American rhythm and blues singer
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48 episodes with LaVern Baker
5 episodes with LaVern Baker
3 episodes with LaVern Baker
4 episodes with LaVern Baker
2 episodes with LaVern Baker
4 episodes with LaVern Baker
2 episodes with LaVern Baker
2 episodes with LaVern Baker
3 episodes with LaVern Baker
Sintonía: "Follow That Arab" - Corduroy "Sweet Nothin´s" - Brenda Lee; "Pink Shoe Laces" - Dodie Stevens; "Lucky Lips" - Ruth Brown; "I´ll Be True" - Faye Adams; "Broken Hearted Melody" - Sarah Vaughan; "Where Will The Dimple Be" - Rosemary Clooney; "I Can See An Angel" - Patsy Cline; "Tennessee Wig Walk" - Bonnie Lou; "Dreamboat" - Alma Cogan; "Kiss Me, Honey Honey, Kiss Me" - Shirley Bassey; "Memories Are Made Of This" - Gale Storm; "Walkin´ After Midnight" - Patsy Cline; "I Wanna Be Loved By You" - Marilyn Monroe; "This Ole House" - Rosemary Clooney; "Jim Dandy" - LaVern Baker; "Love and Marriage" - Dinah Shore; "You Always Hurt The One You Love" - Connie FrancisTodas las músicas extraídas de la recopilación (3xCD) "Fifties Girls: 75 Original Recordings on 3CDs" (Not Now Music, 2014)Escuchar audio
Selección musical de Charlie Fáber, director de Sateli3.1.- "Night and Day" - Francis Faye 2.- "He Cha Cha´d In" - Kay Starr 3.- "It´s So Fine" - Lavern Baker 4.- "Anything Can Happen-Mambo" - Dolores Hawkins 5.- "Cozy and Bossa" - Cozy Cole 6.- "Rhythm 56" - Les Cha-Cha Boys 7.- "Mambo borracho" - Tito Alberti y su típica Orquesta 8.- "Chaquito" - Chaquito and His Orchestra 9.- "Perdido mambo" - Larry Ligett10.- "They Were Doing The Mambo" - Les Brown & His Band Of Renown11.- "Mambo Boogie" - The Johnny Otis Orchestra12.- "Mississippi Mambo (Over The Rainbow)" - Nono Morales & His Orchestra13.- "La suppa del pichon" - Los Merecumbes14.- "Mambo en sax" - Eddie Warner15.- "Dos arbolitos" - Teddy Stauffer16.- "Mambo gitano" - Sylvain DavidBonus: "Bikini" - The BikinisEscuchar audio
Llegó la hora de dar un repasito a titanes y titanas del blues saltarín y el rhythm and blues como Big Joe Turner, Nappy Brown, Lavern Baker, Ruth Brown, Louis Jordan, Roy Milton, Wynonie Harris... A partir de las ocho de la mañana del sábado en la sintonía de Radio 3.Escuchar audio
Sintonía: "You Can´t Sit Down" Pt. 1" - Philip Upchurch Combo"Have Love Will Travel" - Richard Berry; "I´m A Little Mixed Up" - Betty James; "Love Me Right" - LaVern Baker; "He Knows The Rules" - Jimmy McCracklin; "Thanks Mr. Postman" - Bobby King; "To Be Loved By You" - Marie Knight; "Let Me Be Your Boy" - Wilson Pickett; "Messin´ With The Man" - Muddy Waters; "Fortune Teller" - Benny Spellman; "A Help-Each-Other Romance" - LaVern Baker & Ben E King; "If You Don´t Come (You Better Call)" - Patience Valentine; "Blues For Me" - B.B. King; "First Love Baby" - Lena Calhoun; "Chills And Fever" - Ronnie Love; "Leave My Kitten Alone" - Little Willie John; "It´s Easy Child" - Lula Reed & Freddy King; Bonus: "Catch That Teardrop" - The 5 Royales Todas las músicas extraídas de la recopilación "Mod Rhythm & Blues - 36 Original Floorfillers On 2CDs" (2xCD, Not Now Music, 2017)Este programa está dedicado a Álvaro, Laura, Enma y Maia (o Maia y Enma, que tanto monta, monta tanto)Escuchar audio
durée : 00:59:34 - Costume - par : Nathalie Piolé -
Sintonía: "Scorpion" - The Carnations"I´m Gonna Destroy That Boy" - The What Four; "If You Can´t Say Anything Nice" - Gia Mateo; "I Can´t Stay Mad At You" - Skeeter Davis; "I Don´t Want No Mama´s Boy" - Erma Franklin; "Gonna Make Him My Baby" - April Young; "Gee Dad" - Andrea Carroll; "I Wish I Had Known" - Sandra Phillips; "I Just Don´t Understand" - Carmen Cole; "Why Don´t You Do Right?" - Nichelle Nichols; "Don´t Monkey With Me" - The Lollipops; "You´re My Loving Baby" - The Sweet Things; "Stand By Me" - Little Eva; todas las canciones extraídas de la recopilación (1xCD) "Honeybeat : Groovy 60s Girl-Pop" (Real Gone Music/Sony, 2017), compilado por Sheila Burgel y Rob Santos"Night and Day" - Francis Faye; "He Cha Cha´d in" - Kay Starr; "It´s So Fine" - Lavern Baker; "Anything Can Happen-Mambo" - Dolores Hawkins; "My Mama Likes You" - Dolores Gray; "Let´s Mambo" - Betty Reilly; "Christine" - Miss X; "Hollywood Calypso" - Josephine Premice; "Mambo Baby" - Georgia Gibbs; "Hot Tamale Blues" - Ruby Dandridge. Todas las canciones extraídas de la recopilación (1xLP+CD) "Mambo, Cha-Cha-Cha & Calypso Vol. 1: Girls Session!" (Jukebox Music Factory, 2018) compilado por El VidocqEscuchar audio
This week it's a rock-a-beatin' boogie extravaganza. Vintage tracks from the rocking archives of the fifties and sixties, all meant to make you feel good. Hand-picked sizzlers and twenty flight scorchers set alongside some of the more familiar sounds of the Everlys, The Dixie Cups and Shirley & Lee. First, second and third helpings of some of the very best of the day including tributes to Kansas City, Caldonia, Peggu Sue, Jim Dandy and a host of others, all brought to you from the sock hop to the rent party. Tune in for some LaVern Baker, Elvis, Nappy Brown, Wynona Carr and Big Joe Turner. They've all got a place in this week's show here on Sonoma County Community Radio in yet another Deeper Roots barn burner. Hope you can join us and spend two hours leading off with Boston's favorite son, Freddy Cannon. All of this coming your way from the outskirts of the Cherry Street Historic District of downtown Santa Rosa. Will there be reason to celebrate? We're countin' on it.
The charts for the year 1956 were overtaken by Elvis. No question. There were a few others that illuminated the jukebox namely Fats Domino, Webb Pierce, Little Richard, and The Platters. Rock ‘n roll's impact swept the floor with most burying some fairly incredible performances in it's wake. Call it an avalanche. Call it a mudslide. Call it what you like. As I began to assemble a show looking at the top of the charts for the year, I found that starting at the bottom and working my way up was a revelation. Whether it was country, rhythm & blues, rock ‘n roll or pop…there were some delicious also-rans that I could not ignore so chose to ignore the Top 30 and focused today's show on the so-called losers below the waterline of the Top 40. And what a joy it was! We'll hear from some of them including Big Joe Turner, The Dells, LaVern Baker, Clyde McPhatter, Carl Smith and Kitty Wells in today's show. I hope you'll find some time, morning, noon or night, to listen in.
Sintonía: "Bell Bottoms" - Joe Swift´s Internationals"Sweet Lover No More" - Gene McDaniels; "Them Blues" - Billie Poole with Junior Mance Trio; "Summertime" - George Benson Quartet; "Liberation" - Afro Blues Quintet Plus One; "Wild Bird" - The Googie Rene Combo; "Monkey Sho´ Can Talk" - Red Holloway; "Top Of The Pops" - The Dave Davani Four; "Getting Into Something" - TKO; "Humdrum Blues" - Oscar Brown Jr.; "Hide Out" - The Hideaways; "Wild Man On The Loose" - Mose Allison; "Burnin´Coal" - Les McCann; "Do It To Death" - Jackie Ivory; "Jet Set" - Dave Pike; "Love-In" - Charles Lloyd Quartet; "Tres Lobos" - Mark III Trio; "You´re The Boss" - LaVern Baker & Jimmy Ricks; "Jam Up Twist" - Tommy Ridgley; "Sticks & Stones (Pt. 1)" - Gene Ludwig; "Bloodshot" - Hubert Laws; "Sombrero Sam" - Charles Lloyd Quartet; "One Note Samba (Pt.2)" (cortada) - Modern Jazz QuartetTodas las músicas extraídas de las recopilaciones "Yet Mo´Mod Jazz" (Ace/Kent 2000) y "The Return Of Mod Jazz" (2005)Escuchar audio
Clyde Otis nació el 11 de septiembre de 1924. Con motivo de su cien cumpleaños dedicamos nuestro tiempo de radio a picotear en el inabarcable legado de uno de los grandes compositores del siglo XX. Más de 800 canciones registradas a su nombre que han sido interpretadas por muchas de las grandes voces del jazz, el soul o el R&B. Esto es tan solo una pequeña porción de la punta del iceberg de la obra que nos dejó.Playlist;(sintonía) CLYDE OTIS and HIS ORCHESTRA “Jungle drums” (1961)NAT “KING” COLE and THE FOUR KNIGHTS “That’s all there is to that” (1956)ELVIS PRESLEY “Dontcha think it’s time” (1958)THE DIAMONDS “The stroll” (1957)JACK SCOTT “Patsy” (1960)EDDIE RIFF “Ain’t that lovin’ you baby” (1956)THE DEL VIKINS “Flat tire” (1958)THE ELLIS BROTHERS “Sneaky alligator” (1958)LAVERN BAKER “Substitute” (1958)IVORY JOE HUNTER “I just want to love you” (1959)BROOK BENTON “Kiddio” (1960)BROOK BENTON and DINAH WASHINGTON “Baby (You've got what it takes)” (1960)PRISCILLA BOWMAN feat THE SPANIELS “A rockin' good way (to mess around and fall in love)” (1958)ROOSEVELT GRIER “Lover set me free” (1963)SARAH VAUGHAN “Smooth operator” (1959)TIMI YURO “What’s a matter baby (Is it hurtin’ you)” (1962)ARETHA FRANKLIN “A change” (1968)TOM JONES “Endlessly” (1965)CONWAY TWITTY “Looking back” (1963)Escuchar audio
Sintonía: "Sticks & Stones (Part 1)" - Gene Ludwig"Memphis Soul Stew" - King Curtis; "Listen Here" - Eddie Harris; "Burnin´ Coal" - Les McCann; "Compared to What" - Les McCann & Eddie Harris; "Wild Man On The Loose" - Mose Allison; "The Foolkiller" - Mose Allison; "Love-In" y "Sombrero Sam" - The Charles Lloyd Quartet; "Right Now" - Mel Torme; "You´re The Boss" - Lavern Baker & Jimmy Ricks; "Jam Up Twist" - Tommy Ridgley; "Watermelon Man Ska" - Byron Lee & The Ska Kings; "Jet Set" - Dave Pike; "One Note Samba (Part 2)" - The Modern Jazz Quartet with Laurindo Almeida; "When A Man Loves A Woman" - Eddie Harris; "Tres Lobos" - Mark III Trio Todas las músicas extraídas de la recopilación (2xLP/1xCD) "Yet Mo´ Mod Jazz", 4º volumen de la serie (del sello inglés Kent) "Mod Jazz" (Kent Dance, 2000)No te pierdas el repaso exhaustivo que le dimos al 5º y último volumen de la serie, "The Return of Mod Jazz", emitido el 25/06/2024Escuchar audio
Rock & Roll, Reggae, Soul, Funk, new Dance tunes. How does he fit it all into one hour? Listen and find out as Jaf selects tunes from Kito Jempere, Lavern Baker, Lazy Lester, Di Groovy Girls. Melenas, Otis Redding and a whole heap more including the greatest song ever recorded…For more info and tracklisting, visit: https://thefaceradio.com/blues-and-grooves/Tune into new broadcasts of Blues & Grooves, Sundays from 4 - 5 PM EST / 9 - 10 PM GMT.//Dig this show? Please consider supporting The Face Radio: http://support.thefaceradio.com Support The Face Radio with PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/thefaceradio. Join the family at https://plus.acast.com/s/thefaceradio. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
737. Get 'frantic' for that wild Aztec Werewolf fella, DJ Del Villarreal and his Tuesday nite radio program "Go Kat, GO! The Rock-A-Billy Show!" Enjoy a big 3 hour blast of killer-diller 50's styled rock n' roll served up with style, grace and fun! Dig the latest waxings from modern rockabilly stars like The Reverend Horton Heat, Dixie Fried, Ricky Rialto & the Green Rats, Stormy Trucks, Brandon Wayne and his Lonesome Drifters, The Carnivals, The Quakes, La Perra Blanco, Zacharia Malachi, Seatbelt, The Supersonics and you'll marvel at the amazing new Yep Roc Records single from Nick Lowe and Los Straitjackets! Balancing the playlist is a generous assortment of vintage rockers from old school heroes Mac Curtis, Don Gibson, Sheb Wooley, Brenda Lee, Benny Joy, Lavern Baker, Art Adams, Link Wray, Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran, Ricky Nelson, Little Richard, Webb Pierce, Faron Young, Jack Scott and even Ronnie Self! This Saturday in New Boston, MI is the 3d annual Tiki Inferno event at the infamous Speedcult compound -we catch up with event organizer Mark Thompson and hear all about Tiki Inferno show in an exclusive LIVE interview! Dig some spicy Mexican-American rockin' songs, sizzling Summertime rock n' roll themes and even a tiki-billy set in honor of Mark's Speedcult show on Saturday. Hot fun for your summer time is packed into each and every episode of DJ Del's "Go Kat, GO!"Please follow on FaceBook, Instagram & Twitter!
729. I got a feelin... that all those kats are boppin the blues, so, it must be goin' round! Be-bop daddies & hot rockin mamas are all invited to tune into DJ Del Villarreal's "Go Kat, GO! The Rock-A-Billy Show!" Emanating from the not-so-secret underground basement lair beneath the world-famous Motorbilly Building, here comes a wild rockin' radio program almost too good to be true! Amaze your ears with a super fine selection of modern day rockers such as The Low Life Drifters, The Ceazars, The Rover Boys Trio, Marcel Bontempi, J.S. & The Lockerbillies, The Sirocco Bros., Dylan Kirk, Ray Black & The Flying Carpets, Seatbelt, Danny Fisher, The Supersonics, The Quakes, The Rock-A-Sonics, The Blue Velvets, Hillbilly Casino, La Perra Blanco, Jack Rabbit Slim, Charley Crockett, The Horton Brothers and even Nashville Luchadores de instrumentales, Los Straitjackets! Eddie Angel and his Los Straitjackets gang are on tour right now, celebrating 30 incredible years of low-fi masked instrumental madness! We aren't going to let you go without a savvy blend of vintage rockers added to the mix! Dig the classic rockin' sounds of Chuck Berry, The Collins Kids, Dale Hawkins, Benny Joy, Johnny Burnette & The Rock 'n' Roll Trio, Gene Vincent and his Blue Caps, The Cochran Brothers, Bill Haley & The Saddlemen, LaVern Baker, Roy Hall, Link Wray, Jack Scott AND... our birthday boy of the night, RnRoll & Rockabilly Hall of Famer, Ricky Nelson! If Rick were still with us, he'd be 84 years old today. Enjoy a far-reaching overview of the the legendary "Teen Idol," Rick Nelson's musical career all throughout tonite's program. Watch out for webs as we spin some silky smooth Spider-Man songs and we'll be honoring Marty Robbins as our Gator Rock Rockin' Kountry Kat of the Week! Believe what you hear: truly the rockin'est sounds abound when the Aztec Werewolf spins 'em! -good to the last bop!™Please follow on FaceBook, Instagram & Twitter!
The Queens of the Blues podcast celebrates the prolific female blues music from the early 1920's to present times. This show, entitled “My Time Will Come” is entirely about LaVern Baker.#lavernbaker
This week's show, after Jack (with Jim) raves Ray Charles: brand new T.S.O.L, Arab Strap, Pernice Brothers (with Neko Case), Michael Head, Torrey, Jane Weaver, and Neil Young, plus LaVern Baker, Nico, Steve Goodman, Jean Richie, Alton Ellis, Bee Gees, ...
It's Black History Month, and we're looking at LaVern Baker, the pioneering R&B singer LaVern Baker. Today's episode is a guest episode from the fabulously named Dead Ladies Show, which celebrates women - both overlooked and iconic, through live history storytelling on stage in Berlin, and beyond. Check out other episodes from The Dead Ladies Show on their website (https://deadladiesshow.com/podcast/) or wherever you get your podcasts. Visit my website (herhalfofhistory.com) for sources, transcripts, and pictures. Support the show on my Patreon page for bonus episodes, polls, and a general feeling of self-satisfaction. Or make a one-time donation on Buy Me a Coffee. Join Into History (intohistory.com/herhalfofhistory/) for a community of ad-free history podcasts plus bonus content. Visit Evergreen Podcasts to listen to more great shows. Follow me on Twitter (X) as @her_half. Or on Facebook or Instagram as Her Half of History. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Where else but the heart of Saturday night? We've got an eclectic collection of performances that take you ‘there and back' this Friday morning on Deeper Roots. No theme. No tribute. No genre sweep. Just a collection of some great sounds from the past (and present). Little themes that reach deep and a few awesome covers that you may not be familiar with. We're making our way to the outskirts of the bayou with Cookie & The Cupcakes and Jo-el Sonnier, then into some gritty blues from Muddy Waters and RL Burnside, and we'll also have some rollicking country and soul from Big Mama Thornton, Buck Owens, Mickey Baker, and Calvin Boze. Add a dose of Billie Holiday, LaVern Baker, and Tow Waits…and there you have it. Some surprises and some favorites all rolled up on this Friday morning blue plate special.
Legendary songwriter Mike Stoller, of the songwriting team Leiber and Stoller, is speaking with us in this episode. Together with Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller wrote a breathtaking number of classics for Elvis Presley, The Coasters, The Drifters, Peggy Lee, LaVern Baker, Ben. E. King, and more, including "Jailhouse Rock," "Hound Dog," "Santa Claus Is Back in Town," "Stand By Me," "Love Potion #9," "Yakety Yak," "Kansas City," "Poison Ivy," "Along Came Jones," "Bossa Nova Baby," and so many more. Although Jerry passed in 2011, Mike continues the duo's legacy and is still actively working. Songfacts Podcast host Stephanie R. Myers spoke with Mike, now 90 years old, to discuss his work on the recently released album Brendan McCreary Sings the Love Songs of Mike Stoller, tell the story behind the fascinating Peggy Lee song "Is That All There Is?" and talk about his new project, working on the musical Beaches. Enjoying the show? Please leave us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts, Goodpods, or Spotify! Connect with us on Facebook and X (Twitter). For the stories behind the songs, go to Songfacts.com. Proud member of Pantheon Podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Legendary songwriter Mike Stoller, of the songwriting team Leiber and Stoller, is speaking with us in this episode. Together with Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller wrote a breathtaking number of classics for Elvis Presley, The Coasters, The Drifters, Peggy Lee, LaVern Baker, Ben. E. King, and more, including "Jailhouse Rock," "Hound Dog," "Santa Claus Is Back in Town," "Stand By Me," "Love Potion #9," "Yakety Yak," "Kansas City," "Poison Ivy," "Along Came Jones," "Bossa Nova Baby," and so many more. Although Jerry passed in 2011, Mike continues the duo's legacy and is still actively working. Songfacts Podcast host Stephanie R. Myers spoke with Mike, now 90 years old, to discuss his work on the recently released album Brendan McCreary Sings the Love Songs of Mike Stoller, tell the story behind the fascinating Peggy Lee song "Is That All There Is?" and talk about his new project, working on the musical Beaches. Enjoying the show? Please leave us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts, Goodpods, or Spotify! Connect with us on Facebook and X (Twitter). For the stories behind the songs, go to Songfacts.com. Proud member of Pantheon Podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
L'épisode de cette semaine se penche sur "Twist and Shout" des Isley Brothers et sur les débuts de la carrière de Bert Berns. Si certains d'entre vous se demande qui c'est…. C'est un songwriter et producteur responsable de titre comme Everybody need somebody, "Piece of My Heart", "Brown Eyed Girl" et "Under the Boardwalk". Et….. Twist and shout bien sur….. The Isley Brothers, "Twist and Shout" The Isley Brothers, "Standing on the DanceFloor" The Isley Brothers, "The Snake" Jerry Butler, "Make it Easy on Yourself" The Five Pearls, "Please Let Me Know" Dave "Baby" Cortez, "The Happy Organ" Ray Peterson, "Corrina, Corrina" The Top Notes, "Hearts of Stone" Ersel Hickey, "Bluebirds Over the Mountain" Bert and Bill Giant, “The Gettysburg Address” Bert Berns, "The Legend of the Alamo" LaVern Baker, "A Little Bird Told Me" Austin Taylor, "Push Push" The Top Notes, "Twist and Shout" The Jarmels, "A Little Bit of Soap" Russell Byrd, "You'd Better Come Home" Russell Byrd, "Nights of Mexico" Solomon Burke, "Just Out of Reach" Solomon Burke, "Cry to Me" The Isley Brothers, "Twist and Shout" The Contours, "Do You Love Me" Jan et Dean, "Linda" The Isley Brothers, "Twistin' With Linda" The Isley Brothers, "Nobody But Me" The Isley Brothers, "Surf and Shout" The Isley Brothers, "Who's That Lady ?" The Isley Brothers, "Testify" Don Covay and the Goodtimers, "Mercy, Mercy" Little Richard, "I Don't Know What You've Got But It's Got Me" Les Beatles, "Twist and Shout"
Dedicamos nuestro tiempo de radio en el día de Navidad a Delores Williams, conocida artísticamente como Lavern Baker. Repasamos la primera década de trayectoria de esta cantante de Chicago, mujer luchadora, diva del rhythm n’ blues y pionera en la transición hacia el rock’n’roll. (sintonía) LAVERN BAKER “I cried a tear” (1958)LITTLE MISS SHARECROPPER “I want to rock” (1951)TODD RHODES ORCHESTRA feat LAVERN BAKER “Lost child” (1952)LAVERN BAKER “Soul on fire” (1953)LAVERN BAKER and THE GLIDERS “Tweedlee Dee” (1954)LAVERN BAKER and THE GLIDERS “That’s all I need” (1955)LAVERN BAKER and THE GLIDERS “Get up get up (you sleepy head)” (1956)LAVERN BAKER and THE GLIDERS “My happiness forever” (1956)LAVERN BAKER and THE GLIDERS “Fee fee fi fo fum” (1956)LAVERN BAKER “I’ll do the same for you” (1956)LAVERN BAKER and THE GLIDERS “Tra la la” (1956)LAVERN BAKER and THE GLIDERS “Jim Dandy” (1956)LAVERN BAKER “Love me right” (1957)LAVERN BAKER “Substitute” (1957)LAVERN BAKER “Learning to love” (1958)LAVERN BAKER “Whipper snapper” (1958)LAVERN BAKER “Why, baby, why?” (1958)LAVERN BAKER “Miracles” (1956)LAVERN BAKER and THE GLIDERS “Tomorrow night” (1954)Escuchar audio
durée : 00:59:21 - Banzzaï du jeudi 21 décembre 2023 - par : Nathalie Piolé - La playlist jazz de Nathalie Piolé.
Cet épisode se penche sur "Stand By Me" de Ben E. King et sur la fin de carrière des Drifters. Ben E King, Stand By Me Frankie Avalon, Two Fools Ben E. King and the Drifters, This Magic Moment Ben E. King and the Drifters, Save the Last Dance For Me Ben E. King et LaVern Baker, How Often Ben E. King, Spanish Harlem Sœur Rosetta Tharpe, Stand By Me The Soul Stirrers, Stand By Me, Father Ben E. King, Don't Play That Song (You Lied) Ben E. King What Is Soul ? The Soul Clan, “Soul Meeting The Embraceables, My Foolish Pride The Drifters, Up On the Roof The Drapers, (I Know) Your Love Has Gone Away The Drifters, On Broadway Rudy Lewis, I've Loved You So Long Jay and the Americans, Only in America The Drifters, Under the Boardwalk The Drifters, Saturday Night at the Movies Ben E. King, Supernatural Thing
durée : 00:59:27 - Banzzaï du lundi 11 décembre 2023 - par : Nathalie Piolé - ☝️ Ce soir, dans Banzzaï, on obéit au doigt et à l'oeil, on fait des pirouettes quand on le demande. Ce soir nous sommes des marionnettes, et ce sont les notes qui nous commandent !
The year was 1953, and excitement buzzed through the air as whispers of a revolutionary new sound known as rock and roll spread like wildfire. The anticipation reached its peak when the lights dimmed, and Bill Haley and his Comets took the stage. As the first notes of "Crazy, Man, Crazy" echoed through the venue, the teenagers were spellbound. The infectious rhythm swept through the crowd, and for the first time, they witnessed a musical rebellion that spoke to their youthful spirits. The thumping beat and Haley's electrifying performance ignited a spark of rebellion and freedom in the hearts of those teenagers.Includes tracks by: Big Joe Turner, The Five Dollars, Big Sandy and the Fly-Rite Trio, LaVern Baker, John Leyton, and much more. Join me on my Patreon page at patreon.com/radioblivion Blow Yer Radio Up, Baby!! If you cannot see the audio controls, your browser does not support the audio element DOWNLOAD | SUBSCRIBE
Episode 170 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Astral Weeks", the early solo career of Van Morrison, and the death of Bert Berns. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a forty-minute bonus episode available, on "Stoned Soul Picnic" by Laura Nyro. 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/ Errata At one point I, ridiculously, misspeak the name of Charles Mingus' classic album. Black Saint and the Sinner Lady is not about dinner ladies. Also, I say Warren Smith Jr is on "Slim Slow Slider" when I meant to say Richard Davis (Smith is credited in some sources, but I only hear acoustic guitar, bass, and soprano sax on the finished track). Resources As usual, I've created Mixcloud playlists, with full versions of all the songs excerpted in this episode. As there are so many Van Morrison songs in this episode, the Mixcloud is split into three parts, one, two, and three. The information about Bert Berns comes from Here Comes the Night: The Dark Soul of Bert Berns and the Dirty Business of Rhythm and Blues by Joel Selvin. I've used several biographies of Van Morrison. Van Morrison: Into the Music by Ritchie Yorke is so sycophantic towards Morrison that the word “hagiography” would be, if anything, an understatement. Van Morrison: No Surrender by Johnny Rogan, on the other hand, is the kind of book that talks in the introduction about how the author has had to avoid discussing certain topics because of legal threats from the subject. Howard deWitt's Van Morrison: Astral Weeks to Stardom is over-thorough in the way some self-published books are, while Clinton Heylin's Can You Feel the Silence? is probably the best single volume on the artist. Information on Woodstock comes from Small Town Talk by Barney Hoskyns. Ryan Walsh's Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968 is about more than Astral Weeks, but does cover Morrison's period in and around Boston in more detail than anything else. The album Astral Weeks is worth hearing in its entirety. Not all of the music on The Authorized Bang Collection is as listenable, but it's the most complete collection available of everything Morrison recorded for Bang. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before we start, a quick warning -- this episode contains discussion of organised crime activity, and of sudden death. It also contains excerpts of songs which hint at attraction to underage girls and discuss terminal illness. If those subjects might upset you, you might want to read the transcript rather than listen to the episode. Anyway, on with the show. Van Morrison could have been the co-writer of "Piece of My Heart". Bert Berns was one of the great collaborators in the music business, and almost every hit he ever had was co-written, and he was always on the lookout for new collaborators, and in 1967 he was once again working with Van Morrison, who he'd worked with a couple of years earlier when Morrison was still the lead singer of Them. Towards the beginning of 1967 he had come up with a chorus, but no verse. He had the hook, "Take another little piece of my heart" -- Berns was writing a lot of songs with "heart" in the title at the time -- and wanted Morrison to come up with a verse to go with it. Van Morrison declined. He wasn't interested in writing pop songs, or in collaborating with other writers, and so Berns turned to one of his regular collaborators, Jerry Ragavoy, and it was Ragavoy who added the verses to one of the biggest successes of Berns' career: [Excerpt: Erma Franklin, "Piece of My Heart"] The story of how Van Morrison came to make the album that's often considered his masterpiece is intimately tied up with the story we've been telling in the background for several episodes now, the story of Atlantic Records' sale to Warners, and the story of Bert Berns' departure from Atlantic. For that reason, some parts of the story I'm about to tell will be familiar to those of you who've been paying close attention to the earlier episodes, but as always I'm going to take you from there to somewhere we've never been before. In 1962, Bert Berns was a moderately successful songwriter, who had written or co-written songs for many artists, especially for artists on Atlantic Records. He'd written songs for Atlantic artists like LaVern Baker, and when Atlantic's top pop producers Leiber and Stoller started to distance themselves from the label in the early sixties, he had moved into production as well, writing and producing Solomon Burke's big hit "Cry to Me": [Excerpt: Solomon Burke, "Cry to Me"] He was the producer and writer or co-writer of most of Burke's hits from that point forward, but at first he was still a freelance producer, and also produced records for Scepter Records, like the Isley Brothers' version of "Twist and Shout", another song he'd co-written, that one with Phil Medley. And as a jobbing songwriter, of course his songs were picked up by other producers, so Leiber and Stoller produced a version of his song "Tell Him" for the Exciters on United Artists: [Excerpt: The Exciters, "Tell Him"] Berns did freelance work for Leiber and Stoller as well as the other people he was working for. For example, when their former protege Phil Spector released his hit version of "Zip-a-Dee-Do-Dah", they got Berns to come up with a knockoff arrangement of "How Much is that Doggie in the Window?", released as by Baby Jane and the Rockabyes, with a production credit "Produced by Leiber and Stoller, directed by Bert Berns": [Excerpt: Baby Jane and the Rockabyes, "How Much is that Doggie in the Window?"] And when Leiber and Stoller stopped producing work for United Artists, Berns took over some of the artists they'd been producing for the label, like Marv Johnson, as well as producing his own new artists, like Garnet Mimms and the Enchanters, who had been discovered by Berns' friend Jerry Ragovoy, with whom he co-wrote their "Cry Baby": [Excerpt: Garnet Mimms and the Enchanters, "Cry Baby"] Berns was an inveterate collaborator. He was one of the few people to get co-writing credits with Leiber and Stoller, and he would collaborate seemingly with everyone who spoke to him for five minutes. He would also routinely reuse material, cutting the same songs time and again with different artists, knowing that a song must be a hit for *someone*. One of his closest collaborators was Jerry Wexler, who also became one of his best friends, even though one of their earliest interactions had been when Wexler had supervised Phil Spector's production of Berns' "Twist and Shout" for the Top Notes, a record that Berns had thought had butchered the song. Berns was, in his deepest bones, a record man. Listening to the records that Berns made, there's a strong continuity in everything he does. There's a love there of simplicity -- almost none of his records have more than three chords. He loved Latin sounds and rhythms -- a love he shared with other people working in Brill Building R&B at the time, like Leiber and Stoller and Spector -- and great voices in emotional distress. There's a reason that the records he produced for Solomon Burke were the first R&B records to be labelled "soul". Berns was one of those people for whom feel and commercial success are inextricable. He was an artist -- the records he made were powerfully expressive -- but he was an artist for whom the biggest validation was *getting a hit*. Only a small proportion of the records he made became hits, but enough did that in the early sixties he was a name that could be spoken of in the same breath as Leiber and Stoller, Spector, and Bacharach and David. And Atlantic needed a record man. The only people producing hits for the label at this point were Leiber and Stoller, and they were in the process of stopping doing freelance work and setting up their own label, Red Bird, as we talked about in the episode on the Shangri-Las. And anyway, they wanted more money than they were getting, and Jerry Wexler was never very keen on producers wanting money that could have gone to the record label. Wexler decided to sign Bert Berns up as a staff producer for Atlantic towards the end of 1963, and by May 1964 it was paying off. Atlantic hadn't been having hits, and now Berns had four tracks he wrote and produced for Atlantic on the Hot One Hundred, of which the highest charting was "My Girl Sloopy" by the Vibrations: [Excerpt: The Vibrations, "My Girl Sloopy"] Even higher on the charts though was the Beatles' version of "Twist and Shout". That record, indeed, had been successful enough in the UK that Berns had already made exploratory trips to the UK and produced records for Dick Rowe at Decca, a partnership we heard about in the episode on "Here Comes the Night". Berns had made partnerships there which would have vast repercussions for the music industry in both countries, and one of them was with the arranger Mike Leander, who was the uncredited arranger for the Drifters session for "Under the Boardwalk", a song written by Artie Resnick and Kenny Young and produced by Berns, recorded the day after the group's lead singer Rudy Lewis died of an overdose: [Excerpt: The Drifters, "Under the Boardwalk"] Berns was making hits on a regular basis by mid-1964, and the income from the label's new success allowed Jerry Wexler and the Ertegun brothers to buy out their other partners -- Ahmet Ertegun's old dentist, who had put up some of the initial money, and Miriam Bienstock, the ex-wife of their initial partner Herb Abramson, who'd got Abramson's share in the company after the divorce, and who was now married to Freddie Bienstock of Hill and Range publishing. Wexler and the Erteguns now owned the whole label. Berns also made regular trips to the UK to keep up his work with British musicians, and in one of those trips, as we heard in the episode on "Here Comes the Night", he produced several tracks for the group Them, including that track, written by Berns: [Excerpt: Them, "Here Comes the Night"] And a song written by the group's lead singer Van Morrison, "Gloria": [Excerpt: Them, "Gloria"] But Berns hadn't done much other work with them, because he had a new project. Part of the reason that Wexler and the Erteguns had gained total control of Atlantic was because, in a move pushed primarily by Wexler, they were looking at selling it. They'd already tried to merge with Leiber and Stoller's Red Bird Records, but lost the opportunity after a disastrous meeting, but they were in negotiations with several other labels, negotiations which would take another couple of years to bear fruit. But they weren't planning on getting out of the record business altogether. Whatever deal they made, they'd remain with Atlantic, but they were also planning on starting another label. Bert Berns had seen how successful Leiber and Stoller were with Red Bird, and wanted something similar. Wexler and the Erteguns didn't want to lose their one hit-maker, so they came up with an offer that would benefit all of them. Berns' publishing contract had just ended, so they would set up a new publishing company, WEB IV, named after the initials Wexler, Ertegun, and Berns, and the fact that there were four of them. Berns would own fifty percent of that, and the other three would own the other half. And they were going to start up a new label, with seventeen thousand dollars of the Atlantic partners' money. That label would be called Bang -- for Bert, Ahmet, Neshui, and Gerald -- and would be a separate company from Atlantic, so not affected by any sale. Berns would continue as a staff producer for Atlantic for now, but he'd have "his own" label, which he'd have a proper share in, and whether he was making hits for Atlantic or Bang, his partners would have a share of the profits. The first two records on Bang were "Shake and Jerk" by Billy Lamont, a track that they licensed from elsewhere and which didn't do much, and a more interesting track co-written by Berns. Bob Feldman, Richard Gottehrer, and Jerry Goldstein were Brill Building songwriters who had become known for writing "My Boyfriend's Back", a hit for the Angels, a couple of years earlier: [Excerpt: The Angels, "My Boyfriend's Back"] With the British invasion, the three of them had decided to create their own foreign beat group. As they couldn't do British accents, they pretended to be Australian, and as the Strangeloves -- named after the Stanley Kubrick film Dr Strangelove -- they released one flop single. They cut another single, a version of "Bo Diddley", but the label they released their initial record through didn't want it. They then took the record to Atlantic, where Jerry Wexler said that they weren't interested in releasing some white men singing "Bo Diddley". But Ahmet Ertegun suggested they bring the track to Bert Berns to see what he thought. Berns pointed out that if they changed the lyrics and melody, but kept the same backing track, they could claim the copyright in the resulting song themselves. He worked with them on a new lyric, inspired by the novel Candy, a satirical pornographic novel co-written by Terry Southern, who had also co-written the screenplay to Dr Strangelove. Berns supervised some guitar overdubs, and the result went to number eleven: [Excerpt: The Strangeloves, "I Want Candy"] Berns had two other songs on the hot one hundred when that charted, too -- Them's version of "Here Comes the Night", and the version of Van McCoy's song "Baby I'm Yours" he'd produced for Barbara Lewis. Three records on the charts on three different labels. But despite the sheer number of charting records he'd had, he'd never had a number one, until the Strangeloves went on tour. Before the tour they'd cut a version of "My Girl Sloopy" for their album -- Berns always liked to reuse material -- and they started performing the song on the tour. The Dave Clark Five, who they were supporting, told them it sounded like a hit and they were going to do their own version when they got home. Feldman, Gottehrer, and Goldstein decided *they* might as well have the hit with it as anyone else. Rather than put it out as a Strangeloves record -- their own record was still rising up the charts, and there's no reason to be your own competition -- they decided to get a group of teenage musicians who supported them on the last date of the tour to sing new vocals to the backing track from the Strangeloves album. The group had been called Rick and the Raiders, but they argued so much that the Strangeloves nicknamed them the Hatfields and the McCoys, and when their version of "My Girl Sloopy", retitled "Hang on Sloopy", came out, it was under the band name The McCoys: [Excerpt: The McCoys, "Hang on Sloopy"] Berns was becoming a major success, and with major success in the New York music industry in the 1960s came Mafia involvement. We've talked a fair bit about Morris Levy's connection with the mob in many previous episodes, but mob influence was utterly pervasive throughout the New York part of the industry, and so for example Richard Gottehrer of the Strangeloves used to call Sonny Franzese of the Colombo crime family "Uncle John", they were so close. Franzese was big in the record business too, even after his conviction for bank robbery. Berns, unlike many of the other people in the industry, had no scruples at all about hanging out with Mafiosi. indeed his best friend in the mid sixties was Tommy Eboli, a member of the Genovese crime family who had been in the mob since the twenties, starting out working for "Lucky" Luciano. Berns was not himself a violent man, as far as anyone can tell, but he liked the glamour of hanging out with organised crime figures, and they liked hanging out with someone who was making so many hit records. And so while Leiber and Stoller, for example, ended up selling Red Bird Records to George Goldner for a single dollar in order to get away from the Mafiosi who were slowly muscling in on the label, Berns had no problems at all in keeping his own label going. Indeed, he would soon be doing so without the involvement of Atlantic Records. Berns' final work for Atlantic was in June 1966, when he cut a song he had co-written with Jeff Barry for the Drifters, inspired by the woman who would soon become Atlantic's biggest star: [Excerpt: The Drifters, "Aretha"] The way Berns told the story in public, there was no real bad blood between him, Wexler, and the Erteguns -- he'd just decided to go his own way, and he said “I will always be grateful to them for the help they've given me in getting Bang started,” The way Berns' wife would later tell the story, Jerry Wexler had suggested that rather than Berns owning fifty percent of Web IV, they should start to split everything four ways, and she had been horrified by this suggestion, kicked up a stink about it, and Wexler had then said that either Berns needed to buy the other three out, or quit and give them everything, and demanded Berns pay them three hundred thousand dollars. According to other people, Berns decided he wanted one hundred percent control of Web IV, and raised a breach of contract lawsuit against Atlantic, over the usual royalty non-payments that were endemic in the industry at that point. When Atlantic decided to fight the lawsuit rather than settle, Berns' mob friends got involved and threatened to break the legs of Wexler's fourteen-year-old daughter, and the mob ended up with full control of Bang records, while Berns had full control of his publishing company. Given later events, and in particular given the way Wexler talked about Berns until the day he died, with a vitriol that he never used about any of the other people he had business disputes with, it seems likely to me that the latter story is closer to the truth than the former. But most people involved weren't talking about the details of what went on, and so Berns still retained his relationships with many of the people in the business, not least of them Jeff Barry, so when Barry and Ellie Greenwich had a new potential star, it was Berns they thought to bring him to, even though the artist was white and Berns had recently given an interview saying that he wanted to work with more Black artists, because white artists simply didn't have soul. Barry and Greenwich's marriage was breaking up at the time, but they were still working together professionally, as we discussed in the episode on "River Deep, Mountain High", and they had been the main production team at Red Bird. But with Red Bird in terminal decline, they turned elsewhere when they found a potential major star after Greenwich was asked to sing backing vocals on one of his songwriting demos. They'd signed the new songwriter, Neil Diamond, to Leiber and Stoller's company Trio Music at first, but they soon started up their own company, Tallyrand Music, and signed Diamond to that, giving Diamond fifty percent of the company and keeping twenty-five percent each for themselves, and placed one of his songs with Jay and the Americans in 1965: [Excerpt: Jay and the Americans, "Sunday and Me"] That record made the top twenty, and had established Diamond as a songwriter, but he was still not a major performer -- he'd released one flop single on Columbia Records before meeting Barry and Greenwich. But they thought he had something, and Bert Berns agreed. Diamond was signed to Bang records, and Berns had a series of pre-production meetings with Barry and Greenwich before they took Diamond into the studio -- Barry and Greenwich were going to produce Diamond for Bang, as they had previously produced tracks for Red Bird, but they were going to shape the records according to Berns' aesthetic. The first single released from Diamond's first session, "Solitary Man", only made number fifty-five, but it was the first thing Diamond had recorded to make the Hot One Hundred at all: [Excerpt: Neil Diamond, "Solitary Man"] The second single, though, was much more Bert Berns' sort of thing -- a three-chord song that sounded like it could have been written by Berns himself, especially after Barry and Greenwich had added the Latin-style horns that Berns loved so much. Indeed according to some sources, Berns did make a songwriting suggestion -- Diamond's song had apparently been called "Money Money", and Berns had thought that was a ridiculous title, and suggested calling it "Cherry Cherry" instead: [Excerpt: Neil Diamond, "Cherry Cherry"] That became Diamond's first top ten hit. While Greenwich had been the one who had discovered Diamond, and Barry and Greenwich were the credited producers on all Diamond's records as a result, Diamond soon found himself collaborating far more with Barry than with Greenwich, so for example the first number one he wrote, for the Monkees rather than himself, ended up having its production just credited to Barry. That record used a backing track recorded in New York by the same set of musicians used on most Bang records, like Al Gorgoni on lead guitar and Russ Savakus on bass: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "I'm a Believer"] Neil Diamond was becoming a solid hit-maker, but he started rubbing up badly against Berns. Berns wanted hits and only hits, and Diamond thought of himself as a serious artist. The crisis came when two songs were under contention for Diamond's next single in late 1967, after he'd had a whole run of hits for the label. The song Diamond wanted to release, "Shilo", was deeply personal to him: [Excerpt: Neil Diamond, "Shilo"] But Bert Berns had other ideas. "Shilo" didn't sound like a hit, and he knew a hit when he heard one. No, the clear next single, the only choice, was "Kentucky Woman": [Excerpt: Neil Diamond, "Kentucky Woman"] But Berns tried to compromise as best he could. Diamond's contract was up for renewal, and you don't want to lose someone who has had, as Diamond had at that point, five top twenty hits in a row, and who was also writing songs like "I'm a Believer" and "Red Red Wine". He told Diamond that he'd let "Shilo" come out as a single if Diamond signed an extension to his contract. Diamond said that not only was he not going to do that, he'd taken legal advice and discovered that there were problems with his contract which let him record for other labels -- the word "exclusive" had been missed out of the text, among other things. He wasn't going to be recording for Bang at all any more. The lawsuits over this would stretch out for a decade, and Diamond would eventually win, but the first few months were very, very difficult for Diamond. When he played the Bitter End, a club in New York, stink bombs were thrown into the audience. The Bitter End's manager was assaulted and severely beaten. Diamond moved his wife and child out of Manhattan, borrowed a gun, and after his last business meeting with Berns was heard talking about how he needed to contact the District Attorney and hire a bodyguard. Of the many threats that were issued against Diamond, though, the least disturbing was probably the threat Berns made to Diamond's career. Berns pointed out to Diamond in no uncertain terms that he didn't need Diamond anyway -- he already had someone he could replace Diamond with, another white male solo singer with a guitar who could churn out guaranteed hits. He had Van Morrison: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Brown-Eyed Girl"] When we left Van Morrison, Them had just split up due to the problems they had been having with their management team. Indeed, the problems Morrison was having with his managers seem curiously similar to the issues that Diamond was having with Bert Berns -- something that could possibly have been a warning sign to everyone involved, if any of them had known the full details of everyone else's situation. Sadly for all of them, none of them did. Them had had some early singles success, notably with the tracks Berns had produced for them, but Morrison's opinion of their second album, Them Again, was less than complimentary, and in general that album is mostly only remembered for the version of Bob Dylan's "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue", which is one of those cover versions that inspires subsequent covers more than the original ever did: [Excerpt: Them, "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue"] Them had toured the US around the time of the release of that album, but that tour had been a disaster. The group had gained a reputation for incredible live shows, including performances at the Whisky A-Go-Go with the Doors and Captain Beefheart as their support acts, but during the tour Van Morrison had decided that Phil Solomon, the group's manager, was getting too much money -- Morrison had agreed to do the tour on a salary, rather than a percentage, but the tour had been more successful than he'd expected, and Solomon was making a great deal of money off the tour, money that Morrison believed rightfully belonged to him. The group started collecting the money directly from promoters, and got into legal trouble with Solomon as a result. The tour ended with the group having ten thousand dollars that Solomon believed -- quite possibly correctly -- that he was owed. Various gangsters whose acquaintance the group had made offered to have the problem taken care of, but they decided instead to come to a legal agreement -- they would keep the money, and in return Solomon, whose production company the group were signed to, would get to keep all future royalties from the Them tracks. This probably seemed a good idea at the time, when the idea of records earning royalties for sixty or more years into the future seemed ridiculous, but Morrison in particular came to regret the decision bitterly. The group played one final gig when they got back to Belfast, but then split up, though a version of the group led by the bass player Alan Henderson continued performing for a few years to no success. Morrison put together a band that played a handful of gigs under the name Them Again, with little success, but he already had his eyes set on a return to the US. In Morrison's eyes, Bert Berns had been the only person in the music industry who had really understood him, and the two worked well together. He had also fallen in love with an American woman, Janet Planet, and wanted to find some way to be with her. As Morrison said later “I had a couple of other offers but I thought this was the best one, seeing as I wanted to come to America anyway. I can't remember the exact details of the deal. It wasn't really that spectacular, money-wise, I don't think. But it was pretty hard to refuse from the point of view that I really respected Bert as a producer. I'd rather have worked with Bert than some other guy with a bigger record company. From that angle, it was spectacular because Bert was somebody that I wanted to work with.” There's little evidence that Morrison did have other offers -- he was already getting a reputation as someone who it was difficult to work with -- but he and Berns had a mutual respect, and on January the ninth, 1967, he signed a contract with Bang records. That contract has come in for a lot of criticism over the years, but it was actually, *by the standards in operation in the music business in 1967*, a reasonably fair one. The contract provided that, for a $2,500 a year advance, Bang would record twelve sides in the first year, with an option for up to fifty more that year, and options for up to four more years on the same terms. Bang had the full ownership of the masters and the right to do what they wanted with them. According to at least one biographer, Morrison added clauses requiring Bang to actually record the twelve sides a year, and to put out at least three singles and one album per year while the contract was in operation. He also added one other clause which seems telling -- "Company agrees that Company will not make any reference to the name THEM on phonograph records, or in advertising copy in connection with the recording of Artist." Morrison was, at first, extremely happy with Berns. The problems started with their first session: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Brown-Eyed Girl (takes 1-6)"] When Morrison had played the songs he was working on for Berns, Berns had remarked that they sounded great with just Morrison and his guitar, so Morrison was surprised when he got into the studio to find the whole standard New York session crew there -- the same group of session players who were playing for everyone from the Monkees to Laura Nyro, from Neil Diamond to the Shangri-Las -- along with the Sweet Inspirations to provide backing vocals. As he described it later "This fellow Bert, he made it the way he wanted to, and I accepted that he was producing it... I'd write a song and bring it into the group and we'd sit there and bash it around and that's all it was -- they weren't playing the songs, they were just playing whatever it was. They'd say 'OK, we got drums so let's put drums on it,' and they weren't thinking about the song, all they were thinking about was putting drums on it... But it was my song, and I had to watch it go down." The first song they cut was "Brown-Eyed Girl", a song which Morrison has said was originally a calypso, and was originally titled "Brown-skinned Girl", though he's differed in interviews as to whether Berns changed the lyric or if he just decided to sing it differently without thinking about it in the session. Berns turned "Brown-Eyed Girl" into a hit single, because that was what he tended to do with songs, and the result sounds a lot like the kind of record that Bang were releasing for Neil Diamond: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Brown-Eyed Girl"] Morrison has, in later years, expressed his distaste for what was done to the song, and in particular he's said that the backing vocal part by the Sweet Inspirations was added by Berns and he disliked it: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Brown-Eyed Girl"] Morrison has been very dismissive of "Brown-Eyed Girl" over the years, but he seems not to have disliked it at the time, and the song itself is one that has stood the test of time, and is often pointed to by other songwriters as a great example of the writer's craft. I remember reading one interview with Randy Newman -- sadly, while I thought it was in Paul Zollo's "Songwriters on Songwriting" I just checked that and it's not, so I can't quote it precisely -- in which he says that he often points to the line "behind the stadium with you" as a perfect piece of writing, because it's such a strangely specific detail that it convinces you that it actually happened, and that means you implicitly believe the rest of the song. Though it should be made very clear here that Morrison has always said, over and over again, that nothing in his songs is based directly on his own experiences, and that they're all products of his imagination and composites of people he's known. This is very important to note before we go any further, because "Brown-Eyed Girl" is one of many songs from this period in Morrison's career which imply that their narrator has an attraction to underage girls -- in this case he remembers "making love in the green grass" in the distant past, while he also says "saw you just the other day, my how you have grown", and that particular combination is not perhaps one that should be dwelt on too closely. But there is of course a very big difference between a songwriter treating a subject as something that is worth thinking about in the course of a song and writing about their own lives, and that can be seen on one of the other songs that Morrison recorded in these sessions, "T.B. Sheets": [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "T.B. Sheets"] It seems very unlikely indeed that Van Morrison actually had a lover die of tuberculosis, as the lover in the song does, and while a lot of people seem convinced that it's autobiographical, simply because of the intensity of the performance (Morrison apparently broke down in tears after recording it), nobody has ever found anyone in Morrison's life who fits the story in the song, and he's always ridiculed such suggestions. What is true though is that "T.B. Sheets" is evidence against another claim that Morrison has made in the past - that on these initial sessions the eight songs recorded were meant to be the A and B sides of four singles and there was no plan of making an album. It is simply not plausible at all to suggest that "T.B. Sheets" -- a slow blues about terminal illness, that lasts nearly ten minutes -- was ever intended as a single. It wouldn't have even come close to fitting on one side of a forty-five. It was also presumably at this time that Berns brought up the topic of "Piece of My Heart". When Berns signed Erma Franklin, it was as a way of getting at Jerry Wexler, who had gone from being his closest friend to someone he wasn't on speaking terms with, by signing the sister of his new signing Aretha. Morrison, of course, didn't co-write it -- he'd already decided that he didn't play well with others -- but it's tempting to think about how the song might have been different had Morrison written it. The song in some ways seems a message to Wexler -- haven't you had enough from me already? -- but it's also notable how many songs Berns was writing with the word "heart" in the chorus, given that Berns knew he was on borrowed time from his own heart condition. As an example, around the same time he and Jerry Ragavoy co-wrote "Piece of My Heart", they also co-wrote another song, "Heart Be Still", a flagrant lift from "Peace Be Still" by Aretha Franklin's old mentor Rev. James Cleveland, which they cut with Lorraine Ellison: [Excerpt: Lorraine Ellison, "Heart Be Still"] Berns' heart condition had got much worse as a result of the stress from splitting with Atlantic, and he had started talking about maybe getting open-heart surgery, though that was still very new and experimental. One wonders how he must have felt listening to Morrison singing about watching someone slowly dying. Morrison has since had nothing but negative things to say about the sessions in March 1967, but at the time he seemed happy. He returned to Belfast almost straight away after the sessions, on the understanding that he'd be back in the US if "Brown-Eyed Girl" was a success. He wrote to Janet Planet in San Francisco telling her to listen to the radio -- she'd know if she heard "Brown-Eyed Girl" that he would be back on his way to see her. She soon did hear the song, and he was soon back in the US: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Brown-Eyed Girl"] By August, "Brown-Eyed Girl" had become a substantial hit, making the top ten, and Morrison was back in the States. He was starting to get less happy with Berns though. Bang had put out the eight tracks he'd recorded in March as an album, titled Blowin' Your Mind, and Morrison thought that the crass pseudo-psychedelia of the title, liner notes, and cover was very inappropriate -- Morrison has never been a heavy user of any drugs other than alcohol, and didn't particularly want to be associated with them. He also seems to have not realised that every track he recorded in those initial sessions would be on the album, which many people have called one of the great one-sided albums of all time -- side A, with "Brown-Eyed Girl", "He Ain't Give You None" and the extended "T.B. Sheets" tends to get far more love than side B, with five much lesser songs on it. Berns held a party for Morrison on a cruise around Manhattan, but it didn't go well -- when the performer Tiny Tim tried to get on board, Carmine "Wassel" DeNoia, a mobster friend of Berns' who was Berns' partner in a studio they'd managed to get from Atlantic as part of the settlement when Berns left, was so offended by Tim's long hair and effeminate voice and mannerisms that he threw him overboard into the harbour. DeNoia was meant to be Morrison's manager in the US, working with Berns, but he and Morrison didn't get on at all -- at one point DeNoia smashed Morrison's acoustic guitar over his head, and only later regretted the damage he'd done to a nice guitar. And Morrison and Berns weren't getting on either. Morrison went back into the studio to record four more songs for a follow-up to "Brown-Eyed Girl", but there was again a misunderstanding. Morrison thought he'd been promised that this time he could do his songs the way he wanted, but Berns was just frustrated that he wasn't coming up with another "Brown-Eyed Girl", but was instead coming up with slow songs about trans women. Berns overdubbed party noises and soul backing vocals onto "Madame George", possibly in an attempt to copy the Beach Boys' Party! album with its similar feel, but it was never going to be a "Barbara Ann": [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Madame George (Bang version)"] In the end, Berns released one of the filler tracks from Blowin' Your Mind, "Ro Ro Rosey", as the next single, and it flopped. On December the twenty-ninth, Berns had a meeting with Neil Diamond, the meeting after which Diamond decided he needed to get a bodyguard. After that, he had a screaming row over the phone with Van Morrison, which made Berns ill with stress. The next day, he died of a heart attack. Berns' widow Ilene, who had only just given birth to a baby a couple of weeks earlier, would always blame Morrison for pushing her husband over the edge. Neither Van Morrison nor Jerry Wexler went to the funeral, but Neil Diamond did -- he went to try to persuade Ilene to let him out of his contract now Berns was dead. According to Janet Planet later, "We were at the hotel when we learned that Bert had died. We were just mortified, because things had been going really badly, and Van felt really bad, because I guess they'd parted having had some big fight or something... Even though he did love Bert, it was a strange relationship that lived and died in the studio... I remember we didn't go to the funeral, which probably was a mistake... I think [Van] had a really bad feeling about what was going to happen." But Morrison has later mostly talked about the more practical concerns that came up, which were largely the same as the ones Neil Diamond had, saying in 1997 "I'd signed a contract with Bert Berns for management, production, agency and record company, publishing, the whole lot -- which was professional suicide as any lawyer will tell you now... Then the whole thing blew up. Bert Berns died and I was left broke." This was the same mistake, essentially, that he'd made with Phil Solomon, and in order to get out of it, it turned out he was going to have to do much the same for a third time. But it was the experience with Berns specifically that traumatised Morrison enough that twenty-five years later he would still be writing songs about it, like "Big Time Operators": [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Big Time Operators"] The option to renew Morrison's contracts with Berns' companies came on the ninth of January 1968, less than two weeks after Berns' death. After his death, Berns' share of ownership in his companies had passed to his widow, who was in a quandary. She had two young children, one of whom was only a few weeks old, and she needed an income after their father had died. She was also not well disposed at all towards Morrison, who she blamed for causing her husband's death. By all accounts the amazing thing is that Berns lived as long as he did given his heart condition and the state of medical science at the time, but it's easy to understand her thinking. She wanted nothing to do with Morrison, and wanted to punish him. On the other hand, her late husband's silent partners didn't want to let their cash cow go. And so Morrison came under a huge amount of pressure in very different directions. From one side, Carmine DiNoia was determined to make more money off Morrison, and Morrison has since talked about signing further contracts at this point with a gun literally to his head, and his hotel room being shot up. But on the other side, Ilene Berns wanted to destroy Morrison's career altogether. She found out that Bert Berns hadn't got Morrison the proper work permits and reported him to the immigration authorities. Morrison came very close to being deported, but in the end he managed to escape deportation by marrying Janet Planet. The newly-married couple moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to get away from New York and the mobsters, and to try to figure out the next steps in Morrison's career. Morrison started putting together a band, which he called The Van Morrison Controversy, and working on new songs. One of his earliest connections in Massachusetts was the lead singer of a band called the Hallucinations, who he met in a bar where he was trying to get a gig: [Excerpt: The Hallucinations, "Messin' With the Kid"] The Hallucinations' lead singer was called Peter Wolf, and would much later go on to become well-known as the singer with the J. Geils Band. He and Morrison became acquaintances, and later became closer friends when they realised they had another connection -- Wolf had a late-night radio show under the name Woofa Goofa, and he'd been receiving anonymous requests for obscure blues records from a fan of the show. Morrison had been the one sending in the requests, not realising his acquaintance was the DJ. Before he got his own band together, Morrison actually guested with the Hallucinations at one show they did in May 1968, supporting John Lee Hooker. The Hallucinations had been performing "Gloria" since Them's single had come out, and they invited Morrison to join them to perform it on stage. According to Wolf, Morrison was very drunk and ranted in cod-Japanese for thirty-five minutes, and tried to sing a different song while the band played "Gloria". The audience were apparently unimpressed, even though Wolf shouted at them “Don't you know who this man is? He wrote the song!” But in truth, Morrison was sick of "Gloria" and his earlier work, and was trying to push his music in a new direction. He would later talk about having had an epiphany after hearing one particular track on the radio: [Excerpt: The Band, "I Shall Be Released"] Like almost every musician in 1968, Morrison was hit like a lightning bolt by Music From Big Pink, and he decided that he needed to turn his music in the same direction. He started writing the song "Brand New Day", which would later appear on his album Moondance, inspired by the music on the album. The Van Morrison Controversy started out as a fairly straightforward rock band, with guitarist John Sheldon, bass player Tom Kielbania, and drummer Joey Bebo. Sheldon was a novice, though his first guitar teacher was the singer James Taylor, but the other two were students at Berklee, and very serious musicians. Morrison seems to have had various managers involved in rapid succession in 1968, including one who was himself a mobster, and another who was only known as Frank, but one of these managers advanced enough money that the musicians got paid every gig. These musicians were all interested in kinds of music other than just straight rock music, and as well as rehearsing up Morrison's hits and his new songs, they would also jam with him on songs from all sorts of other genres, particularly jazz and blues. The band worked up the song that would become "Domino" based on Sheldon jamming on a Bo Diddley riff, and another time the group were rehearsing a Grant Green jazz piece, "Lazy Afternoon": [Excerpt: Grant Green, "Lazy Afternoon"] Morrison started messing with the melody, and that became his classic song "Moondance": [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Moondance"] No recordings of this electric lineup of the group are known to exist, though the backing musicians remember going to a recording studio called Ace recordings at one point and cutting some demos, which don't seem to circulate. Ace was a small studio which, according to all the published sources I've read, was best known for creating song poems, though it was a minor studio even in the song-poem world. For those who don't know, song poems were essentially a con aimed at wannabe songwriters who knew nothing about the business -- companies would advertise you too could become a successful, rich, songwriter if you sent in your "song poems", because anyone who knew the term "lyric" could be presumed to know too much about the music business to be useful. When people sent in their lyrics, they'd then be charged a fee to have them put out on their very own record -- with tracks made more or less on a conveyor belt with quick head arrangements, sung by session singers who were just handed a lyric sheet and told to get on with it. And thus were created such classics prized by collectors as "I Like Yellow Things", "Jimmy Carter Says 'Yes'", and "Listen Mister Hat". Obviously, for the most part these song poems did not lead to the customers becoming the next Ira Gershwin, but oddly even though Ace recordings is not one of the better-known song poem studios, it seems to have produced an actual hit song poem -- one that I don't think has ever before been identified as such until I made a connection, hence me going on this little tangent. Because in researching this episode I noticed something about its co-owner, Milton Yakus', main claim to fame. He co-wrote the song "Old Cape Cod", and to quote that song's Wikipedia page "The nucleus of the song was a poem written by Boston-area housewife Claire Rothrock, for whom Cape Cod was a favorite vacation spot. "Old Cape Cod" and its derivatives would be Rothrock's sole evident songwriting credit. She brought her poem to Ace Studios, a Boston recording studio owned by Milton Yakus, who adapted the poem into the song's lyrics." And while Yakus had written other songs, including songs for Patti Page who had the hit with "Old Cape Cod", apparently Page recorded that song after Rothrock brought her the demo after a gig, rather than getting it through any formal channels. It sounds to me like the massive hit and classic of the American songbook "Old Cape Cod" started life as a song-poem -- and if you're familiar with the form, it fits the genre perfectly: [Excerpt: Patti Page, "Old Cape Cod"] The studio was not the classiest of places, even if you discount the song-poems. Its main source of income was from cutting private records with mobsters' wives and mistresses singing (and dealing with the problems that came along when those records weren't successful) and it also had a sideline in bugging people's cars to see if their spouses were cheating, though Milton Yakus' son Shelly, who got his start at his dad's studio, later became one of the most respected recording engineers in the industry -- and indeed had already worked as assistant engineer on Music From Big Pink. And there was actually another distant connection to Morrison's new favourite band on these sessions. For some reason -- reports differ -- Bebo wasn't considered suitable for the session, and in his place was the one-handed drummer Victor "Moulty" Moulton, who had played with the Barbarians, who'd had a minor hit with "Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl?" a couple of years earlier: [Excerpt: The Barbarians, "Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl?"] A later Barbarians single, in early 1966, had featured Moulty telling his life story, punctuated by the kind of three-chord chorus that would have been at home on a Bert Berns single: [Excerpt: The Barbarians, "Moulty"] But while that record was credited to the Barbarians, Moulton was the only Barbarian on the track, with the instruments and backing vocals instead being provided by Levon and the Hawks. Shortly after the Ace sessions, the Van Morrison Controversy fell apart, though nobody seems to know why. Depending on which musician's story you listen to, either Morrison had a dream that he should get rid of all electric instruments and only use acoustic players, or there was talk of a record deal but the musicians weren't good enough, or the money from the mysterious manager (who may or may not have been the one who was a mobster) ran out. Bebo went back to university, and Sheldon left soon after, though Sheldon would remain in the music business in one form or another. His most prominent credit has been writing a couple of songs for his old friend James Taylor, including the song "Bittersweet" on Taylor's platinum-selling best-of, on which Sheldon also played guitar: [Excerpt: James Taylor, "Bittersweet"] Morrison and Kielbania continued for a while as a duo, with Morrison on acoustic guitar and Kielbania on double bass, but they were making very different music. Morrison's biggest influence at this point, other than The Band, was King Pleasure, a jazz singer who sang in the vocalese style we've talked about before -- the style where singers would sing lyrics to melodies that had previously been improvised by jazz musicians: [Excerpt: King Pleasure, "Moody's Mood for Love"] Morrison and Kielbania soon decided that to make the more improvisatory music they were interested in playing, they wanted another musician who could play solos. They ended up with John Payne, a jazz flute and saxophone player whose biggest inspiration was Charles Lloyd. This new lineup of the Van Morrison Controversy -- acoustic guitar, double bass, and jazz flute -- kept gigging around Boston, though the sound they were creating was hardly what the audiences coming to see the man who'd had that "Brown-Eyed Girl" hit the year before would have expected -- even when they did "Brown-Eyed Girl", as the one live recording of that line-up, made by Peter Wolf, shows: [Excerpt: The Van Morrison Controversy, "Brown-Eyed Girl (live in Boston 1968)"] That new style, with melodic bass underpinning freely extemporising jazz flute and soulful vocals, would become the basis of the album that to this day is usually considered Morrison's best. But before that could happen, there was the matter of the contracts to be sorted out. Warner-Reprise Records were definitely interested. Warners had spent the last few years buying up smaller companies like Atlantic, Autumn Records, and Reprise, and the label was building a reputation as the major label that would give artists the space and funding they needed to make the music they wanted to make. Idiosyncratic artists with difficult reputations (deserved or otherwise), like Neil Young, Randy Newman, Van Dyke Parks, the Grateful Dead, and Joni Mitchell, had all found homes on the label, which was soon also to start distributing Frank Zappa, the Beach Boys, and Captain Beefheart. A surly artist who wants to make mystical acoustic songs with jazz flute accompaniment was nothing unusual for them, and once Joe Smith, the man who had signed the Grateful Dead, was pointed in Morrison's direction by Andy Wickham, an A&R man working for the label, everyone knew that Morrison would be a perfect fit. But Morrison was still under contract to Bang records and Web IV, and those contracts said, among other things, that any other label that negotiated with Morrison would be held liable for breach of contract. Warners didn't want to show their interest in Morrison, because a major label wanting to sign him would cause Bang to raise the price of buying him out of his contract. Instead they got an independent production company to sign him, with a nod-and-wink understanding that they would then license the records to Warners. The company they chose was Inherit Productions, the production arm of Schwaid-Merenstein, a management company set up by Bob Schwaid, who had previously worked in Warners' publishing department, and record producer Lewis Merenstein. Merenstein came to another demo session at Ace Recordings, where he fell in love with the new music that Morrison was playing, and determined he would do everything in his power to make the record into the masterpiece it deserved to be. He and Morrison were, at least at this point, on exactly the same page, and bonded over their mutual love of King Pleasure. Morrison signed to Schwaid-Merenstein, just as he had with Bert Berns and before him Phil Solomon, for management, record production, and publishing. Schwaid-Merenstein were funded by Warners, and would license any recordings they made to Warners, once the contractual situation had been sorted out. The first thing to do was to negotiate the release from Web IV, the publishing company owned by Ilene Berns. Schwaid negotiated that, and Morrison got released on four conditions -- he had to make a substantial payment to Web IV, if he released a single within a year he had to give Web IV the publishing, any album he released in the next year had to contain at least two songs published by Web IV, and he had to give Web IV at least thirty-six new songs to publish within the next year. The first two conditions were no problem at all -- Warners had the money to buy the contract out, and Merenstein's plans for the first album didn't involve a single anyway. It wouldn't be too much of a hardship to include a couple of Web IV-published tracks on the album -- Morrison had written two songs, "Beside You" and "Madame George", that had already been published and that he was regularly including in his live sets. As for the thirty-six new songs... well, that all depended on what you called a song, didn't it? [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Ring Worm"] Morrison went into a recording studio and recorded thirty-one ostensible songs, most of them lasting one minute to within a few seconds either way, in which he strummed one or two chords and spoke-sang whatever words came into his head -- for example one song, "Here Comes Dumb George", just consists of the words "Here Comes Dumb George" repeated over and over. Some of the 'songs', like "Twist and Shake" and "Hang on Groovy", are parodying Bert Berns' songwriting style; others, like "Waiting for My Royalty Check", "Blowin' Your Nose", and "Nose in Your Blow", are attacks on Bang's business practices. Several of the songs, like "Hold on George", "Here Comes Dumb George", "Dum Dum George", and "Goodbye George" are about a man called George who seems to have come to Boston to try and fail to make a record with Morrison. And “Want a Danish” is about wanting a Danish pastry. But in truth, this description is still making these "songs" sound more coherent than they are. The whole recording is of no musical merit whatsoever, and has absolutely nothing in it which could be considered to have any commercial potential at all. Which is of course the point -- just to show utter contempt to Ilene Berns and her company. The other problem that needed to be solved was Bang Records itself, which was now largely under the control of the mob. That was solved by Joe Smith. As Smith told the story "A friend of mine who knew some people said I could buy the contract for $20,000. I had to meet somebody in a warehouse on the third floor on Ninth Avenue in New York. I walked up there with twenty thousand-dollar bills -- and I was terrified. I was terrified I was going to give them the money, get a belt on the head and still not wind up with the contract. And there were two guys in the room. They looked out of central casting -- a big wide guy and a tall, thin guy. They were wearing suits and hats and stuff. I said 'I'm here with the money. You got the contract?' I remember I took that contract and ran out the door and jumped from the third floor to the second floor, and almost broke my leg to get on the street, where I could get a cab and put the contract in a safe place back at Warner Brothers." But the problem was solved, and Lewis Merenstein could get to work translating the music he'd heard Morrison playing into a record. He decided that Kielbania and Payne were not suitable for the kind of recording he wanted -- though they were welcome to attend the sessions in case the musicians had any questions about the songs, and thus they would get session pay. Kielbania was, at first, upset by this, but he soon changed his mind when he realised who Merenstein was bringing in to replace him on bass for the session. Richard Davis, the bass player -- who sadly died two months ago as I write this -- would later go on to play on many classic rock records by people like Bruce Springsteen and Laura Nyro, largely as a result of his work for Morrison, but at the time he was known as one of the great jazz bass players, most notably having played on Eric Dolphy's Out to Lunch: [Excerpt: Eric Dolphy, "Hat and Beard"] Kielbania could see the wisdom of getting in one of the truly great players for the album, and he was happy to show Davis the parts he'd been playing on the songs live, which Davis could then embellish -- Davis later always denied this, but it's obvious when listening to the live recordings that Kielbania played on before these sessions that Davis is playing very similar lines. Warren Smith Jr, the vibraphone player, had played with great jazz musicians like Charles Mingus and Herbie Mann, as well as backing Lloyd Price, Aretha Franklin, and Janis Joplin. Connie Kay, the drummer, was the drummer for the Modern Jazz Quartet and had also played sessions with everyone from Ruth Brown to Miles Davis. And Jay Berliner, the guitarist, had played on records like Charles Mingus' classic The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady: [Excerpt: Charles Mingus: "Mode D - Trio and Group Dancers, Mode F - Single Solos & Group Dance"] There was also a flute player whose name nobody now remembers. Although all of these musicians were jobbing session musicians -- Berliner came to the first session for the album that became Astral Weeks straight from a session recording a jingle for Pringles potato chips -- they were all very capable of taking a simple song and using it as an opportunity for jazz improvisation. And that was what Merenstein asked them to do. The songs that Morrison was writing were lyrically oblique, but structurally they were very simple -- surprisingly so when one is used to listening to the finished album. Most of the songs were, harmonically, variants of the standard blues and R&B changes that Morrison was used to playing. "Cyprus Avenue" and "The Way Young Lovers Do", for example, are both basically twelve-bar blueses -- neither is *exactly* a standard twelve-bar blues, but both are close enough that they can be considered to fit the form. Other than what Kielbania and Payne showed the musicians, they received no guidance from Morrison, who came in, ran through the songs once for them, and then headed to the vocal booth. None of the musicians had much memory of Morrison at all -- Jay Berliner said “This little guy walks in, past everybody, disappears into the vocal booth, and almost never comes out, even on the playbacks, he stayed in there." While Richard Davis later said “Well, I was with three of my favorite fellas to play with, so that's what made it beautiful. We were not concerned with Van at all, he never spoke to us.” The sound of the basic tracks on Astral Weeks is not the sound of a single auteur, as one might expect given its reputation, it's the sound of extremely good jazz musicians improvising based on the instructions given by Lewis Merenstein, who was trying to capture the feeling he'd got from listening to Morrison's live performances and demos. And because these were extremely good musicians, the album was recorded extremely quickly. In the first session, they cut four songs. Two of those were songs that Morrison was contractually obliged to record because of his agreement with Web IV -- "Beside You" and "Madame George", two songs that Bert Berns had produced, now in radically different versions: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Madame George"] The third song, "Cyprus Avenue", is the song that has caused most controversy over the years, as it's another of the songs that Morrison wrote around this time that relate to a sexual or romantic interest in underage girls. In this case, the reasoning might have been as simple as that the song is a blues, and Morrison may have been thinking about a tradition of lyrics like this in blues songs like "Good Morning, Little Schoolgirl". Whatever the cause though, the lyrics have, to put it mildly, not aged well at all: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Cyprus Avenue"] That song would be his standard set-closer for live performances for much of the seventies. For the fourth and final song, though, they chose to record what would become the title track for the album, "Astral Weeks", a song that was a lot more elliptical, and which seems in part to be about Morrison's longing for Janet Planet from afar, but also about memories of childhood, and also one of the first songs to bring in Morrison's fascination with the occult and spirituality, something that would be a recurring theme throughout his work, as the song was partly inspired by paintings by a friend of Morrison's which suggested to him the concept of astral travel: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Astral Weeks"] Morrison had a fascination with the idea of astral travel, as he had apparently had several out-of-body experiences as a child, and wanted to find some kind of explanation for them. Most of the songs on the album came, by Morrison's own account, as a kind of automatic writing, coming through him rather than being consciously written, and there's a fascination throughout with, to use the phrase from "Madame George", "childhood visions". The song is also one of the first songs in Morrison's repertoire to deliberately namecheck one of his idols, something else he would do often in future, when he talks about "talking to Huddie Leadbelly". "Astral Weeks" was a song that Morrison had been performing live for some time, and Payne had always enjoyed doing it. Unlike Kielbania he had no compunction about insisting that he was good enough to play on the record, and he eventually persuaded the session flute player to let him borrow his instrument, and Payne was allowed to play on the track: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Astral Weeks"] Or at least that's how the story is usually told -- Payne is usually credited for playing on "Madame George" too, even though everyone agrees that "Astral Weeks" was the last song of the night, but people's memories can fade over time. Either way, Payne's interplay with Jay Berliner on the guitar became such a strong point of the track that there was no question of bringing the unknown session player back -- Payne was going to be the woodwind player for the rest of the album: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Astral Weeks"] There was then a six-day break between sessions, during which time Payne and Kielbania went to get initiated into Scientology -- a religion with which Morrison himself would experiment a little over a decade later -- though they soon decided that it wasn't worth the cost of the courses they'd have to take, and gave up on the idea the same week. The next session didn't go so well. Jay Berliner was unavailable, and so Barry Kornfeld, a folkie who played with people like Dave Van Ronk, was brought in to replace him. Kornfeld was perfectly decent in the role, but they'd also brought in a string section, with the idea of recording some of the songs which needed string parts live. But the string players they brought in were incapable of improvising, coming from a classical rather than jazz tradition, and the only track that got used on the finished album was "The Way Young Lovers Do", by far the most conventional song on the album, a three-minute soul ballad structured as a waltz twelve-bar blues, where the strings are essentially playing the same parts that a horn section would play on a record by someone like Solomon Burke: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "The Way Young Lovers Do"] It was decided that any string or horn parts on the rest of the album would just be done as overdubs. It was two weeks before the next and final session for the album, and that featured the return of Jay Berliner on guitar. The session started with "Sweet Thing" and "Ballerina", two songs that Morrison had been playing live for some time, and which were cut in relatively quick order. They then made attempts at two more songs that didn't get very far, "Royalty", and "Going Around With Jesse James", before Morrison, stuck for something to record, pulled out a new lyric he'd never performed live, "Slim Slow Slider". The whole band ran through the song once, but then Merenstein decided to pare the arrangement down to just Morrison, Payne (on soprano sax rather than on flute), and Warren Smith Jr: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Slim Slow Slider"] That track was the only one where, after the recording, Merenstein didn't compliment the performance, remaining silent instead – Payne said “Maybe everyone was just tired, or maybe they were moved by it.” It seems likely it was the latter. The track eventually got chosen as the final track of the album, because Merenstein felt that it didn't fit conceptually with anything else -- and it's definitely a more negative track than the oth
Quinta entrega de este coleccionable dedicado a las compilaciones “The Mod jazz Series” (Ace Records). Estos recopilatorios compilaron diferentes sonidos del jazz, o cercanos al jazz, favoritos entre los mods británicos de los años 50 y 60. Playlist; (sintonía) FREDDIE McCOY “Collard greens” RAY CHARLES “Get on the right track baby” GENE LUDWIG “Sticks and stones (part 1)” BILLIE POOLE and JUNIOR MANCE TRIO “Them blues” RAY BRYANT COMBO “Sack o Woe” ESTHER PHILLIPS “Fever” LAVERN BAKER and JIMMY RICKS “You’re the boss” MODERN JAZZ QUARTET with LAURINDO ALMEIDA “One note samba” BYRON LEE and THE SKA KINGS “Watermelon man” HERBIE MANN “It's a funky thing-right on (part 1)” TOMMY RIDGLEY “Jam up twist” GENE McDANIELS “Sweet lover no more” JOE SWIFTS INTERNATIONALS “Bell bottoms” KENNY RICE and LEO’S FIVE “Hold it” TIMMY THOMAS “Have some boogaloo” MARK III TRIO “Tres lobos” HANK JACOBS “East side” MOSE ALLISON “The foolkiller” EDDIE HARRIS “When a man loves a woman” Escuchar audio
Air Week: October 16-22, 2023 Lavern Baker, Pt. 2 – 1954-56 This week, the “Juke In The Back” looks at how one of R&B's greatest voices, LaVern Baker, got her start. It's part two of a two part feature on the early career of LaVern Baker. In part two, we'll dig on Baker's prime recording […]
Air Week: October 9-15, 2023 Lavern Baker, Pt. 1 – 1949-54 This week, the “Juke In The Back” looks at how one of R&B's greatest voices, Lavern Baker, got her start. It's part one of a two part feature on the early career of Lavern Baker. In part one, we'll dig on Baker's first recordings […]
Con Ben E. King ft LaVern Baker, the Edsels, Ricky Nelson, The Carter Family, Jimmy Webb, Johnny Rivers, Isaac Hayes, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, Frank Sinatra, Glen Campbell, Bobby Bare, The Temptations, Blind Blake, Ry Cooder, the Smithereens, Fountains of Wine, Any Trouble, The B-52´s y Camera Obscura
Valisia LeKae stars as LaVern Baker in Rock & Roll Man. The hit musical is playing at New World Stages. Valisia was nominated for Tony and Grammy Awards playing Diana Ross in Motown: The Musical. Some of her other Broadway and off-Broadway credits include Three Penny Opera, 110 in the Shade, Ragtime, Book of Mormon, Superhero and Almost Heaven: The John Denver Musical. On TV Valisia has been seen in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, FBI: Most Wanted, The Blacklist, and Blue Bloods. On March 15 Valisia will be making her Carnegie Hall debut in the show Hittsville: Celebrating Motown with the New York Pops. This episode was recorded August 10, 2023 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Eternal peace, or eternal flames? What will be our last address? In our story, "Midnight Passage," by M. C. Shelby, a young man has two celestial beings vying for his soul. We'll also take a look at what the afterlife looks like in modern and ancient cultures.MusicFesliyan Studios: "Ghost Stories," "The Lovers"Audio Jungle: "Halloween Waltzes"Lavern Baker: "Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight"Trevor Morris: Music from "Vikings"Gregorian Chants: "Kyrie Fons Bonitatis"Ramin Djawadi: "Game of Thrones"The Klezmatics: "Romanian Fantasy"Narration: Robert BreaultPlease join us! Like and follow our Facebook page to become " patron of the Cemetery Hills Library, or (even better!), jump on our Patreon page and become a VIP Patron. Mugs, tee-shirts and eternal thanks await you! Patreon Page: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=61177769&fan_landing=trueWebpage: http://www.afterwordsparanormal.comFacebook: After Words Paranormal PodcastEmail: afterwordsstories@gmail.com
Eternal peace, or eternal flames? What will be our last address? In our story, "Midnight Passage," by M. C. Shelby, a young man has two celestial beings vying for his soul. We'll also take a look at what the afterlife looks like in modern and ancient cultures.MusicFesliyan Studios: "Ghost Stories," "The Lovers"Audio Jungle: "Halloween Waltzes"Lavern Baker: "Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight"Trevor Morris: Music from "Vikings"Gregorian Chants: "Kyrie Fons Bonitatis"Ramin Djawadi: "Game of Thrones"The Klezmatics: "Romanian Fantasy"Narration: Robert BreaultPlease join us! Like and follow our Facebook page to become " patron of the Cemetery Hills Library, or (even better!), jump on our Patreon page and become a VIP Patron. Mugs, tee-shirts and eternal thanks await you! Patreon Page: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=61177769&fan_landing=trueWebpage: http://www.afterwordsparanormal.comFacebook: After Words Paranormal PodcastEmail: afterwordsstories@gmail.com
Alan Freed was a Cleveland radio DJ who helped popularize rock and roll in the early 1950s. The new musical about his life, “Rock & Roll Man,” opened off-Broadway at New World Stages on June 21.“Rock & Roll Man” features classics created by legends such as Little Richard, Chuck Berry, LaVern Baker, Buddy Holly, Bo Diddley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Screamin' Jay Hawkins, as well as original songs written just for the stage by Gary Kupper, who also penned the book for the show with Larry Marshak and Rose Caiola.Rock & Roll Man, starring Tony Award-nominee Constantine Maroulis and Emmy Award-winner Joe Pantoliano. Maroulis plays the Rock & Roll Man himself and he joins us now. His stage credits include Broadway's Rock of Ages (Tony nomination), RENT, Jesus Chris Superstar, and more. Maroulis also has an active career as a concert performer and competed on season 4 of “American Idol.”
Constantine Maroulis hit it big & became a household name during the heyday of “American Idol.” He is best known today for his iconic star turn in Broadway's Rock of Ages for which he received a Best Actor Tony Award® nomination. His stage acting work also includes Jekyll & Hyde, The Wedding Singer, RENT, Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, The Toxic Avenger, and now he stars in the lead role of the off-Broadway blockbuster musical sensation…Rock & Roll Man. We discuss: -What was it like growing up and did he always know he had singing & acting chops and did he always want to be a star? -How did he get on American Idol and what was it like taking the country by storm with his breathtaking performances on the show and emerging out of anonymity to an instant star? -How is it like getting on stage and performing in front of tens of millions on TV vs. a more intimate audience of a few hundred people on a stage. Does he get nervous on TV or stage? -How was American Idol's Simon Cowell? -What made him excited about taking on the iconic, but challenging role of being the first person to ever portray trailblazing DJ Alan Freed (who actually is credited with coining the term Rock & Roll) in an entire show in the extraordinary new Musical Rock & Roll Man. -What does he hope audiences feel and what does he hope they learn and take away from the show? - Rock & Roll Man features Rock & Roll Classics created by Legends such as Little Richard, Chuck Berry, LaVern Baker, Buddy Holly, Bo Diddley & The Killer Jerry Lee Lewis. However, Constantine sings all original songs which require a lot of heavy lifting. He tells us about the creative process in perfecting brand new songs no one ever did prior. -What it is like getting standing ovations and having people dance in the aisles every show? -What are the secrets to his success and what he would advise other actors or other people in general that want to follow in your footsteps?
It's a spooky surfin' time tonight on Punks in Parkas! Hear tracks by the likes of The Sonics, Lavern Baker, and The Cramps!Tune into new broadcasts of Punks In Parkas, Every Monday from Midday – 1 PM EST / 5 - 6 PM GMTFor more info visit: https://thefaceradio.com/punks-in-parkas//Dig this show? Please consider supporting The Face Radio: http://support.thefaceradio.com Support The Face Radio with PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/thefaceradio. Join the family at https://plus.acast.com/s/thefaceradio. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
It's a spooky surfin' time tonight on Punks in Parkas!Hear tracks by the likes of The Sonics, Lavern Baker, and The Cramps!
This week on Echoes of Indiana Avenue we'll celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Little Miss Cornshucks – a pioneer of rhythm and blues music. She was born Mildred Cummings in Dayton, Ohio in May of 1923, and died in Indianapolis in November of 1999. Little Miss Cornshucks played some of her first, and last gigs in Indianapolis – including an early appearance on Indiana Avenue in 1945. She influenced artists like Aretha Franklin, Ruth Brown, and Lavern Baker, and Atlantic Records' founder Ahmet Ertegun, called her the greatest blues singer he ever heard.
Nueva entrega de nuestra serie dedicada a recuperar grandes canciones que dieron forma al pop de la primera mitad de los 60. No podíamos empezar de otra forma que no fuese recordando a Burt Bacharach. Playlist; (sintonía) SANTO and JOHNNY “Love letters in the sand” DIONNE WARWICK “Walk on by” JACKIE DESHANNON “What the world needs now is love” THE HOLLIES “To you my love” HERMAN’S HERMIT “(What a) wonderful world” ELVIS PRESLEY “Slowly and surely” EDDIE HODGES “Seein’ is believin’’” RAY AND BOB “Air travel” THE FOUR SEASONS “Peanuts” MILLIE SMALL “I’m in love again” GARY US BONDS “Quartet to three” BERN ELLIOT and THE FENMEN “New Orleans” JOE JONES “You talk too much” THE ROLLING STONES “Tell me” LAVERN BAKER “See see rider” ADAM FAITH “A help-each-other romance” JOHN BARRY “James Bond theme” SHIRLEY BASSEY “Goldfinger” THE SHADOWS “Wonderful land” Escuchar audio
Nueva selección de éxitos mayores o menores de la primera mitad de los años 60, picoteando entre todos los estilos que dieron forma a la música popular de aquellos maravillosos años. Playlist; (sintonía) THE VENTURES “Telstar” JOHN LEYTON “Johnny remember me” PAT READER “Cha cha on the moon” CHRIS KENNER “I like it like that” CANNIBAL and THE HEADHUNTERS “Land of 1000 dances” SHAPE and SIZES “Rain on my feet” TRINI LOPEZ “Unchain my heart” LAVERN BAKER and JIMMY RICKS “You’re the boss” THE ROLLING STONES “Congratulations” CLYDE McPHATTER “Spanish Harlem” SANDIE SHAW “(There’s) always something there to remind me” TIPPIE and THE CLOVERS “Bossa Nova baby” THE ESSEX “A walking mircle” THE VERNON GIRLS “I’m gonna let my hair down” NASHVILLE TEENS “Google eye” ELVIS PRESLEY “One broken heart for sale” CLIFF RICHARD “What I’ve got to do” SIMON and GARFUNKEL “I am a rock” BARBARA LEWIS “Hello stranger” RUBY and THE ROMANTICS “What a difference a day makes” Escuchar audio
Brooks Long is back and that means he and Nate are talking about a book written or co-written by the great David Ritz. While at Billboard magazine in the 1940s, Jerry Wexler coined the term Rhythm & Blues. He went on to become one of the great "record men" at Atlantic Records in the 1950s, 60s and 70s where he produced career-peak recordings by legends such as Ruth Brown, LaVern Baker, Ray Charles, Solomon Burke, Aretha Franklin. He also found time to be a villain in the stories of Stax Records, Bert Berns and FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama.Buy the book and support the podcast.Download this episode.Don't miss Nate's interview with David Ritz.Don't miss Nate & Brooks discussing:Aretha FranklinRay CharlesDon't miss Nate's interview with Bert Berns biographer Joel Selvin.Don't miss Nate's interviews with Robert Gordon about Stax Records:Part 1Part 2Have a question or a suggestion for a topic or person for Nate to interview? Email letitrollpodcast@gmail.comFollow us on Twitter.Follow us on Facebook.Let It Roll is proud to be part of Pantheon Podcasts.
Two Cow Garage "The Heart and the Crown"Richard Swift "Broken Finger Blues"JD McPherson "Just Around The Corner"Kitty Wells "Guilty Street"Adia Victoria "Devil Is A Lie"Blue Mountain "Bloody 98"Fats Domino "When I Was Young"Memphis Slim "We're Gonna Rock"Wilco "Falling Apart (Right Now)"Elvis Costello & the Roots "Sugar Won't Work"Eilen Jewell "Back to Dallas"Rick Danko "What A Town"Eddie Hinton "Brand New Man"Hot Water Music "Trusty Chords"Joan Shelley "Over and Even"Superchunk "Endless Summer"Joseph "Come On Up To The House"LaVern Baker "Bumble Bee"Little Brother Montgomery "Michigan Water Blues"Bob Dylan "Precious Angel"Labi Siffre "I Got The..."Kendrick Lamar "Auntie Diaries"Hank Crawford "Sister Sadie"Arthur Gunter "Baby Let´s Play House"The 40 Acre Mule "16 Days"Old 97's "Rollerskate Skinny"Nina Simone "Do I Move You?"Koko Taylor "I'd Rather Go Blind"Jack White "If I Die Tomorrow"Drive-By Truckers "Forged In Hell And Heaven Sent"R.E.M. "Swan Swan H"Cory Branan "Imogene"Sister O.M. Terrell "Life Is a Problem"Jkutchma & the Five Fifths "Sundown, Usa"Carl Perkins "Poor Boy Blues"Blue Lu Barker "I'll Give You Some Tomorrow"John Prine "Sweet Revenge"Buddy Guy "Outskirst of Town"Junior Walker & The All Stars "Way Back Home"Wynonie Harris "Mr Blues Is Coming To Town"Billie Holiday Orchestra "Summertime"Lucero "That Much Further West"
***Mini-Podcast voyageur en direct de New York-Jersey City*** *Musiques* : - "Iguana" by Ultrabeat - "Djinn" by Sahalé *Poème du jour* : Lavern Baker by Harry J Horsman, 2012 (Poet from Austria) *Pensée du jour* : Have a great day and don't forget : "You deserve Happiness, You deserve GOODNESS !" --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/ubuntuu/message
Albert King "I Almost Lost My Mind"Bonnie Raitt "Livin' for the Ones"Old & In the Way "Midnight Moonlight"Doc & Merle Watson "Tennessee Stud (Live)"Doc & Merle Watson "Black Mountain Rag (Live)"Brown Bird "Danger and Dread"Eilen Jewell "Shakin' All Over"Taj Mahal "Slave Driver"Adia Victoria "Stuck in the South"Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit "Sometimes Salvation"Sister Rosetta Tharpe "Shout, Sister, Shout!"Wilson Pickett "I Found the One"Blind Willie McTell "Motherless Children Have a Hard Time"Little Richard "Rip It Up"Pee Wee King "Oh Monah"Loretta Lynn "This Old House"Waxahatchee "Under a Rock"Shovels & Rope "Hail Hail"Allen Toussaint "Just a Closer Walk with Thee"Willie Nelson "Stardust"Ruth Brown "Love Me Baby"Charles Mingus "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat"Marvin Gaye "Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)"The Black Keys "Ten Cent Pistol"Bobby "Blue" Bland "Ain't No Love In The Heart Of The City"Sly Stone "Who Do You Love?"Charles Mingus "Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting"Craig Finn "Birthdays"Bob Dylan "The Wicked Messenger"LaVern Baker "See See Rider"Ella Fitzgerald "'Tain't What You Do"B. B. King "It's My Own Fault Darling"Albert King "She Caught The Katy And Left Me A Mule To Ride"Buddy Emmons "Four, Five Times"Carl Perkins "Honey Don't"Ted Hawkins "California Song"Little Willie John "I'm Shakin'"The Everly Brothers "Cathy's Clown"Lil Green "Why Don't You Do Right"Otis Blackwell "Daddy Rolling Stone"Bonnie Raitt "Everybody's Cryin' Mercy (Remastered Version)"Mississippi Fred McDowell "I Ain't Gonna Be Bad No Mo'"Ike & Tina Turner "Funkier Than a Mosquita's Tweeter"Otis Redding "A Fool for You"John Brim "Ice Cream Man"Johnny Cash "I Heard That Lonesome Whistle"Georgia White "Tain't Nobody's Fault But Yours"
From Buster Brown to The Herd via Dave Davies, Prince Buster, The Lovin' Spoonful, LaVern Baker and many more it's the latest episode of Winkle Pickers & Floor Fillers.
The decade of the fifties found the sounds of rhythm and blues being best represented on the Atlantic Records label. Founded in 1947 by Ahmet Ertegun and Herb Abramson, the catalog of artists and the quality of production were unparalleled for their time. And while Ertegun's biography is subtitled “The House That Ertegun Built”, the performers were also undisputed heavyweights: Big Joe Turner, Ray Charles, Clyde McPhatter, and Lavern Baker to name a few. Things, however, exploded when a lady dubbed “Miss Rhythm” arrived with “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean” leading to another moniker: “The House That Ruth Built”. This week's show will feature some of the great tracks from Ruth Brown and the many contemporaries who made the label synonymous with R&B well into the seventies and beyond. Tune in for a special treat. Rock, rhythm, and dynamite doo wop from the Atlantic vaults on a Friday morning.
Part 2 of the Blue Lineage Timeline to Womanist Epistemological Research. Examples include Mamie Smith, Little Richard, Champion Jack Dupree, Jack L Cooper, Lavern Baker, Charley Patton, Tommy McClennan, Jack the Rapper, and Sylvia Robinson. For more information on this subject see this previous video: https://youtu.be/NBHpPEhx1Q4 Find out more about the timeline at https://www.bluelineage.com
This week Alice welcomes Nwaka Onwusa to discuss LaVern Baker
Episode 122 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs is a double-length (over an hour) look at “A Change is Gonna Come” by Sam Cooke, at Cooke's political and artistic growth, and at the circumstances around his death. This one has a long list of content warnings at the beginning of the episode, for good reason... Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "My Guy" by Mary Wells. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. For this episode, he also did the re-edit of the closing theme. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources No Mixcloud this week due to the number of songs by one artist. My main source for this episode is Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke by Peter Guralnick. Like all Guralnick's work, it's an essential book if you're even slightly interested in the subject. Information on Allen Klein comes from Fred Goodman's book on Klein. The Netflix documentary I mention can be found here. This is the best compilation of Sam Cooke's music for the beginner, and the only one to contain recordings from all four labels (Specialty, Keen, RCA, and Tracey) he recorded for. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start this episode, a brief acknowledgement -- Lloyd Price plays a minor role in this story, and I heard as I was in the middle of writing it that he had died on May the third, aged eighty-eight. Price was one of the great pioneers of rock and roll -- I first looked at him more than a hundred episodes ago, back in episode twelve -- and he continued performing live right up until the start of the coronavirus outbreak in March last year. He'll be missed. Today we're going to look at one of the great soul protest records of all time, a record that was the high point in the career of its singer and songwriter, and which became a great anthem of the Civil Rights movement. But we're also going to look at the dark side of its creator, and the events that led to his untimely death. More than most episodes of the podcast, this requires a content warning. Indeed, it requires more than just content warnings. Those warnings are necessary -- this episode will deal with not only a murder, but also sexual violence, racialised violence, spousal abuse, child sexual abuse, drug use and the death of a child, as well as being about a song which is in itself about the racism that pervaded American society in the 1960s as it does today. This is a story from which absolutely nobody comes out well, which features very few decent human beings, and which I find truly unpleasant to write about. But there is something else that I want to say, before getting into the episode -- more than any other episode I have done, and I think more than any other episode that I am *going* to do, this is an episode where my position as a white British man born fourteen years after Sam Cooke's death might mean that my perspective is flawed in ways that might actually make it impossible for me to tell the story properly, and in ways that might mean that my telling of the story is doing a grave, racialised, injustice. Were this song and this story not so important to the ongoing narrative, I would simply avoid telling it altogether, but there is simply no way for me to avoid it and tell the rest of the story without doing equally grave injustices. So I will say this upfront. There are two narratives about Sam Cooke's death -- the official one, and a more conspiratorial one. Everything I know about the case tells me that the official account is the one that is actually correct, and *as far as I can tell*, I have good reason for thinking that way. But here's the thing. The other narrative is one that is held by a lot of people who knew Cooke, and they claim that the reason their narrative is not the officially-accepted one is because of racism. I do not think that is the case myself. In fact, all the facts I have seen about the case lead to the conclusion that the official narrative is correct. But I am deeply, deeply, uncomfortable with saying that. Because I have an obligation to be honest, but I also have an obligation not to talk over Black people about their experiences of racism. So what I want to say now, before even starting the episode, is this. Listen to what I have to say, by all means, but then watch the Netflix documentary Remastered: The Two Killings of Sam Cooke, and *listen* to what the people saying otherwise have to say. I can only give my own perspective, and my perspective is far more likely to be flawed here than in any other episode of this podcast. I am truly uncomfortable writing and recording this episode, and were this any other record at all, I would have just skipped it. But that was not an option. Anyway, all that said, let's get on with the episode proper, which is on one of the most important records of the sixties -- "A Change is Gonna Come": [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "A Change is Gonna Come"] It's been almost eighteen months since we last looked properly at Sam Cooke, way back in episode sixty, and a lot has happened in the story since then, so a brief recap -- Sam Cooke started out as a gospel singer, first with a group called the Highway QCs, and then joining the Soul Stirrers, the most popular gospel group on the circuit, replacing their lead singer. The Soul Stirrers had signed to Specialty Records, and released records like "Touch the Hem of His Garment", written by Cooke in the studio: [Excerpt: The Soul Stirrers, "Touch the Hem of His Garment"] Cooke had eventually moved away from gospel music to secular, starting with a rewrite of a gospel song he'd written, changing "My God is so wonderful" to "My girl is so lovable", but he'd released that under the name Dale Cook, rather than his own name, in case of a backlash from gospel fans: [Excerpt: Dale Cook, "Lovable"] No-one was fooled, and he started recording under his own name. Shortly after this, Cooke had written his big breakthrough hit, "You Send Me", and when Art Rupe at Specialty Records was unimpressed with it, Cooke and his producer Bumps Blackwell had both moved from Specialty to a new label, Keen Records. Cooke's first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show was a disaster -- cutting him off half way through the song -- but his second was a triumph, and "You Send Me" went to number one on both the pop and R&B charts, and sold over a million copies, while Specialty put out unreleased earlier recordings and sold over half a million copies of some of those. Sam Cooke was now one of the biggest things in the music business. And he had the potential to become even bigger. He had the looks of a teen idol, and was easily among the two or three best-looking male singing stars of the period. He had a huge amount of personal charm, he was fiercely intelligent, and had an arrogant selfishness that came over as self-confidence -- he believed he deserved everything the world could offer to him, and he was charming enough that everyone he met believed it too. He had an astonishing singing voice, and he was also prodigiously talented as a songwriter -- he'd written "Touch the Hem of His Garment" on the spot in the studio after coming in with no material prepared for the session. Not everything was going entirely smoothly for him, though -- he was in the middle of getting divorced from his first wife, and he was arrested backstage after a gig for non-payment of child support for a child he'd fathered with another woman he'd abandoned. This was a regular occurrence – he was as self-centred in his relationships with women as in other aspects of his life -- though as in those other aspects, the women in question were generally so smitten with him that they forgave him everything. Cooke wanted more than to be a pop star. He had his sights set on being another Harry Belafonte. At this point Belafonte was probably the most popular Black all-round entertainer in the world, with his performances of pop arrangements of calypso and folk songs: [Excerpt: Harry Belafonte, "Jamaica Farewell"] Belafonte had nothing like Cooke's chart success, but he was playing prestigious dates in Las Vegas and at high-class clubs, and Cooke wanted to follow his example. Most notably, at a time when almost all notable Black performers straightened their hair, Belafonte left his hair natural and cut it short. Cooke thought that this was very, very shrewd on Belafonte's part, copying him and saying to his brother L.C. that this would make him less threatening to the white public -- he believed that if a Black man slicked his hair back and processed it, he would come across as slick and dishonest, white people wouldn't trust him around their daughters. But if he just kept his natural hair but cut it short, then he'd come across as more honest and trustworthy, just an all-American boy. Oddly, the biggest effect of this decision wasn't on white audiences, but on Black people watching his appearances on TV. People like Smokey Robinson have often talked about how seeing Cooke perform on TV with his natural hair made a huge impression on them -- showing them that it was possible to be a Black man and not be ashamed of it. It was a move to appeal to the white audience that also had the effect of encouraging Black pride. But Cooke's first attempt at appealing to the mainstream white audience that loved Belafonte didn't go down well. He was booked in for a three-week appearance at the Copacabana, one of the most prestigious nightclubs in the country, and right from the start it was a failure. Bumps Blackwell had written the arrangements for the show on the basis that there would be a small band, and when they discovered Cooke would be backed by a sixteen-piece orchestra he and his assistant Lou Adler had to frantically spend a couple of days copying out sheet music for a bigger group. And Cooke's repertoire for those shows stuck mostly to old standards like "Begin the Beguine", "Ol' Man River", and "I Love You For Sentimental Reasons", with the only new song being "Mary, Mary Lou", a song written by a Catholic priest which had recently been a flop single for Bill Haley: [Excerpt: Bill Haley and the Comets, "Mary, Mary Lou"] Cooke didn't put over those old standards with anything like the passion he had dedicated to his gospel and rock and roll recordings, and audiences were largely unimpressed. Cooke gave up for the moment on trying to win over the supper-club audiences and returned to touring on rock and roll package tours, becoming so close with Clyde McPhatter and LaVern Baker on one tour that they seriously considered trying to get their record labels to agree to allow them to record an album of gospel songs together as a trio, although that never worked out. Cooke looked up immensely to McPhatter in particular, and listened attentively as McPhatter explained his views of the world -- ones that were very different to the ones Cooke had grown up with. McPhatter was an outspoken atheist who saw religion as a con, and who also had been a lifelong member of the NAACP and was a vocal supporter of civil rights. Cooke listened closely to what McPhatter had to say, and thought long and hard about it. Cooke was also dealing with lawsuits from Art Rupe at Specialty Records. When Cooke had left Specialty, he'd agreed that Rupe would own the publishing on any future songs he'd written, but he had got round this by crediting "You Send Me" to his brother, L.C. Rupe was incensed, and obviously sued, but he had no hard evidence that Cooke had himself written the song. Indeed, Rupe at one point even tried to turn the tables on Cooke, by getting Lloyd Price's brother Leo, a songwriter himself who had written "Send Me Some Lovin'", to claim that *he* had written "You Send Me", but Leo Price quickly backed down from the claim, and Rupe was left unable to prove anything. It didn't hurt Cooke's case that L.C., while not a talent of his brother's stature, was at least a professional singer and songwriter himself, who was releasing records on Checker Records that sounded very like Sam's work: [Excerpt: L.C. Cooke, "Do You Remember?"] For much of the late 1950s, Sam Cooke seemed to be trying to fit into two worlds simultaneously. He was insistent that he wanted to move into the type of showbusiness that was represented by the Rat Pack -- he cut an album of Billie Holiday songs, and he got rid of Bumps Blackwell as his manager, replacing him with a white man who had previously been Sammy Davis Jr.'s publicist. But on the other hand, he was hanging out with the Central Avenue music scene in LA, with Johnny "Guitar" Watson, Eugene Church, Jesse Belvin, and Alex and Gaynel Hodge. While his aspirations towards Rat Packdom faltered, he carried on having hits -- his own "Only Sixteen" and "Everybody Loves to Cha-Cha-Cha", and he recorded, but didn't release yet, a song that Lou Adler had written with his friend Herb Alpert, and whose lyrics Sam revised, "Wonderful World". Cooke was also starting a relationship with the woman who would become his second wife, Barbara. He'd actually had an affair with her some years earlier, and they'd had a daughter, Linda, who Cooke had initially not acknowledged as his own -- he had many children with other women -- but they got together in 1958, around the time of Cooke's divorce from his first wife. Tragically, that first wife then died in a car crash in 1959 -- Cooke paid her funeral expenses. He was also getting dissatisfied with Keen Records, which had been growing too fast to keep up with its expenses -- Bumps Blackwell, Lou Adler, and Herb Alpert, who had all started at the label with him, all started to move away from it to do other things, and Cooke was sure that Keen weren't paying him the money they owed as fast as they should. He also wanted to help some of his old friends out -- while Cooke was an incredibly selfish man, he was also someone who believed in not leaving anyone behind, so long as they paid him what he thought was the proper respect, and so he started his own record label, with his friends J.W. Alexander and Roy Crain, called SAR Records (standing for Sam, Alex, and Roy), to put out records by his old group The Soul Stirrers, for whom he wrote "Stand By Me, Father", a song inspired by an old gospel song by Charles Tindley, and with a lead sung by Johnnie Taylor, the Sam Cooke soundalike who had replaced Cooke as the group's lead singer: [Excerpt: The Soul Stirrers, "Stand By Me, Father"] Of course, that became, as we heard a few months back, the basis for Ben E. King's big hit "Stand By Me". Cooke and Alexander had already started up their own publishing company, and were collaborating on songs for other artists, too. They wrote "I Know I'll Always Be In Love With You", which was recorded first by the Hollywood Flames and then by Jackie Wilson: [Excerpt: Jackie Wilson, "I Know I'll Always Be in Love With You"] And "I'm Alright", which Little Anthony and the Imperials released as a single: [Excerpt: Little Anthony and the Imperials, "I'm Alright"] But while he was working on rock and roll and gospel records, he was also learning to tap-dance for his performances at the exclusive white nightclubs he wanted to play -- though when he played Black venues he didn't include those bits in the act. He did, though, perform seated on a stool in imitation of Perry Como, having decided that if he couldn't match the energetic performances of people like Jackie Wilson (who had been his support act at a run of shows where Wilson had gone down better than Cooke) he would go in a more casual direction. He was also looking to move into the pop market when it came to his records, and he eventually signed up with RCA Records, and specifically with Hugo and Luigi. We've talked about Hugo and Luigi before, a couple of times -- they were the people who had produced Georgia Gibbs' soundalike records that had ripped off Black performers, and we talked about their production of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight", though at this point they hadn't yet made that record. They had occasionally produced records that were more R&B flavoured -- they produced "Shout!" for the Isley Brothers, for example -- but they were in general about as bland and middle-of-the-road a duo as one could imagine working in the music industry. The first record that Hugo and Luigi produced for Cooke was a song that the then-unknown Jeff Barry had written, "Teenage Sonata". That record did nothing, and the label were especially annoyed when a recording Cooke had done while he was still at Keen, "Wonderful World", was released on his old label and made the top twenty: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "Wonderful World"] Cooke's collaboration with Hugo and Luigi would soon turn into one that bore a strong resemblance to their collaboration with the Isley Brothers -- they would release great singles, but albums that fundamentally misunderstood Cooke's artistry; though some of that misunderstanding may have come from Cooke himself, who never seemed to be sure which direction to go in. Many of the album tracks they released have Cooke sounding unsure of himself, and hesitant, but that's not something that you can say about the first real success that Cooke came out with on RCA, a song he wrote after driving past a group of prisoners working on a chain gang. He'd originally intended that song to be performed by his brother Charles, but he'd half-heartedly played it for Hugo and Luigi when they'd not seen much potential in any of his other recent originals, and they'd decided that that was the hit: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "Chain Gang"] That made number two on the charts, becoming his biggest hit since "You Send Me". Meanwhile Cooke was also still recording other artists for SAR -- though by this point Roy Crain had been eased out and SAR now stood for Sam and Alex Records. He got a group of Central Avenue singers including Alex and Gaynel Hodge to sing backing vocals on a song he gave to a friend of his named Johnny Morisette, who was known professionally as "Johnny Two-Voice" because of the way he could sound totally different in his different ranges, but who was known to his acquaintances as "the singing pimp", because of his other occupation: [Excerpt: Johnny Morisette, "I'll Never Come Running Back to You"] They also thought seriously about signing up a young gospel singer they knew called Aretha Franklin, who was such an admirer of Sam's that she would try to copy him -- she changed her brand of cigarettes to match the ones he smoked, and when she saw him on tour reading William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich -- Cooke was an obsessive reader, especially of history -- she bought her own copy. She never read it, but she thought she should have a copy if Cooke had one. But they decided that Franklin's father, the civil rights leader Rev. C.L. Franklin, was too intimidating, and so it would probably not be a good idea to get involved. The tour on which Franklin saw Cooke read Shirer's book was also the one on which Cooke made his first public stance in favour of civil rights -- that tour, which was one of the big package tours of the time, was meant to play a segregated venue, but the artists hadn't been informed just how segregated it was. While obviously none of them supported segregation, they would mostly accept playing to segregated crowds, because there was no alternative, if at least Black people were allowed in in roughly equal numbers. But in this case, Black people were confined to a tiny proportion of the seats, in areas with extremely restricted views, and both Cooke and Clyde McPhatter refused to go on stage, though the rest of the acts didn't join in their boycott. Cooke's collaboration with Hugo and Luigi remained hit and miss, and produced a few more flop singles, but then Cooke persuaded them to allow him to work in California, with the musicians he'd worked with at Keen, and with René Hall arranging rather than the arrangers they'd employed previously. While the production on Cooke's California sessions was still credited to Hugo and Luigi, Luigi was the only one actually attending those sessions -- Hugo was afraid of flying and wouldn't come out to the West Coast. The first record that came out under this new arrangement was another big hit, "Cupid", which had vocal sound effects supplied by a gospel act Cooke knew, the Sims twins -- Kenneth Sims made the sound of an arrow flying through the air, and Bobbie Sims made the thwacking noise of it hitting a target: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "Cupid"] Cooke became RCA's second-biggest artist, at least in terms of singles sales, and had a string of hits like "Twistin' the Night Away", "Another Saturday Night", and "Bring it On Home to Me", though he was finding it difficult to break the album market. He was frustrated that he wasn't having number one records, but Luigi reassured him that that was actually the best position to be in: “We're getting number four, number six on the Billboard charts, and as long as we get that, nobody's gonna bother you. But if you get two or three number ones in a row, then you got no place to go but down. Then you're competition, and they're just going to do everything they can to knock you off.” But Cooke's personal life had started to unravel. After having two daughters, his wife gave birth to a son. Cooke had desperately wanted a male heir, but he didn't bond with his son, Vincent, who he insisted didn't look like him. He became emotionally and physically abusive towards his wife, beating her up on more than one occasion, and while she had been a regular drug user already, her use increased to try to dull the pain of being married to someone who she loved but who was abusing her so appallingly. Things became much, much worse, when the most tragic thing imaginable happened. Cooke had a swim in his private pool and then went out, leaving the cover off. His wife, Barbara, then let the children play outside, thinking that their three-year-old daughter Tracey would be able to look after the baby for a few minutes. Baby Vincent fell into the pool and drowned. Both parents blamed the other, and Sam was devastated at the death of the child he only truly accepted as his son once the child was dead. You can hear some of that devastation in a recording he made a few months later of an old Appalachian folk song: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "The Riddle Song"] Friends worried that Cooke was suicidal, but Cooke held it together, in part because of the intervention of his new manager, Allen Klein. Klein had had a hard life growing up -- his mother had died when he was young, and his father had sent him to an orphanage for a while. Eventually, his father remarried, and young Allen came back to the family home, but his father was still always distant. He grew close to his stepmother, but then she died as well. Klein turned up at Cooke's house two days after the baby's funeral with his own daughter, and insisted on taking Cooke and his surviving children to Disneyland, telling him "You always had your mother and father, but I lost my mother when I was nine months old. You've got two other children. Those two girls need you even more now. You're their only father, and you've got to take care of them." Klein was very similar to Cooke in many ways. He had decided from a very early age that he couldn't trust anyone but himself, and that he had to make his own way in the world. He became hugely ambitious, and wanted to reach the very top. Klein had become an accountant, and gone to work for Joe Fenton, an accountant who specialised in the entertainment industry. One of the first jobs Klein did in his role with Fenton was to assist him with an audit of Dot Records in 1957, called for by the Harry Fox Agency. We've not talked about Harry Fox before, but they're one of the most important organisations in the American music industry -- they're a collection agency like ASCAP or BMI, who collect songwriting royalties for publishing companies and songwriters. But while ASCAP and BMI collect performance royalties -- they collect payments for music played on the radio or TV, or in live performance -- Harry Fox collect the money for mechanical reproduction, the use of songs on records. It's a gigantic organisation, and it has the backing of all the major music publishers. To do this audit, Klein and Fenton had to travel from New York to LA, and as they were being paid by a major entertainment industry organisation, they were put up in the Roosevelt Hotel, where at the time the other guests included Elvis, Claude Rains, and Sidney Poitier. Klein, who had grown up in comparative poverty, couldn't help but be impressed at the money that you could make by working in entertainment. The audit of Dot Records found some serious discrepancies -- they were severely underpaying publishers and songwriters. While they were in LA, Klein and Fenton also audited several other labels, like Liberty, and they found the same thing at all of them. The record labels were systematically conning publishing companies out of money they were owed. Klein immediately realised that if they were doing this to the major publishing companies that Harry Fox represented, they must be doing the same kind of thing to small songwriters and artists, the kind of people who didn't have a huge organisation to back them up. Unfortunately for Klein, soon after he started working for Fenton, he was fired -- he was someone who was chronically unable to get to work on time in the morning, and while he didn't mind working ridiculously long hours, he could not, no matter how hard he tried, get himself into the office for nine in the morning. He was fired after only four months, and Fenton even recommended to the State of New Jersey that they not allow Klein to become a Certified Public Accountant -- a qualification which, as a result, Klein never ended up getting. He set up his own company to perform audits of record companies for performers, and he got lucky by bumping in to someone he'd been at school with -- Don Kirshner. Kirshner agreed to start passing clients Klein's way, and his first client was Ersel Hickey (no relation), the rockabilly singer we briefly discussed in the episode on "Twist and Shout", who had a hit with "Bluebirds Over the Mountain": [Excerpt: Ersel Hickey, "Bluebirds Over the Mountain"] Klein audited Hickey's record label, but was rather surprised to find out that they didn't actually owe Hickey a penny. It turned out that record contracts were written so much in the company's favour that they didn't have to use any dodgy accounting to get out of paying the artists anything. But sometimes, the companies would rip the artists off anyway, if they were particularly unscrupulous. Kirshner had also referred the rockabilly singer/songwriter duo Buddy Knox and Jimmy Bowen to Klein. Their big hit, "Party Doll", had come out on Roulette Records: [Excerpt: Buddy Knox, "Party Doll"] Klein found out that in the case of Roulette, the label *were* actually not paying the artists what they were contractually owed, largely because Morris Levy didn't like paying people money. After the audit, Levy did actually agree to pay Knox and Bowen what they were owed, but he insisted that he would only pay it over four years, at a rate of seventy dollars a week -- if Klein wanted it any sooner, he'd have to sue, and the money would all be eaten up in lawyers' fees. That was still better than nothing, and Klein made enough from his cut that he was able to buy himself a car. Klein and Levy actually became friends -- the two men were very similar in many ways -- and Klein learned a big lesson from negotiating with him. That lesson was that you take what you can get, because something is better than nothing. If you discover a company owes your client a hundred thousand dollars that your client didn't know about, and they offer you fifty thousand to settle, you take the fifty thousand. Your client still ends up much better off than they would have been, you've not burned any bridges with the company, and you get your cut. And Klein's cut was substantial -- his standard was to take fifty percent of any extra money he got for the artist. And he prided himself on always finding something -- though rarely as much as he would suggest to his clients before getting together with them. One particularly telling anecdote about Klein's attitude is that when he was at Don Kirshner's wedding he went up to Kirshner's friend Bobby Darin and told him he could get him a hundred thousand dollars. Darin signed, but according to Darin's manager, Klein only actually found one underpayment, for ten thousand copies of Darin's hit "Splish Splash" which Atlantic hadn't paid for: [Excerpt: Bobby Darin, "Splish Splash"] However, at the time singles sold for a dollar, Darin was on a five percent royalty, and he only got paid for ninety percent of the records sold (because of a standard clause in contracts at that time to allow for breakages). The result was that Klein found an underpayment of just four hundred and fifty dollars, a little less than the hundred thousand he'd promised the unimpressed Darin. But Klein used the connection to Darin to get a lot more clients, and he did significantly better for some of them. For Lloyd Price, for example, he managed to get an extra sixty thousand dollars from ABC/Paramount, and Price and Klein became lifelong friends. And Price sang Klein's praises to Sam Cooke, who became eager to meet him. He got the chance when Klein started up a new business with a DJ named Jocko Henderson. Henderson was one of the most prominent DJs in Philadelphia, and was very involved in all aspects of the music industry. He had much the same kind of relationship with Scepter Records that Alan Freed had with Chess, and was cut in on most of the label's publishing on its big hits -- rights he would later sell to Klein in order to avoid the kind of investigation that destroyed Freed's career. Henderson had also been the DJ who had first promoted "You Send Me" on the radio, and Cooke owed him a favour. Cooke was also at the time being courted by Scepter Records, who had offered him a job as the Shirelles' writer and producer once Florence Greenberg had split up with Luther Dixon. He'd written them one song, which referenced many of their earlier hits: [Excerpt: The Shirelles, "Only Time Will Tell"] However, Cooke didn't stick with Scepter -- he figured out that Greenberg wasn't interested in him as a writer/producer, but as a singer, and he wasn't going to record for an indie like them when he could work with RCA. But when Henderson and Klein started running a theatre together, putting on R&B shows, those shows obviously featured a lot of Scepter acts like the Shirelles and Dionne Warwick, but they also featured Sam Cooke on the top of the bill, and towards the bottom of the bill were the Valentinos, a band featuring Cooke's touring guitarist, Bobby Womack, who were signed to SAR Records: [Excerpt: The Valentinos, "It's All Over Now"] Klein was absolutely overawed with Cooke's talent when he first saw him on stage, realising straight away that this was one of the major artists of his generation. Whereas most of the time, Klein would push himself forward straight away and try to dominate artists, here he didn't even approach Cooke at all, just chatted to Cooke's road manager and found out what Cooke was like as a person. This is something one sees time and again when it comes to Cooke -- otherwise unflappable people just being absolutely blown away by his charisma, talent, and personality, and behaving towards him in ways that they behaved to nobody else. At the end of the residency, Cooke had approached Klein, having heard good things about him from Price, Henderson, and his road manager. The two had several meetings over the next few months, so Klein could get an idea of what it was that was bothering Cooke about his business arrangements. Eventually, after a few months, Cooke asked Klein for his honest opinion. Klein was blunt. "I think they're treating you like a " -- and here he used the single most offensive anti-Black slur there is -- "and you shouldn't let them." Cooke agreed, and said he wanted Klein to take control of his business arrangements. The first thing Klein did was to get Cooke a big advance from BMI against his future royalties as a songwriter and publisher, giving him seventy-nine thousand dollars up front to ease his immediate cash problems. He then started working on getting Cooke a better recording contract. The first thing he did was go to Columbia records, who he thought would be a better fit for Cooke than RCA were, and with whom Cooke already had a relationship, as he was at that time working with his friend, the boxer Muhammad Ali, on an album that Ali was recording for Columbia: [Excerpt: Muhammad Ali, "The Gang's All Here"] Cooke was very friendly with Ali, and also with Ali's spiritual mentor, the activist Malcolm X, and both men tried to get him to convert to the Nation of Islam. Cooke declined -- while he respected both men, he had less respect for Elijah Mohammed, who he saw as a con artist, and he was becoming increasingly suspicious of religion in general. He did, though, share the Nation of Islam's commitment to Black people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and presenting themselves in a clean-cut way, having the same vision of Black capitalism that many of his contemporaries like James Brown shared. Unfortunately, negotiations with Columbia quickly failed. Klein believed, probably correctly, that record labels didn't have to do anything to sell Sam Cooke's records, and that Cooke was in a unique position as one of the very few artists at that time who could write, perform, and produce hit records without any outside assistance. Klein therefore thought that Cooke deserved a higher royalty rate than the five percent industry standard, and said that Cooke wouldn't sign with anyone for that rate. The problem was that Columbia had most-favoured-nations clauses written into many other artists' contracts. These clauses meant that if any artist signed with Columbia for a higher royalty rate, those other artists would also have to get that royalty rate, so if Cooke got the ten percent that Klein was demanding, a bunch of other performers like Tony Bennett would also have to get the ten percent, and Columbia were simply not willing to do that. So Klein decided that Cooke was going to stay with RCA, but he found a way to make sure that Cooke would get a much better deal from RCA, and in a way which didn't affect any of RCA's own favoured-nations contracts. Klein had had some involvement in filmmaking, and knew that independent production companies were making films without the studios, and just letting the studios distribute them. He also knew that in the music business plenty of songwriters and producers like Leiber and Stoller and Phil Spector owned their own record labels. But up to that point, no performers did, that Klein was aware of, because it was the producers who generally made the records, and the contracts were set up with the assumption that the performer would just do what the producer said. That didn't apply to Sam Cooke, and so Klein didn't see why Cooke couldn't have his own label. Klein set up a new company, called Tracey Records, which was named after Cooke's daughter, and whose president was Cooke's old friend J.W. Alexander. Tracey Records would, supposedly to reduce Cooke's tax burden, be totally owned by Klein, but it would be Cooke's company, and Cooke would be paid in preferred stock in the company, though Cooke would get the bulk of the money -- it would be a mere formality that the company was owned by Klein. While this did indeed have the effect of limiting the amount of tax Cooke had to pay, it also fulfilled a rule that Klein would later state -- "never take twenty percent of an artist's earnings. Instead give them eighty percent of yours". What mattered wasn't the short-term income, but the long-term ownership. And that's what Klein worked out with RCA. Tracey Records would record and manufacture all Cooke's records from that point on, but RCA would have exclusive distribution rights for thirty years, and would pay Tracey a dollar per album. After thirty years, Tracey records would get all the rights to Cooke's recordings back, and in the meantime, Cooke would effectively be on a much higher royalty rate than he'd received before, in return for taking a much larger share of the risk. There were also changes at SAR. Zelda Sands, who basically ran the company for Sam and J.W., was shocked to receive a phone call from Sam and Barbara, telling her to immediately come to Chicago, where Sam was staying while he was on tour. She went up to their hotel room, where Barbara angrily confronted her, saying that she knew that Sam had always been attracted to Zelda -- despite Zelda apparently being one of the few women Cooke met who he never slept with -- and heavily implied that the best way to sort this would be for them to have a threesome. Zelda left and immediately flew back to LA. A few days later, Barbara turned up at the SAR records offices and marched Zelda out at gunpoint. Through all of this turmoil, though, Cooke managed to somehow keep creating music. And indeed he soon came up with the song that would be his most important legacy. J.W. Alexander had given Cooke a copy of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, and Cooke had been amazed at "Blowin' in the Wind": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Blowin' in the Wind"] But more than being amazed at the song, Cooke was feeling challenged. This was a song that should have been written by a Black man. More than that, it was a song that should have been written by *him*. Black performers needed to be making music about their own situation. He added "Blowin' in the Wind" to his own live set, but he also started thinking about how he could write a song like that himself. As is often the case with Cooke's writing, he took inspiration from another song, this time "Ol' Man River", the song from the musical Showboat that had been made famous by the actor, singer, and most importantly civil rights activist Paul Robeson: [Excerpt: Paul Robeson, "Ol' Man River"] Cooke had recorded his own version of that in 1958, but now in early 1964 he took the general pace, some melodic touches, the mention of the river, and particularly the lines "I'm tired of livin' and scared of dyin'", and used them to create something new. Oddly for a song that would inspire a civil rights anthem -- or possibly just appropriately, in the circumstances, "Ol' Man River" in its original form featured several racial slurs included by the white lyricist, Oscar Hammerstein, and indeed Robeson himself in later live performances changed the very lines that Cooke would later appropriate, changing them as he thought they were too defeatist for a Black activist to sing: [Excerpt: Paul Robeson, "Ol' Man River (alternative lyrics)"] Cooke's song would keep the original sense, in his lines "It's been too hard livin' but I'm afraid to die", but the most important thing was the message -- "a change is gonna come". The session at which he recorded it was to be his last with Luigi, whose contract with RCA was coming to an end, and Cooke knew it had to be something special. Rene Hall came up with an arrangement for a full orchestra, which so overawed Cooke's regular musicians that his drummer found himself too nervous to play on the session. Luckily, Earl Palmer was recording next door, and was persuaded to come and fill in for him. Hall's arrangement starts with an overture played by the whole orchestra: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "A Change is Gonna Come"] And then each verse features different instrumentation, with the instruments changing at the last line of each verse -- "a change is gonna come". The first verse is dominated by the rhythm section: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "A Change is Gonna Come"] Then for the second verse, the strings come in, for the third the strings back down and are replaced by horns, and then at the end the whole orchestra swells up behind Cooke: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "A Change is Gonna Come"] Cooke was surprised when Luigi, at the end of the session, told him how much he liked the song, which Cooke thought wouldn't have been to Luigi's taste, as Luigi made simple pop confections, not protest songs. But as Luigi later explained, "But I did like it. It was a serious piece, but still it was him. Some of the other stuff was throwaway, but this was very deep. He was really digging into himself for this one." Cooke was proud of his new record, but also had something of a bad feeling about it, something that was confirmed when he played the record for Bobby Womack, who told him "it sounds like death". Cooke agreed, there was something premonitory about the record, something ominous. Allen Klein, on the other hand, was absolutely ecstatic. The track was intended to be used only as an album track -- they were going in a more R&B direction with Cooke's singles at this point. His previous single was a cover version of Howlin' Wolf's "Little Red Rooster”: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "Little Red Rooster"] And his next two singles were already recorded -- a secularised version of the old spiritual "Ain't That Good News", and a rewrite of an old Louis Jordan song. Cooke was booked on to the Johnny Carson show, where he was meant to perform both sides of his new single, but Allen Klein was so overwhelmed by "A Change is Gonna Come" that he insisted that Cooke drop "Ain't That Good News" and perform his new song instead. Cooke said that he was meant to be on there to promote his new record. Klein insisted that he was meant to be promoting *himself*, and that the best promotion for himself would be this great song. Cooke then said that the Tonight Show band didn't have all the instruments needed to reproduce the orchestration. Klein said that if RCA wouldn't pay for the additional eighteen musicians, he would pay for them out of his own pocket. Cooke eventually agreed. Unfortunately, there seems to exist no recording of that performance, the only time Cooke would ever perform "A Change is Gonna Come" live, but reports from people who watched it at the time suggest that it made as much of an impact on Black people watching as the Beatles' appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show two days later made on white America. "A Change is Gonna Come" became a standard of the soul repertoire, recorded by Aretha Franklin: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "A Change is Gonna Come"] Otis Redding: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "A Change is Gonna Come"] The Supremes and more. Cooke licensed it to a compilation album released as a fundraiser for Martin Luther King's campaigning, and when King was shot in 1968, Rosa Parks spent the night crying in her mother's arms, and they listened to "A Change is Gonna Come". She said ”Sam's smooth voice was like medicine to the soul. It was as if Dr. King was speaking directly to me.” After his Tonight Show appearance, Cooke was in the perfect position to move into the real big time. Allen Klein had visited Brian Epstein on RCA's behalf to see if Epstein would sign the Beatles to RCA for a million-dollar advance. Epstein wasn't interested, but he did suggest to Klein that possibly Cooke could open for the Beatles when they toured the US in 1965. And Cooke was genuinely excited about the British Invasion and the possibilities it offered for the younger musicians he was mentoring. When Bobby Womack complained that the Rolling Stones had covered his song "It's All Over Now" and deprived his band of a hit, Cooke explained to Womack first that he'd be making a ton of money from the songwriting royalties, but also that Womack and his brothers were in a perfect position -- they were young men with long hair who played guitars and drums. If the Valentinos jumped on the bandwagon they could make a lot of money from this new style. But Cooke was going to make a lot of money from older styles. He'd been booked into the Copacabana again, and this time he was going to be a smash hit, not the failure he had been the first time. His residency at the club was advertised with a billboard in Times Square, and he came on stage every night to a taped introduction from Sammy Davis Jr.: [Excerpt: Sammy Davis Jr. introducing Sam Cooke] Listening to the live album from that residency and comparing it to the live recordings in front of a Black audience from a year earlier is astonishing proof of Cooke's flexibility as a performer. The live album from the Harlem Square Club in Florida is gritty and gospel-fuelled, while the Copacabana show has Cooke as a smooth crooner in the style of Nat "King" Cole -- still with a soulful edge to his vocals, but completely controlled and relaxed. The repertoire is almost entirely different as well -- other than "Twistin' the Night Away" and a ballad medley that included "You Send Me", the material was a mixture of old standards like "Bill Bailey" and "When I Fall In Love" and new folk protest songs like "If I Had a Hammer" and "Blowin' in the Wind", the song that had inspired "A Change is Gonna Come": [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "Blowin' in the Wind"] What's astonishing is that both live albums, as different as they are, are equally good performances. Cooke by this point was an artist who could perform in any style, and for any audience, and do it well. In November 1964, Cooke recorded a dance song, “Shake”, and he prepared a shortened edit of “A Change is Gonna Come” to release as its B-side. The single was scheduled for release on December 22nd. Both sides charted, but by the time the single came out, Sam Cooke was dead. And from this point on, the story gets even more depressing and upsetting than it has been. On December the eleventh, 1964, Sam Cooke drove a woman he'd picked up to an out-of the-way motel. According to the woman, he tore off most of her clothes against her will, as well as getting undressed himself, and she was afraid he was going to rape her. When he went to the toilet, she gathered up all of her clothes and ran out, and in her hurry she gathered up his clothes as well. Some of Cooke's friends have suggested that she was in fact known for doing this and stealing men's money, and that Cooke had been carrying a large sum of money which disappeared, but this seems unlikely on the face of it, given that she ran to a phone box and called the police, telling them that she had been kidnapped and didn't know where she was, and could they please help her? Someone else was on the phone at the same time. Bertha Lee Franklin, the motel's manager, was on the phone to the owner of the motel when Sam Cooke found out that his clothes were gone, and the owner heard everything that followed. Cooke turned up at the manager's office naked except for a sports jacket and shoes, drunk, and furious. He demanded to know where the girl was. Franklin told him she didn't know anything about any girl. Cooke broke down the door to the manager's office, believing that she must be hiding in there with his clothes. Franklin grabbed the gun she had to protect herself. Cooke struggled with her, trying to get the gun off her. The gun went off three times. The first bullet went into the ceiling, the next two into Cooke. Cooke's last words were a shocked "Lady, you shot me". Cooke's death shocked everyone, and immediately many of his family and friends started questioning the accepted version of the story. And it has to be said that they had good reason to question it. Several people stood to benefit from Cooke's death -- he was talking about getting a divorce from his wife, who would inherit his money; he was apparently questioning his relationship with Klein, who gained complete ownership of his catalogue after his death, and Klein after all had mob connections in the person of Morris Levy; he had remained friendly with Malcolm X after X's split from the Nation of Islam and it was conceivable that Elijah Muhammad saw Cooke as a threat; while both Elvis and James Brown thought that Cooke setting up his own label had been seen as a threat by RCA, and that *they* had had something to do with it. And you have to understand that while false rape accusations basically never happen -- and I have to emphasise that here, women just *do not* make false rape accusations in any real numbers -- false rape accusations *had* historically been weaponised against Black men in large numbers in the early and mid twentieth century. Almost all lynchings followed a pattern -- a Black man owned a bit of land a white man wanted, a white woman connected to the white man accused the Black man of rape, the Black man was lynched, and his property was sold off at far less than cost to the white man who wanted it. The few lynchings that didn't follow that precise pattern still usually involved an element of sexualising the murdered Black men, as when only a few years earlier Emmett Till, a teenager, had been beaten to death, supposedly for whistling at a white woman. So Cooke's death very much followed the pattern of a lynching. Not exactly -- for a start, the woman he attacked was Black, and so was the woman who shot him -- but it was close enough that it rang alarm bells, completely understandably. But I think we have to set against that Cooke's history of arrogant entitlement to women's bodies, and his history of violence, both against his wife and, more rarely, against strangers who caught him in the wrong mood. Fundamentally, if you read enough about his life and behaviour, the official story just rings absolutely true. He seems like someone who would behave exactly in the way described. Or at least, he seems that way to me. But of course, I didn't know him, and I have never had to live with the threat of murder because of my race. And many people who did know him and have had to live with that threat have a different opinion, and that needs to be respected. The story of Cooke's family after his death is not one from which anyone comes out looking very good. His brother, L.C., pretty much immediately recorded a memorial album and went out on a tribute tour, performing his brother's hits: [Excerpt: L.C. Cooke, "Wonderful World"] Cooke's best friend, J.W. Alexander, also recorded a tribute album. Bertha Franklin sued the family of the man she had killed, because her own life had been ruined and she'd had to go into hiding, thanks to threats from his fans. Cooke's widow, Barbara, married Bobby Womack less than three months after Cooke's death -- and the only reason it wasn't sooner was that Womack had not yet turned twenty-one, and so they were not able to get married without Womack's parents' permission. They married the day after Womack's twenty-first birthday, and Womack was wearing one of Sam's suits at the ceremony. Womack was heard regularly talking about how much he looked like Sam. Two of Cooke's brothers were so incensed at the way that they thought Womack was stepping into their brother's life that they broke Womack's jaw -- and Barbara Cooke pulled a gun on them and tried to shoot them. Luckily for them, Womack had guessed that a confrontation was coming, and had removed the bullets from Barbara's gun, so there would be no more deaths in his mentor's family. Within a few months, Barbara was pregnant, and the baby, when he was born, was named Vincent, the same name as Sam and Barbara's dead son. Five years later, Barbara discovered that Womack had for some time been sexually abusing Linda, her and Sam's oldest child, who was seventeen at the time Barbara discovered this. She kicked Womack out, but Linda sided with Womack and never spoke to her mother again. Linda carried on a consensual relationship with Bobby Womack for some time, and then married Bobby's brother Cecil (or maybe it's pronounced Cee-cil in his case? I've never heard him spoken about), who also became her performing and songwriting partner. They wrote many songs for other artists, as well as having hits themselves as Womack and Womack: [Excerpt: Womack and Womack, "Teardrops"] The duo later changed their names to Zek and Zeriiya Zekkariyas, in recognition of their African heritage. Sam Cooke left behind a complicated legacy. He hurt almost everyone who was ever involved in his life, and yet all of them seem not only to have forgiven him but to have loved him in part because of the things he did that hurt them the most. What effect that has on one's view of his art must in the end be a matter for individual judgement, and I never, ever, want to suggest that great art in any way mitigates appalling personal behaviour. But at the same time, "A Change is Gonna Come" stands as perhaps the most important single record we'll look at in this history, one that marked the entry into the pop mainstream of Black artists making political statements on their own behalf, rather than being spoken for and spoken over by well-meaning white liberals like me. There's no neat conclusion I can come to here, no great lesson that can be learned and no pat answer that will make everything make sense. There's just some transcendent, inspiring, music, a bunch of horribly hurt people, and a young man dying, almost naked, in the most squalid circumstances imaginable.
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