Podcast appearances and mentions of don sugarcane harris

Randy Resnick, an American guitarist, songwriter, and saxophonist, has had a long and illustrious career in the music industry. He has jammed with a who's who of famous blues and jazz musicians, including Don "Sugarcane" Harris, John Lee Hooker, John Mayall, Canned Heat, and Freddie King. Resnick's musical journey began in the early 1970s when he started experimenting with his one- and two-handed tapping style. This innovative technique, tapping the guitar strings with both hands, allowed Resnick to create unique and complex soundscapes.Listen to the sounds of Randy Resnick HERECould you say hello on Instagram?Sign up for our occasional newsletter Come Back To EarthFollow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: nottodaymedia.com/earthTheme music by: Lincoln ParishSign up for the Storyteller Society to join a supportive community of listeners and more. Learn more and sign up here.Join our DiscordWe also make Dads Cry Too and What's Your Story?Check out our online shop.Episode transcripts are posted on our website.______________ Show Sponsor:* BetterHelp: https://betterhelp.com/fragilemoments for 10% off your first month.* WHOOP: join.whoop.com/storyteller for a FREE WHOOP 4.0 and one month FREE. Get full access to Come Back To Earth at comebacktoearth.substack.com/subscribe

Episode 123 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'", the Righteous Brothers, Shindig! and "blue-eyed soul".  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 "Wooly Bully" by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs. 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 I say the music in the bridge drops down to “just the bass”. Obviously there is also a celeste on that section. Resources No Mixcloud this week due to the number of Righteous Brothers songs. A lot of resources were used for this episode. Time of My Life: A Righteous Brother's Memoir is Bill Medley'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 Brill Building scene, and I used it for bits about how Mann and Weil wrote their songs. 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. This two-CD set contains all of the Righteous Brothers recordings excerpted here, all their hits, and a selection of Medley and Hatfield's solo work. It would be an absolutely definitive set, except for the Spector-era tracks being in stereo. 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 Today we're going to look at a record that according to BMI is the most-played song of the twentieth century on American radio, and continued to be the most played song for the first two decades of the twenty-first as well, a record that was arguably the artistic highpoint of Phil Spector's career, and certainly the commercial highpoint for everyone involved. We're going to look at "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'" by the Righteous Brothers: [Excerpt: The Righteous Brothers, "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'"] In this episode we're going to take one of our first looks at an American act who owed their success to TV. We've seen these before, of course -- we've talked in passing about Ricky Nelson, and there was an episode on Chubby Checker -- but there have been relatively few. But as we pass into the mid-sixties, and television becomes an even more important part of the culture, we'll see more of this. In 1964, ABC TV had a problem. Two years before, they'd started a prime-time folk TV show called Hootenanny: [Excerpt: Jack Linkletter introducing Hootenanny] That programme was the source of some controversy -- it blacklisted Pete Seeger and a few other Communist folk musicians, and while Seeger himself argued against a boycott, other musicians were enraged, in part because the term Hootenanny had been popularised by Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and other Communist musicians. As a result, several of the top names in the folk scene, like Joan Baez and Ramblin' Jack Elliott, refused to appear on the show.  But plenty of performers did appear on the show, usually those at the poppier end of the spectrum, like the New Christie Minstrels: [Excerpt: The New Christie Minstrels, "This Train (live on Hootenanny)"] That lineup of the New Christie Minstrels featured, among others, Barry McGuire, Gene Clark, and Larry Ramos, all of whom we should be seeing in future episodes.  But that in itself says something about the programme's problems, because in 1964, the music industry changed drastically. Suddenly, folk music was out, and rock music was in. Half the younger musicians who appeared on Hootenanny -- like those three, but also John Sebastian, John Phillips, Cass Elliot, and others -- all decided they were going to give up singing mass harmony versions of "Go Tell it on the Mountain" accompanied by banjo, and instead they were going to get themselves some electric guitars. And the audience, likewise, decided that they'd rather see the Beatles and the Stones and the Dave Clark Five than the New Christie Minstrels, the Limeliters, and the Chad Mitchell Trio, if that was all the same to the TV companies. And so ABC needed a new prime-time music variety show, and they needed it in a hurry. But there was a problem -- when the music industry is shifting dramatically and all of a sudden it's revolving around a style of music that is based on a whole other continent, what do you do to make a TV show featuring that music? Well, you turn to Jack Good, of course.  For those of you who haven't listened to all the earlier episodes, Jack Good had basically invented rock and roll TV, and he'd invented it in the UK, at a time when rock and roll was basically a US-only genre. Good had produced a whole string of shows -- Six-Five Special, Oh Boy!, Boy Meets Girls, and Wham! -- which had created a set of television conventions for the presentation of rock and roll, and had managed to get an audience by using a whole host of British unknowns, with the very occasional guest appearance by a visiting American rocker. In 1962, he'd moved to the US, and had put together a pilot episode of a show called "Young America Swings the World", financed with his own money. That programme had been on the same lines as his UK shows, and had featured a bunch of then-unknowns, like Jackie DeShannon. It had also featured a band led by Leon Russell and containing Glen Campbell and David Gates, none of whom were famous at the time, and a young singer named P.J. Proby, who was introduced to Good by DeShannon and her songwriting partner Sharon Sheeley, whose demos he worked on. We talked a bit about Proby back in the episode on "LSD-25" if you want to go back and listen to the background on that. Sheeley, of course, had known Good when he worked with her boyfriend Eddie Cochran a few years earlier. "Young America Swings the World" didn't sell, and in 1964, Good returned to England to produce a TV special for the Beatles, "Around the Beatles", which also featured Millie singing "My Boy Lollipop", Cilla Black, Sounds Incorporated, the Vernons Girls, and Long John Baldry singing a Muddy Waters song with the Beatles shouting the backing vocals from the audience: [Excerpt: Long John Baldry, "Got My Mojo Working"] The show also featured Proby, who Good had brought over from the US and who here got his first TV exposure, singing a song Rufus Thomas had recorded for Stax: [Excerpt: P.J. Proby, "Walking the Dog"] Around the Beatles obviously sold to the US, and ABC, who bought it, were suddenly interested in Jack Good's old pilot, too. They asked him to produce two more pilots for a show which was eventually named Shindig! Incidentally, I've seen many people, including some on the production staff, say that the first episode of Shindig! was an episode of Ready Steady Go! with the titles changed. It wasn't. The confusion seems to arise because early in Shindig's run, Around the Beatles was also broadcast by ABC, and when Dave Clark later bought the rights to Around The Beatles and Ready Steady Go!, he released a chunk of Around the Beatles on VHS as a Ready Steady Go special, even though it was made by a totally different production team. Good got together with Sharon Sheeley and her husband, the DJ Jimmy O'Neill, and they started collaborating on the pilots for the show, which eventually credited the three of them as co-creators and producers. The second pilot went in a very different direction -- it was a country music programme, hosted by Roy Clark, who would later become a household name for co-hosting Hee-Haw, and featuring Johnny Cash, along with PJ Proby doing a couple of cover versions of old folk songs that Lonnie Donegan had made famous -- "Rock Island Line" and "Cumberland Gap".  But for the third pilot, Good, Sheeley, and O'Neill went back to the old Oh Boy! formula -- they got a couple of properly famous big guest stars, in this case Little Richard and the Angels, who had had a number one the previous year with "My Boyfriend's Back", and a rotating cast of about a dozen unknown or little-known musical acts, all local, who they could fill the show with. The show opened with a medley with all or most of the cast participating: [Excerpt: Shindig Pilot 3 Opening Medley] And then each artist would perform individually, surrounded by a dancing audience, with minimal or no introductions, in a quick-paced show that was a revelation to American audiences used to the polite pacing of American Bandstand. For the most part, they performed cover versions -- on that pilot, even the Angels, rather than doing their own recentish number one record, sang a cover version of "Chapel of Love" -- and in a sign of the British influence, the pilot also featured what may be the first ska performance by an American group -- although they seem to think that "the ska" is a dance, rather than ska being a style of music: [Excerpt: the Hollywood All-Stars, "Jamaica Ska", plus Jimmy O'Neill intro] That show featured Delaney Bramlett, who would later go on to become a fairly well-known and important performer, and the Blossoms, who we've talked about previously. Both of those would become regular parts of the Shindig cast, as would Leon Russell, Bobby Sherman, Jackie and Gayle, Donna Loren, and Glen Campbell. That pilot led to the first broadcast episode, where the two main star acts were Sam Cooke, who sang a non-waltz version of "The Tennessee Waltz" and "Blowin' in the Wind", both from his cabaret act, and the Everly Brothers -- who as well as doing their own songs performed with Cooke at the end of the show in a recording which I only wish wasn't so covered with audience screams, though who can blame the audience? [Excerpt: Sam Cooke and the Everly Brothers, "Lucille"] Shindig was the first prime-time pop music show in the US, and became massively popular -- so much so that it quickly spawned a rival show on NBC, Hullabaloo. In a sign of just how much transatlantic back-and-forth there was at this time, and possibly just to annoy future researchers, NBC's Hullabaloo took its name, though nothing else, from a British TV show of the same name. That British TV show was made by ABC, which is not the same company as American ABC, and was a folk and blues show clearly patterned after Hootenanny, the show Shindig had replaced on American ABC. (And as a quick aside, if you're at all interested in the early sixties British folk and blues movements, I can't recommend Network's double-DVD set of the British Hullabaloo highly enough). Shindig! remained on air for two years, but the show's quality declined markedly after Jack Good left the show a year or so in, and it was eventually replaced on ABC's schedules by Batman, which appealed to largely the same audience. But all that was in the future. Getting back to the first broadcast episode, the Everlys also appeared in the opening medley, where they sang an old Sister Rosetta Tharpe song with Jackie and Gayle and another unknown act who had appeared in the pilot -- The Righteous Brothers: [Excerpt: Jackie and Gayle, The Righteous Brothers, and the Everly Brothers, "Gonna Build a Mountain/Up Above My Head"] The Righteous Brothers would appear on nine out of sixteen episodes broadcast between September and December 1964, and a further seventeen episodes during 1965 -- by which time they'd become the big breakout stars of the show, and had recorded the song that would become the most-played song, *ever*, on American radio, beating out such comparatively unpopular contenders as "Never My Love", "Yesterday", "Stand By Me" and "Can't Take My Eyes Off of You", a record that was played so much that in thirty-six years it had clocked up forty-five years of continuous airtime.  The Righteous Brothers were a Californian vocal duo consisting of baritone Bill Medley and tenor Bobby Hatfield. Medley's career in the music business had started when he was nineteen, when he'd just decided to go to the office of the Diamonds, the white vocal group we mentioned in passing in the episode on "Why Do Fools Fall in Love?" who much like the Crew Cuts had had hits by covering records by Black artists: [Excerpt: The Diamonds, "Little Darlin'"] Young Bill Medley fancied himself as a songwriter, and he brought the Diamonds a few of his songs, and they ended up recording two of them -- "Chimes of My Heart", which remained unreleased until a later compilation, and "Woomai-Ling", which was the B-side to a flop single: [Excerpt: The Diamonds, "Woomai-Ling"] But Medley was inspired enough by his brief brush with success that he decided to go into music properly. He formed a band called the Paramours, which eventually gained a second singer, Bobby Hatfield, and he and Hatfield also started performing as a duo, mostly performing songs by Black R&B artists they grew up listening to on Hunter Hancock's radio show. While Medley doesn't say this directly in his autobiography, it seems likely that the duo's act was based specifically on one particular Black act -- Don and Dewey. We've mentioned Don and Dewey before, and I did a Patreon episode on them, but for those who don't remember their brief mentions, Don "Sugarcane" Harris and Dewey Terry were an R&B duo signed to Specialty Records, and were basically their second attempt at producing another Little Richard, after Larry Williams. They were even less successful than Williams was, and had no hits themselves, but they wrote and recorded many songs that would become hits for others, like "Farmer John", which became a garage-band staple, and "I'm Leaving it Up to You", which was a hit for Donny and Marie Osmond. While they never had any breakout success, they were hugely popular among R&B lovers on the West Coast, and two of their other singles were "Justine": [Excerpt: Don and Dewey, "Justine"] And "Ko Ko Joe", which was one of their few singles written by someone else -- in this case by Sonny Bono, who was at that time working for Specialty: [Excerpt: Don and Dewey, "Ko Ko Joe"] Hatfield and Medley would record both those songs in their early months working together, and would also perform them on Shindig! The duo were different in many ways -- Medley was tall and Hatfield comparatively short, Medley sang in a deep bass-baritone and Hatfield in a high tenor, and Hatfield was gregarious, outgoing, and funny while Medley was self-effacing and shy. The duo would often perform comedy routines on stage, patterned after Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, and Hatfield was always the comedian while Medley was the straight man. But on the other hand, Hatfield was actually quite uncomfortable with any level of success -- he just wanted to coast through life and had no real ambition, while Medley was fiercely driven and wanted to become huge. But they both loved R&B music, and in many ways had similar attitudes to the British musicians who, unknown to them at the time, were trying to play R&B in the UK. They were white kids who loved Black music, and desperately wanted to do justice to it. Orange County, where Medley and Hatfield lived, was at the time one of the whitest places in America, and they didn't really have much competition on the local scene from authentic R&B bands. But there *was* a Marine base in the area, with a large number of Black Marines, who wanted to hear R&B music when they went out. Medley and Hatfield quickly became very popular with these audiences, who would address them as "brother", and called their music "righteous" -- and so, looking for a name for their duo act, they became The Righteous Brothers. Their first single, on a tiny local label, was a song written by Medley, "Little Latin Lupe Lou": [Excerpt: The Righteous Brothers, "Little Latin Lupe Lou"] That wasn't a success to start with, but picked up after the duo took a gig at the Rendezvous Ballroom, the surf-rock venue where Dick Dale had built his reputation. It turned out that "Little Latin Lupe Lou" was a perfect song to dance the Surfer's Stomp to, and the song caught on locally, making the top five in LA markets, and the top fifty nationally. It became a standard part of every garage band's repertoire, and was covered several times with moderate success, most notably by Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, whose cover version made the top twenty in 1966: [Excerpt: Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, "Little Latin Lupe Lou"] The Righteous Brothers became *the* act that musicians in Southern California wanted to see, even though they were very far from being huge -- Elvis, for example, would insist on his friends coming to see the duo when he was in LA filming, even though at the time they were playing at bowling alleys rather than the more glamorous venues his friends would rather visit. Georgie Woods, a Black DJ in Philadelphia who enjoyed their music but normally played Black records coined a term to describe them -- "blue-eyed soul" -- as a way of signalling to his listeners that they were white but he was going to play them anyway. The duo used that as the title of their second album, and it soon became a generic term for white people who were influenced by Black music -- much to Medley's annoyance. As he put it later "It kind of bothers me when other singers call themselves “blue-eyed soul” because we didn't give ourselves that name. Black people named us that, and you don't just walk around giving yourself that title." This will, of course, be something that comes up over and over again in this history -- the question of how much it's cultural appropriation for white people to perform in musical styles created by Black people, and to what extent it's possible for that to be given a pass when the white musicians in question are embraced by Black musicians and audiences. I have to say that *to me*, Medley's attempts to justify the duo's use of Black styles by pointing out how much Black people liked their music don't ring *entirely* true, but that at the same time, I do think there's a qualitative difference between the early Righteous Brothers singles and later blue-eyed soul performers like Michael Bolton or Simply Red, and a difference between a white act embraced by Black audiences and one that is mostly appealing to other white people. This is something we're going to have to explore a lot more over the course of the series, and my statements about what other people thought about this at the time should not be taken as me entirely agreeing with them -- and indeed it shouldn't be taken as me agreeing with *myself*. My own thoughts on this are very contradictory, and change constantly. While "Little Latin Lupe Lou" was a minor hit and established them as locally important, none of their next few singles did anything at all, and nor did a solo single that Bobby Hatfield released around this time: [Excerpt: Bobby Hatfield, "Hot Tamales"] But the duo picked up enough of a following as a live act that they were picked for Shindig! -- and as an opening act on the Beatles' first US tour, which finished the same week that Shindig! started broadcasting. It turned out that even though the duo's records hadn't had any success, the Beatles, who loved to seek out obscure R&B records, had heard them and liked them, and George Harrison was particularly interested in learning from Barry Rillera, the guitarist who played with them, some of  the guitar techniques he'd used. Shindig! took the duo to stardom, even though they'd not yet had a hit. They'd appear most weeks, usually backed by a house band that included Delaney Bramlett, James Burton, Russ Titelman, Larry Knechtel, Billy Preston, Leon Russell, Ray Pohlman, Glenn Hardin, and many other of the finest studio musicians in LA -- most, though not all, of them also part of the Wrecking Crew. They remained favourites of people who knew music, even though they were appearing on this teen-pop show -- Elvis would apparently regularly phone the TV company with requests for them to sing a favourite song of his on the next week's show, and the TV company would arrange it, in the hopes of eventually getting Elvis on the show, though he never made an appearance. Medley had a certain level of snobbery towards white pop music, even after being on that Beatles tour, but it started to soften a bit after the duo started to appear on Shindig! and especially after meeting the Beach Boys on Shindig's Christmas episode, which also featured Marvin Gaye and Adam Faith. Medley had been unimpressed with the Beach Boys' early singles, but Brian Wilson was a fan of the Righteous Brothers, and asked Medley to accompany him into the men's toilets at the ABC studios -- not for any of the reasons one might imagine, but because the acoustics in the room were so good that the studio had actually installed a piano in there. There, Wilson asked Medley to listen to his group singing their version of "The Lord's Prayer": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "The Lord's Prayer"] Medley was blown away by the group's tight harmonies, and instantly gained a new respect for Wilson as an arranger and musician. The two became lifelong friends, and as they would often work in adjoining rooms in the same studio complex, they would often call on each other to help solve a musical problem. And the reason they would work in the same studios is because Brian Wilson was a huge admirer of Phil Spector, and those were the studios Spector used, so Wilson had to use them as well. And Phil Spector had just leased the last two years of the Righteous Brothers' contract from Moonglow Records, the tiny label they'd been on to that point. Spector, at this point, was desperate to try something different -- the new wave of British acts that had come over were swamping the charts, and he wasn't having hits like he had been a few months earlier. The Righteous Brothers were his attempt to compromise somewhat with that -- they were associated with the Beatles, after all, and they were big TV stars. They were white men, like all the new pop stars, rather than being the Black women he'd otherwise always produced for his own label, but they had a Black enough sound that he wasn't completely moving away from the vocal sound he'd always used.  Medley, in particular, was uneasy about working with Spector -- he wanted to be an R&B singer, not a pop star. But on the other hand, Spector made hits, and who didn't want a hit? For the duo's first single on Philles, Spector flew Mann and Weil out from New York to LA to work with him on the song. Mann and Weil took their inspiration from a new hit record that Holland-Dozier-Holland had produced for a group that had recently signed to Motown, the Four Tops: [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "Baby I Need Your Loving"] Mann and Weil took that feeling, and came up with a verse and chorus, with a great opening line, "You never close your eyes any more when I kiss your lips". They weren't entirely happy with the chorus lyric though, considering it a placeholder that they needed to rewrite. But when they played it for Spector, he insisted that "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'" was a perfect title, and shouldn't be changed. Spector added a long bridge, based around a three-chord riff using the "La Bamba" chords, and the song was done. Spector spent an inordinate amount of time getting the backing track done -- Earl Palmer has said that he took two days to get one eight-bar section recorded, because he couldn't communicate exactly how he wanted the musicians to play it. This is possibly partly because Spector's usual arranger, Jack Nitzsche, had had a temporary falling out with him, and Spector was working with Gene Page, who did a very good job at copying Nitzsche's style but was possibly not as completely in tune with Spector's wishes. When Spector and Mann played the song to the Righteous Brothers, Bill Medley thought that the song, sung in Spector and Mann's wispy high voices, sounded more suitable for the Everly Brothers than for him and Hatfield, but Spector insisted it would work. Of course, it's now impossible to think of the song without hearing Medley's rich, deep, voice: [Excerpt: The Righteous Brothers, "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'"] When Mann first heard that, he thought Spector must have put the record on at the wrong speed, Medley's voice was so deep. Bobby Hatfield was also unimpressed -- the Righteous Brothers were a duo, yet Medley was singing the verses on his own. "What am I supposed to do while the big guy's singing?" he asked. Spector's response, "go to the bank!" But while Medley is the featured singer during Mann and Weil's part of the song, Hatfield gets his own chance to shine, in the bridge that Spector added, which for me makes the record -- it's one of the great examples of the use of dynamics in a pop record, as after the bombast of the chorus the music drops down to just a bass, then slowly builds in emotional intensity as Medley and Hatfield trade off phrases: [Excerpt: The Righteous Brothers, "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'"] The record was released in December 1964, and even though the Righteous Brothers didn't even perform it on Shindig! until it had already risen up the charts, it made number one on the pop charts and number two on the R&B charts, and became the fifth biggest hit of 1965 in the US.  In the UK, it looked like it wasn't going to be a hit at all. Cilla Black, a Liverpudlian singer who was managed by Brian Epstein and produced by George Martin, rushed out a cover version, which charted first: [Excerpt: Cilla Black, "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'"] On their second week on the charts, Black was at number twelve, and the Righteous Brothers at number twenty. At this point, Andrew Oldham, the Rolling Stones' manager and a huge fan of Spector's work, actually took out an ad in Melody Maker, even though he had no financial interest in the record (though it could be argued that he did have an interest in seeing his rival Brian Epstein taken down a peg), saying: "This advert is not for commercial gain, it is taken as something that must be said about the great new PHIL SPECTOR Record, THE RIGHTEOUS BROTHERS singing ‘YOU'VE LOST THAT LOVIN' FEELING'. Already in the American Top Ten, this is Spector's greatest production, the last word in Tomorrow's sound Today, exposing the overall mediocrity of the Music Industry. Signed Andrew Oldham P.S. See them on this week's READY, STEADY, GO!" The next week, Cilla Black was at number two, and the Righteous Brothers at number three. The week after, the Righteous Brothers were at number one, while Black's record had dropped down to number five. The original became the only single ever to reenter the UK top ten twice, going back into the charts in both 1969 and 1990. But Spector wasn't happy, at all, with the record's success, for the simple reason that it was being credited as a Righteous Brothers record rather than as a Phil Spector record. Where normally he worked with Black women, who were so disregarded as artists that he could put records by the Ronettes or the Blossoms out as Crystals records and nobody seemed to care, here he was working with two white men, and they were starting to get some of the credit that Spector thought was due only him.  Spector started to manipulate the two men. He started with Medley, who after all had been the lead singer on their big hit. He met up with Medley, and told him that he thought Bobby Hatfield was dead weight. Who needed a second Righteous Brother? Bill Medley should go solo, and Spector should produce him as a solo artist. Medley realised what was happening -- the Righteous Brothers were a brand, and Spector was trying to sabotage that brand. He turned Spector down. The next single was originally intended to be a song that Mann and Weil were working on, called "Soul and Inspiration", but Spector had second thoughts, and the song he chose was written by Goffin and King, and was essentially a rewrite of "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'". To my mind it's actually the better record, but it wasn't as successful, though it still made the US top ten: [Excerpt: The Righteous Brothers, "Just Once in My Life"] For their third Philles single, Spector released "Hung on You", another intense ballad, very much in the mould of their two previous singles, though not as strong a song as either. But it was the B-side that was the hit. While Spector produced the group's singles, he wasn't interested in producing albums, leaving Medley, a decent producer in his own right, to produce what Spector considered the filler tracks. And Medley and Hatfield had an agreement that on each album, each of them would get a solo spot.  So for Hatfield's solo spot on the first album the duo were recording for Philles, Medley produced Hatfield singing the old standard "Unchained Melody", while Medley played piano: [Excerpt: The Righteous Brothers, "Unchained Melody"] That went out on the B-side, with no production credit -- until DJs started playing that rather than "Hung on You". Spector was furious, and started calling DJs and telling them they were playing the wrong side, but they didn't stop playing it, and so the single was reissued, now with a Spector production credit for Medley's production. "Unchained Melody" made the top five, and now Spector continued his plans to foment dissent between the two singers. This time he argued that they should follow up "Unchained Melody" with "Ebb Tide" -- "Unchained Melody" had previously been a hit for both Roy Hamilton and Al Hibbler, and they'd both also had hits with "Ebb Tide", so why not try that? Oh, and the record was only going to have Bobby Hatfield on. It would still be released as a Righteous Brothers record, but Bill Medley wouldn't be involved. That was also a hit, but it would be the last one the duo would have with Philles Records, as they moved to Mercury and Medley started producing all their records. But the damage had been done -- Spector had successfully pit their egos against each other, and their working relationship would never be the same. But they started at Mercury with their second-biggest hit -- "Soul and Inspiration", the song that Mann and Weil had written as a follow-up to "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'": [Excerpt: The Righteous Brothers, "(You're My) Soul and Inspiration"] That went to number one, and apparently to this day Brian Wilson will still ask Bill Medley whenever they speak "Did you produce that? Really?", unable to believe it isn't a Phil Spector production. But the duo had been pushed apart. and were no longer happy working together. They were also experiencing personal problems -- I don't have details of Hatfield's life at this period, but Medley had a breakdown, and was also having an affair with Darlene Love which led to the breakup of his first marriage. The duo broke up in 1968, and Medley put out some unsuccessful solo recordings, including a song that Mann and Weil wrote for him about his interracial relationship with Love, who sang backing vocals on the record. It's a truly odd record which possibly says more about the gender and racial attitudes of everyone involved at that point than they might have wished, as Medley complains that his "brown-eyed woman" doesn't trust him because "you look at me and all you see are my blue eyes/I'm not a man, baby all I am is what I symbolise", while the chorus of Black women backing him sing "no no, no no" and "stay away": [Excerpt: Bill Medley, "Brown-Eyed Woman"] Hatfield, meanwhile, continued using the Righteous Brothers name, performing with Jimmy Walker, formerly the drummer of the Knickerbockers, who had been one-hit wonders with their Beatles soundalike "Lies": [Excerpt: The Knickerbockers, "Lies"] Walker and Hatfield recorded one album together, but it was unsuccessful, and they split up. Hatfield also tried a solo career -- his version of "Only You" is clearly patterned after the earlier Righteous Brothers hits with "Unchained Melody" and "Ebb Tide": [Excerpt: Bobby Hatfield, "Only You"] But by 1974, both careers floundering, the Righteous Brothers reformed -- and immediately had a hit with "Rock and Roll Heaven", a tribute to dead rock stars, which became their third highest-charting single, peaking at number three. They had a couple more charting singles, but then, tragically, Medley's first wife was murdered, and Medley had to take several years off performing to raise his son. They reunited in the 1980s, although Medley kept up a parallel career as a solo artist, having several minor country hits, and also having a pop number one with the theme song from Dirty Dancing, "I've Had the Time of My Life", sung as a duet with Jennifer Warnes: [Excerpt: Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes, "I've Had the Time of My Life"] A couple of years later, another Patrick Swayze film, Ghost, would lead to another unique record for the Righteous Brothers. Ghost used "Unchained Melody" in a crucial scene, and the single was reissued, and made number nineteen in the US charts, and hit number one in many other countries. It also sparked a revival of their career that made "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'" rechart in the UK.  But "Unchained Melody" was only reissued on vinyl, and the small label Curb Records saw an opportunity, and got the duo to do a soundalike rerecording to come out as a CD single. That CD single *also* made the top twenty, making the Righteous Brothers the only artist ever to be at two places in the top twenty at the same time with two versions of the same song -- when Gene and Eunice's two versions of "Ko Ko Mo" had charted, they'd been counted as one record for chart purposes. The duo continued working together until 2003, when Bobby Hatfield died of a cocaine-induced heart attack. Medley performed as a solo artist for several years, but in 2016 he took on a partner, Bucky Heard, to perform with him as a new lineup of Righteous Brothers, mostly playing Vegas shows. We'll see a lot more blue-eyed soul artists as the story progresses, and we'll be able to look more closely at the issues around race and appropriation with them, but in 1965, unlike all the brown-eyed women like Darlene Love who'd come before them, the Righteous Brothers did become the first act to break free of Phil Spector and have hits without him -- though we will later see at least one Black woman Spector produced who became even bigger later. But still, they'll always be remembered primarily for the work they did with Spector, and somewhere, right now, at least one radio station is still playing "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'", and it'll probably continue to do so as long as radio exists. 

Hot Rats es el segundo álbum en solitario Frank Zappa, lanzado en octubre de 1969. Fue el primer proyecto de grabación de Zappa después de la disolución de la versión original de Mothers of Invention. Cuenta con el trabajo de varios artistas además de Zappa, incluyendo un ex miembro de Mothers of Invention, Capitán Beefheart y Don "Sugarcane" Harris. Cinco de las seis canciones son instrumentales; la otra, "Willie el Pimp", cuenta con la voz de Beefheart. En sus notas originales de la manga, Zappa describió el álbum como "una película para tus oídos".

Por Pachi Tapiz. "Accidental Suicide" John Mayall: Archives to Eighties (Polydor, 1988) Don Sugarcane Harris, John Mayall, Eric Clapton, Harvey Mandel, Mick Taylor, Bobby Haynes, Joe Yuele... © Pachi Tapiz, 2020 JazzX5 es un minipodcast de HDO de la Factoría Tomajazz presentado, editado y producido por Pachi Tapiz. JazzX5 comenzó su andadura el 24 de junio de 2019. Todas las entregas de JazzX5 están disponibles en https://www.tomajazz.com/web/?cat=23120 / https://www.ivoox.com/jazzx5_bk_list_642835_1.html.

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

Episode fifty-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "I Put a Spell on You" by Screamin' Jay Hawkins, and the career of a man who had more than fifty more children than hit records. 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 "Since I Met You Baby" by Ivory Joe Hunter ----more----   Erratum I only noticed while doing the final edit for this episode that I used the words "legitimate" and "illegitimate" to describe children, and that this usage could quite possibly be considered offensive, something I hadn't realised when writing or recording it. I apologise if anyone does take offence. Resources No Mixcloud this week, as the episode is so heavy on Hawkins that it would violate Mixcloud's terms and conditions. I tried to put together a Spotify playlist instead, but a few of the recordings I use here aren't on Spotify. As I mention in the episode, I leaned very heavily on one book here, I Put a Spell on You: The Bizarre Life of Screamin' Jay Hawkins by Steve Bergsman. There are many compilations of Hawkins' work. This double-CD set containing all his work up to 1962 is as good as any and ridiculously cheap. Finally, you should also listen to this short audio documentary on the search for Jay's kids, as it features interviews with a couple of them. They deserve to have their voices heard.    Patreon   This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start, an acknowledgment. I like to acknowledge in the podcast when I've relied heavily on one source, and in this case the source I'm relying on most is Steve Bergsman's book "I Put a Spell on You: The Bizarre Life of Screamin' Jay Hawkins". That book only came out this year, so it deserves the acknowledgment even more than normal. If you like this episode, you might well want to buy Mr. Bergsman's book, which has a lot more information. There are a lot of one-hit wonders in the history of rock and roll. And most of those one-hit wonders might as well have had no hits for all the impact they actually made on the genre. Of the thousands of people who have hits, many of them drop off the mental radar as soon as their chart success ends. For every Beatles or Elvis there's a Sam And The Womp or Simon Park Orchestra. But some one-hit wonders are different. Some one-hit wonders manage to get an entire career out of that one hit. And in the case of Screamin' Jay Hawkins, not only did he do that, but he created a stage show that would inspire every shock-rocker ever to wear makeup, and indirectly inspire a minor British political party. The one hit he recorded, meanwhile, was covered by everyone from Nina Simone to Marilyn Manson. [Excerpt: Screamin' Jay Hawkins, "I Put A Spell On You"] It's hard to separate truth from myth when it comes to Screamin' Jay Hawkins, not least because he was an inveterate liar. He always claimed, for example, that in his time in the army he had been captured by the Japanese and tortured for eighteen months. According to Army records, he joined the army in December 1945 and was honourably discharged in 1952. Given that World War II ended in September 1945, that would tend to suggest that his story about having been a Japanese prisoner of war was, perhaps, not one hundred percent truthful. And the same thing goes for almost everything he ever said. So anything you hear here is provisional. What we do know is that he seems to have grown up extremely resentful of women, particularly his mother. He was, depending on which version of the story you believe, the youngest of four or seven children, all from different fathers, and he, unlike his older siblings, was fostered from an early age. He resented his mother because of this, but does not seem to have been particularly bothered by the fact that his own prodigious fathering of children by multiple women, all of whom he abandoned, will have put those children in the same position. He variously claimed to have between fifty-seven and seventy-five children. Thirty-three have been traced, so this seems to be one of those rare occasions where he was telling the truth. So this is another of the all too many episodes where I have to warn listeners that we are dealing with someone who behaved appallingly towards women. I am not going to go into too many details here, but suffice to say that Hawkins was not an admirable man. Jalacey Hawkins was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and would often claim that he had musical training at the Ohio Conservatory of Music. This is, you will be shocked to hear, not true -- not least because there was not, in fact, an Ohio Conservatory of Music for him to train at. Instead, he learned his trade as a musician in the armed forces, where he was not, in fact, sent into Japan in a combat role aged fourteen. Instead, he joined the Special Services, the people who put on shows for the rest of the military, and learned the saxophone. As well as his stories about being a prisoner of war, he also used to claim on a regular basis that the reason he'd loved being in the military so much was because you were allowed to kill people and wouldn't get punished for it. History does not record exactly how many people his saxophone playing killed. After his discharge from the military in 1952, he abandoned his first wife and children -- telling them he was popping to the shop and then not seeing them again for two years. Around this time he hooked up with Tiny Grimes, who is yet another person who often gets credited as the creator of the "first rock and roll record", this one a 1946 song called "Tiny's Boogie": [Excerpt: Tiny Grimes, "Tiny's Boogie"] Tiny Grimes was a strange figure who straddled the worlds of jazz and R&B, and who had played with great jazz figures like Charlie Parker and Art Tatum as an instrumentalist, but who as a singer was firmly in the rock and roll world. He had seen his greatest success with a rock and roll version of the old Scottish folk song "Loch Lomond" [Excerpt: Tiny Grimes "Loch Lomond"] As a result of that, he'd started performing in a kilt, and calling himself Tiny "Mac" Grimes and His Rocking Highlanders. Grimes first met Hawkins backstage at the Moondog Coronation Ball -- a legendary gig put on by Alan Freed in 1952, which was the first big sign to Freed of just how successful rock and roll was going to become. At that show, so many more people tried to get in than the venue had capacity for -- thanks, largely, to forged tickets being sold -- that the show became dangerously overcrowded, and had to be cancelled after a single song from the first artist on the bill. So Grimes didn't get to play that day, but Jalacey Hawkins, as he was still then known, managed to get himself backstage and meet Grimes. Hawkins did this through Freed, who Hawkins had got to know shortly after his discharge from the military. When he'd got back to Cleveland, he'd heard Freed on the radio and been amazed that they let a black man have his own show, so he'd gone down to the radio station to meet him, and been even more amazed to find out that the man who sounded black, and was playing black music, was in fact white. For decades afterwards, Hawkins would describe Freed as one of the very few white people in the world who actually cared about black people and black music. The two had struck up a friendship, and Hawkins had managed to get backstage at Freed's show. When he did, he just went up to Grimes and asked for a job. Grimes gave him a job as a combination road manager and musician -- Hawkins would play piano and saxophone, sing occasionally, and was also (according to Hawkins) Grimes' valet and dog walker. Working with Grimes is where Hawkins first started performing outrageously on stage. Grimes' band already dressed in Scottish clothing, and put on quite a bit of a show, but Hawkins pushed things a little further. He would, for example, come out on stage in his kilt and with tins of Carnation evaporated milk hanging on his chest as if they were breasts. He would then sing Ruth Brown's hit "Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean". [Excerpt: Ruth Brown, "Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean" According to Hawkins, Ruth Brown came to see the show at one point, and said of him "This is the only bitch who can sing my song better than me". That doesn't sound especially like Brown, it has to be said. Hawkins started recording with Grimes, and started to be billed as "Screamin' Jay Hawkins" -- a stage name which, again, he gave varying origins for. The most likely seems to be the one he gave in a documentary, in which he said that he couldn't sing, but had to take lead vocals, so he decided to just scream everything, because at least that would be different. Quite how that tallies with his ability to sing better than Ruth Brown, it's best not to wonder. Either way, his early recordings show him trying to fit into the standard R&B vocal styles of the time, rather than screaming. On his first record, with Grimes, he's not the blues shouter that he had a reputation of being, and nor is he the screamer he would later become -- instead he sounds like he's imitating Clyde McPhatter's singing on "The Bells" by Billy Ward and His Dominoes, but in a bass register somewhat reminiscent of Paul Robeson. Compare Hawkins here: [Excerpt: Tiny Grimes with Screamin' Jay Hawkins, "Why Did You Waste My Time?"] With McPhatter on the Billy Ward record: [Excerpt: Billy Ward and His Dominoes, "The Bells"] You can hear the resemblance there, I'm sure. At this point Hawkins had a certain amount of potential, but was just one of a million smooth blues singers, who relied more on stage gimmicks than on singing ability. But those stage gimmicks were making him a breakout star in Grimes' band, and so at a recording session for Grimes, it was agreed that Hawkins could record a single of his own at the end of the session, if there was time. Hawkins' attitude quickly caused problems for him, though. During the recording of "Screamin' Blues", which would have been his first single, he got into an argument with Ahmet Ertegun, who kept telling him to sing the song more smoothly, like Fats Domino. Accounts of what happened next vary -- Hawkins' most frequent version was that he ended up punching Ertegun, though other people just say that the two got into a screaming row. Either way, the session was abandoned, and Hawkins soon ended up out of Grimes' band. He worked with a few different bands, before getting a big break as Fats Domino's opening act. He only lasted a few weeks in that role -- depending on who you asked, Domino either fired Hawkins for being vulgar on stage and screaming, as Domino claimed, or because he was jealous of Hawkins' great leopardskin suit, as Hawkins would sometimes claim. Wynonie Harris saw something in Hawkins, and helped him get his first solo shows in New York, and on the back of these he made his first records as a solo artist, for the tiny label Timely Records, under his birth name, Jalacey Hawkins, and featuring Mickey Baker, who would play on most of his fifties sessions, on guitar: [Excerpt: Jalacey Hawkins, "Baptize Me in Wine"] But unfortunately, after two of these singles, Timely Records folded, and Hawkins had to find another label. He moved on to Grand Records, and started recording as Screamin' Jay Hawkins. By this time, he had started using some of the gimmicks he would use in his stage show, though for the most part his act was still fairly tame by modern standards. He was also still, at least in the recording studio, making fairly standard jump blues records, like this one, the first he recorded as a solo artist under his stage name: [Excerpt, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, "Take Me Back"] That was the only single that saw release from his time with Grand Records, and it's not even certain that it was released until a year or so later -- reports seem to vary about this. But it was while he was recording for Grand Records that he wrote the song that would bring him worldwide fame. It came about, as so much of Hawkins' life did, from his mistreatment of a woman. He was playing a residency in Atlantic City, and he had a live-in girlfriend from Philadelphia. But, as was always the case with Hawkins, he was cheating on her with multiple other women. Eventually she figured this out, and walked into the bar in the middle of one of his sets, threw his keys onto the stage, and walked out, blowing him a kiss. He didn't realise what had happened until he was talking to the barmaid later, and she explained to him that no, that meant his girlfriend was definitely leaving. He brooded over this for a day, and then had another conversation with the barmaid, and told her he was planning to go to Philadelphia to get the girl back. She said "so you think she'll come back to you, do you?" and he replied "yes, I'll get her back, even if I have to put a spell on her -- that's it! I'll write a song about putting a spell on her, and she'll realise how much I love her and come back!" Hawkins would later claim that when, two years later, the song was finally released, she did come back -- not because of "I Put A Spell On You", but because she loved the B-side, a song called "Little Demon". As Hawkins told the story, she came back to him, they stayed together for four months, and then he dumped her. He hadn't wanted her back because he loved her, he'd wanted her back so that he could be the one to do the dumping, not her. Whatever the truth of that last part, he recorded "I Put A Spell on You" some time around late 1954, but that version wouldn't be released until decades later: [Excerpt: Screamin' Jay Hawkins, "I Put A Spell on You (unreleased version)"] It's a decent record, but there's something missing, and for whatever reason, it never came out. Instead, he signed to yet another label, Mercury, which was at the time somewhere between a large independent label and a small major, and started putting out singles just as "Jay Hawkins". By this time, he'd found a regular team of people to work with -- Leroy Kirkland was the arranger, and Mickey Baker would play guitar, Sam "the Man" Taylor and Al Sears were on saxophone, and Panama Francis was on drums. That core team would work on everything he did for the next couple of years. It was while he was at Mercury that he hit on the style he would use from that point on, with a B-side called "(She Put The) Wamee (On Me)", a song about voodoo and threatening to murder a woman who'd cast a spell on him that, in retrospect, has all the elements of Hawkins' later hit in place, just with the wrong song: [Excerpt: Jay Hawkins, "(She Put The) Wamee (On Me)"] That was Hawkins' first truly great record, but it was hidden away on a B-side and did nothing. After a couple more singles, Hawkins was once again dropped by his label -- but once again, he moved on to a slightly bigger label, this time to OKeh, which was a subsidiary of Columbia, one of the biggest labels in the country. And in September 1956, he went into the studio to record his first single for them, which was to be a new version of "I Put a Spell on You". But Arnold Maxim, the producer at the session, wanted something a bit different from Hawkins. He thought that everyone sounded a little too staid, a little too uptight, and he asked why they couldn't sound in the studio like they did when they were having fun on stage and really cutting loose. Hawkins replied that when they were on stage everyone was usually so drunk they couldn't *remember* what it was they'd been doing. So Maxim decided to order in some crates of beer and fried chicken, and told them "this isn't a recording session, it's a party. Have fun." When they were drunk enough, he started recording, and the result was this: [Excerpt: Screamin' Jay Hawkins, "I Put A Spell On You"] Now, in later years, Hawkins would try to claim that he had been tricked into that performance, and that he'd had to relearn the song from the record after the fact, because he couldn't remember what it was he'd been doing. In truth, though, it's not that different from a record like "(She Put the) Wamee (On Me)", and it seems more than likely that this is yet more of Hawkins' exaggeration. The record didn't chart, because many radio stations refused to play it, but it nonetheless became a classic and reportedly sold over a million copies. This was in part due to the efforts of Alan Freed. Hawkins was already starting to play up his stage persona even more -- wearing capes and bones through his nose, and trying to portray a voodoo image. But when he was booked as the headline act on a Christmas show Freed put together in 1956, Freed surprised him by telling him he'd had a great idea for the show -- he'd got hold of a coffin, and Hawkins could start his performance by rising out of the coffin like a vampire or zombie. Hawkins was horrified. He told Freed that there was only one time a black man was ever getting into a coffin, and that was when he was never getting out again. Freed insisted, and eventually ended up paying Hawkins a large bonus -- which Hawkins would later claim was multiple thousands of dollars, but which actually seems to have been about three hundred dollars, itself a lot of money in 1956. Hawkins eventually agreed, though he kept a finger between the coffin and the lid, so it couldn't close completely on him. This was the start of Hawkins' career as a shock-rocker, and he became known as "the black Vincent Price" for his stage shows which would include not only the coffin but also a skull on a stick with smoke coming out of it (the skull was named Henry) and a giant rubber snake. Many horror-themed rock acts of the future, such as Alice Cooper or the Cramps, would later use elements of Hawkins' stage shows -- and he would increasingly make music to match the show, so that he later recorded a song called "Constipation Blues", which he would perform while sitting on a toilet on stage. But in 1957, neither he nor the record label seemed quite sure what they should do to follow up "I Put a Spell on You". That record had traded heavily on its shock value, to the extent that OKeh's trade ads contained the line "DJs be brave -- if you get fired, we'll get you a job!" however, only one DJ did get fired for playing it, one Bob Friesen. He contacted OKeh, but they didn't get him a job -- and eventually someone working for the company told Billboard this, Billboard publicised the story, and another station hired Friesen for the publicity that would get them. OKeh actually edited the single shortly after release, to get rid of some of the grunts at the end, which people variously described as "orgiastic" and "cannibalistic", but it didn't make the record any more palatable to the professionally outraged. But the next record went completely the other way -- a cover version of the old standard "You Made Me Love You (I Didn't Want to Do it)": [Excerpt: Screamin' Jay Hawkins, "You Made Me Love You (I Didn't Want to Do It)"] I can see why they thought that was a good idea before recording it -- Fats Domino had just had a massive hit with "Blueberry Hill", another old standard done in a similar arrangement to the one on Hawkins' record, but still... The next couple of records were more in the style one might expect from Hawkins, a track called "Frenzy", and a great Leiber and Stoller swamp-rocker called "Alligator Wine": [Excerpt: Screamin' Jay Hawkins, "Alligator Wine"] But neither of those was a success either -- partly because Hawkins went too far in the other direction. He had the opportunity to appear in Alan Freed's film "Mister Rock and Roll" to promote "Frenzy", but while every other act in the film performed in suits or were similarly well-dressed, Hawkins insisted on performing naked apart from a loincloth, with his hair sticking up, white face-paint, and carrying a spear and a shield -- his idea of what a Mau Mau rebel in Kenya looked like (the Mau Mau fighters did not look like this). Or at least that was his later description of what he was wearing. Others who've seen the footage suggest it wasn't quite that extreme, but still involved him being half-naked and looking like a "native". Hawkins had already been getting a certain amount of criticism from the NAACP and other civil rights groups because they believed that he was making black people look bad by associating them with voodoo and cannibalism. Paramount Pictures decided that they didn't particularly want to have their film picketed, and so removed Hawkins' section from the film. Hawkins' attitude to the NAACP was that as far as he was concerned the only thing they were doing for black people was trying to stop him earning a living, and he wanted nothing to do with them. (This was not a common attitude among black people at the time, as you might imagine.) And so, once again, things went to the other extreme. Hawkins put out his first album. It was called "At Home With Screamin' Jay Hawkins", had a cheery photo of Hawkins in a Santa hat on the cover, and mixed in his recent singles, a couple of new originals (including one called "Hong Kong" which is mostly just Hawkins making racist "ching chong" sounds) and... versions of "I Love Paris in the Springtime", "Ol' Man River", and other extremely non-voodoo-shock-rock songs. Unsurprisingly, it wasn't a success. He was dropped by OKeh and moved to a tiny label, where he started recording more idiosyncratic material like "Armpit #6": [Excerpt: Screamin' Jay Hawkins, "Armpit #6"] But any chance of a comeback was pretty much destroyed when he was arrested in 1958 for possession of cannabis and statutory rape, after having had sex with a fifteen-year-old girl. After he got out of prison, he moved to Hawaii for a while, and became a performer again, although there was a temporary hiccup in his career when his girlfriend and singing partner stabbed him after she found out he'd married someone else without telling her. She presumably also didn't know that he was still married to his first wife at the time. Hawkins' career remained in the doldrums until 1965, when two things happened almost simultaneously. The first was that Nina Simone recorded a cover version of "I Put a Spell on You", which made the top thirty in the US charts: [Excerpt: Nina Simone, "I Put a Spell on You"] The second was that Hawkins got rediscovered in the UK, in quite a big way. There was a club in Manchester called the Twisted Wheel, which was legendary in soul and R&B circles -- to the extent that when I saw P.P. Arnold in its successor venue Night People two weeks ago, she kept referring to it as the Twisted Wheel, even though the original club closed down in 1971, because she had such strong memories of the original venue. And among the regular attendees of that club were a group of people who loved the few Screamin' Jay Hawkins records they'd been able to get hold of. Hawkins had been popular enough that a British act, Screamin' Lord Sutch and the Savages, had stolen his act wholesale, cape, coffin, and all: [Excerpt: Screamin' Lord Sutch and the Savages, "Jack the Ripper"] Screamin' Lord Sutch would later go on to form the Monster Raving Loony Party, a political party intended as a joke that still continues to field candidates at every election twenty years after Sutch's death. But while people like Sutch had admired him, Hawkins was mostly a legend in British blues circles, someone about whom almost nothing was known. But then some of the Twisted Wheel people went to see Little Richard at the Oasis club, another famous Manchester venue, and got chatting to Don "Sugarcane" Harris, from the support act Don and Dewey. He mentioned that he'd recently seen Hawkins, and he was still doing the same show, and so the British blues and soul fans tracked him down and persuaded the promoter Don Arden to put on a tour of the UK, with Hawkins using the Twisted Wheel as his base. The tour wasn't a commercial success, but it built Hawkins' reputation in Britain to the point that it seemed like *every* beat group wanted to record "I Put a Spell on You". Between 1965 and 1968, it was recorded by Manfred Mann, the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, the Animals, Them (featuring Van Morrison) and Alan Price, who made the top ten in the UK with his version: [Excerpt: The Alan Price Set, "I Put a Spell on You"] Hawkins even got to record a second album, finally, in Abbey Road studios, and he started to tour Europe successfully and build up a major fanbase. But Hawkins' self-destructive -- and other-people-destructive -- tendencies kicked in. The next few decades would follow a recurring pattern -- Hawkins would get some big break, like opening for the Rolling Stones at Madison Square Garden, or recording an album with Keith Richards guesting, or finally getting to appear in a film. Every time, he would let his addictions to alcohol or codeine overtake him, or he would rip a friend off for a trifling sum of money, or he would just get married bigamously again. Much of the time, he was living in one-room apartments, sometimes with no electricity. He married six times in total, and was abusive towards at least some of his wives. Screamin' Jay Hawkins died in 2000 after emergency surgery for an aneurysm. His fifth wife, one of the two who seem to have been actually important to him in some way, has dropped strong hints that he was killed by his sixth wife, who he had been claiming was poisoning him, though there's no evidence for that other than that she was strongly disliked by many of the people around Hawkins. When he died, he was seventy, and his current wife was thirty-one. Many people claimed that they had visitations from Hawkins' ghost in the days after his death, but the thing that seems to sum him up in the afterlife the most is his legacy to his family. He sold the rights to "I Put a Spell on You" shortly before his death, for twenty-five thousand dollars, which means his estate gets no songwriting royalties from his one big hit. He hadn't made a will since the 1970s, and that will left most of his money to his second wife, Ginny, who most people seem to agree deserved it if anyone did -- she was with him for sixteen years, and tolerated the worst of his behaviour. He also left an amount to a niece of his. As for his kids? Well, none of the seventy or however many illegitimate children he had saw a penny from his will. His three legitimate children, he left a dollar each. At least one of them, his daughter Sookie, didn't get her dollar -- it went to her cousin, who didn't pass it on to her. And I think that means I should give Sookie the final word here, in a quote from the end of Steve Bergsman's biography. "My father thought he was all that, but not to me. Screamin' Jay Hawkins didn't treat people right. He was a performer, but he didn't treat people right."

El sello MPS continúa con la reedición sistemática de su catálogo. En noviembre de 2017 es el turno de tres grabaciones del violinista Don “Sugarcane” Harris, muy prolífico y activo en formaciones y grabaciones de rock y blues, pero con no demasiadas obras publicadas a su nombre. En Keep On Driving (MPS, 1971) el violinista también toca el bajo eléctrico. Le acompañan John Taylor (a los teclados), Tony Oxley a la batería y el guitarrista alemán Volker Kriegel. I’m On Your Case (1974, MPS) es una obra cercana por momentos al soul, el rock, el blues y el jazz, en la que el violinista también demostró sus dotes como cantante. En Keyzop (1975, MPS) Don “Sugarcane” Harris se centra exclusivamente en el violín, acompañado por Günter Lenz (contrabajo), Todd Canedy (batería), Volker Kriegel (guitarra), y Dewey Terry (piano). Tomajazz: © Pachi Tapiz, 2017 HDO es un podcast editado, presentado y producido por Pachi Tapiz.

Rob and Seth discuss their experiences with Railroad Earth including Rob’s memories of when he saw RRE front man Todd Scheaffer’s band, From Good Homes open for Bob Weir and Ratdog the night after Jerry Garcia died. A brief discussion of this podcast’s fast-approaching live event at City Winery Atlanta September 19th takes us to to Seth and Rob sitting down with Tim Carbone (The Contribution, Railroad Earth) for a thorough examination of what makes him a truly special human and musician. Tim talks about how this summer Railroad Earth was forced to adjust to the temporary-but-still-painful loss of founding member, multi-instrumentalist Andy Goessling - who was "on the disabled list." We learn how they relied on top notch players to step up, sit in and help out - particularly Chris Pandolfi and Matt Slocumb who kept things compelling for RRE loyalists by being part of bringing forth unusual versions of songs in the RRE lexicon - specifically Slocumb on, “Morning Flies." Carbone explains in detail exactly how Psychedelia earned itself an assist with regard to the genesis of his adventurous side project, The Contribution. Tim talks about the band first doing a session in a cabin in Woodacre, California, then working in Laughing Tiger Studios in San Rafeal and eventually recording at Bob Weir’s state-of-the-art TRI Studios in Marin County - elaborating specifically about TRI’s "microphone guru," Rick Vargas. Vargas was vital to the success of their recording and Tim still uses techniques he learned from Vargas during this time. He also relates how he initially became interested in violin, and then how his personal experiences (including a stint playing harmonica in a blues band) and hearing artists like Paul Butterfield and Don “Sugarcane” Harris shaped his approach to playing. Tim tells of his days in The Blue Sparks From Hell, and their string-band bluegrass alter-ego band (each with future Railroad Earth bandmate Andy Goessling). Tim recounts some of the legendary New York shows he saw as an audience member, including his various Fleetwood Mac experiences, detailed accounts of his favorite Traffic shows and his memory of the legendary Grateful Dead SUNY 1970 Halloween show. He also speaks of shaking hands with Muddy Waters, playing in bands with Rick Danko, attending Danko's funeral and meeting future band mates and other significant folks at New York’s legendary music club, The Wetlands. We learn of how Railroad Earth landed the Telluride Bluegrass Festival for their 10th gig, and how the band would unfold from there. He talks about working with various engineers including John Siket of Phish “phame.” Tim conveys what it is like working with RRE’s brilliant Todd Scheaffer, identifying specifically Scheaffer’s feel for melody, knowledge of songwriting and familiarity with literature as reasons for Todd's excellence. He also shares his memory of sitting in with the Allman Brothers’ Band, and then how he, and in turn Railroad Earth evolved from casually collaborating with, to becoming full-on recording partners on Ashes and Dust with jamband icon Warren Haynes. Other icons discussed are Buddy Cage, David Nelson, the timeless David Bromberg and this program's Godfather, Col. Bruce Hampton. We hear music from Tim’s band The Contribution, including the debut of “So Long, Farewell” in its entirety, which is paired with “Raven’s Child” from Railroad Earth’s most recent cd Captain Nowhere. wTnS is Produced by Rob Turner and Engineered by Josh Thane of Wonder Dog Sounds Studio. www.joshthaneproductions.com www.wonderdogsounds.com Inside Out w/ Turner and Seth: insideoutwtns.com Twitter: @InsideoutWTNS Instagram: www.instagram.com/insideoutwtns Facebook: www.facebook.com/insideoutwTnS See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Toda la información en http://www.tomajazz.com/web/?p=23575. La entrega número 97 del podcast HDO está dedicada a repasar las reediciones del sello MPS en abril de 2016 de grabaciones de los violinistas Don “Sugarcane” Harris (habitual en las grabaciones de Frank Zappa a finales de los años 60 y principios de los 70), y el violinista polaco Michal Urbaniak. Del primero suenan temas contenidos en los discos Got the Blues (1973), Cup Full of Dreams (1974) y Flashin’ Time (1976), mientras que del segundo suenan el homenaje al compositor polaco Krzystof Komeda titulado We’ll Remember Komeda (1973), Heritage (1977), y Smiles Ahead (1977). Pachi Tapiz, 2016 HDO es un podcast de la factoría Tomajazz que está editado, producido y presentado por Pachi Tapiz.