Podcasts about roulette records

Retired Intelligence Detective Gary Jenkins brings you the best in mob history with his unique perception of the mafia. In this episode of Gangland Wire, host Gary Jenkins interviews the prolific chronicler of the American Mafia, Jeffrey Sussman. Listeners will learn about Morris levy and the mafia's influence on the roots of the world's most important cultural influences, American Rock and Roll. Two of the most important men who influenced the rise of rock and roll were Morris Levy and Alan Freed. Levy had close ties with the Genovese crime family. Levy was the notorious head of the record label Roulette Records. Reportedly, Morris Levy used illicit money from the family to fund his businesses, with several members of the mob said to be present at his meetings. At the time, Freed and other corrupt Disc Jockeys corrupted the entire industry with their "pay for play" of records, which became known as "Payola." Morris Levy terrorized young performers into giving up thier royalities. Meyer Lansky, AKA the “mob's accountant,” was one of the most successful mafiosos in history and had many investments in jukeboxes. Reportedly, he “controlled every Wurlitzer jukebox in the New York area”. So too, did the Chicago Outfit (who rose to power under Al Capone) have many dealings with Lansky and his jukeboxes. A mob history book, The Outfit, argues that the Wurlitzer Corporation accused Lansky and his Chicago associates of disrupting the distribution of Wurlitzer jukeboxes. The Outfit is also said to have worked closely with Jules Stein, head of the Music Corporation of America. Apparently, Stein, the mob, MCA, and Meyer Lansky had all worked at least in some form with the mob fixer Sidney Korshak, a prominent mafia name in Los Angeles. Click here to get Backbeat Gansters: The Rise and Decline of the Mob in Rock Music by Jeffrey Sussman. Subscribe to get gangster stories weekly Hit me up on Venmo for a cup of coffee or a shot and a beer @ganglandwire Click here to "buy me a cup of coffee" To go to the store or make a donation or rent Ballot Theft: Burglary, Murder, Coverup, click here To rent Brothers against Brothers, the documentary, click here.  To rent Gangland Wire, the documentary, click here To buy my Kindle book, Leaving Vegas: The True Story of How FBI Wiretaps Ended Mob Domination of Las Vegas Casinos. To subscribe on iTunes click here. Please give me a review and help others find the podcast. Donate to the podcast. Click here!

Want to know what '60s megastar Tommy James is doing today? Can you name Tommy James and the Shondells biggest hit? Would you like to know Tommy's life story? Tune in here because few stars had a better run on the pop charts in the '60s than Tommy James. As the leader of his group the Shondells, Tommy had a way with upbeat pop tunes that packied a solid rock & roll punch. The creator of songs like "Hanky Panky," "I Think We're Alone Now," "It's Only Love," and "Mony Mony" - the soundtrack to a generation. As the decade changed so did Tommy writing and recording hits like "Crimson and Clover" and "Crystal Blue Persuasion." As a solo artist in the early '70s, Tommy adopted a more mature and soulful (but still radio-friendly) style with "Draggin' the Line" and "I'm Comin' Home." and he's still doing it today - embracing contemporary pop styles, with electronic instruments and elements of dance-pop and hip-hop. Tommy's journey began in Niles, Michigan, where he formed his first band, The Echoes, at the age of 12. His early passion for music set the stage for his future success. The Shondells, initially formed as The Tornadoes, evolved with his vision, and their innovative fusion of rock, pop, and psychedelia set them apart. Following the success of "Hanky Panky," Tommy James and the Shondells produced a series of chart-toppers. Then, as a solo artist he did it again. Tommy's autobiography, "Me, the Mob, and the Music," revealed his tumultuous relationship with Morris Levy of Roulette Records, adding depth to his legacy and offering a glimpse into the darker side of the music industry. Tommy James was a pioneer in studio experimentation, using cutting-edge effects to create unique sounds that influenced future generations of musicians. His music captured the spirit of the '60s. With over 100 million records sold worldwide, Tommy James' enduring legacy is a testament to his impact on rock and pop music history. His ongoing contributions to music and his influence on artists like Billy Idol, who famously covered "Mony Mony," underscore his lasting impact. From his early days in Michigan to his rise as a music icon, Tommy James' story is one of resilience, creativity, and enduring appeal. I know you're going to love hearing Tommy tell his story. To learn more about him head for his website https://www.tommyjames.com/

Remember the flutter of excitement when you found a long-lost mixtape, each track a portal to the past? That rush of nostalgia is what we're serving up in our latest episode, as we take the scenic route back to 1974, an era rich with bell bottoms, tank tops, and tunes that refuse to fade. Jack, Mark, Lou, and I invite you into our circle for a laugh-filled journey, where personal anecdotes and the quirks of our teenage years collide with the music that became the soundtrack of our lives.Ever played '45 poker'? It's a game where the deck is stacked with memories, and each flip of a record delves into the heart of the '70s music scene. From the amusing saga of The Zombies' two-band tour to the reverence of vinyl in the shadow of Roulette Records, our episode spins a yarn as eclectic as the 45s we reminisce over. And with guest appearances that add spice to our banter, we're critiquing and celebrating in equal measure, ensuring you're right there with us, grooving to the beat of nostalgia.Rounding out the experience, we invite you to weigh in—what's the true legacy of Rush without Neil Peart? How do today's ticket prices compare to the inaugural American Music Awards back in '74? We're tackling these debates head-on, while also paying homage to the icons and epic moments that have etched themselves into music history. From the myths of Mama Cass to the debate over "Young Frankenstein" versus "Blazing Saddles," our conversation is as vibrant and diverse as the era we're celebrating. Tune in, and let the familiar chords of the past strike a chord in your heart.

Join Michael Litten "The Last DJ" for an in-depth conversation. Playing songs from his latest album, The Red Neck & The Red Man, produced by Stevie Salas Sponsored by Cathead Distillery Theme music provided by Peter Perkins Special Thank You to Lucy Piller/ARN Entertainment for providing the talent   American underground metal artist Mike Matney sought out multi-platinum producer/artist Stevie Salas to turn out The Red Neck & The Redman, a dirty, swampy, bluesy, heavy, powerful, guitar filled, beat driven, current Outlaw Southern Rock album. www.matney.rocks

Show #1046 Blues With Horns Vol. 5 01. Deanna Bogart - Collarbone (4:32) (Just A Wish Away, Blind Pig Records, 2014) 02. Mark May Band & The Soul Satyr Horns - Garden Of Truth (6:50) (Blues Heaven, Connor Ray Music, 2016) 03. Eilen Jewell - Hooked (2:26) (Queen Of The Minor Key, Signature Sound Recordings, 2011) 04. Cryin' Out Loud - You Can Dance To The Blues (4:34) (Play Loud & Smoke Often, Pilot Light Records, 2024) 05. Blue Largo - Fine And Mellow (6:50) (What A Day!, self-release, 2000) 06. Dan Dubien - Dizzy Eyes (4:23) (Empty Roads, self-release, 2013) 07. Kern Pratt - Something's Gone Wrong (6:38) (Greenville MS...What About You?, Endless Blues Records, 2019) 08. Kalo - Pay To Play (3:51) (Wild Change, Something Blue Records, 2017) 09. Wily Bo Walker - Moon Over Indigo (6:03) (Almost Transparent Blues, Mescal Canyon Records, 2018) 10. David Bromberg Band - Dyin' Crapshooter's Blues (3:38) (How Late'll Ya Play 'Til?, Fantasy Records, 1976) 11. Billy & the Beaters - Strange Things Happen (3:40) (Billy & the Beaters, Alfa Records, 1981) 12. Dr. John - I Thought I Heard New Orleans Say (4:25) (Tango Palace, Horizon Records, 1979) 13. Altered Five Blues Band - Don't Tell Me I Can't (3:44) (Testifyin', Blind Pig Record, 2024) 14. Robin Banks - My Baby Loves Me (4:51) (Modern Classic, self-release, 2014) 15. Bywater Call - Over And Over (3:49) (Bywater Call, Gypsy Soul Records, 2019) 16. Maureen & The Mercury 5 - Gimme Mo (2:56) (Gimme Mo!, Catty Town Records, 2017) 19. Josh White - I Had To Stoop To Conquer You [1956] (2:49) (In Memoriam, MArble Arch Records, 1970) 18. Doug Sahm - I'll Take Care Of You (4:15) (Hell Of A Spell, Takoma Records, 1980) 19. Joe Williams & Count Basie - It's A Low Down Dirty Shame (5:19) (Everyday I Have The Blues, Roulette Records, 1959) 20. Lucky Peterson - Funky Ray (5:29) (Lucky Strikes, Alligator Records, 1989) Bandana Blues is and will always be a labor of love. Please help Spinner deal with the costs of hosting & bandwidth. Visit www.bandanablues.com and hit the tipjar. Any amount is much appreciated, no matter how small. Thank you.

The lifeblood during my youth was infused by the artists who plied their magical trade via the 45 rpm discs of the 60s and 70s. I never stopped to think about the business men who signed and recorded these artists, distributed their records, and got them played. Art is Art, and Business is Business, and apparently you can't have one without the other. But, oft-times, in the Capitalist system, control of the means of production and distribution don't equate with who gets to share in the pie. In many cases, the recognized artists are exploited and only the business men get rich. In this episode we take a closer look at the practices of a couple of the biggest players.One of the positive aspects of the internet today is that the artist has more control over their product - which is more democratic, but without the gate-keepers of yore, it's easier for your creations to get lost in the crush of competition. We look back at this time, not with nostalgia, but, not without a certain degree of awe, either. 

Label: Roulette 4494Year: 1963Condition: MPrice: $25.00I'm willing to bet a lot of folks who bought this single never bothered to listen to the flip side... I was one of them for a long time, so I suspect there are others. :-) And what did I miss? Take a listen to the jukebox snippet to find out! Just another great, uptempo girl group rocker, but a little less quirky than the A side. Note: This beautiful copy comes in a vintage Roulette Records factory sleeve. It has Near Mint labels, but the vinyl (styrene) looks untouched, and the audio sounds pristine Mint! (This scan is a representative image from our archives.)

Tommy James is one of the most iconic artists of the rock era. Here's all you need to know: 23 Gold singles, 9 Platinum albums, and over 100 million records sold. In this episode Tommy tells stories and talks about his hits, his career, his relationship with Morris Levy of Roulette Records and the Mob, and much more. My featured song is my reimagined version of Cream's “I'm So Glad” from The PGS Experience album by my band, Project Grand Slam. Spotify link here.—--------------------------------------The Follow Your Dream Podcast:Top 1% of all podcasts with Listeners in 200 countries!For more information and other episodes of the podcast click here. To subscribe to the podcast click here.To subscribe to our weekly Follow Your Dream Podcast email click here.To Rate and Review the podcast click here.“Dream With Robert”. Click here.—----------------------------------------“MILES BEHIND”, Robert's first album, was recorded in 1994 but was “lost” for the last 30 years. It's now been released for streaming. Featuring Randy Brecker (Blood Sweat & Tears), Anton Fig (The David Letterman Show), Al Foster (Miles Davis), Tim Ries (The Rolling Stones), Jon Lucien and many more. Called “Hip, Tight and Edgy!” Click here for all links.—--------------------------------------‘THE SINGLES PROJECT” is Robert's new EP, featuring five of his new songs. The songs speak to the ups and downs of life. From the blissful, joyous “Saturday Morning” to the darker commentary of “Like Never Before” and “The Ship”. “This is Robert at his most vulnerable” (Pop Icon Magazine)Reviews: “Amazing!” (Top Buzz Magazine)“Magical…A Sonic Tour De Force!” (IndiePulse Music)“Fabulously Enticing!” (Pop Icon Magazine)“A Home Run!” (Hollywood Digest)Listener Reviews:Saturday Morning:”A neat and simply happy song!””It's so cute and fun. It's describing a world I wish I lived in every day!”Like Never Before:”Great message!””Great song, very perceptive lyrics!”Click here for all links.—--------------------------------------“IT'S ALIVE!” is Robert's latest Project Grand Slam album. Featuring 13 of the band's Greatest Hits performed “live” at festivals in Pennsylvania and Serbia.Reviews:"An instant classic!" (Melody Maker)"Amazing record...Another win for the one and only Robert Miller!" (Hollywood Digest)"Close to perfect!" (Pop Icon)"A Masterpiece!" (Big Celebrity Buzz)"Sterling effort!" (Indie Pulse)"Another fusion wonder for Project Grand Slam!" (MobYorkCity)Click here for all links.Click here for song videos—-----------------------------------------Audio production:Jimmy RavenscroftKymera Films Connect with Tommy at:www.tommyjames.comConnect with the Follow Your Dream Podcast:Website - www.followyourdreampodcast.comEmail Robert - robert@followyourdreampodcast.com Follow Robert's band, Project Grand Slam, and his music:Website - www.projectgrandslam.comPGS Store - www.thePGSstore.comYouTubeSpotify MusicApple MusicEmail - pgs@projectgrandslam.com

In 2017, 'Something Wicked This Way Comes' was released, an album marked by Barry's drumming and Lucie's vocals. Six years later, the focus is their album, 'Lockdown'. Through lineup changes, the collaboration between Thunderstick and vocalist Raven has inspired the new album, and they decided to re-record "Go Sleep With The Enemy (I Dare Ya)", the standout cut from Something Wicked, to link the past with the present. We also discuss the current band members and their journey, how Barry keeps the show on the road and many other topics. Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thunderstickofficial/ Facebook fan site: The Thunderstick Stormtroopers Twitter: https://twitter.com/ThunderstickUK Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thunderstick.official/ Roulette Records: http://www.rouletterecords.co.uk/ Link to the chat with Barry from July 2017: https://open.spotify.com/episode/61RgyFXej33jIZnT3C26DN?si=64116aced8824fef Link to the chat with Raven from June 2019: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1XmlYWHMgwh4sSKUns0oyR?si=6b29b7725b964f4b

Episode one hundred and sixty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “The Weight" by the Band, the Basement Tapes, and the continuing 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 half-hour bonus episode available, on "S.F. Sorrow is Born" by the Pretty Things. 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/ Also, a one-time request here -- Shawn Taylor, who runs the Facebook group for the podcast and is an old and dear friend of mine, has stage-three lung cancer. I will be hugely grateful to anyone who donates to the GoFundMe for her treatment. Errata At one point I say "when Robertson and Helm travelled to the Brill Building". I meant "when Hawkins and Helm". This is fixed in the transcript but not the recording. Resources There are three Mixcloud mixes this time. As there are so many songs by Bob Dylan and the Band excerpted, and Mixcloud won't allow more than four songs by the same artist in any mix, I've had to post the songs not in quite the same order in which they appear in the podcast. But the mixes are here — one, two, three. I've used these books for all the episodes involving Dylan: 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. 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. Chronicles Volume 1 by Bob Dylan is a partial, highly inaccurate, but thoroughly readable autobiography. Information on Tiny Tim comes from Eternal Troubadour: The Improbable Life of Tiny Tim by Justin Martell. Information on John Cage comes from The Roaring Silence by David Revill Information on Woodstock comes from Small Town Talk by Barney Hoskyns. For material on the Basement Tapes, I've used Million Dollar Bash by Sid Griffin. And for the Band, I've used This Wheel's on Fire by Levon Helm with Stephen Davis, Testimony by Robbie Robertson, The Band by Craig Harris and Levon by Sandra B Tooze. I've also referred to the documentaries No Direction Home and Once Were Brothers. The complete Basement Tapes can be found on this multi-disc box set, while this double-CD version has the best material from the sessions. All the surviving live recordings by Dylan and the Hawks from 1966 are on this box set. There are various deluxe versions of Music From Big Pink, but still the best way to get the original album is in this twofer CD with the Band's second album. Transcript Just a brief note before I start – literally while I was in the middle of recording this episode, it was announced that Robbie Robertson had died today, aged eighty. Obviously I've not had time to alter the rest of the episode – half of which had already been edited – with that in mind, though I don't believe I say anything disrespectful to his memory. My condolences to those who loved him – he was a huge talent and will be missed. There are people in the world who question the function of criticism. Those people argue that criticism is in many ways parasitic. If critics knew what they were talking about, so the argument goes, they would create themselves, rather than talk about other people's creation. It's a variant of the "those who can't, teach" cliche. And to an extent it's true. Certainly in the world of rock music, which we're talking about in this podcast, most critics are quite staggeringly ignorant of the things they're talking about. Most criticism is ephemeral, published in newspapers, magazines, blogs and podcasts, and forgotten as soon as it has been consumed -- and consumed is the word . But sometimes, just sometimes, a critic will have an effect on the world that is at least as important as that of any of the artists they criticise. One such critic was John Ruskin. Ruskin was one of the preeminent critics of visual art in the Victorian era, particularly specialising in painting and architecture, and he passionately advocated for a form of art that would be truthful, plain, and honest. To Ruskin's mind, many artists of the past, and of his time, drew and painted, not what they saw with their own eyes, but what other people expected them to paint. They replaced true observation of nature with the regurgitation of ever-more-mannered and formalised cliches. His attacks on many great artists were, in essence, the same critiques that are currently brought against AI art apps -- they're just recycling and plagiarising what other people had already done, not seeing with their own eyes and creating from their own vision. Ruskin was an artist himself, but never received much acclaim for his own work. Rather, he advocated for the works of others, like Turner and the pre-Raphaelite school -- the latter of whom were influenced by Ruskin, even as he admired them for seeing with their own vision rather than just repeating influences from others. But those weren't the only people Ruskin influenced. Because any critical project, properly understood, becomes about more than just the art -- as if art is just anything. Ruskin, for example, studied geology, because if you're going to talk about how people should paint landscapes and what those landscapes look like, you need to understand what landscapes really do look like, which means understanding their formation. He understood that art of the kind he wanted could only be produced by certain types of people, and so society had to be organised in a way to produce such people. Some types of societal organisation lead to some kinds of thinking and creation, and to properly, honestly, understand one branch of human thought means at least to attempt to understand all of them. Opinions about art have moral consequences, and morality has political and economic consequences. The inevitable endpoint of any theory of art is, ultimately, a theory of society. And Ruskin had a theory of society, and social organisation. Ruskin's views are too complex to summarise here, but they were a kind of anarcho-primitivist collectivism. He believed that wealth was evil, and that the classical liberal economics of people like Mill was fundamentally anti-human, that the division of labour alienated people from their work. In Ruskin's ideal world, people would gather in communities no bigger than villages, and work as craftspeople, working with nature rather than trying to bend nature to their will. They would be collectives, with none richer or poorer than any other, and working the land without modern technology. in the first half of the twentieth century, in particular, Ruskin's influence was *everywhere*. His writings on art inspired the Impressionist movement, but his political and economic ideas were the most influential, right across the political spectrum. Ruskin's ideas were closest to Christian socialism, and he did indeed inspire many socialist parties -- most of the founders of Britain's Labour Party were admirers of Ruskin and influenced by his ideas, particularly his opposition to the free market. But he inspired many other people -- Gandhi talked about the profound influence that Ruskin had on him, saying in his autobiography that he got three lessons from Ruskin's Unto This Last: "That 1) the good of the individual is contained in the good of all. 2) a lawyer's work has the same value as the barber's in as much as all have the same right of earning their livelihood from their work. 3) a life of labour, i.e., the life of the tiller of the soil and the handicraftsman is the life worth living. The first of these I knew. The second I had dimly realized. The third had never occurred to me. Unto This Last made it clear as daylight for me that the second and third were contained in the first. I arose with the dawn, ready to reduce these principles to practice" Gandhi translated and paraphrased Unto this Last into Gujurati and called the resulting book Sarvodaya (meaning "uplifting all" or "the welfare of all") which he later took as the name of his own political philosophy. But Ruskin also had a more pernicious influence -- it was said in 1930s Germany that he and his friend Thomas Carlyle were "the first National Socialists" -- there's no evidence I know of that Hitler ever read Ruskin, but a *lot* of Nazi rhetoric is implicit in Ruskin's writing, particularly in his opposition to progress (he even opposed the bicycle as being too much inhuman interference with nature), just as much as more admirable philosophies, and he was so widely read in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that there's barely a political movement anywhere that didn't bear his fingerprints. But of course, our focus here is on music. And Ruskin had an influence on that, too. We've talked in several episodes, most recently the one on the Velvet Underground, about John Cage's piece 4'33. What I didn't mention in any of the discussions of that piece -- because I was saving it for here -- is that that piece was premiered at a small concert hall in upstate New York. The hall, the Maverick Concert Hall, was owned and run by the Maverick arts and crafts collective -- a collective that were so called because they were the *second* Ruskinite arts colony in the area, having split off from the Byrdcliffe colony after a dispute between its three founders, all of whom were disciples of Ruskin, and all of whom disagreed violently about how to implement Ruskin's ideas of pacifist all-for-one and one-for-all community. These arts colonies, and others that grew up around them like the Arts Students League were the thriving centre of a Bohemian community -- close enough to New York that you could get there if you needed to, far enough away that you could live out your pastoral fantasies, and artists of all types flocked there -- Pete Seeger met his wife there, and his father-in-law had been one of the stonemasons who helped build the Maverick concert hall. Dozens of artists in all sorts of areas, from Aaron Copland to Edward G Robinson, spent time in these communities, as did Cage. Of course, while these arts and crafts communities had a reputation for Bohemianism and artistic extremism, even radical utopian artists have their limits, and legend has it that the premiere of 4'33 was met with horror and derision, and eventually led to one artist in the audience standing up and calling on the residents of the town around which these artistic colonies had agglomerated: “Good people of Woodstock, let's drive these people out of town.” [Excerpt: The Band, "The Weight"] Ronnie Hawkins was almost born to make music. We heard back in the episode on "Suzie Q" in 2019 about his family and their ties to music. Ronnie's uncle Del was, according to most of the sources on the family, a member of the Sons of the Pioneers -- though as I point out in that episode, his name isn't on any of the official lists of group members, but he might well have performed with them at some point in the early years of the group. And he was definitely a country music bass player, even if he *wasn't* in the most popular country and western group of the thirties and forties. And Del had had two sons, Jerry, who made some minor rockabilly records: [Excerpt: Jerry Hawkins, "Swing, Daddy, Swing"] And Del junior, who as we heard in the "Susie Q" episode became known as Dale Hawkins and made one of the most important rock records of the fifties: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, "Susie Q"] Ronnie Hawkins was around the same age as his cousins, and was in awe of his country-music star uncle. Hawkins later remembered that after his uncle moved to Califormia to become a star “He'd come home for a week or two, driving a brand new Cadillac and wearing brand new clothes and I knew that's what I wanted to be." Though he also remembered “He spent every penny he made on whiskey, and he was divorced because he was running around with all sorts of women. His wife left Arkansas and went to Louisiana.” Hawkins knew that he wanted to be a music star like his uncle, and he started performing at local fairs and other events from the age of eleven, including one performance where he substituted for Hank Williams -- Williams was so drunk that day he couldn't perform, and so his backing band asked volunteers from the audience to get up and sing with them, and Hawkins sang Burl Ives and minstrel-show songs with the band. He said later “Even back then I knew that every important white cat—Al Jolson, Stephen Foster—they all did it by copying blacks. Even Hank Williams learned all the stuff he had from those black cats in Alabama. Elvis Presley copied black music; that's all that Elvis did.” As well as being a performer from an early age, though, Hawkins was also an entrepreneur with an eye for how to make money. From the age of fourteen he started running liquor -- not moonshine, he would always point out, but something far safer. He lived only a few miles from the border between Missouri and Arkansas, and alcohol and tobacco were about half the price in Missouri that they were in Arkansas, so he'd drive across the border, load up on whisky and cigarettes, and drive back and sell them at a profit, which he then used to buy shares in several nightclubs, which he and his bands would perform in in later years. Like every man of his generation, Hawkins had to do six months in the Army, and it was there that he joined his first ever full-time band, the Blackhawks -- so called because his name was Hawkins, and the rest of the group were Black, though Hawkins was white. They got together when the other four members were performing at a club in the area where Hawkins was stationed, and he was so impressed with their music that he jumped on stage and started singing with them. He said later “It sounded like something between the blues and rockabilly. It sort of leaned in both directions at the same time, me being a hayseed and those guys playing a lot funkier." As he put it "I wanted to sound like Bobby ‘Blue' Bland but it came out sounding like Ernest Tubb.” Word got around about the Blackhawks, both that they were a great-sounding rock and roll band and that they were an integrated band at a time when that was extremely unpopular in the southern states, and when Hawkins was discharged from the Army he got a call from Sam Phillips at Sun Records. According to Hawkins a group of the regular Sun session musicians were planning on forming a band, and he was asked to front the band for a hundred dollars a week, but by the time he got there the band had fallen apart. This doesn't precisely line up with anything else I know about Sun, though it perhaps makes sense if Hawkins was being asked to front the band who had variously backed Billy Lee Riley and Jerry Lee Lewis after one of Riley's occasional threats to leave the label. More likely though, he told everyone he knew that he had a deal with Sun but Phillips was unimpressed with the demos he cut there, and Hawkins made up the story to stop himself losing face. One of the session players for Sun, though, Luke Paulman, who played in Conway Twitty's band among others, *was* impressed with Hawkins though, and suggested that they form a band together with Paulman's bass player brother George and piano-playing cousin Pop Jones. The Paulman brothers and Jones also came from Arkansas, but they specifically came from Helena, Arkansas, the town from which King Biscuit Time was broadcast. King Biscuit Time was the most important blues radio show in the US at that time -- a short lunchtime programme which featured live performances from a house band which varied over the years, but which in the 1940s had been led by Sonny Boy Williamson II, and featured Robert Jr. Lockwood, Robert Johnson's stepson, on guiitar: [Excerpt: Sonny Boy Williamson II "Eyesight to the Blind (King Biscuit Time)"] The band also included a drummer, "Peck" Curtis, and that drummer was the biggest inspiration for a young white man from the town named Levon Helm. Helm had first been inspired to make music after seeing Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys play live when Helm was eight, and he had soon taken up first the harmonica, then the guitar, then the drums, becoming excellent at all of them. Even as a child he knew that he didn't want to be a farmer like his family, and that music was, as he put it, "the only way to get off that stinking tractor  and out of that one hundred and five degree heat.” Sonny Boy Williamson and the King Biscuit Boys would perform in the open air in Marvell, Arkansas, where Helm was growing up, on Saturdays, and Helm watched them regularly as a small child, and became particularly interested in the drumming. “As good as the band sounded,” he said later “it seemed that [Peck] was definitely having the most fun. I locked into the drums at that point. Later, I heard Jack Nance, Conway Twitty's drummer, and all the great drummers in Memphis—Jimmy Van Eaton, Al Jackson, and Willie Hall—the Chicago boys (Fred Belew and Clifton James) and the people at Sun Records and Vee-Jay, but most of my style was based on Peck and Sonny Boy—the Delta blues style with the shuffle. Through the years, I've quickened the pace to a more rock-and-roll meter and time frame, but it still bases itself back to Peck, Sonny Boy Williamson, and the King Biscuit Boys.” Helm had played with another band that George Paulman had played in, and he was invited to join the fledgling band Hawkins was putting together, called for the moment the Sun Records Quartet. The group played some of the clubs Hawkins had business connections in, but they had other plans -- Conway Twitty had recently played Toronto, and had told Luke Paulman about how desperate the Canadians were for American rock and roll music. Twitty's agent Harold Kudlets booked the group in to a Toronto club, Le Coq D'Or, and soon the group were alternating between residencies in clubs in the Deep South, where they were just another rockabilly band, albeit one of the better ones, and in Canada, where they became the most popular band in Ontario, and became the nucleus of an entire musical scene -- the same scene from which, a few years later, people like Neil Young would emerge. George Paulman didn't remain long in the group -- he was apparently getting drunk, and also he was a double-bass player, at a time when the electric bass was becoming the in thing. And this is the best place to mention this, but there are several discrepancies in the various accounts of which band members were in Hawkins' band at which times, and who played on what session. They all *broadly* follow the same lines, but none of them are fully reconcilable with each other, and nobody was paying enough attention to lineup shifts in a bar band between 1957 and 1964 to be absolutely certain who was right. I've tried to reconcile the various accounts as far as possible and make a coherent narrative, but some of the details of what follows may be wrong, though the broad strokes are correct. For much of their first period in Ontario, the group had no bass player at all, relying on Jones' piano to fill in the bass parts, and on their first recording, a version of "Bo Diddley", they actually got the club's manager to play bass with them: [Excerpt: Ronnie Hawkins, "Hey Bo Diddley"] That is claimed to be the first rock and roll record made in Canada, though as everyone who has listened to this podcast knows, there's no first anything. It wasn't released as by the Sun Records Quartet though -- the band had presumably realised that that name would make them much less attractive to other labels, and so by this point the Sun Records Quartet had become Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks. "Hey Bo Diddley" was released on a small Canadian label and didn't have any success, but the group carried on performing live, travelling back down to Arkansas for a while and getting a new bass player, Lefty Evans, who had been playing in the same pool of musicians as them, having been another Sun session player who had been in Conway Twitty's band, and had written Twitty's "Why Can't I Get Through to You": [Excerpt: Conway Twitty, "Why Can't I Get Through to You"] The band were now popular enough in Canada that they were starting to get heard of in America, and through Kudlets they got a contract with Joe Glaser, a Mafia-connected booking agent who booked them into gigs on the Jersey Shore. As Helm said “Ronnie Hawkins had molded us into the wildest, fiercest, speed-driven bar band in America," and the group were apparently getting larger audiences in New Jersey than Sammy Davis Jr was, even though they hadn't released any records in the US. Or at least, they hadn't released any records in their own name in the US. There's a record on End Records by Rockin' Ronald and the Rebels which is very strongly rumoured to have been the Hawks under another name, though Hawkins always denied that. Have a listen for yourself and see what you think: [Excerpt: Rockin' Ronald and the Rebels, "Kansas City"] End Records, the label that was on, was one of the many record labels set up by George Goldner and distributed by Morris Levy, and when the group did release a record in their home country under their own name, it was on Levy's Roulette Records. An audition for Levy had been set up by Glaser's booking company, and Levy decided that given that Elvis was in the Army, there was a vacancy to be filled and Ronnie Hawkins might just fit the bill. Hawkins signed a contract with Levy, and it doesn't sound like he had much choice in the matter. Helm asked him “How long did you have to sign for?” and Hawkins replied "Life with an option" That said, unlike almost every other artist who interacted with Levy, Hawkins never had a bad word to say about him, at least in public, saying later “I don't care what Morris was supposed to have done, he looked after me and he believed in me. I even lived with him in his million-dollar apartment on the Upper East Side." The first single the group recorded for Roulette, a remake of Chuck Berry's "Thirty Days" retitled "Forty Days", didn't chart, but the follow-up, a version of Young Jessie's "Mary Lou", made number twenty-six on the charts: [Excerpt: Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, "Mary Lou"] While that was a cover of a Young Jessie record, the songwriting credits read Hawkins and Magill -- Magill was a pseudonym used by Morris Levy. Levy hoped to make Ronnie Hawkins into a really big star, but hit a snag. This was just the point where the payola scandal had hit and record companies were under criminal investigation for bribing DJs to play their records. This was the main method of promotion that Levy used, and this was so well known that Levy was, for a time, under more scrutiny than anyone. He couldn't risk paying anyone off, and so Hawkins' records didn't get the expected airplay. The group went through some lineup changes, too, bringing in guitarist Fred Carter (with Luke Paulman moving to rhythm and soon leaving altogether)  from Hawkins' cousin Dale's band, and bass player Jimmy Evans. Some sources say that Jones quit around this time, too, though others say he was in the band for  a while longer, and they had two keyboards (the other keyboard being supplied by Stan Szelest. As well as recording Ronnie Hawkins singles, the new lineup of the group also recorded one single with Carter on lead vocals, "My Heart Cries": [Excerpt: Fred Carter, "My Heart Cries"] While the group were now playing more shows in the USA, they were still playing regularly in Canada, and they had developed a huge fanbase there. One of these was a teenage guitarist called Robbie Robertson, who had become fascinated with the band after playing a support slot for them, and had started hanging round, trying to ingratiate himself with the band in the hope of being allowed to join. As he was a teenager, Hawkins thought he might have his finger on the pulse of the youth market, and when Hawkins and Helm travelled to the Brill Building to hear new songs for consideration for their next album, they brought Robertson along to listen to them and give his opinion. Robertson himself ended up contributing two songs to the album, titled Mr. Dynamo. According to Hawkins "we had a little time after the session, so I thought, Well, I'm just gonna put 'em down and see what happens. And they were released. Robbie was the songwriter for words, and Levon was good for arranging, making things fit in and all that stuff. He knew what to do, but he didn't write anything." The two songs in question were "Someone Like You" and "Hey Boba Lou": [Excerpt: Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, "Hey Boba Lou"] While Robertson was the sole writer of the songs, they were credited to Robertson, Hawkins, and Magill -- Morris Levy. As Robertson told the story later, “It's funny, when those songs came out and I got a copy of the album, it had another name on there besides my name for some writer like Morris Levy. So, I said to Ronnie, “There was nobody there writing these songs when I wrote these songs. Who is Morris Levy?” Ronnie just kinda tapped me on the head and said, “There are certain things about this business that you just let go and you don't question.” That was one of my early music industry lessons right there" Robertson desperately wanted to join the Hawks, but initially it was Robertson's bandmate Scott Cushnie who became the first Canadian to join the Hawks. But then when they were in Arkansas, Jimmy Evans decided he wasn't going to go back to Canada. So Hawkins called Robbie Robertson up and made him an offer. Robertson had to come down to Arkansas and get a couple of quick bass lessons from Helm (who could play pretty much every instrument to an acceptable standard, and so was by this point acting as the group's musical director, working out arrangements and leading them in rehearsals). Then Hawkins and Helm had to be elsewhere for a few weeks. If, when they got back, Robertson was good enough on bass, he had the job. If not, he didn't. Robertson accepted, but he nearly didn't get the gig after all. The place Hawkins and Helm had to be was Britain, where they were going to be promoting their latest single on Boy Meets Girls, the Jack Good TV series with Marty Wilde, which featured guitarist Joe Brown in the backing band: [Excerpt: Joe Brown, “Savage”] This was the same series that Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent were regularly appearing on, and while they didn't appear on the episodes that Hawkins and Helm appeared on, they did appear on the episodes immediately before Hawkins and Helm's two appearances, and again a couple of weeks after, and were friendly with the musicians who did play with Hawkins and Helm, and apparently they all jammed together a few times. Hawkins was impressed enough with Joe Brown -- who at the time was considered the best guitarist on the British scene -- that he invited Brown to become a Hawk. Presumably if Brown had taken him up on the offer, he would have taken the spot that ended up being Robertson's, but Brown turned him down -- a decision he apparently later regretted. Robbie Robertson was now a Hawk, and he and Helm formed an immediate bond. As Helm much later put it, "It was me and Robbie against the world. Our mission, as we saw it, was to put together the best band in history". As rockabilly was by this point passe, Levy tried converting Hawkins into a folk artist, to see if he could get some of the Kingston Trio's audience. He recorded a protest song, "The Ballad of Caryl Chessman", protesting the then-forthcoming execution of Chessman (one of only a handful of people to be executed in the US in recent decades for non-lethal offences), and he made an album of folk tunes, The Folk Ballads of Ronnie Hawkins, which largely consisted of solo acoustic recordings, plus a handful of left-over Hawks recordings from a year or so earlier. That wasn't a success, but they also tried a follow-up, having Hawkins go country and do an album of Hank Williams songs, recorded in Nashville at Owen Bradley's Quonset hut. While many of the musicians on the album were Nashville A-Team players, Hawkins also insisted on having his own band members perform, much to the disgust of the producer, and so it's likely (not certain, because there seem to be various disagreements about what was recorded when) that that album features the first studio recordings with Levon Helm and Robbie Robertson playing together: [Excerpt: Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, "Your Cheatin' Heart"] Other sources claim that the only Hawk allowed to play on the album sessions was Helm, and that the rest of the musicians on the album were Harold Bradley and Hank Garland on guitar, Owen Bradley and Floyd Cramer on piano, Bob Moore on bass, and the Anita Kerr singers. I tend to trust Helm's recollection that the Hawks played at least some of the instruments though, because the source claiming that also seems to confuse the Hank Williams and Folk Ballads albums, and because I don't hear two pianos on the album. On the other hand, that *does* sound like Floyd Cramer on piano, and the tik-tok bass sound you'd get from having Harold Bradley play a baritone guitar while Bob Moore played a bass. So my best guess is that these sessions were like the Elvis sessions around the same time and with several of the same musicians, where Elvis' own backing musicians played rhythm parts but left the prominent instruments to the A-team players. Helm was singularly unimpressed with the experience of recording in Nashville. His strongest memory of the sessions was of another session going on in the same studio complex at the time -- Bobby "Blue" Bland was recording his classic single "Turn On Your Love Light", with the great drummer Jabo Starks on drums, and Helm was more interested in listening to that than he was in the music they were playing: [Excerpt: Bobby "Blue" Bland, "Turn On Your Love Light"] Incidentally, Helm talks about that recording being made "downstairs" from where the Hawks were recording, but also says that they were recording in Bradley's Quonset hut.  Now, my understanding here *could* be very wrong -- I've been unable to find a plan or schematic anywhere -- but my understanding is that the Quonset hut was a single-level structure, not a multi-level structure. BUT the original recording facilities run by the Bradley brothers were in Owen Bradley's basement, before they moved into the larger Quonset hut facility in the back, so it's possible that Bland was recording that in the old basement studio. If so, that won't be the last recording made in a basement we hear this episode... Fred Carter decided during the Nashville sessions that he was going to leave the Hawks. As his son told the story: "Dad had discovered the session musicians there. He had no idea that you could play and make a living playing in studios and sleep in your own bed every night. By that point in his life, he'd already been gone from home and constantly on the road and in the service playing music for ten years so that appealed to him greatly. And Levon asked him, he said, “If you're gonna leave, Fred, I'd like you to get young Robbie over here up to speed on guitar”…[Robbie] got kind of aggravated with him—and Dad didn't say this with any malice—but by the end of that week, or whatever it was, Robbie made some kind of comment about “One day I'm gonna cut you.” And Dad said, “Well, if that's how you think about it, the lessons are over.” " (For those who don't know, a musician "cutting" another one is playing better than them, so much better that the worse musician has to concede defeat. For the remainder of Carter's notice in the Hawks, he played with his back to Robertson, refusing to look at him. Carter leaving the group caused some more shuffling of roles. For a while, Levon Helm -- who Hawkins always said was the best lead guitar player he ever worked with as well as the best drummer -- tried playing lead guitar while Robertson played rhythm and another member, Rebel Payne, played bass, but they couldn't find a drummer to replace Helm, who moved back onto the drums. Then they brought in Roy Buchanan, another guitarist who had been playing with Dale Hawkins, having started out playing with Johnny Otis' band. But Buchanan didn't fit with Hawkins' personality, and he quit after a few months, going off to record his own first solo record: [Excerpt: Roy Buchanan, "Mule Train Stomp"] Eventually they solved the lineup problem by having Robertson -- by this point an accomplished lead player --- move to lead guitar and bringing in a new rhythm player, another Canadian teenager named Rick Danko, who had originally been a lead player (and who also played mandolin and fiddle). Danko wasn't expected to stay on rhythm long though -- Rebel Payne was drinking a lot and missing being at home when he was out on the road, so Danko was brought in on the understanding that he was to learn Payne's bass parts and switch to bass when Payne quit. Helm and Robertson were unsure about Danko, and Robertson expressed that doubt, saying "He only knows four chords," to which Hawkins replied, "That's all right son. You can teach him four more the way we had to teach you." He proved himself by sheer hard work. As Hawkins put it “He practiced so much that his arms swoll up. He was hurting.” By the time Danko switched to bass, the group also had a baritone sax player, Jerry Penfound, which allowed the group to play more of the soul and R&B material that Helm and Robertson favoured, though Hawkins wasn't keen. This new lineup of the group (which also had Stan Szelest on piano) recorded Hawkins' next album. This one was produced by Henry Glover, the great record producer, songwriter, and trumpet player who had played with Lucky Millinder, produced Wynonie Harris, Hank Ballard, and Moon Mullican, and wrote "Drowning in My Own Tears", "The Peppermint Twist", and "California Sun". Glover was massively impressed with the band, especially Helm (with whom he would remain friends for the rest of his life) and set aside some studio time for them to cut some tracks without Hawkins, to be used as album filler, including a version of the Bobby "Blue" Bland song "Farther On Up the Road" with Helm on lead vocals: [Excerpt: Levon Helm and the Hawks, "Farther On Up the Road"] There were more changes on the way though. Stan Szelest was about to leave the band, and Jones had already left, so the group had no keyboard player. Hawkins had just the replacement for Szelest -- yet another Canadian teenager. This one was Richard Manuel, who played piano and sang in a band called The Rockin' Revols. Manuel was not the greatest piano player around -- he was an adequate player for simple rockabilly and R&B stuff, but hardly a virtuoso -- but he was an incredible singer, able to do a version of "Georgia on My Mind" which rivalled Ray Charles, and Hawkins had booked the Revols into his own small circuit of clubs around Arkanasas after being impressed with them on the same bill as the Hawks a couple of times. Hawkins wanted someone with a good voice because he was increasingly taking a back seat in performances. Hawkins was the bandleader and frontman, but he'd often given Helm a song or two to sing in the show, and as they were often playing for several hours a night, the more singers the band had the better. Soon, with Helm, Danko, and Manuel all in the group and able to take lead vocals, Hawkins would start missing entire shows, though he still got more money than any of his backing group. Hawkins was also a hard taskmaster, and wanted to have the best band around. He already had great musicians, but he wanted them to be *the best*. And all the musicians in his band were now much younger than him, with tons of natural talent, but untrained. What he needed was someone with proper training, someone who knew theory and technique. He'd been trying for a long time to get someone like that, but Garth Hudson had kept turning him down. Hudson was older than any of the Hawks, though younger than Hawkins, and he was a multi-instrumentalist who was far better than any other musician on the circuit, having trained in a conservatory and learned how to play Bach and Chopin before switching to rock and roll. He thought the Hawks were too loud sounding and played too hard for him, but Helm kept on at Hawkins to meet any demands Hudson had, and Hawkins eventually agreed to give Hudson a higher wage than any of the other band members, buy him a new Lowry organ, and give him an extra ten dollars a week to give the rest of the band music lessons. Hudson agreed, and the Hawks now had a lineup of Helm on drums, Robertson on guitar, Manuel on piano, Danko on bass, Hudson on organ and alto sax, and Penfound on baritone sax. But these new young musicians were beginning to wonder why they actually needed a frontman who didn't turn up to many of the gigs, kept most of the money, and fined them whenever they broke one of his increasingly stringent set of rules. Indeed, they wondered why they needed a frontman at all. They already had three singers -- and sometimes a fourth, a singer called Bruce Bruno who would sometimes sit in with them when Penfound was unable to make a gig. They went to see Harold Kudlets, who Hawkins had recently sacked as his manager, and asked him if he could get them gigs for the same amount of money as they'd been getting with Hawkins. Kudlets was astonished to find how little Hawkins had been paying them, and told them that would be no problem at all. They had no frontman any more -- and made it a rule in all their contracts that the word "sideman" would never be used -- but Helm had been the leader for contractual purposes, as the musical director and longest-serving member (Hawkins, as a non-playing singer, had never joined the Musicians' Union so couldn't be the leader on contracts). So the band that had been Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks became the Levon Helm Sextet briefly -- but Penfound soon quit, and they became Levon and the Hawks. The Hawks really started to find their identity as their own band in 1964. They were already far more interested in playing soul than Hawkins had been, but they were also starting to get into playing soul *jazz*, especially after seeing the Cannonball Adderley Sextet play live: [Excerpt: Cannonball Adderley, "This Here"] What the group admired about the Adderley group more than anything else was a sense of restraint. Helm was particularly impressed with their drummer, Louie Hayes, and said of him "I got to see some great musicians over the years, and you see somebody like that play and you can tell, y' know, that the thing not to do is to just get it down on the floor and stomp the hell out of it!" The other influence they had, and one which would shape their sound even more, was a negative one. The two biggest bands on the charts at the time were the Beatles and the Beach Boys, and as Helm described it in his autobiography, the Hawks thought both bands' harmonies were "a blend of pale, homogenised, voices". He said "We felt we were better than the Beatles and the Beach Boys. We considered them our rivals, even though they'd never heard of us", and they decided to make their own harmonies sound as different as possible as a result. Where those groups emphasised a vocal blend, the Hawks were going to emphasise the *difference* in their voices in their own harmonies. The group were playing prestigious venues like the Peppermint Lounge, and while playing there they met up with John Hammond Jr, who they'd met previously in Canada. As you might remember from the first episode on Bob Dylan, Hammond Jr was the son of the John Hammond who we've talked about in many episodes, and was a blues musician in his own right. He invited Helm, Robertson, and Hudson to join the musicians, including Michael Bloomfield, who were playing on his new album, So Many Roads: [Excerpt: John P. Hammond, "Who Do You Love?"] That album was one of the inspirations that led Bob Dylan to start making electric rock music and to hire Bloomfield as his guitarist, decisions that would have profound implications for the Hawks. The first single the Hawks recorded for themselves after leaving Hawkins was produced by Henry Glover, and both sides were written by Robbie Robertson. "uh Uh Uh" shows the influence of the R&B bands they were listening to. What it reminds me most of is the material Ike and Tina Turner were playing at the time, but at points I think I can also hear the influence of Curtis Mayfield and Steve Cropper, who were rapidly becoming Robertson's favourite songwriters: [Excerpt: The Canadian Squires, "Uh Uh Uh"] None of the band were happy with that record, though. They'd played in the studio the same way they played live, trying to get a strong bass presence, but it just sounded bottom-heavy to them when they heard the record on a jukebox. That record was released as by The Canadian Squires -- according to Robertson, that was a name that the label imposed on them for the record, while according to Helm it was an alternative name they used so they could get bookings in places they'd only recently played, which didn't want the same band to play too often. One wonders if there was any confusion with the band Neil Young played in a year or so before that single... Around this time, the group also met up with Helm's old musical inspiration Sonny Boy Williamson II, who was impressed enough with them that there was some talk of them being his backing band (and it was in this meeting that Williamson apparently told Robertson "those English boys want to play the blues so bad, and they play the blues *so bad*", speaking of the bands who'd backed him in the UK, like the Yardbirds and the Animals). But sadly, Williamson died in May 1965 before any of these plans had time to come to fruition. Every opportunity for the group seemed to be closing up, even as they knew they were as good as any band around them. They had an offer from Aaron Schroeder, who ran Musicor Records but was more importantly a songwriter and publisher who  had written for Elvis Presley and published Gene Pitney. Schroeder wanted to sign the Hawks as a band and Robertson as a songwriter, but Henry Glover looked over the contracts for them, and told them "If you sign this you'd better be able to pay each other, because nobody else is going to be paying you". What happened next is the subject of some controversy, because as these things tend to go, several people became aware of the Hawks at the same time, but it's generally considered that nothing would have happened the same way were it not for Mary Martin. Martin is a pivotal figure in music business history -- among other things she discovered Leonard Cohen and Gordon Lightfoot, managed Van Morrison, and signed Emmylou Harris to Warner Brothers records -- but a somewhat unknown one who doesn't even have a Wikipedia page. Martin was from Toronto, but had moved to New York, where she was working in Albert Grossman's office, but she still had many connections to Canadian musicians and kept an eye out for them. The group had sent demo tapes to Grossman's offices, and Grossman had had no interest in them, but Martin was a fan and kept pushing the group on Grossman and his associates. One of those associates, of course, was Grossman's client Bob Dylan. As we heard in the episode on "Like a Rolling Stone", Dylan had started making records with electric backing, with musicians who included Mike Bloomfield, who had played with several of the Hawks on the Hammond album, and Al Kooper, who was a friend of the band. Martin gave Richard Manuel a copy of Dylan's new electric album Highway 61 Revisited, and he enjoyed it, though the rest of the group were less impressed: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Highway 61 Revisited"] Dylan had played the Newport Folk Festival with some of the same musicians as played on his records, but Bloomfield in particular was more interested in continuing to play with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band than continuing with Dylan long-term. Mary Martin kept telling Dylan about this Canadian band she knew who would be perfect for him, and various people associated with the Grossman organisation, including Hammond, have claimed to have been sent down to New Jersey where the Hawks were playing to check them out in their live setting. The group have also mentioned that someone who looked a lot like Dylan was seen at some of their shows. Eventually, Dylan phoned Helm up and made an offer. He didn't need a full band at the moment -- he had Harvey Brooks on bass and Al Kooper on keyboards -- but he did need a lead guitar player and drummer for a couple of gigs he'd already booked, one in Forest Hills, New York, and a bigger gig at the Hollywood Bowl. Helm, unfamiliar with Dylan's work, actually asked Howard Kudlets if Dylan was capable of filling the Hollywood Bowl. The musicians rehearsed together and got a set together for the shows. Robertson and Helm thought the band sounded terrible, but Dylan liked the sound they were getting a lot. The audience in Forest Hills agreed with the Hawks, rather than Dylan, or so it would appear. As we heard in the "Like a Rolling Stone" episode, Dylan's turn towards rock music was *hated* by the folk purists who saw him as some sort of traitor to the movement, a movement whose figurehead he had become without wanting to. There were fifteen thousand people in the audience, and they listened politely enough to the first set, which Dylan played acoustically, But before the second set -- his first ever full electric set, rather than the very abridged one at Newport -- he told the musicians “I don't know what it will be like out there It's going to be some kind of  carnival and I want you to all know that up front. So go out there and keep playing no matter how weird it gets!” There's a terrible-quality audience recording of that show in circulation, and you can hear the crowd's reaction to the band and to the new material: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Ballad of a Thin Man" (live Forest Hills 1965, audience noise only)] The audience also threw things  at the musicians, knocking Al Kooper off his organ stool at one point. While Robertson remembered the Hollywood Bowl show as being an equally bad reaction, Helm remembered the audience there as being much more friendly, and the better-quality recording of that show seems to side with Helm: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Maggie's Farm (live at the Hollywood Bowl 1965)"] After those two shows, Helm and Robertson went back to their regular gig. and in September they made another record. This one, again produced by Glover, was for Atlantic's Atco subsidiary, and was released as by Levon and the Hawks. Manuel took lead, and again both songs were written by Robertson: [Excerpt: Levon and the Hawks, "He Don't Love You (And He'll Break Your Heart)"] But again that record did nothing. Dylan was about to start his first full electric tour, and while Helm and Robertson had not thought the shows they'd played sounded particularly good, Dylan had, and he wanted the two of them to continue with him. But Robertson and, especially, Helm, were not interested in being someone's sidemen. They explained to Dylan that they already had a band -- Levon and the Hawks -- and he would take all of them or he would take none of them. Helm in particular had not been impressed with Dylan's music -- Helm was fundamentally an R&B fan, while Dylan's music was rooted in genres he had little time for -- but he was OK with doing it, so long as the entire band got to. As Mary Martin put it “I think that the wonderful and the splendid heart of the band, if you will, was Levon, and I think he really sort of said, ‘If it's just myself as drummer and Robbie…we're out. We don't want that. It's either us, the band, or nothing.' And you know what? Good for him.” Rather amazingly, Dylan agreed. When the band's residency in New Jersey finished, they headed back to Toronto to play some shows there, and Dylan flew up and rehearsed with them after each show. When the tour started, the billing was "Bob Dylan with Levon and the Hawks". That billing wasn't to last long. Dylan had been booked in for nine months of touring, and was also starting work on what would become widely considered the first double album in rock music history, Blonde on Blonde, and the original plan was that Levon and the Hawks would play with him throughout that time.  The initial recording sessions for the album produced nothing suitable for release -- the closest was "I Wanna Be Your Lover", a semi-parody of the Beatles' "I Want to be Your Man": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan with Levon and the Hawks, "I Wanna Be Your Lover"] But shortly into the tour, Helm quit. The booing had continued, and had even got worse, and Helm simply wasn't in the business to be booed at every night. Also, his whole conception of music was that you dance to it, and nobody was dancing to any of this. Helm quit the band, only telling Robertson of his plans, and first went off to LA, where he met up with some musicians from Oklahoma who had enjoyed seeing the Hawks when they'd played that state and had since moved out West -- people like Leon Russell, J.J. Cale (not John Cale of the Velvet Underground, but the one who wrote "Cocaine" which Eric Clapton later had a hit with), and John Ware (who would later go on to join the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band). They started loosely jamming with each other, sometimes also involving a young singer named Linda Ronstadt, but Helm eventually decided to give up music and go and work on an oil rig in New Orleans. Levon and the Hawks were now just the Hawks. The rest of the group soldiered on, replacing Helm with session drummer Bobby Gregg (who had played on Dylan's previous couple of albums, and had previously played with Sun Ra), and played on the initial sessions for Blonde on Blonde. But of those sessions, Dylan said a few weeks later "Oh, I was really down. I mean, in ten recording sessions, man, we didn't get one song ... It was the band. But you see, I didn't know that. I didn't want to think that" One track from the sessions did get released -- the non-album single "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?" [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?"] There's some debate as to exactly who's playing drums on that -- Helm says in his autobiography that it's him, while the credits in the official CD releases tend to say it's Gregg. Either way, the track was an unexpected flop, not making the top forty in the US, though it made the top twenty in the UK. But the rest of the recordings with the now Helmless Hawks were less successful. Dylan was trying to get his new songs across, but this was a band who were used to playing raucous music for dancing, and so the attempts at more subtle songs didn't come off the way he wanted: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan and the Hawks, "Visions of Johanna (take 5, 11-30-1965)"] Only one track from those initial New York sessions made the album -- "One Of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)" -- but even that only featured Robertson and Danko of the Hawks, with the rest of the instruments being played by session players: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan (One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)"] The Hawks were a great live band, but great live bands are not necessarily the same thing as a great studio band. And that's especially the case with someone like Dylan. Dylan was someone who was used to recording entirely on his own, and to making records *quickly*. In total, for his fifteen studio albums up to 1974's Blood on the Tracks, Dylan spent a total of eighty-six days in the studio -- by comparison, the Beatles spent over a hundred days in the studio just on the Sgt Pepper album. It's not that the Hawks weren't a good band -- very far from it -- but that studio recording requires a different type of discipline, and that's doubly the case when you're playing with an idiosyncratic player like Dylan. The Hawks would remain Dylan's live backing band, but he wouldn't put out a studio recording with them backing him until 1974. Instead, Bob Johnston, the producer Dylan was working with, suggested a different plan. On his previous album, the Nashville session player Charlie McCoy had guested on "Desolation Row" and Dylan had found him easy to work with. Johnston lived in Nashville, and suggested that they could get the album completed more quickly and to Dylan's liking by using Nashville A-Team musicians. Dylan agreed to try it, and for the rest of the album he had Robertson on lead guitar and Al Kooper on keyboards, but every other musician was a Nashville session player, and they managed to get Dylan's songs recorded quickly and the way he heard them in his head: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Most Likely You Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine"] Though Dylan being Dylan he did try to introduce an element of randomness to the recordings by having the Nashville musicians swap their instruments around and play each other's parts on "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35", though the Nashville players were still competent enough that they managed to get a usable, if shambolic, track recorded that way in a single take: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35"] Dylan said later of the album "The closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind was on individual bands in the Blonde on Blonde album. It's that thin, that wild mercury sound. It's metallic and bright gold, with whatever that conjures up." The album was released in late June 1966, a week before Freak Out! by the Mothers of Invention, another double album, produced by Dylan's old producer Tom Wilson, and a few weeks after Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys. Dylan was at the forefront of a new progressive movement in rock music, a movement that was tying thoughtful, intelligent lyrics to studio experimentation and yet somehow managing to have commercial success. And a month after Blonde on Blonde came out, he stepped away from that position, and would never fully return to it. The first half of 1966 was taken up with near-constant touring, with Dylan backed by the Hawks and a succession of fill-in drummers -- first Bobby Gregg, then Sandy Konikoff, then Mickey Jones. This tour started in the US and Canada, with breaks for recording the album, and then moved on to Australia and Europe. The shows always followed the same pattern. First Dylan would perform an acoustic set, solo, with just an acoustic guitar and harmonica, which would generally go down well with the audience -- though sometimes they would get restless, prompting a certain amount of resistance from the performer: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Just Like a Woman (live Paris 1966)"] But the second half of each show was electric, and that was where the problems would arise. The Hawks were playing at the top of their game -- some truly stunning performances: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan and the Hawks, "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues (live in Liverpool 1966)"] But while the majority of the audience was happy to hear the music, there was a vocal portion that were utterly furious at the change in Dylan's musical style. Most notoriously, there was the performance at Manchester Free Trade Hall where this happened: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone (live Manchester 1966)"] That kind of aggression from the audience had the effect of pushing the band on to greater heights a lot of the time -- and a bootleg of that show, mislabelled as the Royal Albert Hall, became one of the most legendary bootlegs in rock music history. Jimmy Page would apparently buy a copy of the bootleg every time he saw one, thinking it was the best album ever made. But while Dylan and the Hawks played defiantly, that kind of audience reaction gets wearing. As Dylan later said, “Judas, the most hated name in human history, and for what—for playing an electric guitar. As if that is in some kind of way equitable to betraying our Lord, and delivering him up to be crucified; all those evil mothers can rot in hell.” And this wasn't the only stress Dylan, in particular, was under. D.A. Pennebaker was making a documentary of the tour -- a follow-up to his documentary of the 1965 tour, which had not yet come out. Dylan talked about the 1965 documentary, Don't Look Back, as being Pennebaker's film of Dylan, but this was going to be Dylan's film, with him directing the director. That footage shows Dylan as nervy and anxious, and covering for the anxiety with a veneer of flippancy. Some of Dylan's behaviour on both tours is unpleasant in ways that can't easily be justified (and which he has later publicly regretted), but there's also a seeming cruelty to some of his interactions with the press and public that actually reads more as frustration. Over and over again he's asked questions -- about being the voice of a generation or the leader of a protest movement -- which are simply based on incorrect premises. When someone asks you a question like this, there are only a few options you can take, none of them good. You can dissect the question, revealing the incorrect premises, and then answer a different question that isn't what they asked, which isn't really an option at all given the kind of rapid-fire situation Dylan was in. You can answer the question as asked, which ends up being dishonest. Or you can be flip and dismissive, which is the tactic Dylan chose. Dylan wasn't the only one -- this is basically what the Beatles did at press conferences. But where the Beatles were a gang and so came off as being fun, Dylan doing the same thing came off as arrogant and aggressive. One of the most famous artifacts of the whole tour is a long piece of footage recorded for the documentary, with Dylan and John Lennon riding in the back of a taxi, both clearly deeply uncomfortable, trying to be funny and impress the other, but neither actually wanting to be there: [Excerpt Dylan and Lennon conversation] 33) Part of the reason Dylan wanted to go home was that he had a whole new lifestyle. Up until 1964 he had been very much a city person, but as he had grown more famous, he'd found New York stifling. Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul, and Mary had a cabin in Woodstock, where he'd grown up, and after Dylan had spent a month there in summer 1964, he'd fallen in love with the area. Albert Grossman had also bought a home there, on Yarrow's advice, and had given Dylan free run of the place, and Dylan had decided he wanted to move there permanently and bought his own home there. He had also married, to Sara Lowndes (whose name is, as far as I can tell, pronounced "Sarah" even though it's spelled "Sara"), and she had given birth to his first child (and he had adopted her child from her previous marriage). Very little is actually known about Sara, who unlike many other partners of rock stars at this point seemed positively to detest the limelight, and whose privacy Dylan has continued to respect even after the end of their marriage in the late seventies, but it's apparent that the two were very much in love, and that Dylan wanted to be back with his wife and kids, in the country, not going from one strange city to another being asked insipid questions and having abuse screamed at him. He was also tired of the pressure to produce work constantly. He'd signed a contract for a novel, called Tarantula, which he'd written a draft of but was unhappy with, and he'd put out two single albums and a double-album in a little over a year -- all of them considered among the greatest albums ever made. He could only keep up this rate of production and performance with a large intake of speed, and he was sometimes staying up for four days straight to do so. After the European leg of the tour, Dylan was meant to take some time to finish overdubs on Blonde on Blonde, edit the film of the tour for a TV special, with his friend Howard Alk, and proof the galleys for Tarantula, before going on a second world tour in the autumn. That world tour never happened. Dylan was in a motorcycle accident near his home, and had to take time out to recover. There has been a lot of discussion as to how serious the accident actually was, because Dylan's manager Albert Grossman was known to threaten to break contracts by claiming his performers were sick, and because Dylan essentially disappeared from public view for the next eighteen months. Every possible interpretation of the events has been put about by someone, from Dylan having been close to death, to the entire story being put up as a fake. As Dylan is someone who is far more protective of his privacy than most rock stars, it's doubtful we'll ever know the precise truth, but putting together the various accounts Dylan's injuries were bad but not life-threatening, but they acted as a wake-up call -- if he carried on living like he had been, how much longer could he continue? in his sort-of autobiography, Chronicles, Dylan described this period, saying "I had been in a motorcycle accident and I'd been hurt, but I recovered. Truth was that I wanted to get out of the rat race. Having children changed my life and segregated me from just about everybody and everything that was going on. Outside of my family, nothing held any real interest for me and I was seeing everything through different glasses." All his forthcoming studio and tour dates were cancelled, and Dylan took the time out to recover, and to work on his film, Eat the Document. But it's clear that nobody was sure at first exactly how long Dylan's hiatus from touring was going to last. As it turned out, he wouldn't do another tour until the mid-seventies, and would barely even play any one-off gigs in the intervening time. But nobody knew that at the time, and so to be on the safe side the Hawks were being kept on a retainer. They'd always intended to work on their own music anyway -- they didn't just want to be anyone's backing band -- so they took this time to kick a few ideas around, but they were hamstrung by the fact that it was difficult to find rehearsal space in New York City, and they didn't have any gigs. Their main musical work in the few months between summer 1966 and spring 1967 was some recordings for the soundtrack of a film Peter Yarrow was making. You Are What You Eat is a bizarre hippie collage of a film, documenting the counterculture between 1966 when Yarrow started making it and 1968 when it came out. Carl Franzoni, one of the leaders of the LA freak movement that we've talked about in episodes on the Byrds, Love, and the Mothers of Invention, said of the film “If you ever see this movie you'll understand what ‘freaks' are. It'll let you see the L.A. freaks, the San Francisco freaks, and the New York freaks. It was like a documentary and it was about the makings of what freaks were about. And it had a philosophy, a very definite philosophy: that you are free-spirited, artistic." It's now most known for introducing the song "My Name is Jack" by John Simon, the film's music supervisor: [Excerpt: John Simon, "My Name is Jack"] That song would go on to be a top ten hit in the UK for Manfred Mann: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "My Name is Jack"] The Hawks contributed backing music for several songs for the film, in which they acted as backing band for another old Greenwich Village folkie who had been friends with Yarrow and Dylan but who was not yet the star he would soon become, Tiny Tim: [Excerpt: Tiny Tim, "Sonny Boy"] This was their first time playing together properly since the end of the European tour, and Sid Griffin has noted that these Tiny Tim sessions are the first time you can really hear the sound that the group would develop over the next year, and which would characterise them for their whole career. Robertson, Danko, and Manuel also did a session, not for the film with another of Grossman's discoveries, Carly Simon, playing a version of "Baby Let Me Follow You Down", a song they'd played a lot with Dylan on the tour that spring. That recording has never been released, and I've only managed to track down a brief clip of it from a BBC documentary, with Simon and an interviewer talking over most of the clip (so this won't be in the Mixcloud I put together of songs): [Excerpt: Carly Simon, "Baby Let Me Follow You Down"] That recording is notable though because as well as Robertson, Danko, and Manuel, and Dylan's regular studio keyboard players Al Kooper and Paul Griffin, it also features Levon Helm on drums, even though Helm had still not rejoined the band and was at the time mostly working in New Orleans. But his name's on the session log, so he must have m

Jay Bergen was John Lennon's lawyer in connection with several litigations in the mid-70s over the “Roots” album, a knock-off Lennon record illegally marketed by Morris Levy, the Mob-ed up Principal of Roulette Records. He got to know John on a very personal level and talks about him. In a 45-year legal career Jay also represented George Steinbrenner of the New York Yankees and Albert Grossman, manager of Bob Dylan.My featured song is “The Rescue” from the album “The Queen's Carnival” by my band Project Grand Slam. Spotify link.—--------------------------------------The Follow Your Dream Podcast:Top 1% of all podcasts with Listeners in 200 countries!For more information and other episodes of the podcast click here. To subscribe to the podcast click here.To subscribe to our weekly Follow Your Dream Podcast email click here.To Rate and Review the podcast click here.“Dream With Robert”. Click here.—----------------------------------------Jay and Robert discuss the following:- Representing George Steinbrenner of the NY Yankees- Representing Albert Grossman, manager of Bob Dylan- His representation of John Lennon (1975-77)- Copyright infringement case brought by Morris Levy  - Settlement required John Lennon to put 3 of Levy's songs on an album- Second lawsuit after Lennon's “Rock and Roll” album came out- Eating with John at The Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station  - Autographs  - George Harrison- John's assassination in 1980- Outcome of Roots lawsuits—-------------------------------------“IT'S ALIVE!” is Robert's new Project Grand Slam album. Featuring 13 of the band's Greatest Hits performed “live” at SteelStacks in Pennsylvania and The Nisville Jazz Festival in Serbia.Reviews:"An instant classic!" (Melody Maker)"Amazing record...Another win for the one and only Robert Miller!" (Hollywood Digest)"Close to perfect!" (Pop Icon)"A Masterpiece!" (Big Celebrity Buzz)"Sterling effort!" (Indie Pulse)"Another fusion wonder for Project Grand Slam!" (MobYorkCity)Click here for all links.—-----------------------------------------Audio production:Jimmy RavenscroftKymera Films Connect with Jay at:Jay Bergen | Meet the Author | LENNON, the MOBSTER & the LAWYER (lennonthemobsterandthelawyer.com) Connect with the Follow Your Dream Podcast:Website - www.followyourdreampodcast.comEmail Robert - robert@followyourdreampodcast.com Follow Robert's band, Project Grand Slam, and his music:Website - www.projectgrandslam.comPGS Store - www.thePGSstore.comYouTubeSpotify MusicApple MusicEmail - pgs@projectgrandslam.com

Tommy James came up during a time when the music industry was in part controlled by New York's Italian mafia. And for a period in the 1960s, that power was centralized at Roulette Records. The record label was run by convicted extortionist Morris Levy and operated in partnership with the Genovese crime family. Tommy James' hits were sanctioned by the mob, the same mob that would threaten not only his career, but his life. To see the full list of contributors, see the show notes at www.disgracelandpod.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jay Bergen - John Lennon - in conversation with David Eastaugh https://www.lennonthemobsterandthelawyer.com/jay-bergen Before John Lennon retreated peacefully into private life in 1975, he fought a major legal battle that went under the public radar. Just as his Rock 'n' Roll oldies album hit the market, Morris Levy, the Mob-connected owner of Roulette Records, released Roots, an unauthorized version of the same record. Levy had used rough mixes of John's unfinished Rock 'n' Roll recordings—and claimed the former Beatle had verbally agreed to the arrangement. The clash led to a lawsuit and countersuit between Levy and Lennon. Attorney Jay Bergen, a partner in a prestigious New York City law firm, represented John in this epic battle over the rights to his own recordings. Millions of dollars were at stake. Jay tells the intimate story of how he worked closely with John to rebut Levy's outrageous claims. He also recounts how John explained his recording process in poetic, exacting terms before a judge who knew little about the Beatles and John's solo career.

On this episode of The It's Only Rock And Roll Podcast, we feature 1960's hit-maker TOMMY JAMES, who along with his band The Shondells, released a string of classics including “Crimson and Clover”, “Mony Mony”, “Hanky Panky”, “I Think We're Alone Now”, and others. Tommy discusses how he went from a middle-America upbringing, to working and recording for Roulette Records, which in reality was a front for the Genovese crime family. Topics also include which of his biggest hits initially featured heavy breathing (inevitably deemed too risqué for radio); why one of his most famous singles is actually the rough mix; his worst live on-stage experience; his "introduction" to The Beatles; and many captivating anecdotes from his bestselling autobiography “Me, The Mob, and The Music”. ------------------------------------------------ ֎ To order: “Me, The Mob, and The Music” via Amazon - https://a.co/d/eJd9ez7 ֎ To order: “40 Years: The Complete Singles Collection 1966-2006” via Amazon - https://amzn.to/3Fb0k8X Visit the 'It's Only Rock And Roll PODCAST' online at: ● Homepage – www.ItsOnlyRockAndRollPodcast.com ● Facebook – facebook.com/ItsOnlyRockAndRollPodcast/ ● YouTube - https://youtu.be/imhlAeM3jrY ● Audea.io - https://audea.io/ ● Instagram - @itsonlyrockandrollpodcast Be sure to check out our all-new OFFICIAL IORR PODCAST STORE! https://www.cafepress.com/iorrpodcast © 2022 Howlaround Productions. All rights reserved.

Tommy James is one of the most iconic artists of the rock era. Here's all you need to know: 23 Gold singles, 9 Platinum albums, and over 100 million records sold. "Hanky Panky", "Mony Mony", "Crimson And Clover", "I Think We're Alone Now". In this episode Tommy tells stories and talks about his hits, his career, his relationship with Morris Levy of Roulette Records and the Mob, and much more. My featured song is my reimagined version of Cream's “I'm So Glad” from The PGS Experience album by my band, Project Grand Slam. Spotify link here.“Dream With Robert Miller”. Click here.---------------------------------------------If you enjoyed the show, please Subscribe, Rate, and Review. Just Click Here.Tommy and I discuss the following:The 1960sThree generations of fansElvis Presley“Hanky Panky”Roulette Records and Morris Levy“Mony Mony”Woodstock“Crimson and Clover”Sirius/XM showMusical of his autobiography “Live At SteelStacks” is the new 5-song EP by Robert and his band, Project Grand Slam. The release captures the band at the top of their game and shows off the breadth, scope and sound of the band. The EP has been highly praised by musicians and reviewers alike. Elliott Randall, of Steely Dan fame, the guitarist who recorded the unforgettable solos in ‘Reelin' In The Years', calls Live At SteelStacks “Captivating!”. Tony Carey, the incredible multi-talented artist who has produced Joe Cocker, Eric Burden and John Mayall, says “PGS burns down the house!”. Alan Hewitt of the Moody Blues says “Full of life!” Melody Maker says simply “Virtuoso musicians!”, and Hollywood Digest says “Such a great band!”. “Live At SteelStacks” can be streamed on Spotify, Amazon, Apple and all the other streaming platforms, and can be downloaded at The PGS Store.“All Of The Time” is Robert's most recent single by his band Project Grand Slam. It's a playful, whimsical love song. It's light and airy and exudes the happiness and joy of being in love. The reviewers agree. Melody Maker gives it 5 Stars and calls it “Pure bliss…An intimate sound with abundant melodic riches!”. Pop Icon also gives it 5 Stars and calls it “Ecstasy…One of the best all-around bands working today!”. And Mob York City says simply “Excellence…A band in full command of their powers!” Watch the video here. You can stream “All Of The Time” on Spotify, Apple or any of the other streaming platforms. And you can download it here.“The Shakespeare Concert” is the latest album by Robert's band, Project Grand Slam. It's been praised by famous musicians including Mark Farner of Grand Funk Railroad, Jim Peterik of the Ides Of March, Joey Dee of Peppermint Twist fame, legendary guitarist Elliott Randall, and celebrated British composer Sarah Class. The music reviewers have called it “Perfection!”, “5 Stars!”, “Thrilling!”, and “A Masterpiece!”. The album can be streamed on Spotify, Apple and all the other streaming services. You can watch the Highlight Reel HERE. And you can purchase a digital download or autographed CD of the album HERE. “The Fall Of Winter” is Robert's single in collaboration with legendary rocker Jim Peterik of the Ides Of March and formerly with Survivor. Also featuring renowned guitarist Elliott Randall (Steely Dan/Doobie Brothers) and keyboard ace Tony Carey (Joe Cocker/Eric Burden). “A triumph!” (The Indie Source). “Flexes Real Rock Muscle!” (Celebrity Zone). Stream it on Spotify or Apple. Watch the lyric video here. Download it here.Robert's “Follow Your Dream Handbook” is an Amazon #1 Bestseller. It's a combination memoir of his unique musical journey and a step by step how-to follow and succeed at your dream. Available on Amazon and wherever books are sold.  Audio production:Jimmy Ravenscroft Connect with Tommy at:www.tommyjames.com Connect with the Follow Your Dream Podcast:WebsiteFacebookLinkedInEmail RobertYouTube Listen to the Follow Your Dream Podcast on these podcast platforms:CastBoxSpotifyApple Follow Robert's band, Project Grand Slam, and his music:WebsiteInstagramPGS StoreYouTubeFacebookSpotify MusicApple MusicEmail

Tommy James' road to superstardom began when a nightclub DJ in Pittsburgh discovered a two-year-old record by "The Shondells" and played it at his weekend dances. The crowd response was so overwhelmingly positive that radio deejays started spinning it and an enterprising record distributor bootlegged it, selling 80,000 copies in ten days. By May of 1966 "Hanky Panky" was the number one record in Pittsburgh and Tommy James was a sensation. A Pittsburgh promoter tracked Tommy down at his home in Niles, Michigan and urged him to "come on down!" Unable to put the original group back together, Tommy hired a hot P-burgh R&B bar band to replace them. Two weeks later he signed a record deal with Roulette Records. The label, in turn, put their promotion team to work on "Hanky Panky" and made it the summer smash of '66. Thus began one of the longest strings of nonstop hits in recording industry history! --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/edward-kerfin/support

Episode 152 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “For What It's Worth”, and the short but eventful career of Buffalo Springfield. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-five-minute bonus episode available, on "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" by Glen Campbell. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources As usual, there's a Mixcloud mix containing all the songs excerpted in the episode. This four-CD box set is the definitive collection of Buffalo Springfield's work, while if you want the mono version of the second album, the stereo version of the first, and the final album as released, but no demos or outtakes, you want this more recent box set. For What It's Worth: The Story of Buffalo Springfield by Richey Furay and John Einarson is obviously Furay's version of the story, but all the more interesting for that. For information on Steve Stills' early life I used Stephen Stills: Change Partners by David Roberts.  Information on both Stills and Young comes from Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young by David Browne.  Jimmy McDonough's Shakey is the definitive biography of Neil Young, while Young's Waging Heavy Peace is his autobiography. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A quick note before we begin -- this episode deals with various disabilities. In particular, there are descriptions of epileptic seizures that come from non-medically-trained witnesses, many of whom took ableist attitudes towards the seizures. I don't know enough about epilepsy to know how accurate their descriptions and perceptions are, and I apologise if that means that by repeating some of their statements, I am inadvertently passing on myths about the condition. When I talk about this, I am talking about the after-the-fact recollections of musicians, none of them medically trained and many of them in altered states of consciousness, about events that had happened decades earlier. Please do not take anything said in a podcast about music history as being the last word on the causes or effects of epileptic seizures, rather than how those musicians remember them. Anyway, on with the show. One of the things you notice if you write about protest songs is that a lot of the time, the songs that people talk about as being important or impactful have aged very poorly. Even great songwriters like Bob Dylan or John Lennon, when writing material about the political events of the time, would write material they would later acknowledge was far from their best. Too often a song will be about a truly important event, and be powered by a real sense of outrage at injustice, but it will be overly specific, and then as soon as the immediate issue is no longer topical, the song is at best a curio. For example, the sentencing of the poet and rock band manager John Sinclair to ten years in prison for giving two joints to an undercover police officer was hugely controversial in the early seventies, but by the time John Lennon's song about it was released, Sinclair had been freed by the Supreme Court, and very, very few people would use the song as an example of why Lennon's songwriting still has lasting value: [Excerpt: John Lennon, "John Sinclair"] But there are exceptions, and those tend to be songs where rather than talking about specific headlines, the song is about the emotion that current events have caused. Ninety years on from its first success, for example, "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" still has resonance, because there are still people who are put out of work through no fault of their own, and even those of us who are lucky enough to be financially comfortable have the fear that all too soon it may end, and we may end up like Al begging on the streets: [Excerpt: Rudy Vallee, "Brother Can You Spare a Dime?"] And because of that emotional connection, sometimes the very best protest songs can take on new lives and new meanings, and connect with the way people feel about totally unrelated subjects. Take Buffalo Springfield's one hit. The actual subject of the song couldn't be any more trivial in the grand scheme of things -- a change in zoning regulations around the Sunset Strip that meant people under twenty-one couldn't go to the clubs after 10PM, and the subsequent reaction to that -- but because rather than talking about the specific incident, Steve Stills instead talked about the emotions that it called up, and just noted the fleeting images that he was left with, the song became adopted as an anthem by soldiers in Vietnam. Sometimes what a song says is nowhere near as important as how it says it. [Excerpt: Buffalo Springfield, "For What It's Worth"] Steve Stills seems almost to have been destined to be a musician, although the instrument he started on, the drums, was not the one for which he would become best known. According to Stills, though, he always had an aptitude for rhythm, to the extent that he learned to tapdance almost as soon as he had learned to walk. He started on drums aged eight or nine, after somebody gave him a set of drumsticks. After his parents got sick of him damaging the furniture by playing on every available surface, an actual drum kit followed, and that became his principal instrument, even after he learned to play the guitar at military school, as his roommate owned one. As a teenager, Stills developed an idiosyncratic taste in music, helped by the record collection of his friend Michael Garcia. He didn't particularly like most of the pop music of the time, but he was a big fan of pre-war country music, Motown, girl-group music -- he especially liked the Shirelles -- and Chess blues. He was also especially enamoured of the music of Jimmy Reed, a passion he would later share with his future bandmate Neil Young: [Excerpt: Jimmy Reed, "Baby, What You Want Me To Do?"] In his early teens, he became the drummer for a band called the Radars, and while he was drumming he studied their lead guitarist, Chuck Schwin.  He said later "There was a whole little bunch of us who were into kind of a combination of all the blues guys and others including Chet Atkins, Dick Dale, and Hank Marvin: a very weird cross-section of far-out guitar players." Stills taught himself to play like those guitarists, and in particular he taught himself how to emulate Atkins' Travis-picking style, and became remarkably proficient at it. There exists a recording of him, aged sixteen, singing one of his own songs and playing finger-picked guitar, and while the song is not exactly the strongest thing I've ever heard lyrically, it's clearly the work of someone who is already a confident performer: [Excerpt: Stephen Stills, "Travellin'"] But the main reason he switched to becoming a guitarist wasn't because of his admiration for Chet Atkins or Hank Marvin, but because he started driving and discovered that if you have to load a drum kit into your car and then drive it to rehearsals and gigs you either end up bashing up your car or bashing up the drum kit. As this is not a problem with guitars, Stills decided that he'd move on from the Radars, and join a band named the Continentals as their rhythm guitarist, playing with lead guitarist Don Felder. Stills was only in the Continentals for a few months though, before being replaced by another guitarist, Bernie Leadon, and in general Stills' whole early life is one of being uprooted and moved around. His father had jobs in several different countries, and while for the majority of his time Stills was in the southern US, he also ended up spending time in Costa Rica -- and staying there as a teenager even as the rest of his family moved to El Salvador. Eventually, aged eighteen, he moved to New Orleans, where he formed a folk duo with a friend, Chris Sarns. The two had very different tastes in folk music -- Stills preferred Dylan-style singer-songwriters, while Sarns liked the clean sound of the Kingston Trio -- but they played together for several months before moving to Greenwich Village, where they performed together and separately. They were latecomers to the scene, which had already mostly ended, and many of the folk stars had already gone on to do bigger things. But Stills still saw plenty of great performers there -- Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonius Monk in the jazz clubs, Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce, and Richard Pryor in the comedy ones, and Simon and Garfunkel, Richie Havens, Fred Neil and Tim Hardin in the folk ones -- Stills said that other than Chet Atkins, Havens, Neil, and Hardin were the people most responsible for his guitar style. Stills was also, at this time, obsessed with Judy Collins' third album -- the album which had featured Roger McGuinn on banjo and arrangements, and which would soon provide several songs for the Byrds to cover: [Excerpt: Judy Collins, "Turn, Turn, Turn"] Judy Collins would soon become a very important figure in Stills' life, but for now she was just the singer on his favourite record. While the Greenwich Village folk scene was no longer quite what it had been a year or two earlier, it was still a great place for a young talented musician to perform. As well as working with Chris Sarns, Stills also formed a trio with his friend John Hopkins and a banjo player called Peter Tork who everyone said looked just like Stills. Tork soon headed out west to seek his fortune, and then Stills got headhunted to join the Au Go Go Singers. This was a group that was being set up in the same style as the New Christy Minstrels -- a nine-piece vocal and instrumental group that would do clean-sounding versions of currently-popular folk songs. The group were signed to Roulette Records, and recorded one album, They Call Us Au-Go-Go Singers, produced by Hugo and Luigi, the production duo we've previously seen working with everyone from the Tokens to the Isley Brothers. Much of the album is exactly the same kind of thing that a million New Christy Minstrels soundalikes were putting out -- and Stills, with his raspy voice, was clearly intended to be the Barry McGuire of this group -- but there was one exception -- a song called "High Flyin' Bird", on which Stills was able to show off the sound that would later make him famous, and which became so associated with him that even though it was written by Billy Edd Wheeler, the writer of "Jackson", even the biography of Stills I used in researching this episode credits "High Flyin' Bird" as being a Stills original: [Excerpt: The Au-Go-Go Singers, "High Flyin' Bird"] One of the other members of the Au-Go-Go Singers, Richie Furay, also got to sing a lead vocal on the album, on the Tom Paxton song "Where I'm Bound": [Excerpt: The Au-Go-Go Singers, "Where I'm Bound"] The Au-Go-Go Singers got a handful of dates around the folk scene, and Stills and Furay became friendly with another singer playing the same circuit, Gram Parsons. Parsons was one of the few people they knew who could see the value in current country music, and convinced both Stills and Furay to start paying more attention to what was coming out of Nashville and Bakersfield. But soon the Au-Go-Go Singers split up. Several venues where they might otherwise have been booked were apparently scared to book an act that was associated with Morris Levy, and also the market for big folk ensembles dried up more or less overnight when the Beatles hit the music scene. But several of the group -- including Stills but not Furay -- decided they were going to continue anyway, and formed a group called The Company, and they went on a tour of Canada. And one of the venues they played was the Fourth Dimension coffee house in Fort William, Ontario, and there their support act was a rock band called The Squires: [Excerpt: The Squires, "(I'm a Man And) I Can't Cry"] The lead guitarist of the Squires, Neil Young, had a lot in common with Stills, and they bonded instantly. Both men had parents who had split up when they were in their teens, and had a successful but rather absent father and an overbearing mother. And both had shown an interest in music even as babies. According to Young's mother, when he was still in nappies, he would pull himself up by the bars  of his playpen and try to dance every time he heard "Pinetop's Boogie Woogie": [Excerpt: Pinetop Smith, "Pinetop's Boogie Woogie"] Young, though, had had one crucial experience which Stills had not had. At the age of six, he'd come down with polio, and become partially paralysed. He'd spent months in hospital before he regained his ability to walk, and the experience had also affected him in other ways. While he was recovering, he would draw pictures of trains -- other than music, his big interest, almost an obsession, was with electric train sets, and that obsession would remain with him throughout his life -- but for the first time he was drawing with his right hand rather than his left. He later said "The left-hand side got a little screwed. Feels different from the right. If I close my eyes, my left side, I really don't know where it is—but over the years I've discovered that almost one hundred percent for sure it's gonna be very close to my right side … probably to the left. That's why I started appearing to be ambidextrous, I think. Because polio affected my left side, and I think I was left-handed when I was born. What I have done is use the weak side as the dominant one because the strong side was injured." Both Young's father Scott Young -- a very famous Canadian writer and sports broadcaster, who was by all accounts as well known in Canada during his lifetime as his son -- and Scott's brother played ukulele, and they taught Neil how to play, and his first attempt at forming a group had been to get his friend Comrie Smith to get a pair of bongos and play along with him to Preston Epps' "Bongo Rock": [Excerpt: Preston Epps, "Bongo Rock"] Neil Young had liked all the usual rock and roll stars of the fifties  -- though in his personal rankings, Elvis came a distant third behind Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis -- but his tastes ran more to the more darkly emotional. He loved "Maybe" by the Chantels, saying "Raw soul—you cannot miss it. That's the real thing. She was believin' every word she was singin'." [Excerpt: The Chantels, "Maybe"] What he liked more than anything was music that had a mainstream surface but seemed slightly off-kilter. He was a major fan of Roy Orbison, saying, "it's almost impossible to comprehend the depth of that soul. It's so deep and dark it just keeps on goin' down—but it's not black. It's blue, deep blue. He's just got it. The drama. There's something sad but proud about Roy's music", and he would say similar things about Del Shannon, saying "He struck me as the ultimate dark figure—behind some Bobby Rydell exterior, y'know? “Hats Off to Larry,” “Runaway,” “Swiss Maid”—very, very inventive. The stuff was weird. Totally unaffected." More surprisingly, perhaps, he was a particular fan of Bobby Darin, who he admired so much because Darin could change styles at the drop of a hat, going from novelty rock and roll like "Splish Splash" to crooning "Mack The Knife" to singing Tim Hardin songs like "If I Were a Carpenter", without any of them seeming any less authentic. As he put it later "He just changed. He's completely different. And he's really into it. Doesn't sound like he's not there. “Dream Lover,” “Mack the Knife,” “If I Were a Carpenter,” “Queen of the Hop,” “Splish Splash”—tell me about those records, Mr. Darin. Did you write those all the same day, or what happened? He just changed so much. Just kinda went from one place to another. So it's hard to tell who Bobby Darin really was." And one record which Young was hugely influenced by was Floyd Cramer's country instrumental, "Last Date": [Excerpt: Floyd Cramer, "Last Date"] Now, that was a very important record in country music, and if you want to know more about it I strongly recommend listening to the episode of Cocaine and Rhinestones on the Nashville A-Team, which has a long section on the track, but the crucial thing to know about that track is that it's one of the earliest examples of what is known as slip-note playing, where the piano player, before hitting the correct note, briefly hits the note a tone below it, creating a brief discord. Young absolutely loved that sound, and wanted to make a sound like that on the guitar. And then, when he and his mother moved to Winnipeg after his parents' divorce, he found someone who was doing just that. It was the guitarist in a group variously known as Chad Allan and the Reflections and Chad Allan and the Expressions. That group had relatives in the UK who would send them records, and so where most Canadian bands would do covers of American hits, Chad Allan and the Reflections would do covers of British hits, like their version of Geoff Goddard's "Tribute to Buddy Holly", a song that had originally been produced by Joe Meek: [Excerpt: Chad Allan and the Reflections, "Tribute to Buddy Holly"] That would later pay off for them in a big way, when they recorded a version of Johnny Kidd and the Pirates' "Shakin' All Over", for which their record label tried to create an air of mystery by releasing it with no artist name, just "Guess Who?" on the label. It became a hit, the name stuck, and they became The Guess Who: [Excerpt: The Guess Who, "Shakin' All Over"] But at this point they, and their guitarist Randy Bachman, were just another group playing around Winnipeg. Bachman, though, was hugely impressive to Neil Young for a few reasons. The first was that he really did have a playing style that was a lot like the piano style of Floyd Cramer -- Young would later say "it was Randy Bachman who did it first. Randy was the first one I ever heard do things on the guitar that reminded me of Floyd. He'd do these pulls—“darrr darrrr,” this two-note thing goin' together—harmony, with one note pulling and the other note stayin' the same." Bachman also had built the first echo unit that Young heard a guitarist play in person. He'd discovered that by playing with the recording heads on a tape recorder owned by his mother, he could replicate the tape echo that Sam Phillips had used at Sun Studios -- and once he'd attached that to his amplifier, he realised how much the resulting sound sounded like his favourite guitarist, Hank Marvin of the Shadows, another favourite of Neil Young's: [Excerpt: The Shadows, "Man of Mystery"] Young soon started looking to Bachman as something of a mentor figure, and he would learn a lot of guitar techniques second hand from Bachman -- every time a famous musician came to the area, Bachman would go along and stand right at the front and watch the guitarist, and make note of the positions their fingers were in. Then Bachman would replicate those guitar parts with the Reflections, and Neil Young would stand in front of him and make notes of where *his* fingers were. Young joined a band on the local circuit called the Esquires, but soon either quit or was fired, depending on which version of the story you choose to believe. He then formed his own rival band, the Squires, with no "e", much to the disgust of his ex-bandmates. In July 1963, five months after they formed, the  Squires released their first record, "Aurora" backed with "The Sultan", on a tiny local label. Both tracks were very obviously influenced by the Shadows: [Excerpt: The Squires, "Aurora"] The Squires were a mostly-instrumental band for the first year or so they were together, and then the Beatles hit North America, and suddenly people didn't want to hear surf instrumentals and Shadows covers any more, they only wanted to hear songs that sounded a bit like the Beatles. The Squires started to work up the appropriate repertoire -- two songs that have been mentioned as in their set at this point are the Beatles album track "It Won't Be Long", and "Money" which the Beatles had also covered -- but they didn't have a singer, being an instrumental group. They could get in a singer, of course, but that would mean splitting the money with another person. So instead, the guitarist, who had never had any intention of becoming a singer, was more or less volunteered for the role. Over the next eighteen months or so the group's repertoire moved from being largely instrumental to largely vocal, and the group also seem to have shuttled around a bit between two different cities -- Winnipeg and Fort William, staying in one for a while and then moving back to the other. They travelled between the two in Young's car, a Buick Roadmaster hearse. In Winnipeg, Young first met up with a singer named Joni Anderson, who was soon to get married to Chuck Mitchell and would become better known by her married name. The two struck up a friendship, though by all accounts never a particularly close one -- they were too similar in too many ways; as Mitchell later said “Neil and I have a lot in common: Canadian; Scorpios; polio in the same epidemic, struck the same parts of our body; and we both have a black sense of humor". They were both also idiosyncratic artists who never fit very well into boxes. In Fort William the Squires made a few more records, this time vocal tracks like "I'll Love You Forever": [Excerpt: The Squires, "I'll Love You Forever"] It was also in Fort William that Young first encountered two acts that would make a huge impression on him. One was a group called The Thorns, consisting of Tim Rose, Jake Holmes, and Rich Husson. The Thorns showed Young that there was interesting stuff being done on the fringes of the folk music scene. He later said "One of my favourites was “Oh Susannah”—they did this arrangement that was bizarre. It was in a minor key, which completely changed everything—and it was rock and roll. So that idea spawned arrangements of all these other songs for me. I did minor versions of them all. We got into it. That was a certain Squires stage that never got recorded. Wish there were tapes of those shows. We used to do all this stuff, a whole kinda music—folk-rock. We took famous old folk songs like “Clementine,” “She'll Be Comin' 'Round the Mountain,” “Tom Dooley,” and we did them all in minor keys based on the Tim Rose arrangement of “Oh Susannah.” There are no recordings of the Thorns in existence that I know of, but presumably that arrangement that Young is talking about is the version that Rose also later did with the Big 3, which we've heard in a few other episodes: [Excerpt: The Big 3, "The Banjo Song"] The other big influence was, of course, Steve Stills, and the two men quickly found themselves influencing each other deeply. Stills realised that he could bring more rock and roll to his folk-music sound, saying that what amazed him was the way the Squires could go from "Cottonfields" (the Lead Belly song) to "Farmer John", the R&B song by Don and Dewey that was becoming a garage-rock staple. Young in turn was inspired to start thinking about maybe going more in the direction of folk music. The Squires even renamed themselves the High-Flying Birds, after the song that Stills had recorded with the Au Go Go Singers. After The Company's tour of Canada, Stills moved back to New York for a while. He now wanted to move in a folk-rock direction, and for a while he tried to persuade his friend John Sebastian to let him play bass in his new band, but when the Lovin' Spoonful decided against having him in the band, he decided to move West to San Francisco, where he'd heard there was a new music scene forming. He enjoyed a lot of the bands he saw there, and in particular he was impressed by the singer of a band called the Great Society: [Excerpt: The Great Society, "Somebody to Love"] He was much less impressed with the rest of her band, and seriously considered going up to her and asking if she wanted to work with some *real* musicians instead of the unimpressive ones she was working with, but didn't get his nerve up. We will, though, be hearing more about Grace Slick in future episodes. Instead, Stills decided to move south to LA, where many of the people he'd known in Greenwich Village were now based. Soon after he got there, he hooked up with two other musicians, a guitarist named Steve Young and a singer, guitarist, and pianist named Van Dyke Parks. Parks had a record contract at MGM -- he'd been signed by Tom Wilson, the same man who had turned Dylan electric, signed Simon and Garfunkel, and produced the first albums by the Mothers of Invention. With Wilson, Parks put out a couple of singles in 1966, "Come to the Sunshine": [Excerpt: The Van Dyke Parks, "Come to the Sunshine"] And "Number Nine", a reworking of the Ode to Joy from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony: [Excerpt: The Van Dyke Parks, "Number Nine"]Parks, Stills, and Steve Young became The Van Dyke Parks Band, though they didn't play together for very long, with their most successful performance being as the support act for the Lovin' Spoonful for a show in Arizona. But they did have a lasting resonance -- when Van Dyke Parks finally got the chance to record his first solo album, he opened it with Steve Young singing the old folk song "Black Jack Davy", filtered to sound like an old tape: [Excerpt: Steve Young, "Black Jack Davy"] And then it goes into a song written for Parks by Randy Newman, but consisting of Newman's ideas about Parks' life and what he knew about him, including that he had been third guitar in the Van Dyke Parks Band: [Excerpt: Van Dyke Parks, "Vine Street"] Parks and Stills also wrote a few songs together, with one of their collaborations, "Hello, I've Returned", later being demoed by Stills for Buffalo Springfield: [Excerpt: Steve Stills, "Hello, I've Returned"] After the Van Dyke Parks Band fell apart, Parks went on to many things, including a brief stint on keyboards in the Mothers of Invention, and we'll be talking more about him next episode. Stills formed a duo called the Buffalo Fish, with his friend Ron Long. That soon became an occasional trio when Stills met up again with his old Greenwich Village friend Peter Tork, who joined the group on the piano. But then Stills auditioned for the Monkees and was turned down because he had bad teeth -- or at least that's how most people told the story. Stills has later claimed that while he turned up for the Monkees auditions, it wasn't to audition, it was to try to pitch them songs, which seems implausible on the face of it. According to Stills, he was offered the job and turned it down because he'd never wanted it. But whatever happened, Stills suggested they might want his friend Peter, who looked just like him apart from having better teeth, and Peter Tork got the job. But what Stills really wanted to do was to form a proper band. He'd had the itch to do it ever since seeing the Squires, and he decided he should ask Neil Young to join. There was only one problem -- when he phoned Young, the phone was answered by Young's mother, who told Stills that Neil had moved out to become a folk singer, and she didn't know where he was. But then Stills heard from his old friend Richie Furay. Furay was still in Greenwich Village, and had decided to write to Stills. He didn't know where Stills was, other than that he was in California somewhere, so he'd written to Stills' father in El Salvador. The letter had been returned, because the postage had been short by one cent, so Furay had resent it with the correct postage. Stills' father had then forwarded the letter to the place Stills had been staying in San Francisco, which had in turn forwarded it on to Stills in LA. Furay's letter mentioned this new folk singer who had been on the scene for a while and then disappeared again, Neil Young, who had said he knew Stills, and had been writing some great songs, one of which Furay had added to his own set. Stills got in touch with Furay and told him about this great band he was forming in LA, which he wanted Furay to join. Furay was in, and travelled from New York to LA, only to be told that at this point there were no other members of this great band, but they'd definitely find some soon. They got a publishing deal with Columbia/Screen Gems, which gave them enough money to not starve, but what they really needed was to find some other musicians. They did, when driving down Hollywood Boulevard on April the sixth, 1966. There, stuck in traffic going the other way, they saw a hearse... After Steve Stills had left Fort William, so had Neil Young. He hadn't initially intended to -- the High-Flying Birds still had a regular gig, but Young and some of his friends had gone away for a few days on a road trip in his hearse. But unfortunately the transmission on the hearse had died, and Young and his friends had been stranded. Many years later, he would write a eulogy to the hearse, which he and Stills would record together: [Excerpt: The Stills-Young Band, "Long May You Run"] Young and his friends had all hitch-hiked in different directions -- Young had ended up in Toronto, where his dad lived, and had stayed with his dad for a while. The rest of his band had eventually followed him there, but Young found the Toronto music scene not to his taste -- the folk and rock scenes there were very insular and didn't mingle with each other, and the group eventually split up. Young even took on a day job for a while, for the only time in his life, though he soon quit. Young started basically commuting between Toronto and New York, a distance of several hundred miles, going to Greenwich Village for a while before ending up back in Toronto, and ping-ponging between the two. In New York, he met up with Richie Furay, and also had a disastrous audition for Elektra Records as a solo artist. One of the songs he sang in the audition was "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing", the song which Furay liked so much he started performing it himself. Young doesn't normally explain his songs, but as this was one of the first he ever wrote, he talked about it in interviews in the early years, before he decided to be less voluble about his art. The song was apparently about the sense of youthful hope being crushed. The instigation for it was Young seeing his girlfriend with another man, but the central image, of Clancy not singing, came from Young's schooldays. The Clancy in question was someone Young liked as one of the other weird kids at school. He was disabled, like Young, though with MS rather than polio, and he would sing to himself in the hallways at school. Sadly, of course, the other kids would mock and bully him for that, and eventually he ended up stopping. Young said about it "After awhile, he got so self-conscious he couldn't do his thing any more. When someone who is as beautiful as that and as different as that is actually killed by his fellow man—you know what I mean—like taken and sorta chopped down—all the other things are nothing compared to this." [Excerpt: Neil Young, "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing (Elektra demo)"] One thing I should say for anyone who listens to the Mixcloud for this episode, that song, which will be appearing in a couple of different versions, has one use of a term for Romani people that some (though not all) consider a slur. It's not in the excerpts I'll be using in this episode, but will be in the full versions on the Mixcloud. Sadly that word turns up time and again in songs of this era... When he wasn't in New York, Young was living in Toronto in a communal apartment owned by a folk singer named Vicki Taylor, where many of the Toronto folk scene would stay. Young started listening a lot to Taylor's Bert Jansch albums, which were his first real exposure to the British folk-baroque style of guitar fingerpicking, as opposed to the American Travis-picking style, and Young would soon start to incorporate that style into his own playing: [Excerpt: Bert Jansch, "Angie"] Another guitar influence on Young at this point was another of the temporary tenants of Taylor's flat, John Kay, who would later go on to be one of the founding members of Steppenwolf. Young credited Kay with having a funky rhythm guitar style that Young incorporated into his own. While he was in Toronto, he started getting occasional gigs in Detroit, which is "only" a couple of hundred miles away, set up by Joni and Chuck Mitchell, both of whom also sometimes stayed at Taylor's. And it was in Detroit that Neil Young became, albeit very briefly, a Motown artist. The Mynah Birds were a band in Toronto that had at one point included various future members of Steppenwolf, and they were unusual for the time in that they were a white band with a Black lead singer, Ricky Matthews. They also had a rich manager, John Craig Eaton, the heir to the Eaton's department store fortune, who basically gave them whatever money they wanted -- they used to go to his office and tell him they needed seven hundred dollars for lunch, and he'd hand it to them. They were looking for a new guitarist when Bruce Palmer, their bass player, bumped into Neil Young carrying an amp and asked if he was interested in joining. He was. The Mynah Birds quickly became one of the best bands in Toronto, and Young and Matthews became close, both as friends and as a performance team. People who saw them live would talk about things like a song called “Hideaway”, written by Young and Matthews, which had a spot in the middle where Young would start playing a harmonica solo, throw the harmonica up in the air mid-solo, Matthews would catch it, and he would then finish the solo. They got signed to Motown, who were at this point looking to branch out into the white guitar-group market, and they were put through the Motown star-making machine. They recorded an entire album, which remains unreleased, but they did release a single, "It's My Time": [Excerpt: The Mynah Birds, "It's My Time"] Or at least, they released a handful of promo copies. The single was pulled from release after Ricky Matthews got arrested. It turned out his birth name wasn't Ricky Matthews, but James Johnson, and that he wasn't from Toronto as he'd told everyone, but from Buffalo, New York. He'd fled to Canada after going AWOL from the Navy, not wanting to be sent to Vietnam, and he was arrested and jailed for desertion. After getting out of jail, he would start performing under yet another name, and as Rick James would have a string of hits in the seventies and eighties: [Excerpt: Rick James, "Super Freak"] Most of the rest of the group continued gigging as The Mynah Birds, but Young and Palmer had other plans. They sold the expensive equipment Eaton had bought the group, and Young bought a new hearse, which he named Mort 2 – Mort had been his first hearse. And according to one of the band's friends in Toronto, the crucial change in their lives came when Neil Young heard a song on a jukebox: [Excerpt: The Mamas and the Papas, "California Dreamin'"] Young apparently heard "California Dreamin'" and immediately said "Let's go to California and become rock stars". Now, Young later said of this anecdote that "That sounds like a Canadian story to me. That sounds too real to be true", and he may well be right. Certainly the actual wording of the story is likely incorrect -- people weren't talking about "rock stars" in 1966. Google's Ngram viewer has the first use of the phrase in print being in 1969, and the phrase didn't come into widespread usage until surprisingly late -- even granting that phrases enter slang before they make it to print, it still seems implausible. But even though the precise wording might not be correct, something along those lines definitely seems to have happened, albeit possibly less dramatically. Young's friend Comrie Smith independently said that Young told him “Well, Comrie, I can hear the Mamas and the Papas singing ‘All the leaves are brown, and the skies are gray …' I'm gonna go down to the States and really make it. I'm on my way. Today North Toronto, tomorrow the world!” Young and Palmer loaded up Mort 2 with a bunch of their friends and headed towards California. On the way, they fell out with most of the friends, who parted from them, and Young had an episode which in retrospect may have been his first epileptic seizure. They decided when they got to California that they were going to look for Steve Stills, as they'd heard he was in LA and neither of them knew anyone else in the state. But after several days of going round the Sunset Strip clubs asking if anyone knew Steve Stills, and sleeping in the hearse as they couldn't afford anywhere else, they were getting fed up and about to head off to San Francisco, as they'd heard there was a good music scene there, too. They were going to leave that day, and they were stuck in traffic on Sunset Boulevard, about to head off, when Stills and Furay came driving in the other direction. Furay happened to turn his head, to brush away a fly, and saw a hearse with Ontario license plates. He and Stills both remembered that Young drove a hearse, and so they assumed it must be him. They started honking at the hearse, then did a U-turn. They got Young's attention, and they all pulled into the parking lot at Ben Frank's, the Sunset Strip restaurant that attracted such a hip crowd the Monkees' producers had asked for "Ben Frank's types" in their audition advert. Young introduced Stills and Furay to Palmer, and now there *was* a group -- three singing, songwriting, guitarists and a bass player. Now all they needed was a drummer. There were two drummers seriously considered for the role. One of them, Billy Mundi, was technically the better player, but Young didn't like playing with him as much -- and Mundi also had a better offer, to join the Mothers of Invention as their second drummer -- before they'd recorded their first album, they'd had two drummers for a few months, but Denny Bruce, their second drummer, had become ill with glandular fever and they'd reverted to having Jimmy Carl Black play solo. Now they were looking for someone else, and Mundi took that role. The other drummer, who Young preferred anyway, was another Canadian, Dewey Martin. Martin was a couple of years older than the rest of the group, and by far the most experienced. He'd moved from Canada to Nashville in his teens, and according to Martin he had been taken under the wing of Hank Garland, the great session guitarist most famous for "Sugarfoot Rag": [Excerpt: Hank Garland, "Sugarfoot Rag"] We heard Garland playing with Elvis and others in some of the episodes around 1960, and by many reckonings he was the best session guitarist in Nashville, but in 1961 he had a car accident that left him comatose, and even though he recovered from the coma and lived another thirty-three years, he never returned to recording. According to Martin, though, Garland would still sometimes play jazz clubs around Nashville after the accident, and one day Martin walked into a club and saw him playing. The drummer he was playing with got up and took a break, taking his sticks with him, so Martin got up on stage and started playing, using two combs instead of sticks. Garland was impressed, and told Martin that Faron Young needed a drummer, and he could get him the gig. At the time Young was one of the biggest stars in country music. That year, 1961, he had three country top ten hits, including a number one with his version of Willie Nelson's "Hello Walls", produced by Ken Nelson: [Excerpt: Faron Young, "Hello Walls"] Martin joined Faron Young's band for a while, and also ended up playing short stints in the touring bands of various other Nashville-based country and rock stars, including Patsy Cline, Roy Orbison, and the Everly Brothers, before heading to LA for a while. Then Mel Taylor of the Ventures hooked him up with some musicians in the Pacific Northwest scene, and Martin started playing there under the name Sir Raleigh and the Coupons with various musicians. After a while he travelled back to LA where he got some members of the LA group Sons of Adam to become a permanent lineup of Coupons, and they recorded several singles with Martin singing lead, including the Tommy Boyce and Steve Venet song "Tomorrow's Gonna Be Another Day", later recorded by the Monkees: [Excerpt: Sir Raleigh and the Coupons, "Tomorrow's Gonna Be Another Day"] He then played with the Standells, before joining the Modern Folk Quartet for a short while, as they were transitioning from their folk sound to a folk-rock style. He was only with them for a short while, and it's difficult to get precise details -- almost everyone involved with Buffalo Springfield has conflicting stories about their own careers with timelines that don't make sense, which is understandable given that people were talking about events decades later and memory plays tricks. "Fast" Eddie Hoh had joined the Modern Folk Quartet on drums in late 1965, at which point they became the Modern Folk Quintet, and nothing I've read about that group talks about Hoh ever actually leaving, but apparently Martin joined them in February 1966, which might mean he's on their single "Night-Time Girl", co-written by Al Kooper and produced and arranged by Jack Nitzsche: [Excerpt: The Modern Folk Quintet, "Night-Time Girl"] After that, Martin was taken on by the Dillards, a bluegrass band who are now possibly most famous for having popularised the Arthur "Guitar Boogie" Smith song "Duellin' Banjos", which they recorded on their first album and played on the Andy Griffith Show a few years before it was used in Deliverance: [Excerpt: The Dillards, "Duellin' Banjos"] The Dillards had decided to go in a country-rock direction -- and Doug Dillard would later join the Byrds and make records with Gene Clark -- but they were hesitant about it, and after a brief period with Martin in the band they decided to go back to their drummerless lineup. To soften the blow, they told him about another band that was looking for a drummer -- their manager, Jim Dickson, who was also the Byrds' manager, knew Stills and his bandmates. Dewey Martin was in the group. The group still needed a name though. They eventually took their name from a brand of steam roller, after seeing one on the streets when some roadwork was being done. Everyone involved disagrees as to who came up with the name. Steve Stills at one point said it was a group decision after Neil Young and the group's manager Frazier Mohawk stole the nameplate off the steamroller, and later Stills said that Richey Furay had suggested the name while they were walking down the street, Dewey Martin said it was his idea, Neil Young said that he, Steve Sills, and Van Dyke Parks had been walking down the street and either Young or Stills had seen the nameplate and suggested the name, and Van Dyke Parks says that *he* saw the nameplate and suggested it to Dewey Martin: [Excerpt: Steve Stills and Van Dyke Parks on the name] For what it's worth, I tend to believe Van Dyke Parks in most instances -- he's an honest man, and he seems to have a better memory of the sixties than many of his friends who led more chemically interesting lives. Whoever came up with it, the name worked -- as Stills later put it "We thought it was pretty apt, because Neil Young is from Manitoba which is buffalo country, and  Richie Furay was from Springfield, Ohio -- and I'm the field!" It almost certainly also helped that the word "buffalo" had been in the name of Stills' previous group, Buffalo Fish. On the eleventh of April, 1966, Buffalo Springfield played their first gig, at the Troubadour, using equipment borrowed from the Dillards. Chris Hillman of the Byrds was in the audience and was impressed. He got the group a support slot on a show the Byrds and the Dillards were doing a few days later in San Bernardino. That show was compered by a Merseyside-born British DJ, John Ravenscroft, who had managed to become moderately successful in US radio by playing up his regional accent so he sounded more like the Beatles. He would soon return to the UK, and start broadcasting under the name John Peel. Hillman also got them a week-long slot at the Whisky A-Go-Go, and a bidding war started between record labels to sign the band. Dunhill offered five thousand dollars, Warners counted with ten thousand, and then Atlantic offered twelve thousand. Atlantic were *just* starting to get interested in signing white guitar groups -- Jerry Wexler never liked that kind of music, always preferring to stick with soul and R&B, but Ahmet Ertegun could see which way things were going. Atlantic had only ever signed two other white acts before -- Neil Young's old favourite Bobby Darin, who had since left the label, and Sonny and Cher. And Sonny and Cher's management and production team, Brian Stone and Charlie Greene, were also very interested in the group, who even before they had made a record had quickly become the hottest band on the circuit, even playing the Hollywood Bowl as the Rolling Stones' support act. Buffalo Springfield already had managers -- Frazier Mohawk and Richard Davis, the lighting man at the Troubadour (who was sometimes also referred to as Dickie Davis, but I'll use his full name so as not to cause unnecessary confusion in British people who remember the sports TV presenter of the same name), who Mohawk had enlisted to help him. But Stone and Greene weren't going to let a thing like that stop them. According to anonymous reports quoted without attribution in David Roberts' biography of Stills -- so take this with as many grains of salt as you want -- Stone and Greene took Mohawk for a ride around LA in a limo, just the three of them, a gun, and a used hotdog napkin. At the end of the ride, the hotdog napkin had Mohawk's scrawled signature, signing the group over to Stone and Greene. Davis stayed on, but was demoted to just doing their lights. The way things ended up, the group signed to Stone and Greene's production company, who then leased their masters to Atlantic's Atco subsidiary. A publishing company was also set up for the group's songs -- owned thirty-seven point five percent by Atlantic, thirty-seven point five percent by Stone and Greene, and the other twenty-five percent split six ways between the group and Davis, who they considered their sixth member. Almost immediately, Charlie Greene started playing Stills and Young off against each other, trying a divide-and-conquer strategy on the group. This was quite easy, as both men saw themselves as natural leaders, though Stills was regarded by everyone as the senior partner -- the back cover of their first album would contain the line "Steve is the leader but we all are". Stills and Young were the two stars of the group as far as the audience were concerned -- though most musicians who heard them play live say that the band's real strength was in its rhythm section, with people comparing Palmer's playing to that of James Jamerson. But Stills and Young would get into guitar battles on stage, one-upping each other, in ways that turned the tension between them in creative directions. Other clashes, though were more petty -- both men had very domineering mothers, who would actually call the group's management to complain about press coverage if their son was given less space than the other one. The group were also not sure about Young's voice -- to the extent that Stills was known to jokingly apologise to the audience before Young took a lead vocal -- and so while the song chosen as the group's first A-side was Young's "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing", Furay was chosen to sing it, rather than Young: [Excerpt: Buffalo Springfield, "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing"] On the group's first session, though, both Stills and Young realised that their producers didn't really have a clue -- the group had built up arrangements that had a complex interplay of instruments and vocals, but the producers insisted on cutting things very straightforwardly, with a basic backing track and then the vocals. They also thought that the song was too long so the group should play faster. Stills and Young quickly decided that they were going to have to start producing their own material, though Stone and Greene would remain the producers for the first album. There was another bone of contention though, because in the session the initial plan had been for Stills' song "Go and Say Goodbye" to be the A-side with Young's song as the B-side. It was flipped, and nobody seems quite sure why -- it's certainly the case that, whatever the merits of the two tracks as songs, Stills' song was the one that would have been more likely to become a hit. "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing" was a flop, but it did get some local airplay. The next single, "Burned", was a Young song as well, and this time did have Young taking the lead, though in a song dominated by harmonies: [Excerpt: Buffalo Springfield, "Burned"] Over the summer, though, something had happened that would affect everything for the group -- Neil Young had started to have epileptic seizures. At first these were undiagnosed episodes, but soon they became almost routine events, and they would often happen on stage, particularly at moments of great stress or excitement. Several other members of the group became convinced -- entirely wrongly -- that Young was faking these seizures in order to get women to pay attention to him. They thought that what he wanted was for women to comfort him and mop his brow, and that collapsing would get him that. The seizures became so common that Richard Davis, the group's lighting tech, learned to recognise the signs of a seizure before it happened. As soon as it looked like Young was about to collapse the lights would turn on, someone would get ready to carry him off stage, and Richie Furay would know to grab Young's guitar before he fell so that the guitar wouldn't get damaged. Because they weren't properly grounded and Furay had an electric guitar of his own, he'd get a shock every time. Young would later claim that during some of the seizures, he would hallucinate that he was another person, in another world, living another life that seemed to have its own continuity -- people in the other world would recognise him and talk to him as if he'd been away for a while -- and then when he recovered he would have to quickly rebuild his identity, as if temporarily amnesiac, and during those times he would find things like the concept of lying painful. The group's first album came out in December, and they were very, very, unhappy with it. They thought the material was great, but they also thought that the production was terrible. Stone and Greene's insistence that they record the backing tracks first and then overdub vocals, rather than singing live with the instruments, meant that the recordings, according to Stills and Young in particular, didn't capture the sound of the group's live performance, and sounded sterile. Stills and Young thought they'd fixed some of that in the mono mix, which they spent ten days on, but then Stone and Greene did the stereo mix without consulting the band, in less than two days, and the album was released at precisely the time that stereo was starting to overtake mono in the album market. I'm using the mono mixes in this podcast, but for decades the only versions available were the stereo ones, which Stills and Young both loathed. Ahmet Ertegun also apparently thought that the demo versions of the songs -- some of which were eventually released on a box set in 2001 -- were much better than the finished studio recordings. The album was not a success on release, but it did contain the first song any of the group had written to chart. Soon after its release, Van Dyke Parks' friend Lenny Waronker was producing a single by a group who had originally been led by Sly Stone and had been called Sly and the Mojo Men. By this time Stone was no longer involved in the group, and they were making music in a very different style from the music their former leader would later become known for. Parks was brought in to arrange a baroque-pop version of Stills' album track "Sit Down I Think I Love You" for the group, and it became their only top forty hit, reaching number thirty-six: [Excerpt: The Mojo Men, "Sit Down I Think I Love You"] It was shortly after the first Buffalo Springfield album was released, though, that Steve Stills wrote what would turn out to be *his* group's only top forty single. The song had its roots in both LA and San Francisco. The LA roots were more obvious -- the song was written about a specific experience Stills had had. He had been driving to Sunset Strip from Laurel Canyon on November the twelfth 1966, and he had seen a mass of young people and police in riot gear, and he had immediately turned round, partly because he didn't want to get involved in what looked to be a riot, and partly because he'd been inspired -- he had the idea for a lyric, which he pretty much finished in the car even before he got home: [Excerpt: The Buffalo Springfield, "For What it's Worth"] The riots he saw were what became known later as the Riot on Sunset Strip. This was a minor skirmish between the police and young people of LA -- there had been complaints that young people had been spilling out of the nightclubs on Sunset Strip into the street, causing traffic problems, and as a result the city council had introduced various heavy-handed restrictions, including a ten PM curfew for all young people in the area, removing the permits that many clubs had which allowed people under twenty-one to be present, forcing the Whisky A-Go-Go to change its name just to "the Whisk", and forcing a club named Pandora's Box, which was considered the epicentre of the problem, to close altogether. Flyers had been passed around calling for a "funeral" for Pandora's Box -- a peaceful gathering at which people could say goodbye to a favourite nightspot, and a thousand people had turned up. The police also turned up, and in the heavy-handed way common among law enforcement, they managed to provoke a peaceful party and turn it into a riot. This would not normally be an event that would be remembered even a year later, let alone nearly sixty years later, but Sunset Strip was the centre of the American rock music world in the period, and of the broader youth entertainment field. Among those arrested at the riot, for example, were Jack Nicholson and Peter Fonda, neither of whom were huge stars at the time, but who were making cheap B-movies with Roger Corman for American International Pictures. Among the cheap exploitation films that American International Pictures made around this time was one based on the riots, though neither Nicholson, Fonda, or Corman were involved. Riot on Sunset Strip was released in cinemas only four months after the riots, and it had a theme song by Dewey Martin's old colleagues The Standells, which is now regarded as a classic of garage rock: [Excerpt: The Standells, "Riot on Sunset Strip"] The riots got referenced in a lot of other songs, as well. The Mothers of Invention's second album, Absolutely Free, contains the song "Plastic People" which includes this section: [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Plastic People"] And the Monkees track "Daily Nightly", written by Michael Nesmith, was always claimed by Nesmith to be an impressionistic portrait of the riots, though the psychedelic lyrics sound to me more like they're talking about drug use and street-walking sex workers than anything to do with the riots: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Daily Nightly"] But the song about the riots that would have the most lasting effect on popular culture was the one that Steve Stills wrote that night. Although how much he actually wrote, at least of the music, is somewhat open to question. Earlier that month, Buffalo Springfield had spent some time in San Francisco. They hadn't enjoyed the experience -- as an LA band, they were thought of as a bunch of Hollywood posers by most of the San Francisco scene, with the exception of one band, Moby Grape -- a band who, like them had three guitarist/singer/songwriters, and with whom they got on very well. Indeed, they got on rather better with Moby Grape than they were getting on with each other at this point, because Young and Stills would regularly get into arguments, and every time their argument seemed to be settling down, Dewey Martin would manage to say the wrong thing and get Stills riled up again -- Martin was doing a lot of speed at this point and unable to stop talking, even when it would have been politic to do so. There was even some talk while they were in San Francisco of the bands doing a trade -- Young and Pete Lewis of Moby Grape swapping places -- though that came to nothing. But Stills, according to both Richard Davis and Pete Lewis, had been truly impressed by two Moby Grape songs. One of them was a song called "On the Other Side", which Moby Grape never recorded, but which apparently had a chorus that went "Stop, can't you hear the music ringing in your ear, right before you go, telling you the way is clear," with the group all pausing after the word "Stop". The other was a song called "Murder in my Heart for the Judge": [Excerpt: Moby Grape, "Murder in my Heart for the Judge"] The song Stills wrote had a huge amount of melodic influence from that song, and quite a bit from “On the Other Side”, though he apparently didn't notice until after the record came out, at which point he apologised to Moby Grape. Stills wasn't massively impressed with the song he'd written, and went to Stone and Greene's office to play it for them, saying "I'll play it, for what it's worth". They liked the song and booked a studio to get the song recorded and rush-released, though according to Neil Young neither Stone nor Greene were actually present at the session, and the song was recorded on December the fifth, while some outbursts of rioting were still happening, and released on December the twenty-third. [Excerpt: Buffalo Springfield, "For What it's Worth"] The song didn't have a title when they recorded it, or so Stills thought, but when he mentioned this to Greene and Stone afterwards, they said "Of course it does. You said, 'I'm going to play the song, 'For What It's Worth'" So that became the title, although Ahmet Ertegun didn't like the idea of releasing a single with a title that wasn't in the lyric, so the early pressings of the single had "Stop, Hey, What's That Sound?" in brackets after the title. The song became a big hit, and there's a story told by David Crosby that doesn't line up correctly, but which might shed some light on why. According to Crosby, "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing" got its first airplay because Crosby had played members of Buffalo Springfield a tape he'd been given of the unreleased Beatles track "A Day in the Life", and they'd told their gangster manager-producers about it. Those manager-producers had then hired a sex worker to have sex with Crosby and steal the tape, which they'd then traded to a radio station in return for airplay. That timeline doesn't work, unless the sex worker involved was also a time traveller,  because "A Day in the Life" wasn't even recorded until January 1967 while "Clancy" came out in August 1966, and there'd been two other singles released between then and January 1967. But it *might* be the case that that's what happened with "For What It's Worth", which was released in the last week of December 1966, and didn't really start to do well on the charts for a couple of months. Right after recording the song, the group went to play a residency in New York, of which Ahmet Ertegun said “When they performed there, man, there was no band I ever heard that had the electricity of that group. That was the most exciting group I've ever seen, bar none. It was just mind-boggling.” During that residency they were joined on stage at various points by Mitch Ryder, Odetta, and Otis Redding. While in New York, the group also recorded "Mr. Soul", a song that Young had originally written as a folk song about his experiences with epilepsy, the nature of the soul, and dealing with fame. However, he'd noticed a similarity to "Satisfaction" and decided to lean into it. The track as finally released was heavily overdubbed by Young a few months later, but after it was released he decided he preferred the original take, which by then only existed as a scratchy acetate, which got released on a box set in 2001: [Excerpt: Buffalo Springfield, "Mr. Soul (original version)"] Everyone has a different story of how the session for that track went -- at least one version of the story has Otis Redding turning up for the session and saying he wanted to record the song himself, as his follow-up to his version of "Satisfaction", but Young being angry at the idea. According to other versions of the story, Greene and Stills got into a physical fight, with Greene having to be given some of the valium Young was taking for his epilepsy to calm him down. "For What it's Worth" was doing well enough on the charts that the album was recalled, and reissued with "For What It's Worth" replacing Stills' song "Baby Don't Scold", but soon disaster struck the band. Bruce Palmer was arrested on drugs charges, and was deported back to Canada just as the song started to rise through the charts. The group needed a new bass player, fast. For a lipsynch appearance on local TV they got Richard Davis to mime the part, and then they got in Ken Forssi, the bass player from Love, for a couple of gigs. They next brought in Ken Koblun, the bass player from the Squires, but he didn't fit in with the rest of the group. The next replacement was Jim Fielder. Fielder was a friend of the group, and knew the material -- he'd subbed for Palmer a few times in 1966 when Palmer had been locked up after less serious busts. And to give some idea of how small a scene the LA scene was, when Buffalo Springfield asked him to become their bass player, he was playing rhythm guitar for the Mothers of Invention, while Billy Mundi was on drums, and had played on their second, as yet unreleased, album, Absolutely Free: [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Call any Vegetable"] And before joining the Mothers, Fielder and Mundi had also played together with Van Dyke Parks, who had served his own short stint as a Mother of Invention already, backing Tim Buckley on Buckley's first album: [Excerpt: Tim Buckley, "Aren't You the Girl?"] And the arrangements on that album were by Jack Nitzsche, who would soon become a very close collaborator with Young. "For What it's Worth" kept rising up the charts. Even though it had been inspired by a very local issue, the lyrics were vague enough that people in other situations could apply it to themselves, and it soon became regarded as an anti-war protest anthem -- something Stills did nothing to discourage, as the band were all opposed to the war. The band were also starting to collaborate with other people. When Stills bought a new house, he couldn't move in to it for a while, and so Peter Tork invited him to stay at his house. The two got on so well that Tork invited Stills to produce the next Monkees album -- only to find that Michael Nesmith had already asked Chip Douglas to do it. The group started work on a new album, provisionally titled "Stampede", but sessions didn't get much further than Stills' song "Bluebird" before trouble arose between Young and Stills. The root of the argument seems to have been around the number of songs each got on the album. With Richie Furay also writing, Young was worried that given the others' attitudes to his songwriting, he might get as few as two songs on the album. And Young and Stills were arguing over which song should be the next single, with Young wanting "Mr. Soul" to be the A-side, while Stills wanted "Bluebird" -- Stills making the reasonable case that they'd released two Neil Young songs as singles and gone nowhere, and then they'd released one of Stills', and it had become a massive hit. "Bluebird" was eventually chosen as the A-side, with "Mr. Soul" as the B-side: [Excerpt: Buffalo Springfield, "Bluebird"] The "Bluebird" session was another fraught one. Fielder had not yet joined the band, and session player Bobby West subbed on bass. Neil Young had recently started hanging out with Jack Nitzsche, and the two were getting very close and working on music together. Young had impressed Nitzsche not just with his songwriting but with his arrogance -- he'd played Nitzsche his latest song, "Expecting to Fly", and Nitzsche had said halfway through "That's a great song", and Young had shushed him and told him to listen, not interrupt. Nitzsche, who had a monstrous ego himself and was also used to working with people like Phil Spector, the Rolling Stones and Sonny Bono, none of them known for a lack of faith in their own abilities, was impressed. Shortly after that, Stills had asked Nitzsch

Before John Lennon retreated peacefully into private life in 1975,he fought a major legal battle that went under the public radar. Just as his "Rock and Roll" oldies record hit the market, Morris Levy the mob-connected owner of Roulette Records, released "Roots," an unauthorized version of the same record. Levy had used rough mixes of John's unfinished rock and roll recordings and claimed the former Beatle had verbally agreed to the arrangement. The clash led to a lawsuit and countersuit between Levy and Lennon. Attorney Jay Bergen, a partner in a prestigious New York City law firm, represented John in this epic battle to his own recordings. Millions of dollars were at stake. Jay joins us to tell how he worked closely with John to rebut Levy's outrageous claims. He also recounts how John explained his recording process in poetic exacting terms to a judge., who know little about The Beatles, and John's solo career. It also paints a detailed personal picture of John and his world in 1975 and '76, when he was to have a new son and go into happy seclusion to be a husband and father.

This episode is part of Pledge Week 2022. Every day this week, I'll be posting old Patreon bonus episodes of the podcast which will have this short intro. These are short, ten- to twenty-minute bonus podcasts which get posted to Patreon for my paying backers every time I post a new main episode -- there are well over a hundred of these in the archive now. If you like the sound of these episodes, then go to patreon.com/andrewhickey and subscribe for as little as a dollar a month or ten dollars a year to get access to all those bonus episodes, plus new ones as they appear. Click below for the transcript Transcript In today's main episode we look at the career of Bobby Fuller, who many have speculated died because of in some way upsetting the Mafia. So in this bonus episode we're going to look at someone who had a much longer, more successful, career, and did so because he managed *not* to upset the Mafia. We're going to look at the involvement of Morris Levy in the birth of bubblegum, and at "Hanky Panky" by Tommy James and the Shondells: [Excerpt: Tommy James and the Shondells, "Hanky Panky"] The original lineup of the Shondells started out when Tommy James was only twelve years old, and still going by his birth name Tommy Jackson. They performed for three years under various names before, in 1962, recording their first single, "Long Pony Tail", under the name Tom and the Tornadoes: [Excerpt: Tom and the Tornadoes, "Long Pony Tail"] That was actually a cover version of a song originally recorded by the Fireballs, a group that Norman Petty had produced a couple of minor hits for at that point, and who would go on to have a number one with "Sugar Shack", but who are now best known for being the group that Petty got to overdub new instrumental backing on Buddy Holly's acoustic demos so he could keep releasing posthumous hits. "Long Pony Tail" was not a hit, and soon the group had changed their name to the Shondells, inspired by the local one-hit wonder Troy Shondell, who had had a hit with "This Time": [Excerpt: Troy Shondell, "This Time"] The group continued making records on tiny labels with no promotional budget for several years, until they recorded a song called "Hanky Panky". That song had been written by Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, and released as a B-side by Barry and Greenwich's studio group The Raindrops: [Excerpt: The Raindrops, "Hanky Panky"] That record had never been a hit, supposedly because the song to which it was a B-side, “That Boy John”, made people think of John F Kennedy, who was killed shortly after the record's release. But a copy had been picked up by a musician in Michigan, who had added the song to his group's live set, and it had become popular. Another local group, the Spinners -- not the vocal group from Detroit, or the British folk group, but another group of the same name -- saw the reaction that band had from the song, and added it to their own sets. They hadn't got a copy of the record themselves, so they didn't know all the words, so they just made new ones up, other than "My baby does the hanky-panky". When Tommy James saw the reaction the Spinners had, he felt he had to grasp an opportunity. Back in 1960, Joe Jones had recorded "California Sun", a song written by Henry Glover, on Roulette Records: [Excerpt: Joe Jones, "California Sun"] Another group on the same local scene as the Shondells, the Princeton Five, had been playing that song in their sets -- and then a third local group, the Playmates, renamed themselves the Rivieras, ripped off the Princeton Five's arrangement of the song before the Princeton Five could record it, and made the national top ten with it: [Excerpt: The Rivieras, "California Sun"] The lesson was clear -- if a local band starts doing well with a song, it's winner-takes-all and whoever gets into the studio first gets the hit. So the Shondells went into the studio and quickly cut their version, based on what they could remember of what the Spinners could remember of someone else's live versions of “Hanky Panky”, making up new words where they didn't know the real ones. It was released on a tiny local label called Snap: [Excerpt: Tommy James and the Shondells, "Hanky Panky"] The record was a very minor local hit, but didn't get any airplay in major markets, and the Shondells split up, and James joined a new group, the Koachmen. The Koachmen toured for a while, playing dead-end gigs and scraping a living for many months, with constant lineup changes, until eventually also calling it quits. It was then that James got the shocking news that "Hanky Panky" was now number one in Pittsburgh. Somehow a local dance promoter had found the record and started playing it at club nights. It had gone down shockingly well, so a Pittsburgh company just started pressing up more copies from the single, and it sold eighty thousand copies in ten days. The company pressing the record got in touch with the owner of Snap Records, who told Tommy that he needed to put together a new Shondells quickly. As it turned out, there was another band in the area who were called the Shandells (according to James' autobiography -- other sources say they were called the Raconteurs). James became their lead singer and changed the group's name to the Shondells, James went to New York to try to get the newly-successful record national distribution, and to get his new Shondells signed. There was the start of a bidding war, with Red Bird, Atlantic, RCA and others all interested... until Morris Levy of Roulette Records phoned the owners of all the other labels and told them "This is my record". James was quickly persuaded that it wasn't a good idea to refuse offers made by someone with Levy's mob connections, and Tommy James and the Shondells signed to Roulette Records. "Hanky Panky" was reissued and went to number one. The group had a series of hits from 1966 through 1967, including "I Think We're Alone Now", written for the group by their producer Ritchie Cordell: [Excerpt: Tommy James and the Shondells, "I Think We're Alone Now"] And "Mony Mony", a group effort written by several people including Cordell and James, inspired by a large flashing neon sign advertising Mutual of New York: [Excerpt: Tommy James and the Shondells, "Mony Mony"] These early hits helped define bubblegum music, and were massively successful. Levy took a fatherly interest in James, and while he refused ever to pay the royalty rates in James' contract -- James estimates he is owed thirty to forty million dollars in unpaid royalties -- he did make sure that James got what Levy thought was a fair amount, and the two had a good relationship, though James resented much of Levy's attitude towards his music, and had very real qualms about working for a mobster. James particularly disliked the pressure he was under to produce hit singles rather than grow as an artist. James was, though, allowed to change styles as the times changed, and moved into psychedelic rock, co-writing and recording the number one hit "Crimson and Clover" with the group's drummer: [Excerpt: Tommy James and the Shondells, "Crimson and Clover"] And "Crystal Blue Persuasion", inspired by the Book of Revelation, with two other band members, which went to number two: [Excerpt: Tommy James and the Shondells, "Crystal Blue Persuasion"] In 1970, James went solo, having another major hit with "Draggin' the Line": [Excerpt: Tommy James, "Draggin' the Line"] He also co-wrote and produced the big hit "Tighter Tighter" for Alive N Kickin': [Excerpt: Alive N Kickin', "Tighter Tighter"] But two changes in the early seventies saw James lose his commercial momentum. The first was that he started more explicitly writing about his Christian faith, including titling a solo album "Christian of the World". The other, more serious, problem was that a mob war started in New York, with one of the families opposed to Levy's targeting Levy's friends. Levy made James get out of New York and move to Nashville to keep safe, and James moved into country music while he was there, but was unsuccessful in his new genre. James eventually escaped from Levy, as Levy's control over his music industry holdings slipped with his loss of dominance in the mob, but James never returned to commercial success, though his old hits continued to have influence on the next generation of bubblegum pop -- in 1987, Tiffany's cover version of "I Think We're Alone Now" was knocked off number one by Billy Idol's version of "Mony Mony". He currently tours as a nostalgia act, and finally receives royalties from his hits. He's often somewhat dismissed as a minor act, but James, with and without the Shondells, had a hugely impressive run of hit singles, and his catalogue is probably due reevaluation.

Before John Lennon retreated peacefully into private life in 1975,he fought a major legal battle that went under the public radar. Just as his "Rock and Roll" oldies record hit the market, Morris Levy the mob-connected owner of Roulette Records, released "Roots," an unauthorized version of the same record. Levy had used rough mixes of John's unfinished rock and roll recordings and claimed the former Beatle had verbally agreed to the arrangement. The clash led to a lawsuit and countersuit between Levy and Lennon. Attorney Jay Bergen, a partner in a prestigious New York City law firm, represented John in this epic battle to his own recordings. Millions of dollars were at stake. Jay joins us to tell how he worked closely with John to rebut Levy's outrageous claims. He also recounts how John explained his recording process in poetic exacting terms to a judge., who know little about The Beatles, and John's solo career. It also paints a detailed personal picture of John and his world in 1975 and '76, when he was to have a new son and go into happy seclusion to be a husband and father.

My guest for this episode is Jay Bergen, the attorney who represented John in his 1976 trial against Morris Levy, the mob connected owner of Roulette Records who had released 'Roots' - an unauthorised version of John's 'Rock n Roll' album. Jay shares his memories of the time he spent with John - what it was like interviewing him on the stand, and what he observed about John and Yoko, just as they were retiring from the public eye.   More information about the book can be found at https://www.lennonthemobsterandthelawyer.com/

This week singer, songwriter, and producer Tommy James takes us from leading The Shondells through their unlikely breakout hit “Hanky Panky” to his complicated relationship with mobster Morris Levy, who launched his career while swindling him out of millions at the notorious Roulette Records. Listen to hear more about how his iconic track “Crimson and Clover” was leaked and the inspiration for “Mony Mony.”See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Brian breaks down the amazing story of Tommy James and his roller coaster relationship with the "Godfather of the Music Business." Support the show on Patreon. SHOW NOTES: Books used: Me, the Mob and the Music by Tommy James and Martin Fitzpatrick Godfather of The Music Business by Richard Carlin Hit Men by Fredric Dannen https://variety.com/2019/film/news/tommy-james-biopic-me-the-mob-and-the-music-development-1203271345/ Me, the Mob and the Music Book promotional event: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7enAd3jK9k https://www.clicktrack.fm/p/the-dark-history-of-the-jukebox-how https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/jan/22/tommy-james-pop-star-robbed-interview

Episode 143 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Summer in the City'”, and at the short but productive career of the Lovin' Spoonful.  Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Any More" by the Walker Brothers and the strange career of Scott Walker. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources As usual, all the songs excerpted in the podcast can be heard in full at Mixcloud. This box set contains all four studio albums by the Lovin' Spoonful, plus the one album by "The Lovin' Spoonful featuring Joe Butler", while this CD contains their two film soundtracks (mostly inessential instrumental filler, apart from "Darling Be Home Soon") Information about harmonicas and harmonicists comes from Harmonicas, Harps, and Heavy Breathers by Kim Field. There are only three books about the Lovin' Spoonful, but all are worth reading. Do You Believe in Magic? by Simon Wordsworth is a good biography of the band, while his The Magic's in the Music is a scrapbook of press cuttings and reminiscences. Meanwhile Steve Boone's Hotter Than a Match Head: My Life on the Run with the Lovin' Spoonful has rather more discussion of the actual music than is normal in a musician's autobiography. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Let's talk about the harmonica for a while. The harmonica is an instrument that has not shown up a huge amount in the podcast, but which was used in a fair bit of the music we've covered. We've heard it for example on records by Bo Diddley: [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, "I'm a Man"] and by Bob Dylan: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Blowin' in the Wind"] and the Rolling Stones: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Little Red Rooster"] In most folk and blues contexts, the harmonicas used are what is known as a diatonic harmonica, and these are what most people think of when they think of harmonicas at all. Diatonic harmonicas have the notes of a single key in them, and if you want to play a note in another key, you have to do interesting tricks with the shape of your mouth to bend the note. There's another type of harmonica, though, the chromatic harmonica. We've heard that a time or two as well, like on "Love Me Do" by the Beatles: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Love Me Do"] Chromatic harmonicas have sixteen holes, rather than the diatonic harmonica's ten, and they also have a slide which you can press to raise the note by a semitone, meaning you can play far more notes than on a diatonic harmonica -- but they're also physically harder to play, requiring a different kind of breathing to pull off playing one successfully. They're so different that John Lennon would distinguish between the two instruments -- he'd describe a chromatic harmonica as a harmonica, but a diatonic harmonica he would call a harp, like blues musicians often did: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Love These Goon Shows"] While the chromatic harmonica isn't a particularly popular instrument in rock music, it is one that has had some success in other fields. There have been some jazz and light-orchestral musicians who have become famous playing the instrument, like the jazz musician Max Geldray, who played in those Goon Shows the Beatles loved so much: [Excerpt: Max Geldray, "C-Jam Blues"] And in the middle of the twentieth century there were a few musicians who succeeded in making the harmonica into an instrument that was actually respected in serious classical music. By far the most famous of these was Larry Adler, who became almost synonymous with the instrument in the popular consciousness, and who reworked many famous pieces of music for the instrument: [Excerpt: Larry Adler, "Rhapsody in Blue"] But while Adler was the most famous classical harmonicist of his generation, he was not generally considered the best by other musicians. That was, rather, a man named John Sebastian. Sebastian, who chose to take his middle name as a surname partly to Anglicise his name but also, it seems, at least in part as tribute to Johann Sebastian Bach (which incidentally now makes it really, really difficult to search for copies of his masterwork "John Sebastian Plays Bach", as Internet searches uniformly think you're searching just for the composer...) started out like almost all harmonica players as an amateur playing popular music. But he quickly got very, very, good, and by his teens he was already teaching other children, including at a summer camp run by Albert Hoxie, a musician and entrepreneur who was basically single-handedly responsible for the boom in harmonica sales in the 1920s and 1930s, by starting up youth harmonica orchestras -- dozens or even hundreds of kids, all playing harmonica together, in a semi-militaristic youth organisation something like the scouts, but with harmonicas instead of woggles and knots. Hoxie's group and the various organisations copying it led to there being over a hundred and fifty harmonica orchestras in Chicago alone, and in LA in the twenties and thirties a total of more than a hundred thousand children passed through harmonica orchestras inspired by Hoxie. Hoxie's youth orchestras were largely responsible for the popularity of the harmonica as a cheap instrument for young people, and thus for its later popularity in the folk and blues worlds. That was only boosted in the Second World War by the American Federation of Musicians recording ban, which we talked about in the early episodes of the podcast -- harmonicas had never been thought of as a serious instrument, and so most professional harmonica players were not members of the AFM, but were considered variety performers and were part of the American Guild of Variety Artists, along with singers, ukulele players, and musical saw players. Of course, the war did also create a problem, because the best harmonicas were made in Germany by the Hohner company, but soon a lot of American companies started making cheap harmonicas to fill the gap in the market. There's a reason the cliche of the GI in a war film playing a harmonica in the trenches exists, and it's largely because of Hoxie. And Hoxie was based in Philadelphia, where John Sebastian lived as a kid, and he mentored the young player, who soon became a semi-professional performer. Sebastian's father was a rich banker, and discouraged him from becoming a full-time musician -- the plan was that after university, Sebastian would become a diplomat. But as part of his preparation for that role, he was sent to spend a couple of years studying at the universities of Rome and Florence, learning about Italian culture. On the boat back, though, he started talking to two other passengers, who turned out to be the legendary Broadway songwriting team Rodgers and Hart, the writers of such classic songs as "Blue Moon" and "My Funny Valentine": [Excerpt: Ella Fitzgerald, "My Funny Valentine"] Sebastian talked to his new friends, and told them that he was feeling torn between being a musician and being in the foreign service like his father wanted. They both told him that in their experience some people were just born to be artists, and that those people would never actually find happiness doing anything else. He took their advice, and decided he was going to become a full-time harmonica player. He started out playing in nightclubs, initially playing jazz and swing, but only while he built up a repertoire of classical music. He would rehearse with a pianist for three hours every day, and would spend the rest of his time finding classical works, especially baroque ones, and adapting them for the harmonica. As he later said “I discovered sonatas by Telemann, Veracini, Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, Hasse, Marcello, Purcell, and many others, which were written to be played on violin, flute, oboe, musette, even bagpipes... The composer seemed to be challenging each instrument to create the embellishments and ornaments to suit its particular voice. . . . I set about choosing works from this treasure trove that would best speak through my instrument.” Soon his nightclub repertoire was made up entirely of these classical pieces, and he was making records like John Sebastian Plays Bach: [Excerpt: John Sebastian, "Flute Sonata in B Minor BWV1030 (J.S. Bach)"] And while Sebastian was largely a lover of baroque music above all other forms, he realised that he would have to persuade new composers to write new pieces for the instrument should he ever hope for it to have any kind of reputation as a concert instrument, so he persuaded contemporary composers to write pieces like George Kleinsinger's "Street Corner Concerto", which Sebastian premiered with the New York Philharmonic: [Excerpt: John Sebastian, "Street Corner Concerto"] He became the first harmonica player to play an entirely classical repertoire, and regarded as the greatest player of his instrument in the world. The oboe player Jay S Harrison once wrote of seeing him perform "to accomplish with success a program of Mr. Sebastian's scope is nothing short of wizardry. . . . He has vast technical facility, a bulging range of colors, and his intentions are ever musical and sophisticated. In his hands the harmonica is no toy, no simple gadget for the dispensing of homespun tunes. Each single number of the evening was whittled, rounded, polished, and poised. . . . Mr. Sebastian's playing is uncanny." Sebastian came from a rich background, and he managed to earn enough as a classical musician to live the lifestyle of a rich artistic Bohemian. During the forties and fifties he lived in Greenwich Village with his family -- apart from a four-year period living in Rome from 1951 to 55 -- and Eleanor Roosevelt was a neighbour, while Vivian Vance, who played Ethel Mertz on I Love Lucy, was the godmother of his eldest son. But while Sebastian's playing was entirely classical, he was interested in a wider variety of music. When he would tour Europe, he would often return having learned European folk songs, and while he was living in Greenwich Village he would often be visited by people like Burl Ives, Woody Guthrie, and other folk singers living in the area. And that early influence rubbed off on Sebastian's son, John Benson Sebastian, although young John gave up trying to learn the harmonica the first time he tried, because he didn't want to be following too closely in his father's footsteps. Sebastian junior did, though, take up the guitar, inspired by the first wave rock and rollers he was listening to on Alan Freed's show, and he would later play the harmonica, though the diatonic harmonica rather than the chromatic. In case you haven't already figured it out, John Benson Sebastian, rather than his father, is a principal focus of this episode, and so to avoid confusion, from this point on, when I refer to "John Sebastian" or "Sebastian" without any qualifiers, I'm referring to the younger man. When I refer to "John Sebastian Sr" I'm talking about the father. But it was John Sebastian Sr's connections, in particular to the Bohemian folk and blues scenes, which gave his more famous son his first connection to that world of his own, when Sebastian Sr appeared in a TV show, in November 1960, put together by Robert Herridge, a TV writer and producer who was most famous for his drama series but who had also put together documentaries on both classical music and jazz, including the classic performance documentary The Sound of Jazz. Herridge's show featured both Sebastian Sr and the country-blues player Lightnin' Hopkins: [Excerpt: Lightnin' Hopkins, "Blues in the Bottle"] Hopkins was one of many country-blues players whose career was having a second wind after his discovery by the folk music scene. He'd been recording for fourteen years, putting out hundreds of records, but had barely performed outside Houston until 1959, when the folkies had picked up on his work, and in October 1960 he had been invited to play Carnegie Hall, performing with Pete Seeger and Joan Baez. Young John Sebastian had come along with his dad to see the TV show be recorded, and had an almost Damascene conversion -- he'd already heard Hopkins' recordings, but had never seen anything like his live performances. He was at that time attending a private boarding school, Blair Academy, and his roommate at the school also had his own apartment, where Sebastian would sometimes stay. Soon Lightnin' Hopkins was staying there as well, as somewhere he could live rent-free while he was in New York. Sebastian started following Hopkins around and learning everything he could, being allowed by the older man to carry his guitar and buy him gin, though the two never became close. But eventually, Hopkins would occasionally allow Sebastian to play with him when he played at people's houses, which he did on occasion. Sebastian became someone that Hopkins trusted enough that when he was performing on a bill with someone else whose accompanist wasn't able to make the gig and Sebastian put himself forward, Hopkins agreed that Sebastian would be a suitable accompanist for the evening. The singer he accompanied that evening was a performer named Valentine Pringle, who was a protege of Harry Belafonte, and who had a similar kind of sound to Paul Robeson. Sebastian soon became Pringle's regular accompanist, and played on his first album, I Hear America Singing, which was also the first record on which the great trumpet player Hugh Masakela played. Sadly, Paul Robeson style vocals were so out of fashion by that point that that album has never, as far as I can tell, been issued in a digital format, and hasn't even been uploaded to YouTube.  But this excerpt from a later recording by Pringle should give you some idea of the kind of thing he was doing: [Excerpt: Valentine Pringle, "Go 'Way From My Window"] After these experiences, Sebastian started regularly going to shows at Greenwich Village folk clubs, encouraged by his parents -- he had an advantage over his peers because he'd grown up in the area and had artistic parents, and so he was able to have a great deal of freedom that other people in their teens weren't. In particular, he would always look out for any performances by the great country blues performer Mississippi John Hurt. Hurt had made a few recordings for Okeh records in 1928, including an early version of "Stagger Lee", titled "Stack O'Lee": [Excerpt: Mississippi John Hurt, "Stack O'Lee Blues"] But those records had been unsuccessful, and he'd carried on working on a farm. and not performed other than in his tiny home town of Avalon, Mississippi, for decades. But then in 1952, a couple of his tracks had been included on the Harry Smith Anthology, and as a result he'd come to the attention of the folk and blues scholar community. They'd tried tracking him down, but been unable to until in the early sixties one of them had discovered a track on one of Hurt's records, "Avalon Blues", and in 1963, thirty-five years after he'd recorded six flop singles, Mississippi John Hurt became a minor star, playing the Newport Folk Festival and appearing on the Tonight Show. By this time, Sebastian was a fairly well-known figure in Greenwich Village, and he had become quite a virtuoso on the harmonica himself, and would walk around the city wearing a holster-belt containing harmonicas in a variety of different keys. Sebastian became a huge fan of Hurt, and would go and see him perform whenever Hurt was in New York. He soon found himself first jamming backstage with Hurt, and then performing with him on stage for the last two weeks of a residency. He was particularly impressed with what he called Hurt's positive attitude in his music -- something that Sebastian would emulate in his own songwriting. Sebastian was soon invited to join a jug band, called the Even Dozen Jug Band. Jug band music was a style of music that first became popular in the 1920s, and had many of the same musical elements as the music later known as skiffle. It was played on a mixture of standard musical instruments -- usually portable, "folky" ones like guitar and harmonica -- and improvised homemade instruments, like the spoons, the washboard, and comb and paper. The reason they're called jug bands is because they would involve someone blowing into a jug to make a noise that sounded a bit like a horn -- much like the coffee pot groups we talked about way back in episode six. The music was often hokum music, and incorporated elements of what we'd now call blues, vaudeville, and country music, though at the time those genres were nothing like as distinct as they're considered today: [Excerpt: Cincinnati Jug Band, "Newport Blues"] The Even Dozen Jug Band actually ended up having thirteen members, and it had a rather remarkable lineup. The leader was Stefan Grossman, later regarded as one of the greatest fingerpicking guitarists in America, and someone who will be coming up in other contexts in future episodes I'm sure, and they also featured David Grisman, a mandolin player who would later play with the Grateful Dead among many others;  Steve Katz, who would go on to be a founder member of Blood, Sweat and Tears and produce records for Lou Reed; Maria D'Amato, who under her married name Maria Muldaur would go on to have a huge hit with "Midnight at the Oasis"; and Joshua Rifkin, who would later go on to become one of the most important scholars of Bach's music of the latter half of the twentieth century, but who is best known for his recordings of Scott Joplin's piano rags, which more or less single-handedly revived Joplin's music from obscurity and created the ragtime revival of the 1970s: [Excerpt: Joshua Rifkin, "Maple Leaf Rag"] Unfortunately, despite the many talents involved, a band as big as that was uneconomical to keep together, and the Even Dozen Jug Band only played four shows together -- though those four shows were, as Muldaur later remembered, "Carnegie Hall twice, the Hootenanny television show and some church". The group did, though, make an album for Elektra records, produced by Paul Rothchild. Indeed, it was Rothchild who was the impetus for the group forming -- he wanted to produce a record of a jug band, and had told Grossman that if he got one together, he'd record it: [Excerpt: The Even Dozen Jug Band, "On the Road Again"] On that album, Sebastian wasn't actually credited as John Sebastian -- because he was playing harmonica on the album, and his father was such a famous harmonica player, he thought it better if he was credited by his middle name, so he was John Benson for this one album. The Even Dozen Jug Band split up after only a few months, with most of the band more interested in returning to university than becoming professional musicians, but Sebastian remained in touch with Rothchild, as they both shared an interest in the drug culture, and Rothchild started using him on sessions for other artists on Elektra, which was rapidly becoming one of the biggest labels for the nascent counterculture. The first record the two worked together on after the Even Dozen Jug Band was sparked by a casual conversation. Vince Martin and Fred Neil saw Sebastian walking down the street wearing his harmonica holster, and were intrigued and asked him if he played. Soon he and his friend Felix Pappalardi were accompanying Martin and Neil on stage, and the two of them were recording as the duo's accompanists: [Excerpt: Vince Martin and Fred Neil, "Tear Down the Walls"] We've mentioned Neil before, but if you don't remember him, he was one of the people around whom the whole Greenwich Village scene formed -- he was the MC and organiser of bills for many of the folk shows of the time, but he's now best known for writing the songs "Everybody's Talkin'", recorded famously by Harry Nilsson, and "The Dolphins", recorded by Tim Buckley. On the Martin and Neil album, Tear Down The Walls, as well as playing harmonica, Sebastian acted essentially as uncredited co-producer with Rothchild, but Martin and Neil soon stopped recording for Elektra. But in the meantime, Sebastian had met the most important musical collaborator he would ever have, and this is the start of something that will become a minor trend in the next few years, of important musical collaborations happening because of people being introduced by Cass Elliot. Cass Elliot had been a singer in a folk group called the Big 3 -- not the same group as the Merseybeat group -- with Tim Rose, and the man who would be her first husband, Jim Hendricks (not the more famous guitarist of a similar name): [Excerpt: Cass Elliot and the Big 3, "The Banjo Song"] The Big 3 had split up when Elliot and Hendricks had got married, and the two married members had been looking around for other musicians to perform with, when coincidentally another group they knew also split up. The Halifax Three were a Canadian group who had originally started out as The Colonials, with a lineup of Denny Doherty, Pat LaCroix and Richard Byrne. Byrne didn't turn up for a gig, and a homeless guitar player, Zal Yanovsky, who would hang around the club the group were playing at, stepped in. Doherty and LaCroix, much to Yanovsky's objections, insisted he bathe and have a haircut, but soon the newly-renamed Halifax Three were playing Carnegie Hall and recording for Epic Records: [Excerpt: The Halifax Three, "When I First Came to This Island"] But then a plane they were in crash-landed, and the group took that as a sign that they should split up. So they did, and Doherty and Yanovsky continued as a duo, until they hooked up with Hendricks and Elliot and formed a new group, the Mugwumps. A name which may be familiar if you recognise one of the hits of a group that Doherty and Elliot were in later: [Excerpt: The Mamas and the Papas, "Creeque Alley"] But we're skipping ahead a bit there. Cass Elliot was one of those few people in the music industry about whom it is impossible to find anyone with a bad word to say, and she was friendly with basically everyone, and particularly good at matching people up with each other. And on February the 7th 1964, she invited John Sebastian over to watch the Beatles' first performance on the Ed Sullivan Show. Like everyone in America, he was captivated by the performance: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I Want to Hold Your Hand (live on the Ed Sullivan Show)"] But Yanovsky was also there, and the two played guitar together for a bit, before retreating to opposite sides of the room. And then Elliot spent several hours as a go-between, going to each man and telling him how much the other loved and admired his playing and wanted to play more with him. Sebastian joined the Mugwumps for a while, becoming one of the two main instrumentalists with Yanovsky, as the group pivoted from performing folk music to performing Beatles-inspired rock. But the group's management team, Bob Cavallo and Roy Silver, who weren't particularly musical people, and whose main client was the comedian Bill Cosby, got annoyed at Sebastian, because he and Yanovsky were getting on *too* well musically -- they were trading blues licks on stage, rather than sticking to the rather pedestrian arrangements that the group was meant to be performing -- and so Silver fired Sebastian fired from the group. When the Mugwumps recorded their one album, Sebastian had to sit in the control room while his former bandmates recorded with session musicians, who he thought were nowhere near up to his standard: [Excerpt: The Mugwumps, "Searchin'"] By the time that album was released, the Mugwumps had already split up. Sebastian had continued working as a session musician for Elektra, including playing on the album The Blues Project, which featured white Greenwich Village folk musicians like Eric Von Schmidt, Dave Van Ronk, and Spider John Koerner playing their versions of old blues records, including this track by Geoff Muldaur, which features Sebastian on harmonica and "Bob Landy" on piano -- a fairly blatant pseudonym: [Excerpt: Geoff Muldaur, "Downtown Blues"] Sebastian also played rhythm guitar and harmonica on the demos that became a big part of Tim Hardin's first album -- and his fourth, when the record company released the remaining demos. Sebastian doesn't appear to be on the orchestrated ballads that made Hardin's name -- songs like "Reason to Believe" and "Misty Roses" -- but he is on much of the more blues-oriented material, which while it's not anything like as powerful as Hardin's greatest songs, made up a large part of his repertoire: [Excerpt: Tim Hardin, "Ain't Gonna Do Without"] Erik Jacobsen, the producer of Hardin's records, was impressed enough by Sebastian that he got Sebastian to record lead vocals, for a studio group consisting of Sebastian, Felix Pappalardi, Jerry Yester and Henry Diltz of the Modern Folk Quartet, and a bass singer whose name nobody could later remember. The group, under the name "Pooh and the Heffalumps", recorded two Beach Boys knockoffs, "Lady Godiva" and "Rooty Toot", the latter written by Sebastian, though he would later be embarrassed by it and claim it was by his cousin: [Excerpt: Pooh and the Heffalumps, "Rooty Toot"] After that, Jacobsen became convinced that Sebastian should form a group to exploit his potential as a lead singer and songwriter. By this point, the Mugwumps had split up, and their management team had also split, with Silver taking Bill Cosby and Cavallo taking the Mugwumps, and so Sebastian was able to work with Yanovsky, and the putative group could be managed by Cavallo. But Sebastian and Yanovsky needed a rhythm section. And Erik Jacobsen knew a band that might know some people. Jacobsen was a fan of a Beatles soundalike group called the Sellouts, who were playing Greenwich Village and who were co-managed by Herb Cohen, the manager of the Modern Folk Quartet (who, as we heard a couple of episodes ago, would soon go on to be the manager of the Mothers of Invention). The Sellouts were ultra-professional by the standards  of rock groups of the time -- they even had a tape echo machine that they used on stage to give them a unique sound -- and they had cut a couple of tracks with Jacobsen producing, though I've not been able to track down copies of them. Their leader Skip Boone, had started out playing guitar in a band called the Blue Suedes, and had played in 1958 on a record by their lead singer Arthur Osborne: [Excerpt: Arthur Osborne, "Hey Ruby"] Skip Boone's brother Steve in his autobiography says that that was produced by Chet Atkins for RCA, but it was actually released on Brunswick records. In the early sixties, Skip Boone joined a band called the Kingsmen -- not the same one as the band that recorded "Louie Louie" -- playing lead guitar with his brother Steve on rhythm, a singer called Sonny Bottari, a saxophone player named King Charles, bass player Clay Sonier, and drummer Joe Butler. Sometimes Butler would get up front and sing, and then another drummer, Jan Buchner, would sit in in his place. Soon Steve Boone would replace Bonier as the bass player, but the Kingsmen had no success, and split up. From the ashes of the Kingsmen had formed the Sellouts, Skip Boone, Jerry Angus, Marshall O'Connell, and Joe Butler, who had switched from playing "Peppermint Twist" to playing "I Want to Hold Your Hand" in February 1964. Meanwhile Steve Boone went on a trip to Europe before starting at university in New York, where he hooked up again with Butler, and it was Butler who introduced him to Sebastian and Yanovsky. Sebastian and Yanovsky had been going to see the Sellouts at the behest of Jacobsen, and they'd been asking if they knew anyone else who could play that kind of material. Skip Boone had mentioned his little brother, and as soon as they met him, even before they first played together, they knew from his appearance that he would be the right bass player for them. So now they had at least the basis for a band. They hadn't played together, but Erik Jacobsen was an experienced record producer and Cavallo an experienced manager. They just needed to do some rehearsals and get a drummer, and a record contract was more or less guaranteed. Boone suggested Jan Buchner, the backup drummer from the Kingsmen, and he joined them for rehearsals. It was during these early rehearsals that Boone got to play on his first real record, other than some unreleased demos the Kingsmen had made. John Sebastian got a call from that "Bob Landy" we mentioned earlier, asking if he'd play bass on a session. Boone tagged along, because he was a fan, and when Sebastian couldn't get the parts down for some songs, he suggested that Boone, as an actual bass player, take over: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Maggie's Farm"] But the new group needed a name, of course. It was John Sebastian who came up with the name they eventually chose, The Lovin' Spoonful, though Boone was a bit hesitant about it at first, worrying that it might be a reference to heroin -- Boone was from a very conservative, military, background, and knew little of drug culture and didn't at that time make much of a distinction between cannabis and heroin, though he'd started using the former -- but Sebastian was insistent. The phrase actually referred to coffee -- the name came from "Coffee Blues" by Sebastian's old idol Mississippi John Hurt – or at least Hurt always *said* it was about coffee, though in live performance he apparently made it clear that it was about cunnilingus: [Excerpt: Mississippi John Hurt, "Coffee Blues"] Their first show, at the Night Owl Club, was recorded, and there was even an attempt to release it as a CD in the 1990s, but it was left unreleased and as far as I can tell wasn't even leaked. There have been several explanations for this, but perhaps the most accurate one is just the comment from the manager of the club, who came up to the group after their two sets and told them “Hey, I don't know how to break this to you, but you guys suck.” There were apparently three different problems. They were underrehearsed -- which could be fixed with rehearsal -- they were playing too loud and hurting the patrons' ears -- which could be fixed by turning down the amps -- and their drummer didn't look right, was six years older than the rest of the group, and was playing in an out-of-date fifties style that wasn't suitable for the music they were playing. That was solved by sacking Buchner. By this point Joe Butler had left the Sellouts, and while Herb Cohen was interested in managing him as a singer, he was willing to join this new group at least for the moment. By now the group were all more-or-less permanent residents at the Albert Hotel, which was more or less a doss-house where underemployed musicians would stay, and which had its own rehearsal rooms. As well as the Spoonful, Cass Elliot and Denny Doherty lived there, as did the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Joe Butler quickly fit into the group, and soon they were recording what became their first single, produced by Jacobsen, an original of Sebastian's called "Do You Believe in Magic?", with Sebastian on autoharp and vocals, Yanovsky on lead guitar and backing vocals, Boone on bass, Butler on drums, and Jerry Yester adding piano and backing vocals: [Excerpt: The Lovin' Spoonful, "Do You Believe in Magic?"] For a long time, the group couldn't get a deal -- the record companies all liked the song, but said that unless the group were English they couldn't sell them at the moment. Then Phil Spector walked into the Night Owl Cafe, where the new lineup of the group had become popular, and tried to sign them up. But they turned him down -- they wanted Erik Jacobsen to produce them; they were a team. Spector's interest caused other labels to be interested, and the group very nearly signed to Elektra. But again, signing to Elektra would have meant being produced by Rothchild, and also Elektra were an album label who didn't at that time have any hit single acts, and the group knew they had hit single potential. They did record a few tracks for Elektra to stick on a blues compilation, but they knew that Elektra wouldn't be their real home. Eventually the group signed with Charley Koppelman and Don Rubin, who had started out as songwriters themselves, working for Don Kirshner. When Kirshner's organisation had been sold to Columbia, Koppelman and Rubin had gone along and ended up working for Columbia as executives. They'd then worked for Morris Levy at Roulette Records, before forming their own publishing and record company. Rather than put out records themselves, they had a deal to license records to Kama Sutra Records, who in turn had a distribution deal with MGM Records. Koppelman and Rubin were willing to take the group and their manager and producer as a package deal, and they released the group's demo of "Do You Believe In Magic?" unchanged as their first single: [Excerpt: The Lovin' Spoonful, "Do You Believe in Magic?"] The single reached the top ten, and the group were soon in the studio cutting their first album, also titled Do You Believe In Magic? The album was a mix of songs that were part of the standard Greenwich Village folkie repertoire -- songs like Mississippi John Hurt's "Blues in the Bottle" and Fred Neil's "The Other Side of This Life" -- and a couple more originals. The group's second single was the first song that Steve Boone had co-written. It was inspired by a date he'd gone on with the photographer Nurit Wilde, who sadly for him didn't go on a second date, and who would later be the mother of Mike Nesmith's son Jason, but who he was very impressed by. He thought of her when he came up with the line "you didn't have to be so nice, I would have liked you anyway", and he and Sebastian finished up a song that became another top ten hit for the group: [Excerpt: (The Good Time Music of) The Lovin' Spoonful, "You Didn't Have to Be So Nice"] Shortly after that song was recorded, but before it was released, the group were called into Columbia TV with an intriguing proposition. Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson, two young TV producers, were looking at producing a TV show inspired by A Hard Day's Night, and were looking for a band to perform in it. Would the Lovin' Spoonful be up for it? They were interested at first, but Boone and Sebastian weren't sure they wanted to be actors, and also it would involve the group changing its name. They'd already made a name for themselves as the Lovin' Spoonful, did they really want to be the Monkees instead? They passed on the idea. Instead, they went on a tour of the deep South as the support act to the Supremes, a pairing that they didn't feel made much sense, but which did at least allow them to watch the Supremes and the Funk Brothers every night. Sebastian was inspired by the straight four-on-the-floor beat of the Holland-Dozier-Holland repertoire, and came up with his own variation on it, though as this was the Lovin' Spoonful the end result didn't sound very Motown at all: [Excerpt: The Lovin' Spoonful, "Daydream"] It was only after the track was recorded that Yanovsky pointed out to Sebastian that he'd unconsciously copied part of the melody of the old standard "Got a Date With an Angel": [Excerpt: Al Bowlly, "Got a Date With an Angel"] "Daydream" became the group's third top ten hit in a row, but it caused some problems for the group. The first was Kama Sutra's advertising campaign for the record, which had the words "Lovin' Spoonful Daydream", with the initials emphasised. While the group were drug users, they weren't particularly interested in being promoted for that rather than their music, and had strong words with the label. The other problem came with the Beach Boys. The group were supporting the Beach Boys on a tour in spring of 1966, when "Daydream" came out and became a hit, and they got on with all the band members except Mike Love, who they definitely did not get on with. Almost fifty years later, in his autobiography, Steve Boone would have nothing bad to say about the Wilson brothers, but calls Love "an obnoxious, boorish braggart", a "marginally talented hack" and worse, so it's safe to say that Love wasn't his favourite person in the world. Unfortunately, when "Daydream" hit the top ten, one of the promoters of the tour decided to bill the Lovin' Spoonful above the Beach Boys, and this upset Love, who understandably thought that his group, who were much better known and had much more hits, should be the headliners. If this had been any of the other Beach Boys, there would have been no problem, but because it was Love, who the Lovin' Spoonful despised, they decided that they were going to fight for top billing, and the managers had to get involved. Eventually it was agreed that the two groups would alternate the top spot on the bill for the rest of the tour. "Daydream" eventually reached number two on the charts (and number one on Cashbox) and also became the group's first hit in the UK, reaching number two here as well, and leading to the group playing a short UK tour. During that tour, they had a similar argument over billing with Mick Jagger as they'd had with Mike Love, this time over who was headlining on an appearance on Top of the Pops, and the group came to the same assessment of Jagger as they had of Love. The performance went OK, though, despite them being so stoned on hash given them by the wealthy socialite Tara Browne that Sebastian had to be woken up seconds before he started playing. They also played the Marquee Club -- Boone notes in his autobiography that he wasn't impressed by the club when he went to see it the day before their date there, because some nobody named David Bowie was playing there. But in the audience that day were George Harrison, John Lennon, Eric Clapton, Steve Winwood, Spencer Davis, and Brian Jones, most of whom partied with the group afterwards. The Lovin' Spoonful made a big impression on Lennon in particular, who put "Daydream" and "Do You Believe in Magic" in his jukebox at home, and who soon took to wearing glasses in the same round, wiry, style as the ones that Sebastian wore. They also influenced Paul McCartney, who wasn't at that gig, but who soon wrote this, inspired by "Daydream": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Good Day Sunshine"] Unfortunately, this was more or less the high point of the group's career. Shortly after that brief UK tour, Zal Yanovsky and Steve Boone went to a party where they were given some cannabis -- and they were almost immediately stopped by the police, subjected to an illegal search of their vehicle, and arrested. They would probably have been able to get away with this -- after all, it was an illegal search, even though of course the police didn't admit to that -- were it not for the fact that Yanovsky was a Canadian citizen, and he could be deported and barred from ever re-entering the US just for being arrested. This was the first major drug bust of a rock and roll group, and there was no precedent for the group, their managers, their label or their lawyers to deal with this. And so they agreed to something they would regret for the rest of their lives. In return for being let off, Boone and Yanovsky agreed to take an undercover police officer to a party and introduce him to some of their friends as someone they knew in the record business, so he would be able to arrest one of the bigger dealers. This was, of course, something they knew was a despicable thing to do, throwing friends under the bus to save themselves, but they were young men and under a lot of pressure, and they hoped that it wouldn't actually lead to any arrests. And for almost a year, there were no serious consequences, although both Boone and Yanovsky were shaken up by the event, and Yanovsky's behaviour, which had always been erratic, became much, much worse. But for the moment, the group remained very successful. After "Daydream", an album track from their first album, "Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind?" had been released as a stopgap single, and that went to number two as well. And right before the arrest, the group had been working on what would be an even bigger hit. The initial idea for "Summer in the City" actually came from John Sebastian's fourteen-year-old brother Mark, who'd written a bossa nova song called "It's a Different World". The song was, by all accounts, the kind of thing that a fourteen-year-old boy writes, but part of it had potential, and John Sebastian took that part -- giving his brother full credit -- and turned it into the chorus of a new song: [Excerpt: The Lovin' Spoonful, "Summer in the City"] To this, Sebastian added a new verse, inspired by a riff the session player Artie Schroeck had been playing while the group recorded their songs for the Woody Allen film What's Up Tiger Lily, creating a tenser, darker, verse to go with his younger brother's chorus: [Excerpt: The Lovin' Spoonful, "Summer in the City"] In the studio, Steve Boone came up with the instrumental arrangement, which started with drums, organ, electric piano, and guitar, and then proceeded to bass, autoharp, guitar, and percussion overdubs. The drum sound on the record was particularly powerful thanks to the engineer Roy Halee, who worked on most of Simon & Garfunkel's records. Halee put a mic at the top of a stairwell, a giant loudspeaker at the bottom, and used the stairwell as an echo chamber for the drum part. He would later use a similar technique on Simon and Garfunkel's "The Boxer". The track still needed another section though, and Boone suggested an instrumental part, which led to him getting an equal songwriting credit with the Sebastian brothers. His instrumental piano break was inspired by Gershwin, and the group topped it off with overdubbed city noises: [Excerpt: The Lovin' Spoonful, "Summer in the City"] The track went to number one, becoming the group's only number one record, and it was the last track on what is by far their best album, Hums of the Lovin' Spoonful. That album produced two more top ten hits for the group, "Nashville Cats", a tribute to Nashville session players (though John Sebastian seems to have thought that Sun Records was a Nashville, rather than a Memphis, label), and the rather lovely "Rain on the Roof": [Excerpt: The Lovin' Spoonful, "Rain on the Roof"] But that song caused friction with the group, because it was written about Sebastian's relationship with his wife who the other members of the band despised. They also felt that the songs he was writing about their relationship were giving the group a wimpy image, and wanted to make more rockers like "Summer in the City" -- some of them had been receiving homophobic abuse for making such soft-sounding music. The group were also starting to resent Sebastian for other reasons. In a recent contract renegotiation, a "key member" clause had been put into the group's record contract, which stated that Sebastian, as far as the label was concerned, was the only important member of the group. While that didn't affect decision-making in the group, it did let the group know that if the other members did anything to upset Sebastian, he was able to take his ball away with him, and even just that potential affected the way the group thought about each other. All these factors came into play with a song called "Darling Be Home Soon", which was a soft ballad that Sebastian had written about his wife, and which was written for another film soundtrack -- this time for a film by a new director named Francis Ford Coppola. When the other band members came in to play on the soundtrack, including that track, they found that rather than being allowed to improvise and come up with their own parts as they had previously, they had to play pre-written parts to fit with the orchestration. Yanovsky in particular was annoyed by the simple part he had to play, and when the group appeared on the Ed Sullivan show to promote the record, he mugged, danced erratically, and mimed along mocking the lyrics as Sebastian sang. The song -- one of Sebastian's very best -- made a perfectly respectable number fifteen, but it was the group's first record not to make the top ten: [Excerpt: The Lovin' Spoonful, "Darling Be Home Soon"] And then to make matters worse, the news got out that someone had been arrested as a result of Boone and Yanovsky's efforts to get themselves out of trouble the year before. This was greeted with horror by the counterculture, and soon mimeographed newsletters and articles in the underground papers were calling the group part of the establishment, and calling for a general boycott of the group -- if you bought their records, attended their concerts, or had sex with any of the band members, you were a traitor. Yanovsky and Boone had both been in a bad way mentally since the bust, but Yanovsky was far worse, and was making trouble for the other members in all sorts of ways. The group decided to fire Yanovsky, and brought in Jerry Yester to replace him, giving him a severance package that ironically meant that he ended up seeing more money from the group's records than the rest of them, as their records were later bought up by a variety of shell companies that passed through the hands of Morris Levy among others, and so from the late sixties through the early nineties the group never got any royalties. For a while, this seemed to benefit everyone. Yanovsky had money, and his friendship with the group members was repaired. He released a solo single, arranged by Jack Nitzsche, which just missed the top one hundred: [Excerpt: Zal Yanovsky, "Just as Long as You're Here"] That song was written by the Bonner and Gordon songwriting team who were also writing hits for the Turtles at this time, and who were signed to Koppelman and Rubin's company. The extent to which Yanovsky's friendship with his ex-bandmates was repaired by his firing was shown by the fact that Jerry Yester, his replacement in the group, co-produced his one solo album, Alive and Well in Argentina, an odd mixture of comedy tracks, psychedelia, and tributes to the country music he loved. His instrumental version of Floyd Cramer's "Last Date" is fairly listenable -- Cramer's piano playing was a big influence on Yanovsky's guitar -- but his version of George Jones' "From Brown to Blue" makes it very clear that Zal Yanovsky was no George Jones: [Excerpt: Zal Yanovsky, "From Brown to Blue"] Yanovsky then quit music, and went into the restaurant business. The Lovin' Spoonful, meanwhile, made one further album, but the damage had been done. Everything Playing is actually a solid album, though not as good as the album before, and it produced three top forty hits, but the highest-charting was "Six O'Clock", which only made number eighteen, and the album itself made a pitiful one hundred and eighteen on the charts. The song on the album that in retrospect has had the most impact was the rather lovely "Younger Generation", which Sebastian later sang at Woodstock: [Excerpt: John Sebastian, "Younger Generation (Live at Woodstock)"] But at Woodstock he performed that alone, because by then he'd quit the group. Boone, Butler, and Yester decided to continue, with Butler singing lead, and recorded a single, "Never Going Back", produced by Yester's old bandmate from the Modern Folk Quartet Chip Douglas, who had since become a successful producer for the Monkees and the Turtles, and written by John Stewart of the Kingston Trio, who had written "Daydream Believer" for the Monkees, but the record only made number seventy-eight on the charts: [Excerpt: The Lovin' Spoonful featuring Joe Butler, "Never Going Back"] That was followed by an album by "The Lovin' Spoonful Featuring Joe Butler", Revelation: Revolution 69, a solo album by Butler in all but name -- Boone claims not to have played on it, and Butler is the only one featured on the cover, which shows a naked Butler being chased by a naked woman with a lion in front of them covering the naughty bits. The biggest hit other than "Never Going Back" from the album was "Me About You", a Bonner and Gordon song which only made number ninety-one: [Excerpt: The Lovin' Spoonful Featuring Joe Butler, "Me About You"] John Sebastian went on to have a moderately successful solo career -- as well as his appearance at Woodstock, he released several solo albums, guested on harmonica on records by the Doors, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young and others, and had a solo number one hit in 1976 with "Welcome Back", the theme song from the TV show Welcome Back, Kotter: [Excerpt: John Sebastian, "Welcome Back"] Sebastian continues to perform, though he's had throat problems for several decades that mean he can't sing many of the songs he's best known for. The original members of the Lovin' Spoonful reunited for two performances -- an appearance in Paul Simon's film One Trick Pony in 1980, and a rather disastrous induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2000. Zal Yanovsky died of a heart attack in 2002. The remaining band members remained friendly, and Boone, Butler, and Yester reunited as the Lovin' Spoonful in 1991, initially with Yester's brother Jim, who had played in The Association, latterly with other members. One of those other members in the 1990s was Yester's daughter Lena, who became Boone's fourth wife (and is as far as I can discover still married to him). Yester, Boone, and Butler continued touring together as the Lovin' Spoonful until 2017, when Jerry Yester was arrested on thirty counts of child pornography possession, and was immediately sacked from the group. The other two carried on, and the three surviving original members reunited on stage for a performance at one of the Wild Honey Orchestra's benefit concerts in LA in 2020, though that was just a one-off performance, not a full-blown reunion. It was also the last Lovin' Spoonful performance to date, as that was in February 2020, but Steve Boone has performed with John Sebastian's most recent project, John Sebastian's Jug Band Village, a tribute to the Greenwich Village folk scene the group originally formed in, and the two played together most recently in December 2021. The three surviving original members of the group all seem to be content with their legacy, doing work they enjoy, and basically friendly, which is more than can be said for most of their contemporaries, and which is perhaps appropriate for a band whose main songwriter had been inspired, more than anything else, to make music with a positive attitude.

Tommy James cut "Hanky Panky" when he was just a teenager, and then he signed with Morris Levy's Roulette Records and ended up with tons of hits, but very little money. Listen to the story of an artist who pushed the limits of the hit single idiom (remember the tremolo effect in "Crimson and Clover"?) and toured with all the stars of the sixties as well as Hubert Humphrey! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

Jimmie Rodgers was the foremost folksinger and hitmaker of the late 50's. His first smash was "Honeycomb" on Roulette Records in 1957. In the midst of the first stages of rock'n'roll, Jimmie was a winner with his own unique versions of standard folk songs. His version of folk emphasized a background beat that made his music unique. Starting with "Honeycomb" his string of hits lasted until 1967. It's interesting to note that "Honeycomb" was the only number one hit he ever had although his 10-year string of hits was impressive. I met Jimmie Rodgers years later when he came to perform at Vancouver's Queen Elizabeth Theatre. He was most sincere and his folk songs offered a definite balance to the outpourings of hard rock. During my final week of daily radio in CISL's Wakeup Club this week in 2000, Jimmie was part of a group of special guests who made an impact on my career. Jimmie passed away January 18 at 87. I found him to be one of the warmest young singers I had ever met. I will always remember him and the influence he had on the music we loved!

Allen & Rossi - Sway (1976) POACA will recall Marty Allen's ubiquitous presence on 70s talk shows and game shows. Whether they like it or not. Naw, he was funny! More Allen and Rossi vinyl to come! From Both Sides Now, a wonderful resource for people wanting to know the stories behind the labels: The Calla label started in 1965 as an independent New York label, owned by Nathan (Nate) McCalla. Calla hit big with J.J. Jackson's "But It's Alright" in 1966, a song recorded in England with British musicians backing Jackson, and then turned this 45 hit into an LP of the same name. Calla licensed the rights to J.J. Jackson's material to Warner Brothers sometime later, and the same song re-charted in 1969 on WB. Other artists on the label included The Sandpebbles, Jean Wells, Billy Mitchell, and Betty LaVette, Rudy Love, and The Persuaders. Early singles and possibly the first album were distributed by Cameo-Parkway, but Cameo-Parkway soon ran into problems staying in business. With Cameo-Parkway on the rocks, McCalla decided to do his own distribution. McCalla was a friend of Morris Levy and was part of the Roulette Records group of labels, but operated independently as far as distribution. This worked well until 1972 when the material seemed to dry up. Calla was all but inactive for the 1972-1975 years. But in 1976, Calla issued a handful of albums distributed by a company called Shakat Records. The albums that sold well were shifted to CBS for distribution later that same year, and CBS eventually reissued several of the Calla albums on Epic, with a small Calla logo. Calla shut its doors in 1977 when Nate McCalla decided to go on an extended stay outside the United States. When he returned in 1980, he was soon murdered. Like many record company execs, Nate McCalla was less of a studio man and more of an office man, one who knew what he liked, signing a wide variety of musical genres to his label. He leaves a relatively small but quite interesting musical legacy.  Dennis Parker - New York By Night (1979) 12" Mix.  Dennis Parker - Like An Eagle (1979) 12" Mix"  Look at this guy. Just look at him. Sweat. Muscle. Mmmm. I think I'm gay now. Actually, he did straight porn AND gay, and he hooked up with Jacques Morali, and then made this album. I actually like it. As disco goes, it's in the hands of the master. And so was Dennis, for a while. Side One of "The Gene Pitney Show" (1966): This is a fake live album, with Joe O'Brien as emcee. The album features several Musicor acts of the time, many of whom never had an LP release, meaning that this album is the only place to find some of these songs in stereo. I believe this album was meant as a ploy to get more exposure to other Musicor acts by having their biggest star (Pitney) "appear" with the others in concert. However, as stated earlier, this is a fake live album, and a poorly done one. Crowd noises are added in at seemingly random points in the songs, some of the sound effects weren't properly cued up so you can hear the FX record gain speed. On top of this, Joe O'Brien randomly starts speaking at random points on some tracks. If it weren't for the hard-to-find songs (in stereo or mono) this would be just a waste of vinyl.  Gene Pitney - Backstage The Critters - Georgianna  The Bitter End Singers - Let Me In or Keep me Out Teddy and the Pandas - Once Upon A Time The Platters - I Love You 1,000 Times Danny and Diego - Glitter and Gold  Tony Bruno - This Time You're Right (1974) Tony Bruno - Love Was Born Today (1974) I'm glad I bought this little-known soundtrack to a little-known movie with songs by a little-known singer that I love (Tony Bruno).  Elliot Lurie - Rich Girl (1976) Elliot Lurie - Disco (1975) I have raised 3 children, done thousands of gigs, won Musician of the Year in High School, etc., but NOTHING gives me more pleasure than doing my imitation of Elliot Lurie.  Therapy - Fantasia on Eleanor Rigby (1975) Sleeve notes: "This album, our third, is a selection of material which can be heard at a typical Therapy performance." I'm the Greatest - David Hentschel (1975) Phil Collins on drums.  Selections from Side One of Les Humphries Singers' "Carnival" album (1973) WHICH I OWN!!:  Kentucky Dew Do-Da Lonely Kind of Man Square Dance  Les Humphries was not a bad songwriter at all. Somewhat derivative in places, but mostly inoffensive pop in the vein of Gilbert O'Sullivan or a young Elton John after a night out.  Os Mutantes - Panis et Circenses (1970) English version. Translates to "Bread and Circuses".  Os Mutantes - I Feel A Little Spaced (1970) English version of "Ando Meio Desligado". These are not bad. I think the songs are so good and the performances so sincere and unaffected that they transcend our clunky lexicon. They must have done this to expand their audience in the USA. It didn't work but I'm glad they released this at all.  Bobby Lee Trammell - You Mostest Girl (1958) Our favorite guy, Bobby Lee Trammell, records an almost note-for-note copy of Elvis' "You're So Square (Baby I Don't Care)".  J.D. Drews - Don't Want Nobody (1980) Jürgen Drews from the aforementioned LHS tries to break into the American market by anglicizing his name and adopting all the quirky affect of a real-live New Wave singer with somewhat staid results. This song was written by P Delph and D Edwards. I can't see that they wrote anything else. The Brecker Brothers, Jan Akkerman, and Joe Chemay.    Pete Sacco - Pennsylvania (197?) Lou Christie's brother recorded this on the Lightning Label. 

The Cowsills welcome the great Tommy James onto the show for this week's episode. Tommy James is the musician, singer, songwriter, and record producer, we know and love from the 1960s rock band Tommy James and the Shondells.Tommy's songs are pop culture classics and have been covered by everyone from punk rockers to country icons. In 1968, Tommy became one of the first artists to experiment with music videos. To date, Tommy has sold over a hundred million records sold worldwide, and has received five BMI "Million Air" awards in recognition of 22 million broadcast spins of his songs.Tommy and The Cowsills go way back down memory lane. They talk through everythings from his first band of 12 year olds, the call that changed his life, and the craziest story of working with Roulette Records and the mob.For more of Tommy, you can tune in to his Sirius XM show 60s on 6 every Sunday.Song of the Week: Mony Mony by Tommy James and The Shondells

Spring is in the air... Lambs are born... Rabbits are humping... And the foul Stench of another Geecast is incoming! After the Northern Gathering Reunion sets we get back to what we do best. Blowing your ears out! This month we feature a DJ that has run labels in Hardcore, and currently in Drum N Bass and Bass music, as well as successful rave nights, worked in record shop across the country, been a successful producer. And he survived the cut throat politics of the Hardcore scene to tell the tale. LEE UHF!! So, first Ill be playing part 1 of a classic Darkstep 2005-2010 mix & then Lee will take over with a brand new mix done just for us. So without further ado, Lee!  Thanks for joining us!   Thank you for having me Kev, Its been a while hasn't it? Always good to have a catch up with some of the old crew. Can you talk me through your early days within the rave scene? How did things start for you? I'll try my best. Haha. For me music has always been a big part of my life. In fact up to the age of 12yrs old, my Dad ran a record shop in Sheffield called Roulette Records. I spent most evenings for years after school and Saturday mornings in his shop helping out, which basically translates to me being in the big store cupboard going through 1000s of tapes and vinyls and claiming which ones I wanted to take home.  I must have had near £50k of music over the years for free from the shop looking back now, insane!  At this time in the late 80's and early 90's, I had no idea what rave music was as I was pretty young, but I was obsessed with a lot of rave music that charted such as 2 Unlimited, Snap, The Prodigy, Silver Bullet, Praga Khan & The Shamen.  In fact, when my Dad gave up the shop I got heavily into Gangster Rap (Wu-Tang, Onyx, EPMD etc) and really lost touch with anything rave sounding. It wasn't until 1995, while on a family holiday in Chapel St Leonards, Skegness that I met a guy from Lincoln who used to play Vibealite and Pleasuredome tapes, but as I was obsessed with Rap music, I hated the happy, high energy stuff that he was playing and always shot it down saying it was shit. A year later in 1996, I was back at the same holiday camp with him again and he managed to persuade me to go to a rave. The Pleasuredome, at The Zoo in Ingoldmells. It took a lot of persuading. I was only 14yrs old and was way under age (He told my parents it was a teens night lol) but once I got inside and saw the legendary big clowns head/ DJ box, It blew my mind and i ended up really, really enjoyed it. I got home to Sheffield, and had done a complete 180 with my music taste. My friend from Lincoln was sending me tapes in the post all the time to feed my new addiction and I even found some of my mates at School were heavily into it also, one being a guy you might have heard of, MC Keyes?  Where did you used to go raving?  When getting back from the holiday me and my school pals found out about a weekly running event just down the road from my house. `Uprising` and discovered the wonderfull world of MCing, which lead to me and my friends all thinking we were hot shit on the mic at 15/16yrs old. Haha So you wanted to be an MC back then, more than a DJ? Absolutely!  At 16 when I left school, I had carried on attending Uprising and through a mutual friend, I had started hanging around with a few older lads who were also into the same music, one being Martin Space. We'd all pile into Martin's house at weekends where he and his mates would be DJing while me and Keyes did the MCing. I literally had no interest in Djing at all until I kind of got forced to do it when people wanted a break from the decks. So what kit did you have when you first started Djing? Martin Space actually sold me my first set of decks. He upgraded his at the time and this is what got me off the MCing and into Djing.  They were old belt drive Soundlabs. Horrible to use, but believe it or not, I recorded my first demo for Uprising on those bad boys and got a booking from Paul-O, who I sent it to. Can you tell us who were your main influences when you first started out? Early on, I only really went to Uprising, due to it being local and weekly. Plus I never thought to venture out of the area due to how young I was. So the main influences I had were Uprising performers early on. For MCing, Domer & ELL were the best for me hands down. They hard a darker edge, quite like the gangster rap music I loved in the early 90's. Dj wise - I loved Paul-O. Always diverse, playing different genres and always the harder / party style sound, which for me is the direction my tastes were heading towards. And, like most people at Uprising I had a soft spot for Sy & Alchemist early on when they would guest spot. Later on, as I discovered my own style and sound, and this lead me to be a huge fan of Sharkey & Lomas too. Did you send out demo tapes or go to events and give the promoter a demo in person? Yes for sure, back then before we had Social media and Soundcloud etc. you had to record the demo's on a physical tape. My god it feels so weird saying that, like Im an ancient age where tapes are like chalk & slate, but for most Djs now, its an unheard thing to record something on a physical format. Before I had made a name for myself, I can safely say every club that booked me, I had attended them prior and handed in a tape to the promoter.  When I promote nights myself I have always thought the same way.  The amount of Facebook private messages I get on our event page saying "I'd love to come play at your event" with a soundcloud link, is a daily occurance. I don't think this is a good way to get promoters to take notice of you. One message I had not long ago said "u need to book me for ur nite" Oh do I? Really? lol I am completely dumbfounded how people think this is a way to get a booking, especially in the digital age. It's so easy for anyone to get a mix online and be a DJ. How can you think this behaviour makes you stand out from the sea of competition out there? You have to do even more in my eyes with everyone and their mom mixing now. I can't think of a time, when I was an unknown DJ, that I did not make an effort to support the event I wanted to play at, and actually go and get to know the promoter. To me there was no other way.  You got quite a few residencies when you first started, at events like Future Dance, Vibealite and North. How did those come about? For the exact reasons I mentioned above. I attended the events. I networked well and I called the promoters constantly. Yes, I could be annoying but I was young and hungry and I think for the most part promoters respected the hustle I gave back then. I was everywhere and speaking to everyone. The Future Dance residency came out of nowhere due to me buying records from Wax City in London over the phone every week. Dj Kaos owned the shop, and he sent me a few flyers for the first Future Dance event with an order that I had made. It was on my birthday, so me and a few friends decided to go there to celebrate it. I obviously took a bag full of demos too. I got on well with the boys that ran it, and by their 3rd event I was a playing for them. With North, this actually came from getting to know the owner Andy Bowler, by playing in the North hosted Techno rooms at Future Dance. I was a good fit for their Technology room as I was playing alot of the old Hard Trance / Reverse Bass tracks and had my own selection different from M-zone,Mark EG & Vortex. Around this time there was not alot of people spinning it in the UK this so I ended up playing most North events and tours from then on. Vibealite was also a very fun residency that I kept for quite a while, and this was achieved by (again) attending and sending demos. Around 2002 I met Gary at an event he did up North. We got chatting and he invited me onto his guest list for their first Fantasy Island event. I ended up playing an impromptu set out of nowhere and it went down so well I ended up playing every event from then on until 2006 It also led to co-promoting a couple of events with Vibealite and even hosting rooms for them at larger parties they did like Fantasy Island. And last but not least, there was also a residency at small club night called Defiance in Barnsley. Not on as big a scale as the others but just as much fun to play at. This event holds a very special place in my heart, as it gave me the idea to start promoting myself, as I realized you could do a decent event on a smaller scale at a budget. Did you always drive to your gigs or have a driver? Bit of everything really.  Early on there was a huge crew of us who would be going to raves and parties so If I was playing it was just who wanted to go at the time, and who wanted to drive or not. So getting there could be either a car full of a friends. A driver and me. A mini bus full of us. The train. A bus. You name it. Nothing stopped me getting to the parties. What kind of music did you play back then? At the very start of it all I learnt my craft Djing with the happier stuff (Quosh, Jal etc) But as I started to understand mixing more the main styles that I played were Freeform and Hardcore Techno. These 2 genres are where spent all my buying tunes and they're the sounds that got me my first bookings. So you were always into a variety of music back then as well? (Drum & Bass, Hardcore, Trance etc) I didnt like Drum & Bass at all back then. Haha, and it took me a couple of years to enjoy Trance. But eventually I was spinning everything. Trance, Hard House, Gabber, Hard Trance & Techno and I even got a few gigs doing these genre's too. I think having such a diverse music taste back then also helped me get more gigs at events outside of Sheffield.  When I gave Future Dance & Vibealite demos I would give them multiple tapes showcasing Hardcore, Hard Trance & Hardcore Techno. Reason being is that I loved all these styles equally and they had multiple rooms at their events, so as I was only starting to be booked by them, It would be impossible to be playing the main room right away. So this helped me start playing for them in their 2nd and 3rd arenas that were specific to other genres. It was great for me, as I was booked much more often and had an opportunity to play out lots more performing sets with music that I loved.  From this the Hard Trance / Reverse Bass stuff really took off for me, as there was not many people playing it back then, so there was plenty to go around booking wise.  Eventually though I lost interest in this sound when UK distributors re-packaged it as Hardstyle and made it more accessible for everyone to buy, meaning every man and his dog started playing it. The Dutch got hold of the sound then too, and the releases went all screetchy with those "Hard Bass Powaaaa" vocals. So I then started putting my full attention into just Hardcore alone. Nowadays there isn't much music I dislike. I started a DJ stream during lockdown last year where I played everything from 90s rave to 70s Disco. The whole series can be found on www.soundcloud.com/LeeUHF (Quick plug)   Tell us about the Bedlam events? How did they come about? Bedlam was the name of mine and Martin Space's house parties back in 1998- 2000 They were ace, Our mutual friend Pat would host them at his house and we even booked Djs and MCs that were known locally (DJ Max was one) It wasnt until I started getting booked at a night called Defiance in Barnsley in 2001 that I realized It was possible to put a good event on with a small budget. In June 2001 the first real Bedlam event was hosted at a The Mulberry Tavern pub on Arundel Gate in Sheffield. We had Topgroove play and although it seemed and felt a good night it was the most stressfull thing I had ever done in my life at the time. Haha. But the seed was planted and we then put on a Thursday night rave, just up the road at Uropa club and booked Sharkey. It fucking bombed... Hard. LOL It wasnt until November that year we found a function room, quite similar to the one Defiance used in Barnsley, It was situated on Infirmary Road, Sheffield and the place was called `George IV`  This really helped us elevate the event more and we were regularly putting on parties with different themes (Old skool night, North night, Future Dance night) and booked some top DJs along with it, but around late 2002 the pub got sold and the new owners were not up for us doing our events, despite zero trouble happening there and them always being full. Who was promoting these with you? Martin Space for the most part was my partner doing it, With some help from a couple of local friends we knew along the way. So when did the Total Bedlam events start and why ? in late 2003. It was at the time I was working in Reflex Records, a friend from school I had not seen in quite a few years came in the shop as he had heard I was Djing out and about. It was Mc Keyes. Obviously Keyes was the person I came up with early on Mcing and attending raves and we lost touch for a few years after I left school as he had stopped going to raves. Long story short he told me he was still Mcing and wanted to get involved back in Hardcore I suggested we could look into events and told him about Bedlam. The idea was for us to do something totally different and on a much bigger scale, We did our research, Found a big popular venue in the centre of the UK (The Venue in Long Eaton) and Total Bedlam was born. We started with 2 huge events in April 2004 both of them had huge line ups including Force & Styles, Devastate, Vortex, Hixxy, Storm, Whizzkid, Demand, Jay Precott & Frantic they also had 3 rooms to put music in enabling us to bring in a seperate new talent room and a Techno room. Our idea was with it being central we could showcase the best of everythng across the country and try and bring the Yorkshire scene and the rest of the country to one spot. Unfortunately it did not work that way down the line. Not many people in Yorkshire were willing to go to raves outside of the area, despite us booking Mcs & DJs from there so as time went on we catered more for our crowd that was there and what they wanted. I would loved to have supported my roots alot more back then but our crowd dictated what we did, It wasn't all bad though as it went on to gain some huge success being voted No.1 Monthly event in the UK by Mixmag and we were notorious for bringing alot of `firsts` to the UK rave scene in the form of Foeign DJs, B2Bs and Live PAs.  Doing Total Bedlam really got me to understand more about music culture and rave culture on a larger scale, as we got to really feel the high's and lows of this from being involved at this level. Big lessons were learnt, good and bad. You also get a lot more haters when running events, trust me. Few little known facts about Total Bedlam Joey Riot & Dj Kurt met at Total Bedlam and I persuaded them to play B2B for us which was a catalyst for them starting their partnership up. There's a story about how Brisk & Seduction absolutely hated each others guts. They did not speak to each other for years. We booked them in the same room on the same night one time (Accidently of course) We narrowly avoided a fist fight but we did actually get them to hash it out and talk. A couple of months later Brisk was playing Uproar. Haha  We were also the first event outside of London to Book Finnish Freeform DJs There was numerous times Mixmag mentioned us as the best monthly event in the Midlands When we put our 1st Birthday event on, out of nowhere HTID put on a free party at Air in Birmingham. This seemed to anger a lot of the internet (ush.net for one) and the backlash was so big Hixxy called me asking me to post something online saying I was alright about it.... Righteo! Theres some recordings on the events of me Mcing.. The last time I ever did it  (Most Total Bedlam & Bedlam sets can be found at www.mixcloud.com/BedlamRecords So talk us through how you started producing music? Okay well around 2002 Brian Topgroove invited me and Martin Space to his studio up in Hull, Me and Martin had spoken about doing some music ourselves so it was a great opportunity for us. We made a bootleg of Deep Incision by Helix... It had Human Traffic movie samples and It was terrible. Haha. After that I really caught the bug for it, but Bri had decided to focus all his efforts into improving himself in the studio and making tunes for his trance label so did not have time to do much more with us, but he did introduced me to Dave Devastate who had moved his studio into the same building as Bri up in Hull and I carried on from there with Dave. Obviously with me wanting to write Hardcore Dave was a great fit as he was already wel known for his huge hit releases on the Blatant Beats & Next Generation labels. I was up with Dave every month writing tracks and he would engineer and put my ideas together while teaching me bits and bobs along the way.  So how did Bedlam Records come about? We wrote A LOT of music over 2003 and 2004. and naturally I wanted to get it out, so with Daves direction and advise I put Bedlam Records together mid 2003.  How did you set it up?  Dave pointed me to the pressing plant and to the distributor, and I paid for artwork to be done for releases. It also helped that I worked in a record shop (Reflex Records) at the time, which was great to help promote it. What tunes came out and what artists involved etc! You can find the releases on discogs but our first 5 vinyls were by Me, Devastate, Riddler, Freestyle, Mc Domer, Invader, Adam J, Vinyl & Devotion You mentioned you worked in Reflex Records, Sheffield. How vital was that in helping you get contacts/networking within the Underground scene? It had its plus points but also negatives to go with it.  The good points were that I never missed music being released. Nothing got passed me.  I also got on great with distributors like Simon Underground at UM and Jay at Alpha Magic who always hooked me up with test presses and early promos before they were due to be released in the shops. I was making sure I was selling more music than any other shop, so this really kept the distributors happy who were pushing the releases to us.  I was the head buyer for most of the music there. and I did a bloody good job of it. Having upfront music was great for me. Along with my own label stuff, it was a time when people started booking DJs for having original music and not what everyone else could get and play. I also got to know everyone buying the records too, making some cool friends and acquaintances during that period. On the downside you had to work Saturdays and I was severely underpaid I obviously did not learn my lesson with this though as I ended up working at Hard To Find Records in Birmingham years later. Haha. Is there anything you really miss about those early days? Event wise I miss undiscovered events and not knowing everything there was to know about a rave until you actually got there. The unknown was quite exciting and turning up somewhere that was fully banging was always a nice surprise Music wise I miss the hunt.  Getting on a National Express coach every Saturday when I was 17yrs old, to an unknown city to find a record shop you saw on the back of a Vibealite or Slammin Vinyl flyer.  You`d turn up and find a gem like Selecta Disc Nottingham .Or get a big fat `L` landing at a marketplace in Chesterfield not selling anything at all. It was 50/50 most weekends but it was an amazing time for me. You didnt have discogs or Youtube etc so most music was new and unknown and travelling around was the only way to find the tunes you wanted. Especially if you liked a lot of genres like me. I did this every weekend for over a year when I first bought my decks, I look back on this really fondly as we had such a laugh travelling up and down the country Now days with social media you know everything about every event and Dj now and track now. Thats not where the excitment is now. And things you dont really miss?! Swings and round abouts though. I guess It is quite nice to have every tune ever at your finger tips now.  And I definitely do not miss having to carry a 40kg Record box anymore (My back wouldnt handle it either) Moving into recent years can you talk to us about your switch away from Hardcore & Harstyle and into Drum & Bass? With Hard Bass It got really stagnent when the UK Distributors got a hold of all the big releases as I said earlier so that frazzled out for me around 2005 I was still releasing and DJing hardcore up until 2010 but I wont lie, my love had fizzled out over time. The main reason for it fizzling out was  when a friend of mine helped me to discover a sound in Drum & Bass I never knew existed named `Neurofunk` It was all quite sudden really but I went to a legendary night supporting this music in London called `Renegade Hardware` Up until this, I thought the hardest and darkest D&B you could get was Dillinja. But on this night I discovered Noisia, Spor & Black Sun Empire. I walked out that club finding a brand new love and as it was such a new sound I had found I got the buzz I got back in the day from hunting for music, and I was now out to discover as many producers as possible making it. From then I found a lot of Drum & Bass that was a lot harder, It had a lot of Hardcore Techno elements too and it really appealed to me a lot. The artists I was really feeling back then were Current Value, Ewun, Evol Intent, Dylan & Tech Itch. This new found love taking me back hunting really got my disinterest for hardcore to grow and I just eventually stopped buying and listening to it. Looking back now my original loves were Freeform & Hardcore Techno. Neurofunk for me is the D&B Equivelent of Freeform while the Harder side of D&B is almost Hardcore techno.  What goes around comes around I guess. Tell me about your D&B project Drtbox?  Well aound 2007 I was still DJing D&B under `Lee UHF` and I was promoting a multi genre event called `RAW` (Sets can be found at www.mixcloud.com/Raw_Birmingham) We booked a world champion beatboxer in 2010 called Reeps One and he brought along a DJ with him. They did like a DJ vs Beatboxer battle set and it was amazing. It inspired me to try something similar.  My idea was to find a beatboxer, a Drummer & an MC and tour performing sets live. This is how Dirtbox was born, it was basically a band. But doing this got me some insane gigs around the world and really helped me to get my name out especially being a small fish in such a big pond as the D&B/Bass music scene. I ended up touring a lot. Playing across the pond in Australia, USA, China, All over Europe, Canada, Dubai & loads more. Its been an amazing experience doing that the past 10 years and very humbling. Since mid 2019 though, we stopped playing together regularly as its really hard getting 4 people together constantly to practice and tour abroad, so I am back to my Lee UHF alias doing sets alone... For now The name lives on though in the form of a clothing brand and a record label Ahh so are you still running labels now? Yes still in the thick of it all.   Dirtbox Recordings is the first D&B label of mine and is doing exceptionally well. (DirtboxRecordings.co.uk) We havent done any vinyls as yet due to the current climate with music but its getting alot of support from some really huge names in Drum & Bass such as Noisia, Benny V, Mollie Collins, Drumsound, Ray Keith, Koven, Aphrodyte, Freqax & Doc Scott to name a few I also run a Bass House label called `R U SRS?` (Pronounced "Are you serious") Its just a bit of fun for me as a project but its getting huge support at the moment from people like DJ EZ, Flava D, Korrupt FM, Marcus Nasty & Djs on Kiss FM & Rinse FM radio stations. ( RUSRS.co.uk ) And more recently, I have launched a brand new label, VTO Records. Which is co- run with a friend of mine. (A former freeform producer from the early 2000s now turned D&B producer) Dan Traced. This project is something for us to sign as much music as possible from around the world under the Neurofunk banner and I also wanted to seperate this sound from what I have planned on Dirtbox ( VTORecords.co.uk )  The first release lands in June and I am proper fucking excited for it. So what about writing your own music? I still do, but my output is nowhere near what I would love it to be.I released an EP on Dirtbox in October and I have one in June too. There is also a Neurofunk/Hard D&B album I released a few years ago that you can download for free ( www.soundcloud.com/DirtboxRecordings )   Drum & Bass is so fuckling hard to make, I was not fully able to write music on my own until 2009 and when I started attempting Drum & Bass in 2012 I had to learn a lot of new stuff.  It seriously is another level of skill to writing hardcore and it takes a lot longer. Im still way, way off anything I consider to be the highest qualty. Back in the day it wasnt unknown to just knock out a full hardcore track and start a new one in just one day, but for Drum & Bass It can take weeks or even months to get something finished  Being older also has its disadvantages as I have alot of new responsibilities now running my own businesses and spending time with my family so sat 12hrs a day making music is unfortunately not something I can do as often as I did when I was younger. How different in the scene in Birmingham compared to Yorkshire? Depends really. If I was to comment on the Drum & Bass or House music scene, which are the 2 biggest music genres in both cities. I would say they are very very similar. In Sheffield for example, just like Birmingham you have your older clubbers who like the classic nights, You get your rudeboys who like your `Jump Up D&B` and your house music posers. In both cities you also have huge Universities full of youngsters wanting all this music so I dont see much difference at all. Hardcore wise, Im not so sure about Yorkshire any more. Are there any regular hardcore nights happening? Obviously Uprising, Dizstruxshon and the like are one in a million. Very very different than any other Hardcore city or region in the world Birmingham had a really good Hardcore scene in 2004-2009 with a few regular nights and of course the mighty HTID, Uproar & Hardcore Heaven doing regular parties here. You dont see many of those now though in the whole country let alone Sheffield & Birmingham You've also played at events around the world, how do they differ from the UK in organisation & scale? Not many differences. You get your huge, huge festivals and your underground, more intimate clubs also every where you go. It does depend on the sound though Europe has huge festivals literally only playing Neurofunk D&B. far more big events there than the UK. One thing I do find abroad in some places is the level of excitment people have for you being there. Its unmatched due to the fact some places dont get to see alot of Djs from abroad often.  Australia for one. These guys are 1000s of miles away so they dont get many events where as with Hardcore & D&B in the UK we have been spoiled over the years. Between September & November in Birmingham you will find D&B parties constantly 2-3 times a week. All at capacity too. Drum & Bass has most certainly given me great opportunities travelling. I feel truly blessed to have touched every contenant on earth and to have played music on it. What do you have planned next? Any new music or events on the horizon? Of course, Im not happy unless Im busy, The labels will be releasing constantly through the year again like last (COVID or not) and the new label VTO Records launches in June. Events wise I do have some plans for something when things get back to normal and it will be outdoors but I cant say much more than that until have things set up after the Pandemic restrictions ease up. Gigs are not on the top of my list at the moment though as I have had my first child recently and I dont think I could bare to fly away from her for the night just yet. Any plans to make Hardcore again? Maybe even some Crossbreed?! Hardcore.. Ummm, I am not against it. But I have had nothing inspire me to do it. Crossbreed & D&B you will see a few releases by me this year 100%  Vinyl or CD/Digital? The age old debate!  You pro digital?   No Im just pro-music, and pro-innovation. I dont care what you play music on I just care that its great and inspires me.  People get so torn up about this debate its hilarious because  none of these people could tell you if a WAV or a vinyl is played in a club unless they saw inside the DJ box. I always say you're not exactly learning chess or are qualified to fly a rocket if you Dj on vinyl. I learnt a 3 year old once how to mix 2 records together. So people need to get off their high horse on that one. Makes no sense to me. Its all about how you make the music sound and how you get a crowd to pay attention. If thats beat juggling on turntables like a DMC champion or using a CDJ in a ridiculously profound way with effects and live edits. It doesnt matter both have the same outcome, so neither side are right when they debate whats best. I see benefits in both angles. Although I always wonder why DJs rock up with a boatload of MP3s and then expect punters to buy vinyl when they are not playing it themselves?! I dont think its expecting punters to buy vinyl If you are releasing music you are wanting punters to enjoy your music. No matter how they play it or pay for it. I think its great when producers put out a few options for us to choose from. But I dont know any out there spinning MP3s and forcing vinyl down our throats. 99% of music released is digital anyhow. Personally I use Mp3s for convenience and to take a bigger selection. Carrying vinyl is rough lol. But I still do vinyl sets as it just keeps it interesting for me and I have a great collection so I want it to be put to good use  I think the main flaw of download music now is the fact its very "throw away" theres tons of it out as its easier to release, so you do get a lot of stale poorly made music. When you only had vinyl to release it on for DJs, it was expensive so you were a lot more choosy about the releases you paid to press up because the financial investment to pressing them up was a lot greater. It is harder now to promote music though masses of releases every day.. Anyone can set up a digital label nowadays but the big difference in a quality one is understanding the quality control. promoting it properly and promo'ing the music to the right DJs. I look at each release I put out by deciding firstly would I release it on vinyl given the chance and second am I going to spend money promoting it? Ok then! The Mix!! Can you talk us through? Why did you chose these tracks?! Okay so I have put together a selection of Neurofunk & Hard edged Drum & Bass for you. I thought since alot of people would be seeing and hearing this who were possibly familiar with my hardcore I would do something to help them get familiar with what I do now. Theres a few older bits thrown in but also alot of promo material from my label so you are getting some exclusives right here fella. Thanks! Thank you kev. Its been great And finally!! Any Shouts?!!? Of course. Obviously a huge thanks to yourself for having me onboard letting me talk some shit, Its been really nice to reminisce. Also, everyone from my journey in the late 90s to the present day. If you Dj'd with me, for me or even booked me. Thank you. Lots of people have given me chances also along the way to, and I am truly grateful. What people don't know, is that behind events, labels and DJ tours, there are a lot of colleagues behind the scenes that are intricate in making things work, Diaries, Drivers, Artwork, Distrubutors,  Sound Engineers, Promoters. The list is endless but I've never forgot anyone and Im forever grateful even if we have not spoken in a long time. And finally a big shout out to Lucy, my missus who literally looked after our  daughter all day without my help to do this interview and mix haha. She`ll deserves a medal for what she does x   Kev Gees Darkstep Classics Part 1 2005-2010 1 - Audio - Delusional 2 - Current Value & Donny - Nightmare Man 3 - Dylan & Bkey - Slave To Life (Limewax Remix) 4 - Audio - Warehouse VIP 5 - Current Value - Fear Machines (Remix) 6 - Nanotek - Fresh Hell 7 - Limewax - Strike From The Land 8 - Mystification - Computers 9 - Current Value - You Cant Play God 10 - Limewax - Pain 11 - SPL - Denied 12 - Raiden - RM Bleeps 13 - Current Value - Addict 14 - Proket - Norilsk 15 - The Panacea - Burning Like Fire (The Sect Remix) 16 - Evol Intent Feat Blip - Flipside 17 - Evol Intent - Middle Of The Night 18 - Current Value - Clear Blue Water   Lee UHFs Tracklist:- 1/ ID- Traced- Forthcoming (VTO Records) 2/ Agressor Bunx- The Offering VIP (Eatbrain) 3/ Phace & Subtension- For Good (Neosignal) 4/ Phace- Caged (Vision) 5/ Phace- Spray (Vision) 6/ Traced- The System (Dirtbox Recordings) 7/ Lee UHF- Epic Ping Pong (Dirtbox Recordings) 8/ Lee UHF- That Wiggy Thing (Dirtbox Recordings) 9/ Full Kontakt & Deejay Delta (Dirtbox Recordings) 10/ Lee UHF & Rogue- The Music (Traced Remix) Forthcoming (Dirtbox Recordings) 11/ Burr Oak- Teleporter (Blackout) 12/ Jade & MNDSCP- Dangerous (Korsakov) 13/ Killbox- Cypher (Ram) 14/ Resurgence & O`Den- Chicago Style- Forthcoming (Dirtbox Recordings) 15/ 3rdknd- Pingers (Neonlight Remix) (Barcode) 16/ Gancher & Ruin- The Sect (No Music Allowed) 17/ Donny & Katharsys- Cause & Effect (Barcode) 18/ Mefjus- Suicide Bassline (Panacea VIP- Lee UHF Edit) (Unreleased) 19/ Jade- This Is Neurofunk (Unreleased)  

Midnite City, Tigertailz singer Rob Wylde joins Non-Stop Rock Talk to discuss Midnite City's upcoming release on new label Roulette Records, the current status on Tigertailz and his love for Danger Danger. Sit back, stay safe and enjoy!

Jack Tennis ist formal der professionellste unserer bisherigen Gäste. Er hat einen mit 1,3 abgeschlossenen Magister in Musikwissenschaften zum Thema "Der Plattenspieler als Musikinstrument". Adornos Musiksoziologie war halt nichts für ihn. Später hat er, zusammen mit unserem Gast aus Folge 11, DJ Supermarkt, und dem gemeinsamen Freund Shir Khan den Blog "Berlin Battery" geschrieben und auch oft gemeinsam aufgelegt. Die Reise geht durch mehr als 25 Jahre Berliner und internationaler Off- und Clubkultur mit Jack Tennis: Viel Spaß! Social Media: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Jack-Tennis-252672528083954 SoundCloud: https://www.facebook.com/Jack-Tennis-252672528083954 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/_jacktennis_/ BandCamp: https://jacktennis.bandcamp.com Jacks Band: https://soundcloud.com/hotlane Jacks Label: Gomma Records: https://www.facebook.com/GommaRecords Jacks 5 Platten für die Insel: The Cure "Boys Don't Cry" (1980, Fiction Records) Stardust "Music Sounds Better With You" (1998, Roulette Records) ... Links: Insel der Jugend: https://www.inselberlin.de Die Musiksoziologie Adornos: https://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-45142633.html Rote Liebe, Essen: ww.ruhr-clubbing.com/video-club-rote-liebe-die-90er-house-instanz-in-essen/615 ZZ Top: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZZ_Top 1210er Technics: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technics_SL-1200 Galerie Berlintokyo: https://www.tagesspiegel.de/kultur/die-galerie-berlintokyo-als-prototyp-der-berliner-subkultur-gegenwart-war-gestern/8543074.html (Chilly Gonzales): https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilly_Gonzales Peaches: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peaches Feist: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Feist Jim Avignon: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Avignon Rafael Horzon: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rafael_Horzon Blumfeld: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blumfeld DJ Supermarkt (Markus Liesenfeld): https://andendecks.de/folgen-11-20/s01e11-dj-supermarkt/ Jeans Team: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeans_Team Im Eimer, Berlin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKCxiEPi3nk Mia "Alles Neu" (teilweise gedreht Im Eimer): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ec69nT3--WE Club For Chunk (eigtl Club Forschung): https://www.indiepedia.de/index.php?title=Club_Forschung Honey Suckle Company: https://www.honey-suckle.com PS1, New York: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MoMA_PS1 Christiane Rosiger: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christiane_Rösinger Tobi Neumann: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobi_Neumann Max Martin: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Martin_(Musiker) Mit Vergnügen feat. Jack Tennis: https://mitvergnuegen.com/musikmittwoch/musikmittwoch-mit-jack-tennis/ Stevie Wonder "Happy Birthday": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcVZfJO01NI Sugarhill Gang "Rapper's Delight": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKTUAESacQM Ernst Mosch: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Mosch Polonäse Blankenese: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdzPfZIuw_g Gebrüder Blattschuss "Kreuzberger Nächte Sind Lang": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQYQ9nhWw7Q Roberto Blanko "Ein Bisschen Spaß Muss Sein": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwJfAlK_g-A Steve Aoki: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Aoki Flux FM: https://www.fluxfm.de Jack Johnson: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Johnson_(Musiker) Angus & Julia Stone: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angus_%26_Julia_Stone Dua Lipa: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dua_Lipa Meine Sauna (Dirk): http://www.saunabad-berlin.de Megan Thee Stallion: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megan_Thee_Stallion Run The Jewels: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Run_the_Jewels Childish Gambino: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childish_Gambino Anderson Paak: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anderson_Paak Satin Jackets "Think About It" (Jack Tennis 80s Du Remix)": https://soundcloud.com/djsupermarkt/satin-jackets-think-about-it-jack-tennis-80s-dub-remix Village People "YMCA": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dks2NJAVhUs Sister Sledge "We Ware Family": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyGY2NfYpeE Rio, Scala …: https://www.theclubmap.com/closed-clubs/ Blog von Jack Tennis, DJ Supermarkt und Shir Khan: https://berlinbattery.blogspot.com Prince Osaka Rehearsal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qp2R5A7tc9A Prince "Cream" at Webster Hall: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r967lcA_rR8 Sonic Youth: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_Youth Happy Mondays: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pills_%27n%27_Thrills_and_Bellyaches Jack Tennis @ FM4: https://fm4.orf.at/radio/stories/3006795/ Moodyman: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moodymann #andendecks #djpodcast #jacktennis #thedirkness #djthomashaak #podcast #djlife #berlin

Episode ninety-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” by The Tokens, and at a seventy-year-long story of powerful people repeatedly ripping off less powerful people, then themselves being ripped off in turn by more powerful people, and at how racism meant that a song that earned fifteen million dollars for other people paid its composer ten shillings. 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 “Tossin’ and Turnin'” by Bobby Lewis. 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…)

Episode ninety-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" by The Tokens, and at a seventy-year-long story of powerful people repeatedly ripping off less powerful people, then themselves being ripped off in turn by more powerful people, and at how racism meant that a song that earned fifteen million dollars for other people paid its composer ten shillings. 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 "Tossin' and Turnin'" by Bobby Lewis.   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 “Picture in Your Wallet” when I mean “Picture in My Wallet”.   Resources   As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.    Rian Malan's 2000 article on Solomon Linda and The Lion Sleeps Tonight can be found here.   This 2019 article brings the story of the legal disputes up to date.   The information about isicathamiya comes from Nightsong: Performance, Power and Practice in South Africa by Veit Erlmann.   This collection of early isicathamiya and Mbube music includes several tracks by the Evening Birds.   Information on Pete Seeger and the Weavers primarily comes from Pete Seeger vs. The Un-Americans: A Tale of the Blacklist by Edward Renehan.   This collection has everything the Weavers recorded before their first split.   This is the record of one of the legal actions taken during Weiss' dispute with Folkways in the late eighties and early nineties.   Information on the Tokens came from This is My Story.   There are, surprisingly, no budget compilations of the Tokens' music, but this best-of has everything you need.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?   Transcript   Today we're going to look at a song that became a worldwide hit in multiple versions, and which I can guarantee everyone listening to this podcast has heard many times. A song that has been recorded by REM, that featured in a Disney musical, and which can be traced back from a white doo-wop group through a group of Communist folk singers to a man who was exploited by racist South African society -- a man who invented an entire genre of music, which got named after his most famous song, but who never saw any of the millions that his song earned for others, and died in poverty. We're going to look at the story of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight":   [Excerpt: The Tokens, "The Lion Sleeps Tonight"]   The story of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" is a story that goes back to 1939, when a singer called Solomon Linda was performing in South Africa. Linda was a Zulu, and thus in the racist regime of South Africa was largely without rights. Linda was, in the thirties and forties, probably the single most important performer in South Africa. He was the leader of a vocal group called the Evening Birds, who were the most popular isicathamiya group in South Africa.   Isicathamiya -- and I hope I'm pronouncing that right -- was a form of music which has a lot of parallels to some of the American vocal group music we've looked at, largely because it comes from some of the same roots. I don't pretend to be an expert on the music by any means -- I'll put a link on the podcast webpage to a book which has far more information about this -- but as best I understand it, it's a music created when rural black people were forcibly displaced in the late nineteenth century and forced to find work in the city.   Those people combined elements of traditional Zulu music with two more Western elements. The first was the religious music that they heard from Church missions, and the second was American minstrel songs, heard from troupes of minstrels that toured the country, especially a black performer named Orpheus McAdoo, who led a troupe of minstrel and gospel performers who toured South Africa a lot in the late nineteenth century.   This new style of music was usually performed a capella, though sometimes there might be a single instrument added, and it gained a relatively formalised structure -- it would almost always have very specific parts based on European choral music, with parts for a tenor, a soprano, an alto, and a bass, in strict four-part harmony -- though the soprano and alto parts would be sung in falsetto by men. It would usually be based around the same I, IV, and V chords that most Western popular music was based on, and the Zulu language would often be distorted to fit Western metres, though the music was still more freeform than most of the Western music of the time.   This music started to be recorded in around 1930, and you can get an idea of the stylistic range from two examples. Here's "Umteto we Land Act" by Caluza's Double Quartet:   [Excerpt, "Umteto We Land Act", Caluza's Double Quartet"]   While here's the Bantu Glee Singers, singing "Jim Takata Kanjani":   [Excerpt: The Bantu Glee Singers, "Jim Takata Kanjani"]   Solomon Linda's group, the Evening Birds, sang in this style, but incorporated a number of innovations. One was that they dressed differently -- they wore matching striped suits, rather than the baggy trousers that the older groups wore -- but also, they had extra bass singers. Up until this point, there would be four singers or multiples of four, with one singer singing each part. The Evening Birds, at Linda's instigation, had a much thicker bass part, and in some ways prefigured the sound of doo-wop that would take over in America twenty years later.   Their music was often political -- while the South African regime was horribly oppressive in the thirties, it wasn't as oppressive as it later became, and a certain amount of criticism of the government was allowed in ways it wouldn't be in future decades.   At the time, the main way in which this music would be performed was at contests with several groups, most of whom would be performing the same repertoire. An audience member would offer to pay one of the groups a few pennies to start singing -- and then another audience member, when they got bored with the first group, would offer that group some more money to stop singing, before someone else offered another group some money. The Evening Birds quickly became the centre of this scene, and between 1933 and 1948, when they split, they were the most popular group around. As with many of the doo-wop groups they so resembled, they had a revolving lineup with members coming and going, and joining other groups like the Crocodiles and the Dundee Wandering Singers. There was even a second group called the Evening Birds, with a singer who sounded like Linda, and who had a long-running feud with Linda's group.   But it wasn't this popularity that got the Evening Birds recorded. It was because Solomon Linda got a day job packing records for Gallo Records, the only record label in South Africa, which owned the only recording studio in sub-Saharan Africa. While he was working in their factory, packing records, he managed to get the group signed to make some records themselves. In the group's second session, they recorded a song that Linda had written, called "Mbube", which means "lion", and was about hunting the lions that would feed on his family's cattle when he was growing up:   [Excerpt: Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds, "Mbube"]   There's some dispute as to whether Linda wrote the whole song, or whether it's based on a traditional Zulu song -- I tend to fall on the side of Linda having written the whole thing, because very often when people say something is based on a traditional song, what they actually mean is "I don't believe that an uneducated or black person can have written a whole song".   But whatever the circumstances of most of the composition, one thing is definitely known – Linda was the one who came up with this falsetto melody:   [Excerpt: Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds, "Mbube"]   The song became massively, massively popular -- so popular that eventually the master copy of the record disintegrated, as they'd pressed so many copies from it. It gave its name to a whole genre of music -- in the same way that late fifties American vocal groups are doo-wop groups, South African groups like Ladysmith Black Mambazo are, more than eighty years later, still known as "mbube groups".   Linda and the Evening Birds would make many more records, like "Anodu Gonda":   [Excerpt: Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds, "Anodu Gonda"]   But it was "Mbube" that was their biggest hit. It sold a hundred thousand copies on Gallo Records -- and earned Solomon Linda, its writer and lead singer, ten shillings. The South African government at the time estimated that a black family could survive on thirty-seven shillings and sixpence a week. So for writing the most famous melody ever to come out of Africa, Linda got a quarter of a week's poverty-level wages. When Linda died in 1962, he had a hundred rand -- equivalent then to fifty British pounds -- in his bank account. He was buried in an unmarked grave.   And, a little over a year before his death, his song had become an international number one hit record. To see why, we have to go back to 1952, and a folk group called the Weavers.   Pete Seeger, the most important member of the Weavers, is a figure who is hugely important in the history of the folk music rebirth of the 1960s. Like most of the white folk singers of the period, he had an incredibly privileged background -- he had attended Harvard as a classmate of John F Kennedy -- but he also had very strong socialist principles. He had been friends with both Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly in the forties, and he dedicated his later career to the same kind of left-wing activism that Guthrie had taken part in.    Indeed, Guthrie and Seeger had both been members of the Almanac Singers, a folk group of the forties who had been explicitly pro-Communist. They'd been pacifists up until the Soviet entry into the Second World War, at which point they had immediately turned round and become the biggest cheerleaders of the war:   [Excerpt: The Almanac Singers, "Round and Round Hitler's Grave"]   The Almanac Singers had a revolving door membership, including everyone from Burl Ives to Cisco Houston at one point or another, but the core of the group had been Seeger and Lee Hays, and those two had eventually formed another group, more or less as a continuation of the Almanac Singers, but with a less explicitly political agenda -- they would perform Guthrie and Lead Belly songs, and songs they wrote themselves, but not be tied to performing music that fit the ideological line of the Communist Party.   The Weavers immediately had far more commercial success than the Almanac Singers ever had, and recorded such hits as their version of Lead Belly's "Goodnight Irene", with orchestration by Gordon Jenkins:   [Excerpt: The Weavers, "Goodnight Irene"]   And one of the hits they recorded was a version of "Mbube", which they titled "Wimoweh".   Alan Lomax, the folk song collector, had discovered somewhere a big stack of African records, which were about to be thrown out, and he thought to himself that those would be exactly the kind of thing that Pete Seeger might want, and gave them to him. Seeger loved the recording of "Mbube", but neither man had any clear idea of what the song was or where it came from. Seeger couldn't make out the lyrics -- he thought Linda was singing something like "Wimoweh", and he created a new arrangement of the song, taking Linda's melody from the end of the song and singing it repeatedly throughout:   [Excerpt: The Weavers, "Wimoweh"]   At the time, the Weavers were signed as songwriters to Folkways, a company that was set up to promote folk music, but was part of a much bigger conglomerate, The Richmond Organisation. When they were informed that the Weavers were going to record "Wimoweh", Folkways contacted the South African record company and were informed that "Mbube" was a traditional folk song. So Folkways copyrighted "Mbube", as "Wimoweh", in the name Paul Campbell -- a collective pseudonym that the Weavers used for their arrangements of traditional songs.   Shortly after this, Gallo realised their mistake and tried to copyright "Mbube" themselves in the USA, under Solomon Linda's name, only to be told that Folkways already had the copyright. Now, in the 1950s the USA was not yet a signatory to the Berne Convention, the international agreement on copyright laws, and so it made no difference that in South Africa the song had been copyrighted under Linda's name -- in the USA it was owned by Folkways, because they had registered it first.   But Folkways wanted the rights for other countries, too, and so they came to an agreement with Gallo that would be to Gallo's immense disadvantage. Because they agreed that they would pay Gallo a modest one-off fee, and "let" Gallo have the rights to the song in a few territories in Africa, and in return Folkways would get the copyright everywhere else. Gallo agreed, and so "Mbube" by Solomon Linda and "Wimoweh" by Paul Campbell became separate copyrights -- Gallo had, without realising it, given up their legal rights to the song throughout the world.   "Wimoweh" by the Weavers went to number six on the charts, but then Senator McCarthy stepped in. Both Pete Seeger and Lee Hays had been named as past Communist Party members, and were called before the House Unamerican Activities Committee to testify. Hays stood on his fifth amendment rights, refusing to testify against himself, but Seeger took the riskier option of simply refusing on first amendment grounds. He said, quite rightly, that his political activities, voting history, and party membership were nobody's business except his, and he wasn't going to testify about them in front of Congress. He spent much of the next decade with the threat of prison hanging over his head.   As a result, the Weavers were blacklisted from radio and TV, as was Seeger as a solo artist. "Wimoweh" dropped off the charts, and the group's recording catalogue was deleted. The group split up, though they did get back together again a few years later, and managed to have a hit live album of a concert they performed at Carnegie Hall in 1955, which also included "Wimoweh":   [Excerpt: The Weavers, "Wimoweh (live at Carnegie Hall)"]   Seeger left the group permanently a couple of years after that, when they did a commercial for tobacco -- the group were still blacklisted from the radio and TV, and saw it as an opportunity to get some exposure, but Seeger didn't approve of tobacco or advertising, and quit the group because of it -- though because he'd made a commitment to the group, he did appear on the commercial, not wanting to break his word. At his suggestion, he was replaced by Erik Darling, from another folk group, The Tarriers. Darling was an Ayn Rand fan and a libertarian, so presumably didn't have the same attitudes towards advertising.   As you might have gathered from this, Seeger was a man of strong principles, and so you might be surprised that he would take credit for someone else's song. As it turned out, he didn't. When he discovered that Solomon Linda had written the song, that it wasn't just a traditional song, he insisted that all future money he would have made from it go to Linda, and sent Linda a cheque for a thousand dollars for the money he'd already earned. But Seeger was someone who didn't care much about money at all -- he donated the vast majority of his money to worthy causes, and lived frugally, and he assumed that the people he was working with would behave honourably and keep to agreements, and didn't bother checking on them. They didn't, and Linda saw nothing from them.   Over the years after 1952, "Wimoweh" became something of a standard in America, with successful versions like the one by Yma Sumac:   [Excerpt: Yma Sumac, "Wimoweh"]   And in the early sixties it was in the repertoire of almost every folk group, being recorded by groups like the Kingston Trio, who had taken the Weavers' place as the most popular folk group in the country.   And then the Tokens entered the picture. We've mentioned the Tokens before, in the episode on "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?" -- they were the group, also known as the Linc-Tones, that was led by Carole King's friend Neil Sedaka, and who'd recorded "While I Dream" with Sedaka on lead vocals:   [Excerpt: Neil Sedaka and the Tokens, "While I Dream"]   After recording that, one member of the group had gone off to college, and been replaced by the falsetto singer Jay Siegel. But then the group had split up, and Sedaka had gone on to a very successful career as a solo performer and a songwriter.  But Siegel and one of the other group members, Hank Medress, had carried on performing together, and had formed a new group, Darrell and the Oxfords, with two other singers. That group had made a couple of records for Roulette Records, one of which, "Picture in Your Wallet", was a local hit:   [Excerpt: Darrell and the Oxfords, "Picture in Your Wallet"]   But that group had also split up. So the duo invited yet another pair of singers to join them -- Mitch Margo, who was around their age, in his late teens, and his twelve-year-old brother Phil. The group reverted to their old name of The Tokens, and recorded a song called "Tonight I Fell In Love", which they leased to a small label called Warwick Records:   [Excerpt: The Tokens, "Tonight I Fell In Love"]   Warwick Records sat on the track for six months before releasing it. When they did, in 1961, it went to number fifteen on the charts. But by then, the group had signed to RCA Records, and were now working with Hugo and Luigi, the production duo who you might remember from the episode on "Shout".   The group put out a couple of flop singles on RCA, including a remake of the Moonglows' "Sincerely":   [Excerpt: The Tokens, "Sincerely"]   But after those two singles flopped, the group made the record that would define them for the rest of their lives. The Tokens had been performing "Wimoweh" in their stage act, and they played it for Hugo and Luigi, who thought there was something there, but they didn't think it would be commercial as it was. They decided to get a professional writer in to fix the song up, and called in George David Weiss, a writer with whom they'd worked before. The three of them had previously co-written "Can't Help Falling In Love" for Elvis Presley, basing it on a traditional melody, which is what they thought they were doing here:   [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Can't Help Falling In Love"]   Weiss took the song home and reworked it. Weiss decided to find out what the original lyrics had been about, and apparently asked the South African consulate, who told him that it was about lions, so he came up with new lyrics -- "in the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight".   Hugo and Luigi came up with an arrangement for Weiss' new version of the song, and brought in an opera singer named Anita Darian to replicate the part that Yma Sumac had sung on her version. The song was recorded, and released on the B-side of the Tokens' third flop in a row:   [Excerpt: The Tokens, "The Lion Sleeps Tonight"]   As it was believed by everyone involved that the song was a traditional one, the new song was copyrighted in the names of Weiss, Hugo, and Luigi. And as it was released as a B-side of a flop single, nobody cared at first.   But then a DJ flipped the record and started playing the B-side, and suddenly the song was a hit. Indeed, it went to number one. And it didn't just go to number one, it became a standard, recorded over the years by everyone from Brian Eno to Billy Joel, The New Christy Minstrels to They Might Be Giants.   Obviously, the publishers of "Wimoweh", who knew that the song wasn't a traditional piece at all, wanted to get their share of the money. However, the owner of the publishing company was also a good friend of Weiss -- and Weiss was someone who had a lot of influence in the industry, and who nobody wanted to upset, and so they came to a very amicable agreement. The three credited songwriters would stay credited as the songwriters and keep all the songwriting money -- after all, Pete Seeger didn't want it, and the publishers were only under a moral obligation to Solomon Linda, not a legal one -- but the Richmond Organisation would get the publishing money.   Everyone seemed to be satisfied with the arrangement, and Solomon Linda's song went on earning a lot of money for a lot of white men he never met.   The Tokens tried to follow up with a version of an actual African folk song, "Bwa Nina", but that wasn't a hit, and nor was a version of "La Bamba". While they continued their career for decades, the only hit they had as performers was in 1973, by which point Hank Medress had left and the other three had changed their name to Cross Country and had a hit with a remake of "In the Midnight Hour":   [Excerpt: Cross Country, "The Midnight Hour"]   I say that was the only hit they had as performers, because they went into record production themselves. There they were far more successful, and as a group they produced records like the Chiffons' "He's So Fine", making them the first vocal group to produce a hit for another vocal group:   [Excerpt: The Chiffons, "He's So Fine"]   That song would, of course, generate its own famous authorial dispute case in later years. After Hank Medress left the group, he worked as a producer on his own, producing hits for Tony Orlando and Dawn, and also producing one of the later hit versions of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight", Robert John's version, which made number three in 1972:   [Excerpt: Robert John, "The Lion Sleeps Tonight"]   Today there are two touring versions of the Tokens, one led by Jay Siegel and one by Phil Margo.   But while in 1961 the Richmond Organisation, Hugo and Luigi, and George Weiss all seemed happy with their agreement, things started to go wrong in 1989.   American copyright law has had several changes over the years, and nothing of what I'm saying applies now, but for songs written before 1978 and the first of the Mickey Mouse copyright extensions, the rule used to be that a song would be in copyright for twenty-eight years. The writer could then renew it for a second twenty-eight-year term. (The rule is now that songs published in America remain in copyright until seventy years after the writer's death).    And it's specifically the *writer* who could renew it for that second term, not the publishers. George Weiss filed notice that he was going to renew the copyright when the twenty-eight-year term expired, and that he wasn't going to let the Richmond Organisation publish the song.   As soon as the Richmond Organisation heard about this, they took Weiss to court, saying that he couldn't take the publishing rights away from them, because the song was based on "Wimoweh", which they owned. Weiss argued that if the song was based on "Wimoweh", the copyright should have reflected that for the twenty-eight years that the Richmond Organisation owned it. They'd signed papers agreeing that Weiss and Hugo and Luigi were the writers, and if they'd had a problem with that they should have said so back in 1961.   The courts sided with Weiss, but they did say that the Richmond Organisation might have had a bit of a point about the song's similarity to "Wimoweh", so they had to pay a small amount of money to Solomon Linda's family.   And the American writers getting the song back coincided with two big boosts in the income from the song. First, R.E.M recorded a song called "The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite", on their album Automatic For the People (a record we will definitely be talking about in 2026, assuming I'm still around and able to do the podcast by then). The album was one of the biggest records of the decade, and on the song, Michael Stipe sang a fragment of Solomon Linda's melody:   [Excerpt: R.E.M. "The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite"]   The owners of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" took legal action about that, and got themselves credited as co-writers of R.E.M.'s song, and the group also had to record "The Lion Sleeps Tonight", releasing it as a B-side to the hit single version of "Sidewinder":   [Excerpt: R.E.M. "The Lion Sleeps Tonight"]   Even better from their point of view, the song was featured in the Disney film The Lion King, which on its release in 1994 became the second highest-grossing film of all time and the most successful animated film ever, and in its Broadway adaptation, which became the most successful Broadway show of all time.   And in 2000, Rian Malan, a South African journalist based in America, who mostly dedicated his work to expunging his ancestral guilt -- he's a relative of Daniel Malan, the South African dictator who instituted the apartheid system, and of Magnus Malan, one of the more monstrous ministers in the regime in its last days of the eighties and early nineties -- found out that while Solomon Linda's family had been getting some money, it amounted at most to a couple of thousand dollars a year, shared between Linda's daughters. At the same time, Malan estimated that over the years the song had generated something in the region of fifteen million dollars for its American copyright owners.   Malan published an article about this, and just before that, the daughters got a minor windfall -- Pete Seeger noticed a six thousand dollar payment, which came to him when a commercial used "Wimoweh", rather than "The Lion Sleeps Tonight". He realised that he'd been receiving the royalties for "Wimoweh" all along, even though he'd asked that they be sent to Linda, so he totalled up how much he'd earned from the song over the years, which came to twelve thousand dollars, and he sent a cheque for that amount to Linda's daughters.   Those daughters were living in such poverty that in 2001, one of the four died of AIDS -- a disease which would have been completely treatable if she'd been able to afford the anti-retroviral medication to treat it.   The surviving sisters were told that the copyright in "Mbube" should have reverted to them in the eighties, and that they had a very good case under South African law to get a proper share of the rights to both "Wimoweh" and "The Lion Sleeps Tonight".   They just needed to find someone in South Africa that they could sue. Abilene Music, the current owners of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight", were based in the USA and had no assets in South Africa. Suing them would be pointless. But they could sue someone else:   [Excerpt: Timon and Pumbaa, "The Lion Sleeps Tonight"]   Disney had assets in South Africa. Lots of them. And they'd used Solomon Linda's song in their film, which under South African law would be copyright infringement. It would even be possible, if the case went really badly for Disney, that Linda's family could get total ownership of all Disney assets in South Africa.   So in 2006, Disney came to an out of court settlement with Linda's family, and they appear to have pressured Abilene Music to do the same thing. Under South African law, "Mbube" would go out of copyright by 2012, but it was agreed that Linda's daughters would receive royalties on "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" until 2017, even after the South African copyright had expired, and they would get a lump sum from Disney. The money they were owed would be paid into a trust.   After 2017, they would still get money from "Wimoweh", but not from "The Lion Sleeps Tonight", whose rights would revert fully to its American owners.   Unfortunately, most of the money they got seems to have gone on legal bills. The three surviving sisters each received, in total, about eighty-three thousand dollars over the ten-year course of the agreement after those bills, which is much, much, more than they were getting before, but only a fraction of what the song would have earned them if they'd been paid properly.   In 2017, the year the agreement expired, Disney announced they were making a photorealistic CGI remake of The Lion King. That, too, featured "The Lion Sleeps Tonight", and that, too, became the most successful animated film of all time. Under American copyright law, "Wimoweh" will remain in copyright until 2047, unless further changes are made to the law. Solomon Linda's family will continue to receive royalties on that song. "The Lion Sleeps Tonight", the much more successful song, will remain in copyright until 2057, and the money from that will mostly go to Claire Weiss-Creatore, who was George Weiss' third wife, and who after he died in 2010 became the third wife of Luigi Creatore, of Hugo and Luigi, who died himself in 2015. Solomon Linda's daughters won't see a penny of it.   According to George Weiss' obituary in the Guardian, he "was a familiar figure at congressional hearings into copyright reform and music piracy, testifying as to the vital importance of intellectual property protection for composers".  

Episode ninety-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” by The Tokens, and at a seventy-year-long story of powerful people repeatedly ripping off less powerful people, then themselves being ripped off in turn by more powerful people, and at how racism meant that a song that earned fifteen million dollars for other people paid its composer ten shillings. 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 “Tossin’ and Turnin'” by Bobby Lewis.   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 “Picture in Your Wallet” when I mean “Picture in My Wallet”.   Resources   As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.    Rian Malan’s 2000 article on Solomon Linda and The Lion Sleeps Tonight can be found here.   This 2019 article brings the story of the legal disputes up to date.   The information about isicathamiya comes from Nightsong: Performance, Power and Practice in South Africa by Veit Erlmann.   This collection of early isicathamiya and Mbube music includes several tracks by the Evening Birds.   Information on Pete Seeger and the Weavers primarily comes from Pete Seeger vs. The Un-Americans: A Tale of the Blacklist by Edward Renehan.   This collection has everything the Weavers recorded before their first split.   This is the record of one of the legal actions taken during Weiss’ dispute with Folkways in the late eighties and early nineties.   Information on the Tokens came from This is My Story.   There are, surprisingly, no budget compilations of the Tokens’ music, but this best-of has everything you need.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?   Transcript   Today we’re going to look at a song that became a worldwide hit in multiple versions, and which I can guarantee everyone listening to this podcast has heard many times. A song that has been recorded by REM, that featured in a Disney musical, and which can be traced back from a white doo-wop group through a group of Communist folk singers to a man who was exploited by racist South African society — a man who invented an entire genre of music, which got named after his most famous song, but who never saw any of the millions that his song earned for others, and died in poverty. We’re going to look at the story of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”:   [Excerpt: The Tokens, “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”]   The story of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” is a story that goes back to 1939, when a singer called Solomon Linda was performing in South Africa. Linda was a Zulu, and thus in the racist regime of South Africa was largely without rights. Linda was, in the thirties and forties, probably the single most important performer in South Africa. He was the leader of a vocal group called the Evening Birds, who were the most popular isicathamiya group in South Africa.   Isicathamiya — and I hope I’m pronouncing that right — was a form of music which has a lot of parallels to some of the American vocal group music we’ve looked at, largely because it comes from some of the same roots. I don’t pretend to be an expert on the music by any means — I’ll put a link on the podcast webpage to a book which has far more information about this — but as best I understand it, it’s a music created when rural black people were forcibly displaced in the late nineteenth century and forced to find work in the city.   Those people combined elements of traditional Zulu music with two more Western elements. The first was the religious music that they heard from Church missions, and the second was American minstrel songs, heard from troupes of minstrels that toured the country, especially a black performer named Orpheus McAdoo, who led a troupe of minstrel and gospel performers who toured South Africa a lot in the late nineteenth century.   This new style of music was usually performed a capella, though sometimes there might be a single instrument added, and it gained a relatively formalised structure — it would almost always have very specific parts based on European choral music, with parts for a tenor, a soprano, an alto, and a bass, in strict four-part harmony — though the soprano and alto parts would be sung in falsetto by men. It would usually be based around the same I, IV, and V chords that most Western popular music was based on, and the Zulu language would often be distorted to fit Western metres, though the music was still more freeform than most of the Western music of the time.   This music started to be recorded in around 1930, and you can get an idea of the stylistic range from two examples. Here’s “Umteto we Land Act” by Caluza’s Double Quartet:   [Excerpt, “Umteto We Land Act”, Caluza’s Double Quartet”]   While here’s the Bantu Glee Singers, singing “Jim Takata Kanjani”:   [Excerpt: The Bantu Glee Singers, “Jim Takata Kanjani”]   Solomon Linda’s group, the Evening Birds, sang in this style, but incorporated a number of innovations. One was that they dressed differently — they wore matching striped suits, rather than the baggy trousers that the older groups wore — but also, they had extra bass singers. Up until this point, there would be four singers or multiples of four, with one singer singing each part. The Evening Birds, at Linda’s instigation, had a much thicker bass part, and in some ways prefigured the sound of doo-wop that would take over in America twenty years later.   Their music was often political — while the South African regime was horribly oppressive in the thirties, it wasn’t as oppressive as it later became, and a certain amount of criticism of the government was allowed in ways it wouldn’t be in future decades.   At the time, the main way in which this music would be performed was at contests with several groups, most of whom would be performing the same repertoire. An audience member would offer to pay one of the groups a few pennies to start singing — and then another audience member, when they got bored with the first group, would offer that group some more money to stop singing, before someone else offered another group some money. The Evening Birds quickly became the centre of this scene, and between 1933 and 1948, when they split, they were the most popular group around. As with many of the doo-wop groups they so resembled, they had a revolving lineup with members coming and going, and joining other groups like the Crocodiles and the Dundee Wandering Singers. There was even a second group called the Evening Birds, with a singer who sounded like Linda, and who had a long-running feud with Linda’s group.   But it wasn’t this popularity that got the Evening Birds recorded. It was because Solomon Linda got a day job packing records for Gallo Records, the only record label in South Africa, which owned the only recording studio in sub-Saharan Africa. While he was working in their factory, packing records, he managed to get the group signed to make some records themselves. In the group’s second session, they recorded a song that Linda had written, called “Mbube”, which means “lion”, and was about hunting the lions that would feed on his family’s cattle when he was growing up:   [Excerpt: Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds, “Mbube”]   There’s some dispute as to whether Linda wrote the whole song, or whether it’s based on a traditional Zulu song — I tend to fall on the side of Linda having written the whole thing, because very often when people say something is based on a traditional song, what they actually mean is “I don’t believe that an uneducated or black person can have written a whole song”.   But whatever the circumstances of most of the composition, one thing is definitely known – Linda was the one who came up with this falsetto melody:   [Excerpt: Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds, “Mbube”]   The song became massively, massively popular — so popular that eventually the master copy of the record disintegrated, as they’d pressed so many copies from it. It gave its name to a whole genre of music — in the same way that late fifties American vocal groups are doo-wop groups, South African groups like Ladysmith Black Mambazo are, more than eighty years later, still known as “mbube groups”.   Linda and the Evening Birds would make many more records, like “Anodu Gonda”:   [Excerpt: Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds, “Anodu Gonda”]   But it was “Mbube” that was their biggest hit. It sold a hundred thousand copies on Gallo Records — and earned Solomon Linda, its writer and lead singer, ten shillings. The South African government at the time estimated that a black family could survive on thirty-seven shillings and sixpence a week. So for writing the most famous melody ever to come out of Africa, Linda got a quarter of a week’s poverty-level wages. When Linda died in 1962, he had a hundred rand — equivalent then to fifty British pounds — in his bank account. He was buried in an unmarked grave.   And, a little over a year before his death, his song had become an international number one hit record. To see why, we have to go back to 1952, and a folk group called the Weavers.   Pete Seeger, the most important member of the Weavers, is a figure who is hugely important in the history of the folk music rebirth of the 1960s. Like most of the white folk singers of the period, he had an incredibly privileged background — he had attended Harvard as a classmate of John F Kennedy — but he also had very strong socialist principles. He had been friends with both Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly in the forties, and he dedicated his later career to the same kind of left-wing activism that Guthrie had taken part in.    Indeed, Guthrie and Seeger had both been members of the Almanac Singers, a folk group of the forties who had been explicitly pro-Communist. They’d been pacifists up until the Soviet entry into the Second World War, at which point they had immediately turned round and become the biggest cheerleaders of the war:   [Excerpt: The Almanac Singers, “Round and Round Hitler’s Grave”]   The Almanac Singers had a revolving door membership, including everyone from Burl Ives to Cisco Houston at one point or another, but the core of the group had been Seeger and Lee Hays, and those two had eventually formed another group, more or less as a continuation of the Almanac Singers, but with a less explicitly political agenda — they would perform Guthrie and Lead Belly songs, and songs they wrote themselves, but not be tied to performing music that fit the ideological line of the Communist Party.   The Weavers immediately had far more commercial success than the Almanac Singers ever had, and recorded such hits as their version of Lead Belly’s “Goodnight Irene”, with orchestration by Gordon Jenkins:   [Excerpt: The Weavers, “Goodnight Irene”]   And one of the hits they recorded was a version of “Mbube”, which they titled “Wimoweh”.   Alan Lomax, the folk song collector, had discovered somewhere a big stack of African records, which were about to be thrown out, and he thought to himself that those would be exactly the kind of thing that Pete Seeger might want, and gave them to him. Seeger loved the recording of “Mbube”, but neither man had any clear idea of what the song was or where it came from. Seeger couldn’t make out the lyrics — he thought Linda was singing something like “Wimoweh”, and he created a new arrangement of the song, taking Linda’s melody from the end of the song and singing it repeatedly throughout:   [Excerpt: The Weavers, “Wimoweh”]   At the time, the Weavers were signed as songwriters to Folkways, a company that was set up to promote folk music, but was part of a much bigger conglomerate, The Richmond Organisation. When they were informed that the Weavers were going to record “Wimoweh”, Folkways contacted the South African record company and were informed that “Mbube” was a traditional folk song. So Folkways copyrighted “Mbube”, as “Wimoweh”, in the name Paul Campbell — a collective pseudonym that the Weavers used for their arrangements of traditional songs.   Shortly after this, Gallo realised their mistake and tried to copyright “Mbube” themselves in the USA, under Solomon Linda’s name, only to be told that Folkways already had the copyright. Now, in the 1950s the USA was not yet a signatory to the Berne Convention, the international agreement on copyright laws, and so it made no difference that in South Africa the song had been copyrighted under Linda’s name — in the USA it was owned by Folkways, because they had registered it first.   But Folkways wanted the rights for other countries, too, and so they came to an agreement with Gallo that would be to Gallo’s immense disadvantage. Because they agreed that they would pay Gallo a modest one-off fee, and “let” Gallo have the rights to the song in a few territories in Africa, and in return Folkways would get the copyright everywhere else. Gallo agreed, and so “Mbube” by Solomon Linda and “Wimoweh” by Paul Campbell became separate copyrights — Gallo had, without realising it, given up their legal rights to the song throughout the world.   “Wimoweh” by the Weavers went to number six on the charts, but then Senator McCarthy stepped in. Both Pete Seeger and Lee Hays had been named as past Communist Party members, and were called before the House Unamerican Activities Committee to testify. Hays stood on his fifth amendment rights, refusing to testify against himself, but Seeger took the riskier option of simply refusing on first amendment grounds. He said, quite rightly, that his political activities, voting history, and party membership were nobody’s business except his, and he wasn’t going to testify about them in front of Congress. He spent much of the next decade with the threat of prison hanging over his head.   As a result, the Weavers were blacklisted from radio and TV, as was Seeger as a solo artist. “Wimoweh” dropped off the charts, and the group’s recording catalogue was deleted. The group split up, though they did get back together again a few years later, and managed to have a hit live album of a concert they performed at Carnegie Hall in 1955, which also included “Wimoweh”:   [Excerpt: The Weavers, “Wimoweh (live at Carnegie Hall)”]   Seeger left the group permanently a couple of years after that, when they did a commercial for tobacco — the group were still blacklisted from the radio and TV, and saw it as an opportunity to get some exposure, but Seeger didn’t approve of tobacco or advertising, and quit the group because of it — though because he’d made a commitment to the group, he did appear on the commercial, not wanting to break his word. At his suggestion, he was replaced by Erik Darling, from another folk group, The Tarriers. Darling was an Ayn Rand fan and a libertarian, so presumably didn’t have the same attitudes towards advertising.   As you might have gathered from this, Seeger was a man of strong principles, and so you might be surprised that he would take credit for someone else’s song. As it turned out, he didn’t. When he discovered that Solomon Linda had written the song, that it wasn’t just a traditional song, he insisted that all future money he would have made from it go to Linda, and sent Linda a cheque for a thousand dollars for the money he’d already earned. But Seeger was someone who didn’t care much about money at all — he donated the vast majority of his money to worthy causes, and lived frugally, and he assumed that the people he was working with would behave honourably and keep to agreements, and didn’t bother checking on them. They didn’t, and Linda saw nothing from them.   Over the years after 1952, “Wimoweh” became something of a standard in America, with successful versions like the one by Yma Sumac:   [Excerpt: Yma Sumac, “Wimoweh”]   And in the early sixties it was in the repertoire of almost every folk group, being recorded by groups like the Kingston Trio, who had taken the Weavers’ place as the most popular folk group in the country.   And then the Tokens entered the picture. We’ve mentioned the Tokens before, in the episode on “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” — they were the group, also known as the Linc-Tones, that was led by Carole King’s friend Neil Sedaka, and who’d recorded “While I Dream” with Sedaka on lead vocals:   [Excerpt: Neil Sedaka and the Tokens, “While I Dream”]   After recording that, one member of the group had gone off to college, and been replaced by the falsetto singer Jay Siegel. But then the group had split up, and Sedaka had gone on to a very successful career as a solo performer and a songwriter.  But Siegel and one of the other group members, Hank Medress, had carried on performing together, and had formed a new group, Darrell and the Oxfords, with two other singers. That group had made a couple of records for Roulette Records, one of which, “Picture in Your Wallet”, was a local hit:   [Excerpt: Darrell and the Oxfords, “Picture in Your Wallet”]   But that group had also split up. So the duo invited yet another pair of singers to join them — Mitch Margo, who was around their age, in his late teens, and his twelve-year-old brother Phil. The group reverted to their old name of The Tokens, and recorded a song called “Tonight I Fell In Love”, which they leased to a small label called Warwick Records:   [Excerpt: The Tokens, “Tonight I Fell In Love”]   Warwick Records sat on the track for six months before releasing it. When they did, in 1961, it went to number fifteen on the charts. But by then, the group had signed to RCA Records, and were now working with Hugo and Luigi, the production duo who you might remember from the episode on “Shout”.   The group put out a couple of flop singles on RCA, including a remake of the Moonglows’ “Sincerely”:   [Excerpt: The Tokens, “Sincerely”]   But after those two singles flopped, the group made the record that would define them for the rest of their lives. The Tokens had been performing “Wimoweh” in their stage act, and they played it for Hugo and Luigi, who thought there was something there, but they didn’t think it would be commercial as it was. They decided to get a professional writer in to fix the song up, and called in George David Weiss, a writer with whom they’d worked before. The three of them had previously co-written “Can’t Help Falling In Love” for Elvis Presley, basing it on a traditional melody, which is what they thought they were doing here:   [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Can’t Help Falling In Love”]   Weiss took the song home and reworked it. Weiss decided to find out what the original lyrics had been about, and apparently asked the South African consulate, who told him that it was about lions, so he came up with new lyrics — “in the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight”.   Hugo and Luigi came up with an arrangement for Weiss’ new version of the song, and brought in an opera singer named Anita Darian to replicate the part that Yma Sumac had sung on her version. The song was recorded, and released on the B-side of the Tokens’ third flop in a row:   [Excerpt: The Tokens, “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”]   As it was believed by everyone involved that the song was a traditional one, the new song was copyrighted in the names of Weiss, Hugo, and Luigi. And as it was released as a B-side of a flop single, nobody cared at first.   But then a DJ flipped the record and started playing the B-side, and suddenly the song was a hit. Indeed, it went to number one. And it didn’t just go to number one, it became a standard, recorded over the years by everyone from Brian Eno to Billy Joel, The New Christy Minstrels to They Might Be Giants.   Obviously, the publishers of “Wimoweh”, who knew that the song wasn’t a traditional piece at all, wanted to get their share of the money. However, the owner of the publishing company was also a good friend of Weiss — and Weiss was someone who had a lot of influence in the industry, and who nobody wanted to upset, and so they came to a very amicable agreement. The three credited songwriters would stay credited as the songwriters and keep all the songwriting money — after all, Pete Seeger didn’t want it, and the publishers were only under a moral obligation to Solomon Linda, not a legal one — but the Richmond Organisation would get the publishing money.   Everyone seemed to be satisfied with the arrangement, and Solomon Linda’s song went on earning a lot of money for a lot of white men he never met.   The Tokens tried to follow up with a version of an actual African folk song, “Bwa Nina”, but that wasn’t a hit, and nor was a version of “La Bamba”. While they continued their career for decades, the only hit they had as performers was in 1973, by which point Hank Medress had left and the other three had changed their name to Cross Country and had a hit with a remake of “In the Midnight Hour”:   [Excerpt: Cross Country, “The Midnight Hour”]   I say that was the only hit they had as performers, because they went into record production themselves. There they were far more successful, and as a group they produced records like the Chiffons’ “He’s So Fine”, making them the first vocal group to produce a hit for another vocal group:   [Excerpt: The Chiffons, “He’s So Fine”]   That song would, of course, generate its own famous authorial dispute case in later years. After Hank Medress left the group, he worked as a producer on his own, producing hits for Tony Orlando and Dawn, and also producing one of the later hit versions of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”, Robert John’s version, which made number three in 1972:   [Excerpt: Robert John, “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”]   Today there are two touring versions of the Tokens, one led by Jay Siegel and one by Phil Margo.   But while in 1961 the Richmond Organisation, Hugo and Luigi, and George Weiss all seemed happy with their agreement, things started to go wrong in 1989.   American copyright law has had several changes over the years, and nothing of what I’m saying applies now, but for songs written before 1978 and the first of the Mickey Mouse copyright extensions, the rule used to be that a song would be in copyright for twenty-eight years. The writer could then renew it for a second twenty-eight-year term. (The rule is now that songs published in America remain in copyright until seventy years after the writer’s death).    And it’s specifically the *writer* who could renew it for that second term, not the publishers. George Weiss filed notice that he was going to renew the copyright when the twenty-eight-year term expired, and that he wasn’t going to let the Richmond Organisation publish the song.   As soon as the Richmond Organisation heard about this, they took Weiss to court, saying that he couldn’t take the publishing rights away from them, because the song was based on “Wimoweh”, which they owned. Weiss argued that if the song was based on “Wimoweh”, the copyright should have reflected that for the twenty-eight years that the Richmond Organisation owned it. They’d signed papers agreeing that Weiss and Hugo and Luigi were the writers, and if they’d had a problem with that they should have said so back in 1961.   The courts sided with Weiss, but they did say that the Richmond Organisation might have had a bit of a point about the song’s similarity to “Wimoweh”, so they had to pay a small amount of money to Solomon Linda’s family.   And the American writers getting the song back coincided with two big boosts in the income from the song. First, R.E.M recorded a song called “The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite”, on their album Automatic For the People (a record we will definitely be talking about in 2026, assuming I’m still around and able to do the podcast by then). The album was one of the biggest records of the decade, and on the song, Michael Stipe sang a fragment of Solomon Linda’s melody:   [Excerpt: R.E.M. “The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite”]   The owners of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” took legal action about that, and got themselves credited as co-writers of R.E.M.’s song, and the group also had to record “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”, releasing it as a B-side to the hit single version of “Sidewinder”:   [Excerpt: R.E.M. “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”]   Even better from their point of view, the song was featured in the Disney film The Lion King, which on its release in 1994 became the second highest-grossing film of all time and the most successful animated film ever, and in its Broadway adaptation, which became the most successful Broadway show of all time.   And in 2000, Rian Malan, a South African journalist based in America, who mostly dedicated his work to expunging his ancestral guilt — he’s a relative of Daniel Malan, the South African dictator who instituted the apartheid system, and of Magnus Malan, one of the more monstrous ministers in the regime in its last days of the eighties and early nineties — found out that while Solomon Linda’s family had been getting some money, it amounted at most to a couple of thousand dollars a year, shared between Linda’s daughters. At the same time, Malan estimated that over the years the song had generated something in the region of fifteen million dollars for its American copyright owners.   Malan published an article about this, and just before that, the daughters got a minor windfall — Pete Seeger noticed a six thousand dollar payment, which came to him when a commercial used “Wimoweh”, rather than “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”. He realised that he’d been receiving the royalties for “Wimoweh” all along, even though he’d asked that they be sent to Linda, so he totalled up how much he’d earned from the song over the years, which came to twelve thousand dollars, and he sent a cheque for that amount to Linda’s daughters.   Those daughters were living in such poverty that in 2001, one of the four died of AIDS — a disease which would have been completely treatable if she’d been able to afford the anti-retroviral medication to treat it.   The surviving sisters were told that the copyright in “Mbube” should have reverted to them in the eighties, and that they had a very good case under South African law to get a proper share of the rights to both “Wimoweh” and “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”.   They just needed to find someone in South Africa that they could sue. Abilene Music, the current owners of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”, were based in the USA and had no assets in South Africa. Suing them would be pointless. But they could sue someone else:   [Excerpt: Timon and Pumbaa, “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”]   Disney had assets in South Africa. Lots of them. And they’d used Solomon Linda’s song in their film, which under South African law would be copyright infringement. It would even be possible, if the case went really badly for Disney, that Linda’s family could get total ownership of all Disney assets in South Africa.   So in 2006, Disney came to an out of court settlement with Linda’s family, and they appear to have pressured Abilene Music to do the same thing. Under South African law, “Mbube” would go out of copyright by 2012, but it was agreed that Linda’s daughters would receive royalties on “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” until 2017, even after the South African copyright had expired, and they would get a lump sum from Disney. The money they were owed would be paid into a trust.   After 2017, they would still get money from “Wimoweh”, but not from “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”, whose rights would revert fully to its American owners.   Unfortunately, most of the money they got seems to have gone on legal bills. The three surviving sisters each received, in total, about eighty-three thousand dollars over the ten-year course of the agreement after those bills, which is much, much, more than they were getting before, but only a fraction of what the song would have earned them if they’d been paid properly.   In 2017, the year the agreement expired, Disney announced they were making a photorealistic CGI remake of The Lion King. That, too, featured “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”, and that, too, became the most successful animated film of all time. Under American copyright law, “Wimoweh” will remain in copyright until 2047, unless further changes are made to the law. Solomon Linda’s family will continue to receive royalties on that song. “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”, the much more successful song, will remain in copyright until 2057, and the money from that will mostly go to Claire Weiss-Creatore, who was George Weiss’ third wife, and who after he died in 2010 became the third wife of Luigi Creatore, of Hugo and Luigi, who died himself in 2015. Solomon Linda’s daughters won’t see a penny of it.   According to George Weiss’ obituary in the Guardian, he “was a familiar figure at congressional hearings into copyright reform and music piracy, testifying as to the vital importance of intellectual property protection for composers”.  

Episode ninety-one of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “The Twist” by Chubby Checker, and how the biggest hit single ever had its roots in hard R&B. 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 “Viens Danser le Twist” by Johnny Hallyday, a cover of a Chubby Checker record that became the first number one for France’s biggest rock star. 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/ Also, people have asked me to start selling podcast merchandise, so you can now buy T-shirts from https://500-songs.teemill.com/. That store will be updated semi-regularly. (more…)

Episode ninety-one of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “The Twist” by Chubby Checker, and how the biggest hit single ever had its roots in hard R&B. 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 “Viens Danser le Twist” by Johnny Hallyday, a cover of a Chubby Checker record that became the first number one for France’s biggest rock star.   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/   Also, people have asked me to start selling podcast merchandise, so you can now buy T-shirts from https://500-songs.teemill.com/. That store will be updated semi-regularly.   —-more—-   Resources   As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.    Much of the information in this episode comes from The Twist: The Story of the Song and Dance That Changed the World by Jim Dawson.    This collection of Hank Ballard’s fifties singles is absolutely essential for any lover of R&B.   And this four-CD box set contains all Chubby Checker’s pre-1962 recordings, plus a selection of other Twist hits from 1961 and 62, including recordings by Johnny Hallyday, Bill Haley, Vince Taylor, and others.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?   Transcript   Today we’re going to look at a record that achieved a feat that’s unique in American history. It is the only non-Christmas-themed record — ever — to go to number one on the Billboard pop charts, drop off, and go back to number one again later. It’s a record that, a year after it went to number one for the first time, started a craze that would encompass everyone from teenagers in Philadelphia to the first lady of the United States.   We’re going to look at Chubby Checker, and at “the Twist”, and how a B-side by a washed-up R&B group became the most successful record in chart history:   [Excerpt: Chubby Checker, “The Twist”]   One of the groups that have been a perennial background player in our story so far has been Hank Ballard and the Midnighters. We talked about them most in the episode on “The Wallflower”, which was based on their hit “Work With Me Annie”, and they’ve cropped up in passing in a number of other places, most recently in the episode on Jackie Wilson. By 1958, though they were largely a forgotten group. Their style had been rooted in the LA R&B sound that had been pioneered by Johnny Otis, and which we talked so much about in the first year or so of this podcast. That style had been repeatedly swept away by the newer sounds that had come out of Memphis, Chicago, and New York, and they were yesterday’s news. They hadn’t had a hit in three years, and they were worried they were going to be dropped by their record label.   But they were still a popular live act, and they were touring regularly, and in Florida (some sources say they were in Tampa, others Miami) they happened to play on the same bill as a gospel group called the Sensational Nightingales, who were one of the best gospel acts on the circuit:   [Excerpt: The Sensational Nightingales, “Morning Train”]   The Sensational Nightingales had a song, and they were looking for a group to sing it. They couldn’t sing it themselves — it was a secular song, and they were a gospel group — but they knew that it could be a success if someone did. The song was called “The Twist”, and it was based around a common expression from R&B songs that was usually used to mean a generic dance, though it would sometimes be used as a euphemism for sexual activity. There was, though, a specific dance move that was known as the twist, which was a sort of thrusting, grinding move. (It’s difficult to get details of exactly what that move involved these days, as it wasn’t a formalised thing at all). Twisting wasn’t a whole dance itself, it was a movement that people included in other dances.   Twisting in this sense had been mentioned in several songs. For example, in one of Etta James’ sequels to “The Wallflower”, she had sung:   [Excerpt: Etta James, “Good Rockin’ Daddy”]   There had been a lot of songs with lines like that, over the years, and the Sensational Nightingales had written a whole song along those lines. They’d first taken it to Joe Cook, of Little Joe and the Thrillers, who had had a recent pop hit with “Peanuts”:   [Excerpt: Little Joe and the Thrillers, “Peanuts”]   But the Sensational Nightingales were remembering an older song, “Let’s Do the Slop”, that had been an R&B hit for the group in 1954:   [Excerpt: Little Joe and the Thrillers, “Let’s Do the Slop”]   That song was very similar to the one by the Nightingales’, which suggested that Little Joe might be the right person to do their song, but when Little Joe demoed it, he was dissuaded from releasing it by his record label, Okeh, because they thought it sounded too dirty. So instead the Nightingales decided to offer the song to the Midnighters.   Hank Ballard listened to the song and liked it, but he thought the melody needed tightening up. The song as the Sensational Nightingales sang it was a fifteen-bar blues, and fifteen bars is an awkward, uncommercial, number. So he and the Midnighters’ guitarist Cal Green took the song that the Nightingales sang, and fit the lyrics to a pre-existing twelve-bar melody.   The melody they used was one they’d used previously — on a song called “Is Your Love For Real?”:   [Excerpt: Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, “Is Your Love For Real?”]   But this was one of those songs whose melody had a long ancestry. “Is Your Love For Real?” had been inspired by a track by Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, “Whatcha Gonna Do?”:   [Excerpt, Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, “Whatcha Gonna Do?”]   That song is credited as having been written by Ahmet Ertegun, but listening to the gospel song “Whatcha Gonna Do?” by the Radio Four, from a year or so earlier, shows a certain amount of influence, shall we say, on the later song:   [Excerpt: The Radio Four, “Whatcha Gonna Do?”]   Incidentally, it took more work than it should to track down that song, simply because it’s impossible to persuade search engines that a search for The Radio Four, the almost-unknown fifties gospel group, is not a search for Radio Four, the popular BBC radio station.   Initially Ballard and Green took that melody and the twist lyrics, and set them to a Jimmy Reed style blues beat, but by the time they took the song into the studio, in November 1958, they’d changed it for a more straightforward beat, and added the intro they’d previously used on the song “Tore Up Over You”:   [Excerpt: Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, “Tore Up Over You”]   They apparently also changed the lyrics significantly — there exists an earlier demo of the song, recorded as a demo for VeeJay when Ballard wasn’t sure that Syd Nathan would renew his contract, with very different, more sexually suggestive, lyrics, which are apparently those that were used in the Sensational Nightingales’ version.   Either way, the finished song didn’t credit the Nightingales, or Green – who ended up in prison for two years for marijuana possession around this time, and missed out on almost all of this story – or any of the writers of the songs that Ballard lifted from. It was released, with Ballard as the sole credited writer, as the B-side of a ballad called “Teardrops on Your Letter”, but DJs flipped the single, and this went to number sixteen on the R&B chart:   [Excerpt: Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, “The Twist”]   And that should have been the end of the matter, and seemed like it would be, for a whole year. “The Twist” was recorded in late 1958, came out in very early 1959, and was just one of many minor R&B hits the Midnighters had. But then a confluence of events made that minor R&B hit into a major craze. The first of these events was that Ballard and the Midnighters released another dance-themed song, “Finger-Poppin’ Time”, which became a much bigger hit for them, thanks in part to an appearance on Dick Clark’s TV show American Bandstand:   [Excerpt: Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, “Finger-Poppin’ Time”]   The success of that saw “The Twist” start to become a minor hit again, and it made the lower reaches of the chart.   The second event was also to do with Dick Clark. American Bandstand was at the time the biggest music show on TV — at the time it ran for ninety minutes every weekday afternoon, and it was shown live, with a studio audience consisting almost entirely of white teenagers. Clark was very aware of what had happened to Alan Freed when Freed had shown Frankie Lymon dancing with a white girl on his show, and wasn’t going to repeat Freed’s mistakes.   But Clark knew that most of the things that would become cool were coming from black kids, and so there were several regulars in the audience who Clark knew went to black clubs and learned the latest dance moves. Clark would then get those teenagers to demonstrate those moves, while pretending they’d invented them themselves. Several minor dance crazes had started this way, and in 1960 Clark noticed what he thought might become another one.   To understand the dance that became the Twist, we have to go back to the late thirties, and to episode four of this podcast, the one on “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie”. If you can remember that episode, we talked there about a dance that was performed in the Savoy Ballroom in New York in the late thirties, called the Lindy Hop.   There were two parts of the Lindy Hop. One of those was a relatively formalised dance, with the partners holding each other, swinging each other around, and so on. That part of the dance was later adopted by white people, and renamed the jitterbug. But there was another part of the dance, known as the breakaway, where the two dancers would separate and show off their own individual moves before coming back together. That would often involve twisting in the old sense, along with a lot of other movements. The breakaway part of the Lindy Hop was never really taken up by white culture, but it continued in black clubs.   And these teenagers had copied the breakaway, as performed by black dancers, and they showed it to Clark, but they called the whole dance “the Twist”, possibly because of Ballard’s record. Clark thought it had the potential to become something he could promote through his TV shows, at least if they toned down the more overtly sexual aspects. But he needed a record to go with it.   Now, there are several stories about why Clark didn’t ask Hank Ballard and the Midnighters on to the show. Some say that they were simply busy elsewhere on tour and couldn’t make the trip back, others that Clark wanted someone less threatening — by which it’s generally considered he meant less obviously black, though the artist he settled on is himself black, and that argument gets into a lot of things about colourism about which it’s not my place to speak as a white British man. Others say that he wanted someone younger, others that he was worried about the adult nature of Ballard’s act, and yet others that he just wanted a performer with whom he had a financial link — Clark was one of the more obviously corrupt people in the music industry, and would regularly promote records with which he had some sort of financial interest. Possibly all of these were involved.   Either way, rather than getting Hank Ballard and the Midnighters onto his shows to perform “The Twist”, even as it had entered the Hot One Hundred at the lower reaches, Clark decided to get someone to remake the record. He asked Cameo-Parkway, a label based in Philadelphia, the city from which Clark’s show was broadcast, and which was often willing to do “favours” for Clark, if they could do a remake of the record. This was pretty much a guaranteed hit for the label — Clark was the single most powerful person in the music industry at this point, and if he plugged an artist they were going to be a success — and so of course they said yes, despite the label normally being a novelty label, rather than dealing in rock and roll or R&B. They even had the perfect singer for the job.   Ernest Evans was eighteen years old, and had repeatedly tried and failed to get Cameo-Parkway interested in him as a singer, but things had recently changed for him. Clark had wanted to do an audio Christmas card for his friends — a single with “Jingle Bells” sung in the style of various different singers. Evans had told the people at Cameo-Parkway he could do impressions of different singers, and so they’d asked him to record it. That recording was a private one, but Evans later did a rerecording of the song as a duet with Bobby Rydell, including the same impressions of Fats Domino, Elvis Presley, and the Chipmunks that he’d done on Clark’s private copy, so you can hear what it sounded like:   [Excerpt: Chubby Checker and Bobby Rydell, “Jingle Bell Imitations”]   It was that Fats Domino imitation, in particular, that gave Evans his stage name. Dick Clark’s wife Barbara was there when he was doing the recording, and she called him “Chubby Checker”, as a play on “Fats Domino”.   Clark was impressed enough with the record that Cameo-Parkway decided to have the newly-named Chubby Checker make a record in the same style for the public, and his version of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” in that style, renamed “The Class” made number thirty-eight on the charts thanks to promotion from Clark:   [Excerpt: Chubby Checker, “The Class”]   Two more singles in that vein followed, “Whole Lotta Laughin'” and “Dancing Dinosaur”, but neither was a success. But Checker was someone known to Clark, someone unthreatening, someone on a label with financial connections to Clark, and someone who could do decent impressions. So when Clark wanted a record that sounded exactly like Hank Ballard and the Midnighters singing “The Twist”, it was easy enough for Checker to do a Ballard impression:   [Excerpt: Chubby Checker, “The Twist”]   Clark got Checker to perform that on The Dick Clark Show — a different show from Bandstand, but one with a similar audience size — and to demonstrate the toned-down version of the dance that would be just about acceptable to the television audience. This version of the dance basically consisted of miming towelling your buttocks while stubbing out a cigarette with your foot, and was simple enough that anyone could do it.   Checker’s version of “The Twist” went to number one, as a result of Clark constantly plugging it on his TV shows. It was so close to Ballard’s version that when Ballard first heard it on the radio, he was convinced it was his own record. The only differences were that Checker’s drummer plays more on the cymbals, and that Checker’s saxophone player plays all the way through the song, rather than just playing a solo — and King Records quickly got a saxophone player in to the studio to overdub an identical part on Ballard’s track and reissue it, to make it sound more like the soundalike. Ballard’s version of the song ended up going to number twenty-eight on the pop charts on Checker’s coattails.   And that should, by all rights, have been the end of the Twist. Checker recorded a series of follow-up hits over the next few months, all of them covers of older R&B songs about dances — a version of “The Hucklebuck”, a quick cover of Don Covay’s “Pony Time”, released only a few months before, which became Checker’s second number one, and “Dance the Mess Around”. All of these were hits, and it seemed like Chubby Checker would be associated with dances in general, rather than with the Twist in particular. In summer 1961 he did have a second Twist hit, with “Let’s Twist Again” — singing “let’s twist again, like we did last summer”, a year on from “The Twist”:   [Excerpt: Chubby Checker, “Let’s Twist Again”]   That was written by the two owners of Cameo-Parkway, who had parallel careers as writers of novelty songs — their first big hit had been Elvis’ “Teddy Bear”. But over the few months after “Let’s Twist Again”, Checker was back to non-Twist dance songs. But then the Twist craze proper started, and it started because of Joey Dee and the Starliters.   Joey DiNicola was a classmate of the Shirelles, and when the Shirelles had their first hits, they’d told DiNicola that he should meet up with Florence Greenberg. His group had a rotating lineup, at one point including guitarist Joe Pesci, who would later become famous as an actor rather than as a musician, but the core membership was a trio of vocalists — Joey Dee, David Brigati, and Larry Vernieri, all of whom would take lead vocals. They were one of the few interracial bands of the time, and the music they performed was a stripped-down version of R&B, with an organ as the dominant instrument — the kind of thing that would later get known as garage rock or frat rock.   Greenberg signed the Starliters to Scepter Records, and they released a couple of singles on Scepter, produced and written like much of the material on Scepter by Luther Dixon:   [Excerpt: Joey Dee and the Starliters, “Shimmy Baby”]   Neither of their singles on Scepter was particularly successful, but they became a popular live act around New Jersey, and got occasional gigs at venues in New York. They played a three-day weekend at a seedy working-class Mafia-owned bar called the Peppermint Lounge, in Manhattan. Their shows there were so successful that they got a residency there, and became the house band. Soon the tiny venue — which had a capacity of about two hundred people — was packed, largely with the band’s fans from New Jersey — the legal drinking age in New Jersey was twenty-one, while in New York it was eighteen, so a lot of eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds from New Jersey would make the journey.   As Joey Dee and the Starliters were just playing covers of chart hits for dancing, of course they played “The Twist” and “Let’s Twist Again”, and of course these audiences would dance the Twist to them. But that was happening in a million dingy bars and clubs up and down the country, with nobody caring. The idea that anyone would care about a tiny, dingy, bad-smelling bar and the cover band that played it was a nonsense.   Until it wasn’t.   Because the owners of the Peppermint Lounge decided that they wanted a little publicity for their club, and they hired a publicist, who in turn got in touch with a company called Celebrity Services. What Celebrity Services did was, for a fee, they would get some minor celebrity or other to go to a venue and have a drink or a meal, and they would let the gossip columnists know about it, so the venue would then get a mention in the newspapers. Normally this would be one or two passing mentions, and nothing further would happen.   But this time it did. A couple of mentions in the society columns somehow intrigued enough people that some more celebrities started dropping in. The club was quite close to Broadway, and so a few of the stars of Broadway started popping in to see what the fuss was about. And then more stars started popping in to see what the other stars had been popping in for. Noel Coward started cruising the venue looking for rough trade, Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe, and Tallulah Bankhead were regulars, Norman Mailer danced the Twist with the granddaughter of Lord Beaverbrook, and Tennessee Williams and even Greta Garbo turned up, all to either dance to Joey Dee and the Starliters or to watch the younger people dancing to them. There were even rumours, which turned out to be false, that Jackie Kennedy had gone to the Peppermint Lounge – though she did apparently enjoy dancing the Twist herself.   The Peppermint Lounge became a sensation, and the stories all focussed on the dance these people were doing. “The Twist” reentered the charts, eighteen months after it had first come out, and Morris Levy sprang into action. Levy wanted a piece of this new Twist thing, and since he didn’t have Chubby Checker, he was going to get the next best thing. He signed Joey Dee and the Starliters to Roulette Records, and got Henry Glover in to produce them.   Henry Glover is a figure who we really didn’t mention as much as we should have in the first fifty or so episodes of the podcast. He’d played trumpet with Lucky Millinder, and he’d produced most of the artists on King Records in the late forties and fifties, including Wynonie Harris, Bill Doggett, and James Brown. He’d produced Little Willie John’s version of “Fever”, and wrote “Drown in My Own Tears”, which had become a hit for Ray Charles.   Glover had also produced Hank Ballard’s original version of “The Twist”, and now he was assigned to write a Twist song for Joey Dee and the Starliters. His song, “Peppermint Twist”, became their first single on Roulette:   [Excerpt: Joey Dee and the Starliters, “Peppermint Twist”]   “Peppermint Twist” went to number one, and Chubby Checker’s version of “The Twist” went back to number one, becoming the only record ever to do so during the rock and roll era. In fact, Checker’s record, on its reentry, became so popular that as recently as 2018 Billboard listed it as the *all-time* number one record on the Hot One Hundred.   The Twist was a massive sensation, but it had moved first from working-class black adults, to working-class white teenagers, to young middle-class white adults, and now to middle-aged and elderly rich white people who thought it was the latest “in” thing. And so, of course, it stopped being the cool in thing with the teenagers, almost straight away. If you’re young and rebellious, you don’t want to be doing the same thing that your grandmother’s favourite film star from when she was a girl is doing.   But it took a while for that disinterest on the part of the teenagers to filter through to the media, and in the meantime there were thousands of Twist cash-in records. There was a version of “Waltzin’ Matilda” remade as “Twistin’ Matilda”, the Chipmunks recorded “The Alvin Twist”. The Dovells, a group on Cameo Parkway who had had a hit with “The Bristol Stomp”, recorded “Bristol Twistin’ Annie”, which managed to be a sequel not only to “The Twist”, but to their own “The Bristol Stomp” and to Hank Ballard’s earlier “Annie” recordings:   [Excerpt: The Dovells, “Bristol Twistin’ Annie”]   There were Twist records by Bill Haley, Neil Sedaka, Duane Eddy… almost all of these were terrible records, although we will, in a future episode, look at one actually good Twist single.   The Twist craze proper started in November 1961, and by December there were already two films out in the cinemas. Hey! Let’s Twist! starred Joey Dee and the Starliters in a film which portrayed the Peppermint Lounge as a family-run Italian restaurant rather than a Mafia-run bar, and featured Joe Pesci in a cameo that was his first film role. Twist Around the Clock starred Chubby Checker and took a whole week to make. As well as Checker, it featured Dion, and the Marcels, trying desperately to have another hit after “Blue Moon”:   [Excerpt: The Marcels, “Merry Twistmas”]   Twist Around The Clock was an easy film to make because Sam Kurtzman, who produced it, had produced several rock films in the fifties, including Rock Around the Clock. He got the writer of that film to retype his script over a weekend, so it talked about twisting instead of rocking, and starred Chubby Checker instead of Bill Haley. As Kurtzman had also made Bill Haley’s second film, Don’t Knock The Rock, so Checker’s second film became Don’t Knock the Twist.   Checker also appeared in a British film, It’s Trad, Dad!, which we talked about last week. That was a cheap trad jazz cash-in, but at the last minute they decided to rework it so it included Twist music as well as trad, so the director, Richard Lester, flew to the USA for a couple of days to film Checker and a couple of other artists miming to their records, which was then intercut with footage of British teenagers dancing, to make it look like they were dancing to Checker.   Of course, the Twist craze couldn’t last forever, but Chubby Checker managed a good few years of making dance-craze singles, and he married Catharina Lodders, who had been Miss World 1962, in 1964. Rather amazingly for a marriage between a rock star and a beauty queen, they remain married to this day, nearly sixty years later.   Checker’s last big hit came in 1965, by which point the British Invasion had taken over the American charts so comprehensively that Checker was recording “Do the Freddie”, a song about the dance that Freddie Garrity of Freddie and the Dreamers did on stage:   [Excerpt: Chubby Checker, “Do the Freddie”]   In recent decades, Checker has been very bitter about his status. He’s continued a career of sorts, even scoring a novelty hit in the late eighties with a hip-hop remake of “The Twist” with The Fat Boys, but for a long time his most successful records were unavailable. Cameo-Parkway was bought in the late sixties by Allen Klein, a music industry executive we’ll be hearing more of, more or less as a tax writeoff, and between 1975 and 2005 there was no legal way to get any of the recordings on that label, as they went out of print and weren’t issued on CD, so Checker didn’t get the royalties he could have been getting from thirty years of nostalgia compilation albums. Recent interviews show that Checker is convinced he is the victim of an attempt to erase him from rock and roll history, and believes he deserves equal prominence with Elvis and the Beatles. He believes his lack of recognition is down to racism, as he married a white woman, and has protested outside the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at his lack of induction. Whatever one’s view of the artistic merits of his work, it’s sad that someone so successful now feels so overlooked.   But the Twist fad, once it died, left three real legacies. One was a song we’ll be looking at in a few months, and the other two came from Joey Dee and the Starliters. The Young Rascals, a group who had a series of hits from 1965 to 1970, started out as the instrumentalists in the 1964 lineup of Joey Dee and the Starliters before breaking out to become their own band, and a trio called Ronnie and the Relatives made their first appearances at the Peppermint Lounge, singing backing vocals and dancing behind the Starliters. They later changed their name to The Ronettes, and we’ll be hearing more from them later.   The Twist was the last great fad of the pre-Beatles sixties. That it left so little of a cultural mark says a lot about the changes that were to come, and which would sweep away all memory of the previous few years…

Episode ninety-one of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "The Twist" by Chubby Checker, and how the biggest hit single ever had its roots in hard R&B. 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 "Viens Danser le Twist" by Johnny Hallyday, a cover of a Chubby Checker record that became the first number one for France's biggest rock star.   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/   Also, people have asked me to start selling podcast merchandise, so you can now buy T-shirts from https://500-songs.teemill.com/. That store will be updated semi-regularly.   ----more----   Resources   As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.    Much of the information in this episode comes from The Twist: The Story of the Song and Dance That Changed the World by Jim Dawson.    This collection of Hank Ballard's fifties singles is absolutely essential for any lover of R&B.   And this four-CD box set contains all Chubby Checker's pre-1962 recordings, plus a selection of other Twist hits from 1961 and 62, including recordings by Johnny Hallyday, Bill Haley, Vince Taylor, and others.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?   Transcript   Today we're going to look at a record that achieved a feat that's unique in American history. It is the only non-Christmas-themed record -- ever -- to go to number one on the Billboard pop charts, drop off, and go back to number one again later. It's a record that, a year after it went to number one for the first time, started a craze that would encompass everyone from teenagers in Philadelphia to the first lady of the United States.   We're going to look at Chubby Checker, and at "the Twist", and how a B-side by a washed-up R&B group became the most successful record in chart history:   [Excerpt: Chubby Checker, "The Twist"]   One of the groups that have been a perennial background player in our story so far has been Hank Ballard and the Midnighters. We talked about them most in the episode on "The Wallflower", which was based on their hit "Work With Me Annie", and they've cropped up in passing in a number of other places, most recently in the episode on Jackie Wilson. By 1958, though they were largely a forgotten group. Their style had been rooted in the LA R&B sound that had been pioneered by Johnny Otis, and which we talked so much about in the first year or so of this podcast. That style had been repeatedly swept away by the newer sounds that had come out of Memphis, Chicago, and New York, and they were yesterday's news. They hadn't had a hit in three years, and they were worried they were going to be dropped by their record label.   But they were still a popular live act, and they were touring regularly, and in Florida (some sources say they were in Tampa, others Miami) they happened to play on the same bill as a gospel group called the Sensational Nightingales, who were one of the best gospel acts on the circuit:   [Excerpt: The Sensational Nightingales, "Morning Train"]   The Sensational Nightingales had a song, and they were looking for a group to sing it. They couldn't sing it themselves -- it was a secular song, and they were a gospel group -- but they knew that it could be a success if someone did. The song was called "The Twist", and it was based around a common expression from R&B songs that was usually used to mean a generic dance, though it would sometimes be used as a euphemism for sexual activity. There was, though, a specific dance move that was known as the twist, which was a sort of thrusting, grinding move. (It's difficult to get details of exactly what that move involved these days, as it wasn't a formalised thing at all). Twisting wasn't a whole dance itself, it was a movement that people included in other dances.   Twisting in this sense had been mentioned in several songs. For example, in one of Etta James' sequels to "The Wallflower", she had sung:   [Excerpt: Etta James, "Good Rockin' Daddy"]   There had been a lot of songs with lines like that, over the years, and the Sensational Nightingales had written a whole song along those lines. They'd first taken it to Joe Cook, of Little Joe and the Thrillers, who had had a recent pop hit with "Peanuts":   [Excerpt: Little Joe and the Thrillers, "Peanuts"]   But the Sensational Nightingales were remembering an older song, "Let's Do the Slop", that had been an R&B hit for the group in 1954:   [Excerpt: Little Joe and the Thrillers, "Let's Do the Slop"]   That song was very similar to the one by the Nightingales', which suggested that Little Joe might be the right person to do their song, but when Little Joe demoed it, he was dissuaded from releasing it by his record label, Okeh, because they thought it sounded too dirty. So instead the Nightingales decided to offer the song to the Midnighters.   Hank Ballard listened to the song and liked it, but he thought the melody needed tightening up. The song as the Sensational Nightingales sang it was a fifteen-bar blues, and fifteen bars is an awkward, uncommercial, number. So he and the Midnighters' guitarist Cal Green took the song that the Nightingales sang, and fit the lyrics to a pre-existing twelve-bar melody.   The melody they used was one they'd used previously -- on a song called "Is Your Love For Real?":   [Excerpt: Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, "Is Your Love For Real?"]   But this was one of those songs whose melody had a long ancestry. "Is Your Love For Real?" had been inspired by a track by Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, "Whatcha Gonna Do?":   [Excerpt, Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, "Whatcha Gonna Do?"]   That song is credited as having been written by Ahmet Ertegun, but listening to the gospel song "Whatcha Gonna Do?" by the Radio Four, from a year or so earlier, shows a certain amount of influence, shall we say, on the later song:   [Excerpt: The Radio Four, "Whatcha Gonna Do?"]   Incidentally, it took more work than it should to track down that song, simply because it's impossible to persuade search engines that a search for The Radio Four, the almost-unknown fifties gospel group, is not a search for Radio Four, the popular BBC radio station.   Initially Ballard and Green took that melody and the twist lyrics, and set them to a Jimmy Reed style blues beat, but by the time they took the song into the studio, in November 1958, they'd changed it for a more straightforward beat, and added the intro they'd previously used on the song "Tore Up Over You":   [Excerpt: Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, "Tore Up Over You"]   They apparently also changed the lyrics significantly -- there exists an earlier demo of the song, recorded as a demo for VeeJay when Ballard wasn't sure that Syd Nathan would renew his contract, with very different, more sexually suggestive, lyrics, which are apparently those that were used in the Sensational Nightingales' version.   Either way, the finished song didn't credit the Nightingales, or Green – who ended up in prison for two years for marijuana possession around this time, and missed out on almost all of this story – or any of the writers of the songs that Ballard lifted from. It was released, with Ballard as the sole credited writer, as the B-side of a ballad called "Teardrops on Your Letter", but DJs flipped the single, and this went to number sixteen on the R&B chart:   [Excerpt: Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, "The Twist"]   And that should have been the end of the matter, and seemed like it would be, for a whole year. "The Twist" was recorded in late 1958, came out in very early 1959, and was just one of many minor R&B hits the Midnighters had. But then a confluence of events made that minor R&B hit into a major craze. The first of these events was that Ballard and the Midnighters released another dance-themed song, "Finger-Poppin' Time", which became a much bigger hit for them, thanks in part to an appearance on Dick Clark's TV show American Bandstand:   [Excerpt: Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, "Finger-Poppin' Time"]   The success of that saw "The Twist" start to become a minor hit again, and it made the lower reaches of the chart.   The second event was also to do with Dick Clark. American Bandstand was at the time the biggest music show on TV -- at the time it ran for ninety minutes every weekday afternoon, and it was shown live, with a studio audience consisting almost entirely of white teenagers. Clark was very aware of what had happened to Alan Freed when Freed had shown Frankie Lymon dancing with a white girl on his show, and wasn't going to repeat Freed's mistakes.   But Clark knew that most of the things that would become cool were coming from black kids, and so there were several regulars in the audience who Clark knew went to black clubs and learned the latest dance moves. Clark would then get those teenagers to demonstrate those moves, while pretending they'd invented them themselves. Several minor dance crazes had started this way, and in 1960 Clark noticed what he thought might become another one.   To understand the dance that became the Twist, we have to go back to the late thirties, and to episode four of this podcast, the one on "Choo Choo Ch'Boogie". If you can remember that episode, we talked there about a dance that was performed in the Savoy Ballroom in New York in the late thirties, called the Lindy Hop.   There were two parts of the Lindy Hop. One of those was a relatively formalised dance, with the partners holding each other, swinging each other around, and so on. That part of the dance was later adopted by white people, and renamed the jitterbug. But there was another part of the dance, known as the breakaway, where the two dancers would separate and show off their own individual moves before coming back together. That would often involve twisting in the old sense, along with a lot of other movements. The breakaway part of the Lindy Hop was never really taken up by white culture, but it continued in black clubs.   And these teenagers had copied the breakaway, as performed by black dancers, and they showed it to Clark, but they called the whole dance "the Twist", possibly because of Ballard's record. Clark thought it had the potential to become something he could promote through his TV shows, at least if they toned down the more overtly sexual aspects. But he needed a record to go with it.   Now, there are several stories about why Clark didn't ask Hank Ballard and the Midnighters on to the show. Some say that they were simply busy elsewhere on tour and couldn't make the trip back, others that Clark wanted someone less threatening -- by which it's generally considered he meant less obviously black, though the artist he settled on is himself black, and that argument gets into a lot of things about colourism about which it's not my place to speak as a white British man. Others say that he wanted someone younger, others that he was worried about the adult nature of Ballard's act, and yet others that he just wanted a performer with whom he had a financial link -- Clark was one of the more obviously corrupt people in the music industry, and would regularly promote records with which he had some sort of financial interest. Possibly all of these were involved.   Either way, rather than getting Hank Ballard and the Midnighters onto his shows to perform "The Twist", even as it had entered the Hot One Hundred at the lower reaches, Clark decided to get someone to remake the record. He asked Cameo-Parkway, a label based in Philadelphia, the city from which Clark's show was broadcast, and which was often willing to do "favours" for Clark, if they could do a remake of the record. This was pretty much a guaranteed hit for the label -- Clark was the single most powerful person in the music industry at this point, and if he plugged an artist they were going to be a success -- and so of course they said yes, despite the label normally being a novelty label, rather than dealing in rock and roll or R&B. They even had the perfect singer for the job.   Ernest Evans was eighteen years old, and had repeatedly tried and failed to get Cameo-Parkway interested in him as a singer, but things had recently changed for him. Clark had wanted to do an audio Christmas card for his friends -- a single with "Jingle Bells" sung in the style of various different singers. Evans had told the people at Cameo-Parkway he could do impressions of different singers, and so they'd asked him to record it. That recording was a private one, but Evans later did a rerecording of the song as a duet with Bobby Rydell, including the same impressions of Fats Domino, Elvis Presley, and the Chipmunks that he'd done on Clark's private copy, so you can hear what it sounded like:   [Excerpt: Chubby Checker and Bobby Rydell, "Jingle Bell Imitations"]   It was that Fats Domino imitation, in particular, that gave Evans his stage name. Dick Clark's wife Barbara was there when he was doing the recording, and she called him "Chubby Checker", as a play on "Fats Domino".   Clark was impressed enough with the record that Cameo-Parkway decided to have the newly-named Chubby Checker make a record in the same style for the public, and his version of "Mary Had a Little Lamb" in that style, renamed "The Class" made number thirty-eight on the charts thanks to promotion from Clark:   [Excerpt: Chubby Checker, "The Class"]   Two more singles in that vein followed, "Whole Lotta Laughin'" and "Dancing Dinosaur", but neither was a success. But Checker was someone known to Clark, someone unthreatening, someone on a label with financial connections to Clark, and someone who could do decent impressions. So when Clark wanted a record that sounded exactly like Hank Ballard and the Midnighters singing "The Twist", it was easy enough for Checker to do a Ballard impression:   [Excerpt: Chubby Checker, "The Twist"]   Clark got Checker to perform that on The Dick Clark Show -- a different show from Bandstand, but one with a similar audience size -- and to demonstrate the toned-down version of the dance that would be just about acceptable to the television audience. This version of the dance basically consisted of miming towelling your buttocks while stubbing out a cigarette with your foot, and was simple enough that anyone could do it.   Checker's version of "The Twist" went to number one, as a result of Clark constantly plugging it on his TV shows. It was so close to Ballard's version that when Ballard first heard it on the radio, he was convinced it was his own record. The only differences were that Checker's drummer plays more on the cymbals, and that Checker's saxophone player plays all the way through the song, rather than just playing a solo -- and King Records quickly got a saxophone player in to the studio to overdub an identical part on Ballard's track and reissue it, to make it sound more like the soundalike. Ballard's version of the song ended up going to number twenty-eight on the pop charts on Checker's coattails.   And that should, by all rights, have been the end of the Twist. Checker recorded a series of follow-up hits over the next few months, all of them covers of older R&B songs about dances -- a version of "The Hucklebuck", a quick cover of Don Covay's "Pony Time", released only a few months before, which became Checker's second number one, and "Dance the Mess Around". All of these were hits, and it seemed like Chubby Checker would be associated with dances in general, rather than with the Twist in particular. In summer 1961 he did have a second Twist hit, with "Let's Twist Again" -- singing "let's twist again, like we did last summer", a year on from "The Twist":   [Excerpt: Chubby Checker, "Let's Twist Again"]   That was written by the two owners of Cameo-Parkway, who had parallel careers as writers of novelty songs -- their first big hit had been Elvis' "Teddy Bear". But over the few months after "Let's Twist Again", Checker was back to non-Twist dance songs. But then the Twist craze proper started, and it started because of Joey Dee and the Starliters.   Joey DiNicola was a classmate of the Shirelles, and when the Shirelles had their first hits, they'd told DiNicola that he should meet up with Florence Greenberg. His group had a rotating lineup, at one point including guitarist Joe Pesci, who would later become famous as an actor rather than as a musician, but the core membership was a trio of vocalists -- Joey Dee, David Brigati, and Larry Vernieri, all of whom would take lead vocals. They were one of the few interracial bands of the time, and the music they performed was a stripped-down version of R&B, with an organ as the dominant instrument -- the kind of thing that would later get known as garage rock or frat rock.   Greenberg signed the Starliters to Scepter Records, and they released a couple of singles on Scepter, produced and written like much of the material on Scepter by Luther Dixon:   [Excerpt: Joey Dee and the Starliters, "Shimmy Baby"]   Neither of their singles on Scepter was particularly successful, but they became a popular live act around New Jersey, and got occasional gigs at venues in New York. They played a three-day weekend at a seedy working-class Mafia-owned bar called the Peppermint Lounge, in Manhattan. Their shows there were so successful that they got a residency there, and became the house band. Soon the tiny venue -- which had a capacity of about two hundred people -- was packed, largely with the band's fans from New Jersey -- the legal drinking age in New Jersey was twenty-one, while in New York it was eighteen, so a lot of eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds from New Jersey would make the journey.   As Joey Dee and the Starliters were just playing covers of chart hits for dancing, of course they played "The Twist" and "Let's Twist Again", and of course these audiences would dance the Twist to them. But that was happening in a million dingy bars and clubs up and down the country, with nobody caring. The idea that anyone would care about a tiny, dingy, bad-smelling bar and the cover band that played it was a nonsense.   Until it wasn't.   Because the owners of the Peppermint Lounge decided that they wanted a little publicity for their club, and they hired a publicist, who in turn got in touch with a company called Celebrity Services. What Celebrity Services did was, for a fee, they would get some minor celebrity or other to go to a venue and have a drink or a meal, and they would let the gossip columnists know about it, so the venue would then get a mention in the newspapers. Normally this would be one or two passing mentions, and nothing further would happen.   But this time it did. A couple of mentions in the society columns somehow intrigued enough people that some more celebrities started dropping in. The club was quite close to Broadway, and so a few of the stars of Broadway started popping in to see what the fuss was about. And then more stars started popping in to see what the other stars had been popping in for. Noel Coward started cruising the venue looking for rough trade, Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe, and Tallulah Bankhead were regulars, Norman Mailer danced the Twist with the granddaughter of Lord Beaverbrook, and Tennessee Williams and even Greta Garbo turned up, all to either dance to Joey Dee and the Starliters or to watch the younger people dancing to them. There were even rumours, which turned out to be false, that Jackie Kennedy had gone to the Peppermint Lounge – though she did apparently enjoy dancing the Twist herself.   The Peppermint Lounge became a sensation, and the stories all focussed on the dance these people were doing. "The Twist" reentered the charts, eighteen months after it had first come out, and Morris Levy sprang into action. Levy wanted a piece of this new Twist thing, and since he didn't have Chubby Checker, he was going to get the next best thing. He signed Joey Dee and the Starliters to Roulette Records, and got Henry Glover in to produce them.   Henry Glover is a figure who we really didn't mention as much as we should have in the first fifty or so episodes of the podcast. He'd played trumpet with Lucky Millinder, and he'd produced most of the artists on King Records in the late forties and fifties, including Wynonie Harris, Bill Doggett, and James Brown. He'd produced Little Willie John's version of "Fever", and wrote "Drown in My Own Tears", which had become a hit for Ray Charles.   Glover had also produced Hank Ballard's original version of "The Twist", and now he was assigned to write a Twist song for Joey Dee and the Starliters. His song, "Peppermint Twist", became their first single on Roulette:   [Excerpt: Joey Dee and the Starliters, "Peppermint Twist"]   "Peppermint Twist" went to number one, and Chubby Checker's version of "The Twist" went back to number one, becoming the only record ever to do so during the rock and roll era. In fact, Checker's record, on its reentry, became so popular that as recently as 2018 Billboard listed it as the *all-time* number one record on the Hot One Hundred.   The Twist was a massive sensation, but it had moved first from working-class black adults, to working-class white teenagers, to young middle-class white adults, and now to middle-aged and elderly rich white people who thought it was the latest "in" thing. And so, of course, it stopped being the cool in thing with the teenagers, almost straight away. If you're young and rebellious, you don't want to be doing the same thing that your grandmother's favourite film star from when she was a girl is doing.   But it took a while for that disinterest on the part of the teenagers to filter through to the media, and in the meantime there were thousands of Twist cash-in records. There was a version of "Waltzin' Matilda" remade as "Twistin' Matilda", the Chipmunks recorded "The Alvin Twist". The Dovells, a group on Cameo Parkway who had had a hit with "The Bristol Stomp", recorded "Bristol Twistin' Annie", which managed to be a sequel not only to "The Twist", but to their own "The Bristol Stomp" and to Hank Ballard's earlier "Annie" recordings:   [Excerpt: The Dovells, "Bristol Twistin' Annie"]   There were Twist records by Bill Haley, Neil Sedaka, Duane Eddy... almost all of these were terrible records, although we will, in a future episode, look at one actually good Twist single.   The Twist craze proper started in November 1961, and by December there were already two films out in the cinemas. Hey! Let's Twist! starred Joey Dee and the Starliters in a film which portrayed the Peppermint Lounge as a family-run Italian restaurant rather than a Mafia-run bar, and featured Joe Pesci in a cameo that was his first film role. Twist Around the Clock starred Chubby Checker and took a whole week to make. As well as Checker, it featured Dion, and the Marcels, trying desperately to have another hit after "Blue Moon":   [Excerpt: The Marcels, "Merry Twistmas”]   Twist Around The Clock was an easy film to make because Sam Kurtzman, who produced it, had produced several rock films in the fifties, including Rock Around the Clock. He got the writer of that film to retype his script over a weekend, so it talked about twisting instead of rocking, and starred Chubby Checker instead of Bill Haley. As Kurtzman had also made Bill Haley's second film, Don't Knock The Rock, so Checker's second film became Don't Knock the Twist.   Checker also appeared in a British film, It's Trad, Dad!, which we talked about last week. That was a cheap trad jazz cash-in, but at the last minute they decided to rework it so it included Twist music as well as trad, so the director, Richard Lester, flew to the USA for a couple of days to film Checker and a couple of other artists miming to their records, which was then intercut with footage of British teenagers dancing, to make it look like they were dancing to Checker.   Of course, the Twist craze couldn't last forever, but Chubby Checker managed a good few years of making dance-craze singles, and he married Catharina Lodders, who had been Miss World 1962, in 1964. Rather amazingly for a marriage between a rock star and a beauty queen, they remain married to this day, nearly sixty years later.   Checker's last big hit came in 1965, by which point the British Invasion had taken over the American charts so comprehensively that Checker was recording "Do the Freddie", a song about the dance that Freddie Garrity of Freddie and the Dreamers did on stage:   [Excerpt: Chubby Checker, "Do the Freddie"]   In recent decades, Checker has been very bitter about his status. He's continued a career of sorts, even scoring a novelty hit in the late eighties with a hip-hop remake of "The Twist" with The Fat Boys, but for a long time his most successful records were unavailable. Cameo-Parkway was bought in the late sixties by Allen Klein, a music industry executive we'll be hearing more of, more or less as a tax writeoff, and between 1975 and 2005 there was no legal way to get any of the recordings on that label, as they went out of print and weren't issued on CD, so Checker didn't get the royalties he could have been getting from thirty years of nostalgia compilation albums. Recent interviews show that Checker is convinced he is the victim of an attempt to erase him from rock and roll history, and believes he deserves equal prominence with Elvis and the Beatles. He believes his lack of recognition is down to racism, as he married a white woman, and has protested outside the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at his lack of induction. Whatever one's view of the artistic merits of his work, it's sad that someone so successful now feels so overlooked.   But the Twist fad, once it died, left three real legacies. One was a song we'll be looking at in a few months, and the other two came from Joey Dee and the Starliters. The Young Rascals, a group who had a series of hits from 1965 to 1970, started out as the instrumentalists in the 1964 lineup of Joey Dee and the Starliters before breaking out to become their own band, and a trio called Ronnie and the Relatives made their first appearances at the Peppermint Lounge, singing backing vocals and dancing behind the Starliters. They later changed their name to The Ronettes, and we'll be hearing more from them later.   The Twist was the last great fad of the pre-Beatles sixties. That it left so little of a cultural mark says a lot about the changes that were to come, and which would sweep away all memory of the previous few years...

Antes de construir la Apollo Sound, antes de lanzarse al mundo Fania, antes de entrar en International, Roberto Roena se presentó en sociedad como solista al frente de la orquesta Los Megatones, una súper orquesta que más parecía una All Stars. Bueno, si el productor era Al Santiago, tampoco era de extrañar. El álbum se tituló Se Pone Bueno/It Gets Better, y fue hecho para Alegre Records, ya en manos de Branston Music. Por eso salió también publicado por Tico Records y fue licenciado por Roulette Records. Sin embargo, no pasó de allí y cada uno de sus integrantes iniciaría un camino distinto en la música. Con la ayuda de Carlos Durán de Sandunga Radio, esta es su historia en La Hora Faniática.

With a new album, a radio show on SiriusXM, and a movie deal in the works for his thrilling autobiography Me, The Mob, and The Music, Tommy James is very much still alive and rockin.’ There were some close calls, though, brought on by drug addiction, a gun obsession, and his unwitting ties to New York’s Genovese crime family. Looking back at his sensational, decades-long career as the leader of The Shondells, Tommy discusses these stories and more with Steve in this episode of What’s Ahead.

In this new show, Tommy James, lead singer of the rock group Tommy James & The Shondells, discusses his hit songs, his rise to fame, and how he dealt with his tumultuous association with Roulette Records and the dark side of the music industry. We discuss his brand new autobiography, “Me, the Mob, and the Music.”

Taxicab Samurais were a ska punk band made up of members Dave, Dan, Chris, Mark, Mike and Roman. They were influenced by Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Youth of Today, Slapstick, Suicide Machines, Bosstones, LTJ, H2O, Face to Face. I asked Dave Flores if he’d grace the podcast with his words and he agreed. Here’s what we talk about - The North Jersey Pop Punk facebook group His daily life with Robert Heiner of Humble Beginnings His first band called Urine What made them go the Ska route Back to the beach introducing Ska to us Being courted by Some Records His uncle hand in Roulette Records became Pinball The demo he still owes Joe Pulito Ben from Random Task The benefit of compilations What was the dynamic like in the band Razza Jon bigwigs influence on Daves facial hair The Face to Face, Suicide Machines Show at Irving Plaza Getting merchandise printed on Workshirts The Tuesday Broadways West Orange Show The 2000 flushes incident The throw down at West Orange And a ton more Before we being, mark your calendars for July 21 at the Debonair Music hall in Teaneck NJ my old band Lanemeyer will be sharing the stage with our buddies Humble Beginnings and Jettison. Pre sale tickets are currently available for $15 and then $20 at the door. You can find them at thiswasthescene.com. Go there, scroll down and click on the purple button that says CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE TICKETS. We’ll also be throwing an after party until 2 am at Debonair once shows is over. It should be swell As always, thank you to the people who’ve donated to the podcast. If you’d like to do so just go to thiswasthescene.com and send whatever you’d like. It helps me with the $20/month to keep this thing live. I’m still in the process of designing shirts to sell to help keep this thing alive so keep checking the this was the scene facebook page for updates.

Welcome everyone to This Was The Scene, the podcast that takes a look back at the late 90s / early 2000 Nj Jersey Punk scene, I am your host, Mike Doyle.   NJ Joystick was a punk/hardcore band that blended shades of old emo and pop punk producing catchy, fast, and energetic songs that compare to the likes of fellow NJ legends, Lifetime. The line up consisted of Brett, Jay, the Pat and almighty Dan.   The band released a 4-song EP called …A Mile In Change in 1997 on Roulette Records before it became Pinball, and followed up in 1998 with their full length LP, New Song For The Ride, on Annoyance Records (www.annoyances.com).   These guys were always a blast to watch live because they just showed up and had fun. I reached out to Brett to see if he’d like to give me some dirt and he responded with “Would love to!” He then reached out to Jay who was also down to be on the podcast and this is what we talked about:   What were all of us really look for in the scene Jay’s superpower memory with jersey geography Where did the Joystick name come from Where their first demo was recorded How fast did they typically write songs How we mapped out Jersey because of going to shows The backyard show where the Dad yelled at everyone Dating girls while being in a band We break down the meaning behind some of the songs Would they be able to write a new Joystick song today Do they have songs that they could still record? And a ton more Before we being, mark your calendars for July 21 at the Debonair Music hall in Teaneck NJ my old band Lanemeyer will be sharing the stage with our buddies Humble Beginnings and Jettison. Pre sale tickets are currently available for $15 and then $20 at the door. You can find them at thiswasthescene.com. Go there, scroll down and click on the purple button that says CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE TICKETS. We’ll also be throwing an after party until 2 am at Debonair once shows is over. It should be swell As always, thank you to the people who’ve donated to the podcast. If you’d like to do so just go to thiswasthescene.com and send whatever you’d like. It helps me with the $20/month to keep this thing live. I’m still in the process of designing shirts to sell to help keep this thing alive so keep checking the this was the scene facebook page for updates.

Check out Rahn Anthoni as he interviews Jesse James (Mr. I Can Do Bad By Myself) Jesse James is a legend Most sources state that he was born in El Dorado, Arkansas,[1][2][3] but in one interview he gave his home state as nearby Louisiana.[4] He moved to the Bay Area in California as a young child. In his late teens, while working in a chemical factory, he began singing in nightclubs in Richmond, and was given his stage name by a compere who struggled to announce his real name.[2]Initially credited as Jessie James, he recorded several singles in the early 1960s on the Shirley label before moving to the Hit label where some of his recordings featured guitar by Sly Stewart (later Sly Stone). His first commercial success came in 1967 when one of his recordings for Hit, "Believe In Me Baby", was reissued by 20th Century Fox Records, and reached #42 on the Billboard R&B chart and #92 on the pop chart.[3] The song was credited to Jesse James & the Dynamic Four, was produced by Jesse Mason Jr., and was co-written by James with Sugar Pie DeSanto, Shena Demell, and Jesse Anderson.[1][5]Later recordings for 20th Century Fox, to which he was signed by Hosea Wilson,[4] failed to chart, but he released a self-titled LP on the label in 1968, also produced by Mason.[1][6] After one single on Uni, he set up his own label, Zea, distributed by Roulette Records. His first single for the new label, the self-penned "Don't Nobody Want To Get Married", reached #18 on the R&B chart in 1970, and its follow-up, "I Need You Baby", reached #47 R&B.[3] After Zea's distribution deal ended, he re-launched the label as Zay, and had another R&B hit (#25) with his version of "At Last", arranged and produced by Willie Hoskins and previously a hit for Etta James.[3][1] In 1974, he returned to the 20th Century label,[2] and the following year had a minor R&B hit (#73) with "If You Want a Love Affair".[3]He continued to record for various labels through the 1970s and 1980s, and his final chart success came in 1987, when "I Can Do Bad By Myself", on the TTED label, reached #61 on the R&B chart.[3] He released one album on TTED, It Takes One To Know One (credited to Mr. Jessie James), followed by several on Gunsmoke, for whom he signed in 1988.[4] His first album on Gunsmoke, I Can Do Bad By Myself (1988), included a collaboration with Harvey Scales, and was followed by Looking Back (1990). He has continued to release albums on Gunsmoke, including Operator Please Put Me Through (1993), It Just Don't Feel The Same (1997), Versatility (1998), It's Not So Bad After All (2006), Get In Touch With Me (2009), Do Not Disturb (2012), and I Lost My Baby On Facebook (2014).[2][1]

My guest this week is the legendary rockabilly singer and bandleader, Ronnie Hawkins. I grew up knowing of Ronnie through his electrifying appearance in The Band's "The Last Waltz" movie, but as I learned more about the history, came to realize his importance as an artist in his own right, but also his abilities as a bandleader and talent scout. Like John Mayall did in the British blues scene, Ronnie could find the best players hidden away in remote corners, nurture them and bring them together like he did for one of the greatest bands ever, The Band (known originally as The Hawks)!  In 1958 Ronnie released his first hit “Hey, Bo Diddley”. This was followed by "Marylou", which turned Hawkins into a teenage idol. Hawkins, an Arkansas native, started touring in Canada, and with an exploding rockabilly and Rock & Roll scene in Toronto and around more rural Ontario, Ronnie decided to stay. In 1959, Morris Levy signed him to Roulette Records for five years and tried to lure him back to the United States but Hawkins had fallen in love with Canada and didn't want to leave his new home. The membership of his band, The Hawks, kept changing as the talent flowed in and out, but the name stayed the same. Aside from The Band, there was another incarnation that became Janis Joplin's Full Tilt Boogie Band, and another Robbie Lane and the Disciples.  Other famous Hawk alumni include David Clayton Thomas of Blood Sweat and Tears, actor Beverly D'Angelo, musician Lawrence Gowan, and fellow Canadian Music Hall of Fame inductees Burton Cummings and David Foster. It was great to have a chance to hear these stories first-hand, have lots of laughs, and learn new things about a key piece of Rock and Roll history. Enjoy my conversation with Ronnie Hawkins, and please subscribe to the podcast for free on iTunes!