Podcasts about isleys

DJ Maine steps up with blasts from Brooklyn's own M.O.P. and Skyzoo, bassline magic from the Isleys and sleek future funk from Jessica Jolia and Tuxedo. Plus wild Funk Doc antics on "Beastin", 2 shades of Soho's classic "Hot Music", new Montreal bounce from Lou Phelps and flamboyant vault heists with Carmen and Circuitry. View the full playlist for this show at https://www.wefunkradio.com/show/1250 Enjoying WEFUNK? Listen to all of our mixes at https://www.wefunkradio.com/shows/

Joining us all the way from Santa Barbara for this episode is Darrell M. McNeill, director of operations at the Black Rock Coalition and author of a new 33 1/3 study of the Isley Brothers' mighty 1973 album 3 + 3. We start by asking our guest about his '90s contributions to the Village Voice and his involvement with the B.R.C.. Crediting his dad for his own childhood love of the Isleys, Darrell tells us how he came to write about the band. We discuss their unique history across six-plus decades, arriving at the dramatic game-changer that was 3 + 3. Inevitably referencing Jimi Hendrix — an Isleys sideman in the mid-'60s — we ask Darrell about the group's pioneering hybrid of R&B and rock and their covers of classic songs by Carole King, James Taylor et al. A special nod, of course, to Jimi's incalculable influence on kid brother and budding guitar genius Ernie. From the Isleys to Isaac Hayes: following two clips from Ira Robbins' 1995 audio interview with the sometime Stax superstar, we discuss such radical milestones as 'Theme from Shaft' and Hot Buttered Soul's version of Bacharach & David's 'Walk On By'. After a brief digression to salute the 50th anniversary of long-time RBP contributor John Broven's seminal 1974 book Walking to New Orleans, Mark talks us out with quotes from newly-added interviews with Janis Joplin (1969) and Beatles session guitarist David Spinozza (1971). Jasper then wraps up the episode with remarks on Destiny's Child (2003) and The Comet is Coming (2019). Many thanks to special guest Darrell M. McNeill. His book on the Isley Brother's 3 + 3 is published by Bloomsbury and available now. Pieces discussed: The Isleys: first time winners again!, The Isley Brothers: 3 + 3, The Isley Brothers: 3 + 3 = Super Success, Ernie Isley: Pride of the Isleys, Isaac Hayes audio, Fats Domino & His Orchestra: Saville Theatre, Behind The Sun: New Orleans, 'See You Later Alligator': Bobby Charles, Janis Joplin: Janis Superhypermost!, Paul McCartney: Working with Paul — A Session Musician Speaks, Kelly Rowland: Real Girl Talk, Michie Mee is the First Lady of Toronto Hip-Hop and The Comet is Coming: Interstellar Apocalypse.

For those who haven't heard the announcement I posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the first part of a two-episode look at the song “I Heard it Through the Grapevine”. This week we take a short look at the song’s writers, Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong, and the first released version by Gladys Knight and the Pips. In two weeks time we’ll take a longer look at the sixties career of the song’s most famous performer, Marvin Gaye. This episode is quite a light one. That one… won’t be. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a half-hour bonus episode, on “Bend Me Shape Me” by Amen Corner. 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 Mixcloud will be up with the next episode. For Motown-related information in this and other Motown episodes, I've used the following resources: Where Did Our Love Go? The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound by Nelson George is an excellent popular history of the various companies that became Motown. To Be Loved by Berry Gordy is Gordy's own, understandably one-sided, but relatively well-written, autobiography. Women of Motown: An Oral History by Susan Whitall is a collection of interviews with women involved in Motown. I Hear a Symphony: Motown and Crossover R&B by J. Andrew Flory is an academic look at Motown. The Motown Encyclopaedia by Graham Betts is an exhaustive look at the people and records involved in Motown's thirty-year history. Motown: The Golden Years is another Motown encyclopaedia. And Motown Junkies is an infrequently-updated blog looking at (so far) the first 693 tracks released on Motown singles. For information on Marvin Gaye, and his relationship with Norman Whitfield, I relied on Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye by David Ritz. I’ve also used information on Whitfield in  Ain't Too Proud to Beg: The Troubled Lives and Enduring Soul of the Temptations by Mark Ribowsky, I’ve also referred to interviews with Whitfield and Strong archived at rocksbackpages.com , notably “The Norman Whitfield interview”, John Abbey, Blues & Soul, 1 February 1977 For information about Gladys Knight, I’ve used her autobiography. The best collection of Gladys Knight and the Pips’ music is this 3-CD set, but the best way to hear Motown hits is in the context of other Motown hits. This five-CD box set contains the first five in the Motown Chartbusters series of British compilations. The Pips’ version of “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” is on disc 2, while Marvin Gaye’s is on disc 3, which is famously generally considered one of the best single-disc various artists compilations ever. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start, a brief note — this episode contains some brief mentions of miscarriage and drug abuse. The history of modern music would be immeasurably different had it not been for one car breakdown. Norman Whitfield spent the first fifteen years of his life in New York, never leaving the city, until his grandmother died. She’d lived in LA, and that was where the funeral was held, and so the Whitfield family got into a car and drove right across the whole continent — two thousand five hundred miles — to attend the old lady’s funeral. And then after the funeral, they turned round and started to drive home again. But they only got as far as Detroit when the car, understandably, gave up the ghost.  Luckily, like many Black families, they had family in Detroit, and Norman’s aunt was not only willing to put the family up for a while, but her husband was able to give Norman’s father a job in his drug store while he saved up enough money to pay for the car to be fixed. But as it happened, the family liked Detroit, and they never did get around to driving back home to New York. Young Norman in particular took to the city’s nightlife, and soon as well as going to school he was working an evening job at a petrol station — but that was only to supplement the money he made as a pool hustler. Young Norman Whitfield was never going to be the kind of person who took a day job, and so along with his pool he started hanging out with musicians — in particular with Popcorn and the Mohawks, a band led by Popcorn Wylie. [Excerpt: Popcorn and the Mohawks, “Shimmy Gully”] Popcorn and the Mohawks were a band of serious jazz musicians, many of whom, including Wylie himself, went on to be members of the Funk Brothers, the team of session players that played on Motown’s hits — though Wylie would depart Motown fairly early after a falling out with Berry Gordy. They were some of the best musicians in Detroit at the time, and Whitfield would tag along with the group and play tambourine, and sometimes other hand percussion instruments. He wasn’t a serious musician at that point, just hanging out with a bunch of people who were, who were a year or two older than him. But he was learning — one thing that everyone says about Norman Whitfield in his youth is that he was someone who would stand on the periphery of every situation, not getting involved, but soaking in everything that the people around him were doing, and learning from them. And soon, he was playing percussion on sessions. At first, this wasn’t for Motown, but everything in the Detroit music scene connected back to the Gordy family in one way or another. In this case, the label was Thelma Records, which was formed by Berry Gordy’s ex-mother-in-law and named after Gordy’s first wife, who he had recently divorced. Of all the great Motown songwriters and producers, Whitfield’s life is the least-documented, to the extent that the chronology of his early career is very vague and contradictory, and Thelma was such a small label there even seems to be some dispute about when it existed — different sources give different dates, and while Whitfield always said he worked for Thelma records, he might have actually been employed by another label owned by the same people, Ge Ge, which might have operated earlier — but by most accounts Whitfield quickly progressed from session tambourine player to songwriter. According to an article on Whitfield from 1977, the first record of one of his songs was “Alone” by Tommy Storm on Thelma Records, but that record seems not to exist — however, some people on a soul message board, discussing this a few years ago, found an interview with a member of a group called The Fabulous Peps which also featured Storm, saying that their record on Ge Ge Records, “This Love I Have For You”, is a rewrite of that song by Don Davis, Thelma’s head of A&R, though the credit on the label for that is just to Davis and Ron Abner, another member of the group: [Excerpt: The Fabulous Peps, “This Love I Have For You”] So that might, or might not, be the first Norman Whitfield song ever to be released. The other song often credited as Whitfield’s first released song is “Answer Me” by Richard Street and the Distants — Street was another member of the Fabulous Peps, but we’ve encountered him and the Distants before when talking about the Temptations — the Distants were the group that Otis Williams, Melvin Franklin, and Al Bryant had been in before forming the Temptations — and indeed Street would much later rejoin his old bandmates in the Temptations, when Whitfield was producing for them. Unlike the Fabulous Peps track, this one was clearly credited to N. Whitfield, so whatever happened with the Storm track, this is almost certainly Whitfield’s first official credit as a songwriter: [Excerpt: Richard Street and the Distants, “Answer Me”] He was soon writing songs for a lot of small labels — most of which appear to have been recorded by the Thelma team and then licensed out — like “I’ve Gotten Over You” by the Sonnettes: [Excerpt: The Sonnettes, “I’ve Gotten Over You”] That was on KO Records, distributed by Scepter, and was a minor local hit — enough to finally bring Whitfield to the attention of Berry Gordy. According to many sources, Whitfield had been hanging around Hitsville for months trying to get a job with the label, but as he told the story in 1977 “Berry Gordy had sent Mickey Stevenson over to see me about signing with the company as an exclusive in-house writer and producer. The first act I was assigned to was Marvin Gaye and he had just started to become popular.” That’s not quite how the story went. According to everyone else, he was constantly hanging around Hitsville, getting himself into sessions and just watching them, and pestering people to let him get involved. Rather than being employed as a writer and producer, he was actually given a job in Motown’s quality control department for fifteen dollars a week, listening to potential records and seeing which ones he thought were hits, and rating them before they went to the regular department meetings for feedback from the truly important people. But he was also allowed to write songs. His first songwriting credit on a Motown record wasn’t Marvin Gaye, as Whitfield would later tell the story, but was in fact for the far less prestigious Mickey Woods — possibly the single least-known artist of Motown’s early years. Woods was a white teenager, the first white male solo artist signed to Motown, who released two novelty teen-pop singles. Whitfield’s first Motown song was the B-side to Woods’ second single, a knock-off of Sam Cooke’s “Cupid” called “They Call Me Cupid”, co-written with Berry Gordy and Brian Holland: [Excerpt: Mickey Woods, “They Call Me Cupid”] Unsurprisingly that didn’t set the world on fire, and Whitfield didn’t get another Motown label credit for thirteen months (though some of his songs for Thelma may have come out in this period). When he did, it was as co-writer with Mickey Stevenson — and, for the first time, sole producer — of the first single for a new singer, Kim Weston: [Excerpt: Kim Weston, “It Should Have Been Me”] As it turned out, that wasn’t a hit, but the flip-side, “Love Me All The Way”, co-written by Stevenson (who was also Weston’s husband) and Barney Ales, did become a minor hit, making the R&B top thirty. After that, Whitfield was on his way. It was only a month later that he wrote his first song for the Temptations, a B-side, “The Further You Look, The Less You See”: [Excerpt: The Temptations, “The Further You Look, The Less You See”] That was co-written with Smokey Robinson, and as we heard in the episode on “My Girl”, both Robinson and Whitfield vied with each other for the job of Temptations writer and producer. As we also heard in that episode, Robinson got the majority of the group’s singles for the next couple of years, but Whitfield would eventually take over from him. Whitfield’s work with the Temptations is probably his most important work as a writer and producer, and the Temptations story is intertwined deeply with this one, but for the most part I’m going to save discussion of Whitfield’s work with the group until we get to 1972, so bear with me if I seem to skim over that — and if I repeat myself in a couple of years when we get there. Whitfield’s first major success, though, was also the first top ten hit for Marvin Gaye, “Pride and Joy”: [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, “Pride and Joy”] “Pride and Joy” had actually been written and recorded before the Kim Weston and Temptations tracks, and was intended as album filler — it was written during a session by Whitfield, Gaye, and Mickey Stevenson who was also the producer of the track, and recorded in the same session as it was written, with Martha and the Vandellas on backing vocals. The intended hit from the session, “Hitch-Hike”, we covered in the previous episode on Gaye, but that was successful enough that an album, That Stubborn Kinda Fellow, was released, with “Pride and Joy” on it. A few months later Gaye recut his lead vocal, over the same backing track, and the record was released as a single, reaching number ten on the pop charts and number two R&B: [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, “Pride and Joy”] Whitfield had other successes as well, often as B-sides. “The Girl’s Alright With Me”, the B-side to Smokey Robinson’s hit for the Temptations “I’ll Be In Trouble”, went to number forty on the R&B chart in its own right: [Excerpt: The Temptations, “The Girl’s Alright With Me”] That was co-written with Eddie Holland, and Holland and Whitfield had a minor songwriting partnership at this time, with Holland writing lyrics and Whitfield the music. Eddie Holland even released a Holland and Whitfield collaboration himself during his brief attempt at a singing career — “I Couldn’t Cry if I Wanted To” was a song they wrote for the Temptations, who recorded it but then left it on the shelf for four years, so Holland put out his own version, again as a B-side: [Excerpt: Eddie Holland, “I Couldn’t Cry if I Wanted To”] Whitfield was very much a B-side kind of songwriter and producer at this point — but this could be to his advantage. In January 1963, around the same time as all these other tracks, he cut a filler track with the “no-hit Supremes”, “He Means the World to Me”, which was left on the shelf until they needed a B-side eighteen months later and pulled it out and released it: [Excerpt: The Supremes, “He Means the World to Me”] But the track that that was a B-side to was “Where Did Our Love Go?”, and at the time you could make a lot of money from writing the B-side to a hit that big. Indeed, at first, Whitfield made more money from “Where Did Our Love Go?” than Holland, Dozier, or Holland, because he got a hundred percent of the songwriters’ share for his side of the record, while they had to split their share three ways. Slowly Whitfield moved from being a B-side writer to being an A-side writer. With Eddie Holland he was given a chance at a Temptations A-side for the first time, with “Girl, (Why You Wanna Make Me Blue)”: [Excerpt: The Temptations, “Girl (Why You Wanna Make Me Blue)”] He also wrote for Jimmy Ruffin, but in 1964 it was with girl groups that Whitfield was doing his best work. With Mickey Stevenson he wrote “Needle in a Haystack” for the Velvettes: [Excerpt: The Velvettes, “Needle in a Haystack”] He wrote their classic followup “He Was Really Sayin' Somethin’” with Stevenson and Eddie Holland, and with Holland he also wrote “Too Many Fish in the Sea” for the Marvelettes: [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, “Too Many Fish In The Sea”] By late 1964, Whitfield wasn’t quite in the first rank of Motown songwriter-producers with Holland-Dozier-Holland and Smokey Robinson, but he was in the upper part of the second tier with Mickey Stevenson and Clarence Paul. And by early 1966, as we saw in the episode on “My Girl”, he had achieved what he’d wanted for four years, and become the Temptations’ primary writer and producer. As I said, we’re going to look at Whitfield’s time working with the Temptations later, but in 1966 and 67 they were the act he was most associated with, and in particular, he collaborated with Eddie Holland on three top ten hits for the group in 1966. But as we discussed in the episode on “I Can’t Help Myself”, Holland’s collaborations with Whitfield eventually caused problems for Holland with his other collaborators, when he won the BMI award for writing the most hit songs, depriving his brother and Lamont Dozier of their share of the award because his outside collaborations put him ahead of them. While Whitfield *could* write songs by himself, and had in the past, he was at his best as a collaborator — as well as his writing partnership with Eddie Holland he’d written with Mickey Stevenson, Marvin Gaye, and Janie Bradford. And so when Holland told him he was no longer able to work together, Whitfield started looking for someone else who could write lyrics for him, and he soon found someone: [Excerpt: Barrett Strong, “Money”] Barrett Strong had, of course, been the very first Motown act to have a major national hit, with “Money”, but as we discussed in the episode on that song he had been unable to have a follow-up hit, and had actually gone back to working on an assembly line for a while. But when you’ve had a hit as big as “Money”, working on an assembly line loses what little lustre it has, and Strong soon took himself off to New York and started hanging around the Brill Building, where he hooked up with Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, the writers of such hits as “Save the Last Dance for Me”, “Viva Las Vegas”, “Sweets for My Sweet”, and “A Teenager in Love”.  Pomus and Shuman, according to Strong, signed him to a management contract, and they got him signed to Atlantic’s subsidiary Atco, where he recorded one single, “Seven Sins”, written and produced by the team: [Excerpt: Barrett Strong, “Seven Sins”] That was a flop, and Strong was dropped by the label. He bounced around a few cities before ending up in Chicago, where he signed to VeeJay Records and put out one more single as a performer, “Make Up Your Mind”, which also went nowhere: [Excerpt: Barrett Strong, “Make Up Your Mind”] Strong had co-written that, and as his performing career was now definitively over, he decided to move into songwriting as his main job. He co-wrote “Stay in My Corner” for the Dells, which was a top thirty R&B hit for them on VeeJay in 1965 and in a remade version in 1968 became a number one R&B hit and top ten pop hit for them: [Excerpt: The Dells, “Stay in My Corner”] And on his own he wrote another top thirty R&B hit, “This Heart of Mine”, for the Artistics: [Excerpt: The Artistics, “This Heart of Mine”] He wrote several other songs that had some minor success in 1965 and 66, before moving back to Detroit and hooking up again with his old label, this time coming to them as a songwriter with a track record rather than a one-hit wonder singer. As Strong put it “They were doing my style of music then, they were doing something a little different when I left, but they were doing the more soulful, R&B-style stuff, so I thought I had a place there. So I had an idea I thought I could take back and see if they could do something with it.” That idea was the first song he wrote under his new contract, and it was co-written with Norman Whitfield. It’s difficult to know how Whitfield and Strong started writing together, or much about their writing partnership, even though it was one of the most successful songwriting teams of the era, because neither man was interviewed in any great depth, and there’s almost no long-form writing on either of them. What does seem to have been the case is that both men had been aware of each other in the late fifties, when Strong was a budding R&B star and Whitfield merely a teenager hanging round watching the cool kids. The two may even have written together before — in an example of how the chronology for both Whitfield and Strong seems to make no sense, Whitfield had cowritten a song with Marvin Gaye, “Wherever I Lay My Hat, That’s My Home”, in 1962 — when Strong was supposedly away from Motown — and it had been included as an album track on the That Stubborn Kinda Fellow album: [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, “Wherever I Lay My Hat, That’s My Home”] The writing on that was originally credited just to Whitfield and Gaye on the labels, but it is now credited to Whitfield, Gaye, and Strong, including with BMI. Similarly Gaye’s 1965 album track “Me and My Lonely Room” — recorded in 1963 but held back – was initially credited to Whitfield alone but is now credited to Whitfield and Strong, in a strange inverse of the way “Money” initially had Strong’s credit but it was later removed. But whether this was an administrative decision made later, or whether Strong had been moonlighting for Motown uncredited in 1962 and collaborated with Whitfield, they hadn’t been a formal writing team in the way Whitfield and Holland had been, and both later seemed to date their collaboration proper as starting in 1966 when Strong returned to Motown — and understandably. The two songs they’d written earlier – if indeed they had – had been album filler, but between 1967 when the first of their new collaborations came out and 1972 when they split up, they wrote twenty-three top forty hits together. Theirs seems to have been a purely business relationship — in the few interviews with Strong he talks about Whitfield as someone he was friendly with, but Whitfield’s comments on Strong seem always to be the kind of very careful comments one would make about someone for whom one has a great deal of professional respect, a great deal of personal dislike, but absolutely no wish to air the dirty laundry behind that dislike, or to burn bridges that don’t need burning. Either way, Whitfield was in need of a songwriting partner when Barrett Strong walked into a Motown rehearsal room, and recognised that Strong’s talents were complementary to his. So he told Strong, straight out, “I’ve had quite a few hit records already. If you write with me, I can guarantee you you’ll make at least a hundred thousand dollars a year” — though he went on to emphasise that that wasn’t a guarantee-guarantee, and would depend on Strong putting the work in. Strong agreed, and the first idea he brought in for his new team earned both of them more than that hundred thousand dollars by itself. Strong had been struck by the common phrase “I heard it through the grapevine”, and started singing that line over some Ray Charles style gospel chords. Norman Whitfield knew a hook when he heard one, and quickly started to build a full song around Strong’s line. Initially, by at least some accounts, they wanted to place the song with the Isley Brothers, who had just signed to Motown and had a hit with the Holland-Dozier-Holland song “This Old Heart of Mine”: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “This Old Heart of Mine (Is Weak For You)”] For whatever reason, the Isley Brothers didn’t record the song, or if they did no copy of the recording has ever surfaced, though it does seem perfectly suited to their gospel-inflected style. The Isleys did, though, record another early Whitfield and Strong song, “That’s the Way Love Is”, which came out in 1967 as a flop single, but would later be covered more successfully by Marvin Gaye: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “That’s the Way Love Is”] Instead, the song was first recorded by the Miracles. And here the story becomes somewhat murky. We have a recording by the Miracles, released on an album two years later, but some have suggested that that version isn’t the same recording they made in 1966 when Whitfield and Strong wrote the song originally: [Excerpt: Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, “I Heard it Through the Grapevine”] It certainly sounds to my ears like that is probably the version of the song the group recorded in 66 — it sounds, frankly, like a demo for the later, more famous version. All the main elements are there — notably the main Ray Charles style hook played simultaneously on Hammond organ and electric piano, and the almost skanking rhythm guitar stabs — but Smokey Robinson’s vocal isn’t *quite* passionate enough, the tempo is slightly off, and the drums don’t have the same cavernous rack tom sound that they have in the more famous version. If you weren’t familiar with the eventual hit, it would sound like a classic Motown track, but as it is it’s missing something… [Excerpt: Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, “I Heard it Through the Grapevine”] According to at least some sources, that was presented to the quality control team — the team in which Whitfield had started his career, as a potential single, but they dismissed it. It wasn’t a hit, and Berry Gordy said it was one of the worst songs he’d ever heard. But Whitfield knew the song was a hit, and so he went back into the studio and cut a new backing track: [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, “I Heard it Through the Grapevine (backing track only)”] (Incidentally, no official release of the instrumental backing track for “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” exists, and I had to put that one together myself by taking the isolated parts someone had uploaded to youtube and synching them back together in editing software, so if there are some microsecond-level discrepancies between the instruments there, that’s on me, not on the Funk Brothers.) That track was originally intended for the Temptations, with whom Whitfield was making a series of hits at the time, but they never recorded it at the time. Whitfield did produce a version for them as an album track a couple of years later though, so we have an idea how they might have taken the song vocally — though by then David Ruffin had been replaced in the group by Dennis Edwards: [Excerpt: The Temptations, “I Heard it Through the Grapevine”] But instead of giving the song to the Temptations, Whitfield kept it back for Marvin Gaye, the singer with whom he’d had his first big breakthrough hit and for whom his two previous collaborations with Strong – if collaborations they were – had been written. Gaye and Whitfield didn’t get on very well — indeed, it seems that Whitfield didn’t get on very well with *anyone* — and Gaye would later complain about the occasions when Whitfield produced his records, saying “Norman and I came within a fraction of an inch of fighting. He thought I was a prick because I wasn't about to be intimidated by him. We clashed. He made me sing in keys much higher than I was used to. He had me reaching for notes that caused my throat veins to bulge.” But Gaye sang the song fantastically, and Whitfield was absolutely certain they had a sure-fire hit: [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, “I Heard it Through the Grapevine”] But once again the quality control department refused to release the track. Indeed, it was Berry Gordy personally who decided, against the wishes of most of the department by all accounts, that instead of “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” Gaye’s next single should be a Holland-Dozier-Holland track, “Your Unchanging Love”, a soundalike rewrite of their earlier hit for him, “How Sweet It Is”. “Your Unchanging Love” made the top thirty, but was hardly a massive success. Gordy has later claimed that he always liked “Grapevine” but just thought it was a bit too experimental for Gaye’s image at the time, but reports from others who were there say that what Gordy actually said was “it sucks”. So “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” was left on the shelf, and the first fruit of the new Whitfield/Strong team to actually get released was “Gonna Give Her All the Love I’ve Got”, written for Jimmy Ruffin, the brother of Temptations lead singer David, who had had one big hit, “What Becomes of the Brokenhearted” and one medium one, “I’ve Passed This Way Before”, in 1966. Released in 1967, “Gonna Give Her All the Love I’ve Got” became Ruffin’s third and final hit, making number 29: [Excerpt: Jimmy Ruffin, “Gonna Give Her All the Love I’ve Got”] But Whitfield was still certain that “Grapevine” could be a hit. And then in 1967, a few months after he’d shelved Gaye’s version, came the record that changed everything in soul: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, “Respect”] Whitfield was astounded by that record, but also became determined he was going to “out-funk Aretha”, and “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” was going to be the way to do it. And he knew someone who thought she could do just that. Gladys Knight never got on well with Aretha Franklin. According to Knight’s autobiography this was one-sided on Franklin’s part, and Knight was always friendly to Franklin, but it’s also notable that she says the same about several other of the great sixties female soul singers (though not all of them by any means), and there seems to be a general pattern among those singers that they felt threatened by each other and that their own position in the industry was precarious, in a way the male singers usually didn’t. But Knight claimed she always *wished* she got on well with Franklin, because the two had such similar lives. They’d both started out singing gospel as child performers before moving on to the chitlin circuit at an early age, though Knight started her singing career even younger than Franklin did. Knight was only four when she started performing solos in church, and by the age of eight she had won the two thousand dollar top prize on Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour by singing Brahms’ “Lullaby” and the Nat “King” Cole hit “Too Young”: [Excerpt: Nat “King” Cole, “Too Young”] That success inspired her, and she soon formed a vocal group with her brother Bubba, sister Brenda and their cousins William and Eleanor Guest. They named themselves the Pips in honour of a cousin whose nickname that was, and started performing at talent contests in Atlanta Chitlin’ Circuit venues. They soon got a regular gig at one of them, the Peacock, despite them all being pre-teens at the time. The Pips also started touring, and came to the attention of Maurice King, the musical director of the Flame nightclub in Detroit, who became a vocal coach for the group. King got the group signed to Brunswick records, where they released their first single, a song King had written called “Whistle My Love”: [Excerpt: The Pips, “Whistle My Love”] According to Knight that came out in 1955, when she was eleven, but most other sources have it coming out in 1958. The group’s first two singles flopped, and Brenda and Eleanor quit the group, being replaced by another cousin, Edward Patten, and an unrelated singer Langston George, leaving Knight as the only girl in the quintet. While the group weren’t successful on records, they were getting a reputation live and toured on package tours with Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson, and others. Knight also did some solo performances with a jazz band led by her music teacher, and started dating that band’s sax player, Jimmy Newman. The group’s next recording was much more successful. They went into a makeshift studio owned by a local club owner, Fats Hunter, and recorded what they thought was a demo, a version of the Johnny Otis song “Every Beat of My Heart”: [Excerpt: The Pips, “Every Beat of My Heart (HunTom version)”] The first they knew that Hunter had released that on his own small label was when they heard it on the radio. The record was picked up by VeeJay records, and it ended up going to number one on the R&B charts and number six on the pop charts, but they never saw any royalties from it. It brought them to the attention of another small label, Fury Records, which got them to rerecord the song, and that version *also* made the R&B top twenty and got as high as number forty-five on the pop charts: [Excerpt: Gladys Knight and the Pips, “Every Beat of My Heart (Fury version)”] However, just because they had a contract with Fury didn’t mean they actually got any more money, and Knight has talked about the label’s ownership being involved with gangsters. That was the first recording to be released as by “Gladys Knight and the Pips”, rather than just The Pips, and they would release a few more singles on Fury, including a second top twenty pop hit, the Don Covay song “Letter Full of Tears”: [Excerpt: Gladys Knight and the Pips, “Letter Full of Tears”] But Knight had got married to Newman, who was by now the group’s musical director, after she fell pregnant when she was sixteen and he was twenty. However, that first pregnancy tragically ended in miscarriage, and when she became pregnant again she decided to get off the road to reduce the risk. She spent a couple of years at home, having two children, while the other Pips – minus George who left soon after – continued without her to little success. But her marriage was starting to deteriorate under pressure of Newman’s drug use — they wouldn’t officially divorce until 1972, but they were already feeling the pressure, and would split up sooner rather than later — and Knight  returned to the stage, initially as a solo artist or duetting with Jerry Butler, but soon rejoining the Pips, who by this time were based in New York and working with the choreographer Cholly Atkins to improve their stagecraft. For the next few years the Pips drifted from label to label, scoring one more top forty hit in 1964 with Van McCoy’s “Giving Up”, but generally just getting by like so many other acts on the circuit. Eventually the group ended up moving to Detroit, and hooking up with Motown, where mentors like Cholly Atkins and Maurice King were already working. At first they thought they were taking a step up, but they soon found that they were a lower tier Motown act, considered on a par with the Spinners or the Contours rather than the big acts, and according to Knight they got pulled off an early Motown package tour because Diana Ross, with whom like Franklin Knight had something of a rivalry, thought they were too good on stage and were in danger of overshadowing her. Knight says in her autobiography that they “formed a little club of our own with some of the other malcontents” with Martha Reeves, Marvin Gaye, and someone she refers to as “Ivory Joe Hunter” but I presume she means Ivy Jo Hunter (one of the big problems when dealing with R&B musicians of this era is the number of people with similar names. Ivy Jo Hunter, Joe Hunter, and Ivory Joe Hunter were all R&B musicians for whom keyboard was their primary instrument, and both Ivy Jo and just plain Joe worked for Motown at different points, but Ivory Joe never did) Norman Whitfield was also part of that group of “malcontents”, and he was also the producer of the Pips’ first few singles for Motown, and so when he was looking for someone to outdo Aretha, someone with something to prove, he turned to them. He gave the group the demo tape, and they worked out a vocal arrangement for a radically different version of the song, one inspired by “Respect”: [Excerpt: Gladys Knight and the Pips, “I Heard it Through the Grapevine”] The third time was the charm, and quality control finally agreed to release “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” as a single. Gladys Knight always claimed it had no promotion, but Norman Whitfield’s persistence had paid off — the single went to number two on the pop charts (kept off the top by “Daydream Believer”), number one on the R&B charts, and became Motown’s biggest-selling single *ever* up until that point. It also got Knight a Grammy nomination for Best R&B Vocal Performance, Female — though the Grammy committee, at least, didn’t think she’d out-Aretha’d Aretha, as “Respect” won the award. And that, sadly, sort of summed up Gladys Knight and the Pips at Motown — they remained not quite the winners in everything. There’s no shame in being at number two behind a classic single like “Daydream Believer”, and certainly no shame in losing the Grammy to Aretha Franklin at her best, but until they left Motown in 1972 and started their run of hits on Buddah records, Gladys Knight and the Pips would always be in other people’s shadow. That even extended to “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” when, as we’ll hear in part two of this story, Norman Whitfield’s persistence paid off, Marvin Gaye’s version got released as a single, and *that* became the biggest-selling single on Motown ever, outselling the Pips version and making it forever his song, not theirs. And as a final coda to the story of Gladys Knight and the Pips at Motown, while they were touring off the back of “Grapevine’s” success, the Pips ran into someone they vaguely knew from his time as a musician in the fifties, who was promoting a group he was managing made up of his sons. Knight thought they had something, and got in touch with Motown several times trying to get them to sign the group, but she was ignored. After a few attempts, though, Bobby Taylor of another second-tier Motown group, the Vancouvers, also saw them and got in touch with Motown, and this time they got signed. But that story wasn’t good enough for Motown, and so neither Taylor nor Knight got the credit for discovering the group. Instead when Joe Jackson’s sons’ band made their first album, it was titled Diana Ross Presents the Jackson 5. But that, of course, is a story for another time…

Hoy Carole King cumple 82 años. Una de las grandes compositoras de canciones de nuestra era, cuyo repertorio ha sido y es versionado por grandes figuras de la música negra. Escuchamos lo nuevo del teclista afincado en Londres Claudio Corona y de la formación australiana Hyatus Kaiyote. Recordamos el éxito de Jody Watley producido por Bernard Edwards (Chic) y a Guru’s Jazzmatazz sampleando a Toto. DISCO 1 CLAUDIO CORONA Burn The House DownDISCO 2 ZONKE MEETS YORK Music 2023DISCO 3 JODY WATLEY Don’t You Want MeDISCO 4 BERNARD EDWARDS Joy Of LifeDISCO 5 LONDON AFROBEAT COLLECTIVE Freedom (Voilaaa Remix)DISCO 6 HYATUS KAYOTE  Everything Is BeautifulDISCO 7 GURU’S JAZZMATAZZ & CARON WHEELER Kissed The WorldDISCO 8 TOTO AfricaDISCO 9 ETERNAL I Feel The Earth MoveDISCO 10 THE ISLEYS Sweet SeasonsDISCO 11 BEN E. KING So Much LoveDISCO 12 AMY WINEHOUSE Will You Love TomorrowDISCO 13 GENE McDANIELS He’s got my sympathyEscuchar audio

Music journalist and sports author Dan Epstein joins Al to talk about the Isley Brothers' 1973 album, 3 + 3. Dan shares his memories of buying the album and listening to it for the first time, and he breaks down each of the album's nine tracks. He also discusses the Isleys' longevity, their lack of acclaim compared to contemporaries, such as Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye, and their penchant for recording covers.Dan talked about his excellent Substack newsletter, Jagged Time Lapse.  Be sure to check it out and subscribe! It's at danepstein.substack.com.Follow Dan on Instagram at @dockfidrych!Al is on Bluesky at @almelchior.bsky.social. This show has accounts on Instagram and Threads at @youmealbum. Subscribe for free to You, Me and An Album: The Newsletter! https://youmealbum.substack.com/1:12 Dan joins the show1:59 “That Lady” was Dan's introduction to the Isley Brothers4:58 Dan eventually learned the Isleys had been around since the ‘50s5:50 Dan recounts the day he bought 3 + 3 in 198914:44 Dan and Al talk about the progression in the Isleys' discography leading up to 3 + 317:07 Al was astounded when he first heard “Contagious”18:28 Dan got Ernie Isley to tell him how he got his guitar sound on “That Lady”20:16 Ernie Isley and Brian May are special guitarists for Dan for a particular reason21:30 Dan walks through what he likes about each track on the albumObservations about each track23:56 That Lady24:09 Don't Let Me Be Lonely Tonight25:21 If You Were There26:01 You Walk Your Way28:17 Listen to the Music29:26 What It Comes Down To31:40 Sunshine (Go Away Today)32:53 Summer Breeze38:02 The Highways of My Life40:17 Dan asserts that 3 + 3  is one of the great albums of the early ‘70s42:56 Dan has an explanation for why 3 + 3 hasn't received more acclaim47:34 Why did the Isleys include so many covers on their albums?52:41 Dan and Al talk about associations they have formed around certain songs56:08 Dan discusses his Substack, Jagged Time Lapse57:35 Al sums up how his response to 3 + 3 developed1:00:31 Dan's got some holiday content on his Substack1:06:01 Dan updates us on his upcoming book on Redd KrossSupport the show

In Part Two of our special Isley Brothers celebration, award winning vocalist, instrumentalist, producer, composer, and cultural historian TL Cross is back to help unpack the genius of The Isley Brothers' 1973 classic 3+3. On its 50th anniversary, we delve into the pivotal album that transformed the Isleys from a group to one of the greatest bands of the 20th century, with the official addition of younger brothers Ernie and Marvin and brother-in-law Chris Jasper. With songs like "That Lady," which hints at a future rock guitar icon in Ernie Isley and "Summer Breeze," which broadened the breadth of what could be called black music and offered a master class in reinterpretation, 3+3 is an album deserving of deep reflection and reverence. 

Did you know that Janet Jackson was part of a pretty famous musical family? Yeah, her brother Michael was pretty good. Oh, and most of the rest of her siblings are pretty talented.With that in mind, we're following our episode about Janet's album, The Velvet Rope, with a question: who is your favourite musical family? The Record Roulette team and special guest Gia Mora weigh in.Who is your favourite musical family? Let us know how you did on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook at @rrmusicpod.Runtime: 8 minutesMusic by lemonmusicstudio from Pixabay.

This is a review on the latest project from the Isley Brothers called Make me Say it Again, Girl. Recorded and edited @mzoundz. Intro and outro @ceivoice. Follow the show on Instagram, Clubhouse, Facebook and Pinterest @dreaspointofview. Follow on Twitter @dreapoint. Leave a review or grab some merch at theedreaspointofview.com #voiceactor #radiopresenter #dreaspointofview #musicreview  --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/dreaspointofview/message

Celebrating my Glow Up!! 19K Downloads and counting! I want my Daddy's Records...From the Press and Curl to the Jheri Curl Pointer Sisters, Isleys, O'Jays, RFTW, Debarge, Jacksons, The Sylvers..OH MY!! Rest In Power, Queen Elizabeth... Also, Quark's Bar Popular Culture and Ratchet New Update... Check out  Dale's Angels Inc Blog for notes from this episode and other subjects. Subscribe monthly on Anchor.fm  Patreon ,  Podbean or  Deezer! Now I am on Deezer.  https://deezer.page.link/Gva9bLUuXT4TaGuDA Click link to sign up! Contact Us via LinkedIn: Dale's Angels Inc Twitter: @tvfoodwinegirl Instagram: @tnfroisreading YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/FeliciaBaxter_TNFroIsReading Facebook: TNFroIsReading Bookclub You know your girl is on her hustle, support the show by navigating to: Online Bookstore: Far From Beale St. Books Dale's Angel's Store...For Merch Promo Code: tnfro Writer's Block Coffee Ship A Bag of Dicks Promo Code: tnfrogotjokes Don't forget to drop me a line at tnfroisreading@gmail.com comments on the show or suggestions for Far From Beale St additions.  Or you can leave a brief message at the following link https://anchor.fm/felicia-marie-baxter/message. Non-trolley messages will be read on the show! Subscribe and follow me on Spotify and Anchor.fm https://anchor.fm/felicia-marie-baxter Now I am on Deezer!

We take a look at the classic Isley Brothers era from 1973-1983. This is the era in which Ronald, Marvin, Ernie, O'Kelly & Rudolph Isley alongside Rudolph's brother-in-law Chris Jasper formed a 6 man band that revolutionized soul ballads to another level. We discuss the brilliance of Chris Jasper's songwriting, Ernie's guitar playing & the unforgettable lead singing voice of Ronald's. A must listen FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER @ROBERTSILVA5768

Hey you beautiful lot.. Thanks again for your love and listenship. Here is a taste of paradise rewind with some fabulous Vinyl Frontier and the Awesome 3 from Chaka Khan . Wow what a ride includimg the Isleys and a couple of my dads fave tracks.. Hope you enjoy the journey..

Episode one hundred and forty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Hey Joe" by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and is the longest episode to date, at over two hours. Patreon backers also have a twenty-two-minute bonus episode available, on "Making Time" by The Creation. 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, I've put together a Mixcloud mix containing all the music excerpted in this episode. For information on the Byrds, I relied mostly on Timeless Flight Revisited by Johnny Rogan, with some information from Chris Hillman's autobiography. Information on Arthur Lee and Love came from Forever Changes: Arthur Lee and the Book of Love by John Einarson, and Arthur Lee: Alone Again Or by Barney Hoskyns. Information on Gary Usher's work with the Surfaris and the Sons of Adam came from The California Sound by Stephen McParland, which can be found at https://payhip.com/CMusicBooks Information on Jimi Hendrix came from Room Full of Mirrors by Charles R. Cross, Crosstown Traffic by Charles Shaar Murray, and Wild Thing by Philip Norman. Information on the history of "Hey Joe" itself came from all these sources plus Hey Joe: The Unauthorised Biography of a Rock Classic by Marc Shapiro, though note that most of that book is about post-1967 cover versions. Most of the pre-Experience session work by Jimi Hendrix I excerpt in this episode is on this box set of alternate takes and live recordings. And "Hey Joe" can be found on Are You Experienced? Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Just a quick note before we start – this episode deals with a song whose basic subject is a man murdering a woman, and that song also contains references to guns, and in some versions to cocaine use. Some versions excerpted also contain misogynistic slurs. If those things are likely to upset you, please skip this episode, as the whole episode focusses on that song. I would hope it goes without saying that I don't approve of misogyny, intimate partner violence, or murder, and my discussing a song does not mean I condone acts depicted in its lyrics, and the episode itself deals with the writing and recording of the song rather than its subject matter, but it would be impossible to talk about the record without excerpting the song. The normalisation of violence against women in rock music lyrics is a subject I will come back to, but did not have room for in what is already a very long episode. Anyway, on with the show. Let's talk about the folk process, shall we? We've talked before, like in the episodes on "Stagger Lee" and "Ida Red", about how there are some songs that aren't really individual songs in themselves, but are instead collections of related songs that might happen to share a name, or a title, or a story, or a melody, but which might be different in other ways. There are probably more songs that are like this than songs that aren't, and it doesn't just apply to folk songs, although that's where we see it most notably. You only have to look at the way a song like "Hound Dog" changed from the Willie Mae Thornton version to the version by Elvis, which only shared a handful of words with the original. Songs change, and recombine, and everyone who sings them brings something different to them, until they change in ways that nobody could have predicted, like a game of telephone. But there usually remains a core, an archetypal story or idea which remains constant no matter how much the song changes. Like Stagger Lee shooting Billy in a bar over a hat, or Frankie killing her man -- sometimes the man is Al, sometimes he's Johnny, but he always done her wrong. And one of those stories is about a man who shoots his cheating woman with a forty-four, and tries to escape -- sometimes to a town called Jericho, and sometimes to Juarez, Mexico. The first version of this song we have a recording of is by Clarence Ashley, in 1929, a recording of an older folk song that was called, in his version, "Little Sadie": [Excerpt: Clarence Ashley, "Little Sadie"] At some point, somebody seems to have noticed that that song has a slight melodic similarity to another family of songs, the family known as "Cocaine Blues" or "Take a Whiff on Me", which was popular around the same time: [Excerpt: The Memphis Jug Band, "Cocaine Habit Blues"] And so the two songs became combined, and the protagonist of "Little Sadie" now had a reason to kill his woman -- a reason other than her cheating, that is. He had taken a shot of cocaine before shooting her. The first recording of this version, under the name "Cocaine Blues" seems to have been a Western Swing version by W. A. Nichol's Western Aces: [Excerpt: W.A. Nichol's Western Aces, "Cocaine Blues"] Woody Guthrie recorded a version around the same time -- I've seen different dates and so don't know for sure if it was before or after Nichol's version -- and his version had himself credited as songwriter, and included this last verse which doesn't seem to appear on any earlier recordings of the song: [Excerpt: Woody Guthrie, "Cocaine Blues"] That doesn't appear on many later recordings either, but it did clearly influence yet another song -- Mose Allison's classic jazz number "Parchman Farm": [Excerpt: Mose Allison, "Parchman Farm"] The most famous recordings of the song, though, were by Johnny Cash, who recorded it as both "Cocaine Blues" and as "Transfusion Blues". In Cash's version of the song, the murderer gets sentenced to "ninety-nine years in the Folsom pen", so it made sense that Cash would perform that on his most famous album, the live album of his January 1968 concerts at Folsom Prison, which revitalised his career after several years of limited success: [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, "Cocaine Blues (live at Folsom Prison)"] While that was Cash's first live recording at a prison, though, it wasn't the first show he played at a prison -- ever since the success of his single "Folsom Prison Blues" he'd been something of a hero to prisoners, and he had been doing shows in prisons for eleven years by the time of that recording. And on one of those shows he had as his support act a man named Billy Roberts, who performed his own song which followed the same broad outlines as "Cocaine Blues" -- a man with a forty-four who goes out to shoot his woman and then escapes to Mexico. Roberts was an obscure folk singer, who never had much success, but who was good with people. He'd been part of the Greenwich Village folk scene in the 1950s, and at a gig at Gerde's Folk City he'd met a woman named Niela Miller, an aspiring songwriter, and had struck up a relationship with her. Miller only ever wrote one song that got recorded by anyone else, a song called "Mean World Blues" that was recorded by Dave Van Ronk: [Excerpt: Dave Van Ronk, "Mean World Blues"] Now, that's an original song, but it does bear a certain melodic resemblance to another old folk song, one known as "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?" or "In the Pines", or sometimes "Black Girl": [Excerpt: Lead Belly, "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?"] Miller was clearly familiar with the tradition from which "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?" comes -- it's a type of folk song where someone asks a question and then someone else answers it, and this repeats, building up a story. This is a very old folk song format, and you hear it for example in "Lord Randall", the song on which Bob Dylan based "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall": [Excerpt: Ewan MacColl, "Lord Randall"] I say she was clearly familiar with it, because the other song she wrote that anyone's heard was based very much around that idea. "Baby Please Don't Go To Town" is a question-and-answer song in precisely that form, but with an unusual chord progression for a folk song. You may remember back in the episode on "Eight Miles High" I talked about the circle of fifths -- a chord progression which either increases or decreases by a fifth for every chord, so it might go C-G-D-A-E [demonstrates] That's a common progression in pop and jazz, but not really so much in folk, but it's the one that Miller had used for "Baby, Please Don't Go to Town", and she'd taught Roberts that song, which she only recorded much later: [Excerpt: Niela Miller, "Baby, Please Don't Go To Town"] After Roberts and Miller broke up, Miller kept playing that melody, but he changed the lyrics. The lyrics he added had several influences. There was that question-and-answer folk-song format, there's the story of "Cocaine Blues" with its protagonist getting a forty-four to shoot his woman down before heading to Mexico, and there's also a country hit from 1953. "Hey, Joe!" was originally recorded by Carl Smith, one of the most popular country singers of the early fifties: [Excerpt: Carl Smith, "Hey Joe!"] That was written by Boudleaux Bryant, a few years before the songs he co-wrote for the Everly Brothers, and became a country number one, staying at the top for eight weeks. It didn't make the pop chart, but a pop cover version of it by Frankie Laine made the top ten in the US: [Excerpt: Frankie Laine, "Hey Joe"] Laine's record did even better in the UK, where it made number one, at a point where Laine was the biggest star in music in Britain -- at the time the UK charts only had a top twelve, and at one point four of the singles in the top twelve were by Laine, including that one. There was also an answer record by Kitty Wells which made the country top ten later that year: [Excerpt: Kitty Wells, "Hey Joe"] Oddly, despite it being a very big hit, that "Hey Joe" had almost no further cover versions for twenty years, though it did become part of the Searchers' setlist, and was included on their Live at the Star Club album in 1963, in an arrangement that owed a lot to "What'd I Say": [Excerpt: The Searchers, "Hey Joe"] But that song was clearly on Roberts' mind when, as so many American folk musicians did, he travelled to the UK in the late fifties and became briefly involved in the burgeoning UK folk movement. In particular, he spent some time with a twelve-string guitar player from Edinburgh called Len Partridge, who was also a mentor to Bert Jansch, and who was apparently an extraordinary musician, though I know of no recordings of his work. Partridge helped Roberts finish up the song, though Partridge is about the only person in this story who *didn't* claim a writing credit for it at one time or another, saying that he just helped Roberts out and that Roberts deserved all the credit. The first known recording of the completed song is from 1962, a few years after Roberts had returned to the US, though it didn't surface until decades later: [Excerpt: Billy Roberts, "Hey Joe"] Roberts was performing this song regularly on the folk circuit, and around the time of that recording he also finally got round to registering the copyright, several years after it was written. When Miller heard the song, she was furious, and she later said "Imagine my surprise when I heard Hey Joe by Billy Roberts. There was my tune, my chord progression, my question/answer format. He dropped the bridge that was in my song and changed it enough so that the copyright did not protect me from his plagiarism... I decided not to go through with all the complications of dealing with him. He never contacted me about it or gave me any credit. He knows he committed a morally reprehensible act. He never was man enough to make amends and apologize to me, or to give credit for the inspiration. Dealing with all that was also why I made the decision not to become a professional songwriter. It left a bad taste in my mouth.” Pete Seeger, a friend of Miller's, was outraged by the injustice and offered to testify on her behalf should she decide to take Roberts to court, but she never did. Some time around this point, Roberts also played on that prison bill with Johnny Cash, and what happened next is hard to pin down. I've read several different versions of the story, which change the date and which prison this was in, and none of the details in any story hang together properly -- everything introduces weird inconsistencies and things which just make no sense at all. Something like this basic outline of the story seems to have happened, but the outline itself is weird, and we'll probably never know the truth. Roberts played his set, and one of the songs he played was "Hey Joe", and at some point he got talking to one of the prisoners in the audience, Dino Valenti. We've met Valenti before, in the episode on "Mr. Tambourine Man" -- he was a singer/songwriter himself, and would later be the lead singer of Quicksilver Messenger Service, but he's probably best known for having written "Get Together": [Excerpt: Dino Valenti, "Get Together"] As we heard in the "Mr. Tambourine Man" episode, Valenti actually sold off his rights to that song to pay for his bail at one point, but he was in and out of prison several times because of drug busts. At this point, or so the story goes, he was eligible for parole, but he needed to prove he had a possible income when he got out, and one way he wanted to do that was to show that he had written a song that could be a hit he could make money off, but he didn't have such a song. He talked about his predicament with Roberts, who agreed to let him claim to have written "Hey Joe" so he could get out of prison. He did make that claim, and when he got out of prison he continued making the claim, and registered the copyright to "Hey Joe" in his own name -- even though Roberts had already registered it -- and signed a publishing deal for it with Third Story Music, a company owned by Herb Cohen, the future manager of the Mothers of Invention, and Cohen's brother Mutt. Valenti was a popular face on the folk scene, and he played "his" song to many people, but two in particular would influence the way the song would develop, both of them people we've seen relatively recently in episodes of the podcast. One of them, Vince Martin, we'll come back to later, but the other was David Crosby, and so let's talk about him and the Byrds a bit more. Crosby and Valenti had been friends long before the Byrds formed, and indeed we heard in the "Mr. Tambourine Man" episode how the group had named themselves after Valenti's song "Birdses": [Excerpt: Dino Valenti, "Birdses"] And Crosby *loved* "Hey Joe", which he believed was another of Valenti's songs. He'd perform it every chance he got, playing it solo on guitar in an arrangement that other people have compared to Mose Allison. He'd tried to get it on the first two Byrds albums, but had been turned down, mostly because of their manager and uncredited co-producer Jim Dickson, who had strong opinions about it, saying later "Some of the songs that David would bring in from the outside were perfectly valid songs for other people, but did not seem to be compatible with the Byrds' myth. And he may not have liked the Byrds' myth. He fought for 'Hey Joe' and he did it. As long as I could say 'No!' I did, and when I couldn't any more they did it. You had to give him something somewhere. I just wish it was something else... 'Hey Joe' I was bitterly opposed to. A song about a guy who murders his girlfriend in a jealous rage and is on the way to Mexico with a gun in his hand. It was not what I saw as a Byrds song." Indeed, Dickson was so opposed to the song that he would later say “One of the reasons David engineered my getting thrown out was because I would not let Hey Joe be on the Turn! Turn! Turn! album.” Dickson was, though, still working with the band when they got round to recording it. That came during the recording of their Fifth Dimension album, the album which included "Eight Miles High". That album was mostly recorded after the departure of Gene Clark, which was where we left the group at the end of the "Eight Miles High" episode, and the loss of their main songwriter meant that they were struggling for material -- doubly so since they also decided they were going to move away from Dylan covers. This meant that they had to rely on original material from the group's less commercial songwriters, and on a few folk songs, mostly learned from Pete Seeger The album ended up with only eleven songs on it, compared to the twelve that was normal for American albums at that time, and the singles on it after "Eight Miles High" weren't particularly promising as to the group's ability to come up with commercial material. The next single, "5D", a song by Roger McGuinn about the fifth dimension, was a waltz-time song that both Crosby and Chris Hillman were enthused by. It featured organ by Van Dyke Parks, and McGuinn said of the organ part "When he came into the studio I told him to think Bach. He was already thinking Bach before that anyway.": [Excerpt: The Byrds, "5D"] While the group liked it, though, that didn't make the top forty. The next single did, just about -- a song that McGuinn had written as an attempt at communicating with alien life. He hoped that it would be played on the radio, and that the radio waves would eventually reach aliens, who would hear it and respond: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Mr. Spaceman"] The "Fifth Dimension" album did significantly worse, both critically and commercially, than their previous albums, and the group would soon drop Allen Stanton, the producer, in favour of Gary Usher, Brian Wilson's old songwriting partner. But the desperation for material meant that the group agreed to record the song which they still thought at that time had been written by Crosby's friend, though nobody other than Crosby was happy with it, and even Crosby later said "It was a mistake. I shouldn't have done it. Everybody makes mistakes." McGuinn said later "The reason Crosby did lead on 'Hey Joe' was because it was *his* song. He didn't write it but he was responsible for finding it. He'd wanted to do it for years but we would never let him.": [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Hey Joe"] Of course, that arrangement is very far from the Mose Allison style version Crosby had been doing previously. And the reason for that can be found in the full version of that McGuinn quote, because the full version continues "He'd wanted to do it for years but we would never let him. Then both Love and The Leaves had a minor hit with it and David got so angry that we had to let him do it. His version wasn't that hot because he wasn't a strong lead vocalist." The arrangement we just heard was the arrangement that by this point almost every group on the Sunset Strip scene was playing. And the reason for that was because of another friend of Crosby's, someone who had been a roadie for the Byrds -- Bryan MacLean. MacLean and Crosby had been very close because they were both from very similar backgrounds -- they were both Hollywood brats with huge egos. MacLean later said "Crosby and I got on perfectly. I didn't understand what everybody was complaining about, because he was just like me!" MacLean was, if anything, from an even more privileged background than Crosby. His father was an architect who'd designed houses for Elizabeth Taylor and Dean Martin, his neighbour when growing up was Frederick Loewe, the composer of My Fair Lady. He learned to swim in Elizabeth Taylor's private pool, and his first girlfriend was Liza Minelli. Another early girlfriend was Jackie DeShannon, the singer-songwriter who did the original version of "Needles and Pins", who he was introduced to by Sharon Sheeley, whose name you will remember from many previous episodes. MacLean had wanted to be an artist until his late teens, when he walked into a shop in Westwood which sometimes sold his paintings, the Sandal Shop, and heard some people singing folk songs there. He decided he wanted to be a folk singer, and soon started performing at the Balladeer, a club which would later be renamed the Troubadour, playing songs like Robert Johnson's "Cross Roads Blues", which had recently become a staple of the folk repertoire after John Hammond put out the King of the Delta Blues Singers album: [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, "Cross Roads Blues"] Reading interviews with people who knew MacLean at the time, the same phrase keeps coming up. John Kay, later the lead singer of Steppenwolf, said "There was a young kid, Bryan MacLean, kind of cocky but nonetheless a nice kid, who hung around Crosby and McGuinn" while Chris Hillman said "He was a pretty good kid but a wee bit cocky." He was a fan of the various musicians who later formed the Byrds, and was also an admirer of a young guitarist on the scene named Ryland Cooder, and of a blues singer on the scene named Taj Mahal. He apparently was briefly in a band with Taj Mahal, called Summer's Children, who as far as I can tell had no connection to the duo that Curt Boettcher later formed of the same name, before Taj Mahal and Cooder formed The Rising Sons, a multi-racial blues band who were for a while the main rivals to the Byrds on the scene. MacLean, though, firmly hitched himself to the Byrds, and particularly to Crosby. He became a roadie on their first tour, and Hillman said "He was a hard-working guy on our behalf. As I recall, he pretty much answered to Crosby and was David's assistant, to put it diplomatically – more like his gofer, in fact." But MacLean wasn't cut out for the hard work that being a roadie required, and after being the Byrds' roadie for about thirty shows, he started making mistakes, and when they went off on their UK tour they decided not to keep employing him. He was heartbroken, but got back into trying his own musical career. He auditioned for the Monkees, unsuccessfully, but shortly after that -- some sources say even the same day as the audition, though that seems a little too neat -- he went to Ben Frank's -- the LA hangout that had actually been namechecked in the open call for Monkees auditions, which said they wanted "Ben Franks types", and there he met Arthur Lee and Johnny Echols. Echols would later remember "He was this gadfly kind of character who knew everybody and was flitting from table to table. He wore striped pants and a scarf, and he had this long, strawberry hair. All the girls loved him. For whatever reason, he came and sat at our table. Of course, Arthur and I were the only two black people there at the time." Lee and Echols were both Black musicians who had been born in Memphis. Lee's birth father, Chester Taylor, had been a cornet player with Jimmie Lunceford, whose Delta Rhythm Boys had had a hit with "The Honeydripper", as we heard way back in the episode on "Rocket '88": [Excerpt: Jimmie Lunceford and the Delta Rhythm Boys, "The Honeydripper"] However, Taylor soon split from Lee's mother, a schoolteacher, and she married Clinton Lee, a stonemason, who doted on his adopted son, and they moved to California. They lived in a relatively prosperous area of LA, a neighbourhood that was almost all white, with a few Asian families, though the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson lived nearby. A year or so after Arthur and his mother moved to LA, so did the Echols family, who had known them in Memphis, and they happened to move only a couple of streets away. Eight year old Arthur Lee reconnected with seven-year-old Johnny Echols, and the two became close friends from that point on. Arthur Lee first started out playing music when his parents were talked into buying him an accordion by a salesman who would go around with a donkey, give kids free donkey rides, and give the parents a sales pitch while they were riding the donkey, He soon gave up on the accordion and persuaded his parents to buy him an organ instead -- he was a spoiled child, by all accounts, with a TV in his bedroom, which was almost unheard of in the late fifties. Johnny Echols had a similar experience which led to his parents buying him a guitar, and the two were growing up in a musical environment generally. They attended Dorsey High School at the same time as both Billy Preston and Mike Love of the Beach Boys, and Ella Fitzgerald and her then-husband, the great jazz bass player Ray Brown, lived in the same apartment building as the Echols family for a while. Ornette Coleman, the free-jazz saxophone player, lived next door to Echols, and Adolphus Jacobs, the guitarist with the Coasters, gave him guitar lessons. Arthur Lee also knew Johnny Otis, who ran a pigeon-breeding club for local children which Arthur would attend. Echols was the one who first suggested that he and Arthur should form a band, and they put together a group to play at a school talent show, performing "Last Night", the instrumental that had been a hit for the Mar-Keys on Stax records: [Excerpt: The Mar-Keys, "Last Night"] They soon became a regular group, naming themselves Arthur Lee and the LAGs -- the LA Group, in imitation of Booker T and the MGs – the Memphis Group. At some point around this time, Lee decided to switch from playing organ to playing guitar. He would say later that this was inspired by seeing Johnny "Guitar" Watson get out of a gold Cadillac, wearing a gold suit, and with gold teeth in his mouth. The LAGs started playing as support acts and backing bands for any blues and soul acts that came through LA, performing with Big Mama Thornton, Johnny Otis, the O'Jays, and more. Arthur and Johnny were both still under-age, and they would pencil in fake moustaches to play the clubs so they'd appear older. In the fifties and early sixties, there were a number of great electric guitar players playing blues on the West Coast -- Johnny "Guitar" Watson, T-Bone Walker, Guitar Slim, and others -- and they would compete with each other not only to play well, but to put on a show, and so there was a whole bag of stage tricks that West Coast R&B guitarists picked up, and Echols learned all of them -- playing his guitar behind his back, playing his guitar with his teeth, playing with his guitar between his legs. As well as playing their own shows, the LAGs also played gigs under other names -- they had a corrupt agent who would book them under the name of whatever Black group had a hit at the time, in the belief that almost nobody knew what popular groups looked like anyway, so they would go out and perform as the Drifters or the Coasters or half a dozen other bands. But Arthur Lee in particular wanted to have success in his own right. He would later say "When I was a little boy I would listen to Nat 'King' Cole and I would look at that purple Capitol Records logo. I wanted to be on Capitol, that was my goal. Later on I used to walk from Dorsey High School all the way up to the Capitol building in Hollywood -- did that many times. I was determined to get a record deal with Capitol, and I did, without the help of a fancy manager or anyone else. I talked to Adam Ross and Jack Levy at Ardmore-Beechwood. I talked to Kim Fowley, and then I talked to Capitol". The record that the LAGs released, though, was not very good, a track called "Rumble-Still-Skins": [Excerpt: The LAGs, "Rumble-Still-Skins"] Lee later said "I was young and very inexperienced and I was testing the record company. I figured if I gave them my worst stuff and they ripped me off I wouldn't get hurt. But it didn't work, and after that I started giving my best, and I've been doing that ever since." The LAGs were dropped by Capitol after one single, and for the next little while Arthur and Johnny did work for smaller labels, usually labels owned by Bob Keane, with Arthur writing and producing and Johnny playing guitar -- though Echols has said more recently that a lot of the songs that were credited to Arthur as sole writer were actually joint compositions. Most of these records were attempts at copying the style of other people. There was "I Been Trying", a Phil Spector soundalike released by Little Ray: [Excerpt: Little Ray, "I Been Trying"] And there were a few attempts at sounding like Curtis Mayfield, like "Slow Jerk" by Ronnie and the Pomona Casuals: [Excerpt: Ronnie and the Pomona Casuals, "Slow Jerk"] and "My Diary" by Rosa Lee Brooks: [Excerpt: Rosa Lee Brooks, "My Diary"] Echols was also playing with a lot of other people, and one of the musicians he was playing with, his old school friend Billy Preston, told him about a recent European tour he'd been on with Little Richard, and the band from Liverpool he'd befriended while he was there who idolised Richard, so when the Beatles hit America, Arthur and Johnny had some small amount of context for them. They soon broke up the LAGs and formed another group, the American Four, with two white musicians, bass player John Fleckenstein and drummer Don Costa. Lee had them wear wigs so they seemed like they had longer hair, and started dressing more eccentrically -- he would soon become known for wearing glasses with one blue lens and one red one, and, as he put it "wearing forty pounds of beads, two coats, three shirts, and wearing two pairs of shoes on one foot". As well as the Beatles, the American Four were inspired by the other British Invasion bands -- Arthur was in the audience for the TAMI show, and quite impressed by Mick Jagger -- and also by the Valentinos, Bobby Womack's group. They tried to get signed to SAR Records, the label owned by Sam Cooke for which the Valentinos recorded, but SAR weren't interested, and they ended up recording for Bob Keane's Del-Fi records, where they cut "Luci Baines", a "Twist and Shout" knock-off with lyrics referencing the daughter of new US President Lyndon Johnson: [Excerpt: The American Four, "Luci Baines"] But that didn't take off any more than the earlier records had. Another American Four track, "Stay Away", was recorded but went unreleased until 2006: [Excerpt: Arthur Lee and the American Four, "Stay Away"] Soon the American Four were changing their sound and name again. This time it was because of two bands who were becoming successful on the Sunset Strip. One was the Byrds, who to Lee's mind were making music like the stuff he heard in his head, and the other was their rivals the Rising Sons, the blues band we mentioned earlier with Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder. Lee was very impressed by them as an multiracial band making aggressive, loud, guitar music, though he would always make the point when talking about them that they were a blues band, not a rock band, and *he* had the first multiracial rock band. Whatever they were like live though, in their recordings, produced by the Byrds' first producer Terry Melcher, the Rising Sons often had the same garage band folk-punk sound that Lee and Echols would soon make their own: [Excerpt: The Rising Sons, "Take a Giant Step"] But while the Rising Sons recorded a full album's worth of material, only one single was released before they split up, and so the way was clear for Lee and Echols' band, now renamed once again to The Grass Roots, to become the Byrds' new challengers. Lee later said "I named the group The Grass Roots behind a trip, or an album I heard that Malcolm X did, where he said 'the grass roots of the people are out in the street doing something about their problems instead of sitting around talking about it'". After seeing the Rolling Stones and the Byrds live, Lee wanted to get up front and move like Mick Jagger, and not be hindered by playing a guitar he wasn't especially good at -- both the Stones and the Byrds had two guitarists and a frontman who just sang and played hand percussion, and these were the models that Lee was following for the group. He also thought it would be a good idea commercially to get a good-looking white boy up front. So the group got in another guitarist, a white pretty boy who Lee soon fell out with and gave the nickname "Bummer Bob" because he was unpleasant to be around. Those of you who know exactly why Bobby Beausoleil later became famous will probably agree that this was a more than reasonable nickname to give him (and those of you who don't, I'll be dealing with him when we get to 1969). So when Bryan MacLean introduced himself to Lee and Echols, and they found out that not only was he also a good-looking white guitarist, but he was also friends with the entire circle of hipsters who'd been going to Byrds gigs, people like Vito and Franzoni, and he could get a massive crowd of them to come along to gigs for any band he was in and make them the talk of the Sunset Strip scene, he was soon in the Grass Roots, and Bummer Bob was out. The Grass Roots soon had to change their name again, though. In 1965, Jan and Dean recorded their "Folk and Roll" album, which featured "The Universal Coward"... Which I am not going to excerpt again. I only put that pause in to terrify Tilt, who edits these podcasts, and has very strong opinions about that song. But P. F. Sloan and Steve Barri, the songwriters who also performed as the Fantastic Baggies, had come up with a song for that album called "Where Where You When I Needed You?": [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "Where Were You When I Needed You?"] Sloan and Barri decided to cut their own version of that song under a fake band name, and then put together a group of other musicians to tour as that band. They just needed a name, and Lou Adler, the head of Dunhill Records, suggested they call themselves The Grass Roots, and so that's what they did: [Excerpt: The Grass Roots, "Where Were You When I Needed You?"] Echols would later claim that this was deliberate malice on Adler's part -- that Adler had come in to a Grass Roots show drunk, and pretended to be interested in signing them to a contract, mostly to show off to a woman he'd brought with him. Echols and MacLean had spoken to him, not known who he was, and he'd felt disrespected, and Echols claims that he suggested the name to get back at them, and also to capitalise on their local success. The new Grass Roots soon started having hits, and so the old band had to find another name, which they got as a joking reference to a day job Lee had had at one point -- he'd apparently worked in a specialist bra shop, Luv Brassieres, which the rest of the band found hilarious. The Grass Roots became Love. While Arthur Lee was the group's lead singer, Bryan MacLean would often sing harmonies, and would get a song or two to sing live himself. And very early in the group's career, when they were playing a club called Bido Lito's, he started making his big lead spot a version of "Hey Joe", which he'd learned from his old friend David Crosby, and which soon became the highlight of the group's set. Their version was sped up, and included the riff which the Searchers had popularised in their cover version of  "Needles and Pins", the song originally recorded by MacLean's old girlfriend Jackie DeShannon: [Excerpt: The Searchers, "Needles and Pins"] That riff is a very simple one to play, and variants of it became very, very, common among the LA bands, most notably on the Byrds' "I'll Feel a Whole Lot Better": [Excerpt: The Byrds, "I'll Feel a Whole Lot Better"] The riff was so ubiquitous in the LA scene that in the late eighties Frank Zappa would still cite it as one of his main memories of the scene. I'm going to quote from his autobiography, where he's talking about the differences between the LA scene he was part of and the San Francisco scene he had no time for: "The Byrds were the be-all and end-all of Los Angeles rock then. They were 'It' -- and then a group called Love was 'It.' There were a few 'psychedelic' groups that never really got to be 'It,' but they could still find work and get record deals, including the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, Sky Saxon and the Seeds, and the Leaves (noted for their cover version of "Hey, Joe"). When we first went to San Francisco, in the early days of the Family Dog, it seemed that everybody was wearing the same costume, a mixture of Barbary Coast and Old West -- guys with handlebar mustaches, girls in big bustle dresses with feathers in their hair, etc. By contrast, the L.A. costumery was more random and outlandish. Musically, the northern bands had a little more country style. In L.A., it was folk-rock to death. Everything had that" [and here Zappa uses the adjectival form of a four-letter word beginning with 'f' that the main podcast providers don't like you saying on non-adult-rated shows] "D chord down at the bottom of the neck where you wiggle your finger around -- like 'Needles and Pins.'" The reason Zappa describes it that way, and the reason it became so popular, is that if you play that riff in D, the chords are D, Dsus2, and Dsus4 which means you literally only wiggle one finger on your left hand: [demonstrates] And so you get that on just a ton of records from that period, though Love, the Byrds, and the Searchers all actually play the riff on A rather than D: [demonstrates] So that riff became the Big Thing in LA after the Byrds popularised the Searchers sound there, and Love added it to their arrangement of "Hey Joe". In January 1966, the group would record their arrangement of it for their first album, which would come out in March: [Excerpt: Love, "Hey Joe"] But that wouldn't be the first recording of the song, or of Love's arrangement of it – although other than the Byrds' version, it would be the only one to come out of LA with the original Billy Roberts lyrics. Love's performances of the song at Bido Lito's had become the talk of the Sunset Strip scene, and soon every band worth its salt was copying it, and it became one of those songs like "Louie Louie" before it that everyone would play. The first record ever made with the "Hey Joe" melody actually had totally different lyrics. Kim Fowley had the idea of writing a sequel to "Hey Joe", titled "Wanted Dead or Alive", about what happened after Joe shot his woman and went off. He produced the track for The Rogues, a group consisting of Michael Lloyd and Shaun Harris, who later went on to form the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, and Lloyd and Harris were the credited writers: [Excerpt: The Rogues, "Wanted Dead or Alive"] The next version of the song to come out was the first by anyone to be released as "Hey Joe", or at least as "Hey Joe, Where You Gonna Go?", which was how it was titled on its initial release. This was by a band called The Leaves, who were friends of Love, and had picked up on "Hey Joe", and was produced by Nik Venet. It was also the first to have the now-familiar opening line "Hey Joe, where you going with that gun in your hand?": [Excerpt: The Leaves, "Hey Joe Where You Gonna Go?"] Roberts' original lyric, as sung by both Love and the Byrds, had been "where you going with that money in your hand?", and had Joe headed off to *buy* the gun. But as Echols later said “What happened was Bob Lee from The Leaves, who were friends of ours, asked me for the words to 'Hey Joe'. I told him I would have the words the next day. I decided to write totally different lyrics. The words you hear on their record are ones I wrote as a joke. The original words to Hey Joe are ‘Hey Joe, where you going with that money in your hand? Well I'm going downtown to buy me a blue steel .44. When I catch up with that woman, she won't be running round no more.' It never says ‘Hey Joe where you goin' with that gun in your hand.' Those were the words I wrote just because I knew they were going to try and cover the song before we released it. That was kind of a dirty trick that I played on The Leaves, which turned out to be the words that everybody uses.” That first release by the Leaves also contained an extra verse -- a nod to Love's previous name: [Excerpt: The Leaves, "Hey Joe Where You Gonna Go?"] That original recording credited the song as public domain -- apparently Bryan MacLean had refused to tell the Leaves who had written the song, and so they assumed it was traditional. It came out in November 1965, but only as a promo single. Even before the Leaves, though, another band had recorded "Hey Joe", but it didn't get released. The Sons of Adam had started out as a surf group called the Fender IV, who made records like "Malibu Run": [Excerpt: The Fender IV, "Malibu Run"] Kim Fowley had suggested they change their name to the Sons of Adam, and they were another group who were friends with Love -- their drummer, Michael Stuart-Ware, would later go on to join Love, and Arthur Lee wrote the song "Feathered Fish" for them: [Excerpt: Sons of Adam, "Feathered Fish"] But while they were the first to record "Hey Joe", their version has still to this day not been released. Their version was recorded for Decca, with producer Gary Usher, but before it was released, another Decca artist also recorded the song, and the label weren't sure which one to release. And then the label decided to press Usher to record a version with yet another act -- this time with the Surfaris, the surf group who had had a hit with "Wipe Out". Coincidentally, the Surfaris had just changed bass players -- their most recent bass player, Ken Forssi, had quit and joined Love, whose own bass player, John Fleckenstein, had gone off to join the Standells, who would also record a version of “Hey Joe” in 1966. Usher thought that the Sons of Adam were much better musicians than the Surfaris, who he was recording with more or less under protest, but their version, using Love's arrangement and the "gun in your hand" lyrics, became the first version to come out on a major label: [Excerpt: The Surfaris, "Hey Joe"] They believed the song was in the public domain, and so the songwriting credits on the record are split between Gary Usher, a W. Hale who nobody has been able to identify, and Tony Cost, a pseudonym for Nik Venet. Usher said later "I got writer's credit on it because I was told, or I assumed at the time, the song was Public Domain; meaning a non-copyrighted song. It had already been cut two or three times, and on each occasion the writing credit had been different. On a traditional song, whoever arranges it, takes the songwriting credit. I may have changed a few words and arranged and produced it, but I certainly did not co-write it." The public domain credit also appeared on the Leaves' second attempt to cut the song, which was actually given a general release, but flopped. But when the Leaves cut the song for a *third* time, still for the same tiny label, Mira, the track became a hit in May 1966, reaching number thirty-one: [Excerpt: The Leaves, "Hey Joe"] And *that* version had what they thought was the correct songwriting credit, to Dino Valenti. Which came as news to Billy Roberts, who had registered the copyright to the song back in 1962 and had no idea that it had become a staple of LA garage rock until he heard his song in the top forty with someone else's name on the credits. He angrily confronted Third Story Music, who agreed to a compromise -- they would stop giving Valenti songwriting royalties and start giving them to Roberts instead, so long as he didn't sue them and let them keep the publishing rights. Roberts was indignant about this -- he deserved all the money, not just half of it -- but he went along with it to avoid a lawsuit he might not win. So Roberts was now the credited songwriter on the versions coming out of the LA scene. But of course, Dino Valenti had been playing "his" song to other people, too. One of those other people was Vince Martin. Martin had been a member of a folk-pop group called the Tarriers, whose members also included the future film star Alan Arkin, and who had had a hit in the 1950s with "Cindy, Oh Cindy": [Excerpt: The Tarriers, "Cindy, Oh Cindy"] But as we heard in the episode on the Lovin' Spoonful, he had become a Greenwich Village folkie, in a duo with Fred Neil, and recorded an album with him, "Tear Down the Walls": [Excerpt: Fred Neil and Vince Martin, "Morning Dew"] That song we just heard, "Morning Dew", was another question-and-answer folk song. It was written by the Canadian folk-singer Bonnie Dobson, but after Martin and Neil recorded it, it was picked up on by Martin's friend Tim Rose who stuck his own name on the credits as well, without Dobson's permission, for a version which made the song into a rock standard for which he continued to collect royalties: [Excerpt: Tim Rose, "Morning Dew"] This was something that Rose seems to have made a habit of doing, though to be fair to him it went both ways. We heard about him in the Lovin' Spoonful episode too, when he was in a band named the Big Three with Cass Elliot and her coincidentally-named future husband Jim Hendricks, who recorded this song, with Rose putting new music to the lyrics of the old public domain song "Oh! Susanna": [Excerpt: The Big Three, "The Banjo Song"] The band Shocking Blue used that melody for their 1969 number-one hit "Venus", and didn't give Rose any credit: [Excerpt: Shocking Blue, "Venus"] But another song that Rose picked up from Vince Martin was "Hey Joe". Martin had picked the song up from Valenti, but didn't know who had written it, or who was claiming to have written it, and told Rose he thought it might be an old Appalchian murder ballad or something. Rose took the song and claimed writing credit in his own name -- he would always, for the rest of his life, claim it was an old folk tune he'd heard in Florida, and that he'd rewritten it substantially himself, but no evidence of the song has ever shown up from prior to Roberts' copyright registration, and Rose's version is basically identical to Roberts' in melody and lyrics. But Rose takes his version at a much slower pace, and his version would be the model for the most successful versions going forward, though those other versions would use the lyrics Johnny Echols had rewritten, rather than the ones Rose used: [Excerpt: Tim Rose, "Hey Joe"] Rose's version got heard across the Atlantic as well. And in particular it was heard by Chas Chandler, the bass player of the Animals. Some sources seem to suggest that Chandler first heard the song performed by a group called the Creation, but in a biography I've read of that group they clearly state that they didn't start playing the song until 1967. But however he came across it, when Chandler heard Rose's recording, he knew that the song could be a big hit for someone, but he didn't know who. And then he bumped into Linda Keith, Keith Richards' girlfriend,  who took him to see someone whose guitar we've already heard in this episode: [Excerpt: Rosa Lee Brooks, "My Diary"] The Curtis Mayfield impression on guitar there was, at least according to many sources the first recording session ever played on by a guitarist then calling himself Maurice (or possibly Mo-rees) James. We'll see later in the story that it possibly wasn't his first -- there are conflicting accounts, as there are about a lot of things, and it was recorded either in very early 1964, in which case it was his first, or (as seems more likely, and as I tell the story later) a year later, in which case he'd played on maybe half a dozen tracks in the studio by that point. But it was still a very early one. And by late 1966 that guitarist had reverted to the name by which he was brought up, and was calling himself Jimi Hendrix. Hendrix and Arthur Lee had become close, and Lee would later claim that Hendrix had copied much of Lee's dress style and attitude -- though many of Hendrix's other colleagues and employers, including Little Richard, would make similar claims -- and most of them had an element of truth, as Lee's did. Hendrix was a sponge. But Lee did influence him. Indeed, one of Hendrix's *last* sessions, in March 1970, was guesting on an album by Love: [Excerpt: Love with Jimi Hendrix, "Everlasting First"] Hendrix's name at birth was Johnny Allen Hendrix, which made his father, James Allen Hendrix, known as Al, who was away at war when his son was born, worry that he'd been named after another man who might possibly be the real father, so the family just referred to the child as "Buster" to avoid the issue. When Al Hendrix came back from the war the child was renamed James Marshall Hendrix -- James after Al's first name, Marshall after Al's dead brother -- though the family continued calling him "Buster". Little James Hendrix Junior didn't have anything like a stable home life. Both his parents were alcoholics, and Al Hendrix was frequently convinced that Jimi's mother Lucille was having affairs and became abusive about it. They had six children, four of whom were born disabled, and Jimi was the only one to remain with his parents -- the rest were either fostered or adopted at birth, fostered later on because the parents weren't providing a decent home life, or in one case made a ward of state because the Hendrixes couldn't afford to pay for a life-saving operation for him. The only one that Jimi had any kind of regular contact with was the second brother, Leon, his parents' favourite, who stayed with them for several years before being fostered by a family only a few blocks away. Al and Lucille Hendrix frequently split and reconciled, and while they were ostensibly raising Jimi (and for a  few years Leon), he was shuttled between them and various family members and friends, living sometimes in Seattle where his parents lived and sometimes in Vancouver with his paternal grandmother. He was frequently malnourished, and often survived because friends' families fed him. Al Hendrix was also often physically and emotionally abusive of the son he wasn't sure was his. Jimi grew up introverted, and stuttering, and only a couple of things seemed to bring him out of his shell. One was science fiction -- he always thought that his nickname, Buster, came from Buster Crabbe, the star of the Flash Gordon serials he loved to watch, though in fact he got the nickname even before that interest developed, and he was fascinated with ideas about aliens and UFOs -- and the other was music. Growing up in Seattle in the forties and fifties, most of the music he was exposed to as a child and in his early teens was music made by and for white people -- there wasn't a very large Black community in the area at the time compared to most major American cities, and so there were no prominent R&B stations. As a kid he loved the music of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, and when he was thirteen Jimi's favourite record was Dean Martin's "Memories are Made of This": [Excerpt: Dean Martin, "Memories are Made of This"] He also, like every teenager, became a fan of rock and roll music. When Elvis played at a local stadium when Jimi was fifteen, he couldn't afford a ticket, but he went and sat on top of a nearby hill and watched the show from the distance. Jimi's first exposure to the blues also came around this time, when his father briefly took in lodgers, Cornell and Ernestine Benson, and Ernestine had a record collection that included records by Lightnin' Hopkins, Howlin' Wolf, and Muddy Waters, all of whom Jimi became a big fan of, especially Muddy Waters. The Bensons' most vivid memory of Jimi in later years was him picking up a broom and pretending to play guitar along with these records: [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, "Baby Please Don't Go"] Shortly after this, it would be Ernestine Benson who would get Jimi his very first guitar. By this time Jimi and Al had lost their home and moved into a boarding house, and the owner's son had an acoustic guitar with only one string that he was planning to throw out. When Jimi asked if he could have it instead of it being thrown out, the owner told him he could have it for five dollars. Al Hendrix refused to pay that much for it, but Ernestine Benson bought Jimi the guitar. She said later “He only had one string, but he could really make that string talk.” He started carrying the guitar on his back everywhere he went, in imitation of Sterling Hayden in the western Johnny Guitar, and eventually got some more strings for it and learned to play. He would play it left-handed -- until his father came in. His father had forced him to write with his right hand, and was convinced that left-handedness was the work of the devil, so Jimi would play left-handed while his father was somewhere else, but as soon as Al came in he would flip the guitar the other way up and continue playing the song he had been playing, now right-handed. Jimi's mother died when he was fifteen, after having been ill for a long time with drink-related problems, and Jimi and his brother didn't get to go to the funeral -- depending on who you believe, either Al gave Jimi the bus fare and told him to go by himself and Jimi was too embarrassed to go to the funeral alone on the bus, or Al actually forbade Jimi and Leon from going.  After this, he became even more introverted than he was before, and he also developed a fascination with the idea of angels, convinced his mother now was one. Jimi started to hang around with a friend called Pernell Alexander, who also had a guitar, and they would play along together with Elmore James records. The two also went to see Little Richard and Bill Doggett perform live, and while Jimi was hugely introverted, he did start to build more friendships in the small Seattle music scene, including with Ron Holden, the man we talked about in the episode on "Louie Louie" who introduced that song to Seattle, and who would go on to record with Bruce Johnston for Bob Keane: [Excerpt: Ron Holden, "Gee But I'm Lonesome"] Eventually Ernestine Benson persuaded Al Hendrix to buy Jimi a decent electric guitar on credit -- Al also bought himself a saxophone at the same time, thinking he might play music with his son, but sent it back once the next payment became due. As well as blues and R&B, Jimi was soaking up the guitar instrumentals and garage rock that would soon turn into surf music. The first song he learned to play was "Tall Cool One" by the Fabulous Wailers, the local group who popularised a version of "Louie Louie" based on Holden's one: [Excerpt: The Fabulous Wailers, "Tall Cool One"] As we talked about in the "Louie Louie" episode, the Fabulous Wailers used to play at a venue called the Spanish Castle, and Jimi was a regular in the audience, later writing his song "Spanish Castle Magic" about those shows: [Excerpt: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, "Spanish Castle Magic"] He was also a big fan of Duane Eddy, and soon learned Eddy's big hits "Forty Miles of Bad Road", "Because They're Young", and "Peter Gunn" -- a song he would return to much later in his life: [Excerpt: Jimi Hendrix, "Peter Gunn/Catastrophe"] His career as a guitarist didn't get off to a great start -- the first night he played with his first band, he was meant to play two sets, but he was fired after the first set, because he was playing in too flashy a manner and showing off too much on stage. His girlfriend suggested that he might want to tone it down a little, but he said "That's not my style".  This would be a common story for the next several years. After that false start, the first real band he was in was the Velvetones, with his friend Pernell Alexander. There were four guitarists, two piano players, horns and drums, and they dressed up with glitter stuck to their pants. They played Duane Eddy songs, old jazz numbers, and "Honky Tonk" by Bill Doggett, which became Hendrix's signature song with the band. [Excerpt: Bill Doggett, "Honky Tonk"] His father was unsupportive of his music career, and he left his guitar at Alexander's house because he was scared that his dad would smash it if he took it home. At the same time he was with the Velvetones, he was also playing with another band called the Rocking Kings, who got gigs around the Seattle area, including at the Spanish Castle. But as they left school, most of Hendrix's friends were joining the Army, in order to make a steady living, and so did he -- although not entirely by choice. He was arrested, twice, for riding in stolen cars, and he was given a choice -- either go to prison, or sign up for the Army for three years. He chose the latter. At first, the Army seemed to suit him. He was accepted into the 101st Airborne Division, the famous "Screaming Eagles", whose actions at D-Day made them legendary in the US, and he was proud to be a member of the Division. They were based out of Fort Campbell, the base near Clarksville we talked about a couple of episodes ago, and while he was there he met a bass player, Billy Cox, who he started playing with. As Cox and Hendrix were Black, and as Fort Campbell straddled the border between Kentucky and Tennessee, they had to deal with segregation and play to only Black audiences. And Hendrix quickly discovered that Black audiences in the Southern states weren't interested in "Louie Louie", Duane Eddy, and surf music, the stuff he'd been playing in Seattle. He had to instead switch to playing Albert King and Slim Harpo songs, but luckily he loved that music too. He also started singing at this point -- when Hendrix and Cox started playing together, in a trio called the Kasuals, they had no singer, and while Hendrix never liked his own voice, Cox was worse, and so Hendrix was stuck as the singer. The Kasuals started gigging around Clarksville, and occasionally further afield, places like Nashville, where Arthur Alexander would occasionally sit in with them. But Cox was about to leave the Army, and Hendrix had another two and a bit years to go, having enlisted for three years. They couldn't play any further away unless Hendrix got out of the Army, which he was increasingly unhappy in anyway, and so he did the only thing he could -- he pretended to be gay, and got discharged on medical grounds for homosexuality. In later years he would always pretend he'd broken his ankle parachuting from a plane. For the next few years, he would be a full-time guitarist, and spend the periods when he wasn't earning enough money from that leeching off women he lived with, moving from one to another as they got sick of him or ran out of money. The Kasuals expanded their lineup, adding a second guitarist, Alphonso Young, who would show off on stage by playing guitar with his teeth. Hendrix didn't like being upstaged by another guitarist, and quickly learned to do the same. One biography I've used as a source for this says that at this point, Billy Cox played on a session for King Records, for Frank Howard and the Commanders, and brought Hendrix along, but the producer thought that Hendrix's guitar was too frantic and turned his mic off. But other sources say the session Hendrix and Cox played on for the Commanders wasn't until three years later, and the record *sounds* like a 1965 record, not a 1962 one, and his guitar is very audible – and the record isn't on King. But we've not had any music to break up the narration for a little while, and it's a good track (which later became a Northern Soul favourite) so I'll play a section here, as either way it was certainly an early Hendrix session: [Excerpt: Frank Howard and the Commanders, "I'm So Glad"] This illustrates a general problem with Hendrix's life at this point -- he would flit between bands, playing with the same people at multiple points, nobody was taking detailed notes, and later, once he became famous, everyone wanted to exaggerate their own importance in his life, meaning that while the broad outlines of his life are fairly clear, any detail before late 1966 might be hopelessly wrong. But all the time, Hendrix was learning his craft. One story from around this time  sums up both Hendrix's attitude to his playing -- he saw himself almost as much as a scientist as a musician -- and his slightly formal manner of speech.  He challenged the best blues guitarist in Nashville to a guitar duel, and the audience actually laughed at Hendrix's playing, as he was totally outclassed. When asked what he was doing, he replied “I was simply trying to get that B.B. King tone down and my experiment failed.” Bookings for the King Kasuals dried up, and he went to Vancouver, where he spent a couple of months playing in a covers band, Bobby Taylor and the Vancouvers, whose lead guitarist was Tommy Chong, later to find fame as one half of Cheech and Chong. But he got depressed at how white Vancouver was, and travelled back down south to join a reconfigured King Kasuals, who now had a horn section. The new lineup of King Kasuals were playing the chitlin circuit and had to put on a proper show, and so Hendrix started using all the techniques he'd seen other guitarists on the circuit use -- playing with his teeth like Alphonso Young, the other guitarist in the band, playing with his guitar behind his back like T-Bone Walker, and playing with a fifty-foot cord that allowed him to walk into the crowd and out of the venue, still playing, like Guitar Slim used to. As well as playing with the King Kasuals, he started playing the circuit as a sideman. He got short stints with many of the second-tier acts on the circuit -- people who had had one or two hits, or were crowd-pleasers, but weren't massive stars, like Carla Thomas or Jerry Butler or Slim Harpo. The first really big name he played with was Solomon Burke, who when Hendrix joined his band had just released "Just Out of Reach (Of My Two Empty Arms)": [Excerpt: Solomon Burke, "Just Out of Reach (Of My Two Empty Arms)"] But he lacked discipline. “Five dates would go beautifully,” Burke later said, “and then at the next show, he'd go into this wild stuff that wasn't part of the song. I just couldn't handle it anymore.” Burke traded him to Otis Redding, who was on the same tour, for two horn players, but then Redding fired him a week later and they left him on the side of the road. He played in the backing band for the Marvelettes, on a tour with Curtis Mayfield, who would be another of Hendrix's biggest influences, but he accidentally blew up Mayfield's amp and got sacked. On another tour, Cecil Womack threw Hendrix's guitar off the bus while he slept. In February 1964 he joined the band of the Isley Brothers, and he would watch the Beatles on Ed Sullivan with them during his first days with the group. Assuming he hadn't already played the Rosa Lee Brooks session (and I think there's good reason to believe he hadn't), then the first record Hendrix played on was their single "Testify": [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, "Testify"] While he was with them, he also moonlighted on Don Covay's big hit "Mercy, Mercy": [Excerpt: Don Covay and the Goodtimers, "Mercy Mercy"] After leaving the Isleys, Hendrix joined the minor soul singer Gorgeous George, and on a break from Gorgeous George's tour, in Memphis, he went to Stax studios in the hope of meeting Steve Cropper, one of his idols. When he was told that Cropper was busy in the studio, he waited around all day until Cropper finished, and introduced himself. Hendrix was amazed to discover that Cropper was white -- he'd assumed that he must be Black -- and Cropper was delighted to meet the guitarist who had played on "Mercy Mercy", one of his favourite records. The two spent hours showing each other guitar licks -- Hendrix playing Cropper's right-handed guitar, as he hadn't brought along his own. Shortly after this, he joined Little Richard's band, and once again came into conflict with the star of the show by trying to upstage him. For one show he wore a satin shirt, and after the show Richard screamed at him “I am the only Little Richard! I am the King of Rock and Roll, and I am the only one allowed to be pretty. Take that shirt off!” While he was with Richard, Hendrix played on his "I Don't Know What You've Got, But It's Got Me", which like "Mercy Mercy" was written by Don Covay, who had started out as Richard's chauffeur: [Excerpt: Little Richard, "I Don't Know What You've Got, But It's Got Me"] According to the most likely version of events I've read, it was while he was working for Richard that Hendrix met Rosa Lee Brooks, on New Year's Eve 1964. At this point he was using the name Maurice James, apparently in tribute to the blues guitarist Elmore James, and he used various names, including Jimmy James, for most of his pre-fame performances. Rosa Lee Brooks was an R&B singer who had been mentored by Johnny "Guitar" Watson, and when she met Hendrix she was singing in a girl group who were one of the support acts for Ike & Tina Turner, who Hendrix went to see on his night off. Hendrix met Brooks afterwards, and told her she looked like his mother -- a line he used on a lot of women, but which was true in her case if photos are anything to go by. The two got into a relationship, and were soon talking about becoming a duo like Ike and Tina or Mickey and Sylvia -- "Love is Strange" was one of Hendrix's favourite records. But the only recording they made together was the "My Diary" single. Brooks always claimed that she actually wrote that song, but the label credit is for Arthur Lee, and it sounds like his work to me, albeit him trying hard to write like Curtis Mayfield, just as Hendrix is trying to play like him: [Excerpt: Rosa Lee Brooks, "My Diary"] Brooks and Hendrix had a very intense relationship for a short period. Brooks would later recall Little

Tiffany Bynoe is a multi-genre Billboard charting artist who has scored hit singles in Adult Contemporary/Smooth Jazz, R&B and Gospel music. The versatile soul songstress just released her latest single “Make Me Say It Again.” Produced by the young emerging production duo The Trillionaires, “Make me Say It Again” is a lush, contemporary and deeply sensual re-imagining of The Isley Brothers' classic 1975 track “Make Me Say It Again,” with Tiffany bringing her unique female perspective to a lyric originally sung by Ronald Isley. Lorenzo Thomas, CEO/Program Manager of 100 Hip Hop and RNB FM, says, “Tiffany's rendition of the Isley Brothers classic is a testament to the sounds of yesteryear but also ignites today's souls' yearning for some good R&B.” “The interesting thing about my career is that when I used to sing love songs, I was too young to understand the truer meanings of them,” the singer says. “But now, I sing them with a richer understanding of life and love and am able to share with listeners another way of thinking. I have always been a huge fan of the Isleys, and when this one came up one night on Pandora, I knew if I took the right approach to it, it would be a way to bring the older generation of R&B music into the now. I relate to its emotions about being in love and in a relationship so meaningful that you just want to declare that love and are overjoyed when someone makes you say it again and again," she said. “Make Me Say It Again” follows a string of hit singles for Tiffany over the past few years that includes her Top 30 Billboard Gospel Airplay song “Seasons,” “Free,” “Love Like Waterfalls,” “Be Still” and various remixes of “Shame.” Her most recent singles in 2020 were “Be Still” and “All of Us” featuring The Trillionaires. Tiffany's newly released album features songs co-written by the singer, her husband Kyle Bynoe and Marquise Brown and produced by The Trillionaires. The collection also feature sTiffany's trademark wide range of styles and include a collaboration with the “Godfather of Gospel/Jazz,” Ben Tankard. A seasoned performer by the time she was 14, Tiffany competed and won Amateur Night three times at the famed Apollo Theatre in NYC. Following that, she was offered numerous recording deals, but her mother insisted she finish high school first. At 17, the singer signed a major recording contract with Elektra Records and scored the #3 Billboard hit “Give Him a Love He Can Feel” under the name Tene Williams. Wendy Williams was one of the DJ's who broke the record in New York, and one of Tiffany's dreams came true when she appeared on “Soul Train” with Don Cornelius. The singer also appeared on BET's video soul and other major platforms of the time. Tiffany has used her downtime during the pandemic to finish two books, “Ugly Duckling No More” and “M.E. Made Extraordinary.”. These volumes tell her inspirational story of overcoming adversity and challenges in both her personal and professional lives. Their compelling emotional narratives detail the struggles of overcoming low self-esteem, depression, regrets and other mental health issues. Stay tuned as Tiffany dives into her life story, her ups and downs ---she shares the pivots and gives tips on how you can pivot too! Show Highlights : (2:56) When negative things are spoken, make sure it doesn't penetrate (13:19) Down Syndrome and medical issues (30:30) Learn to Let Go in the midst of a shift (36:23) Know where to place friends in your life (41:27) People can be judgmental Connect with Tiffany Bynoe on social media: ig:Tiffanybynoeme fb: tiffanybynoemusic twitter:@tiffanybynoeME in:tiffanybynoe TiktTok Spotify www.tiffanybynoe.com Follow Shawn Zanotti at www.thejourneytold.com Connect with Shawn on Social Media: Instagram- @publicistshawn Facebook-@shawnzanotti Website-www.thejourneytold.com or www.exactpublicity.com Podcast Instagram- @thejourneytoldshow...

Frederik - Se Jokin Minulla On (1975) The Locomotion in Finnish.  Alice Babs - Been To Canaan (1973) Pretty Purdie and the Playboys - You've Got A Friend (1971) Carole King - Child of Mine (1970)  Design - I Feel The Earth Move (1973) The City - Now That Everything's Been Said (1968) From the great Light In The Attic website:  By the mid-‘60s, King's marriage to Gerry Goffin, with whom she'd written many of those wonderful hits, had hit the rocks. A divorce loomed, and King all but retired to raise their two daughters. She headed west to Laurel Canyon in ‘67, taking the children with her, and made the previously unlikely move of joining a progressive folk-rock band. King formed The City with future husband Charles Larkey on bass and Danny Kortchmar on guitar and vocals. With King on piano and vocals, they created a folk-rock sound that pre-empted the singer-songwriter boom of the ‘70s. Produced by Lou Adler and featuring Jimmy Gordon on drums, The City's sound is deep and soulful, imperfect but passionate. And the songs, with King writing or co-writing all but one, are as exceptional as you'd expect and as widely covered as her factory work. “Now That Everything's Been Said” was a hit for American Spring [Ed: That was the band that Brian Wilson produced, featuring his wife Marylin and his affair d'couer, his sister-in-law Diane.], “A Man Without A Dream” was tackled by The Monkees, and “Hi-De-Ho (That Old Sweet Roll)” was a hit for Blood, Sweat & Tears. Central to the album's appeal is King's own stirring reading of her track “Wasn't Born To Follow,” covered masterfully by The Byrds for the Easy Rider soundtrack. King had been used to a life on the sidelines, and her stage fright left the trio unable to tour the LP which adversely affected their fortunes. That, plus some behind-the-scenes distribution problems, meant the album was quickly deleted, and it remained so for the next thirty years–partly at King's request. Even so, its failure was a surprise to those concerned. “I was 26 when Now That Everything's Been Said was released in 1968,” King says of the album. “[We] expected it to zoom to the top of the charts within, at most, a few weeks. Individually and together, we optimistically imagined the album's success as if it had already happened. Danny and Charlie kept telling each other, 'It's a great album. The City is gonna be Number 1 with a bullet!'" Frances Yip - I Feel The Earth Move (1973) The Isleys - It's Too Late (1972) From one of my favorite pages, Wilson and Alroy's Record Reviews: Their review of Brother, Brother, Brother (two stars out of five) This is the kind of thing you can do when you own your record company: the Isleys turn over half the running time to three Carole King covers ("Brother Brother," her then-current hit "Sweet Seasons," and a ten-minute version of "It's Too Late"). All of which are calming and pretty but not particularly moving, similar in style to Givin' It Back but not quite as rough. Those numbers are complemented by some funkier tunes more reminiscent of Get Into Something, including the single "Pop That Thang," "Love Put Me On The Corner," and the propulsive "Work To Do." More than anything, this is transitional, pointing out the direction that was to pay off far better commercially and artistically starting with the next studio album. The younger crop of Isleys played most of the instruments again but still received no producing or arranging credits. Carol Burnett - It's Too Late (1972)  Jerry Butler - So Far Away (1972)  Daffi Von Cramer - Locomotion (1972) Lone Kellerman - Kom An Baby (1977) Mike James Kirkland - It's Too Late (1973) Nora Aunor - Sweet Seasons (1972) Known as "The Grand Dame of Philippine Cinema" for her contribution to the Philippine film industry. Aunor has released more than 360 singles and recorded more than 200 songs and over 50 albums. She has notched more than 30 gold singles and with an estimated gross sales of one million units, Nora's cover of "Pearly Shells" (1971) is one of the biggest-selling singles in the Philippines. Due to a botched cosmetic surgery in Japan while endorsing a cosmetic surgery clinic based in Shinagawa and Makati, her vocal cords were damaged and she cannot sing due to paralysis of her left vocal cords. Peter Nero - Jazzman (1975)  Rita Coolidge - One Fine Day (1979) Carole King - Pierre (1975) Marlena Shaw - So Far Away (1972) Vikki Carr - So Far Away (1971) Carpenters - One Fine Day (1973)  The City - Snow Queen (1968) The City - I Wasn't Born to Follow (1968) The Counts - Jazzman (1974) The Lettermen - You Make Me Feel Like A Natural Man (1970) Tiiti - Sata Kettaa (1979) Carole King - Time Gone By (1979) The Anita Kerr Singers - You've Got A Friend (1973)  Stanislaw Sojka - You've Got A Friend (1979)  

PLEASE JOIN ME TONIGHT FROM 7:30P - 10:30P CST FOR MY RADIO SHOW "THE NIGHT GROOVE" ONLY ON BLOGYALKRADIO AND FACEBOOK. "LIVE" !!

On today’s Episode, we sit down with Brooklyn legend, Dyme-A-Duzin! I did not take the vaccine! (1:10). We discuss longevity in entertainment (1:58). Welcome Dyme-A-Duzin! (3:55) How his career began with gospel rap in 2003 (5:30) Family music history/His grandma sang backup for the Isleys! (7:14) REMEMBERING CAPITOL STEEZ (9:04). Dyme Talks about his time with group, Phony Ppl (11:45). How the late Chris Lighty had dreams on creating a new Wu-Tang (16:16). Dyme talks Collaboration with Kehlani/ I try to pitch a verse (17:21). Timeless sounds and adaptability (20:00). Ghetto Olympics & Training EP concepts (23:41). Is there a pressure to “put your peers on” once you’ve essentially “made it”. (28:00). Acting, and being in the Wu-Tang series episode 6, and will he pursue the craft. (30:00). Ghetto Olympics being another Marathon Continues (32:15). Salute to almost 20 years in the game before age 30, WOW! (33:00). TRAINING EP OUT NOW ON ALL PLATFORMS or visit www.dymeduzin.com Follow us on social media! Instagram.com/dymeaduzin Instagram.com/vontenyc Instagram.com/ashDollas_ Mix by Selecta Sha Instagram.com/selectasha98 This podcast is sponsored by Essentials From Earth! Instagram.com/essentialsfromearthbk Get 15% off your first order by using promo code ‘VONTENYCPOD’ https://essentials-from-earth-bk.myshopify.com

On this week's episode, Slick and the fam discussed Colorism in our community. The constant discrimination we face with each other based on our skin tones. The never ending light skin vs. dark skin debate. Understanding where this all stemmed from and how we can begin to change the narrative, and so much more. As usual, we got into the Quickies, the next Verzuz with Earth, Wind and Fire vs, The Isleys, Quavo and Saweetie splitting (Slick thinks its her fault), Derrick Jaxn getting caught up after years of capping, and so much more. Shoutout our women of the week which goes to our guest for tonight; @sheischill and @_arianarising_. Two amazing women doing great things in their communities. And a special shoutout to our Sponsors for the week, @ZionsKitchenLLC, @Cannasnob, and @Muffins_Mixes! Be sure to follow them and let them know Slick sent you when you order. Catch us next time for Ep. 111!!! Until then...

“Bodies on top of bodies, IV’s on top of IV’s                        Obviously the coroner between the sheets like the Isleys         When you hop on that trolley, make sure your colors correct Make sure you’re corporate or they’ll be callin’ your mother collect" - m.A.A.d city This episode, we're back to the west coast with one of the leaders of the new school.  Kendrick Lamar dropped GKMC in 2012.  With multiple critically acclaimed albums in his repertoire, we decided to take a closer look at his debut, Good Kid, M.A.A.D City. We need to find out if it's as good as advertised.   Is this a classic?

This week enjoy the slow jam battle between The Isley Brothers & Earth, Wind & Fire!..Listen every Sunday night 10pm on mocradio.com

Episode 99 "Flesh of my Flesh" of the Cast Worthy Podcast was recorded on Sunday April 11th, via Belive virtual streaming. Episode 99 is a two part episode. On this episode of the Cast Worthy Podcast, Big Steve, EJ and the VP of research discuss politics, urban culture and sports.The Dog, The Darkman X, the Heart of Yonkers Earl "DMX" Simmons has passed away at 50 years old. The crew discusses the passing of DMX and the legacy he had on the rap and entertainment industry forever. Steve leads the discussion on the Easter Verzuz between the Isley Brothers and Earth Wind and Fire. The two titan groups clashed for an ultimate session of sound and soul. Steve weighs in on how the battle went and the crew discusses the music and legacy of the two groups. Ron Isley plays his R. Kelly produced hits and that spawns into a discussion on cancel culture. The crew discusses another incident in Virginia where the police violate the rights of an Army Lieutenant In a heinous and disgusting act of police brutality. The crew weighs in on America's problem with police brutality. The crew briefly discusses the Derek Chauvin trial and the developments. VP delivers his politimoment and what you should know in politics. The crew discusses sports and predictions for the NBA season. EJ regretfully believes the Heat will actually make it to the finals. Deshaun Watson been a dutty liklle boi as his attorney drops some new information on the case. The crew discusses the weekly bingeables, Steve is still watching the Sopranos. EJ discusses the new Amazon prime series "Invincible" and "Them".The Cast Worthy Podcast is now streaming shows on Youtube live! As always we like to thank you for supporting the podcast. Follow us @castworthy on Twitter, @castworthy_podcast on IG, facebook at Castworthy and on youtube.Click this link below to find all our content. https://linktr.ee/CastworthyPodcast#netflix #hbomax #nba #nfl #texans #stimmy #dmx #verzuz #ewf #isleys #easter #sopranos #verzuz #amaxon #invincible #them #guns #police #georgefloyd #derekchauvin

Episode 99 "Flesh of my Flesh" of the Cast Worthy Podcast was recorded on Sunday April 11th, via Belive virtual streaming. Episode 99 is a two part episode. On this episode of the Cast Worthy Podcast, Big Steve, EJ and the VP of research discuss politics, urban culture and sports.The Dog, The Darkman X, the Heart of Yonkers Earl "DMX" Simmons has passed away at 50 years old. The crew discusses the passing of DMX and the legacy he had on the rap and entertainment industry forever. Steve leads the discussion on the Easter Verzuz between the Isley Brothers and Earth Wind and Fire. The two titan groups clashed for an ultimate session of sound and soul. Steve weighs in on how the battle went and the crew discusses the music and legacy of the two groups. Ron Isley plays his R. Kelly produced hits and that spawns into a discussion on cancel culture. The crew discusses another incident in Virginia where the police violate the rights of an Army Lieutenant In a heinous and disgusting act of police brutality. The crew weighs in on America's problem with police brutality. The crew briefly discusses the Derek Chauvin trial and the developments. VP delivers his politimoment and what you should know in politics. The crew discusses sports and predictions for the NBA season. EJ regretfully believes the Heat will actually make it to the finals. Deshaun Watson been a dutty liklle boi as his attorney drops some new information on the case. The crew discusses the weekly bingeables, Steve is still watching the Sopranos. EJ discusses the new Amazon prime series "Invincible" and "Them".The Cast Worthy Podcast is now streaming shows on Youtube live! As always we like to thank you for supporting the podcast. Follow us @castworthy on Twitter, @castworthy_podcast on IG, facebook at Castworthy and on youtube.Click this link below to find all our content. https://linktr.ee/CastworthyPodcast#netflix #hbomax #nba #nfl #texans #stimmy #dmx #verzuz #ewf #isleys #easter #sopranos #verzuz #amaxon #invincible #them #guns #police #georgefloyd #derekchauvin

This week episode 9 pays tribute to the legend DMX following his untimely passing(4:05)We talk our favorite songs and his impact on our lives! The crew talks about the ncaa b-ball championship(21:53)Paul Pierce firing(27:20) and the Verzuz battle between The Isleys and EW&F(43:04). We get a little deep with a convo about sacrificing your happiness for your child(64:53) and then as always it gets raunchy with a spirited 3some conversation(79:45)! Follow us on Instagram @The87Podcast and individually @thechefproject @fadedtone @therealghost87 enjoy this episode! --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

Uncle is joined by K.Hall as we discuss the latest Verzuz between EWF and The Isleys, Paul Pierce getting fired for living his best life, Tarlo Reviews Sh*t: Godzilla vs Kong edition, and Tweets & Tidbits

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Lil Nas X and MSCHF teach a master class on trolling, and the most epic Verzuz battle of all time between Earth Wind and Fire and the Isley Brothers is going down. The fellas can’t decide who is gonna win. Take a listen and help us figure it out.

This week, the gang kicks off the episode with some well wishes for rapper DMX's recovery and a brief convo about his impact on Hip Hop. We also talk about the Verzuz battle between music icons Earth, Wind & Fire and The Isley Brothers: The wardrobe, the music, the epicness of it all. There is also a conversation about the Isleys' controversial decision to include their R. Kelly-penned hits in the battle, and we ask: is it REALLY possible to cancel R. Kelly completely?! ALSO: An angry Burger King customer thinks she could "have it her way" with a gun. Paul Pierce gets the boot from ESPN after his after-hour antics hit the net. Boosie Badazz gets banned from Instagram (again) and begs Black creators to make a platform for him to display his ratchet content with no restrictions. We discuss why rappers are expected to be role models, whether they like it or not. And finally, Saweetie & Quavo's elevator tussle prompts an honest conversation about Domestic Violence in relationships.

Episode 98 of the Cast Worthy Podcast "No Stimmy no cry" was recorded on Sunday April 4, 2021 via belive.On this episode of the Cast Worthy Podcast, Big Steve and the VP of research discuss politics, urban culture and sports.Shooting in DC at the Capitol. The fellas weigh in, rest in peace to the Capitol officer that lost his life. The Darkman X is fighting for his life. DMX is one of the podcasts favorite artists and we're hoping for his recovery, the crew weighs in. The Houston Police Department is now getting involved with the Deshaun Watson case. The crew discusses what they believe this will do to the case and Deshaun's future. What's new on TV? Steve is STILL watching the Sopranos. The new mighty ducks series is on Disney plus. The guys talk financial success and focusing on achieving financial freedom. The presidents dog bit another person! and Steve is still waiting on his Stimmy!! Dammit Joe!The Verzuz of the year!! The elements vs the Isley's. Steve is getting his gators and cognac ready.As always we thank you for tuning into the podcast. The Cast Worthy Podcast is now streaming shows on Youtube live! As always we like to thank you for supporting the podcast. Follow us @castworthy on Twitter, @castworthy_podcast on IG, facebook at Castworthy and on youtube.Click this link below to find all our content. https://linktr.ee/CastworthyPodcast#netflix #hbomax #nba #nfl #texans #stimmy #dmx #verzuz #ewf #isleys #easter #sopranos #disneyplus #mightyducks #sopranos

(Intro) Weekend Highlights (Dirty) Prayers up for DMX. Bhad Bhabie breaks OnlyFans record. EWF vz. The Isleys. (Topic) What's the most unnecessary thing you've bought? (Contest) BRAINS FOR BANK for $100 (5TYNTK) Week 2 of Derek Chavin trial. 22.27% of Mainers fully vaccinated. Person shot on Main Street in Windham. High Speed chase ends on I-95 in Falmouth. Streets closed in the Old Port. (Outro) Mariah hits a high note while getting vaccinated.

An hour of power from two (and only two) epochal seventies soul bands.Support the show (https://www.paypal.me/butchcorp)

The Isley Brothers have been making their mark as pioneers for five decades and their recent induction into the Lifetime Achievement category of The SoulMusic Hall Of Fame by popular vote online is recognition of their incredible contribution to contemporary music SoulMusic.com founder David Nathan and renowned entertainment journalist Janine Coveney discuss some of The Isleys’ classic recordings including “That Lady,” “Fight The Power,” “Harvest For The World” and “Footsteps In The Dark” and share about the group’s impact as funky groove makers and romantic balladeers of the first order.

Episode one hundred and two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Twist and Shout" by the Isley Brothers, and the early career of Bert Berns. 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 "How Do You Do It?" by Gerry and the Pacemakers. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more---- Resources No Mixcloud this week, due to the number of songs by the Isleys. Amazingly, there are no books on the Isley Brothers, unless you count a seventy-two page self-published pamphlet by Rudolph Isley's daughter, so I've had to piece this together from literally dozens of different sources. For information about the Isley Brothers the main source was  Icons of R&B and Soul by Bob Gulla.  The information about Bert Berns comes from Here Comes the Night: The Dark Soul of Bert Berns and the Dirty Business of Rhythm and Blues by Joel Selvin. There are many compilations of the public-domain recordings of the Isleys. This one seems the most complete. This three-CD set, though, is the best overview of the group's whole career. 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 one of the great Brill Building songwriters, and at a song he wrote which became a classic both of soul and of rock music. We're going to look at how a novelty Latin song based around a dance craze was first taken up by one of the greatest soul groups of the sixties, and then reworked by the biggest British rock band of all time. We're going to look at "Twist and Shout" by the Isley Brothers. [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, "Twist and Shout"] When we left the Isley Brothers, they had just signed to Atlantic, and released several singles with Leiber and Stoller, records like "Standing on the Dance Floor" that were excellent R&B records, but which didn't sell: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, "Standing on the Dance Floor"] In 1962 they were dropped by Atlantic and moved on to Wand Records, the third label started by Florence Greenberg, who had already started Tiara and Scepter. As with those labels, Luther Dixon was in charge of the music, and he produced their first single on the label, a relatively catchy dance song called "The Snake", which didn't catch on commercially: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, "The Snake"] While "The Snake" didn't sell, the Isley Brothers clearly had some commercial potential -- and indeed their earlier hit "Shout" had just recharted, after Joey Dee and the Starliters had a hit with a cover version of it. All that was needed was the right song, and they could be as big as Luther Dixon's other group, the Shirelles. And Dixon had just the song for them -- a song co-written by Burt Bacharach, and sung on the demo by a young singer called Dionne Warwick. Unfortunately, they spent almost all the session trying and failing to get the song down -- they just couldn't make it work -- and eventually they gave up on it, and Bacharach produced the song for Jerry Butler, the former lead singer of the Impressions, who had a top twenty hit with it: [Excerpt: Jerry Butler, "Make it Easy on Yourself"] So they were stuck without a song to record -- and then Dixon's assistant on the session, Bert Berns, suggested that they record one of his songs -- one that had been a flop for another group the previous year. The story of "Twist and Shout" actually starts with a group called the Five Pearls, who made their first record in 1954: [Excerpt: The Five Pearls, "Please Let Me Know"] The Five Pearls recorded under various different names, and in various different combinations, for several different mid-sized record labels like Aladdin throughout the 1950s, but without much success -- the closest they came was when one of the members, Dave "Baby" Cortez, went solo and had a hit with "The Happy Organ" in 1959: [Excerpt: Dave "Baby" Cortez, "The Happy Organ"] But in 1960 two members of the Pearls -- who used different names at different points of their career, but at this point were calling themselves Derek Ray and Guy Howard, signed to Atlantic as a new duo called The Top Notes. Their first single under this name, "A Wonderful Time", did no better than any of their other records had -- but by their third single, they were being produced by a new staff producer -- Phil Spector, who had started taking on production jobs that Leiber and Stoller weren't interested in doing themselves, like a remake of the old folk song "Corrina, Corrina", which had been an R&B hit for Big Joe Turner and which Spector produced for the country singer Ray Peterson: [Excerpt: Ray Peterson, "Corrina, Corrina"] But soon after that, Spector had broken with Leiber and Stoller. Spector was given the opportunity to co-write songs for the new Elvis film, Blue Hawaii. But he was signed to a publishing contract with Leiber and Stoller's company, Trio Music, and they told Hill & Range that he could only do the songs if Trio got half the publishing, which Hill & Range refused -- there was apparently some talk of them going ahead anyway, but Hill & Range were scared of Trio's lawyer, one of the best in the entertainment industry. This wouldn't be the last time that Phil Spector and Lee Eastman ended up on the opposite sides of a disagreement. Shortly after that, Spector's contract mysteriously went missing from Trio's office. Someone remembered that Spector happened to have a key to the office. But by this point Spector had co-written or co-produced a fair few hits, and so he was taken on by Atlantic on his own merits, and so he and Jerry Wexler co-produced singles for the Top Notes, with arrangements by Teddy Randazzo, who we last heard of singing with accordion accompaniment in The Girl Can't Help It. The first of these Top Notes singles, "Hearts of Stone", was an obvious attempt at a Ray Charles soundalike, with bits directly lifted both from "What'd I Say" and Charles' hit "Sticks and Stones": [Excerpt: The Top Notes, "Hearts of Stone"] But the next Top Notes release was the song that would make them at least a footnote in music history. The writing credit on it was Bert Russell and Phil Medley, and while Medley would have little impact on the music world otherwise, the songwriter credited as Bert Russell is worth us looking at. His actual name was Bertrand Russell Berns -- he had been named after the famous philosopher -- and he was a man on a mission. He was already thirty-one, and he knew he didn't have long to live -- he'd had rheumatic fever as a child and it had given him an incurable heart condition. He had no idea how long he had, but he knew he wasn't going to live to a ripe old age. And he'd wasted his twenties already -- he'd tried various ways to get into showbiz, with no success. He'd tried a comedy double act, and at one point had moved to Cuba, where he'd tried to buy a nightclub but backed out when he'd realised it was actually a brothel.  On his return to the US, he'd started working as a songwriter in the Brill Building. In the late fifties he worked for a while with the rockabilly singer Ersel Hickey -- no relation to me -- who had a minor hit with "Bluebirds Over the Mountain": [Excerpt: Ersel Hickey, "Bluebirds Over the Mountain"] Berns was proud just to know Hickey, though, because "Bluebirds Over the Mountain" had been covered by Ritchie Valens, and "La Bamba" was Berns' favourite record -- one he would turn to for inspiration throughout his career. He loved Latin music generally -- it had been one of the reasons he'd moved to Cuba -- but that song in particular was endlessly fascinating to him. He'd written and produced a handful of recordings in the early fifties, before his Cuba trip, but it was on his return that he started to be properly productive. He'd started producing novelty records with a friend called Bill Giant, like a song based on the Gettysburg Address: [Excerpt: Bert and Bill Giant, "The Gettysburg Address"] Or a solo record about the Alamo -- at the time Berns seemed to think that songs about American history were going to be the next big thing: [Excerpt: Bert Berns, "The Legend of the Alamo"] He'd co-written a song called "A Little Bird Told Me" with Ersel Hickey -- not the same as the song of the same name we talked about a year or so ago -- and it was recorded by LaVern Baker: [Excerpt: LaVern Baker, "A Little Bird Told Me"] And he and Medley co-wrote "Push Push" for Austin Taylor: [Excerpt: Austin Taylor, "Push Push"] But he was still basically a nobody in the music industry in 1961. But Jerry Wexler had produced that LaVern Baker record of "A Little Bird Told Me", and he liked Berns, and so he accepted a Berns and Medley cowrite for the next Top Notes session.  The song in question had started out as one called "Shake it Up Baby", based very firmly around the chords and melody of "La Bamba", but reimagined with the Afro-Cuban rhythms that Berns loved so much -- and then further reworked to reference the Twist dance craze. Berns was sure it was a hit -- it was as catchy as anything he could write, and full of hooks.  Berns was allowed into the studio to watch the recording, which was produced by Wexler and Spector, but he wasn't allowed to get involved -- and he watched with horror as Spector flattened the rhythm and totally rewrote the middle section. Spector also added in backing vocals based on the recent hit "Handy Man" -- a "come-a-come-a" vocal line that didn't really fit the song. The result was actually quite a decent record, but despite being performed by all the usual Atlantic session players like King Curtis, and having the Cookies do their usual sterling job on backing vocals, "Twist and Shout" by the Top Notes was a massive flop, and Berns could tell it would be even during the session: [Excerpt: The Top Notes, "Twist and Shout"] The Top Notes soon split up, making no real further mark on the industry -- when Guy Howard died in 1977, he had reverted to his original name Howard Guyton, and the Top Notes were so obscure that his obituaries focused on his time in one of the later touring versions of the Platters. Berns was furious at the way that Spector had wrecked his song, and decided that he was going to have to start producing his own songs, so they couldn't be messed up. But that was put on the back burner for a while, as he started having success. His first chart success as a songwriter was with a song he wrote for a minor group called the Jarmels. By this time, the Drifters were having a lot of success with their use of the same Latin and Caribbean rhythms that Berns liked, and so he wrote "A Little Bit of Soap" in the Drifters' style, and it made the top twenty: [Excerpt: The Jarmels, "A Little Bit of Soap"] He also started making non-novelty records of his own. Luther Dixon at Wand Records heard one of Berns' demos, and decided he should be singing, not just writing songs. Berns was signed to Wand Records as a solo artist under the name "Russell Byrd", and his first single for the label was produced by Dixon. The song itself is structurally a bit of a mess -- Berns seems to have put together several hooks (including some from other songs) but not thought properly about how to link them together, and so it meanders a bit -- but you can definitely see a family resemblance to "Twist and Shout" in the melody, and in Carole King's string arrangement: [Excerpt: Russell Byrd, "You'd Better Come Home"] That made the top fifty, and got Berns a spot on American Bandstand, but it was still not the breakout success that Berns needed. While Berns had been annoyed at Spector for the way he'd messed up "Twist and Shout", he clearly wasn't so upset with him that they couldn't work together, because the second Russell Byrd session, another Drifters knockoff, was produced by Spector: [Excerpt: Russell Byrd, "Nights of Mexico"] But Berns was still looking to produce his own material. He got the chance when Jerry Wexler called him up. Atlantic were having problems -- while they had big vocal groups like the Drifters and the Coasters, they'd just lost their two biggest male solo vocalists, as Bobby Darin and Ray Charles had moved on to other labels. They had recently signed a gospel singer called Solomon Burke, and he'd had a minor hit with a version of an old country song, "Just Out of Reach": [Excerpt: Solomon Burke, "Just Out of Reach"] Burke was the closest thing to a male solo star they now had, and clearly a major talent, but he was also a very opinionated person, and not easy to get on with. His grandmother had had a dream, twelve years before he was born, in which she believed God had told her of her future grandson's importance. She'd founded a church, Solomon's Temple: The House Of God For All People, in anticipation of his birth, and he'd started preaching there from the age of seven as the church's spiritual leader. Rather unsurprisingly, he had rather a large ego, and that ego wasn't made any smaller by the fact that he was clearly a very talented singer. His strong opinions included things like how his music was to be marketed. He was fine with singing pop songs, rather than the gospel music he'd started out in, as he needed the money -- he had eight kids, and as well as being a singer and priest, he was also a mortician, and had a side job shovelling snow for four dollars an hour -- but he wasn't keen on being marketed as "rhythm and blues" -- rhythm and blues was dirty music, not respectable. His music needed to be called something else. After some discussion with Atlantic, everyone agreed on a new label that would be acceptable to his church, one that had previously been applied to a type of mostly-instrumental jazz influenced by Black gospel music, but from this point on would be applied almost exclusively to Black gospel-influenced pop music in the lineage of Ray Charles and Clyde McPhatter. Burke was not singing rhythm and blues, but soul music. Wexler had produced Burke's first sessions, but he always thought he worked better when he had a co-producer, and he liked a song Berns had written, "Cry to Me", another of his Drifters soundalikes. So he asked Berns into the studio to produce Burke singing that song. The two didn't get on very well at first -- Burke's original comment on meeting Berns was "Who is this Paddy mother--" except he included the expletive that my general audience content rating prevents me from saying there -- but it's hard to argue with the results, one of the great soul records of all time: [Excerpt: Solomon Burke, "Cry to Me"] That made the top five on the R&B chart, and started a run of hits for Burke, whose records would continue to be produced by the team of Berns and Wexler for the next several years. After this initial production success, Berns started producing many other records, most of them again unsuccessful, like a cheap Twist album to cash in on the resurgent Twist craze. And he was still working with Wand records, which is what led to him being invited to assist Dixon with the Isley Brothers session for "Make it Easy on Yourself".  When they couldn't get a take done for that track, Berns suggested that they make an attempt at "Twist and Shout", which he still thought had the potential to be a hit, and which would be perfectly suited to the Isley Brothers -- after all, their one hit was "Shout!", so "Twist and Shout" would be the perfect way for them to get some relevance.  The brothers hated the song, and they didn't want to record any Twist material at all -- apparently they were so vehemently against recording the song that furniture got smashed in the argument over it. But Luther Dixon insisted that they do it, and so they reluctantly recorded "Twist and Shout", and did it the way Bert Berns had originally envisioned it, Latin feel and all: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, "Twist and Shout"] It's a testament to Ronald Isley's talent, in particular, that he sounds utterly committed on the record despite it being something he had no wish to take part in at all.  The record made the top twenty on the pop chart and number two in R&B, becoming the Isleys' first real mainstream hit. It might have even done better, but for an unfortunate coincidence -- "Do You Love Me" by the Contours, a song written by Berry Gordy, was released on one of the Motown labels a couple of weeks later, and had a very similar rising vocal hook: [Excerpt: The Contours, "Do You Love Me"] "Do You Love Me" was a bigger hit, making number three in the pop charts and number one R&B, but it's hard not to think that the two records being so similar must have eaten into the market for both records. But either way, "Twist and Shout" was a proper big hit for the Isleys, and one that established them as real stars, and Berns became their regular producer for a while. Unfortunately, both they and Berns floundered about what to do for a follow-up. The first attempt was one of those strange records that tries to mash up bits of as many recent hits as possible, and seems to have been inspired by Jan & Dean's then-recent hit with a revival of the 1946 song "Linda": [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "Linda"] That song was, coincidentally, written about the daughter of Lee Eastman, the lawyer we mentioned earlier. "Twistin' With Linda", the brothers' response, took the character from that song, and added the melody to the recent novelty hit "Hully Gully", lyrical references to "Twist and Shout" and Chubby Checker's Twist hits, and in the tag Ronald Isley sings bits of "Shout", "Don't You Just Know It", "Duke of Earl", and for some reason "I'm Popeye the Sailor Man": [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, "Twistin' With Linda"] That only made the lower reaches of the charts. Their next single was "Nobody But Me", which didn't make the hot one hundred, but would later be covered by the Human Beinz, making the top ten in their version in 1968: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, "Nobody But Me"] With Berns still producing, the Isleys moved over to United Artists records, but within a year of "Twist and Shout", they were reduced to remaking it as "Surf and Shout", with lyrics referencing another Jan and Dean hit, "Surf City": [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, "Surf and Shout"] Oddly, while they were doing this, Berns was producing them on much more interesting material for album tracks, but for some reason, even as Berns was also by now producing regular hits for Solomon Burke, Ben E King and the Drifters, the Isleys were stuck trying to jump on whatever the latest bandwagon was in an attempt at commercial success. Even when they were writing songs that would become hits, they were having no success. The last of the songs that Berns produced for them was another Isleys original, "Who's That Lady?": [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, "Who's That Lady?"] That would become one of the group's biggest hits, but not until they remade it nine years later. It was only two years since "Twist and Shout", but the Isley Brothers were commercially dead. But the success of "Twist and Shout" -- and their songwriting royalties from "Shout" -- gave them the financial cushion to move to comparatively better surroundings -- and to start their own record label. They moved to Teaneck, New Jersey, and named their new label T-Neck in its honour. They also had one of the best live bands in the US at the time, and the first single on T-Neck, "Testify", produced by the brothers themselves, highlighted their new guitar player, Jimmy James: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, "Testify"] But even while he was employed by the Isleys, Jimmy James was playing on other records that were doing better, like Don Covay's big hit "Mercy, Mercy": [Excerpt: Don Covay and the Goodtimers, "Mercy, Mercy"] And he soon left the Isleys, going on first to tour with a minor soul artist supporting Sam Cooke and Jackie Wilson, and then to join Little Richard's band, playing on Richard's classic soul ballad "I Don't Know What You've Got But It's Got Me", also written by Don Covay: [Excerpt: Little Richard, "I Don't Know What You've Got But It's Got Me"] We'll be picking up the story of Jimmy James in a couple of months' time, by which point he will have reverted to his birth name and started performing as Jimi Hendrix. But for the moment, this is where we leave Hendrix and the Isley Brothers, but they will both, of course, be turning up again in the story. But of course, that isn't all there is to say about "Twist and Shout", because the most famous version of the song isn't the Isleys'. While the Beatles' first single had been only a minor hit, their second, "Please Please Me", went to number one or two in the  UK charts, depending on which chart you look at, and they quickly recorded a follow-up album, cutting ten songs in one day to add to their singles to make a fourteen-track album. Most of the songs they performed that day were cover versions that were part of their live act -- versions of songs by Arthur Alexander, the Cookies, and the Shirelles, among others.  John Lennon had a bad cold that day, and so they saved the band's live showstopper til last, because they knew that it would tear his throat up. Their version of "Twist and Shout" was only recorded in one take -- Lennon's voice didn't hold up enough for a second -- but is an undoubted highlight of the album: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Twist and Shout"] Suddenly Bert Berns had a whole new market to work in. And so when we next look at Bert Berns, he will be working with British beat groups, and starting some of the longest-lasting careers in British R&B.  

Episode one hundred and two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Twist and Shout” by the Isley Brothers, and the early career of Bert Berns. 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 “How Do You Do It?” by Gerry and the Pacemakers. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—- Resources No Mixcloud this week, due to the number of songs by the Isleys. Amazingly, there are no books on the Isley Brothers, unless you count a seventy-two page self-published pamphlet by Rudolph Isley’s daughter, so I’ve had to piece this together from literally dozens of different sources. For information about the Isley Brothers the main source was  Icons of R&B and Soul by Bob Gulla.  The information about Bert Berns comes from Here Comes the Night: The Dark Soul of Bert Berns and the Dirty Business of Rhythm and Blues by Joel Selvin. There are many compilations of the public-domain recordings of the Isleys. This one seems the most complete. This three-CD set, though, is the best overview of the group’s whole career. 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 one of the great Brill Building songwriters, and at a song he wrote which became a classic both of soul and of rock music. We’re going to look at how a novelty Latin song based around a dance craze was first taken up by one of the greatest soul groups of the sixties, and then reworked by the biggest British rock band of all time. We’re going to look at “Twist and Shout” by the Isley Brothers. [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “Twist and Shout”] When we left the Isley Brothers, they had just signed to Atlantic, and released several singles with Leiber and Stoller, records like “Standing on the Dance Floor” that were excellent R&B records, but which didn’t sell: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “Standing on the Dance Floor”] In 1962 they were dropped by Atlantic and moved on to Wand Records, the third label started by Florence Greenberg, who had already started Tiara and Scepter. As with those labels, Luther Dixon was in charge of the music, and he produced their first single on the label, a relatively catchy dance song called “The Snake”, which didn’t catch on commercially: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “The Snake”] While “The Snake” didn’t sell, the Isley Brothers clearly had some commercial potential — and indeed their earlier hit “Shout” had just recharted, after Joey Dee and the Starliters had a hit with a cover version of it. All that was needed was the right song, and they could be as big as Luther Dixon’s other group, the Shirelles. And Dixon had just the song for them — a song co-written by Burt Bacharach, and sung on the demo by a young singer called Dionne Warwick. Unfortunately, they spent almost all the session trying and failing to get the song down — they just couldn’t make it work — and eventually they gave up on it, and Bacharach produced the song for Jerry Butler, the former lead singer of the Impressions, who had a top twenty hit with it: [Excerpt: Jerry Butler, “Make it Easy on Yourself”] So they were stuck without a song to record — and then Dixon’s assistant on the session, Bert Berns, suggested that they record one of his songs — one that had been a flop for another group the previous year. The story of “Twist and Shout” actually starts with a group called the Five Pearls, who made their first record in 1954: [Excerpt: The Five Pearls, “Please Let Me Know”] The Five Pearls recorded under various different names, and in various different combinations, for several different mid-sized record labels like Aladdin throughout the 1950s, but without much success — the closest they came was when one of the members, Dave “Baby” Cortez, went solo and had a hit with “The Happy Organ” in 1959: [Excerpt: Dave “Baby” Cortez, “The Happy Organ”] But in 1960 two members of the Pearls — who used different names at different points of their career, but at this point were calling themselves Derek Ray and Guy Howard, signed to Atlantic as a new duo called The Top Notes. Their first single under this name, “A Wonderful Time”, did no better than any of their other records had — but by their third single, they were being produced by a new staff producer — Phil Spector, who had started taking on production jobs that Leiber and Stoller weren’t interested in doing themselves, like a remake of the old folk song “Corrina, Corrina”, which had been an R&B hit for Big Joe Turner and which Spector produced for the country singer Ray Peterson: [Excerpt: Ray Peterson, “Corrina, Corrina”] But soon after that, Spector had broken with Leiber and Stoller. Spector was given the opportunity to co-write songs for the new Elvis film, Blue Hawaii. But he was signed to a publishing contract with Leiber and Stoller’s company, Trio Music, and they told Hill & Range that he could only do the songs if Trio got half the publishing, which Hill & Range refused — there was apparently some talk of them going ahead anyway, but Hill & Range were scared of Trio’s lawyer, one of the best in the entertainment industry. This wouldn’t be the last time that Phil Spector and Lee Eastman ended up on the opposite sides of a disagreement. Shortly after that, Spector’s contract mysteriously went missing from Trio’s office. Someone remembered that Spector happened to have a key to the office. But by this point Spector had co-written or co-produced a fair few hits, and so he was taken on by Atlantic on his own merits, and so he and Jerry Wexler co-produced singles for the Top Notes, with arrangements by Teddy Randazzo, who we last heard of singing with accordion accompaniment in The Girl Can’t Help It. The first of these Top Notes singles, “Hearts of Stone”, was an obvious attempt at a Ray Charles soundalike, with bits directly lifted both from “What’d I Say” and Charles’ hit “Sticks and Stones”: [Excerpt: The Top Notes, “Hearts of Stone”] But the next Top Notes release was the song that would make them at least a footnote in music history. The writing credit on it was Bert Russell and Phil Medley, and while Medley would have little impact on the music world otherwise, the songwriter credited as Bert Russell is worth us looking at. His actual name was Bertrand Russell Berns — he had been named after the famous philosopher — and he was a man on a mission. He was already thirty-one, and he knew he didn’t have long to live — he’d had rheumatic fever as a child and it had given him an incurable heart condition. He had no idea how long he had, but he knew he wasn’t going to live to a ripe old age. And he’d wasted his twenties already — he’d tried various ways to get into showbiz, with no success. He’d tried a comedy double act, and at one point had moved to Cuba, where he’d tried to buy a nightclub but backed out when he’d realised it was actually a brothel.  On his return to the US, he’d started working as a songwriter in the Brill Building. In the late fifties he worked for a while with the rockabilly singer Ersel Hickey — no relation to me — who had a minor hit with “Bluebirds Over the Mountain”: [Excerpt: Ersel Hickey, “Bluebirds Over the Mountain”] Berns was proud just to know Hickey, though, because “Bluebirds Over the Mountain” had been covered by Ritchie Valens, and “La Bamba” was Berns’ favourite record — one he would turn to for inspiration throughout his career. He loved Latin music generally — it had been one of the reasons he’d moved to Cuba — but that song in particular was endlessly fascinating to him. He’d written and produced a handful of recordings in the early fifties, before his Cuba trip, but it was on his return that he started to be properly productive. He’d started producing novelty records with a friend called Bill Giant, like a song based on the Gettysburg Address: [Excerpt: Bert and Bill Giant, “The Gettysburg Address”] Or a solo record about the Alamo — at the time Berns seemed to think that songs about American history were going to be the next big thing: [Excerpt: Bert Berns, “The Legend of the Alamo”] He’d co-written a song called “A Little Bird Told Me” with Ersel Hickey — not the same as the song of the same name we talked about a year or so ago — and it was recorded by LaVern Baker: [Excerpt: LaVern Baker, “A Little Bird Told Me”] And he and Medley co-wrote “Push Push” for Austin Taylor: [Excerpt: Austin Taylor, “Push Push”] But he was still basically a nobody in the music industry in 1961. But Jerry Wexler had produced that LaVern Baker record of “A Little Bird Told Me”, and he liked Berns, and so he accepted a Berns and Medley cowrite for the next Top Notes session.  The song in question had started out as one called “Shake it Up Baby”, based very firmly around the chords and melody of “La Bamba”, but reimagined with the Afro-Cuban rhythms that Berns loved so much — and then further reworked to reference the Twist dance craze. Berns was sure it was a hit — it was as catchy as anything he could write, and full of hooks.  Berns was allowed into the studio to watch the recording, which was produced by Wexler and Spector, but he wasn’t allowed to get involved — and he watched with horror as Spector flattened the rhythm and totally rewrote the middle section. Spector also added in backing vocals based on the recent hit “Handy Man” — a “come-a-come-a” vocal line that didn’t really fit the song. The result was actually quite a decent record, but despite being performed by all the usual Atlantic session players like King Curtis, and having the Cookies do their usual sterling job on backing vocals, “Twist and Shout” by the Top Notes was a massive flop, and Berns could tell it would be even during the session: [Excerpt: The Top Notes, “Twist and Shout”] The Top Notes soon split up, making no real further mark on the industry — when Guy Howard died in 1977, he had reverted to his original name Howard Guyton, and the Top Notes were so obscure that his obituaries focused on his time in one of the later touring versions of the Platters. Berns was furious at the way that Spector had wrecked his song, and decided that he was going to have to start producing his own songs, so they couldn’t be messed up. But that was put on the back burner for a while, as he started having success. His first chart success as a songwriter was with a song he wrote for a minor group called the Jarmels. By this time, the Drifters were having a lot of success with their use of the same Latin and Caribbean rhythms that Berns liked, and so he wrote “A Little Bit of Soap” in the Drifters’ style, and it made the top twenty: [Excerpt: The Jarmels, “A Little Bit of Soap”] He also started making non-novelty records of his own. Luther Dixon at Wand Records heard one of Berns’ demos, and decided he should be singing, not just writing songs. Berns was signed to Wand Records as a solo artist under the name “Russell Byrd”, and his first single for the label was produced by Dixon. The song itself is structurally a bit of a mess — Berns seems to have put together several hooks (including some from other songs) but not thought properly about how to link them together, and so it meanders a bit — but you can definitely see a family resemblance to “Twist and Shout” in the melody, and in Carole King’s string arrangement: [Excerpt: Russell Byrd, “You’d Better Come Home”] That made the top fifty, and got Berns a spot on American Bandstand, but it was still not the breakout success that Berns needed. While Berns had been annoyed at Spector for the way he’d messed up “Twist and Shout”, he clearly wasn’t so upset with him that they couldn’t work together, because the second Russell Byrd session, another Drifters knockoff, was produced by Spector: [Excerpt: Russell Byrd, “Nights of Mexico”] But Berns was still looking to produce his own material. He got the chance when Jerry Wexler called him up. Atlantic were having problems — while they had big vocal groups like the Drifters and the Coasters, they’d just lost their two biggest male solo vocalists, as Bobby Darin and Ray Charles had moved on to other labels. They had recently signed a gospel singer called Solomon Burke, and he’d had a minor hit with a version of an old country song, “Just Out of Reach”: [Excerpt: Solomon Burke, “Just Out of Reach”] Burke was the closest thing to a male solo star they now had, and clearly a major talent, but he was also a very opinionated person, and not easy to get on with. His grandmother had had a dream, twelve years before he was born, in which she believed God had told her of her future grandson’s importance. She’d founded a church, Solomon’s Temple: The House Of God For All People, in anticipation of his birth, and he’d started preaching there from the age of seven as the church’s spiritual leader. Rather unsurprisingly, he had rather a large ego, and that ego wasn’t made any smaller by the fact that he was clearly a very talented singer. His strong opinions included things like how his music was to be marketed. He was fine with singing pop songs, rather than the gospel music he’d started out in, as he needed the money — he had eight kids, and as well as being a singer and priest, he was also a mortician, and had a side job shovelling snow for four dollars an hour — but he wasn’t keen on being marketed as “rhythm and blues” — rhythm and blues was dirty music, not respectable. His music needed to be called something else. After some discussion with Atlantic, everyone agreed on a new label that would be acceptable to his church, one that had previously been applied to a type of mostly-instrumental jazz influenced by Black gospel music, but from this point on would be applied almost exclusively to Black gospel-influenced pop music in the lineage of Ray Charles and Clyde McPhatter. Burke was not singing rhythm and blues, but soul music. Wexler had produced Burke’s first sessions, but he always thought he worked better when he had a co-producer, and he liked a song Berns had written, “Cry to Me”, another of his Drifters soundalikes. So he asked Berns into the studio to produce Burke singing that song. The two didn’t get on very well at first — Burke’s original comment on meeting Berns was “Who is this Paddy mother–” except he included the expletive that my general audience content rating prevents me from saying there — but it’s hard to argue with the results, one of the great soul records of all time: [Excerpt: Solomon Burke, “Cry to Me”] That made the top five on the R&B chart, and started a run of hits for Burke, whose records would continue to be produced by the team of Berns and Wexler for the next several years. After this initial production success, Berns started producing many other records, most of them again unsuccessful, like a cheap Twist album to cash in on the resurgent Twist craze. And he was still working with Wand records, which is what led to him being invited to assist Dixon with the Isley Brothers session for “Make it Easy on Yourself”.  When they couldn’t get a take done for that track, Berns suggested that they make an attempt at “Twist and Shout”, which he still thought had the potential to be a hit, and which would be perfectly suited to the Isley Brothers — after all, their one hit was “Shout!”, so “Twist and Shout” would be the perfect way for them to get some relevance.  The brothers hated the song, and they didn’t want to record any Twist material at all — apparently they were so vehemently against recording the song that furniture got smashed in the argument over it. But Luther Dixon insisted that they do it, and so they reluctantly recorded “Twist and Shout”, and did it the way Bert Berns had originally envisioned it, Latin feel and all: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “Twist and Shout”] It’s a testament to Ronald Isley’s talent, in particular, that he sounds utterly committed on the record despite it being something he had no wish to take part in at all.  The record made the top twenty on the pop chart and number two in R&B, becoming the Isleys’ first real mainstream hit. It might have even done better, but for an unfortunate coincidence — “Do You Love Me” by the Contours, a song written by Berry Gordy, was released on one of the Motown labels a couple of weeks later, and had a very similar rising vocal hook: [Excerpt: The Contours, “Do You Love Me”] “Do You Love Me” was a bigger hit, making number three in the pop charts and number one R&B, but it’s hard not to think that the two records being so similar must have eaten into the market for both records. But either way, “Twist and Shout” was a proper big hit for the Isleys, and one that established them as real stars, and Berns became their regular producer for a while. Unfortunately, both they and Berns floundered about what to do for a follow-up. The first attempt was one of those strange records that tries to mash up bits of as many recent hits as possible, and seems to have been inspired by Jan & Dean’s then-recent hit with a revival of the 1946 song “Linda”: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, “Linda”] That song was, coincidentally, written about the daughter of Lee Eastman, the lawyer we mentioned earlier. “Twistin’ With Linda”, the brothers’ response, took the character from that song, and added the melody to the recent novelty hit “Hully Gully”, lyrical references to “Twist and Shout” and Chubby Checker’s Twist hits, and in the tag Ronald Isley sings bits of “Shout”, “Don’t You Just Know It”, “Duke of Earl”, and for some reason “I’m Popeye the Sailor Man”: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “Twistin’ With Linda”] That only made the lower reaches of the charts. Their next single was “Nobody But Me”, which didn’t make the hot one hundred, but would later be covered by the Human Beinz, making the top ten in their version in 1968: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “Nobody But Me”] With Berns still producing, the Isleys moved over to United Artists records, but within a year of “Twist and Shout”, they were reduced to remaking it as “Surf and Shout”, with lyrics referencing another Jan and Dean hit, “Surf City”: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “Surf and Shout”] Oddly, while they were doing this, Berns was producing them on much more interesting material for album tracks, but for some reason, even as Berns was also by now producing regular hits for Solomon Burke, Ben E King and the Drifters, the Isleys were stuck trying to jump on whatever the latest bandwagon was in an attempt at commercial success. Even when they were writing songs that would become hits, they were having no success. The last of the songs that Berns produced for them was another Isleys original, “Who’s That Lady?”: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “Who’s That Lady?”] That would become one of the group’s biggest hits, but not until they remade it nine years later. It was only two years since “Twist and Shout”, but the Isley Brothers were commercially dead. But the success of “Twist and Shout” — and their songwriting royalties from “Shout” — gave them the financial cushion to move to comparatively better surroundings — and to start their own record label. They moved to Teaneck, New Jersey, and named their new label T-Neck in its honour. They also had one of the best live bands in the US at the time, and the first single on T-Neck, “Testify”, produced by the brothers themselves, highlighted their new guitar player, Jimmy James: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “Testify”] But even while he was employed by the Isleys, Jimmy James was playing on other records that were doing better, like Don Covay’s big hit “Mercy, Mercy”: [Excerpt: Don Covay and the Goodtimers, “Mercy, Mercy”] And he soon left the Isleys, going on first to tour with a minor soul artist supporting Sam Cooke and Jackie Wilson, and then to join Little Richard’s band, playing on Richard’s classic soul ballad “I Don’t Know What You’ve Got But It’s Got Me”, also written by Don Covay: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “I Don’t Know What You’ve Got But It’s Got Me”] We’ll be picking up the story of Jimmy James in a couple of months’ time, by which point he will have reverted to his birth name and started performing as Jimi Hendrix. But for the moment, this is where we leave Hendrix and the Isley Brothers, but they will both, of course, be turning up again in the story. But of course, that isn’t all there is to say about “Twist and Shout”, because the most famous version of the song isn’t the Isleys’. While the Beatles’ first single had been only a minor hit, their second, “Please Please Me”, went to number one or two in the  UK charts, depending on which chart you look at, and they quickly recorded a follow-up album, cutting ten songs in one day to add to their singles to make a fourteen-track album. Most of the songs they performed that day were cover versions that were part of their live act — versions of songs by Arthur Alexander, the Cookies, and the Shirelles, among others.  John Lennon had a bad cold that day, and so they saved the band’s live showstopper til last, because they knew that it would tear his throat up. Their version of “Twist and Shout” was only recorded in one take — Lennon’s voice didn’t hold up enough for a second — but is an undoubted highlight of the album: [Excerpt: The Beatles, “Twist and Shout”] Suddenly Bert Berns had a whole new market to work in. And so when we next look at Bert Berns, he will be working with British beat groups, and starting some of the longest-lasting careers in British R&B.  

Pop music has had its share of bands with siblings: Gallaghers, Finns, Carpenters, Davies, Wilsons (some with heart and some with surf), Isleys, Warhursts….. Then there's the Mael men!!!!! Welcome to episode 135 of Love That Album podcast. Sparks, (ostensibly, Ron and Russell Mael) are that rare beast that are hugely identifiable despite having changed styles (and record companies) several times. By the time they released album number 11, “Angst In My Pants” in 1982, they'd experimented with rock, prog, euro-disco, pop….and they still had many albums and styles to go. Yet, when you hear a Sparks song, there's that "something" that makes you sure it's them. I am honoured to be joined by music and film writers, Heather Drain and Mike McPadden to discuss “Angst” as well as related peripheral topics. The album is loaded with jerky new-wave era pop. Like its title, much of the album sounds musically nervous and this is reflected in many of the record's songs. Join us as we talk about cigarettes with human traits, Stars on 45, humour in music without being comedic, fragile masculinity,  taking the Mickey, anxiety, and (of course) hiding public erections….amongst several other tasteful topics. I also make a production comparison that I hope Heather will forgive me for…….. Having Heather and Mike on the show was a joy. They brought so much insight, and I look forward to further shows with them. Go to Heather's website at www.mondoheather.com to get links to her essays and podcast appearances, or to order her latest brilliant book, The Bizarro Encyclopedia of Film Vol.1 Mike is also keeping busy with 3 (count ‘em) excellent film podcasts on the go. Subscribe to 70 Movies We Saw In The 70s, Crackpot Cinema and Busted Guts: Cracking Open Comedy Cinema, and keep your film-loving earholes happy. You can also order his latest book Teen Movie Hell from https://www.teenmoviehell.com/ Download this episode of LTA from Spotify, Stitcher or iTunes (search for “Love That Album podcast”). Love That Album is proudly part of the Pantheon Podcast network. Go to Pantheon Podcasts to check out all their great shows.You can send me feedback at rrrkitchen@yahoo.com.au (written or mp3 voicemail) or join the Facebook group at http://www.facebook.com/groups/lovethatalbum.If you'd consider writing an iTunes review we'd be immensely grateful. However, it'd be even better if you told a friend about the podcast and Pantheon – at a (socially distanced) barbecue, over coffee (on Skype), on social media….whatever way you choose, consider me grateful.

Pop music has had its share of bands with siblings: Gallaghers, Finns, Carpenters, Davies, Wilsons (some with heart and some with surf), Isleys, Warhursts…..   Then there’s the Mael men!!!!!   Welcome to episode 135 of Love That Album podcast.   Sparks, (ostensibly, Ron and Russell Mael) are that rare beast that are hugely identifiable despite having changed styles (and record companies) several times. By the time they released album number 11, “Angst In My Pants” in 1982, they’d experimented with rock, prog, euro-disco, pop….and they still had many albums and styles to go. Yet, when you hear a Sparks song, there's that "something" that makes you sure it's them.   I am honoured to be joined by music and film writers, Heather Drain and Mike McPadden to discuss “Angst” as well as related peripheral topics. The album is loaded with jerky new-wave era pop. Like its title, much of the album sounds musically nervous and this is reflected in many of the record’s songs. Join us as we talk about cigarettes with human traits, Stars on 45, humour in music without being comedic, fragile masculinity,  taking the Mickey, anxiety, and (of course) hiding public erections….amongst several other tasteful topics. I also make a production comparison that I hope Heather will forgive me for……..   Having Heather and Mike on the show was a joy. They brought so much insight, and I look forward to further shows with them.   Go to Heather’s website at www.mondoheather.com to get links to her essays and podcast appearances, or to order her latest brilliant book, The Bizarro Encyclopedia of Film Vol.1   Mike is also keeping busy with 3 (count ‘em) excellent film podcasts on the go. Subscribe to 70 Movies We Saw In The 70s, Crackpot Cinema and Busted Guts: Cracking Open Comedy Cinema, and keep your film-loving earholes happy. You can also order his latest book Teen Movie Hell from https://www.teenmoviehell.com/   Download this episode of LTA from Spotify, Stitcher or iTunes (search for “Love That Album podcast”). Love That Album is proudly part of the Pantheon Podcast network. Go to Pantheon Podcasts to check out all their great shows. You can send me feedback at rrrkitchen@yahoo.com.au (written or mp3 voicemail) or join the Facebook group at http://www.facebook.com/groups/lovethatalbum. If you’d consider writing an iTunes review we’d be immensely grateful. However, it’d be even better if you told a friend about the podcast and Pantheon – at a (socially distanced) barbecue, over coffee (on Skype), on social media….whatever way you choose, consider me grateful.

Pop music has had its share of bands with siblings: Gallaghers, Finns, Carpenters, Davies, Wilsons (some with heart and some with surf), Isleys, Warhursts….. Then there's the Mael men!!!!! Welcome to episode 135 of Love That Album podcast. Sparks, (ostensibly, Ron and Russell Mael) are that rare beast that are hugely identifiable despite having changed styles (and record companies) several times. By the time they released album number 11, “Angst In My Pants” in 1982, they'd experimented with rock, prog, euro-disco, pop….and they still had many albums and styles to go. Yet, when you hear a Sparks song, there's that "something" that makes you sure it's them. I am honoured to be joined by music and film writers, Heather Drain and Mike McPadden to discuss “Angst” as well as related peripheral topics. The album is loaded with jerky new-wave era pop. Like its title, much of the album sounds musically nervous and this is reflected in many of the record's songs. Join us as we talk about cigarettes with human traits, Stars on 45, humour in music without being comedic, fragile masculinity,  taking the Mickey, anxiety, and (of course) hiding public erections….amongst several other tasteful topics. I also make a production comparison that I hope Heather will forgive me for…….. Having Heather and Mike on the show was a joy. They brought so much insight, and I look forward to further shows with them. Go to Heather's website at www.mondoheather.com to get links to her essays and podcast appearances, or to order her latest brilliant book, The Bizarro Encyclopedia of Film Vol.1 Mike is also keeping busy with 3 (count ‘em) excellent film podcasts on the go. Subscribe to 70 Movies We Saw In The 70s, Crackpot Cinema and Busted Guts: Cracking Open Comedy Cinema, and keep your film-loving earholes happy. You can also order his latest book Teen Movie Hell from https://www.teenmoviehell.com/ Download this episode of LTA from Spotify, Stitcher or iTunes (search for “Love That Album podcast”). Love That Album is proudly part of the Pantheon Podcast network. Go to Pantheon Podcasts to check out all their great shows.You can send me feedback at rrrkitchen@yahoo.com.au (written or mp3 voicemail) or join the Facebook group at http://www.facebook.com/groups/lovethatalbum.If you'd consider writing an iTunes review we'd be immensely grateful. However, it'd be even better if you told a friend about the podcast and Pantheon – at a (socially distanced) barbecue, over coffee (on Skype), on social media….whatever way you choose, consider me grateful.

Pop music has had its share of bands with siblings: Gallaghers, Finns, Carpenters, Davies, Wilsons (some with heart and some with surf), Isleys, Warhursts…..   Then there’s the Mael men!!!!!   Welcome to episode 135 of Love That Album podcast.   Sparks, (ostensibly, Ron and Russell Mael) are that rare beast that are hugely identifiable despite having changed styles (and record companies) several times. By the time they released album number 11, “Angst In My Pants” in 1982, they’d experimented with rock, prog, euro-disco, pop….and they still had many albums and styles to go. Yet, when you hear a Sparks song, there's that "something" that makes you sure it's them.   I am honoured to be joined by music and film writers, Heather Drain and Mike McPadden to discuss “Angst” as well as related peripheral topics. The album is loaded with jerky new-wave era pop. Like its title, much of the album sounds musically nervous and this is reflected in many of the record’s songs. Join us as we talk about cigarettes with human traits, Stars on 45, humour in music without being comedic, fragile masculinity,  taking the Mickey, anxiety, and (of course) hiding public erections….amongst several other tasteful topics. I also make a production comparison that I hope Heather will forgive me for……..   Having Heather and Mike on the show was a joy. They brought so much insight, and I look forward to further shows with them.   Go to Heather’s website at www.mondoheather.com to get links to her essays and podcast appearances, or to order her latest brilliant book, The Bizarro Encyclopedia of Film Vol.1   Mike is also keeping busy with 3 (count ‘em) excellent film podcasts on the go. Subscribe to 70 Movies We Saw In The 70s, Crackpot Cinema and Busted Guts: Cracking Open Comedy Cinema, and keep your film-loving earholes happy. You can also order his latest book Teen Movie Hell from https://www.teenmoviehell.com/   Download this episode of LTA from Spotify, Stitcher or iTunes (search for “Love That Album podcast”). Love That Album is proudly part of the Pantheon Podcast network. Go to Pantheon Podcasts to check out all their great shows. You can send me feedback at rrrkitchen@yahoo.com.au (written or mp3 voicemail) or join the Facebook group at http://www.facebook.com/groups/lovethatalbum. If you’d consider writing an iTunes review we’d be immensely grateful. However, it’d be even better if you told a friend about the podcast and Pantheon – at a (socially distanced) barbecue, over coffee (on Skype), on social media….whatever way you choose, consider me grateful.

Album de la semaine: "Chaos and creation in the backyard" (Paul McCartney 2005) P.McCartney-Speech/How kind of you-Chaos and creation in the backyard (05)J.Lennon-Instant karma-Single (70)G.Harrison-Isn't it a pity (different version)-USB (70)R.Starr-Six o'clock-Ringo (73)Beatles-Little child-With the Beatles (63)P.McCartney-Speech/English tea-Chaos and creation in the backyard (05)Beatles-Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band-Yellow Submarine songtrack (99)Beatles-With a little help fromp my friends-Yellow Submarine songtrack (99)G.Harrison-Lay his head-Single (87)R.Starr-Don't pass me by (re-do)-Give more love (17)P.McCartney-Speech/Jenny Wren-Chaos and creation in the backyard (05)Beatles-Blackbird-White album (68)Beatles-Don't pass me by-White album (68)J.Lennon-Life begins at 40-Anthology 4: Dakota (98)J.Lennon-I'm losing you-Double fantasy (80)P.McCartney-This never happened before-Chaos and creation in the backyard (05)The Isleys brothers-Twist and shout-Shout ! (59)Beatles-Twist and shout-Please please me (63)Beatles-Rock'n'roll music-For sale (64)Traveling Wilburys-Wilbury twist-Traveling Wilburys vol.3 (90)P.McCartney-Riding to Vanity Fair-Chaos and creation in the backyard (05)G.Harrison-Dark sweet Lady-George Harrison (79)Beatles-Here comes the sun-Abbey Road (69)Beatles-What goes on-Rubber Soul (65)R.Starr-Island in the sun-Postcards from Paradise (15)P.McCartney-Friends to go-Chaos and creation in the backyard (05)P.McCartney-Home tonight -Single (19)Beatles-Good day sunshine-Revolver (66)J.Lennon-Going down on love-Walls and bridges (74)R.Starr-Back off Boogaloo-Stop and smell the roses (81)

Episode eighty-one of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Shout” by the Isley Brothers, and the beginnings of a career that would lead to six decades of hit singles. 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 “Tell Laura I Love Her” by Ray Peterson. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—-  Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.   Amazingly, there are no books on the Isley Brothers, unless you count a seventy-two page self-published pamphlet by Rudolph Isley’s daughter, so I’ve had to piece this together from literally dozens of different sources. The ones I relied on most were this section of a very long article on Richie Barrett, this interview with Ronald Isley, and Icons of R&B and Soul by Bob Gulla.  The information on Hugo and Luigi comes mostly from two books — Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke by Peter Guralnick, and  Godfather of the Music Business: Morris Levy by Richard Carlin. There are many compilations of the public-domain recordings of the Isleys. This one seems the most complete. 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 take one of our rare looks — at this point in the story anyway — at an act that is still touring today. Indeed, when I started writing this script back in February, I started by saying that I would soon be seeing them live in concert, as I have a ticket for an Isley Brothers show in a couple of months. Of course, events have overtaken that, and it’s extremely unlikely that anyone will be going to any shows then, but it shows a fundamental difference between the Isley Brothers and most of the other acts we’ve looked at, as even those who are still active now mostly concentrate on performing locally rather than doing international tours playing major venues. Of course, the version of the Isley Brothers touring today isn’t quite the same as the group from the 1950s, but Ronald Isley, the group’s lead singer, remains in the group — and, indeed, has remained artistically relevant, with collaborations with several prominent hip-hop artists. The Isleys had top forty hits in the sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties, and two thousands, and as recently as 2006 they had an album go to number one on the R&B charts. But today, we’re going to look back at the group’s very first hit, from 1959. [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “Shout”] The Isley Brothers were destined to be a vocal group even before they were born, indeed even before their parents were married. When O’Kelly Isley senior was discussing his marriage proposal with his future in-laws, he told his father-in-law-to-be that he intended to have four sons, and that they were going to be the next Mills Brothers. Isley Sr had been a vaudeville performer himself, and as with so many family groups the Isleys seem to have gone into the music business more to please their parents than because they wanted to do it themselves. As it turned out, O’Kelly and Sallye Isley had six children, all boys, and the eldest four of them did indeed form a vocal group. Like many black vocal groups in the early fifties, they were a gospel group, and O’Kelly Jr, Rudolph, Ronald, and Vernon Isley started performing around the churches in Cincinnati as teenagers, having been trained by their parents. They appeared on Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour, the popular TV talent show which launched the careers of many entertainers, and won — their prize was a jewelled watch, which the boys would take turns wearing. But then tragedy struck. Vernon, the youngest of the four singing Isleys, and the one who was generally considered to be far and away the most talented singer in the group, was hit by a car and killed while he was riding his bike, aged only thirteen. The boys were, as one would imagine, devastated by the death of their little brother, and they also thought that that should be the end of their singing career, as Vernon had been their lead singer. It would be two years before they would perform live again. By all accounts, their parents put pressure on them during that time, telling them that it would be the only way to pay respect to Vernon. Eventually a compromise was reached between parents and brothers — Ron agreed that he would attempt to sing lead, if in turn the group could stop singing gospel music and start singing doo-wop songs, like the brothers’ favourite act Billy Ward and the Dominoes. We’ve talked before about how Billy Ward & The Dominoes were a huge influence on the music that became soul, with hit records like “Have Mercy Baby”: [Excerpt: Billy Ward and the Dominoes, “Have Mercy Baby”] Both Ward’s original lead singer Clyde McPhatter and McPhatter’s later replacement Jackie Wilson sang in a style that owed a lot to the church music that the young Isleys had also been performing, and so it was natural for them to make the change to singing in the style of the Dominoes. As soon as Ronald Isley started singing lead, people started making comparisons both to McPhatter and to Wilson. Indeed, Ronald has talked about McPhatter as being something of a mentor figure for the brothers, teaching them how to sing, although it’s never been clear exactly at what point in their career they got to know McPhatter. But their real mentor was a much less well-known singer, Beulah Bryant. The three eldest Isley brothers, O’Kelly, Rudolph, and Ronald, met Bryant on the bus to New York, where they were travelling to try and seek their fortunes. Bryant was one of the many professional blues shouters who never became hugely well known, but who managed to have a moderately successful career from the fifties through to the eighties, mostly in live performances, though she did make a handful of very listenable records: [Excerpt: Beulah Bryant, “What Am I Gonna Do?”] When they got to New York, while they had paid in advance for somewhere to stay, they were robbed on their second day in the city and had no money at all. But Bryant had contacts in the music industry, and started making phone calls for her young proteges, trying to get them bookings. At first she was unsuccessful, and the group just hung around the Harlem Apollo and occasionally performed at their amateur nights. Eventually, though, Bryant got Nat Nazzaro to listen to them over the phone. Nazzaro was known as “the monster agent” — he was one of the most important booking agents in New York, but he wasn’t exactly fair to his young clients. He would book a three-person act, but on the contracts the act would consist of four people — Nazzaro would be the fourth person, and he would get an equal share of the performance money, as well as getting his normal booking agent’s share. Nazzaro listened to the Isleys over the phone, and then he insisted they come and see him in person, because he was convinced that they had been playing a record down the phone rather than singing to him live. When he found out they really did sound like that, Nazzaro started getting them the kind of bookings they could only dream of — they went from having no money at all to playing on Broadway for $750 a week, and then playing the Apollo for $950 a week, at least according to O’Kelly Isley Jr’s later recollection. This was an astonishing sum of money to a bunch of teenagers in the late 1950s. But they still hadn’t made a record, and their sets were based on cover versions of songs by other people, things like “Rock and Roll Waltz” by Kay Starr: [Excerpt: Kay Starr, “Rock and Roll Waltz”] It was hardly the kind of material they would later become famous for. And nor was their first record. They had signed to a label called Teenage Records, a tiny label owned by two former musicians, Bill “Bass” Gordon and Ben Smith. As you might imagine, there were a lot of musicians named Ben Smith and it’s quite difficult to sort out which was which — even Marv Goldberg, who normally knows these things, seems confused about which Ben Smith this was, describing him as a singer on one page and a sax player on another page. As Ben Smith the sax player seems to have played on some records for Teenage, it was probably him, in which case this Ben Smith probably also played alto sax for Lucky Millinder’s band and wrote the hit “I Dreamed I Dwelt in Harlem” for Glenn Miller: [Excerpt: The Glenn Miller Orchestra, “I Dreamed I Dwelt in Harlem”] It’s more certain exactly who Bill “Bass” Gordon was — he was the leader of Bill “Bass” Gordon and the Colonials, who had recorded the doo-wop track “Two Loves Have I”: [Excerpt: Bill “Bass” Gordon and the Colonials, “Two Loves Have I”] Smith and Gordon signed the Isley Brothers to Teenage Records, and in June 1957 the first Isley Brothers single, “Angels Cried”, came out: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “Angels Cried”] Unfortunately, the single didn’t have any real success, and the group decided that they wanted to record for a better label. According to O’Kelly Isley they got some resistance from Teenage Records, who claimed to have them under contract — but the Isley Brothers knew better. They had signed a contract, certainly, but then the contract had just been left on a desk after they’d signed it, rather than being filed, and they’d swiped it from the desk when no-one was looking. Teenage didn’t have a copy of the contract, so had no proof that they had ever signed the Isley Brothers, and the brothers were free to move on to another label. They chose to sign to Gone Records, one of the family of labels that was owned and run by George Goldner. Goldner assigned Richie Barrett, his talent scout, producer, and arranger, to look after the Isleys, as he had previously done with Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers and the Chantels, as well as his own group the Valentines: [The Valentines, “The Woo Woo Train”] By this point, Barrett had established an almost production-line method of making records. He would block-book a studio and some backing musicians for up to twenty-four hours, get as many as ten different vocal groups into the studio, and record dozens of tracks in a row, usually songs written by either group members or by Barrett. The Isleys’ first record with Barrett, “Don’t Be Jealous”, was a fairly standard doo-wop ballad, written by Ron Isley: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “Don’t Be Jealous”] There’s some suggestion that Barrett is also singing on that recording with the group — it certainly sounds like there are four voices on there, not just three. Either way, the song doesn’t show much of the style that the Isley Brothers would later make their own. Much more like their later recordings was the B-side, another Ronald Isley song, which could have been a classic in the Coasters’ mould had it not been for the lyrics, which were an attempt at a hip rewriting of “Old McDonald”: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “Rockin’ McDonald”] They were nearly there, but not quite. The next single, “I Wanna Know”, came closer — you can hear they were clearly trying to incorporate elements of other people’s successful records — Ronald Isley’s vocal owes a lot to Little Richard, while the piano playing has the same piano “ripping” that Jerry Lee Lewis had made his own. But you can also hear the style that would make them famous coming to the fore. But they were not selling records, and Richie Barrett was stretched very thin. A few more singles were released on Gone (often pairing a previously-released track with a new B-side) but nothing was successful enough to justify them staying on with Goldner’s label. But just as they’d moved from a micro-indie label to a large indie without having had any success, now they were going to move from a large indie to a major label, still not having had a hit. They took one of their records to Hugo and Luigi at RCA records, and the duo signed them up. Hugo and Luigi were strange, strange, figures in popular music in the 1950s. They were two cousins, Hugo Peretti and Luigi Creatore, who were always known by their first names, and had started out making children’s records before being hired by Mercury Records, where they would produce, among other things, the cover versions by Georgia Gibbs of black records that we’ve talked about previously, and which were both ethically and musically appalling: [Excerpt: Georgia Gibbs, “Dance With Me Henry”] After a couple of years of consistently producing hits, they got tempted away from Mercury by Morris Levy, who was setting up a new label, Roulette, with George Goldner and Alan Freed. Goldner and Freed quickly dropped out of the label, but Hugo and Luigi ended up having a fifty percent stake in the new label. While they were there, they showed they didn’t really get rock and roll music at all — they produced follow-up singles by a lot of acts who’d had hits before they started working with Hugo and Luigi, but stopped as soon as the duo started producing them, like Frankie Lymon: [Excerpt: Frankie Lymon, “Goodie Goodie”] But they still managed to produce a string of hits like “Honeycomb” by Jimmie Rodgers (who is not either the blues singer or the country singer of the same name), which went to number one: [Excerpt: Jimmie Rogers, “Honeycomb”] And they also recorded their own tracks for Roulette, like the instrumental Cha-Hua-Hua: [Excerpt: Hugo and Luigi, “Cha-Hua-Hua”] After a year or so with Roulette, they were in turn poached by RCA — Morris Levy let them go so long as they gave up their shares in Roulette for far less than they were worth. At RCA they continued their own recording career, with records like “Just Come Home”: [Excerpt: Hugo and Luigi, “Just Come Home”] They also produced several albums for Perry Como. So you would think that they would be precisely the wrong producers for the Isley Brothers. And the first record they made with the trio would tend to suggest that there was at least some creative difference there. “I’m Gonna Knock on Your Door” was written by Aaron Schroeder and Sid Wayne, two people who are best known for writing some of the less interesting songs for Elvis’ films, and has a generic, lightweight, backing track — apart from an interestingly meaty guitar part. The vocals have some power to them, and the record is pleasant, and in some ways even ground-breaking — it doesn’t sound like a late fifties record as much as it does an early sixties one, and one could imagine, say, Gerry and the Pacemakers making a substantially identical record. But it falls between the stools of R&B and pop, and doesn’t quite convince as either: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “I’m Gonna Knock on Your Door”] That combination of a poppy background and soulful vocals would soon bear a lot of fruit for another artist Hugo and Luigi were going to start working with, but it didn’t quite work for the Isleys yet. But their second single for RCA was far more successful. At this point the Isleys were a more successful live act than recording act, and they would mostly perform songs by other people, and one song they performed regularly was “Lonely Teardrops”, the song that Berry and Gwen Gordy and Roquel Davis had written for Jackie Wilson: [Excerpt: Jackie Wilson, “Lonely Teardrops”] The group would perform that at the end of their shows, and they started to extend it, with Ron Isley improvising as the band vamped behind him, starting with the line “say you will” from Wilson’s song. He’d start doing a call and response with his brothers, singing a line and getting them to sing the response “Shout”. These improvised, extended, endings to the song got longer and longer, and got the crowds more and more excited, and they started incorporating elements from Ray Charles records, too, especially “What’d I Say” and “I Got a Woman”. When they got back to New York at the end of the tour, they told Hugo and Luigi how well these performances, which they still thought of as just long performances of “Lonely Teardrops”, had gone. The producers suggested that if they went down that well, what they should do is cut out the part that was still “Lonely Teardrops” and just perform the extended tag. As it turned out, they kept in a little of “Lonely Teardrops” — the “Say you will, say you will” line — and the resulting song, like Ray Charles’ similar call-and-response based “What’d I Say”, was split over two sides of a single, as “Shout (Parts One and Two)”: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “Shout (Parts One and Two)”] That was nothing like anything that Hugo and Luigi had ever produced before, and it became the Isley Brothers’ first chart hit, reaching number forty-seven. More importantly for them, the song was credited to the three brothers, so they made money from the cover versions of the song that charted much higher. In the USA, Joey Dee and the Starliters made number six in 1962 with their version: [Excerpt: Joey Dee and the Starliters, “Shout”] In the UK, Lulu and the Luvvers made number seven in 1964: [Excerpt: Lulu and the Luvvers, “Shout”] And in Australia, Johnny O’Keefe released his version only a month after the Isleys released theirs, and reached number two: [Excerpt: Johnny O’Keefe, “Shout”] Despite all these cover versions, the Isleys’ version remains the definitive one, and itself ended up selling over a million copies, though it never broke into the top forty. It was certainly successful enough that it made sense to record an album. Unfortunately, for the album, also titled Shout!, the old Hugo and Luigi style came out, and apart from one new Isleys original, “Respectable”, which became their next single, the rest of the album was made up of old standards, rearranged in the “Shout!” style. Sometimes, this almost worked, as on “Ring-A-Ling A-Ling (Let The Wedding Bells Ring)”, whose words are close enough to Little Richard-style gibberish that Ronald Isley could scream them effectively. But when the Isleys take on Irving Berlin’s “How Deep is the Ocean” or “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands”, neither the song nor the group are improved by the combination. They released several more singles on RCA, but none of them repeated the success of “Shout!”. At this point they moved across to Atlantic, where they started working with Leiber and Stoller. Leiber and Stoller kept them recording old standards as B-sides, but for the A-sides they went back to gospel-infused soul party songs, like the Leiber and Stoller song “Teach Me How To Shimmy” and the Isleys’ own “Standing On The Dance Floor”, a rewrite of an old gospel song called “Standing at the Judgment”: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “Standing on the Dance Floor”] But none of these songs scraped even the bottom of the charts, and the brothers ended up leaving Atlantic after a year, and signing with a tiny label, Scepter. After having moved from a tiny indie label to a large indie to a major label, they had now moved back down from their major label to a large indie to a tiny indie. They were still a great live act, but they appeared to be a one-hit wonder. But all that was about to change, when they recorded a cover version of a flop single inspired by their one hit, combined with a dance craze. The Isley Brothers were about to make one of the most important records of the 1960s, but “Twist and Shout” is a story for another time.  

Episode eighty-one of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Shout” by the Isley Brothers, and the beginnings of a career that would lead to six decades of hit singles. 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 “Tell Laura I Love Her” by Ray Peterson. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—-  Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.   Amazingly, there are no books on the Isley Brothers, unless you count a seventy-two page self-published pamphlet by Rudolph Isley’s daughter, so I’ve had to piece this together from literally dozens of different sources. The ones I relied on most were this section of a very long article on Richie Barrett, this interview with Ronald Isley, and Icons of R&B and Soul by Bob Gulla.  The information on Hugo and Luigi comes mostly from two books — Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke by Peter Guralnick, and  Godfather of the Music Business: Morris Levy by Richard Carlin. There are many compilations of the public-domain recordings of the Isleys. This one seems the most complete. 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 take one of our rare looks — at this point in the story anyway — at an act that is still touring today. Indeed, when I started writing this script back in February, I started by saying that I would soon be seeing them live in concert, as I have a ticket for an Isley Brothers show in a couple of months. Of course, events have overtaken that, and it’s extremely unlikely that anyone will be going to any shows then, but it shows a fundamental difference between the Isley Brothers and most of the other acts we’ve looked at, as even those who are still active now mostly concentrate on performing locally rather than doing international tours playing major venues. Of course, the version of the Isley Brothers touring today isn’t quite the same as the group from the 1950s, but Ronald Isley, the group’s lead singer, remains in the group — and, indeed, has remained artistically relevant, with collaborations with several prominent hip-hop artists. The Isleys had top forty hits in the sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties, and two thousands, and as recently as 2006 they had an album go to number one on the R&B charts. But today, we’re going to look back at the group’s very first hit, from 1959. [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “Shout”] The Isley Brothers were destined to be a vocal group even before they were born, indeed even before their parents were married. When O’Kelly Isley senior was discussing his marriage proposal with his future in-laws, he told his father-in-law-to-be that he intended to have four sons, and that they were going to be the next Mills Brothers. Isley Sr had been a vaudeville performer himself, and as with so many family groups the Isleys seem to have gone into the music business more to please their parents than because they wanted to do it themselves. As it turned out, O’Kelly and Sallye Isley had six children, all boys, and the eldest four of them did indeed form a vocal group. Like many black vocal groups in the early fifties, they were a gospel group, and O’Kelly Jr, Rudolph, Ronald, and Vernon Isley started performing around the churches in Cincinnati as teenagers, having been trained by their parents. They appeared on Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour, the popular TV talent show which launched the careers of many entertainers, and won — their prize was a jewelled watch, which the boys would take turns wearing. But then tragedy struck. Vernon, the youngest of the four singing Isleys, and the one who was generally considered to be far and away the most talented singer in the group, was hit by a car and killed while he was riding his bike, aged only thirteen. The boys were, as one would imagine, devastated by the death of their little brother, and they also thought that that should be the end of their singing career, as Vernon had been their lead singer. It would be two years before they would perform live again. By all accounts, their parents put pressure on them during that time, telling them that it would be the only way to pay respect to Vernon. Eventually a compromise was reached between parents and brothers — Ron agreed that he would attempt to sing lead, if in turn the group could stop singing gospel music and start singing doo-wop songs, like the brothers’ favourite act Billy Ward and the Dominoes. We’ve talked before about how Billy Ward & The Dominoes were a huge influence on the music that became soul, with hit records like “Have Mercy Baby”: [Excerpt: Billy Ward and the Dominoes, “Have Mercy Baby”] Both Ward’s original lead singer Clyde McPhatter and McPhatter’s later replacement Jackie Wilson sang in a style that owed a lot to the church music that the young Isleys had also been performing, and so it was natural for them to make the change to singing in the style of the Dominoes. As soon as Ronald Isley started singing lead, people started making comparisons both to McPhatter and to Wilson. Indeed, Ronald has talked about McPhatter as being something of a mentor figure for the brothers, teaching them how to sing, although it’s never been clear exactly at what point in their career they got to know McPhatter. But their real mentor was a much less well-known singer, Beulah Bryant. The three eldest Isley brothers, O’Kelly, Rudolph, and Ronald, met Bryant on the bus to New York, where they were travelling to try and seek their fortunes. Bryant was one of the many professional blues shouters who never became hugely well known, but who managed to have a moderately successful career from the fifties through to the eighties, mostly in live performances, though she did make a handful of very listenable records: [Excerpt: Beulah Bryant, “What Am I Gonna Do?”] When they got to New York, while they had paid in advance for somewhere to stay, they were robbed on their second day in the city and had no money at all. But Bryant had contacts in the music industry, and started making phone calls for her young proteges, trying to get them bookings. At first she was unsuccessful, and the group just hung around the Harlem Apollo and occasionally performed at their amateur nights. Eventually, though, Bryant got Nat Nazzaro to listen to them over the phone. Nazzaro was known as “the monster agent” — he was one of the most important booking agents in New York, but he wasn’t exactly fair to his young clients. He would book a three-person act, but on the contracts the act would consist of four people — Nazzaro would be the fourth person, and he would get an equal share of the performance money, as well as getting his normal booking agent’s share. Nazzaro listened to the Isleys over the phone, and then he insisted they come and see him in person, because he was convinced that they had been playing a record down the phone rather than singing to him live. When he found out they really did sound like that, Nazzaro started getting them the kind of bookings they could only dream of — they went from having no money at all to playing on Broadway for $750 a week, and then playing the Apollo for $950 a week, at least according to O’Kelly Isley Jr’s later recollection. This was an astonishing sum of money to a bunch of teenagers in the late 1950s. But they still hadn’t made a record, and their sets were based on cover versions of songs by other people, things like “Rock and Roll Waltz” by Kay Starr: [Excerpt: Kay Starr, “Rock and Roll Waltz”] It was hardly the kind of material they would later become famous for. And nor was their first record. They had signed to a label called Teenage Records, a tiny label owned by two former musicians, Bill “Bass” Gordon and Ben Smith. As you might imagine, there were a lot of musicians named Ben Smith and it’s quite difficult to sort out which was which — even Marv Goldberg, who normally knows these things, seems confused about which Ben Smith this was, describing him as a singer on one page and a sax player on another page. As Ben Smith the sax player seems to have played on some records for Teenage, it was probably him, in which case this Ben Smith probably also played alto sax for Lucky Millinder’s band and wrote the hit “I Dreamed I Dwelt in Harlem” for Glenn Miller: [Excerpt: The Glenn Miller Orchestra, “I Dreamed I Dwelt in Harlem”] It’s more certain exactly who Bill “Bass” Gordon was — he was the leader of Bill “Bass” Gordon and the Colonials, who had recorded the doo-wop track “Two Loves Have I”: [Excerpt: Bill “Bass” Gordon and the Colonials, “Two Loves Have I”] Smith and Gordon signed the Isley Brothers to Teenage Records, and in June 1957 the first Isley Brothers single, “Angels Cried”, came out: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “Angels Cried”] Unfortunately, the single didn’t have any real success, and the group decided that they wanted to record for a better label. According to O’Kelly Isley they got some resistance from Teenage Records, who claimed to have them under contract — but the Isley Brothers knew better. They had signed a contract, certainly, but then the contract had just been left on a desk after they’d signed it, rather than being filed, and they’d swiped it from the desk when no-one was looking. Teenage didn’t have a copy of the contract, so had no proof that they had ever signed the Isley Brothers, and the brothers were free to move on to another label. They chose to sign to Gone Records, one of the family of labels that was owned and run by George Goldner. Goldner assigned Richie Barrett, his talent scout, producer, and arranger, to look after the Isleys, as he had previously done with Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers and the Chantels, as well as his own group the Valentines: [The Valentines, “The Woo Woo Train”] By this point, Barrett had established an almost production-line method of making records. He would block-book a studio and some backing musicians for up to twenty-four hours, get as many as ten different vocal groups into the studio, and record dozens of tracks in a row, usually songs written by either group members or by Barrett. The Isleys’ first record with Barrett, “Don’t Be Jealous”, was a fairly standard doo-wop ballad, written by Ron Isley: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “Don’t Be Jealous”] There’s some suggestion that Barrett is also singing on that recording with the group — it certainly sounds like there are four voices on there, not just three. Either way, the song doesn’t show much of the style that the Isley Brothers would later make their own. Much more like their later recordings was the B-side, another Ronald Isley song, which could have been a classic in the Coasters’ mould had it not been for the lyrics, which were an attempt at a hip rewriting of “Old McDonald”: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “Rockin’ McDonald”] They were nearly there, but not quite. The next single, “I Wanna Know”, came closer — you can hear they were clearly trying to incorporate elements of other people’s successful records — Ronald Isley’s vocal owes a lot to Little Richard, while the piano playing has the same piano “ripping” that Jerry Lee Lewis had made his own. But you can also hear the style that would make them famous coming to the fore. But they were not selling records, and Richie Barrett was stretched very thin. A few more singles were released on Gone (often pairing a previously-released track with a new B-side) but nothing was successful enough to justify them staying on with Goldner’s label. But just as they’d moved from a micro-indie label to a large indie without having had any success, now they were going to move from a large indie to a major label, still not having had a hit. They took one of their records to Hugo and Luigi at RCA records, and the duo signed them up. Hugo and Luigi were strange, strange, figures in popular music in the 1950s. They were two cousins, Hugo Peretti and Luigi Creatore, who were always known by their first names, and had started out making children’s records before being hired by Mercury Records, where they would produce, among other things, the cover versions by Georgia Gibbs of black records that we’ve talked about previously, and which were both ethically and musically appalling: [Excerpt: Georgia Gibbs, “Dance With Me Henry”] After a couple of years of consistently producing hits, they got tempted away from Mercury by Morris Levy, who was setting up a new label, Roulette, with George Goldner and Alan Freed. Goldner and Freed quickly dropped out of the label, but Hugo and Luigi ended up having a fifty percent stake in the new label. While they were there, they showed they didn’t really get rock and roll music at all — they produced follow-up singles by a lot of acts who’d had hits before they started working with Hugo and Luigi, but stopped as soon as the duo started producing them, like Frankie Lymon: [Excerpt: Frankie Lymon, “Goodie Goodie”] But they still managed to produce a string of hits like “Honeycomb” by Jimmie Rodgers (who is not either the blues singer or the country singer of the same name), which went to number one: [Excerpt: Jimmie Rogers, “Honeycomb”] And they also recorded their own tracks for Roulette, like the instrumental Cha-Hua-Hua: [Excerpt: Hugo and Luigi, “Cha-Hua-Hua”] After a year or so with Roulette, they were in turn poached by RCA — Morris Levy let them go so long as they gave up their shares in Roulette for far less than they were worth. At RCA they continued their own recording career, with records like “Just Come Home”: [Excerpt: Hugo and Luigi, “Just Come Home”] They also produced several albums for Perry Como. So you would think that they would be precisely the wrong producers for the Isley Brothers. And the first record they made with the trio would tend to suggest that there was at least some creative difference there. “I’m Gonna Knock on Your Door” was written by Aaron Schroeder and Sid Wayne, two people who are best known for writing some of the less interesting songs for Elvis’ films, and has a generic, lightweight, backing track — apart from an interestingly meaty guitar part. The vocals have some power to them, and the record is pleasant, and in some ways even ground-breaking — it doesn’t sound like a late fifties record as much as it does an early sixties one, and one could imagine, say, Gerry and the Pacemakers making a substantially identical record. But it falls between the stools of R&B and pop, and doesn’t quite convince as either: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “I’m Gonna Knock on Your Door”] That combination of a poppy background and soulful vocals would soon bear a lot of fruit for another artist Hugo and Luigi were going to start working with, but it didn’t quite work for the Isleys yet. But their second single for RCA was far more successful. At this point the Isleys were a more successful live act than recording act, and they would mostly perform songs by other people, and one song they performed regularly was “Lonely Teardrops”, the song that Berry and Gwen Gordy and Roquel Davis had written for Jackie Wilson: [Excerpt: Jackie Wilson, “Lonely Teardrops”] The group would perform that at the end of their shows, and they started to extend it, with Ron Isley improvising as the band vamped behind him, starting with the line “say you will” from Wilson’s song. He’d start doing a call and response with his brothers, singing a line and getting them to sing the response “Shout”. These improvised, extended, endings to the song got longer and longer, and got the crowds more and more excited, and they started incorporating elements from Ray Charles records, too, especially “What’d I Say” and “I Got a Woman”. When they got back to New York at the end of the tour, they told Hugo and Luigi how well these performances, which they still thought of as just long performances of “Lonely Teardrops”, had gone. The producers suggested that if they went down that well, what they should do is cut out the part that was still “Lonely Teardrops” and just perform the extended tag. As it turned out, they kept in a little of “Lonely Teardrops” — the “Say you will, say you will” line — and the resulting song, like Ray Charles’ similar call-and-response based “What’d I Say”, was split over two sides of a single, as “Shout (Parts One and Two)”: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “Shout (Parts One and Two)”] That was nothing like anything that Hugo and Luigi had ever produced before, and it became the Isley Brothers’ first chart hit, reaching number forty-seven. More importantly for them, the song was credited to the three brothers, so they made money from the cover versions of the song that charted much higher. In the USA, Joey Dee and the Starliters made number six in 1962 with their version: [Excerpt: Joey Dee and the Starliters, “Shout”] In the UK, Lulu and the Luvvers made number seven in 1964: [Excerpt: Lulu and the Luvvers, “Shout”] And in Australia, Johnny O’Keefe released his version only a month after the Isleys released theirs, and reached number two: [Excerpt: Johnny O’Keefe, “Shout”] Despite all these cover versions, the Isleys’ version remains the definitive one, and itself ended up selling over a million copies, though it never broke into the top forty. It was certainly successful enough that it made sense to record an album. Unfortunately, for the album, also titled Shout!, the old Hugo and Luigi style came out, and apart from one new Isleys original, “Respectable”, which became their next single, the rest of the album was made up of old standards, rearranged in the “Shout!” style. Sometimes, this almost worked, as on “Ring-A-Ling A-Ling (Let The Wedding Bells Ring)”, whose words are close enough to Little Richard-style gibberish that Ronald Isley could scream them effectively. But when the Isleys take on Irving Berlin’s “How Deep is the Ocean” or “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands”, neither the song nor the group are improved by the combination. They released several more singles on RCA, but none of them repeated the success of “Shout!”. At this point they moved across to Atlantic, where they started working with Leiber and Stoller. Leiber and Stoller kept them recording old standards as B-sides, but for the A-sides they went back to gospel-infused soul party songs, like the Leiber and Stoller song “Teach Me How To Shimmy” and the Isleys’ own “Standing On The Dance Floor”, a rewrite of an old gospel song called “Standing at the Judgment”: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “Standing on the Dance Floor”] But none of these songs scraped even the bottom of the charts, and the brothers ended up leaving Atlantic after a year, and signing with a tiny label, Scepter. After having moved from a tiny indie label to a large indie to a major label, they had now moved back down from their major label to a large indie to a tiny indie. They were still a great live act, but they appeared to be a one-hit wonder. But all that was about to change, when they recorded a cover version of a flop single inspired by their one hit, combined with a dance craze. The Isley Brothers were about to make one of the most important records of the 1960s, but “Twist and Shout” is a story for another time.  

Episode eighty-one of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Shout" by the Isley Brothers, and the beginnings of a career that would lead to six decades of hit singles. 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 "Tell Laura I Love Her" by Ray Peterson. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more----  Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.   Amazingly, there are no books on the Isley Brothers, unless you count a seventy-two page self-published pamphlet by Rudolph Isley's daughter, so I've had to piece this together from literally dozens of different sources. The ones I relied on most were this section of a very long article on Richie Barrett, this interview with Ronald Isley, and Icons of R&B and Soul by Bob Gulla.  The information on Hugo and Luigi comes mostly from two books -- Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke by Peter Guralnick, and  Godfather of the Music Business: Morris Levy by Richard Carlin. There are many compilations of the public-domain recordings of the Isleys. This one seems the most complete. 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 take one of our rare looks -- at this point in the story anyway -- at an act that is still touring today. Indeed, when I started writing this script back in February, I started by saying that I would soon be seeing them live in concert, as I have a ticket for an Isley Brothers show in a couple of months. Of course, events have overtaken that, and it's extremely unlikely that anyone will be going to any shows then, but it shows a fundamental difference between the Isley Brothers and most of the other acts we've looked at, as even those who are still active now mostly concentrate on performing locally rather than doing international tours playing major venues. Of course, the version of the Isley Brothers touring today isn't quite the same as the group from the 1950s, but Ronald Isley, the group's lead singer, remains in the group -- and, indeed, has remained artistically relevant, with collaborations with several prominent hip-hop artists. The Isleys had top forty hits in the sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties, and two thousands, and as recently as 2006 they had an album go to number one on the R&B charts. But today, we're going to look back at the group's very first hit, from 1959. [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, "Shout"] The Isley Brothers were destined to be a vocal group even before they were born, indeed even before their parents were married. When O'Kelly Isley senior was discussing his marriage proposal with his future in-laws, he told his father-in-law-to-be that he intended to have four sons, and that they were going to be the next Mills Brothers. Isley Sr had been a vaudeville performer himself, and as with so many family groups the Isleys seem to have gone into the music business more to please their parents than because they wanted to do it themselves. As it turned out, O'Kelly and Sallye Isley had six children, all boys, and the eldest four of them did indeed form a vocal group. Like many black vocal groups in the early fifties, they were a gospel group, and O'Kelly Jr, Rudolph, Ronald, and Vernon Isley started performing around the churches in Cincinnati as teenagers, having been trained by their parents. They appeared on Ted Mack's Amateur Hour, the popular TV talent show which launched the careers of many entertainers, and won -- their prize was a jewelled watch, which the boys would take turns wearing. But then tragedy struck. Vernon, the youngest of the four singing Isleys, and the one who was generally considered to be far and away the most talented singer in the group, was hit by a car and killed while he was riding his bike, aged only thirteen. The boys were, as one would imagine, devastated by the death of their little brother, and they also thought that that should be the end of their singing career, as Vernon had been their lead singer. It would be two years before they would perform live again. By all accounts, their parents put pressure on them during that time, telling them that it would be the only way to pay respect to Vernon. Eventually a compromise was reached between parents and brothers -- Ron agreed that he would attempt to sing lead, if in turn the group could stop singing gospel music and start singing doo-wop songs, like the brothers' favourite act Billy Ward and the Dominoes. We've talked before about how Billy Ward & The Dominoes were a huge influence on the music that became soul, with hit records like "Have Mercy Baby": [Excerpt: Billy Ward and the Dominoes, "Have Mercy Baby"] Both Ward's original lead singer Clyde McPhatter and McPhatter's later replacement Jackie Wilson sang in a style that owed a lot to the church music that the young Isleys had also been performing, and so it was natural for them to make the change to singing in the style of the Dominoes. As soon as Ronald Isley started singing lead, people started making comparisons both to McPhatter and to Wilson. Indeed, Ronald has talked about McPhatter as being something of a mentor figure for the brothers, teaching them how to sing, although it's never been clear exactly at what point in their career they got to know McPhatter. But their real mentor was a much less well-known singer, Beulah Bryant. The three eldest Isley brothers, O'Kelly, Rudolph, and Ronald, met Bryant on the bus to New York, where they were travelling to try and seek their fortunes. Bryant was one of the many professional blues shouters who never became hugely well known, but who managed to have a moderately successful career from the fifties through to the eighties, mostly in live performances, though she did make a handful of very listenable records: [Excerpt: Beulah Bryant, "What Am I Gonna Do?"] When they got to New York, while they had paid in advance for somewhere to stay, they were robbed on their second day in the city and had no money at all. But Bryant had contacts in the music industry, and started making phone calls for her young proteges, trying to get them bookings. At first she was unsuccessful, and the group just hung around the Harlem Apollo and occasionally performed at their amateur nights. Eventually, though, Bryant got Nat Nazzaro to listen to them over the phone. Nazzaro was known as "the monster agent" -- he was one of the most important booking agents in New York, but he wasn't exactly fair to his young clients. He would book a three-person act, but on the contracts the act would consist of four people -- Nazzaro would be the fourth person, and he would get an equal share of the performance money, as well as getting his normal booking agent's share. Nazzaro listened to the Isleys over the phone, and then he insisted they come and see him in person, because he was convinced that they had been playing a record down the phone rather than singing to him live. When he found out they really did sound like that, Nazzaro started getting them the kind of bookings they could only dream of -- they went from having no money at all to playing on Broadway for $750 a week, and then playing the Apollo for $950 a week, at least according to O'Kelly Isley Jr's later recollection. This was an astonishing sum of money to a bunch of teenagers in the late 1950s. But they still hadn't made a record, and their sets were based on cover versions of songs by other people, things like "Rock and Roll Waltz" by Kay Starr: [Excerpt: Kay Starr, "Rock and Roll Waltz"] It was hardly the kind of material they would later become famous for. And nor was their first record. They had signed to a label called Teenage Records, a tiny label owned by two former musicians, Bill "Bass" Gordon and Ben Smith. As you might imagine, there were a lot of musicians named Ben Smith and it's quite difficult to sort out which was which -- even Marv Goldberg, who normally knows these things, seems confused about which Ben Smith this was, describing him as a singer on one page and a sax player on another page. As Ben Smith the sax player seems to have played on some records for Teenage, it was probably him, in which case this Ben Smith probably also played alto sax for Lucky Millinder's band and wrote the hit "I Dreamed I Dwelt in Harlem" for Glenn Miller: [Excerpt: The Glenn Miller Orchestra, "I Dreamed I Dwelt in Harlem"] It's more certain exactly who Bill "Bass" Gordon was -- he was the leader of Bill "Bass" Gordon and the Colonials, who had recorded the doo-wop track "Two Loves Have I": [Excerpt: Bill "Bass" Gordon and the Colonials, "Two Loves Have I"] Smith and Gordon signed the Isley Brothers to Teenage Records, and in June 1957 the first Isley Brothers single, "Angels Cried", came out: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, "Angels Cried"] Unfortunately, the single didn't have any real success, and the group decided that they wanted to record for a better label. According to O'Kelly Isley they got some resistance from Teenage Records, who claimed to have them under contract -- but the Isley Brothers knew better. They had signed a contract, certainly, but then the contract had just been left on a desk after they'd signed it, rather than being filed, and they'd swiped it from the desk when no-one was looking. Teenage didn't have a copy of the contract, so had no proof that they had ever signed the Isley Brothers, and the brothers were free to move on to another label. They chose to sign to Gone Records, one of the family of labels that was owned and run by George Goldner. Goldner assigned Richie Barrett, his talent scout, producer, and arranger, to look after the Isleys, as he had previously done with Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers and the Chantels, as well as his own group the Valentines: [The Valentines, "The Woo Woo Train"] By this point, Barrett had established an almost production-line method of making records. He would block-book a studio and some backing musicians for up to twenty-four hours, get as many as ten different vocal groups into the studio, and record dozens of tracks in a row, usually songs written by either group members or by Barrett. The Isleys' first record with Barrett, "Don't Be Jealous", was a fairly standard doo-wop ballad, written by Ron Isley: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, "Don't Be Jealous"] There's some suggestion that Barrett is also singing on that recording with the group -- it certainly sounds like there are four voices on there, not just three. Either way, the song doesn't show much of the style that the Isley Brothers would later make their own. Much more like their later recordings was the B-side, another Ronald Isley song, which could have been a classic in the Coasters' mould had it not been for the lyrics, which were an attempt at a hip rewriting of "Old McDonald": [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, "Rockin' McDonald"] They were nearly there, but not quite. The next single, "I Wanna Know", came closer -- you can hear they were clearly trying to incorporate elements of other people's successful records -- Ronald Isley's vocal owes a lot to Little Richard, while the piano playing has the same piano "ripping" that Jerry Lee Lewis had made his own. But you can also hear the style that would make them famous coming to the fore. But they were not selling records, and Richie Barrett was stretched very thin. A few more singles were released on Gone (often pairing a previously-released track with a new B-side) but nothing was successful enough to justify them staying on with Goldner's label. But just as they'd moved from a micro-indie label to a large indie without having had any success, now they were going to move from a large indie to a major label, still not having had a hit. They took one of their records to Hugo and Luigi at RCA records, and the duo signed them up. Hugo and Luigi were strange, strange, figures in popular music in the 1950s. They were two cousins, Hugo Peretti and Luigi Creatore, who were always known by their first names, and had started out making children's records before being hired by Mercury Records, where they would produce, among other things, the cover versions by Georgia Gibbs of black records that we've talked about previously, and which were both ethically and musically appalling: [Excerpt: Georgia Gibbs, "Dance With Me Henry"] After a couple of years of consistently producing hits, they got tempted away from Mercury by Morris Levy, who was setting up a new label, Roulette, with George Goldner and Alan Freed. Goldner and Freed quickly dropped out of the label, but Hugo and Luigi ended up having a fifty percent stake in the new label. While they were there, they showed they didn't really get rock and roll music at all -- they produced follow-up singles by a lot of acts who'd had hits before they started working with Hugo and Luigi, but stopped as soon as the duo started producing them, like Frankie Lymon: [Excerpt: Frankie Lymon, "Goodie Goodie"] But they still managed to produce a string of hits like "Honeycomb" by Jimmie Rodgers (who is not either the blues singer or the country singer of the same name), which went to number one: [Excerpt: Jimmie Rogers, "Honeycomb"] And they also recorded their own tracks for Roulette, like the instrumental Cha-Hua-Hua: [Excerpt: Hugo and Luigi, "Cha-Hua-Hua"] After a year or so with Roulette, they were in turn poached by RCA -- Morris Levy let them go so long as they gave up their shares in Roulette for far less than they were worth. At RCA they continued their own recording career, with records like "Just Come Home": [Excerpt: Hugo and Luigi, "Just Come Home"] They also produced several albums for Perry Como. So you would think that they would be precisely the wrong producers for the Isley Brothers. And the first record they made with the trio would tend to suggest that there was at least some creative difference there. "I'm Gonna Knock on Your Door" was written by Aaron Schroeder and Sid Wayne, two people who are best known for writing some of the less interesting songs for Elvis' films, and has a generic, lightweight, backing track -- apart from an interestingly meaty guitar part. The vocals have some power to them, and the record is pleasant, and in some ways even ground-breaking -- it doesn't sound like a late fifties record as much as it does an early sixties one, and one could imagine, say, Gerry and the Pacemakers making a substantially identical record. But it falls between the stools of R&B and pop, and doesn't quite convince as either: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, "I'm Gonna Knock on Your Door"] That combination of a poppy background and soulful vocals would soon bear a lot of fruit for another artist Hugo and Luigi were going to start working with, but it didn't quite work for the Isleys yet. But their second single for RCA was far more successful. At this point the Isleys were a more successful live act than recording act, and they would mostly perform songs by other people, and one song they performed regularly was "Lonely Teardrops", the song that Berry and Gwen Gordy and Roquel Davis had written for Jackie Wilson: [Excerpt: Jackie Wilson, "Lonely Teardrops"] The group would perform that at the end of their shows, and they started to extend it, with Ron Isley improvising as the band vamped behind him, starting with the line "say you will" from Wilson's song. He'd start doing a call and response with his brothers, singing a line and getting them to sing the response "Shout". These improvised, extended, endings to the song got longer and longer, and got the crowds more and more excited, and they started incorporating elements from Ray Charles records, too, especially "What'd I Say" and "I Got a Woman". When they got back to New York at the end of the tour, they told Hugo and Luigi how well these performances, which they still thought of as just long performances of "Lonely Teardrops", had gone. The producers suggested that if they went down that well, what they should do is cut out the part that was still "Lonely Teardrops" and just perform the extended tag. As it turned out, they kept in a little of "Lonely Teardrops" -- the "Say you will, say you will" line -- and the resulting song, like Ray Charles' similar call-and-response based "What'd I Say", was split over two sides of a single, as "Shout (Parts One and Two)": [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, "Shout (Parts One and Two)"] That was nothing like anything that Hugo and Luigi had ever produced before, and it became the Isley Brothers' first chart hit, reaching number forty-seven. More importantly for them, the song was credited to the three brothers, so they made money from the cover versions of the song that charted much higher. In the USA, Joey Dee and the Starliters made number six in 1962 with their version: [Excerpt: Joey Dee and the Starliters, "Shout"] In the UK, Lulu and the Luvvers made number seven in 1964: [Excerpt: Lulu and the Luvvers, "Shout"] And in Australia, Johnny O'Keefe released his version only a month after the Isleys released theirs, and reached number two: [Excerpt: Johnny O'Keefe, "Shout"] Despite all these cover versions, the Isleys' version remains the definitive one, and itself ended up selling over a million copies, though it never broke into the top forty. It was certainly successful enough that it made sense to record an album. Unfortunately, for the album, also titled Shout!, the old Hugo and Luigi style came out, and apart from one new Isleys original, "Respectable", which became their next single, the rest of the album was made up of old standards, rearranged in the "Shout!" style. Sometimes, this almost worked, as on "Ring-A-Ling A-Ling (Let The Wedding Bells Ring)", whose words are close enough to Little Richard-style gibberish that Ronald Isley could scream them effectively. But when the Isleys take on Irving Berlin's "How Deep is the Ocean" or "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands", neither the song nor the group are improved by the combination. They released several more singles on RCA, but none of them repeated the success of "Shout!". At this point they moved across to Atlantic, where they started working with Leiber and Stoller. Leiber and Stoller kept them recording old standards as B-sides, but for the A-sides they went back to gospel-infused soul party songs, like the Leiber and Stoller song "Teach Me How To Shimmy" and the Isleys' own "Standing On The Dance Floor", a rewrite of an old gospel song called "Standing at the Judgment": [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, "Standing on the Dance Floor"] But none of these songs scraped even the bottom of the charts, and the brothers ended up leaving Atlantic after a year, and signing with a tiny label, Scepter. After having moved from a tiny indie label to a large indie to a major label, they had now moved back down from their major label to a large indie to a tiny indie. They were still a great live act, but they appeared to be a one-hit wonder. But all that was about to change, when they recorded a cover version of a flop single inspired by their one hit, combined with a dance craze. The Isley Brothers were about to make one of the most important records of the 1960s, but "Twist and Shout" is a story for another time.  

BEHIND THE CURTAIN.... Guns. Drugs. Booze. Broads. Cheaters. Liars. Broken bones. Broken dreams. Dead thugs in black Caddy car trunks. Fistfights on the corner. Prejudice. Bigotry. Misogyny. Oh, just a typical day in my hometown - Providence, RI - where working-class heroes STILL hi-five to Mob rule, the Catholic church and a good Italian meatball. Who rescued me from the fate many friends met at the end of a bullet, a bottle, a pill? Aretha, Sly, Tina, Teddy, Barbra, Stevie, Frank, Ray, Isaac, Bassey, The Isleys, Cream, Led Zeppelin, Rod Stewart, Neil Young, Hendrix, Joplin, Sarah, Ella, James, Tower of Power, Earth Wind & Fire - their lives, their songs - my own personal Life Soundtrack! My secret I.V. tube, dripping knowledge no adult could provide, pearls of wisdom that guided & calmed me, fired my imagination, & helped me rise above and get the hell out in one piece. Out, from the fire to the frying pan. Pounding the gritty NYC streets, I fought TOOTH & NAIL for every gig, crumb and credit, while singing songs - theirs and mine - on sidewalks and in dark clubs. One VOICE of thousands, in the shadows, searching for meaning, truth, my sound, MY unique version of love & redemption. Then, a life flipper: a job slinging cocktails at NYC's Blue Note Jazz Club - an education no money could buy. Face to face with living legends - jazz icons who rose up through decades of social injustice to create JAZZ. More creative marination, incubation, trials by fire. Onwards from NYC to Canada. England. L.A. I persevered. I pursued. I forged 'The Dream' ...which led me to: NOW. HERE. WITH YOU. And about NOW?? Well, birds fly. Presidents LIE. Bells RING, & SINGERS SING. No one hears life the way I do. That 's the way I sing it. I wake up with songs in my head. I am a human compilation disk, an amalgam of all styles of music I soaked up as a kid - pop/jazz/funk/soul - plus years of survival on Mother Earth. I NEED TO RECORD the MUSIC. SONGS & MUSIC saved ME. Maybe I can do the same for some lost someone? In the here & now, I tilt forward, through the deluge, the onslaught, the competition, and in doing so, create MY OWN UNIQUE NICHE in an ever changing world! Flanked by an amazing ensemble of stellar soldier musicians who vibe with my equal parts DRIVE, EMOTION, OBSESSION & PASSION, I stand on the shoulders of giants, ready to take it to the next level. I JUST NEED TO RECORD THE MUSIC. ONCE FINISHED, WE TOUR JAPAN!!! dyankanemusic.com

I'm back! Got to spin some tunes for the cool people at WEFUNK Radio. So Enjoy! --- DJ Cam lights the fuse on explosive funk cuts from the Isleys and Prince then eases into coolout vibes from Little Brother, Yaggfu Front and Da Bush Babees. Plus a joyful blast from the Hot 8 Brass Band, colorful cinematics from Anderson .Paak and banging jeep beats from King Tee and Brand Nubian.

I'm back! Got to spin some tunes for the cool people at WEFUNK Radio. So Enjoy! --- DJ Cam lights the fuse on explosive funk cuts from the Isleys and Prince then eases into coolout vibes from Little Brother, Yaggfu Front and Da Bush Babees. Plus a joyful blast from the Hot 8 Brass Band, colorful cinematics from Anderson .Paak and banging jeep beats from King Tee and Brand Nubian.

Two hours of the best across the board soul music direct from the UK Tracklist: The Terry Green Project - Giving It Up Pauline Henry - Happy - Extended Old Flavour The Isley Brothers - It's Your Thing Stevie Wonder - I Wish The Manhattans - Get It Ready Beverlei Brown - Gonna Get Over You The 21st Century Ltd. - Your Smallest Wish Stylistics - Change Is Good Sometimes The Gap Band - Outstanding (Long Version) Jean Carn - (No, No) You Can't Come Back Now Tom Glide & Theresa Griffin - Magic (T Groove Remix) Eugene Cole - Yesterday's Gone Patrice Rushen - Haven't You Heard Ruby Andrews - Just Loving You A Way Of Life - Trippin On Your Love (Subliminal Club Mix) Phil Perry & Melba Moore - Survival Kit Bishop Wayne - Ride & Fly George Benson - Feel Like Making Love Marc Staggers - It's All About You & I Want You Back Mario Biondi - This Is What You Are (Victor Santon Remix) Phillip Brandon - Chocolate Child Chaka Khan - I'm Every Woman Chubby Tavares - Yesterday Don't Count Incognito - Lowdown( Feat Mario Biondi And Chaka Khan The Emotions - I Dont Wanna Lose Your Love

Two hours of the best across the board soul music direct from the UK Tracklist: The Terry Green Project - Giving It Up Pauline Henry - Happy - Extended Old Flavour The Isley Brothers - It's Your Thing Stevie Wonder - I Wish The Manhattans - Get It Ready Beverlei Brown - Gonna Get Over You The 21st Century Ltd. - Your Smallest Wish Stylistics - Change Is Good Sometimes The Gap Band - Outstanding (Long Version) Jean Carn - (No, No) You Can't Come Back Now Tom Glide & Theresa Griffin - Magic (T Groove Remix) Eugene Cole - Yesterday's Gone Patrice Rushen - Haven't You Heard Ruby Andrews - Just Loving You A Way Of Life - Trippin On Your Love (Subliminal Club Mix) Phil Perry & Melba Moore - Survival Kit Bishop Wayne - Ride & Fly George Benson - Feel Like Making Love Marc Staggers - It's All About You & I Want You Back Mario Biondi - This Is What You Are (Victor Santon Remix) Phillip Brandon - Chocolate Child Chaka Khan - I'm Every Woman Chubby Tavares - Yesterday Don't Count Incognito - Lowdown( Feat Mario Biondi And Chaka Khan The Emotions - I Dont Wanna Lose Your Love

Two hours of the best across the board soul music direct from the UK Tracklist: The Terry Green Project - Giving It Up Pauline Henry - Happy - Extended Old Flavour The Isley Brothers - It's Your Thing Stevie Wonder - I Wish The Manhattans - Get It Ready Beverlei Brown - Gonna Get Over You The 21st Century Ltd. - Your Smallest Wish Stylistics - Change Is Good Sometimes The Gap Band - Outstanding (Long Version) Jean Carn - (No, No) You Can't Come Back Now Tom Glide & Theresa Griffin - Magic (T Groove Remix) Eugene Cole - Yesterday's Gone Patrice Rushen - Haven't You Heard Ruby Andrews - Just Loving You A Way Of Life - Trippin On Your Love (Subliminal Club Mix) Phil Perry & Melba Moore - Survival Kit Bishop Wayne - Ride & Fly George Benson - Feel Like Making Love Marc Staggers - It's All About You & I Want You Back Mario Biondi - This Is What You Are (Victor Santon Remix) Phillip Brandon - Chocolate Child Chaka Khan - I'm Every Woman Chubby Tavares - Yesterday Don't Count Incognito - Lowdown( Feat Mario Biondi And Chaka Khan The Emotions - I Dont Wanna Lose Your Love

Two hours of the best across the board soul music direct from the UK Tracklist: The Terry Green Project - Giving It Up Pauline Henry - Happy - Extended Old Flavour The Isley Brothers - It's Your Thing Stevie Wonder - I Wish The Manhattans - Get It Ready Beverlei Brown - Gonna Get Over You The 21st Century Ltd. - Your Smallest Wish Stylistics - Change Is Good Sometimes The Gap Band - Outstanding (Long Version) Jean Carn - (No, No) You Can't Come Back Now Tom Glide & Theresa Griffin - Magic (T Groove Remix) Eugene Cole - Yesterday's Gone Patrice Rushen - Haven't You Heard Ruby Andrews - Just Loving You A Way Of Life - Trippin On Your Love (Subliminal Club Mix) Phil Perry & Melba Moore - Survival Kit Bishop Wayne - Ride & Fly George Benson - Feel Like Making Love Marc Staggers - It's All About You & I Want You Back Mario Biondi - This Is What You Are (Victor Santon Remix) Phillip Brandon - Chocolate Child Chaka Khan - I'm Every Woman Chubby Tavares - Yesterday Don't Count Incognito - Lowdown( Feat Mario Biondi And Chaka Khan The Emotions - I Dont Wanna Lose Your Love

Two hours of the best across the board soul music direct from the UK Tracklist: The Terry Green Project - Giving It Up Pauline Henry - Happy - Extended Old Flavour The Isley Brothers - It's Your Thing Stevie Wonder - I Wish The Manhattans - Get It Ready Beverlei Brown - Gonna Get Over You The 21st Century Ltd. - Your Smallest Wish Stylistics - Change Is Good Sometimes The Gap Band - Outstanding (Long Version) Jean Carn - (No, No) You Can't Come Back Now Tom Glide & Theresa Griffin - Magic (T Groove Remix) Eugene Cole - Yesterday's Gone Patrice Rushen - Haven't You Heard Ruby Andrews - Just Loving You A Way Of Life - Trippin On Your Love (Subliminal Club Mix) Phil Perry & Melba Moore - Survival Kit Bishop Wayne - Ride & Fly George Benson - Feel Like Making Love Marc Staggers - It's All About You & I Want You Back Mario Biondi - This Is What You Are (Victor Santon Remix) Phillip Brandon - Chocolate Child Chaka Khan - I'm Every Woman Chubby Tavares - Yesterday Don't Count Incognito - Lowdown( Feat Mario Biondi And Chaka Khan The Emotions - I Dont Wanna Lose Your Love

Wre playing those ole skool jams from the past. A little Gapband,O'Jays,Isleys,Rick James,Stylistics,TemptationsCameo,Michael Jackson,Prince,Patti Labelle,Marvin Gaye,Teddy P,Stevie Wonder,Just to name a few. Call in and request your favorite ole jam. Its so much fun. Dial 646 716-5525 and press the 1 button to talk and listen on the air. www.blogtalkradio.com/wfunk  

Tonight we are discussing musical families tonight on Mic Check and their contributions to the music industry. The crew will be discussing the way they have shaped and molded the industry as we know it. Families like the Jacksons, the Isleys, the Winans, the Leverts, and so many more. Also Lady T will be hitting you with the quick three and giving you more information on the Mic Check Idol. So get plugged in with the Mic Check.

Musical Madness Monday is an exciting music show that breaks through genres and categories to consistently play great music for you. This show crosses all boundaries to bring you music from artists ranging from the Isleys to U2, Anita Baker to Led Zeppelin, Luther Vandross to the Dave Matthews Band, Sade to Jay-Z, Tamar Braxton to Bruno Mars, Sting to Jimi Hendrix, Tracy Chapman to James Brown, Tom Petty to The Temptations, and everything good in between. Musical Madness Monday is hosted by dynamic radio duo Charles "Tensiongentry" Gentry and Mariea Mariea. Join us Monday night for the show that features no genres, no categories, just great music and brilliant conversation. The discussion question for Monday's show is "What album would be the perfect soundtrack for your life?" Listen to the show right on your phone or through your computer. Call 347-884-8924 or click on the link to listen on your computer. Musical Madness Monday is brought to you by The Literary Corner BTR and executive producer Laura Poindexter.

Musical Madness Monday is an exciting music show that breaks through genres and categories to consistently play great music for you. This show crosses all boundaries to bring you music from artists ranging from the Isleys to U2, Anita Baker to Led Zeppelin, Luther Vandross to the Dave Matthews Band, Sade to Jay-Z, Tamar Braxton to Bruno Mars, Sting to Jimi Hendrix, Tracy Chapman to James Brown, Tom Petty to The Temptations, and everything good in between. Musical Madness Monday is hosted by dynamic radio duo Charles "Tensiongentry" Gentry and Mariea Mariea. Join us Monday night for the show that features no genres, no categories, just great music and brilliant conversation. The discussion question for Monday's show is "Who put on the best concert you ever attended?" Listen to the show right on your phone or through your computer. Call 347-884-8924 or click on the link. Musical Madness Monday is brought to you by The Literary Corner BTR and executive producer Laura Poindexter.

Musical Madness Monday is an exciting music show that breaks through genres and categories to consistently play great music for you. This show crosses all boundaries to bring you music from artists ranging from the Isleys to U2, Anita Baker to Led Zeppelin, Luther Vandross to the Dave Matthews Band, Sade to Jay-Z, Tamar Braxton to Bruno Mars, Sting to Jimi Hendrix, Tracy Chapman to James Brown, Tom Petty to The Temptations, and everything good in between. Musical Madness Monday is hosted by dynamic radio duo Charles "Tensiongentry" Gentry and Mariea Mariea. Join us Monday night for the show that features no genres, no categories, just great music and brilliant conversation. The discussion question for Monday's show is "If you could be one artists for one night only in concert who would you be?" Listen to the show right on your phone or through your computer. Call 347-884-8924 or click on the link. Musical Madness Monday is brought to you by The Literary Corner BTR and executive producer Laura Poindexter.

Musical Madness Monday is an exciting music show that breaks through genres and categories to consistently play great music for you. This show crosses all boundaries to bring you music from artists ranging from the Isleys to U2, Anita Baker to Led Zeppelin, Luther Vandross to the Dave Matthews Band, Sade to Jay-Z, Tamar Braxton to Bruno Mars, Sting to Jimi Hendrix, Tracy Chapman to James Brown, Tom Petty to The Temptations, and everything good in between. Musical Madness Monday is hosted by dynamic radio duo Charles "Tensiongentry" Gentry and Mariea Mariea. Join us Monday night for the show that features no genres, no categories, just great music and brilliant conversation. The discussion question for Monday's show is "If you could send only 3 CDs or albums to the people on another planet to represent the best music on earth which 3 would it be?" Listen to the show right on your phone or through your computer. Call 347-884-8924 or click on the link. Musical Madness Monday is brought to you by The Literary Corner BTR and executive producer Laura Poindexter.

Musical Madness Monday is an exciting music show that breaks through genres and categories to consistently play great music for you. This show crosses all boundaries to bring you music from artists ranging from the Isleys to U2, Anita Baker to Led Zeppelin, Luther Vandross to the Dave Matthews Band, Sade to Jay-Z, Tamar Braxton to Bruno Mars, Sting to Jimi Hendrix, Tracy Chapman to James Brown, Tom Petty to The Temptations, and everything good in between. Musical Madness Monday is hosted by dynamic radio duo Charles "Tensiongentry" Gentry and Mariea Mariea. Join us Monday night for the show that features no genres, no categories, just great music and brilliant conversation. The discussion question for Monday's show is "If you could bring back one artists who has passed on for a special LIVE one night only concert who would it be?" Listen to the show right on your phone or through your computer. Call 347-884-8924 or click on the link. Musical Madness Monday is brought to you by The Literary Corner BTR and executive producer Laura Poindexter.

Musical Madness Monday is an exciting music show that breaks through genres and categories to consistently play great music for you. This show crosses all boundaries to bring you music from artists ranging from the Isleys to U2, Anita Baker to Led Zeppelin, Luther Vandross to the Dave Matthews Band, Sade to Jay-Z, Tamar Braxton to Bruno Mars, Sting to Jimi Hendrix, Tracy Chapman to James Brown, Tom Petty to The Temptations, and everything good in between. Musical Madness Monday is hosted by dynamic radio duo Charles "Tensiongentry" Gentry and Mariea Mariea. Join us Monday night for the show that features no genres, no categories, just great music and brilliant conversation. The discussion question for Monday's show is "If you could bring back one artists who has passed on for a special LIVE one night only concert who would it be?" Listen to the show right on your phone or through your computer. Call 347-884-8924 or click on the link. Musical Madness Monday is brought to you by The Literary Corner BTR and executive producer Laura Poindexter.

Musical Madness Monday is an exciting music show that breaks through genres and categories to consistently play great music for you. This show crosses all boundaries to bring you music from artists ranging from the Isleys to U2, Anita Baker to Led Zeppelin, Luther Vandross to the Dave Matthews Band, Sade to Jay-Z, Tamar Braxton to Bruno Mars, Sting to Jimi Hendrix, Tracy Chapman to James Brown, Tom Petty to The Temptations, and everything good in between. Musical Madness Monday is hosted by dynamic radio duo Charles "Tensiongentry" Gentry and Mariea Mariea. Join us tonight for the show that features no genres, no categories, just great music and brilliant conversation. The discussion question for tonight's show is "Who are your favorite three music artists of all time and why?" Listen to the show right on your phone or through your computer. Call 347-884-8924 or click on the link. Musical Madness Monday is brought to you by The Literary Corner BTR and executive producer Laura Poindexter.

Musical Madness Monday is an exciting music show that breaks through genres and categories to consistently play great music for you. This show crosses all boundaries to bring you music from artists ranging from the Isleys to U2, Anita Baker to Led Zeppelin, Luther Vandross to the Dave Matthews Band, Sade to Jay-Z, Tamar Braxton to Bruno Mars, Sting to Jimi Hendrix, Tracy Chapman to James Brown, Tom Petty to The Temptations, and everything good in between. Musical Madness Monday is hosted by dynamic radio duo Charles "Tensiongentry" Gentry and Mariea Mariea. Join us Monday nights for the show that features no genres, and no categories, just great music and brilliant conversation. The discussion question for tonight's show is "What decade do you think had the best music and best music artists?" Listen to the show right on your phone or through your computer. Call 347-884-8924 or click on the link. Musical Madness Monday is brought to you by The Literary Corner BTR and executive producer Laura Poindexter.

Musical Madness Monday is an exciting music show that breaks through genres and categories to consistently play great music for you. The show crosses all boundaries to bring you music from artists ranging from the Isleys to U2, Anita Baker to Led Zeppelin, Luther Vandross to the Dave Matthews Band, Sade to Jay-Z, Tamar Braxton to Bruno Mars, Sting to Jimi Hendrix, Tracy Chapman to James Brown, and everything good in between. Musical Madness Monday is hosted by dynamic radio duo Charles "Tensiongentry" Gentry and Mariea Mariea. Join us Monday nights for the show that features no genres, and no categories, just great music and brilliant conversation. The discussion question for tonight's show is "What decade do you think had the best music and best music artists?" Listen to the show right on your phone or through your computer. Call 347-884-8924 or click on the link. Musical Madness Monday is brought to you by The Literary Corner BTR and executive producer Laura Poindexter.

Musical Madness Monday is an exciting music show that breaks through genres and categories to consistently play great music for you. Our special guest will be acoustic music artist Mic Tunez. The show crosses all boundaries to bring you music from artists ranging from the Isleys to U2, Anita Baker to Led Zeppelin, Luther Vandross to the Dave Matthews Band, Sade to Jay-Z, Tamar Braxton to Bruno Mars, Sting to Jimi Hendrix, Tracy Chapman to James Brown, and everything good in between. Musical Madness Monday is hosted by dynamic radio duo Charles "Tensiongentry" Gentry and Mariea Mariea. Join us Monday nights for the show that features no genres, and no categories, just great music and brilliant conversation. The discussion question for tonight's show is "What do you value more Money, Power, Peace, or Love?" Listen to the show right on your phone or through your computer. Call 347-884-8924 or click on the link. Musical Madness Monday is brought to you by The Literary Corner BTR and executive producer Laura Poindexter.

Musical Madness Monday is an exciting music show that breaks through genres and categories to consistently play great music for you. The show crosses all boundaries to bring you music from artists ranging from the Isleys to U2, Anita Baker to Led Zeppelin, Luther Vandross to the Dave Matthews Band, Sade to Jay-Z, Tamar Braxton to Bruno Mars, Sting to Jimi Hendrix, Tracy Chapman to James Brown, and everything good in between. Musical Madness Monday is hosted by dynamic radio duo Charles "Tensiongentry" Gentry and Mariea Mariea. Join us Monday nights for the show that features no genres, and no categories, just great music and brilliant conversation. The discussion question for tonight's show is "Who is the GOAT (Greatest Of All Time) guitarist, female vocalist, entertainer, songwriter)?" Listen to the show right on your phone or through your computer. Call 347-884-8924 or click on the link. Musical Madness Monday is brought to you by The Literary Corner BTR and executive producer Laura Poindexter.

Musical Madness Monday is an exciting music show that breaks through genres and categories to consistently play great music for you. The show crosses all boundaries to bring you music from artists ranging from the Isleys to U2, Anita Baker to Led Zeppelin, Luther Vandross to the Dave Matthews Band, Sade to Jay-Z, Tamar Braxton to Bruno Mars, Sting to Jimi Hendrix, Tracy Chapman to James Brown, and everything good in between. Musical Madness Monday is hosted by dynamic radio duo Charles "Tensiongentry" Gentry and Mariea Mariea. Join us Monday nights for the show that features no genres, and no categories, just great music and brilliant conversation. The discussion question for tonight's show is "Can Music Literally Change The World?" Listen to the show right on your phone or through your computer. Call 347-884-8924 or click on the link. Musical Madness Monday is brought to you by The Literary Corner BTR and executive producer Laura Poindexter. 

There is no doubt that among the great soul/funk groups of the 70s and early 80s, the Isleys were the baddest. They had the look down better than anyone; they had the smoke coming up from the ground in their concerts; and, more importantly, they could move from smoking funk songs like "Fight The Power" and "That Lady" to sweet ballads such as "For The Love of You" and "(At Your Best) You Are Love" with a seamlessness no one else could match. And while it is clear that Ronald Isley's magnetic voice and Ernie Isley's searing guitar solos were deserving of the kudos they've continued to receive to this day, Chris Jasper's influence on the unique sound of the Isleys has often been overlooked. His keyboard and moog work was the underpinning of the group's great dance tunes and was a key to their classic ballads such as "Groove With You" and "Between the Sheets."

Her debut CD "From My Soul" has something for everyone, with stirring soulful vocal showcases such as "Won't Be Your Plaything" to the surprising amped funk masterpiece "I Wanna Funk It Up." The latter features funkadelic vocal and saxophone effects, reminiscent of Zapp and Roger, Prince or the Isleys. You'll want to dim the lights as the album turns seductive with Ava's luscious tenor saxophone on the aptly-named "Soft and Silky".

just a trial mix, getting to grips with audacity. A few classics from the back of the box; Rollerball, Cynamade, Modulations, Isleys, Merry Clayton, Nina, Gal Costa, Prince Allah. A snapshot of my tastes. Much more to come. Gonna dig the mic out for the next one. Any feedback welcolme tracklisting:- Andre Previn-Excutive Party (from Rollerball Soundtrack) Cynamade- Brothers On The Slide Modulations- Rough Out There Isleys- Work To Do Merry Clayton- Southern Man Gal Costa- Minha Estrela E Do Orienta Dionne' -Want Me Back Nina Simone- Baltimore Jean Carne- Dont Let It Go To Your Head Cultural Roots - Age Of Creation Prince Allah- Their Reward(12" mix) Axus- Calling U