Podcasts about The Four Freshmen

Hosts Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot pay tribute to the late musical genius Brian Wilson, who died at age 82. They'll discuss Wilson's transcendent music, including doing a deep dive on his masterpiece, Pet Sounds.Join our Facebook Group: https://bit.ly/3sivr9TBecome a member on Patreon: https://bit.ly/3slWZvcSign up for our newsletter: https://bit.ly/3eEvRnGMake a donation via PayPal: https://bit.ly/3dmt9lUSend us a Voice Memo: Desktop: bit.ly/2RyD5Ah Mobile: sayhi.chat/soundops Featured Songs:The Beach Boys, "I Just Wasn't Made For These Times," Pet Sounds, Capitol, 1966The Beatles, "With A Little Help From My Friends," Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Parlophone, 1967The Beach Boys, "In My Room," Surfer Girl, Capitol, 1963The Beach Boys, "Lonely Sea," Surfin' USA, Capitol, 1963The Beach Boys, "Don't Worry Baby," Shut Down Volume 2, Capitol, 1964The Beach Boys, "Surf's Up," Surf's Up, Brother/Reprise, 1971The Beach Boys, "Still I Dream of It (Original Home Demo, 1976)," Good Vibrations:Thirty Years of the Beach Boys, Capitol, 1993The Beach Boys, "Sloop John B," Pet Sounds, Capitol, 1966The Four Freshman, "I Remember You," Four Freshmen and 5 Trombones, Capitol, 1955The Gamblers, "LSD-25," Moon Dawg!/LSD-25, World Pacific, 1960The Beach Boys, "I'm Waiting for the Day," Pet Sounds, Capitol, 1966The Beach Boys, "Don't Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)," Pet Sounds, Capitol, 1966The Beach Boys, "Let's Go Away for Awhile," Pet Sounds, Capitol, 1966The Beach Boys, "Caroline No," Pet Sounds, Capitol, 1966The Beach Boys, "You Still Believe in Me," Pet Sounds, Capitol, 1966The Beach Boys, "Pet Sounds," Pet Sounds, Capitol, 1966The Beach Boys, "Hang On to Your Ego," Pet Sounds, Capitol, 1966The Beach Boys, "That's Not Me," Pet Sounds, Capitol, 1966The Beach Boys, "God Only Knows," Pet Sounds, Capitol, 1966The Beach Boys, "Little Deuce Coupe," Pet Sounds, Capitol, 1966The Beatles, "Nowhere Man," Rubber Soul, Parlophone, 1965The Beatles, "She's Leaving Home," Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Parlophone, 1967Horsegirl, "2468," Phonetics On and On, Matador, 2025See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

pWotD Episode 2962: Brian Wilson Welcome to Popular Wiki of the Day, spotlighting Wikipedia's most visited pages, giving you a peek into what the world is curious about today.With 790,872 views on Wednesday, 11 June 2025 our article of the day is Brian Wilson.Brian Douglas Wilson (June 20, 1942 – c. June 11, 2025) was an American musician, singer, songwriter, and record producer who co-founded the Beach Boys. Often called a genius for his novel approaches to pop composition and mastery of recording techniques, he is widely acknowledged as one of the most innovative and significant songwriters of the 20th century. His best-known work is distinguished for its high production values, complex harmonies and orchestrations, vocal layering, and introspective or ingenuous themes. Wilson was also known for his versatile vocal range. He faced lifelong struggles with mental illness. Wilson's formative influences included George Gershwin, the Four Freshmen, Phil Spector, and Burt Bacharach. In 1961, he began his professional career as a member of the Beach Boys, serving as the band's songwriter, producer, co-lead vocalist, bassist, keyboardist, and de facto leader. After signing with Capitol Records in 1962, he became the first pop musician credited for writing, arranging, producing, and performing his own material. He also produced acts such as the Honeys and American Spring. By the mid-1960s he had written or co-written more than two dozen U. S. Top 40 hits, including the number-ones "Surf City" (1963), "I Get Around" (1964), "Help Me, Rhonda" (1965), and "Good Vibrations" (1966). He is considered among the first music producer auteurs and the first rock producers to apply the studio as an instrument.In 1964, Wilson had a nervous breakdown and resigned from regular concert touring to focus on songwriting and production. This led to works such as the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds and his first credited solo release, "Caroline, No" (both 1966), as well as the unfinished album Smile. By the late 1960s, his productivity and mental health had significantly declined, leading to periods marked by reclusion, overeating, and substance abuse. His first professional comeback yielded the almost solo effort The Beach Boys Love You (1977). In the 1980s, he formed a controversial creative and business partnership with his psychologist, Eugene Landy, and relaunched his solo career with the self-titled album Brian Wilson (1988). Wilson disassociated from Landy in 1991 and toured regularly as a solo artist from 1999 to 2022.Heralding popular music's recognition as an art form, Wilson's accomplishments as a producer helped initiate an era of unprecedented creative autonomy for label-signed acts. He is regarded as an important figure to many music genres and movements, including the California sound, art pop, psychedelia, chamber pop, progressive music, punk, outsider, and sunshine pop. Since the 1980s, his influence has extended to styles such as post-punk, indie rock, emo, dream pop, Shibuya-kei, and chillwave. He received numerous industry awards including two Grammy Awards and Kennedy Center Honors as well as nominations for a Golden Globe Award and Primetime Emmy Award. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988 and the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2000. His life and career were dramatised in the 2014 biopic Love and Mercy.This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 03:15 UTC on Thursday, 12 June 2025.For the full current version of the article, see Brian Wilson on Wikipedia.This podcast uses content from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.Visit our archives at wikioftheday.com and subscribe to stay updated on new episodes.Follow us on Mastodon at @wikioftheday@masto.ai.Also check out Curmudgeon's Corner, a current events podcast.Until next time, I'm generative Ayanda.

Brian Wilson nació en junio y ha muerto ayer a ocho días de cumplir 83 años. El genio compositor de The Beach Boys, el mayor y el último de los Wilson que se nos ha ido. Compitió por la hegemonía en la música popular con The Beatles que se picaron artísticamente para mejorar y superar a los californianos con “Revolver” y “Sg Peppers…”. Es difícil comprender por qué The Beach Boys no son hoy, si no tan célebres como los de Liverpool, al menos de cierto reconocimiento universal. Wilson bebió de las fuentes de George Gershwin, The Four Freshmen, Burt Bacharach, Chuck Berry, Johnny Otis o del mismísimo Johan Sebastian Bach. Gran número de grandes artistas no han podido escapar de su influencia, sobre todo en lo que respecta a los coros, a las armonías vocales: The Association, America, Christopher Cross, Stephen Bishop, The Manhattan Transfer, Prefab Sprout…DISCO 1 BRIAN WILSON Love And Mercy (SMILE- 1)DISCO 2 THE BEACH BOYS Wouldn’t It Be Nice (PET SOUNDS - 1)DISCO 3 THE BEACH BOYS Good Vibrations (COLLECTION - CD 1 - 1) 1967 SMILEY SMILEDISCO 4 THE BEACH BOYS I Get Around (ANTHOLOGY- CD 1 - 1) All Summer Long 1964 (6º)DISCO 5 THE BEACH BOYS Heroes & Villains (PET SOUNDS - 8) 1967 SMILEY SMILEDISCO 6 THE BEACH BOYS California Girls (ANTHOLOGY- CD 2 - 6)DISCO 7 THE BEACH BOYS God Only Knows (PET SOUNDS - 8)DISCO 8 BRIAN WILSON Love And Mercy (BRIAN WILSON - 1)DISCO 9 BRIAN WILSON Imagination (IMAGINATION - 1)DISCO 10 BRIAN WILSON & VAN DYKE PARKS Orange Cat Art (1)DISCO 11 BRIAN WILSON & CARNIE WILSON Do It Again (I JUST WASN’T MADE…- 6)DISCO 12 BRIAN WILSON They Can’t Take That Away From Me (BRIAN WILSON… GERSWIN - 8)DISCO 13 BRIAN WILSON Don’t Worry Baby (LIVE AT THE ROXY THEATRE - 4)DISCO14 THE BEACH BOYS Summer's goneEscuchar audio

Listen to a 2017 interview WFYI's Kyle Long recorded with Brian Wilson, the visionary composer and producer behind the Beach Boys. He died on June 11, 2025, at the age of 82. The Beach Boys are one of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful bands of all time, selling over 100 million records and charting 37 songs in the U.S. Top 40. Much of that success was due to Wilson's visionary production style. which included unorthodox instrumentation, innovative recording techniques, and most notably the band's iconic vocal harmonies. Those trademark vocal harmonies were directly inspired by the Indianapolis group The Four Freshmen. The Four Freshmen were formed on the campus of Butler University in 1948. Wilson credited the Four Freshmen as his main influence in crafting the Beach Boys' sound. Wilson was such a big fan, he even recruited Four Freshmen arranger Dick Reynolds to work on several Beach Boys projects. During his conversation with WFYI, Wilson discussed his deep appreciation for The Four Freshmen.

What's your most loved and least favorite song on Jellyfish's Spilt Milk?!  Jim picked the 1993 favorite by the band that Dan says unites us the most. Between the four of us, we saw the band close to 30 times in just three years but it was Adam that started a website about the band, helped write their boxed set liner notes and....it's complicated. As a result of a whole lotta fun stories, the ranking doesn't start until the 32 minute mark. So close your eyes and get comfortable because we got Roger Joseph Manning Jr, Tim Smith, Eric Dover, Jason Falkner and superfan Pablo Melons to chime in with their most and least loved songs on the album. Listen at WeWillRankYouPod.com, Apple, Spotify and your favorite lactose intolerant dairy bar.Follow us and weigh in with your favorites on Facebook, Instagram & Threads and Twitter @wewillrankyoupod.SPOILERS/FILE UNDER:  Accordion, All Is Forgiven, Beach Boys, the Beatles, Bellybutton, Jay Bennett, Bourgeois Tagg, Brighter Day, Jon Brion, Bye Bye Bye, chalk line dollar sign, Charisma, curtain opens, demo-itus, dick jokes, Disney, Eric Dover, Dukes of Stratosphear, Jason Falkner, fanboy, Fanclub, Four Freshmen, Albhy Galuten, The Ghost At Number One, the Glutton of Sympathy, Mike Halloran, harmonies, He's My Best Friend, Mary Hopkins, Hush, Jellyfish, Joining A Fanclub, Joining A Fanpage, Bruce Kaphan, Los Angeles Union Session Musicians, liner notes, the Lovetarians, Roger Joseph Manning Jr, mayonnaise, Pablo Melons, New Mistake, Harry Nillson, Partridge Family, Pleasanton, polka, pop, power pop, Jack Joseph Puig, Queen, rock, Russian Hill, Sebrina Paste and Plato, the Seventies, Tim Smith, Spilt Milk, Steely Dan, strike the tent, Andy Sturmer, Supertramp, Too Much, Too Late, Too Little, tuba, tuppence, Wings, T Bone Wolk, Lyle Workman, XTC, 1993.US: http://www.WeWillRankYouPod.com wewillrankyoupod@gmail.comNEW! Host tips: Venmo @wewillrankyoupodhttp://www.facebook.com/WeWillRankYouPodhttp://www.instagram.com/WeWillRankYouPodhttps://www.threads.net/@WeWillRankYouPodhttp://www.twitter.com/WeWillRankYouPo http://www.YourOlderBrother.com(Sam's music page) http://www.YerDoinGreat.com (Adam's music page)https://open.spotify.com/user/dancecarbuzz (Dan's playlists)

If your mom (or your grandma or maybe great-grandmother) was a Bobby-soxer in the 1940s, she probably danced to this tune. Sociologists call the bunch born in the 1930s “The Silent Generation” — a term first used in a 1951 Time magazine story to describe their alleged cautious and passive nature — but, well, seriously? Anyone who ever saw them dance didn't think they were all that darn docile. After all, these “Silents” are the same folks who gave us the jitterbug, not to mention setting the stage for early rock ‘n' roll.About This SongAs reported here previously, Sy Oliver's composition “Opus One” was a hit on the radio for Tommy Dorsey in late 1944, but it was an even bigger smash a year later. That's when singer Anita O'Day recorded it with a rocking band fronted by drummer Gene Krupa and featuring legendary trumpeter Roy Eldridge.The song has gone on to be covered many times over the years, from versions by Harry James to those of The Mills Brothers and The Four Freshmen. For more on the song's history — including the story of those sassy lyrics added by Sid Garris — check out this earlier Flood Watch article.Meanwhile, here in The Flood Zone, the song is a perfect warmup for an evening of fun at the weekly rehearsal, offering solo space for everyone in the room.About the VideoThe sound in this video is audio from last week's rehearsal. Meanwhile, for the film footage thanks go out to Douglas K. Morris and Shane Finster of Armstrong Cable.As reported earlier, Doug and Shane dropped into a Flood rehearsal last summer to record an episode of their award-winning Armstrong Neighborhood Channel's Press Room Recordings series. It was a treat to revisit the video from that night to enhance this week's winter evening film.More Swing Tunes?Finally, if you'd like a little more from the “Swing” column on The Flood's menu, the free Radio Floodango music streaming feature has a channel just for you.Click here for a randomized playlist of swing tunes from over the band's decades. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

This episode of The Other Side of the Bell, featuring trumpeter, Scott Belck, is brought to you by Bob Reeves Brass. You can also watch this interview on Youtube. About Scott: Dr. Scott Belck currently serves as the Director of Jazz Studies and Professor of Music at the University of Cincinnati's College-Conservatory of Music (CCM) where he directs the CCM Jazz Orchestra and teaches applied Jazz Trumpet. He is a founding member of critically acclaimed Tromba Mundi contemporary trumpet ensemble and has toured as a member of Grammy Award winning funk legend Bootsy Collins' Funk Unity Band as lead trumpet. He has served as trumpet and cornet soloist with the Air Force Band of Flight in Dayton, Ohio where he also held the post of musical director for the Air Force Night Flight Jazz Ensemble. He is the Founding Artistic Director Emeritus of the Cincinnati Contemporary Jazz Orchestra.   His playing credits include recordings lead trumpet/guest soloist with the Cincinnati Pops featuring the Manhattan Transfer and John Pizzarelli, the Glenn Miller Orchestra, the Van Dells, and jazz soloist with the University of North Texas One O'clock Lab Band with whom he recorded four CDs as jazz soloist and section trumpet. He has performed as principal/lead trumpet with the St. Louis Symphony, Indianapolis Symphony, Cincinnati Symphony, the National Symphony Orchestra of the Dominican Republic, the Columbus Symphony Orchestra, the Dayton Philharmonic Orchestra, the Lexington Philharmonic, the Richmond Symphony Orchestra, and as section trumpet with the Duluth-Superior Symphony Orchestra and the Duluth Festival Opera. He has performed as lead trumpet for shows/concerts of Christian McBride, Jimmy Heath, Aretha Franklin, Gerald Wilson, the Detroit Jazz Festival Orchestra, Linda Ronstadt, John Lithgow, Donna Summer, Maureen McGovern, Michael Feinstein, Lalo Rodriguez, Sandy Patti, Tito Puente Jr., Tommy Tune, Manhattan Transfer, Lou Rawls, Patti Austen, The Coasters, Yes, Ben Vereen, Doc Severinsen, the Temptations, Olivia Newton-John, Neil Sedaka, the Blue Wisp Big Band, the Columbus Jazz Orchestra, the Dayton Jazz Orchestra, the Ink Spots, the Four Freshmen, The Frankie Avalon, Fabian, Bobby Riddell, Little Anthony and the Imperials, Frankie Valli, The Maritime Jazz Orchestra of Canada as well as touring Broadway shows and regional and national recording sessions. He has performed as a leader, musical director, or sideman with many top jazz players on the scene today including: Fred Hersch, Rich Perry, Adam Nussbaum, Lew Soloff, Randy Brecker, Slide Hampton, Jim McNeely, Claudio Roditi, John Riley, Rick Margitza, Bob Belden, Jimmy Heath, Bobby Watson, Tom Harrell, Tim Hagans, Regina Carter, Wes Anderson, John Hollenbeck, Steve Turre, Conrad Herwig, Gordon Brisker, Hank Marr, Marvin Stamm, Gerry Mulligan, Kenny Garrett, John Fedchock, Phil Woods, Ed Soph, John LaBarbera and Diane Schuur. He has also served as the Artistic Director of the Dayton Jazz Orchestra, the Jazz Central Big Band, and the Miami Valley Jazz Camp in Ohio. He is the author of the text “Modern Flexibilities for Brass”, published by Meredith Music and distributed by Hal Leonard. In his spare time, he is the CEO and founder of Lip Slur World Headquarters. Belck's new book “Progressive Lip Flexibilities for Brass” is quickly becoming one of the most popular sarcastic lip slur books in the lower South-Central Ohio River valley region. Scott Belck is a Powell Signature Trumpet Artist.

PopaHALLics #126 "Hit Man & Hitmakers"Wouldn't it be nice to learn more about the Beach Boys and Neil Young? We enjoy a documentary and a biography giving new insights into these influential musicians and their place in pop culture. We also laugh at a sexy fake hit man, cheer on "The Bear" and "Sweeth Tooth," and are very glad Lady Jane Grey does not lose her head in the swashbuckling, dryly funny reimagining "My Lady Jane."Streaming:"Hit Man," Netflix. In this action comedy directed by Richard Linklater, a dweeby college professor (Glen Powell, "Anyone But You") pretends to be a hit man for police investigations. What happens when he falls for a sexy suspect (Adria Arjona) who thinks he's a cool, confident killer?"My Lady Jane," Amazon Prime. Wait, Lady Jane Grey does NOT get "the chop" at the Tower of London? This reimagining of her life is like "The Princess Bride," with adventure, oodles and oodles of sex, and magic realism. As in people can turn into animals!"The Bear," Hulu. Season 3 finds tormented chef Carmie (Jeremy Allen White) continuing to chase a Michelin star, with lots more yelling in the kitchen and more emphasis on the characters around him."Sweet Tooth," Netflix. The third and final season of this sweet, gentle drama finds Gus the deer boy and his friend Big Man trying to get to Alaska and hook up with Gus' mom, who's trying to stop the plague "the Sick.""The Beach Boys," Disney +. This fan-friendly documentary traces the history of the band known for surf anthems through "Pet Sounds," a revolutionary album in its time, and beyond. Tons of never-before-seen photos, great stories, and critical insights into the band's importance from the likes of Lindsey Buckingham, producer Don Was, and Janelle Monae.Books:"Disobedient," by Elizabeth Fremantle. This novel based on the life of Artemisia Gentileschi—the greatest female painter of the Renaissance—finds her refusing to be silent about a rape and having "visual revenge" in the creation of her masterpiece, "Judith Beheading Holofernes.""Shakey: Neil Young's Biography," by Jimmy McDonough. This 2002 mammoth biography is the definitive look at the life and art of the enigmatic rocker. It was authorized by Young and yet still manages to hold his feet to the fire for questionable creative decisions and the many times he treated those closest to him badly. Music:Since we talk about the Beach Boys and Neil Young, let's have fun, fun, fun with a playlist featuring lots of music from both! PopaHALLics #126 Playlist kicks off with a song by the Four Freshmen, who heavily influenced Beach Boys' leader Brian Wilson's ideas about harmonies.Click through the links above to watch, read, and listen to what we're talking about.

It's been 50 years since The Beach Boys released their chart-topping compilation album Endless Summer in 1974. The band's 2024 tour Endless Summer Gold celebrates the legendary Beach Boys hits featured on that album.  This week on Cultural Manifesto, Beach Boys vocalist and co-founder Mike Love will share his thoughts on the band's legacy, and discuss The Four Freshmen, an Indianapolis vocal group that deeply influenced The Beach Boys' sound.

It's been 50 years since The Beach Boys released their chart-topping compilation album Endless Summer in 1974. The band's 2024 tour Endless Summer Gold celebrates the legendary Beach Boys hits featured on that album.  This week on Cultural Manifesto, Beach Boys vocalist and co-founder Mike Love will share his thoughts on the band's legacy, and discuss The Four Freshmen, an Indianapolis vocal group that deeply influenced The Beach Boys' sound.

Hey, thanks for being here. In this second episode of 2024, my guest is the wonderful Tommy Boynton, who you might know as a solo performer, a member of The Four Freshmen, The River Monks, The Mimzees, Jinnouchi Power, or any number of other pursuits as a musician. He's also extremely passionate about teaching music, and we talk a bit about that here. I felt bad about having to call this conversation a little early, but we still ended up having almost a full hour of it for you. I'm definitely looking forward to the possibility of a part two! Links for all of Tommy's music mentioned in the conversation below: They Taste Good EP | The Mimzees (bandcamp.com) growing boy | Tommy Boynton (bandcamp.com) The Four Freshmen: Featuring Emmet Cohen, Russell Hall, & Kyle Poole | The Four Freshmen (bandcamp.com) Live From Emmet's Place Vol. 106 - The Four Freshmen (youtube.com) Support me on Patreon here: Forest Cochran | creating music and podcasts! | Patreon --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/strpodcast/message

Midway through his seven-year stint with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, the brilliant arranger/composer Sy Oliver wrote this tune, which became a huge late World War II-era hit for the band. The chart-topping sensation — which Sy called simply “Opus No. 1” — went on to be radio hits for many other performers as well, from Gene Krupa and Harry James to the Mills Brothers and the Four Freshmen.Sid Garris and Those Sassy LyricsLargely responsible for the song's success was Sid Garris's work in creating those playful words.His lyrics lays out the songwriter's perennial dilemma: trying to think of a name for a catchy melody he has created, hoping to hook a famous crooner into performing it. I'm racking my brains to think of a name To give to this tune so Perry can croon And maybe old Bing will give it a fling And that'll start everyone humming the thing …Meet SidBorn in New York City in 1921, Garris was a violinist by training, performing with the Philadelphia Orchestra and later with the Dayton, Ohio, Philharmonic, and while he created some of the cheekiest lyrics of the late swing era, his music career ultimately didn't involve performing.The late 1940s and early 1950s found Garris working as a jazz disc jockey in Ohio (Dayton and Cleveland), where he was known as "Symphony Sid."Then in 1953 he relocated to the West Coast where he became a much-sought-after entertainment executive, managing The Four Freshmen, Ray Anthony and Stan Kenton and, then in the 1960s, The New Christy Minstrels, Anthony Quinn, Robert Culp and Jose Feliciano. Anita O'Day Rocks ItBut back to that song, Sy Oliver's employer, Tommy Dorsey, was the first to put “Opus One” on disc, recording it as an instrumental on Nov. 14, 1944, but the signature vocal version was Anita O'Day's rendition recorded the following August.That was an all-star session. Gene Krupa led the big band from behind his drums. Trumpeter Roy Eldridge accented Anita's vocals as the guest soloist. Quincy Jones made the arrangement. Sy Oliver After ‘Opus One'A year after “Opus One” was a hit for Anita and Q, Roy and Gene, Sy Oliver left the Dorsey band to begin work as a freelance arranger and as music director for Decca Records.In June 1950, Sy Oliver and his Orchestra recorded the first American version of "C'est si Bon" and "La Vie en Rose" for Louis Armstrong. Then a decade later, some of his career's most successful arrangements were for the 1961 Frank Sinatra album, I Remember Tommy, a combined tribute to their former boss, Dorsey.In 1974, Sy began nightly shows with a small band at New York's Rainbow Room, a gig that continued for the next 10 years before he retired in 1984.Meanwhile, his great song — that magical first opus — lives on and on. Our Take on the TuneIt was the end of a fun evening at the Bowen house, but nobody was quite ready to quit yet. Jack started padding a sweet swing rhythm on the house bongos and Randy jumped in with a bass line that fits it to a T. Charlie got the chords going, just as Danny flew in with that cool melody over Sam's smooth harmonica fills. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

PennLive's Johnny McGonigal and Bob Flounders break down the first James Franklin Tuesday news conference of the regular season. Franklin did not name a starting quarterback for the West Virginia game but offered up some strong praise for Drew Allar. Franklin also revealed the names of the four true freshmen who are expected to play in every game this year. And Johnny and Bob reveal their regular-season predictions for PSU. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode coversEasy Living (Feat. Emmet Cohen, Russell Hall, Kyle Poole) by The Four FreshmenThe Heartburn Song by LawrenceWebsite: https://redcircle.com/shows/two-tunes-podcastInstagram: https://instagram.com/twotunespodcast?igshid=13gpurxc3bf2qDiscord: https://discord.gg/eYMwBuJ6GeRSS Feed: https://feeds.redcircle.com/baeeceec-9527-475d-85b5-d9da2eea19d3E-mail: twotunespodcast@gmail.comSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/two-tunes-podcast/exclusive-content

As we're in the period between Christmas and New Year, the gap between episodes is going to be longer than normal, and the podcast proper is going to be back on January the ninth. So nobody has to wait around for another fortnight for a new episode, I thought I'd upload some old Patreon bonus episodes to fill the gap. Every year around Christmas the bonus episodes I do tend to be on Christmas songs and so this week I'm uploading three of those. These are older episodes, so don't have the same production values as more recent episodes, and are also shorter than more recent bonuses, but I hope they're still worth listening to. Transcript We talked in the last bonus episode about how the American Christmas music canon more or less ends in 1963. One record that just got in under that wire was "Little Saint Nick", recorded by the Beach Boys in October 1963 and released in December: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Little Saint Nick"] Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys' leader, was apparently inspired to write a Christmas song by Phil Spector -- Wilson turned up to at least one of the sessions for the Spector Christmas album, and had briefly played piano during a couple of takes of "Santa Claus is Coming to Town", although he wasn't actually on the record itself, as Spector decided he wasn't a good enough player. The date the Beach Boys recorded their Christmas song, October the twentieth 1963, was actually a historic date for the group. We'll talk about this more in a few weeks' time when we next look at the Beach Boys in the main podcast, but they had gone through a bit of a lineup shuffle, and David Marks had played his last gig with the group the night before, while Al Jardine had rejoined the band shortly before that. That meant that this was the first session since their first single at which the Beach Boys were the classic five-person lineup of Brian, Carl, and Dennis Wilson, Mike Love, and Al Jardine. There seems to be some confusion about what happened at that session, as they recorded two backing tracks. One of them became the "Little Saint Nick" that was a hit, but they also recorded a track that later became an album track called "Drive In": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Drive In"] But there also exists a recording of that backing track, but with the lyrics to "Little Saint Nick": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Drive In (Little Saint Nick version)"] I've seen conflicting accounts of how that track came to exist. Some say that they tried both backing tracks with the same lyrics at the original session, and that they then wrote the "Drive In" lyrics for the track that didn't make the cut as "Little Saint Nick", while others say that they actually sung the "Little Saint Nick" lyrics to the "Drive In" track as a joke a few months later, long after the original "Little Saint Nick" had already come out. Whichever is the truth, the version of "Little Saint Nick" that eventually came out as a single was this one, which became one of the last holiday classics in the US Christmas canon: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Little Saint Nick"] "Little Saint Nick" is very clearly modelled on an earlier hit by the group, "Little Deuce Coupe", and so it makes sense to me that the track that was chosen was the originally intended one, as musically that's quite close to the earlier song. "Little Saint Nick" was only a moderate success on the main chart, but it made number three on Billboard's Christmas Singles chart, which was enough of a success that the group decided the next year to record a full Christmas album. That album included a remixed version of "Little Saint Nick", with the backing track stripped down to sound more like the rest of the album's first side, which was rush-recorded with few overdubs. That album was recorded in a style that the Beach Boys did quite a bit at that time, with a side for "the kids" -- uptempo original songs -- and a side for "the adults", with orchestral versions of more traditional Christmas songs, arranged by the Four Freshmen's arranger Dick Reynolds, including a gorgeous version of "We Three Kings": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "We Three Kings"] The Beach Boys would have another attempt at making a Christmas album, in 1977, which went unreleased at the time -- mostly because much of it is truly terrible. However, there were a couple of worthwhile tracks on the album -- Brian Wilson's "Winter Symphony": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Winter Symphony"] And his brother Dennis' "Morning Christmas": [Excerpt: Dennis Wilson, "Morning Christmas"] Much of that album has since been released, with their 1964 Christmas album, on the compilation "Ultimate Christmas". Both Brian Wilson and Mike Love have since released solo Christmas albums. Both are patchy affairs, but Wilson's has a lovely version of "Joy to the World" as a bonus track: [Excerpt: Brian Wilson, "Joy to the World"] And it has a few other genuinely nice tracks, while the highlight of Love's is rather less impressive -- a reworking of "Shortenin' Bread" titled "Reason For the Season": [Excerpt: Mike Love, "Reason for the Season"] Both albums also include remakes of "Little Saint Nick", the one Beach Boys Christmas song that has really entered the consciousness of the general public. And while this podcast episode might have ended up being too late for you to still be hearing that one on the radio, I'm sure you'll start hearing it again, for the fifty-eighth straight year, come the last week of November 2021. Because some things, at least, stay the same no matter what's happening in the rest of the world.

Nepotism babies are so hot right now! But have they…always been?!? Evan & Andrew discuss the hottest nepotism baby of the 90s outside of Socks Clinton, Evan desperately and fruitlessly attempts to get Andrew to stop talking about Bob Dylan and start talking about  ̶J̶a̶k̶o̶b̶ ̶D̶y̶l̶a̶n̶  The Wallflowers instead. But the sonorous tones of the organ on ‘One Headlight' keeps drawing Andrew back to Dylan the elder like moth to a flame. Andrew resorts to the only revenge available to him in this format, which is the most brutal $5 segment that has ever been recorded on our podcast.  You can watch the video version of this episode HERE! Walk-in music: ‘Backup Plan' by Maya Hawke; ‘Their Hearts Were Full of Spring' by The Four Freshmen.  Follow Punch Up The Jam on Twitter and Instagram Get the punch-ups for yourself and support the show on Patreon Like the show? Rate Punch Up The Jam 5 stars on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and leave a review for Andrew and Evan. Advertise on Punch Up The Jam via Gumball.fmSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ohio State men's basketball beat reporter Adam Jardy discusses where thing currently sit with the Buckeyes on the newest episode of the BuckeyeXtra basketball podcast. During this edition we talk about the four freshmen and their current performance so far this season. Finally, we preview Rutgers, our first upcoming Big Ten opponent this Thursday night.

Roger Ashby does a deep dive into the artists that shaped the future of music. Listen to the Roger Ashby Oldies Show anytime on the iHeartRadio app.

My 2002 BBC Radio 2 documentary series, “The Arrangers”, featured this documentary and my exclusive interview with Composer/Arranger PETE RUGOLO. He studied with Darius Milhaud, and had a long association with the STAN KENTON orchestra, becoming one of the most influential composers in modern jazz. He went on to produce and arrange for stars such as June Christy, The Four Freshmen and Nat King Cole, and write brilliant scores for film and TV including The Fugitive, The Untouchables, and Richard Diamond. As A&R for Capitol, he signed and produced the Miles Davis project known as “The Birth of the Cool”, enabling music that created the “cool school” of jazz. Here is his fascinating story, in his own words, assisted by contributions from Gene Lees, Stephanie Stein Crease, and Bud Shank. PETE RUGOLO – EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW – Kenton, Cole and MILES! Watch this episode in video HERE #peterugolo #richardniles #radiorichard #richardnilesinterview #milesdavis #thefugitive #theuntouchables Please Like, Share, and Subscribe to our YouTube channel HERE Buy Richard's acclaimed books HERE Buy Richard's astounding music HERE  Check our channel's official online shop for great & exclusive memorabilia HERE Send me enough for a cup of coffee at The Ritz to keep our Radio Richard growing: Via PayPal Via Patreon Radio Richard Theme ©2020 Niles Smiles Music (BMI) By Richard Niles, Performed by Kim Chandler & Richard Niles

For Video Edition, Please Click Here and Subscribe: https://youtu.be/SI4GFOisahM Written by a career vocalist, The Contemporary Singer's Blueprint: From Amateur to Professional and Beyond (Meredith Music Publications) is a valuable blueprint providing readers with the professional insight and practical steps for building a top notch, profitable singing career. JILL SWITZER is a singer/songwriter, voice/life coach, morning radio producer and personality of the popular Legends Radio show of eight years The Morning Lounge with Jill and Rich, plenary speaker, spokesmodel, and author of The Diva Next Door: How to be a Singing Star Wherever You Are which Tony Award® winner Linda Lavin called “warm, funny, right to the heart of what counts in the pursuit of a singing career.” Jill's thirty years in showbiz from Palm Beach to New York includes stage appearances and/or recordings with Nicolas King, Faith Prince, Steve Tyrell, John Pizzarelli, Marilyn Maye, Ann Hampton Callaway, Mary Wilson of The Supremes and The Four Freshmen. Her voice has been heard on The Ellen Show, countless national commercial jingles, and the internationally syndicated radio show Dick Robinson's American Standards by the Sea, where she was voted by listeners three consecutive years the “Best New Female Vocalist.” She resides in her native Palm Beach County, FL, with Rich, her husband and musical soulmate of twenty-six years. Deemed “South Florida's First Couple of the Great American Songbook,” Jill and Rich are one of the most sought-after acts in the area and perform regularly at high-profile venues. “I highly recommend this book for anyone who is trying to make a bigger impact with their musical career and is looking for inspiration and guidance!” -Tony-nominated singer/songwriter Ann Hampton Callaway

Hello Friends! Today I'm taking a long overdue deep dive into the music of The Four Freshmen!  You'll hear the classics, some deep cuts, as well as an insider's perspective as I'm joined by Tommy Boynton who currently sings and plays guitar in the current version of the group! Thanks for listening! Wyatt   The Four Freshmen Patreon The Sail On Patreon Discord Instagram Twitter www.sailonsounds.com sailonpodcast@gmail.com (615) 606-3887

We start season four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs with an extra-long look at "San Francisco" by Scott McKenzie, and at the Monterey Pop Festival, and the careers of the Mamas and the Papas and P.F. Sloan. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Up, Up, and Away" by the 5th Dimension. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources As usual, all the songs excerpted in the podcast can be heard in full at Mixcloud. Scott McKenzie's first album is available here. There are many compilations of the Mamas and the Papas' music, but sadly none that are in print in the UK have the original mono mixes. This set is about as good as you're going to find, though, for the stereo versions. Information on the Mamas and the Papas came from Go Where You Wanna Go: The Oral History of The Mamas and the Papas by Matthew Greenwald, California Dreamin': The True Story Of The Mamas and Papas by Michelle Phillips, and Papa John by John Phillips and Jim Jerome. Information on P.F. Sloan came from PF - TRAVELLING BAREFOOT ON A ROCKY ROAD by Stephen McParland and What's Exactly the Matter With Me? by P.F. Sloan and S.E. Feinberg. The film of the Monterey Pop Festival is available on this Criterion Blu-Ray set. Sadly the CD of the performances seems to be deleted. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Welcome to season four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. It's good to be back. Before we start this episode, I just want to say one thing. I get a lot of credit at times for the way I don't shy away from dealing with the more unsavoury elements of the people being covered in my podcast -- particularly the more awful men. But as I said very early on, I only cover those aspects of their life when they're relevant to the music, because this is a music podcast and not a true crime podcast. But also I worry that in some cases this might mean I'm giving a false impression of some people. In the case of this episode, one of the central figures is John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas. Now, Phillips has posthumously been accused of some truly monstrous acts, the kind of thing that is truly unforgivable, and I believe those accusations. But those acts didn't take place during the time period covered by most of this episode, so I won't be covering them here -- but they're easily googlable if you want to know. I thought it best to get that out of the way at the start, so no-one's either anxiously waiting for the penny to drop or upset that I didn't acknowledge the elephant in the room. Separately, this episode will have some discussion of fatphobia and diet culture, and of a death that is at least in part attributable to those things. Those of you affected by that may want to skip this one or read the transcript. There are also some mentions of drug addiction and alcoholism. Anyway, on with the show. One of the things that causes problems with rock history is the tendency of people to have selective memories, and that's never more true than when it comes to the Summer of Love, summer of 1967. In the mythology that's built up around it, that was a golden time, the greatest time ever, a period of peace and love where everything was possible, and the world looked like it was going to just keep on getting better. But what that means, of course, is that the people remembering it that way do so because it was the best time of their lives. And what happens when the best time of your life is over in one summer? When you have one hit and never have a second, or when your band splits up after only eighteen months, and you have to cope with the reality that your best years are not only behind you, but they weren't even best years, but just best months? What stories would you tell about that time? Would you remember it as the eve of destruction, the last great moment before everything went to hell, or would you remember it as a golden summer, full of people with flowers in their hair? And would either really be true? [Excerpt: Scott McKenzie, "San Francisco"] Other than the city in which they worked, there are a few things that seem to characterise almost all the important figures on the LA music scene in the middle part of the 1960s. They almost all seem to be incredibly ambitious, as one might imagine. There seem to be a huge number of fantasists among them -- people who will not only choose the legend over reality when it suits them, but who will choose the legend over reality even when it doesn't suit them. And they almost all seem to have a story about being turned down in a rude and arrogant manner by Lou Adler, usually more or less the same story. To give an example, I'm going to read out a bit of Ray Manzarek's autobiography here. Now, Manzarek uses a few words that I can't use on this podcast and keep a clean rating, so I'm just going to do slight pauses when I get to them, but I'll leave the words in the transcript for those who aren't offended by them: "Sometimes Jim and Dorothy and I went alone. The three of us tried Dunhill Records. Lou Adler was the head man. He was shrewd and he was hip. He had the Mamas and the Papas and a big single with Barry McGuire's 'Eve of Destruction.' He was flush. We were ushered into his office. He looked cool. He was California casually disheveled and had the look of a stoner, but his eyes were as cold as a shark's. He took the twelve-inch acetate demo from me and we all sat down. He put the disc on his turntable and played each cut…for ten seconds. Ten seconds! You can't tell jack [shit] from ten seconds. At least listen to one of the songs all the way through. I wanted to rage at him. 'How dare you! We're the Doors! This is [fucking] Jim Morrison! He's going to be a [fucking] star! Can't you see that? Can't you see how [fucking] handsome he is? Can't you hear how groovy the music is? Don't you [fucking] get it? Listen to the words, man!' My brain was a boiling, lava-filled Jell-O mold of rage. I wanted to eviscerate that shark. The songs he so casually dismissed were 'Moonlight Drive,' 'Hello, I Love You,' 'Summer's Almost Gone,' 'End of the Night,' 'I Looked at You,' 'Go Insane.' He rejected the whole demo. Ten seconds on each song—maybe twenty seconds on 'Hello, I Love You' (I took that as an omen of potential airplay)—and we were dismissed out of hand. Just like that. He took the demo off the turntable and handed it back to me with an obsequious smile and said, 'Nothing here I can use.' We were shocked. We stood up, the three of us, and Jim, with a wry and knowing smile on his lips, cuttingly and coolly shot back at him, 'That's okay, man. We don't want to be *used*, anyway.'" Now, as you may have gathered from the episode on the Doors, Ray Manzarek was one of those print-the-legend types, and that's true of everyone who tells similar stories about Lou Alder. But... there are a *lot* of people who tell similar stories about Lou Adler. One of those was Phil Sloan. You can get an idea of Sloan's attitude to storytelling from a story he always used to tell. Shortly after he and his family moved to LA from New York, he got a job selling newspapers on a street corner on Hollywood Boulevard, just across from Schwab's Drug Store. One day James Dean drove up in his Porsche and made an unusual request. He wanted to buy every copy of the newspaper that Sloan had -- around a hundred and fifty copies in total. But he only wanted one article, something in the entertainment section. Sloan didn't remember what the article was, but he did remember that one of the headlines was on the final illness of Oliver Hardy, who died shortly afterwards, and thought it might have been something to do with that. Dean was going to just clip that article from every copy he bought, and then he was going to give all the newspapers back to Sloan to sell again, so Sloan ended up making a lot of extra money that day. There is one rather big problem with that story. Oliver Hardy died in August 1957, just after the Sloan family moved to LA. But James Dean died in September 1955, two years earlier. Sloan admitted that, and said he couldn't explain it, but he was insistent. He sold a hundred and fifty newspapers to James Dean two years after Dean's death. When not selling newspapers to dead celebrities, Sloan went to Fairfax High School, and developed an interest in music which was mostly oriented around the kind of white pop vocal groups that were popular at the time, groups like the Kingston Trio, the Four Lads, and the Four Aces. But the record that made Sloan decide he wanted to make music himself was "Just Goofed" by the Teen Queens: [Excerpt: The Teen Queens, "Just Goofed"] In 1959, when he was fourteen, he saw an advert for an open audition with Aladdin Records, a label he liked because of Thurston Harris. He went along to the audition, and was successful. His first single, released as by Flip Sloan -- Flip was a nickname, a corruption of "Philip" -- was produced by Bumps Blackwell and featured several of the musicians who played with Sam Cooke, plus Larry Knechtel on piano and Mike Deasey on guitar, but Aladdin shut down shortly after releasing it, and it may not even have had a general release, just promo copies. I've not been able to find a copy online anywhere. After that, he tried Arwin Records, the label that Jan and Arnie recorded for, which was owned by Marty Melcher (Doris Day's husband and Terry Melcher's stepfather). Melcher signed him, and put out a single, "She's My Girl", on Mart Records, a subsidiary of Arwin, on which Sloan was backed by a group of session players including Sandy Nelson and Bruce Johnston: [Excerpt: Philip Sloan, "She's My Girl"] That record didn't have any success, and Sloan was soon dropped by Mart Records. He went on to sign with Blue Bird Records, which was as far as can be ascertained essentially a scam organisation that would record demos for songwriters, but tell the performers that they were making a real record, so that they would record it for the royalties they would never get, rather than for a decent fee as a professional demo singer would get. But Steve Venet -- the brother of Nik Venet, and occasional songwriting collaborator with Tommy Boyce -- happened to come to Blue Bird one day, and hear one of Sloan's original songs. He thought Sloan would make a good songwriter, and took him to see Lou Adler at Columbia-Screen Gems music publishing. This was shortly after the merger between Columbia-Screen Gems and Aldon Music, and Adler was at this point the West Coast head of operations, subservient to Don Kirshner and Al Nevins, but largely left to do what he wanted. The way Sloan always told the story, Venet tried to get Adler to sign Sloan, but Adler said his songs stunk and had no commercial potential. But Sloan persisted in trying to get a contract there, and eventually Al Nevins happened to be in the office and overruled Adler, much to Adler's disgust. Sloan was signed to Columbia-Screen Gems as a songwriter, though he wasn't put on a salary like the Brill Building songwriters, just told that he could bring in songs and they would publish them. Shortly after this, Adler suggested to Sloan that he might want to form a writing team with another songwriter, Steve Barri, who had had a similar non-career non-trajectory, but was very slightly further ahead in his career, having done some work with Carol Connors, the former lead singer of the Teddy Bears. Barri had co-written a couple of flop singles for Connors, before the two of them had formed a vocal group, the Storytellers, with Connors' sister. The Storytellers had released a single, "When Two People (Are in Love)" , which was put out on a local independent label and which Adler had licensed to be released on Dimension Records, the label associated with Aldon Music: [Excerpt: The Storytellers "When Two People (Are in Love)"] That record didn't sell, but it was enough to get Barri into the Columbia-Screen Gems circle, and Adler set him and Sloan up as a songwriting team -- although the way Sloan told it, it wasn't so much a songwriting team as Sloan writing songs while Barri was also there. Sloan would later claim "it was mostly a collaboration of spirit, and it seemed that I was writing most of the music and the lyric, but it couldn't possibly have ever happened unless both of us were present at the same time". One suspects that Barri might have a different recollection of how it went... Sloan and Barri's first collaboration was a song that Sloan had half-written before they met, called "Kick That Little Foot Sally Ann", which was recorded by a West Coast Chubby Checker knockoff who went under the name Round Robin, and who had his own dance craze, the Slauson, which was much less successful than the Twist: [Excerpt: Round Robin, "Kick that Little Foot Sally Ann"] That track was produced and arranged by Jack Nitzsche, and Nitzsche asked Sloan to be one of the rhythm guitarists on the track, apparently liking Sloan's feel. Sloan would end up playing rhythm guitar or singing backing vocals on many of the records made of songs he and Barri wrote together. "Kick That Little Foot Sally Ann" only made number sixty-one nationally, but it was a regional hit, and it meant that Sloan and Barri soon became what Sloan later described as "the Goffin and King of the West Coast follow-ups." According to Sloan "We'd be given a list on Monday morning by Lou Adler with thirty names on it of the groups who needed follow-ups to their hit." They'd then write the songs to order, and they started to specialise in dance craze songs. For example, when the Swim looked like it might be the next big dance, they wrote "Swim Swim Swim", "She Only Wants to Swim", "Let's Swim Baby", "Big Boss Swimmer", "Swim Party" and "My Swimmin' Girl" (the last a collaboration with Jan Berry and Roger Christian). These songs were exactly as good as they needed to be, in order to provide album filler for mid-tier artists, and while Sloan and Barri weren't writing any massive hits, they were doing very well as mid-tier writers. According to Sloan's biographer Stephen McParland, there was a three-year period in the mid-sixties where at least one song written or co-written by Sloan was on the national charts at any given time. Most of these songs weren't for Columbia-Screen Gems though. In early 1964 Lou Adler had a falling out with Don Kirshner, and decided to start up his own company, Dunhill, which was equal parts production company, music publishers, and management -- doing for West Coast pop singers what Motown was doing for Detroit soul singers, and putting everything into one basket. Dunhill's early clients included Jan and Dean and the rockabilly singer Johnny Rivers, and Dunhill also signed Sloan and Barri as songwriters. Because of this connection, Sloan and Barri soon became an important part of Jan and Dean's hit-making process. The Matadors, the vocal group that had provided most of the backing vocals on the duo's hits, had started asking for more money than Jan Berry was willing to pay, and Jan and Dean couldn't do the vocals themselves -- as Bones Howe put it "As a singer, Dean is a wonderful graphic artist" -- and so Sloan and Barri stepped in, doing session vocals without payment in the hope that Jan and Dean would record a few of their songs. For example, on the big hit "The Little Old Lady From Pasadena", Dean Torrence is not present at all on the record -- Jan Berry sings the lead vocal, with Sloan doubling him for much of it, Sloan sings "Dean"'s falsetto, with the engineer Bones Howe helping out, and the rest of the backing vocals are sung by Sloan, Barri, and Howe: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "The Little Old Lady From Pasadena"] For these recordings, Sloan and Barri were known as The Fantastic Baggys, a name which came from the Rolling Stones' manager Andrew Oldham and Mick Jagger, when the two were visiting California. Oldham had been commenting on baggys, the kind of shorts worn by surfers, and had asked Jagger what he thought of The Baggys as a group name. Jagger had replied "Fantastic!" and so the Fantastic Baggys had been born. As part of this, Sloan and Barri moved hard into surf and hot-rod music from the dance songs they had been writing previously. The Fantastic Baggys recorded their own album, Tell 'Em I'm Surfin', as a quickie album suggested by Adler: [Excerpt: The Fantastic Baggys, "Tell 'Em I'm Surfin'"] And under the name The Rally Packs they recorded a version of Jan and Dean's "Move Out Little Mustang" which featured Berry's girlfriend Jill Gibson doing a spoken section: [Excerpt: The Rally Packs, "Move Out Little Mustang"] They also wrote several album tracks for Jan and Dean, and wrote "Summer Means Fun" for Bruce and Terry -- Bruce Johnston, later of the Beach Boys, and Terry Melcher: [Excerpt: Bruce and Terry, "Summer Means Fun"] And they wrote the very surf-flavoured "Secret Agent Man" for fellow Dunhill artist Johnny Rivers: [Excerpt: Johnny Rivers, "Secret Agent Man"] But of course, when you're chasing trends, you're chasing trends, and soon the craze for twangy guitars and falsetto harmonies had ended, replaced by a craze for jangly twelve-string guitars and closer harmonies. According to Sloan, he was in at the very beginning of the folk-rock trend -- the way he told the story, he was involved in the mastering of the Byrds' version of "Mr. Tambourine Man". He later talked about Terry Melcher getting him to help out, saying "He had produced a record called 'Mr. Tambourine Man', and had sent it into the head office, and it had been rejected. He called me up and said 'I've got three more hours in the studio before I'm being kicked out of Columbia. Can you come over and help me with this new record?' I did. I went over there. It was under lock and key. There were two guards outside the door. Terry asked me something about 'Summer Means Fun'. "He said 'Do you remember the guitar that we worked on with that? How we put in that double reverb?' "And I said 'yes' "And he said 'What do you think if we did something like that with the Byrds?' "And I said 'That sounds good. Let's see what it sounds like.' So we patched into all the reverb centres in Columbia Music, and mastered the record in three hours." Whether Sloan really was there at the birth of folk rock, he and Barri jumped on the folk-rock craze just as they had the surf and hot-rod craze, and wrote a string of jangly hits including "You Baby" for the Turtles: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "You Baby"] and "I Found a Girl" for Jan and Dean: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "I Found a Girl"] That song was later included on Jan and Dean's Folk 'n' Roll album, which also included... a song I'm not even going to name, but long-time listeners will know the one I mean. It was also notable in that "I Found a Girl" was the first song on which Sloan was credited not as Phil Sloan, but as P.F. Sloan -- he didn't have a middle name beginning with F, but rather the F stood for his nickname "Flip". Sloan would later talk of Phil Sloan and P.F. Sloan as almost being two different people, with P.F. being a far more serious, intense, songwriter. Folk 'n' Roll also contained another Sloan song, this one credited solely to Sloan. And that song is the one for which he became best known. There are two very different stories about how "Eve of Destruction" came to be written. To tell Sloan's version, I'm going to read a few paragraphs from his autobiography: "By late 1964, I had already written ‘Eve Of Destruction,' ‘The Sins Of A Family,' ‘This Mornin',' ‘Ain't No Way I'm Gonna Change My Mind,' and ‘What's Exactly The Matter With Me?' They all arrived on one cataclysmic evening, and nearly at the same time, as I worked on the lyrics almost simultaneously. ‘Eve Of Destruction' came about from hearing a voice, perhaps an angel's. The voice instructed me to place five pieces of paper and spread them out on my bed. I obeyed the voice. The voice told me that the first song would be called ‘Eve Of Destruction,' so I wrote the title at the top of the page. For the next few hours, the voice came and went as I was writing the lyric, as if this spirit—or whatever it was—stood over me like a teacher: ‘No, no … not think of all the hate there is in Red Russia … Red China!' I didn't understand. I thought the Soviet Union was the mortal threat to America, but the voice went on to reveal to me the future of the world until 2024. I was told the Soviet Union would fall, and that Red China would continue to be communist far into the future, but that communism was not going to be allowed to take over this Divine Planet—therefore, think of all the hate there is in Red China. I argued and wrestled with the voice for hours, until I was exhausted but satisfied inside with my plea to God to either take me out of the world, as I could not live in such a hypocritical society, or to show me a way to make things better. When I was writing ‘Eve,' I was on my hands and knees, pleading for an answer." Lou Adler's story is that he gave Phil Sloan a copy of Bob Dylan's Bringing it All Back Home album and told him to write a bunch of songs that sounded like that, and Sloan came back a week later as instructed with ten Dylan knock-offs. Adler said "It was a natural feel for him. He's a great mimic." As one other data point, both Steve Barri and Bones Howe, the engineer who worked on most of the sessions we're looking at today, have often talked in interviews about "Eve of Destruction" as being a Sloan/Barri collaboration, as if to them it's common knowledge that it wasn't written alone, although Sloan's is the only name on the credits. The song was given to a new signing to Dunhill Records, Barry McGuire. McGuire was someone who had been part of the folk scene for years, He'd been playing folk clubs in LA while also acting in a TV show from 1961. When the TV show had finished, he'd formed a duo, Barry and Barry, with Barry Kane, and they performed much the same repertoire as all the other early-sixties folkies: [Excerpt: Barry and Barry, "If I Had a Hammer"] After recording their one album, both Barrys joined the New Christy Minstrels. We've talked about the Christys before, but they were -- and are to this day -- an ultra-commercial folk group, led by Randy Sparks, with a revolving membership of usually eight or nine singers which included several other people who've come up in this podcast, like Gene Clark and Jerry Yester. McGuire became one of the principal lead singers of the Christys, singing lead on their version of the novelty cowboy song "Three Wheels on My Wagon", which was later released as a single in the UK and became a perennial children's favourite (though it has a problematic attitude towards Native Americans): [Excerpt: The New Christy Minstrels, "Three Wheels on My Wagon"] And he also sang lead on their big hit "Green Green", which he co-wrote with Randy Sparks: [Excerpt: The New Christy Minstrels, "Green Green"] But by 1965 McGuire had left the New Christy Minstrels. As he said later "I'd sung 'Green Green' a thousand times and I didn't want to sing it again. This is January of 1965. I went back to LA to meet some producers, and I was broke. Nobody had the time of day for me. I was walking down street one time to see Dr. Strangelove and I walked by the music store, and I heard "Green Green" comin' out of the store, ya know, on Hollywood Boulevard. And I heard my voice, and I thought, 'I got four dollars in my pocket!' I couldn't believe it, my voice is comin' out on Hollywood Boulevard, and I'm broke. And right at that moment, a car pulls up, and the radio is playing 'Chim Chim Cherie" also by the Minstrels. So I got my voice comin' at me in stereo, standin' on the sidewalk there, and I'm broke, and I can't get anyone to sign me!" But McGuire had a lot of friends who he'd met on the folk scene, some of whom were now in the new folk-rock scene that was just starting to spring up. One of them was Roger McGuinn, who told him that his band, the Byrds, were just about to put out a new single, "Mr. Tambourine Man", and that they were about to start a residency at Ciro's on Sunset Strip. McGuinn invited McGuire to the opening night of that residency, where a lot of other people from the scene were there to see the new group. Bob Dylan was there, as was Phil Sloan, and the actor Jack Nicholson, who was still at the time a minor bit-part player in low-budget films made by people like American International Pictures (the cinematographer on many of Nicholson's early films was Floyd Crosby, David Crosby's father, which may be why he was there). Someone else who was there was Lou Adler, who according to McGuire recognised him instantly. According to Adler, he actually asked Terry Melcher who the long-haired dancer wearing furs was, because "he looked like the leader of a movement", and Melcher told him that he was the former lead singer of the New Christy Minstrels. Either way, Adler approached McGuire and asked if he was currently signed -- Dunhill Records was just starting up, and getting someone like McGuire, who had a proven ability to sing lead on hit records, would be a good start for the label. As McGuire didn't have a contract, he was signed to Dunhill, and he was given some of Sloan's new songs to pick from, and chose "What's Exactly the Matter With Me?" as his single: [Excerpt: Barry McGuire, "What's Exactly the Matter With Me?"] McGuire described what happened next: "It was like, a three-hour session. We did two songs, and then the third one wasn't turning out. We only had about a half hour left in the session, so I said 'Let's do this tune', and I pulled 'Eve of Destruction' out of my pocket, and it just had Phil's words scrawled on a piece of paper, all wrinkled up. Phil worked the chords out with the musicians, who were Hal Blaine on drums and Larry Knechtel on bass." There were actually more musicians than that at the session -- apparently both Knechtel and Joe Osborn were there, so I'm not entirely sure who's playing bass -- Knechtel was a keyboard player as well as a bass player, but I don't hear any keyboards on the track. And Tommy Tedesco was playing lead guitar, and Steve Barri added percussion, along with Sloan on rhythm guitar and harmonica. The chords were apparently scribbled down for the musicians on bits of greasy paper that had been used to wrap some takeaway chicken, and they got through the track in a single take. According to McGuire "I'm reading the words off this piece of wrinkled paper, and I'm singing 'My blood's so mad, feels like coagulatin'", that part that goes 'Ahhh you can't twist the truth', and the reason I'm going 'Ahhh' is because I lost my place on the page. People said 'Man, you really sounded frustrated when you were singing.' I was. I couldn't see the words!" [Excerpt: Barry McGuire, "Eve of Destruction"] With a few overdubs -- the female backing singers in the chorus, and possibly the kettledrums, which I've seen differing claims about, with some saying that Hal Blaine played them during the basic track and others saying that Lou Adler suggested them as an overdub, the track was complete. McGuire wasn't happy with his vocal, and a session was scheduled for him to redo it, but then a record promoter working with Adler was DJing a birthday party for the head of programming at KFWB, the big top forty radio station in LA at the time, and he played a few acetates he'd picked up from Adler. Most went down OK with the crowd, but when he played "Eve of Destruction", the crowd went wild and insisted he play it three times in a row. The head of programming called Adler up and told him that "Eve of Destruction" was going to be put into rotation on the station from Monday, so he'd better get the record out. As McGuire was away for the weekend, Adler just released the track as it was, and what had been intended to be a B-side became Barry McGuire's first and only number one record: [Excerpt: Barry McGuire, "Eve of Destruction"] Sloan would later claim that that song was a major reason why the twenty-sixth amendment to the US Constitution was passed six years later, because the line "you're old enough to kill but not for votin'" shamed Congress into changing the constitution to allow eighteen-year-olds to vote. If so, that would make "Eve of Destruction" arguably the single most impactful rock record in history, though Sloan is the only person I've ever seen saying that As well as going to number one in McGuire's version, the song was also covered by the other artists who regularly performed Sloan and Barri songs, like the Turtles: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "Eve of Destruction"] And Jan and Dean, whose version on Folk & Roll used the same backing track as McGuire, but had a few lyrical changes to make it fit with Jan Berry's right-wing politics, most notably changing "Selma, Alabama" to "Watts, California", thus changing a reference to peaceful civil rights protestors being brutally attacked and murdered by white supremacist state troopers to a reference to what was seen, in the popular imaginary, as Black people rioting for no reason: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "Eve of Destruction"] According to Sloan, he worked on the Folk & Roll album as a favour to Berry, even though he thought Berry was being cynical and exploitative in making the record, but those changes caused a rift in their friendship. Sloan said in his autobiography "Where I was completely wrong was in helping him capitalize on something in which he didn't believe. Jan wanted the public to perceive him as a person who was deeply concerned and who embraced the values of the progressive politics of the day. But he wasn't that person. That's how I was being pulled. It was when he recorded my actual song ‘Eve Of Destruction' and changed a number of lines to reflect his own ideals that my principles demanded that I leave Folk City and never return." It's true that Sloan gave no more songs to Jan and Dean after that point -- but it's also true that the duo would record only one more album, the comedy concept album Jan and Dean Meet Batman, before Jan's accident. Incidentally, the reference to Selma, Alabama in the lyric might help people decide on which story about the writing of "Eve of Destruction" they think is more plausible. Remember that Lou Adler said that it was written after Adler gave Sloan a copy of Bringing it All Back Home and told him to write a bunch of knock-offs, while Sloan said it was written after a supernatural force gave him access to all the events that would happen in the world for the next sixty years. Sloan claimed the song was written in late 1964. Selma, Alabama, became national news in late February and early March 1965. Bringing it All Back Home was released in late March 1965. So either Adler was telling the truth, or Sloan really *was* given a supernatural insight into the events of the future. Now, as it turned out, while "Eve of Destruction" went to number one, that would be McGuire's only hit as a solo artist. His next couple of singles would reach the very low end of the Hot One Hundred, and that would be it -- he'd release several more albums, before appearing in the Broadway musical Hair, most famous for its nude scenes, and getting a small part in the cinematic masterpiece Werewolves on Wheels: [Excerpt: Werewolves on Wheels trailer] P.F. Sloan would later tell various stories about why McGuire never had another hit. Sometimes he would say that Dunhill Records had received death threats because of "Eve of Destruction" and so deliberately tried to bury McGuire's career, other times he would say that Lou Adler had told him that Billboard had said they were never going to put McGuire's records on the charts no matter how well they sold, because "Eve of Destruction" had just been too powerful and upset the advertisers. But of course at this time Dunhill were still trying for a follow-up to "Eve of Destruction", and they thought they might have one when Barry McGuire brought in a few friends of his to sing backing vocals on his second album. Now, we've covered some of the history of the Mamas and the Papas already, because they were intimately tied up with other groups like the Byrds and the Lovin' Spoonful, and with the folk scene that led to songs like "Hey Joe", so some of this will be more like a recap than a totally new story, but I'm going to recap those parts of the story anyway, so it's fresh in everyone's heads. John Phillips, Scott McKenzie, and Cass Elliot all grew up in Alexandria, Virginia, just a few miles south of Washington DC. Elliot was a few years younger than Phillips and McKenzie, and so as is the way with young men they never really noticed her, and as McKenzie later said "She lived like a quarter of a mile from me and I never met her until New York". While they didn't know who Elliot was, though, she was aware who they were, as Phillips and McKenzie sang together in a vocal group called The Smoothies. The Smoothies were a modern jazz harmony group, influenced by groups like the Modernaires, the Hi-Los, and the Four Freshmen. John Phillips later said "We were drawn to jazz, because we were sort of beatniks, really, rather than hippies, or whatever, flower children. So we used to sing modern harmonies, like Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross. Dave Lambert did a lot of our arrangements for us as a matter of fact." Now, I've not seen any evidence other than Phillips' claim that Dave Lambert ever arranged for the Smoothies, but that does tell you a lot about the kind of music that they were doing. Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross were a vocalese trio whose main star was Annie Ross, who had a career worthy of an episode in itself -- she sang with Paul Whiteman, appeared in a Little Rascals film when she was seven, had an affair with Lenny Bruce, dubbed Britt Ekland's voice in The Wicker Man, played the villain's sister in Superman III, and much more. Vocalese, you'll remember, was a style of jazz vocal where a singer would take a jazz instrumental, often an improvised one, and add lyrics which they would sing, like Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross' version of "Cloudburst": [Excerpt: Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross, "Cloudburst"] Whether Dave Lambert ever really did arrange for the Smoothies or not, it's very clear that the trio had a huge influence on John Phillips' ideas about vocal arrangement, as you can hear on Mamas and Papas records like "Once Was a Time I Thought": [Excerpt: The Mamas and the Papas, "Once Was a Time I Thought"] While the Smoothies thought of themselves as a jazz group, when they signed to Decca they started out making the standard teen pop of the era, with songs like "Softly": [Excerpt, The Smoothies, "Softly"] When the folk boom started, Phillips realised that this was music that he could do easily, because the level of musicianship among the pop-folk musicians was so much lower than in the jazz world. The Smoothies made some recordings in the style of the Kingston Trio, like "Ride Ride Ride": [Excerpt: The Smoothies, "Ride Ride Ride"] Then when the Smoothies split, Phillips and McKenzie formed a trio with a banjo player, Dick Weissman, who they met through Izzy Young's Folklore Centre in Greenwich Village after Phillips asked Young to name some musicians who could make a folk record with him. Weissman was often considered the best banjo player on the scene, and was a friend of Pete Seeger's, to whom Seeger sometimes turned for banjo tips. The trio, who called themselves the Journeymen, quickly established themselves on the folk scene. Weissman later said "we had this interesting balance. John had all of this charisma -- they didn't know about the writing thing yet -- John had the personality, Scott had the voice, and I could play. If you think about it, all of those bands like the Kingston Trio, the Brothers Four, nobody could really *sing* and nobody could really *play*, relatively speaking." This is the take that most people seemed to have about John Phillips, in any band he was ever in. Nobody thought he was a particularly good singer or instrumentalist -- he could sing on key and play adequate rhythm guitar, but nobody would actually pay money to listen to him do those things. Mark Volman of the Turtles, for example, said of him "John wasn't the kind of guy who was going to be able to go up on stage and sing his songs as a singer-songwriter. He had to put himself in the context of a group." But he was charismatic, he had presence, and he also had a great musical mind. He would surround himself with the best players and best singers he could, and then he would organise and arrange them in ways that made the most of their talents. He would work out the arrangements, in a manner that was far more professional than the quick head arrangements that other folk groups used, and he instigated a level of professionalism in his groups that was not at all common on the scene. Phillips' friend Jim Mason talked about the first time he saw the Journeymen -- "They were warming up backstage, and John had all of them doing vocal exercises; one thing in particular that's pretty famous called 'Seiber Syllables' -- it's a series of vocal exercises where you enunciate different vowel and consonant sounds. It had the effect of clearing your head, and it's something that really good operetta singers do." The group were soon signed by Frank Werber, the manager of the Kingston Trio, who signed them as an insurance policy. Dave Guard, the Kingston Trio's banjo player, was increasingly having trouble with the other members, and Werber knew it was only a matter of time before he left the group. Werber wanted the Journeymen as a sort of farm team -- he had the idea that when Guard left, Phillips would join the Kingston Trio in his place as the third singer. Weissman would become the Trio's accompanist on banjo, and Scott McKenzie, who everyone agreed had a remarkable voice, would be spun off as a solo artist. But until that happened, they might as well make records by themselves. The Journeymen signed to MGM records, but were dropped before they recorded anything. They instead signed to Capitol, for whom they recorded their first album: [Excerpt: The Journeymen, "500 Miles"] After recording that album, the Journeymen moved out to California, with Phillips' wife and children. But soon Phillips' marriage was to collapse, as he met and fell in love with Michelle Gilliam. Gilliam was nine years younger than him -- he was twenty-six and she was seventeen -- and she had the kind of appearance which meant that in every interview with an older heterosexual man who knew her, that man will spend half the interview talking about how attractive he found her. Phillips soon left his wife and children, but before he did, the group had a turntable hit with "River Come Down", the B-side to "500 Miles": [Excerpt: The Journeymen, "River Come Down"] Around the same time, Dave Guard *did* leave the Kingston Trio, but the plan to split the Journeymen never happened. Instead Phillips' friend John Stewart replaced Guard -- and this soon became a new source of income for Phillips. Both Phillips and Stewart were aspiring songwriters, and they collaborated together on several songs for the Trio, including "Chilly Winds": [Excerpt: The Kingston Trio, "Chilly Winds"] Phillips became particularly good at writing songs that sounded like they could be old traditional folk songs, sometimes taking odd lines from older songs to jump-start new ones, as in "Oh Miss Mary", which he and Stewart wrote after hearing someone sing the first line of a song she couldn't remember the rest of: [Excerpt: The Kingston Trio, "Oh Miss Mary"] Phillips and Stewart became so close that Phillips actually suggested to Stewart that he quit the Kingston Trio and replace Dick Weissman in the Journeymen. Stewart did quit the Trio -- but then the next day Phillips suggested that maybe it was a bad idea and he should stay where he was. Stewart went back to the Trio, claimed he had only pretended to quit because he wanted a pay-rise, and got his raise, so everyone ended up happy. The Journeymen moved back to New York with Michelle in place of Phillips' first wife (and Michelle's sister Russell also coming along, as she was dating Scott McKenzie) and on New Year's Eve 1962 John and Michelle married -- so from this point on I will refer to them by their first names, because they both had the surname Phillips. The group continued having success through 1963, including making appearances on "Hootenanny": [Excerpt: The Journeymen, "Stack O'Lee (live on Hootenanny)"] By the time of the Journeymen's third album, though, John and Scott McKenzie were on bad terms. Weissman said "They had been the closest of friends and now they were the worst of enemies. They talked through me like I was a medium. It got to the point where we'd be standing in the dressing room and John would say to me 'Tell Scott that his right sock doesn't match his left sock...' Things like that, when they were standing five feet away from each other." Eventually, the group split up. Weissman was always going to be able to find employment given his banjo ability, and he was about to get married and didn't need the hassle of dealing with the other two. McKenzie was planning on a solo career -- everyone was agreed that he had the vocal ability. But John was another matter. He needed to be in a group. And not only that, the Journeymen had bookings they needed to complete. He quickly pulled together a group he called the New Journeymen. The core of the lineup was himself, Michelle on vocals, and banjo player Marshall Brickman. Brickman had previously been a member of a folk group called the Tarriers, who had had a revolving lineup, and had played on most of their early-sixties recordings: [Excerpt: The Tarriers, "Quinto (My Little Pony)"] We've met the Tarriers before in the podcast -- they had been formed by Erik Darling, who later replaced Pete Seeger in the Weavers after Seeger's socialist principles wouldn't let him do advertising, and Alan Arkin, later to go on to be a film star, and had had hits with "Cindy, O Cindy", with lead vocals from Vince Martin, who would later go on to be a major performer in the Greenwich Village scene, and with "The Banana Boat Song". By the time Brickman had joined, though, Darling, Arkin, and Martin had all left the group to go on to bigger things, and while he played with them for several years, it was after their commercial peak. Brickman would, though, also go on to a surprising amount of success, but as a writer rather than a musician -- he had a successful collaboration with Woody Allen in the 1970s, co-writing four of Allen's most highly regarded films -- Sleeper, Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Manhattan Murder Mystery -- and with another collaborator he later co-wrote the books for the stage musicals Jersey Boys and The Addams Family. Both John and Michelle were decent singers, and both have their admirers as vocalists -- P.F. Sloan always said that Michelle was the best singer in the group they eventually formed, and that it was her voice that gave the group its sound -- but for the most part they were not considered as particularly astonishing lead vocalists. Certainly, neither had a voice that stood out the way that Scott McKenzie's had. They needed a strong lead singer, and they found one in Denny Doherty. Now, we covered Denny Doherty's early career in the episode on the Lovin' Spoonful, because he was intimately involved in the formation of that group, so I won't go into too much detail here, but I'll give a very abbreviated version of what I said there. Doherty was a Canadian performer who had been a member of the Halifax Three with Zal Yanovsky: [Excerpt: The Halifax Three, "When I First Came to This Land"] After the Halifax Three had split up, Doherty and Yanovsky had performed as a duo for a while, before joining up with Cass Elliot and her husband Jim Hendricks, who both had previously been in the Big Three with Tim Rose: [Excerpt: Cass Elliot and the Big 3, "The Banjo Song"] Elliot, Hendricks, Yanovsky, and Doherty had formed The Mugwumps, sometimes joined by John Sebastian, and had tried to go in more of a rock direction after seeing the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. They recorded one album together before splitting up: [Excerpt: The Mugwumps, "Searchin'"] Part of the reason they split up was that interpersonal relationships within the group were put under some strain -- Elliot and Hendricks split up, though they would remain friends and remain married for several years even though they were living apart, and Elliot had an unrequited crush on Doherty. But since they'd split up, and Yanovsky and Sebastian had gone off to form the Lovin' Spoonful, that meant that Doherty was free, and he was regarded as possibly the best male lead vocalist on the circuit, so the group snapped him up. The only problem was that the Journeymen still had gigs booked that needed to be played, one of them was in just three days, and Doherty didn't know the repertoire. This was a problem with an easy solution for people in their twenties though -- they took a huge amount of amphetamines, and stayed awake for three days straight rehearsing. They made the gig, and Doherty was now the lead singer of the New Journeymen: [Excerpt: The New Journeymen, "The Last Thing on My Mind"] But the New Journeymen didn't last in that form for very long, because even before joining the group, Denny Doherty had been going in a more folk-rock direction with the Mugwumps. At the time, John Phillips thought rock and roll was kids' music, and he was far more interested in folk and jazz, but he was also very interested in making money, and he soon decided it was an idea to start listening to the Beatles. There's some dispute as to who first played the Beatles for John in early 1965 -- some claim it was Doherty, others claim it was Cass Elliot, but everyone agrees it was after Denny Doherty had introduced Phillips to something else -- he brought round some LSD for John and Michelle, and Michelle's sister Rusty, to try. And then he told them he'd invited round a friend. Michelle Phillips later remembered, "I remember saying to the guys "I don't know about you guys, but this drug does nothing for me." At that point there was a knock on the door, and as I opened the door and saw Cass, the acid hit me *over the head*. I saw her standing there in a pleated skirt, a pink Angora sweater with great big eyelashes on and her hair in a flip. And all of a sudden I thought 'This is really *quite* a drug!' It was an image I will have securely fixed in my brain for the rest of my life. I said 'Hi, I'm Michelle. We just took some LSD-25, do you wanna join us?' And she said 'Sure...'" Rusty Gilliam's description matches this -- "It was mind-boggling. She had on a white pleated skirt, false eyelashes. These were the kind of eyelashes that when you put them on you were supposed to trim them to an appropriate length, which she didn't, and when she blinked she looked like a cow, or those dolls you get when you're little and the eyes open and close. And we're on acid. Oh my God! It was a sight! And everything she was wearing were things that you weren't supposed to be wearing if you were heavy -- white pleated skirt, mohair sweater. You know, until she became famous, she suffered so much, and was poked fun at." This gets to an important point about Elliot, and one which sadly affected everything about her life. Elliot was *very* fat -- I've seen her weight listed at about three hundred pounds, and she was only five foot five tall -- and she also didn't have the kind of face that gets thought of as conventionally attractive. Her appearance would be cruelly mocked by pretty much everyone for the rest of her life, in ways that it's genuinely hurtful to read about, and which I will avoid discussing in detail in order to avoid hurting fat listeners. But the two *other* things that defined Elliot in the minds of those who knew her were her voice -- every single person who knew her talks about what a wonderful singer she was -- and her personality. I've read a lot of things about Cass Elliot, and I have never read a single negative word about her as a person, but have read many people going into raptures about what a charming, loving, friendly, understanding person she was. Michelle later said of her "From the time I left Los Angeles, I hadn't had a friend, a buddy. I was married, and John and I did not hang out with women, we just hung out with men, and especially not with women my age. John was nine years older than I was. And here was a fun-loving, intelligent woman. She captivated me. I was as close to in love with Cass as I could be to any woman in my life at that point. She also represented something to me: freedom. Everything she did was because she wanted to do it. She was completely independent and I admired her and was in awe of her. And later on, Cass would be the one to tell me not to let John run my life. And John hated her for that." Either Elliot had brought round Meet The Beatles, the Beatles' first Capitol album, for everyone to listen to, or Denny Doherty already had it, but either way Elliot and Doherty were by this time already Beatles fans. Michelle, being younger than the rest and not part of the folk scene until she met John, was much more interested in rock and roll than any of them, but because she'd been married to John for a couple of years and been part of his musical world she hadn't really encountered the Beatles music, though she had a vague memory that she might have heard a track or two on the radio. John was hesitant -- he didn't want to listen to any rock and roll, but eventually he was persuaded, and the record was put on while he was on his first acid trip: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I Want to Hold Your Hand"] Within a month, John Phillips had written thirty songs that he thought of as inspired by the Beatles. The New Journeymen were going to go rock and roll. By this time Marshall Brickman was out of the band, and instead John, Michelle, and Denny recruited a new lead guitarist, Eric Hord. Denny started playing bass, with John on rhythm guitar, and a violinist friend of theirs, Peter Pilafian, knew a bit of drums and took on that role. The new lineup of the group used the Journeymen's credit card, which hadn't been stopped even though the Journeymen were no more, to go down to St. Thomas in the Caribbean, along with Michelle's sister, John's daughter Mackenzie (from whose name Scott McKenzie had taken his stage name, as he was born Philip Blondheim), a pet dog, and sundry band members' girlfriends. They stayed there for several months, living in tents on the beach, taking acid, and rehearsing. While they were there, Michelle and Denny started an affair which would have important ramifications for the group later. They got a gig playing at a club called Duffy's, whose address was on Creeque Alley, and soon after they started playing there Cass Elliot travelled down as well -- she was in love with Denny, and wanted to be around him. She wasn't in the group, but she got a job working at Duffy's as a waitress, and she would often sing harmony with the group while waiting at tables. Depending on who was telling the story, either she didn't want to be in the group because she didn't want her appearance to be compared to Michelle's, or John wouldn't *let* her be in the group because she was so fat. Later a story would be made up to cover for this, saying that she hadn't been in the group at first because she couldn't sing the highest notes that were needed, until she got hit on the head with a metal pipe and discovered that it had increased her range by three notes, but that seems to be a lie. One of the songs the New Journeymen were performing at this time was "Mr. Tambourine Man". They'd heard that their old friend Roger McGuinn had recorded it with his new band, but they hadn't yet heard his version, and they'd come up with their own arrangement: [Excerpt: The New Journeymen, "Mr. Tambourine Man"] Denny later said "We were doing three-part harmony on 'Mr Tambourine Man', but a lot slower... like a polka or something! And I tell John, 'No John, we gotta slow it down and give it a backbeat.' Finally we get the Byrds 45 down here, and we put it on and turn it up to ten, and John says 'Oh, like that?' Well, as you can tell, it had already been done. So John goes 'Oh, ah... that's it...' a light went on. So we started doing Beatles stuff. We dropped 'Mr Tambourine Man' after hearing the Byrds version, because there was no point." Eventually they had to leave the island -- they had completely run out of money, and were down to fifty dollars. The credit card had been cut up, and the governor of the island had a personal vendetta against them because they gave his son acid, and they were likely to get arrested if they didn't leave the island. Elliot and her then-partner had round-trip tickets, so they just left, but the rest of them were in trouble. By this point they were unwashed, they were homeless, and they'd spent their last money on stage costumes. They got to the airport, and John Phillips tried to write a cheque for eight air fares back to the mainland, which the person at the check-in desk just laughed at. So they took their last fifty dollars and went to a casino. There Michelle played craps, and she rolled seventeen straight passes, something which should be statistically impossible. She turned their fifty dollars into six thousand dollars, which they scooped up, took to the airport, and paid for their flights out in cash. The New Journeymen arrived back in New York, but quickly decided that they were going to try their luck in California. They rented a car, using Scott McKenzie's credit card, and drove out to LA. There they met up with Hoyt Axton, who you may remember as the son of Mae Axton, the writer of "Heartbreak Hotel", and as the performer who had inspired Michael Nesmith to go into folk music: [Excerpt: Hoyt Axton, "Greenback Dollar"] Axton knew the group, and fed them and put them up for a night, but they needed somewhere else to stay. They went to stay with one of Michelle's friends, but after one night their rented car was stolen, with all their possessions in it. They needed somewhere else to stay, so they went to ask Jim Hendricks if they could crash at his place -- and they were surprised to find that Cass Elliot was there already. Hendricks had another partner -- though he and Elliot wouldn't have their marriage annulled until 1968 and were still technically married -- but he'd happily invited her to stay with them. And now all her friends had turned up, he invited them to stay as well, taking apart the beds in his one-bedroom apartment so he could put down a load of mattresses in the space for everyone to sleep on. The next part becomes difficult, because pretty much everyone in the LA music scene of the sixties was a liar who liked to embellish their own roles in things, so it's quite difficult to unpick what actually happened. What seems to have happened though is that first this new rock-oriented version of the New Journeymen went to see Frank Werber, on the recommendation of John Stewart. Werber was the manager of the Kingston Trio, and had also managed the Journeymen. He, however, was not interested -- not because he didn't think they had talent, but because he had experience of working with John Phillips previously. When Phillips came into his office Werber picked up a tape that he'd been given of the group, and said "I have not had a chance to listen to this tape. I believe that you are a most talented individual, and that's why we took you on in the first place. But I also believe that you're also a drag to work with. A pain in the ass. So I'll tell you what, before whatever you have on here sways me, I'm gonna give it back to you and say that we're not interested." Meanwhile -- and this part of the story comes from Kim Fowley, who was never one to let the truth get in the way of him taking claim for everything, but parts of it at least are corroborated by other people -- Cass Elliot had called Fowley, and told him that her friends' new group sounded pretty good and he should sign them. Fowley was at that time working as a talent scout for a label, but according to him the label wouldn't give the group the money they wanted. So instead, Fowley got in touch with Nik Venet, who had just produced the Leaves' hit version of "Hey Joe" on Mira Records: [Excerpt: The Leaves, "Hey Joe"] Fowley suggested to Venet that Venet should sign the group to Mira Records, and Fowley would sign them to a publishing contract, and they could both get rich. The trio went to audition for Venet, and Elliot drove them over -- and Venet thought the group had a great look as a quartet. He wanted to sign them to a record contract, but only if Elliot was in the group as well. They agreed, he gave them a one hundred and fifty dollar advance, and told them to come back the next day to see his boss at Mira. But Barry McGuire was also hanging round with Elliot and Hendricks, and decided that he wanted to have Lou Adler hear the four of them. He thought they might be useful both as backing vocalists on his second album and as a source of new songs. He got them to go and see Lou Adler, and according to McGuire Phillips didn't want Elliot to go with them, but as Elliot was the one who was friends with McGuire, Phillips worried that they'd lose the chance with Adler if she didn't. Adler was amazed, and decided to sign the group right then and there -- both Bones Howe and P.F. Sloan claimed to have been there when the group auditioned for him and have said "if you won't sign them, I will", though exactly what Sloan would have signed them to I'm not sure. Adler paid them three thousand dollars in cash and told them not to bother with Nik Venet, so they just didn't turn up for the Mira Records audition the next day. Instead, they went into the studio with McGuire and cut backing vocals on about half of his new album: [Excerpt: Barry McGuire with the Mamas and the Papas, "Hide Your Love Away"] While the group were excellent vocalists, there were two main reasons that Adler wanted to sign them. The first was that he found Michelle Phillips extremely attractive, and the second is a song that John and Michelle had written which he thought might be very suitable for McGuire's album. Most people who knew John Phillips think of "California Dreamin'" as a solo composition, and he would later claim that he gave Michelle fifty percent just for transcribing his lyric, saying he got inspired in the middle of the night, woke her up, and got her to write the song down as he came up with it. But Michelle, who is a credited co-writer on the song, has been very insistent that she wrote the lyrics to the second verse, and that it's about her own real experiences, saying that she would often go into churches and light candles even though she was "at best an agnostic, and possibly an atheist" in her words, and this would annoy John, who had also been raised Catholic, but who had become aggressively opposed to expressions of religion, rather than still having nostalgia for the aesthetics of the church as Michelle did. They were out walking on a particularly cold winter's day in 1963, and Michelle wanted to go into St Patrick's Cathedral and John very much did not want to. A couple of nights later, John woke her up, having written the first verse of the song, starting "All the leaves are brown and the sky is grey/I went for a walk on a winter's day", and insisting she collaborate with him. She liked the song, and came up with the lines "Stopped into a church, I passed along the way/I got down on my knees and I pretend to pray/The preacher likes the cold, he knows I'm going to stay", which John would later apparently dislike, but which stayed in the song. Most sources I've seen for the recording of "California Dreamin'" say that the lineup of musicians was the standard set of players who had played on McGuire's other records, with the addition of John Phillips on twelve-string guitar -- P.F. Sloan on guitar and harmonica, Joe Osborn on bass, Larry Knechtel on keyboards, and Hal Blaine on drums, but for some reason Stephen McParland's book on Sloan has Bones Howe down as playing drums on the track while engineering -- a detail so weird, and from such a respectable researcher, that I have to wonder if it might be true. In his autobiography, Sloan claims to have rewritten the chord sequence to "California Dreamin'". He says "Barry Mann had unintentionally showed me a suspended chord back at Screen Gems. I was so impressed by this beautiful, simple chord that I called Brian Wilson and played it for him over the phone. The next thing I knew, Brian had written ‘Don't Worry Baby,' which had within it a number suspended chords. And then the chord heard 'round the world, two months later, was the opening suspended chord of ‘A Hard Day's Night.' I used these chords throughout ‘California Dreamin',' and more specifically as a bridge to get back and forth from the verse to the chorus." Now, nobody else corroborates this story, and both Brian Wilson and John Phillips had the kind of background in modern harmony that means they would have been very aware of suspended chords before either ever encountered Sloan, but I thought I should mention it. Rather more plausible is Sloan's other claim, that he came up with the intro to the song. According to Sloan, he was inspired by "Walk Don't Run" by the Ventures: [Excerpt: The Ventures, "Walk Don't Run"] And you can easily see how this: [plays "Walk Don't Run"] Can lead to this: [plays "California Dreamin'"] And I'm fairly certain that if that was the inspiration, it was Sloan who was the one who thought it up. John Phillips had been paying no attention to the world of surf music when "Walk Don't Run" had been a hit -- that had been at the point when he was very firmly in the folk world, while Sloan of course had been recording "Tell 'Em I'm Surfin'", and it had been his job to know surf music intimately. So Sloan's intro became the start of what was intended to be Barry McGuire's next single: [Excerpt: Barry McGuire, "California Dreamin'"] Sloan also provided the harmonica solo on the track: [Excerpt: Barry McGuire, "California Dreamin'"] The Mamas and the Papas -- the new name that was now given to the former New Journeymen, now they were a quartet -- were also signed to Dunhill as an act on their own, and recorded their own first single, "Go Where You Wanna Go", a song apparently written by John about Michelle, in late 1963, after she had briefly left him to have an affair with Russ Titelman, the record producer and songwriter, before coming back to him: [Excerpt: The Mamas and the Papas, "Go Where You Wanna Go"] But while that was put out, they quickly decided to scrap it and go with another song. The "Go Where You Wanna Go" single was pulled after only selling a handful of copies, though its commercial potential was later proved when in 1967 a new vocal group, the 5th Dimension, released a soundalike version as their second single. The track was produced by Lou Adler's client Johnny Rivers, and used the exact same musicians as the Mamas and the Papas version, with the exception of Phillips. It became their first hit, reaching number sixteen on the charts: [Excerpt: The 5th Dimension, "Go Where You Wanna Go"] The reason the Mamas and the Papas version of "Go Where You Wanna Go" was pulled was because everyone became convinced that their first single should instead be their own version of "California Dreamin'". This is the exact same track as McGuire's track, with just two changes. The first is that McGuire's lead vocal was replaced with Denny Doherty: [Excerpt: The Mamas and the Papas, "California Dreamin'"] Though if you listen to the stereo mix of the song and isolate the left channel, you can hear McGuire singing the lead on the first line, and occasional leakage from him elsewhere on the backing vocal track: [Excerpt: The Mamas and the Papas, "California Dreamin'"] The other change made was to replace Sloan's harmonica solo with an alto flute solo by Bud Shank, a jazz musician who we heard about in the episode on "Light My Fire", when he collaborated with Ravi Shankar on "Improvisations on the Theme From Pather Panchali": [Excerpt: Ravi Shankar, "Improvisation on the Theme From Pather Panchali"] Shank was working on another session in Western Studios, where they were recording the Mamas and Papas track, and Bones Howe approached him while he was packing his instrument and asked if he'd be interested in doing another session. Shank agreed, though the track caused problems for him. According to Shank "What had happened was that whe

The Four Seasons, the Four Aces, the Four Tops, the Four Freshmen, the Four Lads...well today on "The Cowsill's Podcast" we are visiting with Bruce Belland of THE FOUR PREPS!!!! In terms of audience reaction to the Four Preps think Beatles and Frank Sinatra. They were mobbed after their concerts. Do you remember watching Ozzie and Harriett and waiting for Ricky Nelson to sing the song at the end of the episode? Remember the band that always stood there with Ricky? That's the Four Preps plus James Burton. That's Bruce Belland to Ricky's right. The Four Preps were Ricky's college buddies on the TV show. Imagine what is must have been like when your band is riding high and the Beatles arrive on the scene and change the whole landscape and there's no room for you anymore. We were new to the story of the Four Preps since they were a little before our time but it just blew us away so we wanted to have Bruce on to share his story with everybody and he was gracious to accept the invitation. You have to read his biography at brucebelland.com and you will be AMAZED! Remember "26 Miles (Santa Catalina)"? It sold 10 million records! That's The Four Preps!! Hope you enjoy the episode.Song of the Week: A Letter To The Beatles by The Four Preps

Episode 141 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “River Deep Mountain High'”, and at the career of Ike and Tina Turner.  Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Also, this episode was recorded before the sad death of the great Ronnie Spector, whose records are featured a couple of times in this episode, which is partly about her abusive ex-husband. Her life paralleled Tina Turner's quite closely, and if you haven't heard the episode I did about her last year, you can find it at https://500songs.com/podcast/episode-110-be-my-baby-by-the-ronettes/. I wish I'd had the opportunity to fit a tribute into this episode too. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Wild Thing" by the Troggs. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources As usual, all the songs excerpted in the podcast can be heard in full at Mixcloud. Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era by Ken Emerson is a good overview of the Brill Building scene, and I referred to it for the material about Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich. I've referred to two biographies of Phil Spector in this episode, Phil Spector: Out of His Head by Richard Williams and He's a Rebel by Mark Ribkowsky. Tina Turner has written two autobiographies. I Tina is now out of print but is slightly more interesting, as it contains interview material with other people in her life. My Love Story is the more recent one and covers her whole life up to 2019. Ike Turner's autobiography Takin' Back My Name is a despicable, self-serving, work of self-justification, and I do not recommend anyone buy or read it. But I did use it for quotes in the episode so it goes on the list. Ike Turner: King of Rhythm by John Collis is more even-handed, and contains a useful discography. That Kat Sure Could Play! is a four-CD compilation of Ike Turner's work up to 1957. The TAMI and Big TNT shows are available on a Blu-Ray containing both performances. There are many compilations available with some of the hits Spector produced, but I recommend getting Back to Mono, a four-CD overview of his career containing all the major singles put out by Philles. There are sadly no good compilations of Ike and Tina Turner's career, as they recorded for multiple labels, and would regularly rerecord the hits in new versions for each new label, so any compilation you find will have the actual hit version of one or two tracks, plus a bunch of shoddy remakes. However, the hit version of "River Deep, Mountain High" is on the album of the same name, which is a worthwhile album to get,. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today's episode is unfortunately another one of those which will require a content warning, because we're going to be talking about Ike and Tina Turner. For those of you who don't know, Ike Turner was possibly the most famously abusive spouse in the whole history of music, and it is literally impossible to talk about the duo's career without talking about that abuse. I am going to try not to go into too many of the details -- if nothing else, the details are very readily available for those who want to seek them out, not least in Tina's two autobiographies, so there's no sense in retraumatising people who've experienced domestic abuse by going over them needlessly -- but it would be dishonest to try to tell the story without talking about it at all. This is not going to be an episode *about* Ike Turner's brutal treatment of Tina Turner -- it's an episode about the record, and about music, and about their musical career -- but the environment in which "River Deep, Mountain High" was created was so full of toxic, abusive, destructive men that Ike Turner may only be the third-worst person credited on the record, and so that abuse will come up. If discussion of domestic abuse, gun violence, cocaine addiction, and suicide attempts are likely to cause you problems, you might want to read the transcript rather than listen to the podcast. That said, let's get on with the story. One of the problems I'm hitting at this point of the narrative is that starting with "I Fought the Law" we've hit a run of incredibly intertangled stories  The three most recent episodes, this one, and nine of the next twelve, all really make up one big narrative about what happened when folk-rock and psychedelia hit the Hollywood scene and the Sunset Strip nightclubs started providing the raw material for the entertainment industry to turn into pop culture. We're going to be focusing on a small number of individuals, and that causes problems when trying to tell a linear narrative, because people don't live their lives sequentially -- it's not the case that everything happened to Phil Spector, and *then* everything happened to Cass Elliot, and *then* everything happened to Brian Wilson. All these people were living their lives and interacting and influencing each other, and so sometimes we'll have to mention something that will be dealt with in a future episode. So I'll say here and now that we *will* be doing an episode on the Lovin' Spoonful in two weeks. So when I say now that in late 1965 the Lovin' Spoonful were one of the biggest bands around, and possibly the hottest band in the country, you'll have to take that on trust. But they were, and in late 1965 their hit "Do You Believe in Magic?" had made the top ten: [Excerpt: The Lovin' Spoonful, "Do You Believe in Magic?"] Phil Spector, as always, was trying to stay aware of the latest trends in music, and he was floundering somewhat. Since the Beatles had hit America in 1964, the hits had dried up -- he'd produced a few minor hit records in 1964, but the only hits he'd made in 1965 had been with the Righteous Brothers -- none of his other acts were charting. And then the Righteous Brothers left him, after only a year. In late 1965, he had no hit acts and no prospect of having any. There was only one thing to do -- he needed to start making his own folk-rock records. And the Lovin' Spoonful gave him an idea how to do that. Their records were identifiably coming from the same kind of place as people like the Byrds or the Mamas and the Papas, but they were pop songs, not protest songs -- the Lovin' Spoonful weren't doing Dylan covers or anything intellectual, but joyous pop confections of a kind that anyone could relate to. Spector knew how to make pop records like that. But to do that, he needed a band. Even though he had been annoyed at the way that people had paid more attention to the Righteous Brothers, as white men, than they had to the other vocalists he'd made hit records with (who, as Black women, had been regarded by a sexist and racist public as interchangeable puppets being controlled by a Svengali rather than as artists in their own right), he knew he was going to have to work with a group of white male vocalist-instrumentalists if he wanted to have his own Lovin' Spoonful. And the group he chose was a group from Greenwich Village called MFQ. MFQ had originally named themselves the Modern Folk Quartet, as a parallel to the much better-known Modern Jazz Quartet, and consisted of Cyrus Faryar, Henry Diltz, Jerry Yester, and Chip Douglas, all of whom were multi-instrumentalists who would switch between guitar, banjo, mandolin, and bass depending on the song. They had combined Kingston Trio style clean-cut folk with Four Freshmen style modern harmonies -- Yester, who was a veteran of the New Christy Minstrels, said of the group's vocals that "the only vocals that competed with us back then was Curt Boettcher's group", and  they had been taken under the wing of manager Herb Cohen, who had got them a record deal with Warner Brothers. They recorded two albums of folk songs, the first of which was produced by Jim Dickson, the Byrds' co-manager: [Excerpt: The Modern Folk Quartet, "Sassafras"] But after their second album, they had decided to go along with the trends and switch to folk-rock. They'd started playing with electric instruments, and after a few shows where John Sebastian, the lead singer of the Lovin' Spoonful, had sat in with them on drums, they'd got themselves a full-time drummer, "Fast" Eddie Hoh, and renamed themselves the Modern Folk Quintet, but they always shortened that to just MFQ. Spector was convinced that this group could be another Lovin' Spoonful if they had the right song, and MFQ in turn were eager to become something more than an unsuccessful folk group. Spector had the group rehearsing in his house for weeks at a stretch before taking them into the studio. The song that Spector chose to have the group record was written by a young songwriter he was working with named Harry Nilsson. Nilsson was as yet a complete unknown, who had not written a hit and was still working a day job, but he had a talent for melody, and he also had a unique songwriting sensibility combining humour and heartbreak. For example, he'd written a song that Spector had recorded with the Ronettes, "Here I Sit", which had been inspired by the famous graffito from public toilet walls -- "Here I sit, broken-hearted/Paid a dime and only farted": [Excerpt: The Ronettes, "Here I Sit"] That ability to take taboo bodily functions and turn them into innocent-sounding love lyrics is also at play in the song that Spector chose to have the MFQ record. "This Could be the Night" was written by Nilsson from the perspective of someone who is hoping to lose his virginity -- he feels like he's sitting on dynamite, and he's going to "give her some", but it still sounds innocent enough to get past the radio censors of the mid-sixties: [Excerpt: Harry Nilsson, "This Could Be the Night (demo)"] Spector took that song, and recorded a version of it which found the perfect balance between Spector's own wall of sound and the Lovin' Spoonful's "Good Time Music" sound: [Excerpt: MFQ, "This Could be the Night"] Brian Wilson was, according to many people, in the studio while that was being recorded, and for decades it would remain a favourite song of Wilson's -- he recorded a solo version of it in the 1990s, and when he started touring solo for the first time in 1998 he included the song in his earliest live performances. He also tried to record it with his wife's group, American Spring, in the early 1970s, but was unable to, because while he could remember almost all of the song, he couldn't get hold of the lyrics. And the reason he couldn't get hold of the lyrics is that the record itself went unreleased, because Phil Spector had found a new performer he was focusing on instead. It happened during the filming of the Big TNT Show, a sequel to the TAMI Show, released by American International Pictures, for which "This Could Be the Night" was eventually used as a theme song. The MFQ were actually performers at the Big TNT Show, which Spector was musical director and associate producer of, but their performances were cut out of the finished film, leaving just their record being played over the credits. The Big TNT Show generally gets less respect than the TAMI Show, but it's a rather remarkable document of the American music scene at the very end of 1965, and it's far more diverse than the TAMI show. It opens with, of all people, David McCallum -- the actor who played Ilya Kuryakin on The Man From UNCLE -- conducting a band of session musicians playing an instrumental version of "Satisfaction": [Excerpt: David McCallum, "Satisfaction"] And then, in front of an audience which included Ron and Russel Mael, later of Sparks, and Frank Zappa, who is very clearly visible in audience shots, came performances of every then-current form of popular music. Ray Charles, Petula Clark, Bo Diddley, the Byrds, the Lovin' Spoonful, Roger Miller, the Ronettes, and Donovan all did multiple songs, though the oddest contribution was from Joan Baez, who as well as doing some of her normal folk repertoire also performed "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'" with Spector on piano: [Excerpt: Joan Baez and Phil Spector, "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'"] But the headline act on the eventual finished film was the least-known act on the bill, a duo who had not had a top forty hit for four years at this point, and who were only on the bill as a last-minute fill-in for an act who dropped out, but who were a sensational live act. So sensational that when Phil Spector saw them, he knew he needed to sign them -- or at least he needed to sign one of them: [Excerpt: Ike and Tina Turner with the Ikettes, "Please, Please, Please"] Because Ike and Tina Turner's performance at the Big TNT Show was, if anything, even more impressive than James Brown's performance on the TAMI Show the previous year. The last we saw of Ike Turner was way back in episode eleven. If you don't remember that, from more than three years ago, at the time Turner was the leader of a small band called the Kings of Rhythm. They'd been told by their friend B.B. King that if you wanted to make a record, the person you go to was Sam Phillips at Memphis Recording Services, and they'd recorded "Rocket '88", often cited as the first ever rock and roll record, under the name of their sax player and vocalist Jackie Brenston: [Excerpt: Jackie Brenston and the Delta Cats, "Rocket '88"] We looked at some of the repercussions from that recording throughout the first year and a half or so of the podcast, but we didn't look any more at the career of Ike Turner himself. While "Rocket '88" was a minor hit, the group hadn't followed it up, and Brenston had left to go solo. For a while Ike wasn't really very successful at all -- though he was still performing around Memphis, and a young man named Elvis Presley was taking notes at some of the shows. But things started to change for Ike when he once again turned up at Sam Phillips' studio -- this time because B.B. King was recording there. At the time, Sun Records had still not started as its own label, and Phillips' studio was being used for records made by all sorts of independent blues labels, including Modern Records, and Joe Bihari was producing a session for B.B. King, who had signed to Modern. The piano player on the session also had a connection to "Rocket '88" -- when Jackie Brenston had quit Ike's band to go solo, he'd put together a new band to tour as the Delta Cats, and Phineas Newborn Jr had ended up playing Turner's piano part on stage, before Brenston's career collapsed and Newborn became King's pianist. But Phineas Newborn was a very technical, dry, jazz pianist -- a wonderful player, but someone who was best suited to playing more cerebral material, as his own recordings as a bandleader from a few years later show: [Excerpt: Phineas Newborn Jr, "Barbados"] Bihari wasn't happy with what Newborn was playing, and the group took a break from recording to get something to eat and try to figure out the problem. While they were busy, Turner went over to the piano and started playing. Bihari said that that was exactly what they wanted, and Turner took over playing the part. In his autobiography, Turner variously remembers the song King was recording there as "You Know I Love You" and "Three O'Clock Blues", neither of which, as far as I can tell, were actually recorded at Phillips' studio, and both of which seem to have been recorded later -- it's difficult to say for sure because there were very few decent records kept of these things at the time. But we do know that Turner played on a lot of King's records in the early fifties, including on "Three O'Clock Blues", King's first big hit: [Excerpt: B.B. King, "Three O'Clock Blues"] For the next while, Turner was on salary at Modern Records, playing piano on sessions, acting as a talent scout, and also apparently writing many of the songs that Modern's artists would record, though those songs were all copyrighted under the name "Taub", a pseudonym for the Bihari brothers, as well as being a de facto arranger and producer for the company. He worked on many records made in and around Memphis, both for Modern Records and for other labels who drew from the same pool of artists and musicians. Records he played on and produced or arranged include several of Bobby "Blue" Bland's early records -- though Turner's claim in his autobiography that he played on Bland's version of "Stormy Monday" appears to be incorrect, as that wasn't recorded until a decade later. He did, though, play on Bland's “Drifting from Town to Town”, a rewrite of Charles Brown's “Driftin' Blues”, on which, as on many sessions run by Turner, the guitarist was Matt “Guitar” Murphy, who later found fame with the Blues Brothers: [Excerpt: Bobby "Blue" Bland with Ike Turner and his Orchestra, "Driftin' Blues"] Though I've also seen the piano part on that credited as being by Johnny Ace – there's often some confusion as to whether Turner or Ace played on a session, as they played with many of the same artists, but that one was later rereleased as by Bobby “Blue” Bland with Ike Turner and his Orchestra, so it's safe to say that Ike's on that one. He also played on several records by Howlin' Wolf, including "How Many More Years", recorded at Sam Phillips' studio: [Excerpt: Howlin' Wolf, "How Many More Years?"] Over the next few years he played with many artists we've covered already in the podcast, like Richard Berry and the Flairs, on whose recordings he played guitar rather than piano: [Excerpt: The Flairs, "Baby Wants"] He also played guitar on records by Elmore James: [Excerpt: Elmore James, "Please Find My Baby"] and played with Little Junior Parker, Little Milton, Johnny Ace, Roscoe Gordon, and many, many more. As well as making blues records, he also made R&B records in the style of Gene and Eunice with his then-wife Bonnie: [Excerpt: Bonnie and Ike Turner, "My Heart Belongs to You"] Bonnie was his fourth wife, all of them bigamous -- or at least, I *think* she was his fourth. I have seen two different lists Turner gave of his wives, both of them made up of entirely different people, though it doesn't help that many of them also went by nicknames. But Turner started getting married when he was fourteen, and as he would often put it "you gave a preacher two dollars, the papers cost three dollars, that was it. In those days Blacks didn't bother with divorces." (One thing you will see a lot with Turner, unfortunately, is his habit of taking his own personal misbehaviours and claiming they were either universal, or at least that they were universal among Black people, or among men. It's certainly true that some people in the Southeastern US had a more lackadaisical attitude towards remarrying without divorce at the time than we might expect, but it was in no way a Black thing specifically -- it was a people-like-Ike-Turner thing -- see for example the very similar behaviour of Jerry Lee Lewis. I'm trying, when I quote him, not to include too many of these generalisations, but I thought it important to include that one early on to show the kind of self-justification to which he was prone throughout his entire life.) It's largely because Bonnie played piano and was singing with his band that Turner switched to playing guitar, but there was another reason – while he disliked the attention he got on stage, he also didn't want a repeat of what had happened with Jackie Brenston, where Brenston as lead vocalist and frontman had claimed credit for what Ike thought of as his own record. Anyone who saw Ike Turner and his Kings of Rhythm was going to know that Ike Turner was the man who was making it all happen, and so he was going to play guitar up front rather than be on the piano in the background. So Turner took guitar lessons from Earl Hooker, one of the great blues guitarists of the period, who had played with Turner's piano inspiration Pinetop Perkins before recording solo tracks like "Sweet Angel": [Excerpt: Earl Hooker, "Sweet Angel"] Turner was always happier in the studio than performing live -- despite his astonishing ego, he was also a rather shy person who didn't like attention -- and he'd been happy working on salary for Modern and freelancing on occasion for other labels like Chess and Duke. But then the Biharis had brought him out to LA, where Modern Records was based, and as Joel Bihari put it "Ike did a great job for us, but he was a country boy. We brought him to L.A., and he just couldn't take city life. He only stayed a month, then left for East St. Louis to form his own band. He told me he was going back there to become a star." For once, Turner's memory of events lined up with what other people said about him. In his autobiography, he described what happened -- "Down in Mississippi, life is slow. Tomorrow, you are going to plough this field. The next day, you going to cut down these trees. You stop and you go on about your business. Next day, you start back on sawing trees or whatever you doing. Here I am in California, and this chick, this receptionist, is saying "Hold on, Mr Bihari, line 2... hold line 3... Hey Joe, Mr Something or other on the phone for you." I thought "What goddamn time does this stop?"" So Turner did head to East St. Louis -- which is a suburb of St. Louis proper, across the Mississippi river from it, and in Illinois rather than Missouri, and at the time a thriving industrial town in its own right, with over eighty thousand people living there. Hardly the laid-back country atmosphere that Turner was talking about, but still also far from LA both geographically and culturally. He put together a new lineup of the Kings of Rhythm, with a returning Jackie Brenston, who were soon recording for pretty much every label that was putting out blues and R&B tracks at that point, releasing records on RPM, Sue, Flair, Federal, and Modern as well as several smaller labels. usually with either Brenston or the group's drummer Billy Gayles singing lead: [Excerpt: Billy Gayles with Ike Turner's Kings of Rhythm, "Just One More Time"] None of these records was a success, but the Kings of Rhythm were becoming the most successful band in East St. Louis. In the mid-fifties the only group that was as popular in the greater St. Louis metro area was the Johnny Johnson trio -- which soon became the Chuck Berry trio, and went on to greater things, while the Kings of Rhythm remained on the club circuit. But Turner was also becoming notorious for his temper -- he got the nickname "Pistol-Whippin' Ike Turner" for the way he would attack people with his gun, He also though was successful enough that he built his own home studio, and that was where he recorded "Boxtop". a calypso song whose middle eight seems to have been nicked from "Why Do Fools Fall In Love?" and whose general feel owes more than a little to "Love is Strange": [Excerpt: Ike Turner, Carlson Oliver, and Little Ann, "Boxtop"] The female vocals on that track were by Turner's new backing vocalist, who at the time went by the stage name "Little Ann". Anna Mae Bullock had started going to see the Kings of Rhythm regularly when she was seventeen, because her sister was dating one of the members of the band, and she had become a fan almost immediately. She later described her first experience seeing the group: "The first time I saw Ike on stage he was at his very best, sharply dressed in a dark suit and tie. Ike wasn't conventionally handsome – actually, he wasn't handsome at all – and he certainly wasn't my type. Remember, I was a schoolgirl, all of seventeen, looking at a man. I was used to high school boys who were clean-cut, athletic, and dressed in denim, so Ike's processed hair, diamond ring, and skinny body – he was all edges and sharp cheekbones – looked old to me, even though he was only twenty-five. I'd never seen anyone that thin! I couldn't help thinking, God, he's ugly." Turner didn't find Bullock attractive either -- one of the few things both have always agreed on in all their public statements about their later relationship was that neither was ever particularly attracted to the other sexually -- and at first this had caused problems for Anna Mae. There was a spot in the show where Turner would invite a girl from the audience up on stage to sing, a different one every night, usually someone he'd decided he wanted to sleep with. Anna Mae desperately wanted to be one of the girls that would get up on stage, but Turner never picked her. But then one day she got her chance. Her sister's boyfriend was teasing her sister, trying to get her to sing in this spot, and passed her the microphone. Her sister didn't want to sing, so Anna Mae grabbed the mic instead, and started singing -- the song she sang was B.B. King's "You Know I Love You", the same song that Turner always remembered as being recorded at Sun studios, and on which Turner had played piano: [Excerpt: B.B. King, "You Know I Love You"] Turner suddenly took notice of Anna Mae. As he would later say, everyone *says* they can sing, but it turned out that Anna Mae could. He took her on as an occasional backing singer, not at first as a full member of the band, but as a sort of apprentice, who he would teach how to use her talents more commercially. Turner always said that during this period, he would get Little Richard to help teach Anna Mae how to sing in a more uncontrolled, exuberant, style like he did, and Richard has backed this up, though Anna Mae never said anything about this. We do know though that Richard was a huge fan of Turner's -- the intro to "Good Golly Miss Molly": [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Good Golly Miss Molly"] was taken almost exactly from the intro to "Rocket '88": [Excerpt: Jackie Brenston and the Delta Cats, "Rocket '88"] and Richard later wrote the introduction to Turner's autobiography. So it's possible -- but both men were inveterate exaggerators, and Anna Mae only joined Ike's band a few months before Richard's conversion and retirement from music, and during a point when he was a massive star, so it seems unlikely. Anna Mae started dating Raymond Hill, a saxophone player in the group, and became pregnant by him -- but then Hill broke his ankle, and used that as an excuse to move back to Clarksdale, Mississippi, to be with his family, abandoning his pregnant teenage girlfriend, and it seems to be around this point that Turner and Anna Mae became romantically and sexually involved. Certainly, one of Ike's girlfriends, Lorraine Taylor, seems to have believed they were involved while Anna Mae was pregnant, and indeed that Turner, rather than Hill, was the father. Taylor threatened Bullock with Turner's gun, before turning it on herself and attempting suicide, though luckily she survived. She gave birth to Turner's son, Ike Junior, a couple of months after Bullock gave birth to her own son, Craig. But even after they got involved, Anna Mae was still mostly just doing odd bits of backing vocals, like on "Boxtop", recorded in 1958, or on 1959's "That's All I Need", released on Sue Records: [Excerpt: Ike Turner's Kings of Rhythm, "That's All I Need"] And it seemed that would be all that Anna Mae Bullock would do, until Ike Turner lent Art Lassiter eighty dollars he didn't want to pay back. Lassiter was a singer who was often backed by his own vocal trio, the Artettes, patterned after Ray Charles' Raelettes. He had performed with Turner's band on a semi-regular basis, since 1955 when he had recorded "As Long as I Have You" with his vocal group the Trojans, backed by "Ike Turner and his Orchestra": [Excerpt: The Trojans, Ike Turner and His Orchestra, "As Long as I Have You"] He'd recorded a few more tracks with Turner since then, both solo and under group names like The Rockers: [Excerpt: The Rockers, "Why Don't You Believe?"] In 1960, Lassiter needed new tyres for his car, and borrowed eighty dollars from Turner in order to get them -- a relatively substantial amount of money for a working musician back then. He told Turner that he would pay him back at a recording session they had booked, where Lassiter was going to record a song Turner had written, "A Fool in Love", with Turner's band and the Artettes. But Lassiter never showed up -- he didn't have the eighty dollars, and Turner found himself sat in a recording studio with a bunch of musicians he was paying for, paying twenty-five dollars an hour for the studio time, and with no singer there to record. At the time, he was still under the impression that Lassiter might eventually show up, if not at that session, then at least at a future one, but until he did, there was nothing he could do and he was getting angry. Bullock suggested that they cut the track without Lassiter. They were using a studio with a multi-track machine -- only two tracks, but that would be enough. They could cut the backing track on one track, and she could record a guide vocal on the other track, since she'd been around when Turner was teaching Lassiter the song. At least that way they wouldn't have wasted all the money. Turner saw the wisdom of the idea -- he said in his autobiography "This was the first time I got hip to two-track stereo" -- and after consulting with the engineer on the session, he decided to go ahead with Bullock's plan. The plan still caused problems, because they were recording the song in a key written for a man, so Bullock had to yell more than sing, causing problems for the engineer, who according to Turner kept saying things like "Goddammit, don't holler in my microphone". But it was only a demo vocal, after all, and they got it cut -- and as Lassiter didn't show up, Turner took Lassiter's backing vocal group as his own new group, renaming the Artettes to the Ikettes, and they became the first of a whole series of lineups of Ikettes who would record with Turner for the rest of his life. The intention was still to get Lassiter to sing lead on the record, but then Turner played an acetate of it at a club night where he was DJing as well as performing, and the kids apparently went wild: [Excerpt: Ike and Tina Turner, "A Fool in Love"] Turner took the demo to Juggy Murray at Sue Records, still with the intention of replacing Anna Mae's vocal with Lassiter's, but Murray insisted that that was the best thing about the record, and that it should be released exactly as it was, that it was a guaranteed hit. Although -- while that's the story that's told all the time about that record by everyone involved in the recording and release, and seems uncontested, there does seem to be one minor problem with the story, which is that the Ikettes sing "you know you love him, you can't understand/Why he treats you like he do when he's such a good man". I'm willing to be proved wrong, of course, but my suspicion is that Ike Turner wasn't such a progressive thinker that he was writing songs about male-male relationships in 1960. It's possible that the Ikettes were recorded on the same track as Tina's guide vocals, but if the intention was to overdub a new lead from Lassiter on an otherwise finished track, it would have made more sense for them to sing their finished backing vocal part. It seems more likely to me that they decided in the studio that the record was going to go out with Anna Mae singing lead, and the idea of Murray insisting is a later exaggeration. One thing that doesn't seem to be an exaggeration, though, is that initially Murray wanted the record to go out as by Ike Turner's Kings of Rhythm featuring Little Ann, but Turner had other ideas. While Murray insisted "the girl is the star", Turner knew what happened when other people were the credited stars on his records. He didn't want another Jackie Brenston, having a hit and immediately leaving Turner right back where he started. If Little Ann was the credited singer, Little Ann would become a star and Ike Turner would have to find a new singer. So he came up with a pseudonym. Turner was a fan of jungle women in film serials and TV, and he thought a wild-woman persona would suit Anna Mae's yelled vocal, and so he named his new star after Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, a female Tarzan knock-off comic character created by Will Eisner and Jerry Iger in the thirties, but who Turner probably knew from a TV series that had been on in 1955 and 56. He gave her his surname, changed "Sheena" slightly to make the new name alliterative and always at least claimed to have registered a trademark on the name he came up with, so if Anna Mae ever left the band he could just get a new singer to use the name. Anna Mae Bullock was now Tina Turner, and the record went out as by "Ike and Tina Turner": [Excerpt: Ike and Tina Turner, "A Fool in Love"] That went to number two on the R&B charts, and hit the top thirty on the pop charts, too. But there were already problems. After Ike had had a second son with Lorraine, he then got Tina pregnant with another of his children, still seeing both women. He had already started behaving abusively towards Tina, and as well as being pregnant, she was suffering from jaundice -- she says in the first of her two autobiographies that she distinctly remembered lying in her hospital bed, hearing "A Fool in Love" on the radio, and thinking "What's love got to do with it?", though as with all such self-mythologising we should take this with a pinch of salt. Turner was in need of money to pay for lawyers -- he had been arrested for financial crimes involving forged cheques -- and Juggy Murray wouldn't give him an advance until he delivered a follow-up to "A Fool in Love", so he insisted that Tina sneak herself out of the hospital and go into the studio, jaundiced and pregnant, to record the follow-up. Then, as soon as the jaundice had cleared up, they went on a four-month tour, with Tina heavily pregnant, to make enough money to pay Ike's legal bills. Turner worked his band relentlessly -- he would accept literally any gig, even tiny clubs with only a hundred people in the audience, reasoning that it was better for the band's image to play  small venues that had to turn people away because they were packed to capacity, than to play large venues that were only half full. While "A Fool in Love" had a substantial white audience, the Ike and Tina Turner Revue was almost the epitome of the chitlin' circuit act, playing exciting, funky, tightly-choreographed shows for almost entirely Black audiences in much the same way as James Brown, and Ike Turner was in control of every aspect of the show. When Tina had to go into hospital to give birth, rather than give up the money from gigging, Ike hired a sex worker who bore a slight resemblance to Tina to be the new onstage "Tina Turner" until the real one was able to perform again. One of the Ikettes told the real Tina, who discharged herself from hospital, travelled to the venue, beat up the fake Tina, and took her place on stage two days after giving birth. The Ike and Tina Turner Revue, with the Kings of Rhythm backing Tina, the Ikettes, and male singer Jimmy Thomas, all of whom had solo spots, were an astonishing live act, but they were only intermittently successful on record. None of the three follow-ups to "A Fool in Love" did better than number eighty-two on the charts, and two of them didn't even make the R&B charts, though "I Idolize You" did make the R&B top five. Their next big hit came courtesy of Mickey and Sylvia. You may remember us talking about Mickey and Sylvia way back in episode forty-nine, from back in 2019, but if you don't, they were one of a series of R&B duet acts, like Gene and Eunice, who came up after the success of Shirley and Lee, and their big hit was "Love is Strange": [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, "Love is Strange"] By 1961, their career had more or less ended, but they'd recorded a song co-written by the great R&B songwriter Rose Marie McCoy, which had gone unreleased: [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, "It's Gonna Work Out Fine"] When that was shelved they remade it as an Ike and Tina Turner record, with Mickey and Sylvia being Ike -- Sylvia took on all the roles that Ike would normally do in the studio, arranging the track and playing lead guitar, as well as joining the Ikettes on backing vocals, while Mickey did the spoken answering vocals that most listeners assumed were Ike, and which Ike would replicate on stage. The result, unsurprisingly, sounded more like a Mickey and Sylvia record than anything Ike and Tina had ever released before, though it's very obviously Tina on lead vocals: [Excerpt: Ike and Tina Turner, "It's Gonna Work Out Fine"] That made the top twenty on the pop charts -- though it would be their last top forty hit for nearly a decade as Ike and Tina Turner. They did though have a couple of other hits as the Ikettes, with Ike Turner putting the girl group's name on the label so he could record for multiple labels. The first of these, "I'm Blue (The Gong Gong Song)" was a song Ike had written which would later go on to become something of an R&B standard. It featured Dolores Johnson on lead vocals, but Tina sang backing vocals and got a rare co-production credit: [Excerpt: The Ikettes, "I'm Blue (The Gong Gong Song)"] The other Ikettes top forty hit was in 1965, with a song written by Steve Venet and Tommy Boyce -- a songwriter we will be hearing more about in three weeks -- and produced by Venet: [Excerpt: The Ikettes, "Peaches 'n' Cream"] Ike wasn't keen on that record at first, but soon came round to it when it hit the charts. The success of that record caused that lineup of Ikettes to split from Ike and Tina -- the Ikettes had become a successful act in their own right, and Dick Clark's Caravan of Stars wanted to book them, but that would have meant they wouldn't be available for Ike and Tina shows. So Ike sent a different group of three girls out on the road with Clark's tour, keeping the original Ikettes back to record and tour with him, and didn't pay them any royalties on their records. They resented being unable to capitalise on their big hit, so they quit. At first they tried to keep the Ikettes name for themselves, and got Tina Turner's sister Alline to manage them, but eventually they changed their name to the Mirettes, and released a few semi-successful records. Ike got another trio of Ikettes to replace them, and carried on with Pat Arnold, Gloria Scott, and Maxine Smith as the new Ikettes,. One Ikette did remain pretty much throughout -- a woman called Ann Thomas, who Ike Turner was sleeping with, and who he would much later marry, but who he always claimed was never allowed to sing with the others, but was just there for her looks. By this point Ike and Tina had married, though Ike had not divorced any of his previous wives (though he paid some of them off when Ike and Tina became big). Ike and Tina's marriage in Tijuana was not remembered by either of them as a particularly happy experience -- Ike would always later insist that it wasn't a legal marriage at all, and in fact that it was the only one of his many, many, marriages that hadn't been, and was just a joke. He was regularly abusing her in the most horrific ways, but at this point the duo still seemed to the public to be perfectly matched. They actually only ended up on the Big TNT Show as a last-minute thing -- another act was sick, though none of my references mention who it was who got sick, just that someone was needed to fill in for them, and as Ike and Tina were now based in LA -- the country boy Ike had finally become a city boy after all -- and would take any job on no notice, they got the gig. Phil Spector was impressed, and he decided that he could revitalise his career by producing a hit for Tina Turner. There was only one thing wrong -- Tina Turner wasn't an act. *Ike* and Tina Turner was an act. And Ike Turner was a control freak, just like Spector was -- the two men had essentially the same personality, and Spector didn't want to work with someone else who would want to be in charge. After some negotiation, they came to an agreement -- Spector could produce a Tina Turner record, but it would be released as an Ike and Tina Turner record. Ike would be paid twenty thousand dollars for his services, and those services would consist of staying well away from the studio and not interfering. Spector was going to go back to the old formulas that had worked for him, and work with the people who had contributed to his past successes, rather than leaving anything to chance. Jack Nitzsche had had a bit of a falling out with him and not worked on some of the singles he'd produced recently, but he was back. And Spector was going to work with Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich again. He'd fallen out with Barry and Greenwich when "Chapel of Love" had been a hit for the Dixie Cups rather than for one of Spector's own artists, and he'd been working with Mann and Weill and Goffin and King instead. But he knew that it was Barry and Greenwich who were the ones who had worked best with him, and who understood his musical needs best, so he actually travelled to see them in New York instead of getting them to come to him in LA, as a peace offering and a sign of how much he valued their input. The only problem was that Spector hadn't realised that Barry and Greenwich had actually split up.  They were still working together in the studio, and indeed had just produced a minor hit single for a new act on Bert Berns' label BANG, for which Greenwich had written the horn arrangement: [Excerpt: Neil Diamond, "Solitary Man"] We'll hear more about Neil Diamond, and about Jeff Barry's work with him, in three weeks. But Barry and Greenwich were going through a divorce and weren't writing together any more, and came back together for one last writing session with Spector, at which, apparently, Ellie Greenwich would cry every time they wrote a line about love. The session produced four songs, of which two became singles. Barry produced a version of "I Can Hear Music", written at these sessions, for the Ronettes, who Spector was no longer interested in producing himself: [Excerpt: The Ronettes, "I Can Hear Music"] That only made number ninety-nine on the charts, but the song was later a hit for the Beach Boys and has become recognised as a classic. The other song they wrote in those sessions, though, was the one that Spector wanted to give to Tina Turner. "River Deep, Mountain High" was a true three-way collaboration -- Greenwich came up with the music for the verses, Spector for the choruses, and Barry wrote the lyrics and tweaked the melody slightly. Spector, Barry, and Greenwich spent two weeks in their writing session, mostly spent on "River Deep, Mountain High". Spector later said of the writing "Every time we'd write a love line, Ellie would start to cry. I couldn't figure out what was happening, and then I realised… it was a very uncomfortable situation. We wrote that, and we wrote ‘I Can Hear Music'…. We wrote three or four hit songs on that one writing session. “The whole thing about ‘River Deep' was the way I could feel that strong bass line. That's how it started. And then Jeff came up with the opening line. I wanted a tender song about a chick who loved somebody very much, but a different way of expressing it. So we came up with the rag doll and ‘I'm going to cuddle you like a little puppy'. And the idea was really built for Tina, just like ‘Lovin' Feelin” was built for the Righteous Brothers.” Spector spent weeks recording, remixing, rerecording, and reremixing the backing track, arranged by Nitzsche, creating the most thunderous, overblown, example of the Wall of Sound he had ever created, before getting Tina into the studio. He also spent weeks rehearsing Tina on the song, and according to her most of what he did was "carefully stripping away all traces of Ike from my performance" -- she was belting the song and adding embellishments, the way Ike Turner had always taught her to, and Spector kept insisting that she just sing the melody -- something that she had never had the opportunity to do before, and which she thought was wonderful. It was so different from anything else that she'd recorded that after each session, when Ike would ask her about the song, she would go completely blank -- she couldn't hold this pop song in her head except when she was running through it with Spector. Eventually she did remember it, and when she did Ike was not impressed, though the record became one of the definitive pop records of all time: [Excerpt: Ike and Tina Turner, "River Deep, Mountain High"] Spector was putting everything on the line for this record, which was intended to be his great comeback and masterpiece. That one track cost more than twenty thousand dollars to record -- an absolute fortune at a time when a single would normally be recorded in one or two sessions at most. It also required a lot of work on Tina's part. She later estimated that she had sung the opening line of the song a thousand times before Spector allowed her to move on to the second line, and talked about how she got so hot and sweaty singing the song over and over that she had to take her blouse off in the studio and sing the song in her bra. She later said "I still don't know what he wanted. I still don't know if I pleased him. But I never stopped trying." Spector produced a total of six tracks with Tina, including the other two songs written at those Barry and Greenwich sessions, "I'll Never Need More Than This", which became the second single released off the "River Deep, Mountain High" album, and "Hold On Baby", plus cover versions of Arthur Alexander's "Every Day I Have to Cry Some", Pomus and Shuman's "Save the Last Dance", and "A Love Like Yours (Don't Come Knocking Everyday)" a Holland-Dozier-Holland song which had originally been released as a Martha and the Vandellas B-side. The planned album was to be padded out with six tracks produced by Ike Turner, mostly remakes of the duo's earlier hits, and was planned for release after the single became the hit everyone knew it would. The single hit the Hot One Hundred soon after it was released: [Excerpt: Ike and Tina Turner, "River Deep, Mountain High"] ...and got no higher up the charts than number eighty-eight. The failure of the record basically destroyed Spector, and while he had been an abusive husband before this, now he became much worse, as he essentially retired from music for four years, and became increasingly paranoid and aggressive towards the industry that he thought was not respectful enough of his genius. There have been several different hypotheses as to why "River Deep Mountain High" was not a success. Some have said that it was simply because DJs were fed up of Spector refusing to pay payola, and had been looking for a reason to take him down a peg. Ike Turner thought it was due to racism, saying later “See, what's wrong with America, I think, is that rather than accept something for its value… what it's doing, America mixes race in it. You can't call that record R&B. But because it's Tina… if you had not put Tina's name on there and put ‘Joe Blow', then the Top 40 stations would have accepted it for being a pop record. But Tina Turner… they want to brand her as being an R&B artist. I think the main reason that ‘River Deep' didn't make it here in America was that the R&B stations wouldn't play it because they thought it was pop, and the pop stations wouldn't play it because they thought it was R&B. And it didn't get played at all. The only record I've heard that could come close to that record is a record by the Beach Boys called ‘Good Vibrations'. I think these are the two records that I've heard in my life that I really like, you know?” Meanwhile, Jeff Barry thought it was partly the DJs but also faults in the record caused by Phil Spector's egomania, saying "he has a self-destructive thing going for him, which is part of the reason that the mix on ‘River Deep' is terrible, he buried the lead and he knows he buried the lead and he cannot stop himself from doing that… if you listen to his records in sequence, the lead goes further and further in and to me what he is saying is, ‘It is not the song I wrote with Jeff and Ellie, it is not the song – just listen to those strings. I want more musicians, it's me, listen to that bass sound. …' That, to me, is what hurts in the long run... Also, I do think that the song is not as clear on the record as it should be, mix-wise. I don't want to use the word overproduced, because it isn't, it's just undermixed." There's possibly an element of all three of these factors in play. As we've discussed, 1965 seems to have been the year that the resegregation of American radio began, and the start of the long slow process of redefining genres so that rock and roll, still considered a predominantly Black music at the beginning of the sixties, was by the end of the decade considered an almost entirely white music. And it's also the case that "River Deep, Mountain High" was the most extreme production Spector ever committed to vinyl, and that Spector had made a lot of enemies in the music business. It's also, though, the case  that it was a genuinely great record: [Excerpt: Ike and Tina Turner, "River Deep, Mountain High"] However, in the UK, it was promoted by Decca executive Tony Hall, who was a figure who straddled both sides of the entertainment world -- as part of his work as a music publicist he had been a presenter on Oh Boy!, written a column in Record Mirror, and presented a Radio Luxembourg show. Hall put his not-inconsiderable weight behind promoting the record, and it ended up reaching number two in the UK -- being successful enough that the album was also released over here, though it wouldn't come out in the US for several years. The record also attracted the attention of the Rolling Stones, who invited Ike and Tina to be their support act on a UK tour, which also featured the Yardbirds, and this would be a major change for the duo in all sorts of ways. Firstly, it got them properly in contact with British musicians -- and the Stones would get Ike and Tina as support artists several times over the next few years -- and also made the UK and Europe part of their regular tour itinerary. It also gave the duo their first big white rock audience, and over the next several years they would pivot more and more to performing music aimed at that audience, rather than the chitlin' circuit they'd been playing for previously. Ike was very conscious of wanting to move away from the blues and R&B -- while that was where he'd made his living as a musician, it wasn't music he actually liked, and he would often talk later about how much he respected Keith Richards and Eric Clapton, and how his favourite music was country music. Tina had also never been a fan of blues or R&B, and wanted to perform songs by the white British performers they were meeting. The tour also, though, gave Tina her first real thoughts of escape. She loved the UK and Europe, and started thinking about what life could be like for her not just being Ike Turner's wife and working fifty-one weeks a year at whatever gigs came along. But it also made that escape a little more difficult, because on the tour Tina lost one of her few confidantes in the organisation. Tina had helped Pat Arnold get away from her own abusive partner, and the two had become very close, but Arnold was increasingly uncomfortable being around Ike's abuse of Tina, and couldn't help her friend the way she'd been helped. She decided she needed to get out of a toxic situation, and decided to stay in England, where she'd struck up an affair with Mick Jagger, and where she found that there were many opportunities for her as a Black woman that simply hadn't been there in the US. (This is not to say that Britain doesn't have problems with racism -- it very much does, but those problems are *different* problems than the ones that the US had at that point, and Arnold found Britain's attitude more congenial to her personally). There was also another aspect, which a lot of Black female singers of her generation have mentioned and which probably applies here. Many Black women have said that they were astonished on visiting Britain to be hailed as great singers, when they thought of themselves as merely average. Britain does not have the kind of Black churches which had taught generations of Black American women to sing gospel, and so singers who in the US thought of themselves as merely OK would be far, far, better than any singers in the UK -- the technical standards were just so much lower here. (This is something that was still true at least as late as the mid-eighties. Bob Geldof talks in his autobiography about attending the recording session for "We Are the World" after having previously recorded "Do They Know It's Christmas?" and being astonished at how much more technically skilled the American stars were and how much more seriously they took their craft.) And Arnold wasn't just an adequate singer -- she was and is a genuinely great talent -- and so she quickly found herself in demand in the UK. Jagger got her signed to Immediate Records, a new label that had been started up by the Stones manager Andrew Oldham, and where Jimmy Page was the staff producer. She was given a new name, P.P. Arnold, which was meant to remind people of another American import, P.J. Proby, but which she disliked because the initials spelled "peepee". Her first single on the label, produced by Jagger, did nothing, but her second single, written by a then-unknown songwriter named Cat Stevens, became a big hit: [Excerpt: P.P. Arnold, "The First Cut is the Deepest"] She toured with a backing band, The Nice, and made records as a backing singer with artists like the Small Faces. She also recorded a duet with the unknown singer Rod Stewart, though that wasn't a success: [Excerpt: Rod Stewart and P.P. Arnold, "Come Home Baby"] We'll be hearing more about P.P. Arnold in future episodes, but the upshot of her success was that Tina had even fewer people to support her. The next few years were increasingly difficult for Tina, as Ike turned to cocaine use in a big way, became increasingly violent, and his abuse of her became much more violent. The descriptions of his behaviour in Tina's two volumes of autobiography are utterly harrowing, and I won't go into them in detail, except to say that nobody should have to suffer what she did. Ike's autobiography, on the other hand, has him attempting to defend himself, even while admitting to several of the most heinous allegations, by saying he didn't beat his wife any more than most men did. Now the sad thing is that this may well be true, at least among his peer group. Turner's behaviour was no worse than behaviour from, say, James Brown or Brian Jones or Phil Spector or Jerry Lee Lewis, and it may well be that behaviour like this was common enough among people he knew that Turner's behaviour didn't stand out at all. His abuse has become much better-known, because the person he was attacking happened to become one of the biggest stars in the world, while the women they attacked didn't. But that of course doesn't make what Ike did to Tina any better -- it just makes it infinitely sadder that so many more people suffered that way. In 1968, Tina actually tried to take her own life -- and she was so fearful of Ike that when she overdosed, she timed it so that she thought she would be able to at least get on stage and start the first song before collapsing, knowing that their contract required her to do that for Ike to get paid. As it was, one of the Ikettes noticed the tablets she had taken had made her so out of it she'd drawn a line across her face with her eyebrow pencil. She was hospitalised, and according to both Ike and Tina's reports, she was comatose and her heart actually stopped beating, but then Ike started yelling at her, saying if she wanted to die why didn't she do it by jumping in front of a truck, rather than leaving him with hospital bills, and telling her to go ahead and die if this was how she was going to treat him -- and she was so scared of Ike her heart started up again. (This does not seem medically likely to me, but I wasn't there, and they both were). Of course, Ike frames this as compassion and tough love. I would have different words for it myself. Tina would make several more suicide attempts over the years, but even as Tina's life was falling apart, the duo's professional career was on the up. They started playing more shows in the UK, and they toured the US as support for the Rolling Stones. They also started having hits again, after switching to performing funked-up cover versions of contemporary hits. They had a minor hit with a double-sided single of the Beatles' "Come Together" and the Stones' "Honky-Tonk Women", then a bigger one with a version of Sly and the Family Stone's "I Want to Take You Higher", then had their biggest hit ever with "Proud Mary". It's likely we'll be looking at Creedence Clearwater Revival's original version of that song at some point, but while Ike Turner disliked the original, Tina liked it, and Ike also became convinced of the song's merits by hearing a version by The Checkmates Ltd: [Excerpt: The Checkmates Ltd, "Proud Mary"] That was produced by Phil Spector, who came briefly out of his self-imposed exile from the music business in 1969 to produce a couple of singles for the Checkmates and Ronnie Spector. That version inspired Ike and Tina's recording of the song, which went to number four on the charts and won them a Grammy award in 1971: [Excerpt: Ike and Tina Turner, "Proud Mary"] Ike was also investing the money they were making into their music. He built his own state-of-the-art studio, Bolic Sound, which Tina always claimed was a nod to her maiden name, Bullock, but which he later always said was a coincidence. Several other acts hired the studio, especially people in Frank Zappa's orbit -- Flo and Eddie recorded their first album as a duo there, and Zappa recorded big chunks of Over-Nite Sensation and Apostrophe('), two of his most successful albums, at the studio. Acts hiring Bolic Sound also got Tina and the Ikettes on backing vocals if they wanted them, and so for example Tina is one of the backing vocalists on Zappa's "Cosmik Debris": [Excerpt: Frank Zappa, "Cosmik Debris"] One of the most difficult things she ever had to sing in her life was this passage in Zappa's song "Montana", which took the Ikettes several days' rehearsal to get right. [Excerpt: Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, "Montana"] She was apparently so excited at having got that passage right that she called Ike out of his own session to come in and listen, but Ike was very much unimpressed, and insisted that Tina and the Ikettes not get credit on the records they made with Zappa. Zappa later said “I don't know how she managed to stick with that guy for so long. He treated her terribly and she's a really nice lady. We were recording down there on a Sunday. She wasn't involved with the session, but she came in on Sunday with a whole pot of stew that she brought for everyone working in the studio. Like out of nowhere, here's Tina Turner coming in with a rag on her head bringing a pot of stew. It was really nice.” By this point, Ike was unimpressed by anything other than cocaine and women, who he mostly got to sleep with him by having truly gargantuan amounts of cocaine around. As Ike was descending further into paranoia and abuse, though, Tina was coming into her own. She wrote "Nutbush City Limits" about the town where she grew up, and it reached number 22 on the charts -- higher than any song Ike ever wrote: [Excerpt: Ike and Tina Turner, "Nutbush City Limits"] Of course, Ike would later claim that he wrote the music and let Tina keep all the credit. Tina was also asked by the Who to appear in the film version of their rock opera Tommy, where her performance of "Acid Queen" was one of the highlights: [Excerpt: Tina Turner, "Acid Queen"] And while she was filming that in London, she was invited to guest on a TV show with Ann-Margret, who was a huge fan of Ike and Tina, and duetted with Tina -- but not Ike -- on a medley of her hits: [Excerpt: Tina Turner and Ann-Margret, "Nutbush City Limits/Honky Tonk Woman"] Just as with "River Deep, Mountain High", Tina was wanted for her own talents, independent of Ike. She was starting to see that as well as being an abusive husband, he was also not necessary for her to have a career. She was also starting to find parts of her life that she could have for herself, independent of her husband. She'd been introduced to Buddhist meditation by a friend, and took it up in a big way, much to Ike's disapproval. Things finally came to a head in July 1976, in Dallas, when Ike started beating her up and for the first time she fought back. She pretended to reconcile with him, waited for him to fall asleep, and ran across a busy interstate, almost getting hit by a ten-wheel truck, to get to another hotel she could see in the distance. Luckily, even though she had no money, and she was a Black woman in Dallas, not a city known for its enlightened attitudes in the 1970s, the manager of the Ramada Inn took pity on her and let her stay there for a while until she could get in touch with Buddhist friends. She spent the next few months living off the kindness of strangers, before making arrangements with Rhonda Graam, who had started working for Ike and Tina in 1964 as a fan, but had soon become indispensable to the organisation. Graam sided with Tina, and while still supposedly working for Ike she started putting together appearances for Tina on TV shows like Cher's. Cher was a fan of Tina's work, and was another woman trying to build a career after leaving an abusive husband who had been her musical partner: [Excerpt: Cher and Tina Turner, "Makin' Music is My Business"] Graam became Tina's full-time assistant, as well as her best friend, and remained part of her life until Graam's death a year ago. She also got Tina booked in to club gigs, but for a long time they found it hard to get bookings -- promoters would say she was "only half the act". Ike still wanted the duo to work together professionally, if not be a couple, but Tina absolutely refused, and Ike had gangster friends of his shoot up Graam's car, and Tina heard rumours that he was planning to hire a hit man to come after her. Tina filed for divorce, and gave Ike everything -- all the money the couple had earned together in sixteen years of work, all the property, all the intellectual property -- except for two cars, one of which Ike had given her and one which Sammy Davis Jr. had given her, and the one truly important thing -- the right to use the name "Tina Turner", which Ike had the trademark on. Ike had apparently been planning to hire someone else to perform as "Tina Turner" and carry on as if nothing had changed. Slowly, Tina built her career back up, though it was not without its missteps. She got a new manager, who also managed Olivia Newton-John, and the manager brought in a song he thought was perfect for Tina. She turned it down, and Newton-John recorded it instead: [Excerpt: Olivia Newton-John, "Physical"] But even while she was still playing small clubs, her old fans from the British rock scene were boosting her career. In 1981, after Rod Stewart saw her playing a club gig and singing his song "Hot Legs", he invited her to guest with him and perform the song on Saturday Night Live: [Excerpt: Rod Stewart and Tina Turner, "Hot Legs"] The Rolling Stones invited Tina to be their support act on a US tour, and to sing "Honky Tonk Women" on stage with them, and eventually when David Bowie, who was at the height of his fame at that point, told his record label he was going to see her on a night that EMI wanted to do an event for him, half the record industry showed up to the gig. She had already recorded a remake of the Temptations' "Ball of Confusion" with the British Electric Foundation -- a side project for two of the members of Heaven 17 -- in 1982, for one of their albums: [Excerpt: British Electric Foundation, "Ball of Confusion"] Now they were brought in to produce a new single for her, a remake of Al Green's "Let's Stay Together": [Excerpt: Tina Turner, "Let's Stay Together"] That made the top thirty in the US, and was a moderate hit in many places, making the top ten in the UK. She followed it up with another BEF production, a remake of "Help!" by the Beatles, which appears only to have been released in mainland Europe. But then came the big hit: [Excerpt: Tina Turner, "What's Love Got to Do With It?"] wenty-six years after she started performing with Ike, Tina Turner was suddenly a major star. She had a string of successes throughout the eighties and nineties, with more hit records, film appearances, a successful autobiography, a film based on the autobiography, and record-setting concert appearan

Roger Ashby does a deep dive into the artists that shaped the future of music. Listen to the Roger Ashby Oldies Show anytime on the iHeartRadio app.

Francesco Stephen Castelluccio headlines our program with his rich sounds that have been recorded with The Four Freshmen since 1960. Rich and memorable, his music will live forever. Bye-the-way, you know him as Frankie Valli. The Rebels come along with a short list of hits that again will be played forever. Grady come along next with thoughts and ideas that will be guaranteed to make you laugh. Enjoy! 

Our sponsor: Houghton Hornswww.houghtonhorns.comThe GOLD Method App - Use code "GOLD21" when subscribing for your first month free!www.ryanbeachtrumpet.com/gold-method-appScott Belck's websitewww.scottbelck.comDr. Scott Belck currently serves as the Director of Jazz Studies and Professor of Music at the University of Cincinnati's College-Conservatory of Music (CCM) where he directs the CCM Jazz Orchestra and teaches applied Jazz Trumpet.He is a founding member of critically acclaimed Tromba Mundi contemporary trumpet ensemble and has toured as a member of Grammy Award winning funk legend Bootsy Collins' Funk Unity Band as lead trumpet. He has served as trumpet and cornet soloist with the Air Force Band of Flight in Dayton, Ohio where he also held the post of musical director for the Air Force Night Flight Jazz Ensemble. He is the Founding the Artistic Director Emeritus of the Cincinnati Contemporary Jazz Orchestra.His playing credits include recordings lead trumpet/guest soloist with the Cincinnati Pops featuring the Manhattan Transfer and John Pizzarelli, the Glenn Miller Orchestra, the Van Dells, and jazz soloist with the University of North Texas One O'clock Lab Band with whom he recorded four CDs as jazz soloist and section trumpet.He has performed as principal/lead trumpet with the St. Louis Symphony, Indianapolis Symphony, Cincinnati Symphony, the National Symphony Orchestra of the Dominican Republic, the Columbus Symphony Orchestra, the Dayton Philharmonic Orchestra, the Lexington Philharmonic, the Richmond Symphony Orchestra, and as section trumpet with the Duluth-Superior Symphony Orchestra and the Duluth Festival Opera.He has performed as lead trumpet for shows/concerts of Christian McBride, Jimmy Heath, Aretha Franklin, Gerald Wilson, the Detroit Jazz Festival Orchestra, Linda Ronstadt, John Lithgow, Donna Summer, Maureen McGovern, Michael Feinstein, Lalo Rodriguez, Sandy Patti, Tito Puente Jr., Tommy Tune, Manhattan Transfer, Lou Rawls, Patti Austen, The Coasters, Yes, Ben Vereen, Doc Severinsen, the Temptations, Olivia Newton-John, Neil Sedaka, the Blue Wisp Big Band, the Columbus Jazz Orchestra, the Dayton Jazz Orchestra, the Ink Spots, the Four Freshmen, The Frankie Avalon, Fabian, Bobby Riddell, Little Anthony and the Imperials, Frankie Valli, The Maritime Jazz Orchestra of Canada as well as touring Broadway shows and regional and national recording sessions.He has performed as a leader, musical director, or sideman with many top jazz players on the scene today including: Fred Hersch, Rich Perry, Adam Nussbaum, Lew Soloff, Randy Brecker, Slide Hampton, Jim McNeely, Claudio Roditi, John Riley, Rick Margitza, Bob Belden, Jimmy Heath, Bobby Watson, Tom Harrell, Tim Hagans, Regina Carter, Wes Anderson, John Hollenbeck, Steve Turre, Conrad Herwig, Gordon Brisker, Hank Marr, Marvin Stamm, Gerry Mulligan, Kenny Garrett, John Fedchock, Phil Woods, Ed Soph, John LaBarbera and Diane Schuur.He has also served as the Artistic Director of the Dayton Jazz Orchestra, the Jazz Central Big Band, and the Miami Valley Jazz Camp in Ohio. He is the author of the text “Modern Flexibilities for Brass”, published by Meredith Music and distributed by Hal Leonard. In his spare time, he is the CEO and founder of Lip Slur World Headquarters.Belck's new book “Progressive Lip Flexibilities for Brass” is quickly becoming one of the most popular sarcastic lip slur books in the lower South-Central Ohio River valley region. Scott Belck is a Powell Signature Trumpet Artist.Support the show (https://thatsnotspit.com/support/)

Vocalisten met onder andere Kurt Elling, Four Freshmen, Michael Kiwanuka, Harry Connick, Rrick Braun. Reacties: jazztrain@studio040.nl

Kyle Long explores extraordinary vocal music from Indianapolis' past and present, including new music from the Indianapolis based composer Hanna Benn and a look back at the music of the Four Freshmen, an innovative vocal ensemble  formed on the campus of Butler University. Plus, Karla Lopez speaks with voting rights advocate Cynthia Morraz.

Kyle Long explores vocal music from Indianapolis past and present, including new music from the Indianapolis based composer Hanna Benn and a look back at the music of vocal group The Four Freshmen.

Kyle Long explores vocal music from Indianapolis past and present, including new music from the Indianapolis based composer Hanna Benn and a look back at the music of vocal group The Four Freshmen.

Episode one hundred and seventeen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Don’t Worry Baby” by the Beach Boys, and how the years 1963 and 1964 saw a radical evolution in the sound and subject matter of the Beach Boys’ work. 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 “You’re No Good” by the Swinging Blue Jeans. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—- ERRATA: I say that the Surfin’ USA album was released only four months after Surfin’ Safari. It was actually over five months. Also, for some reason I pronounce Nik Venet’s name as if he were French here. I believe that’s incorrect and his name is actually pronounced “Vennit”, though I’m not 100% sure. More importantly, I say that “Sweet Little Sixteen” wasn’t a big hit, when of course it made number two on the charts.    Resources There is no Mixcloud this week, because there were too many Beach Boys songs in the episode. I used many resources for this episode, most of which will be used in future Beach Boys episodes too. It’s difficult to enumerate everything here, because I have been an active member of the Beach Boys fan community for twenty-four years, and have at times just used my accumulated knowledge for this. But the resources I list here are ones I’ve checked for specific things. Becoming the Beach Boys by James B. Murphy is an in-depth look at the group’s early years, up to the end of 1963. Stephen McParland has published many, many books on the California surf and hot-rod music scenes, including several on both the Beach Boys and Gary Usher.  His books can be found at https://payhip.com/CMusicBooks Andrew Doe’s Bellagio 10452 site is an invaluable resource. Jon Stebbins’ The Beach Boys FAQ is a good balance between accuracy and readability. Stebbins also co-wrote The Lost Beach Boy, David Marks’ autobiography. And Philip Lambert’s Inside the Music of Brian Wilson is an excellent, though sadly out of print, musicological analysis of Wilson’s music from 1962 through 67. The Beach Boys’ Morgan recordings and all the outtakes from them can be found on this 2-CD set. As a good starting point for the Beach Boys’ music, I would recommend this budget-priced three-CD set, which has a surprisingly good selection of their material on it. Transcript Today, we’re going to take our second look at the Beach Boys, and we’re going to look at their evolution through 1963 and 1964, as they responded to the threat from the Beatles by turning to ever more sophisticated music, even as they went through a variety of personal crises. We’re going to look at a period in which they released four albums a year, had three lineup changes, and saw their first number one – and at a song which, despite being a B-side, regularly makes lists of the best singles of all time. We’re going to look at “Don’t Worry Baby”: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Don’t Worry Baby”] When we left the Beach Boys, they had just secured a contract with Capitol Records, and released their first national hit, “Surfin’ Safari” backed with “409”. Since then we’ve also seen Brian Wilson working with several songwriting collaborators to write hits for Jan and Dean. But now we need to double back and look at what Brian was doing with his main band in that time.  After “Surfin’ Safari” was a hit, in one of the many incomprehensible decisions made in the Beach Boys’ career, Capitol decided to follow it up with an album track that Brian and Gary Usher had written, “Ten Little Indians”. That track, a surf-rock version of the nursery rhyme with the group chanting “Kemo sabe” in the backing vocals, made only number forty-nine on the charts, and frankly didn’t deserve to do even that well. Some have suggested, in fact that the record was released at the instigation of Murry Wilson, who was both Brian, Carl, and Dennis Wilson’s father and the group’s manager, as a way of weakening Usher’s influence with the group, as Murry didn’t want outsiders interfering in what he saw as a family business.  After realising the folly of deviating from the formula, the group’s next single followed the same pattern as their first hit. The B-side was “Shut Down”, a car song co-written by Brian and Roger Christian, who you may remember from the episode on “Surf City” as having been brought in to help Brian with car lyrics. “Shut Down” is most notable for being one of the very small number of Beach Boys records to feature an instrumental contribution from Mike Love, the group’s lead singer. His two-note saxophone solo comes in for some mockery from the group’s fans, but actually fits the record extremely well: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Shut Down”]  “Shut Down” was a top thirty hit, but it was the A-side that was the really big hit. Just as their first hit had had a surf song on the A-side and a car song on the B-side, so did this single. Brian Wilson had been inspired by Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen”, and in particular the opening verse, which had just listed a lot of places: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Sweet Little Sixteen”] He might well also have been thinking of Chubby Checker’s minor hit, “Twistin’ USA”, which listed places in America where people might be twisting: [Excerpt: Chubby Checker, “Twistin’ USA”] Brian had taken Berry’s melody and the place-name recitation, and with the help of his girlfriend’s brother, and some input from Mike Love, had turned it into a song listing all the places that people could be surfing — at least, they could “if everybody had an ocean”: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Surfin’ USA”] “Surfin’ USA” became a huge hit, reaching number two on the charts, and later being named by Billboard as the biggest hit of 1963, but unfortunately for Brian that didn’t result in a financial windfall for him as the songwriter. As the song was so close to “Sweet Little Sixteen”, Chuck Berry got the sole songwriting credit — one of the only times in rock music history where a white artist has ripped off a Black one and the Black artist has actually benefited from it. And Berry definitely did benefit — “Sweet Little Sixteen”, while a great record, had never been a particularly big hit, while “Surfin’ USA” is to this day regularly heard on oldies radio and used in commercials and films. But that success meant extra work, and a lot of it. “Surfin’ USA” was the title song of the group’s second album, released in March 1963 only four months after their first, and they would release two more albums before the end of the year — Surfer Girl in September and Little Deuce Coupe in October. Not only were they having to churn out a quite staggering amount of product — though Little Deuce Coupe featured four songs recycled from their earlier albums — but Brian Wilson, as well as writing or co-writing all their original material, started producing the records as well, as he was unhappy with Nik Venet’s production on the first album. Not only that, but as well as making the Beach Boys’ records, Wilson was also writing for Jan and Dean, and he had also started making records on the side with Gary Usher, doing things like making a “Loco-Motion” knock-off, “The Revolution”, released under the name Rachel and the Revolvers: [Excerpt: Rachel and the Revolvers, “The Revolution”] According to some sources, Usher and Wilson found the singer for that track by the simple expedient of driving to Watts and asking the first Black teenage girl they saw if she could sing. Other sources say they hired a professional session singer — some say it was Betty Everett, but given that that’s the name of a famous singer from the period who lived in the Mid-West, I think people are confusing her for Betty Willis, another singer who gets named as a possibility, who lived in LA and who certainly sounds like the same person: [Excerpt: Betty Willis, “Act Naturally”] Wilson was also in the process of breaking up with his girlfriend and starting a relationship with a young woman named Marilyn Rovell. Rovell, along with her sister Diane, and their cousin, Ginger Blake, had formed a girl group, and Brian was writing and producing records for them as well: [Excerpt: The Honeys, “The One You Can’t Have”] As well as making all these records, the Beach Boys were touring intensively, to the point that on one day in June the group were actually booked in for four shows in the same day.  Unsurprisingly, Brian decided that this was too much for one person, and so in April 1963, just after the release of “Surfin’ USA”, he decided to quit touring with the group. Luckily, there was a replacement on hand. Alan Jardine had been a member of the Beach Boys on their very first single, but had decided to quit the group to go off to university. A year later, that seemed like a bad decision, and when Brian called him up and asked him to rejoin the band, he eagerly agreed. For now, Alan was not going to be a proper member of the group, but he would substitute for Brian on the group’s tour of the Midwest that Spring, and on many of the shows they performed over the summer — he could play the bass, which was the instrument that Brian played on stage, and he could sing Brian’s parts, and so while the Beach Boys still officially consisted of Brian, Carl, and Dennis Wilson, Mike Love, and David Marks, the group that was on tour was Carl, Dennis, Mike, David, and Alan, though Brian would sometimes appear for important shows. Jardine also started recording with the group, though he would not get credited on the covers of the first couple of albums on which he appeared. This made a huge change to the sound of the Beach Boys in the studio, as Jardine playing bass allowed Brian Wilson to play keyboards, while Jardine also added to the group’s vocal harmonies. And this was a major change. Up to this point, the Beach Boys’ records had had only rudimentary harmonies. While Brian was an excellent falsetto singer, and Mike a very good bass, the other three members of the group were less accomplished. Carl would grow to be one of the great vocalists of all time, but at this point was still in his early teens and had a thin voice. Dennis’ voice was also a little thin at this point, and he was behind the drum kit, which meant he didn’t get to sing live, and David Marks was apparently not allowed to sing on the records at all, other than taking a single joint lead with Carl on the first album. With the addition of Jardine, Brian now had another singer as strong as himself and Love, and the Surfer Girl album, the first one on which Jardine appears, sees Brian expanding from the rather rudimentary vocal arrangements of the first two albums to something that incorporates a lot more of the influence of the Four Freshmen. You can hear this most startlingly on “In My Room”. This is one of the first songs on which Jardine took part in the studio, though he’s actually not very audible in the vocal arrangement, which instead concentrates on the three brothers. “In My Room” is a major, major, step forward in the group’s sound, in the themes that would appear in their songwriting for the next few years, and in the juxtaposition of the lyrical theme and the musical arrangement.  The song’s lyrics, written by Gary Usher but inspired by Wilson’s experiences, are about solitude, and the song starts out with Brian singing alone, but then Brian moves up to the third note of the scale and Carl comes in under him, singing the note Brian started on. Then they both move up again, Brian to the fifth and Carl to the third, with Dennis joining in on the note that Brian had started on, before Mike and Alan finally also join in. Brian is singing about being alone, but he has his family with him, supporting him:  [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “In My Room”] This new lineup of the group, with Alan augmenting the other five, might even have lasted, except for a chain of events that started on David Marks’ fifteenth birthday. Murry Wilson, who was still managing the group at this point, had never liked the idea of someone from outside the family being an equal member, and was particularly annoyed at David because Murry had tried to have an affair with David’s mother, which hadn’t worked out well for him.  But then on Marks’ fifteenth birthday, he and Dennis Wilson both caught a sexually transmitted infection from the same sex worker, and when Murry Wilson found this out — as he had to, as he needed to pay their doctor’s bills — he became furious and started screaming at the whole group.  At that point, David had had enough. His mother had been telling him that he was the real talent in the group and he didn’t need those Wilsons, and as a fifteen-year-old kid he didn’t have the understanding to realise that this might not be entirely true. He said “OK, I quit”. At first, the rest of the group thought that he was joking, and even he wasn’t at all sure that he wanted to leave the group altogether. He remained in the band for the next month, but Murry Wilson kept reminding his sons that Marks had quit and that they’d all heard him, and refused to speak directly to him — anything that Murry wanted to say to David, he said to Carl, who passed the message on.  And even though the rest of the group definitely wanted David to stay — especially Brian, who liked having the freedom not to go out on tour, and Carl, who had been the one who’d lobbied to bring his friend into the group in the first place — David was still, as the youngest member, the only one who didn’t sing, and the only one not part of the family, regarded by the others as somewhat lesser than the rest of the band.  David became increasingly frustrated, especially when they were recording the Little Deuce Coupe album. That album was made up entirely of songs about cars, and the group were so short of material that the album ended up being filled out with four songs from earlier albums, including two from the Surfer Girl album released only the previous month. Yet when David tried to persuade Brian to have the group record his song “Kustom Kar Show”, Brian told David that he wasn’t ready to be writing songs for the group.  All this, plus pressure from David’s parents to make him more of a focal point of the group, led to his resignation eventually being accepted, and backdated to the original date he quit. He played his last show with the group on October the fifth 1963, and then formed his own band, the Marksmen, who signed to A&M:  [Excerpt: Dave and the Marksmen, “Kustom Kar Show”] There have been rumours that Murry Wilson threatened DJs that the Beach Boys wouldn’t co-operate with them if they played Marksmen records, but in truth, listening to the records the Marksmen made during their two years of existence, it’s quite obvious why they weren’t played — they were fairly shoddy-sounding garage rock records, with little to commend them. Indeed, they actually sound somewhat better now than they would have done at the time — some of Marks’ flatter and more affectless vocals prefigure the sound of some punk singers, but not in a way that would have had any commercial potential in 1963. Meanwhile, the Beach Boys continued, with Alan Jardine buying a Stratocaster and switching to rhythm guitar, and Brian Wilson resigning himself to having to perform live, at least at the moment, and returning to his old role on the bass. Jardine was now, for publicity purposes, a full member of the group, though he would remain on a salary rather than an equal partner for many years — Murry Wilson didn’t want to make the same mistake with him that he had with Marks. And there was still the constant need for new material, which didn’t let up. Brian’s songwriting was progressing at a furious pace, and that can be seen nowhere better than on “The Warmth of the Sun”, a song he wrote, with Love writing the lyrics, around the time of the Kennedy assassination — the two men have differed over the years over whether it was written the night before or the night after the assassination. “The Warmth of the Sun” is quite staggeringly harmonically sophisticated. We’ve talked before in this podcast about the standard doo-wop progression — the one, minor sixth, minor second, fifth progression that you get in about a million songs: [demonstrates] “The Warmth of the Sun” starts out that way — its first two chords are C, Am, played in the standard arpeggiated way one expects from that kind of song: [demonstrates] You’d expect from that  that the song would go C, Am, Dm, G or C, Am, F, G. But instead of moving to Dm or F, as one normally would, the song moves to E flat, and *starts the progression over*, a minor third up, so you have: [demonstrates] It then stops that progression after two bars, moves back to the Dm one would expect from the original progression, and stays there for twice as long as normal, before moving on to the normal G — and then throwing in a G augmented at the end, which is a normal G chord but with the D note raised to E flat, so it ties in to that original unexpected chord change. And it does all this *in the opening line of the song*: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “The Warmth of the Sun”] This is harmonic sophistication on a totally different order from anything else that was being done in teen pop music at the time — it was far closer to the modern jazz harmonies of the Four Freshmen that Brian loved than to doo-wop. The new five-piece lineup of the group recorded that on January the first, 1964, and on the same day they recorded a song that combined two of Brian’s other big influences. “Fun Fun Fun” had lyrics by Mike Love — some of his wittiest — and starts out with an intro taken straight from “Johnny B. Goode”: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Fun Fun Fun”] But while the rest of the track keeps the same feel as the Chuck Berry song, the verse goes in a different harmonic direction, and actually owes a lot to “Da Doo Ron Ron”. Instead of using a blues progression, as Berry normally would, the verse uses the same I-IV-I-V progression that “Da Doo Ron Ron”‘s chorus does, but uses it to very different effect: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Fun Fun Fun”] That became the group’s fourth top ten hit, and made number five on the charts — but the group suddenly had some real competition. At numbers one, two, and three were the Beatles. Brian Wilson realised that he needed to up his game if he was going to compete, and he did. In April 1964 he started working on a new single. By this time, while the Beach Boys themselves were still playing most of the instruments, Brian was bringing in additional musicians to augment them, and expanding his instrumental palette. The basic track was the core members of the band — Carl playing both lead and rhythm guitar, Alan playing bass, and Dennis playing drums, with Brian on keyboards — but there were two further bass players, Glen Campbell and Ray Pohlman, thickening the sound on six-string bass, plus two saxophones, and Hal Blaine adding percussion.  And the main instrument providing chordal support wasn’t guitar or organ, as it usually had been, but a harpsichord, an instrument Brian would use a lot over the next few years: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “I Get Around (backing track)”] The recording session for that backing track was also another breaking point for the band. Murry Wilson, himself a frustrated songwriter and producer, was at the session and kept insisting that there was a problem with the bassline. Eventually, Brian had enough of his father’s interference, and fired him as the band’s manager. Murry would continue to keep trying to interfere in his children’s career, but this was the point at which the Beach Boys finally took control over their own futures. A few days later, they reconvened in the studio to record the vocals for what would become their first number one hit: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “I Get Around”] It’s fascinating to see that even this early in the group’s career, and on one of their biggest, summeriest hits, there’s already a tension in the lyrics, a sense of wanting to move on — “I’m getting bugged driving up and down the same old strip/I’ve got to find a new place where the kids are hip”. The lyrics are Love’s, but as is so often the case with Brian Wilson’s collaborations, Love seems to have been expressing something that Wilson was feeling at the time. The Beach Boys had risen to the challenge from the Beatles, in a way that few other American musicians could, and “I Get Around” was good enough that it made the top ten in the UK, and became a particular favourite in the Mod subculture in London. The group would only become more popular over the next few years in the UK, a new place where the kids were hip. “I Get Around” is a worthy classic, but the B-side, “Don’t Worry Baby”, is if anything even better. It had been recorded in January, and had already been released on their Shut Down vol 2 album in March. It had originally been intended for the Ronettes, and was inspired by “Be My Baby”, which had astonished Brian Wilson when it had been released a few months earlier. He would later recall having to pull over to the side of the road when he first heard the drum intro to that record: [Excerpt: The Ronettes, “Be My Baby”] Brian would play that record over and over, on repeat, for days at a time, and would try to absorb every nuance of the record and its production, and he tried to come up with something that could follow it. Wilson took the basic rhythm and chord sequence of the song, plus melodic fragments like the line “Be my little baby”, and reworked them into a song that clearly owes a lot to its inspiration, but which stands on its own: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Don’t Worry Baby”] Phil Spector turned the song down, and so the Beach Boys recorded it themselves, and I have to say that this was only a good thing — Ronnie Spector recorded a solo version of it many decades later, and it’s a fine performance, but the lyric misses something when it’s sung by a woman rather than a man. That lyric was by Roger Christian, and in it we see the tension between the more emotional themes that Wilson wanted to explore and the surf and car lyrics that had made up the majority of their singles to this point. The lyric is ostensibly about a car race, and indeed it seems to be setting up precisely the kind of situation that was common in teen tragedy records of the period. The protagonist sings “I guess I should have kept my mouth shut when I started to brag about my car,  but I can’t back down now because I pushed the other guys too far”, and the whole lyric is focused on his terror of an upcoming race.  This seems intended to lead to the kind of situation that we see in “Dead Man’s Curve”, or “Tell Laura I Love Her”, or in another teen tragedy song we’ll be looking at in a couple of weeks, with the protagonist dead in a car crash. But instead, this is short-circuited. The protagonist’s fears are allayed by his girlfriend: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Don’t Worry Baby”] What we have here is someone trying to deal with a particular kind of anxiety brought about by what we now refer to as toxic masculinity. The protagonist has been showing off about his driving skills in front of his peers, and has now found himself in a situation that he can’t cope with. He’s saved by a figure we’ll see a lot more of in Brian’s songs, whoever the lyricist, the supernaturally good woman who understands the protagonist and loves him despite, or because of, his faults, even though she’s too good for him. Obviously, one can point to all sorts of reasons why this figure might be considered problematic — the idea that the man is unable to deal with his own emotional problems without a woman fixing him — but there’s an emotional truth to it that one doesn’t get in much music of the era, and even if it’s a somewhat flawed view of gender relations, it speaks to a very particular kind of insecurity at the inability to live up to traditional masculine roles, and is all the more affecting when it’s paired with the braggadocio of the A-side. The combination means we see the bragging and posturing on the A-side as just a facade, covering over the real emotional fragility of the narrator. Each side reinforces the other, and the combination is one of the most perfect pairings ever released as a single. “Don’t Worry Baby”, released as “I Get Around”’s B-side, made the charts in its own right peaking at number twenty-four. The B-side to the next single further elaborated on the themes of “Don’t Worry Baby”: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “She Knows Me Too Well”] This repurposing of the emotional and musical style of girl-group songs to deal with the emotional vulnerability that comes from acknowledging and attempting to process toxic masculinity is something that few other songwriters were capable of at this point – only some of John Lennon’s work a couple of years later comes close to dealing with this very real area of the emotional landscape, and Lennon, like Wilson, often does so by using the figure of the perfect woman who will save the protagonist. In 1964, the group once again released four albums – Shut Down vol.2, All Summer Long, a live album, and a Christmas album – and they also did most of the work on yet another album, The Beach Boys Today!, which would be released in early 1965. As these recordings progressed, Brian Wilson was more and more ambitious, both in terms of the emotional effect of the music and his arrangements, increasingly using session musicians to augment the group, and trying for a variant on Phil Spector’s production style, but one which emphasised gentle fragility rather than sturm und drang. Possibly the greatest track he created in 1964 ended up not being used by the Beach Boys, though, but was given to Glen Campbell: [Excerpt: Glen Campbell, “Guess I’m Dumb”] Campbell got given that track because of an enormous favour he’d done the group. The mental strain of touring had finally got too much for Brian, and in December, on a plane to Texas, he’d had a breakdown, screaming on the plane and refusing to get off. Eventually, they coaxed him off the plane, and he’d managed to get through that night’s show, but had flown back to LA straight after. Campbell, who was a session guitarist who had played on a number of the Beach Boys’ recordings, and had a minor career as a singer at this point, had flown out at almost no notice and for the next five months he replaced Brian on stage for most of their shows, before the group got a permanent replacement in. Brian Wilson had retired from the road, and the hope was that by doing so, he would reduce the strain on himself enough that he could keep writing and producing for the group without making his mental health worse. And for a while, at least, that seemed to be how it worked out. We’ll take a look at the results in a few weeks’ time.

Episode one hundred and seventeen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Don't Worry Baby" by the Beach Boys, and how the years 1963 and 1964 saw a radical evolution in the sound and subject matter of the Beach Boys' work. 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 "You're No Good" by the Swinging Blue Jeans. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more---- ERRATA: I say that the Surfin' USA album was released only four months after Surfin' Safari. It was actually over five months. Also, for some reason I pronounce Nik Venet's name as if he were French here. I believe that's incorrect and his name is actually pronounced “Vennit”, though I'm not 100% sure. More importantly, I say that "Sweet Little Sixteen" wasn't a big hit, when of course it made number two on the charts.    Resources There is no Mixcloud this week, because there were too many Beach Boys songs in the episode. I used many resources for this episode, most of which will be used in future Beach Boys episodes too. It's difficult to enumerate everything here, because I have been an active member of the Beach Boys fan community for twenty-four years, and have at times just used my accumulated knowledge for this. But the resources I list here are ones I've checked for specific things. Becoming the Beach Boys by James B. Murphy is an in-depth look at the group's early years, up to the end of 1963. Stephen McParland has published many, many books on the California surf and hot-rod music scenes, including several on both the Beach Boys and Gary Usher.  His books can be found at https://payhip.com/CMusicBooks Andrew Doe's Bellagio 10452 site is an invaluable resource. Jon Stebbins' The Beach Boys FAQ is a good balance between accuracy and readability. Stebbins also co-wrote The Lost Beach Boy, David Marks' autobiography. And Philip Lambert's Inside the Music of Brian Wilson is an excellent, though sadly out of print, musicological analysis of Wilson's music from 1962 through 67. The Beach Boys' Morgan recordings and all the outtakes from them can be found on this 2-CD set. As a good starting point for the Beach Boys' music, I would recommend this budget-priced three-CD set, which has a surprisingly good selection of their material on it. Transcript Today, we're going to take our second look at the Beach Boys, and we're going to look at their evolution through 1963 and 1964, as they responded to the threat from the Beatles by turning to ever more sophisticated music, even as they went through a variety of personal crises. We're going to look at a period in which they released four albums a year, had three lineup changes, and saw their first number one – and at a song which, despite being a B-side, regularly makes lists of the best singles of all time. We're going to look at “Don't Worry Baby”: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Don't Worry Baby"] When we left the Beach Boys, they had just secured a contract with Capitol Records, and released their first national hit, "Surfin' Safari" backed with "409". Since then we've also seen Brian Wilson working with several songwriting collaborators to write hits for Jan and Dean. But now we need to double back and look at what Brian was doing with his main band in that time.  After "Surfin' Safari" was a hit, in one of the many incomprehensible decisions made in the Beach Boys' career, Capitol decided to follow it up with an album track that Brian and Gary Usher had written, "Ten Little Indians". That track, a surf-rock version of the nursery rhyme with the group chanting "Kemo sabe" in the backing vocals, made only number forty-nine on the charts, and frankly didn't deserve to do even that well. Some have suggested, in fact that the record was released at the instigation of Murry Wilson, who was both Brian, Carl, and Dennis Wilson's father and the group's manager, as a way of weakening Usher's influence with the group, as Murry didn't want outsiders interfering in what he saw as a family business.  After realising the folly of deviating from the formula, the group's next single followed the same pattern as their first hit. The B-side was "Shut Down", a car song co-written by Brian and Roger Christian, who you may remember from the episode on "Surf City" as having been brought in to help Brian with car lyrics. "Shut Down" is most notable for being one of the very small number of Beach Boys records to feature an instrumental contribution from Mike Love, the group's lead singer. His two-note saxophone solo comes in for some mockery from the group's fans, but actually fits the record extremely well: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Shut Down"]  "Shut Down" was a top thirty hit, but it was the A-side that was the really big hit. Just as their first hit had had a surf song on the A-side and a car song on the B-side, so did this single. Brian Wilson had been inspired by Chuck Berry's "Sweet Little Sixteen", and in particular the opening verse, which had just listed a lot of places: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "Sweet Little Sixteen"] He might well also have been thinking of Chubby Checker's minor hit, "Twistin' USA", which listed places in America where people might be twisting: [Excerpt: Chubby Checker, "Twistin' USA"] Brian had taken Berry's melody and the place-name recitation, and with the help of his girlfriend's brother, and some input from Mike Love, had turned it into a song listing all the places that people could be surfing -- at least, they could "if everybody had an ocean": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Surfin' USA"] "Surfin' USA" became a huge hit, reaching number two on the charts, and later being named by Billboard as the biggest hit of 1963, but unfortunately for Brian that didn't result in a financial windfall for him as the songwriter. As the song was so close to "Sweet Little Sixteen", Chuck Berry got the sole songwriting credit -- one of the only times in rock music history where a white artist has ripped off a Black one and the Black artist has actually benefited from it. And Berry definitely did benefit -- "Sweet Little Sixteen", while a great record, had never been a particularly big hit, while "Surfin' USA" is to this day regularly heard on oldies radio and used in commercials and films. But that success meant extra work, and a lot of it. "Surfin' USA" was the title song of the group's second album, released in March 1963 only four months after their first, and they would release two more albums before the end of the year -- Surfer Girl in September and Little Deuce Coupe in October. Not only were they having to churn out a quite staggering amount of product -- though Little Deuce Coupe featured four songs recycled from their earlier albums -- but Brian Wilson, as well as writing or co-writing all their original material, started producing the records as well, as he was unhappy with Nik Venet's production on the first album. Not only that, but as well as making the Beach Boys' records, Wilson was also writing for Jan and Dean, and he had also started making records on the side with Gary Usher, doing things like making a "Loco-Motion" knock-off, "The Revolution", released under the name Rachel and the Revolvers: [Excerpt: Rachel and the Revolvers, "The Revolution"] According to some sources, Usher and Wilson found the singer for that track by the simple expedient of driving to Watts and asking the first Black teenage girl they saw if she could sing. Other sources say they hired a professional session singer -- some say it was Betty Everett, but given that that's the name of a famous singer from the period who lived in the Mid-West, I think people are confusing her for Betty Willis, another singer who gets named as a possibility, who lived in LA and who certainly sounds like the same person: [Excerpt: Betty Willis, "Act Naturally"] Wilson was also in the process of breaking up with his girlfriend and starting a relationship with a young woman named Marilyn Rovell. Rovell, along with her sister Diane, and their cousin, Ginger Blake, had formed a girl group, and Brian was writing and producing records for them as well: [Excerpt: The Honeys, "The One You Can't Have"] As well as making all these records, the Beach Boys were touring intensively, to the point that on one day in June the group were actually booked in for four shows in the same day.  Unsurprisingly, Brian decided that this was too much for one person, and so in April 1963, just after the release of "Surfin' USA", he decided to quit touring with the group. Luckily, there was a replacement on hand. Alan Jardine had been a member of the Beach Boys on their very first single, but had decided to quit the group to go off to university. A year later, that seemed like a bad decision, and when Brian called him up and asked him to rejoin the band, he eagerly agreed. For now, Alan was not going to be a proper member of the group, but he would substitute for Brian on the group's tour of the Midwest that Spring, and on many of the shows they performed over the summer -- he could play the bass, which was the instrument that Brian played on stage, and he could sing Brian's parts, and so while the Beach Boys still officially consisted of Brian, Carl, and Dennis Wilson, Mike Love, and David Marks, the group that was on tour was Carl, Dennis, Mike, David, and Alan, though Brian would sometimes appear for important shows. Jardine also started recording with the group, though he would not get credited on the covers of the first couple of albums on which he appeared. This made a huge change to the sound of the Beach Boys in the studio, as Jardine playing bass allowed Brian Wilson to play keyboards, while Jardine also added to the group's vocal harmonies. And this was a major change. Up to this point, the Beach Boys' records had had only rudimentary harmonies. While Brian was an excellent falsetto singer, and Mike a very good bass, the other three members of the group were less accomplished. Carl would grow to be one of the great vocalists of all time, but at this point was still in his early teens and had a thin voice. Dennis' voice was also a little thin at this point, and he was behind the drum kit, which meant he didn't get to sing live, and David Marks was apparently not allowed to sing on the records at all, other than taking a single joint lead with Carl on the first album. With the addition of Jardine, Brian now had another singer as strong as himself and Love, and the Surfer Girl album, the first one on which Jardine appears, sees Brian expanding from the rather rudimentary vocal arrangements of the first two albums to something that incorporates a lot more of the influence of the Four Freshmen. You can hear this most startlingly on "In My Room". This is one of the first songs on which Jardine took part in the studio, though he's actually not very audible in the vocal arrangement, which instead concentrates on the three brothers. "In My Room" is a major, major, step forward in the group's sound, in the themes that would appear in their songwriting for the next few years, and in the juxtaposition of the lyrical theme and the musical arrangement.  The song's lyrics, written by Gary Usher but inspired by Wilson's experiences, are about solitude, and the song starts out with Brian singing alone, but then Brian moves up to the third note of the scale and Carl comes in under him, singing the note Brian started on. Then they both move up again, Brian to the fifth and Carl to the third, with Dennis joining in on the note that Brian had started on, before Mike and Alan finally also join in. Brian is singing about being alone, but he has his family with him, supporting him:  [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "In My Room"] This new lineup of the group, with Alan augmenting the other five, might even have lasted, except for a chain of events that started on David Marks' fifteenth birthday. Murry Wilson, who was still managing the group at this point, had never liked the idea of someone from outside the family being an equal member, and was particularly annoyed at David because Murry had tried to have an affair with David's mother, which hadn't worked out well for him.  But then on Marks' fifteenth birthday, he and Dennis Wilson both caught a sexually transmitted infection from the same sex worker, and when Murry Wilson found this out -- as he had to, as he needed to pay their doctor's bills -- he became furious and started screaming at the whole group.  At that point, David had had enough. His mother had been telling him that he was the real talent in the group and he didn't need those Wilsons, and as a fifteen-year-old kid he didn't have the understanding to realise that this might not be entirely true. He said "OK, I quit". At first, the rest of the group thought that he was joking, and even he wasn't at all sure that he wanted to leave the group altogether. He remained in the band for the next month, but Murry Wilson kept reminding his sons that Marks had quit and that they'd all heard him, and refused to speak directly to him -- anything that Murry wanted to say to David, he said to Carl, who passed the message on.  And even though the rest of the group definitely wanted David to stay -- especially Brian, who liked having the freedom not to go out on tour, and Carl, who had been the one who'd lobbied to bring his friend into the group in the first place -- David was still, as the youngest member, the only one who didn't sing, and the only one not part of the family, regarded by the others as somewhat lesser than the rest of the band.  David became increasingly frustrated, especially when they were recording the Little Deuce Coupe album. That album was made up entirely of songs about cars, and the group were so short of material that the album ended up being filled out with four songs from earlier albums, including two from the Surfer Girl album released only the previous month. Yet when David tried to persuade Brian to have the group record his song "Kustom Kar Show", Brian told David that he wasn't ready to be writing songs for the group.  All this, plus pressure from David's parents to make him more of a focal point of the group, led to his resignation eventually being accepted, and backdated to the original date he quit. He played his last show with the group on October the fifth 1963, and then formed his own band, the Marksmen, who signed to A&M:  [Excerpt: Dave and the Marksmen, "Kustom Kar Show"] There have been rumours that Murry Wilson threatened DJs that the Beach Boys wouldn't co-operate with them if they played Marksmen records, but in truth, listening to the records the Marksmen made during their two years of existence, it's quite obvious why they weren't played -- they were fairly shoddy-sounding garage rock records, with little to commend them. Indeed, they actually sound somewhat better now than they would have done at the time -- some of Marks' flatter and more affectless vocals prefigure the sound of some punk singers, but not in a way that would have had any commercial potential in 1963. Meanwhile, the Beach Boys continued, with Alan Jardine buying a Stratocaster and switching to rhythm guitar, and Brian Wilson resigning himself to having to perform live, at least at the moment, and returning to his old role on the bass. Jardine was now, for publicity purposes, a full member of the group, though he would remain on a salary rather than an equal partner for many years -- Murry Wilson didn't want to make the same mistake with him that he had with Marks. And there was still the constant need for new material, which didn't let up. Brian's songwriting was progressing at a furious pace, and that can be seen nowhere better than on "The Warmth of the Sun", a song he wrote, with Love writing the lyrics, around the time of the Kennedy assassination -- the two men have differed over the years over whether it was written the night before or the night after the assassination. "The Warmth of the Sun" is quite staggeringly harmonically sophisticated. We've talked before in this podcast about the standard doo-wop progression -- the one, minor sixth, minor second, fifth progression that you get in about a million songs: [demonstrates] "The Warmth of the Sun" starts out that way -- its first two chords are C, Am, played in the standard arpeggiated way one expects from that kind of song: [demonstrates] You'd expect from that  that the song would go C, Am, Dm, G or C, Am, F, G. But instead of moving to Dm or F, as one normally would, the song moves to E flat, and *starts the progression over*, a minor third up, so you have: [demonstrates] It then stops that progression after two bars, moves back to the Dm one would expect from the original progression, and stays there for twice as long as normal, before moving on to the normal G -- and then throwing in a G augmented at the end, which is a normal G chord but with the D note raised to E flat, so it ties in to that original unexpected chord change. And it does all this *in the opening line of the song*: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "The Warmth of the Sun"] This is harmonic sophistication on a totally different order from anything else that was being done in teen pop music at the time -- it was far closer to the modern jazz harmonies of the Four Freshmen that Brian loved than to doo-wop. The new five-piece lineup of the group recorded that on January the first, 1964, and on the same day they recorded a song that combined two of Brian's other big influences. "Fun Fun Fun" had lyrics by Mike Love -- some of his wittiest -- and starts out with an intro taken straight from "Johnny B. Goode": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Fun Fun Fun"] But while the rest of the track keeps the same feel as the Chuck Berry song, the verse goes in a different harmonic direction, and actually owes a lot to "Da Doo Ron Ron". Instead of using a blues progression, as Berry normally would, the verse uses the same I-IV-I-V progression that "Da Doo Ron Ron"'s chorus does, but uses it to very different effect: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Fun Fun Fun"] That became the group's fourth top ten hit, and made number five on the charts -- but the group suddenly had some real competition. At numbers one, two, and three were the Beatles. Brian Wilson realised that he needed to up his game if he was going to compete, and he did. In April 1964 he started working on a new single. By this time, while the Beach Boys themselves were still playing most of the instruments, Brian was bringing in additional musicians to augment them, and expanding his instrumental palette. The basic track was the core members of the band -- Carl playing both lead and rhythm guitar, Alan playing bass, and Dennis playing drums, with Brian on keyboards -- but there were two further bass players, Glen Campbell and Ray Pohlman, thickening the sound on six-string bass, plus two saxophones, and Hal Blaine adding percussion.  And the main instrument providing chordal support wasn't guitar or organ, as it usually had been, but a harpsichord, an instrument Brian would use a lot over the next few years: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "I Get Around (backing track)"] The recording session for that backing track was also another breaking point for the band. Murry Wilson, himself a frustrated songwriter and producer, was at the session and kept insisting that there was a problem with the bassline. Eventually, Brian had enough of his father's interference, and fired him as the band's manager. Murry would continue to keep trying to interfere in his children's career, but this was the point at which the Beach Boys finally took control over their own futures. A few days later, they reconvened in the studio to record the vocals for what would become their first number one hit: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "I Get Around"] It's fascinating to see that even this early in the group's career, and on one of their biggest, summeriest hits, there's already a tension in the lyrics, a sense of wanting to move on -- "I'm getting bugged driving up and down the same old strip/I've got to find a new place where the kids are hip". The lyrics are Love's, but as is so often the case with Brian Wilson's collaborations, Love seems to have been expressing something that Wilson was feeling at the time. The Beach Boys had risen to the challenge from the Beatles, in a way that few other American musicians could, and "I Get Around" was good enough that it made the top ten in the UK, and became a particular favourite in the Mod subculture in London. The group would only become more popular over the next few years in the UK, a new place where the kids were hip. "I Get Around" is a worthy classic, but the B-side, "Don't Worry Baby", is if anything even better. It had been recorded in January, and had already been released on their Shut Down vol 2 album in March. It had originally been intended for the Ronettes, and was inspired by "Be My Baby", which had astonished Brian Wilson when it had been released a few months earlier. He would later recall having to pull over to the side of the road when he first heard the drum intro to that record: [Excerpt: The Ronettes, "Be My Baby"] Brian would play that record over and over, on repeat, for days at a time, and would try to absorb every nuance of the record and its production, and he tried to come up with something that could follow it. Wilson took the basic rhythm and chord sequence of the song, plus melodic fragments like the line "Be my little baby", and reworked them into a song that clearly owes a lot to its inspiration, but which stands on its own: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Don't Worry Baby"] Phil Spector turned the song down, and so the Beach Boys recorded it themselves, and I have to say that this was only a good thing -- Ronnie Spector recorded a solo version of it many decades later, and it's a fine performance, but the lyric misses something when it's sung by a woman rather than a man. That lyric was by Roger Christian, and in it we see the tension between the more emotional themes that Wilson wanted to explore and the surf and car lyrics that had made up the majority of their singles to this point. The lyric is ostensibly about a car race, and indeed it seems to be setting up precisely the kind of situation that was common in teen tragedy records of the period. The protagonist sings "I guess I should have kept my mouth shut when I started to brag about my car,  but I can't back down now because I pushed the other guys too far", and the whole lyric is focused on his terror of an upcoming race.  This seems intended to lead to the kind of situation that we see in "Dead Man's Curve", or “Tell Laura I Love Her”, or in another teen tragedy song we'll be looking at in a couple of weeks, with the protagonist dead in a car crash. But instead, this is short-circuited. The protagonist's fears are allayed by his girlfriend: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Don't Worry Baby"] What we have here is someone trying to deal with a particular kind of anxiety brought about by what we now refer to as toxic masculinity. The protagonist has been showing off about his driving skills in front of his peers, and has now found himself in a situation that he can't cope with. He's saved by a figure we'll see a lot more of in Brian's songs, whoever the lyricist, the supernaturally good woman who understands the protagonist and loves him despite, or because of, his faults, even though she's too good for him. Obviously, one can point to all sorts of reasons why this figure might be considered problematic -- the idea that the man is unable to deal with his own emotional problems without a woman fixing him -- but there's an emotional truth to it that one doesn't get in much music of the era, and even if it's a somewhat flawed view of gender relations, it speaks to a very particular kind of insecurity at the inability to live up to traditional masculine roles, and is all the more affecting when it's paired with the braggadocio of the A-side. The combination means we see the bragging and posturing on the A-side as just a facade, covering over the real emotional fragility of the narrator. Each side reinforces the other, and the combination is one of the most perfect pairings ever released as a single. "Don't Worry Baby", released as "I Get Around”'s B-side, made the charts in its own right peaking at number twenty-four. The B-side to the next single further elaborated on the themes of "Don't Worry Baby": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "She Knows Me Too Well"] This repurposing of the emotional and musical style of girl-group songs to deal with the emotional vulnerability that comes from acknowledging and attempting to process toxic masculinity is something that few other songwriters were capable of at this point – only some of John Lennon's work a couple of years later comes close to dealing with this very real area of the emotional landscape, and Lennon, like Wilson, often does so by using the figure of the perfect woman who will save the protagonist. In 1964, the group once again released four albums – Shut Down vol.2, All Summer Long, a live album, and a Christmas album – and they also did most of the work on yet another album, The Beach Boys Today!, which would be released in early 1965. As these recordings progressed, Brian Wilson was more and more ambitious, both in terms of the emotional effect of the music and his arrangements, increasingly using session musicians to augment the group, and trying for a variant on Phil Spector's production style, but one which emphasised gentle fragility rather than sturm und drang. Possibly the greatest track he created in 1964 ended up not being used by the Beach Boys, though, but was given to Glen Campbell: [Excerpt: Glen Campbell, "Guess I'm Dumb"] Campbell got given that track because of an enormous favour he'd done the group. The mental strain of touring had finally got too much for Brian, and in December, on a plane to Texas, he'd had a breakdown, screaming on the plane and refusing to get off. Eventually, they coaxed him off the plane, and he'd managed to get through that night's show, but had flown back to LA straight after. Campbell, who was a session guitarist who had played on a number of the Beach Boys' recordings, and had a minor career as a singer at this point, had flown out at almost no notice and for the next five months he replaced Brian on stage for most of their shows, before the group got a permanent replacement in. Brian Wilson had retired from the road, and the hope was that by doing so, he would reduce the strain on himself enough that he could keep writing and producing for the group without making his mental health worse. And for a while, at least, that seemed to be how it worked out. We'll take a look at the results in a few weeks' time.

Vocalisten, Jonathan Jeremiah, Four Freshmen, Jose James, Tania Maria, Michael Kiwanuka en Billie Holiday. Reacties: jazztrain@studio040.nl

This week there are two episiodes of the podcast going up, both of them longer than normal. This one, episode ninety-nine, is on “Surfin’ Safari” by the Beach Boys, and the group’s roots in LA, and is fifty minutes long. 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 “Misirlou” by Dick Dale and the Deltones. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—- Resources No Mixclouds this week, as both episodes have far too many songs by one artist. The mixclouds will be back with episode 101. I used many resources for this episode, most of which will be used in future Beach Boys episodes too. It’s difficult to enumerate everything here, because I have been an active member of the Beach Boys fan community for twenty-three years, and have at times just used my accumulated knowledge for this. But the resources I list here are ones I’ve checked for specific things. Becoming the Beach Boys by James B. Murphy is an in-depth look at the group’s early years. Stephen McParland has published many, many books on the California surf and hot-rod music scenes, including several on both the Beach Boys and Gary Usher. The Beach Boys: Inception and Creation is the one I used most here, but I referred to several. His books can be found at https://payhip.com/CMusicBooks Andrew Doe’s Bellagio 10452 site is an invaluable resource. Jon Stebbins’ The Beach Boys FAQ is a good balance between accuracy and readability. And Philip Lambert’s Inside the Music of Brian Wilson is an excellent, though sadly out of print, musicological analysis of Wilson’s music from 1962 through 67. The Beach Boys’ Morgan recordings and all the outtakes from them can be found on this 2-CD set. The Surfin’ Safari album is now in the public domain, and so can be found cheaply, but the best version to get is still the twofer CD with the Surfin’ USA album. *But*, those two albums are fairly weak, the Beach Boys in their early years were not really an album band, and you will want to investigate them further. I would recommend, rather than the two albums linked above, starting with this budget-priced three-CD set, which has a surprisingly good selection of their material on it.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today, there are going to be two podcast episodes. This one, episode ninety-nine, will be a normal-length episode, or maybe slightly longer than normal, and episode one hundred, which will follow straight after it, will be a super-length one that’s at least three times the normal length of one of these podcasts. I’m releasing them together, because the two episodes really do go together. We’ve talked recently about how we’re getting into the sixties of the popular imagination, and those 1960s began, specifically, in October 1962. That was the month of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which saw the world almost end. It was the month that James Brown released Live at the Apollo — an album we’ll talk about in a few weeks’ time. And if you want one specific date that the 1960s started, it was October the fifth, 1962. On that date, a film came out that we mentioned last week — Doctor No, the first ever James Bond film. It was also the date that two records were released on EMI in Britain. One was a new release by a British band, the other a record originally released a few months earlier in the USA, by an American band. Both bands had previously released records on much smaller labels, to no success other than very locally, but this was their first to be released on a major label, and had a slightly different lineup from those earlier releases. Both bands would influence each other, and go on to be the most successful band from their respective country in the next decade. Both bands would revolutionise popular music. And the two bands would even be filed next to each other alphabetically, both starting “the Bea”. In episode one hundred, we’re going to look at “Love Me Do” by the Beatles, but right now, in episode ninety-nine, we’re going to look at “Surfin’ Safari” by the Beach Boys: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Surfin’ Safari”] Before I start this story properly, I just want to say something — there are a lot of different accounts of the formation of the Beach Boys, and those accounts are all different. What I’ve tried to do here is take one plausible account of how the group formed and tell it in a reasonable length of time. If you read the books I link in the show notes, you might find some disagreements about the precise order of some of these events, or some details I’ve glossed over. This episode is already running long, and I didn’t want to get into that stuff, but it’s important that I stress that this is just as accurate as I can get in the length of an episode. The Beach Boys really were boys when they made their first records. David Marks, their youngest member, was only thirteen when “Surfin’ Safari” came out, and Mike Love, the group’s oldest member, was twenty-one.  So, as you might imagine when we’re talking about children, the story really starts with the older generation. In particular, we want to start with Hite and Dorinda Morgan. The Morgans were part-time music business people in Los Angeles in the fifties. Hite Morgan owned an industrial flooring company, and that was his main source of income — putting in floors at warehouses and factories that could withstand the particular stresses that such industrial sites faced. But while that work was hard, it was well-paying and didn’t take too much time. The company would take on two or three expensive jobs a year, and for the rest of the year Hite would have the money and time to help his wife with her work as a songwriter. She’d collaborated with Spade Cooley, one of the most famous Western Swing musicians of the forties, and she’d also co-written “Don’t Put All Your Dreams in One Basket” for Ray Charles in 1948: [Excerpt: Ray Charles, “Don’t Put All Your Dreams in One Basket”] Hite and Dorinda’s son, Bruce, was also a songwriter, though I’ve seen some claims that often the songs credited to him were actually written by his mother, who gave him credits in order to encourage him. One of Bruce Morgan’s earliest songs was a piece called “Proverb Boogie”, which was actually credited under his father’s name, and which Louis Jordan retitled to “Heed My Warning” and took a co-writing credit on: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Heed My Warning”] Eventually the Morgans also started their own publishing company, and built their own small demo studio, which they used to use to record cheap demos for many other songwriters and performers. The Morgans were only very minor players in the music industry, but they were friendly with many of the big names on the LA R&B scene, and knew people like John Dolphin, Bumps Blackwell, Sam Cooke, and the Hollywood Flames. Bruce Morgan would talk in interviews about Bumps Blackwell calling round to see his father and telling him about this new song “You Send Me” he was going to record with Cooke. But although nobody could have realised it at the time, or for many years later, the Morgans’ place in music history would be cemented in 1952, when Hite Morgan, working at his day job, met a man named Murry Wilson, who ran a machine-tool company based in Hawthorne, a small town in southwestern Los Angeles County. It turned out that Wilson, like Dorinda Morgan, was an aspiring songwriter, and Hite Morgan signed him up to their publishing company, Guild Music. Wilson’s tastes in music were already becoming old-fashioned even in the very early 1950s, but given the style of music he was working in he was a moderately talented writer. His proudest moment was writing a song called “Two Step Side Step” for the Morgans, which was performed on TV by Lawrence Welk — Murry gathered the whole family round the television to watch his song being performed.  That song was a moderate success – it was never a hit for anyone, but it was recorded by several country artists, including the rockabilly singer Bonnie Lou, and most interestingly for our purposes by Johnny Lee Wills, Bob Wills’ brother: [Excerpt: Johnny Lee Wills, “Two Step Side Step”] Wilson wrote a few other songs for the Morgans, of which the most successful was “Tabarin”, which was recorded by the Tangiers — one of the several names under which the Hollywood Flames performed. Gaynel Hodge would later speak fondly of Murry Wilson, and how he was always bragging about his talented kids: [Excerpt: The Tangiers, “Tabarin”] But as the fifties progressed, the Morgans published fewer and fewer of Wilson’s songs, and none of them were hits. But the Morgans and Wilson stayed in touch, and around 1958 he heard from them about an opportunity for one of those talented kids. Dorinda Morgan had written a song called “Chapel of Love” — not the same song as the famous one by the Dixie Cups — and Art Laboe had decided that that song would be perfect as the first record for his new label, Original Sound. Laboe was putting together a new group to sing it, called the Hitmakers, which was based around Val Poliuto. Poliuto had been the tenor singer of an integrated vocal group — two Black members, one white, and one Hispanic — which had gone by the names The Shadows and The Miracles before dismissing both names as being unlikely to lead to any success and taking the name The Jaguars at the suggestion of, of all people, Stan Freberg, the comedian and voice actor. The Jaguars had never had much commercial success, but they’d recorded a version of “The Way You Look Tonight” which became a classic when Laboe included it on the massively successful “Oldies But Goodies”, the first doo-wop nostalgia album: [Excerpt: The Jaguars, “The Way You Look Tonight”] The Jaguars continued for many years, and at one point had Richard Berry guest as an extra vocalist on some of their tracks, but as with so many of the LA vocal groups we’ve looked at from the fifties, they all had their fingers in multiple pies, and so Poliuto was to be in this new group, along with Bobby Adams of the Calvanes, who had been taught to sing R&B by Cornell Gunter and who had recorded for Dootsie Williams: [Excerpt: The Calvanes, “Crazy Over You”] Those two were to be joined by two other singers, who nobody involved can remember much about except that their first names were Don and Duke, but Art Laboe also wanted a new young singer to sing the lead, and was auditioning singers. Murry Wilson suggested to the Morgans that his young son Brian might be suitable for the role, and he auditioned, but Laboe thought he was too young, and the role went to a singer called Rodney Goodens instead: [Excerpt: The Hitmakers, “Chapel of Love”] So the audition was a failure, but it was a first contact between Brian Wilson and the Morgans, and also introduced Brian to Val Poliuto, from whom he would learn a lot about music for the next few years. Brian was a very sensitive kid, the oldest of three brothers, and someone who seemed to have some difficulty dealing with other people — possibly because his father was abusive towards him and his brothers, leaving him frightened of many aspects of life. He did, though, share with his father a love of music, and he had a remarkable ear — singular, as he’s deaf in one ear. He had perfect pitch, a great recollection for melodies — play him something once and it would stay in his brain — and from a very young age he gravitated towards sweet-sounding music. He particularly loved Glenn Miller’s version of “Rhapsody in Blue” as a child: [Excerpt: The Glenn Miller Orchestra, “Rhapsody in Blue”] But his big musical love was a modern harmony group called the Four Freshmen — a group made up of two brothers, their cousin, and a college friend. Modern harmony is an outdated term, but it basically meant that they were singing chords that went beyond the normal simple triads of most pop music. While there were four, obviously, of the Four Freshmen, they often achieved an effect that would normally be five-part harmony, by having the group members sing all the parts of the chord *except* the root note — they’d leave the root note to a bass instrument. So while Brian was listening to four singers, he was learning five-part harmonies. The group would also sing their harmonies in unusual inversions — they’d take one of the notes from the middle of the chord and sing it an octave lower. There was another trick that the Four Freshmen used — they varied their vocals from equal temperament.  To explain this a little bit — musical notes are based on frequencies, and the ratio between them matters. If you double the frequency of a note, you get the same note an octave up — so if you take an A at 440hz, and double the frequency to 880, you get another A, an octave up. If you go down to 220hz, you get the A an octave below. You get all the different notes by multiplying or dividing a note, so A# is A multiplied by a tiny bit more than one, and A flat is A multiplied by a tiny bit less than one. But in the middle ages, this hit a snag — A#. which is A multiplied by one and a bit, is very very slightly different from B flat, which is B multiplied by 0.9 something. And if you double those, so you go to the A# and B flat the next octave up, the difference between A# and B flat gets bigger. And this means that if you play a melody in the key of C, but then decide you want to play it in the key of B flat, you need to retune your instrument — or have instruments with separate notes for A# and B flat — or everything will sound out of tune. It’s very very hard to retune some instruments, especially ones like the piano, and also sometimes you want to play in different keys in the same piece. If you’re playing a song in C, but it goes into C# in the last chorus to give it a bit of extra momentum, you lose that extra momentum if you stop the song to retune the piano. So a different system was invented, and popularised in the Baroque era, called “equal temperament”. In that system, every note is very very slightly out of tune, but those tiny errors cancel out rather than multiply like they do in the old system. You’re sort of taking the average of A# and B flat, and calling them the same note. And to most people’s ears that sounds good enough, and it means you can have a piano without a thousand keys.  But the Four Freshmen didn’t stick to that — because you don’t need to retune your throat to hit different notes (unless you’re as bad a singer as me, anyway). They would sing B flat slightly differently than they would sing A#, and so they would get a purer vocal blend, with stronger harmonic overtones than singers who were singing the notes as placed on a piano: [Excerpt: the Four Freshmen, “It’s a Blue World”] Please note by the way that I’m taking the fact that they used those non-equal temperaments somewhat on trust — Ross Barbour of the group said they did in interviews, and he would know, but I have relatively poor pitch so if you listened to that and thought “Hang on, they’re all singing dead-on equal tempered concert pitch, what’s he talking about?”, then that’s on him. When Brian heard them singing, he instantly fell for them, and became a major, major fan of their work, especially their falsetto singer Bob Flanigan, whose voice he decided to emulate. He decided that he was going to learn how they got that sound. Every day when he got home from school, he would go to the family’s music room, where he had a piano and a record player. He would then play just a second or so of one of their records, and figure out on the piano what notes they were singing in that one second, and duplicating them himself. Then he would learn the next second of the song. He would spend hours every day on this, learning every vocal part, until he had the Four Freshmen’s entire repertoire burned into his brain, and could sing all four vocal parts to every song. Indeed, at one point when he was about sixteen — around the same time as the Art Laboe audition — Brian decided to go and visit the Four Freshmen’s manager, to find out how to form a successful vocal group of his own, and to find out more about the group themselves. After telling the manager that he could sing every part of every one of their songs, the manager challenged him with “The Day Isn’t Long Enough”, a song that they apparently had trouble with: [Excerpt: The Four Freshmen, “The Day Isn’t Long Enough”] And Brian demonstrated every harmony part perfectly. He had a couple of tape recorders at home, and he would experiment with overdubbing his own voice — recording on one tape recorder, playing it back and singing along while recording on the other. Doing this he could do his own imitations of the Four Freshmen, and even as a teenager he could sound spookily like them: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys [Brian Wilson solo recording released on a Beach Boys CD], “Happy Birthday Four Freshmen”] While Brian shared his love for this kind of sweet music with his father, he also liked the rock and roll music that was making its way onto the radio during his teen years — though again, he would gravitate towards the sweet vocal harmonies of the Everly Brothers rather than to more raucous music. He shared his love of the Everlys with his cousin Mike Love, whose tastes otherwise went more in the direction of R&B and doo-wop. Unlike Brian and his brothers, Mike attended Dorsey High School, a predominantly Black school, and his tastes were shaped by that — other graduates of the school include Billy Preston, Eric Dolphy, and Arthur Lee, to give some idea of the kind of atmosphere that Dorsey High had. He loved the Robins, and later the Coasters, and he’s been quoted as saying he “worshipped” Johnny Otis — as did every R&B lover in LA at the time. He would listen to Otis’ show on KFOX, and to Huggy Boy on KRKD. His favourite records were things like “Smokey Joe’s Cafe” by the Robins, which combined an R&B groove with witty lyrics: [Excerpt: The Robins, “Smokey Joe’s Cafe”] He also loved the music of Chuck Berry, a passion he shared with Brian’s youngest brother Carl, who also listened to Otis’ show and got Brian listening to it. While Mike was most attracted to Berry’s witty lyrics, Carl loved the guitar part — he’d loved string instruments since he was a tiny child, and he and a neighbour, David Marks, started taking guitar lessons from another neighbour, John Maus. Maus had been friends with Ritchie Valens, and had been a pallbearer at Valens’ funeral. John was recording at the time with his sister Judy, as the imaginatively-named duo “John & Judy”: [Excerpt: John & Judy, “Why This Feeling?”] John and Judy later took on a bass player called Scott Engel, and a few years after that John and Scott changed their surnames to Walker and became two thirds of The Walker Brothers. But at this time, John was still just a local guitar player, and teaching two enthusiastic kids to play guitar. Carl and David learned how to play Chuck Berry licks, and also started to learn some of the guitar instrumentals that were becoming popular at the time. At the same time, Mike would sing with Brian to pass the time, Mike singing in a bass voice while Brian took a high tenor lead. Other times, Brian would test his vocal arranging out by teaching Carl and his mother Audree vocal parts — Carl got so he could learn parts very quickly, so his big brother wouldn’t keep him around all day and he could go out and play. And sometimes their middle brother Dennis would join in — though he was more interested in going out and having fun at the beach than he was in making music. Brian was interested in nothing *but* making music — at least once he’d quit the school football team (American football, for those of you like me who parse the word to mean what it does in Britain), after he’d got hurt for the first time. But before he did that, he had managed to hurt someone else — a much smaller teammate named Alan Jardine, whose leg Brian broke in a game. Despite that, the two became friends, and would occasionally sing together — like Brian, Alan loved to sing harmonies, and they found that they had an extraordinarily good vocal blend. While Brian mostly sang with his brothers and his cousin, all of whom had a family vocal resemblance, Jardine could sound spookily similar to that family, and especially to Brian. Jardine’s voice was a little stronger and more resonant, Brian’s a little sweeter, with a fuller falsetto, but they had the kind of vocal similarity one normally only gets in family singers. However,  they didn’t start performing together properly, because they had different tastes in music — while Brian was most interested in the modern jazz harmonies of the Four Freshman, Jardine was a fan of the new folk revival groups, especially the Kingston Trio. Alan had a group called the Tikis when he was at high school, which would play Kingston Trio style material like “The Wreck of the John B”, a song that like much of the Kingston Trio’s material had been popularised by the Weavers, but which the Trio had recorded for their first album: [Excerpt: The Kingston Trio, “The Wreck of the John B”] Jardine was inspired by that to write his own song, “The Wreck of the Hesperus”, putting Longfellow’s poem to music. One of the other Tikis had a tape recorder, and they made a few stabs at recording it. They thought that they sounded pretty good, and they decided to go round to Brian Wilson’s house to see if he could help them — depending on who you ask, they either wanted him to join the band, or knew that his dad had some connection with the music business and wanted to pick his brains. When they turned up, Brian was actually out, but Audree Wilson basically had an open-door policy for local teenagers, and she told the boys about Hite and Dorinda Morgan. The Tikis took their tape to the Morgans, and the Morgans responded politely, saying that they did sound good — but they sounded like the Kingston Trio, and there were a million groups that sounded like the Kingston Trio. They needed to get an original sound. The Tikis broke up, as Alan went off to Michigan to college. But then a year later, he came back to Hawthorne and enrolled in the same community college that Brian was enrolled in. Meanwhile, the Morgans had got in touch with Gary Winfrey, Alan’s Tikis bandmate, and asked him if the Tikis would record a demo of one of Bruce Morgan’s songs. As the Tikis no longer existed, Alan and Gary formed a new group along the same lines, and invited Brian to be part of one of these sessions. That group, The Islanders made a couple of attempts at Morgan’s song, but nothing worked out. But this brought Brian back to the Morgans’ attention — at this point they’d not seen him in three years. Alan still wanted to record folk music with Brian, and at some point Brian suggested that they get his brother Carl and cousin Mike involved — and then Brian’s mother made him let his other brother Dennis join in.  The group went to see the Morgans, who once again told them that they needed some original material. Dennis piped up that the group had been fooling around with a song about surfing, and while the Morgans had never heard of the sport, they said it would be worth the group’s while finishing off the song and coming back to them. At this point, the idea of a song about surfing was something that was only in Dennis’ head, though he may have mentioned the idea to Mike at some point. Mike and the Wilsons went home and started working out the song, without Al being involved at this time — some of the rehearsal recordings we have seem to suggest that they thought Al was a little overbearing and thought of himself as a bit more professional than the others, and they didn’t want him in the group at first. While surf music was definitely already a thing, there were very few vocal surf records. Brian and Mike wrote the song together, with Mike writing most of the lyrics and coming up with his own bass vocal line, while Brian wrote the rest of the music: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Surfin’ (Rehearsal)”] None of the group other than Dennis surfed — though Mike would later start surfing a little — and so Dennis provided Mike with some surfing terms that they could add into the song. This led to what would be the first of many, many arguments about songwriting credit among the group, as Dennis claimed that he should get some credit for his contribution, while Mike disagreed: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Surfin’ (Rehearsal)”] The credit was eventually assigned to Brian Wilson and Mike Love. Eventually, they finished the song, and decided that they *would* get Al Jardine back into the group after all. When Murry and Audree Wilson went away for a long weekend and left their boys some money for emergencies, the group saw their chance. They took that money, along with some more they borrowed from Al’s mother, and rented some instruments — a drum kit and a stand-up bass. They had a party at the Wilsons’ house where they played their new song and a few others, in front of their friends, before going back to the Morgans with their new song completed. For their recording session, they used that stand-up bass, which Al played, along with Carl on an acoustic guitar, giving it that Kingston Trio sound that Al liked. Dennis was the group’s drummer, but he wasn’t yet very good and instead of drums the record has Brian thumping a dustbin lid as its percussion. As well as being the lead vocalist, Mike Love was meant to be the group’s saxophone player, but he never progressed more than honking out a couple of notes, and he doesn’t play on the session. The song they came up with was oddly structured — it had a nine-bar verse and a fourteen-bar chorus, the latter of which was based around a twelve-bar blues, but extended to allow the “surf, surf with me” hook. But other than the unusual bar counts it followed the structure that the group would set up most of their early singles. The song seems at least in part to have been inspired by the song “Bermuda Shorts” by the Delroys, which is a song the group have often cited and would play in their earliest live shows: [Excerpt: The Delroys, “Bermuda Shorts”] They messed around with the structure in various ways in rehearsal, and those can be heard on the rehearsal recordings, but by the time they came into the studio they’d settled on starting with a brief statement of the chorus hook: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Surfin'”] It then goes into a verse with Mike singing a tenor lead, with the rest of the group doing block harmonies and then joining him on the last line of the verse: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Surfin'”] And then we have Mike switching down into the bass register to sing wordless doo-wop bass during the blues-based chorus, while the rest of the group again sing in block harmony: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Surfin'”] That formula would be the one that the Beach Boys would stick with for several singles to follow — the major change that would be made would be that Brian would soon start singing an independent falsetto line over the top of the choruses, rather than being in the block harmonies.  The single was licensed to Candix Records, along with a B-side written by Bruce Morgan, and it became a minor hit record, reaching number seventy-five on the national charts. But what surprised the group about the record was the name on it. They’d been calling themselves the Pendletones, because there was a brand of thick woollen shirt called Pendletons which was popular among surfers, and which the group wore.  It might also have been intended as a pun on Dick Dale’s Deltones, the preeminent surf music group of the time. But Hite Morgan had thought the name didn’t work, and they needed something that was more descriptive of the music they were doing. He’d suggested The Surfers, but Russ Regan, a record promoter, had told him there was already a group called the Surfers, and suggested another name. So the first time the Wilsons realised they were now in the Beach Boys was when they saw the record label for the first time. The group started working on follow-ups — and as they were now performing live shows to promote their records, they switched to using electric guitars when they went into the studio to record some demos in February 1962. By now, Al was playing rhythm guitar, while Brian took over on bass, now playing a bass guitar rather than the double bass Al had played. For that session, as Dennis was still not that great a drummer, Brian decided to bring in a session player, and Dennis stormed out of the studio. However, the session player was apparently flashy and overplayed, and got paid off. Brian persuaded Dennis to come back and take over on drums again, and the session resumed. Val Poliuto was also at the session, in case they needed some keyboards, but he’s not audible on any of the tracks they recorded, at least to my ears. The most likely song for a follow-up was another one by Brian and Mike. This one was very much a rewrite of “Surfin'”, but this time the verses were a more normal eight bars, and the choruses were a compromise between the standard twelve-bar blues and “Surfin'”s fourteen, landing on an unusual thirteen bars. With the electric guitars the group decided to bring in a Chuck Berry influence, and you can hear a certain similarity to songs like “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” in the rhythm and phrasing: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Surfin’ Safari [early version]”] Around this time, Brian also wrote another song — the song he generally describes as being the first song he ever wrote. Presumably, given that he’d already co-written “Surfin'”, he means that it was the first song he wrote on his own, words and music. The song was inspired, melodically, by the song “When You Wish Upon A Star” from the Disney film Pinocchio: [Excerpt: Cliff Edwards “When You Wish Upon a Star”] The song came to Brian in the car, and he challenged himself to write the whole thing in his head without going to the piano until he’d finished it. The result was a doo-wop ballad with Four Freshmen-like block harmonies, with lyrics inspired by Brian’s then girlfriend Judy Bowles, which they recorded at the same session as that version of “Surfin’ Safari”: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Surfer Girl [early version]”] At the same session, they also recorded two more songs — a song by Brian called Judy, and a surf instrumental written by Carl called “Karate”. However, shortly after that session, Al left the group. As the group had started playing electric instruments, they’d also started performing songs that were more suitable for those instruments, like “What’d I Say” and “The Twist”. Al wasn’t a fan of that kind of music, and he wanted to be singing “Tom Dooley” and “Wreck of the John B”, not “Come on baby, let’s do the Twist”. He was also quite keen on completing his university studies — he was planning on becoming a dentist — and didn’t want to spend time playing tons of small gigs when he could be working towards his degree. This was especially the case since Murry Wilson, who had by this point installed himself as the group’s manager, was booking them on all sorts of cheap dates to get them exposure. As far as Al could see, being a Beach Boy was never going to make anyone any real money, and it wasn’t worth disrupting his studies to keep playing music that he didn’t even particularly like. His place was taken by David Marks, Carl’s young friend who lived nearby. Marks was only thirteen when he joined, and apparently it caused raised eyebrows among some of the other musicians who knew the group, because he was so much younger and less experienced than the rest. Unlike Al, he was never much of a singer — he can hold a tune, and has a pleasant enough voice, but he wasn’t the exceptional harmony singer that Al was — but he was a competent rhythm player, and he and Carl had been jamming together since they’d both got guitars, and knew each other’s playing style. However, while Al was gone from the group, he wasn’t totally out of the picture, and he remained close enough that he was a part of the first ever Beach Boys spin-off side project a couple of months later. Dorinda Morgan had written a song inspired by the new children’s doll, Barbie, that had come out a couple of years before and which, like the Beach Boys, was from Hawthorne. She wanted to put together a studio group to record it, under the name Kenny and the Cadets, and Brian rounded up Carl, Al, Val Poliuto, and his mother Audree, to sing on the record for Mrs Morgan: [Excerpt: Kenny and the Cadets, “Barbie”] But after that, Al Jardine was out of the group for the moment — though he would be back sooner than anyone expected. Shortly after Al left, the new lineup went into a different studio, Western Studios, to record a new demo. Ostensibly produced by Murry Wilson, the session was actually produced by Brian and his new friend Gary Usher, who took charge in the studio and spent most of his time trying to stop Murry interfering. Gary Usher is someone about whom several books have been written, and who would have a huge influence on West Coast music in the sixties. But at this point he was an aspiring singer, songwriter, and record producer, who had been making records for a few months longer than Brian and was therefore a veteran. He’d put out his first single, “Driven Insane”, in March 1961: [Excerpt: Gary Usher, “Driven Insane”] Usher was still far from a success, but he was very good at networking, and had all sorts of minor connections within the music business. As one example, his girlfriend, Sandra Glanz, who performed under the name Ginger Blake, had just written “You Are My Answer” for Carol Connors, who had been the lead singer of the Teddy Bears but was now going solo: [Excerpt: Carol Connors, “You Are My Answer”] Connors, too, would soon become important in vocal surf music, while Ginger would play a significant part in Brian’s life. Brian had started writing songs with Gary, and they were in the studio to record some demos by Gary, and some demos by the Beach Boys of songs that Brian and Gary had written together, along with a new version of “Surfin’ Safari”. Of the two Wilson/Usher songs recorded in the session, one was a slow doo-wop styled ballad called “The Lonely Sea”, which would later become an album track, but the song that they were most interested in recording was one called “409”, which had been inspired by a new, larger, engine that Chevrolet had introduced for top-of-the-line vehicles. Musically, “409” was another song that followed the “Surfin’ Safari” formula, but it was regularised even more, lopping off the extra bar from “Surfin’ Safari”‘s chorus, and making the verses as well as the choruses into twelve-bar blues. But it still started with the hook, still had Mike sing his tenor lead in the verses, and still had him move to sing a boogie-ish bassline in the chorus while the rest of the group chanted in block harmonies over the top. But it introduced a new lyrical theme to the group — now, as well as singing about surfing and the beach, they could also sing about cars and car racing — Love credits this as being one of the main reasons for the group’s success in landlocked areas, because while there were many places in the US where you couldn’t surf, there was nowhere where people didn’t have cars. It’s also the earliest Beach Boys song over which there is an ongoing question of credit. For the first thirty years of the song’s existence, it was credited solely to Wilson and Usher, but in the early nineties Love won a share of the songwriting credit in a lawsuit in which he won credit on many, many songs he’d not been credited for. Love claims that he came up with the “She’s real fine, my 409” hook, and the “giddy up” bass vocal he sang. Usher always claimed that Love had nothing to do with the song, and that Love was always trying to take credit for things he didn’t do. It’s difficult to tell who was telling the truth, because both obviously had a financial stake in the credit (though Usher was dead by the time of the lawsuit). Usher was always very dismissive of all of the Beach Boys with the exception of Brian, and wouldn’t credit them for making any real contributions, Love’s name was definitely missed off the credits of a large number of songs to which he did make substantial contributions, including some where he wrote the whole lyric, and the bits of the song Love claims *do* sound like the kind of thing he contributed to other songs which have no credit disputes. On the other hand, Love also overreached in his claims of credit in that lawsuit, claiming to have co-written songs that were written when he wasn’t even in the same country as the writers. Where you stand on the question of whether Love deserves that credit usually depends on your views of Wilson, Love and Usher as people, and it’s not a question I’m going to get into, but I thought I should acknowledge that the question is there. While “409” was still following the same pattern as the other songs, it’s head and shoulders ahead of the Hite Morgan productions both in terms of performance and in terms of the sound. A great deal of that clearly owes to Usher, who was experimenting with things like sound effects, and so “409” starts with a recording that Brian and Usher made of Usher’s car driving up and down the street: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “409”] Meanwhile the new version of “Surfin’ Safari” was vastly superior to the recording from a couple of months earlier, with changed lyrics and a tighter performance: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Surfin’ Safari (second version)”] So at the end of the session, the group had a tape of three new songs, and Murry WIlson wanted them to take it somewhere better than Candix Records. He had a contact somewhere much better — at Capitol Records. He was going to phone Ken Nelson. Or at least, Murry *thought* he had a contact at Capitol. He phoned Ken Nelson and told him “Years ago, you did me a favour, and now I’m doing one for you. My sons have formed a group and you have the chance to sign them!” Now, setting aside the question of whether that would actually count as Murry doing Nelson a favour, there was another problem with this — Nelson had absolutely no idea who Murry Wilson was, and no recollection of ever doing him a favour. It turned out that the favour he’d done, in Murry’s eyes, was recording one of Murry’s songs — except that there’s no record of Nelson ever having been involved in a recording of a Murry Wilson song. By this time, Capitol had three A&R people, in charge of different areas. There was Voyle Gilmore, who recorded soft pop — people like Nat “King” Cole. There was Nelson, who as we’ve seen in past episodes had some rockabilly experience but was mostly country — he’d produced Gene Vincent and Wanda Jackson, but he was mostly working at this point with people like Buck Owens and the Louvin Brothers, producing some of the best country music ever recorded, but not really doing the kind of thing that the Beach Boys were doing. But the third, and youngest, A&R man was doing precisely the kind of thing the Beach Boys did. That was Nik Venet, who we met back in the episode on “LSD-25”, and who was one of the people who had been involved with the very first surf music recordings. Nelson suggested that Murry go and see Venet, and Venet was immediately impressed with the tape Murry played him — so impressed that he decided to offer the group a contract, and to release “Surfin’ Safari” backed with “409”, buying the masters from Murry rather than rerecording them. Venet also tried to get the publishing rights for the songs for Beechwood Music, a publishing company owned by Capitol’s parent company EMI (and known in the UK as Ardmore & Beechwood) but Gary Usher, who knew a bit about the business, said that he and Brian were going to set up their own publishing companies — a decision which Murry Wilson screamed at him for, but which made millions of dollars for Brian over the next few years. The single came out, and was a big hit, making number fourteen on the hot one hundred, and “409” as the B-side also scraped the lower reaches of the charts. Venet soon got the group into the studio to record an album to go with the single, with Usher adding extra backing vocals to fill out the harmonies in the absence of Al Jardine. While the Beach Boys were a self-contained group, Venet seems to have brought in his old friend Derry Weaver to add extra guitar, notably on Weaver’s song “Moon Dawg”: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Moon Dawg”] It’s perhaps unsurprising that the Beach Boys recorded that, because not only was it written by Venet’s friend, but Venet owned the publishing on the song. The group also recorded “Summertime Blues”, which was co-written by Jerry Capehart, a friend of Venet and Weaver’s who also may have appeared on the album in some capacity. Both those songs fit the group, but their choice was clearly influenced by factors other than the purely musical, and very soon Brian Wilson would get sick of having his music interfered with by Venet.  The album came out on October 1, and a few days later the single was released in the UK, several months after its release in the US. And on the same day, a British group who *had* signed to have their single published by Ardmore & Beechwood put out their own single on another EMI label. And we’re going to look at that in the next episode…

This week there are two episiodes of the podcast going up, both of them longer than normal. This one, episode ninety-nine, is on "Surfin' Safari" by the Beach Boys, and the group's roots in LA, and is fifty minutes long. 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 "Misirlou" by Dick Dale and the Deltones. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more---- Resources No Mixclouds this week, as both episodes have far too many songs by one artist. The mixclouds will be back with episode 101. I used many resources for this episode, most of which will be used in future Beach Boys episodes too. It's difficult to enumerate everything here, because I have been an active member of the Beach Boys fan community for twenty-three years, and have at times just used my accumulated knowledge for this. But the resources I list here are ones I've checked for specific things. Becoming the Beach Boys by James B. Murphy is an in-depth look at the group's early years. Stephen McParland has published many, many books on the California surf and hot-rod music scenes, including several on both the Beach Boys and Gary Usher. The Beach Boys: Inception and Creation is the one I used most here, but I referred to several. His books can be found at https://payhip.com/CMusicBooks Andrew Doe's Bellagio 10452 site is an invaluable resource. Jon Stebbins' The Beach Boys FAQ is a good balance between accuracy and readability. And Philip Lambert's Inside the Music of Brian Wilson is an excellent, though sadly out of print, musicological analysis of Wilson's music from 1962 through 67. The Beach Boys' Morgan recordings and all the outtakes from them can be found on this 2-CD set. The Surfin' Safari album is now in the public domain, and so can be found cheaply, but the best version to get is still the twofer CD with the Surfin' USA album. *But*, those two albums are fairly weak, the Beach Boys in their early years were not really an album band, and you will want to investigate them further. I would recommend, rather than the two albums linked above, starting with this budget-priced three-CD set, which has a surprisingly good selection of their material on it.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today, there are going to be two podcast episodes. This one, episode ninety-nine, will be a normal-length episode, or maybe slightly longer than normal, and episode one hundred, which will follow straight after it, will be a super-length one that's at least three times the normal length of one of these podcasts. I'm releasing them together, because the two episodes really do go together. We've talked recently about how we're getting into the sixties of the popular imagination, and those 1960s began, specifically, in October 1962. That was the month of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which saw the world almost end. It was the month that James Brown released Live at the Apollo -- an album we'll talk about in a few weeks' time. And if you want one specific date that the 1960s started, it was October the fifth, 1962. On that date, a film came out that we mentioned last week -- Doctor No, the first ever James Bond film. It was also the date that two records were released on EMI in Britain. One was a new release by a British band, the other a record originally released a few months earlier in the USA, by an American band. Both bands had previously released records on much smaller labels, to no success other than very locally, but this was their first to be released on a major label, and had a slightly different lineup from those earlier releases. Both bands would influence each other, and go on to be the most successful band from their respective country in the next decade. Both bands would revolutionise popular music. And the two bands would even be filed next to each other alphabetically, both starting "the Bea". In episode one hundred, we're going to look at "Love Me Do" by the Beatles, but right now, in episode ninety-nine, we're going to look at "Surfin' Safari" by the Beach Boys: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Surfin' Safari"] Before I start this story properly, I just want to say something -- there are a lot of different accounts of the formation of the Beach Boys, and those accounts are all different. What I've tried to do here is take one plausible account of how the group formed and tell it in a reasonable length of time. If you read the books I link in the show notes, you might find some disagreements about the precise order of some of these events, or some details I've glossed over. This episode is already running long, and I didn't want to get into that stuff, but it's important that I stress that this is just as accurate as I can get in the length of an episode. The Beach Boys really were boys when they made their first records. David Marks, their youngest member, was only thirteen when "Surfin' Safari" came out, and Mike Love, the group's oldest member, was twenty-one.  So, as you might imagine when we're talking about children, the story really starts with the older generation. In particular, we want to start with Hite and Dorinda Morgan. The Morgans were part-time music business people in Los Angeles in the fifties. Hite Morgan owned an industrial flooring company, and that was his main source of income -- putting in floors at warehouses and factories that could withstand the particular stresses that such industrial sites faced. But while that work was hard, it was well-paying and didn't take too much time. The company would take on two or three expensive jobs a year, and for the rest of the year Hite would have the money and time to help his wife with her work as a songwriter. She'd collaborated with Spade Cooley, one of the most famous Western Swing musicians of the forties, and she'd also co-written "Don't Put All Your Dreams in One Basket" for Ray Charles in 1948: [Excerpt: Ray Charles, "Don't Put All Your Dreams in One Basket"] Hite and Dorinda's son, Bruce, was also a songwriter, though I've seen some claims that often the songs credited to him were actually written by his mother, who gave him credits in order to encourage him. One of Bruce Morgan's earliest songs was a piece called "Proverb Boogie", which was actually credited under his father's name, and which Louis Jordan retitled to "Heed My Warning" and took a co-writing credit on: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, "Heed My Warning"] Eventually the Morgans also started their own publishing company, and built their own small demo studio, which they used to use to record cheap demos for many other songwriters and performers. The Morgans were only very minor players in the music industry, but they were friendly with many of the big names on the LA R&B scene, and knew people like John Dolphin, Bumps Blackwell, Sam Cooke, and the Hollywood Flames. Bruce Morgan would talk in interviews about Bumps Blackwell calling round to see his father and telling him about this new song "You Send Me" he was going to record with Cooke. But although nobody could have realised it at the time, or for many years later, the Morgans' place in music history would be cemented in 1952, when Hite Morgan, working at his day job, met a man named Murry Wilson, who ran a machine-tool company based in Hawthorne, a small town in southwestern Los Angeles County. It turned out that Wilson, like Dorinda Morgan, was an aspiring songwriter, and Hite Morgan signed him up to their publishing company, Guild Music. Wilson's tastes in music were already becoming old-fashioned even in the very early 1950s, but given the style of music he was working in he was a moderately talented writer. His proudest moment was writing a song called "Two Step Side Step" for the Morgans, which was performed on TV by Lawrence Welk -- Murry gathered the whole family round the television to watch his song being performed.  That song was a moderate success – it was never a hit for anyone, but it was recorded by several country artists, including the rockabilly singer Bonnie Lou, and most interestingly for our purposes by Johnny Lee Wills, Bob Wills' brother: [Excerpt: Johnny Lee Wills, "Two Step Side Step"] Wilson wrote a few other songs for the Morgans, of which the most successful was "Tabarin", which was recorded by the Tangiers -- one of the several names under which the Hollywood Flames performed. Gaynel Hodge would later speak fondly of Murry Wilson, and how he was always bragging about his talented kids: [Excerpt: The Tangiers, "Tabarin"] But as the fifties progressed, the Morgans published fewer and fewer of Wilson's songs, and none of them were hits. But the Morgans and Wilson stayed in touch, and around 1958 he heard from them about an opportunity for one of those talented kids. Dorinda Morgan had written a song called "Chapel of Love" -- not the same song as the famous one by the Dixie Cups -- and Art Laboe had decided that that song would be perfect as the first record for his new label, Original Sound. Laboe was putting together a new group to sing it, called the Hitmakers, which was based around Val Poliuto. Poliuto had been the tenor singer of an integrated vocal group -- two Black members, one white, and one Hispanic -- which had gone by the names The Shadows and The Miracles before dismissing both names as being unlikely to lead to any success and taking the name The Jaguars at the suggestion of, of all people, Stan Freberg, the comedian and voice actor. The Jaguars had never had much commercial success, but they'd recorded a version of "The Way You Look Tonight" which became a classic when Laboe included it on the massively successful "Oldies But Goodies", the first doo-wop nostalgia album: [Excerpt: The Jaguars, "The Way You Look Tonight"] The Jaguars continued for many years, and at one point had Richard Berry guest as an extra vocalist on some of their tracks, but as with so many of the LA vocal groups we've looked at from the fifties, they all had their fingers in multiple pies, and so Poliuto was to be in this new group, along with Bobby Adams of the Calvanes, who had been taught to sing R&B by Cornell Gunter and who had recorded for Dootsie Williams: [Excerpt: The Calvanes, "Crazy Over You"] Those two were to be joined by two other singers, who nobody involved can remember much about except that their first names were Don and Duke, but Art Laboe also wanted a new young singer to sing the lead, and was auditioning singers. Murry Wilson suggested to the Morgans that his young son Brian might be suitable for the role, and he auditioned, but Laboe thought he was too young, and the role went to a singer called Rodney Goodens instead: [Excerpt: The Hitmakers, "Chapel of Love"] So the audition was a failure, but it was a first contact between Brian Wilson and the Morgans, and also introduced Brian to Val Poliuto, from whom he would learn a lot about music for the next few years. Brian was a very sensitive kid, the oldest of three brothers, and someone who seemed to have some difficulty dealing with other people -- possibly because his father was abusive towards him and his brothers, leaving him frightened of many aspects of life. He did, though, share with his father a love of music, and he had a remarkable ear -- singular, as he's deaf in one ear. He had perfect pitch, a great recollection for melodies -- play him something once and it would stay in his brain -- and from a very young age he gravitated towards sweet-sounding music. He particularly loved Glenn Miller's version of "Rhapsody in Blue" as a child: [Excerpt: The Glenn Miller Orchestra, "Rhapsody in Blue"] But his big musical love was a modern harmony group called the Four Freshmen -- a group made up of two brothers, their cousin, and a college friend. Modern harmony is an outdated term, but it basically meant that they were singing chords that went beyond the normal simple triads of most pop music. While there were four, obviously, of the Four Freshmen, they often achieved an effect that would normally be five-part harmony, by having the group members sing all the parts of the chord *except* the root note -- they'd leave the root note to a bass instrument. So while Brian was listening to four singers, he was learning five-part harmonies. The group would also sing their harmonies in unusual inversions -- they'd take one of the notes from the middle of the chord and sing it an octave lower. There was another trick that the Four Freshmen used -- they varied their vocals from equal temperament.  To explain this a little bit -- musical notes are based on frequencies, and the ratio between them matters. If you double the frequency of a note, you get the same note an octave up -- so if you take an A at 440hz, and double the frequency to 880, you get another A, an octave up. If you go down to 220hz, you get the A an octave below. You get all the different notes by multiplying or dividing a note, so A# is A multiplied by a tiny bit more than one, and A flat is A multiplied by a tiny bit less than one. But in the middle ages, this hit a snag -- A#. which is A multiplied by one and a bit, is very very slightly different from B flat, which is B multiplied by 0.9 something. And if you double those, so you go to the A# and B flat the next octave up, the difference between A# and B flat gets bigger. And this means that if you play a melody in the key of C, but then decide you want to play it in the key of B flat, you need to retune your instrument -- or have instruments with separate notes for A# and B flat -- or everything will sound out of tune. It's very very hard to retune some instruments, especially ones like the piano, and also sometimes you want to play in different keys in the same piece. If you're playing a song in C, but it goes into C# in the last chorus to give it a bit of extra momentum, you lose that extra momentum if you stop the song to retune the piano. So a different system was invented, and popularised in the Baroque era, called "equal temperament". In that system, every note is very very slightly out of tune, but those tiny errors cancel out rather than multiply like they do in the old system. You're sort of taking the average of A# and B flat, and calling them the same note. And to most people's ears that sounds good enough, and it means you can have a piano without a thousand keys.  But the Four Freshmen didn't stick to that -- because you don't need to retune your throat to hit different notes (unless you're as bad a singer as me, anyway). They would sing B flat slightly differently than they would sing A#, and so they would get a purer vocal blend, with stronger harmonic overtones than singers who were singing the notes as placed on a piano: [Excerpt: the Four Freshmen, "It's a Blue World"] Please note by the way that I'm taking the fact that they used those non-equal temperaments somewhat on trust -- Ross Barbour of the group said they did in interviews, and he would know, but I have relatively poor pitch so if you listened to that and thought "Hang on, they're all singing dead-on equal tempered concert pitch, what's he talking about?", then that's on him. When Brian heard them singing, he instantly fell for them, and became a major, major fan of their work, especially their falsetto singer Bob Flanigan, whose voice he decided to emulate. He decided that he was going to learn how they got that sound. Every day when he got home from school, he would go to the family's music room, where he had a piano and a record player. He would then play just a second or so of one of their records, and figure out on the piano what notes they were singing in that one second, and duplicating them himself. Then he would learn the next second of the song. He would spend hours every day on this, learning every vocal part, until he had the Four Freshmen's entire repertoire burned into his brain, and could sing all four vocal parts to every song. Indeed, at one point when he was about sixteen -- around the same time as the Art Laboe audition -- Brian decided to go and visit the Four Freshmen's manager, to find out how to form a successful vocal group of his own, and to find out more about the group themselves. After telling the manager that he could sing every part of every one of their songs, the manager challenged him with "The Day Isn't Long Enough", a song that they apparently had trouble with: [Excerpt: The Four Freshmen, "The Day Isn't Long Enough"] And Brian demonstrated every harmony part perfectly. He had a couple of tape recorders at home, and he would experiment with overdubbing his own voice -- recording on one tape recorder, playing it back and singing along while recording on the other. Doing this he could do his own imitations of the Four Freshmen, and even as a teenager he could sound spookily like them: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys [Brian Wilson solo recording released on a Beach Boys CD], "Happy Birthday Four Freshmen"] While Brian shared his love for this kind of sweet music with his father, he also liked the rock and roll music that was making its way onto the radio during his teen years -- though again, he would gravitate towards the sweet vocal harmonies of the Everly Brothers rather than to more raucous music. He shared his love of the Everlys with his cousin Mike Love, whose tastes otherwise went more in the direction of R&B and doo-wop. Unlike Brian and his brothers, Mike attended Dorsey High School, a predominantly Black school, and his tastes were shaped by that -- other graduates of the school include Billy Preston, Eric Dolphy, and Arthur Lee, to give some idea of the kind of atmosphere that Dorsey High had. He loved the Robins, and later the Coasters, and he's been quoted as saying he "worshipped" Johnny Otis -- as did every R&B lover in LA at the time. He would listen to Otis' show on KFOX, and to Huggy Boy on KRKD. His favourite records were things like "Smokey Joe's Cafe" by the Robins, which combined an R&B groove with witty lyrics: [Excerpt: The Robins, "Smokey Joe's Cafe"] He also loved the music of Chuck Berry, a passion he shared with Brian's youngest brother Carl, who also listened to Otis' show and got Brian listening to it. While Mike was most attracted to Berry's witty lyrics, Carl loved the guitar part -- he'd loved string instruments since he was a tiny child, and he and a neighbour, David Marks, started taking guitar lessons from another neighbour, John Maus. Maus had been friends with Ritchie Valens, and had been a pallbearer at Valens' funeral. John was recording at the time with his sister Judy, as the imaginatively-named duo "John & Judy": [Excerpt: John & Judy, "Why This Feeling?"] John and Judy later took on a bass player called Scott Engel, and a few years after that John and Scott changed their surnames to Walker and became two thirds of The Walker Brothers. But at this time, John was still just a local guitar player, and teaching two enthusiastic kids to play guitar. Carl and David learned how to play Chuck Berry licks, and also started to learn some of the guitar instrumentals that were becoming popular at the time. At the same time, Mike would sing with Brian to pass the time, Mike singing in a bass voice while Brian took a high tenor lead. Other times, Brian would test his vocal arranging out by teaching Carl and his mother Audree vocal parts -- Carl got so he could learn parts very quickly, so his big brother wouldn't keep him around all day and he could go out and play. And sometimes their middle brother Dennis would join in -- though he was more interested in going out and having fun at the beach than he was in making music. Brian was interested in nothing *but* making music -- at least once he'd quit the school football team (American football, for those of you like me who parse the word to mean what it does in Britain), after he'd got hurt for the first time. But before he did that, he had managed to hurt someone else -- a much smaller teammate named Alan Jardine, whose leg Brian broke in a game. Despite that, the two became friends, and would occasionally sing together -- like Brian, Alan loved to sing harmonies, and they found that they had an extraordinarily good vocal blend. While Brian mostly sang with his brothers and his cousin, all of whom had a family vocal resemblance, Jardine could sound spookily similar to that family, and especially to Brian. Jardine's voice was a little stronger and more resonant, Brian's a little sweeter, with a fuller falsetto, but they had the kind of vocal similarity one normally only gets in family singers. However,  they didn't start performing together properly, because they had different tastes in music -- while Brian was most interested in the modern jazz harmonies of the Four Freshman, Jardine was a fan of the new folk revival groups, especially the Kingston Trio. Alan had a group called the Tikis when he was at high school, which would play Kingston Trio style material like "The Wreck of the John B", a song that like much of the Kingston Trio's material had been popularised by the Weavers, but which the Trio had recorded for their first album: [Excerpt: The Kingston Trio, "The Wreck of the John B"] Jardine was inspired by that to write his own song, "The Wreck of the Hesperus", putting Longfellow's poem to music. One of the other Tikis had a tape recorder, and they made a few stabs at recording it. They thought that they sounded pretty good, and they decided to go round to Brian Wilson's house to see if he could help them -- depending on who you ask, they either wanted him to join the band, or knew that his dad had some connection with the music business and wanted to pick his brains. When they turned up, Brian was actually out, but Audree Wilson basically had an open-door policy for local teenagers, and she told the boys about Hite and Dorinda Morgan. The Tikis took their tape to the Morgans, and the Morgans responded politely, saying that they did sound good -- but they sounded like the Kingston Trio, and there were a million groups that sounded like the Kingston Trio. They needed to get an original sound. The Tikis broke up, as Alan went off to Michigan to college. But then a year later, he came back to Hawthorne and enrolled in the same community college that Brian was enrolled in. Meanwhile, the Morgans had got in touch with Gary Winfrey, Alan's Tikis bandmate, and asked him if the Tikis would record a demo of one of Bruce Morgan's songs. As the Tikis no longer existed, Alan and Gary formed a new group along the same lines, and invited Brian to be part of one of these sessions. That group, The Islanders made a couple of attempts at Morgan's song, but nothing worked out. But this brought Brian back to the Morgans' attention -- at this point they'd not seen him in three years. Alan still wanted to record folk music with Brian, and at some point Brian suggested that they get his brother Carl and cousin Mike involved -- and then Brian's mother made him let his other brother Dennis join in.  The group went to see the Morgans, who once again told them that they needed some original material. Dennis piped up that the group had been fooling around with a song about surfing, and while the Morgans had never heard of the sport, they said it would be worth the group's while finishing off the song and coming back to them. At this point, the idea of a song about surfing was something that was only in Dennis' head, though he may have mentioned the idea to Mike at some point. Mike and the Wilsons went home and started working out the song, without Al being involved at this time -- some of the rehearsal recordings we have seem to suggest that they thought Al was a little overbearing and thought of himself as a bit more professional than the others, and they didn't want him in the group at first. While surf music was definitely already a thing, there were very few vocal surf records. Brian and Mike wrote the song together, with Mike writing most of the lyrics and coming up with his own bass vocal line, while Brian wrote the rest of the music: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Surfin' (Rehearsal)"] None of the group other than Dennis surfed -- though Mike would later start surfing a little -- and so Dennis provided Mike with some surfing terms that they could add into the song. This led to what would be the first of many, many arguments about songwriting credit among the group, as Dennis claimed that he should get some credit for his contribution, while Mike disagreed: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Surfin' (Rehearsal)”] The credit was eventually assigned to Brian Wilson and Mike Love. Eventually, they finished the song, and decided that they *would* get Al Jardine back into the group after all. When Murry and Audree Wilson went away for a long weekend and left their boys some money for emergencies, the group saw their chance. They took that money, along with some more they borrowed from Al's mother, and rented some instruments -- a drum kit and a stand-up bass. They had a party at the Wilsons' house where they played their new song and a few others, in front of their friends, before going back to the Morgans with their new song completed. For their recording session, they used that stand-up bass, which Al played, along with Carl on an acoustic guitar, giving it that Kingston Trio sound that Al liked. Dennis was the group's drummer, but he wasn't yet very good and instead of drums the record has Brian thumping a dustbin lid as its percussion. As well as being the lead vocalist, Mike Love was meant to be the group's saxophone player, but he never progressed more than honking out a couple of notes, and he doesn't play on the session. The song they came up with was oddly structured -- it had a nine-bar verse and a fourteen-bar chorus, the latter of which was based around a twelve-bar blues, but extended to allow the "surf, surf with me" hook. But other than the unusual bar counts it followed the structure that the group would set up most of their early singles. The song seems at least in part to have been inspired by the song "Bermuda Shorts" by the Delroys, which is a song the group have often cited and would play in their earliest live shows: [Excerpt: The Delroys, "Bermuda Shorts"] They messed around with the structure in various ways in rehearsal, and those can be heard on the rehearsal recordings, but by the time they came into the studio they'd settled on starting with a brief statement of the chorus hook: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Surfin'"] It then goes into a verse with Mike singing a tenor lead, with the rest of the group doing block harmonies and then joining him on the last line of the verse: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Surfin'"] And then we have Mike switching down into the bass register to sing wordless doo-wop bass during the blues-based chorus, while the rest of the group again sing in block harmony: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Surfin'"] That formula would be the one that the Beach Boys would stick with for several singles to follow -- the major change that would be made would be that Brian would soon start singing an independent falsetto line over the top of the choruses, rather than being in the block harmonies.  The single was licensed to Candix Records, along with a B-side written by Bruce Morgan, and it became a minor hit record, reaching number seventy-five on the national charts. But what surprised the group about the record was the name on it. They'd been calling themselves the Pendletones, because there was a brand of thick woollen shirt called Pendletons which was popular among surfers, and which the group wore.  It might also have been intended as a pun on Dick Dale's Deltones, the preeminent surf music group of the time. But Hite Morgan had thought the name didn't work, and they needed something that was more descriptive of the music they were doing. He'd suggested The Surfers, but Russ Regan, a record promoter, had told him there was already a group called the Surfers, and suggested another name. So the first time the Wilsons realised they were now in the Beach Boys was when they saw the record label for the first time. The group started working on follow-ups -- and as they were now performing live shows to promote their records, they switched to using electric guitars when they went into the studio to record some demos in February 1962. By now, Al was playing rhythm guitar, while Brian took over on bass, now playing a bass guitar rather than the double bass Al had played. For that session, as Dennis was still not that great a drummer, Brian decided to bring in a session player, and Dennis stormed out of the studio. However, the session player was apparently flashy and overplayed, and got paid off. Brian persuaded Dennis to come back and take over on drums again, and the session resumed. Val Poliuto was also at the session, in case they needed some keyboards, but he's not audible on any of the tracks they recorded, at least to my ears. The most likely song for a follow-up was another one by Brian and Mike. This one was very much a rewrite of "Surfin'", but this time the verses were a more normal eight bars, and the choruses were a compromise between the standard twelve-bar blues and "Surfin'"s fourteen, landing on an unusual thirteen bars. With the electric guitars the group decided to bring in a Chuck Berry influence, and you can hear a certain similarity to songs like "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man" in the rhythm and phrasing: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Surfin' Safari [early version]"] Around this time, Brian also wrote another song -- the song he generally describes as being the first song he ever wrote. Presumably, given that he'd already co-written "Surfin'", he means that it was the first song he wrote on his own, words and music. The song was inspired, melodically, by the song "When You Wish Upon A Star" from the Disney film Pinocchio: [Excerpt: Cliff Edwards "When You Wish Upon a Star"] The song came to Brian in the car, and he challenged himself to write the whole thing in his head without going to the piano until he'd finished it. The result was a doo-wop ballad with Four Freshmen-like block harmonies, with lyrics inspired by Brian's then girlfriend Judy Bowles, which they recorded at the same session as that version of “Surfin' Safari”: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Surfer Girl [early version]"] At the same session, they also recorded two more songs -- a song by Brian called Judy, and a surf instrumental written by Carl called "Karate". However, shortly after that session, Al left the group. As the group had started playing electric instruments, they'd also started performing songs that were more suitable for those instruments, like "What'd I Say" and "The Twist". Al wasn't a fan of that kind of music, and he wanted to be singing "Tom Dooley" and "Wreck of the John B", not "Come on baby, let's do the Twist". He was also quite keen on completing his university studies -- he was planning on becoming a dentist -- and didn't want to spend time playing tons of small gigs when he could be working towards his degree. This was especially the case since Murry Wilson, who had by this point installed himself as the group's manager, was booking them on all sorts of cheap dates to get them exposure. As far as Al could see, being a Beach Boy was never going to make anyone any real money, and it wasn't worth disrupting his studies to keep playing music that he didn't even particularly like. His place was taken by David Marks, Carl's young friend who lived nearby. Marks was only thirteen when he joined, and apparently it caused raised eyebrows among some of the other musicians who knew the group, because he was so much younger and less experienced than the rest. Unlike Al, he was never much of a singer -- he can hold a tune, and has a pleasant enough voice, but he wasn't the exceptional harmony singer that Al was -- but he was a competent rhythm player, and he and Carl had been jamming together since they'd both got guitars, and knew each other's playing style. However, while Al was gone from the group, he wasn't totally out of the picture, and he remained close enough that he was a part of the first ever Beach Boys spin-off side project a couple of months later. Dorinda Morgan had written a song inspired by the new children's doll, Barbie, that had come out a couple of years before and which, like the Beach Boys, was from Hawthorne. She wanted to put together a studio group to record it, under the name Kenny and the Cadets, and Brian rounded up Carl, Al, Val Poliuto, and his mother Audree, to sing on the record for Mrs Morgan: [Excerpt: Kenny and the Cadets, "Barbie"] But after that, Al Jardine was out of the group for the moment -- though he would be back sooner than anyone expected. Shortly after Al left, the new lineup went into a different studio, Western Studios, to record a new demo. Ostensibly produced by Murry Wilson, the session was actually produced by Brian and his new friend Gary Usher, who took charge in the studio and spent most of his time trying to stop Murry interfering. Gary Usher is someone about whom several books have been written, and who would have a huge influence on West Coast music in the sixties. But at this point he was an aspiring singer, songwriter, and record producer, who had been making records for a few months longer than Brian and was therefore a veteran. He'd put out his first single, "Driven Insane", in March 1961: [Excerpt: Gary Usher, "Driven Insane"] Usher was still far from a success, but he was very good at networking, and had all sorts of minor connections within the music business. As one example, his girlfriend, Sandra Glanz, who performed under the name Ginger Blake, had just written "You Are My Answer" for Carol Connors, who had been the lead singer of the Teddy Bears but was now going solo: [Excerpt: Carol Connors, "You Are My Answer"] Connors, too, would soon become important in vocal surf music, while Ginger would play a significant part in Brian's life. Brian had started writing songs with Gary, and they were in the studio to record some demos by Gary, and some demos by the Beach Boys of songs that Brian and Gary had written together, along with a new version of "Surfin' Safari". Of the two Wilson/Usher songs recorded in the session, one was a slow doo-wop styled ballad called "The Lonely Sea", which would later become an album track, but the song that they were most interested in recording was one called "409", which had been inspired by a new, larger, engine that Chevrolet had introduced for top-of-the-line vehicles. Musically, "409" was another song that followed the "Surfin' Safari" formula, but it was regularised even more, lopping off the extra bar from "Surfin' Safari"'s chorus, and making the verses as well as the choruses into twelve-bar blues. But it still started with the hook, still had Mike sing his tenor lead in the verses, and still had him move to sing a boogie-ish bassline in the chorus while the rest of the group chanted in block harmonies over the top. But it introduced a new lyrical theme to the group -- now, as well as singing about surfing and the beach, they could also sing about cars and car racing -- Love credits this as being one of the main reasons for the group's success in landlocked areas, because while there were many places in the US where you couldn't surf, there was nowhere where people didn't have cars. It's also the earliest Beach Boys song over which there is an ongoing question of credit. For the first thirty years of the song's existence, it was credited solely to Wilson and Usher, but in the early nineties Love won a share of the songwriting credit in a lawsuit in which he won credit on many, many songs he'd not been credited for. Love claims that he came up with the "She's real fine, my 409" hook, and the "giddy up" bass vocal he sang. Usher always claimed that Love had nothing to do with the song, and that Love was always trying to take credit for things he didn't do. It's difficult to tell who was telling the truth, because both obviously had a financial stake in the credit (though Usher was dead by the time of the lawsuit). Usher was always very dismissive of all of the Beach Boys with the exception of Brian, and wouldn't credit them for making any real contributions, Love's name was definitely missed off the credits of a large number of songs to which he did make substantial contributions, including some where he wrote the whole lyric, and the bits of the song Love claims *do* sound like the kind of thing he contributed to other songs which have no credit disputes. On the other hand, Love also overreached in his claims of credit in that lawsuit, claiming to have co-written songs that were written when he wasn't even in the same country as the writers. Where you stand on the question of whether Love deserves that credit usually depends on your views of Wilson, Love and Usher as people, and it's not a question I'm going to get into, but I thought I should acknowledge that the question is there. While "409" was still following the same pattern as the other songs, it's head and shoulders ahead of the Hite Morgan productions both in terms of performance and in terms of the sound. A great deal of that clearly owes to Usher, who was experimenting with things like sound effects, and so "409" starts with a recording that Brian and Usher made of Usher's car driving up and down the street: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "409"] Meanwhile the new version of "Surfin' Safari" was vastly superior to the recording from a couple of months earlier, with changed lyrics and a tighter performance: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Surfin' Safari (second version)"] So at the end of the session, the group had a tape of three new songs, and Murry WIlson wanted them to take it somewhere better than Candix Records. He had a contact somewhere much better -- at Capitol Records. He was going to phone Ken Nelson. Or at least, Murry *thought* he had a contact at Capitol. He phoned Ken Nelson and told him "Years ago, you did me a favour, and now I'm doing one for you. My sons have formed a group and you have the chance to sign them!" Now, setting aside the question of whether that would actually count as Murry doing Nelson a favour, there was another problem with this -- Nelson had absolutely no idea who Murry Wilson was, and no recollection of ever doing him a favour. It turned out that the favour he'd done, in Murry's eyes, was recording one of Murry's songs -- except that there's no record of Nelson ever having been involved in a recording of a Murry Wilson song. By this time, Capitol had three A&R people, in charge of different areas. There was Voyle Gilmore, who recorded soft pop -- people like Nat "King" Cole. There was Nelson, who as we've seen in past episodes had some rockabilly experience but was mostly country -- he'd produced Gene Vincent and Wanda Jackson, but he was mostly working at this point with people like Buck Owens and the Louvin Brothers, producing some of the best country music ever recorded, but not really doing the kind of thing that the Beach Boys were doing. But the third, and youngest, A&R man was doing precisely the kind of thing the Beach Boys did. That was Nik Venet, who we met back in the episode on "LSD-25", and who was one of the people who had been involved with the very first surf music recordings. Nelson suggested that Murry go and see Venet, and Venet was immediately impressed with the tape Murry played him -- so impressed that he decided to offer the group a contract, and to release "Surfin' Safari" backed with "409", buying the masters from Murry rather than rerecording them. Venet also tried to get the publishing rights for the songs for Beechwood Music, a publishing company owned by Capitol's parent company EMI (and known in the UK as Ardmore & Beechwood) but Gary Usher, who knew a bit about the business, said that he and Brian were going to set up their own publishing companies -- a decision which Murry Wilson screamed at him for, but which made millions of dollars for Brian over the next few years. The single came out, and was a big hit, making number fourteen on the hot one hundred, and "409" as the B-side also scraped the lower reaches of the charts. Venet soon got the group into the studio to record an album to go with the single, with Usher adding extra backing vocals to fill out the harmonies in the absence of Al Jardine. While the Beach Boys were a self-contained group, Venet seems to have brought in his old friend Derry Weaver to add extra guitar, notably on Weaver's song "Moon Dawg": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Moon Dawg"] It's perhaps unsurprising that the Beach Boys recorded that, because not only was it written by Venet's friend, but Venet owned the publishing on the song. The group also recorded "Summertime Blues", which was co-written by Jerry Capehart, a friend of Venet and Weaver's who also may have appeared on the album in some capacity. Both those songs fit the group, but their choice was clearly influenced by factors other than the purely musical, and very soon Brian Wilson would get sick of having his music interfered with by Venet.  The album came out on October 1, and a few days later the single was released in the UK, several months after its release in the US. And on the same day, a British group who *had* signed to have their single published by Ardmore & Beechwood put out their own single on another EMI label. And we're going to look at that in the next episode...

The Hit Parade Jukebox series highlights the music from the days when the jukebox dominated our after-school social activities. And the songs we played with our nickels, dimes, and quarters determined the “hits” of the day. This episode features: (1) Music, Music, Music by Teresa Brewer (w/ The Dixieland All-Stars) (2) L-O-V-E by Peggy Lee (3) Oh Baby Mine by The Four Knights (4) You'd Be So Nice To Come Home To by Nancy Wilson (5) Round And Round by Perry Como (6) Sweet Pumpkin by Freda Payne (7) Snootie Little Cutie by Bobby Troup (8) Are You Certain by Sarah Vaughan (9) Teach Me Tonight by The DeCastro Sisters (10) Come Fly With Me by Frank Sinatra (11) Opus No. 1 by The Mills Brothers (12) Heart Of My Heart by The Four Aces (13) Bugle Call Rag by The Modernaires (14) Midnight Flyer by Nat King Cole (15) Just for Old Time's Sake by The McGuire Sisters (16) Comes Love by Billie Holiday & Her Orchestra (17) Route 66 by The Four Freshmen (18) Melodie D'Amour by The Ames Brothers (19) The Lady Is A Tramp by Sammy Davis Jr (20) Send Me The Pillow You Dream On by Dean Martin (21) Allegheny Moon by Patti Page (22) Where The Blue Of The Night (Meets The Gold Of The Day) by Tommy Mara

A review of the careers and lives of the Four Freshmen with Dave and Bill.

We focus on the singing cats and take a listen to the solo work of Josie's "backup" pussycats: Cheryl Ladd and the great Patrice Holloway! A dramatic reading from a Brady Bunch novel! We learn about the "Annette sound" of Annette Funnicello! A Double Bubble helping of The Music Explosion. Plenty of great bubblegum music from the likes of The Archies, Giorgio, The Four Freshmen, The Brady Kids, Boyce and Hart, The Frosted Flakes, The Banana Splits, The Merry Macs, The Innocence, The Royal Guardsmen and The Foundations.

This week's guest is Jesse Farar from Old Salt Union! Jesse Farrar (for the indie rock heads - yes, he’s related – Son Volt front man Jay Farrar is Jesse’s uncle) brings an alternative rock spirit as well as his unique formative experiences as a hip hop producer and bass player for a national tour of The Four Freshmen. We talk about creating a String Band from 'nothing', how Jesse believes that Pop Music is the most free of art forms, and then get into a discussion about anxiety, depression, and reaching out for help when it gets to be just too much!For tour news, music, merch and more check out: oldsaltunion.comINTRO MUSIC BY AND USED WITH PERMISSION OF:MARCO BENEVENTO & CIRCLES AROUND THE SUN***THIS EPISODE IS SPONSORED BY THE AMAZING AND INCREDIBLE SHOP TOUR BUS & DEFYNE PREMIUM CANNABIS!!!! Leave us a 5 star review on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or Google Play so more of us can find out about the show and this thing grows into a juggernaut of love, and laughs, and exploration of this long strange trip we call life JOIN THE NO SIMPLE ROAD FAMILY! Become a Patron through Patreon.com You can give as little or as much as you'd like and earn our everlasting appreciation and assist in realizing the vision of our collective. Follow us on Instagram: @nosimpleroad and remember to #nosimpleroad your pics, videos, merch, streams, whatever... Drop a "Like" and subscribe over on our NSR YouTube Channel No Simple Road is part of the Osiris podcast network. Osiris is creating a community that connects people like you with podcasts and live experiences about artists and topics you love. To stay up to date on what we’re up to, visit our site and sign up for our newsletter. Osiris works in partnership with JamBase, which connects music fans with the music they love and empowers them to go see live music. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Fram og til baka 14.apríl 2019 Umsjón - Felix Bergsson Lag dagsins - Amor úr Söngvakeppninni 2014. Flytjandi Ásdís María Viðarsdóttir. Þetta er árið sem Pollapönk vann. Fimman - Elva Ósk Ólafsdóttir Elva talaði um fimm eyjar sem hún hefur heimsótt og sagði sögur! 1 Færeyjar þegar Elva Ósk var 12 ára 2 Grænland í leikferð með Þjóðleikhúsinu 3 Belle Ile eyjan undan strönd Brittany. Hugmyndin kom í Kolaportinu 4 Kúba en Elva heimsótti eyjuna þegar hún fór ein í ferðalag til karabíska hafsins 5 Gustavia eða Saint Barts. Ein af karabísku eyjunum. Þar fann Elva Ósk skeljaströnd og naut hennar alein Viðtal - Andri Ólafsson bassaleikari og söngvari sagði frá tónleikum sem Uppáhellingarnir og Sigga Thorlacius halda í kvöld. Tríóið Uppáhellingarnir hverfist öðru fremur um þéttradda samsöng (close-harmony) af gamla skólanum, en leikur auk þess undir hjá sjálfu sér: Steingrímur Karl Teague á píanó, Rögnvaldur Borgþórsson á gítar og Andri Ólafsson á kontrabassa. Nefna mætti sönghópa á borð við Mills bræður, The Pied Pipers og The Four Freshmen sem fyrirmyndir. Til að kóróna söng þeirra á Múlanum bætir hin eina sanna Sigríður Thorlacius sinni - og þar með hinni fjórðu - rödd við, en auk samsöngsnúmera býður hópurinn upp á vel valin einsöngslög. Matthías M.D. Hemstock heldur svo utan um allt saman með þýðum, þéttum trommuleik. Á efnisskránni verða útsetningar Andra af söngdönsum þeirra Jóns Múla og Jónasar Árnasona auk tveggja frumsaminna númera, en annars þekkilegar N-Amerískar tónsmíðar frá öndverðri 20. öld. Fréttagetraun - sigurvegari Friðrik Guðmundsson Reykjavík

Fram og til baka 14.apríl 2019 Umsjón - Felix Bergsson Lag dagsins - Amor úr Söngvakeppninni 2014. Flytjandi Ásdís María Viðarsdóttir. Þetta er árið sem Pollapönk vann. Fimman - Elva Ósk Ólafsdóttir Elva talaði um fimm eyjar sem hún hefur heimsótt og sagði sögur! 1 Færeyjar þegar Elva Ósk var 12 ára 2 Grænland í leikferð með Þjóðleikhúsinu 3 Belle Ile eyjan undan strönd Brittany. Hugmyndin kom í Kolaportinu 4 Kúba en Elva heimsótti eyjuna þegar hún fór ein í ferðalag til karabíska hafsins 5 Gustavia eða Saint Barts. Ein af karabísku eyjunum. Þar fann Elva Ósk skeljaströnd og naut hennar alein Viðtal - Andri Ólafsson bassaleikari og söngvari sagði frá tónleikum sem Uppáhellingarnir og Sigga Thorlacius halda í kvöld. Tríóið Uppáhellingarnir hverfist öðru fremur um þéttradda samsöng (close-harmony) af gamla skólanum, en leikur auk þess undir hjá sjálfu sér: Steingrímur Karl Teague á píanó, Rögnvaldur Borgþórsson á gítar og Andri Ólafsson á kontrabassa. Nefna mætti sönghópa á borð við Mills bræður, The Pied Pipers og The Four Freshmen sem fyrirmyndir. Til að kóróna söng þeirra á Múlanum bætir hin eina sanna Sigríður Thorlacius sinni - og þar með hinni fjórðu - rödd við, en auk samsöngsnúmera býður hópurinn upp á vel valin einsöngslög. Matthías M.D. Hemstock heldur svo utan um allt saman með þýðum, þéttum trommuleik. Á efnisskránni verða útsetningar Andra af söngdönsum þeirra Jóns Múla og Jónasar Árnasona auk tveggja frumsaminna númera, en annars þekkilegar N-Amerískar tónsmíðar frá öndverðri 20. öld. Fréttagetraun - sigurvegari Friðrik Guðmundsson Reykjavík

With Jerry Lee Lewis, Dr. Feelgood & The Interns, Gene Thomas, Chuck Berry, Clyde McPhatter, The Beach Boys, Marvin Gaye, The Four Freshmen, The Five Keys... More originals kept alive! In this show, "Cherry Pie" by Marvin & Johnny from '54, later covered by Skip & Flip in '59, "A Rockin' Good Way" by Priscilla Brown & The Spaniels from '59, later covered by Brook Benton & Dinah Washington in '60 and "Crazy" by Willie Nelson who wrote it for Patsy Cline. This week's twin spin includes the Coasters' "Down in Mexico" and its b-side "Turtle Dovin" from '56. A special treat for Beach Boys fans: you'll hear the Honeys, produced by Brian Wilson and whose leading member became Wilson's wife: Marilyn Rovell. And look out, here come Duane Eddy's twangy guitar playing "Three 30 Blues".

Celebrating the Golden Era of American Rock & Roll, this week we feature our twin spin A-side by the Blue Jays "Lover's Island" and its B-side "You're Gonna Cry." We kick off with a fabulous cover of Sixty Minute Man by the Untouchables out of Madison Records, then rap "Rang Tang Ding Dong" with the Cellos. Later on Don & Phil craft what would become their sound before "Wake Up Little Susie" and the Four Freshmen show us how really Brian Wilson was into them. We go way back to '53 to hear the early Flamingos and before the hour is over, you'll hear the original "Rock Around The Clock" - no, not by Bill Haley but by Sonny Dae & His Knights from '54.

"Meryl Streep is the most confident person I have ever met..." We have for your listening pleasure Episode 298 of "Troubadours and Raconteurs with E.W. Conundrum Demure." Episode 298 features a great conversation with NYC Actress and Writer Prudence Wright Holmes. Prudence and I discuss Moving to NYC to Be An Actress, Working with Meryl Streep, Woody Harrelson, and the Coen Brothers. We also discuss a bit about Harper Lee, Truman Capote, Roger Ailes, Being Sexually Harassed While Dressed as Santa... Episode 298 also includes an EW Essay titled "Root." Our Associate Producer Dr. Michael Pavese shares a piece titled " I am Waiting,"written by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. We have a poem called "Happiness." Our music this go round is provided by these wonderful artists: Django Reinhardt, Stephan Grapelli, the Four Freshmen, Phoebe Bridgers, TLC, Lyle Lovett & Katt Edmondson, Vince Guaraldi, Branford Marsalis and Terrence Blanchard. Commercial Free, Small Batch Radio Crafted In the Endless Mountains of Pennsylvania... Heard All Over The World. Tell your Friends and Neighbors...

Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back. Dreams come true as the intrepid filmmaker finds his way into the mysterious Ring Room to discuss his new feature, "Laundry Day." It all comes out in the wash. Topics include Thanksgiving at the track, an inspirational effort, family fireworks, Randy's path to the movie biz, "Burning Annie" plot and production, the studio game, Checkpoint aversion, the making of "Laundry Day," the New Orleans ethic, the rising cost of living, a guest joke, American Girl dolls, the Four Freshmen, laundry bars, Giving Tuesday, a girlfriend, latent citizenship, blowing bridges, the Grand Coulee Dam, and much more. Subscribe, review, and rate in iTunes. Share with friends and spread the word.

Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back. Dreams come true as the intrepid filmmaker finds his way into the mysterious Ring Room to discuss his new feature, "Laundry Day." It all comes out in the wash. Topics include Thanksgiving at the track, an inspirational effort, family fireworks, Randy's path to the movie biz, "Burning Annie" plot and production, the studio game, Checkpoint aversion, the making of "Laundry Day," the New Orleans ethic, the rising cost of living, a guest joke, American Girl dolls, the Four Freshmen, laundry bars, Giving Tuesday, a girlfriend, latent citizenship, blowing bridges, the Grand Coulee Dam, and much more. Subscribe, review, and rate in iTunes. Share with friends and spread the word.

Leikin eru lög úr nokkrum kvikmyndum frá fyrri tíð. Flytjendur eru Frank Sinatra, Four Freshmen, Alice Faye, Bob Hope & Clark Sisters, Doris Day, Nat King Cole, Andy Williams, Audrey Hepburn og Four Aces. Umsjón: Jónatan Garðarsson.

Leikin eru lög úr nokkrum kvikmyndum frá fyrri tíð. Flytjendur eru Frank Sinatra, Four Freshmen, Alice Faye, Bob Hope & Clark Sisters, Doris Day, Nat King Cole, Andy Williams, Audrey Hepburn og Four Aces.

Leikin eru lög úr nokkrum kvikmyndum frá fyrri tíð. Flytjendur eru Frank Sinatra, Four Freshmen, Alice Faye, Bob Hope & Clark Sisters, Doris Day, Nat King Cole, Andy Williams, Audrey Hepburn og Four Aces.

Singer Gary Williams celebrates the Legends of Las Vegas with two hours of great music and chat. Originally broadcast on The Wireless for Age UK for anyone who remembers the great David Jacobs and Desmond Carrington from BBC Radio 2 and enjoys today's Clare Teal, Don Black and Leo Green. If you're into easy listening, bossa nova, swing, big band and the crooners like Dean Martin, Nat 'King' Cole, Ella Fitzgerald and Perry Como you'll love this show. This week's featured artiste is The Four Freshmen.

THE GREAT HARMONIES, THE SIMPLER TIME SONGS ABOUT LOVE AND EMOTIONS THROUGH AN EARLY 60S LOOKING GLASS WITH THE FOUR FRESHMEN. THIS WILL RELAX YOU COMPLETELY.

DOYLE LAWSON & QUICKSILVER are legendary in the Bluegrass genre. With nearly 40 albums to their credit, they have multiple Grammy, Dove, ICM, IBMA and SPBGMA Award nominations, and are 7-time winners of IBMA�s Vocal Group of the Year. Doyle was inducted into the Bluegrass Hall of Fame in 2012 and received the National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellowship award in 2006 for his contributions to cultural heritage as a musical trailblazer. The group�s latest is �Life is a Story� on Mountain Home Music Company. OLD SALT UNION is a string band from Belleville, Illinois founded by a horticulturist, cultivated by classically trained musicians, and fueled by a vocalist/bass player who is also a hip-hop producer with a fondness for the Four Freshmen. It is this collision of styles and musical vocabularies that informs their fresh approach to bluegrass and gives them an electric live performance vibe that seems to pull more from Vaudeville than the front porch. The band�s self-titled debut album on Compass Records is available now. WoodSongs Kid: Cutter Singleton is an 11-year-old banjo wiz from Maryann, Kentucky.

The High Summer Sid Griffin podcast has a summer theme and features The Four Freshmen, surf music legends The Gamblers, The Beach Boys, Sid's late pal Gene Clark and more.

RARE & SCRATCHY ROCK 'N ROLL #041 - ROCK, POP, AND COUNTRY STARS WHO SANG COMMERCIAL JINGLES - Part 2 Some of the biggest rock, pop, and country stars sang jingles – those catchy commercials about soft drinks, cereal, clothing, cars, and lots of other products and services. Several superstars just sang jingles at the beginning of their careers, while others recorded them concurrently with their regular repertoire. There’s so much fun material here that we’ve made this a two-part podcast. And on part two, we’ll identify one of the most famous, yet least publicly-known female voices in the music business. We'll also hear from the Jefferson Airplane, Iron Butterfly, Neil Diamond, Chuck Berry, Barry Manilow, Johnny Rivers, the Four Seasons, Vic Damone, the Four Freshmen, the Beach Boys, Buddy Holly, Sammy Davis Jr., Aretha Franklin, Jerry Butler, Jose Feliciano, and many others singing to sell blue jeans, chewing gum, restaurants, department stores, sun tan lotion, and batteries. Just as he did with part one of this two part-podcast. Ken Deutsch, our resident “rockologist” and pre-eminent jingle producer, co-hosts. So, please stay with us more of what Ken and I call “Singling and Jingling.”

Ad legend Keith Reinhard, who is also the father of our co-founder & CCO Matt, curated this month's playlist of jazz classics, complemented by Matisse visuals. Leave Me Alone — Johnny Griffin When people ask what jazz is all about, I always quote the great Chicago-born tenor saxophonist Johnny Griffin who said: “Jazz is created by and for people who have decided to feel good, regardless of conditions.” His Chicago “tough tenor” sound on this recording makes me feel good regardless of what else is going on. I hope you feel the same. Intermission Riff — Stan Kenton Stan Kenton was coming onto the jazz scene about the time I was graduating from high school. Back then his sound was considered very avant-garde. I like a lot about Kenton’s music, but especially his five-trombone section that growls in close harmony on this recording. These same trombones inspired a jazz vocal quartet at Butler University in my home state of Indiana. They became famous as The Four Freshmen, with a unique sound achieved by vocalizing Kenton’s trombone charts. Take the “A” Train — Duke Ellington I live very close to a subway station in Manhattan, and every time I pass by it or descend into it, Duke Ellington’s theme song starts playing in my mental hum box. The song was written by his composing companion Billy Strayhorn when the young composer was invited to visit Duke at his apartment in Sugar Hill, Harlem. “How do I get there?” asked Billy. “Take the A Train to Sugar Hill,” said Duke. “It’s the quickest way to Harlem.” This recording is by the Ellington orchestra, conducted by Duke’s son Mercer, and featuring an impeccable tenor sax solo by Branford Marsalis. Moten Swing — Count Basie When Benny Moten played this song with his Kansas City Orchestra back in the thirties, his orchestra included Count Basie on the piano. Since then, Moten Swing has become most associated with Basie. I love the way the brass section surprises us by shouting out, in sharp contrast to Basie on piano who, as one reviewer put it, “plays little notes but gives them lots of meaning.” Moral of the story: You don’t have to be loud to be meaningful. Stompin’ at the Savoy — Benny Goodman When listening to jazz, I like to think of the different instruments and sections as being engaged in a conversation. Jazz people refer to this as “call and response.” One section “calls,” the other “responds.” This song is a great example of such dialogue. First the horn section calls “pah pah,” then the reed section responds, “bah da de da da dah.” A few bars later the call and response is reversed with the reed section calling and the horns responding. Soaring above this delightful conversation, Benny Goodman lifts our spirits with his clarinet solos. Goodman was another jazz great born in Chicago. The son of poor Jewish immigrants, he grew up to form, during an era of racial segregation, the first racially integrated jazz group. Watermelon Man — Poncho Sanchez Talk about Feelin’ Good! How can you feel any other way when you listen to Poncho Sanchez, the Mexican-American conguero (conga player) play Herbie Hancock’s composition about a watermelon vendor? Hancock, yet another Chicago-born jazz legend, composed the tune based on the men who drove their melon wagons over Chicago’s cobblestone streets and sang out about their juicy wares. Now that you know the story, you can almost hear the words “Hey, Wa-ter-mel-on man” in the five-note melodic figure that repeats through the song. Thanks to Poncho Sanchez and other Latin band leaders, this song became a bridge between Afro-Cuban and Afro-American music. Drum Boogie — Gene Krupa  My high school buddy, Don Neuen, and I were both percussionists in our high school band and orchestra. We both admired the great drummer Gene Krupa, who was born and raised on Chicago’s South Side, and who became a handsome teenage idol. We wanted to look like him and play like him, neither of which ever happened. My friend Don, however, did become a distinguished musician as a faculty member of the Eastman School of Music and later, director of choral music at UCLA. Lacking Don’s (or Gene Krupa’s) talent, I went on to be just a music lover. But when I hear Krupa on the drum breaks in songs like “Drum Boogie,” it brings back those high school days when I was trying to master drum rudiments like flamadiddles and paradiddles. At least I member their onomatopoeic names. Boplicity — Miles Davis Jazz people often talk about the color of notes. You can even do a Google search to find color wheels assigning different colors to different notes. I’m not that sophisticated. But I respond to what Miles Davis and his nonet (nine-person group) are doing in this recording — experimenting with a less aggressive style of playing, and what is described as warm tonal colors, even though the album title is about the birth of cool. On the subject of color, I’ve always liked what Miles Davis himself said about the relationship between music and paintings: “A painting is music you can see. Music is a painting you can hear.” Big Butter and Egg Man — Wynton Marsalis Wynton Marsalis is an internationally acclaimed musician, composer, bandleader, educator and a leading advocate of American culture. I’m also proud to say he is my friend. We met in 1992 in São Paulo, Brazil and we’ve been friends ever since. Wynton is a multi-Grammy winner and the first jazz musician ever to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music. I love his trumpet solo on this recording of a song that takes its title from a 1920’s slang term for a big spender — a traveling businessman who spent big bucks in nightclubs. Presumably the voice of the trumpet is the voice of a woman who would like to connect with a Big Butter and Egg Man. Wynton is very wise. I once asked him how he feels if people don’t like a brave new composition. His response: “You can’t just be weird man, people gotta dig it.” What great advice for all of us. I hope you dig Wynton on this track along with his father Ellis who is on piano. Four on Six — Wes Montgomery Wes Montgomery is one of the most influential guitarists ever in jazz. A product of my home state, Wes was born in Indianapolis, the middle and most celebrated brother of a family of musicians. He recorded with brothers Buddy, a vibraphonist, and Monk, who played the electric bass. I like the fact that, as a guitarist, Montgomery is said to have introduced many people to jazz — people who knew they liked guitar but didn’t know they liked jazz. Indiana — The Modern Jazz Quartet First recorded in 1917 by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, “Indiana” (aka “(Back Home Again in) Indiana”) soon became a jazz standard. For years, Louis Armstrong and his All-Stars would open each public appearance with this number. As a native Hoosier, it always brings back good memories of my growing up days. This recording is a good example of one of the basic elements of jazz — improvisation or spontaneous composition. The tenor sax plays the familiar melody, followed by a series of soloists improvising on the basic tune structure. In the last :30 of the track, the vibraphonist brings us “Back Home Again” to Indiana and the original tune. Cottontail — Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra I’ve been privileged to serve on the Board of Jazz at Lincoln Center for lots of years and so I’ve been able to see and hear the best of the genre up close and personal. Under the masterful direction of Wynton Marsalis, the organization’s managing and artistic director, every member of this 16-piece orchestra could be a headliner on their own. Each musician is a composer, arranger and performer. In this closing track of my jazz playlist, the orchestra is joined by the famous tenor sax player, Illinois Jacquet. The recording is live and I hope you’ll join in the applause.

Kyle Long asks Brian Wilson, of The Beach Boys, a bunch of weird rapid-fire questions about The Four Freshmen, Martin Denny and Julius Wechter.

Kyle Long asks Brian Wilson, of The Beach Boys, a bunch of weird rapid-fire questions about The Four Freshmen, Martin Denny and Julius Wechter.

Kyle Long asks Brian Wilson, of The Beach Boys, a bunch of weird rapid-fire questions about The Four Freshmen, Martin Denny and Julius Wechter.

Shrunken Head Lounge Surf Radio Show Running Time: 29 minutes 30 seconds The Beach Boys' Christmas Album released on November 16, 1964   Containing five original songs and seven standards, the album proved to be a long-running success during subsequent Christmas seasons, initially reaching #6 in the US Christmas album chart and eventually going gold. Of the original songs, "Little Saint Nick" was already famous, having been a hit single the year before. "The Man with All the Toys" was another hit during Christmastime 1964 and "Christmas Day" is noteworthy for being the first Beach Boys song to feature a lead vocal from Al Jardine. While leader Brian Wilson produced and arranged the "rock" songs, he left it to Dick Reynolds (an arranger of The Four Freshmen, a group Wilson idolized) to arrange the orchestral backings on the traditional songs to which The Beach Boys would apply their vocals. The album was released in both mono and stereo; the stereo mix, prepared by engineer Chuck Britz, would be the last true stereo mix for a Beach Boys album until 1968's Friends.

Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back. Dreams come true as the intrepid filmmaker finds his way into the mysterious Ring Room to discuss his new feature, "Laundry Day." It all comes out in the wash. Topics include Thanksgiving at the track, an inspirational effort, family fireworks, Randy's path to the movie biz, "Burning Annie" plot and production, the studio game, Checkpoint aversion, the making of "Laundry Day," the New Orleans ethic, the rising cost of living, a guest joke, American Girl dolls, the Four Freshmen, laundry bars, Giving Tuesday, a girlfriend, latent citizenship, blowing bridges, the Grand Coulee Dam, and much more. Subscribe, review, and rate in iTunes. Share with friends and spread the word.