Podcast appearances and mentions of ruby baby

Rock and roll icon Dion DiMucci joins us for this week's episode of You Are What You Read. Dion was the lead singer of Dion and the Belmonts and a prominent solo artist with signature hits, “Runaround Sue”, “The Wanderer”, “Ruby Baby”, and “Lovers Who Wander”. In 1989, he was inducted by our good friend Stevie Van Zandt into the Rock n' Roll Hall of Fame with The Rolling Stones and is one of only two artists (along with Bob Dylan) to be on the cover of The Beatles Classic—Sgt. Pepper's. He joins us this week with his memoir, DION: THE ROCK AND ROLL PHILOSOPHER. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rock 'n Roll Hall of Famer Dion is Neil Scott's special guest in this edition of RC2C. They discuss life, recovery, faith, and music. This is Dion's second visit to RC2C, the first was back in 2007, 18 years ago when RC2C was on terrestrial radio.  Dion's greatest hits include - Where or When, Teenager in Love, Runaround Sue, The Wanderer, Ruby Baby, Teenager in Love, Abraham, Martin & John, and many others.  Listen to the 2007 edited interview, which contains musical clips from his many hits, as well as stories about his music and his recovery                            https://soundcloud.com/neil-scott-176065967/edited-rc2c-show-2007-featuring-an-interview-with-dion Here is a link to two of Dion's latest music videos New York Minute                                                              https://youtu.be/KUcrSr8ctp0?si=AsNG-PmtKa34ufy3 Mama Said                                                                       https://youtu.be/CgrS6st2vJI?si=VzNTn77Sp2nQlqGl And be sure to check out the brand new book: Dion- The Rock 'n Roll Philosopher, Conversations on Life, Recovery, Faith and Music                     https://www.amazon.com/Dion-Rock-Roll-Philosopher-DiMucci/dp/1493088025 And finally - an interesting excerpt from Dion's audiobook, in which he describes an encounter with legendary music producer Phil Spector and how Dion's recovery played a big role in defusing a rough situation.                        https://soundcloud.com/neil-scott-176065967/story-from-dions-audio-book  

Temporada 06 | Episodio 19 de Mi Lado V | Radio Fecha de emisión: 21-mayo-2024 Título: Marítimo Protagonista: Ezequiel Ortego Tema 'Vinventions': "Bembe Pembe" by Chapadmaleta Tema 'Saint Felicien': "Ruby Baby" by Donald Fagen #Wine #Jazz

This week, our guest is Maxwell Flanders, a close friend of mine and pseudo-neighbor based in Los Angeles, California. He's a highly sought-after touring and session drummer who recently wrapped up touring with Lizzie McAlpine and is now preparing for a world tour with Luke Hemmings. I've admired Max's drumming for a long time; he plays with such creativity, and his selections today reflect why. I hope you enjoy learning about the five records that have influenced Maxwell Flanders into becoming the drummer he is today. Cheers! MAX'S BIG FAT FIVE - Album - 1 Artist - The Beatles Release Year - 2000 Key Track(s) - Ticket to Ride, Paperback Writer, The Ballad of John and Yoko Drummer - Ringo Star - Album - The Nightfly Artist - Donald Fagen Release Year - 1982 Key Track(s) - Ruby Baby, The Goodbye Look Drummer - Jeff Porcaro - Album - Stuff Artist - Stuff Release Year - 1976 Key Track(s) - Foots, (Do You) Want Some of This, Happy Farms Drummer - Steve Gadd - Album - Tom Scott and the L.A. Express Artist - Tom Scott Release Year - 1974 Key Track(s) - Bless My Soul, Sneakin' In the Back, Nunya Drummer - John Guerin - Album - Wrecking Ball Artist - Emmylou Harris Release Year - 1995 Key Track(s) - Where Will I Be Drummer - Brian Blade For more information on Big Fat Snare Drum, check out www.bigfatsnaredrum.com and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok.

Dion DiMucci better known as Dion, is a Rock and Roll Hall Famer who's career spans 6 decades. And he's still rockin' and a rollin'.  Before there was The Beatles or The Rolling Stones, Dion was one of the most prominent rock and roll performers of the pre-British Invasion era. Initially the lead singer of the vocal group Dion and the Belmonts, he then embarked on a solo career, he had 39 Top 40 hits in the late 1950s and early 1960s as a solo performer, or with the Belmonts and the Del-Satins. He is best remembered for his signature hit songs "Runaround Sue", "The Wanderer", "Ruby Baby" and "Lovers Who Wander", among others. During the 1980s, Dion produced several Christian albums, winning a GMA Dove Award in 1984 for the album I Put Away My Idols. The Grammy-nominated artist, Dion was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989 along wit The Rolling Stones and Otis Redding. In 2002, Dion was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame for "Runaround Sue”. Even a musical based on Dion's life, The Wanderer debuted in 2021. Telling a story of transformation and personal redemption. Now, he has his 42nd album debuting called Dion and Girl Friends, a rockin' album you've got to hear. Ladies and gentlemen, let's welcome THE rock and roll legendary icon, hey he's rock and roll royalty. The one and the only DION to the show! #rockmusic #bluesmusic #brucespringsteen #billygibbons #jeffbeck #paulsimon #joebonamassa #susantedeski #newmusic #newrelease #newalbum #bobdylan #tobykeith 

Dion DiMucci better known as Dion, is a Rock and Roll Hall Famer who's career spans 6 decades. And he's still rockin' and a rollin'.  Before there was The Beatles or The Rolling Stones, Dion was one of the most prominent rock and roll performers of the pre-British Invasion era. Initially the lead singer of the vocal group Dion and the Belmonts, he then embarked on a solo career, he had 39 Top 40 hits in the late 1950s and early 1960s as a solo performer, or with the Belmonts and the Del-Satins. He is best remembered for his signature hit songs "Runaround Sue", "The Wanderer", "Ruby Baby" and "Lovers Who Wander", among others. During the 1980s, Dion produced several Christian albums, winning a GMA Dove Award in 1984 for the album I Put Away My Idols. The Grammy-nominated artist, Dion was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989 along wit The Rolling Stones and Otis Redding. In 2002, Dion was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame for "Runaround Sue”. Even a musical based on Dion's life, The Wanderer debuted in 2021. Telling a story of transformation and personal redemption. Now, he has his 42nd album debuting called Dion and Girl Friends, a rockin' album you've got to hear. Ladies and gentlemen, let's welcome THE rock and roll legendary icon, hey he's rock and roll royalty. The one and the only DION to the show! #rockmusic #bluesmusic #brucespringsteen #billygibbons #jeffbeck #paulsimon #joebonamassa #susantedeski #newmusic #newrelease #newalbum #bobdylan #tobykeith 

  | Paul Desmond  | Live at Bourbon St | Oscar Peterson  | You look good to me | Joshua Redman  | Jazz Crimes | Sara Tavares  | Balance | Sao Paolo Ska Jazz  | Chemical | Nostalgia 77  | Dreamers Dance | Trio Bruxo  | Electric Variation | Donald Fagen  | Ruby Baby

RockerMike and Rob discuss Dion DiMucci. Dion Francis DiMucci (born July 18, 1939),[2] better known mononymously as Dion, is an American singer and songwriter whose music has incorporated elements of doo-wop, rock, R&B and blues. Initially as lead singer of Dion and the Belmonts, and then in his solo career, he was one of the most popular American rock and roll performers of the pre-British Invasion era. He had 39 Top 40 hits in the late 1950s and early 1960s as a solo performer, with the Belmonts or with the Del-Satins. He is best remembered for the singles "Runaround Sue", "The Wanderer", "Ruby Baby" and "Lovers Who Wander", among other hits. https://diondimucci.com/ https://amp.theguardian.com/music/2020/jun/16/dion-dimucci-80-interview-blues-with-friends https://www.facebook.com/OfficialDion?__cmr=1&refsrc=deprecated&_rdr https://music.apple.com/au/artist/dion-dimucci/466428 https://www.rockhall.com/inductees/dion Please follow us on Youtube,Facebook,Instagram,Twitter,Patreon and at www.gettinglumpedup.com https://linktr.ee/RobRossi Get your T-shirt at https://www.prowrestlingtees.com/gettinglumpedup And https://www.bonfire.com/store/getting-lumped-up/ https://app.hashtag.expert/?fpr=roberto-rossi80 https://dc2bfnt-peyeewd4slt50d2x1b.hop.clickbank.net https://8bcded2xph1jdsb8mqp8th3y0n.hop.clickbank.net/?cbpage=nb Subscribe to the channel and hit the like button --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/rob-rossi/support https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/getting-lumped-up-with-rob-rossi/id1448899708 https://open.spotify.com/show/00ZWLZaYqQlJji1QSoEz7a https://www.patreon.com/Gettinglumpedup #musicproduction #musicvideo #musicians #musicartist #musiclover #musicphotography #musician #musicislife #musicindustry #music #musicproducer #musiclife --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/rob-rossi/support

Ruby Baby by Dickey LeeSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/back-story-song/exclusive-contentAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

01 Morning Dance - Spyro Gyra 02 Bridge Over Troubled Water - Kirk Whalum 03 Babylon Sisters - Steely Dan 04 Rock Steady - Richard Elliot 05 Ruby Baby - Donald Fagen 06 Hey Joe - Philippe Chrétien & Markus Fritzsche 07 Mercy Mercy Mercy - Brian Bromberg 08 In A Sentimental Mood - Mark Maxwell 09 L'ete Indien - Marc Antoine 10 Water To Drink - Lee Ritenour 11 Something - Bob Baldwin

Dickey Lee began his career in the 1950s in Memphis during the birth of rock and roll recording in the legendary Sam Phillips' Sun Studios rubbing elbows with Elvis, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis and other legends. In the early 1960s, Dickey became a rock and roll star performing several chart topping songs including some notable “teenage tragedy” songs from the era. He migrated to Nashville where he teamed up with many writers including legends Allen Reynolds and Bob McDill authoring or co-writing a string of country hits. In Nashville, he found his home and has had over 30 chart topping songs including 8 number ones earning Dickey induction into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1995. His songs have been recorded by music legends including Elvis Presley, George Jones, George Strait, Reba McIntyre, Emmy Lou Harris, Anne Murray, Connie Francis and many others.  In this episode Dickey discusses his hit songs “She Thinks I Still Care,” “Dream Boy,” “Patches,” “I Saw Linda Yesterday,” “Ruby Baby,” “Memphis Beat,” “I've Been Around Enough To Know,” “In A Different Light,” “You're The First Time I've Thought About Leaving,” “I'll Be Leaving Alone,” “The Door Is Always Open,” and “Keeper Of The Stars.”Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/back-story-song/exclusive-contentAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Episode seventy-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “There Goes My Baby” by the Drifters, and how a fake record label, a band sacked for drunkenness, and a kettledrum player who couldn’t play led to a genre-defining hit. 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 “Rebel Rouser” by Duane Eddy Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.  I’m not going to recommend a compilation this week, for reasons I mention in the episode itself. There are plenty available, none of them as good as they should be. The episode on the early career of the Drifters is episode seventeen.  My main resource in putting this episode together was Marv Goldberg’s website, and his excellent articles on both the early- and late-period Drifters, Bill Pinkney’s later Original Drifters, the Five Crowns, and Ben E. King.  Lonely Avenue, a biography of Doc Pomus by Alex Halberstadt, helped me with the information on Pomus. Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz tells Leiber and Stoller’s side of the story well. And Bill Millar’s book on the Drifters, while it is more a history of 50s vocal group music generally using them as a focus than a biography of the group, contains some interesting material.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A quick note about this one, before I start. As we’ll see in this episode, there have been many, many, lineups of the Drifters over the years, with many different people involved. One problem with that is that there have been lots of compilations put out under the Drifters name, featuring rerecorded versions of their hits, often involving nobody who was on the original record. Indeed, there have been so many of these compilations, and people putting together hits compilations, even for major labels, have been so sloppy, that I can’t find a single compilation of the Drifters’ recordings that doesn’t have one or two dodgy remakes on replacing the originals. I’ve used multiple sources for the recordings I’m excerpting here, and in most cases I’m pretty sure that the tracks I’m excerpting are the original versions. But particularly when it comes to songs that aren’t familiar, I may have ended up using a rerecording rather than the original. Anyway, on with the story… [Excerpt: The Drifters, “There Goes My Baby”] It’s been more than a year since we last properly checked in with the Drifters, one of the great R&B vocal groups of all time, so I’ll quickly bring you up to speed — if you want to hear the full story so far, episode seventeen, on “Money Honey”, gives you all the details. The Drifters had originally formed as the backing group for Clyde McPhatter, who had been the lead singer of Billy Ward and the Dominoes in the early fifties, when that group had had their biggest success. The original lineup of the group had all been sacked before they even released a record, and then a couple of members of the lineup who recorded their first big hits became ill or died, but the group had released two massive hits — “Money Honey” and “Such a Night”, both with McPhatter on lead vocals: [Excerpt: Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, “Such a Night”] But then McPhatter had been drafted, and the group’s manager, George Treadwell, had got in a member of the original lineup, David Baughan, to replace McPhatter, as Baughan could sound a little like McPhatter. When McPhatter was discharged from the army, he decided to sell the group name to Treadwell, and the Drifters became employees of Treadwell, to be hired and fired at his discretion. This group went through several lineup changes, some of which we’ll look at later in this episode, but they kept making records that sounded a bit like the ones they’d been making with Clyde McPhatter, even after Baughan also left the group. But there was a big difference behind the scenes. Those early records had been produced by Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler, and had usually been arranged by Jesse Stone, the man who’d written “Money Honey” and many other early rock and roll hits, like “Shake, Rattle, and Roll”. But a little while after Baughan left the group, Ertegun and Wexler asked Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller to start working with them. Leiber and Stoller, you might remember, were working with a *lot* of people at the time. They’d come over to Atlantic Records with a non-exclusive contract to write and produce for the label, and while their main project at Atlantic was with the Coasters, they were also producing records for people like Ruth Brown, as well as also working on records for Elvis and others at RCA. But they took on the Drifters as well, and started producing a string of minor hits for them, including “Ruby Baby” and “Fools Fall In Love”. Those hits went top ten on the R&B chart, but did little or nothing in the pop market. [Excerpt: The Drifters, “Fools Fall In Love”] That song, which had Johnny Moore on lead vocals, was the last big hit for what we can think of as the “original” Drifters in some form. It came out in March 1957, and for the rest of the year they kept releasing singles, but nothing made the R&B charts at all, though a few did make the lower reaches of the Hot One Hundred. Throughout 1957, the group had been gaining and losing members. Bill Pinkney, who had been chosen by the other group members to be essentially their shop steward, had gone to Treadwell and asked for a raise in late 1956, and been promptly fired. He’d formed a group called the Flyers, with a new singer called Bobby Hendricks on lead. The Flyers recorded one single, “My Only Desire”: [Excerpt: the Flyers, “My Only Desire”] But then Tommy Evans, Pinkney’s replacement in the group, was fired, and Pinkney was brought back into the group. Hendricks thought that was the end of his career, but then a few days later Pinkney phoned him up — Johnny Moore was getting drafted, and Hendricks was brought into the group to take Moore’s place. But almost immediately after Hendricks joined the group, Pinkney once again asked for a raise, and was kicked out and Evans brought back in. Pinkney went off and made a record for Sam Phillips, with backing music overdubbed by Bill Justis: [Excerpt: Bill Pinkney, “After the Hop”] The group kept changing lineups, and there was only one session in 1958, which led to a horrible version of “Moonlight Bay”. Apparently, the session was run by Leiber and Stoller as an experiment (they would occasionally record old standards with the Coasters, so presumably they were seeing if the same thing would work with the Drifters), and several of the group’s members were drunk when they recorded it. They decided at the session that it was not going to be released, but then the next thing the group knew, it was out as their next single, with overdubs by a white vocal group, making it sound nothing like the Drifters at all: [Excerpt: The Drifters “Moonlight Bay”] Bobby Hendricks hated that recording session so much that he quit the group and went solo, going over to Sue Records, where he joined up with another former Drifter, Jimmy Oliver. Oliver wrote a song for Hendricks, “Itchy Twitchy Feeling”, and the Coasters sang the backup vocals for him, uncredited. That track went to number five on the R&B charts: [Excerpt: Bobby Hendricks, “Itchy Twitchy Feeling”] By this time, the Drifters were down to just three people — Gerhart Thrasher, Jimmy Milner, and Tommy Evans. They no longer had a lead singer, but they had a week’s worth of shows they were contracted to do, at the Harlem Apollo, on a show hosted by the DJ Doctor Jive. That show was headlined by Ray Charles, and also featured the Cookies, Solomon Burke, and a minor group called the Crowns, among several other acts. Treadwell was desperate, so he called Hendricks and Oliver and got them to return to the group just for one week, so they would have a lead vocalist. They both did return, though just as a favour. Then, at the end of the week’s residency, one of the group members got drunk and started shouting abuse at Doctor Jive, and at the owner of the Apollo. George Treadwell had had enough. He fired the entire group. Tommy Evans went on to join Charlie Fuqua’s version of the Ink Spots, and Bill Pinkney decided he wanted to get the old group back together. He got a 1955 lineup of the Drifters together — Pinkney, David Baughan, Gerhart Thrasher, and Andrew Thrasher. That group toured as The Original Drifters, and the group under that name would consist almost entirely of ex-members of the Drifters, with some coming or going, until 1968, when most of the group retired, while Pinkney carried on leading a group under that name until his death in 2007. But they couldn’t use that name on records. Instead they made records as the Harmony Grits: [Excerpt: The Harmony Grits, “I Could Have Told You”] and with ex-Drifter Johnny Moore singing lead, as a solo artist under the name Johnny Darrow: [Excerpt: Johnny Darrow, “Chew Tobacco Rag”] And with Bobby Hendricks singing lead, as the Sprites: [Excerpt: The Sprites, “My Picture”] But the reason they couldn’t call themselves the Drifters on their records is that George Treadwell owned the name, and he had hired a totally different group to tour and record under that name. The Crowns had their basis in a group called the Harmonaires, a street-corner group in New York. They had various members at first, but by the time they changed their name to the Five Crowns, they had stabilised on a lineup of Dock Green, Yonkie Paul, and three brothers — Papa, Nicky, and Sonny Boy Clark. The group were managed by Lover Patterson, who they believed was the manager of the Orioles, but was actually the Orioles’ valet. Nonetheless, Patterson did manage to get them signed to a small record label, Rainbow Records, where they released “You’re My Inspiration” in 1952: [Excerpt: The Five Crowns, “You’re My Inspiration”] The record label sent out a thousand copies of that single to one of their distributors, right at the point a truckers’ strike was called, and ended up having to send another thousand out by plane. That kind of thing sums up the kind of luck the Five Crowns would have for the next few years. Nothing they put out on Rainbow Records was any kind of a success, and in 1953 the group became the first act on a new label, Old Town Records — they actually met the owner of the label, Hy Weiss, in a waiting room, while they were waiting to audition for a different label. On Old Town they put out a couple of singles, starting with “You Could Be My Love”: [Excerpt: The Five Crowns, “You Could Be My Love”] But none of these singles were hits either, and the group were doing so badly that when Nicky Clark left the group, they couldn’t get another singer in to replace him at first — Lover Patterson stood on stage and mimed while the four remaining members sang, so there would still be five people in the Five Crowns. By 1955, the group had re-signed to Rainbow Records, now on their Riviera subsidiary, and they had gone through several further lineup changes. They now consisted of Yonkie Paul, Richard Lewis, Jesse Facing, Dock Green, and Bugeye Bailey. They put out one record on Riviera, “You Came To Me”: [Excerpt: The Five Crowns, “You Came to Me”] The group broke up shortly after that, and Dock Green put together a totally new lineup of the Five Crowns. That group signed to one of George Goldner’s labels, Gee, and released another single, and then they broke up. Green got together *another* lineup of the Five Crowns, made another record on another label, and then that group broke up too. They spent nearly two years without making a record, with constantly shifting lineups as people kept leaving and rejoining, and by the time they went into a studio again, they consisted of Charlie Thomas, Dock Green, Papa Clark, Elsbeary Hobbs, and a new tenor singer called Benjamin Earl Nelson, who hadn’t sung professionally before joining the group — he’d been working in a restaurant owned by his father, and Lover Patterson had heard him singing to himself while he was working and asked him to join the group. This lineup of the group, who were now calling themselves the Crowns rather than the Five Crowns, finally got a contract with a record label… or at least, it was sort of a record label. We’ve talked about Doc Pomus before, back in November, but as a brief recap — Pomus was a blues singer and songwriter, a white Jewish paraplegic whose birth name was Jerome Felder, who had become a blues shouter in the late forties: [Excerpt: Doc Pomus, “Send for the Doctor”] He had been working as a professional songwriter for a decade or so, and had written songs for people like Ray Charles, but the music he loved was hard bluesy R&B, and he didn’t understand the new rock and roll music at all. Other than writing “Young Blood”, which Leiber and Stoller had rewritten and made into a hit for the Coasters, he hadn’t written anything successful in quite some time. He’d recently started writing with a much younger man, Mort Shuman, who did understand rock and roll, and we heard one of the results of that last week — “Teenager in Love” by Dion and the Belmonts, which would be the start of a string of hits for them: [Excerpt: Dion and the Belmonts, “Teenager in Love”] But in 1958, that had not yet been released. Pomus’ wife had a baby on the way, and he was desperate for money. He was so desperate, he got involved in a scam. An old girlfriend introduced him to an acquaintance, a dance instructor named Fred Huckman. Huckman had recently married a rich old widow, and he wanted to get away from her during the day to sleep with other people. So Huckman decided he was going to become the owner of a record label, using his wife’s money to fund an office. The label was named R&B Records at Doc’s suggestion, and Doc was going to be the company’s president, while Mort was going to be the company’s shipping clerk. The company would have offices in 1650 Broadway, one of the buildings that these days gets lumped in when people talk about “the Brill Building”, though the actual Brill Building itself was a little way down the street at 1619. 1650 was still a prime music business location though, and the company’s office would let both Doc and Mort go and try to sell their songs to publishing companies and record labels. And they’d need to do this because R&B Records wasn’t going to put out any records at all. Doc and Mort’s actual job was that one of them had to be in the office at all times, so when Huckman’s wife phoned up, they could tell her that he’d just popped out, or was in a meeting, or something so she didn’t find out about his affairs. They lived off the scam for a little while, while writing songs, but eventually they started to get bored of doing nothing all day. And then Lucky Patterson brought the Crowns in. They didn’t realise that R&B Records wasn’t a real record label, and Pomus decided to audition them. When he did, he was amazed at how good they sounded. He decided that R&B Records was *going* to be a real record label, no matter what Huckman thought. He and Shuman wrote them a single in the style of the Coasters, and they got in the best session musicians in New York — people like King Curtis and Mickey Baker, who were old friends of Pomus — to play on it: [Excerpt: The Crowns, “Kiss and Make Up”] At first that record was completely unsuccessful, but then, rather amazingly, it started to climb in the charts, at least in Pittsburgh, where it became a local number one. It started to do better elsewhere as well, and it looked like the Crowns could have a promising career. And then one day Mrs. Huckman showed up at the office. Pomus tried to tell her that her husband had gone out and would be back later, but she insisted on waiting in the office, silently, all day. R&B Records closed the next day. But “Kiss and Make Up” had been a big enough success that the Crowns had ended up on that Doctor Jive show with the Drifters. And then when George Treadwell fired the Drifters, he immediately hired the Crowns — or at least, he hired four of them. Papa Clark had a drinking problem, and Treadwell was fed up of dealing with drunk singers. So from this point on the Drifters were Charlie Thomas, Dock Green, Elsbeary Hobbs, and Benjamin Nelson, who decided that he was going to take on a stage name and call himself Ben E. King. This new lineup of the group went out on tour for almost a year before going into the studio, and they were abysmal failures. Everywhere they went, promoters advertised their shows with photos of the old group, and then this new group of people came on stage looking and sounding nothing like the original Drifters. They were booed everywhere they went. They even caused problems for the other acts — at one show they nearly killed Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. Hawkins used to pop out of a coffin while performing “I Put A Spell on You”: [Excerpt: Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, “I Put a Spell on You”] The group were sometimes asked to carry the coffin onto the stage with Hawkins inside it, and one night Charlie Thomas accidentally nudged something and heard a click. What he didn’t realise was that Hawkins put matchbooks in the gap in the coffin lid, to stop it closing all the way — Thomas had knocked the coffin properly shut. The music started, and Hawkins tried to open the coffin, and couldn’t. He kept pushing, and the coffin wouldn’t open. Eventually, he rocked the coffin so hard that it fell off its stand and popped open, but if it hadn’t opened there was a very real danger that Hawkins could have asphyxiated. But something else happened on that tour — Ben E. King wrote a song called “There Goes My Baby”, which the group started to perform live. As they originally did it, it was quite a fast song, but when they finally got off the tour and went into the studio, Leiber and Stoller, who were going to be the producers for this new group just like they had been for the old group, decided to slow it down. They also decided that this was going to be a chance for them to experiment with some totally new production ideas. Stoller had become infatuated with a style called baion, a Brazillian musical style that is based on the same tresillo rhythm that a lot of New Orleans R&B is based on. If you don’t remember the tresillo rhythm, we talked about it a lot in episodes on Fats Domino and others, but it’s that “bom [pause] bom-bom [pause] bom [pause] bom-bom” rhythm. We’ve always been calling it the tresillo, but when people talk about the Drifters’ music they always follow Stoller’s lead and call it the baion rhythm, so that’s what we’ll do in future. They decided to use that rhythm, and also to use strings, which very few people had used on a rock and roll record before — this is an idea that several people seemed to have simultaneously, as we saw last week with Buddy Holly doing the same thing. It may, indeed, be that Leiber and Stoller had heard “It Doesn’t Matter Any More” and taken inspiration from it — Holly had died just over a month before the recording session for “There Goes My Baby”, and his single hit the top forty the same week that “There Goes My Baby” was recorded. Stoller sketched out some string lines, which were turned into full arrangements by an old classmate of his, Stan Applebaum, who had previously arranged for Lucky Millinder, and who had written a hit for Sarah Vaughan, who was married to Treadwell. Charlie Thomas was meant to sing lead on the track, but he just couldn’t get it right, and eventually it was decided to have King sing it instead, as he’d written the song. King tried to imitate the sound of Sam Cooke, but it came out sounding like no-one but King himself. Then, as a final touch, Leiber and Stoller decided to use a kettledrum on the track, rather than a normal drum kit. There was only one problem — the drummer they booked didn’t know how to change the pitch on the kettledrum using the foot pedal. So he just kept playing the same note throughout the song, even as the chords changed: [Excerpt: The Drifters, “There Goes My Baby”] When Leiber and Stoller took that to their bosses at Atlantic Records, they were horrified. Jerry Wexler said “It’s dog meat. You’ve wasted our money on an overpriced production that sounds like a radio caught between two stations. It’s a goddamn awful mess!” Ahmet Ertegun was a little more diplomatic, but still said that the record was unreleasable. But eventually he let them have a go at remixing it, and then the label stuck the record out, assuming it would do nothing. Instead, it went to number two on the charts, and became one of the biggest hits of 1959. Not only that, but it instantly opened up the possibilities for new ways of producing records. The new Drifters were a smash hit, and Leiber and Stoller were now as respected as producers as they already had been as songwriters. They got themselves a new office in the Brill Building, and they were on top of the world. But already there was a problem for the new Drifters, and that problem was named Lover Patterson. Rather than sign the Crowns to a management deal as a group, Patterson had signed them all as individuals, with separate contracts. And when he’d allowed George Treadwell to take over their management, he’d only sold the contracts for three of the four members. Ben E. King was still signed to Lover Patterson, rather than to George Treadwell. And Patterson decided that he was going to let King sing on the records, but he wasn’t going to let him tour with the group. So there was yet another lineup change for the Drifters, as they got in Johnnie Lee Williams to sing King’s parts on stage. Williams would sing one lead with the group in the studio, “If You Cry True Love, True Love”: [Excerpt: The Drifters, “If You Cry True Love, True Love”] But for the most part, King was the lead singer in the studio, and so there were five Drifters on the records, but only four on the road. But they were still having hits, and everybody seemed happy. And soon, they would all have the biggest hit of their careers, with a song that Doc Pomus had written with Mort Shuman, about his own wedding reception. We’ll hear more about that, and about Leiber and Stoller’s apprentice Phil Spector, when we return to the Drifters in a few weeks time.

Episode seventy-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “There Goes My Baby” by the Drifters, and how a fake record label, a band sacked for drunkenness, and a kettledrum player who couldn’t play led to a genre-defining hit. 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 “Rebel Rouser” by Duane Eddy Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.  I’m not going to recommend a compilation this week, for reasons I mention in the episode itself. There are plenty available, none of them as good as they should be. The episode on the early career of the Drifters is episode seventeen.  My main resource in putting this episode together was Marv Goldberg’s website, and his excellent articles on both the early- and late-period Drifters, Bill Pinkney’s later Original Drifters, the Five Crowns, and Ben E. King.  Lonely Avenue, a biography of Doc Pomus by Alex Halberstadt, helped me with the information on Pomus. Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz tells Leiber and Stoller’s side of the story well. And Bill Millar’s book on the Drifters, while it is more a history of 50s vocal group music generally using them as a focus than a biography of the group, contains some interesting material.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A quick note about this one, before I start. As we’ll see in this episode, there have been many, many, lineups of the Drifters over the years, with many different people involved. One problem with that is that there have been lots of compilations put out under the Drifters name, featuring rerecorded versions of their hits, often involving nobody who was on the original record. Indeed, there have been so many of these compilations, and people putting together hits compilations, even for major labels, have been so sloppy, that I can’t find a single compilation of the Drifters’ recordings that doesn’t have one or two dodgy remakes on replacing the originals. I’ve used multiple sources for the recordings I’m excerpting here, and in most cases I’m pretty sure that the tracks I’m excerpting are the original versions. But particularly when it comes to songs that aren’t familiar, I may have ended up using a rerecording rather than the original. Anyway, on with the story… [Excerpt: The Drifters, “There Goes My Baby”] It’s been more than a year since we last properly checked in with the Drifters, one of the great R&B vocal groups of all time, so I’ll quickly bring you up to speed — if you want to hear the full story so far, episode seventeen, on “Money Honey”, gives you all the details. The Drifters had originally formed as the backing group for Clyde McPhatter, who had been the lead singer of Billy Ward and the Dominoes in the early fifties, when that group had had their biggest success. The original lineup of the group had all been sacked before they even released a record, and then a couple of members of the lineup who recorded their first big hits became ill or died, but the group had released two massive hits — “Money Honey” and “Such a Night”, both with McPhatter on lead vocals: [Excerpt: Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, “Such a Night”] But then McPhatter had been drafted, and the group’s manager, George Treadwell, had got in a member of the original lineup, David Baughan, to replace McPhatter, as Baughan could sound a little like McPhatter. When McPhatter was discharged from the army, he decided to sell the group name to Treadwell, and the Drifters became employees of Treadwell, to be hired and fired at his discretion. This group went through several lineup changes, some of which we’ll look at later in this episode, but they kept making records that sounded a bit like the ones they’d been making with Clyde McPhatter, even after Baughan also left the group. But there was a big difference behind the scenes. Those early records had been produced by Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler, and had usually been arranged by Jesse Stone, the man who’d written “Money Honey” and many other early rock and roll hits, like “Shake, Rattle, and Roll”. But a little while after Baughan left the group, Ertegun and Wexler asked Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller to start working with them. Leiber and Stoller, you might remember, were working with a *lot* of people at the time. They’d come over to Atlantic Records with a non-exclusive contract to write and produce for the label, and while their main project at Atlantic was with the Coasters, they were also producing records for people like Ruth Brown, as well as also working on records for Elvis and others at RCA. But they took on the Drifters as well, and started producing a string of minor hits for them, including “Ruby Baby” and “Fools Fall In Love”. Those hits went top ten on the R&B chart, but did little or nothing in the pop market. [Excerpt: The Drifters, “Fools Fall In Love”] That song, which had Johnny Moore on lead vocals, was the last big hit for what we can think of as the “original” Drifters in some form. It came out in March 1957, and for the rest of the year they kept releasing singles, but nothing made the R&B charts at all, though a few did make the lower reaches of the Hot One Hundred. Throughout 1957, the group had been gaining and losing members. Bill Pinkney, who had been chosen by the other group members to be essentially their shop steward, had gone to Treadwell and asked for a raise in late 1956, and been promptly fired. He’d formed a group called the Flyers, with a new singer called Bobby Hendricks on lead. The Flyers recorded one single, “My Only Desire”: [Excerpt: the Flyers, “My Only Desire”] But then Tommy Evans, Pinkney’s replacement in the group, was fired, and Pinkney was brought back into the group. Hendricks thought that was the end of his career, but then a few days later Pinkney phoned him up — Johnny Moore was getting drafted, and Hendricks was brought into the group to take Moore’s place. But almost immediately after Hendricks joined the group, Pinkney once again asked for a raise, and was kicked out and Evans brought back in. Pinkney went off and made a record for Sam Phillips, with backing music overdubbed by Bill Justis: [Excerpt: Bill Pinkney, “After the Hop”] The group kept changing lineups, and there was only one session in 1958, which led to a horrible version of “Moonlight Bay”. Apparently, the session was run by Leiber and Stoller as an experiment (they would occasionally record old standards with the Coasters, so presumably they were seeing if the same thing would work with the Drifters), and several of the group’s members were drunk when they recorded it. They decided at the session that it was not going to be released, but then the next thing the group knew, it was out as their next single, with overdubs by a white vocal group, making it sound nothing like the Drifters at all: [Excerpt: The Drifters “Moonlight Bay”] Bobby Hendricks hated that recording session so much that he quit the group and went solo, going over to Sue Records, where he joined up with another former Drifter, Jimmy Oliver. Oliver wrote a song for Hendricks, “Itchy Twitchy Feeling”, and the Coasters sang the backup vocals for him, uncredited. That track went to number five on the R&B charts: [Excerpt: Bobby Hendricks, “Itchy Twitchy Feeling”] By this time, the Drifters were down to just three people — Gerhart Thrasher, Jimmy Milner, and Tommy Evans. They no longer had a lead singer, but they had a week’s worth of shows they were contracted to do, at the Harlem Apollo, on a show hosted by the DJ Doctor Jive. That show was headlined by Ray Charles, and also featured the Cookies, Solomon Burke, and a minor group called the Crowns, among several other acts. Treadwell was desperate, so he called Hendricks and Oliver and got them to return to the group just for one week, so they would have a lead vocalist. They both did return, though just as a favour. Then, at the end of the week’s residency, one of the group members got drunk and started shouting abuse at Doctor Jive, and at the owner of the Apollo. George Treadwell had had enough. He fired the entire group. Tommy Evans went on to join Charlie Fuqua’s version of the Ink Spots, and Bill Pinkney decided he wanted to get the old group back together. He got a 1955 lineup of the Drifters together — Pinkney, David Baughan, Gerhart Thrasher, and Andrew Thrasher. That group toured as The Original Drifters, and the group under that name would consist almost entirely of ex-members of the Drifters, with some coming or going, until 1968, when most of the group retired, while Pinkney carried on leading a group under that name until his death in 2007. But they couldn’t use that name on records. Instead they made records as the Harmony Grits: [Excerpt: The Harmony Grits, “I Could Have Told You”] and with ex-Drifter Johnny Moore singing lead, as a solo artist under the name Johnny Darrow: [Excerpt: Johnny Darrow, “Chew Tobacco Rag”] And with Bobby Hendricks singing lead, as the Sprites: [Excerpt: The Sprites, “My Picture”] But the reason they couldn’t call themselves the Drifters on their records is that George Treadwell owned the name, and he had hired a totally different group to tour and record under that name. The Crowns had their basis in a group called the Harmonaires, a street-corner group in New York. They had various members at first, but by the time they changed their name to the Five Crowns, they had stabilised on a lineup of Dock Green, Yonkie Paul, and three brothers — Papa, Nicky, and Sonny Boy Clark. The group were managed by Lover Patterson, who they believed was the manager of the Orioles, but was actually the Orioles’ valet. Nonetheless, Patterson did manage to get them signed to a small record label, Rainbow Records, where they released “You’re My Inspiration” in 1952: [Excerpt: The Five Crowns, “You’re My Inspiration”] The record label sent out a thousand copies of that single to one of their distributors, right at the point a truckers’ strike was called, and ended up having to send another thousand out by plane. That kind of thing sums up the kind of luck the Five Crowns would have for the next few years. Nothing they put out on Rainbow Records was any kind of a success, and in 1953 the group became the first act on a new label, Old Town Records — they actually met the owner of the label, Hy Weiss, in a waiting room, while they were waiting to audition for a different label. On Old Town they put out a couple of singles, starting with “You Could Be My Love”: [Excerpt: The Five Crowns, “You Could Be My Love”] But none of these singles were hits either, and the group were doing so badly that when Nicky Clark left the group, they couldn’t get another singer in to replace him at first — Lover Patterson stood on stage and mimed while the four remaining members sang, so there would still be five people in the Five Crowns. By 1955, the group had re-signed to Rainbow Records, now on their Riviera subsidiary, and they had gone through several further lineup changes. They now consisted of Yonkie Paul, Richard Lewis, Jesse Facing, Dock Green, and Bugeye Bailey. They put out one record on Riviera, “You Came To Me”: [Excerpt: The Five Crowns, “You Came to Me”] The group broke up shortly after that, and Dock Green put together a totally new lineup of the Five Crowns. That group signed to one of George Goldner’s labels, Gee, and released another single, and then they broke up. Green got together *another* lineup of the Five Crowns, made another record on another label, and then that group broke up too. They spent nearly two years without making a record, with constantly shifting lineups as people kept leaving and rejoining, and by the time they went into a studio again, they consisted of Charlie Thomas, Dock Green, Papa Clark, Elsbeary Hobbs, and a new tenor singer called Benjamin Earl Nelson, who hadn’t sung professionally before joining the group — he’d been working in a restaurant owned by his father, and Lover Patterson had heard him singing to himself while he was working and asked him to join the group. This lineup of the group, who were now calling themselves the Crowns rather than the Five Crowns, finally got a contract with a record label… or at least, it was sort of a record label. We’ve talked about Doc Pomus before, back in November, but as a brief recap — Pomus was a blues singer and songwriter, a white Jewish paraplegic whose birth name was Jerome Felder, who had become a blues shouter in the late forties: [Excerpt: Doc Pomus, “Send for the Doctor”] He had been working as a professional songwriter for a decade or so, and had written songs for people like Ray Charles, but the music he loved was hard bluesy R&B, and he didn’t understand the new rock and roll music at all. Other than writing “Young Blood”, which Leiber and Stoller had rewritten and made into a hit for the Coasters, he hadn’t written anything successful in quite some time. He’d recently started writing with a much younger man, Mort Shuman, who did understand rock and roll, and we heard one of the results of that last week — “Teenager in Love” by Dion and the Belmonts, which would be the start of a string of hits for them: [Excerpt: Dion and the Belmonts, “Teenager in Love”] But in 1958, that had not yet been released. Pomus’ wife had a baby on the way, and he was desperate for money. He was so desperate, he got involved in a scam. An old girlfriend introduced him to an acquaintance, a dance instructor named Fred Huckman. Huckman had recently married a rich old widow, and he wanted to get away from her during the day to sleep with other people. So Huckman decided he was going to become the owner of a record label, using his wife’s money to fund an office. The label was named R&B Records at Doc’s suggestion, and Doc was going to be the company’s president, while Mort was going to be the company’s shipping clerk. The company would have offices in 1650 Broadway, one of the buildings that these days gets lumped in when people talk about “the Brill Building”, though the actual Brill Building itself was a little way down the street at 1619. 1650 was still a prime music business location though, and the company’s office would let both Doc and Mort go and try to sell their songs to publishing companies and record labels. And they’d need to do this because R&B Records wasn’t going to put out any records at all. Doc and Mort’s actual job was that one of them had to be in the office at all times, so when Huckman’s wife phoned up, they could tell her that he’d just popped out, or was in a meeting, or something so she didn’t find out about his affairs. They lived off the scam for a little while, while writing songs, but eventually they started to get bored of doing nothing all day. And then Lucky Patterson brought the Crowns in. They didn’t realise that R&B Records wasn’t a real record label, and Pomus decided to audition them. When he did, he was amazed at how good they sounded. He decided that R&B Records was *going* to be a real record label, no matter what Huckman thought. He and Shuman wrote them a single in the style of the Coasters, and they got in the best session musicians in New York — people like King Curtis and Mickey Baker, who were old friends of Pomus — to play on it: [Excerpt: The Crowns, “Kiss and Make Up”] At first that record was completely unsuccessful, but then, rather amazingly, it started to climb in the charts, at least in Pittsburgh, where it became a local number one. It started to do better elsewhere as well, and it looked like the Crowns could have a promising career. And then one day Mrs. Huckman showed up at the office. Pomus tried to tell her that her husband had gone out and would be back later, but she insisted on waiting in the office, silently, all day. R&B Records closed the next day. But “Kiss and Make Up” had been a big enough success that the Crowns had ended up on that Doctor Jive show with the Drifters. And then when George Treadwell fired the Drifters, he immediately hired the Crowns — or at least, he hired four of them. Papa Clark had a drinking problem, and Treadwell was fed up of dealing with drunk singers. So from this point on the Drifters were Charlie Thomas, Dock Green, Elsbeary Hobbs, and Benjamin Nelson, who decided that he was going to take on a stage name and call himself Ben E. King. This new lineup of the group went out on tour for almost a year before going into the studio, and they were abysmal failures. Everywhere they went, promoters advertised their shows with photos of the old group, and then this new group of people came on stage looking and sounding nothing like the original Drifters. They were booed everywhere they went. They even caused problems for the other acts — at one show they nearly killed Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. Hawkins used to pop out of a coffin while performing “I Put A Spell on You”: [Excerpt: Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, “I Put a Spell on You”] The group were sometimes asked to carry the coffin onto the stage with Hawkins inside it, and one night Charlie Thomas accidentally nudged something and heard a click. What he didn’t realise was that Hawkins put matchbooks in the gap in the coffin lid, to stop it closing all the way — Thomas had knocked the coffin properly shut. The music started, and Hawkins tried to open the coffin, and couldn’t. He kept pushing, and the coffin wouldn’t open. Eventually, he rocked the coffin so hard that it fell off its stand and popped open, but if it hadn’t opened there was a very real danger that Hawkins could have asphyxiated. But something else happened on that tour — Ben E. King wrote a song called “There Goes My Baby”, which the group started to perform live. As they originally did it, it was quite a fast song, but when they finally got off the tour and went into the studio, Leiber and Stoller, who were going to be the producers for this new group just like they had been for the old group, decided to slow it down. They also decided that this was going to be a chance for them to experiment with some totally new production ideas. Stoller had become infatuated with a style called baion, a Brazillian musical style that is based on the same tresillo rhythm that a lot of New Orleans R&B is based on. If you don’t remember the tresillo rhythm, we talked about it a lot in episodes on Fats Domino and others, but it’s that “bom [pause] bom-bom [pause] bom [pause] bom-bom” rhythm. We’ve always been calling it the tresillo, but when people talk about the Drifters’ music they always follow Stoller’s lead and call it the baion rhythm, so that’s what we’ll do in future. They decided to use that rhythm, and also to use strings, which very few people had used on a rock and roll record before — this is an idea that several people seemed to have simultaneously, as we saw last week with Buddy Holly doing the same thing. It may, indeed, be that Leiber and Stoller had heard “It Doesn’t Matter Any More” and taken inspiration from it — Holly had died just over a month before the recording session for “There Goes My Baby”, and his single hit the top forty the same week that “There Goes My Baby” was recorded. Stoller sketched out some string lines, which were turned into full arrangements by an old classmate of his, Stan Applebaum, who had previously arranged for Lucky Millinder, and who had written a hit for Sarah Vaughan, who was married to Treadwell. Charlie Thomas was meant to sing lead on the track, but he just couldn’t get it right, and eventually it was decided to have King sing it instead, as he’d written the song. King tried to imitate the sound of Sam Cooke, but it came out sounding like no-one but King himself. Then, as a final touch, Leiber and Stoller decided to use a kettledrum on the track, rather than a normal drum kit. There was only one problem — the drummer they booked didn’t know how to change the pitch on the kettledrum using the foot pedal. So he just kept playing the same note throughout the song, even as the chords changed: [Excerpt: The Drifters, “There Goes My Baby”] When Leiber and Stoller took that to their bosses at Atlantic Records, they were horrified. Jerry Wexler said “It’s dog meat. You’ve wasted our money on an overpriced production that sounds like a radio caught between two stations. It’s a goddamn awful mess!” Ahmet Ertegun was a little more diplomatic, but still said that the record was unreleasable. But eventually he let them have a go at remixing it, and then the label stuck the record out, assuming it would do nothing. Instead, it went to number two on the charts, and became one of the biggest hits of 1959. Not only that, but it instantly opened up the possibilities for new ways of producing records. The new Drifters were a smash hit, and Leiber and Stoller were now as respected as producers as they already had been as songwriters. They got themselves a new office in the Brill Building, and they were on top of the world. But already there was a problem for the new Drifters, and that problem was named Lover Patterson. Rather than sign the Crowns to a management deal as a group, Patterson had signed them all as individuals, with separate contracts. And when he’d allowed George Treadwell to take over their management, he’d only sold the contracts for three of the four members. Ben E. King was still signed to Lover Patterson, rather than to George Treadwell. And Patterson decided that he was going to let King sing on the records, but he wasn’t going to let him tour with the group. So there was yet another lineup change for the Drifters, as they got in Johnnie Lee Williams to sing King’s parts on stage. Williams would sing one lead with the group in the studio, “If You Cry True Love, True Love”: [Excerpt: The Drifters, “If You Cry True Love, True Love”] But for the most part, King was the lead singer in the studio, and so there were five Drifters on the records, but only four on the road. But they were still having hits, and everybody seemed happy. And soon, they would all have the biggest hit of their careers, with a song that Doc Pomus had written with Mort Shuman, about his own wedding reception. We’ll hear more about that, and about Leiber and Stoller’s apprentice Phil Spector, when we return to the Drifters in a few weeks time.

Episode seventy-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "There Goes My Baby" by the Drifters, and how a fake record label, a band sacked for drunkenness, and a kettledrum player who couldn't play led to a genre-defining hit. 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 "Rebel Rouser" by Duane Eddy Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.  I'm not going to recommend a compilation this week, for reasons I mention in the episode itself. There are plenty available, none of them as good as they should be. The episode on the early career of the Drifters is episode seventeen.  My main resource in putting this episode together was Marv Goldberg's website, and his excellent articles on both the early- and late-period Drifters, Bill Pinkney's later Original Drifters, the Five Crowns, and Ben E. King.  Lonely Avenue, a biography of Doc Pomus by Alex Halberstadt, helped me with the information on Pomus. Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz tells Leiber and Stoller's side of the story well. And Bill Millar's book on the Drifters, while it is more a history of 50s vocal group music generally using them as a focus than a biography of the group, contains some interesting material.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A quick note about this one, before I start. As we'll see in this episode, there have been many, many, lineups of the Drifters over the years, with many different people involved. One problem with that is that there have been lots of compilations put out under the Drifters name, featuring rerecorded versions of their hits, often involving nobody who was on the original record. Indeed, there have been so many of these compilations, and people putting together hits compilations, even for major labels, have been so sloppy, that I can't find a single compilation of the Drifters' recordings that doesn't have one or two dodgy remakes on replacing the originals. I've used multiple sources for the recordings I'm excerpting here, and in most cases I'm pretty sure that the tracks I'm excerpting are the original versions. But particularly when it comes to songs that aren't familiar, I may have ended up using a rerecording rather than the original. Anyway, on with the story... [Excerpt: The Drifters, "There Goes My Baby"] It's been more than a year since we last properly checked in with the Drifters, one of the great R&B vocal groups of all time, so I'll quickly bring you up to speed -- if you want to hear the full story so far, episode seventeen, on "Money Honey", gives you all the details. The Drifters had originally formed as the backing group for Clyde McPhatter, who had been the lead singer of Billy Ward and the Dominoes in the early fifties, when that group had had their biggest success. The original lineup of the group had all been sacked before they even released a record, and then a couple of members of the lineup who recorded their first big hits became ill or died, but the group had released two massive hits -- "Money Honey" and "Such a Night", both with McPhatter on lead vocals: [Excerpt: Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, "Such a Night"] But then McPhatter had been drafted, and the group's manager, George Treadwell, had got in a member of the original lineup, David Baughan, to replace McPhatter, as Baughan could sound a little like McPhatter. When McPhatter was discharged from the army, he decided to sell the group name to Treadwell, and the Drifters became employees of Treadwell, to be hired and fired at his discretion. This group went through several lineup changes, some of which we'll look at later in this episode, but they kept making records that sounded a bit like the ones they'd been making with Clyde McPhatter, even after Baughan also left the group. But there was a big difference behind the scenes. Those early records had been produced by Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler, and had usually been arranged by Jesse Stone, the man who'd written "Money Honey" and many other early rock and roll hits, like "Shake, Rattle, and Roll". But a little while after Baughan left the group, Ertegun and Wexler asked Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller to start working with them. Leiber and Stoller, you might remember, were working with a *lot* of people at the time. They'd come over to Atlantic Records with a non-exclusive contract to write and produce for the label, and while their main project at Atlantic was with the Coasters, they were also producing records for people like Ruth Brown, as well as also working on records for Elvis and others at RCA. But they took on the Drifters as well, and started producing a string of minor hits for them, including "Ruby Baby" and "Fools Fall In Love". Those hits went top ten on the R&B chart, but did little or nothing in the pop market. [Excerpt: The Drifters, "Fools Fall In Love"] That song, which had Johnny Moore on lead vocals, was the last big hit for what we can think of as the "original" Drifters in some form. It came out in March 1957, and for the rest of the year they kept releasing singles, but nothing made the R&B charts at all, though a few did make the lower reaches of the Hot One Hundred. Throughout 1957, the group had been gaining and losing members. Bill Pinkney, who had been chosen by the other group members to be essentially their shop steward, had gone to Treadwell and asked for a raise in late 1956, and been promptly fired. He'd formed a group called the Flyers, with a new singer called Bobby Hendricks on lead. The Flyers recorded one single, "My Only Desire": [Excerpt: the Flyers, "My Only Desire"] But then Tommy Evans, Pinkney's replacement in the group, was fired, and Pinkney was brought back into the group. Hendricks thought that was the end of his career, but then a few days later Pinkney phoned him up -- Johnny Moore was getting drafted, and Hendricks was brought into the group to take Moore's place. But almost immediately after Hendricks joined the group, Pinkney once again asked for a raise, and was kicked out and Evans brought back in. Pinkney went off and made a record for Sam Phillips, with backing music overdubbed by Bill Justis: [Excerpt: Bill Pinkney, "After the Hop"] The group kept changing lineups, and there was only one session in 1958, which led to a horrible version of "Moonlight Bay". Apparently, the session was run by Leiber and Stoller as an experiment (they would occasionally record old standards with the Coasters, so presumably they were seeing if the same thing would work with the Drifters), and several of the group's members were drunk when they recorded it. They decided at the session that it was not going to be released, but then the next thing the group knew, it was out as their next single, with overdubs by a white vocal group, making it sound nothing like the Drifters at all: [Excerpt: The Drifters "Moonlight Bay"] Bobby Hendricks hated that recording session so much that he quit the group and went solo, going over to Sue Records, where he joined up with another former Drifter, Jimmy Oliver. Oliver wrote a song for Hendricks, "Itchy Twitchy Feeling", and the Coasters sang the backup vocals for him, uncredited. That track went to number five on the R&B charts: [Excerpt: Bobby Hendricks, "Itchy Twitchy Feeling"] By this time, the Drifters were down to just three people -- Gerhart Thrasher, Jimmy Milner, and Tommy Evans. They no longer had a lead singer, but they had a week's worth of shows they were contracted to do, at the Harlem Apollo, on a show hosted by the DJ Doctor Jive. That show was headlined by Ray Charles, and also featured the Cookies, Solomon Burke, and a minor group called the Crowns, among several other acts. Treadwell was desperate, so he called Hendricks and Oliver and got them to return to the group just for one week, so they would have a lead vocalist. They both did return, though just as a favour. Then, at the end of the week's residency, one of the group members got drunk and started shouting abuse at Doctor Jive, and at the owner of the Apollo. George Treadwell had had enough. He fired the entire group. Tommy Evans went on to join Charlie Fuqua's version of the Ink Spots, and Bill Pinkney decided he wanted to get the old group back together. He got a 1955 lineup of the Drifters together -- Pinkney, David Baughan, Gerhart Thrasher, and Andrew Thrasher. That group toured as The Original Drifters, and the group under that name would consist almost entirely of ex-members of the Drifters, with some coming or going, until 1968, when most of the group retired, while Pinkney carried on leading a group under that name until his death in 2007. But they couldn't use that name on records. Instead they made records as the Harmony Grits: [Excerpt: The Harmony Grits, "I Could Have Told You"] and with ex-Drifter Johnny Moore singing lead, as a solo artist under the name Johnny Darrow: [Excerpt: Johnny Darrow, "Chew Tobacco Rag"] And with Bobby Hendricks singing lead, as the Sprites: [Excerpt: The Sprites, "My Picture"] But the reason they couldn't call themselves the Drifters on their records is that George Treadwell owned the name, and he had hired a totally different group to tour and record under that name. The Crowns had their basis in a group called the Harmonaires, a street-corner group in New York. They had various members at first, but by the time they changed their name to the Five Crowns, they had stabilised on a lineup of Dock Green, Yonkie Paul, and three brothers -- Papa, Nicky, and Sonny Boy Clark. The group were managed by Lover Patterson, who they believed was the manager of the Orioles, but was actually the Orioles' valet. Nonetheless, Patterson did manage to get them signed to a small record label, Rainbow Records, where they released "You're My Inspiration" in 1952: [Excerpt: The Five Crowns, "You're My Inspiration"] The record label sent out a thousand copies of that single to one of their distributors, right at the point a truckers' strike was called, and ended up having to send another thousand out by plane. That kind of thing sums up the kind of luck the Five Crowns would have for the next few years. Nothing they put out on Rainbow Records was any kind of a success, and in 1953 the group became the first act on a new label, Old Town Records -- they actually met the owner of the label, Hy Weiss, in a waiting room, while they were waiting to audition for a different label. On Old Town they put out a couple of singles, starting with "You Could Be My Love": [Excerpt: The Five Crowns, "You Could Be My Love"] But none of these singles were hits either, and the group were doing so badly that when Nicky Clark left the group, they couldn't get another singer in to replace him at first -- Lover Patterson stood on stage and mimed while the four remaining members sang, so there would still be five people in the Five Crowns. By 1955, the group had re-signed to Rainbow Records, now on their Riviera subsidiary, and they had gone through several further lineup changes. They now consisted of Yonkie Paul, Richard Lewis, Jesse Facing, Dock Green, and Bugeye Bailey. They put out one record on Riviera, "You Came To Me": [Excerpt: The Five Crowns, "You Came to Me"] The group broke up shortly after that, and Dock Green put together a totally new lineup of the Five Crowns. That group signed to one of George Goldner's labels, Gee, and released another single, and then they broke up. Green got together *another* lineup of the Five Crowns, made another record on another label, and then that group broke up too. They spent nearly two years without making a record, with constantly shifting lineups as people kept leaving and rejoining, and by the time they went into a studio again, they consisted of Charlie Thomas, Dock Green, Papa Clark, Elsbeary Hobbs, and a new tenor singer called Benjamin Earl Nelson, who hadn't sung professionally before joining the group -- he'd been working in a restaurant owned by his father, and Lover Patterson had heard him singing to himself while he was working and asked him to join the group. This lineup of the group, who were now calling themselves the Crowns rather than the Five Crowns, finally got a contract with a record label... or at least, it was sort of a record label. We've talked about Doc Pomus before, back in November, but as a brief recap -- Pomus was a blues singer and songwriter, a white Jewish paraplegic whose birth name was Jerome Felder, who had become a blues shouter in the late forties: [Excerpt: Doc Pomus, "Send for the Doctor"] He had been working as a professional songwriter for a decade or so, and had written songs for people like Ray Charles, but the music he loved was hard bluesy R&B, and he didn't understand the new rock and roll music at all. Other than writing "Young Blood", which Leiber and Stoller had rewritten and made into a hit for the Coasters, he hadn't written anything successful in quite some time. He'd recently started writing with a much younger man, Mort Shuman, who did understand rock and roll, and we heard one of the results of that last week -- "Teenager in Love" by Dion and the Belmonts, which would be the start of a string of hits for them: [Excerpt: Dion and the Belmonts, "Teenager in Love"] But in 1958, that had not yet been released. Pomus' wife had a baby on the way, and he was desperate for money. He was so desperate, he got involved in a scam. An old girlfriend introduced him to an acquaintance, a dance instructor named Fred Huckman. Huckman had recently married a rich old widow, and he wanted to get away from her during the day to sleep with other people. So Huckman decided he was going to become the owner of a record label, using his wife's money to fund an office. The label was named R&B Records at Doc's suggestion, and Doc was going to be the company's president, while Mort was going to be the company's shipping clerk. The company would have offices in 1650 Broadway, one of the buildings that these days gets lumped in when people talk about "the Brill Building", though the actual Brill Building itself was a little way down the street at 1619. 1650 was still a prime music business location though, and the company's office would let both Doc and Mort go and try to sell their songs to publishing companies and record labels. And they'd need to do this because R&B Records wasn't going to put out any records at all. Doc and Mort's actual job was that one of them had to be in the office at all times, so when Huckman's wife phoned up, they could tell her that he'd just popped out, or was in a meeting, or something so she didn't find out about his affairs. They lived off the scam for a little while, while writing songs, but eventually they started to get bored of doing nothing all day. And then Lucky Patterson brought the Crowns in. They didn't realise that R&B Records wasn't a real record label, and Pomus decided to audition them. When he did, he was amazed at how good they sounded. He decided that R&B Records was *going* to be a real record label, no matter what Huckman thought. He and Shuman wrote them a single in the style of the Coasters, and they got in the best session musicians in New York -- people like King Curtis and Mickey Baker, who were old friends of Pomus -- to play on it: [Excerpt: The Crowns, "Kiss and Make Up"] At first that record was completely unsuccessful, but then, rather amazingly, it started to climb in the charts, at least in Pittsburgh, where it became a local number one. It started to do better elsewhere as well, and it looked like the Crowns could have a promising career. And then one day Mrs. Huckman showed up at the office. Pomus tried to tell her that her husband had gone out and would be back later, but she insisted on waiting in the office, silently, all day. R&B Records closed the next day. But "Kiss and Make Up" had been a big enough success that the Crowns had ended up on that Doctor Jive show with the Drifters. And then when George Treadwell fired the Drifters, he immediately hired the Crowns -- or at least, he hired four of them. Papa Clark had a drinking problem, and Treadwell was fed up of dealing with drunk singers. So from this point on the Drifters were Charlie Thomas, Dock Green, Elsbeary Hobbs, and Benjamin Nelson, who decided that he was going to take on a stage name and call himself Ben E. King. This new lineup of the group went out on tour for almost a year before going into the studio, and they were abysmal failures. Everywhere they went, promoters advertised their shows with photos of the old group, and then this new group of people came on stage looking and sounding nothing like the original Drifters. They were booed everywhere they went. They even caused problems for the other acts -- at one show they nearly killed Screamin' Jay Hawkins. Hawkins used to pop out of a coffin while performing "I Put A Spell on You": [Excerpt: Screamin' Jay Hawkins, "I Put a Spell on You"] The group were sometimes asked to carry the coffin onto the stage with Hawkins inside it, and one night Charlie Thomas accidentally nudged something and heard a click. What he didn't realise was that Hawkins put matchbooks in the gap in the coffin lid, to stop it closing all the way -- Thomas had knocked the coffin properly shut. The music started, and Hawkins tried to open the coffin, and couldn't. He kept pushing, and the coffin wouldn't open. Eventually, he rocked the coffin so hard that it fell off its stand and popped open, but if it hadn't opened there was a very real danger that Hawkins could have asphyxiated. But something else happened on that tour -- Ben E. King wrote a song called "There Goes My Baby", which the group started to perform live. As they originally did it, it was quite a fast song, but when they finally got off the tour and went into the studio, Leiber and Stoller, who were going to be the producers for this new group just like they had been for the old group, decided to slow it down. They also decided that this was going to be a chance for them to experiment with some totally new production ideas. Stoller had become infatuated with a style called baion, a Brazillian musical style that is based on the same tresillo rhythm that a lot of New Orleans R&B is based on. If you don't remember the tresillo rhythm, we talked about it a lot in episodes on Fats Domino and others, but it's that "bom [pause] bom-bom [pause] bom [pause] bom-bom" rhythm. We've always been calling it the tresillo, but when people talk about the Drifters' music they always follow Stoller's lead and call it the baion rhythm, so that's what we'll do in future. They decided to use that rhythm, and also to use strings, which very few people had used on a rock and roll record before -- this is an idea that several people seemed to have simultaneously, as we saw last week with Buddy Holly doing the same thing. It may, indeed, be that Leiber and Stoller had heard "It Doesn't Matter Any More" and taken inspiration from it -- Holly had died just over a month before the recording session for "There Goes My Baby", and his single hit the top forty the same week that "There Goes My Baby" was recorded. Stoller sketched out some string lines, which were turned into full arrangements by an old classmate of his, Stan Applebaum, who had previously arranged for Lucky Millinder, and who had written a hit for Sarah Vaughan, who was married to Treadwell. Charlie Thomas was meant to sing lead on the track, but he just couldn't get it right, and eventually it was decided to have King sing it instead, as he'd written the song. King tried to imitate the sound of Sam Cooke, but it came out sounding like no-one but King himself. Then, as a final touch, Leiber and Stoller decided to use a kettledrum on the track, rather than a normal drum kit. There was only one problem -- the drummer they booked didn't know how to change the pitch on the kettledrum using the foot pedal. So he just kept playing the same note throughout the song, even as the chords changed: [Excerpt: The Drifters, "There Goes My Baby"] When Leiber and Stoller took that to their bosses at Atlantic Records, they were horrified. Jerry Wexler said “It’s dog meat. You've wasted our money on an overpriced production that sounds like a radio caught between two stations. It’s a goddamn awful mess!” Ahmet Ertegun was a little more diplomatic, but still said that the record was unreleasable. But eventually he let them have a go at remixing it, and then the label stuck the record out, assuming it would do nothing. Instead, it went to number two on the charts, and became one of the biggest hits of 1959. Not only that, but it instantly opened up the possibilities for new ways of producing records. The new Drifters were a smash hit, and Leiber and Stoller were now as respected as producers as they already had been as songwriters. They got themselves a new office in the Brill Building, and they were on top of the world. But already there was a problem for the new Drifters, and that problem was named Lover Patterson. Rather than sign the Crowns to a management deal as a group, Patterson had signed them all as individuals, with separate contracts. And when he'd allowed George Treadwell to take over their management, he'd only sold the contracts for three of the four members. Ben E. King was still signed to Lover Patterson, rather than to George Treadwell. And Patterson decided that he was going to let King sing on the records, but he wasn't going to let him tour with the group. So there was yet another lineup change for the Drifters, as they got in Johnnie Lee Williams to sing King's parts on stage. Williams would sing one lead with the group in the studio, "If You Cry True Love, True Love": [Excerpt: The Drifters, "If You Cry True Love, True Love"] But for the most part, King was the lead singer in the studio, and so there were five Drifters on the records, but only four on the road. But they were still having hits, and everybody seemed happy. And soon, they would all have the biggest hit of their careers, with a song that Doc Pomus had written with Mort Shuman, about his own wedding reception. We'll hear more about that, and about Leiber and Stoller's apprentice Phil Spector, when we return to the Drifters in a few weeks time.

  Episode sixty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Jailhouse Rock” by Elvis Presley, and at his relationships with Colonel Tom Parker, Leiber and Stoller, his band members, and the film industry. 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 Santa Claus is Back in Town, also by Elvis, which ties in more than most to this episode.  —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz tells Leiber and Stoller’s side of the story well. There are many, many books about Elvis Presley out there, but the one I’m using as my major resource for information on him, and which has guided my views as to the kind of person he was, is Last Train to Memphis by Peter Guralnick, generally considered the best biography of him.  The Colonel by Alanna Nash is a little more tabloidy than those two, but is the only full-length biography I know of of Colonel Tom Parker. This box set contains all the recordings, including outtakes, for Elvis’ 1950s films, while this one contains just the finished versions of every record he made in the fifties. And Jailhouse Rock itself is well worth watching. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Colonel Tom Parker, from the very first, had wanted Elvis to move into films. Indeed, even before he met Elvis, he had tried grooming the other stars he’d managed — and non-stars like Tommy Sands — for film roles. In particular, he wanted to work with Hal Wallis at MGM, who had become something of an idee fixe for him after the first time he saw a film being made and was told that Wallis was the man in charge of it all. In particular, Parker was interested in film as a mass medium that nonetheless required people to pay. While Elvis had become famous by taking advantage of television’s newfound ubiquity, Colonel Parker didn’t like the idea that people could just watch Elvis for free. If they could watch him for nothing in their own home, why would they pay to see his shows, or pay for his records? But the cinema was different. People paid to go to the cinema, and you could get millions of people paying money to see the same performance. For the Colonel, that was the key — a way to maximise paying customers. Even if you made more money from the TV than from the cinema in the short term, cultivating a paying audience was clearly the best thing to do in the medium term. And so, from late 1956, Elvis’ career had started to be focussed on films, which were themselves focussed on his music. His first film, a Western originally titled The Reno Brothers, had been intended to have him in a small part, trying to be a straight actor, without any singing at all, and that was how Elvis had been persuaded to do it. Instead, at the last minute, four songs had been added to the film, and it had been retitled from The Reno Brothers to Love Me Tender. Elvis’ part — which was originally a relatively minor part — had been beefed up, though in terms of actual plot involvement he was still not the main star, and the film became an uneasy compromise between being a serious Western drama and a rock and roll vehicle, not really managing to do either well. The film after that, “Loving You”, had been different: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Loving You”] That one had been a more straight ahead rock and roll film — it was basically a fictionalised version of Elvis’ own life to that point, with him playing Deke Rivers, a singer who is discovered by the manager of a fading country star. The manager in this case is a woman, and she also becomes the love interest in the film, but the broad outlines are about what you’d expect from a fictionalised biopic — Elvis was  clearly playing himself. But the soundtrack to “Loving You” had been a huge improvement on the soundtrack to “Love Me Tender”, and had included some of Elvis’ very best songs, including a title song written for him by Leiber and Stoller. The pair had been called on almost straight away after their “Hound Dog” had become a hit for Elvis, to see if they had any more songs for him. At the time, they hadn’t been hugely impressed by Elvis’ version of “Hound Dog”, and so rather than give him anything new, they suggested he record a song they had written for the duo Willy and Ruth: [Excerpt: Willy and Ruth, “Love Me”] That song had been written as a parody of country songs, and they hadn’t taken it seriously at all, but there had been all sorts of cover versions of it, by everyone from Georgia Gibbs to Hank Snow’s son Jimmie Rodgers Snow. None of them had been hits, but the song obviously had some commercial potential. So Leiber and Stoller suggested that Elvis try it, and they were very impressed with his performance of the song, which unlike them he *did* take seriously: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Love Me”] From that point on, they had a certain amount of respect for Elvis as a performer, and so they were happy to write “Loving You” for the film. But at this point they still hadn’t even met him, and regarded him as, in their words, “an idiot savant” — someone who just happened to have a marketable talent, rather than an actual artist like the people they worked with. But Elvis was so impressed with the songs that Leiber and Stoller were writing that they soon got the call to write more songs for his next film. The original plan was that they were to write all of the songs for the film, but there was a snag. They’d been flown back to New York from LA, and they had a suite at an expensive hotel, and Miles Davis and Count Basie and Thelonius Monk all had gigs in the city that week, and there were a few good plays on at the theatre, and they had some friends who wanted to take them out for meals, and… well, there’s a lot of stuff to do in New York that’s more interesting than work. Eventually, Jean Aberbach from Hill and Range publishing came round to see them in their hotel suite, and ask them where his songs were. They told him he would have them soon, and he replied that he knew he would, because he wasn’t going to let them leave until he did. He pushed the sofa in front of the door so they couldn’t get out, and went to sleep on it. In the next five hours, Leiber and Stoller wrote four songs together, which was just about enough for the film, which was padded out with two other songs by other writers — both of them co-written by Aaron Schroeder. There was “Don’t Leave Me Now”, which had been recorded but not used for “Loving You”,  but which had still already appeared on that film’s soundtrack album, and a new ballad called “Young and Beautiful”. But neither of those songs were particularly strong, and so it was the Leiber and Stoller songs that would be the musical spine of the film — the credits at the beginning of the film said “songs mostly by Mike Stoller and Jerry Leiber”, clearly showing that they knew which songs it was that people would actually care about. It was only in April 1957 that Leiber and Stoller actually met the man who had already had hits with two of their songs and used a third as the title song for one of his films. Coincidentally, they met him in Radio Recorders Annex, the same studio where five years earlier they had recorded the original version of “Hound Dog” with Big Mama Thornton. They went in not knowing what to expect, but were struck, in order, by three different things. The first was that Elvis was extremely physically beautiful, far more so in person than in photos. The second was how shy and quiet he was — but how these things actually gave him an extra presence. And the third was how much he knew about R&B music, and how much he loved it. Leiber and Stoller had believed themselves to be the only white people of their own generation to really know or care about R&B or the blues, and here was someone enthusing to them about B.B. King, Big Bill Broonzy, and Arthur Crudup, and also about their own songs. He particularly liked one they’d written for Ray Charles, “The Snow is Falling”: [Excerpt: Ray Charles, “The Snow is Falling”] He ended up sitting at the piano playing a four-handed blues with Mike Stoller. The three men were getting on well enough that even though Leiber and Stoller had only intended to visit the sessions for a short while to meet Elvis, they ended up essentially producing the session — Leiber was in the control room, and would show Elvis how he wanted the songs to be phrased, while Stoller was on the studio floor, working with the musicians, and playing piano on one track. The two were particularly impressed by Elvis’ determination in the studio. They were having to record multiple versions of almost every song, because the plot of the film would have Elvis’ character, Vince Everett, learning songs, trying them out in different arrangements, trying different vocal styles on them, and so on. As well as recording the songs properly, the way he’d like to sing them, Elvis had to do tentative versions, versions with wrong notes, and so forth. And Elvis happily worked, take after take, to get all these different versions of the songs done exactly right.  In fact, he ended up not just singing on the tracks, but playing bass on one of them.  Up until these sessions, Bill Black had been playing double bass on all Elvis’ sessions — the double bass was the standard bass instrument in country music, and had become so in rockabilly as well. But around this time it became clear that the new Fender bass guitars, which had been introduced to the market a couple of years earlier and had quickly taken off in the jazz and blues worlds, were going to become the standard instrument for studio work for everyone. Black was far from being the most accomplished musician in the world — what he brought to Elvis’ sessions was more about his enthusiasm and attitude than his ability to play — and the switch to the bass guitar was an uncomfortable one. If you don’t know, a double bass is played standing up, like a cello, and has no frets, while a bass guitar is played like a guitar. They’re very different instruments, and Black had trouble switching from one to the other. He was also getting annoyed with the whole Presley organisation. Tom Parker was determined to isolate Elvis from anyone else in the business, including his band members. And not only that, Bill and Scotty were on what they both considered was a miserably low salary. So when Bill messed up the intro to “(You’re So Square) Baby, I Don’t Care” repeatedly, he threw the bass across the room and stormed out of the session. Elvis just picked up the bass and played the part himself, and it’s him you can hear playing it on the finished record, doing a rather decent job of it: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “(You’re So Square) Baby I Don’t Care”] While Bill had left the session, it didn’t stop him appearing in the film — “Jailhouse Rock” featured Scotty, Bill, and D.J., miming their instruments. They didn’t have any lines — they weren’t members of the Screen Actors’ Guild, so they couldn’t — but they appeared throughout the last half of the film, as did Mike Stoller on the piano. It was actually meant to be Jerry Leiber miming the piano parts — someone from the film studio had come into the recording studio while they were making the records, and had said that Leiber looked like a piano player. Elvis had said that no, it was Stoller who was the piano player, and the filmmaker had said it didn’t matter — Leiber looked like a piano player, and so if he wanted to be in the film miming the piano parts he could. Leiber agreed, but then on the day he was meant to go into the studio, he developed a terrible toothache. He called up Stoller and said “I can’t go, you go instead”.  Stoller pointed out that they were expecting Leiber, and Leiber told him that they wouldn’t know the difference anyway. So Stoller went along, and the only thing he was told was that he would have to shave off his goatee beard, as it would be a scene-stealer and distract people from Elvis. So Mike Stoller was there with Scotty, Bill, and D.J. as they filmed most of what is generally considered to be Elvis’ best film.  The film almost got stopped before it was started, though. The first thing to be filmed was the big dance sequence to one of the songs Leiber and Stoller had written, “Jailhouse Rock”: [excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Jailhouse Rock”] That was going to be the centrepiece of the whole film, and the dance sequence involved dozens of men dressed as convicts. Some have argued that the song and the sequence were inspired by the bit in The Girl Can’t Help It in which a parody of rock and roll is sung by a group dressed as convicts. There might even be some truth to that as far as the version in the film goes, as the film has extra orchestration and an intro section added which isn’t on the record, and which doesn’t really fit very well. Compare the film version of “Jailhouse Rock”: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Jailhouse Rock”, film version] With “Rock Around the Rockpile”: [Excerpt: “Jerri Jordan”, “Rock Around the Rockpile”] But the thing is, that’s only a partial explanation. The song itself is clearly in a long line of Leiber and Stoller songs about the judicial system, like “Framed”: [Excerpt: The Robins, “Framed”] and “Riot in Cell Block #9”: [Excerpt: The Robins, “Riot in Cell Block #9”] It also contains a lot of the humour that Leiber and Stoller were noted for. Many comedians have made fun of this section: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Jailhouse Rock”] and pointed out the homoerotic implications of those lines. Given Leiber and Stoller’s other work, I think it’s fairly clear they were perfectly aware of those implications — and given that this is a film that also features shots of Elvis shirtless, tied up, being whipped by another man, I suspect they weren’t the only ones who were dropping little coded hints to gay fans at that time. But, as I said, the dance sequence nearly ended the film — and nearly ended Elvis’ singing career along with it. Elvis had some trouble learning to dance with a choreographed troupe, at first — he was a natural mover, and not used to the way trained dancers moved. Luckily, the choreographer, Alex Romero, came up with a solution to that problem. He got Elvis to just perform in front of him, miming to his own records, moving like he would on stage.  Romero then took Elvis’ normal stage movements and worked them into the dance routine, choreographing it so it still worked with the large dance troupe, but Elvis was able to move in ways that were comfortable for him. (The claim on Wikipedia that Elvis himself choreographed the dance sequence is absolutely mythical, incidentally. It was Alex Romero.) That solved the immediate problem, but there was a larger problem when, on the first day of shooting, Elvis hit his mouth and dislodged a crown. Elvis insisted that it had gone into his chest. At first, people thought he was being overly dramatic, but after a few more takes of bits of the sequence, they noticed a whistling sound when he was breathing. He had inhaled his crown.  It required major surgery to remove the crown from his lung, and to do it they had to separate his vocal cords to get into his lungs. This was a weird case of life imitating art, as a crucial plot point in the film was Elvis’ character having to have throat surgery and worrying whether he would be able to sing again. Fortunately, just as in the film, he made a full recovery and was able to carry on. The film itself was surprisingly good, given the depths to which Elvis would sink in some of his later films. Elvis plays a very unsympathetic character, with a chip on his shoulder after being imprisoned after accidentally killing a man in a bar fight, who (of course) becomes a famous singer. It’s no cinematic masterpiece, but it’s a very decent film of its type. The film sadly had a tragic coda — just days after the film finished shooting, Judy Tyler, Elvis’ love interest in the film, died in a car accident. As a result, Elvis refused to ever watch the film in full — he couldn’t bear to. But in the short term, the film’s main effect was to draw Elvis and Mike Stoller closer together. As Stoller was on the set all the time, he had a chance to get close to Elvis, and at one point they were having a game of pool, and one of the songs Leiber and Stoller had written for the Drifters came on: [Excerpt: The Drifters, “Ruby Baby”] Elvis started singing along, and asking Stoller how he and Leiber wrote so many great songs together. But then, a few minutes later, Elvis was dragged out of the room, and came back in telling Stoller that he had to leave — the Colonel didn’t want Elvis hanging round with people who were in the music industry, unless those people worked for the Colonel. Indeed, at one point around this time, the Colonel tried to become Leiber and Stoller’s manager. He sent them blank pieces of paper for them to sign, with a promise that he would fill out the rest later and give them a very good deal. Perhaps unsurprisingly, their response was not one I could repeat on a podcast that isn’t in the adult section. But Elvis had still taken to Leiber and Stoller. He started calling them his “good luck charms”, and decided that he wanted them at every recording session. The Colonel agreed to have them involved in everything. For the moment. But Leiber and Stoller weren’t dependent on Elvis and the Colonel. During 1957, while they were working with Elvis, they also wrote hits for Perry Como: [Excerpt: Perry Como, “Dancin'”] Ruth Brown: [Excerpt: Ruth Brown, “Lucky Lips”] The Drifters: [Excerpt: The Drifters, “Fools Fall in Love”] And of course those Coasters records we looked at a few weeks ago — and will be looking at again in a month or so. And that independence was bothering people in the Colonel’s group of business people. In particular, Freddy Bienstock, who worked at Hill and Range and controlled what songs Elvis performed, became apoplectic when the duo gave the song “Don’t” directly to Elvis: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Don’t”] Stoller explained to Bienstock that the song had been commissioned directly *by* Elvis. Elvis had said, “I want you to write a real pretty ballad for me,” they’d gone away and written him a real pretty ballad, he’d liked it, what was the problem? The problem, Bienstock explained, was that you don’t just give songs to Elvis. There was no contract for the song. What if they couldn’t come to a contract agreement, but Elvis wanted to record the song anyway? What if all the money ended up just going to Leiber and Stoller because they refused to cut Hill and Range, Elvis, and the Colonel in on the royalties? That wasn’t a problem, they said. They’d written songs for Elvis before. They knew the drill. They assumed that the contract would be the same one they always had to sign when writing for Elvis. Bienstock insisted that none of that mattered. You brought the song to Bienstock, or to Jean Aberbach. If they liked it for Elvis, *then* they got the contracts sorted, and *then* Elvis got to hear it. That was the way things worked around here. You don’t just go bringing Elvis a song. That was going behind the Colonel’s back, and the Colonel didn’t like people going behind his back. As far as Leiber and Stoller were concerned, they weren’t going behind anyone’s back.  So by September 1957, when Jailhouse Rock came out, things were a lot more precarious for Elvis than they looked from the outside. The Colonel had weakened the bonds between him and his backing musicians, by insisting that they get paid a small salary rather than a percentage; he had control over what songs Elvis could sing; Sam Phillips was no longer in the picture; and so Leiber and Stoller were the only people involved in Elvis’ life who had any real independence — everyone at Hill and Range, the film studios, and RCA was involved in a complex network of kickbacks which meant that they all stood or fell together with the Colonel.  If the Colonel could just get those good luck charms out of Elvis’ life again, he’d be all set to make sure Elvis’ career was run exactly as he wanted it. And as luck would have it, Elvis was going to become eligible for the draft in January 1958. All the Colonel had to do was wait a few months…  

  Episode sixty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Jailhouse Rock” by Elvis Presley, and at his relationships with Colonel Tom Parker, Leiber and Stoller, his band members, and the film industry. 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 Santa Claus is Back in Town, also by Elvis, which ties in more than most to this episode.  —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz tells Leiber and Stoller’s side of the story well. There are many, many books about Elvis Presley out there, but the one I’m using as my major resource for information on him, and which has guided my views as to the kind of person he was, is Last Train to Memphis by Peter Guralnick, generally considered the best biography of him.  The Colonel by Alanna Nash is a little more tabloidy than those two, but is the only full-length biography I know of of Colonel Tom Parker. This box set contains all the recordings, including outtakes, for Elvis’ 1950s films, while this one contains just the finished versions of every record he made in the fifties. And Jailhouse Rock itself is well worth watching. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Colonel Tom Parker, from the very first, had wanted Elvis to move into films. Indeed, even before he met Elvis, he had tried grooming the other stars he’d managed — and non-stars like Tommy Sands — for film roles. In particular, he wanted to work with Hal Wallis at MGM, who had become something of an idee fixe for him after the first time he saw a film being made and was told that Wallis was the man in charge of it all. In particular, Parker was interested in film as a mass medium that nonetheless required people to pay. While Elvis had become famous by taking advantage of television’s newfound ubiquity, Colonel Parker didn’t like the idea that people could just watch Elvis for free. If they could watch him for nothing in their own home, why would they pay to see his shows, or pay for his records? But the cinema was different. People paid to go to the cinema, and you could get millions of people paying money to see the same performance. For the Colonel, that was the key — a way to maximise paying customers. Even if you made more money from the TV than from the cinema in the short term, cultivating a paying audience was clearly the best thing to do in the medium term. And so, from late 1956, Elvis’ career had started to be focussed on films, which were themselves focussed on his music. His first film, a Western originally titled The Reno Brothers, had been intended to have him in a small part, trying to be a straight actor, without any singing at all, and that was how Elvis had been persuaded to do it. Instead, at the last minute, four songs had been added to the film, and it had been retitled from The Reno Brothers to Love Me Tender. Elvis’ part — which was originally a relatively minor part — had been beefed up, though in terms of actual plot involvement he was still not the main star, and the film became an uneasy compromise between being a serious Western drama and a rock and roll vehicle, not really managing to do either well. The film after that, “Loving You”, had been different: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Loving You”] That one had been a more straight ahead rock and roll film — it was basically a fictionalised version of Elvis’ own life to that point, with him playing Deke Rivers, a singer who is discovered by the manager of a fading country star. The manager in this case is a woman, and she also becomes the love interest in the film, but the broad outlines are about what you’d expect from a fictionalised biopic — Elvis was  clearly playing himself. But the soundtrack to “Loving You” had been a huge improvement on the soundtrack to “Love Me Tender”, and had included some of Elvis’ very best songs, including a title song written for him by Leiber and Stoller. The pair had been called on almost straight away after their “Hound Dog” had become a hit for Elvis, to see if they had any more songs for him. At the time, they hadn’t been hugely impressed by Elvis’ version of “Hound Dog”, and so rather than give him anything new, they suggested he record a song they had written for the duo Willy and Ruth: [Excerpt: Willy and Ruth, “Love Me”] That song had been written as a parody of country songs, and they hadn’t taken it seriously at all, but there had been all sorts of cover versions of it, by everyone from Georgia Gibbs to Hank Snow’s son Jimmie Rodgers Snow. None of them had been hits, but the song obviously had some commercial potential. So Leiber and Stoller suggested that Elvis try it, and they were very impressed with his performance of the song, which unlike them he *did* take seriously: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Love Me”] From that point on, they had a certain amount of respect for Elvis as a performer, and so they were happy to write “Loving You” for the film. But at this point they still hadn’t even met him, and regarded him as, in their words, “an idiot savant” — someone who just happened to have a marketable talent, rather than an actual artist like the people they worked with. But Elvis was so impressed with the songs that Leiber and Stoller were writing that they soon got the call to write more songs for his next film. The original plan was that they were to write all of the songs for the film, but there was a snag. They’d been flown back to New York from LA, and they had a suite at an expensive hotel, and Miles Davis and Count Basie and Thelonius Monk all had gigs in the city that week, and there were a few good plays on at the theatre, and they had some friends who wanted to take them out for meals, and… well, there’s a lot of stuff to do in New York that’s more interesting than work. Eventually, Jean Aberbach from Hill and Range publishing came round to see them in their hotel suite, and ask them where his songs were. They told him he would have them soon, and he replied that he knew he would, because he wasn’t going to let them leave until he did. He pushed the sofa in front of the door so they couldn’t get out, and went to sleep on it. In the next five hours, Leiber and Stoller wrote four songs together, which was just about enough for the film, which was padded out with two other songs by other writers — both of them co-written by Aaron Schroeder. There was “Don’t Leave Me Now”, which had been recorded but not used for “Loving You”,  but which had still already appeared on that film’s soundtrack album, and a new ballad called “Young and Beautiful”. But neither of those songs were particularly strong, and so it was the Leiber and Stoller songs that would be the musical spine of the film — the credits at the beginning of the film said “songs mostly by Mike Stoller and Jerry Leiber”, clearly showing that they knew which songs it was that people would actually care about. It was only in April 1957 that Leiber and Stoller actually met the man who had already had hits with two of their songs and used a third as the title song for one of his films. Coincidentally, they met him in Radio Recorders Annex, the same studio where five years earlier they had recorded the original version of “Hound Dog” with Big Mama Thornton. They went in not knowing what to expect, but were struck, in order, by three different things. The first was that Elvis was extremely physically beautiful, far more so in person than in photos. The second was how shy and quiet he was — but how these things actually gave him an extra presence. And the third was how much he knew about R&B music, and how much he loved it. Leiber and Stoller had believed themselves to be the only white people of their own generation to really know or care about R&B or the blues, and here was someone enthusing to them about B.B. King, Big Bill Broonzy, and Arthur Crudup, and also about their own songs. He particularly liked one they’d written for Ray Charles, “The Snow is Falling”: [Excerpt: Ray Charles, “The Snow is Falling”] He ended up sitting at the piano playing a four-handed blues with Mike Stoller. The three men were getting on well enough that even though Leiber and Stoller had only intended to visit the sessions for a short while to meet Elvis, they ended up essentially producing the session — Leiber was in the control room, and would show Elvis how he wanted the songs to be phrased, while Stoller was on the studio floor, working with the musicians, and playing piano on one track. The two were particularly impressed by Elvis’ determination in the studio. They were having to record multiple versions of almost every song, because the plot of the film would have Elvis’ character, Vince Everett, learning songs, trying them out in different arrangements, trying different vocal styles on them, and so on. As well as recording the songs properly, the way he’d like to sing them, Elvis had to do tentative versions, versions with wrong notes, and so forth. And Elvis happily worked, take after take, to get all these different versions of the songs done exactly right.  In fact, he ended up not just singing on the tracks, but playing bass on one of them.  Up until these sessions, Bill Black had been playing double bass on all Elvis’ sessions — the double bass was the standard bass instrument in country music, and had become so in rockabilly as well. But around this time it became clear that the new Fender bass guitars, which had been introduced to the market a couple of years earlier and had quickly taken off in the jazz and blues worlds, were going to become the standard instrument for studio work for everyone. Black was far from being the most accomplished musician in the world — what he brought to Elvis’ sessions was more about his enthusiasm and attitude than his ability to play — and the switch to the bass guitar was an uncomfortable one. If you don’t know, a double bass is played standing up, like a cello, and has no frets, while a bass guitar is played like a guitar. They’re very different instruments, and Black had trouble switching from one to the other. He was also getting annoyed with the whole Presley organisation. Tom Parker was determined to isolate Elvis from anyone else in the business, including his band members. And not only that, Bill and Scotty were on what they both considered was a miserably low salary. So when Bill messed up the intro to “(You’re So Square) Baby, I Don’t Care” repeatedly, he threw the bass across the room and stormed out of the session. Elvis just picked up the bass and played the part himself, and it’s him you can hear playing it on the finished record, doing a rather decent job of it: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “(You’re So Square) Baby I Don’t Care”] While Bill had left the session, it didn’t stop him appearing in the film — “Jailhouse Rock” featured Scotty, Bill, and D.J., miming their instruments. They didn’t have any lines — they weren’t members of the Screen Actors’ Guild, so they couldn’t — but they appeared throughout the last half of the film, as did Mike Stoller on the piano. It was actually meant to be Jerry Leiber miming the piano parts — someone from the film studio had come into the recording studio while they were making the records, and had said that Leiber looked like a piano player. Elvis had said that no, it was Stoller who was the piano player, and the filmmaker had said it didn’t matter — Leiber looked like a piano player, and so if he wanted to be in the film miming the piano parts he could. Leiber agreed, but then on the day he was meant to go into the studio, he developed a terrible toothache. He called up Stoller and said “I can’t go, you go instead”.  Stoller pointed out that they were expecting Leiber, and Leiber told him that they wouldn’t know the difference anyway. So Stoller went along, and the only thing he was told was that he would have to shave off his goatee beard, as it would be a scene-stealer and distract people from Elvis. So Mike Stoller was there with Scotty, Bill, and D.J. as they filmed most of what is generally considered to be Elvis’ best film.  The film almost got stopped before it was started, though. The first thing to be filmed was the big dance sequence to one of the songs Leiber and Stoller had written, “Jailhouse Rock”: [excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Jailhouse Rock”] That was going to be the centrepiece of the whole film, and the dance sequence involved dozens of men dressed as convicts. Some have argued that the song and the sequence were inspired by the bit in The Girl Can’t Help It in which a parody of rock and roll is sung by a group dressed as convicts. There might even be some truth to that as far as the version in the film goes, as the film has extra orchestration and an intro section added which isn’t on the record, and which doesn’t really fit very well. Compare the film version of “Jailhouse Rock”: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Jailhouse Rock”, film version] With “Rock Around the Rockpile”: [Excerpt: “Jerri Jordan”, “Rock Around the Rockpile”] But the thing is, that’s only a partial explanation. The song itself is clearly in a long line of Leiber and Stoller songs about the judicial system, like “Framed”: [Excerpt: The Robins, “Framed”] and “Riot in Cell Block #9”: [Excerpt: The Robins, “Riot in Cell Block #9”] It also contains a lot of the humour that Leiber and Stoller were noted for. Many comedians have made fun of this section: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Jailhouse Rock”] and pointed out the homoerotic implications of those lines. Given Leiber and Stoller’s other work, I think it’s fairly clear they were perfectly aware of those implications — and given that this is a film that also features shots of Elvis shirtless, tied up, being whipped by another man, I suspect they weren’t the only ones who were dropping little coded hints to gay fans at that time. But, as I said, the dance sequence nearly ended the film — and nearly ended Elvis’ singing career along with it. Elvis had some trouble learning to dance with a choreographed troupe, at first — he was a natural mover, and not used to the way trained dancers moved. Luckily, the choreographer, Alex Romero, came up with a solution to that problem. He got Elvis to just perform in front of him, miming to his own records, moving like he would on stage.  Romero then took Elvis’ normal stage movements and worked them into the dance routine, choreographing it so it still worked with the large dance troupe, but Elvis was able to move in ways that were comfortable for him. (The claim on Wikipedia that Elvis himself choreographed the dance sequence is absolutely mythical, incidentally. It was Alex Romero.) That solved the immediate problem, but there was a larger problem when, on the first day of shooting, Elvis hit his mouth and dislodged a crown. Elvis insisted that it had gone into his chest. At first, people thought he was being overly dramatic, but after a few more takes of bits of the sequence, they noticed a whistling sound when he was breathing. He had inhaled his crown.  It required major surgery to remove the crown from his lung, and to do it they had to separate his vocal cords to get into his lungs. This was a weird case of life imitating art, as a crucial plot point in the film was Elvis’ character having to have throat surgery and worrying whether he would be able to sing again. Fortunately, just as in the film, he made a full recovery and was able to carry on. The film itself was surprisingly good, given the depths to which Elvis would sink in some of his later films. Elvis plays a very unsympathetic character, with a chip on his shoulder after being imprisoned after accidentally killing a man in a bar fight, who (of course) becomes a famous singer. It’s no cinematic masterpiece, but it’s a very decent film of its type. The film sadly had a tragic coda — just days after the film finished shooting, Judy Tyler, Elvis’ love interest in the film, died in a car accident. As a result, Elvis refused to ever watch the film in full — he couldn’t bear to. But in the short term, the film’s main effect was to draw Elvis and Mike Stoller closer together. As Stoller was on the set all the time, he had a chance to get close to Elvis, and at one point they were having a game of pool, and one of the songs Leiber and Stoller had written for the Drifters came on: [Excerpt: The Drifters, “Ruby Baby”] Elvis started singing along, and asking Stoller how he and Leiber wrote so many great songs together. But then, a few minutes later, Elvis was dragged out of the room, and came back in telling Stoller that he had to leave — the Colonel didn’t want Elvis hanging round with people who were in the music industry, unless those people worked for the Colonel. Indeed, at one point around this time, the Colonel tried to become Leiber and Stoller’s manager. He sent them blank pieces of paper for them to sign, with a promise that he would fill out the rest later and give them a very good deal. Perhaps unsurprisingly, their response was not one I could repeat on a podcast that isn’t in the adult section. But Elvis had still taken to Leiber and Stoller. He started calling them his “good luck charms”, and decided that he wanted them at every recording session. The Colonel agreed to have them involved in everything. For the moment. But Leiber and Stoller weren’t dependent on Elvis and the Colonel. During 1957, while they were working with Elvis, they also wrote hits for Perry Como: [Excerpt: Perry Como, “Dancin'”] Ruth Brown: [Excerpt: Ruth Brown, “Lucky Lips”] The Drifters: [Excerpt: The Drifters, “Fools Fall in Love”] And of course those Coasters records we looked at a few weeks ago — and will be looking at again in a month or so. And that independence was bothering people in the Colonel’s group of business people. In particular, Freddy Bienstock, who worked at Hill and Range and controlled what songs Elvis performed, became apoplectic when the duo gave the song “Don’t” directly to Elvis: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Don’t”] Stoller explained to Bienstock that the song had been commissioned directly *by* Elvis. Elvis had said, “I want you to write a real pretty ballad for me,” they’d gone away and written him a real pretty ballad, he’d liked it, what was the problem? The problem, Bienstock explained, was that you don’t just give songs to Elvis. There was no contract for the song. What if they couldn’t come to a contract agreement, but Elvis wanted to record the song anyway? What if all the money ended up just going to Leiber and Stoller because they refused to cut Hill and Range, Elvis, and the Colonel in on the royalties? That wasn’t a problem, they said. They’d written songs for Elvis before. They knew the drill. They assumed that the contract would be the same one they always had to sign when writing for Elvis. Bienstock insisted that none of that mattered. You brought the song to Bienstock, or to Jean Aberbach. If they liked it for Elvis, *then* they got the contracts sorted, and *then* Elvis got to hear it. That was the way things worked around here. You don’t just go bringing Elvis a song. That was going behind the Colonel’s back, and the Colonel didn’t like people going behind his back. As far as Leiber and Stoller were concerned, they weren’t going behind anyone’s back.  So by September 1957, when Jailhouse Rock came out, things were a lot more precarious for Elvis than they looked from the outside. The Colonel had weakened the bonds between him and his backing musicians, by insisting that they get paid a small salary rather than a percentage; he had control over what songs Elvis could sing; Sam Phillips was no longer in the picture; and so Leiber and Stoller were the only people involved in Elvis’ life who had any real independence — everyone at Hill and Range, the film studios, and RCA was involved in a complex network of kickbacks which meant that they all stood or fell together with the Colonel.  If the Colonel could just get those good luck charms out of Elvis’ life again, he’d be all set to make sure Elvis’ career was run exactly as he wanted it. And as luck would have it, Elvis was going to become eligible for the draft in January 1958. All the Colonel had to do was wait a few months…  

Saturday... July 17, 1956... Alan Freed hosts the "Camel Rock and Roll Dance Party" Guests in order of appearance and the songs they are performing: Sam The Man Taylor Orchestra: "Lookout" / The Drifters: "Ruby Baby" / The Drifters: "Your Promise To Be Mine" / Moonglows: "We Go Together" / Moonglows: "Whistle My Love" / Valentines: "Lily Maebelle" / Valentines: "Woo Woo Train" / Sam The Man Taylor Orchestra featuring Big Al Sears and Hayward Henry (Sax players): "The Pretzel" - Most of the ads for Camel cigarettes have been removed. Find more of "Rock and Roll Party" program in the playlist "Alan Freed Rock and Roll Party"

Dion Dimucci is an American singer-songwriter who is one of the most prominent rock n' roll artists of our time. After gaining prominence as the lead singer of the Belmonts with hits such as “A Teenager in Love,” and “Where or When”, he established himself as a solo performer—recording back-to-back hit singles, including “Run Around Sue”, “Wanderer”, “Ruby Baby”, and “Donna the Prima Donna.” He suffered a career hiatus in the mid-60's due to an addiction to heroin.

Dregin eru fram frumsamin lög sem íslenskar hljómsveitir og tónlistarmenn sungu á ensku á upphafsárum áttunda áratugarins. Roof Tops flytja lögin With You og Winter's Gone, Hljómar flytja lögin Rock Me, Let It Flow og Slamat Djalam Mas, Svanfríður flytur lögin Woman Of Our Day og What's Hidden There, Change flytja lögin Lazy London Lady, Wildcat og Ruby Baby og Jóhann G. Jóhannsson flytur lögin Sentimental Blues og What Ya'Gonna Do?. Umsjón: Jónatan Garðarsson.

Dregin eru fram frumsamin lög sem íslenskar hljómsveitir og tónlistarmenn sungu á ensku á upphafsárum áttunda áratugarins. Roof Tops flytja lögin With You og Winter's Gone, Hljómar flytja lögin Rock Me, Let It Flow og Slamat Djalam Mas, Svanfríður flytur lögin Woman Of Our Day og What's Hidden There, Change flytja lögin Lazy London Lady, Wildcat og Ruby Baby og Jóhann G. Jóhannsson flytur lögin Sentimental Blues og What Ya'Gonna Do?.

A collection of early '60s tunes by the King and his contemporaries... 1) The Lady Loves Me by Elvis Presley & Ann-Margaret 2) England Swings by Roger Miller 3) Little Town Flirt by Del Shannon 4) Fools Rush In by The Everly Brothers 5) Gimme Little Sign by Brenton Wood 6) Can't Get Used to Losing You by Andy Williams 7) The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore by The Walker Brothers 8) Deep Purple by Nino Tempo & April Stevens 9) Dream Baby by Roy Orbison 10) I'm Leaving It Up to You by Dale & Grace 11) Sukiyaki by Kyu Sakamoto 12) Ruby Baby by Dion 13) Let Her Dance by Bobby Fuller Four 14) I Just Wanna Make Love to You by The Righteous Brothers 15) Bossa Nova Baby by Elvis Presley

Dion is our guest for part 1 of our interview on Rockabilly N Blues Radio Hour this week.  We talk about playing Viva Las Vegas for the first time last year, both The Beatles and Elvis loving "Ruby Baby" and begin our discussion about his new album, New York Is My Home on Instant Records.  Plus, we hear tunes from Brian Setzer, Elvis Presley, Si Cranstoun, Jack & The Real Deals, Red Simpson and Charlie Feathers! Intro Voice Over- Rob "Cool Daddy" Dempsey   Brian Setzer- "5 Years, 4 Months, 3 Days" Elvis Presley- "We're Coming In Loaded"   Dion interview Dion- "Runaround Sue" Segment 1 Dion- "Teenager In Love" Dion- "Written On The Subway Wall/ Little Star" Segment 2 Dion- "Ruby Baby" Segment 3 Dion- "Visionary Heart" Dion- "Rave On" Segment 4 Dion- "New York Is My Home" Segment 5 Dion- "Aces Up Your Sleeve"   Jack & The Real Deals- "Rock All Night" Si Cranstoun- "Vegas Baby" Red Simpson- "Truck Drivin' Man" Charlie Feathers- "Nobody's Woman"   http://diondimucci.com/wp1/home/ http://instantrecordsinc.com/