English musician; guitarist for the Shadows
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12 episodes with Hank Marvin
3 episodes with Hank Marvin
2 episodes with Hank Marvin
2 episodes with Hank Marvin
4 episodes with Hank Marvin
3 episodes with Hank Marvin
3 episodes with Hank Marvin
2 episodes with Hank Marvin
2 episodes with Hank Marvin
Dave Pegg joined Fairport Convention 56 years ago and fully deserves some sort of medal. They're playing their 49th Cropredy in August and touring the UK later in the year. He talks to us here about the first gigs he ever saw and played which, delightfully, involves … … the night Hank Marvin took him to see Bjork. … an all-nighter in Birmingham with John Mayall, Eric Clapton, Chris Farlowe and Spencer Davis. … memories of his “school hero” Denny Laine. … the fine art of getting it together in the country: life at the Angel pub in Little Hadham – “flea-bitten, enough hot water for one person and a lorry crashed through the wall into Dave Swarbrick's bedroom”. … the link between ticket sales and high blood pressure. … what not to do when you meet McCartney. … a night on the whisky with Rick Danko that ended in hospital. … how a band lasts 58 years without falling out. … the Island albums that made their reputation but never earned them any money. … unsung Birmingham acts: Denny Laine & the Diplomats (Bev Bevan on drums), Steve Gibbons in the Uglys, Jeff Lynne in the Idle Race. … narrowboats, pewter ale jugs, outdoor settees, Matty Groves, Meet On The Ledge and other cornerstones of the Cropredy experience.… Dave Swarbrick's “small holding” and further assorted knob gags. Fairport Convention tickets here: https://www.davepegg.co.uk/gigs/fairportgigs/ Cropredy tickets here: https://www.fairportconvention.com/Find out more about how to help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Dave Pegg joined Fairport Convention 56 years ago and fully deserves some sort of medal. They're playing their 49th Cropredy in August and touring the UK later in the year. He talks to us here about the first gigs he ever saw and played which, delightfully, involves … … the night Hank Marvin took him to see Bjork. … an all-nighter in Birmingham with John Mayall, Eric Clapton, Chris Farlowe and Spencer Davis. … memories of his “school hero” Denny Laine. … the fine art of getting it together in the country: life at the Angel pub in Little Hadham – “flea-bitten, enough hot water for one person and a lorry crashed through the wall into Dave Swarbrick's bedroom”. … the link between ticket sales and high blood pressure. … what not to do when you meet McCartney. … a night on the whisky with Rick Danko that ended in hospital. … how a band lasts 58 years without falling out. … the Island albums that made their reputation but never earned them any money. … unsung Birmingham acts: Denny Laine & the Diplomats (Bev Bevan on drums), Steve Gibbons in the Uglys, Jeff Lynne in the Idle Race. … narrowboats, pewter ale jugs, outdoor settees, Matty Groves, Meet On The Ledge and other cornerstones of the Cropredy experience.… Dave Swarbrick's “small holding” and further assorted knob gags. Fairport Convention tickets here: https://www.davepegg.co.uk/gigs/fairportgigs/ Cropredy tickets here: https://www.fairportconvention.com/Find out more about how to help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Dave Pegg joined Fairport Convention 56 years ago and fully deserves some sort of medal. They're playing their 49th Cropredy in August and touring the UK later in the year. He talks to us here about the first gigs he ever saw and played which, delightfully, involves … … the night Hank Marvin took him to see Bjork. … an all-nighter in Birmingham with John Mayall, Eric Clapton, Chris Farlowe and Spencer Davis. … memories of his “school hero” Denny Laine. … the fine art of getting it together in the country: life at the Angel pub in Little Hadham – “flea-bitten, enough hot water for one person and a lorry crashed through the wall into Dave Swarbrick's bedroom”. … the link between ticket sales and high blood pressure. … what not to do when you meet McCartney. … a night on the whisky with Rick Danko that ended in hospital. … how a band lasts 58 years without falling out. … the Island albums that made their reputation but never earned them any money. … unsung Birmingham acts: Denny Laine & the Diplomats (Bev Bevan on drums), Steve Gibbons in the Uglys, Jeff Lynne in the Idle Race. … narrowboats, pewter ale jugs, outdoor settees, Matty Groves, Meet On The Ledge and other cornerstones of the Cropredy experience.… Dave Swarbrick's “small holding” and further assorted knob gags. Fairport Convention tickets here: https://www.davepegg.co.uk/gigs/fairportgigs/ Cropredy tickets here: https://www.fairportconvention.com/Find out more about how to help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
The renowned voice of the airwaves, Phil Wilson, famous for his morning show "Phil Wilson In The Morning" on Affinity Radio Newcastle and Affinity Radio Shields, Saturday 7-10am and the syndicated sensation "Phil Wilson's Vinyl Revival," engages again in a captivating conversation with Tony Butler of Big Country and now Kindred Spirit with the release of the album Think Loud 4 Parkinsons. Stars have come together to support the charity Cure Parkinson's with an album of brand-new recordings including Leo Sayer, Hank Marvin, The Waterboys, Paul Carrack, Tony Hadley, Pete Townshend, Roger Taylor, Andy Fairweather Low, Hugh Cornwell, John Cooper Clarke, Ralph McTell, Jools Holland, Mike & The Mechanics & Marcella Detroit. Kindred Spirit's - Think Loud 4 Parkinson's, released on 14th February 2025, sees a plethora of British rock legends team up to help raise awareness and funds for the charity Cure Parkinson's. The album features all new and previously unreleased tracks. About Cure Parkinson's We're here for the cure. Cure Parkinson's is working with urgency to find new treatments to slow, stop and reverse Parkinson's. Our funding and innovation has redefined the field of Parkinson's research, enabling the world's leading researchers to prioritise the next generation of drugs for clinical trials. Together we will conquer Parkinson's. Further information at https://www.cureparkinsons.org.uk Cure Parkinson's is the operating name of The Cure Parkinson's Trust, a registered charity in England and Wales (1111816) and Scotland (SCO44368) and a company limited by guarantee - company number 05539974 (England and Wales). https://www.facebook.com/cureparkinsons/ https://x.com/CureParkinsonsT https://www.instagram.com/cureparkinsons/ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC22BEygQpXo9wbb6qMZPjtQ Tune in to Phil Wilson Weekly: Affinity Radio Newcastle - Affinity Radio Shields on DAB accross the North East Of England, Smart Speaker and online https://www.affinityradio.uk Phil Wilson's Vinyl Revival https://www.vinylrevivalradio.com Celeb TV UK https://www.celebtv.co.uk Follow Phil Wilson: https://www.celebtv.co.uk https://www.vinylrevivalradio.com https://www.radioshields.co.uk https://www.facebook.com/CELEBRITYPHIL https://twitter.com/CelebrityPhil https://www.instagram.com/CelebrityPhil/ Please visit https://www.buymeacoffee.com/celebrityphil to show your support for this channel. Thank you!
The renowned voice of the airwaves, Phil Wilson, famous for his morning show "Phil Wilson In The Morning" on Affinity Radio Newcastle and Affinity Radio Shields, Saturday 7-10am and the syndicated sensation "Phil Wilson's Vinyl Revival," engages again in a captivating conversation with Tony Butler of Big Country and now Kindred Spirit with the release of the album Think Loud 4 Parkinsons. Stars have come together to support the charity Cure Parkinson's with an album of brand-new recordings including Leo Sayer, Hank Marvin, The Waterboys, Paul Carrack, Tony Hadley, Pete Townshend, Roger Taylor, Andy Fairweather Low, Hugh Cornwell, John Cooper Clarke, Ralph McTell, Jools Holland, Mike & The Mechanics & Marcella Detroit. Kindred Spirit's - Think Loud 4 Parkinson's, released on 14th February 2025, sees a plethora of British rock legends team up to help raise awareness and funds for the charity Cure Parkinson's. The album features all new and previously unreleased tracks. About Cure Parkinson's We're here for the cure. Cure Parkinson's is working with urgency to find new treatments to slow, stop and reverse Parkinson's. Our funding and innovation has redefined the field of Parkinson's research, enabling the world's leading researchers to prioritise the next generation of drugs for clinical trials. Together we will conquer Parkinson's. Further information at https://www.cureparkinsons.org.uk Cure Parkinson's is the operating name of The Cure Parkinson's Trust, a registered charity in England and Wales (1111816) and Scotland (SCO44368) and a company limited by guarantee - company number 05539974 (England and Wales). https://www.facebook.com/cureparkinsons/ https://x.com/CureParkinsonsT https://www.instagram.com/cureparkinsons/ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC22BEygQpXo9wbb6qMZPjtQ Tune in to Phil Wilson Weekly: Affinity Radio Newcastle - Affinity Radio Shields on DAB accross the North East Of England, Smart Speaker and online https://www.affinityradio.uk Phil Wilson's Vinyl Revival https://www.vinylrevivalradio.com Celeb TV UK https://www.celebtv.co.uk Follow Phil Wilson: https://www.celebtv.co.uk https://www.vinylrevivalradio.com https://www.radioshields.co.uk https://www.facebook.com/CELEBRITYPHIL https://twitter.com/CelebrityPhil https://www.instagram.com/CelebrityPhil/ Please visit https://www.buymeacoffee.com/celebrityphil to show your support for this channel. Thank you!
Send us a textCharles and Grham interview 10cc's Graham Gouldman ahead of his latest tour with his band, Heart Full of Songs.The band line-up comprises Graham, 10cc live band members Iain Hornal and Keith Hayman, and Dave Cobby.In 2014 Graham was inducted into the Songwriter's Hall of Fame – an arm of America's National Academy of Music. Fellow inductees include Noel Coward, Burt Bacharach, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, Elton John and Sting.Graham's songwriting credits over the last 60 years include The Yardbirds, The Hollies, Herman's Hermits and 10cc. In 2024 Graham released a new solo album called I Have Notes which includes collaborations with Brian May, Ringo Starr, Hank Marvin and Albert Lee.Charles and Graham round off the episode with a quick discussion about the recent BAFTA Awards and the latest news about the planned National Poetry Centre.Keep in touch with Two Big Egos in a Small Car:X@2big_egosFacebook@twobigegos
Jangle bell, jangle bell!
Hank Marvin - vocalist, songwriter and lead guitarist for The Shadows - joins Graham Cornes. Listen live on the FIVEAA Player. Follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
115 - Andy Summers (the Police) In episode 115 of “Have Guitar Will Travel”, presented by Vintage Guitar Magazine! host James Patrick Regan speaks with guitarist Andy Summers, from the Police. In their conversation they cover: His photography and documenting his experiences and the Fender guitar covered in Andy's photographs. They speak about Andy's contemporaries while coming up, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Steve Howe, Peter Green, David Gilmore Albert Lee to name a few. They discuss the EP that accompanies his book of photography… and how that relates to scoring film. They discuss Hank Marvin's role in Andy's life which will come full circle with a recording project with Andy and Hank. They discuss the Gibson Les Paul that Eric Clapton bought from Andy and they discuss gear in general including some new guitars Andy is excited about made by Andy Powers from Taylor guitars (Andy calls them Masters guitars, but they're actually called Powers powerselectricguitars.com). Andy tells us about coming to the US with a group called the Soft Machine and how that led him to join Eric Burdon and the Animals and ultimately studying classical guitar at Cal State Northridge. Andy takes through his early jazz guitar and sax influences and how that colored his guitar playing later with the Police. You can find out all you need to know about Andy at his website: andysummers.com Please subscribe, like, comment, share and review this podcast! #VintageGuitarMagazine #AndySummers #thePolice #AndySummersGuitarist #theAnimals #guitar #Guitar #FenderCustomShop #GibsonCustomShop #GuitarHero #Telecaster #theDeadlies #guitarfinds #LesPaul #PowersElectricGuitars #haveguitarwilltravelpodcast #guitarcollector #Travelwithguitars #haveguitarwilltravel #hgwt #HGWT Please like, comment, and share this podcast! Download Link
Welcome to the premiere "Song Dive" bonus episode: a way to hear the story behind a song that has made (or will soon make) our collective mixtapes & playlists! On this "Song Dive" episode, I am joined by Guy Fletcher of Dire Straits, and we're talking about the story behind Mark Knopfler's Guitar Heroes' “Going Home (Theme From Local Hero),” which Guy produced. This new 10-minute rendition was recorded in aid of Teenage Cancer Trust and Teen Cancer America, and features over 60 musical legends on the track. We also take some time to discuss tracks from Dire Straits' catalog including: Money For Nothing, Walk Of Life, Heavy Fuel & The Bug; working with “Weird Al” Yankovic on his Dire Straits' parody “Money For Nothing / Beverly Hillbillies;” recording the soundtrack for The Princess Bride; the experience of mixing Dire Straits' "Live At The Rainbow, London UK, 12/1979" album from the original tapes; Guy's accreditation as a Dolby ATMOS engineer and how that factored into the new Going Home mix; bringing ATMOS to households via the Airsound Spatial speaker technology; and so much more! The full list of artists who appear on “Going Home (Theme From Local Hero)” are (in alphabetical order): Joan Armatrading, Jeff Beck, Richard Bennett, Joe Bonamassa, Joe Brown, James Burton, Jonathan Cain, Paul Carrack, Eric Clapton, Ry Cooder, Jim Cox, Steve Cropper, Sheryl Crow, Danny Cummings, Roger Daltrey, Duane Eddy, Sam Fender, Guy Fletcher, Peter Frampton, Audley Freed, Vince Gill, David Gilmour, Buddy Guy, Keiji Haino, Tony Iommi, Joan Jett, John Jorgenson, Mark Knopfler, Sonny Landreth, Albert Lee, Greg Leisz, Alex Lifeson, Steve Lukather, Phil Manzanera, Dave Mason, Hank Marvin, Brian May, Robbie McIntosh, John McLaughlin, Tom Morello, Rick Nielsen, Orianthi, Brad Paisley, Nile Rodgers, Mike Rutherford, Joe Satriani, John Sebastian, Connor Selby, Slash, Bruce Springsteen, Ringo Starr and Zak Starkey, Sting, Andy Taylor, Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks, Ian Thomas, Pete Townshend, Keith Urban, Steve Vai, Waddy Wachtel, Joe Louis Walker, Joe Walsh, Ronnie Wood, Glenn Worf, & Zucchero. A minimum of 50% of the proceeds from the single are being donated to Teenage Cancer Trust and Teen Cancer America. To purchase the 12" vinyl, CD or digital edition of the single, please visit: https://www.markknopflersguitarheroes.com/ Be sure to visit MyWeeklyMixtape.com to hear all of the songs we discussed in this episode, and join the My Weekly Mixtape Discord Server via the link on the main menu! FOR MORE ON MY WEEKLY MIXTAPE Website: http://www.myweeklymixtape.com Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/myweeklymixtape Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/myweeklymixtape Twitter: https://twitter.com/myweeklymixtape Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/myweeklymixtape TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@myweeklymixtape Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Welcome to the premiere "Song Dive" bonus episode: a way to hear the story behind a song that has made (or will soon make) our collective mixtapes & playlists! On this "Song Dive" episode, I am joined by Guy Fletcher of Dire Straits, and we're talking about the story behind Mark Knopfler's Guitar Heroes' “Going Home (Theme From Local Hero),” which Guy produced. This new 10-minute rendition was recorded in aid of Teenage Cancer Trust and Teen Cancer America, and features over 60 musical legends on the track. We also take some time to discuss tracks from Dire Straits' catalog including: Money For Nothing, Walk Of Life, Heavy Fuel & The Bug; working with “Weird Al” Yankovic on his Dire Straits' parody “Money For Nothing / Beverly Hillbillies;” recording the soundtrack for The Princess Bride; the experience of mixing Dire Straits' "Live At The Rainbow, London UK, 12/1979" album from the original tapes; Guy's accreditation as a Dolby ATMOS engineer and how that factored into the new Going Home mix; bringing ATMOS to households via the Airsound Spatial speaker technology; and so much more! The full list of artists who appear on “Going Home (Theme From Local Hero)” are (in alphabetical order): Joan Armatrading, Jeff Beck, Richard Bennett, Joe Bonamassa, Joe Brown, James Burton, Jonathan Cain, Paul Carrack, Eric Clapton, Ry Cooder, Jim Cox, Steve Cropper, Sheryl Crow, Danny Cummings, Roger Daltrey, Duane Eddy, Sam Fender, Guy Fletcher, Peter Frampton, Audley Freed, Vince Gill, David Gilmour, Buddy Guy, Keiji Haino, Tony Iommi, Joan Jett, John Jorgenson, Mark Knopfler, Sonny Landreth, Albert Lee, Greg Leisz, Alex Lifeson, Steve Lukather, Phil Manzanera, Dave Mason, Hank Marvin, Brian May, Robbie McIntosh, John McLaughlin, Tom Morello, Rick Nielsen, Orianthi, Brad Paisley, Nile Rodgers, Mike Rutherford, Joe Satriani, John Sebastian, Connor Selby, Slash, Bruce Springsteen, Ringo Starr and Zak Starkey, Sting, Andy Taylor, Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks, Ian Thomas, Pete Townshend, Keith Urban, Steve Vai, Waddy Wachtel, Joe Louis Walker, Joe Walsh, Ronnie Wood, Glenn Worf, & Zucchero. A minimum of 50% of the proceeds from the single are being donated to Teenage Cancer Trust and Teen Cancer America. To purchase the 12" vinyl, CD or digital edition of the single, please visit: https://www.markknopflersguitarheroes.com/ Be sure to visit MyWeeklyMixtape.com to hear all of the songs we discussed in this episode, and join the My Weekly Mixtape Discord Server to join in the musical discussions: https://discord.gg/hhDQAnXasm FOR MORE ON MY WEEKLY MIXTAPE Website: http://www.myweeklymixtape.com Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/myweeklymixtape Discord: https://discord.gg/hhDQAnXasm Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/myweeklymixtape Twitter: https://twitter.com/myweeklymixtape Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/myweeklymixtape TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@myweeklymixtape Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
This week on Rockonteurs, we welcome Mark Knopfler to the podcast. Where on earth do you start with a man whose career is so extensive, eclectic, and compelling? Mark shares some incredible stories of his introduction to the guitar, his heroes like Buddy Holly and Hank Marvin, his chart topping, decade defining days with Dire Straits, producing Bob Dylan and his stunning solo career that continues with the release of his new album ‘One Deep River' out on April 12th. This is a must listen from one of the best artists this country has produced.Rockonteurs is produced by Ben Jones for Gimme Sugar Productions. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
This week on Rockonteurs, we welcome Mark Knopfler to the podcast. Where on earth do you start with a man whose career is so extensive, eclectic, and compelling? Mark shares some incredible stories of his introduction to the guitar, his heroes like Buddy Holly and Hank Marvin, his chart topping, decade defining days with Dire Straits, producing Bob Dylan and his stunning solo career that continues with the release of his new album ‘One Deep River' out on April 12th. This is a must listen from one of the best artists this country has produced.Rockonteurs is produced by Ben Jones for Gimme Sugar Productions. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Steve Howe talks to us from the old house and studio in Devon where they rehearsed ‘The Yes Album' in 1970. He's been recording there for 54 years and is part of the current line-up about to set out around Europe. He looks back here on what he's learnt from 60 years onstage and mentions … … the effect of seeing Chuck Berry, Carl Perkins and The Animals in 1964. … playing old Shadows tunes at the Barnsbury Boys School in Holloway, aged 14. … how Yes songs evolved and the cover versions they used to play (America by Paul Simon, Something's Coming from West Side Story). … “the dark 1968 that followed the rainbow 1967”. ... Duane Eddy, Hank Marvin, Chet Atkins, Alison Krauss and the Big Three. … how Sgt Pepper – and blues, jazz and classical music - lit prog's blue touchpaper. … the value of “homework” and the hours of painstaking rehearsal that allowed them to play Fragile onstage. … how Iron Butterfly helped transform the Yes stage show. … Starship Trooper, Roundabout and other songs they're guaranteed to play. … old memories of Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe. … and the road ahead: “I'll keep going while I can still do the twiddly bits”. Yes tour dates: https://www.yesworld.com/Subscribe to Word In Your Ear on Patreon for early - and ad-free - access to all of our content, plus a whole load more!: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Steve Howe talks to us from the old house and studio in Devon where they rehearsed ‘The Yes Album' in 1970. He's been recording there for 54 years and is part of the current line-up about to set out around Europe. He looks back here on what he's learnt from 60 years onstage and mentions … … the effect of seeing Chuck Berry, Carl Perkins and The Animals in 1964. … playing old Shadows tunes at the Barnsbury Boys School in Holloway, aged 14. … how Yes songs evolved and the cover versions they used to play (America by Paul Simon, Something's Coming from West Side Story). … “the dark 1968 that followed the rainbow 1967”. ... Duane Eddy, Hank Marvin, Chet Atkins, Alison Krauss and the Big Three. … how Sgt Pepper – and blues, jazz and classical music - lit prog's blue touchpaper. … the value of “homework” and the hours of painstaking rehearsal that allowed them to play Fragile onstage. … how Iron Butterfly helped transform the Yes stage show. … Starship Trooper, Roundabout and other songs they're guaranteed to play. … old memories of Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe. … and the road ahead: “I'll keep going while I can still do the twiddly bits”. Yes tour dates: https://www.yesworld.com/Subscribe to Word In Your Ear on Patreon for early - and ad-free - access to all of our content, plus a whole load more!: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Steve Howe talks to us from the old house and studio in Devon where they rehearsed ‘The Yes Album' in 1970. He's been recording there for 54 years and is part of the current line-up about to set out around Europe. He looks back here on what he's learnt from 60 years onstage and mentions … … the effect of seeing Chuck Berry, Carl Perkins and The Animals in 1964. … playing old Shadows tunes at the Barnsbury Boys School in Holloway, aged 14. … how Yes songs evolved and the cover versions they used to play (America by Paul Simon, Something's Coming from West Side Story). … “the dark 1968 that followed the rainbow 1967”. ... Duane Eddy, Hank Marvin, Chet Atkins, Alison Krauss and the Big Three. … how Sgt Pepper – and blues, jazz and classical music - lit prog's blue touchpaper. … the value of “homework” and the hours of painstaking rehearsal that allowed them to play Fragile onstage. … how Iron Butterfly helped transform the Yes stage show. … Starship Trooper, Roundabout and other songs they're guaranteed to play. … old memories of Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe. … and the road ahead: “I'll keep going while I can still do the twiddly bits”. Yes tour dates: https://www.yesworld.com/Subscribe to Word In Your Ear on Patreon for early - and ad-free - access to all of our content, plus a whole load more!: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Un homme s'autoproclamant "grimpeur de gratte-ciel" a escaladé la Sphere de Las Vegas avant d'être arrêté par la police locale. Le New York Post a identifié l'homme comme étant Madison Des Champs. Ce dernier a diffusé en direct son ascension sur Instagram où il a expliqué à ses followers qu'il avait entrepris l'exploit afin de collecter de l'argent pour une femme enceinte sans-abri. Un porte-parole de Sphere Entertainment a déclaré dans un communiqué : "Nous sommes reconnaissants aux autorités locales pour leur soutien dans cette affaire. Les personnes impliquées sont actuellement sous la garde de la police de Las Vegas". _______________________________________ Crowded House sort un nouveau morceau après plus de deux ans d'attente.C ette chanson, intitulée "Oh Hi", fait référence à une association chère aux yeux de Neil Finn, le leader. So They Can est en fait une organisation internationale à but non lucratif qui construit des écoles dans les régions reculées du Kenya et de la Tanzanie. Cet été, le groupe entamera une tournée au Royaume-Uni. _______________________________________ Garbage avait sorti Bleed Like Me en 2005. Très vite, l'album avait atteint le top 5 des charts aux États-Unis et en Europe. Une réédition vient d'être annoncée pour le 5 avril. Elle contient les singles "Why Do You Love Me", qui s'est classé dans le top 10 au Royaume-Uni, "Bleed Like Me", "Sex Is Not The Enemy" et "Run Baby Run", dont le clip a été réalisé par Sophie Muller. Entièrement remastérisée, cette réédition élargie de Bleed Like Me sera disponible sous plusieurs formats . _______________________________________ Les Eagles célèbrent leur carrière avec une nouvelle compilation "TO THE LIMIT : THE ESSENTIAL COLLECTION" qui sortira le 12 avril prochain. Avec ce coffret, les Eagles emmèneront leurs auditeurs au cœur de leurs 50 ans d'existence. Vous y trouverez 51 enregistrements studio et live, réalisés sur la période de 1972 à 2020. La collection contiendra les plus grands succès du groupe, mais aussi des lives. _______________________________________ Le double album live de The Cure, Paris, fêtera son 30e anniversaire cette année. Pour marquer l'occasion, Rhino Records a annoncé une nouvelle réédition qui sortira le 22 mars prochain. L'enregistrement live a été remasterisé par Robert Smith et Miles Showell, membres de The Cure, aux studios Abbey Road à Londres. Dans le cadre de la réédition, le groupe a inclus deux titres inédits, "Shake Dog Shake" et "Hot Hot Hot !!!". L'album de 14 titres a été enregistré pendant trois nuits au Zénith de Paris en octobre 1992. _______________________________________ Mark Knopfler a invité plus de 60 stars du rock sur un single caritatif pour le Teenage Cancer Trust, intitulé "Going Home : Theme of the Local Hero". Il sortira le 15 mars. Le guitariste de Dire Straits s'associera à de grands noms tels que Bruce Springsteen, Brian May de Queen, Ronnie Wood des Rolling Stone et Slash de Guns N' Roses dans le but de collecter des fonds pour l'association. La chanson sera une nouvelle version de l'instrumental de Dire Straits datant de 1983, "Going Home : Theme of the Local Hero", écrite à l'origine pour le film avec Burt Lancaster. Les autres musiciens recrutés pour le réenregistrement de la chanson sont David Gilmour (Pink Floyd), Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend (The Who), Joan Jett, Nile Rogers, Joe Bonamassa, Sheryl Crow, Peter Frampton, Steve Lukather (Toto) et Hank Marvin. Merci pour votre écoute Pour écouter Classic 21 à tout moment : www.rtbf.be/classic21 Retrouvez tous les contenus de la RTBF sur notre plateforme Auvio.be Et si vous avez apprécié ce podcast, n'hésitez pas à nous donner des étoiles ou des commentaires, cela nous aide à le faire connaître plus largement.
Dans cet épisode de "La Partition", plongez dans l'univers fascinant du guitariste virtuose Gary Moore. Ombline Roche vous emmène à la découverte de l'artiste qui a marqué la scène du blues mondial par sa maîtrise exceptionnelle de la guitare Gibson Les Paul. Originaire de Belfast, en Irlande du Nord, Gary Moore a été fortement influencé par des légendes telles qu'Elvis Presley, les Beatles et le guitariste britannique Hank Marvin. Dès l'âge de 14 ans, il se lance dans la musique et trouve sa plus grande source d'inspiration en la personne de Peter Green, fondateur du groupe Fleetwood Mac.L'épisode vous dévoile l'itinéraire musical de Gary Moore, de ses débuts avec le groupe Thin Lizzy à ses albums solo qui ont marqué les années 70 et 80. Parmi ses nombreuses réalisations, on découvre notamment l'album "Back on the Street" et son célèbre morceau "Parisian Walkway", véritable hymne de Gary Moore. Avec sa guitare emblématique, héritée de Peter Green, il a su créer des mélodies inoubliables et touchantes.Laissez-vous transporter par l'histoire captivante de Gary Moore, un artiste qui a su allier le blues et le rock avec une virtuosité inégalée. Découvrez les coulisses de sa carrière, ses collaborations marquantes et l'impact de sa musique sur la scène internationale. À travers les mots d'Ombline Roche, plongez dans l'univers passionnant de ce génie de la guitare et laissez-vous envoûter par la magie de sa musique.Plongez au cœur de l'âme musicale de Gary Moore et découvrez les facettes méconnues de son parcours artistique. "La Partition" vous invite à explorer la vie et l'œuvre de cet artiste incontournable, pour mieux apprécier la richesse de son héritage musical.
Making a Scene presents Gerry Casey's interview with Eddie AngelEddie Angel – captivating British guitar player, vocalist and songwriter. Charismatic personality, great showman and artist. Living in London.Having started his art expression with painting he moved on to guitar soon to be seen astounding people with his skills. Has since played with many musicians from styles as diverse as punk and soul, sharing stages with Keith Levine, Bill Hurley, The Kings of rhythm, Hank Marvin, Walter Wolfman Washington, Big Joe Tuner Memphis Blues, The Vibrators, Leon Blue, Todd Sharpville Band, Gary Granger, Jimmy Thomas, Earl Thomas, Mark Olbrich Blues Eternity playing guitar across Great Britain, Ireland, Spain, Norway, Denmark, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia Lithuania, Latvia, USA and Caribbeans. Along with Jack Bruce's musicians he was a part of Ronnie Scott's Club house band.
Reciban un cordial saludo. Desde Cali (Colombia), les habla Sergio Luis López, compartiéndoles un nuevo episodio de "Así la escuché yo..." La agrupación peruana Juaneco y su Combo presentó en 1972 el álbum "El gran cacique" con el cual se anotó un éxito musical en la voz de su cantante Wilindoro Cacique con la canción “Mujer hilandera”. Así la escuché yo… La canción ya había sido versionada en 1964 por Joan Baez, la superestrella estadounidense de música folk, cantada en portugués, pero con un título diferente “O' cangaceiro” (El forajido). Incluso, la famosa agrupación británica, The Shadows, realizó una versión para su álbum “Out of the Shadows” de 1963, vocalizada por Hank Marvin bajo el título “The bandit” (El bandido). Otro título con el que también se conoce a esta canción es “Ole (Samba)” como la cantó la cubana Doris de la Torre acompañada por Los Armónicos de Felipe Dulzaides de Cuba en 1963. El músico brasileño Zé Do Norte realizó una versión en 1953 para la película “O' cangaceiro” que retrata la vida del forajido Lampião, la cual fue muy popular en Brasil, por lo cual muchos la conocen por el título del filme y no por su verdadero nombre que es “Mulher rendeira”; y por la misma razón, se le atribuye erróneamente la autoría de esta canción a Alfredo Ricardo Do Nascimento, que es el nombre real de Zé Do Norte. “Mulher rendeira” (Mujer que teje encajes) es una tonada tradicional de los campesinos del Brasil de autor desconocido, atribuida al forajido Virgulino Ferreira da Silva, mejor conocido como Lampião, quien realizó sus fechorías en la primera mitad del siglo XX en Brasil. A continuación, la versión de Volta Sêca de 1957. ¿Y tú, conocías el origen de esta canción? Autor: Anónimo (Tonada tradicional brasileña) - Atribuida a Lampião (nombre real Virgulino Ferreira da Silva, forajido brasileño; de principios del siglo XX, convertido en héroe popular por su manera de actuar al estilo de Robin Hood) - Acreditada erróneamente a Alfredo Ricardo Do Nascimento (Zé Do Norte), brasileño) Mujer hilandera - Juaneco y su Combo (1972) "El gran cacique" álbum (1972) Ritmo: Cumbia amazónica Canta: Wilindoro Cacique (peruano) Juaneco (nombre real Juan Wong Paredes, peruano) O'cangaceiro - Joan Baez (1964) “Joan Baez 5” álbum (1964) Joan Baez (nombre real Joan Chandos Báez, estadounidense) The bandit - The Shadows (1963) "Out of the Shadows" álbum (1963) Canta: Hank Marvin (nombre real Brian Robson Rankin, británico) The Shadows (banda instrumental británica) Ole - Doris de la Torre & Los Armónicos de Felipe Dulzaides (1963) “Los Armónicos con Doris de la Torre” álbum (1963) Ritmo: Samba Doris de la Torre (cubana) Los Armónicos de Felipe Dulzaides Badía (orquesta cubana) Mulher rendeira - Zé Do Norte (1953) “Mulher rendeira - O' cangaceiro” Movie Soundtrack (1953) "Mulher rendeira" álbum (1969) Canta: Vanja Orico (nombre real Evangelina Orico, brasileña) Zé Do Norte (nombre real Alfredo Ricardo Do Nascimento, brasileño) Mulher rendeira - Volta Sêca (1957) “Cantigas De Lampeão” álbum (1957) Volta Sêca (nombre real Antonio Alves dos Santos, brasileño) ___________________ “Así la escuché yo…” Temporada: 7 Episodio: 24 Sergio Productions Cali – Colombia Sergio Luis López Mora
This week, coming to direct from the guest house in Eastbourne, Guy and Gary present more of the best of Rockonteurs. This week, we dive into the archive for the best guests from the 60s. Bona fide legends, that includeShel Talmy, Colin Blunstone, Nick Mason, Marianne Faithful, Jerry Shirley and Hank Marvin.Rockonteurs is produced by Ben Jones and Ian Callaghan for Gimme Sugar Productions. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
This week, coming to direct from the guest house in Eastbourne, Guy and Gary present more of the best of Rockonteurs. This week, we dive into the archive for the best guests from the 60s. Bona fide legends, that includeShel Talmy, Colin Blunstone, Nick Mason, Marianne Faithful, Jerry Shirley and Hank Marvin.Rockonteurs is produced by Ben Jones and Ian Callaghan for Gimme Sugar Productions. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Joe Matera is a rock journalist who has interviewed artists from all over the world covering the full spectrum of genres. His book Backstage Pass: The Grit and the Glamour takes the reader backstage and beyond to get behind the façade of the rock stars he's met.In this interview, Joe shares stories of his experiences interviewing Nickelback, Lemmy from Motörhead, The Shadows guitarist Hank Marvin, Ray Manzarek, Brian May, George Martin, Gene Simmons, and John Mayer. He recalls the time a member of Death Cab For Cutie blew off his interview, how he approaches asking musicians difficult questions, explains why the metal community is so misunderstood, and how to survive the wear and tear of touring. Purchase a copy of Backstage Pass: The Grit and the Glamour through Amazon HERE Find Joe Matera online HEREListen to Joe Matera's music on Spotify HEREVisit the Booked On Rock Website HERE Watch exclusive video segments from the Booked On Rock podcast HERE Follow The Booked On Rock with Eric Senich:FACEBOOKTWITTERINSTAGRAMTIKTOK Support Your Local Bookstore! Find your nearest independent bookstore HERE Contact The Booked On Rock Podcast: thebookedonrockpodcast@gmail.com The Booked On Rock Music: “Whoosh” by Crowander / “Last Train North” by TrackTribe
Making a Scene presents Gerry Casey's interview with Eddie AngelEddie Angel – captivating British guitar player, vocalist and songwriter. Charismatic personality, great showman and artist. Living in London.Having started his art expression with painting he moved on to guitar soon to be seen astounding people with his skills. Has since played with many musicians from styles as diverse as punk and soul, sharing stages with Keith Levine, Bill Hurley, The Kings of rhythm, Hank Marvin, Walter Wolfman Washington, Big Joe Tuner Memphis Blues, The Vibrators, Leon Blue, Todd Sharpville Band, Gary Granger, Jimmy Thomas, Earl Thomas, Mark Olbrich Blues Eternity playing guitar across Great Britain, Ireland, Spain, Norway, Denmark, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia Lithuania, Latvia, USA and Caribbeans. Along with Jack Bruce's musicians he was a part of Ronnie Scott's Club house band.
Shadows and more with Hank Marvin Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
The Brian D. O'Leary Show February 10, 2023 Show notes at https://briandoleary.substack.com/p/the-brian-d-oleary-show-2102023?sd=pf Today's show brought to you by O'Leary Beef in association with Southside Market & Barbecue. Set up your “Big Game” party with pit-roasted meats from Texas delivered to your front door. Use code BIGGAME10 to get 10% off your order. Vin Scully Quotes He was family but I never met him https://briandoleary.substack.com/p/he-was-family-but-i-never-met-him Fountain.FM Listen and support us at the same time over at Fountain.FM Rick Beato "Did Dire Straits Create the Coolist Riff Ever? Yep" https://www.youtube.com/live/fIzSGFK364A?feature=share Hank Marvin https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/Hank_Marvin Elvis + ONJ Why I consider Elvis Presley and Olivia Newton-John the most influential people in the history of Portland, Oregon https://briandoleary.substack.com/p/why-i-consider-elvis-presley-and ONJ + Vin Scully + Sausage Slammers Pouring one out for a legend https://briandoleary.substack.com/p/pouring-one-out-for-a-legend Knebworth 1990 The most impressive music festival you've never heard of https://briandoleary.substack.com/p/the-most-impressive-music-festival Brion McClanahan “Three Cheers for Pat Buchanan” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cb7DrMByAeI Pat Buchanan History matters...and it's available for free on the Internet https://briandoleary.substack.com/p/history-mattersand-its-available Pat Buchanan's prescience from 1975—a short book review https://briandoleary.substack.com/p/the-brian-d-oleary-show-11212022 Well-deserved retirements for two of my heroes (in entirely different realms) https://briandoleary.substack.com/p/the-brian-d-oleary-show-222023 Cancel culture before it had a name https://briandoleary.substack.com/p/cancel-culture-before-it-had-a-name For your premium meats: O'Leary Beef For all the rest of it, go to BrianDOLeary.com for more information.
Episode 160 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Flowers in the Rain" by the Move, their transition into ELO, and the career of Roy Wood. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-minute bonus episode available, on "The Chipmunk Song" by Canned Heat. 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/ Note I say "And on its first broadcast, as George Martin's theme tune for the new station faded, Tony Blackburn reached for a record." -- I should point out that after Martin's theme fades, Blackburn talks over a brief snatch of a piece by Johnny Dankworth. Resources As so many of the episodes recently have had no Mixcloud due to the number of songs by one artist, I've decided to start splitting the mixes of the recordings excerpted in the podcasts into two parts. Here's part one . I had problems uploading part two, but will attempt to get that up shortly. There are not many books about Roy Wood, and I referred to both of the two that seem to exist -- this biography by John van der Kiste, and this album guide by James R Turner. I also referred to this biography of Jeff Lynne by van der Kiste, The Electric Light Orchestra Story by Bev Bevan, and Mr Big by Don Arden with Mick Wall. Most of the more comprehensive compilations of the Move's material are out of print, but this single-CD-plus-DVD anthology is the best compilation that's in print. This is the one collection of Wood's solo and Wizzard hits that seems currently in print, and for those who want to investigate further, this cheap box set has the last Move album, the first ELO album, the first Wizzard album, Wood's solo Boulders, and a later Wood solo album, for the price of a single CD. Transcript Before I start, a brief note. This episode deals with organised crime, and so contains some mild descriptions of violence, and also has some mention of mental illness and drug use, though not much of any of those things. And it's probably also important to warn people that towards the end there's some Christmas music, including excerpts of a song that is inescapable at this time of year in the UK, so those who work in retail environments and the like may want to listen to this later, at a point when they're not totally sick of hearing Christmas records. Most of the time, the identity of the party in government doesn't make that much of a difference to people's everyday lives. At least in Britain, there tends to be a consensus ideology within the limits of which governments of both main parties tend to work. They will make a difference at the margins, and be more or less competent, and more or less conservative or left-wing, more or less liberal or authoritarian, but life will, broadly speaking, continue along much as before for most people. Some will be a little better or worse off, but in general steering the ship of state is a matter of a lot of tiny incremental changes, not of sudden u-turns. But there have been a handful of governments that have made big, noticeable, changes to the structure of society, reforms that for better or worse affect the lives of every person in the country. Since the end of the Second World War there have been two UK governments that made economic changes of this nature. The Labour government under Clement Atlee which came into power in 1945, and which dramatically expanded the welfare state, introduced the National Health Service, and nationalised huge swathes of major industries, created the post-war social democratic consensus which would be kept to with only minor changes by successive governments of both major parties for decades. The next government to make changes to the economy of such a radical nature was the Conservative government which came to power under Margaret Thatcher in 1979, which started the process of unravelling that social democratic consensus and replacing it with a far more hypercapitalist economic paradigm, which would last for the next several decades. It's entirely possible that the current Conservative government, in leaving the EU, has made a similarly huge change, but we won't know that until we have enough distance from the event to know what long-term changes it's caused. Those are economic changes. Arguably at least as impactful was the Labour government led by Harold Wilson that came to power in 1964, which did not do much to alter the economic consensus, but revolutionised the social order at least as much. Largely because of the influence of Roy Jenkins, the Home Secretary for much of that time, between 1964 and the end of the sixties, Britain abolished the death penalty for murder, decriminalised some sex acts between men in private, abolished corporal punishment in prisons, legalised abortion in certain circumstances, and got rid of censorship in the theatre. They also vastly increased spending on education, and made many other changes. By the end of their term, Britain had gone from being a country with laws reflecting a largely conservative, authoritarian, worldview to one whose laws were some of the most liberal in Europe, and society had started changing to match. There were exceptions, though, and that government did make some changes that were illiberal. They brought in increased restrictions on immigration, starting a worrying trend that continues to this day of governments getting ever crueler to immigrants, and they added LSD to the list of illegal drugs. And they brought in the Marine Broadcasting Offences Act, banning the pirate stations. We've mentioned pirate radio stations very briefly, but never properly explained them. In Britain, at this point, there was a legal monopoly on broadcasting. Only the BBC could run a radio station in the UK, and thanks to agreements with the Musicians' Union, the BBC could only play a very small amount of recorded music, with everything else having to be live performances or spoken word. And because it had a legal obligation to provide something for everyone, that meant the tiny amount of recorded music that was played on the radio had to cover all genres, meaning that even while Britain was going through the most important changes in its musical history, pop records were limited to an hour or two a week on British radio. Obviously, that wasn't going to last while there was money to be made, and the record companies in particular wanted to have somewhere to showcase their latest releases. At the start of the sixties, Radio Luxembourg had become popular, broadcasting from continental Europe but largely playing shows that had been pre-recorded in London. But of course, that was far enough away that it made listening to the transmissions difficult. But a solution presented itself: [Excerpt: The Fortunes, "Caroline"] Radio Caroline still continues to this day, largely as an Internet-based radio station, but in the mid-sixties it was something rather different. It was one of a handful of radio stations -- the pirate stations -- that broadcast from ships in international waters. The ships would stay three miles off the coast of Britain, close enough for their broadcasts to be clearly heard in much of the country, but outside Britain's territorial waters. They soon became hugely popular, with Radio Caroline and Radio London the two most popular, and introduced DJs like Tony Blackburn, Dave Lee Travis, Kenny Everett, and John Peel to the airwaves of Britain. The stations ran on bribery and advertising, and if you wanted a record to get into the charts one of the things you had to do was bribe one of the big pirate stations to playlist it, and with this corruption came violence, which came to a head when as we heard in the episode on “Here Comes the Night”, in 1966 Major Oliver Smedley, a failed right-wing politician and one of the directors of Radio Caroline, got a gang of people to board an abandoned sea fort from which a rival station was broadcasting and retrieve some equipment he claimed belonged to him. The next day, Reginald Calvert, the owner of the rival station, went to Smedley's home to confront him, and Smedley shot him dead, claiming self-defence. The jury in Smedley's subsequent trial took only a minute to find him not guilty and award him two hundred and fifty guineas to cover his costs. This was the last straw for the government, which was already concerned that the pirates' transmitters were interfering with emergency services transmissions, and that proper royalties weren't being paid for the music broadcast (though since much of the music was only on there because of payola, this seems a little bit of a moot point). They introduced legislation which banned anyone in the UK from supplying the pirate ships with records or other supplies, or advertising on the stations. They couldn't do anything about the ships themselves, because they were outside British jurisdiction, but they could make sure that nobody could associate with them while remaining in the UK. The BBC was to regain its monopoly (though in later years some commercial radio stations were allowed to operate). But as well as the stick, they needed the carrot. The pirate stations *had* been filling a real need, and the biggest of them were getting millions of listeners every day. So the arrangements with the Musicians' Union and the record labels were changed, and certain BBC stations were now allowed to play a lot more recorded music per day. I haven't been able to find accurate figures anywhere -- a lot of these things were confidential agreements -- but it seems to have been that the so-called "needle time" rules were substantially relaxed, allowing the BBC to separate what had previously been the Light Programme -- a single radio station that played all kinds of popular music, much of it live performances -- into two radio stations that were each allowed to play as much as twelve hours of recorded music per day, which along with live performances and between-track commentary from DJs was enough to allow a full broadcast schedule. One of these stations, Radio 2, was aimed at older listeners, and to start with mostly had programmes of what we would now refer to as Muzak, mixed in with the pop music of an older generation -- crooners and performers like Englebert Humperdinck. But another, Radio 1, was aimed at a younger audience and explicitly modelled on the pirate stations, and featured many of the DJs who had made their names on those stations. And on its first broadcast, as George Martin's theme tune for the new station faded, Tony Blackburn reached for a record. At different times Blackburn has said either that he was just desperately reaching for whatever record came to hand or that he made a deliberate choice because the record he chose had such a striking opening that it would be the perfect way to start a new station: [Excerpt: Tony Blackburn first radio show into "Flowers in the Rain" by the Move] You may remember me talking in the episode on "Here Comes the Night" about how in 1964 Dick Rowe of Decca, the manager Larry Page, and the publicist and co-owner of Radio Caroline Phil Solomon were all trying to promote something called Brumbeat as the answer to Merseybeat – Brummies, for those who don't know, are people from Birmingham. Brumbeat never took off the way Merseybeat did, but several bands did get a chance to make records, among them Gerry Levene and the Avengers: [Excerpt: Gerry Levene and the Avengers, "Dr. Feelgood"] That was the only single the Avengers made, and the B-side wasn't even them playing, but a bunch of session musicians under the direction of Bert Berns, and the group split up soon afterwards, but several of the members would go on to have rather important careers. According to some sources, one of their early drummers was John Bohnam, who you can be pretty sure will be turning up later in the story, while the drummer on that track was Graeme Edge, who would later go on to co-found the Moody Blues. But today it's the guitarist we'll be looking at. Roy Wood had started playing music when he was very young -- he'd had drum lessons when he was five years old, the only formal musical tuition he ever had, and he'd played harmonica around working men's clubs as a kid. And as a small child he'd loved classical music, particularly Tchaikovsky and Elgar. But it wasn't until he was twelve that he decided that he wanted to be a guitarist. He went to see the Shadows play live, and was inspired by the sound of Hank Marvin's guitar, which he later described as sounding "like it had been dipped in Dettol or something": [Excerpt: The Shadows, "Apache"] He started begging his parents for a guitar, and got one for his thirteenth birthday -- and by the time he was fourteen he was already in a band, the Falcons, whose members were otherwise eighteen to twenty years old, but who needed a lead guitarist who could play like Marvin. Wood had picked up the guitar almost preternaturally quickly, as he would later pick up every instrument he turned his hand to, and he'd also got the equipment. His friend Jeff Lynne later said "I first saw Roy playing in a church hall in Birmingham and I think his group was called the Falcons. And I could tell he was dead posh because he had a Fender Stratocaster and a Vox AC30 amplifier. The business at the time. I mean, if you've got those, that's it, you're made." It was in the Falcons that Wood had first started trying to write songs, at first instrumentals in the style of the Shadows, but then after the Beatles hit the charts he realised it was possible for band members to write their own material, and started hesitantly trying to write a few actual songs. Wood had moved on from the Falcons to Gerry Levene's band, one of the biggest local bands in Birmingham, when he was sixteen, which is also when he left formal education, dropping out from art school -- he's later said that he wasn't expelled as such, but that he and the school came to a mutual agreement that he wouldn't go back there. And when Gerry Levene and the Avengers fell apart after their one chance at success hadn't worked out, he moved on again to an even bigger band. Mike Sheridan and the Night Riders had had two singles out already, both produced by Cliff Richard's producer Norrie Paramor, and while they hadn't charted they were clearly going places. They needed a new guitarist, and Wood was by far the best of the dozen or so people who auditioned, even though Sheridan was very hesitant at first -- the Night Riders were playing cabaret, and all dressed smartly at all times, and this sixteen-year-old guitarist had turned up wearing clothes made by his sister and ludicrous pointy shoes. He was the odd man out, but he was so good that none of the other players could hold a candle to him, and he was in the Night Riders by the time of their third single, "What a Sweet Thing That Was": [Excerpt: Mike Sheridan and the Night Riders, "What a Sweet Thing That Was"] Sheridan later said "Roy was and still is, in my opinion, an unbelievable talent. As stubborn as a mule and a complete extrovert. Roy changed the group by getting us into harmonies and made us realize there was better material around with more than three chords to play. This was our turning point and we became a group's group and a bigger name." -- though there are few other people who would describe Wood as extroverted, most people describing him as painfully shy off-stage. "What a Sweet Thing That Was" didn't have any success, and nor did its follow-up, "Here I Stand", which came out in January 1965. But by that point, Wood had got enough of a reputation that he was already starting to guest on records by other bands on the Birmingham scene, like "Pretty Things" by Danny King and the Mayfair Set: [Excerpt: Danny King and the Mayfair Set, "Pretty Things"] After their fourth single was a flop, Mike Sheridan and the Night Riders changed their name to Mike Sheridan's Lot, and the B-side of their first single under the new name was a Roy Wood song, the first time one of his songs was recorded. Unfortunately the song, modelled on "It's Not Unusual" by Tom Jones, didn't come off very well, and Sheridan blamed himself for what everyone was agreed was a lousy sounding record: [Excerpt: Mike Sheridan's Lot, "Make Them Understand"] Mike Sheridan's Lot put out one final single, but the writing was on the wall for the group. Wood left, and soon after so did Sheridan himself. The remaining members regrouped under the name The Idle Race, with Wood's friend Jeff Lynne as their new singer and guitarist. But Wood wouldn't remain without a band for long. He'd recently started hanging out with another band, Carl Wayne and the Vikings, who had also released a couple of singles, on Pye: [Excerpt: Carl Wayne and the Vikings, "What's the Matter Baby"] But like almost every band from Birmingham up to this point, the Vikings' records had done very little, and their drummer had quit, and been replaced by Bev Bevan, who had been in yet another band that had gone nowhere, Denny Laine and the Diplomats, who had released one single under the name of their lead singer Nicky James, featuring the Breakaways, the girl group who would later sing on "Hey Joe", on backing vocals: [Excerpt: Nicky James, "My Colour is Blue"] Bevan had joined Carl Wayne's group, and they'd recorded one track together, a cover version of "My Girl", which was only released in the US, and which sank without a trace: [Excerpt: Carl Wayne and the Vikings, "My Girl"] It was around this time that Wood started hanging around with the Vikings, and they would all complain about how if you were playing the Birmingham circuit you were stuck just playing cover versions, and couldn't do anything more interesting. They were also becoming more acutely aware of how successful they *could* have been, because one of the Brumbeat bands had become really big. The Moody Blues, a supergroup of players from the best bands in Birmingham who featured Bev Bevan's old bandmate Denny Laine and Wood's old colleague Graeme Edge, had just hit number one with their version of "Go Now": [Excerpt: The Moody Blues, "Go Now"] So they knew the potential for success was there, but they were all feeling trapped. But then Ace Kefford, the bass player for the Vikings, went to see Davy Jones and the Lower Third playing a gig: [Excerpt: Davy Jones and the Lower Third, "You've Got a Habit of Leaving"] Also at the gig was Trevor Burton, the guitarist for Danny King and the Mayfair Set. The two of them got chatting to Davy Jones after the gig, and eventually the future David Bowie told them that the two of them should form their own band if they were feeling constricted in their current groups. They decided to do just that, and they persuaded Carl Wayne from Kefford's band to join them, and got in Wood. Now they just needed a drummer. Their first choice was John Bonham, the former drummer for Gerry Levene and the Avengers who was now drumming in a band with Kefford's uncle and Nicky James from the Diplomats. But Bonham and Wayne didn't get on, and so Bonham decided to remain in the group he was in, and instead they turned to Bev Bevan, the Vikings' new drummer. (Of the other two members of the Vikings, one went on to join Mike Sheridan's Lot in place of Wood, before leaving at the same time as Sheridan and being replaced by Lynne, while the other went on to join Mike Sheridan's New Lot, the group Sheridan formed after leaving his old group. The Birmingham beat group scene seems to have only had about as many people as there were bands, with everyone ending up a member of twenty different groups). The new group called themselves the Move, because they were all moving on from other groups, and it was a big move for all of them. Many people advised them not to get together, saying they were better off where they were, or taking on offers they'd got from more successful groups -- Carl Wayne had had an offer from a group called the Spectres, who would later become famous as Status Quo, while Wood had been tempted by Tony Rivers and the Castaways, a group who at the time were signed to Immediate Records, and who did Beach Boys soundalikes and covers: [Excerpt: Tony Rivers and the Castaways, "Girl Don't Tell Me"] Wood was a huge fan of the Beach Boys and would have fit in with Rivers, but decided he'd rather try something truly new. After their first gig, most of the people who had warned against the group changed their minds. Bevan's best friend, Bobby Davis, told Bevan that while he'd disliked all the other groups Bevan had played in, he liked this one. (Davis would later become a famous comedian, and have a top five single himself in the seventies, produced by Jeff Lynne and with Bevan on the drums, under his stage name Jasper Carrott): [Excerpt: Jasper Carrott, "Funky Moped"] Most of their early sets were cover versions, usually of soul and Motown songs, but reworked in the group's unique style. All five of the band could sing, four of them well enough to be lead vocalists in their own right (Bevan would add occasional harmonies or sing novelty numbers) and so they became known for their harmonies -- Wood talked at the time about how he wanted the band to have Beach Boys harmonies but over instruments that sounded like the Who. And while they were mostly doing cover versions live, Wood was busily writing songs. Their first recording session was for local radio, and at that session they did cover versions of songs by Brenda Lee, the Isley Brothers, the Orlons, the Marvelettes, and Betty Everett, but they also performed four songs written by Wood, with each member of the front line taking a lead vocal, like this one with Kefford singing: [Excerpt: The Move, "You're the One I Need"] The group were soon signed by Tony Secunda, the manager of the Moody Blues, who set about trying to get the group as much publicity as possible. While Carl Wayne, as the only member who didn't play an instrument, ended up the lead singer on most of the group's early records, Secunda started promoting Kefford, who was younger and more conventionally attractive than Wayne, and who had originally put the group together, as the face of the group, while Wood was doing most of the heavy lifting with the music. Wood quickly came to dislike performing live, and to wish he could take the same option as Brian Wilson and stay home and write songs and make records while the other four went out and performed, so Kefford and Wayne taking the spotlight from him didn't bother him at the time, but it set the group up for constant conflicts about who was actually the leader of the group. Wood was also uncomfortable with the image that Secunda set up for the group. Secunda decided that the group needed to be promoted as "bad boys", and so he got them to dress up as 1930s gangsters, and got them to do things like smash busts of Hitler, or the Rhodesian dictator Ian Smith, on stage. He got them to smash TVs on stage too, and in one publicity stunt he got them to smash up a car, while strippers took their clothes off nearby -- claiming that this was to show that people were more interested in violence than in sex. Wood, who was a very quiet, unassuming, introvert, didn't like this sort of thing, but went along with it. Secunda got the group a regular slot at the Marquee club, which lasted several months until, in one of Secunda's ideas for publicity, Carl Wayne let off smoke bombs on stage which set fire to the stage. The manager came up to try to stop the fire, and Wayne tossed the manager's wig into the flames, and the group were banned from the club (though the ban was later lifted). In another publicity stunt, at the time of the 1966 General Election, the group were photographed with "Vote Tory" posters, and issued an invitation to Edward Heath, the leader of the Conservative Party and a keen amateur musician, to join them on stage on keyboards. Sir Edward didn't respond to the invitation. All this publicity led to record company interest. Joe Boyd tried to sign the group to Elektra Records, but much as with The Pink Floyd around the same time, Jac Holzman wasn't interested. Instead they signed with a new production company set up by Denny Cordell, the producer of the Moody Blues' hits. The contract they signed was written on the back of a nude model, as yet another of Secunda's publicity schemes. The group's first single, "Night of Fear" was written by Wood and an early sign of his interest in incorporating classical music into rock: [Excerpt: The Move, "Night of Fear"] Secunda claimed in the publicity that that song was inspired by taking bad acid and having a bad trip, but in truth Wood was more inspired by brown ale than by brown acid -- he and Bev Bevan would never do any drugs other than alcohol. Wayne did take acid once, but didn't like it, though Burton and Kefford would become regular users of most drugs that were going. In truth, the song was not about anything more than being woken up in the middle of the night by an unexpected sound and then being unable to get back to sleep because you're scared of what might be out there. The track reached number two on the charts in the UK, being kept off the top by "I'm a Believer" by the Monkees, and was soon followed up by another song which again led to assumptions of drug use. "I Can Hear the Grass Grow" wasn't about grass the substance, but was inspired by a letter to Health and Efficiency, a magazine which claimed to be about the nudist lifestyle as an excuse for printing photos of naked people at a time before pornography laws were liberalised. The letter was from a reader saying that he listened to pop music on the radio because "where I live it's so quiet I can hear the grass grow!" Wood took that line and turned it into the group's next single, which reached number five: [Excerpt: The Move, "I Can Hear the Grass Grow"] Shortly after that, the group played two big gigs at Alexandra Palace. The first was the Fourteen-Hour Technicolor Dream, which we talked about in the Pink Floyd episode. There Wood had one of the biggest thrills of his life when he walked past John Lennon, who saluted him and then turned to a friend and said "He's brilliant!" -- in the seventies Lennon would talk about how Wood was one of his two favourite British songwriters, and would call the Move "the Hollies with balls". The other gig they played at Alexandra Palace was a "Free the Pirates" benefit show, sponsored by Radio Caroline, to protest the imposition of the Marine Broadcasting (Offences) Act. Despite that, it was, of course, the group's next single that was the first one to be played on Radio One. And that single was also the one which kickstarted Roy Wood's musical ambitions. The catalyst for this was Tony Visconti. Visconti was a twenty-three-year-old American who had been in the music business since he was sixteen, working the typical kind of jobs that working musicians do, like being for a time a member of a latter-day incarnation of the Crew-Cuts, the white vocal group who had had hits in the fifties with covers of "Sh'Boom" and “Earth Angel”. He'd also recorded two singles as a duo with his wife Siegrid, which had gone nowhere: [Excerpt: Tony and Siegrid, "Up Here"] Visconti had been working for the Richmond Organisation as a staff songwriter when he'd met the Move's producer Denny Cordell. Cordell was in the US to promote a new single he had released with a group called Procol Harum, "A Whiter Shade of Pale", and Visconti became the first American to hear the record, which of course soon became a massive hit: [Excerpt: Procol Harum, "A Whiter Shade of Pale"] While he was in New York, Cordell also wanted to record a backing track for one of his other hit acts, Georgie Fame. He told Visconti that he'd booked several of the best session players around, like the jazz trumpet legend Clark Terry, and thought it would be a fun session. Visconti asked to look at the charts for the song, out of professional interest, and Cordell was confused -- what charts? The musicians would just make up an arrangement, wouldn't they? Visconti asked what he was talking about, and Cordell talked about how you made records -- you just got the musicians to come into the studio, hung around while they smoked a few joints and worked out what they were going to play, and then got on with it. It wouldn't take more than about twelve hours to get a single recorded that way. Visconti was horrified, and explained that that might be how they did things in London, but if Cordell tried to make a record that way in New York, with an eight-piece group of session musicians who charged union scale, and would charge double scale for arranging work on top, then he'd bankrupt himself. Cordell went pale and said that the session was in an hour, what was he going to do? Luckily, Cordell had a copy of the demo with him, and Visconti, who unlike Cordell was a trained musician, quickly sat down and wrote an arrangement for him, sketching out parts for guitar, bass, drums, piano, sax, and trumpets. The resulting arrangement wasn't perfect -- Visconti had to write the whole thing in less than an hour with no piano to hand -- but it was good enough that Cordell's production assistant on the track, Harvey Brooks of the group Electric Flag, who also played bass on the track, could tweak it in the studio, and the track was recorded quickly, saving Cordell a fortune: [Excerpt: Georgie Fame, "Because I Love You"] One of the other reasons Cordell had been in the US was that he was looking for a production assistant to work with him in the UK to help translate his ideas into language the musicians could understand. According to Visconti he said that he was going to try asking Phil Spector to be his assistant, and Artie Butler if Spector said no. Astonishingly, assuming he did ask them, neither Phil Spector nor Artie Butler (who was the arranger for records like "Leader of the Pack" and "I'm a Believer" among many, many, others, and who around this time was the one who suggested to Louis Armstrong that he should record "What a Wonderful World") wanted to fly over to the UK to work as Denny Cordell's assistant, and so Cordell turned back to Visconti and invited him to come over to the UK. The main reason Cordell needed an assistant was that he had too much work on his hands -- he was currently in the middle of recording albums for three major hit groups -- Procol Harum, The Move, and Manfred Mann -- and he physically couldn't be in multiple studios at once. Visconti's first work for him was on a Manfred Mann session, where they were recording the Randy Newman song "So Long Dad" for their next single. Cordell produced the rhythm track then left for a Procol Harum session, leaving Visconti to guide the group through the overdubs, including all the vocal parts and the lead instruments: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "So Long Dad"] The next Move single, "Flowers in the Rain", was the first one to benefit from Visconti's arrangement ideas. The band had recorded the track, and Cordell had been unhappy with both the song and performance, thinking it was very weak compared to their earlier singles -- not the first time that Cordell would have a difference of opinion with the band, who he thought of as a mediocre pop group, while they thought of themselves as a heavy rock band who were being neutered in the studio by their producer. In particular, Cordell didn't like that the band fell slightly out of time in the middle eight of the track. He decided to scrap it, and get the band to record something else. Visconti, though, thought the track could be saved. He told Cordell that what they needed to do was to beat the Beatles, by using a combination of instruments they hadn't thought of. He scored for a quartet of wind instruments -- oboe, flute, clarinet, and French horn, in imitation of Mendelssohn: [Excerpt: The Move, "Flowers in the Rain"] And then, to cover up the slight sloppiness on the middle eight, Visconti had the wind instruments on that section recorded at half speed, so when played back at normal speed they'd sound like pixies and distract from the rhythm section: [Excerpt: The Move, "Flowers in the Rain"] Visconti's instincts were right. The single went to number two, kept off the top spot by Englebert Humperdinck, who spent 1967 keeping pretty much every major British band off number one, and thanks in part to it being the first track played on Radio 1, but also because it was one of the biggest hits of 1967, it's been the single of the Move's that's had the most airplay over the years. Unfortunately, none of the band ever saw a penny in royalties from it. It was because of another of Tony Secunda's bright ideas. Harold Wilson, the Prime Minister at the time, was very close to his advisor Marcia Williams, who started out as his secretary, rose to be his main political advisor, and ended up being elevated to the peerage as Baroness Falkender. There were many, many rumours that Williams was corrupt -- rumours that were squashed by both Wilson and Williams frequently issuing libel writs against newspapers that mentioned them -- though it later turned out that at least some of these were the work of Britain's security services, who believed Wilson to be working for the KGB (and indeed Williams had first met Wilson at a dinner with Khrushchev, though Wilson was very much not a Communist) and were trying to destabilise his government as a result. Their personal closeness also led to persistent rumours that Wilson and Williams were having an affair. And Tony Secunda decided that the best way to promote "Flowers in the Rain" was to print a postcard with a cartoon of Wilson and Williams on it, and send it out. Including sticking a copy through the door of ten Downing St, the Prime Minister's official residence. This backfired *spectacularly*. Wilson sued the Move for libel, even though none of them had known of their manager's plans, and as a result of the settlement it became illegal for any publication to print the offending image (though it can easily be found on the Internet now of course), everyone involved with the record was placed under a permanent legal injunction to never discuss the details of the case, and every penny in performance or songwriting royalties the track earned would go to charities of Harold Wilson's choice. In the 1990s newspaper reports said that the group had up to that point lost out on two hundred thousand pounds in royalties as a result of Secunda's stunt, and given the track's status as a perennial favourite, it's likely they've missed out on a similar amount in the decades since. Incidentally, while every member of the band was banned from ever describing the postcard, I'm not, and since Wilson and Williams are now both dead it's unlikely they'll ever sue me. The postcard is a cartoon in the style of Aubrey Beardsley, and shows Wilson as a grotesque naked homunculus sat on a bed, with Williams naked save for a diaphonous nightgown through which can clearly be seen her breasts and genitals, wearing a Marie Antoinette style wig and eyemask and holding a fan coquettishly, while Wilson's wife peers at them through a gap in the curtains. The text reads "Disgusting Depraved Despicable, though Harold maybe is the only way to describe "Flowers in the Rain" The Move, released Aug 23" The stunt caused huge animosity between the group and Secunda, not only because of the money they lost but also because despite Secunda's attempts to associate them with the Conservative party the previous year, Ace Kefford was upset at an attack on the Labour leader -- his grandfather was a lifelong member of the Labour party and Kefford didn't like the idea of upsetting him. The record also had a knock-on effect on another band. Wood had given the song "Here We Go Round the Lemon Tree" to his friends in The Idle Race, the band that had previously been Mike Sheridan and the Night Riders, and they'd planned to use their version as their first single: [Excerpt: The Idle Race, "Here We Go Round the Lemon Tree"] But the Move had also used the song as the B-side for their own single, and "Flowers in the Rain" was so popular that the B-side also got a lot of airplay. The Idle Race didn't want to be thought of as a covers act, and so "Lemon Tree" was pulled at the last minute and replaced by "Impostors of Life's Magazine", by the group's guitarist Jeff Lynne: [Excerpt: The Idle Race, "Impostors of Life's Magazine"] Before the problems arose, the Move had been working on another single. The A-side, "Cherry Blossom Clinic", was a song about being in a psychiatric hospital, and again had an arrangement by Visconti, who this time conducted a twelve-piece string section: [Excerpt: The Move, "Cherry Blossom Clinic"] The B-side, meanwhile, was a rocker about politics: [Excerpt: The Move, "Vote For Me"] Given the amount of controversy they'd caused, the idea of a song about mental illness backed with one about politics seemed a bad idea, and so "Cherry Blossom Clinic" was kept back as an album track while "Vote For Me" was left unreleased until future compilations. The first Wood knew about "Cherry Blossom Clinic" not being released was when after a gig in London someone -- different sources have it as Carl Wayne or Tony Secunda -- told him that they had a recording session the next morning for their next single and asked what song he planned on recording. When he said he didn't have one, he was sent up to his hotel room with a bottle of Scotch and told not to come down until he had a new song. He had one by 8:30 the next morning, and was so drunk and tired that he had to be held upright by his bandmates in the studio while singing his lead vocal on the track. The song was inspired by "Somethin' Else", a track by Eddie Cochran, one of Wood's idols: [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, "Somethin' Else"] Wood took the bass riff from that and used it as the basis for what was the Move's most straight-ahead rock track to date. As 1967 was turning into 1968, almost universally every band was going back to basics, recording stripped down rock and roll tracks, and the Move were no exception. Early takes of "Fire Brigade" featured Matthew Fisher of Procol Harum on piano, but the final version featured just guitar, bass, drums and vocals, plus a few sound effects: [Excerpt: The Move, "Fire Brigade"] While Carl Wayne had sung lead or co-lead on all the Move's previous singles, he was slowly being relegated into the background, and for this one Wood takes the lead vocal on everything except the brief bridge, which Wayne sings: [Excerpt: The Move, "Fire Brigade"] The track went to number three, and while it's not as well-remembered as a couple of other Move singles, it was one of the most influential. Glen Matlock of the Sex Pistols has often said that the riff for "God Save the Queen" is inspired by "Fire Brigade": [Excerpt: The Sex Pistols, "God Save the Queen"] The reversion to a heavier style of rock on "Fire Brigade" was largely inspired by the group's new friend Jimi Hendrix. The group had gone on a package tour with The Pink Floyd (who were at the bottom of the bill), Amen Corner, The Nice, and the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and had become good friends with Hendrix, often jamming with him backstage. Burton and Kefford had become so enamoured of Hendrix that they'd both permed their hair in imitation of his Afro, though Burton regretted it -- his hair started falling out in huge chunks as a result of the perm, and it took him a full two years to grow it out and back into a more natural style. Burton had started sharing a flat with Noel Redding of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and Burton and Wood had also sung backing vocals with Graham Nash of the Hollies on Hendrix's "You Got Me Floatin'", from his Axis: Bold as Love album: [Excerpt: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, "You Got Me Floatin'"] In early 1968, the group's first album came out. In retrospect it's arguably their best, but at the time it felt a little dated -- it was a compilation of tracks recorded between late 1966 and late 1967, and by early 1968 that might as well have been the nineteenth century. The album included their two most recent singles, a few more songs arranged by Visconti, and three cover versions -- versions of Eddie Cochran's "Weekend", Moby Grape's "Hey Grandma", and the old standard "Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart", done copying the Coasters' arrangement with Bev Bevan taking a rare lead vocal. By this time there was a lot of dissatisfaction among the group. Most vocal -- or least vocal, because by this point he was no longer speaking to any of the other members, had been Ace Kefford. Kefford felt he was being sidelined in a band he'd formed and where he was the designated face of the group. He'd tried writing songs, but the only one he'd brought to the group, "William Chalker's Time Machine", had been rejected, and was eventually recorded by a group called The Lemon Tree, whose recording of it was co-produced by Burton and Andy Fairweather-Low of Amen Corner: [Excerpt: The Lemon Tree, "William Chalker's Time Machine"] He was also, though the rest of the group didn't realise it at the time, in the middle of a mental breakdown, which he later attributed to his overuse of acid. By the time the album, titled Move, came out, he'd quit the group. He formed a new group, The Ace Kefford Stand, with Cozy Powell on drums, and they released one single, a cover version of the Yardbirds' "For Your Love", which didn't chart: [Excerpt: The Ace Kefford Stand, "For Your Love"] Kefford recorded a solo album in 1968, but it wasn't released until an archival release in 2003, and he spent most of the next few decades dealing with mental health problems. The group continued on as a four-piece, with Burton moving over to bass. While they thought about what to do -- they were unhappy with Secunda's management, and with the sound that Cordell was getting from their recordings, which they considered far wimpier than their live sound -- they released a live EP of cover versions, recorded at the Marquee. The choice of songs for the EP showed their range of musical influences at the time, going from fifties rockabilly to the burgeoning progressive rock scene, with versions of Cochran's "Somethin' Else", Jerry Lee Lewis' "It'll Be Me", "So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll Star" by the Byrds, "Sunshine Help Me" by Spooky Tooth, and "Stephanie Knows Who" by Love: [Excerpt: The Move, "Stephanie Knows Who"] Incidentally, later that year they headlined a gig at the Royal Albert Hall with the Byrds as the support act, and Gram Parsons, who by that time was playing guitar for the Byrds, said that the Move did "So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll Star" better than the Byrds did. The EP, titled "Something Else From the Move", didn't do well commercially, but it did do something that the band thought important -- Trevor Burton in particular had been complaining that Denny Cordell's productions "took the toughness out" of the band's sound, and was worried that the group were being perceived as a pop band, not as a rock group like his friends in the Jimi Hendrix Experience or Cream. There was an increasing tension between Burton, who wanted to be a heavy rocker, and the older Wayne, who thought there was nothing at all wrong with being a pop band. The next single, "Wild Tiger Woman", was much more in the direction that Burton wanted their music to go. It was ostensibly produced by Cordell, but for the most part he left it to the band, and as a result it ended up as a much heavier track than normal. Roy Wood had only intended the song as an album track, and Bevan and Wayne were hesitant about it being a single, but Burton was insistent -- "Wild Tiger Woman" was going to be the group's first number one record: [Excerpt: The Move, "Wild Tiger Woman"] In fact, it turned out to be the group's first single not to chart at all, after four top ten singles in a row. The group were now in crisis. They'd lost Ace Kefford, Burton and Wayne were at odds, and they were no longer guaranteed hitmakers. They decided to stop working with Cordell and Secunda, and made a commitment that if the next single was a flop, they would split up. In any case, Roy Wood was already thinking about another project. Even though the group's recent records had gone in a guitar-rock direction, he thought maybe you could do something more interesting. Ever since seeing Tony Visconti conduct orchestral instruments playing his music, he'd been thinking about it. As he later put it "I thought 'Well, wouldn't it be great to get a band together, and rather than advertising for a guitarist how about advertising for a cellist or a French horn player or something? There must be lots of young musicians around who play the... instruments that would like to play in a rock kind of band.' That was the start of it, it really was, and I think after those tracks had been recorded with Tony doing the orchestral arrangement, that's when I started to get bored with the Move, with the band, because I thought 'there's something more to it'". He'd started sketching out plans for an expanded lineup of the group, drawing pictures of what it would look like on stage if Carl Wayne was playing timpani while there were cello and French horn players on stage with them. He'd even come up with a name for the new group -- a multi-layered pun. The group would be a light orchestra, like the BBC Light Orchestra, but they would be playing electrical instruments, and also they would have a light show when they performed live, and so he thought "the Electric Light Orchestra" would be a good name for such a group. The other band members thought this was a daft idea, but Wood kept on plotting. But in the meantime, the group needed some new management. The person they chose was Don Arden. We talked about Arden quite a bit in the last episode, but he's someone who is going to turn up a lot in future episodes, and so it's best if I give a little bit more background about him. Arden was a manager of the old school, and like several of the older people in the music business at the time, like Dick James or Larry Page, he had started out as a performer, doing an Al Jolson tribute act, and he was absolutely steeped in showbusiness -- his wife had been a circus contortionist before they got married, and when he moved from Manchester to London their first home had been owned by Winifred Atwell, a boogie piano player who became the first Black person to have a UK number one -- and who is *still* the only female solo instrumentalist to have a UK number one -- with her 1954 hit "Let's Have Another Party": [Excerpt: WInifred Atwell, "Let's Have Another Party"] That was only Atwell's biggest in a long line of hits, and she'd put all her royalties into buying properties in London, one of which became the Ardens' home. Arden had been considered quite a promising singer, and had made a few records in the early 1950s. His first recordings, of material in Yiddish aimed at the Jewish market, are sadly not findable online, but he also apparently recorded as a session singer for Embassy Records. I can't find a reliable source for what records he sang on for that label, which put out budget rerecordings of hits for sale exclusively through Woolworths, but according to Wikipedia one of them was Embassy's version of "Blue Suede Shoes", put out under the group name "The Canadians", and the lead vocal on that track certainly sounds like it could be him: [Excerpt: The Canadians, "Blue Suede Shoes"] As you can tell, rock and roll didn't really suit Arden's style, and he wisely decided to get out of performance and into behind-the-scenes work, though he would still try on occasion to make records of his own -- an acetate exists from 1967 of him singing "Sunrise, Sunset": [Excerpt: Don Arden, "Sunrise, Sunset"] But he'd moved first into promotion -- he'd been the promoter who had put together tours of the UK for Gene Vincent, Little Richard, Brenda Lee and others which we mentioned in the second year of the podcast -- and then into management. He'd first come into management with the Animals -- apparently acting at that point as the money man for Mike Jeffries, who was the manager the group themselves dealt with. According to Arden -- though his story differs from the version of the story told by others involved -- the group at some point ditched Arden for Allen Klein, and when they did, Arden's assistant Peter Grant, another person we'll be hearing a lot more of, went with them. Arden, by his own account, flew over to see Klein and threatened to throw him out of the window of his office, which was several stories up. This was a threat he regularly made to people he believed had crossed him -- he made a similar threat to one of the Nashville Teens, the first group he managed after the Animals, after the musician asked what was happening to the group's money. And as we heard last episode, he threatened Robert Stigwood that way when Stigwood tried to get the Small Faces off him. One of the reasons he'd signed the Small Faces was that Steve Marriott had gone to the Italia Conti school, where Arden had sent his own children, Sharon and David, and David had said that Marriott was talented. And David was also a big reason the Move came over to Arden. After the Small Faces had left him, Arden had bought Galaxy Entertaimnent, the booking agency that handled bookings for Amen Corner and the Move, among many other acts. Arden had taken over management of Amen Corner himself, and had put his son David in charge of liaising with Tony Secunda about the Move. But David Arden was sure that the Move could be an albums act, not just a singles act, and was convinced the group had more potential than they were showing, and when they left Secunda, Don Arden took them on as his clients, at least for the moment. Secunda, according to Arden (who is not the most reliable of witnesses, but is unfortunately the only one we have for a lot of this stuff) tried to hire someone to assassinate Arden, but Arden quickly let Secunda know that if anything happened to Arden, Secunda himself would be dead within the hour. As "Wild Tiger Woman" hadn't been a hit, the group decided to go back to their earlier "Flowers in the Rain" style, with "Blackberry Way": [Excerpt: The Move, "Blackberry Way"] That track was produced by Jimmy Miller, who was producing the Rolling Stones and Traffic around this time, and featured the group's friend Richard Tandy on harpsichord. It's also an example of the maxim "Good artists copy, great artists steal". There are very few more blatant examples of plagiarism in pop music than the middle eight of "Blackberry Way". Compare Harry Nilsson's "Good Old Desk": [Excerpt: Nilsson, "Good Old Desk"] to the middle eight of "Blackberry Way": [Excerpt: The Move, "Blackberry Way"] "Blackberry Way" went to number one, but that was the last straw for Trevor Burton -- it was precisely the kind of thing he *didn't* want to be doing,. He was so sick of playing what he thought of as cheesy pop music that at one show he attacked Bev Bevan on stage with his bass, while Bevan retaliated with his cymbals. He stormed off stage, saying he was "tired of playing this crap". After leaving the group, he almost joined Blind Faith, a new supergroup that members of Cream and Traffic were forming, but instead formed his own supergroup, Balls. Balls had a revolving lineup which at various times included Denny Laine, formerly of the Moody Blues, Jackie Lomax, a singer-songwriter who was an associate of the Beatles, Richard Tandy who had played on "Blackberry Way", and Alan White, who would go on to drum with the band Yes. Balls only released one single, "Fight for My Country", which was later reissued as a Trevor Burton solo single: [Excerpt: Balls, "Fight For My Country"] Balls went through many lineup changes, and eventually seemed to merge with a later lineup of the Idle Race to become the Steve Gibbons Band, who were moderately successful in the seventies and eighties. Richard Tandy covered on bass for a short while, until Rick Price came in as a permanent replacement. Before Price, though, the group tried to get Hank Marvin to join, as the Shadows had then split up, and Wood was willing to move over to bass and let Marvin play lead guitar. Marvin turned down the offer though. But even though "Blackberry Way" had been the group's biggest hit to date, it marked a sharp decline in the group's fortunes. Its success led Peter Walsh, the manager of Marmalade and the Tremeloes, to poach the group from Arden, and even though Arden took his usual heavy-handed approach -- he describes going and torturing Walsh's associate, Clifford Davis, the manager of Fleetwood Mac, in his autobiography -- he couldn't stop Walsh from taking over. Unfortunately, Walsh put the group on the chicken-in-a-basket cabaret circuit, and in the next year they only released one record, the single "Curly", which nobody was happy with. It was ostensibly produced by Mike Hurst, but Hurst didn't turn up to the final sessions and Wood did most of the production work himself, while in the next studio over Jimmy Miller, who'd produced "Blackberry Way", was producing "Honky Tonk Women" by the Rolling Stones. The group were getting pigeonholed as a singles group, at a time when album artists were the in thing. In a three-year career they'd only released one album, though they were working on their second. Wood was by this point convinced that the Move was unsalvageable as a band, and told the others that the group was now just going to be a launchpad for his Electric Light Orchestra project. The band would continue working the chicken-in-a-basket circuit and releasing hit singles, but that would be just to fund the new project -- which they could all be involved in if they wanted, of course. Carl Wayne, on the other hand, was very, very, happy playing cabaret, and didn't see the need to be doing anything else. He made a counter-suggestion to Wood -- keep The Move together indefinitely, but let Wood do the Brian Wilson thing and stay home and write songs. Wayne would even try to get Burton and Kefford back into the band. But Wood wasn't interested. Increasingly his songs weren't even going to the Move at all. He was writing songs for people like Cliff Bennett and the Casuals. He wrote "Dance Round the Maypole" for Acid Gallery: [Excerpt: Acid Gallery, "Dance Round the Maypole"] On that, Wood and Jeff Lynne sang backing vocals. Wood and Lynne had been getting closer since Lynne had bought a home tape recorder which could do multi-tracking -- Wood had wanted to buy one of his own after "Flowers in the Rain", but even though he'd written three hit singles at that point his publishing company wouldn't give him an advance to buy one, and so he'd started using Lynne's. The two have often talked about how they'd recorded the demo for "Blackberry Way" at Lynne's parents' house, recording Wood's vocal on the demo with pillows and cushions around his head so that his singing wouldn't wake Lynne's parents. Lynne had been another person that Wood had asked to join the group when Burton left, but Lynne was happy with The Idle Race, where he was the main singer and songwriter, though their records weren't having any success: [Excerpt: The Idle Race, "I Like My Toys"] While Wood was writing material for other people, the only one of those songs to become a hit was "Hello Suzie", written for Amen Corner, which became a top five single on Immediate Records: [Excerpt: Amen Corner, "Hello Suzie"] While the Move were playing venues like Batley Variety Club in Britain, when they went on their first US tour they were able to play for a very different audience. They were unknown in the US, and so were able to do shows for hippie audiences that had no preconceptions about them, and did things like stretch "Cherry Blossom Clinic" into an eight-minute-long extended progressive rock jam that incorporated bits of "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring", the Nutcracker Suite, and the Sorcerer's Apprentice: [Excerpt: The Move, "Cherry Blossom Clinic Revisited (live at the Fillmore West)"] All the group were agreed that those shows were the highlight of the group's career. Even Carl Wayne, the band member most comfortable with them playing the cabaret circuit, was so proud of the show at the Fillmore West which that performance is taken from that when the tapes proved unusable he kept hold of them, hoping all his life that technology would progress to the point where they could be released and show what a good live band they'd been, though as things turned out they didn't get released until after his death. But when they got back to the UK it was back to the chicken-in-a-basket circuit, and back to work on their much-delayed second album. That album, Shazam!, was the group's attempt at compromise between their different visions. With the exception of one song, it's all heavy rock music, but Wayne, Wood, and Price all co-produced, and Wayne had the most creative involvement he'd ever had. Side two of the album was all cover versions, chosen by Wayne, and Wayne also went out onto the street and did several vox pops, asking members of the public what they thought of pop music: [Excerpt: Vox Pops from "Don't Make My Baby Blue"] There were only six songs on the album, because they were mostly extended jams. Other than the three cover versions chosen by Wayne, there was a sludge-metal remake of "Hello Suzie", the new arrangement of "Cherry Blossom Clinic" they'd been performing live, retitled "Cherry Blossom Clinic Revisited", and only one new original, "Beautiful Daughter", which featured a string arrangement by Visconti, who also played bass: [Excerpt: The Move, "Beautiful Daughter"] And Carl Wayne sang lead on five of the six tracks, which given that one of the reasons Wayne was getting unhappy with the band was that Wood was increasingly becoming the lead singer, must have been some comfort. But it wasn't enough. By the time Shazam! came out, with a cover drawn by Mike Sheridan showing the four band members as superheroes, the band was down to three -- Carl Wayne had quit the group, for a solo career. He continued playing the cabaret circuit, and made records, but never had another hit, but he managed to have a very successful career as an all-round entertainer, acting on TV and in the theatre, including a six-year run as the narrator in the musical Blood Brothers, and replacing Alan Clarke as the lead singer of the Hollies. He died in 2004. As soon as Wayne left the group, the three remaining band members quit their management and went back to Arden. And to replace Wayne, Wood once again asked Jeff Lynne to join the group. But this time the proposition was different -- Lynne wouldn't just be joining the Move, but he would be joining the Electric Light Orchestra. They would continue putting out Move records and touring for the moment, and Lynne would be welcome to write songs for the Move so that Wood wouldn't have to be the only writer, but they'd be doing it while they were planning their new group. Lynne was in, and the first single from the new lineup was a return to the heavy riff rock style of "Wild Tiger Woman", "Brontosaurus": [Excerpt: The Move, "Brontosaurus"] But Wayne leaving the group had put Wood in a difficult position. He was now the frontman, and he hated that responsibility -- he said later "if you look at me in photos of the early days, I'm always the one hanging back with my head down, more the musician than the frontman." So he started wearing makeup, painting his face with triangles and stars, so he would be able to hide his shyness. And it worked -- and "Brontosaurus" returned the group to the top ten. But the next single, "When Alice Comes Back to the Farm", didn't chart at all. The first album for the new Move lineup, Looking On, was to finish their contract with their current record label. Many regard it as the group's "Heavy metal album", and it's often considered the worst of their four albums, with Bev Bevan calling it "plodding", but that's as much to do with Bevan's feeling about the sessions as anything else -- increasingly, after the basic rhythm tracks had been recorded, Wood and Lynne would get to work without the other two members of the band, doing immense amounts of overdubbing. And that continued after Looking On was finished. The group signed a new contract with EMI's new progressive rock label, Harvest, and the contract stated that they were signing as "the Move performing as The Electric Light Orchestra". They started work on two albums' worth of material, with the idea that anything with orchestral instruments would be put aside for the first Electric Light Orchestra album, while anything with just guitar, bass, drums, keyboard, and horns would be for the Move. The first Electric Light Orchestra track, indeed, was intended as a Move B-side. Lynne came in with a song based around a guitar riff, and with lyrics vaguely inspired by the TV show The Prisoner, about someone with a number instead of a name running, trying to escape, and then eventually dying. But then Wood decided that what the track really needed was cello. But not cello played in the standard orchestral manner, but something closer to what the Beatles had done on "I am the Walrus". He'd bought a cheap cello himself, and started playing Jimi Hendrix riffs on it, and Lynne loved the sound of it, so onto the Move's basic rhythm track they overdubbed fifteen cello tracks by Wood, and also two French horns, also by Wood: [Excerpt: The Electric Light Orchestra, "10538 Overture"] The track was named "10538 Overture", after they saw the serial number 1053 on the console they were using to mix the track, and added the number 8 at the end, making 10538 the number of the character in the song. Wood and Lynne were so enamoured with the sound of their new track that they eventually got told by the other two members of the group that they had to sit in the back when the Move were driving to gigs, so they couldn't reach the tape player, because they'd just keep playing the track over and over again. So they got a portable tape player and took that into the back seat with them to play it there. After finishing some pre-existing touring commitments, the Move and Electric Light Orchestra became a purely studio group, and Rick Price quit the bands -- he needed steady touring work to feed his family, and went off to form another band, Mongrel. Around this time, Wood also took part in another strange project. After Immediate Records collapsed, Andrew Oldham needed some fast money, so he and Don Arden put together a fake group they could sign to EMI for ten thousand pounds. The photo of the band Grunt Futtock was of some random students, and that was who Arden and Oldham told EMI was on the track, but the actual performers on the single included Roy Wood, Steve Marriott, Peter Frampton, and Andy Bown, the former keyboard player of the Herd: [Excerpt: Grunt Futtock, "Rock 'n' Roll Christian"] Nobody knows who wrote the song, although it's credited to Bernard Webb, which is a pseudonym Paul McCartney had previously used -- but everyone knew he'd used the pseudonym, so it could very easily be a nod to that. The last Move album, Message From The Country, didn't chart -- just like the previous two hadn't. But Wood's song "Tonight" made number eleven, the follow-up, "Chinatown", made number twenty-three, and then the final Move single, "California Man", a fifties rock and roll pastiche, made the top ten: [Excerpt: The Move, "California Man"] In the US, that single was flipped, and the B-side, Lynne's song "Do Ya", became the only Move song ever to make the Hot One Hundred, reaching number ninety-nine: [Excerpt: The Move, "Do Ya"] By the time "California Man" was released, the Electric Light Orchestra were well underway. They'd recorded their first album, whose biggest highlights were Lynne's "10538 Overture" and Wood's "Whisper in the Night": [Excerpt: The Electric Light Orchestra, "Whisper in the Night"] And they'd formed a touring lineup, including Richard Tandy on keyboards and several orchestral instrumentalists. Unfortunately, there were problems developing between Wood and Lynne. When the Electric Light Orchestra toured, interviewers only wanted to speak to Wood, thinking of him as the band leader, even though Wood insisted that he and Lynne were the joint leaders. And both men had started arguing a lot, to the extent that at some shows they would refuse to go on stage because of arguments as to which of them should go on first. Wood has since said that he thinks most of the problems between Lynne and himself were actually caused by Don Arden, who realised that if he split the two of them into separate acts he could have two hit groups, not one. If that was the plan, it worked, because by the time "10538 Overture" was released as the Electric Light Orchestra's first single, and made the top ten -- while "California Man" was also still in the charts -- it was announced that Roy Wood was now leaving the Electric Light Orchestra, as were keyboard playe
The Shadows front man talk about his life in music
Episode 152 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “For What It's Worth”, and the short but eventful career of Buffalo Springfield. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-five-minute bonus episode available, on "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" by Glen Campbell. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources As usual, there's a Mixcloud mix containing all the songs excerpted in the episode. This four-CD box set is the definitive collection of Buffalo Springfield's work, while if you want the mono version of the second album, the stereo version of the first, and the final album as released, but no demos or outtakes, you want this more recent box set. For What It's Worth: The Story of Buffalo Springfield by Richey Furay and John Einarson is obviously Furay's version of the story, but all the more interesting for that. For information on Steve Stills' early life I used Stephen Stills: Change Partners by David Roberts. Information on both Stills and Young comes from Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young by David Browne. Jimmy McDonough's Shakey is the definitive biography of Neil Young, while Young's Waging Heavy Peace is his autobiography. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A quick note before we begin -- this episode deals with various disabilities. In particular, there are descriptions of epileptic seizures that come from non-medically-trained witnesses, many of whom took ableist attitudes towards the seizures. I don't know enough about epilepsy to know how accurate their descriptions and perceptions are, and I apologise if that means that by repeating some of their statements, I am inadvertently passing on myths about the condition. When I talk about this, I am talking about the after-the-fact recollections of musicians, none of them medically trained and many of them in altered states of consciousness, about events that had happened decades earlier. Please do not take anything said in a podcast about music history as being the last word on the causes or effects of epileptic seizures, rather than how those musicians remember them. Anyway, on with the show. One of the things you notice if you write about protest songs is that a lot of the time, the songs that people talk about as being important or impactful have aged very poorly. Even great songwriters like Bob Dylan or John Lennon, when writing material about the political events of the time, would write material they would later acknowledge was far from their best. Too often a song will be about a truly important event, and be powered by a real sense of outrage at injustice, but it will be overly specific, and then as soon as the immediate issue is no longer topical, the song is at best a curio. For example, the sentencing of the poet and rock band manager John Sinclair to ten years in prison for giving two joints to an undercover police officer was hugely controversial in the early seventies, but by the time John Lennon's song about it was released, Sinclair had been freed by the Supreme Court, and very, very few people would use the song as an example of why Lennon's songwriting still has lasting value: [Excerpt: John Lennon, "John Sinclair"] But there are exceptions, and those tend to be songs where rather than talking about specific headlines, the song is about the emotion that current events have caused. Ninety years on from its first success, for example, "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" still has resonance, because there are still people who are put out of work through no fault of their own, and even those of us who are lucky enough to be financially comfortable have the fear that all too soon it may end, and we may end up like Al begging on the streets: [Excerpt: Rudy Vallee, "Brother Can You Spare a Dime?"] And because of that emotional connection, sometimes the very best protest songs can take on new lives and new meanings, and connect with the way people feel about totally unrelated subjects. Take Buffalo Springfield's one hit. The actual subject of the song couldn't be any more trivial in the grand scheme of things -- a change in zoning regulations around the Sunset Strip that meant people under twenty-one couldn't go to the clubs after 10PM, and the subsequent reaction to that -- but because rather than talking about the specific incident, Steve Stills instead talked about the emotions that it called up, and just noted the fleeting images that he was left with, the song became adopted as an anthem by soldiers in Vietnam. Sometimes what a song says is nowhere near as important as how it says it. [Excerpt: Buffalo Springfield, "For What It's Worth"] Steve Stills seems almost to have been destined to be a musician, although the instrument he started on, the drums, was not the one for which he would become best known. According to Stills, though, he always had an aptitude for rhythm, to the extent that he learned to tapdance almost as soon as he had learned to walk. He started on drums aged eight or nine, after somebody gave him a set of drumsticks. After his parents got sick of him damaging the furniture by playing on every available surface, an actual drum kit followed, and that became his principal instrument, even after he learned to play the guitar at military school, as his roommate owned one. As a teenager, Stills developed an idiosyncratic taste in music, helped by the record collection of his friend Michael Garcia. He didn't particularly like most of the pop music of the time, but he was a big fan of pre-war country music, Motown, girl-group music -- he especially liked the Shirelles -- and Chess blues. He was also especially enamoured of the music of Jimmy Reed, a passion he would later share with his future bandmate Neil Young: [Excerpt: Jimmy Reed, "Baby, What You Want Me To Do?"] In his early teens, he became the drummer for a band called the Radars, and while he was drumming he studied their lead guitarist, Chuck Schwin. He said later "There was a whole little bunch of us who were into kind of a combination of all the blues guys and others including Chet Atkins, Dick Dale, and Hank Marvin: a very weird cross-section of far-out guitar players." Stills taught himself to play like those guitarists, and in particular he taught himself how to emulate Atkins' Travis-picking style, and became remarkably proficient at it. There exists a recording of him, aged sixteen, singing one of his own songs and playing finger-picked guitar, and while the song is not exactly the strongest thing I've ever heard lyrically, it's clearly the work of someone who is already a confident performer: [Excerpt: Stephen Stills, "Travellin'"] But the main reason he switched to becoming a guitarist wasn't because of his admiration for Chet Atkins or Hank Marvin, but because he started driving and discovered that if you have to load a drum kit into your car and then drive it to rehearsals and gigs you either end up bashing up your car or bashing up the drum kit. As this is not a problem with guitars, Stills decided that he'd move on from the Radars, and join a band named the Continentals as their rhythm guitarist, playing with lead guitarist Don Felder. Stills was only in the Continentals for a few months though, before being replaced by another guitarist, Bernie Leadon, and in general Stills' whole early life is one of being uprooted and moved around. His father had jobs in several different countries, and while for the majority of his time Stills was in the southern US, he also ended up spending time in Costa Rica -- and staying there as a teenager even as the rest of his family moved to El Salvador. Eventually, aged eighteen, he moved to New Orleans, where he formed a folk duo with a friend, Chris Sarns. The two had very different tastes in folk music -- Stills preferred Dylan-style singer-songwriters, while Sarns liked the clean sound of the Kingston Trio -- but they played together for several months before moving to Greenwich Village, where they performed together and separately. They were latecomers to the scene, which had already mostly ended, and many of the folk stars had already gone on to do bigger things. But Stills still saw plenty of great performers there -- Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonius Monk in the jazz clubs, Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce, and Richard Pryor in the comedy ones, and Simon and Garfunkel, Richie Havens, Fred Neil and Tim Hardin in the folk ones -- Stills said that other than Chet Atkins, Havens, Neil, and Hardin were the people most responsible for his guitar style. Stills was also, at this time, obsessed with Judy Collins' third album -- the album which had featured Roger McGuinn on banjo and arrangements, and which would soon provide several songs for the Byrds to cover: [Excerpt: Judy Collins, "Turn, Turn, Turn"] Judy Collins would soon become a very important figure in Stills' life, but for now she was just the singer on his favourite record. While the Greenwich Village folk scene was no longer quite what it had been a year or two earlier, it was still a great place for a young talented musician to perform. As well as working with Chris Sarns, Stills also formed a trio with his friend John Hopkins and a banjo player called Peter Tork who everyone said looked just like Stills. Tork soon headed out west to seek his fortune, and then Stills got headhunted to join the Au Go Go Singers. This was a group that was being set up in the same style as the New Christy Minstrels -- a nine-piece vocal and instrumental group that would do clean-sounding versions of currently-popular folk songs. The group were signed to Roulette Records, and recorded one album, They Call Us Au-Go-Go Singers, produced by Hugo and Luigi, the production duo we've previously seen working with everyone from the Tokens to the Isley Brothers. Much of the album is exactly the same kind of thing that a million New Christy Minstrels soundalikes were putting out -- and Stills, with his raspy voice, was clearly intended to be the Barry McGuire of this group -- but there was one exception -- a song called "High Flyin' Bird", on which Stills was able to show off the sound that would later make him famous, and which became so associated with him that even though it was written by Billy Edd Wheeler, the writer of "Jackson", even the biography of Stills I used in researching this episode credits "High Flyin' Bird" as being a Stills original: [Excerpt: The Au-Go-Go Singers, "High Flyin' Bird"] One of the other members of the Au-Go-Go Singers, Richie Furay, also got to sing a lead vocal on the album, on the Tom Paxton song "Where I'm Bound": [Excerpt: The Au-Go-Go Singers, "Where I'm Bound"] The Au-Go-Go Singers got a handful of dates around the folk scene, and Stills and Furay became friendly with another singer playing the same circuit, Gram Parsons. Parsons was one of the few people they knew who could see the value in current country music, and convinced both Stills and Furay to start paying more attention to what was coming out of Nashville and Bakersfield. But soon the Au-Go-Go Singers split up. Several venues where they might otherwise have been booked were apparently scared to book an act that was associated with Morris Levy, and also the market for big folk ensembles dried up more or less overnight when the Beatles hit the music scene. But several of the group -- including Stills but not Furay -- decided they were going to continue anyway, and formed a group called The Company, and they went on a tour of Canada. And one of the venues they played was the Fourth Dimension coffee house in Fort William, Ontario, and there their support act was a rock band called The Squires: [Excerpt: The Squires, "(I'm a Man And) I Can't Cry"] The lead guitarist of the Squires, Neil Young, had a lot in common with Stills, and they bonded instantly. Both men had parents who had split up when they were in their teens, and had a successful but rather absent father and an overbearing mother. And both had shown an interest in music even as babies. According to Young's mother, when he was still in nappies, he would pull himself up by the bars of his playpen and try to dance every time he heard "Pinetop's Boogie Woogie": [Excerpt: Pinetop Smith, "Pinetop's Boogie Woogie"] Young, though, had had one crucial experience which Stills had not had. At the age of six, he'd come down with polio, and become partially paralysed. He'd spent months in hospital before he regained his ability to walk, and the experience had also affected him in other ways. While he was recovering, he would draw pictures of trains -- other than music, his big interest, almost an obsession, was with electric train sets, and that obsession would remain with him throughout his life -- but for the first time he was drawing with his right hand rather than his left. He later said "The left-hand side got a little screwed. Feels different from the right. If I close my eyes, my left side, I really don't know where it is—but over the years I've discovered that almost one hundred percent for sure it's gonna be very close to my right side … probably to the left. That's why I started appearing to be ambidextrous, I think. Because polio affected my left side, and I think I was left-handed when I was born. What I have done is use the weak side as the dominant one because the strong side was injured." Both Young's father Scott Young -- a very famous Canadian writer and sports broadcaster, who was by all accounts as well known in Canada during his lifetime as his son -- and Scott's brother played ukulele, and they taught Neil how to play, and his first attempt at forming a group had been to get his friend Comrie Smith to get a pair of bongos and play along with him to Preston Epps' "Bongo Rock": [Excerpt: Preston Epps, "Bongo Rock"] Neil Young had liked all the usual rock and roll stars of the fifties -- though in his personal rankings, Elvis came a distant third behind Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis -- but his tastes ran more to the more darkly emotional. He loved "Maybe" by the Chantels, saying "Raw soul—you cannot miss it. That's the real thing. She was believin' every word she was singin'." [Excerpt: The Chantels, "Maybe"] What he liked more than anything was music that had a mainstream surface but seemed slightly off-kilter. He was a major fan of Roy Orbison, saying, "it's almost impossible to comprehend the depth of that soul. It's so deep and dark it just keeps on goin' down—but it's not black. It's blue, deep blue. He's just got it. The drama. There's something sad but proud about Roy's music", and he would say similar things about Del Shannon, saying "He struck me as the ultimate dark figure—behind some Bobby Rydell exterior, y'know? “Hats Off to Larry,” “Runaway,” “Swiss Maid”—very, very inventive. The stuff was weird. Totally unaffected." More surprisingly, perhaps, he was a particular fan of Bobby Darin, who he admired so much because Darin could change styles at the drop of a hat, going from novelty rock and roll like "Splish Splash" to crooning "Mack The Knife" to singing Tim Hardin songs like "If I Were a Carpenter", without any of them seeming any less authentic. As he put it later "He just changed. He's completely different. And he's really into it. Doesn't sound like he's not there. “Dream Lover,” “Mack the Knife,” “If I Were a Carpenter,” “Queen of the Hop,” “Splish Splash”—tell me about those records, Mr. Darin. Did you write those all the same day, or what happened? He just changed so much. Just kinda went from one place to another. So it's hard to tell who Bobby Darin really was." And one record which Young was hugely influenced by was Floyd Cramer's country instrumental, "Last Date": [Excerpt: Floyd Cramer, "Last Date"] Now, that was a very important record in country music, and if you want to know more about it I strongly recommend listening to the episode of Cocaine and Rhinestones on the Nashville A-Team, which has a long section on the track, but the crucial thing to know about that track is that it's one of the earliest examples of what is known as slip-note playing, where the piano player, before hitting the correct note, briefly hits the note a tone below it, creating a brief discord. Young absolutely loved that sound, and wanted to make a sound like that on the guitar. And then, when he and his mother moved to Winnipeg after his parents' divorce, he found someone who was doing just that. It was the guitarist in a group variously known as Chad Allan and the Reflections and Chad Allan and the Expressions. That group had relatives in the UK who would send them records, and so where most Canadian bands would do covers of American hits, Chad Allan and the Reflections would do covers of British hits, like their version of Geoff Goddard's "Tribute to Buddy Holly", a song that had originally been produced by Joe Meek: [Excerpt: Chad Allan and the Reflections, "Tribute to Buddy Holly"] That would later pay off for them in a big way, when they recorded a version of Johnny Kidd and the Pirates' "Shakin' All Over", for which their record label tried to create an air of mystery by releasing it with no artist name, just "Guess Who?" on the label. It became a hit, the name stuck, and they became The Guess Who: [Excerpt: The Guess Who, "Shakin' All Over"] But at this point they, and their guitarist Randy Bachman, were just another group playing around Winnipeg. Bachman, though, was hugely impressive to Neil Young for a few reasons. The first was that he really did have a playing style that was a lot like the piano style of Floyd Cramer -- Young would later say "it was Randy Bachman who did it first. Randy was the first one I ever heard do things on the guitar that reminded me of Floyd. He'd do these pulls—“darrr darrrr,” this two-note thing goin' together—harmony, with one note pulling and the other note stayin' the same." Bachman also had built the first echo unit that Young heard a guitarist play in person. He'd discovered that by playing with the recording heads on a tape recorder owned by his mother, he could replicate the tape echo that Sam Phillips had used at Sun Studios -- and once he'd attached that to his amplifier, he realised how much the resulting sound sounded like his favourite guitarist, Hank Marvin of the Shadows, another favourite of Neil Young's: [Excerpt: The Shadows, "Man of Mystery"] Young soon started looking to Bachman as something of a mentor figure, and he would learn a lot of guitar techniques second hand from Bachman -- every time a famous musician came to the area, Bachman would go along and stand right at the front and watch the guitarist, and make note of the positions their fingers were in. Then Bachman would replicate those guitar parts with the Reflections, and Neil Young would stand in front of him and make notes of where *his* fingers were. Young joined a band on the local circuit called the Esquires, but soon either quit or was fired, depending on which version of the story you choose to believe. He then formed his own rival band, the Squires, with no "e", much to the disgust of his ex-bandmates. In July 1963, five months after they formed, the Squires released their first record, "Aurora" backed with "The Sultan", on a tiny local label. Both tracks were very obviously influenced by the Shadows: [Excerpt: The Squires, "Aurora"] The Squires were a mostly-instrumental band for the first year or so they were together, and then the Beatles hit North America, and suddenly people didn't want to hear surf instrumentals and Shadows covers any more, they only wanted to hear songs that sounded a bit like the Beatles. The Squires started to work up the appropriate repertoire -- two songs that have been mentioned as in their set at this point are the Beatles album track "It Won't Be Long", and "Money" which the Beatles had also covered -- but they didn't have a singer, being an instrumental group. They could get in a singer, of course, but that would mean splitting the money with another person. So instead, the guitarist, who had never had any intention of becoming a singer, was more or less volunteered for the role. Over the next eighteen months or so the group's repertoire moved from being largely instrumental to largely vocal, and the group also seem to have shuttled around a bit between two different cities -- Winnipeg and Fort William, staying in one for a while and then moving back to the other. They travelled between the two in Young's car, a Buick Roadmaster hearse. In Winnipeg, Young first met up with a singer named Joni Anderson, who was soon to get married to Chuck Mitchell and would become better known by her married name. The two struck up a friendship, though by all accounts never a particularly close one -- they were too similar in too many ways; as Mitchell later said “Neil and I have a lot in common: Canadian; Scorpios; polio in the same epidemic, struck the same parts of our body; and we both have a black sense of humor". They were both also idiosyncratic artists who never fit very well into boxes. In Fort William the Squires made a few more records, this time vocal tracks like "I'll Love You Forever": [Excerpt: The Squires, "I'll Love You Forever"] It was also in Fort William that Young first encountered two acts that would make a huge impression on him. One was a group called The Thorns, consisting of Tim Rose, Jake Holmes, and Rich Husson. The Thorns showed Young that there was interesting stuff being done on the fringes of the folk music scene. He later said "One of my favourites was “Oh Susannah”—they did this arrangement that was bizarre. It was in a minor key, which completely changed everything—and it was rock and roll. So that idea spawned arrangements of all these other songs for me. I did minor versions of them all. We got into it. That was a certain Squires stage that never got recorded. Wish there were tapes of those shows. We used to do all this stuff, a whole kinda music—folk-rock. We took famous old folk songs like “Clementine,” “She'll Be Comin' 'Round the Mountain,” “Tom Dooley,” and we did them all in minor keys based on the Tim Rose arrangement of “Oh Susannah.” There are no recordings of the Thorns in existence that I know of, but presumably that arrangement that Young is talking about is the version that Rose also later did with the Big 3, which we've heard in a few other episodes: [Excerpt: The Big 3, "The Banjo Song"] The other big influence was, of course, Steve Stills, and the two men quickly found themselves influencing each other deeply. Stills realised that he could bring more rock and roll to his folk-music sound, saying that what amazed him was the way the Squires could go from "Cottonfields" (the Lead Belly song) to "Farmer John", the R&B song by Don and Dewey that was becoming a garage-rock staple. Young in turn was inspired to start thinking about maybe going more in the direction of folk music. The Squires even renamed themselves the High-Flying Birds, after the song that Stills had recorded with the Au Go Go Singers. After The Company's tour of Canada, Stills moved back to New York for a while. He now wanted to move in a folk-rock direction, and for a while he tried to persuade his friend John Sebastian to let him play bass in his new band, but when the Lovin' Spoonful decided against having him in the band, he decided to move West to San Francisco, where he'd heard there was a new music scene forming. He enjoyed a lot of the bands he saw there, and in particular he was impressed by the singer of a band called the Great Society: [Excerpt: The Great Society, "Somebody to Love"] He was much less impressed with the rest of her band, and seriously considered going up to her and asking if she wanted to work with some *real* musicians instead of the unimpressive ones she was working with, but didn't get his nerve up. We will, though, be hearing more about Grace Slick in future episodes. Instead, Stills decided to move south to LA, where many of the people he'd known in Greenwich Village were now based. Soon after he got there, he hooked up with two other musicians, a guitarist named Steve Young and a singer, guitarist, and pianist named Van Dyke Parks. Parks had a record contract at MGM -- he'd been signed by Tom Wilson, the same man who had turned Dylan electric, signed Simon and Garfunkel, and produced the first albums by the Mothers of Invention. With Wilson, Parks put out a couple of singles in 1966, "Come to the Sunshine": [Excerpt: The Van Dyke Parks, "Come to the Sunshine"] And "Number Nine", a reworking of the Ode to Joy from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony: [Excerpt: The Van Dyke Parks, "Number Nine"]Parks, Stills, and Steve Young became The Van Dyke Parks Band, though they didn't play together for very long, with their most successful performance being as the support act for the Lovin' Spoonful for a show in Arizona. But they did have a lasting resonance -- when Van Dyke Parks finally got the chance to record his first solo album, he opened it with Steve Young singing the old folk song "Black Jack Davy", filtered to sound like an old tape: [Excerpt: Steve Young, "Black Jack Davy"] And then it goes into a song written for Parks by Randy Newman, but consisting of Newman's ideas about Parks' life and what he knew about him, including that he had been third guitar in the Van Dyke Parks Band: [Excerpt: Van Dyke Parks, "Vine Street"] Parks and Stills also wrote a few songs together, with one of their collaborations, "Hello, I've Returned", later being demoed by Stills for Buffalo Springfield: [Excerpt: Steve Stills, "Hello, I've Returned"] After the Van Dyke Parks Band fell apart, Parks went on to many things, including a brief stint on keyboards in the Mothers of Invention, and we'll be talking more about him next episode. Stills formed a duo called the Buffalo Fish, with his friend Ron Long. That soon became an occasional trio when Stills met up again with his old Greenwich Village friend Peter Tork, who joined the group on the piano. But then Stills auditioned for the Monkees and was turned down because he had bad teeth -- or at least that's how most people told the story. Stills has later claimed that while he turned up for the Monkees auditions, it wasn't to audition, it was to try to pitch them songs, which seems implausible on the face of it. According to Stills, he was offered the job and turned it down because he'd never wanted it. But whatever happened, Stills suggested they might want his friend Peter, who looked just like him apart from having better teeth, and Peter Tork got the job. But what Stills really wanted to do was to form a proper band. He'd had the itch to do it ever since seeing the Squires, and he decided he should ask Neil Young to join. There was only one problem -- when he phoned Young, the phone was answered by Young's mother, who told Stills that Neil had moved out to become a folk singer, and she didn't know where he was. But then Stills heard from his old friend Richie Furay. Furay was still in Greenwich Village, and had decided to write to Stills. He didn't know where Stills was, other than that he was in California somewhere, so he'd written to Stills' father in El Salvador. The letter had been returned, because the postage had been short by one cent, so Furay had resent it with the correct postage. Stills' father had then forwarded the letter to the place Stills had been staying in San Francisco, which had in turn forwarded it on to Stills in LA. Furay's letter mentioned this new folk singer who had been on the scene for a while and then disappeared again, Neil Young, who had said he knew Stills, and had been writing some great songs, one of which Furay had added to his own set. Stills got in touch with Furay and told him about this great band he was forming in LA, which he wanted Furay to join. Furay was in, and travelled from New York to LA, only to be told that at this point there were no other members of this great band, but they'd definitely find some soon. They got a publishing deal with Columbia/Screen Gems, which gave them enough money to not starve, but what they really needed was to find some other musicians. They did, when driving down Hollywood Boulevard on April the sixth, 1966. There, stuck in traffic going the other way, they saw a hearse... After Steve Stills had left Fort William, so had Neil Young. He hadn't initially intended to -- the High-Flying Birds still had a regular gig, but Young and some of his friends had gone away for a few days on a road trip in his hearse. But unfortunately the transmission on the hearse had died, and Young and his friends had been stranded. Many years later, he would write a eulogy to the hearse, which he and Stills would record together: [Excerpt: The Stills-Young Band, "Long May You Run"] Young and his friends had all hitch-hiked in different directions -- Young had ended up in Toronto, where his dad lived, and had stayed with his dad for a while. The rest of his band had eventually followed him there, but Young found the Toronto music scene not to his taste -- the folk and rock scenes there were very insular and didn't mingle with each other, and the group eventually split up. Young even took on a day job for a while, for the only time in his life, though he soon quit. Young started basically commuting between Toronto and New York, a distance of several hundred miles, going to Greenwich Village for a while before ending up back in Toronto, and ping-ponging between the two. In New York, he met up with Richie Furay, and also had a disastrous audition for Elektra Records as a solo artist. One of the songs he sang in the audition was "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing", the song which Furay liked so much he started performing it himself. Young doesn't normally explain his songs, but as this was one of the first he ever wrote, he talked about it in interviews in the early years, before he decided to be less voluble about his art. The song was apparently about the sense of youthful hope being crushed. The instigation for it was Young seeing his girlfriend with another man, but the central image, of Clancy not singing, came from Young's schooldays. The Clancy in question was someone Young liked as one of the other weird kids at school. He was disabled, like Young, though with MS rather than polio, and he would sing to himself in the hallways at school. Sadly, of course, the other kids would mock and bully him for that, and eventually he ended up stopping. Young said about it "After awhile, he got so self-conscious he couldn't do his thing any more. When someone who is as beautiful as that and as different as that is actually killed by his fellow man—you know what I mean—like taken and sorta chopped down—all the other things are nothing compared to this." [Excerpt: Neil Young, "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing (Elektra demo)"] One thing I should say for anyone who listens to the Mixcloud for this episode, that song, which will be appearing in a couple of different versions, has one use of a term for Romani people that some (though not all) consider a slur. It's not in the excerpts I'll be using in this episode, but will be in the full versions on the Mixcloud. Sadly that word turns up time and again in songs of this era... When he wasn't in New York, Young was living in Toronto in a communal apartment owned by a folk singer named Vicki Taylor, where many of the Toronto folk scene would stay. Young started listening a lot to Taylor's Bert Jansch albums, which were his first real exposure to the British folk-baroque style of guitar fingerpicking, as opposed to the American Travis-picking style, and Young would soon start to incorporate that style into his own playing: [Excerpt: Bert Jansch, "Angie"] Another guitar influence on Young at this point was another of the temporary tenants of Taylor's flat, John Kay, who would later go on to be one of the founding members of Steppenwolf. Young credited Kay with having a funky rhythm guitar style that Young incorporated into his own. While he was in Toronto, he started getting occasional gigs in Detroit, which is "only" a couple of hundred miles away, set up by Joni and Chuck Mitchell, both of whom also sometimes stayed at Taylor's. And it was in Detroit that Neil Young became, albeit very briefly, a Motown artist. The Mynah Birds were a band in Toronto that had at one point included various future members of Steppenwolf, and they were unusual for the time in that they were a white band with a Black lead singer, Ricky Matthews. They also had a rich manager, John Craig Eaton, the heir to the Eaton's department store fortune, who basically gave them whatever money they wanted -- they used to go to his office and tell him they needed seven hundred dollars for lunch, and he'd hand it to them. They were looking for a new guitarist when Bruce Palmer, their bass player, bumped into Neil Young carrying an amp and asked if he was interested in joining. He was. The Mynah Birds quickly became one of the best bands in Toronto, and Young and Matthews became close, both as friends and as a performance team. People who saw them live would talk about things like a song called “Hideaway”, written by Young and Matthews, which had a spot in the middle where Young would start playing a harmonica solo, throw the harmonica up in the air mid-solo, Matthews would catch it, and he would then finish the solo. They got signed to Motown, who were at this point looking to branch out into the white guitar-group market, and they were put through the Motown star-making machine. They recorded an entire album, which remains unreleased, but they did release a single, "It's My Time": [Excerpt: The Mynah Birds, "It's My Time"] Or at least, they released a handful of promo copies. The single was pulled from release after Ricky Matthews got arrested. It turned out his birth name wasn't Ricky Matthews, but James Johnson, and that he wasn't from Toronto as he'd told everyone, but from Buffalo, New York. He'd fled to Canada after going AWOL from the Navy, not wanting to be sent to Vietnam, and he was arrested and jailed for desertion. After getting out of jail, he would start performing under yet another name, and as Rick James would have a string of hits in the seventies and eighties: [Excerpt: Rick James, "Super Freak"] Most of the rest of the group continued gigging as The Mynah Birds, but Young and Palmer had other plans. They sold the expensive equipment Eaton had bought the group, and Young bought a new hearse, which he named Mort 2 – Mort had been his first hearse. And according to one of the band's friends in Toronto, the crucial change in their lives came when Neil Young heard a song on a jukebox: [Excerpt: The Mamas and the Papas, "California Dreamin'"] Young apparently heard "California Dreamin'" and immediately said "Let's go to California and become rock stars". Now, Young later said of this anecdote that "That sounds like a Canadian story to me. That sounds too real to be true", and he may well be right. Certainly the actual wording of the story is likely incorrect -- people weren't talking about "rock stars" in 1966. Google's Ngram viewer has the first use of the phrase in print being in 1969, and the phrase didn't come into widespread usage until surprisingly late -- even granting that phrases enter slang before they make it to print, it still seems implausible. But even though the precise wording might not be correct, something along those lines definitely seems to have happened, albeit possibly less dramatically. Young's friend Comrie Smith independently said that Young told him “Well, Comrie, I can hear the Mamas and the Papas singing ‘All the leaves are brown, and the skies are gray …' I'm gonna go down to the States and really make it. I'm on my way. Today North Toronto, tomorrow the world!” Young and Palmer loaded up Mort 2 with a bunch of their friends and headed towards California. On the way, they fell out with most of the friends, who parted from them, and Young had an episode which in retrospect may have been his first epileptic seizure. They decided when they got to California that they were going to look for Steve Stills, as they'd heard he was in LA and neither of them knew anyone else in the state. But after several days of going round the Sunset Strip clubs asking if anyone knew Steve Stills, and sleeping in the hearse as they couldn't afford anywhere else, they were getting fed up and about to head off to San Francisco, as they'd heard there was a good music scene there, too. They were going to leave that day, and they were stuck in traffic on Sunset Boulevard, about to head off, when Stills and Furay came driving in the other direction. Furay happened to turn his head, to brush away a fly, and saw a hearse with Ontario license plates. He and Stills both remembered that Young drove a hearse, and so they assumed it must be him. They started honking at the hearse, then did a U-turn. They got Young's attention, and they all pulled into the parking lot at Ben Frank's, the Sunset Strip restaurant that attracted such a hip crowd the Monkees' producers had asked for "Ben Frank's types" in their audition advert. Young introduced Stills and Furay to Palmer, and now there *was* a group -- three singing, songwriting, guitarists and a bass player. Now all they needed was a drummer. There were two drummers seriously considered for the role. One of them, Billy Mundi, was technically the better player, but Young didn't like playing with him as much -- and Mundi also had a better offer, to join the Mothers of Invention as their second drummer -- before they'd recorded their first album, they'd had two drummers for a few months, but Denny Bruce, their second drummer, had become ill with glandular fever and they'd reverted to having Jimmy Carl Black play solo. Now they were looking for someone else, and Mundi took that role. The other drummer, who Young preferred anyway, was another Canadian, Dewey Martin. Martin was a couple of years older than the rest of the group, and by far the most experienced. He'd moved from Canada to Nashville in his teens, and according to Martin he had been taken under the wing of Hank Garland, the great session guitarist most famous for "Sugarfoot Rag": [Excerpt: Hank Garland, "Sugarfoot Rag"] We heard Garland playing with Elvis and others in some of the episodes around 1960, and by many reckonings he was the best session guitarist in Nashville, but in 1961 he had a car accident that left him comatose, and even though he recovered from the coma and lived another thirty-three years, he never returned to recording. According to Martin, though, Garland would still sometimes play jazz clubs around Nashville after the accident, and one day Martin walked into a club and saw him playing. The drummer he was playing with got up and took a break, taking his sticks with him, so Martin got up on stage and started playing, using two combs instead of sticks. Garland was impressed, and told Martin that Faron Young needed a drummer, and he could get him the gig. At the time Young was one of the biggest stars in country music. That year, 1961, he had three country top ten hits, including a number one with his version of Willie Nelson's "Hello Walls", produced by Ken Nelson: [Excerpt: Faron Young, "Hello Walls"] Martin joined Faron Young's band for a while, and also ended up playing short stints in the touring bands of various other Nashville-based country and rock stars, including Patsy Cline, Roy Orbison, and the Everly Brothers, before heading to LA for a while. Then Mel Taylor of the Ventures hooked him up with some musicians in the Pacific Northwest scene, and Martin started playing there under the name Sir Raleigh and the Coupons with various musicians. After a while he travelled back to LA where he got some members of the LA group Sons of Adam to become a permanent lineup of Coupons, and they recorded several singles with Martin singing lead, including the Tommy Boyce and Steve Venet song "Tomorrow's Gonna Be Another Day", later recorded by the Monkees: [Excerpt: Sir Raleigh and the Coupons, "Tomorrow's Gonna Be Another Day"] He then played with the Standells, before joining the Modern Folk Quartet for a short while, as they were transitioning from their folk sound to a folk-rock style. He was only with them for a short while, and it's difficult to get precise details -- almost everyone involved with Buffalo Springfield has conflicting stories about their own careers with timelines that don't make sense, which is understandable given that people were talking about events decades later and memory plays tricks. "Fast" Eddie Hoh had joined the Modern Folk Quartet on drums in late 1965, at which point they became the Modern Folk Quintet, and nothing I've read about that group talks about Hoh ever actually leaving, but apparently Martin joined them in February 1966, which might mean he's on their single "Night-Time Girl", co-written by Al Kooper and produced and arranged by Jack Nitzsche: [Excerpt: The Modern Folk Quintet, "Night-Time Girl"] After that, Martin was taken on by the Dillards, a bluegrass band who are now possibly most famous for having popularised the Arthur "Guitar Boogie" Smith song "Duellin' Banjos", which they recorded on their first album and played on the Andy Griffith Show a few years before it was used in Deliverance: [Excerpt: The Dillards, "Duellin' Banjos"] The Dillards had decided to go in a country-rock direction -- and Doug Dillard would later join the Byrds and make records with Gene Clark -- but they were hesitant about it, and after a brief period with Martin in the band they decided to go back to their drummerless lineup. To soften the blow, they told him about another band that was looking for a drummer -- their manager, Jim Dickson, who was also the Byrds' manager, knew Stills and his bandmates. Dewey Martin was in the group. The group still needed a name though. They eventually took their name from a brand of steam roller, after seeing one on the streets when some roadwork was being done. Everyone involved disagrees as to who came up with the name. Steve Stills at one point said it was a group decision after Neil Young and the group's manager Frazier Mohawk stole the nameplate off the steamroller, and later Stills said that Richey Furay had suggested the name while they were walking down the street, Dewey Martin said it was his idea, Neil Young said that he, Steve Sills, and Van Dyke Parks had been walking down the street and either Young or Stills had seen the nameplate and suggested the name, and Van Dyke Parks says that *he* saw the nameplate and suggested it to Dewey Martin: [Excerpt: Steve Stills and Van Dyke Parks on the name] For what it's worth, I tend to believe Van Dyke Parks in most instances -- he's an honest man, and he seems to have a better memory of the sixties than many of his friends who led more chemically interesting lives. Whoever came up with it, the name worked -- as Stills later put it "We thought it was pretty apt, because Neil Young is from Manitoba which is buffalo country, and Richie Furay was from Springfield, Ohio -- and I'm the field!" It almost certainly also helped that the word "buffalo" had been in the name of Stills' previous group, Buffalo Fish. On the eleventh of April, 1966, Buffalo Springfield played their first gig, at the Troubadour, using equipment borrowed from the Dillards. Chris Hillman of the Byrds was in the audience and was impressed. He got the group a support slot on a show the Byrds and the Dillards were doing a few days later in San Bernardino. That show was compered by a Merseyside-born British DJ, John Ravenscroft, who had managed to become moderately successful in US radio by playing up his regional accent so he sounded more like the Beatles. He would soon return to the UK, and start broadcasting under the name John Peel. Hillman also got them a week-long slot at the Whisky A-Go-Go, and a bidding war started between record labels to sign the band. Dunhill offered five thousand dollars, Warners counted with ten thousand, and then Atlantic offered twelve thousand. Atlantic were *just* starting to get interested in signing white guitar groups -- Jerry Wexler never liked that kind of music, always preferring to stick with soul and R&B, but Ahmet Ertegun could see which way things were going. Atlantic had only ever signed two other white acts before -- Neil Young's old favourite Bobby Darin, who had since left the label, and Sonny and Cher. And Sonny and Cher's management and production team, Brian Stone and Charlie Greene, were also very interested in the group, who even before they had made a record had quickly become the hottest band on the circuit, even playing the Hollywood Bowl as the Rolling Stones' support act. Buffalo Springfield already had managers -- Frazier Mohawk and Richard Davis, the lighting man at the Troubadour (who was sometimes also referred to as Dickie Davis, but I'll use his full name so as not to cause unnecessary confusion in British people who remember the sports TV presenter of the same name), who Mohawk had enlisted to help him. But Stone and Greene weren't going to let a thing like that stop them. According to anonymous reports quoted without attribution in David Roberts' biography of Stills -- so take this with as many grains of salt as you want -- Stone and Greene took Mohawk for a ride around LA in a limo, just the three of them, a gun, and a used hotdog napkin. At the end of the ride, the hotdog napkin had Mohawk's scrawled signature, signing the group over to Stone and Greene. Davis stayed on, but was demoted to just doing their lights. The way things ended up, the group signed to Stone and Greene's production company, who then leased their masters to Atlantic's Atco subsidiary. A publishing company was also set up for the group's songs -- owned thirty-seven point five percent by Atlantic, thirty-seven point five percent by Stone and Greene, and the other twenty-five percent split six ways between the group and Davis, who they considered their sixth member. Almost immediately, Charlie Greene started playing Stills and Young off against each other, trying a divide-and-conquer strategy on the group. This was quite easy, as both men saw themselves as natural leaders, though Stills was regarded by everyone as the senior partner -- the back cover of their first album would contain the line "Steve is the leader but we all are". Stills and Young were the two stars of the group as far as the audience were concerned -- though most musicians who heard them play live say that the band's real strength was in its rhythm section, with people comparing Palmer's playing to that of James Jamerson. But Stills and Young would get into guitar battles on stage, one-upping each other, in ways that turned the tension between them in creative directions. Other clashes, though were more petty -- both men had very domineering mothers, who would actually call the group's management to complain about press coverage if their son was given less space than the other one. The group were also not sure about Young's voice -- to the extent that Stills was known to jokingly apologise to the audience before Young took a lead vocal -- and so while the song chosen as the group's first A-side was Young's "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing", Furay was chosen to sing it, rather than Young: [Excerpt: Buffalo Springfield, "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing"] On the group's first session, though, both Stills and Young realised that their producers didn't really have a clue -- the group had built up arrangements that had a complex interplay of instruments and vocals, but the producers insisted on cutting things very straightforwardly, with a basic backing track and then the vocals. They also thought that the song was too long so the group should play faster. Stills and Young quickly decided that they were going to have to start producing their own material, though Stone and Greene would remain the producers for the first album. There was another bone of contention though, because in the session the initial plan had been for Stills' song "Go and Say Goodbye" to be the A-side with Young's song as the B-side. It was flipped, and nobody seems quite sure why -- it's certainly the case that, whatever the merits of the two tracks as songs, Stills' song was the one that would have been more likely to become a hit. "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing" was a flop, but it did get some local airplay. The next single, "Burned", was a Young song as well, and this time did have Young taking the lead, though in a song dominated by harmonies: [Excerpt: Buffalo Springfield, "Burned"] Over the summer, though, something had happened that would affect everything for the group -- Neil Young had started to have epileptic seizures. At first these were undiagnosed episodes, but soon they became almost routine events, and they would often happen on stage, particularly at moments of great stress or excitement. Several other members of the group became convinced -- entirely wrongly -- that Young was faking these seizures in order to get women to pay attention to him. They thought that what he wanted was for women to comfort him and mop his brow, and that collapsing would get him that. The seizures became so common that Richard Davis, the group's lighting tech, learned to recognise the signs of a seizure before it happened. As soon as it looked like Young was about to collapse the lights would turn on, someone would get ready to carry him off stage, and Richie Furay would know to grab Young's guitar before he fell so that the guitar wouldn't get damaged. Because they weren't properly grounded and Furay had an electric guitar of his own, he'd get a shock every time. Young would later claim that during some of the seizures, he would hallucinate that he was another person, in another world, living another life that seemed to have its own continuity -- people in the other world would recognise him and talk to him as if he'd been away for a while -- and then when he recovered he would have to quickly rebuild his identity, as if temporarily amnesiac, and during those times he would find things like the concept of lying painful. The group's first album came out in December, and they were very, very, unhappy with it. They thought the material was great, but they also thought that the production was terrible. Stone and Greene's insistence that they record the backing tracks first and then overdub vocals, rather than singing live with the instruments, meant that the recordings, according to Stills and Young in particular, didn't capture the sound of the group's live performance, and sounded sterile. Stills and Young thought they'd fixed some of that in the mono mix, which they spent ten days on, but then Stone and Greene did the stereo mix without consulting the band, in less than two days, and the album was released at precisely the time that stereo was starting to overtake mono in the album market. I'm using the mono mixes in this podcast, but for decades the only versions available were the stereo ones, which Stills and Young both loathed. Ahmet Ertegun also apparently thought that the demo versions of the songs -- some of which were eventually released on a box set in 2001 -- were much better than the finished studio recordings. The album was not a success on release, but it did contain the first song any of the group had written to chart. Soon after its release, Van Dyke Parks' friend Lenny Waronker was producing a single by a group who had originally been led by Sly Stone and had been called Sly and the Mojo Men. By this time Stone was no longer involved in the group, and they were making music in a very different style from the music their former leader would later become known for. Parks was brought in to arrange a baroque-pop version of Stills' album track "Sit Down I Think I Love You" for the group, and it became their only top forty hit, reaching number thirty-six: [Excerpt: The Mojo Men, "Sit Down I Think I Love You"] It was shortly after the first Buffalo Springfield album was released, though, that Steve Stills wrote what would turn out to be *his* group's only top forty single. The song had its roots in both LA and San Francisco. The LA roots were more obvious -- the song was written about a specific experience Stills had had. He had been driving to Sunset Strip from Laurel Canyon on November the twelfth 1966, and he had seen a mass of young people and police in riot gear, and he had immediately turned round, partly because he didn't want to get involved in what looked to be a riot, and partly because he'd been inspired -- he had the idea for a lyric, which he pretty much finished in the car even before he got home: [Excerpt: The Buffalo Springfield, "For What it's Worth"] The riots he saw were what became known later as the Riot on Sunset Strip. This was a minor skirmish between the police and young people of LA -- there had been complaints that young people had been spilling out of the nightclubs on Sunset Strip into the street, causing traffic problems, and as a result the city council had introduced various heavy-handed restrictions, including a ten PM curfew for all young people in the area, removing the permits that many clubs had which allowed people under twenty-one to be present, forcing the Whisky A-Go-Go to change its name just to "the Whisk", and forcing a club named Pandora's Box, which was considered the epicentre of the problem, to close altogether. Flyers had been passed around calling for a "funeral" for Pandora's Box -- a peaceful gathering at which people could say goodbye to a favourite nightspot, and a thousand people had turned up. The police also turned up, and in the heavy-handed way common among law enforcement, they managed to provoke a peaceful party and turn it into a riot. This would not normally be an event that would be remembered even a year later, let alone nearly sixty years later, but Sunset Strip was the centre of the American rock music world in the period, and of the broader youth entertainment field. Among those arrested at the riot, for example, were Jack Nicholson and Peter Fonda, neither of whom were huge stars at the time, but who were making cheap B-movies with Roger Corman for American International Pictures. Among the cheap exploitation films that American International Pictures made around this time was one based on the riots, though neither Nicholson, Fonda, or Corman were involved. Riot on Sunset Strip was released in cinemas only four months after the riots, and it had a theme song by Dewey Martin's old colleagues The Standells, which is now regarded as a classic of garage rock: [Excerpt: The Standells, "Riot on Sunset Strip"] The riots got referenced in a lot of other songs, as well. The Mothers of Invention's second album, Absolutely Free, contains the song "Plastic People" which includes this section: [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Plastic People"] And the Monkees track "Daily Nightly", written by Michael Nesmith, was always claimed by Nesmith to be an impressionistic portrait of the riots, though the psychedelic lyrics sound to me more like they're talking about drug use and street-walking sex workers than anything to do with the riots: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Daily Nightly"] But the song about the riots that would have the most lasting effect on popular culture was the one that Steve Stills wrote that night. Although how much he actually wrote, at least of the music, is somewhat open to question. Earlier that month, Buffalo Springfield had spent some time in San Francisco. They hadn't enjoyed the experience -- as an LA band, they were thought of as a bunch of Hollywood posers by most of the San Francisco scene, with the exception of one band, Moby Grape -- a band who, like them had three guitarist/singer/songwriters, and with whom they got on very well. Indeed, they got on rather better with Moby Grape than they were getting on with each other at this point, because Young and Stills would regularly get into arguments, and every time their argument seemed to be settling down, Dewey Martin would manage to say the wrong thing and get Stills riled up again -- Martin was doing a lot of speed at this point and unable to stop talking, even when it would have been politic to do so. There was even some talk while they were in San Francisco of the bands doing a trade -- Young and Pete Lewis of Moby Grape swapping places -- though that came to nothing. But Stills, according to both Richard Davis and Pete Lewis, had been truly impressed by two Moby Grape songs. One of them was a song called "On the Other Side", which Moby Grape never recorded, but which apparently had a chorus that went "Stop, can't you hear the music ringing in your ear, right before you go, telling you the way is clear," with the group all pausing after the word "Stop". The other was a song called "Murder in my Heart for the Judge": [Excerpt: Moby Grape, "Murder in my Heart for the Judge"] The song Stills wrote had a huge amount of melodic influence from that song, and quite a bit from “On the Other Side”, though he apparently didn't notice until after the record came out, at which point he apologised to Moby Grape. Stills wasn't massively impressed with the song he'd written, and went to Stone and Greene's office to play it for them, saying "I'll play it, for what it's worth". They liked the song and booked a studio to get the song recorded and rush-released, though according to Neil Young neither Stone nor Greene were actually present at the session, and the song was recorded on December the fifth, while some outbursts of rioting were still happening, and released on December the twenty-third. [Excerpt: Buffalo Springfield, "For What it's Worth"] The song didn't have a title when they recorded it, or so Stills thought, but when he mentioned this to Greene and Stone afterwards, they said "Of course it does. You said, 'I'm going to play the song, 'For What It's Worth'" So that became the title, although Ahmet Ertegun didn't like the idea of releasing a single with a title that wasn't in the lyric, so the early pressings of the single had "Stop, Hey, What's That Sound?" in brackets after the title. The song became a big hit, and there's a story told by David Crosby that doesn't line up correctly, but which might shed some light on why. According to Crosby, "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing" got its first airplay because Crosby had played members of Buffalo Springfield a tape he'd been given of the unreleased Beatles track "A Day in the Life", and they'd told their gangster manager-producers about it. Those manager-producers had then hired a sex worker to have sex with Crosby and steal the tape, which they'd then traded to a radio station in return for airplay. That timeline doesn't work, unless the sex worker involved was also a time traveller, because "A Day in the Life" wasn't even recorded until January 1967 while "Clancy" came out in August 1966, and there'd been two other singles released between then and January 1967. But it *might* be the case that that's what happened with "For What It's Worth", which was released in the last week of December 1966, and didn't really start to do well on the charts for a couple of months. Right after recording the song, the group went to play a residency in New York, of which Ahmet Ertegun said “When they performed there, man, there was no band I ever heard that had the electricity of that group. That was the most exciting group I've ever seen, bar none. It was just mind-boggling.” During that residency they were joined on stage at various points by Mitch Ryder, Odetta, and Otis Redding. While in New York, the group also recorded "Mr. Soul", a song that Young had originally written as a folk song about his experiences with epilepsy, the nature of the soul, and dealing with fame. However, he'd noticed a similarity to "Satisfaction" and decided to lean into it. The track as finally released was heavily overdubbed by Young a few months later, but after it was released he decided he preferred the original take, which by then only existed as a scratchy acetate, which got released on a box set in 2001: [Excerpt: Buffalo Springfield, "Mr. Soul (original version)"] Everyone has a different story of how the session for that track went -- at least one version of the story has Otis Redding turning up for the session and saying he wanted to record the song himself, as his follow-up to his version of "Satisfaction", but Young being angry at the idea. According to other versions of the story, Greene and Stills got into a physical fight, with Greene having to be given some of the valium Young was taking for his epilepsy to calm him down. "For What it's Worth" was doing well enough on the charts that the album was recalled, and reissued with "For What It's Worth" replacing Stills' song "Baby Don't Scold", but soon disaster struck the band. Bruce Palmer was arrested on drugs charges, and was deported back to Canada just as the song started to rise through the charts. The group needed a new bass player, fast. For a lipsynch appearance on local TV they got Richard Davis to mime the part, and then they got in Ken Forssi, the bass player from Love, for a couple of gigs. They next brought in Ken Koblun, the bass player from the Squires, but he didn't fit in with the rest of the group. The next replacement was Jim Fielder. Fielder was a friend of the group, and knew the material -- he'd subbed for Palmer a few times in 1966 when Palmer had been locked up after less serious busts. And to give some idea of how small a scene the LA scene was, when Buffalo Springfield asked him to become their bass player, he was playing rhythm guitar for the Mothers of Invention, while Billy Mundi was on drums, and had played on their second, as yet unreleased, album, Absolutely Free: [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Call any Vegetable"] And before joining the Mothers, Fielder and Mundi had also played together with Van Dyke Parks, who had served his own short stint as a Mother of Invention already, backing Tim Buckley on Buckley's first album: [Excerpt: Tim Buckley, "Aren't You the Girl?"] And the arrangements on that album were by Jack Nitzsche, who would soon become a very close collaborator with Young. "For What it's Worth" kept rising up the charts. Even though it had been inspired by a very local issue, the lyrics were vague enough that people in other situations could apply it to themselves, and it soon became regarded as an anti-war protest anthem -- something Stills did nothing to discourage, as the band were all opposed to the war. The band were also starting to collaborate with other people. When Stills bought a new house, he couldn't move in to it for a while, and so Peter Tork invited him to stay at his house. The two got on so well that Tork invited Stills to produce the next Monkees album -- only to find that Michael Nesmith had already asked Chip Douglas to do it. The group started work on a new album, provisionally titled "Stampede", but sessions didn't get much further than Stills' song "Bluebird" before trouble arose between Young and Stills. The root of the argument seems to have been around the number of songs each got on the album. With Richie Furay also writing, Young was worried that given the others' attitudes to his songwriting, he might get as few as two songs on the album. And Young and Stills were arguing over which song should be the next single, with Young wanting "Mr. Soul" to be the A-side, while Stills wanted "Bluebird" -- Stills making the reasonable case that they'd released two Neil Young songs as singles and gone nowhere, and then they'd released one of Stills', and it had become a massive hit. "Bluebird" was eventually chosen as the A-side, with "Mr. Soul" as the B-side: [Excerpt: Buffalo Springfield, "Bluebird"] The "Bluebird" session was another fraught one. Fielder had not yet joined the band, and session player Bobby West subbed on bass. Neil Young had recently started hanging out with Jack Nitzsche, and the two were getting very close and working on music together. Young had impressed Nitzsche not just with his songwriting but with his arrogance -- he'd played Nitzsche his latest song, "Expecting to Fly", and Nitzsche had said halfway through "That's a great song", and Young had shushed him and told him to listen, not interrupt. Nitzsche, who had a monstrous ego himself and was also used to working with people like Phil Spector, the Rolling Stones and Sonny Bono, none of them known for a lack of faith in their own abilities, was impressed. Shortly after that, Stills had asked Nitzsch
Born in Lubbock, Texas, on September 7, 1936, Charles Hardin Holley (he later dropped the "e"), after both grandfathers the fourth child of Lawrence Odell "L.O." Holley and Ella Pauline Drake. older siblings were Larry, Travis, and Patricia Lou. nicknamed Buddy from a young age, and it stuck with him throughout his life. Oddly enough, the newspaper announcement claimed that Buddy was actually a little girl. “A daughter weighing 8.5 lbs”, the Lubbock evening journal wrote. He was also only 6.5 pounds. And a boy. Buddy's family was mainly of English and Welsh descent and had some native American ancestry. During the Great Depression, the Holleys frequently moved residences within Lubbock; 17 in all. His father changed jobs several times. The Holley family were a musical household. Except for Buddy's father, all family members could play an instrument or sing. His older brothers frequently entered local talent shows, and one time, his brothers signed up and Buddy wanted to play violin with them. However, Buddy couldn't play the violin. Not wanting to break little Buddy's heart, his older brothers greased up the strings so it wouldn't make a sound. Buddy started singing his heart out and the three ended up winning the contest! When WWII started, the U.S. government called his brothers into service. His brother Larry brought back a guitar he bought from a shipmate, and that guitar set Buddy's off. At 11 years old, Buddy started taking piano lessons. Nine months later, he quit piano lessons and switched to guitar after seeing a classmate playing and singing on the school bus. His parents initially bought him a steel guitar, but Buddy insisted he wanted a guitar like his brothers. They bought him a guitar, a gold top Gibson acoustic, from a pawn shop, and his brother Travis taught him to play it. By 15, Buddy was proficient on guitar, banjo, and mandolin. During his early childhood, Holley was influenced by Hank Williams, Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Snow, Bob Wills, and the Carter Family. He started writing songs and working with his childhood friend Bob Montgomery. The two jammed together, practicing songs by the Louvin Brothers and Johnnie & Jack. They frequently listened to Grand Ole Opry's radio programs on WSM, Louisiana Hayride on KWKH (which they once drove 600 miles to okay just to be turned away), and Big D Jamboree. If you're not familiar with the Grand Ol Opry, it's a weekly American country music stage concert in Nashville, Tennessee, founded on November 28, 1925, by George D. Hay as a one-hour radio "barn dance" on Clearchannel's WSM, which first hit the airwaves on October 5, 1925. Its the longest-running radio broadcast in U.S. history. At the same time he was practicing with Bob, Holley played with other musicians he met in high school, including Sonny Curtis and Jerry Allison. In 1952 Holley and Jack Neal participated as a duo billed as "Buddy and Jack" in a talent contest on a local television show. After Neal left, he was replaced by his buddy Bob, and they were billed as "Buddy and Bob." By the mid-'50s, Buddy & Bob played their style of music called "western and bop ." Holley was influenced by late-night radio stations that played the blues and rhythm and blues. Holley would sit in his car with Sonny Curtis and tune to distant “black” radio stations that could only be received at night when bigger stations turned off local transmissions. Holley then changed his music by blending his earlier country and western influence with Rhythm and Blues. After seeing the legendary Elvis perform, Holly decided to pursue his career in music full-time once he graduated high school. By mid-1955, Buddy & Bob, who already worked with an upright bass player (played by Larry Welborn), added drummer Jerry Allison to their lineup. After seeing Elvis Presley performing live in Lubbock, who Pappy Dave Stone of KDAV booked, Buddy really wanted to get after it. In February, he opened for Elvis at the Fair Park Coliseum, in April at the Cotton Club, then again in June at the Coliseum. Elvis significantly influenced the group to turn more towards Rock n Roll. Buddy and the king became friends, with Buddy even driving Elvis around when he was in town. Eventually, Bob Montgomery, who leaned toward a traditional country sound, left the group, though they continued writing and composing songs together. Holly kept pushing his music toward a straight-ahead rock & roll sound, working with Allison, Welborn, and other local musicians, including his pal and guitarist Sonny Curtis and bassist Don Guess. In October, Holly was booked as the opener for Bill Haley & His Comets (Rock Around the Clock), to be seen by Nashville scout Eddie Crandall. Obviously impressed, Eddie Crandall talked Grand Ole Opry manager Jim Denny into finding a recording contract for Holley. Pappy Stone sent Denny a demo tape, which Denny forwarded to Paul Cohen. Cohen signed the band to Decca Records in February 1956. In the contract, Decca accidentally misspelled Holley's surname as "Holly," From that point forward, he was known as "Buddy Holly." On January 26, 1956, Holly went to his first professional recording session with producer Owen Bradley. He was a part of two more sessions in Nashville. the producer selected the session musicians and arrangements, Holly became frustrated by his lack of creative control. In April 1956, Decca released "Blue Days, Black Nights" as a single and "Love Me" on the B-side. "B-sides" were secondary songs that were sent out with single records. They were usually just added to have something on the flip side. Later they became songs that bands would either not release or wait to release. Jim Denny added Holly on tour as the opening act for Faron Young. While on this tour, they were promoted as "Buddy Holly and the Two Tones." Decca then called them "Buddy Holly and the Three Tunes." The label released Holly's second single, "Modern Don Juan," along with "You Are My One Desire." Unfortunately, neither one of these singles tickled anyone's fancy. On January 22, 1957, Decca informed Holly that they wouldn't re-sign him and insisted he could not record the same songs for anyone else for five years. The same shit happened to Universal and me. A couple of classics, like "Midnight Shift" and "Rock Around with Ollie Vee," did come out of those Decca sessions, but nothing issued at the time went anywhere. It looked as though Holly had missed his shot at stardom. Holly was disappointed with his time with Decca. inspired by Buddy Knox's "Party Doll" and Jimmy Bowen's "I'm Stickin' with You" he decided to visit Norman Petty, who produced and promoted both of those successful records. Buddy, Jerry Allison, bassist Joe B. Mauldin, and rhythm guitarist Niki Sullivan pulled together and headed to Petty's studio in Clovis, New Mexico. The group recorded a demo of the now-classic, "That'll Be the Day," which they had previously recorded in Nashville. Now rockin' that lead guitar, Holly finally achieved the sound he wanted. They got the song nailed down and recorded. Along with Petty's help, the group got it picked up by Murray Deutsch, a publishing associate of Petty's, and Murray got it to Bob Thiele, an executive at Coral Records. Thiele loved it. Ironically, Coral Records was a subsidiary of Decca, the company Holly had signed with before. On a side note, a subsidiary is a smaller label under the major label's umbrella. For instance, Universal signed my band to Republic, a subsidiary of Universal Music that dealt primarily with rock genres, like Godsmack. Norman Petty saw the potential in Buddy and became his manager. He sent the record to Brunswick Records in New York City. Thiele saw the record as a potential hit, but there were some significant hurdles to overcome before it could be released. According to author Philip Norman, in his book Rave On, Thiele would only get the most reluctant support from his record company. Decca had lucked out in 1954 when they'd signed Bill Haley & His Comets and saw their "Rock Around the Clock" top the charts. Still, very few of those in charge at Decca had a natural feel or appreciation for Rock & Roll, let alone any idea of where it might be heading or whether the label could (or should) follow it down that road. Also, remember that although Buddy had been dropped by Decca the year before, the contract that Holly signed explicitly forbade him from re-recording anything he had recorded for them, released or not, for five years. However, Coral was a subsidiary of Decca, and Decca's Nashville office could hold up the release and possibly even haul Holly into court. "That'll Be the Day" was issued in May of 1957 mainly as an indulgence to Thiele, to "humor" him. The record was put out on the Brunswick label, more of jazz and R&B label, and credited to the Crickets. The group chose this name to prevent the suits at Decca -- and more importantly, Decca's Nashville office -- from finding out that this new release was from the guy they had just dropped. The name “The Crickets” was inspired by a band that Buddy and his group followed, called “the Spiders” and they initially thought about calling themselves “The Beetles”, with two E's, but Buddy said he was afraid people would want to “squash them.” So, they picked “The Crickets.” Petty also became the group's manager and producer, signing the Crickets, identified as Allison, Sullivan, and Mauldin, to a contract. Unfortunately, Holly wasn't listed as a member in the original document to keep his involvement with "That'll Be the Day" a secret. This ruse would later become the source of severe legal and financial problems for Buddy. The song shot to #1 on the national charts that summer. But, of course, Decca knew Holly was in the band by then. So, with Thiele's persuasion and realizing they had a hit on their hands, the company agreed to release Holly from the five-year restriction on his old contract. This release left him free to sign any recording contract he wanted. While sorting out the ins and outs of Holly's legal situation, Thiele knew that Buddy was far more than a one-hit-wonder and that he could potentially write more and different types of hits. So, Holly found himself with two recording contracts, one with Brunswick as a member of the Crickets and the other with Coral Records as Buddy Holly, all thanks to Thiele's ingenious strategy to get the most out of Buddy and his abilities. By releasing two separate bodies of work, the Crickets could keep rockin' while allowing its apparent leader and "star" to break out on his own. Petty, whose name seems fitting as we go through this, acted as their manager and producer. He handed out writing credits at random, gifting Niki Sullivan and Joe B. Mauldin (and himself) the co-authorship of the song, "I'm Gonna Love You Too," while leaving Holly's name off of "Peggy Sue." at first. The song title, “Peggy Sue” was named after Buddy's biggest fan. Petty usually added his own name to the credit line, something the managers and producers who wanted a more significant piece of the pie did back in the '50s. To be somewhat fair, Petty made some suggestions, which were vital in shaping certain Holly songs. However, he didn't contribute as much as all of his credits allow us to believe. Some confusion over songwriting was exacerbated by problems stemming from Holly's contracts in 1956. Petty had his own publishing company, Nor Va Jak Music, and Buddy signed a contract to publish his new songs. However, Holly had signed an exclusive agreement with another company the year before. To reduce his profile as a songwriter until a settlement could be made with Petty and convince the other publisher that they weren't losing too much in any compensation, buddy copyrighted many of his new songs under the pseudonym "Charles Hardin." So many names! The dual recording contracts allowed Holly to record a crazy amount of songs during his short-lived 18 months of fame. Meanwhile, his band -- billed as Buddy Holly & the Crickets -- became one of the top attractions of the time. Holly was the frontman, singing lead and playing lead guitar, which was unusual for the era, and writing or co-writing many of their songs. But the Crickets were also a great band, creating a big and exciting sound (which is lost to history, aside from some live recordings from their 1958 British tour). Allison was a drummer ahead of his time and contributed to the songwriting more often than his colleagues, and Joe B. Mauldin and Niki Sullivan provided a solid rhythm section. The group relied on originals for their singles, making them unique and years ahead of their time. In 1957-1958, songwriting wasn't considered a skill essential to a career in rock & Roll; the music business was still limping along the lines it had followed since the '20s. Songwriting was a specialized profession set on the publishing side of the industry and not connected to performing and recording. A performer might write a song or, even more rarely, like Duke Ellington (It Don't Mean A Thing), count composition among his key talents; however, this was generally left to the experts. Any rock & roller wanting to write songs would also have to get past the image of Elvis. He was set to become a millionaire at the young age of 22. He never wrote his songs, and the few songwriting credits he had resulted from business arrangements rather than writing anything. Buddy Holly & the Crickets changed that seriously by hitting number one with a song they'd written and then reaching the Top Ten with originals like "Oh, Boy" and "Peggy Sue," They were regularly charging up the charts based on their songwriting. This ability wasn't appreciated by the public at the time and wouldn't be noticed widely until the '70s. Still, thousands of aspiring musicians, including John Lennon and Paul McCartney, from some unknown band called "The Beatles," took note of their success, and some of them decided to try and tried to be like Buddy. Also unknown at the time, Holly and his crew changed the primary industry method of recording, which was to bring the artist into the label's studio, working on their timetable. If an artist were highly successful, they got a blank check in the studio, and any union rules were thrown out, but that was rare and only happened to the highest bar of musicians. Buddy Holly & the Crickets, however, did their thing, starting with "That'll Be the Day," in Clovis, New Mexico, at Petty's studio. They took their time and experimented until they got the sound they were looking for. No union told them when to stop or start their work, and they delivered terrific records; not to mention, they were albums that sounded different than anything out there. The results changed the history of rock music. The group worked out a new sound that gave shape to the next wave of rock & Roll. Most definitely influenced was British rock & Roll and the British Invasion beat, with the lead and rhythm guitars working together to create a fuller, more complex sound. On songs such as "Not Fade Away," "Everyday," "Listen to Me," "Oh Boy!," "Peggy Sue," "Maybe Baby," "Rave On," "Heartbeat," and "It's So Easy," Holly took rock & roll's range and sophistication and pushed it without abandoning its excitement and, most importantly, it's fun. Holly and the band weren't afraid to push the envelope and try new things, even on their singles. "Peggy Sue" used changes in volume and timbre on the guitar that was usually only used in instrumental albums. "Words of Love" was one of the earliest examples of double-tracked vocals in rock & Roll, and the Beatles would jump on that train the following decade. Buddy Holly & the Crickets were extremely popular in America. Still, in England, they were even more significant; their impact was compared to Elvis and, in some ways, was even bigger. This success was because they toured England; Elvis didn't. They spent a month there in 1958, playing a list of shows that were still talked about 30 years later. It also had to do with their sound and Holly's persona on stage. The group's heavy use of rhythm guitar fit right in with the sound of skiffle music, a mix of blues, folk, country, and jazz elements that most of the younger British were introduced to playing music and their first taste of rock & Roll. Also, Holly looked a lot less likely a rock & roll star than Elvis. He was tall, skinny, and wore glasses; he looked like an ordinary dude who was good at music. Part of Buddy's appeal as a rock star was how he didn't look like one. He inspired tens of thousands of British teenagers who couldn't compare themselves to Elvis or Gene Vincent. (Be Bop A Lula) In the '50s, British guitarist Hank Marvin of the Shadows owed his look and that he wore his glasses proudly on-stage to Holly, and it was brought into the '70s by Elvis Costello. Buddy may have played several different kinds of guitars but, he was specifically responsible for popularizing the Fender Stratocaster, especially in England. For many wannabe rock & rollers in the UK, Holly's 1958 tour was the first chance they'd had to see or hear this iconic guitar in action, and it quickly became the guitar of choice for anyone wanting to be a guitarist in England. In fact, Marvin is said to have had the first Stratocaster ever brought into England. The Crickets became a trio with Sullivan dipping out in late 1957, right after the group's appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, but a lot more would transpire over the next year or so. The group consolidated its success with the release of two L.P.s, The Chirping Crickets, and Buddy Holly. They had two successful international tours and performed more in the United States. Holly had also started to have different ideas and aspirations than Allison and Mauldin. They never thought of leaving Texas as their home, and they continued to base their lives there, while Buddy wanted to be in New York, not just to do business but to live. His marriage to Maria Elena Santiago, a receptionist in Murray Deutsch's office, made the decision to move to New York that much easier. By this time, Holly's music had become more sophisticated and complex, and he passed off the lead guitar duties in the studio to session player Tommy Alsup. He had done several recordings in New York using session musicians such as King Curtis. It was around this time that the band started to see a slight decline in sales. Singles such as "Heartbeat" didn't sell nearly as well as the 45s of 1957 that had rolled out of stores. It's said that Buddy might even have advanced further than most of the band's audience was willing to accept in late 1958. Critics believe that the song "Well...All Right" was years ahead of its time. Buddy split with the group -- and Petty -- in 1958. This departure left him free to chase some of those newer sounds, which also left him low on funds. In the course of the split, it became clear to Holly and everyone else that Petty had been fudging the numbers and probably taken a lot of the group's income for himself. Unfortunately, there was almost no way of proving his theft because he never seemed to finish his "accounting" of the money owed to anyone. His books were ultimately found to be so screwed up that when he came up with various low five-figure settlements to the folks he robbed, they took it. Holly vacationed with his wife in Lubbock, TX, and hung out in Waylin Jennings's radio station in December 1958. With no money coming in from Petty, Holly decided to earn some quick cash by signing to play the Midwest's Winter Dance Party package tour. For the start of the Winter Dance Party tour, he assembled a band consisting of Waylon Jennings (on bass), Tommy Allsup (on guitar), and Carl Bunch (on drums). Holly and Jennings left for New York City, arriving on January 15, 1959. Jennings stayed at Holly's apartment by Washington Square Park on the days before a meeting scheduled at the headquarters of the General Artists Corporation, the folks who organized the tour. They then traveled by train to Chicago to meet up with the rest of the band. The Winter Dance Party tour began in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on January 23, 1959. The amount of travel involved created problems because whoever booked the tour dates didn't consider the distance between venues. On top of the scheduling conflicts, the unheated tour buses broke down twice in the freezing weather. In addition, Holly's drummer Carl Bunch was hospitalized for frostbite to his toes while aboard the bus, so Buddy looked for different transportation. Buddy actually sat in on drums for the local bands while Richie Valenz played drums for Buddy. On February 2, before their appearance in Clear Lake, Iowa, Holly chartered a four-seat Beechcraft Bonanza airplane for Jennings, Allsup, and himself, from Dwyer Flying Service in Mason City, Iowa, for $108. Holly wanted to leave after the performance at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake and fly to their next venue, in Moorhead, Minnesota, through Fargo, North Dakota. This plan would allow them time to rest, wash their clothes and avoid being on that crappy bus. The Clear Lake Show ended just before midnight, and Allsup agreed to flip a coin for the seat with Richie Valens. Valens called heads, and when he won, he reportedly said, "That's the first time I've ever won anything in my life" On a side note, Allsup later opened a restaurant in Fort Worth, Texas called Heads Up, in memory of this statement. Waylon Jennings voluntarily gave up his seat to J. P. Richardson (the Big Bopper), who had the flu and complained that the tour bus was too cold and uncomfortable for a man of his stature. When Buddy heard Waylon wouldn't be flying with him, he jokingly said, “I hope your old bus freezes up!” Then Waylon responded, “well, I hope your old plane crashes!” The last thing he would ever say to his friend. Roger Peterson, the pilot and only 21, took off in pretty nasty weather, although he wasn't certified to fly by instruments alone, failing an instrument test the year before. He was a big fan of Buddy's and didn't want to disappoint, so he called a more seasoned pilot to fly the trio to their destination. “I'm more of a Lawrence Welk fan.” Sadly, shortly after 12:55 am on February 3, 1959, Holly, Valens, Richardson, and Peterson were killed instantly when the plane crashed into a frozen cornfield five miles northwest of Mason City, Iowa, airport shortly after takeoff. Buddy was in the front, next to the pilot. He loved flying and had been taking flying lessons. The three musicians were ejected from the plane upon impact, suffering severe head and chest injuries. Holly was 22 years old. Holly's funeral was held on February 7, 1959, at the Tabernacle Baptist Church in Lubbock, TX. It was officiated by Ben D. Johnson, who married the Hollys' just months earlier. Jerry Allison, Joe B. Mauldin, Niki Sullivan, Bob Montgomery, and Sonny Curtis were pallbearers. Some sources say that Phil Everly, the one half of The Everly Brothers, was also the pallbearer, but he said at one time that he attended the funeral but was not a pallbearer. In addition, Waylon Jennings was unable to participate because of his commitment to the still-touring Winter Dance Party. Holly's body was buried in the City of Lubbock Cemetery, in the city's eastern part. His headstone has the correct spelling of his last name (Holley) and a carving of his Fender Stratocaster guitar. His wife, María Elena, had to see the first reports of her husband's death on T.V. She claimed she suffered a miscarriage the following day. Holly's mother, who heard the news on the radio in Lubbock, Texas, screamed and collapsed. Because of Elena's miscarriage, the authorities implemented a policy against announcing victims' names until the families were informed. As a result, Mary did not attend the funeral and has never visited the gravesite. She later told the Avalanche-Journal, "In a way, I blame myself. I was not feeling well when he left. I was two weeks pregnant, and I wanted Buddy to stay with me, but he had scheduled that tour. It was the only time I wasn't with him. And I blame myself because I know that, if only I had gone along, Buddy never would have gotten into that airplane." The accident wasn't considered a significant piece of news at the time, although sad. Most news outlets were run by out-of-touch older men and didn't think rock & Roll was anything more than to be exploited to sell newspapers or grab viewing audiences. However, Holly was clean-cut and scandal-free, and with the news of his recent marriage, the story contained more misery than other music stars of the period. For the teens of the time, it was their first glimpse of a public tragedy like this, and the news was heartbreaking. Radio station D.J.s were also traumatized. The accident and sudden way it happened, along with Holly and Valens being just 22 and 17, made it even worse. Hank Williams Sr had died at 29, but he was a drug user and heavy drinker, causing some to believe his young death was inevitable. The blues guitarist Johnny Ace had passed in 1954 while backstage at a show. However, that tragedy came at his hand in a game of Russian roulette. Holly's death was different, almost more personal to the public. Buddy left behind dozens of unfinished recordings — solo transcriptions of his new compositions, informal jam sessions with bandmates, and tapes with songs intended for other musicians. Buddy recorded his last six original songs in his apartment in late 1958 and were his most recent recordings. In June 1959, Coral Records overdubbed two of the songs with backing vocals by the Ray Charles Singers and hired guns to emulate the Crickets sound. Since his death, the finished tracks became the first singles, "Peggy Sue Got Married"/"Crying, Waiting, Hoping." The new release was a success, and the fans and industry wanted more. As a result, all six songs were included in The Buddy Holly Story, Vol. 2 in 1960 using the other Holly demos and the same studio personnel. The demand for Holly records was so great, and Holly had recorded so many tracks that his record label could release new Holly albums and singles for the next ten years. Norman Petty, the alleged swindler, produced most of these new songs, using unreleased studio masters, alternative takes, audition tapes, and even amateur recordings (a few from 1954 with recorded with low-quality vocals). The final Buddy Holly album, "Giant," was released in 1969 with the single, "Love Is Strange," taking the lead. These posthumous records did well in the U.S. but actually charted in England. New recordings of his music, like the Rolling Stones' rendition of "Not Fade Away" and the Beatles' rendition of "Words of Love," kept Buddy's name and music in the hearts and ears of a new generation of listeners. In the States, the struggle was a little more challenging. The rock & roll wave was constantly morphing, with new sounds, bands, and listeners continuously emerging, and the general public gradually forgot about Buddy and his short-lived legacy. Holly was a largely forgotten figure in his own country by the end of the '60s, except among older fans (then in their twenties) and hardcore oldies listeners. Things began to shift toward the end of the '60s with the start of the oldies boom. Holly's music was, of course, a part of this movement. But, as people listened, they also learned about the man behind the music. Even the highly respected rock zine Rolling Stone went out of its way to remind people who Buddy was. His posing images from 1957 and 1958, wearing his glasses, a jacket, and smiling, looked like a figure from another age. The way he died also set him apart from some of the deaths of rockers like Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison, musicians who, at the time, overindulged in the rock in roll lifestyle. Holly was different. He was eternally innocent in all aspects of his life. Don McLean, a relatively unknown singer/songwriter, who proudly considered himself a Buddy Holly fan, wrote and released a song called "American Pie," in 1971, catapulting him into the musical ethos. Although listeners assumed McLean wrote the song about President Kennedy, he let it be known publicly that he meant February 3, 1959, the day Holly died. Maclean was a holly fan and his death devastated him when he was only 11. The song's popularity led to Holly suddenly getting more press exposure than he'd ever had the chance to enjoy in his lifetime. The tragic plane accident launched a few careers in the years after. Bobby Vee became a star when his band took over Holly's spot on the Winter Dance Party tour. Holly's final single, "It Doesn't Matter Anymore," hit the British charts in the wake of his death and rose to number one. Two years after the event, producer Joe Meek and singer Mike Berry got together to make "Tribute to Buddy Holly," a memorial single. But, unfortunately, rumor has it that Meek never entirely got over Holly's death, and he killed himself on the anniversary of the plane accident. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame included Holly among its first class in 1986. Upon his induction, the Hall of Fame basked about the large quantity of material he produced during his short musical career. Saying, "He made a major and lasting impact on popular music ." Calling him an "innovator" for writing his own material, experimenting with double-tracking, and using orchestration. He was also revered for having "pioneered and popularized" the use of two guitars, bass, and drums by rock bands. He was also inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1986, saying his contributions "changed the face of Rock' n' Roll." Along with Petty, Holly developed techniques like overdubbing and reverb and other innovative instrumentation. As a result, according to the Songwriters Hall of Fame, Holly became "one of the most influential pioneers of rock and roll" who had a "lasting influence" on genre performers of the 1960s. Paul McCartney bought the rights to Buddy Holly's entire song catalog on July 1, 1976. Lubbock TX's Walk of Fame has a statue honoring Buddy of him rocking his Fender, which Grant Speed sculpted in 1980. There are other memorials to Buddy Holly, including a street named in his honor and the Buddy Holly Center, which contains a museum of memorabilia and fine arts gallery. The Center is located on Crickets Avenue, one street east of Buddy Holly Avenue. There was a musical about Buddy. Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story, a “pioneering jukebox musical which worked his familiar hits into a narrative,” debuted in the West End in 1989. It ran until 2008, where it also appeared on Broadway, as well as in Australia and Germany, not to mention touring companies in the U.K. and U.S. In 1994 "Buddy Holly" became a massive hit from the band Weezer, paying homage to the fallen rocker and is still played on the radio and whenever MTV decides to play videos on one of their side stations. Again, in ‘94, Holly's style also showed up in Quentin Tarantino's abstract and groundbreaking film Pulp Fiction, which featured Steve Buscemi playing a waiter impersonating Buddy. In 1997, Buddy received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. He was inducted into the Iowa Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame in 2000, as well. In 2010, Grant Speed's statue of Buddy and his guitar was taken down for repairs, and construction of a new Walk of Fame began. On May 9, 2011, the City of Lubbock held a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Buddy and Maria Elena Holly Plaza, the new home of the statue and the Walk of Fame. The same year, on why would be Buddy's 75th birthday, a star with his name was placed on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. There were two tribute albums released in 2011: Verve Forecast's Listen to Me: Buddy Holly, featuring Stevie Nicks, Brian Wilson, and Ringo Starr plus 13 other artists, and Fantasy/Concord's Rave on Buddy Holly, which had tracks from Paul McCartney, Patti Smith, the Black Keys, and Nick Lowe, among others. Pat DiNizio of the Smithereens released his own Holly tribute album in 2009. Universal released True Love Ways, an album where original Holly recordings were overdubbed by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in 2018, just in time for Christmas. That album debuted at number 10 on the U.K. charts. Groundbreaking was held on April 20, 2017, to construct a new performing arts center in Lubbock, TX, dubbed the Buddy Holly Hall of Performing Arts and Sciences, a $153 million project in downtown Lubbock completed in 2020 located at 1300 Mac Davis Lane. Recently, on May 5, 2019, an article on gearnews.com had a pretty cool story, if it's true. The famous Fender Stratocaster played and owned by Buddy Holly that disappeared after his death in 1959 has been found, according to a new video documentary called "The '54". Gill Matthews is an Australian drummer, producer, and collector of old Fender guitars. According to the documentary, he may have stumbled upon Buddy Holly's legendary guitar. The film is The '54 and tells the history of one particular 1954 Fender Stratocaster Gil purchased two decades after the plane crash that claimed Buddy's life. Experts cited in the film say there is a good chance that the guitar in Matthews' possession is indeed Buddy Holly's actual original '54 Fender Stratocaster. If this is true, it is possibly one of the most significant finds in guitar history. You can watch the video at gearnews.com and see all the evidence presented during the film. Sources: A biography on allmusic.com written by Bruce Eder was the main source of information here with other info coming from the following Rave on: The Biography of Buddy Holly written by Phillip Norman Buddy Holly : Rest In Peace by Don Mclean "Why Buddy Holly will never fade away" an article on The Telegraph website written by Phillip Norman Various other articles were used and tidbits taken from wikipedia. And Adam Moody Consider becoming a producer of the show. www.accidentaldads.com www.iconsandoutlaws.com
This episode is on the legendary band The Atlantics and their instrumental classic, Bombora. We speak with The Atlantics lead guitarist Jim Skaithitis. When it comes to surfing, Australia has always been at the forefront of the sport and that's no different when it comes to surf music, with Sydney band The Atlantics leading the charge. The instrumental rock craze was inspired by the UK band The Shadows – there was Shadow-wanna be bands spring up all over the globe. The Shadows inspired a generation of up and coming musicians. Rather than kids now wanting to be Elvis, suddenly every kid wanted to be Hank Marvin and become a guitar hero. While The Atlantics were unabashed fans of The Shadows, their own original and innovative sound saw the band stand out from the rest. Over the years The Atlantics have gone onto gain their own international acclaim and are now ranked among the finest bands of the surf rock genre.
This episode is on the legendary band The Atlantics and their instrumental classic, Bombora. We speak with The Atlantics lead guitarist Jim Skaithitis. When it comes to surfing, Australia has always been at the forefront of the sport and that's no different when it comes to surf music, with Sydney band The Atlantics leading the charge. The instrumental rock craze was inspired by the UK band The Shadows – there was Shadow-wanna be bands spring up all over the globe. The Shadows inspired a generation of up and coming musicians. Rather than kids now wanting to be Elvis, suddenly every kid wanted to be Hank Marvin and become a guitar hero. While The Atlantics were unabashed fans of The Shadows, their own original and innovative sound saw the band stand out from the rest. Over the years The Atlantics have gone onto gain their own international acclaim and are now ranked among the finest bands of the surf rock genre.
1961 le chanteur des Beatles s'appelle Tony Sheridan, et les Fab Four vont enregistrer leur premier 45 tours avec un hommage aux Shadows et en particulier à Hank Marvin pour le son produit par sa Fender STRATOCASTER branchée sur le fameux Ampli à lampes FENDER TWIN REVERB. CRY FOR THE SHADOWS est le seul morceau instrumental jamais enregistré par les Beatles
James Watt chats to Hank Marvin - Hank celebrates his 80th Birthday on Oct 28th so lets hear some great stories from the Shadows front man. talking Cliff Richard Olivia Newton John and being hungry or Hank Marvin'
In this 90 minute musical adventure we play two Shadows tracks to celebrate Hank Marvin's 80th birthday and have a new 'Sounds Of Surf' feature. Tracks less travelled this show from Stealers Wheel, Kool & the Gang and the Rolling Stones.All this plus, our regular 'Motown Moment', 'Kitchen Disco Ball' and a Look Back at the Sixties.
phone interview with Peter Jonathan Robertson in 1999 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In the lead-up to Gary Kemps new solo album, Clairsy & Lisa caught up with the songwriting legend, looking back on his life and career, including Live Aid, the rivalry with Duran Duran, an incredible Perth coincidence with Hank Marvin... and we find out exactly what the conversation was while out at dinner just a couple of nights ago with, oh you know, Mick Jagger and Ronnie Wood.
It's another great hour packed with awesome music on this week's Catching A Wave! Hear a trio of "Dance" themed songs, a deep track from The Beach Boys from Beth Riley in her Surf's Up: Beth's Beach Boys Break, a "Two-Nami" in the forecast with 2 songs featuring Duane Eddy (from Hank Marvin and The Ventures) and we'll drop a coin in the Jammin' James Jukebox to hear our selection of the week! Plus, we'll play new and vintage tracks from Los Straitjackets, Shoot The Pier, The Bobby Lee Combo, The Surfaris, Girl Over Planet, The Surf Hermits, Hawthorne, Hugo Stranger & The Rattlers, Southern Culture On The Skids, Satan's Pilgrims and Les Agamemnonz! Intro music bed "Catch A Wave"- The Beach Boys Southern Culture On The Skids- "Night Driver" Satan's Pilgrims- "El Ray" The Bobby Lee Combo- "Moon Dawg" Les Agamemnonz- "Xiphias" Hugo Stranger & The Rattlers- "By Your Side" Girl Over Planet- "Rockin' Pants" The Surf Hermits- "Hang Zen" Hawthorne- "City Of Angels" Surf's Up: Beth's Beach Boys Break- The Beach Boys- "California Calling" Follow "Surf's Up: Beth's Beach Boys Break" HERE The Surfaris- "Boss Barracuda" "Dance" theme: Ramones- "Do You Wanna Dance?" Suzi Quatro- "Do Ya Dance?" The Monkees- "Let's Dance On" "Two-Nami": Hank Marvin with Duane Eddy- "Pipeline" The Ventures with Duane Eddy- "I Fought The Law" Jammin' James Jukebox selection of the week: David Marks & The Marksmen- "I Could Make You Mine" Shoot The Pier- "The Fairies Of Inverness" Los Straitjackets- "Hombre" Outro Music Bed: Eddie Angel- "Mustang"
Anytime you talk to any of his fans, whether musicians or civilians, invariably they will speak of not one but two qualities that define his greatness.The first, predictably, is his extraordinary guitar playing. Considered by those in the know to be among this planet's greatest guitarists, his playing is simply miraculous, as it would take three musicians, or more, to do what Tommy does solo. Who else, for example, when playing “Day Tripper,” can lay down the rhythm part, dig into the riff and sing the melody all at once on just one acoustic guitar?Which brings us to the other aspect of his music always mentioned, and without which the first might not be as powerful or as infectiously appealing: the joy. Yes, joy. Because it's one thing to play these multi-dimensional arrangements flawlessly on an acoustic guitar. But to do it with that smile of the ages, that evidence of authentic, unbridled delight, is an irresistible invitation to feel his music as deeply as he does.“The joy, he says, “is there always because I'm chasing it through music. Seeing the surprise in peoples' eyes is worth living and working for… I can't help but play to the people with all my heart, which is overflowing with joy of being in that moment that I've worked all my life for. And here it is!”Although his expression is instrumental, he comes to the guitar much more like a vocalist, positively singing melodies through the strings. He inhabits the tunes he performs, delivering every nuance and turn of phrase. His own songs are also illuminated always with lyrical melodies that go right to the heart, such as his beautiful ode to his daughter, “Angelina,” or his great “story without words,” “Lewis & Clark.” That they resonate so deeply without words makes sense, as words only go so far. But music, coming from a genuine and joyful source, can go so much farther. Now with The Best of Tommysongs, he brings us a complete collection of his own songs, all rich with ripe melodicism and rendered with joy in real-time.Born in 1955, one of six kids in Muswellbrook, New South Wales Australia, his first years were fairly uneventful, mostly mastering necessary motor skills between naps. By age four, he got busy becoming a musician. His father, an engineer who loved music and musicians, brought home an electric guitar one day with the intention of finding out how it worked. Piece by piece, he took it apart to discover its secrets. But Tommy and his brother were much more interested in music than mechanics, so that when their dad was away at work, they'd surreptitiously sneak away with the guitar.Driven somewhat by sibling rivalry, they developed contests that were both fun and extremely educational. “We turned our backs to each other,” Tommy remembered, “and Phil would play a chord and I would have to say what the chord was, what the notes in it were.” It was competition which impacted his entire career, allowing him access to the rich interior architecture of songs. Though neither brother had any formal musical training, this self-schooling quickly transformed both into seriously sophisticated musicians.Though they assumed their father would be angry if he found out, which he did, they were wrong. He was surprised and thrilled his sons could play music. Soon their big brother Chris was enlisted to play drums, and with sister Veronica playing lap-steel, a family band was born. They joyously rocked hip guitar instrumentals such as “Apache” by The Shadows, featuring Hank Marvin on guitar, who both Phil and Tommy adored and emulated. They called themselves The Emmanuel Quartet. But when people kept mistaking them for a classical string quartet, they changed the name to The Midget Surfaries.They entered a band competition, and easily surpassed all contenders to take first prize,a national TV appearance. On that show they burned through “Apache” with .... to continue this read, go to https://tommyemmanuel.com
This week we get an awesome collaboration called California Music (includes Mike Love, Al Jardine, Bruce Johnston, David Marks and some of The Beach Boys' children: Carnie & Wendy Wilson, Matt Jardine, Christian, Hayleigh and Ambha Love, Justyn Wilson) plus tunes from Guitar Up, Messer Chups, Hugo Stranger & The Rattlers, La Luz, The Young Barons, The Aqua Barons, The Cranzers, Hawthorne, The Jagaloons, Spike Marble, Larry Weber and more! Beth Riley has a great track from The Beach Boys in her Surf's Up: Beth's Beach Boys Break, we spin the "Wheel Of Fun, Fun, Fun" to hear Beach Boys covers by Jimmy Buffett, Hank Marvin and Matthew Sweet & Susanna Hoffs and we hear our Jammin' James Jukebox selection of the week as well! Intro music bed "Catch A Wave"- The Beach Boys Guitar Up- "Surfboard" Messer Chups- "Dracula Hates Killer Icicles" California Music- "Add Some Music To Your Day" The Cranzers- "All Sharks Must Die" La Luz- "Don't Leave Me On The Earth" The Young Barons- "Intoxica" The Jagaloons- "Breaking The Law" Spike Marble- "Theme From Murderqueen" Surf's Up: Beth's Beach Boys Break- The Beach Boys- "'Til I Die" Follow "Surf's Up: Beth's Beach Boys Break" HERE Hawthorne- "SoCal Girl" Hugo Stranger & The Rattlers- "Beach Coma" The Super Stocks- "Wheel Stands" Wheel of FUN, FUN, FUN: Jimmy Buffett- "Sail On Sailor" Hank Marvin- "California Girls" Matthew Sweet & Susanna Hoffs- "The Warmth Of The Sun" Jammin' James Jukebox selection of the week: Dennis Wilson & Rumbo- "Sound Of Free" The Aqua Barons- "Galaxy Cruise" Larry Weber- "Down At The Bay" Outro Music Bed: The Beach Boys- "Sail On Sailor" (backing tracks)
Episode one hundred and nineteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "You Really Got Me" by the Kinks, and the song that first took distorted guitar to number one. 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 "G.T.O." by Ronny and the Daytonas. 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've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I've used several resources for this and future episodes on the Kinks, most notably Ray Davies: A Complicated Life by Johnny Rogan and You Really Got Me by Nick Hasted. X-Ray by Ray Davies is a remarkable autobiography with a framing story set in a dystopian science-fiction future, while Kink by Dave Davies is more revealing but less well-written. The Anthology 1964-1971 is a great box set that covers the Kinks' Pye years, which overlap almost exactly with their period of greatest creativity. For those who don't want a full box set, this two-CD set covers all the big hits. 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 has often been called "the first heavy metal record", one that introduced records dominated by heavy, distorted, guitar riffs to the top of the UK charts. We're going to look at the first singles by a group who would become second only to the Beatles among British groups in terms of the creativity of their recordings during the sixties, but who were always sabotaged by a record label more interested in short-term chart success than in artist development. We're going to look at the Kinks, and at "You Really Got Me": [Excerpt: The Kinks, "You Really Got Me"] The story of the Kinks starts with two brothers, Ray and Dave Davies, the seventh and eighth children of a family that had previously had six girls in a row, most of them much older -- their oldest sister was twenty when Ray was born, and Dave was three years younger than Ray. The two brothers always had a difficult relationship, partly because of their diametrically opposed personalities. Ray was introverted, thoughtful, and notoriously selfish, while Dave was outgoing in the extreme, but also had an aggressive side to his nature. Ray, as someone who had previously been the youngest child and only boy, resented his younger brother coming along and taking the attention he saw as his by right, while Dave always looked up to his older brother but never really got to know him. Ray was always a quiet child, but he became more so after the event that was to alter the lives of the whole family in multiple ways forever. Rene, the second-oldest of his sisters, had been in an unhappy marriage and living in Canada with her husband, but moved back to the UK shortly before Ray's thirteenth birthday. Ray had been unsuccessfully pestering his parents to buy him a guitar for nearly a year, since Elvis had started to become popular, and on the night before his birthday, Rene gave him one as his birthday present. She then went out to a dance hall. She did this even though she'd had rheumatic fever as a child, which had given her a heart condition. The doctors had advised her to avoid all forms of exercise, but she loved dancing too much to give it up for anyone. She died that night, aged only thirty-one, and the last time Ray ever saw his sister was when she was giving him his guitar. For the next year, Ray was even more introverted than normal, to the point that he ended up actually seeing a child psychologist, which for a working-class child in the 1950s was something that was as far from the normal experience as it's possible to imagine. But even more than that, he became convinced that he was intended by fate to play the guitar. He started playing seriously, not just the pop songs of the time, though there were plenty of those, but also trying to emulate Chet Atkins. Pete Quaife would later recall that when they first played guitar together at school, while Quaife could do a passable imitation of Hank Marvin playing "Apache", Davies could do a note-perfect rendition of Atkins' version of "Malaguena": [Excerpt: Chet Atkins, "Malaguena"] Ray's newfound obsession with music also drew him closer to his younger brother, though there was something of a cynical motive in this closeness. Both boys got pocket money from their parents, but Dave looked up to his older brother and valued his opinion, so if Ray told him which were the good new records, Dave would go out and buy them -- and then Ray could play them, and spend his own money on other things. And it wasn't just pop music that the two of them were getting into, either. A defining moment of inspiration for both brothers came when a sixteen-minute documentary about Big Bill Broonzy's tour of Belgium, Low Light and Blue Smoke, was shown on the TV: [Excerpt: Big Bill Broonzy, "When Did You Leave Heaven?"] Like Broonzy's earlier appearances on Six-Five Special, that film had a big impact on a lot of British musicians -- you'll see clips from it both in the Beatles Anthology and in a 1980s South Bank Show documentary on Eric Clapton -- but it particularly affected Ray Davies for two reasons. The first was that Ray, more than most people of his generation, respected the older generation's taste in music, and his father approved of Broonzy, saying he sounded like a real man, not like those high-voiced girly-sounding pop singers. The other reason was that Broonzy's performance sounded authentic to him. He said later that he thought that Broonzy sounded like him -- even though Broonzy was Black and American, he sounded *working class* (and unlike many of his contemporaries, Ray Davies did have a working-class background, rather than being comparatively privileged like say John Lennon or Mick Jagger were). Soon Ray and Dave were playing together as a duo, while Ray was also performing with two other kids from school, Pete Quaife and John Start, as a trio. Ray brought them all together, and they became the Ray Davies Quartet -- though sometimes, if Pete or Dave rather than Ray got them the booking, they would be the Pete Quaife Quartet or the Dave Davies Quartet. The group mostly performed instrumentals, with Dave particularly enjoying playing "No Trespassing" by the Ventures: [Excerpt: The Ventures, "No Trespassing"] Both Ray and Dave would sing sometimes, with Ray taking mellower, rockabilly, songs, while Dave would sing Little Richard and Lightnin' Hopkins material, but at first they thought they needed a lead singer. They tried with a few different people, including another pupil from the school they all went to who sang with them at a couple of gigs, but John Start's mother thought the young lad's raspy voice was so awful she wouldn't let them use her house to rehearse, and Ray didn't like having another big ego in the group, so Rod Stewart soon went back to the Moontrekkers and left them with no lead singer. But that was far from the worst problem the Davies brothers had. When Dave was fifteen, he got his sixteen-year-old girlfriend Susan pregnant. The two were very much in love, and wanted to get married, but both children's parents were horrified at the idea, and so each set of parents told their child that the other had dumped them and never wanted to see them again. Both believed what they were told, and Dave didn't see his daughter for thirty years. The trauma of this separation permanently changed him, and you can find echoes of it throughout Dave's songwriting in the sixties. Ray and Pete, after leaving school, went on to Hornsey Art School, where coincidentally Rod Stewart had also moved on to the year before, though Stewart had dropped out after a few weeks after discovering he was colour-blind. Quaife also dropped out of art school relatively soon after enrolling -- he was kicked out for "Teddy Boy behaviour", but his main problem was that he didn't feel comfortable as a working-class lad mixing with Bohemian middle-class people. Ray, on the other hand, was in his element. While Ray grew up on a council estate and was thoroughly working-class, he had always had a tendency to want to climb the social ladder, and he was delighted to be surrounded by people who were interested in art and music, though his particular love at the time was the cinema, and he would regularly go to the college film society's showings of films by people like Bergman, Kurosawa and Truffaut, or silent films by Eisenstein or Griffith, though he would complain about having to pay a whole shilling for entry. Davies also starred in some now-lost experimental films made by the person who ran the film society, and also started branching out into playing with other people. After a gig at the art college, where Alexis Korner had been supported by the young Rolling Stones, Davies went up to Korner and asked him for advice about moving on in the music world. Korner recommended he go and see Giorgio Gomelsky, the promoter and manager who had put on most of the Stones' early gigs, and Gomelsky got Davies an audition with a group called the Dave Hunt Rhythm and Blues Band. Tom McGuinness had been offered a job with them before he went on to Manfred Mann, but McGuinness thought that the Dave Hunt band were too close to trad for his tastes. Davies, on the other hand, was perfectly happy playing trad along with the blues, and for a while it looked like the Ray Davies Quartet were over, as Ray was getting more prestigious gigs with the Dave Hunt group. Ray would later recall that the Dave Hunt band's repertoire included things like the old Meade Lux Lewis boogie piece "Honky Tonk Train Blues", which they would play in the style of Bob Crosby's Bobcats: [Excerpt: Bob Crosby and the Bobcats, "Honky Tonk Train Blues"] But while the group were extremely good musicians -- their soprano saxophone player, Lol Coxhill, would later become one of the most respected sax players in Britain and was a big part of the Canterbury Scene in the seventies -- Ray eventually decided to throw his lot in with his brother. While Ray had been off learning from these jazz musicians, Dave, Pete, and John had continued rehearsing together, and occasionally performing whenever Ray was free to join them. The group had by now renamed themselves the Ramrods, after a track by Duane Eddy, who was the first rock and roll musician Ray and Dave had see live: [Excerpt: Duane Eddy, "Ramrod"] Dave had become a far more accomplished guitarist, now outshining his brother, and was also getting more into the London R&B scene. Ray later remembered that the thing that swung it for him was when Dave played him a record by Cyril Davies, "Country Line Special", which he thought of as a bridge between the kind of music he was playing with Dave Hunt and the kind of music he wanted to be playing, which he described as "Big Bill Broonzy with drums": [Excerpt: Cyril Davies, "Country Line Special"] That was, coincidentally, the first recording to feature the piano player Nicky Hopkins, who would later play a big part in the music Ray, Dave, and Pete would make. But not John. Shortly after Ray got serious about the Ramrods -- who soon changed their name again to the Boll Weevils -- John Start decided it was time to grow up, get serious, give up the drums, and become a quantity surveyor. There were several factors in this decision, but a big one was that he simply didn't like Ray Davies, who he viewed as an unpleasant, troubled, person. Start was soon replaced by another drummer, Mickey Willett, and it was Willett who provided the connection that would change everything for the group. Willett was an experienced musician, who had contacts in the business, and so when a rich dilettante wannabe pop star named Robert Wace and his best friend and "manager" Grenville Collins were looking for a backing band for Wace, one of Willett's friends in the music business pointed them in the direction of the Boll Weevils. Robert Wace offered the Boll Weevils a deal -- he could get them lucrative gigs playing at society functions for his rich friends, if they would allow him to do a couple of songs with them in the middle of the show. Wace even got Brian Epstein to come along and see a Boll Weevils rehearsal, but it wasn't exactly a success -- Mickey Willett had gone on holiday to Manchester that week, and the group were drummerless. Epstein said he was vaguely interested in signing Ray as a solo artist, but didn't want the group, and nothing further came of it. This is particularly odd because at the time Ray wasn't singing any solo leads. Robert Wace would sing his solo spot, Dave would take the lead vocals on most of the upbeat rockers, and Ray and Dave would sing unison leads on everything else. The group were soon favourites on the circuit of society balls, where their only real competition was Mike d'Abo's band A Band of Angels -- d'Abo had been to Harrow, and so was part of the upper class society in a way that the Boll Weevils weren't. However, the first time they tried to play a gig in front of an audience that weren't already friends of Wace, he was booed off stage. It became clear that there was no future for Robert Wace as a pop star, but there was a future for the Boll Weevils. They came to a deal -- Wace and Collins would manage the group, Collins would put in half his wages from his job as a stockbroker, and Wace and Collins would get fifty percent of the group's earnings. Wace and Collins funded the group recording a demo. They recorded two songs, the old Coasters song "I'm A Hog For You Baby": [Excerpt: The Boll Weevils, "I'm A Hog For You Baby"] and a Merseybeat pastiche written by Dave Davies, "I Believed You": [Excerpt: The Ravens, "I Believed You"] It shows how up in the air everything was that those tracks have since been released under two names -- at some point around the time of the recording session, the Boll Weevils changed their name yet again, to The Ravens, naming themselves after the recent film, starring Vincent Price, based on the Edgar Allen Poe poem. This lineup of the Ravens wasn't to last too long, though. Mickey Willett started to get suspicious about what was happening to all of the money, and became essentially the group's self-appointed shop steward, getting into constant rows with the management. Willett soon found himself edged out of the group by Wace and Collins, and the Ravens continued with a temporary drummer until they could find a permanent replacement. Wace and Collins started to realise that neither of them knew much about the music business, though, and so they turned elsewhere for help with managing the group. The person they turned to was Larry Page. This is not the Larry Page who would later co-found Google, rather he was someone who had had a brief career as an attempt at producing a British teen idol under the name "Larry Page, the Teenage Rage" -- a career that was somewhat sabotaged by his inability to sing, and by his producer's insistence that it would be a good idea to record this, as the original was so bad it would never be a hit in the UK: [Excerpt: Larry Page, "That'll be the Day"] After his career in music had come to an ignominious end, Page had briefly tried working in other fields, before going into management. He'd teamed up with Eddie Kassner, an Austrian songwriter who had written for Vera Lynn before going into publishing. Kassner had had the unbelievable fortune to buy the publishing rights for "Rock Around the Clock" for two hundred and fifty dollars, and had become incredibly rich, with offices in both London and New York. Page and Kassner had entered into a complicated business arrangement by which Kassner got a percentage of Page's management income, Kassner would give Page's acts songs, and any song Page's acts wrote would be published by Kassner. Kassner and Page had a third partner in their complicated arrangements -- independent producer Shel Talmy. Talmy had started out as an engineer in Los Angeles, and had come over to the UK for a few weeks in 1962 on holiday, and thought that while he was there he might as well see if he could get some work. Talmy was a good friend of Nik Venet, and Venet gave him a stack of acetates of recent Capitol records that he'd produced, and told him that he could pretend to have produced them if it got him work. Talmy took an acetate of "Surfin' Safari" by the Beach Boys, and one of "Music in the Air" by Lou Rawls, into Dick Rowe's office and told Rowe he had produced them. Sources differ over whether Rowe actually believed him, or if he just wanted anyone who had any experience of American recording studio techniques, but either way Rowe hired him to produce records for Decca as an independent contractor, and Talmy started producing hits like "Charmaine" by the Bachelors: [Excerpt: The Bachelors, "Charmaine"] Page, Kassner, Talmy, and Rowe all worked hand in glove with each other, with Page managing artists, Kassner publishing the songs they recorded, Talmy producing them and Rowe signing them to his record label. And so by contacting Page, Wace and Collins were getting in touch with a team that could pretty much guarantee the Ravens a record deal. They cut Page in on the management, signed Ray and Dave as songwriters for Kassner, and got Talmy to agree to produce the group. The only fly in the ointment was that Rowe, showing the same judgement he had shown over the Beatles, turned down the opportunity to sign the Ravens to Decca. They had already been turned down by EMI, and Phillips also turned them down, which meant that by default they ended up recording for Pye records, the same label as the Searchers. Around the time they signed to Pye, they also changed their name yet again, this time to the name that they would keep for the rest of their careers. In the wake of the Profumo sex scandal, and the rumours that went around as a result of it, including that a Cabinet minister had attended orgies as a slave with a sign round his neck saying to whip him if he displeased the guests, there started to be a public acknowledgement of the concept of BDSM, and "kinky" had become the buzzword of the day, with the fashionable boots worn by the leather-clad Honor Blackman in the TV show The Avengers being publicised as "kinky boots". Blackman and her co-star Patrick MacNee even put out a novelty single, "Kinky Boots", in February 1964: [Excerpt: Patrick MacNee and Honor Blackman, "Kinky Boots"] Page decided that this was too good an opportunity to miss, and that especially given the camp demeanour of both Dave Davies and Pete Quaife it would make sense to call the group "the Kinks", as a name that would generate plenty of outrage but was still just about broadcastable. None of the group liked the name, but they all went along with it, and so Ray, Dave, and Pete were now The Kinks. The ever-increasing team of people around them increased by one more when a promoter and booking agent got involved. Arthur Howes was chosen to be in charge of the newly-named Kinks' bookings primarily because he booked all the Beatles' gigs, and Wade and Collins wanted as much of the Beatles' reflected glory as they could get. Howes started booking the group in for major performances, and Ray finally quit art school -- though he still didn't think that he was going to have a huge amount of success as a pop star. He did, though, think that if he was lucky he could make enough money from six months of being a full time pop musician that he could move to Spain and take guitar lessons from Segovia. Pye had signed the Kinks to a three-single deal, and Arthur Howes was the one who suggested what became their first single. Howes was in Paris with the Beatles in January 1964, and he noticed that one of the songs that was getting the biggest reaction was their cover version of Little Richard's "Long Tall Sally", and that they hadn't yet recorded the song. He phoned Page from Paris, at enormous expense, and told him to get the Kinks into the studio and record the song straight away, because it was bound to be a hit for someone. The group worked up a version with Ray on lead, and recorded it three days later: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Long Tall Sally"] Ray later recollected that someone at the studio had said to him "Congratulations, you just made a flop", and they were correct -- the Kinks' version had none of the power of Little Richard's original or of the Beatles' version, and only scraped its way to number forty-two on the charts. As they had no permanent drummer, for that record, and for the next few they made, the Kinks were augmented by Bobby Graham, who had played for Joe Meek as one of Mike Berry and the Outlaws before becoming one of the two main on-call session drummers in the UK, along with fellow Meek alumnus Clem Cattini. Graham is now best known for having done all the drumming credited to Dave Clark on records by the Dave Clark Five such as "Bits and Pieces": [Excerpt: The Dave Clark Five, "Bits and Pieces"] It's also been reported by various people, notably Shel Talmy, that the session guitarist Jimmy Page played Ray Davies' rhythm parts for him on most of the group's early recordings, although other sources dispute that, including Ray himself who insists that he played the parts. What's definitely not in doubt is that Dave Davies played all the lead guitar. However, the group needed a full-time drummer. Dave Davies wanted to get his friend Viv Prince, the drummer of the Pretty Things, into the group, but when Prince wasn't available they turned instead to Mick Avory, who they found through an ad in the Melody Maker. Avory had actually been a member of the Rolling Stones for a very brief period, but had decided he didn't want to be a full-time drummer, and had quit before they got Charlie Watts in. Avory was chosen by Ray and the management team, and Dave Davies took an instant dislike to him, partly because Ray liked Avory, but accepted that he was the best drummer available. Avory wouldn't play on the next few records -- Talmy liked to use musicians he knew, and Avory was a bit of an unknown quantity -- but he was available for the group's first big tour, playing on the bottom of the bill with the Dave Clark Five and the Hollies further up, and their first TV appearance, on Ready Steady Go. That tour saw the group getting a little bit of notice, but mostly being dismissed as being a clone of the Rolling Stones, because like the Stones they were relying on the same set of R&B standards that all the London R&B bands played, and the Stones were the most obvious point of reference for that kind of music for most people. Arthur Howes eventually sent someone up to work on the Kinks' stage act with them, and to get them into a more showbiz shape, but the person in question didn't get very far before Graham Nash of the Hollies ordered him to leave the Kinks alone, saying they were "OK as they are". Meanwhile, Larry Page was working with both Ray and Dave as potential songwriters, and using their songs for other acts in the Page/Kassner/Talmy stable of artists. With Talmy producing, Shel Naylor recorded Dave's "One Fine Day", a song which its writer dismisses as a throwaway but is actually quite catchy: [Excerpt: Shel Naylor, "One Fine Day"] And Talmy also recorded a girl group called The Orchids, singing Ray's "I've Got That Feeling": [Excerpt: The Orchids, "I've Got That Feeling"] Page also co-wrote a couple of instrumentals with Ray, who was the brother who was more eager to learn the craft of songwriting -- at this point, Dave seemed to find it something of a chore. Page saw it as his job at this point to teach the brothers how to write -- he had a whole set of ideas about what made for a hit song, and chief among them was that it had to make a connection between the singer and the audience. He told the brothers that they needed to write songs with the words "I", "Me", and "You" in the title, and repeat those words as much as possible. This was something that Ray did on the song that became the group's next single, "You Still Want Me", a Merseybeat pastiche that didn't even do as well as the group's first record: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "You Still Want Me"] The group were now in trouble. They'd had two flop singles in a row, on a three-single contract. It seemed entirely likely that the label would drop them after the next single. Luckily for them, they had a song that they knew was a winner. Ray had come up with the basic melody for "You Really Got Me" many years earlier. The song had gone through many changes over the years, and had apparently started off as a jazz piano piece inspired by Gerry Mulligan's performance in the classic documentary Jazz On A Summer's Day: [Excerpt: Gerry Mulligan, "As Catch Can"] From there it had apparently mutated first into a Chet Atkins style guitar instrumental and then into a piece in the style of Mose Allison, the jazz and R&B singer who was a huge influence on the more Mod end of the British R&B scene with records like "Parchman Farm": [Excerpt: Mose Allison, "Parchman Farm"] Through all of this, the basic melody had remained the same, as had the two chords that underpinned the whole thing. But the song's final form was shaped to a large extent by the advice of Larry Page. As well as the "you" and "me" based lyrics, Page had also advised Ray that as he wasn't a great singer at this point, what the group needed to do was to concentrate on riffs. In particular, he'd pointed Ray to "Louie Louie" by the Kingsmen, which had recently been released in the UK on Pye, the same label the Kinks were signed to, and told him to do something like that: [Excerpt: The Kingsmen, "Louie Louie"] Ray was instantly inspired by "Louie Louie", which the Kinks quickly added to their own set, and he retooled his old melody in its image, coming up with a riff to go under it. It seems also to have been Page who made one minor change to the lyric of the song. Where Ray had started the song with the line "Yeah, you really got me going," Page suggested that instead he sing "Girl, you really got me going", partly to increase that sense of connection with the audience again, partly to add a tiny bit of variety to the repetitive lyrics, but also partly because the group's sexuality was already coming in for some question -- Dave Davies is bisexual, and Ray has always been keen to play around with notions of gender and sexuality. Starting with the word "girl" might help reassure people about that somewhat. But the final touch that turned it into one of the great classics came from Dave, rather than Ray. Dave had been frustrated with the sound he was getting from his amplifier, and had slashed the cone with a knife. He then fed the sound from that slashed amp through his new, larger, amp, to get a distorted, fuzzy, sound which was almost unknown in Britain at the time. We've heard examples of fuzz guitar before in this series, of course -- on "Rocket '88", and on some of the Johnny Burnette Rock 'n' Roll Trio records, and most recently last week on Ellie Greenwich's demo of "Do-Wah-Diddy", but those had been odd one-offs. Dave Davies' reinvention of the sound seems to be the point where it becomes a standard part of the rock guitar toolbox -- but it's very rarely been done as well as it was on "You Really Got Me": [Excerpt: The Kinks, "You Really Got Me"] But that introduction, and the classic record that followed, nearly never happened. The original recording of "You Really Got Me" has been lost, but it was apparently very different. Ray and Dave Davies have said that Shel Talmy overproduced it, turning it into a Phil Spector soundalike, and drenched the whole thing with echo. Talmy, for his part, says that that's not the case -- that the main difference was that the song was taken much slower, and that it was a very different but equally valid take on the song. Ray, in particular, was devastated by the result, and didn't want it released. Pye were insistent -- they had a contract, and they were going to put this record out whatever the performers said. But luckily the group's management had faith in their singer's vision. Larry Page insisted that as he and Kassner owned the publishing, the record couldn't come out in the state it was in, and Robert Wace paid for a new recording session out of his own pocket. The group, plus Bobby Graham, piano player Arthur Greenslade, and Talmy, went back into the studio. The first take of the new session was a dud, and Ray worried that Talmy would end the session then and there, but he allowed them to do a second take. And that second take was extraordinary. Going into the solo, Ray yelled "Oh no!" with excitement, looking over at Dave, and became convinced that he'd distracted Dave at the crucial moment. Instead, he delivered one of the defining solos of the rock genre: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "You Really Got Me"] "You Really Got Me" was released on the fourth of August 1964, and became a smash hit, reaching number one in September. It was also released in the US, and made the top ten over there. The Kinks were suddenly huge, and Pye Records quickly exercised their option -- so quickly, that the group needed to get an album recorded by the end of August. The resulting album is, as one might expect, a patchy affair, made up mostly of poor R&B covers, but there were some interesting moments, and one song from the album in particular, "Stop Your Sobbing", showed a giant leap forward in Ray's songwriting: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Stop Your Sobbing"] There may be a reason for that. "Stop Your Sobbing" features backing vocals by someone new to the Kinks' circle, Ray's new girlfriend Rasa Didzpetris, who would become a regular feature on the group's records for the next decade. And when we next look at the Kinks, we'll see some of the influence she had on the group.
Episode one hundred and nineteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “You Really Got Me” by the Kinks, and the song that first took distorted guitar to number one. 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 “G.T.O.” by Ronny and the Daytonas. 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’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I’ve used several resources for this and future episodes on the Kinks, most notably Ray Davies: A Complicated Life by Johnny Rogan and You Really Got Me by Nick Hasted. X-Ray by Ray Davies is a remarkable autobiography with a framing story set in a dystopian science-fiction future, while Kink by Dave Davies is more revealing but less well-written. The Anthology 1964-1971 is a great box set that covers the Kinks’ Pye years, which overlap almost exactly with their period of greatest creativity. For those who don’t want a full box set, this two-CD set covers all the big hits. 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 has often been called “the first heavy metal record”, one that introduced records dominated by heavy, distorted, guitar riffs to the top of the UK charts. We’re going to look at the first singles by a group who would become second only to the Beatles among British groups in terms of the creativity of their recordings during the sixties, but who were always sabotaged by a record label more interested in short-term chart success than in artist development. We’re going to look at the Kinks, and at “You Really Got Me”: [Excerpt: The Kinks, “You Really Got Me”] The story of the Kinks starts with two brothers, Ray and Dave Davies, the seventh and eighth children of a family that had previously had six girls in a row, most of them much older — their oldest sister was twenty when Ray was born, and Dave was three years younger than Ray. The two brothers always had a difficult relationship, partly because of their diametrically opposed personalities. Ray was introverted, thoughtful, and notoriously selfish, while Dave was outgoing in the extreme, but also had an aggressive side to his nature. Ray, as someone who had previously been the youngest child and only boy, resented his younger brother coming along and taking the attention he saw as his by right, while Dave always looked up to his older brother but never really got to know him. Ray was always a quiet child, but he became more so after the event that was to alter the lives of the whole family in multiple ways forever. Rene, the second-oldest of his sisters, had been in an unhappy marriage and living in Canada with her husband, but moved back to the UK shortly before Ray’s thirteenth birthday. Ray had been unsuccessfully pestering his parents to buy him a guitar for nearly a year, since Elvis had started to become popular, and on the night before his birthday, Rene gave him one as his birthday present. She then went out to a dance hall. She did this even though she’d had rheumatic fever as a child, which had given her a heart condition. The doctors had advised her to avoid all forms of exercise, but she loved dancing too much to give it up for anyone. She died that night, aged only thirty-one, and the last time Ray ever saw his sister was when she was giving him his guitar. For the next year, Ray was even more introverted than normal, to the point that he ended up actually seeing a child psychologist, which for a working-class child in the 1950s was something that was as far from the normal experience as it’s possible to imagine. But even more than that, he became convinced that he was intended by fate to play the guitar. He started playing seriously, not just the pop songs of the time, though there were plenty of those, but also trying to emulate Chet Atkins. Pete Quaife would later recall that when they first played guitar together at school, while Quaife could do a passable imitation of Hank Marvin playing “Apache”, Davies could do a note-perfect rendition of Atkins’ version of “Malaguena”: [Excerpt: Chet Atkins, “Malaguena”] Ray’s newfound obsession with music also drew him closer to his younger brother, though there was something of a cynical motive in this closeness. Both boys got pocket money from their parents, but Dave looked up to his older brother and valued his opinion, so if Ray told him which were the good new records, Dave would go out and buy them — and then Ray could play them, and spend his own money on other things. And it wasn’t just pop music that the two of them were getting into, either. A defining moment of inspiration for both brothers came when a sixteen-minute documentary about Big Bill Broonzy’s tour of Belgium, Low Light and Blue Smoke, was shown on the TV: [Excerpt: Big Bill Broonzy, “When Did You Leave Heaven?”] Like Broonzy’s earlier appearances on Six-Five Special, that film had a big impact on a lot of British musicians — you’ll see clips from it both in the Beatles Anthology and in a 1980s South Bank Show documentary on Eric Clapton — but it particularly affected Ray Davies for two reasons. The first was that Ray, more than most people of his generation, respected the older generation’s taste in music, and his father approved of Broonzy, saying he sounded like a real man, not like those high-voiced girly-sounding pop singers. The other reason was that Broonzy’s performance sounded authentic to him. He said later that he thought that Broonzy sounded like him — even though Broonzy was Black and American, he sounded *working class* (and unlike many of his contemporaries, Ray Davies did have a working-class background, rather than being comparatively privileged like say John Lennon or Mick Jagger were). Soon Ray and Dave were playing together as a duo, while Ray was also performing with two other kids from school, Pete Quaife and John Start, as a trio. Ray brought them all together, and they became the Ray Davies Quartet — though sometimes, if Pete or Dave rather than Ray got them the booking, they would be the Pete Quaife Quartet or the Dave Davies Quartet. The group mostly performed instrumentals, with Dave particularly enjoying playing “No Trespassing” by the Ventures: [Excerpt: The Ventures, “No Trespassing”] Both Ray and Dave would sing sometimes, with Ray taking mellower, rockabilly, songs, while Dave would sing Little Richard and Lightnin’ Hopkins material, but at first they thought they needed a lead singer. They tried with a few different people, including another pupil from the school they all went to who sang with them at a couple of gigs, but John Start’s mother thought the young lad’s raspy voice was so awful she wouldn’t let them use her house to rehearse, and Ray didn’t like having another big ego in the group, so Rod Stewart soon went back to the Moontrekkers and left them with no lead singer. But that was far from the worst problem the Davies brothers had. When Dave was fifteen, he got his sixteen-year-old girlfriend Susan pregnant. The two were very much in love, and wanted to get married, but both children’s parents were horrified at the idea, and so each set of parents told their child that the other had dumped them and never wanted to see them again. Both believed what they were told, and Dave didn’t see his daughter for thirty years. The trauma of this separation permanently changed him, and you can find echoes of it throughout Dave’s songwriting in the sixties. Ray and Pete, after leaving school, went on to Hornsey Art School, where coincidentally Rod Stewart had also moved on to the year before, though Stewart had dropped out after a few weeks after discovering he was colour-blind. Quaife also dropped out of art school relatively soon after enrolling — he was kicked out for “Teddy Boy behaviour”, but his main problem was that he didn’t feel comfortable as a working-class lad mixing with Bohemian middle-class people. Ray, on the other hand, was in his element. While Ray grew up on a council estate and was thoroughly working-class, he had always had a tendency to want to climb the social ladder, and he was delighted to be surrounded by people who were interested in art and music, though his particular love at the time was the cinema, and he would regularly go to the college film society’s showings of films by people like Bergman, Kurosawa and Truffaut, or silent films by Eisenstein or Griffith, though he would complain about having to pay a whole shilling for entry. Davies also starred in some now-lost experimental films made by the person who ran the film society, and also started branching out into playing with other people. After a gig at the art college, where Alexis Korner had been supported by the young Rolling Stones, Davies went up to Korner and asked him for advice about moving on in the music world. Korner recommended he go and see Giorgio Gomelsky, the promoter and manager who had put on most of the Stones’ early gigs, and Gomelsky got Davies an audition with a group called the Dave Hunt Rhythm and Blues Band. Tom McGuinness had been offered a job with them before he went on to Manfred Mann, but McGuinness thought that the Dave Hunt band were too close to trad for his tastes. Davies, on the other hand, was perfectly happy playing trad along with the blues, and for a while it looked like the Ray Davies Quartet were over, as Ray was getting more prestigious gigs with the Dave Hunt group. Ray would later recall that the Dave Hunt band’s repertoire included things like the old Meade Lux Lewis boogie piece “Honky Tonk Train Blues”, which they would play in the style of Bob Crosby’s Bobcats: [Excerpt: Bob Crosby and the Bobcats, “Honky Tonk Train Blues”] But while the group were extremely good musicians — their soprano saxophone player, Lol Coxhill, would later become one of the most respected sax players in Britain and was a big part of the Canterbury Scene in the seventies — Ray eventually decided to throw his lot in with his brother. While Ray had been off learning from these jazz musicians, Dave, Pete, and John had continued rehearsing together, and occasionally performing whenever Ray was free to join them. The group had by now renamed themselves the Ramrods, after a track by Duane Eddy, who was the first rock and roll musician Ray and Dave had see live: [Excerpt: Duane Eddy, “Ramrod”] Dave had become a far more accomplished guitarist, now outshining his brother, and was also getting more into the London R&B scene. Ray later remembered that the thing that swung it for him was when Dave played him a record by Cyril Davies, “Country Line Special”, which he thought of as a bridge between the kind of music he was playing with Dave Hunt and the kind of music he wanted to be playing, which he described as “Big Bill Broonzy with drums”: [Excerpt: Cyril Davies, “Country Line Special”] That was, coincidentally, the first recording to feature the piano player Nicky Hopkins, who would later play a big part in the music Ray, Dave, and Pete would make. But not John. Shortly after Ray got serious about the Ramrods — who soon changed their name again to the Boll Weevils — John Start decided it was time to grow up, get serious, give up the drums, and become a quantity surveyor. There were several factors in this decision, but a big one was that he simply didn’t like Ray Davies, who he viewed as an unpleasant, troubled, person. Start was soon replaced by another drummer, Mickey Willett, and it was Willett who provided the connection that would change everything for the group. Willett was an experienced musician, who had contacts in the business, and so when a rich dilettante wannabe pop star named Robert Wace and his best friend and “manager” Grenville Collins were looking for a backing band for Wace, one of Willett’s friends in the music business pointed them in the direction of the Boll Weevils. Robert Wace offered the Boll Weevils a deal — he could get them lucrative gigs playing at society functions for his rich friends, if they would allow him to do a couple of songs with them in the middle of the show. Wace even got Brian Epstein to come along and see a Boll Weevils rehearsal, but it wasn’t exactly a success — Mickey Willett had gone on holiday to Manchester that week, and the group were drummerless. Epstein said he was vaguely interested in signing Ray as a solo artist, but didn’t want the group, and nothing further came of it. This is particularly odd because at the time Ray wasn’t singing any solo leads. Robert Wace would sing his solo spot, Dave would take the lead vocals on most of the upbeat rockers, and Ray and Dave would sing unison leads on everything else. The group were soon favourites on the circuit of society balls, where their only real competition was Mike d’Abo’s band A Band of Angels — d’Abo had been to Harrow, and so was part of the upper class society in a way that the Boll Weevils weren’t. However, the first time they tried to play a gig in front of an audience that weren’t already friends of Wace, he was booed off stage. It became clear that there was no future for Robert Wace as a pop star, but there was a future for the Boll Weevils. They came to a deal — Wace and Collins would manage the group, Collins would put in half his wages from his job as a stockbroker, and Wace and Collins would get fifty percent of the group’s earnings. Wace and Collins funded the group recording a demo. They recorded two songs, the old Coasters song “I’m A Hog For You Baby”: [Excerpt: The Boll Weevils, “I’m A Hog For You Baby”] and a Merseybeat pastiche written by Dave Davies, “I Believed You”: [Excerpt: The Ravens, “I Believed You”] It shows how up in the air everything was that those tracks have since been released under two names — at some point around the time of the recording session, the Boll Weevils changed their name yet again, to The Ravens, naming themselves after the recent film, starring Vincent Price, based on the Edgar Allen Poe poem. This lineup of the Ravens wasn’t to last too long, though. Mickey Willett started to get suspicious about what was happening to all of the money, and became essentially the group’s self-appointed shop steward, getting into constant rows with the management. Willett soon found himself edged out of the group by Wace and Collins, and the Ravens continued with a temporary drummer until they could find a permanent replacement. Wace and Collins started to realise that neither of them knew much about the music business, though, and so they turned elsewhere for help with managing the group. The person they turned to was Larry Page. This is not the Larry Page who would later co-found Google, rather he was someone who had had a brief career as an attempt at producing a British teen idol under the name “Larry Page, the Teenage Rage” — a career that was somewhat sabotaged by his inability to sing, and by his producer’s insistence that it would be a good idea to record this, as the original was so bad it would never be a hit in the UK: [Excerpt: Larry Page, “That’ll be the Day”] After his career in music had come to an ignominious end, Page had briefly tried working in other fields, before going into management. He’d teamed up with Eddie Kassner, an Austrian songwriter who had written for Vera Lynn before going into publishing. Kassner had had the unbelievable fortune to buy the publishing rights for “Rock Around the Clock” for two hundred and fifty dollars, and had become incredibly rich, with offices in both London and New York. Page and Kassner had entered into a complicated business arrangement by which Kassner got a percentage of Page’s management income, Kassner would give Page’s acts songs, and any song Page’s acts wrote would be published by Kassner. Kassner and Page had a third partner in their complicated arrangements — independent producer Shel Talmy. Talmy had started out as an engineer in Los Angeles, and had come over to the UK for a few weeks in 1962 on holiday, and thought that while he was there he might as well see if he could get some work. Talmy was a good friend of Nik Venet, and Venet gave him a stack of acetates of recent Capitol records that he’d produced, and told him that he could pretend to have produced them if it got him work. Talmy took an acetate of “Surfin’ Safari” by the Beach Boys, and one of “Music in the Air” by Lou Rawls, into Dick Rowe’s office and told Rowe he had produced them. Sources differ over whether Rowe actually believed him, or if he just wanted anyone who had any experience of American recording studio techniques, but either way Rowe hired him to produce records for Decca as an independent contractor, and Talmy started producing hits like “Charmaine” by the Bachelors: [Excerpt: The Bachelors, “Charmaine”] Page, Kassner, Talmy, and Rowe all worked hand in glove with each other, with Page managing artists, Kassner publishing the songs they recorded, Talmy producing them and Rowe signing them to his record label. And so by contacting Page, Wace and Collins were getting in touch with a team that could pretty much guarantee the Ravens a record deal. They cut Page in on the management, signed Ray and Dave as songwriters for Kassner, and got Talmy to agree to produce the group. The only fly in the ointment was that Rowe, showing the same judgement he had shown over the Beatles, turned down the opportunity to sign the Ravens to Decca. They had already been turned down by EMI, and Phillips also turned them down, which meant that by default they ended up recording for Pye records, the same label as the Searchers. Around the time they signed to Pye, they also changed their name yet again, this time to the name that they would keep for the rest of their careers. In the wake of the Profumo sex scandal, and the rumours that went around as a result of it, including that a Cabinet minister had attended orgies as a slave with a sign round his neck saying to whip him if he displeased the guests, there started to be a public acknowledgement of the concept of BDSM, and “kinky” had become the buzzword of the day, with the fashionable boots worn by the leather-clad Honor Blackman in the TV show The Avengers being publicised as “kinky boots”. Blackman and her co-star Patrick MacNee even put out a novelty single, “Kinky Boots”, in February 1964: [Excerpt: Patrick MacNee and Honor Blackman, “Kinky Boots”] Page decided that this was too good an opportunity to miss, and that especially given the camp demeanour of both Dave Davies and Pete Quaife it would make sense to call the group “the Kinks”, as a name that would generate plenty of outrage but was still just about broadcastable. None of the group liked the name, but they all went along with it, and so Ray, Dave, and Pete were now The Kinks. The ever-increasing team of people around them increased by one more when a promoter and booking agent got involved. Arthur Howes was chosen to be in charge of the newly-named Kinks’ bookings primarily because he booked all the Beatles’ gigs, and Wade and Collins wanted as much of the Beatles’ reflected glory as they could get. Howes started booking the group in for major performances, and Ray finally quit art school — though he still didn’t think that he was going to have a huge amount of success as a pop star. He did, though, think that if he was lucky he could make enough money from six months of being a full time pop musician that he could move to Spain and take guitar lessons from Segovia. Pye had signed the Kinks to a three-single deal, and Arthur Howes was the one who suggested what became their first single. Howes was in Paris with the Beatles in January 1964, and he noticed that one of the songs that was getting the biggest reaction was their cover version of Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally”, and that they hadn’t yet recorded the song. He phoned Page from Paris, at enormous expense, and told him to get the Kinks into the studio and record the song straight away, because it was bound to be a hit for someone. The group worked up a version with Ray on lead, and recorded it three days later: [Excerpt: The Kinks, “Long Tall Sally”] Ray later recollected that someone at the studio had said to him “Congratulations, you just made a flop”, and they were correct — the Kinks’ version had none of the power of Little Richard’s original or of the Beatles’ version, and only scraped its way to number forty-two on the charts. As they had no permanent drummer, for that record, and for the next few they made, the Kinks were augmented by Bobby Graham, who had played for Joe Meek as one of Mike Berry and the Outlaws before becoming one of the two main on-call session drummers in the UK, along with fellow Meek alumnus Clem Cattini. Graham is now best known for having done all the drumming credited to Dave Clark on records by the Dave Clark Five such as “Bits and Pieces”: [Excerpt: The Dave Clark Five, “Bits and Pieces”] It’s also been reported by various people, notably Shel Talmy, that the session guitarist Jimmy Page played Ray Davies’ rhythm parts for him on most of the group’s early recordings, although other sources dispute that, including Ray himself who insists that he played the parts. What’s definitely not in doubt is that Dave Davies played all the lead guitar. However, the group needed a full-time drummer. Dave Davies wanted to get his friend Viv Prince, the drummer of the Pretty Things, into the group, but when Prince wasn’t available they turned instead to Mick Avory, who they found through an ad in the Melody Maker. Avory had actually been a member of the Rolling Stones for a very brief period, but had decided he didn’t want to be a full-time drummer, and had quit before they got Charlie Watts in. Avory was chosen by Ray and the management team, and Dave Davies took an instant dislike to him, partly because Ray liked Avory, but accepted that he was the best drummer available. Avory wouldn’t play on the next few records — Talmy liked to use musicians he knew, and Avory was a bit of an unknown quantity — but he was available for the group’s first big tour, playing on the bottom of the bill with the Dave Clark Five and the Hollies further up, and their first TV appearance, on Ready Steady Go. That tour saw the group getting a little bit of notice, but mostly being dismissed as being a clone of the Rolling Stones, because like the Stones they were relying on the same set of R&B standards that all the London R&B bands played, and the Stones were the most obvious point of reference for that kind of music for most people. Arthur Howes eventually sent someone up to work on the Kinks’ stage act with them, and to get them into a more showbiz shape, but the person in question didn’t get very far before Graham Nash of the Hollies ordered him to leave the Kinks alone, saying they were “OK as they are”. Meanwhile, Larry Page was working with both Ray and Dave as potential songwriters, and using their songs for other acts in the Page/Kassner/Talmy stable of artists. With Talmy producing, Shel Naylor recorded Dave’s “One Fine Day”, a song which its writer dismisses as a throwaway but is actually quite catchy: [Excerpt: Shel Naylor, “One Fine Day”] And Talmy also recorded a girl group called The Orchids, singing Ray’s “I’ve Got That Feeling”: [Excerpt: The Orchids, “I’ve Got That Feeling”] Page also co-wrote a couple of instrumentals with Ray, who was the brother who was more eager to learn the craft of songwriting — at this point, Dave seemed to find it something of a chore. Page saw it as his job at this point to teach the brothers how to write — he had a whole set of ideas about what made for a hit song, and chief among them was that it had to make a connection between the singer and the audience. He told the brothers that they needed to write songs with the words “I”, “Me”, and “You” in the title, and repeat those words as much as possible. This was something that Ray did on the song that became the group’s next single, “You Still Want Me”, a Merseybeat pastiche that didn’t even do as well as the group’s first record: [Excerpt: The Kinks, “You Still Want Me”] The group were now in trouble. They’d had two flop singles in a row, on a three-single contract. It seemed entirely likely that the label would drop them after the next single. Luckily for them, they had a song that they knew was a winner. Ray had come up with the basic melody for “You Really Got Me” many years earlier. The song had gone through many changes over the years, and had apparently started off as a jazz piano piece inspired by Gerry Mulligan’s performance in the classic documentary Jazz On A Summer’s Day: [Excerpt: Gerry Mulligan, “As Catch Can”] From there it had apparently mutated first into a Chet Atkins style guitar instrumental and then into a piece in the style of Mose Allison, the jazz and R&B singer who was a huge influence on the more Mod end of the British R&B scene with records like “Parchman Farm”: [Excerpt: Mose Allison, “Parchman Farm”] Through all of this, the basic melody had remained the same, as had the two chords that underpinned the whole thing. But the song’s final form was shaped to a large extent by the advice of Larry Page. As well as the “you” and “me” based lyrics, Page had also advised Ray that as he wasn’t a great singer at this point, what the group needed to do was to concentrate on riffs. In particular, he’d pointed Ray to “Louie Louie” by the Kingsmen, which had recently been released in the UK on Pye, the same label the Kinks were signed to, and told him to do something like that: [Excerpt: The Kingsmen, “Louie Louie”] Ray was instantly inspired by “Louie Louie”, which the Kinks quickly added to their own set, and he retooled his old melody in its image, coming up with a riff to go under it. It seems also to have been Page who made one minor change to the lyric of the song. Where Ray had started the song with the line “Yeah, you really got me going,” Page suggested that instead he sing “Girl, you really got me going”, partly to increase that sense of connection with the audience again, partly to add a tiny bit of variety to the repetitive lyrics, but also partly because the group’s sexuality was already coming in for some question — Dave Davies is bisexual, and Ray has always been keen to play around with notions of gender and sexuality. Starting with the word “girl” might help reassure people about that somewhat. But the final touch that turned it into one of the great classics came from Dave, rather than Ray. Dave had been frustrated with the sound he was getting from his amplifier, and had slashed the cone with a knife. He then fed the sound from that slashed amp through his new, larger, amp, to get a distorted, fuzzy, sound which was almost unknown in Britain at the time. We’ve heard examples of fuzz guitar before in this series, of course — on “Rocket ’88”, and on some of the Johnny Burnette Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio records, and most recently last week on Ellie Greenwich’s demo of “Do-Wah-Diddy”, but those had been odd one-offs. Dave Davies’ reinvention of the sound seems to be the point where it becomes a standard part of the rock guitar toolbox — but it’s very rarely been done as well as it was on “You Really Got Me”: [Excerpt: The Kinks, “You Really Got Me”] But that introduction, and the classic record that followed, nearly never happened. The original recording of “You Really Got Me” has been lost, but it was apparently very different. Ray and Dave Davies have said that Shel Talmy overproduced it, turning it into a Phil Spector soundalike, and drenched the whole thing with echo. Talmy, for his part, says that that’s not the case — that the main difference was that the song was taken much slower, and that it was a very different but equally valid take on the song. Ray, in particular, was devastated by the result, and didn’t want it released. Pye were insistent — they had a contract, and they were going to put this record out whatever the performers said. But luckily the group’s management had faith in their singer’s vision. Larry Page insisted that as he and Kassner owned the publishing, the record couldn’t come out in the state it was in, and Robert Wace paid for a new recording session out of his own pocket. The group, plus Bobby Graham, piano player Arthur Greenslade, and Talmy, went back into the studio. The first take of the new session was a dud, and Ray worried that Talmy would end the session then and there, but he allowed them to do a second take. And that second take was extraordinary. Going into the solo, Ray yelled “Oh no!” with excitement, looking over at Dave, and became convinced that he’d distracted Dave at the crucial moment. Instead, he delivered one of the defining solos of the rock genre: [Excerpt: The Kinks, “You Really Got Me”] “You Really Got Me” was released on the fourth of August 1964, and became a smash hit, reaching number one in September. It was also released in the US, and made the top ten over there. The Kinks were suddenly huge, and Pye Records quickly exercised their option — so quickly, that the group needed to get an album recorded by the end of August. The resulting album is, as one might expect, a patchy affair, made up mostly of poor R&B covers, but there were some interesting moments, and one song from the album in particular, “Stop Your Sobbing”, showed a giant leap forward in Ray’s songwriting: [Excerpt: The Kinks, “Stop Your Sobbing”] There may be a reason for that. “Stop Your Sobbing” features backing vocals by someone new to the Kinks’ circle, Ray’s new girlfriend Rasa Didzpetris, who would become a regular feature on the group’s records for the next decade. And when we next look at the Kinks, we’ll see some of the influence she had on the group.
On this podcast I talk to Gordon Giltrap. MBE (born 6 April 1948) is an English guitarist and composer. His music crosses several genres. He has been described as "one of the most revered guitarists of his generation. He speaks about his career and also his time performing with Sir Cliff Richard in HeathCliff. Support the show (https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=TWKBH9HHL3W2G)
Our rendition of the song "Got a Funny Feeling" by Bruce Welch & Hank Marvin from the movie "The Young Ones" as heard in Episode 1 of our podcast Brit Pop Movies of a Certain Age See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
In this week's episode, Guy and Gary speak welcome the guitar hero's guitar hero, Hank Marvin, a multi-instrumentalist, vocalist and songwriter, known as lead guitarist for the Shadows. Hank Marvin takes us through his career, legends he's met and worked with throughout the years. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In this week’s episode, Guy and Gary speak welcome the guitar hero’s guitar hero, Hank Marvin, a multi-instrumentalist, vocalist and songwriter, known as lead guitarist for the Shadows. Hank Marvin takes us through his career, legends he’s met and worked with throughout the years. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
In August, The Bunch spoke to Blue Heelers legend John Wood, not just about his new book, 'How I Clawed My Way To The Middle' but we found out which Shakespearean character both he & Lisa have played on stage, War On Waste was back on our screens so Craig Reucassel from The Chaser jumped on the phone for a yarn about it, plus our unmissable chat with rock legend Hank Marvin with some secrets from his days in The Shadows!
Rock Island Line performed by Lonnie Donegan and Joshua by Allan Holdsworth.
Fred & Lisa caught up with legendary guitarist Hank Marvin. Hear the full chat here!
It was quite something special to be in Mark Knopfler's studio and talk with him about wonderfully evocative memories such as plugging his first electric guitar into a radio and blowing its amp! Plus, childhood memories of songs such as The Big Top Candy Mountain, the electrifying joy of seeing at the age of fifteen, Chuck Berry, “playing his guitar and doing the duck walk,” his “pilgrimage” to the USA to see the places Blind Willie McTell had lived and played, his love for The Shadows, specifically the lead playing of Hank Marvin, and how all this, and so much more fed into his own art. He also talks about the roots of songs such as Money for Nothing, and the phenomenally popular album Sultans of Swing. To end, Mark Knopfler talks about his latest album at the time, Sailing to Philadelphia. Heaven for musos! He even talks about working with the enigmatic Scott Walker!
This is a Zoom/Audio interview. Your choice. Colin Cripps is one of those musicians/artists who may never receive the full spotlight the lead singers get but if you ask that artist in the spotlight, they’ll tell you they wouldn’t be in the studio or out on stage if Colin wasn’t there with them step for step. In other words, invaluable. Currently, he’s a member of Blue Rodeo and The Jim Cuddy Band. He’s played with and produced Crash Vegas and Junkhouse. Produced and written with ex-wife Kathleen Edwards, Tom Wilson, Colin James, Headstones, Sarah McLachlan, Bryan Adams. Many many more credits can be found online. Speaking of online, Colin is a Guitar Geek and he lives in a World where other guitar geeks compare notes on guitars and gear. They all speak another language ..about tone and bridges and strings and colors. They go crazy for colors. Colin has some 40-50 guitars. Each brings something different to music. Colin takes us through the differences and who played what on which records. Jeff Beck. Eric Clapton. Keith Richards. The Beatles. Elvis Costello. Metallica. Jimmy Page. Hank Marvin. Mark Knopfler. Cliff Gallop. It’s time to Geek OUT !! Colin talks about and shows/plays these guitars 1955 Fender Telecaster in Sunburst (Keith Richards. Jimmy Page) 1963 Fender Stratocaster in Fiesta Red (Hank Marvin. Jimi. Mark Knopfler) 1964 Gibson SG Standard in Cherry Red (Colin’s Fave) 1962 Epiphone Casino in Royal Tan (The Beatles made them famous) 1958 Fender Jazzmaster in Roman Red (Elvis Costello. Only 4 in this color) 1958 Gibson Explorer. The Holy Grail of originals. James Hatfield’s is worth 1M. www.colincripps.com www.bluerodeo.com www.jimcuddy.com
Hoy, segundo programa dedicado al año 1970. Cine, música, libros, acontecimientos destacados... El último hombre vivo, El pequeño salvaje, Investigación sobre un ciudadano por encima de toda sospecha, Domicilio conyugal, Tristana... Country Joe & The Fish, Deep Purple, Hank Marvin, Los Módulos, Cactus, Wallace Collection, Pedro Ruy Blas, Soft Machine... El informe de Brodie de Jorge Luis Borges, El azar y la necesidad de Jacques Monod, la enciclopedia Espasa habla sobre los carteristas y otros malhechores... Escuchar audio
Episode eighty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Apache”, by the Shadows, and at the three years in which they and Cliff Richard were on top of the music world. Patreon backers also have a fifteen-minute bonus episode, on “Handy Man” by Jimmy Jones. My apologies for the lateness of this episode, which is due to my home Internet connection having been out for a week. 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 put together a Mixcloud mix with every song excerpted in this podcast. This four-CD set contains all the singles and EPs released by Cliff Richard and the Shadows, together and separately, between 1958 and 1962. Meanwhile, this six-CD set contains every recording the Shadows made on their own between 1959 and 1966, for a very low price. 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. Some of the information on Royston Ellis and Norrie Paramor comes from the extended edition of Mark Lewisohn’s Tune In, which is essential reading for anyone who is interested in the Beatles, British post-war culture, and British post-war music. This volume contains Royston Ellis’ two very slim books, one on Cliff and one on the Shadows, written for a teen audience in 1960 and 61. They are more of historical interest than anything else. 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 Today we’re going to look at the group that, more than any other, made the guitar group the standard for rock music; the group which made the Fender Stratocaster the single most popular guitar in the world; and who dominated the British charts for much of the early 1960s. We’re going to look at the Shadows: [Excerpt: The Shadows: “Apache”] We talked about Cliff Richard four months ago, but we’ve not yet looked at his backing group in any great detail. That’s because his group at the time of “Move It”, the single we looked at back then, was not the group that would end up becoming famous for backing him. We only mentioned in the last few minutes of that episode how his original backing band, the Drifters, were replaced one at a time by Hank Marvin, Bruce Welch, Jet Harris and Tony Meehan, most of whom had been members of the Vipers at one point or another during that group’s commercial decline. This group, still calling themselves the Drifters, went into Abbey Road studios with Cliff in February 1959, to record Richard’s first album — a live album in front of a studio audience. The album was mostly made up of rather anaemic cover versions of American records, though drawing from a rather wider pool than one might expect — as well as ballads like Ritchie Valens’ “Donna” and rockabilly covers like “Baby I Don’t Care” and “That’ll Be the Day”, there were also attempts at styles like Chicago blues, with a cover version of “My Babe”, the song Willie Dixon had written for Little Walter: [Excerpt: Cliff Richard and the Drifters, “My Babe”] The album also featured two instrumentals by the Drifters, one of which was “Jet Black”, named after Jet Harris, who was the de facto leader of the band at this time. Harris was a very experienced musician long before joining the group. He had played bass with Tony Crombie and the Rockets, the very first ever British rock and roll band, and Crombie had told him about a new instrument — the electric bass guitar. Harris had obtained one, and seems to have been the very first British musician to play an electric bass. His bass was a signature of the band’s early work, and it gets the spotlight in “Jet Black”: [Excerpt: Cliff Richard and the Drifters, “Jet Black”] It was around this time that Hank Marvin ended up being the first British musician to play a solid-body electric guitar — and a Fender Stratocaster at that. At the time we’re talking about, there were import restrictions on many goods from America — at the time, most economies were a lot more protectionist than they are these days, and the doctrine of free trade hadn’t taken a foothold — and so there were literally no American electric guitars in the UK, and there were no British manufacturers of them. Every British electric guitar player was playing a hollow-bodied guitar — what we’d these days call a semi-acoustic or electro-acoustic guitar. But Cliff Richard was determined that his guitarist was going to have the best instrument. An instrument that was suitable for his music. While Cliff was portrayed as England’s Elvis, and always credited Elvis as his inspiration, he had another favourite American singer, Ricky Nelson, whose softer style appealed to him, and was closer to the music that he ended up making: [Excerpt: Ricky Nelson, “Poor Little Fool”] Nelson’s lead guitarist was James Burton, who Hank Marvin admired almost as much as Cliff admired Nelson. Burton had got his start playing on Dale Hawkins’ “Suzy Q”: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “Suzy Q”] But at this point, as well as playing for Nelson, he was making a reputation as the best session guitarist on the West Coast of America — so much of a reputation that even musicians in Britain knew his name. So it made sense that they should get Marvin the guitar that Burton played. They knew it was a Fender guitar, but they didn’t know anything else, so they got themselves a Fender catalogue sent over from the US. Looking through it, they recognised one guitar, the Stratocaster, as being the one Buddy Holly played. It was also the most expensive, and the coolest-looking, so it must be the one that Burton played, right? As it turns out, Burton didn’t play a Stratocaster, but a Telecaster, but they didn’t know that until much later, and so Cliff Richard sent off the equivalent of several months’ worth of Marvin’s salary to have a Stratocaster shipped over and pay the import taxes. While they were waiting for it, though, there were records to be made — and some of those records were ones that nobody involved was particularly interested in making. Cliff had started up a film career in parallel with his musical career. His first film was an attempt at an “issue” film, about teen pregnancy and false rape accusations, which featured him in a very minor role as a juvenile delinquent. In the film, he had to sing three songs written by Lionel Bart, who had written Tommy Steele’s hits, and he didn’t realise until afterwards that his film contract stipulated that one of them must be released as a single. The one that was chosen was “Living Doll”. The problem was that Richard loathed the song. He thought it was an attempt at sounding like an American rock and roll record, but one that completely missed everything that made American rock and roll exciting. He flat-out refused to do it. And then Norrie Paramor came up with an ingenious scheme. Paramor was Richard’s producer at EMI, and in a couple of years he became notorious in Britain when a jealous colleague, George Martin, leaked one of his scams to the TV presenter David Frost. Paramor would regularly write songs under pseudonyms, and get his artists to record them as B-sides, so he would get the same royalties from the record sales as the composer of the hit on the A-side. He apparently used thirty-six different pseudonyms, and was so widely known for this in the industry that people would sing of him “Oh I Do Like To See Me On The B-Side”. Paramor earned enough money from his songwriting sideline that he owned a speedboat, a second home at the seaside, and an E-type Jag, while George Martin, ostensibly on the same salary, had a second-hand Mini. But for once, Paramor was going to be able to get the A-side to a single, and present it as doing his artist a favour. He explained to Richard that one way to be sure he’d never have to put out “Living Doll” as a single would be if he’d already put out a single with a similar name. So if, say, Paramor were to write him a song called “Livin’ Lovin’ Doll”, then there’d be no way they could put out “Living Doll” — and, if anyone had seen the film and *did* want “Living Doll”, well, that would be free promotion for Paramor’s song. “Livin’ Lovin’ Doll” went to number twenty on the charts: [Excerpt: Cliff Richard and the Drifters, “Livin’ Lovin’ Doll”] But, as it turned out, the contracts didn’t say anything about only releasing a single if you didn’t have a good reason not to. Cliff still had to release the song he’d sung in the film. But he decided he wasn’t going to release that recording — he was going to get the band to rearrange it into something that he could live with. The band members put their heads together, and decided that the song might work in a country direction, perhaps with a little of that Ricky Nelson soft-rock feel that Cliff liked. So, grudgingly, they recorded a slowed-down, acoustic version of “Living Doll”. Which promptly became Cliff’s first UK number one, as well as becoming a minor hit in the USA: [Excerpt: Cliff Richard and the Drifters, “Living Doll”] Meanwhile, the Drifters were doing some stuff on the sidelines by themselves, too, including backing a beat poet. British popular culture in the late 1950s and early 1960s was largely, if not solely, made up of poor imitations of American pop culture, usually without any understanding of what that culture was. The phrase “cargo cult” is one that reinforces a number of unpleasant stereotypes, and as far as I can tell the story on which the phrase is based is a gross misunderstanding, but if you imagine the cargo cult as it is popularly imagined, much of British pop culture was a cargo cult imitation of America, with signifiers yanked completely out of their contexts and placed in wholly new ones. The British musicians we’ve looked at so far have been the ones that were the most innovative, the least tied to their American inspirations, and yet I’m sure you’ve been able to detect even in them the sense that they were the ersatz version of the American rock stars, the Cheez-wizz to Elvis Presley’s fine mature Stilton, a collection of sneers and hip swivels and “uh-huh”s performed in the vain hope that by doing so they could invoke some of the magic of the King of Rock and Roll. But it wasn’t just popular culture that was like this — even the Bohemian underground were trying desperately to copy American models. We’ve already seen how the skiffle craze came out of trad music, which was in itself an attempt to replicate the music made by black American musicians in New Orleans some thirty or forty years earlier. In the visual arts, there was Pop Art, which was, to start with, a purely British artistic phenomenon, but it was one made up of recycled Americana. A work like Richard Hamilton’s 1956 collage Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? was made up entirely of images found in American magazines sent over to Britain. Pop Art was interested in commenting on mass culture, but Hamilton wasn’t interested in commenting on culture that British people would have any experience of — he uses an image of a Young Romance comic cover, drawn by Jack Kirby, rather than Biffo the Bear or Desperate Dan, and the advert the collage was based on was from Ladies Home Journal, not Home Chat. And so in the late 1950s Britain got its own Beat Poet, Royston Ellis. Ellis was a bearded bisexual teenage speed freak, who hung around in Soho, which was, not coincidentally, simultaneously the gayest place in Britain, the most ethnically diverse, the artiest, and the place where every fifties British rock and roll artist came from. For all that the dozens of identikit Larry Parnes artists were made to a showbiz formula, British rock and roll was still fundamentally intertwined with the Bohemian subculture, and there were usually at most only two degrees of separation between some spotty bequiffed youth pinup in the teen magazines and a bearded folk-singing physics lecturer who went on Ban the Bomb marches every weekend. Ellis managed to parlay being willing to say controversial things like “many teenagers quite like drugs” and “some teenagers have sex before marriage” into a “spokesman for his generation” role, with regular appearances on TV. And so when he decided that he was going to copy the American Beat poets and perform in front of musicians, he wasn’t going to just go for jazz musicians like they did. He was going to continue being the voice of a generation by performing the music that would go with his talk of sex and drugs — he was going to perform his poetry backed by rock and roll music, what he called “rocketry”. And when you think of sex and drugs and rock and roll, obviously your first thought is of Cliff Richard. And so it was that Royston Ellis struck up a friendship with Cliff. Ellis’ first book of beat poetry was dedicated to Cliff, and Cliff’s first attempt at autobiography was dedicated to Royston. And Cliff’s backing band became Ellis’ backing band: [Excerpt: Royston Ellis and the Shadows, “Gone Man Squared”] That wasn’t all the Drifters were doing without Cliff. They were encouraged by Cliff to make their own records — it made him look better if his backing band were famous in their own right, and it would make the tours more attractive if both Cliff and the Drifters were star names, and so they went into Abbey Road themselves to record their first single, which is actually strikingly like the Merseybeat music that would become famous a few years later — Everly Brothers-inspired harmonies, but with the electric guitar more prominent than on the Everlys’ records, and sung in an English accent. Even the scream as they went into the guitar solo sounds very familiar if you’ve spent a lot of time listening to records from 1963 and 64. Remember again that this is 1959: [Excerpt: The Drifters, “Feeling Fine”] That was unsuccessful. By this time, though, Hank Marvin’s Fender had arrived, and he was using it on records like Cliff’s second number one, “Travellin’ Light”: [Excerpt: Cliff Richard and the Shadows, “Travellin’ Light”] That single was also the first to bear a new credit — rather than by Cliff Richard and the Drifters, it was credited to Cliff Richard and the Shadows. It turns out that if you want to release records in the US by a new group made up of geeky-looking white British teenagers, putting it out under the name of an established black vocal group who are climbing the charts with their own massive hit is a good way to get legal letters and have to withdraw the release. Jet Harris and Hank Marvin went to the pub to discuss a new name, and Harris suggested “The Shadows”, because they were always standing in Cliff Richard’s shadow. Their first single under the Shadows name, “Lonesome Fella”, was a hybrid of country and doo-wop, with backing vocals that were more than a little reminiscent of the Del-Vikings’ “Come Go With Me”: [Excerpt: The Shadows, “Lonesome Fella”] That was also unsuccessful, and it seemed that for the time being the Shadows’ time was best spent working as a backing group, either with Cliff Richard or Royston Ellis. But Ellis worked with other musicians too. For example here’s a TV appearance with John Betjeman from very early 1961, where Ellis is accompanied by a single guitar: [Excerpt: Royston Ellis, “Lumbering Now”] The guitar there was played by a young musician Ellis had discovered named Jimmy Page. And in summer 1960, Ellis went up to Liverpool and met a band there that had been formed by a couple of art students and their younger friends. He got them to back him on stage and introduced them to drugs (showing them how at the time you could open up an inhaler to get at the amphetamine inside). He was impressed enough by them that in July 1960 an article appeared about him in Record Mirror, reading in part “the bearded sage of the coffee bars has not always been satisfied with the accompaniment provided, so he’s thinking of bringing down to London a young backing group which he considers is most in accord with his poetry. The name of the group? The Beetles!” When Tony Meehan saw that, he got annoyed — Meehan was the Shadow who, more than any of the others, was interested in being properly artistic. He’d thought that they were doing something worthwhile with Ellis, and didn’t appreciate having their accompaniment dismissed like that in favour of some nobodies from Liverpool. Ellis had to write to the Record Mirror “clarifying” his previous remarks: “These remarks were not intended as disparaging comments on the many excellent groups I have worked with on television and stage shows — groups such as Cliff Richard’s Shadows and the London group The Red Cats. For some time I have been searching for a group to use regularly, and I feel that “The Beetles” (most of them are Liverpool ex-art students) fill the bill. However, I am looking forward to working with other groups as well, and plans are at the moment underway for television appearances with both Bert Weedon and with The Shadows.” As it turned out, Ellis never did bring the Beatles down to London — when he turned twenty, he declared that as he was now middle-aged, he could no longer function as the voice of the teenagers, and turned to travelling and writing novels. You’ll notice that in Ellis’ apology, he refers to “Cliff Richard’s Shadows”, because at this point they were still just Cliff’s backing band in the eyes of the public. That was going to change that same month, and it was about to change, in part, because of someone else Ellis mentioned there — Bert Weedon. Weedon is someone who, when I pencilled in my initial list of songs to cover, was down as a definite. I was going to look at his record “Guitar Boogie Shuffle”: [Excerpt: Bert Weedon, “Guitar Boogie Shuffle”] But unfortunately, it turned out that the tiny amount of information about Weedon available made it impossible to write a full episode about him, even though he had a career that lasted sixty years and was one of the most important people in British music history. But to boil it down to its basics, Bert Weedon was a jazz guitarist, at a time when the guitar was not the prominent instrument it has been since the sixties. When he was growing up in the twenties and thirties, as he would put it, the only time you’d see a guitar was being held by a singing cowboy in a film. There were almost no guitarists in Britain, and he soon became the first-call session player any time anyone in Britain was making a record that needed guitar. Then came both rock and roll and the skiffle boom. Most of Weedon’s contemporaries were bitterly contemptuous of the new music, but the way he saw it, for the first time in his lifetime people were starting to make a decent living out of the guitar, and he wanted in. While his jazz friends started sneering at him and calling him “boogie Bert”, for the first couple of years of British rock and roll he played on almost every record that came out. But his biggest contribution to music came with a book called “Play in a Day”. That book was the first guitar tutorial published in the UK to attempt to show young players how to play the instrument in a way that got them playing songs quickly. While it’s creakily old-fashioned today, Weedon did know that what kids wanted was to learn a couple of chords so they could accompany themselves playing a song, rather than to have to practice scales for months before moving on to anything more interesting. These days there are much better books, and Weedon’s book looks exactly like all those older books it was replacing, but at the time it was a revelation. A lot of guitarists are credited as having learned from Weedon’s book, some of them almost certainly apocryphally. But while it’s been superseded by many better books, it was a massive seller in its time, and sold over two million copies. It’s safe to say that at the very least every British guitarist we look at over the next hundred or so episodes will have had a look at Weedon’s book, and many of them will have learned their first chords from it. Weedon had been a session musician and writer, but not a star musician in his own right, until he released his single “Guitar Boogie Shuffle” in 1959. It was a cover version of a hillbilly boogie called “Guitar Boogie”, by Arthur “Guitar Boogie” Smith, and Weedon’s version became a hit, reaching number ten in the UK — the first British guitar instrumental to make the top ten: [Excerpt: Bert Weedon, “Guitar Boogie”] Dick Rowe, the boss of Top Rank Records, for which Weedon recorded at the time, had disliked that song so much that Weedon had tried to record it under a pseudonym for another label, because Rowe wouldn’t put it out. But it became a hit, and started a run of instrumental hits for Weedon. After he’d had four hits along the lines of “Guitar Boogie Shuffle”, Weedon was sent a piece of sheet music by the publishers Francis, Day, and Hunter. “Apache” was a song inspired by a 1954 western, and written by a young songwriter called Jerry Lordan. Lordan was a minor British singer, who’d had a recent hit with “I’ll Stay Single”: [Excerpt: Jerry Lordan, “I’ll Stay Single”] But while he was a mildly successful singer, he was much more successful as a songwriter, writing Anthony Newley’s top five hit “I’ve Waited So Long”: [Excerpt: Anthony Newley, “I’ve Waited So Long”] And “A House, a Car, and a Wedding Ring”, which had the unusual distinction for a British song of getting an American cover version, by Dale Hawkins: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “A House, a Car, and a Wedding Ring”] Lordan’s song, “Apache”, seemed to be the kind of thing that Bert Weedon could do well, and Weedon recorded a version of it some time in late 1959 or early 1960: [Excerpt: Bert Weedon, “Apache”] Weedon also started performing the song in his shows and on TV. But the recording hadn’t been released yet — according to Weedon, he was planning on releasing the single in September, because that was when the most records were sold. But Lordan didn’t want to wait until September for his song to come out on a record, so while he was on tour with Cliff and the Shadows, he showed the tune to Jet Harris on his ukulele. The group liked the tune, and released it as their second single under their new name. Hank Marvin had by this time been given a guitar echo unit by Joe Brown, who’d bought it and then disliked it. He used it on this record, along with another innovation — the tremolo arm on his guitar. A tremolo arm, sometimes called a whammy bar, is a metal bar on your guitar that allows you to bend all the strings at once, and nobody else in Britain had a guitar with one at this point, but Hank had his Fender Stratocaster, on which they come fitted as standard. The combination of the tremolo arm and the echo unit was a sound that no-one else in the UK had, but which was strikingly similar to some of the surf music being made in the US, which was still mostly on tiny labels with no distribution over here: [Excerpt: The Shadows, “Apache”] “Apache” went to number one on the charts, knocking off “Please Don’t Tease”, a track by Cliff with the Shadows backing him. It stayed on the charts for five months, and became a standard performed by every British guitarist — and soon by American guitarists like the Ventures. Weedon’s version was rushed out to compete with it, but only made number twenty-four. Many versions of the song have become classics in their own right, and I won’t go through all the hit versions here because this is a long episode anyway, but I do have to mention one version — a novelty version recorded as album filler by a group of session musicians hired to make an album under the name The Incredible Bongo Band: [Excerpt: The Incredible Bongo Band, “Apache”] The guitarist on that, incidentally, is Mike Deasy, who we heard last week playing with Bruce Johnston and Sandy Nelson in various bands, and who had been in Eddie Cochran’s backing band. That track includes a drum break, with bongos by King Errisson, and drums probably played by Jim Gordon, which is probably the most sampled recording of all time, and certainly in the top ten: [Excerpt: The Incredible Bongo Band, “Apache”, drum breaks] That’s been sampled by everyone from the Roots to Madonna, Vanilla Ice to Amy Winehouse, Rage Against the Machine to Kanye West. It’s been called “hip-hop’s national anthem”, and there’s a whole ninety-minute documentary on Netflix just about that track. But getting back to 1960 and the Shadows’ version of the tune, it came as a revelation to many British kids, inspiring thousands of young boys who had already learned the guitar to start playing *electric* guitar, and making everyone who wanted to be a rock and roll star covet a Stratocaster specifically (with a few odd exceptions who reacted against what was popular, like there always are). Pete Townshend, for example, in a documentary earlier this year said that hearing “Apache” was for him even more important than his first orgasm. “Apache” stayed on the charts so long that the group’s next single, “Man of Mystery”, went to number five in the charts while “Apache” was still in the top forty: [Excerpt: The Shadows, “Man of Mystery”] And while that was at number five, “Nine Times Out of Ten” by Cliff Richard and the Shadows was at number three. Between 1959 and 1965, Cliff had twenty-six consecutive top ten hit singles, of which twenty-one had the Shadows (or the Drifters) as his backing group. In the same time period, the Shadows had a run of thirteen top ten hits in their own right. They were a phenomenon in British music like nothing anyone had ever seen. They appeared in a series of films, starring Richard, who was in 1962 and 63 a bigger draw at the British cinema than the early James Bond films. Neither Cliff nor the Shadows ever had much American success, but in Europe and Australia, and from 1962 on in Canada, they were at the very peak of success in the music industry. Everything seemed to be going perfectly for Cliff and the Shadows, even when in 1961 a bizarre love triangle upended everything. Jet Harris, who was at the time the band member who was closest to Cliff, had married a beautiful young woman called Carol Costa, without realising that she had never really been interested in him, but was using him to get to Cliff. Cliff and Costa started an affair, Harris became physically abusive towards Costa, she — quite rightly — left him, and he spiralled into depression and alcoholism. Cliff and Costa’s affair didn’t last long either — but as it turned out, she would be the only woman with whom he would ever have sex. Richard’s sexuality or lack of it has been the subject of a huge amount of discussion over the years. For many decades he said he was straight but celibate because of his religious views — that he couldn’t get married without disappointing his female fans, and that he felt sex outside marriage was wrong. In more recent years he’s switched the wording he uses, saying his sexuality is his own business, that he’ll never talk about it publicly, that he has a live-in male companion, and that it shouldn’t matter to anyone what his sexuality is. Most descriptions of him from those who’ve known him over the decades have said that he was and is someone who is simply not very interested in sex. I mention this not to engage in prurient speculation about him, but to show how utterly bizarre it is that the one woman he would ever have sex with would be the wife of a friend and colleague. More in character, though, was the way he would dump Costa — as was so often the case with Cliff Richard when discarding people for whom he had no further use, he got someone else to do it. In this case it was Tony Meehan who was given the task of letting her know that Cliff had suddenly developed moral scruples. Those moral scruples would soon get a lot more scrupulous, as this affair would indirectly lead to the most famous religious conversion in all of British music history. Shortly after dumping Costa on Cliff’s behalf, Tony Meehan left the group, just before a tour of Australia and New Zealand. Meehan had slowly become disenchanted with the rest of the group, and didn’t really fit in with them — he was an intellectual who read books about the history of folk music and jazz, and wanted one day to write a history of Soho’s music scene in the style of books he’d read about New Orleans, while the rest of them just liked reading thrillers. When he left, the group’s second number one, “Kon-Tiki”, was still at the top of the charts: [Excerpt: The Shadows, “Kon-Tiki”] He was replaced by Brian Bennett, who had played in the very first lineup of Vince Taylor and the Playboys, and had been in Marty Wilde’s Wildcats for a while. Jet Harris lasted in the group another few months, until April 1962, when the drink caught up with him and he was fired. Bennett suggested that the group get in his old friend Licorice Locking, who he’d played with in the Vipers, the Playboys, and the Wildcats, and who had played with Bennett on those Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent Saturday Club sessions we heard a couple of weeks back. Locking was a fine bass player, had played with most of them before back in their 2is days, and fitted in perfectly, though he had a very different playing style than Harris — many hardcore Shadows fans think the group’s golden age ended when Harris left, and he’s rated enough as a bass player that while there are currently no substantial books on the Shadows themselves still in print, there are two separate self-published biographies of Harris available. Within a month of being fired, Harris had his own solo hit, making the top thirty with a version of “Besame Mucho” modelled on the Coasters’ version, but with Harris playing lead bass instead of singing: [Excerpt: Jet Harris, “Besame Mucho”] But Locking would have an odd effect on the Shadows. Brian Bennett had been brought up as a Jehovah’s Witness, and even though he was no longer a believer in that religion, he’d told Locking about its beliefs — and Locking had become an enthusiastic convert. As soon as he joined the group, he set about trying to convert the other members, too. He succeeded with Hank Marvin, who to this day is a devoted Witness, and he came part way with Cliff, who never became a Witness but was inspired by Locking’s Bible-reading sessions to become an evangelical Christian, and who is now British rock music’s most famously religious person. Meanwhile, Harris had switched from bass to guitar, and was now going in a more Duane Eddy style. He teamed up with Tony Meehan, and together they recorded another Jerry Lordan song, “Diamonds”, featuring Royston Ellis’ friend Jimmy Page on rhythm guitar, on his first major session: [Excerpt: Jet Harris and Tony Meehan, “Diamonds”] At the beginning of 1963, Cliff and the Shadows, past and present, had a ridiculous monopoly of the top of the charts. “Bachelor Boy” by Cliff and the Shadows, written by Cliff and Bruce Welch, was at number one for three weeks, then was replaced by “Dance On” by the Shadows, which in turn was replaced by “Diamonds” by Jet and Tony. There was a brief three-week respite while Frank Ifield topped the charts with his “Wayward Wind”, then “Summer Holiday” by Cliff and the Shadows, written by Bruce and Brian. Then “Foot Tapper” by the Shadows went to number one, then “Summer Holiday” went back to the top position. They all looked unstoppable. However, while they would all chart again, it would be two years before Cliff would have another number one, and neither the Shadows nor Jet and Tony ever would. In the case of Cliff and the Shadows, this change in commercial fortunes was because of a general change in the music market, which we’ll be looking at towards the end of the year. In the case of Jet and Tony, though, that was only part of it. Jet was in a car accident which put him out of commission for a while, and when he got better he was drinking even more. He made a brief attempt at a comeback and even joined an early lineup of the Jeff Beck Group, but spent the rest of his life either working labouring jobs or playing the nostalgia circuit. He died in 2011. Jet and Tony’s touring bass player, John Paul Jones, actually auditioned for the Shadows, as Licorice Locking left the group to spend more time evangelising, but Jones didn’t get the job, and we’ll be picking up on him later. We’ll be seeing Cliff again too, as well as having a brief appearance from Tony Meehan, but this is the last we’ll see of the Shadows, who continued with a variety of different bass players, and with Brian Bennett as the permanent drummer, off and on until 2015. Marvin, Bennett, and Welch all continue to make music separately, and it’s still possible they may perform together as the Shadows one day. But even if they don’t, “Apache” stands as the moment when a million British kids first decided that they wanted to be a guitar hero and play a Fender Stratocaster.
Episode eighty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Apache", by the Shadows, and at the three years in which they and Cliff Richard were on top of the music world. Patreon backers also have a fifteen-minute bonus episode, on "Handy Man" by Jimmy Jones. My apologies for the lateness of this episode, which is due to my home Internet connection having been out for a week. 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 put together a Mixcloud mix with every song excerpted in this podcast. This four-CD set contains all the singles and EPs released by Cliff Richard and the Shadows, together and separately, between 1958 and 1962. Meanwhile, this six-CD set contains every recording the Shadows made on their own between 1959 and 1966, for a very low price. 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. Some of the information on Royston Ellis and Norrie Paramor comes from the extended edition of Mark Lewisohn's Tune In, which is essential reading for anyone who is interested in the Beatles, British post-war culture, and British post-war music. This volume contains Royston Ellis' two very slim books, one on Cliff and one on the Shadows, written for a teen audience in 1960 and 61. They are more of historical interest than anything else. 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 Today we're going to look at the group that, more than any other, made the guitar group the standard for rock music; the group which made the Fender Stratocaster the single most popular guitar in the world; and who dominated the British charts for much of the early 1960s. We're going to look at the Shadows: [Excerpt: The Shadows: "Apache"] We talked about Cliff Richard four months ago, but we've not yet looked at his backing group in any great detail. That's because his group at the time of "Move It", the single we looked at back then, was not the group that would end up becoming famous for backing him. We only mentioned in the last few minutes of that episode how his original backing band, the Drifters, were replaced one at a time by Hank Marvin, Bruce Welch, Jet Harris and Tony Meehan, most of whom had been members of the Vipers at one point or another during that group's commercial decline. This group, still calling themselves the Drifters, went into Abbey Road studios with Cliff in February 1959, to record Richard's first album -- a live album in front of a studio audience. The album was mostly made up of rather anaemic cover versions of American records, though drawing from a rather wider pool than one might expect -- as well as ballads like Ritchie Valens' "Donna" and rockabilly covers like "Baby I Don't Care" and "That'll Be the Day", there were also attempts at styles like Chicago blues, with a cover version of "My Babe", the song Willie Dixon had written for Little Walter: [Excerpt: Cliff Richard and the Drifters, "My Babe"] The album also featured two instrumentals by the Drifters, one of which was "Jet Black", named after Jet Harris, who was the de facto leader of the band at this time. Harris was a very experienced musician long before joining the group. He had played bass with Tony Crombie and the Rockets, the very first ever British rock and roll band, and Crombie had told him about a new instrument -- the electric bass guitar. Harris had obtained one, and seems to have been the very first British musician to play an electric bass. His bass was a signature of the band's early work, and it gets the spotlight in "Jet Black": [Excerpt: Cliff Richard and the Drifters, "Jet Black"] It was around this time that Hank Marvin ended up being the first British musician to play a solid-body electric guitar -- and a Fender Stratocaster at that. At the time we're talking about, there were import restrictions on many goods from America -- at the time, most economies were a lot more protectionist than they are these days, and the doctrine of free trade hadn't taken a foothold -- and so there were literally no American electric guitars in the UK, and there were no British manufacturers of them. Every British electric guitar player was playing a hollow-bodied guitar -- what we'd these days call a semi-acoustic or electro-acoustic guitar. But Cliff Richard was determined that his guitarist was going to have the best instrument. An instrument that was suitable for his music. While Cliff was portrayed as England's Elvis, and always credited Elvis as his inspiration, he had another favourite American singer, Ricky Nelson, whose softer style appealed to him, and was closer to the music that he ended up making: [Excerpt: Ricky Nelson, "Poor Little Fool"] Nelson's lead guitarist was James Burton, who Hank Marvin admired almost as much as Cliff admired Nelson. Burton had got his start playing on Dale Hawkins' "Suzy Q": [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, "Suzy Q"] But at this point, as well as playing for Nelson, he was making a reputation as the best session guitarist on the West Coast of America -- so much of a reputation that even musicians in Britain knew his name. So it made sense that they should get Marvin the guitar that Burton played. They knew it was a Fender guitar, but they didn't know anything else, so they got themselves a Fender catalogue sent over from the US. Looking through it, they recognised one guitar, the Stratocaster, as being the one Buddy Holly played. It was also the most expensive, and the coolest-looking, so it must be the one that Burton played, right? As it turns out, Burton didn't play a Stratocaster, but a Telecaster, but they didn't know that until much later, and so Cliff Richard sent off the equivalent of several months' worth of Marvin's salary to have a Stratocaster shipped over and pay the import taxes. While they were waiting for it, though, there were records to be made -- and some of those records were ones that nobody involved was particularly interested in making. Cliff had started up a film career in parallel with his musical career. His first film was an attempt at an "issue" film, about teen pregnancy and false rape accusations, which featured him in a very minor role as a juvenile delinquent. In the film, he had to sing three songs written by Lionel Bart, who had written Tommy Steele's hits, and he didn't realise until afterwards that his film contract stipulated that one of them must be released as a single. The one that was chosen was "Living Doll". The problem was that Richard loathed the song. He thought it was an attempt at sounding like an American rock and roll record, but one that completely missed everything that made American rock and roll exciting. He flat-out refused to do it. And then Norrie Paramor came up with an ingenious scheme. Paramor was Richard's producer at EMI, and in a couple of years he became notorious in Britain when a jealous colleague, George Martin, leaked one of his scams to the TV presenter David Frost. Paramor would regularly write songs under pseudonyms, and get his artists to record them as B-sides, so he would get the same royalties from the record sales as the composer of the hit on the A-side. He apparently used thirty-six different pseudonyms, and was so widely known for this in the industry that people would sing of him "Oh I Do Like To See Me On The B-Side". Paramor earned enough money from his songwriting sideline that he owned a speedboat, a second home at the seaside, and an E-type Jag, while George Martin, ostensibly on the same salary, had a second-hand Mini. But for once, Paramor was going to be able to get the A-side to a single, and present it as doing his artist a favour. He explained to Richard that one way to be sure he'd never have to put out "Living Doll" as a single would be if he'd already put out a single with a similar name. So if, say, Paramor were to write him a song called "Livin' Lovin' Doll", then there'd be no way they could put out "Living Doll" -- and, if anyone had seen the film and *did* want "Living Doll", well, that would be free promotion for Paramor's song. "Livin' Lovin' Doll" went to number twenty on the charts: [Excerpt: Cliff Richard and the Drifters, "Livin' Lovin' Doll"] But, as it turned out, the contracts didn't say anything about only releasing a single if you didn't have a good reason not to. Cliff still had to release the song he'd sung in the film. But he decided he wasn't going to release that recording -- he was going to get the band to rearrange it into something that he could live with. The band members put their heads together, and decided that the song might work in a country direction, perhaps with a little of that Ricky Nelson soft-rock feel that Cliff liked. So, grudgingly, they recorded a slowed-down, acoustic version of "Living Doll". Which promptly became Cliff's first UK number one, as well as becoming a minor hit in the USA: [Excerpt: Cliff Richard and the Drifters, "Living Doll"] Meanwhile, the Drifters were doing some stuff on the sidelines by themselves, too, including backing a beat poet. British popular culture in the late 1950s and early 1960s was largely, if not solely, made up of poor imitations of American pop culture, usually without any understanding of what that culture was. The phrase "cargo cult" is one that reinforces a number of unpleasant stereotypes, and as far as I can tell the story on which the phrase is based is a gross misunderstanding, but if you imagine the cargo cult as it is popularly imagined, much of British pop culture was a cargo cult imitation of America, with signifiers yanked completely out of their contexts and placed in wholly new ones. The British musicians we've looked at so far have been the ones that were the most innovative, the least tied to their American inspirations, and yet I'm sure you've been able to detect even in them the sense that they were the ersatz version of the American rock stars, the Cheez-wizz to Elvis Presley's fine mature Stilton, a collection of sneers and hip swivels and "uh-huh"s performed in the vain hope that by doing so they could invoke some of the magic of the King of Rock and Roll. But it wasn't just popular culture that was like this -- even the Bohemian underground were trying desperately to copy American models. We've already seen how the skiffle craze came out of trad music, which was in itself an attempt to replicate the music made by black American musicians in New Orleans some thirty or forty years earlier. In the visual arts, there was Pop Art, which was, to start with, a purely British artistic phenomenon, but it was one made up of recycled Americana. A work like Richard Hamilton's 1956 collage Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? was made up entirely of images found in American magazines sent over to Britain. Pop Art was interested in commenting on mass culture, but Hamilton wasn't interested in commenting on culture that British people would have any experience of -- he uses an image of a Young Romance comic cover, drawn by Jack Kirby, rather than Biffo the Bear or Desperate Dan, and the advert the collage was based on was from Ladies Home Journal, not Home Chat. And so in the late 1950s Britain got its own Beat Poet, Royston Ellis. Ellis was a bearded bisexual teenage speed freak, who hung around in Soho, which was, not coincidentally, simultaneously the gayest place in Britain, the most ethnically diverse, the artiest, and the place where every fifties British rock and roll artist came from. For all that the dozens of identikit Larry Parnes artists were made to a showbiz formula, British rock and roll was still fundamentally intertwined with the Bohemian subculture, and there were usually at most only two degrees of separation between some spotty bequiffed youth pinup in the teen magazines and a bearded folk-singing physics lecturer who went on Ban the Bomb marches every weekend. Ellis managed to parlay being willing to say controversial things like "many teenagers quite like drugs" and "some teenagers have sex before marriage" into a "spokesman for his generation" role, with regular appearances on TV. And so when he decided that he was going to copy the American Beat poets and perform in front of musicians, he wasn't going to just go for jazz musicians like they did. He was going to continue being the voice of a generation by performing the music that would go with his talk of sex and drugs -- he was going to perform his poetry backed by rock and roll music, what he called “rocketry”. And when you think of sex and drugs and rock and roll, obviously your first thought is of Cliff Richard. And so it was that Royston Ellis struck up a friendship with Cliff. Ellis' first book of beat poetry was dedicated to Cliff, and Cliff's first attempt at autobiography was dedicated to Royston. And Cliff's backing band became Ellis' backing band: [Excerpt: Royston Ellis and the Shadows, "Gone Man Squared"] That wasn't all the Drifters were doing without Cliff. They were encouraged by Cliff to make their own records -- it made him look better if his backing band were famous in their own right, and it would make the tours more attractive if both Cliff and the Drifters were star names, and so they went into Abbey Road themselves to record their first single, which is actually strikingly like the Merseybeat music that would become famous a few years later -- Everly Brothers-inspired harmonies, but with the electric guitar more prominent than on the Everlys' records, and sung in an English accent. Even the scream as they went into the guitar solo sounds very familiar if you've spent a lot of time listening to records from 1963 and 64. Remember again that this is 1959: [Excerpt: The Drifters, "Feeling Fine"] That was unsuccessful. By this time, though, Hank Marvin's Fender had arrived, and he was using it on records like Cliff's second number one, "Travellin' Light": [Excerpt: Cliff Richard and the Shadows, "Travellin' Light"] That single was also the first to bear a new credit -- rather than by Cliff Richard and the Drifters, it was credited to Cliff Richard and the Shadows. It turns out that if you want to release records in the US by a new group made up of geeky-looking white British teenagers, putting it out under the name of an established black vocal group who are climbing the charts with their own massive hit is a good way to get legal letters and have to withdraw the release. Jet Harris and Hank Marvin went to the pub to discuss a new name, and Harris suggested "The Shadows", because they were always standing in Cliff Richard's shadow. Their first single under the Shadows name, "Lonesome Fella", was a hybrid of country and doo-wop, with backing vocals that were more than a little reminiscent of the Del-Vikings' "Come Go With Me": [Excerpt: The Shadows, "Lonesome Fella"] That was also unsuccessful, and it seemed that for the time being the Shadows' time was best spent working as a backing group, either with Cliff Richard or Royston Ellis. But Ellis worked with other musicians too. For example here's a TV appearance with John Betjeman from very early 1961, where Ellis is accompanied by a single guitar: [Excerpt: Royston Ellis, “Lumbering Now”] The guitar there was played by a young musician Ellis had discovered named Jimmy Page. And in summer 1960, Ellis went up to Liverpool and met a band there that had been formed by a couple of art students and their younger friends. He got them to back him on stage and introduced them to drugs (showing them how at the time you could open up an inhaler to get at the amphetamine inside). He was impressed enough by them that in July 1960 an article appeared about him in Record Mirror, reading in part "the bearded sage of the coffee bars has not always been satisfied with the accompaniment provided, so he's thinking of bringing down to London a young backing group which he considers is most in accord with his poetry. The name of the group? The Beetles!" When Tony Meehan saw that, he got annoyed -- Meehan was the Shadow who, more than any of the others, was interested in being properly artistic. He'd thought that they were doing something worthwhile with Ellis, and didn't appreciate having their accompaniment dismissed like that in favour of some nobodies from Liverpool. Ellis had to write to the Record Mirror "clarifying" his previous remarks: "These remarks were not intended as disparaging comments on the many excellent groups I have worked with on television and stage shows -- groups such as Cliff Richard's Shadows and the London group The Red Cats. For some time I have been searching for a group to use regularly, and I feel that "The Beetles" (most of them are Liverpool ex-art students) fill the bill. However, I am looking forward to working with other groups as well, and plans are at the moment underway for television appearances with both Bert Weedon and with The Shadows." As it turned out, Ellis never did bring the Beatles down to London -- when he turned twenty, he declared that as he was now middle-aged, he could no longer function as the voice of the teenagers, and turned to travelling and writing novels. You'll notice that in Ellis' apology, he refers to "Cliff Richard's Shadows", because at this point they were still just Cliff's backing band in the eyes of the public. That was going to change that same month, and it was about to change, in part, because of someone else Ellis mentioned there -- Bert Weedon. Weedon is someone who, when I pencilled in my initial list of songs to cover, was down as a definite. I was going to look at his record "Guitar Boogie Shuffle": [Excerpt: Bert Weedon, "Guitar Boogie Shuffle"] But unfortunately, it turned out that the tiny amount of information about Weedon available made it impossible to write a full episode about him, even though he had a career that lasted sixty years and was one of the most important people in British music history. But to boil it down to its basics, Bert Weedon was a jazz guitarist, at a time when the guitar was not the prominent instrument it has been since the sixties. When he was growing up in the twenties and thirties, as he would put it, the only time you'd see a guitar was being held by a singing cowboy in a film. There were almost no guitarists in Britain, and he soon became the first-call session player any time anyone in Britain was making a record that needed guitar. Then came both rock and roll and the skiffle boom. Most of Weedon's contemporaries were bitterly contemptuous of the new music, but the way he saw it, for the first time in his lifetime people were starting to make a decent living out of the guitar, and he wanted in. While his jazz friends started sneering at him and calling him "boogie Bert", for the first couple of years of British rock and roll he played on almost every record that came out. But his biggest contribution to music came with a book called "Play in a Day". That book was the first guitar tutorial published in the UK to attempt to show young players how to play the instrument in a way that got them playing songs quickly. While it's creakily old-fashioned today, Weedon did know that what kids wanted was to learn a couple of chords so they could accompany themselves playing a song, rather than to have to practice scales for months before moving on to anything more interesting. These days there are much better books, and Weedon's book looks exactly like all those older books it was replacing, but at the time it was a revelation. A lot of guitarists are credited as having learned from Weedon's book, some of them almost certainly apocryphally. But while it's been superseded by many better books, it was a massive seller in its time, and sold over two million copies. It's safe to say that at the very least every British guitarist we look at over the next hundred or so episodes will have had a look at Weedon's book, and many of them will have learned their first chords from it. Weedon had been a session musician and writer, but not a star musician in his own right, until he released his single "Guitar Boogie Shuffle" in 1959. It was a cover version of a hillbilly boogie called "Guitar Boogie", by Arthur "Guitar Boogie" Smith, and Weedon's version became a hit, reaching number ten in the UK -- the first British guitar instrumental to make the top ten: [Excerpt: Bert Weedon, "Guitar Boogie"] Dick Rowe, the boss of Top Rank Records, for which Weedon recorded at the time, had disliked that song so much that Weedon had tried to record it under a pseudonym for another label, because Rowe wouldn't put it out. But it became a hit, and started a run of instrumental hits for Weedon. After he'd had four hits along the lines of "Guitar Boogie Shuffle", Weedon was sent a piece of sheet music by the publishers Francis, Day, and Hunter. "Apache" was a song inspired by a 1954 western, and written by a young songwriter called Jerry Lordan. Lordan was a minor British singer, who'd had a recent hit with "I'll Stay Single": [Excerpt: Jerry Lordan, "I'll Stay Single"] But while he was a mildly successful singer, he was much more successful as a songwriter, writing Anthony Newley's top five hit "I've Waited So Long": [Excerpt: Anthony Newley, "I've Waited So Long"] And "A House, a Car, and a Wedding Ring", which had the unusual distinction for a British song of getting an American cover version, by Dale Hawkins: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, "A House, a Car, and a Wedding Ring"] Lordan's song, "Apache", seemed to be the kind of thing that Bert Weedon could do well, and Weedon recorded a version of it some time in late 1959 or early 1960: [Excerpt: Bert Weedon, "Apache"] Weedon also started performing the song in his shows and on TV. But the recording hadn't been released yet -- according to Weedon, he was planning on releasing the single in September, because that was when the most records were sold. But Lordan didn't want to wait until September for his song to come out on a record, so while he was on tour with Cliff and the Shadows, he showed the tune to Jet Harris on his ukulele. The group liked the tune, and released it as their second single under their new name. Hank Marvin had by this time been given a guitar echo unit by Joe Brown, who'd bought it and then disliked it. He used it on this record, along with another innovation -- the tremolo arm on his guitar. A tremolo arm, sometimes called a whammy bar, is a metal bar on your guitar that allows you to bend all the strings at once, and nobody else in Britain had a guitar with one at this point, but Hank had his Fender Stratocaster, on which they come fitted as standard. The combination of the tremolo arm and the echo unit was a sound that no-one else in the UK had, but which was strikingly similar to some of the surf music being made in the US, which was still mostly on tiny labels with no distribution over here: [Excerpt: The Shadows, "Apache"] "Apache" went to number one on the charts, knocking off "Please Don't Tease", a track by Cliff with the Shadows backing him. It stayed on the charts for five months, and became a standard performed by every British guitarist -- and soon by American guitarists like the Ventures. Weedon's version was rushed out to compete with it, but only made number twenty-four. Many versions of the song have become classics in their own right, and I won't go through all the hit versions here because this is a long episode anyway, but I do have to mention one version -- a novelty version recorded as album filler by a group of session musicians hired to make an album under the name The Incredible Bongo Band: [Excerpt: The Incredible Bongo Band, "Apache"] The guitarist on that, incidentally, is Mike Deasy, who we heard last week playing with Bruce Johnston and Sandy Nelson in various bands, and who had been in Eddie Cochran's backing band. That track includes a drum break, with bongos by King Errisson, and drums probably played by Jim Gordon, which is probably the most sampled recording of all time, and certainly in the top ten: [Excerpt: The Incredible Bongo Band, "Apache", drum breaks] That's been sampled by everyone from the Roots to Madonna, Vanilla Ice to Amy Winehouse, Rage Against the Machine to Kanye West. It's been called "hip-hop's national anthem", and there's a whole ninety-minute documentary on Netflix just about that track. But getting back to 1960 and the Shadows' version of the tune, it came as a revelation to many British kids, inspiring thousands of young boys who had already learned the guitar to start playing *electric* guitar, and making everyone who wanted to be a rock and roll star covet a Stratocaster specifically (with a few odd exceptions who reacted against what was popular, like there always are). Pete Townshend, for example, in a documentary earlier this year said that hearing "Apache" was for him even more important than his first orgasm. "Apache" stayed on the charts so long that the group's next single, "Man of Mystery", went to number five in the charts while "Apache" was still in the top forty: [Excerpt: The Shadows, "Man of Mystery"] And while that was at number five, "Nine Times Out of Ten" by Cliff Richard and the Shadows was at number three. Between 1959 and 1965, Cliff had twenty-six consecutive top ten hit singles, of which twenty-one had the Shadows (or the Drifters) as his backing group. In the same time period, the Shadows had a run of thirteen top ten hits in their own right. They were a phenomenon in British music like nothing anyone had ever seen. They appeared in a series of films, starring Richard, who was in 1962 and 63 a bigger draw at the British cinema than the early James Bond films. Neither Cliff nor the Shadows ever had much American success, but in Europe and Australia, and from 1962 on in Canada, they were at the very peak of success in the music industry. Everything seemed to be going perfectly for Cliff and the Shadows, even when in 1961 a bizarre love triangle upended everything. Jet Harris, who was at the time the band member who was closest to Cliff, had married a beautiful young woman called Carol Costa, without realising that she had never really been interested in him, but was using him to get to Cliff. Cliff and Costa started an affair, Harris became physically abusive towards Costa, she -- quite rightly -- left him, and he spiralled into depression and alcoholism. Cliff and Costa's affair didn't last long either -- but as it turned out, she would be the only woman with whom he would ever have sex. Richard's sexuality or lack of it has been the subject of a huge amount of discussion over the years. For many decades he said he was straight but celibate because of his religious views -- that he couldn't get married without disappointing his female fans, and that he felt sex outside marriage was wrong. In more recent years he's switched the wording he uses, saying his sexuality is his own business, that he'll never talk about it publicly, that he has a live-in male companion, and that it shouldn't matter to anyone what his sexuality is. Most descriptions of him from those who've known him over the decades have said that he was and is someone who is simply not very interested in sex. I mention this not to engage in prurient speculation about him, but to show how utterly bizarre it is that the one woman he would ever have sex with would be the wife of a friend and colleague. More in character, though, was the way he would dump Costa -- as was so often the case with Cliff Richard when discarding people for whom he had no further use, he got someone else to do it. In this case it was Tony Meehan who was given the task of letting her know that Cliff had suddenly developed moral scruples. Those moral scruples would soon get a lot more scrupulous, as this affair would indirectly lead to the most famous religious conversion in all of British music history. Shortly after dumping Costa on Cliff's behalf, Tony Meehan left the group, just before a tour of Australia and New Zealand. Meehan had slowly become disenchanted with the rest of the group, and didn't really fit in with them -- he was an intellectual who read books about the history of folk music and jazz, and wanted one day to write a history of Soho's music scene in the style of books he'd read about New Orleans, while the rest of them just liked reading thrillers. When he left, the group's second number one, "Kon-Tiki", was still at the top of the charts: [Excerpt: The Shadows, "Kon-Tiki"] He was replaced by Brian Bennett, who had played in the very first lineup of Vince Taylor and the Playboys, and had been in Marty Wilde's Wildcats for a while. Jet Harris lasted in the group another few months, until April 1962, when the drink caught up with him and he was fired. Bennett suggested that the group get in his old friend Licorice Locking, who he'd played with in the Vipers, the Playboys, and the Wildcats, and who had played with Bennett on those Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent Saturday Club sessions we heard a couple of weeks back. Locking was a fine bass player, had played with most of them before back in their 2is days, and fitted in perfectly, though he had a very different playing style than Harris -- many hardcore Shadows fans think the group's golden age ended when Harris left, and he's rated enough as a bass player that while there are currently no substantial books on the Shadows themselves still in print, there are two separate self-published biographies of Harris available. Within a month of being fired, Harris had his own solo hit, making the top thirty with a version of "Besame Mucho" modelled on the Coasters' version, but with Harris playing lead bass instead of singing: [Excerpt: Jet Harris, "Besame Mucho"] But Locking would have an odd effect on the Shadows. Brian Bennett had been brought up as a Jehovah's Witness, and even though he was no longer a believer in that religion, he'd told Locking about its beliefs -- and Locking had become an enthusiastic convert. As soon as he joined the group, he set about trying to convert the other members, too. He succeeded with Hank Marvin, who to this day is a devoted Witness, and he came part way with Cliff, who never became a Witness but was inspired by Locking's Bible-reading sessions to become an evangelical Christian, and who is now British rock music's most famously religious person. Meanwhile, Harris had switched from bass to guitar, and was now going in a more Duane Eddy style. He teamed up with Tony Meehan, and together they recorded another Jerry Lordan song, "Diamonds", featuring Royston Ellis' friend Jimmy Page on rhythm guitar, on his first major session: [Excerpt: Jet Harris and Tony Meehan, "Diamonds"] At the beginning of 1963, Cliff and the Shadows, past and present, had a ridiculous monopoly of the top of the charts. "Bachelor Boy" by Cliff and the Shadows, written by Cliff and Bruce Welch, was at number one for three weeks, then was replaced by "Dance On" by the Shadows, which in turn was replaced by "Diamonds" by Jet and Tony. There was a brief three-week respite while Frank Ifield topped the charts with his "Wayward Wind", then "Summer Holiday" by Cliff and the Shadows, written by Bruce and Brian. Then "Foot Tapper" by the Shadows went to number one, then "Summer Holiday" went back to the top position. They all looked unstoppable. However, while they would all chart again, it would be two years before Cliff would have another number one, and neither the Shadows nor Jet and Tony ever would. In the case of Cliff and the Shadows, this change in commercial fortunes was because of a general change in the music market, which we'll be looking at towards the end of the year. In the case of Jet and Tony, though, that was only part of it. Jet was in a car accident which put him out of commission for a while, and when he got better he was drinking even more. He made a brief attempt at a comeback and even joined an early lineup of the Jeff Beck Group, but spent the rest of his life either working labouring jobs or playing the nostalgia circuit. He died in 2011. Jet and Tony's touring bass player, John Paul Jones, actually auditioned for the Shadows, as Licorice Locking left the group to spend more time evangelising, but Jones didn't get the job, and we'll be picking up on him later. We'll be seeing Cliff again too, as well as having a brief appearance from Tony Meehan, but this is the last we'll see of the Shadows, who continued with a variety of different bass players, and with Brian Bennett as the permanent drummer, off and on until 2015. Marvin, Bennett, and Welch all continue to make music separately, and it's still possible they may perform together as the Shadows one day. But even if they don't, "Apache" stands as the moment when a million British kids first decided that they wanted to be a guitar hero and play a Fender Stratocaster.
Welcome to The Camping Crew podcast with Aaron Burchael & Chris Byrne This is meant to be a fun podcast, we are just enthusiasts and what we discuss on the podcast are just our own personal views. News: Vantastival follow up Some good news (maybe) from Sunday's Irish Independent. Will we get an early release? Follow-ups & shout-outs: Thank you for the support with coffee donations Update from Mark about his Insurance question from last week Pat was on via email about bringing his Camper back from Germany Colin from Phoenix Motorhome Club got in touch about with advice about Caravan weights Camp life: We have a very inspiring interview this week with Rebecca from A Motorhome Life of Hank and Marvin who are going to be creating a new world record attempt? ---oOo--- If you would like a sticker for your motorhome or Campervan just send us your address and we will pop it in the post to you. We wrap up this podcast with a quick shout out for Aaron's Vlog on YouTube called: Charlie and me our Camping Vlog and his website http://www.campsitereview.com We also give a quick mention to our Twitter account for our podcast which is @TheCampingCrew and our email address CampingCrewPodcast@gmail.com and ask for ideas, campsites, products, news items to discuss on the podcast. We hope that you like our podcast. If you did please subscribe and tell your camping friends about us.
Robin Nolan is arguably one of the most famous gypsy jazz guitarists in the world, having played with every major artist in the genre, and winning a global fan base as well as the respect and acclaim of his peers (George Harrison, Bill Wyman, Hank Marvin to name a few!). Our original LIVE podcast session at the Green Note couldn't take place due to COVID-19, but Robin was up for a quick Zoom session in the meantime.
The "Killer" Live & Killer On The Loose: Jerry Lee Lewis, Hank Marvin & The Shadows, Pretenders, Phil Lynott, Ed O´Brien ja Thin Lizzy. 3 x 2 albumia. Rockhistorian helmien helinää. Mukana ”tappaja” lavalla, sarjamurhaaja kaduilla, uutta aaltoa, uutta romantiikkaa, tennistunteja, virtuaalimatkailua China Towniin, musiikillisia käänteitä ja liittymäkohtia. Kaikki liittyy kaikkeen ja moni moneen, kun voimaa poikkeusoloihin haetaan levyhyllyjen hyvästä musiikista. Sami Ruokangas ja Juha Kakkuri nostavat tuttuun tapaansa esille merkille pantavia äänitteitä. Viihdy ja äimisty! Kuuntele jaksoon liittyvä soittolista: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3SiXLcGUXwu3zNngM9ESq8?si=5-ikBMqaTtS35M_0fLRb5Q
You know, we used to say live and let live all the time on this show. Not anymore! It's "Live and Let Die" (by Paul McCartney and Wings) from here on out! WE talk about what artists we'd like to see making Bond songs in our bonus segment. Covers by: Ray Conniff, Inger Lise Rypdal, Guns N Roses, Hank Marvin, Daniel Johnston, Pato Fu, Mystic-Force, Billy Joel, Frank Turner Spotify playlist here
Dave Pegg has played Bass with one group for half a century: the excellent Fairport Convention. Fairport have one of the most tumultuous histories in British Folk-Rock. But, like many groups that survive that long, they have a spectacularly loyal following, and that now means that they are on a more stable footing than at any time in their history. But before Fairport, there was Rock, gigging five nights a week in the effervescent 60s Birmingham pubrock scene, a stint with the legendary Ian Campbell Group, and the small matter of 15 years in the bass chair with Jethro Tull. Peggy, as everyone calls him, has a stock of anecdotes... catching a Bjork show with Shadows guitarist Hank Marvin in Sydney, Australia, or booking the 83 year-old Petula Clark for Cropedy Convention. He has an encyclopaedic memory, and can reel off the names of obscure bands he cut his teeth with back in the day. A great man to pass time with over a pint. To learn more about the music, or the musicians mentioned in this podcast, head to the companion blog post. 'A Life in Music: Dave Pegg', which you can find at www.radiotogo.com. Everything that Dave touches on is linked there so you can explore to your hearts content. The Lives in Music series celebrates people who have spent a lifetime in music. They may be famous; they may be people who have spent their lives working in the background for the love of it. They all have stories. Lives in Music is a Radio To Go production. The intro and outro music in this series comes from the great bass player Mike Hatton, who you can hear interviewed in series 1, here. 'Everything Changes' is included in his excellent 2019 album 'Bassic Salvation'. Subscribe! Subscribe to the Podcast through your podcast app to automatically download each episode to your device. These will then land with you first, before everyone else hears about it. If you would prefer email updates each time a podcast episode (or blog post) is published, you can subscribe to the mailing list. Head here and scroll down to the signup form.
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.
This week's episode of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs is the second of two bonus episodes answering listener questions at the end of the first year of the podcast. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a bonus podcast, answering even more questions. ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. This one also includes the songs from the Patreon bonus episode, as that's even more questions and answers. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Welcome to the second and final part of this year's question and answer bonus podcasts. This week I'm actually going to do two of these. The one that's going on the main podcast is going to consist of those questions that my backers asked that have to do primarily with the podcast and the music, while the one that's going only to backers consists mostly of questions that have been asked about me and my life and so forth -- stuff that might be less interesting to the casual listener, but that clearly someone is interested in. Next week I get back to the main story, with an episode about Carl Perkins, but right now we're going to jump straight into the questions. Matthew Elmslie asks: "It's not an issue you've had to confront yet, as you navigate the mid-'50s, but eventually you're going to come up against the clash between the concept of popular music where the basic unit is the song or single, and the one where the basic unit is the album. What are your thoughts on that and how do you plan to deal with it?" This is a question I had to give some consideration to when I was writing my book California Dreaming, which in many ways was sort of a trial run for the podcast, and which like the podcast told its story by looking at individual tracks. I think it can be a problem, but probably not in the way it first appears. First, the period where the album was dominant was a fairly short one -- it's only roughly from 1967 through about 1974 that the bands who were getting the most critical respect were primarily thinking in terms of albums rather than singles. After that, once punk starts, the pendulum swings back again, so it's not a long period of time that I have to think of in those terms. But it is something that has to be considered during that period. On the other hand, even during that period, there were many acts who were still primarily singles acts -- the Monkees, Slade, the Move, T-Rex... many of whom, arguably, had more long-term influence than many of the album acts of the time. I think for the most part, though, even the big album acts were still working mostly in ways that allow themselves to be looked at through the lens of single tracks. Like even on something like Dark Side of the Moon, which is about as concept-albumy as it gets, there's still "Money" and "Great Gig in the Sky" which are individual tracks people know even if they don't necessarily know the album, and which could be used as the focus of an episode on the album. Even with Led Zeppelin, who never released singles at all, there are tracks that might as well have been singles, like "Whole Lotta Love" or "Stairway to Heaven". So for the most part it's fairly easy to find a single track I can focus on. The real problem only comes in for a handful of albums -- records, mostly from that period in the late sixties and early seventies, which absolutely deserve to be considered as part of the podcast, but which don't have standout tracks. It's hard to pick one track from, say, Trout Mask Replica by Captain Beefheart or Astral Weeks by Van Morrison -- those two albums really do need considering as albums rather than as individual tracks -- there's no reason to choose, say, "Frownland" over "The Dust Blows Forward 'n' the Dust Blows Back" or vice versa, or "Madame George" over "Slim Slow Slider". What I'll do in those cases will probably vary from case to case. So with Trout Mask Replica I'd probably just pick one song as the title song for the episode but still talk about the whole album, while with Astral Weeks the most likely thing is for me to focus the episode on "Brown-Eyed Girl", which isn't on the album, but talk about the making of Astral Weeks after "Brown-Eyed Girl" was a success. That's assuming I cover both those albums at all, but I named them because I'm more likely to than not. [Excerpt: Van Morrison, “Brown-Eyed Girl”] Russell Stallings asks: "Andrew, in [the] 60s it seems rock guitar was dominated by Stratocasters and Les Pauls, what was the guitar of choice in the period we are currently covering (1957) ?" Well, 1957 is just about the point where this becomes an interesting question. Before this point the guitar hasn't played much of a part in the proceedings -- we've seen guitarists, but there've been more piano players -- 1957 is really the point where the guitar becomes the primary rock and roll instrument. Before I go any further, I just want to say that I've never been a particular gearhead. There are people out there who can tell the difference instantly between different types of guitars based on a note or two. I'm not one of them -- I can sort of make out the difference between a Fendery sound and a Gibsony one and a Rickenbackery one, but not at a tremendous level of precision. I tend to care more about the technique of the player than the sound of the instrument, so this isn't my area of expertise. But I'll give this a go. Now, there wasn't a straightforward single most popular guitar at this point. It's true that from the late sixties on rock pretty much standardised around the Les Paul and the Stratocaster -- though it was from the late sixties, and you get a lot of people playing different guitars in the early and mid sixties -- but in the fifties people were still figuring things out as individuals. But at the same time, there is, sort of, an answer to this. The Strat wasn't particularly popular in the 50s. The only first-rank 50s rocker who played a Strat was Buddy Holly, who always played one on stage, though he varied his guitars in the studio from what I've read. Buddy Holly is indirectly the reason the Strat later became so popular -- he inspired Hank Marvin of the Shadows to get one, and Marvin inspired pretty much every guitarist in Britain to copy him. But other than in surf music, the Strat wasn't really popular until around 1967. You'd occasionally get a Telecaster player in the 50s -- Buck Owens, who played on quite a few rockabilly sessions for people like Gene Vincent and Wanda Jackson before he became one of the greats of country music, played a Telecaster. And James Burton, who played in the fifties with Ricky Nelson and Dale Hawkins, among others, was another Telecaster player. But in general there weren't a lot of Fender players. [Excerpt: Ricky Nelson, “Hello, Mary Lou”, James Burton guitar solo] Some people did play Gibsons -- most of the Chicago electric blues people seem to have been Gibson people, and so was Chuck Berry. Scotty Moore also played a Gibson. But rather than go for the Les Paul, they'd mostly go for hollow-body models like the L5, which could be played as either electric or acoustic. Scotty Moore also used a custom-built Echosonic amp, so he could get a similar guitar sound on stage to the one he'd got in the studio with Sam Phillips, and he used the L5 and Echosonic combination on all the Elvis hits of the fifties. Carl Perkins did play a Les Paul at first, including on "Blue Suede Shoes", but he switched to a Gibson ES-5 (and got himself an Echosonic from the same person who made Scotty Moore's) after that. [Excerpt: Carl Perkins, “Matchbox”] For acoustic guitar, people generally either used a Martin, like Elvis Presley or Ray Edenton, who was the session rhythm player who doubled Don Everly's guitar in the studio (Phil Everly would double it live, but he didn't play on the records), or they'd play a Gibson acoustic, as Don Everly and Buddy Holly did. But overwhelmingly the most popular guitar on rockabilly sessions -- which means in rock and roll for these purposes, since with the exception of Chuck Berry the R&B side of rock and roll remained dominated by piano and sax -- the most popular rockabilly guitar was a Gretsch. There were various popular models of Gretsch guitar, like the Duo Jet, but the most popular were the 6120, the Country Gentleman, and the Tennessean, all of which were variants on the same basic design, and all of which were endorsed by Chet Atkins, which is why they became the pre-eminent guitars among rockabilly musicians, all of whom idolised Atkins. You can hear how that guitar sounds when Atkins plays it here… [Excerpt: Chet Atkins, “Mr. Sandman”] Atkins himself played these guitars on sessions for Elvis (where he just played rhythm) and the Everly Brothers (for whom he played lead in the studio). Duane Eddy, Cliff Gallup of the Blue Caps, Eddie Cochran, and many more played Gretsch guitars in imitation of Atkins. Bo Diddley also played a Gretsch before he started playing his own custom-built guitar. There was no default guitar choice in the 50s the way there was later, but the Gretsch seemed to be the choice of the guitarists who were most admired at the time, and so it also became the choice for anyone else who wanted that clean, country-style, rockabilly lead guitar sound. That sound went out of fashion in the later sixties, but George Harrison used a Gretsch for most of his early leads, and Michael Nesmith of the Monkees always played a Gretsch -- when they started doing twelve-strings, in 1966, they initially only made three, one for Chet Atkins, one for George Harrison, and one for Nesmith, though they later mass-produced them. But anyway, yeah. No single answer, but Gretsch Country Gentleman, with a hollow-bodied Gibson in close second, is the closest you'll get. William Maybury asks "About when does the History of Soul divorce from the History of Rock, in your eyes?" That's a difficult question, and it's something I'll be dealing with in a lot more detail when we get to the 1970s, over a whole series of episodes. This is the grotesquely oversimplified version. The short answer is -- when "soul" stopped being the label that was applied to cutting-edge black music that white people could rip off. The history of rock is, at least in part, a history of white musicians incorporating innovations that first appeared in black musicians' work. It's not *just* that, of course, but that's a big part of it. Now, around 1970 or so, "rock" gets redefined specifically as music that is made by white men with guitars, and other people making identical music were something else. Like there's literally no difference, stylistically, between "Maggot Brain" by Funkadelic and things like Peter Green era Fleetwood Mac or "Watermelon in Easter Hay" by Frank Zappa, but people talk about P-Funk as a funk group rather than a rock group – I know the question was about soul, rather than funk, but in the early seventies there was a huge overlap between the two. [Excerpt: Funkadelic, “Maggot Brain”] But as long as soul music remained at the forefront of musical innovations, those innovations were incorporated by white "rock" acts, and any attempt to tell the story of rock music which ignores George Clinton or Stevie Wonder or Sly Stone or Marvin Gaye would be a fundamentally dishonest one. But some time around the mid-seventies, "soul" stops being a label that's applied to innovative new music, and becomes a label for music that's consciously retro or conservative, people like, say, Luther Vandross. Not that there's anything wrong with retro music -- and there's some great soul music made in the 80s and 90s -- but the music that was at the cutting edge was first disco and then hip-hop, and that's the music that was spawning the innovations that the rock musicians would incorporate into their work. And, indeed, after around 1980 rock itself becomes more consciously retro and less experimental, and so the rate of incorporation of new musical ideas slows down too, though never completely stops. But there's always some fuzziness around genre labels. For example, if you consider Prince to be a soul musician, then obviously he's still part of the story. Same goes for Michael Jackson. I don't know if I'd consider either of them to be soul per se, but I could make a case for it, and obviously it's impossible to tell the story of rock in the eighties without those two, any more than you could tell it without, say, Bruce Springsteen. So, really, there's a slow separation between the two genres over about a twenty-year period, starting in the mid-sixties and finishing in the mid-eighties. I *imagine* that Prince is probably the last new musician who might be described as soul who will be appearing in the podcast, but it really depends on where you draw the boundaries of what counts as soul. There'll be a few disco and hip-hop acts appearing over the last half of the series, and some of them might be considered soul by some people. That's the best I can do at answering the question right now, but it's a vastly oversimplified version of the real answer, which is "listen to all the podcasts for the seventies when I get to them". One from Jeff Stanzler: "For me, the most surprising inclusion so far was the Janis Martin record. You did speak some about why you felt it warranted inclusion, but I'd love to hear more of your thinking on this, and maybe also on the larger philosophical question of including records that were more like significant signposts than records that had huge impact at the time." [Excerpt: Janis Martin, “Drugstore Rock & Roll”] Some of this goes back to some of the stuff I was talking about last week, about how there are multiple factors at play when it comes to any song I'm choosing, but the Janis Martin one makes a good example of how those factors play into each other. First, everything I said in that episode is true -- it *is* an important signpost in the transition of rock and roll into a music specifically aimed at white teenagers, and it is the first record I've come across that deals with the 1950s of Happy Days and American Graffiti rather than the other things that were going on in the culture. Even though "Drugstore Rock and Roll" wasn't a massively successful record, I think that makes it worth including. But there were other factors that warranted its inclusion too. The first of these was simply that I wanted to include at least one song by a woman at that point. If you don't count the Platters, who had one female member, it had been three months since the last song by a woman. I knew I was going to be doing Wanda Jackson a few weeks later, but it's important to me that I show how women were always part of the story of rock and roll. The podcast is going to be biased towards men, because it's telling the story of an industry that was massively biased towards men, but where women did have the opportunity to break through I want to give them credit. This is not including "token women" or anything like that -- rather it's saying "women have always been part of the story, their part of the story has been ignored, I want to do what I can to redress the balance a bit, so long as I don't move into actively misrepresenting history". Then there's the fact that Janis Martin had what to my mind was a fascinating story, and one that allowed me to talk about a lot of social issues of the time, at least in brief. And finally there's the way that her story ties in with those of other people I've covered. Her admiration of Ruth Brown allowed me to tie the story in with the episode on "Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean", and also gave me a way to neatly bookend the story, while showing the influence of one of the songs I'd already covered. Her working for RCA and with the same musicians as Elvis meant that I could talk a bit more about those musicians, and her being marketed as "the Female Elvis" meant that I could talk about Elvis' larger cultural impact on the world in 1956, something that needed to be discussed in the series, but which I hadn't found space for in an episode on Elvis himself at that point. (And in talking about the various Elvis-based novelty records I was also able to mention a few figures who will turn up in future episodes, planting seeds for later). [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran and the Holly Twins, “I Want Elvis For Christmas”] So that's the thinking there. Every episode has to serve a bunch of different purposes if I'm going to tell this story in only five hundred episodes, and the Janis Martin one, I think, did that better than many. As to the larger question of signposts versus impact at the time -- I am trying, for the most part, to tell the story from the point of view of the time we're looking at, and look at what mattered to listeners and other musicians at the time. But you also have to fill in the details of stuff that's going to affect things in the future. So for example you can't talk about REM without first having covered people like Big Star, so even though Big Star weren't huge at the time, they'll definitely be covered. On the other hand someone like, say, Nick Drake, who had little influence until he was rediscovered decades later, won't be covered, except maybe in passing when talking about other artists Joe Boyd produced, because he didn't really have an effect on the wider story. In general, the prime consideration for any song that I include is -- does it advance the overall story I'm telling? There'll be stuff left out that would be in if the only criterion was how people reacted to it at the time, and there'll be stuff included which, on its own merits, just wouldn't make the list at all. There's one Adam Faith album track, for example, that I'm going to talk about in roughly nine months, which I think is almost certainly not even the best track that Adam Faith recorded that day, which is about as low a bar as it gets. But it'll be in there because it's an important link in a larger story, even though it's not a song that mattered at all at the time. And a final question from Daniel Helton on whether I considered doing an episode on "Ain't Got No Home" by Clarence "Frogman" Henry. [Excerpt: Clarence “Frogman” Henry, “Ain't Got No Home”] It's a great record, but much of what I'd have to say about it would be stuff about the New Orleans scene and Cosimo Matassa's studio and so forth -- stuff that I'd probably already covered in the episodes on Fats Domino and Lloyd Price (including the episode on Price that's coming up later), so it'd be covering too much of the same ground for me to devote a full episode to it. If I was going to cover Frogman in the main podcast, it would *probably* be with "I Don't Know Why (But I Do)" because that came out at a time when there were far fewer interesting records being made, and I'd then cover his history including "Ain't Got No Home" as part of that, but I don't think that's likely. In fact, yeah, I'll pencil in "Ain't Got No Home" for next week's Patreon episode. Don't expect much, because those are only ten-minute ones, but it came out at around the same time as next week's proper episode was recorded, and it *is* a great record. I'll see what I can do for that one. Anyway, between this and the Patreon bonus episode, I think that's all the questions covered. Thanks to everyone who asked one, and if I haven't answered your questions fully, please let me know and I'll try and reply in the comments to the Patreon post. We'll be doing this again next year, so sign up for the Patreon now if you want that. Next week we're back to the regular podcasts, with an episode on "Matchbox" by Carl Perkins. Also, I'm *hoping* -- though not completely guaranteeing yet -- that I'll have the book based on the first fifty episodes done and out by this time next week. These things always take longer than I expect, but here's hoping there'll be an announcement next week. See you then.
This week’s episode of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs is the second of two bonus episodes answering listener questions at the end of the first year of the podcast. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a bonus podcast, answering even more questions. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. This one also includes the songs from the Patreon bonus episode, as that’s even more questions and answers. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Welcome to the second and final part of this year’s question and answer bonus podcasts. This week I’m actually going to do two of these. The one that’s going on the main podcast is going to consist of those questions that my backers asked that have to do primarily with the podcast and the music, while the one that’s going only to backers consists mostly of questions that have been asked about me and my life and so forth — stuff that might be less interesting to the casual listener, but that clearly someone is interested in. Next week I get back to the main story, with an episode about Carl Perkins, but right now we’re going to jump straight into the questions. Matthew Elmslie asks: “It’s not an issue you’ve had to confront yet, as you navigate the mid-’50s, but eventually you’re going to come up against the clash between the concept of popular music where the basic unit is the song or single, and the one where the basic unit is the album. What are your thoughts on that and how do you plan to deal with it?” This is a question I had to give some consideration to when I was writing my book California Dreaming, which in many ways was sort of a trial run for the podcast, and which like the podcast told its story by looking at individual tracks. I think it can be a problem, but probably not in the way it first appears. First, the period where the album was dominant was a fairly short one — it’s only roughly from 1967 through about 1974 that the bands who were getting the most critical respect were primarily thinking in terms of albums rather than singles. After that, once punk starts, the pendulum swings back again, so it’s not a long period of time that I have to think of in those terms. But it is something that has to be considered during that period. On the other hand, even during that period, there were many acts who were still primarily singles acts — the Monkees, Slade, the Move, T-Rex… many of whom, arguably, had more long-term influence than many of the album acts of the time. I think for the most part, though, even the big album acts were still working mostly in ways that allow themselves to be looked at through the lens of single tracks. Like even on something like Dark Side of the Moon, which is about as concept-albumy as it gets, there’s still “Money” and “Great Gig in the Sky” which are individual tracks people know even if they don’t necessarily know the album, and which could be used as the focus of an episode on the album. Even with Led Zeppelin, who never released singles at all, there are tracks that might as well have been singles, like “Whole Lotta Love” or “Stairway to Heaven”. So for the most part it’s fairly easy to find a single track I can focus on. The real problem only comes in for a handful of albums — records, mostly from that period in the late sixties and early seventies, which absolutely deserve to be considered as part of the podcast, but which don’t have standout tracks. It’s hard to pick one track from, say, Trout Mask Replica by Captain Beefheart or Astral Weeks by Van Morrison — those two albums really do need considering as albums rather than as individual tracks — there’s no reason to choose, say, “Frownland” over “The Dust Blows Forward ‘n’ the Dust Blows Back” or vice versa, or “Madame George” over “Slim Slow Slider”. What I’ll do in those cases will probably vary from case to case. So with Trout Mask Replica I’d probably just pick one song as the title song for the episode but still talk about the whole album, while with Astral Weeks the most likely thing is for me to focus the episode on “Brown-Eyed Girl”, which isn’t on the album, but talk about the making of Astral Weeks after “Brown-Eyed Girl” was a success. That’s assuming I cover both those albums at all, but I named them because I’m more likely to than not. [Excerpt: Van Morrison, “Brown-Eyed Girl”] Russell Stallings asks: “Andrew, in [the] 60s it seems rock guitar was dominated by Stratocasters and Les Pauls, what was the guitar of choice in the period we are currently covering (1957) ?” Well, 1957 is just about the point where this becomes an interesting question. Before this point the guitar hasn’t played much of a part in the proceedings — we’ve seen guitarists, but there’ve been more piano players — 1957 is really the point where the guitar becomes the primary rock and roll instrument. Before I go any further, I just want to say that I’ve never been a particular gearhead. There are people out there who can tell the difference instantly between different types of guitars based on a note or two. I’m not one of them — I can sort of make out the difference between a Fendery sound and a Gibsony one and a Rickenbackery one, but not at a tremendous level of precision. I tend to care more about the technique of the player than the sound of the instrument, so this isn’t my area of expertise. But I’ll give this a go. Now, there wasn’t a straightforward single most popular guitar at this point. It’s true that from the late sixties on rock pretty much standardised around the Les Paul and the Stratocaster — though it was from the late sixties, and you get a lot of people playing different guitars in the early and mid sixties — but in the fifties people were still figuring things out as individuals. But at the same time, there is, sort of, an answer to this. The Strat wasn’t particularly popular in the 50s. The only first-rank 50s rocker who played a Strat was Buddy Holly, who always played one on stage, though he varied his guitars in the studio from what I’ve read. Buddy Holly is indirectly the reason the Strat later became so popular — he inspired Hank Marvin of the Shadows to get one, and Marvin inspired pretty much every guitarist in Britain to copy him. But other than in surf music, the Strat wasn’t really popular until around 1967. You’d occasionally get a Telecaster player in the 50s — Buck Owens, who played on quite a few rockabilly sessions for people like Gene Vincent and Wanda Jackson before he became one of the greats of country music, played a Telecaster. And James Burton, who played in the fifties with Ricky Nelson and Dale Hawkins, among others, was another Telecaster player. But in general there weren’t a lot of Fender players. [Excerpt: Ricky Nelson, “Hello, Mary Lou”, James Burton guitar solo] Some people did play Gibsons — most of the Chicago electric blues people seem to have been Gibson people, and so was Chuck Berry. Scotty Moore also played a Gibson. But rather than go for the Les Paul, they’d mostly go for hollow-body models like the L5, which could be played as either electric or acoustic. Scotty Moore also used a custom-built Echosonic amp, so he could get a similar guitar sound on stage to the one he’d got in the studio with Sam Phillips, and he used the L5 and Echosonic combination on all the Elvis hits of the fifties. Carl Perkins did play a Les Paul at first, including on “Blue Suede Shoes”, but he switched to a Gibson ES-5 (and got himself an Echosonic from the same person who made Scotty Moore’s) after that. [Excerpt: Carl Perkins, “Matchbox”] For acoustic guitar, people generally either used a Martin, like Elvis Presley or Ray Edenton, who was the session rhythm player who doubled Don Everly’s guitar in the studio (Phil Everly would double it live, but he didn’t play on the records), or they’d play a Gibson acoustic, as Don Everly and Buddy Holly did. But overwhelmingly the most popular guitar on rockabilly sessions — which means in rock and roll for these purposes, since with the exception of Chuck Berry the R&B side of rock and roll remained dominated by piano and sax — the most popular rockabilly guitar was a Gretsch. There were various popular models of Gretsch guitar, like the Duo Jet, but the most popular were the 6120, the Country Gentleman, and the Tennessean, all of which were variants on the same basic design, and all of which were endorsed by Chet Atkins, which is why they became the pre-eminent guitars among rockabilly musicians, all of whom idolised Atkins. You can hear how that guitar sounds when Atkins plays it here… [Excerpt: Chet Atkins, “Mr. Sandman”] Atkins himself played these guitars on sessions for Elvis (where he just played rhythm) and the Everly Brothers (for whom he played lead in the studio). Duane Eddy, Cliff Gallup of the Blue Caps, Eddie Cochran, and many more played Gretsch guitars in imitation of Atkins. Bo Diddley also played a Gretsch before he started playing his own custom-built guitar. There was no default guitar choice in the 50s the way there was later, but the Gretsch seemed to be the choice of the guitarists who were most admired at the time, and so it also became the choice for anyone else who wanted that clean, country-style, rockabilly lead guitar sound. That sound went out of fashion in the later sixties, but George Harrison used a Gretsch for most of his early leads, and Michael Nesmith of the Monkees always played a Gretsch — when they started doing twelve-strings, in 1966, they initially only made three, one for Chet Atkins, one for George Harrison, and one for Nesmith, though they later mass-produced them. But anyway, yeah. No single answer, but Gretsch Country Gentleman, with a hollow-bodied Gibson in close second, is the closest you’ll get. William Maybury asks “About when does the History of Soul divorce from the History of Rock, in your eyes?” That’s a difficult question, and it’s something I’ll be dealing with in a lot more detail when we get to the 1970s, over a whole series of episodes. This is the grotesquely oversimplified version. The short answer is — when “soul” stopped being the label that was applied to cutting-edge black music that white people could rip off. The history of rock is, at least in part, a history of white musicians incorporating innovations that first appeared in black musicians’ work. It’s not *just* that, of course, but that’s a big part of it. Now, around 1970 or so, “rock” gets redefined specifically as music that is made by white men with guitars, and other people making identical music were something else. Like there’s literally no difference, stylistically, between “Maggot Brain” by Funkadelic and things like Peter Green era Fleetwood Mac or “Watermelon in Easter Hay” by Frank Zappa, but people talk about P-Funk as a funk group rather than a rock group – I know the question was about soul, rather than funk, but in the early seventies there was a huge overlap between the two. [Excerpt: Funkadelic, “Maggot Brain”] But as long as soul music remained at the forefront of musical innovations, those innovations were incorporated by white “rock” acts, and any attempt to tell the story of rock music which ignores George Clinton or Stevie Wonder or Sly Stone or Marvin Gaye would be a fundamentally dishonest one. But some time around the mid-seventies, “soul” stops being a label that’s applied to innovative new music, and becomes a label for music that’s consciously retro or conservative, people like, say, Luther Vandross. Not that there’s anything wrong with retro music — and there’s some great soul music made in the 80s and 90s — but the music that was at the cutting edge was first disco and then hip-hop, and that’s the music that was spawning the innovations that the rock musicians would incorporate into their work. And, indeed, after around 1980 rock itself becomes more consciously retro and less experimental, and so the rate of incorporation of new musical ideas slows down too, though never completely stops. But there’s always some fuzziness around genre labels. For example, if you consider Prince to be a soul musician, then obviously he’s still part of the story. Same goes for Michael Jackson. I don’t know if I’d consider either of them to be soul per se, but I could make a case for it, and obviously it’s impossible to tell the story of rock in the eighties without those two, any more than you could tell it without, say, Bruce Springsteen. So, really, there’s a slow separation between the two genres over about a twenty-year period, starting in the mid-sixties and finishing in the mid-eighties. I *imagine* that Prince is probably the last new musician who might be described as soul who will be appearing in the podcast, but it really depends on where you draw the boundaries of what counts as soul. There’ll be a few disco and hip-hop acts appearing over the last half of the series, and some of them might be considered soul by some people. That’s the best I can do at answering the question right now, but it’s a vastly oversimplified version of the real answer, which is “listen to all the podcasts for the seventies when I get to them”. One from Jeff Stanzler: “For me, the most surprising inclusion so far was the Janis Martin record. You did speak some about why you felt it warranted inclusion, but I’d love to hear more of your thinking on this, and maybe also on the larger philosophical question of including records that were more like significant signposts than records that had huge impact at the time.” [Excerpt: Janis Martin, “Drugstore Rock & Roll”] Some of this goes back to some of the stuff I was talking about last week, about how there are multiple factors at play when it comes to any song I’m choosing, but the Janis Martin one makes a good example of how those factors play into each other. First, everything I said in that episode is true — it *is* an important signpost in the transition of rock and roll into a music specifically aimed at white teenagers, and it is the first record I’ve come across that deals with the 1950s of Happy Days and American Graffiti rather than the other things that were going on in the culture. Even though “Drugstore Rock and Roll” wasn’t a massively successful record, I think that makes it worth including. But there were other factors that warranted its inclusion too. The first of these was simply that I wanted to include at least one song by a woman at that point. If you don’t count the Platters, who had one female member, it had been three months since the last song by a woman. I knew I was going to be doing Wanda Jackson a few weeks later, but it’s important to me that I show how women were always part of the story of rock and roll. The podcast is going to be biased towards men, because it’s telling the story of an industry that was massively biased towards men, but where women did have the opportunity to break through I want to give them credit. This is not including “token women” or anything like that — rather it’s saying “women have always been part of the story, their part of the story has been ignored, I want to do what I can to redress the balance a bit, so long as I don’t move into actively misrepresenting history”. Then there’s the fact that Janis Martin had what to my mind was a fascinating story, and one that allowed me to talk about a lot of social issues of the time, at least in brief. And finally there’s the way that her story ties in with those of other people I’ve covered. Her admiration of Ruth Brown allowed me to tie the story in with the episode on “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean”, and also gave me a way to neatly bookend the story, while showing the influence of one of the songs I’d already covered. Her working for RCA and with the same musicians as Elvis meant that I could talk a bit more about those musicians, and her being marketed as “the Female Elvis” meant that I could talk about Elvis’ larger cultural impact on the world in 1956, something that needed to be discussed in the series, but which I hadn’t found space for in an episode on Elvis himself at that point. (And in talking about the various Elvis-based novelty records I was also able to mention a few figures who will turn up in future episodes, planting seeds for later). [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran and the Holly Twins, “I Want Elvis For Christmas”] So that’s the thinking there. Every episode has to serve a bunch of different purposes if I’m going to tell this story in only five hundred episodes, and the Janis Martin one, I think, did that better than many. As to the larger question of signposts versus impact at the time — I am trying, for the most part, to tell the story from the point of view of the time we’re looking at, and look at what mattered to listeners and other musicians at the time. But you also have to fill in the details of stuff that’s going to affect things in the future. So for example you can’t talk about REM without first having covered people like Big Star, so even though Big Star weren’t huge at the time, they’ll definitely be covered. On the other hand someone like, say, Nick Drake, who had little influence until he was rediscovered decades later, won’t be covered, except maybe in passing when talking about other artists Joe Boyd produced, because he didn’t really have an effect on the wider story. In general, the prime consideration for any song that I include is — does it advance the overall story I’m telling? There’ll be stuff left out that would be in if the only criterion was how people reacted to it at the time, and there’ll be stuff included which, on its own merits, just wouldn’t make the list at all. There’s one Adam Faith album track, for example, that I’m going to talk about in roughly nine months, which I think is almost certainly not even the best track that Adam Faith recorded that day, which is about as low a bar as it gets. But it’ll be in there because it’s an important link in a larger story, even though it’s not a song that mattered at all at the time. And a final question from Daniel Helton on whether I considered doing an episode on “Ain’t Got No Home” by Clarence “Frogman” Henry. [Excerpt: Clarence “Frogman” Henry, “Ain’t Got No Home”] It’s a great record, but much of what I’d have to say about it would be stuff about the New Orleans scene and Cosimo Matassa’s studio and so forth — stuff that I’d probably already covered in the episodes on Fats Domino and Lloyd Price (including the episode on Price that’s coming up later), so it’d be covering too much of the same ground for me to devote a full episode to it. If I was going to cover Frogman in the main podcast, it would *probably* be with “I Don’t Know Why (But I Do)” because that came out at a time when there were far fewer interesting records being made, and I’d then cover his history including “Ain’t Got No Home” as part of that, but I don’t think that’s likely. In fact, yeah, I’ll pencil in “Ain’t Got No Home” for next week’s Patreon episode. Don’t expect much, because those are only ten-minute ones, but it came out at around the same time as next week’s proper episode was recorded, and it *is* a great record. I’ll see what I can do for that one. Anyway, between this and the Patreon bonus episode, I think that’s all the questions covered. Thanks to everyone who asked one, and if I haven’t answered your questions fully, please let me know and I’ll try and reply in the comments to the Patreon post. We’ll be doing this again next year, so sign up for the Patreon now if you want that. Next week we’re back to the regular podcasts, with an episode on “Matchbox” by Carl Perkins. Also, I’m *hoping* — though not completely guaranteeing yet — that I’ll have the book based on the first fifty episodes done and out by this time next week. These things always take longer than I expect, but here’s hoping there’ll be an announcement next week. See you then.
This week’s episode of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs is the second of two bonus episodes answering listener questions at the end of the first year of the podcast. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a bonus podcast, answering even more questions. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. This one also includes the songs from the Patreon bonus episode, as that’s even more questions and answers. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Welcome to the second and final part of this year’s question and answer bonus podcasts. This week I’m actually going to do two of these. The one that’s going on the main podcast is going to consist of those questions that my backers asked that have to do primarily with the podcast and the music, while the one that’s going only to backers consists mostly of questions that have been asked about me and my life and so forth — stuff that might be less interesting to the casual listener, but that clearly someone is interested in. Next week I get back to the main story, with an episode about Carl Perkins, but right now we’re going to jump straight into the questions. Matthew Elmslie asks: “It’s not an issue you’ve had to confront yet, as you navigate the mid-’50s, but eventually you’re going to come up against the clash between the concept of popular music where the basic unit is the song or single, and the one where the basic unit is the album. What are your thoughts on that and how do you plan to deal with it?” This is a question I had to give some consideration to when I was writing my book California Dreaming, which in many ways was sort of a trial run for the podcast, and which like the podcast told its story by looking at individual tracks. I think it can be a problem, but probably not in the way it first appears. First, the period where the album was dominant was a fairly short one — it’s only roughly from 1967 through about 1974 that the bands who were getting the most critical respect were primarily thinking in terms of albums rather than singles. After that, once punk starts, the pendulum swings back again, so it’s not a long period of time that I have to think of in those terms. But it is something that has to be considered during that period. On the other hand, even during that period, there were many acts who were still primarily singles acts — the Monkees, Slade, the Move, T-Rex… many of whom, arguably, had more long-term influence than many of the album acts of the time. I think for the most part, though, even the big album acts were still working mostly in ways that allow themselves to be looked at through the lens of single tracks. Like even on something like Dark Side of the Moon, which is about as concept-albumy as it gets, there’s still “Money” and “Great Gig in the Sky” which are individual tracks people know even if they don’t necessarily know the album, and which could be used as the focus of an episode on the album. Even with Led Zeppelin, who never released singles at all, there are tracks that might as well have been singles, like “Whole Lotta Love” or “Stairway to Heaven”. So for the most part it’s fairly easy to find a single track I can focus on. The real problem only comes in for a handful of albums — records, mostly from that period in the late sixties and early seventies, which absolutely deserve to be considered as part of the podcast, but which don’t have standout tracks. It’s hard to pick one track from, say, Trout Mask Replica by Captain Beefheart or Astral Weeks by Van Morrison — those two albums really do need considering as albums rather than as individual tracks — there’s no reason to choose, say, “Frownland” over “The Dust Blows Forward ‘n’ the Dust Blows Back” or vice versa, or “Madame George” over “Slim Slow Slider”. What I’ll do in those cases will probably vary from case to case. So with Trout Mask Replica I’d probably just pick one song as the title song for the episode but still talk about the whole album, while with Astral Weeks the most likely thing is for me to focus the episode on “Brown-Eyed Girl”, which isn’t on the album, but talk about the making of Astral Weeks after “Brown-Eyed Girl” was a success. That’s assuming I cover both those albums at all, but I named them because I’m more likely to than not. [Excerpt: Van Morrison, “Brown-Eyed Girl”] Russell Stallings asks: “Andrew, in [the] 60s it seems rock guitar was dominated by Stratocasters and Les Pauls, what was the guitar of choice in the period we are currently covering (1957) ?” Well, 1957 is just about the point where this becomes an interesting question. Before this point the guitar hasn’t played much of a part in the proceedings — we’ve seen guitarists, but there’ve been more piano players — 1957 is really the point where the guitar becomes the primary rock and roll instrument. Before I go any further, I just want to say that I’ve never been a particular gearhead. There are people out there who can tell the difference instantly between different types of guitars based on a note or two. I’m not one of them — I can sort of make out the difference between a Fendery sound and a Gibsony one and a Rickenbackery one, but not at a tremendous level of precision. I tend to care more about the technique of the player than the sound of the instrument, so this isn’t my area of expertise. But I’ll give this a go. Now, there wasn’t a straightforward single most popular guitar at this point. It’s true that from the late sixties on rock pretty much standardised around the Les Paul and the Stratocaster — though it was from the late sixties, and you get a lot of people playing different guitars in the early and mid sixties — but in the fifties people were still figuring things out as individuals. But at the same time, there is, sort of, an answer to this. The Strat wasn’t particularly popular in the 50s. The only first-rank 50s rocker who played a Strat was Buddy Holly, who always played one on stage, though he varied his guitars in the studio from what I’ve read. Buddy Holly is indirectly the reason the Strat later became so popular — he inspired Hank Marvin of the Shadows to get one, and Marvin inspired pretty much every guitarist in Britain to copy him. But other than in surf music, the Strat wasn’t really popular until around 1967. You’d occasionally get a Telecaster player in the 50s — Buck Owens, who played on quite a few rockabilly sessions for people like Gene Vincent and Wanda Jackson before he became one of the greats of country music, played a Telecaster. And James Burton, who played in the fifties with Ricky Nelson and Dale Hawkins, among others, was another Telecaster player. But in general there weren’t a lot of Fender players. [Excerpt: Ricky Nelson, “Hello, Mary Lou”, James Burton guitar solo] Some people did play Gibsons — most of the Chicago electric blues people seem to have been Gibson people, and so was Chuck Berry. Scotty Moore also played a Gibson. But rather than go for the Les Paul, they’d mostly go for hollow-body models like the L5, which could be played as either electric or acoustic. Scotty Moore also used a custom-built Echosonic amp, so he could get a similar guitar sound on stage to the one he’d got in the studio with Sam Phillips, and he used the L5 and Echosonic combination on all the Elvis hits of the fifties. Carl Perkins did play a Les Paul at first, including on “Blue Suede Shoes”, but he switched to a Gibson ES-5 (and got himself an Echosonic from the same person who made Scotty Moore’s) after that. [Excerpt: Carl Perkins, “Matchbox”] For acoustic guitar, people generally either used a Martin, like Elvis Presley or Ray Edenton, who was the session rhythm player who doubled Don Everly’s guitar in the studio (Phil Everly would double it live, but he didn’t play on the records), or they’d play a Gibson acoustic, as Don Everly and Buddy Holly did. But overwhelmingly the most popular guitar on rockabilly sessions — which means in rock and roll for these purposes, since with the exception of Chuck Berry the R&B side of rock and roll remained dominated by piano and sax — the most popular rockabilly guitar was a Gretsch. There were various popular models of Gretsch guitar, like the Duo Jet, but the most popular were the 6120, the Country Gentleman, and the Tennessean, all of which were variants on the same basic design, and all of which were endorsed by Chet Atkins, which is why they became the pre-eminent guitars among rockabilly musicians, all of whom idolised Atkins. You can hear how that guitar sounds when Atkins plays it here… [Excerpt: Chet Atkins, “Mr. Sandman”] Atkins himself played these guitars on sessions for Elvis (where he just played rhythm) and the Everly Brothers (for whom he played lead in the studio). Duane Eddy, Cliff Gallup of the Blue Caps, Eddie Cochran, and many more played Gretsch guitars in imitation of Atkins. Bo Diddley also played a Gretsch before he started playing his own custom-built guitar. There was no default guitar choice in the 50s the way there was later, but the Gretsch seemed to be the choice of the guitarists who were most admired at the time, and so it also became the choice for anyone else who wanted that clean, country-style, rockabilly lead guitar sound. That sound went out of fashion in the later sixties, but George Harrison used a Gretsch for most of his early leads, and Michael Nesmith of the Monkees always played a Gretsch — when they started doing twelve-strings, in 1966, they initially only made three, one for Chet Atkins, one for George Harrison, and one for Nesmith, though they later mass-produced them. But anyway, yeah. No single answer, but Gretsch Country Gentleman, with a hollow-bodied Gibson in close second, is the closest you’ll get. William Maybury asks “About when does the History of Soul divorce from the History of Rock, in your eyes?” That’s a difficult question, and it’s something I’ll be dealing with in a lot more detail when we get to the 1970s, over a whole series of episodes. This is the grotesquely oversimplified version. The short answer is — when “soul” stopped being the label that was applied to cutting-edge black music that white people could rip off. The history of rock is, at least in part, a history of white musicians incorporating innovations that first appeared in black musicians’ work. It’s not *just* that, of course, but that’s a big part of it. Now, around 1970 or so, “rock” gets redefined specifically as music that is made by white men with guitars, and other people making identical music were something else. Like there’s literally no difference, stylistically, between “Maggot Brain” by Funkadelic and things like Peter Green era Fleetwood Mac or “Watermelon in Easter Hay” by Frank Zappa, but people talk about P-Funk as a funk group rather than a rock group – I know the question was about soul, rather than funk, but in the early seventies there was a huge overlap between the two. [Excerpt: Funkadelic, “Maggot Brain”] But as long as soul music remained at the forefront of musical innovations, those innovations were incorporated by white “rock” acts, and any attempt to tell the story of rock music which ignores George Clinton or Stevie Wonder or Sly Stone or Marvin Gaye would be a fundamentally dishonest one. But some time around the mid-seventies, “soul” stops being a label that’s applied to innovative new music, and becomes a label for music that’s consciously retro or conservative, people like, say, Luther Vandross. Not that there’s anything wrong with retro music — and there’s some great soul music made in the 80s and 90s — but the music that was at the cutting edge was first disco and then hip-hop, and that’s the music that was spawning the innovations that the rock musicians would incorporate into their work. And, indeed, after around 1980 rock itself becomes more consciously retro and less experimental, and so the rate of incorporation of new musical ideas slows down too, though never completely stops. But there’s always some fuzziness around genre labels. For example, if you consider Prince to be a soul musician, then obviously he’s still part of the story. Same goes for Michael Jackson. I don’t know if I’d consider either of them to be soul per se, but I could make a case for it, and obviously it’s impossible to tell the story of rock in the eighties without those two, any more than you could tell it without, say, Bruce Springsteen. So, really, there’s a slow separation between the two genres over about a twenty-year period, starting in the mid-sixties and finishing in the mid-eighties. I *imagine* that Prince is probably the last new musician who might be described as soul who will be appearing in the podcast, but it really depends on where you draw the boundaries of what counts as soul. There’ll be a few disco and hip-hop acts appearing over the last half of the series, and some of them might be considered soul by some people. That’s the best I can do at answering the question right now, but it’s a vastly oversimplified version of the real answer, which is “listen to all the podcasts for the seventies when I get to them”. One from Jeff Stanzler: “For me, the most surprising inclusion so far was the Janis Martin record. You did speak some about why you felt it warranted inclusion, but I’d love to hear more of your thinking on this, and maybe also on the larger philosophical question of including records that were more like significant signposts than records that had huge impact at the time.” [Excerpt: Janis Martin, “Drugstore Rock & Roll”] Some of this goes back to some of the stuff I was talking about last week, about how there are multiple factors at play when it comes to any song I’m choosing, but the Janis Martin one makes a good example of how those factors play into each other. First, everything I said in that episode is true — it *is* an important signpost in the transition of rock and roll into a music specifically aimed at white teenagers, and it is the first record I’ve come across that deals with the 1950s of Happy Days and American Graffiti rather than the other things that were going on in the culture. Even though “Drugstore Rock and Roll” wasn’t a massively successful record, I think that makes it worth including. But there were other factors that warranted its inclusion too. The first of these was simply that I wanted to include at least one song by a woman at that point. If you don’t count the Platters, who had one female member, it had been three months since the last song by a woman. I knew I was going to be doing Wanda Jackson a few weeks later, but it’s important to me that I show how women were always part of the story of rock and roll. The podcast is going to be biased towards men, because it’s telling the story of an industry that was massively biased towards men, but where women did have the opportunity to break through I want to give them credit. This is not including “token women” or anything like that — rather it’s saying “women have always been part of the story, their part of the story has been ignored, I want to do what I can to redress the balance a bit, so long as I don’t move into actively misrepresenting history”. Then there’s the fact that Janis Martin had what to my mind was a fascinating story, and one that allowed me to talk about a lot of social issues of the time, at least in brief. And finally there’s the way that her story ties in with those of other people I’ve covered. Her admiration of Ruth Brown allowed me to tie the story in with the episode on “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean”, and also gave me a way to neatly bookend the story, while showing the influence of one of the songs I’d already covered. Her working for RCA and with the same musicians as Elvis meant that I could talk a bit more about those musicians, and her being marketed as “the Female Elvis” meant that I could talk about Elvis’ larger cultural impact on the world in 1956, something that needed to be discussed in the series, but which I hadn’t found space for in an episode on Elvis himself at that point. (And in talking about the various Elvis-based novelty records I was also able to mention a few figures who will turn up in future episodes, planting seeds for later). [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran and the Holly Twins, “I Want Elvis For Christmas”] So that’s the thinking there. Every episode has to serve a bunch of different purposes if I’m going to tell this story in only five hundred episodes, and the Janis Martin one, I think, did that better than many. As to the larger question of signposts versus impact at the time — I am trying, for the most part, to tell the story from the point of view of the time we’re looking at, and look at what mattered to listeners and other musicians at the time. But you also have to fill in the details of stuff that’s going to affect things in the future. So for example you can’t talk about REM without first having covered people like Big Star, so even though Big Star weren’t huge at the time, they’ll definitely be covered. On the other hand someone like, say, Nick Drake, who had little influence until he was rediscovered decades later, won’t be covered, except maybe in passing when talking about other artists Joe Boyd produced, because he didn’t really have an effect on the wider story. In general, the prime consideration for any song that I include is — does it advance the overall story I’m telling? There’ll be stuff left out that would be in if the only criterion was how people reacted to it at the time, and there’ll be stuff included which, on its own merits, just wouldn’t make the list at all. There’s one Adam Faith album track, for example, that I’m going to talk about in roughly nine months, which I think is almost certainly not even the best track that Adam Faith recorded that day, which is about as low a bar as it gets. But it’ll be in there because it’s an important link in a larger story, even though it’s not a song that mattered at all at the time. And a final question from Daniel Helton on whether I considered doing an episode on “Ain’t Got No Home” by Clarence “Frogman” Henry. [Excerpt: Clarence “Frogman” Henry, “Ain’t Got No Home”] It’s a great record, but much of what I’d have to say about it would be stuff about the New Orleans scene and Cosimo Matassa’s studio and so forth — stuff that I’d probably already covered in the episodes on Fats Domino and Lloyd Price (including the episode on Price that’s coming up later), so it’d be covering too much of the same ground for me to devote a full episode to it. If I was going to cover Frogman in the main podcast, it would *probably* be with “I Don’t Know Why (But I Do)” because that came out at a time when there were far fewer interesting records being made, and I’d then cover his history including “Ain’t Got No Home” as part of that, but I don’t think that’s likely. In fact, yeah, I’ll pencil in “Ain’t Got No Home” for next week’s Patreon episode. Don’t expect much, because those are only ten-minute ones, but it came out at around the same time as next week’s proper episode was recorded, and it *is* a great record. I’ll see what I can do for that one. Anyway, between this and the Patreon bonus episode, I think that’s all the questions covered. Thanks to everyone who asked one, and if I haven’t answered your questions fully, please let me know and I’ll try and reply in the comments to the Patreon post. We’ll be doing this again next year, so sign up for the Patreon now if you want that. Next week we’re back to the regular podcasts, with an episode on “Matchbox” by Carl Perkins. Also, I’m *hoping* — though not completely guaranteeing yet — that I’ll have the book based on the first fifty episodes done and out by this time next week. These things always take longer than I expect, but here’s hoping there’ll be an announcement next week. See you then.
Musician/singer/songwriter, Michael Armstrong, joins Nick Randell in the SNS studio to chat about his life's passion and to play some tunes live and unplugged. Armstrong has performed with some of the biggest names in the business over the years, spending some of it on tour headlining his own shows - as well as appearing as a special guest on major tours with Vonda Shepard, T’Pau, Leo Sayer, Beverley Craven, Dean Friedman & The Hollies’ Peter Howarth. He has also collaborated and worked alongside massive global stars including Sir Paul McCartney, Sir Cliff Richard, Mark Knopfler, Glenn Fry, Chris de Burgh, Russell Watson, Hank Marvin, Michael Ball and countless others. His second critically acclaimed album, Looking For The World, follows his first, simply titled Michael Armstrong. https://michaelarmstrongmusic.co.uk/ SNS Online continues to offer an eclectic range of quality programming - free to download - to all like-minded people out there in cyber-space. These shows are independent podcasts produced to the highest professional standards and are non-profit making. So please enjoy, download and share these shows on all your lovely social media - as essentially that is our advertising! And please, please, please...offer feedback on the 'SNS Online' FB page or Twitter (ScratchNTweet). Other shows currently in preparation... Paul Burston - novelist/LGBTQ activist Sam Forsdike - Postcard Productions Liz Hyder - novelist
Nas, Incredible Bongo Band, The Shadows. La Source remonte tous les mois à l’origine des chansons pour raconter leur histoire, celle des genres musicaux et de leur héritage. Dans le titre le plus brut de sa carrière, Nas rappe sur un sample ralenti d’une version funk d’ « Apache ». Reprise par Incredible Bongo Band, cet air mythique a été consacré par The Shadows.1960 – Hit de la décennie, « Apache » fait partie des morceaux qui ont boulversé la musique. Tambour battant en arrière-plan, les notes voluptueuses de la guitare d’Hank Marvin suggèrent le canyon écarlate et sablé des westerns américains. Cette réverbe aérienne si propre aux Shadows est aujourd’hui ce qui fait le rock anglais.1973 – La mode est au bongo. Formé à l’origine pour terminer la bande-son d’un film, Incredible Bongo Band, avec Jim Gordon à la batterie, rencontre un franc succès. Treize ans après The Shadows, le groupe de funk américain, entourés de musiciens de studios, propose une version plus groovy d’ « Apache ».2002 – Nas et Jay-Z se disputent le trône de New-York. Les deux rappeurs les plus importants de la Big Apple se clashent par morceaux interposés. Alors que la mode est au mélange entre rap et r’n’b, Nas opte pour un retour aux sources, à l’essence du hip-hop. Il décide de reprendre un sample old school tiré d’ « Apache », devenu mythique pour les breakers dans les années 1980.Animé par Raphaël Da Cruz avec Olivier Lamm, Belkacem Meziane et Driver.CRÉDITSLa Source est un hors-série de NoFun animé par Raphaël Da Cruz et produit par Binge Audio. Cet épisode a été enregistré le 16 janvier 2019 au studio V. Despentes de Binge Audio (Paris, 19e). Réalisation : Quentin Bresson et Solène Moulin. Générique : Shkyd. Chargée de production : Juliette Livartowski. Chargée d’édition : Diane Jean. Identité graphique : Sébastien Brothier (Upian). Direction des programmes : Joël Ronez. Direction de la rédaction : David Carzon. Direction générale : Gabrielle Boeri-Charles. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
I 1969 deltog en 17årig Tamra Rosanes i den nu legendariske Woodstock Festival. Det blev startskudet på en lang musikkarriere i musik, der tog hende fra USA til Danmark, hvor hun har været en af pionererne indenfor dansk countrymusik. Fra at høre Hendrix spille på Woodstock til at rense Hudson-floden med Pete Seeger til indspille i Abbey Road Studios i studiet ved sidden af Paul McCartney, så trækker Tamra Rosanes som en anden musikalsk Forrest Gump tråde gennem dansk og amerikansk rockhistorie de sidste 50 år. Tamra var forbi Mediano Music-studiet, ikke blot for at snakke om et liv spækket med anekdoter fra et liv på landevejen, hvordan hun i starten lidt modvilligt blev dronningen af dansk country, men også for at snakke om sit nye album, Divided Heart, der udkom fredag d. 15. marts 2019, der handler om at være splittet mellem at være dansk og amerikansk, og byder på et par engelske oversættelser af gamle danske sange oversat af danske udflyttere til USA blandt andet ‘Det var en lørdag aften’. Hør blandt andet om: - Hvordan Tamra endte med at rense Hudson floden for skrald med den amerikanske folk legende Pete Seeger. -Hvordan Jimi Hendrix guitar vækkede hende en morgen i 1969. -Hvordan det var at indspille i Abbey Road Studios med Hank Marvin. Vært: Jan Eriksen Producer: Thomas Nørskov
The latest edition of the podcast which asks: what is the least Mod Dungeons & Dragons character? This episode, Pop-Crazed Youngsters, has been cursed by the tang of man-flu and dodgy microphones, meaning it’s not at the usual hi-fidelity standard you’ve come to expect from Chart Music. But what an incident-packed go-around on the morbid carousel of Pop it is! There’s wave after wave of guest appearances from people who really shouldn’t have bothered, such as Cliff, his specky henchman Hank Marvin, and none other than co-host KEGGY KEEGLE HIMSELF facing down DLT in a perm-off. Thanks to Simon getting an unexpected birthday present, we have possession of a full shooting script of an episode from The Popses’ post-strike regeneration, and we try to break the codes therein. Musicwise, the Mod revival rides itself right off the cliff, Kelly Marie and Sheena Easton put on their best Bingo Jumpsuits, Cliff does his Danger Dancing routine next to a keyboard player in Alan Partridge shorts, Randy Crawford’s heartbreakingly brilliant performance is ruined by a vision mixer who makes her look like the alien off Alien, and Nicholas Lyndhurst, Martin Shaw and Dennis Waterman rule over the charts. Al Needham is joined by Simon Price and David Stubbs for a good hard leer at the autumn of 1980, veering off – as always – on tangents such as trying to be a 12 year-old Ace Face when everyone’s seen your Dad drag you out of a boating lake at Skegness Butlins, why adding the Poo-Poo drum machine over Joy Division records in clubs will never get old, having a good laugh at younger brothers who get beaten up in town for wearing the wrong badges, pathological hatred of Plastic Mods, and flares. And swearing, swearing, all the time swearing. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Hank Marvin, is an English multi-instrumentalist, vocalist and songwriter. He is best known as the lead guitarist for the Shadows, a group which primarily performed instrumentals and was the backing band for Cliff Richard. The Shadows, along with Richard, secured 69 UK chart singles from the 1950s to the 2000s, Many leading British and Canadian rock guitarists cite Marvin as an influence on them. In today's SNS Online, we talk in depth to Marvin about his life and work. Fully illustrated with both the hits of The Shadows, and of Hank's own successful solo career - including extracts from Without A Word, his brand new album. Free download via Soundcloud. To purchase Without A Word https://www.amazon.co.uk/Without-Word-Hank-Marvin/dp/B06XHJFPKM YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCI9umn9y0BwixqV5wRLKbvw Look out for Hank on Facebook at Hank Marvin Music Official. Our thanks go to ABC Radio Perth/Western Australia. SNS Online continues to offer an eclectic range of quality programming - free to download - to all like-minded people out there in cyber-space. These shows are independent podcasts produced to the highest professional standards and are non-profit making. So please enjoy, download and share these shows on all your lovely social media - as essentially that is our advertising! And please, please, please...offer feedback on the 'SNS Online' FB page or Twitter (ScratchNTweet). The Winachi Tribe coming soon. Big kiss, ScratchNSniffers! - Nick Randell X EXTRAORDINARY LIVES. ONLINE.
‘Color Theory’ (def.) - Retro-nostalgic, heartfelt…synthpop! Color Theory is the musical alter ego of American singer-keyboardist-songwriter, Brian Hazard. With no less than 9 studio albums to his name, a Lennon Award (plus grand prize in the electronic category of The John Lennon Music Contest) and 2.71 million followers on Twitter, Brian is one of the most creative and imaginative musicians in the business. His nods to bands like Depeche Mode, The Pet Shop Boys and OMD are all produced with a fresh, vibrant energy - offering up some very original results, whilst other tracks have their roots in musical theatre - all sung with Brian’s beautifully pure trademark voice. In this extended addition of SNS Online, we head to California to talk to Hazard about his long career to date in music, plus his mastering work with other artists. The definitive guide to all things…Color Theory! Illustrated with the music from Color Theory. Website. http://colortheory.com/ Be a Patreon. https://www.patreon.com/colortheory Cover art by Andy Lambert. SNS Online continues to offer an eclectic range of quality programming - free to download - to all like-minded people out there in cyber-space. These shows are independent podcasts produced to the highest professional standards and are non-profit making. So please enjoy, download and share these shows on all your lovely social media - as essentially that is our advertising! And please, please, please...offer feedback on the 'SNS Online' FB page or Twitter (ScratchNTweet). Shows currently in preparation... Hank Marvin - lead guitarist/The Shadows The Winachi Tribe - band Big kiss, ScratchNSniffers! - Nick Randell X EXTRAORDINARY LIVES. ONLINE.
Enjoy our brand new extended trailer, featuring guests past, present and even future (well, two, at least!). With bitesized anecdotes and general contributions from Katy Manning, Jeremy Swift, Alan Yentob, Derek Fowlds, Andrew Edward Cullip, Gail Renard, Ann Mitchell, Oliver James Kelly, Carol Decker, Cherylee Houston, Toby Hadoke, Louise Jameson, Sandy Walsh, Michael Brown, Peter Tatchell, Stewart Willy, Terence Frisby, Julie Hesmondhalgh, Emma Stace Darling and Mark Elliott. All individual shows are available to be downloaded for free from the SNS Online Soundcloud page. Cover art by Andy Lambert (from an original logo by Vaishali Bhatt). SNS Online continues to offer an eclectic range of quality programming - free to download - to all like-minded people out there in cyber-space. These shows are independent podcasts produced to the highest professional standards and are non-profit making. So please enjoy, download and share these shows on all your lovely social media - as essentially that is our advertising! And please, please, please...offer feedback on the 'SNS Online' FB page or Twitter (ScratchNTweet). Shows currently in preparation... Hank Marvin - lead guitarist/The Shadows Alan Yentob - BBC executive/broadcaster. Color Theory - musician Jeremy Swift - actor The Beautiful Secret - band Mark Elliott - pop journalist The Winachi Tribe - band Big kiss, ScratchNSniffers! - Nick Randell X EXTRAORDINARY LIVES. ONLINE.
Hank Marvin, nacido en 1941 en New Castle, guitarrista de "The Shadows".Cumple 75 años de edad.
Hank Marvin, nacido en 1941 en New Castle, guitarrista de "The Shadows".Cumple 75 años de edad.
Libby Purves meets musician Richard Thompson; writer and broadcaster Peter York; Julie Nicholson - whose daughter Jenny was killed during the 7/7 attacks - and novelist Toby Clements. Peter York is an author, broadcaster and management consultant. His show How To Become A Nicer Type Of Person is at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. It's his personal guide to navigating modern life from what to say, what to think to what to wear - he's definitely not fond of what he calls "sports-derived clothing." He also forbids the use of specific words such as passionate, creative, transparent and journey. How To Become A Nicer Type Of Person is at the Assembly George Square Studios, Edinburgh. Former vicar Julie Nicholson's daughter Jenny was killed after a bomb exploded at Edgware Road Underground station on July 7th 2005. Julie's book A Song for Jenny has been adapted into a factual drama by Frank McGuinness with Emily Watson as Julie. The film chronicles the impact of the 7/7 bombings on Julie's life and those around her. It is an unflinching account of grief and how she was unable to find solace in her faith. A Song For Jenny is broadcast on BBC One. Richard Thompson OBE is a musician and songwriter who co-founded Fairport Convention. His new album, Still, features musical references to Django Reinhardt, Les Paul and Hank Marvin. The Americana Music Association recently honoured him with a Lifetime Achievement Award for Songwriting. Robert Plant, REM, Elvis Costello, Bonnie Raitt and many others have recorded Richard's songs. Still is released on Proper Records. Richard Thompson is touring the UK. Toby Clements is the author of the novel Kingmaker: Broken Faith, the second in his trilogy set against the Wars of the Roses. He became obsessed with this period of history after a school trip to Tewkesbury Abbey where he learned about the Battle of Tewkesbury in 1471 when forces loyal to the House of Lancaster were defeated by the House of York under King Edward IV. During the course of his research Toby learned to use the longbow and fight with the poll axe and how to start a fire with a flint. Kingmaker Broken Faith is published by Century. Producer: Paula McGinley.
Capítulo de miércoles con Chema Lara de cuerpo presente y guitarra gurriata en ristre. Música de altura con Van Morrison por fin con el disco completo, Laura Cantrell protagonista del Huercasa Country Festival, Track Dogs y sus cuerdas, Hank Marvin, Allison Moorer o La Graham Bond Organisation entre otros. Hoy además nos rendimos a la musa de CDS, Su Notísima cumple 100 cuentos a pie de página. Gracias M, un honor!!!
Capítulo de miércoles con Chema Lara de cuerpo presente y guitarra gurriata en ristre. Música de altura con Van Morrison por fin con el disco completo, Laura Cantrell protagonista del Huercasa Country Festival, Track Dogs y sus cuerdas, Hank Marvin, Allison Moorer o La Graham Bond Organisation entre otros. Hoy además nos rendimos a la musa de CDS, Su Notísima cumple 100 cuentos a pie de página. Gracias M, un honor!!!
There are times when you know something historic went down and you wish you could have been there when the person who first suggested something epic did it. Like that one time someone was in a board room somewhere and said "People, listen. This gun has to fly. I know that we don't have an aircraft it will fit into so we build an aircraft around it". That was quite some time ago and the A10 is now being forcibly retired due to American budget cuts. A more recent example of this would be another meeting in another board room. The genius stands up... "People, listen. We dress everybody up to look like Hank Marvin, even a dog. Stay with me guys, stay with me. Then we get Danny Dyer to narrate it". They couldn't even stand up to applaud. Ears bled.
David Stafford celebrates the Fender Stratocaster with the help of some of its key players including Hank Marvin, Pink Floyd's David Gilmour, Jeff Beck and Johnny Marr.
It's Hank Marvin's birthday. So here from the Whistledown Archives is a gem of an interview with a 2013 re-edit and re-mix. Hank talks about his love for the Fender Stratocaster that became his trademark with The Shadows. Bend that Tremelo arm Hank.
The Colonel is in love and is naked. Topics on the table today include inciting riots, berzerking on buses and the unfortunate display of Mrs. Webb's gash
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