Podcast appearances and mentions of joe jefferson

The final recording of the Negroraguan Podcast. Recorded July 21st, of 2019, the first half (Occupant vs. The Squad, Ep 96) was previously re-released July 26th, of 2020. It was obviously a marathon recording session with the skeleton crew, together the shows were almost 4 hours. We plan to return with current recordings soon. Show PrologueThe Negroraguan Podcast is hosted by founding members of the “I-70 connect”, 30PiEcEs_OF_Ag and @DaKcStork. The show has grown to include “The Brothers of Doom” James and Joe Jefferson, Anthony (10 Meters) Jenkins, Ada (Lady Lavender) Ibe and extended Negroraguan Family. Some of us are old friends, some of us are new friends, but as you listen you will understand that we are all friends. We attempt to tackle the important issues of the day, but bring our unique brand of humor, sensitivity, and oftentimes anger to the analysis. We sincerely hope you enjoy, and subscribe to the show. On this episode: Continued from the previous episode...we continue the discussion of a week long political and racial feud that pitted “The Occupant” against “the Squad”. We examine a tragedy circulating on Black Twitter that reminded us of a classic Mobb Deep song. We take some time to appreciate an advertisement that commemorates the life's work and ongoing impact of a slave named Nearest Green. Lastly, we are amused as “the Occupant” desperately tries to save face in a racially charged week by publicizing efforts to extradite A$AP Rocky from a Swedish jail. Music Cred:Show Intro- We Outchea - Joseph JeffersonOutro- It's Over – Joseph JeffersonEpisode Participants:Rodger Winston (@DaKcStork)Joe Jefferson Toni Morrison Opening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6S7zGgL6SuwIn Twitter Jail:https://twitter.com/theofficertatum/status/1151905794964594688?s=12&fbclid=IwAR0bhdmZ81Qo8KeAlCCe_Tir5ROwtmchDFSXnBwd588IqDMr2nJxCyxOXaQColin Powell told us this was happening in 2008:https://twitter.com/qasimrashid/status/1151976062387204096?s=12&fbclid=IwAR1psqLU-TOxbvmb0Jd2WIHu-xNGD5xPVR6ZCnJ3UCBMC26u90pSvp55FZsThe Squad speaking on the Occupant:https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1069481946775329Klan Rallyhttps://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/watch/trump-rally-chants-send-her-back-64140357612https://www.vox.com/2019/7/19/20700941/trump-racist-chants-incredible-patriots-ilhan-omar-apollo-11Rev has had enough https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/videos/rep-emanuel-cleaver-abandons-chair-in-protest-over-partisan-house-debate/vi-AAEtthY?fbclid=IwAR3gr--RCYN7YRZ0TQ6Q4E0xTmfDfFFOTPWrv0PwxHiULNzlDcNePfvBUZ0Cuomo Faces:https://twitter.com/CuomoPrimeTime/status/1151302986934571008?s=07&fbclid=IwAR1A9cEWO86re5aZrVcqMZ5tQ6BLZi-qm4J3AzsuDDXJbU0aL0FVmyZpZeMDa Trife Life:https://www.cbs46.com/news/family-of-woman-shot-during-alleged-robbery-attempt-says-their/article_62c1eb66-a878-11e9-9ddb-7f7e6efc96a0.htmlhttps://www.thatstea.com/woman-shot-after-luring-a-man-to-her-home-to-rob-him/2019/07/17/?fbclid=IwAR3gr--RCYN7YRZ0TQ6Q4E0xTmfDfFFOTPWrv0PwxHiULNzlDcNePfvBUZ0Nearest Green:https://vimeo.com/325286687

The final recording of the Negroraguan Podcast. Recorded July 21st, of 2019, the first half (Occupant vs. The Squad, Ep 96) was previously re-released July 26th, of 2020. It was obviously a marathon recording session with the skeleton crew, together the shows were almost 4 hours. We plan to return with current recordings soon. Show PrologueThe Negroraguan Podcast is hosted by founding members of the “I-70 connect”, 30PiEcEs_OF_Ag and @DaKcStork. The show has grown to include “The Brothers of Doom” James and Joe Jefferson, Anthony (10 Meters) Jenkins, Ada (Lady Lavender) Ibe and extended Negroraguan Family. Some of us are old friends, some of us are new friends, but as you listen you will understand that we are all friends. We attempt to tackle the important issues of the day, but bring our unique brand of humor, sensitivity, and oftentimes anger to the analysis. We sincerely hope you enjoy, and subscribe to the show. On this episode: Continued from the previous episode...we continue the discussion of a week long political and racial feud that pitted “The Occupant” against “the Squad”. We examine a tragedy circulating on Black Twitter that reminded us of a classic Mobb Deep song. We take some time to appreciate an advertisement that commemorates the life's work and ongoing impact of a slave named Nearest Green. Lastly, we are amused as “the Occupant” desperately tries to save face in a racially charged week by publicizing efforts to extradite A$AP Rocky from a Swedish jail. Music Cred:Show Intro- We Outchea - Joseph JeffersonOutro- It's Over – Joseph JeffersonEpisode Participants:Rodger Winston (@DaKcStork)Joe Jefferson Toni Morrison Opening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6S7zGgL6SuwIn Twitter Jail:https://twitter.com/theofficertatum/status/1151905794964594688?s=12&fbclid=IwAR0bhdmZ81Qo8KeAlCCe_Tir5ROwtmchDFSXnBwd588IqDMr2nJxCyxOXaQColin Powell told us this was happening in 2008:https://twitter.com/qasimrashid/status/1151976062387204096?s=12&fbclid=IwAR1psqLU-TOxbvmb0Jd2WIHu-xNGD5xPVR6ZCnJ3UCBMC26u90pSvp55FZsThe Squad speaking on the Occupant:https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1069481946775329Klan Rallyhttps://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/watch/trump-rally-chants-send-her-back-64140357612https://www.vox.com/2019/7/19/20700941/trump-racist-chants-incredible-patriots-ilhan-omar-apollo-11Rev has had enough https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/videos/rep-emanuel-cleaver-abandons-chair-in-protest-over-partisan-house-debate/vi-AAEtthY?fbclid=IwAR3gr--RCYN7YRZ0TQ6Q4E0xTmfDfFFOTPWrv0PwxHiULNzlDcNePfvBUZ0Cuomo Faces:https://twitter.com/CuomoPrimeTime/status/1151302986934571008?s=07&fbclid=IwAR1A9cEWO86re5aZrVcqMZ5tQ6BLZi-qm4J3AzsuDDXJbU0aL0FVmyZpZeMDa Trife Life:https://www.cbs46.com/news/family-of-woman-shot-during-alleged-robbery-attempt-says-their/article_62c1eb66-a878-11e9-9ddb-7f7e6efc96a0.htmlhttps://www.thatstea.com/woman-shot-after-luring-a-man-to-her-home-to-rob-him/2019/07/17/?fbclid=IwAR3gr--RCYN7YRZ0TQ6Q4E0xTmfDfFFOTPWrv0PwxHiULNzlDcNePfvBUZ0Nearest Green:https://vimeo.com/325286687

Episode 106 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Louie Louie" by the Kingsmen, and the story of how a band that had already split up accidentally had one of the biggest hits of the sixties and sparked a two-year FBI investigation. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have an eight-minute bonus episode available, on "It's My Party" by Lesley Gore. 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. The single biggest resource I used in this episode was Dave Marsh's book on Louie Louie. Information on Richard Berry also came from Marv Goldberg's page, specifically his articles on the Flairs and Arthur Lee Maye and the Crowns.  This academic paper on the song is where I learned what the chord Richard Berry uses instead of the V is. The Coasters by Bill Millar also had some information about Berry. Love That Louie: The Louie Louie Files has the versions of the song by the Kingsmen, Berry, Rockin' Robin Roberts, and Paul Revere and the Raiders, plus many more, and also has the pre-"Louie" "Havana Moon" and "El Loco Cha Cha Cha" The Ultimate Flairs has twenty-nine tracks by the Flairs under various names. Yama Yama! The Modern Recordings 1954-56 contains twenty-eight tracks Richard Berry recorded for Modern Records in the mid-fifties, including the Etta James duets. And Have "Louie" Will Travel collects Berry's post-Modern recordings, including "Louie Louie" itself. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today we're going to look at what is arguably the most important three-chord rock and roll record ever made, a song written by someone who's been a bit-part player in many episodes so far, but who never had any success with it himself, and performed by a band that had split up before the record started to chart. We're going to look at how a minor LA R&B hit was picked up by garage rock bands in the Pacific Northwest and sparked a two-and-a-half-year FBI investigation, and was recorded by everyone from Barry White to Iggy Pop, from Motorhead to the Beach Boys, from Julie London to Frank Zappa. We're going to look at "Louie Louie" by the Kingsmen:   [Excerpt: The Kingsmen, "Louie Louie"] The story of "Louie Louie" begins with Richard Berry. We've seen Berry pop up here and there in several episodes -- most recently in the episode on the Crystals, where we looked at how he'd been involved in the early career of the Blossoms, but the only time he's been a signficant part of the story was in the episode on "The Wallflower", back in March 2019, and even there he wasn't the focus of the episode, so I should start by talking about his career. Some of this will be familiar from other episodes from a year or two ago, but here we're looking at Berry specifically. Richard Berry was one of the many, many, great musicians of the fifties to go to Jefferson High School in Los Angeles, and was very involved in music at that school. When he arrived in the school, he had an aggressive attitude, formed by a need to defend himself -- he walked with a limp, and had first started playing music at a camp for disabled kids, and he didn't want people to think he was soft because of his disability. But as soon as he found out that you had to behave well in order to join the school a capella choir he became a changed character -- he needed to be involved in music. And he soon was. He joined a group named The Flamingos, who were all students at Jefferson and proteges of Jesse Belvin, who was a couple of years older than them. That group consisted of Cornell Gunter on lead vocals, Gaynel Hodge on first tenor, Joe Jefferson on second tenor, Curtis Williams on baritone, and Berry on bass -- though Berry was one of those rare vocalists who could sing equally well in the bass and tenor ranges, and in every style from gritty blues to Jesse Belvin style crooning. But as we've seen before, the membership of these groups was ever changing, and soon Curtis Williams left, first to join the Hollywood Flames, and then to join the Penguins. He was replaced, but Gunter and Berry left soon afterwards, and the remaining members of the band renamed themselves to The Platters. Berry and Gunter joined another group, the Debonairs, which was originally led by Arthur Lee Maye, with whom Berry would make many records over the years in the off-season -- Maye was a major-league baseball player, and couldn't record in the months his main career was taking up his time. Maye soon left the group, and in 1952 The Debonairs, with a lineup of Berry, Gunter, Young Jessie, Thomas Fox and Beverly Thompson, visited John Dolphin and made their first record, for Dolphins of Hollywood. The A-side featured Gunter on lead: [Excerpt: The Hollywood Blue Jays, "I Had a Love"] While the B-side featured Berry: [Excerpt: The Hollywood Blue Jays, "Tell Me You Love Me"] The group were disappointed when the record came out to discover that it wasn't credited to the Debonairs, but instead to the Hollywood Blue Jays, a name Dolphin had also used for other groups. The record didn't have any success, and so the group started looking for other labels that might record them. Cornell Gunter sat down with a pile of records and looked for ones with a label in LA. They decided to go with Modern Records, and ended up signed to Flair records, one of Modern's subsidiaries. The label suggested they change their name to The Flairs, and they eagerly agreed, thinking that if their band had the same name as the label, the label would be more likely to promote them. Their first single for their new label was produced by Leiber and Stoller. One side was a remake of their first single, in better quality, with Gunter again singing lead, while the B-side was another Richard Berry song, "She Wants to Rock": [Excerpt: The Flairs, "She Wants to Rock"] Apparently in 1953, when that came out, the title was still considered racy enough that the DJ Hunter Hancock insisted on them going on his radio show and explaining that by "rock" they merely meant to dance, and not anything more suggestive. Over the next couple of years, the Flairs would record and release tracks under all sorts of names -- as well as many Flairs records they also released tracks as by The Hunters: [Excerpt: The Hunters, "Rabbit on a Log"] as Young Jessie solo records: [Excerpt: Young Jessie, "Lonesome Desert"] And as the Chimes. Several of these records were produced by Ike Turner, who by this point had moved on from working with Sam Phillips and was now working for the Bihari brothers, who owned Modern Records. Berry also released solo recordings, and recorded with a group led by Arthur Lee Maye, first as the Five Hearts (though there were only three of them at the time), then as the Rams, before the group settled down to become Arthur Lee Maye and the Crowns: [Excerpt: Arthur Lee Maye and the Crowns, "Set My Heart Free"] At one point in 1954, Berry was in three groups at the same time. He was in the Flairs, the Crowns, and the Dreamers -- the group who became the Blossoms, who we talked about two weeks ago. And on top of that he was also recording a lot of sessions both as a solo singer, and as a duo with Jenell Hawkins, who also sometimes sang with the Dreamers: [Excerpt: Rickey and Jenelle, "Each Step"] The reason Berry was working on so many records wasn't just that he loved singing, though he did, but because he'd learned from Jesse Belvin that it didn't matter what the contract said, you were never going to get any royalties when you made records. So he sang on as many sessions as he could, pocketed his fifty-dollar fee, and then tried to get on another session. The Flairs eventually got sick of Berry working on so many other people's records and singing with so many groups, and so he was out of the group -- but he just formed his own new group, the Pharaohs, and carried on. The Flairs continued for years, though one at a time they left for other groups -- Thomas Fox joined the Cadets, who had a hit with "Stranded in the Jungle", and most famously, Cornell Gunter went on to join the classic lineup of the Coasters. But Berry actually sang on a Coasters record even before Gunter. As we saw, the first Coasters album was padded out with several singles by the Robins, credited to the Coasters, and one of the sessions that Berry had sung on was the Robins' "Riot in Cell Block #9", where Leiber and Stoller had asked him to sing lead, subbing for the Robins' normal bass singer Bobby Nunn: [Excerpt: The Robins, "Riot in Cell Block #9"] The Bihari brothers were annoyed when they recognised Berry's voice on that record -- he was meant to be under contract to them, and even though he protested that it wasn't him, they knew better. But they got Berry to start a solo career with a sequel to "Riot", "The Big Break", which he wrote himself: [Excerpt: Richard Berry, "The Big Break"] And for the next few years, Berry was promoted as a solo artist, recording songs like the Little Richard knockoff "Yama Yama Pretty Mama": [Excerpt: Richard Berry, "Yama Yama Pretty Mama"] But of course that didn't stop him from working with everyone else he could. Most famously, he was Henry on Etta James' "The Wallflower", which we looked at eighteen months ago: [Excerpt: Etta James and the Peaches, "The Wallflower"] Berry collaborated with James on the sequel, "Hey! Henry", which was less successful: [Excerpt: Etta James, "Hey! Henry"] And he wrote "Good Rockin' Daddy" for her, which made the R&B top ten: [Excerpt: Etta James, "Good Rockin' Daddy"] This is all just scratching the surface. Between 1952 and the early sixties, Berry was on literally hundreds of records, under many names, and it's likely we will never accurately know all of them. A fair number of them were classics of the genre, many more were derivative hackwork -- quick knockoffs of the latest hit by Chuck Berry or Fats Domino, with the serial numbers not filed off all that well -- and more than a few managed to be derivative hackwork *and* classics of the genre. Berry's most famous song, "Louie Louie", was both. There is nothing original about "Louie Louie", yet it had an incalculable effect on popular music history, and Berry's original version is a genuinely great record. The song had its genesis in a piece that Berry heard played as an instrumental by a group he was singing with at a gig one night, the Rhythm Rockers. When he asked them what the song was, he found out it was "El Loco Cha Cha Cha", originally recorded by Rene Touzet. Berry loved the intro for the song, and immediately decided to rip it off: [Excerpt: Rene Touzet, "El Loco Cha Cha Cha"] That song is based around the same three-chord Latin groove as "La Bamba", "Twist and Shout", and roughly a million other songs, and so in keeping with the Latin feel of the song, Berry turned to another record as a model for his song. "Havana Moon" by Chuck Berry was the B-side to "You Can't Catch Me", and Richard Berry took its vocal melody, its lyrical theme of someone drinking while waiting for a ship to arrive and missing a girl who the narrator will see at the end of the boat journey, and its attempt at imitating Caribbean speech patterns by saying things like "Me stand and wait for boat to come": [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "Havana Moon"] Of course, nothing is original, and the Chuck Berry track itself was almost certainly inspired by Nat "King" Cole's "Calypso Blues": [Excerpt: Nat "King" Cole, "Calypso Blues"] Richard Berry took these influences, and turned them into "Louie Louie", which he originally intended to have a Latin feel. But the owners of his record label wanted something more straight-ahead R&B, so that's what they got: [Excerpt: Richard Berry and the Pharaohs, "Louie Louie"] While Berry's inspiration had been based on the I-IV-V-IV chord sequence that you get in "La Bamba", "Louie Louie" didn't actually use that precise sequence. I'm going to get into some music-theory stuff here, which I know some of you like and some of you detest, and so if you dislike that stuff skip forward a couple of minutes. If you take just the "Louie Louie" riff, and play it with the standard I-IV-V-IV chords, you get "Wild Thing": [Excerpt: "Wild Thing" riff, piano] But Berry, in his arrangement, incorporated a second melody part, a little standard motif you get in a lot of blues stuff, the fifth, sixth, flattened seventh, and sixth of the scale, repeating: [Excerpt: motif, piano] The problem is that the normal way to use that motif is over a single chord. Berry was using it over three chords, and the flattened seventh note clashes with the V chord -- if you're playing in C, you've got a G chord, which is the notes G, B, and D, but that little motif has a B-flat note. So you get a B and a B-flat played together, which doesn't sound great: [Excerpt: tonal clash, piano] Now, if you're a rock guitarist from the late sixties onwards, the way you'd resolve that problem is to play power chords -- power chords have just the root and fifth note, no third, so in this case you wouldn't be playing the B. Problem solved. But this was the 1950s, and while there were a handful of records using power chords, when Berry was making his record in 1957, they weren't particularly common. Also, Berry was a piano player rather than a guitarist, and so he went for a different option. Instead of playing the normal V chord, he used the I chord, with a seventh -- so if you were to play it in the key of C, it would be C7 -- but he played it in the second inversion, with the dominant in the bass. So if you were playing it in the key of C, the notes would be G-Bflat-C-E. So the bass riff is still the I-IV-V-IV riff, but the chords sound like this: [Excerpt: "Louie Louie" chords, piano] That wouldn't be the solution that many later cover versions would use, but it worked for Berry's record, which was released as the B-side to a version of "You Are My Sunshine", and became a minor local hit: [Excerpt: Richard Berry and the Pharaohs, "Louie Louie"] By this time, Berry had left Modern Records, and "Louie Louie" was on a small label, Flip Records. Berry was twenty-one, he'd been a professional musician since he was sixteen and was thinking of getting married, and he was making so little money from his music that he took a day job, working at a record-pressing plant, smashing returned records. When "Louie Louie" started getting played on local radio, people started giving him a hard time at work, asking why he needed that job when he had a hit record, not understanding that he was making no money from it. He ended up being treated so badly that he quit that job And Flip Records started pressuring him to make follow-ups to "Louie Louie" rather than do anything new. He did come up with a great follow-up, "Have Love Will Travel", but that wasn't a hit: [Excerpt: Richard Berry and the Pharaohs, "Have Love Will Travel"] He got a few big gigs for a while off the back of his local hit, but he ended up working at the docks with his father -- but he eventually had to quit that because his disability made it impossible for him to do it. In 1959, in order to pay for his wedding, he sold his songwriting rights to "Louie Louie" and several of his other songs to the owner of Flip Records, for $750 -- he wanted to hold out for a full thousand, but he ended up settling for a lower amount. From that point on, he would still get paid his BMI royalties when the song was played on the radio -- you couldn't sell those rights -- but he wouldn't receive anything from record sales or sheet music sales, or use in films, or anything like that. But that didn't matter. A song like "Louie Louie", a three-chord B-side to a flop single from two years earlier, was hardly going to earn any real money, and seven hundred and fifty dollars was a lot of money. Berry was a working man who needed money, and anyway he was moving into soul music. "Louie Louie" was just another song he'd written, no more important than "Look Out Miss James" or "Rockin' Man", and while R&B fans in LA loved it (if you listen to the later version by the Beach Boys, or to Frank Zappa's riffs on the song, you can tell they grew up listening to Berry's original, not the later versions) it wasn't going to ever be heard outside those people. And that would have been true, if it hadn't been for Ron Holden. We've not talked about the Pacific Northwest's music scene in the podcast so far, but it had one of the most vibrant and interesting music scenes in the US in the late fifties and early sixties, and much of the music that gets labelled garage rock or frat rock comes from that area. The closest parallel I can think of is Liverpool -- another place where mostly-white musicians were performing their own versions of music made by Black musicians, and performing it on electric guitars. But anyone who became big from the area immediately moved somewhere else and became "an LA musician" or "a New York musician", and the scene as a whole has never really had the attention it deserves. Ron Holden was one of the few Black musicians in that scene. In fact, he was a second-generation musician -- his father, Oscar Holden, was known as "the father of Seattle jazz", and had played with both Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton. Ron Holden led the most popular band in the Seattle area, the Thunderbirds, and in 1960, he had a top ten hit with a song called "Love You So": [Excerpt: Ron Holden, "Love You So"] He didn't have any follow-up hits, but as every musician from Seattle who had any success did, he moved away. He moved to LA, where he signed to Keen Records, where he recorded an entire album of songs written and produced by Keen's new staff producer Bruce Johnston, including "Gee, But I'm Lonesome", a song which was coincidentally also recorded around that time by Richard Berry's old collaborators the Blossoms: [Excerpt: Ron Holden, "Gee But I'm Lonesome"] Holden was also the MC for the Ritchie Valens Memorial Concert which was the Beach Boys' first major professional live performance. But before he left Seattle, he had introduced "Louie Louie" to the music scene there -- he'd heard it on the radio in 1957 and worked up an arrangement with his band, and it had been a highlight of his shows. Once he left the city, so he wasn't performing the song there, all the white bands in Seattle, and in nearby Tacoma, picked up on the song and added Holden's arrangement of the song to their own sets. Holden -- or rather his saxophone player Carlos Ward, who did the Thunderbirds' arrangements -- had made a crucial change to "Louie Louie", one that made it simpler to play on the guitar, and thus suitable for the guitar-heavy music that was starting to predominate in the Pacific Northwest. Remember that Richard Berry had that second-inversion major seventh chord in there? [Excerpt: "Louie Louie" chords, piano] Ward changed that chord for a simpler minor V chord, just flattening the third so there was no clash there: [Excerpt: "Louie Louie" chords, Pacific Northwest version] That would be how almost every version of "Louie Louie" from this point on would be performed, because it was how they played it in the Pacific Northwest, because it was how Ron Holden and the Thunderbirds played it, and few of those bands had heard Richard Berry's original record, just Ron Holden's live performances of the song. But one band who based their version on Holden's did listen to the original record -- once Holden had brought the song to their attention. The Wailers -- who are often referred to as "the Fabulous Wailers" to distinguish them from Bob Marley's later, more famous group -- were a group from Tacoma, which had a strong instrumental guitar band scene -- most famously, the Ventures came from Tacoma, and a lot of the bands in the area sounded like that.  In 1959, the Wailers recorded a self-penned instrumental, "Tall Cool One", which made the top forty: [Excerpt: The Wailers, "Tall Cool One"] They didn't have any other hits, but soon after recording that, they got in a local singer, Rockin Robin Roberts, who became one of the band's three lead singers. The group had a residence at a local venue, the Spanish Castle, and a live recording of one of their sets there, released as the "Live at the Castle" album, shows that they were a hugely exciting live band: [Excerpt: The Fabulous Wailers, "Since You Been Gone"] The shows at that venue were so good that several years later one of the regular audience members, Jimi Hendrix, would commemorate them in the song "Spanish Castle Magic": [Excerpt: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, "Spanish Castle Magic"] But it was their version of "Louie Louie" that became the template for almost every version that ever followed. For contractual reasons, it was released as a Rockin' Robin Roberts solo record, but it was the full Wailers playing on the track. No-one else in the Pacific Northwest knew what the lyrics were -- they'd all learned it from Ron Holden's live performances, but Roberts had actually tracked down a copy of the Richard Berry record and learned the words. Which, if you look at what happened later, is rather ironic. Their version of the song came out on their own label, and had few sales outside their home area, but it would be one of the most influential records ever, because everyone else in the Pacific Northwest started copying their version, right down to Roberts' ad-libbed shout as they go into the guitar solo: [Excerpt: Rockin' Robin Roberts, "Louie Louie"] The Wailers struggled on for a few more years, but never had any more commercial success. Rockin' Robin Roberts went on to become an associate professor of biochemistry, before dying far too young in a car crash in 1967. But while their version of "Louie Louie" wasn't a hit, a few copies made their way a couple of hours' drive south, to Oregon. Here the story becomes a little difficult, because different people had different recollections of what happened. I'm going to tell one version of the story, but there are others. The story goes that one copy made its way into a jukebox at a club called the Pypo Club, in Seaside, Oregon, a club frequented by surfers. And one day in the early sixties -- people seem to disagree whether it was summer 1961 or 62, two local bands played that club. During the intermission, the audience danced to the music on the jukebox -- indeed, they danced to just one record on the jukebox, over and over. They just kept playing "Louie Louie" by Rockin' Robin Roberts, no other records. Both bands immediately added the song to their sets, and it became a highlight of both band's shows. By far the bigger of the two bands was Paul Revere and the Raiders. The Raiders actually came from Idaho, and had had a top forty hit with "Like, Long Hair" a novelty surf-rock version of a Rachmaninoff piece that Kim Fowley had produced: [Excerpt: Paul Revere and the Raiders, "Like, Long Hair"] But their career had stalled and they had moved to Oregon, because Revere, the group's piano player and leader, had been drafted, and while he was allowed not to serve in the military because of his Mennonite faith, he had to do community service work there for two years instead. The Raiders were undoubtedly the best and most popular band in the Oregon area at the time, and their showmanship was on a whole other level from any other band -- they were one of the first bands to smash their instruments on stage, except they weren't smashing guitars -- Revere would buy cheap second-hand pianos and smash *those* on stage. A local DJ, Roger Hart, had become the group's manager, and he was going to start up his own label, and he wanted them to record "Louie Louie" as the label's first single. Revere wasn't keen -- he didn't like the song much, but Roger Hart insisted. He was sure it could be the hit that would restore the Raiders to the charts. So in April 1963, Paul Revere and the Raiders went into Northwest Recorders in Portland and recorded this: [Excerpt: Paul Revere and the Raiders, "Louie Louie"] Hart paid for the recording session and put the single out on his small label, Sande. It was soon picked up by Columbia Records, who put it out nationally. It started to get a bit of airplay, and started rising up the charts -- it didn't break the Hot One Hundred straight away, but it was clearly heading in the right direction. The Raiders signed to Columbia, and with Hart as their manager and occasional songwriter, and Terry Melcher as their producer, they became one of the biggest bands in the US, and had a string of hits stretching from 1965 to 1971. We won't be doing a full episode on them, but they became an integral part of the LA music scene in the sixties, and they're sure to turn up as background characters in future episodes. But note that I said their run of hits started in 1965. Because there had been two bands playing the Pypo Club, and they had both added "Louie Louie" to their set. And they'd both recorded versions of it in the same studio, in the same week. The Kingsmen were... not as big as the Raiders. They were a bunch of teenagers who had formed a group a few years earlier, and even on a good day they were at best the second-best band in Portland, with the Raiders far, far, ahead. The core of the group was based around the friendship of Jack Ely, the group's lead singer, and Lynn Easton, the drummer, whose parents were friends -- both families were Christian Scientists and actively involved in their local church -- and they had grown up together. Ely's parents didn't encourage the duo's music -- Ely's biological father had been a professional singer, but when the father died and Ely's mother remarried, his stepfather didn't want him to have anything to do with music -- but Easton's did, and Easton's father became the group's manager. Easton's mother even went to the local courthouse to register the group's name for them. Easton's father was replaced as their manager by Ken Chase, the owner of the radio station where Roger Hart was the most popular DJ, and they started pressuring him to make a record with them. Eventually he did -- and he booked them into the same studio as the Raiders, the same week. Different people have different stories about which was first and which was second, but there is no doubt that they were only two days or so apart. And there's also no doubt that they were very different in terms of professionalism.  The Kingsmen did their best to copy the Rockin' Robin Roberts version, right down to his shout of "Let's give it to them right now!" but it was shockingly amateurish. The night before, they'd done a live show which consisted of a single ninety-minute-long performance of "Louie Louie" with no breaks, and Ely's voice was shot. The mic was positioned too high for him and he had to strain his throat, and his braces were also making him slur the words. At one point early in the song, Easton clicks his drumsticks together by accident, and yells an obscenity loud enough to be captured on the tape: [Excerpt: The Kingsmen, "Louie Louie"] After the solo, Ely comes back in, wrongly thinks he's come in in the wrong place, and stops, leaving Easton to quickly improvise a drum fill before they pick up again: [Excerpt: The Kingsmen, "Louie Louie"] The difference with the Raiders can be summed up most succinctly by what happened next -- the Raiders' manager paid for their session, but when the engineer at this session asked who was paying, and the Kingsmen pointed to their manager, he said "No, I'm not. I've not got any money", and the members of the group had to dig through their pockets to get together the fifty dollars themselves. It's incompetent teenagers, who have no idea what they're doing, and it would become one of the most important records of all time. But when it was released... well, it was the second-best version of "Louie Louie" recorded in Portland that week, so while the Raiders were selling thousands, the Kingsmen only sold a couple of hundred copies. Jerry Dennon, the owner of the tiny label that released it, tried to get it picked up by Capitol Records, who rejected it saying it was the worst garbage they'd ever heard. He also sent it out to bigger indie labels, like Scepter, who stuck it in a drawer and forgot about it. And that was basically the end of the Kingsmen. In August, Easton decided that he was going to stop being the drummer and be the lead singer instead -- he told Ely that Ely was going to be the drummer now. The other band members were astonished, because Easton couldn't sing and Ely couldn't play the drums, and they said that wasn't going to happen. Easton then played his trump card -- when his mother had registered the band name, she'd registered it just in his name. If they didn't do things his way, they weren't going to be in the Kingsmen any more, and he was going to find new Kingsmen to replace them. Ely and a couple of other members quit, and that was the end of the group. And then, in October, as the Raiders' record was still slowly making some national progress, Arnie "Woo Woo" Ginsburg heard the Kingsmen's version. This Arnie Ginsburg isn't the Arnie Ginsburg we heard about in the episode on "LSD-25", and who we'll be meeting again briefly next week. This one was a DJ in Boston, and the most popular DJ in the area. And he *hated* the record. He hated it so much, he played it on his show, because he had a slot called The Worst Record Of The Week. He played it twice, and the next day, he had fifty calls from record shops -- customers had been coming in wanting to know where they could get "Louie Louie". Marv Schlachter at Scepter heard from the distributors how well the record was doing and picked it up for national distribution on their Wand subsidiary. In its first week on Wand, the single sold twenty-one thousand copies in Boston. [Excerpt: The Kingsmen, "Louie Louie"] For a few weeks, the Raiders and the Kingsmen both hung around the "bubbling under" section of the charts -- the Raiders selling and being played on the West Coast, and the Kingsmen on the East. By the ninth of November, the Kingsmen were at eighty-three in the charts, while the Raiders were at 108. By December the fourteenth, the Kingsmen were at number two, behind "Dominique" by the Singing Nun, a Belgian nun singing in French: [Excerpt: The Singing Nun, "Dominique"] You might think that there could not be two more different records at the top of the charts, and you'd mostly be right, but there was one thing that linked them -- the Singing Nun's song had a chorus that went "Dominique, nique, nique", and one of the reasons it had become popular was that in France, but not in Belgium where she lived, "nique" was a swear word, an expletive meaning "to fornicate", roughly the French equivalent of the word that Lynn Easton shouted when he clicked his drumsticks together. So a big part of its initial popularity was because of people finding an obscene meaning in the lyrics that simply wasn't there. And that was true of "Louie Louie" as well. Jack Ely had slurred the lyrics so badly that people started imagining that there must be dirty words in there, because otherwise why wouldn't he be singing it clearly? People started passing notes in schools and colleges, saying what the lyrics "really" were -- apparently you had to play the single at 33RPM to hear them properly.  These lyrics never made any actual sense, but they were things like "We'll take her and park all alone/She's never a girl I lay at home/At night at ten I lay her again" and "on that chair I'll lay her there/I felt my boner in her hair" -- the kind of thing, in short, that kids make up all the time. So obviously, they were reported to the FBI. And obviously the FBI spent two years investigating the song: [Excerpt: The Kingsmen, "Louie Louie"] They checked it anyway, of course, and reported "A comparison was made of the recording on the tape described above as specimen K1 with the recording on the disk, submitted by the Detroit Office and described as specimen Q3 in this case and no audible differences were noted." On the FBI website, you can read 119 pages of memos from FBI agents (with various bits blacked out for security reasons), and read about them shipping copies of "Louie Louie" to labs (under special seal, in case they'd be violating laws about transferring obscene material across state lines and breaking the very law they were investigating), listening to the record at 33, 45, and 78 RPM and trying to see if they could make out the lyrics, comparing them to the published words, to the various samizdat versions being shared by kids, and to Berry's record, and destroying the records after listening. They interviewed members of the Kingsmen and DJs, and they went to Scepter Records to get a copy of the original master tape, which they were surprised to discover was mono so left them no way of isolating the vocals. Meanwhile they were getting letters from concerned citizens doing things like playing the single at 78 RPM, making a tape recording of that at double speed, and then slowing it down, saying "at that speed the obscene articulation is clearer". This went on for two years. At no point does any of these highly trained FBI agents listening over and over to "Louie Louie" at different speeds appear to have heard Lynn Easton's yelled expletive, which unlike all these other things is actually on the record. Meanwhile, the Kingsmen went on to have one more top twenty hit, with only Easton and the lead guitarist left of the original lineup, and then continued to tour playing their hit. Jack Ely toured solo playing his one hit. The most successful member of the group was Don Gallucci, the keyboard player, who formed Don and the Goodtimes, who had a minor hit with "I Could Be So Good To You": [Excerpt: Don and the Goodtimes, "I Could Be So Good To You"] Gallucci went on to produce Fun House for the Stooges, who would also of course later record their own version of "Louie Louie", in which they sung those dirty lyrics: [Excerpt: the Stooges, "Louie Louie"] But then, nearly everyone did a version of the song -- there are at least two thousand recordings of it. But, other than from radio play, Richard Berry was receiving no money from any of these. After his marriage ended, he'd quit working as a musician to raise his daughter, gone back to school, and taken a day job -- but then he'd been further disabled in an accident and had ended up on welfare, while his song was making millions for the people who'd bought it from him for seven hundred and fifty dollars. He didn't even understand why the song was popular -- the only version that sounded like the record he'd wanted to make was the one by Barry White, another ex-Jefferson High student, who'd added the Latin percussion Berry had wanted to put on before he'd been told to make it more R&B. But in the eighties, things started to change. Some radio stations started doing all-Louie weekends, where for a whole weekend they'd just play different versions of the song, never repeating one. One of those stations invited Berry to do a live performance of the song with Jack Ely, backed by Bo Diddley's former rhythm player Lady Bo and her band: [Excerpt: Richard Berry and Jack Ely, "Louie Louie"] That was the first time Berry ever met the man who'd made his song famous. Soon after that, Berry's old friend Darlene Love, who had been one of the Dreamers who'd sung with Berry back in the fifties, introduced him to the man who would change his life -- Chuck Rubin. Rubin had, in the seventies, been the manager of the blues singer Wilbur Harrison, and had realised that not only was Harrison not getting any money from his old recordings, nor were many other Black musicians. He'd seen a business opportunity, and had started a company that helped get those artists what they deserved -- along with giving himself fifty percent of whatever they made. Which seems like a lot, but many people, including Berry, figured that fifty percent of a fortune was better than the hundred percent of nothing they were currently getting. Most of these artists had signed legally valid bad deals, which meant that while they were morally entitled to something, they weren't legally entitled. But Rubin had a way of getting round that, and he did the same thing with Berry that he did with many other people. He kept starting lawsuits that put off potential business partners, and in 1986 a company wanted to use "Louie Louie" in a TV advertising campaign that would earn huge amounts of money for its owners -- but they didn't want to use a song that was tied up in litigation. If the legal problems weren't sorted, they'd just use "Wild Thing" instead. In order to make sure the commercials used "Louie Louie", the song's owner gave Berry half the publishing rights and full songwriting rights (which Berry then split with Rubin). He didn't get any back payment from what the song had already earned, but he went from getting $240 a month on welfare in 1985, to making $160,000 from "Louie Louie" in 1989 alone. Richard Berry died in 1997, happy, respected, and wealthy. In the last decade of his life people started to explore his music again, and give him some of the credit he was due. Jack Ely continued performing "Louie Louie" until his death in 2015. Lynn Easton quit music in 1968, giving the Kingsmen's name to the lead guitarist Mike Mitchell, the only other original member still in the band. Easton died in April this year -- no-one's sure what of, as his religious beliefs meant he never saw a doctor. Mitchell's lineup of Kingsmen continued to perform until covid happened, and will presumably do so again once the pandemic is over. And somewhere out there, whenever you're listening to this, someone will be playing "duh-duh-duh, duh-duh, duh-duh-duh"

Episode 106 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Louie Louie” by the Kingsmen, and the story of how a band that had already split up accidentally had one of the biggest hits of the sixties and sparked a two-year FBI investigation. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have an eight-minute bonus episode available, on “It’s My Party” by Lesley Gore. 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. The single biggest resource I used in this episode was Dave Marsh’s book on Louie Louie. Information on Richard Berry also came from Marv Goldberg’s page, specifically his articles on the Flairs and Arthur Lee Maye and the Crowns.  This academic paper on the song is where I learned what the chord Richard Berry uses instead of the V is. The Coasters by Bill Millar also had some information about Berry. Love That Louie: The Louie Louie Files has the versions of the song by the Kingsmen, Berry, Rockin’ Robin Roberts, and Paul Revere and the Raiders, plus many more, and also has the pre-“Louie” “Havana Moon” and “El Loco Cha Cha Cha” The Ultimate Flairs has twenty-nine tracks by the Flairs under various names. Yama Yama! The Modern Recordings 1954-56 contains twenty-eight tracks Richard Berry recorded for Modern Records in the mid-fifties, including the Etta James duets. And Have “Louie” Will Travel collects Berry’s post-Modern recordings, including “Louie Louie” itself. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today we’re going to look at what is arguably the most important three-chord rock and roll record ever made, a song written by someone who’s been a bit-part player in many episodes so far, but who never had any success with it himself, and performed by a band that had split up before the record started to chart. We’re going to look at how a minor LA R&B hit was picked up by garage rock bands in the Pacific Northwest and sparked a two-and-a-half-year FBI investigation, and was recorded by everyone from Barry White to Iggy Pop, from Motorhead to the Beach Boys, from Julie London to Frank Zappa. We’re going to look at “Louie Louie” by the Kingsmen:   [Excerpt: The Kingsmen, “Louie Louie”] The story of “Louie Louie” begins with Richard Berry. We’ve seen Berry pop up here and there in several episodes — most recently in the episode on the Crystals, where we looked at how he’d been involved in the early career of the Blossoms, but the only time he’s been a signficant part of the story was in the episode on “The Wallflower”, back in March 2019, and even there he wasn’t the focus of the episode, so I should start by talking about his career. Some of this will be familiar from other episodes from a year or two ago, but here we’re looking at Berry specifically. Richard Berry was one of the many, many, great musicians of the fifties to go to Jefferson High School in Los Angeles, and was very involved in music at that school. When he arrived in the school, he had an aggressive attitude, formed by a need to defend himself — he walked with a limp, and had first started playing music at a camp for disabled kids, and he didn’t want people to think he was soft because of his disability. But as soon as he found out that you had to behave well in order to join the school a capella choir he became a changed character — he needed to be involved in music. And he soon was. He joined a group named The Flamingos, who were all students at Jefferson and proteges of Jesse Belvin, who was a couple of years older than them. That group consisted of Cornell Gunter on lead vocals, Gaynel Hodge on first tenor, Joe Jefferson on second tenor, Curtis Williams on baritone, and Berry on bass — though Berry was one of those rare vocalists who could sing equally well in the bass and tenor ranges, and in every style from gritty blues to Jesse Belvin style crooning. But as we’ve seen before, the membership of these groups was ever changing, and soon Curtis Williams left, first to join the Hollywood Flames, and then to join the Penguins. He was replaced, but Gunter and Berry left soon afterwards, and the remaining members of the band renamed themselves to The Platters. Berry and Gunter joined another group, the Debonairs, which was originally led by Arthur Lee Maye, with whom Berry would make many records over the years in the off-season — Maye was a major-league baseball player, and couldn’t record in the months his main career was taking up his time. Maye soon left the group, and in 1952 The Debonairs, with a lineup of Berry, Gunter, Young Jessie, Thomas Fox and Beverly Thompson, visited John Dolphin and made their first record, for Dolphins of Hollywood. The A-side featured Gunter on lead: [Excerpt: The Hollywood Blue Jays, “I Had a Love”] While the B-side featured Berry: [Excerpt: The Hollywood Blue Jays, “Tell Me You Love Me”] The group were disappointed when the record came out to discover that it wasn’t credited to the Debonairs, but instead to the Hollywood Blue Jays, a name Dolphin had also used for other groups. The record didn’t have any success, and so the group started looking for other labels that might record them. Cornell Gunter sat down with a pile of records and looked for ones with a label in LA. They decided to go with Modern Records, and ended up signed to Flair records, one of Modern’s subsidiaries. The label suggested they change their name to The Flairs, and they eagerly agreed, thinking that if their band had the same name as the label, the label would be more likely to promote them. Their first single for their new label was produced by Leiber and Stoller. One side was a remake of their first single, in better quality, with Gunter again singing lead, while the B-side was another Richard Berry song, “She Wants to Rock”: [Excerpt: The Flairs, “She Wants to Rock”] Apparently in 1953, when that came out, the title was still considered racy enough that the DJ Hunter Hancock insisted on them going on his radio show and explaining that by “rock” they merely meant to dance, and not anything more suggestive. Over the next couple of years, the Flairs would record and release tracks under all sorts of names — as well as many Flairs records they also released tracks as by The Hunters: [Excerpt: The Hunters, “Rabbit on a Log”] as Young Jessie solo records: [Excerpt: Young Jessie, “Lonesome Desert”] And as the Chimes. Several of these records were produced by Ike Turner, who by this point had moved on from working with Sam Phillips and was now working for the Bihari brothers, who owned Modern Records. Berry also released solo recordings, and recorded with a group led by Arthur Lee Maye, first as the Five Hearts (though there were only three of them at the time), then as the Rams, before the group settled down to become Arthur Lee Maye and the Crowns: [Excerpt: Arthur Lee Maye and the Crowns, “Set My Heart Free”] At one point in 1954, Berry was in three groups at the same time. He was in the Flairs, the Crowns, and the Dreamers — the group who became the Blossoms, who we talked about two weeks ago. And on top of that he was also recording a lot of sessions both as a solo singer, and as a duo with Jenell Hawkins, who also sometimes sang with the Dreamers: [Excerpt: Rickey and Jenelle, “Each Step”] The reason Berry was working on so many records wasn’t just that he loved singing, though he did, but because he’d learned from Jesse Belvin that it didn’t matter what the contract said, you were never going to get any royalties when you made records. So he sang on as many sessions as he could, pocketed his fifty-dollar fee, and then tried to get on another session. The Flairs eventually got sick of Berry working on so many other people’s records and singing with so many groups, and so he was out of the group — but he just formed his own new group, the Pharaohs, and carried on. The Flairs continued for years, though one at a time they left for other groups — Thomas Fox joined the Cadets, who had a hit with “Stranded in the Jungle”, and most famously, Cornell Gunter went on to join the classic lineup of the Coasters. But Berry actually sang on a Coasters record even before Gunter. As we saw, the first Coasters album was padded out with several singles by the Robins, credited to the Coasters, and one of the sessions that Berry had sung on was the Robins’ “Riot in Cell Block #9”, where Leiber and Stoller had asked him to sing lead, subbing for the Robins’ normal bass singer Bobby Nunn: [Excerpt: The Robins, “Riot in Cell Block #9”] The Bihari brothers were annoyed when they recognised Berry’s voice on that record — he was meant to be under contract to them, and even though he protested that it wasn’t him, they knew better. But they got Berry to start a solo career with a sequel to “Riot”, “The Big Break”, which he wrote himself: [Excerpt: Richard Berry, “The Big Break”] And for the next few years, Berry was promoted as a solo artist, recording songs like the Little Richard knockoff “Yama Yama Pretty Mama”: [Excerpt: Richard Berry, “Yama Yama Pretty Mama”] But of course that didn’t stop him from working with everyone else he could. Most famously, he was Henry on Etta James’ “The Wallflower”, which we looked at eighteen months ago: [Excerpt: Etta James and the Peaches, “The Wallflower”] Berry collaborated with James on the sequel, “Hey! Henry”, which was less successful: [Excerpt: Etta James, “Hey! Henry”] And he wrote “Good Rockin’ Daddy” for her, which made the R&B top ten: [Excerpt: Etta James, “Good Rockin’ Daddy”] This is all just scratching the surface. Between 1952 and the early sixties, Berry was on literally hundreds of records, under many names, and it’s likely we will never accurately know all of them. A fair number of them were classics of the genre, many more were derivative hackwork — quick knockoffs of the latest hit by Chuck Berry or Fats Domino, with the serial numbers not filed off all that well — and more than a few managed to be derivative hackwork *and* classics of the genre. Berry’s most famous song, “Louie Louie”, was both. There is nothing original about “Louie Louie”, yet it had an incalculable effect on popular music history, and Berry’s original version is a genuinely great record. The song had its genesis in a piece that Berry heard played as an instrumental by a group he was singing with at a gig one night, the Rhythm Rockers. When he asked them what the song was, he found out it was “El Loco Cha Cha Cha”, originally recorded by Rene Touzet. Berry loved the intro for the song, and immediately decided to rip it off: [Excerpt: Rene Touzet, “El Loco Cha Cha Cha”] That song is based around the same three-chord Latin groove as “La Bamba”, “Twist and Shout”, and roughly a million other songs, and so in keeping with the Latin feel of the song, Berry turned to another record as a model for his song. “Havana Moon” by Chuck Berry was the B-side to “You Can’t Catch Me”, and Richard Berry took its vocal melody, its lyrical theme of someone drinking while waiting for a ship to arrive and missing a girl who the narrator will see at the end of the boat journey, and its attempt at imitating Caribbean speech patterns by saying things like “Me stand and wait for boat to come”: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Havana Moon”] Of course, nothing is original, and the Chuck Berry track itself was almost certainly inspired by Nat “King” Cole’s “Calypso Blues”: [Excerpt: Nat “King” Cole, “Calypso Blues”] Richard Berry took these influences, and turned them into “Louie Louie”, which he originally intended to have a Latin feel. But the owners of his record label wanted something more straight-ahead R&B, so that’s what they got: [Excerpt: Richard Berry and the Pharaohs, “Louie Louie”] While Berry’s inspiration had been based on the I-IV-V-IV chord sequence that you get in “La Bamba”, “Louie Louie” didn’t actually use that precise sequence. I’m going to get into some music-theory stuff here, which I know some of you like and some of you detest, and so if you dislike that stuff skip forward a couple of minutes. If you take just the “Louie Louie” riff, and play it with the standard I-IV-V-IV chords, you get “Wild Thing”: [Excerpt: “Wild Thing” riff, piano] But Berry, in his arrangement, incorporated a second melody part, a little standard motif you get in a lot of blues stuff, the fifth, sixth, flattened seventh, and sixth of the scale, repeating: [Excerpt: motif, piano] The problem is that the normal way to use that motif is over a single chord. Berry was using it over three chords, and the flattened seventh note clashes with the V chord — if you’re playing in C, you’ve got a G chord, which is the notes G, B, and D, but that little motif has a B-flat note. So you get a B and a B-flat played together, which doesn’t sound great: [Excerpt: tonal clash, piano] Now, if you’re a rock guitarist from the late sixties onwards, the way you’d resolve that problem is to play power chords — power chords have just the root and fifth note, no third, so in this case you wouldn’t be playing the B. Problem solved. But this was the 1950s, and while there were a handful of records using power chords, when Berry was making his record in 1957, they weren’t particularly common. Also, Berry was a piano player rather than a guitarist, and so he went for a different option. Instead of playing the normal V chord, he used the I chord, with a seventh — so if you were to play it in the key of C, it would be C7 — but he played it in the second inversion, with the dominant in the bass. So if you were playing it in the key of C, the notes would be G-Bflat-C-E. So the bass riff is still the I-IV-V-IV riff, but the chords sound like this: [Excerpt: “Louie Louie” chords, piano] That wouldn’t be the solution that many later cover versions would use, but it worked for Berry’s record, which was released as the B-side to a version of “You Are My Sunshine”, and became a minor local hit: [Excerpt: Richard Berry and the Pharaohs, “Louie Louie”] By this time, Berry had left Modern Records, and “Louie Louie” was on a small label, Flip Records. Berry was twenty-one, he’d been a professional musician since he was sixteen and was thinking of getting married, and he was making so little money from his music that he took a day job, working at a record-pressing plant, smashing returned records. When “Louie Louie” started getting played on local radio, people started giving him a hard time at work, asking why he needed that job when he had a hit record, not understanding that he was making no money from it. He ended up being treated so badly that he quit that job And Flip Records started pressuring him to make follow-ups to “Louie Louie” rather than do anything new. He did come up with a great follow-up, “Have Love Will Travel”, but that wasn’t a hit: [Excerpt: Richard Berry and the Pharaohs, “Have Love Will Travel”] He got a few big gigs for a while off the back of his local hit, but he ended up working at the docks with his father — but he eventually had to quit that because his disability made it impossible for him to do it. In 1959, in order to pay for his wedding, he sold his songwriting rights to “Louie Louie” and several of his other songs to the owner of Flip Records, for $750 — he wanted to hold out for a full thousand, but he ended up settling for a lower amount. From that point on, he would still get paid his BMI royalties when the song was played on the radio — you couldn’t sell those rights — but he wouldn’t receive anything from record sales or sheet music sales, or use in films, or anything like that. But that didn’t matter. A song like “Louie Louie”, a three-chord B-side to a flop single from two years earlier, was hardly going to earn any real money, and seven hundred and fifty dollars was a lot of money. Berry was a working man who needed money, and anyway he was moving into soul music. “Louie Louie” was just another song he’d written, no more important than “Look Out Miss James” or “Rockin’ Man”, and while R&B fans in LA loved it (if you listen to the later version by the Beach Boys, or to Frank Zappa’s riffs on the song, you can tell they grew up listening to Berry’s original, not the later versions) it wasn’t going to ever be heard outside those people. And that would have been true, if it hadn’t been for Ron Holden. We’ve not talked about the Pacific Northwest’s music scene in the podcast so far, but it had one of the most vibrant and interesting music scenes in the US in the late fifties and early sixties, and much of the music that gets labelled garage rock or frat rock comes from that area. The closest parallel I can think of is Liverpool — another place where mostly-white musicians were performing their own versions of music made by Black musicians, and performing it on electric guitars. But anyone who became big from the area immediately moved somewhere else and became “an LA musician” or “a New York musician”, and the scene as a whole has never really had the attention it deserves. Ron Holden was one of the few Black musicians in that scene. In fact, he was a second-generation musician — his father, Oscar Holden, was known as “the father of Seattle jazz”, and had played with both Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton. Ron Holden led the most popular band in the Seattle area, the Thunderbirds, and in 1960, he had a top ten hit with a song called “Love You So”: [Excerpt: Ron Holden, “Love You So”] He didn’t have any follow-up hits, but as every musician from Seattle who had any success did, he moved away. He moved to LA, where he signed to Keen Records, where he recorded an entire album of songs written and produced by Keen’s new staff producer Bruce Johnston, including “Gee, But I’m Lonesome”, a song which was coincidentally also recorded around that time by Richard Berry’s old collaborators the Blossoms: [Excerpt: Ron Holden, “Gee But I’m Lonesome”] Holden was also the MC for the Ritchie Valens Memorial Concert which was the Beach Boys’ first major professional live performance. But before he left Seattle, he had introduced “Louie Louie” to the music scene there — he’d heard it on the radio in 1957 and worked up an arrangement with his band, and it had been a highlight of his shows. Once he left the city, so he wasn’t performing the song there, all the white bands in Seattle, and in nearby Tacoma, picked up on the song and added Holden’s arrangement of the song to their own sets. Holden — or rather his saxophone player Carlos Ward, who did the Thunderbirds’ arrangements — had made a crucial change to “Louie Louie”, one that made it simpler to play on the guitar, and thus suitable for the guitar-heavy music that was starting to predominate in the Pacific Northwest. Remember that Richard Berry had that second-inversion major seventh chord in there? [Excerpt: “Louie Louie” chords, piano] Ward changed that chord for a simpler minor V chord, just flattening the third so there was no clash there: [Excerpt: “Louie Louie” chords, Pacific Northwest version] That would be how almost every version of “Louie Louie” from this point on would be performed, because it was how they played it in the Pacific Northwest, because it was how Ron Holden and the Thunderbirds played it, and few of those bands had heard Richard Berry’s original record, just Ron Holden’s live performances of the song. But one band who based their version on Holden’s did listen to the original record — once Holden had brought the song to their attention. The Wailers — who are often referred to as “the Fabulous Wailers” to distinguish them from Bob Marley’s later, more famous group — were a group from Tacoma, which had a strong instrumental guitar band scene — most famously, the Ventures came from Tacoma, and a lot of the bands in the area sounded like that.  In 1959, the Wailers recorded a self-penned instrumental, “Tall Cool One”, which made the top forty: [Excerpt: The Wailers, “Tall Cool One”] They didn’t have any other hits, but soon after recording that, they got in a local singer, Rockin Robin Roberts, who became one of the band’s three lead singers. The group had a residence at a local venue, the Spanish Castle, and a live recording of one of their sets there, released as the “Live at the Castle” album, shows that they were a hugely exciting live band: [Excerpt: The Fabulous Wailers, “Since You Been Gone”] The shows at that venue were so good that several years later one of the regular audience members, Jimi Hendrix, would commemorate them in the song “Spanish Castle Magic”: [Excerpt: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, “Spanish Castle Magic”] But it was their version of “Louie Louie” that became the template for almost every version that ever followed. For contractual reasons, it was released as a Rockin’ Robin Roberts solo record, but it was the full Wailers playing on the track. No-one else in the Pacific Northwest knew what the lyrics were — they’d all learned it from Ron Holden’s live performances, but Roberts had actually tracked down a copy of the Richard Berry record and learned the words. Which, if you look at what happened later, is rather ironic. Their version of the song came out on their own label, and had few sales outside their home area, but it would be one of the most influential records ever, because everyone else in the Pacific Northwest started copying their version, right down to Roberts’ ad-libbed shout as they go into the guitar solo: [Excerpt: Rockin’ Robin Roberts, “Louie Louie”] The Wailers struggled on for a few more years, but never had any more commercial success. Rockin’ Robin Roberts went on to become an associate professor of biochemistry, before dying far too young in a car crash in 1967. But while their version of “Louie Louie” wasn’t a hit, a few copies made their way a couple of hours’ drive south, to Oregon. Here the story becomes a little difficult, because different people had different recollections of what happened. I’m going to tell one version of the story, but there are others. The story goes that one copy made its way into a jukebox at a club called the Pypo Club, in Seaside, Oregon, a club frequented by surfers. And one day in the early sixties — people seem to disagree whether it was summer 1961 or 62, two local bands played that club. During the intermission, the audience danced to the music on the jukebox — indeed, they danced to just one record on the jukebox, over and over. They just kept playing “Louie Louie” by Rockin’ Robin Roberts, no other records. Both bands immediately added the song to their sets, and it became a highlight of both band’s shows. By far the bigger of the two bands was Paul Revere and the Raiders. The Raiders actually came from Idaho, and had had a top forty hit with “Like, Long Hair” a novelty surf-rock version of a Rachmaninoff piece that Kim Fowley had produced: [Excerpt: Paul Revere and the Raiders, “Like, Long Hair”] But their career had stalled and they had moved to Oregon, because Revere, the group’s piano player and leader, had been drafted, and while he was allowed not to serve in the military because of his Mennonite faith, he had to do community service work there for two years instead. The Raiders were undoubtedly the best and most popular band in the Oregon area at the time, and their showmanship was on a whole other level from any other band — they were one of the first bands to smash their instruments on stage, except they weren’t smashing guitars — Revere would buy cheap second-hand pianos and smash *those* on stage. A local DJ, Roger Hart, had become the group’s manager, and he was going to start up his own label, and he wanted them to record “Louie Louie” as the label’s first single. Revere wasn’t keen — he didn’t like the song much, but Roger Hart insisted. He was sure it could be the hit that would restore the Raiders to the charts. So in April 1963, Paul Revere and the Raiders went into Northwest Recorders in Portland and recorded this: [Excerpt: Paul Revere and the Raiders, “Louie Louie”] Hart paid for the recording session and put the single out on his small label, Sande. It was soon picked up by Columbia Records, who put it out nationally. It started to get a bit of airplay, and started rising up the charts — it didn’t break the Hot One Hundred straight away, but it was clearly heading in the right direction. The Raiders signed to Columbia, and with Hart as their manager and occasional songwriter, and Terry Melcher as their producer, they became one of the biggest bands in the US, and had a string of hits stretching from 1965 to 1971. We won’t be doing a full episode on them, but they became an integral part of the LA music scene in the sixties, and they’re sure to turn up as background characters in future episodes. But note that I said their run of hits started in 1965. Because there had been two bands playing the Pypo Club, and they had both added “Louie Louie” to their set. And they’d both recorded versions of it in the same studio, in the same week. The Kingsmen were… not as big as the Raiders. They were a bunch of teenagers who had formed a group a few years earlier, and even on a good day they were at best the second-best band in Portland, with the Raiders far, far, ahead. The core of the group was based around the friendship of Jack Ely, the group’s lead singer, and Lynn Easton, the drummer, whose parents were friends — both families were Christian Scientists and actively involved in their local church — and they had grown up together. Ely’s parents didn’t encourage the duo’s music — Ely’s biological father had been a professional singer, but when the father died and Ely’s mother remarried, his stepfather didn’t want him to have anything to do with music — but Easton’s did, and Easton’s father became the group’s manager. Easton’s mother even went to the local courthouse to register the group’s name for them. Easton’s father was replaced as their manager by Ken Chase, the owner of the radio station where Roger Hart was the most popular DJ, and they started pressuring him to make a record with them. Eventually he did — and he booked them into the same studio as the Raiders, the same week. Different people have different stories about which was first and which was second, but there is no doubt that they were only two days or so apart. And there’s also no doubt that they were very different in terms of professionalism.  The Kingsmen did their best to copy the Rockin’ Robin Roberts version, right down to his shout of “Let’s give it to them right now!” but it was shockingly amateurish. The night before, they’d done a live show which consisted of a single ninety-minute-long performance of “Louie Louie” with no breaks, and Ely’s voice was shot. The mic was positioned too high for him and he had to strain his throat, and his braces were also making him slur the words. At one point early in the song, Easton clicks his drumsticks together by accident, and yells an obscenity loud enough to be captured on the tape: [Excerpt: The Kingsmen, “Louie Louie”] After the solo, Ely comes back in, wrongly thinks he’s come in in the wrong place, and stops, leaving Easton to quickly improvise a drum fill before they pick up again: [Excerpt: The Kingsmen, “Louie Louie”] The difference with the Raiders can be summed up most succinctly by what happened next — the Raiders’ manager paid for their session, but when the engineer at this session asked who was paying, and the Kingsmen pointed to their manager, he said “No, I’m not. I’ve not got any money”, and the members of the group had to dig through their pockets to get together the fifty dollars themselves. It’s incompetent teenagers, who have no idea what they’re doing, and it would become one of the most important records of all time. But when it was released… well, it was the second-best version of “Louie Louie” recorded in Portland that week, so while the Raiders were selling thousands, the Kingsmen only sold a couple of hundred copies. Jerry Dennon, the owner of the tiny label that released it, tried to get it picked up by Capitol Records, who rejected it saying it was the worst garbage they’d ever heard. He also sent it out to bigger indie labels, like Scepter, who stuck it in a drawer and forgot about it. And that was basically the end of the Kingsmen. In August, Easton decided that he was going to stop being the drummer and be the lead singer instead — he told Ely that Ely was going to be the drummer now. The other band members were astonished, because Easton couldn’t sing and Ely couldn’t play the drums, and they said that wasn’t going to happen. Easton then played his trump card — when his mother had registered the band name, she’d registered it just in his name. If they didn’t do things his way, they weren’t going to be in the Kingsmen any more, and he was going to find new Kingsmen to replace them. Ely and a couple of other members quit, and that was the end of the group. And then, in October, as the Raiders’ record was still slowly making some national progress, Arnie “Woo Woo” Ginsburg heard the Kingsmen’s version. This Arnie Ginsburg isn’t the Arnie Ginsburg we heard about in the episode on “LSD-25”, and who we’ll be meeting again briefly next week. This one was a DJ in Boston, and the most popular DJ in the area. And he *hated* the record. He hated it so much, he played it on his show, because he had a slot called The Worst Record Of The Week. He played it twice, and the next day, he had fifty calls from record shops — customers had been coming in wanting to know where they could get “Louie Louie”. Marv Schlachter at Scepter heard from the distributors how well the record was doing and picked it up for national distribution on their Wand subsidiary. In its first week on Wand, the single sold twenty-one thousand copies in Boston. [Excerpt: The Kingsmen, “Louie Louie”] For a few weeks, the Raiders and the Kingsmen both hung around the “bubbling under” section of the charts — the Raiders selling and being played on the West Coast, and the Kingsmen on the East. By the ninth of November, the Kingsmen were at eighty-three in the charts, while the Raiders were at 108. By December the fourteenth, the Kingsmen were at number two, behind “Dominique” by the Singing Nun, a Belgian nun singing in French: [Excerpt: The Singing Nun, “Dominique”] You might think that there could not be two more different records at the top of the charts, and you’d mostly be right, but there was one thing that linked them — the Singing Nun’s song had a chorus that went “Dominique, nique, nique”, and one of the reasons it had become popular was that in France, but not in Belgium where she lived, “nique” was a swear word, an expletive meaning “to fornicate”, roughly the French equivalent of the word that Lynn Easton shouted when he clicked his drumsticks together. So a big part of its initial popularity was because of people finding an obscene meaning in the lyrics that simply wasn’t there. And that was true of “Louie Louie” as well. Jack Ely had slurred the lyrics so badly that people started imagining that there must be dirty words in there, because otherwise why wouldn’t he be singing it clearly? People started passing notes in schools and colleges, saying what the lyrics “really” were — apparently you had to play the single at 33RPM to hear them properly.  These lyrics never made any actual sense, but they were things like “We’ll take her and park all alone/She’s never a girl I lay at home/At night at ten I lay her again” and “on that chair I’ll lay her there/I felt my boner in her hair” — the kind of thing, in short, that kids make up all the time. So obviously, they were reported to the FBI. And obviously the FBI spent two years investigating the song: [Excerpt: The Kingsmen, “Louie Louie”] They checked it anyway, of course, and reported “A comparison was made of the recording on the tape described above as specimen K1 with the recording on the disk, submitted by the Detroit Office and described as specimen Q3 in this case and no audible differences were noted.” On the FBI website, you can read 119 pages of memos from FBI agents (with various bits blacked out for security reasons), and read about them shipping copies of “Louie Louie” to labs (under special seal, in case they’d be violating laws about transferring obscene material across state lines and breaking the very law they were investigating), listening to the record at 33, 45, and 78 RPM and trying to see if they could make out the lyrics, comparing them to the published words, to the various samizdat versions being shared by kids, and to Berry’s record, and destroying the records after listening. They interviewed members of the Kingsmen and DJs, and they went to Scepter Records to get a copy of the original master tape, which they were surprised to discover was mono so left them no way of isolating the vocals. Meanwhile they were getting letters from concerned citizens doing things like playing the single at 78 RPM, making a tape recording of that at double speed, and then slowing it down, saying “at that speed the obscene articulation is clearer”. This went on for two years. At no point does any of these highly trained FBI agents listening over and over to “Louie Louie” at different speeds appear to have heard Lynn Easton’s yelled expletive, which unlike all these other things is actually on the record. Meanwhile, the Kingsmen went on to have one more top twenty hit, with only Easton and the lead guitarist left of the original lineup, and then continued to tour playing their hit. Jack Ely toured solo playing his one hit. The most successful member of the group was Don Gallucci, the keyboard player, who formed Don and the Goodtimes, who had a minor hit with “I Could Be So Good To You”: [Excerpt: Don and the Goodtimes, “I Could Be So Good To You”] Gallucci went on to produce Fun House for the Stooges, who would also of course later record their own version of “Louie Louie”, in which they sung those dirty lyrics: [Excerpt: the Stooges, “Louie Louie”] But then, nearly everyone did a version of the song — there are at least two thousand recordings of it. But, other than from radio play, Richard Berry was receiving no money from any of these. After his marriage ended, he’d quit working as a musician to raise his daughter, gone back to school, and taken a day job — but then he’d been further disabled in an accident and had ended up on welfare, while his song was making millions for the people who’d bought it from him for seven hundred and fifty dollars. He didn’t even understand why the song was popular — the only version that sounded like the record he’d wanted to make was the one by Barry White, another ex-Jefferson High student, who’d added the Latin percussion Berry had wanted to put on before he’d been told to make it more R&B. But in the eighties, things started to change. Some radio stations started doing all-Louie weekends, where for a whole weekend they’d just play different versions of the song, never repeating one. One of those stations invited Berry to do a live performance of the song with Jack Ely, backed by Bo Diddley’s former rhythm player Lady Bo and her band: [Excerpt: Richard Berry and Jack Ely, “Louie Louie”] That was the first time Berry ever met the man who’d made his song famous. Soon after that, Berry’s old friend Darlene Love, who had been one of the Dreamers who’d sung with Berry back in the fifties, introduced him to the man who would change his life — Chuck Rubin. Rubin had, in the seventies, been the manager of the blues singer Wilbur Harrison, and had realised that not only was Harrison not getting any money from his old recordings, nor were many other Black musicians. He’d seen a business opportunity, and had started a company that helped get those artists what they deserved — along with giving himself fifty percent of whatever they made. Which seems like a lot, but many people, including Berry, figured that fifty percent of a fortune was better than the hundred percent of nothing they were currently getting. Most of these artists had signed legally valid bad deals, which meant that while they were morally entitled to something, they weren’t legally entitled. But Rubin had a way of getting round that, and he did the same thing with Berry that he did with many other people. He kept starting lawsuits that put off potential business partners, and in 1986 a company wanted to use “Louie Louie” in a TV advertising campaign that would earn huge amounts of money for its owners — but they didn’t want to use a song that was tied up in litigation. If the legal problems weren’t sorted, they’d just use “Wild Thing” instead. In order to make sure the commercials used “Louie Louie”, the song’s owner gave Berry half the publishing rights and full songwriting rights (which Berry then split with Rubin). He didn’t get any back payment from what the song had already earned, but he went from getting $240 a month on welfare in 1985, to making $160,000 from “Louie Louie” in 1989 alone. Richard Berry died in 1997, happy, respected, and wealthy. In the last decade of his life people started to explore his music again, and give him some of the credit he was due. Jack Ely continued performing “Louie Louie” until his death in 2015. Lynn Easton quit music in 1968, giving the Kingsmen’s name to the lead guitarist Mike Mitchell, the only other original member still in the band. Easton died in April this year — no-one’s sure what of, as his religious beliefs meant he never saw a doctor. Mitchell’s lineup of Kingsmen continued to perform until covid happened, and will presumably do so again once the pandemic is over. And somewhere out there, whenever you’re listening to this, someone will be playing “duh-duh-duh, duh-duh, duh-duh-duh”

On this episode: I am joined by Joseph Jefferson from the Brothers Breaking Bread Podcast (@Triple_B_Pod). Joe is an educator and a parent that has been forced to making things work both at work and at home as a parent. Joe is also a Track and Field coach and he has to find a way to continue the teaching and mentoring during the Pandemic. Even through it all, we are still here doing our thing. Hope you listen and hopefully in can reassuring to many out that they are not alone with these thoughts and feelings. Enjoy. Guest: Joseph Jefferson- host of Brothers Breaking Bread Podcast Twitter: @jejefferson78, @Triple_B_Pod Music Cred: Show Intro- Mi Gente- Produced by Silent X Outro- Mi Gente- Produced by Silent X Connect With Us: Email: WaitOneMicPod@gmail.com Twitter: WaitOneMicPod Instagram: WaitOneMicPod --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/waitonemicpod/message

On this episode of News With My Dad, Joe & Jefferson discuss the movement of Hurricane Dorian, Prime Minister Johnson’s very-bad-not-so-good week, and the contenders for Oregon’s Secretary of State.

On this episode: New show but a familiar topic, the tragedy in El Paso and Dayton; We also commemorate the passing of a great author and a personal favorite Toni Morrison Stay tuned for part two…Show Prologue:Brothers Breaking Bread, or the “Triple B Pod”, is a collection of African American professionals, friends, and family that attempt to tackle the important issues of the day. We bring our unique brand of humor, sensitivity, and oftentimes anger to the analysis. The show features Rodger (@KcStork) Winston; “The Brothers of Doom” James and Joe Jefferson; Anthony (10 Meters) Jenkins; Ada (Lady Lavender) Ibe and extended #3BPod family. We cut our teeth as podcasters creating nearly 100 episodes of the Negroraguan Podcast, we’ve kept much of the format and traditions with a few personal touches that come with a new show. We sincerely hope you enjoy, and subscribe to the show. Toni Morrison : https://youtu.be/u7vXnbEd8z4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQ0mMjII22I&list=RDDQ0mMjII22I&start_radio=1&t=105Mental Health and Gun ViolenceO.J : https://twitter.com/therealoj32/status/1158067039799586817?s=12&fbclid=IwAR3hQsSGFAEbxpt419bkwIHP5bHZi9AqrAKVNDLXzVQ07aWLOcADymOplO4El Paso and Dayton Shootings:https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/09/politics/mass-shootings-immigrant-arrests-awful-week/index.htmlhttps://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/why-mental-illness-cant-predict-mass-shootingsBlue Lives greater than Our Lives:https://blavity.com/nypd-officers-held-a-blue-lives-matter-march-in-defense-of-officer-who-killed-eric-garner?fbclid=IwAR1Hgn1_rSteXtUjwv47waWOWBy_ZB7AzMTM8yA8a0KPcZl0rS8lsUaDV9khttps://kinja.com/api/profile/getsession?redirect=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theroot.com%2Fsetsession%3Fr%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.theroot.com%252Ffive-years-after-mike-brown-police-brutality-is-still-1837069328Music Cred:Show Intro- We Outchea - Joseph JeffersonOutro- It’s Over – Joseph JeffersonPhoto Editing:Jason JonesEpisode Participants: Rodger Winston (@DaKcStork)The Brothers of Doom: James Jefferson and Joe Jefferson

On this episode: Continued from the previous episode... we marvel at the Texas Rangers walking a black man to jail on horseback as if the fugitive slave law is still in effect ; We examine the field of politicians seeking the Democratic nomination for President, We finish with a discussion of the NCAA’s power, spurred by the new “Rich Paul Rule”.Show Prologue:Brothers Breaking Bread, or the “Triple B Pod”, is a collection of African American professionals, friends, and family that attempt to tackle the important issues of the day. We bring our unique brand of humor, sensitivity, and oftentimes anger to the analysis. The show features Rodger (@KcStork) Winston; “The Brothers of Doom” James and Joe Jefferson; Anthony (10 Meters) Jenkins; Ada (Lady Lavender) Ibe and extended #3BPod family. We cut our teeth as podcasters creating nearly 100 episodes of the Negroraguan Podcast, we’ve kept much of the format and traditions with a few personal touches that come with a new show. We sincerely hope you enjoy, and subscribe to the show. https://abc13.com/society/texas-rangers-investigating-mans-controversial-galveston-arrest/5453189/Dem Debates:https://www.vox.com/2019/8/8/20758519/democratic-debate-qualification-polls-candidates-yang-gabbardNCAA rule changes:https://theundefeated.com/features/the-ncaa-doesnt-have-a-rich-paul-problem-it-has-a-problem-with-black-men/Music Cred:Show Intro- We Outchea - Joseph JeffersonOutro- It’s Over – Joseph JeffersonPhoto Editing:Jason JonesEpisode Participants: Rodger Winston (@DaKcStork)The Brothers of Doom: James Jefferson and Joe Jefferson

On this episode: New show but a familiar topic, the tragedy in El Paso and Dayton; We also commemorate the passing of a great author and a personal favorite Toni Morrison Stay tuned for part two… Show Prologue: Brothers Breaking Bread, or the “Triple B Pod”, is a collection of African American professionals, friends, and family that attempt to tackle the important issues of the day. We bring our unique brand of humor, sensitivity, and oftentimes anger to the analysis. The show features Rodger (@KcStork) Winston; “The Brothers of Doom” James and Joe Jefferson; Anthony (10 Meters) Jenkins; Ada (Lady Lavender) Ibe and extended #3BPod family. We cut our teeth as podcasters creating nearly 100 episodes of the Negroraguan Podcast, we’ve kept much of the format and traditions with a few personal touches that come with a new show. We sincerely hope you enjoy, and subscribe to the show. Toni Morrison : https://youtu.be/u7vXnbEd8z4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQ0mMjII22I&list=RDDQ0mMjII22I&start_radio=1&t=105 Mental Health and Gun Violence O.J : https://twitter.com/therealoj32/status/1158067039799586817?s=12&fbclid=IwAR3hQsSGFAEbxpt419bkwIHP5bHZi9AqrAKVNDLXzVQ07aWLOcADymOplO4 El Paso and Dayton Shootings: https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/09/politics/mass-shootings-immigrant-arrests-awful-week/index.html https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/why-mental-illness-cant-predict-mass-shootings Blue Lives greater than Our Lives: https://blavity.com/nypd-officers-held-a-blue-lives-matter-march-in-defense-of-officer-who-killed-eric-garner?fbclid=IwAR1Hgn1_rSteXtUjwv47waWOWBy_ZB7AzMTM8yA8a0KPcZl0rS8lsUaDV9k https://kinja.com/api/profile/getsession?redirect=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theroot.com%2Fsetsession%3Fr%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.theroot.com%252Ffive-years-after-mike-brown-police-brutality-is-still-1837069328 Music Cred: Show Intro- We Outchea - Joseph Jefferson Outro- It’s Over – Joseph Jefferson Photo Editing: Jason Jones Episode Participants: Rodger Winston (@DaKcStork) The Brothers of Doom: James Jefferson and Joe Jefferson

On this episode: Continued from the previous episode... we marvel at the Texas Rangers walking a black man to jail on horseback as if the fugitive slave law is still in effect ; We examine the field of politicians seeking the Democratic nomination for President, We finish with a discussion of the NCAA’s power, spurred by the new “Rich Paul Rule”. Show Prologue: Brothers Breaking Bread, or the “Triple B Pod”, is a collection of African American professionals, friends, and family that attempt to tackle the important issues of the day. We bring our unique brand of humor, sensitivity, and oftentimes anger to the analysis. The show features Rodger (@KcStork) Winston; “The Brothers of Doom” James and Joe Jefferson; Anthony (10 Meters) Jenkins; Ada (Lady Lavender) Ibe and extended #3BPod family. We cut our teeth as podcasters creating nearly 100 episodes of the Negroraguan Podcast, we’ve kept much of the format and traditions with a few personal touches that come with a new show. We sincerely hope you enjoy, and subscribe to the show. https://abc13.com/society/texas-rangers-investigating-mans-controversial-galveston-arrest/5453189/ Dem Debates: https://www.vox.com/2019/8/8/20758519/democratic-debate-qualification-polls-candidates-yang-gabbard NCAA rule changes: https://theundefeated.com/features/the-ncaa-doesnt-have-a-rich-paul-problem-it-has-a-problem-with-black-men/ Music Cred: Show Intro- We Outchea - Joseph Jefferson Outro- It’s Over – Joseph Jefferson Photo Editing: Jason Jones Episode Participants: Rodger Winston (@DaKcStork) The Brothers of Doom: James Jefferson and Joe Jefferson

Welcome to episode thirty-one of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This one looks at “Only You” by the Platters. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. This episode ties into several others, but in particular you might want to relisten to the episode on Earth Angel, which features several of the same cast of characters. There are no books on the Platters, as far as I know, so as I so often do when talking about vocal groups I relied heavily on Marv Goldberg’s website. For details of Buck Ram’s life, I relied on The Magic Touch of Buck Ram: Songwriter, a self-published book credited to J. Patrick Carr but copyrighted in the name of Gayle Schreiber. Schreiber worked for Buck Ram for many years, and both she and Carr have put out multiple books with similar writing styles and layouts which heap fulsome praise both on Ram and on his assistant Jean Bennett. Those books are low on text and high on pictures from Bennett’s personal collection, and they give a version of the story which is very slanted, but they also contain details not available elsewhere. This long YouTube interview with Gaynel Hodge was interesting in giving Hodge’s side of the story. Some of the court case documents I read through to try to understand the legal ownership of the Platters name: Paul Robi and Tony Williams vs Five Platters Inc Martha Robi v. Five Platters Inc, Jean Bennett, and Buck Ram Martha Robi v. Herb Reed Herb Reed Enterprises v. Jean Bennett, Five Platters, Inc. and Personality Productions, Inc.   There are many cheap compilations of the Platters’ hits. There are also many cheap compilations of rerecorded versions of the Platters’ hits sung by people who weren’t in the Platters. This is one of the former.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript The story of the Platters is intimately tied up with another story we’ve already talked about — that of the Penguins and “Earth Angel”. You might want to relisten to that episode — or listen to it for the first time, if you’re coming to this podcast for the first time — before listening to this one, as this tells a lot of the same story from an alternative perspective. But in both cases Buck Ram ends up being the villain. As I mentioned in that episode, there was a lot of movement between different vocal groups, and the Platters were very far from an exception. It’s hard to talk about how they formed in the way I normally would, where you talk about these three people meeting up and then getting a friend to join them, and their personalities, and so on, because none of the five people who sang on their biggest hits were among the six people who formed the original group they came from. The Platters started out as The Flamingos — this isn’t the same group as the more well-known Flamingos, but a different group, whose lineup was Cornell Gunter, Gaynel Hodge (who was also in the Hollywood Flames at the same time), Gaynel’s brother Alex Hodge, Joe Jefferson, Richard Berry, and Curtis Williams. But very quickly, the Flamingos started to lose members to other, more popular, groups. The first to leave was Curtis Williams, who went on to join the Hollywood Flames, and from there joined the Penguins. Richard Berry, meanwhile formed a band called the Hollywood Bluejays and got Cornell Gunter into the group. They recorded one single for John Dolphin’s record label, before renaming themselves the Flairs and moving over to Flare records: [Excerpt: “She Wants to Rock”, the Flairs] Cornel Gunter would later go on to join the Coasters, and we’ve already heard some of what Richard Berry would do later on in the episode on “The Wallflower”. So the Flamingos had produced some great talents, but those talents’ departure left some gaping holes in the lineup. Eventually, the Flamingos settled into a new lineup, consisting of Gaynel Hodge, Alex Hodge, David Lynch (not the same one as the film director), and Herb Reed. That lineup was not very good, though, and they didn’t have a single singer who was strong enough to sing lead. Even so, the demand for vocal groups at the time was so great that they got signed by Ralph Bass, who was currently working for Federal Records, producing among other artists a singer called Linda Hayes. We’ve heard quite a bit about Linda Hayes in this series already, though you might not recognise the name. She was one of the people who had tried to cash in on Johnny Ace’s death with a tribute record, “Why Johnny Why”, and she was also the one who had replaced Eunice in Gene and Eunice when she went on maternity leave. We find her popping up all over the place when there was a bandwagon to jump on, and at the time we’re talking about she’d just had an actual hit because of doing this. Willie Mabon had just had a hit with “I Don’t Know”: [Excerpt: Willie Mabon, “I Don’t Know”] That had reached number one on the R&B chart and had spawned a country cover version by Tennessee Ernie Ford. And so Hayes had put out an answer record, “Yes, I Know (What You’re Putting Down)”: [Excerpt: Linda Hayes, “Yes, I Know (What You’re Putting Down)”] Hayes’ answer went to number two on the R&B charts, and she was suddenly someone it was worth paying attention to. As it turned out, she would only have one other hit, in 1954. But she introduced Ralph Bass to her brother, Tony Williams, who wanted to be a singer himself. Williams joined the Flamingos as their lead singer, and their first recording was as the vocal chorus on “Nervous Man Nervous” by Big Jay McNeely, one of the all-time great saxophone honkers, who had previously played with Johnny Otis’ band: [Excerpt: Big Jay McNeely, “Nervous Man Nervous”] Shortly after that, the Flamingos were due to have their own first recording session, when a problem hit. There were only so many names of birds that groups could use, and so it wasn’t surprising that someone else was using the name “the Flamingos”, and that group got a hit record out. So they decided that since records were often called “platters” by disc jockeys, they might as well call themselves that. The Platters’ first single did absolutely nothing: [excerpt: The Platters: “Hey Now”] They put out a few more recordings, but nothing clicked, and nobody, Ralph Bass included, thought they were any good. Gaynel Hodge finally got sick of splitting his time between groups, and left the group, to continue with the Hollywood Flames. The group seemed like they might be on the way out, and so Tony Williams went to his sister’s manager, Buck Ram, and asked him if he’d be Williams’ manager as a solo singer. Ram listened to him, and said he was interested, but Williams should get himself a group to sing with. Williams said that, well, he did already have a group. Ram talked to Ralph Bass and took the Platters on as a project for himself. Ram is unusual among the managers of this time, in that he was actually a musician and songwriter of some ability himself. He had obtained a law degree, mostly to please his parents, but Ram was primarily a songwriter. Long before he went into music management Ram was writing songs, and was getting them performed by musicians that you have heard of. And he seems to have been part of the music scene in New York in the late thirties and early forties in a big way, having met Duke Ellington in a music arranging class both were taking, and having been introduced by Ellington to people like Chick Webb, Cab Calloway, and Ellington’s publishers, Mills Music. Ram’s first big success as a songwriter was “I’ll Be Home For Christmas”, which had been a hit for Bing Crosby and would later become a standard: [Excerpt: Bing Crosby, “I’ll Be Home For Christmas”] The story of “I’ll Be Home For Christmas” was a rather controversial one — Ram had written, on his own, a song called “I’ll Be Home For Christmas (Tho Just In Memory)”, and had registered the copyright in December 1942, but hadn’t had it recorded by anyone. A few months later, he talked to his acquaintances Walter Kent and Kim Gannon about it, and was shocked when Crosby released a single written by them which bore a strong resemblance to Ram’s song. His publishers, Mills Music, sued and got Ram credited on future releases. Buck Ram would end up fighting a lot of lawsuits, with a lot of people. But while that biggest credit was the result of a lawsuit, Ram was also, as far as I can tell, an actual songwriter of great ability. Where other managers got themselves credited on songs that they didn’t write and in some cases had never heard, to the best of my knowledge there has never been any suggestion that Buck Ram wasn’t the sole author of the Platters songs he’s credited for. I’m so used to this working the other way, with managers taking credit for work they didn’t do, that I still find it difficult to state for certain that there wasn’t *some* sort of scam going on, but Ram had songwriting credits long before getting into the business side of things. Here, for example, is a song he wrote with Chick Webb, sung by Ella Fitzgerald: [Excerpt: “Chew Chew Chew Your Bubblegum”, Chick Webb and Ella Fitzgerald] He spent several years working as a songwriter and arranger in New York, but made the mistake of moving West in order to get into the film music business, only to find that he couldn’t break into the market and had to move into management instead. But making music, rather than managing it, was his first love, and he saw the Platters as a means to that end — raw material he could mould in his own image. Ram signed the Platters, now a four-piece consisting of Williams, Alex Hodge, David Lynch, and Herb Reed, to a seven-year contract, and started trying to mould them into a hit act. The first single they released after signing with Ram was one which, rather oddly, featured Herb Reed on lead vocals on both sides, rather than their normal lead Tony Williams: [Excerpt: The Platters, “Roses of Picardy”] They still had the problem, though, that they simply weren’t very good at singing. At the time, they didn’t know how to sing in harmony — they’d just take turns singing lead, and often not be able to sing in the same key as each other. This didn’t have much success, but Ram had an idea. In the forties, he’d managed and written for a group called the Quin-Tones. There were several groups of that name over the years, but this one had been a white vocal group with four men and one woman. They weren’t very successful, but here’s one of their few surviving recordings, “Midnight Jamboree”, written and arranged by Ram: [Excerpt: the Quin-Tones, “Midnight Jamboree”] Working with the Quin-Tones had given Ram a taste for the particular vocal blend that comes from having four men and one woman. This had been a popular group style in the 1940s, thanks to the influence of the Modernaires — the vocal group who sang with the Glenn Miller Orchestra — but had largely fallen out of favour in the 50s. Ram decided to reform the Platters along these lines. The woman he chose to bring into the group was a singer Gaynel Hodge knew called Zola Taylor. Taylor had been recording as a solo artist, with little success, but she had a good sound on her recordings for RPM Records: [Excerpt: Zola Taylor, “Oh! My Dear”] With Zola in the group, Ram’s ideal vocal sound was almost complete. But they hadn’t quite got themselves together — after all, there was still an original member left! But Alex Hodge wouldn’t last long, as he was arrested for marijuana possession, and he was replaced by Paul Robi. Gaynel Hodge now claims that this wasn’t the real reason that Alex Hodge was sacked – he says that Ram and Herb Reed conspired to get rid of Alex, who in Gaynel’s telling had been the original founder of the group, because he knew too much about the music business and was getting suspicious that Ram was ripping him off. Either way, the last original member was now gone, and the Platters were Tony Williams, Zola Taylor, Herb Reed, Paul Robi, and David Lynch. This would now be the lineup that would stay together for the rest of the 1950s and beyond. Before that change though, the Platters had recorded a song that had sounded so bad that Ram had persuaded the label not to release it. “Only You” was a song that Ram had written with the intention of passing it on to the Ink Spots, but for whatever reason he had never got round to it, though he’d written for the Ink Spots before — they’d released his “I’ll Lose a Friend Tomorrow” in 1946: [Excerpt: The Ink Spots: “I’ll Lose A Friend Tomorrow”] He later said that he’d decided against giving “Only You” to the Ink Spots because they’d split up before he had a chance. That’s not accurate — the Ink Spots were still around when the earliest recordings of the song by the Platters were made. More likely, he just didn’t like the song. After he wrote it, he stuck the sheet music in a box, where it languished until Jean Bennett, his assistant, was moving things around and the box fell apart. Bennett looked at the song, and said she thought it looked interesting. Ram said it was rubbish, but Bennett put the sheet music on top of Ram’s piano. When Tony Williams saw it, he insisted on recording it. But that initial recording seemed to confirm Ram’s assessment that the song was terrible: [Excerpt: The Platters, “Only You” (original version), including the incredibly bad ending chord] During this period the band were also recording tracks backing Linda Hayes, and indeed there was also a brother-sister duet credited to Linda Hayes and Tony Williams (of the Platters): [Excerpt, Linda Hayes and Tony Williams, “Oochi Pachi”] And again, Hayes was trying to jump on the bandwagons, recording an “Annie” song with the Platters on backing vocals, in the hope of getting some of the money that was going to Hank Ballard and Etta James: [Excerpt: Linda Hayes and the Platters, “My Name Ain’t Annie”] But none of those records sold at all, and despite Ram’s best efforts it looked like the Platters were simply not going to be having any recording success any time soon. Federal dropped them, as it looked likely they were going to do nothing. But then, the group got very lucky. Buck Ram became the manager of the Penguins, another group that had formed out of the primal soup of singers around LA. The Penguins had just had what turned out to be their only big hit, with “Earth Angel”, and Mercury Records were eager to sign them. Ram agreed to the deal, but only on the condition that Mercury signed the Platters as well. Once they were signed, Ram largely gave up on the Penguins, who never had any further success. They’d served his purpose, and got the group he really cared about signed to a major label. There was a six-month break between the last session the Platters did for Federal and the first they did for Mercury. During that time, there was only one session — as backing vocalists for Joe Houston: [Excerpt: Joe Houston, “Shtiggy Boom”] But they spent that six months practising, and when they got into the studio to record for Mercury, they suddenly sounded *good*: [Excerpt: The Platters, “Only You”] Everything had fallen into place. They were now a slick, professional group. They’d even got good enough that they could incorporate mistakes when they worked — on an early take, Williams’ voice cracked on the word “only”, and he apologised to Ram, who said, “no, it sounded good, use it”. And “Only You” became one of those songs that defines an era. More than any of the doo-wop songs we’ve covered previously, it’s the epitome of 1950s smooth balladry. It was a massive hit — it spent thirty weeks on the R&B charts, seven of them at number one, and twenty-two weeks on the pop charts, peaking at number five. Federal rush-released the awful original recording to cash in, and Ram and Mercury took them to court, which eventually ruled in favour of Federal being allowed to put out their version, but the judge also said that that decision might well turn out to be more harmful to Federal than to Mercury. The Federal version didn’t chart. The follow-up to “Only You”, also by Ram, was even bigger: [Excerpt: The Platters, “The Great Pretender”] And this started a whole string of hits — “The Magic Touch”, “Twilight Time”, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”… most of these weren’t quite as long-lasting as their first two massive hits, but they were regulars at the top of the pop charts. The Platters were, in many ways, the 1950s equivalent to the Ink Spots, and while they started off marketed as a rock and roll group, they soon transitioned into the more lucrative adult market, recording albums of standards. But having emulated the Ink Spots in their biggest hits, the Platters also, sadly, emulated the Ink Spots in the way they fell apart. Unfortunately, the only book I’ve been able to find that talks about the Platters in any depth is written by someone working for Buck Ram’s organisation, and so it has a very particular biased take on the legal disputes that followed for the next sixty years. I’ve tried to counter this by at least skimming some of the court documents that are available online, but it’s not really possible to get an accurate sense, either from court filings from 2011 or the mid-eighties, or from a self-published and self-defensive book from 2015, what actually happened between the five Platters, Ram, and Ram’s assistant Jean Bennett back in the late 1950s. What everyone seems to agree on, though, is that soon after the Platters were signed to Mercury, a corporation was set up, “Five Platters Inc”, which was controlled by Buck Ram and had all the members of the Platters as shareholders. The Platters, at the time, assigned any rights they had to the band’s name to this corporation. But then, in 1959, Tony Williams, who had always wanted a solo career, decided he wanted to pursue one more vigorously. He was going to leave the group, and he put out a solo album: [Excerpt: Tony Williams, “Charmaine”] Indeed, it seems to have been Buck Ram’s plan from the very start to get Williams to be a solo artist, while keeping the Platters as a hit group — he tried to find a replacement for Williams as early as 1956, although that didn’t work out. For a while, Williams continued in the Platters, while they looked for a replacement, but his solo career didn’t go wonderfully at first. He wasn’t helped by all four of the male Platters being arrested, allegedly as customers of sex workers, but in fact because they were sharing their hotel room with white women. All charges against everyone involved were later dropped, but this meant that it probably wasn’t the best time for Williams to be starting a solo career. But by 1961, Williams had managed to extricate himself from the Platters, and had been replaced by a young singer called Sonny Turner, who could sound a little like Williams. The record company were so convinced that Williams was the important one in the Platters, though, that on many of their recordings for the next year or two Mercury would take completed recordings by the new Platters lineup and overdub new lead vocals from Williams. But one at a time the band members left, following Williams. And as each member left, they sold their shares in Five Platters Inc. to Buck Ram or to one of Ram’s companies. By 1969 Herb Reed was the only member of the classic lineup still in the group, and then he left the group too, and Buck Ram and his companies continued putting out groups with no original members as the Platters. Now, this doesn’t mean that the real members stopped touring as the Platters. After David Lynch left in 1967, for example, he formed a group called “The Original Platters”, and got both Zola Taylor and Paul Robi into the group. Tony Williams, Herb Reed, and Sonny Turner all also formed their own groups which toured under the Platters name, competing with the “official” Buck Ram Platters. There followed forty years of litigation between Ram’s companies and various Platters members. And the judgements went both ways, to the point that I can’t make accurate judgements from the case documents I’ve been able to find online. As best as I can understand it, there was a court ruling back in 1974 that the whole purpose of Five Platters Inc. had been to illegally deprive the band members of their ownership in the band name, that it was a sham corporation, and that Buck Ram had illegally benefited from an unfair bargaining position. Shortly after that, it was ruled that FPI’s trademark in the Platters name was void. But then there were other cases which went the other way, and Five Platters Inc. insisted that the band members had mostly left because they were alcoholics who didn’t want to tour any more, and that they’d given up their rights to the band name of their own free will. Meanwhile, over a hundred fake Platters groups with no original members went out on the road at various points. There have been almost as many fake Platters as there have fake Ink Spots. The band name issues were finally resolved in 2011. By that point Buck Ram was long dead, as were all the members of the classic Platters lineup except Herb Reed. A judge finally ruled that Herb Reed had the rights to the name, and that Five Platters Inc. had never owned the name. Just before that ruling, Five Platters Inc., which was now run by Jean Bennett, announced that they were going to retire the name. Herb Reed died in 2012, shortly afterwards, though the company he licensed the name to still licenses a band to tour as the Platters. Gaynel Hodge, however, is still alive, the last surviving member of the original Platters, and he still performs with his own Platters group, performing songs the Platters recorded after he left. His website hasn’t been updated since 2005, but at the time its most recent newsflash was that he had co-written this song with Dr. John for Shemekia Copeland: [Excerpt: Shemekia Copeland, “Too Close”] Gaynel Hodge was a major figure in the California music industry. He’ll be turning up in all sorts of odd places in future episodes, as he was involved in a lot of very important records. And we’ll definitely be seeing more of both Richard Berry and Cornell Gunter later as well. And meanwhile, somewhere out there are multiple groups of people who’ve never met anyone who sang on “Only You”, singing that song right now and calling themselves the Platters.

Welcome to episode thirty-one of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This one looks at “Only You” by the Platters. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. This episode ties into several others, but in particular you might want to relisten to the episode on Earth Angel, which features several of the same cast of characters. There are no books on the Platters, as far as I know, so as I so often do when talking about vocal groups I relied heavily on Marv Goldberg’s website. For details of Buck Ram’s life, I relied on The Magic Touch of Buck Ram: Songwriter, a self-published book credited to J. Patrick Carr but copyrighted in the name of Gayle Schreiber. Schreiber worked for Buck Ram for many years, and both she and Carr have put out multiple books with similar writing styles and layouts which heap fulsome praise both on Ram and on his assistant Jean Bennett. Those books are low on text and high on pictures from Bennett’s personal collection, and they give a version of the story which is very slanted, but they also contain details not available elsewhere. This long YouTube interview with Gaynel Hodge was interesting in giving Hodge’s side of the story. Some of the court case documents I read through to try to understand the legal ownership of the Platters name: Paul Robi and Tony Williams vs Five Platters Inc Martha Robi v. Five Platters Inc, Jean Bennett, and Buck Ram Martha Robi v. Herb Reed Herb Reed Enterprises v. Jean Bennett, Five Platters, Inc. and Personality Productions, Inc.   There are many cheap compilations of the Platters’ hits. There are also many cheap compilations of rerecorded versions of the Platters’ hits sung by people who weren’t in the Platters. This is one of the former.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript The story of the Platters is intimately tied up with another story we’ve already talked about — that of the Penguins and “Earth Angel”. You might want to relisten to that episode — or listen to it for the first time, if you’re coming to this podcast for the first time — before listening to this one, as this tells a lot of the same story from an alternative perspective. But in both cases Buck Ram ends up being the villain. As I mentioned in that episode, there was a lot of movement between different vocal groups, and the Platters were very far from an exception. It’s hard to talk about how they formed in the way I normally would, where you talk about these three people meeting up and then getting a friend to join them, and their personalities, and so on, because none of the five people who sang on their biggest hits were among the six people who formed the original group they came from. The Platters started out as The Flamingos — this isn’t the same group as the more well-known Flamingos, but a different group, whose lineup was Cornell Gunter, Gaynel Hodge (who was also in the Hollywood Flames at the same time), Gaynel’s brother Alex Hodge, Joe Jefferson, Richard Berry, and Curtis Williams. But very quickly, the Flamingos started to lose members to other, more popular, groups. The first to leave was Curtis Williams, who went on to join the Hollywood Flames, and from there joined the Penguins. Richard Berry, meanwhile formed a band called the Hollywood Bluejays and got Cornell Gunter into the group. They recorded one single for John Dolphin’s record label, before renaming themselves the Flairs and moving over to Flare records: [Excerpt: “She Wants to Rock”, the Flairs] Cornel Gunter would later go on to join the Coasters, and we’ve already heard some of what Richard Berry would do later on in the episode on “The Wallflower”. So the Flamingos had produced some great talents, but those talents’ departure left some gaping holes in the lineup. Eventually, the Flamingos settled into a new lineup, consisting of Gaynel Hodge, Alex Hodge, David Lynch (not the same one as the film director), and Herb Reed. That lineup was not very good, though, and they didn’t have a single singer who was strong enough to sing lead. Even so, the demand for vocal groups at the time was so great that they got signed by Ralph Bass, who was currently working for Federal Records, producing among other artists a singer called Linda Hayes. We’ve heard quite a bit about Linda Hayes in this series already, though you might not recognise the name. She was one of the people who had tried to cash in on Johnny Ace’s death with a tribute record, “Why Johnny Why”, and she was also the one who had replaced Eunice in Gene and Eunice when she went on maternity leave. We find her popping up all over the place when there was a bandwagon to jump on, and at the time we’re talking about she’d just had an actual hit because of doing this. Willie Mabon had just had a hit with “I Don’t Know”: [Excerpt: Willie Mabon, “I Don’t Know”] That had reached number one on the R&B chart and had spawned a country cover version by Tennessee Ernie Ford. And so Hayes had put out an answer record, “Yes, I Know (What You’re Putting Down)”: [Excerpt: Linda Hayes, “Yes, I Know (What You’re Putting Down)”] Hayes’ answer went to number two on the R&B charts, and she was suddenly someone it was worth paying attention to. As it turned out, she would only have one other hit, in 1954. But she introduced Ralph Bass to her brother, Tony Williams, who wanted to be a singer himself. Williams joined the Flamingos as their lead singer, and their first recording was as the vocal chorus on “Nervous Man Nervous” by Big Jay McNeely, one of the all-time great saxophone honkers, who had previously played with Johnny Otis’ band: [Excerpt: Big Jay McNeely, “Nervous Man Nervous”] Shortly after that, the Flamingos were due to have their own first recording session, when a problem hit. There were only so many names of birds that groups could use, and so it wasn’t surprising that someone else was using the name “the Flamingos”, and that group got a hit record out. So they decided that since records were often called “platters” by disc jockeys, they might as well call themselves that. The Platters’ first single did absolutely nothing: [excerpt: The Platters: “Hey Now”] They put out a few more recordings, but nothing clicked, and nobody, Ralph Bass included, thought they were any good. Gaynel Hodge finally got sick of splitting his time between groups, and left the group, to continue with the Hollywood Flames. The group seemed like they might be on the way out, and so Tony Williams went to his sister’s manager, Buck Ram, and asked him if he’d be Williams’ manager as a solo singer. Ram listened to him, and said he was interested, but Williams should get himself a group to sing with. Williams said that, well, he did already have a group. Ram talked to Ralph Bass and took the Platters on as a project for himself. Ram is unusual among the managers of this time, in that he was actually a musician and songwriter of some ability himself. He had obtained a law degree, mostly to please his parents, but Ram was primarily a songwriter. Long before he went into music management Ram was writing songs, and was getting them performed by musicians that you have heard of. And he seems to have been part of the music scene in New York in the late thirties and early forties in a big way, having met Duke Ellington in a music arranging class both were taking, and having been introduced by Ellington to people like Chick Webb, Cab Calloway, and Ellington’s publishers, Mills Music. Ram’s first big success as a songwriter was “I’ll Be Home For Christmas”, which had been a hit for Bing Crosby and would later become a standard: [Excerpt: Bing Crosby, “I’ll Be Home For Christmas”] The story of “I’ll Be Home For Christmas” was a rather controversial one — Ram had written, on his own, a song called “I’ll Be Home For Christmas (Tho Just In Memory)”, and had registered the copyright in December 1942, but hadn’t had it recorded by anyone. A few months later, he talked to his acquaintances Walter Kent and Kim Gannon about it, and was shocked when Crosby released a single written by them which bore a strong resemblance to Ram’s song. His publishers, Mills Music, sued and got Ram credited on future releases. Buck Ram would end up fighting a lot of lawsuits, with a lot of people. But while that biggest credit was the result of a lawsuit, Ram was also, as far as I can tell, an actual songwriter of great ability. Where other managers got themselves credited on songs that they didn’t write and in some cases had never heard, to the best of my knowledge there has never been any suggestion that Buck Ram wasn’t the sole author of the Platters songs he’s credited for. I’m so used to this working the other way, with managers taking credit for work they didn’t do, that I still find it difficult to state for certain that there wasn’t *some* sort of scam going on, but Ram had songwriting credits long before getting into the business side of things. Here, for example, is a song he wrote with Chick Webb, sung by Ella Fitzgerald: [Excerpt: “Chew Chew Chew Your Bubblegum”, Chick Webb and Ella Fitzgerald] He spent several years working as a songwriter and arranger in New York, but made the mistake of moving West in order to get into the film music business, only to find that he couldn’t break into the market and had to move into management instead. But making music, rather than managing it, was his first love, and he saw the Platters as a means to that end — raw material he could mould in his own image. Ram signed the Platters, now a four-piece consisting of Williams, Alex Hodge, David Lynch, and Herb Reed, to a seven-year contract, and started trying to mould them into a hit act. The first single they released after signing with Ram was one which, rather oddly, featured Herb Reed on lead vocals on both sides, rather than their normal lead Tony Williams: [Excerpt: The Platters, “Roses of Picardy”] They still had the problem, though, that they simply weren’t very good at singing. At the time, they didn’t know how to sing in harmony — they’d just take turns singing lead, and often not be able to sing in the same key as each other. This didn’t have much success, but Ram had an idea. In the forties, he’d managed and written for a group called the Quin-Tones. There were several groups of that name over the years, but this one had been a white vocal group with four men and one woman. They weren’t very successful, but here’s one of their few surviving recordings, “Midnight Jamboree”, written and arranged by Ram: [Excerpt: the Quin-Tones, “Midnight Jamboree”] Working with the Quin-Tones had given Ram a taste for the particular vocal blend that comes from having four men and one woman. This had been a popular group style in the 1940s, thanks to the influence of the Modernaires — the vocal group who sang with the Glenn Miller Orchestra — but had largely fallen out of favour in the 50s. Ram decided to reform the Platters along these lines. The woman he chose to bring into the group was a singer Gaynel Hodge knew called Zola Taylor. Taylor had been recording as a solo artist, with little success, but she had a good sound on her recordings for RPM Records: [Excerpt: Zola Taylor, “Oh! My Dear”] With Zola in the group, Ram’s ideal vocal sound was almost complete. But they hadn’t quite got themselves together — after all, there was still an original member left! But Alex Hodge wouldn’t last long, as he was arrested for marijuana possession, and he was replaced by Paul Robi. Gaynel Hodge now claims that this wasn’t the real reason that Alex Hodge was sacked – he says that Ram and Herb Reed conspired to get rid of Alex, who in Gaynel’s telling had been the original founder of the group, because he knew too much about the music business and was getting suspicious that Ram was ripping him off. Either way, the last original member was now gone, and the Platters were Tony Williams, Zola Taylor, Herb Reed, Paul Robi, and David Lynch. This would now be the lineup that would stay together for the rest of the 1950s and beyond. Before that change though, the Platters had recorded a song that had sounded so bad that Ram had persuaded the label not to release it. “Only You” was a song that Ram had written with the intention of passing it on to the Ink Spots, but for whatever reason he had never got round to it, though he’d written for the Ink Spots before — they’d released his “I’ll Lose a Friend Tomorrow” in 1946: [Excerpt: The Ink Spots: “I’ll Lose A Friend Tomorrow”] He later said that he’d decided against giving “Only You” to the Ink Spots because they’d split up before he had a chance. That’s not accurate — the Ink Spots were still around when the earliest recordings of the song by the Platters were made. More likely, he just didn’t like the song. After he wrote it, he stuck the sheet music in a box, where it languished until Jean Bennett, his assistant, was moving things around and the box fell apart. Bennett looked at the song, and said she thought it looked interesting. Ram said it was rubbish, but Bennett put the sheet music on top of Ram’s piano. When Tony Williams saw it, he insisted on recording it. But that initial recording seemed to confirm Ram’s assessment that the song was terrible: [Excerpt: The Platters, “Only You” (original version), including the incredibly bad ending chord] During this period the band were also recording tracks backing Linda Hayes, and indeed there was also a brother-sister duet credited to Linda Hayes and Tony Williams (of the Platters): [Excerpt, Linda Hayes and Tony Williams, “Oochi Pachi”] And again, Hayes was trying to jump on the bandwagons, recording an “Annie” song with the Platters on backing vocals, in the hope of getting some of the money that was going to Hank Ballard and Etta James: [Excerpt: Linda Hayes and the Platters, “My Name Ain’t Annie”] But none of those records sold at all, and despite Ram’s best efforts it looked like the Platters were simply not going to be having any recording success any time soon. Federal dropped them, as it looked likely they were going to do nothing. But then, the group got very lucky. Buck Ram became the manager of the Penguins, another group that had formed out of the primal soup of singers around LA. The Penguins had just had what turned out to be their only big hit, with “Earth Angel”, and Mercury Records were eager to sign them. Ram agreed to the deal, but only on the condition that Mercury signed the Platters as well. Once they were signed, Ram largely gave up on the Penguins, who never had any further success. They’d served his purpose, and got the group he really cared about signed to a major label. There was a six-month break between the last session the Platters did for Federal and the first they did for Mercury. During that time, there was only one session — as backing vocalists for Joe Houston: [Excerpt: Joe Houston, “Shtiggy Boom”] But they spent that six months practising, and when they got into the studio to record for Mercury, they suddenly sounded *good*: [Excerpt: The Platters, “Only You”] Everything had fallen into place. They were now a slick, professional group. They’d even got good enough that they could incorporate mistakes when they worked — on an early take, Williams’ voice cracked on the word “only”, and he apologised to Ram, who said, “no, it sounded good, use it”. And “Only You” became one of those songs that defines an era. More than any of the doo-wop songs we’ve covered previously, it’s the epitome of 1950s smooth balladry. It was a massive hit — it spent thirty weeks on the R&B charts, seven of them at number one, and twenty-two weeks on the pop charts, peaking at number five. Federal rush-released the awful original recording to cash in, and Ram and Mercury took them to court, which eventually ruled in favour of Federal being allowed to put out their version, but the judge also said that that decision might well turn out to be more harmful to Federal than to Mercury. The Federal version didn’t chart. The follow-up to “Only You”, also by Ram, was even bigger: [Excerpt: The Platters, “The Great Pretender”] And this started a whole string of hits — “The Magic Touch”, “Twilight Time”, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”… most of these weren’t quite as long-lasting as their first two massive hits, but they were regulars at the top of the pop charts. The Platters were, in many ways, the 1950s equivalent to the Ink Spots, and while they started off marketed as a rock and roll group, they soon transitioned into the more lucrative adult market, recording albums of standards. But having emulated the Ink Spots in their biggest hits, the Platters also, sadly, emulated the Ink Spots in the way they fell apart. Unfortunately, the only book I’ve been able to find that talks about the Platters in any depth is written by someone working for Buck Ram’s organisation, and so it has a very particular biased take on the legal disputes that followed for the next sixty years. I’ve tried to counter this by at least skimming some of the court documents that are available online, but it’s not really possible to get an accurate sense, either from court filings from 2011 or the mid-eighties, or from a self-published and self-defensive book from 2015, what actually happened between the five Platters, Ram, and Ram’s assistant Jean Bennett back in the late 1950s. What everyone seems to agree on, though, is that soon after the Platters were signed to Mercury, a corporation was set up, “Five Platters Inc”, which was controlled by Buck Ram and had all the members of the Platters as shareholders. The Platters, at the time, assigned any rights they had to the band’s name to this corporation. But then, in 1959, Tony Williams, who had always wanted a solo career, decided he wanted to pursue one more vigorously. He was going to leave the group, and he put out a solo album: [Excerpt: Tony Williams, “Charmaine”] Indeed, it seems to have been Buck Ram’s plan from the very start to get Williams to be a solo artist, while keeping the Platters as a hit group — he tried to find a replacement for Williams as early as 1956, although that didn’t work out. For a while, Williams continued in the Platters, while they looked for a replacement, but his solo career didn’t go wonderfully at first. He wasn’t helped by all four of the male Platters being arrested, allegedly as customers of sex workers, but in fact because they were sharing their hotel room with white women. All charges against everyone involved were later dropped, but this meant that it probably wasn’t the best time for Williams to be starting a solo career. But by 1961, Williams had managed to extricate himself from the Platters, and had been replaced by a young singer called Sonny Turner, who could sound a little like Williams. The record company were so convinced that Williams was the important one in the Platters, though, that on many of their recordings for the next year or two Mercury would take completed recordings by the new Platters lineup and overdub new lead vocals from Williams. But one at a time the band members left, following Williams. And as each member left, they sold their shares in Five Platters Inc. to Buck Ram or to one of Ram’s companies. By 1969 Herb Reed was the only member of the classic lineup still in the group, and then he left the group too, and Buck Ram and his companies continued putting out groups with no original members as the Platters. Now, this doesn’t mean that the real members stopped touring as the Platters. After David Lynch left in 1967, for example, he formed a group called “The Original Platters”, and got both Zola Taylor and Paul Robi into the group. Tony Williams, Herb Reed, and Sonny Turner all also formed their own groups which toured under the Platters name, competing with the “official” Buck Ram Platters. There followed forty years of litigation between Ram’s companies and various Platters members. And the judgements went both ways, to the point that I can’t make accurate judgements from the case documents I’ve been able to find online. As best as I can understand it, there was a court ruling back in 1974 that the whole purpose of Five Platters Inc. had been to illegally deprive the band members of their ownership in the band name, that it was a sham corporation, and that Buck Ram had illegally benefited from an unfair bargaining position. Shortly after that, it was ruled that FPI’s trademark in the Platters name was void. But then there were other cases which went the other way, and Five Platters Inc. insisted that the band members had mostly left because they were alcoholics who didn’t want to tour any more, and that they’d given up their rights to the band name of their own free will. Meanwhile, over a hundred fake Platters groups with no original members went out on the road at various points. There have been almost as many fake Platters as there have fake Ink Spots. The band name issues were finally resolved in 2011. By that point Buck Ram was long dead, as were all the members of the classic Platters lineup except Herb Reed. A judge finally ruled that Herb Reed had the rights to the name, and that Five Platters Inc. had never owned the name. Just before that ruling, Five Platters Inc., which was now run by Jean Bennett, announced that they were going to retire the name. Herb Reed died in 2012, shortly afterwards, though the company he licensed the name to still licenses a band to tour as the Platters. Gaynel Hodge, however, is still alive, the last surviving member of the original Platters, and he still performs with his own Platters group, performing songs the Platters recorded after he left. His website hasn’t been updated since 2005, but at the time its most recent newsflash was that he had co-written this song with Dr. John for Shemekia Copeland: [Excerpt: Shemekia Copeland, “Too Close”] Gaynel Hodge was a major figure in the California music industry. He’ll be turning up in all sorts of odd places in future episodes, as he was involved in a lot of very important records. And we’ll definitely be seeing more of both Richard Berry and Cornell Gunter later as well. And meanwhile, somewhere out there are multiple groups of people who’ve never met anyone who sang on “Only You”, singing that song right now and calling themselves the Platters.

Welcome to episode thirty-one of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This one looks at "Only You" by the Platters. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. This episode ties into several others, but in particular you might want to relisten to the episode on Earth Angel, which features several of the same cast of characters. There are no books on the Platters, as far as I know, so as I so often do when talking about vocal groups I relied heavily on Marv Goldberg's website. For details of Buck Ram's life, I relied on The Magic Touch of Buck Ram: Songwriter, a self-published book credited to J. Patrick Carr but copyrighted in the name of Gayle Schreiber. Schreiber worked for Buck Ram for many years, and both she and Carr have put out multiple books with similar writing styles and layouts which heap fulsome praise both on Ram and on his assistant Jean Bennett. Those books are low on text and high on pictures from Bennett's personal collection, and they give a version of the story which is very slanted, but they also contain details not available elsewhere. This long YouTube interview with Gaynel Hodge was interesting in giving Hodge's side of the story. Some of the court case documents I read through to try to understand the legal ownership of the Platters name: Paul Robi and Tony Williams vs Five Platters Inc Martha Robi v. Five Platters Inc, Jean Bennett, and Buck Ram Martha Robi v. Herb Reed Herb Reed Enterprises v. Jean Bennett, Five Platters, Inc. and Personality Productions, Inc.   There are many cheap compilations of the Platters' hits. There are also many cheap compilations of rerecorded versions of the Platters' hits sung by people who weren't in the Platters. This is one of the former.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript The story of the Platters is intimately tied up with another story we've already talked about -- that of the Penguins and "Earth Angel". You might want to relisten to that episode -- or listen to it for the first time, if you're coming to this podcast for the first time -- before listening to this one, as this tells a lot of the same story from an alternative perspective. But in both cases Buck Ram ends up being the villain. As I mentioned in that episode, there was a lot of movement between different vocal groups, and the Platters were very far from an exception. It's hard to talk about how they formed in the way I normally would, where you talk about these three people meeting up and then getting a friend to join them, and their personalities, and so on, because none of the five people who sang on their biggest hits were among the six people who formed the original group they came from. The Platters started out as The Flamingos -- this isn't the same group as the more well-known Flamingos, but a different group, whose lineup was Cornell Gunter, Gaynel Hodge (who was also in the Hollywood Flames at the same time), Gaynel's brother Alex Hodge, Joe Jefferson, Richard Berry, and Curtis Williams. But very quickly, the Flamingos started to lose members to other, more popular, groups. The first to leave was Curtis Williams, who went on to join the Hollywood Flames, and from there joined the Penguins. Richard Berry, meanwhile formed a band called the Hollywood Bluejays and got Cornell Gunter into the group. They recorded one single for John Dolphin's record label, before renaming themselves the Flairs and moving over to Flare records: [Excerpt: "She Wants to Rock", the Flairs] Cornel Gunter would later go on to join the Coasters, and we've already heard some of what Richard Berry would do later on in the episode on "The Wallflower". So the Flamingos had produced some great talents, but those talents' departure left some gaping holes in the lineup. Eventually, the Flamingos settled into a new lineup, consisting of Gaynel Hodge, Alex Hodge, David Lynch (not the same one as the film director), and Herb Reed. That lineup was not very good, though, and they didn't have a single singer who was strong enough to sing lead. Even so, the demand for vocal groups at the time was so great that they got signed by Ralph Bass, who was currently working for Federal Records, producing among other artists a singer called Linda Hayes. We've heard quite a bit about Linda Hayes in this series already, though you might not recognise the name. She was one of the people who had tried to cash in on Johnny Ace's death with a tribute record, "Why Johnny Why", and she was also the one who had replaced Eunice in Gene and Eunice when she went on maternity leave. We find her popping up all over the place when there was a bandwagon to jump on, and at the time we're talking about she'd just had an actual hit because of doing this. Willie Mabon had just had a hit with "I Don't Know": [Excerpt: Willie Mabon, "I Don't Know"] That had reached number one on the R&B chart and had spawned a country cover version by Tennessee Ernie Ford. And so Hayes had put out an answer record, "Yes, I Know (What You're Putting Down)": [Excerpt: Linda Hayes, "Yes, I Know (What You're Putting Down)"] Hayes' answer went to number two on the R&B charts, and she was suddenly someone it was worth paying attention to. As it turned out, she would only have one other hit, in 1954. But she introduced Ralph Bass to her brother, Tony Williams, who wanted to be a singer himself. Williams joined the Flamingos as their lead singer, and their first recording was as the vocal chorus on "Nervous Man Nervous" by Big Jay McNeely, one of the all-time great saxophone honkers, who had previously played with Johnny Otis' band: [Excerpt: Big Jay McNeely, "Nervous Man Nervous"] Shortly after that, the Flamingos were due to have their own first recording session, when a problem hit. There were only so many names of birds that groups could use, and so it wasn't surprising that someone else was using the name "the Flamingos", and that group got a hit record out. So they decided that since records were often called "platters" by disc jockeys, they might as well call themselves that. The Platters' first single did absolutely nothing: [excerpt: The Platters: "Hey Now"] They put out a few more recordings, but nothing clicked, and nobody, Ralph Bass included, thought they were any good. Gaynel Hodge finally got sick of splitting his time between groups, and left the group, to continue with the Hollywood Flames. The group seemed like they might be on the way out, and so Tony Williams went to his sister's manager, Buck Ram, and asked him if he'd be Williams' manager as a solo singer. Ram listened to him, and said he was interested, but Williams should get himself a group to sing with. Williams said that, well, he did already have a group. Ram talked to Ralph Bass and took the Platters on as a project for himself. Ram is unusual among the managers of this time, in that he was actually a musician and songwriter of some ability himself. He had obtained a law degree, mostly to please his parents, but Ram was primarily a songwriter. Long before he went into music management Ram was writing songs, and was getting them performed by musicians that you have heard of. And he seems to have been part of the music scene in New York in the late thirties and early forties in a big way, having met Duke Ellington in a music arranging class both were taking, and having been introduced by Ellington to people like Chick Webb, Cab Calloway, and Ellington's publishers, Mills Music. Ram's first big success as a songwriter was "I'll Be Home For Christmas", which had been a hit for Bing Crosby and would later become a standard: [Excerpt: Bing Crosby, "I'll Be Home For Christmas"] The story of "I'll Be Home For Christmas" was a rather controversial one -- Ram had written, on his own, a song called "I'll Be Home For Christmas (Tho Just In Memory)", and had registered the copyright in December 1942, but hadn't had it recorded by anyone. A few months later, he talked to his acquaintances Walter Kent and Kim Gannon about it, and was shocked when Crosby released a single written by them which bore a strong resemblance to Ram's song. His publishers, Mills Music, sued and got Ram credited on future releases. Buck Ram would end up fighting a lot of lawsuits, with a lot of people. But while that biggest credit was the result of a lawsuit, Ram was also, as far as I can tell, an actual songwriter of great ability. Where other managers got themselves credited on songs that they didn't write and in some cases had never heard, to the best of my knowledge there has never been any suggestion that Buck Ram wasn't the sole author of the Platters songs he's credited for. I'm so used to this working the other way, with managers taking credit for work they didn't do, that I still find it difficult to state for certain that there wasn't *some* sort of scam going on, but Ram had songwriting credits long before getting into the business side of things. Here, for example, is a song he wrote with Chick Webb, sung by Ella Fitzgerald: [Excerpt: "Chew Chew Chew Your Bubblegum", Chick Webb and Ella Fitzgerald] He spent several years working as a songwriter and arranger in New York, but made the mistake of moving West in order to get into the film music business, only to find that he couldn't break into the market and had to move into management instead. But making music, rather than managing it, was his first love, and he saw the Platters as a means to that end -- raw material he could mould in his own image. Ram signed the Platters, now a four-piece consisting of Williams, Alex Hodge, David Lynch, and Herb Reed, to a seven-year contract, and started trying to mould them into a hit act. The first single they released after signing with Ram was one which, rather oddly, featured Herb Reed on lead vocals on both sides, rather than their normal lead Tony Williams: [Excerpt: The Platters, "Roses of Picardy"] They still had the problem, though, that they simply weren't very good at singing. At the time, they didn't know how to sing in harmony -- they'd just take turns singing lead, and often not be able to sing in the same key as each other. This didn't have much success, but Ram had an idea. In the forties, he'd managed and written for a group called the Quin-Tones. There were several groups of that name over the years, but this one had been a white vocal group with four men and one woman. They weren't very successful, but here's one of their few surviving recordings, "Midnight Jamboree", written and arranged by Ram: [Excerpt: the Quin-Tones, "Midnight Jamboree"] Working with the Quin-Tones had given Ram a taste for the particular vocal blend that comes from having four men and one woman. This had been a popular group style in the 1940s, thanks to the influence of the Modernaires -- the vocal group who sang with the Glenn Miller Orchestra -- but had largely fallen out of favour in the 50s. Ram decided to reform the Platters along these lines. The woman he chose to bring into the group was a singer Gaynel Hodge knew called Zola Taylor. Taylor had been recording as a solo artist, with little success, but she had a good sound on her recordings for RPM Records: [Excerpt: Zola Taylor, "Oh! My Dear"] With Zola in the group, Ram's ideal vocal sound was almost complete. But they hadn't quite got themselves together -- after all, there was still an original member left! But Alex Hodge wouldn't last long, as he was arrested for marijuana possession, and he was replaced by Paul Robi. Gaynel Hodge now claims that this wasn't the real reason that Alex Hodge was sacked – he says that Ram and Herb Reed conspired to get rid of Alex, who in Gaynel's telling had been the original founder of the group, because he knew too much about the music business and was getting suspicious that Ram was ripping him off. Either way, the last original member was now gone, and the Platters were Tony Williams, Zola Taylor, Herb Reed, Paul Robi, and David Lynch. This would now be the lineup that would stay together for the rest of the 1950s and beyond. Before that change though, the Platters had recorded a song that had sounded so bad that Ram had persuaded the label not to release it. "Only You" was a song that Ram had written with the intention of passing it on to the Ink Spots, but for whatever reason he had never got round to it, though he'd written for the Ink Spots before -- they'd released his "I'll Lose a Friend Tomorrow" in 1946: [Excerpt: The Ink Spots: "I'll Lose A Friend Tomorrow"] He later said that he'd decided against giving "Only You" to the Ink Spots because they'd split up before he had a chance. That's not accurate -- the Ink Spots were still around when the earliest recordings of the song by the Platters were made. More likely, he just didn't like the song. After he wrote it, he stuck the sheet music in a box, where it languished until Jean Bennett, his assistant, was moving things around and the box fell apart. Bennett looked at the song, and said she thought it looked interesting. Ram said it was rubbish, but Bennett put the sheet music on top of Ram's piano. When Tony Williams saw it, he insisted on recording it. But that initial recording seemed to confirm Ram's assessment that the song was terrible: [Excerpt: The Platters, "Only You" (original version), including the incredibly bad ending chord] During this period the band were also recording tracks backing Linda Hayes, and indeed there was also a brother-sister duet credited to Linda Hayes and Tony Williams (of the Platters): [Excerpt, Linda Hayes and Tony Williams, "Oochi Pachi"] And again, Hayes was trying to jump on the bandwagons, recording an "Annie" song with the Platters on backing vocals, in the hope of getting some of the money that was going to Hank Ballard and Etta James: [Excerpt: Linda Hayes and the Platters, "My Name Ain't Annie"] But none of those records sold at all, and despite Ram's best efforts it looked like the Platters were simply not going to be having any recording success any time soon. Federal dropped them, as it looked likely they were going to do nothing. But then, the group got very lucky. Buck Ram became the manager of the Penguins, another group that had formed out of the primal soup of singers around LA. The Penguins had just had what turned out to be their only big hit, with "Earth Angel", and Mercury Records were eager to sign them. Ram agreed to the deal, but only on the condition that Mercury signed the Platters as well. Once they were signed, Ram largely gave up on the Penguins, who never had any further success. They'd served his purpose, and got the group he really cared about signed to a major label. There was a six-month break between the last session the Platters did for Federal and the first they did for Mercury. During that time, there was only one session -- as backing vocalists for Joe Houston: [Excerpt: Joe Houston, "Shtiggy Boom"] But they spent that six months practising, and when they got into the studio to record for Mercury, they suddenly sounded *good*: [Excerpt: The Platters, "Only You"] Everything had fallen into place. They were now a slick, professional group. They'd even got good enough that they could incorporate mistakes when they worked -- on an early take, Williams' voice cracked on the word "only", and he apologised to Ram, who said, "no, it sounded good, use it". And "Only You" became one of those songs that defines an era. More than any of the doo-wop songs we've covered previously, it's the epitome of 1950s smooth balladry. It was a massive hit -- it spent thirty weeks on the R&B charts, seven of them at number one, and twenty-two weeks on the pop charts, peaking at number five. Federal rush-released the awful original recording to cash in, and Ram and Mercury took them to court, which eventually ruled in favour of Federal being allowed to put out their version, but the judge also said that that decision might well turn out to be more harmful to Federal than to Mercury. The Federal version didn't chart. The follow-up to “Only You”, also by Ram, was even bigger: [Excerpt: The Platters, "The Great Pretender"] And this started a whole string of hits -- "The Magic Touch", "Twilight Time", "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes"... most of these weren't quite as long-lasting as their first two massive hits, but they were regulars at the top of the pop charts. The Platters were, in many ways, the 1950s equivalent to the Ink Spots, and while they started off marketed as a rock and roll group, they soon transitioned into the more lucrative adult market, recording albums of standards. But having emulated the Ink Spots in their biggest hits, the Platters also, sadly, emulated the Ink Spots in the way they fell apart. Unfortunately, the only book I've been able to find that talks about the Platters in any depth is written by someone working for Buck Ram's organisation, and so it has a very particular biased take on the legal disputes that followed for the next sixty years. I've tried to counter this by at least skimming some of the court documents that are available online, but it's not really possible to get an accurate sense, either from court filings from 2011 or the mid-eighties, or from a self-published and self-defensive book from 2015, what actually happened between the five Platters, Ram, and Ram's assistant Jean Bennett back in the late 1950s. What everyone seems to agree on, though, is that soon after the Platters were signed to Mercury, a corporation was set up, "Five Platters Inc", which was controlled by Buck Ram and had all the members of the Platters as shareholders. The Platters, at the time, assigned any rights they had to the band's name to this corporation. But then, in 1959, Tony Williams, who had always wanted a solo career, decided he wanted to pursue one more vigorously. He was going to leave the group, and he put out a solo album: [Excerpt: Tony Williams, "Charmaine"] Indeed, it seems to have been Buck Ram's plan from the very start to get Williams to be a solo artist, while keeping the Platters as a hit group -- he tried to find a replacement for Williams as early as 1956, although that didn't work out. For a while, Williams continued in the Platters, while they looked for a replacement, but his solo career didn't go wonderfully at first. He wasn't helped by all four of the male Platters being arrested, allegedly as customers of sex workers, but in fact because they were sharing their hotel room with white women. All charges against everyone involved were later dropped, but this meant that it probably wasn't the best time for Williams to be starting a solo career. But by 1961, Williams had managed to extricate himself from the Platters, and had been replaced by a young singer called Sonny Turner, who could sound a little like Williams. The record company were so convinced that Williams was the important one in the Platters, though, that on many of their recordings for the next year or two Mercury would take completed recordings by the new Platters lineup and overdub new lead vocals from Williams. But one at a time the band members left, following Williams. And as each member left, they sold their shares in Five Platters Inc. to Buck Ram or to one of Ram's companies. By 1969 Herb Reed was the only member of the classic lineup still in the group, and then he left the group too, and Buck Ram and his companies continued putting out groups with no original members as the Platters. Now, this doesn't mean that the real members stopped touring as the Platters. After David Lynch left in 1967, for example, he formed a group called "The Original Platters", and got both Zola Taylor and Paul Robi into the group. Tony Williams, Herb Reed, and Sonny Turner all also formed their own groups which toured under the Platters name, competing with the "official" Buck Ram Platters. There followed forty years of litigation between Ram's companies and various Platters members. And the judgements went both ways, to the point that I can't make accurate judgements from the case documents I've been able to find online. As best as I can understand it, there was a court ruling back in 1974 that the whole purpose of Five Platters Inc. had been to illegally deprive the band members of their ownership in the band name, that it was a sham corporation, and that Buck Ram had illegally benefited from an unfair bargaining position. Shortly after that, it was ruled that FPI's trademark in the Platters name was void. But then there were other cases which went the other way, and Five Platters Inc. insisted that the band members had mostly left because they were alcoholics who didn't want to tour any more, and that they'd given up their rights to the band name of their own free will. Meanwhile, over a hundred fake Platters groups with no original members went out on the road at various points. There have been almost as many fake Platters as there have fake Ink Spots. The band name issues were finally resolved in 2011. By that point Buck Ram was long dead, as were all the members of the classic Platters lineup except Herb Reed. A judge finally ruled that Herb Reed had the rights to the name, and that Five Platters Inc. had never owned the name. Just before that ruling, Five Platters Inc., which was now run by Jean Bennett, announced that they were going to retire the name. Herb Reed died in 2012, shortly afterwards, though the company he licensed the name to still licenses a band to tour as the Platters. Gaynel Hodge, however, is still alive, the last surviving member of the original Platters, and he still performs with his own Platters group, performing songs the Platters recorded after he left. His website hasn't been updated since 2005, but at the time its most recent newsflash was that he had co-written this song with Dr. John for Shemekia Copeland: [Excerpt: Shemekia Copeland, "Too Close"] Gaynel Hodge was a major figure in the California music industry. He'll be turning up in all sorts of odd places in future episodes, as he was involved in a lot of very important records. And we'll definitely be seeing more of both Richard Berry and Cornell Gunter later as well. And meanwhile, somewhere out there are multiple groups of people who've never met anyone who sang on "Only You", singing that song right now and calling themselves the Platters.

 NFL Week 15 review and Week 16 preview! Injury news, Free Agent Advice, and Game Previews!Big News for 2016 season: BFD Partners with ScoutFantasy.com! Join Scout Fantasy Premium for all our exclusive content for only $12 and Use Code: BFD16 for 3 free months & $12 in game credits by clicking link below:https://secure.scout.com/a.z?s=532&p=12Fantasy Football News, Advice & Strategy! BfdFantasyFootball.com Lead Editor, Joe Jefferson, hosts the free show with co-host BFD Writer, Dave Terpoilli. Joe and Dave will analyze NFL player news for the fantasy football implications and advise on strategy to help you win your league! Visit the site (bfdfantasyfootball.com) and join now for free newsletter or become a member to get all our unique content and get advice from proven WINNERS! Joe and Dave are both considered to be some of the best fantasy football minds on the planet as they actually play in some of the most competitive leagues in the world! Why take advice from a guy who only plays in his office league?! Who advises you?

 NFL Week 15 review and Week 16 preview! Injury news, Free Agent Advice, and Game Previews!Big News for 2016 season: BFD Partners with ScoutFantasy.com! Join Scout Fantasy Premium for all our exclusive content for only $12 and Use Code: BFD16 for 3 free months & $12 in game credits by clicking link below:https://secure.scout.com/a.z?s=532&p=12Fantasy Football News, Advice & Strategy! BfdFantasyFootball.com Lead Editor, Joe Jefferson, hosts the free show with co-host BFD Writer, Dave Terpoilli. Joe and Dave will analyze NFL player news for the fantasy football implications and advise on strategy to help you win your league! Visit the site (bfdfantasyfootball.com) and join now for free newsletter or become a member to get all our unique content and get advice from proven WINNERS! Joe and Dave are both considered to be some of the best fantasy football minds on the planet as they actually play in some of the most competitive leagues in the world! Why take advice from a guy who only plays in his office league?! Who advises you?

 NFL Week 13 review and Week 14 preview! Injury news, Free Agent Advice, and Game Previews!Big News for 2016 season: BFD Partners with ScoutFantasy.com! Join Scout Fantasy Premium for all our exclusive content for only $12 and Use Code: BFD16 for 3 free months & $12 in game credits by clicking link below:https://secure.scout.com/a.z?s=532&p=12Fantasy Football News, Advice & Strategy! BfdFantasyFootball.com Lead Editor, Joe Jefferson, hosts the free show with co-host BFD Writer, Dave Terpoilli. Joe and Dave will analyze NFL player news for the fantasy football implications and advise on strategy to help you win your league! Visit the site (bfdfantasyfootball.com) and join now for free newsletter or become a member to get all our unique content and get advice from proven WINNERS! Joe and Dave are both considered to be some of the best fantasy football minds on the planet as they actually play in some of the most competitive leagues in the world! Why take advice from a guy who only plays in his office league?! Who advises you?

 NFL Week 13 review and Week 14 preview! Injury news, Free Agent Advice, and Game Previews!Big News for 2016 season: BFD Partners with ScoutFantasy.com! Join Scout Fantasy Premium for all our exclusive content for only $12 and Use Code: BFD16 for 3 free months & $12 in game credits by clicking link below:https://secure.scout.com/a.z?s=532&p=12Fantasy Football News, Advice & Strategy! BfdFantasyFootball.com Lead Editor, Joe Jefferson, hosts the free show with co-host BFD Writer, Dave Terpoilli. Joe and Dave will analyze NFL player news for the fantasy football implications and advise on strategy to help you win your league! Visit the site (bfdfantasyfootball.com) and join now for free newsletter or become a member to get all our unique content and get advice from proven WINNERS! Joe and Dave are both considered to be some of the best fantasy football minds on the planet as they actually play in some of the most competitive leagues in the world! Why take advice from a guy who only plays in his office league?! Who advises you?

 NFL Week 10 review and Week 11 preview! Injury news, Free Agent Advice, and Game Previews!Big News for 2016 season: BFD Partners with ScoutFantasy.com! Join Scout Fantasy Premium for all our exclusive content for only $12 and Use Code: BFD16 for 3 free months & $12 in game credits by clicking link below:https://secure.scout.com/a.z?s=532&p=12Fantasy Football News, Advice & Strategy! BfdFantasyFootball.com Lead Editor, Joe Jefferson, hosts the free show with co-host BFD Writer, Dave Terpoilli. Joe and Dave will analyze NFL player news for the fantasy football implications and advise on strategy to help you win your league! Visit the site (bfdfantasyfootball.com) and join now for free newsletter or become a member to get all our unique content and get advice from proven WINNERS! Joe and Dave are both considered to be some of the best fantasy football minds on the planet as they actually play in some of the most competitive leagues in the world! Why take advice from a guy who only plays in his office league?! Who advises you?

 NFL Week 10 review and Week 11 preview! Injury news, Free Agent Advice, and Game Previews!Big News for 2016 season: BFD Partners with ScoutFantasy.com! Join Scout Fantasy Premium for all our exclusive content for only $12 and Use Code: BFD16 for 3 free months & $12 in game credits by clicking link below:https://secure.scout.com/a.z?s=532&p=12Fantasy Football News, Advice & Strategy! BfdFantasyFootball.com Lead Editor, Joe Jefferson, hosts the free show with co-host BFD Writer, Dave Terpoilli. Joe and Dave will analyze NFL player news for the fantasy football implications and advise on strategy to help you win your league! Visit the site (bfdfantasyfootball.com) and join now for free newsletter or become a member to get all our unique content and get advice from proven WINNERS! Joe and Dave are both considered to be some of the best fantasy football minds on the planet as they actually play in some of the most competitive leagues in the world! Why take advice from a guy who only plays in his office league?! Who advises you?

 NFL Week 9 review and Week 10 preview! Injury news, Free Agent Advice, and Game Previews!Big News for 2016 season: BFD Partners with ScoutFantasy.com! Join Scout Fantasy Premium for all our exclusive content for only $12 and Use Code: BFD16 for 3 free months & $12 in game credits by clicking link below:https://secure.scout.com/a.z?s=532&p=12Fantasy Football News, Advice & Strategy! BfdFantasyFootball.com Lead Editor, Joe Jefferson, hosts the free show with co-host BFD Writer, Dave Terpoilli. Joe and Dave will analyze NFL player news for the fantasy football implications and advise on strategy to help you win your league! Visit the site (bfdfantasyfootball.com) and join now for free newsletter or become a member to get all our unique content and get advice from proven WINNERS! Joe and Dave are both considered to be some of the best fantasy football minds on the planet as they actually play in some of the most competitive leagues in the world! Why take advice from a guy who only plays in his office league?! Who advises you?

 NFL Week 9 review and Week 10 preview! Injury news, Free Agent Advice, and Game Previews!Big News for 2016 season: BFD Partners with ScoutFantasy.com! Join Scout Fantasy Premium for all our exclusive content for only $12 and Use Code: BFD16 for 3 free months & $12 in game credits by clicking link below:https://secure.scout.com/a.z?s=532&p=12Fantasy Football News, Advice & Strategy! BfdFantasyFootball.com Lead Editor, Joe Jefferson, hosts the free show with co-host BFD Writer, Dave Terpoilli. Joe and Dave will analyze NFL player news for the fantasy football implications and advise on strategy to help you win your league! Visit the site (bfdfantasyfootball.com) and join now for free newsletter or become a member to get all our unique content and get advice from proven WINNERS! Joe and Dave are both considered to be some of the best fantasy football minds on the planet as they actually play in some of the most competitive leagues in the world! Why take advice from a guy who only plays in his office league?! Who advises you?

 NFL Week 8 review and week 9 preview! Injury news, Free Agent Advice, and Game Previews!Big News for 2016 season: BFD Partners with ScoutFantasy.com! Join Scout Fantasy Premium for all our exclusive content for only $12 and Use Code: BFD16 for 3 free months & $12 in game credits by clicking link below:https://secure.scout.com/a.z?s=532&p=12Fantasy Football News, Advice & Strategy! BfdFantasyFootball.com Lead Editor, Joe Jefferson, hosts the free show with co-host BFD Writer, Dave Terpoilli. Joe and Dave will analyze NFL player news for the fantasy football implications and advise on strategy to help you win your league! Visit the site (bfdfantasyfootball.com) and join now for free newsletter or become a member to get all our unique content and get advice from proven WINNERS! Joe and Dave are both considered to be some of the best fantasy football minds on the planet as they actually play in some of the most competitive leagues in the world! Why take advice from a guy who only plays in his office league?! Who advises you?

 NFL Week 8 review and week 9 preview! Injury news, Free Agent Advice, and Game Previews!Big News for 2016 season: BFD Partners with ScoutFantasy.com! Join Scout Fantasy Premium for all our exclusive content for only $12 and Use Code: BFD16 for 3 free months & $12 in game credits by clicking link below:https://secure.scout.com/a.z?s=532&p=12Fantasy Football News, Advice & Strategy! BfdFantasyFootball.com Lead Editor, Joe Jefferson, hosts the free show with co-host BFD Writer, Dave Terpoilli. Joe and Dave will analyze NFL player news for the fantasy football implications and advise on strategy to help you win your league! Visit the site (bfdfantasyfootball.com) and join now for free newsletter or become a member to get all our unique content and get advice from proven WINNERS! Joe and Dave are both considered to be some of the best fantasy football minds on the planet as they actually play in some of the most competitive leagues in the world! Why take advice from a guy who only plays in his office league?! Who advises you?

LORENZO was born in Los Angeles, California, but raised in Havana, Florida, a small town outside of Tallahassee, Florida. As a child, he sang in the churches and was an avid listener of Luther Vandross, Peabo Bryson, Michael Jackson, El Debarge, James Brown and Sam Cooke - just to name a few. In high school, Lorenzo was active and competed in sports, making him one of the top cornerbacks in the state of Florida. In 1990, Lorenzo put out his first album, Let Me Show You. The album was released with Alpha International through CEMA Records. The album's title track reached #64 on the R&B charts, while the album's other single "Tic Tok" reached #41. While in Philadelphia working on his first album, Lorenzo had the privilege of working with great "behind the scene" legends such as Joe Tarsia (legendary recording engineer), Mike Tarsia (son of Joe Tarsia-awesome engineer), Joe Jefferson (he wrote "Sadie", "Brandy", "Mighty Love", "Love Don't Love Nobody"...just to name a few), the late John Whitehead (half of McFadden & Whitehead - he wrote "Backstabbers", "Ain't No Stopping Us Now"), Mike Forte (he signed Lorenzo....produced "Gotta Get You Home With Me Tonight" and "Don't Say No Tonight" by Eugene Wilde...he also produced and co-wrote "Dreaming" by Vanessa Williams), Bruce Weeden 

Bruce Hawes (IN 24 HOURS) My new book: "GROWING UP IN THE SOUND OF PHILADELPHIA" (From The Inside Out) will be released at Amazon.com, Amazon UK, Amazon, Amazon Kindle worldwide. During the course of the next few months, it will be placed in book stores and and made as an affordable (app) to download to your phone or I-pad. In remembrance of the (9-11) event in New York City), Today I share with you a portion of my book that noted this event. Book Excerpt Below: Chapter entitled: (The Right Place, The Right Time) Joe Jefferson and I were instructed by Kenny Gamble to go to CBS Records recording company offices first to pickup the artwork for The Three Degrees first album on the PIR recording label. This would be an incredible day to be remembered. Yes, this would be a very exciting, and a very special day for both of us. Joe Jefferson looked at me, and said, “Brucie baby, we are now going to The Big Apple! Ha,” Joe shrieked to himself. And then he chuckled. When Joe had finished his inner celebration, he said, “This is really great Bruce!” Then Kenny interrupted Joe. He was also laughing pleasantly, and smiling with us. Then he said, “It's a one day trip. You'll go in the morning. And don't forget to pick up your Amtrak tickets from Mary Smoatries. She has them for you now in her office.” We both thanked Kenny and he left our office. “Where is CBS Records, in New York City Joe," I asked? He simply replied, “Don't worry about it Bruce. I have been there before. And I will show you personally where we will have to go.” Suddenly, our thoughts and conversation were interrupted as the phone rang. I answered the office phone. “Hello,” I answered. The voice at the other end of the phone-call shouted out my name and said, “Bruce? Bruce! Let me talk to Joe.” It was Charles Simmons.

Bruce Hawes (IN 24 HOURS) My new book: "GROWING UP IN THE SOUND OF PHILADELPHIA" (From The Inside Out) will be released at Amazon.com, Amazon UK, Amazon, Amazon Kindle worldwide. During the course of the next few months, it will be placed in book stores and and made as an affordable (app) to download to your phone or I-pad. In remembrance of the (9-11) event in New York City), Today I share with you a portion of my book that noted this event. Book Excerpt Below: Chapter entitled: (The Right Place, The Right Time) Joe Jefferson and I were instructed by Kenny Gamble to go to CBS Records recording company offices first to pickup the artwork for The Three Degrees first album on the PIR recording label. This would be an incredible day to be remembered. Yes, this would be a very exciting, and a very special day for both of us. Joe Jefferson looked at me, and said, “Brucie baby, we are now going to The Big Apple! Ha,” Joe shrieked to himself. And then he chuckled. When Joe had finished his inner celebration, he said, “This is really great Bruce!” Then Kenny interrupted Joe. He was also laughing pleasantly, and smiling with us. Then he said, “It's a one day trip. You'll go in the morning. And don't forget to pick up your Amtrak tickets from Mary Smoatries. She has them for you now in her office.” We both thanked Kenny and he left our office. “Where is CBS Records, in New York City Joe," I asked? He simply replied, “Don't worry about it Bruce. I have been there before. And I will show you personally where we will have to go.” Suddenly, our thoughts and conversation were interrupted as the phone rang. I answered the office phone. “Hello,” I answered. The voice at the other end of the phone-call shouted out my name and said, “Bruce? Bruce! Let me talk to Joe.” It was Charles Simmons.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/i-am-indi-entertainment-show--3433195/support.

Bruce Hawes (IN 24 HOURS) My new book: "GROWING UP IN THE SOUND OF PHILADELPHIA" (From The Inside Out) will be released at Amazon.com, Amazon UK, Amazon, Amazon Kindle worldwide. During the course of the next few months, it will be placed in book stores and and made as an affordable (app) to download to your phone or I-pad. In remembrance of the (9-11) event in New York City), Today I share with you a portion of my book that noted this event. Book Excerpt Below: Chapter entitled: (The Right Place, The Right Time) Joe Jefferson and I were instructed by Kenny Gamble to go to CBS Records recording company offices first to pickup the artwork for The Three Degrees first album on the PIR recording label. This would be an incredible day to be remembered. Yes, this would be a very exciting, and a very special day for both of us. Joe Jefferson looked at me, and said, “Brucie baby, we are now going to The Big Apple! Ha,” Joe shrieked to himself. And then he chuckled. When Joe had finished his inner celebration, he said, “This is really great Bruce!” Then Kenny interrupted Joe. He was also laughing pleasantly, and smiling with us. Then he said, “It's a one day trip. You'll go in the morning. And don't forget to pick up your Amtrak tickets from Mary Smoatries. She has them for you now in her office.” We both thanked Kenny and he left our office. “Where is CBS Records, in New York City Joe," I asked? He simply replied, “Don't worry about it Bruce. I have been there before. And I will show you personally where we will have to go.” Suddenly, our thoughts and conversation were interrupted as the phone rang. I answered the office phone. “Hello,” I answered. The voice at the other end of the phone-call shouted out my name and said, “Bruce? Bruce! Let me talk to Joe.” It was Charles Simmons.

Bruce Hawes (IN 24 HOURS) My new book: "GROWING UP IN THE SOUND OF PHILADELPHIA" (From The Inside Out) will be released at Amazon.com, Amazon UK, Amazon, Amazon Kindle worldwide. During the course of the next few months, it will be placed in book stores and and made as an affordable (app) to download to your phone or I-pad. In remembrance of the (9-11) event in New York City), Today I share with you a portion of my book that noted this event. Book Excerpt Below: Chapter entitled: (The Right Place, The Right Time) Joe Jefferson and I were instructed by Kenny Gamble to go to CBS Records recording company offices first to pickup the artwork for The Three Degrees first album on the PIR recording label. This would be an incredible day to be remembered. Yes, this would be a very exciting, and a very special day for both of us. Joe Jefferson looked at me, and said, “Brucie baby, we are now going to The Big Apple! Ha,” Joe shrieked to himself. And then he chuckled. When Joe had finished his inner celebration, he said, “This is really great Bruce!” Then Kenny interrupted Joe. He was also laughing pleasantly, and smiling with us. Then he said, “It's a one day trip. You'll go in the morning. And don't forget to pick up your Amtrak tickets from Mary Smoatries. She has them for you now in her office.” We both thanked Kenny and he left our office. “Where is CBS Records, in New York City Joe," I asked? He simply replied, “Don't worry about it Bruce. I have been there before. And I will show you personally where we will have to go.” Suddenly, our thoughts and conversation were interrupted as the phone rang. I answered the office phone. “Hello,” I answered. The voice at the other end of the phone-call shouted out my name and said, “Bruce? Bruce! Let me talk to Joe.” It was Charles Simmons.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/i-am-indi-entertainment-show--3433195/support.

Your  hosts Eric Balkman and Dave Gerczak discuss Giovanni  Bernard's role at wide receiver and the possibility of a bounce back year for Darren McFadden. Balky takes a firm stance on Ryan Mathews and tells players where he should be drafted in 2013. Plus Balky and Dave are joined by Joe Jefferson from BFDFantasyFootball.com who will talk about the 2013 BFD projections and who stands to gain the most in the Patriots offense this season. The three amigos also answer your e-mails, tweets, calls and more all on The High Stakes Fantasy Football Hour!

SPECIAL GUEST - The new owner of BFDFantasy.com, high stakes veteran Joe Jefferson!  Join Scott Atkins & Michael Trent as they recap the professional circuit of Fantasy Sports.  Scott is VP Marketing of Fultime Fantasy LLC, which conducts contests around the country highlighted by the Fantasy Football World Championship (www.fulltimefantasy.com)  Fulltime Fantasy also owns and operates FFToolbox.com, the nation's largest independent fantasy content site in the country.  Scott is the resident Cardinal Fan representing Planet Red (Louisville) while Mike is the heart of Big Blue Nation (Kentucky).  Stop by and join the chat, "The Crew", some of the best minds in the world of fantasy sports, and let's have a good time!  

You know these names... Don Thompson, Robert Particelli and Mike Krucek are just a FEW of the names in the hunt for the FPC $100 grand. Jeff Schinker, Kimra Schleicher and Chad Schroeder are in the hunt for the $300k at WCOFF. Darren Fecich, KJ Duke and Chad Schroeder are a few of the names near the top at NFFC's chase for $100k. Chad Schroeder and Joe Jefferson lead the way in NFFC's Primetime for $50k. Kelly Schroeder, John Haskell, Dennis Young, Daryl Bommer& Mike Thomas and yes again.. Don Thompson are just a FEW of the names in the hunt for the FFPC $100 grand. Get this.. Mark Pumphrey is in the hunt for ALL 3! #7 wcoff, #7 ffpc and #8 fpc overall! Might we see something special this weekend? We'll break down all the Week 16 action tonight on CHRISTMAS EVE night, and you won't BELIEVE some of the names that have made our START list this week! It's ALL ON THE LINE FELLAS! I LOVE IT!!! MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL!!