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12 episodes with Jackie Brenston
3 episodes with Jackie Brenston
3 episodes with Jackie Brenston
2 episodes with Jackie Brenston
Records selected for the National Recording Registry in 2024 and 25. Including: Aloha Oe by the Hawaiian Quintette, Clarinet Marmelade by Jim Europe, Rose Room By the Benny Goodman Sextette, Rudolph the Red Nosed Raindeer by Gene Autry and Rocket 88 by Jackie Brenston.
Blues Radio International With Jesse Finkelstein & Audrey Michelle
John Nemeth and Sean MacDonald perform on the Blues Radio International soundstage at the 2024 Blues Music Awards on Edition 693 of Blues Radio International, with music from Tia Carroll and Jackie Brenston. Sound by Michael Wolf. Find more at BluesRadioInternational.net
Matt recently took a birthday trip to Memphis where he experienced a lot of musical history at Sun Studio and on Beale Street. Have a listen to stories from the trip and an allstar list of Memphis musical artists. Track list: 00:00 - Intro (Booker T & the M.G.'s - Green Onions) 09:30 - Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats (Ike Turner & the Kings of Rhythm) - Rocket 88 19:41 - Howlin' Wolf - How Many More Years 34:22 - Junior Parker - Love My Baby 45:21 - Elvis Presley - That's Alright 58:28 - Johnny Cash - Hey Porter 66:15 - Outro (Isaac Hayes - Walk On By) Reach Us: @ReasonsAre @ChrisMaierBC @olinernotes olinernotes@gmail.com Web Site: https://ourlinernotes.libsyn.com/ Check out our merch store: https://teespring.com/stores/ourlinernotes
Label: Chess/Coll. 3412Year: 1951Condition: MPrice: $12.00Originally released on Chess 1458. This recording was actually made by Sam Phillips at the fledgling Sun studios and leased to Chess. It is considered by many rock'n'roll fans to be one of the very first true rock'n'roll records, partly because of the distorted guitar that makes its appearance toward the end of the record. Absolutely essential! Incidentally, the band is Ike Turner & The Kings of Rhythm, with Ike Turner himself on that historic lead guitar. This is a new copy of the out-of-print Collectables reissue.
The 2024 National Recording Registry “Clarinet Marmalade” – Lt. James Reese Europe's 369th U.S. Infantry Band (1919) “Kauhavan Polkka” – Viola Turpeinen and John Rosendahl (1928) Wisconsin Folksong Collection (1937-1946) “Rose Room” – Benny Goodman Sextet with Charlie Christian (1939) “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer” – Gene Autry (1949) “Tennessee Waltz” – Patti Page (1950) “Rocket ‘88'” – Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats (1951) “Catch a Falling Star” / ”Magic Moments” – Perry Como (1957) “Chances Are” – Johnny Mathis (1957) “The Sidewinder” – Lee Morgan (1964) “Surrealistic Pillow” – Jefferson Airplane (1967) “Ain't No Sunshine” – Bill Withers (1971) “This is a Recording” – Lily Tomlin (1971) “J.D. Crowe & the New South” – J.D. Crowe & the New South (1975) “Arrival” – ABBA (1976) “El Cantante” – Héctor Lavoe (1978) “The Cars” – The Cars (1978) “Parallel Lines” – Blondie (1978) “La-Di-Da-Di” – Doug E. Fresh and Slick Rick (MC Ricky D) (1985) “Don't Worry, Be Happy” – Bobby McFerrin (1988) “Amor Eterno” – Juan Gabriel (1990) “Pieces of Africa” – Kronos Quartet (1992) “Dookie” – Green Day (1994) “Ready to Die” – The Notorious B.I.G. (1994) “Wide Open Spaces” – The Chicks (1998) Find out more at https://registry-a-podcast.pinecast.co
| Artist | Title | Album Name | Album Copyright | David Booker | Jimmy Reed'd Mama | Hobos And Mojos Vol2 | Howlin' Wolf | My Baby Walked Off | The Legendary Sun Performers | Alec Fraser Jr | Grandma's House | On The Wings Of The Wind | Luke Jordan | If I Call You Mama | Never Let The Same Bee Sting You Twice | Jimmy Regal & The Royals | Elmers End Blues | The First And Last Stop | Gaye Adegbalola (Ft. Roddy Barnes) | Sloppy Drunk | Neo Classic Blues - 2004 - 320 | Tommy Sands | Who Killed JFK | Tommy Sands Fair Play | Shemekia Copeland | Hangin' Up - [33 1/3] | 33 1/3 | | | Frank Muschalle feat. Stephan Holstein | Right From Wrong | The Spiekeroog Sessions | Mojo Buford -[The Muddy Waters Blues Band] | Watch Dog | Mojo Buford | | Dale Storr | When I'm With You | Homecoming | | Bill Haley & His Comets | Real Rock Drive | | | Jackie Brenston | Rocket 88 | | | | Gov't Mule | Made My Peace | Gov't Mule - Peace...Like A River | Paul Lamb And The Kingsnakes | Love Another Day | Mind Games | | Ritchie Dave Porter | Waiting-For-The-Train | Rocking The Blues |
| Artist | Title | Album Name | Album Copyright | David Booker | Jimmy Reed'd Mama | Hobos And Mojos Vol2 | Howlin' Wolf | My Baby Walked Off | The Legendary Sun Performers | Alec Fraser Jr | Grandma's House | On The Wings Of The Wind | Luke Jordan | If I Call You Mama | Never Let The Same Bee Sting You Twice | Jimmy Regal & The Royals | Elmers End Blues | The First And Last Stop | Gaye Adegbalola (Ft. Roddy Barnes) | Sloppy Drunk | Neo Classic Blues - 2004 | Tommy Sands | Who Killed JFK | Fair Play | Shemekia Copeland | Hangin' Up - [33 1/3] | 33 1/3 | | | Frank Muschalle feat. Stephan Holstein | Right From Wrong | The Spiekeroog Sessions | Mojo Buford -[The Muddy Waters Blues Band] | Watch Dog | Mojo Buford | | Dale Storr | When I'm With You | Homecoming | | Bill Haley & His Comets | Real Rock Drive | | | Jackie Brenston | Rocket 88 | | | | Gov't Mule | Made My Peace | Peace...Like A River | Paul Lamb And The Kingsnakes | Love Another Day | Mind Games | | Ritchie Dave Porter | Waiting-For-The-Train | Rocking The Blues |
Brian and Murdock celebrate the "Queen of Rock N Roll" - Tina Turner - by examining the giant impact she just might have made on the way rock n roll has looked onstage for the last 60 years. This episode brought to you in part by Louder Than Life Music Festival. Louder Than Life America's Biggest Rock Festival Louisville, KY September 21-24, 2023 Highland Festival Grounds At Kentucky Exposition Center Foo Fighters, Green Day, Tool, Avenged Sevenfold, Godsmack, Pantera, Queens Of The Stone Age, Weezer, Limp Bizkit, Megadeth, Rancid, Turnstile & More General Admission And VIP Passes On Sale Now Starting At $10 Down Win Louder Than Life tickets by entering HERE! Support the show on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/rocknrollbedtimestories SHOW NOTES Songs used in this episode: “Rocket 88” by Jackie Brenston & His Delta Cats; “A Fool in Love” by Ike & Tina Turner; “River Deep, Mountain High” by Ike & Tina Turner ` https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2021/01/tina-turner-proud-mary/617843/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proud_Mary https://www.biography.com/musicians/tina-turner-proud-mary-origins https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/rolling-stones-mick-jagger-learn-to-dance/ https://www.npr.org/2023/05/25/1178270147/the-genre-bending-influence-and-legacy-of-tina-turner https://nz.news.yahoo.com/tina-turner-taught-mick-jagger-150109041.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kings_of_Rhythm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chitlin%27_Circuit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Krasnow Ike and Tina on The Big TNT Show: https://youtu.be/RrLl1o1shos https://americansongwriter.com/various-artists-t-m-showthe-big-t-n-t-show-collectors-edition/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_Deep_%E2%80%93_Mountain_High https://www.lamag.com/article/listen-tina-turners-marathon-recording-of-river-deep-mountain-high/ River Deep recording session outtakes: https://tinaturnerblog.com/2011/05/28/ike-tina-river-deep-mountain-high-outtake/ https://www.the-world-of-tina.com/rolling-stones---concert.html 1971 Rolling Stone piece: https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/tales-of-ike-and-tina-turner-237489/ Tina and Mick at Live Aid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wyuwJP-u9Q http://rockandrollgarage.com/where-mick-jagger-got-the-inspiration-for-his-dance-moves/ https://www.towleroad.com/2023/05/tina-turner-was-prepared-for-sir-mick-jagger-ripping-her-skirt-off-at-live-aid/ https://etcanada.com/news/994825/mick-jagger-shares-rare-footage-of-himself-and-tina-turner-in-1969/ The Pony dance tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-I0HEbcrVo Another Pony dance tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qhrx5IcPUIw
Nos despedimos de dos poderosas cantantes: la irrepetible Tina Turner, que ha fallecido en Suiza a la edad de 83, y la gran Velma Powell, a quien sus amigos y compañeros de escena darán un homenaje en la sala madrileña El Sol. Playlist: Snatch It Back and Hold It – Junior Wells; Dust My Broom – Ike & Tina Turner; Nothing But the Cat, Let's Do It Again, Blues To The Bone, Too Late – Velma Powell & Bluedays; Rocket 88 – Jackie Brenston & His Delta Cats; My Baby Stole Off – Howlin' Wolf; Five Long Years, Early In the Morning, A Fool For You, Something's Got A Hold On Me – Ike & Tina Turner; Undercover Agent For the Blues – Tina Turner; Proud Mary, Good Times – Ike & Tina Turner. Escuchar audio
March in Rock, Roots and Blues History. PLAYLIST: ARTIST - TRACK. 1 Jo Jo Zep & the Falcons - Security. 2 Renee Geyer - It' s A Man' s Man' s Man' s World. 3 Johnny London - Drivin' Slow. 4 Elvis Presley - Blue Hawaii. 5 Pink Floyd - Breathe. 6 Bo Diddley - Bo Diddley. 7 Jackie Brenston & his Delta Cats - Rocket 88. 8 The Rolling Stones - Ruby Tuesday. 9 Patsy Cline - I Fall To Pieces. 10 Little Charlie & The Nightcats - So Good. 11 Ike & Tina Turner - River Deep Mountain High. 12 Skip James - Crow Jane. 13 Lavern Baker - Jim Dandy. 14 Woody Guthrie with Cisco Houston and Sonny Terry - Hard Travelin' . 15 The Velvet Underground - I' m Waiting For The Man. 16 Otis Redding - The Dock Of The Bay. 17 The Blues Brothers - Peter Gunn Theme. 18 The Blues Brothers - Theme From Rawhide. 19 T Bone Walker - Don' t Leave Me Baby. 20 Dick Dale & His Del-Tones - Misirlou. 21 Chuck Berry - Maybellene. 22 Duane Allman - Goin' Down Slow. 23 The Yardbirds - For Your Love. 24 Roxy Music - Love Is The Drug. Size: 122 MB (127,941,269 bytes) Duration: 0:53:16
In this episode, we talk about noise pollution—a much bigger problem than you might realize! Some of the things we discuss include: the most common (and annoying) sources of outdoor noise adverse mental, physical, and social health effects from too much noise exposure what safe noise levels even are ways to reduce noise in cities (hint: it has a lot to do with cars, like basically everything we talk about) and a whole lot more Links: Want to learn more on this episode's topic? There has been no shortage of words written on the virus and our cities. Here's just a tiny sample: Book: https://islandpress.org/books/curbing-traffic (‘Curbing Traffic' by Melissa & Chris Bruntlett) https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-22/why-city-noise-is-a-serious-health-hazard (Why City Noise Is a Serious Health Hazard) https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/10.1289/ehp.1307272 (Environmental Noise Pollution in the United States: Developing an Effective Public Health Response) https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/07/light-noise-pollution-animal-sensory-impact/638446/ (How Animals Perceive the World) https://www.salon.com/2014/11/02/the_sounds_of_our_lives_suck_how_to_make_cities_better_by_ending_the_blight_of_noise/ (The sounds of our lives suck! How to make cities better by ending the blight of noise) https://youtu.be/CTV-wwszGw8 (Cities Aren't Loud: Cars Are Loud (Video)) https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/06/14/1053771/sounds-smells-vital-to-cities-as-sights/ (Why sounds and smells are as vital to cities as the sights) https://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20210830-paris-caps-speed-limit-to-30km-h-in-further-boost-to-soft-transport-road-safety-hidalgo (Paris caps speed limit to 30km/h in further boost to 'soft' transport) https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-02/the-sensory-assault-of-18th-century-cities (The Sensory Assault of 18th Century Cities) https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-26/road-traffic-noise-pollution-is-linked-with-a-heightened-risk-of-central-obesity (Road Traffic Noise Pollution Is Linked With a Heightened Risk of Central Obesity) https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-03-26/the-science-of-quieter-cities (The Science of Quieter Cities) https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-06-21/traffic-noise-might-give-you-a-heart-attack (Traffic Noise Might GiveYou a Heart Attack) https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-03-26/the-science-of-quieter-cities (The Science of Quieter Cities) https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/10/how-silence-became-a-luxury-good/408412/ (How Silence Became the Ultimate Luxury Good ) https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-20/the-basically-complete-health-case-for-urban-parks-trees-and-nature (The (Basically) Complete Health Case for Urban Parks, Trees, and Nature) https://interactive.wearepossible.org/noisycities/#/?city=nyc&language=en (NOISY CITIES) (interactive map) https://maps.dot.gov/BTS/NationalTransportationNoiseMap/ (National Transportation Noise Map) (US DOT) --- Check us out on https://twitter.com/webuiltitpod (Twitter) and https://www.instagram.com/webuiltitpod/ (Instagram) @webuiltitpod. Hosted by AJ Fawver and Jordan Clark. Edited by Jordan Clark. Music in this episode includes: Sounds of the Supermarket, Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats ("Rocket 88"), Scott Joplin ("Pineapple Rag"), Bob Dylan ("Piano Mood").
Join Piley and Mondo for the 13 year anniversary of Podrophenia. They are joined in the studio by local musician and singer Ethan Wilson who plays a live set of original songs. The boys mark the occasion by playing some good ole rock n roll. The Fat Man - Fats Domino Lights Out - Jerry Byrne The Train Kept A Rollin' - Johnny Burnette Touch And Go - Wynona Carr Fire Down Below - Shakin' Stevens Rocket 88 - Jackie Brenston & his Delta Cats Ethan Wilson Live Set Double Up Boogie Richffield Rox 670 No Use Give In To Me Running From The Hounds - Phathom, Rocker & Slick Drifting - Mike Sanchez and his Band Rock n Roll Medley - Tom Jones Think It Over -Buddy Holly Baby, What You Want Me To Do - Elvis Presley Betty Jean - Chuck Berry Bossy - JD McPherson Big River - Johnny Cash Searchin' (I Gotta Find A Man) - Hazell Dean Tupelo Mississipi Flash - Jerry Read Guitar Man - Elvis Presley
You're hearing the song “Rocket 88,” widely considered to be the first rock and roll song ever recorded. It was recorded here, at Sun Studio, by Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats. The Delta Cats included Ike Turner, just one of the many legendary musicians to record here.Artists from many genres such as B.B. King, Roy Orbison, and Rufus Thomas all used Sun Studio. It was the home to one of the most legendary nights in music history when the Million Dollar Quartet – consisting of Elvis, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis – recorded a spontaneous jam session.-Visit us online at: Itshometownhistory.com-Find us on all podcasting platforms: https://link.chtbl.com/hometownhistory-Support our podcast by becoming a patron at: Patreon.com/itshometownhistory-Check out our other podcasts: itsarclightmedia.com
This week, the boys have Bob Jones from the L.I. & NYC Oldsmobile car club in the studio to recap this year's historic car show event. Talk turns to rare and oddball Oldsmobile's, insurance regulations for certain cars & motorcycles, as well as car show planning and strategies. Ray plays a clip of the 1951 song "Rocket 88" as performed by Jackie Brenston & his Delta Cats, and the gang goes on to cover a modern engine swap into a 1956 Olds as relayed by a caller. Can you say "project car"?
#70-66Intro/Outro: Hey, Good Lookin' by Hank Williams70. Walkin' After Midnight by Patsy Cline69. Rocket 88 by Jackie Brenston & His Delta Cats68. Memories Are Made of This by Dean Martin67. Who Do You Love? by Bo Diddley66. Dream Lover by Bobby DarinVote on your favorite song from today's episodeVote on your favorite song from Week 1
Jerome presents March events in rock, roots and blues history. Playlist: Artist - Tracks. 1 Jo Jo Zep and the Falcons - Security. 2 Renee Geyer - Its A Mans Mans Mans World. 3 Johnny London - Drivin Slow. 4 Elvis Presley - Blue Hawaii. 5 Pink Floyd - Breathe. 6 Bo Diddley - Bo Diddley. 7 Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats - Rocket 88. 8 The Rolling Stones - Ruby Tuesday. 9 Patsy Cline - I Fall To Pieces. 10 Little Charlie and The Nightcats - So Good. 11 Ike And Tina Turner - River Deep Mountain High. 12 Skip James - Crow Jane. 13 Lavern Baker - Jim Dandy. 14 Woody Guthrie with Cisco Houston and Sonny Terry - Hard Travelin. 15 The Velvet Underground - Im Waiting For The Man. 16 Otis Redding - The Dock Of The Bay. 17 Blues Brothers - Peter Gunn Theme. 18 Blues Brothers - Theme From Rawhide. 19 T Bone Walker - Dont Leave Me Baby. 20 Dick Dale and His Del Tones - Misirlou. 21 Chuck Berry - Maybellene. 22 Duane Allman - Goin Down Slow. 23 The Yardbirds - For Your Love. 24 Roxy Music - Love Is The Drug. Size: 122 MB (127,941,269 bytes). Duration: 00:53:16
Episode 141 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “River Deep Mountain High'”, and at the career of Ike and Tina Turner. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Also, this episode was recorded before the sad death of the great Ronnie Spector, whose records are featured a couple of times in this episode, which is partly about her abusive ex-husband. Her life paralleled Tina Turner's quite closely, and if you haven't heard the episode I did about her last year, you can find it at https://500songs.com/podcast/episode-110-be-my-baby-by-the-ronettes/. I wish I'd had the opportunity to fit a tribute into this episode too. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Wild Thing" by the Troggs. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources As usual, all the songs excerpted in the podcast can be heard in full at Mixcloud. Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era by Ken Emerson is a good overview of the Brill Building scene, and I referred to it for the material about Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich. I've referred to two biographies of Phil Spector in this episode, Phil Spector: Out of His Head by Richard Williams and He's a Rebel by Mark Ribkowsky. Tina Turner has written two autobiographies. I Tina is now out of print but is slightly more interesting, as it contains interview material with other people in her life. My Love Story is the more recent one and covers her whole life up to 2019. Ike Turner's autobiography Takin' Back My Name is a despicable, self-serving, work of self-justification, and I do not recommend anyone buy or read it. But I did use it for quotes in the episode so it goes on the list. Ike Turner: King of Rhythm by John Collis is more even-handed, and contains a useful discography. That Kat Sure Could Play! is a four-CD compilation of Ike Turner's work up to 1957. The TAMI and Big TNT shows are available on a Blu-Ray containing both performances. There are many compilations available with some of the hits Spector produced, but I recommend getting Back to Mono, a four-CD overview of his career containing all the major singles put out by Philles. There are sadly no good compilations of Ike and Tina Turner's career, as they recorded for multiple labels, and would regularly rerecord the hits in new versions for each new label, so any compilation you find will have the actual hit version of one or two tracks, plus a bunch of shoddy remakes. However, the hit version of "River Deep, Mountain High" is on the album of the same name, which is a worthwhile album to get,. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today's episode is unfortunately another one of those which will require a content warning, because we're going to be talking about Ike and Tina Turner. For those of you who don't know, Ike Turner was possibly the most famously abusive spouse in the whole history of music, and it is literally impossible to talk about the duo's career without talking about that abuse. I am going to try not to go into too many of the details -- if nothing else, the details are very readily available for those who want to seek them out, not least in Tina's two autobiographies, so there's no sense in retraumatising people who've experienced domestic abuse by going over them needlessly -- but it would be dishonest to try to tell the story without talking about it at all. This is not going to be an episode *about* Ike Turner's brutal treatment of Tina Turner -- it's an episode about the record, and about music, and about their musical career -- but the environment in which "River Deep, Mountain High" was created was so full of toxic, abusive, destructive men that Ike Turner may only be the third-worst person credited on the record, and so that abuse will come up. If discussion of domestic abuse, gun violence, cocaine addiction, and suicide attempts are likely to cause you problems, you might want to read the transcript rather than listen to the podcast. That said, let's get on with the story. One of the problems I'm hitting at this point of the narrative is that starting with "I Fought the Law" we've hit a run of incredibly intertangled stories The three most recent episodes, this one, and nine of the next twelve, all really make up one big narrative about what happened when folk-rock and psychedelia hit the Hollywood scene and the Sunset Strip nightclubs started providing the raw material for the entertainment industry to turn into pop culture. We're going to be focusing on a small number of individuals, and that causes problems when trying to tell a linear narrative, because people don't live their lives sequentially -- it's not the case that everything happened to Phil Spector, and *then* everything happened to Cass Elliot, and *then* everything happened to Brian Wilson. All these people were living their lives and interacting and influencing each other, and so sometimes we'll have to mention something that will be dealt with in a future episode. So I'll say here and now that we *will* be doing an episode on the Lovin' Spoonful in two weeks. So when I say now that in late 1965 the Lovin' Spoonful were one of the biggest bands around, and possibly the hottest band in the country, you'll have to take that on trust. But they were, and in late 1965 their hit "Do You Believe in Magic?" had made the top ten: [Excerpt: The Lovin' Spoonful, "Do You Believe in Magic?"] Phil Spector, as always, was trying to stay aware of the latest trends in music, and he was floundering somewhat. Since the Beatles had hit America in 1964, the hits had dried up -- he'd produced a few minor hit records in 1964, but the only hits he'd made in 1965 had been with the Righteous Brothers -- none of his other acts were charting. And then the Righteous Brothers left him, after only a year. In late 1965, he had no hit acts and no prospect of having any. There was only one thing to do -- he needed to start making his own folk-rock records. And the Lovin' Spoonful gave him an idea how to do that. Their records were identifiably coming from the same kind of place as people like the Byrds or the Mamas and the Papas, but they were pop songs, not protest songs -- the Lovin' Spoonful weren't doing Dylan covers or anything intellectual, but joyous pop confections of a kind that anyone could relate to. Spector knew how to make pop records like that. But to do that, he needed a band. Even though he had been annoyed at the way that people had paid more attention to the Righteous Brothers, as white men, than they had to the other vocalists he'd made hit records with (who, as Black women, had been regarded by a sexist and racist public as interchangeable puppets being controlled by a Svengali rather than as artists in their own right), he knew he was going to have to work with a group of white male vocalist-instrumentalists if he wanted to have his own Lovin' Spoonful. And the group he chose was a group from Greenwich Village called MFQ. MFQ had originally named themselves the Modern Folk Quartet, as a parallel to the much better-known Modern Jazz Quartet, and consisted of Cyrus Faryar, Henry Diltz, Jerry Yester, and Chip Douglas, all of whom were multi-instrumentalists who would switch between guitar, banjo, mandolin, and bass depending on the song. They had combined Kingston Trio style clean-cut folk with Four Freshmen style modern harmonies -- Yester, who was a veteran of the New Christy Minstrels, said of the group's vocals that "the only vocals that competed with us back then was Curt Boettcher's group", and they had been taken under the wing of manager Herb Cohen, who had got them a record deal with Warner Brothers. They recorded two albums of folk songs, the first of which was produced by Jim Dickson, the Byrds' co-manager: [Excerpt: The Modern Folk Quartet, "Sassafras"] But after their second album, they had decided to go along with the trends and switch to folk-rock. They'd started playing with electric instruments, and after a few shows where John Sebastian, the lead singer of the Lovin' Spoonful, had sat in with them on drums, they'd got themselves a full-time drummer, "Fast" Eddie Hoh, and renamed themselves the Modern Folk Quintet, but they always shortened that to just MFQ. Spector was convinced that this group could be another Lovin' Spoonful if they had the right song, and MFQ in turn were eager to become something more than an unsuccessful folk group. Spector had the group rehearsing in his house for weeks at a stretch before taking them into the studio. The song that Spector chose to have the group record was written by a young songwriter he was working with named Harry Nilsson. Nilsson was as yet a complete unknown, who had not written a hit and was still working a day job, but he had a talent for melody, and he also had a unique songwriting sensibility combining humour and heartbreak. For example, he'd written a song that Spector had recorded with the Ronettes, "Here I Sit", which had been inspired by the famous graffito from public toilet walls -- "Here I sit, broken-hearted/Paid a dime and only farted": [Excerpt: The Ronettes, "Here I Sit"] That ability to take taboo bodily functions and turn them into innocent-sounding love lyrics is also at play in the song that Spector chose to have the MFQ record. "This Could be the Night" was written by Nilsson from the perspective of someone who is hoping to lose his virginity -- he feels like he's sitting on dynamite, and he's going to "give her some", but it still sounds innocent enough to get past the radio censors of the mid-sixties: [Excerpt: Harry Nilsson, "This Could Be the Night (demo)"] Spector took that song, and recorded a version of it which found the perfect balance between Spector's own wall of sound and the Lovin' Spoonful's "Good Time Music" sound: [Excerpt: MFQ, "This Could be the Night"] Brian Wilson was, according to many people, in the studio while that was being recorded, and for decades it would remain a favourite song of Wilson's -- he recorded a solo version of it in the 1990s, and when he started touring solo for the first time in 1998 he included the song in his earliest live performances. He also tried to record it with his wife's group, American Spring, in the early 1970s, but was unable to, because while he could remember almost all of the song, he couldn't get hold of the lyrics. And the reason he couldn't get hold of the lyrics is that the record itself went unreleased, because Phil Spector had found a new performer he was focusing on instead. It happened during the filming of the Big TNT Show, a sequel to the TAMI Show, released by American International Pictures, for which "This Could Be the Night" was eventually used as a theme song. The MFQ were actually performers at the Big TNT Show, which Spector was musical director and associate producer of, but their performances were cut out of the finished film, leaving just their record being played over the credits. The Big TNT Show generally gets less respect than the TAMI Show, but it's a rather remarkable document of the American music scene at the very end of 1965, and it's far more diverse than the TAMI show. It opens with, of all people, David McCallum -- the actor who played Ilya Kuryakin on The Man From UNCLE -- conducting a band of session musicians playing an instrumental version of "Satisfaction": [Excerpt: David McCallum, "Satisfaction"] And then, in front of an audience which included Ron and Russel Mael, later of Sparks, and Frank Zappa, who is very clearly visible in audience shots, came performances of every then-current form of popular music. Ray Charles, Petula Clark, Bo Diddley, the Byrds, the Lovin' Spoonful, Roger Miller, the Ronettes, and Donovan all did multiple songs, though the oddest contribution was from Joan Baez, who as well as doing some of her normal folk repertoire also performed "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'" with Spector on piano: [Excerpt: Joan Baez and Phil Spector, "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'"] But the headline act on the eventual finished film was the least-known act on the bill, a duo who had not had a top forty hit for four years at this point, and who were only on the bill as a last-minute fill-in for an act who dropped out, but who were a sensational live act. So sensational that when Phil Spector saw them, he knew he needed to sign them -- or at least he needed to sign one of them: [Excerpt: Ike and Tina Turner with the Ikettes, "Please, Please, Please"] Because Ike and Tina Turner's performance at the Big TNT Show was, if anything, even more impressive than James Brown's performance on the TAMI Show the previous year. The last we saw of Ike Turner was way back in episode eleven. If you don't remember that, from more than three years ago, at the time Turner was the leader of a small band called the Kings of Rhythm. They'd been told by their friend B.B. King that if you wanted to make a record, the person you go to was Sam Phillips at Memphis Recording Services, and they'd recorded "Rocket '88", often cited as the first ever rock and roll record, under the name of their sax player and vocalist Jackie Brenston: [Excerpt: Jackie Brenston and the Delta Cats, "Rocket '88"] We looked at some of the repercussions from that recording throughout the first year and a half or so of the podcast, but we didn't look any more at the career of Ike Turner himself. While "Rocket '88" was a minor hit, the group hadn't followed it up, and Brenston had left to go solo. For a while Ike wasn't really very successful at all -- though he was still performing around Memphis, and a young man named Elvis Presley was taking notes at some of the shows. But things started to change for Ike when he once again turned up at Sam Phillips' studio -- this time because B.B. King was recording there. At the time, Sun Records had still not started as its own label, and Phillips' studio was being used for records made by all sorts of independent blues labels, including Modern Records, and Joe Bihari was producing a session for B.B. King, who had signed to Modern. The piano player on the session also had a connection to "Rocket '88" -- when Jackie Brenston had quit Ike's band to go solo, he'd put together a new band to tour as the Delta Cats, and Phineas Newborn Jr had ended up playing Turner's piano part on stage, before Brenston's career collapsed and Newborn became King's pianist. But Phineas Newborn was a very technical, dry, jazz pianist -- a wonderful player, but someone who was best suited to playing more cerebral material, as his own recordings as a bandleader from a few years later show: [Excerpt: Phineas Newborn Jr, "Barbados"] Bihari wasn't happy with what Newborn was playing, and the group took a break from recording to get something to eat and try to figure out the problem. While they were busy, Turner went over to the piano and started playing. Bihari said that that was exactly what they wanted, and Turner took over playing the part. In his autobiography, Turner variously remembers the song King was recording there as "You Know I Love You" and "Three O'Clock Blues", neither of which, as far as I can tell, were actually recorded at Phillips' studio, and both of which seem to have been recorded later -- it's difficult to say for sure because there were very few decent records kept of these things at the time. But we do know that Turner played on a lot of King's records in the early fifties, including on "Three O'Clock Blues", King's first big hit: [Excerpt: B.B. King, "Three O'Clock Blues"] For the next while, Turner was on salary at Modern Records, playing piano on sessions, acting as a talent scout, and also apparently writing many of the songs that Modern's artists would record, though those songs were all copyrighted under the name "Taub", a pseudonym for the Bihari brothers, as well as being a de facto arranger and producer for the company. He worked on many records made in and around Memphis, both for Modern Records and for other labels who drew from the same pool of artists and musicians. Records he played on and produced or arranged include several of Bobby "Blue" Bland's early records -- though Turner's claim in his autobiography that he played on Bland's version of "Stormy Monday" appears to be incorrect, as that wasn't recorded until a decade later. He did, though, play on Bland's “Drifting from Town to Town”, a rewrite of Charles Brown's “Driftin' Blues”, on which, as on many sessions run by Turner, the guitarist was Matt “Guitar” Murphy, who later found fame with the Blues Brothers: [Excerpt: Bobby "Blue" Bland with Ike Turner and his Orchestra, "Driftin' Blues"] Though I've also seen the piano part on that credited as being by Johnny Ace – there's often some confusion as to whether Turner or Ace played on a session, as they played with many of the same artists, but that one was later rereleased as by Bobby “Blue” Bland with Ike Turner and his Orchestra, so it's safe to say that Ike's on that one. He also played on several records by Howlin' Wolf, including "How Many More Years", recorded at Sam Phillips' studio: [Excerpt: Howlin' Wolf, "How Many More Years?"] Over the next few years he played with many artists we've covered already in the podcast, like Richard Berry and the Flairs, on whose recordings he played guitar rather than piano: [Excerpt: The Flairs, "Baby Wants"] He also played guitar on records by Elmore James: [Excerpt: Elmore James, "Please Find My Baby"] and played with Little Junior Parker, Little Milton, Johnny Ace, Roscoe Gordon, and many, many more. As well as making blues records, he also made R&B records in the style of Gene and Eunice with his then-wife Bonnie: [Excerpt: Bonnie and Ike Turner, "My Heart Belongs to You"] Bonnie was his fourth wife, all of them bigamous -- or at least, I *think* she was his fourth. I have seen two different lists Turner gave of his wives, both of them made up of entirely different people, though it doesn't help that many of them also went by nicknames. But Turner started getting married when he was fourteen, and as he would often put it "you gave a preacher two dollars, the papers cost three dollars, that was it. In those days Blacks didn't bother with divorces." (One thing you will see a lot with Turner, unfortunately, is his habit of taking his own personal misbehaviours and claiming they were either universal, or at least that they were universal among Black people, or among men. It's certainly true that some people in the Southeastern US had a more lackadaisical attitude towards remarrying without divorce at the time than we might expect, but it was in no way a Black thing specifically -- it was a people-like-Ike-Turner thing -- see for example the very similar behaviour of Jerry Lee Lewis. I'm trying, when I quote him, not to include too many of these generalisations, but I thought it important to include that one early on to show the kind of self-justification to which he was prone throughout his entire life.) It's largely because Bonnie played piano and was singing with his band that Turner switched to playing guitar, but there was another reason – while he disliked the attention he got on stage, he also didn't want a repeat of what had happened with Jackie Brenston, where Brenston as lead vocalist and frontman had claimed credit for what Ike thought of as his own record. Anyone who saw Ike Turner and his Kings of Rhythm was going to know that Ike Turner was the man who was making it all happen, and so he was going to play guitar up front rather than be on the piano in the background. So Turner took guitar lessons from Earl Hooker, one of the great blues guitarists of the period, who had played with Turner's piano inspiration Pinetop Perkins before recording solo tracks like "Sweet Angel": [Excerpt: Earl Hooker, "Sweet Angel"] Turner was always happier in the studio than performing live -- despite his astonishing ego, he was also a rather shy person who didn't like attention -- and he'd been happy working on salary for Modern and freelancing on occasion for other labels like Chess and Duke. But then the Biharis had brought him out to LA, where Modern Records was based, and as Joel Bihari put it "Ike did a great job for us, but he was a country boy. We brought him to L.A., and he just couldn't take city life. He only stayed a month, then left for East St. Louis to form his own band. He told me he was going back there to become a star." For once, Turner's memory of events lined up with what other people said about him. In his autobiography, he described what happened -- "Down in Mississippi, life is slow. Tomorrow, you are going to plough this field. The next day, you going to cut down these trees. You stop and you go on about your business. Next day, you start back on sawing trees or whatever you doing. Here I am in California, and this chick, this receptionist, is saying "Hold on, Mr Bihari, line 2... hold line 3... Hey Joe, Mr Something or other on the phone for you." I thought "What goddamn time does this stop?"" So Turner did head to East St. Louis -- which is a suburb of St. Louis proper, across the Mississippi river from it, and in Illinois rather than Missouri, and at the time a thriving industrial town in its own right, with over eighty thousand people living there. Hardly the laid-back country atmosphere that Turner was talking about, but still also far from LA both geographically and culturally. He put together a new lineup of the Kings of Rhythm, with a returning Jackie Brenston, who were soon recording for pretty much every label that was putting out blues and R&B tracks at that point, releasing records on RPM, Sue, Flair, Federal, and Modern as well as several smaller labels. usually with either Brenston or the group's drummer Billy Gayles singing lead: [Excerpt: Billy Gayles with Ike Turner's Kings of Rhythm, "Just One More Time"] None of these records was a success, but the Kings of Rhythm were becoming the most successful band in East St. Louis. In the mid-fifties the only group that was as popular in the greater St. Louis metro area was the Johnny Johnson trio -- which soon became the Chuck Berry trio, and went on to greater things, while the Kings of Rhythm remained on the club circuit. But Turner was also becoming notorious for his temper -- he got the nickname "Pistol-Whippin' Ike Turner" for the way he would attack people with his gun, He also though was successful enough that he built his own home studio, and that was where he recorded "Boxtop". a calypso song whose middle eight seems to have been nicked from "Why Do Fools Fall In Love?" and whose general feel owes more than a little to "Love is Strange": [Excerpt: Ike Turner, Carlson Oliver, and Little Ann, "Boxtop"] The female vocals on that track were by Turner's new backing vocalist, who at the time went by the stage name "Little Ann". Anna Mae Bullock had started going to see the Kings of Rhythm regularly when she was seventeen, because her sister was dating one of the members of the band, and she had become a fan almost immediately. She later described her first experience seeing the group: "The first time I saw Ike on stage he was at his very best, sharply dressed in a dark suit and tie. Ike wasn't conventionally handsome – actually, he wasn't handsome at all – and he certainly wasn't my type. Remember, I was a schoolgirl, all of seventeen, looking at a man. I was used to high school boys who were clean-cut, athletic, and dressed in denim, so Ike's processed hair, diamond ring, and skinny body – he was all edges and sharp cheekbones – looked old to me, even though he was only twenty-five. I'd never seen anyone that thin! I couldn't help thinking, God, he's ugly." Turner didn't find Bullock attractive either -- one of the few things both have always agreed on in all their public statements about their later relationship was that neither was ever particularly attracted to the other sexually -- and at first this had caused problems for Anna Mae. There was a spot in the show where Turner would invite a girl from the audience up on stage to sing, a different one every night, usually someone he'd decided he wanted to sleep with. Anna Mae desperately wanted to be one of the girls that would get up on stage, but Turner never picked her. But then one day she got her chance. Her sister's boyfriend was teasing her sister, trying to get her to sing in this spot, and passed her the microphone. Her sister didn't want to sing, so Anna Mae grabbed the mic instead, and started singing -- the song she sang was B.B. King's "You Know I Love You", the same song that Turner always remembered as being recorded at Sun studios, and on which Turner had played piano: [Excerpt: B.B. King, "You Know I Love You"] Turner suddenly took notice of Anna Mae. As he would later say, everyone *says* they can sing, but it turned out that Anna Mae could. He took her on as an occasional backing singer, not at first as a full member of the band, but as a sort of apprentice, who he would teach how to use her talents more commercially. Turner always said that during this period, he would get Little Richard to help teach Anna Mae how to sing in a more uncontrolled, exuberant, style like he did, and Richard has backed this up, though Anna Mae never said anything about this. We do know though that Richard was a huge fan of Turner's -- the intro to "Good Golly Miss Molly": [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Good Golly Miss Molly"] was taken almost exactly from the intro to "Rocket '88": [Excerpt: Jackie Brenston and the Delta Cats, "Rocket '88"] and Richard later wrote the introduction to Turner's autobiography. So it's possible -- but both men were inveterate exaggerators, and Anna Mae only joined Ike's band a few months before Richard's conversion and retirement from music, and during a point when he was a massive star, so it seems unlikely. Anna Mae started dating Raymond Hill, a saxophone player in the group, and became pregnant by him -- but then Hill broke his ankle, and used that as an excuse to move back to Clarksdale, Mississippi, to be with his family, abandoning his pregnant teenage girlfriend, and it seems to be around this point that Turner and Anna Mae became romantically and sexually involved. Certainly, one of Ike's girlfriends, Lorraine Taylor, seems to have believed they were involved while Anna Mae was pregnant, and indeed that Turner, rather than Hill, was the father. Taylor threatened Bullock with Turner's gun, before turning it on herself and attempting suicide, though luckily she survived. She gave birth to Turner's son, Ike Junior, a couple of months after Bullock gave birth to her own son, Craig. But even after they got involved, Anna Mae was still mostly just doing odd bits of backing vocals, like on "Boxtop", recorded in 1958, or on 1959's "That's All I Need", released on Sue Records: [Excerpt: Ike Turner's Kings of Rhythm, "That's All I Need"] And it seemed that would be all that Anna Mae Bullock would do, until Ike Turner lent Art Lassiter eighty dollars he didn't want to pay back. Lassiter was a singer who was often backed by his own vocal trio, the Artettes, patterned after Ray Charles' Raelettes. He had performed with Turner's band on a semi-regular basis, since 1955 when he had recorded "As Long as I Have You" with his vocal group the Trojans, backed by "Ike Turner and his Orchestra": [Excerpt: The Trojans, Ike Turner and His Orchestra, "As Long as I Have You"] He'd recorded a few more tracks with Turner since then, both solo and under group names like The Rockers: [Excerpt: The Rockers, "Why Don't You Believe?"] In 1960, Lassiter needed new tyres for his car, and borrowed eighty dollars from Turner in order to get them -- a relatively substantial amount of money for a working musician back then. He told Turner that he would pay him back at a recording session they had booked, where Lassiter was going to record a song Turner had written, "A Fool in Love", with Turner's band and the Artettes. But Lassiter never showed up -- he didn't have the eighty dollars, and Turner found himself sat in a recording studio with a bunch of musicians he was paying for, paying twenty-five dollars an hour for the studio time, and with no singer there to record. At the time, he was still under the impression that Lassiter might eventually show up, if not at that session, then at least at a future one, but until he did, there was nothing he could do and he was getting angry. Bullock suggested that they cut the track without Lassiter. They were using a studio with a multi-track machine -- only two tracks, but that would be enough. They could cut the backing track on one track, and she could record a guide vocal on the other track, since she'd been around when Turner was teaching Lassiter the song. At least that way they wouldn't have wasted all the money. Turner saw the wisdom of the idea -- he said in his autobiography "This was the first time I got hip to two-track stereo" -- and after consulting with the engineer on the session, he decided to go ahead with Bullock's plan. The plan still caused problems, because they were recording the song in a key written for a man, so Bullock had to yell more than sing, causing problems for the engineer, who according to Turner kept saying things like "Goddammit, don't holler in my microphone". But it was only a demo vocal, after all, and they got it cut -- and as Lassiter didn't show up, Turner took Lassiter's backing vocal group as his own new group, renaming the Artettes to the Ikettes, and they became the first of a whole series of lineups of Ikettes who would record with Turner for the rest of his life. The intention was still to get Lassiter to sing lead on the record, but then Turner played an acetate of it at a club night where he was DJing as well as performing, and the kids apparently went wild: [Excerpt: Ike and Tina Turner, "A Fool in Love"] Turner took the demo to Juggy Murray at Sue Records, still with the intention of replacing Anna Mae's vocal with Lassiter's, but Murray insisted that that was the best thing about the record, and that it should be released exactly as it was, that it was a guaranteed hit. Although -- while that's the story that's told all the time about that record by everyone involved in the recording and release, and seems uncontested, there does seem to be one minor problem with the story, which is that the Ikettes sing "you know you love him, you can't understand/Why he treats you like he do when he's such a good man". I'm willing to be proved wrong, of course, but my suspicion is that Ike Turner wasn't such a progressive thinker that he was writing songs about male-male relationships in 1960. It's possible that the Ikettes were recorded on the same track as Tina's guide vocals, but if the intention was to overdub a new lead from Lassiter on an otherwise finished track, it would have made more sense for them to sing their finished backing vocal part. It seems more likely to me that they decided in the studio that the record was going to go out with Anna Mae singing lead, and the idea of Murray insisting is a later exaggeration. One thing that doesn't seem to be an exaggeration, though, is that initially Murray wanted the record to go out as by Ike Turner's Kings of Rhythm featuring Little Ann, but Turner had other ideas. While Murray insisted "the girl is the star", Turner knew what happened when other people were the credited stars on his records. He didn't want another Jackie Brenston, having a hit and immediately leaving Turner right back where he started. If Little Ann was the credited singer, Little Ann would become a star and Ike Turner would have to find a new singer. So he came up with a pseudonym. Turner was a fan of jungle women in film serials and TV, and he thought a wild-woman persona would suit Anna Mae's yelled vocal, and so he named his new star after Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, a female Tarzan knock-off comic character created by Will Eisner and Jerry Iger in the thirties, but who Turner probably knew from a TV series that had been on in 1955 and 56. He gave her his surname, changed "Sheena" slightly to make the new name alliterative and always at least claimed to have registered a trademark on the name he came up with, so if Anna Mae ever left the band he could just get a new singer to use the name. Anna Mae Bullock was now Tina Turner, and the record went out as by "Ike and Tina Turner": [Excerpt: Ike and Tina Turner, "A Fool in Love"] That went to number two on the R&B charts, and hit the top thirty on the pop charts, too. But there were already problems. After Ike had had a second son with Lorraine, he then got Tina pregnant with another of his children, still seeing both women. He had already started behaving abusively towards Tina, and as well as being pregnant, she was suffering from jaundice -- she says in the first of her two autobiographies that she distinctly remembered lying in her hospital bed, hearing "A Fool in Love" on the radio, and thinking "What's love got to do with it?", though as with all such self-mythologising we should take this with a pinch of salt. Turner was in need of money to pay for lawyers -- he had been arrested for financial crimes involving forged cheques -- and Juggy Murray wouldn't give him an advance until he delivered a follow-up to "A Fool in Love", so he insisted that Tina sneak herself out of the hospital and go into the studio, jaundiced and pregnant, to record the follow-up. Then, as soon as the jaundice had cleared up, they went on a four-month tour, with Tina heavily pregnant, to make enough money to pay Ike's legal bills. Turner worked his band relentlessly -- he would accept literally any gig, even tiny clubs with only a hundred people in the audience, reasoning that it was better for the band's image to play small venues that had to turn people away because they were packed to capacity, than to play large venues that were only half full. While "A Fool in Love" had a substantial white audience, the Ike and Tina Turner Revue was almost the epitome of the chitlin' circuit act, playing exciting, funky, tightly-choreographed shows for almost entirely Black audiences in much the same way as James Brown, and Ike Turner was in control of every aspect of the show. When Tina had to go into hospital to give birth, rather than give up the money from gigging, Ike hired a sex worker who bore a slight resemblance to Tina to be the new onstage "Tina Turner" until the real one was able to perform again. One of the Ikettes told the real Tina, who discharged herself from hospital, travelled to the venue, beat up the fake Tina, and took her place on stage two days after giving birth. The Ike and Tina Turner Revue, with the Kings of Rhythm backing Tina, the Ikettes, and male singer Jimmy Thomas, all of whom had solo spots, were an astonishing live act, but they were only intermittently successful on record. None of the three follow-ups to "A Fool in Love" did better than number eighty-two on the charts, and two of them didn't even make the R&B charts, though "I Idolize You" did make the R&B top five. Their next big hit came courtesy of Mickey and Sylvia. You may remember us talking about Mickey and Sylvia way back in episode forty-nine, from back in 2019, but if you don't, they were one of a series of R&B duet acts, like Gene and Eunice, who came up after the success of Shirley and Lee, and their big hit was "Love is Strange": [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, "Love is Strange"] By 1961, their career had more or less ended, but they'd recorded a song co-written by the great R&B songwriter Rose Marie McCoy, which had gone unreleased: [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, "It's Gonna Work Out Fine"] When that was shelved they remade it as an Ike and Tina Turner record, with Mickey and Sylvia being Ike -- Sylvia took on all the roles that Ike would normally do in the studio, arranging the track and playing lead guitar, as well as joining the Ikettes on backing vocals, while Mickey did the spoken answering vocals that most listeners assumed were Ike, and which Ike would replicate on stage. The result, unsurprisingly, sounded more like a Mickey and Sylvia record than anything Ike and Tina had ever released before, though it's very obviously Tina on lead vocals: [Excerpt: Ike and Tina Turner, "It's Gonna Work Out Fine"] That made the top twenty on the pop charts -- though it would be their last top forty hit for nearly a decade as Ike and Tina Turner. They did though have a couple of other hits as the Ikettes, with Ike Turner putting the girl group's name on the label so he could record for multiple labels. The first of these, "I'm Blue (The Gong Gong Song)" was a song Ike had written which would later go on to become something of an R&B standard. It featured Dolores Johnson on lead vocals, but Tina sang backing vocals and got a rare co-production credit: [Excerpt: The Ikettes, "I'm Blue (The Gong Gong Song)"] The other Ikettes top forty hit was in 1965, with a song written by Steve Venet and Tommy Boyce -- a songwriter we will be hearing more about in three weeks -- and produced by Venet: [Excerpt: The Ikettes, "Peaches 'n' Cream"] Ike wasn't keen on that record at first, but soon came round to it when it hit the charts. The success of that record caused that lineup of Ikettes to split from Ike and Tina -- the Ikettes had become a successful act in their own right, and Dick Clark's Caravan of Stars wanted to book them, but that would have meant they wouldn't be available for Ike and Tina shows. So Ike sent a different group of three girls out on the road with Clark's tour, keeping the original Ikettes back to record and tour with him, and didn't pay them any royalties on their records. They resented being unable to capitalise on their big hit, so they quit. At first they tried to keep the Ikettes name for themselves, and got Tina Turner's sister Alline to manage them, but eventually they changed their name to the Mirettes, and released a few semi-successful records. Ike got another trio of Ikettes to replace them, and carried on with Pat Arnold, Gloria Scott, and Maxine Smith as the new Ikettes,. One Ikette did remain pretty much throughout -- a woman called Ann Thomas, who Ike Turner was sleeping with, and who he would much later marry, but who he always claimed was never allowed to sing with the others, but was just there for her looks. By this point Ike and Tina had married, though Ike had not divorced any of his previous wives (though he paid some of them off when Ike and Tina became big). Ike and Tina's marriage in Tijuana was not remembered by either of them as a particularly happy experience -- Ike would always later insist that it wasn't a legal marriage at all, and in fact that it was the only one of his many, many, marriages that hadn't been, and was just a joke. He was regularly abusing her in the most horrific ways, but at this point the duo still seemed to the public to be perfectly matched. They actually only ended up on the Big TNT Show as a last-minute thing -- another act was sick, though none of my references mention who it was who got sick, just that someone was needed to fill in for them, and as Ike and Tina were now based in LA -- the country boy Ike had finally become a city boy after all -- and would take any job on no notice, they got the gig. Phil Spector was impressed, and he decided that he could revitalise his career by producing a hit for Tina Turner. There was only one thing wrong -- Tina Turner wasn't an act. *Ike* and Tina Turner was an act. And Ike Turner was a control freak, just like Spector was -- the two men had essentially the same personality, and Spector didn't want to work with someone else who would want to be in charge. After some negotiation, they came to an agreement -- Spector could produce a Tina Turner record, but it would be released as an Ike and Tina Turner record. Ike would be paid twenty thousand dollars for his services, and those services would consist of staying well away from the studio and not interfering. Spector was going to go back to the old formulas that had worked for him, and work with the people who had contributed to his past successes, rather than leaving anything to chance. Jack Nitzsche had had a bit of a falling out with him and not worked on some of the singles he'd produced recently, but he was back. And Spector was going to work with Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich again. He'd fallen out with Barry and Greenwich when "Chapel of Love" had been a hit for the Dixie Cups rather than for one of Spector's own artists, and he'd been working with Mann and Weill and Goffin and King instead. But he knew that it was Barry and Greenwich who were the ones who had worked best with him, and who understood his musical needs best, so he actually travelled to see them in New York instead of getting them to come to him in LA, as a peace offering and a sign of how much he valued their input. The only problem was that Spector hadn't realised that Barry and Greenwich had actually split up. They were still working together in the studio, and indeed had just produced a minor hit single for a new act on Bert Berns' label BANG, for which Greenwich had written the horn arrangement: [Excerpt: Neil Diamond, "Solitary Man"] We'll hear more about Neil Diamond, and about Jeff Barry's work with him, in three weeks. But Barry and Greenwich were going through a divorce and weren't writing together any more, and came back together for one last writing session with Spector, at which, apparently, Ellie Greenwich would cry every time they wrote a line about love. The session produced four songs, of which two became singles. Barry produced a version of "I Can Hear Music", written at these sessions, for the Ronettes, who Spector was no longer interested in producing himself: [Excerpt: The Ronettes, "I Can Hear Music"] That only made number ninety-nine on the charts, but the song was later a hit for the Beach Boys and has become recognised as a classic. The other song they wrote in those sessions, though, was the one that Spector wanted to give to Tina Turner. "River Deep, Mountain High" was a true three-way collaboration -- Greenwich came up with the music for the verses, Spector for the choruses, and Barry wrote the lyrics and tweaked the melody slightly. Spector, Barry, and Greenwich spent two weeks in their writing session, mostly spent on "River Deep, Mountain High". Spector later said of the writing "Every time we'd write a love line, Ellie would start to cry. I couldn't figure out what was happening, and then I realised… it was a very uncomfortable situation. We wrote that, and we wrote ‘I Can Hear Music'…. We wrote three or four hit songs on that one writing session. “The whole thing about ‘River Deep' was the way I could feel that strong bass line. That's how it started. And then Jeff came up with the opening line. I wanted a tender song about a chick who loved somebody very much, but a different way of expressing it. So we came up with the rag doll and ‘I'm going to cuddle you like a little puppy'. And the idea was really built for Tina, just like ‘Lovin' Feelin” was built for the Righteous Brothers.” Spector spent weeks recording, remixing, rerecording, and reremixing the backing track, arranged by Nitzsche, creating the most thunderous, overblown, example of the Wall of Sound he had ever created, before getting Tina into the studio. He also spent weeks rehearsing Tina on the song, and according to her most of what he did was "carefully stripping away all traces of Ike from my performance" -- she was belting the song and adding embellishments, the way Ike Turner had always taught her to, and Spector kept insisting that she just sing the melody -- something that she had never had the opportunity to do before, and which she thought was wonderful. It was so different from anything else that she'd recorded that after each session, when Ike would ask her about the song, she would go completely blank -- she couldn't hold this pop song in her head except when she was running through it with Spector. Eventually she did remember it, and when she did Ike was not impressed, though the record became one of the definitive pop records of all time: [Excerpt: Ike and Tina Turner, "River Deep, Mountain High"] Spector was putting everything on the line for this record, which was intended to be his great comeback and masterpiece. That one track cost more than twenty thousand dollars to record -- an absolute fortune at a time when a single would normally be recorded in one or two sessions at most. It also required a lot of work on Tina's part. She later estimated that she had sung the opening line of the song a thousand times before Spector allowed her to move on to the second line, and talked about how she got so hot and sweaty singing the song over and over that she had to take her blouse off in the studio and sing the song in her bra. She later said "I still don't know what he wanted. I still don't know if I pleased him. But I never stopped trying." Spector produced a total of six tracks with Tina, including the other two songs written at those Barry and Greenwich sessions, "I'll Never Need More Than This", which became the second single released off the "River Deep, Mountain High" album, and "Hold On Baby", plus cover versions of Arthur Alexander's "Every Day I Have to Cry Some", Pomus and Shuman's "Save the Last Dance", and "A Love Like Yours (Don't Come Knocking Everyday)" a Holland-Dozier-Holland song which had originally been released as a Martha and the Vandellas B-side. The planned album was to be padded out with six tracks produced by Ike Turner, mostly remakes of the duo's earlier hits, and was planned for release after the single became the hit everyone knew it would. The single hit the Hot One Hundred soon after it was released: [Excerpt: Ike and Tina Turner, "River Deep, Mountain High"] ...and got no higher up the charts than number eighty-eight. The failure of the record basically destroyed Spector, and while he had been an abusive husband before this, now he became much worse, as he essentially retired from music for four years, and became increasingly paranoid and aggressive towards the industry that he thought was not respectful enough of his genius. There have been several different hypotheses as to why "River Deep Mountain High" was not a success. Some have said that it was simply because DJs were fed up of Spector refusing to pay payola, and had been looking for a reason to take him down a peg. Ike Turner thought it was due to racism, saying later “See, what's wrong with America, I think, is that rather than accept something for its value… what it's doing, America mixes race in it. You can't call that record R&B. But because it's Tina… if you had not put Tina's name on there and put ‘Joe Blow', then the Top 40 stations would have accepted it for being a pop record. But Tina Turner… they want to brand her as being an R&B artist. I think the main reason that ‘River Deep' didn't make it here in America was that the R&B stations wouldn't play it because they thought it was pop, and the pop stations wouldn't play it because they thought it was R&B. And it didn't get played at all. The only record I've heard that could come close to that record is a record by the Beach Boys called ‘Good Vibrations'. I think these are the two records that I've heard in my life that I really like, you know?” Meanwhile, Jeff Barry thought it was partly the DJs but also faults in the record caused by Phil Spector's egomania, saying "he has a self-destructive thing going for him, which is part of the reason that the mix on ‘River Deep' is terrible, he buried the lead and he knows he buried the lead and he cannot stop himself from doing that… if you listen to his records in sequence, the lead goes further and further in and to me what he is saying is, ‘It is not the song I wrote with Jeff and Ellie, it is not the song – just listen to those strings. I want more musicians, it's me, listen to that bass sound. …' That, to me, is what hurts in the long run... Also, I do think that the song is not as clear on the record as it should be, mix-wise. I don't want to use the word overproduced, because it isn't, it's just undermixed." There's possibly an element of all three of these factors in play. As we've discussed, 1965 seems to have been the year that the resegregation of American radio began, and the start of the long slow process of redefining genres so that rock and roll, still considered a predominantly Black music at the beginning of the sixties, was by the end of the decade considered an almost entirely white music. And it's also the case that "River Deep, Mountain High" was the most extreme production Spector ever committed to vinyl, and that Spector had made a lot of enemies in the music business. It's also, though, the case that it was a genuinely great record: [Excerpt: Ike and Tina Turner, "River Deep, Mountain High"] However, in the UK, it was promoted by Decca executive Tony Hall, who was a figure who straddled both sides of the entertainment world -- as part of his work as a music publicist he had been a presenter on Oh Boy!, written a column in Record Mirror, and presented a Radio Luxembourg show. Hall put his not-inconsiderable weight behind promoting the record, and it ended up reaching number two in the UK -- being successful enough that the album was also released over here, though it wouldn't come out in the US for several years. The record also attracted the attention of the Rolling Stones, who invited Ike and Tina to be their support act on a UK tour, which also featured the Yardbirds, and this would be a major change for the duo in all sorts of ways. Firstly, it got them properly in contact with British musicians -- and the Stones would get Ike and Tina as support artists several times over the next few years -- and also made the UK and Europe part of their regular tour itinerary. It also gave the duo their first big white rock audience, and over the next several years they would pivot more and more to performing music aimed at that audience, rather than the chitlin' circuit they'd been playing for previously. Ike was very conscious of wanting to move away from the blues and R&B -- while that was where he'd made his living as a musician, it wasn't music he actually liked, and he would often talk later about how much he respected Keith Richards and Eric Clapton, and how his favourite music was country music. Tina had also never been a fan of blues or R&B, and wanted to perform songs by the white British performers they were meeting. The tour also, though, gave Tina her first real thoughts of escape. She loved the UK and Europe, and started thinking about what life could be like for her not just being Ike Turner's wife and working fifty-one weeks a year at whatever gigs came along. But it also made that escape a little more difficult, because on the tour Tina lost one of her few confidantes in the organisation. Tina had helped Pat Arnold get away from her own abusive partner, and the two had become very close, but Arnold was increasingly uncomfortable being around Ike's abuse of Tina, and couldn't help her friend the way she'd been helped. She decided she needed to get out of a toxic situation, and decided to stay in England, where she'd struck up an affair with Mick Jagger, and where she found that there were many opportunities for her as a Black woman that simply hadn't been there in the US. (This is not to say that Britain doesn't have problems with racism -- it very much does, but those problems are *different* problems than the ones that the US had at that point, and Arnold found Britain's attitude more congenial to her personally). There was also another aspect, which a lot of Black female singers of her generation have mentioned and which probably applies here. Many Black women have said that they were astonished on visiting Britain to be hailed as great singers, when they thought of themselves as merely average. Britain does not have the kind of Black churches which had taught generations of Black American women to sing gospel, and so singers who in the US thought of themselves as merely OK would be far, far, better than any singers in the UK -- the technical standards were just so much lower here. (This is something that was still true at least as late as the mid-eighties. Bob Geldof talks in his autobiography about attending the recording session for "We Are the World" after having previously recorded "Do They Know It's Christmas?" and being astonished at how much more technically skilled the American stars were and how much more seriously they took their craft.) And Arnold wasn't just an adequate singer -- she was and is a genuinely great talent -- and so she quickly found herself in demand in the UK. Jagger got her signed to Immediate Records, a new label that had been started up by the Stones manager Andrew Oldham, and where Jimmy Page was the staff producer. She was given a new name, P.P. Arnold, which was meant to remind people of another American import, P.J. Proby, but which she disliked because the initials spelled "peepee". Her first single on the label, produced by Jagger, did nothing, but her second single, written by a then-unknown songwriter named Cat Stevens, became a big hit: [Excerpt: P.P. Arnold, "The First Cut is the Deepest"] She toured with a backing band, The Nice, and made records as a backing singer with artists like the Small Faces. She also recorded a duet with the unknown singer Rod Stewart, though that wasn't a success: [Excerpt: Rod Stewart and P.P. Arnold, "Come Home Baby"] We'll be hearing more about P.P. Arnold in future episodes, but the upshot of her success was that Tina had even fewer people to support her. The next few years were increasingly difficult for Tina, as Ike turned to cocaine use in a big way, became increasingly violent, and his abuse of her became much more violent. The descriptions of his behaviour in Tina's two volumes of autobiography are utterly harrowing, and I won't go into them in detail, except to say that nobody should have to suffer what she did. Ike's autobiography, on the other hand, has him attempting to defend himself, even while admitting to several of the most heinous allegations, by saying he didn't beat his wife any more than most men did. Now the sad thing is that this may well be true, at least among his peer group. Turner's behaviour was no worse than behaviour from, say, James Brown or Brian Jones or Phil Spector or Jerry Lee Lewis, and it may well be that behaviour like this was common enough among people he knew that Turner's behaviour didn't stand out at all. His abuse has become much better-known, because the person he was attacking happened to become one of the biggest stars in the world, while the women they attacked didn't. But that of course doesn't make what Ike did to Tina any better -- it just makes it infinitely sadder that so many more people suffered that way. In 1968, Tina actually tried to take her own life -- and she was so fearful of Ike that when she overdosed, she timed it so that she thought she would be able to at least get on stage and start the first song before collapsing, knowing that their contract required her to do that for Ike to get paid. As it was, one of the Ikettes noticed the tablets she had taken had made her so out of it she'd drawn a line across her face with her eyebrow pencil. She was hospitalised, and according to both Ike and Tina's reports, she was comatose and her heart actually stopped beating, but then Ike started yelling at her, saying if she wanted to die why didn't she do it by jumping in front of a truck, rather than leaving him with hospital bills, and telling her to go ahead and die if this was how she was going to treat him -- and she was so scared of Ike her heart started up again. (This does not seem medically likely to me, but I wasn't there, and they both were). Of course, Ike frames this as compassion and tough love. I would have different words for it myself. Tina would make several more suicide attempts over the years, but even as Tina's life was falling apart, the duo's professional career was on the up. They started playing more shows in the UK, and they toured the US as support for the Rolling Stones. They also started having hits again, after switching to performing funked-up cover versions of contemporary hits. They had a minor hit with a double-sided single of the Beatles' "Come Together" and the Stones' "Honky-Tonk Women", then a bigger one with a version of Sly and the Family Stone's "I Want to Take You Higher", then had their biggest hit ever with "Proud Mary". It's likely we'll be looking at Creedence Clearwater Revival's original version of that song at some point, but while Ike Turner disliked the original, Tina liked it, and Ike also became convinced of the song's merits by hearing a version by The Checkmates Ltd: [Excerpt: The Checkmates Ltd, "Proud Mary"] That was produced by Phil Spector, who came briefly out of his self-imposed exile from the music business in 1969 to produce a couple of singles for the Checkmates and Ronnie Spector. That version inspired Ike and Tina's recording of the song, which went to number four on the charts and won them a Grammy award in 1971: [Excerpt: Ike and Tina Turner, "Proud Mary"] Ike was also investing the money they were making into their music. He built his own state-of-the-art studio, Bolic Sound, which Tina always claimed was a nod to her maiden name, Bullock, but which he later always said was a coincidence. Several other acts hired the studio, especially people in Frank Zappa's orbit -- Flo and Eddie recorded their first album as a duo there, and Zappa recorded big chunks of Over-Nite Sensation and Apostrophe('), two of his most successful albums, at the studio. Acts hiring Bolic Sound also got Tina and the Ikettes on backing vocals if they wanted them, and so for example Tina is one of the backing vocalists on Zappa's "Cosmik Debris": [Excerpt: Frank Zappa, "Cosmik Debris"] One of the most difficult things she ever had to sing in her life was this passage in Zappa's song "Montana", which took the Ikettes several days' rehearsal to get right. [Excerpt: Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, "Montana"] She was apparently so excited at having got that passage right that she called Ike out of his own session to come in and listen, but Ike was very much unimpressed, and insisted that Tina and the Ikettes not get credit on the records they made with Zappa. Zappa later said “I don't know how she managed to stick with that guy for so long. He treated her terribly and she's a really nice lady. We were recording down there on a Sunday. She wasn't involved with the session, but she came in on Sunday with a whole pot of stew that she brought for everyone working in the studio. Like out of nowhere, here's Tina Turner coming in with a rag on her head bringing a pot of stew. It was really nice.” By this point, Ike was unimpressed by anything other than cocaine and women, who he mostly got to sleep with him by having truly gargantuan amounts of cocaine around. As Ike was descending further into paranoia and abuse, though, Tina was coming into her own. She wrote "Nutbush City Limits" about the town where she grew up, and it reached number 22 on the charts -- higher than any song Ike ever wrote: [Excerpt: Ike and Tina Turner, "Nutbush City Limits"] Of course, Ike would later claim that he wrote the music and let Tina keep all the credit. Tina was also asked by the Who to appear in the film version of their rock opera Tommy, where her performance of "Acid Queen" was one of the highlights: [Excerpt: Tina Turner, "Acid Queen"] And while she was filming that in London, she was invited to guest on a TV show with Ann-Margret, who was a huge fan of Ike and Tina, and duetted with Tina -- but not Ike -- on a medley of her hits: [Excerpt: Tina Turner and Ann-Margret, "Nutbush City Limits/Honky Tonk Woman"] Just as with "River Deep, Mountain High", Tina was wanted for her own talents, independent of Ike. She was starting to see that as well as being an abusive husband, he was also not necessary for her to have a career. She was also starting to find parts of her life that she could have for herself, independent of her husband. She'd been introduced to Buddhist meditation by a friend, and took it up in a big way, much to Ike's disapproval. Things finally came to a head in July 1976, in Dallas, when Ike started beating her up and for the first time she fought back. She pretended to reconcile with him, waited for him to fall asleep, and ran across a busy interstate, almost getting hit by a ten-wheel truck, to get to another hotel she could see in the distance. Luckily, even though she had no money, and she was a Black woman in Dallas, not a city known for its enlightened attitudes in the 1970s, the manager of the Ramada Inn took pity on her and let her stay there for a while until she could get in touch with Buddhist friends. She spent the next few months living off the kindness of strangers, before making arrangements with Rhonda Graam, who had started working for Ike and Tina in 1964 as a fan, but had soon become indispensable to the organisation. Graam sided with Tina, and while still supposedly working for Ike she started putting together appearances for Tina on TV shows like Cher's. Cher was a fan of Tina's work, and was another woman trying to build a career after leaving an abusive husband who had been her musical partner: [Excerpt: Cher and Tina Turner, "Makin' Music is My Business"] Graam became Tina's full-time assistant, as well as her best friend, and remained part of her life until Graam's death a year ago. She also got Tina booked in to club gigs, but for a long time they found it hard to get bookings -- promoters would say she was "only half the act". Ike still wanted the duo to work together professionally, if not be a couple, but Tina absolutely refused, and Ike had gangster friends of his shoot up Graam's car, and Tina heard rumours that he was planning to hire a hit man to come after her. Tina filed for divorce, and gave Ike everything -- all the money the couple had earned together in sixteen years of work, all the property, all the intellectual property -- except for two cars, one of which Ike had given her and one which Sammy Davis Jr. had given her, and the one truly important thing -- the right to use the name "Tina Turner", which Ike had the trademark on. Ike had apparently been planning to hire someone else to perform as "Tina Turner" and carry on as if nothing had changed. Slowly, Tina built her career back up, though it was not without its missteps. She got a new manager, who also managed Olivia Newton-John, and the manager brought in a song he thought was perfect for Tina. She turned it down, and Newton-John recorded it instead: [Excerpt: Olivia Newton-John, "Physical"] But even while she was still playing small clubs, her old fans from the British rock scene were boosting her career. In 1981, after Rod Stewart saw her playing a club gig and singing his song "Hot Legs", he invited her to guest with him and perform the song on Saturday Night Live: [Excerpt: Rod Stewart and Tina Turner, "Hot Legs"] The Rolling Stones invited Tina to be their support act on a US tour, and to sing "Honky Tonk Women" on stage with them, and eventually when David Bowie, who was at the height of his fame at that point, told his record label he was going to see her on a night that EMI wanted to do an event for him, half the record industry showed up to the gig. She had already recorded a remake of the Temptations' "Ball of Confusion" with the British Electric Foundation -- a side project for two of the members of Heaven 17 -- in 1982, for one of their albums: [Excerpt: British Electric Foundation, "Ball of Confusion"] Now they were brought in to produce a new single for her, a remake of Al Green's "Let's Stay Together": [Excerpt: Tina Turner, "Let's Stay Together"] That made the top thirty in the US, and was a moderate hit in many places, making the top ten in the UK. She followed it up with another BEF production, a remake of "Help!" by the Beatles, which appears only to have been released in mainland Europe. But then came the big hit: [Excerpt: Tina Turner, "What's Love Got to Do With It?"] wenty-six years after she started performing with Ike, Tina Turner was suddenly a major star. She had a string of successes throughout the eighties and nineties, with more hit records, film appearances, a successful autobiography, a film based on the autobiography, and record-setting concert appearan
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Roger Ashby does a deep dive into the artists that shaped the future of music. Listen to the Roger Ashby Oldies Show anytime on the iHeartRadio app.
Nikita Gale speaks with Alexander Provan about Tina Turner, Phil Spector, and the prospect of being heard without being controlled. Gale tells the story of the genre-busting song that Turner and Spector, the infamous producer, recorded in 1966, “River Deep—Mountain High”: a commercial failure but a creative breakthrough for Turner, who had previously been defined as an R&B singer and dominated by her abusive husband and bandmate, Ike Turner. Gale, an artist who has often engaged with Turner's music and biography, talks about the song as a symbol for how the music industry determines whose voices are amplified and whose are silenced. She observes that the segregation of cities in midcentury America was echoed on the airwaves, and the definition of audiences via racial and demographic categories has been upheld by record labels, Spotify, and the Grammys.Nikita Gale is an artist who lives in Los Angeles. In addition to co-hosting Medium Rotation, Gale has worked with Triple Canopy on a residency at the Hammer Museum and a related series of performances and publications. Gale's recent and upcoming projects include exhibitions at the California African American Museum (Los Angeles) and LAX Art (Los Angeles), a commissioned performance at MoMA PS1 (New York City), and the record and book INFINITE RESOURCES (Aventures, 2021).In this episode, Gale draws on her essay “Little Girls,” published by Triple Canopy last year, which describes “River Deep—Mountain High” as the zenith of Spector's “wall of sound” technique—and as “the sound of being together—or of being packed together, forced together.” (A reading of Gale's essay by Kaneza Schaal is available as a bonus episode.) Gale connects Turner's effort to transcend the role of R&B singer, Spector's desire to defy genre, and her own frustration as a teenager in Atlanta with radio stations that played rap for Black listeners and alt-rock for white ones. With Provan, she speaks about the production and reception of “River Deep—Mountain High” as part of the trajectory from “race records” in the 1920s to “urban contemporary” in the 1970s to the ongoing subsumption of most genres by pop music.In order of appearance, the music and other recordings played on this episode are: Tina Turner performing in Gimme Shelter (Maysles Films, 1970), directed by David Maysles, Albert Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin; Tracy Chapman, “Fast Car,” Tracy Chapman (Elektra, 1988); Tyler, the Creator speaking to the press after winning Best Rap Album at the Grammy Awards, 2020; outtakes from the recording of “River Deep—Mountain High,” from Ike & Tina Turner, What You See Is What You Get (Big Fro, 2018); the Ronettes, “Walking in the Rain” (Philles, 1964); Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats (a.k.a. Ike Turner and his Kings of Rhythm), “Rocket 88” (Chess, 1951); Tina Turner interviewed on “The Late Show with David Letterman,” May 31, 1984; Phil Spector inducting Ike & Tina Turner into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, 1991; interview with Phil Spector from All You Need Is Love: The Story of Popular Music (London Weekend Television, 1977), directed by Tony Palmer; Brian Gibson, dir., What's Love Got to Do with It (Touchstone Pictures, 1993).Medium Rotation is produced by Alexander Provan with Andrew Leland, and edited by Provan with Matt Frassica. Tashi Wada composed the theme music. Matt Mehlan acted as audio engineer and contributed additional music.Medium Rotation is made possible through generous contributions from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and Nicholas Harteau. This season of Medium Rotation is part of Triple Canopy's twenty-sixth issue, Two Ears and One Mouth, which receives support from the Stolbun Collection, the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation, Agnes Gund, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
Recordareis que hace unas semanas empezamos una mini serie de programas dedicados al blues. Hoy seguiremos ahondando un poco más en el tema y repasaremos la nómina de los mejores representantes del género. Empezamos con uno de los míticos: Robert Johnson, nacido en 1911 en el estado de Missisipi, cantante, compositor y guitarrista de blues. Sus grabaciones de 1936 a 1937, escasamente 29 temas, nos lo muestran como un músico de especial talento que influyó extraordinariamente en un buen número de músicos. Su corta vida, murió a los 27 años, está escasamente documentada y esta circunstancia ha dado lugar a la circulación de numerosas leyendas. La más conocida es la que cuenta que Johnson no era un guitarristas especialmente bueno en sus inicios y, por eso, decidió desaparecer por un tiempo, más o menos un año y medio, para volver como la figura que hoy conocemos. Al instante empezaron a circular rumores, alentados por él mismo, según los cuales Johnson habría vendido su alma al diablo a cambio de recibir dotes extraordinarias como músico. Le escuchamos en una de escasas grabaciones, Love in vain. Little Walter, que había nacido en 1930, revolucionó en blues con la habilidad incomparable de su armónica. Miembro principal del club de los “grandes”, dio vida a lo que vino a llamarse sonido Chicago. Su habilidad a la hora de tocar la armónica es comparada con la Jimi Hendrix con su guitarra o con la de Charlie Parker con su saxo. Algo fuera de lo normal para la época. Desgraciadamente, Walter era alcohólico y esto siempre le acarreó un gran número de problemas personales. Se veía obligado a aceptar giras que no quería dar con el fin de conseguir dinero para pagar sus deudas de juego. Murió de una trombosis cerebral en el año 1968 después de una pelea callejera. Vamos a escucharle interpretar My Babe. Huddie Willian Ledbetter, más conocido como Leadbelly fue un músico folclorista y de blues. Nacido en 1888, destacó por su virtuosismo al tocar la guitarra de 12 cuerdas y como compositor de canciones convertidas hoy en clásicas. Su vida fue, por decirlo suavemente, movida. Se sabe que estuvo una temporada en una cárcel de Texas, condenado por una agresión pero se escapó a los dos años. Nuevamente volvió a la cárcel pero esta vez con una condena de 20 años por asesinato. Y aunque esta condena le fue reducida por buena conducta, nuevamente volvió a prisión, esta vez por intento de asesinato. Todo cambió cuando, en 1933, visitaron la prisión los folcloristas John y Alan Lomax con la intención de grabar música folk negra. Los Lomax quedaron tan impresionados por Leadbelly que, con un equipo de grabación portátil, en la misma cárcel, grabaron un tema en el que pedía perdón por su fechorías. Los Lomax presentaron la grabación al gobernador de Lousiana y éste, no sabemos muy bien por qué le concedió el indulto definitivo. Le escuchamos en The midnight special. Rocket 88 es un canción de R&B que fue grabada por primera vez en Memphis, Tennessee, en marzo de 1951. La grabación fue acreditada por Jackie Brenston y sus Delta Cats, pero que en realidad eran Ike Turner y su Kings of Rhythm. El sencillo alcanzó el número uno en la lista Bilboard R&B. Son muchos críticos los que piensan que esta canción es fundamental en el desarrollo de la música de rock and roll, e incluso se dice que, éste, podría ser el primer disco de rock and roll. Esta es la versión original a cargo Jackie Brenston & Ike Turner. Dale Hawkins fue la oveja blanca del blues y el autor del éxito internacional Susie Q. Dale había empezado a grabar en 1956 y estaba tocando en el circuito de clubs de Luisiana, y aunque su música estaba muy influenciada por el rock and roll de Elvis Presley, no lo estaba menos por el sonido de blues auténtico de los artistas negros. De la fusión de estas dos tendencias, nació Susie Q. George “Buddy” Guy es uno de los mejores guitarristas de blues, en especial del denominado Blues de Chicago, y una referencia para numerosos guitarristas actuales. Buddy empezó tocando en bandas de la zona de Baton Rouge, en Luisiana para posteriormente marcharse a Chicago a colaborar con el maestro Muddy Waters. Y de allí… a la fama. En el año 2004, Buddy, ocupó el puesto número 30 en la lista de los 100 guitarristas más importantes en toda la historia, todo esto según la revista Rolling Stone. Buddy Guy y su Money. Volvemos, como no, a encontrarnos con B.B.King, el rey. Un hombre que llegó a dar hasta 300 conciertos al año y que recibió más premios Grammy que ningún otro músico de blues. Y todo ello a pesar de que sufría una diabetes crónica y unos graves problemas en las rodillas que no le permitían, en los últimos tiempos, tocar de pie. Un gran músico y un gran tipo. Recessión Blues y B.B.King. A Willie Dixon le han llamado “el poeta laureado del blues”, … y con razón. Fue el compositor de blues más importante en su época y se le reconocen, como autor, más de 500 canciones. Bajista de formación, tocó como músico de estudio con gente como Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters y otros muchos. De alguna manera, fue el eslabón necesario entre el blues y el rock and roll. Y todo esto a pesar de que Willie Dixon fue un hombre controvertido. Tubo problemas con la justicia en su adolescencia, de físico corpulento, practicó el boxeo llegando a ganar el título Golden Gloves de los pesos pesados en 1936, y fue encarcelado durante diez meses por negarse a alistarse en el ejército durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Todo un personaje. Walking the blues. De nuevo Albert King. Un músico un poco menos sofisticado que su contemporáneo B.B.King pero más cerca de las raíces del blues rural, su estilo se caracterizaba por una voz profunda, suave y matizada. Modernizó la aspereza de sus primero maestros y a finales de los años 60 puso el blues al alcance de los nuevos grupos, gente como Fleetwood Mac, liderado por Peter Green o los Cream, con Eric Clapton al frente y éstos, a su vez, lideraron una nueva tendencia dentro del rock: la que se inspiraba en las raíces más profundas de la música negra renegando del pop que tenía en los Beatles su punto de referencia. Albert King y Bad luck blues. Bueno, pues no tenemos tiempo para más. Como muestra no ha estado mal pero nos queda mucho por oír así que, en los próximos días, volveremos a la carga con una nueva entrega de este interesante repaso de la música de blues. Hasta ese momento,y como siempre… ¡Buenas Vibraciones!
Fuego en la Pista de Baile, los éxitos y las novedades más underground en www.ipopfm.com, cada miércoles de 20 a 21 horas. Hoy especial Rock 'n & Black Music! 🎸 Tracklist: 1. Greg Townson – Off and Running 2. The Gallants – The Vagabond 3. Johnny and The Hurricanes – Buck Eye 4. Faye Reis – Don’t Broke My heart 5. Ralph Jackson – Jambalaya 6. Los Dinamitas del Twist – Oye lo que te digo 7. Tami Neilson – 16 Miles of Chain 8. Tami Neilson – Call Your Mama 9. Chuck Higgins – Jerky Junction 10. Clarence “Frogman” Henry – A Little Too Much 11. Eli Paperboy Reed – Do it Again 12. Marva Josie – He Does It Better 13. Enma Fernández – The Snake 14. Keith Powell and Billie Davis - When You Move You Lose 15. Little Eva – Where Do I Go 16. Jackie Brenston and His Orchestra – Get High Everybody 17. Errol Dixon – Too Much Whisky 18. Tony and Louise – Brixton Lewisham 19. Sir Jay and The Skatanauts – Lockdown 20. Horace Andy - Fever
Fundamentally, Modern American music features a unique expression of self and community that was brought to America from Africa. It was molded by the oppression of slavery, and then amplified in the language, tones, and instruments brought to America from Europe. Such a profound blending of diverse cultures, European and African, created something new, the Modern American and American music.This is the story of the emergence of jazz and modern music from Spirituals, Blues, and Ragtime, to Swing, Gospel, Boogie Woogie, Rock and Roll, and Hip Hop. The story features samples from the following recordings:Freddie Keppard - Stock Yard StrutMaple Leaf Rag - Scott JoplinGood Morning Blues - Barbara DaneI Found a New Baby - Sidney Bechet, Wild Bill DavidsonLevee Camp Holler - Mississippi State PrisonMoses - John Davis and GroupDark Was the Night - Blind Willie JohnsonRiver of Jordan - Fisk University Jubilee SingersCopenhagen - Benson Orchestra of ChicagoMelancholy Blues - Louis ArmstrongSingin' the Blues - Bix BeiderbeckBrother Can You Spare a Dime - Bing CrosbyWillow Weep For Me - Paul WhitemanDon't Be That Way - Benny GoodmanWhat a Little Moonlight Can Do - Billie HolidayStrange Things Happen Everyday - Sister Rosette TharpRoll 'em Pete - Big Joe TurnerRocket 88 - Jackie Brenston and the Rhythm KingsDizzy Atmosphere - Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie ParkerRoxanne - Arizona CervasI appreciate the assistance provided by Dwayne Ramsey, Richard Hadlock, and Linda Ryan in preparing this episode.Comments may be sent to duane@soundoutofspace.com.
En Suave es la Noche buceamos en el mar del rock and roll y recordamos los inicios de un estilo que surgió en los años 50, no obstante anteriormente ya había melodías y letras con sonidos diferentes, ritmos de boogie-woogie y esencias de blues, country, gospel... La rebeldía de los jóvenes urbanos y y el espíritu de los esclavos que recogían algodón en las plantaciones del Sur se fusionaron para crear una forma de vida. Gervi Navío y Raúl Gallego traen algunas canciones precursoras y otros grandes éxitos ya en la explosión del rock and roll. Este es nuestro especial sobre los orígenes del rock. Salud y Metal! 1 - I believe I´ll dust my Broom - Robert Johnson 2 - This Train - Sister Rosetta Tharpe 3 Flying Home - Lionel Hampton 4 - Caldonia - Louis Jordan And His Tympany Five 5 - Wynonie´s Blues - Wynonie Harris 6 - That ´s all right - Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup 7 - Good rockin ´tonight - Roy Brown 8 - Boogie Chillen´- John Lee Hooker 9 - Rock Awhile - Goree Carter 10 - Rock the Joint - Jimmy Preston and his Prestonians 11 - Rocket 88 - Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats 12 - How many more years - Howlin´Wolf 13 - (Mama) He Treats Your Daughter Mean - Ruth Brown 14 - Please, love me - B B King 15 - I got a Woman - Ray Charles 16 - Shake, rattle and roll - Big Joe Turner 17 - Rock around the Clock - Bill Haley and his Comets 18 - Bob Diddley - Bob Diddley 19 - Maybellene - Chuck Berry 20 - Ready Teddy - Little Richards 21 - Heartbreak Hotel - Elvis Presley 22 - Got my Mojo working - Muddy Waters 23 - Lotta Lovin´- Gene Vincent 24 - That´ll be the Day - Buddy Holly
BLUES TIME PLAYLIST. ARTIST - ALBUM - TRACK. 1 Cindy Cashdollar - Waltz For Abilene - That is No Way For Me To Get Along. 2 John Carey - Road to Nowhere - I Dont Need No Doctor. 3 Sonny Landreth - Blacktop Run - Somebody gotta make a move. 4 Tad Robinson - Real Street - Changes. 5 Hal Mayforth - Aeroplane - Boston Blues. 6 Thorbjorn Risager and The Black Tornado - Come On In - Last Train. 7 Robert Petway - Catfish Blues. 8 Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats - Rocket 88. 9 Bo Diddley - Bo Diddley. 10 Mark Easton - Free Yourself - I Dont Hate You, I Just Hate Everything You Do. 11 Tas Cru - Drive On - Memphis blue. 12 CW Ayon - What They Say - Carla. 13 Doctor Delta - Slow Dog Blues - Lake Michigan Blues. 14 Jose Alvarez with Los Blancos - Tomorrow And The Next Day - Wrong side of everything. 15 The Marcus King Band - Carolina Confessions - Where I am Headed. 16 Blues Archadia - Two Wrongs. 17 Zoe Schwarz Blue Commotion - Chameleon - I Hope I See The Day. Size: 165 MB (173,188,281 bytes) Duration: 1:12:07
EVOLUTION est un podcast qui vous explique l’histoire d’un courant ou d’un genre musical. Pendant une heure, je vous explique la genèse et le développement de chaque genre, en vous faisant écouter les morceaux importants qui ont contribué à faire évoluer la musique populaire. Ce 10ème épisode raconte l'histoire du rock'n'roll, depuis ses influences afro-américaines jusqu'à sa domination sur le marché pop américain au tournant des années 60. Tracklist : Frankie Knuckles – The Whistle Song (E.K. 12’’ mix) [Virgin Records, 1991] Booker T & The MG’s – Green Onions [Stax, 1962] Roy Milton and his Solid Senders – Big Fat Mama [Specialty, 1947] Fats Domino – The Fat Man [Imperial, 1949] Clarence ‘Frogman’ Henry – Ain’t Got No Home [Argo Records, 1956] Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats – Rocket ‘88’ [Chess, 1951] Bobby Bland – It’s My Life [Duke, 1955] Muddy Waters – I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man [Chess, 1954] Chuck Berry – Johnny B. Goode [Chess, 1957] Dale Hawkins – Susie Q [Checker, 1957] Elvis Presley – That’s All Right [Sun Record Company, 1954] Elvis Presley – Blue Moon of Kentucky [Sun Record Company, 1954] Elvis Presley – Hound Dog [RCA Victor, 1956] Bill Haley and his Comets – (We’re Gonna) Rock Around The Clock [Decca, 1954] Jerry Lee Lewis – Whole Lot of Shakin’ Going On [Sun Record Company, 1957] Bobby Darin – Splish Splash [ATCO Records, 1958] Buddy Holly – Peggy Sue [Coral, 1957] Buddy Holly – Words of Love [Coral, 1957] Everly Brothers – Cathy’s Clown [Warner Bros., 1960] Chubby Checker – The Twist [Parkway, 1960] Hank Ballard and the Midnighters – The Twist [King Records, 1959] Little Eva – The Loco-Motion [Dimension, 1962] The Ronettes – Be My Baby [Philles Records, 1963] The Crystals – Da Doo Ron Ron (When He Walked Me Home) [Philles Records, 1963] The Beach Boys – Fun, Fun, Fun [Capitol Records, 1964] Dick Dale & The Del-Tones – Let’s Go Trippin’ [Delton Records, 1961] The Frogmen – Underwater [Candix, 1961] The Beach Boys – Surfer Girl [Capitol Records, 1963]
On this episode we are talking about the blues, specifically the ‘Delta Blues’ and all that happened around Clarksdale, MS! Many now-legendary musical artists were born and raised in and around Clarksdale: Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Son House, Ike Turner, Jackie Brenston, Sam Cooke, Junior Parker, and W. C. Handy, among them. Clarksdale was a major market for the Delta’s constantly traveling musicians, and the likes of Robert Johnson, Howlin’ Wolf, and Charley Patton are also associated with the city. Today, that historic blues culture is preserved for visitors while contemporary musicians carry on the great Delta blues tradition. Resources mentioned: Field Guide: American South (see “Roadtrips")- https://amzn.to/2KZfTH4 The Southerner's Handbook (see “5 Essential Venues”)- https://amzn.to/2LCRLJJ Delta Blues Museum- https://www.deltabluesmuseum.org Pinetop Perkins (Keeping the Blues Alive)- https://www.pinetopperkinsfoundation.org Music Maker.org (Preserving the Soul of America’s Music) - https://musicmaker.org Music Maker Foundation YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUk8c_gGP94 King Fish - check out this prodigy of the blues! - https://christonekingfishingram.com/shows Follow us @steelmagnoliaspodcast
Welcome to episode twenty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at The Moonglows and "Sincerely". Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. For the background on Charlie Fuqua, see episode six, on the Ink Spots. There are no books on the Moonglows, but as always with vocal groups of the fifties, Marv Goldberg has an exhaustively-researched page from which I got most of the information about them. The information on Alan Freed comes from Big Beat Heat: Alan Freed and the Early Years of Rock & Roll by John A. Jackson. And this compilation contains every recording by every lineup of Moonglows and Moonlighters, apart from the brief 1970s reunion. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript [13 seconds of Intro from a recording of Alan Freed: “Hello, everybody, how you all? This is Alan Freed, the old King of the Moondoggers, and a hearty welcome to all our thousands of friends in Northern Ohio, Ontario Canada, Western New York, Western Pennsylvania, West Virginia. Long about eleven thirty, fifteen minutes from now, we'll be joining the Moondog Network...”] Chess Records is one of those labels, like Sun or Stax or PWL, which defined a whole genre. And in the case of Chess, the genre it defined was the electric Chicago blues. People like Muddy Waters, Elmore James, Howlin' Wolf, Little Walter, and Willie Dixon all cut some of their most important recordings for the Chess label. I remember when I was just starting to buy records as a child, decades after the events we're talking about, I knew before I left primary school that Chess, like Sun, was one of the two record labels that consistently put out music that I liked. And yet when it started out, Chess Records was just one of dozens of tiny little indie blues labels, like Modern, or RPM, or King Records, or Duke or Peacock, many of which were even putting out records by the same people who were recording for Chess. So this episode is actually part one of a trilogy, and over the next three episodes, we're going to talk about how Chess ended up being the one label that defined that music in the eyes of many listeners, and how that music fed into early rock and roll. And today we're also going to talk about how it ended up being influential in the formation of another of those important record labels. And to talk about that, we're going to talk about Harvey Fuqua [Foo-kwah]. Yes, Fuqua. Even though we talked about his uncle, Charlie Fuqua [Foo-kway], back in the episode on the Ink Spots, apparently Harvey pronounced his name differently from his uncle. As you might imagine, having an uncle in the most important black vocal group in history gave young Harvey Fuqua quite an impetus, even though the two of them weren't close. Fuqua started a duo with his friend Bobby Lester after they both got out of the military. Fuqua would play piano, and they would both sing. The two of them had a small amount of success, touring the South, but then shortly after their first tour Fuqua had about the worst thing possible happen to him -- there was a fire, and both his children died in it. Understandably, he didn't want to stay in Louisville Kentucky, where he'd been raising his family, so he and his wife moved to Cleveland. When he got to Cleveland, he met up again with an old friend from his military days, Danny Coggins. The two of them started performing together with a bass singer, Prentiss Barnes, under the name The Crazy Sounds. The style they were performing in was called "vocalese", and it's a really odd style of jazz singing that's... the easiest way to explain it is the opposite of scat singing. In scat, you improvise a new melody with nonsense lyrics [demonstrates] -- that's the standard form of jazz singing, other than just singing the song straight. It's what Louis Armstrong or Ella Fitzgerald or whoever would do. In vocalese, on the other hand, you do the opposite. You come up with proper lyrics, not just nonsense syllables, and you put them to a pre-recorded melody. The twist is that the pre-recorded melody you choose is a melody that's already been improvised by an instrumentalist. So for example, you could take Coleman Hawkins' great sax solo on "Body and Soul": [Excerpt: Coleman Hawkins, "Body and Soul"] Hawkins improvised that melody line, and it was a one-off performance -- every other time he played the song he'd play it differently. But Eddie Jefferson, who is credited as the inventor of vocalese, learned Hawkins' solo, added words, and sang this: [Excerpt: Eddie Jefferson, "Body and Soul"] The Crazy Sounds performed this kind of music as a vocal trio for a while, but their sound was missing something, and eventually Fuqua travelled down to Kentucky and persuaded Bobby Lester to move to Cleveland and join the Crazy Sounds. They became a four-piece, and slowly started writing their own new material in a more R&B style. They performed together a little, and eventually auditioned at a club called the Loop, where they were heard by a blues singer called Al "Fats" Thomas. Thomas apparently recorded for several labels, but this is the only one of his records I can find a copy of anywhere, on the Chess subsidiary Checker, from right around the time we're talking about in 1952: [Excerpt: Al "Fats" Thomas, "Baby Please No No"] Fats Thomas was very impressed by the Crazy Sounds, and immediately phoned his friend, the DJ Alan Freed. Alan Freed is a difficult character to explain, and his position in rock and roll history is a murky one. He was the first superstar DJ, and he was the person who more than anyone else made the phrase "rock and roll" into a term for a style of music, rather than, as it had been, just a phrase that was used in some of that music. Freed had not started out as a rhythm and blues or rock and roll DJ, and in fact had no great love for the music when he started playing it on his show. He was a lover of classical music -- particularly Wagner, whose music he loved so much that he named one of his daughters Sieglinde. But he named his first daughter Alana, which shows his other great love, which was for himself. Freed had been a DJ for several years when he was first introduced to rhythm and blues music, and he'd played a mixture of big band music and light classical, depending on what the audience wanted. But then, in 1951, something changed. Freed met Leo Mintz, the owner of a record shop named Record Rendezvous, in a bar. Mintz discovered that Freed was a DJ and took him to the shop. Freed later mythologised this moment, as he did a lot of his life, by talking about how he was shocked to see white teenagers dancing to music made by black people, and he had a sort of Damascene conversion and immediately decided to devote his show to rhythm and blues. The reality is far more prosaic. Mintz, whose business actually mostly sold to black people at this point, decided that if there was a rhythm and blues radio show then it would boost business to his shop, especially if Mintz paid for the radio show and so bought all the advertising on it. He took Freed to the shop to show him that there was indeed an audience for that kind of music, and Freed was impressed, but said that he didn't know anything about rhythm and blues music. Mintz said that that didn't matter. Mintz would pick the records -- they'd be the ones that he wanted his customers to buy -- and tell Freed what to play. All Freed had to do was to play the ones he was told and everything would work out fine. The music Mintz had played for Freed was, according to Freed later, people like LaVern Baker -- who had not yet become at all well known outside Detroit and Chicago at the time -- but Mintz set about putting together selections of records that Freed should play. Those records were mostly things with gospel-sounding vocals, a dance beat, or honking saxophones, and Freed found that his audiences responded astonishingly well to it. Freed would often interject during records, and would bang his fists on the table or other objects in time to the beat, including a cowbell that he had on his desk -- apparently some of his listeners would be annoyed when they bought the records he played to find out half the sounds they'd heard weren't on the record at all. Freed took the stage name "Moondog", after a blind New York street musician and outsider artist of that name. Freed's theme song for his radio show was "Moondog Symphony", by Moondog, a one-man-band performance credited to "Moondog (by himself) playing drums, maracas, claves, gourds, hollow legs, Chinese block and cymbals." [Excerpt: "Moondog Symphony" by Moondog] When Fats Thomas got the Crazy Sounds an audition with Freed, Freed was impressed enough that he offered them a management contract. Being managed by the biggest DJ in the city was obviously a good idea, so they took him up on that, and took his advice about how to make themselves more commercial, including changing their name to emphasise the connection to Freed. They became first the Moonpuppies and then the Moonglows. Freed set up his own record label, Champagne Records, and released the Moonglows' first single, "I Just Can't Tell No Lie": [Excerpt, "I Just Can't Tell No Lie", the Moonglows] According to Freed's biographer John A. Jackson, Freed provided additional percussion on that song, hitting a telephone book in time with the rhythm as he would on his show. I don't hear any percussion on there other than the drum kit, but maybe you can, if you have better ears than me. This was a song that had been written by the Moonglows themselves, but when the record came out, both sides were credited to Al Lance -- which was a pseudonym for Alan Freed. And so the DJ who was pushing their record on the radio was also their manager, and the owner of the record company, and the credited songwriter. Unsurprisingly, then, Freed promoted "I Just Can't Tell No Lie" heavily on his radio show, but it did nothing anywhere outside of Cleveland and the immediately surrounding area. Danny Coggins quit the group, fed up with their lack of success, and he was replaced by a singer who variously went under the names Alex Graves, Alex Walton, Pete Graves, and Pete Walton. Freed closed down Champagne Records. For a time it looked like the Moonglows' career was going to have peaked with their one single, as Freed signed another vocal group, the Coronets, and got them signed to Chess Records in Chicago. Chess was a blues label, which had started in 1947 as Aristocrat Records, but in 1948 it was bought out by two brothers, Leonard and Phil Chess, who had emigrated from Poland as children and Anglicised their names. Their father was in the liquor business during the Prohibition era, which in Chicago meant he was involved with Al Capone, and in their twenties the Chess brothers had started running nightclubs in the black area of Chicago. Chess, at its start, had the artists who had originally recorded for Aristocrat -- people like Muddy Waters and Sunnyland Slim, and they also licensed records made by Sam Phillips in Memphis, and because of that put out early recordings by Howlin' Wolf, before just poaching Wolf for their own label, and Jackie Brenston's "Rocket 88". By 1954, thanks largely to their in-house bass player and songwriter Willie Dixon, Chess had become known as the home of electric Chicago blues, and were putting out classic after classic in that genre. But they were still interested in putting out other styles of black music too, and were happy to sign up doo-wop groups. The Coronets put out a single, "Nadine", on Chess, which did very well. The credited writer was Alan Freed: [Excerpt: "Nadine", the Coronets] The Coronets' follow-up single did less well, though, and Chess dropped them. But Freed had been trying for some time to make a parallel career as a concert promoter, and indeed a few months before he signed the Moonglows to a management contract he had put on what is now considered the first major rock and roll concert -- the Moondog Coronation Ball, at the Cleveland Arena. That show had been Freed's first inkling of just how popular he and the music he was playing were becoming -- twenty thousand people tried to get into the show, even though the arena only had a capacity of ten thousand, and the show had to be cancelled after the first song by the first performer, because it was becoming unsafe to continue. But Freed put on further shows at the arena, with better organisation, and in August 1953 he put on "the Big Rhythm and Blues Show". This featured Fats Domino and Big Joe Turner, and the Moonglows were also put on the bill. As a result of their appearance on the show, they got signed to Chance Records, a small label whose biggest act was the doo-wop group The Flamingos. Freed didn't own this label of course, but by this time he'd got into the record distribution business, and the distribution company he co-owned was Chance's distributor in the Cleveland area. The other co-owner was the owner of Chance Records, and Freed's brother was the distributor's vice-president and in charge of running it. The Moonglows' first single on Chance, a Christmas single, did nothing in the charts, but they followed it with a rather unusual choice. "Secret Love" was a hit for Doris Day, from the soundtrack of her film "Calamity Jane": [Excerpt: Doris Day, "Secret Love"] In the context of the film, which has a certain amount of what we would now call queerbaiting, that song can be read as a song about lesbianism or bisexuality. But that didn't stop a lot of male artists covering it for other markets. We've talked before about how popular songs would be recorded in different genres, and so Day's pop version was accompanied by Slim Whitman's country version and by this by the Moonglows: [Excerpt: the Moonglows, "Secret Love"] Unfortunately, a fortnight after the Moonglows released their version, the Orioles, who were a much more successful doo-wop group, released their own record of the song, and the two competed for the same market. However, "Secret Love" did well enough, given a promotional push by Freed, that it became apparent that the Moonglows could have a proper career. It sold over a hundred thousand copies, but then the next few records on Chance failed to sell, and Chance closed down when their biggest act, the Flamingos, moved first to Parrot Records, and then quickly on to Chess. It seemed like everything was against the Moonglows, but they were about to get a big boost, thanks in part to a strike. WINS radio in New York had been taken over at a rock-bottom price by an investment consortium who wanted to turn the money-losing station into a money-maker. It had a powerful transmitter, and if they could boost listenership they would almost certainly be able to sell it on at a massive profit. One of the first things the new owners did was to sack their house band -- they weren't going to pay musicians any more, as live music was too expensive. This caused the American Federation of Musicians to picket the station, which was expected and understandable. But WINS also had the broadcast rights to the New York Yankees games -- indeed, the ball games were the only really popular thing that the station had. And so the AFM started to picket Yankee Stadium too. On the week of the starting game for what looked to be the Yankees' sixth World Series win in a row. That game would normally have had the opening ball thrown by the Mayor of New York, but the Mayor, Robert Wagner, rather admirably refused to cross a picket line. The Bronx borough president substituted for him -- and threw the opening ball right into the stomach of a newspaper photographer. WINS now desperately needed something to go right for them, and they realised Freed's immense drawing power. They signed him for the unprecedented sum of seventy-five thousand dollars a year, and Freed moved from the mid-market town of Cleveland to a huge, powerful, transmitter in New York. He instantly became the most popular DJ in New York, and probably the best-known DJ in the world. And with his great power came record labels wanting to do Freed favours. He was already friends with the Chess brothers, and with the sure knowledge that any record the Moonglows put out would get airplay from Freed, they eagerly signed the Moonglows and put out "Sincerely": [Excerpt: The Moonglows, "Sincerely"] "Sincerely" featured Bobby Lester on lead vocals, but the song was written by Harvey Fuqua. Or, as the label credited it, Harvey Fuqua and Alan Freed. But while those were the two credited writers, the song owes more than a little to another one. Here's the bridge for "Sincerely": [Excerpt: The Moonglows, "Sincerely"] And here's the bridge for "That's What You're Doing to Me" by Billy Ward and the Dominoes, written by Billy Ward and sung by Clyde McPhatter: [Excerpt: The Dominoes, "That's What You're Doing to Me"] So while I'm critical of Freed for taking credit where it's not deserved, it should be remembered that Fuqua wasn't completely clean when it came to this song either. "Sincerely" rose to number one on the R&B charts, thanks in large part to Freed's promotion. It knocked "Earth Angel" off the top, and was in turn knocked off by "Pledging My Love", and it did relatively well in the pop charts, although once again it was kept off the top of the pop charts by an insipid white cover version, this time by the McGuire Sisters: [Excerpt: The McGuire Sisters, "Sincerely"] Chess wanted to make as much out of the Moonglows as they could, and so they decided to release records by the group under multiple names and on multiple labels. So while the Moonglows were slowly rising up the charts on Chess, The Moonlighters put out another single, "My Loving Baby", on Checker: [Excerpt: the Moonlighters, "My Loving Baby"] There were two Moonlighters singles in total, though neither did well enough for them to continue under that name, and on top of that they also provided backing vocals on records by other Chess artists. Most notably, they sang the backing vocals on "Diddley Daddy" by Bo Diddley: [Excerpt Bo Diddley, "Diddley Daddy"] The Moonglows or Moonlighters weren't the only ones performing under new names though. The real Moondog had, once Freed came to New York, realised that Freed had taken his name, and sued him. Freed had to pay Moondog five thousand seven hundred dollars, and stop calling himself Moondog. He had to switch to using his real name. And along with this, he changed the name of his show to "The Rock and Roll Party". The term "rock and roll" had been used in various contexts before, of course -- the theme for this series in fact comes from almost twenty years before this, but it had not been applied to a form of music on a regular basis. Freed didn't want to get into the same trouble with the phrase "rock and roll" as he had with the name "Moondog", and so he formed a company, Seig Music, which was owned by himself, the promoter Lew Platt, WINS radio, and the gangs–. I'm sorry, the legitimate businessman and music publisher Morris Levy. We'll be hearing more about Levy later. This company trademarked the phrase "rock and roll" (the book I got this information from says they copyrighted the phrase, but I think that's a confusion between copyright and trademark law on the writer's part) and started using it for Freed's now-branded "Rock and Roll Shows", both on radio and on stage. The only problem was that the phrase caught on too much, thanks to Freed's incessant use of the phrase on his show -- there was no possible way they were going to be able to collect royalties from everyone who was using it, and so that particular money-making scheme faltered. The Moonglows, on the other hand, had a run of minor hits. None were as big as "Sincerely", but they had five R&B top ten hits and a bunch more in the top twenty. The most notable, and the one people remember, is "Ten Commandments of Love", from 1958: [excerpt: "Ten Commandments of Love", Harvey and the Moonglows] But that song wasn't released as by "the Moonglows", but by "Harvey and the Moonglows". There was increasing tension between the different members of the band, and songs started to be released as by Harvey and the Moonglows or by Bobby Lester and the Moonglows, as Chess faced the fact that the group's two lead singers would go their separate ways. Chess had been contacted by some Detroit-based songwriters, who were setting up a new label, Anna, and wanted Chess to take over the distribution for it. By this point, Harvey Fuqua had divorced his first wife, and was working for Chess in the backroom as well as as an artist, and he was asked by Leonard Chess to go over and work with this new label. He did -- and he married one of the people involved, Gwen Gordy. Gwen and her brother ended up setting up a lot of different labels, and Harvey got to run a few of them himself -- there was Try-Phi, and Harvey Records. There was a whole family of different record labels owned by the same family, and they soon became quite successful. But at the same time, he was still performing and recording for Chess. We heard one of his singles, a duet with Etta James, in the episode on The Wallflower, but it's so good we might as well play a bit of it again here: [Excerpt: Harvey Fuqua and Etta James, "Spoonful"] But at the same time both Bobby Lester and Harvey Fuqua were performing with rival groups of Moonglows, who both continued recording for Chess. Harvey's Moonglows was an entire other vocal group, a group from Washington DC called the Marquees, who'd had one single out, "Wyatt Earp". That single had been co-written by Bo Diddley, a Chess artist who had tried to get the group signed to Chess. When they'd been turned down, Diddley took them to Okeh instead: [Excerpt: the Marquees, "Wyatt Earp"] Fuqua hired the Marquees and renamed them, and they recorded several tracks as Harvey and the Moonglows, and while none of them were very successful commercially, some of them were musically interesting. This one in particular featured a lead from a great young vocalist who would in 1963 become Harvey Fuqua's brother-in-law, when he married Gwen's sister Anna: [Excerpt: Harvey and the Moonglows, "Mama Loocie"] That record didn't do much, but that singer was to go on to bigger and better things, as was Harvey Fuqua, when one of the Gordy family's labels became a little bit better known than the rest, with Fuqua working for it as a record producer and head of artist development. But the story of Motown Records, and of that singer, Marvin Gaye, is for another time. Next week, we're going to continue the Chess story, with a look at another song that Alan Freed got a co-writing credit for. Come back in a week's time to hear the story of how Chuck Berry came up with Maybellene. [Excerpt: Alan Freed's final signoff]
Welcome to episode twenty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at The Moonglows and “Sincerely”. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. For the background on Charlie Fuqua, see episode six, on the Ink Spots. There are no books on the Moonglows, but as always with vocal groups of the fifties, Marv Goldberg has an exhaustively-researched page from which I got most of the information about them. The information on Alan Freed comes from Big Beat Heat: Alan Freed and the Early Years of Rock & Roll by John A. Jackson. And this compilation contains every recording by every lineup of Moonglows and Moonlighters, apart from the brief 1970s reunion. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript [13 seconds of Intro from a recording of Alan Freed: “Hello, everybody, how you all? This is Alan Freed, the old King of the Moondoggers, and a hearty welcome to all our thousands of friends in Northern Ohio, Ontario Canada, Western New York, Western Pennsylvania, West Virginia. Long about eleven thirty, fifteen minutes from now, we’ll be joining the Moondog Network…”] Chess Records is one of those labels, like Sun or Stax or PWL, which defined a whole genre. And in the case of Chess, the genre it defined was the electric Chicago blues. People like Muddy Waters, Elmore James, Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter, and Willie Dixon all cut some of their most important recordings for the Chess label. I remember when I was just starting to buy records as a child, decades after the events we’re talking about, I knew before I left primary school that Chess, like Sun, was one of the two record labels that consistently put out music that I liked. And yet when it started out, Chess Records was just one of dozens of tiny little indie blues labels, like Modern, or RPM, or King Records, or Duke or Peacock, many of which were even putting out records by the same people who were recording for Chess. So this episode is actually part one of a trilogy, and over the next three episodes, we’re going to talk about how Chess ended up being the one label that defined that music in the eyes of many listeners, and how that music fed into early rock and roll. And today we’re also going to talk about how it ended up being influential in the formation of another of those important record labels. And to talk about that, we’re going to talk about Harvey Fuqua [Foo-kwah]. Yes, Fuqua. Even though we talked about his uncle, Charlie Fuqua [Foo-kway], back in the episode on the Ink Spots, apparently Harvey pronounced his name differently from his uncle. As you might imagine, having an uncle in the most important black vocal group in history gave young Harvey Fuqua quite an impetus, even though the two of them weren’t close. Fuqua started a duo with his friend Bobby Lester after they both got out of the military. Fuqua would play piano, and they would both sing. The two of them had a small amount of success, touring the South, but then shortly after their first tour Fuqua had about the worst thing possible happen to him — there was a fire, and both his children died in it. Understandably, he didn’t want to stay in Louisville Kentucky, where he’d been raising his family, so he and his wife moved to Cleveland. When he got to Cleveland, he met up again with an old friend from his military days, Danny Coggins. The two of them started performing together with a bass singer, Prentiss Barnes, under the name The Crazy Sounds. The style they were performing in was called “vocalese”, and it’s a really odd style of jazz singing that’s… the easiest way to explain it is the opposite of scat singing. In scat, you improvise a new melody with nonsense lyrics [demonstrates] — that’s the standard form of jazz singing, other than just singing the song straight. It’s what Louis Armstrong or Ella Fitzgerald or whoever would do. In vocalese, on the other hand, you do the opposite. You come up with proper lyrics, not just nonsense syllables, and you put them to a pre-recorded melody. The twist is that the pre-recorded melody you choose is a melody that’s already been improvised by an instrumentalist. So for example, you could take Coleman Hawkins’ great sax solo on “Body and Soul”: [Excerpt: Coleman Hawkins, “Body and Soul”] Hawkins improvised that melody line, and it was a one-off performance — every other time he played the song he’d play it differently. But Eddie Jefferson, who is credited as the inventor of vocalese, learned Hawkins’ solo, added words, and sang this: [Excerpt: Eddie Jefferson, “Body and Soul”] The Crazy Sounds performed this kind of music as a vocal trio for a while, but their sound was missing something, and eventually Fuqua travelled down to Kentucky and persuaded Bobby Lester to move to Cleveland and join the Crazy Sounds. They became a four-piece, and slowly started writing their own new material in a more R&B style. They performed together a little, and eventually auditioned at a club called the Loop, where they were heard by a blues singer called Al “Fats” Thomas. Thomas apparently recorded for several labels, but this is the only one of his records I can find a copy of anywhere, on the Chess subsidiary Checker, from right around the time we’re talking about in 1952: [Excerpt: Al “Fats” Thomas, “Baby Please No No”] Fats Thomas was very impressed by the Crazy Sounds, and immediately phoned his friend, the DJ Alan Freed. Alan Freed is a difficult character to explain, and his position in rock and roll history is a murky one. He was the first superstar DJ, and he was the person who more than anyone else made the phrase “rock and roll” into a term for a style of music, rather than, as it had been, just a phrase that was used in some of that music. Freed had not started out as a rhythm and blues or rock and roll DJ, and in fact had no great love for the music when he started playing it on his show. He was a lover of classical music — particularly Wagner, whose music he loved so much that he named one of his daughters Sieglinde. But he named his first daughter Alana, which shows his other great love, which was for himself. Freed had been a DJ for several years when he was first introduced to rhythm and blues music, and he’d played a mixture of big band music and light classical, depending on what the audience wanted. But then, in 1951, something changed. Freed met Leo Mintz, the owner of a record shop named Record Rendezvous, in a bar. Mintz discovered that Freed was a DJ and took him to the shop. Freed later mythologised this moment, as he did a lot of his life, by talking about how he was shocked to see white teenagers dancing to music made by black people, and he had a sort of Damascene conversion and immediately decided to devote his show to rhythm and blues. The reality is far more prosaic. Mintz, whose business actually mostly sold to black people at this point, decided that if there was a rhythm and blues radio show then it would boost business to his shop, especially if Mintz paid for the radio show and so bought all the advertising on it. He took Freed to the shop to show him that there was indeed an audience for that kind of music, and Freed was impressed, but said that he didn’t know anything about rhythm and blues music. Mintz said that that didn’t matter. Mintz would pick the records — they’d be the ones that he wanted his customers to buy — and tell Freed what to play. All Freed had to do was to play the ones he was told and everything would work out fine. The music Mintz had played for Freed was, according to Freed later, people like LaVern Baker — who had not yet become at all well known outside Detroit and Chicago at the time — but Mintz set about putting together selections of records that Freed should play. Those records were mostly things with gospel-sounding vocals, a dance beat, or honking saxophones, and Freed found that his audiences responded astonishingly well to it. Freed would often interject during records, and would bang his fists on the table or other objects in time to the beat, including a cowbell that he had on his desk — apparently some of his listeners would be annoyed when they bought the records he played to find out half the sounds they’d heard weren’t on the record at all. Freed took the stage name “Moondog”, after a blind New York street musician and outsider artist of that name. Freed’s theme song for his radio show was “Moondog Symphony”, by Moondog, a one-man-band performance credited to “Moondog (by himself) playing drums, maracas, claves, gourds, hollow legs, Chinese block and cymbals.” [Excerpt: “Moondog Symphony” by Moondog] When Fats Thomas got the Crazy Sounds an audition with Freed, Freed was impressed enough that he offered them a management contract. Being managed by the biggest DJ in the city was obviously a good idea, so they took him up on that, and took his advice about how to make themselves more commercial, including changing their name to emphasise the connection to Freed. They became first the Moonpuppies and then the Moonglows. Freed set up his own record label, Champagne Records, and released the Moonglows’ first single, “I Just Can’t Tell No Lie”: [Excerpt, “I Just Can’t Tell No Lie”, the Moonglows] According to Freed’s biographer John A. Jackson, Freed provided additional percussion on that song, hitting a telephone book in time with the rhythm as he would on his show. I don’t hear any percussion on there other than the drum kit, but maybe you can, if you have better ears than me. This was a song that had been written by the Moonglows themselves, but when the record came out, both sides were credited to Al Lance — which was a pseudonym for Alan Freed. And so the DJ who was pushing their record on the radio was also their manager, and the owner of the record company, and the credited songwriter. Unsurprisingly, then, Freed promoted “I Just Can’t Tell No Lie” heavily on his radio show, but it did nothing anywhere outside of Cleveland and the immediately surrounding area. Danny Coggins quit the group, fed up with their lack of success, and he was replaced by a singer who variously went under the names Alex Graves, Alex Walton, Pete Graves, and Pete Walton. Freed closed down Champagne Records. For a time it looked like the Moonglows’ career was going to have peaked with their one single, as Freed signed another vocal group, the Coronets, and got them signed to Chess Records in Chicago. Chess was a blues label, which had started in 1947 as Aristocrat Records, but in 1948 it was bought out by two brothers, Leonard and Phil Chess, who had emigrated from Poland as children and Anglicised their names. Their father was in the liquor business during the Prohibition era, which in Chicago meant he was involved with Al Capone, and in their twenties the Chess brothers had started running nightclubs in the black area of Chicago. Chess, at its start, had the artists who had originally recorded for Aristocrat — people like Muddy Waters and Sunnyland Slim, and they also licensed records made by Sam Phillips in Memphis, and because of that put out early recordings by Howlin’ Wolf, before just poaching Wolf for their own label, and Jackie Brenston’s “Rocket 88”. By 1954, thanks largely to their in-house bass player and songwriter Willie Dixon, Chess had become known as the home of electric Chicago blues, and were putting out classic after classic in that genre. But they were still interested in putting out other styles of black music too, and were happy to sign up doo-wop groups. The Coronets put out a single, “Nadine”, on Chess, which did very well. The credited writer was Alan Freed: [Excerpt: “Nadine”, the Coronets] The Coronets’ follow-up single did less well, though, and Chess dropped them. But Freed had been trying for some time to make a parallel career as a concert promoter, and indeed a few months before he signed the Moonglows to a management contract he had put on what is now considered the first major rock and roll concert — the Moondog Coronation Ball, at the Cleveland Arena. That show had been Freed’s first inkling of just how popular he and the music he was playing were becoming — twenty thousand people tried to get into the show, even though the arena only had a capacity of ten thousand, and the show had to be cancelled after the first song by the first performer, because it was becoming unsafe to continue. But Freed put on further shows at the arena, with better organisation, and in August 1953 he put on “the Big Rhythm and Blues Show”. This featured Fats Domino and Big Joe Turner, and the Moonglows were also put on the bill. As a result of their appearance on the show, they got signed to Chance Records, a small label whose biggest act was the doo-wop group The Flamingos. Freed didn’t own this label of course, but by this time he’d got into the record distribution business, and the distribution company he co-owned was Chance’s distributor in the Cleveland area. The other co-owner was the owner of Chance Records, and Freed’s brother was the distributor’s vice-president and in charge of running it. The Moonglows’ first single on Chance, a Christmas single, did nothing in the charts, but they followed it with a rather unusual choice. “Secret Love” was a hit for Doris Day, from the soundtrack of her film “Calamity Jane”: [Excerpt: Doris Day, “Secret Love”] In the context of the film, which has a certain amount of what we would now call queerbaiting, that song can be read as a song about lesbianism or bisexuality. But that didn’t stop a lot of male artists covering it for other markets. We’ve talked before about how popular songs would be recorded in different genres, and so Day’s pop version was accompanied by Slim Whitman’s country version and by this by the Moonglows: [Excerpt: the Moonglows, “Secret Love”] Unfortunately, a fortnight after the Moonglows released their version, the Orioles, who were a much more successful doo-wop group, released their own record of the song, and the two competed for the same market. However, “Secret Love” did well enough, given a promotional push by Freed, that it became apparent that the Moonglows could have a proper career. It sold over a hundred thousand copies, but then the next few records on Chance failed to sell, and Chance closed down when their biggest act, the Flamingos, moved first to Parrot Records, and then quickly on to Chess. It seemed like everything was against the Moonglows, but they were about to get a big boost, thanks in part to a strike. WINS radio in New York had been taken over at a rock-bottom price by an investment consortium who wanted to turn the money-losing station into a money-maker. It had a powerful transmitter, and if they could boost listenership they would almost certainly be able to sell it on at a massive profit. One of the first things the new owners did was to sack their house band — they weren’t going to pay musicians any more, as live music was too expensive. This caused the American Federation of Musicians to picket the station, which was expected and understandable. But WINS also had the broadcast rights to the New York Yankees games — indeed, the ball games were the only really popular thing that the station had. And so the AFM started to picket Yankee Stadium too. On the week of the starting game for what looked to be the Yankees’ sixth World Series win in a row. That game would normally have had the opening ball thrown by the Mayor of New York, but the Mayor, Robert Wagner, rather admirably refused to cross a picket line. The Bronx borough president substituted for him — and threw the opening ball right into the stomach of a newspaper photographer. WINS now desperately needed something to go right for them, and they realised Freed’s immense drawing power. They signed him for the unprecedented sum of seventy-five thousand dollars a year, and Freed moved from the mid-market town of Cleveland to a huge, powerful, transmitter in New York. He instantly became the most popular DJ in New York, and probably the best-known DJ in the world. And with his great power came record labels wanting to do Freed favours. He was already friends with the Chess brothers, and with the sure knowledge that any record the Moonglows put out would get airplay from Freed, they eagerly signed the Moonglows and put out “Sincerely”: [Excerpt: The Moonglows, “Sincerely”] “Sincerely” featured Bobby Lester on lead vocals, but the song was written by Harvey Fuqua. Or, as the label credited it, Harvey Fuqua and Alan Freed. But while those were the two credited writers, the song owes more than a little to another one. Here’s the bridge for “Sincerely”: [Excerpt: The Moonglows, “Sincerely”] And here’s the bridge for “That’s What You’re Doing to Me” by Billy Ward and the Dominoes, written by Billy Ward and sung by Clyde McPhatter: [Excerpt: The Dominoes, “That’s What You’re Doing to Me”] So while I’m critical of Freed for taking credit where it’s not deserved, it should be remembered that Fuqua wasn’t completely clean when it came to this song either. “Sincerely” rose to number one on the R&B charts, thanks in large part to Freed’s promotion. It knocked “Earth Angel” off the top, and was in turn knocked off by “Pledging My Love”, and it did relatively well in the pop charts, although once again it was kept off the top of the pop charts by an insipid white cover version, this time by the McGuire Sisters: [Excerpt: The McGuire Sisters, “Sincerely”] Chess wanted to make as much out of the Moonglows as they could, and so they decided to release records by the group under multiple names and on multiple labels. So while the Moonglows were slowly rising up the charts on Chess, The Moonlighters put out another single, “My Loving Baby”, on Checker: [Excerpt: the Moonlighters, “My Loving Baby”] There were two Moonlighters singles in total, though neither did well enough for them to continue under that name, and on top of that they also provided backing vocals on records by other Chess artists. Most notably, they sang the backing vocals on “Diddley Daddy” by Bo Diddley: [Excerpt Bo Diddley, “Diddley Daddy”] The Moonglows or Moonlighters weren’t the only ones performing under new names though. The real Moondog had, once Freed came to New York, realised that Freed had taken his name, and sued him. Freed had to pay Moondog five thousand seven hundred dollars, and stop calling himself Moondog. He had to switch to using his real name. And along with this, he changed the name of his show to “The Rock and Roll Party”. The term “rock and roll” had been used in various contexts before, of course — the theme for this series in fact comes from almost twenty years before this, but it had not been applied to a form of music on a regular basis. Freed didn’t want to get into the same trouble with the phrase “rock and roll” as he had with the name “Moondog”, and so he formed a company, Seig Music, which was owned by himself, the promoter Lew Platt, WINS radio, and the gangs–. I’m sorry, the legitimate businessman and music publisher Morris Levy. We’ll be hearing more about Levy later. This company trademarked the phrase “rock and roll” (the book I got this information from says they copyrighted the phrase, but I think that’s a confusion between copyright and trademark law on the writer’s part) and started using it for Freed’s now-branded “Rock and Roll Shows”, both on radio and on stage. The only problem was that the phrase caught on too much, thanks to Freed’s incessant use of the phrase on his show — there was no possible way they were going to be able to collect royalties from everyone who was using it, and so that particular money-making scheme faltered. The Moonglows, on the other hand, had a run of minor hits. None were as big as “Sincerely”, but they had five R&B top ten hits and a bunch more in the top twenty. The most notable, and the one people remember, is “Ten Commandments of Love”, from 1958: [excerpt: “Ten Commandments of Love”, Harvey and the Moonglows] But that song wasn’t released as by “the Moonglows”, but by “Harvey and the Moonglows”. There was increasing tension between the different members of the band, and songs started to be released as by Harvey and the Moonglows or by Bobby Lester and the Moonglows, as Chess faced the fact that the group’s two lead singers would go their separate ways. Chess had been contacted by some Detroit-based songwriters, who were setting up a new label, Anna, and wanted Chess to take over the distribution for it. By this point, Harvey Fuqua had divorced his first wife, and was working for Chess in the backroom as well as as an artist, and he was asked by Leonard Chess to go over and work with this new label. He did — and he married one of the people involved, Gwen Gordy. Gwen and her brother ended up setting up a lot of different labels, and Harvey got to run a few of them himself — there was Try-Phi, and Harvey Records. There was a whole family of different record labels owned by the same family, and they soon became quite successful. But at the same time, he was still performing and recording for Chess. We heard one of his singles, a duet with Etta James, in the episode on The Wallflower, but it’s so good we might as well play a bit of it again here: [Excerpt: Harvey Fuqua and Etta James, “Spoonful”] But at the same time both Bobby Lester and Harvey Fuqua were performing with rival groups of Moonglows, who both continued recording for Chess. Harvey’s Moonglows was an entire other vocal group, a group from Washington DC called the Marquees, who’d had one single out, “Wyatt Earp”. That single had been co-written by Bo Diddley, a Chess artist who had tried to get the group signed to Chess. When they’d been turned down, Diddley took them to Okeh instead: [Excerpt: the Marquees, “Wyatt Earp”] Fuqua hired the Marquees and renamed them, and they recorded several tracks as Harvey and the Moonglows, and while none of them were very successful commercially, some of them were musically interesting. This one in particular featured a lead from a great young vocalist who would in 1963 become Harvey Fuqua’s brother-in-law, when he married Gwen’s sister Anna: [Excerpt: Harvey and the Moonglows, “Mama Loocie”] That record didn’t do much, but that singer was to go on to bigger and better things, as was Harvey Fuqua, when one of the Gordy family’s labels became a little bit better known than the rest, with Fuqua working for it as a record producer and head of artist development. But the story of Motown Records, and of that singer, Marvin Gaye, is for another time. Next week, we’re going to continue the Chess story, with a look at another song that Alan Freed got a co-writing credit for. Come back in a week’s time to hear the story of how Chuck Berry came up with Maybellene. [Excerpt: Alan Freed’s final signoff]
Welcome to episode twenty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at The Moonglows and “Sincerely”. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. For the background on Charlie Fuqua, see episode six, on the Ink Spots. There are no books on the Moonglows, but as always with vocal groups of the fifties, Marv Goldberg has an exhaustively-researched page from which I got most of the information about them. The information on Alan Freed comes from Big Beat Heat: Alan Freed and the Early Years of Rock & Roll by John A. Jackson. And this compilation contains every recording by every lineup of Moonglows and Moonlighters, apart from the brief 1970s reunion. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript [13 seconds of Intro from a recording of Alan Freed: “Hello, everybody, how you all? This is Alan Freed, the old King of the Moondoggers, and a hearty welcome to all our thousands of friends in Northern Ohio, Ontario Canada, Western New York, Western Pennsylvania, West Virginia. Long about eleven thirty, fifteen minutes from now, we’ll be joining the Moondog Network…”] Chess Records is one of those labels, like Sun or Stax or PWL, which defined a whole genre. And in the case of Chess, the genre it defined was the electric Chicago blues. People like Muddy Waters, Elmore James, Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter, and Willie Dixon all cut some of their most important recordings for the Chess label. I remember when I was just starting to buy records as a child, decades after the events we’re talking about, I knew before I left primary school that Chess, like Sun, was one of the two record labels that consistently put out music that I liked. And yet when it started out, Chess Records was just one of dozens of tiny little indie blues labels, like Modern, or RPM, or King Records, or Duke or Peacock, many of which were even putting out records by the same people who were recording for Chess. So this episode is actually part one of a trilogy, and over the next three episodes, we’re going to talk about how Chess ended up being the one label that defined that music in the eyes of many listeners, and how that music fed into early rock and roll. And today we’re also going to talk about how it ended up being influential in the formation of another of those important record labels. And to talk about that, we’re going to talk about Harvey Fuqua [Foo-kwah]. Yes, Fuqua. Even though we talked about his uncle, Charlie Fuqua [Foo-kway], back in the episode on the Ink Spots, apparently Harvey pronounced his name differently from his uncle. As you might imagine, having an uncle in the most important black vocal group in history gave young Harvey Fuqua quite an impetus, even though the two of them weren’t close. Fuqua started a duo with his friend Bobby Lester after they both got out of the military. Fuqua would play piano, and they would both sing. The two of them had a small amount of success, touring the South, but then shortly after their first tour Fuqua had about the worst thing possible happen to him — there was a fire, and both his children died in it. Understandably, he didn’t want to stay in Louisville Kentucky, where he’d been raising his family, so he and his wife moved to Cleveland. When he got to Cleveland, he met up again with an old friend from his military days, Danny Coggins. The two of them started performing together with a bass singer, Prentiss Barnes, under the name The Crazy Sounds. The style they were performing in was called “vocalese”, and it’s a really odd style of jazz singing that’s… the easiest way to explain it is the opposite of scat singing. In scat, you improvise a new melody with nonsense lyrics [demonstrates] — that’s the standard form of jazz singing, other than just singing the song straight. It’s what Louis Armstrong or Ella Fitzgerald or whoever would do. In vocalese, on the other hand, you do the opposite. You come up with proper lyrics, not just nonsense syllables, and you put them to a pre-recorded melody. The twist is that the pre-recorded melody you choose is a melody that’s already been improvised by an instrumentalist. So for example, you could take Coleman Hawkins’ great sax solo on “Body and Soul”: [Excerpt: Coleman Hawkins, “Body and Soul”] Hawkins improvised that melody line, and it was a one-off performance — every other time he played the song he’d play it differently. But Eddie Jefferson, who is credited as the inventor of vocalese, learned Hawkins’ solo, added words, and sang this: [Excerpt: Eddie Jefferson, “Body and Soul”] The Crazy Sounds performed this kind of music as a vocal trio for a while, but their sound was missing something, and eventually Fuqua travelled down to Kentucky and persuaded Bobby Lester to move to Cleveland and join the Crazy Sounds. They became a four-piece, and slowly started writing their own new material in a more R&B style. They performed together a little, and eventually auditioned at a club called the Loop, where they were heard by a blues singer called Al “Fats” Thomas. Thomas apparently recorded for several labels, but this is the only one of his records I can find a copy of anywhere, on the Chess subsidiary Checker, from right around the time we’re talking about in 1952: [Excerpt: Al “Fats” Thomas, “Baby Please No No”] Fats Thomas was very impressed by the Crazy Sounds, and immediately phoned his friend, the DJ Alan Freed. Alan Freed is a difficult character to explain, and his position in rock and roll history is a murky one. He was the first superstar DJ, and he was the person who more than anyone else made the phrase “rock and roll” into a term for a style of music, rather than, as it had been, just a phrase that was used in some of that music. Freed had not started out as a rhythm and blues or rock and roll DJ, and in fact had no great love for the music when he started playing it on his show. He was a lover of classical music — particularly Wagner, whose music he loved so much that he named one of his daughters Sieglinde. But he named his first daughter Alana, which shows his other great love, which was for himself. Freed had been a DJ for several years when he was first introduced to rhythm and blues music, and he’d played a mixture of big band music and light classical, depending on what the audience wanted. But then, in 1951, something changed. Freed met Leo Mintz, the owner of a record shop named Record Rendezvous, in a bar. Mintz discovered that Freed was a DJ and took him to the shop. Freed later mythologised this moment, as he did a lot of his life, by talking about how he was shocked to see white teenagers dancing to music made by black people, and he had a sort of Damascene conversion and immediately decided to devote his show to rhythm and blues. The reality is far more prosaic. Mintz, whose business actually mostly sold to black people at this point, decided that if there was a rhythm and blues radio show then it would boost business to his shop, especially if Mintz paid for the radio show and so bought all the advertising on it. He took Freed to the shop to show him that there was indeed an audience for that kind of music, and Freed was impressed, but said that he didn’t know anything about rhythm and blues music. Mintz said that that didn’t matter. Mintz would pick the records — they’d be the ones that he wanted his customers to buy — and tell Freed what to play. All Freed had to do was to play the ones he was told and everything would work out fine. The music Mintz had played for Freed was, according to Freed later, people like LaVern Baker — who had not yet become at all well known outside Detroit and Chicago at the time — but Mintz set about putting together selections of records that Freed should play. Those records were mostly things with gospel-sounding vocals, a dance beat, or honking saxophones, and Freed found that his audiences responded astonishingly well to it. Freed would often interject during records, and would bang his fists on the table or other objects in time to the beat, including a cowbell that he had on his desk — apparently some of his listeners would be annoyed when they bought the records he played to find out half the sounds they’d heard weren’t on the record at all. Freed took the stage name “Moondog”, after a blind New York street musician and outsider artist of that name. Freed’s theme song for his radio show was “Moondog Symphony”, by Moondog, a one-man-band performance credited to “Moondog (by himself) playing drums, maracas, claves, gourds, hollow legs, Chinese block and cymbals.” [Excerpt: “Moondog Symphony” by Moondog] When Fats Thomas got the Crazy Sounds an audition with Freed, Freed was impressed enough that he offered them a management contract. Being managed by the biggest DJ in the city was obviously a good idea, so they took him up on that, and took his advice about how to make themselves more commercial, including changing their name to emphasise the connection to Freed. They became first the Moonpuppies and then the Moonglows. Freed set up his own record label, Champagne Records, and released the Moonglows’ first single, “I Just Can’t Tell No Lie”: [Excerpt, “I Just Can’t Tell No Lie”, the Moonglows] According to Freed’s biographer John A. Jackson, Freed provided additional percussion on that song, hitting a telephone book in time with the rhythm as he would on his show. I don’t hear any percussion on there other than the drum kit, but maybe you can, if you have better ears than me. This was a song that had been written by the Moonglows themselves, but when the record came out, both sides were credited to Al Lance — which was a pseudonym for Alan Freed. And so the DJ who was pushing their record on the radio was also their manager, and the owner of the record company, and the credited songwriter. Unsurprisingly, then, Freed promoted “I Just Can’t Tell No Lie” heavily on his radio show, but it did nothing anywhere outside of Cleveland and the immediately surrounding area. Danny Coggins quit the group, fed up with their lack of success, and he was replaced by a singer who variously went under the names Alex Graves, Alex Walton, Pete Graves, and Pete Walton. Freed closed down Champagne Records. For a time it looked like the Moonglows’ career was going to have peaked with their one single, as Freed signed another vocal group, the Coronets, and got them signed to Chess Records in Chicago. Chess was a blues label, which had started in 1947 as Aristocrat Records, but in 1948 it was bought out by two brothers, Leonard and Phil Chess, who had emigrated from Poland as children and Anglicised their names. Their father was in the liquor business during the Prohibition era, which in Chicago meant he was involved with Al Capone, and in their twenties the Chess brothers had started running nightclubs in the black area of Chicago. Chess, at its start, had the artists who had originally recorded for Aristocrat — people like Muddy Waters and Sunnyland Slim, and they also licensed records made by Sam Phillips in Memphis, and because of that put out early recordings by Howlin’ Wolf, before just poaching Wolf for their own label, and Jackie Brenston’s “Rocket 88”. By 1954, thanks largely to their in-house bass player and songwriter Willie Dixon, Chess had become known as the home of electric Chicago blues, and were putting out classic after classic in that genre. But they were still interested in putting out other styles of black music too, and were happy to sign up doo-wop groups. The Coronets put out a single, “Nadine”, on Chess, which did very well. The credited writer was Alan Freed: [Excerpt: “Nadine”, the Coronets] The Coronets’ follow-up single did less well, though, and Chess dropped them. But Freed had been trying for some time to make a parallel career as a concert promoter, and indeed a few months before he signed the Moonglows to a management contract he had put on what is now considered the first major rock and roll concert — the Moondog Coronation Ball, at the Cleveland Arena. That show had been Freed’s first inkling of just how popular he and the music he was playing were becoming — twenty thousand people tried to get into the show, even though the arena only had a capacity of ten thousand, and the show had to be cancelled after the first song by the first performer, because it was becoming unsafe to continue. But Freed put on further shows at the arena, with better organisation, and in August 1953 he put on “the Big Rhythm and Blues Show”. This featured Fats Domino and Big Joe Turner, and the Moonglows were also put on the bill. As a result of their appearance on the show, they got signed to Chance Records, a small label whose biggest act was the doo-wop group The Flamingos. Freed didn’t own this label of course, but by this time he’d got into the record distribution business, and the distribution company he co-owned was Chance’s distributor in the Cleveland area. The other co-owner was the owner of Chance Records, and Freed’s brother was the distributor’s vice-president and in charge of running it. The Moonglows’ first single on Chance, a Christmas single, did nothing in the charts, but they followed it with a rather unusual choice. “Secret Love” was a hit for Doris Day, from the soundtrack of her film “Calamity Jane”: [Excerpt: Doris Day, “Secret Love”] In the context of the film, which has a certain amount of what we would now call queerbaiting, that song can be read as a song about lesbianism or bisexuality. But that didn’t stop a lot of male artists covering it for other markets. We’ve talked before about how popular songs would be recorded in different genres, and so Day’s pop version was accompanied by Slim Whitman’s country version and by this by the Moonglows: [Excerpt: the Moonglows, “Secret Love”] Unfortunately, a fortnight after the Moonglows released their version, the Orioles, who were a much more successful doo-wop group, released their own record of the song, and the two competed for the same market. However, “Secret Love” did well enough, given a promotional push by Freed, that it became apparent that the Moonglows could have a proper career. It sold over a hundred thousand copies, but then the next few records on Chance failed to sell, and Chance closed down when their biggest act, the Flamingos, moved first to Parrot Records, and then quickly on to Chess. It seemed like everything was against the Moonglows, but they were about to get a big boost, thanks in part to a strike. WINS radio in New York had been taken over at a rock-bottom price by an investment consortium who wanted to turn the money-losing station into a money-maker. It had a powerful transmitter, and if they could boost listenership they would almost certainly be able to sell it on at a massive profit. One of the first things the new owners did was to sack their house band — they weren’t going to pay musicians any more, as live music was too expensive. This caused the American Federation of Musicians to picket the station, which was expected and understandable. But WINS also had the broadcast rights to the New York Yankees games — indeed, the ball games were the only really popular thing that the station had. And so the AFM started to picket Yankee Stadium too. On the week of the starting game for what looked to be the Yankees’ sixth World Series win in a row. That game would normally have had the opening ball thrown by the Mayor of New York, but the Mayor, Robert Wagner, rather admirably refused to cross a picket line. The Bronx borough president substituted for him — and threw the opening ball right into the stomach of a newspaper photographer. WINS now desperately needed something to go right for them, and they realised Freed’s immense drawing power. They signed him for the unprecedented sum of seventy-five thousand dollars a year, and Freed moved from the mid-market town of Cleveland to a huge, powerful, transmitter in New York. He instantly became the most popular DJ in New York, and probably the best-known DJ in the world. And with his great power came record labels wanting to do Freed favours. He was already friends with the Chess brothers, and with the sure knowledge that any record the Moonglows put out would get airplay from Freed, they eagerly signed the Moonglows and put out “Sincerely”: [Excerpt: The Moonglows, “Sincerely”] “Sincerely” featured Bobby Lester on lead vocals, but the song was written by Harvey Fuqua. Or, as the label credited it, Harvey Fuqua and Alan Freed. But while those were the two credited writers, the song owes more than a little to another one. Here’s the bridge for “Sincerely”: [Excerpt: The Moonglows, “Sincerely”] And here’s the bridge for “That’s What You’re Doing to Me” by Billy Ward and the Dominoes, written by Billy Ward and sung by Clyde McPhatter: [Excerpt: The Dominoes, “That’s What You’re Doing to Me”] So while I’m critical of Freed for taking credit where it’s not deserved, it should be remembered that Fuqua wasn’t completely clean when it came to this song either. “Sincerely” rose to number one on the R&B charts, thanks in large part to Freed’s promotion. It knocked “Earth Angel” off the top, and was in turn knocked off by “Pledging My Love”, and it did relatively well in the pop charts, although once again it was kept off the top of the pop charts by an insipid white cover version, this time by the McGuire Sisters: [Excerpt: The McGuire Sisters, “Sincerely”] Chess wanted to make as much out of the Moonglows as they could, and so they decided to release records by the group under multiple names and on multiple labels. So while the Moonglows were slowly rising up the charts on Chess, The Moonlighters put out another single, “My Loving Baby”, on Checker: [Excerpt: the Moonlighters, “My Loving Baby”] There were two Moonlighters singles in total, though neither did well enough for them to continue under that name, and on top of that they also provided backing vocals on records by other Chess artists. Most notably, they sang the backing vocals on “Diddley Daddy” by Bo Diddley: [Excerpt Bo Diddley, “Diddley Daddy”] The Moonglows or Moonlighters weren’t the only ones performing under new names though. The real Moondog had, once Freed came to New York, realised that Freed had taken his name, and sued him. Freed had to pay Moondog five thousand seven hundred dollars, and stop calling himself Moondog. He had to switch to using his real name. And along with this, he changed the name of his show to “The Rock and Roll Party”. The term “rock and roll” had been used in various contexts before, of course — the theme for this series in fact comes from almost twenty years before this, but it had not been applied to a form of music on a regular basis. Freed didn’t want to get into the same trouble with the phrase “rock and roll” as he had with the name “Moondog”, and so he formed a company, Seig Music, which was owned by himself, the promoter Lew Platt, WINS radio, and the gangs–. I’m sorry, the legitimate businessman and music publisher Morris Levy. We’ll be hearing more about Levy later. This company trademarked the phrase “rock and roll” (the book I got this information from says they copyrighted the phrase, but I think that’s a confusion between copyright and trademark law on the writer’s part) and started using it for Freed’s now-branded “Rock and Roll Shows”, both on radio and on stage. The only problem was that the phrase caught on too much, thanks to Freed’s incessant use of the phrase on his show — there was no possible way they were going to be able to collect royalties from everyone who was using it, and so that particular money-making scheme faltered. The Moonglows, on the other hand, had a run of minor hits. None were as big as “Sincerely”, but they had five R&B top ten hits and a bunch more in the top twenty. The most notable, and the one people remember, is “Ten Commandments of Love”, from 1958: [excerpt: “Ten Commandments of Love”, Harvey and the Moonglows] But that song wasn’t released as by “the Moonglows”, but by “Harvey and the Moonglows”. There was increasing tension between the different members of the band, and songs started to be released as by Harvey and the Moonglows or by Bobby Lester and the Moonglows, as Chess faced the fact that the group’s two lead singers would go their separate ways. Chess had been contacted by some Detroit-based songwriters, who were setting up a new label, Anna, and wanted Chess to take over the distribution for it. By this point, Harvey Fuqua had divorced his first wife, and was working for Chess in the backroom as well as as an artist, and he was asked by Leonard Chess to go over and work with this new label. He did — and he married one of the people involved, Gwen Gordy. Gwen and her brother ended up setting up a lot of different labels, and Harvey got to run a few of them himself — there was Try-Phi, and Harvey Records. There was a whole family of different record labels owned by the same family, and they soon became quite successful. But at the same time, he was still performing and recording for Chess. We heard one of his singles, a duet with Etta James, in the episode on The Wallflower, but it’s so good we might as well play a bit of it again here: [Excerpt: Harvey Fuqua and Etta James, “Spoonful”] But at the same time both Bobby Lester and Harvey Fuqua were performing with rival groups of Moonglows, who both continued recording for Chess. Harvey’s Moonglows was an entire other vocal group, a group from Washington DC called the Marquees, who’d had one single out, “Wyatt Earp”. That single had been co-written by Bo Diddley, a Chess artist who had tried to get the group signed to Chess. When they’d been turned down, Diddley took them to Okeh instead: [Excerpt: the Marquees, “Wyatt Earp”] Fuqua hired the Marquees and renamed them, and they recorded several tracks as Harvey and the Moonglows, and while none of them were very successful commercially, some of them were musically interesting. This one in particular featured a lead from a great young vocalist who would in 1963 become Harvey Fuqua’s brother-in-law, when he married Gwen’s sister Anna: [Excerpt: Harvey and the Moonglows, “Mama Loocie”] That record didn’t do much, but that singer was to go on to bigger and better things, as was Harvey Fuqua, when one of the Gordy family’s labels became a little bit better known than the rest, with Fuqua working for it as a record producer and head of artist development. But the story of Motown Records, and of that singer, Marvin Gaye, is for another time. Next week, we’re going to continue the Chess story, with a look at another song that Alan Freed got a co-writing credit for. Come back in a week’s time to hear the story of how Chuck Berry came up with Maybellene. [Excerpt: Alan Freed’s final signoff]
Welcome to episode sixteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at “Crazy Man Crazy” by Bill Haley and the Comets. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Unfortunately, there aren’t many good books about Bill Haley available. There are two biographies which are long out of print — one by John Swenson which I read as a very small child, and one from the nineties by one of Haley’s sons. Another of Haley’s sons has a biography due out in April, which might be worthwhile, but until then the only book available is a self-published biography by Otto Fuchs. I relied on volume one of Fuchs’ book for this post — it’s very good on the facts — but it suffers from being written by someone whose first language is not English, and it also *badly* needs an editor, so I can’t wholly recommend it. This box set, which is ridiculously cheap, contains almost every track anyone could want by Haley and the Comets, and it also includes the early country music sides I’ve excerpted here, as well as tracks by the Jodimars (a band consisting of ex-Comets). Unfortunately it doesn’t contain his great late-fifties singles “Lean Jean” and “Skinny Minnie”, but it has everything else. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript We’ve talked before about how there were multiple different musics that got lumped together in the mid-fifties under the name “rock and roll”. There’s rockabilly, Chicago rhythm and blues, doo-wop, New Orleans R&B, the coastal jump bands, and Northern band rock and roll. We’ve looked at most of these – and the ones we haven’t we’ll be looking at over the next few weeks – but what we haven’t looked at so far is Northern band rock and roll. And in many ways that’s the most interesting of all the rock and roll musics, because it’s the one that at first glance has had almost no obvious impact on anything that followed, but it’s also the one that first came to the attention of the white American public as rock and roll – the one that made the newspapers and got the headlines. And it’s the one that had only one real example. While the other styles of music had dozens of people making them, Northern band rock and roll really only had Bill Haley and the Comets. A whole pillar of rock and roll – a whole massive strand of the contemporary view of this music – was down to the work of one band who had no peers and left no real legacy. Or at least, they seem to have left no legacy, until you look a bit closer. But before we look at where the Comets’ music led, we should look at where they were coming from. Bill Haley didn’t set out to be a rock and roll star, because when he started there was no such thing. He set out to be a country and western singer. He played with various country bands over the years – bands with names like The Down Homers and the Texas Range Riders – before he decided to become a band leader himself, and started his own band, the Four Aces of Western Swing. Obviously this wasn’t a full Western Swing band in the style of Bob Wills’ band, but they played a stripped-down version which captured much of the appeal of the music – and which had a secret weapon in Haley himself, the Indiana State Yodelling Champion. Yes, yodelling. Let me explain. Jimmie Rodgers was a huge, huge, star, and his gimmick was his yodelling: [excerpt “Blue Yodel (T For Texas)”: Jimmie Rodgers] Every country singer in the 1940s wanted to sound like Jimmie Rodgers – at least until Ernest Tubb and Hank Williams came along and everyone wanted to sound like them instead. And that’s the sound that Bill Haley was going for when he started the Four Aces of Western Swing. [excerpt of “Yodel Your Blues Away” by the Four Aces of Western Swing] That’s how Bill Haley started out – as a Jimmie Rodgers imitator whose greatest strength was his yodelling. It definitely doesn’t sound like the work of someone who would change music forever. You’d expect, without knowing the rest of his history, that the Four Aces of Western Swing would become a footnote to a footnote; a band who, if they were remembered at all, would be remembered for one or two singles included on some big box set compilation of vintage country music. Much of their music was derivative in the extreme, but there were a handful of more interesting tracks, some of which would still be of interest to aficionados, like “Foolish Questions”. [Excerpt of “Foolish Questions” by the Four Aces of Western Swing] But without Bill Haley’s future career, it’s unlikely there’d be any more attention paid to the Four Aces than that. They don’t really make a dent in country music history, and didn’t have the kind of career that suggested they would ever do so. Most of their records didn’t even get a proper release – Haley was signed to a label called Cowboy Records, which was a Mafia-run organisation. The first five thousand copies of every Cowboy release went to Mafia-owned jukeboxes, for free, and artists would only get royalties on any records sold after that. Since jukeboxes accounted for the majority of the money in the record business at this point, that didn’t leave much for the artists – especially as Haley had to pay his own recording and production costs, and he had to do any promotion himself – buying boxes of records at $62.50 for two hundred and fifty copies, and sending them out to DJs through the post at his own expense. It was basically a glorified vanity label, and the only reason Haley got any airplay at all was because he was himself a DJ. And after a few unsuccessful singles, he decided to give up on performance and become just a DJ. But soon Haley had a new band, which would become far more successful – Bill Haley and his… Saddlemen. Yes, the Saddlemen. By all accounts, the Saddlemen weren’t Haley’s idea. One day two musicians turned up at the radio station, saying they wanted to join his band. Billy Williamson and Johnny Grande were unhappy with the band they were performing in, and had heard Haley performing with his band on the radio. They had decided that Haley’s band would be a perfect showcase for their talents on steel guitar and accordion, and had travelled from Newark New Jersey to Chester Pennsylvania to see him. But they’d showed up to discover that he didn’t have a band any more. They eventually persuaded him that it would be worth his while going back into music, and Haley arranged for the band to get a show once a week on the station he was DJing on. While Haley was the leader on stage, they were an equal partnership – the Saddlemen, and later the Comets, split money four ways between Haley, Williamson, Grande, and the band’s manager, with any other band members who were later hired, such as drummers and bass players, being on a fixed salary paid out by the partnership. The band didn’t make much money at first — they all had other jobs, with Williamson and Grande working all sorts of odd jobs, while Haley was doing so much work at the radio station that he often ended up sleeping there. Haley worked so hard that his marriage disintegrated, but the Saddlemen had one big advantage – they had the radio station’s recording studio to use for their rehearsals, and they were able to use the studio’s recording equipment to play back their rehearsals and learn, something that very few bands had at the time. They spent two whole years rehearsing every day, and taking whatever gigs they could, and that eventually started to pay off. The Saddlemen started out making the same kind of music that the Four Aces had made. They put out decent, but not massively impressive, records on all sorts of tiny labels. Most of these recordings were called things like “Ten Gallon Stetson”, and in one case the single wasn’t even released as the Saddlemen but as Reno Browne and Her Buckaroos. This was about as generic as country and western music could get. [excerpt: “My Sweet Little Gal From Nevada” – Reno Browne and Her Buckaroos] But Bill Haley had bigger plans, inspired by the show that was on right before his. The radio had changed enormously in a very short period of time. Before the Second World War, playing records on the radio had been almost unknown, until in 1935 the first recognised DJ, Martin Block, started his radio show “Make Believe Ballroom”, in which he would pretend to be introducing all sorts of different bands. The record labels spent much of the next few years fighting the same kind of copyright actions they would later fight against the Internet — in this case aided by the Musicians’ Union, but harmed by the fact that there was no federal copyright protection for sound recordings until the 1970s. Indeed a lot of the musicians’ strikes of the 1940s were, in part, about the issue of playing records on the radio. But eventually, the record labels — especially the ones, like RCA and Columbia, which were also radio network owners — realised that being played on the radio was great advertising for their records, and stopped fighting it. And at the same time, there was a massive expansion in radio stations — and a drop in advertising money. After the war, restrictions on broadcasting were lifted, and within four years there were more than twice as many radio stations as there had been in 1946. But at the same time, the networks were no longer making as much money from advertising, which started going to TV instead. The solution was to go for cheap, local, programming — and there was little programming that was cheaper than getting a man to sit in the studio and play records. And in 1948 and 49, Columbia and RCA introduced “high fidelity” records — the 33RPM album from Columbia, and the 45RPM single from RCA. These didn’t have the problems that 78s had, of poor sound quality and quick degradation, and so the final barrier to radio stations becoming devoted to recorded music was lifted. This is, incidentally, why the earlier musicians we’ve talked about in this series are largely forgotten compared to musicians from even a few years later — their records came out on 78s. Radio stations threw out all their old 78s when they could start playing 45s, and so you’d never hear a Wynonie Harris or Louis Jordan played even as a golden oldie, because the radio stations didn’t have those records any more. They disappeared from the cultural memory, in a way the fifties acts didn’t. And the time we’re talking about now is right when that growth in the radio was at its height, and all the new radio stations were turning to recorded music. But in the early fifties, only a handful of stations were playing black music, only for an hour or two a day at most. And when they did, the DJ was always a white man — but usually a white man who could sound black, and thought himself part of black culture. Zenas Sears in Atlanta, Dewey Phillips in Memphis, Alan Freed in Cleveland, Johnny Otis in LA — all of these were people who even many of their black listeners presumed were black, playing black records, speaking in black slang. All of them, of course, used their privilege as white men to get jobs that black people simply weren’t given. But that was the closest that black people came to representation on the radio at the time, and those radio shows were precious to many of them. People would tune in from hundreds of miles away to hear those few DJs who for one hour a day were playing their music. And the show that was on before Bill Haley’s country and western show was one of those handful of R&B shows. “Judge Rhythm’s Court” was presented by a white man in his forties named Jim Reeves (not the singer of the same name) under the name of “Shorty the Bailiff”. Reeves’ theme was “Rock the Joint” by Jimmy Preston and the Prestonians: [excerpt “Rock the Joint”, Jimmy Preston and the Prestonians] Haley liked the music that Reeves was playing — in particular, he became a big fan of Big Joe Turner and Ruth Brown — and he started adding some of the R&B songs to the Saddlemen’s setlists, and noticed they went down especially well with the younger audiences. But they didn’t record those songs in their rare recording sessions for small labels. Until, that is, the Saddlemen signed up to Holiday Records. As soon as they started with Holiday, their style changed completely. Holiday, and its sister label Essex which also released Saddlemen records, were owned by Dave Miller, who also owned the pressing plant that had pressed Haley’s earlier records for the Cowboy label, and Miller had similar mob connections. Haley would later claim that while Miller always said the money to start the record labels had come from a government subsidy, in fact it had been paid by the Mafia. His labels had started up during the musicians’ union strikes of the 1940s, to put out records by non-union musicians, and Miller wasn’t too concerned about bothering to pay royalties or other such niceties. Haley also later claimed that Miller invented payola – the practice of paying DJs to play records. This was something that a lot of independent labels did in the early fifties, and was one of the ways they managed to get heard, even as many of the big labels were still cautious about the radio. Miller wanted to have big hits, and in particular he wanted to find ways to get both the white and black markets with the same records, and here he had an ally in Haley, who took a scientific approach to maximising his band’s success. Haley would try things like turning up the band’s amplifiers, on the theory that if customers couldn’t hear themselves talking, they’d be more likely to dance – and then turning the amps back down when the bar owners would complain that if the customers danced too much they wouldn’t buy as many drinks. Haley was willing to work hard and try literally anything in order to make his band a success, and wasn’t afraid to try new ideas and then throw them away if they didn’t work. This makes his discography frustrating for listeners now – it’s a long record of failed experiments, dead ends, and stylistic aberrations unlike almost any other successful artist’s. This is someone not blessed with a huge abundance of natural talent, but willing to work much harder in order to make a success of things anyway. Miller was a natural ally in this, and they hit on a formula which would be independently reinvented a couple of years later by Sam Phillips for Elvis’ records – putting out singles with a country song on one side and an R&B song on the other, to try to appeal to both white and black markets. And one song that Dave Miller heard and thought that might suit Haley’s band was “Rocket 88” This might have seemed an odd decision – after all, “Rocket 88” was a horn-driven rhythm and blues song, while the Saddlemen at this point consisted of Haley on acoustic guitar, double-bass player Al Rex, Billy Williamson on steel guitar, and Johnny Grande, an accordion player who could double on piano. This doesn’t sound the most propitious lineup for an R&B song, but along with ace session guitarist Danny Cedrone they actually managed to come up with something rather impressive: [excerpt of “Rocket 88”] Obviously it’s not a patch on the original, but translating that R&B song into a western swing style had ended up with something a little different to the hillbilly boogie one might expect. In particular, there’s the drum sound…. Oh wait, there’s no drumming there. What do you mean, you heard it? Let’s listen again… [excerpt of “Rocket 88”] There are no drums there. It’s what’s called slapback bass. Now, before we go any further, I’d better explain that there’s some terminological confusion, because “slap bass” is a similar but not identical electric bass technique, while the word “slapback” is also used for the echo used on some rockabilly records, so talking about “rockabilly slapback bass” can end up a bit like “Who’s on first?” But what I mean when I talk about slapback bass is a style of bass playing used on many rockabilly records. It’s used in other genres, too, but it basically came to rockabilly because of Bill Haley’s band, and because of the playing style Haley’s bass players Al Rex and Marshall Lytle used. With slapback bass, you’re playing a double bass, and you play it pizzicato, plucking the strings. But you don’t just pluck them, you pull them forward and let them slap right back onto the bridge of the instrument, which makes a sort of clicking sound. At the same time, you might also hit the strings to mute them – which also makes a clicking sound as well. And you might also hit the body of the instrument, making a loud thumping noise. Given the recording techniques in use at the time, slapback bass could often sound a lot like drums on a recording, though you’d never mistake one for the other in a live performance. And at a time when country music wasn’t particularly keen on the whole idea of a drum kit – which was seen as a dangerous innovation from the jazz world, not something that country and western musicians should be playing, though by this time Bob Wills had been using one in his band for a decade – having something else that could keep the beat and act as a percussion instrument was vital, and slapback bass was one of the big innovations that Haley’s band popularised. So yes, Bill Haley and the Saddlemen’s version of “Rocket 88” had no drum kit on it. Despite this, some people still cite this, rather than Jackie Brenston’s original, as “the first rock and roll record”. As we’ve said many times, though, there is no such thing. But Haley’s recording makes an attractive candidate – it’s the mythical “merging of black R&B with white country music”, which of course was something that had been happening since the very start, but which people seem to regard as something that marked out rock and roll, and it’s the first recording in this style by the person who went on to have the first really massive rock and roll hit to cross over into the pop charts. “Rocket 88” wasn’t that big hit. But Haley and Miller felt like they were on to something, and they kept trying to come up with something that would work in that style. They put out quite a few singles that were almost, but not quite, what they were after, things like a remake of “Wabash Cannonball” retitled “Jukebox Cannonball”, and then they finally hit on the perfect formula with “Rock the Joint”, which had been in Haley’s setlist off and on since he heard it on Jim Reeves’ programme. The original “Rock the Joint” had been one of the many, many, records that attempted to cash in on the rock craze ignited by Wynonie Harris’ version of “Good Rockin’ Tonight”, but it hadn’t done much outside of the Philadelphia area. Haley and the band went into the studio to record their own version, which had a very different arrangement – and listen in particular to the solo… [excerpt “Rock the Joint” – Bill Haley and the Saddlemen] That solo is played by the session musician, Danny Cedrone, who played the lead guitar on almost all of Haley’s early records. He wasn’t a member of the band – Haley kept costs low in these early years by having as small a band as possible, but hiring extra musicians for the recordings to beef up the sound — but he was someone that Haley trusted to always play the right parts on his records. Haley and Cedrone were close enough that in 1952 – after “Rocket 88” but before “Rock the Joint” – Haley gave Cedrone a song for his own band, The Esquire Boys. That song, “Rock-A-Beatin’ Boogie”, would probably have been a hit for Haley, had he recorded it at the time — instead, he didn’t record it for another three years. But that song, too, shows that he was on the right track. He was searching for something, and finding it occasionally, but not always recognising it when he had it. (Excerpt: “Rock-A-Beatin’ Boogie” by The Esquire Boys) “Rock the Joint” was a massive success, by the standards of a small indie country label, reportedly selling as much as four hundred thousand copies. But even after “Rock the Joint”, the problems continued. Haley’s next two records were “Dance With a Dolly (With a Hole in Her Stockin’)” – which was to the tune of “Buffalo Gals Won’t You Come Out Tonight?” – and “Stop Beatin’ Around the Mulberry Bush”, which was a rewrite of “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush” as a hillbilly boogie. But “Stop Beatin’ Around the Mulberry Bush” was notable for one reason – it was the first record by “Bill Haley and Haley’s Comets”, rather than by the Saddlemen. The pun on Halley’s comet was obvious, but the real importance of the name change is that it marked a definitive moment when the band stopped thinking of themselves as a country and western band and started thinking of themselves as something else – Haley didn’t pick up on the term “rock and roll” til fairly late, but it was clear that that was what he thought he should be doing now. They now had a drummer, too – Dick Richards – and a sax player. Al Rex was temporarily gone, replaced by Marshall Lytle, but Rex would be back in 1955. They were still veering wildly between rhythm and blues covers, country songs, and outright novelty records, but they were slowly narrowing down what they were trying to do, and hitting a target more and more often – they were making records about rhythm, using slang catchphrases and trying to appeal to a younger audience. And there was a genuine excitement in some of their stage performances. Haley would never be the most exciting vocalist when working in this new rock and roll idiom – he was someone who was a natural country singer and wasn’t familiar with the idioms he was incorporating into his new music, so there was a sense of distance there – but the band would make up for that on stage, with the bass player riding his bass (a common technique for getting an audience going at this point) and the saxophone player lying on his back to play solos. And that excitement shone through in “Crazy Man Crazy”, which became the Comets’ first real big hit. This was another example of the way that Haley would take a scientific approach to his band’s success. He and his band members had realised that the key to success in the record business was going to be appealing to teenagers, who were a fast-growing demographic and who, for the first time in American history, had some real buying power. But teenagers couldn’t go to the bars where country musicians played, and at the time there were very few entertainment venues of any type that catered to teenagers. So Bill Haley and the Comets played, by Johnny Grande’s count, one hundred and eighty-three school assemblies, for free. And at every show they would make note of what songs the kids liked, which ones got them dancing, which ones they were less impressed by, and they would hone their act to appeal to these kids. And one thing Haley noted was that the teenagers’ favourite slang expression was “crazy”, and so he wrote… [excerpt: Crazy Man Crazy, Bill Haley and the Comets] That went to number fifteen on the pop charts, a truly massive success for a country and western band. Marshall Lytle, the Comets’ bass player, later claimed that he had co-written the song and not got the credit, but the other Comets disputed his claims. This is another of those records that is cited as the first rock and roll record, or the first rock and roll hit, and certainly it’s the first example of a white band playing this kind of music to make the charts. And, more fairly to Haley, it’s the first example of a band using guitars as their primary instruments to get onto the charts playing something that resembles jump band music. “Crazy Man Crazy” is very clearly patterned after Louis Jordan, but those guitar fills would be played by a horn section on Jordan’s records. With Danny Cedrone’s solos, Bill Haley and the Comets were responsible for making the guitar the standard lead instrument for rock and roll, although it took a while for that to *become* the standard and we will see plenty of piano and saxophone, including on later records by Haley himself. So why was Haley doing something so different from what everyone else did? In part, I think that can be linked to the reason he didn’t stay successful very long – he wasn’t part of a scene at all. When we look at almost all the other musicians we’re talking about in this series, you’ll see that they’re all connected to other musicians. The myth of the lone genius is just that – a myth. What actually tends to happen is that the “lone genius” is someone who uses the abilities of others and then pretends it was all himself – and it almost always is a him. There’s a whole peer group there, who get conveniently erased. But the fact remains that Haley and the Comets, as a group, didn’t have any kind of peer group or community. They weren’t part of a scene, and really had no peers doing what they were doing. There was no-one to tell them what to do, or what not to do. So Bill Haley and the Comets had started something unique. But it was that very uniqueness that was to cause them problems, as we’ll see when we return to them in a few weeks…
Welcome to episode sixteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at “Crazy Man Crazy” by Bill Haley and the Comets. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. (more…)
Welcome to episode sixteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at "Crazy Man Crazy" by Bill Haley and the Comets. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Unfortunately, there aren't many good books about Bill Haley available. There are two biographies which are long out of print -- one by John Swenson which I read as a very small child, and one from the nineties by one of Haley's sons. Another of Haley's sons has a biography due out in April, which might be worthwhile, but until then the only book available is a self-published biography by Otto Fuchs. I relied on volume one of Fuchs' book for this post -- it's very good on the facts -- but it suffers from being written by someone whose first language is not English, and it also *badly* needs an editor, so I can't wholly recommend it. This box set, which is ridiculously cheap, contains almost every track anyone could want by Haley and the Comets, and it also includes the early country music sides I've excerpted here, as well as tracks by the Jodimars (a band consisting of ex-Comets). Unfortunately it doesn't contain his great late-fifties singles "Lean Jean" and "Skinny Minnie", but it has everything else. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript We've talked before about how there were multiple different musics that got lumped together in the mid-fifties under the name "rock and roll". There's rockabilly, Chicago rhythm and blues, doo-wop, New Orleans R&B, the coastal jump bands, and Northern band rock and roll. We've looked at most of these – and the ones we haven't we'll be looking at over the next few weeks – but what we haven't looked at so far is Northern band rock and roll. And in many ways that's the most interesting of all the rock and roll musics, because it's the one that at first glance has had almost no obvious impact on anything that followed, but it's also the one that first came to the attention of the white American public as rock and roll – the one that made the newspapers and got the headlines. And it's the one that had only one real example. While the other styles of music had dozens of people making them, Northern band rock and roll really only had Bill Haley and the Comets. A whole pillar of rock and roll – a whole massive strand of the contemporary view of this music – was down to the work of one band who had no peers and left no real legacy. Or at least, they seem to have left no legacy, until you look a bit closer. But before we look at where the Comets' music led, we should look at where they were coming from. Bill Haley didn't set out to be a rock and roll star, because when he started there was no such thing. He set out to be a country and western singer. He played with various country bands over the years – bands with names like The Down Homers and the Texas Range Riders – before he decided to become a band leader himself, and started his own band, the Four Aces of Western Swing. Obviously this wasn't a full Western Swing band in the style of Bob Wills' band, but they played a stripped-down version which captured much of the appeal of the music – and which had a secret weapon in Haley himself, the Indiana State Yodelling Champion. Yes, yodelling. Let me explain. Jimmie Rodgers was a huge, huge, star, and his gimmick was his yodelling: [excerpt "Blue Yodel (T For Texas)": Jimmie Rodgers] Every country singer in the 1940s wanted to sound like Jimmie Rodgers – at least until Ernest Tubb and Hank Williams came along and everyone wanted to sound like them instead. And that's the sound that Bill Haley was going for when he started the Four Aces of Western Swing. [excerpt of "Yodel Your Blues Away" by the Four Aces of Western Swing] That's how Bill Haley started out – as a Jimmie Rodgers imitator whose greatest strength was his yodelling. It definitely doesn't sound like the work of someone who would change music forever. You'd expect, without knowing the rest of his history, that the Four Aces of Western Swing would become a footnote to a footnote; a band who, if they were remembered at all, would be remembered for one or two singles included on some big box set compilation of vintage country music. Much of their music was derivative in the extreme, but there were a handful of more interesting tracks, some of which would still be of interest to aficionados, like "Foolish Questions". [Excerpt of "Foolish Questions" by the Four Aces of Western Swing] But without Bill Haley's future career, it's unlikely there'd be any more attention paid to the Four Aces than that. They don't really make a dent in country music history, and didn't have the kind of career that suggested they would ever do so. Most of their records didn't even get a proper release – Haley was signed to a label called Cowboy Records, which was a Mafia-run organisation. The first five thousand copies of every Cowboy release went to Mafia-owned jukeboxes, for free, and artists would only get royalties on any records sold after that. Since jukeboxes accounted for the majority of the money in the record business at this point, that didn't leave much for the artists – especially as Haley had to pay his own recording and production costs, and he had to do any promotion himself – buying boxes of records at $62.50 for two hundred and fifty copies, and sending them out to DJs through the post at his own expense. It was basically a glorified vanity label, and the only reason Haley got any airplay at all was because he was himself a DJ. And after a few unsuccessful singles, he decided to give up on performance and become just a DJ. But soon Haley had a new band, which would become far more successful – Bill Haley and his... Saddlemen. Yes, the Saddlemen. By all accounts, the Saddlemen weren't Haley's idea. One day two musicians turned up at the radio station, saying they wanted to join his band. Billy Williamson and Johnny Grande were unhappy with the band they were performing in, and had heard Haley performing with his band on the radio. They had decided that Haley's band would be a perfect showcase for their talents on steel guitar and accordion, and had travelled from Newark New Jersey to Chester Pennsylvania to see him. But they'd showed up to discover that he didn't have a band any more. They eventually persuaded him that it would be worth his while going back into music, and Haley arranged for the band to get a show once a week on the station he was DJing on. While Haley was the leader on stage, they were an equal partnership – the Saddlemen, and later the Comets, split money four ways between Haley, Williamson, Grande, and the band's manager, with any other band members who were later hired, such as drummers and bass players, being on a fixed salary paid out by the partnership. The band didn't make much money at first -- they all had other jobs, with Williamson and Grande working all sorts of odd jobs, while Haley was doing so much work at the radio station that he often ended up sleeping there. Haley worked so hard that his marriage disintegrated, but the Saddlemen had one big advantage – they had the radio station's recording studio to use for their rehearsals, and they were able to use the studio's recording equipment to play back their rehearsals and learn, something that very few bands had at the time. They spent two whole years rehearsing every day, and taking whatever gigs they could, and that eventually started to pay off. The Saddlemen started out making the same kind of music that the Four Aces had made. They put out decent, but not massively impressive, records on all sorts of tiny labels. Most of these recordings were called things like "Ten Gallon Stetson", and in one case the single wasn't even released as the Saddlemen but as Reno Browne and Her Buckaroos. This was about as generic as country and western music could get. [excerpt: “My Sweet Little Gal From Nevada” – Reno Browne and Her Buckaroos] But Bill Haley had bigger plans, inspired by the show that was on right before his. The radio had changed enormously in a very short period of time. Before the Second World War, playing records on the radio had been almost unknown, until in 1935 the first recognised DJ, Martin Block, started his radio show "Make Believe Ballroom", in which he would pretend to be introducing all sorts of different bands. The record labels spent much of the next few years fighting the same kind of copyright actions they would later fight against the Internet -- in this case aided by the Musicians' Union, but harmed by the fact that there was no federal copyright protection for sound recordings until the 1970s. Indeed a lot of the musicians' strikes of the 1940s were, in part, about the issue of playing records on the radio. But eventually, the record labels -- especially the ones, like RCA and Columbia, which were also radio network owners -- realised that being played on the radio was great advertising for their records, and stopped fighting it. And at the same time, there was a massive expansion in radio stations -- and a drop in advertising money. After the war, restrictions on broadcasting were lifted, and within four years there were more than twice as many radio stations as there had been in 1946. But at the same time, the networks were no longer making as much money from advertising, which started going to TV instead. The solution was to go for cheap, local, programming -- and there was little programming that was cheaper than getting a man to sit in the studio and play records. And in 1948 and 49, Columbia and RCA introduced "high fidelity" records -- the 33RPM album from Columbia, and the 45RPM single from RCA. These didn't have the problems that 78s had, of poor sound quality and quick degradation, and so the final barrier to radio stations becoming devoted to recorded music was lifted. This is, incidentally, why the earlier musicians we've talked about in this series are largely forgotten compared to musicians from even a few years later -- their records came out on 78s. Radio stations threw out all their old 78s when they could start playing 45s, and so you'd never hear a Wynonie Harris or Louis Jordan played even as a golden oldie, because the radio stations didn't have those records any more. They disappeared from the cultural memory, in a way the fifties acts didn't. And the time we're talking about now is right when that growth in the radio was at its height, and all the new radio stations were turning to recorded music. But in the early fifties, only a handful of stations were playing black music, only for an hour or two a day at most. And when they did, the DJ was always a white man -- but usually a white man who could sound black, and thought himself part of black culture. Zenas Sears in Atlanta, Dewey Phillips in Memphis, Alan Freed in Cleveland, Johnny Otis in LA -- all of these were people who even many of their black listeners presumed were black, playing black records, speaking in black slang. All of them, of course, used their privilege as white men to get jobs that black people simply weren't given. But that was the closest that black people came to representation on the radio at the time, and those radio shows were precious to many of them. People would tune in from hundreds of miles away to hear those few DJs who for one hour a day were playing their music. And the show that was on before Bill Haley's country and western show was one of those handful of R&B shows. "Judge Rhythm's Court" was presented by a white man in his forties named Jim Reeves (not the singer of the same name) under the name of "Shorty the Bailiff". Reeves' theme was "Rock the Joint" by Jimmy Preston and the Prestonians: [excerpt "Rock the Joint", Jimmy Preston and the Prestonians] Haley liked the music that Reeves was playing -- in particular, he became a big fan of Big Joe Turner and Ruth Brown -- and he started adding some of the R&B songs to the Saddlemen's setlists, and noticed they went down especially well with the younger audiences. But they didn't record those songs in their rare recording sessions for small labels. Until, that is, the Saddlemen signed up to Holiday Records. As soon as they started with Holiday, their style changed completely. Holiday, and its sister label Essex which also released Saddlemen records, were owned by Dave Miller, who also owned the pressing plant that had pressed Haley's earlier records for the Cowboy label, and Miller had similar mob connections. Haley would later claim that while Miller always said the money to start the record labels had come from a government subsidy, in fact it had been paid by the Mafia. His labels had started up during the musicians' union strikes of the 1940s, to put out records by non-union musicians, and Miller wasn't too concerned about bothering to pay royalties or other such niceties. Haley also later claimed that Miller invented payola – the practice of paying DJs to play records. This was something that a lot of independent labels did in the early fifties, and was one of the ways they managed to get heard, even as many of the big labels were still cautious about the radio. Miller wanted to have big hits, and in particular he wanted to find ways to get both the white and black markets with the same records, and here he had an ally in Haley, who took a scientific approach to maximising his band's success. Haley would try things like turning up the band's amplifiers, on the theory that if customers couldn't hear themselves talking, they'd be more likely to dance – and then turning the amps back down when the bar owners would complain that if the customers danced too much they wouldn't buy as many drinks. Haley was willing to work hard and try literally anything in order to make his band a success, and wasn't afraid to try new ideas and then throw them away if they didn't work. This makes his discography frustrating for listeners now – it's a long record of failed experiments, dead ends, and stylistic aberrations unlike almost any other successful artist's. This is someone not blessed with a huge abundance of natural talent, but willing to work much harder in order to make a success of things anyway. Miller was a natural ally in this, and they hit on a formula which would be independently reinvented a couple of years later by Sam Phillips for Elvis' records – putting out singles with a country song on one side and an R&B song on the other, to try to appeal to both white and black markets. And one song that Dave Miller heard and thought that might suit Haley's band was "Rocket 88" This might have seemed an odd decision – after all, "Rocket 88" was a horn-driven rhythm and blues song, while the Saddlemen at this point consisted of Haley on acoustic guitar, double-bass player Al Rex, Billy Williamson on steel guitar, and Johnny Grande, an accordion player who could double on piano. This doesn't sound the most propitious lineup for an R&B song, but along with ace session guitarist Danny Cedrone they actually managed to come up with something rather impressive: [excerpt of "Rocket 88"] Obviously it's not a patch on the original, but translating that R&B song into a western swing style had ended up with something a little different to the hillbilly boogie one might expect. In particular, there's the drum sound.... Oh wait, there's no drumming there. What do you mean, you heard it? Let's listen again... [excerpt of "Rocket 88"] There are no drums there. It's what's called slapback bass. Now, before we go any further, I'd better explain that there's some terminological confusion, because "slap bass" is a similar but not identical electric bass technique, while the word "slapback" is also used for the echo used on some rockabilly records, so talking about "rockabilly slapback bass" can end up a bit like "Who's on first?" But what I mean when I talk about slapback bass is a style of bass playing used on many rockabilly records. It's used in other genres, too, but it basically came to rockabilly because of Bill Haley's band, and because of the playing style Haley's bass players Al Rex and Marshall Lytle used. With slapback bass, you're playing a double bass, and you play it pizzicato, plucking the strings. But you don't just pluck them, you pull them forward and let them slap right back onto the bridge of the instrument, which makes a sort of clicking sound. At the same time, you might also hit the strings to mute them – which also makes a clicking sound as well. And you might also hit the body of the instrument, making a loud thumping noise. Given the recording techniques in use at the time, slapback bass could often sound a lot like drums on a recording, though you'd never mistake one for the other in a live performance. And at a time when country music wasn't particularly keen on the whole idea of a drum kit – which was seen as a dangerous innovation from the jazz world, not something that country and western musicians should be playing, though by this time Bob Wills had been using one in his band for a decade – having something else that could keep the beat and act as a percussion instrument was vital, and slapback bass was one of the big innovations that Haley's band popularised. So yes, Bill Haley and the Saddlemen's version of "Rocket 88" had no drum kit on it. Despite this, some people still cite this, rather than Jackie Brenston's original, as "the first rock and roll record". As we've said many times, though, there is no such thing. But Haley's recording makes an attractive candidate – it's the mythical "merging of black R&B with white country music", which of course was something that had been happening since the very start, but which people seem to regard as something that marked out rock and roll, and it's the first recording in this style by the person who went on to have the first really massive rock and roll hit to cross over into the pop charts. "Rocket 88" wasn't that big hit. But Haley and Miller felt like they were on to something, and they kept trying to come up with something that would work in that style. They put out quite a few singles that were almost, but not quite, what they were after, things like a remake of "Wabash Cannonball" retitled "Jukebox Cannonball", and then they finally hit on the perfect formula with "Rock the Joint", which had been in Haley's setlist off and on since he heard it on Jim Reeves' programme. The original "Rock the Joint" had been one of the many, many, records that attempted to cash in on the rock craze ignited by Wynonie Harris' version of "Good Rockin' Tonight", but it hadn't done much outside of the Philadelphia area. Haley and the band went into the studio to record their own version, which had a very different arrangement – and listen in particular to the solo... [excerpt "Rock the Joint" – Bill Haley and the Saddlemen] That solo is played by the session musician, Danny Cedrone, who played the lead guitar on almost all of Haley's early records. He wasn't a member of the band – Haley kept costs low in these early years by having as small a band as possible, but hiring extra musicians for the recordings to beef up the sound -- but he was someone that Haley trusted to always play the right parts on his records. Haley and Cedrone were close enough that in 1952 – after "Rocket 88" but before "Rock the Joint" – Haley gave Cedrone a song for his own band, The Esquire Boys. That song, "Rock-A-Beatin' Boogie", would probably have been a hit for Haley, had he recorded it at the time -- instead, he didn't record it for another three years. But that song, too, shows that he was on the right track. He was searching for something, and finding it occasionally, but not always recognising it when he had it. (Excerpt: "Rock-A-Beatin' Boogie" by The Esquire Boys) "Rock the Joint" was a massive success, by the standards of a small indie country label, reportedly selling as much as four hundred thousand copies. But even after "Rock the Joint", the problems continued. Haley's next two records were "Dance With a Dolly (With a Hole in Her Stockin')" – which was to the tune of "Buffalo Gals Won't You Come Out Tonight?" – and "Stop Beatin' Around the Mulberry Bush", which was a rewrite of "Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush" as a hillbilly boogie. But "Stop Beatin' Around the Mulberry Bush" was notable for one reason – it was the first record by "Bill Haley and Haley's Comets", rather than by the Saddlemen. The pun on Halley's comet was obvious, but the real importance of the name change is that it marked a definitive moment when the band stopped thinking of themselves as a country and western band and started thinking of themselves as something else – Haley didn't pick up on the term "rock and roll" til fairly late, but it was clear that that was what he thought he should be doing now. They now had a drummer, too – Dick Richards – and a sax player. Al Rex was temporarily gone, replaced by Marshall Lytle, but Rex would be back in 1955. They were still veering wildly between rhythm and blues covers, country songs, and outright novelty records, but they were slowly narrowing down what they were trying to do, and hitting a target more and more often – they were making records about rhythm, using slang catchphrases and trying to appeal to a younger audience. And there was a genuine excitement in some of their stage performances. Haley would never be the most exciting vocalist when working in this new rock and roll idiom – he was someone who was a natural country singer and wasn't familiar with the idioms he was incorporating into his new music, so there was a sense of distance there – but the band would make up for that on stage, with the bass player riding his bass (a common technique for getting an audience going at this point) and the saxophone player lying on his back to play solos. And that excitement shone through in "Crazy Man Crazy", which became the Comets' first real big hit. This was another example of the way that Haley would take a scientific approach to his band's success. He and his band members had realised that the key to success in the record business was going to be appealing to teenagers, who were a fast-growing demographic and who, for the first time in American history, had some real buying power. But teenagers couldn't go to the bars where country musicians played, and at the time there were very few entertainment venues of any type that catered to teenagers. So Bill Haley and the Comets played, by Johnny Grande's count, one hundred and eighty-three school assemblies, for free. And at every show they would make note of what songs the kids liked, which ones got them dancing, which ones they were less impressed by, and they would hone their act to appeal to these kids. And one thing Haley noted was that the teenagers' favourite slang expression was "crazy", and so he wrote... [excerpt: Crazy Man Crazy, Bill Haley and the Comets] That went to number fifteen on the pop charts, a truly massive success for a country and western band. Marshall Lytle, the Comets' bass player, later claimed that he had co-written the song and not got the credit, but the other Comets disputed his claims. This is another of those records that is cited as the first rock and roll record, or the first rock and roll hit, and certainly it's the first example of a white band playing this kind of music to make the charts. And, more fairly to Haley, it's the first example of a band using guitars as their primary instruments to get onto the charts playing something that resembles jump band music. "Crazy Man Crazy" is very clearly patterned after Louis Jordan, but those guitar fills would be played by a horn section on Jordan's records. With Danny Cedrone's solos, Bill Haley and the Comets were responsible for making the guitar the standard lead instrument for rock and roll, although it took a while for that to *become* the standard and we will see plenty of piano and saxophone, including on later records by Haley himself. So why was Haley doing something so different from what everyone else did? In part, I think that can be linked to the reason he didn't stay successful very long – he wasn't part of a scene at all. When we look at almost all the other musicians we're talking about in this series, you'll see that they're all connected to other musicians. The myth of the lone genius is just that – a myth. What actually tends to happen is that the "lone genius" is someone who uses the abilities of others and then pretends it was all himself – and it almost always is a him. There's a whole peer group there, who get conveniently erased. But the fact remains that Haley and the Comets, as a group, didn't have any kind of peer group or community. They weren't part of a scene, and really had no peers doing what they were doing. There was no-one to tell them what to do, or what not to do. So Bill Haley and the Comets had started something unique. But it was that very uniqueness that was to cause them problems, as we'll see when we return to them in a few weeks...
Welcome to episode eleven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at “Rocket 88” by Jackie Brenston and the Delta Cats. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Both “Rocket 88” and the Howlin’ Wolf tune used here are on Memphis Vol. 3 – Recordings from the Legendary Sun Studios, the third in a series of ludicrously cheap ten-CD box sets (this one currently selling on Amazon for £12!) which between them cover every single and B-side recorded in Sam Phillips’ studio in the 1950s. Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ‘n’ Roll by Peter Guralnick is the definitive biography of Phillips. A content warning, though — the book contains racial slurs, always in quoted speech and used to illustrate historical racism, but some may still find that upsetting. Ike Turner wrote an autobiography, but I’m not going to recommend a book which exists solely to minimise his abuse of his wife. However, Turner was also interviewed by ghostwriter Kurt Loder for Tina Turner’s autobiography I, Tina, and his description of the recording of “Rocket 88” is in there, so if you want to hear his take on the story, buy that. Content Note As you may have noticed from the above, this episode deals with Ike Turner, a man who is now as widely known for his spousal abuse as for his music. I mention this disclaimer episode in the podcast, and everything there goes for this episode. This episode is about the music, and about music he made before his horrific acts, but I don’t want to give the impression I’m condoning or ignoring those. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript There is, of course, no actual “first rock and roll record”, and if there is, it’s not “Rocket 88”. But nonetheless, “Rocket 88” has been officially anointed “the first rock and roll record ever made” by generations of white male music journalists, and so we need to talk about it. And it is, actually, quite a good record of its type, even if not especially innovative. Before I talk about this, go and listen if you haven’t already to the disclaimer episode I did after episode two (I’ll link it in the show notes) about my attitudes towards misogynistic abusers who happen also to have played on some great records. I don’t want to repeat all that here, but at the same time I definitely want to go on record that I’m not an admirer of Ike Turner. Because as it is, here at the official “beginning of rock” according to thousands of attempts to set a canon, we also have the beginning of rock being created by abusive men. Literally at the beginning in this case — Ike Turner plays the opening piano part. And here we see how impossible it is to untangle the work of people like him from this history, as that piano part is one that would echo down the ages, becoming part of the bloodstream of popular music. Anyway, enough about that. To talk about “Rocket 88” we first have to talk about the Honeydrippers, and about the Liggins Brothers. Joe Liggins was a piano player, with a small-time band called Sammy Franklin and the California Rhythm Rascals. In 1942, Liggins wrote a song called “The Honeydripper”, which the California Rhythm Rascals used to perform quite regularly. It’s a pleasant, enjoyable, boogie-flavoured jump band piece, which had a very catchy, unusual, riff, based loosely around the riff from “Shortenin’ Bread”. It was mostly just an excuse for soloing and extended improvisation — sometimes it could last for fifteen minutes or more when performed live — but it was surprisingly catchy nonetheless. Liggins believed it had some commercial potential, so he went to his boss, Franklin, with a deal. He said he thought it could be a big hit, and they should make a record of it. If Sammy Franklin would pay $500 towards the cost of making the record, Liggins would give Franklin half the composer rights for the song. Sammy Franklin turned him down, and Liggins believed in his song so much that he quit the band and formed his own jump band, which he named after the song. Eventually, three years later, Joe Liggins and the Honeydrippers went into the studio and recorded “The Honeydripper Parts 1 & 2” for a small indie label, Exclusive Records, and it was released in April 1945. [Excerpt: “The Honeydripper” by Joe Liggins and the Honeydrippers] It doesn’t sound that much now — pleasant enough, but hardly the most exceptional record ever. But that’s with seventy-three years of hindsight. It went to number thirteen on the pop charts — which is a remarkable feat for an R&B record in itself — but its performance on the R&B charts was just ludicrous. It went to number one on the race charts (later the R&B charts) for eighteen weeks straight, from September 1945 through January 1946. The only reason it didn’t stay at the top for longer was because the record label simply couldn’t keep up with the demand, and it was replaced at number one by Louis Jordan, but at number two was Jimmie Lunceford playing… “The Honeydripper” [Excerpt: Jimmie Lunceford’s version of “The Honeydripper”]. At number three, meanwhile, was Roosevelt Sykes playing… “The Honeydripper”. Later in 1946, Cab Calloway also had a number three hit with the song. Joe Liggins and the Honeydrippers’ version, alone, sold over two million copies in 1945 and 46, and it still, seventy-three years later, is joint holder of the title for longest stay at number one in the race or R&B charts (“Choo Choo Ch’Boogie” is the other joint holder, and that came a few months later). It’s likely that nobody will ever beat that record. “The Honeydripper” was a sensation. Meanwhile the California Rhythm Rascals had renamed themselves Sammy Franklin and his Atomics, in an attempt to sound more up to date and modern, with the atomic bomb having so recently gone off. They recorded their own version of “The Honeydripper”. It sank without trace — but you’ll remember from last week that that record launched the production career of Ralph Bass. “The Honeydripper” made money and careers for everyone in the music industry, except for Sammy Franklin. Sammy Franklin may not have been the single most unwise person in the history of rock and roll — he didn’t turn down Elvis or quit the Beatles or anything like that — but still, one has to imagine that he spent the whole rest of his life regretting that he hadn’t just spent that five hundred dollars. Joe Liggins never had another success as big as “The Honeydripper”, but he had a few minor successes to go along with it, and that was enough for him to give his brother Jimmy a job as the band’s driver — at that time, it was *very* rare for bands to have actual employees, rather than doing their own driving and carrying their own instruments, and for Jimmy it was certainly an improvement on his previous career as a boxer under the name Kid Zulu. But Jimmy also played a bit of guitar, and so he decided, inspired by his brother’s success, to try his hand at his own music career, and he formed his own jump band, the Drops of Joy. The Drops of Joy signed up to Specialty Records, a label we’ll be hearing a *lot* about in upcoming episodes. But the Drops of Joy would normally not be a band that we’d be talking about. They weren’t the most imaginative or innovative band by a long way, and they only had minor hits. Their songs were mostly generic boogies, called things like “Saturday Night Boogie Woogie Man” or “Night Life Boogie” — all perfectly good music of its type, but nothing that set the world on fire. But one B-side, “Cadillac Boogie” was, indirectly, responsible for a great deal of the music that would follow… [Excerpt “Cadillac Boogie” by Jimmy Liggins and the Drops of Joy] To see why “Cadillac Boogie” was a big influence, we now need to turn to Sam Phillips. It’s safe to say that he’s one of the two or three most important people in the history of rock and roll music — and it’s also safe to say that even if rock and roll had never happened at all, we’d still be talking about Sam Phillips because of his influence on country and blues music. He may well have been the single most important record producer of the 1950s — he’s as important to the history of American music as anyone who ever lived. Phillips had started out as a DJ, but had moved sideways from there into recording bands for radio sessions. He had very strong opinions about the way things should sound, and he was willing to work hard to get the sound the way he wanted it. In particular, when he recorded big bands for sessions, he would mic the rhythm section far more than was traditional — when you heard a big band recorded by Sam Phillips, you could hear the guitar and the bass in a way you couldn’t when you heard that band on the records. He had a real ear for sound, but he also had an ear for *performance*. Like a lot of the men we’re dealing with at this point, Sam Phillips was a white man who was motivated by a deeply-felt anger at racial injustice, which expressed itself as a belief that if other white people could just see the humanity, and the talent, in black people the way he could, the world would be a much better place. The racial attitudes of people like him can seem a little patronising these days, as if the problems in America were just down to a few people’s feelings, and if those feelings could be changed everything would be better, but given the utterly horrendous attitudes expressed by the people around him, Phillips was at least partly right — if he could get his fellow white people to just stop being vicious towards black people, well, that wouldn’t fix all the problems by any means, but it would have been a good start. He was also someone who was very much of the opinion that if a problem needed fixing, he should try to fix it himself. During the Cuban missile crisis he decided that since Castro seemed a reasonable sort of person and a good progressive like Phillips himself, the whole thing could be sorted out if a decent American just had a one-to-one chat with him. And since no-one else was doing that, he decided he might as well do it himself. So he phoned Cuba, and while he couldn’t get through to Fidel Castro himself, he did get through to Castro’s brother Raul, and had a long conversation with him. History does not relate whether it was Sam Phillips’ intervention that saved the world from nuclear war. And what Sam Phillips thought he could do to stop the evil of racism — and also to improve the world in other ways — was to capture the music that the black people he saw around him in Memphis were making. The world seemed to him to be full of talented, idiosyncratic, people who were making music like nothing else he had heard. And so he started Memphis Recording Services, with the help of his mistress Marion Keisker, who acted as his assistant and was herself a popular radio presenter. Both kept their jobs at the radio station while starting the business, and they tried to get the business on a sound financial footing by recording things like weddings and funerals (yes, funerals, they’d mic up the funeral home and get a recording of the service which they’d put on an acetate disc — apparently this was a popular service). But the real purpose of the business was to be somewhere where real musicians could come and record. Phillips didn’t have a record label, but he had arrangements with a couple of small labels to send them recordings, and sometimes those labels would put the recordings out. Musicians of all kinds would come into Memphis Recording Services, and Phillips would spend hours trying to get their sound onto disc and, later, tape. Not trying to perfect it, but trying to get the most authentic version of that person’s artistry onto the tape. In 1951 Memphis Recording Services hadn’t been open that long, and Phillips had barely recorded anything worth a listen — but he *had* made some recordings with a local DJ called Riley King, who had recently started going by the name “Blues Boy”, or just “B.B.” for short. To my mind they’re actually some of King’s best material — much more my kind of thing than the later recordings that made his name. Here, for example, is one of those recordings that wasn’t released at the time, but has made compilations later — “Pray For You”: [excerpt: B.B. King “Pray For You”] That was the kind of music that Sam Phillips liked, and it’s the kind of thing I like too. The piano player there, incidentally, was a young man called Johnny Ace, about whom we’ll hear a lot more later. A couple of years earlier, King had met a young musician in Clarksdale Mississippi called Ike Turner, who led a big band called the Top Hatters. Turner had sat in with King on the piano and had impressed King with his ability, and King had even stopped over a couple of nights at Turner’s house. The two hadn’t stayed in touch, but they both liked each other. The Top Hatters had later split up into two bands — there was the Dukes of Swing, who played classy big band music, and the Kings of Rhythm, who were a jump band after the Louis Jordan fashion, led by Turner. One day, the Kings of Rhythm were coming back from a gig when they noticed a large number of cars parked outside a venue which had a poster advertising one “B.B. King”. Ike Turner had noticed that name on posters before, but didn’t know who it was, but thought he should check out why there were so many people wanting to see him. The band stopped and went inside, and discovered that B.B. King was Ike Turner’s old acquaintance Riley. Turner asked King if his band could get up and play a number, and King let him, and was hugely impressed, telling Turner that he should make records. Turner said he’d like to, but he had no idea how one actually went about making a record. King said that the way he did it was there was a guy in Memphis called Sam who recorded him. King would call Sam up and tell him to give Turner a call on Monday. Monday came around, and indeed Sam Phillips did call Ike Turner on the telephone, and asked when they could come up to record. “Straight away”, Ike replied, and they set off — five men, two saxes, a guitar, and a drum kit in a single car, with the guitar amp and bass drum strapped to the roof. The drive from Mississippi to Memphis was not without incident — they got arrested and fined, ostensibly for a traffic violation but actually for being black in the deep South, and they also got a flat tyre, and when they changed it the guitar amp fell on the road. At least, that’s one story as to what happened to the guitar amp — like everything when it comes to this music, there are three or four different stories told by different people, but that’s definitely one of them. Anyway, when they got to the studio, and got their gear set up, the amplifier made a strange sound. The band were horrified — their big break, and it was all going to be destroyed because their amp was making this horrible dirty sound. The speaker cone had been damaged. Sam Phillips, however, was very much not horrified. He was delighted. He got some brown paper from the restaurant next door to stuff inside as a temporary repair, but said that the damaged amp would sound different, and different, to Sam Phillips at least, was always good. The song they chose to record that day was one that was written by the saxophone player, Jackie Brenston. Well, I say written by… as with so many of the songs we’ve seen here, the song was not so much written as remembered (as indeed that line is — I remembered it from Leslie Halliwell, talking about Talbot Rothwell’s scripts for the Carry On films, so I thought I should give it credit here). Specifically, he was remembering “Cadillac Boogie”, as you can tell if you listen to it for even a few seconds: [insert a chunk of Rocket 88] Now the main difference in the songwriting is simply the car that’s being talked about — the 88 was a new, exciting, model, and Brenston made the song more hip and current as a result. But *musically* there are a few things of note here. Firstly, there’s the piano part, written and played by Ike Turner — that part is one that Little Richard adored, to the point that he copied it on the intro to “Good Golly Miss Molly”. Compare and contrast; here’s the intro to “Rocket 88”: [intro to Rocket 88] and here’s Little Richard playing “Good Golly Miss Molly”: [intro to Good Golly Miss Molly] There’s another difference as well — the guitar sound. There’s distortion all over it, thanks to that cone. Now, this probably won’t even have been something that anyone listening at the time noticed — if you’re listening in the context of early fifties R&B, on the poor-quality 78 RPM discs that the music was released on, you’d probably think that buzzing boogie line was a baritone sax — the line it’s playing is the kind of thing that a horn would normally play, and the distortion sounds the same way as many of the distorted sax lines at the time did. But that was enough that when white music critics in the seventies were looking for a “first rock and roll record”, they latched on to this one — because in the seventies rock and roll *meant* distorted guitar. When the record came out, Ike Turner was horrified — because he’d assumed it would be released as by Ike Turner and his Kings of Rhythm, but instead it was under the name “Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats”. And the record was successful enough to make Jackie Brenston decide to quit the Kings of Rhythm and go solo. He released a few more singles, mostly along the same lines as Rocket 88, but they did nothing. Brenston’s solo career fizzled out quite quickly, and he joined the backing band for Lowell Fulson, the blues star. After a couple of years with Fulson, he returned to play with Ike Turner’s band. He stayed with Turner from 1955 through 1962, a sideman once more, and Turner wouldn’t let Brenston sing his hit on stage — he was never going to be upstaged by his sax player again. Eventually Jackie Brenston became an alcoholic, and from 1963 until his death in 1979, he worked as a part-time truck driver, never seeing any recognition for his part in starting rock and roll. But “Rocket 88” had repercussions for a lot of other people, even if it was only a one-off hit for Brenston. For Ike Turner, after “Rocket 88” was released, half of his band quit and stayed with Brenston, so for a long time he was without a full band. He started to work for Phillips as a talent scout and musician, and it was Turner who brought Phillips several artists, including the artist who Phillips later claimed was the greatest artist and greatest human being he ever worked with — Howlin’ Wolf. [excerpt “How Many More Years” — version from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lTpcKnp-NQ ] That’s a recording that was made at Phillips’ studio, with Turner on piano. Phillips licensed several singles by Howlin’ Wolf and others to Chess Records, but then the Chess brothers, the owners of that label, used contractual shenanigans to cut Phillips out of the loop and record the Wolf directly. So Phillips made a resolution to start his own record label, where no-one would steal his artists. Sun Records was born out of this frustration. Meanwhile, Ike Turner resolved that he would never again see his name removed from the credits for a record he was on. When he got a new Kings of Rhythm together, he switched from playing piano, where you’re sat at the side of the stage, to playing guitar, where you can be up front and in the spotlight And when the Kings of Rhythm got a new singer, Annie-Mae Bullock, Turner made sure he would always have equal billing, by giving her his surname as a stage name, so any records she made would be by the new act, “Ike and Tina Turner”. And finally, “Rocket 88” was going to have a profound effect on the career of one man who would later make a big difference to rock and roll. The lead singer of the country band the Saddlemen — a singer who was best known as a champion yodeller — was also working as a DJ for a small Pennsylvania station, and he noticed that Louis Jordan records were popular among the country audience, and he decided to start incorporating a Louis Jordan style in his own music But Jordan’s records were so popular with a crossover audience that when the Saddlemen came to make their first records in this new style, they chose to cover something by someone other than Jordan – someone that hadn’t crossed over into the country market yet. And so they chose to record “Rocket 88”, which had been a big R&B hit but hadn’t broken through into the white audience. Their version of the song is *also* credited by some as the first rock and roll record. But it’ll be a few weeks until Bill Haley becomes a full part of our story…
Welcome to episode eleven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at “Rocket 88” by Jackie Brenston and the Delta Cats. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. (more…)
Welcome to episode eleven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at "Rocket 88" by Jackie Brenston and the Delta Cats. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Both "Rocket 88" and the Howlin' Wolf tune used here are on Memphis Vol. 3 - Recordings from the Legendary Sun Studios, the third in a series of ludicrously cheap ten-CD box sets (this one currently selling on Amazon for £12!) which between them cover every single and B-side recorded in Sam Phillips' studio in the 1950s. Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock 'n' Roll by Peter Guralnick is the definitive biography of Phillips. A content warning, though -- the book contains racial slurs, always in quoted speech and used to illustrate historical racism, but some may still find that upsetting. Ike Turner wrote an autobiography, but I'm not going to recommend a book which exists solely to minimise his abuse of his wife. However, Turner was also interviewed by ghostwriter Kurt Loder for Tina Turner's autobiography I, Tina, and his description of the recording of "Rocket 88" is in there, so if you want to hear his take on the story, buy that. Content Note As you may have noticed from the above, this episode deals with Ike Turner, a man who is now as widely known for his spousal abuse as for his music. I mention this disclaimer episode in the podcast, and everything there goes for this episode. This episode is about the music, and about music he made before his horrific acts, but I don't want to give the impression I'm condoning or ignoring those. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript There is, of course, no actual "first rock and roll record", and if there is, it's not "Rocket 88". But nonetheless, "Rocket 88" has been officially anointed "the first rock and roll record ever made" by generations of white male music journalists, and so we need to talk about it. And it is, actually, quite a good record of its type, even if not especially innovative. Before I talk about this, go and listen if you haven't already to the disclaimer episode I did after episode two (I'll link it in the show notes) about my attitudes towards misogynistic abusers who happen also to have played on some great records. I don't want to repeat all that here, but at the same time I definitely want to go on record that I'm not an admirer of Ike Turner. Because as it is, here at the official "beginning of rock" according to thousands of attempts to set a canon, we also have the beginning of rock being created by abusive men. Literally at the beginning in this case -- Ike Turner plays the opening piano part. And here we see how impossible it is to untangle the work of people like him from this history, as that piano part is one that would echo down the ages, becoming part of the bloodstream of popular music. Anyway, enough about that. To talk about "Rocket 88" we first have to talk about the Honeydrippers, and about the Liggins Brothers. Joe Liggins was a piano player, with a small-time band called Sammy Franklin and the California Rhythm Rascals. In 1942, Liggins wrote a song called "The Honeydripper", which the California Rhythm Rascals used to perform quite regularly. It's a pleasant, enjoyable, boogie-flavoured jump band piece, which had a very catchy, unusual, riff, based loosely around the riff from "Shortenin' Bread". It was mostly just an excuse for soloing and extended improvisation -- sometimes it could last for fifteen minutes or more when performed live -- but it was surprisingly catchy nonetheless. Liggins believed it had some commercial potential, so he went to his boss, Franklin, with a deal. He said he thought it could be a big hit, and they should make a record of it. If Sammy Franklin would pay $500 towards the cost of making the record, Liggins would give Franklin half the composer rights for the song. Sammy Franklin turned him down, and Liggins believed in his song so much that he quit the band and formed his own jump band, which he named after the song. Eventually, three years later, Joe Liggins and the Honeydrippers went into the studio and recorded "The Honeydripper Parts 1 & 2" for a small indie label, Exclusive Records, and it was released in April 1945. [Excerpt: "The Honeydripper" by Joe Liggins and the Honeydrippers] It doesn't sound that much now -- pleasant enough, but hardly the most exceptional record ever. But that's with seventy-three years of hindsight. It went to number thirteen on the pop charts -- which is a remarkable feat for an R&B record in itself -- but its performance on the R&B charts was just ludicrous. It went to number one on the race charts (later the R&B charts) for eighteen weeks straight, from September 1945 through January 1946. The only reason it didn't stay at the top for longer was because the record label simply couldn't keep up with the demand, and it was replaced at number one by Louis Jordan, but at number two was Jimmie Lunceford playing... "The Honeydripper" [Excerpt: Jimmie Lunceford's version of "The Honeydripper"]. At number three, meanwhile, was Roosevelt Sykes playing... "The Honeydripper". Later in 1946, Cab Calloway also had a number three hit with the song. Joe Liggins and the Honeydrippers' version, alone, sold over two million copies in 1945 and 46, and it still, seventy-three years later, is joint holder of the title for longest stay at number one in the race or R&B charts ("Choo Choo Ch'Boogie" is the other joint holder, and that came a few months later). It's likely that nobody will ever beat that record. "The Honeydripper" was a sensation. Meanwhile the California Rhythm Rascals had renamed themselves Sammy Franklin and his Atomics, in an attempt to sound more up to date and modern, with the atomic bomb having so recently gone off. They recorded their own version of "The Honeydripper". It sank without trace -- but you'll remember from last week that that record launched the production career of Ralph Bass. "The Honeydripper" made money and careers for everyone in the music industry, except for Sammy Franklin. Sammy Franklin may not have been the single most unwise person in the history of rock and roll -- he didn't turn down Elvis or quit the Beatles or anything like that -- but still, one has to imagine that he spent the whole rest of his life regretting that he hadn't just spent that five hundred dollars. Joe Liggins never had another success as big as "The Honeydripper", but he had a few minor successes to go along with it, and that was enough for him to give his brother Jimmy a job as the band's driver -- at that time, it was *very* rare for bands to have actual employees, rather than doing their own driving and carrying their own instruments, and for Jimmy it was certainly an improvement on his previous career as a boxer under the name Kid Zulu. But Jimmy also played a bit of guitar, and so he decided, inspired by his brother's success, to try his hand at his own music career, and he formed his own jump band, the Drops of Joy. The Drops of Joy signed up to Specialty Records, a label we'll be hearing a *lot* about in upcoming episodes. But the Drops of Joy would normally not be a band that we'd be talking about. They weren't the most imaginative or innovative band by a long way, and they only had minor hits. Their songs were mostly generic boogies, called things like "Saturday Night Boogie Woogie Man" or "Night Life Boogie" -- all perfectly good music of its type, but nothing that set the world on fire. But one B-side, "Cadillac Boogie" was, indirectly, responsible for a great deal of the music that would follow... [Excerpt "Cadillac Boogie" by Jimmy Liggins and the Drops of Joy] To see why "Cadillac Boogie" was a big influence, we now need to turn to Sam Phillips. It's safe to say that he's one of the two or three most important people in the history of rock and roll music -- and it's also safe to say that even if rock and roll had never happened at all, we'd still be talking about Sam Phillips because of his influence on country and blues music. He may well have been the single most important record producer of the 1950s -- he's as important to the history of American music as anyone who ever lived. Phillips had started out as a DJ, but had moved sideways from there into recording bands for radio sessions. He had very strong opinions about the way things should sound, and he was willing to work hard to get the sound the way he wanted it. In particular, when he recorded big bands for sessions, he would mic the rhythm section far more than was traditional -- when you heard a big band recorded by Sam Phillips, you could hear the guitar and the bass in a way you couldn't when you heard that band on the records. He had a real ear for sound, but he also had an ear for *performance*. Like a lot of the men we're dealing with at this point, Sam Phillips was a white man who was motivated by a deeply-felt anger at racial injustice, which expressed itself as a belief that if other white people could just see the humanity, and the talent, in black people the way he could, the world would be a much better place. The racial attitudes of people like him can seem a little patronising these days, as if the problems in America were just down to a few people's feelings, and if those feelings could be changed everything would be better, but given the utterly horrendous attitudes expressed by the people around him, Phillips was at least partly right -- if he could get his fellow white people to just stop being vicious towards black people, well, that wouldn't fix all the problems by any means, but it would have been a good start. He was also someone who was very much of the opinion that if a problem needed fixing, he should try to fix it himself. During the Cuban missile crisis he decided that since Castro seemed a reasonable sort of person and a good progressive like Phillips himself, the whole thing could be sorted out if a decent American just had a one-to-one chat with him. And since no-one else was doing that, he decided he might as well do it himself. So he phoned Cuba, and while he couldn't get through to Fidel Castro himself, he did get through to Castro's brother Raul, and had a long conversation with him. History does not relate whether it was Sam Phillips' intervention that saved the world from nuclear war. And what Sam Phillips thought he could do to stop the evil of racism -- and also to improve the world in other ways -- was to capture the music that the black people he saw around him in Memphis were making. The world seemed to him to be full of talented, idiosyncratic, people who were making music like nothing else he had heard. And so he started Memphis Recording Services, with the help of his mistress Marion Keisker, who acted as his assistant and was herself a popular radio presenter. Both kept their jobs at the radio station while starting the business, and they tried to get the business on a sound financial footing by recording things like weddings and funerals (yes, funerals, they'd mic up the funeral home and get a recording of the service which they'd put on an acetate disc -- apparently this was a popular service). But the real purpose of the business was to be somewhere where real musicians could come and record. Phillips didn't have a record label, but he had arrangements with a couple of small labels to send them recordings, and sometimes those labels would put the recordings out. Musicians of all kinds would come into Memphis Recording Services, and Phillips would spend hours trying to get their sound onto disc and, later, tape. Not trying to perfect it, but trying to get the most authentic version of that person's artistry onto the tape. In 1951 Memphis Recording Services hadn't been open that long, and Phillips had barely recorded anything worth a listen -- but he *had* made some recordings with a local DJ called Riley King, who had recently started going by the name "Blues Boy", or just "B.B." for short. To my mind they're actually some of King's best material -- much more my kind of thing than the later recordings that made his name. Here, for example, is one of those recordings that wasn't released at the time, but has made compilations later -- "Pray For You": [excerpt: B.B. King "Pray For You"] That was the kind of music that Sam Phillips liked, and it's the kind of thing I like too. The piano player there, incidentally, was a young man called Johnny Ace, about whom we'll hear a lot more later. A couple of years earlier, King had met a young musician in Clarksdale Mississippi called Ike Turner, who led a big band called the Top Hatters. Turner had sat in with King on the piano and had impressed King with his ability, and King had even stopped over a couple of nights at Turner's house. The two hadn't stayed in touch, but they both liked each other. The Top Hatters had later split up into two bands -- there was the Dukes of Swing, who played classy big band music, and the Kings of Rhythm, who were a jump band after the Louis Jordan fashion, led by Turner. One day, the Kings of Rhythm were coming back from a gig when they noticed a large number of cars parked outside a venue which had a poster advertising one "B.B. King". Ike Turner had noticed that name on posters before, but didn't know who it was, but thought he should check out why there were so many people wanting to see him. The band stopped and went inside, and discovered that B.B. King was Ike Turner's old acquaintance Riley. Turner asked King if his band could get up and play a number, and King let him, and was hugely impressed, telling Turner that he should make records. Turner said he'd like to, but he had no idea how one actually went about making a record. King said that the way he did it was there was a guy in Memphis called Sam who recorded him. King would call Sam up and tell him to give Turner a call on Monday. Monday came around, and indeed Sam Phillips did call Ike Turner on the telephone, and asked when they could come up to record. "Straight away", Ike replied, and they set off -- five men, two saxes, a guitar, and a drum kit in a single car, with the guitar amp and bass drum strapped to the roof. The drive from Mississippi to Memphis was not without incident -- they got arrested and fined, ostensibly for a traffic violation but actually for being black in the deep South, and they also got a flat tyre, and when they changed it the guitar amp fell on the road. At least, that's one story as to what happened to the guitar amp -- like everything when it comes to this music, there are three or four different stories told by different people, but that's definitely one of them. Anyway, when they got to the studio, and got their gear set up, the amplifier made a strange sound. The band were horrified -- their big break, and it was all going to be destroyed because their amp was making this horrible dirty sound. The speaker cone had been damaged. Sam Phillips, however, was very much not horrified. He was delighted. He got some brown paper from the restaurant next door to stuff inside as a temporary repair, but said that the damaged amp would sound different, and different, to Sam Phillips at least, was always good. The song they chose to record that day was one that was written by the saxophone player, Jackie Brenston. Well, I say written by… as with so many of the songs we've seen here, the song was not so much written as remembered (as indeed that line is -- I remembered it from Leslie Halliwell, talking about Talbot Rothwell's scripts for the Carry On films, so I thought I should give it credit here). Specifically, he was remembering "Cadillac Boogie", as you can tell if you listen to it for even a few seconds: [insert a chunk of Rocket 88] Now the main difference in the songwriting is simply the car that's being talked about -- the 88 was a new, exciting, model, and Brenston made the song more hip and current as a result. But *musically* there are a few things of note here. Firstly, there's the piano part, written and played by Ike Turner -- that part is one that Little Richard adored, to the point that he copied it on the intro to “Good Golly Miss Molly”. Compare and contrast; here's the intro to “Rocket 88”: [intro to Rocket 88] and here's Little Richard playing “Good Golly Miss Molly”: [intro to Good Golly Miss Molly] There's another difference as well -- the guitar sound. There's distortion all over it, thanks to that cone. Now, this probably won't even have been something that anyone listening at the time noticed -- if you're listening in the context of early fifties R&B, on the poor-quality 78 RPM discs that the music was released on, you'd probably think that buzzing boogie line was a baritone sax -- the line it's playing is the kind of thing that a horn would normally play, and the distortion sounds the same way as many of the distorted sax lines at the time did. But that was enough that when white music critics in the seventies were looking for a "first rock and roll record", they latched on to this one -- because in the seventies rock and roll *meant* distorted guitar. When the record came out, Ike Turner was horrified -- because he'd assumed it would be released as by Ike Turner and his Kings of Rhythm, but instead it was under the name "Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats". And the record was successful enough to make Jackie Brenston decide to quit the Kings of Rhythm and go solo. He released a few more singles, mostly along the same lines as Rocket 88, but they did nothing. Brenston's solo career fizzled out quite quickly, and he joined the backing band for Lowell Fulson, the blues star. After a couple of years with Fulson, he returned to play with Ike Turner's band. He stayed with Turner from 1955 through 1962, a sideman once more, and Turner wouldn't let Brenston sing his hit on stage -- he was never going to be upstaged by his sax player again. Eventually Jackie Brenston became an alcoholic, and from 1963 until his death in 1979, he worked as a part-time truck driver, never seeing any recognition for his part in starting rock and roll. But "Rocket 88" had repercussions for a lot of other people, even if it was only a one-off hit for Brenston. For Ike Turner, after "Rocket 88" was released, half of his band quit and stayed with Brenston, so for a long time he was without a full band. He started to work for Phillips as a talent scout and musician, and it was Turner who brought Phillips several artists, including the artist who Phillips later claimed was the greatest artist and greatest human being he ever worked with -- Howlin' Wolf. [excerpt "How Many More Years" -- version from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lTpcKnp-NQ ] That's a recording that was made at Phillips' studio, with Turner on piano. Phillips licensed several singles by Howlin' Wolf and others to Chess Records, but then the Chess brothers, the owners of that label, used contractual shenanigans to cut Phillips out of the loop and record the Wolf directly. So Phillips made a resolution to start his own record label, where no-one would steal his artists. Sun Records was born out of this frustration. Meanwhile, Ike Turner resolved that he would never again see his name removed from the credits for a record he was on. When he got a new Kings of Rhythm together, he switched from playing piano, where you're sat at the side of the stage, to playing guitar, where you can be up front and in the spotlight And when the Kings of Rhythm got a new singer, Annie-Mae Bullock, Turner made sure he would always have equal billing, by giving her his surname as a stage name, so any records she made would be by the new act, "Ike and Tina Turner". And finally, "Rocket 88" was going to have a profound effect on the career of one man who would later make a big difference to rock and roll. The lead singer of the country band the Saddlemen -- a singer who was best known as a champion yodeller -- was also working as a DJ for a small Pennsylvania station, and he noticed that Louis Jordan records were popular among the country audience, and he decided to start incorporating a Louis Jordan style in his own music But Jordan's records were so popular with a crossover audience that when the Saddlemen came to make their first records in this new style, they chose to cover something by someone other than Jordan – someone that hadn't crossed over into the country market yet. And so they chose to record "Rocket 88", which had been a big R&B hit but hadn't broken through into the white audience. Their version of the song is *also* credited by some as the first rock and roll record. But it'll be a few weeks until Bill Haley becomes a full part of our story...
Welcome to episode seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at Wynonie Harris and “Good Rockin’ Tonight” —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. All the music I talk about here is now in the public domain, and there are a lot of good cheap compilations available. This four-CD set of Wynonie Harris is probably the definitive one. This two-CD set of Roy Brown material has all his big hits, as well as the magnificently disturbing “Butcher Pete Parts 1 & 2”, my personal favourite of his. Lucky Millinder isn’t as well served by compilations, but this one has all the songs I talk about here, plus a couple I talked about in the Sister Rosetta Tharpe episode. There is only one biography of Wynonie Harris that I know of — Rock Mr Blues by Tony Collins — and that is out of print, though you can pick up expensive second-hand copies here. Some of the information on Lucky Millinder comes from Shout, Sister, Shout!: The Untold Story of Rock-and-roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe by Gayle F Wald, which I also used for the episode on Rosetta Tharpe. There are articles on Wynonie Harris, Roy Brown, and Cecil Gant in Unsung Heroes of Rock ‘n’ Roll by Nick Tosches. This book is considered a classic, and will probably be of interest to anyone who finds this episode and the next few interesting, but a word of caution — it was written in the 70s, and Tosches is clearly of the Lester Bangs/underground/gonzo school of rock journalism, which in modern terms means he’s a bit of an edgelord who’ll be needlessly offensive to get a laugh. The quotes from Harris I use here are from an article in Tan magazine, which Tosches quotes. Before Elvis, a book I’ve mentioned many times before, covers all the artists I talk about here. And again, archive.org’s collection of digitised 78 records was very useful. Patreon Admin Note I have updated the details on my Patreon to better reflect the fact that it backs this podcast as well as my other work, and to offer podcast-related rewards. I’ll be doing ebooks for Patreons based on the scripts for the podcasts (the first of those, Savoy Stompers and Kings of Swing should be up in a week or so), and if the Patreon hits $500 a month I’ll start doing monthly bonus episodes for backers only. Those episodes won’t be needed to follow the story in the main show, but I think they’d be fun to do. To find out more, check out my Patreon. Transcript There’s a comic called Phonogram, and in it there are people called “phonomancers”. These are people who aren’t musicians, but who can tap into the power of music other people have made, and use it to do magic. I think “phonomancers” is actually a very useful concept for dealing with the real world as well. There are people in the music industry who don’t themselves play an instrument or sing or any of the normal musician things, but who manage to get great records made — records which are their creative work — by moulding and shaping the work of others. Sometimes they’re record producers, sometimes they’re managers, sometimes they’re DJs or journalists. But there are a lot of people out there who’ve shaped music enormously without being musicians in the normal sense. Brian Eno, Sam Phillips, Joe Meek, Phil Spector, Malcolm McLaren, Simon Napier-Bell… I’m sure you can add more to the list yourself. People — almost always men, to be honest — who have a vision, and a flair for self-publicity, and an idea of how to get musicians to turn that idea into a reality. Men who have the power to take some spotty teenager with a guitar and turn him into a god, at least for the course of a three minute pop song. And there have always been spaces in the music industry for this sort of person. And in the thirties and forties, that place was often in front of the band. Most of the big band leaders we remember now were themselves excellent musicians — Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, you could put those people up against most others on their instruments. They might not have been the best, but they could hold their own. But plenty of other band leaders were mediocre musicians or couldn’t play at all. Glenn Miller was a competent enough trombone player, but no-one listens to the Glenn Miller band and thinks “wow, one of those four trombone players is fantastic!” And other band leaders were much less involved in the music. Kay Kyser — the most successful bandleader of the period, who had eleven number one records and thirty-five in the top ten — never played an instrument, didn’t write songs, didn’t sing. He acted as onstage MC, told jokes, and was the man at the front of the stage. And there were many other bandleaders like that — people who didn’t have any active involvement in the music they were credited with. Bob Crosby, Bing’s brother, for example, was a bandleader and would sing on some tracks, but his band performed plenty of instrumentals without him having anything to do with them. Most non-playing bandleaders would sing, like Bob Crosby, but even then they often did so rarely. And yet some of them had an immense influence on the music world. Because a good bandleader’s talent wasn’t in playing an instrument or writing songs. It was having an idea for a sound, and getting together the right people who could make that sound, and creating a work environment in which they could make that sound well. It was a management role, or an editorial one. But those roles can be important. And one of the most important people to do that job was Lucky Millinder, who we’ve talked about a couple of times already in passing. Lucky Millinder is a largely forgotten figure now, but he was one of the most important figures in black music in the 1940s. He was a fascinating figure — one story about how he got his name is that Al Capone was down ten thousand dollars playing dice, Millinder offered to rub the dice for luck, and Capone ended the night fifty thousand dollars up and called him Lucky from then on. (I think it’s more likely that Lucky was short for his birth name, Lucius, but I think the story shows the kind of people Millinder was hanging around with). He didn’t play an instrument or read music or sing much. What Millinder could definitely do was recognise talent. He’d worked with Bill Doggett, before Doggett went off to join the Ink Spots’ backing band, and the trumpet player on his first hit was Dizzy Gillespie, who Millinder had hired after Gillespie had been sacked from Cab Calloway’s band after stabbing Calloway in the leg. He had Rosetta Tharpe as his female singer at the beginning of the forties, and Ruth Brown — who we’ll talk about later — later on. He’d started out as the leader of the Mills Blue Rhythm Band, the house band in the Cotton Club, before moving on to lead, as his own band, one of the main bands in residence at the Savoy, along with occasionally touring the chitlin circuit — the rather derogatory name for the clubs and theatres that were regular tour stops for almost all major black artists at the time. Slowly, during the 1940s, Millinder transitioned his band from the kind of swing music that had been popular in the thirties, to the jump band style that was becoming more popular. And if you want to point to one band that you can call the first rhythm and blues band, you probably want to look at Millinder’s band, who more than any other band of the era were able to combine all the boogie, jump, and jive sounds with a strong blues feeling and get people dancing. Listen, for example, to “Savoy” from 1943: [Excerpt: “Savoy” by Lucky Millinder] In 1944, after Rosetta Tharpe had left his band, Millinder needed a new second singer, to take the occasional lead as Tharpe had. And he found one — one who later became the most successful rhythm and blues artist of the late 1940s. Wynonie Harris. Harris was already known as “Mr. Blues” when Millinder first saw him playing in Chicago and invited him to join the band. He was primarily a blues shouter, inspired by people like Big Joe Turner and Jimmy Rushing, but he could also perform in a subtler style, close to the jive singing of a Cab Calloway or Louis Jordan. Harris joined the Millinder band and started performing with them in their residency at the Savoy. Shortly after this, the band went into the studio to record “Who Threw The Whiskey In The Well?” [excerpt “Who Threw The Whiskey in the Well?”] You’ll note that that song has a backbeat. One of the things we talked about right back in episode two was that the combination of the backbeat and the boogie bass is what really makes rock and roll, and we’re now getting to the point that that combination was turning up more and more. That was recorded in May 1944, almost straight after the end of the musicians union strike, but it wasn’t released straight away. Records, at that time, were released on discs made out of shellac, which is a resin made from insect secretions. Unfortunately, the insects in question were native to Vietnam, which was occupied by Japan, and India, which was going through its own problems at the time, so shellac was strictly rationed. There was a new product, vinylite, being made which seemed promising for making records, but that was also used for lifejackets, which were obviously given a higher priority during a war than making records was. So the record wasn’t released until nearly a year after it was recorded. And during that time, Wynonie Harris had become a much more important part of Millinder’s band, and was starting to believe that maybe he deserved a bit more credit. Harris, you see, was an absolutely astonishing stage presence. Lots of people who spoke about Elvis Presley in later years said that his performances, hip thrusts and leg shaking and all, were just a watered-down version of what Wynonie Harris had been doing. Harris thought of himself as a big star straight away, This belief was made stronger when “Who Threw The Whiskey In The Well” was finally released. It became a massive hit, and the only money Harris saw from it was a flat $37.50 session fee. Millinder, on the other hand, was getting the royalties. Harris decided that it was his vocal, not anything to do with the rest of the band, that had made the record a success, and that he could make more money on his own. (In case you hadn’t realised, yet, Wynonie Harris was never known as the most self-effacing of people, and that confidence gave him a huge amount of success on stage, but didn’t win him many friends in his personal life). Harris went solo, and Lucky Millinder replaced him with a trumpet player and singer called Henry Glover. Harris started making records for various small labels. His first record as a solo artist was “Around the Clock Blues”, one of the most influential records ever made: [Excerpt “Around the Clock Blues” by Wynonie Harris] If that sounds familiar, maybe it’s because you’ve heard this song by Arthur Crudup that Elvis later covered: [excerpt of “So Glad You’re Mine” by Arthur Crudup, showing it’s more or less identical] Or maybe you know “Reelin’ and Rockin'” by Chuck Berry… [excerpt of “Reelin’ and Rockin'” by Chuck Berry, showing it’s also more or less identical] And of course there was another song with “Around the Clock” in the title, and we’ll get to that pretty soon… The band on “Around the Clock”, incidentally, was led by a session drummer called Johnny Otis. That record, in fact, is one of the milestones in the development of rock and roll. And yet it’s not the most important record Wynonie Harris made in the late 1940s. Harris recorded for many labels over the next couple of years, including King Records, whose A&R man Ralph Bass we’ll also be hearing more about, and Bullet Records, whose founder Jim Bulleit went on to bigger things as well. And just as a brief diversion, we’ll take a listen to one of the singles he made around this time, “Dig this Boogie”: [excerpt “Dig This Boogie”, Wynonie Harris] I played that just because of the pianist on that record — Herman “Sonny” Blount later became rather better known as Sun Ra, and while he didn’t have enough to do with rock music for me to do an episode on him, I had to include him here when I could. Wynonie Harris became a big star within the world of rhythm and blues, and that was in large part because of the extremely sexual performances he put on, and the way he aimed them at women, not at the young girls many other singers would target. As he said himself, the reason he was making fifteen hundred dollars a week when most famous singers were getting fifty or seventy-five dollars a night was “The crooners star on the Great White Way and get swamped with Coca-Cola-drinking bobby-soxers and other ‘jail bait’. I star in Georgia, Texas, Alabama, Tennessee, and Missouri and get those who have money to buy stronger stuff and my records to play while they drink it. I like to sing to women with meat on their bones and that long green stuff in their pocketbook”. And he certainly made enough of that long green stuff, but he spent it just as fast as he made it. When he got a ten thousand dollar royalty cheque, he bought himself two Cadillacs and hired two chauffeurs, and every night at the end of his show they’d both arrive at the venue and he’d pick which one he was riding home in that night. Now, having talked about Wynonie Harris for a little bit, let’s pause for a moment and talk about one of his fans. Roy Brown was a big fan of Harris, and was a blues singer himself, in something like the same style. Brown had originally been hired as “a black singer who sounds white”, which is odd because he used a lot of melisma in his vocals, which was normally a characteristic of black singing. But other than that, Brown’s main vocal influences when he started were people like Bing Crosby and other crooners, rather than blues music. However, he soon became very fond of jump blues, and started writing songs in the style himself. In particular, one, called “Good Rockin’ Tonight”, he thought might be popular with other audiences, since it always went down so well in his own shows. Indeed, he thought it might be suitable for Wynonie Harris — and when Harris came to town, Brown suggested the song to him. And Harris wasn’t interested. But after Brown moved back to New Orleans from Galveston, Texas, where he’d been performing — there was a girl, and a club owner, and these things happen and sometimes you have to move — Brown took his song to Cecil Gant instead. Gant was another blues singer, and if Harris wasn’t up for recording the song, maybe Gant would be. Cecil Gant was riding high off his biggest hit, “I Wonder”, which was a ballad, and he might have seemed a strange choice to record “Good Rockin’ Tonight”, but while Gant’s A-sides were ballads, his B-sides were boogie rockers, and very much in the style of Brown’s song — like this one, the B-side to “I Wonder” [excerpt “Cecil Boogie” by Cecil Gant] But Gant wasn’t the best person for Brown to ask to record a song. According to Jim Bulleit, who produced Gant’s records, everything Gant recorded was improvised in one take, and he could never remember what it was he’d just done, and could never repeat a song. So Gant wasn’t really in the market for other people’s songs. But he was so impressed by Brown’s singing, as well as his song, that he phoned the head of his record company, at 2:30AM, and got Brown to sing down the phone. After hearing the song, the record company head asked to hear it a second time. And then he told Gant “give him fifty dollars and don’t let him out of your sight!” And so Roy Brown ended up recording his song, on Deluxe Records, and having a minor hit with it: [excerpt “Good Rocking Tonight” by Roy Brown] When you listen back to that, now, it doesn’t sound all that innovative at all. In fact it wears its influences on its sleeve so much that it namechecks Sweet Lorraine, Sioux City Sue, Sweet Georgia Brown, and Caldonia, all of whom were characters who’d appeared in other popular R&B songs around that time — we talked about Caldonia, in fact, in the episode about “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie” and Louis Jordan. It might also sound odd to anyone who’s familiar with later cover versions by Elvis Presley, or by Paul McCartney and others who followed the pattern of Elvis’ version. Brown only sings the opening line once, before singing “I’m gonna hold my baby as tight as I can”. Those other versions restructure the song into a fairly conventional sixteen-bar blues form by adding in a repeat of the first line and a chord change along with it. Roy Brown’s original, on the other hand, just holds the first chord, and keeps playing the same riff, for almost the entire verse and chorus — the chord changes are closer to passing chords than to anything else, and the song ends up having some of the one-chord feel that people like John Lee Hooker had, where the groove is all and harmonic change is thrown out of the window. Even though you’d think, from the melody line, that it was a twelve-bar blues, it’s something altogether different. This is something that you need to realise — the more chords something has, in general, the harder it is to dance to. And there will always, always, be a tension between music that’s all about the rhythm, and which is there for you to dance to, and music which is all about the melody line, and which treats harmonic interest as an excuse to write more interesting melodies. You can either be Burt Bacharach or you can be Bo Diddley, and the closer you get to one, the further you get from the other. And on that spectrum, “Good Rockin’ Tonight” is absolutely in the Diddley corner. But at the time, this was an absolutely phenomenal record, and it immediately started to take off in the New Orleans market. And then Wynonie Harris realised that maybe he’d made a mistake. Maybe he should have recorded that song after all. And so he did — cutting his own, almost identical, cover version of Brown’s song: [excerpt from “Good Rocking Tonight” by Wynonie Harris] There are a few differences between the two, of course. In particular, Harris introduced those “hoy hoy” vocals we just heard, which weren’t part of Roy Brown’s original. That’s a line which comes from “The Honeydripper”, another massively important R&B record. Harris also included a different instrumental introduction — playing “When the Saints Go Marchin’ In” at the start, a song whose melody bears a slight resemblance to Brown’s song. Harris also adds that backbeat again, and it’s for that reason that Wynonie Harris’ version of the song, not Roy Brown’s original, is the one that people call “the first rock and roll record”. Other than those changes, Harris’ version is a carbon copy of Roy Brown’s version. Except, of course, that Wynonie Harris was one of the biggest stars in R&B, while Roy Brown was an unknown who’d just released his first single. That makes a lot of difference, and Harris had the big hit with the song. And “Good Rocking Tonight”, in Harris’ version, became one of those records that was *everywhere*. Roy Brown’s version of the song made number thirteen on the R&B charts, and two years later it would re-enter the charts and go to number eleven – but Harris’ was a world-changing hit, at least in the R&B market. Harris’ version, in fact, started off a whole chain of soundalikes and cash-ins, records that were trying to be their own version of “Good Rockin’ Tonight”. Harris himself recorded a sequel, “All She Wants to Do is Rock”, but for the next two years everyone was recording songs with “rock” in the title. There was Roy Brown’s own sequel, “Rockin’ at Midnight”: [Excerpt “Rockin’ at Midnight” by Roy Brown] There was Cecil Gant’s “We’re Gonna Rock” [Excerpt] There was “Rock the Joint” by Jimmy Preston [Excerpt] From 1948 through about 1951, if you listened to rhythm and blues records at all you couldn’t escape this new rock craze. Record after record with “rock” in the title, with a boogie woogie bassline, with a backbeat, and with someone singing about how they were going to rock and roll. This was, in fact, the real start of the rock and roll music fad. We’re still six years away from it coming to the notice of the white mainstream audience, but all the pieces are there together, and while we’re still three years away even from the canonical “first rock and roll record”, Jackie Brenston’s “Rocket 88”, 1948 is when rock and roll first became a cohesive, unified, whole, something that was recognisable and popular, a proper movement in music rather than odd individuals making their own separate music. Of course, it was still missing some of the ingredients that would later be added. First-wave rock and roll is a music that’s based on the piano and horn sections rather than guitars, and it wouldn’t be until it merged with hillbilly boogie in the early fifties that the electric guitar started to be an important instrument in it. But… we’ve talked before and will talk again about how there’s no real “first rock and roll record”, but if you insist on looking for one then “Good Rocking Tonight” is as good a candidate as any. Neither of its creators did especially well from the rock and roll craze they initiated though. Roy Brown got a reputation for being difficult after he went to the musicians’ union to try to get some of the money the record company owed him — in the 1950s, as today, record companies thought it was unreasonable for musicians and singers to actually want them to pay the money that was written in their contract — and so after a period of success in the late forties and very early fifties he spent a couple of decades unable to get a hit. He eventually started selling encyclopaedias door to door — with the unique gimmick that when he was in black neighbourhoods he could offer the people whose doors he was knocking on an autographed photo of himself. He sold a lot of encyclopaedias that way, apparently. He continued making the occasional great R&B record, but he made more money from sales. He died in 1981. Wynonie Harris wasn’t even that lucky. He basically stopped having hits by 1953, and he more or less gave up performing by the early sixties. The new bands couldn’t play his kind of boogie, and in his last few performances, by all accounts, he cut a sad and pitiful figure. He died in 1969 after more or less drinking himself to death. The music business is never friendly towards originals, especially black originals. But we’re now finally into the rock era. We’ll be looking over the next few weeks at a few more “first rock and roll songs” as well as at some music that still doesn’t quite count as rock but was influential on it, but if you’ve ever listened to a rock and roll record and enjoyed it, a tiny part of the pleasure you got you owe to Roy Brown and Wynonie Harris.
Welcome to episode seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at Wynonie Harris and "Good Rockin' Tonight" ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. All the music I talk about here is now in the public domain, and there are a lot of good cheap compilations available. This four-CD set of Wynonie Harris is probably the definitive one. This two-CD set of Roy Brown material has all his big hits, as well as the magnificently disturbing "Butcher Pete Parts 1 & 2", my personal favourite of his. Lucky Millinder isn't as well served by compilations, but this one has all the songs I talk about here, plus a couple I talked about in the Sister Rosetta Tharpe episode. There is only one biography of Wynonie Harris that I know of -- Rock Mr Blues by Tony Collins -- and that is out of print, though you can pick up expensive second-hand copies here. Some of the information on Lucky Millinder comes from Shout, Sister, Shout!: The Untold Story of Rock-and-roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe by Gayle F Wald, which I also used for the episode on Rosetta Tharpe. There are articles on Wynonie Harris, Roy Brown, and Cecil Gant in Unsung Heroes of Rock 'n' Roll by Nick Tosches. This book is considered a classic, and will probably be of interest to anyone who finds this episode and the next few interesting, but a word of caution -- it was written in the 70s, and Tosches is clearly of the Lester Bangs/underground/gonzo school of rock journalism, which in modern terms means he's a bit of an edgelord who'll be needlessly offensive to get a laugh. The quotes from Harris I use here are from an article in Tan magazine, which Tosches quotes. Before Elvis, a book I've mentioned many times before, covers all the artists I talk about here. And again, archive.org's collection of digitised 78 records was very useful. Patreon Admin Note I have updated the details on my Patreon to better reflect the fact that it backs this podcast as well as my other work, and to offer podcast-related rewards. I'll be doing ebooks for Patreons based on the scripts for the podcasts (the first of those, Savoy Stompers and Kings of Swing should be up in a week or so), and if the Patreon hits $500 a month I'll start doing monthly bonus episodes for backers only. Those episodes won't be needed to follow the story in the main show, but I think they'd be fun to do. To find out more, check out my Patreon. Transcript There's a comic called Phonogram, and in it there are people called "phonomancers". These are people who aren't musicians, but who can tap into the power of music other people have made, and use it to do magic. I think "phonomancers" is actually a very useful concept for dealing with the real world as well. There are people in the music industry who don't themselves play an instrument or sing or any of the normal musician things, but who manage to get great records made -- records which are their creative work -- by moulding and shaping the work of others. Sometimes they're record producers, sometimes they're managers, sometimes they're DJs or journalists. But there are a lot of people out there who've shaped music enormously without being musicians in the normal sense. Brian Eno, Sam Phillips, Joe Meek, Phil Spector, Malcolm McLaren, Simon Napier-Bell... I'm sure you can add more to the list yourself. People -- almost always men, to be honest -- who have a vision, and a flair for self-publicity, and an idea of how to get musicians to turn that idea into a reality. Men who have the power to take some spotty teenager with a guitar and turn him into a god, at least for the course of a three minute pop song. And there have always been spaces in the music industry for this sort of person. And in the thirties and forties, that place was often in front of the band. Most of the big band leaders we remember now were themselves excellent musicians -- Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, you could put those people up against most others on their instruments. They might not have been the best, but they could hold their own. But plenty of other band leaders were mediocre musicians or couldn't play at all. Glenn Miller was a competent enough trombone player, but no-one listens to the Glenn Miller band and thinks "wow, one of those four trombone players is fantastic!" And other band leaders were much less involved in the music. Kay Kyser -- the most successful bandleader of the period, who had eleven number one records and thirty-five in the top ten -- never played an instrument, didn't write songs, didn't sing. He acted as onstage MC, told jokes, and was the man at the front of the stage. And there were many other bandleaders like that -- people who didn't have any active involvement in the music they were credited with. Bob Crosby, Bing's brother, for example, was a bandleader and would sing on some tracks, but his band performed plenty of instrumentals without him having anything to do with them. Most non-playing bandleaders would sing, like Bob Crosby, but even then they often did so rarely. And yet some of them had an immense influence on the music world. Because a good bandleader's talent wasn't in playing an instrument or writing songs. It was having an idea for a sound, and getting together the right people who could make that sound, and creating a work environment in which they could make that sound well. It was a management role, or an editorial one. But those roles can be important. And one of the most important people to do that job was Lucky Millinder, who we've talked about a couple of times already in passing. Lucky Millinder is a largely forgotten figure now, but he was one of the most important figures in black music in the 1940s. He was a fascinating figure -- one story about how he got his name is that Al Capone was down ten thousand dollars playing dice, Millinder offered to rub the dice for luck, and Capone ended the night fifty thousand dollars up and called him Lucky from then on. (I think it's more likely that Lucky was short for his birth name, Lucius, but I think the story shows the kind of people Millinder was hanging around with). He didn't play an instrument or read music or sing much. What Millinder could definitely do was recognise talent. He'd worked with Bill Doggett, before Doggett went off to join the Ink Spots' backing band, and the trumpet player on his first hit was Dizzy Gillespie, who Millinder had hired after Gillespie had been sacked from Cab Calloway's band after stabbing Calloway in the leg. He had Rosetta Tharpe as his female singer at the beginning of the forties, and Ruth Brown -- who we'll talk about later -- later on. He'd started out as the leader of the Mills Blue Rhythm Band, the house band in the Cotton Club, before moving on to lead, as his own band, one of the main bands in residence at the Savoy, along with occasionally touring the chitlin circuit -- the rather derogatory name for the clubs and theatres that were regular tour stops for almost all major black artists at the time. Slowly, during the 1940s, Millinder transitioned his band from the kind of swing music that had been popular in the thirties, to the jump band style that was becoming more popular. And if you want to point to one band that you can call the first rhythm and blues band, you probably want to look at Millinder's band, who more than any other band of the era were able to combine all the boogie, jump, and jive sounds with a strong blues feeling and get people dancing. Listen, for example, to "Savoy" from 1943: [Excerpt: "Savoy" by Lucky Millinder] In 1944, after Rosetta Tharpe had left his band, Millinder needed a new second singer, to take the occasional lead as Tharpe had. And he found one -- one who later became the most successful rhythm and blues artist of the late 1940s. Wynonie Harris. Harris was already known as "Mr. Blues" when Millinder first saw him playing in Chicago and invited him to join the band. He was primarily a blues shouter, inspired by people like Big Joe Turner and Jimmy Rushing, but he could also perform in a subtler style, close to the jive singing of a Cab Calloway or Louis Jordan. Harris joined the Millinder band and started performing with them in their residency at the Savoy. Shortly after this, the band went into the studio to record "Who Threw The Whiskey In The Well?" [excerpt "Who Threw The Whiskey in the Well?"] You'll note that that song has a backbeat. One of the things we talked about right back in episode two was that the combination of the backbeat and the boogie bass is what really makes rock and roll, and we're now getting to the point that that combination was turning up more and more. That was recorded in May 1944, almost straight after the end of the musicians union strike, but it wasn't released straight away. Records, at that time, were released on discs made out of shellac, which is a resin made from insect secretions. Unfortunately, the insects in question were native to Vietnam, which was occupied by Japan, and India, which was going through its own problems at the time, so shellac was strictly rationed. There was a new product, vinylite, being made which seemed promising for making records, but that was also used for lifejackets, which were obviously given a higher priority during a war than making records was. So the record wasn't released until nearly a year after it was recorded. And during that time, Wynonie Harris had become a much more important part of Millinder's band, and was starting to believe that maybe he deserved a bit more credit. Harris, you see, was an absolutely astonishing stage presence. Lots of people who spoke about Elvis Presley in later years said that his performances, hip thrusts and leg shaking and all, were just a watered-down version of what Wynonie Harris had been doing. Harris thought of himself as a big star straight away, This belief was made stronger when "Who Threw The Whiskey In The Well" was finally released. It became a massive hit, and the only money Harris saw from it was a flat $37.50 session fee. Millinder, on the other hand, was getting the royalties. Harris decided that it was his vocal, not anything to do with the rest of the band, that had made the record a success, and that he could make more money on his own. (In case you hadn't realised, yet, Wynonie Harris was never known as the most self-effacing of people, and that confidence gave him a huge amount of success on stage, but didn't win him many friends in his personal life). Harris went solo, and Lucky Millinder replaced him with a trumpet player and singer called Henry Glover. Harris started making records for various small labels. His first record as a solo artist was "Around the Clock Blues", one of the most influential records ever made: [Excerpt "Around the Clock Blues" by Wynonie Harris] If that sounds familiar, maybe it's because you've heard this song by Arthur Crudup that Elvis later covered: [excerpt of "So Glad You're Mine" by Arthur Crudup, showing it's more or less identical] Or maybe you know "Reelin' and Rockin'" by Chuck Berry... [excerpt of "Reelin' and Rockin'" by Chuck Berry, showing it's also more or less identical] And of course there was another song with "Around the Clock" in the title, and we'll get to that pretty soon... The band on "Around the Clock", incidentally, was led by a session drummer called Johnny Otis. That record, in fact, is one of the milestones in the development of rock and roll. And yet it's not the most important record Wynonie Harris made in the late 1940s. Harris recorded for many labels over the next couple of years, including King Records, whose A&R man Ralph Bass we'll also be hearing more about, and Bullet Records, whose founder Jim Bulleit went on to bigger things as well. And just as a brief diversion, we'll take a listen to one of the singles he made around this time, "Dig this Boogie": [excerpt "Dig This Boogie", Wynonie Harris] I played that just because of the pianist on that record -- Herman "Sonny" Blount later became rather better known as Sun Ra, and while he didn't have enough to do with rock music for me to do an episode on him, I had to include him here when I could. Wynonie Harris became a big star within the world of rhythm and blues, and that was in large part because of the extremely sexual performances he put on, and the way he aimed them at women, not at the young girls many other singers would target. As he said himself, the reason he was making fifteen hundred dollars a week when most famous singers were getting fifty or seventy-five dollars a night was "The crooners star on the Great White Way and get swamped with Coca-Cola-drinking bobby-soxers and other 'jail bait'. I star in Georgia, Texas, Alabama, Tennessee, and Missouri and get those who have money to buy stronger stuff and my records to play while they drink it. I like to sing to women with meat on their bones and that long green stuff in their pocketbook". And he certainly made enough of that long green stuff, but he spent it just as fast as he made it. When he got a ten thousand dollar royalty cheque, he bought himself two Cadillacs and hired two chauffeurs, and every night at the end of his show they'd both arrive at the venue and he'd pick which one he was riding home in that night. Now, having talked about Wynonie Harris for a little bit, let's pause for a moment and talk about one of his fans. Roy Brown was a big fan of Harris, and was a blues singer himself, in something like the same style. Brown had originally been hired as "a black singer who sounds white", which is odd because he used a lot of melisma in his vocals, which was normally a characteristic of black singing. But other than that, Brown's main vocal influences when he started were people like Bing Crosby and other crooners, rather than blues music. However, he soon became very fond of jump blues, and started writing songs in the style himself. In particular, one, called "Good Rockin' Tonight", he thought might be popular with other audiences, since it always went down so well in his own shows. Indeed, he thought it might be suitable for Wynonie Harris -- and when Harris came to town, Brown suggested the song to him. And Harris wasn't interested. But after Brown moved back to New Orleans from Galveston, Texas, where he'd been performing -- there was a girl, and a club owner, and these things happen and sometimes you have to move -- Brown took his song to Cecil Gant instead. Gant was another blues singer, and if Harris wasn't up for recording the song, maybe Gant would be. Cecil Gant was riding high off his biggest hit, "I Wonder", which was a ballad, and he might have seemed a strange choice to record "Good Rockin' Tonight", but while Gant's A-sides were ballads, his B-sides were boogie rockers, and very much in the style of Brown's song -- like this one, the B-side to "I Wonder" [excerpt "Cecil Boogie" by Cecil Gant] But Gant wasn't the best person for Brown to ask to record a song. According to Jim Bulleit, who produced Gant's records, everything Gant recorded was improvised in one take, and he could never remember what it was he'd just done, and could never repeat a song. So Gant wasn't really in the market for other people's songs. But he was so impressed by Brown's singing, as well as his song, that he phoned the head of his record company, at 2:30AM, and got Brown to sing down the phone. After hearing the song, the record company head asked to hear it a second time. And then he told Gant "give him fifty dollars and don't let him out of your sight!" And so Roy Brown ended up recording his song, on Deluxe Records, and having a minor hit with it: [excerpt "Good Rocking Tonight" by Roy Brown] When you listen back to that, now, it doesn't sound all that innovative at all. In fact it wears its influences on its sleeve so much that it namechecks Sweet Lorraine, Sioux City Sue, Sweet Georgia Brown, and Caldonia, all of whom were characters who'd appeared in other popular R&B songs around that time -- we talked about Caldonia, in fact, in the episode about "Choo Choo Ch'Boogie" and Louis Jordan. It might also sound odd to anyone who's familiar with later cover versions by Elvis Presley, or by Paul McCartney and others who followed the pattern of Elvis' version. Brown only sings the opening line once, before singing "I'm gonna hold my baby as tight as I can". Those other versions restructure the song into a fairly conventional sixteen-bar blues form by adding in a repeat of the first line and a chord change along with it. Roy Brown's original, on the other hand, just holds the first chord, and keeps playing the same riff, for almost the entire verse and chorus -- the chord changes are closer to passing chords than to anything else, and the song ends up having some of the one-chord feel that people like John Lee Hooker had, where the groove is all and harmonic change is thrown out of the window. Even though you'd think, from the melody line, that it was a twelve-bar blues, it's something altogether different. This is something that you need to realise -- the more chords something has, in general, the harder it is to dance to. And there will always, always, be a tension between music that's all about the rhythm, and which is there for you to dance to, and music which is all about the melody line, and which treats harmonic interest as an excuse to write more interesting melodies. You can either be Burt Bacharach or you can be Bo Diddley, and the closer you get to one, the further you get from the other. And on that spectrum, "Good Rockin' Tonight" is absolutely in the Diddley corner. But at the time, this was an absolutely phenomenal record, and it immediately started to take off in the New Orleans market. And then Wynonie Harris realised that maybe he'd made a mistake. Maybe he should have recorded that song after all. And so he did -- cutting his own, almost identical, cover version of Brown's song: [excerpt from "Good Rocking Tonight" by Wynonie Harris] There are a few differences between the two, of course. In particular, Harris introduced those "hoy hoy" vocals we just heard, which weren't part of Roy Brown's original. That's a line which comes from "The Honeydripper", another massively important R&B record. Harris also included a different instrumental introduction -- playing "When the Saints Go Marchin' In" at the start, a song whose melody bears a slight resemblance to Brown's song. Harris also adds that backbeat again, and it's for that reason that Wynonie Harris' version of the song, not Roy Brown's original, is the one that people call "the first rock and roll record". Other than those changes, Harris' version is a carbon copy of Roy Brown's version. Except, of course, that Wynonie Harris was one of the biggest stars in R&B, while Roy Brown was an unknown who'd just released his first single. That makes a lot of difference, and Harris had the big hit with the song. And "Good Rocking Tonight", in Harris' version, became one of those records that was *everywhere*. Roy Brown's version of the song made number thirteen on the R&B charts, and two years later it would re-enter the charts and go to number eleven – but Harris' was a world-changing hit, at least in the R&B market. Harris' version, in fact, started off a whole chain of soundalikes and cash-ins, records that were trying to be their own version of "Good Rockin' Tonight". Harris himself recorded a sequel, "All She Wants to Do is Rock", but for the next two years everyone was recording songs with “rock” in the title. There was Roy Brown's own sequel, "Rockin' at Midnight": [Excerpt "Rockin' at Midnight" by Roy Brown] There was Cecil Gant's "We're Gonna Rock" [Excerpt] There was "Rock the Joint" by Jimmy Preston [Excerpt] From 1948 through about 1951, if you listened to rhythm and blues records at all you couldn't escape this new rock craze. Record after record with "rock" in the title, with a boogie woogie bassline, with a backbeat, and with someone singing about how they were going to rock and roll. This was, in fact, the real start of the rock and roll music fad. We're still six years away from it coming to the notice of the white mainstream audience, but all the pieces are there together, and while we're still three years away even from the canonical "first rock and roll record", Jackie Brenston's "Rocket 88", 1948 is when rock and roll first became a cohesive, unified, whole, something that was recognisable and popular, a proper movement in music rather than odd individuals making their own separate music. Of course, it was still missing some of the ingredients that would later be added. First-wave rock and roll is a music that's based on the piano and horn sections rather than guitars, and it wouldn't be until it merged with hillbilly boogie in the early fifties that the electric guitar started to be an important instrument in it. But... we've talked before and will talk again about how there's no real "first rock and roll record", but if you insist on looking for one then "Good Rocking Tonight" is as good a candidate as any. Neither of its creators did especially well from the rock and roll craze they initiated though. Roy Brown got a reputation for being difficult after he went to the musicians' union to try to get some of the money the record company owed him -- in the 1950s, as today, record companies thought it was unreasonable for musicians and singers to actually want them to pay the money that was written in their contract -- and so after a period of success in the late forties and very early fifties he spent a couple of decades unable to get a hit. He eventually started selling encyclopaedias door to door -- with the unique gimmick that when he was in black neighbourhoods he could offer the people whose doors he was knocking on an autographed photo of himself. He sold a lot of encyclopaedias that way, apparently. He continued making the occasional great R&B record, but he made more money from sales. He died in 1981. Wynonie Harris wasn't even that lucky. He basically stopped having hits by 1953, and he more or less gave up performing by the early sixties. The new bands couldn't play his kind of boogie, and in his last few performances, by all accounts, he cut a sad and pitiful figure. He died in 1969 after more or less drinking himself to death. The music business is never friendly towards originals, especially black originals. But we're now finally into the rock era. We'll be looking over the next few weeks at a few more "first rock and roll songs" as well as at some music that still doesn't quite count as rock but was influential on it, but if you've ever listened to a rock and roll record and enjoyed it, a tiny part of the pleasure you got you owe to Roy Brown and Wynonie Harris.
1. Lover Please - Clyde McPhatter 2. Black Slacks - Robert Gordon 3. I Do - The Marvelows 4. The Jam Pt. 1 - Bobby Gregg and HIs Friends 5. Rocket 88 - Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats SET 2 6. Our Little Rendezvous - Chuck Berry 7. That’s Alright - Elvis Presley 8. Lollipop - The Chordettes 9. Bye Bye Baby - Mary Wells 10. A Love of My Own - Carla Thomas SET 3 11. Shot Down - The Sonics 12. Sticks and Stones - The Zombies 13. Little Latin Lupe Lu - The Righteous Brothers 14. Goin’ To A Go Go - Smokey Robinson & The Miracles 15. What’s In the Loving - Helene Smith SET 4 16. Shoo Rah! Shoo Rah! - Betty Wright 17. I Know - Alanna Royale 18. Please Please Please - James Brown 19. Be Young, Be Foolish, Be Happy - The Tams 50srocknroll 60srocknroll soul doowop girlgroups garagerock rocknroll rock&roll classicsoul northernsoul tamlamotown
1. Leroy - Jack Scott 2. Red Headed Woman - Sonny Burgess 3. Rocket 88 - Jackie Brenston & his Delta Cats 4. No Particular Place To Go - Chuck Berry 5. Lucky Lips - Ruth Brown SET 2 6. I Got It - Little Richard 7. Honey Hush - Johnny Burnette & The Rock ‘N’ Roll Trio 8. A Little Taste Of Soul - Nat Hendrix Band, Sugar Pie DeSanto 9. Some Other Guy - Richie Barrett 10. Chain Gang - Sam Cooke SET 3 11. Scorpion - The Carnations 12. Living In The U.S.A - Steve Miller Band 13. Minute By Minute - James Hunter Six 14. I Want A Love I Can See - The Temptations SET 4 15. Some Kind Of Wonderful - Soul Brothers Six 16. I Want To Do Everything For You - Joe Tex 17. Cissy Strut - The Meters 18. Need Your Love So Bad - Little WIllie John 19. Be Young, Be Foolish, Be Happy - The Tams 50srocknroll 60srocknroll soul doowop girlgroups garagerock rocknroll rock&roll classicsoul
Playliste:Bill Haley & the Comets: ‘Rock Around the Clock’ (1954)Robert Johnson: ‘Cross Road Blues’ (1936)’Hank Williams ‘Move It On Over’ (1947)Sister Rosetta Tharpe: ’ Up Above My Head I Hear Music in the Air’ (1947)Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five: ‘Let the Good Times Roll’ (1946)Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats: ‘Rocket 88’ (1951)Big Joe Turner: ‘Shake Rattle and Roll’ (1954)The Chords: ‘Sh-Boom’ (1954)Fats Domino: ‘Ain’t That a Shame’ (1955)Elvis: ‘Mystery Train’ (1954)Carl Perkins: ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ (1956)Jerry Lee Lewis: ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On’ (1957)Chuck Berry: ‘Maybellene’ (1955)Bo Diddley: ‘Bo Diddley’ (1955)Little Richard: ‘Rip It Up’ (1956)Buddy Holly: ‘That’ll Be the Day’’ (1957)Eddie Cochran: ‘Summertime Blues’ (1958)The Everly Brothers: ‘Bye Bye Love’ (1957)Link Wray: Rumble’ (1958)
Road Runner Bo Diddley Rocket 88 Jackie Brenston & his Delta Cats Spoonful Howlin' Wolf High Heel Sneakers Tommy Tucker Come On Chuck Berry Maybellene Chuck Berry Fattening Frogs For Snakes Sonny Boy Williamson Boom Boom Out Go The Lights Little Walter The First Time I Met The Blues Buddy Guy I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man Muddy Waters 29 Ways Willie Dixon I Don't Know Willie Mabon All Your Love Otis Rush Suzie Q Dale Hawkins Walkin' The Boogie John Lee Hooker The Walk Jimmie McCracklin Anna Lee Robert Nighthawk Gypsy Woman Muddy Waters At Last Etta James
https://www.virginradio.it/audio/189360/Jackie-Brenston-and-his-Delta-Cats.htmlhttps://www.virginradio.it/audio/189360/Jackie-Brenston-and-his-Delta-Cats.htmlWed, 28 Oct 2015 09:34:29 +0100Virgin RadioVirgin Radiono0
Ok...so here's the deal....there won't be another new show until the week of June 6th. Taking some time off and traveling to the family reunion where I hope not too much blood is shed...we're Irish.This weeks show celebrates the Bo Diddley Beat! Bo Did-It if you will.Starting off in BoStyle with Ronnie Hawkins & the Hawks' killer version of "Who do you love" where Robbie Robertson displays some early Telecaster chops that he would duplicate 2 yrs later when the Hawks backed John Hammond, Jr on his groundbreaking "So Many Roads" LP from 1965. Little Walter keeps the drums pounding with an incredible instrumental that doesn't get the attention that it deserves..."Crazy Legs" indeed....Dr. Jack Van Impe waxes poetic on "the beat!" before Hipbone Slim & the Knee Tremblers do the "Diddley Squat" from "What The Shiek Said"......Bo Diddley wails to "Mona", one of the greatest echo-laden vocals evah! The mass comes to fruition when Robert Ward and the Ohio Untouchables "Hot Stuff" lays down a bed for yours truly to comment on the offerings of this Epistle....."skinny-dippin' in the Oil-O-Joy......"Time to shift gears, hop on a plane for Billy Nicols via London laments the loss of the "Girl from New York" from his ultra-rare LP "Would You Believe". Ex Rocket From the Crypt head honcho, Speedo, with his latest band The Night Marchers "Jump in the fire" from their debut "See You In Magic" gets the thumbs up from uber critic, SzQ the lady that keeps all things Mickster grounded...In case you were wondering:"Night Marchers are ghostly apparitions of a band of beings who move with purpose to the beat of primitive pounding drums. Some say they are armed spirit warriors en route to or from battle, toting archaic weaponry and clothed in decorated helmets and cloaks. Other accounts tell of high-ranking alii (ruler) spirits being guided to places of high importance or to welcome new warriors to join in battle. Perhaps these restless souls are looking to reclaim rightful territory, replay a battle gone awry, or avenge their own deaths. Some say the Night Marchers are searching methodically for an entrance into the next world."Jackie Brenston's follow up to what most consider to be the "1st R&R record", "Rocket 88" was "Independent Woman". A pretty cool r&b number that got 'cool' reviews....well the flip of this great 78rpm [only / no 45 rpm versions out there] was credited to Brenston but is really Billy "Red" Love and his band of plunkers....."Juiced" has to be one of the greatest odes to the potation that fuels just about everything from this era of recordings...1951 / Sun Studios / Chess Records release...."now for the rest of the story....."Bo Diddley makes another appearance at the pulpit with his dancin' shoes on..."Bo's Twist" aka "Rockin' Bo" has it's time on the big stage from 1962...Michigan throws in it's $0.02 with The Woolies relentless slam-in-the-face version of "Who do you love" on Dunhill rekids from 1966....Time for a sermon from Reverend Mick before heading over to France for some Ye Ye doin's via Christine Laume and Jacqueline Perez with "Rouge rouge" & "Go home" respectively...The last offering of the Podcast is a DRR Show staple, Kai Ray's "I want some of that", The Uptowns' "Here she come again" and the incredible, always mind numbing CAN with "Hoolah hoolah" from the reunion of CAN and their 1st singer, Malcolm Mooney from "Rite Time"Thats it for this week...remember that we won't have a new show for a couple of weeks but don't let that stop you from listening to old pods and turning on your friends to the show...hey! someone's got to keep this music alive!.Signing off for this week and with a promise to be back recharged with handfulls of 45's & 78's,Your humble host,Mickster
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