Podcasts about lymon

Recorded in the final hours of life as we knew it in Altadena.PATREON.COM/THISBODYPODCASTThe windstorm was upon us, the fire was burning, but we were still waiting for evacuation orders and the end of everything we knew. Also, my final Desert Island Jukebox, featuring Bowie, Lewis, Lymon, Thorne, and The Walker Brothers. A true testiment to the power of music to keep us sane in the scariest of times. KEEP YOUR EYE ON THE DONUT, NOT THE HOLE.PATREON.COM/THISBODYPODCAST

Brace yourself for an explosive episode as Fitz Koehler, race announcer for the OC Marathon, chats with David Lyman, a retired Navy EOD Technician, who's gearing up to run the marathon in a 74-pound bomb suit! Yep, you heard that right—he's running for the EOD Warrior Foundation and bringing the boom to the race. David dives into his high-stakes Navy adventures and how he's prepping for this epic challenge. Get ready for laughs, inspiration, and a story that's truly the bomb! Don't miss this dynamite conversation! Visit OCMarathon.com to donate to David's fundraising effort.  Thanks for keeping The Fitzness Show in the top 3% of all podcasts worldwide. Please subscribe, share, and leave a review.  Order signed copies of the Cancer Comeback Series books at Fitzness.com - on sale now! Visit Fitzness.com for referenced content like the Exact Formula for Weight Loss, free workout videos, Fixing Your Life with Fitzness, books, and more.

In a story full of artifacts from music's past, one looms larger than any other. Doo-wop legend Frankie Lymon's tombstone lives in Bay City, Michigan. Here's how it got there.   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Rough Draft Hattiesburg is proud to present this episode with the one and only Tony Lymon. James and Holley discuss music, art, life, design, and more with Tony, who is a multi-talented drummer, instructor, artist, coffee roaster... Trust us, he does it all! This long awaited episode is a true example of why we do this show. Tony is an inspiration and truly a gift to the city of Hattiesburg. Listen in!

Rough Draft Hattiesburg is proud to present this episode with the one and only Tony Lymon. James and Holley discuss music, art, life, design, and more with Tony, who is a multi-talented drummer, instructor, artist, coffee roaster... Trust us, he does it all! This long awaited episode is a true example of why we do this show. Tony is an inspiration and truly a gift to the city of Hattiesburg. Listen in!

Is there a better way to celebrate the totally chill week between Christmas and New Years than with an ice cold Sprite? We say there is not! From Sprite Boy and Mr. Lymon to Drake and Lebron, come on a journey through time and space (and the McDonald's Drive-Thru) wherein we obey our thirst for the crispiest, spiciest beverage in the universe. Friend of the show Uncle Matt drops by JFHQ to chat about Ernest P. Worrell and the various other Sprite ad campaigns, and don't miss a special appearance by little brother Chase, all this week on Junk Feud! --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/junkfeudpod/support

Imagine you're twenty-something years old. You're touring the world with your friends in your extremely popular pop/rock band, King Konga. You have a hit song that reaches #81 on the AC Hot 100 Pop Charts, and you've captured the eyes of many major record labels. You have the opportunity to take a big step toward fame, and you say... no. That's precisely what TONY LYMON did. But more than saying no to a lifestyle of world tours and hit songs, Tony said yes to how God was calling him to contribute to others. Listen in as we talk with Tony about his journey of saying yes (and where you can find his awesome new Eyrthbeat Coffee brand)!Thanks for listening to the Embodied Holiness Podcast. We invite you to join the community on Facebook and Instagram @embodiedholiness. You can find all our episodes and more at www.embodiedholiness.com. Embodied Holiness is a ministry of Parkway Heights United Methodist Church in Hattiesburg, MS. If you're in the Hattiesburg area and are looking for a church home, we'd love to meet you and welcome you to the family. You can find out more about Parkway Heights at our website.

this is a comedy podcast :)

Back from our summer break, discuss the path to fatherhood for Curtis, more super-powers for Mayors, big changes for Sprite, mustard shortage in France, and a quick recap of Star Wars: Obi-wan.Music: "WFH (Workin' from Home) - The Corporate Valentines

@LaVergneGBB @ChelsiaLymon

ORDER HERE https://eyrthbeat.com Use Promo Code HARDYSTREETBOYZ to get 10% off your order! EYRTHBEAT COFFEE https://www.facebook.com/eYrthBeat https://www.instagram.com/eyrthbeat/SOUTHERN EYE CENTER LASIK VIDEO https://youtu.be/GRh6OvBolOY HARDY STREET BOYZ https://thehardystreetboyz.com https://instagram.com/thehardystreetboyz https://facebook.com/thehardystreetboyz https://instagram.com/massiveJ https://instagram.com/iamdrewwooton Subscribing is FREE! 0:00 FIX the Funk 1:23 Drew Gets LASIK 11:11 Tony Lymon 19:28 Jamie's B-Day Blood Drive @ T-Bones 40:47 WHY COFFEE? 41:37 --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/thehardystreetboyz/support

As part of an ongoing initiative, Charity Hill reviews children's books. In this episode, Charity reviews two novels by Lesa Cline Ransome: Finding Langston and Leaving Lymon, which concern two different boys whose families move from South to North in the Great Migration. Charity appreciates Cline Ransom's handling of Langston's pivotal questions "Who am I?" and "Where have I come from?" Poetry and community reground and re-situate the lonesome Langston in his identity. Leaving Lymon concerns the fate of Langston's bully, Lymon. What forces are at work in forming Lymon's negativity? Can extended family, community fellowship, and music give Lymon the stability he needs to move forward?To purchase Finding Langston.To purchase Leaving Lymon.Please enjoy these links on the history of the Great Migration.General HistoryMap of Great MigrationBronzeville, Chicago IL

@LaVergneGBB @ChelsiaLymon

@LaVergneGBB @ChelsiaLymon

Damon gets to talk to Mike and Tony about sound design for the marching arts and pageantry. How they got started, some gear choices, tips for success, and much more. There are other segments too, including, R.I.P., Happy Birthday, gig alerts, iconic recording, music news and others.

@LaVergneGBB @ChelsiaLymon

@LaVergneGBB @ChelsiaLymon

This week Amber brings another cult. Be ready to laugh, cry and feel all the emotions. Please be sure you subscribe and leave a review on the platform you listen on. We'd love you for it!

Isaac Lymon is Co-Founder and CEO of Raxplay, a company that enables music artists to perform live real/time concerts via virtual reality. Raxplay puts fans in the front row, VIP, and backstage - all in the comfort of their homes.Isaac was born and raised in Detroit. At an early stage, he felt called to music. But after a taste of the grind artists endure, Isaac gravitated to what made music happen behind the scenes. It was then that he really came to appreciate the power that technology could have on the industry. And like many famous tech entrepreneurs before him, he made the tough call to pursue his startup dream instead of focusing on college. A hustled-for internship, a hack-a-thon, and a call from Google Startups followed, changing everything. And so Raxplay was off and running.Isaac has a great story, you'll want to listen in.In this episode Isaac and Dan discussed:growing up in a Detroit suburbhow he relentlessly pursued an internship in musicperspectives on raising money in the LA ecosystemhis thoughts on the future of VROUR SPONSORS FOR THIS EPISODE: Aperture Venture CapitalVC for the Multicultural MainstreamAperture is the new $75M fund that wants to amplify the voices of diverse foundersShare your story at aperturevc.com/foundersMORE on ISAAC and RAXPLAYIsaac:linkedin.com/in/isaac-lymon-24ab9515a/twitter.com/Isaaclymoninstagram.com/isaaccorey___/Raxplay:raxplay.comlinkedin.com/company/raxplaytwitter.com/raxplayxrinstagram.com/raxplayxrFollow Founders Unfound: Like and share - help us grow!PODCAST TRANSCRIPT See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

There's nothing more devastating than losing a loved one. Having made a vow to live together for life, it is a big shock, when the unexpected happens and life is cut short. In this episode, Pastor Lymon Floris shares her experience with us and how she is bouncing back. Please share and invite others to listen and support this podcast. You can also support by becoming a patron via this link:- Thank you. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/lifestorieswithglory/message

Don't miss out on the next WeAreLATech podcast episode, get notified by signing up here http://wearelatech.com/podcastWelcome to WeAreLATech's Los Angeles Tech Community Spotlight!   “Remix: Isaac Lymon, Iman Gadzhi, and Ami Yoshimura”WeAreLATech Podcast is a WeAreTech.fm production.To support our podcast go to http://wearelatech.com/believe To be featured on the podcast go to http://wearelatech.com/feature-your-la-startup/Want to be featured in the WeAreLATech Community? Create your profile here http://wearelatech.com/communityHost,Espree Devorahttps://twitter.com/espreedevorahttps://www.linkedin.com/in/espreeGuest,Isaac Lymonhttps://twitter.com/Isaaclymonhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/isaac-lymon-24ab9515a/Guest,Iman Gadzhihttps://www.instagram.com/imangadzhi/https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQ4FNww3XoNgqIlkBqEAVCg/Guest,Ami Yoshimurahttps://twitter.com/yoshimura_amihttps://www.linkedin.com/in/ami-yoshimura/For a calendar of all LA Startup events go to, http://WeAreLATech.comTo further immerse yourself into the LA Tech community go to http://wearelatech.com/vipLinks Mentioned: Raxplay, https://www.raxplay.comTogether Casa, https://www.together.casaGrow Your Agency, https://growyouragency.com/IAG-Media, https://iag-media.com/Credits:Produced and Hosted by Espree Devora, http://espreedevora.comStory Produced, Edited and Mastered by Cory Jennings, https://www.coryjennings.com/Production and Voiceover by Adam Carroll, http://www.ariacreative.ca/Team support by Janice GeronimoMusic by Jay Huffman, https://soundcloud.com/jayhuffmanShort Title: Isaac Lymon, Iman Gadzhi, and Ami Yoshimura 

Don't miss out on the next WeAreLATech podcast episode, get notified by signing up here http://wearelatech.com/podcastWelcome to WeAreLATech's Los Angeles Tech Community Spotlight!   “Remix: Elisabeth Tuttass, Isaac Lymon, and Alyssa Goldberg”WeAreLATech Podcast is a WeAreTech.fm production.To support our podcast go to http://wearelatech.com/believe To be featured on the podcast go to http://wearelatech.com/feature-your-la-startup/Want to be featured in the WeAreLATech Community? Create your profile here http://wearelatech.com/communityHost,Espree Devorahttps://twitter.com/espreedevorahttps://www.linkedin.com/in/espreeGuest,Elisabeth Tuttashttps://twitter.com/mstuttasshttps://www.linkedin.com/in/elisabethtuttass/Guest,Isaac Lymonhttps://twitter.com/Isaaclymonhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/isaac-lymon-24ab9515a/Guest,Alyssa Goldberg https://www.linkedin.com/in/alyssagoldb/For a calendar of all LA Startup events go to, http://WeAreLATech.comTo further immerse yourself into the LA Tech community go to http://wearelatech.com/vipLinks Mentioned:Grid110, https://www.grid110.orgGrid110, https://www.instagram.com/grid110/Girls in Tech, https://girlsintech.orgRaxplay, https://www.raxplay.comLolly, https://thelollyapp.comTikTok, https://www.tiktok.comDive Chat, https://dive.chatCredits:Produced and Hosted by Espree Devora, http://espreedevora.comStory Produced, Edited and Mastered by Cory Jennings, https://www.coryjennings.com/Production and Voiceover by Adam Carroll, http://www.ariacreative.ca/Team support by Janice GeronimoMusic by Jay Huffman, https://soundcloud.com/jayhuffmanShort Title:  Elisabeth Tuttass, Isaac Lymon, and Alyssa Goldberg

Don't miss out on the next WeAreLATech podcast episode, get notified by signing up here http://wearelatech.com/podcastWelcome to WeAreLATech's Los Angeles Tech Community Spotlight!   “Isaac Lymon of Raxplay”WeAreLATech Podcast is a WeAreTech.fm production.To support our podcast go to http://wearelatech.com/believe To be featured on the podcast go to http://wearelatech.com/feature-your-la-startup/Want to be featured in the WeAreLATech Community? Create your profile here http://wearelatech.com/communityHost,Espree Devorahttps://twitter.com/espreedevorahttps://www.linkedin.com/in/espreeGuest,Isaac Lymonhttps://twitter.com/Isaaclymonhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/isaac-lymon-24ab9515a/Listener Spotlight,Abel Hernandez https://www.instagram.com/abelproductFor a calendar of all LA Startup events go to, http://WeAreLATech.comTo further immerse yourself into the LA Tech community go to http://wearelatech.com/vipLinks Mentioned:Raxplay, https://www.raxplay.comCalendly, https://calendly.comDot.la, https://dot.laPotato Chips, https://www.potatochipsdeli.comBanditos, https://banditosla.comMan's Search For Meaning, https://rb.gy/7n2vowAlchemist, https://amzn.to/3iroTTkCredits:Produced and Hosted by Espree Devora, http://espreedevora.comStory Produced, Edited and Mastered by Cory Jennings, https://www.coryjennings.com/Production and Voiceover by Adam Carroll, http://www.ariacreative.ca/Team support by Janice GeronimoMusic by Jay Huffman, https://soundcloud.com/jayhuffmanShort Title: Isaac Lymon

▽ひたすら歩き続ける"異常散歩"、練馬板橋荒川編 ▽黒沢清の『降霊』という映画がリアル（？）でやばいらしい ▽S.T.A.L.K.E.R.、プレイ終了しました ▽終末ものに惹きつけられるのは子供時代の刷り込みによるものか おたよりはこちらへ forms.gle/m29Sv5Z7PjQm9nVb7 Day By Night by Doris Day; Paul Weston And His Music From Hollywood https://archive.org/details/lp_day-by-night_doris-day-paul-weston-and-his-music-from-h PLEASE BE MINE by FRANKIE LYMON; THE TEENAGERS; Lymon; Goldner https://archive.org/details/78_please-be-mine_frankie-lymon-the-teenagers-lymon-goldner_gbia0271475b --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/claustroman/message

Which stone got rolling on this date in 1942?

Memories of a Twins Bat Boy! (1977 to 1978) Larry Hisle #9 & Lymon Bostock #10

Please join McM staff member Jello Ocious as he sits down with Tony Lymon to discuss being a person of color in the marching arts past, present, and future.

  Episode 110 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Be My Baby”, and at the career of the Ronettes and Ronnie Spector.  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 “Little Saint Nick” by the Beach Boys. 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—- Erratum I say Ray Peterson’s version of “Tell Laura I Love Her” was an American number one. It wasn’t — it only made number seven.   Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. A lot of resources were used for this episode. Be My Baby: How I Survived Mascara Miniskirts and Madness, or My Life as a Fabulous Ronette by Ronnie Spector and Vince Waldron is Ronnie’s autobiography and was the main source. Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era by Ken Emerson is a good overview of the Brill Building scene, and provided me with the information on Barry and Greenwich. I’ve referred to two biographies of Spector in this episode, Phil Spector: Out of His Head by Richard Williams and He’s a Rebel by Mark Ribkowsky. And information on the Wrecking Crew largely comes from The Wrecking Crew by Kent Hartman. There are many compilations available with some of the hits Spector produced, but I recommend getting Back to Mono, a four-CD overview of his career containing all the major singles put out by Philles. If you want something just covering Ronnie Spector and the Ronettes, The Very Best of Ronnie Spector  covers all the Ronettes hits and the best of her solo career. And the AFM contract listing the musicians on “Be My Baby” can be found here.   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 the record that, more than anything, ensured Phil Spector’s place in popular music history — a record that changed the lives of several people who heard it for the better, and changed the life of its singer for the worse, and one which has the most imitated drum intro in the world. We’re going to look at “Be My Baby” by the Ronettes: [Excerpt: The Ronettes, “Be My Baby”] Before I start this one, two things need saying. The first is that this episode, by necessity, deals with spousal abuse. As always, I will try to discuss the issue with sensitivity, and touch on it as briefly as possible, but if you worry that it might upset you, please either skip this episode, or read the transcript to see if you’ll be OK listening to it. I imagine that very few people will be upset by anything I say here, but it’s always a possibility. And secondly, I’d like to apologise for this episode being so late. I had a major disruption in my personal life over Christmas — one of those really bad life events that only happens once or twice in most people’s lifetimes — and that made it impossible for me to get any work done at all for the last couple of weeks. I’m now able to work again, and this should not be anything that affects the podcast for the rest of the year. Anyway, enough about that, let’s get on with the story. The story of the Ronettes begins when Ronnie Bennett, a mixed-race girl from Harlem, became obsessed with the sound of Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers: [Excerpt: Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, “Why Do Fools Fall In Love?”] Ronnie became the Teenagers’ biggest fan, and even managed to arrange a meeting between herself and Lymon when they were both thirteen, but had her illusions torn away when he turned up drunk and made a pass at her. But that didn’t stop her from trying her best to imitate Lymon’s vocals, and forming a vocal group with several friends and relatives. That group had a male lead singer, but when they made their first appearance on one of the Harlem Apollo’s talent shows, the lead singer got stage fright and couldn’t start singing when he got on stage. Ronnie stepped forward and took over the lead vocal, and the group went down well enough even with the Apollo’s notoriously hostile audience that a smaller group of them decided to start performing regularly together. The group took the name Ronnie and the Relatives, and consisted of Ronnie, her sister Estelle, and their cousin Nedra Talley. They originally only performed at private parties, bar mitzvahs and the like, but they soon reached the attention of Stu Phillips at Colpix Records, a label owned by the film studio Columbia Pictures. The first single by Ronnie and the Relatives was not a success — “I Want a Boy” came out in August 1961 and didn’t chart: [Excerpt: Ronnie and the Relatives, “I Want a Boy”] And nor did their second, “I’m Gonna Quit While I’m Ahead”: [Excerpt: Ronnie and the Relatives, “I’m Gonna Quit While I’m Ahead”] Those records did apparently sell to at least one person, though, as when Ronnie met President Clinton in 1997, he asked her to sign a record, and specifically got her to sign an album of those early recordings for Colpix. While the girls were not having any commercial success, they did manage to accidentally get themselves a regular gig at the most important nightclub in New York. They went to the Peppermint Lounge, just as the Twist craze was at its height, and as they were underage they dressed up especially well in order to make themselves look more grown up so they could get in. Their ruse worked better than they expected. As they were all dressed the same, the club’s manager assumed they were the dancers he’d booked, who hadn’t shown up. He came out and told them to get on stage and start dancing, and so of course they did what he said, and started dancing to the Twist sounds of Joey Dee and the Starliters: [Excerpt: Joey Dee and the Starliters, “The Peppermint Twist”] The girls’ dancing went down well, and then the band started playing “What’d I Say?”, a favourite song of Ronnie’s and one the group did in their own act, and Ronnie danced over to David Brigati, who was singing lead on the song, and started dancing close to him. He handed her the mic as a joke, and she took over the song. They got a regular spot at the Peppermint Lounge, dancing behind the Starliters for their whole show and joining them on vocals for a few numbers every night. Inspired by the Bobbettes and the Marvelettes, Ronnie and Estelle’s mother suggested changing the group’s name. She suggested “the Rondettes”, and they dropped the “d”, becoming the Ronettes. The singles they released on ColPix under the new name did no better than the others, but they were such an important part of the Peppermint Lounge that when the Lounge’s owners opened a second venue in Florida, the girls went down there with the Starliters and were part of the show.  That trip to Florida gave them two very different experiences. The first was that they got to see segregation firsthand for the first time, and they didn’t like it — especially when they, as light-skinned mixed-race women, were read as tanned white women and served in restaurants which then refused to serve their darker-skinned mothers. But the second was far more positive. They met Murray the K, who since Alan Freed had been driven out of his job had become the most popular DJ in New York. Murray was down in Florida for a holiday, and was impressed enough by the girls’ dancing that he told them if they were ever in New York and wanted a spot on one of his regular shows at the Brooklyn Fox Theatre they should let him know. They replied that they lived in New York and went to those shows all the time — of course they wanted to perform on his shows. They became regular performers at the Brooklyn Fox, where they danced between the other, bigger, acts, sang backing vocals, did a song or two themselves, and took part in comedy sketches with Murray. It was at these shows, as well, that they developed the look they would become famous with — huge hair piled up on top of their heads, tons of mascara, and tight skirts slit to show their legs. It was a style inspired by street fashion rather than by what the other girl groups were wearing, and it made them incredibly popular with the Fox audience. But the Ronettes, even under their new name, and even with the backing of New York’s most prominent DJ, were still not selling any records. They knew they were good, and the reaction to their stage performances proved as much, so they decided that the problem must be with Colpix. And so in 1963 they made a New Year’s resolution — they were going to get Phil Spector to produce them.  By this time, Spector was becoming very well known in the music industry as a hit maker. We already saw in the recent episode on the Crystals how he was making hits for that group and the Blossoms, but he was also making hits with studio groups like Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans, who he took into the top ten with a remake of the old Disney song “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah”: [Excerpt: Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans, “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah”] and as well as the records he was putting out on Philles, he was also working as a freelance producer for people like Connie Francis, producing her top ten hit “Second-Hand Love”: [Excerpt: Connie Francis, “Second-Hand Love”] So the Ronettes were convinced that he could make them into the stars they knew they had the potential to be. The group had no idea how to get in touch with Spector, so they tried the direct route — Estelle called directory enquiries, got the number for Philles Records, and called and asked to be put through to Spector. She was as astonished as anyone when he agreed to talk to her — and it turned out that he’d seen the group regularly at the Brooklyn Fox and was interested in working with them.  At their audition for Spector, the group first performed a close-harmony version of “When the Red Red Robin Goes Bob-Bob-Bobbin’ Along”, which they’d been taught by their singing teacher. Spector told them that he wanted to hear what they did when they were singing for themselves, not for a teacher, and so Ronnie launched into “Why Do Fools Fall In Love?”  It only took her getting to the second line of the song before Spector yelled at her to stop — “THAT is the voice I’ve been looking for!” The Ronettes’ first recordings for Spector weren’t actually issued as by the Ronettes at all. To start with, he had them record a version of a song by the writing team of Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, “Why Don’t They Let Us Fall In Love?”, but didn’t release it at the time. It was later released as by “Veronica”, the name under which he released solo records by Ronnie: [Excerpt: Veronica, “Why Don’t They Let Us Fall In Love?”] But at the time, when Ronnie asked him when the record was coming out, Spector answered “Never”. He explained to her that it was a good record, but it wasn’t a number one, and he was still working on their first number one record. Their next few recordings were covers of then-current dance hits, like “The Twist”: [Excerpt, “The Crystals”, “The Twist”] And “The Wah-Watusi”, one of the few times that one of the other Ronettes took the lead rather than Ronnie, as Nedra sang lead: [Excerpt, “The Crystals”, “The Wah-Watusi”] But these, and two other tracks, were released as album tracks on a Crystals album, credited to the Crystals rather than the Ronettes. The song that eventually became the group’s first hit, “Be My Baby”, was mostly written by one of the many husband-and-wife songwriting teams that had developed at the Brill Building, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich. Barry had started out as a performer who occasionally wrote, putting out records like “It’s Called Rock and Roll”: [Excerpt: Jeff Barry, “It’s Called Rock and Roll”] But while his performing career had gone nowhere, he’d started to have some success as a songwriter, writing “Teenage Sonata” for Sam Cooke: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, “Teenage Sonata”] And “Tell Laura I Love Her”, which was recorded by several people, but the biggest hit version was the American number one by Ray Peterson: [Excerpt: Ray Peterson, “Tell Laura I Love Her”] Ellie Greenwich had also started as a performer, recording “Silly Isn’t It?” under the name Ellie Gaye: [Excerpt: Ellie Gaye, “Silly, Isn’t It?”] She’d become one of the most important demo singers in New York, and had also started writing songs. She’d first collaborated with Doc Pomus, cowriting songs like “This is It”, which had been a flop single for Jay and the Americans: [Excerpt: Jay and the Americans, “This is It”] She’d then been taken on by Trio Music, Leiber and Stoller’s company, where she had largely collaborated with another writer named Tony Powers. Trio had first refusal on anything the two of them wrote, and if Leiber and Stoller didn’t like it, they could take the song elsewhere. Greenwich and Powers had their biggest successes with songs that Leiber and Stoller rejected, which they sold to Aaron Schroeder. And they’d started up a collaboration with Phil Spector — although Spector and Greenwich’s first meeting had not exactly gone smoothly. He’d gone into her office to hear her play a song that she thought would be suitable for the Paris Sisters, but had kept wandering out of the office, and had kept looking at himself in a mirror and primping himself rather than listen to her song. Eventually she said to him  “Listen to me, you little prick. Did you come to look at yourself or to hear my songs?”, and she didn’t make that sale. But later on, Spector became interested in a song she’d sold to Schroeder, and made an appointment to meet her and talk about her writing some stuff for him — that second meeting, which Spector didn’t realise was with someone he’d already made a bad impression on, Spector turned up four hours late.  But despite that, Greenwich and Powers wrote several songs for Spector, who was also given songwriting credit, and which became big hits in versions he produced — “(Today I Met) The Boy I’m Gonna Marry”, a single by Darlene Love: [Excerpt: Darlene Love, “(Today I Met) The Boy I’m Gonna Marry”] And “Why Do Lovers Break Each Others’ Hearts?”, released as by Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans, but with Love once again on lead vocals: [Excerpt: Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans, “Why Do Lovers Break Each Others’ Hearts?”] I say that Spector was also given songwriting credit on those records, because there is some debate about how much he contributed to the songs he’s credited on. Some of his co-writers have said that he would often only change a word or a phrase, and get himself cut in on an already-completed song, while others have said that he contributed a reasonable amount to the songwriting, though he was never the primary writer — for example Barry Mann has said that Spector came up with the middle section for “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin'”. I tend towards the belief that Spector’s contribution to the writing on those songs he’s co-credited on was minimal — in his whole career, the number of songs he wrote on his own seems to be in the single figures, while those other writers wrote dozens of hit records without any contribution from Spector — and so when I talk about records he produced I’ll tend to use phrasing like “a Goffin and King song co-credited to Phil Spector” rather than “a song by Goffin, King, and Spector”, but I don’t want that to give the impression that I’m certain Spector made no contribution.  But while Greenwich and Powers were a mildly successful team, their partnership ended when Greenwich met Jeff Barry at a family Thanksgiving dinner — Greenwich’s uncle was Barry’s cousin. As Greenwich later put it, when they started talking together about music and realised how much they had in common, “I went ‘ooh’, he went ‘mmmhh’, and his wife went ‘I don’t think I like this'”. Soon their previous partnerships, both romantic and musical, were over, and Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich became the third of the great Brill Building husband-and-wife songwriting teams.  Where Goffin and King had a sophisticated edge to their writing, with a hint of sexual subversion and the mingling of pain and pleasure, and Mann and Weill tried to incorporate social comment into their songs, Barry and Greenwich were happy to be silly — they were writing songs like “Hanky Panky”, “Da Doo Ron Ron”,  and “Doo Wah Diddy Diddy”: [Excerpt: Ellie Greenwich “Doo Wah Diddy Diddy (demo)”] This worked extremely well for them, to the extent that after they broke up a few years later, Barry would continue this formula with songs such as “Sugar Sugar”, “Jingle Jangle” and “Bang Shang A Lang”. Barry and Greenwich’s style was to jam in as many hooks as possible, maybe put in a joke or two, keep the lyrics simple, and get out in two minutes. Very few of their songs were masterpieces of songwriting, but they *were* absolutely perfect templates for masterpieces of production. It sounds like I’m damning them with faint praise, but I’m really not. There is a huge skill involved in what they were doing — if you’re writing some heartwrenching masterpiece about the human condition, people will forgive the odd lapse in craft, but if you’re writing “My baby does the hanky panky”, there’s no margin for error, and you’re not going to get forgiven if you mess it up.  Barry and Greenwich were good enough at this that they became the go-to writers for Spector for the next couple of years. He would record songs by most of the Brill Building teams, but when you think of the classic records Spector produced, they’re far more likely than not to be Barry and Greenwich songs — of the twenty-seven Philles singles released after Barry and Greenwich started writing together, fourteen are credited to Barry/Greenwich/Spector, and other than the joke release “Let’s Dance the Screw”, which we talked about back in the episode on the Crystals, there’s a run of eleven singles released on the label between late 1962 and early 1964 which are credited either as Greenwich/Powers/Spector or Barry/Greenwich/Spector. And so it was naturally to Barry and Greenwich that Spector turned to write the first big hit for the Ronettes — and he let Ronnie hear the writing session. By this time, Spector had become romantically involved with Ronnie, and he invited her into his apartment to sit in the next room and listen to them working on the song — usually they got together in hotels rather than at Spector’s home. While she was there, she found several pairs of women’s shoes — Spector hadn’t told her he was married, and claimed to her when she asked that they belonged to his sister. This should probably have been a sign of things to come. Assuming that Spector did contribute to the writing, I think it’s easy to tell what he brought to “Be My Baby”. If you listen to that Connie Francis record I excerpted earlier, on which Spector is also a credited co-writer, the melody line for the line “that you don’t feel the same” leading into the chorus: [Excerpt: Connie Francis, “Second-Hand Love”] is identical to the melody line leading into the chorus of “Be My Baby”: [Excerpt: The Ronettes, “Be My Baby”] So that transition between the verse and the chorus is likely his work. After rehearsing Ronnie for several weeks in New York, Spector flew her out to LA to make the record in Gold Star Studios, where she spent three days recording the lead vocals. The backing vocals weren’t provided by the other Ronettes, but rather by the Blossoms, with a few extra singers — notably Spector’s assistant Sonny Bono, and his new girlfriend Cher — but what really made the track was not the vocals — although the song was perfect for Ronnie — but Hal Blaine’s drum intro: [Excerpt: The Ronettes, “Be My Baby”] That intro was utterly simple — Blaine was always a minimalist player, someone who would play for the song rather than play fussy fills — but that simple part, combined with the powerful sound that the engineer Larry Levine got, was enough to make it one of the most memorable intros in rock music history. Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys talks to this day about how he had to pull over to the side of the road when he first heard it on his car radio, and he would listen to the record incessantly for hours at a time. Incidentally, since I’m talking about the musicians, a lot of sources credit Carol Kaye for playing the bass on this track, so I’m going to say something once, here, which should be taken as read whenever I’m talking about records made in LA in the sixties — Carol Kaye is not only an unreliable source about what records she played on, she is an utterly dishonest one. For those who don’t know, Ms. Kaye was one of the great bass players of the sixties, and also one of the better session guitarists. She played on hundreds of records in the sixties, including many, many, classics from the Beach Boys, Spector, Frank Zappa, and others, and she was the only woman getting regular session work in LA on a rock instrument — there may have been session orchestral musicians who were women, but when it comes to guitar, bass, drums, keyboards, sax, and so on, she was the only one. For that, she deserves a huge amount of credit. Unfortunately, she has never been happy only being credited for the records she actually played on, and insists she played on many, many, more. Some of this can be reasonably put down to lapses in memory more than fifty years later — if you’re playing two or three sessions a day, and you play on a bunch of Beach Boys records, then it’s easy enough to misremember having played on “Surfin’ USA” when maybe you played on a similar-sounding record, and there are things like her claiming to have played on “Good Vibrations”, where there were multiple sessions for that track, and it happened that the takes eventually used weren’t the ones where she was playing bass, but she had no way of knowing that. That’s completely forgivable. But Ms. Kaye also claims, with no evidence whatsoever on her side and a great deal of evidence against her, to have been responsible for playing almost the entire recorded works of James Jamerson, Motown’s main bass player, claiming tapes were secretly shipped from Detroit to LA — something that has been denied by every single person working at Motown, and which can be easily disproved just by listening to the tapes. She claims to have played the bass on “I’m a Believer” by the Monkees — a track recorded in New York, by New York musicians. And whenever anyone points out the falsehoods, rather than saying “I may have made a mistake” she hurls abuse at them, and in some cases libels them on her website. So, Carol Kaye did not play on this record, and we know that because we have the AFM session sheets, which show that the bass players on the track were Ray Pohlman and Jimmy Bond. I’ll link a PDF of that sheet in the show notes. So in future, when I mention someone other than Carol Kaye playing on a song, and Wikipedia or somewhere says she played on it, bear this in mind. Two people who did play on the record were Bill Pitman and Tommy Tedesco, and this is why the B-side, an instrumental, is named “Tedesco and Pitman”. Spector was enough of a control freak that he didn’t want DJs ever to play the wrong side of his singles, so he stuck instrumental jam sessions by the studio musicians — with the songwriting credited to him rather than to them — on the B-sides. I don’t know about you, but I actually quite like “Tedesco and Pitman”, but then I’ve always had a soft spot for the vibraphone: [Excerpt: “The Ronettes” (The Wrecking Crew), Tedesco and Pitman”] “Be My Baby” was a massive hit — it went to number one on the Cashbox chart, though only number two on the Billboard chart, and sold millions of copies. The group were invited on to Dick Clark’s Caravan of Stars tour, but Spector wanted Ronnie to be in California to record the follow-up, so the girls’ cousin Elaine filled in for her for the first couple of weeks of the tour, while Ronnie recorded another Barry, Greenwich and Spector song, “Baby I Love You”: [Excerpt: The Ronettes, “Baby I Love You”] Ronnie didn’t realise it at the time, but Spector was trying to isolate her from the other group members, and from her family. But at first this seemed to her like a sensible way of solving the problem, and she rejoined the tour after the record was made. Soon after this, the group travelled to the UK for a brief tour in early 1964, during which they became friendly with the Beatles — Ronnie had a brief chaste flirtation with John Lennon, and Estelle something a little more with George Harrison. They also got to know their support act on the tour, the Rolling Stones — at least once Ronnie had had a row with Andrew Loog Oldham, as Spector had sent a telegram forbidding the Rolling Stones from spending time with the Ronettes. Once Ronnie pointed out that they were there and Spector wasn’t, the two groups became very friendly — and more than friendly, if Keith Richards’ autobiography is to be believed. On their return to the US, they continued having hits through 1964 — nothing was as big as “Be My Baby”, but they had three more top forty hits that year, with two mediocre records, “The Best Part of Breaking Up” and “Do I Love You?”, co-written by the team of Pete Andreoli and Vini Poncia, and then a return to form with the magnificent “Walking in the Rain”, written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill: [Excerpt: The Ronettes Featuring Veronica, “Walking in the Rain”] But Spector was becoming more and more erratic in his personal life, and more and more controlling. I won’t go into too many details here, because we’re going to see a lot more of Phil Spector over the next year or so, but he recorded many great records with the Ronettes which he refused to release, claiming they weren’t quite right — Ronnie has later realised that he was probably trying to sabotage their career so he could have her all to himself, though at the time she didn’t know that. Neither of the two singles they did release in 1965 made the top fifty, and the one single they released in 1966, a return to songs by Barry and Greenwich, only made number one hundred, for one week: [Excerpt: The Ronettes, “I Can Hear Music”] Also in 1966, the Ronettes were invited by the Beatles to be their support act on their last ever tour, but once again Spector insisted that Ronnie couldn’t go, because she needed to be in the studio, so Elaine substituted for her again, much to the Beatles’ disappointment. Nothing from the studio sessions during that tour was released. The group broke up in 1967, and the next year Ronnie married Phil Spector, who became ever more controlling and abusive. I won’t go into details of the way he treated her, which you can read all about in her autobiography, but suffice to say that I was completely unsurprised when he murdered a woman in 2003. You’ll probably get some idea of his behaviours when I talk about him in future episodes, but what Ronnie suffered in the years they were together was something no-one should have to go through. By the time she managed to leave him, in June 1972, she had only released one track in years, a song that George Harrison had written for her called “Try Some, Buy Some”, which Spector had recorded with her at Harrison’s insistence, during a period when Spector was working with several of the ex-Beatles and trying to rebuild his own career on the back of them: [Excerpt: Ronnie Spector, “Try Some, Buy Some”] Neither Ronnie nor Spector were particularly keen on the track, and it was a commercial flop — although John Lennon later said that the track had inspired his “Happy Xmas (War is Over)”. Ronnie eventually escaped from Spector’s abuse — leaving the house barefoot, as Spector had stolen her shoes so she couldn’t leave — and started to build a new life for herself, though she would struggle with alcoholism for many years. She got nothing in their divorce settlement, as Spector threatened to hire a hit man to kill her if she tried to get anything from him, and she made a living by touring the nostalgia circuit with various new lineups of Ronettes — the others having given up on their music careers — and while she never had another hit, she did have a recording career. Her solo career got its proper start because of a chance meeting in New York. Her old friend John Lennon saw her on the street and called her over for a chat, and introduced her to the friend he was with, Jimmy Iovine, who was producing an album for Southside Johnny and the Asbury Dukes. Bruce Springsteen had written a song for that band, and Iovine thought it might work well as a duet with Ronnie, and he invited her to the studio that day, and she cut the song with them: [Excerpt: Southside Johnny and the Asbury Dukes, “You Mean So Much To Me”] That song became one of the most popular songs on the album, and so when the Asbury Dukes toured supporting Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band, they brought Ronnie along with them to sing on that song and do a couple of her own hits. That led to the E-Street Band themselves backing Ronnie on a single — a version of Billy Joel’s “Say Goodbye to Hollywood”, a song that Joel had written with her in mind: [Excerpt: Ronnie Spector and the E-Street Band, “Say Goodbye to Hollywood”] However, that was a flop, and so were all her later attempts to have comebacks, though she worked with some great musicians over the years. But she was able to continue having a career as a performer, even if she never returned to stardom, and she never made much money from her hits. She did, though, sing on one more top-ten hit, singing backing vocals on Eddie Money’s “Take Me Home Tonight”: [Excerpt: Eddie Money, “Take Me Home Tonight”] Phil Spector continued to earn money from his ex-wife for a long time after their divorce. By 1998, when the Ronettes finally sued Spector for unpaid royalties, they had earned, between them, a total of $14,482.30 in royalties from all their hit records — the amount that came from a single 1964 royalty payment. In court, Spector argued that he didn’t owe them any more, and indeed that *they* still owed *him* money, because the cost of recording their singles meant that they had never actually earned more money than they cost. Eventually, after a series of appeals, the group members each got about half a million dollars in 2002 — obviously a great deal of money, but a small fraction of what they actually earned. Spector, who was on the board of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, prevented the Ronettes from being inducted out of spite towards his ex until he was imprisoned, at which point they were finally recognised, in 2007.  Ronnie continues to perform, and seems to have a happy life. Estelle, sadly, did not — she suffered from anorexia and schizophrenia, spent a period of time homeless, and died in 2009. Nedra became a born-again Christian shortly after the group split up, and recorded a couple of unsuccessful albums of Christian music in the seventies, before going off to work in real estate. In September last year, it was announced that a film is going to be made of Ronnie Spector’s life story.  It’s nice to know that there’ll be something out there telling her story with her as the protagonist, rather than as a background character in the story of her abusive husband.

  Episode 110 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Be My Baby", and at the career of the Ronettes and Ronnie Spector.  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 "Little Saint Nick" by the Beach Boys. 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---- Erratum I say Ray Peterson's version of "Tell Laura I Love Her" was an American number one. It wasn't -- it only made number seven.   Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. A lot of resources were used for this episode. Be My Baby: How I Survived Mascara Miniskirts and Madness, or My Life as a Fabulous Ronette by Ronnie Spector and Vince Waldron is Ronnie's autobiography and was the main source. Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era by Ken Emerson is a good overview of the Brill Building scene, and provided me with the information on Barry and Greenwich. I've referred to two biographies of Spector in this episode, Phil Spector: Out of His Head by Richard Williams and He's a Rebel by Mark Ribkowsky. And information on the Wrecking Crew largely comes from The Wrecking Crew by Kent Hartman. There are many compilations available with some of the hits Spector produced, but I recommend getting Back to Mono, a four-CD overview of his career containing all the major singles put out by Philles. If you want something just covering Ronnie Spector and the Ronettes, The Very Best of Ronnie Spector  covers all the Ronettes hits and the best of her solo career. And the AFM contract listing the musicians on "Be My Baby" can be found here.   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 the record that, more than anything, ensured Phil Spector's place in popular music history -- a record that changed the lives of several people who heard it for the better, and changed the life of its singer for the worse, and one which has the most imitated drum intro in the world. We're going to look at "Be My Baby" by the Ronettes: [Excerpt: The Ronettes, "Be My Baby"] Before I start this one, two things need saying. The first is that this episode, by necessity, deals with spousal abuse. As always, I will try to discuss the issue with sensitivity, and touch on it as briefly as possible, but if you worry that it might upset you, please either skip this episode, or read the transcript to see if you'll be OK listening to it. I imagine that very few people will be upset by anything I say here, but it's always a possibility. And secondly, I'd like to apologise for this episode being so late. I had a major disruption in my personal life over Christmas -- one of those really bad life events that only happens once or twice in most people's lifetimes -- and that made it impossible for me to get any work done at all for the last couple of weeks. I'm now able to work again, and this should not be anything that affects the podcast for the rest of the year. Anyway, enough about that, let's get on with the story. The story of the Ronettes begins when Ronnie Bennett, a mixed-race girl from Harlem, became obsessed with the sound of Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers: [Excerpt: Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, "Why Do Fools Fall In Love?"] Ronnie became the Teenagers' biggest fan, and even managed to arrange a meeting between herself and Lymon when they were both thirteen, but had her illusions torn away when he turned up drunk and made a pass at her. But that didn't stop her from trying her best to imitate Lymon's vocals, and forming a vocal group with several friends and relatives. That group had a male lead singer, but when they made their first appearance on one of the Harlem Apollo's talent shows, the lead singer got stage fright and couldn't start singing when he got on stage. Ronnie stepped forward and took over the lead vocal, and the group went down well enough even with the Apollo's notoriously hostile audience that a smaller group of them decided to start performing regularly together. The group took the name Ronnie and the Relatives, and consisted of Ronnie, her sister Estelle, and their cousin Nedra Talley. They originally only performed at private parties, bar mitzvahs and the like, but they soon reached the attention of Stu Phillips at Colpix Records, a label owned by the film studio Columbia Pictures. The first single by Ronnie and the Relatives was not a success -- "I Want a Boy" came out in August 1961 and didn't chart: [Excerpt: Ronnie and the Relatives, "I Want a Boy"] And nor did their second, "I'm Gonna Quit While I'm Ahead": [Excerpt: Ronnie and the Relatives, "I'm Gonna Quit While I'm Ahead"] Those records did apparently sell to at least one person, though, as when Ronnie met President Clinton in 1997, he asked her to sign a record, and specifically got her to sign an album of those early recordings for Colpix. While the girls were not having any commercial success, they did manage to accidentally get themselves a regular gig at the most important nightclub in New York. They went to the Peppermint Lounge, just as the Twist craze was at its height, and as they were underage they dressed up especially well in order to make themselves look more grown up so they could get in. Their ruse worked better than they expected. As they were all dressed the same, the club's manager assumed they were the dancers he'd booked, who hadn't shown up. He came out and told them to get on stage and start dancing, and so of course they did what he said, and started dancing to the Twist sounds of Joey Dee and the Starliters: [Excerpt: Joey Dee and the Starliters, "The Peppermint Twist"] The girls' dancing went down well, and then the band started playing "What'd I Say?", a favourite song of Ronnie's and one the group did in their own act, and Ronnie danced over to David Brigati, who was singing lead on the song, and started dancing close to him. He handed her the mic as a joke, and she took over the song. They got a regular spot at the Peppermint Lounge, dancing behind the Starliters for their whole show and joining them on vocals for a few numbers every night. Inspired by the Bobbettes and the Marvelettes, Ronnie and Estelle's mother suggested changing the group's name. She suggested "the Rondettes", and they dropped the "d", becoming the Ronettes. The singles they released on ColPix under the new name did no better than the others, but they were such an important part of the Peppermint Lounge that when the Lounge's owners opened a second venue in Florida, the girls went down there with the Starliters and were part of the show.  That trip to Florida gave them two very different experiences. The first was that they got to see segregation firsthand for the first time, and they didn't like it -- especially when they, as light-skinned mixed-race women, were read as tanned white women and served in restaurants which then refused to serve their darker-skinned mothers. But the second was far more positive. They met Murray the K, who since Alan Freed had been driven out of his job had become the most popular DJ in New York. Murray was down in Florida for a holiday, and was impressed enough by the girls' dancing that he told them if they were ever in New York and wanted a spot on one of his regular shows at the Brooklyn Fox Theatre they should let him know. They replied that they lived in New York and went to those shows all the time -- of course they wanted to perform on his shows. They became regular performers at the Brooklyn Fox, where they danced between the other, bigger, acts, sang backing vocals, did a song or two themselves, and took part in comedy sketches with Murray. It was at these shows, as well, that they developed the look they would become famous with -- huge hair piled up on top of their heads, tons of mascara, and tight skirts slit to show their legs. It was a style inspired by street fashion rather than by what the other girl groups were wearing, and it made them incredibly popular with the Fox audience. But the Ronettes, even under their new name, and even with the backing of New York's most prominent DJ, were still not selling any records. They knew they were good, and the reaction to their stage performances proved as much, so they decided that the problem must be with Colpix. And so in 1963 they made a New Year's resolution -- they were going to get Phil Spector to produce them.  By this time, Spector was becoming very well known in the music industry as a hit maker. We already saw in the recent episode on the Crystals how he was making hits for that group and the Blossoms, but he was also making hits with studio groups like Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans, who he took into the top ten with a remake of the old Disney song "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah": [Excerpt: Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans, "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah"] and as well as the records he was putting out on Philles, he was also working as a freelance producer for people like Connie Francis, producing her top ten hit "Second-Hand Love": [Excerpt: Connie Francis, "Second-Hand Love"] So the Ronettes were convinced that he could make them into the stars they knew they had the potential to be. The group had no idea how to get in touch with Spector, so they tried the direct route -- Estelle called directory enquiries, got the number for Philles Records, and called and asked to be put through to Spector. She was as astonished as anyone when he agreed to talk to her -- and it turned out that he'd seen the group regularly at the Brooklyn Fox and was interested in working with them.  At their audition for Spector, the group first performed a close-harmony version of "When the Red Red Robin Goes Bob-Bob-Bobbin' Along", which they'd been taught by their singing teacher. Spector told them that he wanted to hear what they did when they were singing for themselves, not for a teacher, and so Ronnie launched into "Why Do Fools Fall In Love?"  It only took her getting to the second line of the song before Spector yelled at her to stop -- "THAT is the voice I've been looking for!" The Ronettes' first recordings for Spector weren't actually issued as by the Ronettes at all. To start with, he had them record a version of a song by the writing team of Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, "Why Don't They Let Us Fall In Love?", but didn't release it at the time. It was later released as by "Veronica", the name under which he released solo records by Ronnie: [Excerpt: Veronica, "Why Don't They Let Us Fall In Love?"] But at the time, when Ronnie asked him when the record was coming out, Spector answered "Never". He explained to her that it was a good record, but it wasn't a number one, and he was still working on their first number one record. Their next few recordings were covers of then-current dance hits, like "The Twist": [Excerpt, "The Crystals", "The Twist"] And "The Wah-Watusi", one of the few times that one of the other Ronettes took the lead rather than Ronnie, as Nedra sang lead: [Excerpt, "The Crystals", "The Wah-Watusi"] But these, and two other tracks, were released as album tracks on a Crystals album, credited to the Crystals rather than the Ronettes. The song that eventually became the group's first hit, "Be My Baby", was mostly written by one of the many husband-and-wife songwriting teams that had developed at the Brill Building, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich. Barry had started out as a performer who occasionally wrote, putting out records like "It's Called Rock and Roll": [Excerpt: Jeff Barry, "It's Called Rock and Roll"] But while his performing career had gone nowhere, he'd started to have some success as a songwriter, writing "Teenage Sonata" for Sam Cooke: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "Teenage Sonata"] And "Tell Laura I Love Her", which was recorded by several people, but the biggest hit version was the American number one by Ray Peterson: [Excerpt: Ray Peterson, "Tell Laura I Love Her"] Ellie Greenwich had also started as a performer, recording "Silly Isn't It?" under the name Ellie Gaye: [Excerpt: Ellie Gaye, "Silly, Isn't It?"] She'd become one of the most important demo singers in New York, and had also started writing songs. She'd first collaborated with Doc Pomus, cowriting songs like "This is It", which had been a flop single for Jay and the Americans: [Excerpt: Jay and the Americans, "This is It"] She'd then been taken on by Trio Music, Leiber and Stoller's company, where she had largely collaborated with another writer named Tony Powers. Trio had first refusal on anything the two of them wrote, and if Leiber and Stoller didn't like it, they could take the song elsewhere. Greenwich and Powers had their biggest successes with songs that Leiber and Stoller rejected, which they sold to Aaron Schroeder. And they'd started up a collaboration with Phil Spector -- although Spector and Greenwich's first meeting had not exactly gone smoothly. He'd gone into her office to hear her play a song that she thought would be suitable for the Paris Sisters, but had kept wandering out of the office, and had kept looking at himself in a mirror and primping himself rather than listen to her song. Eventually she said to him  "Listen to me, you little prick. Did you come to look at yourself or to hear my songs?", and she didn't make that sale. But later on, Spector became interested in a song she'd sold to Schroeder, and made an appointment to meet her and talk about her writing some stuff for him -- that second meeting, which Spector didn't realise was with someone he'd already made a bad impression on, Spector turned up four hours late.  But despite that, Greenwich and Powers wrote several songs for Spector, who was also given songwriting credit, and which became big hits in versions he produced -- "(Today I Met) The Boy I'm Gonna Marry", a single by Darlene Love: [Excerpt: Darlene Love, "(Today I Met) The Boy I'm Gonna Marry"] And "Why Do Lovers Break Each Others' Hearts?", released as by Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans, but with Love once again on lead vocals: [Excerpt: Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans, "Why Do Lovers Break Each Others' Hearts?"] I say that Spector was also given songwriting credit on those records, because there is some debate about how much he contributed to the songs he's credited on. Some of his co-writers have said that he would often only change a word or a phrase, and get himself cut in on an already-completed song, while others have said that he contributed a reasonable amount to the songwriting, though he was never the primary writer -- for example Barry Mann has said that Spector came up with the middle section for "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'". I tend towards the belief that Spector's contribution to the writing on those songs he's co-credited on was minimal -- in his whole career, the number of songs he wrote on his own seems to be in the single figures, while those other writers wrote dozens of hit records without any contribution from Spector -- and so when I talk about records he produced I'll tend to use phrasing like "a Goffin and King song co-credited to Phil Spector" rather than "a song by Goffin, King, and Spector", but I don't want that to give the impression that I'm certain Spector made no contribution.  But while Greenwich and Powers were a mildly successful team, their partnership ended when Greenwich met Jeff Barry at a family Thanksgiving dinner -- Greenwich's uncle was Barry's cousin. As Greenwich later put it, when they started talking together about music and realised how much they had in common, "I went 'ooh', he went 'mmmhh', and his wife went 'I don't think I like this'". Soon their previous partnerships, both romantic and musical, were over, and Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich became the third of the great Brill Building husband-and-wife songwriting teams.  Where Goffin and King had a sophisticated edge to their writing, with a hint of sexual subversion and the mingling of pain and pleasure, and Mann and Weill tried to incorporate social comment into their songs, Barry and Greenwich were happy to be silly -- they were writing songs like "Hanky Panky", "Da Doo Ron Ron",  and "Doo Wah Diddy Diddy": [Excerpt: Ellie Greenwich "Doo Wah Diddy Diddy (demo)"] This worked extremely well for them, to the extent that after they broke up a few years later, Barry would continue this formula with songs such as "Sugar Sugar", "Jingle Jangle" and "Bang Shang A Lang". Barry and Greenwich's style was to jam in as many hooks as possible, maybe put in a joke or two, keep the lyrics simple, and get out in two minutes. Very few of their songs were masterpieces of songwriting, but they *were* absolutely perfect templates for masterpieces of production. It sounds like I'm damning them with faint praise, but I'm really not. There is a huge skill involved in what they were doing -- if you're writing some heartwrenching masterpiece about the human condition, people will forgive the odd lapse in craft, but if you're writing "My baby does the hanky panky", there's no margin for error, and you're not going to get forgiven if you mess it up.  Barry and Greenwich were good enough at this that they became the go-to writers for Spector for the next couple of years. He would record songs by most of the Brill Building teams, but when you think of the classic records Spector produced, they're far more likely than not to be Barry and Greenwich songs -- of the twenty-seven Philles singles released after Barry and Greenwich started writing together, fourteen are credited to Barry/Greenwich/Spector, and other than the joke release "Let's Dance the Screw", which we talked about back in the episode on the Crystals, there's a run of eleven singles released on the label between late 1962 and early 1964 which are credited either as Greenwich/Powers/Spector or Barry/Greenwich/Spector. And so it was naturally to Barry and Greenwich that Spector turned to write the first big hit for the Ronettes -- and he let Ronnie hear the writing session. By this time, Spector had become romantically involved with Ronnie, and he invited her into his apartment to sit in the next room and listen to them working on the song -- usually they got together in hotels rather than at Spector's home. While she was there, she found several pairs of women's shoes -- Spector hadn't told her he was married, and claimed to her when she asked that they belonged to his sister. This should probably have been a sign of things to come. Assuming that Spector did contribute to the writing, I think it's easy to tell what he brought to “Be My Baby”. If you listen to that Connie Francis record I excerpted earlier, on which Spector is also a credited co-writer, the melody line for the line “that you don't feel the same” leading into the chorus: [Excerpt: Connie Francis, “Second-Hand Love”] is identical to the melody line leading into the chorus of “Be My Baby”: [Excerpt: The Ronettes, “Be My Baby”] So that transition between the verse and the chorus is likely his work. After rehearsing Ronnie for several weeks in New York, Spector flew her out to LA to make the record in Gold Star Studios, where she spent three days recording the lead vocals. The backing vocals weren't provided by the other Ronettes, but rather by the Blossoms, with a few extra singers -- notably Spector's assistant Sonny Bono, and his new girlfriend Cher -- but what really made the track was not the vocals -- although the song was perfect for Ronnie -- but Hal Blaine's drum intro: [Excerpt: The Ronettes, "Be My Baby"] That intro was utterly simple -- Blaine was always a minimalist player, someone who would play for the song rather than play fussy fills -- but that simple part, combined with the powerful sound that the engineer Larry Levine got, was enough to make it one of the most memorable intros in rock music history. Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys talks to this day about how he had to pull over to the side of the road when he first heard it on his car radio, and he would listen to the record incessantly for hours at a time. Incidentally, since I'm talking about the musicians, a lot of sources credit Carol Kaye for playing the bass on this track, so I'm going to say something once, here, which should be taken as read whenever I'm talking about records made in LA in the sixties -- Carol Kaye is not only an unreliable source about what records she played on, she is an utterly dishonest one. For those who don't know, Ms. Kaye was one of the great bass players of the sixties, and also one of the better session guitarists. She played on hundreds of records in the sixties, including many, many, classics from the Beach Boys, Spector, Frank Zappa, and others, and she was the only woman getting regular session work in LA on a rock instrument -- there may have been session orchestral musicians who were women, but when it comes to guitar, bass, drums, keyboards, sax, and so on, she was the only one. For that, she deserves a huge amount of credit. Unfortunately, she has never been happy only being credited for the records she actually played on, and insists she played on many, many, more. Some of this can be reasonably put down to lapses in memory more than fifty years later -- if you're playing two or three sessions a day, and you play on a bunch of Beach Boys records, then it's easy enough to misremember having played on "Surfin' USA" when maybe you played on a similar-sounding record, and there are things like her claiming to have played on "Good Vibrations", where there were multiple sessions for that track, and it happened that the takes eventually used weren't the ones where she was playing bass, but she had no way of knowing that. That's completely forgivable. But Ms. Kaye also claims, with no evidence whatsoever on her side and a great deal of evidence against her, to have been responsible for playing almost the entire recorded works of James Jamerson, Motown's main bass player, claiming tapes were secretly shipped from Detroit to LA -- something that has been denied by every single person working at Motown, and which can be easily disproved just by listening to the tapes. She claims to have played the bass on "I'm a Believer" by the Monkees -- a track recorded in New York, by New York musicians. And whenever anyone points out the falsehoods, rather than saying "I may have made a mistake" she hurls abuse at them, and in some cases libels them on her website. So, Carol Kaye did not play on this record, and we know that because we have the AFM session sheets, which show that the bass players on the track were Ray Pohlman and Jimmy Bond. I'll link a PDF of that sheet in the show notes. So in future, when I mention someone other than Carol Kaye playing on a song, and Wikipedia or somewhere says she played on it, bear this in mind. Two people who did play on the record were Bill Pitman and Tommy Tedesco, and this is why the B-side, an instrumental, is named "Tedesco and Pitman". Spector was enough of a control freak that he didn't want DJs ever to play the wrong side of his singles, so he stuck instrumental jam sessions by the studio musicians -- with the songwriting credited to him rather than to them -- on the B-sides. I don't know about you, but I actually quite like "Tedesco and Pitman", but then I've always had a soft spot for the vibraphone: [Excerpt: "The Ronettes" (The Wrecking Crew), Tedesco and Pitman"] "Be My Baby" was a massive hit -- it went to number one on the Cashbox chart, though only number two on the Billboard chart, and sold millions of copies. The group were invited on to Dick Clark's Caravan of Stars tour, but Spector wanted Ronnie to be in California to record the follow-up, so the girls' cousin Elaine filled in for her for the first couple of weeks of the tour, while Ronnie recorded another Barry, Greenwich and Spector song, "Baby I Love You": [Excerpt: The Ronettes, "Baby I Love You"] Ronnie didn't realise it at the time, but Spector was trying to isolate her from the other group members, and from her family. But at first this seemed to her like a sensible way of solving the problem, and she rejoined the tour after the record was made. Soon after this, the group travelled to the UK for a brief tour in early 1964, during which they became friendly with the Beatles -- Ronnie had a brief chaste flirtation with John Lennon, and Estelle something a little more with George Harrison. They also got to know their support act on the tour, the Rolling Stones -- at least once Ronnie had had a row with Andrew Loog Oldham, as Spector had sent a telegram forbidding the Rolling Stones from spending time with the Ronettes. Once Ronnie pointed out that they were there and Spector wasn't, the two groups became very friendly -- and more than friendly, if Keith Richards' autobiography is to be believed. On their return to the US, they continued having hits through 1964 -- nothing was as big as "Be My Baby", but they had three more top forty hits that year, with two mediocre records, "The Best Part of Breaking Up" and "Do I Love You?", co-written by the team of Pete Andreoli and Vini Poncia, and then a return to form with the magnificent "Walking in the Rain", written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill: [Excerpt: The Ronettes Featuring Veronica, "Walking in the Rain"] But Spector was becoming more and more erratic in his personal life, and more and more controlling. I won't go into too many details here, because we're going to see a lot more of Phil Spector over the next year or so, but he recorded many great records with the Ronettes which he refused to release, claiming they weren't quite right -- Ronnie has later realised that he was probably trying to sabotage their career so he could have her all to himself, though at the time she didn't know that. Neither of the two singles they did release in 1965 made the top fifty, and the one single they released in 1966, a return to songs by Barry and Greenwich, only made number one hundred, for one week: [Excerpt: The Ronettes, "I Can Hear Music"] Also in 1966, the Ronettes were invited by the Beatles to be their support act on their last ever tour, but once again Spector insisted that Ronnie couldn't go, because she needed to be in the studio, so Elaine substituted for her again, much to the Beatles' disappointment. Nothing from the studio sessions during that tour was released. The group broke up in 1967, and the next year Ronnie married Phil Spector, who became ever more controlling and abusive. I won't go into details of the way he treated her, which you can read all about in her autobiography, but suffice to say that I was completely unsurprised when he murdered a woman in 2003. You'll probably get some idea of his behaviours when I talk about him in future episodes, but what Ronnie suffered in the years they were together was something no-one should have to go through. By the time she managed to leave him, in June 1972, she had only released one track in years, a song that George Harrison had written for her called "Try Some, Buy Some", which Spector had recorded with her at Harrison's insistence, during a period when Spector was working with several of the ex-Beatles and trying to rebuild his own career on the back of them: [Excerpt: Ronnie Spector, "Try Some, Buy Some"] Neither Ronnie nor Spector were particularly keen on the track, and it was a commercial flop -- although John Lennon later said that the track had inspired his "Happy Xmas (War is Over)". Ronnie eventually escaped from Spector's abuse -- leaving the house barefoot, as Spector had stolen her shoes so she couldn't leave -- and started to build a new life for herself, though she would struggle with alcoholism for many years. She got nothing in their divorce settlement, as Spector threatened to hire a hit man to kill her if she tried to get anything from him, and she made a living by touring the nostalgia circuit with various new lineups of Ronettes -- the others having given up on their music careers -- and while she never had another hit, she did have a recording career. Her solo career got its proper start because of a chance meeting in New York. Her old friend John Lennon saw her on the street and called her over for a chat, and introduced her to the friend he was with, Jimmy Iovine, who was producing an album for Southside Johnny and the Asbury Dukes. Bruce Springsteen had written a song for that band, and Iovine thought it might work well as a duet with Ronnie, and he invited her to the studio that day, and she cut the song with them: [Excerpt: Southside Johnny and the Asbury Dukes, "You Mean So Much To Me"] That song became one of the most popular songs on the album, and so when the Asbury Dukes toured supporting Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band, they brought Ronnie along with them to sing on that song and do a couple of her own hits. That led to the E-Street Band themselves backing Ronnie on a single -- a version of Billy Joel's "Say Goodbye to Hollywood", a song that Joel had written with her in mind: [Excerpt: Ronnie Spector and the E-Street Band, "Say Goodbye to Hollywood"] However, that was a flop, and so were all her later attempts to have comebacks, though she worked with some great musicians over the years. But she was able to continue having a career as a performer, even if she never returned to stardom, and she never made much money from her hits. She did, though, sing on one more top-ten hit, singing backing vocals on Eddie Money's "Take Me Home Tonight": [Excerpt: Eddie Money, "Take Me Home Tonight"] Phil Spector continued to earn money from his ex-wife for a long time after their divorce. By 1998, when the Ronettes finally sued Spector for unpaid royalties, they had earned, between them, a total of $14,482.30 in royalties from all their hit records -- the amount that came from a single 1964 royalty payment. In court, Spector argued that he didn't owe them any more, and indeed that *they* still owed *him* money, because the cost of recording their singles meant that they had never actually earned more money than they cost. Eventually, after a series of appeals, the group members each got about half a million dollars in 2002 -- obviously a great deal of money, but a small fraction of what they actually earned. Spector, who was on the board of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, prevented the Ronettes from being inducted out of spite towards his ex until he was imprisoned, at which point they were finally recognised, in 2007.  Ronnie continues to perform, and seems to have a happy life. Estelle, sadly, did not -- she suffered from anorexia and schizophrenia, spent a period of time homeless, and died in 2009. Nedra became a born-again Christian shortly after the group split up, and recorded a couple of unsuccessful albums of Christian music in the seventies, before going off to work in real estate. In September last year, it was announced that a film is going to be made of Ronnie Spector's life story.  It's nice to know that there'll be something out there telling her story with her as the protagonist, rather than as a background character in the story of her abusive husband.

Tony Lymon returns! Tony’s Random Ass Question segment sees him discussing problems in music education (03:45), race in percussion and music, “outperforming your blackness”, politics and social media (08:00), great and terrible movies, and NOT having a sports fandom (37:15), and his love of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings (50:40).Finishing with a Rave on the accomplishments of Stacy Abrams (56:00).Links:Part 1 with Tony LymonTony Lymon’s Pacific Crest pageGeorge Floyd ProtestsMarshall McLuhan“Think Globally, Act Locally”Jonathan SwiftSling Blade trailerJohn RitterBilly Bob ThorntonJurassic Park trailerTriumph the Insult Comic Dog at Star WarsStephen A. SmithKing Konga in 1998Star of Indiana 1993Adagio for Strings - Samuel BarberPlatoon and Adagio for StringsRaves:Stacy Abrams

Petal (MS) based Marching Arts Designer and Educator Tony Lymon stops by to talk about his PASIC 2020 panel on Electronics and the Marching Arts (05:45), his current career activities, getting his first orchestral pit gig, and making some needed life changes (21:30), the teaching challenges during coronavirus (43:00), growing up near Mississippi Valley State University and his time in the Star of Indiana Drum Corps (52:00), his undergrad time at Southern Mississippi (01:07:00), and touring with the band King Konga and their experiences at Woodstock 1999 (01:15:30).Finishing with a Rave on the 2020 Pixar film Soul (01:30:15).Links:Tony Lymon’s Pacific Crest pageTony’s 2020 PASIC PresentationRyan SaulSanta Clara VanguardJim CasellaEminence DrumlineBrett FavreJohn WootonAnnieMan of La ManchaThe Lion KingHamiltonSherman HongHaskell HarrJohn S. PrattRicky BurkheadBlue Devils 1986 drumlineStar of Indiana 1991Thom HannumGeorge ZingaliJim PrimeTodd RyanFrank SullivanAaron WellsColin McNuttMemphis Blues Band“Yellow After the Rain” - Mitchell Peters“Two Mexican Dances” - Gordon Stout“Africa Hot” - John WootonBiloxi Blues trailerJoan RiversRegis Philbin“Rock N Roll Fantasy” - Bad CompanyKing Konga Live in 1998Woodstock 1999Raves:Soul trailer

Today's guest is a long time family friend of the Ricks'. Newly married Ann Lymon describes what it was like to unexpectedly get pregnant within the first year of marriage and what happens when you get the birth experience you did not plan for. Pre-recorded episode available, now.

On this episode I catch up with the extraordinary yet humble Tony Lymon. He is a polyglot of talents and interests who grew up in one of the poorest areas in the USA. I was so fortunate to know Tony and become his friend during college. I was a huge fan during his Jam-Rock phase with King Konga. This is a long one but there are so many gems to learn from Tony. We talk about race and classism. We also go in deep on high school band and its critical role in education. Tony's non traditional path to completing his education is also enlightening. To reward those who listen to the entire podcast Tony gave me permission to add a track from King Konga's album Something Good! Check out the 2020 Virtual Reunion Performance of King Konga Here! Tony Lyom is the former Assistant Director of Bands at Petal High School in Petal, Mississippi and currently is the co-music arranger/show designer for the Petal High School marching band. Tony is the director show designer for the Petal Indoor Percussion Theatre, a national WGI Percussion Scholastic World Finalist. He has twice been awarded the Outstanding Junior High Director of the Southeast Mississippi Band Directors Association and the 2008 Mississippi Bandmasters Association AE McClain Outstanding Young Band Director Award. Tony was also the Founder and Director of Eminence Indoor Percussion Ensemble, a regional and national WGI Open Class finalist and championship ensemble. Tony holds a Bachelors degree in Music Education from the University of Southern Mississippi and a Certification in 3D Architectural Rendering from The 3D Training Institute of New York. He was a member and principal percussionist in the world renowned Southern Miss Wind Ensemble and Southern Miss Symphony Orchestra. While at Southern Miss, Tony was the percussion arranger for the Pride of Mississippi Marching Band and USM indoor percussion ensemble. Tony was also a member of the World Champion Star of Indiana Drum and Bugle Corps (Bloomington, IN) from 1991-1993. In his three years of DCI experience, he won the DCI-Midwest Solo Timpani Champion and the 1994 Percussive Arts Society International Solo Timpani Award. Tony's original marimba composition "Of Thoughts and Thinking" has become a standard in percussion literature. The piece was most recently recorded by German percussion artist Cornelia Monkse on the CD "Marimba 2" and was featured in the French documentary film "Le Ciel." After college, Tony pursued a professional performance career for eight years with the pop/rock band King Konga . While with King Konga, Tony toured the world selling out venues in nationwide. The group did a post September 11th USO tour for the US Military in Hawaii and South East Asia. The four-piece band gained critical acclaim reaching #81 on the AC Hot 100 Pop Charts with "Something Good." With a rare accomplishment by an independent band, King Konga captured the eyes and ears of many major record labels and the band went on to perform at Woodstock '99. Tony has also performed with The Mississippi Symphony, Mobile Opera, Hattiesburg Civic Light Opera and The Meistersingers Orchestral/Choral Ensemble. Tony recently wrapped up a season as the sound designer for The Madison Scouts Drum and Bugle Corps in 2018 and currently serves as Creative Designer for Pacific Crest Drum and Bugle Corps. He is the owner of Eidetic Creative, a multimedia creative designs solution business. He currently resides in Petal, Mississippi with his wife Emily and 13 year-old daughter Colette.

Tony Lymon is the former Assistant Director of Bands at Petal High School in Petal, Mississippi, and currently is the co-music arranger/show designer for the Petal High School marching band. Tony is the director show designer for the Petal Indoor Percussion Theatre, a national WGI Percussion Scholastic World Finalist. He has twice been awarded the Outstanding Junior High Director of the Southeast Mississippi Band Directors Association and the 2008 Mississippi Bandmasters Association AE McClain Outstanding Young Band Director Award. Tony currently serves as a Creative Designer for Pacific Crest Drum and Bugle Corps. Tony holds a Bachelors's degree in Music Education from the University of Southern Mississippi and a Certification in 3D Architectural Rendering from The 3D Training Institute of New York. He was a member and principal percussionist in the world-renowned Southern Miss Wind Ensemble and Southern Miss Symphony Orchestra. While at Southern Miss, Tony was the percussion arranger for the Pride of Mississippi Marching Band and USM indoor percussion ensemble. Tony was also a member of the World Champion Star of Indiana Drum and Bugle Corps (Bloomington, IN) from 1991-1993. In his three years of DCI experience, he won the DCI-Midwest Solo Timpani Champion and the 1994 Percussive Arts Society International Solo Timpani Award. Tony's original marimba composition "Of Thoughts and Thinking" has become a standard in percussion literature. The piece was most recently recorded by German percussion artist Cornelia Monkse on the CD "Marimba 2" and was featured in the French documentary film "Le Ciel." After college, Tony pursued a professional performance career for eight years with the pop/rock band King Konga . While with King Konga, Tony toured the world selling out venues nationwide. The group did a post-September 11th USO tour for the US Military in Hawaii and South East Asia. The four-piece band gained critical acclaim reaching #81 on the AC Hot 100 Pop Charts with "Something Good." With a rare accomplishment by an independent band, King Konga captured the eyes and ears of many major record labels and the band went on to perform at Woodstock '99. Tony has also performed with The Mississippi Symphony, Mobile Opera, Hattiesburg Civic Light Opera, and The Meistersingers Orchestral/Choral Ensemble. Tony recently wrapped up a season as the sound designer for The Madison Scouts Drum and Bugle Corps in 2018 and is the owner of Eidetic Creative, a multimedia creative design solution business. He currently resides in Petal, Mississippi with his wife Emily and 13-year-old daughter Colette. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/sketchbookpodcast/message

Golden Voice narrator Dion Graham is much loved by audiobook listeners and has won numerous Earphones Awards for his narrations. Dion narrates with dexterity and so much emotion, shifting nimbly from one rich character voice to another. He has won Audie Awards for his narrations, including TROMBONE SHORTY, the children’s picture book memoir packed full of music and joy. His narration of BLACK LEOPARD, RED WOLF earned him a nomination for a fantasy Audie Award this year and a spot on AudioFile’s Best Audiobooks list. Dion’s narrations shine in many genres, including literary fiction, fantasies, biographies, and children’s audiobooks. Today, host Jo Reed and AudioFile’s Emily Connelly discuss Dion’s narration of LEAVING LYMON, Lesa Cline-Ransome’s historical fiction about a young Black boy growing up in the 1940s. In this Earphones Award-winning audiobook, listeners get to know Lymon, who appeared as a bully in her earlier book, Coretta Scott King Award-winner FINDING LANGSTON. Dion narrates the story with so much heart, conveying Lymon’s vulnerability at always feeling left behind by those he loves. Listeners see Mississippi, Milwaukee, and Chicago through Lymon’s eyes, as he moves from home to home. Dion’s calm tones give listeners hope that love and music will heal Lymon. Published by Dreamscape. Find more audiobook recommendations at audiofilemagazine.com Support for Behind the Mic comes from Oasis Audio, publisher of the complete Edgar Rice Burroughs Authorized Library and the all-new Edgar Rice Burroughs Universe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

BallN Gems with 2021 MG Lymon from Foley HS AL

The agents return to the Inn at Innsmouth for a debriefing and a dinner. However, Phillip sneaks out and finds not all is well in Innsmouth.     Music from "The Great Old Ones And Other Beings" by Graham Plowman, found at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyFjXaKiJLk&t=761s Website: https://www.Withoutanetpod.com Discord link https://discord.gg/TbE5Ajc If you like the show, swing by our Patreon where you can get access to over 15 extra hours of content.   Email us: Withoutanetpod@gmail.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WithoutANetPodcast Copyright: Without A Net Podcast, 2019, and now 2020?

In our annual review of the previous year we discuss Larry's books on Ubuntu MATE, Microsoft's transformation into an open source company, the distros we've tried, and predictions for 2020. We read a couple of emails from listeners and recommend podcasts and Linux applications. Episode 384 Time Stamps 00:00 Going Linux #384 · 2019 Year In Review 01:12 Upgrade your computer. Ubuntu MATE is the alternative to Windows 7. 03:53 Bill's latest distro hop: KDE Neon, Linux Mint 19.03 07:17 Running Firefox and not using Chrome 08:39 No ZFS in the Linux Kernel 09:11 Microsoft: 400 million insecure Win 7 users should just buy a new computer 10:20 Going Linux: 400 million Win 7 users should keep their computer and upgrade to a secure Linux 11:52 2019: The year of distro hopping 14:36 Our favorite distros 17:12 Topics we discussed in 2019 20:13 Our 2020 predictions 27:33 Tech community in 2019 30:12 Open source in 2019 38:07 Bill gets another raise in pay 39:23 Microsoft: The open source company 42:29 Making money with open source 46:23 2019: The beginning of the grand move to the open source model for software development 47:50 Listener feedback: Ken 49:31 Listener feedback: Lymon 52:15 Podcast recommendations 61:09 Application picks 69:02 goinglinux.com, goinglinux@gmail.com, +1-904-468-7889, @goinglinux, feedback, listen, subscribe 70:09 End

In our annual review of the previous year we discuss Larry's books on Ubuntu MATE, Microsoft's transformation into an open source company, the distros we've tried, and predictions for 2020. We read a couple of emails from listeners and recommend podcasts and Linux applications. Episode 384 Time Stamps 00:00 Going Linux #384 · 2019 Year In Review 01:12 Upgrade your computer. Ubuntu MATE is the alternative to Windows 7. 03:53 Bill's latest distro hop: KDE Neon, Linux Mint 19.03 07:17 Running Firefox and not using Chrome 08:39 No ZFS in the Linux Kernel 09:11 Microsoft: 400 million insecure Win 7 users should just buy a new computer 10:20 Going Linux: 400 million Win 7 users should keep their computer and upgrade to a secure Linux 11:52 2019: The year of distro hopping 14:36 Our favorite distros 17:12 Topics we discussed in 2019 20:13 Our 2020 predictions 27:33 Tech community in 2019 30:12 Open source in 2019 38:07 Bill gets another raise in pay 39:23 Microsoft: The open source company 42:29 Making money with open source 46:23 2019: The beginning of the grand move to the open source model for software development 47:50 Listener feedback: Ken 49:31 Listener feedback: Lymon 52:15 Podcast recommendations 61:09 Application picks 69:02 goinglinux.com, goinglinux@gmail.com, +1-904-468-7889, @goinglinux, feedback, listen, subscribe 70:09 End

What’s up, BRU? - The North Americans challenge their UK panelists to please, please, please explain what lemonade means, since it’s not “lemons, sugar, and water.” The answer will surprise you. But then we discover ginger as a generic. It’s all sweet fizzy water with fake lemon (or Lymon) in the end. Host Glenn Fleishman with Antony Johnston, Dan Moren, Erika Ensign and James Thomson.

Episode thirty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Why Do Fools Fall in Love?" by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, and at the terrible afterlife of child stardom. 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 "Space Guitar" by Johnny "Guitar" Watson. ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. There are no books on the Teenagers, as far as I know, so as I so often do when talking about vocal groups I relied heavily on Marv Goldberg's website. Some information also comes from Big Beat Heat: Alan Freed and the Early Years of Rock & Roll by John A. Jackson. Some background on George Goldner was from Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz. And for more on Morris Levy, see Me, the Mob, and the Music, by Tommy James with Martin Fitzpatrick. This compilation contains every recording by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, together or separately, as well as recordings by Lewis Lymon and the Teenchords, a group led by Lymon's brother. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript The story of Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers is, like so many of the stories we're dealing with in this series, a story of heartbreak and early death, a story of young people of colour having their work become massively successful and making no money off it because of wealthy businessmen stealing their work. But it's also a story of what happens when you get involved with the Mafia before you hit puberty, and your career peaks at thirteen. The Teenagers only had one really big hit, but it was one of the biggest hits of the fifties, and it was a song that is almost universally known to this day. So today we're going to talk about "Why Do Fools Fall in Love?" The Teenagers started when two black teenagers from New York, Jimmy Merchant and Sherman Garnes, left the vocal group they'd formed, which was named "the Earth Angels" after the Penguins song, and hooked up with two Latino neighbours, Joe Negroni and Herman Santiago. They named themselves the Ermines. Soon after, they were the support act for local vocal group the Cadillacs: [Excerpt, The Cadillacs, "Speedoo"] They were impressed enough by the Cadillacs that in honour of them they changed their name, becoming the Coup de Villes, and after that the Premiers. They used to practice in the hallway of the apartment block where Sherman Garnes lived, and eventually one of the neighbours got sick of hearing them sing the same songs over and over. The neighbour decided to bring out some love letters his girlfriend had written, some of which were in the form of poems, and say to the kids "why don't you turn some of these into songs?" And so they did just that -- they took one of the letters, containing the phrase "why do birds sing so gay?" and Santiago and Merchant worked out a ballad for Santiago to sing containing that phrase. Soon after this, the Premiers met up with a very young kid, Frankie Lymon, who sang and played percussion in a mambo group. I suppose I should pause here to talk briefly about the mambo craze. Rock and roll wasn't the only musical style that was making inroads in the pop markets in the fifties -- and an impartial observer, looking in 1953 or 1954, might easily have expected that the big musical trend that would shape the next few decades would be calypso music, which had become huge in the US for a brief period. But that wasn't the only music that was challenging rock and roll. There were a whole host of other musics, usually those from Pacific, Latin-American and/or Caribbean cultures, which tend to get lumped together as "exotica" now, and "mambo" was one of those. This was a craze named after a song by the Cuban bandleader Perez Prado, "Mambo Jambo": [Excerpt: Perez Prado, "Mambo Jambo"] That song was popular enough that soon everyone was jumping on the bandwagon -- for example, Bill Haley and the Comets with "Mambo Rock": [Excerpt: Bill Haley and the Comets, "Mambo Rock"] The group that Frankie Lymon was performing with was one of those groups, but he was easily persuaded instead to join the Premiers. He was the young kid who hung around with them when they practiced, not the leader, and not even a major part of the group. Not yet, anyway. But everything changed for the group when Richie Barrett heard them singing on a street corner near him. These days, Barrett is best-known for his 1962 single "Some Other Guy", which was later covered by the Beatles, among others: [Excerpt: Richie Barrett, "Some Other Guy"] But at the time he was the lead singer of a group called the Valentines: [Excerpt: The Valentines, "Tonight Kathleen"] He was also working for George Goldner at Rama Records as a talent scout and producer, doing the same kind of things that Ike Turner had been doing for Chess and Modern, or that Jesse Stone did for Atlantic -- finding the acts, doing the arrangements, doing all the work involved in turning some teenage kid into someone who could become a star. Goldner was someone for whom most people in the music industry seem to have a certain amount of contempt -- he was, by most accounts, a fairly weak-willed figure who got himself into great amounts of debt with dodgy people. But one thing they're all agreed on is that he had a great ear for a hit, because as Jerry Leiber put it he had the taste of a fourteen-year-old girl. George Goldner had actually got into R&B through the mambo craze. When Goldner had started in the music industry, it had been as the owner of a chain of nightclubs which featured Latin music. The clubs became popular enough that he also started Tico Records, a label that put out Latin records, most notably early recordings by Tito Puente. [Excerpt: Tito Puente: "Vibe Mambo"] When the mambo boom hit, a lot of black teenagers started attending Goldner's clubs, and he became interested in the other music they were listening to. He started first Rama Records, as a label for R&B singles, and then Gee records, named after the most successful record that had been put out on Rama, "Gee", by the Crows. However, Goldner had a business partner, and his name was Morris Levy, and Levy was *not* someone you wanted involved in your business in any way. In this series we're going to talk about a lot of horrible people -- and in fact we've already covered more than a few of them -- yet Morris Levy was one of the worst people we're going to look at. While most of the people we've discussed are either terrible people in their personal life (if they were a musician) or a minor con artist who ripped off musicians and kept the money for themselves, Morris Levy was a terrible human being *and* a con artist, someone who used his Mafia connections to ensure that the artists he ripped off would never even think of suing him, because they valued their lives too much. We'll be looking at at least one rock and roll star, in the 1960s, who died in mysterious circumstances after getting involved with Levy. Levy had been the founder of Birdland, the world-famous jazz club, in the 1940s, but when ASCAP came to him asking for the money they were meant to get for their songwriters from live performances, Levy had immediately seen the possibilities in music publishing. Levy then formed a publishing company, Patricia Music, and a record label, Roulette, and started into the business of properly exploiting young black people, not just having them work in his clubs for a night, but having them create intellectual property he could continue exploiting for the rest of his life. Indeed, Levy was so keen to make money off dubious intellectual property that he actually formed a company with his friend Alan Freed which attempted to trademark the phrase "rock and roll", on the basis that this way any records that came out labelled as such would have to pay them for the privilege. Thankfully, the term caught on so rapidly that there was no way for them to enforce the trademark, and it became genericised. But this is who Levy was, and how he made his money -- at least his more legitimate money. Where he got the rest from is a matter for the true crime podcasts. There are several people who report death threats, or having to give up their careers, or suddenly move thousands of miles away from home, to avoid Levy's revenge on artists who didn't do exactly what he said. So when we're looking at a group of literal teenage kids -- and black teenagers at that, with the smallest amount of institutional privilege possible, you can be sure that he was not going to treat them with the respect that they were due. Levy owned fifty percent of Goldner's record companies, and would soon grow to own all of them, as Goldner accumulated more gambling debts and used his record labels to pay them off. But at the start of their career, the group didn't yet have to worry about Levy. That would come later. For now, they were dealing with George Goldner. And Goldner was someone who was actually concerned with the music, and who had been producing hits consistently for the last few years. At the time the Premiers signed with him, for example, he had just produced "You Baby You" for the Cleftones. [Excerpt: The Cleftones, "You Baby You"] When Richie Barrett brought the Premiers to Goldner, he was intrigued because two of the members were Latino, and he was such a lover of Latin music. But he quickly latched on to the potential of Frankie Lymon as a star. Lymon was a captivating performer, and when you watch video footage of him now you can't help but think of Michael Jackson, who followed almost exactly the same early career trajectory a decade later. While the other band members were the normal kind of teenage kids who joined doo-wop groups, and were clearly a little reserved, Lymon just *went for it*, working the crowd like a young James Brown with absolutely no self-consciousness at all. He also had a gorgeous falsetto voice, and knew how to use it. As we've heard, many of the doo-wop groups of the fifties weren't particularly proficient singers, but Lymon did have a real vocal talent. He was clearly a potential star. Frankie Lymon wasn't even originally meant to be the lead singer on "Why Do Fools Fall in Love?" -- that distinctive falsetto that makes the record so memorable was a late addition. The song was originally meant to be sung by Herman Santiago, and it was only in the studio that the song was rearranged to instead focus on the band's youngest -- and youngest-sounding -- member. [Excerpt: Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, "Why Do Fools Fall In Love?"] When the record came out, it wasn't credited to the Premiers, but to "The Teenagers, featuring Frankie Lymon". Goldner hadn't liked the group's name, and decided to focus on their big selling point -- their youth, and in particular the youth of their new lead singer. Much of the work to make the record sound that good was done not by the Teenagers or by Goldner, but by the session saxophone player Jimmy Wright, who ended up doing the arrangements on all of the Teenagers' records, and whose idea it was to start them with Sherman Garnes' bass intros. Again, as with so many of these records, there was a white cover version that came out almost immediately -- this time by the Diamonds, a group of Canadians who copied the formula of their fellow countrymen the Crew Cuts and more or less cornered the market in white remakes of doo-wop hits. [Excerpt: The Diamonds, "Why Do Fools Fall in Love?"] But in a sign of how the times were changing, the Diamonds' version of the song only went to number twelve, while the Teenagers' version went to number six, helped by a massive push from Morris Levy's good friend Alan Freed. Partly this may have been down to the fact that all the Diamonds were adults, and they simply couldn't compete with the novelty sound of a boy who sounded prepubescent, singing in falsetto. Falsetto had, of course, always been a part of the doo-wop vocal blend, but it had been a minor part up to this point. Lead vocals would generally be sung in a smooth high tenor, but would very rarely reach to the truly high notes. Lymon, by virtue of his voice not yet having broken, introduced a new timbre into rock and roll lead vocals, and he influenced almost every vocal group that followed. There might have been a Four Seasons or a Jan and Dean or a Beach Boys without Lymon, but I doubt it. There was also a British cover version, by Alma Cogan, a middle-of-the-road singer known as "the girl with the giggle in her voice". [Excerpt: Alma Cogan, "Why Do Fools Fall In Love?"] This sort of thing was common in Britain well into the sixties, as most US labels didn't have distribution in the UK, and so if British people wanted to hear American rock and roll songs, they would often get them in native cover versions. Cogan was a particular source of these, often recording songs that had been R&B hits. We will see a lot more of this in future episodes, as we start to look more at the way rock and roll affected the UK. The Teenagers followed the success of "Why Do Fools Fall in Love?" with "I Want You to Be My Girl": [Excerpt, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, "I Want You to Be My Girl"] This one did almost as well, reaching a peak of number thirteen in the pop charts. But the singles after that did less well, although "I'm Not A Juvenile Delinquent" became a big hit in the UK. The record label soon decided that Lymon needed to become a solo star, rather than being just the lead singer of the Teenagers. Quite why they made this decision was difficult to say, as one would not normally deliberately break up a hit act. But presumably the calculation was that they would then have two hit acts -- solo Frankie Lymon, and the Teenagers still recording together. It didn't work out like that. Lymon inadvertently caused another crisis in the ongoing battle of rock and roll versus racism. Alan Freed had a new TV series, The Big Beat, which was a toned-down version of Freed's radio show. By this point, real rock and roll was already in a temporary decline as the major labels fought back, and so Freed's show was generally filled with the kind of pre-packaged major label act, usually named Bobby, that we'll be talking about when we get to the later fifties. For all that Freed had a reputation as a supporter of black music, what he really was was someone with the skill to see a bandwagon and jump on it. But still, some of the black performers were still popular, and so Freed had Lymon on his showr. But his show was aimed at a white audience, and so the studio audience was white, and dancing. And Frankie Lymon started to dance as well. A black boy, dancing with a white girl. This did not go down well at all with the Southern network affiliates, and within a couple of weeks Freed's show had been taken off the TV. And that appearance, the one that destroyed Freed's show, was almost certainly Lymon's very first ever solo performance. One might think that this did not augur well for his future career, and that assessment would be largely correct. Neither Lymon nor the Teenagers would ever have another hit after they split. The last few records credited to Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers were in fact Lymon solo recordings, performed with other backing singers. "Goody Goody" did manage to reach number twenty on the pop charts: [Excerpt: Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, "Goody Goody"] Everything after that did worse. Lymon's first solo single, "My Girl", failed to chart: [Excerpt: Frankie Lymon, "My Girl"] He continued making records for another couple of years, but nothing came of any of them, and when his voice broke he stopped sounding much like himself. The last recording he made that came even close to being a hit was a remake of Bobby Day's "Little Bitty Pretty One" from 1960. [Excerpt: Frankie Lymon, "Little Bitty Pretty One"] And the Teenagers didn't fare much better. They went through several new lead singers. There was Billy Lobrano, a white kid who according to Jimmy Merchant sounded more like Eddie Fisher than like Lymon: [Excerpt: The Teenagers, "Mama Wanna Rock"] Then there was Freddie Houston, who would go on to be the lead singer in one of the many Ink Spots lineups touring in the sixties, and then they started trying to focus on the other original group members, for example calling themselves "Sherman and the Teenagers" when performing the Leiber and Stoller song "The Draw": [Excerpt: Sherman and the Teenagers, "The Draw"] As you can hear, none of these had the same sound as they'd had with Lymon, and they eventually hit on the idea of getting a woman into the group instead. They got in Sandra Doyle, who would later be Zola Taylor's replacement in the Platters, and struggled on until 1961, when they finally split up. Lymon's life after leaving the Teenagers was one of nothing but tragedy. He married three times, every time bigamously, and his only child died two days after the birth. Lymon would apparently regularly steal from Zola Taylor, who became his second wife, to feed his heroin addiction. He briefly reunited with the Teenagers in 1965, but they had little success. He spent a couple of years in the army, and appeared to have got himself clean, and even got a new record deal. But the night before he was meant to go back into the studio, he fell off the wagon, for what would be the last time. Frankie Lymon died, aged just twenty-five, and a has-been for almost half of his life, of a heroin overdose, in 1968. The other Teenagers would reunite, with Lymon's brother joining them briefly, in the 70s. Sherman Garnes died in 1977, and Joe Negroni in 1978, but Santiago and Merchant continued, off and on, with a lineup of the Teenagers -- a version of the band continues to this day, still featuring Herman Santiago, and Merchant remained with the band until his retirement a few years ago. But their first hit caused legal problems: [Excerpt: Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, "Why Do Fools Fall In Love?"] "Why Do Fools Fall In Love?" was written by Herman Santiago, with the help of Jimmy Merchant. But neither Santiago or Merchant were credited on the song when it came out. The credited songwriters for the song are Frankie Lymon -- who did have some input into rewriting it in the studio -- and Morris Levy, who had never even heard the song until after it was a massive hit. George Goldner was originally credited as Lymon's co-writer, and of course Goldner never wrote it either, but at least he was in the studio when it was recorded. But when Levy bought out Goldner's holdings in his companies, he also bought out his rights to songs he was credited for, so Levy became the legal co-writer of "Why Do Fools Fall in Love?" In 1992 Santiago and Merchant finally won the credit for having written "Why Do Fools Fall In Love?", but in 1996 the ruling was overturned. They'd apparently waited too long to take legal action over having their song stolen, and so the rights reverted to Lymon and Morris Levy -- who had never even met the band when they wrote the song. But, of course, Lymon wasn't alive to get the money. But his widow was. Or rather, his widows, plural, were. In the 1980s, three separate women claimed to be Lymon's widow and thus his legitimate heir. One was his first wife, who he had married in 1964 while she was still married to her first husband. One was Zola Taylor, who Lymon supposedly married bigamously a year after his first marriage, but who couldn't produce any evidence of this, and the third was either his second or third wife, who he married bigamously in 1967 while still married to his first, and possibly his second, wife. That third wife eventually won the various legal battles and is now in charge of the Frankie Lymon legacy. "Why Do Fools Fall In Love?" has gone on to be a standard, recorded by everyone from Joni Mitchell to the Beach Boys to Diana Ross. But Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers stand as a cautionary tale, an example that all too many people were still all too eager to follow.

Episode thirty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, and at the terrible afterlife of child stardom. 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 “Space Guitar” by Johnny “Guitar” Watson. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. There are no books on the Teenagers, as far as I know, so as I so often do when talking about vocal groups I relied heavily on Marv Goldberg’s website. Some information also comes from Big Beat Heat: Alan Freed and the Early Years of Rock & Roll by John A. Jackson. Some background on George Goldner was from Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz. And for more on Morris Levy, see Me, the Mob, and the Music, by Tommy James with Martin Fitzpatrick. This compilation contains every recording by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, together or separately, as well as recordings by Lewis Lymon and the Teenchords, a group led by Lymon’s brother. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript The story of Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers is, like so many of the stories we’re dealing with in this series, a story of heartbreak and early death, a story of young people of colour having their work become massively successful and making no money off it because of wealthy businessmen stealing their work. But it’s also a story of what happens when you get involved with the Mafia before you hit puberty, and your career peaks at thirteen. The Teenagers only had one really big hit, but it was one of the biggest hits of the fifties, and it was a song that is almost universally known to this day. So today we’re going to talk about “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” The Teenagers started when two black teenagers from New York, Jimmy Merchant and Sherman Garnes, left the vocal group they’d formed, which was named “the Earth Angels” after the Penguins song, and hooked up with two Latino neighbours, Joe Negroni and Herman Santiago. They named themselves the Ermines. Soon after, they were the support act for local vocal group the Cadillacs: [Excerpt, The Cadillacs, “Speedoo”] They were impressed enough by the Cadillacs that in honour of them they changed their name, becoming the Coup de Villes, and after that the Premiers. They used to practice in the hallway of the apartment block where Sherman Garnes lived, and eventually one of the neighbours got sick of hearing them sing the same songs over and over. The neighbour decided to bring out some love letters his girlfriend had written, some of which were in the form of poems, and say to the kids “why don’t you turn some of these into songs?” And so they did just that — they took one of the letters, containing the phrase “why do birds sing so gay?” and Santiago and Merchant worked out a ballad for Santiago to sing containing that phrase. Soon after this, the Premiers met up with a very young kid, Frankie Lymon, who sang and played percussion in a mambo group. I suppose I should pause here to talk briefly about the mambo craze. Rock and roll wasn’t the only musical style that was making inroads in the pop markets in the fifties — and an impartial observer, looking in 1953 or 1954, might easily have expected that the big musical trend that would shape the next few decades would be calypso music, which had become huge in the US for a brief period. But that wasn’t the only music that was challenging rock and roll. There were a whole host of other musics, usually those from Pacific, Latin-American and/or Caribbean cultures, which tend to get lumped together as “exotica” now, and “mambo” was one of those. This was a craze named after a song by the Cuban bandleader Perez Prado, “Mambo Jambo”: [Excerpt: Perez Prado, “Mambo Jambo”] That song was popular enough that soon everyone was jumping on the bandwagon — for example, Bill Haley and the Comets with “Mambo Rock”: [Excerpt: Bill Haley and the Comets, “Mambo Rock”] The group that Frankie Lymon was performing with was one of those groups, but he was easily persuaded instead to join the Premiers. He was the young kid who hung around with them when they practiced, not the leader, and not even a major part of the group. Not yet, anyway. But everything changed for the group when Richie Barrett heard them singing on a street corner near him. These days, Barrett is best-known for his 1962 single “Some Other Guy”, which was later covered by the Beatles, among others: [Excerpt: Richie Barrett, “Some Other Guy”] But at the time he was the lead singer of a group called the Valentines: [Excerpt: The Valentines, “Tonight Kathleen”] He was also working for George Goldner at Rama Records as a talent scout and producer, doing the same kind of things that Ike Turner had been doing for Chess and Modern, or that Jesse Stone did for Atlantic — finding the acts, doing the arrangements, doing all the work involved in turning some teenage kid into someone who could become a star. Goldner was someone for whom most people in the music industry seem to have a certain amount of contempt — he was, by most accounts, a fairly weak-willed figure who got himself into great amounts of debt with dodgy people. But one thing they’re all agreed on is that he had a great ear for a hit, because as Jerry Leiber put it he had the taste of a fourteen-year-old girl. George Goldner had actually got into R&B through the mambo craze. When Goldner had started in the music industry, it had been as the owner of a chain of nightclubs which featured Latin music. The clubs became popular enough that he also started Tico Records, a label that put out Latin records, most notably early recordings by Tito Puente. [Excerpt: Tito Puente: “Vibe Mambo”] When the mambo boom hit, a lot of black teenagers started attending Goldner’s clubs, and he became interested in the other music they were listening to. He started first Rama Records, as a label for R&B singles, and then Gee records, named after the most successful record that had been put out on Rama, “Gee”, by the Crows. However, Goldner had a business partner, and his name was Morris Levy, and Levy was *not* someone you wanted involved in your business in any way. In this series we’re going to talk about a lot of horrible people — and in fact we’ve already covered more than a few of them — yet Morris Levy was one of the worst people we’re going to look at. While most of the people we’ve discussed are either terrible people in their personal life (if they were a musician) or a minor con artist who ripped off musicians and kept the money for themselves, Morris Levy was a terrible human being *and* a con artist, someone who used his Mafia connections to ensure that the artists he ripped off would never even think of suing him, because they valued their lives too much. We’ll be looking at at least one rock and roll star, in the 1960s, who died in mysterious circumstances after getting involved with Levy. Levy had been the founder of Birdland, the world-famous jazz club, in the 1940s, but when ASCAP came to him asking for the money they were meant to get for their songwriters from live performances, Levy had immediately seen the possibilities in music publishing. Levy then formed a publishing company, Patricia Music, and a record label, Roulette, and started into the business of properly exploiting young black people, not just having them work in his clubs for a night, but having them create intellectual property he could continue exploiting for the rest of his life. Indeed, Levy was so keen to make money off dubious intellectual property that he actually formed a company with his friend Alan Freed which attempted to trademark the phrase “rock and roll”, on the basis that this way any records that came out labelled as such would have to pay them for the privilege. Thankfully, the term caught on so rapidly that there was no way for them to enforce the trademark, and it became genericised. But this is who Levy was, and how he made his money — at least his more legitimate money. Where he got the rest from is a matter for the true crime podcasts. There are several people who report death threats, or having to give up their careers, or suddenly move thousands of miles away from home, to avoid Levy’s revenge on artists who didn’t do exactly what he said. So when we’re looking at a group of literal teenage kids — and black teenagers at that, with the smallest amount of institutional privilege possible, you can be sure that he was not going to treat them with the respect that they were due. Levy owned fifty percent of Goldner’s record companies, and would soon grow to own all of them, as Goldner accumulated more gambling debts and used his record labels to pay them off. But at the start of their career, the group didn’t yet have to worry about Levy. That would come later. For now, they were dealing with George Goldner. And Goldner was someone who was actually concerned with the music, and who had been producing hits consistently for the last few years. At the time the Premiers signed with him, for example, he had just produced “You Baby You” for the Cleftones. [Excerpt: The Cleftones, “You Baby You”] When Richie Barrett brought the Premiers to Goldner, he was intrigued because two of the members were Latino, and he was such a lover of Latin music. But he quickly latched on to the potential of Frankie Lymon as a star. Lymon was a captivating performer, and when you watch video footage of him now you can’t help but think of Michael Jackson, who followed almost exactly the same early career trajectory a decade later. While the other band members were the normal kind of teenage kids who joined doo-wop groups, and were clearly a little reserved, Lymon just *went for it*, working the crowd like a young James Brown with absolutely no self-consciousness at all. He also had a gorgeous falsetto voice, and knew how to use it. As we’ve heard, many of the doo-wop groups of the fifties weren’t particularly proficient singers, but Lymon did have a real vocal talent. He was clearly a potential star. Frankie Lymon wasn’t even originally meant to be the lead singer on “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” — that distinctive falsetto that makes the record so memorable was a late addition. The song was originally meant to be sung by Herman Santiago, and it was only in the studio that the song was rearranged to instead focus on the band’s youngest — and youngest-sounding — member. [Excerpt: Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, “Why Do Fools Fall In Love?”] When the record came out, it wasn’t credited to the Premiers, but to “The Teenagers, featuring Frankie Lymon”. Goldner hadn’t liked the group’s name, and decided to focus on their big selling point — their youth, and in particular the youth of their new lead singer. Much of the work to make the record sound that good was done not by the Teenagers or by Goldner, but by the session saxophone player Jimmy Wright, who ended up doing the arrangements on all of the Teenagers’ records, and whose idea it was to start them with Sherman Garnes’ bass intros. Again, as with so many of these records, there was a white cover version that came out almost immediately — this time by the Diamonds, a group of Canadians who copied the formula of their fellow countrymen the Crew Cuts and more or less cornered the market in white remakes of doo-wop hits. [Excerpt: The Diamonds, “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?”] But in a sign of how the times were changing, the Diamonds’ version of the song only went to number twelve, while the Teenagers’ version went to number six, helped by a massive push from Morris Levy’s good friend Alan Freed. Partly this may have been down to the fact that all the Diamonds were adults, and they simply couldn’t compete with the novelty sound of a boy who sounded prepubescent, singing in falsetto. Falsetto had, of course, always been a part of the doo-wop vocal blend, but it had been a minor part up to this point. Lead vocals would generally be sung in a smooth high tenor, but would very rarely reach to the truly high notes. Lymon, by virtue of his voice not yet having broken, introduced a new timbre into rock and roll lead vocals, and he influenced almost every vocal group that followed. There might have been a Four Seasons or a Jan and Dean or a Beach Boys without Lymon, but I doubt it. There was also a British cover version, by Alma Cogan, a middle-of-the-road singer known as “the girl with the giggle in her voice”. [Excerpt: Alma Cogan, “Why Do Fools Fall In Love?”] This sort of thing was common in Britain well into the sixties, as most US labels didn’t have distribution in the UK, and so if British people wanted to hear American rock and roll songs, they would often get them in native cover versions. Cogan was a particular source of these, often recording songs that had been R&B hits. We will see a lot more of this in future episodes, as we start to look more at the way rock and roll affected the UK. The Teenagers followed the success of “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” with “I Want You to Be My Girl”: [Excerpt, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, “I Want You to Be My Girl”] This one did almost as well, reaching a peak of number thirteen in the pop charts. But the singles after that did less well, although “I’m Not A Juvenile Delinquent” became a big hit in the UK. The record label soon decided that Lymon needed to become a solo star, rather than being just the lead singer of the Teenagers. Quite why they made this decision was difficult to say, as one would not normally deliberately break up a hit act. But presumably the calculation was that they would then have two hit acts — solo Frankie Lymon, and the Teenagers still recording together. It didn’t work out like that. Lymon inadvertently caused another crisis in the ongoing battle of rock and roll versus racism. Alan Freed had a new TV series, The Big Beat, which was a toned-down version of Freed’s radio show. By this point, real rock and roll was already in a temporary decline as the major labels fought back, and so Freed’s show was generally filled with the kind of pre-packaged major label act, usually named Bobby, that we’ll be talking about when we get to the later fifties. For all that Freed had a reputation as a supporter of black music, what he really was was someone with the skill to see a bandwagon and jump on it. But still, some of the black performers were still popular, and so Freed had Lymon on his showr. But his show was aimed at a white audience, and so the studio audience was white, and dancing. And Frankie Lymon started to dance as well. A black boy, dancing with a white girl. This did not go down well at all with the Southern network affiliates, and within a couple of weeks Freed’s show had been taken off the TV. And that appearance, the one that destroyed Freed’s show, was almost certainly Lymon’s very first ever solo performance. One might think that this did not augur well for his future career, and that assessment would be largely correct. Neither Lymon nor the Teenagers would ever have another hit after they split. The last few records credited to Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers were in fact Lymon solo recordings, performed with other backing singers. “Goody Goody” did manage to reach number twenty on the pop charts: [Excerpt: Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, “Goody Goody”] Everything after that did worse. Lymon’s first solo single, “My Girl”, failed to chart: [Excerpt: Frankie Lymon, “My Girl”] He continued making records for another couple of years, but nothing came of any of them, and when his voice broke he stopped sounding much like himself. The last recording he made that came even close to being a hit was a remake of Bobby Day’s “Little Bitty Pretty One” from 1960. [Excerpt: Frankie Lymon, “Little Bitty Pretty One”] And the Teenagers didn’t fare much better. They went through several new lead singers. There was Billy Lobrano, a white kid who according to Jimmy Merchant sounded more like Eddie Fisher than like Lymon: [Excerpt: The Teenagers, “Mama Wanna Rock”] Then there was Freddie Houston, who would go on to be the lead singer in one of the many Ink Spots lineups touring in the sixties, and then they started trying to focus on the other original group members, for example calling themselves “Sherman and the Teenagers” when performing the Leiber and Stoller song “The Draw”: [Excerpt: Sherman and the Teenagers, “The Draw”] As you can hear, none of these had the same sound as they’d had with Lymon, and they eventually hit on the idea of getting a woman into the group instead. They got in Sandra Doyle, who would later be Zola Taylor’s replacement in the Platters, and struggled on until 1961, when they finally split up. Lymon’s life after leaving the Teenagers was one of nothing but tragedy. He married three times, every time bigamously, and his only child died two days after the birth. Lymon would apparently regularly steal from Zola Taylor, who became his second wife, to feed his heroin addiction. He briefly reunited with the Teenagers in 1965, but they had little success. He spent a couple of years in the army, and appeared to have got himself clean, and even got a new record deal. But the night before he was meant to go back into the studio, he fell off the wagon, for what would be the last time. Frankie Lymon died, aged just twenty-five, and a has-been for almost half of his life, of a heroin overdose, in 1968. The other Teenagers would reunite, with Lymon’s brother joining them briefly, in the 70s. Sherman Garnes died in 1977, and Joe Negroni in 1978, but Santiago and Merchant continued, off and on, with a lineup of the Teenagers — a version of the band continues to this day, still featuring Herman Santiago, and Merchant remained with the band until his retirement a few years ago. But their first hit caused legal problems: [Excerpt: Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, “Why Do Fools Fall In Love?”] “Why Do Fools Fall In Love?” was written by Herman Santiago, with the help of Jimmy Merchant. But neither Santiago or Merchant were credited on the song when it came out. The credited songwriters for the song are Frankie Lymon — who did have some input into rewriting it in the studio — and Morris Levy, who had never even heard the song until after it was a massive hit. George Goldner was originally credited as Lymon’s co-writer, and of course Goldner never wrote it either, but at least he was in the studio when it was recorded. But when Levy bought out Goldner’s holdings in his companies, he also bought out his rights to songs he was credited for, so Levy became the legal co-writer of “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” In 1992 Santiago and Merchant finally won the credit for having written “Why Do Fools Fall In Love?”, but in 1996 the ruling was overturned. They’d apparently waited too long to take legal action over having their song stolen, and so the rights reverted to Lymon and Morris Levy — who had never even met the band when they wrote the song. But, of course, Lymon wasn’t alive to get the money. But his widow was. Or rather, his widows, plural, were. In the 1980s, three separate women claimed to be Lymon’s widow and thus his legitimate heir. One was his first wife, who he had married in 1964 while she was still married to her first husband. One was Zola Taylor, who Lymon supposedly married bigamously a year after his first marriage, but who couldn’t produce any evidence of this, and the third was either his second or third wife, who he married bigamously in 1967 while still married to his first, and possibly his second, wife. That third wife eventually won the various legal battles and is now in charge of the Frankie Lymon legacy. “Why Do Fools Fall In Love?” has gone on to be a standard, recorded by everyone from Joni Mitchell to the Beach Boys to Diana Ross. But Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers stand as a cautionary tale, an example that all too many people were still all too eager to follow.

Episode thirty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, and at the terrible afterlife of child stardom. 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 “Space Guitar” by Johnny “Guitar” Watson. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. There are no books on the Teenagers, as far as I know, so as I so often do when talking about vocal groups I relied heavily on Marv Goldberg’s website. Some information also comes from Big Beat Heat: Alan Freed and the Early Years of Rock & Roll by John A. Jackson. Some background on George Goldner was from Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz. And for more on Morris Levy, see Me, the Mob, and the Music, by Tommy James with Martin Fitzpatrick. This compilation contains every recording by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, together or separately, as well as recordings by Lewis Lymon and the Teenchords, a group led by Lymon’s brother. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript The story of Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers is, like so many of the stories we’re dealing with in this series, a story of heartbreak and early death, a story of young people of colour having their work become massively successful and making no money off it because of wealthy businessmen stealing their work. But it’s also a story of what happens when you get involved with the Mafia before you hit puberty, and your career peaks at thirteen. The Teenagers only had one really big hit, but it was one of the biggest hits of the fifties, and it was a song that is almost universally known to this day. So today we’re going to talk about “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” The Teenagers started when two black teenagers from New York, Jimmy Merchant and Sherman Garnes, left the vocal group they’d formed, which was named “the Earth Angels” after the Penguins song, and hooked up with two Latino neighbours, Joe Negroni and Herman Santiago. They named themselves the Ermines. Soon after, they were the support act for local vocal group the Cadillacs: [Excerpt, The Cadillacs, “Speedoo”] They were impressed enough by the Cadillacs that in honour of them they changed their name, becoming the Coup de Villes, and after that the Premiers. They used to practice in the hallway of the apartment block where Sherman Garnes lived, and eventually one of the neighbours got sick of hearing them sing the same songs over and over. The neighbour decided to bring out some love letters his girlfriend had written, some of which were in the form of poems, and say to the kids “why don’t you turn some of these into songs?” And so they did just that — they took one of the letters, containing the phrase “why do birds sing so gay?” and Santiago and Merchant worked out a ballad for Santiago to sing containing that phrase. Soon after this, the Premiers met up with a very young kid, Frankie Lymon, who sang and played percussion in a mambo group. I suppose I should pause here to talk briefly about the mambo craze. Rock and roll wasn’t the only musical style that was making inroads in the pop markets in the fifties — and an impartial observer, looking in 1953 or 1954, might easily have expected that the big musical trend that would shape the next few decades would be calypso music, which had become huge in the US for a brief period. But that wasn’t the only music that was challenging rock and roll. There were a whole host of other musics, usually those from Pacific, Latin-American and/or Caribbean cultures, which tend to get lumped together as “exotica” now, and “mambo” was one of those. This was a craze named after a song by the Cuban bandleader Perez Prado, “Mambo Jambo”: [Excerpt: Perez Prado, “Mambo Jambo”] That song was popular enough that soon everyone was jumping on the bandwagon — for example, Bill Haley and the Comets with “Mambo Rock”: [Excerpt: Bill Haley and the Comets, “Mambo Rock”] The group that Frankie Lymon was performing with was one of those groups, but he was easily persuaded instead to join the Premiers. He was the young kid who hung around with them when they practiced, not the leader, and not even a major part of the group. Not yet, anyway. But everything changed for the group when Richie Barrett heard them singing on a street corner near him. These days, Barrett is best-known for his 1962 single “Some Other Guy”, which was later covered by the Beatles, among others: [Excerpt: Richie Barrett, “Some Other Guy”] But at the time he was the lead singer of a group called the Valentines: [Excerpt: The Valentines, “Tonight Kathleen”] He was also working for George Goldner at Rama Records as a talent scout and producer, doing the same kind of things that Ike Turner had been doing for Chess and Modern, or that Jesse Stone did for Atlantic — finding the acts, doing the arrangements, doing all the work involved in turning some teenage kid into someone who could become a star. Goldner was someone for whom most people in the music industry seem to have a certain amount of contempt — he was, by most accounts, a fairly weak-willed figure who got himself into great amounts of debt with dodgy people. But one thing they’re all agreed on is that he had a great ear for a hit, because as Jerry Leiber put it he had the taste of a fourteen-year-old girl. George Goldner had actually got into R&B through the mambo craze. When Goldner had started in the music industry, it had been as the owner of a chain of nightclubs which featured Latin music. The clubs became popular enough that he also started Tico Records, a label that put out Latin records, most notably early recordings by Tito Puente. [Excerpt: Tito Puente: “Vibe Mambo”] When the mambo boom hit, a lot of black teenagers started attending Goldner’s clubs, and he became interested in the other music they were listening to. He started first Rama Records, as a label for R&B singles, and then Gee records, named after the most successful record that had been put out on Rama, “Gee”, by the Crows. However, Goldner had a business partner, and his name was Morris Levy, and Levy was *not* someone you wanted involved in your business in any way. In this series we’re going to talk about a lot of horrible people — and in fact we’ve already covered more than a few of them — yet Morris Levy was one of the worst people we’re going to look at. While most of the people we’ve discussed are either terrible people in their personal life (if they were a musician) or a minor con artist who ripped off musicians and kept the money for themselves, Morris Levy was a terrible human being *and* a con artist, someone who used his Mafia connections to ensure that the artists he ripped off would never even think of suing him, because they valued their lives too much. We’ll be looking at at least one rock and roll star, in the 1960s, who died in mysterious circumstances after getting involved with Levy. Levy had been the founder of Birdland, the world-famous jazz club, in the 1940s, but when ASCAP came to him asking for the money they were meant to get for their songwriters from live performances, Levy had immediately seen the possibilities in music publishing. Levy then formed a publishing company, Patricia Music, and a record label, Roulette, and started into the business of properly exploiting young black people, not just having them work in his clubs for a night, but having them create intellectual property he could continue exploiting for the rest of his life. Indeed, Levy was so keen to make money off dubious intellectual property that he actually formed a company with his friend Alan Freed which attempted to trademark the phrase “rock and roll”, on the basis that this way any records that came out labelled as such would have to pay them for the privilege. Thankfully, the term caught on so rapidly that there was no way for them to enforce the trademark, and it became genericised. But this is who Levy was, and how he made his money — at least his more legitimate money. Where he got the rest from is a matter for the true crime podcasts. There are several people who report death threats, or having to give up their careers, or suddenly move thousands of miles away from home, to avoid Levy’s revenge on artists who didn’t do exactly what he said. So when we’re looking at a group of literal teenage kids — and black teenagers at that, with the smallest amount of institutional privilege possible, you can be sure that he was not going to treat them with the respect that they were due. Levy owned fifty percent of Goldner’s record companies, and would soon grow to own all of them, as Goldner accumulated more gambling debts and used his record labels to pay them off. But at the start of their career, the group didn’t yet have to worry about Levy. That would come later. For now, they were dealing with George Goldner. And Goldner was someone who was actually concerned with the music, and who had been producing hits consistently for the last few years. At the time the Premiers signed with him, for example, he had just produced “You Baby You” for the Cleftones. [Excerpt: The Cleftones, “You Baby You”] When Richie Barrett brought the Premiers to Goldner, he was intrigued because two of the members were Latino, and he was such a lover of Latin music. But he quickly latched on to the potential of Frankie Lymon as a star. Lymon was a captivating performer, and when you watch video footage of him now you can’t help but think of Michael Jackson, who followed almost exactly the same early career trajectory a decade later. While the other band members were the normal kind of teenage kids who joined doo-wop groups, and were clearly a little reserved, Lymon just *went for it*, working the crowd like a young James Brown with absolutely no self-consciousness at all. He also had a gorgeous falsetto voice, and knew how to use it. As we’ve heard, many of the doo-wop groups of the fifties weren’t particularly proficient singers, but Lymon did have a real vocal talent. He was clearly a potential star. Frankie Lymon wasn’t even originally meant to be the lead singer on “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” — that distinctive falsetto that makes the record so memorable was a late addition. The song was originally meant to be sung by Herman Santiago, and it was only in the studio that the song was rearranged to instead focus on the band’s youngest — and youngest-sounding — member. [Excerpt: Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, “Why Do Fools Fall In Love?”] When the record came out, it wasn’t credited to the Premiers, but to “The Teenagers, featuring Frankie Lymon”. Goldner hadn’t liked the group’s name, and decided to focus on their big selling point — their youth, and in particular the youth of their new lead singer. Much of the work to make the record sound that good was done not by the Teenagers or by Goldner, but by the session saxophone player Jimmy Wright, who ended up doing the arrangements on all of the Teenagers’ records, and whose idea it was to start them with Sherman Garnes’ bass intros. Again, as with so many of these records, there was a white cover version that came out almost immediately — this time by the Diamonds, a group of Canadians who copied the formula of their fellow countrymen the Crew Cuts and more or less cornered the market in white remakes of doo-wop hits. [Excerpt: The Diamonds, “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?”] But in a sign of how the times were changing, the Diamonds’ version of the song only went to number twelve, while the Teenagers’ version went to number six, helped by a massive push from Morris Levy’s good friend Alan Freed. Partly this may have been down to the fact that all the Diamonds were adults, and they simply couldn’t compete with the novelty sound of a boy who sounded prepubescent, singing in falsetto. Falsetto had, of course, always been a part of the doo-wop vocal blend, but it had been a minor part up to this point. Lead vocals would generally be sung in a smooth high tenor, but would very rarely reach to the truly high notes. Lymon, by virtue of his voice not yet having broken, introduced a new timbre into rock and roll lead vocals, and he influenced almost every vocal group that followed. There might have been a Four Seasons or a Jan and Dean or a Beach Boys without Lymon, but I doubt it. There was also a British cover version, by Alma Cogan, a middle-of-the-road singer known as “the girl with the giggle in her voice”. [Excerpt: Alma Cogan, “Why Do Fools Fall In Love?”] This sort of thing was common in Britain well into the sixties, as most US labels didn’t have distribution in the UK, and so if British people wanted to hear American rock and roll songs, they would often get them in native cover versions. Cogan was a particular source of these, often recording songs that had been R&B hits. We will see a lot more of this in future episodes, as we start to look more at the way rock and roll affected the UK. The Teenagers followed the success of “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” with “I Want You to Be My Girl”: [Excerpt, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, “I Want You to Be My Girl”] This one did almost as well, reaching a peak of number thirteen in the pop charts. But the singles after that did less well, although “I’m Not A Juvenile Delinquent” became a big hit in the UK. The record label soon decided that Lymon needed to become a solo star, rather than being just the lead singer of the Teenagers. Quite why they made this decision was difficult to say, as one would not normally deliberately break up a hit act. But presumably the calculation was that they would then have two hit acts — solo Frankie Lymon, and the Teenagers still recording together. It didn’t work out like that. Lymon inadvertently caused another crisis in the ongoing battle of rock and roll versus racism. Alan Freed had a new TV series, The Big Beat, which was a toned-down version of Freed’s radio show. By this point, real rock and roll was already in a temporary decline as the major labels fought back, and so Freed’s show was generally filled with the kind of pre-packaged major label act, usually named Bobby, that we’ll be talking about when we get to the later fifties. For all that Freed had a reputation as a supporter of black music, what he really was was someone with the skill to see a bandwagon and jump on it. But still, some of the black performers were still popular, and so Freed had Lymon on his showr. But his show was aimed at a white audience, and so the studio audience was white, and dancing. And Frankie Lymon started to dance as well. A black boy, dancing with a white girl. This did not go down well at all with the Southern network affiliates, and within a couple of weeks Freed’s show had been taken off the TV. And that appearance, the one that destroyed Freed’s show, was almost certainly Lymon’s very first ever solo performance. One might think that this did not augur well for his future career, and that assessment would be largely correct. Neither Lymon nor the Teenagers would ever have another hit after they split. The last few records credited to Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers were in fact Lymon solo recordings, performed with other backing singers. “Goody Goody” did manage to reach number twenty on the pop charts: [Excerpt: Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, “Goody Goody”] Everything after that did worse. Lymon’s first solo single, “My Girl”, failed to chart: [Excerpt: Frankie Lymon, “My Girl”] He continued making records for another couple of years, but nothing came of any of them, and when his voice broke he stopped sounding much like himself. The last recording he made that came even close to being a hit was a remake of Bobby Day’s “Little Bitty Pretty One” from 1960. [Excerpt: Frankie Lymon, “Little Bitty Pretty One”] And the Teenagers didn’t fare much better. They went through several new lead singers. There was Billy Lobrano, a white kid who according to Jimmy Merchant sounded more like Eddie Fisher than like Lymon: [Excerpt: The Teenagers, “Mama Wanna Rock”] Then there was Freddie Houston, who would go on to be the lead singer in one of the many Ink Spots lineups touring in the sixties, and then they started trying to focus on the other original group members, for example calling themselves “Sherman and the Teenagers” when performing the Leiber and Stoller song “The Draw”: [Excerpt: Sherman and the Teenagers, “The Draw”] As you can hear, none of these had the same sound as they’d had with Lymon, and they eventually hit on the idea of getting a woman into the group instead. They got in Sandra Doyle, who would later be Zola Taylor’s replacement in the Platters, and struggled on until 1961, when they finally split up. Lymon’s life after leaving the Teenagers was one of nothing but tragedy. He married three times, every time bigamously, and his only child died two days after the birth. Lymon would apparently regularly steal from Zola Taylor, who became his second wife, to feed his heroin addiction. He briefly reunited with the Teenagers in 1965, but they had little success. He spent a couple of years in the army, and appeared to have got himself clean, and even got a new record deal. But the night before he was meant to go back into the studio, he fell off the wagon, for what would be the last time. Frankie Lymon died, aged just twenty-five, and a has-been for almost half of his life, of a heroin overdose, in 1968. The other Teenagers would reunite, with Lymon’s brother joining them briefly, in the 70s. Sherman Garnes died in 1977, and Joe Negroni in 1978, but Santiago and Merchant continued, off and on, with a lineup of the Teenagers — a version of the band continues to this day, still featuring Herman Santiago, and Merchant remained with the band until his retirement a few years ago. But their first hit caused legal problems: [Excerpt: Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, “Why Do Fools Fall In Love?”] “Why Do Fools Fall In Love?” was written by Herman Santiago, with the help of Jimmy Merchant. But neither Santiago or Merchant were credited on the song when it came out. The credited songwriters for the song are Frankie Lymon — who did have some input into rewriting it in the studio — and Morris Levy, who had never even heard the song until after it was a massive hit. George Goldner was originally credited as Lymon’s co-writer, and of course Goldner never wrote it either, but at least he was in the studio when it was recorded. But when Levy bought out Goldner’s holdings in his companies, he also bought out his rights to songs he was credited for, so Levy became the legal co-writer of “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” In 1992 Santiago and Merchant finally won the credit for having written “Why Do Fools Fall In Love?”, but in 1996 the ruling was overturned. They’d apparently waited too long to take legal action over having their song stolen, and so the rights reverted to Lymon and Morris Levy — who had never even met the band when they wrote the song. But, of course, Lymon wasn’t alive to get the money. But his widow was. Or rather, his widows, plural, were. In the 1980s, three separate women claimed to be Lymon’s widow and thus his legitimate heir. One was his first wife, who he had married in 1964 while she was still married to her first husband. One was Zola Taylor, who Lymon supposedly married bigamously a year after his first marriage, but who couldn’t produce any evidence of this, and the third was either his second or third wife, who he married bigamously in 1967 while still married to his first, and possibly his second, wife. That third wife eventually won the various legal battles and is now in charge of the Frankie Lymon legacy. “Why Do Fools Fall In Love?” has gone on to be a standard, recorded by everyone from Joni Mitchell to the Beach Boys to Diana Ross. But Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers stand as a cautionary tale, an example that all too many people were still all too eager to follow.

Our December contest winner, Frank Lymon stops through and chops it up with Snubb & Coley. Pull up a chair, pour a drink and vibe out with us on the tenth episode of Open Mic. Follow Frank Lymon on IG: @frank.lymon #WeNeedAPodcast INQUIRIES/SUBMISSIONS: giveusapodcast@gmail.com

Dave and Alonso wish you a very Merry Christmas by offering up another free episode of LKTV, a podcast of the television that's usually an exclusive for our Patreon subscribers. Bibbs and Witney of Canceled Too Soon join us to talk about our favorite holiday-themed TV ads of the past and present. Topics include Scrooge, Barney Rubble's cereal kleptomania, sad Christmas and Lymon. Subscribe and review us at Apple Podcasts, follow us @linoleumcast on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, sure did treat you right. Join our club, won't you? And support Canceled Too Soon on Patreon.

We’re getting around the halfway point of our (somehow) much-beloved LuPat and meeting a mid-series gang of medium bads while we start digging deeper into the lives of our heroes, for better and worse as well as introducing an unlikely alliance across our warring factions! And besides that, your humble(?) hosts also touch on: The … Continue reading Laser Knees 71 – When Life Gives You Lymon…

RARE & SCRATCHY ROCK 'N ROLL _033 - THE GREATEST APRIL FOOLS IN ROCK + POP MUSIC HISTORY This episode celebrates the April Fools – the greatest hit singles during the rock and roll era with the word “fool” or “fools” in the title. These include studio recordings by the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin that both bands never performed live in concert. Then there’s Buddy Holly with the Crickets and the Crickets without Buddy Holly – both acts separately had hits with the same fool song. And there’s the story of the criminally convicted mafia-connected record company owner who was no fool when it came to taking writing credit and royalties for hit songs by artists on his labels that he didn’t compose. We’ll also fool around with Elvis Presley, Connie Francis, Leslie Gore, Rick Nelson, the Drifters, Bob Dylan, Dionne Warwick, Brenda Lee, Aretha Franklin, Ike & Tina Turner, Frankie Lymon & The Teenagers, the Beatles, the Beach Boys, George Michael, the Impressions, the Guess Who, and the Who, along with dozens of others. For more information on the "Rare & Scratchy Rock 'N Roll" podcast series, please visit www.rareandscratchy.com.

Second podcast, sleepy evening Odetta - Another Man Done Gone Toru Takemitsu - 3 The Flamingos - I Only Have Eyes For You Clarice Vince Giordano & The Nighthawks - I Must Have It Honeycombes - Have I The Right? Bobby Beausoleil - Lucifer Rising, track 2 Kathy Acker - The Temple of Eros Sibyll Baier - I Lost Something In Hills Van Dyke Parks - Occapella Moondog - No. 1 - Bell Are Ringing Art Ensemble of Chicago - People In Sorrow, pt 1