Podcasts about Jack Clement

We had the pleasure of interviewing Åsa Orbison over Zoom video!Originally from Stockholm, Sweden Åsa Orbison had a fondness for music at a young age, where she attended music school in Sweden. Into adulthood, she then transitioned into working in marketing, but later came to the realization that music was always something she ultimately gravitated to and wanted to pursue. Åsa decided to make the move to America when she found love with now husband Roy Orbison Jr! She came back to her musical roots when working together with her husband (whom she collaborated with on her new album). As a huge feat, Åsa received a platinum record award for singing backup vocals on her father-in-law, Roy Orbison's ‘Unchained Melodies” in 2019. The “Blue Bayou” album is Åsa's first album and passion project, recorded at Roy Orbison Jr's "Pretty Woman Studio", Nashville A Team member Wayne Moss' “Cinderella Studio” and Jack Clement's “The Cowboy Arms Hotel And Recording Spa”. "Blue Bayou” album is a stunning representation of Åsa's Jazz/Pop soft, breathy singing style with her top singles "Blue Bayou”, ”Green Eyes” “Unchained Melody”, & “Satin Doll”.Åsa resides in Malibu, California with her 4 adorable children and husband Roy Orbison Jr. In her free time, she enjoys music, running, Pilates and hiking. Åsa is also passionate about supporting causes that are close to her heart including, Music Cares, Operation Smile and BabytoBaby. We want to hear from you! Please email Hello@BringinitBackwards.comwww.BringinitBackwards.com#podcast #interview #bringinbackpod #ÅsaOrbison #RoyOrbison #RoyOrbisonJr #NewMusic #ZoomListen & Subscribe to BiBhttps://www.bringinitbackwards.com/followFollow our podcast on Instagram and Twitter! https://www.facebook.com/groups/bringinbackpodBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/bringin-it-backwards--4972373/support.

Adam Hartshorn joins us to discuss Johnny Cash's “At Folsom Prison.”  Plenty of other discussion including Harley t-shirts, breakdance circles, Couer d'Alene Lake, Provo (the good and the bad), cautionary tales, knowing your audience, “I'm On A Train,” Jack Clement, and Wayne laments “should we have done San Quentin instead?”Check out Adam Hartshorn at: https://www.adamhartshorn.com/Check out Johnny Cash at:   https://www.johnnycash.com/Check out other episodes at RecordsRevisitedPodcast.com or one all your favorite podcast providers like Apple Podcasts, Castbox, iHeartMedia, and Spotify. Additional content is found at: Facebook.com/recordsrevisitedpodcast or twitter @podcastrecords or IG at instagram.com/recordsrevisitedpodcast/ or join our Patreon at patreon.com/RecordsRevisitedPodcast

Mick and Sydney look ahead to some holiday games and tournaments this week before an interview with Miami defenseman Jack Clement.

På ”New Better Day”, der er indspillet på Samsø, i København og Nashville, bevæger den danske first lady of country sig gennem forskellige genrer indenfor countrymusikken. For fire et halvt år siden optog Rosanes og Jan Eriksen en POVCast, der handler om hele hendes dengang 45 år lange karriere. Find den på medianomusic.nu, Soundcloud eller din foretrukne podcast platform. I denne omgang handler det især om New Better Day og Tamras baggrund og virke som countrymusiker. POVcasten sætter fokus på et forholdsvis ufortalt kapitel i hendes karriere og udvikling fra folke- og popmusiker til countrymusiker – de talrige rejser til Nashville. Hvordan hun for godt og vel 35 år siden blev taget under vingerne af en gruppe musikere med udgangspunkt i studiet The Cowboy Arms Hotel And Recording Spa. Det gælder især studieejeren Jack Clement. Bare for at sætte ham i perspektiv, var det ham, der i 1954 inviterede Elvis Presley på scenen i klubben Eagles Nest i Memphis – mindre end en måned efter “That's All Right” var udkommet. En af Elvis allerførste optrædender. Det var Charles Cochran, der bl.a. en periode arbejdede tæt sammen med Neil Young, guitarist m.m. Marty Stuart, trommeslager Kenny Malone, guitarist Chris Leuzinger og lydtekniker Dave Ferguson. Ferguson var blandt meget andet tekniker på og stod for mixning af Johnny Cash American Recordings plader. Bl.a. er der er et nummer, ”Wrong Road Again”, på Tamra Rosanes nye plade, indspillet for godt og vel 30 år siden med Marty Stuart på guitar. Vi taler en smule om den fantastiske koncert, Stuart og band sommeren 2022 gav i Gimle, Roskilde. ”Jeg blev accepteret som en pige, ligemand, en del af familien,” siger Tamra om de garvede countrymusikere omkring Jack Clement, som hun lærte at kende for tre-fire årtier siden,” siger Rosanes, der siden har rejst flere gange om året til Nashville. ”Det var fantastisk, fordi jeg følte mig ikke som en flue på væggen, men som en del af dem. Det var det, der var så godt, for så fik jeg noget selvtillid, der gjorde, at jeg kunne komme tilbage til Danmark og vide, at jeg havde kunne præsentere noget countrymusik, der var ægte.” Tamra Rosanes rolle som ambassadør for countrymusik i Danmark er indiskutabel. I dag er der en ganske stor rootsscene her i landet. Og det glæder Tamra. ”Det blomstrer, og det er virkelig, virkelig godt. Okay, ikke for at blære mig, men jeg er amerikaner, så det må man godt … men jeg er også dansker, så jeg skal passe på. Steffen Mørk (Nashville Songwriters Festival) har fortalt nogle af dem fra Nashville om min karriere, og at country er mere accepteret i Danmark nu. Og så har de takket mig.” På det nye album er der sange som Tamras (delvis) egne “A Lot of Honky Tonky to Catch Up On”, “Love Love Love Love Love Love”, “Rusty Old Arrow” og Townes Van Zandts “The Catfish Song”. ”Rusty Old Arrow” er en meget personlig sang. Jeg ville gerne skrive en autobiografisk sang. Jeg tog afsted fra USA som 19-årig og forlod alt, fordi jeg var blevet forelsket i en dansker. Sangen handler om de mange udfordringer, man møder undervejs. Jeg tror, at en af grundene til at jeg kan holde 50 årsjubilæum er, at jeg har optimisme og positivitet.” Efter 12.20 er der et medley med direkte og indirekte bidrag af nogle af de musikere og teknikere, der blev Rosanes mentorer i Nashville. Marty Stuart: The Whiskey ain't Working Cowboy Jack Clement: Beautiful Dreamer John Prine: Sweet Revenge – trommer Kenny Malone U2: Angel of Harlem – lydteknikere Jack Clement og Dave Fergusson Johnny Cash: Would You Lay With Me (On a Field of Stone) – lydteknik Fergusson Lyt til podcasten her:

”Bad cowgirls go everywhere,” synger Tamra Rosanes på sit nye album. Og for nylig lagde hun vejen forbi POV Mediano Musics kontor/studie. Især for at tale om sit nye album, ”New Better Day”, som hun udsender i anledning af sit 50 årsjubilæum som dansk bosiddende kunster – jubilæet fejrer hun i øvrigt med en turné her i sensommeren og efteråret. På ”New Better Day”, der er indspillet på Samsø, i København og Nashville, bevæger den danske first lady of country sig gennem forskellige genrer indenfor countrymusikken. For fire et halvt år siden optog Rosanes og Jan Eriksen en POVCast, der handler om hele hendes dengang 45 år lange karriere. Find den på medianomusic.nu, Soundcloud eller din foretrukne podcast platform. I denne omgang handler det især om New Better Day og Tamras baggrund og virke som countrymusiker. POVcasten sætter fokus på et forholdsvis ufortalt kapitel i hendes karriere og udvikling fra folke- og popmusiker til countrymusiker - de talrige rejser til Nashville. Hvordan hun for godt og vel 35 år siden blev taget under vingerne af en gruppe musikere med udgangspunkt i studiet The Cowboy Arms Hotel And Recording Spa. Det gælder især studieejeren Jack Clement. Bare for at sætte ham i perspektiv, var det ham, der i 1954 inviterede Elvis Presley på scenen i klubben Eagles Nest i Memphis - mindre end en måned efter "That's All Right" var udkommet. En af Elvis allerførste optrædender. Det var Charles Cochran, der bl.a. en periode arbejdede tæt sammen med Neil Young, guitarist m.m. Marty Stuart, trommeslager Kenny Malone, guitarist Chris Leuzinger og lydtekniker Dave Ferguson. Ferguson var blandt meget andet tekniker på og stod for mixning af Johnny Cash American Recordings plader. Bl.a. er der er et nummer, ”Wrong Road Again”, på Tamra Rosanes nye plade, indspillet for godt og vel 30 år siden med Marty Stuart på guitar. Vi taler en smule om den fantastiske koncert, Stuart og band sommeren 2022 gav i Gimle, Roskilde. ”Jeg blev accepteret som en pige, ligemand, en del af familien,” siger Tamra om de garvede countrymusikere omkring Jack Clement, som hun lærte at kende for tre-fire årtier siden," siger Rosanes, der siden har rejst flere gange om året til Nashville. ”Det var fantastisk, fordi jeg følte mig ikke som en flue på væggen, men som en del af dem. Det var det, der var så godt, for så fik jeg noget selvtillid, der gjorde, at jeg kunne komme tilbage til Danmark og vide, at jeg havde kunne præsentere noget countrymusik, der var ægte.” Tamra Rosanes rolle som ambassadør for countrymusik i Danmark er indiskutabel. I dag er der en ganske stor rootsscene her i landet. Og det glæder Tamra. ”Det blomstrer, og det er virkelig, virkelig godt. Okay, ikke for at blære mig, men jeg er amerikaner, så det må man godt … men jeg er også dansker, så jeg skal passe på. Steffen Mørk (Nashville Songwriters Festival) har fortalt nogle af dem fra Nashville om min karriere, og at country er mere accepteret i Danmark nu. Og så har de takket mig.” På det nye album er der sange som Tamras (delvis) egne “A Lot of Honky Tonky to Catch Up On”, “Love Love Love Love Love Love”, “Rusty Old Arrow” og Townes Van Zandts “The Catfish Song". ”Rusty Old Arrow” er en meget personlig sang. Jeg ville gerne skrive en autobiografisk sang. Jeg tog afsted fra USA som 19-årig og forlod alt, fordi jeg var blevet forelsket i en dansker. Sangen handler om de mange udfordringer, man møder undervejs. Jeg tror, at en af grundene til at jeg kan holde 50 årsjubilæum er, at jeg har optimisme og positivitet." Efter 12.20 er der et medley med direkte og indirekte bidrag af nogle af de musikere og teknikere, der blev Rosanes mentorer i Nashville. Marty Stuart: The Whiskey ain't Working Cowboy Jack Clement: Beautiful Dreamer John Prine: Sweet Revenge - trommer Kenny Malone U2: Angel of Harlem - lydteknikere Jack Clement og Dave Fergusson Johnny Cash: Would You Lay With Me (On a Field of Stone) - lydteknik Fergusson

Ugo, Ashy and Danny discuss Nick Evans being named England's attack coach for the Six Nations and whether he can revive their attack in time for the Calcutta Cup at Twickenham. They also discuss Owen Farrell's tackle on Jack Clement, whether rugby should have a January transfer window and Ashy reveals the one Premiership club he's yet to score a try against.

Preview also available on our YouTube channel LEINSTER : 15. Hugo Keenan 14. Jimmy O'Brien 13. Garry Ringrose > CAPTAIN 12. Charlie Ngatai 11. James Lowe 10. Ross Byrne 9. Luke McGrath 1. Andrew Porter 2. Rónan Kelleher 3. Michael Ala'alatoa 4. Ross Molony 5. James Ryan 6. Caelan Doris 7. Josh van der Flier 8. Jack Conan 16. Dan Sheehan 17. Ed Byrne 18. Cian Healy 19. Joe McCarthy 20. Max Deegan 21. Jamison Gibson-Park 22. Johnny Sexton 23. Jordan Larmour Gloucester : 15. Lloyd Evans 14. Alex Hearle 13. Giorgi Kveseladze 12. Billy Twelvetrees 11. Jake Morris 10. George Barton 9. Ben Meehan (C) 1. Harry Ellington 2. Henry Walker 3. Ciaran Knight 4. Freddie Thomas 5. Arthur Clark 6. Jake Polledri 7. Jack Clement 8. Albert Tuisue 16. Seb Blake 17. Alex Seville 18. Kirill Gotovtsev 19. Alex Craig 20. Harry Taylor 21. Charlie Chapman 22. Seb Atkinson 23. Kyle Moyle Heineken Champions Cup 2022/23 Pool A Round 2 Fri Dec 16 KO 8pm RDS Arena Ref: Luc Ramos (France) AR1: Jérémy Rozier (France) AR2: Adrien Descottes (France) TMO: Denis Grenouillet (France) Live on: RTÉ2, BT Sport 1 Our guest TOM COLEMAN https://twitter.com/LeinsterRoyalty Where to find Harpin' On Rugby Website > https://harpinonrugby.com/ Mastodon > @HarpinOnRugby@mastodon.ie Twitter > https://twitter.com/HarpinOnRugby Facebook > https://www.facebook.com/HarpinOnRugby Instagram > https://www.instagram.com/harpinonrugby/ TikTok > https://www.tiktok.com/@harpinonrugby YouTube > https://youtube.com/@HarpinPreviewShow --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/harpinonrugby/message

Charley Pride, Dallas Frazier, A.L. "Doodle" Owens, Chet Atkins, Jack Clement, Bob Ferguson, Felton Jarvis, and me.

Studio engineer Jack Clement, who had discovered Jerry Lee Lewis, was in the control booth and decided to record the session which was the only time that these pop music pioneers would ever record ...

Charley Pride, Jack Clement, Chet Atkins, Bob Ferguson, and me.

The rockabilly and roots guitarist, singer, and bandleader of the Hitmen, O.L.D., and the Blue Vipers has been an intergral part of the New Orleans scene since his arrival in the early ’80s. He’s worked with greats like Alex Chilton, Wayne Bennett, Joe Clay, George the Max, and Dave Turgeon. Tonight Johnny J. Beninati goes on the record with fellow travelers the Troubled Men to illuminate the dark recesses of the rock’n’roll landscape. Topics include a new Troubled Home, Aquarius, the Linda Lindas, self-policing, a horse lover returns, road hazards, curling, Babe Ruth, a first meeting, a working stiff, Bobby Brennan, Ed Sullivan, a contest, hotdog water soup, Jack Clement, Chuck Gwartney, Lalo Schifrin, Murphy “Fluffy” Hines, an Elvis impersonator, a street fight, Dale Hawkins, Radio Shack, Nicky Sanzenbach, Sex Dog, Scott Goudeau, and much more. Intro music: Styler/Coman Break Music: “16 Chicks” from “Louisiana Rockabilly” by Johnny J. and the Hitmen Outro music: “Might As Well Admit It” from “Nuclear Hayride” by Johnny J. and the Hitmen and “4-Legged Lover” from “Nashville Never” by O.L.D. Support the podcast: Paypal or Venmo Join the Patreon page here. Shop for Troubled Men’s Wear here. Subscribe, review, and rate (5 stars) on Apple Podcasts or any podcast source. Follow on social media, share with friends, and spread the Troubled Word. Troubled Men Podcast Facebook Troubled Men Podcast Instagram René Coman Facebook Johnny J Homepage Johnny J. and the Hitmen Facebook Blue Viper Records

With a huge Six Nations weekend upon us, and the top four battle heating up in the Gallagher Premiership. Myself and James give our thoughts and feelings on the up coming fixtures as well as a look at some recent results. We are also joined by Gloucester back row Jack Clement who talks us through how life at Kingsholm is going at the moment.

Johnny Cash, Jack Clement, and Sam Phillips.

Acclaimed actor Dennis Quaid spends the day at Phil's Nashville estate, and the antics are endless! Quaid discusses his “first love” - music - and how he's been able to incorporate it into his acting career. The two bond over the release and emotional benefit that comes from writing songs. Dennis talks about playing Jerry Lee Lewis in “Great Balls of Fire,” where he only had 1 year to learn how to play piano, and was given lessons by Jerry himself. Quaid shares how legendary songwriter Jack Clement coached him in his first music-movie, and performs Jack's hit song, “It'll Be Me.”Performances:“America, I Love You, Too” - Dennis Quaid“It'll Be Me” - Dennis QuaidTo stay up to date with Dennis Quaid, head on over to https://www.dennisquaidandthesharks.comMore info on Songs From The Cellar & details on how to watch the TV series can be found at https://www.songsfromthecellar.comKeep up with Dennis Quaid on Social media at:FacebookFacebook (band)InstagramTwitterSpotify (solo)Spotify (band)Follow Phil Vassar and Songs From The Cellar at:FacebookInstagramTwitterYouTubeSpotifyCheck out more awesome podcasts at:American Songwriter Podcast NetworkAnd go!

Twitter: @podgaverockInsta: @podgaverockTownes Van Zandt 1972 “Pancho and Lefty”  from The Late Great Townes Van Zandt released on Tomato. Written by Townes Van Zandt. Produced by Kevin Eggers and Jack Clement.Personel:Townes Van Zandt acoustic guitar & vocalsJoe Allan – bassJack Clement mandolinVassar Clements – fiddleChuck Cochran – piano keyboards & arrangementsJim Colvard – acoustic guitar, electric guitarRocky Hill– slide guitarKenny Malone -  drumsWillie Nelson and Merle Haggard 1983 " Pancho and Lefty" from Pancho and Lefty released on  Epic. Produced by Chips Moman, Willie Nelson, and Merle Haggard.Personel:Merle Haggard - vocals, guitarWillie Nelson - vocals, guitarLewis Talley – guitarGrady Martin - guitarDon Markham – saxophone, trumpetJohnny Gimble - fiddle, mandolinMickey Raphael -harmonicaReggie Young - guitarChips Moman - guitarJohnny Christopher – guitarBobby Emmons - keyboardsBobby Wood – keyboardsMike Leech – bassGene Chrisman – drumsCover:Performed by Josh Bond and Jonathan HortonIntro Music:"Shithouse" 2010 release from "A Collection of Songs for the Kings". Writer Josh Bond. Produced by Frank Charlton.Other Artists Mentioned:Jimi HendrixMichael JacksonThe Rolling StonesKeith RichardsJim MorrisonVan MorrisonThe Last WaltzGuns n RosesAxl RoseMick JaggerJimi PageElvisJohnny CashBob Dylan “Rolling Thunder Revue”John MaherStevie Ray Vaughn The Grateful DeadLittle RichardJames BrownPrince    The Drifters “Under the Boardwalk”Townes Van Zandt “Dead Flowers”The Big LebowskiSantana   Waylon JenningsBon Jovi “Living on a Prayer”Frances McDormandNomadlandBob Dylan “All Along the Watchtower”UnforgivenSteve JobsBill GatesHewlett PackardThe Beatles “Rocky Raccoon”Leonard CohenHank Williams, Sr.WilcoKings of LeonSon VoltPatty GriffinSteve EarleGillian WelchJason IsbellFather John MistyAngel OlsenDierks BentleyLuke BryanEmmylou HarridsTownes Van Zandt “Rearview Mirror”Freddie FenderElizabeth CookeFrank TurnerDwayne MesserTennessee JetErnest TubTownes Van Zandt “Frauline”Townes Van Zandt “For the Sake of the Song”Townes Van Zandt “If I Needed You”

This is a clip from a 1992 phone interview I did with Sam Phillips, founder of Sun Records, and one of the founding fathers of rock 'n' roll. The interview, plus two more, and comments from the likes of Bono, Jack Clement and Dory Previn, are in my new eBook Elvis, Sam Phillips and Sun Records Revisited. But here we address a new rumour that had begun to circulate, courtesy of British journalist Roy Carr, who suggested that Elvis was not 'discovered' making a demo record at Sun. He had been peddling "for free" his mother amphetamines to black musicians, he was so eager to be discovered.  At the time I thought the rumour was "bull" and I say so in this podcast. But the man who was there at the time was Sam!

El año 2020 sigue sin dar tregua y ahora nos ha tocado perder a Charley Pride debido a complicaciones relacionadas con el Covid-19. Un artista que creció escuchando a algunos de los grandes maestros como Ernest Tubb, Eddy Arnold, Hank Williams y George Jones. Desarrolló un estilo propio partiendo de ellos e incluyó también a otros de sus favoritos como Sam Cooke, B.B. King o Brook Benton. Y es que Charley Pride siempre entendió que la música americana se construye desde el country, el gospel y el blues. “All I Have to Offer You (Is Me)” es canción de Dallas Frazier y "Doodle" Owens sobre cómo un hombre le cuenta a su novia que no es un hombre rico pero que quiere casarse con ella refleja a la perfección lo que fue el llamado Nashville Sound gracias a la producción de Jack Clement y Chet Atkins. Charley Pride hizo historia con ella al convenirse en 1969 en el primer artista negro que lograba el No.1 de las listas de música country desde que Louis Jordan lo hubiera conseguido en el 44. Es muy posible que la canción más recordada de Charley Pride sea "Is Anybody Goin' To San Antone?", que alcanzó la cima de las listas de country en Abril de 1970. A costa de un malentendido entre la editorial y los compositores -Glenn Martin y Dave Kirby-, el tema había sido grabado y publicado por Bake Turner, jugador del equipo de fútbol americano de los Jets de New York. Pride intento encontrar otros singles para sustituirlo, pero la grabación había quedado tan perfecta como acabamos de escuchar y decidieron editarla.  Nacido en Sledge, en el estado de Mississippi, en 1934, nada fue fácil para él y su nombre estuvo en el centro que muchas polémicas que no buscó. Por ejemplo, dos días después del asesinato de Martin Luther King, el Grand Ole Opry canceló por primera vez en su historia un show -precisamente en el que iba a intervenir Charley Pride- alegando tensiones raciales. Casi siempre tenía que enfrentarse a los prejuicios y es que era negro. Recogió algodón, tuvo que jugar en las Negro leagues de béisbol pero no tuvo ningún problema para servir en el ejército. La calidez de la voz de Charley Pride era perfecta para las emisoras de radio de Onda Media de los 70 y RCA, el sello por el que firmó gracias a Jack D. Johnson, relaciones públicas de la editorial Cedarwood, supo aprovecharlo con creces. Incluso sus envíos promocionales no incluían la habitual biografía y mucho menos fotos. También nació en Mississippi Ben Peters, el compositor de “Kiss An Angel Good Mornin’”, una canción que se convirtió en un emblema de lo acogedor de su fraseo y de su sentido del humor.  El mes pasado, Charley Pride fue galardonado con el Willie Nelson Lifetime Achievement Award y actuó en aquella gala de la CMA junto a Jimmie Allen. Con él y Darius Rucker había grabado por última vez "Why Things Happen", un tema que se publicó un mes y medio después de la muerte de George Floyd, que provocó el movimiento Black Lives Matter. Era la fusión de tres generaciones de músicos negros de la escena de la country music compartiendo un sentimiento de angustia con estrofas como "Intentas no cuestionar a Dios ni a su juicio/Pero, maldita sea, no lo entiendo". Nunca olvidamos a Willie Nelson, y la leyenda viviente del Lone Star Stage vuelve a la actualidad cuando acaban de cumplirse 105 años del nacimiento de Frank Sinatra. El artista tejano tiene prevista la edición de un nuevo álbum dedicado a su figura y su música para finales del próximo mes de febrero del esperado 2021. Será su segundo proyecto con el “viejo de los ojos azules” como protagonista tras la publicación de My Way hace dos años y con el que consiguió un Grammy. Esta vez su título será That’s Life y ha sido grabado fundamentalmente en los Capitol Studios, los mismos que utilizó el legendario artista de Hoboken, en Nueva Jersey, para dar vida a buena parte de sus piezas maestras. Una de las 11 canciones que conformarán ese disco es “Cottage For Sale”, que utiliza la metáfora de una cabaña vacía para contar el final de una relación fallida. Sinatra la incluyó en su LP No One Cares del 59, posiblemente uno de los más oscuros de su discografía, llena de melancolía y soledad.  La semana pasada escuchábamos el homenaje que se rindió a Willie y que ahora se edita en CD y DVD. Uno de sus grandes amigos, Merle Haggard, fue homenajeado con motivo del que hubiera sido su cumpleaños número 80 y era, triste coincidencia, el primer aniversario de su muerte. En el Bridgestone Arena de Nashville estuvieron el propio Willie, Keith Richards, John Mellencamp, Sheryl Crow, Loretta Lynn, Billy Gibbons, Lucinda Williams, Lynyrd Skynyrd, entre otros muchos. Dierks Bentley eligió “If We Make It Through December”, que hace ya 47 años formó parte de Merle Haggard's Christmas Present (Something Old, Something New). La mitad estaba grabada con los Strangers y el resto con Billy Walker And His Orchestra. Extraída como single de aquel trabajo, "If We Make It Through December" ha pasado a formar parte de los clásicos navideños de siempre. El respeto infinito de los Avett Brothers a Merle Haggard se hace patente en su versión de “Mama Tried”, uno de los grandes clásicos del inigualable músico californiano, que junto a Buck Owens representó la más clara alternativa al monopolio de Nashville mediante el llamado Backersfield Sound. "Mama Tried" se incluyó en la banda sonora de la película Killers Three que protagonizaron Broderick Crawford, Robert Wagner, Diana Varsi y el propio Merle Haggard. En aquellas canciones había mucho de folk, pero con una exquisita elaboración y una acusada sección rítmica. Los Strangers, la formación que respaldaba a Haggard, era uno de los grupos de referencia del momento y dejaron su impronta de cara al futuro. Merle Haggard y Sturgill Simpson se hicieron buenos amigos en los últimos años de vida de la leyenda californiana y hablaban mucho por teléfono. La letra de “Hobo Cartoon” la compuso Merle estando ya en el hospital y se la envió con una nota que decía “de un ferroviario a otro”, recordando que él había crecido en un vagón convertido en casa por un padre que trabajaba para el ferrocarril y saltaba de uno a otro tren de carga siendo niño. Sturgill, que trabajó en la Union Pacific, completó la música durante las sesiones de Cuttin Grass y se la enseñó a la viuda Theresa y a su hijo Ben. Por fin, “Hobo Cartoon” se ha convertido en el tema de cierre de este nuevo álbum, el segundo de los que ha publicado en 2020. Sturgill Simpson ha guardado sus canciones más personales para Cuttin' Grass - Vol. 2 (Cowboy Arms Sessions) que ha grabado en el mítico Cowboy Arms Hotel and Recording Spa, el estudio de “Cowboy” Jack Clement en Nashville, que ha sobrevivido a la muerte de su propio mentor y al terrible incendio de hace unos años, junto al productor David Ferguson y los Hillbilly Avengers, el mismo grupo de instrumentistas del primer volumen. El disco se editará en vinilo en abril y a diferencia del anterior, el músico de Kentucky ha incluido dos canciones inéditas. Una de ellas es “Tennessee”, llena de melancolía y grabada por primera vez, aunque se conociera de algunas apariciones con Sunday Valley hace ocho años. En 1988, Guy Clark publicó en el sello Sugar Hill su álbum Old Friends, al que abría y daba título una extraordinaria composición junto a su mujer Susanna y a Richard Dobson. Steve Earle hizo una gran versión el año pasado en Guy, el disco que dedicó a su mentor, y ahora ha sido Chris Stapleton quien se ha recreado junto a su mujer Morgane en esta pieza maestra, una de las dos elegidas para formar parte de su último proyecto, Startin’ Over. Si hablamos del Dirty Old One-Man Band estamos hablando de Scott H. Biram, uno de los más apabullantes músicos tejanos, inquieto hasta límites insospechados y con una capacidad extrema para sorprendernos a cada paso. Es una especie de predicador que hace magia con sus historias, como ahora ocurre en Fever Dreams, el álbum que cumple la docena de discos publicados y que ha grabado entre 2017 y 2019 en su estudio de Austin. Como no podía ser de otra forma, el Reverendo Biram ofrece el más amplio muestrario de su visión del mundo, desnudando sus impresiones de un mundo cargado de nostalgia, amores perdidos o almas solitarias. Todo ello está envuelto en sonidos enraizados que les llevan hasta el truckin’ country de “Can’t Stay Long”.  Otro de los ejemplos de la supervivencia en la escena de la country music es el de Aaron Watson, también tejano y que ha seguido trabajando en nuevos proyectos en plena pandemia. Así ha llegado "Silverado Saturday Night", donde se añoran las fiestas al aire libre y los espacios abiertos y compartidos. Será una de las canciones que formarán parte de su próximo álbum, previsto para 2021. Lo que sabemos es que, sin perder el sonido tradicional de sus grabaciones, el artista de Amarillo tiene previsto que su nuevo trabajo sea accesible a una audiencia más amplia. La última apuesta de John Prine fue Arlo McKinley y él mismo decidió que debía pasar a formar parte de su sello discográfico, Oh Boy Records. El músico de Ohio ha debutado con Die Midwestern y para ello se fue hasta Memphis y se dejó acompañar por músicos como Ken Coomer , Rick Steff y Reba Russell. El resultado es un registro equilibrado entre el country y folk para contar historias como las que siempre cantaron los grandes clásicos, aunque el arrope sonoro es mucho más cercano en el tiempo. Así ocurre con “She’s Always Been Around”, un tema de honky tonk de carretera con la jukebox encendida que hubiera interpretado George Jones con sumo gusto. Hace tres años, en su octavo álbum, Kids in the Street, Justin Townes Earle parecía dispuesto a poner al día las esencias de la música folk para que fueran más atractivas a las nuevas generaciones. Para ello trabajó con Mike Mogis e incorporando un sonido más moderno a unos textos clarividentes e imaginativos. Incluso salió de Nashville, su ciudad natal y donde había grabado hasta entonces. Abriendo aquel registro que cerraba la trilogía que anticiparon Single Mothers y Absent Fathers estaba “Champagne Corolla”, una canción enérgica que ahora, cuando su padre, Steve Earle, la ha incluido en J.T., el álbum que ha dedicado a la memoria de su hijo fallecido, goza de un ambiente más pantanoso que el original. Escuchar audio

Hoy empezamos el tiempo de TOMA UNO fundiendo hard rock y bluegrass. Y es que tras una larga lucha contra el cáncer, hemos pedido también a Eddie Van Halen a los 65 años. Revolucionario de la guitarra, el músico holandés nacido en Nijmegen emigró a Estados Unidos con su familia a los ocho años y se asentó en Pasadena, California. A dúo con su hermano Alex formó una serie de grupos en los comienzos de la década de los 70 hasta que se cruzaron con el carismático David Lee Roth. La incorporación de Michael Anthony completó un cuarteto mítico como Van Halen. El único single de la banda que llegó al No. 1 de las listas fue “Jump”, extraído de su álbum 1984. Fue la canción que provocó fuertes tensiones entre los dos pesos pesados del grupo, Eddie Van Halen y David Lee Roth, culminando con la salida de este último del grupo. Lo curioso es que Roth recuperaría en 2006 la mítica canción en esta versión de bluegrass para su álbum Strummin' With the Devil: The Southern Side Of Van Halen, todo un homenaje al legendario grupo, en el que intervenían los más diversos invitados del género, entre ellos la John Jorgenson Bluegrass Band. El tejano Zane Williams, con siete discos en solitario y una veneración secular en la escena del Lone Star State, se refugió en una especie de supergrupo que tomó el primitivo nombre de Hill Country. Hay buena química y una variedad de formas que abarcan rock clásico, bluegrass, country y folk con unas armonías vocales como arma secreta. El viernes 2 de octubre las redes sociales de Hill Country colgaban un mensaje en el que informaban que pasaban a llamarse The Wilder Blue. Nuevo nombre, debido a un problema de marca registrada, pero la misma formación y los mismos argumentos sonoros. Su paseo por la montaña en “Evergreen” es uno de los momentos mágicos del cálido trabajo que les sirvió de debut. Por otro lado, Hill Country Revival se formó como grupo hace tres años en 2017 y muy pronto se han ido ganando una seria reputación en la escena de la Red Dirt music, aunando elementos de country, blues y folk, y entre los seguidores del Southern rock. Este quinteto que integran músicos de Montana, Georgia y Texas, se ha asentado en el Lone Star State recorriendo el circuito central de Texas, con paradas en el norte de Austin y el centro de San Antonio. Hill Country Revival tiene en el vocalista CJ Simmons la base de un sonido distintivo que se refleja en canciones como “Silver Fox”, anticipo de su álbum de debut. El country de los buenos tiempos lleva al recuerdo de las formas de Merle Haggard y los Strangers de la mano de Zephaniah OHora con un segundo álbum titulado Listening To The Music que incide en las enseñanzas del legendario artista de Bakersfield desde su tema de apertura, “Heaven’s On The Way”. Para este nuevo disco que da continuidad a This Highway, su debut de hace tres años, ha contado con la producción del desaparecido Neal Casal en abril de 2019. Zephaniah grabó este trabajo en The Bunker de Brooklyn, NY, a donde se mudó desde su natal New Hampshire para conseguir trabajo en el popular Skinny Dennis de Brooklyn, un bar que debe su nombre al que fuera bajista de Guy Clark. De esta forma, reivindica que la country music puede hacerse en cualquier lugar. El más reciente EP de Kurt Vile, Speed, Sound, Lonely KV (ep), se ha venido completando a lo largo de cuatro años en The Butcher Shoppe Studio de Nashville. Son cinco canciones, con dos versiones de John Prine y una de “Cowboy” Jack Clement además de dos temas originales del músico de Pennsylvania. A comienzos de año se editará físicamente en vinilo rosa y CD. Hoy hemos querido recrearnos con una versión de “Speed Of The Sound Of Loneliness”, una canción inundada de una melancolía casi enfermiza por un amor perdido, que el legendario artista tristemente desaparecido a cuenta del Covid-19 incluyó en su álbum German Afternoons. Nuestros amigos de Track Dogs tienen en Fire On The Rails su cuarto álbum como grupo. Su nombre tiene que ver con los equipos de mantenimiento del metro de Nueva York, y su sonido reúne una enorme diversidad de fuentes, tal y como persiste en el término Americana, referida también a “Las Américas”. El último de los singles que acaban de extraer de ese trabajo cuenta con la especial colaboración de Ashley Campbell, hija del legendario Glenn Campbell, que incorpora su banjo en “Don’t Delay”, del que han lanzado un vídeo grabado desde los hogares de cada uno, incluyendo a la artista de Phoenix, Arizona. Ashley Campbell es la más joven de los ocho hijos que tuvo el mítico Glen Campbell. Hace dos años vino a nuestro país, pero ni tuvo el eco que merecía ni su álbum de entonces, The Lonely One, era la mejor tarjeta de presentación. Ahora es muy diferente. Su música es una mezcla de sus amplias influencias, combinando el sonido del country de la vieja escuela popularizado por su padre durante los años 60 y 70 con la Americana music contemporánea y las raíces más tradicionales. Eso se pone de manifiesto de forma evidente en Something Lovely, un álbum compacto y mucho más maduro en el que encontramos canciones tan deliciosas como “Moonlight”, que cierra el trabajo. "In The Name Of God" es una de las canciones más potentes del nuevo EP de los Mastersosns, Red, White & I Love You Too. Resulta ser una condena formal y conmovedora del estado actual del mundo, aunque fuera compuesta hace un par de años. Tristemente, la situación política ha empeorado. Durante la gira Lampedusa: Concert for Refugees que realizaron en 2018 en apoyo a los refugiados, fueron conscientes de la situación de las personas que se ven obligadas a abandonar sus tierras para huir de la violencia. Los mensajes de miedo y odio que se han difundido por parte de administraciones como la estadounidense les impulsaron a escribir canciones como “In The Name of God”. En estas fechas, Chris Masterson y Eleanor Whitmore están trabajando con Steve Earle en un álbum de homenaje a Justin Townes Earle, hijo de Steve, fallecido el pasado 20 de agosto. Durante las dos últimas décadas quienes han asistido a conciertos de Sunny Sweeney, Eliza Gilkyson, Jimmie Dale Gilmore o Butch Hancock se habrán fijado en una bajista llamada Bonnie Whitmore que también posee una voz especial. Es la hermana pequeña de Eleanor de los Mastersons, residente en Austin y habitual de la legendaria Continental Club Gallery de la ciudad tejana. Para grabar su álbum Last Will & Testament quiso tener cerca a su banda, The Sad Girls, y se refugió en el Ramble Creek Studio de la capital del mundo de la música en directo para completar un disco que no rehuye ninguno de los temas del momento, desde la ruptura al suicidio, pasando por esa “cultura” de la violación y la gran división de su país. Su idea es que hablar de todo ello deje de ser tabú y que podamos encontrar algo de consuelo y de paz. Dentro de este trabajo muy recomendable hay algún respiro emocional como ocurre en "Fine", compuesto junto a Jaimee Harris, y hablando sobre las vicisitudes de las relaciones. A sus 74 años, Linda Ronstadt ha unido un nuevo premio a su vasta colección. Aunque este es claramente especial. En la trigésimo tercera entrega anual de los Premios de la Herencia Hispana, recibió el de “leyenda”. La ceremonia se transmitió el martes por la noche a través de PBS, la cadena de televisión pública de Estados Unidos. Cuando Linda dejó la Universidad de Arizona tras el primer trimestre, fue para unirse al guitarrista Bob Kimmel, con quién ya había actuado junto a sus hermanos con el nombre de los Three Ronstadts en clubs locales. Ese recuerdo estuvo presente en el álbum Más Canciones de 1991, cuando Linda interpretó “El Camino” junto a sus dos hermanos Pete, que era por entonces jefe de policía en Tucson, Arizona, y Mike, que regentaba una tienda de hardware informático. No olvidemos que su padre era mejicano. Gilbert, cantaba con ella y sus otros dos hijos canciones de su tierra natal en los pocos ratos de ocio que les permitía la ferretería que regentaban. Linda nunca olvidó aquellas raíces, no tal solo en los distintos álbumes dedicados íntegramente a canciones hispanas, sino a lo largo de toda su carrera. La fusión del alma musical de dos países, Irlanda y México, dieron vida a un álbum tan conmovedor como San Patricio, la última colaboración entre los irlandeses Chieftains, que lidera Paddy Moloney, y el multi-instrumentista y cantautor Ry Cooder. Su título tiene que ver con la leyenda del batallón de San Patricio, un grupo de inmigrantes irlandeses que desertó del ejército estadounidense en 1846 para pelear al lado de los mexicanos contra los invasores yankees en la guerra entre México y Estados Unidos que duró hasta 1848. Fueron tildados de traidores por unos y de héroes por otros. Ahí estaba Linda Ronstadt con un tradicional como “A la orilla de un palmar”. Tras el éxito del documental Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice, que recorría la carrera de la artista de Arizona, próximamente se estrenará Linda and the Mockingbirds, un documental sobre su viaje a México con un grupo de estudiantes el pasado 2019. Los canadienses Ian & Sylvia son parte de la quinta esencia del folk de aquel país, junto a su buen amigo Gordon Lightfoot. Ian Tyson y Sylvia Fricker se encontraron en su Canadá natal en 1960 y empezaron a actuar juntos muy pronto. Un par de años después vivían en Nueva York, donde llamaron la atención de Albert Grossman, que después se convertiría en el manager de Bob Dylan. A finales del 1962 lanzaron el primero de sus álbumes, Four Strong Winds, que estaba lleno de canciones tradicionales, exceptuando una versión impecable de “Tomorrow Is A Long Time” de Dylan y este tema propio que le daba nombre y que FolkAlley eligió como novena canción folk de todos los tiempos. Escuchar audio

#Fizt20 2️⃣0️⃣ Algunas curiosidades entorno al número 20, el mínimo número de movimientos para resolver el cubo Rubik. Os hablamos de nuestra incapacidad para resolver el mítico cubo y de la frustración y traumas varios que eso provocó en nuestra adolescencia. Por otra parte, os deseamos que el otoño no os pille en pantalones cortos. Comenzamos nuestra selección musical con elegancia, nos ponemos americana blanca, pajarita, y nos tomamos un dry Martini para escuchar a The Saxophones, un dúo de Oakland, marido y mujer, que hace una música con mucha influencia de los 50, una voz peculiar que recuerda a Tindersticks. Compartimos su canción “Picture” de su disco de 2018, “Songs of the saxophones”. Seguimos con Tunng, una banda inglesa con una larga trayectoria que combina el folk con la electrónica. Estos días presentan su nuevo single “Death is the new sex”, su intención es acabar con los tabúes que hay entorno a la muerte, hablando con naturalidad sobre el tema, buscando que se normalice de igual manera a lo que ocurrió con el sexo, un tema que también fue tabú en su momento. La banda ha sacado un podcast en el que profundiza en el tema The Dead Club Podcast. A continuación, suena “The River Nile” de Eddie Harris, un músico de jazz, que alcanzó el éxito con la versión jazz de la banda sonora de “Exodus”. Destacó como un innovador que le gustaba experimentar con nuevos instrumentos de su propia invención. También comenzó a cantar y a realizar números cómicos. Os recomendamos “I Need Some Money” un disco de 1974, en especial "Don't Want Nobody", una canción de doce minutos, con toques humorísticos en la cual se deja llevar por su afán de experimentación musical. Ha sido un gran año para Porridge Radio, el grupo de Brighton liderado por Dana Margolin; en marzo lanzaron su disco “Every Bad”, que ha tenido un gran recibimiento y ha supuesto su nominación a los Mercury Prize. Pero la banda no se duerme en los laureles y acaba de sacar “7 seconds”, un tema muy bailable y que rompe con lo que habían hecho hasta la fecha. Por otra parte, os desvelamos los secretos del Porridge, un desayuno saludable típicamente inglés con mucha avena. Pinchamos la colaboración entre Kurt Vile y el legendario John Prine, recientemente desaparecido por la COVID. Cantan a dos voces “How Lucky”, un tema de Prine. El tema formará parte del EP “Speed, Sound, Lonely KV”, que se publica el 2 de octubre, vendrá con cinco canciones, dos de ellas originales y el resto versiones de artistas del propio John Prine o Jack Clement. Cerramos la selección con “Fire” de los Black Pumas, una banda de soul psicodélico de Austin, Texas. Formada por el cantante Eric Burton y el guitarrista y productor Adrian Quesada. Un productor que encontró la voz que buscaba para su proyecto en un cantante fogueado en las calles donde actuaba a cambio de unos cuantos dólares. Se reedita ahora su disco con un montón de extras y versiones. ▶️43:44 La película de esta semana “Retrato de una mujer en llamas” (Portrait de la jeune fille en feu) de 2019 escrita y dirigida por Céline Sciamma. Una directora con cuatro películas en su haber, las tres primeras centradas en chicas adolescentes o preadolescentes y en su paso a la madurez y el descubrimiento de su identidad sexual durante este periodo de crecimiento. Premios y reconocimientos avalan la trayectoria de esta joven directora. “Retrato de una mujer en llamas” supuso su despegue internacional, entre los numerosos galardones recibido por la cinta destaca el premio al mejor guion en el Festival de Cannes. Una poética historia de amor imposible, una película que a pesar de ser de época se muestra minimalista y desnuda. La idea romántica de atrapar nuestra esencia en un retrato, de robar parte de nuestra libertad. El vinculo que se establece entre el pintor y la modelo ha sido ampliamente tratado en el cine, pero lo novedoso en esta ocasión es que quien pinta es una mujer al igual que quien posa. Un juego de espejos y miradas. Pintar de alguna manera es poseer al retratado. El fuego como una metáfora de la pasión que va surgiendo entre los dos personajes. La representación machista de la mujer a lo largo de la historia del arte occidental. Una comunidad de mujeres que intenta ayudarse entre sí. Los escasos reductos de libertad femenina en los márgenes de la sociedad. Las mujeres pintoras una rareza en un mundo en el que a la mujer no se le enseñaba ningún oficio que pudiera proporcionarle autonomía económica. Como Orfeo y Eurídice, la historia de un amor imposible…

Devon Allman y Duane Betts son la base vital de la Allman Betts Band, cuyos sonidos afilados reflejan la herencia de dos de los mejores músicos de Southern Rock, Gregg Allman y Dickey Betts personificada en sus hijos, que decidieron unir fuerzas tras un concierto de homenaje a Gregg un año después de su muerte en Phoenix. A la aventura también se unió bajista Berry Oakley Jr. — hijo de Berry Oakley, el que fuera miembro de The Allman Brothers Band. El año pasado debutaron con Down to the River y ahora anticipan un segundo registro gracias a “Magnolia Road”, que evoca los sonidos de sus padres respectivos. Procedentes del sur de California, Robert Jon & The Wreck está formada por cinco músicos veteranos músicos que un día decidieron unir sus fuerzas para crear un sonido propio como resultado de enredar el rock más clásico y el southern rock con la frescura del punk californiano. Hace cinco años apareció Glory Bound, su primer larga duración, tras debutar en 2013 con un EP titulado Rhythm Of The Road. El carisma de Robert Jon & The Wreck, la enorme calidad de sus canciones y la energía de sus directos, les hicieron crecer rápidamente y conseguir la tutela de Rival Sons, con quienes terminan compartiendo gira y a los que les une una gran amistad. Su nuevo trabajo es Last Light On The Highway, con mucho de blues, rock y soul pasados por el filtro del Orange County californiano y canciones tan motivadoras como “Do You Remember”. Ross Cooper llegó a Nashville tras abandonar los circuitos del rodeo y empezó a combinar de forma natural country y folk para completar un par de álbumes muy recomendables que ahora tendrán continuación con Chasing Old Highs, su tercer disco de estudio. Tejano de Lubbock y a medio camino entre Sam Outlaw y Ryan Adams, Ross Cooper cabalga, nunca mejor dicho, entre el regusto por la tradición de su estado y los nuevos paisajes sonoros de la country music como ha demostrado componiendo temas que han grabado Randy Rogers, Wade Bowen y William Clark Green, entre otros. Chasing Old Highs sigue la temática de su trabajo anterior, pero continúa ampliando horizontes. Además, su guitarra Gibson J-50, regalo de un amigo de la familia fallecido, ha tomado un papel protagonista en la construcción sonora del álbum. Hay canciones como “Hello Sunshine”, que abre el álbum, que traen a la memoria sonidos propios de John Hartford o Roger Miller y que dejan un mensaje de positividad sobre cómo los días no son inútiles aunque a veces no sean felices. Corb Lund tiene un nuevo álbum titulado Agricultural Tragic. Es un proyecto para honrar el pasado, compartiendo las lecciones aprendidas y las historias escuchadas en su rancho familiar en la provincia canadiense de Alberta, donde nació. Su personalidad artística siempre le ha derivado a publicar canciones que mezclan sus orígenes rurales y los nuevos tiempos. Compuesta junto a la cantautora Jaida Dreyer, "Never Not Had Horses" pasó de ser una tonalidad divertida de principio a terminar convirtiéndose en un lamento por la pérdida y la desesperación. Tiene que ver con el dicho popular de tener demasiados caballos y poco dinero y trata de aferrarse a pequeños hilos de esperanza. Como viene ocurriendo en los últimos tiempos, las nuevas canciones visitan muchos más paisajes reales de y se acercan a un estilo de vida agrícola y rural, al margen de los estereotipos, tantas veces irreales. Dale Watson se acogió al término Ameripolitan para diferenciarse de la industria de Nashville, como un rebelde de la country music, mezclando Outlaw Country, rockabilly, honky-tonk e incluso Western swing. Nacido en Alabama y criado en Texas, la constancia ha sido una de las características de su personalidad hasta convertirse en un músico con tintes de leyenda. Un verdadero forajido. Lo último que hemos conocido de él es esta versión a "Chevy Van", una canción de Sammy Johns, que compuso y cantó en 1973 junto a los miembros de la la mítica Wrecking Crew de Los Angeles. La canción detalla el encuentro fugaz de una pareja en la parte trasera de una Chevrolet Van. En First Rose of Spring, el último álbum de Willie Nelson, no hay demasiadas referencias al paso del tiempo, como había sido costumbre en sus últimos trabajos, ni tantas canciones propias. Tan solo ha compuesto dos temas junto a su viejo amigo y productor Buddy Cannon, y uno de ellos es “Blue Star”. Es una canción de amor donde él promete a su pareja que se encontrarán nuevamente en el cielo. Será “la estrella azul a la derecha”. Willie impone su impacto emocional con una voz entregada que se arropa en su legendaria guitarra Trigger, provocando una sensación relajante de abrazo cálido y seguro. Johnny Cash regresa a la actualidad con la recuperación de sus álbumes grabado en el sello Mercury en la segunda mitad de los años 80. Columbia Records decidió no contar con él y el legendario Hombre de Negro se marchó a mediados de 1986. Pero Mercury Records decidió firmarle un contrato y aquella relación duró cinco años y dejó para la historia seis álbumes. Ahora se edita The Complete Mercury Recordings 1986-1991, una caja de siete discos y el recopilatorio Easy Rider: The Best of the Mercury Recordings, con 24 de aquellos temas. Todos ellos han sido remasterizados de las cintas originales. La versión en CD incluye varias pistas inéditas e incluso un disco adicional de mezclas primitivas de las 20 canciones de su álbum, Classic Cash: Hall of Fame Series. Por supuesto una colección así no podíamos dejarla pasar por alto. Chips Moman fue el productor de Class of ’55: Memphis Rock & Roll Homecoming, un disco grabado conjuntamente por Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis y Roy Orbison recordando sus comienzos en Sun Records durante los 50. En cierta forma, también era un homenaje a su antiguo compañero en el sello Elvis Presley. El disco fue grabado en los Sun Studios y culminado en los American Sound Studios, ambos localizados en Memphis, en tan solo cuatro jornadas de septiembre de 1985. Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins y Jerry Lee Lewis había colaborado juntos previamente en un par de ocasiones. El 1956 fueron protagonista junto a Elvis Presley del mítico Million Dollar Quartet y en 1982 publicaron a trío The Survivors grabado en vivo en Alemania. Johnny Cash fue solista en un par de temas de Class of ’55: Memphis Rock & Roll Homecoming, “We Remember the King” de Paul Kennerly y “I Will Rock and Roll with You”, un tema propio en el que se dejaba acompañar por un cuarteto de metal. Había problemas legales con el Hombre de Negro, ya que aún tenía contrato con Columbia. De tal forma que Chips Moman tuvo que pagar 100.000 dólares a la compañía por el permiso de grabación. Johnny Cash firmó con Mercury muy poco después. Johnny Cash siempre supo rodearse de grandes amigos y en, Johnny Cash Is Coming To Town, su debut en solitario para Mercury en 1987, no dejó de hacerlo. Se puso en manos de "Cowboy" Jack Clement para el trabajo de producción y se reunió con sus artistas más cercanos y familiares como June, Anita, Helen y Carlene Carter, su entonces yerno Marty Stuart y su compañero Waylon Jennings. Con este último cantó “The Night Hank Williams Came to Town”, que fue el único single extraído. Era una canción compuesta por Bobby Braddock, autor de algunos de los mayores éxitos para George Jones y Tammy Wynette, y Charlie Williams, que hizo la locución final. El tema describe la visita de Hank Williams a una pequeña ciudad para dar un concierto en 1951, con Harry Truman de presidente. En el año 1988, Johnny Cash lanzaba el álbum Water From The Wells Of Home, una vez más producido por Jack Clement, con un buen número de colaboraciones con otros artistas, algunas especialmente brillantes, y que abarcaban desde su hija Rosanne, su hijo John, Glen Campbell, Jessi Colter, los Everly Brothers, Tom T. Hall, Waylon Jennings, Hank Williams, Jr., y Paul y Linda McCartney y Emmylou Harris, con quien interpretó un tema del legendario Roy Acuff como “As Long As I Live", en el que encontramos a Waylon, su mujer Jessi y al propio Roy Acuff en los coros. Publicado en formato de doble Lp coincidiendo con el Record Store Day, Classic Cash: Hall of Fame (Early Mixes) es uno de los regalos de esta caja de siete CDs del Hombre de Negro. Contiene las mezclas originales de las 20 canciones que conformaron en 1988 el álbum Classic Cash: Hall of Fame Series y cuyas cintas fueron descubiertas recientemente en los archivos de Mercury. Johnny Cash decidió grabar de nuevo temas emblemáticos de sus años en Sun y Columbia aprovechando las nuevas técnicas de producción, algo que no terminó de contentar a ciertos puristas, aunque el guitarrista Bob Wootton y el batería W.S. Holland seguían a su lado. Entre aquellos viejos éxitos resucitados se encontraba “Sunday Morning Coming Down”, que este pasado viernes cumplió medio siglo desde que fue grabada por primera vez. Era el 10 de Julio de 1970. Estaba escrita por Kris Kristofferson, a quien conoció en los estudios de Columbia un año antes y al que introdujo en los círculos musicales. En 1990 apareció en el mercado Boom Chicka Boom, cuyo título hacía referencia al sonido de los Tennessee Three, la banda de acompañamiento de Johnny Cash. En este caso, se han añadido seis cortes con cuatro primitivas versiones de otros tantos temas y dos canciones que se publicaron como caras B de un par de singles. Entre lo más destacado encontramos “Hidden Shame”, una canción que Elvis Costello compuso expresamente para el veterano artista. Costello ya había visto como uno de los temas de su álbum King of America, "The Big Light", sirvió de apertura tres años antes en Johnny Cash Is Coming to Town. Con el regreso de “Cowboy” Clement a la producción, The Mystery of Life fue el último disco de Johnny Cash para Mercury y, lo cierto, es que no se esforzó demasiado. El artista ya había iniciado la aventura de los Highwayman con Waylon, Willie y Kristofferson y este disco contenía temas de algunas sesiones de grabación muy recientes y de sobras de su primer disco en la compañía, en 1986, Johnny Cash is Coming to Town. The Mystery of Life fue el último disco de estudio en el que participó el mítico batería W.S. Holland, bien conocido como "Fluke", aunque siguió acompañándole en los conciertos. Aquel disco lo cerraba la versión larga de “The Wanderer” que aparecería en la banda sonora de la película de Wim Wenders Faraway, So Close! con Johnny Cash y U2. El cuarteto británico la incluiría en su álbum Zooropa del 94. Menos mal que tres años después comenzaron los American Recordings. En cualquier caso, el Hombre de Negro casi nunca defrauda y al margen de volver a grabar “Hey Porter” y “Wanted Man” de sus años en Sun y Columbia, nos dejó “I’ll Go Somewhere and Sing My Songs Again” con Tom T. Hall. Escuchar audio

Jerry Lee Lewis And Friends - Save The Last Dance For Me (1978) Jerry Lee Lewis And Friends - Sweet Little Sixteen (1978) Jerry Lee Lewis And Friends - I Love You Because (1978) From Discogs: A very weird, and weirdly entertaining, curiosity of an album. The liner notes simply say that the sessions that produced these tracks are "clouded in mystery," with the result that Lewis's lone duet partner on these tracks is never actually identified. Whoever he is, let's just say that he could make a very good living as an Elvis impersonator, and probably does. Let's also say that it's more than possible that his vocals were added years (if not decades) after the original sessions, which sound as if they derive from the early '60s, just before Lewis left Sun Records. Personnel: Jerry Lee Lewis (vocals, piano). Audio Remixer: Bob Smith. Producers: Sam C. Phillips, Jack Clement. Compilation producers: Shelby S. Singleton, Jim Wilson. Mojo (Publisher) (5/02, p.144) -"...A wonderful con devised by producer Shelby Singleton...Acquiring Lewis's Sun originals he persuaded Jimmy Ellis, perhaps the greatest Elvis impersonator, to imitate The King and overdubbing did the rest. Listeners were left open-mouthed..."Factually this artificial album issued in 1978 was composed by two unequal parts:1) most of tracks (9 of 11) are Jerry Lee Lewis recordings from sessions 1960-1962 later overdubbed by Jimmy Ellis vocals;2) two tracks ("Am I To Be The One" and "Sail Away") are Jerry Lee Lewis and Charlie Rich authentic duo recorded in 1959 and previously issued correspondingly in 1970 (on album Jerry Lee Lewis - A Taste Of Country without credit to Rich) and in 1975 (on compilation Kings Of Country Vol.2 where Rich was credited).So this album is performed, besides Jerry Lee Lewis himself, partially by "false friend" Jimmy Ellis (who never recorded together with Lewis) and partially by "true friend" Charlie Rich.Ellis and Rich were not credited, so them remain unnamed mysterious "friends".Though Lewis Sun sessions from 1960 to 1963 were recorded in stereo, this album was released in mono (maybe because duos with Charlie Rich do not have stereo versions).In 1996 this album was also reissued on CD in stereo. Two mono duos with Charlie Rich were removed, and three other tracks with overdubs by Ellis were added. Jerry Lee Lewis - Rockin' Jerry Lee (1980) Orion - Ebony Eyes (1979) Orion - Rockabilly Rebel (1980) Orion - Texas Tea (1980)  Ronnie McDowell - Walking Through Georgia In The Rain (1977) Ronnie McDowell - Animal (1978)  Ronnie McDowell - This is A Hold Up (1978) Kinda rapey. "It's not your money. Since I tasted your honey..." The Flatlanders - Bhagavan Decreed (1972)  The Flatlanders - Dallas (1972)  The Flatlanders - She Had Everything (1972) Phil Ochs - Kansas City Bomber (1972) Bill Medley - Old Friend (1985)  Roy Orbison - Hound Dog Man (1979) The Four Tops - Gira Gira Reach Out (I'll Be There)  Martha Reeves and the Vandellas - Jimmy Mack  Four Tops – L'Arcobaleno Walk Away, Renee Jimmy Ruffin - Se Decidi Cosi' What Becomes Of The Brokenhearted Stevie Wonder - Mi Querido Amor  My Cherie Amour Stevie Wonder - Por Primera Vez  For Once In My Life The Temptations - Mein Girl My Girl The Supremes - Baby, Baby, Wo Ist Unsere Liebe Where Did Our Love Go The Supremes - Jonny Und Jo Come See About Me Marvin Gaye - Wie Schön Das Ist How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You) Johnny Cash Sings In German (late 50's) "Besser so Jenny Joe" "Kleine Rosmarie" "In Virginia" "Wo ist Zuhause Mama" "Wer kennt den Weg" From "The Current": Johnny Cash's German-language songs were released in Germany and to some extent in the United States, but are not very well known on this side of the Atlantic. Two of the tracks appear on an album, The Unissued Johnny Cash, released in 1978 on the Germany-based label, Bear Family Records. "Bear Family is the single most prolific label out of Germany that put out recordings of American artists," says Val Camilletti, owner of Val's Halla Records in Oak Park, Ill., just outside Chicago. "They are renowned for their box sets of recordings by Buddy Holly, Chet Atkins, the Everly Brothers and so many others, especially in the world of rockabilly. The label is extremely important. It's a goldmine of American artists." According to liner notes that appear on The Unissued Johnny Cash, Cash recorded the German-language songs in the late 1950s after he had moved from Sun Records to CBS Records, and the latter label noticed that Cash's song, "Don't Take Your Guns to Town," proved a big hit in Germany. At the label's request, in 1959, Cash recorded a handful of tracks in German, including "I Got Stripes," translated as "Viel Zu Spät." Johnny Hallyday - L'Histoire De Bobby McGee (1975)  Milan Drobný - Kdo Ví (1975) Vicky Leandros - L'amour Est Bleu (1967) Les 409 - S'il Faut un Homme (1967)  

  Episode seventy-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Brand New Cadillac" by Vince Taylor and the Playboys, and the sad career of rock music's first acid casualty. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers have two bonus podcasts this week. There's a haf-hour Q&A episode, where I answer backers' questions, and a ten-minute bonus episode on "The Hippy Hippy Shake" by Chan Romero. 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. There are several books available on Vince Taylor, including an autobiography, but sadly these are all in French, a language I don't speak past schoolboy level, so I can't say if they're any good. The main resources I used for this episode were the liner notes for this compilation CD of Taylor's best material,  this archived copy of a twenty-year-old homepage by a friend of Taylor's, this blogged history of Taylor and the Playboys, and this Radio 4 documentary on Taylor. But *all* of these were riddled with errors, and I used dozens of other resources to try to straighten out the facts -- everything from a genealogy website to interviews with Tony Sheridan to the out-of-print autobiography of Joe Barbera. No doubt this episode still has errors in it, but I am fairly confident that it has fewer errors than anything else in English about Taylor on the Internet.  Errata I say that Gene Vincent also appeared on Oh Boy! -- in fact he didn't appear on UK TV until Parnes' next show, Boy Meets Girls, which would mean Taylor was definitely the originator of that style. A major clanger -- I say that Sheridan recorded "Why" while he was working on "Oh Boy!" -- in fact this wasn't recorded until later -- *with the Beatles* as his backing band. I should have known that one, but it slipped my mind and I trusted my source, wrongly.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript On the twenty-first of May 1965, at the Savoy Hotel in London, there was a party which would have two major effects on the history of rock and roll music, one which would be felt almost immediately, and one whose full ramifications wouldn't be seen for almost a decade. Bob Dylan was on the European tour which is chronicled in the film "Don't Look Back", and he'd just spent a week in Portugal. He'd come back to the UK, and the next day he was planning to film his first ever televised concert.   That plan was put on hold. Dylan was rushed to hospital the day after the party, with what was claimed to be food poisoning but has often been rumoured to be something else. He spent the next week in bed, back at the Savoy, attended by a private nurse, and during that time he wrote what he called "a long piece of vomit around twenty pages long". From that "long piece of vomit" he later extracted the lyrics to what became "Like a Rolling Stone". But Dylan wasn't the only one who came out of that party feeling funny. Vince Taylor, a minor British rock and roller who'd never had much success over here but was big in France, was also there. There are no euphemisms about what it was that happened to him. He had dropped acid at the party, for the first time, and had liked it so much he'd immediately spent two hundred pounds on buying all the acid he could from the person who'd given it to him. The next day, Taylor was meant to be playing a showcase gig. His brother-in-law, Joe Barbera of Hanna Barbera, owned a record label, and was considering signing Taylor. It could be the start of a comeback for him. Instead, it was the end of his career, and the start of a legend: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor and the Playboys, "Brand New Cadillac"] There are two problems with telling the story of Vince Taylor. One is that he was a compulsive liar, who would make up claims like that he was related to Tenzing Norgay, the Nepalese mountaineer who was one of the two men who first climbed Everest, or that he was an airline pilot as a teenager. The other is that nobody who has written about Taylor has bothered to do even the most cursory fact-checking For example, if you read any online articles about Vince Taylor at all, you see the same story about his upbringing -- he was born Brian Holden in the UK, he emigrated to New Jersey with his family in the forties, and then his sister Sheila met Joe Barbera, the co-creator of the Tom and Jerry cartoons. Sheila married him in 1955 and moved with him to Los Angeles -- and so the rest of the family also moved there, and Brian went to Hollywood High School. Barbera decided to manage his brother-in-law, bring him over to London to check out the British music scene, and get him a record deal. There's just... a bit of a problem with this story. Sheila did marry Joe Barbera, but not until the mid 1960s. Her first marriage, in 1947, was to Joe Singer, and it was Singer, not Barbera, who was Taylor's first manager. That kind of inaccuracy appears all over the story of Vince Taylor So, what we actually know is that Brian Maurice Holden -- or Maurice Brian Holden, even his birth name seems to be disputed -- was born in Isleworth Middlesex, and moved to New Jersey when he was seven, with his family, emigrating on the Mauretania, and that he came back to London in his late teens. While there was a real Hollywood High School, which Ricky Nelson among others had attended, I suspect it's as likely that Holden decided to just tell people that was where he'd been to school, because "Hollywood High School" would sound impressive to British people. And sounding impressive to British people was what Brian Holden had decided to base his career on. He claimed to an acquaintance, shortly after he returned to the UK, that he'd heard a Tommy Steele record while he was in the US, and had thought "If this is rock and roll in England, we'll take them by storm!" [Excerpt: Tommy Steele, "Rock With the Caveman"] Holden had been playing American Legion shows and similar small venues in the US, and when his brother-in-law Joe Singer came over to Britain on a business trip, Holden decided to tag along, and Singer became Holden's manager. Holden had three great advantages over British stars like Steele. He had spent long enough in America that he could tell people that he was American and they would believe him. In Britain in the 1950s, there were so few Americans that just being from that country was enough to make you a novelty, and Holden milked that for all it was worth, even though his accent, from the few bits of interviews I've heard with him, was pure London. He was also much, much better looking than almost all the British rock and roll stars. Because of rationing and general poverty in the UK in the forties and fifties as a result of the war, the British fifties teenage generation were on the whole rather scrawny, pasty-looking, and undernourished, with bad complexions, bad teeth, and a general haggardness that meant that even teen idols like Dickie Pride, Tommy Steele, or Marty Wilde were not, by modern standards, at all good looking. Brian Holden, on the other hand, had film-star good looks. He had a chiselled jaw, thick black hair combed into a quiff, and a dazzling smile showing Hollywood-perfect teeth. I am the farthest thing there is from a judge of male beauty, but of all the fifties rock and roll stars, the only one who was better looking than him was Elvis, and even Elvis had to grow into his good looks, while Holden, even when he came to the UK aged eighteen, looked like a cross between James Dean and Rock Hudson. And finally, he had a real sense of what rock and roll was, in a way that almost none of the British musicians did. He knew, in particular, what a rockabilly record should sound like. He did have one tiny drawback, though -- he couldn't sing in tune, or keep time. But nobody except the unfortunate musicians who ended up backing him saw that as a particular problem. Being unable to sing was a minor matter. He had presence, and he was going to be a star. Everyone knew it. He started performing at the 2Is, and he put together a band which had a rather fluid membership that to start with featured Tony Meehan, a drummer who had been in the Vipers Skiffle Group and would later join the Shadows, but by the time he got a record deal consisted of four of the regular musicians from the 2is -- Tony Sheridan on lead guitar, Tony Harvey on rhythm, Licorice Locking on bass and Brian Bennett on drums. He also got himself a new name, and once again there seems to be some doubt as to how the name was chosen. Everyone seems agreed that "Taylor" was suggested by his sister Sheila, after the actor Robert Taylor. But there are three different plausible stories for how he became Vince. The first is that he named himself after Vince Everett, Elvis' character in Jailhouse Rock. The second is that he was named after Gene Vincent. And the third is that he took the name from a pack of Pall Mall cigarettes, which had a logo with the Latin motto "in hoc signo vinces" -- that last word spelled the same way as "Vinces". And while I've never seen this suggestion made anywhere else, there is also the coincidence that both Licorice Locking and Tony Sheridan had been playing, with Jimmy Nicol, in the Vagabonds, the backing band for one of Larry Parnes' teen idol acts, Vince Eager, who had made one EP before the Vagabonds had split from him: [Excerpt: Vince Eager, "Yea Yea"] So it may be that the similarity of names was in someone's mind as well. Taylor and his band, named the Playboys, made a huge impression at the 2is, and they were soon signed to Parlophone Records, and in November 1958 they released their first single. Both sides of the single were cover versions of relatively obscure releases on Sun records. The B-side was a cover version of "I Like Love", which had been written by Jack Clement for Roy Orbison, while the A-side, "Right Behind You Baby" was written by Charlie Rich and originally recorded by Ray Smith: [Excerpt: Ray Smith, "Right Behind You Baby"] Taylor's version was the closest thing to an American rockabilly record that had been made in Britain to that point. While the vocal was still nothing special, and the recording techniques in British studios created a more polite sound than their American equivalents, the performance is bursting with energy: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor, "Right Behind You Baby"] It's Sheridan, though, who really makes the record -- he plays a twenty-four bar guitar solo that is absolute light years ahead of anything else that was being done in Britain. Here, for example, is "Guitar Boogie Shuffle", an instrumental hit from Britain's top rock and roll guitarist of the time, Bert Weedon: [Excerpt: Bert Weedon, "Guitar Boogie Shuffle"] As you can hear, that's a perfectly good guitar instrumental, very pleasant, very well played. Now listen to Tony Sheridan's guitar solo on "Right Behind You Baby": [Excerpt: Vince Taylor, "Right Behind You Baby"] That's clearly not as technically skilled as Weedon, but it's also infinitely more exciting, and it's more exciting than anything that was being made by any other British musicians at the time. Jack Good certainly thought so. While "Right Behind You Baby" wasn't a hit, it was enough to get Vince on to Oh Boy!, and it was because of his Oh Boy! performances that Vince switched to the look he would keep for the rest of his career -- black leather trousers, a black leather jacket, a black shirt with the top few buttons undone, showing his chest and the medallion he always wore, and black leather gloves. It was a look very similar to that which Gene Vincent also adopted for his performances on Oh Boy! -- before that, Vincent had been dressing in a distinctly less memorable style -- and I've seen differing accounts as to which act took on the style first, though both made it their own. Taylor was memorable enough in this getup that when, in the early seventies, another faded rocker who had been known as Shane Fenton made a comeback as a glam-rocker under the name Alvin Stardust, he copied Taylor's dress exactly. But Good was unimpressed with Taylor's performance -- and very impressed with Sheridan's. Sheridan was asked to join the Oh Boy! house band, as well as performing under his own name as Tony Sheridan and the Wreckers. He found himself playing on such less-than-classics as "Happy Organ" by Cherry Wainer: [Excerpt: Cherry Wainer, "The Happy Organ"] He also released his own solo record, "Why": [Excerpt: Tony Sheridan, "Why"] But Sheridan's biggest impact on popular music wouldn't come along for another few years... Losing the most innovative guitarist in the British music industry should have been a death-blow to Taylor's career, but he managed to find the only other guitarist in Britain at that time who might be considered up to Sheridan's standard, Joe Moretti -- who Taylor nicknamed Scotty Moretti, partly because Moretti was Scottish, but mostly because it would make his name similar to that of Scotty Moore, Elvis' guitarist, and Taylor could shout out "take it, Scotty!" on the solos. While Sheridan's style was to play frantic Chuck Berry-style licks, Moretti was a more controlled guitarist, but just as inventive, and he had a particular knack for coming up with riffs. And he showed that knack on Taylor's next single, the first to be credited to Vince Taylor and the Playboys, rather than just to Vince Taylor. The A-side of that single was rather poor -- a cover version of Johnny Ace's "Pledging My Love", which was done no favours by Taylor's vocal: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor and the Playboys, "Pledging My Love"] But it was the B-side that was to become a classic. From the stories told by the band members, it seems that everyone knew that that song -- one written by Taylor, who otherwise barely ever wrote songs, preferring to perform cover versions -- was something special. But the song mentioned two different brand names, Cadillac and Ford, and the BBC at that time had a ban on playing any music which mentioned a brand name at all. So "Brand New Cadillac" became a B-side, but it's undoubtedly the most thrilling B-side by a British performer of the fifties, and arguably the only true fifties rock and roll classic by a British artist. "Move It" by Cliff Richard had been a good record by British standards -- "Brand New Cadillac" was a great record by any standards: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor and the Playboys, "Brand New Cadillac"] Unfortunately, because "Pledging My Love" was the A-side, the record sold almost nothing, and didn't make the charts. After two flops in a row, Parlophone dropped Vince Taylor and the Playboys, and Taylor went back to performing at the 2Is with whatever random collection of musicians he could get together. Brian Bennett and Licorice Locking, meanwhile, went on to join Marty Wilde's band the Wildcats, and scored an immediate hit with Wilde's rather decent cover version of Dion and the Belmonts' "Teenager in Love": [Excerpt: Marty Wilde and the Wildcats, "Teenager in Love"] Moretti, Locking, and Bennett will all turn up in our story in future episodes. Taylor's career seemed to be over before it had really begun, but then he got a second chance. Palette Records was a small label, based in Belgium, which was starting operations in Britain. They didn't have any big stars, but they had signed Janis Martin, who we talked about back in episode forty, and in August 1960 they put out her single "Here Today and Gone Tomorrow Love": [Excerpt: Janis Martin, "Here Today and Gone Tomorrow Love"] And at the same time, they put out a new single by Vince Taylor, with a new lineup of Playboys. The A-side was a fairly uninspired ballad called "I'll Be Your Hero", very much in the style of Elvis' film songs, but they soon switched to promoting the flip side, "Jet Black Machine", which was much more in Taylor's style. It wasn't up to the standards of "Brand New Cadillac", but it was still far more exciting than most of the records that were being made in the UK at the time: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor and the Playboys, "Jet Black Machine"] That seemed like it would be a turning point in Taylor's career -- according to one source I've read, it made the top twenty on the NME charts, though I haven't been able to check those charts myself, and given how unreliable literally everything I've read about Taylor is, I don't entirely trust that. But it was definitely more successful than his two previous singles, and the new lineup of Playboys were booked on a package tour of acts from the 2Is. Things seemed like they were about to start going Taylor's way. But Taylor had always been a little erratic, and he started to get almost pathologically jealous. He would phone his girlfriend up every night before going on stage, and if she didn't answer he'd skip the show, to drive to her house and find out what she was doing. And in November 1960, just before the start of the tour, he skipped out on the tour altogether and headed back to visit his family in the States. The band carried on without him, and became the backing group for Duffy Power, one of the many acts managed by Larry Parnes. Power desperately wanted to be a blues singer, but he was pushed into recording cover versions of American hits, like this one, which came out shortly after the Playboys joined him: [Excerpt: Duffy Power, "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On"] The Playboys continued to back Power until June 1960, when they had a gig in Guildford, and a remarkable coincidence happened. They were unloading their equipment at the 2Is, to drive to Guildford with it, when Taylor walked round the corner. He'd just got back from the USA and happened to be passing, and they invited him along for the drive to the show. He came with them, and then Duffy Power, who was almost as unreliable as Taylor, didn't turn up for the show. They invited Taylor to perform in his place, and he did, and blew the audience away. Power eventually turned up half-way through the show, got angry, punched the drummer in the face during the interval, and drove off again. The drummer got two stitches, and then they finished the show. Taylor was back with the Playboys, and Duffy Power was out, and so the next month when Power was booked for some shows in Paris, on a bill with Vince Eager and Wee Willie Harris, Taylor took his place there, too. France was about as far behind Britain in rock and roll terms as Britain was behind America, and no-one had ever seen anything like Vince Taylor. Taylor and the Playboys got signed to a French label, Barclay Records, and they became huge stars -- Taylor did indeed get himself a brand new Cadillac, a pink one just like Elvis had. Taylor got nicknamed "le diable noir" -- the black Devil -- for his demonic stage presence, and he inspired riots regularly with his shows. A review of one of his performances at that time may be of interest to some listeners: "The atmosphere is like many a night club, but the teenagers stand round the dancing floor which you use as a stage. They jump on a woman with gold trousers and a hand microphone and then hit a man when he says "go away." A group follows, and so do others, playing 'Apache' worse than many other bands. When the singer joins the band, the leather jacket fiends who are the audience, join in dancing and banging tables with chairs. The singers have to go one better than the audience, so they lie on the floor, or jump on a passing drummer, or kiss a guitar, and then hit the man playing it. The crowd enjoy this and many stand on chairs to see the fun, and soon the audience are all singing and shouting like one man, but he didn't mind. Vince (Ron, Ron) Taylor finally appeared and joined the fun, and in the end he had so much fun that he had to rest. But in spite of this it had been a wonderful show, lovely show...lovely." That was written by a young man from Liverpool named Paul McCartney, who was visiting Paris with his friend John Lennon for Lennon's twenty-first birthday. The two attended one of Taylor's shows there, and McCartney sent that review back to run in Mersey Beat, a local music paper. Lennon and McCartney also met Taylor, with whom they had a mutual friend, Tony Sheridan, and tried to blag their way onto the show themselves, but got turned down. While they were in Paris, they also got their hair cut in a new style, to copy the style that was fashionable among Parisian bohemians. When they got back to Liverpool everyone laughed at their new mop-top hairdos... Taylor kept making records while he was in Paris, mostly cover versions of American hits. Probably the best is his version of Chuck Willis' "Whatcha Gonna Do?": [Excerpt: Vince Taylor et ses Play-Boys, "Watcha Gonna Do (When Your Baby Leaves You)?"] But while Taylor was now a big star, his behaviour was becoming ever more erratic, not helped by the amphetamines he was taking to keep himself going during shows. The group quit en masse in November 1962, but he persuaded them back so they could play a two-week residency at the Star Club in Hamburg, before a group from Liverpool called the Beatles took over for Christmas. But Taylor only lasted four days of that two-week residency. Just before midnight on the fifth night, just before they were about to go on, he phoned his girlfriend in Paris, got no answer, decided she was out cheating on him, and flew off to Paris instead of playing the show. He phoned the club's manager the next day to apologise and say he'd be back for that night's show, but Horst Fascher, the manager, wasn't as forgiving of Taylor as most promoters had been, and said that he'd shoot Taylor dead if he ever saw him again. The residency was cancelled, and the Playboys had to sell their mohair suits to Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers to pay for their fare back to Paris. For the next few years, Taylor put out a series of fairly poor records with different backing groups, often singing sickly French-language ballads with orchestral backings. He tried gimmicks like changing from his black leather costume into a white leather one, but nothing seemed to work. His money was running out, but then he had one more opportunity to hit the big time again. Bobby Woodman, the drummer from the second lineup of the Playboys, had been playing with Johnny Hallyday, France's biggest rock and roll star, under the stage name Bobbie Clarke, but then Hallyday was drafted and his band needed work. They got together with Taylor, and as Vince Taylor and the Bobbie Clarke Noise they recorded an EP of blues and rock covers that included a version of the Arthur Crudup song made famous by Elvis, "My Baby Left Me". It was a quite extraordinary record, his best since "Brand New Cadillac" seven years earlier: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor and the Bobbie Clarke Noise, "My Baby Left Me"] They played the Paris Olympia again, this time supporting the Rolling Stones. Vince Taylor was on his way to the top again. And they had the prospect of an American record deal -- Taylor's sister Sheila had married Joe Barbera, and he'd started up a new label and was interested in signing Taylor. They arranged a showcase gig for him, and everyone thought this could be the big time. But before that, he had to make a quick trip to the UK. The group were owed money by a business associate there, and so Taylor went over to collect the money, and while he was there he went to Bob Dylan's party, and dropped acid for the first time. And that was the end of Vince Taylor's career. One of the things that goes completely unreported about the British teen idols of the fifties is that for whatever reason, and I can't know for sure, there was a very high incidence of severe mental illness among them -- an astonishingly high incidence given how few of them there were. Terry Dene was invalided out of the Army with mental health problems shortly after he was drafted. Duffy Power attempted suicide in the early sixties, and had recurrent mental health problems for many years. And Dickie Pride, who his peers thought was the most talented of the lot, ended up dead aged twenty-seven, after having spent time in a psychiatric hospital and suffering so badly he was lobotomised. Vince Taylor was the one whose mental problems have had the most publicity, but much of that has made his illness seem somehow glamorous or entertaining, so I want to emphasise that it was anything but. I spent several years working on a psychiatric ward, and have seen enough people with the same condition that Taylor had that I have no sense of humour about this subject at all. The rest of this podcast is about a man who was suffering horribly. Taylor had always been unstable -- he had been paranoid and controlling, he had a tendency to make up lies about himself and act as if he believed them, and he led a chaotic lifestyle. And while normally LSD is safe even if taken relatively often, Taylor's first acid trip was the last straw for his fragile mental health. He turned up at the showcase gig unshaven, clutching a bottle of Mateus wine, and announced to everyone that he was Mateus, the new Jesus, the son of God. When asked if he had the band's money, he pulled out a hundred and fifty francs and set fire to it, ranting about how Jesus had turfed the money-lenders out of the temple. An ambulance was called, and the band did the show without him. They had a gig the next day, and Taylor turned up clean-shaven, smartly dressed, and seemingly normal. He apologised for his behaviour the night before, saying he'd "felt a bit strange" but was better now. But when they got to the club and he saw the sign saying "Vince Taylor and the Bobbie Clarke Noise", he crossed "Vince Taylor" out, and wrote "Mateus" in a felt pen. During the show, instead of singing, he walked through the crowd, anointing them with water. He spent the next decade in and out of hospital, occasionally touring and recording, but often unable to work. But while he was unwell, "Brand New Cadillac" found a new audience. Indeed, it found several audiences. The Hep Stars, a band from Sweden who featured a pre-ABBA Benny Andersson, had a number one hit in Sweden with their reworking of it, just titled "Cadillac", in 1965, just a month before Taylor's breakdown: [Excerpt: Hep Stars, "Cadillac"] In 1971, Mungo Jerry reworked the song as "Baby Jump", which went to number one in the UK, though they didn't credit Taylor: [Excerpt: Mungo Jerry, "Baby Jump"] And in 1979, the Clash recorded a version of it for their classic double-album London Calling: [Excerpt: The Clash, "Brand New Cadillac"] Shortly after recording that, Joe Strummer of the Clash met up with Taylor, who spent five hours explaining to Strummer how the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were trying to kill him with poisoned chocolate cake. Taylor at that time was still making music, and trying to latch on to whatever the latest trend was, as in his 1982 single "Space Invaders", inspired by the arcade game: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor, "Space Invaders"] But the new music he was making was almost an irrelevance -- by this point he had become a legend in the British music industry, not for who he was in 1982, but for who he was in 1958, and he has had songs written about him by people as diverse as Adam Ant and Van Morrison. But his biggest influence came in the years immediately after his breakdown. Between 1966 and 1972, Taylor spent much of his time in London, severely mentally ill, but trying to have some kind of social life based on his past glories, reminding people that he had once been a star. One of the people he got to know in London in the mid-sixties was a young musician named David Jones. Jones was fascinated by Taylor, even though he'd never liked his music -- Jones' brother was schizophrenic, and he was worried that he would end up like his brother. Jones also wanted to be a rock and roll star, and had some mildly messianic ideas of his own. So a rock and roll star who thought he was Jesus -- although he sometimes thought he was an alien, rather than Jesus, and sometimes claimed that Jesus *was* an alien -- and who was clearly severely mentally ill, had a fascination for him. He talked later about not having been able to decide whether he was seeing Taylor as an example to follow or a cautionary tale, and about how he'd sat with Taylor outside Charing Cross Station while Taylor had used a magnifying glass and a map of Europe to show him all the sites where aliens were going to land. Several years later, after changing his name to David Bowie, Jones remembered the story of Vince Taylor, the rock and roll star who thought he was an alien messiah, and turned it into the story of Ziggy Stardust: [Excerpt: David Bowie, "Ziggy Stardust"] In 1983, Taylor retired to Switzerland with his new wife Nathalie. He changed his name back to Brian Holden, and while he would play the occasional gig, he tried as best he could to forget his past, and seems to have recovered somewhat from his mental illness. In 1991 he was diagnosed with cancer, and died of it three months later. Shortly before he died, he told a friend "If I die, you can tell them that the only period in my life where I was really happy was my life in Switzerland".

  Episode seventy-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Brand New Cadillac” by Vince Taylor and the Playboys, and the sad career of rock music’s first acid casualty. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers have two bonus podcasts this week. There’s a haf-hour Q&A episode, where I answer backers’ questions, and a ten-minute bonus episode on “The Hippy Hippy Shake” by Chan Romero. 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. There are several books available on Vince Taylor, including an autobiography, but sadly these are all in French, a language I don’t speak past schoolboy level, so I can’t say if they’re any good. The main resources I used for this episode were the liner notes for this compilation CD of Taylor’s best material,  this archived copy of a twenty-year-old homepage by a friend of Taylor’s, this blogged history of Taylor and the Playboys, and this Radio 4 documentary on Taylor. But *all* of these were riddled with errors, and I used dozens of other resources to try to straighten out the facts — everything from a genealogy website to interviews with Tony Sheridan to the out-of-print autobiography of Joe Barbera. No doubt this episode still has errors in it, but I am fairly confident that it has fewer errors than anything else in English about Taylor on the Internet.  Errata I say that Gene Vincent also appeared on Oh Boy! — in fact he didn’t appear on UK TV until Parnes’ next show, Boy Meets Girls, which would mean Taylor was definitely the originator of that style. A major clanger — I say that Sheridan recorded “Why” while he was working on “Oh Boy!” — in fact this wasn’t recorded until later — *with the Beatles* as his backing band. I should have known that one, but it slipped my mind and I trusted my source, wrongly.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript On the twenty-first of May 1965, at the Savoy Hotel in London, there was a party which would have two major effects on the history of rock and roll music, one which would be felt almost immediately, and one whose full ramifications wouldn’t be seen for almost a decade. Bob Dylan was on the European tour which is chronicled in the film “Don’t Look Back”, and he’d just spent a week in Portugal. He’d come back to the UK, and the next day he was planning to film his first ever televised concert.   That plan was put on hold. Dylan was rushed to hospital the day after the party, with what was claimed to be food poisoning but has often been rumoured to be something else. He spent the next week in bed, back at the Savoy, attended by a private nurse, and during that time he wrote what he called “a long piece of vomit around twenty pages long”. From that “long piece of vomit” he later extracted the lyrics to what became “Like a Rolling Stone”. But Dylan wasn’t the only one who came out of that party feeling funny. Vince Taylor, a minor British rock and roller who’d never had much success over here but was big in France, was also there. There are no euphemisms about what it was that happened to him. He had dropped acid at the party, for the first time, and had liked it so much he’d immediately spent two hundred pounds on buying all the acid he could from the person who’d given it to him. The next day, Taylor was meant to be playing a showcase gig. His brother-in-law, Joe Barbera of Hanna Barbera, owned a record label, and was considering signing Taylor. It could be the start of a comeback for him. Instead, it was the end of his career, and the start of a legend: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor and the Playboys, “Brand New Cadillac”] There are two problems with telling the story of Vince Taylor. One is that he was a compulsive liar, who would make up claims like that he was related to Tenzing Norgay, the Nepalese mountaineer who was one of the two men who first climbed Everest, or that he was an airline pilot as a teenager. The other is that nobody who has written about Taylor has bothered to do even the most cursory fact-checking For example, if you read any online articles about Vince Taylor at all, you see the same story about his upbringing — he was born Brian Holden in the UK, he emigrated to New Jersey with his family in the forties, and then his sister Sheila met Joe Barbera, the co-creator of the Tom and Jerry cartoons. Sheila married him in 1955 and moved with him to Los Angeles — and so the rest of the family also moved there, and Brian went to Hollywood High School. Barbera decided to manage his brother-in-law, bring him over to London to check out the British music scene, and get him a record deal. There’s just… a bit of a problem with this story. Sheila did marry Joe Barbera, but not until the mid 1960s. Her first marriage, in 1947, was to Joe Singer, and it was Singer, not Barbera, who was Taylor’s first manager. That kind of inaccuracy appears all over the story of Vince Taylor So, what we actually know is that Brian Maurice Holden — or Maurice Brian Holden, even his birth name seems to be disputed — was born in Isleworth Middlesex, and moved to New Jersey when he was seven, with his family, emigrating on the Mauretania, and that he came back to London in his late teens. While there was a real Hollywood High School, which Ricky Nelson among others had attended, I suspect it’s as likely that Holden decided to just tell people that was where he’d been to school, because “Hollywood High School” would sound impressive to British people. And sounding impressive to British people was what Brian Holden had decided to base his career on. He claimed to an acquaintance, shortly after he returned to the UK, that he’d heard a Tommy Steele record while he was in the US, and had thought “If this is rock and roll in England, we’ll take them by storm!” [Excerpt: Tommy Steele, “Rock With the Caveman”] Holden had been playing American Legion shows and similar small venues in the US, and when his brother-in-law Joe Singer came over to Britain on a business trip, Holden decided to tag along, and Singer became Holden’s manager. Holden had three great advantages over British stars like Steele. He had spent long enough in America that he could tell people that he was American and they would believe him. In Britain in the 1950s, there were so few Americans that just being from that country was enough to make you a novelty, and Holden milked that for all it was worth, even though his accent, from the few bits of interviews I’ve heard with him, was pure London. He was also much, much better looking than almost all the British rock and roll stars. Because of rationing and general poverty in the UK in the forties and fifties as a result of the war, the British fifties teenage generation were on the whole rather scrawny, pasty-looking, and undernourished, with bad complexions, bad teeth, and a general haggardness that meant that even teen idols like Dickie Pride, Tommy Steele, or Marty Wilde were not, by modern standards, at all good looking. Brian Holden, on the other hand, had film-star good looks. He had a chiselled jaw, thick black hair combed into a quiff, and a dazzling smile showing Hollywood-perfect teeth. I am the farthest thing there is from a judge of male beauty, but of all the fifties rock and roll stars, the only one who was better looking than him was Elvis, and even Elvis had to grow into his good looks, while Holden, even when he came to the UK aged eighteen, looked like a cross between James Dean and Rock Hudson. And finally, he had a real sense of what rock and roll was, in a way that almost none of the British musicians did. He knew, in particular, what a rockabilly record should sound like. He did have one tiny drawback, though — he couldn’t sing in tune, or keep time. But nobody except the unfortunate musicians who ended up backing him saw that as a particular problem. Being unable to sing was a minor matter. He had presence, and he was going to be a star. Everyone knew it. He started performing at the 2Is, and he put together a band which had a rather fluid membership that to start with featured Tony Meehan, a drummer who had been in the Vipers Skiffle Group and would later join the Shadows, but by the time he got a record deal consisted of four of the regular musicians from the 2is — Tony Sheridan on lead guitar, Tony Harvey on rhythm, Licorice Locking on bass and Brian Bennett on drums. He also got himself a new name, and once again there seems to be some doubt as to how the name was chosen. Everyone seems agreed that “Taylor” was suggested by his sister Sheila, after the actor Robert Taylor. But there are three different plausible stories for how he became Vince. The first is that he named himself after Vince Everett, Elvis’ character in Jailhouse Rock. The second is that he was named after Gene Vincent. And the third is that he took the name from a pack of Pall Mall cigarettes, which had a logo with the Latin motto “in hoc signo vinces” — that last word spelled the same way as “Vinces”. And while I’ve never seen this suggestion made anywhere else, there is also the coincidence that both Licorice Locking and Tony Sheridan had been playing, with Jimmy Nicol, in the Vagabonds, the backing band for one of Larry Parnes’ teen idol acts, Vince Eager, who had made one EP before the Vagabonds had split from him: [Excerpt: Vince Eager, “Yea Yea”] So it may be that the similarity of names was in someone’s mind as well. Taylor and his band, named the Playboys, made a huge impression at the 2is, and they were soon signed to Parlophone Records, and in November 1958 they released their first single. Both sides of the single were cover versions of relatively obscure releases on Sun records. The B-side was a cover version of “I Like Love”, which had been written by Jack Clement for Roy Orbison, while the A-side, “Right Behind You Baby” was written by Charlie Rich and originally recorded by Ray Smith: [Excerpt: Ray Smith, “Right Behind You Baby”] Taylor’s version was the closest thing to an American rockabilly record that had been made in Britain to that point. While the vocal was still nothing special, and the recording techniques in British studios created a more polite sound than their American equivalents, the performance is bursting with energy: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor, “Right Behind You Baby”] It’s Sheridan, though, who really makes the record — he plays a twenty-four bar guitar solo that is absolute light years ahead of anything else that was being done in Britain. Here, for example, is “Guitar Boogie Shuffle”, an instrumental hit from Britain’s top rock and roll guitarist of the time, Bert Weedon: [Excerpt: Bert Weedon, “Guitar Boogie Shuffle”] As you can hear, that’s a perfectly good guitar instrumental, very pleasant, very well played. Now listen to Tony Sheridan’s guitar solo on “Right Behind You Baby”: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor, “Right Behind You Baby”] That’s clearly not as technically skilled as Weedon, but it’s also infinitely more exciting, and it’s more exciting than anything that was being made by any other British musicians at the time. Jack Good certainly thought so. While “Right Behind You Baby” wasn’t a hit, it was enough to get Vince on to Oh Boy!, and it was because of his Oh Boy! performances that Vince switched to the look he would keep for the rest of his career — black leather trousers, a black leather jacket, a black shirt with the top few buttons undone, showing his chest and the medallion he always wore, and black leather gloves. It was a look very similar to that which Gene Vincent also adopted for his performances on Oh Boy! — before that, Vincent had been dressing in a distinctly less memorable style — and I’ve seen differing accounts as to which act took on the style first, though both made it their own. Taylor was memorable enough in this getup that when, in the early seventies, another faded rocker who had been known as Shane Fenton made a comeback as a glam-rocker under the name Alvin Stardust, he copied Taylor’s dress exactly. But Good was unimpressed with Taylor’s performance — and very impressed with Sheridan’s. Sheridan was asked to join the Oh Boy! house band, as well as performing under his own name as Tony Sheridan and the Wreckers. He found himself playing on such less-than-classics as “Happy Organ” by Cherry Wainer: [Excerpt: Cherry Wainer, “The Happy Organ”] He also released his own solo record, “Why”: [Excerpt: Tony Sheridan, “Why”] But Sheridan’s biggest impact on popular music wouldn’t come along for another few years… Losing the most innovative guitarist in the British music industry should have been a death-blow to Taylor’s career, but he managed to find the only other guitarist in Britain at that time who might be considered up to Sheridan’s standard, Joe Moretti — who Taylor nicknamed Scotty Moretti, partly because Moretti was Scottish, but mostly because it would make his name similar to that of Scotty Moore, Elvis’ guitarist, and Taylor could shout out “take it, Scotty!” on the solos. While Sheridan’s style was to play frantic Chuck Berry-style licks, Moretti was a more controlled guitarist, but just as inventive, and he had a particular knack for coming up with riffs. And he showed that knack on Taylor’s next single, the first to be credited to Vince Taylor and the Playboys, rather than just to Vince Taylor. The A-side of that single was rather poor — a cover version of Johnny Ace’s “Pledging My Love”, which was done no favours by Taylor’s vocal: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor and the Playboys, “Pledging My Love”] But it was the B-side that was to become a classic. From the stories told by the band members, it seems that everyone knew that that song — one written by Taylor, who otherwise barely ever wrote songs, preferring to perform cover versions — was something special. But the song mentioned two different brand names, Cadillac and Ford, and the BBC at that time had a ban on playing any music which mentioned a brand name at all. So “Brand New Cadillac” became a B-side, but it’s undoubtedly the most thrilling B-side by a British performer of the fifties, and arguably the only true fifties rock and roll classic by a British artist. “Move It” by Cliff Richard had been a good record by British standards — “Brand New Cadillac” was a great record by any standards: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor and the Playboys, “Brand New Cadillac”] Unfortunately, because “Pledging My Love” was the A-side, the record sold almost nothing, and didn’t make the charts. After two flops in a row, Parlophone dropped Vince Taylor and the Playboys, and Taylor went back to performing at the 2Is with whatever random collection of musicians he could get together. Brian Bennett and Licorice Locking, meanwhile, went on to join Marty Wilde’s band the Wildcats, and scored an immediate hit with Wilde’s rather decent cover version of Dion and the Belmonts’ “Teenager in Love”: [Excerpt: Marty Wilde and the Wildcats, “Teenager in Love”] Moretti, Locking, and Bennett will all turn up in our story in future episodes. Taylor’s career seemed to be over before it had really begun, but then he got a second chance. Palette Records was a small label, based in Belgium, which was starting operations in Britain. They didn’t have any big stars, but they had signed Janis Martin, who we talked about back in episode forty, and in August 1960 they put out her single “Here Today and Gone Tomorrow Love”: [Excerpt: Janis Martin, “Here Today and Gone Tomorrow Love”] And at the same time, they put out a new single by Vince Taylor, with a new lineup of Playboys. The A-side was a fairly uninspired ballad called “I’ll Be Your Hero”, very much in the style of Elvis’ film songs, but they soon switched to promoting the flip side, “Jet Black Machine”, which was much more in Taylor’s style. It wasn’t up to the standards of “Brand New Cadillac”, but it was still far more exciting than most of the records that were being made in the UK at the time: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor and the Playboys, “Jet Black Machine”] That seemed like it would be a turning point in Taylor’s career — according to one source I’ve read, it made the top twenty on the NME charts, though I haven’t been able to check those charts myself, and given how unreliable literally everything I’ve read about Taylor is, I don’t entirely trust that. But it was definitely more successful than his two previous singles, and the new lineup of Playboys were booked on a package tour of acts from the 2Is. Things seemed like they were about to start going Taylor’s way. But Taylor had always been a little erratic, and he started to get almost pathologically jealous. He would phone his girlfriend up every night before going on stage, and if she didn’t answer he’d skip the show, to drive to her house and find out what she was doing. And in November 1960, just before the start of the tour, he skipped out on the tour altogether and headed back to visit his family in the States. The band carried on without him, and became the backing group for Duffy Power, one of the many acts managed by Larry Parnes. Power desperately wanted to be a blues singer, but he was pushed into recording cover versions of American hits, like this one, which came out shortly after the Playboys joined him: [Excerpt: Duffy Power, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On”] The Playboys continued to back Power until June 1960, when they had a gig in Guildford, and a remarkable coincidence happened. They were unloading their equipment at the 2Is, to drive to Guildford with it, when Taylor walked round the corner. He’d just got back from the USA and happened to be passing, and they invited him along for the drive to the show. He came with them, and then Duffy Power, who was almost as unreliable as Taylor, didn’t turn up for the show. They invited Taylor to perform in his place, and he did, and blew the audience away. Power eventually turned up half-way through the show, got angry, punched the drummer in the face during the interval, and drove off again. The drummer got two stitches, and then they finished the show. Taylor was back with the Playboys, and Duffy Power was out, and so the next month when Power was booked for some shows in Paris, on a bill with Vince Eager and Wee Willie Harris, Taylor took his place there, too. France was about as far behind Britain in rock and roll terms as Britain was behind America, and no-one had ever seen anything like Vince Taylor. Taylor and the Playboys got signed to a French label, Barclay Records, and they became huge stars — Taylor did indeed get himself a brand new Cadillac, a pink one just like Elvis had. Taylor got nicknamed “le diable noir” — the black Devil — for his demonic stage presence, and he inspired riots regularly with his shows. A review of one of his performances at that time may be of interest to some listeners: “The atmosphere is like many a night club, but the teenagers stand round the dancing floor which you use as a stage. They jump on a woman with gold trousers and a hand microphone and then hit a man when he says “go away.” A group follows, and so do others, playing ‘Apache’ worse than many other bands. When the singer joins the band, the leather jacket fiends who are the audience, join in dancing and banging tables with chairs. The singers have to go one better than the audience, so they lie on the floor, or jump on a passing drummer, or kiss a guitar, and then hit the man playing it. The crowd enjoy this and many stand on chairs to see the fun, and soon the audience are all singing and shouting like one man, but he didn’t mind. Vince (Ron, Ron) Taylor finally appeared and joined the fun, and in the end he had so much fun that he had to rest. But in spite of this it had been a wonderful show, lovely show…lovely.” That was written by a young man from Liverpool named Paul McCartney, who was visiting Paris with his friend John Lennon for Lennon’s twenty-first birthday. The two attended one of Taylor’s shows there, and McCartney sent that review back to run in Mersey Beat, a local music paper. Lennon and McCartney also met Taylor, with whom they had a mutual friend, Tony Sheridan, and tried to blag their way onto the show themselves, but got turned down. While they were in Paris, they also got their hair cut in a new style, to copy the style that was fashionable among Parisian bohemians. When they got back to Liverpool everyone laughed at their new mop-top hairdos… Taylor kept making records while he was in Paris, mostly cover versions of American hits. Probably the best is his version of Chuck Willis’ “Whatcha Gonna Do?”: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor et ses Play-Boys, “Watcha Gonna Do (When Your Baby Leaves You)?”] But while Taylor was now a big star, his behaviour was becoming ever more erratic, not helped by the amphetamines he was taking to keep himself going during shows. The group quit en masse in November 1962, but he persuaded them back so they could play a two-week residency at the Star Club in Hamburg, before a group from Liverpool called the Beatles took over for Christmas. But Taylor only lasted four days of that two-week residency. Just before midnight on the fifth night, just before they were about to go on, he phoned his girlfriend in Paris, got no answer, decided she was out cheating on him, and flew off to Paris instead of playing the show. He phoned the club’s manager the next day to apologise and say he’d be back for that night’s show, but Horst Fascher, the manager, wasn’t as forgiving of Taylor as most promoters had been, and said that he’d shoot Taylor dead if he ever saw him again. The residency was cancelled, and the Playboys had to sell their mohair suits to Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers to pay for their fare back to Paris. For the next few years, Taylor put out a series of fairly poor records with different backing groups, often singing sickly French-language ballads with orchestral backings. He tried gimmicks like changing from his black leather costume into a white leather one, but nothing seemed to work. His money was running out, but then he had one more opportunity to hit the big time again. Bobby Woodman, the drummer from the second lineup of the Playboys, had been playing with Johnny Hallyday, France’s biggest rock and roll star, under the stage name Bobbie Clarke, but then Hallyday was drafted and his band needed work. They got together with Taylor, and as Vince Taylor and the Bobbie Clarke Noise they recorded an EP of blues and rock covers that included a version of the Arthur Crudup song made famous by Elvis, “My Baby Left Me”. It was a quite extraordinary record, his best since “Brand New Cadillac” seven years earlier: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor and the Bobbie Clarke Noise, “My Baby Left Me”] They played the Paris Olympia again, this time supporting the Rolling Stones. Vince Taylor was on his way to the top again. And they had the prospect of an American record deal — Taylor’s sister Sheila had married Joe Barbera, and he’d started up a new label and was interested in signing Taylor. They arranged a showcase gig for him, and everyone thought this could be the big time. But before that, he had to make a quick trip to the UK. The group were owed money by a business associate there, and so Taylor went over to collect the money, and while he was there he went to Bob Dylan’s party, and dropped acid for the first time. And that was the end of Vince Taylor’s career. One of the things that goes completely unreported about the British teen idols of the fifties is that for whatever reason, and I can’t know for sure, there was a very high incidence of severe mental illness among them — an astonishingly high incidence given how few of them there were. Terry Dene was invalided out of the Army with mental health problems shortly after he was drafted. Duffy Power attempted suicide in the early sixties, and had recurrent mental health problems for many years. And Dickie Pride, who his peers thought was the most talented of the lot, ended up dead aged twenty-seven, after having spent time in a psychiatric hospital and suffering so badly he was lobotomised. Vince Taylor was the one whose mental problems have had the most publicity, but much of that has made his illness seem somehow glamorous or entertaining, so I want to emphasise that it was anything but. I spent several years working on a psychiatric ward, and have seen enough people with the same condition that Taylor had that I have no sense of humour about this subject at all. The rest of this podcast is about a man who was suffering horribly. Taylor had always been unstable — he had been paranoid and controlling, he had a tendency to make up lies about himself and act as if he believed them, and he led a chaotic lifestyle. And while normally LSD is safe even if taken relatively often, Taylor’s first acid trip was the last straw for his fragile mental health. He turned up at the showcase gig unshaven, clutching a bottle of Mateus wine, and announced to everyone that he was Mateus, the new Jesus, the son of God. When asked if he had the band’s money, he pulled out a hundred and fifty francs and set fire to it, ranting about how Jesus had turfed the money-lenders out of the temple. An ambulance was called, and the band did the show without him. They had a gig the next day, and Taylor turned up clean-shaven, smartly dressed, and seemingly normal. He apologised for his behaviour the night before, saying he’d “felt a bit strange” but was better now. But when they got to the club and he saw the sign saying “Vince Taylor and the Bobbie Clarke Noise”, he crossed “Vince Taylor” out, and wrote “Mateus” in a felt pen. During the show, instead of singing, he walked through the crowd, anointing them with water. He spent the next decade in and out of hospital, occasionally touring and recording, but often unable to work. But while he was unwell, “Brand New Cadillac” found a new audience. Indeed, it found several audiences. The Hep Stars, a band from Sweden who featured a pre-ABBA Benny Andersson, had a number one hit in Sweden with their reworking of it, just titled “Cadillac”, in 1965, just a month before Taylor’s breakdown: [Excerpt: Hep Stars, “Cadillac”] In 1971, Mungo Jerry reworked the song as “Baby Jump”, which went to number one in the UK, though they didn’t credit Taylor: [Excerpt: Mungo Jerry, “Baby Jump”] And in 1979, the Clash recorded a version of it for their classic double-album London Calling: [Excerpt: The Clash, “Brand New Cadillac”] Shortly after recording that, Joe Strummer of the Clash met up with Taylor, who spent five hours explaining to Strummer how the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were trying to kill him with poisoned chocolate cake. Taylor at that time was still making music, and trying to latch on to whatever the latest trend was, as in his 1982 single “Space Invaders”, inspired by the arcade game: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor, “Space Invaders”] But the new music he was making was almost an irrelevance — by this point he had become a legend in the British music industry, not for who he was in 1982, but for who he was in 1958, and he has had songs written about him by people as diverse as Adam Ant and Van Morrison. But his biggest influence came in the years immediately after his breakdown. Between 1966 and 1972, Taylor spent much of his time in London, severely mentally ill, but trying to have some kind of social life based on his past glories, reminding people that he had once been a star. One of the people he got to know in London in the mid-sixties was a young musician named David Jones. Jones was fascinated by Taylor, even though he’d never liked his music — Jones’ brother was schizophrenic, and he was worried that he would end up like his brother. Jones also wanted to be a rock and roll star, and had some mildly messianic ideas of his own. So a rock and roll star who thought he was Jesus — although he sometimes thought he was an alien, rather than Jesus, and sometimes claimed that Jesus *was* an alien — and who was clearly severely mentally ill, had a fascination for him. He talked later about not having been able to decide whether he was seeing Taylor as an example to follow or a cautionary tale, and about how he’d sat with Taylor outside Charing Cross Station while Taylor had used a magnifying glass and a map of Europe to show him all the sites where aliens were going to land. Several years later, after changing his name to David Bowie, Jones remembered the story of Vince Taylor, the rock and roll star who thought he was an alien messiah, and turned it into the story of Ziggy Stardust: [Excerpt: David Bowie, “Ziggy Stardust”] In 1983, Taylor retired to Switzerland with his new wife Nathalie. He changed his name back to Brian Holden, and while he would play the occasional gig, he tried as best he could to forget his past, and seems to have recovered somewhat from his mental illness. In 1991 he was diagnosed with cancer, and died of it three months later. Shortly before he died, he told a friend “If I die, you can tell them that the only period in my life where I was really happy was my life in Switzerland”.

  Episode seventy-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Brand New Cadillac” by Vince Taylor and the Playboys, and the sad career of rock music’s first acid casualty. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers have two bonus podcasts this week. There’s a haf-hour Q&A episode, where I answer backers’ questions, and a ten-minute bonus episode on “The Hippy Hippy Shake” by Chan Romero. 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. There are several books available on Vince Taylor, including an autobiography, but sadly these are all in French, a language I don’t speak past schoolboy level, so I can’t say if they’re any good. The main resources I used for this episode were the liner notes for this compilation CD of Taylor’s best material,  this archived copy of a twenty-year-old homepage by a friend of Taylor’s, this blogged history of Taylor and the Playboys, and this Radio 4 documentary on Taylor. But *all* of these were riddled with errors, and I used dozens of other resources to try to straighten out the facts — everything from a genealogy website to interviews with Tony Sheridan to the out-of-print autobiography of Joe Barbera. No doubt this episode still has errors in it, but I am fairly confident that it has fewer errors than anything else in English about Taylor on the Internet.  Errata I say that Gene Vincent also appeared on Oh Boy! — in fact he didn’t appear on UK TV until Parnes’ next show, Boy Meets Girls, which would mean Taylor was definitely the originator of that style. A major clanger — I say that Sheridan recorded “Why” while he was working on “Oh Boy!” — in fact this wasn’t recorded until later — *with the Beatles* as his backing band. I should have known that one, but it slipped my mind and I trusted my source, wrongly.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript On the twenty-first of May 1965, at the Savoy Hotel in London, there was a party which would have two major effects on the history of rock and roll music, one which would be felt almost immediately, and one whose full ramifications wouldn’t be seen for almost a decade. Bob Dylan was on the European tour which is chronicled in the film “Don’t Look Back”, and he’d just spent a week in Portugal. He’d come back to the UK, and the next day he was planning to film his first ever televised concert.   That plan was put on hold. Dylan was rushed to hospital the day after the party, with what was claimed to be food poisoning but has often been rumoured to be something else. He spent the next week in bed, back at the Savoy, attended by a private nurse, and during that time he wrote what he called “a long piece of vomit around twenty pages long”. From that “long piece of vomit” he later extracted the lyrics to what became “Like a Rolling Stone”. But Dylan wasn’t the only one who came out of that party feeling funny. Vince Taylor, a minor British rock and roller who’d never had much success over here but was big in France, was also there. There are no euphemisms about what it was that happened to him. He had dropped acid at the party, for the first time, and had liked it so much he’d immediately spent two hundred pounds on buying all the acid he could from the person who’d given it to him. The next day, Taylor was meant to be playing a showcase gig. His brother-in-law, Joe Barbera of Hanna Barbera, owned a record label, and was considering signing Taylor. It could be the start of a comeback for him. Instead, it was the end of his career, and the start of a legend: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor and the Playboys, “Brand New Cadillac”] There are two problems with telling the story of Vince Taylor. One is that he was a compulsive liar, who would make up claims like that he was related to Tenzing Norgay, the Nepalese mountaineer who was one of the two men who first climbed Everest, or that he was an airline pilot as a teenager. The other is that nobody who has written about Taylor has bothered to do even the most cursory fact-checking For example, if you read any online articles about Vince Taylor at all, you see the same story about his upbringing — he was born Brian Holden in the UK, he emigrated to New Jersey with his family in the forties, and then his sister Sheila met Joe Barbera, the co-creator of the Tom and Jerry cartoons. Sheila married him in 1955 and moved with him to Los Angeles — and so the rest of the family also moved there, and Brian went to Hollywood High School. Barbera decided to manage his brother-in-law, bring him over to London to check out the British music scene, and get him a record deal. There’s just… a bit of a problem with this story. Sheila did marry Joe Barbera, but not until the mid 1960s. Her first marriage, in 1947, was to Joe Singer, and it was Singer, not Barbera, who was Taylor’s first manager. That kind of inaccuracy appears all over the story of Vince Taylor So, what we actually know is that Brian Maurice Holden — or Maurice Brian Holden, even his birth name seems to be disputed — was born in Isleworth Middlesex, and moved to New Jersey when he was seven, with his family, emigrating on the Mauretania, and that he came back to London in his late teens. While there was a real Hollywood High School, which Ricky Nelson among others had attended, I suspect it’s as likely that Holden decided to just tell people that was where he’d been to school, because “Hollywood High School” would sound impressive to British people. And sounding impressive to British people was what Brian Holden had decided to base his career on. He claimed to an acquaintance, shortly after he returned to the UK, that he’d heard a Tommy Steele record while he was in the US, and had thought “If this is rock and roll in England, we’ll take them by storm!” [Excerpt: Tommy Steele, “Rock With the Caveman”] Holden had been playing American Legion shows and similar small venues in the US, and when his brother-in-law Joe Singer came over to Britain on a business trip, Holden decided to tag along, and Singer became Holden’s manager. Holden had three great advantages over British stars like Steele. He had spent long enough in America that he could tell people that he was American and they would believe him. In Britain in the 1950s, there were so few Americans that just being from that country was enough to make you a novelty, and Holden milked that for all it was worth, even though his accent, from the few bits of interviews I’ve heard with him, was pure London. He was also much, much better looking than almost all the British rock and roll stars. Because of rationing and general poverty in the UK in the forties and fifties as a result of the war, the British fifties teenage generation were on the whole rather scrawny, pasty-looking, and undernourished, with bad complexions, bad teeth, and a general haggardness that meant that even teen idols like Dickie Pride, Tommy Steele, or Marty Wilde were not, by modern standards, at all good looking. Brian Holden, on the other hand, had film-star good looks. He had a chiselled jaw, thick black hair combed into a quiff, and a dazzling smile showing Hollywood-perfect teeth. I am the farthest thing there is from a judge of male beauty, but of all the fifties rock and roll stars, the only one who was better looking than him was Elvis, and even Elvis had to grow into his good looks, while Holden, even when he came to the UK aged eighteen, looked like a cross between James Dean and Rock Hudson. And finally, he had a real sense of what rock and roll was, in a way that almost none of the British musicians did. He knew, in particular, what a rockabilly record should sound like. He did have one tiny drawback, though — he couldn’t sing in tune, or keep time. But nobody except the unfortunate musicians who ended up backing him saw that as a particular problem. Being unable to sing was a minor matter. He had presence, and he was going to be a star. Everyone knew it. He started performing at the 2Is, and he put together a band which had a rather fluid membership that to start with featured Tony Meehan, a drummer who had been in the Vipers Skiffle Group and would later join the Shadows, but by the time he got a record deal consisted of four of the regular musicians from the 2is — Tony Sheridan on lead guitar, Tony Harvey on rhythm, Licorice Locking on bass and Brian Bennett on drums. He also got himself a new name, and once again there seems to be some doubt as to how the name was chosen. Everyone seems agreed that “Taylor” was suggested by his sister Sheila, after the actor Robert Taylor. But there are three different plausible stories for how he became Vince. The first is that he named himself after Vince Everett, Elvis’ character in Jailhouse Rock. The second is that he was named after Gene Vincent. And the third is that he took the name from a pack of Pall Mall cigarettes, which had a logo with the Latin motto “in hoc signo vinces” — that last word spelled the same way as “Vinces”. And while I’ve never seen this suggestion made anywhere else, there is also the coincidence that both Licorice Locking and Tony Sheridan had been playing, with Jimmy Nicol, in the Vagabonds, the backing band for one of Larry Parnes’ teen idol acts, Vince Eager, who had made one EP before the Vagabonds had split from him: [Excerpt: Vince Eager, “Yea Yea”] So it may be that the similarity of names was in someone’s mind as well. Taylor and his band, named the Playboys, made a huge impression at the 2is, and they were soon signed to Parlophone Records, and in November 1958 they released their first single. Both sides of the single were cover versions of relatively obscure releases on Sun records. The B-side was a cover version of “I Like Love”, which had been written by Jack Clement for Roy Orbison, while the A-side, “Right Behind You Baby” was written by Charlie Rich and originally recorded by Ray Smith: [Excerpt: Ray Smith, “Right Behind You Baby”] Taylor’s version was the closest thing to an American rockabilly record that had been made in Britain to that point. While the vocal was still nothing special, and the recording techniques in British studios created a more polite sound than their American equivalents, the performance is bursting with energy: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor, “Right Behind You Baby”] It’s Sheridan, though, who really makes the record — he plays a twenty-four bar guitar solo that is absolute light years ahead of anything else that was being done in Britain. Here, for example, is “Guitar Boogie Shuffle”, an instrumental hit from Britain’s top rock and roll guitarist of the time, Bert Weedon: [Excerpt: Bert Weedon, “Guitar Boogie Shuffle”] As you can hear, that’s a perfectly good guitar instrumental, very pleasant, very well played. Now listen to Tony Sheridan’s guitar solo on “Right Behind You Baby”: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor, “Right Behind You Baby”] That’s clearly not as technically skilled as Weedon, but it’s also infinitely more exciting, and it’s more exciting than anything that was being made by any other British musicians at the time. Jack Good certainly thought so. While “Right Behind You Baby” wasn’t a hit, it was enough to get Vince on to Oh Boy!, and it was because of his Oh Boy! performances that Vince switched to the look he would keep for the rest of his career — black leather trousers, a black leather jacket, a black shirt with the top few buttons undone, showing his chest and the medallion he always wore, and black leather gloves. It was a look very similar to that which Gene Vincent also adopted for his performances on Oh Boy! — before that, Vincent had been dressing in a distinctly less memorable style — and I’ve seen differing accounts as to which act took on the style first, though both made it their own. Taylor was memorable enough in this getup that when, in the early seventies, another faded rocker who had been known as Shane Fenton made a comeback as a glam-rocker under the name Alvin Stardust, he copied Taylor’s dress exactly. But Good was unimpressed with Taylor’s performance — and very impressed with Sheridan’s. Sheridan was asked to join the Oh Boy! house band, as well as performing under his own name as Tony Sheridan and the Wreckers. He found himself playing on such less-than-classics as “Happy Organ” by Cherry Wainer: [Excerpt: Cherry Wainer, “The Happy Organ”] He also released his own solo record, “Why”: [Excerpt: Tony Sheridan, “Why”] But Sheridan’s biggest impact on popular music wouldn’t come along for another few years… Losing the most innovative guitarist in the British music industry should have been a death-blow to Taylor’s career, but he managed to find the only other guitarist in Britain at that time who might be considered up to Sheridan’s standard, Joe Moretti — who Taylor nicknamed Scotty Moretti, partly because Moretti was Scottish, but mostly because it would make his name similar to that of Scotty Moore, Elvis’ guitarist, and Taylor could shout out “take it, Scotty!” on the solos. While Sheridan’s style was to play frantic Chuck Berry-style licks, Moretti was a more controlled guitarist, but just as inventive, and he had a particular knack for coming up with riffs. And he showed that knack on Taylor’s next single, the first to be credited to Vince Taylor and the Playboys, rather than just to Vince Taylor. The A-side of that single was rather poor — a cover version of Johnny Ace’s “Pledging My Love”, which was done no favours by Taylor’s vocal: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor and the Playboys, “Pledging My Love”] But it was the B-side that was to become a classic. From the stories told by the band members, it seems that everyone knew that that song — one written by Taylor, who otherwise barely ever wrote songs, preferring to perform cover versions — was something special. But the song mentioned two different brand names, Cadillac and Ford, and the BBC at that time had a ban on playing any music which mentioned a brand name at all. So “Brand New Cadillac” became a B-side, but it’s undoubtedly the most thrilling B-side by a British performer of the fifties, and arguably the only true fifties rock and roll classic by a British artist. “Move It” by Cliff Richard had been a good record by British standards — “Brand New Cadillac” was a great record by any standards: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor and the Playboys, “Brand New Cadillac”] Unfortunately, because “Pledging My Love” was the A-side, the record sold almost nothing, and didn’t make the charts. After two flops in a row, Parlophone dropped Vince Taylor and the Playboys, and Taylor went back to performing at the 2Is with whatever random collection of musicians he could get together. Brian Bennett and Licorice Locking, meanwhile, went on to join Marty Wilde’s band the Wildcats, and scored an immediate hit with Wilde’s rather decent cover version of Dion and the Belmonts’ “Teenager in Love”: [Excerpt: Marty Wilde and the Wildcats, “Teenager in Love”] Moretti, Locking, and Bennett will all turn up in our story in future episodes. Taylor’s career seemed to be over before it had really begun, but then he got a second chance. Palette Records was a small label, based in Belgium, which was starting operations in Britain. They didn’t have any big stars, but they had signed Janis Martin, who we talked about back in episode forty, and in August 1960 they put out her single “Here Today and Gone Tomorrow Love”: [Excerpt: Janis Martin, “Here Today and Gone Tomorrow Love”] And at the same time, they put out a new single by Vince Taylor, with a new lineup of Playboys. The A-side was a fairly uninspired ballad called “I’ll Be Your Hero”, very much in the style of Elvis’ film songs, but they soon switched to promoting the flip side, “Jet Black Machine”, which was much more in Taylor’s style. It wasn’t up to the standards of “Brand New Cadillac”, but it was still far more exciting than most of the records that were being made in the UK at the time: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor and the Playboys, “Jet Black Machine”] That seemed like it would be a turning point in Taylor’s career — according to one source I’ve read, it made the top twenty on the NME charts, though I haven’t been able to check those charts myself, and given how unreliable literally everything I’ve read about Taylor is, I don’t entirely trust that. But it was definitely more successful than his two previous singles, and the new lineup of Playboys were booked on a package tour of acts from the 2Is. Things seemed like they were about to start going Taylor’s way. But Taylor had always been a little erratic, and he started to get almost pathologically jealous. He would phone his girlfriend up every night before going on stage, and if she didn’t answer he’d skip the show, to drive to her house and find out what she was doing. And in November 1960, just before the start of the tour, he skipped out on the tour altogether and headed back to visit his family in the States. The band carried on without him, and became the backing group for Duffy Power, one of the many acts managed by Larry Parnes. Power desperately wanted to be a blues singer, but he was pushed into recording cover versions of American hits, like this one, which came out shortly after the Playboys joined him: [Excerpt: Duffy Power, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On”] The Playboys continued to back Power until June 1960, when they had a gig in Guildford, and a remarkable coincidence happened. They were unloading their equipment at the 2Is, to drive to Guildford with it, when Taylor walked round the corner. He’d just got back from the USA and happened to be passing, and they invited him along for the drive to the show. He came with them, and then Duffy Power, who was almost as unreliable as Taylor, didn’t turn up for the show. They invited Taylor to perform in his place, and he did, and blew the audience away. Power eventually turned up half-way through the show, got angry, punched the drummer in the face during the interval, and drove off again. The drummer got two stitches, and then they finished the show. Taylor was back with the Playboys, and Duffy Power was out, and so the next month when Power was booked for some shows in Paris, on a bill with Vince Eager and Wee Willie Harris, Taylor took his place there, too. France was about as far behind Britain in rock and roll terms as Britain was behind America, and no-one had ever seen anything like Vince Taylor. Taylor and the Playboys got signed to a French label, Barclay Records, and they became huge stars — Taylor did indeed get himself a brand new Cadillac, a pink one just like Elvis had. Taylor got nicknamed “le diable noir” — the black Devil — for his demonic stage presence, and he inspired riots regularly with his shows. A review of one of his performances at that time may be of interest to some listeners: “The atmosphere is like many a night club, but the teenagers stand round the dancing floor which you use as a stage. They jump on a woman with gold trousers and a hand microphone and then hit a man when he says “go away.” A group follows, and so do others, playing ‘Apache’ worse than many other bands. When the singer joins the band, the leather jacket fiends who are the audience, join in dancing and banging tables with chairs. The singers have to go one better than the audience, so they lie on the floor, or jump on a passing drummer, or kiss a guitar, and then hit the man playing it. The crowd enjoy this and many stand on chairs to see the fun, and soon the audience are all singing and shouting like one man, but he didn’t mind. Vince (Ron, Ron) Taylor finally appeared and joined the fun, and in the end he had so much fun that he had to rest. But in spite of this it had been a wonderful show, lovely show…lovely.” That was written by a young man from Liverpool named Paul McCartney, who was visiting Paris with his friend John Lennon for Lennon’s twenty-first birthday. The two attended one of Taylor’s shows there, and McCartney sent that review back to run in Mersey Beat, a local music paper. Lennon and McCartney also met Taylor, with whom they had a mutual friend, Tony Sheridan, and tried to blag their way onto the show themselves, but got turned down. While they were in Paris, they also got their hair cut in a new style, to copy the style that was fashionable among Parisian bohemians. When they got back to Liverpool everyone laughed at their new mop-top hairdos… Taylor kept making records while he was in Paris, mostly cover versions of American hits. Probably the best is his version of Chuck Willis’ “Whatcha Gonna Do?”: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor et ses Play-Boys, “Watcha Gonna Do (When Your Baby Leaves You)?”] But while Taylor was now a big star, his behaviour was becoming ever more erratic, not helped by the amphetamines he was taking to keep himself going during shows. The group quit en masse in November 1962, but he persuaded them back so they could play a two-week residency at the Star Club in Hamburg, before a group from Liverpool called the Beatles took over for Christmas. But Taylor only lasted four days of that two-week residency. Just before midnight on the fifth night, just before they were about to go on, he phoned his girlfriend in Paris, got no answer, decided she was out cheating on him, and flew off to Paris instead of playing the show. He phoned the club’s manager the next day to apologise and say he’d be back for that night’s show, but Horst Fascher, the manager, wasn’t as forgiving of Taylor as most promoters had been, and said that he’d shoot Taylor dead if he ever saw him again. The residency was cancelled, and the Playboys had to sell their mohair suits to Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers to pay for their fare back to Paris. For the next few years, Taylor put out a series of fairly poor records with different backing groups, often singing sickly French-language ballads with orchestral backings. He tried gimmicks like changing from his black leather costume into a white leather one, but nothing seemed to work. His money was running out, but then he had one more opportunity to hit the big time again. Bobby Woodman, the drummer from the second lineup of the Playboys, had been playing with Johnny Hallyday, France’s biggest rock and roll star, under the stage name Bobbie Clarke, but then Hallyday was drafted and his band needed work. They got together with Taylor, and as Vince Taylor and the Bobbie Clarke Noise they recorded an EP of blues and rock covers that included a version of the Arthur Crudup song made famous by Elvis, “My Baby Left Me”. It was a quite extraordinary record, his best since “Brand New Cadillac” seven years earlier: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor and the Bobbie Clarke Noise, “My Baby Left Me”] They played the Paris Olympia again, this time supporting the Rolling Stones. Vince Taylor was on his way to the top again. And they had the prospect of an American record deal — Taylor’s sister Sheila had married Joe Barbera, and he’d started up a new label and was interested in signing Taylor. They arranged a showcase gig for him, and everyone thought this could be the big time. But before that, he had to make a quick trip to the UK. The group were owed money by a business associate there, and so Taylor went over to collect the money, and while he was there he went to Bob Dylan’s party, and dropped acid for the first time. And that was the end of Vince Taylor’s career. One of the things that goes completely unreported about the British teen idols of the fifties is that for whatever reason, and I can’t know for sure, there was a very high incidence of severe mental illness among them — an astonishingly high incidence given how few of them there were. Terry Dene was invalided out of the Army with mental health problems shortly after he was drafted. Duffy Power attempted suicide in the early sixties, and had recurrent mental health problems for many years. And Dickie Pride, who his peers thought was the most talented of the lot, ended up dead aged twenty-seven, after having spent time in a psychiatric hospital and suffering so badly he was lobotomised. Vince Taylor was the one whose mental problems have had the most publicity, but much of that has made his illness seem somehow glamorous or entertaining, so I want to emphasise that it was anything but. I spent several years working on a psychiatric ward, and have seen enough people with the same condition that Taylor had that I have no sense of humour about this subject at all. The rest of this podcast is about a man who was suffering horribly. Taylor had always been unstable — he had been paranoid and controlling, he had a tendency to make up lies about himself and act as if he believed them, and he led a chaotic lifestyle. And while normally LSD is safe even if taken relatively often, Taylor’s first acid trip was the last straw for his fragile mental health. He turned up at the showcase gig unshaven, clutching a bottle of Mateus wine, and announced to everyone that he was Mateus, the new Jesus, the son of God. When asked if he had the band’s money, he pulled out a hundred and fifty francs and set fire to it, ranting about how Jesus had turfed the money-lenders out of the temple. An ambulance was called, and the band did the show without him. They had a gig the next day, and Taylor turned up clean-shaven, smartly dressed, and seemingly normal. He apologised for his behaviour the night before, saying he’d “felt a bit strange” but was better now. But when they got to the club and he saw the sign saying “Vince Taylor and the Bobbie Clarke Noise”, he crossed “Vince Taylor” out, and wrote “Mateus” in a felt pen. During the show, instead of singing, he walked through the crowd, anointing them with water. He spent the next decade in and out of hospital, occasionally touring and recording, but often unable to work. But while he was unwell, “Brand New Cadillac” found a new audience. Indeed, it found several audiences. The Hep Stars, a band from Sweden who featured a pre-ABBA Benny Andersson, had a number one hit in Sweden with their reworking of it, just titled “Cadillac”, in 1965, just a month before Taylor’s breakdown: [Excerpt: Hep Stars, “Cadillac”] In 1971, Mungo Jerry reworked the song as “Baby Jump”, which went to number one in the UK, though they didn’t credit Taylor: [Excerpt: Mungo Jerry, “Baby Jump”] And in 1979, the Clash recorded a version of it for their classic double-album London Calling: [Excerpt: The Clash, “Brand New Cadillac”] Shortly after recording that, Joe Strummer of the Clash met up with Taylor, who spent five hours explaining to Strummer how the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were trying to kill him with poisoned chocolate cake. Taylor at that time was still making music, and trying to latch on to whatever the latest trend was, as in his 1982 single “Space Invaders”, inspired by the arcade game: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor, “Space Invaders”] But the new music he was making was almost an irrelevance — by this point he had become a legend in the British music industry, not for who he was in 1982, but for who he was in 1958, and he has had songs written about him by people as diverse as Adam Ant and Van Morrison. But his biggest influence came in the years immediately after his breakdown. Between 1966 and 1972, Taylor spent much of his time in London, severely mentally ill, but trying to have some kind of social life based on his past glories, reminding people that he had once been a star. One of the people he got to know in London in the mid-sixties was a young musician named David Jones. Jones was fascinated by Taylor, even though he’d never liked his music — Jones’ brother was schizophrenic, and he was worried that he would end up like his brother. Jones also wanted to be a rock and roll star, and had some mildly messianic ideas of his own. So a rock and roll star who thought he was Jesus — although he sometimes thought he was an alien, rather than Jesus, and sometimes claimed that Jesus *was* an alien — and who was clearly severely mentally ill, had a fascination for him. He talked later about not having been able to decide whether he was seeing Taylor as an example to follow or a cautionary tale, and about how he’d sat with Taylor outside Charing Cross Station while Taylor had used a magnifying glass and a map of Europe to show him all the sites where aliens were going to land. Several years later, after changing his name to David Bowie, Jones remembered the story of Vince Taylor, the rock and roll star who thought he was an alien messiah, and turned it into the story of Ziggy Stardust: [Excerpt: David Bowie, “Ziggy Stardust”] In 1983, Taylor retired to Switzerland with his new wife Nathalie. He changed his name back to Brian Holden, and while he would play the occasional gig, he tried as best he could to forget his past, and seems to have recovered somewhat from his mental illness. In 1991 he was diagnosed with cancer, and died of it three months later. Shortly before he died, he told a friend “If I die, you can tell them that the only period in my life where I was really happy was my life in Switzerland”.

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

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

Episode sixty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Great Balls of Fire” by Jerry Lee Lewis. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. This one comes with a bit of a content warning, as while it has nothing explicit, it deals with his marriage to his thirteen-year-old cousin. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Rumble” by Link Wray. (more…)

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

O.T.R. " Free & Easy " live Radio show (Dab+) Le Havre France . Sunday the 12th - 2020 - Wildcliff ( Patryck Albert ) present , playlist 67 : Horace Heller , William Penn-Fyre , Del-Mars , Allen Smithee , spot!, I Punti Cardinali , Johnny Bond , Darell Rhodes , Don Bowman , Johnny Carlton , Spot! , Mojo Men , Arthur Dreyfus , Tommy Scott & Scotty Lee, Thursday 's Children , Frantics , Satan in the high wheel , Burning Bush , Sons of Barbee Doll , spot! , Invictas , spot! , Bobby Wayne , Alvie Self , Wayne Cyrtis , Glenn Barber , Billy Barton , Jack Clement , spot! ...... Rock'n 'Roll on !

Episode fifty-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” by Jerry Lee Lewis. 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 “So Long I’m Gone” by Warren Smith.  —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I’m relying heavily on Sam Phillips: the Man Who Invented Rock and Roll by Peter Guralnick for all the episodes dealing with Phillips and Sun Records. Books on Jerry Lee Lewis tend to be very flawed, as the authors all tend to think they’re Faulkner rather than giving the facts. This one by Rick Bragg is better than most. The episode of Cocaine and Rhinestones I mention in the episode is here. There are many budget CDs containing Lewis’ pre-1962 work. This set seems as good an option as any. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript We’re in an odd position with this episode, really. The first time we looked at Jerry Lee Lewis, it was as part of the Million Dollar Quartet, yet at the time of the actual Million Dollar Quartet session, Lewis was basically an unknown, and we didn’t have time to cover his career up to that point — even though the Million Dollar Quartet recordings prove that he considered himself a peer of Elvis and Carl Perkins right from the start. And we also talked about Lewis a fortnight ago, when we were dealing with Billy Lee Riley, but again, the focus was on someone other than Lewis. The problem is that Jerry Lee Lewis is just the kind of figure who demands discussion, even before he became a famous musician. He’s someone who just dominates other people’s stories, and pushes in to them and takes over. So now we’ve got to the point where he’s about to have his first hit, but we haven’t really looked at how he got to that point, just at him interacting with other people. So now we’re going to have to back up, and look at the first hit record from the last great artist to be discovered by Sun Records. [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On”] Jerry Lee Lewis was a young piano player from Ferriday, Louisiana, who loved music more than anything. He loved Gene Autry, and Hank Williams — and he loved Al Jolson. He would later tell a story about going on a date to the cinema. Before the show they were playing records, and one record that came on was Jolson singing “Toot Toot Tootsie Goodbye”: [Excerpt: Al Jolson, “Toot Toot Tootsie Goodbye”] Lewis immediately got out of his seat, told his girlfriend he needed to use the toilet, cycled home, worked out how to play the song on the piano, cycled back, and rejoined his date for the film. She asked why he’d been gone so long, and he said he’d picked up some popcorn as well. Sam Phillips would often say later that Jerry Lee Lewis was the most naturally talented musician he ever worked with. Elvis was the most charismatic, Johnny Cash had the most commanding presence, and Howlin’ Wolf was the most profound artist, but Lewis was the one who had the greatest obsession with his music, the greatest drive to create, and the greatest sheer knowledge of music, in all different genres. Lewis would play piano for eight hours a day, and while in other matters he was surprisingly ignorant — other than the Bible, the only things he ever read were comics — he could talk with a huge amount of authority about the musical techniques of everyone from B.B. King to Frank Sinatra, and he could hear a song once and remember it and play it years later. And whatever music he learned, from whatever source, he would somehow transmute it and turn it into a Jerry Lee Lewis song. Nothing he played sounded like anyone else. He’d started playing music when he was four years old. He’d been walking past a piano in the house of his rich uncle, Lee Calhoun, and had felt the urge to play it. He’d almost instantly figured out how to play the beginning of “Silent Night”, and his parents — who always doted on him and tried to give him everything he wanted, after the tragically young death of his older brother — realised that they might have a child prodigy on their hands. When his father finally got into a position where he could buy his own farm, the first thing he did was remortgage it so he could buy his son his own piano. They didn’t have electricity in the house — until Elmo Lewis decided to wire the house for electricity, so his boy Jerry Lee could listen to the radio and learn more songs. What Jerry Lee wanted, he got. As a kid, Jerry Lee was always the one who would get his relatives into trouble. He would go to the cinema — a sin in the strict Pentecostal religion of his family — and one time he dragged in Jimmy Swaggart, who was his “double first cousin” — Swaggart’s father was Lewis’ father’s nephew, while Swaggart’s mother was Lewis’ mother’s sister. Swaggart ran out of the cinema crying, convinced he had damned himself to hell. Jerry Lee stayed and watched the cowboys. But while he loved the cinema, the piano was his true love. He and Swaggart, and their other cousin Mickey Gilley, would all play piano together, as well as separately. But Jerry Lee was undoubtedly the most talented, and he was also the biggest music lover, and he would spend his time trying to adapt the styles of the musicians he liked to the piano. Even though Jerry Lee was in Louisiana, which is the home of great piano playing, most of his musical influences were guitarists. His favourite musician was Jimmie Rodgers, and Jerry Lee would play his “Waiting For a Train”: [Excerpt: Jimmie Rodgers, “Waiting For a Train”] His favourite song to play, though, was “Drinking Wine Spo-De-O-Dee”, the Sticks McGhee record that some credit as the first rock and roll record ever: [Excerpt: Sticks McGhee: “Drinking Wine Spo-De-O-Dee”] But he had two bigger influences — two people who could actually play the piano the way that Jerry Lee thought it should be played. The first was Moon Mullican, who we talked about back in the episode on Hank Williams. Mullican was another Louisiana piano player, and another musician who combined bits of everything — Western Swing, hillbilly boogie, blues, R&B, gospel, Cajun music — into a unique melange of styles all his own: [Excerpt: Moon Mullican, “Piano Breakdown”] The other big influence on young Jerry Lee was his uncle, Carl McVoy. McVoy never became famous, but he made a couple of records after his nephew became famous, and listening to this one, made in 1957 with much of the same group of musicians who worked on Elvis’ hits, including Chet Atkins and the Jordanaires, it’s spooky how much it sounds like Jerry Lee himself: [Excerpt: Carl McVoy: “You Are My Sunshine”] But young Jerry Lee was torn between two worlds. On the one hand, as a kid he would regularly sneak into a local blues club with an otherwise entirely black clientele, and hide under the tables to watch people like Fats Domino, Charles Brown, B.B. King, and Big Joe Turner, until he was kicked out by the owner — who, understandably, was not keen on having underaged white kids in his black drinking and gambling club in the segregated South. On the other, he was deeply, deeply, religious, and for a while he studied at the Southwestern Bible Institute in Waxahachie, Texas, in the hope of becoming a priest. Unfortunately, he was kicked out after playing the hymn “My God is Real” with a boogie feel, which according to the people in charge was inciting lust among the other students. This tension between religion and the secular world would recur throughout Lewis’ life, but by the time he signed to Sun Records, aged twenty-one, he was firmly on the side of the Devil. He’d been making a living as a sewing machine salesman, conning women into signing up to buy one on credit by telling them they’d won the machine in a contest. He’d already got married twice, and hadn’t actually got around to divorcing his first wife before marrying the second – and he’d also decided it was about time he moved on from the second wife as well. He’d been touring with a blind musician called Paul Whitehead. Whitehead could play violin, accordion, and piano, and Jerry Lee would play piano while Mr. Paul, as he was always called, played the fiddle, and move on to the drums when Mr. Paul played the piano. Sometimes they would also add a bass player, Johnny Littlejohn (not the same person as the Chicago blues guitarist of the same name). Littlejohn had something of the style of Elvis, and Jerry Lee was jealous of him. There’s only one recording available of Lewis’ mentor Mr. Paul — his piano part on an obscure rockabilly song, “Right Now”, by Gray Montgomery: [Excerpt: Gray Montgomery, “Right Now”] But while he needed a mentor for a while, Jerry Lee Lewis knew he was destined to be great on his own. The big break came when he read in a magazine about how it was Sam Phillips who had made Elvis into a star. He’d already tried RCA Records, the label Elvis was now on — they’d told him he needed to play a guitar. He’d blagged his way into an audition at the Grand Ole Opry, and the same thing had happened — he’d been told to come back when he played guitar, not piano. The only person in the country establishment who was kind to him was another piano player, Del Wood, who thought this young man reminded her of herself: [Excerpt: Del Wood, “Down Yonder”] Maybe Phillips would have more sense in him, and would see the greatness of a man who had been known to refer to himself, blasphemously, as “The Great I AM”. Jerry Lee knew that if he just got the right break he could be the greatest star of all time. He and his father drove down to Memphis, and got themselves a hotel room, which was the first time they’d ever stayed anywhere with running water. They saved the money from selling hundreds of eggs from Jerry Lee’s father’s henhouse to a local supermarket, and they couldn’t afford to stay there very long. And then, when they went into the Sun studio to meet this Mr. Phillips, the person to whom Jerry Lee had pinned all his dreams, they were told that Phillips was out of town. They were welcome to come back later, of course — but they couldn’t afford to just travel back to Memphis later and book another hotel room. It was now or never, and Jerry Lee was just going to stay there until someone listened to him play the piano. The person who eventually agreed to listen to him was Cowboy Jack Clement, who became intrigued when Jerry Lee told him that he could play piano and make it sound like Chet Atkins did when he was playing guitar — except that, no, he was better at piano than Chet Atkins was on guitar. Jerry Lee played for Clement for three or four hours, and when Clement played the tape for Sam Phillips when he got back from his trip, Phillips agreed — they needed to get this man in. Lewis’ first single was recorded almost as a joke. We talked a little about his recording of “Crazy Arms” a couple of weeks back, in the episode on Billy Lee Riley, but there’s more to say about the song than we covered there. [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Crazy Arms”] “Crazy Arms” is a song with a disputed history. There are claims that the song was actually written by a man from Kentucky named Paul Gilley, who died in 1957 and is also considered by some to have secretly ghostwritten a number of Hank Williams’ hits, including “Cold Cold Heart” and “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”. Unfortunately, the bulk of the evidence for this is only available in a self-published book, which can’t even be bought from Amazon but has to be purchased directly from the author via Craigslist, so I have no way of assessing the accuracy of these claims. It seems unlikely to me, but not impossible, and so I’m going to go here with the conventional narrative, that the song was written by the great pedal steel guitar player Ralph Mooney, in 1949, but had remained unrecorded until a demo by Mooney’s frequent collaborator, Wynn Stewart, in 1954. The first release of the song was by a very minor country singer called Marilyn Kaye, and while it wasn’t a hit for her, it got enough response from radio listeners that a DJ played it to the singer Ray Price, who recorded his own version as a result: [Excerpt: Ray Price, “Crazy Arms”] That became the biggest country hit of 1956, and while it doesn’t sound hugely revolutionary these days, it totally changed the sound of honky-tonk music from that point on, thanks largely to the bass player playing four notes to the bar rather than the more usual two. We don’t have time in this episode to look into just how much this changed country music, but I’ll link an episode of the great country podcast Cocaine and Rhinestones, all about Ralph Mooney, and which talks about the song in more detail, in the notes to this episode. But the important thing is that Ray Price’s version of “Crazy Arms” was *everywhere* in 1956, and so it’s unsurprising that at the end of Jerry Lee Lewis’ first solo session for Sun, he started busking his way through the song, which he’d also played on his audition tape: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Crazy Arms”] “Crazy Arms” would always be a bit of a disappointment to Jerry Lee, not because it wasn’t a massive hit — that didn’t bother him, he knew he’d have to make a few records before he became the star he knew he should be — but because his father didn’t seem very impressed with it. Elmo Lewis had always wanted to be a musician himself, but he’d given up playing the piano when Jerry Lee was a small child. Jerry Lee had been trying to teach himself a song, and after he’d been trying for a while, Elmo had sat down and played the song himself. Little Jerry Lee had cried because his dad could do something he couldn’t, and so Elmo had never again touched a piano, to avoid demoralising his young son. And so Jerry Lee believes to this day that the reason his dad wasn’t hugely impressed by Jerry Lee’s first record was just that — that seeing his son achieve an ambition he’d given up on himself was at best bittersweet. Jerry Lee’s next record, though, didn’t disappoint anyone. It took him quite a while to find exactly the right song for his second single. He kept popping back into the studio, in between tour dates, and when he wasn’t recording with Carl Perkins or Billy Lee Riley or whoever, he’d cut a few more songs as himself. He’d play old Gene Autry songs, and Big Joe Turner’s “Honey Hush”, which had just been cut by Johnny Burnette, and old folk songs of the kind the Everly Brothers were soon to do on their second album, and a few songs he wrote himself, even, but nothing seemed suitable for the record that would make him into a star. Until he decided to just cut the highlight of his live show. “Whole Lotta Shakin'” is another song whose authorship is disputed. It was originally recorded by Big Maybelle, a blues singer, in an arrangement by Quincy Jones: [Excerpt: Big Maybelle, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On”] Two people both claimed to have written the song — a black singer called Dave “Curlee” Williams, and a white pianist called Roy Hall, both of whom knew each other, and both of whom are now credited as the song’s writers (though Hall is credited under the pseudonym “Sunny David”). They were supposedly inspired when on holiday together, in Pahokee Florida, where according to Hall they spent their days milking rattlesnakes while drunk. When it was dinnertime, someone would ring a big bell for everyone to come in, and Hall remembered someone saying about it “We got twenty-one drums, we got an old bass horn, an’ they even keepin’ time on a ding-dong.” That became, according to Hall, the inspiration for the opening line of the song. Curlee Williams, though, always claimed that he was the sole writer of the song, and many have speculated that Hall probably bought a share of the song from Williams — something that happened quite a lot in those days. Hall recorded his own version of the song, on Decca, a few months after Big Maybelle recorded her version: [Excerpt: Roy Hall, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On”] If Hall did buy his share of the song, rather than writing it, then it was a bad deal for him — as soon as the song became a hit, Hall’s ex-wife sued him, and was awarded all of his share of the song’s royalties. Neither Big Maybelle’s version of the song, nor Roy Hall’s, had been the inspiration for Jerry Lee Lewis, though. Instead, his inspiration had been that bass player we mentioned earlier, Johnny Littlejohn. Jerry Lee had turned up late to a gig with Littlejohn and Mr. Paul, back when they were playing together, and had found them already on stage, with Littlejohn singing lead on a version of “Whole Lotta Shakin'” that was very different from either version that had already come out — they were playing the song faster, and Littlejohn included a spoken section, where he’d tell the audience that all they needed to do was stand in one spot and wiggle around just a little bit, and that’s when you’ve got it. When Jerry Lee got on stage after the song, Littlejohn had said to him, “You’re a bit late, aren’t you?” “No,” Jerry Lee had replied, “I’m right on time”. That spoken section was probably inspired by this similar passage in “Pine Top’s Boogie Woogie”, a song that Jerry Lee knew well: [Excerpt: Pine Top Smith, “Pine Top’s Boogie Woogie”] When that group had split up, Jerry Lee had taken that song and that performance, exactly as Littlejohn had done it, and started doing it himself. He later said “I done it just like Johnny done it. Maybe I should have felt guilty about that.” He didn’t feel guilty, though. He felt many things, especially when it got the women in the audience dancing and wiggling, but he didn’t feel guilty. Jerry Lee took his version of the song into Sun, convinced that this was going to be his big hit… and neither Sam Phillips nor Jack Clement believed in it. They thought that the song was probably too vulgar to get played on the radio, and that anyway it sounded too much like Elvis — there wasn’t room for someone else who sounded like that in the charts. No, they were going to have Jerry Lee record a nice, sensible, country song that Clement had written. A song inspired by going to the toilet, and by reincarnation. Clement was on the toilet, thinking about a breakup he’d had, and how he’d like to come back as a turd in his ex’s toilet bowl, so she’d look down and see him in there winking up at her. He’d taken that idea, cleaned it up a little, and turned it into “It’ll Be Me”: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “It’ll Be Me”, single version] That was going to be the A-side, of course, but they’d let Jerry Lee cut this “Shakin'” thing for the B-side if he wanted. There are different stories about the recording of “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” — Cowboy Jack Clement, for example, would always claim that they’d recorded it in just one take, with just three minutes of tape left on the reel, right at the end of the session. The reality seems, sadly, slightly more prosaic — they took several takes, with both Clement and Phillips throwing in ideas, and changed the instrumentation around a bit during the session, lowering the bass in the mix and adding some slapback echo to the piano. However much time they spent on it, though, the result still *sounded* spontaneous: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Whole Lotta Shakin'”] When it was finished, everyone knew that that would have to be the A-side of the single. Before it came out, Jerry Lee went out on tour with Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Wanda Jackson, and a couple of other acts — the only things Jerry Lee and his band brought with them on the tour, other than their clothes and instruments, were whiskey, comic books, and cherry bombs. He started out as the third billed act, with Perkins and Cash following him, but soon they started to insist he go on last, even though he’d not had a hit yet, because nobody could follow him. The three men became friends, but Perkins and Cash were already starting to resent the fact that Jerry Lee was clearly Sam Phillips’ new golden boy, and plotting ways to get out of their contract with Sun, and go somewhere that they’d not be overshadowed by this wild kid. The tour zig-zagged across much of North America — at one point Jerry Lee insisted on a detour on the way to Buffalo, to see Niagara Falls. When he got there, he got out of the car, stood there for thirty seconds, said “Jerry Lee Lewis has seen the Niagara Falls. Now let’s go home, boys”, and got back into the car. On an early date on the tour, Jerry Lee met Sam Phillips’ brother Jud for the first time. Jud did a lot of the promotion work for Sun, and he saw something in Jerry Lee — in the way he looked, the way he performed, the way the slicked-back hair he had at the start of a performance would soon fall over his face in wild blond shocks. He knew that anyone who saw Jerry Lee perform live would see the same thing. He knew that Jerry Lee needed to be on TV. Specifically, he had to go on either the Ed Sullivan or the Steve Allen show — the two big variety shows that between them could make an artist. Jud persuaded Sam to let him take Jerry Lee to New York, to try to persuade the bookers for those shows to give the boy a shot. Jud and Jerry Lee travelled up to meet Steve Allen’s manager and the head of talent for NBC — they were squeezed in to a fifteen minute meeting on a Friday evening. They went in to the meeting with none of the usual things that someone trying to book an artist on the Steve Allen show would bring — no photos, no records, nothing — and Jerry Lee sat in the meeting reading a Superman comic and blowing bubbles with his bubblegum while the businessmen talked. Jud Phillips eventually persuaded them to let Jerry show them what he could do on the piano, explaining that records couldn’t capture his performance. When Jerry Lee did show them his stuff, they said to Jud “I’ll give you five hundred dollars if you don’t show him to anyone else. And bring him back on Monday morning. I want Steve to see him.” So Jerry Lee got to spend the weekend in New York, and ride the rollercoasters at Coney Island, before heading back in on the Monday to play the piano for Steve Allen, who despite his general contempt for rock and roll was as impressed as everyone else. They booked him in for an appearance on the Steve Allen Show in a month’s time. That performance is available online, if you go looking for it. I’ll excerpt some of the music, but the sound alone doesn’t capture it. It really needs the video: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On”, Steve Allen Show 1957] At that moment, when Jerry Lee screamed “shake”, he kicked the piano stool away and it went flying across the stage and out of shot. A few seconds later it came flying back across the stage, as Steve Allen, the host who’d made Elvis wear a dinner jacket and sing to a real hound dog, and who’d mocked Fats Domino and Gene Vincent’s lyrics, got into the spirit of the thing and threw the stool right back. That was the moment when Jerry Lee Lewis became a star. But when you’re someone like Jerry Lee Lewis, the only reason to rise up is to fall down again, and we’ll find out about Jerry Lee’s fall in a few weeks’ time.

Episode fifty-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” by Jerry Lee Lewis. 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 “So Long I’m Gone” by Warren Smith. (more…)

Episode fifty-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” by Jerry Lee Lewis. 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 “So Long I’m Gone” by Warren Smith.  —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I’m relying heavily on Sam Phillips: the Man Who Invented Rock and Roll by Peter Guralnick for all the episodes dealing with Phillips and Sun Records. Books on Jerry Lee Lewis tend to be very flawed, as the authors all tend to think they’re Faulkner rather than giving the facts. This one by Rick Bragg is better than most. The episode of Cocaine and Rhinestones I mention in the episode is here. There are many budget CDs containing Lewis’ pre-1962 work. This set seems as good an option as any. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript We’re in an odd position with this episode, really. The first time we looked at Jerry Lee Lewis, it was as part of the Million Dollar Quartet, yet at the time of the actual Million Dollar Quartet session, Lewis was basically an unknown, and we didn’t have time to cover his career up to that point — even though the Million Dollar Quartet recordings prove that he considered himself a peer of Elvis and Carl Perkins right from the start. And we also talked about Lewis a fortnight ago, when we were dealing with Billy Lee Riley, but again, the focus was on someone other than Lewis. The problem is that Jerry Lee Lewis is just the kind of figure who demands discussion, even before he became a famous musician. He’s someone who just dominates other people’s stories, and pushes in to them and takes over. So now we’ve got to the point where he’s about to have his first hit, but we haven’t really looked at how he got to that point, just at him interacting with other people. So now we’re going to have to back up, and look at the first hit record from the last great artist to be discovered by Sun Records. [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On”] Jerry Lee Lewis was a young piano player from Ferriday, Louisiana, who loved music more than anything. He loved Gene Autry, and Hank Williams — and he loved Al Jolson. He would later tell a story about going on a date to the cinema. Before the show they were playing records, and one record that came on was Jolson singing “Toot Toot Tootsie Goodbye”: [Excerpt: Al Jolson, “Toot Toot Tootsie Goodbye”] Lewis immediately got out of his seat, told his girlfriend he needed to use the toilet, cycled home, worked out how to play the song on the piano, cycled back, and rejoined his date for the film. She asked why he’d been gone so long, and he said he’d picked up some popcorn as well. Sam Phillips would often say later that Jerry Lee Lewis was the most naturally talented musician he ever worked with. Elvis was the most charismatic, Johnny Cash had the most commanding presence, and Howlin’ Wolf was the most profound artist, but Lewis was the one who had the greatest obsession with his music, the greatest drive to create, and the greatest sheer knowledge of music, in all different genres. Lewis would play piano for eight hours a day, and while in other matters he was surprisingly ignorant — other than the Bible, the only things he ever read were comics — he could talk with a huge amount of authority about the musical techniques of everyone from B.B. King to Frank Sinatra, and he could hear a song once and remember it and play it years later. And whatever music he learned, from whatever source, he would somehow transmute it and turn it into a Jerry Lee Lewis song. Nothing he played sounded like anyone else. He’d started playing music when he was four years old. He’d been walking past a piano in the house of his rich uncle, Lee Calhoun, and had felt the urge to play it. He’d almost instantly figured out how to play the beginning of “Silent Night”, and his parents — who always doted on him and tried to give him everything he wanted, after the tragically young death of his older brother — realised that they might have a child prodigy on their hands. When his father finally got into a position where he could buy his own farm, the first thing he did was remortgage it so he could buy his son his own piano. They didn’t have electricity in the house — until Elmo Lewis decided to wire the house for electricity, so his boy Jerry Lee could listen to the radio and learn more songs. What Jerry Lee wanted, he got. As a kid, Jerry Lee was always the one who would get his relatives into trouble. He would go to the cinema — a sin in the strict Pentecostal religion of his family — and one time he dragged in Jimmy Swaggart, who was his “double first cousin” — Swaggart’s father was Lewis’ father’s nephew, while Swaggart’s mother was Lewis’ mother’s sister. Swaggart ran out of the cinema crying, convinced he had damned himself to hell. Jerry Lee stayed and watched the cowboys. But while he loved the cinema, the piano was his true love. He and Swaggart, and their other cousin Mickey Gilley, would all play piano together, as well as separately. But Jerry Lee was undoubtedly the most talented, and he was also the biggest music lover, and he would spend his time trying to adapt the styles of the musicians he liked to the piano. Even though Jerry Lee was in Louisiana, which is the home of great piano playing, most of his musical influences were guitarists. His favourite musician was Jimmie Rodgers, and Jerry Lee would play his “Waiting For a Train”: [Excerpt: Jimmie Rodgers, “Waiting For a Train”] His favourite song to play, though, was “Drinking Wine Spo-De-O-Dee”, the Sticks McGhee record that some credit as the first rock and roll record ever: [Excerpt: Sticks McGhee: “Drinking Wine Spo-De-O-Dee”] But he had two bigger influences — two people who could actually play the piano the way that Jerry Lee thought it should be played. The first was Moon Mullican, who we talked about back in the episode on Hank Williams. Mullican was another Louisiana piano player, and another musician who combined bits of everything — Western Swing, hillbilly boogie, blues, R&B, gospel, Cajun music — into a unique melange of styles all his own: [Excerpt: Moon Mullican, “Piano Breakdown”] The other big influence on young Jerry Lee was his uncle, Carl McVoy. McVoy never became famous, but he made a couple of records after his nephew became famous, and listening to this one, made in 1957 with much of the same group of musicians who worked on Elvis’ hits, including Chet Atkins and the Jordanaires, it’s spooky how much it sounds like Jerry Lee himself: [Excerpt: Carl McVoy: “You Are My Sunshine”] But young Jerry Lee was torn between two worlds. On the one hand, as a kid he would regularly sneak into a local blues club with an otherwise entirely black clientele, and hide under the tables to watch people like Fats Domino, Charles Brown, B.B. King, and Big Joe Turner, until he was kicked out by the owner — who, understandably, was not keen on having underaged white kids in his black drinking and gambling club in the segregated South. On the other, he was deeply, deeply, religious, and for a while he studied at the Southwestern Bible Institute in Waxahachie, Texas, in the hope of becoming a priest. Unfortunately, he was kicked out after playing the hymn “My God is Real” with a boogie feel, which according to the people in charge was inciting lust among the other students. This tension between religion and the secular world would recur throughout Lewis’ life, but by the time he signed to Sun Records, aged twenty-one, he was firmly on the side of the Devil. He’d been making a living as a sewing machine salesman, conning women into signing up to buy one on credit by telling them they’d won the machine in a contest. He’d already got married twice, and hadn’t actually got around to divorcing his first wife before marrying the second – and he’d also decided it was about time he moved on from the second wife as well. He’d been touring with a blind musician called Paul Whitehead. Whitehead could play violin, accordion, and piano, and Jerry Lee would play piano while Mr. Paul, as he was always called, played the fiddle, and move on to the drums when Mr. Paul played the piano. Sometimes they would also add a bass player, Johnny Littlejohn (not the same person as the Chicago blues guitarist of the same name). Littlejohn had something of the style of Elvis, and Jerry Lee was jealous of him. There’s only one recording available of Lewis’ mentor Mr. Paul — his piano part on an obscure rockabilly song, “Right Now”, by Gray Montgomery: [Excerpt: Gray Montgomery, “Right Now”] But while he needed a mentor for a while, Jerry Lee Lewis knew he was destined to be great on his own. The big break came when he read in a magazine about how it was Sam Phillips who had made Elvis into a star. He’d already tried RCA Records, the label Elvis was now on — they’d told him he needed to play a guitar. He’d blagged his way into an audition at the Grand Ole Opry, and the same thing had happened — he’d been told to come back when he played guitar, not piano. The only person in the country establishment who was kind to him was another piano player, Del Wood, who thought this young man reminded her of herself: [Excerpt: Del Wood, “Down Yonder”] Maybe Phillips would have more sense in him, and would see the greatness of a man who had been known to refer to himself, blasphemously, as “The Great I AM”. Jerry Lee knew that if he just got the right break he could be the greatest star of all time. He and his father drove down to Memphis, and got themselves a hotel room, which was the first time they’d ever stayed anywhere with running water. They saved the money from selling hundreds of eggs from Jerry Lee’s father’s henhouse to a local supermarket, and they couldn’t afford to stay there very long. And then, when they went into the Sun studio to meet this Mr. Phillips, the person to whom Jerry Lee had pinned all his dreams, they were told that Phillips was out of town. They were welcome to come back later, of course — but they couldn’t afford to just travel back to Memphis later and book another hotel room. It was now or never, and Jerry Lee was just going to stay there until someone listened to him play the piano. The person who eventually agreed to listen to him was Cowboy Jack Clement, who became intrigued when Jerry Lee told him that he could play piano and make it sound like Chet Atkins did when he was playing guitar — except that, no, he was better at piano than Chet Atkins was on guitar. Jerry Lee played for Clement for three or four hours, and when Clement played the tape for Sam Phillips when he got back from his trip, Phillips agreed — they needed to get this man in. Lewis’ first single was recorded almost as a joke. We talked a little about his recording of “Crazy Arms” a couple of weeks back, in the episode on Billy Lee Riley, but there’s more to say about the song than we covered there. [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Crazy Arms”] “Crazy Arms” is a song with a disputed history. There are claims that the song was actually written by a man from Kentucky named Paul Gilley, who died in 1957 and is also considered by some to have secretly ghostwritten a number of Hank Williams’ hits, including “Cold Cold Heart” and “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”. Unfortunately, the bulk of the evidence for this is only available in a self-published book, which can’t even be bought from Amazon but has to be purchased directly from the author via Craigslist, so I have no way of assessing the accuracy of these claims. It seems unlikely to me, but not impossible, and so I’m going to go here with the conventional narrative, that the song was written by the great pedal steel guitar player Ralph Mooney, in 1949, but had remained unrecorded until a demo by Mooney’s frequent collaborator, Wynn Stewart, in 1954. The first release of the song was by a very minor country singer called Marilyn Kaye, and while it wasn’t a hit for her, it got enough response from radio listeners that a DJ played it to the singer Ray Price, who recorded his own version as a result: [Excerpt: Ray Price, “Crazy Arms”] That became the biggest country hit of 1956, and while it doesn’t sound hugely revolutionary these days, it totally changed the sound of honky-tonk music from that point on, thanks largely to the bass player playing four notes to the bar rather than the more usual two. We don’t have time in this episode to look into just how much this changed country music, but I’ll link an episode of the great country podcast Cocaine and Rhinestones, all about Ralph Mooney, and which talks about the song in more detail, in the notes to this episode. But the important thing is that Ray Price’s version of “Crazy Arms” was *everywhere* in 1956, and so it’s unsurprising that at the end of Jerry Lee Lewis’ first solo session for Sun, he started busking his way through the song, which he’d also played on his audition tape: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Crazy Arms”] “Crazy Arms” would always be a bit of a disappointment to Jerry Lee, not because it wasn’t a massive hit — that didn’t bother him, he knew he’d have to make a few records before he became the star he knew he should be — but because his father didn’t seem very impressed with it. Elmo Lewis had always wanted to be a musician himself, but he’d given up playing the piano when Jerry Lee was a small child. Jerry Lee had been trying to teach himself a song, and after he’d been trying for a while, Elmo had sat down and played the song himself. Little Jerry Lee had cried because his dad could do something he couldn’t, and so Elmo had never again touched a piano, to avoid demoralising his young son. And so Jerry Lee believes to this day that the reason his dad wasn’t hugely impressed by Jerry Lee’s first record was just that — that seeing his son achieve an ambition he’d given up on himself was at best bittersweet. Jerry Lee’s next record, though, didn’t disappoint anyone. It took him quite a while to find exactly the right song for his second single. He kept popping back into the studio, in between tour dates, and when he wasn’t recording with Carl Perkins or Billy Lee Riley or whoever, he’d cut a few more songs as himself. He’d play old Gene Autry songs, and Big Joe Turner’s “Honey Hush”, which had just been cut by Johnny Burnette, and old folk songs of the kind the Everly Brothers were soon to do on their second album, and a few songs he wrote himself, even, but nothing seemed suitable for the record that would make him into a star. Until he decided to just cut the highlight of his live show. “Whole Lotta Shakin'” is another song whose authorship is disputed. It was originally recorded by Big Maybelle, a blues singer, in an arrangement by Quincy Jones: [Excerpt: Big Maybelle, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On”] Two people both claimed to have written the song — a black singer called Dave “Curlee” Williams, and a white pianist called Roy Hall, both of whom knew each other, and both of whom are now credited as the song’s writers (though Hall is credited under the pseudonym “Sunny David”). They were supposedly inspired when on holiday together, in Pahokee Florida, where according to Hall they spent their days milking rattlesnakes while drunk. When it was dinnertime, someone would ring a big bell for everyone to come in, and Hall remembered someone saying about it “We got twenty-one drums, we got an old bass horn, an’ they even keepin’ time on a ding-dong.” That became, according to Hall, the inspiration for the opening line of the song. Curlee Williams, though, always claimed that he was the sole writer of the song, and many have speculated that Hall probably bought a share of the song from Williams — something that happened quite a lot in those days. Hall recorded his own version of the song, on Decca, a few months after Big Maybelle recorded her version: [Excerpt: Roy Hall, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On”] If Hall did buy his share of the song, rather than writing it, then it was a bad deal for him — as soon as the song became a hit, Hall’s ex-wife sued him, and was awarded all of his share of the song’s royalties. Neither Big Maybelle’s version of the song, nor Roy Hall’s, had been the inspiration for Jerry Lee Lewis, though. Instead, his inspiration had been that bass player we mentioned earlier, Johnny Littlejohn. Jerry Lee had turned up late to a gig with Littlejohn and Mr. Paul, back when they were playing together, and had found them already on stage, with Littlejohn singing lead on a version of “Whole Lotta Shakin'” that was very different from either version that had already come out — they were playing the song faster, and Littlejohn included a spoken section, where he’d tell the audience that all they needed to do was stand in one spot and wiggle around just a little bit, and that’s when you’ve got it. When Jerry Lee got on stage after the song, Littlejohn had said to him, “You’re a bit late, aren’t you?” “No,” Jerry Lee had replied, “I’m right on time”. That spoken section was probably inspired by this similar passage in “Pine Top’s Boogie Woogie”, a song that Jerry Lee knew well: [Excerpt: Pine Top Smith, “Pine Top’s Boogie Woogie”] When that group had split up, Jerry Lee had taken that song and that performance, exactly as Littlejohn had done it, and started doing it himself. He later said “I done it just like Johnny done it. Maybe I should have felt guilty about that.” He didn’t feel guilty, though. He felt many things, especially when it got the women in the audience dancing and wiggling, but he didn’t feel guilty. Jerry Lee took his version of the song into Sun, convinced that this was going to be his big hit… and neither Sam Phillips nor Jack Clement believed in it. They thought that the song was probably too vulgar to get played on the radio, and that anyway it sounded too much like Elvis — there wasn’t room for someone else who sounded like that in the charts. No, they were going to have Jerry Lee record a nice, sensible, country song that Clement had written. A song inspired by going to the toilet, and by reincarnation. Clement was on the toilet, thinking about a breakup he’d had, and how he’d like to come back as a turd in his ex’s toilet bowl, so she’d look down and see him in there winking up at her. He’d taken that idea, cleaned it up a little, and turned it into “It’ll Be Me”: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “It’ll Be Me”, single version] That was going to be the A-side, of course, but they’d let Jerry Lee cut this “Shakin'” thing for the B-side if he wanted. There are different stories about the recording of “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” — Cowboy Jack Clement, for example, would always claim that they’d recorded it in just one take, with just three minutes of tape left on the reel, right at the end of the session. The reality seems, sadly, slightly more prosaic — they took several takes, with both Clement and Phillips throwing in ideas, and changed the instrumentation around a bit during the session, lowering the bass in the mix and adding some slapback echo to the piano. However much time they spent on it, though, the result still *sounded* spontaneous: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Whole Lotta Shakin'”] When it was finished, everyone knew that that would have to be the A-side of the single. Before it came out, Jerry Lee went out on tour with Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Wanda Jackson, and a couple of other acts — the only things Jerry Lee and his band brought with them on the tour, other than their clothes and instruments, were whiskey, comic books, and cherry bombs. He started out as the third billed act, with Perkins and Cash following him, but soon they started to insist he go on last, even though he’d not had a hit yet, because nobody could follow him. The three men became friends, but Perkins and Cash were already starting to resent the fact that Jerry Lee was clearly Sam Phillips’ new golden boy, and plotting ways to get out of their contract with Sun, and go somewhere that they’d not be overshadowed by this wild kid. The tour zig-zagged across much of North America — at one point Jerry Lee insisted on a detour on the way to Buffalo, to see Niagara Falls. When he got there, he got out of the car, stood there for thirty seconds, said “Jerry Lee Lewis has seen the Niagara Falls. Now let’s go home, boys”, and got back into the car. On an early date on the tour, Jerry Lee met Sam Phillips’ brother Jud for the first time. Jud did a lot of the promotion work for Sun, and he saw something in Jerry Lee — in the way he looked, the way he performed, the way the slicked-back hair he had at the start of a performance would soon fall over his face in wild blond shocks. He knew that anyone who saw Jerry Lee perform live would see the same thing. He knew that Jerry Lee needed to be on TV. Specifically, he had to go on either the Ed Sullivan or the Steve Allen show — the two big variety shows that between them could make an artist. Jud persuaded Sam to let him take Jerry Lee to New York, to try to persuade the bookers for those shows to give the boy a shot. Jud and Jerry Lee travelled up to meet Steve Allen’s manager and the head of talent for NBC — they were squeezed in to a fifteen minute meeting on a Friday evening. They went in to the meeting with none of the usual things that someone trying to book an artist on the Steve Allen show would bring — no photos, no records, nothing — and Jerry Lee sat in the meeting reading a Superman comic and blowing bubbles with his bubblegum while the businessmen talked. Jud Phillips eventually persuaded them to let Jerry show them what he could do on the piano, explaining that records couldn’t capture his performance. When Jerry Lee did show them his stuff, they said to Jud “I’ll give you five hundred dollars if you don’t show him to anyone else. And bring him back on Monday morning. I want Steve to see him.” So Jerry Lee got to spend the weekend in New York, and ride the rollercoasters at Coney Island, before heading back in on the Monday to play the piano for Steve Allen, who despite his general contempt for rock and roll was as impressed as everyone else. They booked him in for an appearance on the Steve Allen Show in a month’s time. That performance is available online, if you go looking for it. I’ll excerpt some of the music, but the sound alone doesn’t capture it. It really needs the video: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On”, Steve Allen Show 1957] At that moment, when Jerry Lee screamed “shake”, he kicked the piano stool away and it went flying across the stage and out of shot. A few seconds later it came flying back across the stage, as Steve Allen, the host who’d made Elvis wear a dinner jacket and sing to a real hound dog, and who’d mocked Fats Domino and Gene Vincent’s lyrics, got into the spirit of the thing and threw the stool right back. That was the moment when Jerry Lee Lewis became a star. But when you’re someone like Jerry Lee Lewis, the only reason to rise up is to fall down again, and we’ll find out about Jerry Lee’s fall in a few weeks’ time.

Episode fifty-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" by Jerry Lee Lewis. 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 "So Long I'm Gone" by Warren Smith.  ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I'm relying heavily on Sam Phillips: the Man Who Invented Rock and Roll by Peter Guralnick for all the episodes dealing with Phillips and Sun Records. Books on Jerry Lee Lewis tend to be very flawed, as the authors all tend to think they're Faulkner rather than giving the facts. This one by Rick Bragg is better than most. The episode of Cocaine and Rhinestones I mention in the episode is here. There are many budget CDs containing Lewis' pre-1962 work. This set seems as good an option as any. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript We're in an odd position with this episode, really. The first time we looked at Jerry Lee Lewis, it was as part of the Million Dollar Quartet, yet at the time of the actual Million Dollar Quartet session, Lewis was basically an unknown, and we didn't have time to cover his career up to that point -- even though the Million Dollar Quartet recordings prove that he considered himself a peer of Elvis and Carl Perkins right from the start. And we also talked about Lewis a fortnight ago, when we were dealing with Billy Lee Riley, but again, the focus was on someone other than Lewis. The problem is that Jerry Lee Lewis is just the kind of figure who demands discussion, even before he became a famous musician. He's someone who just dominates other people's stories, and pushes in to them and takes over. So now we've got to the point where he's about to have his first hit, but we haven't really looked at how he got to that point, just at him interacting with other people. So now we're going to have to back up, and look at the first hit record from the last great artist to be discovered by Sun Records. [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Whole Lotta Shakin' Going On"] Jerry Lee Lewis was a young piano player from Ferriday, Louisiana, who loved music more than anything. He loved Gene Autry, and Hank Williams -- and he loved Al Jolson. He would later tell a story about going on a date to the cinema. Before the show they were playing records, and one record that came on was Jolson singing "Toot Toot Tootsie Goodbye": [Excerpt: Al Jolson, "Toot Toot Tootsie Goodbye"] Lewis immediately got out of his seat, told his girlfriend he needed to use the toilet, cycled home, worked out how to play the song on the piano, cycled back, and rejoined his date for the film. She asked why he'd been gone so long, and he said he'd picked up some popcorn as well. Sam Phillips would often say later that Jerry Lee Lewis was the most naturally talented musician he ever worked with. Elvis was the most charismatic, Johnny Cash had the most commanding presence, and Howlin' Wolf was the most profound artist, but Lewis was the one who had the greatest obsession with his music, the greatest drive to create, and the greatest sheer knowledge of music, in all different genres. Lewis would play piano for eight hours a day, and while in other matters he was surprisingly ignorant -- other than the Bible, the only things he ever read were comics -- he could talk with a huge amount of authority about the musical techniques of everyone from B.B. King to Frank Sinatra, and he could hear a song once and remember it and play it years later. And whatever music he learned, from whatever source, he would somehow transmute it and turn it into a Jerry Lee Lewis song. Nothing he played sounded like anyone else. He'd started playing music when he was four years old. He'd been walking past a piano in the house of his rich uncle, Lee Calhoun, and had felt the urge to play it. He'd almost instantly figured out how to play the beginning of "Silent Night", and his parents -- who always doted on him and tried to give him everything he wanted, after the tragically young death of his older brother -- realised that they might have a child prodigy on their hands. When his father finally got into a position where he could buy his own farm, the first thing he did was remortgage it so he could buy his son his own piano. They didn't have electricity in the house -- until Elmo Lewis decided to wire the house for electricity, so his boy Jerry Lee could listen to the radio and learn more songs. What Jerry Lee wanted, he got. As a kid, Jerry Lee was always the one who would get his relatives into trouble. He would go to the cinema -- a sin in the strict Pentecostal religion of his family -- and one time he dragged in Jimmy Swaggart, who was his "double first cousin" -- Swaggart's father was Lewis' father's nephew, while Swaggart's mother was Lewis' mother's sister. Swaggart ran out of the cinema crying, convinced he had damned himself to hell. Jerry Lee stayed and watched the cowboys. But while he loved the cinema, the piano was his true love. He and Swaggart, and their other cousin Mickey Gilley, would all play piano together, as well as separately. But Jerry Lee was undoubtedly the most talented, and he was also the biggest music lover, and he would spend his time trying to adapt the styles of the musicians he liked to the piano. Even though Jerry Lee was in Louisiana, which is the home of great piano playing, most of his musical influences were guitarists. His favourite musician was Jimmie Rodgers, and Jerry Lee would play his "Waiting For a Train": [Excerpt: Jimmie Rodgers, "Waiting For a Train"] His favourite song to play, though, was "Drinking Wine Spo-De-O-Dee", the Sticks McGhee record that some credit as the first rock and roll record ever: [Excerpt: Sticks McGhee: "Drinking Wine Spo-De-O-Dee"] But he had two bigger influences -- two people who could actually play the piano the way that Jerry Lee thought it should be played. The first was Moon Mullican, who we talked about back in the episode on Hank Williams. Mullican was another Louisiana piano player, and another musician who combined bits of everything -- Western Swing, hillbilly boogie, blues, R&B, gospel, Cajun music -- into a unique melange of styles all his own: [Excerpt: Moon Mullican, "Piano Breakdown"] The other big influence on young Jerry Lee was his uncle, Carl McVoy. McVoy never became famous, but he made a couple of records after his nephew became famous, and listening to this one, made in 1957 with much of the same group of musicians who worked on Elvis' hits, including Chet Atkins and the Jordanaires, it's spooky how much it sounds like Jerry Lee himself: [Excerpt: Carl McVoy: "You Are My Sunshine"] But young Jerry Lee was torn between two worlds. On the one hand, as a kid he would regularly sneak into a local blues club with an otherwise entirely black clientele, and hide under the tables to watch people like Fats Domino, Charles Brown, B.B. King, and Big Joe Turner, until he was kicked out by the owner -- who, understandably, was not keen on having underaged white kids in his black drinking and gambling club in the segregated South. On the other, he was deeply, deeply, religious, and for a while he studied at the Southwestern Bible Institute in Waxahachie, Texas, in the hope of becoming a priest. Unfortunately, he was kicked out after playing the hymn "My God is Real" with a boogie feel, which according to the people in charge was inciting lust among the other students. This tension between religion and the secular world would recur throughout Lewis' life, but by the time he signed to Sun Records, aged twenty-one, he was firmly on the side of the Devil. He'd been making a living as a sewing machine salesman, conning women into signing up to buy one on credit by telling them they'd won the machine in a contest. He'd already got married twice, and hadn't actually got around to divorcing his first wife before marrying the second – and he'd also decided it was about time he moved on from the second wife as well. He'd been touring with a blind musician called Paul Whitehead. Whitehead could play violin, accordion, and piano, and Jerry Lee would play piano while Mr. Paul, as he was always called, played the fiddle, and move on to the drums when Mr. Paul played the piano. Sometimes they would also add a bass player, Johnny Littlejohn (not the same person as the Chicago blues guitarist of the same name). Littlejohn had something of the style of Elvis, and Jerry Lee was jealous of him. There's only one recording available of Lewis' mentor Mr. Paul -- his piano part on an obscure rockabilly song, "Right Now", by Gray Montgomery: [Excerpt: Gray Montgomery, "Right Now"] But while he needed a mentor for a while, Jerry Lee Lewis knew he was destined to be great on his own. The big break came when he read in a magazine about how it was Sam Phillips who had made Elvis into a star. He'd already tried RCA Records, the label Elvis was now on -- they'd told him he needed to play a guitar. He'd blagged his way into an audition at the Grand Ole Opry, and the same thing had happened -- he'd been told to come back when he played guitar, not piano. The only person in the country establishment who was kind to him was another piano player, Del Wood, who thought this young man reminded her of herself: [Excerpt: Del Wood, "Down Yonder"] Maybe Phillips would have more sense in him, and would see the greatness of a man who had been known to refer to himself, blasphemously, as "The Great I AM". Jerry Lee knew that if he just got the right break he could be the greatest star of all time. He and his father drove down to Memphis, and got themselves a hotel room, which was the first time they'd ever stayed anywhere with running water. They saved the money from selling hundreds of eggs from Jerry Lee's father's henhouse to a local supermarket, and they couldn't afford to stay there very long. And then, when they went into the Sun studio to meet this Mr. Phillips, the person to whom Jerry Lee had pinned all his dreams, they were told that Phillips was out of town. They were welcome to come back later, of course -- but they couldn't afford to just travel back to Memphis later and book another hotel room. It was now or never, and Jerry Lee was just going to stay there until someone listened to him play the piano. The person who eventually agreed to listen to him was Cowboy Jack Clement, who became intrigued when Jerry Lee told him that he could play piano and make it sound like Chet Atkins did when he was playing guitar -- except that, no, he was better at piano than Chet Atkins was on guitar. Jerry Lee played for Clement for three or four hours, and when Clement played the tape for Sam Phillips when he got back from his trip, Phillips agreed -- they needed to get this man in. Lewis' first single was recorded almost as a joke. We talked a little about his recording of "Crazy Arms" a couple of weeks back, in the episode on Billy Lee Riley, but there's more to say about the song than we covered there. [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Crazy Arms"] "Crazy Arms" is a song with a disputed history. There are claims that the song was actually written by a man from Kentucky named Paul Gilley, who died in 1957 and is also considered by some to have secretly ghostwritten a number of Hank Williams' hits, including "Cold Cold Heart" and "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry". Unfortunately, the bulk of the evidence for this is only available in a self-published book, which can't even be bought from Amazon but has to be purchased directly from the author via Craigslist, so I have no way of assessing the accuracy of these claims. It seems unlikely to me, but not impossible, and so I'm going to go here with the conventional narrative, that the song was written by the great pedal steel guitar player Ralph Mooney, in 1949, but had remained unrecorded until a demo by Mooney's frequent collaborator, Wynn Stewart, in 1954. The first release of the song was by a very minor country singer called Marilyn Kaye, and while it wasn't a hit for her, it got enough response from radio listeners that a DJ played it to the singer Ray Price, who recorded his own version as a result: [Excerpt: Ray Price, "Crazy Arms"] That became the biggest country hit of 1956, and while it doesn't sound hugely revolutionary these days, it totally changed the sound of honky-tonk music from that point on, thanks largely to the bass player playing four notes to the bar rather than the more usual two. We don't have time in this episode to look into just how much this changed country music, but I'll link an episode of the great country podcast Cocaine and Rhinestones, all about Ralph Mooney, and which talks about the song in more detail, in the notes to this episode. But the important thing is that Ray Price's version of "Crazy Arms" was *everywhere* in 1956, and so it's unsurprising that at the end of Jerry Lee Lewis' first solo session for Sun, he started busking his way through the song, which he'd also played on his audition tape: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Crazy Arms"] "Crazy Arms" would always be a bit of a disappointment to Jerry Lee, not because it wasn't a massive hit -- that didn't bother him, he knew he'd have to make a few records before he became the star he knew he should be -- but because his father didn't seem very impressed with it. Elmo Lewis had always wanted to be a musician himself, but he'd given up playing the piano when Jerry Lee was a small child. Jerry Lee had been trying to teach himself a song, and after he'd been trying for a while, Elmo had sat down and played the song himself. Little Jerry Lee had cried because his dad could do something he couldn't, and so Elmo had never again touched a piano, to avoid demoralising his young son. And so Jerry Lee believes to this day that the reason his dad wasn't hugely impressed by Jerry Lee's first record was just that -- that seeing his son achieve an ambition he'd given up on himself was at best bittersweet. Jerry Lee's next record, though, didn't disappoint anyone. It took him quite a while to find exactly the right song for his second single. He kept popping back into the studio, in between tour dates, and when he wasn't recording with Carl Perkins or Billy Lee Riley or whoever, he'd cut a few more songs as himself. He'd play old Gene Autry songs, and Big Joe Turner's "Honey Hush", which had just been cut by Johnny Burnette, and old folk songs of the kind the Everly Brothers were soon to do on their second album, and a few songs he wrote himself, even, but nothing seemed suitable for the record that would make him into a star. Until he decided to just cut the highlight of his live show. "Whole Lotta Shakin'" is another song whose authorship is disputed. It was originally recorded by Big Maybelle, a blues singer, in an arrangement by Quincy Jones: [Excerpt: Big Maybelle, "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On"] Two people both claimed to have written the song -- a black singer called Dave "Curlee" Williams, and a white pianist called Roy Hall, both of whom knew each other, and both of whom are now credited as the song's writers (though Hall is credited under the pseudonym "Sunny David"). They were supposedly inspired when on holiday together, in Pahokee Florida, where according to Hall they spent their days milking rattlesnakes while drunk. When it was dinnertime, someone would ring a big bell for everyone to come in, and Hall remembered someone saying about it "We got twenty-one drums, we got an old bass horn, an' they even keepin' time on a ding-dong." That became, according to Hall, the inspiration for the opening line of the song. Curlee Williams, though, always claimed that he was the sole writer of the song, and many have speculated that Hall probably bought a share of the song from Williams -- something that happened quite a lot in those days. Hall recorded his own version of the song, on Decca, a few months after Big Maybelle recorded her version: [Excerpt: Roy Hall, "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On"] If Hall did buy his share of the song, rather than writing it, then it was a bad deal for him -- as soon as the song became a hit, Hall's ex-wife sued him, and was awarded all of his share of the song's royalties. Neither Big Maybelle's version of the song, nor Roy Hall's, had been the inspiration for Jerry Lee Lewis, though. Instead, his inspiration had been that bass player we mentioned earlier, Johnny Littlejohn. Jerry Lee had turned up late to a gig with Littlejohn and Mr. Paul, back when they were playing together, and had found them already on stage, with Littlejohn singing lead on a version of "Whole Lotta Shakin'" that was very different from either version that had already come out -- they were playing the song faster, and Littlejohn included a spoken section, where he'd tell the audience that all they needed to do was stand in one spot and wiggle around just a little bit, and that's when you've got it. When Jerry Lee got on stage after the song, Littlejohn had said to him, "You're a bit late, aren't you?" "No," Jerry Lee had replied, "I'm right on time". That spoken section was probably inspired by this similar passage in "Pine Top's Boogie Woogie", a song that Jerry Lee knew well: [Excerpt: Pine Top Smith, "Pine Top's Boogie Woogie"] When that group had split up, Jerry Lee had taken that song and that performance, exactly as Littlejohn had done it, and started doing it himself. He later said “I done it just like Johnny done it. Maybe I should have felt guilty about that.” He didn't feel guilty, though. He felt many things, especially when it got the women in the audience dancing and wiggling, but he didn't feel guilty. Jerry Lee took his version of the song into Sun, convinced that this was going to be his big hit... and neither Sam Phillips nor Jack Clement believed in it. They thought that the song was probably too vulgar to get played on the radio, and that anyway it sounded too much like Elvis -- there wasn't room for someone else who sounded like that in the charts. No, they were going to have Jerry Lee record a nice, sensible, country song that Clement had written. A song inspired by going to the toilet, and by reincarnation. Clement was on the toilet, thinking about a breakup he'd had, and how he'd like to come back as a turd in his ex's toilet bowl, so she'd look down and see him in there winking up at her. He'd taken that idea, cleaned it up a little, and turned it into "It'll Be Me": [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "It'll Be Me", single version] That was going to be the A-side, of course, but they'd let Jerry Lee cut this "Shakin'" thing for the B-side if he wanted. There are different stories about the recording of "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" -- Cowboy Jack Clement, for example, would always claim that they'd recorded it in just one take, with just three minutes of tape left on the reel, right at the end of the session. The reality seems, sadly, slightly more prosaic -- they took several takes, with both Clement and Phillips throwing in ideas, and changed the instrumentation around a bit during the session, lowering the bass in the mix and adding some slapback echo to the piano. However much time they spent on it, though, the result still *sounded* spontaneous: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Whole Lotta Shakin'"] When it was finished, everyone knew that that would have to be the A-side of the single. Before it came out, Jerry Lee went out on tour with Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Wanda Jackson, and a couple of other acts -- the only things Jerry Lee and his band brought with them on the tour, other than their clothes and instruments, were whiskey, comic books, and cherry bombs. He started out as the third billed act, with Perkins and Cash following him, but soon they started to insist he go on last, even though he'd not had a hit yet, because nobody could follow him. The three men became friends, but Perkins and Cash were already starting to resent the fact that Jerry Lee was clearly Sam Phillips' new golden boy, and plotting ways to get out of their contract with Sun, and go somewhere that they'd not be overshadowed by this wild kid. The tour zig-zagged across much of North America -- at one point Jerry Lee insisted on a detour on the way to Buffalo, to see Niagara Falls. When he got there, he got out of the car, stood there for thirty seconds, said “Jerry Lee Lewis has seen the Niagara Falls. Now let’s go home, boys", and got back into the car. On an early date on the tour, Jerry Lee met Sam Phillips' brother Jud for the first time. Jud did a lot of the promotion work for Sun, and he saw something in Jerry Lee -- in the way he looked, the way he performed, the way the slicked-back hair he had at the start of a performance would soon fall over his face in wild blond shocks. He knew that anyone who saw Jerry Lee perform live would see the same thing. He knew that Jerry Lee needed to be on TV. Specifically, he had to go on either the Ed Sullivan or the Steve Allen show -- the two big variety shows that between them could make an artist. Jud persuaded Sam to let him take Jerry Lee to New York, to try to persuade the bookers for those shows to give the boy a shot. Jud and Jerry Lee travelled up to meet Steve Allen's manager and the head of talent for NBC -- they were squeezed in to a fifteen minute meeting on a Friday evening. They went in to the meeting with none of the usual things that someone trying to book an artist on the Steve Allen show would bring -- no photos, no records, nothing -- and Jerry Lee sat in the meeting reading a Superman comic and blowing bubbles with his bubblegum while the businessmen talked. Jud Phillips eventually persuaded them to let Jerry show them what he could do on the piano, explaining that records couldn't capture his performance. When Jerry Lee did show them his stuff, they said to Jud "I'll give you five hundred dollars if you don't show him to anyone else. And bring him back on Monday morning. I want Steve to see him." So Jerry Lee got to spend the weekend in New York, and ride the rollercoasters at Coney Island, before heading back in on the Monday to play the piano for Steve Allen, who despite his general contempt for rock and roll was as impressed as everyone else. They booked him in for an appearance on the Steve Allen Show in a month's time. That performance is available online, if you go looking for it. I'll excerpt some of the music, but the sound alone doesn't capture it. It really needs the video: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On", Steve Allen Show 1957] At that moment, when Jerry Lee screamed "shake", he kicked the piano stool away and it went flying across the stage and out of shot. A few seconds later it came flying back across the stage, as Steve Allen, the host who'd made Elvis wear a dinner jacket and sing to a real hound dog, and who'd mocked Fats Domino and Gene Vincent's lyrics, got into the spirit of the thing and threw the stool right back. That was the moment when Jerry Lee Lewis became a star. But when you're someone like Jerry Lee Lewis, the only reason to rise up is to fall down again, and we'll find out about Jerry Lee's fall in a few weeks' time.

Episode fifty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Flying Saucers Rock ‘n’ Roll” by Billy Lee Riley and the Little Green Men, and at the flying saucer craze of the fifties. 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 “Silhouettes” by the Rays, and the power of subliminal messages. (more…)

 Episode forty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Ooby Dooby” by Roy Orbison and the Teen Kings, and the time when Sam Phillips got things badly wrong.. 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 “Blue Yodel #9” by Jimmie Rodgers. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. There are several books available on Orbison. The one I have used for much of this is The Authorised Roy Orbison written by Jeff Slate and three of Orbison’s children. I’m relying heavily on Sam Phillips: the Man Who Invented Rock and Roll by Peter Guralnick for all the episodes dealing with Phillips and Sun Records. This compilation features every track Orbison released up til 1962. His early Sun singles are also on this ten-disc set, which charts the history of Sun Records, with the A- and B-sides of ninety of the first Sun singles in chronological order for an absurdly low price. This will help give you the full context for Orbison’s work, in a way hearing it in isolation wouldn’t.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today we’re once again going to look at a star who was discovered by Sun Records. But for once, the star we’re looking at did not do his most interesting or vital work at Sun, and nor did he do the work that defined his persona there. Indeed, today we’re going to talk about one of the very few times that Sam Phillips and Sun Records took on someone who would become a massive, massive, star, and completely mismanaged him, misjudged his abilities totally, and did everything completely wrong, to the point where he almost destroyed his career before it began. Roy Orbison was someone who made an unlikely rock and roll star. A quiet, unassuming, man, who rarely used an oath stronger than “Mercy”, and wore dark glasses in later years to hide as much of his face as possible, he was the last person one would expect to be making music that was regarded as rebellious or exciting. And indeed, in his later years, the music he chose to make was very far from rebellious, though always rooted in rock and roll. Orbison had grown up knowing he was going to be a singer. When he was six years old, his father had bought him a guitar and taught him the chords to “You Are My Sunshine”, and by the age of ten he was already winning talent contests. But it was seeing the famous country singer Lefty Frizzell live that really convinced him. [Excerpt: Lefty Frizzell, “If You’ve Got the Money, I’ve Got the Time”] It wasn’t so much that Frizzell was a great performer — though he was pretty good, and he hugely influenced Orbison’s vocal style. What really impressed young Roy Orbison, though, was seeing Frizzell, after the show, getting into a Cadillac. Orbison realised you could make real money just from singing, and started to make plans. In his teens, he and a group of his friends formed a country and western band, the Wink Westerners (named after the small town they lived in). That band had various lineups, but it eventually settled into a two-guitar, bass, drums, and electric mandolin lineup of Orbison, Billy Pat Ellis, Jack Kenneally, Johnny Wilson, and James Morrow. While Orbison was still in school, the band got their own radio show, one day a week, and became big enough that when the country star Slim Whitman came to town they were chosen as his backing group: [Excerpt: Slim Whitman, “Indian Love Call”] The band were primarily a country band, but like most bands of the time they would play whatever music the customers wanted to hear. In later years, Orbison would be able to pinpoint the exact moment he became a rock and roller — on New Year’s Eve 1954. The band started playing “Shake, Rattle, and Roll”, expecting it to finish dead on the stroke of midnight, but then Orbison looked at the clock and realised they’d started far too soon. That version of “Shake, Rattle, and Roll”, which lasted for eight minutes, converted Roy Orbison. When he started playing it, rock and roll was just another form of music, but by the end he knew he wanted to play that kind of music forever. The Wink Westerners were quickly renamed the Teen Kings. Orbison went off to university, where he heard a song called “Ooby Dooby” which was written by two classmates of his, Dick Penner and Wade Moore. They allegedly wrote it in a fifteen minute period, while on the roof of their frat house, and to be honest it sounds like fifteen minutes is about as long as it would take to write. It soon entered the set of the newly-named Teen Kings and became one of their most successful songs. The Teen Kings soon got their own local TV series, to go with the local radio shows they already had. When the new country star Johnny Cash passed through town, he appeared on the Teen Kings’ TV show, and Orbison asked him how to get signed to Sun Records. Cash gave Orbison the phone number for Sam Phillips, and told him to tell Phillips that Cash had sent him. He also advised Orbison that if he wanted to have any success as a musician, he should probably start singing in a lower register, and maybe change his name. Orbison never took that advice, and in later years he would joke with Cash about how terrible his advice was. His advice about getting signed to Sun wasn’t much better either — Orbison did indeed phone Sam Phillips and tell him Johnny Cash had said to call Phillips. Phillips responded by saying “Tell Johnny Cash he doesn’t run Sun Records, I do” and slamming the phone down. So Sun Records seemed like a dead end. The Teen Kings were going to have to look elsewhere for a record contract. So instead the Teen Kings went into the studio to audition for Columbia Records. They recorded two tracks at that initial session. One was “Ooby Dooby”; the other was a cover version of a song by the Clovers, “Hey, Miss Fannie”: [Excerpt: The Clovers, “Hey, Miss Fannie”] At the time, the Teen Kings thought that they’d almost certainly get a contract with Columbia, but Columbia ended up turning them down. They did, however, like “Ooby Dooby”, enough to give it to another group, Sid King and the Five Strings, who released it unsuccessfully as a single. [Excerpt: Sid King and the Five Strings, “Ooby Dooby”] As they had been turned down now by both the major label Columbia and the large indie Sun, Roy and the band went into the studio with Norman Petty, a local Texas record producer, to record “Ooby Dooby” again, to be released as a single on the tiny indie label Je-Wel. It came out at almost exactly the same time as Sid King’s version. [Excerpt: The Teen Kings, “Ooby Dooby”, Je-Wel version] But then Sam Phillips had a change of heart. Roy still wanted to be on Sun, and pestered a local record shop owner who knew Phillips to play “Ooby Dooby” for him. Phillips eventually listened to the single and liked it, but thought that he could do a better job of it. He discovered that Orbison wasn’t yet twenty-one, and so the contract he’d signed with Je-Wel was void. Phillips signed Orbison, got an injunction taken out against Je-Wel, preventing them from putting out any more copies of the single — only a few hundred ever got released — and quickly went into the studio to record a new version of the song. And this sort of sums up the difference between Orbison’s relationship with Sam Phillips and everyone else’s. Every other successful musician who recorded for Sun Records recorded for them first, and owed their careers to Phillips. He’d given them the shot that no-one else would, and he’d moulded them into the artists that they would become. Even the ones who later fell out with Phillips always credited him with being the reason they’d had any success in the business. Roy Orbison, on the other hand, had been discovered before Phillips. Phillips had turned him down, and he’d made a record somewhere else. That record was even with a producer who, in a little while, would be putting out rockabilly hits every bit as big as Phillips was. That meant that Roy Orbison would never feel, as Elvis or Johnny Cash or Carl Perkins did, that he owed his career to Sam Phillips. The rerecorded version was, as far as Orbison’s performance goes, almost identical to the original. Orbison was not a wild improviser like many of the artists with whom Phillips worked — he would work out his parts exactly, and stick to them. While Phillips would always claim in later life that his version of “Ooby Dooby” was vastly superior to the earlier one, most listeners would struggle to tell the difference: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison and the Teen Kings, “Ooby Dooby”, Sun version] Rather oddly, given Orbison’s later career, it wasn’t primarily his singing that impressed Phillips, but rather his guitar playing. Phillips would talk for the rest of his life about what a great guitarist Orbison was. Phillips would often get Orbison to play on records by other artists, and would later say that the only musician he knew who had a better sense of rhythm was Jerry Lee Lewis. And Orbison *was* a great guitarist. He was similar to Chuck Berry in that he would play both rhythm and lead simultaneously — if you listen to the records he made where his guitar playing is prominent, you can hear him using the bass strings to keep a riff down, and then playing fills between his vocal lines. But still, it would be several years before anyone in the record industry seemed to notice that Roy Orbison was, well, Roy Orbison. The B-side was recorded in a single take, and itself became a rockabilly classic. It was co-written by Orbison and the band’s drummer, Billy Pat Ellis, but it caused problems: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison and the Teen Kings, “Go Go Go”] That would later be recorded by Jerry Lee Lewis, among others, and would be one of the few rockabilly songs that Orbison would keep in his setlists in future years. While Ellis had cowritten the song, he wasn’t credited on the label, which understandably caused him to get angry — it seemed like Roy was cheating him out of his royalties. And while the record had been made by Roy Orbison and the Teen Kings as a group, it seemed that all anyone was talking about was Roy Orbison, not the Teen Kings. The group went out on tour, on a package with other Sun artists, and “Ooby Dooby” went to number fifty-nine in the pop charts and sold around two hundred thousand copies. This wasn’t an amazing, ground-breaking level of success like some other Sun artists had had, but it was perfectly respectable, and was enough to see them go into the studio to record a follow-up, “Rockhouse”. [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, “Rockhouse”] That song was originally written by a young singer called Harold Jenkins, who was making recordings for Sun at the time, though the recordings didn’t get released until after Jenkins became a country star under the name Conway Twitty. Orbison took Jenkins’ demo and substantially reworked it, earning himself a co-writing credit. The B-side was a song that Johnny Cash had written, called “Little Woolly Booger”: [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, “Little Woolly Booger”] 10) That was renamed to the rather more radio-friendly “You’re My Baby” for Orbison’s version: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison and the Teen Kings, “You’re My Baby”] “Rockhouse” didn’t do very well, and the band were getting disgruntled. They felt that Sam Phillips didn’t care about any of them, and they were also getting a bit sick of Roy himself, who they thought was taking too much of the spotlight. So they secretly made an agreement. At the start of a scheduled recording session, Orbison and Phillips went to the cafe next door to take a break. When they got back, they found that the Teen Kings had packed up all their gear and driven away. Roy no longer had a band. He was absolutely devastated — the people he’d come up with as a teenager, the people he’d thought were his friends, had all deserted him. He’d been playing with these people for years, and now, just as they were starting to achieve some success, they’d decided to leave him. The session was cancelled, and Sam Phillips was so worried about Orbison that he invited the young man to stay in his house for what turned into a several-month-long stay. Phillips, who had himself suffered from severe depression, was worried about the young singer, and tried to give him life advice. The advice that Phillips was giving Orbison had a profound effect on both Orbison and on Phillips’ son Knox, who later said “It was the first time I actually could see Sam giving someone he really cared about like Roy some hard advice — I mean, I was real young, but I thought, ‘You know what? It’s a different way he’s saying it but it’s the same advice he’s been giving me. It’s the same thing.’ That was the first time I actually knew that Sam was just trying to make people better. I mean, he wasn’t in the studio trying to inspire or record them. He could say the same thing that would teach you the same lesson if you were talking to him about charcoal or motorcycles. It was the same lesson.” For much of the next year, Orbison was essentially homeless. He spent most of his time on tour, but considered Memphis his home base, and stayed with either Sam Phillips, Johnny Cash, or Carl Perkins when he was “at home”. But he was starting to get bigger plans. He had already co-written a handful of songs, but he hadn’t put serious thought into his songwriting. That changed when he went on a tour with Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent. He realised that they — and the other people on the bill — had one hit each. Cochran would later have more, but still, Orbison wondered where those people’s other hits were going to come from. Where were they going to find their material? He didn’t want to get into a position where he had to just keep playing the same hit every day for the rest of his life, and realised that the only way to ensure he would have a ready supply of new material was to write it himself, and so he started to take his songwriting seriously as his principal art. Given that the hits on Sun had dried up, in fact, he basically became a songwriter who happened to sing, rather than a singer who wrote some of his own songs. While he continued making recordings for Sun, none of them did anything, and he later referred to some of them as among the worst records ever made. As Orbison was becoming less successful, Phillips increasingly palmed him off on his new assistant, Jack Clement, and Clement insisted on Orbison performing material for which he had no feeling. Orbison was starting to push to record ballads, but Clement knew that Roy Orbison just didn’t have the voice for them. But his songwriting was another matter. Sun artists started recording his stuff. Jerry Lee Lewis put out “Go Go Go” as the B-side to his big hit “Breathless”, and the minor Sun artist Warren Smith recorded Roy’s “So Long, I’m Gone”: [Excerpt: Warren Smith, “So Long, I’m Gone”]That reached the lower reaches of the Hot 100, and so became the first thing that earned Roy some serious money since “Ooby Dooby” a year earlier. Songwriting was clearly the way forward, and he decided to write a song about his new wife, Claudette, which he pitched to the Everly Brothers when they were on a bill together, and which they decided to record. [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Claudette”] We’ll be talking about the Everly Brothers in future episodes, but the important thing to note right now is that they were a much bigger act than Roy Orbison was. Them performing one of Orbison’s songs would be a massive break for him, but there was a catch. They had a deal with the publishing company Acuff-Rose that they would only perform songs that were published by that company, and Orbison had a contract with Sam Phillips that meant that Orbison’s songs were all published by Phillips. Orbison went to Phillips and explained the situation. He didn’t want to record for Sun any more anyway — they weren’t releasing most of what he was recording, he wasn’t having any hits, and they didn’t have the same ideas about what material he should be recording as he did. He wanted to assign the song to Acuff-Rose and give himself a chance at doing better than he had been. Phillips was not happy about this. This was at almost exactly the same time that both Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins left Sun Records, and he suspected a degree of collusion between the three men — and he wasn’t wrong in his suspicion. The three of them all thought that Phillips was not paying them enough royalties, was not telling them important business information, and was more interested in the latest new thing than in building the careers of people he’d already signed. Sam Phillips eventually made a suggestion which Orbison took up, though he later said that he didn’t realise what the consequences would be. The deal he made was that Orbison could quit his contract, and sign with Acuff-Rose, but only by signing all the songwriting royalties for the songs he’d already recorded over to Phillips. So Sam Phillips is now the credited songwriter for all the songs Orbison wrote and recorded during his time at Sun, and unsurprisingly Orbison resented this for the rest of his life. Most Sun artists came to believe that they had been treated badly in business dealings by Phillips, and that he hadn’t properly recognised their talent. Roy Orbison, more than any of the others, actually had a case to answer here. Sam Phillips never understood what he had in Roy Orbison until much later. With every other artist he had, he took someone raw and unsure of his own direction and moulded him into what Sam saw in him. With Orbison, he took an artist who was already a moderate success, and who had firm ideas, and kept him from doing the material that was good for him. He later said “I really have to take the blame for not bringing Roy to fruition.” As soon as the Everlys’ version of “Claudette” came out, Orbison saw an immediate upswing in his fortunes. Two weeks after it came out, he called Wesley Rose at Acuff Rose. “How’s the record doing?” “Oh, it sold half a million already.” “Have I made any money?” “Why, yes you have”. Roy bought a Cadillac, moved to Nashville, and quickly signed with RCA Records, who saw in him the potential to be the next Elvis. And it seemed he was following the same career path exactly, as his first recordings for RCA were with largely the same group of musicians who played on Elvis’ big hits. There was no Scotty, Bill, or DJ, as they were all exclusive to Elvis, but Chet Atkins was on guitar, Floyd Cramer was on piano, and the Jordanaires were on backing vocals. But even though Roy had largely been signed on the basis of his songwriting ability, the songs they chose to record for him were once again not written by him and not his choice of material. This time they were all picked by Wesley Rose: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, “Seems to Me”] He was now being allowed to sing ballads, but they weren’t the ballads that he wanted to be singing — they were the kind of song that anyone in the pop-country market could be singing. And still the producers didn’t know how to deal with his voice. His RCA singles did even worse than his records on Sun, despite having the push of a major label behind him. Eventually the money from “Claudette” ran out, and he was dropped by RCA. Chet Atkins, like Sam Phillips, just didn’t get Roy Orbison. He would later say “We did some pretty good records, but they were typical Nashville at that time, and we didn’t reach out and try to do something different. I blame myself for that. I should have seen the greatness in him and the quality of his voice.” Orbison sold his Cadillac, and moved out of Nashville, and back to West Texas. It looked like his career was over, and he would spend his life exactly as he’d hoped he wouldn’t, as a musician who’d had one minor hit and never did anything else. But then he met a couple of people who would change the course of his life forever. But that’s a story for a future episode.

 Episode forty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Ooby Dooby” by Roy Orbison and the Teen Kings, and the time when Sam Phillips got things badly wrong.. 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 “Blue Yodel #9” by Jimmie Rodgers. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. There are several books available on Orbison. The one I have used for much of this is The Authorised Roy Orbison written by Jeff Slate and three of Orbison’s children. I’m relying heavily on Sam Phillips: the Man Who Invented Rock and Roll by Peter Guralnick for all the episodes dealing with Phillips and Sun Records. This compilation features every track Orbison released up til 1962. His early Sun singles are also on this ten-disc set, which charts the history of Sun Records, with the A- and B-sides of ninety of the first Sun singles in chronological order for an absurdly low price. This will help give you the full context for Orbison’s work, in a way hearing it in isolation wouldn’t.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today we’re once again going to look at a star who was discovered by Sun Records. But for once, the star we’re looking at did not do his most interesting or vital work at Sun, and nor did he do the work that defined his persona there. Indeed, today we’re going to talk about one of the very few times that Sam Phillips and Sun Records took on someone who would become a massive, massive, star, and completely mismanaged him, misjudged his abilities totally, and did everything completely wrong, to the point where he almost destroyed his career before it began. Roy Orbison was someone who made an unlikely rock and roll star. A quiet, unassuming, man, who rarely used an oath stronger than “Mercy”, and wore dark glasses in later years to hide as much of his face as possible, he was the last person one would expect to be making music that was regarded as rebellious or exciting. And indeed, in his later years, the music he chose to make was very far from rebellious, though always rooted in rock and roll. Orbison had grown up knowing he was going to be a singer. When he was six years old, his father had bought him a guitar and taught him the chords to “You Are My Sunshine”, and by the age of ten he was already winning talent contests. But it was seeing the famous country singer Lefty Frizzell live that really convinced him. [Excerpt: Lefty Frizzell, “If You’ve Got the Money, I’ve Got the Time”] It wasn’t so much that Frizzell was a great performer — though he was pretty good, and he hugely influenced Orbison’s vocal style. What really impressed young Roy Orbison, though, was seeing Frizzell, after the show, getting into a Cadillac. Orbison realised you could make real money just from singing, and started to make plans. In his teens, he and a group of his friends formed a country and western band, the Wink Westerners (named after the small town they lived in). That band had various lineups, but it eventually settled into a two-guitar, bass, drums, and electric mandolin lineup of Orbison, Billy Pat Ellis, Jack Kenneally, Johnny Wilson, and James Morrow. While Orbison was still in school, the band got their own radio show, one day a week, and became big enough that when the country star Slim Whitman came to town they were chosen as his backing group: [Excerpt: Slim Whitman, “Indian Love Call”] The band were primarily a country band, but like most bands of the time they would play whatever music the customers wanted to hear. In later years, Orbison would be able to pinpoint the exact moment he became a rock and roller — on New Year’s Eve 1954. The band started playing “Shake, Rattle, and Roll”, expecting it to finish dead on the stroke of midnight, but then Orbison looked at the clock and realised they’d started far too soon. That version of “Shake, Rattle, and Roll”, which lasted for eight minutes, converted Roy Orbison. When he started playing it, rock and roll was just another form of music, but by the end he knew he wanted to play that kind of music forever. The Wink Westerners were quickly renamed the Teen Kings. Orbison went off to university, where he heard a song called “Ooby Dooby” which was written by two classmates of his, Dick Penner and Wade Moore. They allegedly wrote it in a fifteen minute period, while on the roof of their frat house, and to be honest it sounds like fifteen minutes is about as long as it would take to write. It soon entered the set of the newly-named Teen Kings and became one of their most successful songs. The Teen Kings soon got their own local TV series, to go with the local radio shows they already had. When the new country star Johnny Cash passed through town, he appeared on the Teen Kings’ TV show, and Orbison asked him how to get signed to Sun Records. Cash gave Orbison the phone number for Sam Phillips, and told him to tell Phillips that Cash had sent him. He also advised Orbison that if he wanted to have any success as a musician, he should probably start singing in a lower register, and maybe change his name. Orbison never took that advice, and in later years he would joke with Cash about how terrible his advice was. His advice about getting signed to Sun wasn’t much better either — Orbison did indeed phone Sam Phillips and tell him Johnny Cash had said to call Phillips. Phillips responded by saying “Tell Johnny Cash he doesn’t run Sun Records, I do” and slamming the phone down. So Sun Records seemed like a dead end. The Teen Kings were going to have to look elsewhere for a record contract. So instead the Teen Kings went into the studio to audition for Columbia Records. They recorded two tracks at that initial session. One was “Ooby Dooby”; the other was a cover version of a song by the Clovers, “Hey, Miss Fannie”: [Excerpt: The Clovers, “Hey, Miss Fannie”] At the time, the Teen Kings thought that they’d almost certainly get a contract with Columbia, but Columbia ended up turning them down. They did, however, like “Ooby Dooby”, enough to give it to another group, Sid King and the Five Strings, who released it unsuccessfully as a single. [Excerpt: Sid King and the Five Strings, “Ooby Dooby”] As they had been turned down now by both the major label Columbia and the large indie Sun, Roy and the band went into the studio with Norman Petty, a local Texas record producer, to record “Ooby Dooby” again, to be released as a single on the tiny indie label Je-Wel. It came out at almost exactly the same time as Sid King’s version. [Excerpt: The Teen Kings, “Ooby Dooby”, Je-Wel version] But then Sam Phillips had a change of heart. Roy still wanted to be on Sun, and pestered a local record shop owner who knew Phillips to play “Ooby Dooby” for him. Phillips eventually listened to the single and liked it, but thought that he could do a better job of it. He discovered that Orbison wasn’t yet twenty-one, and so the contract he’d signed with Je-Wel was void. Phillips signed Orbison, got an injunction taken out against Je-Wel, preventing them from putting out any more copies of the single — only a few hundred ever got released — and quickly went into the studio to record a new version of the song. And this sort of sums up the difference between Orbison’s relationship with Sam Phillips and everyone else’s. Every other successful musician who recorded for Sun Records recorded for them first, and owed their careers to Phillips. He’d given them the shot that no-one else would, and he’d moulded them into the artists that they would become. Even the ones who later fell out with Phillips always credited him with being the reason they’d had any success in the business. Roy Orbison, on the other hand, had been discovered before Phillips. Phillips had turned him down, and he’d made a record somewhere else. That record was even with a producer who, in a little while, would be putting out rockabilly hits every bit as big as Phillips was. That meant that Roy Orbison would never feel, as Elvis or Johnny Cash or Carl Perkins did, that he owed his career to Sam Phillips. The rerecorded version was, as far as Orbison’s performance goes, almost identical to the original. Orbison was not a wild improviser like many of the artists with whom Phillips worked — he would work out his parts exactly, and stick to them. While Phillips would always claim in later life that his version of “Ooby Dooby” was vastly superior to the earlier one, most listeners would struggle to tell the difference: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison and the Teen Kings, “Ooby Dooby”, Sun version] Rather oddly, given Orbison’s later career, it wasn’t primarily his singing that impressed Phillips, but rather his guitar playing. Phillips would talk for the rest of his life about what a great guitarist Orbison was. Phillips would often get Orbison to play on records by other artists, and would later say that the only musician he knew who had a better sense of rhythm was Jerry Lee Lewis. And Orbison *was* a great guitarist. He was similar to Chuck Berry in that he would play both rhythm and lead simultaneously — if you listen to the records he made where his guitar playing is prominent, you can hear him using the bass strings to keep a riff down, and then playing fills between his vocal lines. But still, it would be several years before anyone in the record industry seemed to notice that Roy Orbison was, well, Roy Orbison. The B-side was recorded in a single take, and itself became a rockabilly classic. It was co-written by Orbison and the band’s drummer, Billy Pat Ellis, but it caused problems: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison and the Teen Kings, “Go Go Go”] That would later be recorded by Jerry Lee Lewis, among others, and would be one of the few rockabilly songs that Orbison would keep in his setlists in future years. While Ellis had cowritten the song, he wasn’t credited on the label, which understandably caused him to get angry — it seemed like Roy was cheating him out of his royalties. And while the record had been made by Roy Orbison and the Teen Kings as a group, it seemed that all anyone was talking about was Roy Orbison, not the Teen Kings. The group went out on tour, on a package with other Sun artists, and “Ooby Dooby” went to number fifty-nine in the pop charts and sold around two hundred thousand copies. This wasn’t an amazing, ground-breaking level of success like some other Sun artists had had, but it was perfectly respectable, and was enough to see them go into the studio to record a follow-up, “Rockhouse”. [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, “Rockhouse”] That song was originally written by a young singer called Harold Jenkins, who was making recordings for Sun at the time, though the recordings didn’t get released until after Jenkins became a country star under the name Conway Twitty. Orbison took Jenkins’ demo and substantially reworked it, earning himself a co-writing credit. The B-side was a song that Johnny Cash had written, called “Little Woolly Booger”: [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, “Little Woolly Booger”] 10) That was renamed to the rather more radio-friendly “You’re My Baby” for Orbison’s version: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison and the Teen Kings, “You’re My Baby”] “Rockhouse” didn’t do very well, and the band were getting disgruntled. They felt that Sam Phillips didn’t care about any of them, and they were also getting a bit sick of Roy himself, who they thought was taking too much of the spotlight. So they secretly made an agreement. At the start of a scheduled recording session, Orbison and Phillips went to the cafe next door to take a break. When they got back, they found that the Teen Kings had packed up all their gear and driven away. Roy no longer had a band. He was absolutely devastated — the people he’d come up with as a teenager, the people he’d thought were his friends, had all deserted him. He’d been playing with these people for years, and now, just as they were starting to achieve some success, they’d decided to leave him. The session was cancelled, and Sam Phillips was so worried about Orbison that he invited the young man to stay in his house for what turned into a several-month-long stay. Phillips, who had himself suffered from severe depression, was worried about the young singer, and tried to give him life advice. The advice that Phillips was giving Orbison had a profound effect on both Orbison and on Phillips’ son Knox, who later said “It was the first time I actually could see Sam giving someone he really cared about like Roy some hard advice — I mean, I was real young, but I thought, ‘You know what? It’s a different way he’s saying it but it’s the same advice he’s been giving me. It’s the same thing.’ That was the first time I actually knew that Sam was just trying to make people better. I mean, he wasn’t in the studio trying to inspire or record them. He could say the same thing that would teach you the same lesson if you were talking to him about charcoal or motorcycles. It was the same lesson.” For much of the next year, Orbison was essentially homeless. He spent most of his time on tour, but considered Memphis his home base, and stayed with either Sam Phillips, Johnny Cash, or Carl Perkins when he was “at home”. But he was starting to get bigger plans. He had already co-written a handful of songs, but he hadn’t put serious thought into his songwriting. That changed when he went on a tour with Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent. He realised that they — and the other people on the bill — had one hit each. Cochran would later have more, but still, Orbison wondered where those people’s other hits were going to come from. Where were they going to find their material? He didn’t want to get into a position where he had to just keep playing the same hit every day for the rest of his life, and realised that the only way to ensure he would have a ready supply of new material was to write it himself, and so he started to take his songwriting seriously as his principal art. Given that the hits on Sun had dried up, in fact, he basically became a songwriter who happened to sing, rather than a singer who wrote some of his own songs. While he continued making recordings for Sun, none of them did anything, and he later referred to some of them as among the worst records ever made. As Orbison was becoming less successful, Phillips increasingly palmed him off on his new assistant, Jack Clement, and Clement insisted on Orbison performing material for which he had no feeling. Orbison was starting to push to record ballads, but Clement knew that Roy Orbison just didn’t have the voice for them. But his songwriting was another matter. Sun artists started recording his stuff. Jerry Lee Lewis put out “Go Go Go” as the B-side to his big hit “Breathless”, and the minor Sun artist Warren Smith recorded Roy’s “So Long, I’m Gone”: [Excerpt: Warren Smith, “So Long, I’m Gone”]That reached the lower reaches of the Hot 100, and so became the first thing that earned Roy some serious money since “Ooby Dooby” a year earlier. Songwriting was clearly the way forward, and he decided to write a song about his new wife, Claudette, which he pitched to the Everly Brothers when they were on a bill together, and which they decided to record. [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Claudette”] We’ll be talking about the Everly Brothers in future episodes, but the important thing to note right now is that they were a much bigger act than Roy Orbison was. Them performing one of Orbison’s songs would be a massive break for him, but there was a catch. They had a deal with the publishing company Acuff-Rose that they would only perform songs that were published by that company, and Orbison had a contract with Sam Phillips that meant that Orbison’s songs were all published by Phillips. Orbison went to Phillips and explained the situation. He didn’t want to record for Sun any more anyway — they weren’t releasing most of what he was recording, he wasn’t having any hits, and they didn’t have the same ideas about what material he should be recording as he did. He wanted to assign the song to Acuff-Rose and give himself a chance at doing better than he had been. Phillips was not happy about this. This was at almost exactly the same time that both Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins left Sun Records, and he suspected a degree of collusion between the three men — and he wasn’t wrong in his suspicion. The three of them all thought that Phillips was not paying them enough royalties, was not telling them important business information, and was more interested in the latest new thing than in building the careers of people he’d already signed. Sam Phillips eventually made a suggestion which Orbison took up, though he later said that he didn’t realise what the consequences would be. The deal he made was that Orbison could quit his contract, and sign with Acuff-Rose, but only by signing all the songwriting royalties for the songs he’d already recorded over to Phillips. So Sam Phillips is now the credited songwriter for all the songs Orbison wrote and recorded during his time at Sun, and unsurprisingly Orbison resented this for the rest of his life. Most Sun artists came to believe that they had been treated badly in business dealings by Phillips, and that he hadn’t properly recognised their talent. Roy Orbison, more than any of the others, actually had a case to answer here. Sam Phillips never understood what he had in Roy Orbison until much later. With every other artist he had, he took someone raw and unsure of his own direction and moulded him into what Sam saw in him. With Orbison, he took an artist who was already a moderate success, and who had firm ideas, and kept him from doing the material that was good for him. He later said “I really have to take the blame for not bringing Roy to fruition.” As soon as the Everlys’ version of “Claudette” came out, Orbison saw an immediate upswing in his fortunes. Two weeks after it came out, he called Wesley Rose at Acuff Rose. “How’s the record doing?” “Oh, it sold half a million already.” “Have I made any money?” “Why, yes you have”. Roy bought a Cadillac, moved to Nashville, and quickly signed with RCA Records, who saw in him the potential to be the next Elvis. And it seemed he was following the same career path exactly, as his first recordings for RCA were with largely the same group of musicians who played on Elvis’ big hits. There was no Scotty, Bill, or DJ, as they were all exclusive to Elvis, but Chet Atkins was on guitar, Floyd Cramer was on piano, and the Jordanaires were on backing vocals. But even though Roy had largely been signed on the basis of his songwriting ability, the songs they chose to record for him were once again not written by him and not his choice of material. This time they were all picked by Wesley Rose: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, “Seems to Me”] He was now being allowed to sing ballads, but they weren’t the ballads that he wanted to be singing — they were the kind of song that anyone in the pop-country market could be singing. And still the producers didn’t know how to deal with his voice. His RCA singles did even worse than his records on Sun, despite having the push of a major label behind him. Eventually the money from “Claudette” ran out, and he was dropped by RCA. Chet Atkins, like Sam Phillips, just didn’t get Roy Orbison. He would later say “We did some pretty good records, but they were typical Nashville at that time, and we didn’t reach out and try to do something different. I blame myself for that. I should have seen the greatness in him and the quality of his voice.” Orbison sold his Cadillac, and moved out of Nashville, and back to West Texas. It looked like his career was over, and he would spend his life exactly as he’d hoped he wouldn’t, as a musician who’d had one minor hit and never did anything else. But then he met a couple of people who would change the course of his life forever. But that’s a story for a future episode.

 Episode forty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Ooby Dooby" by Roy Orbison and the Teen Kings, and the time when Sam Phillips got things badly wrong.. 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 "Blue Yodel #9" by Jimmie Rodgers. ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. There are several books available on Orbison. The one I have used for much of this is The Authorised Roy Orbison written by Jeff Slate and three of Orbison's children. I'm relying heavily on Sam Phillips: the Man Who Invented Rock and Roll by Peter Guralnick for all the episodes dealing with Phillips and Sun Records. This compilation features every track Orbison released up til 1962. His early Sun singles are also on this ten-disc set, which charts the history of Sun Records, with the A- and B-sides of ninety of the first Sun singles in chronological order for an absurdly low price. This will help give you the full context for Orbison's work, in a way hearing it in isolation wouldn't.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today we're once again going to look at a star who was discovered by Sun Records. But for once, the star we're looking at did not do his most interesting or vital work at Sun, and nor did he do the work that defined his persona there. Indeed, today we're going to talk about one of the very few times that Sam Phillips and Sun Records took on someone who would become a massive, massive, star, and completely mismanaged him, misjudged his abilities totally, and did everything completely wrong, to the point where he almost destroyed his career before it began. Roy Orbison was someone who made an unlikely rock and roll star. A quiet, unassuming, man, who rarely used an oath stronger than "Mercy", and wore dark glasses in later years to hide as much of his face as possible, he was the last person one would expect to be making music that was regarded as rebellious or exciting. And indeed, in his later years, the music he chose to make was very far from rebellious, though always rooted in rock and roll. Orbison had grown up knowing he was going to be a singer. When he was six years old, his father had bought him a guitar and taught him the chords to "You Are My Sunshine", and by the age of ten he was already winning talent contests. But it was seeing the famous country singer Lefty Frizzell live that really convinced him. [Excerpt: Lefty Frizzell, "If You've Got the Money, I've Got the Time"] It wasn't so much that Frizzell was a great performer -- though he was pretty good, and he hugely influenced Orbison's vocal style. What really impressed young Roy Orbison, though, was seeing Frizzell, after the show, getting into a Cadillac. Orbison realised you could make real money just from singing, and started to make plans. In his teens, he and a group of his friends formed a country and western band, the Wink Westerners (named after the small town they lived in). That band had various lineups, but it eventually settled into a two-guitar, bass, drums, and electric mandolin lineup of Orbison, Billy Pat Ellis, Jack Kenneally, Johnny Wilson, and James Morrow. While Orbison was still in school, the band got their own radio show, one day a week, and became big enough that when the country star Slim Whitman came to town they were chosen as his backing group: [Excerpt: Slim Whitman, "Indian Love Call"] The band were primarily a country band, but like most bands of the time they would play whatever music the customers wanted to hear. In later years, Orbison would be able to pinpoint the exact moment he became a rock and roller -- on New Year's Eve 1954. The band started playing "Shake, Rattle, and Roll", expecting it to finish dead on the stroke of midnight, but then Orbison looked at the clock and realised they'd started far too soon. That version of "Shake, Rattle, and Roll", which lasted for eight minutes, converted Roy Orbison. When he started playing it, rock and roll was just another form of music, but by the end he knew he wanted to play that kind of music forever. The Wink Westerners were quickly renamed the Teen Kings. Orbison went off to university, where he heard a song called "Ooby Dooby" which was written by two classmates of his, Dick Penner and Wade Moore. They allegedly wrote it in a fifteen minute period, while on the roof of their frat house, and to be honest it sounds like fifteen minutes is about as long as it would take to write. It soon entered the set of the newly-named Teen Kings and became one of their most successful songs. The Teen Kings soon got their own local TV series, to go with the local radio shows they already had. When the new country star Johnny Cash passed through town, he appeared on the Teen Kings' TV show, and Orbison asked him how to get signed to Sun Records. Cash gave Orbison the phone number for Sam Phillips, and told him to tell Phillips that Cash had sent him. He also advised Orbison that if he wanted to have any success as a musician, he should probably start singing in a lower register, and maybe change his name. Orbison never took that advice, and in later years he would joke with Cash about how terrible his advice was. His advice about getting signed to Sun wasn't much better either -- Orbison did indeed phone Sam Phillips and tell him Johnny Cash had said to call Phillips. Phillips responded by saying "Tell Johnny Cash he doesn't run Sun Records, I do" and slamming the phone down. So Sun Records seemed like a dead end. The Teen Kings were going to have to look elsewhere for a record contract. So instead the Teen Kings went into the studio to audition for Columbia Records. They recorded two tracks at that initial session. One was "Ooby Dooby"; the other was a cover version of a song by the Clovers, "Hey, Miss Fannie": [Excerpt: The Clovers, "Hey, Miss Fannie"] At the time, the Teen Kings thought that they'd almost certainly get a contract with Columbia, but Columbia ended up turning them down. They did, however, like "Ooby Dooby", enough to give it to another group, Sid King and the Five Strings, who released it unsuccessfully as a single. [Excerpt: Sid King and the Five Strings, "Ooby Dooby"] As they had been turned down now by both the major label Columbia and the large indie Sun, Roy and the band went into the studio with Norman Petty, a local Texas record producer, to record "Ooby Dooby" again, to be released as a single on the tiny indie label Je-Wel. It came out at almost exactly the same time as Sid King's version. [Excerpt: The Teen Kings, "Ooby Dooby", Je-Wel version] But then Sam Phillips had a change of heart. Roy still wanted to be on Sun, and pestered a local record shop owner who knew Phillips to play "Ooby Dooby" for him. Phillips eventually listened to the single and liked it, but thought that he could do a better job of it. He discovered that Orbison wasn't yet twenty-one, and so the contract he'd signed with Je-Wel was void. Phillips signed Orbison, got an injunction taken out against Je-Wel, preventing them from putting out any more copies of the single -- only a few hundred ever got released -- and quickly went into the studio to record a new version of the song. And this sort of sums up the difference between Orbison's relationship with Sam Phillips and everyone else's. Every other successful musician who recorded for Sun Records recorded for them first, and owed their careers to Phillips. He'd given them the shot that no-one else would, and he'd moulded them into the artists that they would become. Even the ones who later fell out with Phillips always credited him with being the reason they'd had any success in the business. Roy Orbison, on the other hand, had been discovered before Phillips. Phillips had turned him down, and he'd made a record somewhere else. That record was even with a producer who, in a little while, would be putting out rockabilly hits every bit as big as Phillips was. That meant that Roy Orbison would never feel, as Elvis or Johnny Cash or Carl Perkins did, that he owed his career to Sam Phillips. The rerecorded version was, as far as Orbison's performance goes, almost identical to the original. Orbison was not a wild improviser like many of the artists with whom Phillips worked -- he would work out his parts exactly, and stick to them. While Phillips would always claim in later life that his version of "Ooby Dooby" was vastly superior to the earlier one, most listeners would struggle to tell the difference: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison and the Teen Kings, "Ooby Dooby", Sun version] Rather oddly, given Orbison's later career, it wasn't primarily his singing that impressed Phillips, but rather his guitar playing. Phillips would talk for the rest of his life about what a great guitarist Orbison was. Phillips would often get Orbison to play on records by other artists, and would later say that the only musician he knew who had a better sense of rhythm was Jerry Lee Lewis. And Orbison *was* a great guitarist. He was similar to Chuck Berry in that he would play both rhythm and lead simultaneously -- if you listen to the records he made where his guitar playing is prominent, you can hear him using the bass strings to keep a riff down, and then playing fills between his vocal lines. But still, it would be several years before anyone in the record industry seemed to notice that Roy Orbison was, well, Roy Orbison. The B-side was recorded in a single take, and itself became a rockabilly classic. It was co-written by Orbison and the band's drummer, Billy Pat Ellis, but it caused problems: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison and the Teen Kings, "Go Go Go"] That would later be recorded by Jerry Lee Lewis, among others, and would be one of the few rockabilly songs that Orbison would keep in his setlists in future years. While Ellis had cowritten the song, he wasn't credited on the label, which understandably caused him to get angry -- it seemed like Roy was cheating him out of his royalties. And while the record had been made by Roy Orbison and the Teen Kings as a group, it seemed that all anyone was talking about was Roy Orbison, not the Teen Kings. The group went out on tour, on a package with other Sun artists, and "Ooby Dooby" went to number fifty-nine in the pop charts and sold around two hundred thousand copies. This wasn't an amazing, ground-breaking level of success like some other Sun artists had had, but it was perfectly respectable, and was enough to see them go into the studio to record a follow-up, "Rockhouse". [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, "Rockhouse"] That song was originally written by a young singer called Harold Jenkins, who was making recordings for Sun at the time, though the recordings didn't get released until after Jenkins became a country star under the name Conway Twitty. Orbison took Jenkins' demo and substantially reworked it, earning himself a co-writing credit. The B-side was a song that Johnny Cash had written, called "Little Woolly Booger": [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, "Little Woolly Booger"] 10) That was renamed to the rather more radio-friendly "You're My Baby" for Orbison's version: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison and the Teen Kings, "You're My Baby"] "Rockhouse" didn't do very well, and the band were getting disgruntled. They felt that Sam Phillips didn't care about any of them, and they were also getting a bit sick of Roy himself, who they thought was taking too much of the spotlight. So they secretly made an agreement. At the start of a scheduled recording session, Orbison and Phillips went to the cafe next door to take a break. When they got back, they found that the Teen Kings had packed up all their gear and driven away. Roy no longer had a band. He was absolutely devastated -- the people he'd come up with as a teenager, the people he'd thought were his friends, had all deserted him. He'd been playing with these people for years, and now, just as they were starting to achieve some success, they'd decided to leave him. The session was cancelled, and Sam Phillips was so worried about Orbison that he invited the young man to stay in his house for what turned into a several-month-long stay. Phillips, who had himself suffered from severe depression, was worried about the young singer, and tried to give him life advice. The advice that Phillips was giving Orbison had a profound effect on both Orbison and on Phillips' son Knox, who later said “It was the first time I actually could see Sam giving someone he really cared about like Roy some hard advice — I mean, I was real young, but I thought, ‘You know what? It’s a different way he’s saying it but it’s the same advice he’s been giving me. It’s the same thing.’ That was the first time I actually knew that Sam was just trying to make people better. I mean, he wasn’t in the studio trying to inspire or record them. He could say the same thing that would teach you the same lesson if you were talking to him about charcoal or motorcycles. It was the same lesson." For much of the next year, Orbison was essentially homeless. He spent most of his time on tour, but considered Memphis his home base, and stayed with either Sam Phillips, Johnny Cash, or Carl Perkins when he was "at home". But he was starting to get bigger plans. He had already co-written a handful of songs, but he hadn't put serious thought into his songwriting. That changed when he went on a tour with Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent. He realised that they -- and the other people on the bill -- had one hit each. Cochran would later have more, but still, Orbison wondered where those people's other hits were going to come from. Where were they going to find their material? He didn't want to get into a position where he had to just keep playing the same hit every day for the rest of his life, and realised that the only way to ensure he would have a ready supply of new material was to write it himself, and so he started to take his songwriting seriously as his principal art. Given that the hits on Sun had dried up, in fact, he basically became a songwriter who happened to sing, rather than a singer who wrote some of his own songs. While he continued making recordings for Sun, none of them did anything, and he later referred to some of them as among the worst records ever made. As Orbison was becoming less successful, Phillips increasingly palmed him off on his new assistant, Jack Clement, and Clement insisted on Orbison performing material for which he had no feeling. Orbison was starting to push to record ballads, but Clement knew that Roy Orbison just didn't have the voice for them. But his songwriting was another matter. Sun artists started recording his stuff. Jerry Lee Lewis put out "Go Go Go" as the B-side to his big hit "Breathless", and the minor Sun artist Warren Smith recorded Roy's "So Long, I'm Gone": [Excerpt: Warren Smith, "So Long, I'm Gone"]That reached the lower reaches of the Hot 100, and so became the first thing that earned Roy some serious money since "Ooby Dooby" a year earlier. Songwriting was clearly the way forward, and he decided to write a song about his new wife, Claudette, which he pitched to the Everly Brothers when they were on a bill together, and which they decided to record. [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Claudette"] We'll be talking about the Everly Brothers in future episodes, but the important thing to note right now is that they were a much bigger act than Roy Orbison was. Them performing one of Orbison's songs would be a massive break for him, but there was a catch. They had a deal with the publishing company Acuff-Rose that they would only perform songs that were published by that company, and Orbison had a contract with Sam Phillips that meant that Orbison's songs were all published by Phillips. Orbison went to Phillips and explained the situation. He didn't want to record for Sun any more anyway -- they weren't releasing most of what he was recording, he wasn't having any hits, and they didn't have the same ideas about what material he should be recording as he did. He wanted to assign the song to Acuff-Rose and give himself a chance at doing better than he had been. Phillips was not happy about this. This was at almost exactly the same time that both Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins left Sun Records, and he suspected a degree of collusion between the three men -- and he wasn't wrong in his suspicion. The three of them all thought that Phillips was not paying them enough royalties, was not telling them important business information, and was more interested in the latest new thing than in building the careers of people he'd already signed. Sam Phillips eventually made a suggestion which Orbison took up, though he later said that he didn't realise what the consequences would be. The deal he made was that Orbison could quit his contract, and sign with Acuff-Rose, but only by signing all the songwriting royalties for the songs he'd already recorded over to Phillips. So Sam Phillips is now the credited songwriter for all the songs Orbison wrote and recorded during his time at Sun, and unsurprisingly Orbison resented this for the rest of his life. Most Sun artists came to believe that they had been treated badly in business dealings by Phillips, and that he hadn't properly recognised their talent. Roy Orbison, more than any of the others, actually had a case to answer here. Sam Phillips never understood what he had in Roy Orbison until much later. With every other artist he had, he took someone raw and unsure of his own direction and moulded him into what Sam saw in him. With Orbison, he took an artist who was already a moderate success, and who had firm ideas, and kept him from doing the material that was good for him. He later said “I really have to take the blame for not bringing Roy to fruition." As soon as the Everlys' version of "Claudette" came out, Orbison saw an immediate upswing in his fortunes. Two weeks after it came out, he called Wesley Rose at Acuff Rose. "How's the record doing?" "Oh, it sold half a million already." "Have I made any money?" "Why, yes you have". Roy bought a Cadillac, moved to Nashville, and quickly signed with RCA Records, who saw in him the potential to be the next Elvis. And it seemed he was following the same career path exactly, as his first recordings for RCA were with largely the same group of musicians who played on Elvis' big hits. There was no Scotty, Bill, or DJ, as they were all exclusive to Elvis, but Chet Atkins was on guitar, Floyd Cramer was on piano, and the Jordanaires were on backing vocals. But even though Roy had largely been signed on the basis of his songwriting ability, the songs they chose to record for him were once again not written by him and not his choice of material. This time they were all picked by Wesley Rose: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, "Seems to Me"] He was now being allowed to sing ballads, but they weren't the ballads that he wanted to be singing -- they were the kind of song that anyone in the pop-country market could be singing. And still the producers didn't know how to deal with his voice. His RCA singles did even worse than his records on Sun, despite having the push of a major label behind him. Eventually the money from "Claudette" ran out, and he was dropped by RCA. Chet Atkins, like Sam Phillips, just didn't get Roy Orbison. He would later say “We did some pretty good records, but they were typical Nashville at that time, and we didn’t reach out and try to do something different. I blame myself for that. I should have seen the greatness in him and the quality of his voice.” Orbison sold his Cadillac, and moved out of Nashville, and back to West Texas. It looked like his career was over, and he would spend his life exactly as he'd hoped he wouldn't, as a musician who'd had one minor hit and never did anything else. But then he met a couple of people who would change the course of his life forever. But that's a story for a future episode.

Benjamin Logan Varsity Girls Basketball Coach Donnie Sosby is retiring, and this week's Chalk Talk starts with him. Plus, conversations with Benjamin Logan Boys Track and Bellefontaine Basketball standout Jack Clement.

Would you please help us improve the show by voting for your favourite track from this episode?Stop and GoStorms On The OceanOrdinary PleasureSteady GirlSex On FireTom's Gone To HiloOrange Claw HammerIn TransitVote now! Hello and welcome to the show notes for another episode of the show, brought to you by From the Bottom of the Record Box. Firstly, we are thrilled to be bringing you a true exclusive. The Heathens are spinning in the show. Secondly it is actually on the date that the record is officially released by Black & Wyatt Records. Read on to learn more about this fascinating track. If this takes your fancy, why not take a listen to Black & Wyatt's other recent release Fingers Like Saturn. What else will you learn in this episode? Albert Hammond Jr. is in fact Albert Hammond IIIThat the Appalachian Dulcimer is also known as The Hog FiddleChillwave is a thingDon Van Vliet - aka Captain Beefheart is the greatest musician ever to have livedRichard has invented the musical genre Pirate Music Please help us continue broadcasting £ Donation Amount: It's all I can afford, but you've got all my loveI've got a slightly deeper pocket, keep going guysYep, sure as hell got a spring in my step today - You're awesomeI am the King over all I survey - big me up on the showDang it, I'm so rich I won't even miss this amount - Good Luck!Hang on, I want to give an amount that suits me betterDonate Now Select Payment Method PayPal Personal Info First Name * Last Name Company Name Email Address * Make this an anonymous donation. Comment Donation Total: £10.00 Track Listing Stop and Go Albert Hammond Jr.Storms On The Ocean Robert Force & Albert d'OsschéOrdinary Pleasure Toro y MoiSteady Girl The HeathensSex on Fire Black SheikhsTom's Gone To Hilo Gavin Friday & Shannon McNallyOrange Claw Hammer (1975 Radio) Captain BeefheartIn Transit Albert Hammond Jr. Subscribe for exclusive news about the show. First Name Last Name Email Address Leave this field empty if you're human: The Heathens - Steady Girl - as written by Kaye Garren-Heath-Payne Saturday, December 8th, 1956: Four days after Elvis, Carl, Johnny, and Jerry Lee recorded the ‘Million Dollar Quartet Session’, five East High School students known as The Heathens (named after 15 year-old lead singer Colin Heath) entered Sun Studio to record a song he had written with a female classmate (and rhythm guitar player) Kaye Garren called Steady Girl. Classmen Roger Fakes played lead guitar and Joe Bauer (later of The Youngbloods) played drums. David Gibson played piano on one of two takes. Sam Phillips was probably not there that day, so it is likely that Jack Clement or Marion Keisker produced the session, but there’s no way to ever know for certain. Both takes were cut straight to a 78 rpm acetate disc (live with no overdubs and no mixing) as these teenagers banged away inside Sun Studio on that weekend afternoon. When the smoke cleared, both takes of Steady Girl were too raw even by Sun Records standards, so The Heathens were never called back and the lacquer master remained unheard.  Sixty-three years later,

All about the man who was there at the beginning of Rock & Roll. Jack Clement produced and wrote songs for Jerry Lee Lewis, Charley Pride, Johnny Cash, Townes Van Zandt, The Deep Water Reunion, and many others. One of the finest producers of early rock and roll and country music.

On a December day in 1956, Carl Perkins had a recording session at Sun Records, which label owner Sam Phillips wanted Jerry Lee Lewis at to play piano, when Elvis Presley came in to visit the studios and Johnny Cash popped in from the next room. These four men would become known as "The Million Dollar Quartet" by Sam Phillips, who brought in a reporter to highlight the session in a local paper. Presley, Perkins, Cash, and Lewis would all become legendary early rock 'n' roll artists, with Presley already a megastar and Perkins holding a number one hit. Cash was a hit recording artist who would go on to bigger things, while Jerry Lee Lewis was waiting for his first record to come out. Despite their individual abilities, the Million Dollar Quartet only recorded the one time in what was really an informal jam session that was only captured because producer Jack Clement flipped the "Record" switch. The session would nonetheless reveal the nature of early rock 'n' roll, as the four men swapped songs from the pop charts, Southern gospel, traditional African-American music, and country music.

FTB # 378   (intro bed) The Kentucky Headhunters - Governors Cup (On Safari) Jeb Loy Nichols - You Got In (Country Hustle) Caroline Spence - Wishing Well  (Spades & Roses) Gurf Morlix -  Deeper Down The (The Soul & The Heal) Conor O' Donnell - Missing The Fool  (Come On In) (mic break) Mipso - Coming Down The Mountain  (Coming Down The Mountain) David Olney - Yesterday's News  (Don't Try To Fight It) Pi Jacobs -  Dance Clean  (A Little Blue)  Todd Adelman & The Country Mile - Tired Of Being Tired  (Time Will Tell) (mic break) Matt Urmy - We Must Believe In Magic (feat. Jack Clement)  (Out of the Ashes)  Tony Furtado - Give Me Your Soul  (Cider House Sessions (Live)) The Gibson Brothers - Highway  (In the Ground)  Blackfoot Gypsies - Pototoes And Whiskey  (To The Top) The Whiskey Gentry - Looking for Trouble (Dead Ringer) (mic break) Rodney Crowell - Nashville 1972  (Close Ties)

W.S. talks about joining Carl Perkins’ band, Sun Studio stories, recording Blue Suede Shoes and Matchbox, being there for the Million Dollar Quartet session, Jack Clement stories, Jerry Lee Lewis stories, joining Johnny Cash’s band, Kris Kristofferson stories, Willie Nelson… Continue Reading →