Podcasts about glad all over

Terence and Hesketh reluctantly look back on Palace shipping five goals in consecutive league games for the first time in the Club's history. The heavy defeats at the Etihad and St James' Park have put paid to out previously sterling away goals conceded record and plunged out goal difference back into the negative. At least the DS Eagles have got us feeling Glad All Over. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sintonía: "Glad All Over" (The Dave Clark Five) - The Rezillos"Flying Saucer Attack", "No", "Top Of The Pops", "2000 A.D.", "It Gets Me", "I Can´t Stand My Baby", "(My Baby Does) Good Sculptures", "I Like It" (Gerry & The Pacemakers), "Getting Me Down", "Cold Wars" y "Bad Guy Reaction", extraídas del álbum "Can´t Stand The Rezillos" (Sire Records, 1978/Survival Research, 2023); primer LP del grupo escocés The RezillosTodas las músicas (menos donde ponga lo contrario) compuestas e interpretadas por The Rezillos"He´s a Mover", "You´re The One", "C´Mon", "Just What I Need", "Let´s Go", "Shake It Up", "Back Seat Love" y "I Wanna Be Your Girlfriend", extraídas del primer álbum ("Nikki & The Corvettes", Bomp! Records, 1980/Munster Records, 2023) del trío estadounidense Nikki & The CorvettesTodas las músicas compuestas e interpretadas por Nikki & The CorvettesEscuchar audio

Flashback Friday at RadioWilderLive.com, and we're kicking it off with Shelly's top pick, The Shelters, jamming out to "Can't Go Home." By the way, Shelly isn't just my daughter; she's the heartbeat of this show. Capt'n Dave is on deck, spinning tracks by request. Lewis Vang's got "Wasted on You" by Morgan Wallen on repeat, while Monica Parton's feeling the heat with "Hot Blooded" by Foreigner. Get ready to rock with "Trash Glam Baby" by The Boomtown Rats and sway to the soulful "Girl Crush" by Little Big Town. "Mr. Grey" by The Len Price Three and "Ball & Chain" by Tony C. and the Truth will have you grooving in no time. And when Led Z. and Lenny Kravitz take the stage, you know it's going to be electric. This week's cover spotlight shines on "Glad All Over," originally by The Dave Clark Five, now reimagined by The Verbs. Behind the drums is Grammy winner Steve Jordan, with Megan Voss of The Pop Tarts punk fame rocking the mic. This power couple is bringing down the house, and did I mention? Steve's the chosen one, stepping in for Charlie Watts with The Rolling Stones. If you're looking to supercharge your weekend, this show's the ticket. Tune in for an electrifying playlist that's sure to get your heart racing! And let's hear it for The Arizona Self Storage, lighting up Phoenix with a show that's completely sold out! Amy, Jeff, Ray, and the crew are hosting a blockbuster event that screams "Big Business." Remember, whether you're a first-time listener or a long-time fan, you're the reason the music never stops. So, keep rocking, stay wild, and until next time, keep your dial locked on RadioWilderLive.com.

It came roaring out of the car radio speakers like a sonic boom, powered by Dave Clark's “Air Hammer” pulsating drum beats and Denis Payton's beefy saxophone.  (Clearly, this was inspirational to Clarence Clemons, when crafting Bruce Springsteen's, E-Street sound.) Mike Smith, on double-tracked lead vocal and Vox organ may have looked like the leader, with his cute Paul McCartney face, but without a doubt this was the drummer's party. Dave Clark, (b.1939) is an entrepreneurial former stunt-man, who parlayed his Tottenham sound into a multi-million dollar concern; he owned all his masters from day one, re-releasing them, to universal acclaim, on CD in 1993;  the other song writers in the group shared writing credits with Clark unquestioningly - even if he hadn't written a line. The Dave Clark 5 started as a teenage skiffle group to raise funds for his school football team to go to the Netherlands, and, fittingly, this song became an anthem for several teams throughout the years. Can't you just picture the screaming hordes bellowing GLAD ALL OVER when their team scores a goal?Glad All Over nudged the indomitable Beatles' I Want To Hold Your Hand off the UK's #1 slot, and the band was inducted into the Rock Hall of Fame in 2008. It's the pinnacle of Sunny Songdom - nothing but pure, adrenalized fun.

Rockshow Episode 176 The Dave Clark Five The Dave Clark Five, also known as DC5, was a British rock and roll band that emerged during the 1960s as part of the British Invasion, a cultural phenomenon where British bands gained popularity in the United States. Formed in Tottenham, North London in 1959, the group mainly consisted of Dave Clark (drums), Mike Smith (vocals, keyboards), Lenny Davidson (guitar), Rick Huxley (bass), and Denis Payton (saxophone, guitar). The Dave Clark Five quickly gained fame with their distinct sound, characterized by prominent drums, electric organ, saxophone, and harmonized vocals. Their first UK hit was "Do You Love Me" in 1963, which was followed by a string of successful singles, including "Glad All Over," "Bits and Pieces," and "Catch Us If You Can." In 1964, "Glad All Over" dethroned The Beatles' "I Want to Hold Your Hand" from the top spot on the UK charts, further cementing their status as one of the leading British Invasion bands. The band appeared on the popular television show "The Ed Sullivan Show" more than a dozen times, solidifying their popularity in the United States. Throughout the 1960s, the DC5 continued to produce chart-topping hits in both the UK and the US, with memorable songs like "Because," "I Like It Like That," and "Over and Over." However, their popularity started to decline by the end of the decade. Although The Dave Clark Five disbanded in 1970, their influential role in the British Invasion left an enduring legacy on the development of rock and pop music. In 2008, the band was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, recognizing their significant impact on the music industry. https://daveclark5.com/ https://youtube.com/channel/UCVnXzbk3ZyeIicpX3x-LbaQ https://open.spotify.com/artist/2HBbky0Z08ZcCKVsXWbNE4?autoplay=true&source_application=google_assistant https://www.rockhall.com/inductees/dave-clark-five https://m.facebook.com/thedaveclarkfiveofficial/?wtsid=rdr_00qaEPXW0iLK4Slqf https://www.edsullivan.com/artists/dave-clark-five/ https://www.instagram.com/thedaveclark5/?hl=en https://www.instagram.com/the.dave.clark.five/?hl=en #DaveClarkFive #DC5 #BritishInvasion #60sRock #GladAllOver #BitsAndPieces #CatchUsIfYouCan #DC5Legends #DaveClarkFiveForever #RockAndRollHistory Park Dental Care 12419 101st Ave South Richmond Hill Queens (718) 847-3800 https://www.718DENTISTS.com Please follow us on Youtube,Facebook,Instagram,Twitter,Patreon and at www.gettinglumpedup.com https://linktr.ee/RobRossi Get your T-shirt at https://www.prowrestlingtees.com/gettinglumpedup And https://www.bonfire.com/store/getting-lumped-up/ Subscribe to the channel and hit the like button This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/rob-rossi/support https://www.patreon.com/Gettinglumpedup

Faisons de chaque jour une fête dans rock'n'roll attitude. "Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero" disait Horace : "Cueille le jour présent sans te soucier du lendemain" ! Enfin si pour la collectivité, il faut y penser quand même, mais ça, c'est un autre débat. Aujourd'hui, soyons joyeux, soyons heureux, soyons épicuriens ! " Let The Love Flow " est un titre des Bellamy Brothers en 1976. David et Howard, en 74, croisent le chemin du batteur de la superstar Neil Diamond qui leur présente la démo de "Let The Love Flow " et ils s'en emparent. 1988, "Don't Worry Be Happy" Bobby McFerrin, collaborateur régulier de Chick Corea ou Herbie Hancock, sort cet ovni musical pour l'époque, une belle ode à la détente. Un refrain imparable pour " Glad All Over " que l'on pourrait traduire par heureux partout, tube du Dave Clark Five en 1964. Le chanteur, Mike Smith, s'inspire, d'un autre titre portant le même nom, "Glad All Over" de Carl Perkins (sorti en 1957), en revanche, au niveau du texte et de la compo, aucun rapport. En 1966, les Who sortent ce classique de leur répertoire "Happy Jack", principal compositeur, Pete Townshend. --- Du lundi au vendredi, Fanny Gillard et Laurent Rieppi vous dévoilent l'univers rock, au travers de thèmes comme ceux de l'éducation, des rockers en prison, les objets de la culture rock, les groupes familiaux et leurs déboires, et bien d'autres, chaque matin dans Coffee on the Rocks à 6h30 et rediffusion à 13h30 dans Lunch Around The Clock.

Welcome in to another episode of TotemTalks! Thank you for joining us on our quest to find the greatest musical act of all time! In today's episode, we begin by going to the Paradise Theater with Styx, then we get Glad All Over with The Dave Clark Five, and we wrap it up by finding Young Love with Mat Kearney! Enjoy! TotemTalks is a music podcast dedicated to breaking down a variety of musical artists in fun and educational ways. If that sounds interesting to you, please check it out! And if you enjoy listening, be sure to let us know by using #totemtalks, and following us on our Social Media! Peace and Love! Facebook: facebook.com/lowtotemband Instagram: totemtalks Twitter: low_totem Website: lowtotemband.com Become a Member of Team Totem here: https://anchor.fm/lowtotem/support --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/lowtotem/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/lowtotem/support

Thommy Price is a long time Drumming Legend recording records and touring with Billy Idol, Joan Jett and The Blackhearts, Scandal, Ric Ocasek, John Waite, Roger Daultry and so many others Thommy Price was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York.By the tender age of 16, he had already hit the road playing drums in rock bands … and he hasn't stopped since. Schooled on “early blue-eyed soul” like The Dave Clarke 5 and The Young Rascals, he found his chops playing along with his older brother's 45's of drum heavy songs like “Bits and Pieces” and “Glad All Over”.He has spent his life on the road and in the studio, and along the way has become one of the most well-known and highly sought-after skin bashers in the business. His style is unique in that he has a sound completely his own, and his talent is impossible to overlook, but he stays solid and in the pocket without the flash and distractions of most well-known drummers.He can provide the fireworks without losing his place as the most rock-solid backbone around.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pn51nAThYQc  (Billy Idol Live 1983 MTV NYE Party)

Welcome to the Big Beatles Sort Out Series 2! Having ranked all the Beatles core catalogue releases in series 1, in this series we will be taking a curated look through the best of the rest - the unreleased, the alternatives, the songs that were given away, and more! If you are enjoying this podcast please let us know at @Big_Sort on Twitter and Instagram, and please leave us a review! Paul's band 'Good Grief' have a new album coming out soon, why not pre-order your copy here: https://goodgriefliverpool.bandcamp.com/album/shake-your-faith Garry is also a musician and his recent songs can be found here on Spotify and Apple Music Please listen out for Paul's other Podcasts, 'The Head Ballet' - all about novelty music, and 'Hark! 87th Precinct Podcast' - all about Ed McBain's seminal police procedural novel series. You can listen along to the songs featured in this episode on this handy Spotify playlist: Episode Playlist Keep up with the scoring charts with this handy google sheet: Big Sort Ranking Table Series 2 This Week's Songs: 'Memphis, Tennessee', Glad All Over, Happy Birthday Dear Saturday Club, I Got A Woman, And I Love Her

On this day in 1964, three months after the Beatles' Empire Stadium concert, British hitmakers The Dave Clark Five arrived in Vancouver! A month after the Beatles smash February performance on the Ed Sullivan Show, the DC5 visited Sullivan and performed their first hit "Glad All Over". They returned the next week with two more songs and an encore of "Glad All Over". The group appeared on Ed Sullivan twelve times over a span of three years. Rock'n'roll competitor CKLG was just getting established and they were eager to take away some C-FUN listeners. To counter this I arranged for the Dave Clark Five to be available for an exclusive press conference right in the radio station's studio. Preparations were carefully made to ensure a minimum of interruption from avid fans who might invade the station. The first knowledge that fans had of the Dave Clark Five's presence in the studios was when they hit the air with their live press conference. CKLG complained bitterly to the show promoters... but to no avail. The Dave Clark Five — Dave Clark, Mike Smith, Rick Huxley, Dennis Peyton and Lenny Davidson — racked up some major hits between 1964 and 1967: "Glad All Over", "Bits and Pieces", "Do You Love Me", "Can't You See That She's Mine", "Because", "Any Way You Want It", "I Like It Like That", "Catch Us If You Can" and "Over and Over" Their last big hit, 1967's "You Got What It Takes", was released a couple of months before the Beatles' landmark "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" album. Suddenly, music had changed and the formula hits stopped coming. The group disbanded in early 1970. Exactly 44 years after their first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, The Dave Clark Five was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008 by Tom Hanks. They might have lacked the originality of The Beatles, but The Dave Clark Five did make a contribution. They were among the most memorable of the British acts that played Vancouver. Just a coincidence, but The Dave Clark Five just reissued their debut US album “Glad All Over” today! Remastered by Dave Clark at Abbey Road Studios and released on limited edition white vinyl, it includes the hit singles “Glad All Over”, “Do You Love Me”, “Bits and Pieces” and more. Pre-order your copy now at DC5.lnk.to/GladAllOverFA

The Dave Clark Five, sixties British Invasion band, and Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame inductees, had many fine ballads among their fourteen American-released albums. Some of them were hits, while others, perhaps overlooked, were superb also. Here are thirteen album cut/non-hit ballads by the DC5 (one from each album, except their first album, Glad All Over, which didn't contain any ballads). Enjoy!1. Bernadette (Album: 5 X 5 1967)2. 'Til the Right One Comes Along (Album: Weekend In London 1965)3. I'm Left Without You (Album: Coast To Coast 1964)4. I Still Need You (Album: Satisfied With You 1966)5. Whenever You're Around (Album: American Tour 1964)6. Scared of Falling in Love (Album: Try Too Hard 1966)7. That's How Long Our Love Will Last (Album: I Like It Like That 1965)8. Julia (Album: If Somebody Loves You 1970)9. I'll Do the Best I Can (Album: Everybody Knows 1968)10. No One Can Break A Heart Like You (Album: 5 X 5 1964-1969)11. Forever and a Day (Album: The Dave Clark Five Return! 1964)

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees, the sixties British Invasion band, The Dave Clark Five, placed twenty-one songs in the U.S. Billboard Top 50 Charts. Here are those twenty-one hits, in chronological order along with their highest chart position:1. Glad All Over #6 Feb. 19642. Bits & Pieces #4 April '643. Do You Love Me #11 May '644. Can't You See That She's Mine #4 June '645. Because #3 Aug. '646. Everybody Knows (I Still Love You) #15 Oct. '647. Any Way You Want It #14 Nov. '648. Come Home #14 Feb. 19659. Reelin' & Rockin' #23 '6510. I Like It Like That #7 June '6511. Catch Us If You Can #4 Aug. '6512. Over and Over #1 Nov. 6513. At the Scene #18 Feb. 196614. Try Too Hard #12 Apr. '6615. Please Tell Me Why #28 June '6616. Satisfied With You #50 Aug. '6617. Nineteen Days #48 Oct. '6618. I've Got To Have A Reason #44 Jan. 196719. You've Got What It Takes #7 Apr. '6720. You Must Have Been A Beautiful Baby #35 June '6721. Everybody Knows #43 Dec. '67

The New Album From The Legendary California Punk Band, Descendents With A Nice Throwback Feel On This Album With Fast Hardcore To Moody Love Songs. RATE: 9/10 Favorites: Nightage, Its A Hectic World, You Make Me Sick, Tired Of Being Tired, Grudge, Yore Disgusting, It's My Hair, Glad All Over, Ride The Wild, Lullaby Least Favorite: Sailor's Choice Keep On Craving My Lil Junkies

Part 2 of The Bee Gees on Australian Television, highlights the surviving performances from 1964-6. It's fascinating to listen to the development of The Bee Gees as performers, when we move through these years. The performances come from four programs; Sing, Sing, Sing, Bandstand, Reg Lindsay's Country & Western Hour and, It's All Happening. Performances include the "Johnny O'Keefe and The Bee Gees" rendition of "Glad All Over", a hillbilly, stomping version of "The Battle of The Blue and The Grey" (including backing by a fiddle and piano accordion!) on Reg Lindsay's C&W Hour and, a remarkable rendition of The Rolling Stones' "Out of Time", with Robin on lead vocals. Again, thanks and kudos to the various You Tube Creators whose preservation work has made this episode possible. Enjoy the "Development of Brilliance"!

Yes the show is a year old and Tommy celebrated with the following playlist The Beatles - Birthday The Supremes "Baby Love" Elvis Presley "It's Now or Never" The Searchers "Needles and Pins" Billy J. Kramer & The Dakotas "Little Children" Engelbert Humperdinck "Release Me" Cilla Black "You're My World (Il Mio Mondo)" Roy Orbison "It's Over" Elvis Presley "Wooden Heart" The Dave Clark Five "Glad All Over" The Archies "Sugar, Sugar" † The Bachelors "Diane" Cilla Black "Anyone Who Had a Heart" The Beatles "She Loves You" Peter & Gordon "A World Without Love" The Searchers "Don't Throw Your Love Away" Pye The Four Pennies "Juliet" The Animals "The House of the Rising Sun" The Rolling Stones "It's All Over Now" The Beatles "A Hard Day's Night" Manfred Mann "Do Wah Diddy Diddy" The Honeycombs "Have I the Right?" Herman's Hermits "I'm Into Something Good" The Beatles "Hey Jude" Roy Orbison "Oh, Pretty Woman" Sandie Shaw "(There's) Always Something There to Remind Me" Frank Ifield - I remember you The Rolling Stones "Little Red Rooster" The Beatles "I Feel Fine" Ken Dodd "Tears" † Tom Jones "Green, Green Grass of Home" The Kinks "You Really Got Me" The Beatles - "Can't Buy Me Love" Mary Wells - My Guy 4 seasons - Rag Doll Shangri-las - Leader of the pack

This week's episode looks at "She Loves You", the Beatles in 1963, and the start of Beatlemania in the UK. 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 "Glad All Over" by the Dave Clark Five. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more---- Resources As usual, I have created a Mixcloud playlist containing every song heard in this episode (except for the excerpt of a Beatles audience screaming, and the recording of me singing, because nobody needs those.) While there are many books on the Beatles, and I have read dozens of them,  All These Years Vol 1: Tune In by Mark Lewisohn is simply the *only* book worth reading on the Beatles' career up to the end of 1962. It is the most detailed, most accurate, biography imaginable, and the gold standard by which all other biographies of musicians should be measured. I only wish volumes two and three were available already so I could not expect my future episodes on the Beatles to be obsolete when they do come out. There are two versions of the book -- a nine-hundred page mass-market version and a 1700-page expanded edition. I recommend the latter.  I have read literally dozens of books on the Beatles, and used bits of information from many of them, but the ones I specifically referred to while writing this episode, other than Tune In, were: The Complete Beatles Chronicle by Mark Lewisohn, All The Songs: The Stories Behind Every Beatles Release by Jean-Michel Guesdon, And The Band Begins To Play: The Definitive Guide To The Songs of The Beatles by Steve Lambley, The Beatles By Ear by Kevin Moore, Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald, and The Beatles Anthology.   "She Loves You" can be found on Past Masters, a 2-CD compilation of the Beatles' non-album tracks that includes the majority of their singles and B-sides.    Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today, we're going to look at a record that is one of the most crucial turning points in the history of rock music, and of popular culture as a whole, a record that took the Beatles from being a very popular pop group to being the biggest band in Britain -- and soon to be the world. We're going to look at "She Loves You" by the Beatles: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "She Loves You"] When we left the Beatles, they had just released their first single, and seen it make the top twenty -- though we have, of course, seen them pop up in other people's stories in the course of our narrative, and we've seen how Lennon and McCartney wrote a hit for the Rolling Stones. But while we've been looking the other way, the Beatles had become the biggest band in Britain. Even before "Love Me Do" had been released, George Martin had realised that the Beatles had more potential than he had initially thought. He knew "Love Me Do" would be only a minor hit, but he didn't mind that -- over the sessions at which he'd worked with the group, he'd come to realise that they had real talent, and more than that, they had real charisma.  The Beatles' second single was to be their real breakthrough. "Please Please Me" was a song that had largely been written by John, and which had two very different musical inspirations. The first was a song originally made famous by Bing Crosby in 1932, "Please": [Excerpt: Bing Crosby, "Please"] Lennon had always been fascinated by the pun in the opening line -- the play on the word "please" -- and wanted to do something similar himself. The other influence is less obvious in the finished record, but makes sense once you realise it. A lot of Roy Orbison's records have a slow build up with a leap into falsetto, like "Crying": [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, "Crying"] Now, I'm going to have to do something I'm a little uncomfortable with here, and which I've honestly been dreading since the start of this project two years ago -- to demonstrate the similarity between "Please Please Me" and an Orbison song, I'm going to have to actually sing. I have a terrible voice and appalling pitch, and I could easily win an award for "person who has the least vocal resemblance to Roy Orbison of anyone in existence", so this will not be a pleasant sound, but it will hopefully give you some idea of how Lennon was thinking when he was writing "Please Please Me": [Excerpt: Me singing "Please Please Me"] I'm sorry you had to hear that, and I hope we can all move past it together. I promise that won't be a regular feature of the podcast. But I hope it gets the basic idea across, of how the song that's so familiar now could have easily been inspired by Orbison. Lennon had played that to George Martin very early on, but Martin had been unimpressed, thinking it a dirge. At Martin's suggestion, they took the song at a much faster tempo, and they rearranged the song so that instead of Lennon singing it solo, he and McCartney sang it as a duo with Everly Brothers style harmonies. They also changed the ascending "come on" section to be a call and response, like many of the Black vocal groups the Beatles were so influenced by, and by taking elements from a variety of sources they changed what had been a derivative piece into something totally original. For good measure, they overdubbed some harmonica from Lennon, to provide some sonic continuity with their earlier single. The result was a very obvious hit: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Please Please Me"] After they'd finished recording that, George Martin said to them, "Gentlemen, you've just made your first number one" -- there are a number of slight variations of the wording depending on when Martin was telling the story, but it was something very close to that. Now that the Beatles had recorded something that really displayed their talents, they were clearly on their way to becoming very big, and it was at this point that George Martin brought in the final part of the team that would lead to that success; someone who would work closely with himself, the Beatles, and Brian Epstein. Dick James was someone who had himself had been a successful performer -- he's most famous now for having recorded the theme tune for the 1950s Robin Hood TV series: [Excerpt: Dick James, "Robin Hood"] That record had been produced by George Martin, as had several of James' other records, but James had recently retired from singing -- in part because he had gone prematurely bald, and didn't look right -- and had set up his own publishing company. George Martin had no great love for the people at Ardmore and Beechwood -- despite them having been the ones who had brought the Beatles to him -- and so he suggested to Brian Epstein that rather than continue with Ardmore and Beechwood, the group's next single should be published by Dick James. In particular, he owed James a favour, because James had passed him "How Do You Do It?", and Martin hadn't yet been able to get that recorded, and he thought that giving him the publishing for another guaranteed hit would possibly make up for that, though he still intended to get "How Do You Do It?" recorded by someone. Epstein had been unsure about this at first -- Epstein was a man who put a lot of stock in loyalty, but he ended up believing that Ardmore and Beechwood had done nothing to promote "Love Me Do" -- he possibly never realised that in fact it was them who were responsible for the record having come out at all, and that they'd had a great deal to do with its chart success. He ended up having a meeting with James, who was enthused by "Please Please Me", and wanted the song. Epstein told him he could have it, if he could prove he would be more effective at promoting the song than Ardmore and Beechwood had been with "Love Me Do". James picked up the telephone and called the producer of Thank Your Lucky Stars, one of the most popular music programmes on TV, and got the group booked for the show. He had the publishing rights. "Please Please Me" and its B-side "Ask Me Why" were published by Dick James Music, but after that point, any songs written by the Beatles for the next few years were published by a new company, Northern Songs. The business arrangements behind this have come in for some unfair criticism over the years, because Lennon and McCartney have later said that they were under the impression that they owned the company outright, but in fact they owned forty percent of the company, with Epstein owning ten percent, and the remaining fifty percent owned by Dick James and his business partner Charles Silver.  Obviously it's impossible to know what Lennon and McCartney were told about Northern Songs, and whether they were misled, but at the time this was very far from a bad deal. Most songwriters, even those with far more hits under their belt at the time, wrote for publishing companies owned by other people -- it was almost unheard of for them to even have a share in their own company. And at this time, it was still normal for publishing companies to actually have to work for their money, to push songs and get cover versions of them from established artists. Obviously the Beatles would change all that, and after them the job of a publisher became almost nonexistent, but nobody could have predicted how much the entire world of music was about to change, and so the deal that Lennon and McCartney got was an astonishingly good one for the time. This is something that's also true of a lot of the business decisions that Epstein made for the group early on. The Beatles earned incalculably less than they would have if they'd got the kind of contracts that people who started even a year or so after them got -- but their contracts were still vastly superior to anything that other performers in British music at the time were getting. Remember that Larry Parnes' teen idols were on a fixed salary, as were, for example, all the members of the Dave Clark Five except Clark himself, and you can see that the assumptions that apply when you look at later acts don't apply here. Either way, Dick James now had the publishing of what became the Beatles' first number one: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Please Please Me"] At least, it became the Beatles' first number one as far as anyone paying attention in 1963 was concerned. But it's not their first number one according to any modern reference. These days, the British charts are compiled by a company called the Official Charts Company. That company started, under another name, in 1969, and is run by a consortium of record companies and retailers. If you see anywhere referring to "the UK charts" after 1969, that's always what they're referring to. In 1963, though, there were multiple singles charts in Britain, published by different magazines, and no single standard music-industry one. "Please Please Me" went to number one in the charts published by the NME and Melody Maker, two general-interest magazines whose charts were regarded by most people at the time as "the real charts", and which had huge audiences. However, it only made number two in the chart published by Record Retailer, a smaller magazine aimed at music industry professionals and the trade, rather than at the wider public. However, because the Official Charts Company is an industry body, the people who ran it were the people Record Retailer was aimed at, and so when they provide lists of historical charts, they use the Record Retailer one for the period from 1960 through 69 (they use the NME chart for 1952 through 59). So retroactively, "Please Please Me" does not appear as a number one in the history books, but as far as anyone at the time was concerned, it was. The record that kept "Please Please Me" off the top on the Record Retailer charts was "The Wayward Wind" by Frank Ifield: [Excerpt: Frank Ifield, "The Wayward "Wind"] Oddly, Ifield would himself record a version of "Please", the song that had inspired "Please Please Me", the next year: [Excerpt: Frank Ifield, "Please"] As a result of the success of "Please Please Me", the group were quickly brought into the studio to record an album. George Martin had originally intended to make that a live album, recorded at the Cavern, but having visited it he decided that possibly the huge amounts of condensation dripping from the ceiling might not be a good idea to mix with EMI's expensive electronic equipment. So instead, as we talked about briefly a couple of months back, the group came into Abbey Road on a rare day off from a package tour they were on, and recorded ten more songs that would, with the A- and B-sides of their first two singles, round out an album. Those tracks were a mixture of six songs that they performed regularly as part of their normal set -- covers of songs by the Cookies, the Shirelles, and Arthur Alexander, plus "Twist and Shout" and the soft pop ballad "A Taste of Honey", all of which they'd performed often enough that they could turn out creditable performances even though they all had colds, and Lennon especially was definitely the worse for wear (you can hear this in some of his vocals -- his nose is particularly congested on "There's a Place"), plus four more  recent Lennon and McCartney originals. By the time that first album came out, Lennon and McCartney had also started expanding their songwriting ambitions, offering songs to other performers. This had always been something that McCartney, in particular, had considered as part of their long-term career path -- he knew that the average pop act only had a very small time in the spotlight, and he would talk in interviews about Lennon and McCartney becoming a songwriting team after that point. That said, the first two Lennon/McCartney songs to be released as singles by other acts -- if you don't count a version of "Love Me Do" put out by a group of anonymous session players on a budget EP of covers of hits of the day, anyway -- were both primarily Lennon songs, and were both included on the Please Please Me album. "Misery" was written by Lennon and McCartney on a tour they were on in the early part of the year. That tour was headlined by Helen Shapiro, a sixteen-year-old whose biggest hits had been two years earlier, when she was fourteen: [Excerpt: Helen Shapiro, "Walking Back to Happiness"] Shapiro had also, in 1962, appeared in the film It's Trad, Dad!, which we've mentioned before, and which was  the first feature film directed by Richard Lester, who would later play a big part in the Beatles' career. Lennon and McCartney wrote "Misery" for Shapiro, but it was turned down by her producer, Norrie Paramor, without Shapiro ever hearing it -- it's interesting to wonder if that might have been, in part, because of the strained relationship between Paramor and George Martin. In the event, the song was picked up by one of the other artists on the tour, Kenny Lynch, who recorded a version of it as a single, though it didn't have any chart success: [Excerpt: Kenny Lynch, "Misery"] Lennon apparently disliked that record, and would mock Lynch for having employed Bert Weedon as the session guitarist for the track, as he regarded Weedon as a laughable figure. The other non-Beatles single of Lennon/McCartney songs that came out in early 1963 was rather more successful. Billy J Kramer and the Dakotas were another act that Brian Epstein managed and who George Martin produced. Their first single, "Do You Want To Know A Secret?" was a cover of a song mostly written by Lennon, which had been an album track on Please Please Me. Kramer's version went to number two on the charts (or number one on some charts): [Excerpt: Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, "Do You Want To Know A Secret?"] They also gave a song to Kramer for the B-side -- "I'll Be On My Way", which the group never recorded in the studio themselves, though they did do a version of it on a radio show, which was later released on the Live at the BBC set. In 1963 and 64 Lennon and McCartney would write a further three singles for Kramer, "I'll Keep You Satisfied", "Bad to Me", and "From a Window", all of which also became top ten hits for him. and none of which were ever recorded by the Beatles. They also gave him "I Call Your Name" as a B-side, but they later recorded that song themselves. As well as the Rolling Stones, who we've obviously looked at a few weeks back, Lennon and McCartney also wrote hits in 1963 and early 64 for The Fourmost: [Excerpt: The Fourmost, "I'm In Love"] Cilla Black: [Excerpt: Cilla Black, "It's For You"] And Peter & Gordon: [Excerpt: Peter & Gordon, "World Without Love"] As well as a flop for Tommy Quickly: [Excerpt: Tommy Quickly, "Tip of My Tongue"] Kramer, the Fourmost, and Black were all managed by Epstein and produced by Martin, while Quickly was also managed by Epstein, and they were part of a massive shift in British music that started with "Please Please Me", and then shifted into gear with Gerry and the Pacemakers, another act managed by Epstein, who Martin also produced. Their first single was a version of "How Do You Do It?", the song that Dick James had published and that Martin had tried to get the Beatles to record: [Excerpt: Gerry and the Pacemakes, "How Do You Do It?"] "How Do You Do It?" went to number one, and when it dropped off the top of the charts, it was replaced by the Beatles' next single. "From Me to You" was a song they wrote on the tour bus of that Helen Shapiro tour, and lyrically it was inspired by the NME's letter column, which had the header "From You To Us": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "From Me To You"] "From Me To You" often gets dismissed when talking about the Beatles' early hits, but it has a few points worth noticing. Firstly, it's the first Beatles single to be written as a true collaboration. Both sides of the "Love Me Do" single had been written by McCartney, with Lennon helping him fix up a song he'd started and largely finished on his own. And in turn, both "Please Please Me" and its B-side were Lennon ideas, which McCartney helped him finish. "From Me to You" and its B-side "Thank You Girl" were written together, "one on one, eyeball to eyeball", to use Lennon's famous phrase, and that would be the case for the next two singles. It's also an interesting stepping stone. The song retains the harmonica from the first two singles, which would be dropped by the next single, and it also has the octave leap into falsetto that "Please Please Me" has, on the line "If there's anything I can do", but it also has the "ooh" at the end of the middle eight leading back into the verse, a trick they'd picked up from "Twist and Shout", and an opportunity for Lennon and McCartney to shake their heads while making a high-pitched noise, a bit of stagecraft that set the audiences screaming and which turned up again in the next single. The other notable aspect is that the song is more harmonically sophisticated than their previous work. McCartney always singles out the change to the minor of the dominant at the start of the middle eight (on the word  "arms") as being interesting: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "From Me To You"] And that is an interesting change, and it sets up an unexpected key change to F, but I'd also note the change from G to G augmented at the end of the middle eight, on the "fied" of "satisfied". That's a very, very, Lennon chord change -- Lennon liked augmented chords in general, and he'd already used one in "Ask Me Why", but the G augmented chord in particular is one he would use over and over again. For those who don't understand that -- chords are normally made up of three notes, the first, third, and fifth of the scale for a major chord, and the flrst, flattened third, and fifth of a scale for a minor chord. But you can get other chords that have unexpected notes in them, and those can be particularly useful if you want to change key or move between two chords that don't normally go together. All the Beatles had particular favourite odd chords they would use in this way -- Paul would often use a minor fourth instead of a major one, and John would use it occasionally too, so much so that some people refer to a minor fourth as "the Beatle chord". George, meanwhile, would often use a diminished seventh in his songwriting, especially a D diminished seventh. And John's chord was G augmented. An augmented chord is one where the fifth note is raised a semitone, so instead of the first, third and fifth: [demonstrates] it's the first, third, and sharpened fifth: [demonstrates] In this case, John moves from G to G augmented right as they're going into the climax of the middle eight, so the top note of the chord goes higher than you'd normally expect, giving an impression of being so excited you just can't stop going up. "From Me To You" knocked "How Do You Do It" off the top of the charts, and at this point, the British music scene had been changed irrevocably. While we've seen that, according to the Official Charts Company, the number one records in the UK for eleven of the first fourteen weeks of 1963 were by either Cliff Richard, the Shadows, or ex-members of the Shadows, with only Frank Ifield breaking their dominance, between the eleventh of April 1963 and the sixteenth of January 1964, thirty-two out of forty weeks at the top were taken up by the Beatles, Gerry and the Pacemakers, and Billy J Kramer and the Dakotas -- all acts from Liverpool, managed by Brian Epstein and produced by George Martin. And two of the other acts to hit number one in that period were Brian Poole and the Tremeloes, who were a London band, but doing a Motown cover, "Do You Love Me?", in a style clearly inspired by the Beatles' version of "Twist and Shout", and The Searchers, another band from Liverpool who rose to prominence as a result of the sudden dominance of Liverpudlian acts, and who we'll be looking at next week. The only pre-April acts to go to number one for the rest of 1963 were Frank Ifield and Elvis. In 1964 there was only Roy Orbison. There would be occasional number one hits by older acts after that -- Cliff Richard would have several more over his career -- but looking at the charts from this time it's almost as if there's a switch thrown, as if when people heard "Please Please Me", they decided "that's what we want now, that's what music should be", and as soon as there was more supply of stuff like that, as soon as the next Merseybeat single came out, they decided they were going to get that in preference to all other kinds of music. And of course, they were choosing the Beatles over every other Merseybeat act. The Beatles were, of course, a great band, and they are still nearly sixty years later the most commercially successful band ever, but so much has focused on what happened once they hit America, and so much time has passed, that it becomes almost impossible to see clearly just how huge they became how quickly in Britain. But they dominated 1963 culturally in the UK in a way that nothing else has before or since.  And the song that cemented that dominance was their next single, "She Loves You": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "She Loves You"] "She Loves You" was another step forward in the group's songwriting, and in the technical aspects of their recording. The group were, at this point, still only recording on two-track machines, but Norman Smith, the engineer, and his assistant Geoff Emerick, came up with a few techniques to make the sound more interesting. In particular, Emerick decided to use separate compressors on the drums and bass, rather than putting them both through the same compressor, and to use an overhead mic on Ringo's drums, which he'd never previously used.  But it was the songwriting itself that was, once again, of most interest. The idea for "She Loves You" came from McCartney, who was particularly inspired by a hit by one of the interchangeable Bobbies, Bobby Rydell, who was in the charts at the time with "Forget Him": [Excerpt: Bobby Rydell, "Forget Him"] McCartney took the idea of having a song be one side of a conversation with someone about their relationship, and decided that it would be an interesting idea to have the song be telling someone else "she loves you", rather than be about the singer's own relationships, as their previous singles had been. Everything up to that point had been centred around the first person addressing the second -- "Love ME Do", "PS I Love You", "Please Please ME", "Ask ME Why", "From ME to You", "Thank You Girl". This would be about addressing the second person about a third. While the song was McCartney's idea, he and Lennon wrote it together, but it was Harrison who added a crucial suggestion -- he came up with the idea that the final "Yeah" at the end of the chorus should be a major sixth instead of a normal chord, and that they should end with that as well: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "She Loves You"] George Martin was not keen on that -- while the Beatles saw it as something exciting and new, something they'd not done before, to Martin it was reminiscent of the 1940s -- both the Andrews Sisters and Glenn Miller would use similar tricks, and it was quite dated even then, being a standard technique of barbershop harmony. But to the Beatles, on the other hand, it didn't matter if other people had done it before, *they'd* not done it before, and while they agreed to try it both ways, Martin eventually agreed that it did sound better the way they were doing it. "She Loves You" took, by the standards of the Beatles in 1963, an inordinately long time to record -- though by today's standards it was ridiculously quick. While they had recorded ten tracks in ten hours for the Please Please Me album, they took six hours in total to record just "She Loves You" and its B-side "I'll Get You". This is partly explained by the fact that Please Please Me consisted of songs they'd been playing every night for years, while John and Paul finished writing "She Loves You" only four days before they went into the studio to record it. The arrangement had to be shaped in the studio -- apparently it was George Martin's idea to start with the chorus -- and there are clear edits in the final version, most audibly just before and after the line "you know it's up to you/I think it's only fair" [Excerpt: The Beatles, "She Loves You"] For those of you who want to see if you can spot the edits, they're most audible on the original CD issue of Past Masters vol. 1 from the eighties -- the later CD versions I have (the 2009 Mono Masters CD and the 2015 reissue of the 1 compilation) have been mastered in a way that makes the edits less obvious. As far as I can tell, there are six audible edit points in the song, even though it's only two minutes twenty-one -- a clear sign that they had to do a lot of studio work to get the song into a releasable shape. That work paid off, though. The single sold half a million advance copies before being released, quickly sold over a million, and became the biggest-selling single in British history -- there wouldn't be another single that sold more until fourteen years later, when Paul McCartney's solo single "Mull of Kintyre" overtook it. While "Please Please Me" and "From Me To You" had been big hits, it was "She Loves You" that caught the cultural moment in the UK. The "Yeah Yeah Yeah" chorus, in particular, caught on in a way few if any cultural phenomena ever had before. The phenomenon known as Beatlemania had, by this point, started in earnest. As the Beatles started their first national tour as headliners, their audiences could no longer hear them playing -- every girl in the audience was screaming at the top of her lungs for the entire performance.  Beatlemania is something that's impossible to explain in conventional terms. While I'm sure everyone listening to this episode has seen at least some of the footage, but for those who haven't, the only way to explain it is to hear the level of the screaming compared to the music. This is from some newsreel footage of the Beatles playing what was then the ABC in Ardwick. It's fascinating because most of the footage of Beatlemania shows gigs in the US at places like Shea Stadium or the Hollywood Bowl -- places where you get enough people that you can understand how they made that much noise. But this is a medium-sized theatre, and having been there many times myself (it's now the Manchester Apollo) I actually can't imagine how a crowd in that venue could make this much noise: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Twist and Shout", Ardwick ABC] I won't be including that on the Mixcloud, by the way, as the noise makes it unlistenable, but the footage can easily be found on YouTube and is worth watching.  After "She Loves You" came their second album, With The Beatles, another album very much along the same lines as the first -- a mixture of Lennon/McCartney songs and covers of records by Black American artists, this time dominated by Motown artists, with versions of "Money", "Please Mr Postman", and the Miracles' "You Really Got A Hold On Me", all with Lennon lead vocals. That went to number one on the album charts, knocking Please Please Me down to number two. "She Loves You", meanwhile, remained at number one for a month, then dropped down into the top three, giving Brian Poole and the Tremeloes and Gerry and the Pacemakers a chance at the top spot, before it returned to number one for a couple of weeks -- the last time a record would go back to number one after dropping off the top until "Bohemian Rhapsody" went back to number one after Freddie Mercury died, nearly thirty years later. But while all this had been going on in Britain, the Beatles had had no success at all in the USA. Capitol, the label that had the right of first refusal for EMI records in the US, had a consistent pattern of turning down almost every British record, on the grounds that there was no market in the US for foreign records. This also meant that any record that EMI tried to license to any other label, that label knew had been turned down by Capitol. So the Beatles' first singles and album were licensed by a small label, VeeJay, who mostly put out soul records but also licensed Frank Ifield's material and had a hit act in The Four Seasons. VeeJay was close to bankruptcy, though, and didn't do any promotion of the Beatles' music. "She Loves You" was put out by an even smaller label, Swan, whose biggest hit act was Freddie "Boom Boom" Cannon. But Brian Epstein and George Martin were convinced that the Beatles could break America, and the group's next single was written specifically with the American audience in mind, and recorded using the unbelievably advanced technology of four-track tape machines -- the first time they'd used anything other than two-track: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I Want To Hold Your Hand"] "I Want To Hold Your Hand" went to number one in the UK, of course, replacing "She Loves You" -- the only time that an artist would knock themselves off the number one spot until 1981, when John Lennon did it as a solo artist in far more tragic circumstances. At this point, the Beatles had the number one and two spots on the singles chart, the number one and two positions on the album charts, and were at numbers one, two and three on the EP chart.  It would also be the start of Beatlemania in the USA. After the Beatles' famous appearance on the Royal Variety Performance, at the time the most prestigious booking an entertainer could get in the UK, Brian Epstein flew to New York, with a few aims in mind. He brought Billy J. Kramer with him, as he thought that Kramer had some potential as a lounge singer and could maybe get some club work in the US, but mostly he was there to try to persuade Capitol to release "I Want to Hold Your Hand", using the news coverage of Beatlemania as a reason they should pick up on it. By this time, Capitol were running out of excuses. Given the group's popularity was at a different level from any other British artist ever, they had no reason not to release "I Want to Hold Your Hand". They agreed they would put it out on January the thirteenth 1964. [Excerpt: The Beatles, “I Want to Hold Your Hand”] Epstein also had two more meetings while he was in New York. One was with the makers of the Ed Sullivan Show -- Sullivan had been in London and been at the airport when the Beatles had arrived back from a trip abroad, and had seen the response of the crowds there. He was mildly interested in having the group on his show, and he agreed to book them. The other meeting was with Sid Bernstein, a promoter who had been in the UK and was willing to take a gamble on putting the group on at Carnegie Hall. Both of these were major, major bookings for a group who had so far had no commercial success whatsoever in the US, but by this point the Beatles were *so* big in the UK that people were willing to take a chance on them. But it turned out that they weren't taking a chance at all. In November, a CBS journalist had done a quick "look at those wacky Brits" piece to use as a filler in the evening news, including some footage of the Beatles performing "She Loves You". That had originally been intended to be shown on November the 22nd, but with President Kennedy's murder, the news had more important things to cover. It was eventually shown, introduced by Walter Cronkite, on December the tenth. Cronkite's broadcast got the attention of his friend Ed Sullivan, who had already more or less forgotten that he'd booked this British group whose name he couldn't even remember. He phoned Cronkite and asked him about these "Bugs, or whatever they call themselves", and started actually promoting their appearance on his show. At the same time, a fifteen-year-old girl named Marsha Albert in Maryland was very impressed with "She Loves You", after seeing the news report and wrote to a DJ called Carroll James, asking "Why can't we have this music in America?" James got a friend who worked as a flight attendant to bring him a copy of "I Want to Hold Your Hand" on her next return from the UK, and started playing it on December the seventeenth. He played it a *lot*, because the audience loved it and kept calling in for more. Capitol tried to get him to stop playing the record -- they weren't planning on releasing it for another month yet! What was he doing, actually promoting this record?!  Unfortunately for Capitol, by the time they got round to this, DJs at a couple of other stations had heard about the reaction the record was getting, and started playing their own copies as well. Capitol changed the release date, and put the record out early, on December the twenty-sixth. It sold a quarter of a million copies in the first three days. By the week of its originally scheduled release date, it was at number one on the Cashbox chart, and it would hit the same position on Billboard soon after. By the time the Beatles arrived in America for their Ed Sullivan show, it was half-way through a seven-week run at the top of the charts, and only got knocked off the top spot by "She Loves You", which was in its turn knocked off by "Can't Buy Me Love". The Beatles had hit America, and the world of music would never be the same again.

This week’s episode looks at “She Loves You”, the Beatles in 1963, and the start of Beatlemania in the UK. 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 “Glad All Over” by the Dave Clark Five. 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…)

This week’s episode looks at “She Loves You”, the Beatles in 1963, and the start of Beatlemania in the UK. 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 “Glad All Over” by the Dave Clark Five. 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…)

Mike Smith - Medley (1985)    Mike Smith Marlboro Themes (?) I would guess 1980.  2004: Mike Smith, the lead singer of band the Dave Clark Five, has died of pneumonia at an English hospital, just weeks before the band was to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Smith, 64, was admitted to a hospital outside London on Wednesday morning with a chest infection resulting from complications of a 2003 spinal cord injury that had left him paralyzed from the waist down, his New York agent, Margo Lewis, said in a statement. His death came just two weeks before the Dave Clark Five - one of the leading bands of the 1960s British invasion - was due to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in two weeks. The Dave Clark Five, whose hits included Glad All Over and Bits and Pieces, were one of the first British bands to find major success in the United States after the Beatles. Mike Smith & Mike D'Abo - Free As A Bird (1976)  Dave Clark Five - Fallout Shelter (1965)  Dave Clark Five - Into Your Life (1971)  Sal Mineo - PSA "Inside Your Insanity" Laughable anti-drug PSA.  The Sonics - Don't You Just Know It (1965) Orig. hit by Huey (Piano) Smith & The Clowns  Joy Fleming - Half-Breed (1973)  The Kane Triplets - Theme Form Mission:Impossible (1968)  The Kane Triplets were a pop music group made up of triplets Lucille, Jeanne and Maureen Kane. They are perhaps best known for their recording of the Theme from Mission: Impossible, which was released in 1968 by United Artists Records with vocals written by Fred Milano and Angelo D'Aleo of The Belmonts. On 30 January 2007, Jeanne Kane was murdered by her ex-husband and retired NYPD sergeant John Galtieri. Galtieri, who was (at the time) a manager at Quiznos, was sentenced to 25 years to life imprisonment for shooting Kane in a Staten Island parking lot. Which confirms my theory: DON'T EAT AT QUIZNOS!!! The Chocolate Tunnel - The Highly Successful Young Rupert White (1967)  Moody Blues - Driftwood (1978)  Evie Sands - Any Way That You Want Me (1969) Evie Sands - Lady Of The Night (1979)  Evie Sands - One Fine Summer Morning (1969)  Evie Sands - Wouldn't It Be Nice To Live Again (2007) Written by that wonderful broken soul Dennis Wilson.  Link Wray - Ice People (1971)  Link Wray - Snag (1979) Link Wray & Mordicai Jones - The Coca Cola Sign Blinds My Eyes (1971) Mordicai Jones was Link's piano/mandolin player Bobby Howard. Link Wray & Joey Welz - Listen To The Voices That Want To Be Free (1970)  Ray Thomas - Didn't I (1976) Flautist from The Moody Blues did a solo record like all the other members did in 1976.  Ray Thomas - Adam and I (1975) Or two. He was the Robin Gibb of the Moodies.  Ray Thomas - Hey Mama Life (1975) The Whispers - A Mother For My Children (1974) The Whispers - Bingo (1974)  The Whispers - I Only Meant To Wet My Feet (1971) The Gap Band - Fontessa Fame (1974) 

There was more to Dave Clark than his clean-cut good looks.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

There was more to Dave Clark than his clean-cut good looks. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

No cold, no pandemic, no spring rain will stop Marty from getting his show out there. At the onset of a two week isolation caused by a sore throat Mod Marty battles the blahs to get you a full hour of outstanding R&B, Soul and Hot Rocks; Rare Groove, Modbeat and Pop; Funk, Northern Soul and Cross-over. This week's show is a guaranteed cure-all. FACEBOOK: facebook.com/ontargetpodcast INSTAGRAM: instagram.com/modmarty TWITTER: twitter.com/modmarty ----------------------------------------------- The Playlist Is: "You're The Cream Of The Crop" Lee Rogers - D-Town "Boys" The Shirelles - Scepter "Chain of Fools" Aretha Franklin - Atlantic "It Will Stand" The Showmen - Minit "Lipstick Traces (On A Cigarette)" Benny Spellman - Minit "The Switch-A-Roo" Hank Ballard & The Midnighters - Regency "I'm Cryin'" The Animals - MGM "Someone Needs You" The Creatures - Columbia "Glad All Over" The Dave Clark Five - Columbia "No Where To Run, No Where To Hide" Witches And The Warlock - Sew City "Wigglin' & Gigglin'" Roy Head & The Traits - Back Beat "Soul Fever" Lavell Hardy - Rojac "You Made Me A V.I.P." Tony Clarke - Chess "Chills & Fever" Paul Kelly - Dial "Try My Method" Jackie Lee - Mirwood "The Out Crowd" Hank Marr - Wingate "Phone Me" Robb & Dean Douglas - Deram "Can't Let Her Go" The Hipster Image - Decca "Dreams Of A Shoe Shine Boy" The Light Drivers - Gemini "Hold Back The Night" The Trammps - Buddah "In Love Forever" The Constellations - Sonday

  Episode seventy of A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs looks at "Move It" by Cliff Richard, and the beginning of rock and roll TV in the UK. 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 "Poor Little Fool" by Ricky Nelson, another artist whose career was made by TV, and one who influenced Cliff Richard hugely.   ----more----  ERRATUM: I say Cliff Richard was sixteen when he first heard “Heartbreak Hotel”. He was fifteen. Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.   This four-CD set contains all the singles and EPs released by Cliff Richard and the Shadows, together and separately, between 1958 and 1962. This MP3 compilation, meanwhile, contains a huge number of skiffle records and early British attempts at rock and roll. Much of the music is not very good, but I can't imagine a better way of getting an understanding of the roots of British rock. Pete Frame's The Restless Generation is the best book available looking at British 50s rock and roll from a historical perspective. Be warned, though -- his jokey and irreverent style can, when dealing with people like Larry Parnes (who was gay and Jewish) very occasionally tip over into reinforcing homophobic and anti-semitic stereotypes for an easy laugh. Billy Bragg's Roots, Radicals, and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World is one of the best books I've read on music at all, and gives far more detail about the historical background. And Cliff Richard: The Biography by Steve Turner is very positive towards Richard, but not at the expense of honesty.     Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   We've looked a little bit at the start of rock and roll in Britain, which was so different from the American music that it feels absurd to talk of the two in the same breath. But today we're going to have a look at the first really massive star of British rock and roll -- someone who is still going strong today, more than sixty years after he released his first record: [Excerpt: Cliff Richard, "Move It"] When we've looked at British rock and roll to this point, it's been rather lifeless, and there's a reason for that. There were, in the mid-fifties, two different streams of music in Britain that were aiming to appeal to young people. One was skiffle, and that's the branch of music that eventually led to all British rock and roll from the sixties onwards -- we looked at that with Lonnie Donegan, but the skiffle craze was a big, big thing for about two years, and when it finally died down it splintered into three different, overlapping, groups -- there were the folk revivalists, who we'll talk about when we get to Bob Dylan; the British blues people, who we'll look at when we get to the Rolling Stones; and the rock and rollers. Skiffle had everything that people found exciting and interesting about American rock and roll -- at least, it had much of the excitement of the rockabilly music. But it wasn't marketed as rock and roll, and it tended to aim at a slightly more bohemian audience. Meanwhile, British rock and roll proper -- the stuff that was being marketed as rock and roll -- was mostly being made by longtime professional musicians who had switched from playing anaemic copies of swing music to anaemic copies of Bill Haley and the Comets. Groups like Tony Crombie and the Rockets were making records like "Let's You and I Rock", which copied the formula of Haley's less good records: [Excerpt: Tony Crombie and the Rockets, "Let's You and I Rock"] The idea of rock and roll in the British music business in those early years came entirely from the film Rock Around the Clock, which had featured Haley, the Platters, and Freddie Bell and His Bellboys -- who were a second-rate clone of Haley's band. As we discussed in the episodes on Haley, his particular style of music had few imitators in American rock and roll, so while British groups were copying things like Freddie Bell's one hit, "Giddy-Up A Ding-Dong", British teenagers were instead listening to American records by Buddy Holly or Little Richard, the Everly Brothers or Elvis, none of whose recordings had anything to do with anything that was being made by the British commercial rock and roll industry. For British rock and roll to matter, it had to at least catch up to what the American records were doing. It needed its own Elvis -- and that Elvis would ideally be someone who came from the skiffle scene, but was more oriented towards rock and roll than most of the skifflers, who were very happy playing Lead Belly songs rather than "Blue Suede Shoes". Tommy Steele had been a good start, but he'd jumped the gun a little bit. He was essentially still a pre-Elvis performer, although he was one who followed the rockabilly pattern of a young man with a guitar. His records were still novelty songs with the word "rock" thrown in, like "Rock With the Caveman", and when he tried to copy Elvis' vocal mannerisms, while it brought him a number one hit, it didn't really sound particularly credible: [Excerpt: Tommy Steele, "Singing the Blues"] In the wake of Steele came a whole host of other teen idols along the same lines, most of them managed by Larry Parnes -- Adam Faith, Mary Wilde, Terry Dene, Vince Taylor, Johnny Gentle, Billy Fury, Duffy Power, Dickie Pride, and many more. Some of these went on to have interesting careers, and a few made records that we'll be looking at in future episodes, but one of them -- one of the few not managed by Parnes -- managed to have a career that would outlast almost all of his American contemporaries, and outsell many of them. [Excerpt: Cliff Richard, "Move It"] One of the things that will be a recurring theme in this podcast as Britain becomes a bigger part of rock history is the end of the British Empire. It is literally impossible to understand anything about Britain for the last eighty years without understanding that at the start of the 1940s the British Empire was the largest, most powerful empire that had ever been seen in human history, while by the early 1970s Britain was a tiny island that was desperately begging to be allowed into the EEC -- the precursor of the EU -- because it had no economic or political power at all on its own. The psychic shock this change in status gave to multiple generations of British people cannot be overstated, and almost all British history since at least 1945 can be explained in terms of Britain trying and failing to convince itself and the world that it was still important and still mattered. And one of the people whom that change in status hit most dramatically was a young boy named Harry Webb, who was born in India in 1940, to a family who were of British descent, but who had been in India for a couple of generations. Like most white people in India at the time they benefited hugely from the Empire -- although they were only moderately well off by white British standards in India, they lived in what for most people would seem absolute luxury, with servants looking after them, and the people of India being deferential to them. But then, after World War II came Indian independence and partition, and the Webb family found themselves in Britain, a country they'd never lived in, homeless and jobless. Harry, his parents, and his three sisters had to live in one room of a three-bedroom house, with the other rooms of the house occupied by another family of eight. Not only that, but while Harry had been a beneficiary of racism in India, in Britain he was a victim of it -- while he was white, he had a dark complexion, an Anglo-Indian accent, and came from India, so everyone assumed he was Indian -- except that the only Indians that his schoolmates knew anything about were the ones in cowboy films, so he kept getting asked where his wigwam was. Eventually the Webb family managed to get a house to themselves, and young Harry managed to get rid of his accent, ending up with an accent that reflected neither his Indian origins nor his London upbringing, but rather a generic regionless middle-class accent with a trace of the mid-Atlantic behind it. Webb's accent would later become almost the default for people in the media, edging out the received pronunciation that had dominated in previous decades, but at the time it gave him a distinct advantage when he finally became a pop star, because he didn't sound like he was from a particular place. When he was sixteen, he heard the record that would change his life: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Heartbreak Hotel”] Young Harry became obsessed with Elvis Presley, and tried to make himself look as much like Elvis as possible. His first public performance was with a vocal group he formed at school, and he took a solo on "Heartbreak Hotel". On leaving school, having failed almost all his exams, he decided that he wanted to become a rock and roll star. He had no idea how he was going to go about it until one day his bike broke, and he had to get the bus into work. On the same bus was an old schoolfriend, Terry Smart, who was the drummer in a skiffle group. Their singer had recently been drafted, and they needed a new one. He remembered that Harry could sing, and invited him to join the group. Harry's musical tastes didn't really run to skiffle, which by this time had become a very formalised genre, with the instruments almost always consisting of acoustic guitar, teachest bass, and washboard, and a repertoire that was made up primarily of songs by Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie, and Big Bill Broonzy (who was the one blues musician that even the least knowledgable skiffler could name, despite his relative lack of commercial success in the US). There would also be a good chunk of traditional folk and sea shanties thrown in. A typical example of the style would be the Vipers Skiffle Group's version of "Maggie May": [Excerpt: The Vipers Skiffle Group, "Maggie May"] Skiffle was both too rowdy and too intellectual for young Harry Webb, whose main interest other than music was sports rather than digging up old folk songs. Other than Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis, his tastes ran to smoother American soft-rockers like Ricky Nelson and the Everly Brothers -- he never had much time for the R&B styles of people like Little Richard, let alone for anything as raw as Lead Belly or Big Bill Broonzy. But Harry Webb was an unusual person. On the one hand, he was amazingly old-fashioned and prudish even for the period -- he refused to smoke, drink, or blaspheme, he was very softly spoken, and as a teenager when asked if he had a girlfriend he would say "Yes, I've got a picture of her in my pocket" and would pull out a photo of his mother. But on the other hand, he was incredibly driven, and was willing to make use of anyone around him for precisely as long as it would take for them to help him achieve his goals. If the musicians around him wanted to play skiffle, he would play skiffle -- for the moment. So Harry Webb joined Dick Teague's Skiffle Group, and became their lead singer. He applied himself diligently to learning the skiffle material -- songs like "Rock Island Line", "This Train", "This Little Light of Mine", and "Don't You Rock Me Daddy-O" -- and he would rehearse every single night, and got to know the material intimately. But he insisted on singing in an imitation of Elvis' voice, and thrusting his hips like Elvis did. But an Elvis-style vocal simply didn't work with songs like this: [Excerpt: The Vipers Skiffle Group, “Don't You Rock Me Daddy-O”] After a short period with the group, he started scheming with Terry Smart -- they were going to continue with the skiffle group for the moment, but they secretly put together their own rock and roll group. Harry's friend Norman Mitham started turning up to the group's rehearsals, and watching the guitarists' fingers intently -- he was learning their material for the new group. Webb and Smart left the Dick Teague Skiffle Group, and with Mitham they formed a new rock and roll group. Inspired by the recent launch of Sputnik, they thought of calling themselves The Planets. But they decided that wasn't quite right, and looked up the etymology of "planet", and found it came from the Greek for "wanderer" or "drifter", and so they became the Drifters, unaware there was an American group of the same name. On one of their very early gigs, a man named John Foster came up and introduced himself to them. Foster had no music business experience -- he worked in a sewage farm -- but he became the group's manager based on two important factors. The first was that he had a telephone, which in 1958 meant he was clearly a figure of some importance -- *no-one* in Britain had a telephone! And the second was that he was a nodding acquaintance of the managers of the 2is, the famous coffee bar where the Vipers used to play, and where both Tommy Steele and Terry Dene had been discovered, and he was pretty sure he could get them a gig there. He managed to get them a two-week residency at the 2is, and during the first week, a young man named Ian Samwell came up and asked them if they needed a lead guitarist. They said yes, and he was in the group. A booking agent who saw the group in their second week decided he wanted to book them for some shows in the North, but he had two problems. He didn't want them to be booked as a group, but as a lead singer and his backing group, and he thought Harry Webb wasn't a good enough name. So the Drifters became Cliff Richard and the Drifters, and Harry Webb soon told everyone in his life that he was only to be addressed as Cliff from now on. Foster and Samwell got the group an agent, and the agent in turn got them an audition with Norrie Paramor at Columbia Records. But there was one more thing to do. By this time Cliff *did* have a girlfriend -- while according to those around him he was never that interested in dating or sex, they did go out with each other for a little while and claimed to be in love with each other. But he knew that if he was going to be a rock and roll star, he had to appear available to the teenage girls, so he dumped her. She understood -- he'd had to choose between his career and love, and he'd chosen his career. Paramor was interested, and he wanted the group to record a song which had been a hit in the US for Bobby Helms: [Excerpt: Bobby Helms, "Schoolboy Crush"] That song was co-written by Aaron Schroeder, who we've seen before as the co-writer of some of Elvis' tracks for Jailhouse Rock, and of Carl Perkins' "Glad All Over". Cliff learned the song straight away, and soon the Drifters were in Abbey Road studios ready to record their first single -- but only Cliff Richard's name was on the recording contract. While the record label would say "Cliff Richard and the Drifters", the other group members were only going to get a flat session fee for the record, while Cliff was going to get artist royalties. Also, not all of the Drifters were present. Ian Samwell had persuaded Cliff that there was no need to keep Norman Mitham in the band. Mitham was just playing rhythm guitar like Cliff was, and Samwell thought there was no point having three guitarists and splitting the money three ways instead of two. So Mitham, who had been friends with Cliff since they were both nine, was out of the group. Cliff didn't play guitar especially well, so for the session Samwell switched to rhythm and a session player, Ernie Shear, was brought in to play lead. The group was also augmented in the studio by a double bass player, Frank Clarke, and the Mike Sammes singers on backing vocals. The track they cut that day was not hugely inspiring: [Excerpt: Cliff Richard and the Drifters, "Schoolboy Crush"] But the B-side was more interesting. It was the first song that Ian Samwell had ever written -- an angry response to an article in the Melody Maker arguing that rock and roll was dead. It was stuck on the B-side of the proposed single mostly for lack of anything better, and it was knocked off quickly. Indeed, the main engineer on the session didn't stick around for the recording -- he wanted to go to the opera, and so it was left to the junior engineer Malcolm Addey to actually record the song. And that made a big difference -- Addey was young enough to have some idea himself as to what a rock and roll record should sound like, and he came up with a much louder, more resonant, sound than anything that had been heard in a British recording session -- a record that didn't sound all that dissimilar to the records that Sun was putting out: [Excerpt: Cliff Richard and the Drifters, "Move It"] That track was still intended for the B-side, until the point that Jack Good heard it. Jack Good was possibly the most important person ever to be involved in music TV -- not just in Britain, but in the world. Good had been an actor, until he saw "Rock Around the Clock" in the cinema, and saw the way that the audiences reacted to the film. He became immediately convinced that the audience response was a crucial part of rock and roll, and that if done properly rock and roll performances could lead to the kind of catharsis that classical Greek drama aimed at. He took this idea to the BBC, who were at the time looking to put on a new teenage show. Up until mid 1956, the practice in British TV had been to stop transmitting for an hour, from six until seven in the evening, in order to let parents put their kids to bed -- this was known as the Toddlers' Truce. But after the commercial network ITV began broadcasting in 1955, the practice became controversial. While the BBC saved money by not putting on any programmes between six and seven -- they got the same amount in TV license fees however much they broadcast -- an hour without programmes for a commercial channel meant an hour without advertising fees. Eventually, ITV managed to get the rules changed, and the BBC decided that at five past six on a Saturday, they would put out a programme for young people, but young people allowed up that late -- and it was to be called Six-Five Special. [Excerpt: The Bob Cort Skiffle Group, "The Six-Five Special"] Six-Five Special embodied many of Good's ideas about how to broadcast rock and roll music -- it had the audience as an integral part of the programme -- there was very little distinction between the audience and the performers, who would perform among the crowd rather than separated from them. By all accounts it had some fantastic moments, including an appearance by Big Bill Broonzy, and a live broadcast from the 2Is coffee bar itself. But Good wasn't the sole producer, and he had to compromise his vision. As well as rock and roll and skiffle, the programme also included light music of a kind parents would approve of, educational items, and bits about sport. Good kept trying to persuade the people at the BBC to let him have the show be just about rock and roll, but his co-producer wanted Hungarian acrobats and features on stamp collecting. So Good moved over to ABC, one of the ITV stations, and started a rival show, "Oh Boy!" On "Oh Boy!" the focus was entirely on the music. Good had very strong ideas on what he wanted from the show, ideas he'd got from sources as varied as a theatrical company who put on performances of Shakespeare with all-black backgrounds and no sets, and a book he'd read on the physiology of brainwashing. He wanted to make something powerful. Unlike on Six-Five Special the audience wouldn't be mixing with the performers, but this time the performers would be picked out by a white spotlight on a black background. After two pilot episodes in June 1958, the programme started its run in September, with appearances from Marty Wilde, the John Barry Seven and more, and with instrumental backing for the solo performers provided by Lord Rockingham's Eleven, a studio group who would go on to have a novelty hit with "Hoots Mon!" as a result of their appearances on the show: [Excerpt: Lord Rockingham's XI, "Hoots Mon!"] And Cliff Richard was to be added to that show. It was Jack Good who, more than anyone else, came up with the image of the rock and roll star, and his influence can be seen in literally every visual depiction of rock and roll music from the early sixties on. And from the evidence of the two surviving episodes of Oh Boy! he, and the director Rita Gillespie, one of the very few female directors working in TV at the time, did a remarkable job of creating something truly exciting -- something all the more remarkable when you look at what they had to work with. Most of the British rock and roll acts at the time were small, malnourished, spotty, teenage boys, who were doing a sort of cargo-cult imitation of American rock and rollers without really understanding what they were meant to be doing. But the lighting and the visuals of the show were extraordinary -- and in Cliff Richard, Good had found someone who, if he was nowhere near as exciting as his American models, at least could be moulded into something that was the closest thing that could be found to a real British rock and roll star -- someone who might one day be almost as good as Gene Vincent. Good insisted that the song Cliff should perform on his show should be "Move It", and so the record label quickly flipped the single. Good worked with Cliff for a full week on his performance of the song, instructing him in every blink, every time he should clutch his arm as if in pain, the way he should look down , not straight at the audience, everything. Good chose his shocking pink outfit (not visible on black and white TV, but designed to send the girls in the audience into a frenzy) and had him restyle his hair to be less like Elvis'. And so in September 1958, a few weeks before his eighteenth birthday, Cliff Richard made his TV debut: [Excerpt: Cliff Richard, “Move It”] "Oh Boy" was the most fast-paced thing on TV -- on the evidence of the surviving episodes it was one song after another, non-stop, by different performers -- as many as seventeen songs in a twenty-five minute live show, with no artist doing two songs in a row. It was an immediate hit, and so was "Move It", which went to number two in the charts. There was a media outcry over Cliff's brazen sexuality, with the NME accusing him of "crude exhibitionism", while the Daily Sketch would ask "Is this boy TV star too sexy?" Cliff Richard was suddenly the biggest star and sex symbol in the UK, but there were problems with the band. Cliff was no longer playing guitar while he sang, and the group also needed a bass player, so Ian Samwell switched to bass, and they went looking for a new guitarist. The original intention was to audition a young player named Tony Sheridan, but while John Foster was waiting in the 2is to meet him, he started talking with someone who had just left the Vipers, and said that he and his friend would be happy to join the group, and so Cliff's backing group now consisted of Ian Samwell, Terry Smart, Hank Marvin and Bruce Welch. The new group recorded another Ian Samwell song, "High Class Baby": [Excerpt: Cliff Richard and the Drifters, "High Class Baby"] What Samwell didn't know when they recorded that was that Cliff was already planning to replace him, with Jet Harris, who had played with Marvin in the Vipers. Now he was playing with better musicians, Samwell's shortcomings were showing up. Cliff didn't tell Samwell himself -- he got John Foster to fire him. Samwell would go on to have some success as a songwriter and record producer, though, most famously producing “Horse With No Name” for America. Shortly after that, Foster was gone as well, first demoted from manager to roadie, then given two weeks' notice in a letter from Cliff's dad. And then finally, Cliff replaced Terry Smart, his old school friend, the person who had invited him into his group, with Tony Meehan, another ex-Viper. By Cliff's nineteenth birthday, the only thing left of the original Drifters was the name. And soon that would change too, as Cliff Richard and the Drifters became Cliff Richard and the Shadows.

  Episode seventy of A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs looks at “Move It” by Cliff Richard, and the beginning of rock and roll TV in the UK. 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 “Poor Little Fool” by Ricky Nelson, another artist whose career was made by TV, and one who influenced Cliff Richard hugely.   —-more—-  ERRATUM: I say Cliff Richard was sixteen when he first heard “Heartbreak Hotel”. He was fifteen. Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.   This four-CD set contains all the singles and EPs released by Cliff Richard and the Shadows, together and separately, between 1958 and 1962. This MP3 compilation, meanwhile, contains a huge number of skiffle records and early British attempts at rock and roll. Much of the music is not very good, but I can’t imagine a better way of getting an understanding of the roots of British rock. Pete Frame’s The Restless Generation is the best book available looking at British 50s rock and roll from a historical perspective. Be warned, though — his jokey and irreverent style can, when dealing with people like Larry Parnes (who was gay and Jewish) very occasionally tip over into reinforcing homophobic and anti-semitic stereotypes for an easy laugh. Billy Bragg’s Roots, Radicals, and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World is one of the best books I’ve read on music at all, and gives far more detail about the historical background. And Cliff Richard: The Biography by Steve Turner is very positive towards Richard, but not at the expense of honesty.     Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   We’ve looked a little bit at the start of rock and roll in Britain, which was so different from the American music that it feels absurd to talk of the two in the same breath. But today we’re going to have a look at the first really massive star of British rock and roll — someone who is still going strong today, more than sixty years after he released his first record: [Excerpt: Cliff Richard, “Move It”] When we’ve looked at British rock and roll to this point, it’s been rather lifeless, and there’s a reason for that. There were, in the mid-fifties, two different streams of music in Britain that were aiming to appeal to young people. One was skiffle, and that’s the branch of music that eventually led to all British rock and roll from the sixties onwards — we looked at that with Lonnie Donegan, but the skiffle craze was a big, big thing for about two years, and when it finally died down it splintered into three different, overlapping, groups — there were the folk revivalists, who we’ll talk about when we get to Bob Dylan; the British blues people, who we’ll look at when we get to the Rolling Stones; and the rock and rollers. Skiffle had everything that people found exciting and interesting about American rock and roll — at least, it had much of the excitement of the rockabilly music. But it wasn’t marketed as rock and roll, and it tended to aim at a slightly more bohemian audience. Meanwhile, British rock and roll proper — the stuff that was being marketed as rock and roll — was mostly being made by longtime professional musicians who had switched from playing anaemic copies of swing music to anaemic copies of Bill Haley and the Comets. Groups like Tony Crombie and the Rockets were making records like “Let’s You and I Rock”, which copied the formula of Haley’s less good records: [Excerpt: Tony Crombie and the Rockets, “Let’s You and I Rock”] The idea of rock and roll in the British music business in those early years came entirely from the film Rock Around the Clock, which had featured Haley, the Platters, and Freddie Bell and His Bellboys — who were a second-rate clone of Haley’s band. As we discussed in the episodes on Haley, his particular style of music had few imitators in American rock and roll, so while British groups were copying things like Freddie Bell’s one hit, “Giddy-Up A Ding-Dong”, British teenagers were instead listening to American records by Buddy Holly or Little Richard, the Everly Brothers or Elvis, none of whose recordings had anything to do with anything that was being made by the British commercial rock and roll industry. For British rock and roll to matter, it had to at least catch up to what the American records were doing. It needed its own Elvis — and that Elvis would ideally be someone who came from the skiffle scene, but was more oriented towards rock and roll than most of the skifflers, who were very happy playing Lead Belly songs rather than “Blue Suede Shoes”. Tommy Steele had been a good start, but he’d jumped the gun a little bit. He was essentially still a pre-Elvis performer, although he was one who followed the rockabilly pattern of a young man with a guitar. His records were still novelty songs with the word “rock” thrown in, like “Rock With the Caveman”, and when he tried to copy Elvis’ vocal mannerisms, while it brought him a number one hit, it didn’t really sound particularly credible: [Excerpt: Tommy Steele, “Singing the Blues”] In the wake of Steele came a whole host of other teen idols along the same lines, most of them managed by Larry Parnes — Adam Faith, Mary Wilde, Terry Dene, Vince Taylor, Johnny Gentle, Billy Fury, Duffy Power, Dickie Pride, and many more. Some of these went on to have interesting careers, and a few made records that we’ll be looking at in future episodes, but one of them — one of the few not managed by Parnes — managed to have a career that would outlast almost all of his American contemporaries, and outsell many of them. [Excerpt: Cliff Richard, “Move It”] One of the things that will be a recurring theme in this podcast as Britain becomes a bigger part of rock history is the end of the British Empire. It is literally impossible to understand anything about Britain for the last eighty years without understanding that at the start of the 1940s the British Empire was the largest, most powerful empire that had ever been seen in human history, while by the early 1970s Britain was a tiny island that was desperately begging to be allowed into the EEC — the precursor of the EU — because it had no economic or political power at all on its own. The psychic shock this change in status gave to multiple generations of British people cannot be overstated, and almost all British history since at least 1945 can be explained in terms of Britain trying and failing to convince itself and the world that it was still important and still mattered. And one of the people whom that change in status hit most dramatically was a young boy named Harry Webb, who was born in India in 1940, to a family who were of British descent, but who had been in India for a couple of generations. Like most white people in India at the time they benefited hugely from the Empire — although they were only moderately well off by white British standards in India, they lived in what for most people would seem absolute luxury, with servants looking after them, and the people of India being deferential to them. But then, after World War II came Indian independence and partition, and the Webb family found themselves in Britain, a country they’d never lived in, homeless and jobless. Harry, his parents, and his three sisters had to live in one room of a three-bedroom house, with the other rooms of the house occupied by another family of eight. Not only that, but while Harry had been a beneficiary of racism in India, in Britain he was a victim of it — while he was white, he had a dark complexion, an Anglo-Indian accent, and came from India, so everyone assumed he was Indian — except that the only Indians that his schoolmates knew anything about were the ones in cowboy films, so he kept getting asked where his wigwam was. Eventually the Webb family managed to get a house to themselves, and young Harry managed to get rid of his accent, ending up with an accent that reflected neither his Indian origins nor his London upbringing, but rather a generic regionless middle-class accent with a trace of the mid-Atlantic behind it. Webb’s accent would later become almost the default for people in the media, edging out the received pronunciation that had dominated in previous decades, but at the time it gave him a distinct advantage when he finally became a pop star, because he didn’t sound like he was from a particular place. When he was sixteen, he heard the record that would change his life: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Heartbreak Hotel”] Young Harry became obsessed with Elvis Presley, and tried to make himself look as much like Elvis as possible. His first public performance was with a vocal group he formed at school, and he took a solo on “Heartbreak Hotel”. On leaving school, having failed almost all his exams, he decided that he wanted to become a rock and roll star. He had no idea how he was going to go about it until one day his bike broke, and he had to get the bus into work. On the same bus was an old schoolfriend, Terry Smart, who was the drummer in a skiffle group. Their singer had recently been drafted, and they needed a new one. He remembered that Harry could sing, and invited him to join the group. Harry’s musical tastes didn’t really run to skiffle, which by this time had become a very formalised genre, with the instruments almost always consisting of acoustic guitar, teachest bass, and washboard, and a repertoire that was made up primarily of songs by Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie, and Big Bill Broonzy (who was the one blues musician that even the least knowledgable skiffler could name, despite his relative lack of commercial success in the US). There would also be a good chunk of traditional folk and sea shanties thrown in. A typical example of the style would be the Vipers Skiffle Group’s version of “Maggie May”: [Excerpt: The Vipers Skiffle Group, “Maggie May”] Skiffle was both too rowdy and too intellectual for young Harry Webb, whose main interest other than music was sports rather than digging up old folk songs. Other than Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis, his tastes ran to smoother American soft-rockers like Ricky Nelson and the Everly Brothers — he never had much time for the R&B styles of people like Little Richard, let alone for anything as raw as Lead Belly or Big Bill Broonzy. But Harry Webb was an unusual person. On the one hand, he was amazingly old-fashioned and prudish even for the period — he refused to smoke, drink, or blaspheme, he was very softly spoken, and as a teenager when asked if he had a girlfriend he would say “Yes, I’ve got a picture of her in my pocket” and would pull out a photo of his mother. But on the other hand, he was incredibly driven, and was willing to make use of anyone around him for precisely as long as it would take for them to help him achieve his goals. If the musicians around him wanted to play skiffle, he would play skiffle — for the moment. So Harry Webb joined Dick Teague’s Skiffle Group, and became their lead singer. He applied himself diligently to learning the skiffle material — songs like “Rock Island Line”, “This Train”, “This Little Light of Mine”, and “Don’t You Rock Me Daddy-O” — and he would rehearse every single night, and got to know the material intimately. But he insisted on singing in an imitation of Elvis’ voice, and thrusting his hips like Elvis did. But an Elvis-style vocal simply didn’t work with songs like this: [Excerpt: The Vipers Skiffle Group, “Don’t You Rock Me Daddy-O”] After a short period with the group, he started scheming with Terry Smart — they were going to continue with the skiffle group for the moment, but they secretly put together their own rock and roll group. Harry’s friend Norman Mitham started turning up to the group’s rehearsals, and watching the guitarists’ fingers intently — he was learning their material for the new group. Webb and Smart left the Dick Teague Skiffle Group, and with Mitham they formed a new rock and roll group. Inspired by the recent launch of Sputnik, they thought of calling themselves The Planets. But they decided that wasn’t quite right, and looked up the etymology of “planet”, and found it came from the Greek for “wanderer” or “drifter”, and so they became the Drifters, unaware there was an American group of the same name. On one of their very early gigs, a man named John Foster came up and introduced himself to them. Foster had no music business experience — he worked in a sewage farm — but he became the group’s manager based on two important factors. The first was that he had a telephone, which in 1958 meant he was clearly a figure of some importance — *no-one* in Britain had a telephone! And the second was that he was a nodding acquaintance of the managers of the 2is, the famous coffee bar where the Vipers used to play, and where both Tommy Steele and Terry Dene had been discovered, and he was pretty sure he could get them a gig there. He managed to get them a two-week residency at the 2is, and during the first week, a young man named Ian Samwell came up and asked them if they needed a lead guitarist. They said yes, and he was in the group. A booking agent who saw the group in their second week decided he wanted to book them for some shows in the North, but he had two problems. He didn’t want them to be booked as a group, but as a lead singer and his backing group, and he thought Harry Webb wasn’t a good enough name. So the Drifters became Cliff Richard and the Drifters, and Harry Webb soon told everyone in his life that he was only to be addressed as Cliff from now on. Foster and Samwell got the group an agent, and the agent in turn got them an audition with Norrie Paramor at Columbia Records. But there was one more thing to do. By this time Cliff *did* have a girlfriend — while according to those around him he was never that interested in dating or sex, they did go out with each other for a little while and claimed to be in love with each other. But he knew that if he was going to be a rock and roll star, he had to appear available to the teenage girls, so he dumped her. She understood — he’d had to choose between his career and love, and he’d chosen his career. Paramor was interested, and he wanted the group to record a song which had been a hit in the US for Bobby Helms: [Excerpt: Bobby Helms, “Schoolboy Crush”] That song was co-written by Aaron Schroeder, who we’ve seen before as the co-writer of some of Elvis’ tracks for Jailhouse Rock, and of Carl Perkins’ “Glad All Over”. Cliff learned the song straight away, and soon the Drifters were in Abbey Road studios ready to record their first single — but only Cliff Richard’s name was on the recording contract. While the record label would say “Cliff Richard and the Drifters”, the other group members were only going to get a flat session fee for the record, while Cliff was going to get artist royalties. Also, not all of the Drifters were present. Ian Samwell had persuaded Cliff that there was no need to keep Norman Mitham in the band. Mitham was just playing rhythm guitar like Cliff was, and Samwell thought there was no point having three guitarists and splitting the money three ways instead of two. So Mitham, who had been friends with Cliff since they were both nine, was out of the group. Cliff didn’t play guitar especially well, so for the session Samwell switched to rhythm and a session player, Ernie Shear, was brought in to play lead. The group was also augmented in the studio by a double bass player, Frank Clarke, and the Mike Sammes singers on backing vocals. The track they cut that day was not hugely inspiring: [Excerpt: Cliff Richard and the Drifters, “Schoolboy Crush”] But the B-side was more interesting. It was the first song that Ian Samwell had ever written — an angry response to an article in the Melody Maker arguing that rock and roll was dead. It was stuck on the B-side of the proposed single mostly for lack of anything better, and it was knocked off quickly. Indeed, the main engineer on the session didn’t stick around for the recording — he wanted to go to the opera, and so it was left to the junior engineer Malcolm Addey to actually record the song. And that made a big difference — Addey was young enough to have some idea himself as to what a rock and roll record should sound like, and he came up with a much louder, more resonant, sound than anything that had been heard in a British recording session — a record that didn’t sound all that dissimilar to the records that Sun was putting out: [Excerpt: Cliff Richard and the Drifters, “Move It”] That track was still intended for the B-side, until the point that Jack Good heard it. Jack Good was possibly the most important person ever to be involved in music TV — not just in Britain, but in the world. Good had been an actor, until he saw “Rock Around the Clock” in the cinema, and saw the way that the audiences reacted to the film. He became immediately convinced that the audience response was a crucial part of rock and roll, and that if done properly rock and roll performances could lead to the kind of catharsis that classical Greek drama aimed at. He took this idea to the BBC, who were at the time looking to put on a new teenage show. Up until mid 1956, the practice in British TV had been to stop transmitting for an hour, from six until seven in the evening, in order to let parents put their kids to bed — this was known as the Toddlers’ Truce. But after the commercial network ITV began broadcasting in 1955, the practice became controversial. While the BBC saved money by not putting on any programmes between six and seven — they got the same amount in TV license fees however much they broadcast — an hour without programmes for a commercial channel meant an hour without advertising fees. Eventually, ITV managed to get the rules changed, and the BBC decided that at five past six on a Saturday, they would put out a programme for young people, but young people allowed up that late — and it was to be called Six-Five Special. [Excerpt: The Bob Cort Skiffle Group, “The Six-Five Special”] Six-Five Special embodied many of Good’s ideas about how to broadcast rock and roll music — it had the audience as an integral part of the programme — there was very little distinction between the audience and the performers, who would perform among the crowd rather than separated from them. By all accounts it had some fantastic moments, including an appearance by Big Bill Broonzy, and a live broadcast from the 2Is coffee bar itself. But Good wasn’t the sole producer, and he had to compromise his vision. As well as rock and roll and skiffle, the programme also included light music of a kind parents would approve of, educational items, and bits about sport. Good kept trying to persuade the people at the BBC to let him have the show be just about rock and roll, but his co-producer wanted Hungarian acrobats and features on stamp collecting. So Good moved over to ABC, one of the ITV stations, and started a rival show, “Oh Boy!” On “Oh Boy!” the focus was entirely on the music. Good had very strong ideas on what he wanted from the show, ideas he’d got from sources as varied as a theatrical company who put on performances of Shakespeare with all-black backgrounds and no sets, and a book he’d read on the physiology of brainwashing. He wanted to make something powerful. Unlike on Six-Five Special the audience wouldn’t be mixing with the performers, but this time the performers would be picked out by a white spotlight on a black background. After two pilot episodes in June 1958, the programme started its run in September, with appearances from Marty Wilde, the John Barry Seven and more, and with instrumental backing for the solo performers provided by Lord Rockingham’s Eleven, a studio group who would go on to have a novelty hit with “Hoots Mon!” as a result of their appearances on the show: [Excerpt: Lord Rockingham’s XI, “Hoots Mon!”] And Cliff Richard was to be added to that show. It was Jack Good who, more than anyone else, came up with the image of the rock and roll star, and his influence can be seen in literally every visual depiction of rock and roll music from the early sixties on. And from the evidence of the two surviving episodes of Oh Boy! he, and the director Rita Gillespie, one of the very few female directors working in TV at the time, did a remarkable job of creating something truly exciting — something all the more remarkable when you look at what they had to work with. Most of the British rock and roll acts at the time were small, malnourished, spotty, teenage boys, who were doing a sort of cargo-cult imitation of American rock and rollers without really understanding what they were meant to be doing. But the lighting and the visuals of the show were extraordinary — and in Cliff Richard, Good had found someone who, if he was nowhere near as exciting as his American models, at least could be moulded into something that was the closest thing that could be found to a real British rock and roll star — someone who might one day be almost as good as Gene Vincent. Good insisted that the song Cliff should perform on his show should be “Move It”, and so the record label quickly flipped the single. Good worked with Cliff for a full week on his performance of the song, instructing him in every blink, every time he should clutch his arm as if in pain, the way he should look down , not straight at the audience, everything. Good chose his shocking pink outfit (not visible on black and white TV, but designed to send the girls in the audience into a frenzy) and had him restyle his hair to be less like Elvis’. And so in September 1958, a few weeks before his eighteenth birthday, Cliff Richard made his TV debut: [Excerpt: Cliff Richard, “Move It”] “Oh Boy” was the most fast-paced thing on TV — on the evidence of the surviving episodes it was one song after another, non-stop, by different performers — as many as seventeen songs in a twenty-five minute live show, with no artist doing two songs in a row. It was an immediate hit, and so was “Move It”, which went to number two in the charts. There was a media outcry over Cliff’s brazen sexuality, with the NME accusing him of “crude exhibitionism”, while the Daily Sketch would ask “Is this boy TV star too sexy?” Cliff Richard was suddenly the biggest star and sex symbol in the UK, but there were problems with the band. Cliff was no longer playing guitar while he sang, and the group also needed a bass player, so Ian Samwell switched to bass, and they went looking for a new guitarist. The original intention was to audition a young player named Tony Sheridan, but while John Foster was waiting in the 2is to meet him, he started talking with someone who had just left the Vipers, and said that he and his friend would be happy to join the group, and so Cliff’s backing group now consisted of Ian Samwell, Terry Smart, Hank Marvin and Bruce Welch. The new group recorded another Ian Samwell song, “High Class Baby”: [Excerpt: Cliff Richard and the Drifters, “High Class Baby”] What Samwell didn’t know when they recorded that was that Cliff was already planning to replace him, with Jet Harris, who had played with Marvin in the Vipers. Now he was playing with better musicians, Samwell’s shortcomings were showing up. Cliff didn’t tell Samwell himself — he got John Foster to fire him. Samwell would go on to have some success as a songwriter and record producer, though, most famously producing “Horse With No Name” for America. Shortly after that, Foster was gone as well, first demoted from manager to roadie, then given two weeks’ notice in a letter from Cliff’s dad. And then finally, Cliff replaced Terry Smart, his old school friend, the person who had invited him into his group, with Tony Meehan, another ex-Viper. By Cliff’s nineteenth birthday, the only thing left of the original Drifters was the name. And soon that would change too, as Cliff Richard and the Drifters became Cliff Richard and the Shadows.

  Episode seventy of A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs looks at “Move It” by Cliff Richard, and the beginning of rock and roll TV in the UK. 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 “Poor Little Fool” by Ricky Nelson, another artist whose career was made by TV, and one who influenced Cliff Richard hugely.   —-more—-  ERRATUM: I say Cliff Richard was sixteen when he first heard “Heartbreak Hotel”. He was fifteen. Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.   This four-CD set contains all the singles and EPs released by Cliff Richard and the Shadows, together and separately, between 1958 and 1962. This MP3 compilation, meanwhile, contains a huge number of skiffle records and early British attempts at rock and roll. Much of the music is not very good, but I can’t imagine a better way of getting an understanding of the roots of British rock. Pete Frame’s The Restless Generation is the best book available looking at British 50s rock and roll from a historical perspective. Be warned, though — his jokey and irreverent style can, when dealing with people like Larry Parnes (who was gay and Jewish) very occasionally tip over into reinforcing homophobic and anti-semitic stereotypes for an easy laugh. Billy Bragg’s Roots, Radicals, and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World is one of the best books I’ve read on music at all, and gives far more detail about the historical background. And Cliff Richard: The Biography by Steve Turner is very positive towards Richard, but not at the expense of honesty.     Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   We’ve looked a little bit at the start of rock and roll in Britain, which was so different from the American music that it feels absurd to talk of the two in the same breath. But today we’re going to have a look at the first really massive star of British rock and roll — someone who is still going strong today, more than sixty years after he released his first record: [Excerpt: Cliff Richard, “Move It”] When we’ve looked at British rock and roll to this point, it’s been rather lifeless, and there’s a reason for that. There were, in the mid-fifties, two different streams of music in Britain that were aiming to appeal to young people. One was skiffle, and that’s the branch of music that eventually led to all British rock and roll from the sixties onwards — we looked at that with Lonnie Donegan, but the skiffle craze was a big, big thing for about two years, and when it finally died down it splintered into three different, overlapping, groups — there were the folk revivalists, who we’ll talk about when we get to Bob Dylan; the British blues people, who we’ll look at when we get to the Rolling Stones; and the rock and rollers. Skiffle had everything that people found exciting and interesting about American rock and roll — at least, it had much of the excitement of the rockabilly music. But it wasn’t marketed as rock and roll, and it tended to aim at a slightly more bohemian audience. Meanwhile, British rock and roll proper — the stuff that was being marketed as rock and roll — was mostly being made by longtime professional musicians who had switched from playing anaemic copies of swing music to anaemic copies of Bill Haley and the Comets. Groups like Tony Crombie and the Rockets were making records like “Let’s You and I Rock”, which copied the formula of Haley’s less good records: [Excerpt: Tony Crombie and the Rockets, “Let’s You and I Rock”] The idea of rock and roll in the British music business in those early years came entirely from the film Rock Around the Clock, which had featured Haley, the Platters, and Freddie Bell and His Bellboys — who were a second-rate clone of Haley’s band. As we discussed in the episodes on Haley, his particular style of music had few imitators in American rock and roll, so while British groups were copying things like Freddie Bell’s one hit, “Giddy-Up A Ding-Dong”, British teenagers were instead listening to American records by Buddy Holly or Little Richard, the Everly Brothers or Elvis, none of whose recordings had anything to do with anything that was being made by the British commercial rock and roll industry. For British rock and roll to matter, it had to at least catch up to what the American records were doing. It needed its own Elvis — and that Elvis would ideally be someone who came from the skiffle scene, but was more oriented towards rock and roll than most of the skifflers, who were very happy playing Lead Belly songs rather than “Blue Suede Shoes”. Tommy Steele had been a good start, but he’d jumped the gun a little bit. He was essentially still a pre-Elvis performer, although he was one who followed the rockabilly pattern of a young man with a guitar. His records were still novelty songs with the word “rock” thrown in, like “Rock With the Caveman”, and when he tried to copy Elvis’ vocal mannerisms, while it brought him a number one hit, it didn’t really sound particularly credible: [Excerpt: Tommy Steele, “Singing the Blues”] In the wake of Steele came a whole host of other teen idols along the same lines, most of them managed by Larry Parnes — Adam Faith, Mary Wilde, Terry Dene, Vince Taylor, Johnny Gentle, Billy Fury, Duffy Power, Dickie Pride, and many more. Some of these went on to have interesting careers, and a few made records that we’ll be looking at in future episodes, but one of them — one of the few not managed by Parnes — managed to have a career that would outlast almost all of his American contemporaries, and outsell many of them. [Excerpt: Cliff Richard, “Move It”] One of the things that will be a recurring theme in this podcast as Britain becomes a bigger part of rock history is the end of the British Empire. It is literally impossible to understand anything about Britain for the last eighty years without understanding that at the start of the 1940s the British Empire was the largest, most powerful empire that had ever been seen in human history, while by the early 1970s Britain was a tiny island that was desperately begging to be allowed into the EEC — the precursor of the EU — because it had no economic or political power at all on its own. The psychic shock this change in status gave to multiple generations of British people cannot be overstated, and almost all British history since at least 1945 can be explained in terms of Britain trying and failing to convince itself and the world that it was still important and still mattered. And one of the people whom that change in status hit most dramatically was a young boy named Harry Webb, who was born in India in 1940, to a family who were of British descent, but who had been in India for a couple of generations. Like most white people in India at the time they benefited hugely from the Empire — although they were only moderately well off by white British standards in India, they lived in what for most people would seem absolute luxury, with servants looking after them, and the people of India being deferential to them. But then, after World War II came Indian independence and partition, and the Webb family found themselves in Britain, a country they’d never lived in, homeless and jobless. Harry, his parents, and his three sisters had to live in one room of a three-bedroom house, with the other rooms of the house occupied by another family of eight. Not only that, but while Harry had been a beneficiary of racism in India, in Britain he was a victim of it — while he was white, he had a dark complexion, an Anglo-Indian accent, and came from India, so everyone assumed he was Indian — except that the only Indians that his schoolmates knew anything about were the ones in cowboy films, so he kept getting asked where his wigwam was. Eventually the Webb family managed to get a house to themselves, and young Harry managed to get rid of his accent, ending up with an accent that reflected neither his Indian origins nor his London upbringing, but rather a generic regionless middle-class accent with a trace of the mid-Atlantic behind it. Webb’s accent would later become almost the default for people in the media, edging out the received pronunciation that had dominated in previous decades, but at the time it gave him a distinct advantage when he finally became a pop star, because he didn’t sound like he was from a particular place. When he was sixteen, he heard the record that would change his life: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Heartbreak Hotel”] Young Harry became obsessed with Elvis Presley, and tried to make himself look as much like Elvis as possible. His first public performance was with a vocal group he formed at school, and he took a solo on “Heartbreak Hotel”. On leaving school, having failed almost all his exams, he decided that he wanted to become a rock and roll star. He had no idea how he was going to go about it until one day his bike broke, and he had to get the bus into work. On the same bus was an old schoolfriend, Terry Smart, who was the drummer in a skiffle group. Their singer had recently been drafted, and they needed a new one. He remembered that Harry could sing, and invited him to join the group. Harry’s musical tastes didn’t really run to skiffle, which by this time had become a very formalised genre, with the instruments almost always consisting of acoustic guitar, teachest bass, and washboard, and a repertoire that was made up primarily of songs by Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie, and Big Bill Broonzy (who was the one blues musician that even the least knowledgable skiffler could name, despite his relative lack of commercial success in the US). There would also be a good chunk of traditional folk and sea shanties thrown in. A typical example of the style would be the Vipers Skiffle Group’s version of “Maggie May”: [Excerpt: The Vipers Skiffle Group, “Maggie May”] Skiffle was both too rowdy and too intellectual for young Harry Webb, whose main interest other than music was sports rather than digging up old folk songs. Other than Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis, his tastes ran to smoother American soft-rockers like Ricky Nelson and the Everly Brothers — he never had much time for the R&B styles of people like Little Richard, let alone for anything as raw as Lead Belly or Big Bill Broonzy. But Harry Webb was an unusual person. On the one hand, he was amazingly old-fashioned and prudish even for the period — he refused to smoke, drink, or blaspheme, he was very softly spoken, and as a teenager when asked if he had a girlfriend he would say “Yes, I’ve got a picture of her in my pocket” and would pull out a photo of his mother. But on the other hand, he was incredibly driven, and was willing to make use of anyone around him for precisely as long as it would take for them to help him achieve his goals. If the musicians around him wanted to play skiffle, he would play skiffle — for the moment. So Harry Webb joined Dick Teague’s Skiffle Group, and became their lead singer. He applied himself diligently to learning the skiffle material — songs like “Rock Island Line”, “This Train”, “This Little Light of Mine”, and “Don’t You Rock Me Daddy-O” — and he would rehearse every single night, and got to know the material intimately. But he insisted on singing in an imitation of Elvis’ voice, and thrusting his hips like Elvis did. But an Elvis-style vocal simply didn’t work with songs like this: [Excerpt: The Vipers Skiffle Group, “Don’t You Rock Me Daddy-O”] After a short period with the group, he started scheming with Terry Smart — they were going to continue with the skiffle group for the moment, but they secretly put together their own rock and roll group. Harry’s friend Norman Mitham started turning up to the group’s rehearsals, and watching the guitarists’ fingers intently — he was learning their material for the new group. Webb and Smart left the Dick Teague Skiffle Group, and with Mitham they formed a new rock and roll group. Inspired by the recent launch of Sputnik, they thought of calling themselves The Planets. But they decided that wasn’t quite right, and looked up the etymology of “planet”, and found it came from the Greek for “wanderer” or “drifter”, and so they became the Drifters, unaware there was an American group of the same name. On one of their very early gigs, a man named John Foster came up and introduced himself to them. Foster had no music business experience — he worked in a sewage farm — but he became the group’s manager based on two important factors. The first was that he had a telephone, which in 1958 meant he was clearly a figure of some importance — *no-one* in Britain had a telephone! And the second was that he was a nodding acquaintance of the managers of the 2is, the famous coffee bar where the Vipers used to play, and where both Tommy Steele and Terry Dene had been discovered, and he was pretty sure he could get them a gig there. He managed to get them a two-week residency at the 2is, and during the first week, a young man named Ian Samwell came up and asked them if they needed a lead guitarist. They said yes, and he was in the group. A booking agent who saw the group in their second week decided he wanted to book them for some shows in the North, but he had two problems. He didn’t want them to be booked as a group, but as a lead singer and his backing group, and he thought Harry Webb wasn’t a good enough name. So the Drifters became Cliff Richard and the Drifters, and Harry Webb soon told everyone in his life that he was only to be addressed as Cliff from now on. Foster and Samwell got the group an agent, and the agent in turn got them an audition with Norrie Paramor at Columbia Records. But there was one more thing to do. By this time Cliff *did* have a girlfriend — while according to those around him he was never that interested in dating or sex, they did go out with each other for a little while and claimed to be in love with each other. But he knew that if he was going to be a rock and roll star, he had to appear available to the teenage girls, so he dumped her. She understood — he’d had to choose between his career and love, and he’d chosen his career. Paramor was interested, and he wanted the group to record a song which had been a hit in the US for Bobby Helms: [Excerpt: Bobby Helms, “Schoolboy Crush”] That song was co-written by Aaron Schroeder, who we’ve seen before as the co-writer of some of Elvis’ tracks for Jailhouse Rock, and of Carl Perkins’ “Glad All Over”. Cliff learned the song straight away, and soon the Drifters were in Abbey Road studios ready to record their first single — but only Cliff Richard’s name was on the recording contract. While the record label would say “Cliff Richard and the Drifters”, the other group members were only going to get a flat session fee for the record, while Cliff was going to get artist royalties. Also, not all of the Drifters were present. Ian Samwell had persuaded Cliff that there was no need to keep Norman Mitham in the band. Mitham was just playing rhythm guitar like Cliff was, and Samwell thought there was no point having three guitarists and splitting the money three ways instead of two. So Mitham, who had been friends with Cliff since they were both nine, was out of the group. Cliff didn’t play guitar especially well, so for the session Samwell switched to rhythm and a session player, Ernie Shear, was brought in to play lead. The group was also augmented in the studio by a double bass player, Frank Clarke, and the Mike Sammes singers on backing vocals. The track they cut that day was not hugely inspiring: [Excerpt: Cliff Richard and the Drifters, “Schoolboy Crush”] But the B-side was more interesting. It was the first song that Ian Samwell had ever written — an angry response to an article in the Melody Maker arguing that rock and roll was dead. It was stuck on the B-side of the proposed single mostly for lack of anything better, and it was knocked off quickly. Indeed, the main engineer on the session didn’t stick around for the recording — he wanted to go to the opera, and so it was left to the junior engineer Malcolm Addey to actually record the song. And that made a big difference — Addey was young enough to have some idea himself as to what a rock and roll record should sound like, and he came up with a much louder, more resonant, sound than anything that had been heard in a British recording session — a record that didn’t sound all that dissimilar to the records that Sun was putting out: [Excerpt: Cliff Richard and the Drifters, “Move It”] That track was still intended for the B-side, until the point that Jack Good heard it. Jack Good was possibly the most important person ever to be involved in music TV — not just in Britain, but in the world. Good had been an actor, until he saw “Rock Around the Clock” in the cinema, and saw the way that the audiences reacted to the film. He became immediately convinced that the audience response was a crucial part of rock and roll, and that if done properly rock and roll performances could lead to the kind of catharsis that classical Greek drama aimed at. He took this idea to the BBC, who were at the time looking to put on a new teenage show. Up until mid 1956, the practice in British TV had been to stop transmitting for an hour, from six until seven in the evening, in order to let parents put their kids to bed — this was known as the Toddlers’ Truce. But after the commercial network ITV began broadcasting in 1955, the practice became controversial. While the BBC saved money by not putting on any programmes between six and seven — they got the same amount in TV license fees however much they broadcast — an hour without programmes for a commercial channel meant an hour without advertising fees. Eventually, ITV managed to get the rules changed, and the BBC decided that at five past six on a Saturday, they would put out a programme for young people, but young people allowed up that late — and it was to be called Six-Five Special. [Excerpt: The Bob Cort Skiffle Group, “The Six-Five Special”] Six-Five Special embodied many of Good’s ideas about how to broadcast rock and roll music — it had the audience as an integral part of the programme — there was very little distinction between the audience and the performers, who would perform among the crowd rather than separated from them. By all accounts it had some fantastic moments, including an appearance by Big Bill Broonzy, and a live broadcast from the 2Is coffee bar itself. But Good wasn’t the sole producer, and he had to compromise his vision. As well as rock and roll and skiffle, the programme also included light music of a kind parents would approve of, educational items, and bits about sport. Good kept trying to persuade the people at the BBC to let him have the show be just about rock and roll, but his co-producer wanted Hungarian acrobats and features on stamp collecting. So Good moved over to ABC, one of the ITV stations, and started a rival show, “Oh Boy!” On “Oh Boy!” the focus was entirely on the music. Good had very strong ideas on what he wanted from the show, ideas he’d got from sources as varied as a theatrical company who put on performances of Shakespeare with all-black backgrounds and no sets, and a book he’d read on the physiology of brainwashing. He wanted to make something powerful. Unlike on Six-Five Special the audience wouldn’t be mixing with the performers, but this time the performers would be picked out by a white spotlight on a black background. After two pilot episodes in June 1958, the programme started its run in September, with appearances from Marty Wilde, the John Barry Seven and more, and with instrumental backing for the solo performers provided by Lord Rockingham’s Eleven, a studio group who would go on to have a novelty hit with “Hoots Mon!” as a result of their appearances on the show: [Excerpt: Lord Rockingham’s XI, “Hoots Mon!”] And Cliff Richard was to be added to that show. It was Jack Good who, more than anyone else, came up with the image of the rock and roll star, and his influence can be seen in literally every visual depiction of rock and roll music from the early sixties on. And from the evidence of the two surviving episodes of Oh Boy! he, and the director Rita Gillespie, one of the very few female directors working in TV at the time, did a remarkable job of creating something truly exciting — something all the more remarkable when you look at what they had to work with. Most of the British rock and roll acts at the time were small, malnourished, spotty, teenage boys, who were doing a sort of cargo-cult imitation of American rock and rollers without really understanding what they were meant to be doing. But the lighting and the visuals of the show were extraordinary — and in Cliff Richard, Good had found someone who, if he was nowhere near as exciting as his American models, at least could be moulded into something that was the closest thing that could be found to a real British rock and roll star — someone who might one day be almost as good as Gene Vincent. Good insisted that the song Cliff should perform on his show should be “Move It”, and so the record label quickly flipped the single. Good worked with Cliff for a full week on his performance of the song, instructing him in every blink, every time he should clutch his arm as if in pain, the way he should look down , not straight at the audience, everything. Good chose his shocking pink outfit (not visible on black and white TV, but designed to send the girls in the audience into a frenzy) and had him restyle his hair to be less like Elvis’. And so in September 1958, a few weeks before his eighteenth birthday, Cliff Richard made his TV debut: [Excerpt: Cliff Richard, “Move It”] “Oh Boy” was the most fast-paced thing on TV — on the evidence of the surviving episodes it was one song after another, non-stop, by different performers — as many as seventeen songs in a twenty-five minute live show, with no artist doing two songs in a row. It was an immediate hit, and so was “Move It”, which went to number two in the charts. There was a media outcry over Cliff’s brazen sexuality, with the NME accusing him of “crude exhibitionism”, while the Daily Sketch would ask “Is this boy TV star too sexy?” Cliff Richard was suddenly the biggest star and sex symbol in the UK, but there were problems with the band. Cliff was no longer playing guitar while he sang, and the group also needed a bass player, so Ian Samwell switched to bass, and they went looking for a new guitarist. The original intention was to audition a young player named Tony Sheridan, but while John Foster was waiting in the 2is to meet him, he started talking with someone who had just left the Vipers, and said that he and his friend would be happy to join the group, and so Cliff’s backing group now consisted of Ian Samwell, Terry Smart, Hank Marvin and Bruce Welch. The new group recorded another Ian Samwell song, “High Class Baby”: [Excerpt: Cliff Richard and the Drifters, “High Class Baby”] What Samwell didn’t know when they recorded that was that Cliff was already planning to replace him, with Jet Harris, who had played with Marvin in the Vipers. Now he was playing with better musicians, Samwell’s shortcomings were showing up. Cliff didn’t tell Samwell himself — he got John Foster to fire him. Samwell would go on to have some success as a songwriter and record producer, though, most famously producing “Horse With No Name” for America. Shortly after that, Foster was gone as well, first demoted from manager to roadie, then given two weeks’ notice in a letter from Cliff’s dad. And then finally, Cliff replaced Terry Smart, his old school friend, the person who had invited him into his group, with Tony Meehan, another ex-Viper. By Cliff’s nineteenth birthday, the only thing left of the original Drifters was the name. And soon that would change too, as Cliff Richard and the Drifters became Cliff Richard and the Shadows.

On today's show, Tim welcomes legendary drummer Dave Clark from The Dave Clark Five to the show to discuss his and the group's legacy, his music inspirations, and the concept of British Invasion. Then, Associated Press sportswriter Rob Maaddi joins the show to discuss MLB Hall of Fame recipients, and as a voter himself, his selections and the process of getting into the Hall of Fame, as well as his journey with faith and the story of his and Tim's friendship. Make sure to tune in live weekdays 4-5 pm ET on AM 560 WFIL! Music ft: Brother (NEEDTOBREATHE) Glad All Over (The Dave Clark Five)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Check Playlist This edition of The Five Count featured an exclusive interview with Dave Clark. Dave is best known as the founder and drummer for The Dave Clark Five. Known for hits like Glad All Over, Over and Over and Catch Us If You Can, Dave Clark is also a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. During the show he discussed the incredible success of The Dave Clark Five in their early days, his relationship in the 1960s with The Beatles, and the new Dave Clark Five album All the Hits. Get your copy now! During the rest of the show we paid tribute to Monty Python's Terry Jones, discussed which ‘80s cartoons deserved more episodes, Dustin tried to defend being a Kansas City Chiefs fan in today's society, and we gave away tickets to WWE Presents NXT Live! on Feb. 23 at Roy Wilkins Auditorium in St. Paul. The Five Count never ceases to amaze you! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKw9AYPeCz8https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdyH2wW34JI&t=1s

Episode sixty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Great Balls of Fire” by Jerry Lee Lewis. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. This one comes with a bit of a content warning, as while it has nothing explicit, it deals with his marriage to his thirteen-year-old cousin. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Rumble” by Link Wray. —-more—-  Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode (with one exception, which I mention in the podcast). The Spark That Survived by Myra Lewis Williams is Myra’s autobiography, and tells her side of the story, which has tended to be ignored in favour of her famous husband’s side. I’m relying heavily on Sam Phillips: the Man Who Invented Rock and Roll by Peter Guralnick for all the episodes dealing with Phillips and Sun Records. Books on Jerry Lee Lewis tend to be very flawed, as the authors all tend to think they’re Faulkner rather than giving the facts. This one by Rick Bragg is better than most. There are many budget CDs containing Lewis’ pre-1962 work. This set seems as good an option as any. And this ten-CD box set contains ninety Sun singles in chronological order, starting with “Whole Lotta Shakin'” and covering the Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, and Carl Perkins records discussed here. There are few better ways to get an idea of Lewis’ work in context. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Erratum: I say “Glad All Over” was written by Aaron Schroeder. In fact it was co-written by Schroeder, Roy Bennett, and Sid Tepper. Transcript   We’ve looked before at the rise of Jerry Lee Lewis, but in this episode we’re going to talk about his fall. And for that reason I have to put a content warning at the beginning here. While I’m not going to say anything explicit at all, this episode has to deal with events that I, and most of my listeners, would refer to as child sexual abuse, though the child in question still, more than sixty years later, doesn’t see them that way, and I don’t want to say anything that imposes my framing over hers. If you might find this subject distressing, I suggest reading the transcript before listening, or just skipping this episode. It also deals, towards the end, with domestic violence. Indeed, if you’re affected by these issues, I would also suggest skipping the next episode, on “Johnny B. Goode”, and coming back on February the second for “Yakety Yak” by the Coasters. We’re hitting a point in the history of rock and roll where, for the first time, rock and roll begins its decline in popularity. We’ll see from this point on that every few years there’s a change in musical fashions, and a new set of artists take over from the most popular artists of the previous period. And in the case of the first rock and roll era, that takeover was largely traumatic. There were a number of deaths, some prosecutions — and in the case of Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry, scandals. In general, I try not to make these podcast episodes be about the horrific acts that some of the men involved have committed. This is a podcast about music, not about horrible men doing horrible things. But in the case of Jerry Lee Lewis, he was one of the very small number of men to have actually faced consequences for his actions, and so it has to be discussed. I promise I will try to do so as sensitively as possible. Although sensitivity is not the word that comes to mind when one thinks of Jerry Lee Lewis, generally… [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Great Balls of Fire”] When we left Jerry Lee Lewis, he had just had his first really major success, with “Whole Lotta Shakin'”. He was on top of the world, and the most promising artist in rock and roll music. With Elvis about to be drafted into the army, the role of biggest rock and roll star was wide open, and Lewis intended to take over Elvis’ mantle. There was going to be a new king of rock and roll. It didn’t quite work out that way. “Whole Lotta Shakin'” was such a massive hit that on the basis of that one record, Jerry Lee was invited to perform his next single in a film called Jamboree. This was one of the many exploitation films that were being put out starring popular DJs — this one starred Dick Clark, rather than Alan Freed, who’d appeared in most of them. They were the kind of thing that made Elvis’ films look like masterpieces of the cinema, and tended to involve a bunch of kids who wanted to put a dance on at their local school, or similar interchangeable plots. The reason people went to see them wasn’t the plot, but the performances by rock and roll musicians. Fats Domino was in most of these, and he was in this one, singing his minor single “Wait and See”. There were also a few performances by musicians who weren’t strictly rock and roll, and were from an older generation, but who were close enough that the kids would probably accept them. Slim Whitman appeared, as did Count Basie, with Joe Williams as lead vocalist:… [Excerpt: Joe Williams, “I Don’t Like You No More”] The film also featured the only known footage of Lewis Lymon and the Teenchords, who we talked about briefly last week. More pertinently to this story, it featured Carl Perkins: [Excerpt: Carl Perkins, “Glad All Over”] That song was one of the few that Perkins recorded which wasn’t written by him. Instead, it was written by Aaron Schroeder, who had co-written the non-Leiber-and-Stoller songs for Jailhouse Rock, and who also appeared in this film in a cameo role as himself. The song was provided to Sam Phillips by Hill and Range, who were Phillips’ publishing partners as well as being Elvis’. It was to be Carl Perkins’ last record for Sun — Perkins had finally had enough of Sam Phillips being more interested in Jerry Lee Lewis. Even little things were getting to him — Jerry Lee’s records were credited to “Jerry Lee Lewis and his Pumping Piano”. Why did Carl’s records never say anything about Carl’s guitar? Sam promised him that the records would start to credit Carl Perkins as “the rocking guitar man”, but it was too late — Perkins and Johnny Cash both made an agreement with Columbia Records on November the first 1957 that when their current contracts with Sun expired, they’d start recording for the new label. Cash was in a similar situation to Perkins — Jack Clement had now taken over production of Cash’s records, and while Cash was writing some of his best material, songs like “Big River” that remain classics, Clement was making him record songs Clement had written himself, like “Ballad of a Teenage Queen”: [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, “Ballad of a Teenage Queen”] It’s quite easy to see from that, which he recorded in mid-November, why Cash left Sun. While Cash would go on to have greater success at Columbia, Perkins wouldn’t. And ironically it was possible that he had had one more opportunity to have a hit follow-up to “Blue Suede Shoes” at Sun, and he’d passed on it. According to Perkins, he was given a choice of two songs to perform in Jamboree, both of them published by Hill and Range, but “I thought both of them was junk!” and he’d chosen the one that was slightly less awful — that’s not how other people involved remember it, but he would always claim that he had been offered the song that Jerry Lee Lewis performed, and turned down “Great Balls of Fire”: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Great Balls of Fire”] That song was one that both Lewis and Phillips were immediately convinced would be a hit as soon as they heard the demo. Sam Phillips’ main worry was how they were going to improve on the demo by the song’s writer, Otis Blackwell, which he thought was pretty much perfect as it was. We’ve met Otis Blackwell briefly before — he was a New York-based songwriter, one of a relatively small number of black people who managed to get work as a professional songwriter for one of the big publishing companies. Blackwell had written “Fever” for Little Willie John, “You’re the Apple of My Eye” for Frankie Valli, and two massive hits for Elvis — “Don’t Be Cruel” and “All Shook Up”. We don’t have access to his demo of “Great Balls of Fire”, but in the seventies he recorded an album called “These are My Songs”, featuring many of the hits he’d written for other people, and it’s possible that the version of “Great Balls of Fire” on that album gives some idea of what the demo that so impressed Phillips sounded like: [Excerpt: Otis Blackwell, “Great Balls of Fire”] “Great Balls of Fire” seems to be the first thing to have been tailored specifically for the persona that Lewis had created with his previous hit. It’s a refinement of the “Whole Lotta Shakin'” formula, but it has a few differences that give the song far more impact. Most notably, where “Whole Lotta Shakin'” starts off with a gently rolling piano intro and only later picks up steam: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Whole Lotta Shakin'”] “Great Balls of Fire” has a much more dynamic opening — one that sets the tone for the whole record with its stop-start exclamations: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Great Balls of Fire”] Although that stop-start intro is one of the few signs in the record that point to the song having been possibly offered to Perkins — it’s very reminiscent of the intro to “Blue Suede Shoes”: [Excerpt: Carl Perkins, “Blue Suede Shoes”] I could imagine Perkins recording the song in the “Blue Suede Shoes” manner and having a hit with it, though not as big a hit as Lewis eventually had. On the other hand I can’t imagine Lewis turning “Glad All Over”, fun as it is, into anything even remotely worthy of following up “Whole Lotta Shakin'”. Almost straight away they managed to cut a version of “Great Balls of Fire” that was suitable for the film, but it wasn’t right for a hit record. They needed something that was absolutely perfect. After having sent the film version off, they spent several days working on getting the perfect version cut — paying particular attention to that stop-start intro, which the musicians had to time perfectly for it not to come out as a sloppy mess. Oddly, the musicians on the track weren’t the normal Sun session players, and nor were they the musicians who normally played in Lewis’ band. Instead, Lewis was backed by Sidney Stokes on bass and Larry Linn on drums — according to Lewis, he never met those two people again after they finished recording. But as the work proceeded, Jerry Lee became concerned. “Great Balls of Fire”? Didn’t that sound a bit… Satanic? And people did say that rock and roll was the Devil’s music. He ended up getting into an angry, rambling, theological discussion with Sam Phillips, which was recorded and which gives an insight into how difficult Lewis must have been to work with, but also how tortured he was — he truly believed in the existence of a physical Hell, and that he was destined to go there because of his music: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis and Sam Phillips, Bible discussion] Sam Phillips, who appears to have had the patience of a saint, eventually talked Lewis down and persuaded him to get back to making music. When “Great Balls of Fire” came out, with a cover of Hank Williams’ ballad “You Win Again” on the B-side, it was an immediate success. It sold over a million copies in the first ten days it was out, and it became a classic that has been covered by everyone from Dolly Parton to Aerosmith. It’s one of the records that defines 1950s rock and roll music, and it firmly established Jerry Lee Lewis as one of the greatest stars of rock and roll, if not the greatest. Jack and Sam kept recording everything they could from Lewis, getting a backlog of recordings that would be released for decades to come — everything from Hank Williams covers to the old blues number “Big Legged Woman”: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Big Legged Woman”] But they decided that they didn’t want to mess with a winning formula, and so the next record that they put out was another Otis Blackwell song, “Breathless”. This time, the band was the normal Sun studio drummer Jimmy Van Eaton, Billy Lee Riley on guitar — Riley was also furious with Sam Phillips for the way he was concentrating on Lewis’ career at the expense of everyone else’s, but he was still working on sessions for Phillips — and Jerry Lee’s cousin J.W. Brown on bass. J.W. was his full name — it didn’t stand for anything — and he was the regular touring bass player in Lewis’ band. “Breathless” was very much in the same style as “Great Balls of Fire”, if perhaps not *quite* so good: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Breathless”] To promote the record, Jud Phillips, Sam’s brother, came up with a great promotional scheme. Dick Clark, the presenter of American Bandstand, had another show, the Dick Clark Show, which was also called Dick Clark’s Saturday Night Beechnut Show because it was sponsored by Beechnut chewing gum. Clark had already had Jerry Lee on his show once, and he’d been a hit — Clark could bring him back on the show, and they could announce that if you sent Sun Records five Beechnut wrappers and fifty cents for postage and packing, you could get a signed copy of the new record. The fifty cents would be more than the postage and packing would cost, of course, and Sun would split the profits with Dick Clark. Sun bought an autograph stamp to stamp copies of the record with, hired a few extra temporary staff members to help them get the records posted, and made the arrangements with Dick Clark and his sponsors. The result was extraordinary — in some parts of the country, stores ran out of Beechnut gum altogether. More than thirty-eight thousand copies of the single were sent out to eager gum-chewers. It was around this time that Jerry Lee went on the Alan Freed tour that we mentioned last week, with Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Larry Williams, the Chantels, and eleven other acts. The tour later became legendary not so much for the music — though that was great — but for the personal disputes between Lewis and Berry. There were two separate issues at stake. The first was Elmo Lewis, Jerry’s father. Elmo had a habit of using racial slurs, and of threatening to fight anyone, especially black people, who he thought was disrespecting him. At one show on the tour, a dispute about parking spaces between Berry and Lewis led to the elder Lewis chasing Berry three blocks, waving a knife, and shouting “You know what we do with cats like you down in Ferriday? We chop the heads off them and throw it in a lake.” Apparently, by the next day, Elmo and Chuck were sat with each other at breakfast, the best of friends. The other issue was Berry’s belief that he, rather than Lewis, should be headlining the shows. He managed to persuade the promoters of this, and this led Lewis to try more and more outrageous stunts on stage to try to upstage Berry. The legend has it that at one show he went so far as to set his piano on fire at the climax of “Great Balls of Fire”, and then walk off stage challenging Berry to follow that. Some versions of the story have him using a racial slur there, too, but the story in whatever form seems to be apocryphal. It does, though, sum up the atmosphere between the two. That said, while Lewis and Berry fought incessantly, Berry was one of the few people to whom Lewis has ever shown any respect at all. Partly that’s because of Lewis’ admiration for Berry’s songwriting — he’s called Berry “the Hank Williams of rock and roll” before now, and for someone who admires Williams as much as Lewis does that’s about the highest imaginable praise. But also, Lewis and his father were both always very careful not to do anything that would lead to word of the feud getting back to his mother, because his mother had repeatedly told him that Chuck Berry was the greatest rock and roller in the world — Elvis was good, she said, and obviously so was her son, but neither of them were a patch on Chuck. She would have been furious with him, and would definitely have taken Chuck’s side. After the tour, Jerry Lee recorded another song for a film he was going to appear in. This time, it was the title song for a terribly shlocky attempt at drama, called High School Confidential — a film that dealt with the very serious and weighty issue of marijuana use among teenagers, and is widely regarded as one of the worst films ever made. The theme music, though, was pretty good: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “High School Confidential”] That came out on the nineteenth of May, 1958, and immediately started rising up the charts. Two days later, Jerry Lee headed out on what was meant to be a triumphal tour of the UK, solidifying him as the biggest, most important, rock and roll star in the world. And that is when everything came crashing down. Because it was when he and his entourage landed in the UK, and the press saw the thirteen-year-old girl with him, and asked who she was, that it became public knowledge he had married his thirteen-year-old cousin Myra. And here we get to something I’ve been dreading talking about since I decided on this project. There is simply no way to talk about Jerry Lee Lewis’ marriage to Myra Gale Brown which doesn’t erase Brown’s experience, doesn’t excuse Lewis’ behaviour, explains the cultural context in which it happened, and doesn’t minimise child abuse — which, and let’s be clear about this right now, this was. If you take from *anything* that I say after this that I think there is any possible excuse, any justification, for a man in his twenties having sex with a thirteen-year-old girl — let alone a thirteen-year-old girl in his own family, to whom he was an authority figure — then I have *badly* failed to get my meaning across. What Lewis did was, simply, wrong. It’s important to say that, because something that applies both to this episode and to the downfall of Chuck Berry, which we’ll be looking at in the next episode, is the way that both have been framed by all the traditional histories of rock and roll. If you read almost anything about rock and roll history, what you see when it gets to 1958 is “and here rock and roll nearly died, because of the prurient attitudes of a few prudes, who were out to destroy the careers of these new exciting rock and rollers because they hated the threat they posed to their traditional way of life”. That is simply not the case. Yes, there was a great deal of establishment opposition to rock and roll music, but what happened to Jerry Lee Lewis wasn’t some conspiracy of blue-nosed prudes. It was people getting angry, for entirely understandable reasons, about a man doing something that was absolutely, unquestionably, just *wrong*. And the fact that this has been minimised by rock and roll histories says a lot about the culture around rock journalism, none of it good. Now, that said, something that needs to be understood here is that Lewis and most of the people round him didn’t see him as doing anything particularly wrong. In the culture of the Southern US at the time, it was normal for very young girls to be married, often to older men. By his own lights, he was doing nothing wrong. His first marriage was when he was sixteen — Myra was his third wife, and he was still legally married to his second when he married her — and his own younger sister had recently got married, aged twelve. Likewise, marrying one’s cousin was the norm within Jerry Lee’s extended family, where pretty much everyone whose surname was Lewis, Swaggart, or Gilley was married to someone else whose surname was Lewis, Swaggart, or Gilley. But I don’t believe we have to judge people by their own standards, or at least not wholly so. There were many other horrific aspects to the culture of the Southern states at the time, and just because, for example, the people who defended segregation believed they were doing nothing wrong and were behaving according to their own culture, doesn’t mean we can’t judge them harshly. And it’s not as if everyone in Jerry Lee’s own culture was completely accepting of this. They’d married in secret, and when Myra’s father — Jerry Lee’s cousin and bass player, J.W. Brown — found out about it, he grabbed his shotgun and went out with every intention of murdering Jerry Lee, and it was only Sam Phillips who persuaded him that maybe that would be a bad idea. The British tour, which was meant to last six weeks, ended up lasting only three days. Jerry Lee and his band and family cancelled the tour and returned home, where they expected everyone to accept them again, and for things to carry on as normal. They didn’t. The record company tried to capitalise on the controversy, and also to defuse the anger towards Lewis. At the time, there was a craze for novelty records which interpolated bits of spoken word dialogue with excerpts of rock and roll hits, sparked off by a record called “The Flying Saucer”: [Excerpt: Buchanan and Goodman, “The Flying Saucer”] Jack Clement put together a similar thing, as a joke for the Sun Records staff, called “The Return of Jerry Lee”, having an interviewer, the DJ George Klein, ask Jerry Lee questions about the recent controversy, and having Jerry Lee “answer” them in clips from his records. Sam Phillips loved it, and insisted on releasing it as a single. [Excerpt: George and Louis, “The Return of Jerry Lee”] Unsurprisingly, that did not have the effect that was hoped, and did not defuse the situation one iota — especially since some of the jokes in the record were leering ones about Myra’s physical attractiveness — the attractiveness, remember, of a child. For that reason, I will *not* be putting the full version of that particular track in the Mixcloud mix of songs I excerpted in this episode. This is where we say goodbye to Sam Phillips. With Jerry Lee Lewis’ career destroyed, and with all his other major acts having left him, Phillips’ brief reign as the most important record producer and company owner in the USA was over. He carried on running Sun records for a few years, and eventually sold it to Shelby Singleton. Singleton is a complicated figure, but one thing he definitely did right was exploiting Sun’s back catalogue — in their four-year rockabilly heyday Sam Phillips and Jack Clement had recorded literally thousands of unreleased songs by Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Carl Perkins, Conway Twitty, Charlie Rich, Billy Lee Riley, and many more. Those tracks sat in Sun’s vaults for more than a decade, but once Singleton took over the company pretty much every scrap of material from Sun’s vaults saw release, especially once a British reissue label called Charly employed Martin Hawkins and Colin Escott, two young music obsessives, to put out systematic releases of Sun’s rockabilly and blues archives. The more of that material came out, the more obvious it became that Sam Phillips had tapped into something very, very special at Sun Records, and that throughout the fifties one small studio in Memphis had produced staggering recordings on a daily basis. By the time Sam Phillips died, in 2003, aged eighty, he was widely regarded as one of the most important people in the history of music. Jerry Lee Lewis, meanwhile, spent several years trying and failing to have a hit, but slowly rebuilding his live audiences, playing small venues and winning back his audience one crowd at a time. By the late 1960s he was in a position to have a comeback, and “Another Place, Another Time” went to number four on the country charts, and started a run of country hits that lasted for the best part of a decade: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Another Place, Another Time”] Myra divorced Jerry Lee around that time, citing physical and emotional abuse. She is now known as Myra Williams, has been happily married for thirty-six years, and works as a real-estate agent. Jerry Lee has, so far, married four more times. His fourth and fifth wives died in mysterious circumstances — his fourth drowned shortly before the divorce went through, and the fifth died in circumstances that are still unclear, and several have raised suspicions that Jerry Lee killed her. It’s not impossible. The man known as the Killer did once shoot his bass player in the chest in the late seventies — he insists that was an accident — and was arrested outside Graceland, drunk and with a gun, yelling for Elvis Presley to come out and settle who was the real king. Jerry Lee Lewis is still alive, married to his seventh wife, who is Myra’s brother’s ex-wife. Last year, he and his wife sued his daughter, though the lawsuit was thrown out of court. He’s eighty-four years old, still performs, and according to recent interviews, worries if he is going to go to Heaven or to Hell when he dies. I imagine I would worry too, in his place.  

Episode sixty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Great Balls of Fire” by Jerry Lee Lewis. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. This one comes with a bit of a content warning, as while it has nothing explicit, it deals with his marriage to his thirteen-year-old cousin. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Rumble” by Link Wray. —-more—-  Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode (with one exception, which I mention in the podcast). The Spark That Survived by Myra Lewis Williams is Myra’s autobiography, and tells her side of the story, which has tended to be ignored in favour of her famous husband’s side. I’m relying heavily on Sam Phillips: the Man Who Invented Rock and Roll by Peter Guralnick for all the episodes dealing with Phillips and Sun Records. Books on Jerry Lee Lewis tend to be very flawed, as the authors all tend to think they’re Faulkner rather than giving the facts. This one by Rick Bragg is better than most. There are many budget CDs containing Lewis’ pre-1962 work. This set seems as good an option as any. And this ten-CD box set contains ninety Sun singles in chronological order, starting with “Whole Lotta Shakin'” and covering the Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, and Carl Perkins records discussed here. There are few better ways to get an idea of Lewis’ work in context. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Erratum: I say “Glad All Over” was written by Aaron Schroeder. In fact it was co-written by Schroeder, Roy Bennett, and Sid Tepper. Transcript   We’ve looked before at the rise of Jerry Lee Lewis, but in this episode we’re going to talk about his fall. And for that reason I have to put a content warning at the beginning here. While I’m not going to say anything explicit at all, this episode has to deal with events that I, and most of my listeners, would refer to as child sexual abuse, though the child in question still, more than sixty years later, doesn’t see them that way, and I don’t want to say anything that imposes my framing over hers. If you might find this subject distressing, I suggest reading the transcript before listening, or just skipping this episode. It also deals, towards the end, with domestic violence. Indeed, if you’re affected by these issues, I would also suggest skipping the next episode, on “Johnny B. Goode”, and coming back on February the second for “Yakety Yak” by the Coasters. We’re hitting a point in the history of rock and roll where, for the first time, rock and roll begins its decline in popularity. We’ll see from this point on that every few years there’s a change in musical fashions, and a new set of artists take over from the most popular artists of the previous period. And in the case of the first rock and roll era, that takeover was largely traumatic. There were a number of deaths, some prosecutions — and in the case of Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry, scandals. In general, I try not to make these podcast episodes be about the horrific acts that some of the men involved have committed. This is a podcast about music, not about horrible men doing horrible things. But in the case of Jerry Lee Lewis, he was one of the very small number of men to have actually faced consequences for his actions, and so it has to be discussed. I promise I will try to do so as sensitively as possible. Although sensitivity is not the word that comes to mind when one thinks of Jerry Lee Lewis, generally… [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Great Balls of Fire”] When we left Jerry Lee Lewis, he had just had his first really major success, with “Whole Lotta Shakin'”. He was on top of the world, and the most promising artist in rock and roll music. With Elvis about to be drafted into the army, the role of biggest rock and roll star was wide open, and Lewis intended to take over Elvis’ mantle. There was going to be a new king of rock and roll. It didn’t quite work out that way. “Whole Lotta Shakin'” was such a massive hit that on the basis of that one record, Jerry Lee was invited to perform his next single in a film called Jamboree. This was one of the many exploitation films that were being put out starring popular DJs — this one starred Dick Clark, rather than Alan Freed, who’d appeared in most of them. They were the kind of thing that made Elvis’ films look like masterpieces of the cinema, and tended to involve a bunch of kids who wanted to put a dance on at their local school, or similar interchangeable plots. The reason people went to see them wasn’t the plot, but the performances by rock and roll musicians. Fats Domino was in most of these, and he was in this one, singing his minor single “Wait and See”. There were also a few performances by musicians who weren’t strictly rock and roll, and were from an older generation, but who were close enough that the kids would probably accept them. Slim Whitman appeared, as did Count Basie, with Joe Williams as lead vocalist:… [Excerpt: Joe Williams, “I Don’t Like You No More”] The film also featured the only known footage of Lewis Lymon and the Teenchords, who we talked about briefly last week. More pertinently to this story, it featured Carl Perkins: [Excerpt: Carl Perkins, “Glad All Over”] That song was one of the few that Perkins recorded which wasn’t written by him. Instead, it was written by Aaron Schroeder, who had co-written the non-Leiber-and-Stoller songs for Jailhouse Rock, and who also appeared in this film in a cameo role as himself. The song was provided to Sam Phillips by Hill and Range, who were Phillips’ publishing partners as well as being Elvis’. It was to be Carl Perkins’ last record for Sun — Perkins had finally had enough of Sam Phillips being more interested in Jerry Lee Lewis. Even little things were getting to him — Jerry Lee’s records were credited to “Jerry Lee Lewis and his Pumping Piano”. Why did Carl’s records never say anything about Carl’s guitar? Sam promised him that the records would start to credit Carl Perkins as “the rocking guitar man”, but it was too late — Perkins and Johnny Cash both made an agreement with Columbia Records on November the first 1957 that when their current contracts with Sun expired, they’d start recording for the new label. Cash was in a similar situation to Perkins — Jack Clement had now taken over production of Cash’s records, and while Cash was writing some of his best material, songs like “Big River” that remain classics, Clement was making him record songs Clement had written himself, like “Ballad of a Teenage Queen”: [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, “Ballad of a Teenage Queen”] It’s quite easy to see from that, which he recorded in mid-November, why Cash left Sun. While Cash would go on to have greater success at Columbia, Perkins wouldn’t. And ironically it was possible that he had had one more opportunity to have a hit follow-up to “Blue Suede Shoes” at Sun, and he’d passed on it. According to Perkins, he was given a choice of two songs to perform in Jamboree, both of them published by Hill and Range, but “I thought both of them was junk!” and he’d chosen the one that was slightly less awful — that’s not how other people involved remember it, but he would always claim that he had been offered the song that Jerry Lee Lewis performed, and turned down “Great Balls of Fire”: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Great Balls of Fire”] That song was one that both Lewis and Phillips were immediately convinced would be a hit as soon as they heard the demo. Sam Phillips’ main worry was how they were going to improve on the demo by the song’s writer, Otis Blackwell, which he thought was pretty much perfect as it was. We’ve met Otis Blackwell briefly before — he was a New York-based songwriter, one of a relatively small number of black people who managed to get work as a professional songwriter for one of the big publishing companies. Blackwell had written “Fever” for Little Willie John, “You’re the Apple of My Eye” for Frankie Valli, and two massive hits for Elvis — “Don’t Be Cruel” and “All Shook Up”. We don’t have access to his demo of “Great Balls of Fire”, but in the seventies he recorded an album called “These are My Songs”, featuring many of the hits he’d written for other people, and it’s possible that the version of “Great Balls of Fire” on that album gives some idea of what the demo that so impressed Phillips sounded like: [Excerpt: Otis Blackwell, “Great Balls of Fire”] “Great Balls of Fire” seems to be the first thing to have been tailored specifically for the persona that Lewis had created with his previous hit. It’s a refinement of the “Whole Lotta Shakin'” formula, but it has a few differences that give the song far more impact. Most notably, where “Whole Lotta Shakin'” starts off with a gently rolling piano intro and only later picks up steam: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Whole Lotta Shakin'”] “Great Balls of Fire” has a much more dynamic opening — one that sets the tone for the whole record with its stop-start exclamations: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Great Balls of Fire”] Although that stop-start intro is one of the few signs in the record that point to the song having been possibly offered to Perkins — it’s very reminiscent of the intro to “Blue Suede Shoes”: [Excerpt: Carl Perkins, “Blue Suede Shoes”] I could imagine Perkins recording the song in the “Blue Suede Shoes” manner and having a hit with it, though not as big a hit as Lewis eventually had. On the other hand I can’t imagine Lewis turning “Glad All Over”, fun as it is, into anything even remotely worthy of following up “Whole Lotta Shakin'”. Almost straight away they managed to cut a version of “Great Balls of Fire” that was suitable for the film, but it wasn’t right for a hit record. They needed something that was absolutely perfect. After having sent the film version off, they spent several days working on getting the perfect version cut — paying particular attention to that stop-start intro, which the musicians had to time perfectly for it not to come out as a sloppy mess. Oddly, the musicians on the track weren’t the normal Sun session players, and nor were they the musicians who normally played in Lewis’ band. Instead, Lewis was backed by Sidney Stokes on bass and Larry Linn on drums — according to Lewis, he never met those two people again after they finished recording. But as the work proceeded, Jerry Lee became concerned. “Great Balls of Fire”? Didn’t that sound a bit… Satanic? And people did say that rock and roll was the Devil’s music. He ended up getting into an angry, rambling, theological discussion with Sam Phillips, which was recorded and which gives an insight into how difficult Lewis must have been to work with, but also how tortured he was — he truly believed in the existence of a physical Hell, and that he was destined to go there because of his music: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis and Sam Phillips, Bible discussion] Sam Phillips, who appears to have had the patience of a saint, eventually talked Lewis down and persuaded him to get back to making music. When “Great Balls of Fire” came out, with a cover of Hank Williams’ ballad “You Win Again” on the B-side, it was an immediate success. It sold over a million copies in the first ten days it was out, and it became a classic that has been covered by everyone from Dolly Parton to Aerosmith. It’s one of the records that defines 1950s rock and roll music, and it firmly established Jerry Lee Lewis as one of the greatest stars of rock and roll, if not the greatest. Jack and Sam kept recording everything they could from Lewis, getting a backlog of recordings that would be released for decades to come — everything from Hank Williams covers to the old blues number “Big Legged Woman”: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Big Legged Woman”] But they decided that they didn’t want to mess with a winning formula, and so the next record that they put out was another Otis Blackwell song, “Breathless”. This time, the band was the normal Sun studio drummer Jimmy Van Eaton, Billy Lee Riley on guitar — Riley was also furious with Sam Phillips for the way he was concentrating on Lewis’ career at the expense of everyone else’s, but he was still working on sessions for Phillips — and Jerry Lee’s cousin J.W. Brown on bass. J.W. was his full name — it didn’t stand for anything — and he was the regular touring bass player in Lewis’ band. “Breathless” was very much in the same style as “Great Balls of Fire”, if perhaps not *quite* so good: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Breathless”] To promote the record, Jud Phillips, Sam’s brother, came up with a great promotional scheme. Dick Clark, the presenter of American Bandstand, had another show, the Dick Clark Show, which was also called Dick Clark’s Saturday Night Beechnut Show because it was sponsored by Beechnut chewing gum. Clark had already had Jerry Lee on his show once, and he’d been a hit — Clark could bring him back on the show, and they could announce that if you sent Sun Records five Beechnut wrappers and fifty cents for postage and packing, you could get a signed copy of the new record. The fifty cents would be more than the postage and packing would cost, of course, and Sun would split the profits with Dick Clark. Sun bought an autograph stamp to stamp copies of the record with, hired a few extra temporary staff members to help them get the records posted, and made the arrangements with Dick Clark and his sponsors. The result was extraordinary — in some parts of the country, stores ran out of Beechnut gum altogether. More than thirty-eight thousand copies of the single were sent out to eager gum-chewers. It was around this time that Jerry Lee went on the Alan Freed tour that we mentioned last week, with Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Larry Williams, the Chantels, and eleven other acts. The tour later became legendary not so much for the music — though that was great — but for the personal disputes between Lewis and Berry. There were two separate issues at stake. The first was Elmo Lewis, Jerry’s father. Elmo had a habit of using racial slurs, and of threatening to fight anyone, especially black people, who he thought was disrespecting him. At one show on the tour, a dispute about parking spaces between Berry and Lewis led to the elder Lewis chasing Berry three blocks, waving a knife, and shouting “You know what we do with cats like you down in Ferriday? We chop the heads off them and throw it in a lake.” Apparently, by the next day, Elmo and Chuck were sat with each other at breakfast, the best of friends. The other issue was Berry’s belief that he, rather than Lewis, should be headlining the shows. He managed to persuade the promoters of this, and this led Lewis to try more and more outrageous stunts on stage to try to upstage Berry. The legend has it that at one show he went so far as to set his piano on fire at the climax of “Great Balls of Fire”, and then walk off stage challenging Berry to follow that. Some versions of the story have him using a racial slur there, too, but the story in whatever form seems to be apocryphal. It does, though, sum up the atmosphere between the two. That said, while Lewis and Berry fought incessantly, Berry was one of the few people to whom Lewis has ever shown any respect at all. Partly that’s because of Lewis’ admiration for Berry’s songwriting — he’s called Berry “the Hank Williams of rock and roll” before now, and for someone who admires Williams as much as Lewis does that’s about the highest imaginable praise. But also, Lewis and his father were both always very careful not to do anything that would lead to word of the feud getting back to his mother, because his mother had repeatedly told him that Chuck Berry was the greatest rock and roller in the world — Elvis was good, she said, and obviously so was her son, but neither of them were a patch on Chuck. She would have been furious with him, and would definitely have taken Chuck’s side. After the tour, Jerry Lee recorded another song for a film he was going to appear in. This time, it was the title song for a terribly shlocky attempt at drama, called High School Confidential — a film that dealt with the very serious and weighty issue of marijuana use among teenagers, and is widely regarded as one of the worst films ever made. The theme music, though, was pretty good: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “High School Confidential”] That came out on the nineteenth of May, 1958, and immediately started rising up the charts. Two days later, Jerry Lee headed out on what was meant to be a triumphal tour of the UK, solidifying him as the biggest, most important, rock and roll star in the world. And that is when everything came crashing down. Because it was when he and his entourage landed in the UK, and the press saw the thirteen-year-old girl with him, and asked who she was, that it became public knowledge he had married his thirteen-year-old cousin Myra. And here we get to something I’ve been dreading talking about since I decided on this project. There is simply no way to talk about Jerry Lee Lewis’ marriage to Myra Gale Brown which doesn’t erase Brown’s experience, doesn’t excuse Lewis’ behaviour, explains the cultural context in which it happened, and doesn’t minimise child abuse — which, and let’s be clear about this right now, this was. If you take from *anything* that I say after this that I think there is any possible excuse, any justification, for a man in his twenties having sex with a thirteen-year-old girl — let alone a thirteen-year-old girl in his own family, to whom he was an authority figure — then I have *badly* failed to get my meaning across. What Lewis did was, simply, wrong. It’s important to say that, because something that applies both to this episode and to the downfall of Chuck Berry, which we’ll be looking at in the next episode, is the way that both have been framed by all the traditional histories of rock and roll. If you read almost anything about rock and roll history, what you see when it gets to 1958 is “and here rock and roll nearly died, because of the prurient attitudes of a few prudes, who were out to destroy the careers of these new exciting rock and rollers because they hated the threat they posed to their traditional way of life”. That is simply not the case. Yes, there was a great deal of establishment opposition to rock and roll music, but what happened to Jerry Lee Lewis wasn’t some conspiracy of blue-nosed prudes. It was people getting angry, for entirely understandable reasons, about a man doing something that was absolutely, unquestionably, just *wrong*. And the fact that this has been minimised by rock and roll histories says a lot about the culture around rock journalism, none of it good. Now, that said, something that needs to be understood here is that Lewis and most of the people round him didn’t see him as doing anything particularly wrong. In the culture of the Southern US at the time, it was normal for very young girls to be married, often to older men. By his own lights, he was doing nothing wrong. His first marriage was when he was sixteen — Myra was his third wife, and he was still legally married to his second when he married her — and his own younger sister had recently got married, aged twelve. Likewise, marrying one’s cousin was the norm within Jerry Lee’s extended family, where pretty much everyone whose surname was Lewis, Swaggart, or Gilley was married to someone else whose surname was Lewis, Swaggart, or Gilley. But I don’t believe we have to judge people by their own standards, or at least not wholly so. There were many other horrific aspects to the culture of the Southern states at the time, and just because, for example, the people who defended segregation believed they were doing nothing wrong and were behaving according to their own culture, doesn’t mean we can’t judge them harshly. And it’s not as if everyone in Jerry Lee’s own culture was completely accepting of this. They’d married in secret, and when Myra’s father — Jerry Lee’s cousin and bass player, J.W. Brown — found out about it, he grabbed his shotgun and went out with every intention of murdering Jerry Lee, and it was only Sam Phillips who persuaded him that maybe that would be a bad idea. The British tour, which was meant to last six weeks, ended up lasting only three days. Jerry Lee and his band and family cancelled the tour and returned home, where they expected everyone to accept them again, and for things to carry on as normal. They didn’t. The record company tried to capitalise on the controversy, and also to defuse the anger towards Lewis. At the time, there was a craze for novelty records which interpolated bits of spoken word dialogue with excerpts of rock and roll hits, sparked off by a record called “The Flying Saucer”: [Excerpt: Buchanan and Goodman, “The Flying Saucer”] Jack Clement put together a similar thing, as a joke for the Sun Records staff, called “The Return of Jerry Lee”, having an interviewer, the DJ George Klein, ask Jerry Lee questions about the recent controversy, and having Jerry Lee “answer” them in clips from his records. Sam Phillips loved it, and insisted on releasing it as a single. [Excerpt: George and Louis, “The Return of Jerry Lee”] Unsurprisingly, that did not have the effect that was hoped, and did not defuse the situation one iota — especially since some of the jokes in the record were leering ones about Myra’s physical attractiveness — the attractiveness, remember, of a child. For that reason, I will *not* be putting the full version of that particular track in the Mixcloud mix of songs I excerpted in this episode. This is where we say goodbye to Sam Phillips. With Jerry Lee Lewis’ career destroyed, and with all his other major acts having left him, Phillips’ brief reign as the most important record producer and company owner in the USA was over. He carried on running Sun records for a few years, and eventually sold it to Shelby Singleton. Singleton is a complicated figure, but one thing he definitely did right was exploiting Sun’s back catalogue — in their four-year rockabilly heyday Sam Phillips and Jack Clement had recorded literally thousands of unreleased songs by Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Carl Perkins, Conway Twitty, Charlie Rich, Billy Lee Riley, and many more. Those tracks sat in Sun’s vaults for more than a decade, but once Singleton took over the company pretty much every scrap of material from Sun’s vaults saw release, especially once a British reissue label called Charly employed Martin Hawkins and Colin Escott, two young music obsessives, to put out systematic releases of Sun’s rockabilly and blues archives. The more of that material came out, the more obvious it became that Sam Phillips had tapped into something very, very special at Sun Records, and that throughout the fifties one small studio in Memphis had produced staggering recordings on a daily basis. By the time Sam Phillips died, in 2003, aged eighty, he was widely regarded as one of the most important people in the history of music. Jerry Lee Lewis, meanwhile, spent several years trying and failing to have a hit, but slowly rebuilding his live audiences, playing small venues and winning back his audience one crowd at a time. By the late 1960s he was in a position to have a comeback, and “Another Place, Another Time” went to number four on the country charts, and started a run of country hits that lasted for the best part of a decade: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Another Place, Another Time”] Myra divorced Jerry Lee around that time, citing physical and emotional abuse. She is now known as Myra Williams, has been happily married for thirty-six years, and works as a real-estate agent. Jerry Lee has, so far, married four more times. His fourth and fifth wives died in mysterious circumstances — his fourth drowned shortly before the divorce went through, and the fifth died in circumstances that are still unclear, and several have raised suspicions that Jerry Lee killed her. It’s not impossible. The man known as the Killer did once shoot his bass player in the chest in the late seventies — he insists that was an accident — and was arrested outside Graceland, drunk and with a gun, yelling for Elvis Presley to come out and settle who was the real king. Jerry Lee Lewis is still alive, married to his seventh wife, who is Myra’s brother’s ex-wife. Last year, he and his wife sued his daughter, though the lawsuit was thrown out of court. He’s eighty-four years old, still performs, and according to recent interviews, worries if he is going to go to Heaven or to Hell when he dies. I imagine I would worry too, in his place.  

Episode sixty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Great Balls of Fire" by Jerry Lee Lewis. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. This one comes with a bit of a content warning, as while it has nothing explicit, it deals with his marriage to his thirteen-year-old cousin. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Rumble" by Link Wray. ----more----  Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode (with one exception, which I mention in the podcast). The Spark That Survived by Myra Lewis Williams is Myra's autobiography, and tells her side of the story, which has tended to be ignored in favour of her famous husband's side. I'm relying heavily on Sam Phillips: the Man Who Invented Rock and Roll by Peter Guralnick for all the episodes dealing with Phillips and Sun Records. Books on Jerry Lee Lewis tend to be very flawed, as the authors all tend to think they're Faulkner rather than giving the facts. This one by Rick Bragg is better than most. There are many budget CDs containing Lewis' pre-1962 work. This set seems as good an option as any. And this ten-CD box set contains ninety Sun singles in chronological order, starting with "Whole Lotta Shakin'" and covering the Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, and Carl Perkins records discussed here. There are few better ways to get an idea of Lewis' work in context. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Erratum: I say “Glad All Over” was written by Aaron Schroeder. In fact it was co-written by Schroeder, Roy Bennett, and Sid Tepper. Transcript   We've looked before at the rise of Jerry Lee Lewis, but in this episode we're going to talk about his fall. And for that reason I have to put a content warning at the beginning here. While I'm not going to say anything explicit at all, this episode has to deal with events that I, and most of my listeners, would refer to as child sexual abuse, though the child in question still, more than sixty years later, doesn't see them that way, and I don't want to say anything that imposes my framing over hers. If you might find this subject distressing, I suggest reading the transcript before listening, or just skipping this episode. It also deals, towards the end, with domestic violence. Indeed, if you're affected by these issues, I would also suggest skipping the next episode, on "Johnny B. Goode", and coming back on February the second for "Yakety Yak" by the Coasters. We're hitting a point in the history of rock and roll where, for the first time, rock and roll begins its decline in popularity. We'll see from this point on that every few years there's a change in musical fashions, and a new set of artists take over from the most popular artists of the previous period. And in the case of the first rock and roll era, that takeover was largely traumatic. There were a number of deaths, some prosecutions -- and in the case of Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry, scandals. In general, I try not to make these podcast episodes be about the horrific acts that some of the men involved have committed. This is a podcast about music, not about horrible men doing horrible things. But in the case of Jerry Lee Lewis, he was one of the very small number of men to have actually faced consequences for his actions, and so it has to be discussed. I promise I will try to do so as sensitively as possible. Although sensitivity is not the word that comes to mind when one thinks of Jerry Lee Lewis, generally... [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Great Balls of Fire"] When we left Jerry Lee Lewis, he had just had his first really major success, with "Whole Lotta Shakin'". He was on top of the world, and the most promising artist in rock and roll music. With Elvis about to be drafted into the army, the role of biggest rock and roll star was wide open, and Lewis intended to take over Elvis' mantle. There was going to be a new king of rock and roll. It didn't quite work out that way. "Whole Lotta Shakin'" was such a massive hit that on the basis of that one record, Jerry Lee was invited to perform his next single in a film called Jamboree. This was one of the many exploitation films that were being put out starring popular DJs -- this one starred Dick Clark, rather than Alan Freed, who'd appeared in most of them. They were the kind of thing that made Elvis' films look like masterpieces of the cinema, and tended to involve a bunch of kids who wanted to put a dance on at their local school, or similar interchangeable plots. The reason people went to see them wasn't the plot, but the performances by rock and roll musicians. Fats Domino was in most of these, and he was in this one, singing his minor single "Wait and See". There were also a few performances by musicians who weren't strictly rock and roll, and were from an older generation, but who were close enough that the kids would probably accept them. Slim Whitman appeared, as did Count Basie, with Joe Williams as lead vocalist:… [Excerpt: Joe Williams, "I Don't Like You No More"] The film also featured the only known footage of Lewis Lymon and the Teenchords, who we talked about briefly last week. More pertinently to this story, it featured Carl Perkins: [Excerpt: Carl Perkins, "Glad All Over"] That song was one of the few that Perkins recorded which wasn't written by him. Instead, it was written by Aaron Schroeder, who had co-written the non-Leiber-and-Stoller songs for Jailhouse Rock, and who also appeared in this film in a cameo role as himself. The song was provided to Sam Phillips by Hill and Range, who were Phillips' publishing partners as well as being Elvis'. It was to be Carl Perkins' last record for Sun -- Perkins had finally had enough of Sam Phillips being more interested in Jerry Lee Lewis. Even little things were getting to him -- Jerry Lee's records were credited to "Jerry Lee Lewis and his Pumping Piano". Why did Carl's records never say anything about Carl's guitar? Sam promised him that the records would start to credit Carl Perkins as "the rocking guitar man", but it was too late -- Perkins and Johnny Cash both made an agreement with Columbia Records on November the first 1957 that when their current contracts with Sun expired, they'd start recording for the new label. Cash was in a similar situation to Perkins -- Jack Clement had now taken over production of Cash's records, and while Cash was writing some of his best material, songs like "Big River" that remain classics, Clement was making him record songs Clement had written himself, like "Ballad of a Teenage Queen": [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, "Ballad of a Teenage Queen"] It's quite easy to see from that, which he recorded in mid-November, why Cash left Sun. While Cash would go on to have greater success at Columbia, Perkins wouldn't. And ironically it was possible that he had had one more opportunity to have a hit follow-up to "Blue Suede Shoes" at Sun, and he'd passed on it. According to Perkins, he was given a choice of two songs to perform in Jamboree, both of them published by Hill and Range, but "I thought both of them was junk!" and he'd chosen the one that was slightly less awful -- that's not how other people involved remember it, but he would always claim that he had been offered the song that Jerry Lee Lewis performed, and turned down "Great Balls of Fire": [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Great Balls of Fire"] That song was one that both Lewis and Phillips were immediately convinced would be a hit as soon as they heard the demo. Sam Phillips' main worry was how they were going to improve on the demo by the song's writer, Otis Blackwell, which he thought was pretty much perfect as it was. We've met Otis Blackwell briefly before -- he was a New York-based songwriter, one of a relatively small number of black people who managed to get work as a professional songwriter for one of the big publishing companies. Blackwell had written "Fever" for Little Willie John, "You're the Apple of My Eye" for Frankie Valli, and two massive hits for Elvis -- "Don't Be Cruel" and "All Shook Up". We don't have access to his demo of "Great Balls of Fire", but in the seventies he recorded an album called "These are My Songs", featuring many of the hits he'd written for other people, and it's possible that the version of "Great Balls of Fire" on that album gives some idea of what the demo that so impressed Phillips sounded like: [Excerpt: Otis Blackwell, "Great Balls of Fire"] "Great Balls of Fire" seems to be the first thing to have been tailored specifically for the persona that Lewis had created with his previous hit. It's a refinement of the "Whole Lotta Shakin'" formula, but it has a few differences that give the song far more impact. Most notably, where "Whole Lotta Shakin'" starts off with a gently rolling piano intro and only later picks up steam: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Whole Lotta Shakin'"] "Great Balls of Fire" has a much more dynamic opening -- one that sets the tone for the whole record with its stop-start exclamations: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Great Balls of Fire"] Although that stop-start intro is one of the few signs in the record that point to the song having been possibly offered to Perkins -- it's very reminiscent of the intro to "Blue Suede Shoes": [Excerpt: Carl Perkins, "Blue Suede Shoes"] I could imagine Perkins recording the song in the "Blue Suede Shoes" manner and having a hit with it, though not as big a hit as Lewis eventually had. On the other hand I can't imagine Lewis turning "Glad All Over", fun as it is, into anything even remotely worthy of following up "Whole Lotta Shakin'". Almost straight away they managed to cut a version of "Great Balls of Fire" that was suitable for the film, but it wasn't right for a hit record. They needed something that was absolutely perfect. After having sent the film version off, they spent several days working on getting the perfect version cut -- paying particular attention to that stop-start intro, which the musicians had to time perfectly for it not to come out as a sloppy mess. Oddly, the musicians on the track weren't the normal Sun session players, and nor were they the musicians who normally played in Lewis' band. Instead, Lewis was backed by Sidney Stokes on bass and Larry Linn on drums -- according to Lewis, he never met those two people again after they finished recording. But as the work proceeded, Jerry Lee became concerned. "Great Balls of Fire"? Didn't that sound a bit... Satanic? And people did say that rock and roll was the Devil's music. He ended up getting into an angry, rambling, theological discussion with Sam Phillips, which was recorded and which gives an insight into how difficult Lewis must have been to work with, but also how tortured he was -- he truly believed in the existence of a physical Hell, and that he was destined to go there because of his music: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis and Sam Phillips, Bible discussion] Sam Phillips, who appears to have had the patience of a saint, eventually talked Lewis down and persuaded him to get back to making music. When "Great Balls of Fire" came out, with a cover of Hank Williams' ballad "You Win Again" on the B-side, it was an immediate success. It sold over a million copies in the first ten days it was out, and it became a classic that has been covered by everyone from Dolly Parton to Aerosmith. It's one of the records that defines 1950s rock and roll music, and it firmly established Jerry Lee Lewis as one of the greatest stars of rock and roll, if not the greatest. Jack and Sam kept recording everything they could from Lewis, getting a backlog of recordings that would be released for decades to come -- everything from Hank Williams covers to the old blues number "Big Legged Woman": [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Big Legged Woman"] But they decided that they didn't want to mess with a winning formula, and so the next record that they put out was another Otis Blackwell song, "Breathless". This time, the band was the normal Sun studio drummer Jimmy Van Eaton, Billy Lee Riley on guitar -- Riley was also furious with Sam Phillips for the way he was concentrating on Lewis' career at the expense of everyone else's, but he was still working on sessions for Phillips -- and Jerry Lee's cousin J.W. Brown on bass. J.W. was his full name -- it didn't stand for anything -- and he was the regular touring bass player in Lewis' band. "Breathless" was very much in the same style as "Great Balls of Fire", if perhaps not *quite* so good: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Breathless"] To promote the record, Jud Phillips, Sam's brother, came up with a great promotional scheme. Dick Clark, the presenter of American Bandstand, had another show, the Dick Clark Show, which was also called Dick Clark's Saturday Night Beechnut Show because it was sponsored by Beechnut chewing gum. Clark had already had Jerry Lee on his show once, and he'd been a hit -- Clark could bring him back on the show, and they could announce that if you sent Sun Records five Beechnut wrappers and fifty cents for postage and packing, you could get a signed copy of the new record. The fifty cents would be more than the postage and packing would cost, of course, and Sun would split the profits with Dick Clark. Sun bought an autograph stamp to stamp copies of the record with, hired a few extra temporary staff members to help them get the records posted, and made the arrangements with Dick Clark and his sponsors. The result was extraordinary -- in some parts of the country, stores ran out of Beechnut gum altogether. More than thirty-eight thousand copies of the single were sent out to eager gum-chewers. It was around this time that Jerry Lee went on the Alan Freed tour that we mentioned last week, with Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Larry Williams, the Chantels, and eleven other acts. The tour later became legendary not so much for the music -- though that was great -- but for the personal disputes between Lewis and Berry. There were two separate issues at stake. The first was Elmo Lewis, Jerry's father. Elmo had a habit of using racial slurs, and of threatening to fight anyone, especially black people, who he thought was disrespecting him. At one show on the tour, a dispute about parking spaces between Berry and Lewis led to the elder Lewis chasing Berry three blocks, waving a knife, and shouting "You know what we do with cats like you down in Ferriday? We chop the heads off them and throw it in a lake." Apparently, by the next day, Elmo and Chuck were sat with each other at breakfast, the best of friends. The other issue was Berry's belief that he, rather than Lewis, should be headlining the shows. He managed to persuade the promoters of this, and this led Lewis to try more and more outrageous stunts on stage to try to upstage Berry. The legend has it that at one show he went so far as to set his piano on fire at the climax of "Great Balls of Fire", and then walk off stage challenging Berry to follow that. Some versions of the story have him using a racial slur there, too, but the story in whatever form seems to be apocryphal. It does, though, sum up the atmosphere between the two. That said, while Lewis and Berry fought incessantly, Berry was one of the few people to whom Lewis has ever shown any respect at all. Partly that's because of Lewis' admiration for Berry's songwriting -- he's called Berry "the Hank Williams of rock and roll" before now, and for someone who admires Williams as much as Lewis does that's about the highest imaginable praise. But also, Lewis and his father were both always very careful not to do anything that would lead to word of the feud getting back to his mother, because his mother had repeatedly told him that Chuck Berry was the greatest rock and roller in the world -- Elvis was good, she said, and obviously so was her son, but neither of them were a patch on Chuck. She would have been furious with him, and would definitely have taken Chuck's side. After the tour, Jerry Lee recorded another song for a film he was going to appear in. This time, it was the title song for a terribly shlocky attempt at drama, called High School Confidential -- a film that dealt with the very serious and weighty issue of marijuana use among teenagers, and is widely regarded as one of the worst films ever made. The theme music, though, was pretty good: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "High School Confidential"] That came out on the nineteenth of May, 1958, and immediately started rising up the charts. Two days later, Jerry Lee headed out on what was meant to be a triumphal tour of the UK, solidifying him as the biggest, most important, rock and roll star in the world. And that is when everything came crashing down. Because it was when he and his entourage landed in the UK, and the press saw the thirteen-year-old girl with him, and asked who she was, that it became public knowledge he had married his thirteen-year-old cousin Myra. And here we get to something I've been dreading talking about since I decided on this project. There is simply no way to talk about Jerry Lee Lewis' marriage to Myra Gale Brown which doesn't erase Brown's experience, doesn't excuse Lewis' behaviour, explains the cultural context in which it happened, and doesn't minimise child abuse -- which, and let's be clear about this right now, this was. If you take from *anything* that I say after this that I think there is any possible excuse, any justification, for a man in his twenties having sex with a thirteen-year-old girl -- let alone a thirteen-year-old girl in his own family, to whom he was an authority figure -- then I have *badly* failed to get my meaning across. What Lewis did was, simply, wrong. It's important to say that, because something that applies both to this episode and to the downfall of Chuck Berry, which we'll be looking at in the next episode, is the way that both have been framed by all the traditional histories of rock and roll. If you read almost anything about rock and roll history, what you see when it gets to 1958 is "and here rock and roll nearly died, because of the prurient attitudes of a few prudes, who were out to destroy the careers of these new exciting rock and rollers because they hated the threat they posed to their traditional way of life". That is simply not the case. Yes, there was a great deal of establishment opposition to rock and roll music, but what happened to Jerry Lee Lewis wasn't some conspiracy of blue-nosed prudes. It was people getting angry, for entirely understandable reasons, about a man doing something that was absolutely, unquestionably, just *wrong*. And the fact that this has been minimised by rock and roll histories says a lot about the culture around rock journalism, none of it good. Now, that said, something that needs to be understood here is that Lewis and most of the people round him didn't see him as doing anything particularly wrong. In the culture of the Southern US at the time, it was normal for very young girls to be married, often to older men. By his own lights, he was doing nothing wrong. His first marriage was when he was sixteen -- Myra was his third wife, and he was still legally married to his second when he married her -- and his own younger sister had recently got married, aged twelve. Likewise, marrying one's cousin was the norm within Jerry Lee's extended family, where pretty much everyone whose surname was Lewis, Swaggart, or Gilley was married to someone else whose surname was Lewis, Swaggart, or Gilley. But I don't believe we have to judge people by their own standards, or at least not wholly so. There were many other horrific aspects to the culture of the Southern states at the time, and just because, for example, the people who defended segregation believed they were doing nothing wrong and were behaving according to their own culture, doesn't mean we can't judge them harshly. And it's not as if everyone in Jerry Lee's own culture was completely accepting of this. They'd married in secret, and when Myra's father -- Jerry Lee's cousin and bass player, J.W. Brown -- found out about it, he grabbed his shotgun and went out with every intention of murdering Jerry Lee, and it was only Sam Phillips who persuaded him that maybe that would be a bad idea. The British tour, which was meant to last six weeks, ended up lasting only three days. Jerry Lee and his band and family cancelled the tour and returned home, where they expected everyone to accept them again, and for things to carry on as normal. They didn't. The record company tried to capitalise on the controversy, and also to defuse the anger towards Lewis. At the time, there was a craze for novelty records which interpolated bits of spoken word dialogue with excerpts of rock and roll hits, sparked off by a record called "The Flying Saucer": [Excerpt: Buchanan and Goodman, "The Flying Saucer"] Jack Clement put together a similar thing, as a joke for the Sun Records staff, called "The Return of Jerry Lee", having an interviewer, the DJ George Klein, ask Jerry Lee questions about the recent controversy, and having Jerry Lee "answer" them in clips from his records. Sam Phillips loved it, and insisted on releasing it as a single. [Excerpt: George and Louis, "The Return of Jerry Lee"] Unsurprisingly, that did not have the effect that was hoped, and did not defuse the situation one iota -- especially since some of the jokes in the record were leering ones about Myra's physical attractiveness -- the attractiveness, remember, of a child. For that reason, I will *not* be putting the full version of that particular track in the Mixcloud mix of songs I excerpted in this episode. This is where we say goodbye to Sam Phillips. With Jerry Lee Lewis' career destroyed, and with all his other major acts having left him, Phillips' brief reign as the most important record producer and company owner in the USA was over. He carried on running Sun records for a few years, and eventually sold it to Shelby Singleton. Singleton is a complicated figure, but one thing he definitely did right was exploiting Sun's back catalogue -- in their four-year rockabilly heyday Sam Phillips and Jack Clement had recorded literally thousands of unreleased songs by Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Carl Perkins, Conway Twitty, Charlie Rich, Billy Lee Riley, and many more. Those tracks sat in Sun's vaults for more than a decade, but once Singleton took over the company pretty much every scrap of material from Sun's vaults saw release, especially once a British reissue label called Charly employed Martin Hawkins and Colin Escott, two young music obsessives, to put out systematic releases of Sun's rockabilly and blues archives. The more of that material came out, the more obvious it became that Sam Phillips had tapped into something very, very special at Sun Records, and that throughout the fifties one small studio in Memphis had produced staggering recordings on a daily basis. By the time Sam Phillips died, in 2003, aged eighty, he was widely regarded as one of the most important people in the history of music. Jerry Lee Lewis, meanwhile, spent several years trying and failing to have a hit, but slowly rebuilding his live audiences, playing small venues and winning back his audience one crowd at a time. By the late 1960s he was in a position to have a comeback, and "Another Place, Another Time" went to number four on the country charts, and started a run of country hits that lasted for the best part of a decade: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Another Place, Another Time"] Myra divorced Jerry Lee around that time, citing physical and emotional abuse. She is now known as Myra Williams, has been happily married for thirty-six years, and works as a real-estate agent. Jerry Lee has, so far, married four more times. His fourth and fifth wives died in mysterious circumstances -- his fourth drowned shortly before the divorce went through, and the fifth died in circumstances that are still unclear, and several have raised suspicions that Jerry Lee killed her. It's not impossible. The man known as the Killer did once shoot his bass player in the chest in the late seventies -- he insists that was an accident -- and was arrested outside Graceland, drunk and with a gun, yelling for Elvis Presley to come out and settle who was the real king. Jerry Lee Lewis is still alive, married to his seventh wife, who is Myra's brother's ex-wife. Last year, he and his wife sued his daughter, though the lawsuit was thrown out of court. He's eighty-four years old, still performs, and according to recent interviews, worries if he is going to go to Heaven or to Hell when he dies. I imagine I would worry too, in his place.  

The best of the rest of the British Invasion, the birth of modern metal guitar, and The Pit of Disco Despair. This week we look at Glad All Over, originally by The Dave Clark Five, covered by Quiet Riot and by Pet Shop Boys. Outro music is Cum On Feel The Noize, by a post-Rhoads Quiet Riot.

The Dave Clark Five was a part of the British Invasion, in fact their classic, Glad All Over, knocked the Beatles, “I Want To Hold Your Hand” off the top of the UK charts. Dave recently unearthed an amazing performance from his collection, a song he helped pen for a musical that Freddy Mercury sang. He has now stripped it down to just the Queen singer's stunning voice and piano. Dave talks about his friendship with Mercury, the first time they met (Looks like Liza Minnelli!) and the search for this amazing track. He also talks about the Dave Clark Five playing Red Rocks and the only role he turned down as a young stunt actor (it involved dressing in drag and a very famous river).

Front row season ticket holder for Crystal Palace FC, Wendy McLeod joins the podcast. You won't want to miss her singing club chant "Glad All Over"! Music is Something Elated by Broke for Free. freemusicarchive.org/music/Broke_Fo…e/Something_EP --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/football-neophytes/support

Thomas Price was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. By the tender age of 16, he had already hit the road playing drums in rock bands ... and he hasn't stopped since. Schooled on "early blue-eyed soul" like The Dave Clarke 5 and The Young Rascals, he found his chops playing along with his older brother's 45's of drum heavy songs like "Bits and Pieces" and "Glad All Over". He has spent his life on the road and in the studio, and along the way has become one of the most well-known and highly sought-after skin bashers in the business. His style is unique in that he has a sound completely his own, and his talent is impossible to overlook, but he stays solid and in the pocket without the flash and distractions of most well-known drummers. He can provide the fireworks without losing his place as the most rock-solid backbone around.For more than 30 years now, Thommy Price has been a Blackheart. "In the beginning I was just playing on Joan's records, but I wasn't really in the band. Kenny Laguna would call me all the time and ask 'Are you ready yet?' At the time I was in Mink Deville and touring all over Europe for months at a time. What really sold me on being a Blackheart was a show I saw them do at Radio City one year. It was unbelievable. I watched the whole show from the sound desk, so I was able to see the whole stage. It reminded me of seeing The Who. It didn't just sound great, it was like seeing a great play or choreographed dance. Whether or not they planned it, the band  Iwas beautiful to watch. I left Radio City that night saying THAT'S the band I need to be in. It was a gang a perfect rock and roll gang.Besides being a Blackheart, Thommy continues to write and produce with others. In his latest side project "Downtown Phantom" Thommy has reunited with old friend and bandmate Johnny Rao and Joey Vasta. 

WilderTime #025 – Happy Easter Weekend! The Team at (https://radiowilder.com/wildertime-025/) Highlights are: The original garage rock recording band, The Sonics. Number#1 song from 2017 “Shape of you” by Ed Sheehan. Great live performance by The Who. And a big-time cover of ‘Glad All Over' in the “Deuces Are Wilder” collection. Doing two requests and; Check out (https://www.flipcause.com/secure/cause_pdetails/MzE4NTI) and help the kids out if you can. Again, enjoy your Easter Weekend!!

Leikin lög frá stuttum en farsælum ferli ensku hljómsveitarinnar Dave Clark Five. Lögin heita: I Knew It All The Time, Do You Love Me?, Glad All Over, Bits And Pieces, Can't You See That She's Mine, Because, Everybody Knows (I Still Love You), Any Way You Want It, Reelin' And Rocking, I Like It Like That, Catch Us If You Can, Having A Wild Weekend, Over And Over, Try To Hard, You Got What It Takes, The Red Balloon og Everybody Knows.

This week we're playing B-Sides and covers as well as a truck load of original discs. We're putting vinyl under the needle to shake out the boss sounds hidden within. Feel it. Please like the Facebook page here: facebook.com/ontargetpodcast/ ------------------------------------------------- The Playlist Is: "Come On Sock It To Me" Syl Johnson - Twilight "Baby Don't You Do It" Alvin Robinson - Atco "Don't Start None" The Mayfield Singers - Mayfield "Karate Boogaloo" The Emperors - Brunswick "Look At Me Now" The Ethics - Vent "Get Ready - Uptight" Little Eva Harris - Spring "Some Other Guy" The Big Three - Decca "Glad All Over" Billy Fury & The Gamblers - London "Never Met A Girl Like You Before" The Kinks - Pye "A Last Minute Miracle" Linda Jones - Warner Brothers "I Got A Feeling" Barbara Randolph - Soul "It's All Over But The Shouting" Gladys Knight & The Pips - Soul "Got To Find A Way" Cajun Hart - Warner Brothers "I've Got To Find Her" The Cavaliers - RCA Victor "Needless To Say" Bernard Williams & The Original Blue Notes - Harthon "Warm City Baby" The Honey Jug - H.I.P. "Yesterday Folks" The Mustard Family - Buddah "Just In Case You Wonder" The Ugly Ducklings - Yorkville "Storm Warning" Lynn Taitt & The Boys - Treasure Isle "Tougher Than Tough" Derrick Morgan - Beverly's "Something Is Worrying Me" Otis Redding - Volt

Leikin lög frá stuttum en farsælum ferli ensku hljómsveitarinnar Dave Clark Five. Lögin heita: I Knew It All The Time, Do You Love Me?, Glad All Over, Bits And Pieces, Can't You See That She's Mine, Because, Everybody Knows (I Still Love You), Any Way You Want It, Reelin' And Rocking, I Like It Like That, Catch Us If You Can, Having A Wild Weekend, Over And Over, Try To Hard, You Got What It Takes, The Red Balloon og Everybody Knows.

Leikin lög frá stuttum en farsælum ferli ensku hljómsveitarinnar Dave Clark Five. Lögin heita: I Knew It All The Time, Do You Love Me?, Glad All Over, Bits And Pieces, Can't You See That She's Mine, Because, Everybody Knows (I Still Love You), Any Way You Want It, Reelin' And Rocking, I Like It Like That, Catch Us If You Can, Having A Wild Weekend, Over And Over, Try To Hard, You Got What It Takes, The Red Balloon og Everybody Knows.

Thomas Price was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. By the tender age of 16, he had already hit the road playing drums in rock bands  and he hasn't stopped since. Schooled on "early blue eyed soul" like The Dave Clarke 5 and The Young Rascals, he found his chops playing along with his older brother's 45's of drum heavy songs like "Bits and Pieces" and "Glad All Over" (the latter of which he now covers in his own new band . He has spent his life on the road and in the studio, and along the way has become one of the most well known and highly sought after skin bashers in the business. His style is unique in that he has a sound completely his own, and his talent is impossible to overlook, but he stays solid and in the pocket without the flash and distractions of most well known drummers. He can provide the fireworks without losing his place as the most rock solid backbone around. For this reason his list of credits is almost endless. The band Price-Sulton, released a full-length album on CBS Records called Lights On. Price-Sulton also had a song featured in a movie starring Susanna Hoffs called The All-Nighter. This project was the first time Thommy stepped up to the front of the stage, playing guitar and singing his original songs. Thommy Price has been a Blackheart. "In the beginning I was just playing on Joan's records, but I wasn't really in the band. Kenny Laguna would call me all the time and say 'Are you ready yet?' At the time I was in Mink DeVille and touring all over Europe for months at a time. "Besides being a Blackheart, Thommy continues to write and produce with others.  In his latest side project "Downtown Phantom" Thommy has  reunited with old friend and bandmate Johnny Rao and Joey Vasta. 

Thommy Price is a rock musician from Brooklyn, New York. He has played drums in a number of bands, including Scandal, Billy Idol, Blue Öyster Cult, and Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, and is an in-demand session drummer. Thomas Price was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. By the tender age of 16, he had already hit the road playing drums in rock bands ... and he hasn't stopped since. Schooled on "early blue eyed soul" like The Dave Clarke 5and The Young Rascals, he found his chops playing along with his older brother's 45's of drum heavy songs like "Bits and Pieces" and "Glad All Over" (the latter of which he now covers in his own new band ... but more on that later...) He has spent his life on the road and in the studio, and along the way has become one of the most well known and highly sought after skin bashers in the business. His style is unique in that he has a sound completely his own, and his talent is impossible to overlook, but he stays solid and in the pocket without the flash and distractions of most well known drummers. He can provide the fireworks without losing his place as the most rock solid backbone around. For this reason his list of credits is almost endless...  

Glad All Over is their first album in seven years and picks up where the band left off before Jakob Dylan's two solo albums.