Podcast appearances and mentions of jimmy nicol

For 13 days he was a Beatles. He actually saved the Beatles first world tour. He was 24 years old.  And then he was gone. And most people don't even know his name.How is it possible that drummer Jimmie Nicol could simply vanish after playing with the Beatles? The new book "The Beatle Who Vanished" finally solves the mystery of what happened to Nicol.This episode also includes the latest insight into new projects from Joni Mitchell, Steven Van Zant, Stax Records, The Stone Pony and more. Support the Show.email Big Rick at:info@rocktalkstudio.com

Sintonía: "Nats" - The Magic Christians"Breathalyser" - The Cocktail Cabinet; "Rock Candy" - Remo 4; "Look Out Now" (H. Mancini) - Garry Blake; "I Wish I Could Jerk Like My Uncle Cyril" - Timebox; "Husky" - Jimmy Nicol; "Western Drag" - The Progressive Seekers; "Switched On" - The Excursion; "Love You Too" - Sounds Nice; "Foxy" - Earl Guest; "Junk" - The Roulettes; "One Mint Julep" - The Mike Cotton Band; "Four Wheel Drive" - The Salon Band; "Flying" - Sounds Nice; "The Spy" - The Original Checkmates; "Warpaint" - Joe Loss & His Music; "Zoot´s Suite" - Zoot Money; "I´m Coming Home" - Trendsetters Ltd; "Step Inside" - Apartment OneEscuchar audio

Nesta nova edição do podcast, André Góis reconta a história de Jimmy Nicol, o baterista que substituiu Ringo Starr temporariamente nos anos 60.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Beware ....O.T.R . present ((( Free & Easy ))) live Radio show en Dab+ Sunday the 12th June 2023 , Le Havre FRANCE .....Playlist : ( Wyldcliff ) Patryck Albert....intro ....Jack Lee , Carnaby , Tony Valentino & the Standells , Breadmakers , Bwanas , Cramps , Dark Marbles , Rollin' Stones , Flamin' Groovies , Sounds Incarcerated , Peter Jay & the Jaywalkers , Soul Agents , Things to Come , Stones , Weirdos , A Lonely Dogs , Paint Fumes , Grindhouse , Monsters , Jimmy Nicol and the Shubdibs ...... entiendo , chikies & lads ...... Oye !

HOW COULD DRUMMER JIMMIE NICOL SIMPLY VANISH AFTER PLAYING WITH THE BEATLES IN 1964? “The Beatle Who Vanished” is the first historical account of Jimmie Nicol, an unknown drummer whose journey from humble beginnings to saving The Beatles' first world tour was only one part of his legend. Though his 13 days of fame made headlines, the true mystery of Nicol's story is riddled with blacklisting, betrayal, drugs, divorce, bankruptcy and an eventual disappearance that led many to question whether he is dead or alive. Berkenstadt uncovers the incredible details of a Beatles story never before revealed: * Draws on new documentary evidence * Interviews with The Beatles, Nicol and eyewitnesses * Inner circle tour accounts of Nicol and The Beatles * Uncovers the secrets behind his post-Beatles career and disappearance * Over 100 rare archival photographs and memorabilia illustrations * Features a Foreword by Former Beatles Bass Player, Chas Newby“The Beatle Who Vanished” is an Amazon Bestseller and is being made into a major motion picture. Find out from Jim the latest on that motion picture plus Jim shares a story of a recent encounter with Jimmy Nicol that you won't find in the book. You'll want to hear this one!Jim Berkenstadt is a bestselling author, producer, music historian and consultant who has documented the history of several rock and roll musicians. He is founder of the firm Rock And Roll Detective, LLC, which provides content and consulting services to the entertainment industry. He recently was credited for his work on The Beatles new Disney+ documentary, “Get Back”.Berkenstadt's newest book, “Mysteries in the Music: Case Closed”, uncovers and solves Rock And Roll's greatest myths, mysteries, conspiracies and hoaxes. He's co-authored “Black Market Beatles: The Story Behind The Lost Recordings”; “Nevermind Nirvana”; “Goldmine The Beatles Digest”; and edited “John, Paul & Me: Before The Beatles”.Berkenstadt has lent his talent to TV and film productions as well. He has served as the historical consultant on several high-profile projects including: Martin Scorsese's Emmy Award winning documentary, “George Harrison: Living In The Material World”; “The Beatles Help! DVD”; “The Traveling Wilburys” box set” DVD; “George Harrison Dark Horse Years” box set DVD documentary; “The Beatles First US Visit” DVD website; “VH1 Behind The Music” and “Dick Clark's Teen Idol Special” (ABC). He also appears as an expert on two REELZ documentary series.In the record industry, Berkenstadt has been active in producing, research, and liner note writing. His credits include: Traveling Wilburys - The Traveling Wilburys box set (2004); George Harrison - The Dark Horse Years box set (2004); George Harrison - All Things Must Pass reissue CD box (2021); Garbage - Version 2.0, Bleed like Me, Absolute Garbage (1998-2007); Live At The Edgewater: Tex Beneke, Stan Kenton & Ralph Flanagan (2000 - Producer); and Live At The Edgewater: Jimmy Dorsey & Woody Herman (1998 - Producer).Purchase a copy of “The Beatle Who Vanished” through Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Beatle-Who-Vanished-Jim-Berkenstadt/dp/0985667702/refListen to a playlist of the music discussed in this episode: LINK HERE- Jim Berkenstadt Links -Mysteries in the Music: Case Closed www.musicmysterybook.comwww.thebeatlewhovanished.comwww.rockandrolldetective.comBlog: http://rocknrolldetective.blogspot.com/Twitter: @RockDetectiveImdb.com: imdb.com/name/nm2844636/The Booked On Rock Website: www.bookedonrock.comFollow The Booked On Rock with Eric Senich:FACEBOOK: www.facebook.com/bookedonrockpodcastTWITTER: https://twitter.com/bookedonrockINSTAGRAM: www.instagram.com/bookedonrockpodcast/?hl=enSupport Your Local Bookstore! Find your nearest independent bookstore here: www.indiebound.org/indie-store-finderContact The Booked On Rock Podcast:thebookedonrockpodcast@gmail.comThe Booked On Rock Music: “Whoosh” & “Nasty” by Crowander (www.crowander.com)

In March of 1957, John Winston Lennon formed a "skiffle" group called The Quarrymen. What is "skiffle," you may be asking? It's a kind of folk music with a blues or jazz flavor that was popular in the 1950s, played by a small group and often incorporating improvised instruments such as washboards. On July 6, '57, Lennon met a guy named James. James Paul McCartney, while playing at the Woolton Parish church fete. In Britain, fêtes are traditional public festivals held outdoors and organized to raise funds for a charity. On February 6, 1958, the young up-and-coming guitarist George Harrison was invited to watch the group perform at Wilson Hall, Garston, Liverpool. He was soon brought in as a regular player. During this period, members continually joined and left the lineup. Finally, Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Stuart Sutcliffe (a classmate of Lennon at Liverpool Art College) emerged as the only constant members. One day, the members showed up to a gig wearing different colored shirts, so they decided to call themselves 'The Rainbows.' In a talent show they did in 1959, they called themselves 'Johnny and the Moondogs.' Once again, changing their name to "The Silver Beatles," they eventually decided, on August 17, 1960, on the moniker "The Beatles." Why did they choose the Beatles, Logan? They were huge fans of Buddy Holly and The Crickets – as a way of emulating their heroes, they called themselves after an insect. Right?   Well, According to John Lennon, "It came in a vision – a man appeared on a flaming pie and said unto them, 'from this day forward you are the Beatles with an 'A'! Thank you, mister man, they said, thanking him," he said.   Most of the accounts claim that Lennon's love of wordplay led them to adopt the 'a' eventually. Lennon would explain in a 1964 interview: "It was beat and beetles, and when you said it, people thought of crawly things, and when you read it, it was beat music."   After Lennon died in 1980, George Harrison claimed that the name came about differently in the Beatles' Anthology documentary (as is usually the case).   Harrison claimed that the name, 'The Beatles', came from the 1953 Marlon Brando film, The Wild One. In the film, Brando played a character called 'Johnny' and was in a gang called 'The Beetles.'   This answer would add up considering that the group also flirted with the name of 'Johnny and the Beetles', as well as 'Long John and the Silver Beetles.' Their unofficial manager, Allan Williams, arranged for them to perform in clubs on the Reeperbahn in Hamburg, Germany. On August 16, 1960, McCartney invited a guy named Pete Best to become the group's permanent drummer after watching Best playing with The Blackjacks in the Casbah Club. The Casbah Club was a cellar club operated by Best's mother Mona in West Derby, Liverpool, where The Beatles had played and often visited. They started in Hamburg by playing in the Indra and Kaiserkeller bars and the Top Ten club. George, who was only seventeen years old, had lied about his age, and when this little fact was discovered, he was deported by the German authorities. Paul and Pete thought it was good to start a small fire by lighting an unused condom in their living quarters while leaving it for more luxurious rooms. Arrested and charged for arson, they too were both deported. Lennon and Sutcliffe followed suit and returned to Liverpool in December. While in Germany, they stayed in a small room with bunkbeds. George Harrison admitted in The Beatles Anthology that this made things especially awkward when he crawled under the sheets with a woman for the first time — Lennon, McCartney, and then-drummer Pete Best actually applauded for him after the deed was done. Harrison joked, "At least they kept quiet while I was doing it."   They went back a second time and played the Top Ten Club for three months (April-June 1961). Stuart Sutcliffe decided to remain in Germany to concentrate on painting and left the group during this time. Sutcliffe's departure led McCartney to switch from playing rhythm guitar to bass guitar. While they were playing at the Top Ten, they were recruited by singer Tony Sheridan to act as his "backing band" on a series of recordings for the German Polydor Records label, produced by famed bandleader Bert Kaempfert ("Strangers in the Night", "Danke Schoen"). Kaempfert signed the group to its own Polydor contract at the first session on June 22, 1961. On October 31, Polydor released the recording, My Bonnie (Mein Herz ist bei dir nur), which made it into the German charts under Tony Sheridan and The Beat Brothers. Around 1962, My Bonnie was mentioned in Cashbox as the debut of a "new rock and roll team, Tony Sheridan and the Beatles," and a few copies were also pressed for U.S. disc jockeys. Cashbox, also known as Cash Box, was a music industry trade magazine published initially weekly from July 1942 to November 1996. Ten years after its dissolution, it was revived and continues as Cashbox Magazine, an online magazine with weekly charts and occasional special print issues. The band's third stay in Hamburg was from April 13–May 31, 1962, when they opened The Star Club. However, that stay was dampened when Astrid Kirchherr informed them upon their arrival of Sutcliffe's death from a brain hemorrhage. Astrid, a German photographer, and friend of the Beatles, revealed that her fiancé (and former Beatles bass player) Stuart Sutcliffe had died. No one was more shocked than John Lennon, who reportedly broke out in a fit of hysterical laughter at the idea of losing his art school buddy.   Upon their return from Hamburg, the group was enthusiastically promoted by local promoter Sam Leach, who presented them for the next year and a half on various stages in Liverpool forty-nine times. Brian Epstein (no relation to a particular disgusting human being), took over as the group's manager in 1962 and led The Beatles' quest for a British recording contract. In one now-famous exchange, a senior Decca Records A&R executive named Dick Rowe turned Epstein down flat and informed him that "The Decca audition for guitar groups are on the way out, Mr. Epstein." Remember Decca? They were Buddy Holly's first record label that thought "rock n roll was a fad." Strike two, Decca. Strike two. Epstein eventually met with producer George Martin of EMI's Parlophone label. Martin expressed an interest in hearing the band in the studio. So he invited the band to London's Abbey Road studios to audition on June 6. Martin wasn't particularly impressed by the band's demo recordings but instantly liked them when they met. He concluded that they had raw musical talent but said (in later interviews) that what made the difference for him that fateful day was their wit and humor in the studio.   Martin privately suggested to Brian Epstein that the band use another drummer in the studio. Yikes. Pete Best had some popularity and was considered attractive by many fans. Still, the three founding members had become increasingly unhappy with his popularity and personality, and Epstein had become exasperated with his refusal to adopt the distinctive hairstyle as part of their unified look. So Epstein sacked Best on August 16, 1962. Lennon and McCartney immediately asked their friend Richard Starkey, the drummer for one of the top Merseybeat groups, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, to join the band. Unfortunately, Rory Storm didn't want to release Starkey but let Starkey out of his contract. Oh... Richard Starkey would eventually be known as "Ringo Starr." He chose Ringo because of the rings he wore, and it also had a cowboy feel to it. His drum solos were referred to as Starr Time.   The Beatles' first EMI session on June 6 did not yield any releasable recordings, but the September sessions produced the minor U.K. hit, "Love Me Do," which peaked on the charts at number 17. The single reached the top of the United States singles chart more than 18 months later in May 1964. This single was swiftly followed by their second single, "Please Please Me." They recorded their first album (also titled Please Please Me) three months later. George Martin capitalized on the wild, live energy the boys perfected in Hamburg and recorded the entire Please Please Me LP in less than 13 hours — saving "Twist and Shout" for last so the taxing vocals wouldn't ruin Lennon's voice before the other songs were done. That's fourteen songs. Luckily, the longest song on the album was only 2 minutes and 54 seconds long. The shortest was a minute and 47 seconds.   The band's first televised performance was on a program called People and Places, transmitted live from Manchester by Granada Television on October 17, 1962. The band experienced massive popularity on the record charts in the U.K. from early 1963. However, Parlophone's American counterpart, Capitol Records (owned by EMI), refused to issue their singles "Love Me Do," "Please Please Me," and "From Me to You" in the United States. Mainly because no British act had ever had a sustained commercial impact on American audiences.   Vee-Jay Records, a small Chicago label, is said by some to have been pressured into issuing these initial singles. Allegedly it was part of a deal for the rights to another performer's masters. Art Roberts, music director of Chicago powerhouse radio station WLS, placed "Please Please Me" into radio rotation in late February 1963, making it possibly the first time the American people heard a Beatles record on American radio. In August 1963, the Philadelphia-based Swan Records tried again with The Beatles' "She Loves You," which failed to receive airplay.   After The Beatles' massive success in 1964, Vee-Jay Records and Swan Records took advantage of their previously secured rights to The Beatles' early recordings and reissued the songs they had rights to, which all reached the top ten of the charts the second time around. Then, in a shifty move, Vee-Jay Records issued some weird L.P. repackaging of the Beatles' material they had and released "Introducing… The Beatles," which was basically The Beatles' debut British album with some minor alterations. Andi Lothian, a former Scottish music promoter, laid claim to the term in that he coined 'Beatlemania" while speaking to a reporter on October 7, 1963 at the Caird Hall in Dundee at a Beatles concert that took place during The Beatles' 1963 Mini-Tour of Scotland. Beatlemania was taking over the world.   In early November 1963, Brian Epstein persuaded Ed Sullivan to commit to presenting The Beatles on three editions of his show in February. He turned this guaranteed exposure into a record deal with Capitol Records. Capitol agreed to a mid-January 1964 release for "I Want to Hold Your Hand." Still, unexpected circumstances triggered premature airplay of an imported copy of the single on a Washington D.C. radio station in mid-December. Capitol brought forward the release of the record on December 26, 1963.   Bob Dylan introduced The Beatles to the cannabis drug in 1964 in a New York hotel room. He offered the "Fab Four" marijuana as a consequence of his misconception that the lyrics in their hit song "I Want to Hold Your Hand" from Meet the Beatles! were "I get high" instead of "I can't hide." This initial partaking in drugs grew into heavier experimentation with LSD and other substances whose psychedelic effects were commonly thought to have manifested themselves in the band's music. The Beatles, in turn, would influence Dylan's move into an electrified rock sound in his music.   Several New York City radio stations—first WMCA, then WINS, and finally, WABC began playing "I Want to Hold Your Hand" on its release day. The Beatlemania that had started in Washington was duplicated in New York and quickly spread to other markets. The record sold one million copies in just ten days. By January 16, Cashbox Magazine had certified The Beatle's record as number one in the edition published with the cover-date January 23, 1964.   This widespread phenomenon contributed to the near-hysterical fan reaction on February 7, 1964 at John F. Kennedy International Airport (which had been renamed in December 1963 from Idlewild Airport). A record-breaking seventy-three million viewers, approximately 40 percent of the U.S. population at the time, tuned in to the first Ed Sullivan Show appearance two days later on February 9. During the week of April 4, The Beatles held the top five places on the Billboard Hot 100, a feat that has never been repeated. They had an additional seven songs at lower positions. That's twelve songs on the Billboard charts at once. Of all the music acts on the charts, 12 percent of the entries consisted of Beatles songs. They were so unaware of their popularity in America that, on their arrival, they initially thought the crowds were there to greet someone else.   Oh, and their Concerts Often Smelled Like Urine Apparently, the masses of young girls who turned up for their concerts, movie premieres, or to wave hello as the Beatles walked off the plane in a new city were apparently too distracted by their love for the band to care about whether or not their bladders were full. DSo, they'd pee themselves.  In 1964, the band undertook their first appearances outside of Europe and North America, touring Australia and New Zealand, notably without Ringo Starr, who was ill and was temporarily replaced by session drummer Jimmy Nicol. When they arrived in Adelaide, The Beatles were greeted by what is reputed to be the largest crowd of their touring career, when over 300,000 people turned out to see them at the Adelaide Town Hall. Yeah, Adelaide's population was only right around 200,000. In September of that year, baseball owner Charles O. Finley paid the band the unheard-of sum of $150,000 to play in Kansas City, Missouri. That's $1,398,914.52 today and utterly unheard of at that time.   In 1965, Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom bestowed the band the Member of the Order of the British Empire or MBE, a civil honor nominated by Prime Minister Harold Wilson.   On August 15, that year, The Beatles performed in the first stadium rock concert in the history of Rock n roll, playing at Shea Stadium in New York to a crowd of 55,600. The stadium's capacity is 57,333. The band later admitted that they had mainly been unable to hear themselves play or sing due to the volume of screaming and cheering. This concert is generally considered when they started disliking playing live shows.   In 1965, recently interested in Indian music, George Harrison purchased a sitar. He played it in the song Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown), the first instance of such an instrument being used on a rock record. He later took sitar lessons from maestro Ravi Shankar, and implemented additional elements of Eastern music and spirituality into his songs, notably Love You To and Within You Without You. These musical decisions significantly increased the influence of Indian music on popular culture in the late 1960s.   In July 1966, when The Beatles toured the Philippines, they unintentionally snubbed the nation's first lady, Imelda Marcos, who had expected the group to attend a breakfast reception at the Presidential Palace. Manager Brian Epstein was forced to give back all the money that the band had earned while there before being allowed to leave the country.   Upon returning from the Philippines, an earlier comment by John Lennon back in March of that year launched a backlash against The Beatles. In an interview with British reporter Maureen Cleave, Lennon had offered his opinion that Christianity was dying and that The Beatles were "more popular than Jesus now." Oops!   There was an immediate response, starting with an announcement by two radio stations in Alabama and Texas that they had banned Beatles' music from their playlists. WAQY DJ, Tommy Charles said: "We just felt it was so absurd and sacrilegious that something ought to be done to show them that they can't get away with this sort of thing." Around two dozen other stations followed suit with similar announcements. Some stations in the South (shocker) went further, organizing demonstrations with bonfires, drawing hordes of teenagers to burn their Beatles' records and other memorabilia publicly. Many people affiliated with churches in the American South took the suggestion seriously.   The Memphis, TN city council, aware that a Beatles' concert was scheduled at the Mid-South Coliseum during the group's upcoming U.S. tour, voted to cancel it. Rather than have "municipal facilities be used as a forum to ridicule anyone's religion" and said, "The Beatles are not welcome in Memphis." On August 13, The Ku Klux Klan nailed a Beatles' album to a wooden cross and subsequently burned it, vowing "vengeance," with conservative groups staging further public burnings of Beatles' records.   Young people across the United States and South Africa burned Beatles records in protest. Then, under tremendous pressure from the American media, John Lennon apologized for his remarks at a press conference in Chicago on August 11, the eve of the first performance of what turned out to be their final tour.   The Beatles performed their last concert at Candlestick Park in San Francisco on August 29, 1966. From that point forward, they focused on recording music. They ended up pioneering more advanced, multi-layered arrangements in popular and pop music. After three months away from each other, they returned to Abbey Road Studios on November 24, 1966, to begin a 129-day recording period in making their eighth album: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, was released on June 1, 1967.   Along with studio tricks such as sound effects, unconventional microphone placements, automatic double-tracking, and vari-speed recording, The Beatles began to augment their recordings with unconventional instruments for rock music at the time. These instruments included string and brass ensembles, Indian instruments such as the sitar and the "swarmandel," tape loops, and early electronic devices, including the "Mellotron," which was used with flute voices on the intro to "Strawberry Fields Forever." McCartney once asked Martin what a guitar would sound like if played underwater and was serious about trying it. Lennon also wondered what his vocals would sound like if he was hanging upside down from the ceiling. Unfortunately, their ideas were ahead of the available technology at the time.   Beginning with the use of a string quartet (arranged by George Martin) on Yesterday in 1965, The Beatles pioneered a modern form of art-rock and art song, exemplified by the double-quartet string arrangement on "Eleanor Rigby" (1966), "Here, There and Everywhere" (1966), and "She's Leaving Home" (1967). In addition, Lennon and McCartney's interest in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach led them to use a piccolo trumpet on the arrangement of "Penny Lane" and a Mellotron at the start of "Strawberry Fields Forever."   On June 25, 1967, the Beatles became the first band globally transmitted on television, in front of an estimated 400 million people worldwide, in a segment within the first-ever worldwide T.V. satellite hook-up, a show entitled Our World. The Beatles were transmitted live from Abbey Road Studios, and their new song "All You Need Is Love" was recorded live during the show.   Following the triumphs of the Sgt. Pepper album and the global broadcast, The Beatles' situation seemingly got worse. First, their manager Brian Epstein died of an overdose of sleeping pills on August 27, 1967, at 32, and the band's business affairs began to unravel. Next, at the end of 1967, they received their first major negative press criticism in the U.K., with disparaging reviews of their surrealistic T.V. film Magical Mystery Tour. The public wasn't a fan, either.   The group spent the early part of 1968 in Rishikesh, Uttar Pradesh, India, studying transcendental meditation with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Upon their return, Lennon and McCartney formed Apple Corps, initially a philanthropic business venture they described as an attempt at "western communism." The middle part of 1968 saw the guys busy recording the double album, The Beatles, popularly known as "The White Album" due to its stark white cover. These sessions saw deep divisions beginning within the band, including John Lennon's new girlfriend, Yoko Ono, being at his side through much of the sessions and the feeling that Paul McCartney was becoming too dominating. Paul McCartney gradually took more control of the group. Internal divisions within the band had been a small but growing problem during their earlier career. Most notably, this was reflected in the difficulty that George Harrison experienced in getting his songs onto Beatles' albums, and in the growing artistic and personal differences between John and Paul.   On the business side, Paul wanted Lee Eastman, the father of his wife, Linda Eastman, to manage The Beatles, but the other guys wanted New York manager Allen Klein to represent them. All of the band's decisions in the past were unanimous, but this time the four could not agree on a manager. Lennon, Harrison, and Starr felt the Eastmans would look after McCartney's well-being before the group's. Paul was quoted years later during the Anthology interviews, saying, "Looking back, I can understand why they would feel that was biased against them." Afterward, the band kicked themselves in the ass for the Klein decision, as Klein embezzled millions from their earnings.   Their final live performance was on the rooftop of the Apple building in Savile Row, London, on January 30, 1969, the next-to-last day of the problematic Get Back sessions. Mainly due to Paul McCartney's efforts, they recorded their final album, Abbey Road, in the summer of 1969.   John Lennon announced his departure to the rest of the group on September 20, 1969. The rest of the band talked him out of saying anything publicly. In March 1970, the band gave the "Get Back" session tapes to American producer Phil Spector, whose "Wall of Sound" production was in direct opposition to the record's original intent to appear as a stripped-down live studio performance. McCartney announced the breakup on April 10, 1970, a week before releasing his first solo album, McCartney. On May 8, 1970, the Spector-produced version of Get Back was released as the album Let It Be, followed by the documentary film of the same name. The Beatles' partnership was legally dissolved after McCartney filed a lawsuit on December 31, 1970. Following the group's dissolution, the BBC marketed an extensive collection of Beatles recordings, mainly of original studio sessions from 1963 to 1968. Much of this material formed the basis for a 1988 radio documentary series, The Beeb's Lost Beatles Tapes. Later, in 1994, the best of these sessions were given an official EMI, released on Live at the BBC.   On the evening of December 8 1980, John Lennon was shot and fatally wounded in the archway of the Dakota, his home in New York City. His killer was Mark David Chapman, an American Beatles fan incensed by Lennon's lavish lifestyle and his 1966 comment that the Beatles were "more popular than Jesus." Chapman said he was inspired by the fictional character Holden Caulfield from J. D. Salinger's novel The Catcher in the Rye, a "phony-killer" who despised hypocrisy. Chapman planned the killing over several months and waited for John at the Dakota on the morning of December 8. Early in the evening, Chapman met Lennon, who signed his copy of the album Double Fantasy and subsequently left for a recording session. Later that night, Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, returned to the Dakota. As Lennon and Ono approached the building's entrance, Chapman fired five hollow-point bullets from a .38 special revolver, four of which hit John in the back. Chapman remained at the scene reading The Catcher in the Rye until the police arrested him. John Lennon was rushed to Roosevelt Hospital in a police car, where he was pronounced dead on arrival at around 11:15 p.m.   In February 1994, the then-three surviving Beatles reunited to produce and record additional music for a few of John Lennon's old unfinished demos, almost as if reuniting the Beatles. "Free As A Bird" premiered as part of The Beatles Anthology, a series of television documentaries, and was released as a single in December 1995, with "Real Love" following in March 1996. These songs were also included in the three Anthology collections of C.D.s released in 1995 and 1996, each consisting of two C.D.s of never-before-released Beatles material.   On November 29 2001, George Harrison died at a property belonging to Paul McCartney, on Heather Road in Beverly Hills, California. He was 58 years old. As relayed in a statement by his wife Olivia and son Dhani, his final message to the world was: "Everything else can wait, but the search for God cannot wait, and love one another." The Beatles were the best-selling popular musical act of the twentieth century. EMI estimated that by 1985, the band had sold over one billion discs or tapes worldwide. In addition, the Recording Industry Association of America has certified The Beatles as the top-selling artists of all time in the United States based on U.S. sales of singles and albums.   The Beatles have spent 132 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart – by far the most of any artist. Garth Brooks occupied the top spot for 52 weeks, the second most.   The Beatles are one of only two musical acts to have eight consecutive albums on the Billboard 200 all hit No. 1.  – the other being Eminem –   Anthology 1 sold 450,000 copies on its first day of release, reaching the highest volume of single-day sales ever for an album. In 2000, a compilation album named one was released, containing almost every number-one single released by the band from 1962 to 1970. The collection sold 3.6 million copies in its first week and more than 12 million in three weeks worldwide, becoming the fastest-selling album of all time and the biggest-selling album of 2000. The collection also reached number one in the United States and 33 other countries. In 1988, every Beatles member (including Pete Best and Stuart Sutcliffe) was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. www.iconsandoutlaws.com www.accidentaldads.com  

This week's episode looks at "Ticket to Ride", the making of the Beatles' second film, and the influence of Bob Dylan on the Beatles' work and lives. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "The Game of Love" by Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders. 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 No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by the Beatles. I have read literally dozens of books on the Beatles, and used bits of information from many of them, but the ones I specifically referred to while writing this episode were: The Complete Beatles Chronicle by Mark Lewisohn, All The Songs: The Stories Behind Every Beatles Release by Jean-Michel Guesdon, And The Band Begins To Play: The Definitive Guide To The Songs of The Beatles by Steve Lambley, The Beatles By Ear by Kevin Moore, Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald, and The Beatles Anthology. For material on the making of the film, I referred to Getting Away With It by Steven Soderbergh, a book which is in part a lengthy set of conversations between Soderbergh and Richard Lester. Sadly the only way to legally get the original mix of "Ticket to Ride" is this ludicrously-expensive out-of-print box set, but the 1987 remix is widely available on the CD issue of the Help! soundtrack. The film is available on DVD. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript When we last looked at the Beatles, they had just achieved their American success, and had appeared in their first film, A Hard Day's Night. Today, we're going to look at the massive artistic growth that happened to them between late 1964 and mid 1965, the making of their second film, Help!, the influence, both artistic and personal, of Bob Dylan on the group, and their introduction both to studio experimentation and to cannabis. We're going to look at "Ticket to Ride": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Ticket to Ride"] 1964 was a tremendously busy year for the Beatles. After they'd finished making A Hard Day's Night, but even before it was released, they had gone on yet another tour, playing Denmark, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, Australia, and New Zealand, though without Ringo for much of the tour -- Ringo had to have his tonsils removed, and so for the first eight shows of the tour he was replaced by session drummer Jimmy Nicol, the former drummer with Colin Hicks and his Cabin Boys, who had played on several cheap soundalike records of Beatles songs. Nicol was a competent drummer, though very different in style from Ringo, and he found his temporary moment of celebrity hugely upsetting -- he later described it as the worst thing to ever happen to him, and ended up declaring bankruptcy only nine months after touring with the group. Nicol is now a recluse, and hasn't spoken to anyone about his time with the Beatles in more than thirty years. After Ringo returned to the group and the film came out they went back into the studio, only two months after the release of their third album, to start work on their fourth. They recorded four songs in two sessions before departing on their first full US tour. Those songs included two cover versions -- a version of "Mr. Moonlight" by Doctor Feelgood and the Interns that appeared on the album, and a version of Little Willie John's "Leave My Kitten Alone" that didn't see release until 1995 -- and two originals written mostly or entirely by John Lennon, "Baby's In Black", and "I'm a Loser": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I'm a Loser"] "I'm a Loser" was an early sign of an influence that had particularly changed Lennon's attitude to songwriting -- that of Bob Dylan. Dylan had been on the group's radar for some time -- Paul McCartney in the Anthology book seems to have a confused memory of seeing Madhouse on Castle Street, the TV play Dylan had appeared in in January 1963 -- but early 1964 had seen him rise in prominence to the point that he was a major star, not just an obscure folk singer. And Lennon had paid particular attention to what he was doing with his lyrics. We've already seen that Lennon had been writing surreal poetry for years, but at this point in his life he still thought of his songwriting and his poetry as separate. As he would later put it "I had a sort of professional songwriter's attitude to writing pop songs; we would turn out a certain style of song for a single, and we would do a certain style of thing for this and the other thing. I'd have a separate songwriting John Lennon who wrote songs for the meat market, and I didn't consider them (the lyrics or anything) to have any depth at all." This shouldn't be taken as Lennon saying that the early Beatles songs were lacking in quality, or that he didn't take the work seriously, but that it wasn't about self-expression. He was trying to do the best work he could as a craftsman. Listening to Dylan had showed him that it was possible instead to treat pop songwriting as art, in the sense Lennon understood the term -- as a means of personal expression that could also allow for experimentation and playing games. "I'm a Loser" is a first tentative step towards that, with Lennon for one of the first times consciously writing about his own emotions -- though careful to wrap those feelings both in a conventional love song structure and in a thick layer of distancing irony, to avoid making himself vulnerable -- and the stylistic influence of Dylan is very noticeable, as much in the instrumentation as in the lyrics. While several early Beatles singles had featured Lennon playing harmonica, he had been playing a chromatic harmonica, a type of harmonica that's mostly used for playing single-note melodies, because it allows the player to access every single note, but which is not very good for bending notes or playing chords. If you've heard someone playing the harmonica as a single-note melody instrument with few or no chords, whether Stevie Wonder, Larry Adler, or Max Geldray, the chances are they were playing a chromatic harmonica. On "I'm a Loser", though, Lennon plays a diatonic harmonica -- an instrument that he would refer to as a "harp" rather than a harmonica, because he associated it with the blues, where it's often referred to as a harp. Diatonic harmonicas are the instrument of choice for blues players because they allow more note-bending, and it's easier to play a full chord on them -- the downside, that you have a smaller selection of notes available, is less important in the blues, which tends towards harmonic minimalism. Diatonic harmonicas are the ones you're likely to hear on country, blues, and folk recordings -- they're the instrument played by people like Little Walter, Sonny Boy Williamson, Charlie McCoy, and Bob Dylan. Lennon had played a diatonic before, on "I Should Have Known Better", another song which shows Dylan's influence in the performance, though not in the lyrics. In both cases he is imitating Dylan's style, which tends to be full of chordal phrases rather than single-note melody. What's interesting about “I'm a Loser” though is contrasting John's harmonica solo with George's guitar solo which follows immediately after: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I'm a Loser"] That's a pure Carl Perkins solo, and the group would, in their choices of cover versions for the next few months, move away somewhat from the soul and girl-group influences that dominated the covers on their first two albums, and towards country and rockabilly -- they would still cover Larry Williams, Little Richard, and Chuck Berry, but there were no more covers of contemporary Black artists, and instead there were cover versions of Buddy Holly, Carl Perkins, and Buck Owens, and Harrison switched from the Rickenbacker that had been his main instrument on A Hard Day's Night to playing a Gretsch -- the brand of guitar that Chet Atkins and Eddie Cochrane played.  The consensus among commentators -- with which, for once, I agree -- seems to be that this was also because of the influence of Dylan. The argument is that the Beatles heard Dylan's music as a form of country music, and it inspired them to go back to their other country-oriented influences. And this makes a lot of sense -- it was only fifteen years earlier, at the same time as they replaced "race" with "rhythm and blues", that Billboard magazine chose to rename their folk chart to the country and western chart -- as Tyler Mahan Coe puts it, "after years of trying to figure out what to call their “poor Black people music” and “poor white people music” charts". And Dylan had been as influenced by Hank Williams as by Woody Guthrie. In short what the Beatles, especially Lennon, heard in Dylan seems to have been three things -- a reminder of the rockabilly and skiffle influences that had been their first love before they'd discovered R&B and soul, permission to write honestly about one's own experiences, and an acknowledgement that such writing could include surrealistic wordplay. Fundamentally, Dylan, as much as being a direct influence, seems to have given the group a kind of permission -- to have shown them that there was room in the commercial sphere in which they were now operating for them to venture into musical and lyrical areas that had always appealed to them. But of course, that was not the only influence that Dylan had on the group, as anyone who has ever read anything at all about their first full US tour knows. That tour saw them playing huge venues like the Hollywood Bowl -- a show which later made up a big part of their only official live album, which was finally released in 1977: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Things We Said Today (live at the Hollywood Bowl 1964)"] It was nine days into the tour, on the twenty-eighth of August 1964, that they met Bob Dylan for the first time. The meeting with Dylan is usually called the first time the Beatles ever smoked cannabis -- and that's true, at least if you're talking about them as a group. Lennon had tried it around 1960, and both Lennon and Harrison had tried it at a show at the Southport Floral Hall in early 1962, but neither had properly understood what they were smoking, and had both already been drunk before smoking it. According to a later interview with Harrison, that had led to the two of them madly dancing the Twist in their dressing room, shouting "This stuff isn't doing anything!" But it was at this meeting that Paul and Ringo first smoked it, and it also seems to have been taken by Lennon and Harrison as their "real" first time, possibly partly because being introduced to cannabis by Bob Dylan in a New York hotel sounds a lot cooler than being introduced to it by your support band's drummer in Southport, possibly because it was the first time that they had all smoked it together as a group, but mostly because this was the time when it became a regular part of the group's life. Oddly, it happened because of a misheard lyric. Dylan had loved "I Want to Hold Your Hand", and had misheard "I can't hide" as "I get high", and thus just assumed that the British band were already familiar with cannabis. The drug had a profound effect on them -- McCartney later recalled being convinced he had discovered the meaning of life, writing it down on a bit of paper, and getting their roadie Mal Evans to hold the paper for safekeeping. The next morning, when he looked at the paper, he found it merely said "there are seven levels". Lennon, on the other hand, mostly remembered Dylan playing them his latest demos and telling them to listen to the words, but Lennon characteristically being unable to concentrate on the lyrics because in his stoned state he was overwhelmed by the rhythm and general sound of the music. From this point on, the use of cannabis became a major part of the group's life, and it would soon have a profound effect on their lifestyles, their songwriting, the production on their records, and every other aspect of their career. The Beatle on whom it seems to have had the strongest and most immediate effect was Lennon, possibly because he was the one who was coping least well with success and most needed something to take his mind off things. Lennon had always been susceptible to extremes of mood -- it's likely that he would these days be diagnosed as bipolar, and we've already seen how as soon as he'd started writing personally, he'd written "I'm a Loser". He was feeling trapped in suburbia, unsuited for his role as a husband and father, unhappy about his weight, and just generally miserable. Cannabis seemed, at least at first, to offer a temporary escape from that. All the group spent much of the next couple of years stoned, but Lennon probably more than any of them, and he was the one whose writing it seemed to affect most profoundly. On the group's return from the US, they carried on working on the next album, and on a non-album single designed to be released simultaneously with it. "I Feel Fine" is a major milestone in the group's career in a number of ways. The most obvious is the opening -- a brief bit of feedback which Lennon would always later claim to be the first deliberate use of the technique on a record: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I Feel Fine"] Feedback had, up until this point, been something that musicians generally tried to avoid -- an unwanted sound that could wreck a performance. But among guitarists in London, especially, it was becoming the fashionable sound to incorporate, in a carefully controlled manner, in order to make sounds that nobody had heard before. Jeff Beck, Dave Davies, and Pete Townshend would all argue about which of them was the first to use the technique, but all were using it on stage by the time the Beatles recorded "I Feel Fine". But the Beatles were, if not the first to deliberately use feedback on a record (as I've said in the past, there is no such thing as a first anything, and there are debatable examples where feedback may be deliberate going back to the 1930s and some records by Bob Wills), certainly the most prominent artists to do so up to that point, and also the first to make it a major, prominent feature of a hit record in this manner. If they hadn't done it, someone else undoubtedly would, but they were the first to capture the sound that was becoming so popular in the London clubs, and as so often in their career they were able to capture something that was at the cutting edge of the underground culture and turn it into something that would be accepted by millions. "I Feel Fine" was important to the Beatles in another way, though, in that it was the first Beatles original to be based entirely around a guitar riff, and this was if anything a more important departure from their earlier records than the feedback was. Up to this point, while the Beatles had used riffs in covers like "Twist and Shout", their originals had avoided them -- the rhythm guitar had tended to go for strummed chords, while the lead guitar was usually reserved for solos and interjections. Rather than sustaining a riff through the whole record, George Harrison would tend to play answer phrases to the vocal melody, somewhat in the same manner as a backing vocalist. This time, though, Lennon wrote an entire song around a riff -- one he had based on an R&B record from a few years earlier that he particularly loved, "Watch Your Step" by Bobby Parker: [Excerpt: Bobby Parker, "Watch Your Step"] Parker's record had, in turn, been inspired by two others -- the influence of Ray Charles' "What'd I Say" is very obvious, but Parker had based the riff on one that Dizzy Gillespie had used in "Manteca", a classic early Afro-Cuban jazz record from 1947: [Excerpt: Dizzy Gillespie, "Manteca"] Parker had played that riff on his guitar, varied it, and come up with what may be the most influential guitar riff of all time, one lifted not only by the Beatles (on both "I Feel Fine" and, in a modified form, "Day Tripper") but Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, the Allman Brothers Band, and many, many others: [Excerpt: Bobby Parker, "Watch Your Step"] Lennon took that riff and based a new song around it -- and it's important to note here that "I Feel Fine" *is* a new song. Both songs share the same riff and twelve-bar blues structure, but Lennon's lyric and melody are totally different, and the record has a different feel. There's a blurry line between plagiarism and homage, and to my mind "I Feel Fine" stays on the right side of that line, although it's a difficult issue because the Beatles were so much more successful than the unknown Parker. Part of the reason "I Feel Fine" could be the Beatles' first single based around a riff was it was recorded on a four-track machine, EMI having finally upgraded their equipment, which meant that the Beatles could record the instrumental and vocal tracks separately. This allowed Lennon and Harrison to hold down the tricky riff in unison, something Lennon couldn't do while also singing the melody -- it's noticeable that when they performed this song live, Lennon usually strummed the chords on a semi-acoustic guitar rather than doubling the riff as he does on the record. It's also worth listening to what Ringo's doing on the drums on the track. One of the more annoying myths about the Beatles is the claim made by a lot of people that Starr was in some way not a good drummer. While there has been some pushback on this, even to the extent that there is now a contrarian counterconsensus that says he was the best drummer in the world at the time, the general public still thinks of him as having been not particularly good. One listen to the part Starr played on "I Feel Fine" -- or indeed a close listen to any of his drum parts -- should get rid of that idea. While George and John are basically duplicating Parker's riff, Ringo picks up on the Parker record's similarity to "What'd I Say" and plays essentially the same part that Ray Charles' drummer had: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I Feel Fine (isolated drum part)"] There are copies of that posted on YouTube, and almost all of them have comments from people claiming that the drumming in question must be a session drummer, because Starr couldn't play that well.  Several of the Beatles' singles for the next two years would feature a heavy guitar riff as their main instrumental hook. Indeed, it seems like late 1964 is a point where things start to change a little for the Beatles in how they conceptualise singles and albums. Up to this point, they seem to have just written every song as a potential single, then chosen the ones they thought of as the most commercial as singles and stuck the rest out as album tracks. But from autumn 1964 through early 1966 there seems, at least on Lennon's part, to be a divide in how he looked at songs. The songs he brought in that became singles were almost uniformly guitar-driven heavy rockers with a strong riff. Meanwhile, the songs recorded for albums were almost all based on strummed acoustic guitars, usually ballads or at most mid-tempo, and often with meditative lyrics. He clearly seems to have been thinking in terms of commercial singles and less commercial album tracks, even if he didn't quite articulate it that way.  I specify Lennon here, because there doesn't seem to be a comparable split in McCartney's writing -- partly because McCartney didn't really start writing riff-based songs until Lennon dropped the idea in late 1966. McCartney instead seems to start expanding his palette of genres -- while Lennon seems to be in two modes for about an eighteen-month period, and not really to venture out of either the bluesy riff-rocker or the country-flavoured folk rock mode, McCartney starts becoming the stylistic magpie he would become in the later period of the group's career. The B-side to the single, "She's a Woman" is, like the A-side, blues-based, but here it's McCartney in Little Richard mode. The most interesting aspect to it, though, is the rhythm guitar part -- off-beat stabs which sound very much like the group continuing to try to incorporate ska into their work: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "She's a Woman"] The single went to number one, of course, as all the group's singles in this period did. Beatles For Sale, the album that came out of these sessions, is generally regarded as one of the group's weaker efforts, possibly because of the relatively large number of cover versions, but also because of its air of bleakness. From the autumnal cover photo to the laid-back acoustic feel of much of the album, to the depressing nature of Lennon's contributions to the songwriting -- "No Reply", "I'm a Loser", "Baby's in Black", and "I Don't Want to Spoil the Party" all being a far cry from "I Feel Fine" – it's not a fun album by any means. I've always had a soft spot for the album myself, but it's clearly the work of people who were very tired, depressed, and overworked. And they were working hard -- in the four months after the end of their American tour on the twentieth of September, they recorded most of Beatles For Sale and the accompanying single, played forty-eight gigs, made TV appearances on Shindig, Scene at 6:30, Thank Your Lucky Stars, Ready Steady Go, and Top of the Pops, radio appearances on Top Gear and Saturday Club, and sundry interviews. On top of that John also made an appearance on Peter Cook and Dudley Moore's show "Not Only... But Also", performing versions of some of his poetry with Moore and Norman Rossington, who had co-starred in A Hard Day's Night: [Excerpt: John Lennon, Dudley Moore and Norman Rossington, "All Abord Speeching"] They did get a month off from mid-January 1965 through mid-February, but then it was back to work on a new film and accompanying soundtrack album. The group's second film, Help!, is generally regarded with rather less fondness than A Hard Day's Night, and it's certainly the case that some aspects of the film have not dated at all well -- in particular the way that several characters are played by white actors in brownface doing very unconvincing Indian accents, and the less than respectful attitude to Hindu religious beliefs, are things which will make any modern viewer with the slightest sensitivity to such issues cringe terribly.  But those aren't the aspects of the film which most of its critics pick up on -- rather they tend to focus only on the things that the Beatles themselves criticise about the film, mostly that the group spent most of the filming stoned out of their minds, and the performances are thus a lot less focused than those in A Hard Day's Night, and also that the script -- written this time by Richard Lester's regular collaborator Charles Wood, from a story by Marc Behm, rather than by Alun Owen -- is also a little unfocused. All these are fair criticisms as far as they go, but it's also the case that Help! is not a film that is best done justice by being viewed on a small screen on one's own, as most of its critics have viewed it most of the time. Help! is part of a whole subgenre of films which were popular in the 1960s but largely aren't made today -- the loose, chaotic, adventure comedy in which a nominal plot is just an excuse for a series of comedy sketches strung together with spectacular visuals. The genre encompasses everything from It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World to Casino Royale to The Pink Panther, and all of these films are meant to be seen on a big screen which allows the audience to appreciate their visual inventiveness, and in a communal audience which is laughing along with them. And when seen in that light, Help! is actually a remarkably entertaining example of the type. Yes, it doesn't hold together as well as A Hard Day's Night, and it doesn't resolve so much as just stop, but structurally it's remarkably close to the films of the Marx Brothers, especially their Paramount films, and it's odd that the Marx comparisons get made about A Hard Day's Night, a slice-of-life film inspired by the French New Wave, and not about the screwball comedy that ends in a confused chase sequence. There is one thing that is worth noting about Help! that is often obscured -- part of the reason for its globetrotting nature was because of the levels of taxation in Britain at the time. For top earners, like the Beatles were, the marginal rate of income tax was as high as ninety-five percent in the mid-sixties. Many of us would think this was a reasonable rate for people who were earning many, many times in a year what most people would earn in a lifetime, but it's also worth noting that the Beatles'  success had so far lasted only two years, and that a pop act who was successful for five years was remarkably long-lived -- in the British pop industry only Cliff Richard and the Shadows had had a successful career as chart artists for longer than that, and even they were doing much less well in 1965 than they had been in 1963. In retrospect, of course, we know that the Beatles would continue to sell millions of records a year for more than sixty years, but that was not something any of them could possibly have imagined at the time, and we're still in a period where Paul McCartney could talk about going into writing musicals once the Beatles fad passed, and Ringo could still imagine himself as the owner of a hairdresser's. So it's not completely unreasonable of them to want to keep as much of their money as they could, while they could, and so while McCartney will always talk in interviews about how many of the scenes in the film were inspired by a wishlist from the group -- "We've never been skiing", "We've never been to the Bahamas" -- and there might even be some truth to that, it's also the case that the Bahamas were as known for their lax tax regime as for their undoubted charm as a tourist destination, and these journeys were not solely about giving the group a chance to have fun. But of course, before making the film itself, the group had to record songs for its soundtrack, and so on February the sixteenth they went into the studio to record four songs, including the next single, "Ticket to Ride": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Ticket to Ride"] While "Ticket to Ride" is mostly -- or possibly solely -- John's song, the record is very much Paul's record. For most of 1964, McCartney hadn't really been pulling his weight in the songwriting department when compared to John -- the handful of songs he had written had included some exceptional ones, but for the most part he hadn't written much, and John had been the more productive member of their partnership, writing almost all of the A Hard Day's Night album, most of the better tracks on Beatles For Sale, and the non-album single "I Feel Fine".  But now, John was sinking into one of his periodic bouts of depression -- he was still writing strong material, and would produce some of the best songs of his career in 1965, but he was unfocused and unhappy, and it was showing in his slowed productivity -- while McCartney was energised by living in London, the cultural capital of the world at that point in time, and having a famous girlfriend who was exposing him to vast areas of culture he had never been aware of before.  I say that "Ticket to Ride" is written by John, but there is some slight dispute about who contributed what to the writing. John's statement was that the song was all him, and that Paul's main contribution was the drum pattern that Ringo plays. Paul, on the other hand, claims that the song is about a sixty-forty split, with John being the sixty. McCartney's evidence for that is the strong vocal harmony he sings -- usually, if there's a two-part harmony like that on a Beatles song, it came about because Lennon and McCartney were in the same room together while writing it, and singing the part together as they were writing. He also talks about how when writing it they were discussing Ryde in the Isle of Wight, where McCartney's cousin ran a pub. I can certainly see it being the case that McCartney co-wrote the song, but I can also easily see the musicianly McCartney feeling the need to harmonise what would otherwise have been a monotonous melody, and adding the harmonies during the recording stage.  Either way, though, the song is primarily John's in the writing, but the arrangement is primarily McCartney's work -- and while Lennon would later claim that McCartney would always pay less attention to Lennon's songs than to McCartney's own, in this middle period of the group's career most of their truly astounding work comes when  Lennon brings in the song but McCartney experiments with the arrangement and production. Over and over again we see McCartney taking control of a Lennon song in the studio and bringing out aspects of it that its composer either had not considered or had not had the musical vocabulary or patience to realise on his own. Indeed one can see this as part of the dynamic that eventually led to the group breaking up. Lennon would bring in a half-formed idea and have the whole group work on it, especially McCartney, and turn it into the best version of itself it could be, but this would then seem like McCartney trying to take over. McCartney, meanwhile, with his greater musical facility, would increasingly not bother asking for the input of the group's other members, even when that input would have turned a mediocre song into a good one or a good one into a great one.  But at this point in their careers, at least, the collaboration brought out the best in both Lennon and McCartney -- though one must wonder what Harrison and Starr felt about having their parts dictated to them or simply replaced. In the case of "Ticket to Ride", one can trace the evolution of McCartney's drum pattern idea over a period of a few months. He was clearly fascinated by Hal Blaine's drum intro to "Be My Baby": [Excerpt: The Ronettes, "Be My Baby"] and came up with a variation of it for his own song "What You're Doing", possibly the most interesting song on Beatles For Sale on a pure production level, the guitar part for which, owing a lot to the Searchers, is also clearly a pointer to the sound on “Ticket to Ride”: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "What You're Doing"] "Ticket to Ride"s drum part is a more complex variation on that slightly broken pattern, as you can hear if you listen to the isolated drum part: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Ticket to Ride (isolated drums)"] Interestingly, Ringo doesn't keep that precise pattern up all the way through in the studio recording of the song, though he does in subsequent live versions. Instead, from the third verse onwards he shifts to a more straightforward backbeat of the kind he would more normally play: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Ticket to Ride (isolated drums)"] The mono mix of "Ticket to Ride", which is how most listeners of the time encountered it, shows much more than the stereo mix just what the group, and particularly Paul, were trying to do.  It's a bass-heavy track, sluggish and thundering. It's also a song that sounds *obsessed*. For the first six bars of the verse, and the whole intro, the song stays on a single chord, A, only changing on the word "away", right before the chorus: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Ticket to Ride"] This obsession with one chord was possibly inspired by soul music, and in particular by "Dancing in the Street", which similarly stays on one chord for a long time: [Excerpt: Martha and the Vandellas, "Dancing in the Street"] We'll be looking more at how soul music was increasingly doing away with chord progressions in favour of keeping to an extended groove on a single chord when we next look at James Brown in a few weeks' time. But in its single-chord focus and its broken drum beat, "Ticket to Ride" is very much a precursor of what the group would do a little over a year later, when they recorded "Tomorrow Never Knows". Of course, it was also around this time that the group discovered Indian music for the first time. There are scenes in the film Help! which feature musicians playing Indian instruments, and George Harrison became fascinated by the sound of the sitar and bought one, and we'll be seeing the repercussions of that for much of the next year. But it's interesting to note that a lot of the elements that make Indian classical music so distinctive to ears used to Western popular music -- the lack of harmonic movement, the modal melodies, the use of percussion not to keep a steady beat but in melodic interplay with the string instruments -- were all already present in songs like "Ticket to Ride", albeit far less obviously and in a way that still fit very much into pop song conventions. The Beatles grew immensely as musicians from their exposure to Indian music, but it's also the case that Indian music appealed to them precisely because it was an extension of the tastes they already had. Unlike when recording Beatles For Sale, the group clearly had enough original material to fill out an album, even if they ended up not doing so and including two mediocre cover versions on the album -- the last time that would happen during the group's time together. The B-sides of the two singles, John's "Yes It Is" and Paul's "I'm Down", both remained only available on the singles, even though the previous film soundtrack had included the B-sides of both its singles. Not only that, but they recorded two Lennon/McCartney songs that would remain unreleased until more than thirty years later. "If You've Got Troubles" was left unreleased for good reason -- a song written for Ringo to sing, it's probably the single worst Lennon/McCartney song ever attempted by the group, with little or nothing to redeem it. McCartney's "That Means a Lot" is more interesting. It's clearly an attempt by McCartney to write a "Ticket to Ride" part two, with a similar riff and feel: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "That Means a Lot"] It even has a sped-up repurposing of the hook line at the end, just as "Ticket to Ride" does, with "Can't you see?" taking the place of "My baby don't care": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "That Means a Lot"] The group spent a couple of sessions on that track, but seem to have given up on it. While it's far from the best thing they did, it's not worthless or unreleasable, and one suspects that they ended up thinking that the track couldn't go on the same album as "Ticket to Ride" because the two songs were just too close. Instead, they ended up giving the song to P.J. Proby, the American singer who had been brought over by Jack Good for the About The Beatles show, and who had built something of a career for himself in the UK with a string of minor hits. Lennon said "we found we just couldn't sing it. In fact, we made a hash of it, so we thought we'd better give it to someone who could do it well". And Proby *could* have done it well -- but whether he did or not is something you can judge for yourself: [Excerpt: P.J. Proby, "That Means a Lot"] Somehow, Proby's version of the song made the top thirty. When the group started filming "Help!", the film was still going under the working title "Eight Arms to Hold You", which absolutely nobody involved liked -- the title was even included on the label of some copies of "Ticket to Ride", but Lennon and McCartney particularly disliked the idea of writing a song to that title. Some have suggested that the plan was to use McCartney's "Eight Days a Week", an album track from Beatles For Sale that had been released as an American single, as a title track, but it seems unlikely that anyone would have considered that -- United Artists wanted something they could put out on a soundtrack album, and the song had already been out for many months. Instead, at almost the last minute, it was decided to name the film "Help!". This was actually close to the very first working title for the film, which had been "Help, Help". According to Lester, "the lawyer said it had already been registered and you mustn't use it so we had Beatles Two and then Eight Arms to Hold You". The only film I've been able to discover with the title "Help, Help", though, is a silent film from 1912, which I don't imagine would have caused much problem in this case.  However, after the group insisted that they couldn't possibly write a song called "Eight Arms to Hold You", Lester realised that if he put an exclamation mark after the word "help", that turned it into a different title. After getting legal approval he announced that the title of the new film was going to be "Help!", and that same day John came up with a song to that title: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Help!"] Lennon later said that the song had started out as a slow, intense, ballad, and he had been persuaded to speed it up in the studio somewhat against his will. The song being performed as an upbeat pop song possibly made it harder for the public to see what was obvious to Lennon himself, that the song itself was a cry for help from someone going through a mental health crisis. Despite the title not being his, the sentiments certainly were, and for the first time there was barely even the fig-leaf of romantic love to disguise this. The song's lyrics certainly could be interpreted as being the singer wanting help from a romantic partner, but they don't actually specify this, which is not something that could be said about any of the group's other originals up to this point. The soundtrack album for Help! is also notable in other ways. George Harrison writes two songs on the album, when he'd only written one in total for the first four albums. From this point on he would be a major songwriting presence in the group. It also contains the most obvious Dylan homage yet, with Lennon impersonating Dylan's vocal style on "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away", recorded three days after "Ticket to Ride": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away"]  "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away" was notable in another way as well -- it was the first time that a musician other than the Beatles or George Martin was called in to work on a Beatles record (other than Andy White on the "Love Me Do" session, which was not something the Beatles chose or approved of). The flute player Johnny Scott overdubbed two tracks of flute at the end of the recording: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away"] That was a sign of things to come, because in June, once filming had completed, the group went into the studio to continue recording for the non-soundtrack side of the soundtrack album. This was the height of the group's success and embrace by the establishment -- two days earlier it had been announced that they were all to be awarded MBEs -- and it's also the point at which McCartney's new creative growth as a songwriter really became apparent. They recorded three songs on the same day -- his Little Richard soundalike "I'm Down", which ended up being used as the B-side for "Help!", an acoustic country song called "I've Just Seen a Face", and finally a song whose melody had come to him in a dream many months earlier. McCartney had been so impressed by the melody he'd dreamed that he'd been unable to believe it was original to him, and had spent a long time playing it to other people to see if they recognised it. When they didn't, he eventually changed the lyrics from his original jokey "Scrambled eggs/Oh my baby how I love your legs" to something more appropriate, and titled it "Yesterday": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Yesterday (Anthology 2 early take)"] "Yesterday" was released as a Beatles track, on a Beatles album, but it had absolutely no involvement from John, George, and Ringo -- nobody could figure out how to adapt the song to a guitars/bass/drums format. Instead George Martin scored it for a string quartet, with some assistance from McCartney who, worried that strings would end up meaning something Mantovani-like, insisted that the score be kept as simple as possible, and played with almost no vibrato. The result was a Beatles track that featured five people, but only one Beatle: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Yesterday"] The group's next album would see all the band members appearing on every track, and no musicians brought in from outside the group and their organisation, but the genie was now out of the bottle -- the label "The Beatles" on a record no longer meant that it featured John, Paul, George, and Ringo, but just that at least one of them was on the track and the others had agreed it could go out under their name. This would lead to immense changes in the way the group worked, and we'll be seeing how that played out throughout the rest of the 1960s.

IT'S been a week of elections. But it's time to get back to talking about putting crosses into boxes of a different kind. This week we'll hear the second part of a great interview with St Cadoc's boss Craig McEwan. He tells us why his wife's underwear regularly turned up in the dressing room, being sold to Raith 24 hours after signing a new deal at Clyde AND learning from Jimmy Nicol, John Brownlee and Terry Butcher in Kirkcaldy. There's also the day he stormed out of Linlithgow Rose after being dropped for an important game – only to watch his replacement get injured in the warmup. He looks back at his Scotland Under-21 days too, when he played with the likes of Barry Ferguson and Lee McCulloch and also tells us why he's nicknamed Southy. Plus we've got Matt Maley back on the show after his quick return to management at Girvan and we hear about Annbank's request to sit things out for 12 months. We'd like to give a quick mention to our sponsors FortyFour Creative. They have a team of highly skilled and passionate photographers, graphic designers, videographers and video editors to help promote your content, brand, organisation or event. They make creation personal. Find out more at www.fortyfourcreativehq.com If you have any comments we'd love to hear from you. Likewise if you're at a club who would like your post-match audio featured on the show then do get in touch. You can email downthedivisions@gmail.com or contact us through Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. Thanks for giving us your vote as we go Down The Divisions. Down The Divisions logo design Adam Aitken Intro and outro music Bensound  

In this episode, we discuss the Beatles' trip to Australia and New Zealand in 1964, covering such things as: Jimmy Nicol, rainy weather standing in clothes from Hong Kong, press conferences, and the setlist from the filmed gig in Melbourne. This was at a high point of Beatlemania, where the group was in good spirits and playing well, and the fans all came out for the shows. Thanks to our listeners in Australia and New Zealand who helped with information about these gigs!  Here's a great performance of the Melbourne gig that we discuss: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EVtWKkMa9E ivegotabeatlespodcast@hotmail.com @ivegotabeatles Facebook: I've Got A Beatles Podcast @chrisdbragg

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

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

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

Episode seventy-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Brand New Cadillac” by Vince Taylor and the Playboys, and the sad career of rock music’s first acid casualty. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers have two bonus podcasts this week. There’s a half-hour Q&A episode, where I answer backers’ questions, and a ten-minute bonus episode on “The Hippy Hippy Shake” by Chan Romero. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

Welcome to episode forty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This one looks at “Rock With the Caveman” by Tommy Steele, and the birth of the British rock and roll industry. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a bonus episode available. This one’s on “The Death of Rock and Roll” by the Maddox Brothers and Rose, in which we look at a country group some say invented rock & roll, and how they reacted badly to it  —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. This double-CD set contains all Steele’s rock and roll material, plus a selection of songs from the musicals he appeared in later. This MP3 compilation, meanwhile, contains a huge number of skiffle records and early British attempts at rock and roll, including Steele’s. Much of the music is not very good, but I can’t imagine a better way of getting an understanding of the roots of British rock. Pete Frame’s The Restless Generation is the best book available looking at British 50s rock and roll from a historical perspective. Billy Bragg’s Roots, Radicals, and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World is one of the best books I’ve read on music at all, and covers Steele from the skiffle perspective. Fings Ain’t What They Used T’Be: The Life of Lionel Bart by David & Caroline Stafford gave me a lot of information on Steel’s songwriting partner. Steele’s autobiography, Bermondsey Boy, covers his childhood and early stardom. I am not 100% convinced of its accuracy, but it’s an entertaining book, and if nothing else probably gives a good idea of the mental atmosphere in the poor parts of South London in the war and immediate post-war years. And George Melly’s Revolt Into Style was one of the first books to take British pop culture seriously, and puts Steele into a wider context of British pop, both music and art. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Let’s talk a little bit about the Piltdown Man. Piltdown Man was an early example of a hominid — a missing link between the apes and humans. Its skull was discovered in 1912 in Piltdown, East Sussex, by the eminent archaeologist Charles Dawson, and for years was considered one of the most important pieces of evidence in the story of human evolution. And then, in 1953, it was discovered that the whole thing was a hoax, and not even a particularly good one. Someone had just taken the jaw of an orang-utan and the top part of a human skull, and filed down the orang-utan teeth, and then stained the bones to make them look old. It was almost certainly the work of Dawson himself, who seems to have spent his entire life making fraudulent discoveries. Dawson had died decades earlier, and the full extent of his fraud wasn’t even confirmed until 2003. Sometimes researching the history of rock and roll can be a lot like that. You can find a story repeated in numerous apparently reliable books, and then find out that it’s all based on the inaccurate testimony of a single individual. The story never happened. It was just something someone made up. [Excerpt: “Rock With the Caveman”, Tommy Steele and the Steelmen] We talked a little while ago about the skiffle movement, and the first British guitar-based pop music. Today, we’re going to look at the dawn of British rock and roll. Now, there’s an important thing to note about the first wave of British rock and roll, and that is that it was, essentially, a music that had no roots in the culture. It was an imitation of American music, without any of the ties to social issues that made the American music so interesting. Britain in the 1950s was a very different place to the one it is today, or to America. It was ethnically extremely homogeneous, as the waves of immigration that have so improved the country had only just started. And while few people travelled much outside their own immediate areas, it was culturally more homogeneous as well, as Britain, unlike America, had a national media rather than a local one. In Britain, someone could become known throughout the country before they’d played their second gig, if they got the right media exposure. And so British rock and roll started out at the point that American rock and roll was only just starting to get to — a clean-cut version of the music, with little black influence or sexuality left in it, designed from the outset to be a part of mainstream showbusiness aimed at teenagers, not music for an underclass or a racial or sexual minority. Britain’s first rock and roll star put out his first record in November 1956, and by November 1957 he was appearing on the Royal Variety Show, with Mario Lanza, Bob Monkhouse, and Vera Lynn. That is, fundamentally, what early British rock and roll was. Keep that in mind for the rest of the story, as we look at how a young sailor from a dirt-poor family became Britain’s first teen idol. To tell that story, we first have to discuss the career of the Vipers Skiffle Group. That was the group’s full name, and they were just about the most important British group of the mid-fifties, even though they were never as commercially successful as some of the acts we’ve looked at. The name of the Vipers Skiffle Group was actually the first drug reference in British pop music. They took the name from the autobiography of the American jazz clarinettist Mezz Mezzrow — a man who was better known in the jazz community as a dope dealer than as a musician; so much so that “Mezz” itself became slang for marijuana, while “viper” became the name for dope smokers, as you can hear in this recording by Stuff Smith, in which he sings that he “dreamed about a reefer five foot long/Mighty Mezz but not too strong”. [Excerpt: Stuff Smith, “You’se a Viper”] So when Wally Whyton, Johnny Booker, and Jean Van Den Bosch formed a guitar trio, they chose that name, even though as it turned out none of them actually smoked dope. They just thought it sounded cool. They started performing at a cafe called the 2is (two as in the numeral, I as in the letter), and started to build up something of a reputation — to the point that Lonnie Donegan started nicking their material. Whyton had taken an old sea shanty, “Sail Away Ladies”, popularised by the country banjo player Uncle Dave Macon, and rewritten it substantially, turning it into “Don’t You Rock Me Daddy-O”. Donegan copyrighted Whyton’s song as soon as he heard it, and rushed out his version of it, but the Vipers put out their own version too, and the two chased each other up the charts. Donegan’s charted higher, but the Vipers ended up at a respectable number ten: [Excerpt: The Vipers, “Don’t You Rock Me, Daddy-O”] That recording was on Parlophone records, and was produced by a young producer who normally did comedy and novelty records, named George Martin. We’ll be hearing more about him later on. But at the time we’re talking about, the Vipers had not yet gained a recording contract, and they were still playing the 2is. Occasionally, they would be joined on stage by a young acquaintance named Thomas Hicks. Hicks was a merchant seaman, and was away at sea most of the time, and so was never a full part of the group, but even though he didn’t care much for skiffle — he was a country and western fan first and foremost — he played guitar, and in Britain in 1955 and 56, if you played guitar, you played skiffle. Hicks had come from an absolutely dirt-poor background. Three of his siblings had died at cruelly young ages, and young Thomas himself had had several brushes with ill health, which meant that while he was a voracious reader he had lacked formal education. He had wanted to be a performer from a very early age, and had developed a routine that he used to do around the pubs in his early teens, in which he would mime to a record by Danny Kaye, “Knock on Wood”: [Excerpt: Danny Kaye, “Knock on Wood”] But at age fifteen he had joined the Merchant Navy. This isn’t the same thing as the Royal Navy, but rather is the group of commercial shipping companies that provide non-military shipping, and Hicks worked as wait staff on a cruise ship making regular trips to America. On an early trip, he fell in love with the music of Hank Williams, who would remain a favourite of his for the rest of his life, and he particularly loved the song “Kaw-Liga”: [Excerpt: Hank Williams, “Kaw-Liga”] Hicks replaced his old party piece of miming to Danny Kaye with a new one of singing “Kaw-Liga”, with accompaniment from anyone he could persuade to play guitar for him. Eventually one of his crewmates taught him how to play the song himself, and he started performing with pick-up groups, singing Hank Williams songs, whenever he was on shore leave in the UK. And when he couldn’t get a paid gig he’d head to the 2is and sing with the Vipers. But then came the event that changed his life. Young Tommy Hicks, with his love of country music, was delighted when on shore leave in 1955 to see an advert for a touring show based on the Grand Ole Opry, in Norfolk Virginia, where he happened to be. Of course he went along, and there he saw something that made a huge impression. One of the acts in the middle of the bill was a young man who wore horn-rimmed glasses. Tommy still remembers the details to this day. The young man came out and did a three-song set. The first song was a standard country song, but the second one was something else; something that hit like a bolt of lightning: [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, “Peggy Sue”] That song was young Thomas Hicks’ introduction to the new music called rock and roll, and nothing would ever be the same for him ever again after seeing Buddy Holly sing “Peggy Sue”. By February 1956 he had finished working on the cruise ships, and was performing rock and roll in London, the very first British rock and roller. Except… There’s a reason why we’re covering Tommy Steele *before* Buddy Holly, the man who he claims as his inspiration. Buddy Holly *did* perform with a Grand Ole Opry tour. But it didn’t tour until May 1956, three months after Thomas Hicks quit his job on the cruise ships, and about a year after the time Tommy claims to have seen him. That tour only hit Oklahoma, which is landlocked, and didn’t visit Norfolk Virginia. According to various timelines put together by people like the Buddy Holly Centre in Lubbock Texas, Holly didn’t perform outside Lubbock until that tour, and that’s the only time he did perform outside West Texas until 1957. Also, Buddy Holly didn’t meet Peggy Sue Gerron, the woman who gave the song its name, until 1956, and the song doesn’t seem to have been written until 1957. So whatever it was that introduced young Tommy Hicks to the wonders of rock and roll, it wasn’t seeing Buddy Holly sing “Peggy Sue” in Norfolk Virginia in 1955. But that’s the story that’s in his autobiography, and that’s the story that’s in every other source I’ve seen on the subject, because they’re all just repeating what he said, on the assumption that he’d remember something like that, something which was so important in his life and future career. Remember what I said at the beginning, about rock and roll history being like dealing with Piltdown Man? Yeah. There are a lot of inaccuracies in the life story of Thomas Hicks, who became famous under the name Tommy Steele. Anything I tell you about him is based on information he put out, and that information is not always the truth, so be warned. For example, when he started his career, he claimed he’d worked his way up on the cruise ships to being a gymnastics instructor — something that the shipping federation denied to the press. You find a lot of that kind of thing when you dig into Steele’s stories. In fact, by the time Hicks started performing, there had already been at least one British rock and roll record made. He wasn’t bringing something new that he’d discovered in America at all. “Rock Around the Clock”, the Bill Haley film, had played in UK cinemas at around the time of Hicks’ supposed epiphany, and it had inspired a modern jazz drummer, Tony Crombie, to form Tony Crombie and the Rockets and record a Bill Haley soundalike called “Teach You To Rock”: [Excerpt: Tony Crombie and the Rockets, “Teach You To Rock”] However, Crombie was not teen idol material — a serious jazz drummer in his thirties, he soon went back to playing bebop, and has largely been written out of British rock history since, in favour of Tommy Steele as the first British rock and roller. Thomas Hicks the merchant seaman became Tommy Steele the pop idol as a result of a chance meeting. Hicks went to a party with a friend, and the host was a man called Lionel Bart, who was celebrating because he’d just sold his first song, to the bandleader Bill Cotton. No recording of that song seems to exist, but the lyrics to the song — a lament about the way that old-style cafes were being replaced by upscale coffee bars — are quoted in a biography of Bart: “Oh for a cup of tea, instead of a cuppuchini/What would it mean to me, just one little cup so teeny!/You ask for some char and they reckon you’re barmy/Ask for a banger, they’ll give you salami/Oh for the liquid they served in the Army/Just a cup of tea!” Heartrending stuff, I’m sure you’ll agree. But Bart was proud of the twenty-five guineas the song had earned him, and so he was having a party. Bart was at the centre of a Bohemian crowd in Soho, and the party was held at a squat where Bart, a card-carrying member of the Communist Party, spent most of his time. At that squat at various times around this period lived, among others, the playwright John Antrobus, the actor Shirley Eaton, who would later become famous as the woman painted gold in the beginning of Goldfinger, and the great folk guitarist Davey Graham, who would later become famous for his instrumental, “Angi”: [Excerpt: Davey Graham, “Angi”] We’ll hear more about Graham in future episodes. Another inhabitant of the squat was Mike Pratt, a guitarist and pianist who would later turn to acting and become famous as Jeff Randall in the fantasy detective series Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased). Hicks, Bart, and Pratt started collaborating on songs together — Hicks would bring in a basic idea, and then Bart would write the lyrics and Pratt the music. They also performed as The Cavemen, though Bart soon tired of playing washboard and stuck to writing. The Cavemen became a floating group of musicians, centred around Hicks and Pratt, and with various Vipers and other skifflers pulled in as and when they were available. The various skiffle musicians looked down on Hicks, because of his tendency to want to play “Heartbreak Hotel” or “Blue Suede Shoes” rather than “Bring a Little Water Sylvie” or “Rock Island Line”, but a gig was a gig, and they had to admit that Hicks seemed to go down well with the young women in the audience. Two minor music industry people, Bill Varley and Roy Tuvey, agreed to manage Hicks, but they decided that they needed someone involved who would be able to publicise Hicks, so they invited John Kennedy, a PR man from New Zealand, to come to the 2is to see him. Hicks wasn’t actually playing the 2is the night in question – it was the Vipers, who were just on the verge of getting signed and recording their first single: [Excerpt: The Vipers Skiffle Group, “Ain’t You Glad?”] While Hicks wasn’t scheduled to play, at the request of Varley and Tuvey he jumped on stage when the Vipers took a break, and sang a song that he, Bart, and Pratt had written, called “Rock With the Caveman”. Kennedy was impressed. He was impressed enough, in fact, that he brought in a friend, Larry Parnes, who would go on to become the most important manager in British rock and roll in the fifties and early sixties. Kennedy, Parnes, and Hicks cut Varley and Tuvey out altogether — to the extent that neither of them are even mentioned in the version of this story in Tommy Steele’s autobiography. Hicks was renamed Tommy Steele, in a nod to his paternal grandfather Thomas Stil-Hicks (the Stil in that name is spelled either Stil or Stijl, depending on which source you believe) and Parnes would go on to name a whole host of further rock stars in a similar manner — Duffy Power, Johnny Gentle, Billy Fury, Marty Wilde. They had everything except a record contract, but that was why Kennedy was there. Kennedy rented a big house, and hired a load of showgirls, models, and sex workers to turn up for a party and bring their boyfriends. They were to dress nicely, talk in fake posh accents, and if anyone asked who they were they were to give fake double-barrelled names. He then called the press and said it was “the first high society rock and roll show” and that the girls were all debutantes. The story made the newspapers, and got Steele national attention. Steele was signed by Decca records, where Hugh Mendl, the producer of “Rock Island Line”, was so eager to sign him that he didn’t check if any studios were free for his audition, and so Britain’s first homegrown rock idol auditioned for his record contract in the gents’ toilets. A bunch of slumming jazz musicians, including Dave Lee, the pianist with the Dankworth band, and the legendary saxophone player Ronnie Scott, were brought in to record “Rock With the Caveman”: [Excerpt: Tommy Steele, “Rock With the Caveman”] The single went to number thirteen. Tommy Steele was now a bona fide rock and roll star, at least in the UK. The next record, “Elevator Rock”, didn’t do so well, however: [Excerpt: Tommy Steele, “Elevator Rock”] That failed to chart, so Steele’s producers went for the well-worn trick in British record making of simply copying a US hit. Guy Mitchell had just released “Singing the Blues”: [Excerpt: Guy Mitchell, “Singing the Blues”] That was actually a cover version of a recording by Marty Robbins from earlier in the year, but Mitchell’s version was the one that became the big hit. And Steele was brought into the studio to record a soundalike version, and hopefully get it out before Mitchell’s version hit the charts. Steele’s version has an identical arrangement and sound to Mitchell’s, except that Steele sings it in an incredibly mannered Elvis impression: [Excerpt: Tommy Steele, “Singing the Blues”] Now, to twenty-first century ears, Steele’s version is clearly inferior. But here was the birth of something particularly English — and indeed something particularly London — in rock and roll music. The overly mannered, music-hall inspired, Cockneyfied impression of an American singing style. On Steele’s subsequent tour, a nine-year old kid called David Jones, who would later change his name to Bowie, went to see him and came away inspired to become a rock and roll star. And we can hear in this performance the roots of Bowie’s own London take on Elvis, as we can also hear a style that would be taken up by Anthony Newley, Ray Davies, and many more masters of Cockney archness. I don’t think “Singing the Blues” is a particularly good record compared to Mitchell’s, but it is a prototype for something that would become good, and it deserves recognition for that. Mitchell’s version got out first, and went to the top of the charts, with Steele’s following close behind, but then for one week Mitchell’s record label had a minor distribution problem, and Steele took over the top spot, before Mitchell’s record returned to number one the next week. Tommy Steele had become the first British rock and roll singer to get to number one in the UK charts. It would be the only time he would do so, but it was enough. He was a bona fide teen idol. He was so big, in fact, that even his brother, Colin Hicks, became a minor rock and roll star himself off the back of his brother’s success: [Excerpt: Colin Hicks and the Cabin Boys, “Hollering and Screaming”] The drummer on that record, Jimmy Nicol, later had his fifteen minutes of fame when Ringo Starr got tonsilitis just before a tour of Australia, and for a few shows Nicol got to be a substitute Beatle. Very soon, Tommy Steele moved on into light entertainment. First he moved into films — starting with “The Tommy Steele Story”, a film based on his life, for which he, Bart, and Pratt wrote all twelve of the songs in a week to meet the deadline, and then he went into stage musicals. Within a year, he had given up on rock and roll altogether. But rock and roll hadn’t *quite* given up on him. While Steele was appearing in stage musicals, one was also written about him — a hurtful parody of his life, which he claimed later he’d wanted to sue over. In Expresso Bongo, a satire of the British music industry, Steele was parodied as “Bongo Herbert”, who rises to fame with no talent whatsoever. That stage musical was then rewritten for a film version, with the satire taken out of it, so it was a straight rags-to-riches story. It was made into a vehicle for another singer who had been a regular at the 2is, and whose backing band was made up of former members of the Vipers Skiffle Group: [Excerpt: Cliff Richard, “Love” (from Expresso Bongo)] We’ll talk about both Cliff Richard and the Shadows in future episodes though… Tommy Steele would go on to become something of a national treasure, working on stage with Gene Kelly and on screen with Fred Astaire, writing several books, having a minor artistic career as a sculptor, and touring constantly in pantomimes and musicals. At age eighty-two he still tours every year, performing as Scrooge in a stage musical version of A Christmas Carol. His 1950s hits remain popular enough in the UK that a compilation of them went to number twenty-two in the charts in 2009. He may not leave a large body of rock and roll work, but without him, there would be no British rock and roll industry as we know it, and the rest of this history would be very different.

Welcome to episode forty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This one looks at “Rock With the Caveman” by Tommy Steele, and the birth of the British rock and roll industry. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a bonus episode available. This one’s on “The Death of Rock and Roll” by the Maddox Brothers and Rose, in which we look at a country group some say invented rock & roll, and how they reacted badly to it  —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. This double-CD set contains all Steele’s rock and roll material, plus a selection of songs from the musicals he appeared in later. This MP3 compilation, meanwhile, contains a huge number of skiffle records and early British attempts at rock and roll, including Steele’s. Much of the music is not very good, but I can’t imagine a better way of getting an understanding of the roots of British rock. Pete Frame’s The Restless Generation is the best book available looking at British 50s rock and roll from a historical perspective. Billy Bragg’s Roots, Radicals, and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World is one of the best books I’ve read on music at all, and covers Steele from the skiffle perspective. Fings Ain’t What They Used T’Be: The Life of Lionel Bart by David & Caroline Stafford gave me a lot of information on Steel’s songwriting partner. Steele’s autobiography, Bermondsey Boy, covers his childhood and early stardom. I am not 100% convinced of its accuracy, but it’s an entertaining book, and if nothing else probably gives a good idea of the mental atmosphere in the poor parts of South London in the war and immediate post-war years. And George Melly’s Revolt Into Style was one of the first books to take British pop culture seriously, and puts Steele into a wider context of British pop, both music and art. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Let’s talk a little bit about the Piltdown Man. Piltdown Man was an early example of a hominid — a missing link between the apes and humans. Its skull was discovered in 1912 in Piltdown, East Sussex, by the eminent archaeologist Charles Dawson, and for years was considered one of the most important pieces of evidence in the story of human evolution. And then, in 1953, it was discovered that the whole thing was a hoax, and not even a particularly good one. Someone had just taken the jaw of an orang-utan and the top part of a human skull, and filed down the orang-utan teeth, and then stained the bones to make them look old. It was almost certainly the work of Dawson himself, who seems to have spent his entire life making fraudulent discoveries. Dawson had died decades earlier, and the full extent of his fraud wasn’t even confirmed until 2003. Sometimes researching the history of rock and roll can be a lot like that. You can find a story repeated in numerous apparently reliable books, and then find out that it’s all based on the inaccurate testimony of a single individual. The story never happened. It was just something someone made up. [Excerpt: “Rock With the Caveman”, Tommy Steele and the Steelmen] We talked a little while ago about the skiffle movement, and the first British guitar-based pop music. Today, we’re going to look at the dawn of British rock and roll. Now, there’s an important thing to note about the first wave of British rock and roll, and that is that it was, essentially, a music that had no roots in the culture. It was an imitation of American music, without any of the ties to social issues that made the American music so interesting. Britain in the 1950s was a very different place to the one it is today, or to America. It was ethnically extremely homogeneous, as the waves of immigration that have so improved the country had only just started. And while few people travelled much outside their own immediate areas, it was culturally more homogeneous as well, as Britain, unlike America, had a national media rather than a local one. In Britain, someone could become known throughout the country before they’d played their second gig, if they got the right media exposure. And so British rock and roll started out at the point that American rock and roll was only just starting to get to — a clean-cut version of the music, with little black influence or sexuality left in it, designed from the outset to be a part of mainstream showbusiness aimed at teenagers, not music for an underclass or a racial or sexual minority. Britain’s first rock and roll star put out his first record in November 1956, and by November 1957 he was appearing on the Royal Variety Show, with Mario Lanza, Bob Monkhouse, and Vera Lynn. That is, fundamentally, what early British rock and roll was. Keep that in mind for the rest of the story, as we look at how a young sailor from a dirt-poor family became Britain’s first teen idol. To tell that story, we first have to discuss the career of the Vipers Skiffle Group. That was the group’s full name, and they were just about the most important British group of the mid-fifties, even though they were never as commercially successful as some of the acts we’ve looked at. The name of the Vipers Skiffle Group was actually the first drug reference in British pop music. They took the name from the autobiography of the American jazz clarinettist Mezz Mezzrow — a man who was better known in the jazz community as a dope dealer than as a musician; so much so that “Mezz” itself became slang for marijuana, while “viper” became the name for dope smokers, as you can hear in this recording by Stuff Smith, in which he sings that he “dreamed about a reefer five foot long/Mighty Mezz but not too strong”. [Excerpt: Stuff Smith, “You’se a Viper”] So when Wally Whyton, Johnny Booker, and Jean Van Den Bosch formed a guitar trio, they chose that name, even though as it turned out none of them actually smoked dope. They just thought it sounded cool. They started performing at a cafe called the 2is (two as in the numeral, I as in the letter), and started to build up something of a reputation — to the point that Lonnie Donegan started nicking their material. Whyton had taken an old sea shanty, “Sail Away Ladies”, popularised by the country banjo player Uncle Dave Macon, and rewritten it substantially, turning it into “Don’t You Rock Me Daddy-O”. Donegan copyrighted Whyton’s song as soon as he heard it, and rushed out his version of it, but the Vipers put out their own version too, and the two chased each other up the charts. Donegan’s charted higher, but the Vipers ended up at a respectable number ten: [Excerpt: The Vipers, “Don’t You Rock Me, Daddy-O”] That recording was on Parlophone records, and was produced by a young producer who normally did comedy and novelty records, named George Martin. We’ll be hearing more about him later on. But at the time we’re talking about, the Vipers had not yet gained a recording contract, and they were still playing the 2is. Occasionally, they would be joined on stage by a young acquaintance named Thomas Hicks. Hicks was a merchant seaman, and was away at sea most of the time, and so was never a full part of the group, but even though he didn’t care much for skiffle — he was a country and western fan first and foremost — he played guitar, and in Britain in 1955 and 56, if you played guitar, you played skiffle. Hicks had come from an absolutely dirt-poor background. Three of his siblings had died at cruelly young ages, and young Thomas himself had had several brushes with ill health, which meant that while he was a voracious reader he had lacked formal education. He had wanted to be a performer from a very early age, and had developed a routine that he used to do around the pubs in his early teens, in which he would mime to a record by Danny Kaye, “Knock on Wood”: [Excerpt: Danny Kaye, “Knock on Wood”] But at age fifteen he had joined the Merchant Navy. This isn’t the same thing as the Royal Navy, but rather is the group of commercial shipping companies that provide non-military shipping, and Hicks worked as wait staff on a cruise ship making regular trips to America. On an early trip, he fell in love with the music of Hank Williams, who would remain a favourite of his for the rest of his life, and he particularly loved the song “Kaw-Liga”: [Excerpt: Hank Williams, “Kaw-Liga”] Hicks replaced his old party piece of miming to Danny Kaye with a new one of singing “Kaw-Liga”, with accompaniment from anyone he could persuade to play guitar for him. Eventually one of his crewmates taught him how to play the song himself, and he started performing with pick-up groups, singing Hank Williams songs, whenever he was on shore leave in the UK. And when he couldn’t get a paid gig he’d head to the 2is and sing with the Vipers. But then came the event that changed his life. Young Tommy Hicks, with his love of country music, was delighted when on shore leave in 1955 to see an advert for a touring show based on the Grand Ole Opry, in Norfolk Virginia, where he happened to be. Of course he went along, and there he saw something that made a huge impression. One of the acts in the middle of the bill was a young man who wore horn-rimmed glasses. Tommy still remembers the details to this day. The young man came out and did a three-song set. The first song was a standard country song, but the second one was something else; something that hit like a bolt of lightning: [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, “Peggy Sue”] That song was young Thomas Hicks’ introduction to the new music called rock and roll, and nothing would ever be the same for him ever again after seeing Buddy Holly sing “Peggy Sue”. By February 1956 he had finished working on the cruise ships, and was performing rock and roll in London, the very first British rock and roller. Except… There’s a reason why we’re covering Tommy Steele *before* Buddy Holly, the man who he claims as his inspiration. Buddy Holly *did* perform with a Grand Ole Opry tour. But it didn’t tour until May 1956, three months after Thomas Hicks quit his job on the cruise ships, and about a year after the time Tommy claims to have seen him. That tour only hit Oklahoma, which is landlocked, and didn’t visit Norfolk Virginia. According to various timelines put together by people like the Buddy Holly Centre in Lubbock Texas, Holly didn’t perform outside Lubbock until that tour, and that’s the only time he did perform outside West Texas until 1957. Also, Buddy Holly didn’t meet Peggy Sue Gerron, the woman who gave the song its name, until 1956, and the song doesn’t seem to have been written until 1957. So whatever it was that introduced young Tommy Hicks to the wonders of rock and roll, it wasn’t seeing Buddy Holly sing “Peggy Sue” in Norfolk Virginia in 1955. But that’s the story that’s in his autobiography, and that’s the story that’s in every other source I’ve seen on the subject, because they’re all just repeating what he said, on the assumption that he’d remember something like that, something which was so important in his life and future career. Remember what I said at the beginning, about rock and roll history being like dealing with Piltdown Man? Yeah. There are a lot of inaccuracies in the life story of Thomas Hicks, who became famous under the name Tommy Steele. Anything I tell you about him is based on information he put out, and that information is not always the truth, so be warned. For example, when he started his career, he claimed he’d worked his way up on the cruise ships to being a gymnastics instructor — something that the shipping federation denied to the press. You find a lot of that kind of thing when you dig into Steele’s stories. In fact, by the time Hicks started performing, there had already been at least one British rock and roll record made. He wasn’t bringing something new that he’d discovered in America at all. “Rock Around the Clock”, the Bill Haley film, had played in UK cinemas at around the time of Hicks’ supposed epiphany, and it had inspired a modern jazz drummer, Tony Crombie, to form Tony Crombie and the Rockets and record a Bill Haley soundalike called “Teach You To Rock”: [Excerpt: Tony Crombie and the Rockets, “Teach You To Rock”] However, Crombie was not teen idol material — a serious jazz drummer in his thirties, he soon went back to playing bebop, and has largely been written out of British rock history since, in favour of Tommy Steele as the first British rock and roller. Thomas Hicks the merchant seaman became Tommy Steele the pop idol as a result of a chance meeting. Hicks went to a party with a friend, and the host was a man called Lionel Bart, who was celebrating because he’d just sold his first song, to the bandleader Bill Cotton. No recording of that song seems to exist, but the lyrics to the song — a lament about the way that old-style cafes were being replaced by upscale coffee bars — are quoted in a biography of Bart: “Oh for a cup of tea, instead of a cuppuchini/What would it mean to me, just one little cup so teeny!/You ask for some char and they reckon you’re barmy/Ask for a banger, they’ll give you salami/Oh for the liquid they served in the Army/Just a cup of tea!” Heartrending stuff, I’m sure you’ll agree. But Bart was proud of the twenty-five guineas the song had earned him, and so he was having a party. Bart was at the centre of a Bohemian crowd in Soho, and the party was held at a squat where Bart, a card-carrying member of the Communist Party, spent most of his time. At that squat at various times around this period lived, among others, the playwright John Antrobus, the actor Shirley Eaton, who would later become famous as the woman painted gold in the beginning of Goldfinger, and the great folk guitarist Davey Graham, who would later become famous for his instrumental, “Angi”: [Excerpt: Davey Graham, “Angi”] We’ll hear more about Graham in future episodes. Another inhabitant of the squat was Mike Pratt, a guitarist and pianist who would later turn to acting and become famous as Jeff Randall in the fantasy detective series Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased). Hicks, Bart, and Pratt started collaborating on songs together — Hicks would bring in a basic idea, and then Bart would write the lyrics and Pratt the music. They also performed as The Cavemen, though Bart soon tired of playing washboard and stuck to writing. The Cavemen became a floating group of musicians, centred around Hicks and Pratt, and with various Vipers and other skifflers pulled in as and when they were available. The various skiffle musicians looked down on Hicks, because of his tendency to want to play “Heartbreak Hotel” or “Blue Suede Shoes” rather than “Bring a Little Water Sylvie” or “Rock Island Line”, but a gig was a gig, and they had to admit that Hicks seemed to go down well with the young women in the audience. Two minor music industry people, Bill Varley and Roy Tuvey, agreed to manage Hicks, but they decided that they needed someone involved who would be able to publicise Hicks, so they invited John Kennedy, a PR man from New Zealand, to come to the 2is to see him. Hicks wasn’t actually playing the 2is the night in question – it was the Vipers, who were just on the verge of getting signed and recording their first single: [Excerpt: The Vipers Skiffle Group, “Ain’t You Glad?”] While Hicks wasn’t scheduled to play, at the request of Varley and Tuvey he jumped on stage when the Vipers took a break, and sang a song that he, Bart, and Pratt had written, called “Rock With the Caveman”. Kennedy was impressed. He was impressed enough, in fact, that he brought in a friend, Larry Parnes, who would go on to become the most important manager in British rock and roll in the fifties and early sixties. Kennedy, Parnes, and Hicks cut Varley and Tuvey out altogether — to the extent that neither of them are even mentioned in the version of this story in Tommy Steele’s autobiography. Hicks was renamed Tommy Steele, in a nod to his paternal grandfather Thomas Stil-Hicks (the Stil in that name is spelled either Stil or Stijl, depending on which source you believe) and Parnes would go on to name a whole host of further rock stars in a similar manner — Duffy Power, Johnny Gentle, Billy Fury, Marty Wilde. They had everything except a record contract, but that was why Kennedy was there. Kennedy rented a big house, and hired a load of showgirls, models, and sex workers to turn up for a party and bring their boyfriends. They were to dress nicely, talk in fake posh accents, and if anyone asked who they were they were to give fake double-barrelled names. He then called the press and said it was “the first high society rock and roll show” and that the girls were all debutantes. The story made the newspapers, and got Steele national attention. Steele was signed by Decca records, where Hugh Mendl, the producer of “Rock Island Line”, was so eager to sign him that he didn’t check if any studios were free for his audition, and so Britain’s first homegrown rock idol auditioned for his record contract in the gents’ toilets. A bunch of slumming jazz musicians, including Dave Lee, the pianist with the Dankworth band, and the legendary saxophone player Ronnie Scott, were brought in to record “Rock With the Caveman”: [Excerpt: Tommy Steele, “Rock With the Caveman”] The single went to number thirteen. Tommy Steele was now a bona fide rock and roll star, at least in the UK. The next record, “Elevator Rock”, didn’t do so well, however: [Excerpt: Tommy Steele, “Elevator Rock”] That failed to chart, so Steele’s producers went for the well-worn trick in British record making of simply copying a US hit. Guy Mitchell had just released “Singing the Blues”: [Excerpt: Guy Mitchell, “Singing the Blues”] That was actually a cover version of a recording by Marty Robbins from earlier in the year, but Mitchell’s version was the one that became the big hit. And Steele was brought into the studio to record a soundalike version, and hopefully get it out before Mitchell’s version hit the charts. Steele’s version has an identical arrangement and sound to Mitchell’s, except that Steele sings it in an incredibly mannered Elvis impression: [Excerpt: Tommy Steele, “Singing the Blues”] Now, to twenty-first century ears, Steele’s version is clearly inferior. But here was the birth of something particularly English — and indeed something particularly London — in rock and roll music. The overly mannered, music-hall inspired, Cockneyfied impression of an American singing style. On Steele’s subsequent tour, a nine-year old kid called David Jones, who would later change his name to Bowie, went to see him and came away inspired to become a rock and roll star. And we can hear in this performance the roots of Bowie’s own London take on Elvis, as we can also hear a style that would be taken up by Anthony Newley, Ray Davies, and many more masters of Cockney archness. I don’t think “Singing the Blues” is a particularly good record compared to Mitchell’s, but it is a prototype for something that would become good, and it deserves recognition for that. Mitchell’s version got out first, and went to the top of the charts, with Steele’s following close behind, but then for one week Mitchell’s record label had a minor distribution problem, and Steele took over the top spot, before Mitchell’s record returned to number one the next week. Tommy Steele had become the first British rock and roll singer to get to number one in the UK charts. It would be the only time he would do so, but it was enough. He was a bona fide teen idol. He was so big, in fact, that even his brother, Colin Hicks, became a minor rock and roll star himself off the back of his brother’s success: [Excerpt: Colin Hicks and the Cabin Boys, “Hollering and Screaming”] The drummer on that record, Jimmy Nicol, later had his fifteen minutes of fame when Ringo Starr got tonsilitis just before a tour of Australia, and for a few shows Nicol got to be a substitute Beatle. Very soon, Tommy Steele moved on into light entertainment. First he moved into films — starting with “The Tommy Steele Story”, a film based on his life, for which he, Bart, and Pratt wrote all twelve of the songs in a week to meet the deadline, and then he went into stage musicals. Within a year, he had given up on rock and roll altogether. But rock and roll hadn’t *quite* given up on him. While Steele was appearing in stage musicals, one was also written about him — a hurtful parody of his life, which he claimed later he’d wanted to sue over. In Expresso Bongo, a satire of the British music industry, Steele was parodied as “Bongo Herbert”, who rises to fame with no talent whatsoever. That stage musical was then rewritten for a film version, with the satire taken out of it, so it was a straight rags-to-riches story. It was made into a vehicle for another singer who had been a regular at the 2is, and whose backing band was made up of former members of the Vipers Skiffle Group: [Excerpt: Cliff Richard, “Love” (from Expresso Bongo)] We’ll talk about both Cliff Richard and the Shadows in future episodes though… Tommy Steele would go on to become something of a national treasure, working on stage with Gene Kelly and on screen with Fred Astaire, writing several books, having a minor artistic career as a sculptor, and touring constantly in pantomimes and musicals. At age eighty-two he still tours every year, performing as Scrooge in a stage musical version of A Christmas Carol. His 1950s hits remain popular enough in the UK that a compilation of them went to number twenty-two in the charts in 2009. He may not leave a large body of rock and roll work, but without him, there would be no British rock and roll industry as we know it, and the rest of this history would be very different.

Welcome to episode forty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This one looks at "Rock With the Caveman" by Tommy Steele, and the birth of the British rock and roll industry. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a bonus episode available. This one's on "The Death of Rock and Roll" by the Maddox Brothers and Rose, in which we look at a country group some say invented rock & roll, and how they reacted badly to it  ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. This double-CD set contains all Steele's rock and roll material, plus a selection of songs from the musicals he appeared in later. This MP3 compilation, meanwhile, contains a huge number of skiffle records and early British attempts at rock and roll, including Steele's. Much of the music is not very good, but I can't imagine a better way of getting an understanding of the roots of British rock. Pete Frame's The Restless Generation is the best book available looking at British 50s rock and roll from a historical perspective. Billy Bragg's Roots, Radicals, and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World is one of the best books I've read on music at all, and covers Steele from the skiffle perspective. Fings Ain't What They Used T'Be: The Life of Lionel Bart by David & Caroline Stafford gave me a lot of information on Steel's songwriting partner. Steele's autobiography, Bermondsey Boy, covers his childhood and early stardom. I am not 100% convinced of its accuracy, but it's an entertaining book, and if nothing else probably gives a good idea of the mental atmosphere in the poor parts of South London in the war and immediate post-war years. And George Melly's Revolt Into Style was one of the first books to take British pop culture seriously, and puts Steele into a wider context of British pop, both music and art. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Let's talk a little bit about the Piltdown Man. Piltdown Man was an early example of a hominid -- a missing link between the apes and humans. Its skull was discovered in 1912 in Piltdown, East Sussex, by the eminent archaeologist Charles Dawson, and for years was considered one of the most important pieces of evidence in the story of human evolution. And then, in 1953, it was discovered that the whole thing was a hoax, and not even a particularly good one. Someone had just taken the jaw of an orang-utan and the top part of a human skull, and filed down the orang-utan teeth, and then stained the bones to make them look old. It was almost certainly the work of Dawson himself, who seems to have spent his entire life making fraudulent discoveries. Dawson had died decades earlier, and the full extent of his fraud wasn't even confirmed until 2003. Sometimes researching the history of rock and roll can be a lot like that. You can find a story repeated in numerous apparently reliable books, and then find out that it's all based on the inaccurate testimony of a single individual. The story never happened. It was just something someone made up. [Excerpt: "Rock With the Caveman", Tommy Steele and the Steelmen] We talked a little while ago about the skiffle movement, and the first British guitar-based pop music. Today, we're going to look at the dawn of British rock and roll. Now, there's an important thing to note about the first wave of British rock and roll, and that is that it was, essentially, a music that had no roots in the culture. It was an imitation of American music, without any of the ties to social issues that made the American music so interesting. Britain in the 1950s was a very different place to the one it is today, or to America. It was ethnically extremely homogeneous, as the waves of immigration that have so improved the country had only just started. And while few people travelled much outside their own immediate areas, it was culturally more homogeneous as well, as Britain, unlike America, had a national media rather than a local one. In Britain, someone could become known throughout the country before they'd played their second gig, if they got the right media exposure. And so British rock and roll started out at the point that American rock and roll was only just starting to get to -- a clean-cut version of the music, with little black influence or sexuality left in it, designed from the outset to be a part of mainstream showbusiness aimed at teenagers, not music for an underclass or a racial or sexual minority. Britain's first rock and roll star put out his first record in November 1956, and by November 1957 he was appearing on the Royal Variety Show, with Mario Lanza, Bob Monkhouse, and Vera Lynn. That is, fundamentally, what early British rock and roll was. Keep that in mind for the rest of the story, as we look at how a young sailor from a dirt-poor family became Britain's first teen idol. To tell that story, we first have to discuss the career of the Vipers Skiffle Group. That was the group's full name, and they were just about the most important British group of the mid-fifties, even though they were never as commercially successful as some of the acts we've looked at. The name of the Vipers Skiffle Group was actually the first drug reference in British pop music. They took the name from the autobiography of the American jazz clarinettist Mezz Mezzrow -- a man who was better known in the jazz community as a dope dealer than as a musician; so much so that "Mezz" itself became slang for marijuana, while "viper" became the name for dope smokers, as you can hear in this recording by Stuff Smith, in which he sings that he "dreamed about a reefer five foot long/Mighty Mezz but not too strong". [Excerpt: Stuff Smith, "You'se a Viper"] So when Wally Whyton, Johnny Booker, and Jean Van Den Bosch formed a guitar trio, they chose that name, even though as it turned out none of them actually smoked dope. They just thought it sounded cool. They started performing at a cafe called the 2is (two as in the numeral, I as in the letter), and started to build up something of a reputation -- to the point that Lonnie Donegan started nicking their material. Whyton had taken an old sea shanty, "Sail Away Ladies", popularised by the country banjo player Uncle Dave Macon, and rewritten it substantially, turning it into "Don't You Rock Me Daddy-O". Donegan copyrighted Whyton's song as soon as he heard it, and rushed out his version of it, but the Vipers put out their own version too, and the two chased each other up the charts. Donegan's charted higher, but the Vipers ended up at a respectable number ten: [Excerpt: The Vipers, "Don't You Rock Me, Daddy-O"] That recording was on Parlophone records, and was produced by a young producer who normally did comedy and novelty records, named George Martin. We'll be hearing more about him later on. But at the time we're talking about, the Vipers had not yet gained a recording contract, and they were still playing the 2is. Occasionally, they would be joined on stage by a young acquaintance named Thomas Hicks. Hicks was a merchant seaman, and was away at sea most of the time, and so was never a full part of the group, but even though he didn't care much for skiffle -- he was a country and western fan first and foremost -- he played guitar, and in Britain in 1955 and 56, if you played guitar, you played skiffle. Hicks had come from an absolutely dirt-poor background. Three of his siblings had died at cruelly young ages, and young Thomas himself had had several brushes with ill health, which meant that while he was a voracious reader he had lacked formal education. He had wanted to be a performer from a very early age, and had developed a routine that he used to do around the pubs in his early teens, in which he would mime to a record by Danny Kaye, "Knock on Wood": [Excerpt: Danny Kaye, "Knock on Wood"] But at age fifteen he had joined the Merchant Navy. This isn't the same thing as the Royal Navy, but rather is the group of commercial shipping companies that provide non-military shipping, and Hicks worked as wait staff on a cruise ship making regular trips to America. On an early trip, he fell in love with the music of Hank Williams, who would remain a favourite of his for the rest of his life, and he particularly loved the song "Kaw-Liga": [Excerpt: Hank Williams, "Kaw-Liga"] Hicks replaced his old party piece of miming to Danny Kaye with a new one of singing "Kaw-Liga", with accompaniment from anyone he could persuade to play guitar for him. Eventually one of his crewmates taught him how to play the song himself, and he started performing with pick-up groups, singing Hank Williams songs, whenever he was on shore leave in the UK. And when he couldn't get a paid gig he'd head to the 2is and sing with the Vipers. But then came the event that changed his life. Young Tommy Hicks, with his love of country music, was delighted when on shore leave in 1955 to see an advert for a touring show based on the Grand Ole Opry, in Norfolk Virginia, where he happened to be. Of course he went along, and there he saw something that made a huge impression. One of the acts in the middle of the bill was a young man who wore horn-rimmed glasses. Tommy still remembers the details to this day. The young man came out and did a three-song set. The first song was a standard country song, but the second one was something else; something that hit like a bolt of lightning: [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, "Peggy Sue"] That song was young Thomas Hicks' introduction to the new music called rock and roll, and nothing would ever be the same for him ever again after seeing Buddy Holly sing "Peggy Sue". By February 1956 he had finished working on the cruise ships, and was performing rock and roll in London, the very first British rock and roller. Except... There's a reason why we're covering Tommy Steele *before* Buddy Holly, the man who he claims as his inspiration. Buddy Holly *did* perform with a Grand Ole Opry tour. But it didn't tour until May 1956, three months after Thomas Hicks quit his job on the cruise ships, and about a year after the time Tommy claims to have seen him. That tour only hit Oklahoma, which is landlocked, and didn't visit Norfolk Virginia. According to various timelines put together by people like the Buddy Holly Centre in Lubbock Texas, Holly didn't perform outside Lubbock until that tour, and that's the only time he did perform outside West Texas until 1957. Also, Buddy Holly didn't meet Peggy Sue Gerron, the woman who gave the song its name, until 1956, and the song doesn't seem to have been written until 1957. So whatever it was that introduced young Tommy Hicks to the wonders of rock and roll, it wasn't seeing Buddy Holly sing "Peggy Sue" in Norfolk Virginia in 1955. But that's the story that's in his autobiography, and that's the story that's in every other source I've seen on the subject, because they're all just repeating what he said, on the assumption that he'd remember something like that, something which was so important in his life and future career. Remember what I said at the beginning, about rock and roll history being like dealing with Piltdown Man? Yeah. There are a lot of inaccuracies in the life story of Thomas Hicks, who became famous under the name Tommy Steele. Anything I tell you about him is based on information he put out, and that information is not always the truth, so be warned. For example, when he started his career, he claimed he'd worked his way up on the cruise ships to being a gymnastics instructor -- something that the shipping federation denied to the press. You find a lot of that kind of thing when you dig into Steele's stories. In fact, by the time Hicks started performing, there had already been at least one British rock and roll record made. He wasn't bringing something new that he'd discovered in America at all. "Rock Around the Clock", the Bill Haley film, had played in UK cinemas at around the time of Hicks' supposed epiphany, and it had inspired a modern jazz drummer, Tony Crombie, to form Tony Crombie and the Rockets and record a Bill Haley soundalike called "Teach You To Rock": [Excerpt: Tony Crombie and the Rockets, "Teach You To Rock"] However, Crombie was not teen idol material -- a serious jazz drummer in his thirties, he soon went back to playing bebop, and has largely been written out of British rock history since, in favour of Tommy Steele as the first British rock and roller. Thomas Hicks the merchant seaman became Tommy Steele the pop idol as a result of a chance meeting. Hicks went to a party with a friend, and the host was a man called Lionel Bart, who was celebrating because he'd just sold his first song, to the bandleader Bill Cotton. No recording of that song seems to exist, but the lyrics to the song -- a lament about the way that old-style cafes were being replaced by upscale coffee bars -- are quoted in a biography of Bart: "Oh for a cup of tea, instead of a cuppuchini/What would it mean to me, just one little cup so teeny!/You ask for some char and they reckon you're barmy/Ask for a banger, they'll give you salami/Oh for the liquid they served in the Army/Just a cup of tea!" Heartrending stuff, I'm sure you'll agree. But Bart was proud of the twenty-five guineas the song had earned him, and so he was having a party. Bart was at the centre of a Bohemian crowd in Soho, and the party was held at a squat where Bart, a card-carrying member of the Communist Party, spent most of his time. At that squat at various times around this period lived, among others, the playwright John Antrobus, the actor Shirley Eaton, who would later become famous as the woman painted gold in the beginning of Goldfinger, and the great folk guitarist Davey Graham, who would later become famous for his instrumental, “Angi”: [Excerpt: Davey Graham, “Angi”] We'll hear more about Graham in future episodes. Another inhabitant of the squat was Mike Pratt, a guitarist and pianist who would later turn to acting and become famous as Jeff Randall in the fantasy detective series Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased). Hicks, Bart, and Pratt started collaborating on songs together -- Hicks would bring in a basic idea, and then Bart would write the lyrics and Pratt the music. They also performed as The Cavemen, though Bart soon tired of playing washboard and stuck to writing. The Cavemen became a floating group of musicians, centred around Hicks and Pratt, and with various Vipers and other skifflers pulled in as and when they were available. The various skiffle musicians looked down on Hicks, because of his tendency to want to play "Heartbreak Hotel" or "Blue Suede Shoes" rather than "Bring a Little Water Sylvie" or "Rock Island Line", but a gig was a gig, and they had to admit that Hicks seemed to go down well with the young women in the audience. Two minor music industry people, Bill Varley and Roy Tuvey, agreed to manage Hicks, but they decided that they needed someone involved who would be able to publicise Hicks, so they invited John Kennedy, a PR man from New Zealand, to come to the 2is to see him. Hicks wasn't actually playing the 2is the night in question – it was the Vipers, who were just on the verge of getting signed and recording their first single: [Excerpt: The Vipers Skiffle Group, “Ain't You Glad?”] While Hicks wasn't scheduled to play, at the request of Varley and Tuvey he jumped on stage when the Vipers took a break, and sang a song that he, Bart, and Pratt had written, called "Rock With the Caveman". Kennedy was impressed. He was impressed enough, in fact, that he brought in a friend, Larry Parnes, who would go on to become the most important manager in British rock and roll in the fifties and early sixties. Kennedy, Parnes, and Hicks cut Varley and Tuvey out altogether -- to the extent that neither of them are even mentioned in the version of this story in Tommy Steele's autobiography. Hicks was renamed Tommy Steele, in a nod to his paternal grandfather Thomas Stil-Hicks (the Stil in that name is spelled either Stil or Stijl, depending on which source you believe) and Parnes would go on to name a whole host of further rock stars in a similar manner -- Duffy Power, Johnny Gentle, Billy Fury, Marty Wilde. They had everything except a record contract, but that was why Kennedy was there. Kennedy rented a big house, and hired a load of showgirls, models, and sex workers to turn up for a party and bring their boyfriends. They were to dress nicely, talk in fake posh accents, and if anyone asked who they were they were to give fake double-barrelled names. He then called the press and said it was "the first high society rock and roll show" and that the girls were all debutantes. The story made the newspapers, and got Steele national attention. Steele was signed by Decca records, where Hugh Mendl, the producer of "Rock Island Line", was so eager to sign him that he didn't check if any studios were free for his audition, and so Britain's first homegrown rock idol auditioned for his record contract in the gents' toilets. A bunch of slumming jazz musicians, including Dave Lee, the pianist with the Dankworth band, and the legendary saxophone player Ronnie Scott, were brought in to record "Rock With the Caveman": [Excerpt: Tommy Steele, "Rock With the Caveman"] The single went to number thirteen. Tommy Steele was now a bona fide rock and roll star, at least in the UK. The next record, "Elevator Rock", didn't do so well, however: [Excerpt: Tommy Steele, "Elevator Rock"] That failed to chart, so Steele's producers went for the well-worn trick in British record making of simply copying a US hit. Guy Mitchell had just released "Singing the Blues": [Excerpt: Guy Mitchell, "Singing the Blues"] That was actually a cover version of a recording by Marty Robbins from earlier in the year, but Mitchell's version was the one that became the big hit. And Steele was brought into the studio to record a soundalike version, and hopefully get it out before Mitchell's version hit the charts. Steele's version has an identical arrangement and sound to Mitchell's, except that Steele sings it in an incredibly mannered Elvis impression: [Excerpt: Tommy Steele, "Singing the Blues"] Now, to twenty-first century ears, Steele's version is clearly inferior. But here was the birth of something particularly English -- and indeed something particularly London -- in rock and roll music. The overly mannered, music-hall inspired, Cockneyfied impression of an American singing style. On Steele's subsequent tour, a nine-year old kid called David Jones, who would later change his name to Bowie, went to see him and came away inspired to become a rock and roll star. And we can hear in this performance the roots of Bowie's own London take on Elvis, as we can also hear a style that would be taken up by Anthony Newley, Ray Davies, and many more masters of Cockney archness. I don't think "Singing the Blues" is a particularly good record compared to Mitchell's, but it is a prototype for something that would become good, and it deserves recognition for that. Mitchell's version got out first, and went to the top of the charts, with Steele's following close behind, but then for one week Mitchell's record label had a minor distribution problem, and Steele took over the top spot, before Mitchell's record returned to number one the next week. Tommy Steele had become the first British rock and roll singer to get to number one in the UK charts. It would be the only time he would do so, but it was enough. He was a bona fide teen idol. He was so big, in fact, that even his brother, Colin Hicks, became a minor rock and roll star himself off the back of his brother's success: [Excerpt: Colin Hicks and the Cabin Boys, "Hollering and Screaming"] The drummer on that record, Jimmy Nicol, later had his fifteen minutes of fame when Ringo Starr got tonsilitis just before a tour of Australia, and for a few shows Nicol got to be a substitute Beatle. Very soon, Tommy Steele moved on into light entertainment. First he moved into films -- starting with "The Tommy Steele Story", a film based on his life, for which he, Bart, and Pratt wrote all twelve of the songs in a week to meet the deadline, and then he went into stage musicals. Within a year, he had given up on rock and roll altogether. But rock and roll hadn't *quite* given up on him. While Steele was appearing in stage musicals, one was also written about him -- a hurtful parody of his life, which he claimed later he'd wanted to sue over. In Expresso Bongo, a satire of the British music industry, Steele was parodied as "Bongo Herbert", who rises to fame with no talent whatsoever. That stage musical was then rewritten for a film version, with the satire taken out of it, so it was a straight rags-to-riches story. It was made into a vehicle for another singer who had been a regular at the 2is, and whose backing band was made up of former members of the Vipers Skiffle Group: [Excerpt: Cliff Richard, "Love" (from Expresso Bongo)] We'll talk about both Cliff Richard and the Shadows in future episodes though... Tommy Steele would go on to become something of a national treasure, working on stage with Gene Kelly and on screen with Fred Astaire, writing several books, having a minor artistic career as a sculptor, and touring constantly in pantomimes and musicals. At age eighty-two he still tours every year, performing as Scrooge in a stage musical version of A Christmas Carol. His 1950s hits remain popular enough in the UK that a compilation of them went to number twenty-two in the charts in 2009. He may not leave a large body of rock and roll work, but without him, there would be no British rock and roll industry as we know it, and the rest of this history would be very different.

Lars Saabye Christensen gjestet i år for første gang Bjørneboedagene, og mange hadde møtt frem for å høre den populære forfatteren i samtale med Fredrik Wandrup. I fjor kom han med første bind i en ny romanserie, Byens spor. Nylig kom bind to, Byens spor – Maj. Men Christensen er også aktuell med bøker som kanskje har gått litt mer under radaren, som diktsamlinga "En blues for Jimmy Nicol".

4. juni 1964 landet the Beatles i København for å holde konsert under sin The Beatles World Tour. Men det var noe som ikke stemte da de fire langhåra guttene fra Liverpool gikk ut av flyet. En av dem var et ukjent ansikt, og det var Jimmy Nicol. Han hadde steppet inn som trommeslager-vikar for Ringo Starr, som nettopp hadde tatt mandlene. Forfatter Lars Saabye Christensen har skrevet bok om vikaren. Hør ham her - fra Studio 2. Studio 2 hører du alle hverdager på P2 fra klokken 16 til 18. Abonnerer du på NRKBok-podkasten, er du alltid oppdatert på den nyeste litteraturen - gjennom anmeldelser, intervjuer, reportasjer og debatter.

For the first two weeks of June 1964, Jimmy Nicol replaced Ringo Starr as the Beatles’ drummer. Allan Kozinn of the New York Times explains how you move on from an experience like that. Plus, Sanjay Basu explains the arguments for excluding soda and other sugary beverages from the food stamp program, and Slate’s John Dickerson answers one question, one question only, about Eric Cantor. And for today’s Spiel, we need to talk about sex with dolphins. Get The Gist by email as soon as it’s available: slate.com/GistEmail Subscribe to the podcast in iTunes: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/slate…id873667927?mt=2 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Author and historian Jim Berkenstadt talks with the guys about his work, including his new book about Jimmy Nicol.

New DOMi & JD Beck, Jesse Garland + Sandi Thom, Pentatonix, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, Pine Valley Cosmonauts, ALO, Phil Parlapiano … Birthdays for Tony Bennett, Jimmy Nicol, Gordon Stoker…