Podcasts about flamingoes

This week's show, after a Jesse Welles warble: brand new Jeanines, Brian Jonestown Massacre, New Model Army, Tisburys, Lucy Dacus, Heaven, and Allo Darlin', plus Buddy Holly, Left Banke, R. Dean Taylor, Tim Hardin, Dave & Ansel Collins, Flamingoes, and...

Welcome to the Episode! The 2024 U17 Women's World Cup is here, featuring the Flamingoes of Nigeria, the Harambee Starlets of Kenya and the Copper Princesses of Zambia. We review the first and second round of group games and look ahead to the final round. Enjoy! Recording date: Monday October 21, 2024

Flamingoes in Wisconsin? Yes! In late August, Hurricane Idalia pushed dozens of Pink Flamingoes northward, with some landing in Virginia and even Wisconsin! Today we speak with Threatened Species specialist Dan Lebbin from the American Bird Conservancy about how the Flamingoes are doing and how things may go once the freezing cold weather arrives. For more information on the American Bird Conservancy, go to: https://www.abcbirds.org. To track the movement of the wayward Flamingoes go to: https://ebird.org. Join Catherine Greenleaf, a certified wildlife rehabilitator with 20 years of experience rescuing and rehabilitating injured birds, for twice-monthly discussions about restoring native habitat and helping the birds in your backyard. Access the BIRD HUGGER Newsletter here: www.birdhuggerpodcast.com. Send your questions about birds and native gardening to birdhuggerpodcast@gmail.com. (PG-13) St. Dymphna Press, LLC.

A busy week, indeed. Court cases, a Green and Gold flop at Lambeau and a possible government shutdown. Don't forget Oktoberfest is this weekend. Plus, we witnessed flamingoes in Wisconsin! Oh, and don't forget Damian Lillard is now a Buck!

ALSO: Police crack deadly hit-and-run... Flamingoes get a leg up on Lake MichiganSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Space fact. Dubai has a lot of hotel rooms. Fat Bear Week. National holidays and celebrity birthdays. Flamingoes in Wisconsin. Politics. Most dangerous NFL stadiums. Plus local news and sports.

Flamingoes were just spotted in Wisconsin, while a rainy weekend caused flooding all over the Duluth area. Luke Bryan was in Minnesota over the weekend but it didn't turn out as planned. Ken has an update to his ice cream dilemma from last week.

The Daily Quiz - Science and Nature Today's Questions: Question 1: "Despite posing a threat to swimmers, it is widely acknowledged that these creatures are significantly less hazardous compared to sharks." Question 2: Which animal has the ability to open its mouth wide enough to accommodate a 4-foot-tall child? Question 3: "The process of combining different plant parts to encourage their growth as a unified entity is known as ." Question 4: "A natural phenomenon where a spring releases steam into the atmosphere is known as a ." Question 5: Flamingoes have an impressive lifespan, reaching up to what number of years? Question 6: Which Colours Are Most Commonly Confused In Colour Blindness Question 7: What is name applied to the study of soil? Question 8: What is the symbol for iron in chemistry? Question 9: Dogs bark. What do donkeys do This podcast is produced by Klassic Studios Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Explore the fascinating world of flamingo colours as you set out on a journey. Learn the tricks behind their amazing change from dull grey to vivid pink feathers. Learn about the significance of their vibrant colours during courting, their special diet, and their capacity to detoxify pollutants. In this succinct and fascinating piece, learn about the mystery and beauty of these majestic birds.

When we think of Australia and its wildlife, the first thing that comes to mind is the iconic, often-hopping, marsupials! (Ok… and all the things might kill and maim you!) In exploring Australia's recent prehistoric past, it's also often the marsupials that we get to hear of. Giant wombats, rather large, short-faced kangaroos, and leopard-sized, scissor-toothed, tree-climbing pouched predators!   What we don't often think of, is Australia as a land of vultures and flamingoes! And yet, the evidence now tells us that these birds also made Australia home. We've known about flamingoes living in the Land Down Under for a while, but its only very recently that fossils have come to light to tell us that vultures in Australia were also a thing.   In this episode of Palaeo Jam, host Michael Mills chats with Dr Ellen Mather, Adjunct Associate lecturer at Flinders University, and Tim Niederer, PhD student, also at Flinders University, about these lesser known Australians, what we know of them, and why they may have gone extinct.   A great article examining Ellen's recent work on the discovery of vultures in Australia can be found here… https://theconversation.com/it-was-long-thought-these-fossils-came-from-an-eagle-turns-out-they-belong-to-the-only-known-vulture-species-from-australia-187017   Ellen was also co-author for an article on a prehistoric species of eagle…  https://theconversation.com/meet-the-prehistoric-eagle-that-ruled-australian-forests-25-million-years-ago-168249   You can find Ellen on Twitter at https://twitter.com/Ellenaetus   Here's a link to a 1963 chapter on fossilised flamingo bones from Australia… https://sora.unm.edu/sites/default/files/journals/condor/v065n04/p0289-p0299.pdf   And here's a short mention in National Geographic… https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/topics/wildlife/2017/02/australia-was-once-full-of-flamingos/   We all very much look forward to the additional insights that Tim's research will bring to our understanding of the place of these fascinating birds in Australia.   You can find Tim on Twitter at https://twitter.com/Gaylaeontology   Each episode of Palaeo Jam is recorded with a strict 30 minute time-limit and is unedited. What you hear is how it went! As part of each episode, the host and each guest bring along an object to open the discussion on the day's theme. Michael's item was part of a skull of Thylacoleo. Tune in to find out what Ellen and Tim brought along, and what it all means for what prehistoric Australia looked like.

Flamingos are bird fashion icons. Those long legs! That distinctive beak! The glorious pink hue! But why do they have pink feathers? It's not to blend into their environment, since they don't live among clouds of cotton candy. What gives? We asked Flora Lichtman, science journalist and host of Every Little Thing from Gimlet Media, to help us find the answer. Got a question that you can't stop pinking about?? Send it to us at BrainsOn.org/contact, and we'll help you find the answer that's pig-meant to be.

Flamingoes

Something is afoot in Transcona...Follow the show on social media:@TylerCarrfm@JasminLaine@Energy106fmTyler Carr on Tik Tok 

We continue our Complete Namibia trip report today with our second shoot in Deadvlei, then on to Walvis Bay with the flamingoes and pelicans. Details on the blog: https://mbp.ac/782 Music by Martin Bailey

We continue our Complete Namibia trip report today with our second shoot in Deadvlei, then on to Walvis Bay with the flamingoes and pelicans. Details on the blog: https://mbp.ac/782 Music by Martin Bailey

Quite an eclectic mix of chatter this week. Join us for cows, Shania Twain, Dingers, Eurovision and more! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/birdswithballs/message

Sign up to our newsletter here. Join our facebook group here or join our Discord here.You can physically send us stuff to PO BOX 7127, Reservoir East, Victoria, 3073.Want to help support the show?Sanspants+ | Shop | TeesWant to get in contact with us?Email | Twitter | Website | Facebook | RedditOr individually at:Hayden | Cass Shut Up a Second is hosted and produced by Cass Paige and Hayden Bleechmore.Recorded and produced on Wurundjeri land, we respectfully acknowledge the Wurundjeri People of the Kulin Nation, pay our respect to their Elders past and present, and recognise that sovereignty was never ceded. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

366 - Flamingoes Love Bubbles - Darryl Baser in Kenmure. This show was broadcast on OAR 105.4FM Dunedin - oar.org.nz

Special guest and hot dog connoisseur Bryce joins the boiz to discuss Jim Bakker's patented Silver Solution to COVID-19, as well as the finer points of proper cow and wharf rat consumption. Jon argues the merits of addressing our respective (and non-existent) boo-thangs as "toddler" while Drew gets to the bottom of this whole “baby” situation and accidentally creates a new history segment! Amidst concocting an elaborate and hare-brained retirement scheme involving a cigarette boat and extremely compliant flamingoes, the boiz also commit to definitely maybe for sure doing a live show somewhere AND sometime!NOTE: There are some minor audio issues with the first half of the podcast. We didn't realize until editing that Bryce's mic cable was shorting out, so there is some occasional noise coming from his track. We cleaned it up as best we could, and we apologize for the oversight. We love y'all and we'll continue to put out the best quality trash we can every week!Join our growing legion of Patreon subscribers and get access to even more content! Early access to weekly episodes, hilarious commentary tracks, special topic episodes not available to the hoi polloi, and SO much more! Sign up today at Patreon.com/tequilatrashpodYou can also follow all our social media shenanigans!Instagram.com/tequilatrashpodTwitter.com/tequilatrashpodTikTok & Twitch: COMING SOON!!!

Episode one hundred and thirty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “I Can't Help Myself” by the Four Tops, and is part two of a three-episode look at Motown in 1965. 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 "Colours" by Donovan. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources No Mixcloud this week, as too many of the songs were by the Four Tops. Amazingly, there are no books on the Four Tops, so I've had to rely on the information in the general Motown sources I use, plus the liner notes for the Four Tops 50th Anniversary singles collection, a collection of the A and B sides of all their Motown singles. That collection is the best collection of the Four Tops' work available, but is pricey -- for a cheaper option this single-disc set is much better value. For Motown-related information in this and other Motown episodes, I've used the following resources: Where Did Our Love Go? The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound by Nelson George is an excellent popular history of the various companies that became Motown. To Be Loved by Berry Gordy is Gordy's own, understandably one-sided, but relatively well-written, autobiography. Women of Motown: An Oral History by Susan Whitall is a collection of interviews with women involved in Motown. I Hear a Symphony: Motown and Crossover R&B by J. Andrew Flory is an academic look at Motown. The Motown Encyclopaedia by Graham Betts is an exhaustive look at the people and records involved in Motown's thirty-year history. How Sweet It Is by Lamont Dozier and Scott B. Bomar is Dozier's autobiography, while Come and Get These Memories by Brian and Eddie Holland and Dave Thompson is the Holland brothers'. And Motown Junkies is an infrequently-updated blog looking at (so far) the first 694 tracks released on Motown singles. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript This is the second part of a two-part look at the work of Holland, Dozier, and Holland, and part of a three-part look at Motown Records in the mid-sixties. If you've not listened to the last episode, on the Supremes, you might want to listen to that one before this. There's a clip of an old radio comedy show that always makes me irrationally irritated when I hear it, even though I like the programme it's from: [Excerpt of The Mark Steel Lectures, “Aristotle” episode. Transcript: "Which led him back to the problem, what is it that makes something what it is? Is an apple still an apple when it's decomposing? I went to see the Four Tops once and none of the original members were in the band, they were just session musicians. So have i seen the Four Tops or not? I don't know" ] That's the kind of joke that would work with many vocal groups -- you could make the joke about the Drifters or the Ink Spots, of course, and it would even work for, for example, the Temptations, though they do have one original member still touring with them. Everyone knows that that kind of group has a constantly rotating membership, and that people come and go from groups like that all the time. Except that that wasn't true for the Four Tops at the time Mark Steel made that joke, in the late 1990s. The current version of the Four Tops does only have one original member -- but that's because the other three all died. At the time Steel made the joke, his only opportunity to see the Four Tops would have been seeing all four original members -- the same four people who had been performing under that name since the 1950s. Other groups have had longer careers than that without changing members -- mostly duos, like Simon & Garfunkel or the Everly Brothers -- but I can't think of another one that lasted as long while performing together continuously, without taking a break at any point. So today, we're going to look at the career of a group who performed together for forty-four years without a lineup change, a group who were recording together before Motown even started, but who became indelibly associated with Motown and with Holland-Dozier-Holland. We're going to look at the Four Tops, and at "I Can't Help Myself": [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "I Can't Help Myself"] The Four Tops have turned up in the background in several episodes already, even though we're only now getting to their big hits. By the time they became huge, they had already been performing together for more than a decade, and had had a big influence on the burgeoning Detroit music scene even before Berry Gordy had got involved with the scene. The group had started out after Abdul "Duke" Fakir, a teenager in Detroit, had gone to see Lucky Millinder and his band perform, and had been surprised to see his friend Levi Stubbs turn up, get on stage, and start singing with the band in a guest spot. Fakir had never realised before that his friend sang at all, let alone that he had an astonishing baritone voice. Stubbs was, in fact, a regular on the Detroit amateur singing circuit, and had connections with several other performers on that circuit -- most notably his cousin Jackie Wilson, but also Hank Ballard and Little Willie John. Those few singers would make deals with each other about who would get to win at a particular show, and carved things up between them. Stubbs and Fakir quickly started singing together, and by 1953 they had teamed up with two other kids, Obie Benson and Lawrence Payton. The four of them sang together at a party, and decided that they sounded good enough together that they should become a group. They named themselves the Four Aims, and started playing local shows. They got a one-off record deal with a small label called Grady Records, and released their only single under the name "The Four Aims" in 1956: [Excerpt: The Four Aims, "She Gave Me Love"] After that single, they tried teaming up with Jackie Wilson, who had just quit Billy Ward and the Dominoes, but they found that Wilson and Stubbs' voices clashed -- Wilson's then-wife said their voices were too similar, though they sound very different to me. Wilson would, of course, go on to his own massive success, and that success would be in part thanks to Roquel Davis, who was Lawrence Payton's cousin. As we saw in the episode on "Reet Petite", Davis would co-write most of Wilson's hits with Berry Gordy, and he was also writing songs for the Four Aims -- who he renamed the Four Tops, because he thought the Four Aims sounded too much like the Ames Brothers, a white vocal quartet who were popular at the time.  They explained to Davis that they were called the Four Aims because they were *aiming* for the top, and Davis said that in that case they should be the Four Tops, and that was the name under which they would perform for the rest of their career. In the early fifties, before Wilson's success, Davis was the person in the group's circle with the most music industry connections, and he got them a deal with Chess Records. I already talked about this back in the episode on Jackie Wilson, but the group's first record on Chess, with Davis as the credited songwriter: [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "Kiss Me Baby"] Sounds more than a little like a Ray Charles record from a couple of years earlier, which Davis definitely didn't write: [Excerpt: Ray Charles, "Kissa Me Baby"] But that wasn't a success, and it would be another four years before they released their next single -- a one-off single on Columbia Records. It turned out that Chess had mostly signed the Four Tops not for the group, but to get Davis as a songwriter, and songs he'd originally written for the Tops ended up being recorded by other acts on Chess, like the Moonglows and the Flamingoes. The group's single on Columbia would also be a flop, they'd wait another two years before another one-off single on Riverside, and then yet another two years before they were signed by Motown. Their signing to Motown was largely the work of Mickey Stevenson, Motown's head of A&R. Of course, Stevenson was responsible, directly or otherwise, for every signing to the label at this point in time, but he had a special interest in the Four Tops. Stevenson had been in the Air Force in the 1950s, when he'd wandered into one of the Detroit amateur shows at which the Four Aims had been performing. He'd been so impressed with them that he immediately decided to quit the air force and go into music himself. He'd joined the Hamptones, the vocal group who toured with Lionel Hampton's band, and he'd also become a member of a doo-wop group called The Classics, who'd had a minor hit with "If Only the Sky Was a Mirror": [Excerpt: The Classics, "If Only the Sky Was a Mirror"] Stevenson had moved into a backroom position with Motown, but it was arguably the most important position in the company other than Gordy's. He was responsible for putting together the Funk Brothers, for signing many of the label's biggest acts, and for co-writing a number of the label's biggest hits, including "Stubborn Kind of Fellow" and "Dancing in the Street". Stevenson had wanted to sign the group from the start -- given that they were the group who were directly responsible for everything that had happened in his career, they were important to him. And Berry Gordy was also a fan of the group, and had known them since his time working with Jackie Wilson, but it had taken several years for everything to fall into place so that the group were able to sign to Motown. When they did, they naturally became a priority. When they were signed to the label, it was initially with the intention of recording them as a jazz group rather than doing the soul pop that Motown was best known for. Their first recordings for Motown were for their subsidiary Workshop Jazz. They recorded an entire album of old standards for the label, titled "Breaking Through": [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "This Can't be Love"] Unfortunately for the group, that album wouldn't be released for thirty-five years -- Workshop Jazz had been founded because Berry Gordy was still a jazz fanatic, but none of the records on it had been very successful (or, frankly, very good -- the Four Tops album was pretty good, but most of the music put out on the label was third rate at best), and so the label closed down before they released the Four Tops album. So the group were at a loose end, and for a while they were put to work as session vocalists on other people's records, adding backing to records by the Supremes: [Excerpt: The Supremes, "Run Run Run"] And even after they started having hits of their own they would appear on records by other people, like "My Baby Loves Me" by Martha and the Vandellas: [Excerpt: Martha and the Vandellas, "My Baby Loves Me"] You'll notice that both of these records were ones where the Four Tops were added to a female group -- and that would also be the case on their own records, once Holland, Dozier, and Holland took over producing them. The sound on the Four Tops' records is a distinctive one, and is actually made up of seven voices. Levi Stubbs, of course, took the lead on the singles, but the combination of backing vocalists was as important as the lead. Unlike several other vocal groups, the Four Tops were never replaced on their records -- Stubbs was always resistant to the idea that he was more important than the rest of his group. Instead, they were augmented -- Motown's normal session singers, the Andantes, joining in with Fakir, Payton, and Benson. The idea was to give the group a distinctive sound, and in particular to set them apart from the Temptations, whose recordings all featured only male vocals. The group's first hit single, "Baby I Need Your Loving", was a song that Holland, Dozier, and Holland had written but weren't too impressed with. Indeed, they'd cut the backing track two years earlier, but been too uninspired by it to do anything with the completed track. But then, two years after cutting the backing, Dozier was hit with inspiration -- the lines "Baby, I need your loving/Got to have all your loving" fit the backing track perfectly. Eddie Holland was particularly excited to work with the Four Tops. Even though he'd somehow managed never to hear the group, despite both moving in the same musical circles in the same town for several years, he'd been hearing for all that time that Levi Stubbs was as good as his rivals Little Willie John and Jackie Wilson -- and anyone that good must be worth working with. When they took the song into the studio, though, Levi Stubbs didn't want to sing it, insisting that the key was wrong for his voice, and that it should be Payton who sang the song. The producers, though, insisted that Stubbs had the perfect voice for the song, and that they wanted the strained tone that came from Stubbs' baritone going into a higher register than he was comfortable with. Eddie Holland, who always coached the lead vocalists while his brother and Lamont Dozier worked with the musicians, would later say that the problem was that Stubbs was unprepared and embarrassed -- they eventually persuaded Stubbs to take the song home and rehearse it over the weekend, and to come in to have a second go at the track the next Monday. On the Monday, Stubbs came in and sang the song perfectly, and Stubbs' baritone leads became the most distinctive sound to come out of Motown in this period: [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "Baby I Need Your Loving"] According to at least one source, Stubbs was still unhappy with his vocal, and wanted to come in again the next day and record it again. Holland, Dozier, and Holland humoured him, but that wasn't going to happen. "Baby I Need Your Loving" became a hit, making number eleven, and so of course the next record was a soundalike. "Without the One You Love (Life's Not Worthwhile)" even started with the line "Baby, I need your good loving". Unfortunately, this time Holland, Dozier, and Holland copied their previous hit a little *too* closely, and people weren't interested. Dozier has later said that they were simply so busy with the Supremes at the time that they didn't give the single the attention it deserved, and thought that cranking out a soundalike would be good enough. Because of this, they weren't given the group's next single -- the way Motown worked at the time, if you came up with a hit for an act, you automatically got the chance to do the follow-up, but if you didn't have a hit, someone else got a chance. Instead, Mickey Stevenson and Ivy Joe Hunter came up with a ballad called "Ask the Lonely", which became a minor hit -- not as big as "Baby I Need Your Loving", but enough that the group could continue to have a career. It would be the next single that would make the Four Tops into the other great Holland-Dozier-Holland act, the one on which their reputation rests as much as it does on the Supremes: [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "I Can't Help Myself"] "I Can't Help Myself" was inspired by Dozier's grandfather, who would catcall women as they passed him on the street -- "Hey, sugar pie! Hi there honey bunch!" Dozier married those words to a chord progression that's almost identical to the one from "Where Did Our Love Go?".  Both songs go C-G-Dm-F-G, with the same number of beats between changes: [demonstrates] There's only one tiny change in the progression -- in the last beat of the last bar, there's a passing chord in "I Can't Help Myself", a move to A minor, that isn't there in "Where Did Our Love Go?" Even the melody lines, the syllabics of the words, and their general meanings are very similar. "Where Did Our Love Go?" starts with "Baby baby", "I Can't Help Myself" starts with "Sugar pie, honey bunch". "Baby don't leave me" is syllabically similar to "You know that I love you". The two songs diverge lyrically and melodically after that, but what's astonishing is how a different vocalist and arrangement can utterly transform two such similar basic songs. Compare the opening of "Where Did Our Love Go?": [Excerpt: The Supremes, "Where Did Our Love Go?"] With the opening of "I Can't Help Myself": [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "I Can't Help Myself"] It's a perfect example of how Holland, Dozier, and Holland would reuse musical ideas, but would put a different spin on them and make the records sound very different. Of course, some of the credit for this should go to the Funk Brothers, the session musicians who played on every Motown hit in this period, but there's some question as to exactly how much credit they deserved. Depending on who you believe, either the musicians all came up with their own instrumental lines, and the arrangement was a group effort by the session musicians with minimal interference from the nominal producers, or it was all written by Brian Holland and Lamont Dozier, and the musicians just did what they were told with no creative input at all. The arguments about who did what tend to get quite vicious, with each side pointing out, accurately, that the other needed them. It's true that Holland, Dozier, and Holland didn't do anything like as well as writers and producers after they left Motown. It's also true that the Funk Brothers didn't write or produce any hits themselves, but were reliant on the Motown staff writers and producers for material. I suspect, and it is only a suspicion, that the truth lies between the two, and that it was a collaborative process where Holland and Dozier would go into the studio with a good idea of what they wanted, but that there was scope for interpretation and the musicians were able to make suggestions, which the producers might take up if they were good ones. If Brian Holland sketched out or hummed a rough bassline to James Jamerson, saying something like "play bum-bum-bum-bum", and then Jamerson embellished and improvised around that rough bassline, it would be easy to see how both men could come out of the session thinking they had written the bassline, and having good reason to think so. It's also easy to see how the balance could differ in different sessions -- how sometimes Holland or Dozier could come in with a fully worked out part, and other times they might come in saying "you know the kind of thing I want",  and how that could easily become remembered as "I came up with all the parts and the musicians did nothing" or "Us musicians came up with all the parts and the producers just trusted us". Luckily, there's more than enough credit to go around, and we can say that the Four Tops, Holland, Dozier, and Holland, the Funk Brothers, and the Andantes all played an important part in making these classic singles: [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "I Can't Help Myself"] "I Can't Help Myself" knocked the Supremes' "Back in My Arms Again" off the number one spot, but was itself knocked off the top by "Mr. Tambourine Man" -- but then a week later, "I Can't Help Myself" was at number one again, before being knocked off again by "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction". The success of "I Can't Help Myself" meant that the group's singles on their old labels suddenly had some value. Columbia Records reissued "Ain't That Love", a single the group had originally released four years earlier, in the hope of having some success because of the group's new-found fame. As we saw last time when the Supremes rushed out "Come See About Me" to prevent someone else having the hit with it, there was nothing that Berry Gordy hated more than the idea that someone else could have a hit based on the success of a Motown act. The Four Tops needed a new single *now* to kill the record on Columbia, and it didn't matter that there were no recordings or even songs available to put out. Holland, Dozier, and Holland went into the studio to record a new backing track with the Funk Brothers, essentially just a remake of the backing from "I Can't Help Myself", only very slightly changed. By three o'clock in the afternoon on the day they found out that the Columbia record was being released, they were in the studio, Dozier fine-tuning the melody while Brian Holland rehearsed the musicians and Eddie Holland scribbled lyrics in another corner. By five PM the track had been recorded and mixed. By six PM the master stamper was being driven the ninety miles to the pressing plant so they could start pressing up copies. The next day, DJs started getting copies of the record, and it was in the shops a couple of days later. Of course, the record being made in such a rush meant that it was essentially a remake of their previous hit -- something that was acknowledged in the tongue-in-cheek title: [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "It's the Same Old Song"] "It's the Same Old Song" wasn't as big a hit as "I Can't Help Myself", but it made number five on the charts, a more than respectable follow-up, and quite astonishing given the pressure under which the record was made. The next few singles that Holland, Dozier, and Holland wrote for the group weren't quite as successful -- this was early 1966, and Holland, Dozier, and Holland were in a mini slump -- they'd had a number one with "I Hear a Symphony", as we heard in the last episode, but then they produced two singles for the Supremes that made the top ten, but not number one -- "My World is Empty Without You" and "Love is Like an Itching in My Heart".  And as the Four Tops weren't quite as big as the Supremes, so their next two singles, "Something About You" and "Shake Me, Wake Me (When It's Over)", only just scraped into the bottom of the top twenty. Still hits, but not up to Holland, Dozier, and Holland's 1965 standards. And so as was the common practice at Motown, someone else was given a chance to come up with a song for the group. "Loving You is Sweeter Than Ever" was written by Ivy Jo Hunter, a songwriter and producer whose biggest contribution to this point had been co-writing "Dancing in the Street", and Stevie Wonder, a child star who'd had a hit a couple of years earlier but never really followed up on it, and who also played drums on the track: [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "Loving You is Sweeter Than Ever"] Within a few months, Wonder would begin a run of hit singles that would continue for more than a decade, and would become arguably the most important artist on Motown. But that golden period hadn't quite started yet, and "Loving You is Sweeter Than Ever" didn't make the top forty. At this point, it would have been easy for the Four Tops to have been relegated to the same pile as artists like the Contours -- people who'd had a couple of hits on Motown, but had then failed to follow up with a decent career. Motown was becoming ever more willing to drop artists as dead weight, as Gordy was increasingly concentrating on a few huge stars -- Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson and especially the Supremes – to the exclusion of everyone else. But then Holland, Dozier, and Holland got back up on top. They came up with two more number ones for the Supremes in quick succession. "You Can't Hurry Love" was recorded around the same time that "Loving You is Sweeter Than Ever" was failing to chart, and quickly became one of the Supremes' biggest ever hits. They followed that with a song inspired by the sound of the breaking news alert on the radio, replicating that sound with the staccato guitars on what was their most inventive production to date: [Excerpt: The Supremes, "You Keep Me Hanging On"] Not only was that a number one record, it was soon followed by a top ten cover version by the heavy rock band Vanilla Fudge: [Excerpt: Vanilla Fudge, "You Keep Me Hanging On"] Holland, Dozier, and Holland were back on top, and they brought the Four Tops back to the top with them. The next single they recorded with the group, "Reach Out, I'll Be There", started with an instrumental introduction that Brian Holland was noodling with on the piano: [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "Reach Out I'll Be There"] Holland was playing that part, over and over, and then suddenly Lamont Dozier was hit with inspiration -- so much so that he literally pushed Holland to one side without saying anything and started playing what would become the verse: [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "Reach Out I'll Be There"] The interesting thing about that track is that it shows how the different genres that were charting at the time would have more influence on each other than it might appear from this distance, where we put them all into neat little boxes named "folk-rock" or "Motown". Because Lamont Dozier was very specifically being influenced by Bob Dylan and "Like a Rolling Stone", when it came to how the song was phrased. Now, this is not something that I would ever in a million years have thought of, but once you know it, the influence is absolutely plain -- the way the melody stresses and elongates the last syllable of each line is pure Dylan. To show this, I am afraid I'm going to have to do something that I hoped I'd never, ever, have to do, which is do a bad Bob Dylan impression. Everyone thinks they can impersonate Dylan, everyone's imitations of Dylan are cringeworthy, and mine is worse than most. This will sound awful, but it *will* show you how Dozier was thinking when he came up with that bit of melody: [demonstrates] Let us never speak of that again. I think we'd better hear how Levi Stubbs sang it again, hadn't we, to take that unpleasant sound away: [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "Reach Out I'll Be There"] That became the group's second and last number one single, and also their only UK number one. Unfortunately, Holland, Dozier, and Holland were so hot at this point that they ended up competing with themselves. Norman Whitfield, one of the other Motown songwriter-producers, had wanted for a while to produce the Temptations, whose records were at this point mostly written and produced by Smokey Robinson. He called on Eddie Holland to help him write the hit that let him take over from Robinson as the Temptations' producer, "Ain't Too Proud to Beg": [Excerpt: The Temptations, "Ain't Too Proud to Beg"] Dozier and Brian Holland were fine with Eddie working with another writer -- they all did that kind of thing on occasion -- until the date of the BMI Awards. The previous two years, the trio had been jointly given BMI's award for most successful songwriter of the year. But that year, Eddie Holland got the award on his own, for having written more hits than anyone else (he'd written eight, Dozier and Brian Holland had written six. According to a contemporary issue of Billboard, John Sebastian was next with five, then Lennon/McCartney and Jagger/Richards with four each.) Holland felt bad that he'd inadvertently prevented his collaborators from winning the award for a third year in a row, and from this point on he'd be much more careful about outside collaborations. Holland, Dozier, and Holland wrote two more classic singles for the Four Tops, "Standing in the Shadows of Love", and "Bernadette". That latter had been inspired by a coincidence that all three of Holland, Dozier, and Holland had at one time or another dated or felt unrequited love for different girls called Bernadette, but it proved extremely difficult to record. When the trio wrote together, Eddie Holland would always sing the songs, and the melodies were constructed around his tenor vocal range. Stubbs was a baritone, and sometimes couldn't hit some of the higher notes in the melodies, and he was having that problem with "Bernadette". Eddie Holland eventually solved the problem by inviting in a few fans who had been hanging around outside hoping for autographs. Stubbs being a performer wasn't going to make himself look bad in front of an audience, and sang it perfectly: [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "Bernadette"] "Bernadette" made the top five, and it was followed by a couple more top twenty hits with lesser Holland/Dozier/Holland songs, but then the writer-producers quit Motown, for reasons we'll look at in a few months when we take our last look at the Supremes. This left the Four Tops stranded -- they were so associated with their producers that nobody else could get hits with them. For a while, Motown turned to an interesting strategy with them. It had been normal Motown practice to fill albums up with cover versions of hits of the day, and so the label put out some of this album filler as singles, and surprisingly had some chart success with cover versions of the Left Banke's baroque pop hit "Walk Away Renee": [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "Walk Away Renee"] and of Tim Hardin's folk ballad "If I Were a Carpenter": [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "If I Were a Carpenter"] And so for a while many of the singles the group released, both in the US and elsewhere, were covers of songs that were very far from the normal Motown style -- the Jimmy Webb ballad "Do What You Gotta Do" made the UK top twenty, their cover of another Jimmy Webb song, "MacArthur Park", made the lower reaches of the US top forty, their version of the old standard "It's All in the Game" made number twenty-four, and they released a version of "River Deep, Mountain High", teaming up with the Supremes, that became more successful in the US than the original, though still only just made the top forty. But they were flailing. Motown had no idea what to do with them other than release cover versions, and any time any of Motown's writing and production teams tried to come up with something new for the group it failed catastrophically. In 1972 they signed to ABC/Dunhill, and there they had a few hits, including a couple that made the top ten, but soon the same pattern emerged -- no-one could reliably get hits with the group, and they spent much of the seventies chasing trends and failing to catch them. They had one more big US hit in 1981, with "When She Was My Girl", which made number eleven, and which went to number one on the R&B charts: [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "When She Was My Girl"] But from that point on they were essentially a nostalgia act, though they carried on releasing records through the eighties. The group's career nearly came to a premature end in 1988. They were in the UK to promote their single "Loco in Acapulco", co-written by Lamont Dozier and Phil Collins, from the soundtrack of Collins' film Buster: [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "Loco in Acapulco"] That was a UK top ten hit, but it nearly led to the group's death -- they were scheduled to fly out of the UK on Pan Am flight 103 to Detroit on the twenty-first of December 1988. But the group were tired after recording an appearance on Top of the Pops the night before, slept in, and missed the flight. The flight fell victim to a terrorist bombing -- the Lockerbie bombing -- and everyone on it died. The group carried on performing together after that, but their last new single was released in 1989, and they only recorded one more album, a Christmas album in 1995. They performed together, still in their original lineup, until 1997 when Lawrence Payton died from cancer. At first the group continued as a trio, retiring the Four Tops name and just performing as The Tops, but eventually they got in a replacement. By the turn of the century, Levi Stubbs had become too ill to perform as well -- he retired in 2000, though he came back for a one-off performance for the group's fiftieth anniversary in 2004, and he died in 2008. Obie Benson continued performing with the group until three months before his death in 2005. A version of the Four Tops continues to perform, led by Abdul Fakir, and also featuring Lawrence Payton's son Roquel, named after Roquel Davis, who performs under the name Lawrence Payton Jr. The Four Tops were one of those groups that never quite lived up to their commercial potential, thanks in large part to Holland, Dozier, and Holland leaving Motown at precisely the wrong moment, and one has to wonder how many more hits they could have had under other circumstances. But the hits they did have included some of the greatest records of the sixties, and they managed to continue working together, without any public animosity, until their deaths. Given the way the careers of more successful groups have tended to end, perhaps it's better this way.

  This episode is about striated caracaras, or rather, one man's obsession with them.  The man in question is Jonathan Meiburg who is a musician, author and bird lover.  In 1833, a young Charles Darwin was astonished by a strange animal he met in the Falkland Islands: a handsome, social, and oddly crow-like falcon that was “tame and inquisitive,” “quarrelsome and passionate,” and so insatiably curious that it stole hats, compasses, and other valuables from the crew of the Beagle. Darwin met many unusual creatures in his five-year voyage, but no others showed an interest in studying him—and he wondered why these birds were confined to islands at the tip of South America, sensing a larger story. But he set this mystery aside, and never returned to it. Almost two hundred years later, Meiburg picks up where Darwin left off. These rare and unusual birds—now called striated caracaras—still exist, and A Most Remarkable Creature reveals the wild and fascinating story of their history, origins, and possible futures in a series of travels throughout South America, from the fog-bound coasts of Tierra del Fuego to the tropical forests of Guyana. Along the way, Meiburg draws us into the life and work of W.H. Hudson, a Victorian writer and naturalist who championed caracaras as unsung wonders of the natural world, and takes us to falconry parks in England, where captive caracaras perform incredible feats of memory, problem-solving, and friendship. A Most Remarkable Creature is much more than a book about birds: it's a quest for moments of first contact between humans and animals, science and religion, and the mismatched continents Europeans mistakenly called the New World.  In 1997, Jonathan Meiburg received a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship to travel to remote communities around the world, a year-long journey that sparked his enduring fascination with islands, birds, and the deep history of the living world. Since then, he's written reviews, features, and interviews for print and online publications including The Believer, Talkhouse, and The Appendix on subjects ranging from a hidden exhibit hall at the American Museum of Natural History to the last long-form interview with author Peter Matthiessen. But he's best known as the leader of the band Shearwater and as a member of Sub Pop recording artists Loma, whose albums and performances have often been praised by NPR, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Pitchfork. His unique career between the sciences and the arts makes him an ideal guide for a journey that takes in the deep history and landscapes of an entire continent, from the lush forests of Guyana to the windswept Falkland Islands. He lives in central Texas. “Caracaras are not like other birds, or even other birds of prey. Curious, wide-ranging, gregarious, and intelligent, the ten species of caracara are a scientific puzzle that has intrigued biologists since the days of Darwin. And this book — as curious, wide-ranging, gregarious, and intelligent as its subject — is not like any other book that I have encountered.” Charles C. Mann, author of 1491.  Image credit: Bryan C. Parker Summary of the episode 1:00 What are Caracaras? 3:00 Falklands from Tierra del Fuego. 5:25: Bird life in the Falklands per Darwin. Striated caracaras. 8:30 Black-browed albatrosses.  140,000 birds sitting on their nests in the summertime.  Royal and Wandering albatrosses. 10:00 Jonathan imitates bird sounds. 12:00 Antarctica used to be warm before the Cretaceous extinction. The ancestors of falcons lived there and came to North America later on.  Greatest diversity of the various falcon species are in North America. 13:00 True falcons-- what are they? 14:00 Specialist versus generalist approach to life. 15:00 Are Caracaras intelligent? Ten species of Caracaras.  Only one is endangered: Striated Caracaras.  Why are they only in the Falklands? This is what Darwin asked. Jonathan has a theory about why Striated Caracaras are stuck in the Falkland Islands. 20:00 Who was William Henry Hudson? The book has both these characters? What did Darwin think about the function of music? 24:00 Guyana trip to look for tropical caracaras.  About the red-throated caracaras.  They nest in bromeliads, sometimes 200 feet off the forest floors.  Feed on wasp combs, litter their nest with millipedes (pest control?) 27:00 Genetically, falcons are closest to parrots.  Not hawks and eagles. 28:00 The Guadalupe caracara.  30:00 Flamingoes on Andes Mountains 33:00 The future of striated caracaras.  

Interview With: @louis.eager Louis Eager is a multi-disciplinary designer and maker working within the realms of furniture, products, and occasionally clothing. He tends to art-direct his projects with the use of photography and drawing to communicate ideas. Describing himself as an Adhocist and often making things using readymades or found objects. He uses these objects in new contexts to challenge the way people perceive the made world. Eager's designs are in the realm of ready-made and garner around the concept of making us humans question things and expand the way we tend to think. His works show the multiple ways we can take advantage of things that seem useless to a majority of people and bring out new mental passages of through within a physical object. He has recently finished his degree project called “Doorknobs, Bath Plugs and Flamingoes” which acts as manifesto for future work involving Adhocism and working with readymades. Topics we touch on: personifying inanimate objects, revaluing standard things, being cautious of “sustainable design”, the crossover between furniture and art --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/10p/message

Flamingos: you've probably seen one, either in the wild or at a zoo. Fun to look at but not that interesting, right? Wrong! Flamingos, known for their pink feathers and standing on one foot, are a very delightful  group of birds, who happen to be more closely related to doves than water fowl. First we talk #LGBTQIA in professional sports, specifically Carl Nassib who has become the first active NFL player to come out as gay. We have come a long way,  but hopefully soon we will come to a day when an LGBTQIA player is so common it isn't newsworthy. Talking about LGBTQIA, did you know that some Flamingos form homosexual pairs that have been known to mate, build nests, and even raise chicks together? They have even been known to form polyamorous partnerships. Listen as we answer some of Google's most asked questions about Flamingoes (like can they be blue) and learn about the fascinating Flamingos. For more information on us, visit our website at betterthanhumanpodcast.comFollow us on Twitter @betterthanhuma1on Facebook @betterthanhumanpodcaston Instagram @betterthanhumanpodcasthttps://www.tiktok.com/@betterthanhumanpodcastor Email us at betterthanhumanpodcast@gmail.comWe look forward to hearing from you, and we look forward to you joining our cult of weirdness!#betterthanhuman #cultofweirdnes

Facts About ! Credits: Executive Producer: Chris Krimitsos Voice, Editor, and Post-Producer: Jimmy Murray "Winner Winner!" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ Facts from Wikipedia Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License

On this week's episode, The Gang attempts to prove that they are worthy of entering the Temple of the Golden Orb. Bort and Kroy hate each other for a while, and Nubz learns something new about Flamingoes. Oh, and Bark Scruffalo has a minor mishap.This temple is fun!And don't forget, you can come by out website or check out our instagram to see the full map of The Temple of the Golden Orb!

In this episode, we talk about: Threesomes. Lies. Going over 200 episodes. Friendships. Learning. How their podcast got started. Usable gems. Critical thinking. Hating the premise of self-help. Being of service. Doing good work. Writing on accident. Filter feeding the debris. What sticks. Living with a professor. Questioning authority. Flamingoes. Best sellers. Being our best selves. Screenwriters. Lord God King Boofoo. Self-help is a misnomer. What you would actually have to do each day if you followed all the top self-help advice (spoiler alert: it's impossible). Racism and privilege. Community care. Victim blaming. Manipulation. Caveats. Rachel Hollis' divorce. Problematic advice. Social constructs. The mental load of women. Not having a party. Best advice. Worst advice. Leveling up. Assistance. Experts. Protecting listeners. Responsibility. Fabergé-ing. Ageism. Tea drinking.Books mentioned in the episode:A Sassy Little Guide to Getting Over Him (by yours truly)On Screenwriting by Syd FieldMaking a Good Script Great by Linda SegerFed Up by Gemma HartleyBurnout by Amelia Nagoski and Emily NagoskiHow to be Antiracist by Ibram X. KendiGeneration X by Douglas CouplandEpisode recorded on 01/02/21Episode released on 02/03/21For more information on the podcast or its host, please visit sassylittlepodcast.com. There, you will find links to social media (Twitter and Insta: @SassyLittlePod) and an opportunity to become a member of the podcast community.Thanks for listening! If you like this sassy little podcast, please subscribe to it, rate it and review it, and tell your friends about it. Become a patron on Patreon. Cheers!

Flamingoes,Crows and pigeons

How many law firms would describe themselves as a 'flamingo in a flock of pigeons'?That's the mission for the first guest of Founded & Grounded Season 2, Alice Stephenson.In a career that has seen Alice go from in-house to freelance to Founder & CEO of Stephenson Law, we discuss the pros and cons of virtual-working - and keeping a team happy - in the Covid era, the nice dilemma of having infrastructure that can keep up with rapid growth, and why sometimes it's good to let people move on. Additionally Alice talks about gender imbalance in the legal world, and her plan for a more inclusive generation of angel investors. Oh, and flamingos too.https://www.stephenson.law

Thinking that a tiny house is going to allow you to get away from it all and enjoy life as a digital nomad?  Let's bring some reality to the situation and help your wallet in the process. If you think tiny home living might be for you, listen to this; episode 3 before you make a big purchase on a small place.   Our First Interview: Joe interviews Lucy, Ryan's wife, to learn what living in a tiny home together for over a year was like. What were the pitfalls? How much did they really spend?  What would they have done differently? What was the toilet situation like? Learn from their experiences in today's episode. All about tiny home expenses:How are you going to pay for your tiny home? Is financing worth it? Do banks like to lend on them? What is your tiny home exit strategy?  Will you be able to sell it if you need or have to? Where will you park? Real examples from buyers of small houses. Don't forget...Witty Banter. Ryan's Money Saving Tip of the Week: Did you know that a roof replacement for an RV is thousands of dollars? Ryan's money saving tip of the week accomplishes the same thing for a fraction of the price *ding! Check out the blog for this weeks episode. “Lucy's 2 Cents” Blog Post for this episode will help you save even more money and you get her valuable insights. Send us a message on our website: https://budgetbrospodcast.com/ Tell us what you like, what you didn't and share any money saving tips that you have and we'll share them with our community.  Email us: budgetbrospodcast@gmail.com Follow Joe on Twitter @joebudget EPDM Coatings Dicor --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/budgetbrospodcast/message

news birthdays/events when you're sick...are youa "leave me alone person" or a "baby" weird stuff people eat when no one is looking news the upside of stress the most embarassing thing you ever hit with your car small dumb things that make us unreasonably mad news 10 best beach list is out movies you can't get enough of and will watch over and over ashley and brad play are you smarter than a 5th grader news classic american dishes that no one eats anymore what's the tooth fairy paying these days goodbye/fun facts....national pink flamingo day...This day was originally created to honor the popular plastic lawn ornaments created by trained sculptor Don Featherstone in 1957...who just happened to work for a plastics company. Flamingoes are the tallest bird species, and can stand as high as five feet tall.Baby flamingos are fed a high protein and high fat “crop milk” that’s produced by both the mother and the father

1. Another person has tested positive in Meghalaya. With this total cases reported in the state stands at 12, tweeted Meghalaya CM while updating status of COVID-19 patients in the state. One deceased and other 11 are stable. 2. The state government has suspended rapid antibody tests, informed Assam Health Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma through a tweet. The advisory was given by ICMR. Sarma had earlier announced that rapid antibody tests were to be carried out in Spanish Garden in Guwahati. 3. Jadav Gogoi reached home in Assam after completing 2,800-km trip from Gujarat's Vapi region. He was a migrant labourer who started his journey with Rs 4000. He walked, hitchhiked often for a fee to reach his destination by which time he was exhausted. He was robbed of his money while he was on his way. Finally he managed to contact his family via someone's phone. The man is from Gadharia village in Nagaon district. 4. Daily wage workers stranded in Assam will be allowed to return home, informed DGP Bhaskar Jyoti Mahanta on April 20. The transportation for the workers will be arranged by the Assam government. There are thousands of people who will be provided help. There are more than 40,000 workers from Assam stranded outside the state. 13,000 of them have been provided help by Assam Bhawans. The lockdown has made things really difficult for the migrants. 5. Arnab Goswami, face of TV news channel Republic TV, has resigned from Editors Guild of India on Live show. He has condemned silence of many editors on the killing of seers that took place in Palghar Maharashtra. 6. Amid lockdown, various instances of how nature is healing itself have been reported. In once such instance, pics of Flamingoes flocking in thousands are being seen in Navi Mumbai. They have caught the attention of many who have shared pics widely through twitter. 7. In a latest version of Sky map which is China's authority on digital maps, Arunachal Pradesh is shown as part of China. China calls Arunachal Pradesh as South Tibet, a claim India rejects. 8. Factory in China criticized for holding kissing contest as it reopens. The video of participants kissing through plexiglass have been reviewed millions of times. 10 couples were invited to take part in kissing contest. The contest was organised restrictions imposed due to COVID-19 pandemic have started easing. This happened in Suzhou, Jiangsu. Twitter users posted pictures of the event.

506 . The return of Bob (and Stuart) In this episode they chat what they have been watching, what they have done, and what they are planning to do. We talk touring with rock bands, and Valentines Day movies, as well as life in general. At the end of the show is a special dedication to a very special man. Mr John OBanion who plays out the show with a very special song. Heres to you John! Check out https://frompage2screen.com/ for more content including reviews, competitions, interviews and movie news that you dont see everywhere else. Twitter: https://twitter.com/FromPage2Screen Check out 'thegeekhouse' in groups on Facebook Video Content at https://www.youtube.com/frompage2screen Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/frompage2screen/ This podcast episode was brought to you by frompage2screen.com

Welcome to another edition of the RV  Podcast - Your Guide to Freedom and Fun through RV Travel.  This week we meet a remarkable woman, Carolyn Rose of the YouTube Channel Carolyn’s RV Life. Carolyn left a big corporate job in the city for a life mostly spent in the boonies, traveling alone in her RV, to follow her dreams. Carolyn is our Interview of the Week on this 274th episode of the RV podcast, being released on Jan 1, 2020, the first day of a new year and a new decade. So Happy New Year Fellow Travelers and welcome to our New Year’s Day edition of the podcast. Besides the interview, we have RV News, your questions, and much more. But right now, my lifelong traveling companion and my bride…Jennifer.  WHAT MIKE AND JENNIFER ARE UP TO THIS WEEK We took last week off for Christmas and have had a great Holiday season with family. Yesterday we traveled to Frankenmuth, MI, home of Bronner’s famous Christmas Wonderland. It was surprisingly crowded even though Christmas was last week and they don’t discount their decorations because they are open 361 days a year, closed only on Christmas Day, New Year’s Day and Easter. We’re getting ready for our annual winter campout in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula next week, where we’ll gather with several dozen RV Lifestyle Fellow Travelers. And the day after we get back from the UP, we head to Tampa, FL to spend a week at the Tampa RV Supershow. We’ll be doing Meet and Greets every day during the show from 2-3PM Eastern Time at the Leisure Travel Vans display. On Thursday Jan. 16, we’ll be at a big party that everyone is invited to that is held at the Wing House right near the Fairgrounds. We’ll put info in the shownotes for this episode at rvlifestyle.com/274 On Friday we’ll be at the Islamorada Restaurant at Bass World in nearby Brandon to meet with a group of Leisure Travel Van owners. They call their club the Flamingoes. And every day during the show we’ll be roaming the fairgrounds doing stories. If you see be sure to introduce yourself! This part of the podcast is brought to you by Dish Outdoors, which lets RVers pay as they go and watch HD satellite television from wherever they are camped with easy to set up gear made with the RVer in mind. Just go to https://rvlifestyle.com/dish for details on the service and special deal just for listeners of this podcast RV LIFESTYLE NEWS OF THE WEEK People breaking rules and getting close to Yellowstone wolf pups being blamed their deathSad news out of Yellowstone National Park last week for all wolf lovers. Two wolf pups died after being struck by a car back in November. Officials said the pups’ death was tied to them losing their fear of humans. Park officials did their best to keep people away from the wolves - closing off the area around their den, requiring people stay 100 yards away when they left their den, hazing them to scare them of roads and people, and so on. But people kept breaking the rules and getting close for pictures. After losing their fear of humans, the pups kept getting too close to roads, which ultimately,  park officials said, led to them being hit by a vehicle and dying. New Mexico's White Sands National Monument is now White Sands National Park  It's now official: America has a new national park. Last Friday New Mexico's White Sands National Monument became White Sands National Park. This brings the number of national parks to 62. White Sands became a national monument in 1933 and plans were underway for years to turn the unique spot, home to the world's largest gypsum dune field, into a national park for some time. Officials hope the designation will help the local economy. French paper runs feature on Roadtrek After driving a Roadtrek for years, we have promised to keep our readers informed as best we can when we see or hear any news on the brand. Well, last week a French publication ran a story saying 70 employees were hired by Rapido are currently producing camper vans.

Kimmy Gatewood (GLOW, The Mother Of All Shows podcast) catches up with Betsy and Amanda this week to talk about getting conned into a sick-day, the one kid who makes the whole family late, and the realization that Paw Patrol will win every time. Plus, Betsy makes a shocking confession! -- SHOW INFORMATION Why Mommy Drinks Merchandise Facebook Page: @WhyMommyDrinksPodcast Facebook Group: @WhyMommyDrinks Instagram: @WhyMommyDrinksPodcast Twitter: @MommyDrinksShow Email: WhyMommyDrinksPodcast@gmail.com Sh*tshows Hotline: 424-279-8842 Subscribe: Apple Podcasts Subscribe: Spotify

This week, we've got another voice messages edition of Weirdest Thing! We listen and react to extra weird, listener-provided facts that range from how a volcanic eruption led to the invention of the bicycle to female bugs with spiky penises. It's always great to hear from you all—to submit your own fact, download the Anchor podcast app on Apple or Google Play, and look up our show, The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week. Click the voice message button, introduce yourself, maybe tell us where you're from, and record up to 60 seconds of gab about your favorite weird fact. Don't worry, we'll make sure it's accurate before posting it anywhere. Thanks for calling, weirdos! The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share more of your weirdest facts and stories with us in our Facebook group or tweet at us! Click here to learn more about all of our stories! Click here to buy tickets for Weirdest Thing Live on June 14th! Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Jess Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme music by Billy Cadden: www.twitter.com/billycadden --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/support

Vells,Dion,Ideals,Rickateers,Marcels,Flamingoes,Danleers, And More!

It's a great day for taffy lovers - and the second episode in a row that looks at some random animal behaviors. Learn about an elementary school planting seeds of kindness and stick around for the Thursday affirmation.   Helpful links from today's show   Taffy Day   Flamingo legs   Kindness mural   Subscribe on YouTube   Subscribe on iTunes   Subscribe on Spotify   Subscribe on Google Play   Follow on Facebook   Follow on Instagram

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

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

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

  Welcome to episode twenty-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at "Ko Ko Mo" by Gene and Eunice. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. For the most part I have only used two resources for this podcast, because as I explain in the episode itself there is basically no information available anywhere on Gene and Eunice. The resource which I used for all the information about Gene and Eunice themselves, and most of the music, is the now out-of-print 2001 Ace Records CD Go On Ko Ko Mo!, whose eleven-page booklet by Stuart Colman contains about ten and a half pages more information about Gene and Eunice than otherwise seems to exist. For the information about John Dolphin, I used the self-published book Recorded in Hollywood, the John Dolphin Story, by Jamelle Baruck Dolphin. This contains some very incorrect information in parts -- notably, in the couple of paragraphs talking about Gene and Eunice, it mentions "The Vow" being covered by Bunny and Rita, which is how I found out about that, but it also says that the song was covered by Jackie and Doreen on the same label. The Jackie and Doreen record called "The Vow" is a different song (unless there were two records of that name, which I don't dismiss, but I've only been able to find one), and the book also calls Coxsone Dodd "Coxton Dodd". But presumably, given the author's surname and the fact that the book heavily quotes from John Dolphin's children, the book can be relied on to be more or less accurate when it comes to the facts of Dolphin's life, at least. The Ace Records CD mentioned above contains *almost* every record released by Gene and Eunice, but it doesn't contain the Aladdin Records version of "Ko Ko Mo", just the Combo original. However, That's Your Last Boogie, a three-CD compilation of Johnny Otis music I have recommended here before, does have that track on it, as well as many more tracks we've discussed in this series and a few that we're going to look at in future. And finally, it looks like the Kickstarter for the first book based on this series is going to fail -- there are two days left to go and it's still short by nearly two hundred pounds. But it's still possible to pledge if you feel like it. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   "Arruba, Jamaica..." no, sorry, this is not that Kokomo, which much as I love the Beach Boys is *not* going to make this history. Instead it's a song that is now almost completely forgotten but which was one of the most important records in early rock and roll. And I do mean both that it has been almost completely forgotten and that it was hugely important. This song seems just to have fallen out of the collective memory altogether, to the extent that I only found out about it by reading old books and asking "what is this ko ko mo they're talking about?” Because it was important enough that *all* of the best books on R&B history -- most of which were written in the sixties or seventies, when the events I've been talking about were far fresher in the memory -- mentioned it, and said it was one of the most important records of 1954. And the fact is, there is an interesting story buried in there, the story of how "Ko Ko Mo" by Gene and Eunice was *two* of the most important records in early rock and roll. But there's another story there too -- the story of how a record can completely disappear from the cultural memory. Because even in those books which mention it... that's all they do. They just mention this record's existence, giving it no more than a few sentences. On most of these podcast episodes, I end up cutting a lot of material, because there's far more to say than will fit into a half-hour podcast. Here... there's nothing to cut. The sum total of all the information out there, in the whole world, as far as I can tell, is in a single eleven-page CD booklet. To talk about "Ko Ko Mo", first we're going to have to talk about Shirley & Lee. Shirley and Lee were "the sweethearts of the blues", a New Orleans R&B duo who recorded in Cosimo Matassa's studio. They weren't a real-life couple, but their publicity suggested that they were, and their songs made up a continuing story of an on-again off-again romance. Their first single, "I'm Gone", reached number two on the R&B charts: [excerpt: "I'm Gone", Shirley and Lee] They were, as far as I can tell, the first people in *any* genre to do this kind of couple back-and-forth singing, as opposed to duets by singers who clearly weren't in a real relationship. You can trace a line from them through Sonny and Cher or Johnny Cash and June Carter -- duet partners whose appeal was partly due to their offstage relationships. Of course in Shirley and Lee's case this was faked, but the audiences didn't know that, at least at the time. Shirley and Lee were popular enough that they inspired a whole host of imitators. We've mentioned Ike and Tina Turner before, and we're likely to talk about them again, but there was also Mickey and Sylvia, whose "Love is Strange" we'll be looking at later. The three duo acts we've mentioned all knew each other -- for example, Mickey and Sylvia sang backup on Ike and Tina Turner's "I Think It's Going to Work Out Fine". [excerpt: Ike and Tina Turner: "I Think It's Going To Work Out Fine"] But there was one other duo act who tried to make a success out of the Shirley and Lee formula, and who didn't know those other groups, and it's them we're going to be talking about today. Unlike Shirley and Lee, Gene and Eunice were a real-life couple, and so they didn't have to fake things the way Shirley and Lee did. Gene Forrest had been a jobbing singer for several years. He started out recording solo records for John Dolphin's label Recorded In Hollywood. The label "Recorded in Hollywood" was a bit of a misnomer, but that label name itself tells you something about the rampant racism of American society in the 1950s. You see, John Dolphin wasn't actually based in Hollywood because when he'd tried to open his first business there -- a record shop -- he'd been unable to, because Dolphin was black, and black people weren't allowed to own businesses in Hollywood. So he named his record shop "Dolphin's of Hollywood" anyway, and opened it in a different part of Los Angeles. But even though Dolphin was a victim of racism, he was also a beneficiary of it, and this just goes to show how revoltingly endemic racism was in the US in this time period. Because the original location for Dolphin's of Hollywood was on Central Ave, which at the time was the centre for black businesses in LA, in the same way that Beale Street was in Memphis or Rampart Street in New Orleans. But Central Ave only became a centre for black business because of one of the worst acts of racism in America's history. Most of the businesses there were originally owned by Japanese people. When, during World War II, Japanese people in America, and Japanese-Americans, were interred in concentration camps for the duration of the war, those businesses became vacant, and the white owners of the properties were desperate for someone to rent them to, so they "allowed" black people to rent them. There was a big campaign in the black local press at the time to encourage black entrepreneurs to take over these vacant properties, and part of the campaign was to tell people that if they didn't start businesses there then Jews would instead. Yes. Sadly society in the US at that time was just *that* fractally racist. But John Dolphin managed to build himself a very successful business, and he essentially dominated rhythm and blues in Los Angeles in the 1950s. As well as having a record shop, which stayed open twenty-four hours a day, he also owned a radio station, which broadcast from the front window of the record shop, with DJs such as Hunter Hancock and Johnny Otis. Those DJs would tell everyone they were broadcasting from Dolphin's, so the listeners would come along to the shop. And Dolphin innovated something that may have changed the whole of music history -- he deliberately targeted both his radio station and his record shop at white teenagers -- realising that they would buy music by black musicians if they knew about it, and that they had more money than the black community. As a result, his record shop often had queues out the door of white teenagers eager to buy the latest R&B records, and through the influence of his DJs the whole of the West Coast music scene became strongly influenced by the music people like Otis and Hancock would play. And then on top of that, in what, depending on how you look at it, was a great act of corporate synergy or something that should have brought action by antitrust agencies. Dolphin owned record labels. And his promise to artists was "We'll record you today and you'll have a hit tonight" -- because anything recorded on his labels would instantly go into heavy rotation on his radio station and be pushed in his record shop. Gene Forrest's records were an example: [excerpt: Gene Forrest, "Everybody's Got Money"] What that *didn't* mean for the musicians, though, was any money. Dolphin paid a flat fee for his recordings, took all the publishing rights, and wouldn't pay royalties. But for many musicians this was reasonable enough at the time -- the idea for them was that they'd make records for Dolphin to build themselves a name, then move on to a label which paid them reasonable amounts of money. As Dolphin never signed anyone to a multi-record contract, they could easily move on after making a record or two for him. Sadly for Gene the promise of "a hit tonight" didn't pay off, and after three singles for Recorded in Hollywood, he moved first to RPM Records, one of the many blues and R&B labels that was operating at the time, and then to Aladdin Records for a one-off single backed by a band called the Four Feathers. That would be the only record they would make together, but the connection with Aladdin Records would prove to be important. Shortly after that record came out, Forrest met a young singer named Eunice Levy, after she'd done well at Hunter Hancock's talent show. Initially they started working together because the Four Feathers were looking for a female harmony vocalist, but soon they became romantically involved, and started working as a duo rather than as part of a larger group, and recording for Combo Records. Combo was a tiny label owned by the trumpet player Jake Porter, and most of the records it released were recorded in Porter's basement. A typical example of a Combo release is "Ting Ting Boom Scat", by Jonesy's Combo: [excerpt: "Ting Ting Boom Scat", Jonesy's Combo] Gene and Eunice's only record for Combo, "Ko Ko Mo", is a fairly typical rhythm and blues record for 1954. It varies simply between a verse in tresillo rhythm, trying for something of the sound of Fats Domino's records, and a more straightforward shuffle on the choruses, going between them rather awkwardly: [excerpt: "Ko Ko Mo" first version, by Gene and Eunice] The reason for the awkward transition is simple enough -- it's a song made up from ideas from two different songwriters bolted together. Gene came up with the verse, while Eunice came up with the chorus -- she was inspired by the town of Kokomo, Indiana. Jake Porter is the third credited songwriter, and it's not entirely certain what, if anything, he contributed -- Porter was the owner of the record label, and label owners often took credit they didn't deserve. But on the other hand, Porter was himself a musician, and he'd performed with Lionel Hampton and Benny Goodman, among others, so it's not unreasonable that he might have actually contributed to the songwriting. The record was backed by "Jonesy's Combo", who are credited on the record along with Gene and Eunice. Now, listen to this: [excerpt "Ko Ko Mo", second version, by Gene and Eunice] That record is Gene and Eunice doing "Ko Ko Mo". The record is credited to Gene and Eunice with Johnny's Combo. The Johnny in this case is Johnny Otis, whose band backs the singers on that version. As you can tell, it sounds very close to identical to the original -- even though I'm sure Johnny Otis could easily have got the record sounding smoother and with more of a groove if he had been allowed. You see, Gene was still under contract with Aladdin Records as a solo artist following his one single with them, and when they found that he had put out a record that might have some success with a competing label, they decided that they had to have their own version, and pulled rank, getting him to rerecord the track as closely as he could to the original recording. Eunice wasn't contracted to Aladdin, but given that the alternative was presumably a lawsuit, she went along with it. Gene and Eunice were now an Aladdin Records act, and their next few records would all be released on that label. The recording replicated the original as closely as possible, and both records even had B-sides which were identical-sounding recordings of the same song. Once Combo Records found out, they started an advertising war with Aladdin. It was bad enough that other people were recording the song and having hits with it, but the same act putting out the record on two different labels, that was obviously unacceptable, and the two labels started to put out competing adverts in the trade journals, Aladdin's adverts saying "Don't Be Fooled, *THIS* is the Gene and Eunice Ko Ko Mo!", while Combo's said "This is it! The *original* Ko Ko Mo!" Billboard counted the two records as the same for chart purposes -- no-one could be bothered keeping track of *which* version of "Ko Ko Mo" it was that was played on the radio or on a jukebox. As far as the public were concerned, it was all one record, and that one record ended up going to number six on the R&B charts. But Gene and Eunice weren't the only ones to have a hit with "Ko Ko Mo". The song became the subject of almost a feeding frenzy of cover versions. The first, by Marvin and Johnny, came out only a month after the original recording: [Excerpt: "Ko Ko Mo" by Marvin and Johnny] But there were dozens upon dozens of them. The Crew Cuts, Louis Armstrong, The Flamingoes, Rosemary Clooney's sister Betty... everyone was recording a version of "Ko Ko Mo", within a month or two of the single coming out. The best explanation anyone can come up with for the massive, improbable, success of the song in cover versions is that it was one of the few R&B singles of the time to be completely free of sexual innuendo. While R&B records of the time mostly sound completely clean to modern ears, to radio programmers at the time records like "the Wallflower" and "Hound Dog" were utterly scandalous, and required substantial rewriting if they were going to play to white audiences. But "Ko Ko Mo" had such a simplistic lyric that there was no problem with it, and the result was that everyone could record it and have a hit with the white audience, leading to it even being recorded by Perry Como: [excerpt "Ko Ko Mo" by Perry Como] And that was the biggest hit of all. Como was the person with whom the song became associated, although thankfully for all concerned he made no further rock and roll records. And even Como's version is probably more rocking than that by Andy Griffith -- yes, that Andy Griffith, the 50s sitcom actor. [excerpt: Andy Griffith, "Ko Ko Mo"] It's notable that the trade magazines advertised Como's version of "Ko Ko Mo" as a rock and roll record -- this was in very early 1955, after "Rock Around the Clock" had been released, but well before it became a hit. But rock and roll was already a phrase that was in use for the style of music, at least among the trade magazines. Normally this kind of cover version would have brought at least a reasonable amount of money to the songwriters -- and as Gene and Eunice were the writers, that should have given them a large amount of money. However, after they sold the song to one publishing company, Aladdin claimed that they owned the publishing, again due to their existing contract with Gene Forrest. So everybody got a share of the money from the hit record, except for the people who wrote and sang it. Gene and Eunice's next single was "This is My Story" [Excerpt: Gene and Eunice "This is My Story"] There was a problem, though. "Ko Ko Mo" was going up the charts, and "This is My Story" was about to be released. They needed to go out on tour to capitalise on the first, promote the second, and generally get themselves into a position where they could have a career with some sort of possibility of lasting. And Eunice was pregnant, with Gene's child. Obviously, she couldn't go out on the road and tour, especially in the kind of conditions in which black artists had to tour in the 1950s, often sleeping on fans' floors because there were no hotels that would take black people. There was only one thing for it. They would have to get in a replacement Eunice. They auditioned several singers, before eventually settling on Linda Hayes, the sister of Tony Williams of the Platters. Hayes didn't sound much like Eunice, but she looked enough like her that she could do the job. We heard from Linda Hayes last week, when we looked at one of the Johnny Ace tribute records she sang on, but she had a relatively decent minor career herself, singing lead on several records with her brother's group before putting out a few records of her own. Here, for example, is one of her records with the Platters: [excerpt: Linda Hayes and the Platters, "Please Have Mercy"] So Gene toured with Linda as a substitute Eunice while Eunice was on what amounted to maternity leave, and that worked well enough. "This is My Story" went to number eight on the R&B charts, and it looked like Gene and Eunice were on their way to permanent stardom. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case, and by the time Eunice got back from maternity leave, the duo's career stalled. They recorded several more records for Aladdin, and tried various different tactics to repeat their early success, including having their records produced by the great Earl Palmer: [Excerpt: Gene and Eunice, "The Angels Gave You To Me"] None of that did any good as far as charting goes. "This is My Story" was their last chart hit for Aladdin records, and after the recordings with Earl Palmer in 1958, the label dropped them. They recorded for several more labels, with mixed results. For a while, Eunice returned to Combo records -- unsurprisingly, after what had happened with Gene's contract, Jake Porter didn't want to have anything to do with Gene, but Eunice released a couple of unsuccessful tracks with them: [excerpt: Eunice Levy, "Only Lovers"] So, why did Gene and Eunice become completely forgotten? Why, outside the liner notes for a single out-of-print CD booklet and a Wikipedia article based substantially on that booklet, have I been able to find a grand total of four paragraphs or so of text about them in any reliable source? And why does even that set of liner notes start with the sentence "Gene & Eunice's story is muddled, confusing, and largely unknown"? I think this comes back to something that has been an underlying theme of this podcast from the start -- the fact that great art comes from scenes as much as it does from individuals. This is not the same as saying that great *artists* aren't individuals, but that the music we remember tends to come out of reinforcing groups of artists, not just collaborating but providing networks for each other, acting as each other's support acts, promoting each other's material. I mentioned when I was talking about Mickey and Sylvia, Shirley & Lee, and Ike and Tina Turner that all three of these acts knew and worked with each other. None of them worked with Gene and Eunice, and Gene & Eunice just don't seem to have had any particular network of musicians with whom they collaborated. The collaboration with Johnny Otis just seems to have been a one-off job for him, and bringing in Linda Hayes doesn't seem to have led to any further connections with the people she worked with. With almost every act we've talked about, you find them turning up in unexpected places in biographies of other acts, and even the one-hit wonders who had hits that people remembered continued being parts of other musicians' lives. Gene and Eunice just didn't. But without those connections, without making themselves part of a bigger story, they didn't become part of the cultural memory. Most of the acts that covered "Ko Ko Mo" were people like Perry Como or Louis Armstrong who aren't part of the rock and roll canon, and so the record seems to have turned into a footnote. But that wasn't quite the end of their influence. Jamaica always had a soft spot for US R&B of the Fats Domino type, and Gene and Eunice, with their adaptations of Dave Bartholomew's New Orleans style, became mildly successful in Jamaica. In particular, their record "The Vow", which had been one of their last Aladdin releases, got covered on Coxsone Dodd's Studio One records, the label that basically pioneered ska, rocksteady, and reggae music in Jamaica. In 1965, Studio One released this: [excerpt: Bunny and Rita: "The Vow"] That's another version of their song, this time performed by Bunny and Rita -- as in Bunny Wailer, of the Wailers, and Rita Anderson, who would later also join the Wailers and become better known by her married name after she married Bunny's bandmate Bob Marley. Gene and Eunice attempted a reunion in the eighties. They didn't get on well enough to make it work, but Eunice did get to record one last single as a solo artist, under her new married name Eunice Russ Frost. On "Real Reel Switcher" she was backed by the classic fifties rhythm section of Red Callender and Earl Palmer: [excerpt: Eunice Russ Frost, "Real Reel Switcher"] Gene remained out of the spotlight until his death in 2003, but Eunice would occasionally perform at conventions for fans of doo-wop and R&B until she died in 2002. She never got to recapture her early success, but she did, at least, know there were still people out there who remembered "Ko Ko Mo”.

  Welcome to episode twenty-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at “Ko Ko Mo” by Gene and Eunice. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. For the most part I have only used two resources for this podcast, because as I explain in the episode itself there is basically no information available anywhere on Gene and Eunice. The resource which I used for all the information about Gene and Eunice themselves, and most of the music, is the now out-of-print 2001 Ace Records CD Go On Ko Ko Mo!, whose eleven-page booklet by Stuart Colman contains about ten and a half pages more information about Gene and Eunice than otherwise seems to exist. For the information about John Dolphin, I used the self-published book Recorded in Hollywood, the John Dolphin Story, by Jamelle Baruck Dolphin. This contains some very incorrect information in parts — notably, in the couple of paragraphs talking about Gene and Eunice, it mentions “The Vow” being covered by Bunny and Rita, which is how I found out about that, but it also says that the song was covered by Jackie and Doreen on the same label. The Jackie and Doreen record called “The Vow” is a different song (unless there were two records of that name, which I don’t dismiss, but I’ve only been able to find one), and the book also calls Coxsone Dodd “Coxton Dodd”. But presumably, given the author’s surname and the fact that the book heavily quotes from John Dolphin’s children, the book can be relied on to be more or less accurate when it comes to the facts of Dolphin’s life, at least. The Ace Records CD mentioned above contains *almost* every record released by Gene and Eunice, but it doesn’t contain the Aladdin Records version of “Ko Ko Mo”, just the Combo original. However, That’s Your Last Boogie, a three-CD compilation of Johnny Otis music I have recommended here before, does have that track on it, as well as many more tracks we’ve discussed in this series and a few that we’re going to look at in future. And finally, it looks like the Kickstarter for the first book based on this series is going to fail — there are two days left to go and it’s still short by nearly two hundred pounds. But it’s still possible to pledge if you feel like it. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   “Arruba, Jamaica…” no, sorry, this is not that Kokomo, which much as I love the Beach Boys is *not* going to make this history. Instead it’s a song that is now almost completely forgotten but which was one of the most important records in early rock and roll. And I do mean both that it has been almost completely forgotten and that it was hugely important. This song seems just to have fallen out of the collective memory altogether, to the extent that I only found out about it by reading old books and asking “what is this ko ko mo they’re talking about?” Because it was important enough that *all* of the best books on R&B history — most of which were written in the sixties or seventies, when the events I’ve been talking about were far fresher in the memory — mentioned it, and said it was one of the most important records of 1954. And the fact is, there is an interesting story buried in there, the story of how “Ko Ko Mo” by Gene and Eunice was *two* of the most important records in early rock and roll. But there’s another story there too — the story of how a record can completely disappear from the cultural memory. Because even in those books which mention it… that’s all they do. They just mention this record’s existence, giving it no more than a few sentences. On most of these podcast episodes, I end up cutting a lot of material, because there’s far more to say than will fit into a half-hour podcast. Here… there’s nothing to cut. The sum total of all the information out there, in the whole world, as far as I can tell, is in a single eleven-page CD booklet. To talk about “Ko Ko Mo”, first we’re going to have to talk about Shirley & Lee. Shirley and Lee were “the sweethearts of the blues”, a New Orleans R&B duo who recorded in Cosimo Matassa’s studio. They weren’t a real-life couple, but their publicity suggested that they were, and their songs made up a continuing story of an on-again off-again romance. Their first single, “I’m Gone”, reached number two on the R&B charts: [excerpt: “I’m Gone”, Shirley and Lee] They were, as far as I can tell, the first people in *any* genre to do this kind of couple back-and-forth singing, as opposed to duets by singers who clearly weren’t in a real relationship. You can trace a line from them through Sonny and Cher or Johnny Cash and June Carter — duet partners whose appeal was partly due to their offstage relationships. Of course in Shirley and Lee’s case this was faked, but the audiences didn’t know that, at least at the time. Shirley and Lee were popular enough that they inspired a whole host of imitators. We’ve mentioned Ike and Tina Turner before, and we’re likely to talk about them again, but there was also Mickey and Sylvia, whose “Love is Strange” we’ll be looking at later. The three duo acts we’ve mentioned all knew each other — for example, Mickey and Sylvia sang backup on Ike and Tina Turner’s “I Think It’s Going to Work Out Fine”. [excerpt: Ike and Tina Turner: “I Think It’s Going To Work Out Fine”] But there was one other duo act who tried to make a success out of the Shirley and Lee formula, and who didn’t know those other groups, and it’s them we’re going to be talking about today. Unlike Shirley and Lee, Gene and Eunice were a real-life couple, and so they didn’t have to fake things the way Shirley and Lee did. Gene Forrest had been a jobbing singer for several years. He started out recording solo records for John Dolphin’s label Recorded In Hollywood. The label “Recorded in Hollywood” was a bit of a misnomer, but that label name itself tells you something about the rampant racism of American society in the 1950s. You see, John Dolphin wasn’t actually based in Hollywood because when he’d tried to open his first business there — a record shop — he’d been unable to, because Dolphin was black, and black people weren’t allowed to own businesses in Hollywood. So he named his record shop “Dolphin’s of Hollywood” anyway, and opened it in a different part of Los Angeles. But even though Dolphin was a victim of racism, he was also a beneficiary of it, and this just goes to show how revoltingly endemic racism was in the US in this time period. Because the original location for Dolphin’s of Hollywood was on Central Ave, which at the time was the centre for black businesses in LA, in the same way that Beale Street was in Memphis or Rampart Street in New Orleans. But Central Ave only became a centre for black business because of one of the worst acts of racism in America’s history. Most of the businesses there were originally owned by Japanese people. When, during World War II, Japanese people in America, and Japanese-Americans, were interred in concentration camps for the duration of the war, those businesses became vacant, and the white owners of the properties were desperate for someone to rent them to, so they “allowed” black people to rent them. There was a big campaign in the black local press at the time to encourage black entrepreneurs to take over these vacant properties, and part of the campaign was to tell people that if they didn’t start businesses there then Jews would instead. Yes. Sadly society in the US at that time was just *that* fractally racist. But John Dolphin managed to build himself a very successful business, and he essentially dominated rhythm and blues in Los Angeles in the 1950s. As well as having a record shop, which stayed open twenty-four hours a day, he also owned a radio station, which broadcast from the front window of the record shop, with DJs such as Hunter Hancock and Johnny Otis. Those DJs would tell everyone they were broadcasting from Dolphin’s, so the listeners would come along to the shop. And Dolphin innovated something that may have changed the whole of music history — he deliberately targeted both his radio station and his record shop at white teenagers — realising that they would buy music by black musicians if they knew about it, and that they had more money than the black community. As a result, his record shop often had queues out the door of white teenagers eager to buy the latest R&B records, and through the influence of his DJs the whole of the West Coast music scene became strongly influenced by the music people like Otis and Hancock would play. And then on top of that, in what, depending on how you look at it, was a great act of corporate synergy or something that should have brought action by antitrust agencies. Dolphin owned record labels. And his promise to artists was “We’ll record you today and you’ll have a hit tonight” — because anything recorded on his labels would instantly go into heavy rotation on his radio station and be pushed in his record shop. Gene Forrest’s records were an example: [excerpt: Gene Forrest, “Everybody’s Got Money”] What that *didn’t* mean for the musicians, though, was any money. Dolphin paid a flat fee for his recordings, took all the publishing rights, and wouldn’t pay royalties. But for many musicians this was reasonable enough at the time — the idea for them was that they’d make records for Dolphin to build themselves a name, then move on to a label which paid them reasonable amounts of money. As Dolphin never signed anyone to a multi-record contract, they could easily move on after making a record or two for him. Sadly for Gene the promise of “a hit tonight” didn’t pay off, and after three singles for Recorded in Hollywood, he moved first to RPM Records, one of the many blues and R&B labels that was operating at the time, and then to Aladdin Records for a one-off single backed by a band called the Four Feathers. That would be the only record they would make together, but the connection with Aladdin Records would prove to be important. Shortly after that record came out, Forrest met a young singer named Eunice Levy, after she’d done well at Hunter Hancock’s talent show. Initially they started working together because the Four Feathers were looking for a female harmony vocalist, but soon they became romantically involved, and started working as a duo rather than as part of a larger group, and recording for Combo Records. Combo was a tiny label owned by the trumpet player Jake Porter, and most of the records it released were recorded in Porter’s basement. A typical example of a Combo release is “Ting Ting Boom Scat”, by Jonesy’s Combo: [excerpt: “Ting Ting Boom Scat”, Jonesy’s Combo] Gene and Eunice’s only record for Combo, “Ko Ko Mo”, is a fairly typical rhythm and blues record for 1954. It varies simply between a verse in tresillo rhythm, trying for something of the sound of Fats Domino’s records, and a more straightforward shuffle on the choruses, going between them rather awkwardly: [excerpt: “Ko Ko Mo” first version, by Gene and Eunice] The reason for the awkward transition is simple enough — it’s a song made up from ideas from two different songwriters bolted together. Gene came up with the verse, while Eunice came up with the chorus — she was inspired by the town of Kokomo, Indiana. Jake Porter is the third credited songwriter, and it’s not entirely certain what, if anything, he contributed — Porter was the owner of the record label, and label owners often took credit they didn’t deserve. But on the other hand, Porter was himself a musician, and he’d performed with Lionel Hampton and Benny Goodman, among others, so it’s not unreasonable that he might have actually contributed to the songwriting. The record was backed by “Jonesy’s Combo”, who are credited on the record along with Gene and Eunice. Now, listen to this: [excerpt “Ko Ko Mo”, second version, by Gene and Eunice] That record is Gene and Eunice doing “Ko Ko Mo”. The record is credited to Gene and Eunice with Johnny’s Combo. The Johnny in this case is Johnny Otis, whose band backs the singers on that version. As you can tell, it sounds very close to identical to the original — even though I’m sure Johnny Otis could easily have got the record sounding smoother and with more of a groove if he had been allowed. You see, Gene was still under contract with Aladdin Records as a solo artist following his one single with them, and when they found that he had put out a record that might have some success with a competing label, they decided that they had to have their own version, and pulled rank, getting him to rerecord the track as closely as he could to the original recording. Eunice wasn’t contracted to Aladdin, but given that the alternative was presumably a lawsuit, she went along with it. Gene and Eunice were now an Aladdin Records act, and their next few records would all be released on that label. The recording replicated the original as closely as possible, and both records even had B-sides which were identical-sounding recordings of the same song. Once Combo Records found out, they started an advertising war with Aladdin. It was bad enough that other people were recording the song and having hits with it, but the same act putting out the record on two different labels, that was obviously unacceptable, and the two labels started to put out competing adverts in the trade journals, Aladdin’s adverts saying “Don’t Be Fooled, *THIS* is the Gene and Eunice Ko Ko Mo!”, while Combo’s said “This is it! The *original* Ko Ko Mo!” Billboard counted the two records as the same for chart purposes — no-one could be bothered keeping track of *which* version of “Ko Ko Mo” it was that was played on the radio or on a jukebox. As far as the public were concerned, it was all one record, and that one record ended up going to number six on the R&B charts. But Gene and Eunice weren’t the only ones to have a hit with “Ko Ko Mo”. The song became the subject of almost a feeding frenzy of cover versions. The first, by Marvin and Johnny, came out only a month after the original recording: [Excerpt: “Ko Ko Mo” by Marvin and Johnny] But there were dozens upon dozens of them. The Crew Cuts, Louis Armstrong, The Flamingoes, Rosemary Clooney’s sister Betty… everyone was recording a version of “Ko Ko Mo”, within a month or two of the single coming out. The best explanation anyone can come up with for the massive, improbable, success of the song in cover versions is that it was one of the few R&B singles of the time to be completely free of sexual innuendo. While R&B records of the time mostly sound completely clean to modern ears, to radio programmers at the time records like “the Wallflower” and “Hound Dog” were utterly scandalous, and required substantial rewriting if they were going to play to white audiences. But “Ko Ko Mo” had such a simplistic lyric that there was no problem with it, and the result was that everyone could record it and have a hit with the white audience, leading to it even being recorded by Perry Como: [excerpt “Ko Ko Mo” by Perry Como] And that was the biggest hit of all. Como was the person with whom the song became associated, although thankfully for all concerned he made no further rock and roll records. And even Como’s version is probably more rocking than that by Andy Griffith — yes, that Andy Griffith, the 50s sitcom actor. [excerpt: Andy Griffith, “Ko Ko Mo”] It’s notable that the trade magazines advertised Como’s version of “Ko Ko Mo” as a rock and roll record — this was in very early 1955, after “Rock Around the Clock” had been released, but well before it became a hit. But rock and roll was already a phrase that was in use for the style of music, at least among the trade magazines. Normally this kind of cover version would have brought at least a reasonable amount of money to the songwriters — and as Gene and Eunice were the writers, that should have given them a large amount of money. However, after they sold the song to one publishing company, Aladdin claimed that they owned the publishing, again due to their existing contract with Gene Forrest. So everybody got a share of the money from the hit record, except for the people who wrote and sang it. Gene and Eunice’s next single was “This is My Story” [Excerpt: Gene and Eunice “This is My Story”] There was a problem, though. “Ko Ko Mo” was going up the charts, and “This is My Story” was about to be released. They needed to go out on tour to capitalise on the first, promote the second, and generally get themselves into a position where they could have a career with some sort of possibility of lasting. And Eunice was pregnant, with Gene’s child. Obviously, she couldn’t go out on the road and tour, especially in the kind of conditions in which black artists had to tour in the 1950s, often sleeping on fans’ floors because there were no hotels that would take black people. There was only one thing for it. They would have to get in a replacement Eunice. They auditioned several singers, before eventually settling on Linda Hayes, the sister of Tony Williams of the Platters. Hayes didn’t sound much like Eunice, but she looked enough like her that she could do the job. We heard from Linda Hayes last week, when we looked at one of the Johnny Ace tribute records she sang on, but she had a relatively decent minor career herself, singing lead on several records with her brother’s group before putting out a few records of her own. Here, for example, is one of her records with the Platters: [excerpt: Linda Hayes and the Platters, “Please Have Mercy”] So Gene toured with Linda as a substitute Eunice while Eunice was on what amounted to maternity leave, and that worked well enough. “This is My Story” went to number eight on the R&B charts, and it looked like Gene and Eunice were on their way to permanent stardom. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case, and by the time Eunice got back from maternity leave, the duo’s career stalled. They recorded several more records for Aladdin, and tried various different tactics to repeat their early success, including having their records produced by the great Earl Palmer: [Excerpt: Gene and Eunice, “The Angels Gave You To Me”] None of that did any good as far as charting goes. “This is My Story” was their last chart hit for Aladdin records, and after the recordings with Earl Palmer in 1958, the label dropped them. They recorded for several more labels, with mixed results. For a while, Eunice returned to Combo records — unsurprisingly, after what had happened with Gene’s contract, Jake Porter didn’t want to have anything to do with Gene, but Eunice released a couple of unsuccessful tracks with them: [excerpt: Eunice Levy, “Only Lovers”] So, why did Gene and Eunice become completely forgotten? Why, outside the liner notes for a single out-of-print CD booklet and a Wikipedia article based substantially on that booklet, have I been able to find a grand total of four paragraphs or so of text about them in any reliable source? And why does even that set of liner notes start with the sentence “Gene & Eunice’s story is muddled, confusing, and largely unknown”? I think this comes back to something that has been an underlying theme of this podcast from the start — the fact that great art comes from scenes as much as it does from individuals. This is not the same as saying that great *artists* aren’t individuals, but that the music we remember tends to come out of reinforcing groups of artists, not just collaborating but providing networks for each other, acting as each other’s support acts, promoting each other’s material. I mentioned when I was talking about Mickey and Sylvia, Shirley & Lee, and Ike and Tina Turner that all three of these acts knew and worked with each other. None of them worked with Gene and Eunice, and Gene & Eunice just don’t seem to have had any particular network of musicians with whom they collaborated. The collaboration with Johnny Otis just seems to have been a one-off job for him, and bringing in Linda Hayes doesn’t seem to have led to any further connections with the people she worked with. With almost every act we’ve talked about, you find them turning up in unexpected places in biographies of other acts, and even the one-hit wonders who had hits that people remembered continued being parts of other musicians’ lives. Gene and Eunice just didn’t. But without those connections, without making themselves part of a bigger story, they didn’t become part of the cultural memory. Most of the acts that covered “Ko Ko Mo” were people like Perry Como or Louis Armstrong who aren’t part of the rock and roll canon, and so the record seems to have turned into a footnote. But that wasn’t quite the end of their influence. Jamaica always had a soft spot for US R&B of the Fats Domino type, and Gene and Eunice, with their adaptations of Dave Bartholomew’s New Orleans style, became mildly successful in Jamaica. In particular, their record “The Vow”, which had been one of their last Aladdin releases, got covered on Coxsone Dodd’s Studio One records, the label that basically pioneered ska, rocksteady, and reggae music in Jamaica. In 1965, Studio One released this: [excerpt: Bunny and Rita: “The Vow”] That’s another version of their song, this time performed by Bunny and Rita — as in Bunny Wailer, of the Wailers, and Rita Anderson, who would later also join the Wailers and become better known by her married name after she married Bunny’s bandmate Bob Marley. Gene and Eunice attempted a reunion in the eighties. They didn’t get on well enough to make it work, but Eunice did get to record one last single as a solo artist, under her new married name Eunice Russ Frost. On “Real Reel Switcher” she was backed by the classic fifties rhythm section of Red Callender and Earl Palmer: [excerpt: Eunice Russ Frost, “Real Reel Switcher”] Gene remained out of the spotlight until his death in 2003, but Eunice would occasionally perform at conventions for fans of doo-wop and R&B until she died in 2002. She never got to recapture her early success, but she did, at least, know there were still people out there who remembered “Ko Ko Mo”.

  Welcome to episode eighteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at "Sh-Boom" by the Chords. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.    ----more----     Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of almost all the songs in the episode. In this case, I have missed out one track that's used in the podcast - I use approximately seven seconds of the intro to "Blurred Lines" by Robin Thicke, without any of the lyrics, in the podcast. I am not going to share that song anywhere, given its lyrical content. My main resources are, as with last week  Honkers & Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues by Arnold Shaw, one of the most important books on early 50s rhythm and blues, The Sound of the City by Charlie Gillett, and Marv Goldberg's website. The Chords' music has never been anthologised on CD that I can find out, but almost any good doo-wop compilation should have "Sh-Boom".   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Let's talk about one-hit wonders for a while. One-hit wonders have an unusual place in the realm of music history, and one which it's never easy to decide whether to envy or to pity. After all, a one-hit wonder has had a hit, which is more than the vast majority of musicians ever do. And depending on how big the hit is and how good it is, that one hit might be enough to keep them going through a whole career. There are musicians to this day who can go out and perform in front of a crowd of a few thousand people, every night, who've come there just to hear that one song they recorded nearly sixty years ago -- and if the musician is good enough they can get that crowd enjoying their other songs as well. But there are other musicians who can never capitalise on that one record, and who never get another shot. And for those people, as the song goes, "a taste of honey's worse than none at all". What initially looked like it might be a massive career turns into a fluke. Sometimes they take it well and it just becomes a story to tell the grandkids, but other times it messes up everyone's life. There are people out there who've spent thirty or forty years of their life chasing a second hit, who will never be truly happy because they expected more from their brief success than it brought them. There are a lot of one-hit wonders in the world of rock and roll, and a lot of people who end up unlucky, but few have been as unlucky as the Chords, who wrote and recorded one of the biggest hits of all time, but who through a combination of bad luck in choosing a name, and more than a little racism, never managed to have a follow-up. Amazingly, they seem to have handled it far better than most. "Sh-Boom", the Chords' only hit, was the first rhythm and blues record by a black artist or group to make the top ten in the Billboard pop charts, so I suppose this is as good a time as any to talk about how the Billboard charts work, and how they differ from charts in the UK and some other countries. While the UK's singles charts are based only on record sales (and, these days, streams, but that doesn't really apply to this pre-digital era), the Billboard charts have always been an industry-specific thing rather than aimed at the public, and so they were based on many different metrics. As well as charts for record sales, they had (or have) charts for jukebox plays, for radio plays, and various other things. These would be combined into different genre-specific charts first, and those genres would be based on what the radio stations were playing. This means that the country charts would include all the songs played by country stations, the R&B charts all those played by R&B stations, and so on, rather than Billboard deciding themselves what counted as what genre. Then all of these charts would be combined to make the "Hot 100", which is sort of a chart of charts. This would sometimes lead to anomalous results, when more than one type of station started playing a song, and some songs would end up on the country chart *and* the rhythm and blues chart *and* the pop chart. Pop is here a separate type of music in itself, and in the early 1950s what got played on "pop" radio was, essentially, the music that was made by white people in the suburbs *for* white people in the suburbs. In 1954, the year we're talking about, the big hits were "O Mein Papa" by Eddie Fisher... [very short excerpt] "Secret Love" by Doris Day [very short excerpt] and records by Perry Como, Rosemary Clooney, Jo Stafford, and Tony Bennett. Polite, white, middle-class music for polite white middle-class people. None of that hillbilly nonsense, and *certainly* nothing by any black people. Some of it, like the Tony Bennett tracks, was pretty good, but much of it was the kind of horrible pap which made rock and roll, when it finally broke on to the pop charts, seem like such a breath of fresh air. And even the Tony Bennett records weren't in any way exciting -- they were good, but they'd relax you after a hard day, not make you want to get up and dance. What's noticeable here is that the pop music charts were dominated by music aimed at adults. There was no music for teenagers or younger adults hitting the pop charts, and no music for dancing. During the height of the swing era, the big bands had of course been making dance music, but now every last bit of black or lower-class influence was being eradicated, in order to appeal to the "return to normalcy". You see, by the end of the Second World War, America had been through a lot -- so much so that the first call for a "return to normalcy" had been from Warren G. Harding in the 1920 election, nearly thirty years earlier. In the previous forty-five years, the country had been involved in two world wars, suffered through the depression and the dustbowl, and simultaneously seen an unprecedented growth in technology which had brought the car, the plane and now the jet, the cinema and then the talkies, the radio and the TV, and now the atomic bomb, into people's lives. People had undergone the greatest disruption in history, and several generations had now grown up with an idea of what was "normal" that didn't match their reality at all. And so the white, semi-prosperous, middle and upper-working class in America made a collective decision around 1946 that they were going to reconstruct that normality for themselves, and to try to pretend as much as possible that nothing had really changed. And that meant pretending that all the black people who'd moved to the Northern cities from the south in that time, and all the poor white people from Oklahoma and Texas who'd moved west to avoid the dustbowl, simply didn't exist. Obviously those other people had some ideas of their own about that, and about how they fit into the world. And those people had a little more of a voice now than they'd had previously. The black people living in the cities had enjoyed something of a war boom -- there had been so much work in the factories that many black people had pulled themselves up into something approaching affluence. That was quickly snatched away when the war ended and those jobs were quote needed by the returning heroes unquote, but a small number of them had managed to get themselves into economically secure positions, and a larger number now knew that it was *possible* for them to make money, and were more motivated than ever for social change that would let them return to their previous status. (This is a recurring pattern in the American economy, incidentally. Every time there's an economic boom, black people are the last to benefit from it and then the first to be damaged in the downturn that follows. White America is like Lucy, putting the football of the American Dream in front of black people and then taking it away again, over and over.) And so the pop chart was for the people who were working in advertising, having three-martini lunches, and driving home to their new suburban picket-fence houses. And the other charts were for everyone else. And this is why it was the music on the other charts that was so interesting. There's an argument that what made rock and roll something new and interesting wasn't any one feature of the genre, but an attitude towards creation. Early rock and roll was very much what we would now think of as "mash ups" -- collages or montages of wildly different elements being brought together -- and this is what really distinguishes between the innovative musicians and the copycats. If you were bringing together half a dozen elements from different styles, then you were doing rock and roll. But if you were just copying one other record -- even if that other record was itself a rock and roll record -- and not bringing anything new to it, then you weren't doing rock and roll, you were doing pop. And it was the people at the margins who would do rock and roll. Because they were the ones who weren't sealing themselves off and trying to deny reality. We talked a little bit about doo-wop last week, but the songs we talked about there probably wouldn't be called doo-wop by most listeners, though there are clear stylistic similarities. It's probably time for me to explain what doo-wop actually is, musically. It's a style you don't get now, except in conscious pastiches, but it was basically an extension of the Ink Spots' style. You have at least four singers, one of whom is a very prominent bass vocalist who sings nonsense words like "doo wop" or "bom bom ba dom", another of whom is a high tenor who takes most of the leads, and the rest sing harmonies in the middle. While the jump bands and western swing were both music that dominated on the West Coast -- the early jump bands were often based in New York, but LA was really the base of the music -- doo wop was a music of the North-East. It sometimes got as far west as Detroit, but it was mostly New York, Washington DC, and a bit later New Jersey, that produced doo-wop singers. And it was doo-wop that would really take off as a musical style. While the jump bands remained mildly successful, the early fifties saw them decline in popularity as far as the R&B charts went, because the new vocal groups were becoming the dominant form in R&B -- and this was especially true of the "bird groups". The first "bird group" was the Ravens, and they might be considered the first doo-wop group full stop. They took the Ink Spots' "top and bottom" format and extended it, so that on their ballads there'd be more interplay between the high and low vocals. Listening to "You Foolish Thing" you can clearly hear the Ink Spots influence: [excerpt "you Foolish Thing"] On their uptempo music, on the other hand, they just had the bass singer sing the lead: [excerpt: the Ravens “Rock Me All Night Long”] And the Ravens became massively influential. They'd found a way to get the catchiest parts of the Ink Spots sound, but without having to stick so closely to the formula. It could work for all kinds of songs, and soon there were a whole host of bands named after birds and singing in the Ravens' style -- the Orioles, the Flamingoes, the Penguins, the Wrens, and many more. We've already heard one of the bands they influenced when we listened to the Robins. The other major influential bird group was the Orioles, whose "It's Too Soon To Know" is another record that's often considered by some to be "the first rock and roll record" -- though to my ears it just sounds like a derivative of the Ink Spots rather than anything new: [excerpt "It's Too Soon to Know" by the Orioles] So there's a clear stylistic progression there, but we're not looking at anything radically different from what came before. The first real doo-wop record to really have a major impact was "Gee", by the Crows, another bird group, which was recorded and released in 1953, but became a hit in 1954, charting a month after "Sh-Boom" was recorded, but before Sh-Boom itself became a hit: [excerpt: "Gee", the Crows] "Gee" is doo-wop absolutely fully formed, and it's a record which had a massive influence, particularly on young California teenagers who were growing up listening to Johnny Otis' radio show -- both Frank Zappa and the Beach Boys would later record their own strange takes on the song, emphasising how odd the record actually sounded. It's also widely credited as the first R&B record to become a hit with a large part of its audience being white teenagers. More than any other form of R&B, doo-wop traded in the concerns of the adolescent, and so it was the first subgenre to become accessible to that huge demographic of white kids who wanted something new they could appropriate and call their own. "Gee" is a record that deserves an episode to itself, frankly, in terms of importance, but there's not much to say about it -- the Crows had one hit, never had another, split up soon after, and there's no real biographical information out there about them. The record just stands on its own. That's also true for "Sh-Boom", and the Chords were another one-hit wonder, but there's a difference there. While "Gee" was the first doo-wop record to make money from white people, "Sh-Boom" was the first doo-wop record to lose money to white people. [excerpt: “Sh-Boom”, the Chords] The Chords were, at least, not actually a bird group -- they were too individual for that -- but in other respects they're very much in the typical mould of the early doo-wop bands, and "Sh-Boom" is, in many ways, an absolutely typical doo-wop song. "Sh-Boom" was not meant to be a hit. It was released on Cat records, a subsidiary of Atlantic Records, but apparently everyone at Atlantic hated the song -- it was only recorded at the Chords' insistence, and it was originally only a B-side until the song started to hit with the DJs. Sh-Boom was arranged by Jesse Stone, but presumably his contribution was the instrumental, rather than the vocal arrangement, as the song was written by the Chords themselves, originally while sitting together in a car. At the time, according to Buddy McCrea of the band, "When they talked to each other, they'd say 'boom.' They'd say 'Hey, man, boom, how ya doin'." Jimmy Keyes, also of the band, said "'Boom' was the slang word. If you were standing on this block for five minutes, you'd hear that slang word fifteen times or more. We would take the 'boom' and make it sound like a bomb: 'shhhhhh-BOOM'." Even the nonsense words in the background were, according to Keyes, meaningful to the band -- "'A langala langala lang.' Well, you could hear the church bells over there," while other parts were references to someone called "Bip", the uncle of band members Carl and Claude Feaster. Bip was homeless, and apparently stank, and when Bip would come to visit, according to Keyes, "We could smell Bip as soon as he opened the door." They would cover their noses and sing "here comes Bip, a flip a dooba dip." And one suspects that this played a big part in the song's success -- while the lyrics are genial gibberish, they're genial gibberish that had meaning to the singers, if not to the audience. That wasn't necessarily appreciated by older people though. The great satirist Stan Freberg recorded a rather mean-spirited parody of the song, combining it with a parody of Marlon Brando who was similarly popular at the time and who Freberg thought comparable in unintelligibility: [excerpt: Stan Freberg "Sh-Boom"] But there's an element of racism in the popular reaction to the success of "Sh-Boom". There was a belief among many people that since they couldn't understand the lyrics, they were hiding some secret code. And any secret code sung by black men must, obviously, have to do with sex. We'll see a lot of this kind of thing as the story goes on, unfortunately. But of course, meaningless lyrics have a long, long, history in popular music -- much longer than is usually appreciated. Most people, when they're talking about nonsense lyrics, trace scat singing back as far as Louis Armstrong imitating his own trumpet. But there's a good argument that they go back as far as we have records of songs existing, or almost. If you look at traditional folk music you'll often find a common pattern, of people singing "As I walked out one bright summer's day/sing too ra la loo ra la loo ra la lay" or similar. That kind of nonsense singing dates back as far as we have records, and no-one knows how it started, but one hypothesis I've seen which makes sense to me is that it comes from Gregorian chant and similar religious forms. No, seriously. It makes sense when you think about it. One of the places that people in the Middle Ages were most likely to hear music was in church, and many early motets contained Latin texts -- usually sung by the tenors -- while other people would sing commentary or explanation of the lyrics in the vernacular -- English or French or whatever language. Now, for a peasant hearing this, what do you hear? You hear some of the people singing words that make sense to you, in your own language, but it's mixed in with this other gibberish that you don't understand. If the people you're listening to are singing something that makes sense and they drop into Latin, they might as well be singing "Sh-Boom Sh-Boom sha la la la la la la la la la la la" for all the sense it'll make to you. So you come to the conclusion that that's just how songs *are*. They have bits that make sense and then bits of nonsense that sounds good. Indeed, one of the bits of lyric of “Sh-Boom” as it's commonly transcribed is "hey nonny", which if that's the lyric would tie directly back into that old folk tradition -- that is, sadly, the one bit of nonsense syllabics that the band weren't asked about, and so we can't know if they were thinking of minstrels singing "hey nonny nonny", or if it had some other inspiration as personal as Uncle Bip. But either way, after “Sh-Boom” doo-wop, and R&B in general, became obsessed with nonsense syllabics. We'll be hearing a lot of examples of this in the next few years, and it became so prevalent that by 1961 Barry Mann was asking this musical question: [excerpt: “Who Put the Bomp”, Barry Mann] Doo-wop started as a musical style among black teenagers in East Coast cities, but within a few years it became dominated by Italian-American teenagers from the same areas, and we'll see that progression happen over the next eighty or ninety episodes of this podcast. But we can also see it happening in miniature in the Chords' career. Because while they had a big hit with "Sh-Boom", they didn't have the biggest hit with it. If you vaguely know "Sh-Boom", maybe from hearing it in a film soundtrack, you might have been surprised when you heard a snatch of it earlier in this episode. It might have sounded very subtly wrong. It will have sounded *more or less* like the record you know, but... different. That's because the record you know isn't "Sh-Boom" by the Chords, but "Sh-Boom" by the Crew Cuts. To explain why, we're first going to have to talk about "A Little Bird Told Me": "A Little Bird Told Me" was a song originally recorded by Paula Watson on Supreme Records. Watson, and all the musicians on the record, and the record label's owner, were all black. Watson's record went to number two on the R&B charts and number fourteen on the bestseller charts: [excerpt "A Little Bird Told Me", Paula Watson] And then Decca put out a record -- "A Little Bird Told Me", sung by Evelyn Knight: [excerpt: "A Little Bird Told Me", Evelyn Knight] That record went to number one on the pop charts. And everyone involved in *that* record -- the singer, the backing band, the record label owners -- was white. Now, to just show you how ridiculously similar the two are, I'm going to try something -- I'm going to play both records together, simultaneously. [excerpt: both versions of "A Little Bird Told Me" played together] As you can imagine, the owners of Supreme Records were more than a little put out by this. This kind of direct copying was *not* the norm in the late 1940s -- as we've talked about before, it was perfectly normal for people to rework songs into their own style, and to do different versions for different markets, but just to make a record sounding as close as possible to someone else's hit record of the song, that was unusual. So Supreme Records took Decca to court, and said that Decca's record was copyright infringement. It was a direct copy of their record and should be treated as such. Before we go any further, you have to know that there are roughly three different concepts that many people confuse when they're talking about the music industry, all of which are important. There's the song, the recording, and the arrangement. The song is, to put it simply, just what the singer sings. It's the words and the melody line, and maybe the chord sequence if the chord sequence is sufficiently original. But basically, if you can sing it to yourself unaccompanied, that bit's the song. And the copyright in that is owned by the songwriter or her publisher. Now, once a song has been published, either as a record or as sheet music, *anyone* at all can make a recording of it or perform it live. There are certain conditions to that -- you can change the song in minor ways, to put it into your own style, or for example to give the protagonist's love interest a different gender if that's something that concerns you, but you can't make major changes to the song's melody or lyrics without the writer or publisher's permission. You also can't use the song in a film or TV show without jumping through some other hoops, just on a record or live performance. But I could, right now, make and release an album of "Andrew Hickey Sings the Lennon and McCartney Songbook in the Bath" and I wouldn't need anyone's permission to do so, so long as I paid Lennon and McCartney's publishers the legal minimum amount for every copy I sold. I need a songwriter's permission to make the *first* record of their song, but anyone can legally make the second. The next thing is the recording itself -- the specific recording of a specific performance. These days, that too is under copyright -- I can put out my *own* recording of me singing Beatles songs, but I can't just release a CD of one of the Beatles' albums, at least if I don't want to go to prison. A lot of people get confused by this because we talk, for example, about "She Loves You" being "a Beatles song" -- in fact, it's a Lennon and McCartney *song* performed on a Beatles *recording*. These days, each individual recording has its own copyright, but at the time we're talking about, in the US, there was no federal legislation giving copyright to sound recordings -- that didn't end up happening, in fact, until the 1970s. Up to that point, the copyright law around sound recordings was based on case law and odd rulings (for example it was ruled that it was illegal to play a record on the radio without permission, not because of copyright, but because of the right to privacy -- playing a record which had only been licensed for individual use to a group was considered like opening someone's mail). But still, there was usually at least state-level copyright law around recordings, and so record labels were fairly safe. But there's a third aspect, one somewhere between the song and the recording, and that's the arrangement. The arrangement is all the decisions made about how to perform a song -- things like how much of a groove you want it to have, whether you're going to back it with guitar or harpsichord or accordion, whether the backing instruments are going to play countermelodies or riffs or just strum the chords, whether you're going to play it as a slow ballad or an uptempo boogie. All that stuff. Until the "A Little Bird Told Me" case, everyone had assumed that arrangements were copyrightable. It makes sense that they would be -- you can write them down in sheet music form, they make a massive difference to how the performance sounds, they're often what we remember most, and they require a huge amount of creative effort. By every basic principle of copyright law, arrangements should be copyrightable. But the court ruled otherwise, and set a precedent that held until very recently -- until, in fact, a case that only went through its final appeal in December 2018, the "Blurred Lines" case, which ruled on whether Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines" plagiarised Marvin Gaye's "Got To Give It Up". [excerpts: “Blurred Lines” and “Got To Give It Up”] Between "A Little Bird Told Me" and "Blurred Lines", copyright law in the US held that you could copyright an actual recording, and you could copyright a song, but you couldn't copyright an arrangement or groove. And this had two major effects on the music industry, both of them hugely detrimental to black people. The first was simply that people could steal a groove -- a riff or rhythm or feel -- and make a new record with new lyrics and melody but the same groove, without giving credit. As the genres favoured by black musicians were mostly groove-based, while those favoured by white musicians were mostly melody-based, white musicians were more protected from theft than black musicians were. Bo Diddley, for example, invented the "Bo Diddley beat", but didn't receive royalties from Buddy Holly, the Rolling Stones, or George Michael when they used that rhythm. And secondly, it opened the floodgates to white musicians remaking black musicians' hits in the same style as the black musicians. Up to this point, if a white singer had covered a black musician, or vice versa, it would have been with a different feel and a different arrangement. But now, all of a sudden, whenever a black musician put out an interesting-sounding record, a white person would put out an identical copy, and the white version would get the radio play and record sales. As the black musicians tended to record for tiny labels while the white ones would be on major labels that wouldn't sign black musicians, the result was that a whole generation of black innovators saw their work stolen from them. And we'll be seeing the results of that play out in a lot of the records we talk about in the future. But for most of the records we're going to look at, the one that's stood the test of time will be the original -- very few people nowadays listen to, say, Pat Boone's versions of "Tutti Frutti" or "Ain't That A Shame", because no-one would do so when the Little Richard or Fats Domino versions are available. But with "Sh-Boom", the version that still has most traction is by The Crew Cuts. [excerpt: “Sh-Boom” – the Crew Cuts] The Crew Cuts were a white, Canadian, vocal group, who specialised in rerecording songs originally performed by black groups, in near-identical arrangements, and scoring bigger hits with them than the black people had. In the case of "Sh-Boom", sadly, the characterless white copy has dominated in popular culture over the version that actually has some life in it. The Chords never had another hit, although "Sh-Boom" was successful enough that at one point in 1955 there was even a Sh-Boom shampoo on the market, made by a company owned by the Chords themselves. Lawsuits over the band's name which made them have to be known for a time as the Chordcats contributed to their decline, and while there were several reunions over the years, they never replicated the magic of "Sh-Boom". The Crew Cuts, on the other hand, had many more hits, successfully leeching off sales of records of black artists like the Penguins, Gene and Eunice, Nappy Brown, and Otis Williams and the Charms, and getting more airplay and sales from identical copies. They even had the gall to say that those artists should be grateful to the Crew Cuts, for giving their songs exposure. We'll be talking about several of those songs in the next few weeks. It seems it's not as hard to follow up your first hit if you don't have to have any ideas yourself, just be white.

  Welcome to episode eighteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at “Sh-Boom” by the Chords. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.    —-more—-     Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of almost all the songs in the episode. In this case, I have missed out one track that’s used in the podcast – I use approximately seven seconds of the intro to “Blurred Lines” by Robin Thicke, without any of the lyrics, in the podcast. I am not going to share that song anywhere, given its lyrical content. My main resources are, as with last week  Honkers & Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues by Arnold Shaw, one of the most important books on early 50s rhythm and blues, The Sound of the City by Charlie Gillett, and Marv Goldberg’s website. The Chords’ music has never been anthologised on CD that I can find out, but almost any good doo-wop compilation should have “Sh-Boom”.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Let’s talk about one-hit wonders for a while. One-hit wonders have an unusual place in the realm of music history, and one which it’s never easy to decide whether to envy or to pity. After all, a one-hit wonder has had a hit, which is more than the vast majority of musicians ever do. And depending on how big the hit is and how good it is, that one hit might be enough to keep them going through a whole career. There are musicians to this day who can go out and perform in front of a crowd of a few thousand people, every night, who’ve come there just to hear that one song they recorded nearly sixty years ago — and if the musician is good enough they can get that crowd enjoying their other songs as well. But there are other musicians who can never capitalise on that one record, and who never get another shot. And for those people, as the song goes, “a taste of honey’s worse than none at all”. What initially looked like it might be a massive career turns into a fluke. Sometimes they take it well and it just becomes a story to tell the grandkids, but other times it messes up everyone’s life. There are people out there who’ve spent thirty or forty years of their life chasing a second hit, who will never be truly happy because they expected more from their brief success than it brought them. There are a lot of one-hit wonders in the world of rock and roll, and a lot of people who end up unlucky, but few have been as unlucky as the Chords, who wrote and recorded one of the biggest hits of all time, but who through a combination of bad luck in choosing a name, and more than a little racism, never managed to have a follow-up. Amazingly, they seem to have handled it far better than most. “Sh-Boom”, the Chords’ only hit, was the first rhythm and blues record by a black artist or group to make the top ten in the Billboard pop charts, so I suppose this is as good a time as any to talk about how the Billboard charts work, and how they differ from charts in the UK and some other countries. While the UK’s singles charts are based only on record sales (and, these days, streams, but that doesn’t really apply to this pre-digital era), the Billboard charts have always been an industry-specific thing rather than aimed at the public, and so they were based on many different metrics. As well as charts for record sales, they had (or have) charts for jukebox plays, for radio plays, and various other things. These would be combined into different genre-specific charts first, and those genres would be based on what the radio stations were playing. This means that the country charts would include all the songs played by country stations, the R&B charts all those played by R&B stations, and so on, rather than Billboard deciding themselves what counted as what genre. Then all of these charts would be combined to make the “Hot 100”, which is sort of a chart of charts. This would sometimes lead to anomalous results, when more than one type of station started playing a song, and some songs would end up on the country chart *and* the rhythm and blues chart *and* the pop chart. Pop is here a separate type of music in itself, and in the early 1950s what got played on “pop” radio was, essentially, the music that was made by white people in the suburbs *for* white people in the suburbs. In 1954, the year we’re talking about, the big hits were “O Mein Papa” by Eddie Fisher… [very short excerpt] “Secret Love” by Doris Day [very short excerpt] and records by Perry Como, Rosemary Clooney, Jo Stafford, and Tony Bennett. Polite, white, middle-class music for polite white middle-class people. None of that hillbilly nonsense, and *certainly* nothing by any black people. Some of it, like the Tony Bennett tracks, was pretty good, but much of it was the kind of horrible pap which made rock and roll, when it finally broke on to the pop charts, seem like such a breath of fresh air. And even the Tony Bennett records weren’t in any way exciting — they were good, but they’d relax you after a hard day, not make you want to get up and dance. What’s noticeable here is that the pop music charts were dominated by music aimed at adults. There was no music for teenagers or younger adults hitting the pop charts, and no music for dancing. During the height of the swing era, the big bands had of course been making dance music, but now every last bit of black or lower-class influence was being eradicated, in order to appeal to the “return to normalcy”. You see, by the end of the Second World War, America had been through a lot — so much so that the first call for a “return to normalcy” had been from Warren G. Harding in the 1920 election, nearly thirty years earlier. In the previous forty-five years, the country had been involved in two world wars, suffered through the depression and the dustbowl, and simultaneously seen an unprecedented growth in technology which had brought the car, the plane and now the jet, the cinema and then the talkies, the radio and the TV, and now the atomic bomb, into people’s lives. People had undergone the greatest disruption in history, and several generations had now grown up with an idea of what was “normal” that didn’t match their reality at all. And so the white, semi-prosperous, middle and upper-working class in America made a collective decision around 1946 that they were going to reconstruct that normality for themselves, and to try to pretend as much as possible that nothing had really changed. And that meant pretending that all the black people who’d moved to the Northern cities from the south in that time, and all the poor white people from Oklahoma and Texas who’d moved west to avoid the dustbowl, simply didn’t exist. Obviously those other people had some ideas of their own about that, and about how they fit into the world. And those people had a little more of a voice now than they’d had previously. The black people living in the cities had enjoyed something of a war boom — there had been so much work in the factories that many black people had pulled themselves up into something approaching affluence. That was quickly snatched away when the war ended and those jobs were quote needed by the returning heroes unquote, but a small number of them had managed to get themselves into economically secure positions, and a larger number now knew that it was *possible* for them to make money, and were more motivated than ever for social change that would let them return to their previous status. (This is a recurring pattern in the American economy, incidentally. Every time there’s an economic boom, black people are the last to benefit from it and then the first to be damaged in the downturn that follows. White America is like Lucy, putting the football of the American Dream in front of black people and then taking it away again, over and over.) And so the pop chart was for the people who were working in advertising, having three-martini lunches, and driving home to their new suburban picket-fence houses. And the other charts were for everyone else. And this is why it was the music on the other charts that was so interesting. There’s an argument that what made rock and roll something new and interesting wasn’t any one feature of the genre, but an attitude towards creation. Early rock and roll was very much what we would now think of as “mash ups” — collages or montages of wildly different elements being brought together — and this is what really distinguishes between the innovative musicians and the copycats. If you were bringing together half a dozen elements from different styles, then you were doing rock and roll. But if you were just copying one other record — even if that other record was itself a rock and roll record — and not bringing anything new to it, then you weren’t doing rock and roll, you were doing pop. And it was the people at the margins who would do rock and roll. Because they were the ones who weren’t sealing themselves off and trying to deny reality. We talked a little bit about doo-wop last week, but the songs we talked about there probably wouldn’t be called doo-wop by most listeners, though there are clear stylistic similarities. It’s probably time for me to explain what doo-wop actually is, musically. It’s a style you don’t get now, except in conscious pastiches, but it was basically an extension of the Ink Spots’ style. You have at least four singers, one of whom is a very prominent bass vocalist who sings nonsense words like “doo wop” or “bom bom ba dom”, another of whom is a high tenor who takes most of the leads, and the rest sing harmonies in the middle. While the jump bands and western swing were both music that dominated on the West Coast — the early jump bands were often based in New York, but LA was really the base of the music — doo wop was a music of the North-East. It sometimes got as far west as Detroit, but it was mostly New York, Washington DC, and a bit later New Jersey, that produced doo-wop singers. And it was doo-wop that would really take off as a musical style. While the jump bands remained mildly successful, the early fifties saw them decline in popularity as far as the R&B charts went, because the new vocal groups were becoming the dominant form in R&B — and this was especially true of the “bird groups”. The first “bird group” was the Ravens, and they might be considered the first doo-wop group full stop. They took the Ink Spots’ “top and bottom” format and extended it, so that on their ballads there’d be more interplay between the high and low vocals. Listening to “You Foolish Thing” you can clearly hear the Ink Spots influence: [excerpt “you Foolish Thing”] On their uptempo music, on the other hand, they just had the bass singer sing the lead: [excerpt: the Ravens “Rock Me All Night Long”] And the Ravens became massively influential. They’d found a way to get the catchiest parts of the Ink Spots sound, but without having to stick so closely to the formula. It could work for all kinds of songs, and soon there were a whole host of bands named after birds and singing in the Ravens’ style — the Orioles, the Flamingoes, the Penguins, the Wrens, and many more. We’ve already heard one of the bands they influenced when we listened to the Robins. The other major influential bird group was the Orioles, whose “It’s Too Soon To Know” is another record that’s often considered by some to be “the first rock and roll record” — though to my ears it just sounds like a derivative of the Ink Spots rather than anything new: [excerpt “It’s Too Soon to Know” by the Orioles] So there’s a clear stylistic progression there, but we’re not looking at anything radically different from what came before. The first real doo-wop record to really have a major impact was “Gee”, by the Crows, another bird group, which was recorded and released in 1953, but became a hit in 1954, charting a month after “Sh-Boom” was recorded, but before Sh-Boom itself became a hit: [excerpt: “Gee”, the Crows] “Gee” is doo-wop absolutely fully formed, and it’s a record which had a massive influence, particularly on young California teenagers who were growing up listening to Johnny Otis’ radio show — both Frank Zappa and the Beach Boys would later record their own strange takes on the song, emphasising how odd the record actually sounded. It’s also widely credited as the first R&B record to become a hit with a large part of its audience being white teenagers. More than any other form of R&B, doo-wop traded in the concerns of the adolescent, and so it was the first subgenre to become accessible to that huge demographic of white kids who wanted something new they could appropriate and call their own. “Gee” is a record that deserves an episode to itself, frankly, in terms of importance, but there’s not much to say about it — the Crows had one hit, never had another, split up soon after, and there’s no real biographical information out there about them. The record just stands on its own. That’s also true for “Sh-Boom”, and the Chords were another one-hit wonder, but there’s a difference there. While “Gee” was the first doo-wop record to make money from white people, “Sh-Boom” was the first doo-wop record to lose money to white people. [excerpt: “Sh-Boom”, the Chords] The Chords were, at least, not actually a bird group — they were too individual for that — but in other respects they’re very much in the typical mould of the early doo-wop bands, and “Sh-Boom” is, in many ways, an absolutely typical doo-wop song. “Sh-Boom” was not meant to be a hit. It was released on Cat records, a subsidiary of Atlantic Records, but apparently everyone at Atlantic hated the song — it was only recorded at the Chords’ insistence, and it was originally only a B-side until the song started to hit with the DJs. Sh-Boom was arranged by Jesse Stone, but presumably his contribution was the instrumental, rather than the vocal arrangement, as the song was written by the Chords themselves, originally while sitting together in a car. At the time, according to Buddy McCrea of the band, “When they talked to each other, they’d say ‘boom.’ They’d say ‘Hey, man, boom, how ya doin’.” Jimmy Keyes, also of the band, said “‘Boom’ was the slang word. If you were standing on this block for five minutes, you’d hear that slang word fifteen times or more. We would take the ‘boom’ and make it sound like a bomb: ‘shhhhhh-BOOM’.” Even the nonsense words in the background were, according to Keyes, meaningful to the band — “‘A langala langala lang.’ Well, you could hear the church bells over there,” while other parts were references to someone called “Bip”, the uncle of band members Carl and Claude Feaster. Bip was homeless, and apparently stank, and when Bip would come to visit, according to Keyes, “We could smell Bip as soon as he opened the door.” They would cover their noses and sing “here comes Bip, a flip a dooba dip.” And one suspects that this played a big part in the song’s success — while the lyrics are genial gibberish, they’re genial gibberish that had meaning to the singers, if not to the audience. That wasn’t necessarily appreciated by older people though. The great satirist Stan Freberg recorded a rather mean-spirited parody of the song, combining it with a parody of Marlon Brando who was similarly popular at the time and who Freberg thought comparable in unintelligibility: [excerpt: Stan Freberg “Sh-Boom”] But there’s an element of racism in the popular reaction to the success of “Sh-Boom”. There was a belief among many people that since they couldn’t understand the lyrics, they were hiding some secret code. And any secret code sung by black men must, obviously, have to do with sex. We’ll see a lot of this kind of thing as the story goes on, unfortunately. But of course, meaningless lyrics have a long, long, history in popular music — much longer than is usually appreciated. Most people, when they’re talking about nonsense lyrics, trace scat singing back as far as Louis Armstrong imitating his own trumpet. But there’s a good argument that they go back as far as we have records of songs existing, or almost. If you look at traditional folk music you’ll often find a common pattern, of people singing “As I walked out one bright summer’s day/sing too ra la loo ra la loo ra la lay” or similar. That kind of nonsense singing dates back as far as we have records, and no-one knows how it started, but one hypothesis I’ve seen which makes sense to me is that it comes from Gregorian chant and similar religious forms. No, seriously. It makes sense when you think about it. One of the places that people in the Middle Ages were most likely to hear music was in church, and many early motets contained Latin texts — usually sung by the tenors — while other people would sing commentary or explanation of the lyrics in the vernacular — English or French or whatever language. Now, for a peasant hearing this, what do you hear? You hear some of the people singing words that make sense to you, in your own language, but it’s mixed in with this other gibberish that you don’t understand. If the people you’re listening to are singing something that makes sense and they drop into Latin, they might as well be singing “Sh-Boom Sh-Boom sha la la la la la la la la la la la” for all the sense it’ll make to you. So you come to the conclusion that that’s just how songs *are*. They have bits that make sense and then bits of nonsense that sounds good. Indeed, one of the bits of lyric of “Sh-Boom” as it’s commonly transcribed is “hey nonny”, which if that’s the lyric would tie directly back into that old folk tradition — that is, sadly, the one bit of nonsense syllabics that the band weren’t asked about, and so we can’t know if they were thinking of minstrels singing “hey nonny nonny”, or if it had some other inspiration as personal as Uncle Bip. But either way, after “Sh-Boom” doo-wop, and R&B in general, became obsessed with nonsense syllabics. We’ll be hearing a lot of examples of this in the next few years, and it became so prevalent that by 1961 Barry Mann was asking this musical question: [excerpt: “Who Put the Bomp”, Barry Mann] Doo-wop started as a musical style among black teenagers in East Coast cities, but within a few years it became dominated by Italian-American teenagers from the same areas, and we’ll see that progression happen over the next eighty or ninety episodes of this podcast. But we can also see it happening in miniature in the Chords’ career. Because while they had a big hit with “Sh-Boom”, they didn’t have the biggest hit with it. If you vaguely know “Sh-Boom”, maybe from hearing it in a film soundtrack, you might have been surprised when you heard a snatch of it earlier in this episode. It might have sounded very subtly wrong. It will have sounded *more or less* like the record you know, but… different. That’s because the record you know isn’t “Sh-Boom” by the Chords, but “Sh-Boom” by the Crew Cuts. To explain why, we’re first going to have to talk about “A Little Bird Told Me”: “A Little Bird Told Me” was a song originally recorded by Paula Watson on Supreme Records. Watson, and all the musicians on the record, and the record label’s owner, were all black. Watson’s record went to number two on the R&B charts and number fourteen on the bestseller charts: [excerpt “A Little Bird Told Me”, Paula Watson] And then Decca put out a record — “A Little Bird Told Me”, sung by Evelyn Knight: [excerpt: “A Little Bird Told Me”, Evelyn Knight] That record went to number one on the pop charts. And everyone involved in *that* record — the singer, the backing band, the record label owners — was white. Now, to just show you how ridiculously similar the two are, I’m going to try something — I’m going to play both records together, simultaneously. [excerpt: both versions of “A Little Bird Told Me” played together] As you can imagine, the owners of Supreme Records were more than a little put out by this. This kind of direct copying was *not* the norm in the late 1940s — as we’ve talked about before, it was perfectly normal for people to rework songs into their own style, and to do different versions for different markets, but just to make a record sounding as close as possible to someone else’s hit record of the song, that was unusual. So Supreme Records took Decca to court, and said that Decca’s record was copyright infringement. It was a direct copy of their record and should be treated as such. Before we go any further, you have to know that there are roughly three different concepts that many people confuse when they’re talking about the music industry, all of which are important. There’s the song, the recording, and the arrangement. The song is, to put it simply, just what the singer sings. It’s the words and the melody line, and maybe the chord sequence if the chord sequence is sufficiently original. But basically, if you can sing it to yourself unaccompanied, that bit’s the song. And the copyright in that is owned by the songwriter or her publisher. Now, once a song has been published, either as a record or as sheet music, *anyone* at all can make a recording of it or perform it live. There are certain conditions to that — you can change the song in minor ways, to put it into your own style, or for example to give the protagonist’s love interest a different gender if that’s something that concerns you, but you can’t make major changes to the song’s melody or lyrics without the writer or publisher’s permission. You also can’t use the song in a film or TV show without jumping through some other hoops, just on a record or live performance. But I could, right now, make and release an album of “Andrew Hickey Sings the Lennon and McCartney Songbook in the Bath” and I wouldn’t need anyone’s permission to do so, so long as I paid Lennon and McCartney’s publishers the legal minimum amount for every copy I sold. I need a songwriter’s permission to make the *first* record of their song, but anyone can legally make the second. The next thing is the recording itself — the specific recording of a specific performance. These days, that too is under copyright — I can put out my *own* recording of me singing Beatles songs, but I can’t just release a CD of one of the Beatles’ albums, at least if I don’t want to go to prison. A lot of people get confused by this because we talk, for example, about “She Loves You” being “a Beatles song” — in fact, it’s a Lennon and McCartney *song* performed on a Beatles *recording*. These days, each individual recording has its own copyright, but at the time we’re talking about, in the US, there was no federal legislation giving copyright to sound recordings — that didn’t end up happening, in fact, until the 1970s. Up to that point, the copyright law around sound recordings was based on case law and odd rulings (for example it was ruled that it was illegal to play a record on the radio without permission, not because of copyright, but because of the right to privacy — playing a record which had only been licensed for individual use to a group was considered like opening someone’s mail). But still, there was usually at least state-level copyright law around recordings, and so record labels were fairly safe. But there’s a third aspect, one somewhere between the song and the recording, and that’s the arrangement. The arrangement is all the decisions made about how to perform a song — things like how much of a groove you want it to have, whether you’re going to back it with guitar or harpsichord or accordion, whether the backing instruments are going to play countermelodies or riffs or just strum the chords, whether you’re going to play it as a slow ballad or an uptempo boogie. All that stuff. Until the “A Little Bird Told Me” case, everyone had assumed that arrangements were copyrightable. It makes sense that they would be — you can write them down in sheet music form, they make a massive difference to how the performance sounds, they’re often what we remember most, and they require a huge amount of creative effort. By every basic principle of copyright law, arrangements should be copyrightable. But the court ruled otherwise, and set a precedent that held until very recently — until, in fact, a case that only went through its final appeal in December 2018, the “Blurred Lines” case, which ruled on whether Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” plagiarised Marvin Gaye’s “Got To Give It Up”. [excerpts: “Blurred Lines” and “Got To Give It Up”] Between “A Little Bird Told Me” and “Blurred Lines”, copyright law in the US held that you could copyright an actual recording, and you could copyright a song, but you couldn’t copyright an arrangement or groove. And this had two major effects on the music industry, both of them hugely detrimental to black people. The first was simply that people could steal a groove — a riff or rhythm or feel — and make a new record with new lyrics and melody but the same groove, without giving credit. As the genres favoured by black musicians were mostly groove-based, while those favoured by white musicians were mostly melody-based, white musicians were more protected from theft than black musicians were. Bo Diddley, for example, invented the “Bo Diddley beat”, but didn’t receive royalties from Buddy Holly, the Rolling Stones, or George Michael when they used that rhythm. And secondly, it opened the floodgates to white musicians remaking black musicians’ hits in the same style as the black musicians. Up to this point, if a white singer had covered a black musician, or vice versa, it would have been with a different feel and a different arrangement. But now, all of a sudden, whenever a black musician put out an interesting-sounding record, a white person would put out an identical copy, and the white version would get the radio play and record sales. As the black musicians tended to record for tiny labels while the white ones would be on major labels that wouldn’t sign black musicians, the result was that a whole generation of black innovators saw their work stolen from them. And we’ll be seeing the results of that play out in a lot of the records we talk about in the future. But for most of the records we’re going to look at, the one that’s stood the test of time will be the original — very few people nowadays listen to, say, Pat Boone’s versions of “Tutti Frutti” or “Ain’t That A Shame”, because no-one would do so when the Little Richard or Fats Domino versions are available. But with “Sh-Boom”, the version that still has most traction is by The Crew Cuts. [excerpt: “Sh-Boom” – the Crew Cuts] The Crew Cuts were a white, Canadian, vocal group, who specialised in rerecording songs originally performed by black groups, in near-identical arrangements, and scoring bigger hits with them than the black people had. In the case of “Sh-Boom”, sadly, the characterless white copy has dominated in popular culture over the version that actually has some life in it. The Chords never had another hit, although “Sh-Boom” was successful enough that at one point in 1955 there was even a Sh-Boom shampoo on the market, made by a company owned by the Chords themselves. Lawsuits over the band’s name which made them have to be known for a time as the Chordcats contributed to their decline, and while there were several reunions over the years, they never replicated the magic of “Sh-Boom”. The Crew Cuts, on the other hand, had many more hits, successfully leeching off sales of records of black artists like the Penguins, Gene and Eunice, Nappy Brown, and Otis Williams and the Charms, and getting more airplay and sales from identical copies. They even had the gall to say that those artists should be grateful to the Crew Cuts, for giving their songs exposure. We’ll be talking about several of those songs in the next few weeks. It seems it’s not as hard to follow up your first hit if you don’t have to have any ideas yourself, just be white.

The Saturday edition of Whole 'Nuther Thing features tuneage from Traffic, Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Beatles, Jethro Tull, Dave Mason, Love, The Doors, Rod Stewart, Velvet Underground, Stevie Wonder, Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes, Tower Of Power, Sparklehorse, Neil Young, America, Taj Mahal, Little Feat, JJ Cale, John Hammond Jr, James Lee Stanley, Leonard Cohen, Roy Orbison, Chris Isaak, New Riders Of The Purple Sage, Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, Blood Sweat & Tears, Thom Beckham, Then There Were Two, Laura Nyro, Ben E King, Dionne Warwick, Gene Pitney, Jay & The Americans, Everly Brothers, Flamingoes, Santana, Full Moon, Brian Augers Oblivion Express, King Crimson, ELO, Moody Blues, Sagittarius, Rotary Connection, Glitterhouse, Steve Stills & Tufano & Giamerese.

We continue our Complete Namibia Tour travelogue as we relax with the Flamingoes in Walvis Bay, photograph a shipwreck on the Skeleton Coast, then spend some time with the incredibly charming Himba People. Details on blog: https://mbp.ac/624 Music by Martin Bailey.

We continue our Complete Namibia Tour travelogue as we relax with the Flamingoes in Walvis Bay, photograph a shipwreck on the Skeleton Coast, then spend some time with the incredibly charming Himba People. Details on blog: https://mbp.ac/624 Music by Martin Bailey.

Today on the New Books in Music podcast James Cook discuses his book, Memory Songs: A Personal Journey into the Music that Shaped the 90s (Unbound, 2018). The book details the author’s own adolescent musical obsessions from The Beatles to John Barry from Led Zeppelin to The Waterboys that led him to form his own band Flamingoes with his twin brother, Jude, and move to London in the early 1990s and begin the long the often perilous road to becoming a full-time working musician. The book is part memoir, part music criticism, part social history, and a vivid tale of life lived on the periphery of a vibrant era in British cultural history. Originally a musician and songwriter, James Cook released two albums with his band Flamingoes: the acclaimed “Plastic Jewels” in 1995 and “Street Noise Invades the House” in 2007. Present from the start of the Britpop boom, The Flamingoes toured the UK and Europe extensively, selling 20,000 records worldwide. In 2009, one of James’ short stories was featured in the collection Vagabond Holes alongside work by Nick Cave and ManBooker winner D. B. C . Pierre. James has written about music for The Guardian and Litromagazine among others, and is currently working on a new book. He lives in London. Stephen Lee Naish is a writer, independent researcher, and cultural critic. Originally from Leicester, UK, he now resides in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the New Books in Music podcast James Cook discuses his book, Memory Songs: A Personal Journey into the Music that Shaped the 90s (Unbound, 2018). The book details the author’s own adolescent musical obsessions from The Beatles to John Barry from Led Zeppelin to The Waterboys that led him to form his own band Flamingoes with his twin brother, Jude, and move to London in the early 1990s and begin the long the often perilous road to becoming a full-time working musician. The book is part memoir, part music criticism, part social history, and a vivid tale of life lived on the periphery of a vibrant era in British cultural history. Originally a musician and songwriter, James Cook released two albums with his band Flamingoes: the acclaimed “Plastic Jewels” in 1995 and “Street Noise Invades the House” in 2007. Present from the start of the Britpop boom, The Flamingoes toured the UK and Europe extensively, selling 20,000 records worldwide. In 2009, one of James’ short stories was featured in the collection Vagabond Holes alongside work by Nick Cave and ManBooker winner D. B. C . Pierre. James has written about music for The Guardian and Litromagazine among others, and is currently working on a new book. He lives in London. Stephen Lee Naish is a writer, independent researcher, and cultural critic. Originally from Leicester, UK, he now resides in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the New Books in Music podcast James Cook discuses his book, Memory Songs: A Personal Journey into the Music that Shaped the 90s (Unbound, 2018). The book details the author’s own adolescent musical obsessions from The Beatles to John Barry from Led Zeppelin to The Waterboys that led him to form his own band Flamingoes with his twin brother, Jude, and move to London in the early 1990s and begin the long the often perilous road to becoming a full-time working musician. The book is part memoir, part music criticism, part social history, and a vivid tale of life lived on the periphery of a vibrant era in British cultural history. Originally a musician and songwriter, James Cook released two albums with his band Flamingoes: the acclaimed “Plastic Jewels” in 1995 and “Street Noise Invades the House” in 2007. Present from the start of the Britpop boom, The Flamingoes toured the UK and Europe extensively, selling 20,000 records worldwide. In 2009, one of James’ short stories was featured in the collection Vagabond Holes alongside work by Nick Cave and ManBooker winner D. B. C . Pierre. James has written about music for The Guardian and Litromagazine among others, and is currently working on a new book. He lives in London. Stephen Lee Naish is a writer, independent researcher, and cultural critic. Originally from Leicester, UK, he now resides in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the New Books in Music podcast James Cook discuses his book, Memory Songs: A Personal Journey into the Music that Shaped the 90s (Unbound, 2018). The book details the author’s own adolescent musical obsessions from The Beatles to John Barry from Led Zeppelin to The Waterboys that led him to form his own band Flamingoes with his twin brother, Jude, and move to London in the early 1990s and begin the long the often perilous road to becoming a full-time working musician. The book is part memoir, part music criticism, part social history, and a vivid tale of life lived on the periphery of a vibrant era in British cultural history. Originally a musician and songwriter, James Cook released two albums with his band Flamingoes: the acclaimed “Plastic Jewels” in 1995 and “Street Noise Invades the House” in 2007. Present from the start of the Britpop boom, The Flamingoes toured the UK and Europe extensively, selling 20,000 records worldwide. In 2009, one of James’ short stories was featured in the collection Vagabond Holes alongside work by Nick Cave and ManBooker winner D. B. C . Pierre. James has written about music for The Guardian and Litromagazine among others, and is currently working on a new book. He lives in London. Stephen Lee Naish is a writer, independent researcher, and cultural critic. Originally from Leicester, UK, he now resides in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the New Books in Music podcast James Cook discuses his book, Memory Songs: A Personal Journey into the Music that Shaped the 90s (Unbound, 2018). The book details the author’s own adolescent musical obsessions from The Beatles to John Barry from Led Zeppelin to The Waterboys that led him to form his own band Flamingoes with his twin brother, Jude, and move to London in the early 1990s and begin the long the often perilous road to becoming a full-time working musician. The book is part memoir, part music criticism, part social history, and a vivid tale of life lived on the periphery of a vibrant era in British cultural history. Originally a musician and songwriter, James Cook released two albums with his band Flamingoes: the acclaimed “Plastic Jewels” in 1995 and “Street Noise Invades the House” in 2007. Present from the start of the Britpop boom, The Flamingoes toured the UK and Europe extensively, selling 20,000 records worldwide. In 2009, one of James’ short stories was featured in the collection Vagabond Holes alongside work by Nick Cave and ManBooker winner D. B. C . Pierre. James has written about music for The Guardian and Litromagazine among others, and is currently working on a new book. He lives in London. Stephen Lee Naish is a writer, independent researcher, and cultural critic. Originally from Leicester, UK, he now resides in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Show #204 | Guest: Jewelle Gomez | Show Summary: A rebroadcast of our November 19, 2016 show | Before Buffy, before Twilight, before Octavia Butler’s Fledgling, there was The Gilda Stories, Jewelle Gomez’s sexy vampire novel. This remarkable novel begins in 1850s Louisiana, where Gilda escapes slavery and learns about freedom while working in a brothel. After being initiated into eternal life as one who “shares the blood” by two women there, Gilda spends the next two hundred years searching for a place to call home. An instant lesbian classic when it was first published in 1991, The Gilda Stories has endured as an auspiciously prescient book in its explorations of blackness, radical ecology, re-definitions of family, and yes, the erotic potential of the vampire story. The winner of two Lambda Literary Awards (fiction and science fiction) THE GILDA STORIES is a very American odyssey. The 2016 anniversary edition has a new forward by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, one of UTNE Reader’s 50 Visionaries Transforming the World, a Reproductive Reality Check Shero, a Black Woman Rising nominee, and winner of one of the first-ever “Too Sexy for 501c3” trophies. Jewelle Gomez is a writer, activist, and the author of many books including Forty-Three Septembers, Don’t Explain, The Lipstick Papers, Flamingoes and Bears, and Oral Tradition. The Gilda Stories was the recipient of two Lambda Literary Awards, and was adapted for the stage by the Urban Bush Women theater company in thirteen United States cities.

Joe and his guest, Ernie Krivda, listen with you to renditions of "Love Walked in" by Kenny Baker, Erroll Garner, The Flamingoes, Ernie Krivda, and Frank Sinatra. They explore how the song has evolved over time and the great variety of the performers who have made their own versions of this song. Then you'll enjoy this week's bonus tune by the great saxophonist, Ben Webster, performing another popular Gershwin tune.

Show #147 | Guest: Jewelle Gomez is a writer, activist, and the author of many books including Forty-Three Septembers, Don’t Explain, The Lipstick Papers, Flamingoes and Bears, and Oral Tradition. The Gilda Stories was the recipient of two Lambda Literary Awards, and was adapted for the stage by the Urban Bush Women theater company in thirteen United States cities | Show Summary: Before Buffy, before Twilight, before Octavia Butler’s Fledgling, there was The Gilda Stories, Jewelle Gomez’s sexy vampire novel. This remarkable novel begins in 1850s Louisiana, where Gilda escapes slavery and learns about freedom while working in a brothel. After being initiated into eternal life as one who “shares the blood” by two women there, Gilda spends the next two hundred years searching for a place to call home. An instant lesbian classic when it was first published in 1991, The Gilda Stories has endured as an auspiciously prescient book in its explorations of blackness, radical ecology, re-definitions of family, and yes, the erotic potential of the vampire story. The winner of two Lambda Literary Awards (fiction and science fiction) THE GILDA STORIES is a very American odyssey. The 2016 anniversary edition has a new forward by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, one of UTNE Reader’s 50 Visionaries Transforming the World, a Reproductive Reality Check Shero, a Black Woman Rising nominee, and winner of one of the first-ever “Too Sexy for 501c3” trophies.

Luke Rodney was born in Trinidad & Tobago in the year 1954. His mother Josephine Stephen and Simeon Rodney his father lived in Biche Charuma a little village in the country side. As far back as Luke can remember he always had a love for music and wanted to be a musician. From a very young age Luke has been a self taught musician with music, melodies and lyrics floating around in his head. All his songs are from like experiences. Luke is a vocalist and is a master drummer and took up ukulele a few years ago. Luke has played with many renown music groups such as Bird Song Steel Orchestra, Flamingoes, Sound Roy Cape Calypso All Stars, Ed Watson Brass Circle and has run the gamut from dance halls to playing for Presidents. Luke also played on different cruise lines such as Norwegian, Crown, and Royal Viking. Luke Rodney has travelled extensively through the Caribbean, Germany, Sweden, Norway, ETC. Luke is a father of three children and one grand daughter. Luke migrated to the United States in 1993. Some of the bands he played with : Cobalt Rhythm Kings (a blues band out of New Haven), INITY Reggae band, Holy Smoke, Jah Movements, St. Luke’s Steel Band, and currently plays with White Eyed Lizard.

The Show Notes Cover BandsIntroCrucifixion non-senseWeekly Standard     - That Old Black MagicGlow in the Dark RoadsReligious Moron of the Week     - Abu Azmi from Dave Molloy     - Saudi King Abdullah from Gold     - Evil French Priest from Chris YuzikAsk George     - Closeted “friend” from MichelleFacts That’ll Fuck Y’Up     - Photos, Flamingoes, Germany and Will SmithPete Townshend and Rock BiographiesPFA at Rivals in EastonShow close................................... Geologic Podcast PatronageSubscribe and information on subscription levels. ................................... Sign up for the mailing list: Write to Geo! A reminder that the portal to the Geologic Universe is at GeorgeHrab.com. Score more data from the Geologic Universe! Get George's Non-Coloring Book at Lulu, both as and E-BOOK and PRINT editions. Check out Geo's wiki page thanks to Tim Farley. Get your George HrApp here. Thanks to Gerry Orkin for the design and engineering and 2.0 IS NOW AVAILABLE! Have a comment on the show, a Religious Moron tip, or a question for Ask George? Drop George a line and write to Geo's Mom, too!    

Sydney Long (Australia 1871 – England 1955), Flamingoes c. 1905–06. Oil on canvas, 30.6 x 61.0 cm. Acquired with the assistance of the Masterpieces of the Nation Fund 2006. Reproduced with the kind permission of the Ophthalmic Research Institute of Australia.

On this Question of the Week, we ask if humans grow a winter coat, and then moult in the winter, as so many other furry animals do? Plus, if Flamingoes are pink because of their diet, can we eat to change colour? Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists