Podcasts about Ray Peterson

In this episode, we dive into The 'Burbs, a dark comedy where paranoia brews behind picket fences. Through the eyes of Ray Peterson, we witness neighborly suspicion spiral into full-blown hysteria as he and his friends investigate the creepy Klopeks next door. Join The Dale, Cea, and Twan as we discuss if The 'Burbs still holds up today and what? Directed by Joe Dante, this 1989 cult classic blends slapstick, suspense, and a healthy dose of suburban dread.

Con Hauser, Procol Harum, Erika Stuky, Georges Moustaki, Ray Peterson, The Rolling Stones, Angelique Kidjo feat. Joss Stone, Joan Manuel Serrat, Alberto Cortez, Patxi Andion y Paco Ibáñez

Forrest, Conan Neutron, Kristina Oakes and Matt Strackbein AKA @TheLetterhack talk about Joe Dante's The Burbs!!! Starring Tom Hanks, Bruce Dern, Carrie Fisher, Rick Ducommun, Corey Feldman, Wendy Schall, and Henry Gibson. Tom Hanks is Ray Peterson and Bruce Dern is Mark Rumsfield who come to the conclusion that their new neighbors are ritualistic satanic killers. #theburbs #burbs #joedante #tomhanks #1989 #brucedern #carriefisher #princessleia #piranhas #gremlins #coreyfeldman #henrygibson #wendyschaal #suburban #satanicpanic #satanic The Letterhack streams on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/theletterhack Join our discord: https://discord.gg/ZHU8W55pnh The Movie Night Extravaganza Patreon helps us keep the show going.. become a Patron and support the show!! https://patreon.com/MovieNightExtra

Con Benny Moré, Carmen de Veracruz, Jorge Sepúlveda, Juanito Valderrama, el Príncipe gitano, Carmen Sevilla, Conchita Bautista, Lola Flores, Encarnita Polo, Jose Luis y su guitarra, Mochi, Duane Eddy y Ray Peterson, con las voces de José Miguel Rodríguez "Rodri" y Ángel Álvarez.

Ontario extends cannabis sales moratorium through Oct. 31: https://www.richlandsource.com/2024/09/06/ontario-extends-cannabis-sales-moratorium-through-oct-31/ Today - we look into the Ontario City Council's recent decision to extend a moratorium on commercial cannabis sales.Support the show: https://richlandsource.com/membersSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We decided to do a classic that Brandon has never seen, The Burbs! Starring Tom Hanks, Carrie Fisher, Corey Feldman and many many more. Ray Peterson begins to think there is something weird about the new next door neighbors. There's a lot of laughs and macabre in this 1989 horror comedy! Check out the episode and let us know what you think! --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/itcamefrom-thevideostore/support

Your neighbors disappear, the new neighbors dig in their backyard at night in the pouring rain, every now and then strange sounds and lights come from their basement and they drive their garbage down to the edge of the driveway and beat the hell out of it with a stick. For most of us in Slasherville, that sounds like a pretty dope vacation. Ray Peterson is not from Slasherville. He lives in Iowa or Illinois or something. Anyway, the Slasher Brothers determine whether the classic that is "The Burbs" falls within the horrorverse or maybe Iowa or Illinois or something.

"Es el secreto mejor guardado de la música estadounidense", dijo su gran admirador Jack White, "fue mi gran influencia para montar The White Stripes".Dexter Romweber falleció el pasado 16 de febrero a los 57 años de edad. Fundador de los Flat Duo Jets en 1983, duo de rock’n’roll cavernario con el que se mantuvo hasta el nuevo siglo, cuando, también en formato de dúo, fue ampliando su registro abarcando todos los estilos de raíces y el cancionero de la música popular estadounidense, saltando del rockabilly primitivo a la balada de crooner y pasando por el surf, el swing o el rhythm’n’blues más intimista.En 2023 Dex Romweber rompió un silencio discográfico de siete años con su disco “Good thing going’” (Propeller Sound Recordings), el cual se ha convertido en el último álbum de este rebelde del rock’n’roll. A modo de homenaje sobrevolamos ese disco de principio a fin, centrándonos en las variopintas versiones que siempre incluía en sus obras y que Dexter hacía completamente suyas.Playlist;(sintonía) DEX ROMWEBER “Andrieux boogie” (Good thing goin’, 2023)DEX ROMWEBER “Going down” (Good thing goin’, 2023)DEX ROMWEBER “Good thing goin’” (Good thing goin’, 2023)ENGELBERT HUMPERDINCK “Good thing goin’” (1969)DEX ROMWEBER “If you love me” (Good thing goin’, 2023)EDITH PIAF “Hhymne a l’amour” (1950)DEX ROMWEBER “Coming home” (Good thing goin’, 2023)JOHNNY HORTON “Coming home” (1956)DEX ROMWEBER “For all we know” (Good thing goin’, 2023)HAL KEMP and HIS ORCHESTRA “For all we know” (1934)DEX ROMWEBER “Shape of things to come” (Good thing goin’, 2023)DEX ROMWEBER “Twine time” (Good thing goin’, 2023)ALVIN CASH and THE CRAWLERS “Twine time” (1964)DEX ROMWEBER “Tell Laura I love her” (Good thing goin’, 2023)RAY PETERSON “Tell Laura I love her” (1960)BERT KAEMPFERT “I found my love” (1974)DEX ROMWEBER “I found my love” (Good thing goin’, 2023)Escuchar audio

Aujourd'hui, nous allons parler du disque qui, plus que tout autre, a assuré la place de Phil Spector dans l'histoire de la musique populaire - un disque qui a changé la vie de plusieurs personnes qui l'ont écouté pour le meilleur, qui a changé la vie de sa chanteuse pour le pire, et qui possède l'intro de batterie la plus imitée de tous les temps. Nous allons nous pencher sur un chef d'oeuvre intemporel, sur une intro de batterie reconnaissable entre mille : "Be My Baby" des Ronettes The Ronettes, "Be My Baby" Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, "Why Do Fools Fall In Love ?" Ronnie and the Relatives, "I Want a Boy" Ronnie and the Relatives, "I'm Gonna Quit While I'm Ahead" Joey Dee and the Starliters, "The Peppermint Twist" Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans, "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah". Connie Francis, "Second-Hand Love" Veronica, "Why Don't They Let Us Fall In Love ?" The Crystals, "The Twist"The Crystals, " The Wah-Watusi "Jeff Barry, "It's Called Rock and Roll" Sam Cooke, "Teenage Sonata" Ray Peterson, "Tell Laura I Love Her" Ellie Gaye, "Silly, Isn't It ?" Jay and the Americans, "This is It" Darlene Love, "(Today I Met) The Boy I'm Gonna Marry" Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans, "Why Do Lovers Break Each Others' Hearts ?" Ellie Greenwich "Doo Wah Diddy Diddy (demo)" The Ronettes, "Be My Baby"" The Ronettes" (The Wrecking Crew), Tedesco and Pitman". The Ronettes, "Baby I Love You" The Ronettes Featuring Veronica, "Walking in the Rain" The Ronettes, "I Can Hear Music" Ronnie Spector, "Try Some, Buy Some" Southside Johnny and the Asbury Dukes, "You Mean So Much To Me" Ronnie Spector et le E-Street Band, "Say Goodbye to Hollywood" Eddie Money, "Take Me Home Tonight"

Le 8 août 1960, la maison de disques anglaise Decca détruit vingt-cinq mille copies du disque de Ray Peterson "Tell Laura I Love Her". Pourquoi? Parce que les directeurs artistiques ont jugé qu'elle manquait de goût et qu'elle était vulgaire. Soyez courageux·euses, les chanspons les pires sont dans Airs de rien!

L'épisode de cette semaine se penche sur "Twist and Shout" des Isley Brothers et sur les débuts de la carrière de Bert Berns. Si certains d'entre vous se demande qui c'est…. C'est un songwriter et producteur responsable de titre comme Everybody need somebody,  "Piece of My Heart", "Brown Eyed Girl" et "Under the Boardwalk". Et….. Twist and shout bien sur….. The Isley Brothers, "Twist and Shout" The Isley Brothers, "Standing on the DanceFloor" The Isley Brothers, "The Snake" Jerry Butler, "Make it Easy on Yourself" The Five Pearls, "Please Let Me Know" Dave "Baby" Cortez, "The Happy Organ" Ray Peterson, "Corrina, Corrina" The Top Notes, "Hearts of Stone" Ersel Hickey, "Bluebirds Over the Mountain" Bert and Bill Giant, “The Gettysburg Address” Bert Berns, "The Legend of the Alamo" LaVern Baker, "A Little Bird Told Me" Austin Taylor, "Push Push" The Top Notes, "Twist and Shout" The Jarmels, "A Little Bit of Soap" Russell Byrd, "You'd Better Come Home" Russell Byrd, "Nights of Mexico" Solomon Burke, "Just Out of Reach" Solomon Burke, "Cry to Me" The Isley Brothers, "Twist and Shout" The Contours, "Do You Love Me" Jan et Dean, "Linda" The Isley Brothers, "Twistin' With Linda" The Isley Brothers, "Nobody But Me" The Isley Brothers, "Surf and Shout" The Isley Brothers, "Who's That Lady ?" The Isley Brothers, "Testify" Don Covay and the Goodtimers, "Mercy, Mercy" Little Richard, "I Don't Know What You've Got But It's Got Me" Les Beatles, "Twist and Shout"  

#073 Broadcast 073 - Episode 067 - The Crooners - 20230114 - 3 in 1 = Ray Peterson by Jim Reeves

Quelque soit l'époque, toutes les grandes innovations musicales ont connu leurs détracteurs. Toutes les musiques dîtes populaires ont toujours eu le pouvoir d'indigner et de provoquer la panique morale des plus réactionnaires. Le chanteur américain Ray Peterson en a fait l'amère expérience dans les années 60. Notre politique de confidentialité GDPR a été mise à jour le 8 août 2022. Visitez acast.com/privacy pour plus d'informations.

#737 - Luigi Creatore The Luigi Creatore Interview is featured on The Paul Leslie Hour. The major motion picture “Elvis” is going to be out any day now. Paul plans to see it with Miss Paul as soon as possible. Do you have a favorite song that Elvis Presley sang? We've got a few, but everyone knows “Can't Help Falling in Love.” Which brings to mind this interview that Paul Leslie had with the late Luigi Creatore, one of the most imaginative, kindest people around. Luigi Creatore was born December 21, 1921 and passed away December 13, 2015. He was a songwriter and record producer born in New York City. He was mostly known for co-writing the song "Can't Help Falling in Love" for Elvis Presley. Luigi Creatore also wrote English lyrics for the song "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" recorded by the Tokens. As a record producer, Creatore produced major hits for pop singer Jimmie Rodgers, and went on to work with Perry Como, Sam Cooke, Ray Peterson, just to name a few. A creative writer, Creatore wrote a book and collaborated in a Broadway musical titled "Maggie Flynn." One of his last projects was the off-Broadway play "An Error of the Moon." This interview was conducted at Luigi Creatore's condominium in Boca Raton, Florida and features a surprise appearance from Luigi's wife Claire Weiss Creatore. It is one of Paul's top interviews that he likes to remember. Can you help us in our efforts to get these historical interview artifacts out there? Please consider going to http://www.thepaulleslie.com/support It only takes a moment and makes a big difference. And now, we're going to start the interview. It's a good one folks. Join us as we remember, Luigi Creatore. The Paul Leslie Hour is a talk show dedicated to “Helping People Tell Their Stories.” Some of the most iconic people of all time drop in to chat. Frequent topics include Arts, Entertainment and Culture. This podcast is powered by Pinecast.

Programa nº 182. Dos horas con “Los Tres Tenores” … ¡Casi “ná”! A continuación le dejamos las músicas y los apartados. Víctor Manuel. SOLO PIENSO EN TI. SAN TORAL. Eric Weissberg – PONY EXPRESS. Herbert von Karajan. 4 ESTACIONES. VERANO PRESTO. CELEBRACIONES. Ray Peterson. TELL LAURA IN LOVE HER. Little Walter – JUKE. EFEMÉRIDES. Luisa Fernanda. MAZURCA […] The post Los Tres Tenores 02/03/2022 first appeared on Ripollet Ràdio.

One FM presenter Josh Revens and Steve present 'Whatever Happened To?' This week's topic is singer Ray Peterson. This program originally aired on Monday the 22nd of November, 2021. Contact the station on admin@fm985.com.au or (+613) 58313131 The ONE FM 98.5 Community Radio podcast page operates under the license of Goulburn Valley Community Radio Inc. (ONE FM) Number 1385226/1. PRA AMCOS (Australasian Performing Right Association Limited and Australasian Mechanical Copyright Owners Society) that covers Simulcasting and Online content including podcasts with musical content, that we pay every year. This licence number is 1385226/1.

Ray Peterson's RCA teen tragedy "Tell Laura I Love Her" topped the charts in 1960. Many radio stations refused to play "Tell Laura I Love Her", fearing the song would incite teens to commit suicide. It was songwriter Jeff Barry's first big pop success. Ray's other hits included "The Wonder of You" (later covered by Elvis), "Missing You," and "Corinna, Corinna" (produced by Phil Spector). "Tell Laura I Love Her" was a CISL listener favourite, and every time I played it the song got great reaction. When I retired from day-to-day radio and CISL's Wakeup Club in 2000, Ray was nice enough to take part in the celebrations from his home in Tennessee. Ray passed away in 2005. He was three months shy of his 70th birthday.

NOTE: This episode went up before the allegations about Dylan, in a lawsuit filed on Friday, were made public on Monday night. Had I been aware of them, I would at least have commented at the beginning of the episode. Episode one hundred and thirty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Like a Rolling Stone" by Bob Dylan, and the controversy over Dylan going electric, 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 "Hold What You've Got" by Joe Tex. 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/ Erratum A couple of times I refer to “CBS”. Dylan's label in the US was Columbia Records, a subsidiary of CBS Inc, but in the rest of the world the label traded as “CBS Records”. I should probably have used “Columbia” throughout... Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by Dylan. Much of the information in this episode comes from Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties by Elijah Wald, which is recommended, as all Wald's books are. I've used these books for all the episodes involving Dylan: Bob Dylan: All The Songs by Phillipe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon is a song-by-song look at every song Dylan ever wrote, as is Revolution in the Air, by Clinton Heylin. Heylin also wrote the most comprehensive and accurate biography of Dylan, Behind the Shades. I've also used Robert Shelton's No Direction Home, which is less accurate, but which is written by someone who knew Dylan. The New Yorker article by Nat Hentoff I talk about is here. And for the information about the writing of "Like a Rolling Stone", I relied on yet another book by Heylin, All the Madmen. Dylan's albums up to 1967 can all be found in their original mono mixes on this box set. And Dylan's performances at Newport from 1963 through 1965 are on this DVD. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript There's a story that everyone tells about Bob Dylan in 1965, the story that has entered into legend. It's the story that you'll see in most of the biographies of him, and in all those coffee-table histories of rock music put out by glossy music magazines. Bob Dylan, in this story, was part of the square, boring, folk scene until he plugged in an electric guitar and just blew the minds of all those squares, who immediately ostracised him forever for being a Judas and betraying their traditionalist acoustic music, but he was just too cool and too much of a rebel to be bound by their rules, man. Pete Seeger even got an axe and tried to cut his way through the cables of the amplifiers, he was so offended by the desecration of the Newport Folk Festival. And like all these stories, it's an oversimplification but there's an element of truth to it too. So today, we're going to look at what actually happened when Dylan went electric. We're going to look at what led to him going electric, and at the truth behind the legend of Seeger's axe. And we're going to look at the masterpiece at the centre of it all, a record that changed rock songwriting forever. We're going to look at Bob Dylan and "Like a Rolling Stone": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone"] While we've seen Dylan turn up in all sorts of episodes -- most recently the episode on "Mr. Tambourine Man", the last time we looked at him in detail was in the episode on "Blowin' in the Wind", and when we left him there he had just recorded his second album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, but it had not yet been released. As we'll see, Dylan was always an artist who moved on very quickly from what he'd been doing before, and that had started as early as that album. While his first album, produced by John Hammond, had been made up almost entirely of traditional songs and songs he'd learned from Dave van Ronk or Eric von Schmidt, with only two originals, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan had started out being produced by Hammond, but as Hammond and Dylan's manager Albert Grossman had come to find it difficult to work together, the last few tracks had been produced by Tom Wilson. We've mentioned Wilson briefly a couple of times already, but to reiterate, Wilson was a Black Harvard graduate and political conservative whose background was in jazz and who had no knowledge of or love for folk music. But Wilson saw two things in Dylan -- the undeniable power of his lyrics, and his vocals, which Wilson compared to Ray Charles. Wilson wanted to move Dylan towards working with a backing band, and this was something that Dylan was interested in doing, but his first experiment with that, with John Hammond, hadn't been a particular success. Dylan had recorded a single backed with a band -- "Mixed-Up Confusion", backed with "Corrina, Corrina", a version of an old song that had been recorded by both Bob Wills and Big Joe Turner, but had recently been brought back to the public mind by a version Phil Spector had produced for Ray Peterson. Dylan's version of that song had a country lope and occasional breaks into Jimmie Rodgers style keening that foreshadow his work of the late sixties: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Corrina, Corrina (single version)"] A different take of that track was included on The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, an album that was made up almost entirely of originals. Those originals fell into roughly two types -- there were songs like "Masters of War", "Blowin' in the Wind", and "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall" which dealt in some way with the political events of the time -- the fear of nuclear war, the ongoing conflict in Vietnam, the Civil Rights movement and more -- but did so in an elliptical, poetic way; and there were songs about distance in a relationship -- songs like "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright", which do a wonderful job at portraying a young man's conflicted feelings -- the girl has left him, and he wants her back, but he wants to pretend that he doesn't.  While it's always a bad idea to look for a direct autobiographical interpretation of Dylan's lyrics, it seems fairly safe to say that these songs were inspired by Dylan's feelings for his girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, who had gone travelling in Europe and not seen him for eight months, and who he was worried he would never see again, and he does seem to have actually had several conflicting feelings about this, ranging from desperation for her to come back through to anger and resentment. The surprising thing about The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan is that it's a relatively coherent piece of work, despite being recorded with two different producers over a period of more than a year, and that recording being interrupted by Dylan's own travels to the UK, his separation from and reconciliation with Rotolo, and a change of producers. If you listened to it, you would get an impression of exactly who Dylan was -- you'd come away from it thinking that he was an angry, talented, young man who was trying to merge elements of both traditional English folk music and Robert Johnson style Delta blues with poetic lyrics related to what was going on in the young man's life. By the next album, that opinion of Dylan would have to be reworked, and it would have to be reworked with every single album that came out.  But The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan came out at the perfect time for Dylan to step into the role of "spokesman for a generation" -- a role which he didn't want, and to which he wasn't particularly suited. Because it came out in May 1963, right at the point at which folk music was both becoming hugely more mainstream, and becoming more politicised. And nothing showed both those things as well as the Hootenanny boycott: [Excerpt: The Brothers Four, “Hootenanny Saturday Night”] We've talked before about Hootenanny, the folk TV show, but what we haven't mentioned is that there was a quite substantial boycott of that show by some of the top musicians in folk music at the time. The reason for this is that Pete Seeger, the elder statesman of the folk movement, and his old band the Weavers, were both blacklisted from the show because of Seeger's Communist leanings. The Weavers were --- according to some sources -- told that they could go on if they would sign a loyalty oath, but they refused. It's hard for those of us who weren't around at the time to really comprehend both just how subversive folk music was considered, and how seriously subversion was taken in the USA of the early 1960s. To give a relevant example -- Suze Rotolo was pictured on the cover of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. Because of this, her cousin's husband, who was in the military, lost his security clearance and didn't get a promotion he was in line for. Again,  someone lost his security clearance because his wife's cousin was pictured on the cover of a Bob Dylan album. So the blacklisting of Seeger and the Weavers was considered a serious matter by the folk music community, and people reacted very strongly. Joan Baez announced that she wouldn't be going on Hootenanny until they asked Seeger on, and Dylan, the Kingston Trio, Dave van Ronk, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, and Peter, Paul, and Mary, among many others, all refused to go on the show as a result. But the odd thing was, whenever anyone *actually asked* Pete Seeger what he thought they should do, he told them they should go on the TV show and use it as an opportunity to promote the music. So while the Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul, and Mary, two of the biggest examples of the commercialisation of folk music that the serious purists sneered at, were refusing to go on the TV in solidarity with a Communist, that Communist's brother, Mike Seeger, happily went on Hootenanny with his band the New Lost City Ramblers, and when the Tarriers were invited on to the show but it clashed with one of their regular bookings, Pete Seeger covered their booking for them so they could appear. Dylan was on the side of the boycotters, though he was not too clear on exactly why. When he spoke about  the boycott on stage, this is what he had to say: [Excerpt: Dylan talks about the boycott. Transcript: "Now a friend of mine, a friend of all yours I'm sure, Pete Seeger's been blacklisted [applause]. He and another group called the Weavers who are around New York [applause] I turned down that television show, but I got no right [applause] but . . . I feel bad turning it down, because the Weavers and Pete Seeger can't be on it. They oughta turn it down. They aren't even asked to be on it because they are blacklisted. Uh—which is, which is a bad thing. I don't know why it's bad, but it's just bad, it's bad all around."] Hootenanny started broadcasting in April 1963, just over a month before The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan came out, and so it would have been a good opportunity for publicity for him -- but turning the show down was also good publicity. Hootenanny wouldn't be the only opportunity to appear on TV that he was offered. It would also not be the only one he turned down. In May, Dylan was given the opportunity to appear on the Ed Sullivan Show, but he agreed on one condition -- that he be allowed to sing "Talking John Birch Paranoid Blues". For those who don't know, the John Birch Society is a far-right conspiratorial organisation which had a huge influence on the development of the American right-wing in the middle of the twentieth century, and is responsible for perpetuating almost every conspiracy theory that has exerted a malign influence on the country and the world since that time. They were a popular punching bag for the left and centre, and for good reason -- we heard the Chad Mitchell Trio mocking them, for example, in the episode on "Mr. Tambourine Man" a couple of weeks ago.  So Dylan insisted that if he was going to go on the Ed Sullivan Show, it would only be to perform his song about them: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Talking John Birch Paranoid Blues"] Now, the Ed Sullivan Show was not interested in having Dylan sing a song that would upset a substantial proportion of its audience, on what was after all meant to be an entertainment show, and so Dylan didn't appear on the show -- and he got a big publicity boost from his principled refusal to make a TV appearance that would have given him a big publicity boost. It's interesting to note in this context that Dylan himself clearly didn't actually think very much of the song -- he never included it on any of his albums, and it remained unreleased for decades. By this point, Dylan had started dating Joan Baez, with whom he would have an on-again off-again relationship for the next couple of years, even though at this point he was also still seeing Suze Rotolo. Baez was one of the big stars of the folk movement, and like Rotolo she was extremely politically motivated. She was also a fan of Dylan's writing, and had started recording versions of his songs on her albums: [Excerpt: Joan Baez, "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right"] The relationship between the two of them became much more public when they appeared together at the Newport Folk Festival in 1963. The Newport Folk Festival had started in 1959, as a spinoff from the successful Newport Jazz Festival, which had been going for a number of years previously. As there was a large overlap between the jazz and folk music fanbases -- both musics appealed at this point to educated, middle-class, liberals who liked to think of themselves as a little bit Bohemian -- the Jazz Festival had first started putting on an afternoon of folk music during its normal jazz programme, and then spun that off into a whole separate festival, initially with the help of Albert Grossman, who advised on which acts should be booked (and of course included several of the acts he managed on the bill). Both Newport festivals had been shut down after rioting at the 1960 Jazz Festival, as three thousand more people had turned up for the show than there was capacity for, and the Marines had had to be called in to clear the streets of angry jazz fans, but the jazz  festival had returned in 1962, and in 1963 the folk festival came back as well. By this time, Albert Grossman was too busy to work for the festival, and so its organisation was taken over by a committee headed by Pete Seeger.  At that 1963 festival, even though Dylan was at this point still a relative unknown compared to some of the acts on the bill, he was made the headliner of the first night, which finished with his set, and then with him bringing Joan Baez, Peter, Paul and Mary, Pete Seeger and the Freedom Singers out to sing with him on "Blowin' in the Wind" and "We Shall Overcome".  To many people, Dylan's appearance in 1963 was what launched him from being "one of the rising stars of the folk movement" to being the most important musician in the movement -- still just one of many, but the first among equals. He was now being talked of in the same terms as Joan Baez or Pete Seeger, and was also starting to behave like someone as important as them -- like he was a star. And that was partly because Baez was promoting Dylan, having him duet with her on stage on his songs -- though few would now argue that the combination of their voices did either artist any favours, Baez's pure, trained, voice, rubbing up against Dylan's more idiosyncratic phrasing in ways that made both sound less impressive: [Excerpt: Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, "With God On Our Side (live at Newport 1963)"] At the end of 1963, Dylan recorded his third album, which came out in early 1964. The Times They Are A-Changin' seems to be Dylan's least personal album to this point, and seems to have been written as a conscious attempt to write the kind of songs that people wanted and expected from him -- there were songs about particular recent news events, like "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll",  the true story of the murder of a Black woman by a white man, and  "Only a Pawn in Their Game", about the murder of the Civil Rights activist Medgar Evers. There were fictional dramatisations of the kind of effects that real-world social problems were having on people, like "North Country Blues", in which the callous way mining towns were treated by capital leads to a woman losing her parents, brother, husband, and children, or "The Ballad of Hollis Brown", about a farmer driven to despair by poverty who ends up killing his whole family and himself. As you can imagine, it's not a very cheery album, but it's one that impressed a lot of people, especially its title track, which was very deliberately written as an anthem for the new social movements that were coming up: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "The Times They Are A-Changin'"] But it was a bleak album, with none of the humour that had characterised Dylan's first two albums. Soon after recording the album, Dylan had a final split with Rotolo, went travelling for a while, and took LSD for the first time. He also started to distance himself from Baez at this point, though the two would remain together until mid 1965. He seems to have regarded the political material he was doing as a mistake, as something he was doing for other people, rather than because that was what he wanted to do.  He toured the UK in early 1964, and then returned to the US in time to record his fourth album, Another Side of Bob Dylan. It can be argued that this is the point where Dylan really becomes himself, and starts making music that's the music he wants to make, rather than music that he thinks other people want him to make.  The entire album was recorded in one session, along with a few tracks that didn't make the cut -- like the early version of "Mr. Tambourine Man" with Ramblin' Jack Elliott that we heard in the episode on that song. Elliott was in attendance, as were a number of Dylan's other friends, though the album features only Dylan performing. Also there was the journalist Nat Hentoff, who wrote a full account of the recording session for the New Yorker, which I'll link in the show notes.  Dylan told Hentoff "“There aren't any finger-pointing songs in here, either. Those records I've already made, I'll stand behind them, but some of that was jumping into the scene to be heard and a lot of it was because I didn't see anybody else doing that kind of thing. Now a lot of people are doing finger-pointing songs. You know—pointing to all the things that are wrong. Me, I don't want to write for people anymore. You know—be a spokesman. Like I once wrote about Emmett Till in the first person, pretending I was him. From now on, I want to write from inside me, and to do that I'm going to have to get back to writing like I used to when I was ten—having everything come out naturally." Dylan was right to say that there were no finger-pointing songs. The songs on Another Side of Bob Dylan were entirely personal -- "Ballad in Plain D", in particular, is Dylan's take on the night he split up with Suze Rotolo, laying the blame -- unfairly, as he would later admit -- on her older sister. The songs mostly dealt with love and relationships, and as a result were ripe for cover versions. The opening track, in particular, "All I Really Want to Do", which in Dylan's version was a Jimmie Rodgers style hillbilly tune, became the subject of duelling cover versions. The Byrds' version came out as the follow-up to their version of "Mr. Tambourine Man": [Excerpt: The Byrds, "All I Really Want to Do"] But Cher also released a version -- which the Byrds claimed came about when Cher's husband Sonny Bono secretly taped a Byrds live show where they performed the song before they'd released it, and he then stole their arrangement: [Excerpt: Cher, "All I Really Want to Do"] In America, the Byrds' version only made number forty on the charts, while Cher made number fifteen. In the UK, where both artists were touring at the time to promote the single, Cher made number nine but the Byrds charted higher at number four.  Both those releases came out after the album came out in late 1964, but even before it was released, Dylan was looking for other artists to cover his new songs. He found one at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, where he met Johnny Cash for the first time. Cash had been a fan of Dylan for some time -- and indeed, he's often credited as being the main reason why CBS persisted with Dylan after his first album was unsuccessful, as Cash had lobbied for him within the company -- and he'd recently started to let that influence show. His most recent hit, "Understand Your Man", owed more than a little to Dylan's "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right", and Cash had also started recording protest songs. At Newport, Cash performed his own version of "Don't Think Twice": [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right"] Cash and Dylan met up, with June Carter and Joan Baez, in Baez's hotel room, and according to later descriptions they were both so excited to meet each other they were bouncing with excitement, jumping up and down on the beds. They played music together all night, and Dylan played some of his new songs for Cash. One of them was "It Ain't Me Babe", a song that seems at least slightly inspired by "She Loves You" -- you can sing the "yeah, yeah, yeah" and "no, no, no" together -- and which was the closing track of Another Side of Bob Dylan. Cash soon released his own version of the song, which became a top five country hit: [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, "It Ain't Me Babe"] But it wasn't long after meeting Cash that Dylan met the group who may have inspired that song -- and his meeting with the Beatles seems to have confirmed in him his decision that he needed to move away from the folk scene and towards making pop records. This was something that Tom Wilson had been pushing for for a while -- Wilson had told Dylan's manager Albert Grossman that if they could get Dylan backed by a good band, they'd have a white Ray Charles on their hands. As an experiment, Wilson took some session musicians into the studio and had them overdub an electric backing on Dylan's acoustic version of "House of the Rising Sun", basing the new backing on the Animals' hit version. The result wasn't good enough to release, but it did show that there was a potential for combining Dylan's music with the sound of electric guitars and drums: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, “House of the Rising Sun (electric version)”] Dylan was also being influenced by his friend John Hammond Jr, the blues musician son of Dylan's first producer, and a veteran of the Greenwich Village folk scene. Hammond had decided that he wanted to show the British R&B bands what proper American blues sounded like, and so he'd recruited a group of mostly-Canadian musicians to back him on an electric album. His "So Many Roads" album featured three members of a group called Levon and the Hawks -- Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, and Robbie Robertson -- who had recently quit working for the Canadian rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins -- plus harmonica player Charlie Musselwhite and Mike Bloomfield, who was normally a guitarist but who is credited on piano for the album: [Excerpt: John Hammond, Jr. "Who Do You Love?"] Dylan was inspired by Hammond's sound, and wanted to get the same sound on his next record, though he didn't consider hiring the same musicians. Instead, for his next album he brought in Bruce Langhorne, the tambourine man himself, on guitar, Bobby Gregg -- a drummer who had been the house drummer for Cameo-Parkway and played on hits by Chubby Checker, Bobby Rydell and others; the session guitarists Al Gorgoni and Kenny Rankin, piano players Frank Owens and Paul Griffin, and two bass players, Joseph Macho and William Lee, the father of the film director Spike Lee. Not all of these played on all the finished tracks -- and there were other tracks recorded during the sessions, where Dylan was accompanied by Hammond and another guitarist, John Sebastian, that weren't used at all -- but that's the lineup that played on Dylan's first electric album, Bringing it All Back Home. The first single, "Subterranean Homesick Blues" actually takes more inspiration than one might imagine from the old-school folk singers Dylan was still associating with. Its opening lines seem to be a riff on "Taking it Easy", a song that had originally been written in the forties by Woody Guthrie for the Almanac Singers, where it had been a song about air-raid sirens: [Excerpt: The Almanac Singers, "Taking it Easy"] But had then been rewritten by Pete Seeger for the Weavers, whose version had included this verse that wasn't in the original: [Excerpt: The Weavers, "Taking it Easy"] Dylan took that verse, and the basic Guthrie-esque talking blues rhythm, and connected it to Chuck Berry's "Too Much Monkey Business" with its rapid-fire joking blues lyrics: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "Too Much Monkey Business"] But Dylan's lyrics were a radical departure, a freeform, stream-of-consciousness proto-psychedelic lyric inspired as much by the Beat poets as by any musician -- it's no coincidence that in the promotional film Dylan made for the song, one of the earliest examples of what would become known as the rock video, the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg makes an appearance: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Subterranean Homesick Blues"] "Subterranean Homesick Blues" made the top forty in the US -- it only made number thirty-nine, but it was Dylan's first single to chart at all in the US. And it made the top ten in the UK -- but it's notable that even over here, there was still some trepidation about Dylan's new direction. To promote his UK tour, CBS put out a single of "The Times They Are A-Changin'", and that too made the top ten, and spent longer on the charts than "Subterranean Homesick Blues". Indeed, it seems like everyone was hedging their bets. The opening side of Bringing it All Back Home is all electric, but the B-side is made up entirely of acoustic performances, though sometimes with a little added electric guitar countermelody -- it's very much in the same style as Dylan's earlier albums, and seems to be a way of pulling back after testing the waters, of reassuring people who might have been upset by the change in style on the first side that this was still the same Dylan they knew.  And the old Dylan certainly still had plenty of commercial life in him. Indeed, when Dylan went to the UK for a tour in spring of 1965, he found that British musicians were trying to copy his style -- a young man called Donovan seemed to be doing his best to *be* Dylan, with even the title of his debut hit single seeming to owe something to "Blowing in the Wind": [Excerpt: Donovan, "Catch the Wind (original single version)"] On that UK tour, Dylan performed solo as he always had -- though by this point he had taken to bringing along an entourage. Watching the classic documentary of that tour, Dont Look Back, it's quite painful to see Dylan's cruelty to Joan Baez, who had come along on the expectation that she would be duetting with him occasionally, as he had dueted with her, but who is sidelined, tormented, and ignored. It's even worse to see Bob Neuwirth,  a hanger-on who is very obviously desperate to impress Dylan by copying all his mannerisms and affectations, doing the same. It's unsurprising that this was the end of Dylan and Baez's relationship. Dylan's solo performances on that tour went down well, but some of his fans questioned him about his choice to make an electric record. But he wasn't going to stop recording with electric musicians. Indeed, Tom Wilson also came along on the tour, and while he was in England he made an attempt to record a track with the members of John Mayall's Bluesbreakers -- Mayall, Hughie Flint, Eric Clapton, and John McVie, though it was unsuccessful and only a low-fidelity fragment of it circulates: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan and the Bluesbreakers, "If You Gotta Go, Go Now"] Also attending that session was a young wannabe singer from Germany who Dylan had taken up with, though their dalliance was very brief. During the session Dylan cut a demo of a song he planned to give her, but Nico didn't end up recording "I'll Keep it With Mine" until a couple of years later. But one other thing happened in England. After the UK tour, Dylan travelled over to Europe for a short tour, then returned to the UK to do a show for the BBC -- his first full televised concert. Unfortunately, that show never went ahead -- there was a party the night before, and Dylan was hospitalised after it with what was said to be food poisoning. It might even actually have been food poisoning, but take a listen to the episode I did on Vince Taylor, who was also at that party, and draw your own conclusions. Anyway, Dylan was laid up in bed for a while, and took the opportunity to write what he's variously described as being ten or twenty pages of stream of consciousness vomit, out of which he eventually took four pages of lyrics, a vicious attack on a woman who was originally the protagonist's social superior, but has since fallen. He's never spoken in any detail about what or who the subject of the song was, but given that it was written just days after his breakup with Baez, it's not hard to guess. The first attempt at recording the song was a false start. On June the fifteenth, Dylan and most of the same musicians who'd played on his previous album went into the studio to record it, along with Mike Bloomfield, who had played on that John Hammond album that had inspired Dylan and was now playing in the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Bloomfield had been surprised when Dylan had told him that he didn't want the kind of string-bending electric blues that Bloomfield usually played, but he managed to come up with something Dylan approved of -- but the song was at this point in waltz time: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone (early version)"] The session ended, but Joe Macho, Al Gorgoni and Bobby Gregg stayed around after the session, when Tom Wilson called in another session guitarist to join them in doing the same trick he'd done on "House of the Rising Sun", overdubbing new instruments on a flop acoustic record he'd produced for a Greenwich Village folk duo who'd already split up. But we'll hear more about "The Sound of Silence" in a few weeks' time. The next day, the same musicians came back, along with one new one. Al Kooper had been invited by Wilson to come along and watch the session, but he was determined that he was going to play on whatever was recorded. He got to the session early, brought his guitar and amp in and got tuned up before Wilson arrived. But then Kooper heard Bloomfield play, realised that he simply couldn't play at anything remotely like the same standard, and decided he'd be best off staying in the control room after all.  But then, before they started recording "Like a Rolling Stone", which by now was in 4/4 time, Frank Owens, who had been playing organ, switched to piano and left his organ on. Kooper saw his chance -- he played a bit of keyboards, too, and the song was in C, which is the easiest key to play in. Kooper asked Wilson if he could go and play, and Wilson didn't exactly say no, so Kooper went into the studio and sat at the organ.  Kooper improvised the organ line that became the song's most notable instrumental part, but you will notice that it's mixed quite low in the track. This is because Wilson was unimpressed with Kooper's playing, which is technically pretty poor -- indeed, for much of the song, Kooper is a beat behind the rest of the band, waiting for them to change chords and then following the change on the next measure. Luckily, Kooper is also a good enough natural musician that he made this work, and it gave the song a distinctive sound: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone"] The finished record came in at around six minutes -- and here I should just mention that most books on the subject say that the single was six minutes and thirteen seconds long. That's the length of the stereo mix of the song on the stereo version of the album. The mono mix on the mono album, which we just heard, is five minutes fifty-eight, as it has a shorter fade. I haven't been able to track down a copy of the single as released in 1965, but usually the single mix would be the same as the mono album mix. Whatever the exact length, it was much, much, longer than the norm for a single -- the Animals' "House of the Rising Sun" had been regarded as ridiculously long at four and a half minutes -- and Columbia originally wanted to split the song over two sides of a single. But eventually it was released as one side, in full: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone"] That's Bruce Langhorne there playing that rather sloppy tambourine part, high in the mix. The record made the top five in the UK, and reached number two in the US, only being held off from the top spot by "Help!" by the Beatles.  It would, however, be the last track that Tom Wilson produced for Dylan. Nobody knows what caused their split after three and a half albums working together -- and everything suggests that on the UK tour in the Spring, the two were very friendly. But they had some sort of disagreement, about which neither of them would ever speak, other than a comment by Wilson in an interview shortly before his death in which he said that Dylan had told him he was going to get Phil Spector to produce his records. In the event, the rest of the album Dylan was working on would be produced by Bob Johnston, who would be Dylan's regular producer until the mid-seventies. So "Like a Rolling Stone" was a major break in Dylan's career, and there was another one shortly after its release, when Dylan played the Newport Folk Festival for the third time, in what has become possibly the single most discussed and analysed performance in folk or rock music. The most important thing to note here is that there was not a backlash among the folk crowd against electric instruments. The Newport Folk Festival had *always* had electric performers -- John Lee Hooker and Johnny Cash and The Staple Singers had all performed with electric guitars and nobody had cared. What there was, was a backlash against pop music. You see, up until the Beatles hit America, the commercial side of folk music had been huge. Acts like the Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul, and Mary, The Chad Mitchell Trio, and so on had been massive. Most of the fans at the Newport Folk Festival actually despised many of these acts as sell-outs, doing watered-down versions of the traditional music they loved. But at the same time, those acts *were* doing watered-down versions of the traditional music they loved, and by doing so they were exposing more people to that traditional music. They were making programmes like Hootenanny possible -- and the folkies didn't like Hootenanny, but Hootenanny existing meant that the New Lost City Ramblers got an audience they would otherwise not have got. There was a recognition, then, that the commercialised folk music that many of them despised was nonetheless important in the development of a thriving scene. And it was those acts, the Kingston Trios and Peter, Paul, and Marys, who were fast losing their commercial relevance because of the renewed popularity of rock music. If Hootenanny gets cancelled and Shindig put on in its place, that's great for fans of the Righteous Brothers and Sam Cooke, but it's not so great if you want to hear "Tom Dooley" or "If I Had a Hammer". And so many of the old guard in the folk movement weren't wary of electric guitars *as instruments*, but they were wary of anything that looked like someone taking sides with the new pop music rather than the old folk music. For Dylan's first performance at the festival in 1965, he played exactly the set that people would expect of him, and there was no problem. The faultlines opened up, not with Dylan's first performance, but with the performance by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, as part of a history of the blues, presented by Alan Lomax. Lomax had no objection to rock and roll -- indeed, earlier in the festival the Chambers Brothers, a Black electric group from Mississippi, had performed a set of rock and R&B songs, and Lomax had come on stage afterwards and said “I'm very proud tonight that we finally got onto the Newport Folk Festival our modern American folk music: rock 'n' roll!” But Lomax didn't think that the Butterfield band met his criteria of "authenticity". And he had a point. The Paul Butterfield Blues Band were an integrated group -- their rhythm section were Black musicians who had played with Howlin' Wolf -- and they'd gained experience through playing Chicago blues on the South Side of Chicago, but their leader, Butterfield, was a white man, as was Mike Bloomfield, their guitarist, and so they'd quickly moved to playing clubs on the North side, where Black musicians had generally not been able to play. Butterfield and Bloomfield were both excellent musicians, but they were closer to the British blues lovers who were making up groups like the Rolling Stones, Animals, and Manfred Mann. There was a difference -- they were from Chicago, not from the Home Counties -- but they were still scholars coming at the music from the outside, rather than people who'd grown up with the music and had it as part of their culture. The Butterfield Band were being promoted as a sort of American answer to the Stones, and they had been put on Lomax's bill rather against his will -- he wanted to have some Chicago blues to illustrate that part of the music, but why not Muddy Waters or Howlin' Wolf, rather than this new group who had never really done anything? One he'd never even heard -- but who he knew that Albert Grossman was thinking about managing. So his introduction to the Butterfield Blues Band's performance was polite but hardly rapturous. He said "Us white cats always moved in, a little bit late, but tried to catch up...I understand that this present combination has not only caught up but passed the rest. That's what I hear—I'm anxious to find out whether it's true or not." He then introduced the musicians, and they started to play an old Little Walter song: [Excerpt: The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, "Juke"] But after the set, Grossman was furious at Lomax, asking him what kind of introduction that was meant to be. Lomax responded by asking if Grossman wanted a punch in the mouth, Grossman hurled a homophobic slur at Lomax, and the two men started hitting each other and rolling round in the dirt, to the amusement of pretty much everyone around. But Lomax and Grossman were both far from amused. Lomax tried to get the Festival board to kick Grossman out, and almost succeeded, until someone explained that if they did, then that would mean that all Grossman's acts, including huge names like Dylan and Peter, Paul, and Mary, would also be out.  Nobody's entirely sure whose idea it was, but it seems to have been Grossman who thought that since Bloomfield had played on Dylan's recent single, it might be an idea to get the Butterfield Blues Band to back Dylan on stage, as a snub to Lomax. But the idea seems to have cohered properly when Grossman bumped into Al Kooper, who was attending the festival just as an audience member. Grossman gave Kooper a pair of backstage passes, and told him to meet up with Dylan. And so, for Dylan's performance on the Sunday -- scheduled in the middle of the day, rather than as the headliner as most people expected, he appeared with an electric guitar, backed by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and Al Kooper. He opened with his recent single "Maggie's Farm", and followed it with the new one, "Like a Rolling Stone": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone (live at Newport)"] After those two songs, the group did one more, a song called "Phantom Engineer", which they hadn't rehearsed properly and which was an utter train wreck. And then they left the stage. And there was booing. How much booing, and what the cause was, is hard to say, but everyone agrees there was some. Some people claim that the booing was just because the set had been so short, others say that the audience was mostly happy but there were just a few people booing. And others say that the booing mostly came from the front -- that there were sound problems that meant that while the performance sounded great to people further back, there was a tremendous level of distortion near the front. That's certainly what Pete Seeger said. Seeger was visibly distraught and angry at the sounds coming from the stage. He later said, and I believe him, that it wasn't annoyance at Dylan playing with an electric band, but at the distorted sound. He said he couldn't hear the words, that the guitar was too loud compared to the vocals, and in particular that his father, who was an old man using a hearing aid, was in actual physical pain at the sound. According to Joe Boyd, later a famous record producer but at this time just helping out at the festival, Seeger, the actor Theodore Bikel, and Alan Lomax, all of whom were on the festival board, told Boyd to take a message to Paul Rothchild, who was working the sound, telling him that the festival board ordered him to lower the volume. When Boyd got there, he found Rothchild there with Albert Grossman and Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul, and Mary, who was also on the board. When Boyd gave his message, Yarrow responded that the board was "adequately represented at the sound controls", that the sound was where the musicians wanted it, and gave Boyd a message to take back to the other board members, consisting of a single raised middle finger. Whatever the cause of the anger, which was far from universal, Dylan was genuinely baffled and upset at the reaction -- while it's been portrayed since, including by Dylan himself at times, as a deliberate act of provocation on Dylan's part, it seems that at the time he was just going on stage with his new friends, to play his new songs in front of some of his old friends and a crowd that had always been supportive of him. Eventually Peter Yarrow, who was MCing, managed to persuade Dylan to go back on stage and do a couple more numbers, alone this time as the band hadn't rehearsed any more songs. He scrounged up an acoustic guitar, went back on, spent a couple of minutes fiddling around with the guitar, got a different guitar because something was wrong with that one, played "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue", spent another couple of minutes tuning up, and then finally played "Mr. Tambourine Man": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Mr. Tambourine Man (live at Newport)"] But that pause while Dylan was off stage scrounging an acoustic guitar from somewhere led to a rumour that has still got currency fifty-six years later. Because Peter Yarrow, trying to keep the crowd calm, said "He's gone to get his axe" -- using musicians' slang for a guitar. But many of the crowd didn't know that slang. But they had seen Pete Seeger furious, and they'd also seen, earlier in the festival, a demonstration of work-songs, sung by people who kept time by chopping wood, and according to some people Seeger had joined in with that demonstration, swinging an axe as he sang. So the audience put two and two together, and soon the rumour was going round the festival -- Pete Seeger had been so annoyed by Dylan going electric he'd tried to chop the cables with an axe, and had had to be held back from doing so. Paul Rothchild even later claimed to have seen Seeger brandishing it. The rumour became so pervasive that in later years, even as he denied doing it, Seeger tried to explain it away by saying that he might have said something like "I wish I had an axe so I could cut those cables". In fact, Seeger wasn't angry at Dylan, as much as he was concerned -- shortly afterwards he wrote a private note to himself trying to sort out his own feelings, which said in part "I like some rock and roll a great deal. Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters. I confess that, like blues and like flamenco music, I can't listen to it for a long time at a stretch. I just don't feel that aggressive, personally. But I have a question. Was the sound at Newport from Bob's aggregation good rock and roll?  I once had a vision of a beast with hollow fangs. I first saw it when my mother-in-law, who I loved very much, died of cancer... Who knows, but I am one of the fangs that has sucked Bob dry. It is in the hope that I can learn that I write these words, asking questions I need help to answer, using language I never intended. Hoping that perhaps I'm wrong—but if I am right, hoping that it won't happen again." Seeger would later make his own electric albums, and he would always continue to be complimentary towards Dylan in public. He even repeatedly said that while he still wished he'd been able to hear the words and that the guitar had been mixed quieter, he knew he'd been on the wrong side, and that if he had the time over he'd have gone on stage and asked the audience to stop booing Dylan. But the end result was the same -- Dylan was now no longer part of the Newport Folk Festival crowd. He'd moved on and was now a pop star, and nothing was going to change that. He'd split with Suze, he'd split with Joan Baez, he'd split with Tom Wilson, and now he'd split with his peer group. From now on Dylan wasn't a spokesman for his generation, or the leader of a movement. He was a young man with a leather jacket and a Stratocaster, and he was going to make rock music. And we'll see the results of that in future episodes.

This week, the Cult Classics Podcast talks about the 1989 Tom Hanks hidden gem, “The Burbs”.    Settling in for some time off in his suburban home, Ray Peterson's (Tom Hanks) vacation becomes a horror when the Klopeks, a suspiciously odd family, move in down the block. Enlisting the aid of his paranoid buddy, Art (Rick Ducommun), and his militia-man neighbor, Rumsfield (Bruce Dern), Ray sends his son and wife (Carrie Fisher) away on a trip while he investigates the Klopeks. When a neighbor disappears, Ray and his cohorts risk their lives to save their cul-de-sac from the clutches of evil.     Director: Joe Dante Starring: Tom Hanks, Bruce Dern, Carrie Fisher, Rick Ducommun, Corey Feldman   Hosts: Jordan Jones, Cameron Jones, Mark Nussle

This week, the Cult Classics Podcast talks about the 1989 Tom Hanks hidden gem, “The Burbs”.    Settling in for some time off in his suburban home, Ray Peterson's (Tom Hanks) vacation becomes a horror when the Klopeks, a suspiciously odd family, move in down the block. Enlisting the aid of his paranoid buddy, Art (Rick Ducommun), and his militia-man neighbor, Rumsfield (Bruce Dern), Ray sends his son and wife (Carrie Fisher) away on a trip while he investigates the Klopeks. When a neighbor disappears, Ray and his cohorts risk their lives to save their cul-de-sac from the clutches of evil.     Director: Joe Dante Starring: Tom Hanks, Bruce Dern, Carrie Fisher, Rick Ducommun, Corey Feldman   Hosts: Jordan Jones, Cameron Jones, Mark Nussle --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

Settling in for some time off in his suburban home, Ray Peterson's (Tom Hanks) vacation becomes a horror when the Klopeks, a suspiciously odd family, move in down the block. Enlisting the aid of his paranoid buddy, Art (Rick Ducommun), and his militia-man neighbor, Rumsfield (Bruce Dern), Ray sends his son and wife (Carrie Fisher) away on a trip while he investigates the Klopeks. When a neighbor disappears, Ray and his cohorts risk their lives to save their cul-de-sac from the clutches of evil. It's time for a hilarious Horror Comedy and host Drew has brought one of his favorites, "The 'Burbs"!  The guys get into the antics of all the neighbors, their characteristics, stories of their own neighborhoods and even what they would serve to some uninvited guests.  From the comedic writing, the improved scenes and the makeshift dog poop from Queenie... this is a true 80's classic!  Joe Dante has done it again in this cult classic!  We are the Reel Feels Podcast, every other Wednesday we'll bring you a new movie with all the feels you can handle.  We'll laugh, we'll cry and possibly restrain the frustrations to curse the heavens. But what you can count on is three guys sharing their love of cinema with you.   Please leave us a review and share your "reel" feelings.  Don't forget to call the "Tucc" line (Reel Feels Hotline) and leave us a voicemail: 661-376-0030   Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ReelFeelsPodcast Email:  reelfeelspodcast@gmail.com  Twitter:  https://twitter.com/ReelFeelsPod Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/ReelFeelsPodcast/

Settling in for some time off in his suburban home, Ray Peterson's (Tom Hanks) vacation becomes a horror when the Klopeks, a suspiciously odd family, move in down the block. Enlisting the aid of his paranoid buddy, Art (Rick Ducommun), and his militia-man neighbor, Rumsfield (Bruce Dern), Ray sends his son and wife (Carrie Fisher) away on a trip while he investigates the Klopeks. When a neighbor disappears, Ray and his cohorts risk their lives to save their cul-de-sac from the clutches of evil.

 Ever since his mother signed him up for piano lessons, Thornton Cline has been writing non-stop. With over 1,000 published songs, THORNTON CLINE and Rhett talk about making music and the music businesshttp://thorntoncline.com/ Author / Songwriter / MusicianEver since his mother signed him up for piano lessons, Thornton Cline has been writing non-stop. With over 1,000 published songs, 150 recorded songs, 26 adult, young adult, and children's books published, Thornton Cline has been nominated multiple times for Grammy and Dove Awards. Cline's songs have appeared in TV and film. Cline has been honored with “Songwriter of the Year” twice in a row and received a platinum award for certified sales of over one million album units in Europe. He won the first place Maxy Literary Award 2017 for “Best Children's Young Adult Book”, and has had his songs recorded by Engelbert Humperdinck, Gloria Gaynor, Rebecca Holden, Gary Puckett, Tim Murphy, Ray Peterson, Tammy Trent, Billy and Sarah Gaines, The Anchormen, Amber Thompson, and Matt Newton among others. Many of Cline's tunes have appeared in the top of the charts. Cline continues to mentor, teach and inspire aspiring authors and songwriters all around the world as CEO/president of his publishing company, Clinetel Music. Cline is a regular speaker at the NAMM Winter and Summer shows and has been a guest speaker in music conferences, libraries, schools, on radio and TV shows, and colleges throughout the United States.  He was selected as a delegate from Nashville to speak at the Music Cities Convention held in Chengdu, China. Delegates from over 250 cities and 40 countries participated in the convention. Cline recently had two new songs recorded by Vanessa Hill and a soon-to-be announced Universal-label artist. Cline is an adjunct faculty member in music at Cumberland University, and Welch College.Turning Your Dream Smile Into Reality We are proud of the service we provide at Planes Dental Arts. Come see what we can do for you!Your JUNK MONKEYS are just a click away! Don't let your junk drive you bananas!

Ray Peterson and his bumbling neighbours take it upon themselves to investigate the strange new family that has moved onto Mayfield Place. Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/bsbargainbin Merch: https://www.redbubble.com/people/bsbargainbin/shop

Segundo programa dedicado al estupendo libro de Javier Lodin sobre la figura de Ángel Álvarez, "Música y leyenda: la historia del proyecto musical de Ángel Álvarez" (Editorial Piezas Azules). Empezamos con "Good vibrations" por Beach Boys Ayer os conté mi relación con el maestro y su aportación a esa etapa fundamental de la historia de la radio en España. Hoy doy paso al protagonista. Recuperamos un programa original del año 1960, que se emitía en La Voz de Madrid. Recordamos a Alvarez como un locutor no profesional de voz pausada y tranquila. Sin embargo en este documento se nos presenta muy bisoño e incluso algo altivo. Era el principio de su carrera, con los años moldearia su dicción haciéndola mas cálida y expresiva. Durante este extraordinario documento suenan, Duane Eddy, Paul Anka, Elvis Presley, Palito Ortega, Rod Lauren, The Browns, Wilma De Angelis y las sintonias de "Caravana" Luego os pongo su intervención cuarenta años mas tarde, en el acto de presentación del libro de Luis Miguel Pedrero, "La radio musical en España" al que eché una mano en la coordinación-edicion. Fue un 14 septiembre de 2000 en la sede de la SGAE. Terminamos con otro programa de "Caravana" también de 1960 (con la voz editada; recreado, no es original), donde suenan fragmentos de canciones interpretadas por Duane Eddy, Jim Reeves, Bobby Rydell, Ricky Nelson, Ray Peterson, The Drifters con Ben E.King, Elvis Presley, Sam Cooke, Brothers Four y Johnny y los Huracanes. En la despedida cometo un lapsus linguae con el nombre de la editorial. El nombre correcto es Editorial Piezas Azules. Escuchar audio

Tonight we explore the music of the musicians who played with Dylan on ROUGH AND ROWDY WAYS, released this past June. Some have have been playing with Dylan for decades and some joined him for the first time with this record, but they all came together to make something special. Each of them has a history and body of work that we explore in this episode. As we do each week, we round up news from the world of Bob Dylan in "20 Pounds of Headlines." In "Who Did It Better?" we ask you to go to our Twitter page @RainTrains and vote for who did "Corrina, Corrina" better: Ray Peterson, as produced by the late Phil Spector, or Bob Dylan off his second album?

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

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

Settling in for some time off in his suburban home, Ray Peterson's (Tom Hanks) vacation becomes a horror when the Klopeks, a suspiciously odd family, move in down the block. Enlisting the aid of his paranoid buddy, Art (Rick Ducommun), and his militia-man neighbor, Rumsfield (Bruce Dern), Ray sends his son and wife (Carrie Fisher) away on a trip while he investigates the Klopeks. When a neighbor disappears, Ray and his cohorts risk their lives to save their cul-de-sac from the clutches of evil.

Settling in for some time off in his suburban home, Ray Peterson's (Tom Hanks) vacation becomes a horror when the Klopeks, a suspiciously odd family, move in down the block. Enlisting the aid of his paranoid buddy, Art (Rick Ducommun), and his militia-man neighbor, Rumsfield (Bruce Dern), Ray sends his son and wife (Carrie Fisher) away on a trip while he investigates the Klopeks. When a neighbor disappears, Ray and his cohorts risk their lives to save their cul-de-sac from the clutches of evil.

Settling in for some time off in his suburban home, Ray Peterson's (Tom Hanks) vacation becomes a horror when the Klopeks, a suspiciously odd family, move in down the block. Enlisting the aid of his paranoid buddy, Art (Rick Ducommun), and his militia-man neighbor, Rumsfield (Bruce Dern), Ray sends his son and wife (Carrie Fisher) away on a trip while he investigates the Klopeks. When a neighbor disappears, Ray and his cohorts risk their lives to save their cul-de-sac from the clutches of evil. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tradepaperbacks/message --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/rangerryan/message

Oscar Wilde is credited with the quote, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery … ”. But in popular music, a cover version, remake, cover song, revival, or simply cover, is a new performance or recording by someone other than the original artist or composer of a song. Sometimes, a cover version can become even more popular than the original. Enjoy these 35 cover songs from the 1970s. Another musical exhibit from The Music Museum. Enjoy. **** Join the conversation on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100008232395712 **** or by email at dannymemorylane@gmail.com **** In this episode, you’ll hear: 1) Come Together [Cover of The Beatles' 1969 version] by Aerosmith 2) That'll Be The Day [Cover of Buddy Holly & The Crickets' 1957 version] by Linda Ronstadt 3) She's Not There [Cover of The Zombies' 1964 version] by Santana 4) Everlasting Love [Cover of Robert Knight's 1967 version] by Carl Carlton 5) You Really Got Me [Cover of The Kinks' 1964 version] by Van Halen 6) Ain't No Mountain High Enough [Cover of Marvin & Tammi's 1967 version] by Diana Ross 7) Handy Man [Cover of Jimmy Jones' 1960 version] by James Taylor 8) (I Know) I'm Losing You [Cover of The Temptations' 1966 version] by Rare Earth 9) He Don't Love You (Like I Love You) [Cover of Jerry Butler's 1960 version] by Tony Orlando & Dawn 10) Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds [Cover of The Beatles' 1967 version] by Elton John (with John Lennon, backing vocals) 11) Let's Work Together [Cover of Wilbert Harison's 1962 version] by Canned Heat 12) On Broadway [Cover of The Drifters' 1963 version] by George Benson 13) Spanish Harlem [Cover of Ben E. King's 1960 version] by Aretha Franklin 14) Ain't That A Shame [Cover of Fats Domino's 1955 version] by Cheap Trick 15) Only Sixteen [Cover of Sam Cooke's 1959 version] by Dr. Hook 16) Blue Bayou [Cover of Roy Orbison's 1963 version] by Linda Ronstadt 17) The Locomotion [Cover of Little Eva's 1962 version] by Grand Funk Railroad 18) Rockin' Robin [Cover of Bobby Day's 1958 version] by Michael Jackson 19) Maybe [Cover of The Chantels' 1958 version] by Janis Joplin 20) Roll Over Beethoven [Cover of Chuck Berry's 1956 version] by Electric Light Orchestra 21) Stand By Me [Cover of Ben E. King's 1961 version] by John Lennon 22) MacArthur Park [Cover of Richard Harris' 1968 version] by Donna Summer 23) Twistin' The Night Away [Cover of Sam Cooke's 1962 version] by Rod Stewart 24) Lookin' For A Love [Cover of The Valentinos' 1962 version] by The J. Geils Band 25) Knock On Wood [Cover of Eddie Floyd's 1966 version] by Amii Stewart 26) The Wonder Of You [Cover of Ray Peterson's 1959 version] by Elvis Presley 27) Gloria [Cover of Them's 1964 version] by Patti Smith 28) Hooked On A Feeling [Cover of B.J. Thomas's 1968 version] by Blue Swede 29) You're Sixteen (You're Beautiful And You're Mine) [Cover of Johnny Burnette's 1960 version] by Ringo Starr 30) Yes, I'm Ready [Cover of Barbara Mason's 1965 version] by Teri DeSario with K.C. 31) Another Saturday Night [Cover of Sam Cooke's 1963 version] by Cat Stevens 32) You're No Good [Cover of Dee Dee Warwick's 1963 version] by Linda Ronstadt 33) I Fought The Law [Cover of Bobby Fuller Four's 1966 version] by The Clash 34) Mockingbird [Cover of Inez & Charlie Foxx's 1963 version] by Carly Simon & James Taylor 35) Love Hurts [Cover of The Everly Brothers' 1960 version] by Nazareth

The Danny Lane Music Museum is an institution that conserves a collection of artifacts and other objects of musical and historical importance. Ordinary museums make these items available for public viewing through exhibits that may be permanent or temporary. The Danny Lane Music Museum is for listening and remembering the great rock & roll music of the past. There are many large museums located in major cities throughout the world, while thousands of local museums exist in smaller cities, towns, and rural areas. This museum is a global effort. We are available around the world and at any time you want. Ordinary museums have varying aims, ranging from serving researchers and specialists to serving the general public. We serve the world. Enjoy - - - - Join the conversation on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100008232395712 or by email at dannymemorylane@gmail.com - - - - You’ll hear: 1) Those Oldies But Goodies (Remind Me Of You) by Nino & The Ebb Tides (1961) 2) Jenny Take A Ride! by Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels (1965) 3) The Wanderer by Dion (1962) 4) The Locomotion by Little Eva (1962) 5) Nag by The Halos (1961) 6) Sorry (I Ran All The Way Home) by The Impalas (1959) 7) I Understand (Just How You Feel) by The G-Clefs (1961) 8) La Bamba by Ritchie Valens (1958) 9) You Don't Know What You've Got (Until You Lose It) by Ral Donner (1961) 10) Pretty Girls Everywhere by Eugene Church & The Fellows (1958) 11) Barbara-Ann by The Regents (1961) 12) Dance by the Light of the Moon by The Olympics (1961) 13) Hey Paula by Paul & Paula (1963) 14) My True Story by The Jive Five (w/ Eugene Pitt) (1961) 15) Little Latin Lupe Lu by The Righteous Brothers (1962) 16) Cry to Me by Solomon Burke (1962) 17) Air Travel by Ray & Bob (1962) 18) Rock 'n' Roll Music by Chuck Berry (1957) 19) She's Got You by Patsy Cline (1961) 20) I Like It Like That by The Dave Clark Five (1965) 21) Guess Who by Jesse Belvin (1959) 22) Let Me In by The Sensations (1962) 23) Willie And The Hand Jive by The Johnny Otis Show (1958) 24) Tired Of Waiting For You by The Kinks (1965) 25) Summertime, Summertime by The Jamies (1958) 26) Bongo Rock by Preston Epps (1959) 27) Bye Bye Johnny by The Rolling Stones (1964) 28) Shout (Parts 1 & 2) by The Isley Brothers (1959) 29) Travelin' Man by Ricky Nelson (1961) 30) Let's Have A Party by Wanda Jackson (1959) 31) Hey Little One by Dorsey Burnette (1960) 32) We Got Love by Bobby Rydell (1959) 33) Roll Over Beethoven by The Beatles (1964) 34) Love Hurts by The Everly Brothers (1960) 35) Over and Over by Bobby Day (1958) 36) She Belongs to Me by Bob Dylan (1965) 37) This Time by Troy Shondell (1961) 38) Beechwood 4-5789 by The Marvelettes (1962) 39) A Summer Song by Chad & Jeremy (1964) 40) You Cheated by The Shields (1958) 41) Girls On The Beach by The Beach Boys (1965) 42) Tiger by Fabian (1959) 43) The Lion Sleeps Tonight (Wimoweh) by The Tokens (1961) 44) The Joker (That's what they call me) by Billy Myles (1957) 45) All In My Mind by Maxine Brown (1961) 46) Little Sister by Elvis Presley (1961) 47) Goodnight My Love (Pleasant Dreams) by Ray Peterson (1959) 48) Last Night by The Mar-Keys (1961)

JackoLanternPress.com’s Michael Picarella and Tom Picarella celebrate the Sunday Movie Night with Matt Douglas and Greg Douglas from Nightmare365. The movie: “The ‘BURBS.” -Nightmare365 music is their own and by Kevin Macleod. More from Mr. Macleod at: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSZXFhRIx6b0dFX3xS8L1yQ “Spooky” music track at 01:48:09 is by Andrew G. Check out more of his work at: http://bit.ly/andrewg_portfolio SHOW HIGHLIGHTS: According to IMDb, it’s debated when the film actually takes place. Ray Peterson mentions how he doesn't want to sit in “holiday traffic” during his argument with Carol. During the scene when they break into Walter’s house out of concern for his well-being, you can clearly see a June, 1989 calendar hanging on the wall. We can assume the film takes place either the week of Memorial Day (Mon., May 29, 1989), or the week leading up to the July 4th, which fell on the first Tuesday of July.) The movie takes place over five days. Here are the two holiday scenarios: MEMORIAL DAY Opens Sun., May 28 with Ray witnessing strange happenings in basement. Mon., May 29 (everyone off, except Chemlawn truck folks, mention of holiday traffic) Tues., May 30 (trash day, go into Walter’s house, Walt ahead on the calendar in his house) Wed., May 31 (brownies) Thurs., June 1 (big day) FOURTH OF JULY Opens Sat., July 1 Sun., July 2 (everyone off, except Chemlawn truck folks, mention of holiday traffic) Mon., July 3 (trash day, go into Walter’s house, Walt behind on the calendar in his house) Tues., July 4 (brownies) Wed., July 5 (big day) Discussion Points & Further Research: -Real grave robbers: https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/culture/2012/oct/17/exhibition-grave-robbers-medical-science -Weather conspiracy theories: https://observer.com/2018/05/why-do-people-believe-in-weather-conspiracy-theories-like-chemtrails/ -Real life gateways to Hell: https://www.ranker.com/list/hellmouths-on-earth/harrison-tenpas -“Curse of the Demon” full movie: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x21hmso -Real succubus cases: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6198602/ -Real incubus story: https://www.amazon.com/Stalked-Demon-Real-Life-Encounters-Incubus-ebook/dp/B07H2S66FF -Nightmare365: Nightmare365.com -Monster Revolution Group on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/MonsterRevolution/ -Our Book: https://www.amazon.com/Transylveinya-Traveler-Monsters-Werewolves-Scientists/dp/1096544717/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=transylveinya+traveler&qid=1564620032&s=gateway&sr=8-1 -Pumpkin Hotline: 323-761-0276 For more info, go to JackoLanternPress.com

Episode eighty-one of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Shout” by the Isley Brothers, and the beginnings of a career that would lead to six decades of hit singles. 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 “Tell Laura I Love Her” by Ray Peterson. 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.   Amazingly, there are no books on the Isley Brothers, unless you count a seventy-two page self-published pamphlet by Rudolph Isley’s daughter, so I’ve had to piece this together from literally dozens of different sources. The ones I relied on most were this section of a very long article on Richie Barrett, this interview with Ronald Isley, and Icons of R&B and Soul by Bob Gulla.  The information on Hugo and Luigi comes mostly from two books — Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke by Peter Guralnick, and  Godfather of the Music Business: Morris Levy by Richard Carlin. There are many compilations of the public-domain recordings of the Isleys. This one seems the most complete. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today we’re going to take one of our rare looks — at this point in the story anyway — at an act that is still touring today. Indeed, when I started writing this script back in February, I started by saying that I would soon be seeing them live in concert, as I have a ticket for an Isley Brothers show in a couple of months. Of course, events have overtaken that, and it’s extremely unlikely that anyone will be going to any shows then, but it shows a fundamental difference between the Isley Brothers and most of the other acts we’ve looked at, as even those who are still active now mostly concentrate on performing locally rather than doing international tours playing major venues. Of course, the version of the Isley Brothers touring today isn’t quite the same as the group from the 1950s, but Ronald Isley, the group’s lead singer, remains in the group — and, indeed, has remained artistically relevant, with collaborations with several prominent hip-hop artists. The Isleys had top forty hits in the sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties, and two thousands, and as recently as 2006 they had an album go to number one on the R&B charts. But today, we’re going to look back at the group’s very first hit, from 1959. [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “Shout”] The Isley Brothers were destined to be a vocal group even before they were born, indeed even before their parents were married. When O’Kelly Isley senior was discussing his marriage proposal with his future in-laws, he told his father-in-law-to-be that he intended to have four sons, and that they were going to be the next Mills Brothers. Isley Sr had been a vaudeville performer himself, and as with so many family groups the Isleys seem to have gone into the music business more to please their parents than because they wanted to do it themselves. As it turned out, O’Kelly and Sallye Isley had six children, all boys, and the eldest four of them did indeed form a vocal group. Like many black vocal groups in the early fifties, they were a gospel group, and O’Kelly Jr, Rudolph, Ronald, and Vernon Isley started performing around the churches in Cincinnati as teenagers, having been trained by their parents. They appeared on Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour, the popular TV talent show which launched the careers of many entertainers, and won — their prize was a jewelled watch, which the boys would take turns wearing. But then tragedy struck. Vernon, the youngest of the four singing Isleys, and the one who was generally considered to be far and away the most talented singer in the group, was hit by a car and killed while he was riding his bike, aged only thirteen. The boys were, as one would imagine, devastated by the death of their little brother, and they also thought that that should be the end of their singing career, as Vernon had been their lead singer. It would be two years before they would perform live again. By all accounts, their parents put pressure on them during that time, telling them that it would be the only way to pay respect to Vernon. Eventually a compromise was reached between parents and brothers — Ron agreed that he would attempt to sing lead, if in turn the group could stop singing gospel music and start singing doo-wop songs, like the brothers’ favourite act Billy Ward and the Dominoes. We’ve talked before about how Billy Ward & The Dominoes were a huge influence on the music that became soul, with hit records like “Have Mercy Baby”: [Excerpt: Billy Ward and the Dominoes, “Have Mercy Baby”] Both Ward’s original lead singer Clyde McPhatter and McPhatter’s later replacement Jackie Wilson sang in a style that owed a lot to the church music that the young Isleys had also been performing, and so it was natural for them to make the change to singing in the style of the Dominoes. As soon as Ronald Isley started singing lead, people started making comparisons both to McPhatter and to Wilson. Indeed, Ronald has talked about McPhatter as being something of a mentor figure for the brothers, teaching them how to sing, although it’s never been clear exactly at what point in their career they got to know McPhatter. But their real mentor was a much less well-known singer, Beulah Bryant. The three eldest Isley brothers, O’Kelly, Rudolph, and Ronald, met Bryant on the bus to New York, where they were travelling to try and seek their fortunes. Bryant was one of the many professional blues shouters who never became hugely well known, but who managed to have a moderately successful career from the fifties through to the eighties, mostly in live performances, though she did make a handful of very listenable records: [Excerpt: Beulah Bryant, “What Am I Gonna Do?”] When they got to New York, while they had paid in advance for somewhere to stay, they were robbed on their second day in the city and had no money at all. But Bryant had contacts in the music industry, and started making phone calls for her young proteges, trying to get them bookings. At first she was unsuccessful, and the group just hung around the Harlem Apollo and occasionally performed at their amateur nights. Eventually, though, Bryant got Nat Nazzaro to listen to them over the phone. Nazzaro was known as “the monster agent” — he was one of the most important booking agents in New York, but he wasn’t exactly fair to his young clients. He would book a three-person act, but on the contracts the act would consist of four people — Nazzaro would be the fourth person, and he would get an equal share of the performance money, as well as getting his normal booking agent’s share. Nazzaro listened to the Isleys over the phone, and then he insisted they come and see him in person, because he was convinced that they had been playing a record down the phone rather than singing to him live. When he found out they really did sound like that, Nazzaro started getting them the kind of bookings they could only dream of — they went from having no money at all to playing on Broadway for $750 a week, and then playing the Apollo for $950 a week, at least according to O’Kelly Isley Jr’s later recollection. This was an astonishing sum of money to a bunch of teenagers in the late 1950s. But they still hadn’t made a record, and their sets were based on cover versions of songs by other people, things like “Rock and Roll Waltz” by Kay Starr: [Excerpt: Kay Starr, “Rock and Roll Waltz”] It was hardly the kind of material they would later become famous for. And nor was their first record. They had signed to a label called Teenage Records, a tiny label owned by two former musicians, Bill “Bass” Gordon and Ben Smith. As you might imagine, there were a lot of musicians named Ben Smith and it’s quite difficult to sort out which was which — even Marv Goldberg, who normally knows these things, seems confused about which Ben Smith this was, describing him as a singer on one page and a sax player on another page. As Ben Smith the sax player seems to have played on some records for Teenage, it was probably him, in which case this Ben Smith probably also played alto sax for Lucky Millinder’s band and wrote the hit “I Dreamed I Dwelt in Harlem” for Glenn Miller: [Excerpt: The Glenn Miller Orchestra, “I Dreamed I Dwelt in Harlem”] It’s more certain exactly who Bill “Bass” Gordon was — he was the leader of Bill “Bass” Gordon and the Colonials, who had recorded the doo-wop track “Two Loves Have I”: [Excerpt: Bill “Bass” Gordon and the Colonials, “Two Loves Have I”] Smith and Gordon signed the Isley Brothers to Teenage Records, and in June 1957 the first Isley Brothers single, “Angels Cried”, came out: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “Angels Cried”] Unfortunately, the single didn’t have any real success, and the group decided that they wanted to record for a better label. According to O’Kelly Isley they got some resistance from Teenage Records, who claimed to have them under contract — but the Isley Brothers knew better. They had signed a contract, certainly, but then the contract had just been left on a desk after they’d signed it, rather than being filed, and they’d swiped it from the desk when no-one was looking. Teenage didn’t have a copy of the contract, so had no proof that they had ever signed the Isley Brothers, and the brothers were free to move on to another label. They chose to sign to Gone Records, one of the family of labels that was owned and run by George Goldner. Goldner assigned Richie Barrett, his talent scout, producer, and arranger, to look after the Isleys, as he had previously done with Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers and the Chantels, as well as his own group the Valentines: [The Valentines, “The Woo Woo Train”] By this point, Barrett had established an almost production-line method of making records. He would block-book a studio and some backing musicians for up to twenty-four hours, get as many as ten different vocal groups into the studio, and record dozens of tracks in a row, usually songs written by either group members or by Barrett. The Isleys’ first record with Barrett, “Don’t Be Jealous”, was a fairly standard doo-wop ballad, written by Ron Isley: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “Don’t Be Jealous”] There’s some suggestion that Barrett is also singing on that recording with the group — it certainly sounds like there are four voices on there, not just three. Either way, the song doesn’t show much of the style that the Isley Brothers would later make their own. Much more like their later recordings was the B-side, another Ronald Isley song, which could have been a classic in the Coasters’ mould had it not been for the lyrics, which were an attempt at a hip rewriting of “Old McDonald”: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “Rockin’ McDonald”] They were nearly there, but not quite. The next single, “I Wanna Know”, came closer — you can hear they were clearly trying to incorporate elements of other people’s successful records — Ronald Isley’s vocal owes a lot to Little Richard, while the piano playing has the same piano “ripping” that Jerry Lee Lewis had made his own. But you can also hear the style that would make them famous coming to the fore. But they were not selling records, and Richie Barrett was stretched very thin. A few more singles were released on Gone (often pairing a previously-released track with a new B-side) but nothing was successful enough to justify them staying on with Goldner’s label. But just as they’d moved from a micro-indie label to a large indie without having had any success, now they were going to move from a large indie to a major label, still not having had a hit. They took one of their records to Hugo and Luigi at RCA records, and the duo signed them up. Hugo and Luigi were strange, strange, figures in popular music in the 1950s. They were two cousins, Hugo Peretti and Luigi Creatore, who were always known by their first names, and had started out making children’s records before being hired by Mercury Records, where they would produce, among other things, the cover versions by Georgia Gibbs of black records that we’ve talked about previously, and which were both ethically and musically appalling: [Excerpt: Georgia Gibbs, “Dance With Me Henry”] After a couple of years of consistently producing hits, they got tempted away from Mercury by Morris Levy, who was setting up a new label, Roulette, with George Goldner and Alan Freed. Goldner and Freed quickly dropped out of the label, but Hugo and Luigi ended up having a fifty percent stake in the new label. While they were there, they showed they didn’t really get rock and roll music at all — they produced follow-up singles by a lot of acts who’d had hits before they started working with Hugo and Luigi, but stopped as soon as the duo started producing them, like Frankie Lymon: [Excerpt: Frankie Lymon, “Goodie Goodie”] But they still managed to produce a string of hits like “Honeycomb” by Jimmie Rodgers (who is not either the blues singer or the country singer of the same name), which went to number one: [Excerpt: Jimmie Rogers, “Honeycomb”] And they also recorded their own tracks for Roulette, like the instrumental Cha-Hua-Hua: [Excerpt: Hugo and Luigi, “Cha-Hua-Hua”] After a year or so with Roulette, they were in turn poached by RCA — Morris Levy let them go so long as they gave up their shares in Roulette for far less than they were worth. At RCA they continued their own recording career, with records like “Just Come Home”: [Excerpt: Hugo and Luigi, “Just Come Home”] They also produced several albums for Perry Como. So you would think that they would be precisely the wrong producers for the Isley Brothers. And the first record they made with the trio would tend to suggest that there was at least some creative difference there. “I’m Gonna Knock on Your Door” was written by Aaron Schroeder and Sid Wayne, two people who are best known for writing some of the less interesting songs for Elvis’ films, and has a generic, lightweight, backing track — apart from an interestingly meaty guitar part. The vocals have some power to them, and the record is pleasant, and in some ways even ground-breaking — it doesn’t sound like a late fifties record as much as it does an early sixties one, and one could imagine, say, Gerry and the Pacemakers making a substantially identical record. But it falls between the stools of R&B and pop, and doesn’t quite convince as either: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “I’m Gonna Knock on Your Door”] That combination of a poppy background and soulful vocals would soon bear a lot of fruit for another artist Hugo and Luigi were going to start working with, but it didn’t quite work for the Isleys yet. But their second single for RCA was far more successful. At this point the Isleys were a more successful live act than recording act, and they would mostly perform songs by other people, and one song they performed regularly was “Lonely Teardrops”, the song that Berry and Gwen Gordy and Roquel Davis had written for Jackie Wilson: [Excerpt: Jackie Wilson, “Lonely Teardrops”] The group would perform that at the end of their shows, and they started to extend it, with Ron Isley improvising as the band vamped behind him, starting with the line “say you will” from Wilson’s song. He’d start doing a call and response with his brothers, singing a line and getting them to sing the response “Shout”. These improvised, extended, endings to the song got longer and longer, and got the crowds more and more excited, and they started incorporating elements from Ray Charles records, too, especially “What’d I Say” and “I Got a Woman”. When they got back to New York at the end of the tour, they told Hugo and Luigi how well these performances, which they still thought of as just long performances of “Lonely Teardrops”, had gone. The producers suggested that if they went down that well, what they should do is cut out the part that was still “Lonely Teardrops” and just perform the extended tag. As it turned out, they kept in a little of “Lonely Teardrops” — the “Say you will, say you will” line — and the resulting song, like Ray Charles’ similar call-and-response based “What’d I Say”, was split over two sides of a single, as “Shout (Parts One and Two)”: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “Shout (Parts One and Two)”] That was nothing like anything that Hugo and Luigi had ever produced before, and it became the Isley Brothers’ first chart hit, reaching number forty-seven. More importantly for them, the song was credited to the three brothers, so they made money from the cover versions of the song that charted much higher. In the USA, Joey Dee and the Starliters made number six in 1962 with their version: [Excerpt: Joey Dee and the Starliters, “Shout”] In the UK, Lulu and the Luvvers made number seven in 1964: [Excerpt: Lulu and the Luvvers, “Shout”] And in Australia, Johnny O’Keefe released his version only a month after the Isleys released theirs, and reached number two: [Excerpt: Johnny O’Keefe, “Shout”] Despite all these cover versions, the Isleys’ version remains the definitive one, and itself ended up selling over a million copies, though it never broke into the top forty. It was certainly successful enough that it made sense to record an album. Unfortunately, for the album, also titled Shout!, the old Hugo and Luigi style came out, and apart from one new Isleys original, “Respectable”, which became their next single, the rest of the album was made up of old standards, rearranged in the “Shout!” style. Sometimes, this almost worked, as on “Ring-A-Ling A-Ling (Let The Wedding Bells Ring)”, whose words are close enough to Little Richard-style gibberish that Ronald Isley could scream them effectively. But when the Isleys take on Irving Berlin’s “How Deep is the Ocean” or “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands”, neither the song nor the group are improved by the combination. They released several more singles on RCA, but none of them repeated the success of “Shout!”. At this point they moved across to Atlantic, where they started working with Leiber and Stoller. Leiber and Stoller kept them recording old standards as B-sides, but for the A-sides they went back to gospel-infused soul party songs, like the Leiber and Stoller song “Teach Me How To Shimmy” and the Isleys’ own “Standing On The Dance Floor”, a rewrite of an old gospel song called “Standing at the Judgment”: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “Standing on the Dance Floor”] But none of these songs scraped even the bottom of the charts, and the brothers ended up leaving Atlantic after a year, and signing with a tiny label, Scepter. After having moved from a tiny indie label to a large indie to a major label, they had now moved back down from their major label to a large indie to a tiny indie. They were still a great live act, but they appeared to be a one-hit wonder. But all that was about to change, when they recorded a cover version of a flop single inspired by their one hit, combined with a dance craze. The Isley Brothers were about to make one of the most important records of the 1960s, but “Twist and Shout” is a story for another time.  

Episode eighty-one of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Shout" by the Isley Brothers, and the beginnings of a career that would lead to six decades of hit singles. 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 "Tell Laura I Love Her" by Ray Peterson. 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.   Amazingly, there are no books on the Isley Brothers, unless you count a seventy-two page self-published pamphlet by Rudolph Isley's daughter, so I've had to piece this together from literally dozens of different sources. The ones I relied on most were this section of a very long article on Richie Barrett, this interview with Ronald Isley, and Icons of R&B and Soul by Bob Gulla.  The information on Hugo and Luigi comes mostly from two books -- Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke by Peter Guralnick, and  Godfather of the Music Business: Morris Levy by Richard Carlin. There are many compilations of the public-domain recordings of the Isleys. This one seems the most complete. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today we're going to take one of our rare looks -- at this point in the story anyway -- at an act that is still touring today. Indeed, when I started writing this script back in February, I started by saying that I would soon be seeing them live in concert, as I have a ticket for an Isley Brothers show in a couple of months. Of course, events have overtaken that, and it's extremely unlikely that anyone will be going to any shows then, but it shows a fundamental difference between the Isley Brothers and most of the other acts we've looked at, as even those who are still active now mostly concentrate on performing locally rather than doing international tours playing major venues. Of course, the version of the Isley Brothers touring today isn't quite the same as the group from the 1950s, but Ronald Isley, the group's lead singer, remains in the group -- and, indeed, has remained artistically relevant, with collaborations with several prominent hip-hop artists. The Isleys had top forty hits in the sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties, and two thousands, and as recently as 2006 they had an album go to number one on the R&B charts. But today, we're going to look back at the group's very first hit, from 1959. [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, "Shout"] The Isley Brothers were destined to be a vocal group even before they were born, indeed even before their parents were married. When O'Kelly Isley senior was discussing his marriage proposal with his future in-laws, he told his father-in-law-to-be that he intended to have four sons, and that they were going to be the next Mills Brothers. Isley Sr had been a vaudeville performer himself, and as with so many family groups the Isleys seem to have gone into the music business more to please their parents than because they wanted to do it themselves. As it turned out, O'Kelly and Sallye Isley had six children, all boys, and the eldest four of them did indeed form a vocal group. Like many black vocal groups in the early fifties, they were a gospel group, and O'Kelly Jr, Rudolph, Ronald, and Vernon Isley started performing around the churches in Cincinnati as teenagers, having been trained by their parents. They appeared on Ted Mack's Amateur Hour, the popular TV talent show which launched the careers of many entertainers, and won -- their prize was a jewelled watch, which the boys would take turns wearing. But then tragedy struck. Vernon, the youngest of the four singing Isleys, and the one who was generally considered to be far and away the most talented singer in the group, was hit by a car and killed while he was riding his bike, aged only thirteen. The boys were, as one would imagine, devastated by the death of their little brother, and they also thought that that should be the end of their singing career, as Vernon had been their lead singer. It would be two years before they would perform live again. By all accounts, their parents put pressure on them during that time, telling them that it would be the only way to pay respect to Vernon. Eventually a compromise was reached between parents and brothers -- Ron agreed that he would attempt to sing lead, if in turn the group could stop singing gospel music and start singing doo-wop songs, like the brothers' favourite act Billy Ward and the Dominoes. We've talked before about how Billy Ward & The Dominoes were a huge influence on the music that became soul, with hit records like "Have Mercy Baby": [Excerpt: Billy Ward and the Dominoes, "Have Mercy Baby"] Both Ward's original lead singer Clyde McPhatter and McPhatter's later replacement Jackie Wilson sang in a style that owed a lot to the church music that the young Isleys had also been performing, and so it was natural for them to make the change to singing in the style of the Dominoes. As soon as Ronald Isley started singing lead, people started making comparisons both to McPhatter and to Wilson. Indeed, Ronald has talked about McPhatter as being something of a mentor figure for the brothers, teaching them how to sing, although it's never been clear exactly at what point in their career they got to know McPhatter. But their real mentor was a much less well-known singer, Beulah Bryant. The three eldest Isley brothers, O'Kelly, Rudolph, and Ronald, met Bryant on the bus to New York, where they were travelling to try and seek their fortunes. Bryant was one of the many professional blues shouters who never became hugely well known, but who managed to have a moderately successful career from the fifties through to the eighties, mostly in live performances, though she did make a handful of very listenable records: [Excerpt: Beulah Bryant, "What Am I Gonna Do?"] When they got to New York, while they had paid in advance for somewhere to stay, they were robbed on their second day in the city and had no money at all. But Bryant had contacts in the music industry, and started making phone calls for her young proteges, trying to get them bookings. At first she was unsuccessful, and the group just hung around the Harlem Apollo and occasionally performed at their amateur nights. Eventually, though, Bryant got Nat Nazzaro to listen to them over the phone. Nazzaro was known as "the monster agent" -- he was one of the most important booking agents in New York, but he wasn't exactly fair to his young clients. He would book a three-person act, but on the contracts the act would consist of four people -- Nazzaro would be the fourth person, and he would get an equal share of the performance money, as well as getting his normal booking agent's share. Nazzaro listened to the Isleys over the phone, and then he insisted they come and see him in person, because he was convinced that they had been playing a record down the phone rather than singing to him live. When he found out they really did sound like that, Nazzaro started getting them the kind of bookings they could only dream of -- they went from having no money at all to playing on Broadway for $750 a week, and then playing the Apollo for $950 a week, at least according to O'Kelly Isley Jr's later recollection. This was an astonishing sum of money to a bunch of teenagers in the late 1950s. But they still hadn't made a record, and their sets were based on cover versions of songs by other people, things like "Rock and Roll Waltz" by Kay Starr: [Excerpt: Kay Starr, "Rock and Roll Waltz"] It was hardly the kind of material they would later become famous for. And nor was their first record. They had signed to a label called Teenage Records, a tiny label owned by two former musicians, Bill "Bass" Gordon and Ben Smith. As you might imagine, there were a lot of musicians named Ben Smith and it's quite difficult to sort out which was which -- even Marv Goldberg, who normally knows these things, seems confused about which Ben Smith this was, describing him as a singer on one page and a sax player on another page. As Ben Smith the sax player seems to have played on some records for Teenage, it was probably him, in which case this Ben Smith probably also played alto sax for Lucky Millinder's band and wrote the hit "I Dreamed I Dwelt in Harlem" for Glenn Miller: [Excerpt: The Glenn Miller Orchestra, "I Dreamed I Dwelt in Harlem"] It's more certain exactly who Bill "Bass" Gordon was -- he was the leader of Bill "Bass" Gordon and the Colonials, who had recorded the doo-wop track "Two Loves Have I": [Excerpt: Bill "Bass" Gordon and the Colonials, "Two Loves Have I"] Smith and Gordon signed the Isley Brothers to Teenage Records, and in June 1957 the first Isley Brothers single, "Angels Cried", came out: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, "Angels Cried"] Unfortunately, the single didn't have any real success, and the group decided that they wanted to record for a better label. According to O'Kelly Isley they got some resistance from Teenage Records, who claimed to have them under contract -- but the Isley Brothers knew better. They had signed a contract, certainly, but then the contract had just been left on a desk after they'd signed it, rather than being filed, and they'd swiped it from the desk when no-one was looking. Teenage didn't have a copy of the contract, so had no proof that they had ever signed the Isley Brothers, and the brothers were free to move on to another label. They chose to sign to Gone Records, one of the family of labels that was owned and run by George Goldner. Goldner assigned Richie Barrett, his talent scout, producer, and arranger, to look after the Isleys, as he had previously done with Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers and the Chantels, as well as his own group the Valentines: [The Valentines, "The Woo Woo Train"] By this point, Barrett had established an almost production-line method of making records. He would block-book a studio and some backing musicians for up to twenty-four hours, get as many as ten different vocal groups into the studio, and record dozens of tracks in a row, usually songs written by either group members or by Barrett. The Isleys' first record with Barrett, "Don't Be Jealous", was a fairly standard doo-wop ballad, written by Ron Isley: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, "Don't Be Jealous"] There's some suggestion that Barrett is also singing on that recording with the group -- it certainly sounds like there are four voices on there, not just three. Either way, the song doesn't show much of the style that the Isley Brothers would later make their own. Much more like their later recordings was the B-side, another Ronald Isley song, which could have been a classic in the Coasters' mould had it not been for the lyrics, which were an attempt at a hip rewriting of "Old McDonald": [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, "Rockin' McDonald"] They were nearly there, but not quite. The next single, "I Wanna Know", came closer -- you can hear they were clearly trying to incorporate elements of other people's successful records -- Ronald Isley's vocal owes a lot to Little Richard, while the piano playing has the same piano "ripping" that Jerry Lee Lewis had made his own. But you can also hear the style that would make them famous coming to the fore. But they were not selling records, and Richie Barrett was stretched very thin. A few more singles were released on Gone (often pairing a previously-released track with a new B-side) but nothing was successful enough to justify them staying on with Goldner's label. But just as they'd moved from a micro-indie label to a large indie without having had any success, now they were going to move from a large indie to a major label, still not having had a hit. They took one of their records to Hugo and Luigi at RCA records, and the duo signed them up. Hugo and Luigi were strange, strange, figures in popular music in the 1950s. They were two cousins, Hugo Peretti and Luigi Creatore, who were always known by their first names, and had started out making children's records before being hired by Mercury Records, where they would produce, among other things, the cover versions by Georgia Gibbs of black records that we've talked about previously, and which were both ethically and musically appalling: [Excerpt: Georgia Gibbs, "Dance With Me Henry"] After a couple of years of consistently producing hits, they got tempted away from Mercury by Morris Levy, who was setting up a new label, Roulette, with George Goldner and Alan Freed. Goldner and Freed quickly dropped out of the label, but Hugo and Luigi ended up having a fifty percent stake in the new label. While they were there, they showed they didn't really get rock and roll music at all -- they produced follow-up singles by a lot of acts who'd had hits before they started working with Hugo and Luigi, but stopped as soon as the duo started producing them, like Frankie Lymon: [Excerpt: Frankie Lymon, "Goodie Goodie"] But they still managed to produce a string of hits like "Honeycomb" by Jimmie Rodgers (who is not either the blues singer or the country singer of the same name), which went to number one: [Excerpt: Jimmie Rogers, "Honeycomb"] And they also recorded their own tracks for Roulette, like the instrumental Cha-Hua-Hua: [Excerpt: Hugo and Luigi, "Cha-Hua-Hua"] After a year or so with Roulette, they were in turn poached by RCA -- Morris Levy let them go so long as they gave up their shares in Roulette for far less than they were worth. At RCA they continued their own recording career, with records like "Just Come Home": [Excerpt: Hugo and Luigi, "Just Come Home"] They also produced several albums for Perry Como. So you would think that they would be precisely the wrong producers for the Isley Brothers. And the first record they made with the trio would tend to suggest that there was at least some creative difference there. "I'm Gonna Knock on Your Door" was written by Aaron Schroeder and Sid Wayne, two people who are best known for writing some of the less interesting songs for Elvis' films, and has a generic, lightweight, backing track -- apart from an interestingly meaty guitar part. The vocals have some power to them, and the record is pleasant, and in some ways even ground-breaking -- it doesn't sound like a late fifties record as much as it does an early sixties one, and one could imagine, say, Gerry and the Pacemakers making a substantially identical record. But it falls between the stools of R&B and pop, and doesn't quite convince as either: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, "I'm Gonna Knock on Your Door"] That combination of a poppy background and soulful vocals would soon bear a lot of fruit for another artist Hugo and Luigi were going to start working with, but it didn't quite work for the Isleys yet. But their second single for RCA was far more successful. At this point the Isleys were a more successful live act than recording act, and they would mostly perform songs by other people, and one song they performed regularly was "Lonely Teardrops", the song that Berry and Gwen Gordy and Roquel Davis had written for Jackie Wilson: [Excerpt: Jackie Wilson, "Lonely Teardrops"] The group would perform that at the end of their shows, and they started to extend it, with Ron Isley improvising as the band vamped behind him, starting with the line "say you will" from Wilson's song. He'd start doing a call and response with his brothers, singing a line and getting them to sing the response "Shout". These improvised, extended, endings to the song got longer and longer, and got the crowds more and more excited, and they started incorporating elements from Ray Charles records, too, especially "What'd I Say" and "I Got a Woman". When they got back to New York at the end of the tour, they told Hugo and Luigi how well these performances, which they still thought of as just long performances of "Lonely Teardrops", had gone. The producers suggested that if they went down that well, what they should do is cut out the part that was still "Lonely Teardrops" and just perform the extended tag. As it turned out, they kept in a little of "Lonely Teardrops" -- the "Say you will, say you will" line -- and the resulting song, like Ray Charles' similar call-and-response based "What'd I Say", was split over two sides of a single, as "Shout (Parts One and Two)": [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, "Shout (Parts One and Two)"] That was nothing like anything that Hugo and Luigi had ever produced before, and it became the Isley Brothers' first chart hit, reaching number forty-seven. More importantly for them, the song was credited to the three brothers, so they made money from the cover versions of the song that charted much higher. In the USA, Joey Dee and the Starliters made number six in 1962 with their version: [Excerpt: Joey Dee and the Starliters, "Shout"] In the UK, Lulu and the Luvvers made number seven in 1964: [Excerpt: Lulu and the Luvvers, "Shout"] And in Australia, Johnny O'Keefe released his version only a month after the Isleys released theirs, and reached number two: [Excerpt: Johnny O'Keefe, "Shout"] Despite all these cover versions, the Isleys' version remains the definitive one, and itself ended up selling over a million copies, though it never broke into the top forty. It was certainly successful enough that it made sense to record an album. Unfortunately, for the album, also titled Shout!, the old Hugo and Luigi style came out, and apart from one new Isleys original, "Respectable", which became their next single, the rest of the album was made up of old standards, rearranged in the "Shout!" style. Sometimes, this almost worked, as on "Ring-A-Ling A-Ling (Let The Wedding Bells Ring)", whose words are close enough to Little Richard-style gibberish that Ronald Isley could scream them effectively. But when the Isleys take on Irving Berlin's "How Deep is the Ocean" or "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands", neither the song nor the group are improved by the combination. They released several more singles on RCA, but none of them repeated the success of "Shout!". At this point they moved across to Atlantic, where they started working with Leiber and Stoller. Leiber and Stoller kept them recording old standards as B-sides, but for the A-sides they went back to gospel-infused soul party songs, like the Leiber and Stoller song "Teach Me How To Shimmy" and the Isleys' own "Standing On The Dance Floor", a rewrite of an old gospel song called "Standing at the Judgment": [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, "Standing on the Dance Floor"] But none of these songs scraped even the bottom of the charts, and the brothers ended up leaving Atlantic after a year, and signing with a tiny label, Scepter. After having moved from a tiny indie label to a large indie to a major label, they had now moved back down from their major label to a large indie to a tiny indie. They were still a great live act, but they appeared to be a one-hit wonder. But all that was about to change, when they recorded a cover version of a flop single inspired by their one hit, combined with a dance craze. The Isley Brothers were about to make one of the most important records of the 1960s, but "Twist and Shout" is a story for another time.  

Episode eighty-one of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Shout” by the Isley Brothers, and the beginnings of a career that would lead to six decades of hit singles. 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 “Tell Laura I Love Her” by Ray Peterson. 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.   Amazingly, there are no books on the Isley Brothers, unless you count a seventy-two page self-published pamphlet by Rudolph Isley’s daughter, so I’ve had to piece this together from literally dozens of different sources. The ones I relied on most were this section of a very long article on Richie Barrett, this interview with Ronald Isley, and Icons of R&B and Soul by Bob Gulla.  The information on Hugo and Luigi comes mostly from two books — Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke by Peter Guralnick, and  Godfather of the Music Business: Morris Levy by Richard Carlin. There are many compilations of the public-domain recordings of the Isleys. This one seems the most complete. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today we’re going to take one of our rare looks — at this point in the story anyway — at an act that is still touring today. Indeed, when I started writing this script back in February, I started by saying that I would soon be seeing them live in concert, as I have a ticket for an Isley Brothers show in a couple of months. Of course, events have overtaken that, and it’s extremely unlikely that anyone will be going to any shows then, but it shows a fundamental difference between the Isley Brothers and most of the other acts we’ve looked at, as even those who are still active now mostly concentrate on performing locally rather than doing international tours playing major venues. Of course, the version of the Isley Brothers touring today isn’t quite the same as the group from the 1950s, but Ronald Isley, the group’s lead singer, remains in the group — and, indeed, has remained artistically relevant, with collaborations with several prominent hip-hop artists. The Isleys had top forty hits in the sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties, and two thousands, and as recently as 2006 they had an album go to number one on the R&B charts. But today, we’re going to look back at the group’s very first hit, from 1959. [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “Shout”] The Isley Brothers were destined to be a vocal group even before they were born, indeed even before their parents were married. When O’Kelly Isley senior was discussing his marriage proposal with his future in-laws, he told his father-in-law-to-be that he intended to have four sons, and that they were going to be the next Mills Brothers. Isley Sr had been a vaudeville performer himself, and as with so many family groups the Isleys seem to have gone into the music business more to please their parents than because they wanted to do it themselves. As it turned out, O’Kelly and Sallye Isley had six children, all boys, and the eldest four of them did indeed form a vocal group. Like many black vocal groups in the early fifties, they were a gospel group, and O’Kelly Jr, Rudolph, Ronald, and Vernon Isley started performing around the churches in Cincinnati as teenagers, having been trained by their parents. They appeared on Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour, the popular TV talent show which launched the careers of many entertainers, and won — their prize was a jewelled watch, which the boys would take turns wearing. But then tragedy struck. Vernon, the youngest of the four singing Isleys, and the one who was generally considered to be far and away the most talented singer in the group, was hit by a car and killed while he was riding his bike, aged only thirteen. The boys were, as one would imagine, devastated by the death of their little brother, and they also thought that that should be the end of their singing career, as Vernon had been their lead singer. It would be two years before they would perform live again. By all accounts, their parents put pressure on them during that time, telling them that it would be the only way to pay respect to Vernon. Eventually a compromise was reached between parents and brothers — Ron agreed that he would attempt to sing lead, if in turn the group could stop singing gospel music and start singing doo-wop songs, like the brothers’ favourite act Billy Ward and the Dominoes. We’ve talked before about how Billy Ward & The Dominoes were a huge influence on the music that became soul, with hit records like “Have Mercy Baby”: [Excerpt: Billy Ward and the Dominoes, “Have Mercy Baby”] Both Ward’s original lead singer Clyde McPhatter and McPhatter’s later replacement Jackie Wilson sang in a style that owed a lot to the church music that the young Isleys had also been performing, and so it was natural for them to make the change to singing in the style of the Dominoes. As soon as Ronald Isley started singing lead, people started making comparisons both to McPhatter and to Wilson. Indeed, Ronald has talked about McPhatter as being something of a mentor figure for the brothers, teaching them how to sing, although it’s never been clear exactly at what point in their career they got to know McPhatter. But their real mentor was a much less well-known singer, Beulah Bryant. The three eldest Isley brothers, O’Kelly, Rudolph, and Ronald, met Bryant on the bus to New York, where they were travelling to try and seek their fortunes. Bryant was one of the many professional blues shouters who never became hugely well known, but who managed to have a moderately successful career from the fifties through to the eighties, mostly in live performances, though she did make a handful of very listenable records: [Excerpt: Beulah Bryant, “What Am I Gonna Do?”] When they got to New York, while they had paid in advance for somewhere to stay, they were robbed on their second day in the city and had no money at all. But Bryant had contacts in the music industry, and started making phone calls for her young proteges, trying to get them bookings. At first she was unsuccessful, and the group just hung around the Harlem Apollo and occasionally performed at their amateur nights. Eventually, though, Bryant got Nat Nazzaro to listen to them over the phone. Nazzaro was known as “the monster agent” — he was one of the most important booking agents in New York, but he wasn’t exactly fair to his young clients. He would book a three-person act, but on the contracts the act would consist of four people — Nazzaro would be the fourth person, and he would get an equal share of the performance money, as well as getting his normal booking agent’s share. Nazzaro listened to the Isleys over the phone, and then he insisted they come and see him in person, because he was convinced that they had been playing a record down the phone rather than singing to him live. When he found out they really did sound like that, Nazzaro started getting them the kind of bookings they could only dream of — they went from having no money at all to playing on Broadway for $750 a week, and then playing the Apollo for $950 a week, at least according to O’Kelly Isley Jr’s later recollection. This was an astonishing sum of money to a bunch of teenagers in the late 1950s. But they still hadn’t made a record, and their sets were based on cover versions of songs by other people, things like “Rock and Roll Waltz” by Kay Starr: [Excerpt: Kay Starr, “Rock and Roll Waltz”] It was hardly the kind of material they would later become famous for. And nor was their first record. They had signed to a label called Teenage Records, a tiny label owned by two former musicians, Bill “Bass” Gordon and Ben Smith. As you might imagine, there were a lot of musicians named Ben Smith and it’s quite difficult to sort out which was which — even Marv Goldberg, who normally knows these things, seems confused about which Ben Smith this was, describing him as a singer on one page and a sax player on another page. As Ben Smith the sax player seems to have played on some records for Teenage, it was probably him, in which case this Ben Smith probably also played alto sax for Lucky Millinder’s band and wrote the hit “I Dreamed I Dwelt in Harlem” for Glenn Miller: [Excerpt: The Glenn Miller Orchestra, “I Dreamed I Dwelt in Harlem”] It’s more certain exactly who Bill “Bass” Gordon was — he was the leader of Bill “Bass” Gordon and the Colonials, who had recorded the doo-wop track “Two Loves Have I”: [Excerpt: Bill “Bass” Gordon and the Colonials, “Two Loves Have I”] Smith and Gordon signed the Isley Brothers to Teenage Records, and in June 1957 the first Isley Brothers single, “Angels Cried”, came out: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “Angels Cried”] Unfortunately, the single didn’t have any real success, and the group decided that they wanted to record for a better label. According to O’Kelly Isley they got some resistance from Teenage Records, who claimed to have them under contract — but the Isley Brothers knew better. They had signed a contract, certainly, but then the contract had just been left on a desk after they’d signed it, rather than being filed, and they’d swiped it from the desk when no-one was looking. Teenage didn’t have a copy of the contract, so had no proof that they had ever signed the Isley Brothers, and the brothers were free to move on to another label. They chose to sign to Gone Records, one of the family of labels that was owned and run by George Goldner. Goldner assigned Richie Barrett, his talent scout, producer, and arranger, to look after the Isleys, as he had previously done with Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers and the Chantels, as well as his own group the Valentines: [The Valentines, “The Woo Woo Train”] By this point, Barrett had established an almost production-line method of making records. He would block-book a studio and some backing musicians for up to twenty-four hours, get as many as ten different vocal groups into the studio, and record dozens of tracks in a row, usually songs written by either group members or by Barrett. The Isleys’ first record with Barrett, “Don’t Be Jealous”, was a fairly standard doo-wop ballad, written by Ron Isley: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “Don’t Be Jealous”] There’s some suggestion that Barrett is also singing on that recording with the group — it certainly sounds like there are four voices on there, not just three. Either way, the song doesn’t show much of the style that the Isley Brothers would later make their own. Much more like their later recordings was the B-side, another Ronald Isley song, which could have been a classic in the Coasters’ mould had it not been for the lyrics, which were an attempt at a hip rewriting of “Old McDonald”: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “Rockin’ McDonald”] They were nearly there, but not quite. The next single, “I Wanna Know”, came closer — you can hear they were clearly trying to incorporate elements of other people’s successful records — Ronald Isley’s vocal owes a lot to Little Richard, while the piano playing has the same piano “ripping” that Jerry Lee Lewis had made his own. But you can also hear the style that would make them famous coming to the fore. But they were not selling records, and Richie Barrett was stretched very thin. A few more singles were released on Gone (often pairing a previously-released track with a new B-side) but nothing was successful enough to justify them staying on with Goldner’s label. But just as they’d moved from a micro-indie label to a large indie without having had any success, now they were going to move from a large indie to a major label, still not having had a hit. They took one of their records to Hugo and Luigi at RCA records, and the duo signed them up. Hugo and Luigi were strange, strange, figures in popular music in the 1950s. They were two cousins, Hugo Peretti and Luigi Creatore, who were always known by their first names, and had started out making children’s records before being hired by Mercury Records, where they would produce, among other things, the cover versions by Georgia Gibbs of black records that we’ve talked about previously, and which were both ethically and musically appalling: [Excerpt: Georgia Gibbs, “Dance With Me Henry”] After a couple of years of consistently producing hits, they got tempted away from Mercury by Morris Levy, who was setting up a new label, Roulette, with George Goldner and Alan Freed. Goldner and Freed quickly dropped out of the label, but Hugo and Luigi ended up having a fifty percent stake in the new label. While they were there, they showed they didn’t really get rock and roll music at all — they produced follow-up singles by a lot of acts who’d had hits before they started working with Hugo and Luigi, but stopped as soon as the duo started producing them, like Frankie Lymon: [Excerpt: Frankie Lymon, “Goodie Goodie”] But they still managed to produce a string of hits like “Honeycomb” by Jimmie Rodgers (who is not either the blues singer or the country singer of the same name), which went to number one: [Excerpt: Jimmie Rogers, “Honeycomb”] And they also recorded their own tracks for Roulette, like the instrumental Cha-Hua-Hua: [Excerpt: Hugo and Luigi, “Cha-Hua-Hua”] After a year or so with Roulette, they were in turn poached by RCA — Morris Levy let them go so long as they gave up their shares in Roulette for far less than they were worth. At RCA they continued their own recording career, with records like “Just Come Home”: [Excerpt: Hugo and Luigi, “Just Come Home”] They also produced several albums for Perry Como. So you would think that they would be precisely the wrong producers for the Isley Brothers. And the first record they made with the trio would tend to suggest that there was at least some creative difference there. “I’m Gonna Knock on Your Door” was written by Aaron Schroeder and Sid Wayne, two people who are best known for writing some of the less interesting songs for Elvis’ films, and has a generic, lightweight, backing track — apart from an interestingly meaty guitar part. The vocals have some power to them, and the record is pleasant, and in some ways even ground-breaking — it doesn’t sound like a late fifties record as much as it does an early sixties one, and one could imagine, say, Gerry and the Pacemakers making a substantially identical record. But it falls between the stools of R&B and pop, and doesn’t quite convince as either: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “I’m Gonna Knock on Your Door”] That combination of a poppy background and soulful vocals would soon bear a lot of fruit for another artist Hugo and Luigi were going to start working with, but it didn’t quite work for the Isleys yet. But their second single for RCA was far more successful. At this point the Isleys were a more successful live act than recording act, and they would mostly perform songs by other people, and one song they performed regularly was “Lonely Teardrops”, the song that Berry and Gwen Gordy and Roquel Davis had written for Jackie Wilson: [Excerpt: Jackie Wilson, “Lonely Teardrops”] The group would perform that at the end of their shows, and they started to extend it, with Ron Isley improvising as the band vamped behind him, starting with the line “say you will” from Wilson’s song. He’d start doing a call and response with his brothers, singing a line and getting them to sing the response “Shout”. These improvised, extended, endings to the song got longer and longer, and got the crowds more and more excited, and they started incorporating elements from Ray Charles records, too, especially “What’d I Say” and “I Got a Woman”. When they got back to New York at the end of the tour, they told Hugo and Luigi how well these performances, which they still thought of as just long performances of “Lonely Teardrops”, had gone. The producers suggested that if they went down that well, what they should do is cut out the part that was still “Lonely Teardrops” and just perform the extended tag. As it turned out, they kept in a little of “Lonely Teardrops” — the “Say you will, say you will” line — and the resulting song, like Ray Charles’ similar call-and-response based “What’d I Say”, was split over two sides of a single, as “Shout (Parts One and Two)”: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “Shout (Parts One and Two)”] That was nothing like anything that Hugo and Luigi had ever produced before, and it became the Isley Brothers’ first chart hit, reaching number forty-seven. More importantly for them, the song was credited to the three brothers, so they made money from the cover versions of the song that charted much higher. In the USA, Joey Dee and the Starliters made number six in 1962 with their version: [Excerpt: Joey Dee and the Starliters, “Shout”] In the UK, Lulu and the Luvvers made number seven in 1964: [Excerpt: Lulu and the Luvvers, “Shout”] And in Australia, Johnny O’Keefe released his version only a month after the Isleys released theirs, and reached number two: [Excerpt: Johnny O’Keefe, “Shout”] Despite all these cover versions, the Isleys’ version remains the definitive one, and itself ended up selling over a million copies, though it never broke into the top forty. It was certainly successful enough that it made sense to record an album. Unfortunately, for the album, also titled Shout!, the old Hugo and Luigi style came out, and apart from one new Isleys original, “Respectable”, which became their next single, the rest of the album was made up of old standards, rearranged in the “Shout!” style. Sometimes, this almost worked, as on “Ring-A-Ling A-Ling (Let The Wedding Bells Ring)”, whose words are close enough to Little Richard-style gibberish that Ronald Isley could scream them effectively. But when the Isleys take on Irving Berlin’s “How Deep is the Ocean” or “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands”, neither the song nor the group are improved by the combination. They released several more singles on RCA, but none of them repeated the success of “Shout!”. At this point they moved across to Atlantic, where they started working with Leiber and Stoller. Leiber and Stoller kept them recording old standards as B-sides, but for the A-sides they went back to gospel-infused soul party songs, like the Leiber and Stoller song “Teach Me How To Shimmy” and the Isleys’ own “Standing On The Dance Floor”, a rewrite of an old gospel song called “Standing at the Judgment”: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “Standing on the Dance Floor”] But none of these songs scraped even the bottom of the charts, and the brothers ended up leaving Atlantic after a year, and signing with a tiny label, Scepter. After having moved from a tiny indie label to a large indie to a major label, they had now moved back down from their major label to a large indie to a tiny indie. They were still a great live act, but they appeared to be a one-hit wonder. But all that was about to change, when they recorded a cover version of a flop single inspired by their one hit, combined with a dance craze. The Isley Brothers were about to make one of the most important records of the 1960s, but “Twist and Shout” is a story for another time.  

It was thirty years ago when we got the film that taught us that being a nosey neighbour has its ups and downs. Directed by Joe Dante, The ‘Burbs pokes fun at suburban environments and their sometimes-eccentric dwellers. Who are the evil ones – the different ones who keep to themselves or the conforming neighbours who let their suspicions get the better of them? Settling in for some time off in his suburban home, Ray Peterson’s (Tom Hanks) vacation becomes a horror when the Klopeks, a suspiciously odd family, movie in down the block. Enlisting the aid of his paranoid buddy, Art (Rick Ducommun), and his militia-man neighbour, Rumsfield (Bruce Dern), Ray sends his son and wife (Carrie Fisher) away on a trip while he investigates the Klopeks. When a neighbour disappears, Ray and his cohorts risk their lives to save their cul-de-sac from the clutches of evil.

Start your engines, it's time for another episode of THE STORY SONG PODCAST! On this episode, your hosts review the 1960 teen tragedy classic, "Tell Laura I Love Her," recorded by Ray Peterson and written by songwriting legends Jeff Barry and Ben Raleigh. You'll find out the cost - adjusting for inflation - of buying someone everything, and learn how an amateur can participate in a professional stock car race. And maybe you'll find out what happened that day. Just kidding. No one knows. Fasten your seat belts. It's going to be a bumpy episode. Continue the conversation; follow THE STORY SONG PODCAST on social media. Follow us on Twitter (@story_song), Instagram (storysongpodcast), and Facebook (thestorysongpodcast). THE STORY SONG PODCAST is a member of the Forge Audio Network.

Een uur liefdesliedjes die we allemaal kennen uit de jaren ’60. Jongens zingen over een meisjes en de meisjes zingen over de jongens. Muziek van The Regents, Patti Page, The Kaye Sisters, Ray Peterson, Etta James, Paul Anka en Nina Simone.

In just around three minutes, a good pop story song gives us an abbreviated account of a love affair, or the details of an adventure (or misadventure), or the particulars of a personal tragedy that wasn’t our own, but was something that touched our soul.  The first twenty or so years of the Rock and Roll Era (from the mid-1950s to the mid-70s) were, what could be, the heyday of the story song. Singers and songwriters of the 1950s to the 1970s made sure that as soon as you got one story song out of your head, another one took its place—forming a compendium of musical experiences that allowed you to see the world a bit differently.  Listen to Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Loretta Lynn, Ray Peterson, Mark Dinning, Leslie Gore, Shangri-Las, Jeannie C. Riley, Creedence Clearwater Revival, David Geddes, Andrew Gold, Michael Jackson, Tracy Chapman, Carrie underwood, Paramore, Panic at the Disco, and lots of other singers and musicians who help you discover another side of life.   

Been a crazy couple of week but have a crazy stack of records for a reward Covering my time at the Canby Record Show (Oregon's oldest Record Show) & then my manic 10 days in Las Vegas we allowed the Gods of Record Finding to once again, dictate the playlist, this week we have: Herb Henderson, Sammy Barnhill, Western Melody Makers, Hoyt Scoggins, Ray Peterson, The Renegades, Don Burton & a weird mix of R&B, Rockabilly, Popcorn & some oddities

Brandon & Randy tackle a classic/go-to in the humidor this week by way of the Padron 3000 Maduro. During this weeks "Creature Feature" we review a Halloween Classic and we also reveal the two lucky winners of our "Perfecto Cigar Holder" drawing! ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Special thanks to www.Warpedpuro.com for providing us with samples of their very cool Cigar Journal. A great tool to keep track of what you smoke, and later relive those great cigar memories. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Check out Randy's Movie Star Debut in "The Shade": http://youtu.be/trNb7w7FgsU ++++++++++++++++++++++++ Check out all my Podcasts and videos for Calypso Cigar Review and Cigar Bombs on YouTube and subscribe! Audio and Video versions of our Podcasts "Calypso Cigar Review" can be found here: http://calypsocigar.podomatic.com http://www.spreaker.com/show/calypso_cigar_reviews http://www.youtube.com/user/meatcake1 https://www.facebook.com/CalypsoCigarShopAndLounge http://www.stogiefriends.com/brandonluna/video/ or on I-tunes, to subscribe search for Calypso Cigar and subscribe! If you would like to purchase fine tobacco products and you happen to be in the DFW area, check out the Calypso Cigar shop in Richardson Texas or call them at: 972.761.9903 Or visit them at Face Book at: http://www.facebook.com/CalypsoCigarShopAndLounge Join a cigar forum! It is a great way to learn, trade and have fun with other Cigar hobbyist. I highly recommend the following Cigar Forums: http://www.stogiefriends.com http://www.botl.org http://www.cigarfederation.com A great Cigar Review Website: http://www.blindmanspuff.com Want some great Cuban Cigars at a great price? Visit: http://www.cigarsofhabanos.com/ When you buy something, please make sure to tell them you heard about them from us!! Donate Cigars to the Troops! They fight for your rights to smoke and so much more. There are several great organizations you can donate cigars too, why not donate here: http://cigarsforwarriors.org You can also donate here, another great organization: http://www.stogiefriends.com/cigarsfortroops/ East Coast Donations can be sent to: Ray Peterson 128 Delaware St Staten Island, NY 10304 West Coast Donations can be sent to: Troop Donations PO Box 79292 Corona, CA 92877 If you happen to donate, please let them know you heard about them through our show! Would appreciate it and it help us keep track of if we are reaching anyone out in the interwebs! Both of these groups donate to different sets of troops so donate what you can, as often as you can! +++++++++++++++

Brandon & Randy review the Torano Vault Red (Aka D-042) and discuss some Torano news and history with Miguel Schoedel from Torano. Listen in as we smoke and discuss the strongest, most flavorful Torano to date. +++++++++++++ Between now and episode 35 we will be holding a raffle so you can get your very own Perfecto Cigar Holder. To enter: Comment AND Like the podcast at any of the following locations: Podomatic, Spreaker, YouTube, Facebook, Google+, Stogie Friends Or go to twitter and Tweet about the contest and retweet our podcast. We will tally up the entries and 2 lucky listeners will receive the Perfecto Cigar Holder. ++++++++++++++ Check out Randy's Movie Star Debut in "The Shade": http://youtu.be/trNb7w7FgsU ++++++++++++++++++++++++ Check out all my Podcasts and videos for Calypso Cigar Review and Cigar Bombs on YouTube and subscribe! Audio and Video versions of our Podcasts "Calypso Cigar Review" can be found here: http://calypsocigar.podomatic.com http://www.spreaker.com/show/calypso_cigar_reviews http://www.youtube.com/user/meatcake1 https://www.facebook.com/CalypsoCigarShopAndLounge http://www.stogiefriends.com/brandonluna/video/ or on I-tunes, to subscribe search for Calypso Cigar and subscribe! If you would like to purchase fine tobacco products and you happen to be in the DFW area, check out the Calypso Cigar shop in Richardson Texas or call them at: 972.761.9903 Or visit them at Face Book at: http://www.facebook.com/CalypsoCigarShopAndLounge Join a cigar forum! It is a great way to learn, trade and have fun with other Cigar hobbyist. I highly recommend the following Cigar Forums: http://www.stogiefriends.com http://www.botl.org http://www.cigarfederation.com A great Cigar Review Website: http://www.blindmanspuff.com Donate Cigars to the Troops! They fight for your rights to smoke and so much more. There are several great organizations you can donate cigars too, why not donate here: http://cigarsforwarriors.org You can also donate here, another great organization: http://www.stogiefriends.com/cigarsfortroops/ East Coast Donations can be sent to: Ray Peterson 128 Delaware St Staten Island, NY 10304 Troop Donations PO Box 79292 Corona, CA 92877 If you happen to donate, please let them know you heard about them through our show! Would appreciate it and it help us keep track of if we are reaching anyone out in the interwebs! Both of these groups donate to different sets of troops so donate what you can, as often as you can! +++++++++++++++

This is my arrangement of the flamenco tune by Ottmar Liebert. When I first heard Liebert play this on the guitar, I thought, "this should be played on a banjo!" My wife, Lynn, plays bass on this arrangement, playing the bass with a bow in the intro. and the ending of this tune. Thanks, Lynn! Irv Wright is on dobro and the late Ray Peterson is on guitar.

This is my arrangement of the flamenco tune by Ottmar Liebert. When I first heard Liebert play this on the guitar, I thought, "this should be played on a banjo!" My wife, Lynn, plays bass on this arrangement, playing the bass with a bow in the intro. and the ending of this tune. Thanks, Lynn! Irv Wright is on dobro and the late Ray Peterson is on guitar.

This arrangement is by my good friend, Howard Anderson (aka "Handy 13" on the BHO), of Tempe, Arizona. Irv Wright is on the Dobro, the late Ray Peterson on guitar and my wife, Lynn Breen on bass. There's a little "James Bond" theme thrown in between each verse...

This arrangement is by my good friend, Howard Anderson (aka "Handy 13" on the BHO), of Tempe, Arizona. Irv Wright is on the Dobro, the late Ray Peterson on guitar and my wife, Lynn Breen on bass. There's a little "James Bond" theme thrown in between each verse...

This is a combination of some licks from Beethoven's "Fifth Symphony" added to John McEuen's "Miner's Night Out" and an original tune of mine entitled, "Roundout." Irv Wright on dobro, the late Ray Peterson on guitar, my wife, Lynn, on bass and I'm on banjo.

This is a combination of some licks from Beethoven's "Fifth Symphony" added to John McEuen's "Miner's Night Out" and an original tune of mine entitled, "Roundout." Irv Wright on dobro, the late Ray Peterson on guitar, my wife, Lynn, on bass and I'm on banjo.