Podcasts about Little Willie John

Today's show features music performed by Little Willie John and Amos Wilburn

durée : 00:59:30 - Du Nerf ! - par : Nathalie Piolé -

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

Send us a textWelcome to Guess the Year! This is an interactive, competitive podcast series where you will be able to play along and compete against your fellow listeners. Here is how the scoring works:10 points: Get the year dead on!7 points: 1-2 years off4 points: 3-5 years off1 point: 6-10 years offGuesses can be emailed to drandrewmay@gmail.com or texted using the link at the top of the show notes (please leave your name).I will read your scores out before the next episode, along with the scores of your fellow listeners! Please email your guesses to Andrew no later than 12pm EST on the day the next episode posts if you want them read out on the episode (e.g., if an episode releases on Monday, then I need your guesses by 12pm EST on Wednesday; if an episode releases on Friday, then I need your guesses by 12 pm EST on Monday). Note: If you don't get your scores in on time, they will still be added to the overall scores I am keeping. So they will count for the final scores - in other words, you can catch up if you get behind, you just won't have your scores read out on the released episode. All I need is your guesses (e.g., Song 1 - 19xx, Song 2 - 20xx, Song 3 - 19xx, etc.). Please be honest with your guesses! Best of luck!!The answers to today's ten songs can be found below. If you are playing along, don't scroll down until you have made your guesses. .....Have you made your guesses yet? If so, you can scroll down and look at the answers......Okay, answers coming. Don't peek if you haven't made your guesses yet!.....Intro song: Drunk in Love by Beyonce (feat. Jay-Z) (2013)Song 1: Your Wildest Dreams by The Moody Blues (1986)Song 2: Pony by Ginuwine (1996)Song 3: Cannonball by The Breeders (1993)Song 4: Broken Bones by KALEO (2016)Song 5: Say Something by Justin Timberlake (feat. Chris Stapleton) (2018)Song 6: The Rainbow by Ben Kweller (2012)Song 7: Ahead of Time by Just Jinger (1997)Song 8: Try Again by Aaliyah (2000)Song 9: Fever by Little Willie John (1956)Song 10: Why Do Fools Fall in Love by Frankie Lymon & the Teenagers (1956)

This week's show, after a 1968 Zombies zoom: brand new Bob Mould, Idaho, New Model Army, Bevil Web (Tobin Sprout), Flying Vipers, Laughing Chimes, and Chills, plus Little Willie John, Beckies, Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, Bobby Lee Trammell, The Boots,...

Today's show features music performed by Johnnie Taylor and Little Willie John

Little Willie John was a teenager when he recorded his first hit, “All Around the World,” for King Records, in 1955.When his career faded in 1962, John was a grizzled veteran of 25. Although rock & roll was once the province of the young, few singers under the age of 20 have been able to communicate more than jittery restlessness or poignant ache.Little Willie John did much more. Like his contemporaries Sam Cooke, Ray Charles and Clyde McPhatter, Little Willie John was a vanguard of soul.

Picoteamos en las compilaciones Born Bad, recopilatorios piratas lanzados a mediados de los 80 y construídos con muchas de las canciones que inspiraron e influenciaron al grupo The Cramps y a las emergentes bandas del psychobilly. Grupos y artistas que por sonido, temática o actitud eran mal vistos según los cánones de su tiempo. Chicos y chicas malas, ya sabes.Playlist;(sintonía) LINK WRAY and HIS RAY MEN “Fat back”DWIGHT PULLEN “Sunglasses after dark”WARREN SMITH “Uranium rock”ROY ORBISON “Domino”MEL ROBBINS “Save it”RONNIE DAWSON “Rockin’ bones”GLEN GLENN “Everybody’s movin’”WANDA JACKSON “Funnel of love”RONNIE COCK and THE GAYLADS “Goo goo muck”THE PHANTOM “Love me”JIMMY LLOYD “Rocket in my pocket”JIMMY STEWART “Rock on the moon”HASIL ADKINS “She said”DALE HAWKINS “Tornado”CHARLIE FEATHERS “I can’t hardly stand it”JODY REYNOLDS “Fire of love”LITTLE WILLIE JOHN “Fever”ANDRE WILLIAMS “Jail bait”ANDY STARR “Give me a woman”JACK SCOTT “The way I walk”DAVE “DIDDLEY” DAY “Blue moon baby”RICKY NELSON “Lonesome town”Escuchar audio

The R&B singer was known for his chart successes like the 1956 hit "Fever", but his career ended following a conviction of manslaughter in 1965. He died in prison in 1968 at the age of 30.

Henry Glover definió a Little Willie John como "el artista de todos los artistas". Glover no bromeaba: "Tenía una clase propia. Era un solista realmente genial. En aquella época nadie podía hacerle sombra". James Brown lo calificó de "intérprete de soul antes de que a nadie se le ocurriera llamarlo así". Conduce y edita Jose M Corrales t.me/EnfoqueCritico (https://t.me/EnfoqueCritico) debateafondo@gmail.com @EnfoqueCritico_ facebook.com/DebateAFondo facebook.com/josemanuel.corrales.750/ https://www.youtube.com/@EnfoqueCritico Instagram enfoquecritico Mastodon @EnfoqueCritico@masto.es

Today's show features music performed by Little Willie John and Amos Wilburn

Label: Reprise 17734Year: 1995Condition: MPrice: $6.50From a warehouse find, this is a new, unplayed stock copy... pristine Mint. Hardly one of Dwight Yoakam's signature tunes, nonetheless "Nothing" is a great demonstration of the qualities that make him one of the greatest American singer/songwriter of the last 20 years. For me, Yoakam's willingness to bend the country music genre---to reach out and incorporate musical elements from from pop, rock, & soul---put him in with the class of heroes that made American music from the last half of the 1900's the worldwide phenomenon it became. Only the American melting pot could have produced Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Charlie Rich, James Brown, Eddie Cochran, the Dell-Vikings, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash, Sam Cooke, John Fogerty, Buck Owens, Little Willie John, Ray Charles, George Jones, and all the hundreds of other pioneers of rockabilly, rock & soul. And it was those folks who, in turn, so inspired Britain's youth that the rock & roll revolution regained momentum and started rolling in whole new directions. Dwight Yoakam's muse reaches back into that melting pot, harmonizing beautifully with the qualities that made those early pioneers great. And this humble tune is simply a nice, seldom-heard example of Yoakam's genius. Note that both sides hit the country chart, as the rollicking rockabilly B side took off in early 1996. Unfortunately, despite Yoakam's clear "crossover" appeal, pop/rock radio has pretty much ignored him.

This week on the Music Halls of Fame Podcast, we honor the year in music for 1996, along 1996 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Little Willie John, we look at the case for putting Kool & the Gang into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and our spotlight hall of fame is the ARIA Hall of Fame in Melbourne, Australia & inductee INXS. Podcast Music Playlist - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSMDYrumQfYQE_vx1Oa3EmjqSEzhY60ie Rock & Roll Hall of Fame - RockHall.com ARIA Hall of Fame - artscentremelbourne.com.au ALL MY MUSIC HALLS OF FAME AUDIO PODCAST LINKS - allmylinks.com/musichallsoffamepodcast CHECK OUT MY OTHER PODCAST, THE MUSIC HISTORY TODAY PODCAST - YouTube link - www.youtube.com/channel/UC2JR8blGysKFpOB__soF5uw/ --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/musichistorytodaypodcast/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/musichistorytodaypodcast/support

As part of our Let It Roll Nightmares series we're re-casting Nate's 2019 interview with Susan Whitall author of  Fever: Little Willie John: A Fast Life, Mysterious Death, and the Birth of Soul." Buy the book and support the show. CHECK OUT THE NEW LET IT ROLL WEB SITE -- We've got all 350+ episodes listed, organized by mini-series, genre, era, co-host, guest and more. Please sign up for the email list on the site and get music essays from Nate as well as (eventually) transcriptions of every episode. Also if you can afford it please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support the show. Thanks! Have a question or a suggestion for a topic or person for Nate to interview? Email letitrollpodcast@gmail.com Follow us on Twitter. Follow us on Facebook. Let It Roll is proud to be part of Pantheon Podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week's show, after a 1959 Little Willie John lilt: brand new The Bevis Frond, Plush Machine, Small Square, The Smile, Seablite, Anderson Council, and Tulipomania, plus The Coasters (The Robins), Rulers, Webb Pierce, Joe Simon, Martin Carthy, Blind...

Today's show features music performed by Little Willie John and Bobby Blue Bland

Some say Willie West's greatest musical triumph was in the 1970s when he was the lead singer for the iconic pop group, the Meters. But Willie has never stopped singing, as his new CD The Soul Sessions attests. In a conversation with Phil Nusbaum, Willie told about how the songs on the CD are special to him, such as Talk to Me, composed by Little Willie John.

Keith, or more commonly known as Deuce, is a musician, producer, and Detroit Pistons enthusiast. Music has always been in Keith's blood with his grandfather being Little Willie John, a R&B musician from the 1950s and 60s, and a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Additionally, Keith's uncle performed as Stevie Wonder's lead background vocalist for over 30 years. Music was always something that Keith grew up around so it was only logical that he would dabble in it himself and turn that into his career. While music has always been a passion of Keith's, so has the Detroit Pistons. Keith has watched the Pistons all of his life and has seen their Championship years and the tougher more recent rebuilding years. Keith decided to combine his passions and that's when Downtown Deuce was born. Now Keith is using his musical talents and making anthems about the Detroit Pistons not only for the team, but for the city of Detroit. Keith's current hit, Destination Restoration, is a song about how this young Pistons team is looking to bring excitement and a winning culture back to Detroit. Destination Restoration has been a massive hit for all Pistons' fans. Before every Pistons home game, Destination Restoration can be heard throughout Little Caesars Arena. Keith has been a major beacon of light for the city of Detroit and I cannot wait to see what else is in store for him. In this episode Keith talks about the city of Detroit, music, mindset, the Detroit Pistons, and much more! Connect with Keith! Twitter: @DowntownDeuce Instagram: @downtowndeuce All Music Streaming Services: Downtown Deuce YouTube: https://youtube.com/@downtowndeuce Connect with me! Personal: Instagram/Twitter/Facebook: @zachhose14 Email: zachhose14@gmail.com The Official Podcast: Instagram/Facebook: @zappodcastofficial If you want want to be a guest on the podcast, I'd love to have you! Feel free to reach out directly! --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/zappodcastofficial/message

Originally broadcast January 22, 2023We spin tunes by Big Ella, Little Willie John, Ben E. King, Barbara Lynn, Edwin Starr, The Coasters, and more!Willie Mitchell / That Driving BeatJackie Wilson / You Brought About a Change In MeEdwin Starr / My Weakness Is YouSolomon Burke / (No, No, No) Can't Stop Lovin' You NowThe Manhattans / Teach Me (The "Philly" Dog)Little Willie John / Doll FaceTheola Kilgore / I Know That He Loves MeMarion Black / Who KnowsMajor Lance / Little Young LoverMel & Tim / Do Right BabyFive Stairsteps & Cubie / Little Young LoverBarbara Lynn / I'm a Good WomanThe Furys / Zing! Went The String of My HeartLes Chanceliers / La Génération D'Aujourd'huiThe Bobby Fuller Four / The Magic TouchThe RPM's / Memphis BeatBill Deal & the Rhondels / I've Been HurtBoyd Bennett / Ba-BehThe Coasters / Bad BloodBen E. King / Stand By MeThe Starlets / Better Tell Him NoPaul Anka / Uh HuhBaby Washington / Run My HeartShirley Ellis / I See It, I Like It, I Want ItMarty Balin / Nobody But YouChubby Checker / Popeye the HitchhikerFrankie Valli & The Four Seasons / HickoryThe Spinners / I Cross My HeartTommy Hunt / The ClownJohnny Thunder & Ruby Winters / Make Love To MeBig Ella / The QueenHarry Starr / Another Time, Another PlaceDean Parrish / DeterminationThe Metros / Since I Found My BabyLinda Jones / A Last Minute MiracleAnna King / Come And Get These MemoriesThe Casinos / I Still Love YouThe Da-Kars / Shot In The Dark Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Label: King 5394Year: 1960Condition: M-Last Price: $30.00. Not currently available for sale.This actually turned out to be John's biggest Pop hit and is certainly one of his most beloved numbers today. Great flip side, too! Note: This beautiful copy comes in a vintage King/Federal Records factory sleeve. It grades Near Mint across the board (Labels, Vinyl, Audio).

Vera Hall "Death, Have Mercy"Fleetwood Mac "Green Manalishi (With the Two Pronged Crown)"Bessie Smith "Graveyard Dream Blues"Billy Joe Shaver "The Devil Made Me Do It the First Time"Ted Leo and the Pharmacists "I'm A Ghost"Sister Rosetta Tharpe "Strange Things Happening Every Day"Tampa Red "Witchin' Hour Blues"Neil Young "Vampire Blues"Lefty Frizzell "The Long Black Veil"Muddy Waters "Got My Mojo Working"Dr. John "Black John the Conqueror"Leon Redbone "Haunted House"Little Willie John "I'm Shakin'"Shotgun Jazz Band "Old Man Mose"Lil Green "Romance In the Dark"The Make-Up "They Live By Night"Uncle Tupelo "Graveyard Shift"Bessie Jones "Oh Death"Albert King "Born Under a Bad Sign"Nina Simone "I Want a Little Sugar In My Bowl"Oscar Celestin "Marie Laveau"Reverend Gary Davis "Death Don't Have No Mercy"Roy Newman & His Boys "Sadie Green (The Vamp of New Orleans)"Jessie Mae Hemphill "She-Wolf"Screamin' Jay Hawkins "I Put a Spell On You"Eilen Jewell "It's Your Voodoo Working"George Olsen and His Music "Tain't No Sin to Dance Around in Your Bones"Son House "Death Letter"Johnny Cash "The Man Comes Around"Fleetwood Mac "Black Magic Woman"Blind Lemon Jefferson "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean"Elvis Costello & the Roots "Wise Up Ghost"Hank Williams "Howlin' At the Moon"Bob Dylan "That Old Black Magic"The Halo Benders "Scarin'"Blind Willie Johnson "Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground"Steve And Justin Townes Earle "Candy Man"Billie Holiday "Sugar"Jeff Beck "I Ain't Superstitious"Cab Calloway/Cab Calloway Orchestra "St. James Infirmary"Bonnie Raitt "Devil Got My Woman"Sebadoh "Vampire"Fred McDowell "Death Came In"Howlin' Wolf "Evil"Ella Fitzgerald "Chew-Chew-Chew (Your Bubble Gum)"Robert Johnson "Hellhound On My Trail"John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers "The Super-Natural"Tom Waits "Big Joe and Phantom 309"

This week's show, after a 1982 Descendents refrain: brand new Beatles, Sloan, I Was a King, Wet Leg, Black Nite Crash, Robert Forster, and Sadies; plus Pete Ham, Little Willie John, Hank Snow, Fats Domino, Electric Light Orchestra, Guy Lombardo & His R...

469. Part 2 of our interview with Sybil Gage. Born and raised in New Orleans Sybil Gage had front row schooling in what makes that city great. Now living in Florida, Sybil is spreading New Orleans music to the rest of the world. The “Little Dynamo” is slinky in sequins, and funky in fishnets and has become the darling of the East Coast from New Orleans (Old U.S. Mint Theater) to New York City (Triad Theater W. 72nd St. Broadway). Witness “Sybil Gage and Her Mighty Catahoulas” and a typical evening will include the legendary music of Professor Longhair and James Booker, fun tunes from Smiley Lewis and Jesse Hill and Eddie Bo, blues from Elmore James, Little Willie John, Mississippi John Hurt, Robert Johnson, Etta James, Gus Cannon, as well as many of her own award winning original contributions. On intimate evenings, with only piano to accompany, she sings Pre War Blues, Hokum, Traditional New Orleans inspired Jazz and original tunes that fit seamlessly into her vast repertoire. This week in Louisiana history. May 14, 1845. First free public school opened in LA. This week in New Orleans history. On May 14, 2011, the Morganza Spillway on the Mississippi River was opened for the second time in its history, deliberately flooding 3,000 square miles of rural Louisiana and placing three nuclear power plants at risk to avert possible flooding in Baton Rouge and New Orleans. This week in Louisiana. Bogalusa Balloon Fest May 20-22, 2022 10:00 am - 10:00 pm 401 Walker St. Bogalusa LA 70427 We are a hot air balloon festival which includes hot air balloons, a carnival, vendors and live entertainment. May 20-22, 2022 10:00 am - 10:00 pm Amenities: Senior Citizen Discount, Student Discount, Family Friendly, Free Parking. View Website Phone: 985-750-3905 Email: bprcc.70427@gmail.com Postcards from Louisiana. Guitarist on Royal St.Listen on iTunes.Listen on Google Play.Listen on Google Podcasts.Listen on Spotify.Listen on Stitcher.Listen on TuneIn.The Louisiana Anthology Home Page.Like us on Facebook.  

Bing Crosby "Try A Little Tenderness"Ruth Brown "Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean"Hank Williams "Long Gone Lonesome Blues"Eilen Jewell "Hallelujah Band"John Hammond "Murder In The Red Barn"Langhorne Slim "Alligator Girl"Ted Hawkins "North to Alaska"Martha Carter "I'm Through Crying"THE BLACK CROWES "She Gave Good Sunflower"Steve Earle "Now She's Gone"James McMurtry "Song for a Deck Hand's Daughter"Geeshie Wiley "Last Kind Word Blues"Lucinda Williams "Can't Let Go"The Wandering "Old Joe Clark"Freddy King "Have You Ever Loved A Woman"Hank Penny And His California Cowhands "What She's Got Is Mine"Little Miss Jessie "My Baby Has Gone"Lyle Lovett "If I Had a Boat"Howlin' Wolf "Sugar Mama (Live 1963)"Buddie Emmons "Bluemmons"Joan Shelley "We'd Be Home"Lucero "The Only One"Little Willie John "Fever"George Jones "White Lightning"Benny Goodman & His Orchestra "Your Mother's Son-In-Law"Slim Harpo "Buzz Me Babe"Loretta Lynn "Heartaches Meet Mr. Blues"Neko Case "Deep Red Bells"Bo Diddley "Pretty Thing"Bonnie Raitt "Give It up or Let Me Go"Jimmy & Mama Yancey "Santa Fe Blues"Gillian Welch "I Had a Real Good Mother and Father"Jimmie Rodgers "Long Tall Mama Blues"Arthur Crudup "That's Alright Mama"Satan and Adam "Crawdad Hole""Sweet" Emma Barrett and Her Dixieland Boys "I Ain't Gonna Give Nobody None of This Jelly Roll"Bob Dylan "Floater (Too Much to Ask)"Trixie Butler "You Got The Right Key"Pearl Reaves "Step It Up And Go"Pearl Reaves "You Can't Stay Here"Pearl Reeves And The Concords "You Can't Stay Here"Milton Brown "Easy Ridin' Papa"Albert King "I'll Play The Blues For You (Album Version - (Parts 1 & 2))"Andrew Bird "Fake Palindromes"Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys "Steel Guitar Rag"Reverend Gary Davis "Motherless Children"Blue Lu Barker "Loan Me Your Husband (03-21-49)"Tom Waits "Tom Traubert's Blues (Four Sheets To The Wind In Copenhagen)"Bessie Smith "I Used to Be Your Sweet Mama"Beastie Boys "Slow and Low"

468. Part 1 of our interview with returning guest Sybil Gage. Born and raised in New Orleans Sybil had front row schooling in what makes that city great. Now living in Florida, Sybil is spreading New Orleans music to the rest of the world. The “Little Dynamo” is slinky in sequins, and funky in fishnets and has become the darling of the East Coast from New Orleans (Old U.S. Mint Theater) to New York City (Triad Theater W. 72nd St. Broadway). Witness “Sybil Gage and Her Mighty Catahoulas” and a typical evening will include the legendary music of Professor Longhair and James Booker, fun tunes from Smiley Lewis and Jesse Hill and Eddie Bo, blues from Elmore James, Little Willie John, Mississippi John Hurt, Robert Johnson, Etta James, Gus Cannon, as well as many of her own award winning original contributions. On intimate evenings, with only piano to accompany, she sings Pre War Blues, Hokum, Traditional New Orleans inspired Jazz and original tunes that fit seamlessly into her vast repertoire. This week in Louisiana history. May 7, 1862. The Union Army captures Baton Rouge during the Civil War. This week in New Orleans history. The corner stone for Notre Dame Seminary on Carrollton Avenue was laid on May 7, 1922. This week in Louisiana. 46th Annual Cochon de Lait Festival 1832 Leglise Mansura, LA 71350 May 12-15, 2022 The first official festival was in 1961, but that doesn't mean that is when the magic happened. That happend in 1960 during Mansura's Centennial celebration when over 10,000 people converged on Mansura. From that weekend on, Mansura has been known as the Cochon de Lait Festival of the world. After celebrating for 12 years straight and a record crowd of 100,000 in 1972, the town of Mansura took a little break. That all changed in 1987 when the Cochon de Lait festival was revived and Mansura has been never been the same again. We continue the tradition again this year. The Mansura Chamber of Commerce invites you to come pass a good time and join us for the 46th annual Cochon de Lait Festival! Postcards from Louisiana. Lauren Sturm sings and plays piano. Listen on iTunes.Listen on Google Play.Listen on Google Podcasts.Listen on Spotify.Listen on Stitcher.Listen on TuneIn.The Louisiana Anthology Home Page.Like us on Facebook.  

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"

WhoooooWHEEEEE WE ARE BAAACK! It's the first show of 2022, recorded at the end of 2021 - and my engineer, Dr. Paul Bertolino and I have a lot of laughs, and a lot of wild originals and even wilder covers by - Fleetwood Mac, Iggy Pop, Little Willie John, The Stylistics, Ben Folds 5, The Cowsills and more! Listen, enjoy, subscribe if you haven't already - and please tell your friends!!

durée : 00:04:13 - Tubes N' Co - par : Rebecca Manzoni - Cette chanson "Fever" d'abord chantée par Little Willie John est adaptée en 1958 par Peggy Lee qui en fera un tube.

Amanda Shires "Wasn't I Paying Attention"Lula Reed "Watch Dog"Neil Young & Crazy Horse "Barstool Blues"Booker T. "Get Behind The Mule"Dr. John "Wash, Mama, Wash"Bettye LaVette "Piece of My Heart"M. Ward "Requiem"Iron & Wine "Call It Dreaming"Built To Spill "Out of Site"Gillian Welch "I Dream a Highway"Bob Dylan "I Contain Multitudes"Bonnie 'Prince' Billy & Matt Sweeney "Make Worry for Me"R.L. Burnside "Rollin' and Tumblin'"Lucinda Williams "Well Well Well"Hank Williams "Howlin' at the Moon"Ry Cooder "Hey Porter"Grateful Dead "New Speedway Boogie"Bo Diddley "Cops and Robbers"Dave Alvin "Cherry Red Blues"Big Joe Williams "Levee Camp Blues"Shovels & Rope "Bad as Me"Bikini Kill "Reject All American"Curtis Harding "The One"D'Angelo "Chicken Grease"Lee Morgan "Cornbread"De La Soul "Eye Patch"Red Hot Chili Peppers "Readymade"Booker T. Jones "The Bronx"Otis Redding "Ole Man Trouble (Mono)"Big Daddy Kane "It's a Big Daddy Thing"Adia Victoria "Magnolia Blues"Lee Morgan "The Sidewinder"John Moreland "Hang Me in the Tulsa County Stars"Neil Young "Walk On"Old 97's "What We Talk About"Betty Harris "There's a Break in the Road"Little Willie John "I'm Shakin'"Albert King "The Hunter"Elvis Costello & The Attractions "Temptation"Cheap Trick "I Want You To Want Me"

Episode one hundred and thirty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Papa's Got a Brand New Bag” by James Brown, and at how Brown went from a minor doo-wop artist to the pioneer of funk. 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 "I'm a Fool" by Dino, Desi, and Billy. 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/ NB an early version of this was uploaded, in which I said "episode 136" rather than 137 and "flattened ninth" at one point rather than "ninth". I've fixed that in a new upload, which is otherwise unchanged. Resources As usual, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I relied mostly on fur books for this episode. James Brown: The Godfather of Soul, by James Brown with Bruce Tucker, is a celebrity autobiography with all that that entails, but a more interesting read than many. Kill ‘Em and Leave: Searching for the Real James Brown, by James McBride is a more discursive, gonzo journalism piece, and well worth a read. Black and Proud: The Life of James Brown by Geoff Brown is a more traditional objective biography. And Douglas Wolk's 33 1/3 book on Live at the Apollo is a fascinating, detailed, look at that album. This box set is the best collection of Brown's work there is, but is out of print. This two-CD set has all the essential hits. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript [Introduction, the opening of Live at the Apollo. "So now, ladies and gentlemen, it is star time. Are you ready for star time? [Audience cheers, and gives out another cheer with each musical sting sting] Thank you, and thank you very kindly. It is indeed a great pleasure to present to you in this particular time, national and international known as the hardest working man in showbusiness, Man that sing "I'll Go Crazy"! [sting] "Try Me" [sting] "You've Got the Power" [sting] "Think" [sting], "If You Want Me" [sting] "I Don't Mind" [sting] "Bewildered" [sting] million-dollar seller "Lost Someone" [sting], the very latest release, "Night Train" [sting] Let's everybody "Shout and Shimmy" [sting] Mr. Dynamite, the amazing Mr. Please Please himself, the star of the show, James Brown and the Famous Flames"] In 1951, the composer John Cage entered an anechoic chamber at Harvard University. An anechoic chamber is a room that's been completely soundproofed, so no sound can get in from the outside world, and in which the walls, floor, and ceiling are designed to absorb any sounds that are made. It's as close as a human being can get to experiencing total silence. When Cage entered it, he expected that to be what he heard -- just total silence. Instead, he heard two noises, a high-pitched one and a low one. Cage was confused by this -- why hadn't he heard the silence? The engineer in charge of the chamber explained to him that what he was hearing was himself -- the high-pitched noise was Cage's nervous system, and the low-pitched one was his circulatory system. Cage later said about this, "Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music." The experience inspired him to write his most famous piece, 4'33, in which a performer attempts not to make any sound for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. The piece is usually described as being four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence, but it actually isn't -- the whole point is that there is no silence, and that the audience is meant to listen to the ambient noise and appreciate that noise as music. Here is where I would normally excerpt the piece, but of course for 4'33 to have its full effect, one has to listen to the whole thing. But I can excerpt another piece Cage wrote. Because on October the twenty-fourth 1962 he wrote a sequel to 4'33, a piece he titled 0'00, but which is sometimes credited as "4'33 no. 2". He later reworked the piece, but the original score, which is dedicated to two avant-garde Japanese composers, Toshi Ichiyanagi and his estranged wife Yoko Ono, reads as follows: "In a situation provided with maximum amplification (no feedback), perform a disciplined action." Now, as it happens, we have a recording of someone else performing Cage's piece, as written, on the day it was written, though neither performer nor composer were aware that that was what was happening. But I'm sure everyone can agree that this recording from October the 24th, 1962, is a disciplined action performed with maximum amplification and no feedback: [Excerpt: James Brown, "Night Train" (Live at the Apollo version)] When we left James Brown, almost a hundred episodes ago, he had just had his first R&B number one, with "Try Me", and had performed for the first time at the venue with which he would become most associated, the Harlem Apollo, and had reconnected with the mother he hadn't seen since he was a small child. But at that point, in 1958, he was still just the lead singer of a doo-wop group, one of many, and there was nothing in his shows or his records to indicate that he was going to become anything more than that, nothing to distinguish him from King Records labelmates like Hank Ballard, who made great records, put on a great live show, and are still remembered more than sixty years later, but mostly as a footnote. Today we're going to look at the process that led James Brown from being a peer of Ballard or Little Willie John to being arguably the single most influential musician of the second half of the twentieth century. Much of that influence is outside rock music, narrowly defined, but the records we're going to look at this time and in the next episode on Brown are records without which the entire sonic landscape of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries would be unimaginably different. And that process started in 1958, shortly after the release of "Try Me" in October that year, with two big changes to Brown's organisation. The first was that this was -- at least according to Brown -- when he first started working with Universal Attractions, a booking agency run by a man named Ben Bart, who before starting his own company had spent much of the 1940s working for Moe Gale, the owner of the Savoy Ballroom and manager of the Ink Spots, Louis Jordan, and many of the other acts we looked at in the very first episodes of this podcast. Bart had started his own agency in 1945, and had taken the Ink Spots with him, though they'd returned to Gale a few years later, and he'd been responsible for managing the career of the Ravens, one of the first bird groups: [Excerpt: The Ravens, "Rock Me All Night Long"] In the fifties, Bart had become closely associated with King Records, the label to which Brown and the Famous Flames were signed. A quick aside here -- Brown's early records were released on Federal Records, and later they switched to being released on King, but Federal was a subsidiary label for King, and in the same way that I don't distinguish between Checker and Chess, Tamla and Motown, or Phillips and Sun, I'll just refer to King throughout. Bart and Universal Attractions handled bookings for almost every big R&B act signed by King, including Tiny Bradshaw, Little Willie John, the "5" Royales, and Hank Ballard and the Midnighters. According to some sources, the Famous Flames signed with Universal Attractions at the same time they signed with King Records, and Bart's family even say it was Bart who discovered them and got them signed to King in the first place. Other sources say they didn't sign with Universal until after they'd proved themselves on the charts. But everyone seems agreed that 1958 was when Bart started making Brown a priority and taking an active interest in his career. Within a few years, Bart would have left Universal, handing the company over to his son and a business partner, to devote himself full-time to managing Brown, with whom he developed an almost father-son relationship. With Bart behind them, the Famous Flames started getting better gigs, and a much higher profile on the chitlin circuit. But around this time there was another change that would have an even more profound effect. Up to this point, the Famous Flames had been like almost every other vocal group playing the chitlin' circuit, in that they hadn't had their own backing musicians. There were exceptions, but in general vocal groups would perform with the same backing band as every other act on a bill -- either a single backing band playing for a whole package tour, or a house band at the venue they were playing at who would perform with every act that played that venue. There would often be a single instrumentalist with the group, usually a guitarist or piano player, who would act as musical director to make sure that the random assortment of musicians they were going to perform with knew the material. This was, for the most part, how the Famous Flames had always performed, though they had on occasion also performed their own backing in the early days. But now they got their own backing band, centred on J.C. Davis as sax player and bandleader, Bobby Roach on guitar, Nat Kendrick on drums, and Bernard Odum on bass. Musicians would come and go, but this was the core original lineup of what became the James Brown Band. Other musicians who played with them in the late fifties were horn players Alfred Corley and Roscoe Patrick, guitarist Les Buie, and bass player Hubert Perry, while keyboard duties would be taken on by Fats Gonder, although James Brown and Bobby Byrd would both sometimes play keyboards on stage. At this point, as well, the lineup of the Famous Flames became more or less stable. As we discussed in the previous episode on Brown, the original lineup of the Famous Flames had left en masse when it became clear that they were going to be promoted as James Brown and the Famous Flames, with Brown getting more money, rather than as a group. Brown had taken on another vocal group, who had previously been Little Richard's backing vocalists, but shortly after "Try Me" had come out, but before they'd seen any money from it, that group had got into an argument with Brown over money he owed them. He dropped them, and they went off to record unsuccessfully as the Fabulous Flames on a tiny label, though the records they made, like "Do You Remember", are quite good examples of their type: [Excerpt: The Fabulous Flames, "Do You Remember?"] Brown pulled together a new lineup of Famous Flames, featuring two of the originals. Johnny Terry had already returned to the group earlier, and stayed when Brown sacked the rest of the second lineup of Flames, and they added Lloyd Bennett and Bobby Stallworth. And making his second return to the group was Bobby Byrd, who had left with the other original members, joined again briefly, and then left again. Oddly, the first commercial success that Brown had after these lineup changes was not with the Famous Flames, or even under his own name. Rather, it was under the name of his drummer, Nat Kendrick. Brown had always seen himself, not primarily as a singer, but as a band leader and arranger. He was always a jazz fan first and foremost, and he'd grown up in the era of the big bands, and musicians he'd admired growing up like Lionel Hampton and Louis Jordan had always recorded instrumentals as well as vocal selections, and Brown saw himself very much in that tradition. Even though he couldn't read music, he could play several instruments, and he could communicate his arrangement ideas, and he wanted to show off the fact that he was one of the few R&B musicians with his own tight band. The story goes that Syd Nathan, the owner of King Records, didn't like the idea, because he thought that the R&B audience at this point only wanted vocal tracks, and also because Brown's band had previously released an instrumental which hadn't sold. Now, this is a definite pattern in the story of James Brown -- it seems that at every point in Brown's career for the first decade, Brown would come up with an idea that would have immense commercial value, Nathan would say it was the most ridiculous thing he'd ever heard, Brown would do it anyway, and Nathan would later admit that he was wrong. This is such a pattern -- it apparently happened with "Please Please Please", Brown's first hit, *and* "Try Me", Brown's first R&B number one, and we'll see it happen again later in this episode -- that one tends to suspect that maybe these stories were sometimes made up after the fact, especially since Syd Nathan somehow managed to run a successful record label for over twenty years, putting out some of the best R&B and country records from everyone from Moon Mullican to Wynonie Harris, the Stanley Brothers to Little Willie John, while if these stories are to be believed he was consistently making the most boneheaded, egregious, uncommercial decisions imaginable. But in this case, it seems to be at least mostly true, as rather than being released on King Records as by James Brown, "(Do the) Mashed Potatoes" was released on Dade Records as by Nat Kendrick and the Swans, with the DJ Carlton Coleman shouting vocals over Brown's so it wouldn't be obvious Brown was breaking his contract: [Excerpt: Nat Kendrick and the Swans, "(Do the)" Mashed Potatoes"] That made the R&B top ten,  and I've seen reports that Brown and his band even toured briefly as Nat Kendrick and the Swans, before Syd Nathan realised his mistake, and started allowing instrumentals to be released under the name "James Brown presents HIS BAND", starting with a cover of Bill Doggett's "Hold It": [Excerpt: James Brown Presents HIS BAND, "Hold It"] After the Nat Kendrick record gave Brown's band an instrumental success, the Famous Flames also came back from another mini dry spell for hits, with the first top twenty R&B hit for the new lineup, "I'll Go Crazy", which was followed shortly afterwards by their first pop top forty hit, "Think!": [Excerpt: James Brown and the Famous Flames, "Think!"] The success of "Think!" is at least in part down to Bobby Byrd, who would from this point on be Brown's major collaborator and (often uncredited) co-writer and co-producer until the mid-seventies. After leaving the Flames, and before rejoining them, Byrd had toured for a while with his own group, but had then gone to work for King Records at the request of Brown. King Records' pressing plant had equipment that sometimes produced less-than-ideal pressings of records, and Brown had asked Byrd to take a job there performing quality control, making sure that Brown's records didn't skip. While working there, Byrd also worked as a song doctor. His job was to take songs that had been sent in as demos, and rework them in the style of some of the label's popular artists, to make them more suitable, changing a song so it might fit the style of the "5" Royales or Little Willie John or whoever, and Byrd had done this for "Think", which had originally been recorded by the "5" Royales, whose leader, Lowman Pauling, had written it: [Excerpt: The "5" Royales, "Think"] Byrd had reworked the song to fit Brown's style and persona. It's notable for example that the Royales sing "How much of all your happiness have I really claimed?/How many tears have you cried for which I was to blame?/Darlin', I can't remember which was my fault/I tried so hard to please you—at least that's what I thought.” But in Brown's version this becomes “How much of your happiness can I really claim?/How many tears have you shed for which you was to blame?/Darlin', I can't remember just what is wrong/I tried so hard to please you—at least that's what I thought.” [Excerpt: James Brown and the Famous Flames, "Think"] In Brown's version, nothing is his fault, he's trying to persuade an unreasonable woman who has some problem he doesn't even understand, but she needs to think about it and she'll see that he's right, while in the Royales' version they're acknowledging that they're at fault, that they've done wrong, but they didn't *only* do wrong and maybe she should think about that too. It's only a couple of words' difference, but it changes the whole tenor of the song. "Think" would become the Famous Flames' first top forty hit on the pop charts, reaching number thirty-three. It went top ten on the R&B charts, and between 1959 and 1963 Brown and the Flames would have fifteen top-thirty R&B hits, going from being a minor doo-wop group that had had a few big hits to being consistent hit-makers, who were not yet household names, but who had a consistent sound that could be guaranteed to make the R&B charts, and who put on what was regarded as the best live show of any R&B band in the world. This was partly down to the type of discipline that Brown imposed on his band. Many band-leaders in the R&B world would impose fines on their band members, and Johnny Terry suggested that Brown do the same thing. As Bobby Byrd put it, "Many band leaders do it but it was Johnny's idea to start it with us and we were all for it ‘cos we didn't want to miss nothing. We wanted to be immaculate, clothes-wise, routine-wise and everything. Originally, the fines was only between James and us, The Famous Flames, but then James carried it over into the whole troupe. It was still a good idea because anybody joining The James Brown Revue had to know that they couldn't be messing up, and anyway, all the fines went into a pot for the parties we had." But Brown went much further with these fines than any other band leader, and would also impose them arbitrarily, and it became part of his reputation that he was the strictest disciplinarian in rhythm and blues music. One thing that became legendary among musicians was the way that he would impose fines while on stage. If a band member missed a note, or a dance step, or missed a cue, or had improperly polished shoes, Brown would, while looking at them, briefly make a flashing gesture with his hand, spreading his fingers out for a fraction of a second. To the audience, it looked like just part of Brown's dance routine, but the musician knew he had just been fined five dollars. Multiple flashes meant multiples of five dollars fined. Brown also developed a whole series of other signals to the band, which they had to learn, To quote Bobby Byrd again: "James didn't want anybody else to know what we was doing, so he had numbers and certain screams and spins. There was a certain spin he'd do and if he didn't do the complete spin you'd know it was time to go over here. Certain screams would instigate chord changes, but mostly it was numbers. James would call out football numbers, that's where we got that from. Thirty-nine — Sixteen —Fourteen — Two — Five — Three — Ninety-eight, that kind of thing. Number thirty-nine was always the change into ‘Please, Please, Please'. Sixteen is into a scream and an immediate change, not bam-bam but straight into something else. If he spins around and calls thirty-six, that means we're going back to the top again. And the forty-two, OK, we're going to do this verse and then bow out, we're leaving now. It was amazing." This, or something like this, is a fairly standard technique among more autocratic band leaders, a way of allowing the band as a whole to become a live compositional or improvisational tool for their leader, and Frank Zappa, for example, had a similar system. It requires the players to subordinate themselves utterly to the whim of the band leader, but also requires a band leader who knows the precise strengths and weaknesses of every band member and how they are likely to respond to a cue. When it works well, it can be devastatingly effective, and it was for Brown's live show. The Famous Flames shows soon became a full-on revue, with other artists joining the bill and performing with Brown's band. From the late 1950s on, Brown would always include a female singer. The first of these was Sugar Pie DeSanto, a blues singer who had been discovered (and given her stage name) by Johnny Otis, but DeSanto soon left Brown's band and went on to solo success on Chess records, with hits like "Soulful Dress": [Excerpt: Sugar Pie DeSanto, "Soulful Dress"] After DeSanto left, she was replaced by  Bea Ford, the former wife of the soul singer Joe Tex, with whom Brown had an aggressive rivalry and mutual loathing. Ford and Brown recorded together, cutting tracks like "You Got the Power": [Excerpt: James Brown and Bea Ford, "You Got the Power"] However, Brown and Ford soon fell out, and Brown actually wrote to Tex asking if he wanted his wife back. Tex's response was to record this: [Excerpt: Joe Tex, "You Keep Her"] Ford's replacement was Yvonne Fair, who had briefly replaced Jackie Landry in the Chantels for touring purposes when Landry had quit touring to have a baby. Fair would stay with Brown for a couple of years, and would release a number of singles written and produced for her by Brown, including one which Brown would later rerecord himself with some success: [Excerpt: Yvonne Fair, "I Found You"] Fair would eventually leave the band after getting pregnant with a child by Brown, who tended to sleep with the female singers in his band. The last shows she played with him were the shows that would catapult Brown into the next level of stardom. Brown had been convinced for a long time that his live shows had an energy that his records didn't, and that people would buy a record of one of them. Syd Nathan, as usual, disagreed. In his view the market for R&B albums was small, and only consisted of people who wanted collections of hit singles they could play in one place. Nobody would buy a James Brown live album. So Brown decided to take matters into his own hands. He decided to book a run of shows at the Apollo Theatre, and record them, paying for the recordings with his own money. This was a week-long engagement, with shows running all day every day -- Brown and his band would play five shows a day, and Brown would wear a different suit for every show. This was in October 1962, the month that we've already established as the month the sixties started -- the month the Beatles released their first single, the Beach Boys released their first record outside the US, and the first Bond film came out, all on the same day at the beginning of the month. By the end of October, when Brown appeared at the Apollo, the Cuban Missile Crisis was at its height, and there were several points during the run where it looked like the world itself might not last until November 62. Douglas Wolk has written an entire book on the live album that resulted, which claims to be a recording of the midnight performance from October the twenty-fourth, though it seems like it was actually compiled from multiple performances. The album only records the headline performance, but Wolk describes what a full show by the James Brown Revue at the Apollo was like in October 1962, and the following description is indebted to his book, which I'll link in the show notes. The show would start with the "James Brown Orchestra" -- the backing band. They would play a set of instrumentals, and a group of dancers called the Brownies would join them: [Excerpt: James Brown Presents His Band, "Night Flying"] At various points during the set, Brown himself would join the band for a song or two, playing keyboards or drums. After the band's instrumental set, the Valentinos would take the stage for a few songs. This was before they'd been taken on by Sam Cooke, who would take them under his wing very soon after these shows, but the Valentinos were already recording artists in their own right, and had recently released "Lookin' For a Love": [Excerpt: The Valentinos, "Lookin' For a Love"] Next up would be Yvonne Fair, now visibly pregnant with her boss' child, to sing her few numbers: [Excerpt: Yvonne Fair, "You Can Make it if You Try"] Freddie King was on next, another artist for the King family of labels who'd had a run of R&B hits the previous year, promoting his new single "I'm On My Way to Atlanta": [Excerpt: Freddie King, "I'm on My Way to Atlanta"] After King came Solomon Burke, who had been signed to Atlantic earlier that year and just started having hits, and was the new hot thing on the scene, but not yet the massive star he became: [Excerpt: Solomon Burke, "Cry to Me"] After Burke came a change of pace -- the vaudeville comedian Pigmeat Markham would take the stage and perform a couple of comedy sketches. We actually know exactly how these went, as Brown wasn't the only one recording a live album there that week, and Markham's album "The World's Greatest Clown" was a result of these shows and released on Chess Records: [Excerpt: Pigmeat Markham, "Go Ahead and Sing"] And after Markham would come the main event. Fats Gonder, the band's organist, would give the introduction we heard at the beginning of the episode -- and backstage, Danny Ray, who had been taken on as James Brown's valet that very week (according to Wolk -- I've seen other sources saying he'd joined Brown's organisation in 1960), was listening closely. He would soon go on to take over the role of MC, and would introduce Brown in much the same way as Gonder had at every show until Brown's death forty-four years later. The live album is an astonishing tour de force, showing Brown and his band generating a level of excitement that few bands then or now could hope to equal. It's even more astonishing when you realise two things. The first is that this was *before* any of the hits that most people now associate with the name James Brown -- before "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" or "Sex Machine", or "It's a Man's Man's Man's World" or "Say it Loud I'm Black and I'm Proud" or "Funky Drummer" or "Get Up Offa That Thing". It's still an *unformed* James Brown, only six years into a fifty-year career, and still without most of what made him famous. The other thing is, as Wolk notes, if you listen to any live bootleg recordings from this time, the microphone distorts all the time, because Brown is singing so loud. Here, the vocal tone is clean, because Brown knew he was being recorded. This is the sound of James Brown restraining himself: [Excerpt: James Brown and the Famous Flames, "Night Train" (Live at the Apollo version)] The album was released a few months later, and proved Syd Nathan's judgement utterly, utterly, wrong. It became the thirty-second biggest selling album of 1963 -- an amazing achievement given that it was released on a small independent label that dealt almost exclusively in singles, and which had no real presence in the pop market. The album spent sixty-six weeks on the album charts, making number two on the charts -- the pop album charts, not R&B charts. There wasn't an R&B albums chart until 1965, and Live at the Apollo basically forced Billboard to create one, and more or less single-handedly created the R&B albums market. It was such a popular album in 1963 that DJs took to playing the whole album -- breaking for commercials as they turned the side over, but otherwise not interrupting it. It turned Brown from merely a relatively big R&B star into a megastar. But oddly, given this astonishing level of success, Brown's singles in 1963 were slightly less successful than they had been in the previous few years -- possibly partly because he decided to record a few versions of old standards, changing direction as he had for much of his career. Johnny Terry quit the Famous Flames, to join the Drifters, becoming part of the lineup that recorded "Under the Boardwalk" and "Saturday Night at the Movies". Brown also recorded a second live album, Pure Dynamite!, which is generally considered a little lacklustre in comparison to the Apollo album. There were other changes to the lineup as well as Terry leaving. Brown wanted to hire a new drummer, Melvin Parker, who agreed to join the band, but only if Brown took on his sax-playing brother, Maceo, along with him. Maceo soon became one of the most prominent musicians in Brown's band, and his distinctive saxophone playing is all over many of Brown's biggest hits. The first big hit that the Parkers played on was released as by James Brown and his Orchestra, rather than James Brown and the Famous Flames, and was a landmark in Brown's evolution as a musician: [Excerpt: James Brown and his Orchestra, "Out of Sight"] The Famous Flames did sing on the B-side of that, a song called "Maybe the Last Time", which was ripped off from the same Pops Staples song that the Rolling Stones later ripped off for their own hit single. But that would be the last time Brown would use them in the studio -- from that point on, the Famous Flames were purely a live act, although Bobby Byrd, but not the other members, would continue to sing on the records. The reason it was credited to James Brown, rather than to James Brown and the Famous Flames, is that "Out of Sight" was released on Smash Records, to which Brown -- but not the Flames -- had signed a little while earlier. Brown had become sick of what he saw as King Records' incompetence, and had found what he and his advisors thought was a loophole in his contract. Brown had been signed to King Records under a personal services contract as a singer, not under a musician contract as a musician, and so they believed that he could sign to Smash, a subsidiary of Mercury, as a musician. He did, and he made what he thought of as a fresh start on his new label by recording "Caldonia", a cover of a song by his idol Louis Jordan: [Excerpt: James Brown and his Orchestra, "Caldonia"] Understandably, King Records sued on the reasonable grounds that Brown was signed to them as a singer, and they got an injunction to stop him recording for Smash -- but by the time the injunction came through, Brown had already released two albums and three singles for the label. The injunction prevented Brown from recording any new material for the rest of 1964, though both labels continued to release stockpiled material during that time. While he was unable to record new material, October 1964 saw Brown's biggest opportunity to cross over to a white audience -- the TAMI Show: [Excerpt: James Brown, "Out of Sight (TAMI show live)"] We've mentioned the TAMI show a couple of times in previous episodes, but didn't go into it in much detail. It was a filmed concert which featured Jan and Dean, the Barbarians, Lesley Gore, Chuck Berry, the Beach Boys, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Billy J Kramer and the Dakotas, Marvin Gaye, the Miracles, the Supremes, and, as the two top acts, James Brown and the Rolling Stones. Rather oddly, the point of the TAMI Show wasn't the music as such. Rather it was intended as a demonstration of a technical process. Before videotape became cheap and a standard, it was difficult to record TV shows for later broadcast, for distribution to other countries, or for archive. The way they used to be recorded was a process known as telerecording in the UK and kinescoping in the US, and that was about as crude as it's possible to get -- you'd get a film camera, point it at a TV showing the programme you wanted to record, and film the TV screen. There was specialist equipment to do this, but that was all it actually did. Almost all surviving TV from the fifties and sixties -- and even some from the seventies -- was preserved by this method rather than by videotape. Even after videotape started being used to make the programmes, there were differing standards and tapes were expensive, so if you were making a programme in the UK and wanted a copy for US broadcast, or vice versa, you'd make a telerecording. But what if you wanted to make a TV show that you could also show on cinema screens? If you're filming a TV screen, and then you project that film onto a big screen, you get a blurry, low-resolution, mess -- or at least you did with the 525-line TV screens that were used in the US at the time. So a company named Electronovision came into the picture, for those rare times when you wanted to do something using video cameras that would be shown at the cinema. Rather than shoot in 525-line resolution, their cameras shot in 819-line resolution -- super high definition for the time, but capable of being recorded onto standard videotape with appropriate modifications for the equipment. But that meant that when you kinescoped the production, it was nearly twice the resolution that a standard US TV broadcast would be, and so it didn't look terrible when shown in a cinema. The owner of the Electronovision process had had a hit with a cinema release of a performance by Richard Burton as Hamlet, and he needed a follow-up, and decided that another filmed live performance would be the best way to make use of his process -- TV cameras were much more useful for capturing live performances than film cameras, for a variety of dull technical reasons, and so this was one of the few areas where Electronovision might actually be useful. And so Bill Roden, one of the heads of Electronovision, turned to a TV director named Steve Binder, who was working at the time on the Steve Allen show, one of the big variety shows, second only to Ed Sullivan, and who would soon go on to direct Hullaballoo. Roden asked Binder to make a concert film, shot on video, which would be released on the big screen by American International Pictures (the same organisation with which David Crosby's father worked so often). Binder had contacts with West Coast record labels, and particularly with Lou Adler's organisation, which managed Jan and Dean. He also had been in touch with a promoter who was putting on a package tour of British musicians. So they decided that their next demonstration of the capabilities of the equipment would be a show featuring performers from "all over the world", as the theme song put it -- by which they meant all over the continental United States plus two major British cities. For those acts who didn't have their own bands -- or whose bands needed augmenting -- there was an orchestra, centred around members of the Wrecking Crew, conducted by Jack Nitzsche, and the Blossoms were on hand to provide backing vocals where required. Jan and Dean would host the show and sing the theme song. James Brown had had less pop success than any of the other artists on the show except for the Barbarians, who are now best-known for their appearances on the Nuggets collection of relatively obscure garage rock singles, and whose biggest hit, "Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl?" only went to number fifty-five on the charts: [Excerpt: The Barbarians, "Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl?"] The Barbarians were being touted as the American equivalent of the Rolling Stones, but the general cultural moment of the time can be summed up by that line "You're either a girl or you come from Liverpool" -- which was where the Rolling Stones came from. Or at least, it was where Americans seemed to think they came from given both that song, and the theme song of the TAMI show, written by P.F. Sloan and Steve Barri, which sang about “the Rolling Stones from Liverpool”, and also referred to Brown as "the king of the blues": [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "Here They Come From All Over The World"] But other than the Barbarians, the TAMI show was one of the few places in which all the major pop music movements of the late fifties and early sixties could be found in one place -- there was the Merseybeat of Gerry and the Pacemakers and the Dakotas, already past their commercial peak but not yet realising it, the fifties rock of Chuck Berry, who actually ended up performing one song with Gerry and the Pacemakers: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry and Gerry and the Pacemakers: "Maybellene"] And there was the Brill Building pop of Lesley Gore, the British R&B of the Rolling Stones right at the point of their breakthrough, the vocal surf music of the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean, and three of the most important Motown acts, with Brown the other representative of soul on the bill. But the billing was a sore point. James Brown's manager insisted that he should be the headliner of the show, and indeed by some accounts the Rolling Stones also thought that they should probably not try to follow him -- though other accounts say that the Stones were equally insistent that they *must* be the headliners. It was a difficult decision, because Brown was much less well known, but it was eventually decided that the Rolling Stones would go on last. Most people talking about the event, including most of those involved with the production, have since stated that this was a mistake, because nobody could follow James Brown, though in interviews Mick Jagger has always insisted that the Stones didn't have to follow Brown, as there was a recording break between acts and they weren't even playing to the same audience -- though others have disputed that quite vigorously. But what absolutely everyone has agreed is that Brown gave the performance of a lifetime, and that it was miraculously captured by the cameras. I say its capture was miraculous because every other act had done a full rehearsal for the TV cameras, and had had a full shot-by-shot plan worked out by Binder beforehand. But according to Steve Binder -- though all the accounts of the show are contradictory -- Brown refused to do a rehearsal -- so even though he had by far the most complex and choreographed performance of the event, Binder and his camera crew had to make decisions by pure instinct, rather than by having an actual plan they'd worked out in advance of what shots to use. This is one of the rare times when I wish this was a video series rather than a podcast, because the visuals are a huge part of this performance -- Brown is a whirlwind of activity, moving all over the stage in a similar way to Jackie Wilson, one of his big influences, and doing an astonishing gliding dance step in which he stands on one leg and moves sideways almost as if on wheels. The full performance is easily findable online, and is well worth seeking out. But still, just hearing the music and the audience's reaction can give some insight: [Excerpt: James Brown, "Out of Sight" (TAMI Show)] The Rolling Stones apparently watched the show in horror, unable to imagine following that -- though when they did, the audience response was fine: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Around and Around"] Incidentally, Chuck Berry must have been quite pleased with his payday from the TAMI Show, given that as well as his own performance the Stones did one of his songs, as did Gerry and the Pacemakers, as we heard earlier, and the Beach Boys did "Surfin' USA" for which he had won sole songwriting credit. After the TAMI Show, Mick Jagger would completely change his attitude to performing, and would spend the rest of his career trying to imitate Brown's performing style. He was unsuccessful in this, but still came close enough that he's still regarded as one of the great frontmen, nearly sixty years later. Brown kept performing, and his labels kept releasing material, but he was still not allowed to record, until in early 1965 a court reached a ruling -- yes, Brown wasn't signed as a musician to King Records, so he was perfectly within his rights to record with Smash Records. As an instrumentalist. But Brown *was* signed to King Records as a singer, so he was obliged to record vocal tracks for them, and only for them. So until his contract with Smash lapsed, he had to record twice as much material -- he had to keep recording instrumentals, playing piano or organ, for Smash, while recording vocal tracks for King Records. His first new record, released as by "James Brown" rather than the earlier billings of "James Brown and his Orchestra" or "James Brown and the Famous Flames", was for King, and was almost a remake of "Out of Sight", his hit for Smash Records. But even so, "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" was a major step forward, and is often cited as the first true funk record. This is largely because of the presence of a new guitarist in Brown's band. Jimmy Nolen had started out as a violin player, but like many musicians in the 1950s he had been massively influenced by T-Bone Walker, and had switched to playing guitar. He was discovered as a guitarist by the bluesman Jimmy Wilson, who had had a minor hit with "Tin Pan Alley": [Excerpt: Jimmy Wilson, "Tin Pan Alley"] Wilson had brought Nolen to LA, where he'd soon parted from Wilson and started working with a whole variety of bandleaders. His first recording came with Monte Easter on Aladdin Records: [Excerpt: Monte Easter, "Blues in the Evening"] After working with Easter, he started recording with Chuck Higgins, and also started recording by himself. At this point, Nolen was just one of many West Coast blues guitarists with a similar style, influenced by T-Bone Walker -- he was competing with Pete "Guitar" Lewis, Johnny "Guitar" Watson, and Guitar Slim, and wasn't yet quite as good as any of them. But he was still making some influential records. His version of "After Hours", for example, released under his own name on Federal Records, was a big influence on Roy Buchanan, who would record several versions of the standard based on Nolen's arrangement: [Excerpt: Jimmy Nolen, "After Hours"] Nolen had released records on many labels, but his most important early association came from records he made but didn't release. In the mid-fifties, Johnny Otis produced a couple of tracks by Nolen, for Otis' Dig Records label, but they weren't released until decades later: [Excerpt: Jimmy Nolen, "Jimmy's Jive"] But when Otis had a falling out with his longtime guitar player Pete "Guitar" Lewis, who was one of the best players in LA but who was increasingly becoming unreliable due to his alcoholism, Otis hired Nolen to replace him. It's Nolen who's playing on most of the best-known recordings Otis made in the late fifties, like "Casting My Spell": [Excerpt: Johnny Otis, "Casting My Spell"] And of course Otis' biggest hit "Willie and the Hand Jive": [Excerpt: Johnny Otis, "Willie and the Hand Jive"] Nolen left Otis after a few years, and spent the early sixties mostly playing in scratch bands backing blues singers, and not recording. It was during this time that Nolen developed the style that would revolutionise music. The style he developed was unique in several different ways. The first was in Nolen's choice of chords. We talked last week about how Pete Townshend's guitar playing became based on simplifying chords and only playing power chords. Nolen went the other way -- while his voicings often only included two or three notes, he was also often using very complex chords with *more* notes than a standard chord. As we discussed last week, in most popular music, the chords are based around either major or minor triads -- the first, third, and fifth notes of a scale, so you have an E major chord, which is the notes E, G sharp, and B: [Excerpt: E major chord] It's also fairly common to have what are called seventh chords, which are actually a triad with an added flattened seventh, so an E7 chord would be the notes E, G sharp, B, and D: [Excerpt: E7 chord] But Nolen built his style around dominant ninth chords, often just called ninth chords. Dominant ninth chords are mostly thought of as jazz chords because they're mildly dissonant. They consist of the first, third, fifth, flattened seventh, *and* ninth of a scale, so an E9 would be the notes E, G sharp, B, D, and F sharp: [Excerpt: E9 chord] Another way of looking at that is that you're playing both a major chord *and* at the same time a minor chord that starts on the fifth note, so an E major and B minor chord at the same time: [Demonstrates Emajor, B minor, E9] It's not completely unknown for pop songs to use ninth chords, but it's very rare. Probably the most prominent example came from a couple of years after the period we're talking about, when in mid-1967 Bobby Gentry basically built the whole song "Ode to Billie Joe" around a D9 chord, barely ever moving off it: [Excerpt: Bobby Gentry, "Ode to Billie Joe"] That shows the kind of thing that ninth chords are useful for -- because they have so many notes in them, you can just keep hammering on the same chord for a long time, and the melody can go wherever it wants and will fit over it. The record we're looking at, "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag", actually has three chords in it -- it's basically a twelve-bar blues, like "Out of Sight" was, just with these ninth chords sometimes used instead of more conventional chords -- but as Brown's style got more experimental in future years, he would often build songs with no chord changes at all, just with Nolen playing a single ninth chord throughout. There's a possibly-apocryphal story, told in a few different ways, but the gist of which is that when auditioning Nolen's replacement many years later, Brown asked "Can you play an E ninth chord?" "Yes, of course" came the reply. "But can you play an E ninth chord *all night*?" The reason Brown asked this, if he did, is that playing like Nolen is *extremely* physically demanding. Because the other thing about Nolen's style is that he was an extremely percussive player. In his years backing blues musicians, he'd had to play with many different drummers, and knew they weren't always reliable timekeepers. So he'd started playing like a drummer himself, developing a technique called chicken-scratching, based on the Bo Diddley style he'd played with Otis, where he'd often play rapid, consistent, semiquaver chords, keeping the time himself so the drummer didn't have to. Other times he'd just play single, jagged-sounding, chords to accentuate the beat. He used guitars with single-coil pickups and turned the treble up and got rid of all the midrange, so the sound would cut through no matter what. As well as playing full-voiced chords, he'd also sometimes mute all the strings while he strummed, giving a percussive scratching sound rather than letting the strings ring. In short, the sound he got was this: [Excerpt: James Brown, "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag"] And that is the sound that became funk guitar. If you listen to Jimmy Nolen's playing on "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag", that guitar sound -- chicken scratched ninth chords -- is what every funk guitarist after him based their style on. It's not Nolen's guitar playing in its actual final form -- that wouldn't come until he started using wah wah pedals, which weren't mass produced until early 1967 -- but it's very clear when listening to the track that this is the birth of funk. The original studio recording of "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" actually sounds odd if you listen to it now -- it's slower than the single, and lasts almost seven minutes: [Excerpt: James Brown "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag (parts 1, 2, and 3)"] But for release as a single, it was sped up a semitone, a ton of reverb was added, and it was edited down to just a few seconds over two minutes. The result was an obvious hit single: [Excerpt: James Brown, "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag"] Or at least, it was an obvious hit single to everyone except Syd Nathan, who as you'll have already predicted by now didn't like the song. Indeed according to Brown, he was so disgusted with the record that he threw his acetate copy of it onto the floor. But Brown got his way, and the single came out, and it became the biggest hit of Brown's career up to that point, not only giving him his first R&B number one since "Try Me" seven years earlier, but also crossing over to the pop charts in a way he hadn't before. He'd had the odd top thirty or even top twenty pop single in the past, but now he was in the top ten, and getting noticed by the music business establishment in a way he hadn't earlier. Brown's audience went from being medium-sized crowds of almost exclusively Black people with the occasional white face, to a much larger, more integrated, audience. Indeed, at the Grammys the next year, while the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Phil Spector and the whole Motown stable were overlooked in favour of the big winners for that year Roger Miller, Herb Alpert, and the Anita Kerr Singers, even an organisation with its finger so notoriously off the pulse of the music industry as the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, which presents the Grammys, couldn't fail to find the pulse of "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag", and gave Brown the Grammy for Best Rhythm and Blues record, beating out the other nominees "In the Midnight Hour", "My Girl", "Shotgun" by Junior Walker, and "Shake" by Sam Cooke. From this point on, Syd Nathan would no longer argue with James Brown as to which of his records would be released. After nine years of being the hardest working man in showbusiness, James Brown had now become the Godfather of Soul, and his real career had just begun.

The Hold Steady "Killer Parties"Arliss Nancy "Finches"Ramones "I Don't Wanna Go Down to the Basement"Aimee Mann "Give Me Fifteen"Alejandro Escovedo "Gravity / Falling Down Again"My Morning Jacket "Xmas Curtain"Mavis Staples, Bonnie Raitt "Turn Me Around"Bob Dylan "Tough Mama"Taj Mahal "Statesboro Blues"Elvis Costello "A Slow Drag With Josephine"Charlie Parr "Empty Out Your Pockets"Langhorne Slim "House of My Soul (You Light the Rooms)"Lefty Frizzell "Smoking Cigarettes and Drinking Coffee Blues"John R. Miller "Lookin' Over My Shoulder"The Band "Don't Do It"Big Mama Thornton "Big Mama's Bumble Bee Blues"Albert King "I'll Play The Blues For You (Pt. 1)"Townes Van Zandt "Where I Lead Me"Ray Wylie Hubbard "Rattlesnake Shakin' Woman"Madeleine Peyroux "Don't Wait Too Long"Cannonball Adderley "Why Am I Treated So Bad!"Gil Scott-Heron "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised"Bonnie Raitt "Write Me a Few of Your Lines / Kokomo Blues"Joni Mitchell "Help Me"Alvin Youngblood Hart "Lawd I'm Just a Country Boy In This Great Big Freaky City"Jake Xerxes Fussell "Love Farewell"Joan Shelley "Stay On My Shore"Chris Knight "Crooked Mile"R.E.M. "Wichita Lineman"Johnny Cash "I'm Just an Old Chunk of Coal (But I'm Gonna Be a Diamond Someday)"Alex Chilton/Hi Rhythm Section "Kansas City (Live)"Drive-By Truckers "The Righteous Path"Hank Williams "Move It On Over"Willie Nelson and Leon Russell and Bonnie Raitt "Trouble In Mind"Ruth Brown "Mambo Baby"Pete Guitar Lewis "Ooh Midnight"Fred McDowell "Shake 'Em On Down (Remastered)"Aretha Franklin "Good to Me as I Am to You"Prince "A Case of You"Sister Rosetta Tharpe "Tall Skinny Papa"Little Willie John "Need Your Love So Bad"Pops Staples "World In Motion"

Episode one hundred and thirty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “The Sound of Silence" by Simon and Garfunkel, and the many records they made, together and apart, before their success. 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 "Blues Run the Game" by Jackson C. Frank. 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 I talk about a tour of Lancashire towns, but some of the towns I mention were in Cheshire at the time, and some are in Greater Manchester or Merseyside now. They're all very close together though. I say Mose Rager was Black. I was misremembering, confusing Mose Rager, a white player in the Muhlenberg style, with Arnold Schultz, a Black player who invented it. I got this right in the episode on "Bye Bye Love". Also, I couldn't track down a copy of the Paul Kane single version of “He Was My Brother” in decent quality, so I used the version on The Paul Simon Songbook instead, as they're basically identical performances. Resources As usual, I've created a Mixcloud playlist of the music excerpted here. This compilation collects all Simon and Garfunkel's studio albums, with bonus tracks, plus a DVD of their reunion concert. There are many collections of the pre-S&G recordings by the two, as these are now largely in the public domain. This one contains a good selection. I've referred to several books for this episode: Simon and Garfunkel: Together Alone by Spencer Leigh is a breezy, well-researched, biography of the duo. Paul Simon: The Life by Robert Hilburn is the closest thing there is to an authorised biography of Simon. And What is it All But Luminous? is Art Garfunkel's memoir. It's not particularly detailed, being more a collection of thoughts and poetry than a structured narrative, but gives a good idea of Garfunkel's attitude to people and events in his life. Roots, Radicals, and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World by Billy Bragg has some great information on the British folk scene of the fifties and sixties. And Singing From the Floor is an oral history of British folk clubs, including a chapter on Dylan's 1962 visit to London. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today, we're going to take a look at a hit record that almost never happened -- a record by a duo who had already split up, twice, by the time it became a hit, and who didn't know it was going to come out. We're going to look at how a duo who started off as an Everly Brothers knockoff, before becoming unsuccessful Greenwich Village folkies, were turned into one of the biggest acts of the sixties by their producer. We're going to look at Simon and Garfunkel, and at "The Sound of Silence": [Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, "The Sound of Silence"] The story of Simon and Garfunkel starts with two children in a school play.  Neither Paul Simon or Art Garfunkel had many friends when they met in a school performance of Alice in Wonderland, where Simon was playing the White Rabbit and Garfunkel the Cheshire Cat. Simon was well-enough liked, by all accounts, but he'd been put on an accelerated programme for gifted students which meant he was progressing through school faster than his peers. He had a small social group, mostly based around playing baseball, but wasn't one of the popular kids. Art Garfunkel, another gifted student, had no friends at all until he got to know Simon, who he described later as his "one and only friend" in this time period. One passage in Garfunkel's autobiography seems to me to sum up everything about Garfunkel's personality as a child -- and indeed a large part of his personality as it comes across in interviews to this day. He talks about the pleasure he got from listening to the chart rundown on the radio -- "It was the numbers that got me. I kept meticulous lists—when a new singer like Tony Bennett came onto the charts with “Rags to Riches,” I watched the record jump from, say, #23 to #14 in a week. The mathematics of the jumps went to my sense of fun." Garfunkel is, to this day, a meticulous person -- on his website he has a list of every book he's read since June 1968, which is currently up to one thousand three hundred and ten books, and he has always had a habit of starting elaborate projects and ticking off every aspect of them as he goes. Both Simon and Garfunkel were outsiders at this point, other than their interests in sport, but Garfunkel was by far the more introverted of the two, and as a result he seems to have needed their friendship more than Simon did. But the two boys developed an intense, close, friendship, initially based around their shared sense of humour. Both of them were avid readers of Mad magazine, which had just started publishing when the two of them had met up, and both could make each other laugh easily. But they soon developed a new interest, when Martin Block on the middle-of-the-road radio show Make Believe Ballroom announced that he was going to play the worst record he'd ever heard. That record was "Gee" by the Crows: [Excerpt: The Crows, "Gee"] Paul Simon later said that that record was the first thing he'd ever heard on that programme that he liked, and soon he and Garfunkel had become regular listeners to Alan Freed's show on WINS, loving the new rock and roll music they were discovering. Art had already been singing in public from an early age -- his first public performance had been singing Nat "King" Cole's hit "Too Young" in a school talent contest when he was nine -- but the two started singing together. The first performance by Simon and Garfunkel was at a high school dance and, depending on which source you read, was a performance either of "Sh'Boom" or of Big Joe Turner's "Flip, Flop, and Fly": [Excerpt: Big Joe Turner, "Flip, Flop, and Fly"] The duo also wrote at least one song together as early as 1955 -- or at least Garfunkel says they wrote it together. Paul Simon describes it as one he wrote. They tried to get a record deal with the song, but it was never recorded at the time -- but Simon has later performed it: [Excerpt: Paul Simon, "The Girl For Me"] Even at this point, though, while Art Garfunkel was putting all his emotional energy into the partnership with Simon, Simon was interested in performing with other people. Al Kooper was another friend of Simon's at the time, and apparently Simon and Kooper would also perform together. Once Elvis came on to Paul's radar, he also bought a guitar, but it was when the two of them first heard the Everly Brothers that they realised what it was that they could do together. Simon fell in love with the Everly Brothers as soon as he heard "Bye Bye Love": [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Bye Bye Love"] Up to this point, Paul hadn't bought many records -- he spent his money on baseball cards and comic books, and records just weren't good value. A pack of baseball cards was five cents, a comic book was ten cents, but a record was a dollar. Why buy records when you could hear music on the radio for free? But he needed that record, he couldn't just wait around to hear it on the radio. He made an hour-long two-bus journey to a record shop in Queens, bought the record, took it home, played it... and almost immediately scratched it. So he got back on the bus, travelled for another hour, bought another copy, took it home, and made sure he didn't scratch that one. Simon and Garfunkel started copying the Everlys' harmonies, and would spend hours together, singing close together watching each other's mouths and copying the way they formed words, eventually managing to achieve a vocal blend through sheer effort which would normally only come from familial closeness. Paul became so obsessed with music that he sold his baseball card collection and bought a tape recorder for two hundred dollars. They would record themselves singing, and then sing back along with it, multitracking themselves, but also critiquing the tape, refining their performances. Paul's father was a bass player -- "the family bassman", as he would later sing -- and encouraged his son in his music, even as he couldn't see the appeal in this new rock and roll music. He would critique Paul's songs, saying things like "you went from four-four to a bar of nine-eight, you can't do that" -- to which his son would say "I just did" -- but this wasn't hostile criticism, rather it was giving his son a basic grounding in song construction which would prove invaluable. But the duo's first notable original song -- and first hit -- came about more or less by accident. In early 1956, the doo-wop group the Clovers had released the hit single "Devil or Angel". Its B-side had a version of "Hey Doll Baby", a song written by the blues singer Titus Turner, and which sounds to me very inspired by Hank Williams' "Hey, Good Lookin'": [Excerpt: The Clovers, "Hey, Doll Baby"] That song was picked up by the Everly Brothers, who recorded it for their first album: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Hey Doll Baby"] Here is where the timeline gets a little confused for me, because that album wasn't released until early 1958, although the recording session for that track was in August 1957. Yet that track definitely influenced Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel to record a song that they released in November 1957. All I can imagine is that they heard the brothers perform it live, or maybe a radio station had an acetate copy. Because the way everyone has consistently told the story is that at the end of summer 1957, Simon and Garfunkel had both heard the Everly Brothers perform "Hey Doll Baby", but couldn't remember how it went. The two of them tried to remember it, and to work a version of it out together, and their hazy memories combined to reconstruct something that was completely different, and which owed at least as much to "Wake Up Little Suzie" as to "Hey Doll Baby". Their new song, "Hey Schoolgirl", was catchy enough that they thought if they recorded a demo of it, maybe the Everly Brothers themselves would record the song. At the demo studio they happened to encounter Sid Prosen, who owned a small record label named Big Records. He heard the duo perform and realised he might have his own Everly Brothers here. He signed the duo to a contract, and they went into a professional studio to rerecord "Hey Schoolgirl", this time with Paul's father on bass, and a couple of other musicians to fill out the sound: [Excerpt: Tom and Jerry, "Hey Schoolgirl"] Of course, the record couldn't be released under their real names -- there was no way anyone was going to buy a record by Simon and Garfunkel. So instead they became Tom and Jerry. Paul Simon was Jerry Landis -- a surname he chose because he had a crush on a girl named Sue Landis. Art became Tom Graff, because he liked drawing graphs. "Hey Schoolgirl" became a local hit. The two were thrilled to hear it played on Alan Freed's show (after Sid Prosen gave Freed two hundred dollars), and were even more thrilled when they got to perform on American Bandstand, on the same show as Jerry Lee Lewis. When Dick Clark asked them where they were from, Simon decided to claim he was from Macon, Georgia, where Little Richard came from, because all his favourite rock and roll singers were from the South. "Hey Schoolgirl" only made number forty-nine nationally, because the label didn't have good national distribution, but it sold over a hundred thousand copies, mostly in the New York area. And Sid Prosen seems to have been one of a very small number of independent label owners who wasn't a crook -- the two boys got about two thousand dollars each from their hit record. But while Tom and Jerry seemed like they might have a successful career, Simon and Garfunkel were soon to split up, and the reason for their split was named True Taylor. Paul had been playing some of his songs for Sid Prosen, to see what the duo's next single should be, and Prosen had noticed that while some of them were Everly Brothers soundalikes, others were Elvis soundalikes. Would Paul be interested in recording some of those, too? Obviously Art couldn't sing on those, so they'd use a different name, True Taylor. The single was released around the same time as the second Tom and Jerry record, and featured an Elvis-style ballad by Paul on one side, and a rockabilly song written by his father on the other: [Excerpt: True Taylor, "True or False"] But Paul hadn't discussed that record with Art before doing it, and the two had vastly different ideas about their relationship. Paul was Art's only friend, and Art thought they had an indissoluble bond and that they would always work together. Paul, on the other hand, thought of Art as one of his friends and someone he made music with, but he could play at being Elvis if he wanted, as well as playing at being an Everly brother. Garfunkel, in his memoir published in 2017, says "the friendship was shattered for life" -- he decided then and there that Paul Simon was a "base" person, a betrayer. But on the other hand, he still refers to Simon, over and over again, in that book as still being his friend, even as Simon has largely been disdainful of him since their last performance together in 2010. Friendships are complicated. Tom and Jerry struggled on for a couple more singles, which weren't as successful as "Hey Schoolgirl" had been, with material like "Two Teenagers", written by Rose Marie McCoy: [Excerpt: Tom and Jerry, "Two Teenagers"] But as they'd stopped being friends, and they weren't selling records, they drifted apart and didn't really speak for five years, though they would occasionally run into one another. They both went off to university, and Garfunkel basically gave up on the idea of having a career in music, though he did record a couple of singles, under the name "Artie Garr": [Excerpt: Artie Garr, "Beat Love"] But for the most part, Garfunkel concentrated on his studies, planning to become either an architect or maybe an academic. Paul Simon, on the other hand, while he was technically studying at university too, was only paying minimal attention to his studies. Instead, he was learning the music business. Every afternoon, after university had finished, he'd go around the Brill Building and its neighbouring buildings, offering his services both as a songwriter and as a demo performer. As Simon was competent on guitar, bass, and drums, could sing harmonies, and could play a bit of piano if it was in the key of C, he could use primitive multitracking to play and sing all the parts on a demo, and do it well: [Excerpt: Paul Simon, "Boys Were Made For Girls"] That's an excerpt from a demo Simon recorded for Burt Bacharach, who has said that he tried to get Simon to record as many of his demos as possible, though only a couple of them have surfaced publicly. Simon would also sometimes record demos with his friend Carole Klein, sometimes under the name The Cosines: [Excerpt: The Cosines, "Just to Be With You"] As we heard back in the episode on "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?", Carole Klein went on to change her name to Carole King, and become one of the most successful songwriters of the era -- something which spurred Paul Simon on, as he wanted to emulate her success. Simon tried to get signed up by Don Kirshner, who was publishing Goffin and King, but Kirshner turned Simon down -- an expensive mistake for Kirshner, but one that would end up benefiting Simon, who eventually figured out that he should own his own publishing. Simon was also getting occasional work as a session player, and played lead guitar on "The Shape I'm In" by Johnny Restivo, which made the lower reaches of the Hot One Hundred: [Excerpt: Johnny Restivo, "The Shape I'm In"] Between 1959 and 1963 Simon recorded a whole string of unsuccessful pop singles. including as a member of the Mystics: [Excerpt: The Mystics, "All Through the Night"] He even had a couple of very minor chart hits -- he got to number 99 as Tico and the Triumphs: [Excerpt: Tico and the Triumphs, "Motorcycle"] and number ninety-seven as Jerry Landis: [Excerpt: Jerry Landis, "The Lone Teen Ranger"] But he was jumping around, hopping onto every fad as it passed, and not getting anywhere. And then he started to believe that he could do something more interesting in music. He first became aware that the boundaries of what could be done in music extended further than "ooh-bop-a-loochy-ba" when he took a class on modern music at university, which included a trip to Carnegie Hall to hear a performance of music by the avant-garde composer Edgard Varese: [Excerpt: Edgard Varese, "Ionisation"] Simon got to meet Varese after the performance, and while he would take his own music in a very different, and much more commercial, direction than Varese's, he was nonetheless influenced by what Varese's music showed about the possibilities that existed in music. The other big influence on Simon at this time was when he heard The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Girl From the North Country"] Simon immediately decided to reinvent himself as a folkie, despite at this point knowing very little about folk music other than the Everly Brothers' Songs Our Daddy Taught Us album. He tried playing around Greenwich Village, but found it an uncongenial atmosphere, and inspired by the liner notes to the Dylan album, which talked about Dylan's time in England, he made what would be the first of several trips to the UK, where he was given a rapturous reception simply on the grounds of being an American and owning a better acoustic guitar -- a Martin -- than most British people owned. He had the showmanship that he'd learned from watching his father on stage and sometimes playing with him, and from his time in Tom and Jerry and working round the studios, and so he was able to impress the British folk-club audiences, who were used to rather earnest, scholarly, people, not to someone like Simon who was clearly ambitious and very showbiz. His repertoire at this point consisted mostly of songs from the first two Dylan albums, a Joan Baez record, Little Willie John's "Fever", and one song he'd written himself, an attempt at a protest song called "He Was My Brother", which he would release on his return to the US under yet another stage name, Paul Kane: [Excerpt: Paul Kane, "He Was My Brother"] Simon has always stated that that song was written about a friend of his who was murdered when he went down to Mississippi with the Freedom Riders -- but while Simon's friend was indeed murdered, it wasn't until about a year after he wrote the song, and Simon has confused the timelines in his subsequent recollections. At the time he recorded that, when he had returned to New York at the end of the summer, Simon had a job as a song plugger for a publishing company, and he gave the publishing company the rights to that song and its B-side, which led to that B-side getting promoted by the publisher, and ending up covered on one of the biggest British albums of 1964, which went to number two in the UK charts: [Excerpt: Val Doonican, "Carlos Dominguez"] Oddly, that may not end up being the only time we feature a Val Doonican track on this podcast. Simon continued his attempts to be a folkie, even teaming up again with Art Garfunkel, with whom he'd re-established contact, to perform in Greenwich Village as Kane and Garr, but they went down no better as a duo than Simon had as a solo artist. Simon went back to the UK again over Christmas 1963, and while he was there he continued work on a song that would become such a touchstone for him that of the first six albums he would be involved in, four would feature the song while a fifth would include a snippet of it. "The Sound of Silence" was apparently started in November 1963, but not finished until February 1964, by which time he was once again back in the USA, and back working as a song plugger. It was while working as a song plugger that Simon first met Tom Wilson, Bob Dylan's producer at Columbia. Simon met up with Wilson trying to persuade him to use some of the songs that the publishing company were putting out. When Wilson wasn't interested, Simon played him a couple of his own songs. Wilson took one of them, "He Was My Brother", for the Pilgrims, a group he was producing who were supposed to be the Black answer to Peter, Paul, and Mary: [Excerpt: The Pilgrims, "He Was My Brother"] Wilson was also interested in "The Sound of Silence", but Simon was more interested in getting signed as a performer than in having other acts perform his songs. Wilson was cautious, though -- he was already producing one folkie singer-songwriter, and he didn't really need a second one. But he *could* probably do with a vocal group... Simon mentioned that he had actually made a couple of records before, as part of a duo. Would Wilson be at all interested in a vocal *duo*? Wilson would be interested. Simon and Garfunkel auditioned for him, and a few days later were in the Columbia Records studio on Seventh Avenue recording their first album as a duo, which was also the first time either of them would record under their own name. Wednesday Morning, 3AM, the duo's first album, was a simple acoustic album, and the only instrumentation was Simon and Barry Kornfeld, a Greenwich Village folkie, on guitars, and Bill Lee, the double bass player who'd played with Dylan and others, on bass. Tom Wilson guided the duo in their song selection, and the eventual album contained six cover versions and six originals written by Simon. The cover versions were a mixture of hootenanny staples like "Go Tell it on the Mountain", plus Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin'", included to cross-promote Dylan's new album and to try to link the duo with the more famous writer, and one unusual one, "The Sun is Burning", written by Ian Campbell, a Scottish folk singer who Simon had got to know on his trips to the UK: [Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, "The Sun is Burning"] But the song that everyone was keenest on was "The Sound of Silence", the first song that Simon had written that he thought would stand up in comparison with the sort of song that Dylan was writing: [Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, "The Sound of Silence (Wednesday Morning 3AM version)"] In between sessions for the album, Simon and Garfunkel also played a high-profile gig at Gerde's Folk City in the Village, and a couple of shows at the Gaslight Cafe. The audiences there, though, regarded them as a complete joke -- Dave Van Ronk would later relate that for weeks afterwards, all anyone had to do was sing "Hello darkness, my old friend", for everyone around to break into laughter. Bob Dylan was one of those who laughed at the performance -- though Robert Shelton later said that Dylan hadn't been laughing at them, specifically, he'd just had a fit of the giggles -- and this had led to a certain amount of anger from Simon towards Dylan. The album was recorded in March 1964, and was scheduled for release  in October. In the meantime, they both made plans to continue with their studies and their travels. Garfunkel was starting to do postgraduate work towards his doctorate in mathematics, while Simon was now enrolled in Brooklyn Law School, but was still spending most of his time travelling, and would drop out after one semester. He would spend much of the next eighteen months in the UK. While he was occasionally in the US between June 1964 and November 1965, Simon now considered himself based in England, where he made several acquaintances that would affect his life deeply. Among them were a young woman called Kathy Chitty, with whom he would fall in love and who would inspire many of his songs, and an older woman called Judith Piepe (and I apologise if I'm mispronouncing her name, which I've only ever seen written down, never heard) who many people believed had an unrequited crush on Simon. Piepe ran her London flat as something of a commune for folk musicians, and Simon lived there for months at a time while in the UK. Among the other musicians who stayed there for a time were Sandy Denny, Cat Stevens, and Al Stewart, whose bedroom was next door to Simon's. Piepe became Simon's de facto unpaid manager and publicist, and started promoting him around the British folk scene. Simon also at this point became particularly interested in improving his guitar playing. He was spending a lot of time at Les Cousins, the London club that had become the centre of British acoustic guitar. There are, roughly, three styles of acoustic folk guitar -- to be clear, I'm talking about very broad-brush categorisations here, and there are people who would disagree and say there are more, but these are the main ones. Two of these are American styles -- there's the simple style known as Carter scratching, popularised by Mother Maybelle Carter of the Carter family, and for this all you do is alternate bass notes with your thumb while scratching the chord on the treble strings with one finger, like this: [Excerpt: Carter picking] That's the style played by a lot of country and folk players who were primarily singers accompanying themselves. In the late forties and fifties, though, another style had become popularised -- Travis picking. This is named after Merle Travis, the most well-known player in the style, but he always called it Muhlenberg picking, after Muhlenberg County, where he'd learned the style from Ike Everly -- the Everly Brothers' father -- and Mose Rager, a Black guitarist. In Travis picking, the thumb alternates between two bass notes, but rather than strumming a chord, the index and middle fingers play simple patterns on the treble strings, like this: [Excerpt: Travis picking] That's, again, a style primarily used for accompaniment, but it can also be used to play instrumentals by oneself. As well as Travis and Ike Everly, it's also the style played by Donovan, Chet Atkins, James Taylor, and more. But there's a third style, British baroque folk guitar, which was largely the invention of Davey Graham. Graham, you might remember, was a folk guitarist who had lived in the same squat as Lionel Bart when Bart started working with Tommy Steele, and who had formed a blues duo with Alexis Korner. Graham is now best known for one of his simpler pieces, “Anji”, which became the song that every British guitarist tried to learn: [Excerpt: Davey Graham, "Anji"] Dozens of people, including Paul Simon, would record versions of that. Graham invented an entirely new style of guitar playing, influenced by ragtime players like Blind Blake, but also by Bach, by Moroccan oud music, and by Celtic bagpipe music. While it was fairly common for players to retune their guitar to an open major chord, allowing them to play slide guitar, Graham retuned his to a suspended fourth chord -- D-A-D-G-A-D -- which allowed him to keep a drone going on some strings while playing complex modal counterpoints on others. While I demonstrated the previous two styles myself, I'm nowhere near a good enough guitarist to demonstrate British folk baroque, so here's an excerpt of Davey Graham playing his own arrangement of the traditional ballad "She Moved Through the Fair", recast as a raga and retitled "She Moved Thru' the Bizarre": [Excerpt: Davey Graham, "She Moved Thru' the Bizarre"] Graham's style was hugely influential on an entire generation of British guitarists, people who incorporated world music and jazz influences into folk and blues styles, and that generation of guitarists was coming up at the time and playing at Les Cousins. People who started playing in this style included Jimmy Page, Bert Jansch, Roy Harper, John Renbourn, Richard Thompson, Nick Drake, and John Martyn, and it also had a substantial influence on North American players like Joni Mitchell, Tim Buckley, and of course Paul Simon. Simon was especially influenced at this time by Martin Carthy, the young British guitarist whose style was very influenced by Graham -- but while Graham applied his style to music ranging from Dave Brubeck to Lutheran hymns to Big Bill Broonzy songs, Carthy mostly concentrated on traditional English folk songs. Carthy had a habit of taking American folk singers under his wing, and he taught Simon several songs, including Carthy's own arrangement of the traditional "Scarborough Fair": [Excerpt: Martin Carthy, "Scarborough Fair"] Simon would later record that arrangement, without crediting Carthy, and this would lead to several decades of bad blood between them, though Carthy forgave him in the 1990s, and the two performed the song together at least once after that. Indeed, Simon seems to have made a distinctly negative impression on quite a few of the musicians he knew in Britain at this time, who seem to, at least in retrospect, regard him as having rather used and discarded them as soon as his career became successful. Roy Harper has talked in liner notes to CD reissues of his work from this period about how Simon used to regularly be a guest in his home, and how he has memories of Simon playing with Harper's baby son Nick (now himself one of the greats of British guitar) but how as soon as he became successful he never spoke to Harper again. Similarly, in 1965 Simon started a writing partnership with Bruce Woodley of the Seekers, an Australian folk-pop band based in the UK, best known for "Georgy Girl". The two wrote "Red Rubber Ball", which became a hit for the Cyrkle: [Excerpt: The Cyrke, "Red Rubber Ball"] and also "Cloudy", which the Seekers recorded as an album track: [Excerpt: The Seekers, "Cloudy"] When that was recorded by Simon and Garfunkel, Woodley's name was removed from the writing credits, though Woodley still apparently received royalties for it. But at this point there *was* no Simon and Garfunkel. Paul Simon was a solo artist working the folk clubs in Britain, and Simon and Garfunkel's one album had sold a minuscule number of copies. They did, when Simon briefly returned to the US in March, record two tracks for a prospective single, this time with an electric backing band. One was a rewrite of the title track of their first album, now titled "Somewhere They Can't Find Me" and with a new chorus and some guitar parts nicked from Davey Graham's "Anji"; the other a Twist-beat song that could almost be Manfred Mann or Georgie Fame -- "We Got a Groovy Thing Goin'". That was also influenced by “Anji”, though by Bert Jansch's version rather than Graham's original. Jansch rearranged the song and stuck in this phrase: [Excerpt: Bert Jansch, “Anji”] Which became the chorus to “We Got a Groovy Thing Goin'”: [Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, "We Got a Groovy Thing Goin'"] But that single was never released, and as far as Columbia were concerned, Simon and Garfunkel were a defunct act, especially as Tom Wilson, who had signed them, was looking to move away from Columbia. Art Garfunkel did come to visit Simon in the UK a couple of times, and they'd even sing together occasionally, but it was on the basis of Paul Simon the successful club act occasionally inviting his friend on stage during the encore, rather than as a duo, and Garfunkel was still seeing music only as a sideline while Simon was now utterly committed to it. He was encouraged in this commitment by Judith Piepe, who considered him to be the greatest songwriter of his generation, and who started a letter-writing campaign to that effect, telling the BBC they needed to put him on the radio. Eventually, after a lot of pressure, they agreed -- though they weren't exactly sure what to do with him, as he didn't fit into any of the pop formats they had. He was given his own radio show -- a five-minute show in a religious programming slot. Simon would perform a song, and there would be an introduction tying the song into some religious theme or other. Two series of four episodes of this were broadcast, in a plum slot right after Housewives' Choice, which got twenty million listeners, and the BBC were amazed to find that a lot of people phoned in asking where they could get hold of the records by this Paul Simon fellow. Obviously he didn't have any out yet, and even the Simon and Garfunkel album, which had been released in the US, hadn't come out in Britain. After a little bit of negotiation, CBS, the British arm of Columbia Records, had Simon come in and record an album of his songs, titled The Paul Simon Songbook. The album, unlike the Simon and Garfunkel album, was made up entirely of Paul Simon originals. Two of them were songs that had previously been recorded for Wednesday Morning 3AM -- "He Was My Brother" and a new version of "The Sound of Silence": [Excerpt: Paul Simon, "The Sound of Silence"] The other ten songs were newly-written pieces like "April Come She Will", "Kathy's Song", a parody of Bob Dylan entitled "A Simple Desultory Philippic", and the song that was chosen as the single, "I am a Rock": [Excerpt: Paul Simon, "I am a Rock"] That song was also the one that was chosen for Simon's first TV appearance since Tom and Jerry had appeared on Bandstand eight years earlier. The appearance on Ready, Steady, Go, though, was not one that anyone was happy with. Simon had been booked to appear on  a small folk music series, Heartsong, but that series was cancelled before he could appear. Rediffusion, the company that made the series, also made Ready, Steady, Go, and since they'd already paid Simon they decided they might as well stick him on that show and get something for their money. Unfortunately, the episode in question was already running long, and it wasn't really suited for introspective singer-songwriter performances -- the show was geared to guitar bands and American soul singers. Michael Lindsay-Hogg, the director, insisted that if Simon was going to do his song, he had to cut at least one verse, while Simon was insistent that he needed to perform the whole thing because "it's a story". Lindsay-Hogg got his way, but nobody was happy with the performance. Simon's album was surprisingly unsuccessful, given the number of people who'd called the BBC asking about it -- the joke went round that the calls had all been Judith Piepe doing different voices -- and Simon continued his round of folk clubs, pubs, and birthday parties, sometimes performing with Garfunkel, when he visited for the summer, but mostly performing on his own. One time he did perform with a full band, singing “Johnny B Goode” at a birthday party, backed by a band called Joker's Wild who a couple of weeks later went into the studio to record their only privately-pressed five-song record, of them performing recent hits: [Excerpt: Joker's Wild, "Walk Like a Man"] The guitarist from Joker's Wild would later join the other band who'd played at that party, but the story of David Gilmour joining Pink Floyd is for another episode. During this time, Simon also produced his first record for someone else, when he was responsible for producing the only album by his friend Jackson C Frank, though there wasn't much production involved as like Simon's own album it was just one man and his guitar. Al Stewart and Art Garfunkel were also in the control room for the recording, but the notoriously shy Frank insisted on hiding behind a screen so they couldn't see him while he recorded: [Excerpt: Jackson C Frank, "Blues Run the Game"] It seemed like Paul Simon was on his way to becoming a respected mid-level figure on the British folk scene, releasing occasional albums and maybe having one or two minor hits, but making a steady living. Someone who would be spoken of in the same breath as Ralph McTell perhaps. Meanwhile, Art Garfunkel would be going on to be a lecturer in mathematics whose students might be surprised to know he'd had a minor rock and roll hit as a kid. But then something happened that changed everything. Wednesday Morning 3AM hadn't sold at all, and Columbia hadn't promoted it in the slightest. It was too collegiate and polite for the Greenwich Village folkies, and too intellectual for the pop audience that had been buying Peter, Paul, and Mary, and it had come out just at the point that the folk boom had imploded. But one DJ in Boston, Dick Summer, had started playing one song from it, "The Sound of Silence", and it had caught on with the college students, who loved the song. And then came spring break 1965. All those students went on holiday, and suddenly DJs in places like Cocoa Beach, Florida, were getting phone calls requesting "The Sound of Silence" by Simon and Garfunkel. Some of them with contacts at Columbia got in touch with the label, and Tom Wilson had an idea. On the first day of what turned out to be his last session with Dylan, the session for "Like a Rolling Stone", Wilson asked the musicians to stay behind and work on something. He'd already experimented with overdubbing new instruments on an acoustic recording with his new version of Dylan's "House of the Rising Sun", now he was going to try it with "The Sound of Silence". He didn't bother asking the duo what they thought -- record labels messed with people's records all the time. So "The Sound of Silence" was released as an electric folk-rock single: [Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, "The Sound of Silence"] This is always presented as Wilson massively changing the sound of the duo without their permission or knowledge, but the fact is that they had *already* gone folk-rock, back in March, so they were already thinking that way. The track was released as a single with “We Got a Groovy Thing Going” on the B-side, and was promoted first in the Boston market, and it did very well. Roy Harper later talked about Simon's attitude at this time, saying "I can remember going into the gents in The Three Horseshoes in Hempstead during a gig, and we're having a pee together. He was very excited, and he turns round to me and and says, “Guess what, man? We're number sixteen in Boston with The Sound of Silence'”. A few days later I was doing another gig with him and he made a beeline for me. “Guess what?” I said “You're No. 15 in Boston”. He said, “No man, we're No. 1 in Boston”. I thought, “Wow. No. 1 in Boston, eh?” It was almost a joke, because I really had no idea what that sort of stuff meant at all." Simon was even more excited when the record started creeping up the national charts, though he was less enthused when his copy of the single arrived from America. He listened to it, and thought the arrangement was a Byrds rip-off, and cringed at the way the rhythm section had to slow down and speed up in order to stay in time with the acoustic recording: [Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, "The Sound of Silence"] I have to say that, while the tempo fluctuations are noticeable once you know to look for them, it's a remarkably tight performance given the circumstances. As the record went up the charts, Simon was called back to America, to record an album to go along with it. The Paul Simon Songbook hadn't been released in the US,  and they needed an album *now*, and Simon was a slow songwriter, so the duo took six songs from that album and rerecorded them in folk-rock versions with their new producer Bob Johnston, who was also working with Dylan now, since Tom Wilson had moved on to Verve records. They filled out the album with "The Sound of Silence", the two electric tracks from March, one new song, "Blessed", and a version of "Anji", which came straight after "Somewhere They Can't Find Me", presumably to acknowledge Simon lifting bits of it. That version of “Anji” also followed Jansch's arrangement, and so included the bit that Simon had taken for “We Got a Groovy Thing Going” as well. They also recorded their next single, which was released on the British version of the album but not the American one, a song that Simon had written during a thoroughly depressing tour of Lancashire towns (he wrote it in Widnes, but a friend of Simon's who lived in Widnes later said that while it was written in Widnes it was written *about* Birkenhead. Simon has also sometimes said it was about Warrington or Wigan, both of which are so close to Widnes and so similar in both name and atmosphere that it would be the easiest thing in the world to mix them up.) [Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, "Homeward Bound"] These tracks were all recorded in December 1965, and they featured the Wrecking Crew -- Bob Johnston wanted the best, and didn't rate the New York players that Wilson had used, and so they were recorded in LA with Glen Campbell, Joe South, Hal Blaine, Larry Knechtel, and Joe Osborne. I've also seen in some sources that there were sessions in Nashville with A-team players Fred Carter and Charlie McCoy. By January, "The Sound of Silence" had reached number one, knocking "We Can Work it Out" by the Beatles off the top spot for two weeks, before the Beatles record went back to the top. They'd achieved what they'd been trying for for nearly a decade, and I'll give the last word here to Paul Simon, who said of the achievement: "I had come back to New York, and I was staying in my old room at my parents' house. Artie was living at his parents' house, too. I remember Artie and I were sitting there in my car one night, parked on a street in Queens, and the announcer said, "Number one, Simon & Garfunkel." And Artie said to me, "That Simon & Garfunkel, they must be having a great time.""

Nessuno può negare che l'argomento “amore” sia il più utilizzato nelle canzoni Pop. Molti dicono che si tratta di musica “romantica”. In verità, però, la vera Musica Romantica risale al XIX secolo, ed è il genere musicale “inventato” da Ludwig van Beethoven, che proveniva dalla Musica Classica del secolo precedente. Le parole “romantico” e “romanticismo” derivano da una parola inglese in uso dal XVII secolo, ovvero romantic, che si traduce “pittoresco, romanzesco”. A loro volta, gli inglesi copiarono questa parola da un antico termine francese, romanz, che si traduce “romanzo”. Allora, cosa significa la parola “romanzo”? Viene dalla locuzione latina romanĭce loqui, ovvero “parlare latino”. Dal XV secolo, però, questa parola si iniziò a usare per indicare i componimenti letterari in prosa in qualsiasi lingua. Ecco perché, nei due secoli successivi, la narrazione di vicende familiari o con un solo protagonista iniziò a essere chiamata “romanzo” e il termine fu avvicinato anche alle altre arti. Così, anche la Musica dal genere Classico passò al Romantico. Ma passiamo alla musica di oggi, quella dei cantanti e delle band Pop. Di cosa parlano? Dal secondo dopo guerra, dagli anni '50 in particolare, i testi delle canzoni hanno parlato sempre più spesso di sesso, e, dal decennio successivo, si sono aggiunti molti riferimenti anche alla droga. I testi delle canzoni riflettono lo stile di vita dei loro cantanti e dei loro compositori. Per esempio, nel 1976 uscirono 2 canzoni intitolate I wanna see what you're like in bed (che si traduce “Voglio vedere come sei a letto”) e She's hot, she's sexy. Il famoso cantante Marvin Gaye's descrisse così la copertina dell'album che conteneva la prima canzone: “Non trovo nulla di sbagliato nel sesso fra persone consenzienti. […] Non credo nelle filosofie eccessivamente moralistiche”. Avete mai sentito Big Spender? Fu un successo di Shirley Bassey del 1967, ma era già stata registrata da Peggy Lee nel 1966. Dal 1964 al 1979 Shirley Bassey fu presente nei titoli iniziali dei film su James Bond. Big Spender fu usata nel 1969 nel film Sweet Charity – Una ragazza che voleva essere amata. Di cosa parlava questa canzone? Di una prostituta che cercava di “agganciare” un cliente. È curioso che la versione originale del film, diretto da Bob Fosse, era un remake del film italiano Le notti di Cabiria di Federico Fellini. Comunque, la protagonista, una giovane prostituta, nel film di Bob Fosse diventa una ballerina in cerca del successo e dell'amore. Anche se la versione americana cercò di “nascondere” le origini della protagonista nello svolgimento della narrazione, nella colonna sonora incluse una canzone che era un inno della prostituzione. Nel 1956 Eddie Cooley e Otis Blackwell (più famoso con il nome d'arte John Davenport) fecero incidere a Little Willie John una delle canzoni Jazz più famose in assoluto: Fever. Nel 1958, anche Peggy Lee fece la sua versione. La canzone diventò un successo anche di Elvis Presley. Grandi artisti di tutto il mondo si sono cimentati con questa canzone. Ma di cosa parla il testo? È una descrizione sottilmente mascherata di un intenso desiderio sessuale. Nel 1993 Madonna registrò la sua versione in cui, però, “smascherava” l'intenso desiderio sessuale con il titolo dell'album in cui incluse la canzone: Erotica. È invece curiosa la versione italiana di Bruno Lauzi, risalente al 1965. Intitolò la canzone Garibaldi (blues), e trasformò il testo in una parodia su Giuseppe Garibaldi, sulla sua famiglia e sulle sue imprese. Adesso parliamo di un'altra canzone: Never on Sunday. Fra i diversi interpreti segnaliamo Connie Francis. Anche questa canzone parlava di una prostituta. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/corgiov/message

Det är andra avsnittet i vår intervjuserie med Peter LeMarc. Detta avsnitt tar avstamp i åren efter genombrottet. Hur följer man upp en succé? Vi pratar om Beatles, föräldraskap, mångkultur, låtskrivande, Little Willie John, och mycket mer. Ni vill inte missa när Peter plockar fram gitarren eller gräver bland kassetterna med alternativa tagningar. Följ med oss i fortsättningen på samtalen från Bagarmossen, juli 2021.   Peter LePod finns på twitter, instagram och facebook. Maila oss på peterlepod@gmail.com Intro- och outromusik av Kristoffer Hedberg från Easy October.     Keep the evil spirits away!

Episode one hundred and thirty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “I Can't Help Myself” by the Four Tops, and is part two of a three-episode look at Motown in 1965. 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 "Colours" by Donovan. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources No Mixcloud this week, as too many of the songs were by the Four Tops. Amazingly, there are no books on the Four Tops, so I've had to rely on the information in the general Motown sources I use, plus the liner notes for the Four Tops 50th Anniversary singles collection, a collection of the A and B sides of all their Motown singles. That collection is the best collection of the Four Tops' work available, but is pricey -- for a cheaper option this single-disc set is much better value. For Motown-related information in this and other Motown episodes, I've used the following resources: Where Did Our Love Go? The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound by Nelson George is an excellent popular history of the various companies that became Motown. To Be Loved by Berry Gordy is Gordy's own, understandably one-sided, but relatively well-written, autobiography. Women of Motown: An Oral History by Susan Whitall is a collection of interviews with women involved in Motown. I Hear a Symphony: Motown and Crossover R&B by J. Andrew Flory is an academic look at Motown. The Motown Encyclopaedia by Graham Betts is an exhaustive look at the people and records involved in Motown's thirty-year history. How Sweet It Is by Lamont Dozier and Scott B. Bomar is Dozier's autobiography, while Come and Get These Memories by Brian and Eddie Holland and Dave Thompson is the Holland brothers'. And Motown Junkies is an infrequently-updated blog looking at (so far) the first 694 tracks released on Motown singles. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript This is the second part of a two-part look at the work of Holland, Dozier, and Holland, and part of a three-part look at Motown Records in the mid-sixties. If you've not listened to the last episode, on the Supremes, you might want to listen to that one before this. There's a clip of an old radio comedy show that always makes me irrationally irritated when I hear it, even though I like the programme it's from: [Excerpt of The Mark Steel Lectures, “Aristotle” episode. Transcript: "Which led him back to the problem, what is it that makes something what it is? Is an apple still an apple when it's decomposing? I went to see the Four Tops once and none of the original members were in the band, they were just session musicians. So have i seen the Four Tops or not? I don't know" ] That's the kind of joke that would work with many vocal groups -- you could make the joke about the Drifters or the Ink Spots, of course, and it would even work for, for example, the Temptations, though they do have one original member still touring with them. Everyone knows that that kind of group has a constantly rotating membership, and that people come and go from groups like that all the time. Except that that wasn't true for the Four Tops at the time Mark Steel made that joke, in the late 1990s. The current version of the Four Tops does only have one original member -- but that's because the other three all died. At the time Steel made the joke, his only opportunity to see the Four Tops would have been seeing all four original members -- the same four people who had been performing under that name since the 1950s. Other groups have had longer careers than that without changing members -- mostly duos, like Simon & Garfunkel or the Everly Brothers -- but I can't think of another one that lasted as long while performing together continuously, without taking a break at any point. So today, we're going to look at the career of a group who performed together for forty-four years without a lineup change, a group who were recording together before Motown even started, but who became indelibly associated with Motown and with Holland-Dozier-Holland. We're going to look at the Four Tops, and at "I Can't Help Myself": [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "I Can't Help Myself"] The Four Tops have turned up in the background in several episodes already, even though we're only now getting to their big hits. By the time they became huge, they had already been performing together for more than a decade, and had had a big influence on the burgeoning Detroit music scene even before Berry Gordy had got involved with the scene. The group had started out after Abdul "Duke" Fakir, a teenager in Detroit, had gone to see Lucky Millinder and his band perform, and had been surprised to see his friend Levi Stubbs turn up, get on stage, and start singing with the band in a guest spot. Fakir had never realised before that his friend sang at all, let alone that he had an astonishing baritone voice. Stubbs was, in fact, a regular on the Detroit amateur singing circuit, and had connections with several other performers on that circuit -- most notably his cousin Jackie Wilson, but also Hank Ballard and Little Willie John. Those few singers would make deals with each other about who would get to win at a particular show, and carved things up between them. Stubbs and Fakir quickly started singing together, and by 1953 they had teamed up with two other kids, Obie Benson and Lawrence Payton. The four of them sang together at a party, and decided that they sounded good enough together that they should become a group. They named themselves the Four Aims, and started playing local shows. They got a one-off record deal with a small label called Grady Records, and released their only single under the name "The Four Aims" in 1956: [Excerpt: The Four Aims, "She Gave Me Love"] After that single, they tried teaming up with Jackie Wilson, who had just quit Billy Ward and the Dominoes, but they found that Wilson and Stubbs' voices clashed -- Wilson's then-wife said their voices were too similar, though they sound very different to me. Wilson would, of course, go on to his own massive success, and that success would be in part thanks to Roquel Davis, who was Lawrence Payton's cousin. As we saw in the episode on "Reet Petite", Davis would co-write most of Wilson's hits with Berry Gordy, and he was also writing songs for the Four Aims -- who he renamed the Four Tops, because he thought the Four Aims sounded too much like the Ames Brothers, a white vocal quartet who were popular at the time.  They explained to Davis that they were called the Four Aims because they were *aiming* for the top, and Davis said that in that case they should be the Four Tops, and that was the name under which they would perform for the rest of their career. In the early fifties, before Wilson's success, Davis was the person in the group's circle with the most music industry connections, and he got them a deal with Chess Records. I already talked about this back in the episode on Jackie Wilson, but the group's first record on Chess, with Davis as the credited songwriter: [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "Kiss Me Baby"] Sounds more than a little like a Ray Charles record from a couple of years earlier, which Davis definitely didn't write: [Excerpt: Ray Charles, "Kissa Me Baby"] But that wasn't a success, and it would be another four years before they released their next single -- a one-off single on Columbia Records. It turned out that Chess had mostly signed the Four Tops not for the group, but to get Davis as a songwriter, and songs he'd originally written for the Tops ended up being recorded by other acts on Chess, like the Moonglows and the Flamingoes. The group's single on Columbia would also be a flop, they'd wait another two years before another one-off single on Riverside, and then yet another two years before they were signed by Motown. Their signing to Motown was largely the work of Mickey Stevenson, Motown's head of A&R. Of course, Stevenson was responsible, directly or otherwise, for every signing to the label at this point in time, but he had a special interest in the Four Tops. Stevenson had been in the Air Force in the 1950s, when he'd wandered into one of the Detroit amateur shows at which the Four Aims had been performing. He'd been so impressed with them that he immediately decided to quit the air force and go into music himself. He'd joined the Hamptones, the vocal group who toured with Lionel Hampton's band, and he'd also become a member of a doo-wop group called The Classics, who'd had a minor hit with "If Only the Sky Was a Mirror": [Excerpt: The Classics, "If Only the Sky Was a Mirror"] Stevenson had moved into a backroom position with Motown, but it was arguably the most important position in the company other than Gordy's. He was responsible for putting together the Funk Brothers, for signing many of the label's biggest acts, and for co-writing a number of the label's biggest hits, including "Stubborn Kind of Fellow" and "Dancing in the Street". Stevenson had wanted to sign the group from the start -- given that they were the group who were directly responsible for everything that had happened in his career, they were important to him. And Berry Gordy was also a fan of the group, and had known them since his time working with Jackie Wilson, but it had taken several years for everything to fall into place so that the group were able to sign to Motown. When they did, they naturally became a priority. When they were signed to the label, it was initially with the intention of recording them as a jazz group rather than doing the soul pop that Motown was best known for. Their first recordings for Motown were for their subsidiary Workshop Jazz. They recorded an entire album of old standards for the label, titled "Breaking Through": [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "This Can't be Love"] Unfortunately for the group, that album wouldn't be released for thirty-five years -- Workshop Jazz had been founded because Berry Gordy was still a jazz fanatic, but none of the records on it had been very successful (or, frankly, very good -- the Four Tops album was pretty good, but most of the music put out on the label was third rate at best), and so the label closed down before they released the Four Tops album. So the group were at a loose end, and for a while they were put to work as session vocalists on other people's records, adding backing to records by the Supremes: [Excerpt: The Supremes, "Run Run Run"] And even after they started having hits of their own they would appear on records by other people, like "My Baby Loves Me" by Martha and the Vandellas: [Excerpt: Martha and the Vandellas, "My Baby Loves Me"] You'll notice that both of these records were ones where the Four Tops were added to a female group -- and that would also be the case on their own records, once Holland, Dozier, and Holland took over producing them. The sound on the Four Tops' records is a distinctive one, and is actually made up of seven voices. Levi Stubbs, of course, took the lead on the singles, but the combination of backing vocalists was as important as the lead. Unlike several other vocal groups, the Four Tops were never replaced on their records -- Stubbs was always resistant to the idea that he was more important than the rest of his group. Instead, they were augmented -- Motown's normal session singers, the Andantes, joining in with Fakir, Payton, and Benson. The idea was to give the group a distinctive sound, and in particular to set them apart from the Temptations, whose recordings all featured only male vocals. The group's first hit single, "Baby I Need Your Loving", was a song that Holland, Dozier, and Holland had written but weren't too impressed with. Indeed, they'd cut the backing track two years earlier, but been too uninspired by it to do anything with the completed track. But then, two years after cutting the backing, Dozier was hit with inspiration -- the lines "Baby, I need your loving/Got to have all your loving" fit the backing track perfectly. Eddie Holland was particularly excited to work with the Four Tops. Even though he'd somehow managed never to hear the group, despite both moving in the same musical circles in the same town for several years, he'd been hearing for all that time that Levi Stubbs was as good as his rivals Little Willie John and Jackie Wilson -- and anyone that good must be worth working with. When they took the song into the studio, though, Levi Stubbs didn't want to sing it, insisting that the key was wrong for his voice, and that it should be Payton who sang the song. The producers, though, insisted that Stubbs had the perfect voice for the song, and that they wanted the strained tone that came from Stubbs' baritone going into a higher register than he was comfortable with. Eddie Holland, who always coached the lead vocalists while his brother and Lamont Dozier worked with the musicians, would later say that the problem was that Stubbs was unprepared and embarrassed -- they eventually persuaded Stubbs to take the song home and rehearse it over the weekend, and to come in to have a second go at the track the next Monday. On the Monday, Stubbs came in and sang the song perfectly, and Stubbs' baritone leads became the most distinctive sound to come out of Motown in this period: [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "Baby I Need Your Loving"] According to at least one source, Stubbs was still unhappy with his vocal, and wanted to come in again the next day and record it again. Holland, Dozier, and Holland humoured him, but that wasn't going to happen. "Baby I Need Your Loving" became a hit, making number eleven, and so of course the next record was a soundalike. "Without the One You Love (Life's Not Worthwhile)" even started with the line "Baby, I need your good loving". Unfortunately, this time Holland, Dozier, and Holland copied their previous hit a little *too* closely, and people weren't interested. Dozier has later said that they were simply so busy with the Supremes at the time that they didn't give the single the attention it deserved, and thought that cranking out a soundalike would be good enough. Because of this, they weren't given the group's next single -- the way Motown worked at the time, if you came up with a hit for an act, you automatically got the chance to do the follow-up, but if you didn't have a hit, someone else got a chance. Instead, Mickey Stevenson and Ivy Joe Hunter came up with a ballad called "Ask the Lonely", which became a minor hit -- not as big as "Baby I Need Your Loving", but enough that the group could continue to have a career. It would be the next single that would make the Four Tops into the other great Holland-Dozier-Holland act, the one on which their reputation rests as much as it does on the Supremes: [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "I Can't Help Myself"] "I Can't Help Myself" was inspired by Dozier's grandfather, who would catcall women as they passed him on the street -- "Hey, sugar pie! Hi there honey bunch!" Dozier married those words to a chord progression that's almost identical to the one from "Where Did Our Love Go?".  Both songs go C-G-Dm-F-G, with the same number of beats between changes: [demonstrates] There's only one tiny change in the progression -- in the last beat of the last bar, there's a passing chord in "I Can't Help Myself", a move to A minor, that isn't there in "Where Did Our Love Go?" Even the melody lines, the syllabics of the words, and their general meanings are very similar. "Where Did Our Love Go?" starts with "Baby baby", "I Can't Help Myself" starts with "Sugar pie, honey bunch". "Baby don't leave me" is syllabically similar to "You know that I love you". The two songs diverge lyrically and melodically after that, but what's astonishing is how a different vocalist and arrangement can utterly transform two such similar basic songs. Compare the opening of "Where Did Our Love Go?": [Excerpt: The Supremes, "Where Did Our Love Go?"] With the opening of "I Can't Help Myself": [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "I Can't Help Myself"] It's a perfect example of how Holland, Dozier, and Holland would reuse musical ideas, but would put a different spin on them and make the records sound very different. Of course, some of the credit for this should go to the Funk Brothers, the session musicians who played on every Motown hit in this period, but there's some question as to exactly how much credit they deserved. Depending on who you believe, either the musicians all came up with their own instrumental lines, and the arrangement was a group effort by the session musicians with minimal interference from the nominal producers, or it was all written by Brian Holland and Lamont Dozier, and the musicians just did what they were told with no creative input at all. The arguments about who did what tend to get quite vicious, with each side pointing out, accurately, that the other needed them. It's true that Holland, Dozier, and Holland didn't do anything like as well as writers and producers after they left Motown. It's also true that the Funk Brothers didn't write or produce any hits themselves, but were reliant on the Motown staff writers and producers for material. I suspect, and it is only a suspicion, that the truth lies between the two, and that it was a collaborative process where Holland and Dozier would go into the studio with a good idea of what they wanted, but that there was scope for interpretation and the musicians were able to make suggestions, which the producers might take up if they were good ones. If Brian Holland sketched out or hummed a rough bassline to James Jamerson, saying something like "play bum-bum-bum-bum", and then Jamerson embellished and improvised around that rough bassline, it would be easy to see how both men could come out of the session thinking they had written the bassline, and having good reason to think so. It's also easy to see how the balance could differ in different sessions -- how sometimes Holland or Dozier could come in with a fully worked out part, and other times they might come in saying "you know the kind of thing I want",  and how that could easily become remembered as "I came up with all the parts and the musicians did nothing" or "Us musicians came up with all the parts and the producers just trusted us". Luckily, there's more than enough credit to go around, and we can say that the Four Tops, Holland, Dozier, and Holland, the Funk Brothers, and the Andantes all played an important part in making these classic singles: [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "I Can't Help Myself"] "I Can't Help Myself" knocked the Supremes' "Back in My Arms Again" off the number one spot, but was itself knocked off the top by "Mr. Tambourine Man" -- but then a week later, "I Can't Help Myself" was at number one again, before being knocked off again by "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction". The success of "I Can't Help Myself" meant that the group's singles on their old labels suddenly had some value. Columbia Records reissued "Ain't That Love", a single the group had originally released four years earlier, in the hope of having some success because of the group's new-found fame. As we saw last time when the Supremes rushed out "Come See About Me" to prevent someone else having the hit with it, there was nothing that Berry Gordy hated more than the idea that someone else could have a hit based on the success of a Motown act. The Four Tops needed a new single *now* to kill the record on Columbia, and it didn't matter that there were no recordings or even songs available to put out. Holland, Dozier, and Holland went into the studio to record a new backing track with the Funk Brothers, essentially just a remake of the backing from "I Can't Help Myself", only very slightly changed. By three o'clock in the afternoon on the day they found out that the Columbia record was being released, they were in the studio, Dozier fine-tuning the melody while Brian Holland rehearsed the musicians and Eddie Holland scribbled lyrics in another corner. By five PM the track had been recorded and mixed. By six PM the master stamper was being driven the ninety miles to the pressing plant so they could start pressing up copies. The next day, DJs started getting copies of the record, and it was in the shops a couple of days later. Of course, the record being made in such a rush meant that it was essentially a remake of their previous hit -- something that was acknowledged in the tongue-in-cheek title: [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "It's the Same Old Song"] "It's the Same Old Song" wasn't as big a hit as "I Can't Help Myself", but it made number five on the charts, a more than respectable follow-up, and quite astonishing given the pressure under which the record was made. The next few singles that Holland, Dozier, and Holland wrote for the group weren't quite as successful -- this was early 1966, and Holland, Dozier, and Holland were in a mini slump -- they'd had a number one with "I Hear a Symphony", as we heard in the last episode, but then they produced two singles for the Supremes that made the top ten, but not number one -- "My World is Empty Without You" and "Love is Like an Itching in My Heart".  And as the Four Tops weren't quite as big as the Supremes, so their next two singles, "Something About You" and "Shake Me, Wake Me (When It's Over)", only just scraped into the bottom of the top twenty. Still hits, but not up to Holland, Dozier, and Holland's 1965 standards. And so as was the common practice at Motown, someone else was given a chance to come up with a song for the group. "Loving You is Sweeter Than Ever" was written by Ivy Jo Hunter, a songwriter and producer whose biggest contribution to this point had been co-writing "Dancing in the Street", and Stevie Wonder, a child star who'd had a hit a couple of years earlier but never really followed up on it, and who also played drums on the track: [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "Loving You is Sweeter Than Ever"] Within a few months, Wonder would begin a run of hit singles that would continue for more than a decade, and would become arguably the most important artist on Motown. But that golden period hadn't quite started yet, and "Loving You is Sweeter Than Ever" didn't make the top forty. At this point, it would have been easy for the Four Tops to have been relegated to the same pile as artists like the Contours -- people who'd had a couple of hits on Motown, but had then failed to follow up with a decent career. Motown was becoming ever more willing to drop artists as dead weight, as Gordy was increasingly concentrating on a few huge stars -- Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson and especially the Supremes – to the exclusion of everyone else. But then Holland, Dozier, and Holland got back up on top. They came up with two more number ones for the Supremes in quick succession. "You Can't Hurry Love" was recorded around the same time that "Loving You is Sweeter Than Ever" was failing to chart, and quickly became one of the Supremes' biggest ever hits. They followed that with a song inspired by the sound of the breaking news alert on the radio, replicating that sound with the staccato guitars on what was their most inventive production to date: [Excerpt: The Supremes, "You Keep Me Hanging On"] Not only was that a number one record, it was soon followed by a top ten cover version by the heavy rock band Vanilla Fudge: [Excerpt: Vanilla Fudge, "You Keep Me Hanging On"] Holland, Dozier, and Holland were back on top, and they brought the Four Tops back to the top with them. The next single they recorded with the group, "Reach Out, I'll Be There", started with an instrumental introduction that Brian Holland was noodling with on the piano: [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "Reach Out I'll Be There"] Holland was playing that part, over and over, and then suddenly Lamont Dozier was hit with inspiration -- so much so that he literally pushed Holland to one side without saying anything and started playing what would become the verse: [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "Reach Out I'll Be There"] The interesting thing about that track is that it shows how the different genres that were charting at the time would have more influence on each other than it might appear from this distance, where we put them all into neat little boxes named "folk-rock" or "Motown". Because Lamont Dozier was very specifically being influenced by Bob Dylan and "Like a Rolling Stone", when it came to how the song was phrased. Now, this is not something that I would ever in a million years have thought of, but once you know it, the influence is absolutely plain -- the way the melody stresses and elongates the last syllable of each line is pure Dylan. To show this, I am afraid I'm going to have to do something that I hoped I'd never, ever, have to do, which is do a bad Bob Dylan impression. Everyone thinks they can impersonate Dylan, everyone's imitations of Dylan are cringeworthy, and mine is worse than most. This will sound awful, but it *will* show you how Dozier was thinking when he came up with that bit of melody: [demonstrates] Let us never speak of that again. I think we'd better hear how Levi Stubbs sang it again, hadn't we, to take that unpleasant sound away: [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "Reach Out I'll Be There"] That became the group's second and last number one single, and also their only UK number one. Unfortunately, Holland, Dozier, and Holland were so hot at this point that they ended up competing with themselves. Norman Whitfield, one of the other Motown songwriter-producers, had wanted for a while to produce the Temptations, whose records were at this point mostly written and produced by Smokey Robinson. He called on Eddie Holland to help him write the hit that let him take over from Robinson as the Temptations' producer, "Ain't Too Proud to Beg": [Excerpt: The Temptations, "Ain't Too Proud to Beg"] Dozier and Brian Holland were fine with Eddie working with another writer -- they all did that kind of thing on occasion -- until the date of the BMI Awards. The previous two years, the trio had been jointly given BMI's award for most successful songwriter of the year. But that year, Eddie Holland got the award on his own, for having written more hits than anyone else (he'd written eight, Dozier and Brian Holland had written six. According to a contemporary issue of Billboard, John Sebastian was next with five, then Lennon/McCartney and Jagger/Richards with four each.) Holland felt bad that he'd inadvertently prevented his collaborators from winning the award for a third year in a row, and from this point on he'd be much more careful about outside collaborations. Holland, Dozier, and Holland wrote two more classic singles for the Four Tops, "Standing in the Shadows of Love", and "Bernadette". That latter had been inspired by a coincidence that all three of Holland, Dozier, and Holland had at one time or another dated or felt unrequited love for different girls called Bernadette, but it proved extremely difficult to record. When the trio wrote together, Eddie Holland would always sing the songs, and the melodies were constructed around his tenor vocal range. Stubbs was a baritone, and sometimes couldn't hit some of the higher notes in the melodies, and he was having that problem with "Bernadette". Eddie Holland eventually solved the problem by inviting in a few fans who had been hanging around outside hoping for autographs. Stubbs being a performer wasn't going to make himself look bad in front of an audience, and sang it perfectly: [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "Bernadette"] "Bernadette" made the top five, and it was followed by a couple more top twenty hits with lesser Holland/Dozier/Holland songs, but then the writer-producers quit Motown, for reasons we'll look at in a few months when we take our last look at the Supremes. This left the Four Tops stranded -- they were so associated with their producers that nobody else could get hits with them. For a while, Motown turned to an interesting strategy with them. It had been normal Motown practice to fill albums up with cover versions of hits of the day, and so the label put out some of this album filler as singles, and surprisingly had some chart success with cover versions of the Left Banke's baroque pop hit "Walk Away Renee": [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "Walk Away Renee"] and of Tim Hardin's folk ballad "If I Were a Carpenter": [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "If I Were a Carpenter"] And so for a while many of the singles the group released, both in the US and elsewhere, were covers of songs that were very far from the normal Motown style -- the Jimmy Webb ballad "Do What You Gotta Do" made the UK top twenty, their cover of another Jimmy Webb song, "MacArthur Park", made the lower reaches of the US top forty, their version of the old standard "It's All in the Game" made number twenty-four, and they released a version of "River Deep, Mountain High", teaming up with the Supremes, that became more successful in the US than the original, though still only just made the top forty. But they were flailing. Motown had no idea what to do with them other than release cover versions, and any time any of Motown's writing and production teams tried to come up with something new for the group it failed catastrophically. In 1972 they signed to ABC/Dunhill, and there they had a few hits, including a couple that made the top ten, but soon the same pattern emerged -- no-one could reliably get hits with the group, and they spent much of the seventies chasing trends and failing to catch them. They had one more big US hit in 1981, with "When She Was My Girl", which made number eleven, and which went to number one on the R&B charts: [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "When She Was My Girl"] But from that point on they were essentially a nostalgia act, though they carried on releasing records through the eighties. The group's career nearly came to a premature end in 1988. They were in the UK to promote their single "Loco in Acapulco", co-written by Lamont Dozier and Phil Collins, from the soundtrack of Collins' film Buster: [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "Loco in Acapulco"] That was a UK top ten hit, but it nearly led to the group's death -- they were scheduled to fly out of the UK on Pan Am flight 103 to Detroit on the twenty-first of December 1988. But the group were tired after recording an appearance on Top of the Pops the night before, slept in, and missed the flight. The flight fell victim to a terrorist bombing -- the Lockerbie bombing -- and everyone on it died. The group carried on performing together after that, but their last new single was released in 1989, and they only recorded one more album, a Christmas album in 1995. They performed together, still in their original lineup, until 1997 when Lawrence Payton died from cancer. At first the group continued as a trio, retiring the Four Tops name and just performing as The Tops, but eventually they got in a replacement. By the turn of the century, Levi Stubbs had become too ill to perform as well -- he retired in 2000, though he came back for a one-off performance for the group's fiftieth anniversary in 2004, and he died in 2008. Obie Benson continued performing with the group until three months before his death in 2005. A version of the Four Tops continues to perform, led by Abdul Fakir, and also featuring Lawrence Payton's son Roquel, named after Roquel Davis, who performs under the name Lawrence Payton Jr. The Four Tops were one of those groups that never quite lived up to their commercial potential, thanks in large part to Holland, Dozier, and Holland leaving Motown at precisely the wrong moment, and one has to wonder how many more hits they could have had under other circumstances. But the hits they did have included some of the greatest records of the sixties, and they managed to continue working together, without any public animosity, until their deaths. Given the way the careers of more successful groups have tended to end, perhaps it's better this way.

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

Featuring two classics, one coming from Little Willie John and the late great James Brown. Strictly for entertainment purposes only. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/radikalra/message

Air Week: May 31-June 6, 2021 Little Willie John The “Juke In The Back” is proud to spotlight one of R&B’s most underrated singers and showmen, Little Willie John. Born in Arkansas, Willie was raised in Detroit and took advantage of its thriving music scene from an early age. By 18, he was recording for […]

One frigid night in late January, our two intrepid hosts recorded three episodes back-to-back, in an experiment public health officials have described as both “insane” and “totally wicked rad."  All three shows are part of our now-renowned “Always a B-Side, Never A Bride” series, where we flip over a song we previously discussed on the pod and listen to the reverse. For secret reasons, we're publishing the 3rd episode before the second one we recorded that night: in this one we discuss First Gear's “Leave My Kitten Alone” (2:27), the turvy to that band's 1964 topsy, “A Certain Girl.” Yes, that's Jimmy Page on the git-box! But more importantly, we flip our lids to Little Willie John's 1959 original ingredients (21:34) and wonder where it's been all our lives!

Today’s show features music performed by Little Willie John and Amos Wilburn

Um episódio sobre a emancipação do desejo feminino, que começa com “Nasty”, de Janet Jackson, a abrir caminho para a geração seguinte. Há um legado de Miss Jackson quando ouvimos canções como “Partition”, de Beyoncé, e “Kiss It Better”, de Rihanna. Esta edição do NUCLEAR tem ainda músicas de Vanity 6, Róisín Murphy e Jessie Ware. Fala-se em “Fever”, original de Little Willie John, com múltiplas versões, incluindo a de Madonna. Destaque ainda para o projecto jornalístico da Time Magazine para celebrar o Black History Month - “The Renaissance is Black”. Fiquem connosco!

Episode Four Welcome Greatness, people who create greatness. 40s, 50s, 60s music has changed, many evolutions, great artist, singers, groups. Those that made their mark. What's changed through the years? Everyones a STAR.??? Most artist are measured to the greats, Duke Ellington, Count Basie.  Somehow, the lovers of music have been deceived. Marketing rules. Mediocrity means nothing.  The Beatles raised the bar, followed by record companies in search of profit. Everything measured in pop music based on The Beatles. Exceptions include Hendrix, Cream.  Record companies would not sign unless you were unique. You had to be different. Album deals etc.  Something to offer that could create profit. Greatness = Segovia, Chet Atkins, Hendrix, Tommy Emmanuel, Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, Ella, Little Richard, Frank Sinatra, Little Willie John from Detroit.  Mid 70s = music business began to change, record companies = profit priority. $$$$$$$$ Artist merit no longer important.  Now=everybody sounds the same, saying nothing musically.  Sound Alike and Look Alike Exceptions = The Police Leads music lovers, listeners to go back and find better content.  Greatness and World of Mediocrity Anyone can be a star without music skills.  What Happened = are they really that exciting? Listeners feel empty? Internet vs Record Companies Publicity machine, global contacts.   Be aware of music artist publicity hype.   Till next time. Peace      

Toni och Emil har intervjuat Lasse Ermalm, Sveriges kanske främsta formgivare av albumomslag. Bland de ca 2500 skivor han designat hittar vi Peter LeMarcs album och singlar från genombrottet fram till Little Willie John. Vi får inte bara höra sanningen bakom dessa skivomslag, utan även berättelser och tankar från en hel karriär. Artisterna på Lasses CV är många: Från John Holm till Monica Zetterlund, från Kenta till Eva Dahlgren och Tomas Ledin. Det här avsnittet bjuder på ett unikt perspektiv på svensk musik- och designhistoria, och ger oss fler pusselbitar till artisten Peter LeMarc. Ett härligt, djupodlande samtal som ni kommer att gilla.   Med detta avsnitt tar Peter LePod julledighet och är tillbaka 8 januari. Du kan läsa mer om Lasse Ermalm och se exempel på omslag han designat på ermalsmegenart.se. Intro- och outromusik av Kristoffer Hedberg från fenomenala Easy October. Följ oss på instagram och facebook för mer info och uppdateringar. God jul och gott nytt år!

We're counting down the 12 Days of Christmas with daily mini-episodes spotlighting a classic holiday song and featuring an interview with the writer. On this fifth day of Christmas, we explore "That Spirit of Christmas" with co-writer Mable John. The first female artist signed to Motown, the sister of Rock & Roll Hall of Famer Little Willie John, and a long-time Ray Charles associate, Mable tells us all about the creation of the song that's probably best known as from the attic scene of the hit holiday film Christmas Vacation.

Toni & Emil vänder på Sången dom spelar-LPn och hittar: Little Willie John! Drivved! Ett av dom sätt! Gråt! (!) Nonsomdu! Är det därför jag älskar dig så! Ni hör ju bara på titlarna vilket avsnitt det kommer bli. De pratar om det svåra med lyckliga känslor i musik. Emil levererar ett scoop om den besjungna mjölkbutiken.  Förstod den tjugoårige Lisa Nilsson vad hon sjöng om i sin duett? Vilken är Peter LeMarcs favoritfilm med James Bond? Toni och Emil är oense om sexmetaforer i en sång, och älvmetaforer i en annan. Det blir i vanlig ordning både skratt och allvar. Let them talk!   Intro- och outromusik av Kristoffer Hedberg från kanonbandet Easy October. Följ oss på instagram på @peterlepod och gilla vår facebooksida.

Episode 107 of A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs looks at "Surf City" and the career of Jan and Dean, including a Pop Symphony, accidental conspiracy to kidnap, and a career that both started and ended with attempts to get out of being drafted. 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 "Hey Little Cobra" by the Rip Chords. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more---- Resources No Mixcloud this week, due to the number of songs by Jan and Dean. Stephen McParland has published many, many books on the California surf and hot-rod music scenes. The Grand High Potentates of California Rock: Jan and Dean "In Perspective" 1958-1968 is the one I used most here, but I referred to several. His books can be found at https://payhip.com/CMusicBooks I also used Dead Man's Curve and Back: The Jan and Dean Story by Mark Thomas Passmore, and Dean Torrence's autobiography Surf City.  The original mono versions of the Liberty singles are only available on an out-of-print CD that goes for over £400, and many compilations have later rerecordings (often by Dean without Jan) but this has the proper recordings, albeit in stereo mixes. This compilation contains their pre-Liberty singles, including the Jan & Arnie material.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?   Transcript A warning about this episode -- it features some discussion of a car crash and resulting disability and recovery, which may be upsetting to some people. Today we're going to look at one of the most successful duos in rock and roll history, but one who have been relegated to a footnote because of their collaboration with a far more successful band, who had a similar sound to them. We're going to look at Jan and Dean, and at "Surf City": [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "Surf City"] The story of Jan and Dean begins with Jan and Arnie, and with the Barons. We discussed the Barons briefly in the episode on "LSD-25", a few months ago, but only in passing, so to recap -- the Barons were a singing group that formed at University High School in LA in the late fifties, centred around Jan Berry. Various people involved in the group's formation went on to be important parts of the LA music scene in the sixties, but by 1958 they were down to Berry and his friends Arnie Ginsburg -- not the DJ we talked about last episode, Dean Torrence, and Don Altfeld. The group members all had a love for R&B, and hung around with various of the Black groups of the time -- Don Altfeld has talked about him and Berry being present, but not participating, for Richard Berry's recording of "Louie Louie", though his memories of the time seem confused in the interviews I've read. And Jan Berry in particular was a real music obsessive, and had what may have been the biggest R&B and rock and roll record collection in LA -- which he obtained by scamming record companies, which seems to be very in character for him. He got a letterhead made up for a fake radio station, KJAN, and wrote to every record company he could find asking for promo copies. He ended up getting six copies of every new release "to play on the radio", and would give some of the extra copies to his friends -- and others he would use as frisbees. According to Torrence, Berry would often receive two hundred new records a day, all free. Berry had a reel-to-reel tape recorder belonging to his father -- his father, William Berry, was important in the Howard Hughes organisation, and had been in charge of the Spruce Goose project, even flying in the famous plane with Hughes, and Hughes had given him the tape recorder, which unlike almost all recording equipment available in the fifties had a primitive reverb function built in. With that and a microphone stolen from the school auditorium, Berry started recording himself and his friends, and he'd wanted to play one of the tapes he'd made at a party, so he'd taken it to a studio to be cut as an acetate, where it had been heard by Joe Lubin of Arwin Records, who took the tape and got session musicians to overdub it: [Excerpt: Jan and Arnie, "Jennie Lee"] That record was released as by Jan and Arnie, rather than the Barons -- Dean Torrence was off doing six months in the army, to get out of being conscripted later. Torrence has always said that he could hear himself on the recording, and that it was one the Barons had done together, but everyone else involved has claimed that while the Barons did record a version of that song, the finished version only features Jan and Arnie's vocals. Don Altfeld didn't sing on it, because he was never allowed to sing in the Barons -- he was forced to just mouth along, which given that both Jan and Dean were known for regularly singing flat must say something about just how bad a singer he is -- though he did apparently hit a metal chair leg as percussion on the record. "Jennie Lee" went to number three on the Cashbox chart -- number eight on Billboard -- and was a big enough hit that it set a precedent for how all the records Jan Berry would be involved in for the next few years would be made -- he would record vocals and piano in his garage, with a ton of reverb, and then the backing track would be recorded to that, usually by the same group of musicians that played on records by people like Sam Cooke, Ritchie Valens, and other late-fifties LA singers -- a group centred around Ernie Freeman on piano and organ, Rene Hall on guitar, and Earl Palmer on drums. This was a completely backwards way of recording -- normally you'd have the musicians play the backing track first and then overdub the vocals on it -- but it was how they would carry on doing things for several years. Jan and Arnie's follow-up, "Gas Money", written by Berry, Ginsburg, and Altfeld, did less well, only making number eighty-one in the charts: [Excerpt: Jan and Arnie, "Gas Money"] And their third single didn't chart at all. By this point, Arnie Ginsburg was getting thoroughly sick of working with Jan Berry -- pretty much without exception everyone who knew Berry in the fifties and early sixties says two things about him -- that he was the single most intelligent person they ever met, and that he was a domineering egomaniac who used anyone he could remorselessly. Jan and Arnie split up, and Arwin Records seems to have decided to stick with Arnie, rather than Jan -- though this might have been because Arnie seemed *less* likely to have hits, as Dean Torrence has later claimed that Arwin was a tax dodge -- it was owned by Marty Melcher, Doris Day's husband, and seems to have been used as much to get out of paying as much tax on the family's vast wealth as it was a real record label. Whatever the reason, though, Arnie made one more single, as The Rituals, backed by many of the people who had played with The Barons -- Bruce Johnston, Sandy Nelson, and Dave Shostac, plus their regular collaborators Mike Deasy, Richie Polodor and Harper Cosby. It didn't chart: [Excerpt: The Rituals, "Girl in Zanzibar"] Dean Torrence, who had by now left the Army, saw his chance, and soon Jan and Arnie had become Jan and Dean -- after a brief phase in which it looked like they might persuade Dean to change his name in order to avoid losing the group name. They hooked up with a new management and production team, Lou Adler and Herb Alpert, who had both been working at Keen Records with Sam Cooke. Kim Fowley later said that it was him who persuaded Adler to sign the duo, but Kim Fowley said a lot of things, very few of them true. Adler and Alpert got the new duo signed to Doré Records, a small label based in LA, and their first release on the label was a cover version of a record originally by a group called the Laurels: [Excerpt: The Laurels, "Baby Talk"] Herb Alpert brought that song to the duo, and their version became a top ten hit, with Jan singing the low parts and Dean singing the lead: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "Baby Talk"] The hit was big enough that budget labels released soundalike cover versions of it, one of which was by a duo called Tom and Jerry, who had been one hit wonders a year earlier: [Excerpt: Tom and Jerry, "Baby Talk"] That cover version was unsuccessful, something Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel were probably very grateful for when they reinvented themselves as sensitive folkies a couple of years later. Around this time, Jan got his girlfriend pregnant. In order not to spoil their son's promising career -- as well as being a singer, he was also at university and planned to become a doctor -- Jan's parents adopted his son and raised the boy as their own son. The duo went on a tour with Little Willie John, Bobby Day, and Little Richard's old backing band The Upsetters, playing to mainly Black audiences -- a tour they were booked on because almost all West Coast doo-wop at that time was from Black singers. Once the mistake was realised, a decision was made to promote the new duo's image more -- lots of photos of the very blonde, very white, duo started to be released, as a way to reassure the white audience. The duo's film-star good looks assured them of regular coverage in the teen magazines, but they didn't have any more hits on Doré -- of the seven singles they released in the two years after "Baby Talk", none of them got to better than number fifty-three on the charts.  Eventually the duo left Doré, and Jan released one solo single, "Tomorrow's Teardrops": [Excerpt: Jan Berry, "Tomorrow's Teardrops"] That was actually released as by Jan Barry, rather than Jan Berry, at a point when the duo had actually split up -- Dean was getting tired of not having any further hit records, and wanted to concentrate on his college work, while Berry was one of those people who needs to be doing several things simultaneously. Berry's new girlfriend Jill Gibson added backing vocals -- by this time he'd dumped the one he'd got pregnant -- and the song was written by Berry and Altfeld. Jan actually started his own label, Ripple Records -- named after the brand of cheap wine -- to release it, and Dean created the logo for him -- the first of many he would create over the years. However, the duo soon reunited, and came up with a plan which would have them only touring during the summer break, and doing local performances in the LA area on those weekends when neither had any homework. Now they needed to get signed to a major label. The one they wanted was Liberty, the label that Eddie Cochran had been on, and whose owner, Si Waronker, was actually the cousin of the owners of Doré. And they had recorded a track that they were sure would get them signed to Liberty. The Marcels had recently had a hit with their doo-wop revival of the old standard "Blue Moon": [Excerpt: The Marcels, "Blue Moon"] Jan had decided to make a soundalike arrangement of another song from the same period, using the same chord changes -- the old Hoagy Carmichael song "Heart and Soul": [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "Heart and Soul"] They were sure that would be a hit. But Herb Alpert wasn't -- he thought it was a dreadful record, He hated it so much, in fact, that he broke up his partnership with Lou Adler. The division of the partnership's assets was straightforward -- they owned Jan and Dean's contract, and they owned a tape recorder. Alpert got the tape recorder, and Adler got Jan and Dean. Alpert went on to have a string of hit records as a trumpet player, starting with "The Lonely Bull" in 1962: [Excerpt: Herb Alpert, "The Lonely Bull"] He later formed his own record label, A&M, and never seems to have regretted losing Jan & Dean. Jan and Dean took their tape of "Heart and Soul" to Liberty Records, who said that they did want to sign Jan and Dean, but they didn't want to release a record like that -- they told them to take it somewhere else, and then when the single was a flop, they could come back to Liberty and make some proper records. So the duo got a two-record deal with the small label Challenge Records, on the understanding that after those two singles they would move on to Liberty. And "Heart and Soul" turned out to be a big hit, making number twenty-five on the charts: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "Heart and Soul"] Their second single on Challenge only made number one hundred and four, but by this time they knew the drill -- they'd release their first single on a new label, it would be a big hit, then everything after that would be a flop. But they were going to a new label anyway, and they were sure their first single on Liberty Records would be a huge hit, just like every time they changed labels. The first record they put out on Liberty was a cover of another oldie, "A Sunday Kind of Love", suggested by Si Waronker's son Lenny, who we'll be hearing a lot more about in future episodes. By this point Lou Adler was working for Aldon Music as their West Coast representative, and so the track was credited as "produced by Lou Adler for Nevins-Kirshner", but Jan was given a separate arrangement credit on the record. But despite their predictions that the single would be a hit because it was a new label, it only made number ninety-four on the charts. The follow-up, "Tennessee", was a song which had been more or less forced on them -- it was originally one of the recordings that Phil Spector produced during his short-lived contract with Liberty, for a group called the Ducanes, but when the Ducanes had made a hash of it, Liberty forced the song on Jan & Dean instead: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "Tennessee"] By this time, while Ernie Freeman was still the studio leader of the session musicians, Jan was requesting a rather larger group of musicians, and they'd started recording the backing tracks first. The musicians on "Tennessee" included Tommy Allsup and Jerry Allison of the Crickets, Earl Palmer on drums, and Glen Campbell on guitar, but even these proven hit-makers couldn't bring the song to more than number sixty-nine on the charts. And even that was better than their next two singles, neither of which even made the Hot One Hundred -- though the fact that by this point they were reduced to recording versions of "Frosty The Snowman", and attempting to recapture their first hit with a sequel called "She's Still Talking Baby Talk" shows how desperately they were casting around for something, anything that could be a hit. Eventually they found something that worked. A group called the Regents had recently had a hit with "Barbara Ann": [Excerpt: The Regents, "Barbara Ann"] The duo had cut a cover version of that for their most recent album, and they thought it had worked well, and so they wanted something else that would allow Dean to sing a falsetto lead, over a bass vocal by Jan, with a girl's name in the title. They eventually hit on an old standard from the 1940s, originally written as a favour for the songwriter's lawyer, Lee Eastman, about his then one-year-old daughter Linda (who we'll be hearing more about later in this series). Their version of "Linda" finally gave them another hit after five flops in a row, reaching number twenty-eight in the charts: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "Linda"] Their career was on an upswing again, and then everything changed for them when they played a gig with support from a local band who had just started having hits, the Beach Boys. The story goes that the Beach Boys were booked to do their own support slot and then to back Jan and Dean on their set. The show went down well with the audience, and they wanted an encore, but Jan and Dean had run out of rehearsed songs. So they suggested that the Beach Boys play their own two singles again, and Jan and Dean would sing with them. The group were flattered that two big stars like Jan and Dean would want to perform their songs, and eagerly joined in. Suddenly, Jan and Dean had an idea -- their next album was going to be called Jan & Dean Take Linda Surfin', but as yet they hadn't recorded any surf songs. They invited the Beach Boys to come into the studio and record new versions of their two singles for Jan & Dean's album, with Jan and Dean singing the leads: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean and the Beach Boys, "Surfin'"] The Beach Boys weren't credited for that session, as they were signed to another label, but it started a long collaboration between the two groups. In particular, the Beach Boys' leader Brian Wilson became a close collaborator with Berry. And at that same session, Wilson gave Jan and Dean what would become their biggest hit. After the recording, Jan and Dean asked Wilson if he had any new songs they might be able to do. The first one he played them, "Surfin' USA", he told them they couldn't do anything with as he wanted that for the Beach Boys themselves. But then he played them two others. The one that Jan and Dean saw most potential in was a song he'd completed, "Gonna Hustle You": [Excerpt: Brian Wilson, "Gonna Hustle You"] The duo wanted that as their next single, but Liberty Records flat out refused to put out something that sounded so dirty as "Gonna Hustle You". They tried rewriting it as "Get a Chance With You", but even that was too much. They put the song aside, though they'd return to it later as "The New Girl In School", which would become a minor hit for them. Instead, they worked on a half-completed song that Wilson had started, very much in the same mould as the first two Beach Boys singles, with the provisional title "Goodie Connie Won't You Please Come Home". This song would become the first of many Jan and Dean songs for which the songwriting credit is disputed. No-one argues with the fact that the basic idea of the song was Brian Wilson's, but Jan Berry's process was to get a lot of people to throw ideas in, sometimes working in a group, sometimes working separately and not even knowing that other people had been involved. The song is officially credited to Wilson and Berry, but Don Altfeld has also claimed he contributed to it, Dean Torrence says that he wrote about a quarter of the lyrics, and it's also been suggested that Roger Christian wrote the lyrics to the first verse. Christian was an LA-area DJ who was obsessed with cars, and had come to Wilson's attention after he'd said on the air that the Beach Boys' "409" was a great song about a bad car. He'd started writing songs with Wilson, and he would also collaborate with both Jan Berry and Wilson's friend Gary Usher (who was a big part of this scene but hardly ever worked with Jan and Dean because he hated Jan). Almost every car song from this period, by the Beach Boys, Jan and Dean, or any number of studio groups, was co-written by Christian, and we'll be hearing more about him in a future episode. This group of people -- Jan and Dean, Brian Wilson, Roger Christian, and Don Altfeld -- would write together in various combinations, and write a lot of hits, but a lot of the credits were assigned more or less randomly -- though Jan Berry was almost always credited, and Dean Torrence almost never was. The completed song, titled "Surf City", was recorded with members of the Wrecking Crew -- the studio musicians who usually worked with Phil Spector -- performing the backing track. In this case, these were Hal Blaine, Glen Campbell, Earl Palmer, Bill Pitman, Ray Pohlman and Billy Strange -- there were two drummers because Berry liked a big drum sound. Brian Wilson was at the session, and soon after this he started using some of those musicians himself. While it was released as a Jan and Dean record, Dean doesn't sing on it at all -- the vocals featured Jan, three singers from another Liberty Records group called the Gents, and Brian Wilson, with Wilson and Tony Minichello of the Gents singing the falsetto parts that Dean would sing live: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "Surf City"] That went to number one, becoming Jan and Dean's only number one, and Brian Wilson's first -- much to the fury of Wilson's father Murry, who thought that Wilson's hits should only be going to the Beach Boys. Murry Wilson may well have been more bothered by the fact that the publishing for the song went to Columbia/Screen Gems, to whom Jan was signed, rather than to Sea of Tunes, the company that published Wilson's other songs, and which was owned by Murry himself. Murry started calling Jan a "pirate", which prompted Berry to turn up to a Beach Boys session wearing a full pirate costume to taunt Murry. From "Linda" on, Jan and Dean had ten top forty hits with ten singles -- one of the B-sides also charted, but they did miss with "Here They Come From All Over The World", the theme tune for the TAMI Show, a classic rock concert film on which Jan and Dean appeared both as singers and as the hosts. That was by far their weakest single from this period, being as it is just a list of the musicians in the show, some of them described incorrectly -- the song talks about "The Rolling Stones from Liverpool" and James Brown being "the King of the Blues". All of these hits were made by the same team. The Wrecking Crew would play the instruments, the Gents -- now renamed the Matadors, and sometimes the Blossoms would provide backing vocals on the earlier singles. The later ones would feature the Fantastic Baggies instead of the Matadors -- two young songwriters, Steve Barri and P.F. Sloan, who were also making their own surf records. The lead would be sung by Jan, the falsetto by some combination of Brian Wilson, Dean Torrence, Tony Minichello and P.F. Sloan -- often Dean wouldn't appear at all. The singles would be written by some combination of Wilson, Berry, Altfeld and Christian, and the songs would be about the same subjects as the Beach Boys' records -- surf, cars, girls, or some combination of the three. Sometimes the records would be just repetitions of the formula, like "Drag City", which was an attempt at a second "Surf City": [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "Drag City"] But often there would be a self-parodic element that wasn't present in the Beach Boys' singles, as in "The Little Old Lady From Pasadena", a car song written by Berry, Christian, and Altfeld, based on a series of Dodge commercials featuring a car-racing old lady: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "The Little Old Lady From Pasadena"] And the grotesque "Dead Man's Curve", equal parts a serious attempt at a teen tragedy song and a parody of the genre, which took on a new meaning a few years after it was a hit: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "Dead Man's Curve"] But while 1963 and 64 saw the duo rack up an incredible run of hits, they were making enemies. Jan was so unpleasant to people by this point that even the teen mags would call him out, with Teen Scene in March 1964 running an article which read, in part, "Blast of the month goes to half of a certain group whose initials are J&D. Reason for the blast: his personality, which makes enemies faster than Carter makes pills... (It's the Jan Half)... Acting like Mr. Big Britches gets you nowhere, and your poor partner, who is one of the nicest guys on earth, shouldn't be forced to go around making apologies for your actions." And while Torrence may have been "one of the nicest guys on Earth", not all of his friends were. In fact, in December 1963, his closest friend, Barry Keenan, was the ringleader in the kidnapping of Frank Sinatra Jr.  Keenan told Torrence about the plan in advance, and Torrence had lent Keenan a great deal of money, which Keenan used to finance the kidnapping. Torrence was accused of being a major part of the plot, though he was let off after testifying against the people who were actually involved -- he's always claimed that he thought that his friend's talking about his plan for the perfect crime was just talk, not a serious plan. Torrence had even offered suggestions, jokingly, which Keenan had incorporated -- and Keenan had left a bag containing fifty thousand dollars at Torrence's home, Torrence's share of the ransom money, which Torrence refused to keep. However, Sinatra Sr was annoyed enough at Torrence that a lot of plans for Jan and Dean TV shows and film appearances suddenly dried up. The lack of TV and film appearances was a particular problem as the music industry was changing under them, and surf and hot rod records weren't the in thing any more -- and Brian Wilson seems to have been less interested in working with them as well, as the Beach Boys overtook Jan and Dean in popularity. 1965 saw them trying to figure out the new, more serious, music scene, with experiments like Pop Symphony Number 1, an album of orchestral arrangements of the duo's hits by Berry (who minored in music at UCLA) and George Tipton: [Excerpt: The Bel-Aire Pops Orchestra, "Surf City"] The duo also tried going folk-rock, releasing an album called Folk 'n' Roll, which featured another variation on the "Surf City" and "Drag City" theme -- this one "Folk City": [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "Folk City"] That album didn't do well at all, not least because the lead-off single was a pro-war protest song, released as a Jan Berry solo single. Berry had become incensed by Buffy Saint-Marie's song "The Universal Soldier", and had written a right-wing response, "The Universal Coward": [Excerpt: Jan Berry, "The Universal Coward"] As you can imagine, that was not popular with the folk-rock crowd, especially coming as it did from someone who was still managing to avoid the draft by studying medicine, even as he was also a pop star. Torrence became so irritated with Berry, and with the music they were making, during the recording of that album that he ended up going down the hall to another studio, where the Beach Boys were recording their unplugged Party! album, and sitting in with them. He suggested they do a new recording of "Barbara Ann", and he sang lead on it, uncredited: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Barbara Ann"] That went to number two on the charts, becoming the biggest hit record that Torrence ever sang on. Torrence was happier with the next project, though, an album spoofing the popular TV show Batman, with several comedy sketches, along with songs about the characters from the TV show: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "Batman"] But by this point, in 1966, Jan and Dean's singles were doing absolutely nothing in the charts. In March, Liberty Records dropped them. And then on April the twelfth, 1966, something happened that would end their chances of another comeback. Jan Berry had been in numerous accidents over the previous few years -- he was a thrill-seeker, and would often end up crashing cars or breaking bones. On April the twelfth, he had an appointment at the draft board, at which he was given bad news -- depending on which account you read, he was either told that his draft deferment was coming to an end and he was going to Vietnam straight away, or that he was going to Vietnam as soon as he graduated from medical school at the end of the school year. He was furious, and he got into his car. What happened next has been the subject of some debate. Some people say that a wheel came off his car -- and some have hinted that this was the result of some of Sinatra's friends getting revenge on Jan and Dean. Others just say he was driving carelessly, which he often did. Some have suggested that he was trying to deliberately get into a minor accident to avoid being drafted. Whatever happened, he was involved in a major accident, in which he, though luckily no-one else, was severely injured. He spent a month in a coma, and came out of it severely brain damaged. He had to relearn to read and speak, and for the rest of his life would have problems with his memory, his physical co-ordination, and his speech. Liberty kept releasing old Jan and Dean tracks, and even got them a final top twenty hit with "Popsicle", a song from a few years earlier. Dean made a Jan and Dean album, Save For a Rainy Day, without Jan, while Jan was still recovering, as a way of trying to keep their career options open if Jan ever got better. Dean put it out on the duo's own new label, J&D, and there were plans for Columbia to pick it up and give it a wider release, but Jan refused to sign the contracts -- he was furious that Dean had made a Jan and Dean record without him, and would have nothing to do with it. Torrence tried to have a music career anyway -- he put out a cover of the Beach Boys song "Vegetables" under the name The Laughing Gravy: [Excerpt: The Laughing Gravy, "Vegetables"] But he soon gave up, and became an artist, designing covers and logos for people like Harry Nilsson, Canned Heat, the Turtles, and the Beach Boys. Jan tried making his own Jan and Dean album without Dean, even though he was unable to sing again or write yet. With a lot of help from Roger Christian, he pulled together some old half-finished songs and finished them, got in some soundalike session singers and famous friends like Glen Campbell and Davy Jones of the Monkees and put together Carnival of Sound, an album that didn't get released until 2010: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, “Girl You're Blowing My Mind"] In the mid-seventies, Jan and Dean got back together and started touring the nostalgia circuit, spurred by a TV movie, Dead Man's Curve, based on their lives. There seemed to be a love-hate relationship between them in later years -- they would split up and get back together, and their roles had reversed, with Dean now taking most of the leads on the shows -- Dean had to look after Jan a lot of the time, and some reports said that Jan had to relearn the words to the three songs he sang lead on every night. But with the aid of some excellent backing musicians, and with some love and tolerance from the audience for Jan's ongoing problems, they managed to regularly please crowds of thousands until a few weeks before Jan's death in 2004. Since then, Dean has mostly performed with the Surf City All-Stars, a band that sometimes also features Al Jardine and David Marks of the Beach Boys, playing a few shows a year. He released an autobiography in 2016 -- it came out at the same time as the autobiographies of Brian Wilson and Mike Love of the Beach Boys, ensuring that even at this late date, he would be overshadowed by his more famous colleagues.

The most gifted of the original generation of soul singers, covered by Elvis and the Beatles, Little Willie John couldn't get out of his own way. Host Nate Wilcox gets the tragic tale from biographer Susan Whitall.

The most gifted of the original generation of soul singers, covered by Elvis and the Beatles, Little Willie John couldn't get out of his own way. Host Nate Wilcox gets the tragic tale from biographer Susan Whitall.This show is part of Pantheon Podcasts.