Blues standard first recorded by Little Walter
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14 episodes with My Babe
2 episodes with My Babe
2 episodes with My Babe
3 episodes with My Babe
2 episodes with My Babe
Ce week-end démarrait le "Outlaw Music Festival Tour", avec notamment Bob Dylan, qui a joué un tout nouveau set de reprises des années 50 ainsi que des titres des débuts de sa carrière, l'infatigable nonagénaire Willie Nelson, a, quant à lui, été obligé d'annuler sa participation pour raisons médicales. ‘'Purple Rain'', l'album enregistré par Prince and the Revolution, sorti en 1984, fait l'objet d'une réédition Dolby Atmos pour son 40e anniversaire, nouvel arrangement disponible sur les plateformes de streaming. Un musicien australien a fait la trouvaille de sa vie au marché aux puces en découvrant des images inédites du concert des Beatles à Sydney en 1964. L'équipe Classic 21 Metal était présente au Graspop, retrouvez les compte-rendus, les photos de concerts, des vidéos d'ambiance, interviews et autres sur notre site web ainsi que sur nos réseaux sociaux. Courtney Love et Melissa Auf Der Maur, qui a rejoint le groupe Hole en 1994 après la mort de la bassiste Kristen Pfaff, étaient de retour en studio, et cela pour la première fois en plus de 20 ans, une série de photos a été partagée sur Instagram. Blink-182, groupe composé de Tom Delonge, Mark Hoppus et Travis Barker, a lancé sa nouvelle tournée nord-américaine 2024 ce 20 juin et en a profité pour dévoiler "Can't Go Back", nouvelle chanson sur la scène du Kia Center d'Orlando (en Floride), en coup d'envoi de la tournée ‘'One More Time''. Mots-Clés : Willie Dixon, My Babe, Chuck Berry, Hank Williams, répertoire, classique, Highway 61 Revisited, set list, site, film, nom, tête, hit-parade, américain, millions d'exemplaires, monde, récompense, Grammys, Oscars, Brit awards, version, mixé, bandes originales, version, Blu-ray, audio, fan, adaptation, comédie musicale, chanceux, dollars, boîte, pellicule, 8 mm, marché, gros plan, stade, célèbre, album, Celebrity Skin, 1998, Musicienne, rencontre, ensemble, rumeurs, réunion, succès, Obvious, M M's, chansons, projets parallèles. --- Classic 21 vous informe des dernières actualités du rock, en Belgique et partout ailleurs. Le Journal du Rock, chaque jour à 7h30 et 18h30. Merci pour votre écoute Pour écouter Classic 21 à tout moment : www.rtbf.be/classic21 Retrouvez tous les contenus de la RTBF sur notre plateforme Auvio.be Et si vous avez apprécié ce podcast, n'hésitez pas à nous donner des étoiles ou des commentaires, cela nous aide à le faire connaître plus largement.
Episode 100 is a retrospective on the greatest ever blues harmonica player, Marion Walter Jacobs, aka Little Walter.Little Walter was born in 1930, probably, and started playing harmonica age 8. He was busking on the streets of New Orleans by age 12, spent some time in Helena, before heading north to Chicago to make his indelible mark on blues and the harmonica. Little Walter teamed up with Muddy Waters and Jimmy Rogers and cut some classic blues recordings before he went out under his own name after he was launched into superstardom with his instrumental Juke, in 1952. He was riding high in the charts and touring for the next few years, including another number one with My Babe, while still also recording with Muddy Waters.The arrival of rhythm and blues started to replace the blues as the popular music of the day, which saw Little Walter start to go down slow, but he still made some great recordings and completed two tours of Europe.He was then taken far too young, at the age of 37, as a result of an injury sustained in a street fight. But he left behind numerous masterpieces in the blues harmonica genre, that have influenced pretty much every player since. Links:The Little Walter Foundation:https://littlewalterfoundation.org/Billy Boy Arnold interview:https://www.harmonicahappyhour.com/billy-boy-arnold-interview/Kim Field website:https://www.kimfield.com/Bob Corritore Little Walter photo tribute page:https://bobcorritore.com/photos/little-walter-photo-tribute/Videos:Lonnie Glosson and Wayne Raney:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfXb7OEjVzUOra Nelle Blues, first recording:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-E7z56E0DwIPlaying Walter's Jump with Hound Dog Taylor in 1967:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8GWEvIkzGETrailer of Blue Midnight Little Walter biography:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtZDbiCEfnMShe's 19 Years Old bootleg recording with Sam Lay from 1967:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9-pYoSCcHcLittle Walter's induction into Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyYk_PlnnUoPodcast website:https://www.harmonicahappyhour.comDonations:If you want to make a voluntary donation to help support the running costs of the podcast then please use this link (or visit the podcast website link above):https://paypal.me/harmonicahappyhour?locale.x=en_GBor sign-up to a monthly subscription to the podcast:https://www.buzzsprout.com/995536/supportSpotify Playlist:https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5QC6RF2VTfs4iPuasJBqwT?si=M-j3IkiISeefhR7ybm9qIQPodcast sponsors:This podcast is sponsored by SEYDEL harmonicas - visit the oldest harmonica factory in the world at www.seydel1847.com or on Facebook or InstagramSupport the show
The Song That Changed My Life is a segment that gives us the chance to talk with some of our favorite artists about the music that made them who they are today. This time around, we're joined by a blues great – Bobby Rush. When he got his start, he played with other greats like Jimmy Reed, Buddy Guy and Howlin' Wolf. The song that changed his life was recorded by another close friend of his – Little Walter. The song? My Babe. Bobby's latest record All My Love For You is out now.
Intro Song – Albert King, “I'll Play The Blues For You”, At The Forum 1972 First Set - Howlin' Wolf, “Little Red Rooster”, Ebbet's Field, Denver CO 8/23/1973 The Fabulous Thunderbirds, “Feelin' Good”, Rhein-Mein Halle Maifestspiele, 5/23/1980 Second Set – James Cotton, “Dust My Broom”, Dallas Motor Speedway, 08/30/1969 Tommy Castro, “Calling San Francisco”, Aladdin Theater, Portland OR, 10/31/2001 Lightnin' Hopkins, “My Babe”, Live in Montreal, 6/23/1977 Third Set – Albert Collins, “Iceman”, Red Rocks, Morrison CO, 8/16/1992 Coco Montoya, “Nothing But Love”, Petrillo Music Shell, Chicago, IL, 7/4/2000 Fourth Set – Muddy Waters, “Instrumental with Intro”, Live at Ebbetts Field, Denver, 5/30/1973 Muddy Waters, “Band Intros”, Live at Ebbetts Field, Denver, 5/30/1973 Muddy Waters/BB King, “I Know You Didn't Want Me”, Live at Ebbetts Field, Denver, 5/30/1973
Singles Going Around- ThirteenJimi Hendrix- "Catfish Blues" Bob Dylan- "Gonna Serve Somebody"Muddy Waters- "I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man"Captain Beefheart- "Dirty Blue Gene"Jerry Lee Lewis- "Ubangi Stomp"The Kills- "Pull A You"Loretta Lynn- "Mrs. Leroy Brown"Little Walter- "My Babe"Johnny Cash- "Thirteen"Buffalo Springfield- "Go and Say Goodbye"Dave Edmunds- " Get Out of Denver"Sun Ra & The Blues Project- "Batman Theme"The White Stripes- "Black Jack Davey"Junior Wells- "Cut That Out"Nirvana- "Sliver"The Byrds- "Drug Store Truck Driving Man"Slim Harpo- "Blues Hang Over"Johnny Cash- "Don't Think Twice"Leon Rebone- "Please Don't Talk About Me When I'm Gone"* All Vinyl.
Drive-by Truckers "Dragon Pants"Fleetwood Mac "Like It This Way"Fats Domino "The Big Beat"Aerial M "Wedding Song No.2"Valerie June "You And I"Hound Dog Taylor & The HouseRockers "Give Me Back My Wig (Live)"AC/DC "Let There Be Rock"John Fahey "Uncloudy Day"Adia Victoria "Stuck In The South"Andrew Bird "Underlands"Elizabeth Cotten "Going Down the Road Feeling Bad"Craig Finn "God in Chicago"Ian Noe "Strip Job Blues 1984"Esther Phillips "Tonight I'll Be Staying Here with You"R.L. Burnside "Miss Maybelle"Hank Williams "I'm Sorry for You My Friend"Joan Shelley "Amberlit Morning (feat. Bill Callahan)"John R. Miller "Lookin' Over My Shoulder"Max Roach "Garvey's Ghost (feat. Carlos "Patato" Valdes & Carlos "Totico" Eugenio)"Ranie Burnette "Hungry Spell"Nina Nastasia "This Is Love"Thurston Harris "I Got Loaded (In Smokey Joe's Joint)"Folk Implosion "Sputnik's Down"Slim Harpo "I'm a King Bee"Wipers "Youth of America"The Scotty McKay Quintet "The Train Kept a-Rollin'"Mississippi John Hurt "Sliding Delta"Magnolia Electric Co. "Montgomery"Dr. John "Memories of Professor Longhair"Billie McKenzie "I'd Rather Drink Muddy Water"Little Walter "Juke"Elvis Presley "Trying to Get to You"Billie Jo Spears "Get Behind Me Satan And Push"Ray Charles "Georgia On My Mind"Freddy King "Hide Away"Furry Lewis "Old Blue"Billie Holiday "What a Little Moonlight Can Do"Bob Dylan "One More Cup of Coffee"The Primitives "How Do Yu Feel"Ramones "Blitzkrieg Bop"Ruth Brown "Lucky Lips"Bonnie 'Prince' Billy "A Minor Place"Pearl Bailey "Frankie and Johnnie"fIREHOSE "In Memory Of Elizabeth Cotton"James Booker "On The Sunny Side Of The Street"Ray Price "The Same Old Me"Mississippi Fred McDowell "My Babe"The Replacements "Here Comes a Regular"
"Do you need a non-stop music mix to get you through your day/week/workout/commute? Do you appreciate House Music from Around the World? Do you enjoy a variety of styles, flavors, and one-of-a-kind edits/remixes? Subscribe, hit play, and enjoy!" - DJ MIDIMACK MIDI's FUNKY FAVs Vol. 5 (Ep 226) Playlist: House Thing by Roog/David Penn (Ep 83) Blame by Bastille (Ep 24) Work by Frankie J (Ep 80) My Babe by Alex Kenji (Ep 24) Music in You by Purple Disco Machine/Lorenz Rhode (Ep 81) Disco Drive by Superlover (Ep 83) Halloween by Disco Incorporated (Ep 82) Go Bumrush The Sound by Block & Crown (Ep 82) Promises by Calvin Harris/Sam Smith (Ep 81) State Of Confusion by Honey Dijon/Tim K/Sam Sparro (Ep 83) Maghic by Agua Sin Gas/Antoine Clamaran (Ep 80) Come Get It by Spindeman (Ep 81) Give You Some by Davide Ranno (Ep 82) Keep On Rockin It by Luca Debonaire (Ep 34) Real Life by Hoxton Whores/HXTN/James Hurr (Ep 80) Together For Ever by Hoxton Whores/James Hurr (Ep 32) Better Place byFabio Pierucci (Ep 83) Stars by Honey Dijon/Sam Sparro (Ep 83) Saturday Love by The Fabulous Joker/The Space Knights (Ep 82) Delta House Blues by Kevin McKay/Unorthodox (Ep 82) Como Va by Natema/Sugar Hill (Ep 80) Old School Back by Fred Dekker (Ep 81) Rescue Me by Sunkids/Chance (Ep 83) Memories by Klelight (Ep 24) Jackin Radio by Block & Crown/Deep Fish (Ep 32) Madan by Boris Roodbwoy (Ep 110) My Disco Groovin by Nacho Chapado (Ep 111) www.themixbagpodcast.com www.patreon.com/djmidimack Thank you for listening!
Shellac "Billiard Player Song"Sister Rosetta Tharpe "Up Above My Head"Langhorne Slim "House Of My Soul (You Light The Rooms)"Johnny "Guitar" Watson "Let's Rock"The Harlem Hamfats "Let's Get Drunk and Truck"Ted Leo and the Pharmacists "Bottled in Cork"Jimi Hendrix "My Friend"Bonnie 'Prince' Billy "I See A Darkness"Eilen Jewell "I'm Gonna Dress in Black"Precious Bryant "Black Rat Swing"Tyler Childers "Junction City Queen"Pixies "Gigantic"Bill Boyd's Cowboy Ramblers "Fan It"Minutemen "Dr. Wu"Bob Dylan "Key West (Philosopher Pirate)"Joan Shelley "Amberlit Morning"Hazel "Storm In My House"Unknown Artists "My Babe"Hank Williams "Be Careful of Stones That You Throw"Andrew Bird "Make a Picture"The Replacements "Within Your Reach"Walter Vinson "Rosa Lee Blues"Johnny Cash "Nobody"Shannon Wright "St. Pete"Earthless "Violence of the Red Sea"79rs "Drama"John Lee Hooker "Boogie Chillin'"Frankie Lee Sims "Lucy Mae Blues"Sundown Songs "I'm Gone"Nina Simone "My Man's Gone Now"S.G. Goodman "If You Were Someone I Loved"Louis Jordan "What's The Use Of Getting Sober (When You're Gonna Get Drunk Again)"Slim Cessna's Auto Club "Mark Of Vaccination"Lucero "Can't Feel A Thing"Various Artists "Tribulations"Sebadoh "Rebound"Art Blakey Quintet "A Night in Tunisia "Rev. R.C. Crenshaw "I'm Goin' Home On The Mornin' Train"James Booker "On The Sunny Side Of The Street"Hüsker Dü "Celebrated Summer"Jimmy Carpenter "Soul Doctor"
Aquesta setmana al Males Vibracions tenim un especial. Recuperem la visita anual dels germans Amat, cap-pensants del Benicàssim Blues Festival. Ens conten al detall tot el festival, i fem un tast de la música que hi sonarà. I per si no en teniu prou Andreu encara ens porta unes novetats musicals. The Black Keys - Burn the dam thing down; Trombone shorty - Lifted; Eli Paperboy Reed - Workin' man blues; -Bennicàssim Blues Festival- Alber Solo - Shake shake shake; Cecilya Mestres - Player!; Big Dez - Bout you; Kyla Bronx - Grey sky blue; Alice & The wonders - My Babe; Big yuyu - Nobody cares about love; The Cinelli Brothers - Your lies; Giselle Jackson - I put spell on you; Rambalaya - One more chance.
This episode is about MY BABE!!!! I Love YOU BABE!!! I VALUE YOU!
This episode is about MY BABE!!!! I Love YOU BABE!!! I VALUE YOU!
| Artist | Title | Album Name | Album Copyright | Shawn Pittman | Lightnin's Stomp | Stompin' Solo | | Ed Bell | Hambone Blues | The Paramount Masters - CD 4/4 | Hans Theessink and Big Daddy Wilson | Virus Blues | Pay Day | | | Prakash Slim | Crossroad Blues | Country Blues From Nepal | Piano Kid Edwards | Give Us Another Jug | The Paramount Masters - CD 4/4 | Duke Ellington | Mood Indigo | Rockin' In Rhythm | | Little G Weevil | On My Way To Memphis | Live Acoustic Session | Sawmill Roots Orchestra | Build Me A Statue | Sawmill Roots Orchestra | Lightnin' Hopkins | My Babe | Double Blues (1972) | | Blind Lemon Jefferson | Bed Spring Blues | The Best Of Blind Lemon Jefferson | Meade Lux Lewis | Honky Tonk Train Blues | The Paramount Masters - CD 1/4 | Otis Rush | Three Times A Fool | Total Blues - 100 Essential Songs | John Hammond | Cryin' For My Baby | Southern Fried | | Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee | Backwater Blues | Ash Grove 01-21-1967 1st Show | John Lee Hooker | Worried Life Blues | Total Blues - 100 Essential Songs
Rebirth Brass Band "Do Whatcha Wanna, Pt. 2"Bobby Charles "Street People"Sister Rosetta Tharpe "Cain't No Grave Hold My Body Down"James McMurtry "Painting By Numbers"Taj Mahal "Good Morning Little School Girl"The Black Crowes "Gone"The Deslondes "Muddy Water"Uncle Tupelo "We've Been Had"Bonnie Raitt "Write Me A Few Of Your Lines/Kokomo Blues"Louis Jordan & His Tympany Five "Saturday Night Fish Fry"Esther Phillips "Use Me"Little Walter "My Babe"Cedric Burnside "Pretty Flowers"Valerie June "Smile"Slim Dunlap "Hate This Town"Jason Isbell And The 400 Unit "Sad But True"Krista Shows "Twenty-Two"Johnny Little john "What in the World (You Gonna Do?)"Bob Dylan "Chimes of Freedom"Gillian Welch "Wrecking Ball"Merle Haggard "Ramblin' Fever (Live)"The Band "The Weight"Emmylou Harris "C'est La Vie"John Prine "Everybody"Johnny Cash "Johnny 99"Ray Charles "Early in the Morning"Drive-By Truckers "Bulldozers And Dirt"Adam Faucett "Rock Ain't Gold"Fleetwood Mac "Shake Your Moneymaker"Aretha Franklin "Night Time Is the Right Time"Elvis Costello "American Without Tears"Lucero "The Blue and the Gray"Jeff Beck "I Ain't Superstitious"Sam Cooke "Having a Party"Mississippi John Hurt "Talking Casey"Beck "Stagger Lee"Billie Holiday "Yankee Doodle Never Went to Town"Little Richard "Lawdy Miss Clawdy"Satan and Adam "Freedom for My People"James McMurtry "Canola Fields"Bruce Springsteen "Incident on 57th Street"Black Joe Lewis & The Honeybears "Gunpowder"Big Mama Thornton "Gimme a Penny"
Recordareis que hace unas semanas empezamos una mini serie de programas dedicados al blues. Hoy seguiremos ahondando un poco más en el tema y repasaremos la nómina de los mejores representantes del género. Empezamos con uno de los míticos: Robert Johnson, nacido en 1911 en el estado de Missisipi, cantante, compositor y guitarrista de blues. Sus grabaciones de 1936 a 1937, escasamente 29 temas, nos lo muestran como un músico de especial talento que influyó extraordinariamente en un buen número de músicos. Su corta vida, murió a los 27 años, está escasamente documentada y esta circunstancia ha dado lugar a la circulación de numerosas leyendas. La más conocida es la que cuenta que Johnson no era un guitarristas especialmente bueno en sus inicios y, por eso, decidió desaparecer por un tiempo, más o menos un año y medio, para volver como la figura que hoy conocemos. Al instante empezaron a circular rumores, alentados por él mismo, según los cuales Johnson habría vendido su alma al diablo a cambio de recibir dotes extraordinarias como músico. Le escuchamos en una de escasas grabaciones, Love in vain. Little Walter, que había nacido en 1930, revolucionó en blues con la habilidad incomparable de su armónica. Miembro principal del club de los “grandes”, dio vida a lo que vino a llamarse sonido Chicago. Su habilidad a la hora de tocar la armónica es comparada con la Jimi Hendrix con su guitarra o con la de Charlie Parker con su saxo. Algo fuera de lo normal para la época. Desgraciadamente, Walter era alcohólico y esto siempre le acarreó un gran número de problemas personales. Se veía obligado a aceptar giras que no quería dar con el fin de conseguir dinero para pagar sus deudas de juego. Murió de una trombosis cerebral en el año 1968 después de una pelea callejera. Vamos a escucharle interpretar My Babe. Huddie Willian Ledbetter, más conocido como Leadbelly fue un músico folclorista y de blues. Nacido en 1888, destacó por su virtuosismo al tocar la guitarra de 12 cuerdas y como compositor de canciones convertidas hoy en clásicas. Su vida fue, por decirlo suavemente, movida. Se sabe que estuvo una temporada en una cárcel de Texas, condenado por una agresión pero se escapó a los dos años. Nuevamente volvió a la cárcel pero esta vez con una condena de 20 años por asesinato. Y aunque esta condena le fue reducida por buena conducta, nuevamente volvió a prisión, esta vez por intento de asesinato. Todo cambió cuando, en 1933, visitaron la prisión los folcloristas John y Alan Lomax con la intención de grabar música folk negra. Los Lomax quedaron tan impresionados por Leadbelly que, con un equipo de grabación portátil, en la misma cárcel, grabaron un tema en el que pedía perdón por su fechorías. Los Lomax presentaron la grabación al gobernador de Lousiana y éste, no sabemos muy bien por qué le concedió el indulto definitivo. Le escuchamos en The midnight special. Rocket 88 es un canción de R&B que fue grabada por primera vez en Memphis, Tennessee, en marzo de 1951. La grabación fue acreditada por Jackie Brenston y sus Delta Cats, pero que en realidad eran Ike Turner y su Kings of Rhythm. El sencillo alcanzó el número uno en la lista Bilboard R&B. Son muchos críticos los que piensan que esta canción es fundamental en el desarrollo de la música de rock and roll, e incluso se dice que, éste, podría ser el primer disco de rock and roll. Esta es la versión original a cargo Jackie Brenston & Ike Turner. Dale Hawkins fue la oveja blanca del blues y el autor del éxito internacional Susie Q. Dale había empezado a grabar en 1956 y estaba tocando en el circuito de clubs de Luisiana, y aunque su música estaba muy influenciada por el rock and roll de Elvis Presley, no lo estaba menos por el sonido de blues auténtico de los artistas negros. De la fusión de estas dos tendencias, nació Susie Q. George “Buddy” Guy es uno de los mejores guitarristas de blues, en especial del denominado Blues de Chicago, y una referencia para numerosos guitarristas actuales. Buddy empezó tocando en bandas de la zona de Baton Rouge, en Luisiana para posteriormente marcharse a Chicago a colaborar con el maestro Muddy Waters. Y de allí… a la fama. En el año 2004, Buddy, ocupó el puesto número 30 en la lista de los 100 guitarristas más importantes en toda la historia, todo esto según la revista Rolling Stone. Buddy Guy y su Money. Volvemos, como no, a encontrarnos con B.B.King, el rey. Un hombre que llegó a dar hasta 300 conciertos al año y que recibió más premios Grammy que ningún otro músico de blues. Y todo ello a pesar de que sufría una diabetes crónica y unos graves problemas en las rodillas que no le permitían, en los últimos tiempos, tocar de pie. Un gran músico y un gran tipo. Recessión Blues y B.B.King. A Willie Dixon le han llamado “el poeta laureado del blues”, … y con razón. Fue el compositor de blues más importante en su época y se le reconocen, como autor, más de 500 canciones. Bajista de formación, tocó como músico de estudio con gente como Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters y otros muchos. De alguna manera, fue el eslabón necesario entre el blues y el rock and roll. Y todo esto a pesar de que Willie Dixon fue un hombre controvertido. Tubo problemas con la justicia en su adolescencia, de físico corpulento, practicó el boxeo llegando a ganar el título Golden Gloves de los pesos pesados en 1936, y fue encarcelado durante diez meses por negarse a alistarse en el ejército durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Todo un personaje. Walking the blues. De nuevo Albert King. Un músico un poco menos sofisticado que su contemporáneo B.B.King pero más cerca de las raíces del blues rural, su estilo se caracterizaba por una voz profunda, suave y matizada. Modernizó la aspereza de sus primero maestros y a finales de los años 60 puso el blues al alcance de los nuevos grupos, gente como Fleetwood Mac, liderado por Peter Green o los Cream, con Eric Clapton al frente y éstos, a su vez, lideraron una nueva tendencia dentro del rock: la que se inspiraba en las raíces más profundas de la música negra renegando del pop que tenía en los Beatles su punto de referencia. Albert King y Bad luck blues. Bueno, pues no tenemos tiempo para más. Como muestra no ha estado mal pero nos queda mucho por oír así que, en los próximos días, volveremos a la carga con una nueva entrega de este interesante repaso de la música de blues. Hasta ese momento,y como siempre… ¡Buenas Vibraciones!
Digital Versatile Discmen - he’s kinda stuck on that b-word Nostalgia Time - we all miss the Latin stuff Clown University - we can’t just leave it all up to the Jesuits Diagnosis: Burger - his last wish was to share these hawaiian barbecue sliders with you all Hello Hello What Do You Need? What Is the Joke? - a booger is at your door This Hanson Interred - take it from me; Hollywood actor Tom Skerrit The Canned Razz - we’re telling Mike and Molly where to stick it Huberman, My Babe! - the idea babe for all seasons Freakdown - “Yee!”
Playlist: Snatch It Back and Hold It – Junior Wells; My Babe – Little Walter; A Chance To Breathe – Sista Monica Parker; Dimples – John Lee Hooker, Elvin Bishop, Van Morrison; Back Water Blues – Bessie Smith; Don't Call No Ambulance – Selwyn Birchwood; Million Miles – Bonnie Raitt; Devil Got My Woman – Skip James; Gone For Good – Samantha Fish; Fine Little Mama – John Primer; Backstreet Baby – Dana Fuchs; Like Sonny Did – Guy Davis; Too Much – John Primer; Poor Black Mattie – Samantha Fish, Lightnin' Malcolm. Escuchar audio
We are back from a nice refresh and refuel! The show on radiowilderllive.com this Friday is going to release some of your pent up end of 2020 and start of 2021 stuff! Lift Me Up by Independent Counsel of Funk, My Babe by Little Walter, Easy by Next Town Down and Black. How about a little Weezer giving you a little Mr. Blue Sky? Motherly Love by Frank Z, Devo and The Stones doing ‘I can't get No Satisfaction' in Deuces are Wilder.For mask wearers, 'The best mask ever is by a woman named Erin Robertson. She makes it out of a parachute-like fabric. I have tried all the fancy masks, and these are by far the most comfortable and wearable you will find - and your glasses won't fog up.' Ken Fulk Interior Designer! Music rolls out after ‘Baby Ruth' finishes her call with the Rock n'Roll Hall of Fame, installs new cabinets and try's to complete first sales pipeline of 2021! Shout out to Fresno and Germany! Check out new radiowilderlive.com tee shirts in Grayson's gift shop.If you have a little time this weekend, would you mind reaching out on YouTube and subscribing to our channel. Thanks a bunch! Harry and The Wilder Crew!
I just heard the sad news that Gerry Marsden, of Gerry and the Pacemakers, has died today aged seventy-eight. As the latest episode of the podcast is late due to personal issues, I thought I’d make this available to the general public – this is a ten-minute Patreon bonus episode I did back in October, on Gerry and the Pacemakers, so it’s here as a little tribute. He’ll be missed. —-more—- Transcript Today we’re going to look at a group that were for a very short while arguably the most successful band to come out of Liverpool, one that set a record that wouldn’t be broken for twenty-one years, and who deserved rather better than the reputation they’ve ended up with. We’re going to look at Gerry and the Pacemakers, and at “How Do You Do It?”: [Excerpt: Gerry and the Pacemakers, “How Do You Do It?”] Gerry and the Pacemakers were, in the very early sixties, one of the bands that was most strongly competing for the title of Liverpool’s best band. They were so good that before he joined the Beatles, for a while Richy Starkey was considering quitting the Hurricanes and joining them, even though it would mean switching instruments — Gerry’s brother Freddy Marsden was the Pacemakers’ drummer, but they didn’t have a bass player, and everyone was sure that Richy could pick it up no problem. The Pacemakers had been around before the Beatles, and they shared similar musical tastes, and even a similar repertoire — the Beatles dropped “What’d I Say” from their sets because the Pacemakers were also doing it, and when Paul started to sing “Over the Rainbow” in the Beatles’ sets, the Pacemakers responded by adding the old Rogers and Hammerstein song “You’ll Never Walk Alone” to match it. Both bands played Hamburg backing Tony Sheridan, and both were playing songs by Arthur Alexander, Larry Williams, Richie Barrett and Carl Perkins. The main difference between the two was that the Pacemakers would have a slightly harder-edged sound — the Pacemakers only had one real singer, Gerry, and so they couldn’t do the kind of girl-group harmonies that the Beatles would do, and so they couldn’t move off into the songs by the Shirelles or the Cookies that the Beatles performed, and instead had to fill out their set with bluesy songs like Little Walter’s “My Babe”: [Excerpt: Gerry and the Pacemakers, “My Babe (live)”] There was a friendly but real rivalry between the Beatles and the Pacemakers, so much so that when Mersey Beat had a popularity poll among its readers, the Beatles bought up as many copies of the magazine as they could and filled out the poll under fake names with themselves at the top and the Pacemakers at the bottom, to make sure they won and the Pacemakers only came second (Rory Storm and the Hurricanes tried filling out the poll with themselves at the top too, but Bill Harry disqualified forty ballots written in green ink in the same handwriting, posted from the same letter box, so they came in fourth). It even looked for a while like the Pacemakers would be the very first Liverpool band to release a record — a local promoter called Sam Leach was planning to set up his own label and record them, before they realised he was better at coming up with plans than coming up with money. The Pacemakers also had their own PA system rather than just relying on the club ones, at a time when no other band did. Indeed, when Brian Epstein took the Decca A&R man Mike Smith to see the Beatles at the Cavern, when it looked like they would be signed to Decca, he seems to have taken Smith out for dinner before the show because the Pacemakers were the support act, and Paul McCartney was worried that if Smith saw the Pacemakers’ set he might choose to sign them rather than the Beatles. So it made sense that when Epstein was looking to sign up some more artists to a management contract, he signed the Pacemakers. And it made sense that once the Beatles had had some success, George Martin trusted Epstein enough to sign Gerry and the Pacemakers. And as there was no awkward publishing company contract to deal with like there had been with the Beatles, he could give them “How Do You Do It?”, the song that he’d tried to foist on the Beatles: [Excerpt: Gerry and the Pacemakers, “How Do You Do It?”]qqqq Martin’s ear for a hit was proved right, and the song went to number one — and it was the first record from a Liverpool group to do so on what is now considered the “official” chart, though it was then just one of several. Unsurprisingly, the second single released was another Mitch Murray song — one that was almost identical to “How Do You Do It?”: [Excerpt: Gerry and the Pacemakers, “I Like It”] That also went to number one, as did their third single, “You’ll Never Walk Alone”: [Excerpt: Gerry and the Pacemakers, “You’ll Never Walk Alone”] That last became almost the unofficial anthem of Liverpool after the Pacemakers’ release, and is to this day still sung by fans of Liverpool Football Club at every match. It also made them the first act ever to have their first three singles go to number one in the British charts, something that wouldn’t be repeated until another Liverpool act, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, twenty-one years later. After that, the group started recording songs Gerry wrote himself, and he proved to be quite good. Their first original single, “I’m the One”, went to number two, just behind “Needles and Pins” by the Searchers, and was very much in the same style as their first two hits, but he also started writing a few more interesting and meditative songs, most notably “Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying”, which became their first and biggest hit in the US: [Excerpt: Gerry and the Pacemakers, “Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying”] But the Pacemakers came along, sadly, at *just* the wrong time. As the first of the Liverpool bands other than the Beatles to get signed, they were initially pushed into the same all-round entertainer role that groups like Cliff Richard and the Shadows were in, and their early singles were light pop even as their first album was full of covers of Arthur Alexander songs like “A Shot of Rhythm and Blues”. By mid-1964 the light pop style of their early singles was considered hopelessly passe when compared to groups like the Animals, the Rolling Stones, and the Yardbirds — all of whom were playing the same kind of material that the Pacemakers’ pre-fame club sets and first album had been made up of. On the evidence of the small number of live recordings of the Pacemakers, had they been signed even a year later, they would have fit easily into that millieu, and while Gerry Marsden’s friendly singing voice and persona would never have allowed him to become a menacing, rebellious figure like Mick Jagger, the group could easily have had a much longer period of success and respect than they did: [Excerpt: Gerry and the Pacemakers, “What’d I Say (Live)”] The Pacemakers split up in 1966, but Gerry later revived the name for tours on the nostalgia circuit. He’s now retired due to health problems, but I saw him on what was his last tour a couple of years ago, and he was still good enough that you could understand why, for at least a few weeks, he had once been bigger than the Beatles.
I just heard the sad news that Gerry Marsden, of Gerry and the Pacemakers, has died today aged seventy-eight. As the latest episode of the podcast is late due to personal issues, I thought I'd make this available to the general public – this is a ten-minute Patreon bonus episode I did back in October, on Gerry and the Pacemakers, so it's here as a little tribute. He'll be missed. ----more---- Transcript Today we're going to look at a group that were for a very short while arguably the most successful band to come out of Liverpool, one that set a record that wouldn't be broken for twenty-one years, and who deserved rather better than the reputation they've ended up with. We're going to look at Gerry and the Pacemakers, and at "How Do You Do It?": [Excerpt: Gerry and the Pacemakers, "How Do You Do It?"] Gerry and the Pacemakers were, in the very early sixties, one of the bands that was most strongly competing for the title of Liverpool's best band. They were so good that before he joined the Beatles, for a while Richy Starkey was considering quitting the Hurricanes and joining them, even though it would mean switching instruments -- Gerry's brother Freddy Marsden was the Pacemakers' drummer, but they didn't have a bass player, and everyone was sure that Richy could pick it up no problem. The Pacemakers had been around before the Beatles, and they shared similar musical tastes, and even a similar repertoire -- the Beatles dropped "What'd I Say" from their sets because the Pacemakers were also doing it, and when Paul started to sing "Over the Rainbow" in the Beatles' sets, the Pacemakers responded by adding the old Rogers and Hammerstein song "You'll Never Walk Alone" to match it. Both bands played Hamburg backing Tony Sheridan, and both were playing songs by Arthur Alexander, Larry Williams, Richie Barrett and Carl Perkins. The main difference between the two was that the Pacemakers would have a slightly harder-edged sound -- the Pacemakers only had one real singer, Gerry, and so they couldn't do the kind of girl-group harmonies that the Beatles would do, and so they couldn't move off into the songs by the Shirelles or the Cookies that the Beatles performed, and instead had to fill out their set with bluesy songs like Little Walter's "My Babe": [Excerpt: Gerry and the Pacemakers, "My Babe (live)"] There was a friendly but real rivalry between the Beatles and the Pacemakers, so much so that when Mersey Beat had a popularity poll among its readers, the Beatles bought up as many copies of the magazine as they could and filled out the poll under fake names with themselves at the top and the Pacemakers at the bottom, to make sure they won and the Pacemakers only came second (Rory Storm and the Hurricanes tried filling out the poll with themselves at the top too, but Bill Harry disqualified forty ballots written in green ink in the same handwriting, posted from the same letter box, so they came in fourth). It even looked for a while like the Pacemakers would be the very first Liverpool band to release a record -- a local promoter called Sam Leach was planning to set up his own label and record them, before they realised he was better at coming up with plans than coming up with money. The Pacemakers also had their own PA system rather than just relying on the club ones, at a time when no other band did. Indeed, when Brian Epstein took the Decca A&R man Mike Smith to see the Beatles at the Cavern, when it looked like they would be signed to Decca, he seems to have taken Smith out for dinner before the show because the Pacemakers were the support act, and Paul McCartney was worried that if Smith saw the Pacemakers' set he might choose to sign them rather than the Beatles. So it made sense that when Epstein was looking to sign up some more artists to a management contract, he signed the Pacemakers. And it made sense that once the Beatles had had some success, George Martin trusted Epstein enough to sign Gerry and the Pacemakers. And as there was no awkward publishing company contract to deal with like there had been with the Beatles, he could give them "How Do You Do It?", the song that he'd tried to foist on the Beatles: [Excerpt: Gerry and the Pacemakers, "How Do You Do It?"]qqqq Martin's ear for a hit was proved right, and the song went to number one -- and it was the first record from a Liverpool group to do so on what is now considered the "official" chart, though it was then just one of several. Unsurprisingly, the second single released was another Mitch Murray song -- one that was almost identical to "How Do You Do It?": [Excerpt: Gerry and the Pacemakers, "I Like It"] That also went to number one, as did their third single, "You'll Never Walk Alone": [Excerpt: Gerry and the Pacemakers, "You'll Never Walk Alone"] That last became almost the unofficial anthem of Liverpool after the Pacemakers' release, and is to this day still sung by fans of Liverpool Football Club at every match. It also made them the first act ever to have their first three singles go to number one in the British charts, something that wouldn't be repeated until another Liverpool act, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, twenty-one years later. After that, the group started recording songs Gerry wrote himself, and he proved to be quite good. Their first original single, "I'm the One", went to number two, just behind "Needles and Pins" by the Searchers, and was very much in the same style as their first two hits, but he also started writing a few more interesting and meditative songs, most notably "Don't Let the Sun Catch You Crying", which became their first and biggest hit in the US: [Excerpt: Gerry and the Pacemakers, "Don't Let the Sun Catch You Crying"] But the Pacemakers came along, sadly, at *just* the wrong time. As the first of the Liverpool bands other than the Beatles to get signed, they were initially pushed into the same all-round entertainer role that groups like Cliff Richard and the Shadows were in, and their early singles were light pop even as their first album was full of covers of Arthur Alexander songs like "A Shot of Rhythm and Blues". By mid-1964 the light pop style of their early singles was considered hopelessly passe when compared to groups like the Animals, the Rolling Stones, and the Yardbirds -- all of whom were playing the same kind of material that the Pacemakers' pre-fame club sets and first album had been made up of. On the evidence of the small number of live recordings of the Pacemakers, had they been signed even a year later, they would have fit easily into that millieu, and while Gerry Marsden's friendly singing voice and persona would never have allowed him to become a menacing, rebellious figure like Mick Jagger, the group could easily have had a much longer period of success and respect than they did: [Excerpt: Gerry and the Pacemakers, “What'd I Say (Live)”] The Pacemakers split up in 1966, but Gerry later revived the name for tours on the nostalgia circuit. He's now retired due to health problems, but I saw him on what was his last tour a couple of years ago, and he was still good enough that you could understand why, for at least a few weeks, he had once been bigger than the Beatles.
Episode ninety-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Stand By Me” by Ben E. King, and at the later career of the Drifters. 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 “If I Had a Hammer” by Trini López. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. This 3-CD set has all Ben E. King’s recordings, both solo and with the Drifters, the Crowns, and LaVern Baker, up to 1962. This episode follows on from episode seventy-five, on “There Goes My Baby”. I’m not going to recommend a Drifters compilation, because I know of none that actually have only the original hit recordings without any remakes or remixes. The disclaimer in episode seventy-five also applies here — I may have used an incorrect version of a song here, because of the sloppy way the Drifters’ music is packaged. My main resource in putting this episode together was Marv Goldberg’s website, and his excellent articles on both the early- and late-period Drifters, Bill Pinkney’s later Original Drifters, the Five Crowns, and Ben E. King. Lonely Avenue, a biography of Doc Pomus by Alex Halberstadt, helped me with the information on Pomus. Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz tells Leiber and Stoller’s side of the story well. And Bill Millar’s book on the Drifters, while it is more a history of 50s vocal group music generally using them as a focus than a biography of the group, contains some interesting material. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today, we’re going to look at a song that ties together several of the threads we’ve looked at in previous episodes. We’re going to look at a song that had its roots in a gospel song that had been performed by Sister Rosetta Tharpe, that involves the Drifters, Leiber and Stoller, and Phil Spector, and which marks the highpoint of the crossover from gospel to pop audiences that had been started by Ray Charles. We’re going to look at “Stand By Me”, by Ben E King. [Excerpt: Ben E King, “Stand By Me”] When we left the Drifters, they’d hit a legal problem. When the contracts for the individual members had been sold to George Treadwell, the owner of the Drifters’ name, Ben E King’s contract had not been sold with the rest. This had meant that while King continued to sing lead on the records, including the first few big hits of this new lineup of Drifters, he wasn’t allowed to tour with them, and so they’d had to bring in a soundalike singer, Johnnie Lee Williams, to sing his parts on stage. So there were now five Drifters in the studio, but only four of them in the touring group. That might seem like an unworkable arrangement for any length of time, and so it turned out, but at first this was very successful. Leiber and Stoller continued producing records for this new Drifters lineup, but didn’t tend to write for them. They were increasingly tiring of writing to a teenage audience that didn’t really share their tastes, and were starting to move into writing for adult stars like Peggy Lee. And so Leiber and Stoller increasingly relied on songs by other writers, and one team they particularly relied on was Pomus and Shuman. You’ll remember we’ve talked about them in association with both the Drifters and Leiber and Stoller previously, and that they’d been the ones who’d discovered the Ben E. King lineup of the Drifters. Doc Pomus was one of the great R&B songwriters of the fifties, but by 1960 he and Mort Shuman, who was thirteen years younger than him, had written a whole string of hits for white performers like Fabian, Bobby Rydell, Frankie Avalon, and Bobby Darin. A typical example of the stuff they were writing was “Two Fools” for Frankie Avalon: [Excerpt: Frankie Avalon, “Two Fools”] They were one of the hottest teams in the Brill Building, but they still had a sensibility for the R&B music that the Drifters had their roots in, and so they were the perfect writers to provide crossover hits for the group, and that’s what they did. They’d already written “If You Cry True Love, True Love” for the group, which had gone to number thirty-three and which had been the only Drifters single on which Williams had taken a lead vocal, and now they wrote a song for King to sing, “This Magic Moment”: [Excerpt: Ben E. King and the Drifters, “This Magic Moment”] That made number sixteen on the pop charts. But the next song they wrote for the group was a much bigger success, and a far more personal song. Pomus was paraplegic after having had polio as a child, and either used crutches or a wheelchair to get around. His wife, though, was younger, and was an actor and dancer. On their wedding day, Pomus was unable to dance with her himself, and watched as she danced with a succession of other people. The feeling stayed with him, and a few years later, he turned those thoughts into a set of lyrics, which Shuman then put to music with a vaguely Latin feel, like many of the Drifters’ recent hits. The result was a number one record, and one of the all-time classic songs of the rock and roll era: [Excerpt: Ben E. King and the Drifters, “Save the Last Dance For Me”] That song has gone on to be one of the most covered songs of all time, with recordings by Tina Turner, Leonard Cohen, Buck Owens, Jerry Lee Lewis, The Swinging Blue Jeans, Harry Nilsson, and Bruce Willis, among many others. It would be the Drifters’ only number one on the pop charts, and it was also Ben E King’s last single with the Drifters, after King’s manager Lover Patterson came to an agreement with the Drifters’ manager George Treadwell that would let King move smoothly into a solo career. There might have been more to it than that, as there seems to have been a lot of negotiation going on around the group’s future at this time. There were reports, for example, that King Records were negotiating to buy the Drifters’ contract from Atlantic, which would have been interesting — it’s hard to see the group continuing to have success at King, which didn’t have Leiber and Stoller, and which put out very different records from Atlantic. But either way, the result was that Ben E. King started performing solo, and indeed by the time “Save the Last Dance” came out, he had already released a couple of solo records. The first of these was not a success, and nor was the second, a duet with LaVern Baker: [Excerpt: Ben E. King and LaVern Baker, “How Often”] But the third was something else. At this point, as a favour to their old friend Lester Sill, Leiber and Stoller were mentoring a kid that Sill thought had promise, named Phil Spector, who we’ve talked about before in the episode on The Gamblers, but who had now moved over to New York for a time. Spector was staying with Leiber, and would follow him around literally everywhere, claiming that he was so traumatised by his father’s death that he couldn’t be left alone at any time. Leiber found Spector annoying, but owed Sill a favour, and so kept working with him. And Spector kept pestering Leiber to collaborate with him on some songs. Leiber told Spector, “No, I write with Mike Stoller”, to which Spector would reply, “Well, he can write with us too.” Leiber explained to him that that wasn’t how things worked, and that if there was any collaboration, it would be Leiber and Stoller letting Spector write with them, not Spector graciously allowing Stoller to write with him and Leiber. Spector said that that was what he had meant, of course. Leiber and Stoller reluctantly agreed that Spector could write with them, but then Stoller was unable to turn up to the writing session. Spector persuaded Leiber to go ahead and just write a song with him since Stoller wasn’t around. He agreed, and they came up with a song called “Spanish Harlem”, to which Stoller later added a prominent instrumental line, for which he didn’t claim credit, because he thought that Spector would only whine, and he didn’t need the hassle. Or at least, that’s the story that normally gets told — there are people who knew Ritchie Valens who say that the marimba riff on the record, which became the most defining feature of the song, was actually something that Valens had been regularly playing in the months before he died. According to them, Spector, who moved in the same circles as Valens, must have stolen the riff from him. I tend to believe Stoller’s version of the story myself, but either way, Leiber, Stoller, and Spector played the song to Jerry Wexler and Ahmet Ertegun as a trio, with Stoller on piano, Spector on guitar, and Leiber singing. They agreed it should be on the B-side of the next single by King, though the song was popular enough that the record was soon flipped, and “Spanish Harlem” made the top ten: [Excerpt: Ben E. King, “Spanish Harlem”] But that wasn’t even the most important record they made at that session, because after recording it, they decided to record a song that King had written for the Drifters, but which they had turned down. King had brought in the basic idea for the song, and Leiber had helped him finish off the lyric, while Stoller had helped with the music — the resulting songwriting credit gave fifty percent of the royalties to King, and twenty-five percent each to Leiber and Stoller, as a result. King’s song had a long prehistory before he wrote it, and like many early soul songs it had its basis in gospel music. The original source for the song is a spiritual from 1905 by Rev. Charles Albert Tindley, which had been recorded by various people, including Sister Rosetta Tharpe: [Excerpt: Sister Rosetta Tharpe, “Stand By Me”] But the proximate influence for the song was a song that Sam Cooke had written for his old group, the Soul Stirrers, the year before, which had in turn been inspired by Tindley’s song. The lead vocal on the Soul Stirrers’ record was by Johnnie Taylor, a friend of Cooke’s who had replaced Cooke in his first group, the Highway QCs, and then replaced him in his second one, because he sounded exactly like Cooke: [Excerpt: The Soul Stirrers, “Stand By Me, Father”] King idolised Cooke, and was inspired by that record to come up with his own variant on the song. Working with Leiber and Stoller, he carefully crafted his secular adaptation of it, writing a lyric that worked equally well as a gospel song or as a song to a lover, other than the words “darling, darling” in the chorus. The chord sequence they used was a simple adaptation of the standard doo-wop chord changes. On a normal doo-wop song, the chords would go I, minor vi, IV, V, with each chord taking up the same amount of time, like this: [demonstrates on guitar] Stoller took those changes, and made the I and minor vi last two bars each, [demonstrates] then had the IV and V chords both last a bar, then go to two more bars of the I chord. [demonstrates] That bar of IV, bar of V, two bars of I thing is almost what you get at the end of a twelve-bar blues, except there you go V, IV, I, I, rather than IV, V, I, I. So to compare, here’s the end of a twelve-bar blues: [demonstrates] And here’s what Stoller did again: [demonstrates] So effectively Stoller has taken the two most hackneyed chord sequences in rock and roll music, and hybridised them to turn them into a single new sequence that’s instantly recognisable: [demonstrates on guitar] In later years, Leiber always gave Stoller the credit for the song’s success, saying that while the lyrics and melody were good, and King’s performance exceptional, it was the bass line that Stoller came up with which made the song the success it was. I agree, to a large extent — but that bassline is largely just following the root notes of the chord sequence that Stoller had written. But it’s one of the most immediately recognisable pieces of music of the early sixties: [Excerpt: Ben E. King, “Stand By Me”] The record sounded remarkably original, for something that was made up almost entirely out of repurposed elements from other songs, and it shows more clearly than perhaps any other song that originality doesn’t mean creating something entirely ab initio, but can mean taking a fresh look at things that are familiar, and putting just a slight twist on them. In particular, one thing that doesn’t get noted enough is just how much of a departure the song was lyrically. People had been reworking gospel ideas into secular ones for years — we’ve already looked at Ray Charles doing this, and at Sam Cooke, and there were many other examples, like Little Walter turning “This Train” into “My Babe”. But in most cases those songs required wholesale lyrical reworking. “Stand By Me” is different, it brings the lyrical concerns and style of gospel firmly into the secular realm. “If the sky that we look upon should tumble and fall, and the mountains should crumble to the sea” is an apocalyptic vision, not “Candy’s sweet/And honey too/There’s not another quite, quite as sweet as you”, which were the lyrics Sam Cooke wrote when he turned a song about how God is wonderful into one about how his girl is loveable. This new type of more gospel-inflected lyric would become very common in the next few years, especially among Black performers. Another building block in the music that would become known as soul had been put in place. The record went to number four on the charts, and it looked like he was headed for a huge career. But the next few singles he released didn’t do so well — he recorded a version of the old standard “Amor” which made number nineteen, and then his next two records topped out at sixty-six and fifty-six. He did get back in the pop top twenty with a song co-written by his wife and Ahmet Ertegun, “Don’t Play That Song (You Lied)”, which reached number eleven and became an R&B standard: [Excerpt: Ben E. King, “Don’t Play That Song (You Lied)”] But as many people did at the time, he tried to move into the more lucrative world of adult supper-club singers, rather than singing R&B. While his version of “I Who Have Nothing” — a French song that has since become a standard, and whose English lyrics were written for King by Leiber and Stoller — managed to reach number twenty-nine, everything else did terribly. He sang “I Could Have Danced All Night” and “What Now My Love?” perfectly well, but that wasn’t what the audience wanted from him. He made some great records in the later 60s, like “What Is Soul”: [Excerpt: Ben E. King “What Is Soul?”] But even teaming up with Solomon Burke, Don Covay, Joe Tex, and Arthur Conley as The Soul Clan didn’t help him kickstart his recording career: [Excerpt: The Soul Clan, “Soul Meeting”] He asked to be let go from his contract with Atlantic in 1969, and spent a few years in the early seventies recording for small labels. Meanwhile, the Drifters were continuing without King. After King left, Atlantic started releasing whatever material they had in their vaults, both songs with King’s leads and older records from the earlier line-up of Drifters. But they were about to have even more personnel shifts. When they were on tour and got to Mobile, Alabama, Johnny Lee Williams said that he was just going to stay there and not continue on the tour — he was sick of not getting to sing lead vocals, and he came from Mobile anyway. Williams went on to join a group called the Embraceables, who released this with him singing lead: [Excerpt: The Embraceables, “My Foolish Pride”] That was later rereleased as by The Implaceables, for reasons I’ve not been able to discover. The Drifters got in a replacement for Williams, James Poindexter, but he turned out to have stage fright, and the group spent several months as a trio, before being joined by new lead singer Rudy Lewis. And then Elsbeary Hobbs, the group’s bass singer, was drafted, and the group got in a couple of different singers before settling on Tommy Evans, who had sung with the old versions of the Drifters in the fifties. The new lineup, Rudy Lewis, Charlie Thomas, Dock Green, and Tommy Evans, would be one of the group’s longest-lasting lineups, lasting more than a year, and would record hits like “Up On the Roof”, by Goffin and King: [Excerpt: The Drifters, “Up On the Roof”] But then Dock Green left the group. He and Tommy Evans joined another group — even though Evans was also still in the Drifters. The Drapers, the group they joined, was managed by Lover Patterson, Ben E. King’s manager, and had been given a name that sounded as much like “The Drifters” as possible. As well as Green and Evans, it also had Johnny Moore and Carnation Charlie Hughes, who had been in the same 1956 lineup of the Drifters that Tommy Evans had been in. That lineup of the Drapers released one single that didn’t do particularly well: [Excerpt: The Drapers, “(I Know) Your Love Has Gone Away”] The new Drifters lineup, without Dock Green, recorded “On Broadway”, a song that Leiber and Stoller had co-written with the Brill Building team of Mann and Weill. The guitar on the record was by Phil Spector — he was by that point a successful producer, but Leiber and Stoller had bumped into him on the way to the session and invited him to sit in: [Excerpt: The Drifters, “On Broadway”] Tommy Evans then also left the Drifters, and was replaced by Johnny Terry, leaving a lineup of Rudy Lewis, Charlie Thomas, Gene Pearson, and Johnny Terry. But Rudy Lewis, the lead singer of the group since just after King had left, was thinking of going solo, and even released one solo single: [Excerpt: Rudy Lewis, “I’ve Loved You So Long”] That wasn’t a success, but George Treadwell wanted some insurance in case Lewis left, so he got Johnny Moore — who had been in the group in the fifties and had just left the Drapers — to join, and for a few months Lewis and Moore traded off leads in the studio. One song that they recorded during 1963, but didn’t release, was “Only in America”, written for them by Leiber and Stoller. Leiber and Stoller had intended the song to be a sly satire, with Black people singing about the American dream, but Atlantic worried that in the racial climate of 1963, the satire would seem tasteless, so they took the Drifters’ backing track and got Jay and the Americans, a white group, to record new vocals, turning it into a straightforward bit of boosterism: [Excerpt: Jay and the Americans, “Only in America”] Tragedy struck on the day the Drifters recorded what would be their last US top ten hit, the twenty-first of May 1964. Johnny Moore bumped into Sylvia Vanterpool, of Mickey and Sylvia, and she said “thank God it wasn’t you”. He didn’t know what she was talking about, and she told him that Rudy Lewis had died suddenly earlier that day. The group went into the studio anyway, and recorded the songs that had been scheduled, including one called “I Don’t Want To Go On Without You” which took on a new meaning in the circumstances. But the hit from the session was “Under the Boardwalk”, with lead vocals from Moore: [Excerpt: The Drifters, “Under the Boardwalk”] This version of the group — Johnny Moore, Charlie Thomas, Gene Pearson, and Johnny Terry, would be the longest-lasting of all the versions of the group managed by George Treadwell, staying together a full two years. But after “Under the Boardwalk”, which went to number four, they had no more top ten hits in the US. The best they could do was scrape the top twenty with “Saturday Night at the Movies”: [Excerpt: The Drifters, “Saturday Night at the Movies”] There were several more lineup changes, but the big change came in 1967 when George Treadwell died. His wife, Faye, took over the management of the group, and shortly after that, Charlie Thomas — the person who had been in the group for the longest continuous time, nine years at that point, decided to leave. There were a lot more squabbles and splinter groups, and by 1970 the Drifters’ career on Atlantic was over. By this point, there were three different versions of The Drifters. There was a group called The Original Drifters, which had formed in 1958 after the first set of Drifters had been fired, and was originally made up entirely of members of the early-fifties lineups, but which was now a revolving-door group based around Bill Pinkney, the bass singer of the Clyde McPhatter lineup, and stayed that way until Pinkney’s death in 2007. Then there was a version of the Drifters that consisted of Dock Green, Charlie Thomas, and Elsbeary Hobbs, the people who had been in Ben E. King’s version of the group. Charlie Thomas won the right to use the name in the USA in 1972, and continues touring with his own group there to this day, though no more of that lineup of the Drifters are with him. And then there was a UK-based group, managed by Faye Treadwell, with Johnny Moore as lead singer. That group scored big UK hits when the group moved to the UK in 72, with re-releases of mid-sixties records that had been comparative flops at the time — “Saturday Night at the Movies”, “At the Club”, and “Come On Over to My Place” all made the UK top ten in 1972, and Moore’s Drifters would have nine more top ten hits with new material in the UK between 1973 and 76. And Ben E. King, meanwhile, had signed again to Atlantic, and had a one-off top ten hit with “Supernatural Thing” in 1975: [Excerpt: Ben E. King, “Supernatural Thing”] But other than that he’d continued to have far less chart success than his vocal talents deserved, and in the eighties he moved to the UK and joined the UK version of the Drifters, singing his old hits on the nostalgia circuit with them, and adding more authenticity to the Johnny Moore lineup of the group. He spent several years like that, until in 1986 his career had a sudden resurgence, when the film Stand By Me came out and his single was used as the theme. On the back of the film’s success, the song reentered the top ten, twenty-five years after its initial success, and made number one in the UK. As a result, King became the first person to have hit the top ten in the US in the fifties, sixties, seventies, and eighties — a remarkable record for someone who had had relatively few hits. A greatest hits collection of King’s records made the top twenty in the UK, as well, and King left the Drifters to once again become a solo artist. But this is where we say goodbye to King, and to the Drifters, and to Leiber and Stoller as songwriters. The UK version of the Drifters carried on with Johnny Moore as lead singer until he died in 1998, and up to that point it was reasonable to think of that group as a real version of the Drifters, because Moore had sung with the group on hits in the fifties and sixties, and in the UK in the seventies – roughly eighty percent of records released as by The Drifters had had Moore singing on them. But after Moore’s death, it gets very confusing, with the Treadwell family apparently abandoning the trademark and moving back to the US, and then changing their mind, resulting in a series of lawsuits. The current UK version of the Drifters has nobody who was in the group before 2010, and is managed by George and Faye Treadwell’s daughter. They still fill medium-sized theatres on large national tours, because their audiences don’t seem to care, so long as they can hear people singing “Up On the Roof” and “On Broadway”, “There Goes My Baby” and “Save the Last Dance For Me”. In total thirty-four different people were members of the Drifters during their time with Atlantic Records. It’s the only case I know where a group identity was genuinely bigger than the members, where whoever was involved, somehow they carried on making exceptional records. Leiber and Stoller, meanwhile, will turn up again, once more, next year, as record executives, collaborating with another figure we’ve seen several times before to run a record label. But this is the last record we’ll look at with them as a songwriting team. We’ve been following their remarkable career since episode fifteen, and they would continue writing great songs for a huge variety of artists, but “Stand By Me” would be the last time they would come up with something that would change the music industry. It was the end of a truly remarkable run, and one which stands as one of the great achievements in twentieth century popular music. And Ben E. King, who was, other than Clyde McPhatter, the only member of the Drifters to ever break away and become a solo success, spent the last twenty-nine years of his life touring as a solo artist off the renewed success of his greatest contribution to music. He died in 2015, but as long as people listen to rock, pop, soul, or R&B, there’ll be people listening to “Stand By Me”.
Episode ninety-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Stand By Me" by Ben E. King, and at the later career of the Drifters. 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 "If I Had a Hammer" by Trini López. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. This 3-CD set has all Ben E. King's recordings, both solo and with the Drifters, the Crowns, and LaVern Baker, up to 1962. This episode follows on from episode seventy-five, on "There Goes My Baby". I'm not going to recommend a Drifters compilation, because I know of none that actually have only the original hit recordings without any remakes or remixes. The disclaimer in episode seventy-five also applies here -- I may have used an incorrect version of a song here, because of the sloppy way the Drifters' music is packaged. My main resource in putting this episode together was Marv Goldberg's website, and his excellent articles on both the early- and late-period Drifters, Bill Pinkney's later Original Drifters, the Five Crowns, and Ben E. King. Lonely Avenue, a biography of Doc Pomus by Alex Halberstadt, helped me with the information on Pomus. Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz tells Leiber and Stoller's side of the story well. And Bill Millar's book on the Drifters, while it is more a history of 50s vocal group music generally using them as a focus than a biography of the group, contains some interesting material. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today, we're going to look at a song that ties together several of the threads we've looked at in previous episodes. We're going to look at a song that had its roots in a gospel song that had been performed by Sister Rosetta Tharpe, that involves the Drifters, Leiber and Stoller, and Phil Spector, and which marks the highpoint of the crossover from gospel to pop audiences that had been started by Ray Charles. We're going to look at "Stand By Me", by Ben E King. [Excerpt: Ben E King, "Stand By Me"] When we left the Drifters, they'd hit a legal problem. When the contracts for the individual members had been sold to George Treadwell, the owner of the Drifters' name, Ben E King's contract had not been sold with the rest. This had meant that while King continued to sing lead on the records, including the first few big hits of this new lineup of Drifters, he wasn't allowed to tour with them, and so they'd had to bring in a soundalike singer, Johnnie Lee Williams, to sing his parts on stage. So there were now five Drifters in the studio, but only four of them in the touring group. That might seem like an unworkable arrangement for any length of time, and so it turned out, but at first this was very successful. Leiber and Stoller continued producing records for this new Drifters lineup, but didn't tend to write for them. They were increasingly tiring of writing to a teenage audience that didn't really share their tastes, and were starting to move into writing for adult stars like Peggy Lee. And so Leiber and Stoller increasingly relied on songs by other writers, and one team they particularly relied on was Pomus and Shuman. You'll remember we've talked about them in association with both the Drifters and Leiber and Stoller previously, and that they'd been the ones who'd discovered the Ben E. King lineup of the Drifters. Doc Pomus was one of the great R&B songwriters of the fifties, but by 1960 he and Mort Shuman, who was thirteen years younger than him, had written a whole string of hits for white performers like Fabian, Bobby Rydell, Frankie Avalon, and Bobby Darin. A typical example of the stuff they were writing was "Two Fools" for Frankie Avalon: [Excerpt: Frankie Avalon, "Two Fools"] They were one of the hottest teams in the Brill Building, but they still had a sensibility for the R&B music that the Drifters had their roots in, and so they were the perfect writers to provide crossover hits for the group, and that's what they did. They'd already written "If You Cry True Love, True Love" for the group, which had gone to number thirty-three and which had been the only Drifters single on which Williams had taken a lead vocal, and now they wrote a song for King to sing, "This Magic Moment": [Excerpt: Ben E. King and the Drifters, "This Magic Moment"] That made number sixteen on the pop charts. But the next song they wrote for the group was a much bigger success, and a far more personal song. Pomus was paraplegic after having had polio as a child, and either used crutches or a wheelchair to get around. His wife, though, was younger, and was an actor and dancer. On their wedding day, Pomus was unable to dance with her himself, and watched as she danced with a succession of other people. The feeling stayed with him, and a few years later, he turned those thoughts into a set of lyrics, which Shuman then put to music with a vaguely Latin feel, like many of the Drifters' recent hits. The result was a number one record, and one of the all-time classic songs of the rock and roll era: [Excerpt: Ben E. King and the Drifters, "Save the Last Dance For Me"] That song has gone on to be one of the most covered songs of all time, with recordings by Tina Turner, Leonard Cohen, Buck Owens, Jerry Lee Lewis, The Swinging Blue Jeans, Harry Nilsson, and Bruce Willis, among many others. It would be the Drifters' only number one on the pop charts, and it was also Ben E King's last single with the Drifters, after King's manager Lover Patterson came to an agreement with the Drifters' manager George Treadwell that would let King move smoothly into a solo career. There might have been more to it than that, as there seems to have been a lot of negotiation going on around the group's future at this time. There were reports, for example, that King Records were negotiating to buy the Drifters' contract from Atlantic, which would have been interesting -- it's hard to see the group continuing to have success at King, which didn't have Leiber and Stoller, and which put out very different records from Atlantic. But either way, the result was that Ben E. King started performing solo, and indeed by the time "Save the Last Dance" came out, he had already released a couple of solo records. The first of these was not a success, and nor was the second, a duet with LaVern Baker: [Excerpt: Ben E. King and LaVern Baker, "How Often"] But the third was something else. At this point, as a favour to their old friend Lester Sill, Leiber and Stoller were mentoring a kid that Sill thought had promise, named Phil Spector, who we've talked about before in the episode on The Gamblers, but who had now moved over to New York for a time. Spector was staying with Leiber, and would follow him around literally everywhere, claiming that he was so traumatised by his father's death that he couldn't be left alone at any time. Leiber found Spector annoying, but owed Sill a favour, and so kept working with him. And Spector kept pestering Leiber to collaborate with him on some songs. Leiber told Spector, "No, I write with Mike Stoller", to which Spector would reply, "Well, he can write with us too." Leiber explained to him that that wasn't how things worked, and that if there was any collaboration, it would be Leiber and Stoller letting Spector write with them, not Spector graciously allowing Stoller to write with him and Leiber. Spector said that that was what he had meant, of course. Leiber and Stoller reluctantly agreed that Spector could write with them, but then Stoller was unable to turn up to the writing session. Spector persuaded Leiber to go ahead and just write a song with him since Stoller wasn't around. He agreed, and they came up with a song called "Spanish Harlem", to which Stoller later added a prominent instrumental line, for which he didn't claim credit, because he thought that Spector would only whine, and he didn't need the hassle. Or at least, that's the story that normally gets told -- there are people who knew Ritchie Valens who say that the marimba riff on the record, which became the most defining feature of the song, was actually something that Valens had been regularly playing in the months before he died. According to them, Spector, who moved in the same circles as Valens, must have stolen the riff from him. I tend to believe Stoller's version of the story myself, but either way, Leiber, Stoller, and Spector played the song to Jerry Wexler and Ahmet Ertegun as a trio, with Stoller on piano, Spector on guitar, and Leiber singing. They agreed it should be on the B-side of the next single by King, though the song was popular enough that the record was soon flipped, and "Spanish Harlem" made the top ten: [Excerpt: Ben E. King, "Spanish Harlem"] But that wasn't even the most important record they made at that session, because after recording it, they decided to record a song that King had written for the Drifters, but which they had turned down. King had brought in the basic idea for the song, and Leiber had helped him finish off the lyric, while Stoller had helped with the music -- the resulting songwriting credit gave fifty percent of the royalties to King, and twenty-five percent each to Leiber and Stoller, as a result. King's song had a long prehistory before he wrote it, and like many early soul songs it had its basis in gospel music. The original source for the song is a spiritual from 1905 by Rev. Charles Albert Tindley, which had been recorded by various people, including Sister Rosetta Tharpe: [Excerpt: Sister Rosetta Tharpe, "Stand By Me"] But the proximate influence for the song was a song that Sam Cooke had written for his old group, the Soul Stirrers, the year before, which had in turn been inspired by Tindley's song. The lead vocal on the Soul Stirrers' record was by Johnnie Taylor, a friend of Cooke's who had replaced Cooke in his first group, the Highway QCs, and then replaced him in his second one, because he sounded exactly like Cooke: [Excerpt: The Soul Stirrers, "Stand By Me, Father"] King idolised Cooke, and was inspired by that record to come up with his own variant on the song. Working with Leiber and Stoller, he carefully crafted his secular adaptation of it, writing a lyric that worked equally well as a gospel song or as a song to a lover, other than the words "darling, darling" in the chorus. The chord sequence they used was a simple adaptation of the standard doo-wop chord changes. On a normal doo-wop song, the chords would go I, minor vi, IV, V, with each chord taking up the same amount of time, like this: [demonstrates on guitar] Stoller took those changes, and made the I and minor vi last two bars each, [demonstrates] then had the IV and V chords both last a bar, then go to two more bars of the I chord. [demonstrates] That bar of IV, bar of V, two bars of I thing is almost what you get at the end of a twelve-bar blues, except there you go V, IV, I, I, rather than IV, V, I, I. So to compare, here's the end of a twelve-bar blues: [demonstrates] And here's what Stoller did again: [demonstrates] So effectively Stoller has taken the two most hackneyed chord sequences in rock and roll music, and hybridised them to turn them into a single new sequence that's instantly recognisable: [demonstrates on guitar] In later years, Leiber always gave Stoller the credit for the song's success, saying that while the lyrics and melody were good, and King's performance exceptional, it was the bass line that Stoller came up with which made the song the success it was. I agree, to a large extent -- but that bassline is largely just following the root notes of the chord sequence that Stoller had written. But it's one of the most immediately recognisable pieces of music of the early sixties: [Excerpt: Ben E. King, "Stand By Me"] The record sounded remarkably original, for something that was made up almost entirely out of repurposed elements from other songs, and it shows more clearly than perhaps any other song that originality doesn't mean creating something entirely ab initio, but can mean taking a fresh look at things that are familiar, and putting just a slight twist on them. In particular, one thing that doesn't get noted enough is just how much of a departure the song was lyrically. People had been reworking gospel ideas into secular ones for years -- we've already looked at Ray Charles doing this, and at Sam Cooke, and there were many other examples, like Little Walter turning "This Train" into "My Babe". But in most cases those songs required wholesale lyrical reworking. "Stand By Me" is different, it brings the lyrical concerns and style of gospel firmly into the secular realm. "If the sky that we look upon should tumble and fall, and the mountains should crumble to the sea" is an apocalyptic vision, not "Candy's sweet/And honey too/There's not another quite, quite as sweet as you", which were the lyrics Sam Cooke wrote when he turned a song about how God is wonderful into one about how his girl is loveable. This new type of more gospel-inflected lyric would become very common in the next few years, especially among Black performers. Another building block in the music that would become known as soul had been put in place. The record went to number four on the charts, and it looked like he was headed for a huge career. But the next few singles he released didn't do so well -- he recorded a version of the old standard "Amor" which made number nineteen, and then his next two records topped out at sixty-six and fifty-six. He did get back in the pop top twenty with a song co-written by his wife and Ahmet Ertegun, "Don't Play That Song (You Lied)", which reached number eleven and became an R&B standard: [Excerpt: Ben E. King, "Don't Play That Song (You Lied)"] But as many people did at the time, he tried to move into the more lucrative world of adult supper-club singers, rather than singing R&B. While his version of "I Who Have Nothing" -- a French song that has since become a standard, and whose English lyrics were written for King by Leiber and Stoller -- managed to reach number twenty-nine, everything else did terribly. He sang "I Could Have Danced All Night" and "What Now My Love?" perfectly well, but that wasn't what the audience wanted from him. He made some great records in the later 60s, like "What Is Soul": [Excerpt: Ben E. King "What Is Soul?"] But even teaming up with Solomon Burke, Don Covay, Joe Tex, and Arthur Conley as The Soul Clan didn't help him kickstart his recording career: [Excerpt: The Soul Clan, "Soul Meeting"] He asked to be let go from his contract with Atlantic in 1969, and spent a few years in the early seventies recording for small labels. Meanwhile, the Drifters were continuing without King. After King left, Atlantic started releasing whatever material they had in their vaults, both songs with King's leads and older records from the earlier line-up of Drifters. But they were about to have even more personnel shifts. When they were on tour and got to Mobile, Alabama, Johnny Lee Williams said that he was just going to stay there and not continue on the tour -- he was sick of not getting to sing lead vocals, and he came from Mobile anyway. Williams went on to join a group called the Embraceables, who released this with him singing lead: [Excerpt: The Embraceables, "My Foolish Pride"] That was later rereleased as by The Implaceables, for reasons I've not been able to discover. The Drifters got in a replacement for Williams, James Poindexter, but he turned out to have stage fright, and the group spent several months as a trio, before being joined by new lead singer Rudy Lewis. And then Elsbeary Hobbs, the group's bass singer, was drafted, and the group got in a couple of different singers before settling on Tommy Evans, who had sung with the old versions of the Drifters in the fifties. The new lineup, Rudy Lewis, Charlie Thomas, Dock Green, and Tommy Evans, would be one of the group's longest-lasting lineups, lasting more than a year, and would record hits like "Up On the Roof", by Goffin and King: [Excerpt: The Drifters, "Up On the Roof"] But then Dock Green left the group. He and Tommy Evans joined another group -- even though Evans was also still in the Drifters. The Drapers, the group they joined, was managed by Lover Patterson, Ben E. King's manager, and had been given a name that sounded as much like "The Drifters" as possible. As well as Green and Evans, it also had Johnny Moore and Carnation Charlie Hughes, who had been in the same 1956 lineup of the Drifters that Tommy Evans had been in. That lineup of the Drapers released one single that didn't do particularly well: [Excerpt: The Drapers, "(I Know) Your Love Has Gone Away"] The new Drifters lineup, without Dock Green, recorded "On Broadway", a song that Leiber and Stoller had co-written with the Brill Building team of Mann and Weill. The guitar on the record was by Phil Spector -- he was by that point a successful producer, but Leiber and Stoller had bumped into him on the way to the session and invited him to sit in: [Excerpt: The Drifters, "On Broadway"] Tommy Evans then also left the Drifters, and was replaced by Johnny Terry, leaving a lineup of Rudy Lewis, Charlie Thomas, Gene Pearson, and Johnny Terry. But Rudy Lewis, the lead singer of the group since just after King had left, was thinking of going solo, and even released one solo single: [Excerpt: Rudy Lewis, "I've Loved You So Long"] That wasn't a success, but George Treadwell wanted some insurance in case Lewis left, so he got Johnny Moore -- who had been in the group in the fifties and had just left the Drapers -- to join, and for a few months Lewis and Moore traded off leads in the studio. One song that they recorded during 1963, but didn't release, was "Only in America", written for them by Leiber and Stoller. Leiber and Stoller had intended the song to be a sly satire, with Black people singing about the American dream, but Atlantic worried that in the racial climate of 1963, the satire would seem tasteless, so they took the Drifters' backing track and got Jay and the Americans, a white group, to record new vocals, turning it into a straightforward bit of boosterism: [Excerpt: Jay and the Americans, "Only in America"] Tragedy struck on the day the Drifters recorded what would be their last US top ten hit, the twenty-first of May 1964. Johnny Moore bumped into Sylvia Vanterpool, of Mickey and Sylvia, and she said "thank God it wasn't you". He didn't know what she was talking about, and she told him that Rudy Lewis had died suddenly earlier that day. The group went into the studio anyway, and recorded the songs that had been scheduled, including one called "I Don't Want To Go On Without You" which took on a new meaning in the circumstances. But the hit from the session was "Under the Boardwalk", with lead vocals from Moore: [Excerpt: The Drifters, "Under the Boardwalk"] This version of the group -- Johnny Moore, Charlie Thomas, Gene Pearson, and Johnny Terry, would be the longest-lasting of all the versions of the group managed by George Treadwell, staying together a full two years. But after "Under the Boardwalk", which went to number four, they had no more top ten hits in the US. The best they could do was scrape the top twenty with "Saturday Night at the Movies": [Excerpt: The Drifters, "Saturday Night at the Movies"] There were several more lineup changes, but the big change came in 1967 when George Treadwell died. His wife, Faye, took over the management of the group, and shortly after that, Charlie Thomas -- the person who had been in the group for the longest continuous time, nine years at that point, decided to leave. There were a lot more squabbles and splinter groups, and by 1970 the Drifters' career on Atlantic was over. By this point, there were three different versions of The Drifters. There was a group called The Original Drifters, which had formed in 1958 after the first set of Drifters had been fired, and was originally made up entirely of members of the early-fifties lineups, but which was now a revolving-door group based around Bill Pinkney, the bass singer of the Clyde McPhatter lineup, and stayed that way until Pinkney's death in 2007. Then there was a version of the Drifters that consisted of Dock Green, Charlie Thomas, and Elsbeary Hobbs, the people who had been in Ben E. King's version of the group. Charlie Thomas won the right to use the name in the USA in 1972, and continues touring with his own group there to this day, though no more of that lineup of the Drifters are with him. And then there was a UK-based group, managed by Faye Treadwell, with Johnny Moore as lead singer. That group scored big UK hits when the group moved to the UK in 72, with re-releases of mid-sixties records that had been comparative flops at the time -- "Saturday Night at the Movies", "At the Club", and "Come On Over to My Place" all made the UK top ten in 1972, and Moore's Drifters would have nine more top ten hits with new material in the UK between 1973 and 76. And Ben E. King, meanwhile, had signed again to Atlantic, and had a one-off top ten hit with "Supernatural Thing" in 1975: [Excerpt: Ben E. King, "Supernatural Thing"] But other than that he'd continued to have far less chart success than his vocal talents deserved, and in the eighties he moved to the UK and joined the UK version of the Drifters, singing his old hits on the nostalgia circuit with them, and adding more authenticity to the Johnny Moore lineup of the group. He spent several years like that, until in 1986 his career had a sudden resurgence, when the film Stand By Me came out and his single was used as the theme. On the back of the film's success, the song reentered the top ten, twenty-five years after its initial success, and made number one in the UK. As a result, King became the first person to have hit the top ten in the US in the fifties, sixties, seventies, and eighties -- a remarkable record for someone who had had relatively few hits. A greatest hits collection of King's records made the top twenty in the UK, as well, and King left the Drifters to once again become a solo artist. But this is where we say goodbye to King, and to the Drifters, and to Leiber and Stoller as songwriters. The UK version of the Drifters carried on with Johnny Moore as lead singer until he died in 1998, and up to that point it was reasonable to think of that group as a real version of the Drifters, because Moore had sung with the group on hits in the fifties and sixties, and in the UK in the seventies – roughly eighty percent of records released as by The Drifters had had Moore singing on them. But after Moore's death, it gets very confusing, with the Treadwell family apparently abandoning the trademark and moving back to the US, and then changing their mind, resulting in a series of lawsuits. The current UK version of the Drifters has nobody who was in the group before 2010, and is managed by George and Faye Treadwell's daughter. They still fill medium-sized theatres on large national tours, because their audiences don't seem to care, so long as they can hear people singing "Up On the Roof" and "On Broadway", "There Goes My Baby" and "Save the Last Dance For Me". In total thirty-four different people were members of the Drifters during their time with Atlantic Records. It's the only case I know where a group identity was genuinely bigger than the members, where whoever was involved, somehow they carried on making exceptional records. Leiber and Stoller, meanwhile, will turn up again, once more, next year, as record executives, collaborating with another figure we've seen several times before to run a record label. But this is the last record we'll look at with them as a songwriting team. We've been following their remarkable career since episode fifteen, and they would continue writing great songs for a huge variety of artists, but "Stand By Me" would be the last time they would come up with something that would change the music industry. It was the end of a truly remarkable run, and one which stands as one of the great achievements in twentieth century popular music. And Ben E. King, who was, other than Clyde McPhatter, the only member of the Drifters to ever break away and become a solo success, spent the last twenty-nine years of his life touring as a solo artist off the renewed success of his greatest contribution to music. He died in 2015, but as long as people listen to rock, pop, soul, or R&B, there'll be people listening to "Stand By Me".
This week, Justin & Gurdip return to their coverage of Elvis' non-movie recording sessions. First up are the sessions that not only produced his first Christmas album but also the smash hit "Don't" but also led to a rift between Elvis and his band members. Skipping ahead a few months (and a draft notice), the guys also explore the final sessions with Scotty & Bill in early 1958. With a couple Frankenstein'd masters, tracks that remained unreleased for years, and failed attempts to capture the broad pop style Elvis would only begin to master upon his return, do these sessions bear out that theory that Elvis was ready to step beyond the rock sound (and country players) that skyrocketed him to fame? Then, for Song of the Week, Gurdip takes us to the fair with his fluffy pick from a 1962 Elvis flick, while Justin goes for Elvis' cover of the hard-hitting Little Walter rocker, "My Babe." Featured Songs of the Week: Gurdip: Take Me To the Fair Justin: My Babe
Sintonía: "Theme from Route 66" - Nelson Riddle Orchestra "The Jazz in You" - Gloria Lynne; "Bag´s Groove" - The Modern Jazz Quartet; "Image (Part 2)" - Hank Levine; "Young Man Blues" - Mose Allison; "My Babe" - Sonny Jackson; "The Work Song" - Nat Adderley; "(They Call It) Stormy Monday" - Lou Rawls & Les McCann; "Take The Last Train Home" - King Curtis & The Shirelles; "Little Liza Jane" - Ramsey Lewis Trio; "Let´s Have a Natural Ball" - Albert King; "The Peeper" - Hank Crawford; "Green Door" - Eskew Reeder; "Never Will I Marry" - Nancy Wilson with Cannonball Adderley; "Steppin´Out" - Memphis Slim; "Night and Day" - Frances Faye; "Space Flight" - Sam Lazar with Grant Green y "Jelly Bread" - Booker T & The MG´s Escuchar audio
Episode eighty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Apache", by the Shadows, and at the three years in which they and Cliff Richard were on top of the music world. Patreon backers also have a fifteen-minute bonus episode, on "Handy Man" by Jimmy Jones. My apologies for the lateness of this episode, which is due to my home Internet connection having been out for a week. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more---- Resources As usual, I have put together a Mixcloud mix with every song excerpted in this podcast. This four-CD set contains all the singles and EPs released by Cliff Richard and the Shadows, together and separately, between 1958 and 1962. Meanwhile, this six-CD set contains every recording the Shadows made on their own between 1959 and 1966, for a very low price. Pete Frame's The Restless Generation is the best book available looking at British 50s rock and roll from a historical perspective. Be warned, though -- his jokey and irreverent style can, when dealing with people like Larry Parnes (who was gay and Jewish) very occasionally tip over into reinforcing homophobic and anti-semitic stereotypes for an easy laugh. Some of the information on Royston Ellis and Norrie Paramor comes from the extended edition of Mark Lewisohn's Tune In, which is essential reading for anyone who is interested in the Beatles, British post-war culture, and British post-war music. This volume contains Royston Ellis' two very slim books, one on Cliff and one on the Shadows, written for a teen audience in 1960 and 61. They are more of historical interest than anything else. And Cliff Richard: The Biography by Steve Turner is very positive towards Richard, but not at the expense of honesty. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today we're going to look at the group that, more than any other, made the guitar group the standard for rock music; the group which made the Fender Stratocaster the single most popular guitar in the world; and who dominated the British charts for much of the early 1960s. We're going to look at the Shadows: [Excerpt: The Shadows: "Apache"] We talked about Cliff Richard four months ago, but we've not yet looked at his backing group in any great detail. That's because his group at the time of "Move It", the single we looked at back then, was not the group that would end up becoming famous for backing him. We only mentioned in the last few minutes of that episode how his original backing band, the Drifters, were replaced one at a time by Hank Marvin, Bruce Welch, Jet Harris and Tony Meehan, most of whom had been members of the Vipers at one point or another during that group's commercial decline. This group, still calling themselves the Drifters, went into Abbey Road studios with Cliff in February 1959, to record Richard's first album -- a live album in front of a studio audience. The album was mostly made up of rather anaemic cover versions of American records, though drawing from a rather wider pool than one might expect -- as well as ballads like Ritchie Valens' "Donna" and rockabilly covers like "Baby I Don't Care" and "That'll Be the Day", there were also attempts at styles like Chicago blues, with a cover version of "My Babe", the song Willie Dixon had written for Little Walter: [Excerpt: Cliff Richard and the Drifters, "My Babe"] The album also featured two instrumentals by the Drifters, one of which was "Jet Black", named after Jet Harris, who was the de facto leader of the band at this time. Harris was a very experienced musician long before joining the group. He had played bass with Tony Crombie and the Rockets, the very first ever British rock and roll band, and Crombie had told him about a new instrument -- the electric bass guitar. Harris had obtained one, and seems to have been the very first British musician to play an electric bass. His bass was a signature of the band's early work, and it gets the spotlight in "Jet Black": [Excerpt: Cliff Richard and the Drifters, "Jet Black"] It was around this time that Hank Marvin ended up being the first British musician to play a solid-body electric guitar -- and a Fender Stratocaster at that. At the time we're talking about, there were import restrictions on many goods from America -- at the time, most economies were a lot more protectionist than they are these days, and the doctrine of free trade hadn't taken a foothold -- and so there were literally no American electric guitars in the UK, and there were no British manufacturers of them. Every British electric guitar player was playing a hollow-bodied guitar -- what we'd these days call a semi-acoustic or electro-acoustic guitar. But Cliff Richard was determined that his guitarist was going to have the best instrument. An instrument that was suitable for his music. While Cliff was portrayed as England's Elvis, and always credited Elvis as his inspiration, he had another favourite American singer, Ricky Nelson, whose softer style appealed to him, and was closer to the music that he ended up making: [Excerpt: Ricky Nelson, "Poor Little Fool"] Nelson's lead guitarist was James Burton, who Hank Marvin admired almost as much as Cliff admired Nelson. Burton had got his start playing on Dale Hawkins' "Suzy Q": [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, "Suzy Q"] But at this point, as well as playing for Nelson, he was making a reputation as the best session guitarist on the West Coast of America -- so much of a reputation that even musicians in Britain knew his name. So it made sense that they should get Marvin the guitar that Burton played. They knew it was a Fender guitar, but they didn't know anything else, so they got themselves a Fender catalogue sent over from the US. Looking through it, they recognised one guitar, the Stratocaster, as being the one Buddy Holly played. It was also the most expensive, and the coolest-looking, so it must be the one that Burton played, right? As it turns out, Burton didn't play a Stratocaster, but a Telecaster, but they didn't know that until much later, and so Cliff Richard sent off the equivalent of several months' worth of Marvin's salary to have a Stratocaster shipped over and pay the import taxes. While they were waiting for it, though, there were records to be made -- and some of those records were ones that nobody involved was particularly interested in making. Cliff had started up a film career in parallel with his musical career. His first film was an attempt at an "issue" film, about teen pregnancy and false rape accusations, which featured him in a very minor role as a juvenile delinquent. In the film, he had to sing three songs written by Lionel Bart, who had written Tommy Steele's hits, and he didn't realise until afterwards that his film contract stipulated that one of them must be released as a single. The one that was chosen was "Living Doll". The problem was that Richard loathed the song. He thought it was an attempt at sounding like an American rock and roll record, but one that completely missed everything that made American rock and roll exciting. He flat-out refused to do it. And then Norrie Paramor came up with an ingenious scheme. Paramor was Richard's producer at EMI, and in a couple of years he became notorious in Britain when a jealous colleague, George Martin, leaked one of his scams to the TV presenter David Frost. Paramor would regularly write songs under pseudonyms, and get his artists to record them as B-sides, so he would get the same royalties from the record sales as the composer of the hit on the A-side. He apparently used thirty-six different pseudonyms, and was so widely known for this in the industry that people would sing of him "Oh I Do Like To See Me On The B-Side". Paramor earned enough money from his songwriting sideline that he owned a speedboat, a second home at the seaside, and an E-type Jag, while George Martin, ostensibly on the same salary, had a second-hand Mini. But for once, Paramor was going to be able to get the A-side to a single, and present it as doing his artist a favour. He explained to Richard that one way to be sure he'd never have to put out "Living Doll" as a single would be if he'd already put out a single with a similar name. So if, say, Paramor were to write him a song called "Livin' Lovin' Doll", then there'd be no way they could put out "Living Doll" -- and, if anyone had seen the film and *did* want "Living Doll", well, that would be free promotion for Paramor's song. "Livin' Lovin' Doll" went to number twenty on the charts: [Excerpt: Cliff Richard and the Drifters, "Livin' Lovin' Doll"] But, as it turned out, the contracts didn't say anything about only releasing a single if you didn't have a good reason not to. Cliff still had to release the song he'd sung in the film. But he decided he wasn't going to release that recording -- he was going to get the band to rearrange it into something that he could live with. The band members put their heads together, and decided that the song might work in a country direction, perhaps with a little of that Ricky Nelson soft-rock feel that Cliff liked. So, grudgingly, they recorded a slowed-down, acoustic version of "Living Doll". Which promptly became Cliff's first UK number one, as well as becoming a minor hit in the USA: [Excerpt: Cliff Richard and the Drifters, "Living Doll"] Meanwhile, the Drifters were doing some stuff on the sidelines by themselves, too, including backing a beat poet. British popular culture in the late 1950s and early 1960s was largely, if not solely, made up of poor imitations of American pop culture, usually without any understanding of what that culture was. The phrase "cargo cult" is one that reinforces a number of unpleasant stereotypes, and as far as I can tell the story on which the phrase is based is a gross misunderstanding, but if you imagine the cargo cult as it is popularly imagined, much of British pop culture was a cargo cult imitation of America, with signifiers yanked completely out of their contexts and placed in wholly new ones. The British musicians we've looked at so far have been the ones that were the most innovative, the least tied to their American inspirations, and yet I'm sure you've been able to detect even in them the sense that they were the ersatz version of the American rock stars, the Cheez-wizz to Elvis Presley's fine mature Stilton, a collection of sneers and hip swivels and "uh-huh"s performed in the vain hope that by doing so they could invoke some of the magic of the King of Rock and Roll. But it wasn't just popular culture that was like this -- even the Bohemian underground were trying desperately to copy American models. We've already seen how the skiffle craze came out of trad music, which was in itself an attempt to replicate the music made by black American musicians in New Orleans some thirty or forty years earlier. In the visual arts, there was Pop Art, which was, to start with, a purely British artistic phenomenon, but it was one made up of recycled Americana. A work like Richard Hamilton's 1956 collage Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? was made up entirely of images found in American magazines sent over to Britain. Pop Art was interested in commenting on mass culture, but Hamilton wasn't interested in commenting on culture that British people would have any experience of -- he uses an image of a Young Romance comic cover, drawn by Jack Kirby, rather than Biffo the Bear or Desperate Dan, and the advert the collage was based on was from Ladies Home Journal, not Home Chat. And so in the late 1950s Britain got its own Beat Poet, Royston Ellis. Ellis was a bearded bisexual teenage speed freak, who hung around in Soho, which was, not coincidentally, simultaneously the gayest place in Britain, the most ethnically diverse, the artiest, and the place where every fifties British rock and roll artist came from. For all that the dozens of identikit Larry Parnes artists were made to a showbiz formula, British rock and roll was still fundamentally intertwined with the Bohemian subculture, and there were usually at most only two degrees of separation between some spotty bequiffed youth pinup in the teen magazines and a bearded folk-singing physics lecturer who went on Ban the Bomb marches every weekend. Ellis managed to parlay being willing to say controversial things like "many teenagers quite like drugs" and "some teenagers have sex before marriage" into a "spokesman for his generation" role, with regular appearances on TV. And so when he decided that he was going to copy the American Beat poets and perform in front of musicians, he wasn't going to just go for jazz musicians like they did. He was going to continue being the voice of a generation by performing the music that would go with his talk of sex and drugs -- he was going to perform his poetry backed by rock and roll music, what he called “rocketry”. And when you think of sex and drugs and rock and roll, obviously your first thought is of Cliff Richard. And so it was that Royston Ellis struck up a friendship with Cliff. Ellis' first book of beat poetry was dedicated to Cliff, and Cliff's first attempt at autobiography was dedicated to Royston. And Cliff's backing band became Ellis' backing band: [Excerpt: Royston Ellis and the Shadows, "Gone Man Squared"] That wasn't all the Drifters were doing without Cliff. They were encouraged by Cliff to make their own records -- it made him look better if his backing band were famous in their own right, and it would make the tours more attractive if both Cliff and the Drifters were star names, and so they went into Abbey Road themselves to record their first single, which is actually strikingly like the Merseybeat music that would become famous a few years later -- Everly Brothers-inspired harmonies, but with the electric guitar more prominent than on the Everlys' records, and sung in an English accent. Even the scream as they went into the guitar solo sounds very familiar if you've spent a lot of time listening to records from 1963 and 64. Remember again that this is 1959: [Excerpt: The Drifters, "Feeling Fine"] That was unsuccessful. By this time, though, Hank Marvin's Fender had arrived, and he was using it on records like Cliff's second number one, "Travellin' Light": [Excerpt: Cliff Richard and the Shadows, "Travellin' Light"] That single was also the first to bear a new credit -- rather than by Cliff Richard and the Drifters, it was credited to Cliff Richard and the Shadows. It turns out that if you want to release records in the US by a new group made up of geeky-looking white British teenagers, putting it out under the name of an established black vocal group who are climbing the charts with their own massive hit is a good way to get legal letters and have to withdraw the release. Jet Harris and Hank Marvin went to the pub to discuss a new name, and Harris suggested "The Shadows", because they were always standing in Cliff Richard's shadow. Their first single under the Shadows name, "Lonesome Fella", was a hybrid of country and doo-wop, with backing vocals that were more than a little reminiscent of the Del-Vikings' "Come Go With Me": [Excerpt: The Shadows, "Lonesome Fella"] That was also unsuccessful, and it seemed that for the time being the Shadows' time was best spent working as a backing group, either with Cliff Richard or Royston Ellis. But Ellis worked with other musicians too. For example here's a TV appearance with John Betjeman from very early 1961, where Ellis is accompanied by a single guitar: [Excerpt: Royston Ellis, “Lumbering Now”] The guitar there was played by a young musician Ellis had discovered named Jimmy Page. And in summer 1960, Ellis went up to Liverpool and met a band there that had been formed by a couple of art students and their younger friends. He got them to back him on stage and introduced them to drugs (showing them how at the time you could open up an inhaler to get at the amphetamine inside). He was impressed enough by them that in July 1960 an article appeared about him in Record Mirror, reading in part "the bearded sage of the coffee bars has not always been satisfied with the accompaniment provided, so he's thinking of bringing down to London a young backing group which he considers is most in accord with his poetry. The name of the group? The Beetles!" When Tony Meehan saw that, he got annoyed -- Meehan was the Shadow who, more than any of the others, was interested in being properly artistic. He'd thought that they were doing something worthwhile with Ellis, and didn't appreciate having their accompaniment dismissed like that in favour of some nobodies from Liverpool. Ellis had to write to the Record Mirror "clarifying" his previous remarks: "These remarks were not intended as disparaging comments on the many excellent groups I have worked with on television and stage shows -- groups such as Cliff Richard's Shadows and the London group The Red Cats. For some time I have been searching for a group to use regularly, and I feel that "The Beetles" (most of them are Liverpool ex-art students) fill the bill. However, I am looking forward to working with other groups as well, and plans are at the moment underway for television appearances with both Bert Weedon and with The Shadows." As it turned out, Ellis never did bring the Beatles down to London -- when he turned twenty, he declared that as he was now middle-aged, he could no longer function as the voice of the teenagers, and turned to travelling and writing novels. You'll notice that in Ellis' apology, he refers to "Cliff Richard's Shadows", because at this point they were still just Cliff's backing band in the eyes of the public. That was going to change that same month, and it was about to change, in part, because of someone else Ellis mentioned there -- Bert Weedon. Weedon is someone who, when I pencilled in my initial list of songs to cover, was down as a definite. I was going to look at his record "Guitar Boogie Shuffle": [Excerpt: Bert Weedon, "Guitar Boogie Shuffle"] But unfortunately, it turned out that the tiny amount of information about Weedon available made it impossible to write a full episode about him, even though he had a career that lasted sixty years and was one of the most important people in British music history. But to boil it down to its basics, Bert Weedon was a jazz guitarist, at a time when the guitar was not the prominent instrument it has been since the sixties. When he was growing up in the twenties and thirties, as he would put it, the only time you'd see a guitar was being held by a singing cowboy in a film. There were almost no guitarists in Britain, and he soon became the first-call session player any time anyone in Britain was making a record that needed guitar. Then came both rock and roll and the skiffle boom. Most of Weedon's contemporaries were bitterly contemptuous of the new music, but the way he saw it, for the first time in his lifetime people were starting to make a decent living out of the guitar, and he wanted in. While his jazz friends started sneering at him and calling him "boogie Bert", for the first couple of years of British rock and roll he played on almost every record that came out. But his biggest contribution to music came with a book called "Play in a Day". That book was the first guitar tutorial published in the UK to attempt to show young players how to play the instrument in a way that got them playing songs quickly. While it's creakily old-fashioned today, Weedon did know that what kids wanted was to learn a couple of chords so they could accompany themselves playing a song, rather than to have to practice scales for months before moving on to anything more interesting. These days there are much better books, and Weedon's book looks exactly like all those older books it was replacing, but at the time it was a revelation. A lot of guitarists are credited as having learned from Weedon's book, some of them almost certainly apocryphally. But while it's been superseded by many better books, it was a massive seller in its time, and sold over two million copies. It's safe to say that at the very least every British guitarist we look at over the next hundred or so episodes will have had a look at Weedon's book, and many of them will have learned their first chords from it. Weedon had been a session musician and writer, but not a star musician in his own right, until he released his single "Guitar Boogie Shuffle" in 1959. It was a cover version of a hillbilly boogie called "Guitar Boogie", by Arthur "Guitar Boogie" Smith, and Weedon's version became a hit, reaching number ten in the UK -- the first British guitar instrumental to make the top ten: [Excerpt: Bert Weedon, "Guitar Boogie"] Dick Rowe, the boss of Top Rank Records, for which Weedon recorded at the time, had disliked that song so much that Weedon had tried to record it under a pseudonym for another label, because Rowe wouldn't put it out. But it became a hit, and started a run of instrumental hits for Weedon. After he'd had four hits along the lines of "Guitar Boogie Shuffle", Weedon was sent a piece of sheet music by the publishers Francis, Day, and Hunter. "Apache" was a song inspired by a 1954 western, and written by a young songwriter called Jerry Lordan. Lordan was a minor British singer, who'd had a recent hit with "I'll Stay Single": [Excerpt: Jerry Lordan, "I'll Stay Single"] But while he was a mildly successful singer, he was much more successful as a songwriter, writing Anthony Newley's top five hit "I've Waited So Long": [Excerpt: Anthony Newley, "I've Waited So Long"] And "A House, a Car, and a Wedding Ring", which had the unusual distinction for a British song of getting an American cover version, by Dale Hawkins: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, "A House, a Car, and a Wedding Ring"] Lordan's song, "Apache", seemed to be the kind of thing that Bert Weedon could do well, and Weedon recorded a version of it some time in late 1959 or early 1960: [Excerpt: Bert Weedon, "Apache"] Weedon also started performing the song in his shows and on TV. But the recording hadn't been released yet -- according to Weedon, he was planning on releasing the single in September, because that was when the most records were sold. But Lordan didn't want to wait until September for his song to come out on a record, so while he was on tour with Cliff and the Shadows, he showed the tune to Jet Harris on his ukulele. The group liked the tune, and released it as their second single under their new name. Hank Marvin had by this time been given a guitar echo unit by Joe Brown, who'd bought it and then disliked it. He used it on this record, along with another innovation -- the tremolo arm on his guitar. A tremolo arm, sometimes called a whammy bar, is a metal bar on your guitar that allows you to bend all the strings at once, and nobody else in Britain had a guitar with one at this point, but Hank had his Fender Stratocaster, on which they come fitted as standard. The combination of the tremolo arm and the echo unit was a sound that no-one else in the UK had, but which was strikingly similar to some of the surf music being made in the US, which was still mostly on tiny labels with no distribution over here: [Excerpt: The Shadows, "Apache"] "Apache" went to number one on the charts, knocking off "Please Don't Tease", a track by Cliff with the Shadows backing him. It stayed on the charts for five months, and became a standard performed by every British guitarist -- and soon by American guitarists like the Ventures. Weedon's version was rushed out to compete with it, but only made number twenty-four. Many versions of the song have become classics in their own right, and I won't go through all the hit versions here because this is a long episode anyway, but I do have to mention one version -- a novelty version recorded as album filler by a group of session musicians hired to make an album under the name The Incredible Bongo Band: [Excerpt: The Incredible Bongo Band, "Apache"] The guitarist on that, incidentally, is Mike Deasy, who we heard last week playing with Bruce Johnston and Sandy Nelson in various bands, and who had been in Eddie Cochran's backing band. That track includes a drum break, with bongos by King Errisson, and drums probably played by Jim Gordon, which is probably the most sampled recording of all time, and certainly in the top ten: [Excerpt: The Incredible Bongo Band, "Apache", drum breaks] That's been sampled by everyone from the Roots to Madonna, Vanilla Ice to Amy Winehouse, Rage Against the Machine to Kanye West. It's been called "hip-hop's national anthem", and there's a whole ninety-minute documentary on Netflix just about that track. But getting back to 1960 and the Shadows' version of the tune, it came as a revelation to many British kids, inspiring thousands of young boys who had already learned the guitar to start playing *electric* guitar, and making everyone who wanted to be a rock and roll star covet a Stratocaster specifically (with a few odd exceptions who reacted against what was popular, like there always are). Pete Townshend, for example, in a documentary earlier this year said that hearing "Apache" was for him even more important than his first orgasm. "Apache" stayed on the charts so long that the group's next single, "Man of Mystery", went to number five in the charts while "Apache" was still in the top forty: [Excerpt: The Shadows, "Man of Mystery"] And while that was at number five, "Nine Times Out of Ten" by Cliff Richard and the Shadows was at number three. Between 1959 and 1965, Cliff had twenty-six consecutive top ten hit singles, of which twenty-one had the Shadows (or the Drifters) as his backing group. In the same time period, the Shadows had a run of thirteen top ten hits in their own right. They were a phenomenon in British music like nothing anyone had ever seen. They appeared in a series of films, starring Richard, who was in 1962 and 63 a bigger draw at the British cinema than the early James Bond films. Neither Cliff nor the Shadows ever had much American success, but in Europe and Australia, and from 1962 on in Canada, they were at the very peak of success in the music industry. Everything seemed to be going perfectly for Cliff and the Shadows, even when in 1961 a bizarre love triangle upended everything. Jet Harris, who was at the time the band member who was closest to Cliff, had married a beautiful young woman called Carol Costa, without realising that she had never really been interested in him, but was using him to get to Cliff. Cliff and Costa started an affair, Harris became physically abusive towards Costa, she -- quite rightly -- left him, and he spiralled into depression and alcoholism. Cliff and Costa's affair didn't last long either -- but as it turned out, she would be the only woman with whom he would ever have sex. Richard's sexuality or lack of it has been the subject of a huge amount of discussion over the years. For many decades he said he was straight but celibate because of his religious views -- that he couldn't get married without disappointing his female fans, and that he felt sex outside marriage was wrong. In more recent years he's switched the wording he uses, saying his sexuality is his own business, that he'll never talk about it publicly, that he has a live-in male companion, and that it shouldn't matter to anyone what his sexuality is. Most descriptions of him from those who've known him over the decades have said that he was and is someone who is simply not very interested in sex. I mention this not to engage in prurient speculation about him, but to show how utterly bizarre it is that the one woman he would ever have sex with would be the wife of a friend and colleague. More in character, though, was the way he would dump Costa -- as was so often the case with Cliff Richard when discarding people for whom he had no further use, he got someone else to do it. In this case it was Tony Meehan who was given the task of letting her know that Cliff had suddenly developed moral scruples. Those moral scruples would soon get a lot more scrupulous, as this affair would indirectly lead to the most famous religious conversion in all of British music history. Shortly after dumping Costa on Cliff's behalf, Tony Meehan left the group, just before a tour of Australia and New Zealand. Meehan had slowly become disenchanted with the rest of the group, and didn't really fit in with them -- he was an intellectual who read books about the history of folk music and jazz, and wanted one day to write a history of Soho's music scene in the style of books he'd read about New Orleans, while the rest of them just liked reading thrillers. When he left, the group's second number one, "Kon-Tiki", was still at the top of the charts: [Excerpt: The Shadows, "Kon-Tiki"] He was replaced by Brian Bennett, who had played in the very first lineup of Vince Taylor and the Playboys, and had been in Marty Wilde's Wildcats for a while. Jet Harris lasted in the group another few months, until April 1962, when the drink caught up with him and he was fired. Bennett suggested that the group get in his old friend Licorice Locking, who he'd played with in the Vipers, the Playboys, and the Wildcats, and who had played with Bennett on those Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent Saturday Club sessions we heard a couple of weeks back. Locking was a fine bass player, had played with most of them before back in their 2is days, and fitted in perfectly, though he had a very different playing style than Harris -- many hardcore Shadows fans think the group's golden age ended when Harris left, and he's rated enough as a bass player that while there are currently no substantial books on the Shadows themselves still in print, there are two separate self-published biographies of Harris available. Within a month of being fired, Harris had his own solo hit, making the top thirty with a version of "Besame Mucho" modelled on the Coasters' version, but with Harris playing lead bass instead of singing: [Excerpt: Jet Harris, "Besame Mucho"] But Locking would have an odd effect on the Shadows. Brian Bennett had been brought up as a Jehovah's Witness, and even though he was no longer a believer in that religion, he'd told Locking about its beliefs -- and Locking had become an enthusiastic convert. As soon as he joined the group, he set about trying to convert the other members, too. He succeeded with Hank Marvin, who to this day is a devoted Witness, and he came part way with Cliff, who never became a Witness but was inspired by Locking's Bible-reading sessions to become an evangelical Christian, and who is now British rock music's most famously religious person. Meanwhile, Harris had switched from bass to guitar, and was now going in a more Duane Eddy style. He teamed up with Tony Meehan, and together they recorded another Jerry Lordan song, "Diamonds", featuring Royston Ellis' friend Jimmy Page on rhythm guitar, on his first major session: [Excerpt: Jet Harris and Tony Meehan, "Diamonds"] At the beginning of 1963, Cliff and the Shadows, past and present, had a ridiculous monopoly of the top of the charts. "Bachelor Boy" by Cliff and the Shadows, written by Cliff and Bruce Welch, was at number one for three weeks, then was replaced by "Dance On" by the Shadows, which in turn was replaced by "Diamonds" by Jet and Tony. There was a brief three-week respite while Frank Ifield topped the charts with his "Wayward Wind", then "Summer Holiday" by Cliff and the Shadows, written by Bruce and Brian. Then "Foot Tapper" by the Shadows went to number one, then "Summer Holiday" went back to the top position. They all looked unstoppable. However, while they would all chart again, it would be two years before Cliff would have another number one, and neither the Shadows nor Jet and Tony ever would. In the case of Cliff and the Shadows, this change in commercial fortunes was because of a general change in the music market, which we'll be looking at towards the end of the year. In the case of Jet and Tony, though, that was only part of it. Jet was in a car accident which put him out of commission for a while, and when he got better he was drinking even more. He made a brief attempt at a comeback and even joined an early lineup of the Jeff Beck Group, but spent the rest of his life either working labouring jobs or playing the nostalgia circuit. He died in 2011. Jet and Tony's touring bass player, John Paul Jones, actually auditioned for the Shadows, as Licorice Locking left the group to spend more time evangelising, but Jones didn't get the job, and we'll be picking up on him later. We'll be seeing Cliff again too, as well as having a brief appearance from Tony Meehan, but this is the last we'll see of the Shadows, who continued with a variety of different bass players, and with Brian Bennett as the permanent drummer, off and on until 2015. Marvin, Bennett, and Welch all continue to make music separately, and it's still possible they may perform together as the Shadows one day. But even if they don't, "Apache" stands as the moment when a million British kids first decided that they wanted to be a guitar hero and play a Fender Stratocaster.
Episode eighty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Apache”, by the Shadows, and at the three years in which they and Cliff Richard were on top of the music world. Patreon backers also have a fifteen-minute bonus episode, on “Handy Man” by Jimmy Jones. My apologies for the lateness of this episode, which is due to my home Internet connection having been out for a week. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—- Resources As usual, I have put together a Mixcloud mix with every song excerpted in this podcast. This four-CD set contains all the singles and EPs released by Cliff Richard and the Shadows, together and separately, between 1958 and 1962. Meanwhile, this six-CD set contains every recording the Shadows made on their own between 1959 and 1966, for a very low price. Pete Frame’s The Restless Generation is the best book available looking at British 50s rock and roll from a historical perspective. Be warned, though — his jokey and irreverent style can, when dealing with people like Larry Parnes (who was gay and Jewish) very occasionally tip over into reinforcing homophobic and anti-semitic stereotypes for an easy laugh. Some of the information on Royston Ellis and Norrie Paramor comes from the extended edition of Mark Lewisohn’s Tune In, which is essential reading for anyone who is interested in the Beatles, British post-war culture, and British post-war music. This volume contains Royston Ellis’ two very slim books, one on Cliff and one on the Shadows, written for a teen audience in 1960 and 61. They are more of historical interest than anything else. And Cliff Richard: The Biography by Steve Turner is very positive towards Richard, but not at the expense of honesty. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today we’re going to look at the group that, more than any other, made the guitar group the standard for rock music; the group which made the Fender Stratocaster the single most popular guitar in the world; and who dominated the British charts for much of the early 1960s. We’re going to look at the Shadows: [Excerpt: The Shadows: “Apache”] We talked about Cliff Richard four months ago, but we’ve not yet looked at his backing group in any great detail. That’s because his group at the time of “Move It”, the single we looked at back then, was not the group that would end up becoming famous for backing him. We only mentioned in the last few minutes of that episode how his original backing band, the Drifters, were replaced one at a time by Hank Marvin, Bruce Welch, Jet Harris and Tony Meehan, most of whom had been members of the Vipers at one point or another during that group’s commercial decline. This group, still calling themselves the Drifters, went into Abbey Road studios with Cliff in February 1959, to record Richard’s first album — a live album in front of a studio audience. The album was mostly made up of rather anaemic cover versions of American records, though drawing from a rather wider pool than one might expect — as well as ballads like Ritchie Valens’ “Donna” and rockabilly covers like “Baby I Don’t Care” and “That’ll Be the Day”, there were also attempts at styles like Chicago blues, with a cover version of “My Babe”, the song Willie Dixon had written for Little Walter: [Excerpt: Cliff Richard and the Drifters, “My Babe”] The album also featured two instrumentals by the Drifters, one of which was “Jet Black”, named after Jet Harris, who was the de facto leader of the band at this time. Harris was a very experienced musician long before joining the group. He had played bass with Tony Crombie and the Rockets, the very first ever British rock and roll band, and Crombie had told him about a new instrument — the electric bass guitar. Harris had obtained one, and seems to have been the very first British musician to play an electric bass. His bass was a signature of the band’s early work, and it gets the spotlight in “Jet Black”: [Excerpt: Cliff Richard and the Drifters, “Jet Black”] It was around this time that Hank Marvin ended up being the first British musician to play a solid-body electric guitar — and a Fender Stratocaster at that. At the time we’re talking about, there were import restrictions on many goods from America — at the time, most economies were a lot more protectionist than they are these days, and the doctrine of free trade hadn’t taken a foothold — and so there were literally no American electric guitars in the UK, and there were no British manufacturers of them. Every British electric guitar player was playing a hollow-bodied guitar — what we’d these days call a semi-acoustic or electro-acoustic guitar. But Cliff Richard was determined that his guitarist was going to have the best instrument. An instrument that was suitable for his music. While Cliff was portrayed as England’s Elvis, and always credited Elvis as his inspiration, he had another favourite American singer, Ricky Nelson, whose softer style appealed to him, and was closer to the music that he ended up making: [Excerpt: Ricky Nelson, “Poor Little Fool”] Nelson’s lead guitarist was James Burton, who Hank Marvin admired almost as much as Cliff admired Nelson. Burton had got his start playing on Dale Hawkins’ “Suzy Q”: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “Suzy Q”] But at this point, as well as playing for Nelson, he was making a reputation as the best session guitarist on the West Coast of America — so much of a reputation that even musicians in Britain knew his name. So it made sense that they should get Marvin the guitar that Burton played. They knew it was a Fender guitar, but they didn’t know anything else, so they got themselves a Fender catalogue sent over from the US. Looking through it, they recognised one guitar, the Stratocaster, as being the one Buddy Holly played. It was also the most expensive, and the coolest-looking, so it must be the one that Burton played, right? As it turns out, Burton didn’t play a Stratocaster, but a Telecaster, but they didn’t know that until much later, and so Cliff Richard sent off the equivalent of several months’ worth of Marvin’s salary to have a Stratocaster shipped over and pay the import taxes. While they were waiting for it, though, there were records to be made — and some of those records were ones that nobody involved was particularly interested in making. Cliff had started up a film career in parallel with his musical career. His first film was an attempt at an “issue” film, about teen pregnancy and false rape accusations, which featured him in a very minor role as a juvenile delinquent. In the film, he had to sing three songs written by Lionel Bart, who had written Tommy Steele’s hits, and he didn’t realise until afterwards that his film contract stipulated that one of them must be released as a single. The one that was chosen was “Living Doll”. The problem was that Richard loathed the song. He thought it was an attempt at sounding like an American rock and roll record, but one that completely missed everything that made American rock and roll exciting. He flat-out refused to do it. And then Norrie Paramor came up with an ingenious scheme. Paramor was Richard’s producer at EMI, and in a couple of years he became notorious in Britain when a jealous colleague, George Martin, leaked one of his scams to the TV presenter David Frost. Paramor would regularly write songs under pseudonyms, and get his artists to record them as B-sides, so he would get the same royalties from the record sales as the composer of the hit on the A-side. He apparently used thirty-six different pseudonyms, and was so widely known for this in the industry that people would sing of him “Oh I Do Like To See Me On The B-Side”. Paramor earned enough money from his songwriting sideline that he owned a speedboat, a second home at the seaside, and an E-type Jag, while George Martin, ostensibly on the same salary, had a second-hand Mini. But for once, Paramor was going to be able to get the A-side to a single, and present it as doing his artist a favour. He explained to Richard that one way to be sure he’d never have to put out “Living Doll” as a single would be if he’d already put out a single with a similar name. So if, say, Paramor were to write him a song called “Livin’ Lovin’ Doll”, then there’d be no way they could put out “Living Doll” — and, if anyone had seen the film and *did* want “Living Doll”, well, that would be free promotion for Paramor’s song. “Livin’ Lovin’ Doll” went to number twenty on the charts: [Excerpt: Cliff Richard and the Drifters, “Livin’ Lovin’ Doll”] But, as it turned out, the contracts didn’t say anything about only releasing a single if you didn’t have a good reason not to. Cliff still had to release the song he’d sung in the film. But he decided he wasn’t going to release that recording — he was going to get the band to rearrange it into something that he could live with. The band members put their heads together, and decided that the song might work in a country direction, perhaps with a little of that Ricky Nelson soft-rock feel that Cliff liked. So, grudgingly, they recorded a slowed-down, acoustic version of “Living Doll”. Which promptly became Cliff’s first UK number one, as well as becoming a minor hit in the USA: [Excerpt: Cliff Richard and the Drifters, “Living Doll”] Meanwhile, the Drifters were doing some stuff on the sidelines by themselves, too, including backing a beat poet. British popular culture in the late 1950s and early 1960s was largely, if not solely, made up of poor imitations of American pop culture, usually without any understanding of what that culture was. The phrase “cargo cult” is one that reinforces a number of unpleasant stereotypes, and as far as I can tell the story on which the phrase is based is a gross misunderstanding, but if you imagine the cargo cult as it is popularly imagined, much of British pop culture was a cargo cult imitation of America, with signifiers yanked completely out of their contexts and placed in wholly new ones. The British musicians we’ve looked at so far have been the ones that were the most innovative, the least tied to their American inspirations, and yet I’m sure you’ve been able to detect even in them the sense that they were the ersatz version of the American rock stars, the Cheez-wizz to Elvis Presley’s fine mature Stilton, a collection of sneers and hip swivels and “uh-huh”s performed in the vain hope that by doing so they could invoke some of the magic of the King of Rock and Roll. But it wasn’t just popular culture that was like this — even the Bohemian underground were trying desperately to copy American models. We’ve already seen how the skiffle craze came out of trad music, which was in itself an attempt to replicate the music made by black American musicians in New Orleans some thirty or forty years earlier. In the visual arts, there was Pop Art, which was, to start with, a purely British artistic phenomenon, but it was one made up of recycled Americana. A work like Richard Hamilton’s 1956 collage Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? was made up entirely of images found in American magazines sent over to Britain. Pop Art was interested in commenting on mass culture, but Hamilton wasn’t interested in commenting on culture that British people would have any experience of — he uses an image of a Young Romance comic cover, drawn by Jack Kirby, rather than Biffo the Bear or Desperate Dan, and the advert the collage was based on was from Ladies Home Journal, not Home Chat. And so in the late 1950s Britain got its own Beat Poet, Royston Ellis. Ellis was a bearded bisexual teenage speed freak, who hung around in Soho, which was, not coincidentally, simultaneously the gayest place in Britain, the most ethnically diverse, the artiest, and the place where every fifties British rock and roll artist came from. For all that the dozens of identikit Larry Parnes artists were made to a showbiz formula, British rock and roll was still fundamentally intertwined with the Bohemian subculture, and there were usually at most only two degrees of separation between some spotty bequiffed youth pinup in the teen magazines and a bearded folk-singing physics lecturer who went on Ban the Bomb marches every weekend. Ellis managed to parlay being willing to say controversial things like “many teenagers quite like drugs” and “some teenagers have sex before marriage” into a “spokesman for his generation” role, with regular appearances on TV. And so when he decided that he was going to copy the American Beat poets and perform in front of musicians, he wasn’t going to just go for jazz musicians like they did. He was going to continue being the voice of a generation by performing the music that would go with his talk of sex and drugs — he was going to perform his poetry backed by rock and roll music, what he called “rocketry”. And when you think of sex and drugs and rock and roll, obviously your first thought is of Cliff Richard. And so it was that Royston Ellis struck up a friendship with Cliff. Ellis’ first book of beat poetry was dedicated to Cliff, and Cliff’s first attempt at autobiography was dedicated to Royston. And Cliff’s backing band became Ellis’ backing band: [Excerpt: Royston Ellis and the Shadows, “Gone Man Squared”] That wasn’t all the Drifters were doing without Cliff. They were encouraged by Cliff to make their own records — it made him look better if his backing band were famous in their own right, and it would make the tours more attractive if both Cliff and the Drifters were star names, and so they went into Abbey Road themselves to record their first single, which is actually strikingly like the Merseybeat music that would become famous a few years later — Everly Brothers-inspired harmonies, but with the electric guitar more prominent than on the Everlys’ records, and sung in an English accent. Even the scream as they went into the guitar solo sounds very familiar if you’ve spent a lot of time listening to records from 1963 and 64. Remember again that this is 1959: [Excerpt: The Drifters, “Feeling Fine”] That was unsuccessful. By this time, though, Hank Marvin’s Fender had arrived, and he was using it on records like Cliff’s second number one, “Travellin’ Light”: [Excerpt: Cliff Richard and the Shadows, “Travellin’ Light”] That single was also the first to bear a new credit — rather than by Cliff Richard and the Drifters, it was credited to Cliff Richard and the Shadows. It turns out that if you want to release records in the US by a new group made up of geeky-looking white British teenagers, putting it out under the name of an established black vocal group who are climbing the charts with their own massive hit is a good way to get legal letters and have to withdraw the release. Jet Harris and Hank Marvin went to the pub to discuss a new name, and Harris suggested “The Shadows”, because they were always standing in Cliff Richard’s shadow. Their first single under the Shadows name, “Lonesome Fella”, was a hybrid of country and doo-wop, with backing vocals that were more than a little reminiscent of the Del-Vikings’ “Come Go With Me”: [Excerpt: The Shadows, “Lonesome Fella”] That was also unsuccessful, and it seemed that for the time being the Shadows’ time was best spent working as a backing group, either with Cliff Richard or Royston Ellis. But Ellis worked with other musicians too. For example here’s a TV appearance with John Betjeman from very early 1961, where Ellis is accompanied by a single guitar: [Excerpt: Royston Ellis, “Lumbering Now”] The guitar there was played by a young musician Ellis had discovered named Jimmy Page. And in summer 1960, Ellis went up to Liverpool and met a band there that had been formed by a couple of art students and their younger friends. He got them to back him on stage and introduced them to drugs (showing them how at the time you could open up an inhaler to get at the amphetamine inside). He was impressed enough by them that in July 1960 an article appeared about him in Record Mirror, reading in part “the bearded sage of the coffee bars has not always been satisfied with the accompaniment provided, so he’s thinking of bringing down to London a young backing group which he considers is most in accord with his poetry. The name of the group? The Beetles!” When Tony Meehan saw that, he got annoyed — Meehan was the Shadow who, more than any of the others, was interested in being properly artistic. He’d thought that they were doing something worthwhile with Ellis, and didn’t appreciate having their accompaniment dismissed like that in favour of some nobodies from Liverpool. Ellis had to write to the Record Mirror “clarifying” his previous remarks: “These remarks were not intended as disparaging comments on the many excellent groups I have worked with on television and stage shows — groups such as Cliff Richard’s Shadows and the London group The Red Cats. For some time I have been searching for a group to use regularly, and I feel that “The Beetles” (most of them are Liverpool ex-art students) fill the bill. However, I am looking forward to working with other groups as well, and plans are at the moment underway for television appearances with both Bert Weedon and with The Shadows.” As it turned out, Ellis never did bring the Beatles down to London — when he turned twenty, he declared that as he was now middle-aged, he could no longer function as the voice of the teenagers, and turned to travelling and writing novels. You’ll notice that in Ellis’ apology, he refers to “Cliff Richard’s Shadows”, because at this point they were still just Cliff’s backing band in the eyes of the public. That was going to change that same month, and it was about to change, in part, because of someone else Ellis mentioned there — Bert Weedon. Weedon is someone who, when I pencilled in my initial list of songs to cover, was down as a definite. I was going to look at his record “Guitar Boogie Shuffle”: [Excerpt: Bert Weedon, “Guitar Boogie Shuffle”] But unfortunately, it turned out that the tiny amount of information about Weedon available made it impossible to write a full episode about him, even though he had a career that lasted sixty years and was one of the most important people in British music history. But to boil it down to its basics, Bert Weedon was a jazz guitarist, at a time when the guitar was not the prominent instrument it has been since the sixties. When he was growing up in the twenties and thirties, as he would put it, the only time you’d see a guitar was being held by a singing cowboy in a film. There were almost no guitarists in Britain, and he soon became the first-call session player any time anyone in Britain was making a record that needed guitar. Then came both rock and roll and the skiffle boom. Most of Weedon’s contemporaries were bitterly contemptuous of the new music, but the way he saw it, for the first time in his lifetime people were starting to make a decent living out of the guitar, and he wanted in. While his jazz friends started sneering at him and calling him “boogie Bert”, for the first couple of years of British rock and roll he played on almost every record that came out. But his biggest contribution to music came with a book called “Play in a Day”. That book was the first guitar tutorial published in the UK to attempt to show young players how to play the instrument in a way that got them playing songs quickly. While it’s creakily old-fashioned today, Weedon did know that what kids wanted was to learn a couple of chords so they could accompany themselves playing a song, rather than to have to practice scales for months before moving on to anything more interesting. These days there are much better books, and Weedon’s book looks exactly like all those older books it was replacing, but at the time it was a revelation. A lot of guitarists are credited as having learned from Weedon’s book, some of them almost certainly apocryphally. But while it’s been superseded by many better books, it was a massive seller in its time, and sold over two million copies. It’s safe to say that at the very least every British guitarist we look at over the next hundred or so episodes will have had a look at Weedon’s book, and many of them will have learned their first chords from it. Weedon had been a session musician and writer, but not a star musician in his own right, until he released his single “Guitar Boogie Shuffle” in 1959. It was a cover version of a hillbilly boogie called “Guitar Boogie”, by Arthur “Guitar Boogie” Smith, and Weedon’s version became a hit, reaching number ten in the UK — the first British guitar instrumental to make the top ten: [Excerpt: Bert Weedon, “Guitar Boogie”] Dick Rowe, the boss of Top Rank Records, for which Weedon recorded at the time, had disliked that song so much that Weedon had tried to record it under a pseudonym for another label, because Rowe wouldn’t put it out. But it became a hit, and started a run of instrumental hits for Weedon. After he’d had four hits along the lines of “Guitar Boogie Shuffle”, Weedon was sent a piece of sheet music by the publishers Francis, Day, and Hunter. “Apache” was a song inspired by a 1954 western, and written by a young songwriter called Jerry Lordan. Lordan was a minor British singer, who’d had a recent hit with “I’ll Stay Single”: [Excerpt: Jerry Lordan, “I’ll Stay Single”] But while he was a mildly successful singer, he was much more successful as a songwriter, writing Anthony Newley’s top five hit “I’ve Waited So Long”: [Excerpt: Anthony Newley, “I’ve Waited So Long”] And “A House, a Car, and a Wedding Ring”, which had the unusual distinction for a British song of getting an American cover version, by Dale Hawkins: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “A House, a Car, and a Wedding Ring”] Lordan’s song, “Apache”, seemed to be the kind of thing that Bert Weedon could do well, and Weedon recorded a version of it some time in late 1959 or early 1960: [Excerpt: Bert Weedon, “Apache”] Weedon also started performing the song in his shows and on TV. But the recording hadn’t been released yet — according to Weedon, he was planning on releasing the single in September, because that was when the most records were sold. But Lordan didn’t want to wait until September for his song to come out on a record, so while he was on tour with Cliff and the Shadows, he showed the tune to Jet Harris on his ukulele. The group liked the tune, and released it as their second single under their new name. Hank Marvin had by this time been given a guitar echo unit by Joe Brown, who’d bought it and then disliked it. He used it on this record, along with another innovation — the tremolo arm on his guitar. A tremolo arm, sometimes called a whammy bar, is a metal bar on your guitar that allows you to bend all the strings at once, and nobody else in Britain had a guitar with one at this point, but Hank had his Fender Stratocaster, on which they come fitted as standard. The combination of the tremolo arm and the echo unit was a sound that no-one else in the UK had, but which was strikingly similar to some of the surf music being made in the US, which was still mostly on tiny labels with no distribution over here: [Excerpt: The Shadows, “Apache”] “Apache” went to number one on the charts, knocking off “Please Don’t Tease”, a track by Cliff with the Shadows backing him. It stayed on the charts for five months, and became a standard performed by every British guitarist — and soon by American guitarists like the Ventures. Weedon’s version was rushed out to compete with it, but only made number twenty-four. Many versions of the song have become classics in their own right, and I won’t go through all the hit versions here because this is a long episode anyway, but I do have to mention one version — a novelty version recorded as album filler by a group of session musicians hired to make an album under the name The Incredible Bongo Band: [Excerpt: The Incredible Bongo Band, “Apache”] The guitarist on that, incidentally, is Mike Deasy, who we heard last week playing with Bruce Johnston and Sandy Nelson in various bands, and who had been in Eddie Cochran’s backing band. That track includes a drum break, with bongos by King Errisson, and drums probably played by Jim Gordon, which is probably the most sampled recording of all time, and certainly in the top ten: [Excerpt: The Incredible Bongo Band, “Apache”, drum breaks] That’s been sampled by everyone from the Roots to Madonna, Vanilla Ice to Amy Winehouse, Rage Against the Machine to Kanye West. It’s been called “hip-hop’s national anthem”, and there’s a whole ninety-minute documentary on Netflix just about that track. But getting back to 1960 and the Shadows’ version of the tune, it came as a revelation to many British kids, inspiring thousands of young boys who had already learned the guitar to start playing *electric* guitar, and making everyone who wanted to be a rock and roll star covet a Stratocaster specifically (with a few odd exceptions who reacted against what was popular, like there always are). Pete Townshend, for example, in a documentary earlier this year said that hearing “Apache” was for him even more important than his first orgasm. “Apache” stayed on the charts so long that the group’s next single, “Man of Mystery”, went to number five in the charts while “Apache” was still in the top forty: [Excerpt: The Shadows, “Man of Mystery”] And while that was at number five, “Nine Times Out of Ten” by Cliff Richard and the Shadows was at number three. Between 1959 and 1965, Cliff had twenty-six consecutive top ten hit singles, of which twenty-one had the Shadows (or the Drifters) as his backing group. In the same time period, the Shadows had a run of thirteen top ten hits in their own right. They were a phenomenon in British music like nothing anyone had ever seen. They appeared in a series of films, starring Richard, who was in 1962 and 63 a bigger draw at the British cinema than the early James Bond films. Neither Cliff nor the Shadows ever had much American success, but in Europe and Australia, and from 1962 on in Canada, they were at the very peak of success in the music industry. Everything seemed to be going perfectly for Cliff and the Shadows, even when in 1961 a bizarre love triangle upended everything. Jet Harris, who was at the time the band member who was closest to Cliff, had married a beautiful young woman called Carol Costa, without realising that she had never really been interested in him, but was using him to get to Cliff. Cliff and Costa started an affair, Harris became physically abusive towards Costa, she — quite rightly — left him, and he spiralled into depression and alcoholism. Cliff and Costa’s affair didn’t last long either — but as it turned out, she would be the only woman with whom he would ever have sex. Richard’s sexuality or lack of it has been the subject of a huge amount of discussion over the years. For many decades he said he was straight but celibate because of his religious views — that he couldn’t get married without disappointing his female fans, and that he felt sex outside marriage was wrong. In more recent years he’s switched the wording he uses, saying his sexuality is his own business, that he’ll never talk about it publicly, that he has a live-in male companion, and that it shouldn’t matter to anyone what his sexuality is. Most descriptions of him from those who’ve known him over the decades have said that he was and is someone who is simply not very interested in sex. I mention this not to engage in prurient speculation about him, but to show how utterly bizarre it is that the one woman he would ever have sex with would be the wife of a friend and colleague. More in character, though, was the way he would dump Costa — as was so often the case with Cliff Richard when discarding people for whom he had no further use, he got someone else to do it. In this case it was Tony Meehan who was given the task of letting her know that Cliff had suddenly developed moral scruples. Those moral scruples would soon get a lot more scrupulous, as this affair would indirectly lead to the most famous religious conversion in all of British music history. Shortly after dumping Costa on Cliff’s behalf, Tony Meehan left the group, just before a tour of Australia and New Zealand. Meehan had slowly become disenchanted with the rest of the group, and didn’t really fit in with them — he was an intellectual who read books about the history of folk music and jazz, and wanted one day to write a history of Soho’s music scene in the style of books he’d read about New Orleans, while the rest of them just liked reading thrillers. When he left, the group’s second number one, “Kon-Tiki”, was still at the top of the charts: [Excerpt: The Shadows, “Kon-Tiki”] He was replaced by Brian Bennett, who had played in the very first lineup of Vince Taylor and the Playboys, and had been in Marty Wilde’s Wildcats for a while. Jet Harris lasted in the group another few months, until April 1962, when the drink caught up with him and he was fired. Bennett suggested that the group get in his old friend Licorice Locking, who he’d played with in the Vipers, the Playboys, and the Wildcats, and who had played with Bennett on those Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent Saturday Club sessions we heard a couple of weeks back. Locking was a fine bass player, had played with most of them before back in their 2is days, and fitted in perfectly, though he had a very different playing style than Harris — many hardcore Shadows fans think the group’s golden age ended when Harris left, and he’s rated enough as a bass player that while there are currently no substantial books on the Shadows themselves still in print, there are two separate self-published biographies of Harris available. Within a month of being fired, Harris had his own solo hit, making the top thirty with a version of “Besame Mucho” modelled on the Coasters’ version, but with Harris playing lead bass instead of singing: [Excerpt: Jet Harris, “Besame Mucho”] But Locking would have an odd effect on the Shadows. Brian Bennett had been brought up as a Jehovah’s Witness, and even though he was no longer a believer in that religion, he’d told Locking about its beliefs — and Locking had become an enthusiastic convert. As soon as he joined the group, he set about trying to convert the other members, too. He succeeded with Hank Marvin, who to this day is a devoted Witness, and he came part way with Cliff, who never became a Witness but was inspired by Locking’s Bible-reading sessions to become an evangelical Christian, and who is now British rock music’s most famously religious person. Meanwhile, Harris had switched from bass to guitar, and was now going in a more Duane Eddy style. He teamed up with Tony Meehan, and together they recorded another Jerry Lordan song, “Diamonds”, featuring Royston Ellis’ friend Jimmy Page on rhythm guitar, on his first major session: [Excerpt: Jet Harris and Tony Meehan, “Diamonds”] At the beginning of 1963, Cliff and the Shadows, past and present, had a ridiculous monopoly of the top of the charts. “Bachelor Boy” by Cliff and the Shadows, written by Cliff and Bruce Welch, was at number one for three weeks, then was replaced by “Dance On” by the Shadows, which in turn was replaced by “Diamonds” by Jet and Tony. There was a brief three-week respite while Frank Ifield topped the charts with his “Wayward Wind”, then “Summer Holiday” by Cliff and the Shadows, written by Bruce and Brian. Then “Foot Tapper” by the Shadows went to number one, then “Summer Holiday” went back to the top position. They all looked unstoppable. However, while they would all chart again, it would be two years before Cliff would have another number one, and neither the Shadows nor Jet and Tony ever would. In the case of Cliff and the Shadows, this change in commercial fortunes was because of a general change in the music market, which we’ll be looking at towards the end of the year. In the case of Jet and Tony, though, that was only part of it. Jet was in a car accident which put him out of commission for a while, and when he got better he was drinking even more. He made a brief attempt at a comeback and even joined an early lineup of the Jeff Beck Group, but spent the rest of his life either working labouring jobs or playing the nostalgia circuit. He died in 2011. Jet and Tony’s touring bass player, John Paul Jones, actually auditioned for the Shadows, as Licorice Locking left the group to spend more time evangelising, but Jones didn’t get the job, and we’ll be picking up on him later. We’ll be seeing Cliff again too, as well as having a brief appearance from Tony Meehan, but this is the last we’ll see of the Shadows, who continued with a variety of different bass players, and with Brian Bennett as the permanent drummer, off and on until 2015. Marvin, Bennett, and Welch all continue to make music separately, and it’s still possible they may perform together as the Shadows one day. But even if they don’t, “Apache” stands as the moment when a million British kids first decided that they wanted to be a guitar hero and play a Fender Stratocaster.
Episode eighty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Three Steps to Heaven" by Eddie Cochran, and at the British tour which changed music and ended his life. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifteen-minute bonus episode, on "Quarter to Three" by Gary US Bonds. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more---- Resources As usual, I have put together a Mixcloud mix with every song excerpted in this podcast. Much of the information here comes from Spencer Leigh's book Things Do Go Wrong, which looks specifically at the 1960 tour. I also used Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran: Rock and Roll Revolutionaries by John Collis. While there are dozens of compilations of Cochran's music available, many of them are flawed in one way or another (including the Real Gone Music four-CD set, which is what I would normally recommend). This one is probably the best you can get for Cochran novices. This CD contains the Saturday Club recordings by Vincent and Cochran, which are well worth listening to. Pete Frame's The Restless Generation is the best book available looking at British 50s rock and roll from a historical perspective. Be warned, though -- his jokey and irreverent style can, when dealing with people like Larry Parnes (who was gay and Jewish) very occasionally tip over into reinforcing homophobic and anti-semitic stereotypes for an easy laugh. And a fair chunk of the background information here also comes from the extended edition of Mark Lewisohn's Tune In, which is essential reading for anyone who is interested in the Beatles, British post-war culture, and British post-war music. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript There's been a sad running theme in the episodes in recent months of rock stars dying in accidents. Sadly, in the 1950s and sixties, travelling long distances was even more dangerous than it is today, and rock musicians, who had to travel a lot more than most people, and did much of that travelling at night, were more likely to be in accidents than most. Today, we're going to look at yet another of these tragic deaths, of someone who is thought of in the US as being something of a one-hit wonder, but who had a much bigger effect on British music. We're going to look at what would be Eddie Cochran's final tour, and at his UK number one single "Three Steps to Heaven": [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, "Three Steps to Heaven"] When we left Eddie Cochran, he had just appeared in the film "The Girl Can't Help It", singing "Twenty Flight Rock", and he had also had a hit with "Sittin' in the Balcony". But he hadn't yet managed to establish himself as the star he knew he could be -- he was the whole package, singer, songwriter, and especially guitarist, and he hadn't yet made a record that showed him to his best advantage as an artist. "Twenty Flight Rock" had come close, but it wasn't a song he'd written himself, and the record hadn't yet been released in the US. Meanwhile, Liberty Records seemed to not understand what they had in him -- they were trying to push him to be another Pat Boone, and become a bland pop singer with no rock and roll in his sound. His first album, Singin' to My Baby, had little to do with the music that he was interested in playing. So Cochran needed to find something that would really put him on the map -- a song that would mean he wasn't just one of dozens of Fabians and Frankie Avalons and interchangeable Bobbies who were starting to take over shows like American Bandstand. "Twenty Flight Rock" hadn't ended up being a hit at all, despite its placement in a popular film -- they'd left it too long between the film coming out and releasing the record, and he'd lost that momentum. At the end of 1957 he'd gone on the Australian tour with Little Richard and Gene Vincent which had led to Richard retiring from rock and roll, and he'd become much closer with Vincent, with whom he'd already struck up a friendship when making The Girl Can't Help It. The two men bonded, particularly, over their love of guns, although they expressed that love in very different ways. Cochran had grown up in rural Minnesota, and had the same love of hunting and fishing that most men of his background did at that time (and that many still do). He was, by all accounts, an affable person, and basically well adjusted. Vincent, on the other hand, was a polite and friendly person when not drinking. Unfortunately, he was in constant pain from his leg wounds, and that meant he was drinking a lot, and when he was drunk he was an incredibly unpleasant, aggressive, person. His love of guns was mostly for threatening people with, and he seems to have latched on to Cochran as someone who could look after him when he got himself into awkward situations -- Cochran was so personally charming that he could defuse the situation when Vincent had behaved appallingly towards someone. At the time, Vincent seemed like a has-been and Cochran a never-would-be. This was late 1957, and it seemed like rock and roll records with guitars on were a fad that had already passed their sell-by date. The only white guitarist/vocalist other than Elvis who'd been having hits on a regular basis was Buddy Holly, and his records were doing worse and worse with each release. Vincent hadn't had a real hit since his first single, "Be Bop A Lula", while Cochran had made the top twenty with "Sittin' in the Balcony", but the highest he'd got after that was number eighty-two. He'd recently recorded a song co-written by George Mottola, who'd written "Goodnight My Love", but "Jeannie, Jeannie, Jeannie" stalled at number ninety-four when it was released in early 1958: [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, "Jeannie, Jeannie, Jeannie"] So neither man was in a good place at the start of 1958, but they had very different attitudes -- Vincent was depressed and angry, but Cochran knew that something would come along. He was only nineteen, he was astonishingly good looking, he was a great guitarist -- if rock and roll didn't work out, something would. In early 1958, Cochran was still hunting for that elusive big hit, as he joined the Blue Caps in the studio, to provide bass, arrangements, and backing vocals on several tracks for Vincent's latest album. It's Cochran singing the bass vocals at the start of "Git It", one of Vincent's greatest tracks: [Excerpt: Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps, "Git It"] But shortly after that recording, a major turn in Cochran's fortunes came from an unexpected place. Liberty Records had been in financial difficulties, and part of the reason that Cochran's records were unsuccessful was that they just didn't have the money to promote them as much as they'd like. But then at the beginning of April a man called Ross Bagdasarian, under the name David Seville, released a novelty song called "The Witch Doctor", featuring some mildly racist comedy and a sped-up voice. That record became a massive hit, selling over a million copies, going to number one, and becoming the fourth most successful record of 1958. Suddenly, Liberty Records was saved from bankruptcy. That made all the difference to the success of a track that Cochran had recorded on March the 28th, the same week he recorded those Gene Vincent sessions, and which came out at the tail-end of summer. Cochran had come up with a guitar riff that he liked, but he didn't have any lyrics for it, and his friend and co-writer Jerry Capehart said "there's never been a blues about the summer". The two of them came up with some comedy lyrics in the style of the Coasters, who had just started to have big hits, and the result became Cochran's only top ten hit in the US, reaching number eight, and becoming one of the best-remembered tracks of the fifties: [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, "Summertime Blues"] That track was recorded with a minimal number of musicians -- Cochran played all the guitars and sang both vocal parts, his bass player Guybo Smith played the bass part, and the great session drummer Earl Palmer played drums. There was also a fourth person on the record -- Sharon Sheeley, who added handclaps, and who had written the B-side. Sheeley was a talented songwriter who also had a propensity for dating musicians. She'd dated one of the Everly Brothers for a while -- different reports name different brothers, but the consensus seems to be that it was Don -- and then when they'd split up, she'd written a song called "Poor Little Fool". She'd then faked having her car break down outside Ricky Nelson's house, and collared him when he came out to help. That sort of thing seemed to happen to Nelson a lot with songwriters -- Johnny and Dorsey Burnette had sold Nelson songs by sitting on his doorstep and refusing to move until he listened to them -- but it seemed to work out very well for him. The Burnettes wrote several hits for him, while Sheeley's "Poor Little Fool" became Nelson's first number one, as well as being the first number one ever on Billboard's newly-renamed Hot One Hundred, and the first number one single on any chart to be written by a woman without a male cowriter: [Excerpt: Ricky Nelson, "Poor Little Fool"] Sheeley gets unfairly pigeonholed as a groupie (not that there's anything wrong with being a groupie) because she had relationships with musicians, and at this point she was starting a relationship with Cochran. But it's important to remember that when they got together, even though he was eighteen months older than her, she was the one who had written a number one single, and he was the one whose last record had gone to number ninety-four -- and that after her relationship with Cochran, she went on to form a writing partnership with Jackie DeShannon that produced a long string of hits for people like Brenda Lee and the Fleetwoods, as well as songs that weren't hits but probably deserved to be, like Ral Donner's "Don't Put Your Heart in His Hands": [Excerpt: Ral Donner, "Don't Put Your Heart in His Hands"] Sheeley was more invested in her relationship with Cochran than he was, but this has led rock writers to completely dismiss her as "just Eddie Cochran's girlfriend", when in terms of their relative statuses in the music industry, it would be more fair to define Cochran as "just Sharon Sheeley's boyfriend". I have to emphasise this point, because in the limited number of books about Cochran, you will see a lot of descriptions of her as "a groupie", "a fantasist", and worse, and very few mentions of the fact that she had a life outside her partner. "Summertime Blues" looked like it was going to be the start of Eddie Cochran's career as a rock and roll star, but in fact it was the peak of it, at least in the US. While the song was a big hit, the follow-up, "C'mon Everybody", which was written by Cochran and Capehart to much the same formula, but without the humour that characterised "Summertime Blues", didn't do so well: [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, "C'mon Everybody"] That made only number thirty-five on the US charts, and would be Cochran's last top forty record there -- but in the UK, it was a bigger hit than "Summertime Blues", reaching number six. "C'mon Everybody" was, though, big enough for Cochran to make some TV appearances. He'd agreed to go on tour with his friends Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens on a tour called the Winter Dance Party tour, but had bowed out when he got some offers of TV work. He definitely appeared on a show called Town Hall Party broadcast from California on February the second 1959, and according to Sheeley he was booked to appear in New York on the Ed Sullivan Show, which was the reason he'd decided not to do the tour, a few days later. As it turned out, Cochran never made that Ed Sullivan Show appearance, as in the early hours of February the third, his friends died in a plane crash. He refused to get on the plane to New York for the show, and instead drove out to the desert in his station wagon to grieve, and from that point on he developed a fear of flying. The follow-up to "C'mon Everybody", "Teenage Heaven", only went to number ninety-nine on the charts, and his next two singles didn't do much better. "Somethin' Else", a song that Sheeley had written for him, made number fifty-eight, while his cover version of Ray Charles' "Hallelujah I Love Her So" didn't chart at all. 1959 was a depressing year for Cochran personally and professionally. But while "Somethin' Else" and "Hallelujah I Love Her So" were flops in the US, they both made the top thirty in the UK. In the US, guitar-based white rock and roll was now firmly out of fashion, with the audience split between black vocal groups singing R&B and white male solo singers called Bobby singing mid-tempo pop. But in the UK, the image of rock and roll in people's minds was still that of the rockabillies from a couple of years earlier -- while British musical trends would start to move faster than the US by the sixties, in the fifties they lagged a long way behind. And in particular, Cochran's friend Gene Vincent was doing much better in Britain than in the US. Very few US performers had toured the UK, and with the exception of Buddy Holly, most of those who had were not particularly impressive. Because of an agreement between the two countries' musicians' unions, it was difficult for musicians to perform in one country if they were from the other. It wasn't quite so difficult for solo performers, who could be backed by local musicians and were covered under a different agreement, but Lew and Leslie Grade, who had a virtual monopoly on the UK entertainment business, had had a very bad experience with Jerry Lee Lewis when his marriage to his teenage cousin had caused his UK tour to be cancelled, and anyway, Britain was an unimportant market a long way away from America, so why would Americans come all that way? For most of 1959, the closest thing to American rock and roll stars touring the UK were Connie Francis and Paul Anka, neither of whom screamed rock and roll rebellion. American rockers just didn't come to the UK. Unless they had nowhere else to go, that is -- and Gene Vincent had nowhere else to go. In the US, he was a washed-up has been who'd burned every single bridge, but in the UK he was an American Rock Star. In late 1959 he released a not-great single, "Wildcat": [Excerpt: Gene Vincent, "Wildcat"] That single wasn't doing particularly well, but then Larry Parnes and Jack Good hatched a plan. Good had a new TV show, "Boy Meets Girls", based around one of Parnes' artists, Marty Wilde, and also had a column in Disc magazine. They'd get an American rock star over to the UK, Parnes would stick him on a bill with a bunch of Parnes' acts, Good would put him on the TV show and promote him in Disc magazine, and the tour and TV show would split the costs. Wilde was, at the time, about to go into a career slump. He'd just got married, and he and his wife were trying for their first kid -- they'd decided that if it was a girl, they were going to call her Kim. It seemed likely they were going to lose his audience of teenage girls, as he was no longer available, and so Larry Parnes was trying to move him from rock and roll into musical styles that would be more suitable for adults, so his latest single was a ballad, "Bad Boy": [Excerpt: Marty Wilde, "Bad Boy"] That meant that Wilde's band, the Wildcats, made up at this point of Tony Belcher, Big Jim Sullivan, Licorice Locking and Brian Bennett, were no longer going to be suitable to back Wilde, as they were all rock and rollers, so they'd be fine for whichever rock star they could persuade over to the UK. Vincent was the only rock star available, and his latest single was even called "Wildcat". That made him perfect for Parnes' purposes, though Vincent was slightly nervous about using British musicians -- he simply didn't think that British musicians would be any good. As it turned out, Vincent had nothing to worry about on that score at least. When he got to the studios in Didsbury, in Manchester, where Boy Meets Girls was filmed, he met some of the best session musicians Britain had to offer. The house band for the show, the Flying Squad, was a smaller version of the bands that had appeared on Good's earlier shows, a nine-piece group that included organist Cherry Wainer and session drummer Andy White, and was led by Joe Brown. Brown was a Larry Parnes artist, who at this point had released one rather uninspired single, the country-flavoured "People Gotta Talk": [Excerpt: Joe Brown, "People Gotta Talk"] But Brown had an independent streak, which could be seen just from his name -- Larry Parnes had tried to change it, as he did with all his acts, but Brown had flat-out refused to be called Elmer Twitch, the name Parnes had chosen for him. He insisted on keeping his own name, and it was under that name that he became one of Britain's most respected guitarists. Vincent, amazingly, found these British musicians to be every bit as good as any musicians he'd worked with in the USA. But that was about all that he liked about the UK -- you couldn't get a hamburger or a pizza anywhere in the whole country, and the TV was only in black and white, and it finished at 11PM. For someone like Vincent, who liked to stay up all night watching old monster movies on TV, that was completely unacceptable. Luckily for him, at least he had his gun and knife to keep him occupied -- he'd strapped them both to the leg iron he used for his damaged leg, so they wouldn't set off the metal detectors coming into the country. But whatever his thoughts about the country as a whole, he couldn't help loving the audience reaction. Jack Good knew how to present a rock and roll star to an audience, and he'd moved Vincent out of the slacks and sweater vests and blue caps into the kind of leather that he'd already had Vince Taylor wear. He got Vincent to emphasise his limp, and to look pained at all times. He was imagining Vincent as something along the lines of Richard III, and wanted him to appear as dangerous as possible. He used all the tricks of stagecraft that he'd used on Taylor, but with the added advantage that Vincent had a remarkable voice, unlike Taylor. Sadly, as is the case with almost all of the British TV of the period, the videotapes of the performances have long since been wiped, but we have poor-quality audio that demonstrates both how good Vincent was sounding and how well the British musicians were able to adapt to backing him: [Excerpt: Gene Vincent, "Summertime", live on Boy Meets Girls] After making three appearances on Boy Meets Girls, Vincent was put on tour backed by the Wildcats, on a bill with acts like Wee Willie Harris and the Bachelors (the ones who recorded for Parlophone, not the later act of the same name), and "Wildcat" started going up the charts. Even though Gene Vincent hadn't had a hit in three years, he was a massive success with the British audiences, and as a result Parnes and Good decided that it might be an idea if they got another American star over here, and the obvious choice was Eddie Cochran. Cochran had the same agent as Vincent, and so there was a working relationship there; they both knew each other and so Vincent could help persuade Cochran over; and Cochran had had a string of top thirty hits in the UK, but was commercially dead in the US. It was tempting for Cochran, too -- as well as the obvious advantage of playing to people who were actually buying his record, the geography of Britain appealed. He'd been terrified of flying since Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens had died, but the British tour would only involve the transatlantic flight -- all the travel once he was in the UK would be by road or rail. Before he came over, he had to record his next single, to be released while he was over in the UK. So on January the 8th, 1960, Eddie Cochran went into Gold Star Studios with his normal bass player, Guybo, and with his friends Sonny Curtis and Jerry Allison, the guitarist and drummer of the Crickets, and they cut what turned out to be his last single, "Three Steps to Heaven": [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, "Three Steps to Heaven"] Two days later, he was in Britain, for the start of what was the biggest rock and roll tour in British history to that point -- a hundred and eight live appearances, plus several TV and radio appearances, in a little over three months, playing two shows a night most nights. Parnes felt he had to work them hard to justify their fees -- Vincent was getting $2500 a week, and Cochran $1000, while for example Billy Fury, at that point the biggest of Parnes' acts, was on a salary of twenty pounds a week. While Vincent had made a great impression largely despite himself, Cochran was a different matter. Everyone seemed to love him. Unlike Vincent, he was a musician's musician, and he formed close friendships with the players on the tour. Joe Brown, for example, remembers Cochran explaining to him that if you swap the G string on your guitar for a second B string, tuned down to G, you could bend a note a full tone -- Brown used that trick to make himself one of the most sought-after session players in the UK before his own pop career started to take off. It was also apparent that while Jack Good had had to create a stage act for Gene Vincent, he didn't have to do anything to make Cochran look good in front of the cameras. Marty Wilde said of him "The first thing I noticed about Eddie was his complexion. We British lads had acne and all the usual problems, and Eddie walked in with the most beautiful hair and the most beautiful skin - his skin was a light brown, beautiful colour, all that California sunshine, and I thought 'you lucky devil'. We had Manchester white all over us. And he had the most beautiful face -- the photographs never did the guy justice". From the moment Cochran started his set in Ipswich, by saying "It's great to be here in Hipswich" and wiggling his hips, he was utterly in command of the British audiences. Thankfully, because they did so many TV and radio sessions while they were over here, we have some idea of what these shows sounded like -- and from the recordings, even when they were in the antiseptic environment of a BBC recording studio, without an audience, they still sounded fantastic. On some shows, Cochran would start with his back to the audience, the band would start playing "Somethin' Else", the song that Sharon Sheeley had written for him that had been a minor hit, and he'd whirl round and face the audience on the opening line, "Well look-a there!" [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent, "Somethin' Else [Eddie Cochran vocals]", Saturday Club version] The shows all had a number of acts on, all of them other than the stars Larry Parnes acts, and because there were so many shows, acts would get rotated in and out as the tour went on. But some of those who played on many dates were Vince Eager, who had named himself after Gene Vincent but quickly grew more attached to Eddie Cochran, who he started to regard as his best friend as the tour went on, Tony Sheridan, who was building a solo career after leaving the Oh Boy! band, Georgie Fame, who was already more interested in being a jazz and R&B pianist in the mould of Mose Allison than he was in being a pop star, Johnny Gentle, a Liverpudlian performer who never rose to massive success, and Billy Fury, by far the most talented of Parnes' acts. Fury was another Liverpudlian, who looked enough like Cochran that they could be brothers, and who had a top ten hit at the time with "Collette", one of many hits he wrote for himself: [Excerpt: Billy Fury, "Collette"] Fury was something of a sex symbol, aided by the fact that he would stuff his pants with the cardboard tube from a toilet roll before going on stage. This would lead the girls to scream at him -- but would also lead their violent boyfriends to try to bottle him off stage, which meant he had more reason than most to have stagefright. Cochran would joke with Fury, and try to put him at ease -- one story has him telling a nervous Fury, about to go on stage, to just say to himself "I am the greatest performer in the world". Fury repeated back "I am the greatest performer in the world", and Cochran replied, "No you're not -- I am!" This kind of joking led to Cochran becoming immensely popular among all the musicians on the tour, and to him once again falling into his old role of protecting Gene Vincent from the consequences of his own actions, when Vincent would do things like cut up a suit belonging to one of the road managers, while the road manager was inside it. While Vincent was the headliner, Cochran was clearly the one who impressed the British audiences the most. We have some stories from people who saw the tour, and they all focus on Eddie. Particularly notable is the tour's residency in Liverpool, during which time Cochran was opening his set with his version of "What'd I Say": [Excerpt: Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran, "What'd I Say [Eddie Cochran vocals]", Saturday Club version] We have this report of Cochran's performance in Liverpool: "Eddie blew me away. He had his unwound 3rd string, looked good and sang good and he was really getting to be a good guitarist… One moment will always represent Eddie to me. He finished a tune, the crowd stopped screaming and clapping, and he stepped up to the mike and before he said something he put both his hands back, pushed his hair back, and some girl, a single voice in the audience, she went ‘Eddie!’ and he said ‘Hi honey!’… I thought, ‘Yes! That’s it – rock ’n’ roll!’" That's a quote from George Harrison in the early 1990s. He'd gone to see the show with a friend, John Lennon -- it was Lennon's first ever rock and roll gig as an audience member, and one of a very small number he ever attended. Lennon never particularly enjoyed seeing live shows -- he preferred records -- but even he couldn't resist seeing Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent on the same bill. The Liverpool shows were massive successes, despite both American rockers being increasingly bored and turning more and more to drink as a result. Apparently the two would drink a bottle of bourbon between them before going on stage, and at one Liverpool show Cochran had to hold on to a mic stand to keep himself upright for the first two songs, before he sobered up enough to let go. The shows were successful enough that a local promoter, Allan Williams, asked if he could book Cochran and Vincent for another show, and Larry Parnes said yes -- after Liverpool, they had to play Newcastle, Manchester, London, and Bristol, taking up another month, and then Eddie Cochran was going to be going back to the US for a couple of weeks, but he could pencil them in for six weeks' time, when Cochran was going to come back. It's quite surprising that Cochran agreed to come back, because he was getting thoroughly sick of the UK. He'd asked Sharon Sheeley to fly over and join him, but other than her and Vincent he had nothing of home with him, and he liked sunshine, fast food, cold beer, and all-night TV, and hated everything about the British winter, which was far darker and wetter than anything he'd experienced. But on the other hand, he was enjoying making music with these British people. There's a great recording of Cochran, Vincent, Billy Fury, and Joe Brown jamming on the Willie Dixon blues song "My Babe" on "Boy Meets Girls": [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent, Billy Fury, Joe Brown, “My Babe”] But by the time the tour ended in Bristol, Eddie was very keen to get back. He was going to be bringing Vince Eager over to America to record, and arranged to meet him in London in the early hours of Easter Sunday. They were going to be taking the lunchtime plane from what was then London Airport but is now Heathrow. But there was a problem with getting there on time. There were very few trains between Bristol and London, and they'd have to get a car from the train station to the airport. But that Easter Sunday was the day of the annual Aldermaston March against nuclear weapons. These were massive marches which were big enough that they spawned compilation albums of songs to sing on the march, like Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger's "Brother Won't You Join the Line": [Excerpt: Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, "Brother Won't You Join the Line?"] But the main effect the march was having on Cochran and Vincent was that it meant that to be sure of catching their plane, they would have to travel overnight by car. At first, they asked one of the other artists on the tour, Johnny Gentle, if they could go in his car, but he already had a carful, so they ended up getting a local driver, named George Martin (not the one at Parlophone Records) to drive them overnight. They got into the back seat of the car -- Cochran sitting between Vincent and Sheeley, as Sheeley couldn't stand Vincent. Vincent took a sleeping pill and went to sleep almost immediately, but Sheeley and Cochran were in a good mood, singing "California Here We Come" together, when Martin took a turn too fast and hit a lamppost. Vincent and Sheeley suffered major injuries and had to spend time in hospital. Cochran died. A short while later, Johnny Gentle's car made its way onward towards London, and ran out of fuel. As all-night garages weren't a thing in Britain then, they flagged down a policeman who told them there'd been a crash, and they could see if the breakdown vehicle would let them siphon petrol from the wrecked car. They did, and it was only the next day they realised which car it was they'd taken the fuel from. One of the police at the scene – maybe even that one – was a cadet who would later change his name to Dave Dee, and become the lead singer in Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Titch. As soon as the news got out about Cochran's death, "Three Steps to Heaven", which had come out in the US, but not yet in the UK, was rush-released: [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, "Three Steps to Heaven"] It went to number one, and became Cochran's biggest hit. Larry Parnes didn't see why Cochran's death should put a crimp in his plans, and so he immediately started promoting the shows for which Vincent and Cochran had been booked, calling them Eddie Cochran Tribute Shows, and talking to the press about how ironic it was that Cochran's last song was "Three Steps to Heaven". Vince Eager was so disgusted with Parnes that he never worked with him again. But those shows turned out to have a much bigger impact than anyone could have imagined. Allan Williams was worried that without Cochran, the show he'd got booked in Liverpool wouldn't get enough of a crowd, so he booked in a number of local bands -- Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, Cass and the Cassanovas, Nero and the Gladiators, and Gerry and the Pacemakers -- to fill out the bill. This led to all the bands and musicians in Liverpool realising, for the first time, how much talent there was in the city and how many bands there were. That one show changed Liverpool from a town where there were a few bands to a town with a music scene, and May the third 1960 can be pointed to as the day that Merseybeat started. Parnes was impressed enough by the local groups that he decided that Liverpool might be a good place to look for musicians to back his singers on the road. And we'll pick up on what happened then in a few months. Sharon Sheeley, once she'd recovered from her injuries, went on to write hits for Brenda Lee, Jackie DeShannon, the Fleetwoods, and Irma Thomas, and when Jack Good moved back to the US, she renewed her acquaintance with him, and together with Sheeley's husband they created Shindig, the most important American music show of the sixties. But by the time she died in 2002, all her obituaries talked about was that she'd been Eddie Cochran's girlfriend. And as for Gene Vincent, he was already in chronic pain, suffering mood swings, and drinking too much before the accident hospitalised him. After that, all those things intensified. He became increasingly unreliable, and the hits dried up even in Britain by mid-1961. He made some good music in the sixties, but almost nobody was listening any more, and an attempted comeback was cut short when he died, aged thirty-six, in 1971, from illnesses caused by his alcoholism. Despite their tragic deaths, Vincent and Cochran, on that 1960 UK tour, almost accidentally catalysed a revolution in British music, and the changes from that will reverberate throughout the rest of this story.
Episode eighty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Three Steps to Heaven” by Eddie Cochran, and at the British tour which changed music and ended his life. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifteen-minute bonus episode, on “Quarter to Three” by Gary US Bonds. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—- Resources As usual, I have put together a Mixcloud mix with every song excerpted in this podcast. Much of the information here comes from Spencer Leigh’s book Things Do Go Wrong, which looks specifically at the 1960 tour. I also used Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran: Rock and Roll Revolutionaries by John Collis. While there are dozens of compilations of Cochran’s music available, many of them are flawed in one way or another (including the Real Gone Music four-CD set, which is what I would normally recommend). This one is probably the best you can get for Cochran novices. This CD contains the Saturday Club recordings by Vincent and Cochran, which are well worth listening to. Pete Frame’s The Restless Generation is the best book available looking at British 50s rock and roll from a historical perspective. Be warned, though — his jokey and irreverent style can, when dealing with people like Larry Parnes (who was gay and Jewish) very occasionally tip over into reinforcing homophobic and anti-semitic stereotypes for an easy laugh. And a fair chunk of the background information here also comes from the extended edition of Mark Lewisohn’s Tune In, which is essential reading for anyone who is interested in the Beatles, British post-war culture, and British post-war music. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript There’s been a sad running theme in the episodes in recent months of rock stars dying in accidents. Sadly, in the 1950s and sixties, travelling long distances was even more dangerous than it is today, and rock musicians, who had to travel a lot more than most people, and did much of that travelling at night, were more likely to be in accidents than most. Today, we’re going to look at yet another of these tragic deaths, of someone who is thought of in the US as being something of a one-hit wonder, but who had a much bigger effect on British music. We’re going to look at what would be Eddie Cochran’s final tour, and at his UK number one single “Three Steps to Heaven”: [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, “Three Steps to Heaven”] When we left Eddie Cochran, he had just appeared in the film “The Girl Can’t Help It”, singing “Twenty Flight Rock”, and he had also had a hit with “Sittin’ in the Balcony”. But he hadn’t yet managed to establish himself as the star he knew he could be — he was the whole package, singer, songwriter, and especially guitarist, and he hadn’t yet made a record that showed him to his best advantage as an artist. “Twenty Flight Rock” had come close, but it wasn’t a song he’d written himself, and the record hadn’t yet been released in the US. Meanwhile, Liberty Records seemed to not understand what they had in him — they were trying to push him to be another Pat Boone, and become a bland pop singer with no rock and roll in his sound. His first album, Singin’ to My Baby, had little to do with the music that he was interested in playing. So Cochran needed to find something that would really put him on the map — a song that would mean he wasn’t just one of dozens of Fabians and Frankie Avalons and interchangeable Bobbies who were starting to take over shows like American Bandstand. “Twenty Flight Rock” hadn’t ended up being a hit at all, despite its placement in a popular film — they’d left it too long between the film coming out and releasing the record, and he’d lost that momentum. At the end of 1957 he’d gone on the Australian tour with Little Richard and Gene Vincent which had led to Richard retiring from rock and roll, and he’d become much closer with Vincent, with whom he’d already struck up a friendship when making The Girl Can’t Help It. The two men bonded, particularly, over their love of guns, although they expressed that love in very different ways. Cochran had grown up in rural Minnesota, and had the same love of hunting and fishing that most men of his background did at that time (and that many still do). He was, by all accounts, an affable person, and basically well adjusted. Vincent, on the other hand, was a polite and friendly person when not drinking. Unfortunately, he was in constant pain from his leg wounds, and that meant he was drinking a lot, and when he was drunk he was an incredibly unpleasant, aggressive, person. His love of guns was mostly for threatening people with, and he seems to have latched on to Cochran as someone who could look after him when he got himself into awkward situations — Cochran was so personally charming that he could defuse the situation when Vincent had behaved appallingly towards someone. At the time, Vincent seemed like a has-been and Cochran a never-would-be. This was late 1957, and it seemed like rock and roll records with guitars on were a fad that had already passed their sell-by date. The only white guitarist/vocalist other than Elvis who’d been having hits on a regular basis was Buddy Holly, and his records were doing worse and worse with each release. Vincent hadn’t had a real hit since his first single, “Be Bop A Lula”, while Cochran had made the top twenty with “Sittin’ in the Balcony”, but the highest he’d got after that was number eighty-two. He’d recently recorded a song co-written by George Mottola, who’d written “Goodnight My Love”, but “Jeannie, Jeannie, Jeannie” stalled at number ninety-four when it was released in early 1958: [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, “Jeannie, Jeannie, Jeannie”] So neither man was in a good place at the start of 1958, but they had very different attitudes — Vincent was depressed and angry, but Cochran knew that something would come along. He was only nineteen, he was astonishingly good looking, he was a great guitarist — if rock and roll didn’t work out, something would. In early 1958, Cochran was still hunting for that elusive big hit, as he joined the Blue Caps in the studio, to provide bass, arrangements, and backing vocals on several tracks for Vincent’s latest album. It’s Cochran singing the bass vocals at the start of “Git It”, one of Vincent’s greatest tracks: [Excerpt: Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps, “Git It”] But shortly after that recording, a major turn in Cochran’s fortunes came from an unexpected place. Liberty Records had been in financial difficulties, and part of the reason that Cochran’s records were unsuccessful was that they just didn’t have the money to promote them as much as they’d like. But then at the beginning of April a man called Ross Bagdasarian, under the name David Seville, released a novelty song called “The Witch Doctor”, featuring some mildly racist comedy and a sped-up voice. That record became a massive hit, selling over a million copies, going to number one, and becoming the fourth most successful record of 1958. Suddenly, Liberty Records was saved from bankruptcy. That made all the difference to the success of a track that Cochran had recorded on March the 28th, the same week he recorded those Gene Vincent sessions, and which came out at the tail-end of summer. Cochran had come up with a guitar riff that he liked, but he didn’t have any lyrics for it, and his friend and co-writer Jerry Capehart said “there’s never been a blues about the summer”. The two of them came up with some comedy lyrics in the style of the Coasters, who had just started to have big hits, and the result became Cochran’s only top ten hit in the US, reaching number eight, and becoming one of the best-remembered tracks of the fifties: [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, “Summertime Blues”] That track was recorded with a minimal number of musicians — Cochran played all the guitars and sang both vocal parts, his bass player Guybo Smith played the bass part, and the great session drummer Earl Palmer played drums. There was also a fourth person on the record — Sharon Sheeley, who added handclaps, and who had written the B-side. Sheeley was a talented songwriter who also had a propensity for dating musicians. She’d dated one of the Everly Brothers for a while — different reports name different brothers, but the consensus seems to be that it was Don — and then when they’d split up, she’d written a song called “Poor Little Fool”. She’d then faked having her car break down outside Ricky Nelson’s house, and collared him when he came out to help. That sort of thing seemed to happen to Nelson a lot with songwriters — Johnny and Dorsey Burnette had sold Nelson songs by sitting on his doorstep and refusing to move until he listened to them — but it seemed to work out very well for him. The Burnettes wrote several hits for him, while Sheeley’s “Poor Little Fool” became Nelson’s first number one, as well as being the first number one ever on Billboard’s newly-renamed Hot One Hundred, and the first number one single on any chart to be written by a woman without a male cowriter: [Excerpt: Ricky Nelson, “Poor Little Fool”] Sheeley gets unfairly pigeonholed as a groupie (not that there’s anything wrong with being a groupie) because she had relationships with musicians, and at this point she was starting a relationship with Cochran. But it’s important to remember that when they got together, even though he was eighteen months older than her, she was the one who had written a number one single, and he was the one whose last record had gone to number ninety-four — and that after her relationship with Cochran, she went on to form a writing partnership with Jackie DeShannon that produced a long string of hits for people like Brenda Lee and the Fleetwoods, as well as songs that weren’t hits but probably deserved to be, like Ral Donner’s “Don’t Put Your Heart in His Hands”: [Excerpt: Ral Donner, “Don’t Put Your Heart in His Hands”] Sheeley was more invested in her relationship with Cochran than he was, but this has led rock writers to completely dismiss her as “just Eddie Cochran’s girlfriend”, when in terms of their relative statuses in the music industry, it would be more fair to define Cochran as “just Sharon Sheeley’s boyfriend”. I have to emphasise this point, because in the limited number of books about Cochran, you will see a lot of descriptions of her as “a groupie”, “a fantasist”, and worse, and very few mentions of the fact that she had a life outside her partner. “Summertime Blues” looked like it was going to be the start of Eddie Cochran’s career as a rock and roll star, but in fact it was the peak of it, at least in the US. While the song was a big hit, the follow-up, “C’mon Everybody”, which was written by Cochran and Capehart to much the same formula, but without the humour that characterised “Summertime Blues”, didn’t do so well: [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, “C’mon Everybody”] That made only number thirty-five on the US charts, and would be Cochran’s last top forty record there — but in the UK, it was a bigger hit than “Summertime Blues”, reaching number six. “C’mon Everybody” was, though, big enough for Cochran to make some TV appearances. He’d agreed to go on tour with his friends Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens on a tour called the Winter Dance Party tour, but had bowed out when he got some offers of TV work. He definitely appeared on a show called Town Hall Party broadcast from California on February the second 1959, and according to Sheeley he was booked to appear in New York on the Ed Sullivan Show, which was the reason he’d decided not to do the tour, a few days later. As it turned out, Cochran never made that Ed Sullivan Show appearance, as in the early hours of February the third, his friends died in a plane crash. He refused to get on the plane to New York for the show, and instead drove out to the desert in his station wagon to grieve, and from that point on he developed a fear of flying. The follow-up to “C’mon Everybody”, “Teenage Heaven”, only went to number ninety-nine on the charts, and his next two singles didn’t do much better. “Somethin’ Else”, a song that Sheeley had written for him, made number fifty-eight, while his cover version of Ray Charles’ “Hallelujah I Love Her So” didn’t chart at all. 1959 was a depressing year for Cochran personally and professionally. But while “Somethin’ Else” and “Hallelujah I Love Her So” were flops in the US, they both made the top thirty in the UK. In the US, guitar-based white rock and roll was now firmly out of fashion, with the audience split between black vocal groups singing R&B and white male solo singers called Bobby singing mid-tempo pop. But in the UK, the image of rock and roll in people’s minds was still that of the rockabillies from a couple of years earlier — while British musical trends would start to move faster than the US by the sixties, in the fifties they lagged a long way behind. And in particular, Cochran’s friend Gene Vincent was doing much better in Britain than in the US. Very few US performers had toured the UK, and with the exception of Buddy Holly, most of those who had were not particularly impressive. Because of an agreement between the two countries’ musicians’ unions, it was difficult for musicians to perform in one country if they were from the other. It wasn’t quite so difficult for solo performers, who could be backed by local musicians and were covered under a different agreement, but Lew and Leslie Grade, who had a virtual monopoly on the UK entertainment business, had had a very bad experience with Jerry Lee Lewis when his marriage to his teenage cousin had caused his UK tour to be cancelled, and anyway, Britain was an unimportant market a long way away from America, so why would Americans come all that way? For most of 1959, the closest thing to American rock and roll stars touring the UK were Connie Francis and Paul Anka, neither of whom screamed rock and roll rebellion. American rockers just didn’t come to the UK. Unless they had nowhere else to go, that is — and Gene Vincent had nowhere else to go. In the US, he was a washed-up has been who’d burned every single bridge, but in the UK he was an American Rock Star. In late 1959 he released a not-great single, “Wildcat”: [Excerpt: Gene Vincent, “Wildcat”] That single wasn’t doing particularly well, but then Larry Parnes and Jack Good hatched a plan. Good had a new TV show, “Boy Meets Girls”, based around one of Parnes’ artists, Marty Wilde, and also had a column in Disc magazine. They’d get an American rock star over to the UK, Parnes would stick him on a bill with a bunch of Parnes’ acts, Good would put him on the TV show and promote him in Disc magazine, and the tour and TV show would split the costs. Wilde was, at the time, about to go into a career slump. He’d just got married, and he and his wife were trying for their first kid — they’d decided that if it was a girl, they were going to call her Kim. It seemed likely they were going to lose his audience of teenage girls, as he was no longer available, and so Larry Parnes was trying to move him from rock and roll into musical styles that would be more suitable for adults, so his latest single was a ballad, “Bad Boy”: [Excerpt: Marty Wilde, “Bad Boy”] That meant that Wilde’s band, the Wildcats, made up at this point of Tony Belcher, Big Jim Sullivan, Licorice Locking and Brian Bennett, were no longer going to be suitable to back Wilde, as they were all rock and rollers, so they’d be fine for whichever rock star they could persuade over to the UK. Vincent was the only rock star available, and his latest single was even called “Wildcat”. That made him perfect for Parnes’ purposes, though Vincent was slightly nervous about using British musicians — he simply didn’t think that British musicians would be any good. As it turned out, Vincent had nothing to worry about on that score at least. When he got to the studios in Didsbury, in Manchester, where Boy Meets Girls was filmed, he met some of the best session musicians Britain had to offer. The house band for the show, the Flying Squad, was a smaller version of the bands that had appeared on Good’s earlier shows, a nine-piece group that included organist Cherry Wainer and session drummer Andy White, and was led by Joe Brown. Brown was a Larry Parnes artist, who at this point had released one rather uninspired single, the country-flavoured “People Gotta Talk”: [Excerpt: Joe Brown, “People Gotta Talk”] But Brown had an independent streak, which could be seen just from his name — Larry Parnes had tried to change it, as he did with all his acts, but Brown had flat-out refused to be called Elmer Twitch, the name Parnes had chosen for him. He insisted on keeping his own name, and it was under that name that he became one of Britain’s most respected guitarists. Vincent, amazingly, found these British musicians to be every bit as good as any musicians he’d worked with in the USA. But that was about all that he liked about the UK — you couldn’t get a hamburger or a pizza anywhere in the whole country, and the TV was only in black and white, and it finished at 11PM. For someone like Vincent, who liked to stay up all night watching old monster movies on TV, that was completely unacceptable. Luckily for him, at least he had his gun and knife to keep him occupied — he’d strapped them both to the leg iron he used for his damaged leg, so they wouldn’t set off the metal detectors coming into the country. But whatever his thoughts about the country as a whole, he couldn’t help loving the audience reaction. Jack Good knew how to present a rock and roll star to an audience, and he’d moved Vincent out of the slacks and sweater vests and blue caps into the kind of leather that he’d already had Vince Taylor wear. He got Vincent to emphasise his limp, and to look pained at all times. He was imagining Vincent as something along the lines of Richard III, and wanted him to appear as dangerous as possible. He used all the tricks of stagecraft that he’d used on Taylor, but with the added advantage that Vincent had a remarkable voice, unlike Taylor. Sadly, as is the case with almost all of the British TV of the period, the videotapes of the performances have long since been wiped, but we have poor-quality audio that demonstrates both how good Vincent was sounding and how well the British musicians were able to adapt to backing him: [Excerpt: Gene Vincent, “Summertime”, live on Boy Meets Girls] After making three appearances on Boy Meets Girls, Vincent was put on tour backed by the Wildcats, on a bill with acts like Wee Willie Harris and the Bachelors (the ones who recorded for Parlophone, not the later act of the same name), and “Wildcat” started going up the charts. Even though Gene Vincent hadn’t had a hit in three years, he was a massive success with the British audiences, and as a result Parnes and Good decided that it might be an idea if they got another American star over here, and the obvious choice was Eddie Cochran. Cochran had the same agent as Vincent, and so there was a working relationship there; they both knew each other and so Vincent could help persuade Cochran over; and Cochran had had a string of top thirty hits in the UK, but was commercially dead in the US. It was tempting for Cochran, too — as well as the obvious advantage of playing to people who were actually buying his record, the geography of Britain appealed. He’d been terrified of flying since Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens had died, but the British tour would only involve the transatlantic flight — all the travel once he was in the UK would be by road or rail. Before he came over, he had to record his next single, to be released while he was over in the UK. So on January the 8th, 1960, Eddie Cochran went into Gold Star Studios with his normal bass player, Guybo, and with his friends Sonny Curtis and Jerry Allison, the guitarist and drummer of the Crickets, and they cut what turned out to be his last single, “Three Steps to Heaven”: [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, “Three Steps to Heaven”] Two days later, he was in Britain, for the start of what was the biggest rock and roll tour in British history to that point — a hundred and eight live appearances, plus several TV and radio appearances, in a little over three months, playing two shows a night most nights. Parnes felt he had to work them hard to justify their fees — Vincent was getting $2500 a week, and Cochran $1000, while for example Billy Fury, at that point the biggest of Parnes’ acts, was on a salary of twenty pounds a week. While Vincent had made a great impression largely despite himself, Cochran was a different matter. Everyone seemed to love him. Unlike Vincent, he was a musician’s musician, and he formed close friendships with the players on the tour. Joe Brown, for example, remembers Cochran explaining to him that if you swap the G string on your guitar for a second B string, tuned down to G, you could bend a note a full tone — Brown used that trick to make himself one of the most sought-after session players in the UK before his own pop career started to take off. It was also apparent that while Jack Good had had to create a stage act for Gene Vincent, he didn’t have to do anything to make Cochran look good in front of the cameras. Marty Wilde said of him “The first thing I noticed about Eddie was his complexion. We British lads had acne and all the usual problems, and Eddie walked in with the most beautiful hair and the most beautiful skin – his skin was a light brown, beautiful colour, all that California sunshine, and I thought ‘you lucky devil’. We had Manchester white all over us. And he had the most beautiful face — the photographs never did the guy justice”. From the moment Cochran started his set in Ipswich, by saying “It’s great to be here in Hipswich” and wiggling his hips, he was utterly in command of the British audiences. Thankfully, because they did so many TV and radio sessions while they were over here, we have some idea of what these shows sounded like — and from the recordings, even when they were in the antiseptic environment of a BBC recording studio, without an audience, they still sounded fantastic. On some shows, Cochran would start with his back to the audience, the band would start playing “Somethin’ Else”, the song that Sharon Sheeley had written for him that had been a minor hit, and he’d whirl round and face the audience on the opening line, “Well look-a there!” [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent, “Somethin’ Else [Eddie Cochran vocals]”, Saturday Club version] The shows all had a number of acts on, all of them other than the stars Larry Parnes acts, and because there were so many shows, acts would get rotated in and out as the tour went on. But some of those who played on many dates were Vince Eager, who had named himself after Gene Vincent but quickly grew more attached to Eddie Cochran, who he started to regard as his best friend as the tour went on, Tony Sheridan, who was building a solo career after leaving the Oh Boy! band, Georgie Fame, who was already more interested in being a jazz and R&B pianist in the mould of Mose Allison than he was in being a pop star, Johnny Gentle, a Liverpudlian performer who never rose to massive success, and Billy Fury, by far the most talented of Parnes’ acts. Fury was another Liverpudlian, who looked enough like Cochran that they could be brothers, and who had a top ten hit at the time with “Collette”, one of many hits he wrote for himself: [Excerpt: Billy Fury, “Collette”] Fury was something of a sex symbol, aided by the fact that he would stuff his pants with the cardboard tube from a toilet roll before going on stage. This would lead the girls to scream at him — but would also lead their violent boyfriends to try to bottle him off stage, which meant he had more reason than most to have stagefright. Cochran would joke with Fury, and try to put him at ease — one story has him telling a nervous Fury, about to go on stage, to just say to himself “I am the greatest performer in the world”. Fury repeated back “I am the greatest performer in the world”, and Cochran replied, “No you’re not — I am!” This kind of joking led to Cochran becoming immensely popular among all the musicians on the tour, and to him once again falling into his old role of protecting Gene Vincent from the consequences of his own actions, when Vincent would do things like cut up a suit belonging to one of the road managers, while the road manager was inside it. While Vincent was the headliner, Cochran was clearly the one who impressed the British audiences the most. We have some stories from people who saw the tour, and they all focus on Eddie. Particularly notable is the tour’s residency in Liverpool, during which time Cochran was opening his set with his version of “What’d I Say”: [Excerpt: Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran, “What’d I Say [Eddie Cochran vocals]”, Saturday Club version] We have this report of Cochran’s performance in Liverpool: “Eddie blew me away. He had his unwound 3rd string, looked good and sang good and he was really getting to be a good guitarist… One moment will always represent Eddie to me. He finished a tune, the crowd stopped screaming and clapping, and he stepped up to the mike and before he said something he put both his hands back, pushed his hair back, and some girl, a single voice in the audience, she went ‘Eddie!’ and he said ‘Hi honey!’… I thought, ‘Yes! That’s it – rock ’n’ roll!’” That’s a quote from George Harrison in the early 1990s. He’d gone to see the show with a friend, John Lennon — it was Lennon’s first ever rock and roll gig as an audience member, and one of a very small number he ever attended. Lennon never particularly enjoyed seeing live shows — he preferred records — but even he couldn’t resist seeing Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent on the same bill. The Liverpool shows were massive successes, despite both American rockers being increasingly bored and turning more and more to drink as a result. Apparently the two would drink a bottle of bourbon between them before going on stage, and at one Liverpool show Cochran had to hold on to a mic stand to keep himself upright for the first two songs, before he sobered up enough to let go. The shows were successful enough that a local promoter, Allan Williams, asked if he could book Cochran and Vincent for another show, and Larry Parnes said yes — after Liverpool, they had to play Newcastle, Manchester, London, and Bristol, taking up another month, and then Eddie Cochran was going to be going back to the US for a couple of weeks, but he could pencil them in for six weeks’ time, when Cochran was going to come back. It’s quite surprising that Cochran agreed to come back, because he was getting thoroughly sick of the UK. He’d asked Sharon Sheeley to fly over and join him, but other than her and Vincent he had nothing of home with him, and he liked sunshine, fast food, cold beer, and all-night TV, and hated everything about the British winter, which was far darker and wetter than anything he’d experienced. But on the other hand, he was enjoying making music with these British people. There’s a great recording of Cochran, Vincent, Billy Fury, and Joe Brown jamming on the Willie Dixon blues song “My Babe” on “Boy Meets Girls”: [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent, Billy Fury, Joe Brown, “My Babe”] But by the time the tour ended in Bristol, Eddie was very keen to get back. He was going to be bringing Vince Eager over to America to record, and arranged to meet him in London in the early hours of Easter Sunday. They were going to be taking the lunchtime plane from what was then London Airport but is now Heathrow. But there was a problem with getting there on time. There were very few trains between Bristol and London, and they’d have to get a car from the train station to the airport. But that Easter Sunday was the day of the annual Aldermaston March against nuclear weapons. These were massive marches which were big enough that they spawned compilation albums of songs to sing on the march, like Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger’s “Brother Won’t You Join the Line”: [Excerpt: Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, “Brother Won’t You Join the Line?”] But the main effect the march was having on Cochran and Vincent was that it meant that to be sure of catching their plane, they would have to travel overnight by car. At first, they asked one of the other artists on the tour, Johnny Gentle, if they could go in his car, but he already had a carful, so they ended up getting a local driver, named George Martin (not the one at Parlophone Records) to drive them overnight. They got into the back seat of the car — Cochran sitting between Vincent and Sheeley, as Sheeley couldn’t stand Vincent. Vincent took a sleeping pill and went to sleep almost immediately, but Sheeley and Cochran were in a good mood, singing “California Here We Come” together, when Martin took a turn too fast and hit a lamppost. Vincent and Sheeley suffered major injuries and had to spend time in hospital. Cochran died. A short while later, Johnny Gentle’s car made its way onward towards London, and ran out of fuel. As all-night garages weren’t a thing in Britain then, they flagged down a policeman who told them there’d been a crash, and they could see if the breakdown vehicle would let them siphon petrol from the wrecked car. They did, and it was only the next day they realised which car it was they’d taken the fuel from. One of the police at the scene – maybe even that one – was a cadet who would later change his name to Dave Dee, and become the lead singer in Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Titch. As soon as the news got out about Cochran’s death, “Three Steps to Heaven”, which had come out in the US, but not yet in the UK, was rush-released: [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, “Three Steps to Heaven”] It went to number one, and became Cochran’s biggest hit. Larry Parnes didn’t see why Cochran’s death should put a crimp in his plans, and so he immediately started promoting the shows for which Vincent and Cochran had been booked, calling them Eddie Cochran Tribute Shows, and talking to the press about how ironic it was that Cochran’s last song was “Three Steps to Heaven”. Vince Eager was so disgusted with Parnes that he never worked with him again. But those shows turned out to have a much bigger impact than anyone could have imagined. Allan Williams was worried that without Cochran, the show he’d got booked in Liverpool wouldn’t get enough of a crowd, so he booked in a number of local bands — Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, Cass and the Cassanovas, Nero and the Gladiators, and Gerry and the Pacemakers — to fill out the bill. This led to all the bands and musicians in Liverpool realising, for the first time, how much talent there was in the city and how many bands there were. That one show changed Liverpool from a town where there were a few bands to a town with a music scene, and May the third 1960 can be pointed to as the day that Merseybeat started. Parnes was impressed enough by the local groups that he decided that Liverpool might be a good place to look for musicians to back his singers on the road. And we’ll pick up on what happened then in a few months. Sharon Sheeley, once she’d recovered from her injuries, went on to write hits for Brenda Lee, Jackie DeShannon, the Fleetwoods, and Irma Thomas, and when Jack Good moved back to the US, she renewed her acquaintance with him, and together with Sheeley’s husband they created Shindig, the most important American music show of the sixties. But by the time she died in 2002, all her obituaries talked about was that she’d been Eddie Cochran’s girlfriend. And as for Gene Vincent, he was already in chronic pain, suffering mood swings, and drinking too much before the accident hospitalised him. After that, all those things intensified. He became increasingly unreliable, and the hits dried up even in Britain by mid-1961. He made some good music in the sixties, but almost nobody was listening any more, and an attempted comeback was cut short when he died, aged thirty-six, in 1971, from illnesses caused by his alcoholism. Despite their tragic deaths, Vincent and Cochran, on that 1960 UK tour, almost accidentally catalysed a revolution in British music, and the changes from that will reverberate throughout the rest of this story.
Episode eighty-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Shakin' All Over" by Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, and how the first great British R&B band interacted with the entertainment industry. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifteen-minute bonus episode, on "Under Your Spell Again" by Buck Owens. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more---- Resources As usual, I have put together a Mixcloud mix with every song excerpted in this podcast. Only one biography of Kidd has been written, and that's been out of print for nearly a quarter of a century and goes for ridiculous prices. Luckily Adie Barrett's site http://www.johnnykidd.co.uk/ is everything a fan-site should be, and has a detailed biographical section which I used for the broad-strokes outline. Clem Cattini: My Life, Through the Eye of a Tornado is somewhere between authorised biography and autobiography. It's not the best-written book ever, but it contains a lot of information about Clem's life. Spike & Co by Graham McCann gives a very full account of Associated London Scripts. Pete Frame's The Restless Generation is the best book available looking at British 50s rock and roll from a historical perspective. Be warned, though -- his jokey and irreverent style can, when dealing with people like Larry Parnes (who was gay and Jewish) very occasionally tip over into reinforcing homophobic and anti-semitic stereotypes for an easy laugh. Billy Bragg's Roots, Radicals, and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World is one of the best books I've read on music at all, and gives far more detail about the historical background. And a fair chunk of the background information here also comes from the extended edition of Mark Lewisohn's Tune In, which is essential reading for anyone who is interested in the Beatles, British post-war culture, and British post-war music. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript As we get more into this story, we're going to see a lot more British acts becoming part of it. We've already looked at Lonnie Donegan, Cliff Richard, Tommy Steele, and Vince Taylor, but without spoiling anything I think most of you can guess that over the next year or so we're going to see a few guitar bands from the UK enter the narrative. Today we're going to look at one of the most important British bands of the early sixties -- a band who are now mostly known for one hit and a gimmick, but who made a massive contribution to the sound of rock music. We're going to look at Johnny Kidd and the Pirates: [Excerpt: Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, "Shakin' All Over"] Our story starts during the skiffle boom of 1957. If you don't remember the episodes we did on skiffle and early British rock and roll, it was a musical craze that swept Britain after Lonnie Donegan's surprise hit with "Rock Island Line". For about eighteen months, nearly every teenage boy in Britain was in a group playing a weird mix of Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie songs, old folk tunes, and music-hall numbers, with a lineup usually consisting of guitar, banjo, someone using a washboard as percussion, and a homemade double bass made out of a teachest, a broom handle, and a single string. The skiffle craze died away as quickly as it started out, but it left a legacy -- thousands of young kids who'd learned at least three chords, who'd performed in public, and who knew that it was possible to make music without having gone through the homogenising star-making process. That would have repercussions throughout the length of this story, and to this day. But while almost everyone in a skiffle group was a kid, not everyone was. Obviously the big stars of the genre -- Lonnie Donegan, Chas McDevitt, the Vipers -- were all in their twenties when they became famous, and so were some of the amateurs who tried to jump on the bandwagon. In particular, there was Fred Heath. Heath was twenty-one when skiffle hit, and was already married -- while twenty-one might seem young now, at the time, it was an age when people were meant to have settled down and found a career. But Heath wasn't the career sort. There were rumours about him which attest to the kind of person he was perceived as being -- that he was a bookie's runner, that he'd not been drafted because he was thought to be completely impossible to discipline, that he had been working as a painter in a warehouse and urinated on the warehouse floor from the scaffolding he was on -- and he was clearly not someone who was *ever* going to settle down. The first skiffle band Heath formed was called Bats Heath and the Vampires, and featured Heath on vocals and rhythm guitar, Brian Englund on banjo, Frank Rouledge on lead guitar, and Clive Lazell on washboard. The group went through a variety of names, at one point naming themselves the Frantic Four in what seems to have been an attempt to confuse people into thinking they were seeing Don Lang's Frantic Five, the group who often appeared on Six-Five Special: [Excerpt: Don Lang and his Frantic Five, "Six-Five Hand Jivel"] The group went through the standard lineup and name changes that almost every amateur group went through, and they ended up as a five-piece group called the Five Nutters. And it was as the Five Nutters that they made their first attempts at becoming stars, when they auditioned for Carroll Levis. Levis was one of the most important people in showbusiness in the UK at this time. He'd just started a TV series, but for years before that his show had been on Radio Luxembourg, which was for many teenagers in the UK the most important radio station in the world. At the time, the BBC had a legal monopoly on radio broadcasting in the UK, but they had a couple of problems when it came to attracting a teenage audience. The first was that they had to provide entertainment for *everyone*, and so they couldn't play much music that only appealed to teenagers but was detested by adults. But there was a much bigger problem for the BBC when it came to recorded music. In the 1950s, the BBC ran three national radio stations -- the Light Programme, the Home Service, and the Third Programme -- along with one national TV channel. The Musicians' Union were worried that playing recorded music on these would lead to their members losing work, and so there was an agreement called "needletime", which allowed the BBC to use recorded music for twenty-two hours a week, total, across all three radio stations, plus another three hours for the TV. That had to cover every style of music from Little Richard through to Doris Day through to Beethoven. The rest of the time, if they had music, it had to be performed by live musicians, and so you'd be more likely to hear "Rock Around the Clock" as performed by the Northern Dance Orchestra than Bill Haley's version, and much of the BBC's youth programming had middle-aged British session musicians trying to replicate the sound of American records and failing miserably. But Luxembourg didn't have a needle-time rule, and so a commercial English-language station had been set up there, using transmitters powerful enough to reach most of Britain and Ireland. The station was owned and run in Britain, and most of the shows were recorded in London by British DJs like Brian Matthew, Jimmy Savile, and Alan Freeman, although there were also recordings of Alan Freed's show broadcast on it. The shows were mostly sponsored by record companies, who would make the DJs play just half of the record, so they could promote more songs in their twenty-minute slot, and this was the main way that any teenager in Britain would actually be able to hear rock and roll music. Oddly, even though he spent many years on Radio Luxembourg, Levis' show, which had originally been on the BBC before the War, was not a music show, but a talent show. Whether on his original BBC radio show, the Radio Luxembourg one, or his new TV show, the format was the same. He would alternate weeks between broadcasting and talent scouting. In talent scouting weeks he would go to a different city each week, where for five nights in a row he would put on talent shows featuring up to twenty different local amateur acts doing their party pieces -- without payment, of course, just for the exposure. At the end of the show, the audience would get a chance to clap for each act, and the act that got the loudest applause would go through to a final on the Saturday night. This of course meant that acts that wanted to win would get a lot of their friends and family to come along and cheer for them. The Saturday night would then have the winning acts -- which is to say, those who brought along the most paying customers -- compete against each other. The most popular of *those* acts would then get to appear on Levis' TV show the next week. It was, as you can imagine, an extremely lucrative business. When the Five Nutters appeared on Levis' Discoveries show, they were fairly sure that the audience clapped loudest for them, but they came third. Being the type of person he was, Fred Heath didn't take this lying down, and remonstrated with Levis, who eventually promised to get the Nutters some better gigs, one suspects just to shut Heath up. As a result of Levis putting in a good word for them, they got a few appearances at places like the 2Is, and made an appearance on the BBC's one concession to youth culture on the radio -- a new show called Saturday Skiffle Club. Around this time, the Five Nutters also recorded a demo disc. The first side was a skiffled-up version of "Shake, Rattle and Roll", with some extremely good jazzy lead guitar: [Excerpt: Fred Heath and the Five Nutters, "Shake, Rattle, and Roll"] I've heard quite a few records of skiffle groups, mostly by professionals, and it's clear that the Five Nutters were far more musical, and far more interesting, than most of them, even despite the audible sloppiness here. The point of skiffle was meant to be that it was do-it-yourself music that required no particular level of skill -- but in this case the Nutters' guitarist Frank Rouledge was clearly quite a bit more proficient than the run-of-the-mill skiffle guitarist. What was even more interesting about that recording, though, was the B-side, which was a song written by the group. It seems to have been mostly written by Heath, and it's called "Blood-Red Beauty" because Heath's wife was a redhead: [Excerpt: Fred Heath and the Five Nutters, "Blood Red Beauty"] The song itself is fairly unexceptional -- it's a standard Hank Williams style hillbilly boogie -- but at this time there was still in Britain a fairly hard and fast rule which had performers and songwriters as two distinct things. There were a handful of British rock musicians who were attempting to write their own material -- most prominently Billy Fury, a Larry Parnes artist who I'm afraid we don't have space for in the podcast, but who was one of the most interesting of the late-fifties British acts -- but in general, there was a fairly strict demarcation. It was very unusual for a British performer to also be trying to write songs. The Nutters split up shortly after their Saturday Skiffle Club appearance, and Heath formed various other groups called things like The Fabulous Freddie Heath Band and The Fred, Mike & Tom Show, before going back to the old name, with a new lineup of Freddie Heath and the Nutters consisting of himself on vocals, Mike West and Tom Brown -- who had been the Mike and Tom in The Fred, Mike, & Tom Show, on backing vocals, Tony Doherty on rhythm guitar, Ken McKay on drums, Johnny Gordon on bass, and on lead guitar Alan Caddy, a man who was known by the nickname "tea", which was partly a pun on his name, partly a reference to his drinking copious amounts of tea, and partly Cockney rhyming slang -- tea-leaf for thief -- as he was known for stealing cars. The Nutters got a new agent, Don Toy, and manager, Guy Robinson, but Heath seemed mostly to want to be a songwriter rather than a singer at this point. He was looking to place his songs with other artists, and in early 1959, he did. He wrote a song called "Please Don't Touch", and managed to get it placed with a vocal group called the Bachelors -- not the more famous group of that name, but a minor group who recorded for Parlophone, a subsidiary of EMI run by a young producer named George Martin. "Please Don't Touch" came out as the B-side of a Bachelors record: [Excerpt: The Bachelors, "Please Don't Touch"] One notable thing about the songwriting credit -- while most sources say Fred Heath wrote the song by himself, he gave Guy Robinson a co-writing credit on this and many of his future songs. This was partly because it was fairly standard at the time for managers to cut themselves in on their artists' credits, but also because that way the credit could read Heath Robinson -- Heath Robinson was a famous British cartoonist who was notable for drawing impossibly complicated inventions, and whose name had become part of the British language -- for American listeners, imagine that the song was credited to Rube Goldberg, and you'll have the idea. At this point, the Nutters had become quite a professional organisation, and so it was unsurprising that after "Please Don't Touch" brought Fred Heath to the attention of EMI, a different EMI imprint, HMV, signed them up. Much of the early success of the Nutters, and this professionalism, seems to be down to Don Toy, who seems to have been a remarkably multi-talented individual. As well as being an agent who had contracts with many London venues to provide them with bands, he was also an electrical engineer specialising in sound equipment. He built a two-hundred watt bass amp for the group, at a time when almost every band just put their bass guitar through a normal guitar amp, and twenty-five watts was considered quite loud. He also built a portable tape echo device that could be used on stage to make Heath's voice sound like it would on the records. Heath later bought the first Copicat echo unit to be made -- this was a mass-produced device that would be used by a lot of British bands in the early sixties, and Heath's had serial number 0001 -- but before that became available, he used Toy's device, which may well have been the very first on-stage echo device in the UK. On top of that, Toy has also claimed that most of the songs credited to Heath and Robinson were also co-written by him, but he left his name off because the credit looked better without it. And whether or not that's true, he was also the drummer on this first session -- Ken McKay, the Nutters' drummer, was a bit unsteady in his tempo, and Toy was a decent player and took over from him when in April 1959, Fred Heath and the Nutters went into Abbey Road Studio 2, to record their own version of "Please Don't Touch". This was ostensibly produced by HMV producer Walter Ridley, but Ridley actually left rock and roll records to his engineer, Peter Sullivan: [Excerpt: Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, "Please Don't Touch"] It was only when the session was over that they saw the paperwork for it. Fred Heath was the only member of the Nutters to be signed to EMI, with the rest of the group being contracted as session musicians, but that was absolutely normal for the time period -- Tommy Steele's Steelmen and Cliff Richard's Drifters hadn't been signed as artists either. What they were concerned about was the band name on the paperwork -- it didn't say Fred Heath and the Nutters, but Johnny Kidd and the Pirates. They were told that that was going to be their new name. They never did find out who it was who had decided on this for them, but from now on Fred Heath was Johnny Kidd. The record was promoted on Radio Luxembourg, and everyone thought it was going to go to number one. Unfortunately, strike action prevented that, and the record was only a moderate chart success -- the highest position it hit in any of the UK charts at the time was number twenty on the Melody Maker chart. But that didn't stop it from becoming an acknowledged classic of British rock and roll. It was so popular that it actually saw an American cover version, which was something that almost never happened with British songs, though Chico Holliday's version was unsuccessful: [Excerpt: Chico Holliday, "Please Don't Touch"] It remained such a fond memory for British rockers that in 1980 the heavy metal groups Motorhead and Girlschool recorded it as the supergroup HeadGirl, and it became the biggest hit either group ever had, reaching number five in the British charts: [Excerpt: Headgirl, "Please Don't Touch"] But while "Please Don't Touch" was one of the very few good rock and roll records made in Britain, it wasn't the one for which Johnny Kidd and the Pirates would be remembered. It was, though, enough to make them a big act. They toured the country on a bill compered by Liverpool comedian Jimmy Tarbuck, and they made several appearances on Saturday Club, which had now dropped the "skiffle" name and was the only place anyone could hear rock and roll on BBC radio. Of course, the British record industry having the immense sense of potential it did, HMV immediately capitalised on the success of Johnny Kidd and the Pirates doing a great group performance of an original rock and roll number, by releasing as a follow-up single, a version of the old standard "If You Were the Only Girl in the World and I Were the Only Boy" by Johnny without the Pirates, but with chorus and orchestra conducted by Ivor Raymonde: [Excerpt: Johnny Kidd, "If You Were The Only Girl in the World"] For some reason -- I can't imagine why -- that didn't chart. One suspects that young Lemmy wasn't quite as fond of that one as "Please Don't Touch". The B-side was a quite good rocker, with some nice guitar work from the session guitarist Bert Weedon, but no-one bothered to buy the record at the time, so they didn't turn it over to hear the other side. The follow-up was better -- a reworking of Marv Johnson's "You've Got What it Takes", one of the hits that Berry Gordy had been writing and producing for Johnson. Johnson's version made the top five in the UK, but the Pirates' version still made the top thirty. But by this time there had been some changes. The first change that was made was that the Pirates changed manager -- while Robinson would continue getting songwriting credits, the group were now managed through Associated London Scripts, by Stan "Scruffy" Dale. Associated London Scripts was, as the name suggests, primarily a company that produced scripts. It was started as a writers' co-operative, and in its early days it was made up of seven people. There was Frankie Howerd, one of the most popular stand-up comedians of the time, who was always looking for new material; Spike Milligan, the writer and one of the stars of the Goon Show, the most important surreal comedy of the fifties; Eric Sykes, who was a writer-performer who was involved in almost every important comedy programme of the decade, including co-writing many Goon episodes with Milligan, before becoming a TV star himself; Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, who wrote the most important *sitcom* of the fifties and early sixties, Hancock's Half Hour; and Scruffy Dale, who was Howerd and Sykes' manager and was supposed to take care of the business stuff. In fact, though, most of the business was actually taken care of by the seventh person and only woman, Beryl Vertue, who was taken on as the secretary on the basis of an interview that mostly asked about her tea-making skills, but soon found herself doing almost everything -- the men in the office got so used to asking her "Could you make the tea, Beryl?", "Could you type up this script, Beryl?" that they just started asking her things like "Could you renegotiate our contract with the BBC, Beryl?" She eventually became one of the most important women in the TV industry, with her most recent prominent credit being as executive producer on the BBC's Sherlock up until 2017, more than sixty years after she joined the business. Vertue did all the work to keep the company running -- a company which grew to about thirty writers, and between the early fifties and mid sixties, as well as Hancock's Half Hour and the Goons, its writers created Sykes, Beyond Our Ken, Round the Horne, Steptoe and Son, The Bedsitting Room, the Running, Jumping, Standing Still Film, Til Death Us Do Part, Citizen James, and the Daleks. That's a list off the top of my head -- it would actually be easier to list memorable British comedy programmes and films of the fifties and early sixties that *didn't* have a script from one of ALS' writers. And while Vertue was keeping Marty Feldman, John Junkin, Barry Took, Johnny Speight, John Antrobus and all the rest of these new writers in work, Scruffy Dale was trying to create a career in pop management. As several people associated with ALS had made records with George Martin at Parlophone, he had an in there, and some of the few pop successes that Martin had in the fifties were producing acts managed by Dale through ALS, like the Vipers Skiffle Group: [Excerpt: The Vipers Skiffle Group, "Don't You Rock Me, Daddy-O"] and a young performer named Jim Smith, who wanted to be a comedian and actor, but who Dale renamed after himself, and who had a string of hits as Jim Dale: [Excerpt: Jim Dale, "Be My Girl"] Jim Dale eventually did become a film and TV star, starting with presenting Six-Five Special, and is now best known for having starred in many of the Carry On films and narrating the Harry Potter audiobooks, but at the time he was still a pop star. Jim Dale and the Vipers were the two professional acts headlining an otherwise-amateur tour that Scruffy Dale put together that was very much like Carroll Levis' Discoveries show, except without the need to even give the winners a slot on the TV every other week. This tour was supposed to be a hunt for the country's best skiffle group, and there was going to be a grand national final, and the winner of *that* would go on TV. Except they just kept dragging the tour out for eighteen months, until the skiffle fad was completely over and no-one cared, so there never was a national final. And in the meantime the Vipers had to sit through twenty groups of spotty kids a night, all playing "Don't You Rock Me Daddy-O", and then go out and play it themselves, every night for eighteen months. Scruffy Dale was unscrupulous in other ways as well, and not long after he'd taken on the Pirates' management he was sacked from ALS. Spike Milligan had never liked Dale -- when told that Dale had lost a testicle in the war, he'd merely replied "I hope he dropped it on Dresden" -- but Frankie Howerd and Eric Sykes had always been impressed with his ability to negotiate deals. But then Frankie Howerd found out that he'd missed out on lucrative opportunities because Dale had shoved letters in his coat pocket and forgotten about them for a fortnight. He started investigating a few more things, and it turned out that Dale had been siphoning money from Sykes and Howerd's personal bank accounts into his own, having explained to their bank manager that it would just be resting in his account for them, because they were showbiz people who would spend it all too fast, so he was looking after them. And he'd also been doing other bits of creative accounting -- every success his musical acts had was marked down as something he'd done independently, and all the profits went to him, while all the unsuccessful ventures were marked down as being ALS projects, and their losses charged to the company. So neither Dale nor the Pirates were with Associated London Scripts very long. But Dale made one very important change -- he and Don Toy decided between them that most of the Pirates had to go. There were six backing musicians in the group if you counted the two backing vocalists, who all needed paying, and only one could read music -- they weren't professional enough to make a career in the music business. So all of the Pirates except Alan Caddy were sacked. Mike West and Tony Doherty formed another band, Robby Hood and His Merry Men, whose first single was written by Kidd (though it's rare enough I've not been able to find a copy anywhere online). The new backing group was going to be a trio, modelled on Johnny Burnette's Rock and Roll Trio -- just one guitar, bass, and drums. They had Caddy on lead guitar, Clem Cattini on drums, and Brian Gregg on bass. Cattini was regarded as by far the best rock drummer in Britain at the time. He'd played with Terry Dene's backing band the Dene Aces, and can be seen glumly backing Dene in the film The Golden Disc: [Excerpt: Terry Dene, "Candy Floss"] Gregg had joined Dene's band, and they'd both then moved on to be touring musicians for Larry Parnes, backing most of the acts on a tour featuring Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran that we'll be looking at next week. They'd played with various of Parnes' acts for a while, but had then asked for more money, and he'd refused, so they'd quit working for Parnes and joined Vince Taylor and the Playboys. They'd only played with the Playboys a few weeks when they moved on to Chas McDevitt's group. For a brief time, McDevitt had been the biggest star in skiffle other than Lonnie Donegan, but he was firmly in the downward phase of his career at this point. McDevitt also owned a coffee bar, the Freight Train, named after his biggest hit, and most of the musicians in London would hang out there. And after Clem Cattini and Brian Gregg had joined the Pirates, it was at the Freight Train that the song for which the group would be remembered was written. They were going to go into the studio to record another song chosen by the record label -- a version of the old standard "Yes Sir, That's My Baby" -- because EMI had apparently not yet learned that if you had Johnny Kidd record old standards, no-one bought it, but if you had him record bluesy rock and roll you had a hit. But they'd been told they could write their own B-side, as they'd been able to on the last few singles. They were also allowed to bring in Joe Moretti to provide a second guitar -- Moretti, who had played the solo on "Brand New Cadillac", was an old friend of Clem Cattini's, and they thought he'd add something to the record, and also thought they'd be doing him a favour by letting him make a session fee -- he wasn't a regular session player. So they all got together in the Freight Train coffee bar, and wrote another Heath/Robinson number. They weren't going to do anything too original for a B-side, of course. They nicked a rhythm guitar part from "Linda Lu", a minor US hit that Lee Hazelwood had produced for a Chuck Berry soundalike named Ray Sharpe, and which was itself clearly lifted from “Speedoo” by the Cadillacs: [Excerpt: Ray Sharpe, "Linda Lu"] They may also have nicked Joe Moretti's lead guitar part as well, though there's more doubt about this. There's a Mickey and Sylvia record, "No Good Lover", which hadn't been released in the UK at the time, so it's hard to imagine how they could have heard it, but the lead guitar part they hit on was very, very similar -- maybe someone had played it on Radio Luxembourg: [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, "No Good Lover"] They combined those musical ideas with a lyric that was partly a follow-on to the line in "Please Don't Touch" about shaking too much, and partly a slightly bowdlerised version of a saying that Kidd had -- when he saw a woman he found particularly attractive, he'd say "She gives me quivers in me membranes". As it was a B-side, the track they recorded only took two takes, plus a brief overdub for Moretti to add some guitar shimmers, created by him using a cigarette lighter as a slide: [Excerpt: Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, "Shakin' All Over"] The song was knocked off so quickly that they even kept in a mistake -- before the guitar solo, Clem Cattini was meant to play just a one-bar fill. Instead he played for longer, which was very unlike Cattini, who was normally a professional's professional. He asked for another take, but the producer just left it in, and that break going into the solo was one of the things that people latched on to: [Excerpt: Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, "Shakin' All Over"] Despite the track having been put together from pre-existing bits, it had a life and vitality to it that no other British record except "Brand New Cadillac" had had, and Kidd had the added bonus of actually being able to hold a tune, unlike Vince Taylor. The record company quickly realised that "Shakin' All Over" should be the record that they were pushing, and flipped the single. The Pirates appeared on Wham!, the latest Jack Good TV show, and immediately the record charted. It soon made number one, and became the first real proof to British listeners that British people could make rock and roll every bit as good as the Americans -- at this point, everyone still thought Vince Taylor was from America. It was possibly Jack Good who also made the big change to Johnny Kidd's appearance -- he had a slight cast in one eye that got worse as the day went on, with his eyelid drooping more and more. Someone -- probably Good -- suggested that he should make this problem into an advantage, by wearing an eyepatch. He did, and the Pirates got pirate costumes to wear on stage, while Kidd would frantically roam the stage swinging a cutlass around. At this point, stagecraft was something almost unknown to British rock performers, who rarely did more than wear a cleanish suit and say "thank you" after each song. The only other act that was anything like as theatrical was Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages, a minor act who had ripped off Screamin' Jay Hawkins' act. The follow-up, "Restless", was very much "Shakin' All Over" part two, and made the top thirty. After that, sticking with the formula, they did a version of "Linda Lu", but that didn't make the top forty at all. Possibly the most interesting record they made at this point was a version of "I Just Want to Make Love to You", a song Willie Dixon had written for Muddy Waters: [Excerpt: Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, "I Just Want to Make Love to You"] The Pirates were increasingly starting to include blues and R&B songs in their set, and the British blues boom artists of the next few years would often refer to the Pirates as being the band that had inspired them. Clem Cattini still says that Johnny Kidd was the best British blues singer he ever heard. But as their singles were doing less and less well, the Pirates decided to jump ship. Colin Hicks, Tommy Steele's much less successful younger brother, had a backing band called the Cabin Boys, which Brian Gregg had been in before joining Terry Dene's band. Hicks had now started performing an act that was based on Kidd's, and for a tour of Italy, where he was quite popular, he wanted a new band -- he asked the Pirates if they would leave Kidd and become the latest lineup of Cabin Boys, and they left, taking their costumes with them. Clem Cattini now says that agreeing was the worst move he ever made, but they parted on good terms -- Kidd said "Alan, Brian and Clem left me to better themselves. How could I possibly begrudge them their opportunity?" We'll be picking up the story of Alan, Brian, and Clem in a few months' time, but in the meantime, Kidd picked up a new backing band, who had previously been performing as the Redcaps, backing a minor singer called Cuddly Dudley on his single "Sitting on a Train": [Excerpt: Cuddly Dudley and the Redcaps, "Sitting on a Train"] That new lineup of Pirates didn't last too long before the guitarist quit, due to ill health, but he was soon replaced by Mick Green, who is now regarded by many as one of the great British guitarists of all time, to the extent that Wilko Johnson, another British guitarist who came to prominence about fifteen years later, has said that he spent his entire career trying and failing to sound like MIck Green. In 1962 and 63 the group were playing clubs where they found a lot of new bands who they seemed to have things in common with. After playing the Cavern in Liverpool and a residency at the Star Club in Hamburg, they added Richie Barrett's "Some Other Guy" and Arthur Alexander's "A Shot of Rhythm and Blues" to their sets, two R&B numbers that were very popular among the Liverpool bands playing in Hamburg but otherwise almost unknown in the UK. Unfortunately, their version of "A Shot of Rhythm and Blues" didn't chart, and their record label declined to issue their version of "Some Other Guy" -- and then almost immediately the Liverpool group The Big Three released their version as a single, and it made the top forty. As the Pirates' R&B sound was unsuccessful -- no-one seemed to want British R&B, at all -- they decided to go the other way, and record a song written by their new manager, Gordon Mills (who would later become better known for managing Tom Jones and Englebert Humperdinck). "I'll Never Get Over You" was a very catchy, harmonised, song in the style of many of the new bands that were becoming popular, and it's an enjoyable record, but it's not really in the Pirates' style: [Excerpt: Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, "I'll Never Get Over You"] That made number four on the charts, but it would be Johnny Kidd and the Pirates' last major hit. They did have a minor hit with another song by Mills, "Hungry For Love", but a much better record, and a much better example of the Pirates' style, was an R&B single released by the Pirates without Kidd. The plan at the time was that they would be split into two acts in the same way as Cliff Richard and the Shadows -- Kidd would be a solo star, while the Pirates would release records of their own. The A-side of the Pirates' single was a fairly good version of the Willie Dixon song "My Babe", but to my ears the B-side is better -- it's a version of "Casting My Spell", a song originally by an obscure duo called the Johnson Brothers, but popularised by Johnny Otis. The Pirates' version is quite possibly the finest early British R&B record I've heard: [Excerpt: The Pirates, "Casting My Spell"] That didn't chart, and the plan to split the two acts failed. Neither act ever had another hit again, and eventually the classic Mick Green lineup of the Pirates split up -- Green left first, to join Billy J Kramer and the Dakotas, and the rest left one by one. In 1965, The Guess Who had a hit in the US with their cover version of "Shakin' All Over": [Excerpt: The Guess Who, "Shakin' All Over"] The Pirates were reduced to remaking their own old hit as "Shakin' All Over '65" in an attempt to piggyback on that cover version, but the new version, which was dominated by a Hammond organ part, didn't have any success. After the Pirates left Kidd, he got a new group, which he called the New Pirates. He continued making extremely good records on occasion, but had no success at all. Even though younger bands like the Rolling Stones and the Animals were making music very similar to his, he was regarded as an outdated novelty act, a relic of an earlier age from six years earlier. There was always the potential for him to have a comeback, but then in 1966 Kidd, who was never a very good driver and had been in a number of accidents, arrived late at a gig in Bolton. The manager refused to let him on stage because he'd arrived so late, so he drove off to find another gig. He'd been driving most of the day, and he crashed the car and died, as did one person in the vehicle he crashed into. His final single, "Send For That Girl", was released after his death. It's really a very good record, but at the time Kidd's fortunes were so low that even his death didn't make it chart: [Excerpt: Johnny Kidd and the New Pirates, "Send For That Girl"] Kidd was only thirty when he died, and already a has-been, but he left behind the most impressive body of work of any pre-Beatles British act. Various lineups of Pirates have occasionally played since -- including, at one point, Cattini and Gregg playing with Joe Moretti's son Joe Moretti Jr -- but none have ever captured that magic that gave millions of people quivers down the backbone and shakes in the kneebone.
Episode eighty-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Shakin’ All Over” by Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, and how the first great British R&B band interacted with the entertainment industry. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifteen-minute bonus episode, on “Under Your Spell Again” by Buck Owens. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—- Resources As usual, I have put together a Mixcloud mix with every song excerpted in this podcast. Only one biography of Kidd has been written, and that’s been out of print for nearly a quarter of a century and goes for ridiculous prices. Luckily Adie Barrett’s site http://www.johnnykidd.co.uk/ is everything a fan-site should be, and has a detailed biographical section which I used for the broad-strokes outline. Clem Cattini: My Life, Through the Eye of a Tornado is somewhere between authorised biography and autobiography. It’s not the best-written book ever, but it contains a lot of information about Clem’s life. Spike & Co by Graham McCann gives a very full account of Associated London Scripts. Pete Frame’s The Restless Generation is the best book available looking at British 50s rock and roll from a historical perspective. Be warned, though — his jokey and irreverent style can, when dealing with people like Larry Parnes (who was gay and Jewish) very occasionally tip over into reinforcing homophobic and anti-semitic stereotypes for an easy laugh. Billy Bragg’s Roots, Radicals, and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World is one of the best books I’ve read on music at all, and gives far more detail about the historical background. And a fair chunk of the background information here also comes from the extended edition of Mark Lewisohn’s Tune In, which is essential reading for anyone who is interested in the Beatles, British post-war culture, and British post-war music. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript As we get more into this story, we’re going to see a lot more British acts becoming part of it. We’ve already looked at Lonnie Donegan, Cliff Richard, Tommy Steele, and Vince Taylor, but without spoiling anything I think most of you can guess that over the next year or so we’re going to see a few guitar bands from the UK enter the narrative. Today we’re going to look at one of the most important British bands of the early sixties — a band who are now mostly known for one hit and a gimmick, but who made a massive contribution to the sound of rock music. We’re going to look at Johnny Kidd and the Pirates: [Excerpt: Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, “Shakin’ All Over”] Our story starts during the skiffle boom of 1957. If you don’t remember the episodes we did on skiffle and early British rock and roll, it was a musical craze that swept Britain after Lonnie Donegan’s surprise hit with “Rock Island Line”. For about eighteen months, nearly every teenage boy in Britain was in a group playing a weird mix of Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie songs, old folk tunes, and music-hall numbers, with a lineup usually consisting of guitar, banjo, someone using a washboard as percussion, and a homemade double bass made out of a teachest, a broom handle, and a single string. The skiffle craze died away as quickly as it started out, but it left a legacy — thousands of young kids who’d learned at least three chords, who’d performed in public, and who knew that it was possible to make music without having gone through the homogenising star-making process. That would have repercussions throughout the length of this story, and to this day. But while almost everyone in a skiffle group was a kid, not everyone was. Obviously the big stars of the genre — Lonnie Donegan, Chas McDevitt, the Vipers — were all in their twenties when they became famous, and so were some of the amateurs who tried to jump on the bandwagon. In particular, there was Fred Heath. Heath was twenty-one when skiffle hit, and was already married — while twenty-one might seem young now, at the time, it was an age when people were meant to have settled down and found a career. But Heath wasn’t the career sort. There were rumours about him which attest to the kind of person he was perceived as being — that he was a bookie’s runner, that he’d not been drafted because he was thought to be completely impossible to discipline, that he had been working as a painter in a warehouse and urinated on the warehouse floor from the scaffolding he was on — and he was clearly not someone who was *ever* going to settle down. The first skiffle band Heath formed was called Bats Heath and the Vampires, and featured Heath on vocals and rhythm guitar, Brian Englund on banjo, Frank Rouledge on lead guitar, and Clive Lazell on washboard. The group went through a variety of names, at one point naming themselves the Frantic Four in what seems to have been an attempt to confuse people into thinking they were seeing Don Lang’s Frantic Five, the group who often appeared on Six-Five Special: [Excerpt: Don Lang and his Frantic Five, “Six-Five Hand Jivel”] The group went through the standard lineup and name changes that almost every amateur group went through, and they ended up as a five-piece group called the Five Nutters. And it was as the Five Nutters that they made their first attempts at becoming stars, when they auditioned for Carroll Levis. Levis was one of the most important people in showbusiness in the UK at this time. He’d just started a TV series, but for years before that his show had been on Radio Luxembourg, which was for many teenagers in the UK the most important radio station in the world. At the time, the BBC had a legal monopoly on radio broadcasting in the UK, but they had a couple of problems when it came to attracting a teenage audience. The first was that they had to provide entertainment for *everyone*, and so they couldn’t play much music that only appealed to teenagers but was detested by adults. But there was a much bigger problem for the BBC when it came to recorded music. In the 1950s, the BBC ran three national radio stations — the Light Programme, the Home Service, and the Third Programme — along with one national TV channel. The Musicians’ Union were worried that playing recorded music on these would lead to their members losing work, and so there was an agreement called “needletime”, which allowed the BBC to use recorded music for twenty-two hours a week, total, across all three radio stations, plus another three hours for the TV. That had to cover every style of music from Little Richard through to Doris Day through to Beethoven. The rest of the time, if they had music, it had to be performed by live musicians, and so you’d be more likely to hear “Rock Around the Clock” as performed by the Northern Dance Orchestra than Bill Haley’s version, and much of the BBC’s youth programming had middle-aged British session musicians trying to replicate the sound of American records and failing miserably. But Luxembourg didn’t have a needle-time rule, and so a commercial English-language station had been set up there, using transmitters powerful enough to reach most of Britain and Ireland. The station was owned and run in Britain, and most of the shows were recorded in London by British DJs like Brian Matthew, Jimmy Savile, and Alan Freeman, although there were also recordings of Alan Freed’s show broadcast on it. The shows were mostly sponsored by record companies, who would make the DJs play just half of the record, so they could promote more songs in their twenty-minute slot, and this was the main way that any teenager in Britain would actually be able to hear rock and roll music. Oddly, even though he spent many years on Radio Luxembourg, Levis’ show, which had originally been on the BBC before the War, was not a music show, but a talent show. Whether on his original BBC radio show, the Radio Luxembourg one, or his new TV show, the format was the same. He would alternate weeks between broadcasting and talent scouting. In talent scouting weeks he would go to a different city each week, where for five nights in a row he would put on talent shows featuring up to twenty different local amateur acts doing their party pieces — without payment, of course, just for the exposure. At the end of the show, the audience would get a chance to clap for each act, and the act that got the loudest applause would go through to a final on the Saturday night. This of course meant that acts that wanted to win would get a lot of their friends and family to come along and cheer for them. The Saturday night would then have the winning acts — which is to say, those who brought along the most paying customers — compete against each other. The most popular of *those* acts would then get to appear on Levis’ TV show the next week. It was, as you can imagine, an extremely lucrative business. When the Five Nutters appeared on Levis’ Discoveries show, they were fairly sure that the audience clapped loudest for them, but they came third. Being the type of person he was, Fred Heath didn’t take this lying down, and remonstrated with Levis, who eventually promised to get the Nutters some better gigs, one suspects just to shut Heath up. As a result of Levis putting in a good word for them, they got a few appearances at places like the 2Is, and made an appearance on the BBC’s one concession to youth culture on the radio — a new show called Saturday Skiffle Club. Around this time, the Five Nutters also recorded a demo disc. The first side was a skiffled-up version of “Shake, Rattle and Roll”, with some extremely good jazzy lead guitar: [Excerpt: Fred Heath and the Five Nutters, “Shake, Rattle, and Roll”] I’ve heard quite a few records of skiffle groups, mostly by professionals, and it’s clear that the Five Nutters were far more musical, and far more interesting, than most of them, even despite the audible sloppiness here. The point of skiffle was meant to be that it was do-it-yourself music that required no particular level of skill — but in this case the Nutters’ guitarist Frank Rouledge was clearly quite a bit more proficient than the run-of-the-mill skiffle guitarist. What was even more interesting about that recording, though, was the B-side, which was a song written by the group. It seems to have been mostly written by Heath, and it’s called “Blood-Red Beauty” because Heath’s wife was a redhead: [Excerpt: Fred Heath and the Five Nutters, “Blood Red Beauty”] The song itself is fairly unexceptional — it’s a standard Hank Williams style hillbilly boogie — but at this time there was still in Britain a fairly hard and fast rule which had performers and songwriters as two distinct things. There were a handful of British rock musicians who were attempting to write their own material — most prominently Billy Fury, a Larry Parnes artist who I’m afraid we don’t have space for in the podcast, but who was one of the most interesting of the late-fifties British acts — but in general, there was a fairly strict demarcation. It was very unusual for a British performer to also be trying to write songs. The Nutters split up shortly after their Saturday Skiffle Club appearance, and Heath formed various other groups called things like The Fabulous Freddie Heath Band and The Fred, Mike & Tom Show, before going back to the old name, with a new lineup of Freddie Heath and the Nutters consisting of himself on vocals, Mike West and Tom Brown — who had been the Mike and Tom in The Fred, Mike, & Tom Show, on backing vocals, Tony Doherty on rhythm guitar, Ken McKay on drums, Johnny Gordon on bass, and on lead guitar Alan Caddy, a man who was known by the nickname “tea”, which was partly a pun on his name, partly a reference to his drinking copious amounts of tea, and partly Cockney rhyming slang — tea-leaf for thief — as he was known for stealing cars. The Nutters got a new agent, Don Toy, and manager, Guy Robinson, but Heath seemed mostly to want to be a songwriter rather than a singer at this point. He was looking to place his songs with other artists, and in early 1959, he did. He wrote a song called “Please Don’t Touch”, and managed to get it placed with a vocal group called the Bachelors — not the more famous group of that name, but a minor group who recorded for Parlophone, a subsidiary of EMI run by a young producer named George Martin. “Please Don’t Touch” came out as the B-side of a Bachelors record: [Excerpt: The Bachelors, “Please Don’t Touch”] One notable thing about the songwriting credit — while most sources say Fred Heath wrote the song by himself, he gave Guy Robinson a co-writing credit on this and many of his future songs. This was partly because it was fairly standard at the time for managers to cut themselves in on their artists’ credits, but also because that way the credit could read Heath Robinson — Heath Robinson was a famous British cartoonist who was notable for drawing impossibly complicated inventions, and whose name had become part of the British language — for American listeners, imagine that the song was credited to Rube Goldberg, and you’ll have the idea. At this point, the Nutters had become quite a professional organisation, and so it was unsurprising that after “Please Don’t Touch” brought Fred Heath to the attention of EMI, a different EMI imprint, HMV, signed them up. Much of the early success of the Nutters, and this professionalism, seems to be down to Don Toy, who seems to have been a remarkably multi-talented individual. As well as being an agent who had contracts with many London venues to provide them with bands, he was also an electrical engineer specialising in sound equipment. He built a two-hundred watt bass amp for the group, at a time when almost every band just put their bass guitar through a normal guitar amp, and twenty-five watts was considered quite loud. He also built a portable tape echo device that could be used on stage to make Heath’s voice sound like it would on the records. Heath later bought the first Copicat echo unit to be made — this was a mass-produced device that would be used by a lot of British bands in the early sixties, and Heath’s had serial number 0001 — but before that became available, he used Toy’s device, which may well have been the very first on-stage echo device in the UK. On top of that, Toy has also claimed that most of the songs credited to Heath and Robinson were also co-written by him, but he left his name off because the credit looked better without it. And whether or not that’s true, he was also the drummer on this first session — Ken McKay, the Nutters’ drummer, was a bit unsteady in his tempo, and Toy was a decent player and took over from him when in April 1959, Fred Heath and the Nutters went into Abbey Road Studio 2, to record their own version of “Please Don’t Touch”. This was ostensibly produced by HMV producer Walter Ridley, but Ridley actually left rock and roll records to his engineer, Peter Sullivan: [Excerpt: Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, “Please Don’t Touch”] It was only when the session was over that they saw the paperwork for it. Fred Heath was the only member of the Nutters to be signed to EMI, with the rest of the group being contracted as session musicians, but that was absolutely normal for the time period — Tommy Steele’s Steelmen and Cliff Richard’s Drifters hadn’t been signed as artists either. What they were concerned about was the band name on the paperwork — it didn’t say Fred Heath and the Nutters, but Johnny Kidd and the Pirates. They were told that that was going to be their new name. They never did find out who it was who had decided on this for them, but from now on Fred Heath was Johnny Kidd. The record was promoted on Radio Luxembourg, and everyone thought it was going to go to number one. Unfortunately, strike action prevented that, and the record was only a moderate chart success — the highest position it hit in any of the UK charts at the time was number twenty on the Melody Maker chart. But that didn’t stop it from becoming an acknowledged classic of British rock and roll. It was so popular that it actually saw an American cover version, which was something that almost never happened with British songs, though Chico Holliday’s version was unsuccessful: [Excerpt: Chico Holliday, “Please Don’t Touch”] It remained such a fond memory for British rockers that in 1980 the heavy metal groups Motorhead and Girlschool recorded it as the supergroup HeadGirl, and it became the biggest hit either group ever had, reaching number five in the British charts: [Excerpt: Headgirl, “Please Don’t Touch”] But while “Please Don’t Touch” was one of the very few good rock and roll records made in Britain, it wasn’t the one for which Johnny Kidd and the Pirates would be remembered. It was, though, enough to make them a big act. They toured the country on a bill compered by Liverpool comedian Jimmy Tarbuck, and they made several appearances on Saturday Club, which had now dropped the “skiffle” name and was the only place anyone could hear rock and roll on BBC radio. Of course, the British record industry having the immense sense of potential it did, HMV immediately capitalised on the success of Johnny Kidd and the Pirates doing a great group performance of an original rock and roll number, by releasing as a follow-up single, a version of the old standard “If You Were the Only Girl in the World and I Were the Only Boy” by Johnny without the Pirates, but with chorus and orchestra conducted by Ivor Raymonde: [Excerpt: Johnny Kidd, “If You Were The Only Girl in the World”] For some reason — I can’t imagine why — that didn’t chart. One suspects that young Lemmy wasn’t quite as fond of that one as “Please Don’t Touch”. The B-side was a quite good rocker, with some nice guitar work from the session guitarist Bert Weedon, but no-one bothered to buy the record at the time, so they didn’t turn it over to hear the other side. The follow-up was better — a reworking of Marv Johnson’s “You’ve Got What it Takes”, one of the hits that Berry Gordy had been writing and producing for Johnson. Johnson’s version made the top five in the UK, but the Pirates’ version still made the top thirty. But by this time there had been some changes. The first change that was made was that the Pirates changed manager — while Robinson would continue getting songwriting credits, the group were now managed through Associated London Scripts, by Stan “Scruffy” Dale. Associated London Scripts was, as the name suggests, primarily a company that produced scripts. It was started as a writers’ co-operative, and in its early days it was made up of seven people. There was Frankie Howerd, one of the most popular stand-up comedians of the time, who was always looking for new material; Spike Milligan, the writer and one of the stars of the Goon Show, the most important surreal comedy of the fifties; Eric Sykes, who was a writer-performer who was involved in almost every important comedy programme of the decade, including co-writing many Goon episodes with Milligan, before becoming a TV star himself; Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, who wrote the most important *sitcom* of the fifties and early sixties, Hancock’s Half Hour; and Scruffy Dale, who was Howerd and Sykes’ manager and was supposed to take care of the business stuff. In fact, though, most of the business was actually taken care of by the seventh person and only woman, Beryl Vertue, who was taken on as the secretary on the basis of an interview that mostly asked about her tea-making skills, but soon found herself doing almost everything — the men in the office got so used to asking her “Could you make the tea, Beryl?”, “Could you type up this script, Beryl?” that they just started asking her things like “Could you renegotiate our contract with the BBC, Beryl?” She eventually became one of the most important women in the TV industry, with her most recent prominent credit being as executive producer on the BBC’s Sherlock up until 2017, more than sixty years after she joined the business. Vertue did all the work to keep the company running — a company which grew to about thirty writers, and between the early fifties and mid sixties, as well as Hancock’s Half Hour and the Goons, its writers created Sykes, Beyond Our Ken, Round the Horne, Steptoe and Son, The Bedsitting Room, the Running, Jumping, Standing Still Film, Til Death Us Do Part, Citizen James, and the Daleks. That’s a list off the top of my head — it would actually be easier to list memorable British comedy programmes and films of the fifties and early sixties that *didn’t* have a script from one of ALS’ writers. And while Vertue was keeping Marty Feldman, John Junkin, Barry Took, Johnny Speight, John Antrobus and all the rest of these new writers in work, Scruffy Dale was trying to create a career in pop management. As several people associated with ALS had made records with George Martin at Parlophone, he had an in there, and some of the few pop successes that Martin had in the fifties were producing acts managed by Dale through ALS, like the Vipers Skiffle Group: [Excerpt: The Vipers Skiffle Group, “Don’t You Rock Me, Daddy-O”] and a young performer named Jim Smith, who wanted to be a comedian and actor, but who Dale renamed after himself, and who had a string of hits as Jim Dale: [Excerpt: Jim Dale, “Be My Girl”] Jim Dale eventually did become a film and TV star, starting with presenting Six-Five Special, and is now best known for having starred in many of the Carry On films and narrating the Harry Potter audiobooks, but at the time he was still a pop star. Jim Dale and the Vipers were the two professional acts headlining an otherwise-amateur tour that Scruffy Dale put together that was very much like Carroll Levis’ Discoveries show, except without the need to even give the winners a slot on the TV every other week. This tour was supposed to be a hunt for the country’s best skiffle group, and there was going to be a grand national final, and the winner of *that* would go on TV. Except they just kept dragging the tour out for eighteen months, until the skiffle fad was completely over and no-one cared, so there never was a national final. And in the meantime the Vipers had to sit through twenty groups of spotty kids a night, all playing “Don’t You Rock Me Daddy-O”, and then go out and play it themselves, every night for eighteen months. Scruffy Dale was unscrupulous in other ways as well, and not long after he’d taken on the Pirates’ management he was sacked from ALS. Spike Milligan had never liked Dale — when told that Dale had lost a testicle in the war, he’d merely replied “I hope he dropped it on Dresden” — but Frankie Howerd and Eric Sykes had always been impressed with his ability to negotiate deals. But then Frankie Howerd found out that he’d missed out on lucrative opportunities because Dale had shoved letters in his coat pocket and forgotten about them for a fortnight. He started investigating a few more things, and it turned out that Dale had been siphoning money from Sykes and Howerd’s personal bank accounts into his own, having explained to their bank manager that it would just be resting in his account for them, because they were showbiz people who would spend it all too fast, so he was looking after them. And he’d also been doing other bits of creative accounting — every success his musical acts had was marked down as something he’d done independently, and all the profits went to him, while all the unsuccessful ventures were marked down as being ALS projects, and their losses charged to the company. So neither Dale nor the Pirates were with Associated London Scripts very long. But Dale made one very important change — he and Don Toy decided between them that most of the Pirates had to go. There were six backing musicians in the group if you counted the two backing vocalists, who all needed paying, and only one could read music — they weren’t professional enough to make a career in the music business. So all of the Pirates except Alan Caddy were sacked. Mike West and Tony Doherty formed another band, Robby Hood and His Merry Men, whose first single was written by Kidd (though it’s rare enough I’ve not been able to find a copy anywhere online). The new backing group was going to be a trio, modelled on Johnny Burnette’s Rock and Roll Trio — just one guitar, bass, and drums. They had Caddy on lead guitar, Clem Cattini on drums, and Brian Gregg on bass. Cattini was regarded as by far the best rock drummer in Britain at the time. He’d played with Terry Dene’s backing band the Dene Aces, and can be seen glumly backing Dene in the film The Golden Disc: [Excerpt: Terry Dene, “Candy Floss”] Gregg had joined Dene’s band, and they’d both then moved on to be touring musicians for Larry Parnes, backing most of the acts on a tour featuring Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran that we’ll be looking at next week. They’d played with various of Parnes’ acts for a while, but had then asked for more money, and he’d refused, so they’d quit working for Parnes and joined Vince Taylor and the Playboys. They’d only played with the Playboys a few weeks when they moved on to Chas McDevitt’s group. For a brief time, McDevitt had been the biggest star in skiffle other than Lonnie Donegan, but he was firmly in the downward phase of his career at this point. McDevitt also owned a coffee bar, the Freight Train, named after his biggest hit, and most of the musicians in London would hang out there. And after Clem Cattini and Brian Gregg had joined the Pirates, it was at the Freight Train that the song for which the group would be remembered was written. They were going to go into the studio to record another song chosen by the record label — a version of the old standard “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby” — because EMI had apparently not yet learned that if you had Johnny Kidd record old standards, no-one bought it, but if you had him record bluesy rock and roll you had a hit. But they’d been told they could write their own B-side, as they’d been able to on the last few singles. They were also allowed to bring in Joe Moretti to provide a second guitar — Moretti, who had played the solo on “Brand New Cadillac”, was an old friend of Clem Cattini’s, and they thought he’d add something to the record, and also thought they’d be doing him a favour by letting him make a session fee — he wasn’t a regular session player. So they all got together in the Freight Train coffee bar, and wrote another Heath/Robinson number. They weren’t going to do anything too original for a B-side, of course. They nicked a rhythm guitar part from “Linda Lu”, a minor US hit that Lee Hazelwood had produced for a Chuck Berry soundalike named Ray Sharpe, and which was itself clearly lifted from “Speedoo” by the Cadillacs: [Excerpt: Ray Sharpe, “Linda Lu”] They may also have nicked Joe Moretti’s lead guitar part as well, though there’s more doubt about this. There’s a Mickey and Sylvia record, “No Good Lover”, which hadn’t been released in the UK at the time, so it’s hard to imagine how they could have heard it, but the lead guitar part they hit on was very, very similar — maybe someone had played it on Radio Luxembourg: [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, “No Good Lover”] They combined those musical ideas with a lyric that was partly a follow-on to the line in “Please Don’t Touch” about shaking too much, and partly a slightly bowdlerised version of a saying that Kidd had — when he saw a woman he found particularly attractive, he’d say “She gives me quivers in me membranes”. As it was a B-side, the track they recorded only took two takes, plus a brief overdub for Moretti to add some guitar shimmers, created by him using a cigarette lighter as a slide: [Excerpt: Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, “Shakin’ All Over”] The song was knocked off so quickly that they even kept in a mistake — before the guitar solo, Clem Cattini was meant to play just a one-bar fill. Instead he played for longer, which was very unlike Cattini, who was normally a professional’s professional. He asked for another take, but the producer just left it in, and that break going into the solo was one of the things that people latched on to: [Excerpt: Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, “Shakin’ All Over”] Despite the track having been put together from pre-existing bits, it had a life and vitality to it that no other British record except “Brand New Cadillac” had had, and Kidd had the added bonus of actually being able to hold a tune, unlike Vince Taylor. The record company quickly realised that “Shakin’ All Over” should be the record that they were pushing, and flipped the single. The Pirates appeared on Wham!, the latest Jack Good TV show, and immediately the record charted. It soon made number one, and became the first real proof to British listeners that British people could make rock and roll every bit as good as the Americans — at this point, everyone still thought Vince Taylor was from America. It was possibly Jack Good who also made the big change to Johnny Kidd’s appearance — he had a slight cast in one eye that got worse as the day went on, with his eyelid drooping more and more. Someone — probably Good — suggested that he should make this problem into an advantage, by wearing an eyepatch. He did, and the Pirates got pirate costumes to wear on stage, while Kidd would frantically roam the stage swinging a cutlass around. At this point, stagecraft was something almost unknown to British rock performers, who rarely did more than wear a cleanish suit and say “thank you” after each song. The only other act that was anything like as theatrical was Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages, a minor act who had ripped off Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ act. The follow-up, “Restless”, was very much “Shakin’ All Over” part two, and made the top thirty. After that, sticking with the formula, they did a version of “Linda Lu”, but that didn’t make the top forty at all. Possibly the most interesting record they made at this point was a version of “I Just Want to Make Love to You”, a song Willie Dixon had written for Muddy Waters: [Excerpt: Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, “I Just Want to Make Love to You”] The Pirates were increasingly starting to include blues and R&B songs in their set, and the British blues boom artists of the next few years would often refer to the Pirates as being the band that had inspired them. Clem Cattini still says that Johnny Kidd was the best British blues singer he ever heard. But as their singles were doing less and less well, the Pirates decided to jump ship. Colin Hicks, Tommy Steele’s much less successful younger brother, had a backing band called the Cabin Boys, which Brian Gregg had been in before joining Terry Dene’s band. Hicks had now started performing an act that was based on Kidd’s, and for a tour of Italy, where he was quite popular, he wanted a new band — he asked the Pirates if they would leave Kidd and become the latest lineup of Cabin Boys, and they left, taking their costumes with them. Clem Cattini now says that agreeing was the worst move he ever made, but they parted on good terms — Kidd said “Alan, Brian and Clem left me to better themselves. How could I possibly begrudge them their opportunity?” We’ll be picking up the story of Alan, Brian, and Clem in a few months’ time, but in the meantime, Kidd picked up a new backing band, who had previously been performing as the Redcaps, backing a minor singer called Cuddly Dudley on his single “Sitting on a Train”: [Excerpt: Cuddly Dudley and the Redcaps, “Sitting on a Train”] That new lineup of Pirates didn’t last too long before the guitarist quit, due to ill health, but he was soon replaced by Mick Green, who is now regarded by many as one of the great British guitarists of all time, to the extent that Wilko Johnson, another British guitarist who came to prominence about fifteen years later, has said that he spent his entire career trying and failing to sound like MIck Green. In 1962 and 63 the group were playing clubs where they found a lot of new bands who they seemed to have things in common with. After playing the Cavern in Liverpool and a residency at the Star Club in Hamburg, they added Richie Barrett’s “Some Other Guy” and Arthur Alexander’s “A Shot of Rhythm and Blues” to their sets, two R&B numbers that were very popular among the Liverpool bands playing in Hamburg but otherwise almost unknown in the UK. Unfortunately, their version of “A Shot of Rhythm and Blues” didn’t chart, and their record label declined to issue their version of “Some Other Guy” — and then almost immediately the Liverpool group The Big Three released their version as a single, and it made the top forty. As the Pirates’ R&B sound was unsuccessful — no-one seemed to want British R&B, at all — they decided to go the other way, and record a song written by their new manager, Gordon Mills (who would later become better known for managing Tom Jones and Englebert Humperdinck). “I’ll Never Get Over You” was a very catchy, harmonised, song in the style of many of the new bands that were becoming popular, and it’s an enjoyable record, but it’s not really in the Pirates’ style: [Excerpt: Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, “I’ll Never Get Over You”] That made number four on the charts, but it would be Johnny Kidd and the Pirates’ last major hit. They did have a minor hit with another song by Mills, “Hungry For Love”, but a much better record, and a much better example of the Pirates’ style, was an R&B single released by the Pirates without Kidd. The plan at the time was that they would be split into two acts in the same way as Cliff Richard and the Shadows — Kidd would be a solo star, while the Pirates would release records of their own. The A-side of the Pirates’ single was a fairly good version of the Willie Dixon song “My Babe”, but to my ears the B-side is better — it’s a version of “Casting My Spell”, a song originally by an obscure duo called the Johnson Brothers, but popularised by Johnny Otis. The Pirates’ version is quite possibly the finest early British R&B record I’ve heard: [Excerpt: The Pirates, “Casting My Spell”] That didn’t chart, and the plan to split the two acts failed. Neither act ever had another hit again, and eventually the classic Mick Green lineup of the Pirates split up — Green left first, to join Billy J Kramer and the Dakotas, and the rest left one by one. In 1965, The Guess Who had a hit in the US with their cover version of “Shakin’ All Over”: [Excerpt: The Guess Who, “Shakin’ All Over”] The Pirates were reduced to remaking their own old hit as “Shakin’ All Over ’65” in an attempt to piggyback on that cover version, but the new version, which was dominated by a Hammond organ part, didn’t have any success. After the Pirates left Kidd, he got a new group, which he called the New Pirates. He continued making extremely good records on occasion, but had no success at all. Even though younger bands like the Rolling Stones and the Animals were making music very similar to his, he was regarded as an outdated novelty act, a relic of an earlier age from six years earlier. There was always the potential for him to have a comeback, but then in 1966 Kidd, who was never a very good driver and had been in a number of accidents, arrived late at a gig in Bolton. The manager refused to let him on stage because he’d arrived so late, so he drove off to find another gig. He’d been driving most of the day, and he crashed the car and died, as did one person in the vehicle he crashed into. His final single, “Send For That Girl”, was released after his death. It’s really a very good record, but at the time Kidd’s fortunes were so low that even his death didn’t make it chart: [Excerpt: Johnny Kidd and the New Pirates, “Send For That Girl”] Kidd was only thirty when he died, and already a has-been, but he left behind the most impressive body of work of any pre-Beatles British act. Various lineups of Pirates have occasionally played since — including, at one point, Cattini and Gregg playing with Joe Moretti’s son Joe Moretti Jr — but none have ever captured that magic that gave millions of people quivers down the backbone and shakes in the kneebone.
Making a Scene Presents the PODCAST of LIVE from the Midnight Circus Featuring Sass JordanThis is the Voice of Indie Blues, the future of the blues. Artists who embrace the diversity of the blues that always has and still is being created from it's roots. These artists understand the blues is a living art form that is driven by innovation and creativity. These are the Indie Blues Artists!The Claudettes,Most Accidents Happen,The Claudettes,"Bad Babe, Losin' Touch",Mike Zito,QUARANTINE BLUES,Quarantine BluesMike Zito,DONT LET THE WORLD GET YOU DOWN,Quarantine BluesCrystal Shawanda,Evil Memory,Church House BluesVictor Wainwright & The Train,America,Memphis LoudJim Diamond Revue,15 Below,Friends & FamilyPeter Karp,Sitting On The Edge Of The World,Magnificent HeartLiz Mandeville,Online Love Affair,Playing With FireTas Cru,Drive On,Drive OnMakingascene.org,Intro Sass Jordon,makingascene.orgSass Jordan,Am I Wrong,Sassy Blues and the Champagne HookersSass Jordan,My Babe,Sassy Blues and the Champagne Hookerswww.makingascene.org,Sass Jordon,Sass Jordon,01_Leaving Trunk,Sass Jordon,08_Still Got The Blues,Ryan Perry,"High Risk, Low Reward","High Risk, Low Reward"John Primer And Bob Corritore,Let's Get Together,The Gypsy Woman Told MeEliza Neals,Black Crow Moan (feat. Joe Louis Walker),Black Crow MoanThe Proven Ones,Already Gone,You Ain't DoneLisa Mills,02 Tell Mama,The TriangleReverend Freakchild,I know You Rider,The Bodhisattva BluesThe Reverend Shawn Amos & The Brotherhood,Albion Blues (feat. Kenya Hathaway),Blue SkyThe Reverend Shawn Amos & The Brotherhood,"Keep the Faith, Have Some Fun (feat. Mudbug Brass Band)",Blue SkyJohn Pagano Band,Misbehavin,SingleRory Block,Its Red Hot,Prove It On MeAlbert Cummings,Do What Mama Says,BelieveStephen Cooper and The Nobody Famous,Welcome Home,Stephen Cooper and The Nobody FamousBen Rice and RB Stone,Hey Politician,Out of the BoxMichael Mills Band,My New Woman,Stand UpTomas Docker,Smokestack Lightning,Tyler Morris,Young Man's Blues (feat. Ronnie Earl),Living In The ShadowsALBERT CASTIGLIA,GET YOUR ASS IN THE VAN,WILD AND FREEJim Gustin & Truth Jones,All You Ever Bring Me Is The Blues,Lessons LearnedMike Mattison,Word's Comin' Down,AfterglowAna Cristina Cash,Southern Roots,ShineChanda Rule & Sweet Emma Band,Come Sunday,Hold On
Thanks to the keen eyes and ears over at #oldgoldvintagevinyl204 we have masses of virgin spins this week and into the next month to be sure. Please like the Facebook page here: facebook.com/ontargetpodcast/ ----------------------------------------------- The Playlist Is: "High Blood Pressure" Maurice Williams & The Zodiacs - Reo "My Babe" Ron Holden & The Thunderbirds - Apex "Dear Abby" The Hearts - Tuff "Crazy Baby" Bobby Hebb - Philips "Are You Lonely For Me Baby" Freddie Scott - Shout "Get Away" The Tams - ABC "The Beginning" The Collectors - London "The Witch" The Rattles - Probe "Gimmie Little Lovin'" Blakewood Castle - Franklin "Tip Toe" Robert Parker - Nola "Land Of Love" Steve Sanders - MGM "It Won't Be This way Always" The King Pins - Federal "It Takes Two" Marvin Gaye & Mary Wells - Tamla "When You're Near" Joe Simon - Vee Jay "The Buzzard" C. Smalls & Co. - A&M "Long Day's Flight" The Electric Prunes - Reprise "Have You Ever Felt Blue" The Chantels - MW "Can't Seem To Make You Mine" The Seeds - GNP Crescendo "Oh, I've Been Bless'd" Bobby Taylor - Taylor Made Soul LP "Little Miss Sweetness" Bobby Taylor - Taylor Made Soul LP "(Do The) Hot Pants" Mr. Jim & The Rhythm Machine - Wizdom
Episode sixty-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Susie Q” by Dale Hawkins, and at the difference between rockabilly and electric blues. 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 “Shake a Hand” by Faye Adams. —-more—- Errata I pronounce presage incorrectly in the episode, and the song “Do it Again a Little Bit Slower” doesn’t have the word “just” in the title. Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. This time, for reasons to do with Mixcloud’s terms of service, it’s broken into two parts. Part one, part two. There are no books that I know of on Hawkins, but I relied heavily on three books with chapters on him — Hepcats and Rockabilly Boys by Robert Reynolds, Dig That Beat! Interviews with Musicians at the Root of Rock and Roll by Sheree Homer, and Shreveport Sounds in Black and White edited by Kip Lornell and Tracy E.W. Laird. This compilation of Hawkins’ early singles is as good a set as any to start with, though the liner notes are perfunctory at best. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript We’re pretty much at the end of the true rockabilly era already — all the major figures to come out of Sun studios have done so, and while 1957 saw several country-influenced white rock and rollers show up, like Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers, and those singers will often get referred to as “rockabilly”, they don’t tend to get counted by aficionados of the subgenre, who think they don’t sound enough like the music from Sun to count. But there are still a few exceptions. And one of those is Dale Hawkins, the man whose recordings were to spark a whole new subgenre, the style of music that would later become known as “swamp rock”. [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “Susie Q”] Dale Hawkins never liked being called a rockabilly, though that’s the description that most people now use of him. We’ll look later in the episode at how accurate that description actually is, but for the moment the important thing is that he thought of himself as a bluesman. When he was living in Shreveport, Louisiana, he lived in a shack in the black part of town, and inside the shack there was only a folding camp bed, a record player, and thousands of 78RPM blues records. Nothing else at all. It’s not that he didn’t like country music, of course — as a kid, he and his brother hitch-hiked to a nearby town to go to a Flatt and Scruggs gig, and he also loved Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers — but it was the blues that called to him more, and so he never thought of himself as having the country elements that would normally be necessary for someone to call themselves a rockabilly. While he didn’t have much direct country influence, he did come from a country music family. His father, Delmar Hawkins senior, was a country musician who was according to some sources one of the original members of the Sons of the Pioneers, the group that launched the career of Roy Rogers: [Excerpt: Sons of the Pioneers, “Tumbling Tumbleweeds”] While Hawkins Sr.’s name isn’t in any of the official lists of group members, he might well have performed with them at some point in the early years of the group. And whether he did or didn’t, he was definitely a bass player in many other hillbilly bands. However, it’s unlikely that Delmar Hawkins Sr. had much influence on his son, as he left the family when Delmar Jr was three, and didn’t reconnect until after “Susie Q” became a hit. Delmar Sr. wasn’t the only family member to be a musician, either — Dale’s younger brother Jerry was a rockabilly who made a few singles in the fifties: [Excerpt: Jerry Hawkins, “Swing Daddy Swing”] Another family member, Ronnie Hawkins, would later have his own musical career, which would intersect with several of the artists we’re going to be looking at later in this series. Del Hawkins, as he was originally called, did a variety of jobs, including a short stint as a sailor, after dropping out of school, but he soon got the idea of becoming a musician, and started performing with Sonny Jones, a local guitarist whose sister was Hank Williams’ widow. Jones had a lot of contacts in the local music industry, and helped Hawkins pull together the first lineup of his band, when he was nineteen. While Hawkins thought of himself as a blues musician, for a white singer in Shreveport, there was only one option open if you wanted to be a star, and that was performing on the Louisiana Hayride, the country show where Elvis, among many others, had made his name. And Jones had many contacts on the show, and performed on it himself. But Hawkins’ first job at the Louisiana Hayride wasn’t as a performer, but working in the car park. He and his brother would go up to drivers heading into the car park for the show, and charge them fifty cents to park their cars for them — when the car park filled up, they’d just park the cars on the street outside. What they didn’t tell the drivers was that the car park was actually free to the public. At the same time he was starting out as a musician, Del was working in a record shop, Stan’s Record Shop, run by a man named Stan Lewis. Hawkins had been a regular customer for several years before working up the courage to ask for a job there, and by the time he got the job, he was familiar with almost every blues or R&B record that was available at the time. Customers would come into the shop, sing a snatch of a song they’d heard, and young Del would be able to tell them the title and the artist. It was through doing this job that Hawkins became friendly with customers like B.B. King, who would remain a lifelong friend. It was also while working at Stan’s Record Shop that Hawkins became better acquainted with its owner. Stan Lewis was, among other things, both a talent scout for Chess records and one of the biggest customers of the label — if he got behind a record, Chess knew it would sell, at least in Louisiana, and so they would listen to him. Indeed, Lewis was one of the biggest record distributors, as well as a record shop owner, and he distributed records all across the region, to many other stores. Lewis also worked as a record producer — the first record he ever produced was one of the biggest blues hits of all time, Lowell Fulson’s “Reconsider Baby”, which was released on the Chess subsidiary Checker: [Excerpt: Lowell Fulson, “Reconsider Baby”] Lewis took an interest in his young employee’s music career, and introduced Hawkins to his cousin, D.J. Fontana, another musician who played on the Louisiana Hayride. Fontana played with Hawkins for a while before taking on a better-paid job with Elvis Presley. At Lewis’ instigation, Hawkins went into the studio in 1956 with engineer Merle Kilgore (who would later become famous in his own right as a country songwriter, co-writing songs like “Ring of Fire”), his new guitarist James Burton, and several other musicians, to record a demo of what would become Hawkins’ most famous song, “Susie Q”: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “Susie Q”, demo version] Listening to that, it’s clear that they already had all the elements of the finished record nearly in place — the main difference between that and the finished version that they cut later is that the demo has a saxophone solo, and that James Burton hasn’t fully worked out his guitar part, although it’s close to the final version. At the time he cut that track, Hawkins intended it as a potential first single, but Stan Lewis had other ideas. While Chess records put out almost solely tracks by black artists, their subsidiary Checker *had* recently released a single by a white artist — a song by Bobby Charles called “Later, Alligator”, which a short while later had become a hit for Bill Haley, under the longer title “See You Later, Alligator”: [Excerpt: Bobby Charles, “Later Alligator”] Lewis thought that given that precedent, Checker might be willing to put out another record by a white act, if that record was an answer record to Bobby Charles’. So he persuaded Hawkins to write a soundalike song, which Hawkins and his band quickly demoed — “See You Soon, Baboon”: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “See You Soon, Baboon”] Lewis sent that off to Checker, who released Hawkins’ demo, although they did make three small changes. The first was to add a Tarzan-style yodelling call at the beginning and end of the record: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “See You Soon, Baboon”] The second, which would have long-lasting consequences, was that they misspelled Hawkins’ first name — Leonard Chess misheard “Del Hawkins” over the phone, and the record came out as by “Dale Hawkins”, which would be his name from that point on. The last change was to remove Hawkins’ songwriting credit, and give it instead to Stan Lewis and Eleanor Broadwater. Broadwater was the wife of Gene Nobles, a DJ to whom the Chess brothers owed money. Nobles is also the one who supplied the Tarzan cry. Both Lewis and Broadwater would also get credited for Hawkins’ follow-up single, a new version of “Susie Q”: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “Susie Q”] On that, at least, Hawkins was credited as one of the writers along with Lewis and Broadwater. But according to Hawkins, not only did the credit get split with the wrong people, but he didn’t receive any of the royalties to which he was entitled until as late as 1985. And crucially, the other people who did cowrite the song — notably James Burton — didn’t get any credit at all. In general, there seems to be a great deal of disagreement about who contributed what to the song — I’ve seen various other putative co-authors listed — but everyone seems agreed that Hawkins came up with the lyrics, while Burton came up with the guitar riff. Presumably the song evolved from a jam session by the musicians — it’s the kind of song that musicians come up with when they’re jamming together, and that would explain the discrepancies in the stories as to who wrote it. Well, that and the record company ripping the writers off. The song came from a myriad musical sources. The most obvious influence for its overall sound — both the melody and the way the melody interacts with the guitar riff — is “Baby Please Don’t Go” by Muddy Waters: [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, “Baby Please Don’t Go”] But the principal influence on the melody was, rather than Waters’ song, a record by the Clovers which had a very similar melody — “I’ve Got My Eyes on You”: [Excerpt: The Clovers, “I’ve Got My Eyes On You”] Hawkins and Burton took those melodic and arrangement ideas and coupled them with a riff inspired by Howlin’ Wolf — I’ve seen some people claim that the song was “ripped off” from Wolf. I don’t believe, myself, that that is the case. Wolf certainly had several records with similar riffs, like “Smokestack Lightnin'”: [Excerpt: Howlin’ Wolf, “Smokestack Lightnin'”] And “Spoonful”: [Excerpt: Howlin’ Wolf, “Spoonful”] But nothing with the exact same riff, and certainly nothing with the same melody. Some have also claimed that Wolf provided lyrical inspiration — that Hawkins was inspired by seeing Wolf drop to his knees on stage yelling something about “Suzy”. There are also claims that the song was named after Stan Lewis’ daughter Suzie — and notably Stan Lewis himself bolstered his claim to a co-writing credit for the song by pointing out that not only did he have a daughter named Susan, so did Leonard Chess. He claimed that he had mentioned this to Hawkins and suggested that the two of them write a song together with the name in it, because it would appeal to Chess. Both of those tales of the song’s lyrical inspiration may well be true, but I suspect that a more likely explanation is that the song is named after a dance move. We talked way back in episode four about the Lindy Hop, the popular dance from the late 1930s and forties. That dance was never a formalised dance, and one of its major characteristics was that it would incorporate dance moves from any other dance around. And one of the dances it incorporated into itself was one called the Suzie Q, which at the height of its popularity was promoted by a song performed by the pianist Lilian Hardin, who is now best known for having been the wife of Louis Armstrong, whose career she managed in its early years, but who at the time was a respected jazz musician in her own right: [Excerpt: Lil Hardin Armstrong, “Doin’ the Suzie Q”] The dance that that song was about was a simple dance step, involving crossing one’s feet, swivelling. and stepping to one side. It got incorporated into the more complex Lindy Hop, but was still remembered as a step in itself. So, it’s likely that Hawkins was at least as inspired by that as he was by any of the other alleged inspirations for the song. Certainly at least one other Checker records artist thought so — Jimmy McCracklin, in his song “The Walk”, released the next year, starts his list of dances by singing “I know you’ve heard of the Susie Q”: [Excerpt: Jimmy McCracklin, “The Walk”] According to the engineer on the session, Bob Sullivan, who was more used to recording Jim Reeves and Slim Whitman than raw rock and roll music, “Susie Q” was recorded in four takes, and Hawkins had the final choice of which take to use, but in Sullivan’s opinion he chose the wrong one. The take chosen for release was an early take of the song, when Sullivan was still trying to get a balance, and he didn’t notice at first that Hawkins was starting to sing, and had to quickly raise the volume on Hawkins’ vocal just as he started. You can hear this if you listen to the finished recording: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “Susie Q”] This new version of “Susie Q” was stripped right down — it was just guitar, bass, and drums — none of the saxophone that was present on the early version. But it kept the crucial ingredients of the earlier version — that biting guitar riff played by James Burton, and the drum part, with its ear-catching cowbell. That drum part was played by Stan Lewis’ fifteen-year-old brother Ronnie on the new version, but he’s closely copying the part that A.J. Tuminello played on the demo — Tuminello couldn’t make the session, so Lewis just copied the part, which came about when Hawkins had heard Tuminello playing his drum and cowbell simultaneously during a soundcheck. Now that we’ve put the song in context, there’s an interesting point we can make. As we discussed in the beginning, people usually refer to “Susie Q” as a rockabilly song. But there are a few criteria that generally apply to rockabilly but not to “Susie Q”. And one of the most important of these ties back to something we were talking about last week — the electric bass. The demo version of “Susie Q” had, like almost all rock and roll records of the time, featured a double bass, played in the slapback style, and as we talked about back in the episodes on Bill Haley several months back, slapback bass is one of the defining features of the rockabilly genre. For this new recording, though, Sonny Trammell, a country player who played with Jim Reeves, played electric bass, as he was the only person in Shreveport who owned one. This was a deliberate choice by Hawkins, who wanted to imitate the sound of electric blues records, rather than using the double bass, which he associated with country music — though as it turns out, he would probably have been better off using a double bass if he wanted that sound, as Willie Dixon, who played bass on all the Chess blues records, actually didn’t play an electric bass. Rather, he got a sound similar to an electric bass by actually placing the microphone inside the bottom of the bass’ tailpiece. But that points to something that “Susie Q” was doing that we’ve not seen before. One of the things people have asked me a few times is why I’ve not looked very much at the music that we now think of as “the blues”, though at the time it was only a small part of the blues — the guitar playing male solo artists who made up the Chicago sound, and the Delta bluesmen who inspired them. And that’s because the common narrative, that rock and roll came from that kind of blues, is false — as I hope the last year and a bit of podcasts have shown. Rock and roll came from a lot of different musics — primarily Western swing, jump bands, and vocal group R&B — and had relatively little influence in its early years from that branch of blues. But over the next few years we will see a lot of musicians, primarily but not exclusively white British men, inspired by the first wave of rock and rollers to pick up a guitar, but rejecting the country music that inspired those early rock and rollers, and turning instead to Muddy Waters, Little Walter, and Howlin’ Wolf. There’s never a first anything, and that’s especially the case here where we’re talking about musical ideas crossing racial lines, but one can make an argument that Dale Hawkins was the first white rock and roller to be inspired by people like Waters and Wolf, and for “Susie Q” as the record, more than any other, that presaged the white rock acts of the sixties, with its electric bass, Chess-style guitar riffs, and country-inflected vocals. Acts like the Rolling Stones or the Animals or Canned Heat were all following in Hawkins’ footsteps, as you can hear in, for example, the Stones’ own version of the song: [Excerpt: the Rolling Stones, “Susie Q”] What’s surprising is how reluctant Chess were to release the single. The master was sent to Chess for release, but they kept hold of it for ten months without getting round to releasing it. Eventually, Hawkins became so frustrated that he sent a copy of the recording to Jerry Wexler at Atlantic Records. Wexler got excited, and told Leonard Chess that if Chess weren’t going to put out the single, Atlantic would release it instead. At that point, Chess realised that he might have something commercial on his hands, and decided to put the record out on Checker as it was originally intended. The song went to number seven on the R&B charts, and number twenty-seven on the pop charts. Between the recording and release of the single, James Burton quit the band. He moved on first to work with another Louisiana musician, Bob Luman: [Excerpt: Bob Luman, “All Night Long”] Burton then went on to work first with Ricky Nelson and then as a session player with everyone from the Monkees to Elvis. Hawkins had an ear for good guitarists, and after Burton went on to be one of the most important guitarists in rock music, Hawkins would continue to play with many other superb players, such as Roy Buchanan, who played on Hawkins’ cover version of Little Walter’s “My Babe”: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “My Babe”] And then there was the guitarist on the closest he came to a follow-up hit, “La-Do-Dada”: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “Lo-Do-Dada”] That guitarist was another young player, Joe Osborn, who would soon follow James Burton to LA and to the pool of session players that became known as the Wrecking Crew, though Osborn would switch his guitar for bass. However, none of Hawkins’ follow-ups had anything more than very minor commercial success, and he would increasingly find himself chasing trends and trying to catch up with other people’s styles, rather than continuing with the raw rock and roll sound he had found on “Susie Q”. By the early sixties he was recording novelty live albums of twist songs, to try to cash in on the twist fad: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “Do the Twist”] After his brief run of hits dried up, he used his connection with Dick Clark, the TV presenter whose American Bandstand had helped to break “Susie Q” on the national market, to get his own TV show, The Dale Hawkins Show, which ran for eighteen months and was a similar format to Bandstand. Once that show was over, he turned to record production. There he once again worked for Stan Lewis, who by that point had started his own record labels. There seems to be some dispute as to which records Hawkins produced in his second career. I’ve seen claims, for example, that he produced “Hey Baby” by Bruce Channel: [Excerpt: Bruce Channel, “Hey Baby”] But Hawkins is not the credited producer on that, or on “Judy In Disguise With Glasses” by John Fred and the Playboy Band, another record he’s often credited with. On the other hand, he *is* the credited producer on the big hit “Do it Again Just a Little Bit Slower” by Jon and Robin: [Excerpt: Jon and Robin, “Do it Again A Little Bit Slower”] Towards the end of the sixties, he had a brief second attempt at a recording career for himself. Creedence Clearwater Revival had a hit in 1968 with their version of “Susie Q”: [Excerpt: Creedence Clearwater Revival, “Susie Q”] And that was enough to draw Hawkins back into the studio, working once again with James Burton on guitar and Joe Osborn on bass, along with a few newer blues musicians like Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder, on an album full of the swamp-rock style he had created in the fifties, “LA, Memphis, and Tyler, Texas”: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins: “LA, Memphis, Tyler, Texas”] When that wasn’t a success, he moved on to RCA Records to become head of A&R for their West Coast rock department — a job he was apparently put forward for by Joe Osborn. But after a successful few years, he spent much of the seventies suffering from an amphetamine addiction, having started taking speed back in the fifties. He finally got clean in the early eighties, and started touring the rockabilly revival circuit — as well as finally getting his master’s degree, which for a high school dropout was a major achievement, and something to be as proud of as any hit. In 1998, he recorded his first album in thirty years, Wildcat Tamer: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “Wildcat Tamer”] That got some of the best reviews of his career, but his next album took nearly a decade to come out, and by that time he had been diagnosed with the colon cancer that eventually killed him in 2010. Hawkins is in many ways a paradoxical figure — he was someone who pointed the way to the future of rock and roll, but the future he pointed to was one of white men taking the ideas of black blues musicians and only slightly altering them. He was a byword for untutored, raw, instinctive rock and roll, and yet his biggest hit is carefully constructed out of bits of other people’s records, melded together with a great deal of thought. At the end of it all, what survives is that one glorious hit record — a guitar, a bass, drums, a cowbell, and a teenage boy singing of how he loves Susie Q.
Episode sixty-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Susie Q” by Dale Hawkins, and at the difference between rockabilly and electric blues. 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 “Shake a Hand” by Faye Adams. —-more—- Errata I pronounce presage incorrectly in the episode, and the song “Do it Again a Little Bit Slower” doesn’t have the word “just” in the title. Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. This time, for reasons to do with Mixcloud’s terms of service, it’s broken into two parts. Part one, part two. There are no books that I know of on Hawkins, but I relied heavily on three books with chapters on him — Hepcats and Rockabilly Boys by Robert Reynolds, Dig That Beat! Interviews with Musicians at the Root of Rock and Roll by Sheree Homer, and Shreveport Sounds in Black and White edited by Kip Lornell and Tracy E.W. Laird. This compilation of Hawkins’ early singles is as good a set as any to start with, though the liner notes are perfunctory at best. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript We’re pretty much at the end of the true rockabilly era already — all the major figures to come out of Sun studios have done so, and while 1957 saw several country-influenced white rock and rollers show up, like Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers, and those singers will often get referred to as “rockabilly”, they don’t tend to get counted by aficionados of the subgenre, who think they don’t sound enough like the music from Sun to count. But there are still a few exceptions. And one of those is Dale Hawkins, the man whose recordings were to spark a whole new subgenre, the style of music that would later become known as “swamp rock”. [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “Susie Q”] Dale Hawkins never liked being called a rockabilly, though that’s the description that most people now use of him. We’ll look later in the episode at how accurate that description actually is, but for the moment the important thing is that he thought of himself as a bluesman. When he was living in Shreveport, Louisiana, he lived in a shack in the black part of town, and inside the shack there was only a folding camp bed, a record player, and thousands of 78RPM blues records. Nothing else at all. It’s not that he didn’t like country music, of course — as a kid, he and his brother hitch-hiked to a nearby town to go to a Flatt and Scruggs gig, and he also loved Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers — but it was the blues that called to him more, and so he never thought of himself as having the country elements that would normally be necessary for someone to call themselves a rockabilly. While he didn’t have much direct country influence, he did come from a country music family. His father, Delmar Hawkins senior, was a country musician who was according to some sources one of the original members of the Sons of the Pioneers, the group that launched the career of Roy Rogers: [Excerpt: Sons of the Pioneers, “Tumbling Tumbleweeds”] While Hawkins Sr.’s name isn’t in any of the official lists of group members, he might well have performed with them at some point in the early years of the group. And whether he did or didn’t, he was definitely a bass player in many other hillbilly bands. However, it’s unlikely that Delmar Hawkins Sr. had much influence on his son, as he left the family when Delmar Jr was three, and didn’t reconnect until after “Susie Q” became a hit. Delmar Sr. wasn’t the only family member to be a musician, either — Dale’s younger brother Jerry was a rockabilly who made a few singles in the fifties: [Excerpt: Jerry Hawkins, “Swing Daddy Swing”] Another family member, Ronnie Hawkins, would later have his own musical career, which would intersect with several of the artists we’re going to be looking at later in this series. Del Hawkins, as he was originally called, did a variety of jobs, including a short stint as a sailor, after dropping out of school, but he soon got the idea of becoming a musician, and started performing with Sonny Jones, a local guitarist whose sister was Hank Williams’ widow. Jones had a lot of contacts in the local music industry, and helped Hawkins pull together the first lineup of his band, when he was nineteen. While Hawkins thought of himself as a blues musician, for a white singer in Shreveport, there was only one option open if you wanted to be a star, and that was performing on the Louisiana Hayride, the country show where Elvis, among many others, had made his name. And Jones had many contacts on the show, and performed on it himself. But Hawkins’ first job at the Louisiana Hayride wasn’t as a performer, but working in the car park. He and his brother would go up to drivers heading into the car park for the show, and charge them fifty cents to park their cars for them — when the car park filled up, they’d just park the cars on the street outside. What they didn’t tell the drivers was that the car park was actually free to the public. At the same time he was starting out as a musician, Del was working in a record shop, Stan’s Record Shop, run by a man named Stan Lewis. Hawkins had been a regular customer for several years before working up the courage to ask for a job there, and by the time he got the job, he was familiar with almost every blues or R&B record that was available at the time. Customers would come into the shop, sing a snatch of a song they’d heard, and young Del would be able to tell them the title and the artist. It was through doing this job that Hawkins became friendly with customers like B.B. King, who would remain a lifelong friend. It was also while working at Stan’s Record Shop that Hawkins became better acquainted with its owner. Stan Lewis was, among other things, both a talent scout for Chess records and one of the biggest customers of the label — if he got behind a record, Chess knew it would sell, at least in Louisiana, and so they would listen to him. Indeed, Lewis was one of the biggest record distributors, as well as a record shop owner, and he distributed records all across the region, to many other stores. Lewis also worked as a record producer — the first record he ever produced was one of the biggest blues hits of all time, Lowell Fulson’s “Reconsider Baby”, which was released on the Chess subsidiary Checker: [Excerpt: Lowell Fulson, “Reconsider Baby”] Lewis took an interest in his young employee’s music career, and introduced Hawkins to his cousin, D.J. Fontana, another musician who played on the Louisiana Hayride. Fontana played with Hawkins for a while before taking on a better-paid job with Elvis Presley. At Lewis’ instigation, Hawkins went into the studio in 1956 with engineer Merle Kilgore (who would later become famous in his own right as a country songwriter, co-writing songs like “Ring of Fire”), his new guitarist James Burton, and several other musicians, to record a demo of what would become Hawkins’ most famous song, “Susie Q”: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “Susie Q”, demo version] Listening to that, it’s clear that they already had all the elements of the finished record nearly in place — the main difference between that and the finished version that they cut later is that the demo has a saxophone solo, and that James Burton hasn’t fully worked out his guitar part, although it’s close to the final version. At the time he cut that track, Hawkins intended it as a potential first single, but Stan Lewis had other ideas. While Chess records put out almost solely tracks by black artists, their subsidiary Checker *had* recently released a single by a white artist — a song by Bobby Charles called “Later, Alligator”, which a short while later had become a hit for Bill Haley, under the longer title “See You Later, Alligator”: [Excerpt: Bobby Charles, “Later Alligator”] Lewis thought that given that precedent, Checker might be willing to put out another record by a white act, if that record was an answer record to Bobby Charles’. So he persuaded Hawkins to write a soundalike song, which Hawkins and his band quickly demoed — “See You Soon, Baboon”: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “See You Soon, Baboon”] Lewis sent that off to Checker, who released Hawkins’ demo, although they did make three small changes. The first was to add a Tarzan-style yodelling call at the beginning and end of the record: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “See You Soon, Baboon”] The second, which would have long-lasting consequences, was that they misspelled Hawkins’ first name — Leonard Chess misheard “Del Hawkins” over the phone, and the record came out as by “Dale Hawkins”, which would be his name from that point on. The last change was to remove Hawkins’ songwriting credit, and give it instead to Stan Lewis and Eleanor Broadwater. Broadwater was the wife of Gene Nobles, a DJ to whom the Chess brothers owed money. Nobles is also the one who supplied the Tarzan cry. Both Lewis and Broadwater would also get credited for Hawkins’ follow-up single, a new version of “Susie Q”: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “Susie Q”] On that, at least, Hawkins was credited as one of the writers along with Lewis and Broadwater. But according to Hawkins, not only did the credit get split with the wrong people, but he didn’t receive any of the royalties to which he was entitled until as late as 1985. And crucially, the other people who did cowrite the song — notably James Burton — didn’t get any credit at all. In general, there seems to be a great deal of disagreement about who contributed what to the song — I’ve seen various other putative co-authors listed — but everyone seems agreed that Hawkins came up with the lyrics, while Burton came up with the guitar riff. Presumably the song evolved from a jam session by the musicians — it’s the kind of song that musicians come up with when they’re jamming together, and that would explain the discrepancies in the stories as to who wrote it. Well, that and the record company ripping the writers off. The song came from a myriad musical sources. The most obvious influence for its overall sound — both the melody and the way the melody interacts with the guitar riff — is “Baby Please Don’t Go” by Muddy Waters: [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, “Baby Please Don’t Go”] But the principal influence on the melody was, rather than Waters’ song, a record by the Clovers which had a very similar melody — “I’ve Got My Eyes on You”: [Excerpt: The Clovers, “I’ve Got My Eyes On You”] Hawkins and Burton took those melodic and arrangement ideas and coupled them with a riff inspired by Howlin’ Wolf — I’ve seen some people claim that the song was “ripped off” from Wolf. I don’t believe, myself, that that is the case. Wolf certainly had several records with similar riffs, like “Smokestack Lightnin'”: [Excerpt: Howlin’ Wolf, “Smokestack Lightnin'”] And “Spoonful”: [Excerpt: Howlin’ Wolf, “Spoonful”] But nothing with the exact same riff, and certainly nothing with the same melody. Some have also claimed that Wolf provided lyrical inspiration — that Hawkins was inspired by seeing Wolf drop to his knees on stage yelling something about “Suzy”. There are also claims that the song was named after Stan Lewis’ daughter Suzie — and notably Stan Lewis himself bolstered his claim to a co-writing credit for the song by pointing out that not only did he have a daughter named Susan, so did Leonard Chess. He claimed that he had mentioned this to Hawkins and suggested that the two of them write a song together with the name in it, because it would appeal to Chess. Both of those tales of the song’s lyrical inspiration may well be true, but I suspect that a more likely explanation is that the song is named after a dance move. We talked way back in episode four about the Lindy Hop, the popular dance from the late 1930s and forties. That dance was never a formalised dance, and one of its major characteristics was that it would incorporate dance moves from any other dance around. And one of the dances it incorporated into itself was one called the Suzie Q, which at the height of its popularity was promoted by a song performed by the pianist Lilian Hardin, who is now best known for having been the wife of Louis Armstrong, whose career she managed in its early years, but who at the time was a respected jazz musician in her own right: [Excerpt: Lil Hardin Armstrong, “Doin’ the Suzie Q”] The dance that that song was about was a simple dance step, involving crossing one’s feet, swivelling. and stepping to one side. It got incorporated into the more complex Lindy Hop, but was still remembered as a step in itself. So, it’s likely that Hawkins was at least as inspired by that as he was by any of the other alleged inspirations for the song. Certainly at least one other Checker records artist thought so — Jimmy McCracklin, in his song “The Walk”, released the next year, starts his list of dances by singing “I know you’ve heard of the Susie Q”: [Excerpt: Jimmy McCracklin, “The Walk”] According to the engineer on the session, Bob Sullivan, who was more used to recording Jim Reeves and Slim Whitman than raw rock and roll music, “Susie Q” was recorded in four takes, and Hawkins had the final choice of which take to use, but in Sullivan’s opinion he chose the wrong one. The take chosen for release was an early take of the song, when Sullivan was still trying to get a balance, and he didn’t notice at first that Hawkins was starting to sing, and had to quickly raise the volume on Hawkins’ vocal just as he started. You can hear this if you listen to the finished recording: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “Susie Q”] This new version of “Susie Q” was stripped right down — it was just guitar, bass, and drums — none of the saxophone that was present on the early version. But it kept the crucial ingredients of the earlier version — that biting guitar riff played by James Burton, and the drum part, with its ear-catching cowbell. That drum part was played by Stan Lewis’ fifteen-year-old brother Ronnie on the new version, but he’s closely copying the part that A.J. Tuminello played on the demo — Tuminello couldn’t make the session, so Lewis just copied the part, which came about when Hawkins had heard Tuminello playing his drum and cowbell simultaneously during a soundcheck. Now that we’ve put the song in context, there’s an interesting point we can make. As we discussed in the beginning, people usually refer to “Susie Q” as a rockabilly song. But there are a few criteria that generally apply to rockabilly but not to “Susie Q”. And one of the most important of these ties back to something we were talking about last week — the electric bass. The demo version of “Susie Q” had, like almost all rock and roll records of the time, featured a double bass, played in the slapback style, and as we talked about back in the episodes on Bill Haley several months back, slapback bass is one of the defining features of the rockabilly genre. For this new recording, though, Sonny Trammell, a country player who played with Jim Reeves, played electric bass, as he was the only person in Shreveport who owned one. This was a deliberate choice by Hawkins, who wanted to imitate the sound of electric blues records, rather than using the double bass, which he associated with country music — though as it turns out, he would probably have been better off using a double bass if he wanted that sound, as Willie Dixon, who played bass on all the Chess blues records, actually didn’t play an electric bass. Rather, he got a sound similar to an electric bass by actually placing the microphone inside the bottom of the bass’ tailpiece. But that points to something that “Susie Q” was doing that we’ve not seen before. One of the things people have asked me a few times is why I’ve not looked very much at the music that we now think of as “the blues”, though at the time it was only a small part of the blues — the guitar playing male solo artists who made up the Chicago sound, and the Delta bluesmen who inspired them. And that’s because the common narrative, that rock and roll came from that kind of blues, is false — as I hope the last year and a bit of podcasts have shown. Rock and roll came from a lot of different musics — primarily Western swing, jump bands, and vocal group R&B — and had relatively little influence in its early years from that branch of blues. But over the next few years we will see a lot of musicians, primarily but not exclusively white British men, inspired by the first wave of rock and rollers to pick up a guitar, but rejecting the country music that inspired those early rock and rollers, and turning instead to Muddy Waters, Little Walter, and Howlin’ Wolf. There’s never a first anything, and that’s especially the case here where we’re talking about musical ideas crossing racial lines, but one can make an argument that Dale Hawkins was the first white rock and roller to be inspired by people like Waters and Wolf, and for “Susie Q” as the record, more than any other, that presaged the white rock acts of the sixties, with its electric bass, Chess-style guitar riffs, and country-inflected vocals. Acts like the Rolling Stones or the Animals or Canned Heat were all following in Hawkins’ footsteps, as you can hear in, for example, the Stones’ own version of the song: [Excerpt: the Rolling Stones, “Susie Q”] What’s surprising is how reluctant Chess were to release the single. The master was sent to Chess for release, but they kept hold of it for ten months without getting round to releasing it. Eventually, Hawkins became so frustrated that he sent a copy of the recording to Jerry Wexler at Atlantic Records. Wexler got excited, and told Leonard Chess that if Chess weren’t going to put out the single, Atlantic would release it instead. At that point, Chess realised that he might have something commercial on his hands, and decided to put the record out on Checker as it was originally intended. The song went to number seven on the R&B charts, and number twenty-seven on the pop charts. Between the recording and release of the single, James Burton quit the band. He moved on first to work with another Louisiana musician, Bob Luman: [Excerpt: Bob Luman, “All Night Long”] Burton then went on to work first with Ricky Nelson and then as a session player with everyone from the Monkees to Elvis. Hawkins had an ear for good guitarists, and after Burton went on to be one of the most important guitarists in rock music, Hawkins would continue to play with many other superb players, such as Roy Buchanan, who played on Hawkins’ cover version of Little Walter’s “My Babe”: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “My Babe”] And then there was the guitarist on the closest he came to a follow-up hit, “La-Do-Dada”: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “Lo-Do-Dada”] That guitarist was another young player, Joe Osborn, who would soon follow James Burton to LA and to the pool of session players that became known as the Wrecking Crew, though Osborn would switch his guitar for bass. However, none of Hawkins’ follow-ups had anything more than very minor commercial success, and he would increasingly find himself chasing trends and trying to catch up with other people’s styles, rather than continuing with the raw rock and roll sound he had found on “Susie Q”. By the early sixties he was recording novelty live albums of twist songs, to try to cash in on the twist fad: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “Do the Twist”] After his brief run of hits dried up, he used his connection with Dick Clark, the TV presenter whose American Bandstand had helped to break “Susie Q” on the national market, to get his own TV show, The Dale Hawkins Show, which ran for eighteen months and was a similar format to Bandstand. Once that show was over, he turned to record production. There he once again worked for Stan Lewis, who by that point had started his own record labels. There seems to be some dispute as to which records Hawkins produced in his second career. I’ve seen claims, for example, that he produced “Hey Baby” by Bruce Channel: [Excerpt: Bruce Channel, “Hey Baby”] But Hawkins is not the credited producer on that, or on “Judy In Disguise With Glasses” by John Fred and the Playboy Band, another record he’s often credited with. On the other hand, he *is* the credited producer on the big hit “Do it Again Just a Little Bit Slower” by Jon and Robin: [Excerpt: Jon and Robin, “Do it Again A Little Bit Slower”] Towards the end of the sixties, he had a brief second attempt at a recording career for himself. Creedence Clearwater Revival had a hit in 1968 with their version of “Susie Q”: [Excerpt: Creedence Clearwater Revival, “Susie Q”] And that was enough to draw Hawkins back into the studio, working once again with James Burton on guitar and Joe Osborn on bass, along with a few newer blues musicians like Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder, on an album full of the swamp-rock style he had created in the fifties, “LA, Memphis, and Tyler, Texas”: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins: “LA, Memphis, Tyler, Texas”] When that wasn’t a success, he moved on to RCA Records to become head of A&R for their West Coast rock department — a job he was apparently put forward for by Joe Osborn. But after a successful few years, he spent much of the seventies suffering from an amphetamine addiction, having started taking speed back in the fifties. He finally got clean in the early eighties, and started touring the rockabilly revival circuit — as well as finally getting his master’s degree, which for a high school dropout was a major achievement, and something to be as proud of as any hit. In 1998, he recorded his first album in thirty years, Wildcat Tamer: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, “Wildcat Tamer”] That got some of the best reviews of his career, but his next album took nearly a decade to come out, and by that time he had been diagnosed with the colon cancer that eventually killed him in 2010. Hawkins is in many ways a paradoxical figure — he was someone who pointed the way to the future of rock and roll, but the future he pointed to was one of white men taking the ideas of black blues musicians and only slightly altering them. He was a byword for untutored, raw, instinctive rock and roll, and yet his biggest hit is carefully constructed out of bits of other people’s records, melded together with a great deal of thought. At the end of it all, what survives is that one glorious hit record — a guitar, a bass, drums, a cowbell, and a teenage boy singing of how he loves Susie Q.
Intro Song – Little Walter, “My Babe”, The Complete Checker Singles As & Bs 1952-60 First Set – Stevie Ray Vaughan & Double Trouble, “Scuttle Buttin'”, Couldn't Stand The WeatherMichael Burks, “Raised Up In Arkansas”, I'm A BluesmanMonster Mike Welch and Mike Ledbetter, “Kay Marie”, Right Place, Right Time Second Set – Sean Costello, “Going Home”, We Can Get TogetherRobert Johnson, “They're Red Hot”, The Complete Recordings John-Alex Mason, “My Old Lonesome Home”, Jook Joint Thunderclap Third Set – WIB Robin Rogers, “Hittin' On Nothin'”, Back In The Fire Deborah Coleman, “I Can't Lose”, I Can't LoseCandye Kane, “Ik Hou Van Je (I Love You)”, Superhero Fourth Set – Lynwood Slim and The Igor Prado Band, “Bloodshot Eyes”, Brazilian Kicks The Mannish Boys w/ Randy Chartkoff, “Rude Groove”, Lowdown Feelin' Lil' Dave Thompson, “Deep In The Night”, Deep In The Night Big thanks to Michael Allen from the Crossroads Blues Gallery for letting me use his great artwork on my web sites!
1. Sid Hemphill and band: The Carrier Line (or the Carrier song). Sledge, Mississippi, August 1942. 2. Sid Hemphill and Lucius Smith: Going Away, Won't Be Long. Senatobia, Miss., September 1959. 3. Miles and Bob Pratcher: I'm Gonna Live Anyhow Until I Die. Como, Miss., 9/59.4. Fred McDowell with Fanny Davis and Miles Pratcher: Shake 'Em On Down. Como, 9/59. 5. Rosa Lee Hemphill Hill: Faro. Como, 9/59.6. Sidney Hemphill Carter: Pharoah. Senatobia, 9/59.7. Ed Young; Lonnie Young, Sr.; G.D. Young: Ida Reed aka Oree aka Little and Low. Como, 9/59.8. R.L. Burnside: Going Down South. Coldwater, Miss., August 1967. (Recorded by George Mitchell.)9. R.L. Burnside: Coal Black Mattie. Como, August 1978. 10. Napoleon Strickland: Shake 'Em On Down. Como, 8/78. 11. Lucius Smith: New Railroad. Sardis, Miss., 8/78.12. Othar Turner and band: My Babe. Gravel Springs, Miss., 8/78.
1. Sid Hemphill and band: The Carrier Line (or the Carrier song). Sledge, Mississippi, August 1942. 2. Sid Hemphill and Lucius Smith: Going Away, Won't Be Long. Senatobia, Miss., September 1959. 3. Miles and Bob Pratcher: I'm Gonna Live Anyhow Until I Die. Como, Miss., 9/59.4. Fred McDowell with Fanny Davis and Miles Pratcher: Shake 'Em On Down. Como, 9/59. 5. Rosa Lee Hemphill Hill: Faro. Como, 9/59.6. Sidney Hemphill Carter: Pharoah. Senatobia, 9/59.7. Ed Young; Lonnie Young, Sr.; G.D. Young: Ida Reed aka Oree aka Little and Low. Como, 9/59.8. R.L. Burnside: Going Down South. Coldwater, Miss., August 1967. (Recorded by George Mitchell.)9. R.L. Burnside: Coal Black Mattie. Como, August 1978. 10. Napoleon Strickland: Shake 'Em On Down. Como, 8/78. 11. Lucius Smith: New Railroad. Sardis, Miss., 8/78.12. Othar Turner and band: My Babe. Gravel Springs, Miss., 8/78.
This is episode #222!! Teetering on the precipice of Rockabilly and jumping off into a sea of R&B this week finds Mod Marty navigating the choppy waters of fuzz guitar and Hand claps, Screaming soul and shake-your-tuchas, rattle-your-cage Blues. The destination? A Northern Soul, double-sided, Holy Grail. Get into it! Please like the Facebook page here: facebook.com/ontargetpodcast/ ------------------------------------------------- The Playlist Is: She's Got It" Little Richard - Regency "My Babe" Dale Hawkins - Quality "What'cha Gonna Do" Gary Ray & The Charms - Emerson "Lets Rock While the Rockin's Good" Little Willie John - Delta "Twist And Shout" The Isley Brothers - Quality "Don't Wanna Twist No More" Gabriel & The Angels - Quality "Junco Partner (A Worthless Cajun)" Nobody's Children - United Artists "Get Something Going" Paper Dragon - Bell "Comin' At You" The Reflections - Golden World "The Pearl" Jerry O - Shout "Love-Itis" Harvey Scales & The Seven Sounds - Magic Touch "The Duck" Jackie Lee - Sparton "Steppin' Out" John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton - Decca "Rollin' And Tumblin'" Johnny Winter - Imperial "Waitin' On You" B.B. King - ABC "Midnight Moses" Alex Harvey - Fontana "It's Just A Little Bit Too Late" Wayne Fontana & The Mindbenders - Fontana "Gonna Have A Good Time" The Clingers - Columbia "Soul Superman" The Hesitations - Kapp "I'm Not Built That Way" The Hesitations - Kapp "Come On Down" Wes Dakus - Capitol
El "T'agrada el blues?" d'aquesta setmana suggereix escoltar un disc de blues cabdal i imprescindible que els grans Tom Jones (Treforest, Pontypridd, Glamorgan, Gal
MY BABE! Today the most amazing thing happened where I went from trying so hard to force something to happen, to stepping back and allowing flow in - and the Universe delivered in literally 2 MINUTES. Seriously, I went from being my own biggest block, to being in total alignment and letting the Universe in, and as soon as it did, my desire manifested. And then, I got not one, but TWO Universe signs confirming it. So excited to share all this and more on today’s episode with you! Here’s what I talk to you babes about in this episode: ↣ Why trying to force something to happen is literally going to stop it ↣ How you are blocking your desires by trying to control the when and the how ↣ The reason that stressing and worrying actually HINDERS your manifestation process ↣ How to let go of the control, and let flow back into your life ↣ What happens when you trust that the Universe has got you and you let it deliver your desires ↣ How the Universe can deliver INSTANTLY whatever it is that you are manifesting Connect with Taylor: ↣ Instagram: @tayraeofficial ↣ Facebook: @tayraeofficial ↣ YouTube: @taylorrae ↣ LinkedIn: @tayraeofficial ↣ TikTok: @tayandjames ↣ Free Facebook Group: The Collective with Taylor Rae ↣ Website: www.taylorrae.com.au **** Join thousands of other visionary women on my mailing list and as a thank you, I'll send you my 12-page ebook that teaches you how to write Captions that Call in Soulmate Clients: GET THE GUIDE FOR FREE **** If you enjoyed this episode, please let me know by leaving a 5-star review over on iTunes. It means the world and helps us reach more people that need to hear these messages. Music: Lights by Sappheiros promoted by Audio Library: https://youtu.be/-lbbHQbZNKg
Welcome to episode five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at Sister Rosetta Tharpe and “This Train” —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Most of Rosetta Tharpe’s music is now in the public domain, so there are a lot of compilations available. This one, at three CDs for four pounds, is probably the one to get. Almost all the information about Rosetta Tharpe’s life in this episode comes from Shout, Sister, Shout!: The Untold Story of Rock-and-roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe by Gayle F Wald, For more on Thomas Dorsey, check out The Rise of Gospel Blues: The Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey in the Urban Church by Michael W. Harris. The Spirituals to Swing concerts are currently out of print, and the recording quality is poor enough it’s really not worth paying the silly money the CDs go for second hand. But if you want to do that, you can find them here. And Rosetta Tharpe’s performance at Wilbraham Road Railway Station can be found on The American Folk Blues Festival: The British Tours 1963-1966 Transcript One of the problems when dealing with the history of rock and roll, as we touched upon the other week in the brief disclaimer episode, is the way it’s dominated by men. Indeed, the story of rock and roll is the story of men crowding out women, and white men crowding out black men, and finally of rich white men crowding out poorer white men, until it eventually becomes a dull, conservative genre. Sorry if that’s a spoiler, but don’t say I didn’t warn you when I get to the nineties. But one black woman is as responsible as anyone for the style of rock and roll, and in particular, for its focus on the guitar. To find out why, we’re going to be making our final trip back to 1938 and Carnegie Hall. We’ve talked in earlier episodes about John Hammond’s legendary Spirituals to Swing concerts, and at the time I said that I’d talk some more about the ways in which they were important, but also about how they were problematic. (I know that’s a word that gets overused these days, but I mean it literally — they had problems, but weren’t all bad. Far from it). One of the most problematic aspects of them, indeed, is encoded in the name. “From Spirituals to Swing”. It gives you a nice, simple, linear narrative — one that was still being pushed in books I read in the 1980s. You start with the spirituals and you end with swing. It’s like those diagrams of the evolution of man, with the crawling monkey on one side and the tall, oddly hairless, white man with his genitals carefully concealed on the other. The fact is, most of the narrative about “primitive” music — a narrative that was put forward by very progressive white men like John Hammond or the Lomaxes — is deeply mistaken. The forms of music made largely by black people could sound less sophisticated in the 1930s, but that wasn’t because they were atavistic survivals of more primitive forms, musical coelacanths dredged up from the depths to parade. It was because the people making the music often couldn’t afford expensive instruments, and were recorded on cheaper equipment, and all the other myriad ways society makes the lives of black people, and underprivileged people in other ways, just that bit more difficult. But this was, nonetheless, the narrative that was current in the 1930s. And so the Spirituals to Swing concerts featured a bisexual black woman who basically invented much of what would become rock guitar, an innovator if ever there was one, but portrayed her as somehow less sophisticated than the big band music on the same bill. And they did that because that innovative black woman was playing religious music. In fact, black gospel music had grown up around the same time as the big bands. Black people had, of course, been singing in churches since their ancestors were forcibly converted to Christianity, but gospel music as we talk about it now was largely the creation of one man — Thomas Dorsey. (This is not the same man as the white bandleader Tommy Dorsey who we’ve mentioned a couple of times earlier). Dorsey was a blues and jazz musician, who had led the band for Ma Rainey, one of the great early blues singers, and under the name “Georgia Tom” he’d collaborated with Tampa Red on a series of singles. Their song “It’s Tight Like That”, from 1928, is one of the earliest hokum records, and is largely responsible for a lot of the cliches of the form — and it sold seven million copies. [excerpt of “It’s Tight Like That”] That record, in itself, is one of the most important records that has ever been made — you can trace from that song, through hokum blues, through R&B, and find its influence in basically every record made by a black American, or by anyone who’s ever listened to a record made by a black American, since then. If Dorsey had only made that one record, he would have been one of the most important figures in music history. But some time around 1930, he also started writing a whole new style of music. It combined the themes, and some of the melody, of traditional Christian hymns, with the feel of the blues and jazz music he’d been playing. It’s rare that you can talk about a single person inventing a whole field of music, but gospel music as we know it basically *was* invented by Thomas Dorsey. Other people had performed gospel music before, of course, but the style was very different from anything we now think of as gospel. Dorsey was the one who pulled all the popular music idioms into it and made it into something that powered and inspired all the popular music since. He did this because he was so torn between his faith and his work as a blues musician that he had multiple breakdowns — at one point finding himself on stage with Ma Rainey and completely unable to move his fingers to play the piano. While he continued parallel careers for a while, eventually he settled on making religious music. And the songs he wrote include some of the most well-known songs of all time, like “Peace in the Valley” and “Take My Hand, Precious Lord”. That’s a song he wrote in 1932, after his wife died in childbirth and his newborn son died a couple of days later. He was feeling a grief that most of us could never imagine, a pain that must have been more unbearable than anything anyone should have to suffer, and the pain came out in beauty like this: [excerpt of Rosetta Tharpe singing “Take My Hand, Precious Lord”] That’s not “primitive” music. That’s not music that is unsophisticated. That’s not some form of folk art. That’s one man, a man who personally revolutionised music multiple times over, writing about his own personal grief and creating something that stands as great art without having to be patronised or given special consideration. And the person singing on that recording is Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who, like Dorsey, is someone who doesn’t need to be given special treatment or be thought of as good considering her disadvantages or any of that patronising nonsense. Sister Rosetta Tharpe was one of the great singers of her generation, and one of the great guitar players of all time. And she was making music that was as modern and cutting-edge as anything else made in the 1930s and 40s. She wasn’t making music that was a remnant of something that would evolve into swing, no matter what John Hammond thought, she was making important music, and music that would in the long run be seen as far more important than most of the swing bands. Obviously, one should not judge Hammond too harshly. He was from another time. A primitive. Sister Rosetta was brought up in, and spent her life singing for, the Church of God in Christ. As many of my listeners are in Europe, as I am myself, it’s probably worth explaining what this church is, because while it does have branches outside the US, that’s where it’s based, and that’s where most of its membership is. The Church of God in Christ is a Pentecostal church, and it’s the largest Pentacostal church in the US, and the fifth-largest church full stop. I mention that it’s a Pentacostal church, because that’s something you need to understand to understand Rosetta Tharpe. Pentacostals believe in something slightly different to what most other Christian denominations believe. Before I go any further, I should point out that I am *not* an expert in theology by any means, and that what I’m going to say may well be a mischaracterisation. If you’re a Pentacostal and disagree with my characterisation of your religion here, I apologise, and if you let me know I’ll at least update the show notes. No disrespect is intended. While most Christians believe that humanity is always tainted by original sin, Pentacostals believe that it is possible for some people, if they truly believe — if they’re “born again” to use a term that’s a little more widespread than just Pentacostalism — to become truly holy. Those people will have all their past sins forgiven, and will then be sinless on Earth. To do this, you have to be “baptised in the Holy Ghost”. This is different from normal baptism, what Pentacostals call “water baptism” — though most Pentacostals think you should be water baptised anyway, as a precursor to the main event. Rather, this is the Holy Spirit descending from Heaven and entering you, filling you with joy and a sense of sanctity. This can often cause speaking in tongues and other strange behaviours, as people are enthused (a word which, in the original Greek, actually meant a god entering into you), and once this has happened you have the tendency to sin removed from you altogether. This is all based on the Acts of the Apostles, specifically Acts 2:4, which describes how at the Pentecost (which is the seventh Sunday after Easter), “All were filled with the Holy Spirit. They began to express themselves in foreign tongues and make bold proclamation as the Spirit prompted them”. Unlike many Protestant denominations, which adhere to Calvinist beliefs that nobody can know if they’re going to Heaven or Hell, and that only God can ever know this, and that nothing you do can make a difference to your chances, most Pentacostals believe that you can definitely tell whether you’re going to Heaven. You’re going to Heaven once you’re sanctified by the Holy Spirit, and that’s an end of it. At least, it’s an end of it so long as you continue with what’s called “outward holiness”, and so you have to dress conservatively, to avoid swearing, to avoid drinking or gambling or smoking, or dancing suggestively, or wearing makeup. If you do that, once the spirit’s entered into you, you’re going to remain holy and free from temptation. If you don’t do that, well, then the Devil might get you after all. This is a very real fear for many Pentacostals, who have a belief in a literal heaven and hell. And it’s a fear that has inspired a *lot* of the most important musicians in rock and roll. But Pentacostalism isn’t just about fear and living right, it’s also about that feeling of elation and exhiliration when the holy spirit enters you. And music helps bring that feeling about. It’s no surprise that a lot of the early rock and rollers went to Pentacostal churches — at many of them, especially in the South of the US, there’s a culture of absolutely wild, unrestrained, passionate music and dancing, to get people into the mood to have the spirit enter them. And Sister Rosetta Tharpe is probably the greatest performer to come out of those churches. But while most of the performers we’ll be looking at started playing secular music, Sister Rosetta never did, or at least very rarely. But she was, nonetheless, an example of something that we’ll see a lot in the history of rock — the pull between the spiritual and the worldly. From the very start of her career, Sister Rosetta was slightly different from the other gospel performers. While she lived in Chicago at the same time as Thomas Dorsey and Mahalia Jackson, she isn’t generally considered part of the gospel scene that they were at the centre of — because she was travelling round the country playing at revival meetings, rather than staying in one place. When her first marriage — to a fellow evangelist, who apparently abused her — broke up, she moved on to New York, and there she started playing to audiences that were very different from the churches she was used to. Where people like Mahalia were playing church music for church people, Rosetta Tharpe was taking the gospel to the sinners. Throughout her career, she played in nightclubs and theatres, playing for any audience that would have her, and playing music that got them excited and dancing, even as she was singing about holiness. She started playing the Cotton Club in 1938. The Cotton Club was the most famous club in New York, though in 1938 it was on its last days of relevance. It had been located in Harlem until 1936, but after riots in Harlem, it had moved to a more respectable area, and was now on Broadway. In the twenties and early thirties, the Cotton Club had been responsible for the success of both Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway, though only Calloway was still playing there regularly by the time Rosetta Tharpe started performing there. It was still, though, the place to be seen — at least if you were white. The Cotton Club was strictly segregated — only black people on stage, but only white people in the audience. The black performers were there to be leered at, in the case of the showgirls, or to play up to black stereotypes. Even Duke Ellington, possibly the most sophisticated musician ever to come out of the United States, had been presented as a “jungle musician”. The name itself — the Cotton Club — was trading on associations with slavery and cotton picking, and the feel of the new venue could probably be summed up by the fact that it had, on its walls, pictures of famous white bandleaders in blackface. So it’s not surprising that the performances that Sister Rosetta did at the Cotton Club were very different from the ones she’d been doing when she was travelling the country with her mother performing to church crowds. She was still playing the same music, of course — in fact, over her career, she mostly stuck to the same quite small repertoire, rerecording the same material in new arrangements and with new emphases as she grew as an artist — but now she was doing it as part of a parody of the very kind of church service she had grown up in and devoted her life to, with dancers pretending to be “Holy Rollers”, mocking her religion even as her music itself was still devoted to it. Originally, she was only taken on at the Cotton Club as a sort of trial, on a two-week engagement — and apparently she thought the manager was joking when she was offered five hundred dollars a week, not believing she could be making that much money — and her role was simply to be one of many acts who’d come on and do a song or two between the bigger acts who were given star billing. But she soon became a hit, and she soon got signed to Decca to make records. Her first record was, of course, a song by Thomas Dorsey, originally titled “Hide Me in Thy Bosom” but given the newer title “Rock Me” by Tharpe. Her arrangement largely stuck to Dorsey’s original, with one important exception — where he had written “singing”, Tharpe sang “swinging”. [excerpt of “Rock Me”] Many people also claimed to hear a double entendre in the lyrics to “Rock Me”, and to think the song was about more worldly matters than Dorsey had intended. Whether Tharpe thought that or not, it almost certainly factored into the decision to make it her first single. When she was booked to perform at the Spirituals to Swing concerts, she performed both that song and “That’s All”, backed by Albert Ammons, one of the boogie woogie players who also appeared on the bill, and in the recording of that we can hear, rather better than in the studio recording, the raw power of Tharpe’s performance. [excerpt of “That’s All” from Carnegie Hall] The sound quality of these recordings isn’t great, of course, but you can clearly hear the enthusiasm in that performance. Tharpe’s performances at the Cotton Club drew a great deal of attention, and Time magazine even did a feature on her, and how she “Swings Same Songs in Church and Night Club.” When the Cotton Club shut down she moved on to the Cafe Society, a venue booked by John Hammond, which was an integrated club and which fit her rather better. While she was working there, she came to the attention of Lucky Millinder, the big band leader. Different people have different ideas as to how the two started working together — Mo Gale, Millinder’s manager, was also Chick Webb’s manager, and claimed that it was his idea and that he’d seen Tharpe as being an Ella Fitzgerald to Millinder’s Chick Webb, but Bill Doggett, the piano player with Millinder’s band, said that it was Millinder’s idea, not Gale’s, to get Tharpe on board. Either way, the combination worked well enough at first, as Tharpe got to sing the same songs she’d been performing earlier — her gospel repertoire — but with a big band backing her. She’d also switched to playing an electric guitar rather than an acoustic, and the effect on her guitar playing was extraordinary — where before she’d had to be a busy accompanist, constantly playing new notes due to the lack of sustain from an acoustic guitar, now she was able to play single-note lead lines and rely on the orchestra to provide the chordal pad. Her remake of “Rock Me” with Millinder’s band, from 1941, shows just how much her artistry had improved in just three years: [excerpt of 1941 “Rock Me”] With that record, she more or less invented the guitar style that T-Bone Walker, B.B. King, and others would adapt for themselves. That’s just how you play electric blues now, but it wasn’t how anyone played before Rosetta Tharpe. Soon after she joined Millinder’s band they moved to a residency at the Savoy Ballroom, and became one of the most popular bands for dancers in New York — regulars there included a young man known as Detroit Red, who later changed his name to Malcolm X. The Savoy Ballroom was closed down not long after — allegedly for prostitution, but more likely because it allowed white women to dance with black men, and the city of New York wouldn’t allow that — although as Malcolm X said, it wasn’t as if they were dragging the white women in there. However, Millinder’s band was an odd fit for Rosetta Tharpe, and she was increasingly forced to sing secular numbers along with the gospel music she loved. There were plenty of good things about the band, of course — she became lifelong friends with its young trumpet player, Dizzy Gillespie, for example, and she enjoyed a tour where they were on the same bill as a young vocal group, The Four Ink Spots, but she was a little bit uncomfortable singing songs like “Tall Skinny Papa”, which wasn’t particularly gospel-like [excerpt “Tall Skinny Papa”] And it’s not particularly likely that she was keen on the follow-up, although she didn’t sing on that one. [excerpt “Big Fat Mama”] So eventually, she quit the Millinder band, without giving notice, and went back to performing entirely solo, at least at first. This was in the middle of the musicians’ union strike, but when that ended, Tharpe was back in the studio, and in September 1944 she began one of the two most important musical collaborations of her career, when she recorded “Strange Things Happening Every Day”, with Sam Price on piano. Sam Price did *not* get along with Tharpe. He insisted on her playing with a capo, because she was playing in an open tuning and wasn’t playing in a normal jazz key. He didn’t like the idea of combining gospel music with his boogie woogie style (eventually he was persuaded by Tharpe’s mother, a gospel star in her own right who was by all accounts a fearsome and intimidating presence, that this was OK), and when the result became a massive hit, he resented that he got a flat fee. But nonetheless, “Strange Things Happening Every Day” marks out the start of yet another new style for Tharpe — and it’s yet another song often credited as “the first rock and roll record”. [Excerpt “Strange Things Happening Every Day”] Shortly after this, Tharpe started working with another gospel singer, Marie Knight. Her partnership with Marie Knight may have been a partnership in more than one sense. Knight denied the relationship to the end of her days — and it’s entirely understandable that she would, given that she was a gospel singer who was devoted to a particularly conservative church, and whose career also depended on that church — but their relationship was regarded as an open secret within the gospel music community, which had a rather more relaxed attitude to homosexuality and bisexuality than the rest of the church. Some of Tharpe’s friends have described her as a secret lesbian, but given her multiple marriages to men it seems more likely that she was bi — although of course we will never know for sure. Either way, Tharpe and Knight were a successful double act for many years, with their voices combining perfectly to provide a gospel vocal sound that was unlike anything ever recorded. They stopped working together in 1950, but remained close enough that Knight was in charge of Tharpe’s funeral in 1973, The two of them toured together — and Tharpe toured later on her own — in their own bus, which was driven by a white man. This gave them a number of advantages in a deeply segregated and racist country. It was considered acceptable for them to go into some public places where they otherwise wouldn’t have been allowed, because they were with a white man — if a black woman was with a white man, it was just assumed that she was sleeping with him, and unlike a white woman sleeping with a black man, this was considered absolutely acceptable, a sexual double-standard that dated back to slavery. If they needed food and the restaurant in a town was whites-only, they could send the white driver in to get them takeout. And if it came to it, if there was no hotel in town that would take black people, they could sleep on the bus. And segregation was so accepted at the time by so many people that even when Tharpe toured with a white vocal group, the Jordanaires (who would later find more fame backing up some country singer named Elvis something) they just thought her having her own bus was cool, and didn’t even make the connection to how necessary it was for her. While Tharpe and Knight made many great records together, probably Tharpe’s most important recording was a solo B-side to one of their singles, a 1947 remake of a song she’d first recorded in 1938, “This Train”, again featuring Sam Price on piano: [excerpt “This Train”] That’s a song that sets out the theology of the Pentacostal church as well as you’ll ever hear it. This train is a *clean* train. You want to ride it you better get redeemed. No tobacco chewers or cigar smokers. No crap shooters. If you want to be bound for glory, you need to act holy. There was no-one bigger than Tharpe in her genre. She is probably the first person to ever play rock and roll guitar in stadiums — and not only that, she played rock and roll guitar in a stadium *at her wedding* — her third wedding, to be precise, which took place at Griffith Stadium, the home of the Washington Senators and the Homestead Grays. Twenty thousand people came to see her get married and perform a gospel show afterwards, concluding with fireworks that first exploded in the shape of Tharpe playing her guitar before taking on other shapes like two hearts pierced with Cupid’s arrow. Even Tharpe’s half-sister had to pay for her ticket to the show. Apparently Tharpe signed the contract for her wedding seven months earlier, and then went out to find herself a husband. Rosetta Tharpe’s popularity started to wane in the 1950s, at least in her home country, but she retained a following in Europe. There’s fascinating footage of her in 1964 filmed by Granada TV, playing at the abandoned Wilbraham Road railway station in Manchester. If you live in Manchester, as I do, that piece of track, which is now part of the Fallowfield cycle loop was the place where some of the greats of black American music were filmed for what may have been the greatest blues TV programme of all time — along with Tharpe, there was Muddy Waters, Otis Span, Reverend Gary Davis, and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, all performing in the open air in Manchester in front of an extremely earnest audience of young white British people. Fittingly for an open-air show in Manchester, Tharpe opened her short set with “Didn’t It Rain” [Didn’t It Rain TV performance excerpt] By that time, Tharpe had become primarily known as a blues musician, even though she was still doing the same thing she’d always been doing, simply because music had moved on and recategorised her. But she’d had an influence on blues, R&B, and rock and roll music that most people didn’t even realise. “This Train” was not written by Tharpe, exactly — it dates back to the 1920s — but it was definitely her version, and her rewrite, that inspired one of the most important blues records of all time: [Excerpt of “My Babe”] Indeed, only a few months after Rosetta Tharpe’s UK performances, Gerry and the Pacemakers, one of the biggest bands of the new Merseybeat sound, who’d had three number one records that year in the UK, were recording their own version of “My Babe”. Gerry and the Pacemakers were, in most respects, as far as you could imagine from gospel music, and yet the connection is there, closer than you’d think. Rosetta Tharpe died in 1973, and never really got the recognition she deserved. She was only inducted into the Rock Hall of Fame last year. But if you’ve ever liked rock guitar, you’ve got her to thank. Shout, Sister, Shout! 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Welcome to episode five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at Sister Rosetta Tharpe and "This Train" ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Most of Rosetta Tharpe's music is now in the public domain, so there are a lot of compilations available. This one, at three CDs for four pounds, is probably the one to get. Almost all the information about Rosetta Tharpe's life in this episode comes from Shout, Sister, Shout!: The Untold Story of Rock-and-roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe by Gayle F Wald, For more on Thomas Dorsey, check out The Rise of Gospel Blues: The Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey in the Urban Church by Michael W. Harris. The Spirituals to Swing concerts are currently out of print, and the recording quality is poor enough it's really not worth paying the silly money the CDs go for second hand. But if you want to do that, you can find them here. And Rosetta Tharpe's performance at Wilbraham Road Railway Station can be found on The American Folk Blues Festival: The British Tours 1963-1966 Transcript One of the problems when dealing with the history of rock and roll, as we touched upon the other week in the brief disclaimer episode, is the way it's dominated by men. Indeed, the story of rock and roll is the story of men crowding out women, and white men crowding out black men, and finally of rich white men crowding out poorer white men, until it eventually becomes a dull, conservative genre. Sorry if that's a spoiler, but don't say I didn't warn you when I get to the nineties. But one black woman is as responsible as anyone for the style of rock and roll, and in particular, for its focus on the guitar. To find out why, we're going to be making our final trip back to 1938 and Carnegie Hall. We've talked in earlier episodes about John Hammond's legendary Spirituals to Swing concerts, and at the time I said that I'd talk some more about the ways in which they were important, but also about how they were problematic. (I know that's a word that gets overused these days, but I mean it literally -- they had problems, but weren't all bad. Far from it). One of the most problematic aspects of them, indeed, is encoded in the name. "From Spirituals to Swing". It gives you a nice, simple, linear narrative -- one that was still being pushed in books I read in the 1980s. You start with the spirituals and you end with swing. It's like those diagrams of the evolution of man, with the crawling monkey on one side and the tall, oddly hairless, white man with his genitals carefully concealed on the other. The fact is, most of the narrative about "primitive" music -- a narrative that was put forward by very progressive white men like John Hammond or the Lomaxes -- is deeply mistaken. The forms of music made largely by black people could sound less sophisticated in the 1930s, but that wasn't because they were atavistic survivals of more primitive forms, musical coelacanths dredged up from the depths to parade. It was because the people making the music often couldn't afford expensive instruments, and were recorded on cheaper equipment, and all the other myriad ways society makes the lives of black people, and underprivileged people in other ways, just that bit more difficult. But this was, nonetheless, the narrative that was current in the 1930s. And so the Spirituals to Swing concerts featured a bisexual black woman who basically invented much of what would become rock guitar, an innovator if ever there was one, but portrayed her as somehow less sophisticated than the big band music on the same bill. And they did that because that innovative black woman was playing religious music. In fact, black gospel music had grown up around the same time as the big bands. Black people had, of course, been singing in churches since their ancestors were forcibly converted to Christianity, but gospel music as we talk about it now was largely the creation of one man -- Thomas Dorsey. (This is not the same man as the white bandleader Tommy Dorsey who we've mentioned a couple of times earlier). Dorsey was a blues and jazz musician, who had led the band for Ma Rainey, one of the great early blues singers, and under the name "Georgia Tom" he'd collaborated with Tampa Red on a series of singles. Their song "It's Tight Like That", from 1928, is one of the earliest hokum records, and is largely responsible for a lot of the cliches of the form -- and it sold seven million copies. [excerpt of "It's Tight Like That"] That record, in itself, is one of the most important records that has ever been made -- you can trace from that song, through hokum blues, through R&B, and find its influence in basically every record made by a black American, or by anyone who's ever listened to a record made by a black American, since then. If Dorsey had only made that one record, he would have been one of the most important figures in music history. But some time around 1930, he also started writing a whole new style of music. It combined the themes, and some of the melody, of traditional Christian hymns, with the feel of the blues and jazz music he'd been playing. It's rare that you can talk about a single person inventing a whole field of music, but gospel music as we know it basically *was* invented by Thomas Dorsey. Other people had performed gospel music before, of course, but the style was very different from anything we now think of as gospel. Dorsey was the one who pulled all the popular music idioms into it and made it into something that powered and inspired all the popular music since. He did this because he was so torn between his faith and his work as a blues musician that he had multiple breakdowns -- at one point finding himself on stage with Ma Rainey and completely unable to move his fingers to play the piano. While he continued parallel careers for a while, eventually he settled on making religious music. And the songs he wrote include some of the most well-known songs of all time, like "Peace in the Valley" and "Take My Hand, Precious Lord". That's a song he wrote in 1932, after his wife died in childbirth and his newborn son died a couple of days later. He was feeling a grief that most of us could never imagine, a pain that must have been more unbearable than anything anyone should have to suffer, and the pain came out in beauty like this: [excerpt of Rosetta Tharpe singing "Take My Hand, Precious Lord"] That's not "primitive" music. That's not music that is unsophisticated. That's not some form of folk art. That's one man, a man who personally revolutionised music multiple times over, writing about his own personal grief and creating something that stands as great art without having to be patronised or given special consideration. And the person singing on that recording is Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who, like Dorsey, is someone who doesn't need to be given special treatment or be thought of as good considering her disadvantages or any of that patronising nonsense. Sister Rosetta Tharpe was one of the great singers of her generation, and one of the great guitar players of all time. And she was making music that was as modern and cutting-edge as anything else made in the 1930s and 40s. She wasn't making music that was a remnant of something that would evolve into swing, no matter what John Hammond thought, she was making important music, and music that would in the long run be seen as far more important than most of the swing bands. Obviously, one should not judge Hammond too harshly. He was from another time. A primitive. Sister Rosetta was brought up in, and spent her life singing for, the Church of God in Christ. As many of my listeners are in Europe, as I am myself, it's probably worth explaining what this church is, because while it does have branches outside the US, that's where it's based, and that's where most of its membership is. The Church of God in Christ is a Pentecostal church, and it's the largest Pentacostal church in the US, and the fifth-largest church full stop. I mention that it's a Pentacostal church, because that's something you need to understand to understand Rosetta Tharpe. Pentacostals believe in something slightly different to what most other Christian denominations believe. Before I go any further, I should point out that I am *not* an expert in theology by any means, and that what I'm going to say may well be a mischaracterisation. If you're a Pentacostal and disagree with my characterisation of your religion here, I apologise, and if you let me know I'll at least update the show notes. No disrespect is intended. While most Christians believe that humanity is always tainted by original sin, Pentacostals believe that it is possible for some people, if they truly believe -- if they're "born again" to use a term that's a little more widespread than just Pentacostalism -- to become truly holy. Those people will have all their past sins forgiven, and will then be sinless on Earth. To do this, you have to be "baptised in the Holy Ghost". This is different from normal baptism, what Pentacostals call "water baptism" -- though most Pentacostals think you should be water baptised anyway, as a precursor to the main event. Rather, this is the Holy Spirit descending from Heaven and entering you, filling you with joy and a sense of sanctity. This can often cause speaking in tongues and other strange behaviours, as people are enthused (a word which, in the original Greek, actually meant a god entering into you), and once this has happened you have the tendency to sin removed from you altogether. This is all based on the Acts of the Apostles, specifically Acts 2:4, which describes how at the Pentecost (which is the seventh Sunday after Easter), "All were filled with the Holy Spirit. They began to express themselves in foreign tongues and make bold proclamation as the Spirit prompted them". Unlike many Protestant denominations, which adhere to Calvinist beliefs that nobody can know if they're going to Heaven or Hell, and that only God can ever know this, and that nothing you do can make a difference to your chances, most Pentacostals believe that you can definitely tell whether you're going to Heaven. You're going to Heaven once you're sanctified by the Holy Spirit, and that's an end of it. At least, it's an end of it so long as you continue with what's called "outward holiness", and so you have to dress conservatively, to avoid swearing, to avoid drinking or gambling or smoking, or dancing suggestively, or wearing makeup. If you do that, once the spirit's entered into you, you're going to remain holy and free from temptation. If you don't do that, well, then the Devil might get you after all. This is a very real fear for many Pentacostals, who have a belief in a literal heaven and hell. And it's a fear that has inspired a *lot* of the most important musicians in rock and roll. But Pentacostalism isn't just about fear and living right, it's also about that feeling of elation and exhiliration when the holy spirit enters you. And music helps bring that feeling about. It's no surprise that a lot of the early rock and rollers went to Pentacostal churches -- at many of them, especially in the South of the US, there's a culture of absolutely wild, unrestrained, passionate music and dancing, to get people into the mood to have the spirit enter them. And Sister Rosetta Tharpe is probably the greatest performer to come out of those churches. But while most of the performers we'll be looking at started playing secular music, Sister Rosetta never did, or at least very rarely. But she was, nonetheless, an example of something that we'll see a lot in the history of rock -- the pull between the spiritual and the worldly. From the very start of her career, Sister Rosetta was slightly different from the other gospel performers. While she lived in Chicago at the same time as Thomas Dorsey and Mahalia Jackson, she isn't generally considered part of the gospel scene that they were at the centre of -- because she was travelling round the country playing at revival meetings, rather than staying in one place. When her first marriage -- to a fellow evangelist, who apparently abused her -- broke up, she moved on to New York, and there she started playing to audiences that were very different from the churches she was used to. Where people like Mahalia were playing church music for church people, Rosetta Tharpe was taking the gospel to the sinners. Throughout her career, she played in nightclubs and theatres, playing for any audience that would have her, and playing music that got them excited and dancing, even as she was singing about holiness. She started playing the Cotton Club in 1938. The Cotton Club was the most famous club in New York, though in 1938 it was on its last days of relevance. It had been located in Harlem until 1936, but after riots in Harlem, it had moved to a more respectable area, and was now on Broadway. In the twenties and early thirties, the Cotton Club had been responsible for the success of both Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway, though only Calloway was still playing there regularly by the time Rosetta Tharpe started performing there. It was still, though, the place to be seen -- at least if you were white. The Cotton Club was strictly segregated -- only black people on stage, but only white people in the audience. The black performers were there to be leered at, in the case of the showgirls, or to play up to black stereotypes. Even Duke Ellington, possibly the most sophisticated musician ever to come out of the United States, had been presented as a "jungle musician". The name itself -- the Cotton Club -- was trading on associations with slavery and cotton picking, and the feel of the new venue could probably be summed up by the fact that it had, on its walls, pictures of famous white bandleaders in blackface. So it's not surprising that the performances that Sister Rosetta did at the Cotton Club were very different from the ones she'd been doing when she was travelling the country with her mother performing to church crowds. She was still playing the same music, of course -- in fact, over her career, she mostly stuck to the same quite small repertoire, rerecording the same material in new arrangements and with new emphases as she grew as an artist -- but now she was doing it as part of a parody of the very kind of church service she had grown up in and devoted her life to, with dancers pretending to be "Holy Rollers", mocking her religion even as her music itself was still devoted to it. Originally, she was only taken on at the Cotton Club as a sort of trial, on a two-week engagement -- and apparently she thought the manager was joking when she was offered five hundred dollars a week, not believing she could be making that much money -- and her role was simply to be one of many acts who'd come on and do a song or two between the bigger acts who were given star billing. But she soon became a hit, and she soon got signed to Decca to make records. Her first record was, of course, a song by Thomas Dorsey, originally titled "Hide Me in Thy Bosom" but given the newer title "Rock Me" by Tharpe. Her arrangement largely stuck to Dorsey's original, with one important exception -- where he had written "singing", Tharpe sang "swinging". [excerpt of "Rock Me"] Many people also claimed to hear a double entendre in the lyrics to "Rock Me", and to think the song was about more worldly matters than Dorsey had intended. Whether Tharpe thought that or not, it almost certainly factored into the decision to make it her first single. When she was booked to perform at the Spirituals to Swing concerts, she performed both that song and "That's All", backed by Albert Ammons, one of the boogie woogie players who also appeared on the bill, and in the recording of that we can hear, rather better than in the studio recording, the raw power of Tharpe's performance. [excerpt of "That's All" from Carnegie Hall] The sound quality of these recordings isn't great, of course, but you can clearly hear the enthusiasm in that performance. Tharpe's performances at the Cotton Club drew a great deal of attention, and Time magazine even did a feature on her, and how she “Swings Same Songs in Church and Night Club.” When the Cotton Club shut down she moved on to the Cafe Society, a venue booked by John Hammond, which was an integrated club and which fit her rather better. While she was working there, she came to the attention of Lucky Millinder, the big band leader. Different people have different ideas as to how the two started working together -- Mo Gale, Millinder's manager, was also Chick Webb's manager, and claimed that it was his idea and that he'd seen Tharpe as being an Ella Fitzgerald to Millinder's Chick Webb, but Bill Doggett, the piano player with Millinder's band, said that it was Millinder's idea, not Gale's, to get Tharpe on board. Either way, the combination worked well enough at first, as Tharpe got to sing the same songs she'd been performing earlier -- her gospel repertoire -- but with a big band backing her. She'd also switched to playing an electric guitar rather than an acoustic, and the effect on her guitar playing was extraordinary -- where before she'd had to be a busy accompanist, constantly playing new notes due to the lack of sustain from an acoustic guitar, now she was able to play single-note lead lines and rely on the orchestra to provide the chordal pad. Her remake of "Rock Me" with Millinder's band, from 1941, shows just how much her artistry had improved in just three years: [excerpt of 1941 "Rock Me"] With that record, she more or less invented the guitar style that T-Bone Walker, B.B. King, and others would adapt for themselves. That's just how you play electric blues now, but it wasn't how anyone played before Rosetta Tharpe. Soon after she joined Millinder's band they moved to a residency at the Savoy Ballroom, and became one of the most popular bands for dancers in New York -- regulars there included a young man known as Detroit Red, who later changed his name to Malcolm X. The Savoy Ballroom was closed down not long after -- allegedly for prostitution, but more likely because it allowed white women to dance with black men, and the city of New York wouldn't allow that -- although as Malcolm X said, it wasn't as if they were dragging the white women in there. However, Millinder's band was an odd fit for Rosetta Tharpe, and she was increasingly forced to sing secular numbers along with the gospel music she loved. There were plenty of good things about the band, of course -- she became lifelong friends with its young trumpet player, Dizzy Gillespie, for example, and she enjoyed a tour where they were on the same bill as a young vocal group, The Four Ink Spots, but she was a little bit uncomfortable singing songs like "Tall Skinny Papa", which wasn't particularly gospel-like [excerpt "Tall Skinny Papa"] And it's not particularly likely that she was keen on the follow-up, although she didn't sing on that one. [excerpt "Big Fat Mama"] So eventually, she quit the Millinder band, without giving notice, and went back to performing entirely solo, at least at first. This was in the middle of the musicians' union strike, but when that ended, Tharpe was back in the studio, and in September 1944 she began one of the two most important musical collaborations of her career, when she recorded "Strange Things Happening Every Day", with Sam Price on piano. Sam Price did *not* get along with Tharpe. He insisted on her playing with a capo, because she was playing in an open tuning and wasn't playing in a normal jazz key. He didn't like the idea of combining gospel music with his boogie woogie style (eventually he was persuaded by Tharpe's mother, a gospel star in her own right who was by all accounts a fearsome and intimidating presence, that this was OK), and when the result became a massive hit, he resented that he got a flat fee. But nonetheless, "Strange Things Happening Every Day" marks out the start of yet another new style for Tharpe -- and it's yet another song often credited as "the first rock and roll record". [Excerpt "Strange Things Happening Every Day"] Shortly after this, Tharpe started working with another gospel singer, Marie Knight. Her partnership with Marie Knight may have been a partnership in more than one sense. Knight denied the relationship to the end of her days -- and it's entirely understandable that she would, given that she was a gospel singer who was devoted to a particularly conservative church, and whose career also depended on that church -- but their relationship was regarded as an open secret within the gospel music community, which had a rather more relaxed attitude to homosexuality and bisexuality than the rest of the church. Some of Tharpe's friends have described her as a secret lesbian, but given her multiple marriages to men it seems more likely that she was bi -- although of course we will never know for sure. Either way, Tharpe and Knight were a successful double act for many years, with their voices combining perfectly to provide a gospel vocal sound that was unlike anything ever recorded. They stopped working together in 1950, but remained close enough that Knight was in charge of Tharpe's funeral in 1973, The two of them toured together -- and Tharpe toured later on her own -- in their own bus, which was driven by a white man. This gave them a number of advantages in a deeply segregated and racist country. It was considered acceptable for them to go into some public places where they otherwise wouldn't have been allowed, because they were with a white man -- if a black woman was with a white man, it was just assumed that she was sleeping with him, and unlike a white woman sleeping with a black man, this was considered absolutely acceptable, a sexual double-standard that dated back to slavery. If they needed food and the restaurant in a town was whites-only, they could send the white driver in to get them takeout. And if it came to it, if there was no hotel in town that would take black people, they could sleep on the bus. And segregation was so accepted at the time by so many people that even when Tharpe toured with a white vocal group, the Jordanaires (who would later find more fame backing up some country singer named Elvis something) they just thought her having her own bus was cool, and didn't even make the connection to how necessary it was for her. While Tharpe and Knight made many great records together, probably Tharpe's most important recording was a solo B-side to one of their singles, a 1947 remake of a song she'd first recorded in 1938, "This Train", again featuring Sam Price on piano: [excerpt "This Train"] That's a song that sets out the theology of the Pentacostal church as well as you'll ever hear it. This train is a *clean* train. You want to ride it you better get redeemed. No tobacco chewers or cigar smokers. No crap shooters. If you want to be bound for glory, you need to act holy. There was no-one bigger than Tharpe in her genre. She is probably the first person to ever play rock and roll guitar in stadiums -- and not only that, she played rock and roll guitar in a stadium *at her wedding* -- her third wedding, to be precise, which took place at Griffith Stadium, the home of the Washington Senators and the Homestead Grays. Twenty thousand people came to see her get married and perform a gospel show afterwards, concluding with fireworks that first exploded in the shape of Tharpe playing her guitar before taking on other shapes like two hearts pierced with Cupid's arrow. Even Tharpe's half-sister had to pay for her ticket to the show. Apparently Tharpe signed the contract for her wedding seven months earlier, and then went out to find herself a husband. Rosetta Tharpe's popularity started to wane in the 1950s, at least in her home country, but she retained a following in Europe. There's fascinating footage of her in 1964 filmed by Granada TV, playing at the abandoned Wilbraham Road railway station in Manchester. If you live in Manchester, as I do, that piece of track, which is now part of the Fallowfield cycle loop was the place where some of the greats of black American music were filmed for what may have been the greatest blues TV programme of all time -- along with Tharpe, there was Muddy Waters, Otis Span, Reverend Gary Davis, and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, all performing in the open air in Manchester in front of an extremely earnest audience of young white British people. Fittingly for an open-air show in Manchester, Tharpe opened her short set with "Didn't It Rain" [Didn't It Rain TV performance excerpt] By that time, Tharpe had become primarily known as a blues musician, even though she was still doing the same thing she'd always been doing, simply because music had moved on and recategorised her. But she'd had an influence on blues, R&B, and rock and roll music that most people didn't even realise. "This Train" was not written by Tharpe, exactly -- it dates back to the 1920s -- but it was definitely her version, and her rewrite, that inspired one of the most important blues records of all time: [Excerpt of "My Babe"] Indeed, only a few months after Rosetta Tharpe's UK performances, Gerry and the Pacemakers, one of the biggest bands of the new Merseybeat sound, who'd had three number one records that year in the UK, were recording their own version of "My Babe". Gerry and the Pacemakers were, in most respects, as far as you could imagine from gospel music, and yet the connection is there, closer than you'd think. Rosetta Tharpe died in 1973, and never really got the recognition she deserved. She was only inducted into the Rock Hall of Fame last year. But if you've ever liked rock guitar, you've got her to thank. Shout, Sister, Shout! Patreon As always, this podcast only exists because of the donations of my backers on Patreon. If you enjoy it, why not join them?
Comedian and writer Adam Hills is also the host of Channel 4's taboo busting comedy satire The Last Leg. He joins Richard and Aasmah along with: Georgina Lawton who grew up thinking she was white like her parents, then she found out about her black heritage. Claire de Lune is a ceramicist who recently found that her family had been working with clay for 700 years. And composer Shirley J Thompson on how modern history inspires her work. We have your thank you and the inheritance tracks of Manfred Mann's Paul Jones who chooses My Babe performed by Little Walter and Come Sunday performed by Mahalia Jackson with the Duke Ellington Orchestra. Producer: Corinna Jones Editor: Eleanor Garland
The singer chooses My Babe by Little Walter and Come Sunday by Mahalia Jackson.
Once I made the decision to include a new Deep Edition set into the scorched earth round of mixes, I re-purposed the cover art by creating a new one for yesterday's Spring Break Edition 2017 and used the original intended for the DANCE series for my new Deep set. So, if you're a bit confused as to what happened, that's why. OMG starts off with those deep, dark delicious beats that we oh so love around here but quickly changes direction. By the time we get to "Live Stream" by Mark Knight & Green Velvet, this set takes on a whole new meaning. With its dark throbbing disco beat set against an industrial background, I just can't get enough of this song. The song sets the stage for some serious peak-time mayhem that just splatters all over your face like a deep pimple you've been squeezing for eternity until it finally relents. Set to the infamous disco beat of "Funkytown," Gnarly Davidson's "Fuck Me I'm Famous" let's you know this set DOES NOT conform to your expectations. Will Sparks x Orchestrated's "Crank It Loud" brings back some more progressive house but the unexpected acoustic guitar drop is what really pulls this song together. That leads us into what is certain to be another number one on the club charts for veteran DJ Stonebridge. He and Lizzie Curious pull off a remake of the classic Olive track "You're Not Alone" that leaves the original in the dust. I expect BIG things for this song. You heard it here first. We continue down the deep and progressive track until we get to YonPiu's mashup of one of Elvis Crespo's most beloved songs "Suavamente" which turns this into a peak-hour Latin smash and not anything listeners would be expecting in this set. From there, I swerve off the road into peak-time disco mayhem with DJ Dan's ode to Prince in "Squissh". He take's the massive 80's hit "Kiss" and chops it into funky house bits creating a massive floor-stomper. Alex Kenji keeps the disco vibe moving with "My Babe" with Me & My Toothbrush doing the remix honors. Funky never sounded so good. Finally, we move back into the progressive house territory with the latest from Oliver Helden under the pseudonym Hi-LO "The Answer", Alok & Bhaskar's Latinesque "Fuego" and a deep rendition of Madonna's "Vogue" by Ki Creighton & Makanan (Trivial) before closing things out with a little Jack House with Throttle's 'Hit the Road Jack" (a cover of the Ray Charles classic from yonder's ago). Overall this set has a bit of everything and was intended to keep listeners on their toes. Finding the right songs to achieve this cocktail was no easy feat but the end result was well worth it. In other news, we are 55% of goal to keep Party Favorz alive and the music flowing. If you haven't read what's going on, please take the time to read this post and then consider chipping in to help keep us alive for another year. I promise, it will be worth it. That's all I got for this weekend. Just in case things don't go as planned, I'll start rolling out some Diva Series next week to ensure we end on a high note. Until then...ENJOY! Album : Oh My Gravy! (OMG) | The 2017 WMC After Party Genre : Techno, Tech House, Disco, Progressive, Electro Year : 2017 Total Time : 01:12:38 Blasterjaxx - Neptune (Extended Mix) Curbi - Shinai (Extended Mix) Donna Summer & Barbara Streisand - Enough is Enough 2017 (Mindskap Remix) Mark Knight, Green Velvet & Rene Amesz - Live Stream (Original Mix) Nowder feat. Potrykus - Neon (Original Mix) Gnarly Davidson - F_ck Me I'm Famous (Club Killers Twerk Remix Dirty) Will Sparks x Orkestrated - Crank It Loud (Original Mix) Scotty Boy & Lizzie Curious - You're Not Alone (StoneBridge & Damien Hall Club Mix) Merk & Kremont - Invisible (Original Mix) Joe Goddard - Music Is the Answer (Hot Since 82 Remix) Deorro feat. Elvis Crespo - Suavemente Bailar (YonaPiu Mashup) DJ Dan - Squissh (Original Mix) Alex Kenji - My Babe (Me & My Toothbrush Remix)
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Episode 40 : Les DeuxluxesCette semaine, on recoit un duo super Rock'n'roll, avant leur tournée en amérique du sud, ils viennent nous interprêter des extraits de leur nouvel album ''springtime devil'' et nous parler de Canard Pressé... oui oui... vous avez bien entendu! Setlist : Queen of them allMy Babe & MeL.O.S.T.Calendar Girl (Neil Sedaka)- cover Bomb of time
This week the exciting (and super long!) second set from the band's performance at the Capitol Theater in Port Chester NY on November 8th, 1970. The band was clearly developing quickly at this time.. and in many ways we can look upon this as a turning point, away from perhaps the rawer, more psychedelic sound to a more polished version that would come to dominate in 1971 and beyond. The set list contains some song we'd never hear again, (Mystery Train, My Babe, The Main Ten) as well as some we would hear for the first time (Around and Around). This is truly a joy to behold as it clocks in at over 2 hours just for this second set.. one can only speculate on how long it seemed :) I think it is clearly a joy to have this show documented, albeit in an audience tape, to give us a window onto what was obviously a creative apex for the band.. Grateful Dead Capitol, Theatre , Port Chester NY November 8, 1970 Electric Dead - Tuning Morning Dew Me And My Uncle Mystery Train (Only time played) >My Babe (Only time played) Around And Around (First time played) New Orleans >Searchin' It's All Over Now, Baby Blue Casey Jones Truckin' >Dark Star (First verse only) >The Main Ten (Final time played) >Dancin' In The Streets >Not Fade Away >Goin' Down The Road Feelin' Bad >Not Fade Away >Drums >Good Lovin' >Drums >Good Lovin' You can listen to this week's Deadpod here: http://traffic.libsyn.com/deadshow/deadpod120613.mp3 As always I want to thank those of you able to contribute your support to keeping the Deadpod alive.. I very much appreciate it!
Jonny and Jason return for another episode of Discover Music Project! For this week's DMP, the duo are going to be discussing Little Walter, the best harmonica player you've never heard of. Juke - 2:47 (instrumental blues dance hit)Roller Coaster - 2:56 (amazing intro; drums like a wooden track)Sad Hours - 3:15 (bottom of a well)Off the Wall - 2:52 (high notes near end)My Babe - 2:44 (best vocals, more R&B than blues)Too Late - 2:44Blues With A Feeling - 3:10 (stop blues near end)Key to the Highway - 2:49 (jangly guitar)Boom Boom Out Goes the Light - 2:54Mellow Down Easy - 2:46 (smoldering intensity)Walking Thru the Park (w/ Muddy Waters) - 2:45Hoochie Coochie Man (W/ Muddy Waters) - 2:45 (famous "Mannish Boy" riff)Rollin' and Tumblin' - 2:50 (acoustic harp with Muddy on slide)Encore:Paul Butterfield Blues Band - "Work Song" (East-West) - 7:56 As always, you can send your thoughts on over to us via email (crosstawk@gmail.com), Twitter (@crosstawk) or in the comments section on the website. Thanks for listening, guys - we'll see you on Thursday for How to Liberal and again on Friday for Box Office Poison!
This is a re-run from February 25th, 2007 During the late 1940s and the 1950s, there were a lot of records made that were a bit past the "blue"side....in fact, these records were downright "gray". So much so, that these records were banned in Boston.Now banned in Boston is just a term borrowed from the late twenties when there was an organization (which was housed in Boston) that literally banned books from entering public libraries and stopped these books from being sold in America.In the instance of these recordings however, it was white owned radio during these years which banned what they called "Race" music. Race music in the late forties was merely black music. That title did not change until a young editor from Billboard Magazine came up with a catchy phrase....the rhythm and blues. That man was Jerry Wexler and he would go on to produce some of the greatest rhythm and blues music of all time.This music spawned some of the greatest labels America has ever known. Atlantic, Atco, Chess, Checker, Argo, King (from which label many of the cuts heard tonight hail), Federal, and on and on. These records needed to be heard. Black radio stepped in to fill the gap and a whole new business was created.One of the terms of many of these records is "rock and roll" and everyone thinks that Alan Freed coined the phrase. I personally believe that Mr. Freed loved this wild music as much as any of us did at the time and simply borrowed the term. It stuck....and American music would never be the same again.Tune in as I play many of my favorite "dirty" songs. The songs my step-father did his best to stop me from listening. As you can hear....he failed.Here's tonight's music: 1)...."Hand Clappin' "....Red Prysock....Mercury Records 2)...."My Big Ten Inch"....Moose Jackson....King Records 3)...."I Didn't Want To Do It"....The Spiders....Imperial Records 4)...."My Babe"....Little Walter....Checker Records 5)...."Herpes Blues"....Matt Lucas....BJCD Records 6)...."Sixty Minute Man"....The Dominoes....Federal Records 7)...."Lovin' Machine"....Wynonie Harris....King Records 8)...."Work With Me Annie"....The Midnighters....Federal Records 9)...."I'm Your Hoochie-Coochie Man"....Muddy Waters....Chess Records 10)..."It Ain't The Meat, It's The Motion"....The Swallows....King Records 11)..."Yield Not To Temptation"....Bobby "Blue" Bland....Duke Records 12)..."Turn On Your Lovelight"....Bobby "Blue" Bland....Duke Records 13)...."Good Mornin' Little School Girl"....Junior Wells....Chess Records 14)..."All She Wants To Do Is Rock"....Wynonie Harris....King Records 15)..."Sexy Ways"....The Midnighters....Federal Records 16)..."My Ding-A-Ling"....Dave Bartholomew....King Records 17)..."Hand Clappin' "....Red Prysock....Mercury RecordsI made a serious mistake in this show. Be the first to point it out to me and I will send you a great new live concert DVD.Thanks for listening!John Rhys-Eddins/BluePower.com Click here to listen to....BluePower Presents....Banned In Boston!
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