Podcasts about my baby left me

Singles Going Around- Waiting For The SunT Rex- "Telegram Sam"Beastie Boys- "Son of Neckbone"Bo Diddley- "You Can't Judge A Book By It's Cover"The Beach Boys- "Salt Lake City"Roger Miller- "My Uncle Used To Love Me, But She Died"The Doors- "Love Me Two Times"The Fury's- "Little Queenie"The Rolling Stones- "Everybody Needs Somebody To Love"Creedence Clearwater Revival- "My Baby Left Me"Bob Dylan- "When I Paint My Masterpiece"Booker T & The MG's- "Get Ready"Neil Young- "Don't Cry No Tears"The Satisfactions- "Girl Don't Tell Me"The Beach Boys- "Lttle Pad"The Beatles- "Yer Blues"The Doors- "Spanish Caravan"John Fahey- "Night Train of Valhalla"*All selections taken from the original lp's.

#58-56Intro/Outro: Love Song by Miranda Lambert58. Elvis Presley by Elvis Presley (Heartbreak Hotel & One-Sided Love Affair & I Love You Because & Trying to Get To You & My Baby Left Me)57. O Brother, Where Art Thou? Soundtrack (Down to the River to Pray & I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow & I'll Fly Away)56. The Joshua Tree by U2 (With or Without You & Where the Streets Have No Name & I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For & Bullet the Blue Sky)Vote on Today's Album ArtHave you voted on Week 12 Round 1 winners yet? If so, no further action needed. If not:Vote on Week 12 Round 2 Album Art (Episodes 356-360)

“Elvis, Scotty and Bill”, los Blue Moon Boys -1954, Sun Records- una mezcla imprecisa de estilos, del country al R&B, recalan en el Louisiana Hayride, donde se produce el encuentro con D.J. Fontana, batería. Nace el Rock´n´Roll, el de Elvis Presley, el metrónomo de D.J. adaptado a la idiosincrasia y movimientos del icono en expansión de ropa y tupé extravagante. "My Baby Left Me”, la primera. Después llegaron “Heartbreak Hotel", ”Perro de Caza”, “El Rock de la Cárcel” y todos los demás, las películas, la reclusión y el declive. El Comeback 68, el final de 15 años de colaboración y nueva etapa de multitudinarios directos y canciones como “Suspicious minds” junto a Ronnie Tutt. De 1969 hasta su muerte en 1977 e incluso después en el mundo virtual. La Ludwig azul de Ronnie Tutt frente a la batería del primer rock. Silenciosas, vacías, como un muerto bodegón en el que habitó la vida. Desde el corazón del rock, el adiós a Ronnie, 16-X-2021, y a D. J. Fontana, 13-VI-2018, y el reconocimiento al invisible batería. El corazón del Rock en nuestro Laberinto de Ausentes. Escuchar audio

Nuestro programa de hoy esta dedicado a un clásico absoluto del rock made-in-America: Cosmo’s Factory (1970) de la Creedence Clearwater Revival. Este disco marcó el punto más alto de la banda de John Fogerty, así como el inicio de su declive. Podrán escuchar Ramble Tamble, Before You Accuse Me, Travellin’ Band, Ooby Dooby, Lookin’ Out My Back Door, Run Through The Jungle, Up Around The Bend, My Baby Left Me, Who’ll Stop The Rain, I Heard It Through The Grapevine y Long As I Can See The Light + Bonus tracks.

This episode features an interview with Margaret Bell. The song entitled "My Baby Left Me", sung by Margaret Bell. This song has been written by Margaret Bell and Vanessa Bell Armstrong.

Songs about left. Songs include: The Girl I Left Behind Me, Left Turn, Never Let Your Left Hand Know, My Baby Left Me, and Two Left Feet. Musicians include: Arthur Crudup, Ginny Simms, Josh White, Thomas "Fats" Waller, Jimmy Dorsey, Fud Candrix. Louis Jordan and The Squadronaires.

  Episode seventy-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Brand New Cadillac" by Vince Taylor and the Playboys, and the sad career of rock music's first acid casualty. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers have two bonus podcasts this week. There's a haf-hour Q&A episode, where I answer backers' questions, and a ten-minute bonus episode on "The Hippy Hippy Shake" by Chan Romero. 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. There are several books available on Vince Taylor, including an autobiography, but sadly these are all in French, a language I don't speak past schoolboy level, so I can't say if they're any good. The main resources I used for this episode were the liner notes for this compilation CD of Taylor's best material,  this archived copy of a twenty-year-old homepage by a friend of Taylor's, this blogged history of Taylor and the Playboys, and this Radio 4 documentary on Taylor. But *all* of these were riddled with errors, and I used dozens of other resources to try to straighten out the facts -- everything from a genealogy website to interviews with Tony Sheridan to the out-of-print autobiography of Joe Barbera. No doubt this episode still has errors in it, but I am fairly confident that it has fewer errors than anything else in English about Taylor on the Internet.  Errata I say that Gene Vincent also appeared on Oh Boy! -- in fact he didn't appear on UK TV until Parnes' next show, Boy Meets Girls, which would mean Taylor was definitely the originator of that style. A major clanger -- I say that Sheridan recorded "Why" while he was working on "Oh Boy!" -- in fact this wasn't recorded until later -- *with the Beatles* as his backing band. I should have known that one, but it slipped my mind and I trusted my source, wrongly.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript On the twenty-first of May 1965, at the Savoy Hotel in London, there was a party which would have two major effects on the history of rock and roll music, one which would be felt almost immediately, and one whose full ramifications wouldn't be seen for almost a decade. Bob Dylan was on the European tour which is chronicled in the film "Don't Look Back", and he'd just spent a week in Portugal. He'd come back to the UK, and the next day he was planning to film his first ever televised concert.   That plan was put on hold. Dylan was rushed to hospital the day after the party, with what was claimed to be food poisoning but has often been rumoured to be something else. He spent the next week in bed, back at the Savoy, attended by a private nurse, and during that time he wrote what he called "a long piece of vomit around twenty pages long". From that "long piece of vomit" he later extracted the lyrics to what became "Like a Rolling Stone". But Dylan wasn't the only one who came out of that party feeling funny. Vince Taylor, a minor British rock and roller who'd never had much success over here but was big in France, was also there. There are no euphemisms about what it was that happened to him. He had dropped acid at the party, for the first time, and had liked it so much he'd immediately spent two hundred pounds on buying all the acid he could from the person who'd given it to him. The next day, Taylor was meant to be playing a showcase gig. His brother-in-law, Joe Barbera of Hanna Barbera, owned a record label, and was considering signing Taylor. It could be the start of a comeback for him. Instead, it was the end of his career, and the start of a legend: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor and the Playboys, "Brand New Cadillac"] There are two problems with telling the story of Vince Taylor. One is that he was a compulsive liar, who would make up claims like that he was related to Tenzing Norgay, the Nepalese mountaineer who was one of the two men who first climbed Everest, or that he was an airline pilot as a teenager. The other is that nobody who has written about Taylor has bothered to do even the most cursory fact-checking For example, if you read any online articles about Vince Taylor at all, you see the same story about his upbringing -- he was born Brian Holden in the UK, he emigrated to New Jersey with his family in the forties, and then his sister Sheila met Joe Barbera, the co-creator of the Tom and Jerry cartoons. Sheila married him in 1955 and moved with him to Los Angeles -- and so the rest of the family also moved there, and Brian went to Hollywood High School. Barbera decided to manage his brother-in-law, bring him over to London to check out the British music scene, and get him a record deal. There's just... a bit of a problem with this story. Sheila did marry Joe Barbera, but not until the mid 1960s. Her first marriage, in 1947, was to Joe Singer, and it was Singer, not Barbera, who was Taylor's first manager. That kind of inaccuracy appears all over the story of Vince Taylor So, what we actually know is that Brian Maurice Holden -- or Maurice Brian Holden, even his birth name seems to be disputed -- was born in Isleworth Middlesex, and moved to New Jersey when he was seven, with his family, emigrating on the Mauretania, and that he came back to London in his late teens. While there was a real Hollywood High School, which Ricky Nelson among others had attended, I suspect it's as likely that Holden decided to just tell people that was where he'd been to school, because "Hollywood High School" would sound impressive to British people. And sounding impressive to British people was what Brian Holden had decided to base his career on. He claimed to an acquaintance, shortly after he returned to the UK, that he'd heard a Tommy Steele record while he was in the US, and had thought "If this is rock and roll in England, we'll take them by storm!" [Excerpt: Tommy Steele, "Rock With the Caveman"] Holden had been playing American Legion shows and similar small venues in the US, and when his brother-in-law Joe Singer came over to Britain on a business trip, Holden decided to tag along, and Singer became Holden's manager. Holden had three great advantages over British stars like Steele. He had spent long enough in America that he could tell people that he was American and they would believe him. In Britain in the 1950s, there were so few Americans that just being from that country was enough to make you a novelty, and Holden milked that for all it was worth, even though his accent, from the few bits of interviews I've heard with him, was pure London. He was also much, much better looking than almost all the British rock and roll stars. Because of rationing and general poverty in the UK in the forties and fifties as a result of the war, the British fifties teenage generation were on the whole rather scrawny, pasty-looking, and undernourished, with bad complexions, bad teeth, and a general haggardness that meant that even teen idols like Dickie Pride, Tommy Steele, or Marty Wilde were not, by modern standards, at all good looking. Brian Holden, on the other hand, had film-star good looks. He had a chiselled jaw, thick black hair combed into a quiff, and a dazzling smile showing Hollywood-perfect teeth. I am the farthest thing there is from a judge of male beauty, but of all the fifties rock and roll stars, the only one who was better looking than him was Elvis, and even Elvis had to grow into his good looks, while Holden, even when he came to the UK aged eighteen, looked like a cross between James Dean and Rock Hudson. And finally, he had a real sense of what rock and roll was, in a way that almost none of the British musicians did. He knew, in particular, what a rockabilly record should sound like. He did have one tiny drawback, though -- he couldn't sing in tune, or keep time. But nobody except the unfortunate musicians who ended up backing him saw that as a particular problem. Being unable to sing was a minor matter. He had presence, and he was going to be a star. Everyone knew it. He started performing at the 2Is, and he put together a band which had a rather fluid membership that to start with featured Tony Meehan, a drummer who had been in the Vipers Skiffle Group and would later join the Shadows, but by the time he got a record deal consisted of four of the regular musicians from the 2is -- Tony Sheridan on lead guitar, Tony Harvey on rhythm, Licorice Locking on bass and Brian Bennett on drums. He also got himself a new name, and once again there seems to be some doubt as to how the name was chosen. Everyone seems agreed that "Taylor" was suggested by his sister Sheila, after the actor Robert Taylor. But there are three different plausible stories for how he became Vince. The first is that he named himself after Vince Everett, Elvis' character in Jailhouse Rock. The second is that he was named after Gene Vincent. And the third is that he took the name from a pack of Pall Mall cigarettes, which had a logo with the Latin motto "in hoc signo vinces" -- that last word spelled the same way as "Vinces". And while I've never seen this suggestion made anywhere else, there is also the coincidence that both Licorice Locking and Tony Sheridan had been playing, with Jimmy Nicol, in the Vagabonds, the backing band for one of Larry Parnes' teen idol acts, Vince Eager, who had made one EP before the Vagabonds had split from him: [Excerpt: Vince Eager, "Yea Yea"] So it may be that the similarity of names was in someone's mind as well. Taylor and his band, named the Playboys, made a huge impression at the 2is, and they were soon signed to Parlophone Records, and in November 1958 they released their first single. Both sides of the single were cover versions of relatively obscure releases on Sun records. The B-side was a cover version of "I Like Love", which had been written by Jack Clement for Roy Orbison, while the A-side, "Right Behind You Baby" was written by Charlie Rich and originally recorded by Ray Smith: [Excerpt: Ray Smith, "Right Behind You Baby"] Taylor's version was the closest thing to an American rockabilly record that had been made in Britain to that point. While the vocal was still nothing special, and the recording techniques in British studios created a more polite sound than their American equivalents, the performance is bursting with energy: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor, "Right Behind You Baby"] It's Sheridan, though, who really makes the record -- he plays a twenty-four bar guitar solo that is absolute light years ahead of anything else that was being done in Britain. Here, for example, is "Guitar Boogie Shuffle", an instrumental hit from Britain's top rock and roll guitarist of the time, Bert Weedon: [Excerpt: Bert Weedon, "Guitar Boogie Shuffle"] As you can hear, that's a perfectly good guitar instrumental, very pleasant, very well played. Now listen to Tony Sheridan's guitar solo on "Right Behind You Baby": [Excerpt: Vince Taylor, "Right Behind You Baby"] That's clearly not as technically skilled as Weedon, but it's also infinitely more exciting, and it's more exciting than anything that was being made by any other British musicians at the time. Jack Good certainly thought so. While "Right Behind You Baby" wasn't a hit, it was enough to get Vince on to Oh Boy!, and it was because of his Oh Boy! performances that Vince switched to the look he would keep for the rest of his career -- black leather trousers, a black leather jacket, a black shirt with the top few buttons undone, showing his chest and the medallion he always wore, and black leather gloves. It was a look very similar to that which Gene Vincent also adopted for his performances on Oh Boy! -- before that, Vincent had been dressing in a distinctly less memorable style -- and I've seen differing accounts as to which act took on the style first, though both made it their own. Taylor was memorable enough in this getup that when, in the early seventies, another faded rocker who had been known as Shane Fenton made a comeback as a glam-rocker under the name Alvin Stardust, he copied Taylor's dress exactly. But Good was unimpressed with Taylor's performance -- and very impressed with Sheridan's. Sheridan was asked to join the Oh Boy! house band, as well as performing under his own name as Tony Sheridan and the Wreckers. He found himself playing on such less-than-classics as "Happy Organ" by Cherry Wainer: [Excerpt: Cherry Wainer, "The Happy Organ"] He also released his own solo record, "Why": [Excerpt: Tony Sheridan, "Why"] But Sheridan's biggest impact on popular music wouldn't come along for another few years... Losing the most innovative guitarist in the British music industry should have been a death-blow to Taylor's career, but he managed to find the only other guitarist in Britain at that time who might be considered up to Sheridan's standard, Joe Moretti -- who Taylor nicknamed Scotty Moretti, partly because Moretti was Scottish, but mostly because it would make his name similar to that of Scotty Moore, Elvis' guitarist, and Taylor could shout out "take it, Scotty!" on the solos. While Sheridan's style was to play frantic Chuck Berry-style licks, Moretti was a more controlled guitarist, but just as inventive, and he had a particular knack for coming up with riffs. And he showed that knack on Taylor's next single, the first to be credited to Vince Taylor and the Playboys, rather than just to Vince Taylor. The A-side of that single was rather poor -- a cover version of Johnny Ace's "Pledging My Love", which was done no favours by Taylor's vocal: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor and the Playboys, "Pledging My Love"] But it was the B-side that was to become a classic. From the stories told by the band members, it seems that everyone knew that that song -- one written by Taylor, who otherwise barely ever wrote songs, preferring to perform cover versions -- was something special. But the song mentioned two different brand names, Cadillac and Ford, and the BBC at that time had a ban on playing any music which mentioned a brand name at all. So "Brand New Cadillac" became a B-side, but it's undoubtedly the most thrilling B-side by a British performer of the fifties, and arguably the only true fifties rock and roll classic by a British artist. "Move It" by Cliff Richard had been a good record by British standards -- "Brand New Cadillac" was a great record by any standards: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor and the Playboys, "Brand New Cadillac"] Unfortunately, because "Pledging My Love" was the A-side, the record sold almost nothing, and didn't make the charts. After two flops in a row, Parlophone dropped Vince Taylor and the Playboys, and Taylor went back to performing at the 2Is with whatever random collection of musicians he could get together. Brian Bennett and Licorice Locking, meanwhile, went on to join Marty Wilde's band the Wildcats, and scored an immediate hit with Wilde's rather decent cover version of Dion and the Belmonts' "Teenager in Love": [Excerpt: Marty Wilde and the Wildcats, "Teenager in Love"] Moretti, Locking, and Bennett will all turn up in our story in future episodes. Taylor's career seemed to be over before it had really begun, but then he got a second chance. Palette Records was a small label, based in Belgium, which was starting operations in Britain. They didn't have any big stars, but they had signed Janis Martin, who we talked about back in episode forty, and in August 1960 they put out her single "Here Today and Gone Tomorrow Love": [Excerpt: Janis Martin, "Here Today and Gone Tomorrow Love"] And at the same time, they put out a new single by Vince Taylor, with a new lineup of Playboys. The A-side was a fairly uninspired ballad called "I'll Be Your Hero", very much in the style of Elvis' film songs, but they soon switched to promoting the flip side, "Jet Black Machine", which was much more in Taylor's style. It wasn't up to the standards of "Brand New Cadillac", but it was still far more exciting than most of the records that were being made in the UK at the time: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor and the Playboys, "Jet Black Machine"] That seemed like it would be a turning point in Taylor's career -- according to one source I've read, it made the top twenty on the NME charts, though I haven't been able to check those charts myself, and given how unreliable literally everything I've read about Taylor is, I don't entirely trust that. But it was definitely more successful than his two previous singles, and the new lineup of Playboys were booked on a package tour of acts from the 2Is. Things seemed like they were about to start going Taylor's way. But Taylor had always been a little erratic, and he started to get almost pathologically jealous. He would phone his girlfriend up every night before going on stage, and if she didn't answer he'd skip the show, to drive to her house and find out what she was doing. And in November 1960, just before the start of the tour, he skipped out on the tour altogether and headed back to visit his family in the States. The band carried on without him, and became the backing group for Duffy Power, one of the many acts managed by Larry Parnes. Power desperately wanted to be a blues singer, but he was pushed into recording cover versions of American hits, like this one, which came out shortly after the Playboys joined him: [Excerpt: Duffy Power, "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On"] The Playboys continued to back Power until June 1960, when they had a gig in Guildford, and a remarkable coincidence happened. They were unloading their equipment at the 2Is, to drive to Guildford with it, when Taylor walked round the corner. He'd just got back from the USA and happened to be passing, and they invited him along for the drive to the show. He came with them, and then Duffy Power, who was almost as unreliable as Taylor, didn't turn up for the show. They invited Taylor to perform in his place, and he did, and blew the audience away. Power eventually turned up half-way through the show, got angry, punched the drummer in the face during the interval, and drove off again. The drummer got two stitches, and then they finished the show. Taylor was back with the Playboys, and Duffy Power was out, and so the next month when Power was booked for some shows in Paris, on a bill with Vince Eager and Wee Willie Harris, Taylor took his place there, too. France was about as far behind Britain in rock and roll terms as Britain was behind America, and no-one had ever seen anything like Vince Taylor. Taylor and the Playboys got signed to a French label, Barclay Records, and they became huge stars -- Taylor did indeed get himself a brand new Cadillac, a pink one just like Elvis had. Taylor got nicknamed "le diable noir" -- the black Devil -- for his demonic stage presence, and he inspired riots regularly with his shows. A review of one of his performances at that time may be of interest to some listeners: "The atmosphere is like many a night club, but the teenagers stand round the dancing floor which you use as a stage. They jump on a woman with gold trousers and a hand microphone and then hit a man when he says "go away." A group follows, and so do others, playing 'Apache' worse than many other bands. When the singer joins the band, the leather jacket fiends who are the audience, join in dancing and banging tables with chairs. The singers have to go one better than the audience, so they lie on the floor, or jump on a passing drummer, or kiss a guitar, and then hit the man playing it. The crowd enjoy this and many stand on chairs to see the fun, and soon the audience are all singing and shouting like one man, but he didn't mind. Vince (Ron, Ron) Taylor finally appeared and joined the fun, and in the end he had so much fun that he had to rest. But in spite of this it had been a wonderful show, lovely show...lovely." That was written by a young man from Liverpool named Paul McCartney, who was visiting Paris with his friend John Lennon for Lennon's twenty-first birthday. The two attended one of Taylor's shows there, and McCartney sent that review back to run in Mersey Beat, a local music paper. Lennon and McCartney also met Taylor, with whom they had a mutual friend, Tony Sheridan, and tried to blag their way onto the show themselves, but got turned down. While they were in Paris, they also got their hair cut in a new style, to copy the style that was fashionable among Parisian bohemians. When they got back to Liverpool everyone laughed at their new mop-top hairdos... Taylor kept making records while he was in Paris, mostly cover versions of American hits. Probably the best is his version of Chuck Willis' "Whatcha Gonna Do?": [Excerpt: Vince Taylor et ses Play-Boys, "Watcha Gonna Do (When Your Baby Leaves You)?"] But while Taylor was now a big star, his behaviour was becoming ever more erratic, not helped by the amphetamines he was taking to keep himself going during shows. The group quit en masse in November 1962, but he persuaded them back so they could play a two-week residency at the Star Club in Hamburg, before a group from Liverpool called the Beatles took over for Christmas. But Taylor only lasted four days of that two-week residency. Just before midnight on the fifth night, just before they were about to go on, he phoned his girlfriend in Paris, got no answer, decided she was out cheating on him, and flew off to Paris instead of playing the show. He phoned the club's manager the next day to apologise and say he'd be back for that night's show, but Horst Fascher, the manager, wasn't as forgiving of Taylor as most promoters had been, and said that he'd shoot Taylor dead if he ever saw him again. The residency was cancelled, and the Playboys had to sell their mohair suits to Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers to pay for their fare back to Paris. For the next few years, Taylor put out a series of fairly poor records with different backing groups, often singing sickly French-language ballads with orchestral backings. He tried gimmicks like changing from his black leather costume into a white leather one, but nothing seemed to work. His money was running out, but then he had one more opportunity to hit the big time again. Bobby Woodman, the drummer from the second lineup of the Playboys, had been playing with Johnny Hallyday, France's biggest rock and roll star, under the stage name Bobbie Clarke, but then Hallyday was drafted and his band needed work. They got together with Taylor, and as Vince Taylor and the Bobbie Clarke Noise they recorded an EP of blues and rock covers that included a version of the Arthur Crudup song made famous by Elvis, "My Baby Left Me". It was a quite extraordinary record, his best since "Brand New Cadillac" seven years earlier: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor and the Bobbie Clarke Noise, "My Baby Left Me"] They played the Paris Olympia again, this time supporting the Rolling Stones. Vince Taylor was on his way to the top again. And they had the prospect of an American record deal -- Taylor's sister Sheila had married Joe Barbera, and he'd started up a new label and was interested in signing Taylor. They arranged a showcase gig for him, and everyone thought this could be the big time. But before that, he had to make a quick trip to the UK. The group were owed money by a business associate there, and so Taylor went over to collect the money, and while he was there he went to Bob Dylan's party, and dropped acid for the first time. And that was the end of Vince Taylor's career. One of the things that goes completely unreported about the British teen idols of the fifties is that for whatever reason, and I can't know for sure, there was a very high incidence of severe mental illness among them -- an astonishingly high incidence given how few of them there were. Terry Dene was invalided out of the Army with mental health problems shortly after he was drafted. Duffy Power attempted suicide in the early sixties, and had recurrent mental health problems for many years. And Dickie Pride, who his peers thought was the most talented of the lot, ended up dead aged twenty-seven, after having spent time in a psychiatric hospital and suffering so badly he was lobotomised. Vince Taylor was the one whose mental problems have had the most publicity, but much of that has made his illness seem somehow glamorous or entertaining, so I want to emphasise that it was anything but. I spent several years working on a psychiatric ward, and have seen enough people with the same condition that Taylor had that I have no sense of humour about this subject at all. The rest of this podcast is about a man who was suffering horribly. Taylor had always been unstable -- he had been paranoid and controlling, he had a tendency to make up lies about himself and act as if he believed them, and he led a chaotic lifestyle. And while normally LSD is safe even if taken relatively often, Taylor's first acid trip was the last straw for his fragile mental health. He turned up at the showcase gig unshaven, clutching a bottle of Mateus wine, and announced to everyone that he was Mateus, the new Jesus, the son of God. When asked if he had the band's money, he pulled out a hundred and fifty francs and set fire to it, ranting about how Jesus had turfed the money-lenders out of the temple. An ambulance was called, and the band did the show without him. They had a gig the next day, and Taylor turned up clean-shaven, smartly dressed, and seemingly normal. He apologised for his behaviour the night before, saying he'd "felt a bit strange" but was better now. But when they got to the club and he saw the sign saying "Vince Taylor and the Bobbie Clarke Noise", he crossed "Vince Taylor" out, and wrote "Mateus" in a felt pen. During the show, instead of singing, he walked through the crowd, anointing them with water. He spent the next decade in and out of hospital, occasionally touring and recording, but often unable to work. But while he was unwell, "Brand New Cadillac" found a new audience. Indeed, it found several audiences. The Hep Stars, a band from Sweden who featured a pre-ABBA Benny Andersson, had a number one hit in Sweden with their reworking of it, just titled "Cadillac", in 1965, just a month before Taylor's breakdown: [Excerpt: Hep Stars, "Cadillac"] In 1971, Mungo Jerry reworked the song as "Baby Jump", which went to number one in the UK, though they didn't credit Taylor: [Excerpt: Mungo Jerry, "Baby Jump"] And in 1979, the Clash recorded a version of it for their classic double-album London Calling: [Excerpt: The Clash, "Brand New Cadillac"] Shortly after recording that, Joe Strummer of the Clash met up with Taylor, who spent five hours explaining to Strummer how the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were trying to kill him with poisoned chocolate cake. Taylor at that time was still making music, and trying to latch on to whatever the latest trend was, as in his 1982 single "Space Invaders", inspired by the arcade game: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor, "Space Invaders"] But the new music he was making was almost an irrelevance -- by this point he had become a legend in the British music industry, not for who he was in 1982, but for who he was in 1958, and he has had songs written about him by people as diverse as Adam Ant and Van Morrison. But his biggest influence came in the years immediately after his breakdown. Between 1966 and 1972, Taylor spent much of his time in London, severely mentally ill, but trying to have some kind of social life based on his past glories, reminding people that he had once been a star. One of the people he got to know in London in the mid-sixties was a young musician named David Jones. Jones was fascinated by Taylor, even though he'd never liked his music -- Jones' brother was schizophrenic, and he was worried that he would end up like his brother. Jones also wanted to be a rock and roll star, and had some mildly messianic ideas of his own. So a rock and roll star who thought he was Jesus -- although he sometimes thought he was an alien, rather than Jesus, and sometimes claimed that Jesus *was* an alien -- and who was clearly severely mentally ill, had a fascination for him. He talked later about not having been able to decide whether he was seeing Taylor as an example to follow or a cautionary tale, and about how he'd sat with Taylor outside Charing Cross Station while Taylor had used a magnifying glass and a map of Europe to show him all the sites where aliens were going to land. Several years later, after changing his name to David Bowie, Jones remembered the story of Vince Taylor, the rock and roll star who thought he was an alien messiah, and turned it into the story of Ziggy Stardust: [Excerpt: David Bowie, "Ziggy Stardust"] In 1983, Taylor retired to Switzerland with his new wife Nathalie. He changed his name back to Brian Holden, and while he would play the occasional gig, he tried as best he could to forget his past, and seems to have recovered somewhat from his mental illness. In 1991 he was diagnosed with cancer, and died of it three months later. Shortly before he died, he told a friend "If I die, you can tell them that the only period in my life where I was really happy was my life in Switzerland".

  Episode seventy-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Brand New Cadillac” by Vince Taylor and the Playboys, and the sad career of rock music’s first acid casualty. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers have two bonus podcasts this week. There’s a haf-hour Q&A episode, where I answer backers’ questions, and a ten-minute bonus episode on “The Hippy Hippy Shake” by Chan Romero. 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. There are several books available on Vince Taylor, including an autobiography, but sadly these are all in French, a language I don’t speak past schoolboy level, so I can’t say if they’re any good. The main resources I used for this episode were the liner notes for this compilation CD of Taylor’s best material,  this archived copy of a twenty-year-old homepage by a friend of Taylor’s, this blogged history of Taylor and the Playboys, and this Radio 4 documentary on Taylor. But *all* of these were riddled with errors, and I used dozens of other resources to try to straighten out the facts — everything from a genealogy website to interviews with Tony Sheridan to the out-of-print autobiography of Joe Barbera. No doubt this episode still has errors in it, but I am fairly confident that it has fewer errors than anything else in English about Taylor on the Internet.  Errata I say that Gene Vincent also appeared on Oh Boy! — in fact he didn’t appear on UK TV until Parnes’ next show, Boy Meets Girls, which would mean Taylor was definitely the originator of that style. A major clanger — I say that Sheridan recorded “Why” while he was working on “Oh Boy!” — in fact this wasn’t recorded until later — *with the Beatles* as his backing band. I should have known that one, but it slipped my mind and I trusted my source, wrongly.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript On the twenty-first of May 1965, at the Savoy Hotel in London, there was a party which would have two major effects on the history of rock and roll music, one which would be felt almost immediately, and one whose full ramifications wouldn’t be seen for almost a decade. Bob Dylan was on the European tour which is chronicled in the film “Don’t Look Back”, and he’d just spent a week in Portugal. He’d come back to the UK, and the next day he was planning to film his first ever televised concert.   That plan was put on hold. Dylan was rushed to hospital the day after the party, with what was claimed to be food poisoning but has often been rumoured to be something else. He spent the next week in bed, back at the Savoy, attended by a private nurse, and during that time he wrote what he called “a long piece of vomit around twenty pages long”. From that “long piece of vomit” he later extracted the lyrics to what became “Like a Rolling Stone”. But Dylan wasn’t the only one who came out of that party feeling funny. Vince Taylor, a minor British rock and roller who’d never had much success over here but was big in France, was also there. There are no euphemisms about what it was that happened to him. He had dropped acid at the party, for the first time, and had liked it so much he’d immediately spent two hundred pounds on buying all the acid he could from the person who’d given it to him. The next day, Taylor was meant to be playing a showcase gig. His brother-in-law, Joe Barbera of Hanna Barbera, owned a record label, and was considering signing Taylor. It could be the start of a comeback for him. Instead, it was the end of his career, and the start of a legend: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor and the Playboys, “Brand New Cadillac”] There are two problems with telling the story of Vince Taylor. One is that he was a compulsive liar, who would make up claims like that he was related to Tenzing Norgay, the Nepalese mountaineer who was one of the two men who first climbed Everest, or that he was an airline pilot as a teenager. The other is that nobody who has written about Taylor has bothered to do even the most cursory fact-checking For example, if you read any online articles about Vince Taylor at all, you see the same story about his upbringing — he was born Brian Holden in the UK, he emigrated to New Jersey with his family in the forties, and then his sister Sheila met Joe Barbera, the co-creator of the Tom and Jerry cartoons. Sheila married him in 1955 and moved with him to Los Angeles — and so the rest of the family also moved there, and Brian went to Hollywood High School. Barbera decided to manage his brother-in-law, bring him over to London to check out the British music scene, and get him a record deal. There’s just… a bit of a problem with this story. Sheila did marry Joe Barbera, but not until the mid 1960s. Her first marriage, in 1947, was to Joe Singer, and it was Singer, not Barbera, who was Taylor’s first manager. That kind of inaccuracy appears all over the story of Vince Taylor So, what we actually know is that Brian Maurice Holden — or Maurice Brian Holden, even his birth name seems to be disputed — was born in Isleworth Middlesex, and moved to New Jersey when he was seven, with his family, emigrating on the Mauretania, and that he came back to London in his late teens. While there was a real Hollywood High School, which Ricky Nelson among others had attended, I suspect it’s as likely that Holden decided to just tell people that was where he’d been to school, because “Hollywood High School” would sound impressive to British people. And sounding impressive to British people was what Brian Holden had decided to base his career on. He claimed to an acquaintance, shortly after he returned to the UK, that he’d heard a Tommy Steele record while he was in the US, and had thought “If this is rock and roll in England, we’ll take them by storm!” [Excerpt: Tommy Steele, “Rock With the Caveman”] Holden had been playing American Legion shows and similar small venues in the US, and when his brother-in-law Joe Singer came over to Britain on a business trip, Holden decided to tag along, and Singer became Holden’s manager. Holden had three great advantages over British stars like Steele. He had spent long enough in America that he could tell people that he was American and they would believe him. In Britain in the 1950s, there were so few Americans that just being from that country was enough to make you a novelty, and Holden milked that for all it was worth, even though his accent, from the few bits of interviews I’ve heard with him, was pure London. He was also much, much better looking than almost all the British rock and roll stars. Because of rationing and general poverty in the UK in the forties and fifties as a result of the war, the British fifties teenage generation were on the whole rather scrawny, pasty-looking, and undernourished, with bad complexions, bad teeth, and a general haggardness that meant that even teen idols like Dickie Pride, Tommy Steele, or Marty Wilde were not, by modern standards, at all good looking. Brian Holden, on the other hand, had film-star good looks. He had a chiselled jaw, thick black hair combed into a quiff, and a dazzling smile showing Hollywood-perfect teeth. I am the farthest thing there is from a judge of male beauty, but of all the fifties rock and roll stars, the only one who was better looking than him was Elvis, and even Elvis had to grow into his good looks, while Holden, even when he came to the UK aged eighteen, looked like a cross between James Dean and Rock Hudson. And finally, he had a real sense of what rock and roll was, in a way that almost none of the British musicians did. He knew, in particular, what a rockabilly record should sound like. He did have one tiny drawback, though — he couldn’t sing in tune, or keep time. But nobody except the unfortunate musicians who ended up backing him saw that as a particular problem. Being unable to sing was a minor matter. He had presence, and he was going to be a star. Everyone knew it. He started performing at the 2Is, and he put together a band which had a rather fluid membership that to start with featured Tony Meehan, a drummer who had been in the Vipers Skiffle Group and would later join the Shadows, but by the time he got a record deal consisted of four of the regular musicians from the 2is — Tony Sheridan on lead guitar, Tony Harvey on rhythm, Licorice Locking on bass and Brian Bennett on drums. He also got himself a new name, and once again there seems to be some doubt as to how the name was chosen. Everyone seems agreed that “Taylor” was suggested by his sister Sheila, after the actor Robert Taylor. But there are three different plausible stories for how he became Vince. The first is that he named himself after Vince Everett, Elvis’ character in Jailhouse Rock. The second is that he was named after Gene Vincent. And the third is that he took the name from a pack of Pall Mall cigarettes, which had a logo with the Latin motto “in hoc signo vinces” — that last word spelled the same way as “Vinces”. And while I’ve never seen this suggestion made anywhere else, there is also the coincidence that both Licorice Locking and Tony Sheridan had been playing, with Jimmy Nicol, in the Vagabonds, the backing band for one of Larry Parnes’ teen idol acts, Vince Eager, who had made one EP before the Vagabonds had split from him: [Excerpt: Vince Eager, “Yea Yea”] So it may be that the similarity of names was in someone’s mind as well. Taylor and his band, named the Playboys, made a huge impression at the 2is, and they were soon signed to Parlophone Records, and in November 1958 they released their first single. Both sides of the single were cover versions of relatively obscure releases on Sun records. The B-side was a cover version of “I Like Love”, which had been written by Jack Clement for Roy Orbison, while the A-side, “Right Behind You Baby” was written by Charlie Rich and originally recorded by Ray Smith: [Excerpt: Ray Smith, “Right Behind You Baby”] Taylor’s version was the closest thing to an American rockabilly record that had been made in Britain to that point. While the vocal was still nothing special, and the recording techniques in British studios created a more polite sound than their American equivalents, the performance is bursting with energy: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor, “Right Behind You Baby”] It’s Sheridan, though, who really makes the record — he plays a twenty-four bar guitar solo that is absolute light years ahead of anything else that was being done in Britain. Here, for example, is “Guitar Boogie Shuffle”, an instrumental hit from Britain’s top rock and roll guitarist of the time, Bert Weedon: [Excerpt: Bert Weedon, “Guitar Boogie Shuffle”] As you can hear, that’s a perfectly good guitar instrumental, very pleasant, very well played. Now listen to Tony Sheridan’s guitar solo on “Right Behind You Baby”: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor, “Right Behind You Baby”] That’s clearly not as technically skilled as Weedon, but it’s also infinitely more exciting, and it’s more exciting than anything that was being made by any other British musicians at the time. Jack Good certainly thought so. While “Right Behind You Baby” wasn’t a hit, it was enough to get Vince on to Oh Boy!, and it was because of his Oh Boy! performances that Vince switched to the look he would keep for the rest of his career — black leather trousers, a black leather jacket, a black shirt with the top few buttons undone, showing his chest and the medallion he always wore, and black leather gloves. It was a look very similar to that which Gene Vincent also adopted for his performances on Oh Boy! — before that, Vincent had been dressing in a distinctly less memorable style — and I’ve seen differing accounts as to which act took on the style first, though both made it their own. Taylor was memorable enough in this getup that when, in the early seventies, another faded rocker who had been known as Shane Fenton made a comeback as a glam-rocker under the name Alvin Stardust, he copied Taylor’s dress exactly. But Good was unimpressed with Taylor’s performance — and very impressed with Sheridan’s. Sheridan was asked to join the Oh Boy! house band, as well as performing under his own name as Tony Sheridan and the Wreckers. He found himself playing on such less-than-classics as “Happy Organ” by Cherry Wainer: [Excerpt: Cherry Wainer, “The Happy Organ”] He also released his own solo record, “Why”: [Excerpt: Tony Sheridan, “Why”] But Sheridan’s biggest impact on popular music wouldn’t come along for another few years… Losing the most innovative guitarist in the British music industry should have been a death-blow to Taylor’s career, but he managed to find the only other guitarist in Britain at that time who might be considered up to Sheridan’s standard, Joe Moretti — who Taylor nicknamed Scotty Moretti, partly because Moretti was Scottish, but mostly because it would make his name similar to that of Scotty Moore, Elvis’ guitarist, and Taylor could shout out “take it, Scotty!” on the solos. While Sheridan’s style was to play frantic Chuck Berry-style licks, Moretti was a more controlled guitarist, but just as inventive, and he had a particular knack for coming up with riffs. And he showed that knack on Taylor’s next single, the first to be credited to Vince Taylor and the Playboys, rather than just to Vince Taylor. The A-side of that single was rather poor — a cover version of Johnny Ace’s “Pledging My Love”, which was done no favours by Taylor’s vocal: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor and the Playboys, “Pledging My Love”] But it was the B-side that was to become a classic. From the stories told by the band members, it seems that everyone knew that that song — one written by Taylor, who otherwise barely ever wrote songs, preferring to perform cover versions — was something special. But the song mentioned two different brand names, Cadillac and Ford, and the BBC at that time had a ban on playing any music which mentioned a brand name at all. So “Brand New Cadillac” became a B-side, but it’s undoubtedly the most thrilling B-side by a British performer of the fifties, and arguably the only true fifties rock and roll classic by a British artist. “Move It” by Cliff Richard had been a good record by British standards — “Brand New Cadillac” was a great record by any standards: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor and the Playboys, “Brand New Cadillac”] Unfortunately, because “Pledging My Love” was the A-side, the record sold almost nothing, and didn’t make the charts. After two flops in a row, Parlophone dropped Vince Taylor and the Playboys, and Taylor went back to performing at the 2Is with whatever random collection of musicians he could get together. Brian Bennett and Licorice Locking, meanwhile, went on to join Marty Wilde’s band the Wildcats, and scored an immediate hit with Wilde’s rather decent cover version of Dion and the Belmonts’ “Teenager in Love”: [Excerpt: Marty Wilde and the Wildcats, “Teenager in Love”] Moretti, Locking, and Bennett will all turn up in our story in future episodes. Taylor’s career seemed to be over before it had really begun, but then he got a second chance. Palette Records was a small label, based in Belgium, which was starting operations in Britain. They didn’t have any big stars, but they had signed Janis Martin, who we talked about back in episode forty, and in August 1960 they put out her single “Here Today and Gone Tomorrow Love”: [Excerpt: Janis Martin, “Here Today and Gone Tomorrow Love”] And at the same time, they put out a new single by Vince Taylor, with a new lineup of Playboys. The A-side was a fairly uninspired ballad called “I’ll Be Your Hero”, very much in the style of Elvis’ film songs, but they soon switched to promoting the flip side, “Jet Black Machine”, which was much more in Taylor’s style. It wasn’t up to the standards of “Brand New Cadillac”, but it was still far more exciting than most of the records that were being made in the UK at the time: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor and the Playboys, “Jet Black Machine”] That seemed like it would be a turning point in Taylor’s career — according to one source I’ve read, it made the top twenty on the NME charts, though I haven’t been able to check those charts myself, and given how unreliable literally everything I’ve read about Taylor is, I don’t entirely trust that. But it was definitely more successful than his two previous singles, and the new lineup of Playboys were booked on a package tour of acts from the 2Is. Things seemed like they were about to start going Taylor’s way. But Taylor had always been a little erratic, and he started to get almost pathologically jealous. He would phone his girlfriend up every night before going on stage, and if she didn’t answer he’d skip the show, to drive to her house and find out what she was doing. And in November 1960, just before the start of the tour, he skipped out on the tour altogether and headed back to visit his family in the States. The band carried on without him, and became the backing group for Duffy Power, one of the many acts managed by Larry Parnes. Power desperately wanted to be a blues singer, but he was pushed into recording cover versions of American hits, like this one, which came out shortly after the Playboys joined him: [Excerpt: Duffy Power, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On”] The Playboys continued to back Power until June 1960, when they had a gig in Guildford, and a remarkable coincidence happened. They were unloading their equipment at the 2Is, to drive to Guildford with it, when Taylor walked round the corner. He’d just got back from the USA and happened to be passing, and they invited him along for the drive to the show. He came with them, and then Duffy Power, who was almost as unreliable as Taylor, didn’t turn up for the show. They invited Taylor to perform in his place, and he did, and blew the audience away. Power eventually turned up half-way through the show, got angry, punched the drummer in the face during the interval, and drove off again. The drummer got two stitches, and then they finished the show. Taylor was back with the Playboys, and Duffy Power was out, and so the next month when Power was booked for some shows in Paris, on a bill with Vince Eager and Wee Willie Harris, Taylor took his place there, too. France was about as far behind Britain in rock and roll terms as Britain was behind America, and no-one had ever seen anything like Vince Taylor. Taylor and the Playboys got signed to a French label, Barclay Records, and they became huge stars — Taylor did indeed get himself a brand new Cadillac, a pink one just like Elvis had. Taylor got nicknamed “le diable noir” — the black Devil — for his demonic stage presence, and he inspired riots regularly with his shows. A review of one of his performances at that time may be of interest to some listeners: “The atmosphere is like many a night club, but the teenagers stand round the dancing floor which you use as a stage. They jump on a woman with gold trousers and a hand microphone and then hit a man when he says “go away.” A group follows, and so do others, playing ‘Apache’ worse than many other bands. When the singer joins the band, the leather jacket fiends who are the audience, join in dancing and banging tables with chairs. The singers have to go one better than the audience, so they lie on the floor, or jump on a passing drummer, or kiss a guitar, and then hit the man playing it. The crowd enjoy this and many stand on chairs to see the fun, and soon the audience are all singing and shouting like one man, but he didn’t mind. Vince (Ron, Ron) Taylor finally appeared and joined the fun, and in the end he had so much fun that he had to rest. But in spite of this it had been a wonderful show, lovely show…lovely.” That was written by a young man from Liverpool named Paul McCartney, who was visiting Paris with his friend John Lennon for Lennon’s twenty-first birthday. The two attended one of Taylor’s shows there, and McCartney sent that review back to run in Mersey Beat, a local music paper. Lennon and McCartney also met Taylor, with whom they had a mutual friend, Tony Sheridan, and tried to blag their way onto the show themselves, but got turned down. While they were in Paris, they also got their hair cut in a new style, to copy the style that was fashionable among Parisian bohemians. When they got back to Liverpool everyone laughed at their new mop-top hairdos… Taylor kept making records while he was in Paris, mostly cover versions of American hits. Probably the best is his version of Chuck Willis’ “Whatcha Gonna Do?”: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor et ses Play-Boys, “Watcha Gonna Do (When Your Baby Leaves You)?”] But while Taylor was now a big star, his behaviour was becoming ever more erratic, not helped by the amphetamines he was taking to keep himself going during shows. The group quit en masse in November 1962, but he persuaded them back so they could play a two-week residency at the Star Club in Hamburg, before a group from Liverpool called the Beatles took over for Christmas. But Taylor only lasted four days of that two-week residency. Just before midnight on the fifth night, just before they were about to go on, he phoned his girlfriend in Paris, got no answer, decided she was out cheating on him, and flew off to Paris instead of playing the show. He phoned the club’s manager the next day to apologise and say he’d be back for that night’s show, but Horst Fascher, the manager, wasn’t as forgiving of Taylor as most promoters had been, and said that he’d shoot Taylor dead if he ever saw him again. The residency was cancelled, and the Playboys had to sell their mohair suits to Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers to pay for their fare back to Paris. For the next few years, Taylor put out a series of fairly poor records with different backing groups, often singing sickly French-language ballads with orchestral backings. He tried gimmicks like changing from his black leather costume into a white leather one, but nothing seemed to work. His money was running out, but then he had one more opportunity to hit the big time again. Bobby Woodman, the drummer from the second lineup of the Playboys, had been playing with Johnny Hallyday, France’s biggest rock and roll star, under the stage name Bobbie Clarke, but then Hallyday was drafted and his band needed work. They got together with Taylor, and as Vince Taylor and the Bobbie Clarke Noise they recorded an EP of blues and rock covers that included a version of the Arthur Crudup song made famous by Elvis, “My Baby Left Me”. It was a quite extraordinary record, his best since “Brand New Cadillac” seven years earlier: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor and the Bobbie Clarke Noise, “My Baby Left Me”] They played the Paris Olympia again, this time supporting the Rolling Stones. Vince Taylor was on his way to the top again. And they had the prospect of an American record deal — Taylor’s sister Sheila had married Joe Barbera, and he’d started up a new label and was interested in signing Taylor. They arranged a showcase gig for him, and everyone thought this could be the big time. But before that, he had to make a quick trip to the UK. The group were owed money by a business associate there, and so Taylor went over to collect the money, and while he was there he went to Bob Dylan’s party, and dropped acid for the first time. And that was the end of Vince Taylor’s career. One of the things that goes completely unreported about the British teen idols of the fifties is that for whatever reason, and I can’t know for sure, there was a very high incidence of severe mental illness among them — an astonishingly high incidence given how few of them there were. Terry Dene was invalided out of the Army with mental health problems shortly after he was drafted. Duffy Power attempted suicide in the early sixties, and had recurrent mental health problems for many years. And Dickie Pride, who his peers thought was the most talented of the lot, ended up dead aged twenty-seven, after having spent time in a psychiatric hospital and suffering so badly he was lobotomised. Vince Taylor was the one whose mental problems have had the most publicity, but much of that has made his illness seem somehow glamorous or entertaining, so I want to emphasise that it was anything but. I spent several years working on a psychiatric ward, and have seen enough people with the same condition that Taylor had that I have no sense of humour about this subject at all. The rest of this podcast is about a man who was suffering horribly. Taylor had always been unstable — he had been paranoid and controlling, he had a tendency to make up lies about himself and act as if he believed them, and he led a chaotic lifestyle. And while normally LSD is safe even if taken relatively often, Taylor’s first acid trip was the last straw for his fragile mental health. He turned up at the showcase gig unshaven, clutching a bottle of Mateus wine, and announced to everyone that he was Mateus, the new Jesus, the son of God. When asked if he had the band’s money, he pulled out a hundred and fifty francs and set fire to it, ranting about how Jesus had turfed the money-lenders out of the temple. An ambulance was called, and the band did the show without him. They had a gig the next day, and Taylor turned up clean-shaven, smartly dressed, and seemingly normal. He apologised for his behaviour the night before, saying he’d “felt a bit strange” but was better now. But when they got to the club and he saw the sign saying “Vince Taylor and the Bobbie Clarke Noise”, he crossed “Vince Taylor” out, and wrote “Mateus” in a felt pen. During the show, instead of singing, he walked through the crowd, anointing them with water. He spent the next decade in and out of hospital, occasionally touring and recording, but often unable to work. But while he was unwell, “Brand New Cadillac” found a new audience. Indeed, it found several audiences. The Hep Stars, a band from Sweden who featured a pre-ABBA Benny Andersson, had a number one hit in Sweden with their reworking of it, just titled “Cadillac”, in 1965, just a month before Taylor’s breakdown: [Excerpt: Hep Stars, “Cadillac”] In 1971, Mungo Jerry reworked the song as “Baby Jump”, which went to number one in the UK, though they didn’t credit Taylor: [Excerpt: Mungo Jerry, “Baby Jump”] And in 1979, the Clash recorded a version of it for their classic double-album London Calling: [Excerpt: The Clash, “Brand New Cadillac”] Shortly after recording that, Joe Strummer of the Clash met up with Taylor, who spent five hours explaining to Strummer how the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were trying to kill him with poisoned chocolate cake. Taylor at that time was still making music, and trying to latch on to whatever the latest trend was, as in his 1982 single “Space Invaders”, inspired by the arcade game: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor, “Space Invaders”] But the new music he was making was almost an irrelevance — by this point he had become a legend in the British music industry, not for who he was in 1982, but for who he was in 1958, and he has had songs written about him by people as diverse as Adam Ant and Van Morrison. But his biggest influence came in the years immediately after his breakdown. Between 1966 and 1972, Taylor spent much of his time in London, severely mentally ill, but trying to have some kind of social life based on his past glories, reminding people that he had once been a star. One of the people he got to know in London in the mid-sixties was a young musician named David Jones. Jones was fascinated by Taylor, even though he’d never liked his music — Jones’ brother was schizophrenic, and he was worried that he would end up like his brother. Jones also wanted to be a rock and roll star, and had some mildly messianic ideas of his own. So a rock and roll star who thought he was Jesus — although he sometimes thought he was an alien, rather than Jesus, and sometimes claimed that Jesus *was* an alien — and who was clearly severely mentally ill, had a fascination for him. He talked later about not having been able to decide whether he was seeing Taylor as an example to follow or a cautionary tale, and about how he’d sat with Taylor outside Charing Cross Station while Taylor had used a magnifying glass and a map of Europe to show him all the sites where aliens were going to land. Several years later, after changing his name to David Bowie, Jones remembered the story of Vince Taylor, the rock and roll star who thought he was an alien messiah, and turned it into the story of Ziggy Stardust: [Excerpt: David Bowie, “Ziggy Stardust”] In 1983, Taylor retired to Switzerland with his new wife Nathalie. He changed his name back to Brian Holden, and while he would play the occasional gig, he tried as best he could to forget his past, and seems to have recovered somewhat from his mental illness. In 1991 he was diagnosed with cancer, and died of it three months later. Shortly before he died, he told a friend “If I die, you can tell them that the only period in my life where I was really happy was my life in Switzerland”.

  Episode seventy-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Brand New Cadillac” by Vince Taylor and the Playboys, and the sad career of rock music’s first acid casualty. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers have two bonus podcasts this week. There’s a haf-hour Q&A episode, where I answer backers’ questions, and a ten-minute bonus episode on “The Hippy Hippy Shake” by Chan Romero. 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. There are several books available on Vince Taylor, including an autobiography, but sadly these are all in French, a language I don’t speak past schoolboy level, so I can’t say if they’re any good. The main resources I used for this episode were the liner notes for this compilation CD of Taylor’s best material,  this archived copy of a twenty-year-old homepage by a friend of Taylor’s, this blogged history of Taylor and the Playboys, and this Radio 4 documentary on Taylor. But *all* of these were riddled with errors, and I used dozens of other resources to try to straighten out the facts — everything from a genealogy website to interviews with Tony Sheridan to the out-of-print autobiography of Joe Barbera. No doubt this episode still has errors in it, but I am fairly confident that it has fewer errors than anything else in English about Taylor on the Internet.  Errata I say that Gene Vincent also appeared on Oh Boy! — in fact he didn’t appear on UK TV until Parnes’ next show, Boy Meets Girls, which would mean Taylor was definitely the originator of that style. A major clanger — I say that Sheridan recorded “Why” while he was working on “Oh Boy!” — in fact this wasn’t recorded until later — *with the Beatles* as his backing band. I should have known that one, but it slipped my mind and I trusted my source, wrongly.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript On the twenty-first of May 1965, at the Savoy Hotel in London, there was a party which would have two major effects on the history of rock and roll music, one which would be felt almost immediately, and one whose full ramifications wouldn’t be seen for almost a decade. Bob Dylan was on the European tour which is chronicled in the film “Don’t Look Back”, and he’d just spent a week in Portugal. He’d come back to the UK, and the next day he was planning to film his first ever televised concert.   That plan was put on hold. Dylan was rushed to hospital the day after the party, with what was claimed to be food poisoning but has often been rumoured to be something else. He spent the next week in bed, back at the Savoy, attended by a private nurse, and during that time he wrote what he called “a long piece of vomit around twenty pages long”. From that “long piece of vomit” he later extracted the lyrics to what became “Like a Rolling Stone”. But Dylan wasn’t the only one who came out of that party feeling funny. Vince Taylor, a minor British rock and roller who’d never had much success over here but was big in France, was also there. There are no euphemisms about what it was that happened to him. He had dropped acid at the party, for the first time, and had liked it so much he’d immediately spent two hundred pounds on buying all the acid he could from the person who’d given it to him. The next day, Taylor was meant to be playing a showcase gig. His brother-in-law, Joe Barbera of Hanna Barbera, owned a record label, and was considering signing Taylor. It could be the start of a comeback for him. Instead, it was the end of his career, and the start of a legend: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor and the Playboys, “Brand New Cadillac”] There are two problems with telling the story of Vince Taylor. One is that he was a compulsive liar, who would make up claims like that he was related to Tenzing Norgay, the Nepalese mountaineer who was one of the two men who first climbed Everest, or that he was an airline pilot as a teenager. The other is that nobody who has written about Taylor has bothered to do even the most cursory fact-checking For example, if you read any online articles about Vince Taylor at all, you see the same story about his upbringing — he was born Brian Holden in the UK, he emigrated to New Jersey with his family in the forties, and then his sister Sheila met Joe Barbera, the co-creator of the Tom and Jerry cartoons. Sheila married him in 1955 and moved with him to Los Angeles — and so the rest of the family also moved there, and Brian went to Hollywood High School. Barbera decided to manage his brother-in-law, bring him over to London to check out the British music scene, and get him a record deal. There’s just… a bit of a problem with this story. Sheila did marry Joe Barbera, but not until the mid 1960s. Her first marriage, in 1947, was to Joe Singer, and it was Singer, not Barbera, who was Taylor’s first manager. That kind of inaccuracy appears all over the story of Vince Taylor So, what we actually know is that Brian Maurice Holden — or Maurice Brian Holden, even his birth name seems to be disputed — was born in Isleworth Middlesex, and moved to New Jersey when he was seven, with his family, emigrating on the Mauretania, and that he came back to London in his late teens. While there was a real Hollywood High School, which Ricky Nelson among others had attended, I suspect it’s as likely that Holden decided to just tell people that was where he’d been to school, because “Hollywood High School” would sound impressive to British people. And sounding impressive to British people was what Brian Holden had decided to base his career on. He claimed to an acquaintance, shortly after he returned to the UK, that he’d heard a Tommy Steele record while he was in the US, and had thought “If this is rock and roll in England, we’ll take them by storm!” [Excerpt: Tommy Steele, “Rock With the Caveman”] Holden had been playing American Legion shows and similar small venues in the US, and when his brother-in-law Joe Singer came over to Britain on a business trip, Holden decided to tag along, and Singer became Holden’s manager. Holden had three great advantages over British stars like Steele. He had spent long enough in America that he could tell people that he was American and they would believe him. In Britain in the 1950s, there were so few Americans that just being from that country was enough to make you a novelty, and Holden milked that for all it was worth, even though his accent, from the few bits of interviews I’ve heard with him, was pure London. He was also much, much better looking than almost all the British rock and roll stars. Because of rationing and general poverty in the UK in the forties and fifties as a result of the war, the British fifties teenage generation were on the whole rather scrawny, pasty-looking, and undernourished, with bad complexions, bad teeth, and a general haggardness that meant that even teen idols like Dickie Pride, Tommy Steele, or Marty Wilde were not, by modern standards, at all good looking. Brian Holden, on the other hand, had film-star good looks. He had a chiselled jaw, thick black hair combed into a quiff, and a dazzling smile showing Hollywood-perfect teeth. I am the farthest thing there is from a judge of male beauty, but of all the fifties rock and roll stars, the only one who was better looking than him was Elvis, and even Elvis had to grow into his good looks, while Holden, even when he came to the UK aged eighteen, looked like a cross between James Dean and Rock Hudson. And finally, he had a real sense of what rock and roll was, in a way that almost none of the British musicians did. He knew, in particular, what a rockabilly record should sound like. He did have one tiny drawback, though — he couldn’t sing in tune, or keep time. But nobody except the unfortunate musicians who ended up backing him saw that as a particular problem. Being unable to sing was a minor matter. He had presence, and he was going to be a star. Everyone knew it. He started performing at the 2Is, and he put together a band which had a rather fluid membership that to start with featured Tony Meehan, a drummer who had been in the Vipers Skiffle Group and would later join the Shadows, but by the time he got a record deal consisted of four of the regular musicians from the 2is — Tony Sheridan on lead guitar, Tony Harvey on rhythm, Licorice Locking on bass and Brian Bennett on drums. He also got himself a new name, and once again there seems to be some doubt as to how the name was chosen. Everyone seems agreed that “Taylor” was suggested by his sister Sheila, after the actor Robert Taylor. But there are three different plausible stories for how he became Vince. The first is that he named himself after Vince Everett, Elvis’ character in Jailhouse Rock. The second is that he was named after Gene Vincent. And the third is that he took the name from a pack of Pall Mall cigarettes, which had a logo with the Latin motto “in hoc signo vinces” — that last word spelled the same way as “Vinces”. And while I’ve never seen this suggestion made anywhere else, there is also the coincidence that both Licorice Locking and Tony Sheridan had been playing, with Jimmy Nicol, in the Vagabonds, the backing band for one of Larry Parnes’ teen idol acts, Vince Eager, who had made one EP before the Vagabonds had split from him: [Excerpt: Vince Eager, “Yea Yea”] So it may be that the similarity of names was in someone’s mind as well. Taylor and his band, named the Playboys, made a huge impression at the 2is, and they were soon signed to Parlophone Records, and in November 1958 they released their first single. Both sides of the single were cover versions of relatively obscure releases on Sun records. The B-side was a cover version of “I Like Love”, which had been written by Jack Clement for Roy Orbison, while the A-side, “Right Behind You Baby” was written by Charlie Rich and originally recorded by Ray Smith: [Excerpt: Ray Smith, “Right Behind You Baby”] Taylor’s version was the closest thing to an American rockabilly record that had been made in Britain to that point. While the vocal was still nothing special, and the recording techniques in British studios created a more polite sound than their American equivalents, the performance is bursting with energy: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor, “Right Behind You Baby”] It’s Sheridan, though, who really makes the record — he plays a twenty-four bar guitar solo that is absolute light years ahead of anything else that was being done in Britain. Here, for example, is “Guitar Boogie Shuffle”, an instrumental hit from Britain’s top rock and roll guitarist of the time, Bert Weedon: [Excerpt: Bert Weedon, “Guitar Boogie Shuffle”] As you can hear, that’s a perfectly good guitar instrumental, very pleasant, very well played. Now listen to Tony Sheridan’s guitar solo on “Right Behind You Baby”: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor, “Right Behind You Baby”] That’s clearly not as technically skilled as Weedon, but it’s also infinitely more exciting, and it’s more exciting than anything that was being made by any other British musicians at the time. Jack Good certainly thought so. While “Right Behind You Baby” wasn’t a hit, it was enough to get Vince on to Oh Boy!, and it was because of his Oh Boy! performances that Vince switched to the look he would keep for the rest of his career — black leather trousers, a black leather jacket, a black shirt with the top few buttons undone, showing his chest and the medallion he always wore, and black leather gloves. It was a look very similar to that which Gene Vincent also adopted for his performances on Oh Boy! — before that, Vincent had been dressing in a distinctly less memorable style — and I’ve seen differing accounts as to which act took on the style first, though both made it their own. Taylor was memorable enough in this getup that when, in the early seventies, another faded rocker who had been known as Shane Fenton made a comeback as a glam-rocker under the name Alvin Stardust, he copied Taylor’s dress exactly. But Good was unimpressed with Taylor’s performance — and very impressed with Sheridan’s. Sheridan was asked to join the Oh Boy! house band, as well as performing under his own name as Tony Sheridan and the Wreckers. He found himself playing on such less-than-classics as “Happy Organ” by Cherry Wainer: [Excerpt: Cherry Wainer, “The Happy Organ”] He also released his own solo record, “Why”: [Excerpt: Tony Sheridan, “Why”] But Sheridan’s biggest impact on popular music wouldn’t come along for another few years… Losing the most innovative guitarist in the British music industry should have been a death-blow to Taylor’s career, but he managed to find the only other guitarist in Britain at that time who might be considered up to Sheridan’s standard, Joe Moretti — who Taylor nicknamed Scotty Moretti, partly because Moretti was Scottish, but mostly because it would make his name similar to that of Scotty Moore, Elvis’ guitarist, and Taylor could shout out “take it, Scotty!” on the solos. While Sheridan’s style was to play frantic Chuck Berry-style licks, Moretti was a more controlled guitarist, but just as inventive, and he had a particular knack for coming up with riffs. And he showed that knack on Taylor’s next single, the first to be credited to Vince Taylor and the Playboys, rather than just to Vince Taylor. The A-side of that single was rather poor — a cover version of Johnny Ace’s “Pledging My Love”, which was done no favours by Taylor’s vocal: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor and the Playboys, “Pledging My Love”] But it was the B-side that was to become a classic. From the stories told by the band members, it seems that everyone knew that that song — one written by Taylor, who otherwise barely ever wrote songs, preferring to perform cover versions — was something special. But the song mentioned two different brand names, Cadillac and Ford, and the BBC at that time had a ban on playing any music which mentioned a brand name at all. So “Brand New Cadillac” became a B-side, but it’s undoubtedly the most thrilling B-side by a British performer of the fifties, and arguably the only true fifties rock and roll classic by a British artist. “Move It” by Cliff Richard had been a good record by British standards — “Brand New Cadillac” was a great record by any standards: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor and the Playboys, “Brand New Cadillac”] Unfortunately, because “Pledging My Love” was the A-side, the record sold almost nothing, and didn’t make the charts. After two flops in a row, Parlophone dropped Vince Taylor and the Playboys, and Taylor went back to performing at the 2Is with whatever random collection of musicians he could get together. Brian Bennett and Licorice Locking, meanwhile, went on to join Marty Wilde’s band the Wildcats, and scored an immediate hit with Wilde’s rather decent cover version of Dion and the Belmonts’ “Teenager in Love”: [Excerpt: Marty Wilde and the Wildcats, “Teenager in Love”] Moretti, Locking, and Bennett will all turn up in our story in future episodes. Taylor’s career seemed to be over before it had really begun, but then he got a second chance. Palette Records was a small label, based in Belgium, which was starting operations in Britain. They didn’t have any big stars, but they had signed Janis Martin, who we talked about back in episode forty, and in August 1960 they put out her single “Here Today and Gone Tomorrow Love”: [Excerpt: Janis Martin, “Here Today and Gone Tomorrow Love”] And at the same time, they put out a new single by Vince Taylor, with a new lineup of Playboys. The A-side was a fairly uninspired ballad called “I’ll Be Your Hero”, very much in the style of Elvis’ film songs, but they soon switched to promoting the flip side, “Jet Black Machine”, which was much more in Taylor’s style. It wasn’t up to the standards of “Brand New Cadillac”, but it was still far more exciting than most of the records that were being made in the UK at the time: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor and the Playboys, “Jet Black Machine”] That seemed like it would be a turning point in Taylor’s career — according to one source I’ve read, it made the top twenty on the NME charts, though I haven’t been able to check those charts myself, and given how unreliable literally everything I’ve read about Taylor is, I don’t entirely trust that. But it was definitely more successful than his two previous singles, and the new lineup of Playboys were booked on a package tour of acts from the 2Is. Things seemed like they were about to start going Taylor’s way. But Taylor had always been a little erratic, and he started to get almost pathologically jealous. He would phone his girlfriend up every night before going on stage, and if she didn’t answer he’d skip the show, to drive to her house and find out what she was doing. And in November 1960, just before the start of the tour, he skipped out on the tour altogether and headed back to visit his family in the States. The band carried on without him, and became the backing group for Duffy Power, one of the many acts managed by Larry Parnes. Power desperately wanted to be a blues singer, but he was pushed into recording cover versions of American hits, like this one, which came out shortly after the Playboys joined him: [Excerpt: Duffy Power, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On”] The Playboys continued to back Power until June 1960, when they had a gig in Guildford, and a remarkable coincidence happened. They were unloading their equipment at the 2Is, to drive to Guildford with it, when Taylor walked round the corner. He’d just got back from the USA and happened to be passing, and they invited him along for the drive to the show. He came with them, and then Duffy Power, who was almost as unreliable as Taylor, didn’t turn up for the show. They invited Taylor to perform in his place, and he did, and blew the audience away. Power eventually turned up half-way through the show, got angry, punched the drummer in the face during the interval, and drove off again. The drummer got two stitches, and then they finished the show. Taylor was back with the Playboys, and Duffy Power was out, and so the next month when Power was booked for some shows in Paris, on a bill with Vince Eager and Wee Willie Harris, Taylor took his place there, too. France was about as far behind Britain in rock and roll terms as Britain was behind America, and no-one had ever seen anything like Vince Taylor. Taylor and the Playboys got signed to a French label, Barclay Records, and they became huge stars — Taylor did indeed get himself a brand new Cadillac, a pink one just like Elvis had. Taylor got nicknamed “le diable noir” — the black Devil — for his demonic stage presence, and he inspired riots regularly with his shows. A review of one of his performances at that time may be of interest to some listeners: “The atmosphere is like many a night club, but the teenagers stand round the dancing floor which you use as a stage. They jump on a woman with gold trousers and a hand microphone and then hit a man when he says “go away.” A group follows, and so do others, playing ‘Apache’ worse than many other bands. When the singer joins the band, the leather jacket fiends who are the audience, join in dancing and banging tables with chairs. The singers have to go one better than the audience, so they lie on the floor, or jump on a passing drummer, or kiss a guitar, and then hit the man playing it. The crowd enjoy this and many stand on chairs to see the fun, and soon the audience are all singing and shouting like one man, but he didn’t mind. Vince (Ron, Ron) Taylor finally appeared and joined the fun, and in the end he had so much fun that he had to rest. But in spite of this it had been a wonderful show, lovely show…lovely.” That was written by a young man from Liverpool named Paul McCartney, who was visiting Paris with his friend John Lennon for Lennon’s twenty-first birthday. The two attended one of Taylor’s shows there, and McCartney sent that review back to run in Mersey Beat, a local music paper. Lennon and McCartney also met Taylor, with whom they had a mutual friend, Tony Sheridan, and tried to blag their way onto the show themselves, but got turned down. While they were in Paris, they also got their hair cut in a new style, to copy the style that was fashionable among Parisian bohemians. When they got back to Liverpool everyone laughed at their new mop-top hairdos… Taylor kept making records while he was in Paris, mostly cover versions of American hits. Probably the best is his version of Chuck Willis’ “Whatcha Gonna Do?”: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor et ses Play-Boys, “Watcha Gonna Do (When Your Baby Leaves You)?”] But while Taylor was now a big star, his behaviour was becoming ever more erratic, not helped by the amphetamines he was taking to keep himself going during shows. The group quit en masse in November 1962, but he persuaded them back so they could play a two-week residency at the Star Club in Hamburg, before a group from Liverpool called the Beatles took over for Christmas. But Taylor only lasted four days of that two-week residency. Just before midnight on the fifth night, just before they were about to go on, he phoned his girlfriend in Paris, got no answer, decided she was out cheating on him, and flew off to Paris instead of playing the show. He phoned the club’s manager the next day to apologise and say he’d be back for that night’s show, but Horst Fascher, the manager, wasn’t as forgiving of Taylor as most promoters had been, and said that he’d shoot Taylor dead if he ever saw him again. The residency was cancelled, and the Playboys had to sell their mohair suits to Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers to pay for their fare back to Paris. For the next few years, Taylor put out a series of fairly poor records with different backing groups, often singing sickly French-language ballads with orchestral backings. He tried gimmicks like changing from his black leather costume into a white leather one, but nothing seemed to work. His money was running out, but then he had one more opportunity to hit the big time again. Bobby Woodman, the drummer from the second lineup of the Playboys, had been playing with Johnny Hallyday, France’s biggest rock and roll star, under the stage name Bobbie Clarke, but then Hallyday was drafted and his band needed work. They got together with Taylor, and as Vince Taylor and the Bobbie Clarke Noise they recorded an EP of blues and rock covers that included a version of the Arthur Crudup song made famous by Elvis, “My Baby Left Me”. It was a quite extraordinary record, his best since “Brand New Cadillac” seven years earlier: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor and the Bobbie Clarke Noise, “My Baby Left Me”] They played the Paris Olympia again, this time supporting the Rolling Stones. Vince Taylor was on his way to the top again. And they had the prospect of an American record deal — Taylor’s sister Sheila had married Joe Barbera, and he’d started up a new label and was interested in signing Taylor. They arranged a showcase gig for him, and everyone thought this could be the big time. But before that, he had to make a quick trip to the UK. The group were owed money by a business associate there, and so Taylor went over to collect the money, and while he was there he went to Bob Dylan’s party, and dropped acid for the first time. And that was the end of Vince Taylor’s career. One of the things that goes completely unreported about the British teen idols of the fifties is that for whatever reason, and I can’t know for sure, there was a very high incidence of severe mental illness among them — an astonishingly high incidence given how few of them there were. Terry Dene was invalided out of the Army with mental health problems shortly after he was drafted. Duffy Power attempted suicide in the early sixties, and had recurrent mental health problems for many years. And Dickie Pride, who his peers thought was the most talented of the lot, ended up dead aged twenty-seven, after having spent time in a psychiatric hospital and suffering so badly he was lobotomised. Vince Taylor was the one whose mental problems have had the most publicity, but much of that has made his illness seem somehow glamorous or entertaining, so I want to emphasise that it was anything but. I spent several years working on a psychiatric ward, and have seen enough people with the same condition that Taylor had that I have no sense of humour about this subject at all. The rest of this podcast is about a man who was suffering horribly. Taylor had always been unstable — he had been paranoid and controlling, he had a tendency to make up lies about himself and act as if he believed them, and he led a chaotic lifestyle. And while normally LSD is safe even if taken relatively often, Taylor’s first acid trip was the last straw for his fragile mental health. He turned up at the showcase gig unshaven, clutching a bottle of Mateus wine, and announced to everyone that he was Mateus, the new Jesus, the son of God. When asked if he had the band’s money, he pulled out a hundred and fifty francs and set fire to it, ranting about how Jesus had turfed the money-lenders out of the temple. An ambulance was called, and the band did the show without him. They had a gig the next day, and Taylor turned up clean-shaven, smartly dressed, and seemingly normal. He apologised for his behaviour the night before, saying he’d “felt a bit strange” but was better now. But when they got to the club and he saw the sign saying “Vince Taylor and the Bobbie Clarke Noise”, he crossed “Vince Taylor” out, and wrote “Mateus” in a felt pen. During the show, instead of singing, he walked through the crowd, anointing them with water. He spent the next decade in and out of hospital, occasionally touring and recording, but often unable to work. But while he was unwell, “Brand New Cadillac” found a new audience. Indeed, it found several audiences. The Hep Stars, a band from Sweden who featured a pre-ABBA Benny Andersson, had a number one hit in Sweden with their reworking of it, just titled “Cadillac”, in 1965, just a month before Taylor’s breakdown: [Excerpt: Hep Stars, “Cadillac”] In 1971, Mungo Jerry reworked the song as “Baby Jump”, which went to number one in the UK, though they didn’t credit Taylor: [Excerpt: Mungo Jerry, “Baby Jump”] And in 1979, the Clash recorded a version of it for their classic double-album London Calling: [Excerpt: The Clash, “Brand New Cadillac”] Shortly after recording that, Joe Strummer of the Clash met up with Taylor, who spent five hours explaining to Strummer how the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were trying to kill him with poisoned chocolate cake. Taylor at that time was still making music, and trying to latch on to whatever the latest trend was, as in his 1982 single “Space Invaders”, inspired by the arcade game: [Excerpt: Vince Taylor, “Space Invaders”] But the new music he was making was almost an irrelevance — by this point he had become a legend in the British music industry, not for who he was in 1982, but for who he was in 1958, and he has had songs written about him by people as diverse as Adam Ant and Van Morrison. But his biggest influence came in the years immediately after his breakdown. Between 1966 and 1972, Taylor spent much of his time in London, severely mentally ill, but trying to have some kind of social life based on his past glories, reminding people that he had once been a star. One of the people he got to know in London in the mid-sixties was a young musician named David Jones. Jones was fascinated by Taylor, even though he’d never liked his music — Jones’ brother was schizophrenic, and he was worried that he would end up like his brother. Jones also wanted to be a rock and roll star, and had some mildly messianic ideas of his own. So a rock and roll star who thought he was Jesus — although he sometimes thought he was an alien, rather than Jesus, and sometimes claimed that Jesus *was* an alien — and who was clearly severely mentally ill, had a fascination for him. He talked later about not having been able to decide whether he was seeing Taylor as an example to follow or a cautionary tale, and about how he’d sat with Taylor outside Charing Cross Station while Taylor had used a magnifying glass and a map of Europe to show him all the sites where aliens were going to land. Several years later, after changing his name to David Bowie, Jones remembered the story of Vince Taylor, the rock and roll star who thought he was an alien messiah, and turned it into the story of Ziggy Stardust: [Excerpt: David Bowie, “Ziggy Stardust”] In 1983, Taylor retired to Switzerland with his new wife Nathalie. He changed his name back to Brian Holden, and while he would play the occasional gig, he tried as best he could to forget his past, and seems to have recovered somewhat from his mental illness. In 1991 he was diagnosed with cancer, and died of it three months later. Shortly before he died, he told a friend “If I die, you can tell them that the only period in my life where I was really happy was my life in Switzerland”.

After a brief holiday break, the guys are back to review the "Elvis album without Elvis," James Burton's 1971 solo debut, "The Guitar Sounds of James Burton." Cut at an Elvis session with the TCB Band after Elvis left due to an eye problem, the lead track from the album, a cover of "Polk Salad Annie," featured heavily in the 2019 film "Ford vs Ferrari" and now Justin & Gurdip see if the album holds up. Then for Song of the Week, Gurdip sings the praises of the Big Boy Crudup R&B classic "My Baby Left Me" while Justin covers the history behind Elvis' version of the George Jones weeper "She Thinks I Still Care." Featured Songs of the Week: Gurdip: My Baby Left Me Justin: She Thinks I Still Care

NB This is a new version — I accidentally uploaded the wrong file previously Episode thirty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Heartbreak Hotel” by Elvis Presley, and is part three of a trilogy on the aftermath of Elvis leaving Sun, and the birth of rockabilly. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “The Flying Saucer” by Buchanan and Goodman.  Also, it came too late for me to acknowledge in the episode itself, but I have to mention the sad news that Dave Bartholomew died today, aged 100. He will be missed.  —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.   There are many, many books about Elvis Presley out there, but the one I’m using as my major resource for information on him, and which has guided my views as to the kind of person he was, is Last Train to Memphis by Peter Guralnick, generally considered the best biography of him. This 3-CD box set (expensive on CD, but relatively cheap as MP3s) contains every surviving recording by Elvis from 1956, including outtakes. This more reasonably priced ten-CD box contains every official release he put out from 1954 through 62, but without the outtakes. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   We’ve talked before, a couple of times, about Elvis Presley and his early recordings. Those Sun records are the ones on which his artistic reputation now largely rests, but they weren’t the ones that made him famous. He didn’t become the Elvis we all know until he started recording for RCA. So today we’re going to look at the first single he put out on a major label, and the way it turned him from a minor regional country star into the King of Rock and Roll, a cultural phenomenon that would eclipse all music prior to him, and lead John Lennon to say “Before Elvis there was nothing”. As you might remember from the last episode on Elvis, a few weeks ago, Elvis’ manager, Colonel Tom Parker, had managed to get Elvis signed to RCA Records for a sum of money far greater than anything anyone had paid for a singer before, after Sam Phillips made what seemed like a ludicrous demand just to get Parker out of his hair. And this was a big deal. Sun Records, as we’ve seen, was a tiny regional operation. It was able to generate massive hits for Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash after Elvis left, but that’s only because of the cash the label was able to make from the Elvis deal. It’s safe to say that the whole genre of rockabilly was funded by that one deal. RCA, on the other hand, was one of the biggest labels in the world. The first thing RCA did was to reissue his last Sun single, “I Forgot to Remember to Forget”, backed with “Mystery Train”. With RCA’s backing, the single did far better than it had on Sun, hitting number one on the country charts at the beginning of 1956. But was that enough to make the money RCA had paid for Elvis worth it? When Elvis went into the studio on January 10 1956, two days after his twenty-first birthday, the pressure was on him to record something very special indeed. Before going into the studio, Elvis had been sent ten demos of songs to consider for this first session. The song he ended up choosing as the main one for the session, though, was a song by someone he already knew — and for which he had a third of the songwriting credit. Mae Axton was an odd figure. She was an English teacher who had a sideline as a freelance journalist. One day she was asked by a magazine she was freelancing for to write a story about hillbilly music, a subject about which she knew nothing. She went to Nashville to interview the singer Minnie Pearl, and while she was working on her story, Pearl introduced her to Fred Rose, the co-owner of Acuff-Rose Publishing, the biggest publishing company in country music. And Pearl, for some reason, told Rose that Mae, who had never written a song in her life, was a songwriter. Rose said that he needed a new novelty song for a recording session for the singer Dub Dickerson that afternoon, and asked Mae to write him one. And so, all of a sudden, Mae Axton was a songwriter, and she eventually wrote over two hundred songs, starting with her early collaborations with Dub Dickerson: [Excerpt: Dub Dickerson, “Shotgun Wedding”] She was still also a freelance journalist, though, and it was easy for her to make a sidestep into publicity for hillbilly acts. For a time she was Hank Snow’s personal publicist, and she would often work with Colonel Parker on promoting shows when they came through Florida, where she lived. She’d interviewed Elvis when he came to Florida, and had immediately been struck by him. He’d talked to her about how amazed he was by how big the ocean was, and how he’d give anything to have enough money to bring his parents down to Florida to live there. She said later, “That just went through my heart. ‘Cause I looked down there, and there were all these other kids, different show members for that night, all the guys looking for cute little girls. But his priority was doing something for his mother and daddy.” She promised she’d write him a song, and by the end of the year, she had one for him. [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Heartbreak Hotel”] “Heartbreak Hotel” was, initially, the work of Tommy Durden, a country singer and songwriter. As Durden used to tell it, he was inspired by a newspaper story of a man who’d died by suicide, who had been found with no identification on him and a note that simply read “I walk a lonely street”. Later research has suggested that rather than a suicide, the story Durden had read was probably about an armed robber, Alvin Krolik, who had been shot dead in the course of committing a robbery. Krolik had, a few years earlier, after confessing to a string of other robberies, made the news with a partial autobiography he’d written containing the lines “If you stand on a corner with a pack of cigarettes or a bottle and have nothing to do in life, I suggest you sit down and think. This is the story of a person who walked a lonely street. I hope this will help someone in the future.” Whatever the actual story, it inspired Durden, who had a few lines of the song, and he played what he had to Mae Axton. She thought a lot about the phrase, and eventually came to the conclusion that what you’d find at the end of a lonely street was a heartbreak hotel. The two of them finished the song off, with the help of Glenn Reeves, a rockabilly singer who refused to take credit for his work on the song, because he thought it was ridiculous. Reeves did, though, record the demo for them. They’d already decided that the song should be pitched to Elvis, and so Reeves impersonated Presley: [Excerpt: Glenn Reeves, “Heartbreak Hotel”] A lot of people have claimed that Elvis copied that recording exactly, phrasing and all. Comparing the two recordings, though, shows that that’s not the case. Elvis definitely found it easier to record a song when he’d heard someone else doing it in an approximation of his style, and in the sixties he often *would* just copy the phrasing on demos. But in the case of “Heartbreak Hotel”, Elvis is not copying Reeves’ phrasing at all. The two are similar, but that’s just because Reeves is imitating Elvis in the first place. There are dozens of tiny choices Elvis makes throughout the song which differ from those made by Reeves, and it’s clear that Elvis was thinking hard about the choices he was making. When Mae played him the song, insisting to him that it would be his first million seller, his reaction on hearing it was “Hot dog, Mae! Play it again!” He instantly fell in love with the song, which reminded the young blues-lover of Roy Brown’s “Hard Luck Blues”: [Excerpt: Roy Brown, “Hard Luck Blues”] Elvis got a third of the songwriting credit for the song, which most people have said was insisted on by the Colonel – and certainly other songs Elvis recorded around that time gave him a credit for that reason. But to her dying day Mae Axton always said that she’d cut him in on the song so he might be able to get that money to buy his parents a house in Florida. The session to record “Heartbreak Hotel” started with the engineers trying — and failing — to get a replica of Sam Phillips’ slapback echo sound, which was a sound whose secret nobody but Phillips knew. Instead they set up a speaker at one end of the room and fed in the sound from the mics at the other end, creating a makeshift echo chamber which satisfied Chet Atkins but threw the musicians, who weren’t used to hearing the echo live rather than added after the fact. Atkins isn’t the credited producer for “Heartbreak Hotel” — that’s Steve Sholes, the A&R man at RCA Records who had signed Presley — but by all accounts Atkins was nominally in charge of actually running the session. And certainly there would be no other reason for having Atkins there — he played guitar on the record, but only adding another acoustic rhythm guitar to the sound, which was frankly a waste of the talents of probably the greatest country guitarist of his generation. That said, Atkins didn’t do that much production either — according to Scotty Moore, his only suggestion was that they just keep doing what they’d been doing. To start the session off, they recorded a quick version of “I Got A Woman”, the Ray Charles song, which had been a staple of Elvis’ live act since it had been released: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “I Got A Woman”] After that, the remainder of the first session was devoted to “Heartbreak Hotel”, a record that has a sense of thought that’s been put into the arrangement that’s entirely absent from the Sun Records arrangements, which mostly consist of start the song, play the song through with a single solo, and end the song. The whole point of those records was to capture a kind of spontaneity, and you can’t do much to play with the dynamics of an arrangement when there are only three instruments there. But now there were six — Scotty Moore and Bill Black were there as always, as was D.J. Fontana, who had joined the band on drums in 1955 and was recording for the first time, along with Atkins and piano player Floyd Cramer, who played on many of the biggest hits to come out of Nashville in the fifties and sixties. Atkins and Cramer are two of the principal architects of what became known as “the Nashville Sound” or “Countrypolitan” — there are distinctions between these two styles for those who are interested in the fine details of country music, but for our purposes they’re the same, a style of country music that pulled the music away from its roots and towards a sound that was almost a continuation of the pre-rock pop sound, all vocal groups and strings with little in the way of traditional country instrumentation like fiddles, mandolins, banjos, and steel guitars. And there’s an element of that with their work with Presley, too — the rough edges being smoothed off, everything getting a little bit more mannered. But at this point it seems still to be working in the record’s favour. After recording “Heartbreak Hotel”, they took a break before spending another three-hour session recording another R&B cover that was a staple of Elvis’ stage show, “Money Honey”. Along with the addition of Atkins and Cramer, there were also backing vocalists for the very first time. Now this is something that often gets treated as a problem by people coming to Elvis’ music fresh today. Backing vocals in general have been deprecated in rock and roll music for much of the last fifty years, and people think of them as spoiling Elvis’ artistry. There have even been releases of some of Elvis’ recordings remixed to get rid of the backing vocals altogether (though that’s thankfully not possible with these 1956 records, which were recorded directly to mono). But the backing vocals weren’t an irritating addition to Elvis’ artistry. Rather, they were the essence of it, and if you’re going to listen to Elvis at all, and have any understanding of what he was trying to do, you need to understand that before anything else. Elvis’ first ambition — the aspiration he had right at the beginning of his career — was to be a member of a gospel quartet. Elvis wanted to have his voice be part of a group, and he loved to sing harmony more than anything else. He wanted to sing in a gospel quartet before he ever met Sam Phillips, and as his career went on he only increased the number of backing vocalists he worked with — by the end of his career he would have J.D. Sumner and the Stamps (a Southern Gospel group), *and* the Sweet Inspirations (the girl group who had backed Aretha Franklin), *and* Kathy Westmoreland, a classically-trained soprano, all providing backing vocals. However, the backing vocalists on this initial session weren’t yet the Jordanaires, the group who would back Elvis throughout the fifties and sixties. One of the Jordanaires *was* there — Gordon Stoker — but the rest of them weren’t hired for the January sessions, as Steve Sholes wanted to use members of a group who were signed with RCA in their own right — the Speer Family. So Ben and Brock Speer joined Elvis and Stoker to make an unbalanced gospel quartet, with too many tenors and no baritone. When Elvis found out at a later session that this had happened as a cost-cutting measure, he insisted that all the Jordanaires be employed at his future sessions. The next day, to end the sessions, they regrouped and cut a couple of ballads. “I’m Counting On You” was rather mediocre, but “I Was The One” ended up being Elvis’ personal favourite track from the sessions: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “I Was The One”] At the end of the sessions, Steve Sholes was very unsure if he’d made the right choice signing Elvis. He only had five tracks to show for three sessions in two days, when the normal thing was to record four songs per session — Elvis and his group were so slow partly because they were used to the laid-back feel of the Sun studios, with Sam Phillips never clock-watching, and partly because Elvis was a perfectionist. Several times they’d recorded a take that Sholes had felt would be good enough to release, but Elvis had insisted he could do it better. He’d been right — the later versions were an improvement — but they had remarkably few tracks that they could use. Many of those who’d loved Elvis’ earlier work were astonished at how bad “Heartbreak Hotel” sounded to them. The reverb, sounding so different from the restrained use of slapback on the Sun records, sounded to many ears, not least Sam Phillips’, like a bad joke — Phillips called the result “a morbid mess”. [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Heartbreak Hotel”] Yet it became a smash hit. It went to number one on the pop charts, number one in country, and made the top five in R&B. This was the moment when Elvis went from being a minor country singer on a minor label to being Elvis, Elvis the Pelvis, the King of Rock & Roll. After the sessions that produced “Heartbreak Hotel”, Elvis went back into the studio twice more and recorded a set of songs — mostly R&B and rockabilly covers — for his first album. Almost all of these were Elvis’ own choice of material, and so while his versions of “Blue Suede Shoes” or “Tutti Frutti” didn’t match the quality of the originals, they were fine performances and perfect for album tracks. While the “Heartbreak Hotel” session had been in Nashville — a natural choice, since it was both relatively close to Elvis’ home town of Memphis, and the capital of country music, and Elvis was still supposedly a country artist — the next couple of sessions were in New York, timed to coincide with Elvis’ appearances on TV. Starting with the low-rated Stage Show, a programme that was presented by the swing bandleaders Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Elvis quickly moved up the ladder of TV shows, appearing first with Milton Berle, then with Steve Allen, and then finally on the Ed Sullivan show. On his first appearances, you can see the Elvis that people who knew him talked about – even as he’s working the audience with what looks like the utmost confidence, you can see his fingers twitching wildly in a way he’s not properly conscious of, and you can tell that under the mask of the sex symbol is the quiet country boy who would never meet anyone’s eye. Each show caused more controversy than the last, as first Elvis’ hip gyrations got him branded a moral menace, then he was forced to sing while standing still, and then only filmed from the waist up. Those shows helped propel “Heartbreak Hotel” to the top of the charts, but the Colonel decided that Elvis probably shouldn’t do too much more TV – if people could see him without paying, why would they pay to see him? No, Elvis was going to be in films instead. But all that work meant that Elvis’ fourth set of sessions for RCA was fairly disastrous, and ended up with nothing that was usable. Elvis had been so busy promoting “Heartbreak Hotel” that he hadn’t had any chance to prepare material, and so he just went with Steve Sholes’ suggestion of “I Want You I Need You I Love You”. But the session went terribly, because Elvis had no feel for the song at all. Normally, Elvis would learn a song straight away, after a single listen, but he just couldn’t get the song in his head. They spent the whole session working on that single track, and didn’t manage to get a usable take recorded at all. Steve Sholes eventually had to cobble together a take using bits of two different performances, and no-one was happy with it, but it reached number one on the country chart and number three on the pop charts. It was hardly “Heartbreak Hotel” levels of success, but it was OK. It was the B-side of that single that was really worth listening to. A leftover from the album sessions, it was, like Elvis’ first single, a cover version of an Arthur Crudup song. And this one also gave D.J. Fontana his first chance to shine. [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “My Baby Left Me”] By this point, it was very clear that if Elvis was given control of the studio and singing material he connected with, he would produce great things. And if he was doing what someone else thought he should be doing, he would be much less successful. A couple of months later Elvis and the group were back in the studio cutting what would become their biggest double-sided hit, both songs definitely chosen by Elvis. These days their cover version of Big Mama Thornton’s “Hound Dog” is the better-known of the two sides they cut that day, but while that’s an excellent track — and one that bears almost no relation to Thornton’s original — the A-side, and the song that finally convinced several detractors, including Sam Phillips, that Elvis might be able to make decent records away from Sun, was “Don’t Be Cruel”, a song written by Otis Blackwell, but credited to Blackwell and Presley, as the Colonel insisted that his boy get a cut for making it a hit. Otis Blackwell is another person who we’ll be hearing from a lot over the course of the series, as he wrote a string of hits, including several for Elvis, who he never met — the one time he did have a chance to meet him, he declined, as he’d developed a superstition about meeting the man who’d given him his biggest hits. At this time, Blackwell had just written the song “Fever” for Little Willie John: [Excerpt: “Fever”, Little Willie John] That song had become a big hit for Peggy Lee, in a version with different lyrics, and Blackwell was at the start of an impressive career. We don’t have Blackwell’s demo of “Don’t Be Cruel”, but he recorded a version in the 1970s which might give some idea of what Elvis heard in 1956: [Excerpt: Otis Blackwell, “Don’t Be Cruel”] Elvis’ version showed a lightness of touch that had been absent on his earlier RCA records. He was finally in control of the sound he wanted in the studio. “Don’t Be Cruel” took twenty-eight takes, and “Hound Dog” thirty-one, but you’d never believe it from the light, frothy, sound that “Don’t Be Cruel” has in its finished version, where Elvis sounds as playful as if he was improvising the song on the spot: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Don’t Be Cruel”] Both sides of the record went to number one – first “Don’t Be Cruel” went to number one and “Hound Dog” to number two, and then they swapped over. Between them they spent eleven weeks at the top of the charts. But even as Elvis was starting to take complete control in the studio, that control was starting to be taken away from him by events. His next session after the one that produced “Hound Dog” and “Don’t Be Cruel” was one he had not been expecting. When he’d signed to make his first film, a Western called “The Reno Brothers”, he’d expected it to be a straight acting role with no songs — he wanted to follow the path of people like Frank Sinatra, who had parallel careers in the cinema and in music, and he also hoped that he could emulate his acting idols, Marlon Brando and James Dean. But by the time he came to make the film, several songs had been added — and he found out, to his annoyance, that he wasn’t allowed to use Scotty, Bill, and DJ on the soundtrack, because the film company didn’t think they could sound hillbilly enough. They were replaced with Hollywood session musicians, who could do a better job of sounding hillbilly than those country musicians could. Elvis didn’t have any say over the material either, although he did like the main ballad that was going to be used in the film — the other three songs were among the most mediocre he’d do in the fifties. By the time “The Reno Brothers” was finished, it had been renamed “Love Me Tender”, and we’ll be picking up on Elvis’ film career in a future episode…

NB This is a new version — I accidentally uploaded the wrong file previously Episode thirty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Heartbreak Hotel” by Elvis Presley, and is part three of a trilogy on the aftermath of Elvis leaving Sun, and the birth of rockabilly. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “The Flying Saucer” by Buchanan and Goodman.  Also, it came too late for me to acknowledge in the episode itself, but I have to mention the sad news that Dave Bartholomew died today, aged 100. He will be missed.  —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.   There are many, many books about Elvis Presley out there, but the one I’m using as my major resource for information on him, and which has guided my views as to the kind of person he was, is Last Train to Memphis by Peter Guralnick, generally considered the best biography of him. This 3-CD box set (expensive on CD, but relatively cheap as MP3s) contains every surviving recording by Elvis from 1956, including outtakes. This more reasonably priced ten-CD box contains every official release he put out from 1954 through 62, but without the outtakes. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   We’ve talked before, a couple of times, about Elvis Presley and his early recordings. Those Sun records are the ones on which his artistic reputation now largely rests, but they weren’t the ones that made him famous. He didn’t become the Elvis we all know until he started recording for RCA. So today we’re going to look at the first single he put out on a major label, and the way it turned him from a minor regional country star into the King of Rock and Roll, a cultural phenomenon that would eclipse all music prior to him, and lead John Lennon to say “Before Elvis there was nothing”. As you might remember from the last episode on Elvis, a few weeks ago, Elvis’ manager, Colonel Tom Parker, had managed to get Elvis signed to RCA Records for a sum of money far greater than anything anyone had paid for a singer before, after Sam Phillips made what seemed like a ludicrous demand just to get Parker out of his hair. And this was a big deal. Sun Records, as we’ve seen, was a tiny regional operation. It was able to generate massive hits for Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash after Elvis left, but that’s only because of the cash the label was able to make from the Elvis deal. It’s safe to say that the whole genre of rockabilly was funded by that one deal. RCA, on the other hand, was one of the biggest labels in the world. The first thing RCA did was to reissue his last Sun single, “I Forgot to Remember to Forget”, backed with “Mystery Train”. With RCA’s backing, the single did far better than it had on Sun, hitting number one on the country charts at the beginning of 1956. But was that enough to make the money RCA had paid for Elvis worth it? When Elvis went into the studio on January 10 1956, two days after his twenty-first birthday, the pressure was on him to record something very special indeed. Before going into the studio, Elvis had been sent ten demos of songs to consider for this first session. The song he ended up choosing as the main one for the session, though, was a song by someone he already knew — and for which he had a third of the songwriting credit. Mae Axton was an odd figure. She was an English teacher who had a sideline as a freelance journalist. One day she was asked by a magazine she was freelancing for to write a story about hillbilly music, a subject about which she knew nothing. She went to Nashville to interview the singer Minnie Pearl, and while she was working on her story, Pearl introduced her to Fred Rose, the co-owner of Acuff-Rose Publishing, the biggest publishing company in country music. And Pearl, for some reason, told Rose that Mae, who had never written a song in her life, was a songwriter. Rose said that he needed a new novelty song for a recording session for the singer Dub Dickerson that afternoon, and asked Mae to write him one. And so, all of a sudden, Mae Axton was a songwriter, and she eventually wrote over two hundred songs, starting with her early collaborations with Dub Dickerson: [Excerpt: Dub Dickerson, “Shotgun Wedding”] She was still also a freelance journalist, though, and it was easy for her to make a sidestep into publicity for hillbilly acts. For a time she was Hank Snow’s personal publicist, and she would often work with Colonel Parker on promoting shows when they came through Florida, where she lived. She’d interviewed Elvis when he came to Florida, and had immediately been struck by him. He’d talked to her about how amazed he was by how big the ocean was, and how he’d give anything to have enough money to bring his parents down to Florida to live there. She said later, “That just went through my heart. ‘Cause I looked down there, and there were all these other kids, different show members for that night, all the guys looking for cute little girls. But his priority was doing something for his mother and daddy.” She promised she’d write him a song, and by the end of the year, she had one for him. [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Heartbreak Hotel”] “Heartbreak Hotel” was, initially, the work of Tommy Durden, a country singer and songwriter. As Durden used to tell it, he was inspired by a newspaper story of a man who’d died by suicide, who had been found with no identification on him and a note that simply read “I walk a lonely street”. Later research has suggested that rather than a suicide, the story Durden had read was probably about an armed robber, Alvin Krolik, who had been shot dead in the course of committing a robbery. Krolik had, a few years earlier, after confessing to a string of other robberies, made the news with a partial autobiography he’d written containing the lines “If you stand on a corner with a pack of cigarettes or a bottle and have nothing to do in life, I suggest you sit down and think. This is the story of a person who walked a lonely street. I hope this will help someone in the future.” Whatever the actual story, it inspired Durden, who had a few lines of the song, and he played what he had to Mae Axton. She thought a lot about the phrase, and eventually came to the conclusion that what you’d find at the end of a lonely street was a heartbreak hotel. The two of them finished the song off, with the help of Glenn Reeves, a rockabilly singer who refused to take credit for his work on the song, because he thought it was ridiculous. Reeves did, though, record the demo for them. They’d already decided that the song should be pitched to Elvis, and so Reeves impersonated Presley: [Excerpt: Glenn Reeves, “Heartbreak Hotel”] A lot of people have claimed that Elvis copied that recording exactly, phrasing and all. Comparing the two recordings, though, shows that that’s not the case. Elvis definitely found it easier to record a song when he’d heard someone else doing it in an approximation of his style, and in the sixties he often *would* just copy the phrasing on demos. But in the case of “Heartbreak Hotel”, Elvis is not copying Reeves’ phrasing at all. The two are similar, but that’s just because Reeves is imitating Elvis in the first place. There are dozens of tiny choices Elvis makes throughout the song which differ from those made by Reeves, and it’s clear that Elvis was thinking hard about the choices he was making. When Mae played him the song, insisting to him that it would be his first million seller, his reaction on hearing it was “Hot dog, Mae! Play it again!” He instantly fell in love with the song, which reminded the young blues-lover of Roy Brown’s “Hard Luck Blues”: [Excerpt: Roy Brown, “Hard Luck Blues”] Elvis got a third of the songwriting credit for the song, which most people have said was insisted on by the Colonel – and certainly other songs Elvis recorded around that time gave him a credit for that reason. But to her dying day Mae Axton always said that she’d cut him in on the song so he might be able to get that money to buy his parents a house in Florida. The session to record “Heartbreak Hotel” started with the engineers trying — and failing — to get a replica of Sam Phillips’ slapback echo sound, which was a sound whose secret nobody but Phillips knew. Instead they set up a speaker at one end of the room and fed in the sound from the mics at the other end, creating a makeshift echo chamber which satisfied Chet Atkins but threw the musicians, who weren’t used to hearing the echo live rather than added after the fact. Atkins isn’t the credited producer for “Heartbreak Hotel” — that’s Steve Sholes, the A&R man at RCA Records who had signed Presley — but by all accounts Atkins was nominally in charge of actually running the session. And certainly there would be no other reason for having Atkins there — he played guitar on the record, but only adding another acoustic rhythm guitar to the sound, which was frankly a waste of the talents of probably the greatest country guitarist of his generation. That said, Atkins didn’t do that much production either — according to Scotty Moore, his only suggestion was that they just keep doing what they’d been doing. To start the session off, they recorded a quick version of “I Got A Woman”, the Ray Charles song, which had been a staple of Elvis’ live act since it had been released: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “I Got A Woman”] After that, the remainder of the first session was devoted to “Heartbreak Hotel”, a record that has a sense of thought that’s been put into the arrangement that’s entirely absent from the Sun Records arrangements, which mostly consist of start the song, play the song through with a single solo, and end the song. The whole point of those records was to capture a kind of spontaneity, and you can’t do much to play with the dynamics of an arrangement when there are only three instruments there. But now there were six — Scotty Moore and Bill Black were there as always, as was D.J. Fontana, who had joined the band on drums in 1955 and was recording for the first time, along with Atkins and piano player Floyd Cramer, who played on many of the biggest hits to come out of Nashville in the fifties and sixties. Atkins and Cramer are two of the principal architects of what became known as “the Nashville Sound” or “Countrypolitan” — there are distinctions between these two styles for those who are interested in the fine details of country music, but for our purposes they’re the same, a style of country music that pulled the music away from its roots and towards a sound that was almost a continuation of the pre-rock pop sound, all vocal groups and strings with little in the way of traditional country instrumentation like fiddles, mandolins, banjos, and steel guitars. And there’s an element of that with their work with Presley, too — the rough edges being smoothed off, everything getting a little bit more mannered. But at this point it seems still to be working in the record’s favour. After recording “Heartbreak Hotel”, they took a break before spending another three-hour session recording another R&B cover that was a staple of Elvis’ stage show, “Money Honey”. Along with the addition of Atkins and Cramer, there were also backing vocalists for the very first time. Now this is something that often gets treated as a problem by people coming to Elvis’ music fresh today. Backing vocals in general have been deprecated in rock and roll music for much of the last fifty years, and people think of them as spoiling Elvis’ artistry. There have even been releases of some of Elvis’ recordings remixed to get rid of the backing vocals altogether (though that’s thankfully not possible with these 1956 records, which were recorded directly to mono). But the backing vocals weren’t an irritating addition to Elvis’ artistry. Rather, they were the essence of it, and if you’re going to listen to Elvis at all, and have any understanding of what he was trying to do, you need to understand that before anything else. Elvis’ first ambition — the aspiration he had right at the beginning of his career — was to be a member of a gospel quartet. Elvis wanted to have his voice be part of a group, and he loved to sing harmony more than anything else. He wanted to sing in a gospel quartet before he ever met Sam Phillips, and as his career went on he only increased the number of backing vocalists he worked with — by the end of his career he would have J.D. Sumner and the Stamps (a Southern Gospel group), *and* the Sweet Inspirations (the girl group who had backed Aretha Franklin), *and* Kathy Westmoreland, a classically-trained soprano, all providing backing vocals. However, the backing vocalists on this initial session weren’t yet the Jordanaires, the group who would back Elvis throughout the fifties and sixties. One of the Jordanaires *was* there — Gordon Stoker — but the rest of them weren’t hired for the January sessions, as Steve Sholes wanted to use members of a group who were signed with RCA in their own right — the Speer Family. So Ben and Brock Speer joined Elvis and Stoker to make an unbalanced gospel quartet, with too many tenors and no baritone. When Elvis found out at a later session that this had happened as a cost-cutting measure, he insisted that all the Jordanaires be employed at his future sessions. The next day, to end the sessions, they regrouped and cut a couple of ballads. “I’m Counting On You” was rather mediocre, but “I Was The One” ended up being Elvis’ personal favourite track from the sessions: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “I Was The One”] At the end of the sessions, Steve Sholes was very unsure if he’d made the right choice signing Elvis. He only had five tracks to show for three sessions in two days, when the normal thing was to record four songs per session — Elvis and his group were so slow partly because they were used to the laid-back feel of the Sun studios, with Sam Phillips never clock-watching, and partly because Elvis was a perfectionist. Several times they’d recorded a take that Sholes had felt would be good enough to release, but Elvis had insisted he could do it better. He’d been right — the later versions were an improvement — but they had remarkably few tracks that they could use. Many of those who’d loved Elvis’ earlier work were astonished at how bad “Heartbreak Hotel” sounded to them. The reverb, sounding so different from the restrained use of slapback on the Sun records, sounded to many ears, not least Sam Phillips’, like a bad joke — Phillips called the result “a morbid mess”. [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Heartbreak Hotel”] Yet it became a smash hit. It went to number one on the pop charts, number one in country, and made the top five in R&B. This was the moment when Elvis went from being a minor country singer on a minor label to being Elvis, Elvis the Pelvis, the King of Rock & Roll. After the sessions that produced “Heartbreak Hotel”, Elvis went back into the studio twice more and recorded a set of songs — mostly R&B and rockabilly covers — for his first album. Almost all of these were Elvis’ own choice of material, and so while his versions of “Blue Suede Shoes” or “Tutti Frutti” didn’t match the quality of the originals, they were fine performances and perfect for album tracks. While the “Heartbreak Hotel” session had been in Nashville — a natural choice, since it was both relatively close to Elvis’ home town of Memphis, and the capital of country music, and Elvis was still supposedly a country artist — the next couple of sessions were in New York, timed to coincide with Elvis’ appearances on TV. Starting with the low-rated Stage Show, a programme that was presented by the swing bandleaders Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Elvis quickly moved up the ladder of TV shows, appearing first with Milton Berle, then with Steve Allen, and then finally on the Ed Sullivan show. On his first appearances, you can see the Elvis that people who knew him talked about – even as he’s working the audience with what looks like the utmost confidence, you can see his fingers twitching wildly in a way he’s not properly conscious of, and you can tell that under the mask of the sex symbol is the quiet country boy who would never meet anyone’s eye. Each show caused more controversy than the last, as first Elvis’ hip gyrations got him branded a moral menace, then he was forced to sing while standing still, and then only filmed from the waist up. Those shows helped propel “Heartbreak Hotel” to the top of the charts, but the Colonel decided that Elvis probably shouldn’t do too much more TV – if people could see him without paying, why would they pay to see him? No, Elvis was going to be in films instead. But all that work meant that Elvis’ fourth set of sessions for RCA was fairly disastrous, and ended up with nothing that was usable. Elvis had been so busy promoting “Heartbreak Hotel” that he hadn’t had any chance to prepare material, and so he just went with Steve Sholes’ suggestion of “I Want You I Need You I Love You”. But the session went terribly, because Elvis had no feel for the song at all. Normally, Elvis would learn a song straight away, after a single listen, but he just couldn’t get the song in his head. They spent the whole session working on that single track, and didn’t manage to get a usable take recorded at all. Steve Sholes eventually had to cobble together a take using bits of two different performances, and no-one was happy with it, but it reached number one on the country chart and number three on the pop charts. It was hardly “Heartbreak Hotel” levels of success, but it was OK. It was the B-side of that single that was really worth listening to. A leftover from the album sessions, it was, like Elvis’ first single, a cover version of an Arthur Crudup song. And this one also gave D.J. Fontana his first chance to shine. [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “My Baby Left Me”] By this point, it was very clear that if Elvis was given control of the studio and singing material he connected with, he would produce great things. And if he was doing what someone else thought he should be doing, he would be much less successful. A couple of months later Elvis and the group were back in the studio cutting what would become their biggest double-sided hit, both songs definitely chosen by Elvis. These days their cover version of Big Mama Thornton’s “Hound Dog” is the better-known of the two sides they cut that day, but while that’s an excellent track — and one that bears almost no relation to Thornton’s original — the A-side, and the song that finally convinced several detractors, including Sam Phillips, that Elvis might be able to make decent records away from Sun, was “Don’t Be Cruel”, a song written by Otis Blackwell, but credited to Blackwell and Presley, as the Colonel insisted that his boy get a cut for making it a hit. Otis Blackwell is another person who we’ll be hearing from a lot over the course of the series, as he wrote a string of hits, including several for Elvis, who he never met — the one time he did have a chance to meet him, he declined, as he’d developed a superstition about meeting the man who’d given him his biggest hits. At this time, Blackwell had just written the song “Fever” for Little Willie John: [Excerpt: “Fever”, Little Willie John] That song had become a big hit for Peggy Lee, in a version with different lyrics, and Blackwell was at the start of an impressive career. We don’t have Blackwell’s demo of “Don’t Be Cruel”, but he recorded a version in the 1970s which might give some idea of what Elvis heard in 1956: [Excerpt: Otis Blackwell, “Don’t Be Cruel”] Elvis’ version showed a lightness of touch that had been absent on his earlier RCA records. He was finally in control of the sound he wanted in the studio. “Don’t Be Cruel” took twenty-eight takes, and “Hound Dog” thirty-one, but you’d never believe it from the light, frothy, sound that “Don’t Be Cruel” has in its finished version, where Elvis sounds as playful as if he was improvising the song on the spot: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Don’t Be Cruel”] Both sides of the record went to number one – first “Don’t Be Cruel” went to number one and “Hound Dog” to number two, and then they swapped over. Between them they spent eleven weeks at the top of the charts. But even as Elvis was starting to take complete control in the studio, that control was starting to be taken away from him by events. His next session after the one that produced “Hound Dog” and “Don’t Be Cruel” was one he had not been expecting. When he’d signed to make his first film, a Western called “The Reno Brothers”, he’d expected it to be a straight acting role with no songs — he wanted to follow the path of people like Frank Sinatra, who had parallel careers in the cinema and in music, and he also hoped that he could emulate his acting idols, Marlon Brando and James Dean. But by the time he came to make the film, several songs had been added — and he found out, to his annoyance, that he wasn’t allowed to use Scotty, Bill, and DJ on the soundtrack, because the film company didn’t think they could sound hillbilly enough. They were replaced with Hollywood session musicians, who could do a better job of sounding hillbilly than those country musicians could. Elvis didn’t have any say over the material either, although he did like the main ballad that was going to be used in the film — the other three songs were among the most mediocre he’d do in the fifties. By the time “The Reno Brothers” was finished, it had been renamed “Love Me Tender”, and we’ll be picking up on Elvis’ film career in a future episode…

The Favorite Elvis Tunes Countdown continues as we hit the Top 10!  We'll hear songs #10-#6 this week as well as The BellFuries, Wanda Jackson, Crazy Cavan & The Rhythm Rockers and so much more! Intro Voice Over- Rob "Cool Daddy" Dempsey   Katmen- "We Nee Elvis Back" Little Richard- "Slippin' & Slidin'" 13 Kats- "Drag On" Billy Burnette- "Oh Well"   Favorite Elvis Tunes Countdown 10.  "Reconsider Baby" 9.  "My Baby Left Me" 8.  "Such A Night" 7.  "Guitar Man" 6.  "Suspicious Minds" Brought to you by Dr. Rubin's Pomade!   Billy Lee Riley- "Searchin'" The BellFuries- "Love Found Me" Bo Diddley- "Hey Bo Diddley" Charlie Gracie- "Just Lookin'" Jimmie Vaughan- "I Ain't Never" Wanda Jackson- "Riot In Cell Block #9" Crazy Cavan & The Rhythm Rockers- "Bop Little Baby" Imelda May- "Tribal"  

Artiest: Ike Turner – Prancin’ Album: Ike’s Instrumentals Label: Ace Artiest: Smokey Wilson – I Wanna Do It To You Baby Album: 45RPM record Label: Big Town Artiest: BB King – My Baby’s Comin’ Home Album: Mr. Blues Label: ABC Music Artiest: Carol Fran & Clarence Hollimon – The Way I Used To Be Album: It’s About Time Label: JSP Artiest: Junior Parker – Sweet Home Chicago Album: The Duke Recordings Label: MCA Artiest: Lloyd Price – Peeping And Hiding Album: 45RPM record Label: Double-L Records Artiest: Amos Milburn – One Scotch, One Bourbon, One Beer Album: Blues, Barrelhouse & Boogie Woogie Label: Capitol Blues Collection Artiest: Arthur Big Boy Crudup – Rock Me Mama Album: Look on Yonder’s Wall Label: Delmark Artiest: Floyd Dixon – Hey Bartender Album: Atlantic Blues: Piano Label: Atlantic Artiest: Memphis Slim – Sassy Mae Album: Memphis Slim U.S.A. Label: Delmark Artiest: Moose John – Wrong Doin’ Woman Album: Legendary Dig Masters Vol 2 – Dig These Blues Label: Ace Artiest: Johnny Jones – Hoy Hoy [Alternate Take] Album: Messing with the Blues Label: Ace Artiest: Annie Laurie – It´s Been A Long Time Album: The OKeh Rhythm & Blues Story Label: Columbia/Legacy Artiest: Big Walter Price – Gamblin Woman Album: Stompin’ 29: 23 More Fifties R ‘n’ B Pounders! Label: Stompin’ Artiest: Guitar Slim – Guitar Slim Album: Sufferin’ Mind Label: Specialty Artiest: Pee Wee Calyton – Do Unto Others Album: Pee Wee’s Blues – The Complete Aladdin & Imperial Recordings Label: Capitol Artiest: Lowell Fulson – Too Many Drivers Album: Soul Label: Kent Artiest: Ray Charles – It Should Have Been Me Album: Blowing The Fuse – 1954 Label: Bear Family Artiest: Louisiana Red – Early In The Morning Album: The Best of Louisiana Red Label: Evidence Artiest: Jimmy Reed – Knockin’ At Your Door Album: Soulin’ Label: Bluesway Artiest: Morris Pejoe – Let’s Get High Album: Wrapped in My Baby Label: Delmark Artiest: Buster Brown & His Rockin’ McVouts – My Baby Left Me Album: 45RPM record Label: Vest 827

"My Baby Left Me" "I Was Born About 10,000 Years Ago" "Never Say Yes" "Wearin' That Loved On Look" "Double Trouble" "Easy Question" "That's What You Get For Loving Me" "City By Night" "Please Don't Stop Loving Me" "A Big Hunk O' Love" "Baby, If You'll Give Me All Your Love" "It Hurts Me" "Am I Ready" "I Don't Care If The Sun Don't Shine" "When My Blue Moon Turns To Gold Again" "It Won't Be Long" "Suspicion" "Snowbird" "Beach Shack" "So Glad You're Mine" "Put Your Hand In The Hand" "Paralyzed" "By And By" "She's A Machine" "Reconsider Baby" "I Washed My Hands In Muddy Water" -Elvis

On the afternoon of 6 July 1957 the Quarrymen skiffle group played at the garden fete of St Peter's Church, Woolton, Liverpool. In the band were John Lennon (vocals, guitar), Eric Griffiths (guitar), Colin Hanton (drums), Rod Davies (banjo), Pete Shotton (washboard) and Len Garry (tea chest bass). Their repertoire consisted mainly of Skiffle songs; skiffle blossomed in England, just before Rock &R oll replaced it from 1958 onwards. They played various Lonnie Donnegan songs,interspersed with songs by Gene Vincent, Elvis Presley, Eddie Cochran and Jerry Lee Lewis.This Quarrymen's set, remarkably, was recorded by an audience member, Bob Molyneux, on his portable Grundig reel-to-reel tape recorder. In 1994 Molyneux, then a retired policeman, rediscovered the tape. The tape was sold on 15 September 1994 at Sotheby's for £78,500. The winning bidder was EMI Records, who considered if for release as part of the Anthology project: performencas of Lonnie Donegan's Puttin' On The Style and Elvis Presley's Baby, Let's Play House were released, but EMI chose not to release more than half a minute or so, as the sound quality was deemed substandard.The BDJ engineers carefully reconstructed the tape using state-of-the-art digital techniques and so 10 minutes of the set were reproduced. The sound quality is as poor as the Anthology release, but true Beatles fans will appreciate these 10 minutes for their historic value.Setlist: Puttin on the Style, My Baby Left Me, Be-Bop-A-Lula, Maggie Mae, Baby Let's Play House, Blue Suede Shoes.