Podcasts about will you love me tomorrow

"MixTape 114 Classic Oldies Favorites" TRACK 1 AUDIO TITLE "Stand By Me" PERFORMER "Ben E. King" INDEX 01 00:00:00 TRACK 2 AUDIO TITLE "The Sound of Silence - Acoustic Version" PERFORMER "Simon & Garfunkel" INDEX 01 02:46:70 TRACK 3 AUDIO TITLE "All I Have to Do Is Dream" PERFORMER "The Everly Brothers" INDEX 01 05:31:35 TRACK 4 AUDIO TITLE "All You Need Is Love - Remastered 2009" PERFORMER "The Beatles" INDEX 01 07:41:11 TRACK 5 AUDIO TITLE "Ring of Fire" PERFORMER "Johnny Cash" INDEX 01 10:36:31 TRACK 6 AUDIO TITLE "Suspicious Minds" PERFORMER "Elvis Presley" INDEX 01 13:00:26 TRACK 7 AUDIO TITLE "Sugar, Sugar" PERFORMER "The Archies" INDEX 01 17:01:33 TRACK 8 AUDIO TITLE "Travelin' Man - Remastered" PERFORMER "Ricky Nelson" INDEX 01 19:36:73 TRACK 9 AUDIO TITLE "Splish Splash" PERFORMER "Bobby Darin" INDEX 01 21:52:10 TRACK 10 AUDIO TITLE "Do You Love Me - Mono Single" PERFORMER "The Contours" INDEX 01 23:49:50 TRACK 11 AUDIO TITLE "Runaway" PERFORMER "Del Shannon" INDEX 01 26:21:04 TRACK 12 AUDIO TITLE "Johnny B. Goode" PERFORMER "Chuck Berry" INDEX 01 28:23:33 TRACK 13 AUDIO TITLE "Tutti Frutti" PERFORMER "Little Richard" INDEX 01 30:49:36 TRACK 14 AUDIO TITLE "I Walk The Line - Single Version" PERFORMER "Johnny Cash, The Tennessee Two" INDEX 01 33:06:73 TRACK 15 AUDIO TITLE "Only the Lonely" PERFORMER "Roy Orbison" INDEX 01 35:20:16 TRACK 16 AUDIO TITLE "Dream Lover" PERFORMER "Bobby Darin" INDEX 01 37:35:34 TRACK 17 AUDIO TITLE "Will You Love Me Tomorrow" PERFORMER "The Shirelles" INDEX 01 39:53:17 TRACK 18 AUDIO TITLE "Brown Eyed Girl" PERFORMER "Van Morrison" INDEX 01 42:17:71 TRACK 19 AUDIO TITLE "You Never Can Tell" PERFORMER "Chuck Berry" INDEX 01 44:58:04 TRACK 20 AUDIO TITLE "I'm a Believer - 2006 Remaster" PERFORMER "The Monkees" INDEX 01 47:27:06 TRACK 21 AUDIO TITLE "Runaround Sue" PERFORMER "Dion" INDEX 01 49:57:73 TRACK 22 AUDIO TITLE "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'" PERFORMER "Nancy Sinatra" INDEX 01 52:11:36 TRACK 23 AUDIO TITLE "Don't Be Cruel" PERFORMER "Elvis Presley" INDEX 01 54:34:24 TRACK 24 AUDIO TITLE "Bye Bye Love" PERFORMER "The Everly Brothers" INDEX 01 56:26:43 TRACK 25 AUDIO TITLE "Misirlou" PERFORMER "Dick Dale" INDEX 01 58:20:52 TRACK 26 AUDIO TITLE "Then He Kissed Me" PERFORMER "The Crystals" INDEX 01 60:24:66 TRACK 27 AUDIO TITLE "(What A) Wonderful World" PERFORMER "Sam Cooke" INDEX 01 62:45:16 TRACK 28 AUDIO TITLE "Do Wah Diddy Diddy - 2007 Remaster" PERFORMER "Manfred Mann" INDEX 01 64:44:71 TRACK 29 AUDIO TITLE "Be My Baby" PERFORMER "The Ronettes" INDEX 01 67:02:23 TRACK 30 AUDIO TITLE "Mambo Italiano (with The Mellomen) - 78rpm Version" PERFORMER "Rosemary Clooney, The Mellomen" INDEX 01 69:23:33 TRACK 31 AUDIO TITLE "Let's Twist Again" PERFORMER "Chubby Checker" INDEX 01 71:23:31 TRACK 32 AUDIO TITLE "Wipe Out - Hit Version / Extended Ending" PERFORMER "The Surfaris" INDEX 01 73:36:28 TRACK 33 AUDIO TITLE "Great Balls Of Fire" PERFORMER "Jerry Lee Lewis" INDEX 01 75:32:13 TRACK 34 AUDIO TITLE "Think" PERFORMER "Aretha Franklin" INDEX 01 77:16:50 TRACK 35 AUDIO TITLE "California Dreamin' - Single Version" PERFORMER "The Mamas & The Papas" INDEX 01 79:20:31 TRACK 36 AUDIO TITLE "Mrs. Robinson - From "The Graduate" Soundtrack" PERFORMER "Simon & Garfunkel" INDEX 01 81:42:59 TRACK 37 AUDIO TITLE "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" PERFORMER "The Animals" INDEX 01 85:02:61 TRACK 38 AUDIO TITLE "Oh, Pretty Woman" PERFORMER "Roy Orbison" INDEX 01 87:09:29 TRACK 39 AUDIO TITLE "Always On My Mind" PERFORMER "Elvis Presley" INDEX 01 89:59:40 TRACK 40 AUDIO TITLE "I Got You Babe" PERFORMER "Sonny & Cher" INDEX 01 93:19:73

This week, a real cross section of artists, which speaks to the depth and diversity of our interview archive. First up is Pink Floyd. We have a short but interesting chat with David Gilmour from 1984 and he promotes his solo work, but also wrestles with the past and future of Pink Floyd. Then we have an awesome 1979 chat with legendary Canadian producer Bob Ezrin as he talks about Pink Floyd’s The Wall – and as many fans know, Bob was instrumental in the creation of that album – and he has lots to say about it – from the development of the theme, to Roger Waters’ LACK of musical imagination (at least at the outset) to the planning of the ambitious tour that was to follow. Fascinating stuff from a guy who’s NOT afraid to share his opinions. Then we have a chat with Chad Kroeger and the guys from Nickelback from 2014. This was around the time that the whole backlash against them was just starting to heat up. They address it head on – and do a very good job too! Then we travel back to 2004 with Gwen Stefani, upon the release of her first solo album. Gwen is a bundle of energy who cannot be contained – and you can hear the passion, emotion and even insecurity that drives her. We also have a short but fun segment with the Black Eyed Peas from 2005 – a boy did THEY ever own the charts in that decade. We also remember the classic ‘60s Girl Groups, with cool facts from the amazing book “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” Our favourite story is about the vocal group that you’ve likely heard thousands of times over the years, but never knew by name. Famous Lost Words, hosted by Christopher Ward and Tom Jokic, is heard in more than 100 countries worldwide and on radio stations across Canada, including Newstalk 1010 Toronto, CJAD 800 Montreal, 580 CFRA Ottawa, AM 800 CKLW Windsor, 610 CKTB St Catharines, CFAX Victoria, AM1150 Kelowna and 91x in Belleville. It is in the Top 20% of worldwide podcasts based on the number of listeners in the first week.

Hosts Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot look back on the occasion of Sound Opinions reaching the 1000 episodes milestone. Both hosts share highlights and a couple lowlights, plus listeners share their favorite memories.Join our Facebook Group: https://bit.ly/3sivr9TBecome a member on Patreon: https://bit.ly/3slWZvcSign up for our newsletter: https://bit.ly/3eEvRnGMake a donation via PayPal: https://bit.ly/3dmt9lUSend us a Voice Memo: Desktop: bit.ly/2RyD5Ah Mobile: sayhi.chat/soundops Featured Songs:The Beatles, "With A Little Help From My Friends," Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Parlophone, 1967Radiohead, "I Want None Of It (Live on Sound Opinions)," Unreleased, NA, 2008Carole King, "Will You Love Me Tomorrow," Tapestry, Ode, 1971D'Angelo, "Send It On," Voodoo, Virgin, 2000Trupa Trupa, "Sister Ray," (Single), Glitterbeat, 2024Wire, "Used To ," Chairs Missing, Harvest, 1978Goat Girl, "Creep," Goat Girl, Rough Trade, 2018Allen Toussaint, "A New Orleans Thing (Live on Sound Opinions)," Songbook, Concord, 2013Boygenius, "20," The Record, Interscope, 2023Max Roach, "Driva Man," We Insist!, Candid, 1960The Allman Brothers Band, "Ramblin' Man," Brothers and Sisters, Capricorn, 1973See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

RNIB Connect Radio's Toby Davey is joined again by Vidar Hjardeng MBE, Inclusion and Diversity Consultant for ITV News across England, Wales, Northern Ireland and the Channel Islands for the next in his regular Connect Radio theatre reviews.  This week Vidar was reviewing the Lawrence Olivier award winning comedy musical Pride and Prejudice* (*sort of) as the current touring production visited the Wolverhampton Grand Theatre with description by Professional audio describer Remy Lloyd. About Pride and Prejudice* (*sort of) Direct from its triumph in the West End where it won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Comedy, this is a unique and audacious retelling of Jane Austen's most iconic love story. Men, money and microphones will be fought over in this irreverent but affectionate adaptation where the stakes couldn't be higher when it comes to romance.  This multi-award-winning production features a string of pop classics including Young Hearts Run Free, Will You Love Me Tomorrow and You're So Vain. It's the 1800s. It's Party Time. Let The Ruthless Matchmaking Begin. For more about the current tour of Pride and Prejudice* (*sort of) do visit the production website - https://prideandprejudicesortof.com And for more about access at the Wolverhampton Grand Theatre including details of audio described performances do visit - https://www.grandtheatre.co.uk/access/  (Image shows RNIB logo. 'RNIB' written in black capital letters over a white background and underlined with a bold pink line, with the words 'See differently' underneath)

It's been more than 50 years since Carole King's Tapestry was released to critical and cultural acclaim, and the record is still as impressive today as it was then. Hosts Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot revisit their classic album dissection of Carole King's Tapestry.--Join our Facebook Group: https://bit.ly/3sivr9TBecome a member on Patreon: https://bit.ly/3slWZvcSign up for our newsletter: https://bit.ly/3eEvRnGMake a donation via PayPal: https://bit.ly/3dmt9lUSend us a Voice Memo: Desktop: bit.ly/2RyD5Ah Mobile: sayhi.chat/soundops--Featured Songs:Carole King, "It's Too Late," Tapestry, Ode, 1971The Shirelles, "Will You Love Me Tomorrow," Tonight's the Night, Scepter, 1960Little Eva, "The Loco-motion," The Loco-motion (Single), Dimension 1000, 1962Bobby Vee, "Take Good Care of My Baby," Take Good Care of My Baby, Liberty, 1961The Monkees, "Pleasant Valley Sunday," Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd., Colgems, 1967Carole King, "It Might As Well Rain Until September," It Might As Well Rain Until September (Single), Dimension, 1962The City, "Now That Everything's Been Said," Now That Everything's Been Said, Ode, 1968Carole King, "No Easy Way Down," Writer, Ode, 1970Carole King, "Beautiful," Tapestry, Ode, 1971Carole King, "I Feel the Earth Move," Tapestry, Ode, 1971Carole King, "You've Got a Friend," Tapestry, Ode, 1971Carole King, "Tapestry," Tapestry, Ode, 1971Carole King, "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman," Tapestry, Ode, 1971Carole King and Louise Gioffin, "Where You Lead," Our Little Corner of the World: Music From Gilmore Girls, Rhino, 2002Carole King, "Where You Lead," Tapestry, Ode, 1971Carole King, "So Far Away," Tapestry, Ode, 1971Carole King, "Will You Love Me Tomorrow," Tapestry, Ode, 1971Carole King, "Way Over Yonder," Tapestry, Ode, 1971Carole King, "Home Again," Tapestry, Ode, 1971Carole King, "Smackwater Jack," Tapestry, Ode, 1971James Taylor, "You've Got a Friend," Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon, Warner Bros., 1971Carole King and James Taylor, "You've Got a Friend," Live At The Troubadour, Syzygy, 2010Liz Phair, "Divorce Song (Girly-Sound Version)," The Girly-Sound Tapes, Matador, 2018Lauryn Hill, "Everything Is Everything," The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, Columbia, 1998Tori Amos, "Cornflake Girl," Under the Pink, Atlantic, 1994Caroline Rose, "Do You Think We'll Last Forever?," Superstar, New West, 2020See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

You'll feel the earth move under your feet this week because You've Got A Friend in Carole King! We'll listen to her weave a Tapestry of self-love and heartache on her unprecedented 1971 sophomore album. She was already established as a hit songwriter; we'll talk about her early career and her breakout as a recording artist. The Mixtaper has another journey for us and Where He Leads, we will follow... even if that means facts about Gilmore Girls, her VERY loose ties to Otis Redding, or even reading the phone book‽‽ The whole album feels like a time capsule, like sitting around a piano listening to Carole King play these songs in her living room with Telemachus. Will it be a surefire winner? Can James call his shot in the Year Of Healing? (And if you DIDN'T want us to release this episode, well, It's Too Late, baby, it's too late... We really did try to make it.) Keep Spinning at www.SpinItPod.com!Thanks for listening!0:00 Intro4:26 About Carole King9:34 About Tapestry16:16 Awards & Accolades18:01 Fact Or Spin19:35 Otis Redding Was A Part Of Her Conception23:49 Carole King Is A Fan Of Dead Punctuation‽30:40 Gilmore Girls: She Sang That Song33:31 Carole King: Grade Skipper38:40 Album Art40:07 I Feel The Earth Move42:15 So Far Away44:06 It's Too Late46:47 Home Again47:53 Beautiful49:34 Way Over Yonder50:37 You've Got A Friend52:56 Where You Lead54:33 Will You Love Me Tomorrow?56:12 Smackwater Jack57:51 Tapestry1:00:02 (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman1:02:20 Final Spin Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Shirelles, Amy Winehouse, Culture Club et les Ramones. 1960, les Shirelles interprètent avec succès "Will You Love Me Tomorrow" signée par le duo Gerry Goffin et Carole King avec une simple question "m'aimeras-tu toujours demain" ? L'ensemble de l'œuvre des Shirelles sera une grande source d'inspiration pour Amy Winehouse qui sort une version en 2004 pour la B.O. "Bridget Jones : l'âge de raison". 1982, Culture Club publie : "Do You Really Want To Hurt Me" Boy George s'adresse au batteur du groupe, Jon Moss avec qui il a une aventure amoureuse cachée durant 6 ans. En 1980, les Ramones se font nostalgique "Do You Remember Rock'n'Roll Radio" permet au groupe new-yorkais de se souvenir des radios qui leur ont donné l'envie de devenir des rockeurs et font référence à John Lennon, T.Rex ou encore Alan Freed, l'animateur radio qui popularise le terme rock'n'roll. --- Du lundi au vendredi, Fanny Gillard et Laurent Rieppi vous dévoilent l'univers rock, au travers de thèmes comme ceux de l'éducation, des rockers en prison, les objets de la culture rock, les groupes familiaux et leurs déboires, et bien d'autres, chaque matin dans Coffee on the Rocks à 6h30 et rediffusion à 13h30 dans Lunch Around The Clock. Merci pour votre écoute Pour écouter Classic 21 à tout moment : www.rtbf.be/classic21 Retrouvez tous les contenus de la RTBF sur notre plateforme Auvio.be Et si vous avez apprécié ce podcast, n'hésitez pas à nous donner des étoiles ou des commentaires, cela nous aide à le faire connaître plus largement.

Episode 168 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “I Say a Little Prayer”, and the interaction of the sacred, political, and secular in Aretha Franklin's life and work. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a forty-five-minute bonus episode available, on "Abraham, Martin, and John" by Dion. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by Aretha Franklin. Even splitting it into multiple parts would have required six or seven mixes. My main biographical source for Aretha Franklin is Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin by David Ritz, and this is where most of the quotes from musicians come from. Information on C.L. Franklin came from Singing in a Strange Land: C. L. Franklin, the Black Church, and the Transformation of America by Nick Salvatore. Country Soul by Charles L Hughes is a great overview of the soul music made in Muscle Shoals, Memphis, and Nashville in the sixties. Peter Guralnick's Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm And Blues And The Southern Dream Of Freedom is possibly less essential, but still definitely worth reading. Information about Martin Luther King came from Martin Luther King: A Religious Life by Paul Harvey. I also referred to Burt Bacharach's autobiography Anyone Who Had a Heart, Carole King's autobiography A Natural Woman, and Soul Serenade: King Curtis and his Immortal Saxophone by Timothy R. Hoover. For information about Amazing Grace I also used Aaron Cohen's 33 1/3 book on the album. The film of the concerts is also definitely worth watching. And the Aretha Now album is available in this five-album box set for a ludicrously cheap price. But it's actually worth getting this nineteen-CD set with her first sixteen Atlantic albums and a couple of bonus discs of demos and outtakes. There's barely a duff track in the whole nineteen discs. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A quick warning before I begin. This episode contains some moderate references to domestic abuse, death by cancer, racial violence, police violence, and political assassination. Anyone who might be upset by those subjects might want to check the transcript rather than listening to the episode. Also, as with the previous episode on Aretha Franklin, this episode presents something of a problem. Like many people in this narrative, Franklin's career was affected by personal troubles, which shaped many of her decisions. But where most of the subjects of the podcast have chosen to live their lives in public and share intimate details of every aspect of their personal lives, Franklin was an extremely private person, who chose to share only carefully sanitised versions of her life, and tried as far as possible to keep things to herself. This of course presents a dilemma for anyone who wants to tell her story -- because even though the information is out there in biographies, and even though she's dead, it's not right to disrespect someone's wish for a private life. I have therefore tried, wherever possible, to stay away from talk of her personal life except where it *absolutely* affects the work, or where other people involved have publicly shared their own stories, and even there I've tried to keep it to a minimum. This will occasionally lead to me saying less about some topics than other people might, even though the information is easily findable, because I don't think we have an absolute right to invade someone else's privacy for entertainment. When we left Aretha Franklin, she had just finally broken through into the mainstream after a decade of performing, with a version of Otis Redding's song "Respect" on which she had been backed by her sisters, Erma and Carolyn. "Respect", in Franklin's interpretation, had been turned from a rather chauvinist song about a man demanding respect from his woman into an anthem of feminism, of Black power, and of a new political awakening. For white people of a certain generation, the summer of 1967 was "the summer of love". For many Black people, it was rather different. There's a quote that goes around (I've seen it credited in reliable sources to both Ebony and Jet magazine, but not ever seen an issue cited, so I can't say for sure where it came from) saying that the summer of 67 was the summer of "'retha, Rap, and revolt", referring to the trifecta of Aretha Franklin, the Black power leader Jamil Abdullah al-Amin (who was at the time known as H. Rap Brown, a name he later disclaimed) and the rioting that broke out in several major cities, particularly in Detroit: [Excerpt: John Lee Hooker, "The Motor City is Burning"] The mid sixties were, in many ways, the high point not of Black rights in the US -- for the most part there has been a lot of progress in civil rights in the intervening decades, though not without inevitable setbacks and attacks from the far right, and as movements like the Black Lives Matter movement have shown there is still a long way to go -- but of *hope* for Black rights. The moral force of the arguments made by the civil rights movement were starting to cause real change to happen for Black people in the US for the first time since the Reconstruction nearly a century before. But those changes weren't happening fast enough, and as we heard in the episode on "I Was Made to Love Her", there was not only a growing unrest among Black people, but a recognition that it was actually possible for things to change. A combination of hope and frustration can be a powerful catalyst, and whether Franklin wanted it or not, she was at the centre of things, both because of her newfound prominence as a star with a hit single that couldn't be interpreted as anything other than a political statement and because of her intimate family connections to the struggle. Even the most racist of white people these days pays lip service to the memory of Dr Martin Luther King, and when they do they quote just a handful of sentences from one speech King made in 1963, as if that sums up the full theological and political philosophy of that most complex of men. And as we discussed the last time we looked at Aretha Franklin, King gave versions of that speech, the "I Have a Dream" speech, twice. The most famous version was at the March on Washington, but the first time was a few weeks earlier, at what was at the time the largest civil rights demonstration in American history, in Detroit. Aretha's family connection to that event is made clear by the very opening of King's speech: [Excerpt: Martin Luther King, "Original 'I Have a Dream' Speech"] So as summer 1967 got into swing, and white rock music was going to San Francisco to wear flowers in its hair, Aretha Franklin was at the centre of a very different kind of youth revolution. Franklin's second Atlantic album, Aretha Arrives, brought in some new personnel to the team that had recorded Aretha's first album for Atlantic. Along with the core Muscle Shoals players Jimmy Johnson, Spooner Oldham, Tommy Cogbill and Roger Hawkins, and a horn section led by King Curtis, Wexler and Dowd also brought in guitarist Joe South. South was a white session player from Georgia, who had had a few minor hits himself in the fifties -- he'd got his start recording a cover version of "The Purple People Eater Meets the Witch Doctor", the Big Bopper's B-side to "Chantilly Lace": [Excerpt: Joe South, "The Purple People Eater Meets the Witch Doctor"] He'd also written a few songs that had been recorded by people like Gene Vincent, but he'd mostly become a session player. He'd become a favourite musician of Bob Johnston's, and so he'd played guitar on Simon and Garfunkel's Sounds of Silence and Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme albums: [Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, "I am a Rock"] and bass on Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde, with Al Kooper particularly praising his playing on "Visions of Johanna": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Visions of Johanna"] South would be the principal guitarist on this and Franklin's next album, before his own career took off in 1968 with "Games People Play": [Excerpt: Joe South, "Games People Play"] At this point, he had already written the other song he's best known for, "Hush", which later became a hit for Deep Purple: [Excerpt: Deep Purple, "Hush"] But he wasn't very well known, and was surprised to get the call for the Aretha Franklin session, especially because, as he put it "I was white and I was about to play behind the blackest genius since Ray Charles" But Jerry Wexler had told him that Franklin didn't care about the race of the musicians she played with, and South settled in as soon as Franklin smiled at him when he played a good guitar lick on her version of the blues standard "Going Down Slow": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Going Down Slow"] That was one of the few times Franklin smiled in those sessions though. Becoming an overnight success after years of trying and failing to make a name for herself had been a disorienting experience, and on top of that things weren't going well in her personal life. Her marriage to her manager Ted White was falling apart, and she was performing erratically thanks to the stress. In particular, at a gig in Georgia she had fallen off the stage and broken her arm. She soon returned to performing, but it meant she had problems with her right arm during the recording of the album, and didn't play as much piano as she would have previously -- on some of the faster songs she played only with her left hand. But the recording sessions had to go on, whether or not Aretha was physically capable of playing piano. As we discussed in the episode on Otis Redding, the owners of Atlantic Records were busily negotiating its sale to Warner Brothers in mid-1967. As Wexler said later “Everything in me said, Keep rolling, keep recording, keep the hits coming. She was red hot and I had no reason to believe that the streak wouldn't continue. I knew that it would be foolish—and even irresponsible—not to strike when the iron was hot. I also had personal motivation. A Wall Street financier had agreed to see what we could get for Atlantic Records. While Ahmet and Neshui had not agreed on a selling price, they had gone along with my plan to let the financier test our worth on the open market. I was always eager to pump out hits, but at this moment I was on overdrive. In this instance, I had a good partner in Ted White, who felt the same. He wanted as much product out there as possible." In truth, you can tell from Aretha Arrives that it's a record that was being thought of as "product" rather than one being made out of any kind of artistic impulse. It's a fine album -- in her ten-album run from I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You through Amazing Grace there's not a bad album and barely a bad track -- but there's a lack of focus. There are only two originals on the album, neither of them written by Franklin herself, and the rest is an incoherent set of songs that show the tension between Franklin and her producers at Atlantic. Several songs are the kind of standards that Franklin had recorded for her old label Columbia, things like "You Are My Sunshine", or her version of "That's Life", which had been a hit for Frank Sinatra the previous year: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "That's Life"] But mixed in with that are songs that are clearly the choice of Wexler. As we've discussed previously in episodes on Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett, at this point Atlantic had the idea that it was possible for soul artists to cross over into the white market by doing cover versions of white rock hits -- and indeed they'd had some success with that tactic. So while Franklin was suggesting Sinatra covers, Atlantic's hand is visible in the choices of songs like "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" and "96 Tears": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "96 Tears'] Of the two originals on the album, one, the hit single "Baby I Love You" was written by Ronnie Shannon, the Detroit songwriter who had previously written "I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You)": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Baby I Love You"] As with the previous album, and several other songs on this one, that had backing vocals by Aretha's sisters, Erma and Carolyn. But the other original on the album, "Ain't Nobody (Gonna Turn Me Around)", didn't, even though it was written by Carolyn: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Ain't Nobody (Gonna Turn Me Around)"] To explain why, let's take a little detour and look at the co-writer of the song this episode is about, though we're not going to get to that for a little while yet. We've not talked much about Burt Bacharach in this series so far, but he's one of those figures who has come up a few times in the periphery and will come up again, so here is as good a time as any to discuss him, and bring everyone up to speed about his career up to 1967. Bacharach was one of the more privileged figures in the sixties pop music field. His father, Bert Bacharach (pronounced the same as his son, but spelled with an e rather than a u) had been a famous newspaper columnist, and his parents had bought him a Steinway grand piano to practice on -- they pushed him to learn the piano even though as a kid he wasn't interested in finger exercises and Debussy. What he was interested in, though, was jazz, and as a teenager he would often go into Manhattan and use a fake ID to see people like Dizzy Gillespie, who he idolised, and in his autobiography he talks rapturously of seeing Gillespie playing his bent trumpet -- he once saw Gillespie standing on a street corner with a pet monkey on his shoulder, and went home and tried to persuade his parents to buy him a monkey too. In particular, he talks about seeing the Count Basie band with Sonny Payne on drums as a teenager: [Excerpt: Count Basie, "Kid From Red Bank"] He saw them at Birdland, the club owned by Morris Levy where they would regularly play, and said of the performance "they were just so incredibly exciting that all of a sudden, I got into music in a way I never had before. What I heard in those clubs really turned my head around— it was like a big breath of fresh air when somebody throws open a window. That was when I knew for the first time how much I loved music and wanted to be connected to it in some way." Of course, there's a rather major problem with this story, as there is so often with narratives that musicians tell about their early career. In this case, Birdland didn't open until 1949, when Bacharach was twenty-one and stationed in Germany for his military service, while Sonny Payne didn't join Basie's band until 1954, when Bacharach had been a professional musician for many years. Also Dizzy Gillespie's trumpet bell only got bent on January 6, 1953. But presumably while Bacharach was conflating several memories, he did have some experience in some New York jazz club that led him to want to become a musician. Certainly there were enough great jazz musicians playing the clubs in those days. He went to McGill University to study music for two years, then went to study with Darius Milhaud, a hugely respected modernist composer. Milhaud was also one of the most important music teachers of the time -- among others he'd taught Stockhausen and Xenakkis, and would go on to teach Philip Glass and Steve Reich. This suited Bacharach, who by this point was a big fan of Schoenberg and Webern, and was trying to write atonal, difficult music. But Milhaud had also taught Dave Brubeck, and when Bacharach rather shamefacedly presented him with a composition which had an actual tune, he told Bacharach "Never be ashamed of writing a tune you can whistle". He dropped out of university and, like most men of his generation, had to serve in the armed forces. When he got out of the army, he continued his musical studies, still trying to learn to be an avant-garde composer, this time with Bohuslav Martinů and later with Henry Cowell, the experimental composer we've heard about quite a bit in previous episodes: [Excerpt: Henry Cowell, "Aeolian Harp and Sinister Resonance"] He was still listening to a lot of avant garde music, and would continue doing so throughout the fifties, going to see people like John Cage. But he spent much of that time working in music that was very different from the avant-garde. He got a job as the band leader for the crooner Vic Damone: [Excerpt: Vic Damone. "Ebb Tide"] He also played for the vocal group the Ames Brothers. He decided while he was working with the Ames Brothers that he could write better material than they were getting from their publishers, and that it would be better to have a job where he didn't have to travel, so he got himself a job as a staff songwriter in the Brill Building. He wrote a string of flops and nearly hits, starting with "Keep Me In Mind" for Patti Page: [Excerpt: Patti Page, "Keep Me In Mind"] From early in his career he worked with the lyricist Hal David, and the two of them together wrote two big hits, "Magic Moments" for Perry Como: [Excerpt: Perry Como, "Magic Moments"] and "The Story of My Life" for Marty Robbins: [Excerpt: "The Story of My Life"] But at that point Bacharach was still also writing with other writers, notably Hal David's brother Mack, with whom he wrote the theme tune to the film The Blob, as performed by The Five Blobs: [Excerpt: The Five Blobs, "The Blob"] But Bacharach's songwriting career wasn't taking off, and he got himself a job as musical director for Marlene Dietrich -- a job he kept even after it did start to take off.  Part of the problem was that he intuitively wrote music that didn't quite fit into standard structures -- there would be odd bars of unusual time signatures thrown in, unusual harmonies, and structural irregularities -- but then he'd take feedback from publishers and producers who would tell him the song could only be recorded if he straightened it out. He said later "The truth is that I ruined a lot of songs by not believing in myself enough to tell these guys they were wrong." He started writing songs for Scepter Records, usually with Hal David, but also with Bob Hilliard and Mack David, and started having R&B hits. One song he wrote with Mack David, "I'll Cherish You", had the lyrics rewritten by Luther Dixon to make them more harsh-sounding for a Shirelles single -- but the single was otherwise just Bacharach's demo with the vocals replaced, and you can even hear his voice briefly at the beginning: [Excerpt: The Shirelles, "Baby, It's You"] But he'd also started becoming interested in the production side of records more generally. He'd iced that some producers, when recording his songs, would change the sound for the worse -- he thought Gene McDaniels' version of "Tower of Strength", for example, was too fast. But on the other hand, other producers got a better sound than he'd heard in his head. He and Hilliard had written a song called "Please Stay", which they'd given to Leiber and Stoller to record with the Drifters, and he thought that their arrangement of the song was much better than the one he'd originally thought up: [Excerpt: The Drifters, "Please Stay"] He asked Leiber and Stoller if he could attend all their New York sessions and learn about record production from them. He started doing so, and eventually they started asking him to assist them on records. He and Hilliard wrote a song called "Mexican Divorce" for the Drifters, which Leiber and Stoller were going to produce, and as he put it "they were so busy running Redbird Records that they asked me to rehearse the background singers for them in my office." [Excerpt: The Drifters, "Mexican Divorce"] The backing singers who had been brought in to augment the Drifters on that record were a group of vocalists who had started out as members of a gospel group called the Drinkard singers: [Excerpt: The Drinkard Singers, "Singing in My Soul"] The Drinkard Singers had originally been a family group, whose members included Cissy Drinkard, who joined the group aged five (and who on her marriage would become known as Cissy Houston -- her daughter Whitney would later join the family business), her aunt Lee Warrick, and Warrick's adopted daughter Judy Clay. That group were discovered by the great gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, and spent much of the fifties performing with gospel greats including Jackson herself, Clara Ward, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. But Houston was also the musical director of a group at her church, the Gospelaires, which featured Lee Warrick's two daughters Dionne and Dee Dee Warwick (for those who don't know, the Warwick sisters' birth name was Warrick, spelled with two rs. A printing error led to it being misspelled the same way as the British city on a record label, and from that point on Dionne at least pronounced the w in her misspelled name). And slowly, the Gospelaires rather than the Drinkard Singers became the focus, with a lineup of Houston, the Warwick sisters, the Warwick sisters' cousin Doris Troy, and Clay's sister Sylvia Shemwell. The real change in the group's fortunes came when, as we talked about a while back in the episode on "The Loco-Motion", the original lineup of the Cookies largely stopped working as session singers to become Ray Charles' Raelettes. As we discussed in that episode, a new lineup of Cookies formed in 1961, but it took a while for them to get started, and in the meantime the producers who had been relying on them for backing vocals were looking elsewhere, and they looked to the Gospelaires. "Mexican Divorce" was the first record to feature the group as backing vocalists -- though reports vary as to how many of them are on the record, with some saying it's only Troy and the Warwicks, others saying Houston was there, and yet others saying it was all five of them. Some of these discrepancies were because these singers were so good that many of them left to become solo singers in fairly short order. Troy was the first to do so, with her hit "Just One Look", on which the other Gospelaires sang backing vocals: [Excerpt: Doris Troy, "Just One Look"] But the next one to go solo was Dionne Warwick, and that was because she'd started working with Bacharach and Hal David as their principal demo singer. She started singing lead on their demos, and hoping that she'd get to release them on her own. One early one was "Make it Easy On Yourself", which was recorded by Jerry Butler, formerly of the Impressions. That record was produced by Bacharach, one of the first records he produced without outside supervision: [Excerpt: Jerry Butler, "Make it Easy On Yourself"] Warwick was very jealous that a song she'd sung the demo of had become a massive hit for someone else, and blamed Bacharach and David. The way she tells the story -- Bacharach always claimed this never happened, but as we've already seen he was himself not always the most reliable of narrators of his own life -- she got so angry she complained to them, and said "Don't make me over, man!" And so Bacharach and David wrote her this: [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "Don't Make Me Over"] Incidentally, in the UK, the hit version of that was a cover by the Swinging Blue Jeans: [Excerpt: The Swinging Blue Jeans, "Don't Make Me Over"] who also had a huge hit with "You're No Good": [Excerpt: The Swinging Blue Jeans, "You're No Good"] And *that* was originally recorded by *Dee Dee* Warwick: [Excerpt: Dee Dee Warwick, "You're No Good"] Dee Dee also had a successful solo career, but Dionne's was the real success, making the names of herself, and of Bacharach and David. The team had more than twenty top forty hits together, before Bacharach and David had a falling out in 1971 and stopped working together, and Warwick sued both of them for breach of contract as a result. But prior to that they had hit after hit, with classic records like "Anyone Who Had a Heart": [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "Anyone Who Had a Heart"] And "Walk On By": [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "Walk On By"] With Doris, Dionne, and Dee Dee all going solo, the group's membership was naturally in flux -- though the departed members would occasionally join their former bandmates for sessions, and the remaining members would sing backing vocals on their ex-members' records. By 1965 the group consisted of Cissy Houston, Sylvia Shemwell, the Warwick sisters' cousin Myrna Smith, and Estelle Brown. The group became *the* go-to singers for soul and R&B records made in New York. They were regularly hired by Leiber and Stoller to sing on their records, and they were also the particular favourites of Bert Berns. They sang backing vocals on almost every record he produced. It's them doing the gospel wails on "Cry Baby" by Garnet Mimms: [Excerpt: Garnet Mimms, "Cry Baby"] And they sang backing vocals on both versions of "If You Need Me" -- Wilson Pickett's original and Solomon Burke's more successful cover version, produced by Berns: [Excerpt: Solomon Burke, "If You Need Me"] They're on such Berns records as "Show Me Your Monkey", by Kenny Hamber: [Excerpt: Kenny Hamber, "Show Me Your Monkey"] And it was a Berns production that ended up getting them to be Aretha Franklin's backing group. The group were becoming such an important part of the records that Atlantic and BANG Records, in particular, were putting out, that Jerry Wexler said "it was only a matter of common decency to put them under contract as a featured group". He signed them to Atlantic and renamed them from the Gospelaires to The Sweet Inspirations.  Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham wrote a song for the group which became their only hit under their own name: [Excerpt: The Sweet Inspirations, "Sweet Inspiration"] But to start with, they released a cover of Pops Staples' civil rights song "Why (Am I treated So Bad)": [Excerpt: The Sweet Inspirations, "Why (Am I Treated So Bad?)"] That hadn't charted, and meanwhile, they'd all kept doing session work. Cissy had joined Erma and Carolyn Franklin on the backing vocals for Aretha's "I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You"] Shortly after that, the whole group recorded backing vocals for Erma's single "Piece of My Heart", co-written and produced by Berns: [Excerpt: Erma Franklin, "Piece of My Heart"] That became a top ten record on the R&B charts, but that caused problems. Aretha Franklin had a few character flaws, and one of these was an extreme level of jealousy for any other female singer who had any level of success and came up in the business after her. She could be incredibly graceful towards anyone who had been successful before her -- she once gave one of her Grammies away to Esther Phillips, who had been up for the same award and had lost to her -- but she was terribly insecure, and saw any contemporary as a threat. She'd spent her time at Columbia Records fuming (with some justification) that Barbra Streisand was being given a much bigger marketing budget than her, and she saw Diana Ross, Gladys Knight, and Dionne Warwick as rivals rather than friends. And that went doubly for her sisters, who she was convinced should be supporting her because of family loyalty. She had been infuriated at John Hammond when Columbia had signed Erma, thinking he'd gone behind her back to create competition for her. And now Erma was recording with Bert Berns. Bert Berns who had for years been a colleague of Jerry Wexler and the Ertegun brothers at Atlantic. Aretha was convinced that Wexler had put Berns up to signing Erma as some kind of power play. There was only one problem with this -- it simply wasn't true. As Wexler later explained “Bert and I had suffered a bad falling-out, even though I had enormous respect for him. After all, he was the guy who brought over guitarist Jimmy Page from England to play on our sessions. Bert, Ahmet, Nesuhi, and I had started a label together—Bang!—where Bert produced Van Morrison's first album. But Bert also had a penchant for trouble. He courted the wise guys. He wanted total control over every last aspect of our business dealings. Finally it was too much, and the Erteguns and I let him go. He sued us for breach of contract and suddenly we were enemies. I felt that he signed Erma, an excellent singer, not merely for her talent but as a way to get back at me. If I could make a hit with Aretha, he'd show me up by making an even bigger hit on Erma. Because there was always an undercurrent of rivalry between the sisters, this only added to the tension.” There were two things that resulted from this paranoia on Aretha's part. The first was that she and Wexler, who had been on first-name terms up to that point, temporarily went back to being "Mr. Wexler" and "Miss Franklin" to each other. And the second was that Aretha no longer wanted Carolyn and Erma to be her main backing vocalists, though they would continue to appear on her future records on occasion. From this point on, the Sweet Inspirations would be the main backing vocalists for Aretha in the studio throughout her golden era [xxcut line (and when the Sweet Inspirations themselves weren't on the record, often it would be former members of the group taking their place)]: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Ain't Nobody (Gonna Turn Me Around)"] The last day of sessions for Aretha Arrives was July the twenty-third, 1967. And as we heard in the episode on "I Was Made to Love Her", that was the day that the Detroit riots started. To recap briefly, that was four days of rioting started because of a history of racist policing, made worse by those same racist police overreacting to the initial protests. By the end of those four days, the National Guard, 82nd Airborne Division, and the 101st Airborne from Clarksville were all called in to deal with the violence, which left forty-three dead (of whom thirty-three were Black and only one was a police officer), 1,189 people were injured, and over 7,200 arrested, almost all of them Black. Those days in July would be a turning point for almost every musician based in Detroit. In particular, the police had murdered three members of the soul group the Dramatics, in a massacre of which the author John Hersey, who had been asked by President Johnson to be part of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders but had decided that would compromise his impartiality and did an independent journalistic investigation, said "The episode contained all the mythic themes of racial strife in the United States: the arm of the law taking the law into its own hands; interracial sex; the subtle poison of racist thinking by “decent” men who deny they are racists; the societal limbo into which, ever since slavery, so many young black men have been driven by our country; ambiguous justice in the courts; and the devastation in both black and white human lives that follows in the wake of violence as surely as ruinous and indiscriminate flood after torrents" But these were also the events that radicalised the MC5 -- the group had been playing a gig as Tim Buckley's support act when the rioting started, and guitarist Wayne Kramer decided afterwards to get stoned and watch the fires burning down the city through a telescope -- which police mistook for a rifle, leading to the National Guard knocking down Kramer's door. The MC5 would later cover "The Motor City is Burning", John Lee Hooker's song about the events: [Excerpt: The MC5, "The Motor City is Burning"] It would also be a turning point for Motown, too, in ways we'll talk about in a few future episodes.  And it was a political turning point too -- Michigan Governor George Romney, a liberal Republican (at a time when such people existed) had been the favourite for the Republican Presidential candidacy when he'd entered the race in December 1966, but as racial tensions ramped up in Detroit during the early months of 1967 he'd started trailing Richard Nixon, a man who was consciously stoking racists' fears. President Johnson, the incumbent Democrat, who was at that point still considering standing for re-election, made sure to make it clear to everyone during the riots that the decision to call in the National Guard had been made at the State level, by Romney, rather than at the Federal level.  That wasn't the only thing that removed the possibility of a Romney presidency, but it was a big part of the collapse of his campaign, and the, as it turned out, irrevocable turn towards right-authoritarianism that the party took with Nixon's Southern Strategy. Of course, Aretha Franklin had little way of knowing what was to come and how the riots would change the city and the country over the following decades. What she was primarily concerned about was the safety of her father, and to a lesser extent that of her sister-in-law Earline who was staying with him. Aretha, Carolyn, and Erma all tried to keep in constant touch with their father while they were out of town, and Aretha even talked about hiring private detectives to travel to Detroit, find her father, and get him out of the city to safety. But as her brother Cecil pointed out, he was probably the single most loved man among Black people in Detroit, and was unlikely to be harmed by the rioters, while he was too famous for the police to kill with impunity. Reverend Franklin had been having a stressful time anyway -- he had recently been fined for tax evasion, an action he was convinced the IRS had taken because of his friendship with Dr King and his role in the civil rights movement -- and according to Cecil "Aretha begged Daddy to move out of the city entirely. She wanted him to find another congregation in California, where he was especially popular—or at least move out to the suburbs. But he wouldn't budge. He said that, more than ever, he was needed to point out the root causes of the riots—the economic inequality, the pervasive racism in civic institutions, the woefully inadequate schools in inner-city Detroit, and the wholesale destruction of our neighborhoods by urban renewal. Some ministers fled the city, but not our father. The horror of what happened only recommitted him. He would not abandon his political agenda." To make things worse, Aretha was worried about her father in other ways -- as her marriage to Ted White was starting to disintegrate, she was looking to her father for guidance, and actually wanted him to take over her management. Eventually, Ruth Bowen, her booking agent, persuaded her brother Cecil that this was a job he could do, and that she would teach him everything he needed to know about the music business. She started training him up while Aretha was still married to White, in the expectation that that marriage couldn't last. Jerry Wexler, who only a few months earlier had been seeing Ted White as an ally in getting "product" from Franklin, had now changed his tune -- partly because the sale of Atlantic had gone through in the meantime. He later said “Sometimes she'd call me at night, and, in that barely audible little-girl voice of hers, she'd tell me that she wasn't sure she could go on. She always spoke in generalities. She never mentioned her husband, never gave me specifics of who was doing what to whom. And of course I knew better than to ask. She just said that she was tired of dealing with so much. My heart went out to her. She was a woman who suffered silently. She held so much in. I'd tell her to take as much time off as she needed. We had a lot of songs in the can that we could release without new material. ‘Oh, no, Jerry,' she'd say. ‘I can't stop recording. I've written some new songs, Carolyn's written some new songs. We gotta get in there and cut 'em.' ‘Are you sure?' I'd ask. ‘Positive,' she'd say. I'd set up the dates and typically she wouldn't show up for the first or second sessions. Carolyn or Erma would call me to say, ‘Ree's under the weather.' That was tough because we'd have asked people like Joe South and Bobby Womack to play on the sessions. Then I'd reschedule in the hopes she'd show." That third album she recorded in 1967, Lady Soul, was possibly her greatest achievement. The opening track, and second single, "Chain of Fools", released in November, was written by Don Covay -- or at least it's credited as having been written by Covay. There's a gospel record that came out around the same time on a very small label based in Houston -- "Pains of Life" by Rev. E. Fair And The Sensational Gladys Davis Trio: [Excerpt: Rev. E. Fair And The Sensational Gladys Davis Trio, "Pains of Life"] I've seen various claims online that that record came out shortly *before* "Chain of Fools", but I can't find any definitive evidence one way or the other -- it was on such a small label that release dates aren't available anywhere. Given that the B-side, which I haven't been able to track down online, is called "Wait Until the Midnight Hour", my guess is that rather than this being a case of Don Covay stealing the melody from an obscure gospel record he'd have had little chance to hear, it's the gospel record rewriting a then-current hit to be about religion, but I thought it worth mentioning. The song was actually written by Covay after Jerry Wexler asked him to come up with some songs for Otis Redding, but Wexler, after hearing it, decided it was better suited to Franklin, who gave an astonishing performance: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Chain of Fools"] Arif Mardin, the arranger of the album, said of that track “I was listed as the arranger of ‘Chain of Fools,' but I can't take credit. Aretha walked into the studio with the chart fully formed inside her head. The arrangement is based around the harmony vocals provided by Carolyn and Erma. To add heft, the Sweet Inspirations joined in. The vision of the song is entirely Aretha's.” According to Wexler, that's not *quite* true -- according to him, Joe South came up with the guitar part that makes up the intro, and he also said that when he played what he thought was the finished track to Ellie Greenwich, she came up with another vocal line for the backing vocals, which she overdubbed. But the core of the record's sound is definitely pure Aretha -- and Carolyn Franklin said that there was a reason for that. As she said later “Aretha didn't write ‘Chain,' but she might as well have. It was her story. When we were in the studio putting on the backgrounds with Ree doing lead, I knew she was singing about Ted. Listen to the lyrics talking about how for five long years she thought he was her man. Then she found out she was nothing but a link in the chain. Then she sings that her father told her to come on home. Well, he did. She sings about how her doctor said to take it easy. Well, he did too. She was drinking so much we thought she was on the verge of a breakdown. The line that slew me, though, was the one that said how one of these mornings the chain is gonna break but until then she'll take all she can take. That summed it up. Ree knew damn well that this man had been doggin' her since Jump Street. But somehow she held on and pushed it to the breaking point." [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Chain of Fools"] That made number one on the R&B charts, and number two on the hot one hundred, kept from the top by "Judy In Disguise (With Glasses)" by John Fred and his Playboy Band -- a record that very few people would say has stood the test of time as well. The other most memorable track on the album was the one chosen as the first single, released in September. As Carole King told the story, she and Gerry Goffin were feeling like their career was in a slump. While they had had a huge run of hits in the early sixties through 1965, they had only had two new hits in 1966 -- "Goin' Back" for Dusty Springfield and "Don't Bring Me Down" for the Animals, and neither of those were anything like as massive as their previous hits. And up to that point in 1967, they'd only had one -- "Pleasant Valley Sunday" for the Monkees. They had managed to place several songs on Monkees albums and the TV show as well, so they weren't going to starve, but the rise of self-contained bands that were starting to dominate the charts, and Phil Spector's temporary retirement, meant there simply wasn't the opportunity for them to place material that there had been. They were also getting sick of travelling to the West Coast all the time, because as their children were growing slightly older they didn't want to disrupt their lives in New York, and were thinking of approaching some of the New York based labels and seeing if they needed songs. They were particularly considering Atlantic, because soul was more open to outside songwriters than other genres. As it happened, though, they didn't have to approach Atlantic, because Atlantic approached them. They were walking down Broadway when a limousine pulled up, and Jerry Wexler stuck his head out of the window. He'd come up with a good title that he wanted to use for a song for Aretha, would they be interested in writing a song called "Natural Woman"? They said of course they would, and Wexler drove off. They wrote the song that night, and King recorded a demo the next morning: [Excerpt: Carole King, "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman (demo)"] They gave Wexler a co-writing credit because he had suggested the title.  King later wrote in her autobiography "Hearing Aretha's performance of “Natural Woman” for the first time, I experienced a rare speechless moment. To this day I can't convey how I felt in mere words. Anyone who had written a song in 1967 hoping it would be performed by a singer who could take it to the highest level of excellence, emotional connection, and public exposure would surely have wanted that singer to be Aretha Franklin." She went on to say "But a recording that moves people is never just about the artist and the songwriters. It's about people like Jerry and Ahmet, who matched the songwriters with a great title and a gifted artist; Arif Mardin, whose magnificent orchestral arrangement deserves the place it will forever occupy in popular music history; Tom Dowd, whose engineering skills captured the magic of this memorable musical moment for posterity; and the musicians in the rhythm section, the orchestral players, and the vocal contributions of the background singers—among them the unforgettable “Ah-oo!” after the first line of the verse. And the promotion and marketing people helped this song reach more people than it might have without them." And that's correct -- unlike "Chain of Fools", this time Franklin did let Arif Mardin do most of the arrangement work -- though she came up with the piano part that Spooner Oldham plays on the record. Mardin said that because of the song's hymn-like feel they wanted to go for a more traditional written arrangement. He said "She loved the song to the point where she said she wanted to concentrate on the vocal and vocal alone. I had written a string chart and horn chart to augment the chorus and hired Ralph Burns to conduct. After just a couple of takes, we had it. That's when Ralph turned to me with wonder in his eyes. Ralph was one of the most celebrated arrangers of the modern era. He had done ‘Early Autumn' for Woody Herman and Stan Getz, and ‘Georgia on My Mind' for Ray Charles. He'd worked with everyone. ‘This woman comes from another planet' was all Ralph said. ‘She's just here visiting.'” [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman"] By this point there was a well-functioning team making Franklin's records -- while the production credits would vary over the years, they were all essentially co-productions by the team of Franklin, Wexler, Mardin and Dowd, all collaborating and working together with a more-or-less unified purpose, and the backing was always by the same handful of session musicians and some combination of the Sweet Inspirations and Aretha's sisters. That didn't mean that occasional guests couldn't get involved -- as we discussed in the Cream episode, Eric Clapton played guitar on "Good to Me as I am to You": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Good to Me as I am to You"] Though that was one of the rare occasions on one of these records where something was overdubbed. Clapton apparently messed up the guitar part when playing behind Franklin, because he was too intimidated by playing with her, and came back the next day to redo his part without her in the studio. At this point, Aretha was at the height of her fame. Just before the final batch of album sessions began she appeared in the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade, and she was making regular TV appearances, like one on the Mike Douglas Show where she duetted with Frankie Valli on "That's Life": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin and Frankie Valli, "That's Life"] But also, as Wexler said “Her career was kicking into high gear. Contending and resolving both the professional and personal challenges were too much. She didn't think she could do both, and I didn't blame her. Few people could. So she let the personal slide and concentrated on the professional. " Her concert promoter Ruth Bowen said of this time "Her father and Dr. King were putting pressure on her to sing everywhere, and she felt obligated. The record company was also screaming for more product. And I had a mountain of offers on my desk that kept getting higher with every passing hour. They wanted her in Europe. They wanted her in Latin America. They wanted her in every major venue in the U.S. TV was calling. She was being asked to do guest appearances on every show from Carol Burnett to Andy Williams to the Hollywood Palace. She wanted to do them all and she wanted to do none of them. She wanted to do them all because she's an entertainer who burns with ambition. She wanted to do none of them because she was emotionally drained. She needed to go away and renew her strength. I told her that at least a dozen times. She said she would, but she didn't listen to me." The pressures from her father and Dr King are a recurring motif in interviews with people about this period. Franklin was always a very political person, and would throughout her life volunteer time and money to liberal political causes and to the Democratic Party, but this was the height of her activism -- the Civil Rights movement was trying to capitalise on the gains it had made in the previous couple of years, and celebrity fundraisers and performances at rallies were an important way to do that. And at this point there were few bigger celebrities in America than Aretha Franklin. At a concert in her home town of Detroit on February the sixteenth, 1968, the Mayor declared the day Aretha Franklin Day. At the same show, Billboard, Record World *and* Cash Box magazines all presented her with plaques for being Female Vocalist of the Year. And Dr. King travelled up to be at the show and congratulate her publicly for all her work with his organisation, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Backstage at that show, Dr. King talked to Aretha's father, Reverend Franklin, about what he believed would be the next big battle -- a strike in Memphis: [Excerpt, Martin Luther King, "Mountaintop Speech" -- "And so, as a result of this, we are asking you tonight, to go out and tell your neighbors not to buy Coca-Cola in Memphis. Go by and tell them not to buy Sealtest milk. Tell them not to buy—what is the other bread?—Wonder Bread. And what is the other bread company, Jesse? Tell them not to buy Hart's bread. As Jesse Jackson has said, up to now, only the garbage men have been feeling pain; now we must kind of redistribute the pain. We are choosing these companies because they haven't been fair in their hiring policies; and we are choosing them because they can begin the process of saying, they are going to support the needs and the rights of these men who are on strike. And then they can move on downtown and tell Mayor Loeb to do what is right."] The strike in question was the Memphis Sanitation Workers' strike which had started a few days before.  The struggle for Black labour rights was an integral part of the civil rights movement, and while it's not told that way in the sanitised version of the story that's made it into popular culture, the movement led by King was as much about economic justice as social justice -- King was a democratic socialist, and believed that economic oppression was both an effect of and cause of other forms of racial oppression, and that the rights of Black workers needed to be fought for. In 1967 he had set up a new organisation, the Poor People's Campaign, which was set to march on Washington to demand a program that included full employment, a guaranteed income -- King was strongly influenced in his later years by the ideas of Henry George, the proponent of a universal basic income based on land value tax -- the annual building of half a million affordable homes, and an end to the war in Vietnam. This was King's main focus in early 1968, and he saw the sanitation workers' strike as a major part of this campaign. Memphis was one of the most oppressive cities in the country, and its largely Black workforce of sanitation workers had been trying for most of the 1960s to unionise, and strike-breakers had been called in to stop them, and many of them had been fired by their white supervisors with no notice. They were working in unsafe conditions, for utterly inadequate wages, and the city government were ardent segregationists. After two workers had died on the first of February from using unsafe equipment, the union demanded changes -- safer working conditions, better wages, and recognition of the union. The city council refused, and almost all the sanitation workers stayed home and stopped work. After a few days, the council relented and agreed to their terms, but the Mayor, Henry Loeb, an ardent white supremacist who had stood on a platform of opposing desegregation, and who had previously been the Public Works Commissioner who had put these unsafe conditions in place, refused to listen. As far as he was concerned, he was the only one who could recognise the union, and he wouldn't. The workers continued their strike, marching holding signs that simply read "I am a Man": [Excerpt: Stevie Wonder, "Blowing in the Wind"] The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the NAACP had been involved in organising support for the strikes from an early stage, and King visited Memphis many times. Much of the time he spent visiting there was spent negotiating with a group of more militant activists, who called themselves The Invaders and weren't completely convinced by King's nonviolent approach -- they believed that violence and rioting got more attention than non-violent protests. King explained to them that while he had been persuaded by Gandhi's writings of the moral case for nonviolent protest, he was also persuaded that it was pragmatically necessary -- asking the young men "how many guns do we have and how many guns do they have?", and pointing out as he often did that when it comes to violence a minority can't win against an armed majority. Rev Franklin went down to Memphis on the twenty-eighth of March to speak at a rally Dr. King was holding, but as it turned out the rally was cancelled -- the pre-rally march had got out of hand, with some people smashing windows, and Memphis police had, like the police in Detroit the previous year, violently overreacted, clubbing and gassing protestors and shooting and killing one unarmed teenage boy, Larry Payne. The day after Payne's funeral, Dr King was back in Memphis, though this time Rev Franklin was not with him. On April the third, he gave a speech which became known as the "Mountaintop Speech", in which he talked about the threats that had been made to his life: [Excerpt: Martin Luther King, "Mountaintop Speech": “And then I got to Memphis. And some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers? Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. So I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord."] The next day, Martin Luther King was shot dead. James Earl Ray, a white supremacist, pled guilty to the murder, and the evidence against him seems overwhelming from what I've read, but the King family have always claimed that the murder was part of a larger conspiracy and that Ray was not the gunman. Aretha was obviously distraught, and she attended the funeral, as did almost every other prominent Black public figure. James Baldwin wrote of the funeral: "In the pew directly before me sat Marlon Brando, Sammy Davis, Eartha Kitt—covered in black, looking like a lost, ten-year-old girl—and Sidney Poitier, in the same pew, or nearby. Marlon saw me, and nodded. The atmosphere was black, with a tension indescribable—as though something, perhaps the heavens, perhaps the earth, might crack. Everyone sat very still. The actual service sort of washed over me, in waves. It wasn't that it seemed unreal; it was the most real church service I've ever sat through in my life, or ever hope to sit through; but I have a childhood hangover thing about not weeping in public, and I was concentrating on holding myself together. I did not want to weep for Martin, tears seemed futile. But I may also have been afraid, and I could not have been the only one, that if I began to weep I would not be able to stop. There was more than enough to weep for, if one was to weep—so many of us, cut down, so soon. Medgar, Malcolm, Martin: and their widows, and their children. Reverend Ralph David Abernathy asked a certain sister to sing a song which Martin had loved—“Once more,” said Ralph David, “for Martin and for me,” and he sat down." Many articles and books on Aretha Franklin say that she sang at King's funeral. In fact she didn't, but there's a simple reason for the confusion. King's favourite song was the Thomas Dorsey gospel song "Take My Hand, Precious Lord", and indeed almost his last words were to ask a trumpet player, Ben Branch, if he would play the song at the rally he was going to be speaking at on the day of his death. At his request, Mahalia Jackson, his old friend, sang the song at his private funeral, which was not filmed, unlike the public part of the funeral that Baldwin described. Four months later, though, there was another public memorial for King, and Franklin did sing "Take My Hand, Precious Lord" at that service, in front of King's weeping widow and children, and that performance *was* filmed, and gets conflated in people's memories with Jackson's unfilmed earlier performance: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Take My Hand, Precious Lord (at Martin Luther King Memorial)"] Four years later, she would sing that at Mahalia Jackson's funeral. Through all this, Franklin had been working on her next album, Aretha Now, the sessions for which started more or less as soon as the sessions for Lady Soul had finished. The album was, in fact, bookended by deaths that affected Aretha. Just as King died at the end of the sessions, the beginning came around the time of the death of Otis Redding -- the sessions were cancelled for a day while Wexler travelled to Georgia for Redding's funeral, which Franklin was too devastated to attend, and Wexler would later say that the extra emotion in her performances on the album came from her emotional pain at Redding's death. The lead single on the album, "Think", was written by Franklin and -- according to the credits anyway -- her husband Ted White, and is very much in the same style as "Respect", and became another of her most-loved hits: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Think"] But probably the song on Aretha Now that now resonates the most is one that Jerry Wexler tried to persuade her not to record, and was only released as a B-side. Indeed, "I Say a Little Prayer" was a song that had already once been a hit after being a reject.  Hal David, unlike Burt Bacharach, was a fairly political person and inspired by the protest song movement, and had been starting to incorporate his concerns about the political situation and the Vietnam War into his lyrics -- though as with many such writers, he did it in much less specific ways than a Phil Ochs or a Bob Dylan. This had started with "What the World Needs Now is Love", a song Bacharach and David had written for Jackie DeShannon in 1965: [Excerpt: Jackie DeShannon, "What the "World Needs Now is Love"] But he'd become much more overtly political for "The Windows of the World", a song they wrote for Dionne Warwick. Warwick has often said it's her favourite of her singles, but it wasn't a big hit -- Bacharach blamed himself for that, saying "Dionne recorded it as a single and I really blew it. I wrote a bad arrangement and the tempo was too fast, and I really regret making it the way I did because it's a good song." [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "The Windows of the World"] For that album, Bacharach and David had written another track, "I Say a Little Prayer", which was not as explicitly political, but was intended by David to have an implicit anti-war message, much like other songs of the period like "Last Train to Clarksville". David had sons who were the right age to be drafted, and while it's never stated, "I Say a Little Prayer" was written from the perspective of a woman whose partner is away fighting in the war, but is still in her thoughts: [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "I Say a Little Prayer"] The recording of Dionne Warwick's version was marked by stress. Bacharach had a particular way of writing music to tell the musicians the kind of feel he wanted for the part -- he'd write nonsense words above the stave, and tell the musicians to play the parts as if they were singing those words. The trumpet player hired for the session, Ernie Royal, got into a row with Bacharach about this unorthodox way of communicating musical feeling, and the track ended up taking ten takes (as opposed to the normal three for a Bacharach session), with Royal being replaced half-way through the session. Bacharach was never happy with the track even after all the work it had taken, and he fought to keep it from being released at all, saying the track was taken at too fast a tempo. It eventually came out as an album track nearly eighteen months after it was recorded -- an eternity in 1960s musical timescales -- and DJs started playing it almost as soon as it came out. Scepter records rushed out a single, over Bacharach's objections, but as he later said "One thing I love about the record business is how wrong I was. Disc jockeys all across the country started playing the track, and the song went to number four on the charts and then became the biggest hit Hal and I had ever written for Dionne." [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "I Say a Little Prayer"] Oddly, the B-side for Warwick's single, "Theme From the Valley of the Dolls" did even better, reaching number two. Almost as soon as the song was released as a single, Franklin started playing around with the song backstage, and in April 1968, right around the time of Dr. King's death, she recorded a version. Much as Burt Bacharach had been against releasing Dionne Warwick's version, Jerry Wexler was against Aretha even recording the song, saying later “I advised Aretha not to record it. I opposed it for two reasons. First, to cover a song only twelve weeks after the original reached the top of the charts was not smart business. You revisit such a hit eight months to a year later. That's standard practice. But more than that, Bacharach's melody, though lovely, was peculiarly suited to a lithe instrument like Dionne Warwick's—a light voice without the dark corners or emotional depths that define Aretha. Also, Hal David's lyric was also somewhat girlish and lacked the gravitas that Aretha required. “Aretha usually listened to me in the studio, but not this time. She had written a vocal arrangement for the Sweet Inspirations that was undoubtedly strong. Cissy Houston, Dionne's cousin, told me that Aretha was on the right track—she was seeing this song in a new way and had come up with a new groove. Cissy was on Aretha's side. Tommy Dowd and Arif were on Aretha's side. So I had no choice but to cave." It's quite possible that Wexler's objections made Franklin more, rather than less, determined to record the song. She regarded Warwick as a hated rival, as she did almost every prominent female singer of her generation and younger ones, and would undoubtedly have taken the implication that there was something that Warwick was simply better at than her to heart. [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Say a Little Prayer"] Wexler realised as soon as he heard it in the studio that Franklin's version was great, and Bacharach agreed, telling Franklin's biographer David Ritz “As much as I like the original recording by Dionne, there's no doubt that Aretha's is a better record. She imbued the song with heavy soul and took it to a far deeper place. Hers is the definitive version.” -- which is surprising because Franklin's version simplifies some of Bacharach's more unusual chord voicings, something he often found extremely upsetting. Wexler still though thought there was no way the song would be a hit, and it's understandable that he thought that way. Not only had it only just been on the charts a few months earlier, but it was the kind of song that wouldn't normally be a hit at all, and certainly not in the kind of rhythmic soul music for which Franklin was known. Almost everything she ever recorded is in simple time signatures -- 4/4, waltz time, or 6/8 -- but this is a Bacharach song so it's staggeringly metrically irregular. Normally even with semi-complex things I'm usually good at figuring out how to break it down into bars, but here I actually had to purchase a copy of the sheet music in order to be sure I was right about what's going on. I'm going to count beats along with the record here so you can see what I mean. The verse has three bars of 4/4, one bar of 2/4, and three more bars of 4/4, all repeated: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Say a Little Prayer" with me counting bars over verse] While the chorus has a bar of 4/4, a bar of 3/4 but with a chord change half way through so it sounds like it's in two if you're paying attention to the harmonic changes, two bars of 4/4, another waltz-time bar sounding like it's in two, two bars of four, another bar of three sounding in two, a bar of four, then three more bars of four but the first of those is *written* as four but played as if it's in six-eight time (but you can keep the four/four pulse going if you're counting): [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Say a Little Prayer" with me counting bars over verse] I don't expect you to have necessarily followed that in great detail, but the point should be clear -- this was not some straightforward dance song. Incidentally, that bar played as if it's six/eight was something Aretha introduced to make the song even more irregular than how Bacharach wrote it. And on top of *that* of course the lyrics mixed the secular and the sacred, something that was still taboo in popular music at that time -- this is only a couple of years after Capitol records had been genuinely unsure about putting out the Beach Boys' "God Only Knows", and Franklin's gospel-inflected vocals made the religious connection even more obvious. But Franklin was insistent that the record go out as a single, and eventually it was released as the B-side to the far less impressive "The House That Jack Built". It became a double-sided hit, with the A-side making number two on the R&B chart and number seven on the Hot One Hundred, while "I Say a Little Prayer" made number three on the R&B chart and number ten overall. In the UK, "I Say a Little Prayer" made number four and became her biggest ever solo UK hit. It's now one of her most-remembered songs, while the A-side is largely forgotten: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Say a Little Prayer"] For much of the

My guest on this episode of Talking Taiwan is the film director Arvin Chen. He just directed Love in Taipei, the film adaptation of Abigail Hing Wen's bestselling YA novel Loveboat, Taipei. Related Links: https://talkingtaiwan.com/love-in-taipei-our-interview-with-award-winning-film-director-arvin-chen-ep-252/     If you're a long-time listener of Talking Taiwan you may remember when I interviewed Abigail about her bestselling YA novel. That success was preceded by 12 years of writing and over 20 drafts of the novel. It was also in that episode that she announced that Loveboat, Taipei was going to be made into a film.   I remember watching her journey afterward on social media as the film was being shot in Taiwan during COVID. Arvin directed the film version of the book Love in Taipei and I had a chance to speak to him recently about the film.   Some of you may be familiar with some of Arvin's other films, Au Revoir Taipei, Will You Love Me Tomorrow? and Mama Boy.        Here's a little preview of what we talked about in this podcast episode: ·         The iconic scenes of Taipei that are captured in the film, Love in Taipei ·         What it was like shooting at the Grand Hotel because Arvin got married there ·         Some of Arvin's favorite scenes from Love in Taipei ·         The challenges of shooting huge crowd scenes ·         Arvin's favorite types of scenes to shoot ·         What it was like shooting in Taiwan during COVID ·         How the casting was an open call and what that process was like ·         How Arvin usually writes and directs his films, but Love in Taipei was adapted from the YA novel Loveboat Taipei and Arvin was not involved with the screen adaptation ·         Arvin's directing approach to Love in Taipei ·         How to capture the essence of the Loveboat experience ·         The Loveboat program and what it is ·         Parallels between Arvin's experience of going back to Taiwan in his 20s and that of the characters of the film Love in Taipei ·         What has changed and stayed the same about Taipei since Arvin went there to live and work in 2001 ·         How Taiwanese food has been softly exported around the world ·         The music that was selected for Love in Taipei ·         The Mandarin Chinese language version of the Whitney Houston song, How Will I Know ·         The role of or choreography in Love in Taipei ·         How Ashley Liao had to learn modern dance moves in a matter of weeks for her role as Ever Wong ·         If anything unexpected happened during the filming of Love in Taipei ·         What Arvin likes about the romantic comedy genre ·         What it was like to co-write the script for Arvin's latest film Mama Boy ·         Changes in the Taiwanese film industry over the last 20 years ·         How Taiwan has a thriving film industry because of commercial filmmaking and local film crews with technical know how to work on an American movie ·         How Arvin's films could be someone's introduction to Taiwan or a Taiwanese movie ·         Films that introduced Taiwan to Arvin and that Arvin would recommend people watch ·         A more recent Taiwanese film that Arvin would recommend ·         How working with film director Edward Yang influenced Arvin ·         How Arvin's directing style differs from Edward Yang's ·         What it is about Taipei that inspires Arvin ·         What Arvin has been working on and what we can expect from him in the future ·         What Arvin hopes that audiences come away with after watching Love in Taipei   Related Links: https://talkingtaiwan.com/love-in-taipei-our-interview-with-award-winning-film-director-arvin-chen-ep-252/

This week Justin and Tyler review Carole King's 14 times platinum second album Tapestry. Selling over 30 million copies worldwide and spending almost 6 years in the Billboard 200, this album held up as the longest charting female album for almost 50 years. With great songs on this album like I Feel the Earth Move, So Far Away, It's Too Late, You've Got a Friend, Will You Love Me Tomorrow, and (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman, it is no wonder the album has done so well and was such a huge success. If you haven't already, give it a listen and let us know what you think. Classic Vinyl Podcast Website https://classicvinlylpodcast.podbean.com/   Classic Vinyl Podcast Email classicvinylpodcast@gmail.com   Support our podcast and buy us a beer https://www.buymeacoffee.com/classicvinylpod

Helen and Gavin chat about 64, the Oscars, and Scream VI, and it's Week 69 from the list of Rolling Stone's 500 Best Songs Ever, numbers 155 to 151; Last Nite by The Strokes, Spoonful by Howlin' Wolf, Super Freak by Rick James, Proud Mary by Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Will You Love Me Tomorrow by The Shirelles.

Jerry Garcia "That's What Love Will Make You Do"Valerie June "Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With You"The Mountain Goats "Get Famous"Fiona Apple "I Want You To Love Me"? & The Mysterians "Can't Get Enough Of You, Baby"Jeff Tweedy "Love Is the King"Jeff Tweedy "Opaline"Johnny Cash "God's Gonna Cut You Down"The Crystals "He's a Rebel"The Shirelles "Will You Love Me Tomorrow"Howlin' Wolf "Shake for Me"Eilen Jewell "It's Your Voodoo Working"Warren Zevon "Rub Me Raw"New Moon Jelly Roll Freedom Rockers "She's About a Mover (feat. Alvin Youngblood Hart)"The Shangri-Las "Give Him A Great Big Kiss"Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band "Born to Run (Live at Madison Square Garden,  New York City, NY - 05/23/1988)"Sheryl Crow "Strong Enough"Lucinda Williams "I Just Wanted To See You So Bad"Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit "Cigarettes and Wine"Mavis Staples "Last Train"The Nashville Teens "Tobacco Road"Ramones "Blitzkrieg Bop"Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers "I Need to Know"Drivin N Cryin "Honeysuckle Blue"A Tribe Called Quest "Scenario"The White Stripes "Fell In Love With a Girl"Missy Elliott "The Rain [Supa Dupa Fly] (Amended Version)"Curtis Harding "I Won't Let You Down"Willie Nelson "Devil In a Sleepin' Bag"

R.E.M. "I'm Gonna DJ"The Hold Steady "Most People Are Djs"The Low Anthem "Yellowed By the Sun"Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit "Kid Fears (feat. Brandi Carlile & Julien Baker)"The Crystals "And Then He Kissed Me"Louis Armstrong "I Ain't Gonna Give Nobody None of This Jelly Roll"Kitty Wells "Do Right Woman, Do Right Man"13th Floor Elevators "You're Gonna Miss Me"Kris Kristofferson "Maybe You Heard"The Undertones "Teenage Kicks"The Tammys "Egyptian Shumba"The White Stripes "Hello Operator"Muddy Waters "Baby I Done Got Wise"D'Angelo "Feel Like Makin' Love"Dolly Parton "Don't Drop Out"John R. Miller "Motor's Fried"Aimee Mann "In Mexico"Bob Dylan & The Band "Goin' to Acapulco"The Flies "I'm Not Your Stepping Stone"Clem Snide "Moment in the Sun"Neko Case "John Saw That Number"My Morning Jacket "The Way That He Sings"The Supremes "You Can't Hurry Love"Willie Nelson & Wynton Marsalis "Rainy Day Blues"Oscar Peterson Trio "The Girl From Ipanema"Leslie Gore "Maybe I Know"The Velvet Underground "Oh! Sweet Nuthin'"Cat Clyde "Sheets of Green"Lightnin' Hopkins "Ride in Your New Automobile"Matt Sweeney "I Am a Youth Inclined to Ramble"Townes Van Zandt "Still Looking For You"The Shirelles "Will You Love Me Tomorrow"Gram Parsons "The Angels Rejoiced Last Night"Doc Watson "Little Darling Pal of Mine"Tom Verlaine "There's a Reason"Television "See No Evil"Neutral Milk Hotel "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea"Phoebe Bridgers "I Know The End"Shaver "The Earth Rolls On"Solomon Burke "Diamond in Your Mind"Dave Rawlings Machine "Pilgrim (You Can't Go Home)"

It's not too late to download this baby. We really did make it, not just try to make it, the only way The Two Dragons of Podcasting would. Sure, we're so far away, but we're home again and it's beautiful. Seriously, it was interesting to learn more about Carole's background, the songwriting collaborations she had with her first husband, Jerry Goffin as well as with James Taylor and Joni Mitchell, who harmonize with her on her version of Will You Love Me Tomorrow. Support the show

It's not too late to download this baby. We really did make it, not just try to make it, the only way The Two Dragons of Podcasting would. Sure, we're so far away, but we're home again and it's beautiful. Seriously, it was interesting to learn more about Carole's background, the songwriting collaborations she had with her first husband, Jerry Goffin as well as with James Taylor and Joni Mitchell, who harmonize with her on her version of Will You Love Me Tomorrow. Support the show

ROCK & ROLL IN KENNEDY'S AMERICA reclaims the lost music history of the early 60's. The dramatic tale stars talented country rockers like Elvis Presley, Brenda Lee, and Roy Orbison; innovative R&B rock artists such as Ray Charles, Smokey Robinson, Mary Wells, Sam Cooke, and the Shirelles; outstanding pop rockers like Dion, Connie Francis, the Beach Boys, Lesley Gore, Del Shannon, and the 4 Seasons; and hundreds of other singers and musicians, including pop artists and folk singers who earned hit records with songs aimed at young audiences. The soundtrack features many of rock & roll's greatest hits, including the Shirelles' “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” Dion's “Runaround Sue,” U.S. Bonds' “Quarter to Three,” and the Kingsmen's “Louie Louie,” as well as more obscure rock gems like Wanda Jackson's “Let's Have a Party” and the Lafayettes' “Life's Too Short.”

ROCK & ROLL IN KENNEDY'S AMERICA reclaims the lost music history of the early 60's. The dramatic tale stars talented country rockers like Elvis Presley, Brenda Lee, and Roy Orbison; innovative R&B rock artists such as Ray Charles, Smokey Robinson, Mary Wells, Sam Cooke, and the Shirelles; outstanding pop rockers like Dion, Connie Francis, the Beach Boys, Lesley Gore, Del Shannon, and the 4 Seasons; and hundreds of other singers and musicians, including pop artists and folk singers who earned hit records with songs aimed at young audiences. The soundtrack features many of rock & roll's greatest hits, including the Shirelles' “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” Dion's “Runaround Sue,” U.S. Bonds' “Quarter to Three,” and the Kingsmen's “Louie Louie,” as well as more obscure rock gems like Wanda Jackson's “Let's Have a Party” and the Lafayettes' “Life's Too Short.”

Hosts of the Who? Weekly podcast Bobby Finger and Lindsey Weber join to talk about karaoke do's and don't's, semi-ironic love of Rita Ora's music, and the greatest songs they've ever heard in their entire lives, "Pancho and Lefty" by Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard and "Will You Love Me Tomorrow" by Carole King. Bobby's debut novel 'The Old Place' comes out on September 20th and is available for pre-order now!  You can find the podcast on twitter or instagram @whoweekly. You can find Bobby @BobbyFinger and Lindsey @LindseyWeber    @gr8songpod on twitter, instagram, and tiktok @InterranteScott on twitter @ScottInterrante on tiktok Theme music: "Kratos In Love" by Skylar Spence Mixing by Michael Isabella Creative Production by Katherine Mohr

We start season four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs with an extra-long look at "San Francisco" by Scott McKenzie, and at the Monterey Pop Festival, and the careers of the Mamas and the Papas and P.F. Sloan. 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 "Up, Up, and Away" by the 5th Dimension. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources As usual, all the songs excerpted in the podcast can be heard in full at Mixcloud. Scott McKenzie's first album is available here. There are many compilations of the Mamas and the Papas' music, but sadly none that are in print in the UK have the original mono mixes. This set is about as good as you're going to find, though, for the stereo versions. Information on the Mamas and the Papas came from Go Where You Wanna Go: The Oral History of The Mamas and the Papas by Matthew Greenwald, California Dreamin': The True Story Of The Mamas and Papas by Michelle Phillips, and Papa John by John Phillips and Jim Jerome. Information on P.F. Sloan came from PF - TRAVELLING BAREFOOT ON A ROCKY ROAD by Stephen McParland and What's Exactly the Matter With Me? by P.F. Sloan and S.E. Feinberg. The film of the Monterey Pop Festival is available on this Criterion Blu-Ray set. Sadly the CD of the performances seems to be deleted. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Welcome to season four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. It's good to be back. Before we start this episode, I just want to say one thing. I get a lot of credit at times for the way I don't shy away from dealing with the more unsavoury elements of the people being covered in my podcast -- particularly the more awful men. But as I said very early on, I only cover those aspects of their life when they're relevant to the music, because this is a music podcast and not a true crime podcast. But also I worry that in some cases this might mean I'm giving a false impression of some people. In the case of this episode, one of the central figures is John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas. Now, Phillips has posthumously been accused of some truly monstrous acts, the kind of thing that is truly unforgivable, and I believe those accusations. But those acts didn't take place during the time period covered by most of this episode, so I won't be covering them here -- but they're easily googlable if you want to know. I thought it best to get that out of the way at the start, so no-one's either anxiously waiting for the penny to drop or upset that I didn't acknowledge the elephant in the room. Separately, this episode will have some discussion of fatphobia and diet culture, and of a death that is at least in part attributable to those things. Those of you affected by that may want to skip this one or read the transcript. There are also some mentions of drug addiction and alcoholism. Anyway, on with the show. One of the things that causes problems with rock history is the tendency of people to have selective memories, and that's never more true than when it comes to the Summer of Love, summer of 1967. In the mythology that's built up around it, that was a golden time, the greatest time ever, a period of peace and love where everything was possible, and the world looked like it was going to just keep on getting better. But what that means, of course, is that the people remembering it that way do so because it was the best time of their lives. And what happens when the best time of your life is over in one summer? When you have one hit and never have a second, or when your band splits up after only eighteen months, and you have to cope with the reality that your best years are not only behind you, but they weren't even best years, but just best months? What stories would you tell about that time? Would you remember it as the eve of destruction, the last great moment before everything went to hell, or would you remember it as a golden summer, full of people with flowers in their hair? And would either really be true? [Excerpt: Scott McKenzie, "San Francisco"] Other than the city in which they worked, there are a few things that seem to characterise almost all the important figures on the LA music scene in the middle part of the 1960s. They almost all seem to be incredibly ambitious, as one might imagine. There seem to be a huge number of fantasists among them -- people who will not only choose the legend over reality when it suits them, but who will choose the legend over reality even when it doesn't suit them. And they almost all seem to have a story about being turned down in a rude and arrogant manner by Lou Adler, usually more or less the same story. To give an example, I'm going to read out a bit of Ray Manzarek's autobiography here. Now, Manzarek uses a few words that I can't use on this podcast and keep a clean rating, so I'm just going to do slight pauses when I get to them, but I'll leave the words in the transcript for those who aren't offended by them: "Sometimes Jim and Dorothy and I went alone. The three of us tried Dunhill Records. Lou Adler was the head man. He was shrewd and he was hip. He had the Mamas and the Papas and a big single with Barry McGuire's 'Eve of Destruction.' He was flush. We were ushered into his office. He looked cool. He was California casually disheveled and had the look of a stoner, but his eyes were as cold as a shark's. He took the twelve-inch acetate demo from me and we all sat down. He put the disc on his turntable and played each cut…for ten seconds. Ten seconds! You can't tell jack [shit] from ten seconds. At least listen to one of the songs all the way through. I wanted to rage at him. 'How dare you! We're the Doors! This is [fucking] Jim Morrison! He's going to be a [fucking] star! Can't you see that? Can't you see how [fucking] handsome he is? Can't you hear how groovy the music is? Don't you [fucking] get it? Listen to the words, man!' My brain was a boiling, lava-filled Jell-O mold of rage. I wanted to eviscerate that shark. The songs he so casually dismissed were 'Moonlight Drive,' 'Hello, I Love You,' 'Summer's Almost Gone,' 'End of the Night,' 'I Looked at You,' 'Go Insane.' He rejected the whole demo. Ten seconds on each song—maybe twenty seconds on 'Hello, I Love You' (I took that as an omen of potential airplay)—and we were dismissed out of hand. Just like that. He took the demo off the turntable and handed it back to me with an obsequious smile and said, 'Nothing here I can use.' We were shocked. We stood up, the three of us, and Jim, with a wry and knowing smile on his lips, cuttingly and coolly shot back at him, 'That's okay, man. We don't want to be *used*, anyway.'" Now, as you may have gathered from the episode on the Doors, Ray Manzarek was one of those print-the-legend types, and that's true of everyone who tells similar stories about Lou Alder. But... there are a *lot* of people who tell similar stories about Lou Adler. One of those was Phil Sloan. You can get an idea of Sloan's attitude to storytelling from a story he always used to tell. Shortly after he and his family moved to LA from New York, he got a job selling newspapers on a street corner on Hollywood Boulevard, just across from Schwab's Drug Store. One day James Dean drove up in his Porsche and made an unusual request. He wanted to buy every copy of the newspaper that Sloan had -- around a hundred and fifty copies in total. But he only wanted one article, something in the entertainment section. Sloan didn't remember what the article was, but he did remember that one of the headlines was on the final illness of Oliver Hardy, who died shortly afterwards, and thought it might have been something to do with that. Dean was going to just clip that article from every copy he bought, and then he was going to give all the newspapers back to Sloan to sell again, so Sloan ended up making a lot of extra money that day. There is one rather big problem with that story. Oliver Hardy died in August 1957, just after the Sloan family moved to LA. But James Dean died in September 1955, two years earlier. Sloan admitted that, and said he couldn't explain it, but he was insistent. He sold a hundred and fifty newspapers to James Dean two years after Dean's death. When not selling newspapers to dead celebrities, Sloan went to Fairfax High School, and developed an interest in music which was mostly oriented around the kind of white pop vocal groups that were popular at the time, groups like the Kingston Trio, the Four Lads, and the Four Aces. But the record that made Sloan decide he wanted to make music himself was "Just Goofed" by the Teen Queens: [Excerpt: The Teen Queens, "Just Goofed"] In 1959, when he was fourteen, he saw an advert for an open audition with Aladdin Records, a label he liked because of Thurston Harris. He went along to the audition, and was successful. His first single, released as by Flip Sloan -- Flip was a nickname, a corruption of "Philip" -- was produced by Bumps Blackwell and featured several of the musicians who played with Sam Cooke, plus Larry Knechtel on piano and Mike Deasey on guitar, but Aladdin shut down shortly after releasing it, and it may not even have had a general release, just promo copies. I've not been able to find a copy online anywhere. After that, he tried Arwin Records, the label that Jan and Arnie recorded for, which was owned by Marty Melcher (Doris Day's husband and Terry Melcher's stepfather). Melcher signed him, and put out a single, "She's My Girl", on Mart Records, a subsidiary of Arwin, on which Sloan was backed by a group of session players including Sandy Nelson and Bruce Johnston: [Excerpt: Philip Sloan, "She's My Girl"] That record didn't have any success, and Sloan was soon dropped by Mart Records. He went on to sign with Blue Bird Records, which was as far as can be ascertained essentially a scam organisation that would record demos for songwriters, but tell the performers that they were making a real record, so that they would record it for the royalties they would never get, rather than for a decent fee as a professional demo singer would get. But Steve Venet -- the brother of Nik Venet, and occasional songwriting collaborator with Tommy Boyce -- happened to come to Blue Bird one day, and hear one of Sloan's original songs. He thought Sloan would make a good songwriter, and took him to see Lou Adler at Columbia-Screen Gems music publishing. This was shortly after the merger between Columbia-Screen Gems and Aldon Music, and Adler was at this point the West Coast head of operations, subservient to Don Kirshner and Al Nevins, but largely left to do what he wanted. The way Sloan always told the story, Venet tried to get Adler to sign Sloan, but Adler said his songs stunk and had no commercial potential. But Sloan persisted in trying to get a contract there, and eventually Al Nevins happened to be in the office and overruled Adler, much to Adler's disgust. Sloan was signed to Columbia-Screen Gems as a songwriter, though he wasn't put on a salary like the Brill Building songwriters, just told that he could bring in songs and they would publish them. Shortly after this, Adler suggested to Sloan that he might want to form a writing team with another songwriter, Steve Barri, who had had a similar non-career non-trajectory, but was very slightly further ahead in his career, having done some work with Carol Connors, the former lead singer of the Teddy Bears. Barri had co-written a couple of flop singles for Connors, before the two of them had formed a vocal group, the Storytellers, with Connors' sister. The Storytellers had released a single, "When Two People (Are in Love)" , which was put out on a local independent label and which Adler had licensed to be released on Dimension Records, the label associated with Aldon Music: [Excerpt: The Storytellers "When Two People (Are in Love)"] That record didn't sell, but it was enough to get Barri into the Columbia-Screen Gems circle, and Adler set him and Sloan up as a songwriting team -- although the way Sloan told it, it wasn't so much a songwriting team as Sloan writing songs while Barri was also there. Sloan would later claim "it was mostly a collaboration of spirit, and it seemed that I was writing most of the music and the lyric, but it couldn't possibly have ever happened unless both of us were present at the same time". One suspects that Barri might have a different recollection of how it went... Sloan and Barri's first collaboration was a song that Sloan had half-written before they met, called "Kick That Little Foot Sally Ann", which was recorded by a West Coast Chubby Checker knockoff who went under the name Round Robin, and who had his own dance craze, the Slauson, which was much less successful than the Twist: [Excerpt: Round Robin, "Kick that Little Foot Sally Ann"] That track was produced and arranged by Jack Nitzsche, and Nitzsche asked Sloan to be one of the rhythm guitarists on the track, apparently liking Sloan's feel. Sloan would end up playing rhythm guitar or singing backing vocals on many of the records made of songs he and Barri wrote together. "Kick That Little Foot Sally Ann" only made number sixty-one nationally, but it was a regional hit, and it meant that Sloan and Barri soon became what Sloan later described as "the Goffin and King of the West Coast follow-ups." According to Sloan "We'd be given a list on Monday morning by Lou Adler with thirty names on it of the groups who needed follow-ups to their hit." They'd then write the songs to order, and they started to specialise in dance craze songs. For example, when the Swim looked like it might be the next big dance, they wrote "Swim Swim Swim", "She Only Wants to Swim", "Let's Swim Baby", "Big Boss Swimmer", "Swim Party" and "My Swimmin' Girl" (the last a collaboration with Jan Berry and Roger Christian). These songs were exactly as good as they needed to be, in order to provide album filler for mid-tier artists, and while Sloan and Barri weren't writing any massive hits, they were doing very well as mid-tier writers. According to Sloan's biographer Stephen McParland, there was a three-year period in the mid-sixties where at least one song written or co-written by Sloan was on the national charts at any given time. Most of these songs weren't for Columbia-Screen Gems though. In early 1964 Lou Adler had a falling out with Don Kirshner, and decided to start up his own company, Dunhill, which was equal parts production company, music publishers, and management -- doing for West Coast pop singers what Motown was doing for Detroit soul singers, and putting everything into one basket. Dunhill's early clients included Jan and Dean and the rockabilly singer Johnny Rivers, and Dunhill also signed Sloan and Barri as songwriters. Because of this connection, Sloan and Barri soon became an important part of Jan and Dean's hit-making process. The Matadors, the vocal group that had provided most of the backing vocals on the duo's hits, had started asking for more money than Jan Berry was willing to pay, and Jan and Dean couldn't do the vocals themselves -- as Bones Howe put it "As a singer, Dean is a wonderful graphic artist" -- and so Sloan and Barri stepped in, doing session vocals without payment in the hope that Jan and Dean would record a few of their songs. For example, on the big hit "The Little Old Lady From Pasadena", Dean Torrence is not present at all on the record -- Jan Berry sings the lead vocal, with Sloan doubling him for much of it, Sloan sings "Dean"'s falsetto, with the engineer Bones Howe helping out, and the rest of the backing vocals are sung by Sloan, Barri, and Howe: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "The Little Old Lady From Pasadena"] For these recordings, Sloan and Barri were known as The Fantastic Baggys, a name which came from the Rolling Stones' manager Andrew Oldham and Mick Jagger, when the two were visiting California. Oldham had been commenting on baggys, the kind of shorts worn by surfers, and had asked Jagger what he thought of The Baggys as a group name. Jagger had replied "Fantastic!" and so the Fantastic Baggys had been born. As part of this, Sloan and Barri moved hard into surf and hot-rod music from the dance songs they had been writing previously. The Fantastic Baggys recorded their own album, Tell 'Em I'm Surfin', as a quickie album suggested by Adler: [Excerpt: The Fantastic Baggys, "Tell 'Em I'm Surfin'"] And under the name The Rally Packs they recorded a version of Jan and Dean's "Move Out Little Mustang" which featured Berry's girlfriend Jill Gibson doing a spoken section: [Excerpt: The Rally Packs, "Move Out Little Mustang"] They also wrote several album tracks for Jan and Dean, and wrote "Summer Means Fun" for Bruce and Terry -- Bruce Johnston, later of the Beach Boys, and Terry Melcher: [Excerpt: Bruce and Terry, "Summer Means Fun"] And they wrote the very surf-flavoured "Secret Agent Man" for fellow Dunhill artist Johnny Rivers: [Excerpt: Johnny Rivers, "Secret Agent Man"] But of course, when you're chasing trends, you're chasing trends, and soon the craze for twangy guitars and falsetto harmonies had ended, replaced by a craze for jangly twelve-string guitars and closer harmonies. According to Sloan, he was in at the very beginning of the folk-rock trend -- the way he told the story, he was involved in the mastering of the Byrds' version of "Mr. Tambourine Man". He later talked about Terry Melcher getting him to help out, saying "He had produced a record called 'Mr. Tambourine Man', and had sent it into the head office, and it had been rejected. He called me up and said 'I've got three more hours in the studio before I'm being kicked out of Columbia. Can you come over and help me with this new record?' I did. I went over there. It was under lock and key. There were two guards outside the door. Terry asked me something about 'Summer Means Fun'. "He said 'Do you remember the guitar that we worked on with that? How we put in that double reverb?' "And I said 'yes' "And he said 'What do you think if we did something like that with the Byrds?' "And I said 'That sounds good. Let's see what it sounds like.' So we patched into all the reverb centres in Columbia Music, and mastered the record in three hours." Whether Sloan really was there at the birth of folk rock, he and Barri jumped on the folk-rock craze just as they had the surf and hot-rod craze, and wrote a string of jangly hits including "You Baby" for the Turtles: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "You Baby"] and "I Found a Girl" for Jan and Dean: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "I Found a Girl"] That song was later included on Jan and Dean's Folk 'n' Roll album, which also included... a song I'm not even going to name, but long-time listeners will know the one I mean. It was also notable in that "I Found a Girl" was the first song on which Sloan was credited not as Phil Sloan, but as P.F. Sloan -- he didn't have a middle name beginning with F, but rather the F stood for his nickname "Flip". Sloan would later talk of Phil Sloan and P.F. Sloan as almost being two different people, with P.F. being a far more serious, intense, songwriter. Folk 'n' Roll also contained another Sloan song, this one credited solely to Sloan. And that song is the one for which he became best known. There are two very different stories about how "Eve of Destruction" came to be written. To tell Sloan's version, I'm going to read a few paragraphs from his autobiography: "By late 1964, I had already written ‘Eve Of Destruction,' ‘The Sins Of A Family,' ‘This Mornin',' ‘Ain't No Way I'm Gonna Change My Mind,' and ‘What's Exactly The Matter With Me?' They all arrived on one cataclysmic evening, and nearly at the same time, as I worked on the lyrics almost simultaneously. ‘Eve Of Destruction' came about from hearing a voice, perhaps an angel's. The voice instructed me to place five pieces of paper and spread them out on my bed. I obeyed the voice. The voice told me that the first song would be called ‘Eve Of Destruction,' so I wrote the title at the top of the page. For the next few hours, the voice came and went as I was writing the lyric, as if this spirit—or whatever it was—stood over me like a teacher: ‘No, no … not think of all the hate there is in Red Russia … Red China!' I didn't understand. I thought the Soviet Union was the mortal threat to America, but the voice went on to reveal to me the future of the world until 2024. I was told the Soviet Union would fall, and that Red China would continue to be communist far into the future, but that communism was not going to be allowed to take over this Divine Planet—therefore, think of all the hate there is in Red China. I argued and wrestled with the voice for hours, until I was exhausted but satisfied inside with my plea to God to either take me out of the world, as I could not live in such a hypocritical society, or to show me a way to make things better. When I was writing ‘Eve,' I was on my hands and knees, pleading for an answer." Lou Adler's story is that he gave Phil Sloan a copy of Bob Dylan's Bringing it All Back Home album and told him to write a bunch of songs that sounded like that, and Sloan came back a week later as instructed with ten Dylan knock-offs. Adler said "It was a natural feel for him. He's a great mimic." As one other data point, both Steve Barri and Bones Howe, the engineer who worked on most of the sessions we're looking at today, have often talked in interviews about "Eve of Destruction" as being a Sloan/Barri collaboration, as if to them it's common knowledge that it wasn't written alone, although Sloan's is the only name on the credits. The song was given to a new signing to Dunhill Records, Barry McGuire. McGuire was someone who had been part of the folk scene for years, He'd been playing folk clubs in LA while also acting in a TV show from 1961. When the TV show had finished, he'd formed a duo, Barry and Barry, with Barry Kane, and they performed much the same repertoire as all the other early-sixties folkies: [Excerpt: Barry and Barry, "If I Had a Hammer"] After recording their one album, both Barrys joined the New Christy Minstrels. We've talked about the Christys before, but they were -- and are to this day -- an ultra-commercial folk group, led by Randy Sparks, with a revolving membership of usually eight or nine singers which included several other people who've come up in this podcast, like Gene Clark and Jerry Yester. McGuire became one of the principal lead singers of the Christys, singing lead on their version of the novelty cowboy song "Three Wheels on My Wagon", which was later released as a single in the UK and became a perennial children's favourite (though it has a problematic attitude towards Native Americans): [Excerpt: The New Christy Minstrels, "Three Wheels on My Wagon"] And he also sang lead on their big hit "Green Green", which he co-wrote with Randy Sparks: [Excerpt: The New Christy Minstrels, "Green Green"] But by 1965 McGuire had left the New Christy Minstrels. As he said later "I'd sung 'Green Green' a thousand times and I didn't want to sing it again. This is January of 1965. I went back to LA to meet some producers, and I was broke. Nobody had the time of day for me. I was walking down street one time to see Dr. Strangelove and I walked by the music store, and I heard "Green Green" comin' out of the store, ya know, on Hollywood Boulevard. And I heard my voice, and I thought, 'I got four dollars in my pocket!' I couldn't believe it, my voice is comin' out on Hollywood Boulevard, and I'm broke. And right at that moment, a car pulls up, and the radio is playing 'Chim Chim Cherie" also by the Minstrels. So I got my voice comin' at me in stereo, standin' on the sidewalk there, and I'm broke, and I can't get anyone to sign me!" But McGuire had a lot of friends who he'd met on the folk scene, some of whom were now in the new folk-rock scene that was just starting to spring up. One of them was Roger McGuinn, who told him that his band, the Byrds, were just about to put out a new single, "Mr. Tambourine Man", and that they were about to start a residency at Ciro's on Sunset Strip. McGuinn invited McGuire to the opening night of that residency, where a lot of other people from the scene were there to see the new group. Bob Dylan was there, as was Phil Sloan, and the actor Jack Nicholson, who was still at the time a minor bit-part player in low-budget films made by people like American International Pictures (the cinematographer on many of Nicholson's early films was Floyd Crosby, David Crosby's father, which may be why he was there). Someone else who was there was Lou Adler, who according to McGuire recognised him instantly. According to Adler, he actually asked Terry Melcher who the long-haired dancer wearing furs was, because "he looked like the leader of a movement", and Melcher told him that he was the former lead singer of the New Christy Minstrels. Either way, Adler approached McGuire and asked if he was currently signed -- Dunhill Records was just starting up, and getting someone like McGuire, who had a proven ability to sing lead on hit records, would be a good start for the label. As McGuire didn't have a contract, he was signed to Dunhill, and he was given some of Sloan's new songs to pick from, and chose "What's Exactly the Matter With Me?" as his single: [Excerpt: Barry McGuire, "What's Exactly the Matter With Me?"] McGuire described what happened next: "It was like, a three-hour session. We did two songs, and then the third one wasn't turning out. We only had about a half hour left in the session, so I said 'Let's do this tune', and I pulled 'Eve of Destruction' out of my pocket, and it just had Phil's words scrawled on a piece of paper, all wrinkled up. Phil worked the chords out with the musicians, who were Hal Blaine on drums and Larry Knechtel on bass." There were actually more musicians than that at the session -- apparently both Knechtel and Joe Osborn were there, so I'm not entirely sure who's playing bass -- Knechtel was a keyboard player as well as a bass player, but I don't hear any keyboards on the track. And Tommy Tedesco was playing lead guitar, and Steve Barri added percussion, along with Sloan on rhythm guitar and harmonica. The chords were apparently scribbled down for the musicians on bits of greasy paper that had been used to wrap some takeaway chicken, and they got through the track in a single take. According to McGuire "I'm reading the words off this piece of wrinkled paper, and I'm singing 'My blood's so mad, feels like coagulatin'", that part that goes 'Ahhh you can't twist the truth', and the reason I'm going 'Ahhh' is because I lost my place on the page. People said 'Man, you really sounded frustrated when you were singing.' I was. I couldn't see the words!" [Excerpt: Barry McGuire, "Eve of Destruction"] With a few overdubs -- the female backing singers in the chorus, and possibly the kettledrums, which I've seen differing claims about, with some saying that Hal Blaine played them during the basic track and others saying that Lou Adler suggested them as an overdub, the track was complete. McGuire wasn't happy with his vocal, and a session was scheduled for him to redo it, but then a record promoter working with Adler was DJing a birthday party for the head of programming at KFWB, the big top forty radio station in LA at the time, and he played a few acetates he'd picked up from Adler. Most went down OK with the crowd, but when he played "Eve of Destruction", the crowd went wild and insisted he play it three times in a row. The head of programming called Adler up and told him that "Eve of Destruction" was going to be put into rotation on the station from Monday, so he'd better get the record out. As McGuire was away for the weekend, Adler just released the track as it was, and what had been intended to be a B-side became Barry McGuire's first and only number one record: [Excerpt: Barry McGuire, "Eve of Destruction"] Sloan would later claim that that song was a major reason why the twenty-sixth amendment to the US Constitution was passed six years later, because the line "you're old enough to kill but not for votin'" shamed Congress into changing the constitution to allow eighteen-year-olds to vote. If so, that would make "Eve of Destruction" arguably the single most impactful rock record in history, though Sloan is the only person I've ever seen saying that As well as going to number one in McGuire's version, the song was also covered by the other artists who regularly performed Sloan and Barri songs, like the Turtles: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "Eve of Destruction"] And Jan and Dean, whose version on Folk & Roll used the same backing track as McGuire, but had a few lyrical changes to make it fit with Jan Berry's right-wing politics, most notably changing "Selma, Alabama" to "Watts, California", thus changing a reference to peaceful civil rights protestors being brutally attacked and murdered by white supremacist state troopers to a reference to what was seen, in the popular imaginary, as Black people rioting for no reason: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "Eve of Destruction"] According to Sloan, he worked on the Folk & Roll album as a favour to Berry, even though he thought Berry was being cynical and exploitative in making the record, but those changes caused a rift in their friendship. Sloan said in his autobiography "Where I was completely wrong was in helping him capitalize on something in which he didn't believe. Jan wanted the public to perceive him as a person who was deeply concerned and who embraced the values of the progressive politics of the day. But he wasn't that person. That's how I was being pulled. It was when he recorded my actual song ‘Eve Of Destruction' and changed a number of lines to reflect his own ideals that my principles demanded that I leave Folk City and never return." It's true that Sloan gave no more songs to Jan and Dean after that point -- but it's also true that the duo would record only one more album, the comedy concept album Jan and Dean Meet Batman, before Jan's accident. Incidentally, the reference to Selma, Alabama in the lyric might help people decide on which story about the writing of "Eve of Destruction" they think is more plausible. Remember that Lou Adler said that it was written after Adler gave Sloan a copy of Bringing it All Back Home and told him to write a bunch of knock-offs, while Sloan said it was written after a supernatural force gave him access to all the events that would happen in the world for the next sixty years. Sloan claimed the song was written in late 1964. Selma, Alabama, became national news in late February and early March 1965. Bringing it All Back Home was released in late March 1965. So either Adler was telling the truth, or Sloan really *was* given a supernatural insight into the events of the future. Now, as it turned out, while "Eve of Destruction" went to number one, that would be McGuire's only hit as a solo artist. His next couple of singles would reach the very low end of the Hot One Hundred, and that would be it -- he'd release several more albums, before appearing in the Broadway musical Hair, most famous for its nude scenes, and getting a small part in the cinematic masterpiece Werewolves on Wheels: [Excerpt: Werewolves on Wheels trailer] P.F. Sloan would later tell various stories about why McGuire never had another hit. Sometimes he would say that Dunhill Records had received death threats because of "Eve of Destruction" and so deliberately tried to bury McGuire's career, other times he would say that Lou Adler had told him that Billboard had said they were never going to put McGuire's records on the charts no matter how well they sold, because "Eve of Destruction" had just been too powerful and upset the advertisers. But of course at this time Dunhill were still trying for a follow-up to "Eve of Destruction", and they thought they might have one when Barry McGuire brought in a few friends of his to sing backing vocals on his second album. Now, we've covered some of the history of the Mamas and the Papas already, because they were intimately tied up with other groups like the Byrds and the Lovin' Spoonful, and with the folk scene that led to songs like "Hey Joe", so some of this will be more like a recap than a totally new story, but I'm going to recap those parts of the story anyway, so it's fresh in everyone's heads. John Phillips, Scott McKenzie, and Cass Elliot all grew up in Alexandria, Virginia, just a few miles south of Washington DC. Elliot was a few years younger than Phillips and McKenzie, and so as is the way with young men they never really noticed her, and as McKenzie later said "She lived like a quarter of a mile from me and I never met her until New York". While they didn't know who Elliot was, though, she was aware who they were, as Phillips and McKenzie sang together in a vocal group called The Smoothies. The Smoothies were a modern jazz harmony group, influenced by groups like the Modernaires, the Hi-Los, and the Four Freshmen. John Phillips later said "We were drawn to jazz, because we were sort of beatniks, really, rather than hippies, or whatever, flower children. So we used to sing modern harmonies, like Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross. Dave Lambert did a lot of our arrangements for us as a matter of fact." Now, I've not seen any evidence other than Phillips' claim that Dave Lambert ever arranged for the Smoothies, but that does tell you a lot about the kind of music that they were doing. Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross were a vocalese trio whose main star was Annie Ross, who had a career worthy of an episode in itself -- she sang with Paul Whiteman, appeared in a Little Rascals film when she was seven, had an affair with Lenny Bruce, dubbed Britt Ekland's voice in The Wicker Man, played the villain's sister in Superman III, and much more. Vocalese, you'll remember, was a style of jazz vocal where a singer would take a jazz instrumental, often an improvised one, and add lyrics which they would sing, like Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross' version of "Cloudburst": [Excerpt: Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross, "Cloudburst"] Whether Dave Lambert ever really did arrange for the Smoothies or not, it's very clear that the trio had a huge influence on John Phillips' ideas about vocal arrangement, as you can hear on Mamas and Papas records like "Once Was a Time I Thought": [Excerpt: The Mamas and the Papas, "Once Was a Time I Thought"] While the Smoothies thought of themselves as a jazz group, when they signed to Decca they started out making the standard teen pop of the era, with songs like "Softly": [Excerpt, The Smoothies, "Softly"] When the folk boom started, Phillips realised that this was music that he could do easily, because the level of musicianship among the pop-folk musicians was so much lower than in the jazz world. The Smoothies made some recordings in the style of the Kingston Trio, like "Ride Ride Ride": [Excerpt: The Smoothies, "Ride Ride Ride"] Then when the Smoothies split, Phillips and McKenzie formed a trio with a banjo player, Dick Weissman, who they met through Izzy Young's Folklore Centre in Greenwich Village after Phillips asked Young to name some musicians who could make a folk record with him. Weissman was often considered the best banjo player on the scene, and was a friend of Pete Seeger's, to whom Seeger sometimes turned for banjo tips. The trio, who called themselves the Journeymen, quickly established themselves on the folk scene. Weissman later said "we had this interesting balance. John had all of this charisma -- they didn't know about the writing thing yet -- John had the personality, Scott had the voice, and I could play. If you think about it, all of those bands like the Kingston Trio, the Brothers Four, nobody could really *sing* and nobody could really *play*, relatively speaking." This is the take that most people seemed to have about John Phillips, in any band he was ever in. Nobody thought he was a particularly good singer or instrumentalist -- he could sing on key and play adequate rhythm guitar, but nobody would actually pay money to listen to him do those things. Mark Volman of the Turtles, for example, said of him "John wasn't the kind of guy who was going to be able to go up on stage and sing his songs as a singer-songwriter. He had to put himself in the context of a group." But he was charismatic, he had presence, and he also had a great musical mind. He would surround himself with the best players and best singers he could, and then he would organise and arrange them in ways that made the most of their talents. He would work out the arrangements, in a manner that was far more professional than the quick head arrangements that other folk groups used, and he instigated a level of professionalism in his groups that was not at all common on the scene. Phillips' friend Jim Mason talked about the first time he saw the Journeymen -- "They were warming up backstage, and John had all of them doing vocal exercises; one thing in particular that's pretty famous called 'Seiber Syllables' -- it's a series of vocal exercises where you enunciate different vowel and consonant sounds. It had the effect of clearing your head, and it's something that really good operetta singers do." The group were soon signed by Frank Werber, the manager of the Kingston Trio, who signed them as an insurance policy. Dave Guard, the Kingston Trio's banjo player, was increasingly having trouble with the other members, and Werber knew it was only a matter of time before he left the group. Werber wanted the Journeymen as a sort of farm team -- he had the idea that when Guard left, Phillips would join the Kingston Trio in his place as the third singer. Weissman would become the Trio's accompanist on banjo, and Scott McKenzie, who everyone agreed had a remarkable voice, would be spun off as a solo artist. But until that happened, they might as well make records by themselves. The Journeymen signed to MGM records, but were dropped before they recorded anything. They instead signed to Capitol, for whom they recorded their first album: [Excerpt: The Journeymen, "500 Miles"] After recording that album, the Journeymen moved out to California, with Phillips' wife and children. But soon Phillips' marriage was to collapse, as he met and fell in love with Michelle Gilliam. Gilliam was nine years younger than him -- he was twenty-six and she was seventeen -- and she had the kind of appearance which meant that in every interview with an older heterosexual man who knew her, that man will spend half the interview talking about how attractive he found her. Phillips soon left his wife and children, but before he did, the group had a turntable hit with "River Come Down", the B-side to "500 Miles": [Excerpt: The Journeymen, "River Come Down"] Around the same time, Dave Guard *did* leave the Kingston Trio, but the plan to split the Journeymen never happened. Instead Phillips' friend John Stewart replaced Guard -- and this soon became a new source of income for Phillips. Both Phillips and Stewart were aspiring songwriters, and they collaborated together on several songs for the Trio, including "Chilly Winds": [Excerpt: The Kingston Trio, "Chilly Winds"] Phillips became particularly good at writing songs that sounded like they could be old traditional folk songs, sometimes taking odd lines from older songs to jump-start new ones, as in "Oh Miss Mary", which he and Stewart wrote after hearing someone sing the first line of a song she couldn't remember the rest of: [Excerpt: The Kingston Trio, "Oh Miss Mary"] Phillips and Stewart became so close that Phillips actually suggested to Stewart that he quit the Kingston Trio and replace Dick Weissman in the Journeymen. Stewart did quit the Trio -- but then the next day Phillips suggested that maybe it was a bad idea and he should stay where he was. Stewart went back to the Trio, claimed he had only pretended to quit because he wanted a pay-rise, and got his raise, so everyone ended up happy. The Journeymen moved back to New York with Michelle in place of Phillips' first wife (and Michelle's sister Russell also coming along, as she was dating Scott McKenzie) and on New Year's Eve 1962 John and Michelle married -- so from this point on I will refer to them by their first names, because they both had the surname Phillips. The group continued having success through 1963, including making appearances on "Hootenanny": [Excerpt: The Journeymen, "Stack O'Lee (live on Hootenanny)"] By the time of the Journeymen's third album, though, John and Scott McKenzie were on bad terms. Weissman said "They had been the closest of friends and now they were the worst of enemies. They talked through me like I was a medium. It got to the point where we'd be standing in the dressing room and John would say to me 'Tell Scott that his right sock doesn't match his left sock...' Things like that, when they were standing five feet away from each other." Eventually, the group split up. Weissman was always going to be able to find employment given his banjo ability, and he was about to get married and didn't need the hassle of dealing with the other two. McKenzie was planning on a solo career -- everyone was agreed that he had the vocal ability. But John was another matter. He needed to be in a group. And not only that, the Journeymen had bookings they needed to complete. He quickly pulled together a group he called the New Journeymen. The core of the lineup was himself, Michelle on vocals, and banjo player Marshall Brickman. Brickman had previously been a member of a folk group called the Tarriers, who had had a revolving lineup, and had played on most of their early-sixties recordings: [Excerpt: The Tarriers, "Quinto (My Little Pony)"] We've met the Tarriers before in the podcast -- they had been formed by Erik Darling, who later replaced Pete Seeger in the Weavers after Seeger's socialist principles wouldn't let him do advertising, and Alan Arkin, later to go on to be a film star, and had had hits with "Cindy, O Cindy", with lead vocals from Vince Martin, who would later go on to be a major performer in the Greenwich Village scene, and with "The Banana Boat Song". By the time Brickman had joined, though, Darling, Arkin, and Martin had all left the group to go on to bigger things, and while he played with them for several years, it was after their commercial peak. Brickman would, though, also go on to a surprising amount of success, but as a writer rather than a musician -- he had a successful collaboration with Woody Allen in the 1970s, co-writing four of Allen's most highly regarded films -- Sleeper, Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Manhattan Murder Mystery -- and with another collaborator he later co-wrote the books for the stage musicals Jersey Boys and The Addams Family. Both John and Michelle were decent singers, and both have their admirers as vocalists -- P.F. Sloan always said that Michelle was the best singer in the group they eventually formed, and that it was her voice that gave the group its sound -- but for the most part they were not considered as particularly astonishing lead vocalists. Certainly, neither had a voice that stood out the way that Scott McKenzie's had. They needed a strong lead singer, and they found one in Denny Doherty. Now, we covered Denny Doherty's early career in the episode on the Lovin' Spoonful, because he was intimately involved in the formation of that group, so I won't go into too much detail here, but I'll give a very abbreviated version of what I said there. Doherty was a Canadian performer who had been a member of the Halifax Three with Zal Yanovsky: [Excerpt: The Halifax Three, "When I First Came to This Land"] After the Halifax Three had split up, Doherty and Yanovsky had performed as a duo for a while, before joining up with Cass Elliot and her husband Jim Hendricks, who both had previously been in the Big Three with Tim Rose: [Excerpt: Cass Elliot and the Big 3, "The Banjo Song"] Elliot, Hendricks, Yanovsky, and Doherty had formed The Mugwumps, sometimes joined by John Sebastian, and had tried to go in more of a rock direction after seeing the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. They recorded one album together before splitting up: [Excerpt: The Mugwumps, "Searchin'"] Part of the reason they split up was that interpersonal relationships within the group were put under some strain -- Elliot and Hendricks split up, though they would remain friends and remain married for several years even though they were living apart, and Elliot had an unrequited crush on Doherty. But since they'd split up, and Yanovsky and Sebastian had gone off to form the Lovin' Spoonful, that meant that Doherty was free, and he was regarded as possibly the best male lead vocalist on the circuit, so the group snapped him up. The only problem was that the Journeymen still had gigs booked that needed to be played, one of them was in just three days, and Doherty didn't know the repertoire. This was a problem with an easy solution for people in their twenties though -- they took a huge amount of amphetamines, and stayed awake for three days straight rehearsing. They made the gig, and Doherty was now the lead singer of the New Journeymen: [Excerpt: The New Journeymen, "The Last Thing on My Mind"] But the New Journeymen didn't last in that form for very long, because even before joining the group, Denny Doherty had been going in a more folk-rock direction with the Mugwumps. At the time, John Phillips thought rock and roll was kids' music, and he was far more interested in folk and jazz, but he was also very interested in making money, and he soon decided it was an idea to start listening to the Beatles. There's some dispute as to who first played the Beatles for John in early 1965 -- some claim it was Doherty, others claim it was Cass Elliot, but everyone agrees it was after Denny Doherty had introduced Phillips to something else -- he brought round some LSD for John and Michelle, and Michelle's sister Rusty, to try. And then he told them he'd invited round a friend. Michelle Phillips later remembered, "I remember saying to the guys "I don't know about you guys, but this drug does nothing for me." At that point there was a knock on the door, and as I opened the door and saw Cass, the acid hit me *over the head*. I saw her standing there in a pleated skirt, a pink Angora sweater with great big eyelashes on and her hair in a flip. And all of a sudden I thought 'This is really *quite* a drug!' It was an image I will have securely fixed in my brain for the rest of my life. I said 'Hi, I'm Michelle. We just took some LSD-25, do you wanna join us?' And she said 'Sure...'" Rusty Gilliam's description matches this -- "It was mind-boggling. She had on a white pleated skirt, false eyelashes. These were the kind of eyelashes that when you put them on you were supposed to trim them to an appropriate length, which she didn't, and when she blinked she looked like a cow, or those dolls you get when you're little and the eyes open and close. And we're on acid. Oh my God! It was a sight! And everything she was wearing were things that you weren't supposed to be wearing if you were heavy -- white pleated skirt, mohair sweater. You know, until she became famous, she suffered so much, and was poked fun at." This gets to an important point about Elliot, and one which sadly affected everything about her life. Elliot was *very* fat -- I've seen her weight listed at about three hundred pounds, and she was only five foot five tall -- and she also didn't have the kind of face that gets thought of as conventionally attractive. Her appearance would be cruelly mocked by pretty much everyone for the rest of her life, in ways that it's genuinely hurtful to read about, and which I will avoid discussing in detail in order to avoid hurting fat listeners. But the two *other* things that defined Elliot in the minds of those who knew her were her voice -- every single person who knew her talks about what a wonderful singer she was -- and her personality. I've read a lot of things about Cass Elliot, and I have never read a single negative word about her as a person, but have read many people going into raptures about what a charming, loving, friendly, understanding person she was. Michelle later said of her "From the time I left Los Angeles, I hadn't had a friend, a buddy. I was married, and John and I did not hang out with women, we just hung out with men, and especially not with women my age. John was nine years older than I was. And here was a fun-loving, intelligent woman. She captivated me. I was as close to in love with Cass as I could be to any woman in my life at that point. She also represented something to me: freedom. Everything she did was because she wanted to do it. She was completely independent and I admired her and was in awe of her. And later on, Cass would be the one to tell me not to let John run my life. And John hated her for that." Either Elliot had brought round Meet The Beatles, the Beatles' first Capitol album, for everyone to listen to, or Denny Doherty already had it, but either way Elliot and Doherty were by this time already Beatles fans. Michelle, being younger than the rest and not part of the folk scene until she met John, was much more interested in rock and roll than any of them, but because she'd been married to John for a couple of years and been part of his musical world she hadn't really encountered the Beatles music, though she had a vague memory that she might have heard a track or two on the radio. John was hesitant -- he didn't want to listen to any rock and roll, but eventually he was persuaded, and the record was put on while he was on his first acid trip: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I Want to Hold Your Hand"] Within a month, John Phillips had written thirty songs that he thought of as inspired by the Beatles. The New Journeymen were going to go rock and roll. By this time Marshall Brickman was out of the band, and instead John, Michelle, and Denny recruited a new lead guitarist, Eric Hord. Denny started playing bass, with John on rhythm guitar, and a violinist friend of theirs, Peter Pilafian, knew a bit of drums and took on that role. The new lineup of the group used the Journeymen's credit card, which hadn't been stopped even though the Journeymen were no more, to go down to St. Thomas in the Caribbean, along with Michelle's sister, John's daughter Mackenzie (from whose name Scott McKenzie had taken his stage name, as he was born Philip Blondheim), a pet dog, and sundry band members' girlfriends. They stayed there for several months, living in tents on the beach, taking acid, and rehearsing. While they were there, Michelle and Denny started an affair which would have important ramifications for the group later. They got a gig playing at a club called Duffy's, whose address was on Creeque Alley, and soon after they started playing there Cass Elliot travelled down as well -- she was in love with Denny, and wanted to be around him. She wasn't in the group, but she got a job working at Duffy's as a waitress, and she would often sing harmony with the group while waiting at tables. Depending on who was telling the story, either she didn't want to be in the group because she didn't want her appearance to be compared to Michelle's, or John wouldn't *let* her be in the group because she was so fat. Later a story would be made up to cover for this, saying that she hadn't been in the group at first because she couldn't sing the highest notes that were needed, until she got hit on the head with a metal pipe and discovered that it had increased her range by three notes, but that seems to be a lie. One of the songs the New Journeymen were performing at this time was "Mr. Tambourine Man". They'd heard that their old friend Roger McGuinn had recorded it with his new band, but they hadn't yet heard his version, and they'd come up with their own arrangement: [Excerpt: The New Journeymen, "Mr. Tambourine Man"] Denny later said "We were doing three-part harmony on 'Mr Tambourine Man', but a lot slower... like a polka or something! And I tell John, 'No John, we gotta slow it down and give it a backbeat.' Finally we get the Byrds 45 down here, and we put it on and turn it up to ten, and John says 'Oh, like that?' Well, as you can tell, it had already been done. So John goes 'Oh, ah... that's it...' a light went on. So we started doing Beatles stuff. We dropped 'Mr Tambourine Man' after hearing the Byrds version, because there was no point." Eventually they had to leave the island -- they had completely run out of money, and were down to fifty dollars. The credit card had been cut up, and the governor of the island had a personal vendetta against them because they gave his son acid, and they were likely to get arrested if they didn't leave the island. Elliot and her then-partner had round-trip tickets, so they just left, but the rest of them were in trouble. By this point they were unwashed, they were homeless, and they'd spent their last money on stage costumes. They got to the airport, and John Phillips tried to write a cheque for eight air fares back to the mainland, which the person at the check-in desk just laughed at. So they took their last fifty dollars and went to a casino. There Michelle played craps, and she rolled seventeen straight passes, something which should be statistically impossible. She turned their fifty dollars into six thousand dollars, which they scooped up, took to the airport, and paid for their flights out in cash. The New Journeymen arrived back in New York, but quickly decided that they were going to try their luck in California. They rented a car, using Scott McKenzie's credit card, and drove out to LA. There they met up with Hoyt Axton, who you may remember as the son of Mae Axton, the writer of "Heartbreak Hotel", and as the performer who had inspired Michael Nesmith to go into folk music: [Excerpt: Hoyt Axton, "Greenback Dollar"] Axton knew the group, and fed them and put them up for a night, but they needed somewhere else to stay. They went to stay with one of Michelle's friends, but after one night their rented car was stolen, with all their possessions in it. They needed somewhere else to stay, so they went to ask Jim Hendricks if they could crash at his place -- and they were surprised to find that Cass Elliot was there already. Hendricks had another partner -- though he and Elliot wouldn't have their marriage annulled until 1968 and were still technically married -- but he'd happily invited her to stay with them. And now all her friends had turned up, he invited them to stay as well, taking apart the beds in his one-bedroom apartment so he could put down a load of mattresses in the space for everyone to sleep on. The next part becomes difficult, because pretty much everyone in the LA music scene of the sixties was a liar who liked to embellish their own roles in things, so it's quite difficult to unpick what actually happened. What seems to have happened though is that first this new rock-oriented version of the New Journeymen went to see Frank Werber, on the recommendation of John Stewart. Werber was the manager of the Kingston Trio, and had also managed the Journeymen. He, however, was not interested -- not because he didn't think they had talent, but because he had experience of working with John Phillips previously. When Phillips came into his office Werber picked up a tape that he'd been given of the group, and said "I have not had a chance to listen to this tape. I believe that you are a most talented individual, and that's why we took you on in the first place. But I also believe that you're also a drag to work with. A pain in the ass. So I'll tell you what, before whatever you have on here sways me, I'm gonna give it back to you and say that we're not interested." Meanwhile -- and this part of the story comes from Kim Fowley, who was never one to let the truth get in the way of him taking claim for everything, but parts of it at least are corroborated by other people -- Cass Elliot had called Fowley, and told him that her friends' new group sounded pretty good and he should sign them. Fowley was at that time working as a talent scout for a label, but according to him the label wouldn't give the group the money they wanted. So instead, Fowley got in touch with Nik Venet, who had just produced the Leaves' hit version of "Hey Joe" on Mira Records: [Excerpt: The Leaves, "Hey Joe"] Fowley suggested to Venet that Venet should sign the group to Mira Records, and Fowley would sign them to a publishing contract, and they could both get rich. The trio went to audition for Venet, and Elliot drove them over -- and Venet thought the group had a great look as a quartet. He wanted to sign them to a record contract, but only if Elliot was in the group as well. They agreed, he gave them a one hundred and fifty dollar advance, and told them to come back the next day to see his boss at Mira. But Barry McGuire was also hanging round with Elliot and Hendricks, and decided that he wanted to have Lou Adler hear the four of them. He thought they might be useful both as backing vocalists on his second album and as a source of new songs. He got them to go and see Lou Adler, and according to McGuire Phillips didn't want Elliot to go with them, but as Elliot was the one who was friends with McGuire, Phillips worried that they'd lose the chance with Adler if she didn't. Adler was amazed, and decided to sign the group right then and there -- both Bones Howe and P.F. Sloan claimed to have been there when the group auditioned for him and have said "if you won't sign them, I will", though exactly what Sloan would have signed them to I'm not sure. Adler paid them three thousand dollars in cash and told them not to bother with Nik Venet, so they just didn't turn up for the Mira Records audition the next day. Instead, they went into the studio with McGuire and cut backing vocals on about half of his new album: [Excerpt: Barry McGuire with the Mamas and the Papas, "Hide Your Love Away"] While the group were excellent vocalists, there were two main reasons that Adler wanted to sign them. The first was that he found Michelle Phillips extremely attractive, and the second is a song that John and Michelle had written which he thought might be very suitable for McGuire's album. Most people who knew John Phillips think of "California Dreamin'" as a solo composition, and he would later claim that he gave Michelle fifty percent just for transcribing his lyric, saying he got inspired in the middle of the night, woke her up, and got her to write the song down as he came up with it. But Michelle, who is a credited co-writer on the song, has been very insistent that she wrote the lyrics to the second verse, and that it's about her own real experiences, saying that she would often go into churches and light candles even though she was "at best an agnostic, and possibly an atheist" in her words, and this would annoy John, who had also been raised Catholic, but who had become aggressively opposed to expressions of religion, rather than still having nostalgia for the aesthetics of the church as Michelle did. They were out walking on a particularly cold winter's day in 1963, and Michelle wanted to go into St Patrick's Cathedral and John very much did not want to. A couple of nights later, John woke her up, having written the first verse of the song, starting "All the leaves are brown and the sky is grey/I went for a walk on a winter's day", and insisting she collaborate with him. She liked the song, and came up with the lines "Stopped into a church, I passed along the way/I got down on my knees and I pretend to pray/The preacher likes the cold, he knows I'm going to stay", which John would later apparently dislike, but which stayed in the song. Most sources I've seen for the recording of "California Dreamin'" say that the lineup of musicians was the standard set of players who had played on McGuire's other records, with the addition of John Phillips on twelve-string guitar -- P.F. Sloan on guitar and harmonica, Joe Osborn on bass, Larry Knechtel on keyboards, and Hal Blaine on drums, but for some reason Stephen McParland's book on Sloan has Bones Howe down as playing drums on the track while engineering -- a detail so weird, and from such a respectable researcher, that I have to wonder if it might be true. In his autobiography, Sloan claims to have rewritten the chord sequence to "California Dreamin'". He says "Barry Mann had unintentionally showed me a suspended chord back at Screen Gems. I was so impressed by this beautiful, simple chord that I called Brian Wilson and played it for him over the phone. The next thing I knew, Brian had written ‘Don't Worry Baby,' which had within it a number suspended chords. And then the chord heard 'round the world, two months later, was the opening suspended chord of ‘A Hard Day's Night.' I used these chords throughout ‘California Dreamin',' and more specifically as a bridge to get back and forth from the verse to the chorus." Now, nobody else corroborates this story, and both Brian Wilson and John Phillips had the kind of background in modern harmony that means they would have been very aware of suspended chords before either ever encountered Sloan, but I thought I should mention it. Rather more plausible is Sloan's other claim, that he came up with the intro to the song. According to Sloan, he was inspired by "Walk Don't Run" by the Ventures: [Excerpt: The Ventures, "Walk Don't Run"] And you can easily see how this: [plays "Walk Don't Run"] Can lead to this: [plays "California Dreamin'"] And I'm fairly certain that if that was the inspiration, it was Sloan who was the one who thought it up. John Phillips had been paying no attention to the world of surf music when "Walk Don't Run" had been a hit -- that had been at the point when he was very firmly in the folk world, while Sloan of course had been recording "Tell 'Em I'm Surfin'", and it had been his job to know surf music intimately. So Sloan's intro became the start of what was intended to be Barry McGuire's next single: [Excerpt: Barry McGuire, "California Dreamin'"] Sloan also provided the harmonica solo on the track: [Excerpt: Barry McGuire, "California Dreamin'"] The Mamas and the Papas -- the new name that was now given to the former New Journeymen, now they were a quartet -- were also signed to Dunhill as an act on their own, and recorded their own first single, "Go Where You Wanna Go", a song apparently written by John about Michelle, in late 1963, after she had briefly left him to have an affair with Russ Titelman, the record producer and songwriter, before coming back to him: [Excerpt: The Mamas and the Papas, "Go Where You Wanna Go"] But while that was put out, they quickly decided to scrap it and go with another song. The "Go Where You Wanna Go" single was pulled after only selling a handful of copies, though its commercial potential was later proved when in 1967 a new vocal group, the 5th Dimension, released a soundalike version as their second single. The track was produced by Lou Adler's client Johnny Rivers, and used the exact same musicians as the Mamas and the Papas version, with the exception of Phillips. It became their first hit, reaching number sixteen on the charts: [Excerpt: The 5th Dimension, "Go Where You Wanna Go"] The reason the Mamas and the Papas version of "Go Where You Wanna Go" was pulled was because everyone became convinced that their first single should instead be their own version of "California Dreamin'". This is the exact same track as McGuire's track, with just two changes. The first is that McGuire's lead vocal was replaced with Denny Doherty: [Excerpt: The Mamas and the Papas, "California Dreamin'"] Though if you listen to the stereo mix of the song and isolate the left channel, you can hear McGuire singing the lead on the first line, and occasional leakage from him elsewhere on the backing vocal track: [Excerpt: The Mamas and the Papas, "California Dreamin'"] The other change made was to replace Sloan's harmonica solo with an alto flute solo by Bud Shank, a jazz musician who we heard about in the episode on "Light My Fire", when he collaborated with Ravi Shankar on "Improvisations on the Theme From Pather Panchali": [Excerpt: Ravi Shankar, "Improvisation on the Theme From Pather Panchali"] Shank was working on another session in Western Studios, where they were recording the Mamas and Papas track, and Bones Howe approached him while he was packing his instrument and asked if he'd be interested in doing another session. Shank agreed, though the track caused problems for him. According to Shank "What had happened was that whe

Welcome to the Instant Trivia podcast episode 535, where we ask the best trivia on the Internet. Round 1. Category: Questionable Songs 1: Million seller in which Elvis Presley asks, "Are you sorry we drifted apart?". "Are You Lonesome Tonight?". 2: It's what Patti Page asked about "the one with the waggly tail". "(How Much Is) That Doggie In The Window?". 3: It followed Linda Ronstadt's lament "I've been cheated, been mistreated". "When Will I Be Loved?". 4: The Shirelles said, "Tonight you're mine completely" but weren't sure about this. "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?". 5: In her first top ten hit, Connie Francis asked this title question. "Who's Sorry Now?". Round 2. Category: Just Desserts 1: In England, a biscuit can be a cracker or one of these sweet treats. cookie. 2: The original Toll House cookies were this type. chocolate chip. 3: Sharing its name with a French novel, this candy bar was originally 3 nougat bars. Three Musketeers. 4: Shhh! A chocolate one of these is just out of the oven. soufflé. 5: It's the 2-word French name for a custard dessert with a hard, caramelized sugar topping. crème brûlée. Round 3. Category: Name That Roman Emperor 1: 54-68 A.D.:Presided during a big barbecue. Nero. 2: 117-138 A.D.:Had his own "wall" of fame. Hadrian. 3: 37-41 A.D.:Nutty guy who once "declared war" against the ocean. Caligula. 4: 306-337 A.D.:Converted to a non-Roman religion and moved the capital city. Constantine. 5: 27 B.C.-14 A.D.:His sister married Mark Antony and he defeated Mark Antony. Augustus. Round 4. Category: Eagle Hodgepodge 1: In 1782 the U.S. chose this eagle as its national bird. Bald eagle. 2: Young eagles are called eyases or these. Eaglets. 3: It's a synonym for sprawl. Spreadeagle. 4: The chapters of the Fraternal Order of Eagles are called these after the nests of eagles. Aeries. 5: Eddie "The Eagle" Edwards won the hearts of Englanders in 1988 competing in this Olympic event. Ski jumping. Round 5. Category: Tough Potpourri 1: Wow! This man bought Manhattan with trinkets worth about 60 guilders, usually quoted as $24. (Peter) Minuit. 2: It's the specific word for a person between 90 and 100 years old. nonagenarian. 3: If you've read "The Flame Trees of Thika" (or if you saw the miniseries) you know that Thika is in this country. Kenya. 4: She was the first African-American author to win a Pulitzer Prize; she won in 1950 for her poetry. Gwendolyn Brooks. 5: This explorer was the governor of the Louisiana territory when he died mysteriously at a Tennessee inn in 1809. Meriwether Lewis. Thanks for listening! Come back tomorrow for more exciting trivia!

#60-56Intro/Outro: Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There is a Season) by The Byrds60. Reach Out, I'll Be There by The Four Tops *59. Will You Love Me Tomorrow? by The Shirelles58. Proud Mary by Creedence Clearwater Revival *57. Strawberry Fields Forever by The Beatles *56. Oh, Pretty Woman by Roy OrbisonVote on your favorite song from today's episodeVote on your favorite song from Week 1Vote on your favorite of "The Greatest Song of the 50's" finalists* - Previously played on the podcast

Hosts Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot revisit their classic album dissection of Carole King's "Tapestry" for its 50th anniversary. Join our Facebook Group: https://bit.ly/3sivr9TBecome a member on Patreon: https://bit.ly/3slWZvcSign up for our newsletter: https://bit.ly/3eEvRnGMake a donation via PayPal: https://bit.ly/3dmt9lURecord a Voice Memo: https://bit.ly/2RyD5Ah Featured Songs:Carole King, "It's Too Late," Tapestry, Ode, 1971The Shirelles, "Will You Love Me Tomorrow," Tonight's the Night, Scepter, 1960Little Eva, "The Loco-motion," The Loco-motion (Single), Dimension 1000, 1962Bobby Vee, "Take Good Care of My Baby," Take Good Care of My Baby, Liberty, 1961The Monkees, "Pleasant Valley Sunday," Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd., Colgems, 1967Carole King, "It Might As Well Rain Until September," It Might As Well Rain Until September (Single), Dimension, 1962The City, "Now That Everything's Been Said," Now That Everything's Been Said, Ode, 1968Carole King, "No Easy Way Down," Writer, Ode, 1970Carole King, "Beautiful," Tapestry, Ode, 1971Carole King, "I Feel the Earth Move," Tapestry, Ode, 1971Carole King, "You've Got a Friend," Tapestry, Ode, 1971Carole King, "Tapestry," Tapestry, Ode, 1971Carole King, "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman," Tapestry, Ode, 1971Carole King and Louise Goffin, "Where You Lead," Our Little Corner of the World Music From Gilmore Girls, Rhino, 2002Carole King, "Where You Lead," Tapestry, Ode, 1971Carole King, "So Far Away," Tapestry, Ode, 1971Carole King, "Will You Love Me Tomorrow," Tapestry, Ode, 1971Carole King, "Way Over Yonder," Tapestry, Ode, 1971Carole King, "Home Again," Tapestry, Ode, 1971Carole King, "Smackwater Jack," Tapestry, Ode, 1971James Taylor, "You've Got a Friend," Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon, Warner Bros., 1971Carole King and James Taylor, "You've Got a Friend," Live At The Troubadour, Syzygy, 2010Liz Phair, "Divorce Song (Girly-Sound Version)," The Girly-Sound Tapes, Matador, 2018Lauryn Hill, "Everything Is Everything," The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, Columbia, 1998Tori Amos, "Cornflake Girl," Under the Pink, Atlantic, 1994Rolling Stones, "Gimme Shelter," Let It Bleed, Decca, 1969

Features Blossom, So Far Away, Carolina In My Mind, It's To Late, Smackwater Jack, Will You Love Me Tomorrow, Country Road, Fire And Rain, Sweet Baby James, I Feel The Earth Move, You'veGot A Friend, and Up On A Roof.

BABY LET THE GAMES BEGIN — we're in the final stretch pre-Red re-release. This week, we're recapping what's been happening in the Taylorverse on the eve of us finally having our grubby little paws on the ten-minute version of All Too Well (From the Vault) (Taylor's Version). Theories swirling on Tik Tok & @deuxmoi, secret projects filmed in Taylor's New York apartment, Taylor's introduction for Carole King, and our most anticipated songs from Red — let's get into it. We'll be in person together for the re-record next week, so stay tuned for a boatload of content to match the boatload of songs coming soon. Sidebars this week: John Mayer has a laundry detergent line now, Succession, squirrel gestation, the lost Palm Tree era, Taylor's cheugy social media presence, and Cora Coleman from Music & Lyrics (iconic film). As mentioned, here is Taylor's speech and her cover of “Will You Love Me Tomorrow."

Episode one hundred and thirty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “The Sound of Silence" by Simon and Garfunkel, and the many records they made, together and apart, before their success. 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 "Blues Run the Game" by Jackson C. Frank. 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/ Errata I talk about a tour of Lancashire towns, but some of the towns I mention were in Cheshire at the time, and some are in Greater Manchester or Merseyside now. They're all very close together though. I say Mose Rager was Black. I was misremembering, confusing Mose Rager, a white player in the Muhlenberg style, with Arnold Schultz, a Black player who invented it. I got this right in the episode on "Bye Bye Love". Also, I couldn't track down a copy of the Paul Kane single version of “He Was My Brother” in decent quality, so I used the version on The Paul Simon Songbook instead, as they're basically identical performances. Resources As usual, I've created a Mixcloud playlist of the music excerpted here. This compilation collects all Simon and Garfunkel's studio albums, with bonus tracks, plus a DVD of their reunion concert. There are many collections of the pre-S&G recordings by the two, as these are now largely in the public domain. This one contains a good selection. I've referred to several books for this episode: Simon and Garfunkel: Together Alone by Spencer Leigh is a breezy, well-researched, biography of the duo. Paul Simon: The Life by Robert Hilburn is the closest thing there is to an authorised biography of Simon. And What is it All But Luminous? is Art Garfunkel's memoir. It's not particularly detailed, being more a collection of thoughts and poetry than a structured narrative, but gives a good idea of Garfunkel's attitude to people and events in his life. Roots, Radicals, and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World by Billy Bragg has some great information on the British folk scene of the fifties and sixties. And Singing From the Floor is an oral history of British folk clubs, including a chapter on Dylan's 1962 visit to London. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today, we're going to take a look at a hit record that almost never happened -- a record by a duo who had already split up, twice, by the time it became a hit, and who didn't know it was going to come out. We're going to look at how a duo who started off as an Everly Brothers knockoff, before becoming unsuccessful Greenwich Village folkies, were turned into one of the biggest acts of the sixties by their producer. We're going to look at Simon and Garfunkel, and at "The Sound of Silence": [Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, "The Sound of Silence"] The story of Simon and Garfunkel starts with two children in a school play.  Neither Paul Simon or Art Garfunkel had many friends when they met in a school performance of Alice in Wonderland, where Simon was playing the White Rabbit and Garfunkel the Cheshire Cat. Simon was well-enough liked, by all accounts, but he'd been put on an accelerated programme for gifted students which meant he was progressing through school faster than his peers. He had a small social group, mostly based around playing baseball, but wasn't one of the popular kids. Art Garfunkel, another gifted student, had no friends at all until he got to know Simon, who he described later as his "one and only friend" in this time period. One passage in Garfunkel's autobiography seems to me to sum up everything about Garfunkel's personality as a child -- and indeed a large part of his personality as it comes across in interviews to this day. He talks about the pleasure he got from listening to the chart rundown on the radio -- "It was the numbers that got me. I kept meticulous lists—when a new singer like Tony Bennett came onto the charts with “Rags to Riches,” I watched the record jump from, say, #23 to #14 in a week. The mathematics of the jumps went to my sense of fun." Garfunkel is, to this day, a meticulous person -- on his website he has a list of every book he's read since June 1968, which is currently up to one thousand three hundred and ten books, and he has always had a habit of starting elaborate projects and ticking off every aspect of them as he goes. Both Simon and Garfunkel were outsiders at this point, other than their interests in sport, but Garfunkel was by far the more introverted of the two, and as a result he seems to have needed their friendship more than Simon did. But the two boys developed an intense, close, friendship, initially based around their shared sense of humour. Both of them were avid readers of Mad magazine, which had just started publishing when the two of them had met up, and both could make each other laugh easily. But they soon developed a new interest, when Martin Block on the middle-of-the-road radio show Make Believe Ballroom announced that he was going to play the worst record he'd ever heard. That record was "Gee" by the Crows: [Excerpt: The Crows, "Gee"] Paul Simon later said that that record was the first thing he'd ever heard on that programme that he liked, and soon he and Garfunkel had become regular listeners to Alan Freed's show on WINS, loving the new rock and roll music they were discovering. Art had already been singing in public from an early age -- his first public performance had been singing Nat "King" Cole's hit "Too Young" in a school talent contest when he was nine -- but the two started singing together. The first performance by Simon and Garfunkel was at a high school dance and, depending on which source you read, was a performance either of "Sh'Boom" or of Big Joe Turner's "Flip, Flop, and Fly": [Excerpt: Big Joe Turner, "Flip, Flop, and Fly"] The duo also wrote at least one song together as early as 1955 -- or at least Garfunkel says they wrote it together. Paul Simon describes it as one he wrote. They tried to get a record deal with the song, but it was never recorded at the time -- but Simon has later performed it: [Excerpt: Paul Simon, "The Girl For Me"] Even at this point, though, while Art Garfunkel was putting all his emotional energy into the partnership with Simon, Simon was interested in performing with other people. Al Kooper was another friend of Simon's at the time, and apparently Simon and Kooper would also perform together. Once Elvis came on to Paul's radar, he also bought a guitar, but it was when the two of them first heard the Everly Brothers that they realised what it was that they could do together. Simon fell in love with the Everly Brothers as soon as he heard "Bye Bye Love": [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Bye Bye Love"] Up to this point, Paul hadn't bought many records -- he spent his money on baseball cards and comic books, and records just weren't good value. A pack of baseball cards was five cents, a comic book was ten cents, but a record was a dollar. Why buy records when you could hear music on the radio for free? But he needed that record, he couldn't just wait around to hear it on the radio. He made an hour-long two-bus journey to a record shop in Queens, bought the record, took it home, played it... and almost immediately scratched it. So he got back on the bus, travelled for another hour, bought another copy, took it home, and made sure he didn't scratch that one. Simon and Garfunkel started copying the Everlys' harmonies, and would spend hours together, singing close together watching each other's mouths and copying the way they formed words, eventually managing to achieve a vocal blend through sheer effort which would normally only come from familial closeness. Paul became so obsessed with music that he sold his baseball card collection and bought a tape recorder for two hundred dollars. They would record themselves singing, and then sing back along with it, multitracking themselves, but also critiquing the tape, refining their performances. Paul's father was a bass player -- "the family bassman", as he would later sing -- and encouraged his son in his music, even as he couldn't see the appeal in this new rock and roll music. He would critique Paul's songs, saying things like "you went from four-four to a bar of nine-eight, you can't do that" -- to which his son would say "I just did" -- but this wasn't hostile criticism, rather it was giving his son a basic grounding in song construction which would prove invaluable. But the duo's first notable original song -- and first hit -- came about more or less by accident. In early 1956, the doo-wop group the Clovers had released the hit single "Devil or Angel". Its B-side had a version of "Hey Doll Baby", a song written by the blues singer Titus Turner, and which sounds to me very inspired by Hank Williams' "Hey, Good Lookin'": [Excerpt: The Clovers, "Hey, Doll Baby"] That song was picked up by the Everly Brothers, who recorded it for their first album: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Hey Doll Baby"] Here is where the timeline gets a little confused for me, because that album wasn't released until early 1958, although the recording session for that track was in August 1957. Yet that track definitely influenced Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel to record a song that they released in November 1957. All I can imagine is that they heard the brothers perform it live, or maybe a radio station had an acetate copy. Because the way everyone has consistently told the story is that at the end of summer 1957, Simon and Garfunkel had both heard the Everly Brothers perform "Hey Doll Baby", but couldn't remember how it went. The two of them tried to remember it, and to work a version of it out together, and their hazy memories combined to reconstruct something that was completely different, and which owed at least as much to "Wake Up Little Suzie" as to "Hey Doll Baby". Their new song, "Hey Schoolgirl", was catchy enough that they thought if they recorded a demo of it, maybe the Everly Brothers themselves would record the song. At the demo studio they happened to encounter Sid Prosen, who owned a small record label named Big Records. He heard the duo perform and realised he might have his own Everly Brothers here. He signed the duo to a contract, and they went into a professional studio to rerecord "Hey Schoolgirl", this time with Paul's father on bass, and a couple of other musicians to fill out the sound: [Excerpt: Tom and Jerry, "Hey Schoolgirl"] Of course, the record couldn't be released under their real names -- there was no way anyone was going to buy a record by Simon and Garfunkel. So instead they became Tom and Jerry. Paul Simon was Jerry Landis -- a surname he chose because he had a crush on a girl named Sue Landis. Art became Tom Graff, because he liked drawing graphs. "Hey Schoolgirl" became a local hit. The two were thrilled to hear it played on Alan Freed's show (after Sid Prosen gave Freed two hundred dollars), and were even more thrilled when they got to perform on American Bandstand, on the same show as Jerry Lee Lewis. When Dick Clark asked them where they were from, Simon decided to claim he was from Macon, Georgia, where Little Richard came from, because all his favourite rock and roll singers were from the South. "Hey Schoolgirl" only made number forty-nine nationally, because the label didn't have good national distribution, but it sold over a hundred thousand copies, mostly in the New York area. And Sid Prosen seems to have been one of a very small number of independent label owners who wasn't a crook -- the two boys got about two thousand dollars each from their hit record. But while Tom and Jerry seemed like they might have a successful career, Simon and Garfunkel were soon to split up, and the reason for their split was named True Taylor. Paul had been playing some of his songs for Sid Prosen, to see what the duo's next single should be, and Prosen had noticed that while some of them were Everly Brothers soundalikes, others were Elvis soundalikes. Would Paul be interested in recording some of those, too? Obviously Art couldn't sing on those, so they'd use a different name, True Taylor. The single was released around the same time as the second Tom and Jerry record, and featured an Elvis-style ballad by Paul on one side, and a rockabilly song written by his father on the other: [Excerpt: True Taylor, "True or False"] But Paul hadn't discussed that record with Art before doing it, and the two had vastly different ideas about their relationship. Paul was Art's only friend, and Art thought they had an indissoluble bond and that they would always work together. Paul, on the other hand, thought of Art as one of his friends and someone he made music with, but he could play at being Elvis if he wanted, as well as playing at being an Everly brother. Garfunkel, in his memoir published in 2017, says "the friendship was shattered for life" -- he decided then and there that Paul Simon was a "base" person, a betrayer. But on the other hand, he still refers to Simon, over and over again, in that book as still being his friend, even as Simon has largely been disdainful of him since their last performance together in 2010. Friendships are complicated. Tom and Jerry struggled on for a couple more singles, which weren't as successful as "Hey Schoolgirl" had been, with material like "Two Teenagers", written by Rose Marie McCoy: [Excerpt: Tom and Jerry, "Two Teenagers"] But as they'd stopped being friends, and they weren't selling records, they drifted apart and didn't really speak for five years, though they would occasionally run into one another. They both went off to university, and Garfunkel basically gave up on the idea of having a career in music, though he did record a couple of singles, under the name "Artie Garr": [Excerpt: Artie Garr, "Beat Love"] But for the most part, Garfunkel concentrated on his studies, planning to become either an architect or maybe an academic. Paul Simon, on the other hand, while he was technically studying at university too, was only paying minimal attention to his studies. Instead, he was learning the music business. Every afternoon, after university had finished, he'd go around the Brill Building and its neighbouring buildings, offering his services both as a songwriter and as a demo performer. As Simon was competent on guitar, bass, and drums, could sing harmonies, and could play a bit of piano if it was in the key of C, he could use primitive multitracking to play and sing all the parts on a demo, and do it well: [Excerpt: Paul Simon, "Boys Were Made For Girls"] That's an excerpt from a demo Simon recorded for Burt Bacharach, who has said that he tried to get Simon to record as many of his demos as possible, though only a couple of them have surfaced publicly. Simon would also sometimes record demos with his friend Carole Klein, sometimes under the name The Cosines: [Excerpt: The Cosines, "Just to Be With You"] As we heard back in the episode on "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?", Carole Klein went on to change her name to Carole King, and become one of the most successful songwriters of the era -- something which spurred Paul Simon on, as he wanted to emulate her success. Simon tried to get signed up by Don Kirshner, who was publishing Goffin and King, but Kirshner turned Simon down -- an expensive mistake for Kirshner, but one that would end up benefiting Simon, who eventually figured out that he should own his own publishing. Simon was also getting occasional work as a session player, and played lead guitar on "The Shape I'm In" by Johnny Restivo, which made the lower reaches of the Hot One Hundred: [Excerpt: Johnny Restivo, "The Shape I'm In"] Between 1959 and 1963 Simon recorded a whole string of unsuccessful pop singles. including as a member of the Mystics: [Excerpt: The Mystics, "All Through the Night"] He even had a couple of very minor chart hits -- he got to number 99 as Tico and the Triumphs: [Excerpt: Tico and the Triumphs, "Motorcycle"] and number ninety-seven as Jerry Landis: [Excerpt: Jerry Landis, "The Lone Teen Ranger"] But he was jumping around, hopping onto every fad as it passed, and not getting anywhere. And then he started to believe that he could do something more interesting in music. He first became aware that the boundaries of what could be done in music extended further than "ooh-bop-a-loochy-ba" when he took a class on modern music at university, which included a trip to Carnegie Hall to hear a performance of music by the avant-garde composer Edgard Varese: [Excerpt: Edgard Varese, "Ionisation"] Simon got to meet Varese after the performance, and while he would take his own music in a very different, and much more commercial, direction than Varese's, he was nonetheless influenced by what Varese's music showed about the possibilities that existed in music. The other big influence on Simon at this time was when he heard The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Girl From the North Country"] Simon immediately decided to reinvent himself as a folkie, despite at this point knowing very little about folk music other than the Everly Brothers' Songs Our Daddy Taught Us album. He tried playing around Greenwich Village, but found it an uncongenial atmosphere, and inspired by the liner notes to the Dylan album, which talked about Dylan's time in England, he made what would be the first of several trips to the UK, where he was given a rapturous reception simply on the grounds of being an American and owning a better acoustic guitar -- a Martin -- than most British people owned. He had the showmanship that he'd learned from watching his father on stage and sometimes playing with him, and from his time in Tom and Jerry and working round the studios, and so he was able to impress the British folk-club audiences, who were used to rather earnest, scholarly, people, not to someone like Simon who was clearly ambitious and very showbiz. His repertoire at this point consisted mostly of songs from the first two Dylan albums, a Joan Baez record, Little Willie John's "Fever", and one song he'd written himself, an attempt at a protest song called "He Was My Brother", which he would release on his return to the US under yet another stage name, Paul Kane: [Excerpt: Paul Kane, "He Was My Brother"] Simon has always stated that that song was written about a friend of his who was murdered when he went down to Mississippi with the Freedom Riders -- but while Simon's friend was indeed murdered, it wasn't until about a year after he wrote the song, and Simon has confused the timelines in his subsequent recollections. At the time he recorded that, when he had returned to New York at the end of the summer, Simon had a job as a song plugger for a publishing company, and he gave the publishing company the rights to that song and its B-side, which led to that B-side getting promoted by the publisher, and ending up covered on one of the biggest British albums of 1964, which went to number two in the UK charts: [Excerpt: Val Doonican, "Carlos Dominguez"] Oddly, that may not end up being the only time we feature a Val Doonican track on this podcast. Simon continued his attempts to be a folkie, even teaming up again with Art Garfunkel, with whom he'd re-established contact, to perform in Greenwich Village as Kane and Garr, but they went down no better as a duo than Simon had as a solo artist. Simon went back to the UK again over Christmas 1963, and while he was there he continued work on a song that would become such a touchstone for him that of the first six albums he would be involved in, four would feature the song while a fifth would include a snippet of it. "The Sound of Silence" was apparently started in November 1963, but not finished until February 1964, by which time he was once again back in the USA, and back working as a song plugger. It was while working as a song plugger that Simon first met Tom Wilson, Bob Dylan's producer at Columbia. Simon met up with Wilson trying to persuade him to use some of the songs that the publishing company were putting out. When Wilson wasn't interested, Simon played him a couple of his own songs. Wilson took one of them, "He Was My Brother", for the Pilgrims, a group he was producing who were supposed to be the Black answer to Peter, Paul, and Mary: [Excerpt: The Pilgrims, "He Was My Brother"] Wilson was also interested in "The Sound of Silence", but Simon was more interested in getting signed as a performer than in having other acts perform his songs. Wilson was cautious, though -- he was already producing one folkie singer-songwriter, and he didn't really need a second one. But he *could* probably do with a vocal group... Simon mentioned that he had actually made a couple of records before, as part of a duo. Would Wilson be at all interested in a vocal *duo*? Wilson would be interested. Simon and Garfunkel auditioned for him, and a few days later were in the Columbia Records studio on Seventh Avenue recording their first album as a duo, which was also the first time either of them would record under their own name. Wednesday Morning, 3AM, the duo's first album, was a simple acoustic album, and the only instrumentation was Simon and Barry Kornfeld, a Greenwich Village folkie, on guitars, and Bill Lee, the double bass player who'd played with Dylan and others, on bass. Tom Wilson guided the duo in their song selection, and the eventual album contained six cover versions and six originals written by Simon. The cover versions were a mixture of hootenanny staples like "Go Tell it on the Mountain", plus Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin'", included to cross-promote Dylan's new album and to try to link the duo with the more famous writer, and one unusual one, "The Sun is Burning", written by Ian Campbell, a Scottish folk singer who Simon had got to know on his trips to the UK: [Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, "The Sun is Burning"] But the song that everyone was keenest on was "The Sound of Silence", the first song that Simon had written that he thought would stand up in comparison with the sort of song that Dylan was writing: [Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, "The Sound of Silence (Wednesday Morning 3AM version)"] In between sessions for the album, Simon and Garfunkel also played a high-profile gig at Gerde's Folk City in the Village, and a couple of shows at the Gaslight Cafe. The audiences there, though, regarded them as a complete joke -- Dave Van Ronk would later relate that for weeks afterwards, all anyone had to do was sing "Hello darkness, my old friend", for everyone around to break into laughter. Bob Dylan was one of those who laughed at the performance -- though Robert Shelton later said that Dylan hadn't been laughing at them, specifically, he'd just had a fit of the giggles -- and this had led to a certain amount of anger from Simon towards Dylan. The album was recorded in March 1964, and was scheduled for release  in October. In the meantime, they both made plans to continue with their studies and their travels. Garfunkel was starting to do postgraduate work towards his doctorate in mathematics, while Simon was now enrolled in Brooklyn Law School, but was still spending most of his time travelling, and would drop out after one semester. He would spend much of the next eighteen months in the UK. While he was occasionally in the US between June 1964 and November 1965, Simon now considered himself based in England, where he made several acquaintances that would affect his life deeply. Among them were a young woman called Kathy Chitty, with whom he would fall in love and who would inspire many of his songs, and an older woman called Judith Piepe (and I apologise if I'm mispronouncing her name, which I've only ever seen written down, never heard) who many people believed had an unrequited crush on Simon. Piepe ran her London flat as something of a commune for folk musicians, and Simon lived there for months at a time while in the UK. Among the other musicians who stayed there for a time were Sandy Denny, Cat Stevens, and Al Stewart, whose bedroom was next door to Simon's. Piepe became Simon's de facto unpaid manager and publicist, and started promoting him around the British folk scene. Simon also at this point became particularly interested in improving his guitar playing. He was spending a lot of time at Les Cousins, the London club that had become the centre of British acoustic guitar. There are, roughly, three styles of acoustic folk guitar -- to be clear, I'm talking about very broad-brush categorisations here, and there are people who would disagree and say there are more, but these are the main ones. Two of these are American styles -- there's the simple style known as Carter scratching, popularised by Mother Maybelle Carter of the Carter family, and for this all you do is alternate bass notes with your thumb while scratching the chord on the treble strings with one finger, like this: [Excerpt: Carter picking] That's the style played by a lot of country and folk players who were primarily singers accompanying themselves. In the late forties and fifties, though, another style had become popularised -- Travis picking. This is named after Merle Travis, the most well-known player in the style, but he always called it Muhlenberg picking, after Muhlenberg County, where he'd learned the style from Ike Everly -- the Everly Brothers' father -- and Mose Rager, a Black guitarist. In Travis picking, the thumb alternates between two bass notes, but rather than strumming a chord, the index and middle fingers play simple patterns on the treble strings, like this: [Excerpt: Travis picking] That's, again, a style primarily used for accompaniment, but it can also be used to play instrumentals by oneself. As well as Travis and Ike Everly, it's also the style played by Donovan, Chet Atkins, James Taylor, and more. But there's a third style, British baroque folk guitar, which was largely the invention of Davey Graham. Graham, you might remember, was a folk guitarist who had lived in the same squat as Lionel Bart when Bart started working with Tommy Steele, and who had formed a blues duo with Alexis Korner. Graham is now best known for one of his simpler pieces, “Anji”, which became the song that every British guitarist tried to learn: [Excerpt: Davey Graham, "Anji"] Dozens of people, including Paul Simon, would record versions of that. Graham invented an entirely new style of guitar playing, influenced by ragtime players like Blind Blake, but also by Bach, by Moroccan oud music, and by Celtic bagpipe music. While it was fairly common for players to retune their guitar to an open major chord, allowing them to play slide guitar, Graham retuned his to a suspended fourth chord -- D-A-D-G-A-D -- which allowed him to keep a drone going on some strings while playing complex modal counterpoints on others. While I demonstrated the previous two styles myself, I'm nowhere near a good enough guitarist to demonstrate British folk baroque, so here's an excerpt of Davey Graham playing his own arrangement of the traditional ballad "She Moved Through the Fair", recast as a raga and retitled "She Moved Thru' the Bizarre": [Excerpt: Davey Graham, "She Moved Thru' the Bizarre"] Graham's style was hugely influential on an entire generation of British guitarists, people who incorporated world music and jazz influences into folk and blues styles, and that generation of guitarists was coming up at the time and playing at Les Cousins. People who started playing in this style included Jimmy Page, Bert Jansch, Roy Harper, John Renbourn, Richard Thompson, Nick Drake, and John Martyn, and it also had a substantial influence on North American players like Joni Mitchell, Tim Buckley, and of course Paul Simon. Simon was especially influenced at this time by Martin Carthy, the young British guitarist whose style was very influenced by Graham -- but while Graham applied his style to music ranging from Dave Brubeck to Lutheran hymns to Big Bill Broonzy songs, Carthy mostly concentrated on traditional English folk songs. Carthy had a habit of taking American folk singers under his wing, and he taught Simon several songs, including Carthy's own arrangement of the traditional "Scarborough Fair": [Excerpt: Martin Carthy, "Scarborough Fair"] Simon would later record that arrangement, without crediting Carthy, and this would lead to several decades of bad blood between them, though Carthy forgave him in the 1990s, and the two performed the song together at least once after that. Indeed, Simon seems to have made a distinctly negative impression on quite a few of the musicians he knew in Britain at this time, who seem to, at least in retrospect, regard him as having rather used and discarded them as soon as his career became successful. Roy Harper has talked in liner notes to CD reissues of his work from this period about how Simon used to regularly be a guest in his home, and how he has memories of Simon playing with Harper's baby son Nick (now himself one of the greats of British guitar) but how as soon as he became successful he never spoke to Harper again. Similarly, in 1965 Simon started a writing partnership with Bruce Woodley of the Seekers, an Australian folk-pop band based in the UK, best known for "Georgy Girl". The two wrote "Red Rubber Ball", which became a hit for the Cyrkle: [Excerpt: The Cyrke, "Red Rubber Ball"] and also "Cloudy", which the Seekers recorded as an album track: [Excerpt: The Seekers, "Cloudy"] When that was recorded by Simon and Garfunkel, Woodley's name was removed from the writing credits, though Woodley still apparently received royalties for it. But at this point there *was* no Simon and Garfunkel. Paul Simon was a solo artist working the folk clubs in Britain, and Simon and Garfunkel's one album had sold a minuscule number of copies. They did, when Simon briefly returned to the US in March, record two tracks for a prospective single, this time with an electric backing band. One was a rewrite of the title track of their first album, now titled "Somewhere They Can't Find Me" and with a new chorus and some guitar parts nicked from Davey Graham's "Anji"; the other a Twist-beat song that could almost be Manfred Mann or Georgie Fame -- "We Got a Groovy Thing Goin'". That was also influenced by “Anji”, though by Bert Jansch's version rather than Graham's original. Jansch rearranged the song and stuck in this phrase: [Excerpt: Bert Jansch, “Anji”] Which became the chorus to “We Got a Groovy Thing Goin'”: [Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, "We Got a Groovy Thing Goin'"] But that single was never released, and as far as Columbia were concerned, Simon and Garfunkel were a defunct act, especially as Tom Wilson, who had signed them, was looking to move away from Columbia. Art Garfunkel did come to visit Simon in the UK a couple of times, and they'd even sing together occasionally, but it was on the basis of Paul Simon the successful club act occasionally inviting his friend on stage during the encore, rather than as a duo, and Garfunkel was still seeing music only as a sideline while Simon was now utterly committed to it. He was encouraged in this commitment by Judith Piepe, who considered him to be the greatest songwriter of his generation, and who started a letter-writing campaign to that effect, telling the BBC they needed to put him on the radio. Eventually, after a lot of pressure, they agreed -- though they weren't exactly sure what to do with him, as he didn't fit into any of the pop formats they had. He was given his own radio show -- a five-minute show in a religious programming slot. Simon would perform a song, and there would be an introduction tying the song into some religious theme or other. Two series of four episodes of this were broadcast, in a plum slot right after Housewives' Choice, which got twenty million listeners, and the BBC were amazed to find that a lot of people phoned in asking where they could get hold of the records by this Paul Simon fellow. Obviously he didn't have any out yet, and even the Simon and Garfunkel album, which had been released in the US, hadn't come out in Britain. After a little bit of negotiation, CBS, the British arm of Columbia Records, had Simon come in and record an album of his songs, titled The Paul Simon Songbook. The album, unlike the Simon and Garfunkel album, was made up entirely of Paul Simon originals. Two of them were songs that had previously been recorded for Wednesday Morning 3AM -- "He Was My Brother" and a new version of "The Sound of Silence": [Excerpt: Paul Simon, "The Sound of Silence"] The other ten songs were newly-written pieces like "April Come She Will", "Kathy's Song", a parody of Bob Dylan entitled "A Simple Desultory Philippic", and the song that was chosen as the single, "I am a Rock": [Excerpt: Paul Simon, "I am a Rock"] That song was also the one that was chosen for Simon's first TV appearance since Tom and Jerry had appeared on Bandstand eight years earlier. The appearance on Ready, Steady, Go, though, was not one that anyone was happy with. Simon had been booked to appear on  a small folk music series, Heartsong, but that series was cancelled before he could appear. Rediffusion, the company that made the series, also made Ready, Steady, Go, and since they'd already paid Simon they decided they might as well stick him on that show and get something for their money. Unfortunately, the episode in question was already running long, and it wasn't really suited for introspective singer-songwriter performances -- the show was geared to guitar bands and American soul singers. Michael Lindsay-Hogg, the director, insisted that if Simon was going to do his song, he had to cut at least one verse, while Simon was insistent that he needed to perform the whole thing because "it's a story". Lindsay-Hogg got his way, but nobody was happy with the performance. Simon's album was surprisingly unsuccessful, given the number of people who'd called the BBC asking about it -- the joke went round that the calls had all been Judith Piepe doing different voices -- and Simon continued his round of folk clubs, pubs, and birthday parties, sometimes performing with Garfunkel, when he visited for the summer, but mostly performing on his own. One time he did perform with a full band, singing “Johnny B Goode” at a birthday party, backed by a band called Joker's Wild who a couple of weeks later went into the studio to record their only privately-pressed five-song record, of them performing recent hits: [Excerpt: Joker's Wild, "Walk Like a Man"] The guitarist from Joker's Wild would later join the other band who'd played at that party, but the story of David Gilmour joining Pink Floyd is for another episode. During this time, Simon also produced his first record for someone else, when he was responsible for producing the only album by his friend Jackson C Frank, though there wasn't much production involved as like Simon's own album it was just one man and his guitar. Al Stewart and Art Garfunkel were also in the control room for the recording, but the notoriously shy Frank insisted on hiding behind a screen so they couldn't see him while he recorded: [Excerpt: Jackson C Frank, "Blues Run the Game"] It seemed like Paul Simon was on his way to becoming a respected mid-level figure on the British folk scene, releasing occasional albums and maybe having one or two minor hits, but making a steady living. Someone who would be spoken of in the same breath as Ralph McTell perhaps. Meanwhile, Art Garfunkel would be going on to be a lecturer in mathematics whose students might be surprised to know he'd had a minor rock and roll hit as a kid. But then something happened that changed everything. Wednesday Morning 3AM hadn't sold at all, and Columbia hadn't promoted it in the slightest. It was too collegiate and polite for the Greenwich Village folkies, and too intellectual for the pop audience that had been buying Peter, Paul, and Mary, and it had come out just at the point that the folk boom had imploded. But one DJ in Boston, Dick Summer, had started playing one song from it, "The Sound of Silence", and it had caught on with the college students, who loved the song. And then came spring break 1965. All those students went on holiday, and suddenly DJs in places like Cocoa Beach, Florida, were getting phone calls requesting "The Sound of Silence" by Simon and Garfunkel. Some of them with contacts at Columbia got in touch with the label, and Tom Wilson had an idea. On the first day of what turned out to be his last session with Dylan, the session for "Like a Rolling Stone", Wilson asked the musicians to stay behind and work on something. He'd already experimented with overdubbing new instruments on an acoustic recording with his new version of Dylan's "House of the Rising Sun", now he was going to try it with "The Sound of Silence". He didn't bother asking the duo what they thought -- record labels messed with people's records all the time. So "The Sound of Silence" was released as an electric folk-rock single: [Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, "The Sound of Silence"] This is always presented as Wilson massively changing the sound of the duo without their permission or knowledge, but the fact is that they had *already* gone folk-rock, back in March, so they were already thinking that way. The track was released as a single with “We Got a Groovy Thing Going” on the B-side, and was promoted first in the Boston market, and it did very well. Roy Harper later talked about Simon's attitude at this time, saying "I can remember going into the gents in The Three Horseshoes in Hempstead during a gig, and we're having a pee together. He was very excited, and he turns round to me and and says, “Guess what, man? We're number sixteen in Boston with The Sound of Silence'”. A few days later I was doing another gig with him and he made a beeline for me. “Guess what?” I said “You're No. 15 in Boston”. He said, “No man, we're No. 1 in Boston”. I thought, “Wow. No. 1 in Boston, eh?” It was almost a joke, because I really had no idea what that sort of stuff meant at all." Simon was even more excited when the record started creeping up the national charts, though he was less enthused when his copy of the single arrived from America. He listened to it, and thought the arrangement was a Byrds rip-off, and cringed at the way the rhythm section had to slow down and speed up in order to stay in time with the acoustic recording: [Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, "The Sound of Silence"] I have to say that, while the tempo fluctuations are noticeable once you know to look for them, it's a remarkably tight performance given the circumstances. As the record went up the charts, Simon was called back to America, to record an album to go along with it. The Paul Simon Songbook hadn't been released in the US,  and they needed an album *now*, and Simon was a slow songwriter, so the duo took six songs from that album and rerecorded them in folk-rock versions with their new producer Bob Johnston, who was also working with Dylan now, since Tom Wilson had moved on to Verve records. They filled out the album with "The Sound of Silence", the two electric tracks from March, one new song, "Blessed", and a version of "Anji", which came straight after "Somewhere They Can't Find Me", presumably to acknowledge Simon lifting bits of it. That version of “Anji” also followed Jansch's arrangement, and so included the bit that Simon had taken for “We Got a Groovy Thing Going” as well. They also recorded their next single, which was released on the British version of the album but not the American one, a song that Simon had written during a thoroughly depressing tour of Lancashire towns (he wrote it in Widnes, but a friend of Simon's who lived in Widnes later said that while it was written in Widnes it was written *about* Birkenhead. Simon has also sometimes said it was about Warrington or Wigan, both of which are so close to Widnes and so similar in both name and atmosphere that it would be the easiest thing in the world to mix them up.) [Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, "Homeward Bound"] These tracks were all recorded in December 1965, and they featured the Wrecking Crew -- Bob Johnston wanted the best, and didn't rate the New York players that Wilson had used, and so they were recorded in LA with Glen Campbell, Joe South, Hal Blaine, Larry Knechtel, and Joe Osborne. I've also seen in some sources that there were sessions in Nashville with A-team players Fred Carter and Charlie McCoy. By January, "The Sound of Silence" had reached number one, knocking "We Can Work it Out" by the Beatles off the top spot for two weeks, before the Beatles record went back to the top. They'd achieved what they'd been trying for for nearly a decade, and I'll give the last word here to Paul Simon, who said of the achievement: "I had come back to New York, and I was staying in my old room at my parents' house. Artie was living at his parents' house, too. I remember Artie and I were sitting there in my car one night, parked on a street in Queens, and the announcer said, "Number one, Simon & Garfunkel." And Artie said to me, "That Simon & Garfunkel, they must be having a great time.""

In 1971, Carole King released her masterpiece, Tapestry. 50 years later, the music feels more brilliant, moving and comforting than ever. Hosts Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot do a classic album dissection of Tapestry and talk to lyricist Toni Stern, guitarist Danny Kortchmar and drummer Russ Kunkel about their involvement on the legendary record. Become a member on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/soundopinionsMake a donation via PayPal: https://bit.ly/36zIhZK Record a Voice Memo: https://www.micdropp.com/studio/5febf006eba45/ Featured Songs:Carole King, "It's Too Late," Tapestry, Ode, 1971The Shirelles, "Will You Love Me Tomorrow," Tonight's the Night, Scepter, 1960 Little Eva, "The Loco-motion," The Loco-motion (Single), Dimension 1000, 1962Bobby Vee, "Take Good Care of My Baby," Take Good Care of My Baby, Liberty, 1961The Monkees, "Pleasant Valley Sunday," Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd., Colgems, 1967Carole King, "It Might As Well Rain Until September," It Might As Well Rain Until September (Single), Dimension, 1962The City, "Now That Everything's Been Said," Now That Everything's Been Said, Ode, 1968Carole King, "No Easy Way Down," Writer, Ode, 1970Carole King, "Beautiful," Tapestry, Ode, 1971Carole King, "I Feel the Earth Move," Tapestry, Ode, 1971Carole King, "You've Got a Friend," Tapestry, Ode, 1971Carole King, "Tapestry," Tapestry, Ode, 1971Carole King, "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman," Tapestry, Ode, 1971Carole King and Louise Goffin, "Where You Lead," Our Little Corner of the World Music From Gilmore Girls, Rhino, 2002Carole King, "Where You Lead," Tapestry, Ode, 1971Carole King, "So Far Away," Tapestry, Ode, 1971Carole King, "Will You Love Me Tomorrow," Tapestry, Ode, 1971Carole King, "Way Over Yonder," Tapestry, Ode, 1971Carole King, "Home Again," Tapestry, Ode, 1971Carole King, "Smackwater Jack," Tapestry, Ode, 1971James Taylor, "You've Got a Friend," Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon, Warner Bros., 1971Carole King and James Taylor, "You've Got a Friend," Live At The Troubadour, Syzygy, 2010Liz Phair, "Divorce Song (Girly-Sound Version)," The Girly-Sound Tapes, Matador, 2018Lauryn Hill, "Everything Is Everything," The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, Columbia, 1998Tori Amos, "Cornflake Girl," Under the Pink, Atlantic, 1994Caroline Rose, "Do You Think We'll Last Forever," Superstar, New West, 2020

Karen Fraser and Tich McLean read extracts from Danny Gillan's novel- Will You Love Me Tomorrow? Includes origial songs by Danny Gillan. Engineered and produced by Glen Dickson A very funny and well observed story about what can happen when a dream comes true, but later than you hoped. I loved the characters in this book - reading their banter feels like eavesdropping on a group of friends in a pub. The story is engaging and makes you think about the issues the characters are faced with.

Episode ninety-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "The Loco-Motion" by Little Eva, and how a demo by Carole King's babysitter became one of the biggest hits of the sixties. 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 "Duke of Earl" by Gene Chandler. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. There are no biographies of Little Eva, so I've used a variety of sources, including the articles on Little Eva and The Cookies at This Is My Story. The following books were also of some use: A Natural Woman is Carole King's autobiography. Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era by Ken Emerson is a good overview of the whole scene. Girl Groups by John Clemente contains potted biographies of many groups of the era, including articles on both Little Eva and The Cookies. There are no decent CDs of Eva's material readily available, but I can recommend two overlapping compilations. This compilation contains Little Eva's only sixties album in full, along with some tracks by Carole King, the Cookies, and the Ronettes, while Dimension Dolls is a compilation from 1963 that overlaps substantially with that album but contains several tracks not on it.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A quick note before this begins -- there is some mention of domestic violence in this episode. If that's something that might upset you, please check the transcript of the episode at 500songs.com if reading it might be easier than listening. A couple of months back, we talked about Goffin and King, and the early days of the Brill Building sound. Today we're going to take another look at them, and at a singer who recorded some of their best material, both solo and in a group, but who would always be overshadowed by the first single they wrote for her, when she was still working as their childminder. Today, we're going to look at Little Eva and "The Loco-Motion", and the short history of Dimension Records: [Excerpt: Little Eva, "The Loco-Motion"] The story of Little Eva is intertwined with the story of the Cookies, one of the earliest of the girl groups, and so we should probably start with them. We've mentioned the Cookies earlier, in the episode on "What'd I Say", but we didn't look at them in any great detail. The group started out in the mid-fifties, as a group of schoolgirls singing together in New York -- Dorothy Jones, her cousin Beulah Robertson, and a friend, Darlene McRae, who had all been in the choir at their local Baptist Church. They formed a group and made their first appearance at the famous Harlem Apollo talent contests, where they came third, to Joe Tex and a vocal group called the Flairs (not, I think, any of the Flairs groups we've looked at). They were seen at that contest by Jesse Stone, who gave them the name "The Cookies". He signed them to Aladdin Records, and produced and co-wrote their first single, "All-Night Mambo". That wasn't commercially successful, but Stone liked them enough that he then got them signed to Atlantic, where he again wrote their first single for the label. That first single was relatively unsuccessful, but their second single on Atlantic, "In Paradise", did chart, making number nine on the R&B chart: [Excerpt: The Cookies, "In Paradise"] But the B-side to that record would end up being more important to their career in the long run. "Passing Time" was the very first song by Neil Sedaka and Howie Greenfield to get recorded, even before Sedaka's recordings with the Tokens or his own successful solo records: [Excerpt: The Cookies, "Passing Time"] But then two things happened. Firstly, one of the girls, Beulah Robertson, fell out with Jesse Stone, who sacked her from the group. Stone got in a new vocalist, Margie Hendrix, to replace her, and after one more single the group stopped making singles for Atlantic. But they continued recording for smaller labels, and they also had regular gigs as backing vocalists for Atlantic, on records like "Lipstick, Powder, and Paint" by Big Joe Turner: [Excerpt: Big Joe Turner, "Lipstick, Powder and Paint"] "It's Too Late" by Chuck Willis: [Excerpt: Chuck Willis, "It's Too Late"] And "Lonely Avenue" by Ray Charles: [Excerpt: Ray Charles, "Lonely Avenue"] It was working with Ray Charles that led to the breakup of the original lineup of the Cookies -- Charles was putting together his own group, and wanted the Cookies as his backing vocalists, but Dorothy was pregnant, and decided she'd rather stay behind and continue working as a session singer than go out on the road. Darlene and Margie went off to become the core of Charles' new backing group, the Raelettes, and they would play a major part in the sound of Charles' records for the next few years. It's Margie, for example, who can be heard duetting with Charles on "The Right Time": [Excerpt: Ray Charles, "The Right Time"] Dorothy stayed behind and put together a new lineup of Cookies. To make sure the group sounded the same, she got Darlene's sister Earl-Jean into the group -- Darlene and Earl-Jean looked and sounded so similar that many histories of the group say they're the same person -- and got another of her cousins, Margaret Ross, to take over the spot that had previously been Beulah's before Margie had taken her place.  This new version of the Cookies didn't really start doing much for a couple of years, while Dorothy was raising her newborn and Earl-Jean and Margaret were finishing high school. But in 1961 they started again in earnest, when Neil Sedaka remembered the Cookies and called Dorothy up, saying he knew someone who needed a vocal group. Gerry Goffin and Carole King had become hot songwriters, and they'd also become increasingly interested in record production after Carole had been involved in the making of "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?" Carole was recording her own demos of the songs she and Goffin were writing, and was increasingly making them fully-produced recordings in their own right. The first record the new Cookies sang on was one that seems to have started out as one of these demos. "Halfway to Paradise" by Tony Orlando sounds exactly like a Drifters record, and Orlando was, at the time, a sixteen-year-old demo singer. My guess, and it is only a guess, is that this was a demo intended for the Drifters, that it was turned down, and so the demo was released as a record itself: [Excerpt: Tony Orlando, "Halfway to Paradise"] That made the lower reaches of the Hot One Hundred, while a British cover version by Billy Fury made number three in the UK. From this point on, the new lineup of the Cookies were once again the premier session singers. They added extra backing vocals to a lot of the Drifters' records at this time, and would provide backing vocals for most of Atlantic's artists, as the earlier lineup had. They were also effectively the in-house backing singers for Aldon Music -- as well as singing on every Goffin and King demo, they were also singing with Neil Sedaka: [Excerpt: Neil Sedaka, "Breaking Up is Hard to Do"] But it was Goffin and King who spent the most time working with the Cookies, and who pushed them as recording artists in their own right. They started with a solo record for Dorothy, "Taking That Long Walk Home", a song that was very much "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?" part two: [Excerpt: Dorothy Jones, "Taking That Long Walk Home"] The Cookies were doing huge amounts of session work, working twelve hours a day, seven days a week. Dorothy Jones described being in the studio working on a King Curtis session until literally fifteen minutes before giving birth.  They weren't the only ones working hard, though. Goffin and King were writing from their Aldon offices every single day, writing songs for the Drifters, the Shirelles, Bobby Rydell, Bobby Vee, Gene Pitney, the Crickets, the Everly Brothers, and more. And on top of that they had a child and Carole King was pregnant with a second one.  And, this being the very early 1960s, it never occurred to either Goffin or King that just because Carole King was working the exact same number of hours as Goffin, that might mean she shouldn't also be doing the housework and looking after the children with no help from Goffin. There was only one way they could continue their level of productivity, and that was to get someone in to help out Carole. She mentioned to the Cookies that she was looking for someone to help her with the children, and Earl-Jean mentioned that a nineteen-year-old acquaintance -- her friend's husband's sister -- had just moved to New York from North Carolina to try to become a singer and was looking for any work she could get while she was trying to make it. Eva Narcissus Boyd, Earl-Jean's acquaintance, moved in with Goffin and King and became their live-in childminder for $35 a week plus room and board. Goffin and King had known that Eva was a singer before they hired her, and they discovered that her voice was rather good. Not only that, but she blended well with the Cookies, and was friends with them. She became an unofficial "fourth Cookie", and was soon in the studio on a regular basis too -- and when she was, that meant that Eva's sister was looking after the kids, as a subcontracted babysitter. During this time, Don Kirshner's attitude was still that he was determined to get the next hit for every artist that had a hit. But that wasn't always possible.  Cameo-Parkway had, after the success they'd had with "The Twist", fully jumped on the dance-craze bandwagon, and they'd hit on another dance that might be the next Twist. The Mashed Potato was a dance that James Brown had been doing on stage for a few years, and in the wake of "The Twist", Brown had had a hit with a song about it "(Do the) Mashed Potatoes", which was credited to Nat Kendrick & the Swans rather than to Brown for contractual reasons: [Excerpt: Nat Kendrick and the Swans, "(Do the) Mashed Potatoes"] Cameo-Parkway had picked up on that dance, and had done just what Kirshner always did and created a soundalike of a recent hit -- and in fact they'd mashed up, if you'll pardon the expression, two recent hits. In this case, they'd taken the sound of "Please Mr. Postman", slightly reworked the lyrics to be about Brown's dance, and given it to session singer Dee Dee Sharp: [Excerpt: Dee Dee Sharp, "Mashed Potato Time"] That had gone to number two on the pop charts and number one on the R&B charts, and even inspired its own rip-offs, like "The Monster Mash" by Bobby "Boris" Pickett: [Excerpt: Bobby "Boris" Pickett and the Crypt-Kickers, "The Monster Mash"] So Kirshner just assumed that Sharp would be looking for another dance hit, one that sounded just like "Mashed Potato Time", and got Goffin and King to write one to submit to her.  Unfortunately for him, he'd assumed wrong. Cameo-Parkway was owned by a group of successful songwriters, and they didn't need outside writers bringing them hits when they could write their own. Dee Dee Sharp wasn't going to be recording Goffin and King's song.  When he listened to the demo, Don Kirshner was astonished that they hadn't taken the song. It had "hit" written all over it. He decided that he was going to start his own record label, Dimension Records, and he was just going to release that demo as the single. The Cookies went into the studio to overdub another layer of backing vocals, but otherwise the record that was released was the demo Eva -- now renamed "Little Eva" -- had sung: [Excerpt: Little Eva, "The Loco-Motion"] The record went to number one, and made Little Eva a star. It also made Gerry Goffin a successful producer, because even though Goffin and King had coproduced it, Goffin got sole production credit on this, and on other records the two produced together. According to King, Goffin was the one in the control room for their productions, while she would be on the studio floor, and she didn't really question whether what she was doing counted as production too until much later -- and anyway, getting the sole credit was apparently important to Gerry. "The Loco-Motion" was such a big hit that it inspired its own knockoffs, including one song cheekily called "Little Eva" by a group called "The Locomotions"  -- so the record label would say "Little Eva, The Locomotions", and people might buy it by mistake. You'll be shocked to learn that that one was on a Morris Levy label: [Excerpt: The Locomotions, "Little Eva"] That group featured Leon Huff, who would later go on to make a lot of much better records. Meanwhile, as Little Eva was now a star, Carole King once again had to look for a childminder. This time she insisted that anyone she hired be unable to sing, so she wouldn't keep having to do this. Dimension Records was soon churning out singles, all of them involving the Cookies, and Eva, and Goffin and King. They put out "Everybody's Got a Dance But Me" by Big Dee Irwin, a song that excerpted "The Loco-Motion", "Wah Watusi", "Hully Gully" and "Twist and Shout" among many others, with the Cookies on backing vocals, and with Goffin as the credited producer: [Excerpt: Big Dee Irwin, "Everybody's Got a Dance But Me"] That wasn't a hit, but Dimension soon released two more big hits. One was a solo single by Carole King, "It Might as Well Rain Until September", which went to number twenty even though its only national exposure was a disastrous appearance by King on American Bandstand which left her feeling humiliated: [Excerpt: Carole King, "It Might as Well Rain Until September"] Her solo performing career wouldn't properly take off for a few more years, but that was a step towards it. The Cookies also had a hit on Dimension around this point. Goffin and King had written a song called "Chains" for the Everly Brothers, who had recorded it but not released it: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Chains"] So they gave the song to the Cookies instead, with Little Eva on additional vocals, and it made the pop top twenty, and the R&B top ten: [Excerpt: The Cookies, "Chains"] Several people have pointed out that that lyric can be read as having an element of BDSM to it, and it's not the only Goffin and King song from this period that does -- there's a 1964 B-side they wrote for Eva called "Please Hurt Me", which is fairly blatant: [Excerpt: Little Eva, "Please Hurt Me"] But the BDSM comparison has also been made -- wrongly, in my opinion -- about one of the most utterly misguided songs that Goffin and King ever wrote -- a song inspired by Little Eva telling them that her boyfriend beat her up. They'd asked her why she put up with it, and she said that he only hit her because he loved her. They were inspired by that to write "He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)", an utterly grotesque song which, in a version produced by Phil Spector for the Crystals, was issued as a single but soon withdrawn due to general horror. I won't be excerpting that one here, though it's easy enough to find if you want to. (Having said that, I should also say that while people have said that Goffin & King's material at this point flirts with BDSM, my understanding of BDSM, as it has been explained to me by friends who indulge in such activities, is that consent is paramount, so I don't think that "He Hit Me" should be talked about in those terms. I don't want anything I've said here to contribute to the blurring of distinctions between consensual kink and abuse, which are too often conflated). Originally, Eva's follow-up to "The Loco-Motion" was going to be "One Fine Day", another Goffin and King song, but no matter how much Goffin and King worked on the track, they couldn't come up with an arrangement, and eventually they passed the song over to the Tokens, who solved the arrangement problems (though they kept King's piano part) and produced a version of it for the Chiffons, for whom it became a hit: [Excerpt: The Chiffons, "One Fine Day"] Instead, Goffin and King gave Eva "Keep Your Hands Off My Baby". This is, in my opinion, the best thing that Eva ever did, and it made the top twenty, though it wasn't as big a hit as "The Loco-Motion": [Excerpt: Little Eva, "Keep Your Hands Off My Baby"] And Eva also appeared on another Cookies record, "Don't Say Nothing Bad About My Baby", which made the top ten: [Excerpt: The Cookies, "Don't Say Nothing Bad About My Baby"] The Cookies, Eva, and Goffin and King were such a package deal that Dimension released an album called Dimension Dolls featuring the first few hits of each act and padded out with demos they'd made for other artists.  This hit-making machine was so successful for a brief period in 1962 and 63 that even Eva's sister Idalia got in on the act, releasing a song by Goffin, King, and Jack Keller, "Hula Hoppin'": [Excerpt: Idalia Boyd, "Hula Hoppin'"] For Eva's third single, Gerry Goffin and Jack Keller wrote a song called "Let's Turkey Trot", which also made the top twenty. But that would be the last time that Eva would have a hit of her own. At first, the fact that she had a couple of flop singles wasn't a problem -- no artists at this time were consistent hit-makers, and it was normal for someone to have a few top ten hits, then a couple at number 120 or something, before going back to the top. And she was touring with Dick Clark's Caravan of Stars, and still in high demand as a live performer. She also, in 1963, recorded a version of "Swinging on a Star" with Big Dee Irwin, though she wasn't credited on the label, and that made the top forty (and made number seven in the UK): [Excerpt: Big Dee Irwin, "Swinging on a Star"] But everything changed for Little Eva, and for the whole world of Brill Building pop, in 1964. In part, this was because the Beatles became successful and changed the pop landscape, but by itself that shouldn't have destroyed the careers of Eva or the Cookies, who the Beatles admired -- they recorded a cover of "Chains", and they used to play "Keep Your Hands Off My Baby" in their live sets. But Don Kirshner decided to sell Aldon Music and Dimension Records to Columbia Pictures, and to start concentrating on the West Coast rather than New York. The idea was that they could come up with songs that would be used in films and TV, and make more money that way, and that worked out for many people, including Kirshner himself. But even when artists like Eva and the Cookies got hit material, the British Invasion made it hard for them to get a footing. For example, Goffin and King wrote a song for Earl-Jean from the Cookies to record as a solo track just after Dimension was taken over by Columbia. That record did make the top forty: [Excerpt: Earl-Jean, "I'm Into Something Good"] But then Herman's Hermits released their version, which became a much bigger hit. That sort of thing kept happening. The Cookies ended up splitting up by 1967. Little Eva did end up doing some TV work -- most famously, she sang a dance song in an episode of the Hanna-Barbera cartoon Magilla Gorilla: [Excerpt: Little Eva "Makin' With the Magilla"] But Dimension Records was not a priority for anyone -- Columbia already owned their own labels, and didn't need another one -- and the label was being wound down. And then Al Nevins, Don Kirshner's partner in Aldon, died. He'd always been friendly with Eva, and without him to advocate for her, the label sold her contract off to Bell Records. From that point on, she could no longer rely on Goffin and King, and she hopped between a number of different labels, none of them with any great success. After spending seven years going from label to label, and having split up with her husband, she quit the music business in 1971 and moved back to North Carolina. She was sick of the music industry, and particularly sick of the lack of money -- she had signed a lot of bad contracts, and was making no royalties from sales of her records. She worked menial day jobs, survived on welfare for a while, became active in her local church, and depending on which reports you read either ran a soul-food restaurant or merely worked there as a waitress. Meanwhile, "The Loco-Motion" was a perennial hit. Her version re-charted in the UK in the early seventies, and Todd Rundgren produced a version for the heavy metal band Grand Funk Railroad which went to number one in the US in 1974: [Excerpt: Grand Funk Railroad, "The Loco-Motion"] And then in 1988 an Australian soap star, Kylie Minogue, recorded her own version, which went top five worldwide and started Minogue's own successful pop career: [Excerpt: Kylie Minogue, "The Loco-Motion"] That record becoming a hit got a series of "where are they now?" articles written about Eva, and she was persuaded to come out of retirement and start performing again -- though having been so badly hurt by the industry, she was very dubious at first, and she also had scruples because of her strong religious faith. She later said that she'd left the contracts on her table for eight months before signing them -- but when she finally did, she found that her audience was still there for her. For the rest of her life, she was a popular performer on the oldies circuit, performing on package tours with people like Bobby Vee and Brian Hyland, playing state fairs and touring Europe. She continued performing until shortly before her death, even after she was diagnosed with the cancer that eventually killed her, as she once again connected with the audiences who had loved her music back when she was still a teenager. She died, aged fifty-nine, in 2003.

Episode ninety-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “The Loco-Motion” by Little Eva, and how a demo by Carole King’s babysitter became one of the biggest hits of the sixties. 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 “Duke of Earl” by Gene Chandler. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. There are no biographies of Little Eva, so I’ve used a variety of sources, including the articles on Little Eva and The Cookies at This Is My Story. The following books were also of some use: A Natural Woman is Carole King’s autobiography. Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era by Ken Emerson is a good overview of the whole scene. Girl Groups by John Clemente contains potted biographies of many groups of the era, including articles on both Little Eva and The Cookies. There are no decent CDs of Eva’s material readily available, but I can recommend two overlapping compilations. This compilation contains Little Eva’s only sixties album in full, along with some tracks by Carole King, the Cookies, and the Ronettes, while Dimension Dolls is a compilation from 1963 that overlaps substantially with that album but contains several tracks not on it.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A quick note before this begins — there is some mention of domestic violence in this episode. If that’s something that might upset you, please check the transcript of the episode at 500songs.com if reading it might be easier than listening. A couple of months back, we talked about Goffin and King, and the early days of the Brill Building sound. Today we’re going to take another look at them, and at a singer who recorded some of their best material, both solo and in a group, but who would always be overshadowed by the first single they wrote for her, when she was still working as their childminder. Today, we’re going to look at Little Eva and “The Loco-Motion”, and the short history of Dimension Records: [Excerpt: Little Eva, “The Loco-Motion”] The story of Little Eva is intertwined with the story of the Cookies, one of the earliest of the girl groups, and so we should probably start with them. We’ve mentioned the Cookies earlier, in the episode on “What’d I Say”, but we didn’t look at them in any great detail. The group started out in the mid-fifties, as a group of schoolgirls singing together in New York — Dorothy Jones, her cousin Beulah Robertson, and a friend, Darlene McRae, who had all been in the choir at their local Baptist Church. They formed a group and made their first appearance at the famous Harlem Apollo talent contests, where they came third, to Joe Tex and a vocal group called the Flairs (not, I think, any of the Flairs groups we’ve looked at). They were seen at that contest by Jesse Stone, who gave them the name “The Cookies”. He signed them to Aladdin Records, and produced and co-wrote their first single, “All-Night Mambo”. That wasn’t commercially successful, but Stone liked them enough that he then got them signed to Atlantic, where he again wrote their first single for the label. That first single was relatively unsuccessful, but their second single on Atlantic, “In Paradise”, did chart, making number nine on the R&B chart: [Excerpt: The Cookies, “In Paradise”] But the B-side to that record would end up being more important to their career in the long run. “Passing Time” was the very first song by Neil Sedaka and Howie Greenfield to get recorded, even before Sedaka’s recordings with the Tokens or his own successful solo records: [Excerpt: The Cookies, “Passing Time”] But then two things happened. Firstly, one of the girls, Beulah Robertson, fell out with Jesse Stone, who sacked her from the group. Stone got in a new vocalist, Margie Hendrix, to replace her, and after one more single the group stopped making singles for Atlantic. But they continued recording for smaller labels, and they also had regular gigs as backing vocalists for Atlantic, on records like “Lipstick, Powder, and Paint” by Big Joe Turner: [Excerpt: Big Joe Turner, “Lipstick, Powder and Paint”] “It’s Too Late” by Chuck Willis: [Excerpt: Chuck Willis, “It’s Too Late”] And “Lonely Avenue” by Ray Charles: [Excerpt: Ray Charles, “Lonely Avenue”] It was working with Ray Charles that led to the breakup of the original lineup of the Cookies — Charles was putting together his own group, and wanted the Cookies as his backing vocalists, but Dorothy was pregnant, and decided she’d rather stay behind and continue working as a session singer than go out on the road. Darlene and Margie went off to become the core of Charles’ new backing group, the Raelettes, and they would play a major part in the sound of Charles’ records for the next few years. It’s Margie, for example, who can be heard duetting with Charles on “The Right Time”: [Excerpt: Ray Charles, “The Right Time”] Dorothy stayed behind and put together a new lineup of Cookies. To make sure the group sounded the same, she got Darlene’s sister Earl-Jean into the group — Darlene and Earl-Jean looked and sounded so similar that many histories of the group say they’re the same person — and got another of her cousins, Margaret Ross, to take over the spot that had previously been Beulah’s before Margie had taken her place.  This new version of the Cookies didn’t really start doing much for a couple of years, while Dorothy was raising her newborn and Earl-Jean and Margaret were finishing high school. But in 1961 they started again in earnest, when Neil Sedaka remembered the Cookies and called Dorothy up, saying he knew someone who needed a vocal group. Gerry Goffin and Carole King had become hot songwriters, and they’d also become increasingly interested in record production after Carole had been involved in the making of “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” Carole was recording her own demos of the songs she and Goffin were writing, and was increasingly making them fully-produced recordings in their own right. The first record the new Cookies sang on was one that seems to have started out as one of these demos. “Halfway to Paradise” by Tony Orlando sounds exactly like a Drifters record, and Orlando was, at the time, a sixteen-year-old demo singer. My guess, and it is only a guess, is that this was a demo intended for the Drifters, that it was turned down, and so the demo was released as a record itself: [Excerpt: Tony Orlando, “Halfway to Paradise”] That made the lower reaches of the Hot One Hundred, while a British cover version by Billy Fury made number three in the UK. From this point on, the new lineup of the Cookies were once again the premier session singers. They added extra backing vocals to a lot of the Drifters’ records at this time, and would provide backing vocals for most of Atlantic’s artists, as the earlier lineup had. They were also effectively the in-house backing singers for Aldon Music — as well as singing on every Goffin and King demo, they were also singing with Neil Sedaka: [Excerpt: Neil Sedaka, “Breaking Up is Hard to Do”] But it was Goffin and King who spent the most time working with the Cookies, and who pushed them as recording artists in their own right. They started with a solo record for Dorothy, “Taking That Long Walk Home”, a song that was very much “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” part two: [Excerpt: Dorothy Jones, “Taking That Long Walk Home”] The Cookies were doing huge amounts of session work, working twelve hours a day, seven days a week. Dorothy Jones described being in the studio working on a King Curtis session until literally fifteen minutes before giving birth.  They weren’t the only ones working hard, though. Goffin and King were writing from their Aldon offices every single day, writing songs for the Drifters, the Shirelles, Bobby Rydell, Bobby Vee, Gene Pitney, the Crickets, the Everly Brothers, and more. And on top of that they had a child and Carole King was pregnant with a second one.  And, this being the very early 1960s, it never occurred to either Goffin or King that just because Carole King was working the exact same number of hours as Goffin, that might mean she shouldn’t also be doing the housework and looking after the children with no help from Goffin. There was only one way they could continue their level of productivity, and that was to get someone in to help out Carole. She mentioned to the Cookies that she was looking for someone to help her with the children, and Earl-Jean mentioned that a nineteen-year-old acquaintance — her friend’s husband’s sister — had just moved to New York from North Carolina to try to become a singer and was looking for any work she could get while she was trying to make it. Eva Narcissus Boyd, Earl-Jean’s acquaintance, moved in with Goffin and King and became their live-in childminder for $35 a week plus room and board. Goffin and King had known that Eva was a singer before they hired her, and they discovered that her voice was rather good. Not only that, but she blended well with the Cookies, and was friends with them. She became an unofficial “fourth Cookie”, and was soon in the studio on a regular basis too — and when she was, that meant that Eva’s sister was looking after the kids, as a subcontracted babysitter. During this time, Don Kirshner’s attitude was still that he was determined to get the next hit for every artist that had a hit. But that wasn’t always possible.  Cameo-Parkway had, after the success they’d had with “The Twist”, fully jumped on the dance-craze bandwagon, and they’d hit on another dance that might be the next Twist. The Mashed Potato was a dance that James Brown had been doing on stage for a few years, and in the wake of “The Twist”, Brown had had a hit with a song about it “(Do the) Mashed Potatoes”, which was credited to Nat Kendrick & the Swans rather than to Brown for contractual reasons: [Excerpt: Nat Kendrick and the Swans, “(Do the) Mashed Potatoes”] Cameo-Parkway had picked up on that dance, and had done just what Kirshner always did and created a soundalike of a recent hit — and in fact they’d mashed up, if you’ll pardon the expression, two recent hits. In this case, they’d taken the sound of “Please Mr. Postman”, slightly reworked the lyrics to be about Brown’s dance, and given it to session singer Dee Dee Sharp: [Excerpt: Dee Dee Sharp, “Mashed Potato Time”] That had gone to number two on the pop charts and number one on the R&B charts, and even inspired its own rip-offs, like “The Monster Mash” by Bobby “Boris” Pickett: [Excerpt: Bobby “Boris” Pickett and the Crypt-Kickers, “The Monster Mash”] So Kirshner just assumed that Sharp would be looking for another dance hit, one that sounded just like “Mashed Potato Time”, and got Goffin and King to write one to submit to her.  Unfortunately for him, he’d assumed wrong. Cameo-Parkway was owned by a group of successful songwriters, and they didn’t need outside writers bringing them hits when they could write their own. Dee Dee Sharp wasn’t going to be recording Goffin and King’s song.  When he listened to the demo, Don Kirshner was astonished that they hadn’t taken the song. It had “hit” written all over it. He decided that he was going to start his own record label, Dimension Records, and he was just going to release that demo as the single. The Cookies went into the studio to overdub another layer of backing vocals, but otherwise the record that was released was the demo Eva — now renamed “Little Eva” — had sung: [Excerpt: Little Eva, “The Loco-Motion”] The record went to number one, and made Little Eva a star. It also made Gerry Goffin a successful producer, because even though Goffin and King had coproduced it, Goffin got sole production credit on this, and on other records the two produced together. According to King, Goffin was the one in the control room for their productions, while she would be on the studio floor, and she didn’t really question whether what she was doing counted as production too until much later — and anyway, getting the sole credit was apparently important to Gerry. “The Loco-Motion” was such a big hit that it inspired its own knockoffs, including one song cheekily called “Little Eva” by a group called “The Locomotions”  — so the record label would say “Little Eva, The Locomotions”, and people might buy it by mistake. You’ll be shocked to learn that that one was on a Morris Levy label: [Excerpt: The Locomotions, “Little Eva”] That group featured Leon Huff, who would later go on to make a lot of much better records. Meanwhile, as Little Eva was now a star, Carole King once again had to look for a childminder. This time she insisted that anyone she hired be unable to sing, so she wouldn’t keep having to do this. Dimension Records was soon churning out singles, all of them involving the Cookies, and Eva, and Goffin and King. They put out “Everybody’s Got a Dance But Me” by Big Dee Irwin, a song that excerpted “The Loco-Motion”, “Wah Watusi”, “Hully Gully” and “Twist and Shout” among many others, with the Cookies on backing vocals, and with Goffin as the credited producer: [Excerpt: Big Dee Irwin, “Everybody’s Got a Dance But Me”] That wasn’t a hit, but Dimension soon released two more big hits. One was a solo single by Carole King, “It Might as Well Rain Until September”, which went to number twenty even though its only national exposure was a disastrous appearance by King on American Bandstand which left her feeling humiliated: [Excerpt: Carole King, “It Might as Well Rain Until September”] Her solo performing career wouldn’t properly take off for a few more years, but that was a step towards it. The Cookies also had a hit on Dimension around this point. Goffin and King had written a song called “Chains” for the Everly Brothers, who had recorded it but not released it: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Chains”] So they gave the song to the Cookies instead, with Little Eva on additional vocals, and it made the pop top twenty, and the R&B top ten: [Excerpt: The Cookies, “Chains”] Several people have pointed out that that lyric can be read as having an element of BDSM to it, and it’s not the only Goffin and King song from this period that does — there’s a 1964 B-side they wrote for Eva called “Please Hurt Me”, which is fairly blatant: [Excerpt: Little Eva, “Please Hurt Me”] But the BDSM comparison has also been made — wrongly, in my opinion — about one of the most utterly misguided songs that Goffin and King ever wrote — a song inspired by Little Eva telling them that her boyfriend beat her up. They’d asked her why she put up with it, and she said that he only hit her because he loved her. They were inspired by that to write “He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)”, an utterly grotesque song which, in a version produced by Phil Spector for the Crystals, was issued as a single but soon withdrawn due to general horror. I won’t be excerpting that one here, though it’s easy enough to find if you want to. (Having said that, I should also say that while people have said that Goffin & King’s material at this point flirts with BDSM, my understanding of BDSM, as it has been explained to me by friends who indulge in such activities, is that consent is paramount, so I don’t think that “He Hit Me” should be talked about in those terms. I don’t want anything I’ve said here to contribute to the blurring of distinctions between consensual kink and abuse, which are too often conflated). Originally, Eva’s follow-up to “The Loco-Motion” was going to be “One Fine Day”, another Goffin and King song, but no matter how much Goffin and King worked on the track, they couldn’t come up with an arrangement, and eventually they passed the song over to the Tokens, who solved the arrangement problems (though they kept King’s piano part) and produced a version of it for the Chiffons, for whom it became a hit: [Excerpt: The Chiffons, “One Fine Day”] Instead, Goffin and King gave Eva “Keep Your Hands Off My Baby”. This is, in my opinion, the best thing that Eva ever did, and it made the top twenty, though it wasn’t as big a hit as “The Loco-Motion”: [Excerpt: Little Eva, “Keep Your Hands Off My Baby”] And Eva also appeared on another Cookies record, “Don’t Say Nothing Bad About My Baby”, which made the top ten: [Excerpt: The Cookies, “Don’t Say Nothing Bad About My Baby”] The Cookies, Eva, and Goffin and King were such a package deal that Dimension released an album called Dimension Dolls featuring the first few hits of each act and padded out with demos they’d made for other artists.  This hit-making machine was so successful for a brief period in 1962 and 63 that even Eva’s sister Idalia got in on the act, releasing a song by Goffin, King, and Jack Keller, “Hula Hoppin'”: [Excerpt: Idalia Boyd, “Hula Hoppin'”] For Eva’s third single, Gerry Goffin and Jack Keller wrote a song called “Let’s Turkey Trot”, which also made the top twenty. But that would be the last time that Eva would have a hit of her own. At first, the fact that she had a couple of flop singles wasn’t a problem — no artists at this time were consistent hit-makers, and it was normal for someone to have a few top ten hits, then a couple at number 120 or something, before going back to the top. And she was touring with Dick Clark’s Caravan of Stars, and still in high demand as a live performer. She also, in 1963, recorded a version of “Swinging on a Star” with Big Dee Irwin, though she wasn’t credited on the label, and that made the top forty (and made number seven in the UK): [Excerpt: Big Dee Irwin, “Swinging on a Star”] But everything changed for Little Eva, and for the whole world of Brill Building pop, in 1964. In part, this was because the Beatles became successful and changed the pop landscape, but by itself that shouldn’t have destroyed the careers of Eva or the Cookies, who the Beatles admired — they recorded a cover of “Chains”, and they used to play “Keep Your Hands Off My Baby” in their live sets. But Don Kirshner decided to sell Aldon Music and Dimension Records to Columbia Pictures, and to start concentrating on the West Coast rather than New York. The idea was that they could come up with songs that would be used in films and TV, and make more money that way, and that worked out for many people, including Kirshner himself. But even when artists like Eva and the Cookies got hit material, the British Invasion made it hard for them to get a footing. For example, Goffin and King wrote a song for Earl-Jean from the Cookies to record as a solo track just after Dimension was taken over by Columbia. That record did make the top forty: [Excerpt: Earl-Jean, “I’m Into Something Good”] But then Herman’s Hermits released their version, which became a much bigger hit. That sort of thing kept happening. The Cookies ended up splitting up by 1967. Little Eva did end up doing some TV work — most famously, she sang a dance song in an episode of the Hanna-Barbera cartoon Magilla Gorilla: [Excerpt: Little Eva “Makin’ With the Magilla”] But Dimension Records was not a priority for anyone — Columbia already owned their own labels, and didn’t need another one — and the label was being wound down. And then Al Nevins, Don Kirshner’s partner in Aldon, died. He’d always been friendly with Eva, and without him to advocate for her, the label sold her contract off to Bell Records. From that point on, she could no longer rely on Goffin and King, and she hopped between a number of different labels, none of them with any great success. After spending seven years going from label to label, and having split up with her husband, she quit the music business in 1971 and moved back to North Carolina. She was sick of the music industry, and particularly sick of the lack of money — she had signed a lot of bad contracts, and was making no royalties from sales of her records. She worked menial day jobs, survived on welfare for a while, became active in her local church, and depending on which reports you read either ran a soul-food restaurant or merely worked there as a waitress. Meanwhile, “The Loco-Motion” was a perennial hit. Her version re-charted in the UK in the early seventies, and Todd Rundgren produced a version for the heavy metal band Grand Funk Railroad which went to number one in the US in 1974: [Excerpt: Grand Funk Railroad, “The Loco-Motion”] And then in 1988 an Australian soap star, Kylie Minogue, recorded her own version, which went top five worldwide and started Minogue’s own successful pop career: [Excerpt: Kylie Minogue, “The Loco-Motion”] That record becoming a hit got a series of “where are they now?” articles written about Eva, and she was persuaded to come out of retirement and start performing again — though having been so badly hurt by the industry, she was very dubious at first, and she also had scruples because of her strong religious faith. She later said that she’d left the contracts on her table for eight months before signing them — but when she finally did, she found that her audience was still there for her. For the rest of her life, she was a popular performer on the oldies circuit, performing on package tours with people like Bobby Vee and Brian Hyland, playing state fairs and touring Europe. She continued performing until shortly before her death, even after she was diagnosed with the cancer that eventually killed her, as she once again connected with the audiences who had loved her music back when she was still a teenager. She died, aged fifty-nine, in 2003.

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

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

Episode eighty-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?" by the Shirelles, and at the beginnings of the Brill Building sound. 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 "Tom Dooley" by the Kingston Trio. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. There are no biographies of the Shirelles in print, so I've used a variety of sources, including the articles on the Shirelles and Luther Dixon at This Is My Story. The following books were also of some use: A Natural Woman is Carole King's autobiography. Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era by Ken Emerson is a good overview of the whole scene. Girl Groups by John Clemente contains potted biographies of many groups of the era. And Here Comes The Night: The Dark Soul of Bert Berns and the Dirty Business of Rhythm and Blues by Joel Selvin goes into some detail about Scepter Records. I also referred to the liner notes of this CD, which contains most of the Shirelles tracks worth owning.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?   Transcript   We're currently in a patch of rock and roll history that is ludicrously undocumented. There is book after book about the major stars of the early rock and roll era -- while you won't find much out there on a lot of truly important artists, you can find out enough about Elvis and Ray Charles and Johnny Cash and Little Richard and Chuck Berry and the rest -- these are all romantic figures of legend, the Titans who were defeated in the Titanomachy that was the mid-sixties Beat boom. And of course, there are many many, books on almost every band of the mid to late sixties to even have a minor hit. But the period from 1958 through 1964 is generally summed up by "and there were some whitebread nonentities like Fabian and Frankie Avalon". Occasionally, in some of the books, there is a slightly more subtle approach taken, and the summary is "there were some whitebread nonentities like Fabian and Frankie Avalon, and also Roy Orbison and one or two others made a decent record". But there were many other people making great records -- people who made hits that are still staples of oldies radio in a way that a lot of records from a few years later aren't; records that still sound like they're fresh new records made by people who have ideas. Today we're going to talk about a few of those people, and about one of those great records. We're going to look at the Brill Building, and some of the songwriters who worked there, and at the great record producer Luther Dixon, and at the Shirelles, and their record "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?": [Excerpt: The Shirelles, "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?"] It's been a little while since we looked at any of the early girl groups, but if you remember the episodes on the Bobettes and the Chantels, girl groups in the early years were largely a phenomenon based in New York, and that's more or less the case with the Shirelles, who didn't come from New York itself, but from Passaic New Jersey, about sixteen miles away. Shirley Owens, Doris Coley, Addie Harris and Beverly Lee met at school, and formed a group called the Poquellos, which is apparently Spanish for "little birds". As we've discussed previously, most of the early doo-wop groups were named after birds, and these girls were forming their group before girl groups became regarded as something separate from male vocal groups. Oddly, the group that became the most successful of the early girl groups, and the one that more than any other set the template for all those that would follow, never wanted to become professional singers, and almost had to be forced against their will at every stage. Their first public performance, in fact, was as a punishment. They had been singing with each other in gym class, and not paying attention to the teacher, and so the teacher told them that, as a punishment, they would have to perform in the school talent contest, which they didn't want to do. They performed at the show, singing a song they'd made up themselves, "I Met Him on a Sunday", and went down a storm with the kids at the school. In particular, one of the girls there, Mary Jane Greenberg, insisted that the girls come and meet her mother, Florence. Florence Greenberg was a bored suburban housewife, who until her mid-forties had concentrated on being a homemaker for her husband, who was an executive at a potato chip firm, and for her two children. In her spare time she mostly did things like run fundraisers for the local Republican party. But her son was interested in getting into the music business in some way, and her husband was friends with Freddy Bienstock, who worked for Hill and Range at the Brill Building, and whose job was choosing the songs that Elvis Presley would record. Bienstock invited Greenberg to come and visit him at Hill and Range's offices, and after spending a little time around the Brill Building, Greenberg became convinced that she should start her own record label, despite having no experience in the field whatsoever. She would often just go and hang around at a restaurant near the Brill Building to soak in the atmosphere. The Poquellos were actually not at all interested in making a record, but Mary Jane kept insisting that they should meet with her mother anyway. It got to the point that the girls used to try to avoid her at school and hide from her, but she was insistent and eventually they relented, and went to see Mrs Greenberg. They auditioned for her in her front room, singing the same song they'd performed at the school talent contest. Mrs Greenberg decided that they were going to be the first group signed to her new label, Tiara Records, and they recorded the song they'd written, with Greenberg's musical son Stan producing and arranging, under the name Stan Green: [Excerpt: The Shirelles, "I Met Him On A Sunday (Ronde Ronde)"] Stan wasn't the only person with a new name. The Poquellos were also renamed, to the Shirelles -- after Shirley Owens, but with the "el" ending to be reminiscent of the Chantels, and that was the name they would be known by from that point on. "I Met Him On A Sunday" was a minor local success, and was picked up by Decca Records, who bought the girls' contract out from Greenberg. They managed to get it to number fifty on the charts, but the two singles they recorded for Decca after that didn't have any success, and the label dropped them. That might have been the end of the Shirelles, but Greenberg had remained their manager, and she had started up a new record label, Scepter Records, and signed them up to that instead of Tiara. Their first few singles for Scepter did nothing, but then a change in Scepter's staffing changed everything, not just for the Shirelles, but for the world of music. Greenberg was not a particularly musical person -- and indeed several of the people who worked for her would later mock some decisions she'd made when she'd used her own judgment about songs. But she surrounded herself with people who were musical. The director of A&R for Scepter was Wally Roker, who had originally been the bass singer in the Heartbeats, who'd had a top five hit with "A Thousand Miles Away" in 1956: [Excerpt: The Heartbeats, "A Thousand Miles Away"] Roker in turn introduced Greenberg to a friend of his, Luther Dixon. Greenberg and Dixon's initial meeting was just the length of one elevator ride, but that was long enough for them to exchange numbers and arrange to meet again. Soon Dixon was working for Greenberg at Scepter, and was also her lover. Dixon had started out as a singer, joining a minor group called The Buddies, who had recorded singles like "I Stole Your Heart": [Excerpt: The Buddies, "I Stole Your Heart"] But he had soon moved into songwriting. Dixon was a collaborator by nature, and his first big hit was written with a writing partner called Larry Harrison. "Why Baby Why" went to number five for Pat Boone in 1957: [Excerpt: Pat Boone, "Why Baby Why"] He spent some time writing with Otis Blackwell, with whom he wrote "All the Way Home" for Bobby Darin: [Excerpt: Bobby Darin, "All the Way Home"] And at the time he met Greenberg, he had just written "Sixteen Candles" with Allyson Khent, a number two hit for the Crests: [Excerpt: The Crests, "Sixteen Candles"] Greenberg took him on as a staff writer and producer, and gave him a cut of the publishing rights for his songs -- almost unheard of at that time. The first record he worked on for the Shirelles was also the group's first top forty hit. With Shirley Owens, Dixon wrote "Tonight's the Night". It was intended as a B-side to a song with a lead by Doris, but "Tonight's the Night" was an unexpected success and established Shirley firmly in the role of the group's lead singer: [Excerpt: The Shirelles, "Tonight's the Night"] That went to number thirty-nine, and a competing version by the Chiffons also made the Hot One Hundred: [Excerpt: The Chiffons, "Tonight's the Night"] The Shirelles were a hit group, and they needed a follow-up. And that's where Goffin and King enter our story... Carole King had, from a very early age, been a child prodigy with a particular talent for music. In her autobiography she talks about how when she was a child, her dad would have her, as a party trick, turn to the wall while he played notes on the piano and she called out which one he was playing. Apparently her father would claim she had perfect pitch, and this was not quite true -- she had relative pitch, which meant that once she heard one note she knew, she could tell all the rest of the notes from that, so her father would always start with middle C. But that sense of relative pitch is in itself an amazing talent for a tiny child -- I still can't do that with any great accuracy in my forties, and I've spent most of my life studying and playing music. By the age of eight she had appeared in a couple of shows, including Ted Mack's Amateur Hour, which was a nationally broadcast show, performing in a duo with a friend, but she didn't know exactly what it was she wanted to do until she was thirteen, when she went on a date with Joel Zwick, who would later become known as the director of My Big Fat Greek Wedding among others -- one thing that seems to happen a lot in King's early life is getting to know people who would go on to become very successful. Zwick took her to an Alan Freed show at the Paramount in Brooklyn, where she saw LaVern Baker, BB King, Mickey Baker, the Moonglows, and several other R&B stars of the period. It wasn't, though, seeing the musicians themselves that made Carol Klein, as she then was, want to go into rock and roll music, though that was certainly an inspiration, and she talks a lot about how that Freed show was her introduction to a whole world of music that was far from the whitebread pop on which she had grown up. Rather, it was almost a chance event. She and her date hung around the stage door to see if they could see any of the performers and get autographs. The group they were in accidentally got drawn in through the stage door when some people who were meant to be there were let in, and she got to see the performers hanging around backstage. She knew then, not that she wanted to be a performer herself, but that she wanted to be part of that world, someone that those performers knew and respected. She started attending a stage school, where one of her classmates was Al Pacino, but after a short while she left, deciding that she wasn't cut out for the non-musical aspects of the school, and went back to a normal high school, where she formed her first group, the Cosines. along with Zwick. She started writing songs when she heard a group from a rival local high school, Neil Sedaka and the Linc-Tones, singing a song called "While I Dream": [Excerpt: The Tokens "While I Dream"] Sedaka had briefly dated her, and had co-written that song himself, with Howard Greenfield, and his group got a record deal under the name The Tokens. King figured that if he could do that, so could she. She started writing songs, and found she was good at melodies but not particularly great at lyrics. But she still thought she was good enough to do something. She decided that she was going to go and see Alan Freed, and play him some of her songs. Freed listened to her politely, and explained to her how, at the time, one went about becoming a professional songwriter for the R&B market. He told her to get the addresses of record labels from the phone book, go and try to play her songs to them, and explained how a publishing contract would work. The record label he mentioned to her specifically was Atlantic Records, so she tried that one first. Jerry Wexler and Ahmet Ertegun listened to her, and told her she had talent and to come back when she had more songs. It wasn't a rejection, but it wasn't the instant acceptance she'd hoped for. The second label she went to was ABC-Paramount, where she saw Don Costa. Costa was head of A&R at the label, but also a musician himself. Around this time he had released a cover version of Bill Justis' "Raunchy", under the name Muvva Guitar Hubbard: [Excerpt: Muvva "Guitar" Hubbard, "Raunchy"] Costa would later go on to arrange and conduct for Frank Sinatra, and he also had a respectable career as a session guitarist, but Carol didn't know any of this when she went into his office and played through her songs for him. She was flabbergasted to find that, rather than just sign her to a publishing contract, he asked her to sign a recording contract as well. She was disappointed that he wasn't interested in signing the rest of her group -- he thought she was good enough by herself, without needing to hear the other three -- but not so disappointed that she didn't sign with him straight away. Her first few singles were solo compositions, and didn't do very much in terms of sales, partly because she still didn't consider herself especially good as a lyricist: [Excerpt: Carole King, "The Right Girl"] So while she was trying to have a music career, she also went off to college, aged sixteen -- she had skipped multiple years in school -- where she met someone else who had had a minor hit. The boy who performed under the name Jerry Landis had released "Hey! Schoolgirl", an Everly Brothers knockoff, with a friend, as Tom and Jerry: [Excerpt: Tom and Jerry, "Hey! Schoolgirl"] Landis and King started working together, recording demos for other writers, though never writing together. For some of those demos, they re-used the Cosines name, like on this one for a song by Marty Kalfin: [Excerpt: The Cosines, "Just to Be With You"] They were quite proud when the arrangement they came up with for that demo was copied exactly for the finished record, which made the lower regions of the Hot One Hundred: [Excerpt: The Passions, "Just to Be With You"] They didn't work together for very long, and Jerry Landis went on to record under other names like "True Taylor" and "Paul Kane", before getting back together with Tom, and deciding to work together under their real names. We'll be hearing more of Paul Simon and his partner Art Garfunkel in future episodes. Someone else she met while at college was the man who was to become her first husband, another Gerry -- Gerry Goffin. Goffin impressed her with his looks the first time she saw him -- he looked exactly like a drawing she had clipped out of a magazine, which looked to her like the perfect boyfriend. Goffin impressed her less, though, with his studied dislike of rock and roll music, but was suddenly keen to write a song with her when she mentioned that she'd been selling songs. He'd been trying to write a musical, but he was primarily a lyricist, and couldn't do much with music. King mentioned that she knew that Atlantic were looking for a new song for Mickey and Sylvia, and the two of them worked on a song based on the style of "Love is Strange", which they completed very quickly, and took to Atlantic. Unfortunately, when they got there, they were told that Mickey and Sylvia had split up, but that their song would be suitable for the new duo they'd put together to continue the act -- Mickey and Kitty: [Excerpt: Mickey and Kitty, "The Kid Brother"] That was released as a B-side. The A-side, "Ooh Sha La La" was written by Neil Sedaka and Howie Greenfield: [Excerpt: MIckey and Kitty, "Ooh Sha La La"] Sedaka and Greenfield had become hot songwriters, and around this time Sedaka was also becoming a successful performer. His first hit as a performer, "Oh Carol", was in fact written about Carole King: [Excerpt: Neil Sedaka, "Oh Carol"] And King herself recorded an answer record to that, with new lyrics by Goffin: [Excerpt: Carole King, "Oh Neil"] By the time she was seventeen, King was married to Goffin, and pregnant with his child. Goffin was working a day job, and they were treating the occasional twenty-five dollar advance they got from writing songs as windfalls. But then, when she was on one of her visits to 1650 Broadway to sell songs, King bumped into Sedaka, who told her she should come and meet Al Nevins and Don Kirshner, the owners of Aldon Music. Aldon is the publisher who, more than any single other company, was responsible for what became known as the Brill Building sound. Even though they weren't based in the actual Brill Building, which was at 1619 Broadway, but in 1650 Broadway, the companies in that second building were so associated with the Brill Building sound that you'll find almost every history of music misattributes them and places them there, and in most interviews, when you see people talking about the Brill Building, even people who worked in one or other building, they're as likely to be talking about 1650 as 1619. Kirshner is someone we've met briefly before. He'd started out as a songwriter, working with his friend Bobby Darin on songs like "I Want Elvis For Christmas", which had been recorded by the Holly Twins with Eddie Cochran impersonating Elvis: [Excerpt: The Holly Twins and Eddie Cochran, "I Want Elvis For Christmas"] However, as Darin had moved into performance, Kirshner had gone into music publishing. He'd scored early success when working for Vanderbilt Music by bringing Al Lewis out of retirement. Lewis had been a hit songwriter in the thirties and forties, but hadn't done much for a while. But then Fats Domino had had a hit with "Blueberry Hill", a song Lewis had cowritten decades earlier, and Kirshner decided to pair Lewis with a black musician, Sylvester Bradford, and the two started writing hits together, notably "Tears on My Pillow" for Little Anthony and the Imperials: [Excerpt: Little Anthony and the Imperials, "Tears on My Pillow"] Kirshner had then formed his own publishing company. He'd first approached Pomus and Shuman, and then Leiber and Stoller, to go into business with him, but he ended up with Al Nevins, who had been a musician and had also co-written "Twilight Time" with Buck Ram, which had been a hit in the forties and then later revived by the Platters: [Excerpt: The Platters, "Twilight Time"] Kirshner and Nevins were looking for talented new songwriters, and they had signed up Sedaka and Greenfield, and also signed Paul Simon around this time, as well as another couple, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill. When Carole King played them a few of the songs she'd co-written with Goffin, they signed Goffin and King to a three-year contract, with advances of one thousand dollars for the first year, two thousand for the second, and three thousand for the third, to be offset against their royalties. This was a fortune for the young couple, and so they went from soul-crushing day jobs to... a day job, working in a cubicle. Aldon had a very regimented system. Every writing team had a tiny cubicle, containing a piano and a couple of chairs, in which they would work during normal office hours. Kirshner's system was simple -- any time any new act had a hit, he would get all the songwriters in his office to try to write a follow-up to the hit, in the same style. Of the efforts to find a follow-up to "Tonight's the Night", Kirshner decided on one that Goffin and King had written. "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?" had lyrics that had rather more depth than most of the songs that were charting at the time. Goffin's initial dislike of rock and roll music had been because of what he perceived as its lyrical vacuity, and in "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?" he found a lyrical formula that would define girl groups from that point on -- a look at a kind of female adolescent emotion that had previously not been discussed in pop music. In this case the lyrics were from the point of view of a woman worrying that she's just a one-night stand, not someone the man cares about, and struck a chord with millions. But King's music is at least as impressive. She modelled the song on "There Goes My Baby", and when Luther Dixon accepted the song for the Shirelles, she decided she would write a string arrangement for it like the one the Drifters had used. She'd never written for an orchestra before, so she got a book on arrangement out of the library, and looked through it quickly before writing the string arrangement overnight. The group didn't like the song, thinking it sounded like a country song, but Luther Dixon insisted, and the result went to number one: [Excerpt: The Shirelles, "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?"] The B-side to that single, a Luther Dixon song called "Boys", would also become a well-known track itself: [Excerpt: The Shirelles, "Boys"] Two more top ten hits followed, and then the group's singles started doing less well again. To reverse the downward trend, Dixon brought in a song by another new writer, Burt Bacharach. Bacharach had written a song with Mack David -- the brother of his usual lyricist Hal David -- called "I'll Cherish You". Dixon liked the song, but thought the lyrics were a bit too sickly. He changed the lyrics around, making them instead about someone who still loves her boyfriend despite her friends telling her how bad he is, and retitling it "Baby It's You". For the record itself, he just used Bacharach's original demo and stuck Shirley's voice on top -- Shirley was the only member of the group to sing on the record, though it was still released as by the Shirelles. You can still hear Bacharach singing on the "sha la la"s: [Excerpt: The Shirelles, "Baby It's You"] That returned them to the top ten, and the follow-up, "Soldier Boy", written by Dixon and Greenberg, became their second number one. Unfortunately, it would be their last. Dixon and Greenberg ended their relationship, and Dixon went on to a new job at Capitol Records. Various other people produced recordings for the Shirelles at Scepter, but none had the same success with them that Dixon did. It didn't help that the girls were starting families, and at various times one or other member had to be replaced on the road while they were on maternity leave. The singer who replaced them for those shows was a session singer who Bacharach was producing for Scepter, named Dionne Warwick. To make matters worse, the Shirelles discovered that Greenberg had been lying to them. They'd been told that their royalties were being put into a trust for them, for when they turned twenty-one, but they discovered that no such trust existed, and Greenberg had just been keeping their money. They entered into lawsuits against Scepter, but remained signed to the label, and so couldn't record for anyone else. Their career was destroyed. They remained together in one lineup or another, with members coming and going, until the early eighties, when they all went their separate ways, though they all started their own lineups of Shirelles. These days Shirley tours under her married name as Shirley Alston Reeves and Her Shirelles, while Beverly Lee owns the rights to tour as The Shirelles with no modifiers. Addie Harris died in 1982, and Doris Coley in 2000. The Shirelles were badly treated by their record company, and by history. They made some of the most important records of the sixties, and it was their success that led to the great boom in girl groups of the next few years -- the Supremes, the Marvelettes, the Crystals, the Ronettes, and the rest, all were following in the Shirelles' footsteps. Because they had their greatest success in that period between 1958 and 1964 which most rock historians treat as having nothing of interest in, they're almost ignored despite their huge influence on the musicians who followed them. But without them, the sound of sixties pop would have been vastly different, and to this day their greatest records sound as fresh and inspiring as the day they were recorded.

Episode eighty-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” by the Shirelles, and at the beginnings of the Brill Building sound. 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 “Tom Dooley” by the Kingston Trio. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. There are no biographies of the Shirelles in print, so I’ve used a variety of sources, including the articles on the Shirelles and Luther Dixon at This Is My Story. The following books were also of some use: A Natural Woman is Carole King’s autobiography. Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era by Ken Emerson is a good overview of the whole scene. Girl Groups by John Clemente contains potted biographies of many groups of the era. And Here Comes The Night: The Dark Soul of Bert Berns and the Dirty Business of Rhythm and Blues by Joel Selvin goes into some detail about Scepter Records. I also referred to the liner notes of this CD, which contains most of the Shirelles tracks worth owning.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?   Transcript   We’re currently in a patch of rock and roll history that is ludicrously undocumented. There is book after book about the major stars of the early rock and roll era — while you won’t find much out there on a lot of truly important artists, you can find out enough about Elvis and Ray Charles and Johnny Cash and Little Richard and Chuck Berry and the rest — these are all romantic figures of legend, the Titans who were defeated in the Titanomachy that was the mid-sixties Beat boom. And of course, there are many many, books on almost every band of the mid to late sixties to even have a minor hit. But the period from 1958 through 1964 is generally summed up by “and there were some whitebread nonentities like Fabian and Frankie Avalon”. Occasionally, in some of the books, there is a slightly more subtle approach taken, and the summary is “there were some whitebread nonentities like Fabian and Frankie Avalon, and also Roy Orbison and one or two others made a decent record”. But there were many other people making great records — people who made hits that are still staples of oldies radio in a way that a lot of records from a few years later aren’t; records that still sound like they’re fresh new records made by people who have ideas. Today we’re going to talk about a few of those people, and about one of those great records. We’re going to look at the Brill Building, and some of the songwriters who worked there, and at the great record producer Luther Dixon, and at the Shirelles, and their record “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?”: [Excerpt: The Shirelles, “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?”] It’s been a little while since we looked at any of the early girl groups, but if you remember the episodes on the Bobettes and the Chantels, girl groups in the early years were largely a phenomenon based in New York, and that’s more or less the case with the Shirelles, who didn’t come from New York itself, but from Passaic New Jersey, about sixteen miles away. Shirley Owens, Doris Coley, Addie Harris and Beverly Lee met at school, and formed a group called the Poquellos, which is apparently Spanish for “little birds”. As we’ve discussed previously, most of the early doo-wop groups were named after birds, and these girls were forming their group before girl groups became regarded as something separate from male vocal groups. Oddly, the group that became the most successful of the early girl groups, and the one that more than any other set the template for all those that would follow, never wanted to become professional singers, and almost had to be forced against their will at every stage. Their first public performance, in fact, was as a punishment. They had been singing with each other in gym class, and not paying attention to the teacher, and so the teacher told them that, as a punishment, they would have to perform in the school talent contest, which they didn’t want to do. They performed at the show, singing a song they’d made up themselves, “I Met Him on a Sunday”, and went down a storm with the kids at the school. In particular, one of the girls there, Mary Jane Greenberg, insisted that the girls come and meet her mother, Florence. Florence Greenberg was a bored suburban housewife, who until her mid-forties had concentrated on being a homemaker for her husband, who was an executive at a potato chip firm, and for her two children. In her spare time she mostly did things like run fundraisers for the local Republican party. But her son was interested in getting into the music business in some way, and her husband was friends with Freddy Bienstock, who worked for Hill and Range at the Brill Building, and whose job was choosing the songs that Elvis Presley would record. Bienstock invited Greenberg to come and visit him at Hill and Range’s offices, and after spending a little time around the Brill Building, Greenberg became convinced that she should start her own record label, despite having no experience in the field whatsoever. She would often just go and hang around at a restaurant near the Brill Building to soak in the atmosphere. The Poquellos were actually not at all interested in making a record, but Mary Jane kept insisting that they should meet with her mother anyway. It got to the point that the girls used to try to avoid her at school and hide from her, but she was insistent and eventually they relented, and went to see Mrs Greenberg. They auditioned for her in her front room, singing the same song they’d performed at the school talent contest. Mrs Greenberg decided that they were going to be the first group signed to her new label, Tiara Records, and they recorded the song they’d written, with Greenberg’s musical son Stan producing and arranging, under the name Stan Green: [Excerpt: The Shirelles, “I Met Him On A Sunday (Ronde Ronde)”] Stan wasn’t the only person with a new name. The Poquellos were also renamed, to the Shirelles — after Shirley Owens, but with the “el” ending to be reminiscent of the Chantels, and that was the name they would be known by from that point on. “I Met Him On A Sunday” was a minor local success, and was picked up by Decca Records, who bought the girls’ contract out from Greenberg. They managed to get it to number fifty on the charts, but the two singles they recorded for Decca after that didn’t have any success, and the label dropped them. That might have been the end of the Shirelles, but Greenberg had remained their manager, and she had started up a new record label, Scepter Records, and signed them up to that instead of Tiara. Their first few singles for Scepter did nothing, but then a change in Scepter’s staffing changed everything, not just for the Shirelles, but for the world of music. Greenberg was not a particularly musical person — and indeed several of the people who worked for her would later mock some decisions she’d made when she’d used her own judgment about songs. But she surrounded herself with people who were musical. The director of A&R for Scepter was Wally Roker, who had originally been the bass singer in the Heartbeats, who’d had a top five hit with “A Thousand Miles Away” in 1956: [Excerpt: The Heartbeats, “A Thousand Miles Away”] Roker in turn introduced Greenberg to a friend of his, Luther Dixon. Greenberg and Dixon’s initial meeting was just the length of one elevator ride, but that was long enough for them to exchange numbers and arrange to meet again. Soon Dixon was working for Greenberg at Scepter, and was also her lover. Dixon had started out as a singer, joining a minor group called The Buddies, who had recorded singles like “I Stole Your Heart”: [Excerpt: The Buddies, “I Stole Your Heart”] But he had soon moved into songwriting. Dixon was a collaborator by nature, and his first big hit was written with a writing partner called Larry Harrison. “Why Baby Why” went to number five for Pat Boone in 1957: [Excerpt: Pat Boone, “Why Baby Why”] He spent some time writing with Otis Blackwell, with whom he wrote “All the Way Home” for Bobby Darin: [Excerpt: Bobby Darin, “All the Way Home”] And at the time he met Greenberg, he had just written “Sixteen Candles” with Allyson Khent, a number two hit for the Crests: [Excerpt: The Crests, “Sixteen Candles”] Greenberg took him on as a staff writer and producer, and gave him a cut of the publishing rights for his songs — almost unheard of at that time. The first record he worked on for the Shirelles was also the group’s first top forty hit. With Shirley Owens, Dixon wrote “Tonight’s the Night”. It was intended as a B-side to a song with a lead by Doris, but “Tonight’s the Night” was an unexpected success and established Shirley firmly in the role of the group’s lead singer: [Excerpt: The Shirelles, “Tonight’s the Night”] That went to number thirty-nine, and a competing version by the Chiffons also made the Hot One Hundred: [Excerpt: The Chiffons, “Tonight’s the Night”] The Shirelles were a hit group, and they needed a follow-up. And that’s where Goffin and King enter our story… Carole King had, from a very early age, been a child prodigy with a particular talent for music. In her autobiography she talks about how when she was a child, her dad would have her, as a party trick, turn to the wall while he played notes on the piano and she called out which one he was playing. Apparently her father would claim she had perfect pitch, and this was not quite true — she had relative pitch, which meant that once she heard one note she knew, she could tell all the rest of the notes from that, so her father would always start with middle C. But that sense of relative pitch is in itself an amazing talent for a tiny child — I still can’t do that with any great accuracy in my forties, and I’ve spent most of my life studying and playing music. By the age of eight she had appeared in a couple of shows, including Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour, which was a nationally broadcast show, performing in a duo with a friend, but she didn’t know exactly what it was she wanted to do until she was thirteen, when she went on a date with Joel Zwick, who would later become known as the director of My Big Fat Greek Wedding among others — one thing that seems to happen a lot in King’s early life is getting to know people who would go on to become very successful. Zwick took her to an Alan Freed show at the Paramount in Brooklyn, where she saw LaVern Baker, BB King, Mickey Baker, the Moonglows, and several other R&B stars of the period. It wasn’t, though, seeing the musicians themselves that made Carol Klein, as she then was, want to go into rock and roll music, though that was certainly an inspiration, and she talks a lot about how that Freed show was her introduction to a whole world of music that was far from the whitebread pop on which she had grown up. Rather, it was almost a chance event. She and her date hung around the stage door to see if they could see any of the performers and get autographs. The group they were in accidentally got drawn in through the stage door when some people who were meant to be there were let in, and she got to see the performers hanging around backstage. She knew then, not that she wanted to be a performer herself, but that she wanted to be part of that world, someone that those performers knew and respected. She started attending a stage school, where one of her classmates was Al Pacino, but after a short while she left, deciding that she wasn’t cut out for the non-musical aspects of the school, and went back to a normal high school, where she formed her first group, the Cosines. along with Zwick. She started writing songs when she heard a group from a rival local high school, Neil Sedaka and the Linc-Tones, singing a song called “While I Dream”: [Excerpt: The Tokens “While I Dream”] Sedaka had briefly dated her, and had co-written that song himself, with Howard Greenfield, and his group got a record deal under the name The Tokens. King figured that if he could do that, so could she. She started writing songs, and found she was good at melodies but not particularly great at lyrics. But she still thought she was good enough to do something. She decided that she was going to go and see Alan Freed, and play him some of her songs. Freed listened to her politely, and explained to her how, at the time, one went about becoming a professional songwriter for the R&B market. He told her to get the addresses of record labels from the phone book, go and try to play her songs to them, and explained how a publishing contract would work. The record label he mentioned to her specifically was Atlantic Records, so she tried that one first. Jerry Wexler and Ahmet Ertegun listened to her, and told her she had talent and to come back when she had more songs. It wasn’t a rejection, but it wasn’t the instant acceptance she’d hoped for. The second label she went to was ABC-Paramount, where she saw Don Costa. Costa was head of A&R at the label, but also a musician himself. Around this time he had released a cover version of Bill Justis’ “Raunchy”, under the name Muvva Guitar Hubbard: [Excerpt: Muvva “Guitar” Hubbard, “Raunchy”] Costa would later go on to arrange and conduct for Frank Sinatra, and he also had a respectable career as a session guitarist, but Carol didn’t know any of this when she went into his office and played through her songs for him. She was flabbergasted to find that, rather than just sign her to a publishing contract, he asked her to sign a recording contract as well. She was disappointed that he wasn’t interested in signing the rest of her group — he thought she was good enough by herself, without needing to hear the other three — but not so disappointed that she didn’t sign with him straight away. Her first few singles were solo compositions, and didn’t do very much in terms of sales, partly because she still didn’t consider herself especially good as a lyricist: [Excerpt: Carole King, “The Right Girl”] So while she was trying to have a music career, she also went off to college, aged sixteen — she had skipped multiple years in school — where she met someone else who had had a minor hit. The boy who performed under the name Jerry Landis had released “Hey! Schoolgirl”, an Everly Brothers knockoff, with a friend, as Tom and Jerry: [Excerpt: Tom and Jerry, “Hey! Schoolgirl”] Landis and King started working together, recording demos for other writers, though never writing together. For some of those demos, they re-used the Cosines name, like on this one for a song by Marty Kalfin: [Excerpt: The Cosines, “Just to Be With You”] They were quite proud when the arrangement they came up with for that demo was copied exactly for the finished record, which made the lower regions of the Hot One Hundred: [Excerpt: The Passions, “Just to Be With You”] They didn’t work together for very long, and Jerry Landis went on to record under other names like “True Taylor” and “Paul Kane”, before getting back together with Tom, and deciding to work together under their real names. We’ll be hearing more of Paul Simon and his partner Art Garfunkel in future episodes. Someone else she met while at college was the man who was to become her first husband, another Gerry — Gerry Goffin. Goffin impressed her with his looks the first time she saw him — he looked exactly like a drawing she had clipped out of a magazine, which looked to her like the perfect boyfriend. Goffin impressed her less, though, with his studied dislike of rock and roll music, but was suddenly keen to write a song with her when she mentioned that she’d been selling songs. He’d been trying to write a musical, but he was primarily a lyricist, and couldn’t do much with music. King mentioned that she knew that Atlantic were looking for a new song for Mickey and Sylvia, and the two of them worked on a song based on the style of “Love is Strange”, which they completed very quickly, and took to Atlantic. Unfortunately, when they got there, they were told that Mickey and Sylvia had split up, but that their song would be suitable for the new duo they’d put together to continue the act — Mickey and Kitty: [Excerpt: Mickey and Kitty, “The Kid Brother”] That was released as a B-side. The A-side, “Ooh Sha La La” was written by Neil Sedaka and Howie Greenfield: [Excerpt: MIckey and Kitty, “Ooh Sha La La”] Sedaka and Greenfield had become hot songwriters, and around this time Sedaka was also becoming a successful performer. His first hit as a performer, “Oh Carol”, was in fact written about Carole King: [Excerpt: Neil Sedaka, “Oh Carol”] And King herself recorded an answer record to that, with new lyrics by Goffin: [Excerpt: Carole King, “Oh Neil”] By the time she was seventeen, King was married to Goffin, and pregnant with his child. Goffin was working a day job, and they were treating the occasional twenty-five dollar advance they got from writing songs as windfalls. But then, when she was on one of her visits to 1650 Broadway to sell songs, King bumped into Sedaka, who told her she should come and meet Al Nevins and Don Kirshner, the owners of Aldon Music. Aldon is the publisher who, more than any single other company, was responsible for what became known as the Brill Building sound. Even though they weren’t based in the actual Brill Building, which was at 1619 Broadway, but in 1650 Broadway, the companies in that second building were so associated with the Brill Building sound that you’ll find almost every history of music misattributes them and places them there, and in most interviews, when you see people talking about the Brill Building, even people who worked in one or other building, they’re as likely to be talking about 1650 as 1619. Kirshner is someone we’ve met briefly before. He’d started out as a songwriter, working with his friend Bobby Darin on songs like “I Want Elvis For Christmas”, which had been recorded by the Holly Twins with Eddie Cochran impersonating Elvis: [Excerpt: The Holly Twins and Eddie Cochran, “I Want Elvis For Christmas”] However, as Darin had moved into performance, Kirshner had gone into music publishing. He’d scored early success when working for Vanderbilt Music by bringing Al Lewis out of retirement. Lewis had been a hit songwriter in the thirties and forties, but hadn’t done much for a while. But then Fats Domino had had a hit with “Blueberry Hill”, a song Lewis had cowritten decades earlier, and Kirshner decided to pair Lewis with a black musician, Sylvester Bradford, and the two started writing hits together, notably “Tears on My Pillow” for Little Anthony and the Imperials: [Excerpt: Little Anthony and the Imperials, “Tears on My Pillow”] Kirshner had then formed his own publishing company. He’d first approached Pomus and Shuman, and then Leiber and Stoller, to go into business with him, but he ended up with Al Nevins, who had been a musician and had also co-written “Twilight Time” with Buck Ram, which had been a hit in the forties and then later revived by the Platters: [Excerpt: The Platters, “Twilight Time”] Kirshner and Nevins were looking for talented new songwriters, and they had signed up Sedaka and Greenfield, and also signed Paul Simon around this time, as well as another couple, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill. When Carole King played them a few of the songs she’d co-written with Goffin, they signed Goffin and King to a three-year contract, with advances of one thousand dollars for the first year, two thousand for the second, and three thousand for the third, to be offset against their royalties. This was a fortune for the young couple, and so they went from soul-crushing day jobs to… a day job, working in a cubicle. Aldon had a very regimented system. Every writing team had a tiny cubicle, containing a piano and a couple of chairs, in which they would work during normal office hours. Kirshner’s system was simple — any time any new act had a hit, he would get all the songwriters in his office to try to write a follow-up to the hit, in the same style. Of the efforts to find a follow-up to “Tonight’s the Night”, Kirshner decided on one that Goffin and King had written. “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” had lyrics that had rather more depth than most of the songs that were charting at the time. Goffin’s initial dislike of rock and roll music had been because of what he perceived as its lyrical vacuity, and in “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” he found a lyrical formula that would define girl groups from that point on — a look at a kind of female adolescent emotion that had previously not been discussed in pop music. In this case the lyrics were from the point of view of a woman worrying that she’s just a one-night stand, not someone the man cares about, and struck a chord with millions. But King’s music is at least as impressive. She modelled the song on “There Goes My Baby”, and when Luther Dixon accepted the song for the Shirelles, she decided she would write a string arrangement for it like the one the Drifters had used. She’d never written for an orchestra before, so she got a book on arrangement out of the library, and looked through it quickly before writing the string arrangement overnight. The group didn’t like the song, thinking it sounded like a country song, but Luther Dixon insisted, and the result went to number one: [Excerpt: The Shirelles, “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?”] The B-side to that single, a Luther Dixon song called “Boys”, would also become a well-known track itself: [Excerpt: The Shirelles, “Boys”] Two more top ten hits followed, and then the group’s singles started doing less well again. To reverse the downward trend, Dixon brought in a song by another new writer, Burt Bacharach. Bacharach had written a song with Mack David — the brother of his usual lyricist Hal David — called “I’ll Cherish You”. Dixon liked the song, but thought the lyrics were a bit too sickly. He changed the lyrics around, making them instead about someone who still loves her boyfriend despite her friends telling her how bad he is, and retitling it “Baby It’s You”. For the record itself, he just used Bacharach’s original demo and stuck Shirley’s voice on top — Shirley was the only member of the group to sing on the record, though it was still released as by the Shirelles. You can still hear Bacharach singing on the “sha la la”s: [Excerpt: The Shirelles, “Baby It’s You”] That returned them to the top ten, and the follow-up, “Soldier Boy”, written by Dixon and Greenberg, became their second number one. Unfortunately, it would be their last. Dixon and Greenberg ended their relationship, and Dixon went on to a new job at Capitol Records. Various other people produced recordings for the Shirelles at Scepter, but none had the same success with them that Dixon did. It didn’t help that the girls were starting families, and at various times one or other member had to be replaced on the road while they were on maternity leave. The singer who replaced them for those shows was a session singer who Bacharach was producing for Scepter, named Dionne Warwick. To make matters worse, the Shirelles discovered that Greenberg had been lying to them. They’d been told that their royalties were being put into a trust for them, for when they turned twenty-one, but they discovered that no such trust existed, and Greenberg had just been keeping their money. They entered into lawsuits against Scepter, but remained signed to the label, and so couldn’t record for anyone else. Their career was destroyed. They remained together in one lineup or another, with members coming and going, until the early eighties, when they all went their separate ways, though they all started their own lineups of Shirelles. These days Shirley tours under her married name as Shirley Alston Reeves and Her Shirelles, while Beverly Lee owns the rights to tour as The Shirelles with no modifiers. Addie Harris died in 1982, and Doris Coley in 2000. The Shirelles were badly treated by their record company, and by history. They made some of the most important records of the sixties, and it was their success that led to the great boom in girl groups of the next few years — the Supremes, the Marvelettes, the Crystals, the Ronettes, and the rest, all were following in the Shirelles’ footsteps. Because they had their greatest success in that period between 1958 and 1964 which most rock historians treat as having nothing of interest in, they’re almost ignored despite their huge influence on the musicians who followed them. But without them, the sound of sixties pop would have been vastly different, and to this day their greatest records sound as fresh and inspiring as the day they were recorded.

Episode eighty-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” by the Shirelles, and at the beginnings of the Brill Building sound. 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 “Tom Dooley” by the Kingston Trio. 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…)