crystals were on those records — it was La La singing with the Blossoms, plus other session singers. Listen out for the low harmony in “Da Doo Ron Ron” and see if you recognise the voice: [Excerpt: The Crystals, “Da Doo Ron Ron”] Cher would later move on to bigger things than being a fill-in Crystal. “Da Doo Ron Ron” became another big hit, making number three in the charts, and the follow-up, “Then He Kissed Me”, with La La once again on lead vocals, also made the top ten, but the group were falling apart — Spector was playing La La off against the rest of the group, just to cause trouble, and he’d also lost interest in them once he discovered another group, The Ronettes, who we’ll be hearing more about in future episodes. The singles following “Then He Kissed Me” barely scraped the bottom of the Hot One Hundred, and the group left Philles in 1964. They got a payoff of five thousand dollars, in lieu of all future royalties on any of their recordings. They had no luck having hits without Spector, and one by one the group members left, and the group split up by 1966. Mary, Barbara, and Dee Dee briefly reunited as the Crystals in 1971, and La La and Dee Dee made an album together in the eighties of remakes of the group’s hits, but nothing came of any of these. Dee Dee continues to tour under the Crystals name in North America, while La La performs solo in America and under the Crystals name in Europe. Barbara, the lead singer on the group’s first hits, died in 2018. Darlene Love continues to perform, but we’ll hear more about her and the Blossoms in future episodes, I’m sure. The Crystals were treated appallingly by Spector, and are not often treated much better by the fans, who see them as just interchangeable parts in a machine created by a genius. But it should be remembered that they were the ones who brought Spector the song that became the first Philles hit, that both Barbara and La La were fine singers who sang lead on classic hit records, and that Spector taking all the credit for a team effort doesn’t mean he deserved it. Both the Crystals and the Blossoms deserved better than to have their identities erased in return for a flat session fee, in order to service the ego of one man.
October 1-7, 1966 This week Ken welcomes legendary punk rock icon, record collector and raconteur Jello Biafra to the show. Ken and Jell discuss becoming part of the Zoom generation, cigarette ads, the wonders of muck raking journalism, out scooping your competitors, watching the news as a kid, The Vietnam War, being a newshound, seeing Oswald get shot on live TV, having parents who don't shield you from stuff, Chef Boyardee, Kars for Kids, the 2012 vote, how cameras change everything, Route 66, Dragnet, Lee Marvin, good acting and good writing, Hulabaloo, Batman '66, the incredible music in the original Spider-Man cartoon, surf music, Star Trek, country music, Martin Luther King Jr, Bobby Kennedy, The Night James Brown Saved Boston, growing up wanting to be the Penguin, Eric Burdon and the Animals, River of Blood, The Midnight Special, Suicide on TV, Don Kirshner's Rock Concert, Man from U.N.C.L.E., Elliot Ness's drinking problem, The Untouchables, being paid in exposure, How Ariana Huffington may be a lost Gabor, Free Speech TV, Green Acres, documentaries on Al Jazera, Industrial Accident: The Story of Wax Trax Records, Al Jorgenson, James Bond themes, Beat Girl, These Are The Damned, Julie Newmar, Rocky and Bullwinkle, Bill Maher, the horrors of Crosscheck and kicking people off voter rolls, why you NEED to vote, Colorado, Lon Chaney, the wonders of TV soundtrack LPs, and Mrs. Miller's psychedelic lp.
Episode ninety-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “The Loco-Motion” by Little Eva, and how a demo by Carole King’s babysitter became one of the biggest hits of the sixties. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Duke of Earl” by Gene Chandler. 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. There are no biographies of Little Eva, so I’ve used a variety of sources, including the articles on Little Eva and The Cookies at This Is My Story. The following books were also of some use: A Natural Woman is Carole King’s autobiography. Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era by Ken Emerson is a good overview of the whole scene. Girl Groups by John Clemente contains potted biographies of many groups of the era, including articles on both Little Eva and The Cookies. There are no decent CDs of Eva’s material readily available, but I can recommend two overlapping compilations. This compilation contains Little Eva’s only sixties album in full, along with some tracks by Carole King, the Cookies, and the Ronettes, while Dimension Dolls is a compilation from 1963 that overlaps substantially with that album but contains several tracks not on it. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A quick note before this begins — there is some mention of domestic violence in this episode. If that’s something that might upset you, please check the transcript of the episode at 500songs.com if reading it might be easier than listening. A couple of months back, we talked about Goffin and King, and the early days of the Brill Building sound. Today we’re going to take another look at them, and at a singer who recorded some of their best material, both solo and in a group, but who would always be overshadowed by the first single they wrote for her, when she was still working as their childminder. Today, we’re going to look at Little Eva and “The Loco-Motion”, and the short history of Dimension Records: [Excerpt: Little Eva, “The Loco-Motion”] The story of Little Eva is intertwined with the story of the Cookies, one of the earliest of the girl groups, and so we should probably start with them. We’ve mentioned the Cookies earlier, in the episode on “What’d I Say”, but we didn’t look at them in any great detail. The group started out in the mid-fifties, as a group of schoolgirls singing together in New York — Dorothy Jones, her cousin Beulah Robertson, and a friend, Darlene McRae, who had all been in the choir at their local Baptist Church. They formed a group and made their first appearance at the famous Harlem Apollo talent contests, where they came third, to Joe Tex and a vocal group called the Flairs (not, I think, any of the Flairs groups we’ve looked at). They were seen at that contest by Jesse Stone, who gave them the name “The Cookies”. He signed them to Aladdin Records, and produced and co-wrote their first single, “All-Night Mambo”. That wasn’t commercially successful, but Stone liked them enough that he then got them signed to Atlantic, where he again wrote their first single for the label. That first single was relatively unsuccessful, but their second single on Atlantic, “In Paradise”, did chart, making number nine on the R&B chart: [Excerpt: The Cookies, “In Paradise”] But the B-side to that record would end up being more important to their career in the long run. “Passing Time” was the very first song by Neil Sedaka and Howie Greenfield to get recorded, even before Sedaka’s recordings with the Tokens or his own successful solo records: [Excerpt: The Cookies, “Passing Time”] But then two things happened. Firstly, one of the girls, Beulah Robertson, fell out with Jesse Stone, who sacked her from the group. Stone got in a new vocalist, Margie Hendrix, to replace her, and after one more single the group stopped making singles for Atlantic. But they continued recording for smaller labels, and they also had regular gigs as backing vocalists for Atlantic, on records like “Lipstick, Powder, and Paint” by Big Joe Turner: [Excerpt: Big Joe Turner, “Lipstick, Powder and Paint”] “It’s Too Late” by Chuck Willis: [Excerpt: Chuck Willis, “It’s Too Late”] And “Lonely Avenue” by Ray Charles: [Excerpt: Ray Charles, “Lonely Avenue”] It was working with Ray Charles that led to the breakup of the original lineup of the Cookies — Charles was putting together his own group, and wanted the Cookies as his backing vocalists, but Dorothy was pregnant, and decided she’d rather stay behind and continue working as a session singer than go out on the road. Darlene and Margie went off to become the core of Charles’ new backing group, the Raelettes, and they would play a major part in the sound of Charles’ records for the next few years. It’s Margie, for example, who can be heard duetting with Charles on “The Right Time”: [Excerpt: Ray Charles, “The Right Time”] Dorothy stayed behind and put together a new lineup of Cookies. To make sure the group sounded the same, she got Darlene’s sister Earl-Jean into the group — Darlene and Earl-Jean looked and sounded so similar that many histories of the group say they’re the same person — and got another of her cousins, Margaret Ross, to take over the spot that had previously been Beulah’s before Margie had taken her place. This new version of the Cookies didn’t really start doing much for a couple of years, while Dorothy was raising her newborn and Earl-Jean and Margaret were finishing high school. But in 1961 they started again in earnest, when Neil Sedaka remembered the Cookies and called Dorothy up, saying he knew someone who needed a vocal group. Gerry Goffin and Carole King had become hot songwriters, and they’d also become increasingly interested in record production after Carole had been involved in the making of “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” Carole was recording her own demos of the songs she and Goffin were writing, and was increasingly making them fully-produced recordings in their own right. The first record the new Cookies sang on was one that seems to have started out as one of these demos. “Halfway to Paradise” by Tony Orlando sounds exactly like a Drifters record, and Orlando was, at the time, a sixteen-year-old demo singer. My guess, and it is only a guess, is that this was a demo intended for the Drifters, that it was turned down, and so the demo was released as a record itself: [Excerpt: Tony Orlando, “Halfway to Paradise”] That made the lower reaches of the Hot One Hundred, while a British cover version by Billy Fury made number three in the UK. From this point on, the new lineup of the Cookies were once again the premier session singers. They added extra backing vocals to a lot of the Drifters’ records at this time, and would provide backing vocals for most of Atlantic’s artists, as the earlier lineup had. They were also effectively the in-house backing singers for Aldon Music — as well as singing on every Goffin and King demo, they were also singing with Neil Sedaka: [Excerpt: Neil Sedaka, “Breaking Up is Hard to Do”] But it was Goffin and King who spent the most time working with the Cookies, and who pushed them as recording artists in their own right. They started with a solo record for Dorothy, “Taking That Long Walk Home”, a song that was very much “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” part two: [Excerpt: Dorothy Jones, “Taking That Long Walk Home”] The Cookies were doing huge amounts of session work, working twelve hours a day, seven days a week. Dorothy Jones described being in the studio working on a King Curtis session until literally fifteen minutes before giving birth. They weren’t the only ones working hard, though. Goffin and King were writing from their Aldon offices every single day, writing songs for the Drifters, the Shirelles, Bobby Rydell, Bobby Vee, Gene Pitney, the Crickets, the Everly Brothers, and more. And on top of that they had a child and Carole King was pregnant with a second one. And, this being the very early 1960s, it never occurred to either Goffin or King that just because Carole King was working the exact same number of hours as Goffin, that might mean she shouldn’t also be doing the housework and looking after the children with no help from Goffin. There was only one way they could continue their level of productivity, and that was to get someone in to help out Carole. She mentioned to the Cookies that she was looking for someone to help her with the children, and Earl-Jean mentioned that a nineteen-year-old acquaintance — her friend’s husband’s sister — had just moved to New York from North Carolina to try to become a singer and was looking for any work she could get while she was trying to make it. Eva Narcissus Boyd, Earl-Jean’s acquaintance, moved in with Goffin and King and became their live-in childminder for $35 a week plus room and board. Goffin and King had known that Eva was a singer before they hired her, and they discovered that her voice was rather good. Not only that, but she blended well with the Cookies, and was friends with them. She became an unofficial “fourth Cookie”, and was soon in the studio on a regular basis too — and when she was, that meant that Eva’s sister was looking after the kids, as a subcontracted babysitter. During this time, Don Kirshner’s attitude was still that he was determined to get the next hit for every artist that had a hit. But that wasn’t always possible. Cameo-Parkway had, after the success they’d had with “The Twist”, fully jumped on the dance-craze bandwagon, and they’d hit on another dance that might be the next Twist. The Mashed Potato was a dance that James Brown had been doing on stage for a few years, and in the wake of “The Twist”, Brown had had a hit with a song about it “(Do the) Mashed Potatoes”, which was credited to Nat Kendrick & the Swans rather than to Brown for contractual reasons: [Excerpt: Nat Kendrick and the Swans, “(Do the) Mashed Potatoes”] Cameo-Parkway had picked up on that dance, and had done just what Kirshner always did and created a soundalike of a recent hit — and in fact they’d mashed up, if you’ll pardon the expression, two recent hits. In this case, they’d taken the sound of “Please Mr. Postman”, slightly reworked the lyrics to be about Brown’s dance, and given it to session singer Dee Dee Sharp: [Excerpt: Dee Dee Sharp, “Mashed Potato Time”] That had gone to number two on the pop charts and number one on the R&B charts, and even inspired its own rip-offs, like “The Monster Mash” by Bobby “Boris” Pickett: [Excerpt: Bobby “Boris” Pickett and the Crypt-Kickers, “The Monster Mash”] So Kirshner just assumed that Sharp would be looking for another dance hit, one that sounded just like “Mashed Potato Time”, and got Goffin and King to write one to submit to her. Unfortunately for him, he’d assumed wrong. Cameo-Parkway was owned by a group of successful songwriters, and they didn’t need outside writers bringing them hits when they could write their own. Dee Dee Sharp wasn’t going to be recording Goffin and King’s song. When he listened to the demo, Don Kirshner was astonished that they hadn’t taken the song. It had “hit” written all over it. He decided that he was going to start his own record label, Dimension Records, and he was just going to release that demo as the single. The Cookies went into the studio to overdub another layer of backing vocals, but otherwise the record that was released was the demo Eva — now renamed “Little Eva” — had sung: [Excerpt: Little Eva, “The Loco-Motion”] The record went to number one, and made Little Eva a star. It also made Gerry Goffin a successful producer, because even though Goffin and King had coproduced it, Goffin got sole production credit on this, and on other records the two produced together. According to King, Goffin was the one in the control room for their productions, while she would be on the studio floor, and she didn’t really question whether what she was doing counted as production too until much later — and anyway, getting the sole credit was apparently important to Gerry. “The Loco-Motion” was such a big hit that it inspired its own knockoffs, including one song cheekily called “Little Eva” by a group called “The Locomotions” — so the record label would say “Little Eva, The Locomotions”, and people might buy it by mistake. You’ll be shocked to learn that that one was on a Morris Levy label: [Excerpt: The Locomotions, “Little Eva”] That group featured Leon Huff, who would later go on to make a lot of much better records. Meanwhile, as Little Eva was now a star, Carole King once again had to look for a childminder. This time she insisted that anyone she hired be unable to sing, so she wouldn’t keep having to do this. Dimension Records was soon churning out singles, all of them involving the Cookies, and Eva, and Goffin and King. They put out “Everybody’s Got a Dance But Me” by Big Dee Irwin, a song that excerpted “The Loco-Motion”, “Wah Watusi”, “Hully Gully” and “Twist and Shout” among many others, with the Cookies on backing vocals, and with Goffin as the credited producer: [Excerpt: Big Dee Irwin, “Everybody’s Got a Dance But Me”] That wasn’t a hit, but Dimension soon released two more big hits. One was a solo single by Carole King, “It Might as Well Rain Until September”, which went to number twenty even though its only national exposure was a disastrous appearance by King on American Bandstand which left her feeling humiliated: [Excerpt: Carole King, “It Might as Well Rain Until September”] Her solo performing career wouldn’t properly take off for a few more years, but that was a step towards it. The Cookies also had a hit on Dimension around this point. Goffin and King had written a song called “Chains” for the Everly Brothers, who had recorded it but not released it: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Chains”] So they gave the song to the Cookies instead, with Little Eva on additional vocals, and it made the pop top twenty, and the R&B top ten: [Excerpt: The Cookies, “Chains”] Several people have pointed out that that lyric can be read as having an element of BDSM to it, and it’s not the only Goffin and King song from this period that does — there’s a 1964 B-side they wrote for Eva called “Please Hurt Me”, which is fairly blatant: [Excerpt: Little Eva, “Please Hurt Me”] But the BDSM comparison has also been made — wrongly, in my opinion — about one of the most utterly misguided songs that Goffin and King ever wrote — a song inspired by Little Eva telling them that her boyfriend beat her up. They’d asked her why she put up with it, and she said that he only hit her because he loved her. They were inspired by that to write “He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)”, an utterly grotesque song which, in a version produced by Phil Spector for the Crystals, was issued as a single but soon withdrawn due to general horror. I won’t be excerpting that one here, though it’s easy enough to find if you want to. (Having said that, I should also say that while people have said that Goffin & King’s material at this point flirts with BDSM, my understanding of BDSM, as it has been explained to me by friends who indulge in such activities, is that consent is paramount, so I don’t think that “He Hit Me” should be talked about in those terms. I don’t want anything I’ve said here to contribute to the blurring of distinctions between consensual kink and abuse, which are too often conflated). Originally, Eva’s follow-up to “The Loco-Motion” was going to be “One Fine Day”, another Goffin and King song, but no matter how much Goffin and King worked on the track, they couldn’t come up with an arrangement, and eventually they passed the song over to the Tokens, who solved the arrangement problems (though they kept King’s piano part) and produced a version of it for the Chiffons, for whom it became a hit: [Excerpt: The Chiffons, “One Fine Day”] Instead, Goffin and King gave Eva “Keep Your Hands Off My Baby”. This is, in my opinion, the best thing that Eva ever did, and it made the top twenty, though it wasn’t as big a hit as “The Loco-Motion”: [Excerpt: Little Eva, “Keep Your Hands Off My Baby”] And Eva also appeared on another Cookies record, “Don’t Say Nothing Bad About My Baby”, which made the top ten: [Excerpt: The Cookies, “Don’t Say Nothing Bad About My Baby”] The Cookies, Eva, and Goffin and King were such a package deal that Dimension released an album called Dimension Dolls featuring the first few hits of each act and padded out with demos they’d made for other artists. This hit-making machine was so successful for a brief period in 1962 and 63 that even Eva’s sister Idalia got in on the act, releasing a song by Goffin, King, and Jack Keller, “Hula Hoppin'”: [Excerpt: Idalia Boyd, “Hula Hoppin'”] For Eva’s third single, Gerry Goffin and Jack Keller wrote a song called “Let’s Turkey Trot”, which also made the top twenty. But that would be the last time that Eva would have a hit of her own. At first, the fact that she had a couple of flop singles wasn’t a problem — no artists at this time were consistent hit-makers, and it was normal for someone to have a few top ten hits, then a couple at number 120 or something, before going back to the top. And she was touring with Dick Clark’s Caravan of Stars, and still in high demand as a live performer. She also, in 1963, recorded a version of “Swinging on a Star” with Big Dee Irwin, though she wasn’t credited on the label, and that made the top forty (and made number seven in the UK): [Excerpt: Big Dee Irwin, “Swinging on a Star”] But everything changed for Little Eva, and for the whole world of Brill Building pop, in 1964. In part, this was because the Beatles became successful and changed the pop landscape, but by itself that shouldn’t have destroyed the careers of Eva or the Cookies, who the Beatles admired — they recorded a cover of “Chains”, and they used to play “Keep Your Hands Off My Baby” in their live sets. But Don Kirshner decided to sell Aldon Music and Dimension Records to Columbia Pictures, and to start concentrating on the West Coast rather than New York. The idea was that they could come up with songs that would be used in films and TV, and make more money that way, and that worked out for many people, including Kirshner himself. But even when artists like Eva and the Cookies got hit material, the British Invasion made it hard for them to get a footing. For example, Goffin and King wrote a song for Earl-Jean from the Cookies to record as a solo track just after Dimension was taken over by Columbia. That record did make the top forty: [Excerpt: Earl-Jean, “I’m Into Something Good”] But then Herman’s Hermits released their version, which became a much bigger hit. That sort of thing kept happening. The Cookies ended up splitting up by 1967. Little Eva did end up doing some TV work — most famously, she sang a dance song in an episode of the Hanna-Barbera cartoon Magilla Gorilla: [Excerpt: Little Eva “Makin’ With the Magilla”] But Dimension Records was not a priority for anyone — Columbia already owned their own labels, and didn’t need another one — and the label was being wound down. And then Al Nevins, Don Kirshner’s partner in Aldon, died. He’d always been friendly with Eva, and without him to advocate for her, the label sold her contract off to Bell Records. From that point on, she could no longer rely on Goffin and King, and she hopped between a number of different labels, none of them with any great success. After spending seven years going from label to label, and having split up with her husband, she quit the music business in 1971 and moved back to North Carolina. She was sick of the music industry, and particularly sick of the lack of money — she had signed a lot of bad contracts, and was making no royalties from sales of her records. She worked menial day jobs, survived on welfare for a while, became active in her local church, and depending on which reports you read either ran a soul-food restaurant or merely worked there as a waitress. Meanwhile, “The Loco-Motion” was a perennial hit. Her version re-charted in the UK in the early seventies, and Todd Rundgren produced a version for the heavy metal band Grand Funk Railroad which went to number one in the US in 1974: [Excerpt: Grand Funk Railroad, “The Loco-Motion”] And then in 1988 an Australian soap star, Kylie Minogue, recorded her own version, which went top five worldwide and started Minogue’s own successful pop career: [Excerpt: Kylie Minogue, “The Loco-Motion”] That record becoming a hit got a series of “where are they now?” articles written about Eva, and she was persuaded to come out of retirement and start performing again — though having been so badly hurt by the industry, she was very dubious at first, and she also had scruples because of her strong religious faith. She later said that she’d left the contracts on her table for eight months before signing them — but when she finally did, she found that her audience was still there for her. For the rest of her life, she was a popular performer on the oldies circuit, performing on package tours with people like Bobby Vee and Brian Hyland, playing state fairs and touring Europe. She continued performing until shortly before her death, even after she was diagnosed with the cancer that eventually killed her, as she once again connected with the audiences who had loved her music back when she was still a teenager. She died, aged fifty-nine, in 2003.
Episode ninety-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "The Loco-Motion" by Little Eva, and how a demo by Carole King's babysitter became one of the biggest hits of the sixties. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Duke of Earl" by Gene Chandler. 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. There are no biographies of Little Eva, so I've used a variety of sources, including the articles on Little Eva and The Cookies at This Is My Story. The following books were also of some use: A Natural Woman is Carole King's autobiography. Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era by Ken Emerson is a good overview of the whole scene. Girl Groups by John Clemente contains potted biographies of many groups of the era, including articles on both Little Eva and The Cookies. There are no decent CDs of Eva's material readily available, but I can recommend two overlapping compilations. This compilation contains Little Eva's only sixties album in full, along with some tracks by Carole King, the Cookies, and the Ronettes, while Dimension Dolls is a compilation from 1963 that overlaps substantially with that album but contains several tracks not on it. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A quick note before this begins -- there is some mention of domestic violence in this episode. If that's something that might upset you, please check the transcript of the episode at 500songs.com if reading it might be easier than listening. A couple of months back, we talked about Goffin and King, and the early days of the Brill Building sound. Today we're going to take another look at them, and at a singer who recorded some of their best material, both solo and in a group, but who would always be overshadowed by the first single they wrote for her, when she was still working as their childminder. Today, we're going to look at Little Eva and "The Loco-Motion", and the short history of Dimension Records: [Excerpt: Little Eva, "The Loco-Motion"] The story of Little Eva is intertwined with the story of the Cookies, one of the earliest of the girl groups, and so we should probably start with them. We've mentioned the Cookies earlier, in the episode on "What'd I Say", but we didn't look at them in any great detail. The group started out in the mid-fifties, as a group of schoolgirls singing together in New York -- Dorothy Jones, her cousin Beulah Robertson, and a friend, Darlene McRae, who had all been in the choir at their local Baptist Church. They formed a group and made their first appearance at the famous Harlem Apollo talent contests, where they came third, to Joe Tex and a vocal group called the Flairs (not, I think, any of the Flairs groups we've looked at). They were seen at that contest by Jesse Stone, who gave them the name "The Cookies". He signed them to Aladdin Records, and produced and co-wrote their first single, "All-Night Mambo". That wasn't commercially successful, but Stone liked them enough that he then got them signed to Atlantic, where he again wrote their first single for the label. That first single was relatively unsuccessful, but their second single on Atlantic, "In Paradise", did chart, making number nine on the R&B chart: [Excerpt: The Cookies, "In Paradise"] But the B-side to that record would end up being more important to their career in the long run. "Passing Time" was the very first song by Neil Sedaka and Howie Greenfield to get recorded, even before Sedaka's recordings with the Tokens or his own successful solo records: [Excerpt: The Cookies, "Passing Time"] But then two things happened. Firstly, one of the girls, Beulah Robertson, fell out with Jesse Stone, who sacked her from the group. Stone got in a new vocalist, Margie Hendrix, to replace her, and after one more single the group stopped making singles for Atlantic. But they continued recording for smaller labels, and they also had regular gigs as backing vocalists for Atlantic, on records like "Lipstick, Powder, and Paint" by Big Joe Turner: [Excerpt: Big Joe Turner, "Lipstick, Powder and Paint"] "It's Too Late" by Chuck Willis: [Excerpt: Chuck Willis, "It's Too Late"] And "Lonely Avenue" by Ray Charles: [Excerpt: Ray Charles, "Lonely Avenue"] It was working with Ray Charles that led to the breakup of the original lineup of the Cookies -- Charles was putting together his own group, and wanted the Cookies as his backing vocalists, but Dorothy was pregnant, and decided she'd rather stay behind and continue working as a session singer than go out on the road. Darlene and Margie went off to become the core of Charles' new backing group, the Raelettes, and they would play a major part in the sound of Charles' records for the next few years. It's Margie, for example, who can be heard duetting with Charles on "The Right Time": [Excerpt: Ray Charles, "The Right Time"] Dorothy stayed behind and put together a new lineup of Cookies. To make sure the group sounded the same, she got Darlene's sister Earl-Jean into the group -- Darlene and Earl-Jean looked and sounded so similar that many histories of the group say they're the same person -- and got another of her cousins, Margaret Ross, to take over the spot that had previously been Beulah's before Margie had taken her place. This new version of the Cookies didn't really start doing much for a couple of years, while Dorothy was raising her newborn and Earl-Jean and Margaret were finishing high school. But in 1961 they started again in earnest, when Neil Sedaka remembered the Cookies and called Dorothy up, saying he knew someone who needed a vocal group. Gerry Goffin and Carole King had become hot songwriters, and they'd also become increasingly interested in record production after Carole had been involved in the making of "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?" Carole was recording her own demos of the songs she and Goffin were writing, and was increasingly making them fully-produced recordings in their own right. The first record the new Cookies sang on was one that seems to have started out as one of these demos. "Halfway to Paradise" by Tony Orlando sounds exactly like a Drifters record, and Orlando was, at the time, a sixteen-year-old demo singer. My guess, and it is only a guess, is that this was a demo intended for the Drifters, that it was turned down, and so the demo was released as a record itself: [Excerpt: Tony Orlando, "Halfway to Paradise"] That made the lower reaches of the Hot One Hundred, while a British cover version by Billy Fury made number three in the UK. From this point on, the new lineup of the Cookies were once again the premier session singers. They added extra backing vocals to a lot of the Drifters' records at this time, and would provide backing vocals for most of Atlantic's artists, as the earlier lineup had. They were also effectively the in-house backing singers for Aldon Music -- as well as singing on every Goffin and King demo, they were also singing with Neil Sedaka: [Excerpt: Neil Sedaka, "Breaking Up is Hard to Do"] But it was Goffin and King who spent the most time working with the Cookies, and who pushed them as recording artists in their own right. They started with a solo record for Dorothy, "Taking That Long Walk Home", a song that was very much "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?" part two: [Excerpt: Dorothy Jones, "Taking That Long Walk Home"] The Cookies were doing huge amounts of session work, working twelve hours a day, seven days a week. Dorothy Jones described being in the studio working on a King Curtis session until literally fifteen minutes before giving birth. They weren't the only ones working hard, though. Goffin and King were writing from their Aldon offices every single day, writing songs for the Drifters, the Shirelles, Bobby Rydell, Bobby Vee, Gene Pitney, the Crickets, the Everly Brothers, and more. And on top of that they had a child and Carole King was pregnant with a second one. And, this being the very early 1960s, it never occurred to either Goffin or King that just because Carole King was working the exact same number of hours as Goffin, that might mean she shouldn't also be doing the housework and looking after the children with no help from Goffin. There was only one way they could continue their level of productivity, and that was to get someone in to help out Carole. She mentioned to the Cookies that she was looking for someone to help her with the children, and Earl-Jean mentioned that a nineteen-year-old acquaintance -- her friend's husband's sister -- had just moved to New York from North Carolina to try to become a singer and was looking for any work she could get while she was trying to make it. Eva Narcissus Boyd, Earl-Jean's acquaintance, moved in with Goffin and King and became their live-in childminder for $35 a week plus room and board. Goffin and King had known that Eva was a singer before they hired her, and they discovered that her voice was rather good. Not only that, but she blended well with the Cookies, and was friends with them. She became an unofficial "fourth Cookie", and was soon in the studio on a regular basis too -- and when she was, that meant that Eva's sister was looking after the kids, as a subcontracted babysitter. During this time, Don Kirshner's attitude was still that he was determined to get the next hit for every artist that had a hit. But that wasn't always possible. Cameo-Parkway had, after the success they'd had with "The Twist", fully jumped on the dance-craze bandwagon, and they'd hit on another dance that might be the next Twist. The Mashed Potato was a dance that James Brown had been doing on stage for a few years, and in the wake of "The Twist", Brown had had a hit with a song about it "(Do the) Mashed Potatoes", which was credited to Nat Kendrick & the Swans rather than to Brown for contractual reasons: [Excerpt: Nat Kendrick and the Swans, "(Do the) Mashed Potatoes"] Cameo-Parkway had picked up on that dance, and had done just what Kirshner always did and created a soundalike of a recent hit -- and in fact they'd mashed up, if you'll pardon the expression, two recent hits. In this case, they'd taken the sound of "Please Mr. Postman", slightly reworked the lyrics to be about Brown's dance, and given it to session singer Dee Dee Sharp: [Excerpt: Dee Dee Sharp, "Mashed Potato Time"] That had gone to number two on the pop charts and number one on the R&B charts, and even inspired its own rip-offs, like "The Monster Mash" by Bobby "Boris" Pickett: [Excerpt: Bobby "Boris" Pickett and the Crypt-Kickers, "The Monster Mash"] So Kirshner just assumed that Sharp would be looking for another dance hit, one that sounded just like "Mashed Potato Time", and got Goffin and King to write one to submit to her. Unfortunately for him, he'd assumed wrong. Cameo-Parkway was owned by a group of successful songwriters, and they didn't need outside writers bringing them hits when they could write their own. Dee Dee Sharp wasn't going to be recording Goffin and King's song. When he listened to the demo, Don Kirshner was astonished that they hadn't taken the song. It had "hit" written all over it. He decided that he was going to start his own record label, Dimension Records, and he was just going to release that demo as the single. The Cookies went into the studio to overdub another layer of backing vocals, but otherwise the record that was released was the demo Eva -- now renamed "Little Eva" -- had sung: [Excerpt: Little Eva, "The Loco-Motion"] The record went to number one, and made Little Eva a star. It also made Gerry Goffin a successful producer, because even though Goffin and King had coproduced it, Goffin got sole production credit on this, and on other records the two produced together. According to King, Goffin was the one in the control room for their productions, while she would be on the studio floor, and she didn't really question whether what she was doing counted as production too until much later -- and anyway, getting the sole credit was apparently important to Gerry. "The Loco-Motion" was such a big hit that it inspired its own knockoffs, including one song cheekily called "Little Eva" by a group called "The Locomotions" -- so the record label would say "Little Eva, The Locomotions", and people might buy it by mistake. You'll be shocked to learn that that one was on a Morris Levy label: [Excerpt: The Locomotions, "Little Eva"] That group featured Leon Huff, who would later go on to make a lot of much better records. Meanwhile, as Little Eva was now a star, Carole King once again had to look for a childminder. This time she insisted that anyone she hired be unable to sing, so she wouldn't keep having to do this. Dimension Records was soon churning out singles, all of them involving the Cookies, and Eva, and Goffin and King. They put out "Everybody's Got a Dance But Me" by Big Dee Irwin, a song that excerpted "The Loco-Motion", "Wah Watusi", "Hully Gully" and "Twist and Shout" among many others, with the Cookies on backing vocals, and with Goffin as the credited producer: [Excerpt: Big Dee Irwin, "Everybody's Got a Dance But Me"] That wasn't a hit, but Dimension soon released two more big hits. One was a solo single by Carole King, "It Might as Well Rain Until September", which went to number twenty even though its only national exposure was a disastrous appearance by King on American Bandstand which left her feeling humiliated: [Excerpt: Carole King, "It Might as Well Rain Until September"] Her solo performing career wouldn't properly take off for a few more years, but that was a step towards it. The Cookies also had a hit on Dimension around this point. Goffin and King had written a song called "Chains" for the Everly Brothers, who had recorded it but not released it: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Chains"] So they gave the song to the Cookies instead, with Little Eva on additional vocals, and it made the pop top twenty, and the R&B top ten: [Excerpt: The Cookies, "Chains"] Several people have pointed out that that lyric can be read as having an element of BDSM to it, and it's not the only Goffin and King song from this period that does -- there's a 1964 B-side they wrote for Eva called "Please Hurt Me", which is fairly blatant: [Excerpt: Little Eva, "Please Hurt Me"] But the BDSM comparison has also been made -- wrongly, in my opinion -- about one of the most utterly misguided songs that Goffin and King ever wrote -- a song inspired by Little Eva telling them that her boyfriend beat her up. They'd asked her why she put up with it, and she said that he only hit her because he loved her. They were inspired by that to write "He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)", an utterly grotesque song which, in a version produced by Phil Spector for the Crystals, was issued as a single but soon withdrawn due to general horror. I won't be excerpting that one here, though it's easy enough to find if you want to. (Having said that, I should also say that while people have said that Goffin & King's material at this point flirts with BDSM, my understanding of BDSM, as it has been explained to me by friends who indulge in such activities, is that consent is paramount, so I don't think that "He Hit Me" should be talked about in those terms. I don't want anything I've said here to contribute to the blurring of distinctions between consensual kink and abuse, which are too often conflated). Originally, Eva's follow-up to "The Loco-Motion" was going to be "One Fine Day", another Goffin and King song, but no matter how much Goffin and King worked on the track, they couldn't come up with an arrangement, and eventually they passed the song over to the Tokens, who solved the arrangement problems (though they kept King's piano part) and produced a version of it for the Chiffons, for whom it became a hit: [Excerpt: The Chiffons, "One Fine Day"] Instead, Goffin and King gave Eva "Keep Your Hands Off My Baby". This is, in my opinion, the best thing that Eva ever did, and it made the top twenty, though it wasn't as big a hit as "The Loco-Motion": [Excerpt: Little Eva, "Keep Your Hands Off My Baby"] And Eva also appeared on another Cookies record, "Don't Say Nothing Bad About My Baby", which made the top ten: [Excerpt: The Cookies, "Don't Say Nothing Bad About My Baby"] The Cookies, Eva, and Goffin and King were such a package deal that Dimension released an album called Dimension Dolls featuring the first few hits of each act and padded out with demos they'd made for other artists. This hit-making machine was so successful for a brief period in 1962 and 63 that even Eva's sister Idalia got in on the act, releasing a song by Goffin, King, and Jack Keller, "Hula Hoppin'": [Excerpt: Idalia Boyd, "Hula Hoppin'"] For Eva's third single, Gerry Goffin and Jack Keller wrote a song called "Let's Turkey Trot", which also made the top twenty. But that would be the last time that Eva would have a hit of her own. At first, the fact that she had a couple of flop singles wasn't a problem -- no artists at this time were consistent hit-makers, and it was normal for someone to have a few top ten hits, then a couple at number 120 or something, before going back to the top. And she was touring with Dick Clark's Caravan of Stars, and still in high demand as a live performer. She also, in 1963, recorded a version of "Swinging on a Star" with Big Dee Irwin, though she wasn't credited on the label, and that made the top forty (and made number seven in the UK): [Excerpt: Big Dee Irwin, "Swinging on a Star"] But everything changed for Little Eva, and for the whole world of Brill Building pop, in 1964. In part, this was because the Beatles became successful and changed the pop landscape, but by itself that shouldn't have destroyed the careers of Eva or the Cookies, who the Beatles admired -- they recorded a cover of "Chains", and they used to play "Keep Your Hands Off My Baby" in their live sets. But Don Kirshner decided to sell Aldon Music and Dimension Records to Columbia Pictures, and to start concentrating on the West Coast rather than New York. The idea was that they could come up with songs that would be used in films and TV, and make more money that way, and that worked out for many people, including Kirshner himself. But even when artists like Eva and the Cookies got hit material, the British Invasion made it hard for them to get a footing. For example, Goffin and King wrote a song for Earl-Jean from the Cookies to record as a solo track just after Dimension was taken over by Columbia. That record did make the top forty: [Excerpt: Earl-Jean, "I'm Into Something Good"] But then Herman's Hermits released their version, which became a much bigger hit. That sort of thing kept happening. The Cookies ended up splitting up by 1967. Little Eva did end up doing some TV work -- most famously, she sang a dance song in an episode of the Hanna-Barbera cartoon Magilla Gorilla: [Excerpt: Little Eva "Makin' With the Magilla"] But Dimension Records was not a priority for anyone -- Columbia already owned their own labels, and didn't need another one -- and the label was being wound down. And then Al Nevins, Don Kirshner's partner in Aldon, died. He'd always been friendly with Eva, and without him to advocate for her, the label sold her contract off to Bell Records. From that point on, she could no longer rely on Goffin and King, and she hopped between a number of different labels, none of them with any great success. After spending seven years going from label to label, and having split up with her husband, she quit the music business in 1971 and moved back to North Carolina. She was sick of the music industry, and particularly sick of the lack of money -- she had signed a lot of bad contracts, and was making no royalties from sales of her records. She worked menial day jobs, survived on welfare for a while, became active in her local church, and depending on which reports you read either ran a soul-food restaurant or merely worked there as a waitress. Meanwhile, "The Loco-Motion" was a perennial hit. Her version re-charted in the UK in the early seventies, and Todd Rundgren produced a version for the heavy metal band Grand Funk Railroad which went to number one in the US in 1974: [Excerpt: Grand Funk Railroad, "The Loco-Motion"] And then in 1988 an Australian soap star, Kylie Minogue, recorded her own version, which went top five worldwide and started Minogue's own successful pop career: [Excerpt: Kylie Minogue, "The Loco-Motion"] That record becoming a hit got a series of "where are they now?" articles written about Eva, and she was persuaded to come out of retirement and start performing again -- though having been so badly hurt by the industry, she was very dubious at first, and she also had scruples because of her strong religious faith. She later said that she'd left the contracts on her table for eight months before signing them -- but when she finally did, she found that her audience was still there for her. For the rest of her life, she was a popular performer on the oldies circuit, performing on package tours with people like Bobby Vee and Brian Hyland, playing state fairs and touring Europe. She continued performing until shortly before her death, even after she was diagnosed with the cancer that eventually killed her, as she once again connected with the audiences who had loved her music back when she was still a teenager. She died, aged fifty-nine, in 2003.
As an immigrant to Canada from Holland as a young boy, Ronnie King quickly adapted to life as a Canuck. His journey as an iconic rock & roller started early. In this episode, we discuss his learning to play guitar on a used guitar with one string that his Dad brought home to him as a gift, along with the early years with the original six piece version of the Stampeders, driving from Calgary to Toronto in the 1960s in an old broken down limo and more. Ronnie chuckles as he tells me about life in the Stampeders. We also discuss his acting career, appearing on both Don Kirshner's Rock concert & the Dating game. Ronnie King along with Rich Dodson & Kim Berley forged paths for many other great Canadian bands to follow & he tells us all about it in this episode.
With a legendary career spanning nearly five decades, KANSAS has firmly established itself as one of America’s iconic classic rock bands. This "garage band" from Topeka released their debut album in 1974 after being discovered by Wally Gold, who worked for Don Kirshner, and have gone on to sell more than 30 million albums worldwide. Composing a catalogue that includes sixteen studio albums and five live albums, KANSAS has produced eight gold albums, three sextuple-Platinum albums (Leftoverture, Point of Know Return, Best of KANSAS), one platinum live album (Two for the Show), one quadruple-Platinum single ‘Carry On Wayward Son,’ and another triple-Platinum single ‘Dust in the Wind.’ KANSAS appeared on the Billboard charts for over 200 weeks throughout the ‘70's and ‘80's and played to sold-out arenas and stadiums throughout North America, Europe and Japan. ‘Carry On Wayward Son’ continues to be one of the top five most played songs on classic rock radio, and ‘Dust In the Wind’ has been played on the radio more than three million times! The summer of 2020 marks the release of “The Absence of Presence,” KANSAS’s sixteenth studio album. The wide-ranging progressive rock album, released by InsideOut Music, follows-up 2016’s “The Prelude Implicit,” which debuted at #14 on Billboard’s Top 200 Albums chart. Throughout 2016-2017, the band celebrated the anniversary of breakout album “Leftoverture” with the highly successful KANSAS: Leftoverture 40th Anniversary Tour. That tour was released in 2017 as a live album, “Leftoverture Live & Beyond.” Since 2018, KANSAS has followed that tour with the even more successful KANSAS: Point of Know Return Anniversary Tour. The band is currently comprised of original drummer Phil Ehart, bassist/vocalist Billy Greer, vocalist/keyboardist Ronnie Platt, violinist/guitarist David Ragsdale, keyboardist/vocalist Tom Brislin, guitarist Zak Rizvi, and original guitarist Richard Williams. With no signs of slowing down, KANSAS continues to perform in front of large and enthusiastic audiences around the world. Along with constant touring, KANSAS continues to remain a fixture of Classic Rock radio. The band has reached a whole new audience through their unmistakable presence on the popular video games Rock Band, Guitar Hero, and Grand Theft Auto; the band’s documentary film “KANSAS: Miracles Out of Nowhere” airing on AXSTV; and through their songs’ inclusion in various television shows such as ‘Supernatural,’ ‘South Park,’ ‘The Office,’ and ‘The Simpsons;’ and with films including ‘Old School,’ ‘Anchorman,’ and ‘Happy Gilmore.’
With a legendary career spanning nearly five decades, KANSAS has firmly established itself as one of America’s iconic classic rock bands. This "garage band" from Topeka released their debut album in 1974 after being discovered by Wally Gold, who worked for Don Kirshner, and have gone on to sell more than 30 million albums worldwide. Composing a catalogue that includes sixteen studio albums and five live albums, KANSAS has produced eight gold albums, three sextuple-Platinum albums (Leftoverture, Point of Know Return, Best of KANSAS), one platinum live album (Two for the Show), one quadruple-Platinum single ‘Carry On Wayward Son,’ and another triple-Platinum single ‘Dust in the Wind.’ KANSAS appeared on the Billboard charts for over 200 weeks throughout the ‘70's and ‘80's and played to sold-out arenas and stadiums throughout North America, Europe and Japan. ‘Carry On Wayward Son’ continues to be one of the top five most played songs on classic rock radio, and ‘Dust In the Wind’ has been played on the radio more than three million times! The summer of 2020 marks the release of “The Absence of Presence,” KANSAS’s sixteenth studio album. The wide-ranging progressive rock album, released by InsideOut Music, follows-up 2016’s “The Prelude Implicit,” which debuted at #14 on Billboard’s Top 200 Albums chart. Throughout 2016-2017, the band celebrated the anniversary of breakout album “Leftoverture” with the highly successful KANSAS: Leftoverture 40th Anniversary Tour. That tour was released in 2017 as a live album, “Leftoverture Live & Beyond.” Since 2018, KANSAS has followed that tour with the even more successful KANSAS: Point of Know Return Anniversary Tour. The band is currently comprised of original drummer Phil Ehart, bassist/vocalist Billy Greer, vocalist/keyboardist Ronnie Platt, violinist/guitarist David Ragsdale, keyboardist/vocalist Tom Brislin, guitarist Zak Rizvi, and original guitarist Richard Williams. With no signs of slowing down, KANSAS continues to perform in front of large and enthusiastic audiences around the world. Along with constant touring, KANSAS continues to remain a fixture of Classic Rock radio. The band has reached a whole new audience through their unmistakable presence on the popular video games Rock Band, Guitar Hero, and Grand Theft Auto; the band’s documentary film “KANSAS: Miracles Out of Nowhere” airing on AXSTV; and through their songs’ inclusion in various television shows such as ‘Supernatural,’ ‘South Park,’ ‘The Office,’ and ‘The Simpsons;’ and with films including ‘Old School,’ ‘Anchorman,’ and ‘Happy Gilmore.’
In 1970, the Harlem Globetrotters got their own Saturday morning cartoon. The show’s music supervisor was the man with the golden ear, Don Kirshner. So, that meant the show had a surprisingly good soundtrack, thanks to uncredited studio musicians. This is the story of The Globetrotters. from 1970. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/bizarrealbums/support
RONNIE PLATT Ronnie Platt is a Chicagoland native and veteran of the Chicago music scene. Prior to joining KANSAS, Ronnie fronted very popular Chicago-based bands such as Chaser, Drama, and ARRA at night while driving a semi during the day. From 2007-2011 Ronnie was lead singer for the band Shooting Star. In 2014, Ronnie joined KANSAS as lead singer & keyboardist. Since joining KANSAS, Ronnie has performed in more than 400 concerts. Platt performs, and has writing credits, on KANSAS studio albums “The Prelude Implicit” (#14 Billboard Top 200 Albums Chart) & “The Absence of Presence” (Out July 17, 2020), and live album “Leftoverture Live & Beyond.” Platt is a car enthusiast, a fan of the Chicago Cubs and Chicago Blackhawks, and enjoys historical documentaries. KANSAS With a legendary career spanning nearly five decades, KANSAS has firmly established itself as one of America's iconic classic rock bands. This "garage band" from Topeka released their debut album in 1974 after being discovered by Wally Gold, who worked for Don Kirshner, and have gone on to sell more than 30 million albums worldwide. Composing a catalogue that includes sixteen studio albums and five live albums, KANSAS has produced eight gold albums, three sextuple-Platinum albums (Leftoverture, Point of Know Return, Best of KANSAS), one platinum live album (Two for the Show), one quadruple-Platinum single ‘Carry On Wayward Son,' and another triple-Platinum single ‘Dust in the Wind.' KANSAS appeared on the Billboard charts for over 200 weeks throughout the ‘70's and ‘80's and played to sold-out arenas and stadiums throughout North America, Europe and Japan. ‘Carry On Wayward Son' continues to be one of the top five most played songs on classic rock radio, and ‘Dust In the Wind' has been played on the radio more than three million times! The summer of 2020 marks the release of “The Absence of Presence,” KANSAS's sixteenth studio album. The wide-ranging progressive rock album, released by InsideOut Music, follows-up 2016's “The Prelude Implicit,” which debuted at #14 on Billboard's Top 200 Albums chart. Throughout 2016-2017, the band celebrated the anniversary of breakout album “Leftoverture” with the highly successful KANSAS: Leftoverture 40th Anniversary Tour. That tour was released in 2017 as a live album, “Leftoverture Live & Beyond.” Since 2018, KANSAS has followed that tour with the even more successful KANSAS: Point of Know Return Anniversary Tour. The band is currently comprised of original drummer Phil Ehart, bassist/vocalist Billy Greer, vocalist/keyboardist Ronnie Platt, violinist/guitarist David Ragsdale, keyboardist/vocalist Tom Brislin, guitarist Zak Rizvi, and original guitarist Richard Williams. With no signs of slowing down, KANSAS continues to perform in front of large and enthusiastic audiences around the world. Along with constant touring, KANSAS continues to remain a fixture of Classic Rock radio. The band has reached a whole new audience through their unmistakable presence on the popular video games Rock Band, Guitar Hero, and Grand Theft Auto; the band's documentary film “KANSAS: Miracles Out of Nowhere” airing on AXSTV; and through their songs' inclusion in various television shows such as ‘Supernatural,' ‘South Park,' ‘The Office,' and ‘The Simpsons;' and with films including ‘Old School,' ‘Anchorman,' and ‘Happy Gilmore.
Episode eighty-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?" by the Shirelles, and at the beginnings of the Brill Building sound. 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 "Tom Dooley" by the Kingston Trio. 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. There are no biographies of the Shirelles in print, so I've used a variety of sources, including the articles on the Shirelles and Luther Dixon at This Is My Story. The following books were also of some use: A Natural Woman is Carole King's autobiography. Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era by Ken Emerson is a good overview of the whole scene. Girl Groups by John Clemente contains potted biographies of many groups of the era. And Here Comes The Night: The Dark Soul of Bert Berns and the Dirty Business of Rhythm and Blues by Joel Selvin goes into some detail about Scepter Records. I also referred to the liner notes of this CD, which contains most of the Shirelles tracks worth owning. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript We're currently in a patch of rock and roll history that is ludicrously undocumented. There is book after book about the major stars of the early rock and roll era -- while you won't find much out there on a lot of truly important artists, you can find out enough about Elvis and Ray Charles and Johnny Cash and Little Richard and Chuck Berry and the rest -- these are all romantic figures of legend, the Titans who were defeated in the Titanomachy that was the mid-sixties Beat boom. And of course, there are many many, books on almost every band of the mid to late sixties to even have a minor hit. But the period from 1958 through 1964 is generally summed up by "and there were some whitebread nonentities like Fabian and Frankie Avalon". Occasionally, in some of the books, there is a slightly more subtle approach taken, and the summary is "there were some whitebread nonentities like Fabian and Frankie Avalon, and also Roy Orbison and one or two others made a decent record". But there were many other people making great records -- people who made hits that are still staples of oldies radio in a way that a lot of records from a few years later aren't; records that still sound like they're fresh new records made by people who have ideas. Today we're going to talk about a few of those people, and about one of those great records. We're going to look at the Brill Building, and some of the songwriters who worked there, and at the great record producer Luther Dixon, and at the Shirelles, and their record "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?": [Excerpt: The Shirelles, "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?"] It's been a little while since we looked at any of the early girl groups, but if you remember the episodes on the Bobettes and the Chantels, girl groups in the early years were largely a phenomenon based in New York, and that's more or less the case with the Shirelles, who didn't come from New York itself, but from Passaic New Jersey, about sixteen miles away. Shirley Owens, Doris Coley, Addie Harris and Beverly Lee met at school, and formed a group called the Poquellos, which is apparently Spanish for "little birds". As we've discussed previously, most of the early doo-wop groups were named after birds, and these girls were forming their group before girl groups became regarded as something separate from male vocal groups. Oddly, the group that became the most successful of the early girl groups, and the one that more than any other set the template for all those that would follow, never wanted to become professional singers, and almost had to be forced against their will at every stage. Their first public performance, in fact, was as a punishment. They had been singing with each other in gym class, and not paying attention to the teacher, and so the teacher told them that, as a punishment, they would have to perform in the school talent contest, which they didn't want to do. They performed at the show, singing a song they'd made up themselves, "I Met Him on a Sunday", and went down a storm with the kids at the school. In particular, one of the girls there, Mary Jane Greenberg, insisted that the girls come and meet her mother, Florence. Florence Greenberg was a bored suburban housewife, who until her mid-forties had concentrated on being a homemaker for her husband, who was an executive at a potato chip firm, and for her two children. In her spare time she mostly did things like run fundraisers for the local Republican party. But her son was interested in getting into the music business in some way, and her husband was friends with Freddy Bienstock, who worked for Hill and Range at the Brill Building, and whose job was choosing the songs that Elvis Presley would record. Bienstock invited Greenberg to come and visit him at Hill and Range's offices, and after spending a little time around the Brill Building, Greenberg became convinced that she should start her own record label, despite having no experience in the field whatsoever. She would often just go and hang around at a restaurant near the Brill Building to soak in the atmosphere. The Poquellos were actually not at all interested in making a record, but Mary Jane kept insisting that they should meet with her mother anyway. It got to the point that the girls used to try to avoid her at school and hide from her, but she was insistent and eventually they relented, and went to see Mrs Greenberg. They auditioned for her in her front room, singing the same song they'd performed at the school talent contest. Mrs Greenberg decided that they were going to be the first group signed to her new label, Tiara Records, and they recorded the song they'd written, with Greenberg's musical son Stan producing and arranging, under the name Stan Green: [Excerpt: The Shirelles, "I Met Him On A Sunday (Ronde Ronde)"] Stan wasn't the only person with a new name. The Poquellos were also renamed, to the Shirelles -- after Shirley Owens, but with the "el" ending to be reminiscent of the Chantels, and that was the name they would be known by from that point on. "I Met Him On A Sunday" was a minor local success, and was picked up by Decca Records, who bought the girls' contract out from Greenberg. They managed to get it to number fifty on the charts, but the two singles they recorded for Decca after that didn't have any success, and the label dropped them. That might have been the end of the Shirelles, but Greenberg had remained their manager, and she had started up a new record label, Scepter Records, and signed them up to that instead of Tiara. Their first few singles for Scepter did nothing, but then a change in Scepter's staffing changed everything, not just for the Shirelles, but for the world of music. Greenberg was not a particularly musical person -- and indeed several of the people who worked for her would later mock some decisions she'd made when she'd used her own judgment about songs. But she surrounded herself with people who were musical. The director of A&R for Scepter was Wally Roker, who had originally been the bass singer in the Heartbeats, who'd had a top five hit with "A Thousand Miles Away" in 1956: [Excerpt: The Heartbeats, "A Thousand Miles Away"] Roker in turn introduced Greenberg to a friend of his, Luther Dixon. Greenberg and Dixon's initial meeting was just the length of one elevator ride, but that was long enough for them to exchange numbers and arrange to meet again. Soon Dixon was working for Greenberg at Scepter, and was also her lover. Dixon had started out as a singer, joining a minor group called The Buddies, who had recorded singles like "I Stole Your Heart": [Excerpt: The Buddies, "I Stole Your Heart"] But he had soon moved into songwriting. Dixon was a collaborator by nature, and his first big hit was written with a writing partner called Larry Harrison. "Why Baby Why" went to number five for Pat Boone in 1957: [Excerpt: Pat Boone, "Why Baby Why"] He spent some time writing with Otis Blackwell, with whom he wrote "All the Way Home" for Bobby Darin: [Excerpt: Bobby Darin, "All the Way Home"] And at the time he met Greenberg, he had just written "Sixteen Candles" with Allyson Khent, a number two hit for the Crests: [Excerpt: The Crests, "Sixteen Candles"] Greenberg took him on as a staff writer and producer, and gave him a cut of the publishing rights for his songs -- almost unheard of at that time. The first record he worked on for the Shirelles was also the group's first top forty hit. With Shirley Owens, Dixon wrote "Tonight's the Night". It was intended as a B-side to a song with a lead by Doris, but "Tonight's the Night" was an unexpected success and established Shirley firmly in the role of the group's lead singer: [Excerpt: The Shirelles, "Tonight's the Night"] That went to number thirty-nine, and a competing version by the Chiffons also made the Hot One Hundred: [Excerpt: The Chiffons, "Tonight's the Night"] The Shirelles were a hit group, and they needed a follow-up. And that's where Goffin and King enter our story... Carole King had, from a very early age, been a child prodigy with a particular talent for music. In her autobiography she talks about how when she was a child, her dad would have her, as a party trick, turn to the wall while he played notes on the piano and she called out which one he was playing. Apparently her father would claim she had perfect pitch, and this was not quite true -- she had relative pitch, which meant that once she heard one note she knew, she could tell all the rest of the notes from that, so her father would always start with middle C. But that sense of relative pitch is in itself an amazing talent for a tiny child -- I still can't do that with any great accuracy in my forties, and I've spent most of my life studying and playing music. By the age of eight she had appeared in a couple of shows, including Ted Mack's Amateur Hour, which was a nationally broadcast show, performing in a duo with a friend, but she didn't know exactly what it was she wanted to do until she was thirteen, when she went on a date with Joel Zwick, who would later become known as the director of My Big Fat Greek Wedding among others -- one thing that seems to happen a lot in King's early life is getting to know people who would go on to become very successful. Zwick took her to an Alan Freed show at the Paramount in Brooklyn, where she saw LaVern Baker, BB King, Mickey Baker, the Moonglows, and several other R&B stars of the period. It wasn't, though, seeing the musicians themselves that made Carol Klein, as she then was, want to go into rock and roll music, though that was certainly an inspiration, and she talks a lot about how that Freed show was her introduction to a whole world of music that was far from the whitebread pop on which she had grown up. Rather, it was almost a chance event. She and her date hung around the stage door to see if they could see any of the performers and get autographs. The group they were in accidentally got drawn in through the stage door when some people who were meant to be there were let in, and she got to see the performers hanging around backstage. She knew then, not that she wanted to be a performer herself, but that she wanted to be part of that world, someone that those performers knew and respected. She started attending a stage school, where one of her classmates was Al Pacino, but after a short while she left, deciding that she wasn't cut out for the non-musical aspects of the school, and went back to a normal high school, where she formed her first group, the Cosines. along with Zwick. She started writing songs when she heard a group from a rival local high school, Neil Sedaka and the Linc-Tones, singing a song called "While I Dream": [Excerpt: The Tokens "While I Dream"] Sedaka had briefly dated her, and had co-written that song himself, with Howard Greenfield, and his group got a record deal under the name The Tokens. King figured that if he could do that, so could she. She started writing songs, and found she was good at melodies but not particularly great at lyrics. But she still thought she was good enough to do something. She decided that she was going to go and see Alan Freed, and play him some of her songs. Freed listened to her politely, and explained to her how, at the time, one went about becoming a professional songwriter for the R&B market. He told her to get the addresses of record labels from the phone book, go and try to play her songs to them, and explained how a publishing contract would work. The record label he mentioned to her specifically was Atlantic Records, so she tried that one first. Jerry Wexler and Ahmet Ertegun listened to her, and told her she had talent and to come back when she had more songs. It wasn't a rejection, but it wasn't the instant acceptance she'd hoped for. The second label she went to was ABC-Paramount, where she saw Don Costa. Costa was head of A&R at the label, but also a musician himself. Around this time he had released a cover version of Bill Justis' "Raunchy", under the name Muvva Guitar Hubbard: [Excerpt: Muvva "Guitar" Hubbard, "Raunchy"] Costa would later go on to arrange and conduct for Frank Sinatra, and he also had a respectable career as a session guitarist, but Carol didn't know any of this when she went into his office and played through her songs for him. She was flabbergasted to find that, rather than just sign her to a publishing contract, he asked her to sign a recording contract as well. She was disappointed that he wasn't interested in signing the rest of her group -- he thought she was good enough by herself, without needing to hear the other three -- but not so disappointed that she didn't sign with him straight away. Her first few singles were solo compositions, and didn't do very much in terms of sales, partly because she still didn't consider herself especially good as a lyricist: [Excerpt: Carole King, "The Right Girl"] So while she was trying to have a music career, she also went off to college, aged sixteen -- she had skipped multiple years in school -- where she met someone else who had had a minor hit. The boy who performed under the name Jerry Landis had released "Hey! Schoolgirl", an Everly Brothers knockoff, with a friend, as Tom and Jerry: [Excerpt: Tom and Jerry, "Hey! Schoolgirl"] Landis and King started working together, recording demos for other writers, though never writing together. For some of those demos, they re-used the Cosines name, like on this one for a song by Marty Kalfin: [Excerpt: The Cosines, "Just to Be With You"] They were quite proud when the arrangement they came up with for that demo was copied exactly for the finished record, which made the lower regions of the Hot One Hundred: [Excerpt: The Passions, "Just to Be With You"] They didn't work together for very long, and Jerry Landis went on to record under other names like "True Taylor" and "Paul Kane", before getting back together with Tom, and deciding to work together under their real names. We'll be hearing more of Paul Simon and his partner Art Garfunkel in future episodes. Someone else she met while at college was the man who was to become her first husband, another Gerry -- Gerry Goffin. Goffin impressed her with his looks the first time she saw him -- he looked exactly like a drawing she had clipped out of a magazine, which looked to her like the perfect boyfriend. Goffin impressed her less, though, with his studied dislike of rock and roll music, but was suddenly keen to write a song with her when she mentioned that she'd been selling songs. He'd been trying to write a musical, but he was primarily a lyricist, and couldn't do much with music. King mentioned that she knew that Atlantic were looking for a new song for Mickey and Sylvia, and the two of them worked on a song based on the style of "Love is Strange", which they completed very quickly, and took to Atlantic. Unfortunately, when they got there, they were told that Mickey and Sylvia had split up, but that their song would be suitable for the new duo they'd put together to continue the act -- Mickey and Kitty: [Excerpt: Mickey and Kitty, "The Kid Brother"] That was released as a B-side. The A-side, "Ooh Sha La La" was written by Neil Sedaka and Howie Greenfield: [Excerpt: MIckey and Kitty, "Ooh Sha La La"] Sedaka and Greenfield had become hot songwriters, and around this time Sedaka was also becoming a successful performer. His first hit as a performer, "Oh Carol", was in fact written about Carole King: [Excerpt: Neil Sedaka, "Oh Carol"] And King herself recorded an answer record to that, with new lyrics by Goffin: [Excerpt: Carole King, "Oh Neil"] By the time she was seventeen, King was married to Goffin, and pregnant with his child. Goffin was working a day job, and they were treating the occasional twenty-five dollar advance they got from writing songs as windfalls. But then, when she was on one of her visits to 1650 Broadway to sell songs, King bumped into Sedaka, who told her she should come and meet Al Nevins and Don Kirshner, the owners of Aldon Music. Aldon is the publisher who, more than any single other company, was responsible for what became known as the Brill Building sound. Even though they weren't based in the actual Brill Building, which was at 1619 Broadway, but in 1650 Broadway, the companies in that second building were so associated with the Brill Building sound that you'll find almost every history of music misattributes them and places them there, and in most interviews, when you see people talking about the Brill Building, even people who worked in one or other building, they're as likely to be talking about 1650 as 1619. Kirshner is someone we've met briefly before. He'd started out as a songwriter, working with his friend Bobby Darin on songs like "I Want Elvis For Christmas", which had been recorded by the Holly Twins with Eddie Cochran impersonating Elvis: [Excerpt: The Holly Twins and Eddie Cochran, "I Want Elvis For Christmas"] However, as Darin had moved into performance, Kirshner had gone into music publishing. He'd scored early success when working for Vanderbilt Music by bringing Al Lewis out of retirement. Lewis had been a hit songwriter in the thirties and forties, but hadn't done much for a while. But then Fats Domino had had a hit with "Blueberry Hill", a song Lewis had cowritten decades earlier, and Kirshner decided to pair Lewis with a black musician, Sylvester Bradford, and the two started writing hits together, notably "Tears on My Pillow" for Little Anthony and the Imperials: [Excerpt: Little Anthony and the Imperials, "Tears on My Pillow"] Kirshner had then formed his own publishing company. He'd first approached Pomus and Shuman, and then Leiber and Stoller, to go into business with him, but he ended up with Al Nevins, who had been a musician and had also co-written "Twilight Time" with Buck Ram, which had been a hit in the forties and then later revived by the Platters: [Excerpt: The Platters, "Twilight Time"] Kirshner and Nevins were looking for talented new songwriters, and they had signed up Sedaka and Greenfield, and also signed Paul Simon around this time, as well as another couple, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill. When Carole King played them a few of the songs she'd co-written with Goffin, they signed Goffin and King to a three-year contract, with advances of one thousand dollars for the first year, two thousand for the second, and three thousand for the third, to be offset against their royalties. This was a fortune for the young couple, and so they went from soul-crushing day jobs to... a day job, working in a cubicle. Aldon had a very regimented system. Every writing team had a tiny cubicle, containing a piano and a couple of chairs, in which they would work during normal office hours. Kirshner's system was simple -- any time any new act had a hit, he would get all the songwriters in his office to try to write a follow-up to the hit, in the same style. Of the efforts to find a follow-up to "Tonight's the Night", Kirshner decided on one that Goffin and King had written. "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?" had lyrics that had rather more depth than most of the songs that were charting at the time. Goffin's initial dislike of rock and roll music had been because of what he perceived as its lyrical vacuity, and in "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?" he found a lyrical formula that would define girl groups from that point on -- a look at a kind of female adolescent emotion that had previously not been discussed in pop music. In this case the lyrics were from the point of view of a woman worrying that she's just a one-night stand, not someone the man cares about, and struck a chord with millions. But King's music is at least as impressive. She modelled the song on "There Goes My Baby", and when Luther Dixon accepted the song for the Shirelles, she decided she would write a string arrangement for it like the one the Drifters had used. She'd never written for an orchestra before, so she got a book on arrangement out of the library, and looked through it quickly before writing the string arrangement overnight. The group didn't like the song, thinking it sounded like a country song, but Luther Dixon insisted, and the result went to number one: [Excerpt: The Shirelles, "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?"] The B-side to that single, a Luther Dixon song called "Boys", would also become a well-known track itself: [Excerpt: The Shirelles, "Boys"] Two more top ten hits followed, and then the group's singles started doing less well again. To reverse the downward trend, Dixon brought in a song by another new writer, Burt Bacharach. Bacharach had written a song with Mack David -- the brother of his usual lyricist Hal David -- called "I'll Cherish You". Dixon liked the song, but thought the lyrics were a bit too sickly. He changed the lyrics around, making them instead about someone who still loves her boyfriend despite her friends telling her how bad he is, and retitling it "Baby It's You". For the record itself, he just used Bacharach's original demo and stuck Shirley's voice on top -- Shirley was the only member of the group to sing on the record, though it was still released as by the Shirelles. You can still hear Bacharach singing on the "sha la la"s: [Excerpt: The Shirelles, "Baby It's You"] That returned them to the top ten, and the follow-up, "Soldier Boy", written by Dixon and Greenberg, became their second number one. Unfortunately, it would be their last. Dixon and Greenberg ended their relationship, and Dixon went on to a new job at Capitol Records. Various other people produced recordings for the Shirelles at Scepter, but none had the same success with them that Dixon did. It didn't help that the girls were starting families, and at various times one or other member had to be replaced on the road while they were on maternity leave. The singer who replaced them for those shows was a session singer who Bacharach was producing for Scepter, named Dionne Warwick. To make matters worse, the Shirelles discovered that Greenberg had been lying to them. They'd been told that their royalties were being put into a trust for them, for when they turned twenty-one, but they discovered that no such trust existed, and Greenberg had just been keeping their money. They entered into lawsuits against Scepter, but remained signed to the label, and so couldn't record for anyone else. Their career was destroyed. They remained together in one lineup or another, with members coming and going, until the early eighties, when they all went their separate ways, though they all started their own lineups of Shirelles. These days Shirley tours under her married name as Shirley Alston Reeves and Her Shirelles, while Beverly Lee owns the rights to tour as The Shirelles with no modifiers. Addie Harris died in 1982, and Doris Coley in 2000. The Shirelles were badly treated by their record company, and by history. They made some of the most important records of the sixties, and it was their success that led to the great boom in girl groups of the next few years -- the Supremes, the Marvelettes, the Crystals, the Ronettes, and the rest, all were following in the Shirelles' footsteps. Because they had their greatest success in that period between 1958 and 1964 which most rock historians treat as having nothing of interest in, they're almost ignored despite their huge influence on the musicians who followed them. But without them, the sound of sixties pop would have been vastly different, and to this day their greatest records sound as fresh and inspiring as the day they were recorded.
Episode eighty-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” by the Shirelles, and at the beginnings of the Brill Building sound. 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 “Tom Dooley” by the Kingston Trio. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)
Episode eighty-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” by the Shirelles, and at the beginnings of the Brill Building sound. 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 “Tom Dooley” by the Kingston Trio. 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. There are no biographies of the Shirelles in print, so I’ve used a variety of sources, including the articles on the Shirelles and Luther Dixon at This Is My Story. The following books were also of some use: A Natural Woman is Carole King’s autobiography. Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era by Ken Emerson is a good overview of the whole scene. Girl Groups by John Clemente contains potted biographies of many groups of the era. And Here Comes The Night: The Dark Soul of Bert Berns and the Dirty Business of Rhythm and Blues by Joel Selvin goes into some detail about Scepter Records. I also referred to the liner notes of this CD, which contains most of the Shirelles tracks worth owning. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript We’re currently in a patch of rock and roll history that is ludicrously undocumented. There is book after book about the major stars of the early rock and roll era — while you won’t find much out there on a lot of truly important artists, you can find out enough about Elvis and Ray Charles and Johnny Cash and Little Richard and Chuck Berry and the rest — these are all romantic figures of legend, the Titans who were defeated in the Titanomachy that was the mid-sixties Beat boom. And of course, there are many many, books on almost every band of the mid to late sixties to even have a minor hit. But the period from 1958 through 1964 is generally summed up by “and there were some whitebread nonentities like Fabian and Frankie Avalon”. Occasionally, in some of the books, there is a slightly more subtle approach taken, and the summary is “there were some whitebread nonentities like Fabian and Frankie Avalon, and also Roy Orbison and one or two others made a decent record”. But there were many other people making great records — people who made hits that are still staples of oldies radio in a way that a lot of records from a few years later aren’t; records that still sound like they’re fresh new records made by people who have ideas. Today we’re going to talk about a few of those people, and about one of those great records. We’re going to look at the Brill Building, and some of the songwriters who worked there, and at the great record producer Luther Dixon, and at the Shirelles, and their record “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?”: [Excerpt: The Shirelles, “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?”] It’s been a little while since we looked at any of the early girl groups, but if you remember the episodes on the Bobettes and the Chantels, girl groups in the early years were largely a phenomenon based in New York, and that’s more or less the case with the Shirelles, who didn’t come from New York itself, but from Passaic New Jersey, about sixteen miles away. Shirley Owens, Doris Coley, Addie Harris and Beverly Lee met at school, and formed a group called the Poquellos, which is apparently Spanish for “little birds”. As we’ve discussed previously, most of the early doo-wop groups were named after birds, and these girls were forming their group before girl groups became regarded as something separate from male vocal groups. Oddly, the group that became the most successful of the early girl groups, and the one that more than any other set the template for all those that would follow, never wanted to become professional singers, and almost had to be forced against their will at every stage. Their first public performance, in fact, was as a punishment. They had been singing with each other in gym class, and not paying attention to the teacher, and so the teacher told them that, as a punishment, they would have to perform in the school talent contest, which they didn’t want to do. They performed at the show, singing a song they’d made up themselves, “I Met Him on a Sunday”, and went down a storm with the kids at the school. In particular, one of the girls there, Mary Jane Greenberg, insisted that the girls come and meet her mother, Florence. Florence Greenberg was a bored suburban housewife, who until her mid-forties had concentrated on being a homemaker for her husband, who was an executive at a potato chip firm, and for her two children. In her spare time she mostly did things like run fundraisers for the local Republican party. But her son was interested in getting into the music business in some way, and her husband was friends with Freddy Bienstock, who worked for Hill and Range at the Brill Building, and whose job was choosing the songs that Elvis Presley would record. Bienstock invited Greenberg to come and visit him at Hill and Range’s offices, and after spending a little time around the Brill Building, Greenberg became convinced that she should start her own record label, despite having no experience in the field whatsoever. She would often just go and hang around at a restaurant near the Brill Building to soak in the atmosphere. The Poquellos were actually not at all interested in making a record, but Mary Jane kept insisting that they should meet with her mother anyway. It got to the point that the girls used to try to avoid her at school and hide from her, but she was insistent and eventually they relented, and went to see Mrs Greenberg. They auditioned for her in her front room, singing the same song they’d performed at the school talent contest. Mrs Greenberg decided that they were going to be the first group signed to her new label, Tiara Records, and they recorded the song they’d written, with Greenberg’s musical son Stan producing and arranging, under the name Stan Green: [Excerpt: The Shirelles, “I Met Him On A Sunday (Ronde Ronde)”] Stan wasn’t the only person with a new name. The Poquellos were also renamed, to the Shirelles — after Shirley Owens, but with the “el” ending to be reminiscent of the Chantels, and that was the name they would be known by from that point on. “I Met Him On A Sunday” was a minor local success, and was picked up by Decca Records, who bought the girls’ contract out from Greenberg. They managed to get it to number fifty on the charts, but the two singles they recorded for Decca after that didn’t have any success, and the label dropped them. That might have been the end of the Shirelles, but Greenberg had remained their manager, and she had started up a new record label, Scepter Records, and signed them up to that instead of Tiara. Their first few singles for Scepter did nothing, but then a change in Scepter’s staffing changed everything, not just for the Shirelles, but for the world of music. Greenberg was not a particularly musical person — and indeed several of the people who worked for her would later mock some decisions she’d made when she’d used her own judgment about songs. But she surrounded herself with people who were musical. The director of A&R for Scepter was Wally Roker, who had originally been the bass singer in the Heartbeats, who’d had a top five hit with “A Thousand Miles Away” in 1956: [Excerpt: The Heartbeats, “A Thousand Miles Away”] Roker in turn introduced Greenberg to a friend of his, Luther Dixon. Greenberg and Dixon’s initial meeting was just the length of one elevator ride, but that was long enough for them to exchange numbers and arrange to meet again. Soon Dixon was working for Greenberg at Scepter, and was also her lover. Dixon had started out as a singer, joining a minor group called The Buddies, who had recorded singles like “I Stole Your Heart”: [Excerpt: The Buddies, “I Stole Your Heart”] But he had soon moved into songwriting. Dixon was a collaborator by nature, and his first big hit was written with a writing partner called Larry Harrison. “Why Baby Why” went to number five for Pat Boone in 1957: [Excerpt: Pat Boone, “Why Baby Why”] He spent some time writing with Otis Blackwell, with whom he wrote “All the Way Home” for Bobby Darin: [Excerpt: Bobby Darin, “All the Way Home”] And at the time he met Greenberg, he had just written “Sixteen Candles” with Allyson Khent, a number two hit for the Crests: [Excerpt: The Crests, “Sixteen Candles”] Greenberg took him on as a staff writer and producer, and gave him a cut of the publishing rights for his songs — almost unheard of at that time. The first record he worked on for the Shirelles was also the group’s first top forty hit. With Shirley Owens, Dixon wrote “Tonight’s the Night”. It was intended as a B-side to a song with a lead by Doris, but “Tonight’s the Night” was an unexpected success and established Shirley firmly in the role of the group’s lead singer: [Excerpt: The Shirelles, “Tonight’s the Night”] That went to number thirty-nine, and a competing version by the Chiffons also made the Hot One Hundred: [Excerpt: The Chiffons, “Tonight’s the Night”] The Shirelles were a hit group, and they needed a follow-up. And that’s where Goffin and King enter our story… Carole King had, from a very early age, been a child prodigy with a particular talent for music. In her autobiography she talks about how when she was a child, her dad would have her, as a party trick, turn to the wall while he played notes on the piano and she called out which one he was playing. Apparently her father would claim she had perfect pitch, and this was not quite true — she had relative pitch, which meant that once she heard one note she knew, she could tell all the rest of the notes from that, so her father would always start with middle C. But that sense of relative pitch is in itself an amazing talent for a tiny child — I still can’t do that with any great accuracy in my forties, and I’ve spent most of my life studying and playing music. By the age of eight she had appeared in a couple of shows, including Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour, which was a nationally broadcast show, performing in a duo with a friend, but she didn’t know exactly what it was she wanted to do until she was thirteen, when she went on a date with Joel Zwick, who would later become known as the director of My Big Fat Greek Wedding among others — one thing that seems to happen a lot in King’s early life is getting to know people who would go on to become very successful. Zwick took her to an Alan Freed show at the Paramount in Brooklyn, where she saw LaVern Baker, BB King, Mickey Baker, the Moonglows, and several other R&B stars of the period. It wasn’t, though, seeing the musicians themselves that made Carol Klein, as she then was, want to go into rock and roll music, though that was certainly an inspiration, and she talks a lot about how that Freed show was her introduction to a whole world of music that was far from the whitebread pop on which she had grown up. Rather, it was almost a chance event. She and her date hung around the stage door to see if they could see any of the performers and get autographs. The group they were in accidentally got drawn in through the stage door when some people who were meant to be there were let in, and she got to see the performers hanging around backstage. She knew then, not that she wanted to be a performer herself, but that she wanted to be part of that world, someone that those performers knew and respected. She started attending a stage school, where one of her classmates was Al Pacino, but after a short while she left, deciding that she wasn’t cut out for the non-musical aspects of the school, and went back to a normal high school, where she formed her first group, the Cosines. along with Zwick. She started writing songs when she heard a group from a rival local high school, Neil Sedaka and the Linc-Tones, singing a song called “While I Dream”: [Excerpt: The Tokens “While I Dream”] Sedaka had briefly dated her, and had co-written that song himself, with Howard Greenfield, and his group got a record deal under the name The Tokens. King figured that if he could do that, so could she. She started writing songs, and found she was good at melodies but not particularly great at lyrics. But she still thought she was good enough to do something. She decided that she was going to go and see Alan Freed, and play him some of her songs. Freed listened to her politely, and explained to her how, at the time, one went about becoming a professional songwriter for the R&B market. He told her to get the addresses of record labels from the phone book, go and try to play her songs to them, and explained how a publishing contract would work. The record label he mentioned to her specifically was Atlantic Records, so she tried that one first. Jerry Wexler and Ahmet Ertegun listened to her, and told her she had talent and to come back when she had more songs. It wasn’t a rejection, but it wasn’t the instant acceptance she’d hoped for. The second label she went to was ABC-Paramount, where she saw Don Costa. Costa was head of A&R at the label, but also a musician himself. Around this time he had released a cover version of Bill Justis’ “Raunchy”, under the name Muvva Guitar Hubbard: [Excerpt: Muvva “Guitar” Hubbard, “Raunchy”] Costa would later go on to arrange and conduct for Frank Sinatra, and he also had a respectable career as a session guitarist, but Carol didn’t know any of this when she went into his office and played through her songs for him. She was flabbergasted to find that, rather than just sign her to a publishing contract, he asked her to sign a recording contract as well. She was disappointed that he wasn’t interested in signing the rest of her group — he thought she was good enough by herself, without needing to hear the other three — but not so disappointed that she didn’t sign with him straight away. Her first few singles were solo compositions, and didn’t do very much in terms of sales, partly because she still didn’t consider herself especially good as a lyricist: [Excerpt: Carole King, “The Right Girl”] So while she was trying to have a music career, she also went off to college, aged sixteen — she had skipped multiple years in school — where she met someone else who had had a minor hit. The boy who performed under the name Jerry Landis had released “Hey! Schoolgirl”, an Everly Brothers knockoff, with a friend, as Tom and Jerry: [Excerpt: Tom and Jerry, “Hey! Schoolgirl”] Landis and King started working together, recording demos for other writers, though never writing together. For some of those demos, they re-used the Cosines name, like on this one for a song by Marty Kalfin: [Excerpt: The Cosines, “Just to Be With You”] They were quite proud when the arrangement they came up with for that demo was copied exactly for the finished record, which made the lower regions of the Hot One Hundred: [Excerpt: The Passions, “Just to Be With You”] They didn’t work together for very long, and Jerry Landis went on to record under other names like “True Taylor” and “Paul Kane”, before getting back together with Tom, and deciding to work together under their real names. We’ll be hearing more of Paul Simon and his partner Art Garfunkel in future episodes. Someone else she met while at college was the man who was to become her first husband, another Gerry — Gerry Goffin. Goffin impressed her with his looks the first time she saw him — he looked exactly like a drawing she had clipped out of a magazine, which looked to her like the perfect boyfriend. Goffin impressed her less, though, with his studied dislike of rock and roll music, but was suddenly keen to write a song with her when she mentioned that she’d been selling songs. He’d been trying to write a musical, but he was primarily a lyricist, and couldn’t do much with music. King mentioned that she knew that Atlantic were looking for a new song for Mickey and Sylvia, and the two of them worked on a song based on the style of “Love is Strange”, which they completed very quickly, and took to Atlantic. Unfortunately, when they got there, they were told that Mickey and Sylvia had split up, but that their song would be suitable for the new duo they’d put together to continue the act — Mickey and Kitty: [Excerpt: Mickey and Kitty, “The Kid Brother”] That was released as a B-side. The A-side, “Ooh Sha La La” was written by Neil Sedaka and Howie Greenfield: [Excerpt: MIckey and Kitty, “Ooh Sha La La”] Sedaka and Greenfield had become hot songwriters, and around this time Sedaka was also becoming a successful performer. His first hit as a performer, “Oh Carol”, was in fact written about Carole King: [Excerpt: Neil Sedaka, “Oh Carol”] And King herself recorded an answer record to that, with new lyrics by Goffin: [Excerpt: Carole King, “Oh Neil”] By the time she was seventeen, King was married to Goffin, and pregnant with his child. Goffin was working a day job, and they were treating the occasional twenty-five dollar advance they got from writing songs as windfalls. But then, when she was on one of her visits to 1650 Broadway to sell songs, King bumped into Sedaka, who told her she should come and meet Al Nevins and Don Kirshner, the owners of Aldon Music. Aldon is the publisher who, more than any single other company, was responsible for what became known as the Brill Building sound. Even though they weren’t based in the actual Brill Building, which was at 1619 Broadway, but in 1650 Broadway, the companies in that second building were so associated with the Brill Building sound that you’ll find almost every history of music misattributes them and places them there, and in most interviews, when you see people talking about the Brill Building, even people who worked in one or other building, they’re as likely to be talking about 1650 as 1619. Kirshner is someone we’ve met briefly before. He’d started out as a songwriter, working with his friend Bobby Darin on songs like “I Want Elvis For Christmas”, which had been recorded by the Holly Twins with Eddie Cochran impersonating Elvis: [Excerpt: The Holly Twins and Eddie Cochran, “I Want Elvis For Christmas”] However, as Darin had moved into performance, Kirshner had gone into music publishing. He’d scored early success when working for Vanderbilt Music by bringing Al Lewis out of retirement. Lewis had been a hit songwriter in the thirties and forties, but hadn’t done much for a while. But then Fats Domino had had a hit with “Blueberry Hill”, a song Lewis had cowritten decades earlier, and Kirshner decided to pair Lewis with a black musician, Sylvester Bradford, and the two started writing hits together, notably “Tears on My Pillow” for Little Anthony and the Imperials: [Excerpt: Little Anthony and the Imperials, “Tears on My Pillow”] Kirshner had then formed his own publishing company. He’d first approached Pomus and Shuman, and then Leiber and Stoller, to go into business with him, but he ended up with Al Nevins, who had been a musician and had also co-written “Twilight Time” with Buck Ram, which had been a hit in the forties and then later revived by the Platters: [Excerpt: The Platters, “Twilight Time”] Kirshner and Nevins were looking for talented new songwriters, and they had signed up Sedaka and Greenfield, and also signed Paul Simon around this time, as well as another couple, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill. When Carole King played them a few of the songs she’d co-written with Goffin, they signed Goffin and King to a three-year contract, with advances of one thousand dollars for the first year, two thousand for the second, and three thousand for the third, to be offset against their royalties. This was a fortune for the young couple, and so they went from soul-crushing day jobs to… a day job, working in a cubicle. Aldon had a very regimented system. Every writing team had a tiny cubicle, containing a piano and a couple of chairs, in which they would work during normal office hours. Kirshner’s system was simple — any time any new act had a hit, he would get all the songwriters in his office to try to write a follow-up to the hit, in the same style. Of the efforts to find a follow-up to “Tonight’s the Night”, Kirshner decided on one that Goffin and King had written. “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” had lyrics that had rather more depth than most of the songs that were charting at the time. Goffin’s initial dislike of rock and roll music had been because of what he perceived as its lyrical vacuity, and in “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” he found a lyrical formula that would define girl groups from that point on — a look at a kind of female adolescent emotion that had previously not been discussed in pop music. In this case the lyrics were from the point of view of a woman worrying that she’s just a one-night stand, not someone the man cares about, and struck a chord with millions. But King’s music is at least as impressive. She modelled the song on “There Goes My Baby”, and when Luther Dixon accepted the song for the Shirelles, she decided she would write a string arrangement for it like the one the Drifters had used. She’d never written for an orchestra before, so she got a book on arrangement out of the library, and looked through it quickly before writing the string arrangement overnight. The group didn’t like the song, thinking it sounded like a country song, but Luther Dixon insisted, and the result went to number one: [Excerpt: The Shirelles, “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?”] The B-side to that single, a Luther Dixon song called “Boys”, would also become a well-known track itself: [Excerpt: The Shirelles, “Boys”] Two more top ten hits followed, and then the group’s singles started doing less well again. To reverse the downward trend, Dixon brought in a song by another new writer, Burt Bacharach. Bacharach had written a song with Mack David — the brother of his usual lyricist Hal David — called “I’ll Cherish You”. Dixon liked the song, but thought the lyrics were a bit too sickly. He changed the lyrics around, making them instead about someone who still loves her boyfriend despite her friends telling her how bad he is, and retitling it “Baby It’s You”. For the record itself, he just used Bacharach’s original demo and stuck Shirley’s voice on top — Shirley was the only member of the group to sing on the record, though it was still released as by the Shirelles. You can still hear Bacharach singing on the “sha la la”s: [Excerpt: The Shirelles, “Baby It’s You”] That returned them to the top ten, and the follow-up, “Soldier Boy”, written by Dixon and Greenberg, became their second number one. Unfortunately, it would be their last. Dixon and Greenberg ended their relationship, and Dixon went on to a new job at Capitol Records. Various other people produced recordings for the Shirelles at Scepter, but none had the same success with them that Dixon did. It didn’t help that the girls were starting families, and at various times one or other member had to be replaced on the road while they were on maternity leave. The singer who replaced them for those shows was a session singer who Bacharach was producing for Scepter, named Dionne Warwick. To make matters worse, the Shirelles discovered that Greenberg had been lying to them. They’d been told that their royalties were being put into a trust for them, for when they turned twenty-one, but they discovered that no such trust existed, and Greenberg had just been keeping their money. They entered into lawsuits against Scepter, but remained signed to the label, and so couldn’t record for anyone else. Their career was destroyed. They remained together in one lineup or another, with members coming and going, until the early eighties, when they all went their separate ways, though they all started their own lineups of Shirelles. These days Shirley tours under her married name as Shirley Alston Reeves and Her Shirelles, while Beverly Lee owns the rights to tour as The Shirelles with no modifiers. Addie Harris died in 1982, and Doris Coley in 2000. The Shirelles were badly treated by their record company, and by history. They made some of the most important records of the sixties, and it was their success that led to the great boom in girl groups of the next few years — the Supremes, the Marvelettes, the Crystals, the Ronettes, and the rest, all were following in the Shirelles’ footsteps. Because they had their greatest success in that period between 1958 and 1964 which most rock historians treat as having nothing of interest in, they’re almost ignored despite their huge influence on the musicians who followed them. But without them, the sound of sixties pop would have been vastly different, and to this day their greatest records sound as fresh and inspiring as the day they were recorded.
On the January 17 edition of Music History Today, there's Juice, Sugarland, Don Kirshner, Garth Brooks, Eartha Kitt, & Kid Rock.
Comedians Mark Bailey and Steve Howard joke about internet publishing censorship issues, why Silicon Valley is either the new Don Kirshner or they are the mob, and what will happen when our AI overlords take over safari parks. Talk Funny is a show about comedians in Japan from all over the world, working in comedy in Japan, writing comedy, working, doing stand up, and getting paid in comedy in Japan. Brought to you by Nagoyaradio.com and stand up comic Mark Bailey.
Comedians Mark Bailey and Steve Howard joke about internet publishing censorship issues, why Silicon Valley is either the new Don Kirshner or they are the mob, and what will happen when our AI overlords take over safari parks. Talk Funny is a show about comedians in Japan from all over the world, working in comedy in Japan, writing comedy, working, doing stand up, and getting paid in comedy in Japan. Brought to you by Nagoyaradio.com and stand up comic Mark Bailey.
Episode forty-one of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Be-Bop-A-Lula” by Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps, and how Vincent defined for many what a rock and roll star was. 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 “Smokestack Lightning” by Howlin’ Wolf. —-more—- Resources There are far, far more books on Gene Vincent than one would expect from his short chart history — a testament to how much he influenced a generation. The two that I used most are Race With the Devil by Susan VanHecke, and Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran: Rock and Roll Revolutionaries by John Collis. Of the two, I’d recommend the latter more. There are many compilations of Gene Vincent’s early rock and roll work. This one contains everything he recorded up until 1962. And as always there’s a Mixcloud with the full versions of all the songs featured in today’s episode. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript [Excerpt: Ian Dury and the Blockheads, “Sweet Gene Vincent”] So sang Ian Dury, one of the greats of the rock and roll generation that came up in the seventies, a generation that grew up on listening to Gene Vincent. In the USA, Vincent was more or less regarded as a one-hit wonder, though that one hit was one of the most memorable of the 1950s, but in the UK, he was to become one of the biggest influences on everyone who sang or played a guitar. Gene Vincent was born Vincent Eugene Craddock, and he would have been perfectly happy in his original career as a sailor, until 1955. Then, something happened that changed his life forever. He re-enlisted in the Navy, and got a nine-hundred dollar bonus – a huge sum of money for a sailor in those days – which he used to buy himself a new Triumph racing motorbike. The bike didn’t last long, and nor did Gene’s Navy career. There are two stories about the accident. The one which he told most often, and which was the official story, was that he was not at fault – a woman driving a Chrysler ran a red light and ran into him, and the only reason he didn’t get compensation was that he signed some papers while he was sedated in hospital. The other story, which he told at least one friend, was that he’d been out drinking and was late getting back to the Naval base. There was a security barrier at the base, and he tried to ride under the barrier. He’d failed, and the bike had come down hard on his left leg, crushing it. Whatever the truth, his left leg was smashed up, and looked for a long time like it was going to be amputated, but he refused to allow this. He had it put into a cast for more than a year, after which it was put into a metal brace instead. His leg never really properly healed, and it would leave him in pain for the rest of his life. His leg developed chronic osteomyelitis, he had a permanent open sore on his shin, his leg muscles withered, and his bones would break regularly. Then in September 1955, finally discharged from the naval hospital, Gene Vincent went to see a country music show. The headliner was Hank Snow, and the Louvin Brothers were also on the bill, but the act that changed Gene’s life was lower down the bill – a young singer named Elvis Presley. [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Mystery Train”] The story seems to be the same for almost every one of the early rockabilly artists, but this is the first time we’ve seen it happen with someone who didn’t go on to sign with Sun – a young man in the Southern US has been playing his guitar for a while, making music that’s a little bit country, a little bit blues, and then one day he goes to see a show featuring Elvis Presley, and he immediately decides that he wants to do that, that Elvis is doing something that’s like what the young man has already started doing, but he’s proved that you can do it on stage, for people. It’s as if at every single show Elvis played in 1954 and 1955 there was a future rockabilly star in the audience — and by playing those shows, Elvis permanently defined what we mean when we say “rock and roll star”. The first thing Gene did was to get himself noticed by the radio station that had promoted the show, and in particular by Sheriff Tex Davis, who was actually a DJ from Connecticut whose birth name was William Doucette, but had changed his name to sound more country. Davis was a DJ and show promoter, and he was the one who had promoted the gig that Elvis had appeared at. Gene Craddock came into his office a few days after that show, and told him that he was a singer. Davis listened to him sing a couple of songs, and thought that he would do a decent job as a regular on his Country Showtime radio show. Soon afterwards, Carl Perkins came to town to do a show with Craddock as the opening act. It would, in fact, be his last show for a while – it was right after this show, as he travelled to get to New York for the TV appearance he was booked on, that he got into the car crash that derailed his career. But Tex Davis asked Carl to watch the opening act and tell him what he thought. Carl watched, and he said that the boy had potential, especially one particular song, “Be-Bop-A-Lula”, which sounded to Carl quite like some of his own stuff. That was good enough for Tex Davis, who signed Craddock up to a management contract, and who almost immediately recorded some of his performances to send to Ken Nelson at Capitol Records. Capitol at the time was the home of crooners like Frank Sinatra and Nat “King” Cole, and other than its small country music division had little connection to the new forms of music that were starting to dominate the culture. Capitol had been founded in the early 1940s by the songwriter Johnny Mercer, who wrote many standards for Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Tony Bennett and others, and also recorded his own material, like this: [Excerpt: Johnny Mercer, “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive”] Mercer was a great songwriter, but you can imagine that a record label headed up by Mercer might not have been one that was most attuned to rock and roll. However, in 1955 Capitol had been bought up by the big conglomerate EMI, and things were changing at the label. Ken Nelson was the head of country music for Capitol Records, and is someone who has a very mixed reputation among lovers of both country music and rockabilly, as someone who had impeccable taste in artists – he also signed Buck Owens and the Louvin Brothers among many other classic country artists – but also as someone who would impose a style on those artists that didn’t necessarily suit them. Nelson didn’t really understand rockabilly at all, but he knew that Capitol needed its own equivalent of Elvis Presley. So he put a call out for people to recommend him country singers who could sound a bit like Elvis. On hearing the tape that Tex Davis sent him of Gene Craddock, he decided to call in this kid for a session in Nashville. By this point, Craddock had formed his own backing band, who became known as the Blue Caps. This consisted of guitarist Cliff Gallup, the oldest of the group and a plumber by trade, drummer Dickie Harrell, a teenager who was enthusiastic but a good decade younger than Gallup, rhythm guitarist Willie Williams, and bass player Jack Neal. They took the name “Blue Caps” from the hats they all wore on stage, which were allegedly inspired by the golf caps that President Eisenhower used to wear while playing golf. Not the most rebellious of inspirations for the group that would, more than any other rock and roll group of the fifties, inspire juvenile delinquency and youthful rebelliousness. The session was at a studio run by Owen Bradley, who had just recently recorded some early tracks by a singer from Texas named Buddy Holly. The song chosen for the first single was a track called “Woman Love”, which everyone was convinced could be a hit. They were convinced, that is, until they heard Gene singing it in the studio, at which point they wondered if perhaps some of what he was singing was not quite as wholesome as they had initially been led to believe: [Excerpt: Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps, “Woman Love”] Ken Nelson asked to look at the lyric sheet, and satisfied that Gene *could* have been singing “hugging” rather than what Nelson had worried he had been singing, agreed that the song should go out on the A-side of Gene’s first single, which was to be released under the name Gene Vincent – a name Nelson created from Gene’s forenames. It turned out that the lyric sheet didn’t completely convince everyone. Most radio stations refused to play “Woman Love” at all, saying that even if the lyrics weren’t obscene – and plenty of people were convinced that they were – the record itself still was. Or, at least, the A-side was. The B-side, a song called “Be-Bop-A-Lula”, was a different matter: [Excerpt: Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps: “Be-Bop-A-Lula”] There are three stories about how the song came to have the title “Be-Bop-A-Lula”. Donald Graves, a fellow patient in the naval hospital who was widely considered to have co-written the song with Gene, always claimed the song was inspired by the 1920s vaudeville song “Don’t Bring Lulu”. [Excerpt: “Don’t Bring Lulu”, Billy Murray] As Tex Davis told the story, it was inspired by a Little Lulu comic book Davis showed Vincent, to which Vincent said, “Hey, it’s be-bop a lulu!” Davis is credited as co-writer of the song along with Gene, but it’s fairly widely acknowledged that he had no part in the song’s writing. Almost every source now says that Davis paid Donald Graves twenty-five dollars for his half of the songwriting rights. Far more likely is that it was inspired by the Helen Humes song “Be Baba Leba”: [Excerpt: Helen Humes, “Be Baba Leba”] That song had been rerecorded by Lionel Hampton as “Hey Baba Reba!”, which had been a massive R&B hit, and the song is also generally considered one of the inspirations behind the term “be bop” being applied to the style of music. And that’s something we should probably at least talk about briefly here, because it shows how much culture changes, and how fast we lose context for things that seemed obvious at the time. The term “bebop”, as it was originally used, was used in the same way we use it now — for a type of jazz music that originated in New York in the mid-1940s, which prized harmonic complexity, instrumental virtuosity, and individual self-expression. The music made by people like Charlie Parker, Oscar Peterson, Dexter Gordon, Dizzy Gillespie, and so on, and which pretty much defined what was thought of as jazz in the postwar era. But while that was what the term originally meant, and is what the term means now, it wasn’t what the term meant in 1956, at least to most of the people who used the term. Colloquially, bebop meant “that noisy music I don’t understand that the young people like, and most of the people making it are black”. So it covered bebop itself, but it was also used for rhythm and blues, rock and roll, even rockabilly — you would often find interviewers talking with Elvis in his early years referring to his music as “Hillbilly Bop” or “a mixture of country music and bebop”. So even though “Be-Bop-A-Lula” had about as much to do with bebop as it did with Stravinsky, the name still fit. At that initial session, Ken Nelson brought in a few of the top session players in Nashville, but when he heard the Blue Caps play, he was satisfied that they were good enough to play on the records, and sent the session musicians home. In truth, the Blue Caps were probably best described as a mixed-ability group. Some of them were rudimentary musicians at best — though as we’ve seen, rockabilly, more than most genres, was comfortable with enthusiastic amateurs anyway. But Cliff Gallup, the lead guitarist, was quite probably the most technically accomplished guitarist in the world of rockabilly. Gallup’s guitar style, which involved fast-picked triplets and the use of multiple steel fingerpicks, was an inspiration for almost every rock and roll guitarist of the 1960s, and any group which had him in would sound at least decent. During the recording of “Be-Bop-A-Lula”, the young drummer Dickie Harrell decided to let out a giant scream right in the middle of the song — he later said that this was so that his mother would know he was on the record. Cliff Gallup was not impressed, and wanted to do a second take, but the first take was what was used. [Excerpt: Gene Vincent, “Be Bop A Lula”, scream section] “Be-Bop-A-Lula” is by any standards a quite astonishing record. The lyric is, of course, absolute nonsense — it’s a gibberish song with no real lyrical content at all — but that doesn’t matter at all. What matters is the *sound*. What we have here, fundamentally, is the sound of “Heartbreak Hotel” applied to a much, much, less depressive lyric. It still has that strange morbidity that the Elvis track had, but combined with carefree gibberish lyrics in the style of Little Richard. It’s the precise midpoint between “Heartbreak Hotel” and “Tutti Frutti”, and is probably the record which, more than any other, epitomises 1956. A lot of people commented on the similarity between Vincent’s record and the music of Elvis Presley. There are various stories that went round at the time, including that Scotty and Bill got annoyed at Elvis for recording it without them, that Elvis’ mother had told him she liked that new single of his, “Be-Bop-A-Lula”, and even that Elvis himself, on hearing it, had been confused and wondered if he’d forgotten recording it. In truth, none of these stories seem likely. The record is, sonically and stylistically, like an Elvis one, but Vincent’s voice has none of the same qualities as Elvis’. While Elvis is fully in control at all times, playful and exuberant, Gene Vincent is tense and twitchy. Vincent’s voice is thinner than Elvis’, and his performance is more mannered than Elvis’ singing at that time was. But none of this stopped Vincent from worrying the one time he did meet Elvis, who came over and asked him if he was the one who’d recorded “Be-Bop-A-Lula”. Vincent was apologetic, and explained that he’d not been intending to copy Elvis, the record had just come out like that. But Elvis reassured him that he understood, and that that was just how Gene sang. What fewer people commented on was the song’s similarity to “Money Honey”: [Excerpt: The Drifters, “Money Honey”] The two songs have near-identical melodies. The only real difference is that in “Be-Bop-A-Lula” Vincent bookends the song with a slight variation, turning the opening and closing choruses into twelve-bar blueses, rather than the eight-bar blues used in the rest of the song and in “Money Honey”. Luckily for Vincent, at this time the culture in R&B was relaxed enough about borrowings that Jesse Stone seems not to have even considered suing. The follow-up to “Be-Bop-A-Lula” did much less well. “Race With the Devil” — not the same song as the one later made famous by Judas Priest — was one of the all-time great rockabilly records, but the lyrics, about a hot-rod race with the actual Devil, were, like “Woman Love”, considered unbroadcastable, and this time there was no massive hit record hidden away on the B-side to salvage things: [Excerpt: Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps, “Race With The Devil”] The single after that, “Blue Jean Bop”, did a little better, reaching the lower reaches of the top fifty, rather than the lower reaches of the top hundred as “Race With the Devil” had, and making the top twenty in the UK: [Excerpt: Gene Vincent, “Blue Jean Bop”] But there were three major problems that were preventing Vincent and the Blue Caps from having the success that it seemed they deserved. The first was Ken Nelson. He was in charge of the material that the group were recording, and he would suggest songs like “Up a Lazy River”, “Ain’t She Sweet”, and “Those Wedding Bells are Breaking up That Old Gang of Mine”. Vincent enjoyed those old standards as much as anyone, but they weren’t actually suited to the rockabilly treatment – especially not to the kind of rough and ready performances that the original lineup of the Blue Caps were suited to. And that brings us to the second problem. There was a huge age gap, as well as disparity in ability, in the band, and Cliff Gallup, in particular, felt that he was too old to be touring in a rock and roll band, and quit the group. Gallup was actually offered a regular gig as a session guitarist by Ken Nelson, which would have meant that he didn’t have to travel, but he turned it down and got a job as a high school janitor and maintenance man, just playing the occasional extra gig for pin money. When he was contacted by fans, he would get embarrassed, and he didn’t like to talk about his brief time as a rock and roll star. He never signed a single autograph, and when he died in 1989 his widow made sure the obituaries never mentioned his time with Gene Vincent. But Gallup was just the first to leave. In the first two and a half years of the Blue Caps’ existence, twenty different people were members of the band. Vincent could never keep a stable lineup of the band together for more than a few weeks or months at a time. And the third major problem… that was Vincent himself. Even before his accident, he had been an impetuous, hot-headed man, who didn’t think very carefully about the possible consequences of his actions. Now he was in chronic pain from the accident, he was a rock and roll star, and he was drinking heavily to deal with the pain. This is not a combination that makes people less inclined to rash behaviour. So, for example, he’d started breaking contracts. Vincent and the Blue Caps were booked to play a residency in Las Vegas, where they were making three thousand dollars a week – for 1956 a staggering sum of money. But Tex Davis told Vincent that the owner of the casino wanted him to tone down some aspects of his act, and he didn’t like that at all. It wasn’t even enough to convince him when it was pointed out that the man doing the asking was big in the Mafia. Instead, Gene went on stage, sang one song, found Tex Davis in the crowd, caught his eye, flipped him off, and walked off stage, leaving the band to do the rest of the show without him. Unsurprisingly, the residency didn’t last very long. Equally unsurprisingly, Tex Davis decided he was no longer going to manage Gene Vincent. Legal problems around the fallout from losing his management caused Vincent to be unable to work for several months. While both “Race With the Devil” and “Blue Jean Bop” were big hits in the UK, the closest they came to having another hit in the USA was a song called “Lotta Lovin'”: [Excerpt: Gene Vincent, “Lotta Lovin'”] That was written by a songwriter named Bernice Bedwell, who is otherwise unknown — she wrote a handful of other rockabilly songs, including another song that Vincent would record, but nothing else that was particularly successful, and there seems to be no biographical information about her anywhere. She sold the publishing rights to the song to a Texas oilman, Tom Fleeger, who does seem to have had a fairly colourful life — he wrote a memoir called “Fidel and the Fleeg”, which I sadly haven’t read, but in which he claims that Fidel Castro tried to frame him for murder in the 1940s after a dispute over a beautiful woman. Fleeger was soon to start his own record label, Jan Records, but for now he thought that the song would be suitable for Gene Vincent, and got in touch with him. “Lotta Lovin'” was quickly recorded at Gene’s first session at Capitol’s new studio at the Capitol Tower in Hollywood. The B-side was a ballad called “Wear My Ring” by Warren Cassoto, the future Bobby Darin, and Don Kirshner. [Excerpt: Gene Vincent, “Wear My Ring”] “Lotta Lovin'” went to number thirteen on the pop charts, and number seven on the R&B charts, and it looked like it would revitalise Gene’s career. But it was not to be. Vincent’s increasingly erratic behaviour — including pulling a gun on band members on multiple occasions — and Capitol and Ken Nelson’s lack of understanding of rock and roll music, meant that he quickly became a forgotten figure in the US. But he had a huge impact on the UK, thanks to a TV producer named Jack Good. Jack Good was the person who, more than anyone else, had brought rock and roll to British TV. He’d been the producer of Six-Five Special, a BBC TV show that was devoted to rock and roll and skiffle, before moving to ITV, producing its first two rock and roll shows, “Oh Boy”, and “Boy Meets Girls”. And it was Good who suggested that Vincent switch from his normal polite-looking stagewear into black leather, and that he accentuate the postural problems his disability caused him. Vincent’s appearances on “Boy Meets Girls”, dressed in black leather, hunched over, in pain because of his leg, defined for British teenagers of the 1950s what a rock and roller was meant to look like. At a time when few American rock and roll stars were visiting the UK, and even fewer were getting any exposure on the very small number of TV shows that were actually broadcast — this was when there were only two TV channels in the UK, and they broadcast for only a few hours — Gene Vincent being *here*, and on British TV, meant the world. And on a show like Boy Meets Girls, where the rest of the acts were people like Cliff RIchard or Adam Faith, having a mean, moody, leather-clad rock and roller on screen was instantly captivating. For a generation of British rockers, Gene Vincent epitomised American rock and roll. Until in 1960 he was on a tour of the UK that ended in tragedy. But that’s a story for another time…
Episode forty-one of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Be-Bop-A-Lula” by Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps, and how Vincent defined for many what a rock and roll star was. 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 “Smokestack Lightning” by Howlin’ Wolf. —-more—- Resources There are far, far more books on Gene Vincent than one would expect from his short chart history — a testament to how much he influenced a generation. The two that I used most are Race With the Devil by Susan VanHecke, and Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran: Rock and Roll Revolutionaries by John Collis. Of the two, I’d recommend the latter more. There are many compilations of Gene Vincent’s early rock and roll work. This one contains everything he recorded up until 1962. And as always there’s a Mixcloud with the full versions of all the songs featured in today’s episode. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript [Excerpt: Ian Dury and the Blockheads, “Sweet Gene Vincent”] So sang Ian Dury, one of the greats of the rock and roll generation that came up in the seventies, a generation that grew up on listening to Gene Vincent. In the USA, Vincent was more or less regarded as a one-hit wonder, though that one hit was one of the most memorable of the 1950s, but in the UK, he was to become one of the biggest influences on everyone who sang or played a guitar. Gene Vincent was born Vincent Eugene Craddock, and he would have been perfectly happy in his original career as a sailor, until 1955. Then, something happened that changed his life forever. He re-enlisted in the Navy, and got a nine-hundred dollar bonus – a huge sum of money for a sailor in those days – which he used to buy himself a new Triumph racing motorbike. The bike didn’t last long, and nor did Gene’s Navy career. There are two stories about the accident. The one which he told most often, and which was the official story, was that he was not at fault – a woman driving a Chrysler ran a red light and ran into him, and the only reason he didn’t get compensation was that he signed some papers while he was sedated in hospital. The other story, which he told at least one friend, was that he’d been out drinking and was late getting back to the Naval base. There was a security barrier at the base, and he tried to ride under the barrier. He’d failed, and the bike had come down hard on his left leg, crushing it. Whatever the truth, his left leg was smashed up, and looked for a long time like it was going to be amputated, but he refused to allow this. He had it put into a cast for more than a year, after which it was put into a metal brace instead. His leg never really properly healed, and it would leave him in pain for the rest of his life. His leg developed chronic osteomyelitis, he had a permanent open sore on his shin, his leg muscles withered, and his bones would break regularly. Then in September 1955, finally discharged from the naval hospital, Gene Vincent went to see a country music show. The headliner was Hank Snow, and the Louvin Brothers were also on the bill, but the act that changed Gene’s life was lower down the bill – a young singer named Elvis Presley. [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Mystery Train”] The story seems to be the same for almost every one of the early rockabilly artists, but this is the first time we’ve seen it happen with someone who didn’t go on to sign with Sun – a young man in the Southern US has been playing his guitar for a while, making music that’s a little bit country, a little bit blues, and then one day he goes to see a show featuring Elvis Presley, and he immediately decides that he wants to do that, that Elvis is doing something that’s like what the young man has already started doing, but he’s proved that you can do it on stage, for people. It’s as if at every single show Elvis played in 1954 and 1955 there was a future rockabilly star in the audience — and by playing those shows, Elvis permanently defined what we mean when we say “rock and roll star”. The first thing Gene did was to get himself noticed by the radio station that had promoted the show, and in particular by Sheriff Tex Davis, who was actually a DJ from Connecticut whose birth name was William Doucette, but had changed his name to sound more country. Davis was a DJ and show promoter, and he was the one who had promoted the gig that Elvis had appeared at. Gene Craddock came into his office a few days after that show, and told him that he was a singer. Davis listened to him sing a couple of songs, and thought that he would do a decent job as a regular on his Country Showtime radio show. Soon afterwards, Carl Perkins came to town to do a show with Craddock as the opening act. It would, in fact, be his last show for a while – it was right after this show, as he travelled to get to New York for the TV appearance he was booked on, that he got into the car crash that derailed his career. But Tex Davis asked Carl to watch the opening act and tell him what he thought. Carl watched, and he said that the boy had potential, especially one particular song, “Be-Bop-A-Lula”, which sounded to Carl quite like some of his own stuff. That was good enough for Tex Davis, who signed Craddock up to a management contract, and who almost immediately recorded some of his performances to send to Ken Nelson at Capitol Records. Capitol at the time was the home of crooners like Frank Sinatra and Nat “King” Cole, and other than its small country music division had little connection to the new forms of music that were starting to dominate the culture. Capitol had been founded in the early 1940s by the songwriter Johnny Mercer, who wrote many standards for Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Tony Bennett and others, and also recorded his own material, like this: [Excerpt: Johnny Mercer, “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive”] Mercer was a great songwriter, but you can imagine that a record label headed up by Mercer might not have been one that was most attuned to rock and roll. However, in 1955 Capitol had been bought up by the big conglomerate EMI, and things were changing at the label. Ken Nelson was the head of country music for Capitol Records, and is someone who has a very mixed reputation among lovers of both country music and rockabilly, as someone who had impeccable taste in artists – he also signed Buck Owens and the Louvin Brothers among many other classic country artists – but also as someone who would impose a style on those artists that didn’t necessarily suit them. Nelson didn’t really understand rockabilly at all, but he knew that Capitol needed its own equivalent of Elvis Presley. So he put a call out for people to recommend him country singers who could sound a bit like Elvis. On hearing the tape that Tex Davis sent him of Gene Craddock, he decided to call in this kid for a session in Nashville. By this point, Craddock had formed his own backing band, who became known as the Blue Caps. This consisted of guitarist Cliff Gallup, the oldest of the group and a plumber by trade, drummer Dickie Harrell, a teenager who was enthusiastic but a good decade younger than Gallup, rhythm guitarist Willie Williams, and bass player Jack Neal. They took the name “Blue Caps” from the hats they all wore on stage, which were allegedly inspired by the golf caps that President Eisenhower used to wear while playing golf. Not the most rebellious of inspirations for the group that would, more than any other rock and roll group of the fifties, inspire juvenile delinquency and youthful rebelliousness. The session was at a studio run by Owen Bradley, who had just recently recorded some early tracks by a singer from Texas named Buddy Holly. The song chosen for the first single was a track called “Woman Love”, which everyone was convinced could be a hit. They were convinced, that is, until they heard Gene singing it in the studio, at which point they wondered if perhaps some of what he was singing was not quite as wholesome as they had initially been led to believe: [Excerpt: Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps, “Woman Love”] Ken Nelson asked to look at the lyric sheet, and satisfied that Gene *could* have been singing “hugging” rather than what Nelson had worried he had been singing, agreed that the song should go out on the A-side of Gene’s first single, which was to be released under the name Gene Vincent – a name Nelson created from Gene’s forenames. It turned out that the lyric sheet didn’t completely convince everyone. Most radio stations refused to play “Woman Love” at all, saying that even if the lyrics weren’t obscene – and plenty of people were convinced that they were – the record itself still was. Or, at least, the A-side was. The B-side, a song called “Be-Bop-A-Lula”, was a different matter: [Excerpt: Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps: “Be-Bop-A-Lula”] There are three stories about how the song came to have the title “Be-Bop-A-Lula”. Donald Graves, a fellow patient in the naval hospital who was widely considered to have co-written the song with Gene, always claimed the song was inspired by the 1920s vaudeville song “Don’t Bring Lulu”. [Excerpt: “Don’t Bring Lulu”, Billy Murray] As Tex Davis told the story, it was inspired by a Little Lulu comic book Davis showed Vincent, to which Vincent said, “Hey, it’s be-bop a lulu!” Davis is credited as co-writer of the song along with Gene, but it’s fairly widely acknowledged that he had no part in the song’s writing. Almost every source now says that Davis paid Donald Graves twenty-five dollars for his half of the songwriting rights. Far more likely is that it was inspired by the Helen Humes song “Be Baba Leba”: [Excerpt: Helen Humes, “Be Baba Leba”] That song had been rerecorded by Lionel Hampton as “Hey Baba Reba!”, which had been a massive R&B hit, and the song is also generally considered one of the inspirations behind the term “be bop” being applied to the style of music. And that’s something we should probably at least talk about briefly here, because it shows how much culture changes, and how fast we lose context for things that seemed obvious at the time. The term “bebop”, as it was originally used, was used in the same way we use it now — for a type of jazz music that originated in New York in the mid-1940s, which prized harmonic complexity, instrumental virtuosity, and individual self-expression. The music made by people like Charlie Parker, Oscar Peterson, Dexter Gordon, Dizzy Gillespie, and so on, and which pretty much defined what was thought of as jazz in the postwar era. But while that was what the term originally meant, and is what the term means now, it wasn’t what the term meant in 1956, at least to most of the people who used the term. Colloquially, bebop meant “that noisy music I don’t understand that the young people like, and most of the people making it are black”. So it covered bebop itself, but it was also used for rhythm and blues, rock and roll, even rockabilly — you would often find interviewers talking with Elvis in his early years referring to his music as “Hillbilly Bop” or “a mixture of country music and bebop”. So even though “Be-Bop-A-Lula” had about as much to do with bebop as it did with Stravinsky, the name still fit. At that initial session, Ken Nelson brought in a few of the top session players in Nashville, but when he heard the Blue Caps play, he was satisfied that they were good enough to play on the records, and sent the session musicians home. In truth, the Blue Caps were probably best described as a mixed-ability group. Some of them were rudimentary musicians at best — though as we’ve seen, rockabilly, more than most genres, was comfortable with enthusiastic amateurs anyway. But Cliff Gallup, the lead guitarist, was quite probably the most technically accomplished guitarist in the world of rockabilly. Gallup’s guitar style, which involved fast-picked triplets and the use of multiple steel fingerpicks, was an inspiration for almost every rock and roll guitarist of the 1960s, and any group which had him in would sound at least decent. During the recording of “Be-Bop-A-Lula”, the young drummer Dickie Harrell decided to let out a giant scream right in the middle of the song — he later said that this was so that his mother would know he was on the record. Cliff Gallup was not impressed, and wanted to do a second take, but the first take was what was used. [Excerpt: Gene Vincent, “Be Bop A Lula”, scream section] “Be-Bop-A-Lula” is by any standards a quite astonishing record. The lyric is, of course, absolute nonsense — it’s a gibberish song with no real lyrical content at all — but that doesn’t matter at all. What matters is the *sound*. What we have here, fundamentally, is the sound of “Heartbreak Hotel” applied to a much, much, less depressive lyric. It still has that strange morbidity that the Elvis track had, but combined with carefree gibberish lyrics in the style of Little Richard. It’s the precise midpoint between “Heartbreak Hotel” and “Tutti Frutti”, and is probably the record which, more than any other, epitomises 1956. A lot of people commented on the similarity between Vincent’s record and the music of Elvis Presley. There are various stories that went round at the time, including that Scotty and Bill got annoyed at Elvis for recording it without them, that Elvis’ mother had told him she liked that new single of his, “Be-Bop-A-Lula”, and even that Elvis himself, on hearing it, had been confused and wondered if he’d forgotten recording it. In truth, none of these stories seem likely. The record is, sonically and stylistically, like an Elvis one, but Vincent’s voice has none of the same qualities as Elvis’. While Elvis is fully in control at all times, playful and exuberant, Gene Vincent is tense and twitchy. Vincent’s voice is thinner than Elvis’, and his performance is more mannered than Elvis’ singing at that time was. But none of this stopped Vincent from worrying the one time he did meet Elvis, who came over and asked him if he was the one who’d recorded “Be-Bop-A-Lula”. Vincent was apologetic, and explained that he’d not been intending to copy Elvis, the record had just come out like that. But Elvis reassured him that he understood, and that that was just how Gene sang. What fewer people commented on was the song’s similarity to “Money Honey”: [Excerpt: The Drifters, “Money Honey”] The two songs have near-identical melodies. The only real difference is that in “Be-Bop-A-Lula” Vincent bookends the song with a slight variation, turning the opening and closing choruses into twelve-bar blueses, rather than the eight-bar blues used in the rest of the song and in “Money Honey”. Luckily for Vincent, at this time the culture in R&B was relaxed enough about borrowings that Jesse Stone seems not to have even considered suing. The follow-up to “Be-Bop-A-Lula” did much less well. “Race With the Devil” — not the same song as the one later made famous by Judas Priest — was one of the all-time great rockabilly records, but the lyrics, about a hot-rod race with the actual Devil, were, like “Woman Love”, considered unbroadcastable, and this time there was no massive hit record hidden away on the B-side to salvage things: [Excerpt: Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps, “Race With The Devil”] The single after that, “Blue Jean Bop”, did a little better, reaching the lower reaches of the top fifty, rather than the lower reaches of the top hundred as “Race With the Devil” had, and making the top twenty in the UK: [Excerpt: Gene Vincent, “Blue Jean Bop”] But there were three major problems that were preventing Vincent and the Blue Caps from having the success that it seemed they deserved. The first was Ken Nelson. He was in charge of the material that the group were recording, and he would suggest songs like “Up a Lazy River”, “Ain’t She Sweet”, and “Those Wedding Bells are Breaking up That Old Gang of Mine”. Vincent enjoyed those old standards as much as anyone, but they weren’t actually suited to the rockabilly treatment – especially not to the kind of rough and ready performances that the original lineup of the Blue Caps were suited to. And that brings us to the second problem. There was a huge age gap, as well as disparity in ability, in the band, and Cliff Gallup, in particular, felt that he was too old to be touring in a rock and roll band, and quit the group. Gallup was actually offered a regular gig as a session guitarist by Ken Nelson, which would have meant that he didn’t have to travel, but he turned it down and got a job as a high school janitor and maintenance man, just playing the occasional extra gig for pin money. When he was contacted by fans, he would get embarrassed, and he didn’t like to talk about his brief time as a rock and roll star. He never signed a single autograph, and when he died in 1989 his widow made sure the obituaries never mentioned his time with Gene Vincent. But Gallup was just the first to leave. In the first two and a half years of the Blue Caps’ existence, twenty different people were members of the band. Vincent could never keep a stable lineup of the band together for more than a few weeks or months at a time. And the third major problem… that was Vincent himself. Even before his accident, he had been an impetuous, hot-headed man, who didn’t think very carefully about the possible consequences of his actions. Now he was in chronic pain from the accident, he was a rock and roll star, and he was drinking heavily to deal with the pain. This is not a combination that makes people less inclined to rash behaviour. So, for example, he’d started breaking contracts. Vincent and the Blue Caps were booked to play a residency in Las Vegas, where they were making three thousand dollars a week – for 1956 a staggering sum of money. But Tex Davis told Vincent that the owner of the casino wanted him to tone down some aspects of his act, and he didn’t like that at all. It wasn’t even enough to convince him when it was pointed out that the man doing the asking was big in the Mafia. Instead, Gene went on stage, sang one song, found Tex Davis in the crowd, caught his eye, flipped him off, and walked off stage, leaving the band to do the rest of the show without him. Unsurprisingly, the residency didn’t last very long. Equally unsurprisingly, Tex Davis decided he was no longer going to manage Gene Vincent. Legal problems around the fallout from losing his management caused Vincent to be unable to work for several months. While both “Race With the Devil” and “Blue Jean Bop” were big hits in the UK, the closest they came to having another hit in the USA was a song called “Lotta Lovin'”: [Excerpt: Gene Vincent, “Lotta Lovin'”] That was written by a songwriter named Bernice Bedwell, who is otherwise unknown — she wrote a handful of other rockabilly songs, including another song that Vincent would record, but nothing else that was particularly successful, and there seems to be no biographical information about her anywhere. She sold the publishing rights to the song to a Texas oilman, Tom Fleeger, who does seem to have had a fairly colourful life — he wrote a memoir called “Fidel and the Fleeg”, which I sadly haven’t read, but in which he claims that Fidel Castro tried to frame him for murder in the 1940s after a dispute over a beautiful woman. Fleeger was soon to start his own record label, Jan Records, but for now he thought that the song would be suitable for Gene Vincent, and got in touch with him. “Lotta Lovin'” was quickly recorded at Gene’s first session at Capitol’s new studio at the Capitol Tower in Hollywood. The B-side was a ballad called “Wear My Ring” by Warren Cassoto, the future Bobby Darin, and Don Kirshner. [Excerpt: Gene Vincent, “Wear My Ring”] “Lotta Lovin'” went to number thirteen on the pop charts, and number seven on the R&B charts, and it looked like it would revitalise Gene’s career. But it was not to be. Vincent’s increasingly erratic behaviour — including pulling a gun on band members on multiple occasions — and Capitol and Ken Nelson’s lack of understanding of rock and roll music, meant that he quickly became a forgotten figure in the US. But he had a huge impact on the UK, thanks to a TV producer named Jack Good. Jack Good was the person who, more than anyone else, had brought rock and roll to British TV. He’d been the producer of Six-Five Special, a BBC TV show that was devoted to rock and roll and skiffle, before moving to ITV, producing its first two rock and roll shows, “Oh Boy”, and “Boy Meets Girls”. And it was Good who suggested that Vincent switch from his normal polite-looking stagewear into black leather, and that he accentuate the postural problems his disability caused him. Vincent’s appearances on “Boy Meets Girls”, dressed in black leather, hunched over, in pain because of his leg, defined for British teenagers of the 1950s what a rock and roller was meant to look like. At a time when few American rock and roll stars were visiting the UK, and even fewer were getting any exposure on the very small number of TV shows that were actually broadcast — this was when there were only two TV channels in the UK, and they broadcast for only a few hours — Gene Vincent being *here*, and on British TV, meant the world. And on a show like Boy Meets Girls, where the rest of the acts were people like Cliff RIchard or Adam Faith, having a mean, moody, leather-clad rock and roller on screen was instantly captivating. For a generation of British rockers, Gene Vincent epitomised American rock and roll. Until in 1960 he was on a tour of the UK that ended in tragedy. But that’s a story for another time…
Episode forty-one of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Be-Bop-A-Lula" by Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps, and how Vincent defined for many what a rock and roll star was. 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 "Smokestack Lightning" by Howlin' Wolf. ----more---- Resources There are far, far more books on Gene Vincent than one would expect from his short chart history -- a testament to how much he influenced a generation. The two that I used most are Race With the Devil by Susan VanHecke, and Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran: Rock and Roll Revolutionaries by John Collis. Of the two, I'd recommend the latter more. There are many compilations of Gene Vincent's early rock and roll work. This one contains everything he recorded up until 1962. And as always there's a Mixcloud with the full versions of all the songs featured in today's episode. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript [Excerpt: Ian Dury and the Blockheads, "Sweet Gene Vincent"] So sang Ian Dury, one of the greats of the rock and roll generation that came up in the seventies, a generation that grew up on listening to Gene Vincent. In the USA, Vincent was more or less regarded as a one-hit wonder, though that one hit was one of the most memorable of the 1950s, but in the UK, he was to become one of the biggest influences on everyone who sang or played a guitar. Gene Vincent was born Vincent Eugene Craddock, and he would have been perfectly happy in his original career as a sailor, until 1955. Then, something happened that changed his life forever. He re-enlisted in the Navy, and got a nine-hundred dollar bonus – a huge sum of money for a sailor in those days – which he used to buy himself a new Triumph racing motorbike. The bike didn't last long, and nor did Gene's Navy career. There are two stories about the accident. The one which he told most often, and which was the official story, was that he was not at fault – a woman driving a Chrysler ran a red light and ran into him, and the only reason he didn't get compensation was that he signed some papers while he was sedated in hospital. The other story, which he told at least one friend, was that he'd been out drinking and was late getting back to the Naval base. There was a security barrier at the base, and he tried to ride under the barrier. He'd failed, and the bike had come down hard on his left leg, crushing it. Whatever the truth, his left leg was smashed up, and looked for a long time like it was going to be amputated, but he refused to allow this. He had it put into a cast for more than a year, after which it was put into a metal brace instead. His leg never really properly healed, and it would leave him in pain for the rest of his life. His leg developed chronic osteomyelitis, he had a permanent open sore on his shin, his leg muscles withered, and his bones would break regularly. Then in September 1955, finally discharged from the naval hospital, Gene Vincent went to see a country music show. The headliner was Hank Snow, and the Louvin Brothers were also on the bill, but the act that changed Gene's life was lower down the bill – a young singer named Elvis Presley. [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Mystery Train”] The story seems to be the same for almost every one of the early rockabilly artists, but this is the first time we've seen it happen with someone who didn't go on to sign with Sun – a young man in the Southern US has been playing his guitar for a while, making music that's a little bit country, a little bit blues, and then one day he goes to see a show featuring Elvis Presley, and he immediately decides that he wants to do that, that Elvis is doing something that's like what the young man has already started doing, but he's proved that you can do it on stage, for people. It's as if at every single show Elvis played in 1954 and 1955 there was a future rockabilly star in the audience -- and by playing those shows, Elvis permanently defined what we mean when we say "rock and roll star". The first thing Gene did was to get himself noticed by the radio station that had promoted the show, and in particular by Sheriff Tex Davis, who was actually a DJ from Connecticut whose birth name was William Doucette, but had changed his name to sound more country. Davis was a DJ and show promoter, and he was the one who had promoted the gig that Elvis had appeared at. Gene Craddock came into his office a few days after that show, and told him that he was a singer. Davis listened to him sing a couple of songs, and thought that he would do a decent job as a regular on his Country Showtime radio show. Soon afterwards, Carl Perkins came to town to do a show with Craddock as the opening act. It would, in fact, be his last show for a while – it was right after this show, as he travelled to get to New York for the TV appearance he was booked on, that he got into the car crash that derailed his career. But Tex Davis asked Carl to watch the opening act and tell him what he thought. Carl watched, and he said that the boy had potential, especially one particular song, "Be-Bop-A-Lula", which sounded to Carl quite like some of his own stuff. That was good enough for Tex Davis, who signed Craddock up to a management contract, and who almost immediately recorded some of his performances to send to Ken Nelson at Capitol Records. Capitol at the time was the home of crooners like Frank Sinatra and Nat "King" Cole, and other than its small country music division had little connection to the new forms of music that were starting to dominate the culture. Capitol had been founded in the early 1940s by the songwriter Johnny Mercer, who wrote many standards for Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Tony Bennett and others, and also recorded his own material, like this: [Excerpt: Johnny Mercer, "Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive"] Mercer was a great songwriter, but you can imagine that a record label headed up by Mercer might not have been one that was most attuned to rock and roll. However, in 1955 Capitol had been bought up by the big conglomerate EMI, and things were changing at the label. Ken Nelson was the head of country music for Capitol Records, and is someone who has a very mixed reputation among lovers of both country music and rockabilly, as someone who had impeccable taste in artists – he also signed Buck Owens and the Louvin Brothers among many other classic country artists – but also as someone who would impose a style on those artists that didn't necessarily suit them. Nelson didn't really understand rockabilly at all, but he knew that Capitol needed its own equivalent of Elvis Presley. So he put a call out for people to recommend him country singers who could sound a bit like Elvis. On hearing the tape that Tex Davis sent him of Gene Craddock, he decided to call in this kid for a session in Nashville. By this point, Craddock had formed his own backing band, who became known as the Blue Caps. This consisted of guitarist Cliff Gallup, the oldest of the group and a plumber by trade, drummer Dickie Harrell, a teenager who was enthusiastic but a good decade younger than Gallup, rhythm guitarist Willie Williams, and bass player Jack Neal. They took the name "Blue Caps" from the hats they all wore on stage, which were allegedly inspired by the golf caps that President Eisenhower used to wear while playing golf. Not the most rebellious of inspirations for the group that would, more than any other rock and roll group of the fifties, inspire juvenile delinquency and youthful rebelliousness. The session was at a studio run by Owen Bradley, who had just recently recorded some early tracks by a singer from Texas named Buddy Holly. The song chosen for the first single was a track called "Woman Love", which everyone was convinced could be a hit. They were convinced, that is, until they heard Gene singing it in the studio, at which point they wondered if perhaps some of what he was singing was not quite as wholesome as they had initially been led to believe: [Excerpt: Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps, "Woman Love"] Ken Nelson asked to look at the lyric sheet, and satisfied that Gene *could* have been singing "hugging" rather than what Nelson had worried he had been singing, agreed that the song should go out on the A-side of Gene's first single, which was to be released under the name Gene Vincent – a name Nelson created from Gene's forenames. It turned out that the lyric sheet didn't completely convince everyone. Most radio stations refused to play “Woman Love” at all, saying that even if the lyrics weren't obscene – and plenty of people were convinced that they were – the record itself still was. Or, at least, the A-side was. The B-side, a song called "Be-Bop-A-Lula", was a different matter: [Excerpt: Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps: "Be-Bop-A-Lula"] There are three stories about how the song came to have the title "Be-Bop-A-Lula". Donald Graves, a fellow patient in the naval hospital who was widely considered to have co-written the song with Gene, always claimed the song was inspired by the 1920s vaudeville song "Don't Bring Lulu". [Excerpt: "Don't Bring Lulu", Billy Murray] As Tex Davis told the story, it was inspired by a Little Lulu comic book Davis showed Vincent, to which Vincent said, "Hey, it's be-bop a lulu!" Davis is credited as co-writer of the song along with Gene, but it's fairly widely acknowledged that he had no part in the song's writing. Almost every source now says that Davis paid Donald Graves twenty-five dollars for his half of the songwriting rights. Far more likely is that it was inspired by the Helen Humes song "Be Baba Leba": [Excerpt: Helen Humes, "Be Baba Leba"] That song had been rerecorded by Lionel Hampton as "Hey Baba Reba!", which had been a massive R&B hit, and the song is also generally considered one of the inspirations behind the term "be bop" being applied to the style of music. And that's something we should probably at least talk about briefly here, because it shows how much culture changes, and how fast we lose context for things that seemed obvious at the time. The term "bebop", as it was originally used, was used in the same way we use it now -- for a type of jazz music that originated in New York in the mid-1940s, which prized harmonic complexity, instrumental virtuosity, and individual self-expression. The music made by people like Charlie Parker, Oscar Peterson, Dexter Gordon, Dizzy Gillespie, and so on, and which pretty much defined what was thought of as jazz in the postwar era. But while that was what the term originally meant, and is what the term means now, it wasn't what the term meant in 1956, at least to most of the people who used the term. Colloquially, bebop meant "that noisy music I don't understand that the young people like, and most of the people making it are black". So it covered bebop itself, but it was also used for rhythm and blues, rock and roll, even rockabilly -- you would often find interviewers talking with Elvis in his early years referring to his music as "Hillbilly Bop" or "a mixture of country music and bebop". So even though “Be-Bop-A-Lula” had about as much to do with bebop as it did with Stravinsky, the name still fit. At that initial session, Ken Nelson brought in a few of the top session players in Nashville, but when he heard the Blue Caps play, he was satisfied that they were good enough to play on the records, and sent the session musicians home. In truth, the Blue Caps were probably best described as a mixed-ability group. Some of them were rudimentary musicians at best -- though as we've seen, rockabilly, more than most genres, was comfortable with enthusiastic amateurs anyway. But Cliff Gallup, the lead guitarist, was quite probably the most technically accomplished guitarist in the world of rockabilly. Gallup's guitar style, which involved fast-picked triplets and the use of multiple steel fingerpicks, was an inspiration for almost every rock and roll guitarist of the 1960s, and any group which had him in would sound at least decent. During the recording of “Be-Bop-A-Lula”, the young drummer Dickie Harrell decided to let out a giant scream right in the middle of the song -- he later said that this was so that his mother would know he was on the record. Cliff Gallup was not impressed, and wanted to do a second take, but the first take was what was used. [Excerpt: Gene Vincent, “Be Bop A Lula”, scream section] "Be-Bop-A-Lula" is by any standards a quite astonishing record. The lyric is, of course, absolute nonsense -- it's a gibberish song with no real lyrical content at all -- but that doesn't matter at all. What matters is the *sound*. What we have here, fundamentally, is the sound of "Heartbreak Hotel" applied to a much, much, less depressive lyric. It still has that strange morbidity that the Elvis track had, but combined with carefree gibberish lyrics in the style of Little Richard. It's the precise midpoint between "Heartbreak Hotel" and "Tutti Frutti", and is probably the record which, more than any other, epitomises 1956. A lot of people commented on the similarity between Vincent's record and the music of Elvis Presley. There are various stories that went round at the time, including that Scotty and Bill got annoyed at Elvis for recording it without them, that Elvis' mother had told him she liked that new single of his, "Be-Bop-A-Lula", and even that Elvis himself, on hearing it, had been confused and wondered if he'd forgotten recording it. In truth, none of these stories seem likely. The record is, sonically and stylistically, like an Elvis one, but Vincent's voice has none of the same qualities as Elvis'. While Elvis is fully in control at all times, playful and exuberant, Gene Vincent is tense and twitchy. Vincent's voice is thinner than Elvis', and his performance is more mannered than Elvis' singing at that time was. But none of this stopped Vincent from worrying the one time he did meet Elvis, who came over and asked him if he was the one who'd recorded "Be-Bop-A-Lula". Vincent was apologetic, and explained that he'd not been intending to copy Elvis, the record had just come out like that. But Elvis reassured him that he understood, and that that was just how Gene sang. What fewer people commented on was the song's similarity to “Money Honey”: [Excerpt: The Drifters, “Money Honey”] The two songs have near-identical melodies. The only real difference is that in “Be-Bop-A-Lula” Vincent bookends the song with a slight variation, turning the opening and closing choruses into twelve-bar blueses, rather than the eight-bar blues used in the rest of the song and in “Money Honey”. Luckily for Vincent, at this time the culture in R&B was relaxed enough about borrowings that Jesse Stone seems not to have even considered suing. The follow-up to "Be-Bop-A-Lula" did much less well. "Race With the Devil" -- not the same song as the one later made famous by Judas Priest -- was one of the all-time great rockabilly records, but the lyrics, about a hot-rod race with the actual Devil, were, like "Woman Love", considered unbroadcastable, and this time there was no massive hit record hidden away on the B-side to salvage things: [Excerpt: Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps, "Race With The Devil"] The single after that, "Blue Jean Bop", did a little better, reaching the lower reaches of the top fifty, rather than the lower reaches of the top hundred as "Race With the Devil" had, and making the top twenty in the UK: [Excerpt: Gene Vincent, "Blue Jean Bop"] But there were three major problems that were preventing Vincent and the Blue Caps from having the success that it seemed they deserved. The first was Ken Nelson. He was in charge of the material that the group were recording, and he would suggest songs like "Up a Lazy River", "Ain't She Sweet", and "Those Wedding Bells are Breaking up That Old Gang of Mine". Vincent enjoyed those old standards as much as anyone, but they weren't actually suited to the rockabilly treatment – especially not to the kind of rough and ready performances that the original lineup of the Blue Caps were suited to. And that brings us to the second problem. There was a huge age gap, as well as disparity in ability, in the band, and Cliff Gallup, in particular, felt that he was too old to be touring in a rock and roll band, and quit the group. Gallup was actually offered a regular gig as a session guitarist by Ken Nelson, which would have meant that he didn't have to travel, but he turned it down and got a job as a high school janitor and maintenance man, just playing the occasional extra gig for pin money. When he was contacted by fans, he would get embarrassed, and he didn't like to talk about his brief time as a rock and roll star. He never signed a single autograph, and when he died in 1989 his widow made sure the obituaries never mentioned his time with Gene Vincent. But Gallup was just the first to leave. In the first two and a half years of the Blue Caps' existence, twenty different people were members of the band. Vincent could never keep a stable lineup of the band together for more than a few weeks or months at a time. And the third major problem... that was Vincent himself. Even before his accident, he had been an impetuous, hot-headed man, who didn't think very carefully about the possible consequences of his actions. Now he was in chronic pain from the accident, he was a rock and roll star, and he was drinking heavily to deal with the pain. This is not a combination that makes people less inclined to rash behaviour. So, for example, he'd started breaking contracts. Vincent and the Blue Caps were booked to play a residency in Las Vegas, where they were making three thousand dollars a week – for 1956 a staggering sum of money. But Tex Davis told Vincent that the owner of the casino wanted him to tone down some aspects of his act, and he didn't like that at all. It wasn't even enough to convince him when it was pointed out that the man doing the asking was big in the Mafia. Instead, Gene went on stage, sang one song, found Tex Davis in the crowd, caught his eye, flipped him off, and walked off stage, leaving the band to do the rest of the show without him. Unsurprisingly, the residency didn't last very long. Equally unsurprisingly, Tex Davis decided he was no longer going to manage Gene Vincent. Legal problems around the fallout from losing his management caused Vincent to be unable to work for several months. While both "Race With the Devil" and "Blue Jean Bop" were big hits in the UK, the closest they came to having another hit in the USA was a song called "Lotta Lovin'": [Excerpt: Gene Vincent, "Lotta Lovin'"] That was written by a songwriter named Bernice Bedwell, who is otherwise unknown -- she wrote a handful of other rockabilly songs, including another song that Vincent would record, but nothing else that was particularly successful, and there seems to be no biographical information about her anywhere. She sold the publishing rights to the song to a Texas oilman, Tom Fleeger, who does seem to have had a fairly colourful life -- he wrote a memoir called "Fidel and the Fleeg", which I sadly haven't read, but in which he claims that Fidel Castro tried to frame him for murder in the 1940s after a dispute over a beautiful woman. Fleeger was soon to start his own record label, Jan Records, but for now he thought that the song would be suitable for Gene Vincent, and got in touch with him. "Lotta Lovin'" was quickly recorded at Gene's first session at Capitol's new studio at the Capitol Tower in Hollywood. The B-side was a ballad called "Wear My Ring" by Warren Cassoto, the future Bobby Darin, and Don Kirshner. [Excerpt: Gene Vincent, "Wear My Ring"] "Lotta Lovin'" went to number thirteen on the pop charts, and number seven on the R&B charts, and it looked like it would revitalise Gene's career. But it was not to be. Vincent's increasingly erratic behaviour -- including pulling a gun on band members on multiple occasions -- and Capitol and Ken Nelson's lack of understanding of rock and roll music, meant that he quickly became a forgotten figure in the US. But he had a huge impact on the UK, thanks to a TV producer named Jack Good. Jack Good was the person who, more than anyone else, had brought rock and roll to British TV. He'd been the producer of Six-Five Special, a BBC TV show that was devoted to rock and roll and skiffle, before moving to ITV, producing its first two rock and roll shows, "Oh Boy", and "Boy Meets Girls". And it was Good who suggested that Vincent switch from his normal polite-looking stagewear into black leather, and that he accentuate the postural problems his disability caused him. Vincent's appearances on “Boy Meets Girls”, dressed in black leather, hunched over, in pain because of his leg, defined for British teenagers of the 1950s what a rock and roller was meant to look like. At a time when few American rock and roll stars were visiting the UK, and even fewer were getting any exposure on the very small number of TV shows that were actually broadcast -- this was when there were only two TV channels in the UK, and they broadcast for only a few hours -- Gene Vincent being *here*, and on British TV, meant the world. And on a show like Boy Meets Girls, where the rest of the acts were people like Cliff RIchard or Adam Faith, having a mean, moody, leather-clad rock and roller on screen was instantly captivating. For a generation of British rockers, Gene Vincent epitomised American rock and roll. Until in 1960 he was on a tour of the UK that ended in tragedy. But that's a story for another time...
Episode forty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Drugstore Rock ‘n’ Roll”, by Janis Martin, an early rockabilly classic by the woman known as “the Female Elvis”. 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 “Fever” by Little Willie John —-more—- A brief apology before I go any further. There is no Mixcloud this week, and also I’ve only done one edit pass, rather than my customary two, on the podcast sound file, so there might be some noises and so on that would otherwise not be on there, and the sound quality may not be as good as normal. A close family member has had a severe medical emergency this weekend, and I haven’t been able to put in the time I normally would. Normal service should be resumed next week, and I hope this is at least adequate. Resources There is very little information out there about Janis Martin. Much of this was stitched together from brief mentions in books on other people, and from ten minutes’ worth of interview in an out-of-print documentary called Welcome to the Club: The Women of Rockabilly. The single most important source here was the liner notes for the Bear Family CD collecting all Janis’ fifties recordings. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Sometimes a novelty act will have real talent, and sometimes the things that can bring you the most success initially can be the very things that stop you from building a career. In the case of Janis Martin, “the female Elvis Presley”, those four words were the reason she became successful, and some say they are also the reason she very quickly dropped into obscurity. There are no books about Janis Martin, who as far as I can tell was the first successful female rockabilly artist. There are no films about her. There are just a handful of articles in obscure fanzines, and pages on unvisited websites, to mark the story of a true pioneer of rockabilly music. But I don’t think that the way Janis Martin’s career stalled was down to that label at all. I think it stalled because of misogyny, plain and simple, and I’m going to explain why in this episode. So a warning right now — this will deal in passing with abortion and underage marriage. If you are likely to find anything dealing with those things traumatising, please check out the transcript on the podcast website at 500songs.com, to make sure it’s something you’re comfortable hearing. I won’t be going into those things in any great detail, but sometimes better safe than sorry. Janis Martin was born in 1940, and spent her early years as a child country and western act. She started playing the guitar when she was only four, holding it upright because she wasn’t big enough yet to play it normally, and by the age of eleven she was a regular on The Old Dominion Barn Dance. This was at a time when the dominant force in country and western music was a series of live variety shows that would be broadcast by different radio stations, and there was a definite hierarchy there. At the very top of the chain was the Grand Ole Opry, whose performers like Roy Acuff would absolutely dominate the whole medium of country music. If you were on the Opry, you were going to be a big star, and you would be heard by everyone. You’d made it. Slightly lower than the Opry were shows like the Louisiana Hayride. The Hayride was for those who were on their way up or on their way down. Elvis Presley got a residency on the show when he went down too badly on the Opry for them to book him again, and Hank Williams started performing on it when he was dropped by the Opry for drunkenness, but it also booked acts who weren’t quite well known enough to secure a spot on the Opry, people who were still building their names up. And then, a rung below the Hayride, were shows like the Old Dominion Barn Dance. The Barn Dance had some big name acts — the Carter Family, Flatt and Scruggs, Joe Maphis — these weren’t small-time no-namers by any means. But it wasn’t as big as the Hayride. Young Janis Martin was a country singer, pushed into the role by her domineering mother. But she wasn’t massively interested in country music. She liked the honky-tonk stuff — she liked Hank Williams, “Because he had a little rock to his music”: [Excerpt: Hank Williams, “Honky Tonkin'”] But she didn’t like bluegrass, and she was starting to get bored with the slow country ballads that dominated the pop part of the country field. But luckily, the further down the rungs you got, the more experimental the hillbilly shows could be, and the more they could deviate from the straight formula insisted on by the shows at the top. Shows like the Opry, while wildly popular, were also extraordinarily conservative. The Barn Dance allowed people to try things that were a little different. Janis Martin was a little different. She changed her whole style with one twist of a radio dial, when she was thirteen. She was going through the radio stations trying to find something she liked, when she hit on a station that was playing “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean” by Ruth Brown: [Excerpt: Ruth Brown, “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean”] She immediately decided that that was what she wanted to be singing — “black R&B”, as she would always put it, not country music. She immediately incorporated “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean” into her set, and started adding a lot of similar songs — not just Ruth Brown songs, though Brown would always remain her very favourite, but songs by LaVern Baker and Dinah Washington as well. This was not normal, even for the small number of country musicians who were playing R&B songs. Generally, the few who did that were performing music originally recorded by male jump band artists like Louis Jordan or Big Joe Turner. The songs Brown, Baker, and Washington recorded were all closer to jazz than to country music, and it’s actually quite hard for me to imagine how one could perform “Mama He Treats Your Daughter Mean” with country instrumentation. But this was what Janis Martin was doing, and it went down well with the Old Dominion Barn Dance audience. What worried some of them was another change that went along with this — she started performing in a manner that they interpreted as overtly sexual. At thirteen and fourteen years old, she was dancing on the stage in a way that was often compared to Elvis Presley — someone she’d never heard of at the time, and wasn’t that impressed by when she did. She preferred Carl Perkins. She wasn’t intending to be vulgar or sexual — it just made no sense to her *not* to dance while she was singing uptempo R&B-style songs. As she later said, “When I was a little girl doing all those rock ‘n’ roll moves on the barndances, people thought it was cute. But then, when I was fifteen or sixteen, and wearing a ponytail, and out there moving like Elvis, a lot of people thought it was vulgar.” But, at the time, the crowds at the Barndance shows were still happy to hear this music, however different it was from the country music they were used to. Martin’s big break came when two staff announcers on WRVA, the station that hosted the barndance, Carl Stutz and Carl Barefoot, brought her a song they’d written, “Will You, Willyum?”: [Excerpt: Janis Martin, “Will You, Willyum?”] The song itself was not hugely impressive — it’s a standard boogie rhythm country song, and like many second-rate songs of the time it tries to get itself a little second-hand excitement by namechecking another song — in this case, it references dancing with Henry, a reference to “the Wallflower”. But Martin’s demo of the song was enough to catch the ear of Steve Sholes, the A&R man who had signed Elvis a few months earlier, and so in March 1956, aged just fifteen, Janis Martin was signed to RCA Records, one of the biggest labels in the country. Sholes wanted to record “Will You Willyum?” as her first single, but had also suggested that she try writing songs herself. Her very first attempt at writing a song took her, by her own accounts, ten or fifteen minutes to write, and ended up as the B-side. It was “Drugstore Rock ‘n’ Roll”: [Excerpt: Janis Martin, “Drugstore Rock ‘n’ Roll”] Now, this actually marks something of a turning point in our story, though it may not seem it. Up to this point, the music we’ve looked at broadly falls into three categories — R&B and jump band music made by and for black adults, white country musicians imitating that jump band music and generally aiming it at a younger audience, and doo-wop music made by and for black teenagers. “Drugstore Rock ‘n’ Roll” is the first record we’ve looked at — and one of the first records ever made — to deal specifically with the experience of the white teenagers who were now the music’s biggest audience, and deal with it from their own perspective. This is where the 1950s of the popular imagination — letter sweaters, crewcuts, ponytails, big skirts, dancing to the jukebox, drinking a malt with two straws, the 1950s of “Happy Days” and “American Graffiti” and Archie Comics, all starts. Now, in this, we have to consider that the micro and the macro are telling us rather different things, and that both parts of the picture are true. On the one hand, we have a teenage girl, writing her first ever song, talking about her own experiences and doing so in a musical idiom that she loves. On the other hand, we have a massive corporate conglomerate taking musical styles created by marginalised groups, removing those elements that made them distinctive to those groups, and marketing them at a more affluent, privileged, audience. Both these things were happening at the same time — and we’ll see, as we look at the next few years of rock and roll history, how an influx of well-meaning — and often great — individual white artists making music they truly believed in, and with no racist motives as individuals (indeed many of them were committed anti-racists), would still, in aggregate, turn rock and roll from a music that was dominated by black artists and created for a primarily black audience, into one that was created by and for privileged white teenagers. Over the next few years the most popular artists in rock and roll music would go from being black men singing about gay sex and poor white sharecroppers singing about drinking liquor from an old fruit jar to being perky teenagers singing about sock hops and going steady, and Janis Martin was an early example of this. But she was still, ultimately, too individual for the system to cope with. Given that she supposedly moved like Elvis (I say “supposedly” because I haven’t been able to find any footage of her to confirm this) and had had a similar career path, RCA decided to market her as “the Female Elvis”. They got the permission of Elvis and the Colonel to do so, though Martin only ever met Elvis twice, and barely exchanged a couple of words with him when she did. They also got in some of the same people who performed on Elvis’ records. While Elvis’ own musicians weren’t available, Chet Atkins, who also produced Janis’ sessions, and Floyd Cramer were both on most of Janis’ early recordings, and came up with a very similar sound to the Elvis records, and on at least some of her records the Jordanaires provided backing vocals, as they did for Elvis. The first single, “Will You Willyum” backed with “Drugstore Rock ‘n’ Roll” was a hit, and went to number thirty-five in the pop charts. It sold three quarters of a million copies, and led to performances on most of the big TV shows, as well as on the Grand Ole Opry. But the follow-up, “Ooby Dooby” (a cover of a song we’ll be dealing with in a future episode) didn’t do quite so well. So for her third single they tried to lean into the Elvis comparisons with… a song about Elvis: [Excerpt: “My Boy Elvis”, Janis Martin] She wasn’t particularly keen on the song, but she had no control over the material she was given — back then, artists on major labels made the records they were told to make, and that was the end of it. “My Boy Elvis” was, in fact, only one of a large number of novelty records about Elvis that hit in 1956. Novelty records were a huge part of the music industry in the 1950s and 60s, and there would not be a trend that would go by without a dozen people putting out records of one kind or another about the trend. And given that Elvis’ rise to stardom was the biggest cultural phenomenon the world had ever seen, it’s not surprising that a few record company owners figured that if the kids were interested in buying records by Elvis, they might be tricked into buying records about Elvis too. A typical example of the form was “I Want Elvis For Christmas”: [Excerpt: The Holly Sisters, “I Want Elvis For Christmas”] That song was written by two aspiring songwriters — Don Kirshner, who would later become one of the most important music publishing executives in the world, and a young man named Walden Cassoto, who would soon change his name to Bobby Darin. The person impersonating Elvis was a country singer called Eddie Cochran, who we’ll be hearing a lot more about soon. So these novelty records were being released left and right, but very few of them had any success. And Martin’s record was no exception. Not only that, the teenage girl audience who were Elvis’ biggest fanbase started to resent the marketing — which she hadn’t chosen herself — comparing her to Elvis. They were in love with Elvis, and didn’t like the comparison. Janis was selling records, but not quite at the level RCA initially hoped – they were having trouble building her audience. That was because in 1956, unlike even a year or so later, record labels had no idea what to do with white rock and roll acts aimed at the teen crowd. There were Bill Haley and Elvis, who were in a league of their own, and there were the Sun Records artists who could be packaged together on tours and play to the same crowds. But other than that, rock and roll acts played the chitlin circuit, and that was black acts for black audiences. There was a possible solution to this problem — Elvis. Colonel Parker, Elvis’ manager, was a close associate of Steve Sholes, and believed Sholes when he told Parker that Janis Martin was going places. He wanted to sign Janis to a management contract and promote Elvis and Janis as a double-bill, thinking that having a male-female act would be a good gimmick. But her parents thought this was a bad idea. Just before she had been signed to RCA, Elvis had very publicly collapsed and been hospitalised with exhaustion through overwork. For all that Martin’s mother was a pushy stage mother, she didn’t want that for her daughter, and so the Colonel never got to sign Janis, and Janis never got to tour and play to Elvis’ audience. So since she had come up through the country music scene, and had been signed by RCA’s country department, she was put on bills with other RCA country artists like Hank Snow, who made music like this: [Excerpt: Hank Snow, “Wedding Bells”] Understandably, Martin’s rock and roll style didn’t really fit on the bills, and the audiences were unimpressed. No-one in RCA or her promotional team knew how to deal with a rock and roll star who wasn’t the most massive thing on the charts — there was not, yet, anywhere to put a mid-range rock and roll star. But she continued plugging away, making rockabilly records, and slowly building up a fanbase for herself. She even had a screen test with MGM, the film studio that had signed Elvis up so successfully. But she had a problem, and one that would eventually cause the end of her career. A few months before she was signed to RCA, she had got married. This is less odd than it might now sound. In the southern US in the 1950s, it was perfectly normal for people to get married in their early or mid teens. We will see a few more stories as the series goes on where people have married far, far, too young — in some cases, because of abuse by an older man, in other cases just because teenage hormones had convinced them that they were definitely mature enough, no matter what those old people said. In this case, she had eloped with a paratrooper, who was stationed in Germany soon after. She only told her parents about the marriage once her husband had left the country. So everything was fine — while she might have been technically married, it wasn’t like she was even on the same continent as her husband, so for all practical purposes it was exactly as if she was the single, sweet, innocent teenage girl that RCA wanted people to think she was. And she didn’t see the need to tell RCA any different. What they didn’t know couldn’t hurt them. And that was all fine, until her 1957 European tour. As she was going to be in Europe anyway, her husband asked for a leave of absence and spent thirty days travelling around with her. And when she got back to the US, she was pregnant. When she informed RCA, they were furious. They couldn’t have their seventeen-year-old nation’s sweetheart going around being visibly pregnant — even though one of the songs they’d chosen for her to record at her first session, “Let’s Elope Baby”, had described her actual experiences rather better than they’d realised: [Excerpt: Janis Martin, “Let’s Elope Baby”] And so they came up with what they thought was the obvious solution — they tried to persuade her to get an abortion, although that was still illegal in the US at the time. She refused, and the label dropped her. She started recording for a small label — she turned down offers from King and Decca records, and instead went with the tiny Belgian label Palette — but she never had any success, and soon split from her husband. By 1960, aged twenty, she was on to her second marriage. Her second husband toured with her for a while, but soon told her that if she wanted to stay with him, she would have to give up on the music industry. For the next thirteen years, while she was married to him, she did just that, and her career was over. But then, after her second marriage ended, she put together a band, Janis Martin and the Variations, and started playing gigs again. And the woman whose entire life had been controlled by other people — first her mother, then her record label, then her husband — found she liked performing again. She didn’t return to full-time music, at least at first — she held down a day job as the assistant manager of a country club in Virginia — but she found that she still had fans, especially in Europe. In the late seventies Bear Family Records, a German reissue label that specialises in doing comprehensive catalogue releases by 50s country and rock and roll artists, had put out two vinyl albums collecting everything she’d released in the fifties (and this was later put together as a single-CD set, one of their first CD releases, in the mid-eighties), and she’d become known to a new generation of rockabilly fans in Europe, as well as building up a new small fanbase in the USA. So in 1982, she travelled to Europe for the first time since that 1957 tour, and started performing for audiences who, more than anything else, wanted to hear her own song, “Drugstore Rock ‘n’ Roll”. For the last few decades of her life, Janis Martin would regularly tour, even though she hated flying, because she felt she owed it to the fans to let them see her perform. Her son played drums with her band, and audiences would regularly thrill to Janis, as this woman who was now a great-grandmother and looked like any other great-grandmother from Virginia, sang her songs of teenage rebellion. Her third marriage, in 1977, was to a man who had been a fan of hers during her first career, and lasted the rest of her life. She was finally happy. And in 2006 she recorded what was intended to be a comeback album, and she was finally able to fulfil a lifetime ambition, and perform with Ruth Brown, singing the song that changed everything for her when she’d heard it more than fifty years earlier: [Excerpt: Ruth Brown and Janis Martin, “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean”] That was the first and only time Janis Martin and Ruth Brown would meet and perform together. Ruth Brown died in late 2006, and Janis’ son died in early 2007. Janis herself died of cancer in September 2007, having outlived the man with whom she had been compared in her teens by more than thirty years, and having lived to see her work embraced by new generations. There are much worse lives for an Elvis to have had.
Episode forty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Drugstore Rock 'n' Roll", by Janis Martin, an early rockabilly classic by the woman known as "the Female Elvis". 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 "Fever" by Little Willie John ----more---- A brief apology before I go any further. There is no Mixcloud this week, and also I've only done one edit pass, rather than my customary two, on the podcast sound file, so there might be some noises and so on that would otherwise not be on there, and the sound quality may not be as good as normal. A close family member has had a severe medical emergency this weekend, and I haven't been able to put in the time I normally would. Normal service should be resumed next week, and I hope this is at least adequate. Resources There is very little information out there about Janis Martin. Much of this was stitched together from brief mentions in books on other people, and from ten minutes' worth of interview in an out-of-print documentary called Welcome to the Club: The Women of Rockabilly. The single most important source here was the liner notes for the Bear Family CD collecting all Janis' fifties recordings. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Sometimes a novelty act will have real talent, and sometimes the things that can bring you the most success initially can be the very things that stop you from building a career. In the case of Janis Martin, "the female Elvis Presley", those four words were the reason she became successful, and some say they are also the reason she very quickly dropped into obscurity. There are no books about Janis Martin, who as far as I can tell was the first successful female rockabilly artist. There are no films about her. There are just a handful of articles in obscure fanzines, and pages on unvisited websites, to mark the story of a true pioneer of rockabilly music. But I don't think that the way Janis Martin's career stalled was down to that label at all. I think it stalled because of misogyny, plain and simple, and I'm going to explain why in this episode. So a warning right now -- this will deal in passing with abortion and underage marriage. If you are likely to find anything dealing with those things traumatising, please check out the transcript on the podcast website at 500songs.com, to make sure it's something you're comfortable hearing. I won't be going into those things in any great detail, but sometimes better safe than sorry. Janis Martin was born in 1940, and spent her early years as a child country and western act. She started playing the guitar when she was only four, holding it upright because she wasn't big enough yet to play it normally, and by the age of eleven she was a regular on The Old Dominion Barn Dance. This was at a time when the dominant force in country and western music was a series of live variety shows that would be broadcast by different radio stations, and there was a definite hierarchy there. At the very top of the chain was the Grand Ole Opry, whose performers like Roy Acuff would absolutely dominate the whole medium of country music. If you were on the Opry, you were going to be a big star, and you would be heard by everyone. You'd made it. Slightly lower than the Opry were shows like the Louisiana Hayride. The Hayride was for those who were on their way up or on their way down. Elvis Presley got a residency on the show when he went down too badly on the Opry for them to book him again, and Hank Williams started performing on it when he was dropped by the Opry for drunkenness, but it also booked acts who weren't quite well known enough to secure a spot on the Opry, people who were still building their names up. And then, a rung below the Hayride, were shows like the Old Dominion Barn Dance. The Barn Dance had some big name acts -- the Carter Family, Flatt and Scruggs, Joe Maphis -- these weren't small-time no-namers by any means. But it wasn't as big as the Hayride. Young Janis Martin was a country singer, pushed into the role by her domineering mother. But she wasn't massively interested in country music. She liked the honky-tonk stuff -- she liked Hank Williams, "Because he had a little rock to his music": [Excerpt: Hank Williams, "Honky Tonkin'"] But she didn't like bluegrass, and she was starting to get bored with the slow country ballads that dominated the pop part of the country field. But luckily, the further down the rungs you got, the more experimental the hillbilly shows could be, and the more they could deviate from the straight formula insisted on by the shows at the top. Shows like the Opry, while wildly popular, were also extraordinarily conservative. The Barn Dance allowed people to try things that were a little different. Janis Martin was a little different. She changed her whole style with one twist of a radio dial, when she was thirteen. She was going through the radio stations trying to find something she liked, when she hit on a station that was playing "Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean" by Ruth Brown: [Excerpt: Ruth Brown, "Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean"] She immediately decided that that was what she wanted to be singing -- "black R&B", as she would always put it, not country music. She immediately incorporated "Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean" into her set, and started adding a lot of similar songs -- not just Ruth Brown songs, though Brown would always remain her very favourite, but songs by LaVern Baker and Dinah Washington as well. This was not normal, even for the small number of country musicians who were playing R&B songs. Generally, the few who did that were performing music originally recorded by male jump band artists like Louis Jordan or Big Joe Turner. The songs Brown, Baker, and Washington recorded were all closer to jazz than to country music, and it's actually quite hard for me to imagine how one could perform "Mama He Treats Your Daughter Mean" with country instrumentation. But this was what Janis Martin was doing, and it went down well with the Old Dominion Barn Dance audience. What worried some of them was another change that went along with this -- she started performing in a manner that they interpreted as overtly sexual. At thirteen and fourteen years old, she was dancing on the stage in a way that was often compared to Elvis Presley -- someone she'd never heard of at the time, and wasn't that impressed by when she did. She preferred Carl Perkins. She wasn't intending to be vulgar or sexual -- it just made no sense to her *not* to dance while she was singing uptempo R&B-style songs. As she later said, "When I was a little girl doing all those rock 'n' roll moves on the barndances, people thought it was cute. But then, when I was fifteen or sixteen, and wearing a ponytail, and out there moving like Elvis, a lot of people thought it was vulgar." But, at the time, the crowds at the Barndance shows were still happy to hear this music, however different it was from the country music they were used to. Martin's big break came when two staff announcers on WRVA, the station that hosted the barndance, Carl Stutz and Carl Barefoot, brought her a song they'd written, "Will You, Willyum?": [Excerpt: Janis Martin, "Will You, Willyum?"] The song itself was not hugely impressive -- it's a standard boogie rhythm country song, and like many second-rate songs of the time it tries to get itself a little second-hand excitement by namechecking another song -- in this case, it references dancing with Henry, a reference to "the Wallflower". But Martin's demo of the song was enough to catch the ear of Steve Sholes, the A&R man who had signed Elvis a few months earlier, and so in March 1956, aged just fifteen, Janis Martin was signed to RCA Records, one of the biggest labels in the country. Sholes wanted to record "Will You Willyum?" as her first single, but had also suggested that she try writing songs herself. Her very first attempt at writing a song took her, by her own accounts, ten or fifteen minutes to write, and ended up as the B-side. It was "Drugstore Rock 'n' Roll": [Excerpt: Janis Martin, "Drugstore Rock 'n' Roll"] Now, this actually marks something of a turning point in our story, though it may not seem it. Up to this point, the music we've looked at broadly falls into three categories -- R&B and jump band music made by and for black adults, white country musicians imitating that jump band music and generally aiming it at a younger audience, and doo-wop music made by and for black teenagers. "Drugstore Rock 'n' Roll" is the first record we've looked at -- and one of the first records ever made -- to deal specifically with the experience of the white teenagers who were now the music's biggest audience, and deal with it from their own perspective. This is where the 1950s of the popular imagination -- letter sweaters, crewcuts, ponytails, big skirts, dancing to the jukebox, drinking a malt with two straws, the 1950s of "Happy Days" and "American Graffiti" and Archie Comics, all starts. Now, in this, we have to consider that the micro and the macro are telling us rather different things, and that both parts of the picture are true. On the one hand, we have a teenage girl, writing her first ever song, talking about her own experiences and doing so in a musical idiom that she loves. On the other hand, we have a massive corporate conglomerate taking musical styles created by marginalised groups, removing those elements that made them distinctive to those groups, and marketing them at a more affluent, privileged, audience. Both these things were happening at the same time -- and we'll see, as we look at the next few years of rock and roll history, how an influx of well-meaning -- and often great -- individual white artists making music they truly believed in, and with no racist motives as individuals (indeed many of them were committed anti-racists), would still, in aggregate, turn rock and roll from a music that was dominated by black artists and created for a primarily black audience, into one that was created by and for privileged white teenagers. Over the next few years the most popular artists in rock and roll music would go from being black men singing about gay sex and poor white sharecroppers singing about drinking liquor from an old fruit jar to being perky teenagers singing about sock hops and going steady, and Janis Martin was an early example of this. But she was still, ultimately, too individual for the system to cope with. Given that she supposedly moved like Elvis (I say "supposedly" because I haven't been able to find any footage of her to confirm this) and had had a similar career path, RCA decided to market her as "the Female Elvis". They got the permission of Elvis and the Colonel to do so, though Martin only ever met Elvis twice, and barely exchanged a couple of words with him when she did. They also got in some of the same people who performed on Elvis' records. While Elvis' own musicians weren't available, Chet Atkins, who also produced Janis' sessions, and Floyd Cramer were both on most of Janis' early recordings, and came up with a very similar sound to the Elvis records, and on at least some of her records the Jordanaires provided backing vocals, as they did for Elvis. The first single, "Will You Willyum" backed with "Drugstore Rock 'n' Roll" was a hit, and went to number thirty-five in the pop charts. It sold three quarters of a million copies, and led to performances on most of the big TV shows, as well as on the Grand Ole Opry. But the follow-up, "Ooby Dooby" (a cover of a song we'll be dealing with in a future episode) didn't do quite so well. So for her third single they tried to lean into the Elvis comparisons with... a song about Elvis: [Excerpt: "My Boy Elvis", Janis Martin] She wasn't particularly keen on the song, but she had no control over the material she was given -- back then, artists on major labels made the records they were told to make, and that was the end of it. "My Boy Elvis" was, in fact, only one of a large number of novelty records about Elvis that hit in 1956. Novelty records were a huge part of the music industry in the 1950s and 60s, and there would not be a trend that would go by without a dozen people putting out records of one kind or another about the trend. And given that Elvis' rise to stardom was the biggest cultural phenomenon the world had ever seen, it's not surprising that a few record company owners figured that if the kids were interested in buying records by Elvis, they might be tricked into buying records about Elvis too. A typical example of the form was "I Want Elvis For Christmas": [Excerpt: The Holly Sisters, "I Want Elvis For Christmas"] That song was written by two aspiring songwriters -- Don Kirshner, who would later become one of the most important music publishing executives in the world, and a young man named Walden Cassoto, who would soon change his name to Bobby Darin. The person impersonating Elvis was a country singer called Eddie Cochran, who we'll be hearing a lot more about soon. So these novelty records were being released left and right, but very few of them had any success. And Martin's record was no exception. Not only that, the teenage girl audience who were Elvis' biggest fanbase started to resent the marketing -- which she hadn't chosen herself -- comparing her to Elvis. They were in love with Elvis, and didn't like the comparison. Janis was selling records, but not quite at the level RCA initially hoped – they were having trouble building her audience. That was because in 1956, unlike even a year or so later, record labels had no idea what to do with white rock and roll acts aimed at the teen crowd. There were Bill Haley and Elvis, who were in a league of their own, and there were the Sun Records artists who could be packaged together on tours and play to the same crowds. But other than that, rock and roll acts played the chitlin circuit, and that was black acts for black audiences. There was a possible solution to this problem -- Elvis. Colonel Parker, Elvis' manager, was a close associate of Steve Sholes, and believed Sholes when he told Parker that Janis Martin was going places. He wanted to sign Janis to a management contract and promote Elvis and Janis as a double-bill, thinking that having a male-female act would be a good gimmick. But her parents thought this was a bad idea. Just before she had been signed to RCA, Elvis had very publicly collapsed and been hospitalised with exhaustion through overwork. For all that Martin's mother was a pushy stage mother, she didn't want that for her daughter, and so the Colonel never got to sign Janis, and Janis never got to tour and play to Elvis' audience. So since she had come up through the country music scene, and had been signed by RCA's country department, she was put on bills with other RCA country artists like Hank Snow, who made music like this: [Excerpt: Hank Snow, "Wedding Bells"] Understandably, Martin's rock and roll style didn't really fit on the bills, and the audiences were unimpressed. No-one in RCA or her promotional team knew how to deal with a rock and roll star who wasn't the most massive thing on the charts -- there was not, yet, anywhere to put a mid-range rock and roll star. But she continued plugging away, making rockabilly records, and slowly building up a fanbase for herself. She even had a screen test with MGM, the film studio that had signed Elvis up so successfully. But she had a problem, and one that would eventually cause the end of her career. A few months before she was signed to RCA, she had got married. This is less odd than it might now sound. In the southern US in the 1950s, it was perfectly normal for people to get married in their early or mid teens. We will see a few more stories as the series goes on where people have married far, far, too young -- in some cases, because of abuse by an older man, in other cases just because teenage hormones had convinced them that they were definitely mature enough, no matter what those old people said. In this case, she had eloped with a paratrooper, who was stationed in Germany soon after. She only told her parents about the marriage once her husband had left the country. So everything was fine -- while she might have been technically married, it wasn't like she was even on the same continent as her husband, so for all practical purposes it was exactly as if she was the single, sweet, innocent teenage girl that RCA wanted people to think she was. And she didn't see the need to tell RCA any different. What they didn't know couldn't hurt them. And that was all fine, until her 1957 European tour. As she was going to be in Europe anyway, her husband asked for a leave of absence and spent thirty days travelling around with her. And when she got back to the US, she was pregnant. When she informed RCA, they were furious. They couldn't have their seventeen-year-old nation's sweetheart going around being visibly pregnant -- even though one of the songs they'd chosen for her to record at her first session, "Let's Elope Baby", had described her actual experiences rather better than they'd realised: [Excerpt: Janis Martin, "Let's Elope Baby"] And so they came up with what they thought was the obvious solution -- they tried to persuade her to get an abortion, although that was still illegal in the US at the time. She refused, and the label dropped her. She started recording for a small label -- she turned down offers from King and Decca records, and instead went with the tiny Belgian label Palette -- but she never had any success, and soon split from her husband. By 1960, aged twenty, she was on to her second marriage. Her second husband toured with her for a while, but soon told her that if she wanted to stay with him, she would have to give up on the music industry. For the next thirteen years, while she was married to him, she did just that, and her career was over. But then, after her second marriage ended, she put together a band, Janis Martin and the Variations, and started playing gigs again. And the woman whose entire life had been controlled by other people -- first her mother, then her record label, then her husband -- found she liked performing again. She didn't return to full-time music, at least at first -- she held down a day job as the assistant manager of a country club in Virginia -- but she found that she still had fans, especially in Europe. In the late seventies Bear Family Records, a German reissue label that specialises in doing comprehensive catalogue releases by 50s country and rock and roll artists, had put out two vinyl albums collecting everything she'd released in the fifties (and this was later put together as a single-CD set, one of their first CD releases, in the mid-eighties), and she'd become known to a new generation of rockabilly fans in Europe, as well as building up a new small fanbase in the USA. So in 1982, she travelled to Europe for the first time since that 1957 tour, and started performing for audiences who, more than anything else, wanted to hear her own song, "Drugstore Rock 'n' Roll". For the last few decades of her life, Janis Martin would regularly tour, even though she hated flying, because she felt she owed it to the fans to let them see her perform. Her son played drums with her band, and audiences would regularly thrill to Janis, as this woman who was now a great-grandmother and looked like any other great-grandmother from Virginia, sang her songs of teenage rebellion. Her third marriage, in 1977, was to a man who had been a fan of hers during her first career, and lasted the rest of her life. She was finally happy. And in 2006 she recorded what was intended to be a comeback album, and she was finally able to fulfil a lifetime ambition, and perform with Ruth Brown, singing the song that changed everything for her when she'd heard it more than fifty years earlier: [Excerpt: Ruth Brown and Janis Martin, "Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean"] That was the first and only time Janis Martin and Ruth Brown would meet and perform together. Ruth Brown died in late 2006, and Janis' son died in early 2007. Janis herself died of cancer in September 2007, having outlived the man with whom she had been compared in her teens by more than thirty years, and having lived to see her work embraced by new generations. There are much worse lives for an Elvis to have had.
Episode forty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Drugstore Rock ‘n’ Roll”, by Janis Martin, an early rockabilly classic by the woman known as “the Female Elvis”. 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 “Fever” by Little Willie John —-more—- A brief apology before I go any further. There is no Mixcloud this week, and also I’ve only done one edit pass, rather than my customary two, on the podcast sound file, so there might be some noises and so on that would otherwise not be on there, and the sound quality may not be as good as normal. A close family member has had a severe medical emergency this weekend, and I haven’t been able to put in the time I normally would. Normal service should be resumed next week, and I hope this is at least adequate. Resources There is very little information out there about Janis Martin. Much of this was stitched together from brief mentions in books on other people, and from ten minutes’ worth of interview in an out-of-print documentary called Welcome to the Club: The Women of Rockabilly. The single most important source here was the liner notes for the Bear Family CD collecting all Janis’ fifties recordings. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Sometimes a novelty act will have real talent, and sometimes the things that can bring you the most success initially can be the very things that stop you from building a career. In the case of Janis Martin, “the female Elvis Presley”, those four words were the reason she became successful, and some say they are also the reason she very quickly dropped into obscurity. There are no books about Janis Martin, who as far as I can tell was the first successful female rockabilly artist. There are no films about her. There are just a handful of articles in obscure fanzines, and pages on unvisited websites, to mark the story of a true pioneer of rockabilly music. But I don’t think that the way Janis Martin’s career stalled was down to that label at all. I think it stalled because of misogyny, plain and simple, and I’m going to explain why in this episode. So a warning right now — this will deal in passing with abortion and underage marriage. If you are likely to find anything dealing with those things traumatising, please check out the transcript on the podcast website at 500songs.com, to make sure it’s something you’re comfortable hearing. I won’t be going into those things in any great detail, but sometimes better safe than sorry. Janis Martin was born in 1940, and spent her early years as a child country and western act. She started playing the guitar when she was only four, holding it upright because she wasn’t big enough yet to play it normally, and by the age of eleven she was a regular on The Old Dominion Barn Dance. This was at a time when the dominant force in country and western music was a series of live variety shows that would be broadcast by different radio stations, and there was a definite hierarchy there. At the very top of the chain was the Grand Ole Opry, whose performers like Roy Acuff would absolutely dominate the whole medium of country music. If you were on the Opry, you were going to be a big star, and you would be heard by everyone. You’d made it. Slightly lower than the Opry were shows like the Louisiana Hayride. The Hayride was for those who were on their way up or on their way down. Elvis Presley got a residency on the show when he went down too badly on the Opry for them to book him again, and Hank Williams started performing on it when he was dropped by the Opry for drunkenness, but it also booked acts who weren’t quite well known enough to secure a spot on the Opry, people who were still building their names up. And then, a rung below the Hayride, were shows like the Old Dominion Barn Dance. The Barn Dance had some big name acts — the Carter Family, Flatt and Scruggs, Joe Maphis — these weren’t small-time no-namers by any means. But it wasn’t as big as the Hayride. Young Janis Martin was a country singer, pushed into the role by her domineering mother. But she wasn’t massively interested in country music. She liked the honky-tonk stuff — she liked Hank Williams, “Because he had a little rock to his music”: [Excerpt: Hank Williams, “Honky Tonkin'”] But she didn’t like bluegrass, and she was starting to get bored with the slow country ballads that dominated the pop part of the country field. But luckily, the further down the rungs you got, the more experimental the hillbilly shows could be, and the more they could deviate from the straight formula insisted on by the shows at the top. Shows like the Opry, while wildly popular, were also extraordinarily conservative. The Barn Dance allowed people to try things that were a little different. Janis Martin was a little different. She changed her whole style with one twist of a radio dial, when she was thirteen. She was going through the radio stations trying to find something she liked, when she hit on a station that was playing “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean” by Ruth Brown: [Excerpt: Ruth Brown, “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean”] She immediately decided that that was what she wanted to be singing — “black R&B”, as she would always put it, not country music. She immediately incorporated “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean” into her set, and started adding a lot of similar songs — not just Ruth Brown songs, though Brown would always remain her very favourite, but songs by LaVern Baker and Dinah Washington as well. This was not normal, even for the small number of country musicians who were playing R&B songs. Generally, the few who did that were performing music originally recorded by male jump band artists like Louis Jordan or Big Joe Turner. The songs Brown, Baker, and Washington recorded were all closer to jazz than to country music, and it’s actually quite hard for me to imagine how one could perform “Mama He Treats Your Daughter Mean” with country instrumentation. But this was what Janis Martin was doing, and it went down well with the Old Dominion Barn Dance audience. What worried some of them was another change that went along with this — she started performing in a manner that they interpreted as overtly sexual. At thirteen and fourteen years old, she was dancing on the stage in a way that was often compared to Elvis Presley — someone she’d never heard of at the time, and wasn’t that impressed by when she did. She preferred Carl Perkins. She wasn’t intending to be vulgar or sexual — it just made no sense to her *not* to dance while she was singing uptempo R&B-style songs. As she later said, “When I was a little girl doing all those rock ‘n’ roll moves on the barndances, people thought it was cute. But then, when I was fifteen or sixteen, and wearing a ponytail, and out there moving like Elvis, a lot of people thought it was vulgar.” But, at the time, the crowds at the Barndance shows were still happy to hear this music, however different it was from the country music they were used to. Martin’s big break came when two staff announcers on WRVA, the station that hosted the barndance, Carl Stutz and Carl Barefoot, brought her a song they’d written, “Will You, Willyum?”: [Excerpt: Janis Martin, “Will You, Willyum?”] The song itself was not hugely impressive — it’s a standard boogie rhythm country song, and like many second-rate songs of the time it tries to get itself a little second-hand excitement by namechecking another song — in this case, it references dancing with Henry, a reference to “the Wallflower”. But Martin’s demo of the song was enough to catch the ear of Steve Sholes, the A&R man who had signed Elvis a few months earlier, and so in March 1956, aged just fifteen, Janis Martin was signed to RCA Records, one of the biggest labels in the country. Sholes wanted to record “Will You Willyum?” as her first single, but had also suggested that she try writing songs herself. Her very first attempt at writing a song took her, by her own accounts, ten or fifteen minutes to write, and ended up as the B-side. It was “Drugstore Rock ‘n’ Roll”: [Excerpt: Janis Martin, “Drugstore Rock ‘n’ Roll”] Now, this actually marks something of a turning point in our story, though it may not seem it. Up to this point, the music we’ve looked at broadly falls into three categories — R&B and jump band music made by and for black adults, white country musicians imitating that jump band music and generally aiming it at a younger audience, and doo-wop music made by and for black teenagers. “Drugstore Rock ‘n’ Roll” is the first record we’ve looked at — and one of the first records ever made — to deal specifically with the experience of the white teenagers who were now the music’s biggest audience, and deal with it from their own perspective. This is where the 1950s of the popular imagination — letter sweaters, crewcuts, ponytails, big skirts, dancing to the jukebox, drinking a malt with two straws, the 1950s of “Happy Days” and “American Graffiti” and Archie Comics, all starts. Now, in this, we have to consider that the micro and the macro are telling us rather different things, and that both parts of the picture are true. On the one hand, we have a teenage girl, writing her first ever song, talking about her own experiences and doing so in a musical idiom that she loves. On the other hand, we have a massive corporate conglomerate taking musical styles created by marginalised groups, removing those elements that made them distinctive to those groups, and marketing them at a more affluent, privileged, audience. Both these things were happening at the same time — and we’ll see, as we look at the next few years of rock and roll history, how an influx of well-meaning — and often great — individual white artists making music they truly believed in, and with no racist motives as individuals (indeed many of them were committed anti-racists), would still, in aggregate, turn rock and roll from a music that was dominated by black artists and created for a primarily black audience, into one that was created by and for privileged white teenagers. Over the next few years the most popular artists in rock and roll music would go from being black men singing about gay sex and poor white sharecroppers singing about drinking liquor from an old fruit jar to being perky teenagers singing about sock hops and going steady, and Janis Martin was an early example of this. But she was still, ultimately, too individual for the system to cope with. Given that she supposedly moved like Elvis (I say “supposedly” because I haven’t been able to find any footage of her to confirm this) and had had a similar career path, RCA decided to market her as “the Female Elvis”. They got the permission of Elvis and the Colonel to do so, though Martin only ever met Elvis twice, and barely exchanged a couple of words with him when she did. They also got in some of the same people who performed on Elvis’ records. While Elvis’ own musicians weren’t available, Chet Atkins, who also produced Janis’ sessions, and Floyd Cramer were both on most of Janis’ early recordings, and came up with a very similar sound to the Elvis records, and on at least some of her records the Jordanaires provided backing vocals, as they did for Elvis. The first single, “Will You Willyum” backed with “Drugstore Rock ‘n’ Roll” was a hit, and went to number thirty-five in the pop charts. It sold three quarters of a million copies, and led to performances on most of the big TV shows, as well as on the Grand Ole Opry. But the follow-up, “Ooby Dooby” (a cover of a song we’ll be dealing with in a future episode) didn’t do quite so well. So for her third single they tried to lean into the Elvis comparisons with… a song about Elvis: [Excerpt: “My Boy Elvis”, Janis Martin] She wasn’t particularly keen on the song, but she had no control over the material she was given — back then, artists on major labels made the records they were told to make, and that was the end of it. “My Boy Elvis” was, in fact, only one of a large number of novelty records about Elvis that hit in 1956. Novelty records were a huge part of the music industry in the 1950s and 60s, and there would not be a trend that would go by without a dozen people putting out records of one kind or another about the trend. And given that Elvis’ rise to stardom was the biggest cultural phenomenon the world had ever seen, it’s not surprising that a few record company owners figured that if the kids were interested in buying records by Elvis, they might be tricked into buying records about Elvis too. A typical example of the form was “I Want Elvis For Christmas”: [Excerpt: The Holly Sisters, “I Want Elvis For Christmas”] That song was written by two aspiring songwriters — Don Kirshner, who would later become one of the most important music publishing executives in the world, and a young man named Walden Cassoto, who would soon change his name to Bobby Darin. The person impersonating Elvis was a country singer called Eddie Cochran, who we’ll be hearing a lot more about soon. So these novelty records were being released left and right, but very few of them had any success. And Martin’s record was no exception. Not only that, the teenage girl audience who were Elvis’ biggest fanbase started to resent the marketing — which she hadn’t chosen herself — comparing her to Elvis. They were in love with Elvis, and didn’t like the comparison. Janis was selling records, but not quite at the level RCA initially hoped – they were having trouble building her audience. That was because in 1956, unlike even a year or so later, record labels had no idea what to do with white rock and roll acts aimed at the teen crowd. There were Bill Haley and Elvis, who were in a league of their own, and there were the Sun Records artists who could be packaged together on tours and play to the same crowds. But other than that, rock and roll acts played the chitlin circuit, and that was black acts for black audiences. There was a possible solution to this problem — Elvis. Colonel Parker, Elvis’ manager, was a close associate of Steve Sholes, and believed Sholes when he told Parker that Janis Martin was going places. He wanted to sign Janis to a management contract and promote Elvis and Janis as a double-bill, thinking that having a male-female act would be a good gimmick. But her parents thought this was a bad idea. Just before she had been signed to RCA, Elvis had very publicly collapsed and been hospitalised with exhaustion through overwork. For all that Martin’s mother was a pushy stage mother, she didn’t want that for her daughter, and so the Colonel never got to sign Janis, and Janis never got to tour and play to Elvis’ audience. So since she had come up through the country music scene, and had been signed by RCA’s country department, she was put on bills with other RCA country artists like Hank Snow, who made music like this: [Excerpt: Hank Snow, “Wedding Bells”] Understandably, Martin’s rock and roll style didn’t really fit on the bills, and the audiences were unimpressed. No-one in RCA or her promotional team knew how to deal with a rock and roll star who wasn’t the most massive thing on the charts — there was not, yet, anywhere to put a mid-range rock and roll star. But she continued plugging away, making rockabilly records, and slowly building up a fanbase for herself. She even had a screen test with MGM, the film studio that had signed Elvis up so successfully. But she had a problem, and one that would eventually cause the end of her career. A few months before she was signed to RCA, she had got married. This is less odd than it might now sound. In the southern US in the 1950s, it was perfectly normal for people to get married in their early or mid teens. We will see a few more stories as the series goes on where people have married far, far, too young — in some cases, because of abuse by an older man, in other cases just because teenage hormones had convinced them that they were definitely mature enough, no matter what those old people said. In this case, she had eloped with a paratrooper, who was stationed in Germany soon after. She only told her parents about the marriage once her husband had left the country. So everything was fine — while she might have been technically married, it wasn’t like she was even on the same continent as her husband, so for all practical purposes it was exactly as if she was the single, sweet, innocent teenage girl that RCA wanted people to think she was. And she didn’t see the need to tell RCA any different. What they didn’t know couldn’t hurt them. And that was all fine, until her 1957 European tour. As she was going to be in Europe anyway, her husband asked for a leave of absence and spent thirty days travelling around with her. And when she got back to the US, she was pregnant. When she informed RCA, they were furious. They couldn’t have their seventeen-year-old nation’s sweetheart going around being visibly pregnant — even though one of the songs they’d chosen for her to record at her first session, “Let’s Elope Baby”, had described her actual experiences rather better than they’d realised: [Excerpt: Janis Martin, “Let’s Elope Baby”] And so they came up with what they thought was the obvious solution — they tried to persuade her to get an abortion, although that was still illegal in the US at the time. She refused, and the label dropped her. She started recording for a small label — she turned down offers from King and Decca records, and instead went with the tiny Belgian label Palette — but she never had any success, and soon split from her husband. By 1960, aged twenty, she was on to her second marriage. Her second husband toured with her for a while, but soon told her that if she wanted to stay with him, she would have to give up on the music industry. For the next thirteen years, while she was married to him, she did just that, and her career was over. But then, after her second marriage ended, she put together a band, Janis Martin and the Variations, and started playing gigs again. And the woman whose entire life had been controlled by other people — first her mother, then her record label, then her husband — found she liked performing again. She didn’t return to full-time music, at least at first — she held down a day job as the assistant manager of a country club in Virginia — but she found that she still had fans, especially in Europe. In the late seventies Bear Family Records, a German reissue label that specialises in doing comprehensive catalogue releases by 50s country and rock and roll artists, had put out two vinyl albums collecting everything she’d released in the fifties (and this was later put together as a single-CD set, one of their first CD releases, in the mid-eighties), and she’d become known to a new generation of rockabilly fans in Europe, as well as building up a new small fanbase in the USA. So in 1982, she travelled to Europe for the first time since that 1957 tour, and started performing for audiences who, more than anything else, wanted to hear her own song, “Drugstore Rock ‘n’ Roll”. For the last few decades of her life, Janis Martin would regularly tour, even though she hated flying, because she felt she owed it to the fans to let them see her perform. Her son played drums with her band, and audiences would regularly thrill to Janis, as this woman who was now a great-grandmother and looked like any other great-grandmother from Virginia, sang her songs of teenage rebellion. Her third marriage, in 1977, was to a man who had been a fan of hers during her first career, and lasted the rest of her life. She was finally happy. And in 2006 she recorded what was intended to be a comeback album, and she was finally able to fulfil a lifetime ambition, and perform with Ruth Brown, singing the song that changed everything for her when she’d heard it more than fifty years earlier: [Excerpt: Ruth Brown and Janis Martin, “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean”] That was the first and only time Janis Martin and Ruth Brown would meet and perform together. Ruth Brown died in late 2006, and Janis’ son died in early 2007. Janis herself died of cancer in September 2007, having outlived the man with whom she had been compared in her teens by more than thirty years, and having lived to see her work embraced by new generations. There are much worse lives for an Elvis to have had.
Steve Cooper talks with musician John Ford Coley. John is most revered as half of the Grammy nominated duo England Dan and John Ford Coley. With double platinum and gold records behind him he has shared the stage with many of the music industry’s famous hit makers. Some of those include: Elton John, Heart, Fleetwood Mac, Chicago, Carole King, Bread, Loggins and Messina, Led Zepplin, Carly Simon, Bill Cosby, Steve Miller Band, Randy Bachman, Jesse Colin Young, Air Supply, Ambrosia, Poco, Terry Sylvester (formerly of the Hollies), Orleans, Lou Gramm and Gordon Lightfoot, Dan Hill and Stephen Bishop, to name a few. He's also hosted The Midnight Special and co-hosted The Mike Douglas Show and appeared on The Tonight Show, Merv Griffin, David Soul and Friends, Dinah, American Bandstand, Hollywood Squares (A Special Rock Edition), Make Me Laugh, Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert, Prime Time Country, and the Trinity Broadcasting Network. Currently he still records and tours the country.
ESPECIAL EDDIE KIRKLAND ¿Cuántos bluesmen nacidos en Jamaica han grabado con John Lee Hooker o salido de gira con Otis Redding? Solo hay una respuesta: Eddie Kirkland, un músico sorprendente que ha tocado la guitarray la armonica, además de cantar, a lo largo de décadas e incluso salió en el concierto de rock de Don Kirshner realizado para la televisión.
ESPECIAL EDDIE KIRKLAND ¿Cuántos bluesmen nacidos en Jamaica han grabado con John Lee Hooker o salido de gira con Otis Redding? Solo hay una respuesta: Eddie Kirkland, un músico sorprendente que ha tocado la guitarray la armonica, además de cantar, a lo largo de décadas e incluso salió en el concierto de rock de Don Kirshner realizado para la televisión.
Singer, actor and pop culture icon Micky Dolenz returns to the podcast and holds court on a range of topics, including the early days of live television, the tense relationship between the Monkees and Don Kirshner, the lasting influence of "Head" and the secret origin of the infamous Hollywood Vampires. Also, Gilbert rides an elephant, Alice Cooper builds a catapult, Lon Chaney Jr. moves in next door and Howard Hughes scouts talent in the men's room. PLUS: Rondo "The Brute Man" Hatton! William "One Shot" Beaudine! Jerry Lewis takes a hard pass! Frank Zappa extends an invite! And Davy Jones shares the stage with...the Beatles? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Singer Ron Dante joins me on the Mike Wagner talking about how he started with producer Don Kirshner and discovered singer Barry Manilow (later became his producer) , having a big hit with The Archies and Sugar Sugar plus he has some new musicals in production, including about a former famous couple!
This is the big blockbuster episode! Famed songwriter Bobby Hart calls in, recalling his days of co-writing some of the Monkees biggest hits ("Last Train to Clarksville," "Monkees Theme," "Valleri," etc.), his early impression of the guys themselves, the hits, Don Kirshner, writing with partner Tommy Boyce, the Boyce & Hart recording years, later reunions, and so much more! A fabulous interview, where we ask our trademark "off the beaten path" questions! PLUS: Hear the rare Boyce & Hart versions of a few of their Monkees tunes, such as "Teardrop City," and "P.O. Box 9847!" AND: You can also learn how Boyce and Hart affected US history! BONUS: Monkees agent and event organizer Jodi Ritzen calls in, with sea-going tales of the 2018 "Flower Power Cruise," Micky's karaoke events, and much more Monkees machinations! WOW! A contest update! You can still win the treasure trove of rare Monkees goodies! Find out how! Music! Interviews! Updates! Humor! Love! What more could any frantic fan ask for? Come SEE what we discuss on our powerful podcasts, at our fabulous TPCHC blog page! http://tpchcmonkeescast.blogspot.com
Time Codes: 00:00:30 - Introduction 00:003:11 - We get significant listener responses! 00:07:41 - Red Winter 00:32:46 - Motherlands #1 00:50:03 - The Archies #4 01:14:34 - Wrap up 01:15:39 - Contact us This week Gene and Derek discuss, yet again, three diverse titles. They begin with Anneli Furmark's Red Winter (Drawn and Quarterly). It's the the first in a trilogy of graphic novels, although this is Furmark's first work translated into English. The narrative is set in the late 1970s and centers on two lovers struggling with complicating relationships, both marital and political. Each chapter focuses on a particular character involved in the drama, and Furmark's presentation is both contemplative and tonally provocative. The guys eagerly await further Furmark translations coming from Drawn and Quarterly. Next, the Two Guys check out the first issue of a new Vertigo Comics miniseries, Motherlands, written by Si Spurrier and with art by Rachel Stott. This is a sci-fi, futuristic story of a middle-age multi-dimensional bounty hunter, Tabitha Tubach, trying to earn a living, while at the same time struggling with her past and a mother who marked it (and not for the better). And as if familial matters couldn't get more any more trying, the end of this inaugural issue brings additional complications with the emergence of Tabitha's sibling, Bubbsa. Gene and Derek wrap up this week's show with Alex Segura, Matthew Rosenberg, and Joe Eisma's The Archies #4. It's unusual that the guys review an issue of a series beyond the first one or two issues, but this is a special case. The focus of The Archies #4 is a musical group near and dear to both Derek and Gene, The Monkees. That's right, Davy, Mickey, Peter, and Mike meet The Archies...which is not as unusual as you might think. After all, both groups have been perceived as "fictions," both have been categorized as bubblegum pop, both inadvertently find themselves in weird dilemmas, and both have a history with Don Kirshner. Hey hey...
1961 and 1962 are often written off as “the dark ages” of the first rock and roll era -- the original rock & roll revolution was over and the Beatles hadn’t yet come along -- and yet as Ed Ward points out “any time you’re a teenager is the best time for rock and roll!” And sure enough on closer inspection this period produced a lot of great music to discuss. This week we’ll dive deep into the birth of the Beach Boys, Dick Dale and surf music, the explosion of the Twist and how it got away from song writer Hank Ballard, Don Kirshner and his amazing stable of songwriters in the Brill Buildings, Barry Gordy’s struggle to capitalize Motown and what Stax was doing in Memphis.
Go to http://www.EveryoneLovesGuitar.com and sign up to get notified of future episodes and other cool stuff for guitar players, or subscribe on iTunes at http://www.EveryoneLovesGuitar.com/itunes The history of Don Kirshner’s late-night show Guest artists who appeared on the show Some memorable shows, and a slice of nostalgia
Pop vocalist, record producer and "Sugar Sugar" singer Ron Dante joins Gilbert and Frank for an engaging and enjoyable conversation about the history of the legendary Brill Building, the birth of The Archies, the magic touch of Don Kirshner (and Barry Manilow) and the lost art of commercial jingles. Also, Ron mimics Donovan, Larry Fine throws in the towel, Paul Shaffer goes deep-sea fishing and Carole King's babysitter tops the charts. PLUS: "Leader of the Laundromat"! The fabulous Toni Wine! The 1910 Fruitgum Company! "The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan"! And the return of "Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep"! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
With a legendary career spanning more than four decades, KANSAS has firmly established itself as one of America's iconic of classic rock bands. This “garage band” from Topeka released their debut album in 1974 after being discovered by Wally Gold, who worked for Don Kirshner, and have gone on to sell more than 30 million albums worldwide. Composing a catalogue that includes fifteen studio albums and five live albums, KANSAS has produced eight gold albums, three sextuple-Platinum albums (Leftoverture, Point of Know Return, Best of KANSAS), one platinum live album (Two for the Show), and two one million-selling gold singles, Carry On Wayward Son and Dust in the Wind. KANSAS appeared on the Billboard charts for over 200 weeks throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s and played to sold-out arenas and stadiums throughout North America, Europe and Japan. Carry On Wayward Son continues to be one of the top five most played songs on classic rock radio, and Dust In the Wind has been played on the radio more than three million times! Slacker chats with Richard Williams and new Front Man, Ronnie Platt! @KansasBand #slackermorningshow101thefox
Jamie returns to talk about stalker insurance, Yngwie heckling & unusual pet requests.
In this episode recorded LIVE! at the NorthEast Comic Con and Pop Culture Expo on Saturday June 20, 2015 Ken welcomes writer/producer Jeff Kline and actor/comedian Julie McCullough to the show. First up Ken welcomes Jeff Kline. Jeff looks at a TV Guide from the week March 18-24, 1978. Ken and Jeff discuss producing cartoons, Jumanji, finding out you got a job in the papers, the life and death of Saturday Morning Cartoons, UPN, That was Then, being 30 and getting to be 16 again twice, The Starland Vocal Band, generational record business, The Monkees, The Banana Splits, Sid & Marty Kroft, Johnny Carson, KTLA, The Legend of Cougar Canyon, Lawrence Welk, Lechmere, Andy Williams, Wayland Flowers & Madam, the pasts' refusal to admit gayness, dialing is a commitment, Ken's aluminium foil based conspiracy theory, Saturday Night family TV, Wonder Woman, replacing Cathy Lee Crosby with Linda Carter, Eletra Woman and Dynagirl, spending 10 minutes in a hot tub with Pink Lady & Jeff, the Sid and Marty Kroft Amusement park, suing McDonald's, Land of the Lost, Hanna-Barbera formal wear, being starstruck, telling The Rock to sound more dead, exactly what an "executive" does, Party of Five, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Frank Lupo, Werewolf, Matt Helm, re-inventing your youth, GI Joe, Transformers, The 7 Stages of Fandom, Twilight Zone, Star Trek, The Jackie Chan Animated Series, R-Rated movies becoming G-Rated Toys, CG Cartoons, Eddie Albert, Love American Style, The Cowsills, the disgusting nature of Afternoon Delight, Summer Replacement Series, The Kids from C.A.P.E.R., The New Monkees, Don Kirshner, Szysznyk, Mr. President, Kolchak, Richard Matheson, The Outer Limits, Art Carney: World's Most Prolific TV Santa, Paul Shaffer and Greg Evigan's deal with Satan, local kids' shows, the golden age of the variety show, Dolly, Hey Vern! It's Ernest, Ernest Saves Christmas, Prime Time Saturday Morning Preview Specials, favorite Christmas Specials, Police Woman, Battle of the Network Stars, Gabe Kaplan's fury, Busting Loose, and the strange TV career of Don Rickles. Ken then welcomes actress/comedian Julie McCullough. Ken and Julie discuss Game of Thrones, Grizzly Adams, the wonders of color TV, moving around as a Military kid, touring the South, Dark Shadows, ghosts, love of the Munsters leading to a role on The Munsters Today, The Flying Nun, Sally Field, Sid & Marty Kroft, Star Trek, locking into all your interests by age 10, Max Headroom, kissing Superboy, Relic Hunter, playing an Evil Magician, being a Magician's assistant, living with Tia Carerre, Dick Clark, Tony Orlando and Dawn, Hee Haw, Carol Burnett, Drive-Ins, Big Bad Mama, a scoop on Big Bad Mama III, Angie Dickinson, when stunts go wrong, Circus of the Stars, Karen Black: Elephant Trainer, Julie's Carnival roots, Monkey Mazes, Carnival based Reality TV Series, the social implications of Freak Shows, "The Scat", Sleepy Hollow, We Are the Millers, shooting in North Carolina, Growing Pains connection to Abbot and Costello, and loving dying on screen.
Don Kirshner is not exactly a household name, but if you’ve listened to popular music in the last 50 years or so, you’ve probably heard his influence. Who Put the Bomp was one of about 200 songs the music producer helped turn into hits in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. Don Kirshner, a Bronx native, died in January of last year of heart failure at the age of 76. A new book explores the career of this pop-music hit maker. It’s called Don Kirshner: The Man with the Golden Ear. Author Rich Podolsky is our guest on this week's Cityscape.
This is my favorite interview I have ever done. I had the pleasure of interviewing Don for my book, “Moms rate the CEO’s of Life”. Don Kirshner was king from the 50’s to the 70’s. He was called “The Man With The Golden Ear” by Time magazine. He discovered Carol King, Neil Sadaka, Tony Orlando, […] The post Things My Mom Taught Me – Don Kirshner appeared first on WebTalkRadio.net.
My mom taught me many lessons but there were four that were a reoccurring theme. Not only were they lessons i always heard but they were reoccurring themes for the people I interviewed for my book, Moms are the CEO’s of LIfe. I talk about four of these highly successful people, Paul Daugherty, Don Kirshner, […] The post Things My Mom Taught Me – Moms Diamond Lessons and Food for Thought appeared first on WebTalkRadio.net.
This show is all about Don Kirshner
This show is all about Don Kirshner
It a was combination of fate and irony that a young man born in Kansas would eventually play in a band called Kansas. It happened to Phil Ehart, founding member and drummer of a band that would leave a lasting impression in the world of Classic Rock. Legendary Rock promoter Don Kirshner clearly made the right decision when he signed Kansas to their first deal…placing the band on a road to rock success. For decades, Ehart’s steady backing rhythms have been the foundation of the band’s hits, such as Carry On Wayward Son and Dust In The Wind. These classic hits have become timeless gifts to the world that will carry on forever. Follow the evolution of Kansas as Inside MusiCast welcomes the timeless Phil Ehart.
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