Episodes

6d ago

This episode, we look at the song “Many Rivers to Cross”, the birth of reggae, and the career of the late Jimmy Cliff. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a sixty-seven-minute bonus episode available, on “Return of Django” by the Upsetters . Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by editing, 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…)

Nov 3

This episode, we look at the song “Proud Mary” and the brief but productive career of Creedence Clearwater Revival. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a forty-four-minute bonus episode available, on “Mendocino” by the Sir Douglas Quintet . Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by editing, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ . ERRATUM: Three times early on I talk about a 1940s label called Concord Records. That’s meant to be Coronet Records — Concord Records is the label that *bought* Fantasy Records in the early twenty-first century, Coronet Records is the label that *became* Fantasy Records. (more…)

Sep 30

For those who haven’t heard the announcement I posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the first part of a two-episode look at the song “Dazed and Confused” by Led Zeppelin, although this episode doesn’t get as far as Led Zeppelin’s formation, and is mostly about the intertwining session careers of John Paul Jones and (especially) Jimmy Page. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a thirty-eight minute bonus episode available, on “Jim’s Blues” by P.J. Proby . Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by editing, 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…)

Aug 24

For those who haven’t heard the announcement I posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the first part of a two-episode look at the song “Dazed and Confused” by Led Zeppelin, although this episode doesn’t get as far as Led Zeppelin’s formation, and is mostly about the intertwining session careers of John Paul Jones and (especially) Jimmy Page. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a thirty-five minute bonus episode available, on “Boom-Bang-a-Bang” by Lulu . Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by editing, 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…)

Jul 26

Erratum: At one point here I say “Cannonball Adderley” when I mean “Nat Adderley”. This episode is part of Pledge Week 2025. For five days this week, I will be posting old Patreon bonus episodes to the main feed to encourage people to subscribe to my Patreon. If you want more of these, and only if you can afford it, subscribe for $1 a month at patreon.com/andrewhickey . Whether you do or not, I hope you enjoy this one. (more…)

Jul 25

This episode is part of Pledge Week 2025. For five days this week, I will be posting old Patreon bonus episodes to the main feed to encourage people to subscribe to my Patreon. If you want more of these, and only if you can afford it, subscribe for $1 a month at patreon.com/andrewhickey . Whether you do or not, I hope you enjoy this one. (more…)

Jul 24

This episode is part of Pledge Week 2025. For five days this week, I will be posting old Patreon bonus episodes to the main feed to encourage people to subscribe to my Patreon. If you want more of these, and only if you can afford it, subscribe for $1 a month at patreon.com/andrewhickey . Whether you do or not, I hope you enjoy this one. (more…)

Jul 23

This episode is part of Pledge Week 2025. For five days this week, I will be posting old Patreon bonus episodes to the main feed to encourage people to subscribe to my Patreon. If you want more of these, and only if you can afford it, subscribe for $1 a month at patreon.com/andrewhickey . Whether you do or not, I hope you enjoy this one. (more…)

Jul 22

This episode is part of Pledge Week 2025. For five days this week, I will be posting old Patreon bonus episodes to the main feed to encourage people to subscribe to my Patreon. If you want more of these, and only if you can afford it, subscribe for $1 a month at patreon.com/andrewhickey . Whether you do or not, I hope you enjoy this one. (more…)

Jul 22

Transcript It’s that time of year again, the time that regular listeners have come to know as Pledge Week, where for five days (this time from Tuesday through Saturday, because I had a migraine yesterday when I should have been recording this intro) I post five old Patreon bonus episodes to the main feed as a way of persuading some of you to sign up to become Patreon backers. I say at the end of every episode that every week there’s a ten-minute bonus episode, and that’s no longer completely true (and I’ll be refreshing the outro on the podcast soon to acknowledge that). Instead there’s at least one bonus for every main episode, plus other ones as frequently as I can release them, which seems to average about once a fortnight overall. But the bonuses are also a lot longer than ten minutes now — at the shortest they tend to be twenty minutes, and some of them can stretch to ninety minutes or longer. And you can get access to all of them — around two hundred currently available, plus new ones — for one dollar a month at patreon.com/andrewhickey . You could, if you wanted, sign up, pay your one dollar, download the two hundred or so episodes that are there, and then cancel. Though obviously I’d prefer you stick around a while. As always when I do this though I want to make something clear — while Patreon is the only way I make my living, and my Patreon supporters are the only way I am able to keep doing what I’m doing, I do not want you to sign up to my Patreon if you are short of money yourself. I am currently making a very comfortable living — I could always do with more, and I need to do these pledge weeks every so often to keep the numbers up, but if you don’t have any spare cash I do not want anyone going short to support my work. But if, after paying your own bills, helping out loved ones, supporting charities and good causes, and putting something away in savings, you still have a dollar a month left over (and it’s completely understandable if you don’t), then I think there are worse things you could do with that dollar than support me at patreon.com/andrewhickey . And if you don’t have a spare dollar left over after all that, then please continue listening to the main podcast for free, and maybe tell just one friend about it. I’ll be back in a week or so with the next main episode, on a band a lot of people have been looking forward to hearing about.

Jul 18

This episode, we look at the song “Kick Out the Jams” by the MC5, and the brief career of the most revolutionary guitar band of the sixties. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. As explained in the episode itself, it would be impossible to do this episode without using one particular Oedipal epithet, but use of that term would lose this podcast its clean rating. Therefore this is a censored version of the episode, with the many, many, many uses of that word replaced. Patreon backers have access to an uncensored version , if you want to hear me say a lot of swear words. Patreon backers also have a twenty-four-minute bonus episode available, on “Get Together” by the Youngbloods . Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by editing, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ . Also, thanks to Mia Murch for checking the final version and making sure no expletives were left in. (more…)

Jun 23

For those who haven’t heard the announcement I posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the second part of a two-episode look at the song “Who Knows Where The Time Goes?” by Fairport Convention, and the intertwining careers of Joe Boyd, Sandy Denny, and Richard Thompson. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a forty-one-minute bonus episode available, on Judy Collins’ version of this song . Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by editing, 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…)

May 16

For those who haven’t heard the announcement I posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the first part of a two-episode look at the song “Who Knows Where The Time Goes?” by Fairport Convention, and the intertwining careers of Joe Boyd, Sandy Denny, and Richard Thompson. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-seven-minute bonus episode available, on “Baby It’s You” by Smith . 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…)

Mar 22

For those who haven’t heard the announcement I posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the third and final (and very, very long) part of a multi-episode look at the song “Never Learn Not to Love” by the Beach Boys, and the links between Charles Manson and the LA music scene, as well as the life of Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ninety-minute bonus episode available, on “The Letter” by the Box Tops and the career of Alex Chilton . I’ve also started up an email newsletter at https://it-was-ninety-years-ago-today.ghost.io/ . I took a temporary break from that while finishing this episode, as it became much, much longer than I expected, but I will be resuming it shortly. 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…)

Jan 31

For those who haven’t heard the announcement I posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the third part of a multi-episode look at the song “Never Learn Not to Love” by the Beach Boys, and the links between Charles Manson and the LA music scene, as well as the life of Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a forty-eight-minute bonus episode available, on “ Fruit Tree” by Nick Drake . I’ve also started up an email newsletter at https://it-was-ninety-years-ago-today.ghost.io/ 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…)

Dec 16, 2024

For those who haven’t heard the announcement I posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the second part of a multi-episode look at the song “Never Learn Not to Love” by the Beach Boys, and the links between Charles Manson and the LA music scene. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. This one is later than normal, for reasons explained in the episode. The next one should be up much sooner. Patreon backers also have a twenty-five-minute bonus episode available, on “Israelites” by Desmond Dekker . 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…)

Dec 10, 2024

This is just to let people know that there is a better than usual reason for the longer than normal delay in the next episode. I was about to record it early last week, when checking a minor detail I discovered a book published this year, after I’d bought the books I used for the research, which showed that everything in the first half of the episode — everything that had been published in every book on Huddie Ledbetter, who is the focus of that first half — was badly mistaken. I had to totally scrap a completed script and redo the research from scratch. I start recording tomorrow and it should be up in a few days. I think you’ll agree when you hear it that it’s worth the extra time it ended up taking.

Nov 19, 2024

For those who haven’t heard the announcement I posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the first part of a multi-episode look at the song “Never Learn Not to Love” by the Beach Boys, and the links between Charles Manson and the LA music scene. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifty-five-minute bonus episode available, on “Light Flight” by Pentangle 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…)

Oct 17, 2024

For those who haven’t heard the announcement I posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the fourth and final part of a multi-episode look at the song “Sympathy for the Devil” and the career of the Rolling Stones. This episode covers January through December 1969, and may distress some listeners as it deals with murder, drowning, attempted suicide, and miscarriage. It’s not a happy episode. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-two-minute bonus episode, on “La Conferencia Secreta del Toto’s Bar” by Los Shakers . 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…)

Sep 22, 2024

For those who haven’t heard the announcement I posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the third part of a multi-episode look at the song “Sympathy for the Devil” and the career of the Rolling Stones. This episode covers so much though , even though it only takes us from February 1967 through December 1968, that by itself it is one of the longer episodes of the podcast (hence the longer-than-usual delay between parts two and three). Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifty-minute bonus episode, on “I Think it’s Going to Rain Today” by Randy Newman . 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…)

Aug 19, 2024

For those who haven’t heard the announcement I posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the second part of a multi-episode look at the song “Sympathy for the Devil” and the career of the Rolling Stones. This episode takes us from April 1966 through to the release of “Let’s Spend the Night Together”/”Ruby Tuesday” Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a half-hour bonus episode, on “Laurel Canyon Home” by John Mayall . 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…)

Aug 1, 2024

For those who haven’t heard the announcement I posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the first part of a multi-episode look at the song “Sympathy for the Devil” and the career of the Rolling Stones. This episode takes us from the release of “Satisfaction” through to the release of “Paint it Black”. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a nineteen-minute bonus episode, on “Amen Brother” by the Winstons . 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…)

Jul 13, 2024

This episode is part of Pledge Week 2024. From Tuesday through Saturday this week I’m posting some of my old Patreon bonuses to the main feed, as a taste of what Patreon backers get. If you enjoy them, why not subscribe for a dollar a month at patreon.com/andrewhickey ? (more…)

Jul 12, 2024

This episode is part of Pledge Week 2024. From Tuesday through Saturday this week I’m posting some of my old Patreon bonuses to the main feed, as a taste of what Patreon backers get. If you enjoy them, why not subscribe for a dollar a month at patreon.com/andrewhickey ? (more…)

Jul 11, 2024

This episode is part of Pledge Week 2024. From Tuesday through Saturday this week I’m posting some of my old Patreon bonuses to the main feed, as a taste of what Patreon backers get. If you enjoy them, why not subscribe for a dollar a month at patreon.com/andrewhickey ? (more…)

Jul 10, 2024

This episode is part of Pledge Week 2024. From Tuesday through Saturday this week I’m posting some of my old Patreon bonuses to the main feed, as a taste of what Patreon backers get. If you enjoy them, why not subscribe for a dollar a month at patreon.com/andrewhickey ? (more…)

Jul 9, 2024

This episode is part of Pledge Week 2024. From Tuesday through Saturday this week I’m posting some of my old Patreon bonuses to the main feed, as a taste of what Patreon backers get. If you enjoy them, why not subscribe for a dollar a month at patreon.com/andrewhickey ? (more…)

Jul 8, 2024

An announcement of this year’s pledge week. To sign up to the Patreon, visit http://patreon.com/andrewhickey Transcript Welcome to Pledge Week 2024. For those who don’t know — perhaps you’ve only recently started listening to the podcast — this podcast is entirely funded by people backing me on Patreon, the crowdfunding site, and so occasionally I’ll do a pledge week, where I remind people about this and encourage people to sign up. The main benefit you get for signing up to the Patreon, other than the knowledge that you’re supporting an independent creator, is bonus episodes. There’s one of these with every main episode, and sometimes random other ones as well. They’re shorter episodes than the main episodes — I say at the end of each main episode that they’re ten minutes, and that’s how they started out, but often in more recent years they’ve been twenty-five minutes or more, sometimes as long as an hour, as they’ve grown in the same way the main episodes have grown. These bonus episodes are about artists who for whatever reason don’t fit into the main narrative I’m telling. Sometimes they’re a massively important artist, but one who never interacted much with the rest of the music world and made their own path, and so they don’t feed into the larger story. Sometimes they’re an obscure artist who never had much success at the time but gained a cult following after their death. Sometimes they’re just a personal favourite of mine who I can’t really justify devoting a main episode to. Sometimes they’re someone who made great music but had a boring story that wouldn’t be worth spending a long time over, but I can tell the highlights, and sometimes they’re someone who made terrible music but had a fascinating story. And sometimes they’re people who I would cover in a main episode but who there’s simply not enough information about to tell the story in any detail. There are lots of reasons for artists being covered in the Patreon but some of the episodes I’ve done for that have been among my favourites. Anyway, anyone who signs up to the Patreon as a backer for $1 or more gets access to every single bonus episode I’ve done, and continues to get access to new ones as long as they’re a backer. Now I have to emphasise this time round that that is “for $1 or more”. For some reason known only to themselves, the people at Patreon recently decided it would be a good idea for their crowdfunding site which exists as a way for people to pay artists they want to support, if they put in a compulsory free tier on every account where you pay nothing, and to make that the default that people see. So if you sign up, you see “Sign up for free!” If you sign up for free you won’t get anything. But if you sign up for $1 a month, you’ll get somewhere in the region of two hundred bonus episodes — and if you want you can cancel right after you download them all, and you’ll have only paid one dollar. I won’t be annoyed at that — that’s the deal here. I know times are tough and sometimes a dollar is a lot. If you sign up for higher tiers, you get copies of most of my old books as ebooks, and new print books when they come out (though it’s been quite a while since a new book came out — the person who was proofing and indexing the next book based on the podcast got sick with long covid and I’ve been having to do that myself while doing my other work, but that should be out sooner rather than later, and you’ll get access to all the past ebooks straight away). People on all tiers also get occasional blog posts from me — gig reviews, occasional updates about my work process, and so on. But the main extra you get is the bonus podcasts. So for the next five days, tomorrow through Saturday, I’m going to post five of those bonus podcasts to the main feed, to give you a free taster of what these bonus episodes are like. If you like what you hear, you can sign up at patreon.com/andrewhickey — there’ll be a link on the blog post associated with this, as there is with all of the episodes. And one more thing I need to stress — *only sign up for the Patreon if you can afford it*. My listeners are currently very generous, and I am making a good income from this podcast now. I have to do these pledge weeks to keep the numbers up and make sure new listeners know what’s on offer, but I don’t want anyone to feel like they are under any obligation to pay me a penny. And times are tight enough that many people genuinely can’t afford even a dollar a month. But if, after you’ve paid your living expenses, helped out any needy friends, given to proper charities, put away something in savings, and all the other important uses for money, you do have a dollar a month or more left over, and you like the sound of the bonus episodes that will hit the feed this week, why not sign up to the Patreon? There’s a lot more where they came from.

Jul 2, 2024

For those who haven’t heard the announcement I posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the first part of a two-episode look at the song “Everyday People”. This episode looks at the whole career of Sly and the Family Stone, from their first rehearsal until today. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-five-minute bonus episode, on “Living in the Past” by Jethro Tull . 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…)

Jun 13, 2024

For those who haven’t heard the announcement I posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the first part of a two-episode look at the song “Everyday People”. This week we take a short look at the formation of Sly and the Family Stone, and in a week’s time we’ll look at the group’s career after they formed. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-five-minute bonus episode, on “Je T’Aime… Moi Non Plus” by Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin . 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…)

May 24, 2024

For those who haven’t heard the announcement I posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the second part of a two-episode look at the song “I Heard it Through the Grapevine”. This week we’re looking at the career of Marvin Gaye from 1963 through 1970, as well as his duet partners Mary Wells, Kim Weston, and Tammi Terrell, whose tragically short life comes with a great many content warnings. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-minute bonus episode, on “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” by Iron Butterfly And if you just can’t get enough of me talking, I’ve also guested this week, with Tilt and Gary from The Sitcom Club , on our friend Tyler’s podcast Goon Pod , talking about the 1974 film Man About The House. 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…)

May 7, 2024

For those who haven’t heard the announcement I posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the first part of a two-episode look at the song “I Heard it Through the Grapevine”. This week we take a short look at the song’s writers, Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong, and the first released version by Gladys Knight and the Pips. In two weeks time we’ll take a longer look at the sixties career of the song’s most famous performer, Marvin Gaye. This episode is quite a light one. That one… won’t be. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a half-hour bonus episode, on “Bend Me Shape Me” by Amen Corner . 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…)

May 3, 2024

Transcript The next proper episode will be up in a couple of days – I’m recording it tonight – but I just wanted to make a brief announcement. It has recently been brought to my attention that the French language podcast Un dernier disque avant la fin du monde has, for nearly two years, been making French-language versions of my podcast without giving me credit (the episodes before that don’t seem to be ripped off from me), and has been monetising them on Patreon – including making his own French-language versions of some of my Patreon bonuses. This is not a case of someone just taking inspiration from my work. It’s not someone doing episodes on the same songs and possibly leaning a little too heavily on me as a source. That kind of thing is forgivable. This is someone who has been doing word-for-word translations, without my permission, and without crediting me or even notifying me, and posting them as his own work. As far as my schoolboy French indicates he’s not even lightly paraphrasing. He clearly listens to my podcast, so I am going to give him until Monday to take all those episodes down and post an apology before I contact a lawyer. I’m posting this publicly so that anyone who has been listening to his show and wondering about the similarity, or listening in the belief I authorised his work, knows that this is the work of a plagiarist, not something I’ve endorsed in any way. And if anyone *wants* to do translated versions of my work, they can contact me and make proper arrangements. I put too much time and effort into my job to have someone pass my work off as theirs without a fight.

Apr 14, 2024

For those who haven’t heard the announcement I posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the second part of a two-episode look at the song “All Along the Watchtower”. Part one was on the original version by Bob Dylan, while this part is on Jimi Hendrix’s cover version. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a half-hour bonus episode, on “Games People Play” by Joe South . 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 mispronounce Ed Chalpin’s name as Halpin for most of the episode. And towards the end I say “January the 28th 1969” when I meant 1970 (more…)

Mar 25, 2024

For those who haven’t heard the announcement I posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the first of a two-episode look at the song “All Along the Watchtower”. This one is on the original version by Bob Dylan, while part two will be on Jimi Hendrix’s cover version. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a half-hour bonus episode, on “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” by Arlo Guthrie . 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…)

Mar 1, 2024

For those who haven’t heard the announcement I just posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the fourth and final part of a four-episode look at the Byrds in 1966-69 and the birth of country rock, this time mostly focused on what Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman did after leaving the band. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-minute bonus episode, on “The Dark End of the Street” by James Carr . 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…)

Feb 16, 2024

For those who haven’t heard the announcement I just posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the third part of a four-episode look at the Byrds in 1966-69 and the birth of country rock. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a half-hour bonus episode, on “Fire” by The Crazy World of Arthur Brown . 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…)

Feb 1, 2024

For those who haven’t heard the announcement I just posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the second part of a multi-episode look at the Byrds in 1966-69 and the birth of country rock. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a half-hour bonus episode, on “ With a Little Help From My Friends” by Joe Cocker . 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…)

Jan 17, 2024

For those who haven’t heard the announcement I just posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the first part of a multi-episode look at the Byrds in 1966-69 and the birth of country rock. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a half-hour bonus episode on “My World Fell Down” by Sagittarius . 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…)

Jan 17, 2024

This is just a brief announcement. The fact that I’ve released stuff so inconsistently over the last year, along with the last episode being so long that it actually caused problems for Tilt’s editing softwaere has caused me to reconsider how I’m breaking these episodes up. I have had very good reasons for making the episodes longer rather than doing multiple parts — we would have had episodes titled “White Light/White Heat”, “Eight Miles High”, and “Good Vibrations” which literally didn’t mention at all the bands they were ostensibly about, and people would have got very annoyed at listening to an episode supposedly about the Beach Boys and finding it was entirely about a Soviet inventor in the 1920s. But the balance has tipped the other way now. Things have got a bit ridiculous. So what I’m doing npw is I’m still writing the scripts the same way I always do, as one long narrative, but then once a script is finished I will break it into sections of about 5-10,000 words (somewhere in the 45-minute to ninety minute range) depending on where natural cliffhangers come, and I will release those parts fortnightly. There still might be gaps between the last part of the previous song and the first part of the next, but probably nothing like as long as they have been. The actual content will still be the same — just for example the Velvet Underground episode would have been split into three or four parts, with the first part ending with John Cale joining the story, and me saying “join us in two weeks time”. But it’ll be broken up into more manageable parts which hopefully won’t cause Tilt’s editing software to explode, and if you like listening to it all in one go you can just wait until the final part of that story and then listen to it all. So today you’re going to get, not ‘Episode 172, “Hickory Wind” by the Byrds’, but ‘SONG 172: “Hickory Wind” by the Byrds: Part 1, Ushering in a New Dimension”, and then Song 172 part two two weeks later. I want to emphasise that this will still be *exactly the same content* as it would otherwise be. The stories will go on as long as they need to. Some will be a single episode, some will be three or four. But breaking it up like this should mean you get more consistent releases and I can get ahead. Indeed, it *might* mean I could go back to weekly episodes — I’ve averaged somewhere in the region of thirty thousand words per month last year on the main podcast, which would be four seven-thousand-word episodes — but I won’t even think about that unless I start to actually build up a backlog. The stories should be getting shorter anyway as we finally move out of the late sixties, so the rate of storytelling *should* get faster, but this way at least you’re going to get regular episodes. So listen to today’s episode, and then join me again in precisely two weeks as Gram Parsons joins the story.

Dec 17, 2023

Episode 171 looks at “Hey Jude”, the White Album , and the career of the Beatles from August 1967 through November 1968. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifty-seven-minute bonus episode available, on “I Love You” by People! . 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…)

Nov 21, 2023

Episode 170 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Astral Weeks”, the early solo career of Van Morrison, and the death of Bert Berns. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a forty-minute bonus episode available, on “Stoned Soul Picnic” by Laura Nyro . 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…)

Oct 30, 2023

Episode 169 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Piece of My Heart” and the short, tragic life of Janis Joplin. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a half-hour bonus episode available, on “Spinning Wheel” by Blood, Sweat & Tears . 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…)

Sep 28, 2023

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/ Errat a I say the Gospelaires sang backing vocals on Doris Troy's "Just One Look". That's what the sources I used said, but other sources I've since been pointed to say that the vocals are all Troy, multi-tracked, and listening to the record that sounds more plausible. Also, I talk about ? and the Mysterians' "96 Tears" just after talking about white rock hits, but don't actually say they were white themselves. To be clear, ? and the Mysterians were Latino. 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 rest of 1968, Franklin split her time between recording her next album and live performance. The album was a big band jazz project mistitled Soul '69 which was probably the least successful of her records from this period both artistically and commercially. It went to number one on the R&B albums chart, but Franklin was for most of her career, with one exception we'll talk about later, a singles artist more than an albums one, and the singles from the record sank without trace. She was also going through a lot of personal stress. An article in Time magazine appeared which, while overall complimentary and a puff piece by most standards, revealed more of her personal troubles than she was comfortable having made public, and became the main reason she became extremely guarded about giving interviews in the future. Her live performances were also a source of stress at this point. Franklin had been thrilled with the opportunity to go on tour in Europe, and arranged to record a live album in Paris, a city she would come to love. When they travelled over, in May, White was still her husband and manager, and he put together the live band she would use for the tour. Nobody was happy with the band. Carolyn Franklin said of the tour "The only problem was the band. Wexler didn’t put it together. Ted did. The band lacked the fire that we’d been used to in the studio. And then the band became another point of contention between Aretha and Ted. She accused him of hiring the wrong musicians. He accused her of slacking on her singing. It got bad, even as the crowds kept getting bigger.” Wexler said of the resulting live album “She and the band aren’t on the same page. They’re out of tune, they miss their cues, and they’re struggling to find the right groove. Naturally she was excited to be performing in Europe for the first time, and naturally it had to be thrilling for her to see the international scope of her success, but when the music’s not right Aretha’s not right. Like Ray Charles, she hears every note being played by every band member. And when a note is wrong—and, believe me, there were scores of bad notes—for Aretha, it’s like squeaky chalk on a blackboard. It hurts. When she came home, she was hurting. Here you had the premier singer of our time touring the Continent with a ragtag band suitable for backing up a third-rate blues singer in some bucket of blood in Loserville, Louisiana. It was outrageous.” In truth, to most ears, the recordings, which were presumably sweetened in the studio afterwards as most live albums were, sound... fine. But they're definitely not a patch on the studio versions, and Wexler refused to take a production credit, insisting instead on being credited as “supervisor”: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Chain of Fools (live in Paris)"] Luckily, her marriage finally ended -- though even after they separated and she handed her management over to Cecil, Ted White insisted he had a management contract with her. With White's waning influence, Jerry Wexler had the perfect solution, and it was also someone he owed a favour to. We've mentioned King Curtis many times before in different episodes, because he was *the* premier tenor sax session player on the East Coast of America at the time. He'd started out with Lionel Hampton's band, but from the late fifties he played almost every important sax part on a hit record to come out of the East Coast, like Buddy Holly's "Reminiscing": [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, "Reminiscing"] The Coasters' "Yakety Yak": [Excerpt: The Coasters, "Yaklety Yak"] And all the other Coasters hits. He'd played on records by Ruth Brown, the Drifters, Ben E. King, Solomon Burke, the Isley Brothers, and Wilson Pickett. He'd played with Sam Cooke's band on the legendary Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "Twisting the Night Away (live)"] He'd played on "Boys" by the Shirelles: [Excerpt: The Shirelles, "Boys"] And he'd also had encounters with future stars -- he'd played sax on the single Lou Reed had recorded as The Jades: [Excerpt: The Jades, "Leave Her For Me"] More importantly, he was a bandleader in his own right. He'd had hits with "Soul Twist", "Memphis Soul Stew", and his signature song "Soul Serenade": [Excerpt: King Curtis, "Soul Serenade"] And he'd had Jimi Hendrix in his band the Kingpins, for a while -- Hendrix had played on several of his records, like "Instant Groove": [Excerpt: King Curtis, "Instant Groove"] Curtis had also supported the Beatles on their 1965 US tour, including the legendary Shea Stadium gig. He was also, obviously, the sax player on most of Franklin's records since she'd started working at Atlantic, and had been the one who had suggested the key change and sax solo on "Respect". Wexler knew he was a great musician and a great bandleader, but he also literally owed Curtis his life. In July 1968 there was a DJ convention in Miami, a promotional junket for record labels in the R&B market, which will come up a lot in future episodes. Various gangs -- what the great record man Henry Stone referred to as the "Black New York Mafia" chose that moment to try to take over many of the soul record labels. Stone himself had connections with a rival set of gangsters, led by Joe Robinson, the husband of Sylvia from Mickey and Sylvia. Stone got Robinson to organise protection for various people he considered under threat, and because of that protection he later agreed to go into a business partnership with Robinson which would revolutionise music a decade or so later. The convention also played a pivotal role in a change of direction for Stax Records. So you can be sure this will come up again. But the person who was most threatened at the convention was Jerry Wexler, who was at one point during the event actually hanged in effigy. It was King Curtis who warned Wexler in the middle of the convention banquet that his life was in danger, and he and the singer Titus Turner, who were both armed with pistols, acted as Wexler's bodyguards to get him out of the event alive. Nobody would mess with Curtis, who as well as being armed was also six foot two, two hundred pounds, and one of the most respected figures in the business. Wexler owed Curtis his life, and also knew that he led one of the best bands around -- and the Kingpins were already used to touring with the Sweet Inspirations as vocalists (though the Sweet Inspirations would only rarely perform live with Franklin, because they soon had one of the few artists bigger than her using their services regularly in a live situation). For the moment though, Franklin's records would still use the Muscle Shoals rhythm section -- and on several tracks a new friend of Curtis', a session musician whose contract Wexler had bought from Rick Hall at Muscle Shoals after hearing his playing on Wilson Pickett's version of "Hey Jude", Duane Allman. Allman can be heard on two tracks on Franklin's next album, This Girl's In Love With You -- named after another Bacharach and David song, previously a hit for Herb Alpert. One of those tracks is one we heard in the most recent episode, her version of "The Weight": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "The Weight"] That was one of several songs on the album where Franklin was trying Wexler's strategy of recording songs by successful white acts in the hope of a crossover -- she also recorded versions of "Eleanor Rigby" and "Let It Be", the latter of which was the first version of the song to be released, Paul McCartney having sent her a demo a while before the Beatles got around to releasing their version. Another song on the album originally recorded by a white person was another example of Aretha working out feelings of jealousy towards a potential rival. "Son of a Preacher Man" had originally been written for her, but she'd turned the song down -- something that would happen with increasing frequency. In this case her reasoning was that the song might seem disrespectful to her father, who was himself a "preacher man". So Jerry Wexler had brought the track to the British singer Dusty Springfield, for whom he was producing a new album, Dusty in Memphis : [Excerpt: Dusty Springfield, "Son of a Preacher Man"] According to Wexler "There was also a little tension in that January session because I was coming off a hit album I’d done with Dusty Springfield, Dusty in Memphis . It was being called a soul classic and compared to Aretha. Aretha didn’t like me producing other chick singers. I told her that she was Dusty’s idol and Dusty was making no claims to her throne. Aretha smiled that little passive smile she’s famous for—the smile that told me she wasn’t happy." So of course, Franklin recorded her own version of the song: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Son of a Preacher Man"] Of course, what Franklin didn't know was that Springfield was far more insecure even than Franklin, and hated the idea of being compared to someone she realised was a much better singer. For the rest of her life she would always talk about how much better Franklin's performance was, and draw particular attention to the way Franklin phrased the words "reach me", and copy that phrasing in her own live performances. Still though I think in this case, for once, Franklin's version didn't quite beat Springfield's original. The sessions for that album lasted quite a while, and in the middle King Curtis recorded another album of his own, which also featured Duane Allman on guitar on several songs, including Curtis' own version of "The Weight", and a version of "Games People Play" that won him a Grammy: [Excerpt: King Curtis, "Games People Play"] Around this time, King Curtis also discovered a new soul musician who would go on to become one of the most influential in the genre in the seventies, Donny Hathaway, and he produced several tracks on Hathaway's first album, and guested on guitar, rather than his normal saxophone, on Hathaway's version of Ray Charles' “I Believe to My Soul”: [Excerpt: Donny Hathaway, "I Believe to My Soul"] According to the biography of King Curtis that I used for this episode, Curtis got Aretha Franklin to sit in on piano on that album, but Franklin's not credited on it. I suspect that biography is misremembering a different occasion when Franklin acted purely as piano player on a session produced by Curtis, an album by Sam Moore that went unreleased until 2002 due to Moore's heroin addiction, and on which Franklin agreed to play piano partly so she could work with Hathaway, who was playing the other keyboard on the album: [Excerpt: Sam Moore, "Get Out My Life Woman"] The other musicians on that, other than Franklin and Hathaway, were the members of the Kingpins -- Cornell Dupree on guitar, Chuck Rainey on bass, and Bernard "Pretty" Purdie on drums. Aretha's next album, Spirit in the Dark , was her first not to make the top twenty since she'd signed to Atlantic, though it had two more big hits -- "Don't Play That Song" and the title track. But it was a patchwork affair, recorded in sessions in different studios with three different sets of musicians -- the Muscle Shoals players she normally worked with, her own touring band, and a set of musicians Wexler had found in Florida, where he now lived. Increasingly Wexler was producing sessions in Florida and not wanting to travel, while Mardin and Dowd were producing sessions in New York. But Franklin was dealing with things that were more important than music. Her family was going through serious problems. As well as her divorce from White, she was seriously concerned about her father. Rev. Franklin had become more radical since the death of Martin Luther King, and had started giving support to more radical elements of the Black Power movement. He was still a staunch believer in non-violence, but he would allow his church to be used by those who weren't, including the Republic of New Africa. This was a Black separatist movement whose vice president was Betty Shabazz, the widow of Malik el-Shabazz, the activist known for most of his life as Malcolm X. The organisation was founded to call for the secession of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina, and for those states to become a Black ethnostate with no white people. Rev. Franklin didn't agree with this view, but he thought solidarity with other supporters of Black liberation now more important than disagreements over strategy, so he let them use his church as a meeting place. On the twenty-ninth of March, 1969, they held a meeting to which some members of their paramilitary faction came armed with rifles. A police car drove past towards the end of the meeting and saw some of the armed men outside. The police approached, and while reports differ as to what actually happened, shots were fired and one of the police officers was killed. This led to the police storming the church, spraying bullets into the windows, and arresting the hundred and fifty people inside (many of whom were then held illegally without access to counsel) and confiscating large numbers of guns found on the premises. Rev. Franklin was defiant when interviewed about this, saying “I do not denounce these people. Their goals are the same as ours, only they approach them from different directions.” He said he'd happily let them use the church again, so long as they promised not to bring guns in future. This caused Rev. Franklin to become even more of a target for law enforcement himself. On one flight shortly afterwards, his baggage got misplaced by the airline, and when it turned up it contained small amounts of cannabis, for which he was arrested, though the charges were later dropped -- he always claimed it had been planted. And he also found himself once again under investigation by tax officials. According to Cecil Franklin “My father was sought out and victimized by government officials, both national and local, who resented his political positions and were determined to humiliate him. He fought back, he answered every charge, he eventually paid his tax bill, and, as far as his congregation was concerned, he cleared his name. But I have to say that after what happened to him in that particular season of 1969, he was never quite the same.” Another family strain in 1969 came when Aretha's sister Carolyn, who had written several songs for her and who Aretha was hoping would continue to just be a songwriter and backing vocalist rather than pursue stardom herself, got a record contract, leading to a flare-up of tensions between the sisters: [Excerpt: Carolyn Franklin, "Boxer"] Carolyn begged Aretha to write liner notes for the album, in the hopes that her famous sister's approval would lead to sales, but Aretha kept saying she would and then not doing it, jealous of her sister. Eventually Carolyn turned to their father, who also tried and failed to get Aretha to write notes. When she wouldn't, he wrote them himself, concluding with a claimed endorsement from Aretha that didn't sound convincing. There was also some tension between the sisters because Carolyn, who was lesbian, had expressed support for the Stonewall riots and considered queer rights to be the logical next step in the progression that included Black civil rights and women's rights. Aretha would later become a vocal queer ally, but in 1969 this was a step too far for her. Aretha did soften on Carolyn when her second solo album, Chain Reaction , came out, and she praised it privately: [Excerpt: Carolyn Franklin, "Chain Reaction"] But she refused to talk to the press about her sister's new record. This time it was because of more scandal in her private life, which by this time had made the press. Charles Cooke, Sam Cooke's brother, had come round to visit her at her home when her ex-husband had turned up, acting aggressive. Cooke had tried to protect Aretha, who was seven months pregnant at the time, and White shot him. Thankfully, Cooke survived, but Franklin was horrified by the publicity. All of this happened in a short period from spring 1969 through early 1970, during which time she was also recording the albums Spirit in the Dark and Young, Gifted, and Black , the latter of which is often considered her greatest studio album by people who don't think it's Lady Soul . Both albums, like everything Aretha recorded in these first few years at Atlantic, are great, but they're not coherent artistic statements. As Jerry Wexler said "When you look back and see what are now considered the great Aretha Franklin albums of the late sixties and early seventies, they really aren’t albums at all. They’re compilations of singles. There was never any organizational principle. We just threw ’em together... For example, you could interchange the tunes on Spirit in the Dark with those on Young, Gifted, and Black . Mix and match as you please." It was in her live shows that she was making artistic statements, shows that were structured with peaks and troughs, and that had a throughline. And so it makes sense that her two greatest albums of the early seventies are two very different live albums. The first of these came about almost by accident. Ruth Bowen was organising a tour for Franklin and Curtis, and realised there was an uncomfortable gap in California that needed filling. She persuaded Bill Graham to book them into the Fillmore West for three nights, as both a way to plug the hole and possibly a way to bring Aretha to greater prominence with the hippie market. But Graham would only pay five thousand dollars in total for the three nights, and the normal fee for Franklin and Curtis would be five thousand dollars a night. Franklin wouldn't budge on her fee -- she didn't want to play the Fillmore at all, seeing it as not her audience -- but Bowen thought this was important. She eventually got Ahmet Ertegun to agree to pay an extra five thousand dollars in tour support from the label, because Ertegun was well aware of the importance of the hippie market. But that still wasn't enough. But then Jerry Wexler had an idea. They could put up the full ten thousand dollars difference, and use the shows to record a live album by Aretha. And why not record a King Curtis live album while they were at it? Almost as soon as he had the idea he regretted it -- in his words he "considered the musical tastes of the flower children infantile" and had no time for people who liked Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead, thinking such people could never appreciate Franklin's music, but by that point the agreement had already been made. Curtis put together the best possible live band he could for the tour. He used his regular Kingpins guitarist Cornell Dupree and drummer Bernard "Pretty" Purdie, but rather than Chuck Rainey, who was his second-call bass player, he got in Jerry Jemmott, his first-call player, who normally only did studio work but made an exception for this special tour. They brought in vocal group The Sweethearts of Soul, as the Sweet Inspirations were no longer available for Aretha's live shows; the Memphis Horns who had played on so many great Stax records; and on keyboards was Billy Preston, who had recently become a minor star in his own right after performing with the Beatles, but who had originally trained with James Cleveland, the gospel musician who had also been Aretha's mentor. And at the shows, Ray Charles also turned up, just to listen to the music, but Aretha dragged him out on stage for a surprise duet on her "Spirit in the Dark": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles, "Spirit in the Dark"] King Curtis' set was a mixture of soul classics, both his own like "Memphis Soul Stew" and others like "Knock on Wood", and songs that were designed to appeal to the hippie crowd. The set was largely instrumental, but he had Preston sing vocals on "My Sweet Lord", the George Harrison song that Preston had played on and just released as his own single: [Excerpt: King Curtis and Billy Preston, "My Sweet Lord"] They also did instrumental versions of "A Whiter Shade of Pale", and a song that had just come out by a band of former session players that Atlantic Records had signed after Dusty Springfield had recommended them: [Excerpt: King Curtis and the Kingpins, "Whole Lotta Love"] Franklin's set was similarly geared towards the white rock audience, with many of her biggest hits missing in favour of funked-up or gospel versions of "Eleanor Rigby", "The Long and Winding Road", "Bridge Over Troubled Water", Bread's "Make it With You", and Stephen Stills' "Love the One You're With": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin and King Curtis, "Love the One You're With"] That song, incidentally, took its title from something Billy Preston had said to Stills. Both Curtis and Franklin's live albums are regularly ranked among the greatest live albums in soul music history, only matched perhaps by James Brown's Live at the Apollo , Otis Redding's Live in Europe and Sam Cooke's Live at the Harlem Square Club . There's a four-CD box set of the complete recordings which is *well* worth tracking down (and from which I took the recordings I just excerpted, rather than the original releases). On the last night, the last song was one she hadn't done in the previous shows, a version of Diana Ross' first solo hit "Reach Out and Touch (Somebody's Hand)", presumably chosen once again in a spirit of rivalry. That song was also used for band intros, and she said this when talking about Curtis: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin and King Curtis, "Reach Out and Touch (Somebody's Hand)"] Sadly, that was not to be. Rather than performing with Franklin for "many years to come", only a week after the release of the second album from the shows, King Curtis' one, Curtis was dead. He'd spent the time between the shows and the albums' release a few months later productively and as in-demand as ever, playing on everything from the theme to Soul Train to John Lennon's forthcoming album, Imagine , on which he played on two tracks, produced by Phil Spector, with whom Curtis had worked before Spector became famous: [Excerpt: John Lennon, "It's So Hard"] Aretha had toured Europe again, this time with the Kingpins backing her, and while they were there Curtis had cut another live album, this time backing Champion Jack Dupree, who was playing on the same bill on some shows and got the Kingpins to back him. He played a one-off gig with his close friends Delaney Bramlett and Duane Allman, and started recording his next solo album, Everybody's Talkin' , engineered by his friend Gene Paul, Les Paul's son, and he'd just bought a new mansion just off Central Park, he was earning so much money. But the air conditioning was causing problems with the electrics in the house, causing the circuit breaker to go off. On August the thirteenth 1971, King Curtis went out onto the street -- his house had two doors, and the easiest way to get to the circuit breaker to sort the problem out was to exit one door and enter the other. He was carrying a torch. A man named Juan Montanez was stood in the other doorway, arguing with a woman. Curtis asked him to move. Montanez pretended not to speak English and smirked. Curtis tried to intimidate him, using his size to try to get the man to move. Montanez continued smirking and pretending not to understand English. Curtis got so irate he ended up smashing the torch over Montanez's head, at which point Montanez pulled out a knife and stabbed Curtis. The wound proved fatal -- though before he collapsed Curtis managed to pull the knife from his assailant's hand and stab him back. It didn't kill Montanez, but it did mean that the police found him when he turned up wounded in the hospital. Aretha was distraught. Bernard Purdie, who became her bandleader after that, said “It was a sad, sad time. And the strange part is that Aretha didn't even want his name mentioned; it was like she couldn't take the sadness. If someone happened to say anything about King, she went into her shell. I understood. She couldn't handle it. When Aretha was around, it was better to act like it had never happened.” Franklin immediately went round to Curtis' house to look after his girlfriend, and stayed with her for several days, helping out and buying her dress for the funeral. Curtis' funeral was a mixture of the secular and the sacred, mourning and Black liberation. It was officiated by CL Franklin and eulogies were given by Cecil Franklin, himself now a Baptist minister at his father's church, and Jesse Jackson. Almost every star of Black music who could make it was in attendance, including the Isley Brothers, Brook Benton, and Dizzy Gillespie. The Kingpins played an hour long version of "Soul Serenade" while people entered and took their seats, Stevie Wonder moved everyone to tears by singing a version of "Abraham, Martin, and John" which included a new extra verse starting "Has anybody here seen my old friend King Curtis?", and Aretha closed the service by singing the gospel song "Never Grow Old", which had been the first single she had ever released, when she was fourteen. And it would be to gospel she would turn for what would be her own greatest artistic statement a few months later: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Amazing Grace"] It was the perfect time for Aretha to go back to her gospel roots, because in the years since she had turned to secular music, secular music had turned towards gospel, largely thanks to her old mentor James Cleveland. After Cleveland had stopped working for Rev Franklin, he had gone on to become one of the most important people in gospel music, both as a musician himself and as a talent scout for Savoy Records, who by this time were the biggest label in Black gospel. He had recorded a string of successful records, had mentored many musicians, and had become the single most important figure in the music since Thomas Dorsey, changing the style of the music completely by introducing massed choirs. These days the standard image of a gospel performance in the popular imaginary is a group of twenty to forty people, in robes, singing together, but up until the mid-sixties that was almost unknown in gospel music. We always say there's no first anything here, and I'm sure there are earlier examples, but it's generally considered that the first truly important gospel choir was Cleveland's "Angelic Choir": [Excerpt: James Cleveland and the Angelic Choir, "I Stood on the Banks of Jordan"] Before Cleveland, Black gospel music in America was small vocal groups like the Swan Silvertones or the Soul Stirrers, or solo performers like Rosetta Tharpe or Mahalia Jackson. Cleveland, a rigorous taskmaster, taught his vocalists to enunciate clearly and stay on pitch perfectly, so they could sing in unison in huge groups without the music turning into a mushy mess. The results revolutionised gospel music, especially after he had formed an organisation called the Gospel Music Workshop of America to promote that choir sound and encourage other similar choirs to form. And then in 1967, Edwin Hawkins formed a fifty-piece choir in the Cleveland style, and recorded an album in his local church to use as a fundraiser to get the choir to a national competition. That album got picked up by the San Francisco underground radio station KSAN, and was reissued by Buddah records, a label that was mostly best known for putting out records like "Yummy Yummy Yummy" by Ohio Express and "Simon Says" by the 1910 Fruitgum Company. The single from it became a worldwide smash, becoming one of the few gospel singles to make the pop top ten: [Excerpt: The Edwin Hawkins Singers, "Oh Happy Day"] That song opened the floodgates for a whole lot of secular musicians to start using gospel styles in their work -- though mostly the older gospel styles of those earlier groups. The Beatles' "Let It Be" had a gospel influence, as did Simon and Garfunkel's "Bridge Over Troubled Water". George Harrison always said his "My Sweet Lord" was influenced by "Oh Happy Day" (though of course it's actually closer to "He's So Fine" by the Chiffons). And there were many more attempts to meld rock music and gospel. There was Norman Greenbaum's "Spirit in the Sky": [Excerpt: Norman Greenbaum, "Spirit in the Sky"] There was Billy Preston's “That's The Way God Planned It”, backed by a supergroup of George Harrison, Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, and Ginger Baker, with Doris Troy and Madeleine Bell on backing vocals [Excerpt: Billy Preston, “That's The Way God Planned It”] There were the rock musicals Jesus Christ, Superstar and Godspell, and there were all sorts of weird attempts to jump on the bandwagon, like the Motown compilation Rock Gospel: The Key to the Kingdom, which as well as tracks by the Jackson Five, The Supremes, and Marvin Gaye, also contained this: [Excerpt: Stoney and Meatloaf, "I'd Love to be as Heavy as Jesus"] Yes, that is Meat Loaf, several years before his career took off, singing a Motown song about how he'd love to be as heavy as Jesus. This meant that by early 1972, the idea of a secular artist recording religious music was, rather than a novelty, completely in the zeitgeist, to the point that around the same time Franklin recorded her album, the song she chose as a title track, "Amazing Grace" was a worldwide hit single for the Pipes and Drums of the Military Band of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guard: [Excerpt: the Pipes and Drums of the Military Band of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guard, "Amazing Grace"] The song "Amazing Grace" has a disturbing history. The words were written by John Newton, a man who had been pressganged into working on ships, serving in involuntary servitude, but had then himself voluntarily gone on to work on ships transporting enslaved people from Africa for many years. After a life-threatening storm, he had a deep religious experience and immediately became an ardent Christian -- but carried on for years more taking part in the most evil activity imaginable. He did give up swearing though. When he was thirty he became too ill to sail, though he continued to invest his money in slave ships, but slowly his conscience nagged at him, and by the time he was sixty he became an ardent abolitionist, and was one of the people whose campaigning eventually led to the end of the slave trade. "Amazing Grace" was written between those two points, and so there's an ambiguity to its intended meaning. The song was picked up by many marginalised groups though, including enslaved people, and usually sung set to an American folk tune (Newton didn't publish any music with it, and the words are in common metre which meant it could be sung to many folk tunes -- it fits "House of the Rising Sun" perfectly, for example). [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Amazing Grace"] There's some confusion as to whose idea it was to do the album -- Franklin always said it was hers, while Wexler also always claimed the credit, and both are listed as coproducers with Mardin, the first time Franklin got an official co-production credit on one of her records. The album was recorded during two actual church services -- she insisted that it be recorded as part of a proper religious service -- and featured Franklin's normal rhythm section, plus James Cleveland's choir, with Cleveland on piano for most of it. The material was largely the gospel of Franklin's youth -- songs like the title track, "Mary Don't You Weep", "How I Got Over", written by Franklin's de facto stepmother the great gospel singer Clara Ward, who sat in the front row, and "Precious Memories", which she sang as a duet with Cleveland: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin and James Cleveland, "Precious Memories"] But she also included moments of the new gospel-influenced popular music, like Marvin Gaye's "Wholy Holy", George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord", and, interpolated into "Take My Hand Precious Lord", "You've Got a Friend", by Carole King who had earlier written "Natural Woman" for her: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin and the James Cleveland Choir, "Take My Hand Precious Lord/You've Got a Friend"] Two weeks after the performances that made up the Amazing Grace album, Mahalia Jackson died, and Aretha sang "Take My Hand Precious Lord" at her funeral. The Amazing Grace performances were also filmed, and you can see Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts in the crowd, which is otherwise made up of regular congregants and friends of the Franklins. Sadly, technical issues meant that the film went unreleased at the time, and when those were solved forty years later, Franklin sued to keep the film unreleased. It only got a release after her death, but it's a stunning piece of work which everyone should watch. The album, which the label thought they were taking a chance on as a possible commercial failure, made the top ten on the album charts, and eventually went double platinum, becoming both the best-selling album of Franklin's career and the best selling live gospel album by anyone ever. It's often considered the greatest gospel album of all time, and Franklin's crowning artistic achievement. [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Climbing Higher Mountains"] That was the peak of Franklin's artistic and commercial success. Two months after the Amazing Grace recordings, she had her thirtieth birthday party, hosting activists like Betty Shabazz and musicians like Cannonball Adderley and Quincy Jones. Jones was going to be the producer of her next album. Counting the live albums, the team of Wexler, Mardin, and Dowd had, together or separately, produced ten albums for her in five years, and she wanted to try something different. In particular, she was sick of those three getting all the credit for productions she felt -- with some justification -- she had contributed as much to as them. But she was also at least half-aware of a truism in music which is that great singers rarely make great producers. A record producer has to be able to be dispassionate, to step back and listen to every element objectively, whereas a great singer has to put all their passion into the performance. So she looked around for other collaborators -- with Atlantic's blessing -- and chose Jones. On paper, the combination made a lot of sense. Quincy Jones, as it turned out, was yet to have the career for which he is now best known, and had not yet rocketed to the superstar level at which he remains. But he had already produced and arranged classic records for Ray Charles, Betty Carter, Peggy Lee, Count Basie, Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan, Tony Bennett, Ella Fitzgerald, Little Richard and Billy Preston, and a string of early-sixties hits for Lesley Gore. He should have been a perfect collaborator for Franklin -- someone who knew great voices and had a foot in the jazz and crooner world that Franklin loved and one in the modern R&B world. But as it turns out, nobody was happy with the album that resulted. The one song everyone agrees is worthwhile on it is "Angel", written by Aretha's sister Carolyn, which would be the only song Aretha would sing in every single full concert for the rest of her career: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Angel"] The album is a bit of a mess, which can't decide if it wants to be an album of jazz covers of songs from musicals or modern R&B, and succeeds at neither. It only made number thirty on the charts. Wexler said "Carolyn saved Aretha’s ass on that record. If it weren’t for ‘Angel,’ the album would have been a total wash. Even with ‘Angel,’ the album was still seen as a flop. It slowed down Aretha’s momentum. Careers have trajectories, and, ever since joining Atlantic, Aretha’s was up, up, up... the issuance of that album represents the end of her golden age on Atlantic.” Another blow came in January 1973 when Clara Ward, her father's partner and the singer who influenced her more than anyone, died. After her death, Ward's sister found a notebook containing her thoughts on the people in her life. Of Aretha, she wrote “My baby Aretha, she doesn’t know how good she is. Doubts self.” She returned to working with Wexler, Dowd, and Mardin for an album called Let Me Into Your Life. That album has its admirers, and did better than the album with Jones, but it wasn't the return to form she needed. From this point on, she would have hits, and she would make great records, but the great records were rarely the same as the hits. Her next two albums, again with Wexler, had no top forty singles at all, though they did adequately on the R&B charts. She switched producers, working with Curtis Mayfield on an album of songs from a film he'd been involved in, Sparkle, which was more successful and the best thing she did in the latter half of the seventies. The rest of her albums from that period are largely best forgotten. She rejected a whole series of songs that became hits for other people, including the people that Franklin thought of as bitter rivals. Most of Natalie Cole's early hits were songs that had been submitted to Franklin and she'd rejected. Nile Rogers and Bernard Edwards of Chic came to her with backing tracks for songs like "Upside Down" which they later gave to Diana Ross, who had hits with them. Ahmet Ertegun tried to get her produced by Barry Gibb, but she turned him down -- he went off to write and produce Barbra Streisand's Guilty album, which contained the massive hit "Woman in Love". Eventually, Franklin decided to change record labels. Clive Davis at Arista had revitalised the career of another old rival, getting Barry Manilow to produce an album for Dionne Warwick which had got her back in the top ten: [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "I'll Never Love This Way Again"] Maybe he'd do the same for her? She signed with Arista. But then, on June the tenth, 1979, her father was shot twice in his home. As far as anyone knows it was a burglary gone wrong, though he had also made many enemies over the years. He survived, but he was in a coma, and would be for five years, until he finally died. Another important man in her life -- the *most* important man in her life -- had died a violent death, even if his body was still alive for the moment. Aretha moved back to the family home in Detroit to take care of him, and initially announced that her career was on hold, but soon started working again in order to pay for his medical bills. And she got the biggest profile she'd had for many years when she appeared in the film The Blues Brothers, singing her old hit "Think": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin and the Blues Brothers band, "Think!"] The Blues Brothers has received some criticism for its attitude towards Black music, with some going so far as to call it uncomfortably close to minstrelsy at times. But what's undeniable is that it provided a massive career boost for the Black artists featured in the film, all of whom were in lulls in their career and credited the film for their renewed success -- as well as Franklin there were John Lee Hooker, Ray Charles, Cab Calloway, and James Brown, who in his appearance sang the gospel song "The Old Landmark", which Franklin had performed on Amazing Grace , and Brown too was backed by James Cleveland and his choir: [Excerpt: James Brown and the James Cleveland Choir, "The Old Landmark"] Her career started to rise again. Clive Davis didn't put her with Barry Manilow as she'd hoped, but he did get Luther Vandross to produce her, and she started having minor hits, and even major hits after she and Vandross stopped working together. But these records were, largely, passionless. Whereas her old recordings had been made in Atlantic's studios, now she wouldn't leave Detroit for any length of time -- she wanted to be close to her father, and by the time he died she'd also developed a fear of flying that meant she would only travel by car or bus. For the rest of her life she didn't travel anywhere she couldn't be driven to, and rarely left Detroit at all. This meant that increasingly, rather than record in the same room as the musicians and collaborate with them, working out ideas for arrangements and bouncing off each other, producers would record backing tracks for her in LA or New York, and bring them to Detroit, where she would cut a single vocal take on top of the pre-recorded track, rarely letting any producer criticise her. But she had massive commercial success in the latter part of the eighties thanks to Davis' marketing skills, and a series of hit singles pairing her with other artists, like the Eurythmics: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin and the Eurythmics, "Sisters are Doing it For Themselves"] And George Michael, whose duet with her became her second and final number one single: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin and George Michael, "I Knew You Were Waiting For Me"] As Jerry Wexler said “If you put Aretha’s Atlantic material next to her Arista stuff, there’s no comparison. Artistically, Atlantic wins, hands down. But if you count up the money we made with Aretha as opposed to Clive, Clive is the clear winner. What makes his victory even more remarkable is the fact that he had to market her when she was clearly past her prime. And yet he still found a way to present and package her in products that sold big-time. Incredible.” But eventually the duet formula started to dry up -- a duet with Elton John was only a minor hit, while collaborations with James Brown and Whitney Houston didn't make the top forty. She didn't record for much of the nineties, and then from 1998 through 2014 released a handful of albums at lengthy intervals, most of them the kind of record that gets called either "a return to form" or "a brave attempt to update her style to new fashions", all of them ultimately footnotes to her stunning body of work from the sixties and seventies. But that didn't mean she wasn't still the great Aretha Franklin, and even though she no longer toured much, she would make special appearances. In the mid-nineties she honoured Lionel Hampton at the Kennedy Centre, saying “I have a rule about supporting Republicans, and Lionel was a lifelong Republican. But when it came to Hamp, I broke my rule, because my dad loved him. We all did. Hamp had worshipped at New Bethel, and during a concert in Detroit, where Daddy had taken me and Erma, Hamp asked us onstage to do a little dance while he played behind us. Outside of church, that was probably my first time on a public stage. So I had to break party lines and honor the great Lionel Hampton and forgive the fact that he voted for the wrong party.” She also performed at Bill Clinton's inauguration, and other similar events. And she was still capable on occasion of performances that nobody else could have given. At the Grammy Awards in 1998, Aretha was only scheduled to perform "Respect", but then in her dressing room after her performance, the show's producer came to her, frantic. Pavarotti had been meant to perform "Nessun Dorma", but he'd been taken ill. They had an orchestra and twenty-piece choir there, waiting, and they needed to perform it in twenty minutes. She knew the piece of course, but the arrangement wasn't in her key. Could she possibly step in for Pavarotti? Of course she could. She was Aretha Franklin: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Nessun Dorma"] And in the last couple of decades of her life, that's essentially what she did -- she'd show up at Rosa Parks' funeral, or at the Kennedy Centre to honour Carole King, or at Barack Obama's inauguration and give an amazing performance that reminded everyone that she was still the queen of soul. She'd do occasional short tours of the biggest venues in the US, travelling only by bus. And then she'd go back to her home life, and to being an important part of Detroit's Black community. She died in 2018 of cancer, the same disease that had earlier taken both her sisters. She'd been ill for many years, but had wanted the details kept out of the newspapers and had carried on performing, preserving her privacy to the end. In the end, her career is probably best summed up by her old producer Jerry Wexler, who, like almost everyone in the story, predeceased her. He said (and I'm going to elide a couple of swear words here, because Wexler used language that would get me an adult rating) “You may not like all the stuff she did to stay popular. You may be bothered by cracks in her voice and the lapses of taste when it came to material. There was a lot of cheesy [shit]. But in the end, you got to give it to her. The woman is [fuckin’] fierce. In a half dozen different epochs of music, she managed to stay in the middle of the mix. She isn’t a Miles Davis, who kept breaking through barriers and never stopped innovating. And she isn’t a Duke Ellington or a Marvin Gaye, who never stopped writing brilliantly. She chiefly became an interpreter and an adapter of very diverse material. She studied the Billboard charts and, for over forty years, found a way to stay on those charts. That’s one hell of an accomplishment.” It is indeed. But actually, no, there's a simpler way to sum her up, and that is just to say -- she was Aretha.

Aug 14, 2023

Episode one hundred and sixty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “The Weight” by the Band, the Basement Tapes, and the continuing controversy over Dylan going electric. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a half-hour bonus episode available, on “S.F. Sorrow is Born” by the Pretty Things . Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Also, a one-time request here — Shawn Taylor, who runs the Facebook group for the podcast and is an old and dear friend of mine, has stage-three lung cancer. I will be hugely grateful to anyone who donates to the GoFundMe for her treatment . (more…)

Jul 2, 2023

Episode 166 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Crossroads”, Cream, the myth of Robert Johnson, and whether white men can sing the blues. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a forty-eight-minute bonus episode available, on “Tip-Toe Thru’ the Tulips” by Tiny Tim. 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…)

May 20, 2023

Episode 165 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Dark Star” and the career of the Grateful Dead. This is a long one, even longer than the previous episode, but don't worry, that won't be the norm. There's a reason these two were much longer than average. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-minute bonus episode available, on "Codine" by the Charlatans . Errata I mispronounce Brent Mydland's name as Myland a couple of times, and in the introduction I say "Touch of Grey" came out in 1988 -- I later, correctly, say 1987. (I seem to have had a real problem with dates in the intro -- I also originally talked about "Blue Suede Shoes" being in 1954 before fixing it in the edit to be 1956) Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by the Grateful Dead, and Grayfolded runs to two hours. I referred to a lot of books for this episode, partly because almost everything about the Grateful Dead is written from a fannish perspective that already assumes background knowledge, rather than to provide that background knowledge. Of the various books I used, Dennis McNally's biography of the band and This Is All a Dream We Dreamed: An Oral History of the Grateful Dead by Blair Jackson and David Gans are probably most useful for the casually interested. Other books on the Dead I used included McNally's Jerry on Jerry , a collection of interviews with Garcia; Deal , Bill Kreutzmann's autobiography; The Grateful Dead FAQ by Tony Sclafani; So Many Roads by David Browne; Deadology by Howard F. Weiner; Fare Thee Well by Joel Selvin and Pamela Turley; and Skeleton Key: A Dictionary for Deadheads by David Shenk and Steve Silberman. Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is the classic account of the Pranksters, though not always reliable. I reference Slaughterhouse Five a lot. As well as the novel itself , which everyone should read, I also read this rather excellent graphic novel adaptation , and The Writer's Crusade , a book about the writing of the novel. I also reference Ted Sturgeon's More Than Human . For background on the scene around Astounding Science Fiction which included Sturgeon, John W. Campbell, L. Ron Hubbard, and many other science fiction writers, I recommend Alec Nevala-Lee's Astounding . 1,000 True Fans can be read online, as can the essay on the Californian ideology , and John Perry Barlow's "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" . The best collection of Grateful Dead material is the box set The Golden Road , which contains all the albums released in Pigpen's lifetime along with a lot of bonus material, but which appears currently out of print. Live/Dead contains both the live version of "Dark Star" which made it well known and, as a CD bonus track, the original single version. And archive.org has more live recordings of the group than you can possibly ever listen to. Grayfolded can be bought from John Oswald's Bandcamp Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon . Why not join them? Transcript [Excerpt: Tuning from "Grayfolded", under the warnings] Before we begin -- as we're tuning up, as it were, I should mention that this episode contains discussions of alcoholism, drug addiction, racism, nonconsensual drugging of other people, and deaths from drug abuse, suicide, and car accidents. As always, I try to deal with these subjects as carefully as possible, but if you find any of those things upsetting you may wish to read the transcript rather than listen to this episode, or skip it altogether. Also, I should note that the members of the Grateful Dead were much freer with their use of swearing in interviews than any other band we've covered so far, and that makes using quotes from them rather more difficult than with other bands, given the limitations of the rules imposed to stop the podcast being marked as adult. If I quote anything with a word I can't use here, I'll give a brief pause in the audio, and in the transcript I'll have the word in square brackets. [tuning ends] All this happened, more or less. In 1910, T. S. Eliot started work on "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", which at the time was deemed barely poetry, with one reviewer imagining Eliot saying "I'll just put down the first thing that comes into my head, and call it 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.'" It is now considered one of the great classics of modernist literature. In 1969, Kurt Vonnegut wrote "Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death", a book in which the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, comes unstuck in time, and starts living a nonlinear life, hopping around between times reliving his experiences in the Second World War, and future experiences up to 1976 after being kidnapped by beings from the planet Tralfamadore. Or perhaps he has flashbacks and hallucinations after having a breakdown from PTSD. It is now considered one of the great classics of modernist literature or of science fiction, depending on how you look at it. In 1953, Theodore Sturgeon wrote More Than Human. It is now considered one of the great classics of science fiction. In 1950, L. Ron Hubbard wrote Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. It is now considered either a bad piece of science fiction or one of the great revelatory works of religious history, depending on how you look at it. In 1994, 1995, and 1996 the composer John Oswald released, first as two individual CDs and then as a double-CD, an album called Grayfolded, which the composer says in the liner notes he thinks of as existing in Tralfamadorian time. The Tralfamadorians in Vonnegut's novels don't see time as a linear thing with a beginning and end, but as a continuum that they can move between at will. When someone dies, they just think that at this particular point in time they're not doing so good, but at other points in time they're fine, so why focus on the bad time? In the book, when told of someone dying, the Tralfamadorians just say "so it goes". In between the first CD's release and the release of the double-CD version, Jerry Garcia died. From August 1942 through August 1995, Jerry Garcia was alive. So it goes. Shall we go, you and I? [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Dark Star (Omni 3/30/94)"] "One principle has become clear. Since motives are so frequently found in combination, it is essential that the complex types be analyzed and arranged, with an eye kept single nevertheless to the master-theme under discussion. Collectors, both primary and subsidiary, have done such valiant service that the treasures at our command are amply sufficient for such studies, so extensive, indeed, that the task of going through them thoroughly has become too great for the unassisted student. It cannot be too strongly urged that a single theme in its various types and compounds must be made predominant in any useful comparative study. This is true when the sources and analogues of any literary work are treated; it is even truer when the bare motive is discussed. The Grateful Dead furnishes an apt illustration of the necessity of such handling. It appears in a variety of different combinations, almost never alone. Indeed, it is so widespread a tale, and its combinations are so various, that there is the utmost difficulty in determining just what may properly be regarded the original kernel of it, the simple theme to which other motives were joined. Various opinions, as we shall see, have been held with reference to this matter, most of them justified perhaps by the materials in the hands of the scholars holding them, but none quite adequate in view of later evidence." That's a quote from The Grateful Dead: The History of a Folk Story, by Gordon Hall Gerould, published in 1908. Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five opens with a chapter about the process of writing the novel itself, and how difficult it was. He says "I would hate to tell you what this lousy little book cost me in money and anxiety and time. When I got home from the Second World War twenty-three years ago, I thought it would be easy for me to write about the destruction of Dresden, since all I would have to do would be to report what I had seen. And I thought, too, that it would be a masterpiece or at least make me a lot of money, since the subject was so big." This is an episode several of my listeners have been looking forward to, but it's one I've been dreading writing, because this is an episode -- I think the only one in the series -- where the format of the podcast simply *will not* work. Were the Grateful Dead not such an important band, I would skip this episode altogether, but they're a band that simply can't be ignored, and that's a real problem here. Because my intent, always, with this podcast, is to present the recordings of the artists in question, put them in context, and explain why they were important, what their music meant to its listeners. To put, as far as is possible, the positive case for why the music mattered *in the context of its time*. Not why it matters now, or why it matters to me, but why it matters *in its historical context*. Whether I like the music or not isn't the point. Whether it stands up now isn't the point. I play the music, explain what it was they were doing, why they were doing it, what people saw in it. If I do my job well, you come away listening to "Blue Suede Shoes" the way people heard it in 1956, or "Good Vibrations" the way people heard it in 1966, and understanding why people were so impressed by those records. That is simply *not possible* for the Grateful Dead. I can present a case for them as musicians, and hope to do so. I can explain the appeal as best I understand it, and talk about things I like in their music, and things I've noticed. But what I can't do is present their recordings the way they were received in the sixties and explain why they were popular. Because every other act I have covered or will cover in this podcast has been a *recording* act, and their success was based on records. They may also have been exceptional live performers, but James Brown or Ike and Tina Turner are remembered for great *records*, like "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" or "River Deep, Mountain High". Their great moments were captured on vinyl, to be listened back to, and susceptible of analysis. That is not the case for the Grateful Dead, and what is worse *they explicitly said, publicly, on multiple occasions* that it is not possible for me to understand their art, and thus that it is not possible for me to explain it. The Grateful Dead did make studio records, some of them very good. But they always said, consistently, over a thirty year period, that their records didn't capture what they did, and that the only way -- the *only* way, they were very clear about this -- that one could actually understand and appreciate their music, was to see them live, and furthermore to see them live while on psychedelic drugs. [Excerpt: Grateful Dead crowd noise] I never saw the Grateful Dead live -- their last UK performance was a couple of years before I went to my first ever gig -- and I have never taken a psychedelic substance. So by the Grateful Dead's own criteria, it is literally impossible for me to understand or explain their music the way that it should be understood or explained. In a way I'm in a similar position to the one I was in with La Monte Young in the last episode, whose music it's mostly impossible to experience without being in his presence. This is one reason of several why I placed these two episodes back to back. Of course, there is a difference between Young and the Grateful Dead. The Grateful Dead allowed -- even encouraged -- the recording of their live performances. There are literally thousands of concert recordings in circulation, many of them of professional quality. I have listened to many of those, and I can hear what they were doing. I can tell you what *I* think is interesting about their music, and about their musicianship. And I think I can build up a good case for why they were important, and why they're interesting, and why those recordings are worth listening to. And I can certainly explain the cultural phenomenon that was the Grateful Dead. But just know that while I may have found *a* point, *an* explanation for why the Grateful Dead were important, by the band's own lights and those of their fans, no matter how good a job I do in this episode, I *cannot* get it right. And that is, in itself, enough of a reason for this episode to exist, and for me to try, even harder than I normally do, to get it right *anyway*. Because no matter how well I do my job this episode will stand as an example of why this series is called "*A* History", not *the* history. Because parts of the past are ephemeral. There are things about which it's true to say "You had to be there". I cannot know what it was like to have been an American the day Kennedy was shot, I cannot know what it was like to be alive when a man walked on the Moon. Those are things nobody my age or younger can ever experience. And since August the ninth, 1995, the experience of hearing the Grateful Dead's music the way they wanted it heard has been in that category. And that is by design. Jerry Garcia once said "if you work really hard as an artist, you may be able to build something they can’t tear down, you know, after you’re gone... What I want to do is I want it here. I want it now, in this lifetime. I want what I enjoy to last as long as I do and not last any longer. You know, I don’t want something that ends up being as much a nuisance as it is a work of art, you know?" And there's another difficulty. There are only two points in time where it makes sense to do a podcast episode on the Grateful Dead -- late 1967 and early 1968, when the San Francisco scene they were part of was at its most culturally relevant, and 1988 when they had their only top ten hit and gained their largest audience. I can't realistically leave them out of the story until 1988, so it has to be 1968. But the songs they are most remembered for are those they wrote between 1970 and 1972, and those songs are influenced by artists and events we haven't yet covered in the podcast, who will be getting their own episodes in the future. I can't explain those things in this episode, because they need whole episodes of their own. I can't not explain them without leaving out important context for the Grateful Dead. So the best I can do is treat the story I'm telling as if it were in Tralfamadorian time. All of it's happening all at once, and some of it is happening in different episodes that haven't been recorded yet. The podcast as a whole travels linearly from 1938 through to 1999, but this episode is happening in 1968 and 1972 and 1988 and 1995 and other times, all at once. Sometimes I'll talk about things as if you're already familiar with them, but they haven't happened yet in the story. Feel free to come unstuck in time and revisit this time after episode 167, and 172, and 176, and 192, and experience it again. So this has to be an experimental episode. It may well be an experiment that you think fails. If so, the next episode is likely to be far more to your taste, and much shorter than this or the last episode, two episodes that between them have to create a scaffolding on which will hang much of the rest of this podcast's narrative. I've finished my Grateful Dead script now. The next one I write is going to be fun: [Excerpt: Grateful Dead, "Dark Star"] Infrastructure means everything. How we get from place to place, how we transport goods, information, and ourselves, makes a big difference in how society is structured, and in the music we hear. For many centuries, the prime means of long-distance transport was by water -- sailing ships on the ocean, canal boats and steamboats for inland navigation -- and so folk songs talked about the ship as both means of escape, means of making a living, and in some senses as a trap. You'd go out to sea for adventure, or to escape your problems, but you'd find that the sea itself brought its own problems. Because of this we have a long, long tradition of sea shanties which are known throughout the world: [Excerpt: A. L. Lloyd, "Off to Sea Once More"] But in the nineteenth century, the railway was invented and, at least as far as travel within a landmass goes, it replaced the steamboat in the popular imaginary. Now the railway was how you got from place to place, and how you moved freight from one place to another. The railway brought freedom, and was an opportunity for outlaws, whether train robbers or a romanticised version of the hobo hopping onto a freight train and making his way to new lands and new opportunity. It was the train that brought soldiers home from wars, and the train that allowed the Great Migration of Black people from the South to the industrial North. There would still be songs about the riverboats, about how ol' man river keeps rolling along and about the big river Johnny Cash sang about, but increasingly they would be songs of the past, not the present. The train quickly replaced the steamboat in the iconography of what we now think of as roots music -- blues, country, folk, and early jazz music. Sometimes this was very literal. Furry Lewis' "Kassie Jones" -- about a legendary train driver who would break the rules to make sure his train made the station on time, but who ended up sacrificing his own life to save his passengers in a train crash -- is based on "Alabamy Bound", which as we heard in the episode on "Stagger Lee", was about steamboats: [Excerpt: Furry Lewis, "Kassie Jones"] In the early episodes of this podcast we heard many, many, songs about the railway. Louis Jordan saying "take me right back to the track, Jack", Rosetta Tharpe singing about how "this train don't carry no gamblers", the trickster freight train driver driving on the "Rock Island Line", the mystery train sixteen coaches long, the train that kept-a-rollin' all night long, the Midnight Special which the prisoners wished would shine its ever-loving light on them, and the train coming past Folsom Prison whose whistle makes Johnny Cash hang his head and cry. But by the 1960s, that kind of song had started to dry up. It would happen on occasion -- "People Get Ready" by the Impressions is the most obvious example of the train metaphor in an important sixties record -- but by the late sixties the train was no longer a symbol of freedom but of the past. In 1969 Harry Nilsson sang about how "Nobody Cares About the Railroads Any More", and in 1968 the Kinks sang about "The Last of the Steam-Powered Trains". When in 1968 Merle Haggard sang about a freight train, it was as a memory, of a child with hopes that ended up thwarted by reality and his own nature: [Excerpt: Merle Haggard, "Mama Tried"] And the reason for this was that there had been another shift, a shift that had started in the forties and accelerated in the late fifties but had taken a little time to ripple through the culture. Now the train had been replaced in the popular imaginary by motorised transport. Instead of hopping on a train without paying, if you had no money in your pocket you'd have to hitch-hike all the way. Freedom now meant individuality. The ultimate in freedom was the biker -- the Hell's Angels who could go anywhere, unburdened by anything -- and instead of goods being moved by freight train, increasingly they were being moved by truck drivers. By the mid-seventies, truck drivers took a central place in American life, and the most romantic way to live life was to live it on the road. On The Road was also the title of a 1957 novel by Jack Kerouac, which was one of the first major signs of this cultural shift in America. Kerouac was writing about events in the late forties and early fifties, but his book was also a precursor of the sixties counterculture. He wrote the book on one continuous sheet of paper, as a stream of consciousness. Kerouac died in 1969 of an internal haemmorage brought on by too much alcohol consumption. So it goes. But the big key to this cultural shift was caused by the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, a massive infrastructure spending bill that led to the construction of the modern American Interstate Highway system. This accelerated a program that had already started, of building much bigger, safer, faster roads. It also, as anyone who has read Robert Caro's The Power Broker knows, reinforced segregation and white flight. It did this both by making commuting into major cities from the suburbs easier -- thus allowing white people with more money to move further away from the cities and still work there -- and by bulldozing community spaces where Black people lived. More than a million people lost their homes and were forcibly moved, and orders of magnitude more lost their communities' parks and green spaces. And both as a result of deliberate actions and unconscious bigotry, the bulk of those affected were Black people -- who often found themselves, if they weren't forced to move, on one side of a ten-lane highway where the park used to be, with white people on the other side of the highway. The Federal-Aid Highway Act gave even more power to the unaccountable central planners like Robert Moses, the urban planner in New York who managed to become arguably the most powerful man in the city without ever getting elected, partly by slowly compromising away his early progressive ideals in the service of gaining more power. Of course, not every new highway was built through areas where poor Black people lived. Some were planned to go through richer areas for white people, just because you can't completely do away with geographical realities. For example one was planned to be built through part of San Francisco, a rich, white part. But the people who owned properties in that area had enough political power and clout to fight the development, and after nearly a decade of fighting it, the development was called off in late 1966. But over that time, many of the owners of the impressive buildings in the area had moved out, and they had no incentive to improve or maintain their properties while they were under threat of demolition, so many of them were rented out very cheaply. And when the beat community that Kerouac wrote about, many of whom had settled in San Francisco, grew too large and notorious for the area of the city they were in, North Beach, many of them moved to these cheap homes in a previously-exclusive area. The area known as Haight-Ashbury. [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Grayfolded"] Stories all have their starts, even stories told in Tralfamadorian time, although sometimes those starts are shrouded in legend. For example, the story of Scientology's start has been told many times, with different people claiming to have heard L. Ron Hubbard talk about how writing was a mug's game, and if you wanted to make real money, you needed to get followers, start a religion. Either he said this over and over and over again, to many different science fiction writers, or most science fiction writers of his generation were liars. Of course, the definition of a writer is someone who tells lies for money, so who knows? One of the more plausible accounts of him saying that is given by Theodore Sturgeon. Sturgeon's account is more believable than most, because Sturgeon went on to be a supporter of Dianetics, the "new science" that Hubbard turned into his religion, for decades, even while telling the story. The story of the Grateful Dead probably starts as it ends, with Jerry Garcia. There are three things that everyone writing about the Dead says about Garcia's childhood, so we might as well say them here too. The first is that he was named by a music-loving father after Jerome Kern, the songwriter responsible for songs like "Ol' Man River" (though as Oscar Hammerstein's widow liked to point out, "Jerome Kern wrote dum-dum-dum-dum, *my husband* wrote 'Ol' Man River'" -- an important distinction we need to bear in mind when talking about songwriters who write music but not lyrics). The second is that when he was five years old that music-loving father drowned -- and Garcia would always say he had seen his father dying, though some sources claim this was a false memory. So it goes. And the third fact, which for some reason is always told after the second even though it comes before it chronologically, is that when he was four he lost two joints from his right middle finger. Garcia grew up a troubled teen, and in turn caused trouble for other people, but he also developed a few interests that would follow him through his life. He loved the fantastical, especially the fantastical macabre, and became an avid fan of horror and science fiction -- and through his love of old monster films he became enamoured with cinema more generally. Indeed, in 1983 he bought the film rights to Kurt Vonnegut's science fiction novel The Sirens of Titan, the first story in which the Tralfamadorians appear, and wrote a script based on it. He wanted to produce the film himself, with Francis Ford Coppola directing and Bill Murray starring, but most importantly for him he wanted to prevent anyone who didn't care about it from doing it badly. And in that he succeeded. As of 2023 there is no film of The Sirens of Titan. He loved to paint, and would continue that for the rest of his life, with one of his favourite subjects being Boris Karloff as the Frankenstein monster. And when he was eleven or twelve, he heard for the first time a record that was hugely influential to a whole generation of Californian musicians, even though it was a New York record -- "Gee" by the Crows: [Excerpt: The Crows, "Gee"] Garcia would say later "That was an important song. That was the first kind of, like where the voices had that kind of not-trained-singer voices, but tough-guy-on-the-street voice." That record introduced him to R&B, and soon he was listening to Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, to Ray Charles, and to a record we've not talked about in the podcast but which was one of the great early doo-wop records, "WPLJ" by the Four Deuces: [Excerpt: The Four Deuces, "WPLJ"] Garcia said of that record "That was one of my anthem songs when I was in junior high school and high school and around there. That was one of those songs everybody knew. And that everybody sang. Everybody sang that street-corner favorite." Garcia moved around a lot as a child, and didn't have much time for school by his own account, but one of the few teachers he did respect was an art teacher when he was in North Beach, Walter Hedrick. Hedrick was also one of the earliest of the conceptual artists, and one of the most important figures in the San Francisco arts scene that would become known as the Beat Generation (or the Beatniks, which was originally a disparaging term). Hedrick was a painter and sculptor, but also organised happenings, and he had also been one of the prime movers in starting a series of poetry readings in San Francisco, the first one of which had involved Allen Ginsberg giving the first ever reading of "Howl" -- one of a small number of poems, along with Eliot's "Prufrock" and "The Waste Land" and possibly Pound's Cantos, which can be said to have changed twentieth-century literature. Garcia was fifteen when he got to know Hedrick, in 1957, and by then the Beat scene had already become almost a parody of itself, having become known to the public because of the publication of works like On the Road, and the major artists in the scene were already rejecting the label. By this point tourists were flocking to North Beach to see these beatniks they'd heard about on TV, and Hedrick was actually employed by one cafe to sit in the window wearing a beret, turtleneck, sandals, and beard, and draw and paint, to attract the tourists who flocked by the busload because they could see that there was a "genuine beatnik" in the cafe. Hedrick was, as well as a visual artist, a guitarist and banjo player who played in traditional jazz bands, and he would bring records in to class for his students to listen to, and Garcia particularly remembered him bringing in records by Big Bill Broonzy: [Excerpt: Big Bill Broonzy, "When Things Go Wrong (It Hurts Me Too)"] Garcia was already an avid fan of rock and roll music, but it was being inspired by Hedrick that led him to get his first guitar. Like his contemporary Paul McCartney around the same time, he was initially given the wrong instrument as a birthday present -- in Garcia's case his mother gave him an accordion -- but he soon persuaded her to swap it for an electric guitar he saw in a pawn shop. And like his other contemporary, John Lennon, Garcia initially tuned his instrument incorrectly. He said later "When I started playing the guitar, believe me, I didn’t know anybody that played. I mean, I didn’t know anybody that played the guitar. Nobody. They weren’t around. There were no guitar teachers. You couldn’t take lessons. There was nothing like that, you know? When I was a kid and I had my first electric guitar, I had it tuned wrong and learned how to play on it with it tuned wrong for about a year. And I was getting somewhere on it, you know… Finally, I met a guy that knew how to tune it right and showed me three chords, and it was like a revelation. You know what I mean? It was like somebody gave me the key to heaven." He joined a band, the Chords, which mostly played big band music, and his friend Gary Foster taught him some of the rudiments of playing the guitar -- things like how to use a capo to change keys. But he was always a rebellious kid, and soon found himself faced with a choice between joining the military or going to prison. He chose the former, and it was during his time in the Army that a friend, Ron Stevenson, introduced him to the music of Merle Travis, and to Travis-style guitar picking: [Excerpt: Merle Travis, "Nine-Pound Hammer"] Garcia had never encountered playing like that before, but he instantly recognised that Travis, and Chet Atkins who Stevenson also played for him, had been an influence on Scotty Moore. He started to realise that the music he'd listened to as a teenager was influenced by music that went further back. But Stevenson, as well as teaching Garcia some of the rudiments of Travis-picking, also indirectly led to Garcia getting discharged from the Army. Stevenson was not a well man, and became suicidal. Garcia decided it was more important to keep his friend company and make sure he didn't kill himself than it was to turn up for roll call, and as a result he got discharged himself on psychiatric grounds -- according to Garcia he told the Army psychiatrist "I was involved in stuff that was more important to me in the moment than the army was and that was the reason I was late" and the psychiatrist thought it was neurotic of Garcia to have his own set of values separate from that of the Army. After discharge, Garcia did various jobs, including working as a transcriptionist for Lenny Bruce, the comedian who was a huge influence on the counterculture. In one of the various attacks over the years by authoritarians on language, Bruce was repeatedly arrested for obscenity, and in 1961 he was arrested at a jazz club in North Beach. Sixty years ago, the parts of speech that were being criminalised weren't pronouns, but prepositions and verbs: [Excerpt: Lenny Bruce, "To is a Preposition, Come is a Verb"] That piece, indeed, was so controversial that when Frank Zappa quoted part of it in a song in 1968, the record label insisted on the relevant passage being played backwards so people couldn't hear such disgusting filth: [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Harry You're a Beast"] (Anyone familiar with that song will understand that the censored portion is possibly the least offensive part of the whole thing). Bruce was facing trial, and he needed transcripts of what he had said in his recordings to present in court. Incidentally, there seems to be some confusion over exactly which of Bruce's many obscenity trials Garcia became a transcriptionist for. Dennis McNally says in his biography of the band, published in 2002, that it was the most famous of them, in autumn 1964, but in a later book, Jerry on Jerry, a book of interviews of Garcia edited by McNally, McNally talks about it being when Garcia was nineteen, which would mean it was Bruce's first trial, in 1961. We can put this down to the fact that many of the people involved, not least Garcia, lived in Tralfamadorian time, and were rather hazy on dates, but I'm placing the story here rather than in 1964 because it seems to make more sense that Garcia would be involved in a trial based on an incident in San Francisco than one in New York. Garcia got the job, even though he couldn't type, because by this point he'd spent so long listening to recordings of old folk and country music that he was used to transcribing indecipherable accents, and often, as Garcia would tell it, Bruce would mumble very fast and condense multiple syllables into one. Garcia was particularly impressed by Bruce's ability to improvise but talk in entire paragraphs, and he compared his use of language to bebop. Another thing that was starting to impress Garcia, and which he also compared to bebop, was bluegrass: [Excerpt: Bill Monroe, "Fire on the Mountain"] Bluegrass is a music that is often considered very traditional, because it's based on traditional songs and uses acoustic instruments, but in fact it was a terribly *modern* music, and largely a postwar creation of a single band -- Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys. And Garcia was right when he said it was "white bebop" -- though he did say "The only thing it doesn’t have is the harmonic richness of bebop. You know what I mean? That’s what it’s missing, but it has everything else." Both bebop and bluegrass evolved after the second world war, though they were informed by music from before it, and both prized the ability to improvise, and technical excellence. Both are musics that involved playing *fast*, in an ensemble, and being able to respond quickly to the other musicians. Both musics were also intensely rhythmic, a response to a faster paced, more stressful world. They were both part of the general change in the arts towards immediacy that we looked at in the last episode with the creation first of expressionism and then of pop art. Bluegrass didn't go into the harmonic explorations that modern jazz did, but it was absolutely as modern as anything Charlie Parker was doing, and came from the same impulses. It was tradition and innovation, the past and the future simultaneously. Bill Monroe, Jackson Pollock, Charlie Parker, Jack Kerouac, and Lenny Bruce were all in their own ways responding to the same cultural moment, and it was that which Garcia was responding to. But he didn't become able to play bluegrass until after a tragedy which shaped his life even more than his father's death had. Garcia had been to a party and was in a car with his friends Lee Adams, Paul Speegle, and Alan Trist. Adams was driving at ninety miles an hour when they hit a tight curve and crashed. Garcia, Adams, and Trist were all severely injured but survived. Speegle died. So it goes. This tragedy changed Garcia's attitudes totally. Of all his friends, Speegle was the one who was most serious about his art, and who treated it as something to work on. Garcia had always been someone who fundamentally didn't want to work or take any responsibility for anything. And he remained that way -- except for his music. Speegle's death changed Garcia's attitude to that, totally. If his friend wasn't going to be able to practice his own art any more, Garcia would practice his, in tribute to him. He resolved to become a virtuoso on guitar and banjo. His girlfriend of the time later said “I don’t know if you’ve spent time with someone rehearsing ‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown’ on a banjo for eight hours, but Jerry practiced endlessly. He really wanted to excel and be the best. He had tremendous personal ambition in the musical arena, and he wanted to master whatever he set out to explore. Then he would set another sight for himself. And practice another eight hours a day of new licks.” But of course, you can't make ensemble music on your own: [Excerpt: Jerry Garcia and Bob Hunter, "Oh Mary Don't You Weep" (including end)] "Evelyn said, “What is it called when a person needs a … person … when you want to be touched and the … two are like one thing and there isn’t anything else at all anywhere?” Alicia, who had read books, thought about it. “Love,” she said at length." That's from More Than Human, by Theodore Sturgeon, a book I'll be quoting a few more times as the story goes on. Robert Hunter, like Garcia, was just out of the military -- in his case, the National Guard -- and he came into Garcia's life just after Paul Speegle had left it. Garcia and Alan Trist met Hunter ten days after the accident, and the three men started hanging out together, Trist and Hunter writing while Garcia played music. Garcia and Hunter both bonded over their shared love for the beats, and for traditional music, and the two formed a duo, Bob and Jerry, which performed together a handful of times. They started playing together, in fact, after Hunter picked up a guitar and started playing a song and halfway through Garcia took it off him and finished the song himself. The two of them learned songs from the Harry Smith Anthology -- Garcia was completely apolitical, and only once voted in his life, for Lyndon Johnson in 1964 to keep Goldwater out, and regretted even doing that, and so he didn't learn any of the more political material people like Pete Seeger, Phil Ochs, and Bob Dylan were doing at the time -- but their duo only lasted a short time because Hunter wasn't an especially good guitarist. Hunter would, though, continue to jam with Garcia and other friends, sometimes playing mandolin, while Garcia played solo gigs and with other musicians as well, playing and moving round the Bay Area and performing with whoever he could: [Excerpt: Jerry Garcia, "Railroad Bill"] "Bleshing, that was Janie’s word. She said Baby told it to her. She said it meant everyone all together being something, even if they all did different things. Two arms, two legs, one body, one head, all working together, although a head can’t walk and arms can’t think. Lone said maybe it was a mixture of “blending” and “meshing,” but I don’t think he believed that himself. It was a lot more than that." That's from More Than Human In 1961, Garcia and Hunter met another young musician, but one who was interested in a very different type of music. Phil Lesh was a serious student of modern classical music, a classically-trained violinist and trumpeter whose interest was solidly in the experimental and whose attitude can be summed up by a story that's always told about him meeting his close friend Tom Constanten for the first time. Lesh had been talking with someone about serialism, and Constanten had interrupted, saying "Music stopped being created in 1750 but it started again in 1950". Lesh just stuck out his hand, recognising a kindred spirit. Lesh and Constanten were both students of Luciano Berio, the experimental composer who created compositions for magnetic tape: [Excerpt: Luciano Berio, "Momenti"] Berio had been one of the founders of the Studio di fonologia musicale di Radio Milano, a studio for producing contemporary electronic music where John Cage had worked for a time, and he had also worked with the electronic music pioneer Karlheinz Stockhausen. Lesh would later remember being very impressed when Berio brought a tape into the classroom -- the actual multitrack tape for Stockhausen's revolutionary piece Gesang Der Juenglinge: [Excerpt: Karlheinz Stockhausen, "Gesang Der Juenglinge"] Lesh at first had been distrustful of Garcia -- Garcia was charismatic and had followers, and Lesh never liked people like that. But he was impressed by Garcia's playing, and soon realised that the two men, despite their very different musical interests, had a lot in common. Lesh was interested in the technology of music as well as in performing and composing it, and so when he wasn't studying he helped out by engineering at the university's radio station. Lesh was impressed by Garcia's playing, and suggested to the presenter of the station's folk show, the Midnight Special, that Garcia be a guest. Garcia was so good that he ended up getting an entire solo show to himself, where normally the show would feature multiple acts. Lesh and Constanten soon moved away from the Bay Area to Las Vegas, but both would be back -- in Constanten's case he would form an experimental group in San Francisco with their fellow student Steve Reich, and that group (though not with Constanten performing) would later premiere Terry Riley's In C, a piece influenced by La Monte Young and often considered one of the great masterpieces of minimalist music. By early 1962 Garcia and Hunter had formed a bluegrass band, with Garcia on guitar and banjo and Hunter on mandolin, and a rotating cast of other musicians including Ken Frankel, who played banjo and fiddle. They performed under different names, including the Tub Thumpers, the Hart Valley Drifters, and the Sleepy Valley Hog Stompers, and played a mixture of bluegrass and old-time music -- and were very careful about the distinction: [Excerpt: The Hart Valley Drifters, "Cripple Creek"] In 1993, the Republican political activist John Perry Barlow was invited to talk to the CIA about the possibilities open to them with what was then called the Information Superhighway. He later wrote, in part "They told me they'd brought Steve Jobs in a few weeks before to indoctrinate them in modern information management. And they were delighted when I returned later, bringing with me a platoon of Internet gurus, including Esther Dyson, Mitch Kapor, Tony Rutkowski, and Vint Cerf. They sealed us into an electronically impenetrable room to discuss the radical possibility that a good first step in lifting their blackout would be for the CIA to put up a Web site... We told them that information exchange was a barter system, and that to receive, one must also be willing to share. This was an alien notion to them. They weren't even willing to share information among themselves, much less the world." 1962 brought a new experience for Robert Hunter. Hunter had been recruited into taking part in psychological tests at Stanford University, which in the sixties and seventies was one of the preeminent universities for psychological experiments. As part of this, Hunter was given $140 to attend the VA hospital (where a janitor named Ken Kesey, who had himself taken part in a similar set of experiments a couple of years earlier, worked a day job while he was working on his first novel) for four weeks on the run, and take different psychedelic drugs each time, starting with LSD, so his reactions could be observed. (It was later revealed that these experiments were part of a CIA project called MKUltra, designed to investigate the possibility of using psychedelic drugs for mind control, blackmail, and torture. Hunter was quite lucky in that he was told what was going to happen to him and paid for his time. Other subjects included the unlucky customers of brothels the CIA set up as fronts -- they dosed the customers' drinks and observed them through two-way mirrors. Some of their experimental subjects died by suicide as a result of their experiences. So it goes. ) Hunter was interested in taking LSD after reading Aldous Huxley's writings about psychedelic substances, and he brought his typewriter along to the experiment. During the first test, he wrote a six-page text, a short excerpt from which is now widely quoted, reading in part "Sit back picture yourself swooping up a shell of purple with foam crests of crystal drops soft nigh they fall unto the sea of morning creep-very-softly mist ... and then sort of cascade tinkley-bell-like (must I take you by the hand, ever so slowly type) and then conglomerate suddenly into a peal of silver vibrant uncomprehendingly, blood singingly, joyously resounding bells" Hunter's experience led to everyone in their social circle wanting to try LSD, and soon they'd all come to the same conclusion -- this was something special. But Garcia needed money -- he'd got his girlfriend pregnant, and they'd married (this would be the first of several marriages in Garcia's life, and I won't be covering them all -- at Garcia's funeral, his second wife, Carolyn, said Garcia always called her the love of his life, and his first wife and his early-sixties girlfriend who he proposed to again in the nineties both simultaneously said "He said that to me!"). So he started teaching guitar at a music shop in Palo Alto. Hunter had no time for Garcia's incipient domesticity and thought that his wife was trying to make him live a conventional life, and the two drifted apart somewhat, though they'd still play together occasionally. Through working at the music store, Garcia got to know the manager, Troy Weidenheimer, who had a rock and roll band called the Zodiacs. Garcia joined the band on bass, despite that not being his instrument. He later said "Troy was a lot of fun, but I wasn’t good enough a musician then to have been able to deal with it. I was out of my idiom, really, ’cause when I played with Troy I was playing electric bass, you know. I never was a good bass player. Sometimes I was playing in the wrong key and didn’t even [fuckin’] know it. I couldn’t hear that low, after playing banjo, you know, and going to electric...But Troy taught me the principle of, hey, you know, just stomp your foot and get on it. He was great. A great one for the instant arrangement, you know. And he was also fearless for that thing of get your friends to do it." Garcia's tenure in the Zodiacs didn't last long, nor did this experiment with rock and roll, but two other members of the Zodiacs will be notable later in the story -- the harmonica player, an old friend of Garcia's named Ron McKernan, who would soon gain the nickname Pig Pen after the Peanuts character, and the drummer, Bill Kreutzmann: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Drums/Space (Skull & Bones version)"] Kreutzmann said of the Zodiacs "Jerry was the hired bass player and I was the hired drummer. I only remember playing that one gig with them, but I was in way over my head. I always did that. I always played things that were really hard and it didn’t matter. I just went for it." Garcia and Kreutzmann didn't really get to know each other then, but Garcia did get to know someone else who would soon be very important in his life. Bob Weir was from a very different background than Garcia, though both had the shared experience of long bouts of chronic illness as children. He had grown up in a very wealthy family, and had always been well-liked, but he was what we would now call neurodivergent -- reading books about the band he talks about being dyslexic but clearly has other undiagnosed neurodivergences, which often go along with dyslexia -- and as a result he was deemed to have behavioural problems which led to him getting expelled from pre-school and kicked out of the cub scouts. He was never academically gifted, thanks to his dyslexia, but he was always enthusiastic about music -- to a fault. He learned to play boogie piano but played so loudly and so often his parents sold the piano. He had a trumpet, but the neighbours complained about him playing it outside. Finally he switched to the guitar, an instrument with which it is of course impossible to make too loud a noise. The first song he learned was the Kingston Trio's version of an old sea shanty, "The Wreck of the John B": [Excerpt: The Kingston Trio, "The Wreck of the John B"] He was sent off to a private school in Colorado for teenagers with behavioural issues, and there he met the boy who would become his lifelong friend, John Perry Barlow. Unfortunately the two troublemakers got on with each other *so* well that after their first year they were told that it was too disruptive having both of them at the school, and only one could stay there the next year. Barlow stayed and Weir moved back to the Bay Area. By this point, Weir was getting more interested in folk music that went beyond the commercial folk of the Kingston Trio. As he said later "There was something in there that was ringing my bells. What I had grown up thinking of as hillbilly music, it started to have some depth for me, and I could start to hear the music in it. Suddenly, it wasn’t just a bunch of ignorant hillbillies playing what they could. There was some depth and expertise and stuff like that to aspire to.” He moved from school to school but one thing that stayed with him was his love of playing guitar, and he started taking lessons from Troy Weidenheimer, but he got most of his education going to folk clubs and hootenannies. He regularly went to the Tangent, a club where Garcia played, but Garcia's bluegrass banjo playing was far too rigorous for a free spirit like Weir to emulate, and instead he started trying to copy one of the guitarists who was a regular there, Jorma Kaukonnen. On New Year's Eve 1963 Weir was out walking with his friends Bob Matthews and Rich Macauley, and they passed the music shop where Garcia was a teacher, and heard him playing his banjo. They knocked and asked if they could come in -- they all knew Garcia a little, and Bob Matthews was one of his students, having become interested in playing banjo after hearing the theme tune to the Beverly Hillbillies, played by the bluegrass greats Flatt and Scruggs: [Excerpt: Flatt and Scruggs, "The Beverly Hillbillies"] Garcia at first told these kids, several years younger than him, that they couldn't come in -- he was waiting for his students to show up. But Weir said “Jerry, listen, it’s seven-thirty on New Year’s Eve, and I don’t think you’re going to be seeing your students tonight.” Garcia realised the wisdom of this, and invited the teenagers in to jam with him. At the time, there was a bit of a renaissance in jug bands, as we talked about back in the episode on the Lovin' Spoonful. This was a form of music that had grown up in the 1920s, and was similar and related to skiffle and coffee-pot bands -- jug bands would tend to have a mixture of portable string instruments like guitars and banjos, harmonicas, and people using improvised instruments, particularly blowing into a jug. The most popular of these bands had been Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers, led by banjo player Gus Cannon and with harmonica player Noah Lewis: [Excerpt: Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers, "Viola Lee Blues"] With the folk revival, Cannon's work had become well-known again. The Rooftop Singers, a Kingston Trio style folk group, had had a hit with his song "Walk Right In" in 1963, and as a result of that success Cannon had even signed a record contract with Stax -- Stax's first album ever, a month before Booker T and the MGs' first album, was in fact the eighty-year-old Cannon playing his banjo and singing his old songs. The rediscovery of Cannon had started a craze for jug bands, and the most popular of the new jug bands was Jim Kweskin's Jug Band, which did a mixture of old songs like "You're a Viper" and more recent material redone in the old style. Weir, Matthews, and Macauley had been to see the Kweskin band the night before, and had been very impressed, especially by their singer Maria D’Amato -- who would later marry her bandmate Geoff Muldaur and take his name -- and her performance of Leiber and Stoller's "I'm a Woman": [Excerpt: Jim Kweskin's Jug Band, "I'm a Woman"] Matthews suggested that they form their own jug band, and Garcia eagerly agreed -- though Matthews found himself rapidly moving from banjo to washboard to kazoo to second kazoo before realising he was surplus to requirements. Robert Hunter was similarly an early member but claimed he "didn’t have the embouchure" to play the jug, and was soon also out. He moved to LA and started studying Scientology -- later claiming that he wanted science-fictional magic powers, which L. Ron Hubbard's new religion certainly offered. The group took the name Mother McRee's Uptown Jug Champions -- apparently they varied the spelling every time they played -- and had a rotating membership that at one time or another included about twenty different people, but tended always to have Garcia on banjo, Weir on jug and later guitar, and Garcia's friend Pig Pen on harmonica: [Excerpt: Mother McRee's Uptown Jug Champions, "On the Road Again"] The group played quite regularly in early 1964, but Garcia's first love was still bluegrass, and he was trying to build an audience with his bluegrass band, The Black Mountain Boys. But bluegrass was very unpopular in the Bay Area, where it was simultaneously thought of as unsophisticated -- as "hillbilly music" -- and as elitist, because it required actual instrumental ability, which wasn't in any great supply in the amateur folk scene. But instrumental ability was something Garcia definitely had, as at this point he was still practising eight hours a day, every day, and it shows on the recordings of the Black Mountain Boys: [Excerpt: The Black Mountain Boys, "Rosa Lee McFall"] By the summer, Bob Weir was also working at the music shop, and so Garcia let Weir take over his students while he and the Black Mountain Boys' guitarist Sandy Rothman went on a road trip to see as many bluegrass musicians as they could and to audition for Bill Monroe himself. As it happened, Garcia found himself too shy to audition for Monroe, but Rothman later ended up playing with Monroe's Blue Grass Boys. On his return to the Bay Area, Garcia resumed playing with the Uptown Jug Champions, but Pig Pen started pestering him to do something different. While both men had overlapping tastes in music and a love for the blues, Garcia's tastes had always been towards the country end of the spectrum while Pig Pen's were towards R&B. And while the Uptown Jug Champions were all a bit disdainful of the Beatles at first -- apart from Bob Weir, the youngest of the group, who thought they were interesting -- Pig Pen had become enamoured of another British band who were just starting to make it big: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Not Fade Away"] 29) Garcia liked the first Rolling Stones album too, and he eventually took Pig Pen's point -- the stuff that the Rolling Stones were doing, covers of Slim Harpo and Buddy Holly, was not a million miles away from the material they were doing as Mother McRee's Uptown Jug Champions. Pig Pen could play a little electric organ, Bob had been fooling around with the electric guitars in the music shop. Why not give it a go? The stuff bands like the Rolling Stones were doing wasn't that different from the electric blues that Pig Pen liked, and they'd all seen A Hard Day's Night -- they could carry on playing with banjos, jugs, and kazoos and have the respect of a handful of folkies, or they could get electric instruments and potentially have screaming girls and millions of dollars, while playing the same songs. This was a convincing argument, especially when Dana Morgan Jr, the son of the owner of the music shop, told them they could have free electric instruments if they let him join on bass. Morgan wasn't that great on bass, but what the hell, free instruments. Pig Pen had the best voice and stage presence, so he became the frontman of the new group, singing most of the leads, though Jerry and Bob would both sing a few songs, and playing harmonica and organ. Weir was on rhythm guitar, and Garcia was the lead guitarist and obvious leader of the group. They just needed a drummer, and handily Bill Kreutzmann, who had played with Garcia and Pig Pen in the Zodiacs, was also now teaching music at the music shop. Not only that, but about three weeks before they decided to go electric, Kreutzmann had seen the Uptown Jug Champions performing and been astonished by Garcia's musicianship and charisma, and said to himself "Man, I’m gonna follow that guy forever!" The new group named themselves the Warlocks, and started rehearsing in earnest. Around this time, Garcia also finally managed to get some of the LSD that his friend Robert Hunter had been so enthusiastic about three years earlier, and it was a life-changing experience for him. In particular, he credited LSD with making him comfortable being a less disciplined player -- as a bluegrass player he'd had to be frighteningly precise, but now he was playing rock and needed to loosen up. A few days after taking LSD for the first time, Garcia also heard some of Bob Dylan's new material, and realised that the folk singer he'd had little time for with his preachy politics was now making electric music that owed a lot more to the Beat culture Garcia considered himself part of: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Subterranean Homesick Blues"] Another person who was hugely affected by hearing that was Phil Lesh, who later said "I couldn’t believe that was Bob Dylan on AM radio, with an electric band. It changed my whole consciousness: if something like that could happen, the sky was the limit." Up to that point, Lesh had been focused entirely on his avant-garde music, working with friends like Steve Reich to push music forward, inspired by people like John Cage and La Monte Young, but now he realised there was music of value in the rock world. He'd quickly started going to rock gigs, seeing the Rolling Stones and the Byrds, and then he took acid and went to see his friend Garcia's new electric band play their third ever gig. He was blown away, and very quickly it was decided that Lesh would be the group's new bass player -- though everyone involved tells a different story as to who made the decision and how it came about, and accounts also vary as to whether Dana Morgan took his sacking gracefully and let his erstwhile bandmates keep their instruments, or whether they had to scrounge up some new ones. Lesh had never played bass before, but he was a talented multi-instrumentalist with a deep understanding of music and an ability to compose and improvise, and the repertoire the Warlocks were playing in the early days was mostly three-chord material that doesn't take much rehearsal -- though it was apparently beyond the abilities of poor Dana Morgan, who apparently had to be told note-by-note what to play by Garcia, and learn it by rote. Garcia told Lesh what notes the strings of a bass were tuned to, told him to borrow a guitar and practice, and within two weeks he was on stage with the Warlocks: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, “Grayfolded"] In September 1995, just weeks after Jerry Garcia's death, an article was published in Mute magazine identifying a cultural trend that had shaped the nineties, and would as it turned out shape at least the next thirty years. It's titled "The Californian Ideology", though it may be better titled "The Bay Area Ideology", and it identifies a worldview that had grown up in Silicon Valley, based around the ideas of the hippie movement, of right-wing libertarianism, of science fiction authors, and of Marshall McLuhan. It starts "There is an emerging global orthodoxy concerning the relation between society, technology and politics. We have called this orthodoxy `the Californian Ideology' in honour of the state where it originated. By naturalising and giving a technological proof to a libertarian political philosophy, and therefore foreclosing on alternative futures, the Californian Ideologues are able to assert that social and political debates about the future have now become meaningless. The California Ideology is a mix of cybernetics, free market economics, and counter-culture libertarianism and is promulgated by magazines such as WIRED and MONDO 2000 and preached in the books of Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly and others. The new faith has been embraced by computer nerds, slacker students, 30-something capitalists, hip academics, futurist bureaucrats and even the President of the USA himself. As usual, Europeans have not been slow to copy the latest fashion from America. While a recent EU report recommended adopting the Californian free enterprise model to build the 'infobahn', cutting-edge artists and academics have been championing the 'post-human' philosophy developed by the West Coast's Extropian cult. With no obvious opponents, the global dominance of the Californian ideology appears to be complete." [Excerpt: Grayfolded] The Warlocks' first gig with Phil Lesh on bass was on June the 18th 1965, at a club called Frenchy's with a teenage clientele. Lesh thought his playing had been wooden and it wasn't a good gig, and apparently the management of Frenchy's agreed -- they were meant to play a second night there, but turned up to be told they'd been replaced by a band with an accordion and clarinet. But by September the group had managed to get themselves a residency at a small bar named the In Room, and playing there every night made them cohere. They were at this point playing the kind of sets that bar bands everywhere play to this day, though at the time the songs they were playing, like "Gloria" by Them and "In the Midnight Hour", were the most contemporary of hits. Another song that they introduced into their repertoire was "Do You Believe in Magic" by the Lovin' Spoonful, another band which had grown up out of former jug band musicians. As well as playing their own sets, they were also the house band at The In Room and as such had to back various touring artists who were the headline acts. The first act they had to back up was Cornell Gunter's version of the Coasters. Gunter had brought his own guitarist along as musical director, and for the first show Weir sat in the audience watching the show and learning the parts, staring intently at this musical director's playing. After seeing that, Weir's playing was changed, because he also picked up how the guitarist was guiding the band while playing, the small cues that a musical director will use to steer the musicians in the right direction. Weir started doing these things himself when he was singing lead -- Pig Pen was the frontman but everyone except Bill sang sometimes -- and the group soon found that rather than Garcia being the sole leader, now whoever was the lead singer for the song was the de facto conductor as well. By this point, the Bay Area was getting almost overrun with people forming electric guitar bands, as every major urban area in America was. Some of the bands were even having hits already -- We Five had had a number three hit with "You Were On My Mind", a song which had originally been performed by the folk duo Ian and Sylvia: [Excerpt: We Five, "You Were On My Mind"] Although the band that was most highly regarded on the scene, the Charlatans, was having problems with the various record companies they tried to get signed to, and didn't end up making a record until 1969. If tracks like "Number One" had been released in 1965 when they were recorded, the history of the San Francisco music scene may have taken a very different turn: [Excerpt: The Charlatans, "Number One"] Bands like Jefferson Airplane, the Great Society, and Big Brother and the Holding Company were also forming, and Autumn Records was having a run of success with records by the Beau Brummels, whose records were produced by Autumn's in-house A&R man, Sly Stone: [Excerpt: The Beau Brummels, "Laugh Laugh"] The Warlocks were somewhat cut off from this, playing in a dive bar whose clientele was mostly depressed alcoholics. But the fact that they were playing every night for an audience that didn't care much gave them freedom, and they used that freedom to improvise. Both Lesh and Garcia were big fans of John Coltrane, and they started to take lessons from his style of playing. When the group played "Gloria" or "Midnight Hour" or whatever, they started to extend the songs and give themselves long instrumental passages for soloing. Garcia's playing wasn't influenced *harmonically* by Coltrane -- in fact Garcia was always a rather harmonically simple player. He'd tend to play lead lines either in Mixolydian mode, which is one of the most standard modes in rock, pop, blues, and jazz, or he'd play the notes of the chord that was being played, so if the band were playing a G chord his lead would emphasise the notes G, B, and D. But what he was influenced by was Coltrane's tendency to improvise in long, complex, phrases that made up a single thought -- Coltrane was thinking musically in paragraphs, rather than sentences, and Garcia started to try the same kind of thing. And under him Lesh was slowly starting to innovate in his bass playing. Lesh was also thinking in terms of Coltrane, but also of the way classical and baroque composers would use bass lines contrapuntally. Of all the band Lesh had the least knowledge of what the norms of popular music forms like rock and roll and blues were, and so his use of the bass inadvertently paralleled the moves being made by a lot of other bass players around this time, now that recording techniques were improving and allowing much better definition of bass sounds on record. Up to about 1965 the bass on rock and roll records was almost always playing very simple lines -- at its most complicated it'd be something like a boogie walking bassline, but more often it would be the root and maybe fifth of the chord, simple whole notes dead on the beat, often locked in with the bass drum. Lesh was one of the first bass players to start playing after people like James Jamerson, Paul McCartney, and Brian Wilson started coming up with more through-composed parts for rock music, and that became his natural idiom. What Lesh was doing was not what one might think of as conventional rhythm section work at all, and he would often syncopate his lines, only rarely coming in on the one of a bar as a normal bass player would, but often coming in half a beat later. The group started to develop a conversational approach to performance, with the instrumentalists, especially Lesh and Garcia, entering into a dialogue with each other, all doing their own thing. They were particularly influenced by "Cleo's Back" by Junior Walker and the All-Stars, a Motown instrumental, and it's fascinating to listen to that record in this context. "Cleo's Back" is clearly an attempt to replicate Stax records like "Green Onions", but the Walker record has each of the musicians doing his own thing, rather than playing in tight lockstep. They're all paying attention to the groove, but they're riffing on it, coming in and out when they have something to say, playing off each other as if they all think they're the star soloist but still somehow working as an ensemble: [Excerpt: Junior Walker & the All-Stars, "Cleo's Back"] By the time the Warlocks had finished their stint at the In Room, the San Francisco psychedelic rock scene had exploded, almost without the group realising it, and record companies were on the lookout. San Francisco was clearly the next big thing to exploit, and Autumn Records was right there. After Sly Stone had had hits with the Beau Brummels and minor success with the Mojo Men, they were on a bit of a high and were auditioning bands left and right. The recording of the Charlatans we heard earlier was from a session they did for Autumn that didn't get released, and Sly Stone was just about to start work with the Great Society, but Stone was apparently not present when the Warlocks did their audition for the label in November 1965: [Excerpt: The Warlocks, "Can't Come Down"] But for that audition, the group actually performed under another name, The Emergency Crew, because Phil Lesh had been looking through records in a shop and found one by another group called the Warlocks. McNally in his biography suggests that this is likely the Warlocks who included two-thirds of ZZ Top, but as far as I can tell that band didn't release a record until a few months after this. Nor of course is it the Velvet Underground, who never released a record under that name. There were, it turns out, a lot of bands who decided in the mid-sixties to call themselves The Warlocks -- I've found evidence of at least ten, many of whom released singles. My guess is that the record that Lesh had found was this one, an attempt by a band from Massachusetts to start a dance craze, released on Decca in June 1965. Lesh remembered the record he'd seen as being on Columbia, but otherwise this fits: [Excerpt: The Warlocks, "Temper Tantrum"] Oddly, the B-side to that track was a cover of James Brown's "I'll Go Crazy", which was a song that was also in the set of the Bay Area Warlocks. The group got together in Phil Lesh's house and started throwing out names. When nobody liked any of anyone else's suggestions, they started thumbing through reference books -- dictionaries, books of quotations, and so on -- and eventually Garcia found what he and Lesh thought the perfect name, though Bob Weir wasn't so keen. The Grateful Dead is a motif from many folk stories throughout the world. To quote from Gordon Hall Gerould's book on the subject: "A man finds a corpse lying unburied, and out of pure philanthropy procures interment for it at great personal inconvenience. Later he is met by the ghost of the dead man, who in many cases promises him help on condition of receiving, in return, half of whatever he gets. The hero obtains a wife (or some other reward), and, when called upon, is ready to fulfil his bargain as to sharing his possessions." Gerould identifies variants of this story all over the world, and sees it crop up as an element in many, many, stories. It exists in endless variations with no single canonical version, as so many folk stories and songs do. None of the band knew much of this at the time, but Lesh in particular was so enthusiastic about the name that the matter was settled. The Warlocks were now the Grateful Dead: [Excerpt: “Grayfolded”] In Kurt Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle, there's a religion made up by a calypso singer named Bokonon, which includes a concept called a karass. To quote from the book "We Bokononists believe that humanity is organized into teams, teams that do God's Will without ever discovering what they are doing. Such a team is called a karass by Bokonon" A karass doesn't necessarily know it's a karass -- it's a collection of people whose lives are intertwined in ways they will never fully understand. Later in the book he goes on to define another term: "A wampeter is the pivot of a karass. No karass is without a wampeter, Bokonon tells us, just as no wheel is without a hub. Anything can be a wampeter: a tree, a rock, an animal, an idea, a book, a melody, the Holy Grail. Whatever it is, the members of its karass revolve about it in the majestic chaos of a spiral nebula. The orbits of the members of a karass about their common wampeter are spiritual orbits, naturally. It is souls and not bodies that revolve." In Vonnegut's twice-fictional religion, there are always two wampeters for every karass, one waxing and one waning. And there's no doubt that one of the wampeters around which the karass that encompassed the Grateful Dead at this time was revolving was Neal Cassady: [Excerpt: Bob Weir "Cassidy"] Cassady is difficult to sum up, especially at a remove of nearly sixty years. He was a vital link between two different versions of the counterculture -- the Beats of the fifties and the hippies of the sixties -- and everyone who knew him talks about him as having been a great artist and a vital inspiration to them. He was regarded as a peer by Ken Kesey, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Jerry Garcia. But while Kesey and Kerouac's art was their novels, Ginsberg's was his poetry, and Garcia's was his guitar playing -- all things that one can point to and analyse and that exist as works of art, according to Garcia "Neal was a guy who was like an artist without an art. He was his art, you know?" He meant that very literally. He said "If you’re doing something and eventually you’re doing it well enough to where there’s a flow to it, then you know when the flow is there and you know when it ain’t. And it’s that same thing. But like, most people do it the way I’ve done it—the way most conventional artists deal with it at that level is to take up a discipline, one specific thing, scope in on it, concentrate your energy on it, like an alchemist, and work on it and work on it, and that becomes the way of telling whether you’re on or not, and then all your energy goes into it. Neal’s way of doing that was to eliminate the tool, you know, even though he probably wasn’t conscious of it initially and used to envy that discipline. Eventually he became that whole thing—all of his surfaces, if you imagine human beings as having many surfaces, all of his surfaces were on that edge of on-ness and off-ness, and being conscious of whether you’re on or off. That whole thing of balancing on the end of a stepladder, you know, the kind of stuff that Neal could do. I mean, when he was on, he could really, because he worked at it, man. He spent a lot of the time doing it. Everybody else thought it was crazy weirdness, but he was working on it." Cassady had been a petty criminal for a great part of his youth, and had been arrested a number of times for car theft, shoplifting, and possession of stolen goods. But he was also mentored by a renowned educator, Justin Brierly, who saw potential in him. Through one of Brierly's other students, after getting out of prison when he was nineteen he met Jack Kerouac, and the two travelled across the country on several occasions -- with Cassady becoming the model for Dean Moriarty, the main character in Kerouac's On The Road. Cassady asked Kerouac to teach him how to write, though he never finished a completed work in his lifetime, but according to many sources while Kerouac was teaching Cassady, Cassady was also teaching Kerouac, and the prose style which made Kerouac famous was in large part an imitation of Cassady's style. In 1962, Cassady read Ken Kesey's novel One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, and identified so strongly with the protagonist, Randle McMurphy, and his fight against a system that considers him insane and eventually breaks him, that he tracked down Kesey and the two became friends. By this time Kesey was a strong advocate for the use of LSD -- not in controlled, experimental, safe conditions like those advocated by Timothy Leary at this point, but for general, uninhibited, recreational use. When in 1964 Kesey needed to travel to New York in connection with the publication of his second novel, he and Cassady and a group of other people, who dubbed themselves the Merry Pranksters, decided to make it a ritual event -- they were going to retrace the East-West migration that had characterised white people's journey in America, and do it backwards. They were going to go on the road, and bring West Coast weirdness to the heartlands and East Coast. They got a bus, and painted it in psychedelic colours -- and note that this is in June 1964, before even A Hard Day's Night had come out, to give some perspective on where the general culture was at -- and where the destination should be they simply wrote "Furthur" (spelled with a u instead of an e, apparently as a mistake, but taken as serendipity), and went out on the road. They attempted to make a film of the journey, and they filmed extensive material. So extensive, indeed, that the task of going through it thoroughly became too great for the unassisted Kesey, and a film didn't come out until 2011. But the Merry Pranksters' journey and attempted film did, as the Tralfamadorians among you will know, become the inspiration for another film that was released: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Magical Mystery Tour"] After this, Kesey's home became something of a commune with various of the Pranksters often in attendance. In 1965 a young journalist named Hunter S. Thompson, working on a book about the Hells Angels motorcycle gang, decided that it might be interesting to bring them along to meet the Pranksters, and a party was thrown for the Angels at Kesey's house, with Allen Ginsberg and Ram Dass also attending. This went well enough that there started to be *weekly* parties organised by the Pranksters, and just after the Warlocks changed their name to the Grateful Dead, in November 1965, several of them attended one of these parties, where they took acid and had a great time with people like Kesey and Ginsberg. Shortly after that, the Pranksters decided to do something a little bigger -- they were going to turn their parties into full-blown Happenings, in the way we talked about last episode, and the Grateful Dead were going to be involved, providing music. Part of the reasoning for this was that the film that had been made of the road trip was clearly not yet ready, but they could show bits of it in these Happenings as essentially guerilla marketing, establishing an underground reputation for when it was finally released. These Happenings were to be called Acid Tests, and the main way they were distinct from the other happenings we've talked about was that everyone involved would be on acid. Or at least, almost everyone -- a small number never indulged, notably Pig Pen, whose drug of choice was always alcohol, not anything psychedelic. At a typical one of these acid tests, the Grateful Dead would play their music, which from the few surviving recordings of them in 1966 was a mixture of fairly standard R&B: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "I'm a Hog For You Baby (acid test)"] And rather unformed psychedelic jamming: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Caution (Do Not Step on Tracks) (acid test)"] Film of the Pranksters' road trip would be shown, some of the Pranksters would make their own music (though they couldn't play instruments), Kesey would write messages on slides which would be projected while the band were playing, and Neal Cassady would juggle hammers. After the first of the Acid Tests involving the Dead, they quickly found themselves with a team -- co-managers Rock Scully, who they met at the Acid Test, and Danny Rifkin, and sound man Owsley Stanley, who became interested in doing the band's sound after an acid trip in which he claimed he could see the patterns the sound was making and knew how to improve them. Stanley was the first private individual in the world, outside industry and academia, to figure out how to synthesise his own LSD, and he used the money he made from this to help support the group in their career, buying equipment. He would also record all the group's shows (and others he engineered) to check his own work back, and he kept almost all of these recordings, starting a practice that would lead to the Grateful Dead being the most exhaustively documented live act of the rock era. Within two months of the first Acid Test the group found themselves playing to six thousand people at the Trips Festival, and they soon built up enough of a following that they actually decamped with the Pranksters to LA, spending two months there holding acid tests while working on original material and trying to get a little privacy as they worked out how to deal with their new followers. They returned to San Francisco after a couple of months, thoroughly disillusioned with LA, and in July they released a single on the tiny San Francisco-based indie label Scorpio Records: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Don't Ease Me In" (use single mix from YouTube as it has reverb)] "people still laugh about as much as they ever did, despite their shrunken brains. If a bunch of them are lying around on a beach, and one of them farts, everybody else laughs and laughs, just as people would have done a million years ago.” That's from Galapagos, by Kurt Vonnegut. The narrator in that novel is the son of Kilgore Trout, an unsuccessful and rather bad science fiction writer who appears in several of Vonnegut's novels as an inspirational figure who writes mostly for himself and doesn't really realise that he has any fans, let alone that some of his fans regard him as some sort of guru with great wisdom. There are two main models for Trout -- one is Vonnegut's friend Theodore Sturgeon, and the other is Vonnegut himself. While the Dead had been working on original material, they apparently chose not to record any -- while both tracks on the single were credited to Garcia as songwriter on the label, they were actually traditional jug band songs that had been in their repertoire while they were still Mother McRee's Uptown Jug Champions. The single was only released in very limited quantities, but at least they had now actually made a record, even if the only place to buy a copy was the Psychedelic Shop on Haight Street. The Grateful Dead by this point were just one of several bands in the Haight-Ashbury area, and not necessarily the most successful -- that would be jefferson Airplane, who were actually releasing records, or maybe the Great Society. Or Quicksilver Messenger Service. Or the Charlatans. Or Big Brother and the Holding Company. All these bands were regularly playing sets around a local circuit, with two venues in particular standing out -- the Avalon Ballroom, which was run by Chet Helms and the Family Dog commune, and the Fillmore, run by Bill Graham. The Avalon was a friendlier venue, and everyone liked Helms more, and it had a better light show, but Graham was a better businessman, the Fillmore had a better sound system -- bought from Owsley during one of his periodic fallings-out with the Dead -- and Graham was also more interested in putting on a wider variety of acts. Graham would listen to the musicians who played his venue, and would bring in outside acts that they suggested, and often juxtapose wildly different performers like the avant-garde jazz pianist Cecil Taylor and the Yardbirds. The reputation that Graham got was of someone who would rip off the artists who were performing for him, but was so good at business that they'd still end up better off than playing for anyone else. By late 1966 the group were essentially living in two communes -- Garcia, Weir, Pig Pen, their managers, and assorted girlfriends and roadies in a house on Ashbury, and Lesh and Kreutzmann and their partners a couple of blocks away (they'd originally lived with the others, but Lesh had soon bolted after having to share a room with Garcia, who snored very loudly). That wasn't the only bodily function that was causing problems for the group. Weir had by this point given up on LSD -- joining Pig Pen, who'd never used it -- but while Pig Pen was drinking a bottle of whisky a day, Weir had given up in order to become healthier, and had taken up a vegetarian diet which led to a severe flatulence problem. There were other issues starting to develop between Garcia and Weir as well. By this point a group of hippie anarchists called the Diggers had taken up residence in the area, and they were giving away free food, scrounged or stolen from local shops and cooked, as a combination of political act and performance art piece -- anyone getting their free food had to step through a frame, because inspired by John Cage they thought that the act of putting a frame round something made it art. The Diggers also insisted that music should be free, and that it belonged to the people who shouldn't have to pay to get it. Garcia had some sympathy for this attitude, and the Dead would often play free shows, but he was also pragmatic enough to realise that if the Dead didn't get paid for their work he'd have to get an actual job, which would be horrifying. The way Garcia squared this was to insist that the group needed to get good enough to be *worth* paying, and this led to him pressuring Weir, who was the youngest of the band members and the least facile on his instrument. Weir decided he needed to figure out a way for a rhythm player to function in a band with a soloist who was inspired by John Coltrane, and eventually hit on the idea of, rather than looking to rhythm guitarists like Steve Cropper, as most musicians in his position would, listening to McCoy Tyner, the piano player in Coltrane's quartet, and copying his style: [Excerpt: John Coltrane, "My Favorite Things"] "To be a successful creator you don’t need millions. You don’t need millions of dollars or millions of customers, millions of clients or millions of fans. To make a living as a craftsperson, photographer, musician, designer, author, animator, app maker, entrepreneur, or inventor you need only thousands of true fans. A true fan is defined as a fan that will buy anything you produce. These diehard fans will drive 200 miles to see you sing; they will buy the hardback and paperback and audible versions of your book; they will purchase your next figurine sight unseen; they will pay for the “best-of” DVD version of your free youtube channel; they will come to your chef’s table once a month. If you have roughly a thousand of true fans like this (also known as super fans), you can make a living — if you are content to make a living but not a fortune. Here’s how the math works. You need to meet two criteria. First, you have to create enough each year that you can earn, on average, $100 profit from each true fan. That is easier to do in some arts and businesses than others, but it is a good creative challenge in every area because it is always easier and better to give your existing customers more, than it is to find new fans. Second, you must have a direct relationship with your fans. That is, they must pay you directly. You get to keep all of their support, unlike the small percent of their fees you might get from a music label, publisher, studio, retailer, or other intermediate. If you keep the full $100 of each true fan, then you need only 1,000 of them to earn $100,000 per year. That’s a living for most folks." That's from an essay called 1000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly, who along with Stewart Brand, one of the people who organised the Trips Festival, set up the early online community The WELL. Kelly later founded Wired magazine. The essay appears in Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers by Tim Ferris. In late 1966 the Dead put out their first T-shirt, designed by Alton Kelley and Stanley Mouse who did the group's early posters, which had an image of Pig Pen on it. They also started to move away from their association with Kesey and the acid tests. The final break came when Kesey negotiated a plea bargain for some legal trouble, which involved him committing to doing a final acid test style show, but with a "don't do acid any more, kids" type message. Kesey announced that the Dead would be playing this, without asking them, and on a night when they were booked to play elsewhere. They still considered doing it until one of the Pranksters told Danny Rifkin that the plan for the event was to play one last big prank and dose the entire audience with LSD. Unlike many in the Dead's circle, Rifkin detested the idea of dosing people without their consent, and he was also worried that if the performance went ahead, Bill Graham, who was meant to be promoting it, would lose his promoter's license. The group pulled out, and Kesey ended up doing a much smaller event. By this point the Dead were a powerful live band, though very far from the style that they would become known for in later years. Listening to live recordings from the summer of 1966, they're a conventional garage band, not a million miles away from other bands from the area like the Standells or the Count Five, though with a more imaginative guitarist than those bands: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Cream Puff War (live in Vancouver)"] And it was that powerful live band that Joe Smith of Warner Brothers Records came to see, after being informed that the San Francisco scene was ripe with potentially successful bands that they could pick up for bargain prices. Over the autumn, Warners negotiated a deal with the group for a ten thousand dollar advance, and assurances that they would be given a certain amount of special treatment. Rather than being put through their customary marketing machine, the label would treat them the way they treated country artists, giving them special marketing for their niche genre. Smith was very eager to get the Dead signed -- other than the Everly Brothers, who were making great records but no longer having hits, Warners had few rock acts, and was mostly known for the artists on its Reprise subsidiary -- a label that had been started by Frank Sinatra and still mostly had artists of Sinatra's generation (plus the mildly successful teenpop band Dino, Desi, and Billy, two of whom were the sons of Sinatra's celebrity friends). They were trying desperately to build up a rock roster, and San Francisco was the obvious place to turn, since LA had already been picked clean -- as we heard in the episode on "Heroes and Villains" they also bought up Autumn Records around this time and got Lenny Waronker, Van Dyke Parks and their circle to work with that label's group of San Francisco artists. Smith said later of signing the Dead “That was one of the two or three most important signings in all those years. It changed the nature and opinion of the record company. We were out in front. It was important to indicate we were more than Dean Martin and Sinatra—that we were hip.” For this reason they made another important concession, which would have a profound impact on the way the group's sound evolved. The standard record contract at this time paid performers per song, and that made sense for a time when most songs were about two or three minutes long -- you'd need at least ten songs to make up an album, and so bands were being incentivised to produce as many of those two or three minute pop songs as possible. But the Grateful Dead liked to stretch out and play long solos, and Rock Scully had heard that there was another way to structure these contracts. He'd worked at the Monterey Jazz Festival, and there he'd heard that jazz musicians were paid by the minute of recording, not by the song, which was how they could afford to do those long exploratory improvisational tracks that could last an entire side of an album. Scully insisted on this being the case for the Grateful Dead's contract too, and Smith agreed. By the time of the group's first sessions for Warners, Garcia at least had some studio experience. As we heard in the episode on Jefferson Airplane, Garcia had been involved in the recording of their album Surrealistic Pillow, at least according to most participants, though the record's producer always said he wasn't involved. Certainly some tracks sound very much like they have Garcia playing on them: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Today"] In January 1967, the group made their first album. Garcia later said of it "At that time we had no real record consciousness. We were just going to go down to L.A. and make a record. We were completely naïve about it. We had a producer we had chosen because he’d been the engineer on a couple of Rolling Stones records that we liked the sound of; that was as much as we were into record-making." Dave Hassinger had definitely engineered a lot of Rolling Stones records -- he'd been the group's main US engineer for the run of hit singles and albums they'd had in the previous couple of years -- but Garcia also knew him from working with Jefferson Airplane, as he'd engineered their album. Hassinger was a super-competent engineer who had worked on everything from the TAMI Show to the Chipmunks' album of Beatles covers, and he and Garcia had got on well. But Hassinger had only recently moved into production rather than engineering, and the rules of the studio they were working in meant that he had to use the studio's staff engineer rather than do the job himself as he wanted, and as Hassinger himself said the band didn't want to hear what a conventional producer had to say -- they just went in and bashed out versions of their live set of the time, though as always they found themselves unable to let loose and improvise in the studio without the feedback of the audience. The first single, "The Golden Road (to Unlimited Devotion)", failed to chart: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "The Golden Road (to Unlimited Devotion)"] That track was actually recorded in San Francisco later, after the record company said they needed a single. Other than that, the album, which was just titled The Grateful Dead, only took four days to record, including the time spent mixing, and for the most part it sounds like any other pop album of the period -- Bob Weir sounds spookily like Peter Tork at points. Despite Pig Pen being the band's frontman and most popular member, he only gets one lead vocal, on the blues standard "Good Morning, Little Schoolgirl", with the rest of the leads being shared between Garcia and Weir, but his keyboard is all over the album. At this point, the group weren't writing much of their own material, and other than the group composition "The Golden Road", the only original is Garcia's "Cream Puff War", with everything else being standard folk-club material like Bonnie Dobson's apocalyptic ballad "Morning Dew": [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Morning Dew"] or jug band material they'd been playing when they were still the Uptown Jug Champions, like "Viola Lee Blues", originally written by Noah Lewis and performed by Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers, which at just over ten minutes long was the only truly extended track on the album: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Viola Lee Blues"] Garcia said at the time "I think our album is honest. It sounds just like us. It even has mistakes on it. But it also has a certain amount of excitement on it. It sounds like we felt good when we were making it. We made it in a short period—four days—and it’s the material we’d been doing onstage for quite a long time. It sounds like one of our good sets." Phil Lesh, not really getting the hang of this promotion business, said in an interview at the time "I think it’s a turd." The album wasn't a success, and only reached number sixty-nine on the album charts. But the group's reputation as a live act was steadily improving. A couple of weeks before the studio dates they'd performed at the Human Be-In, a massive outdoor show in San Francisco with speeches from people like Timothy Leary and the political activist Jerry Rubin, food distributed for free by the Diggers (paid for by Owsley, who was also distributing the acid), security provided by the Hell's Angels, and performances by Jefferson Airplane, Blue Cheer, and Big Brother and the Holding Company. Twenty thousand people turned up for that event, and they were all astonished to find that there were *that many* people in what they all thought of up to that point as a rather small scene. The gathering of that many people in one place to hear the new psychedelic music got the biggest national and international media exposure the San Francisco scene had ever had, and soon everything that wanted to be cool and hip had the suffix "-in", in imitation of the Be-In -- there were love-ins, Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In on TV, and John Lennon and Yoko Ono having bed-ins. Soon San Francisco, and the Haight-Ashbury area, was once again being overrun by the kind of tourists who ten years earlier had come looking for beatniks, only this time they were looking for hippies, or trying to become hippies, as the Mothers of Invention would satirise the next year: [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Who Needs the Peace Corps?"] The Human Be-In was also one of the precursors to the Monterey Pop Festival, which of course, as we talked about in episode 151, was only possible because the Grateful Dead persuaded the other San Francisco bands to play, and where of course the Dead played what they considered an incredibly sub-par show sandwiched between the Who and Jimi Hendrix, both of whom blew them off the stage. The Dead's performance was so bad that none of it was used in the film. The Dead did, though, come out ahead from the show -- apparently they stole the PA system. [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Grayfolded"] There is of course a reason that the Californian ideology became centred in California and developed in the way it did, and that reason is of course infrastructure. Many people who were influential on the Californian ideology, like the postmodernist science fiction writer Robert Anton Wilson, would argue that if you plotted a timeline of the most innovative people in human history, that timeline would slowly move west and slightly north, accelerating over the centuries, as the most radical thinkers followed the Sun, so in the last few centuries the greatest innovations had come from Greece, then Italy, then France, then England, then New York, and then finally the West Coast of the USA. According to Wilson and his friends like Timothy Leary, now that wave had finally reached the Pacific there was only one place left to go, and so humanity would fulfil its manifest destiny and head up into the stars. Other, less teleologically-minded, thinkers have suggested that the growth of that ideology had more to do with the fact that the Bay Area had... well, a bay. Which meant that it was a natural area for naval bases, and thus for much of the twentieth century a hub of military activity more generally. And this meant that when the US Government wanted to fund research into military technology -- like rockets, or like the computer systems that would be needed to guide missiles, or like a communications network that would allow those computers to communicate, the Bay Area's institutions of higher learning were the best places to turn to, and so places like Berkeley and Stanford got vast military research grants, and so became the cutting-edge institutions for those topics. And so Berkeley, for example, counts among its alumni Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, Gordon Moore, the semiconductor researcher who co-founded Intel and coined "Moore's Law", and Eric Schmidt, a software engineer who went on to become the CEO of Google; while Stanford produced seventeen of the forty-four winners of the Turing Award for computer science to date, and was also the place where in order "to exploit new computer technologies to meet the needs of military command and control against nuclear threats, achieve survivable control of US nuclear forces, and improve military tactical and management decision making" as the director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency put it, they developed what was then called ARPANET but later became known as the Internet -- the first ever ARPANET message, the word "login", was sent from CalTech to Stanford, though problems meant that only the first two letters arrived. So many advances in computer science came out of the military-funded institutions in the Bay Area that soon corporations started building their own facilities there to hire all the bright young graduates, and Silicon Valley was built, starting with Xerox's Palo Alto Research Centre, where basically every personal computing technology of the nineties was invented in the seventies. And so young men (and it was, sadly, almost all men, sexism in science and technology being what it is) flocked to the Bay Area to work with this cutting-edge technology. Many of these people were the kind of staggeringly bright, vaguely idealistic people who had been inspired by science fiction stories to build technology for a better, utopian, future. They wanted to go where the best tech was, to have the best toys to play with, but they often didn't like the idea of being funded by the defence industry, because these were young men at a time when the US was prosecuting an unpopular war in which their friends were being called up to fight. But they didn't *dislike* that idea enough not to take the money and play with the toys, especially when what they were doing wasn't *exactly* weapons research. I mean, yes, they were being funded by the Department of Defence, but they weren't building *bombs*. They were making computers talk to each other. And so, rationalisation being what it is, they leapt on any ideas that would let them do defence-department-funded work while still having a clear conscience. And one of those ideas was one that was very current among the hippies of the Bay Area, people like Stewart Brand. The idea was that all large institutions were just jokes, figments of the imagination that didn't really exist, that they're what Vonnegut in Cat's Cradle talks about as "a false _karass_... a seeming team that was meaningless in terms of the ways God gets things done... what Bokonon calls a _granfalloon_... examples of _granfalloons_ are the Communist party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company, the International Order of Odd Fellows--and any nation, anytime,anywhere. As Bokonon invites us to sing along with him: If you wish to study a _granfalloon_, Just remove the skin of a toy balloon. " So the Department of Defence and the government weren't real. What was real was individuals, taking individual actions -- and those individual actions would somehow coalesce into a collective higher purpose without organisation. Individuals all doing their own thing, together and leaderless, the same way the Grateful Dead all improvised their own parts and the sound gelled. That idea appealed a *lot* to these bright young men. And this gentle hippie idea of freedom also fit in with the rugged individualist heroic idea of freedom that they'd read about in all their old science fiction magazines, a hypercapitalist pioneering libertarian idea promulgated by editors like John W. Campbell. And it didn't hurt, of course, that those ideas of individual freedom also meant that you didn't have to feel guilty about becoming very, very rich... [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Grayfolded"] There were several other changes to the world of the Dead in 1967, too. In March, on a trip to play in New York, Bob Weir reconnected with his old friend John Perry Barlow, who would become a major figure in the band's lives over the next few years. And there was a new band member too. The story of how Mickey Hart came to join the Grateful Dead has never quite made sense. The way Hart always tells the story, he was at the Fillmore watching Count Basie and hanging out with Basie's drummer, Sonny Payne, who was one of *the* great jazz drummers of all time: [Excerpt: Count Basie, "Ol' Man River"] And Count Basie definitely did play the Fillmore in August 1967, as support to Chuck Berry on one of the wonderfully eclectic bills that Bill Graham put together. But Sonny Payne wasn't in Basie's band in 1967 -- he'd stopped working with Basie the previous year, and Basie's main drummer in 1967 was Ed Shaughnessey, before Harold Jones took over for a five-year stint. Possibly this was a situation like David Bowie and Lou Reed. Either way, Hart met Bill Kreutzmann at the gig, and the two hit it off immediately -- and that wasn't the only thing they hit. They spent much of the rest of the night going around the streets of San Francisco drumming on bins, cars, lampposts and so on together. A little while later, Hart came to see Kreutzmann's band, and was impressed. Soon he was in the band as their second drummer. This actually opened up a lot of possibilities for the group. Lesh didn't play like a conventional bass player, which meant that the group didn't have as firmly rhythmic a sound as other bands. Hart moved in with Kreutzmann and Lesh and Hart and Kreutzmann soon started spending hours playing together, learning each other's idiosyncracies. They even tried hypnotising each other so that they could be more in tune with each other, which led to some people in the band's circle wondering if Hart had hypnotised Kreutzmann into letting him join the band. (They also tried hypnotising Pig Pen, but it just made him walk into a door). Shortly after Hart joined the band, the group decided they had to get away from Haight-Ashbury. What had seemed like an idyllic community soon became, in the words of George Harrison who had visited the area that summer, "like the Bowery". There were drug dealers getting murdered, teenage girls getting raped, and the group themselves got busted for dope possession. On October the sixth, the Diggers held a funeral for the hippie movement. The Summer of Love was over. Most of the band moved to Marin County -- Pig Pen stayed behind at first, though he followed later -- and it's at this point that the band became the Grateful Dead as they are in the popular imaginary, the experimental psychedelic act. Robert Hunter had been in Mexico for a while, but he'd been in touch with Garcia, and had sent Garcia some poems, which Garcia had set to music -- Garcia had never liked writing lyrics. Hunter had now returned to San Francisco, and was made a non-performing member of the band, with the job of writing lyrics for the band's music. The first song he wrote with the band, rather than at a distance, became the non-album single "Dark Star". Hunter heard the band rehearsing what was then an instrumental and came up with the first verse straight away: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Dark Star"] Hunter would later acknowledge that he was inspired by the start of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock -- "Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table; Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, The muttering retreats Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: Streets that follow like a tedious argument Of insidious intent To lead you to an overwhelming question" When "Dark Star" came out as a single, it wasn't a success, and was only a two-and-a-half-minute song. It wasn't even included on the album which they were recording at the time, Anthem of the Sun, though that did feature Hunter's first contribution to the band, a lyric called "Alligator" which was used on one of the two tracks for the "Pig Pen side" of the album: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Alligator"] Anthem of the Sun was the first Grateful Dead album to consist entirely of original material -- material published by the band's own publishing company, Ice-Nine, which was named after a substance in Kurt Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle. Ice-Nine, in the novel, is an allotrope of water that's solid at room temperature, and that makes any other water touching it become solid. One crystal of Ice-Nine dropped in an ocean would eventually freeze the entire ocean. Vonnegut always claimed the inspiration for this idea came from the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Irving Langmuir, but it was also an idea that John Campbell, the science fiction editor who worked with Theodore Sturgeon and L. Ron Hubbard, had been suggesting to authors since the 1940s (though Campbell may also have got it from Langmuir). That album had a much more difficult genesis than their first album. They started sessions with Hassinger in LA, but soon moved to better studios in New York. And then to other studios in New York... when they started the sessions, they had two main songs they wanted to work on, "Alligator", and one they hadn't titled yet and just called "The Other One", which eventually became a suite entitled "That's it for the Other One". Along with the new members Hart and Hunter, there was another addition to the group at this point -- Lesh brought in his old friend Tom Constanten, who at the time was in the military, working as a computer programmer on an Air Force base in Las Vegas, and secretly using their IBM machines to create electronic music, but who would take leaves of absence to join the group in the studio and help them create new sonic textures, with John Cage-inspired prepared pianos and electronic noises. (Constanten was famously a Scientologist, but he had his religion listed with the Air Force as Buddhist. Whenever he needed time off he'd make up a Buddhist holiday and get a pass). [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "That's it for the Other One"] Hassinger soon got exasperated with the band's endless tinkering -- according to one story the final straw came when Bob Weir wanted to record some silence from the desert so they could get the sound of "thick air" to add to the recordings, though the story is told in different ways that make Weir's request seem more or less reasonable depending on who is telling the story and when -- and the group and their sound engineer Dan Healy began working on their own, recording an assortment of exotic instruments and sounds like a gyroscope spinning on a piano soundboard. But the group still weren't happy with the sounds they were getting in the studio, and eventually Lesh hit on an idea -- they'd take the recordings of their live performances of these songs and create collages, mixing live and studio performance together, sometimes layering multiple performances from different shows on top of each other. It would be like Charles Ives, whose work often involved the orchestra playing two different songs at the same time. Lesh, Garcia, and Healy spent a huge amount of time in the studio, with Healy, who understood the equipment intimately, helping translate the ideas of Lesh and Garcia, who took charge of this editing process and kept asking things like "can we make a sound purple?" The resulting album, with two tracks sung by Pig Pen, one by Weir, and two duets between Garcia and Weir, is probably the most experimental record the Dead ever made, and the polar opposite of their first album. It's the one time in their career that the Dead really used the studio to its full potential, and it's all the more surprising that they did that by using so much live material: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "That's it for the Other One"] Those lyrics about "cowboy Neal" were written by Bob Weir on the fourth of February 1968, while the band were on tour. When he got back to San Francisco, he learned that that same day Neal Cassady had died. The night before he'd gone walking down a railway track trying to get from one town to another. He'd only been wearing a T-shirt and jeans, it was raining and he'd taken barbituates. He collapsed and was found comatose, and died of exposure. He was only forty-one. So it goes. Anthem of the Sun was not a particular success, either critically or commercially, and is the kind of album that can only be appreciated with a little distance from its release. The album is very much of a part with other contemporaneous albums whose reputation have grown over the ensuing decades. Its experiments with tape and musique concrete put it somewhere in the same ballpark as the Beach Boys' Smiley Smile, which a few years later Garcia would cite as his favourite album of all time, but which at the time was dismissed as stoned nonsense that was trying too hard: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "She's Going Bald"] While its collaging and mixture of folk and psychedelia is very much the same kind of thing that the Incredible String Band were doing on The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter: [Excerpt: The Incredible String Band, "A Very Cellular Song"] By this time, many of the groups were getting sick of working with Bill Graham, and the Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and some of the other groups decided to open their own venue, run as a collective. As Bob Weir later said "We were young and strong and high on ourselves. At that point, Bill Graham wasn’t the huge mogul that he became, and we thought, “There’s room in this town for us, too!” We were also acutely aware that Bill was stealing from us, and he made no bones about it, but he also made no bones about the fact that we’d never catch him. That said, we probably did better working for him than we would’ve done working for someone who wasn’t stealing from us, because he always managed to sell more tickets. He managed to get more people into the building and he knew how to get around the fire marshals and all that kind of stuff. So he was a crook, but he was a great one." The Carousel Ballroom, however, only lasted a few months before they realised that musicians and business are not a good mixture. The ballroom closed, and soon reopened under a new name -- Bill Graham had set up a Fillmore East in New York, and now he closed down his original Fillmore -- largely because it was in a Black neighbourhood and the hippies were no more immune to racism than anyone else -- and rebranded the former Carousel as the Fillmore West. At the group's first gig at the newly-renamed Fillmore West they spiked Bill Graham, giving him acid without his consent. This was sadly a common practice for the band -- and they didn't just do it to their human friends, but to animals, with Hart occasionally giving acid to a horse he owned. Graham, who didn't use the drug, knew this was a practice of theirs, so refused to eat or drink anything they had been near, and got his wife to put his own food and a thermos into a paper bag which was then sealed with wax, and would be the only food he'd touch while he was there, so he knew it was untouched. But he thought he'd be safe with a can of 7-Up, because after all, it was a sealed can, he opened it himself and drank it down with none of them being able to touch it. Except that they'd used a hypodermic needle to inject LSD into all the 7-Up cans backstage, and then warned each other not to drink them if they didn't want to be dosed. They were *that* desperate to make sure that everyone around them used the same drugs as them, and *that* unconcerned about basic notions of consent. Remarkably, Graham continued to work with them for the rest of his life. (That story, like many with the Dead, is told as happening in different ways at different times. I've placed it here because the other main version of the story places it at a time when Mickey Hart wasn't in the band, and he remembers it happening and Graham remembered him being there.) The Carousel closed at the end of June 1968, the album came out in July 1968, and in August 1968 the group fired Bob Weir and Pig Pen. Or at least they tried to. Lesh, and to a lesser extent the other three, had grown increasingly impatient with the two of them. Garcia was the leader, and he was a virtuoso guitarist by this point. The drummers were working together to investigate polyrhythms and were innovating on their instruments. Lesh was generally regarded as one of the most innovative bass players in the business. But Weir, the youngest and most naive of the band members, was not yet able to translate his McCoy Tyner ideas into playing, and Hart described him as playing "little waterfalls" rather than proper rhythm guitar. And Pig Pen, meanwhile, had never been into this psychedelic thing in the first place. He wanted to be a bluesman, and simply had no interest in doing extended spacey jams influenced by John Cage and Charles Ives and Edgard Varese and John Coltrane. But somehow, even after sacking the two members who the rest regarded as deadweight, they just... stayed in the band. Garcia in particular was too nonconfrontational to actually properly sack someone -- or indeed to make any kind of decision at all. Everyone else thought of him as the leader, the guru, the person in charge. He thought of himself as just one of the band, and went to great lengths to avoid the responsibility everyone else was putting on him. So the Grateful Dead carried on as a six-piece, but played fewer gigs, and instead Mickey Hart and the Heartbeats -- Garcia, Lesh, Hart, and Kreutzmann -- played their own separate gigs, with the idea that they would become the main band and the Grateful Dead would wither away. That didn't happen, though. Lesh liked to compare the Grateful Dead to the characters in More Than Human by Sturgeon, how when they were working together -- bleshing in Sturgeon's term -- they were like a single organism rather than separate individuals. As Owsley later put it, "you can't fire your left hand just because it doesn't write as nicely as your right". And without Weir and Pig Pen, that feeling simply wasn't there. So they came up with another solution. By this point, Tom Constaten had left the Air Force, and so he was available to join the group. The decision to add Constanten to the band was made by Lesh and Garcia, without consulting the other members, and not everyone was happy about it -- they felt that Constanten was far too intellectual a player and was never really comfortable jamming, and some of them didn't like his abstinence from drugs (because they're banned by Scientology). Constanten also found playing in a live band difficult because of the levels of amplification. But it meant that Pig Pen could play congas and harmonica and be more of a frontman for much of the show and not have to be the sole keyboard player, and that in turn gave Weir a chance to develop his style more now there was another avant-garde player on stage with Lesh and Garcia: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "That's It For the Other One, San Francisco February 1969"] And Weir did eventually find his style, and as the band's instrumental jams grew more complex, he went from being dead weight to being hugely important to the group's sound. Whereas in most rock bands the bass player would provide a steady harmonic root to keep the rest of the band in place, Lesh didn't play that way, and so both Garcia and Lesh were usually playing improvisational melody lines, twisting round each other and going in different directions. But any two notes played at the same time imply a chord, and the two were often implying all sorts of complex harmonics. Weir's job during an improvisation came to be to listen to what Lesh and Garcia were doing, figure out what chord they were implying, and play that chord -- *and* to figure out where both of them were going in their different directions, figure out what chords they were *going* to be implying, and figure out a smooth route between them that sounded musical and anticipated their decisions. While Weir and Pig Pen were mostly out of the band, the group recorded their third album, provisionally titled Earthquake Country, and even though Constanten was involved, and on stage they were going steadily more experimental, in the studio the band were being influenced by the same return to roots music the Tralfamadorians among you will remember from other episodes, acts like The Band. It was essentially a Garcia solo album in all but name, with all the songs having Garcia singing lead, and all but one being Garcia/Hunter songs (the other, opener "St. Stephen", was by Garcia, Hunter, and Lesh). It was in many ways a return to the kind of music that Garcia had been doing before psychedelia, a nice simple album that would keep the record company happy after the massive cost overruns and general headaches caused in recording Anthem of the Sun. And then they discovered that a sixteen-track machine existed, and scrapped the entire album and rerecorded it using the new technology, this time with Pig Pen and Weir involved (though not very heavily, and some sources say Pig Pen's not on the album at all), giving the rootsy Americana songs a little more of the oddness the band had live: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead. "Mountains of the Moon (original mix)"] This made the album once again go massively over budget, and also ended up a little like a falling between two stools, and in 1971 Garcia and Lesh went back into the studio to remix the album, making it sound slightly more like a conventional country-rock album, though nothing could make a track like "What's Become of the Baby?" sound conventional: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "What's Become of the Baby? (remix)"] The album, named Aoxomoxoa, was a failure both commercially and by the band's own standards, and is neither an album that has become beloved by the group's fans as some of the later ones have, nor a record that stands out as an interesting time capsule like Anthem of the Sun does. It has some songs that became well loved as part of the group's live sets, but it's the group in transitional mode. And then almost straight away came an album that did not go over budget at all, and that almost every Grateful Dead fan holds up as the peak of their vinyl career. After having used sixteen-track recording in the studio for the first time, they now decided to take a sixteen-track recorder into their regular gigs at the Avalon Ballroom and the Fillmore West, and record what is generally cited as the first live recording using sixteen tracks. It's also often claimed to be the first live double album, but as far as I'm aware the first popular music live double-album was actually the 1950 release of Benny Goodman's 1938 Carnegie Hall shows, the ones we talked about in episode one. Live/Dead mostly came about because Aoxomoxoa was so expensive that the group needed to record two cheap albums if they and Warner Brothers ever wanted to make a profit on their deal. Cutting a live double-album essentially gave them three records for the price of one. And Live/Dead was essentially two records for the price of one. Sides three and four were a blues album -- though note that I say sides three and four, not disc two. In a very Tralfamadorian move, the record's order was shuffled about -- like many double albums at the time, it was set up for record-changers that could stack multiple discs, so sides one and three were on one disc and sides two and four were on the other. Side four was dominated by a ten-minute version of Reverend Gary Davis' blues classic "Death Don't Have No Mercy", along with an eight-minute experimental piece just titled "Feedback" and the old Bahamian hymn "I Bid You Goodnight", which the group probably learned from the Incredible String Band's recording. Side three was where Pig Pen got to shine for the only time on the album -- for much of it he's relegated to playing congas, in a band with two other percussionists. But side three is a single track -- a fifteen-minute hyperextended version of Bobby Bland's "Turn On Your Lovelight", presumably inspired by the similarly extended versions that Van Morrison's group Them used to do. It sounds utterly unlike the Grateful Dead as they're normally thought of, but it makes a lot more sense of their repeated statements that they were always more inspired by the Rolling Stones than the Beatles: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Turn on Your Lovelight"] Side two was a medley of two songs -- an extended version of "St. Stephen" from Aoxomoxoa, and a song with lyrics by Hunter and, unusually, music by Lesh, who only very rarely contributed songs to the band. That song was called "The Eleven", because of its time signature, which is usually given as 11/8. This sounds more complex than it is, as it's basically just three bars of three and one bar of two, repeated -- "one-two-three one-two-three one-two-three one-two one-two-three one-two-three one-two-three one-two one-two-three one-two-three one-two-three one-two": [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "The Eleven" (from about 5:40, record so it synchs with the rhythm at the end there)] Robert Christagu called that medley "the finest rock improvisation ever recorded". Though the band were less impressed with "The Eleven" generally. Garcia said of it "you’re trapped in this very fast-moving little chord pattern which is tough to play gracefully through, except for the most obvious [shit], which is what I did on “The Eleven.” When we went in to the E minor, then it started to get weird. We used to do these revolving patterns against each other where we would play 11 against 33. So one part of the band was playing a big thing that revolved in 33 beats, or 66 beats, and the other part of the band would be tying that into the 11 figure. That’s what made those things sound like “Whoa—what the hell is going on?” It was thrilling, but we used to rehearse a lot to get that effect. It sounded like chaos, but it was in reality hard rehearsal." Lesh, its composer, was similarly in two minds, saying it "was really designed to be a rhythm trip. It wasn’t designed to be a song. That more or less came later, as a way to give it more justification, or something, to work in a rock ’n’ roll set. We could’ve used it just as a transition, which is what it was, really. It was really too restrictive, and the vocal part—the song part—was dumb." But the opening track is the one that arguably defined the band in the minds of many listeners. The single version of "Dark Star", which had sunk without a trace the previous year, was an upbeat two-and-a-half-minute pop song. The version on Live/Dead was twenty-three minutes, and took up the whole of side one: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Dark Star (Live/Dead version)"] In the months since the single's release, "Dark Star" had changed utterly. As Tom Constanten later said "“Dark Star” is a tremendously adaptable piece—I can’t think offhand of any other piece that is so comfortable to just ease into and work out for a while and leads to as many interesting places, and then you just ease out of it. It’s simple enough to be malleable but complex enough to be interesting. It isn’t like some of the jams … let’s say, one that has just one or two chords that alternate. You get into this sort of generic jam, which might be nice for shifting gears or moving to another piece, but it doesn’t engender as many ideas of its own. It doesn’t suggest as many as the changes of “Dark Star” do. Certain motifs were integrated over time, almost like an aural tradition. I viewed the piece not so much as something written out, but as a galaxy that would be entered at any of several places. That appealed to me from my aleatoric sixties days—John Cage and all. And naturally, in the sense that every performance would be unique, with one-of-a-kind moments that were completely spontaneous. We were just exploring the map—the dimensional, capillarious intestine of … cosmic goop" It was now, and would remain until 1974, the centrepiece of the group's live set, though the group didn't play it, or any song, every night. But it was a regular, and for much of that time, it and "Turn On Your Lovelight" would be the two poles around which the set was based -- "Dark Star" would be the track which would allow Garcia, in particular, to wander into new realms on the guitar, while "Turn On Your Lovelight" would be the closer, a chance for Pig Pen to shine but also to leave the audience on a high with a straightforward, uptempo, upbeat, danceable song. Of course, at this point, much of the Dead's set was built around improvisation anyway, and increasingly the group didn't have a planned-out setlist, or endings and beginnings of songs. Instead, the whole performance would be a continuous piece of music, with the group flowing from one song to another as the mood took them, ending songs by going into freeflowing jams which someone would usually then transition into the start of another song, with the rest of the group following him. Live/Dead was not a commercial success, only reaching number sixty-five on the album charts, but for the first time it gave people who hadn't seen the group live some idea of what they'd been missing. But soon after it came out, the group would have changed again: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, Grayfolded] There were a number of disappointments for the group in the months after Live/Dead was recorded. As the Tralfamadorians among you will remember from episode 192, just as they had at Monterey the group turned in a well-below-par performance at Woodstock, not helped by Bob Weir getting literally blown across the stage by an electric shock caused by a badly-grounded mic. The Dead's performance was so bad that none of it was used in the film. The group had also taken on Mickey Hart's father, Lenny, to help them with the business side of management. The Harts had been semi-estranged, and Lenny Hart had become an evangelical preacher, but Mickey knew that his father had a good head for money. What he didn't know, yet, was that Lenny Hart's good head for money was mostly a good head for getting money for Lenny Hart. Without the band's knowledge, Lenny had renegotiated their contract with Warner Brothers, and had claimed a seventy-five-thousand dollar advance, which he had kept for himself. They wouldn't find out about this for a while, and meanwhile things were happening like sheriffs coming on stage at the start of one show to repossess Pig Pen's organ because the band owed money they hadn't repaid. Then the group tried to organise a free concert in London, with Jefferson Airplane and Crosby, Stills, and Nash, who you will also remember from episode 192, which would have been the Grateful Dead's first show outside North America, but when Rock Scully flew over to the UK to organise the show, he was busted for possession of LSD -- which he later claimed had been planted by Lenny Hart to get him out of the way while Hart organised the Warner's deal. That show didn't get organised, but the Rolling Stones' team were involved in helping bail Scully out, and that created a tie between the two organisations. A tie which meant that when the Rolling Stones wanted to organise a free concert on the West Coast at the end of their US tour in late 1969, the Grateful Dead's management were involved in helping set it up, and Alembic, the company that Owsley had started to produce equipment primarily for the group, was put in charge of sorting out the sound. The Dead also helped the Stones liaise with the Hells Angels who provided security for the event. The Tralfamadorians among you will remember from episode 176 what happened at Altamont. So it goes. And then in New Orleans, the band -- apart from Pig Pen and Constanten, neither of whom used illegal substances -- and several of the crew were busted for drug possession. They eventually had the charges dropped after Joe Smith at Warner Brothers made a large campaign contribution to the re-election campaign of DA Jim Garrison, but this caused a lot of inconvenience for the group -- not least that it was not Owsley's first arrest, and it made it difficult for him to travel with the group for a while, causing one of his periodic steps away from the group. Someone else who was stepping away from the group was Tom Constanten. He'd only been a member of the group for a little under two years, but he'd found playing in a live situation more difficult than he'd thought. He was fundamentally a studio musician, whose best work was planned, not improvised, and he often couldn't hear himself on stage because of the relatively primitive amplification of the time, even despite Owsley's best efforts. He'd also felt a little like a pawn in the band -- he'd been brought in by Garcia and Lesh without much consultation with the others, and he was viewed in particular as "Phil's man", and so criticising him, the new boy, was a good way for other band members to weaken Lesh within the group's power structure. He was also regarded as a bit holier-than-thou for his promotion of Scientology. While Garcia, Hunter, and Weir had all dabbled in it at one time or another, and Garcia, Lesh, Weir, and Constanten had even played benefit concerts for Scientology in a country band they had as a side project, Constanten was the only one who stuck with it, and that made him something of an outsider. The decision for Constanten to leave the group was apparently mutual and amicable, and came in New Orleans at the time of the bust. Constanten's first major work after leaving the Dead was to provide orchestrations on a track on the Incredible String Band's new Scientology-themed concept album, U: [Excerpt: The Incredible String Band, "The Queen of Love"] Constanten went on to work with many influential and experimental musicians, hold down some academic posts in music composition, and, in recent years, play with Jefferson Starship and sit in with a large number of Grateful Dead tribute bands. He is also the only one of the five keyboard players to have officially become full members of the Grateful Dead not to have died a horribly premature death. I mention this here because this is another of the many difficulties I have had putting this episode together, and another reason I have to let my own personality intrude in this episode and actually talk in it about the writing process. Normally when something happens over and over again to a band or artist, it becomes part of the structure of an episode or even a series of episodes. I can turn it into a neat pattern or a running joke. Oh look, here's another Ink Spots intro that sounds the same. Oh look, another band has turned Rod Stewart down. Every instinct in my body as a writer tells me to do the same with the Grateful Dead's keyboard players. Every instinct as a human being tells me that to make light of the tragic deaths of four men who still have loved ones who are alive and might hear this episode would be abhorrent and monstrous. I have had to put in considerable effort with the structuring of this episode so that that does *not* become a running joke. But still, it is something that will repeat several times in the remainder of the episode. But Tom Constanten is alive, and we can be thankful for that. The time Constanten was in the band is considered by many fans to be the group's most interesting period as a live act (though there are partisans for various other points in their career), and it is certainly the most experimental period in the studio, and the change from the latter is part of the reason he left. When he had joined the group, psychedelia had been at its height, and every band wanted to push the limits of what could be done in the studio. But rather quickly after that, the tide had changed musically. As the Tralfamadorians among you will know from episodes 167 through 178 inclusive, and from many other episodes after that point, rock music from early 1968 entered a period, largely inspired by a band called The Band who we'll be talking about soon, in which musicians were no longer asking Alice when she's ten feet tall or picturing themselves on a boat on a river, but rather singing about steamboats and trains and a pastoral past. There was a convergence of hippie psychedelia with the blues roots of many of the newer British artists, and with the country and folk roots of many American rock stars. This was paralleling a new movement in country music which had its roots in the Bakersfield Sound of people like Buck Owens, and which would later become known as Outlaw Country, but at the time was being talked of as Progressive Country. The result was that you'd have albums like the Everly Brothers' Roots, which saw them covering the early San Francisco band the Beau Brummels and new songwriters like Randy Newman, but also country records by Glen Campbell, George Jones, Jimmie Rodgers and Merle Haggard, and giving it all a psychedelic sweetness: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Sing Me Back Home"] The Grateful Dead were as swept up in this movement as anyone, and at one point Garcia was even talking about the group as now being a Bakersfield Sound group -- though this seems to have been more overenthusiastic hyperbole than anything else. The Bakersfield Sound is hard to pin down, but pretty much everyone is agreed that the sound of Buck Owens and his Buckaroos is the epitome of the sound, and their tight, precise, disciplined playing, spiky Telecaster attack with few or no effects, and preference for highly-rehearsed simple clean lines, often played in unison, couldn't be further from the Dead's loose, individualistic, playing style, preference for Gibsons, and use of as many effects as they could: [Excerpt: Buck Owens, "I've Got a Tiger By the Tail"] It's hard to find examples of two guitar duos that are further apart than Buck Owens and Don Rich on the one hand and Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir on the other. That said, Garcia was sincere in his love for this music, and he'd even taken up playing the pedal steel guitar, and had formed a country band, the New Riders of the Purple Sage, which at various times would also include Hart, Lesh, and very occasionally Weir, and where Garcia played pedal steel rather than electric guitar. They included many covers of Buck Owens and Merle Haggard songs in their early sets, though San Francisco's looser playing style didn't really fit the material: [Excerpt: New Riders of the Purple Sage, "I've Got a Tiger By the Tail"] Hart would soon leave the New Riders and be replaced by Spencer Dryden of Jefferson Airplane, and Garcia would also depart after their first album, but the New Riders of the Purple Sage, who continue performing to this day, would continue to be associated with the Grateful Dead over the coming years, often acting as a support act for them. The Grateful Dead's stage show would still continue to involve long, improvised, jams, and those would be the things that the audience would most want to hear, but on record it was a different proposition. Garcia in particular had always loved country and folk music, and it couldn't have escaped anyone's attention that the studio experimentation on the last couple of albums had sent the group vastly over budget, while their friends in other bands were selling millions with albums that took a fraction of the time to record. As Bob Weir said "From a record company standpoint and the way the media’s set up these days, it’s easier to sell songs than it is to sell improvisational long pieces. That’s one of the restrictions of the art of making a record encompasses the music, how long the piece is going to be, how appealing and how accessible it is to the audience. By accessible I mean easily understood. As opposed to John Coltrane, who played some dynamite music—I mean some really fantastic music—but he was never any superstar. And he had not much of an audience, because not many people could understand what he was playing. It bugs you if you are playing music the best you can play it and not many people are listening. And just because you’re a performer, a performer wants people to listen. Generally, you might consider changing your material or finding a new sort of material that more people will be interested in listening to and at the same time you will be interested in playing it. That’s kind of where we settled down, at least with Workingman’s Dead." The new stripped-down lineup of the Grateful Dead went into the studio with a new attitude -- they were going to cut an album like they had with their first record. Get it done in three weeks, keep it simple, make it about the songs. They could always be extended into jams on stage. They went into the studios with their sound engineers Bob Matthews and Betty Cantor-Jackson, who acted as co-producers with the group. They cut simple demos of all the songs they had, and then the songs were put into a proper sequence, as the group had learned from Sgt Pepper that the flow of an album from one song to another mattered. They then went off and listened to the demo album, and rehearsed all the songs with the flow and feel of the finished album in mind. The resulting album, Workingman's Dead, is considered by many fans to be their first truly great studio album, and it's one of the few that has a substantial number of defenders despite it sounding nothing like the extended jams they were known for on stage. It's a collection of relatively concise songs -- only one of them going over five minutes, and none going over six -- like "Dire Wolf", a song about fate and predestination, and how everything is predetermined, inspired partly by a viewing of the Basil Rathbone version of The Hound of the Baskervilles on TV, though little of that inspiration shows up in the finished song: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Dire Wolf"] The influence of the Bakersfield sound on that track is very noticeable, but Tralfamadorians will also notice that the records we looked at in episodes 172 and 192 were hugely influential on the group's sound at this point. In particular, the Dead's newfound attention to their harmony vocals, on this album and the next one, was a conscious attempt to copy their friends Crosby, Stills, and Nash. As Weir put it "we’ve been hanging out with David Crosby and Stephen Stills, particularly, and listening to them sing together, and just blown out by the fact that they really can sing together; and we began to realize that we had been neglecting our own vocal presentation for instrumental presentation. And so we started working on our vocal arrangements, and choral arrangements. As it turned out, the next record we did had a lot of that on it. And it represented a marked change from the way we had sounded in the past, though none of us had really given it any thought." The other most notable song on the album, "Casey Jones", also indirectly has a cinematic inspiration. The film Easy Rider had been a huge hit in the counterculture, especially among the elements of it that overlapped with the Hell's Angels and other biker groups -- Robert Hunter, for example, had gone to see the film rather than go to Altamont, as he'd had a bad feeling about the concert which proved to be accurate. That film had had a number of huge effects -- it basically started the New Hollywood that would define cinema in the seventies, it made Jack Nicholson a star -- but Dennis Hopper summed up the biggest when he said “The cocaine problem in the United States is really because of me. There was no cocaine before Easy Rider on the street. After Easy Rider it was everywhere.” Cocaine had gone from being an unpopular, unfashionable drug to almost overnight being *the* drug of choice for people who wanted to think themselves hip. And since "cocaine" rhymes with "train", it was inevitable that when Garcia and Hunter decided to update the legend of Casey Jones, that would get added to the legend: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Casey Jones"] The group later disclaimed the idea that it was in some way promoting cocaine use, with Garcia in particular saying "It’s clearly an anti-coke song. The words aren’t light, good-time words—it’s just the feeling of it. We were manipulating a couple of things consciously when we put that song together. First of all, there’s a whole tradition of cocaine songs, there’s a tradition of train songs, and there’s a tradition of Casey Jones songs. And we’ve been doing a thing, ever since Aoxomoxoa, of building on a tradition that’s already there. Like “Dupree’s Diamond Blues.” But the group were using cocaine a lot at this point, and initially it seemed to be a positive influence on the group, giving them additional energy in the studio. It was only later that it would start to cause real problems for them. The new album was extremely popular with the record company. Joe Smith of Warners, when he heard it, hugged co-producer Bob Matthews and said "I can hear the vocals!" and allegedly ran into the corridors and grabbed people, ecstatically shouting "We've got a single! We've got a single!" The single in question, "Uncle John's Band" was edited into a single mix that Garcia later called "an atrocity", with gaps left in the vocals where words like "goddam" were used in the unexpurgated version. Apologies for the poor sound quality of this. As far as I'm able to discover, that single edit has never been released on CD or as a download, and so I've had to use a vinyl rip from a YouTube channel called "scratchy 45s": [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead "Uncle John's Band (single mix)"] But it did give the group their first entry onto the Hot One Hundred, making number sixty-nine on the charts. And the album itself did even better, making number twenty-seven on the album charts. After a string of flops, this new version of the Grateful Dead looked like they might be on to a winner. And they needed one. The group were also busily rearranging their management team. Rock Scully would still be involved, but from this point on he was an advisor paid by the record label rather than being on the band's payroll himself. But the big change, and the one that meant they needed money, was that Lenny Hart had been revealed to have been stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from the band. He disappeared with their money, and there was some talk of sending Hell's Angels after him to get the money back, but Garcia, who despite his passivity and unwillingness to take a formal leadership role was always informally accepted as their leader, decided that his karma would probably get him so they didn't need to take any action. In early 1970, the group played the Fillmore supported by Miles Davis, who had just released his Bitches' Brew album, which was the most influential album on the new genre of jazz-rock: [Excerpt: Miles Davis, "Great Expectations"] The group were all amazed by Davis, and his performance renewed their interest in improvisation, though they were still for the moment even more interested in writing the kind of songs that would earn them enough money that they could make back the money Lenny Hart had stolen. They went on a big multi-artist tour across Canada with Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, The Band, Buddy Guy and others, all travelling by train, but the shows were disrupted by protestors who insisted that they should all be playing for free, not for money, and who were storming one of the venues, with thousands of people trying to get in for free. Garcia eventually managed to calm the protests by organising a free show in a park, with some of the acts including the Dead playing both shows, but he -- understandably -- resented this. He said of the protests "I think the musician’s first responsibility is to play music as well as he can, and that’s the most important thing. And any responsibility to anyone else is just journalistic fiction, or political fiction. Because that [bullshit] about “the people’s music,” man—where’s that at, what’s that supposed to mean? It wasn’t any “people” who sat with me while I learned to play the guitar. I mean, who paid the dues? I mean, if “the people” think that way, they can [fucking] make their own music. And besides, when somebody says “people,” to me it means everybody. It means cops, the guys who drive the limousine, the [fucker] who runs the elevator. Everybody." Much of the tour was spent with Janis Joplin trying to persuade the Grateful Dead, who other than Pig Pen were not big drinkers, to get drunk with her. She succeeded, but they got their revenge by spiking her and her band on the last day of the tour with acid. According to at least one book, the vector for the acid was Janis' birthday cake, which was shared with a number of members of the Calgary Police Department. Some of the bands on the tour actually decided it would be a plan to hijack the train and drive it down to San Francisco after the tour, but luckily rather than "driving that train high on cocaine" they realised that the power had been switched off when they got to their destination, so they had no way to get it to move. While the group were still playing big, multi-act, events like this though, they had also started a new style of touring, one that was designed to maximise money and also give them the time to play all the music they wanted. Where up to this point the norm for a Grateful Dead show had been for them to go on as part of a bill with two or three other acts, now they started touring as "An Evening With the Grateful Dead". The show would start with a performance by the "acoustic Dead", performing largely their new song-oriented material: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "I Know You Rider (Harpur College Binghamton)"] That would follow with a performance by the New Riders of the Purple Sage, featuring Garcia and Hart, and then to finish off an electric set -- or sometimes a show broken into two sets -- featuring as wide a variety of songs as they could fit in, from their long jams like "The Other One": [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "The Other One (Harpur College Binghamton)"] To covers of James Brown songs: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "It's a Man's World (Harpur College Binghamton)"] These shows would last for five hours, and would require no other bands, just the Dead and the people in their immediate circle. This made them both more artistically fulfilling and, crucially, more fiscally rewarding, than playing on a package with other bands. And these shows went along with another innovation, one that came from Rock Scully, and which eventually changed everything for the Dead, who at this point were an act with no hit singles and only one moderately-successful album, in a world where record sales and radio play were all. The Tralfamadorians among you have obviously heard other episodes in which I talk about the rise of FM radio, but in brief, frequency modulation, or FM, was an alternative way of transmitting radio to amplitude modulation, or AM, which had been the norm up until the late sixties and would remain important for a long time to come. Because of the bands allocated to the different types of radio in most countries, AM radio could be broadcast for thousands of miles, while FM radio could only be heard dozens of miles away at most, and so AM dominated among the big commercial broadcasters, while FM was at this point mostly only used by small community radio stations, college stations and the like. But those stations were more likely to play obscure music than the big stations were, and they could also take advantage of one big difference that FM radio had -- there was a consistent standard for broadcasting stereo in FM, while at the time AM radio could only be broadcast in mono. This made those small community stations perfect for a new format, Album Oriented Radio, which went on to define what in America is now known as "classic rock". Those stations didn't have to worry about pleasing massive audiences, so they could play stereo album tracks rather than just singles, which were only released in mono. And they also started broadcasting concerts. Indeed, one show at the Winterland Arena on October the fourth 1970 became the first ever *quadrophonic* broadcast, as two different FM stations, KQED and KSAN, both broadcast different simultaneous stereo mixes that you could play together (though here you're only going to hear it in mono of course): [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Till the Morning Comes (Live at Winterland Arena on 1970-10-04)"] And this -- broadcasting of live shows -- became the Grateful Dead's salvation. Because as Sam Cutler, their road manager, who joined them from the Rolling Stones after Altamont, said "There was a way in which FM radio could be used to reach markets that hadn’t been touched. So, for example, in Pennsylvania, you wanted to do a gig at the Spectrum in Philadelphia, which holds 18,000 people. The promoter would say, “We’d love to put you on at the Spectrum, but you aren’t even going to sell eight hundred tickets.” So how do we get this exposed to enough people that they can sell out the Spectrum? One of the keys to that was FM radio and college radio stations. We took Pennsylvania as a market area, and worked on playing at different colleges where there were 15,000 to 20,000 resident people, and used the FM radio station in that market to reach more people. You play in the state universities of Pennsylvania in order that when you play in a Pittsburgh or Philadelphia, people actually come to you. They’re drawn to you, and they know about you. Then you broadcast live for free. That just snowballed. The band, in those four years, went from not selling very many tickets to being very successful." These radio broadcasts meant that over a period of a couple of years, the Grateful Dead went from playing to a few hundred people at most, anywhere but San Francisco, New York, and a couple of other major cities, to playing to huge crowds of thousands. And those broadcasts also started to be taped, and people started making copies of the tapes for their friends... By 1971 this success was already causing problems of its own, with Garcia saying "The Grateful Dead has become incredibly popular and we can’t play a small hall anymore without having 3,000 people outside wanting to get in. Our classic situation the last six months has been people breaking down the doors and just coming in. We have to play 7,000 to 10,000 seats to be able to get people in at a reasonable price. Just to do it. It’s weird. Here’s what we’re wondering: Do we really want to do that? When it comes down to it, we’re just heads. We’re not interested in creating a lot of [fucking] trouble and being superstars and all that [shit]. We’re just playing, getting off, out to have a good time and giving it all a chance to happen. And all of a sudden there are all these problems making it more difficult to do, and it’s getting to be where it’s not fun. We have to play shows like some military campaigns just to make sure the equipment guys don’t have to be fighting thousands of people to save the [shit]." But back in 1970 it's a plan to save the band financially at all. Although at that point the hope of commercial success in recordings was also still alive. Indeed, right after the release of Workingman's Dead, the group went into the studio to record another album, one that would generally be considered the closest thing they came to a studio masterpiece: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Ripple"] American Beauty was an album that was haunted by parental loss. There was the loss of Mickey Hart's father from the group's management, of course, an estrangement that hurt him deeply. But in August 1970 Garcia's mother was in a car crash, and died in hospital of her injuries a month later, and at the same time Lesh's father was diagnosed with terminal cancer. So it goes. But rather than wallow, the band made their most optimistic album, and the most collaborative studio album they'd made to that point. They threw themselves into their work to distract themselves from their problems, and gathered as many of their friends around them as they could. Friends of theirs like Jefferson Airplane, David Crosby, Neil Young, and Carlos Santana were all recording in the same studio complex around that time, and Lesh described it as "jammer heaven". Those musicians weren't included in the sessions themselves -- though various members of the New Riders and other, less famous, friends of the band contributed additional instruments -- but they were around, and added to a family feeling for the sessions. And while the previous two albums had been made up almost entirely of songs by Garcia and Hunter, the other band members contributed songs to American Beauty. The album opened with a song whose music Lesh wrote for his dying father, with lyrics by Hunter, and which featured Lesh's first lead vocal and guest appearances by a couple of members of the New Riders of the Purple Sage: [Excerpt: Grateful Dead, "Box of Rain"] In 1995 that became the last song the Grateful Dead ever played live. The album also featured another song that would become a live favourite, "Sugar Magnolia", written by Weir and Hunter: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Sugar Magnolia"] And what turned out to be Pig Pen's only solo songwriting credit on a Grateful Dead album, "Operator": [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Operator"] Almost all the rest of the album was made up of Garcia and Hunter collaborations (with John Dawson of the New Riders collaborating with them on "Friend of the Devil"). But the song that was chosen as the single -- and once again released in a single edit, though this time that single has been included on official CD releases -- is the song that for the next eighteen years at least would be their most well-known song, and that had music that evolved out of a jam between Garcia, Weir, and Lesh. The lyrics to "Truckin'" were written by Hunter after he went out on tour with the band for the first time and got to experience what life on the road was like: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Truckin' (single edit)"] From this point on, Hunter would be a regular backstage presence, as he was considered a non-performing member of the band. Indeed the backstage areas of Dead shows were growing somewhat crowded, as the band's crew became larger, and as more and more people got admitted to the Grateful Dead "family". "Truckin'" was another minor hit like "Casey Jones" had been, reaching number sixty-four, and the album also made the top thirty. The group weren't having massive hit records, but they were doing much better than they had been. Over the next few months, in between gigs, the band members, particularly Garcia and Hart, spent a lot of time in Wally Heider's studio, where they had recorded American Beauty, with the friends who had created that "jammer heaven". Garcia, Hart, and Kreutzmann all added parts to tracks on Blows Against the Empire, the science fiction concept album by members of Jefferson Airplane that became the first Jefferson Starship album, and which also featured David Crosby and Graham Nash: [Excerpt: Jefferson Starship, "Have You Seen the Stars Tonite"] Garcia, Lesh, Kreutzmann, and Hart also guested on several tracks on David Crosby's album If I Could Only Remember My Name, which also featured Neil Young, Nash, several of Jefferson Airplane, and Joni Mitchell: [Excerpt: David Crosby, "What Are Their Names?"] And Garcia and Lesh guested on Graham Nash's Songs For Beginners, which also featured Crosby, Young, and John Barbata, the former Turtles drummer who had just been working with Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and would soon join Jefferson Airplane: [Excerpt: Graham Nash, "I Used to Be a King"] This music was all, as you can hear, very much in the same area as the two Grateful Dead albums of 1970, all acoustic guitar and pedal steel and vocal harmonies. But live, the group were still spending at least as much of their time playing long pieces like "Dark Star" as they were the more commercial songs: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Dark Star (live at Port Chester, NY)"] That performance of "Dark Star",which many fans of the group consider the best ever, is a historic one. That would be the last time that Pig Pen and Mickey Hart would both play on the same stage together. February the eighteenth 1971 was the last performance by the lineup of the Grateful Dead that had made their most successful records. Mickey Hart had taken his father's betrayal of the group very, very badly. While almost all the group were having drug problems at this time -- everyone except Pig Pen was using cocaine, and Pig Pen's alcohol dependency had by this point become even worse than the other members' more illicit habits -- Hart was spiralling. According to Kreutzmann's autobiography, Hart had developed a serious heroin habit at this point, and according to everyone he was depressed and feeling guilty over the way his father had betrayed the people he thought of as his brothers. Things came to a head on the eighteenth of February. Hart was simply too much of a mess, mentally, to play. Luckily for the group, they had a hypnotist on hand -- they were playing a short residency, and as part of that run of shows they were taking part in an ESP experiment where the audience tried to send images to a sleeping experimental recipient elsewhere. The hypnotist managed to get Hart into a state to play that show, and then he was driven back to his mother's house, where he was medicated and slept for three days. The group continued with Kreutzmann as their only drummer. But there was another change that happened that week, during the same run of shows. Bob Weir had been writing more music, and had of course been collaborating with the band's resident lyricist, Hunter. But Hunter thought that Weir was showing disrespect for his lyrics -- though Weir argued no more so than Garcia did. Backstage they got into a fight over the way the band were now playing "Sugar Magnolia", which had started out as a gentle country song but by this point had evolved into a fast rocker, and Weir would sometimes improvise new words: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Sugar Magnolia (live at Port Chester, NY)"] "Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear." That's from A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, by John Perry Barlow, from 1996. Backstage after the show was Weir's old friend John Perry Barlow, who by this time was a part-time writer who'd taken an advance for a novel he had no intention of writing and had used it to travel the world before becoming a cocaine dealer -- the capacity in which he was backstage. He was just about to travel to his family's ranch in Wyoming, because his father was ill and would die the next year. So it goes. Barlow would spend the next twenty years running the family business and living out his cowboy fantasies -- fantasies that would also appear in a lot of the writing he would do over that time period. He would also get very involved in Republican politics, including helping run Dick Cheney's first Senatorial campaign. Much of Barlow's writing would end up being scripts for films that were never made, but for which Barlow was nonetheless paid, but the work he would become best known for -- at least up until his promotion in the nineties into the position of leading propagandist for Internet anarchocapitalism and the Californian ideology -- was started backstage in February 1971. Hunter and Weir were having an argument about Weir's attitude to Hunter's lyrics, and Hunter turned to Barlow and after determining that Barlow had written poetry in college and thus could presumably write lyrics, said "Take him, he's yours." From that point on there were two main songwriting teams for the Grateful Dead -- Hunter and Garcia and Barlow and Weir. 1971 continued to be a year of changes and loss. Over the spring, both of Weir's parents died -- each on the other's birthday. So it goes. And while Bill Graham would continue to be the promoter who booked many of the Dead's most prominent gigs, the move in the rock world from bands playing theatres to amphitheatres and stadiums meant that his venues were no longer economical for him to operate, and so the Fillmores East and West, the two venues that had been most welcoming for the Dead, announced their closure. The bands who played the Fillmore East in its last weeks tended to bring on special guests to make the event special -- the Mothers of Invention brought John Lennon and Yoko Ono on, for example -- and the Grateful Dead were no exception, bringing another famous Californian band out to play a few of their own hits, and to jam on songs that both bands often included in their respective sets, like "Riot in Cell Block #9", "Johnny B Goode", and Merle Haggard's "Okie From Muskogee": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys and the Grateful Dead, "Okie From Muskogee"] As the Tralfamadorians among us heard in episode 177, the Beach Boys were at a low ebb in their fortunes at this time, and the endorsement of the Grateful Dead helped them gain the appreciation of a hip college audience, which was a major part in the revival of their fortunes in the seventies. By contrast, at the group's last performance at the Fillmore West, which was being filmed for Bill Graham's documentary The Last Days of the Fillmore, was so bad that they asked that none of it be used in the film, though Graham eventually persuaded them to let him use performances of "Casey Jones" and "Johnny B Goode": [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Johnny B. Goode (Last Days of the Fillmore)"] Garcia was asked about that show the next year and said "We struggled to avoid getting into the movie because it was like really a notably bad night for us and the tapes were a drag, and everybody was out of tune and everything, and we were - it was that thing of not having played for a couple of weeks, you know, three or four weeks we'd been in the studio... But finally Graham just hassled us and hassled us and we finally went for it. We doctored 'em up a bit." That said, while the band were notably out of tune at points during the show, it wasn't a completely meritless one -- indeed, a little over an hour of that show (not including the two songs used in the Fillmore film, recently got a release as a bonus disc on the fiftieth anniversary deluxe edition of the band's next album. That album was a double-disc live album recorded mostly at the group's Fillmore East shows over the spring, and consisting, other than an extended version of "The Other One", largely of cover versions of blues, rockabilly, and country songs: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Me and Bobby McGee (Skull and Roses)"] While that was billed as a live album, it actually had quite a few overdubs. Pig Pen's playing had been increasingly erratic, and he had become severely ill, suffering from delirium tremens. He'd started to cut down on the drinking, but he'd still ended up in the hospital in September, where he was treated for a perforated ulcer and hepatitis. Given Pig Pen's condition, organ parts were overdubbed on three of the songs by Garcia's friend and occasional performance partner Merl Saunders. The album caused a major problem between the group and their record label. Not because it was a second double-live album -- that made sense, especially given there was no overlap in the repertoire on the two albums. No, the problem was the group's chosen title -- Skull[fuck]. Warner Brothers were adamant that you couldn't release an album with a title like Skull[fuck]. You simply couldn't use the word [fuck], or any of the other seven words you can't say on television or in a podcast with a clean rating, in a title and expect it to be stocked on shelves. The group were equally adamant that it couldn't be called anything else. Eventually Warners asked for a meeting about this. The group agreed, but said that as they were a democracy the meeting had to involve *everyone* in their organisation. All fifty-five of them. Eventually the meeting hammered out a compromise -- the album would go out without a title, just labelled "Grateful Dead", which was taken as its title -- all the true Deadheads continued referring to it by its original name, f-word intact, while almost everyone else ended up referring to it as "Skull and Roses" after the cover image, to stop it being confused with their eponymous studio album from a few years earlier. In return for this concession, Warners agreed to give it a huge marketing budget, and it became their first album to go gold: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Big Railroad Blues"] As 1971 came to an end, the group had a further change in lineup. Donna Jean Godchaux had been a member of a vocal group called Southern Comfort, who had become the go-to session backing singers at FAME studios in Muscle Shoals, and we actually heard her singing in the episode before last: [Excerpt: Johnny Jenkins, "I Walk on Guilded Splinters"] She had also recorded backing vocals in several other studios in the South, including, as the Tralfamadorians among you will remember, on Elvis' number one hit "Suspicious Minds": [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Suspicious Minds"] (Incidentally, and as a sign of the kind of reason this episode took so very long to do, every source on the Grateful Dead I've read uses phrasing like "she’d been part of a female vocal group in her teens and worked as a session singer in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, where she performed on such records as Elvis Presley’s “Suspicious Minds.”" -- "Suspicious Minds" was famously recorded at American Sound Studios in Memphis, not in Muscle Shoals, with some extra work by Felton Jarvis in Las Vegas afterwards. This meant I had to take time out to find a source for Godchaux being on the record that *didn't* trace back to a source on the Grateful Dead. But she's credited under her maiden name in Ernst Jorgenson's book on Elvis' sessions, so anyone else who has that problem in future can relax). She had given up on session work and moved to California, where she met her husband, Keith Godchaux. Keith was a resentful lounge pianist who was playing muzak he didn't like, but who desperately wanted to be playing modal jazz and bebop. However, after Donna Jean saw the Grateful Dead live, both of them became interested in the group, even though neither had any background in the Dead's kind of music. One day, a friend of theirs suggested they put on a Grateful Dead album, and Keith said he'd rather be playing the music than listening to it. That gave Donna-Jean an idea. She took Keith to one of the small duo gigs that Garcia played when the Dead weren't playing -- Garcia would pretty much constantly perform live every chance he could get. This one was a performance with the jazz keyboard player Howard Wales, with whom Garcia had recently recorded the duo album Hooteroll: [Excerpt: Jerry Garcia and Howard Wales, "Uncle Martin's"] She grabbed Garcia between sets and told him "this is your new keyboard player". What she didn't know, of course, was that Pig Pen was in the hospital and increasingly in no state to play even when he wasn't. Indeed, they'd actually tried auditioning Howard Wales, but come to the conclusion that while they liked his playing, they brought the worst out of each other -- the group egging Wales on to be too experimental, and him doing likewise for the group. Garcia got Keith in to audition, first just for him, and then bringing in first Kreutzmann and then the whole band. Keith Godchaux was now the Grateful Dead's main keyboard player, though Pig Pen would still perform whenever he was well enough, and to the extent he could. Keith's playing was considered revelatory at this time -- he's been compared to the legendary Nashville session player Floyd Cramer for his playing on the country tunes, and called "a cross between Chick Corea and Little Richard" for his more experimental playing. Within a few months, Donna Jean would also join on backing and occasional lead vocals, becoming the only woman ever to be a member of the group. The new expanded lineup of the group got ready to head out on the road for their first tour of Europe, but before they did, there were some solo albums to get released: [Excerpt: Jerry Garcia, "Deal"] The band's contract with Warners allowed them to make solo albums, and Jerry Garcia's first true solo album, simply titled Garcia, had a simple motivation behind it -- he wanted to buy a house, and if he turned in an album relatively cheaply, the advance would be enough for a downpayment on one. As he said later, there was a reason that the first track on the album was called "Deal" while the last was "The Wheel" -- the album was him wheeling and dealing for a house. So in the summer it had been decided that Garcia and Weir would both do solo albums. Garcia's solo album was actually recorded in July 1971, before Pig Pen's illness worsened. Garcia was a perfectionist in the studio and wanted to make an album where he had total control -- somewhat in the same spirit as Roy Wood's Boulders, although Garcia couldn't play drums or write lyrics, so there were a whole six people in the studio some of the time -- Garcia himself, playing everything except drums; the Dead's sound engineers Bob and Betty; Ramrod the guitar tech who everyone regarded as at least as much a part of the Dead's spirit as any band member -- sort of the Dead's equivalent of Mal Evans or Neil Aspinall, and who was given the job of co-producing the album, in part to give him an extra payday; Kreutzmann on drums; and Robert Hunter to write the lyrics. The album was recorded at Wally Heider's studio, where the Dead and most of their friends regularly recorded, the "jam heaven" we talked about earlier, so to discourage the kind of party atmosphere that led to fun times but expensive records, they put up a sign saying "Anita Bryant Session" -- Bryant was a moderately-successful middle-of-the-road singer who had been heavily involved in campaigns to prosecute the Doors for indecency, and is now best known for being a raging homophobic bigot whose campaigns against gay people in the seventies featured exactly the same kind of language and accusations her ideological fellows are currently weaponising against trans people today. Nobody wants to spend time around anyone like that, and so the sessions were safe from interruption. The album was later more or less dismissed by Garcia, and it was disliked by the record label because even on the new album-oriented stations it was unlikely that the commercial tracks would get played -- there were plenty of commercial sounding tracks, like "The Wheel": [Excerpt: Jerry Garcia, "The Wheel"] But interspersed with those songs on the album were things like "Spidergawd": [Excerpt: Jerry Garcia, "Spidergawd"] And the album was mastered without much gap between the tracks, meaning that DJs cueing up a singalong that wasn't a million miles away from the stuff the Eagles would soon be having hits with might inadvertently get a blast of Varese-alike musique concrete. Bob Weir's solo album, recorded around February 1972, had a very different story. While Garcia was so musically fecund that he could just turn out new songs in the studio, Weir had to be encouraged by Garcia to write at all, but by all accounts Garcia, who hated the responsibility that came with leadership and refused to take it even though everyone around him insisted that he was the leader of the group, wanted to encourage the band to have another focus other than just him. Weir's first solo album, Ace, came together in something of a rush. He had studio time set aside for the album, but had almost no songs, and drove up to Barlow's ranch for a frenetic writing session that led to a collection of songs that ended up almost all becoming staples of the Grateful Dead's repertoire: [Excerpt: Bob Weir, "Cassidy"] Weir and Barlow found writing together much more congenial than Weir and Hunter had. Often the process was far more collaborative than the simple music/lyrics split that Weir had had with Hunter -- Weir would bring Barlow just a chord sequence with no melody line, Barlow would come up with lyrics and sing them over the chord sequence, coming up with a melody line as he did so, and then Weir would rework Barlow's melody line into something different, while also changing the lyrics around and adding new ones. The album did include two songs that Weir had already written with Hunter and erstwhile Dead drummer Mickey Hart, "Greatest Story Ever Told" and "Playing in the Band" : [Excerpt: Bob Weir, "Playing in the Band"] That had actually already appeared in live form on the Skull and Roses album, and Hart also did a version of that song on his own first solo album, released towards the end of 1972. There's also one song credited to Weir on his own, "One More Saturday Night", though apparently that started as a collaboration with Hunter before Weir rewrote it to get rid of Hunter's contributions. But the rest of the album is Weir and Barlow, and mostly shows the particular ideas of freedom that Barlow brought to the group -- he was equally influenced by the idea of cowboys and the Old West and the modern-day Easy Rider style bikers who would head out on the highway, looking for adventure and whatever came their way. People who lived free of government interference and age of consent laws, where men could be men and live as Americans should: [Excerpt: Bob Weir, "Mexicali Blues"] While Ace was released as a Bob Weir album, it is in fact a Grateful Dead album, and the single "One More Saturday Night" was released as by "The Grateful Dead with Bobby Ace". Weir initially started recording the album without the rest of the band other than Kreutzmann -- Dave Torbert, the bass player for the New Riders of the Purple Sage, contributed to the opening song -- but soon Rock Scully persuaded him that the easiest way to make the album would just be to persuade his bandmates to record it with him. Other than Pig Pen, who wasn't well enough to join them, all the other members of the Dead at the time -- Garcia, Lesh, Kreutzmann, and the Godschauxes -- contributed to the album, and other than Torbert's bass on "Greatest Story Ever Told" and some string and horn parts, all the parts on the album are played and sung by Grateful Dead members. It's just as much a Grateful Dead album as any of the group's previous studio albums, and contains as many of the songs that they became known for as any of the others: [Excerpt: Bob Weir, "One More Saturday Night"] The comic strip Dilbert, by Scott Adams, became in the 1990s a touchstone for a whole generation of tech workers, especially in the Bay Area, as the titular character, named by one of Adams' colleagues at Pacific Bell, the San Francisco-based telephone company that at that time was moving into computer networking and was a hotbed of the San Francisco hacker culture, came to symbolise the struggles of the software engineers who were being kept down and in their place by the pointy-haired boss, who didn't understand as much as the engineers he was in charge of. The message of the comic at that time was that the people in charge should step aside and let the people who knew what they were talking about -- the people who really knew computers -- do their thing. In more recent years, the comic started to present the boss as a more and more sympathetic figure, and more of the jokes became about attacking what Adams would refer to as "wokeness", such as consideration for people of colour, trans people, and so on. Eventually this year the strip was cancelled -- in the actual, not metaphorical, sense -- as Adams was videoed making explicitly white-separatist remarks. [Excerpt: Grayfolded] The Dead's trip to Europe in 1972 saw Pig Pen returning to the group. He was still very, very ill, and could no longer drink alcohol at all -- and obviously he had not been taking recreational drugs anyway. He was very withdrawn, but apparently his gentle character shone through even more on that trip than normally. Pig Pen was pretty much universally considered the nicest person in the band, even though he was the scariest-looking of the band. While the others mostly looked like cuddly hippies but could be utterly cold-minded when they needed to be for the good of the band, Pig Pen was regarded by everyone who spoke about him in later decades as being practically a saint. That's not really the case for the people he was hanging around with though. On the European tour, Pig Pen chose to spend most of the time with the crew rather than his bandmates, and the Grateful Dead were getting a reputation as having a crew you didn't want to mess with. The group's sound and lighting system were getting much more complex and much more physically difficult to get in place, and they were attracting the kind of crew who had to be good at quickly and efficiently dealing with physical problems. The crew also had to deal with all the other problems that the rock stars didn't want to know about, and thus essentially became enforcers. There are lots of stories in this period of crew members cutting the microphone cords of people in the audience taping the shows, and of Sam Cutler threatening promoters with guns to make them pay up (though Cutler always denied those stories and said he'd never owned a gun). They were temperamentally very different from the band members -- the iron fist around which the velvet glove of the band were wrapped -- and so a certain amount of natural separation happened. On the European tour there were two buses, and while there was no formal rule as to who sat where, and people could travel on whichever they wished, one bus had almost all the band, other than Pig Pen, and a couple of the crew, while the other mostly had the crew, plus Pig Pen. As is the way of things, the two buses developed two ostensible characters, and the people on them got nicknames. The people on the band bus were "Bozos", partly because they sometimes wore clown masks to freak out the people of Europe as they drove past, and partly after I Think We're All Bozos On This Bus, a comedy science fiction album by the Firesign Theater parodying futurism, religious creation myths, artificial intelligence, and the idea of government by machines: [Excerpt: The Firesign Theater, "I Think We're All Bozos On This Bus"] The people on the other bus, by contrast, were Bolos. And over the course of the trip, Robert Hunter worked out a complex fake religion in the tradition of other comedy religions like Bokononism or Discordianism which were popular in the part of the counterculture that overlapped with science fiction fandom. This religion, whose patron saint was St. Dilbert, saw Bozos and Bolos as two necessary opposing forces like yin and yang. Hunter named the religion Hypnocracy, as a parody of Technocracy, a movement that had reached its height of popularity in the 1930s but still clings on to life to this day, and to which a friend of Garcia belonged. Technocracy was a huge influence on Golden Age science fiction, particularly on writers who came up through John W Campbell's editing of Astounding magazine, like Theodore Sturgeon, L. Ron Hubbard, and Robert A. Heinlein, and held a lot of beliefs, but primarily that society should be organised scientifically, with scientists and technicians and engineers in charge, not politicians. This idea didn't tend to appeal to actual scientists, who could see the flaws in the argument, but did appeal to cranks who thought of themselves as scientists, and for a while had quite a widespread following in North America. The leader of the Technocracy movement in Canada, for example, was one Joshua Haldeman, a former rodeo performer turned chiropractor who later went on to campaign against Coca-Cola, before moving his family to apartheid South Africa because he thought Canada was morally degenerate. His thinking appears to have had an influence on his grandson, Elon Musk, a follower of the Californian Ideology who tweeted in 2019 that he was “accelerating Starship development to build the Martian Technocracy.” Obviously ridiculous people like this deserved mockery, and soon Hypnocracy became the philosophy of the people on the tour -- at least those on the Bozo bus. The European tour was regarded by everyone involved as one of the great experiences of their lives, and the group were playing better than ever before. Many fans consider their performance of "Dark Star" in Dusseldorf to be one of their finest ever: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Dark Star (Dusseldorf 1972)"] While others point to the performance from London on the same tour: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Dark Star (Wembley, April 1972) "] By this point "Dark Star" had become a massive event, something audiences looked forward to. You didn't get it every show, but when you did you knew you were going to get something special. It was considered something rather apart from the group's other material. Lesh once said "Dark Star is always playing somewhere. All we do is tap into it." The group were all, other than Pig Pen, playing at their best, and band members have all especially pointed out how well Kreutzmann was playing at the time. Hart's departure had freed Kreutzmann up -- when you have two drummers, each drummer has to stay in sync with the other, and can't make the tiny adjustments to tempo and feel that a single drummer has the freedom to do. Lesh later said "Billy played like a young god. I mean, he was everywhere on the drums, and just kickin’ our butts every which way, which is what drummers live to do, you know." Donna Jean agreed, saying "Billy was so there with what the Grateful Dead’s music was all about; he was always postured to play anything. He never set down a 2 and 4 that you couldn’t get away from; Billy’s left and right arm were always postured at any millisecond to take that rhythm anywhere that it needed to go. That’s the beauty of Billy Kreutzmann’s playing. He played like a dancer." Of course, a massive touring operation like the Grateful Dead's was expensive to bring across to Europe, and the only sensible way they could do it was to release yet another live album -- this time a triple one. Although Europe '72 is, while often considered the pinnacle of the group's work, not exactly live. The group were pleased with their instrumental playing, but not with their vocals, and so most of the vocals on the album were rerecorded in the studio back in the US -- but not done the conventional way, with the band members using headphones and singing into the mic. Instead, to make sure that the vocal tracks sounded as they would have live, with instrumental bleed-through to make them fit the ambience, the group's entire stage setup was replicated in the studio, with the amps positioned as they would normally be and the mics spaced exactly as they would be in a live performance. The instruments were played back through the same amps they'd used on stage, and the group redid their parts, including a couple of vocals from Pig Pen: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "It Hurts Me Too"] Those would be his last contributions to a Grateful Dead record. He played only one show with the group after the European tour, in June, and then he stayed at home, trying to get well. As Bob Weir would later explain "Pig Pen had been slowing down and gradually getting sicker, and his musical output was tapering, so by the time he had to stay off the road, he hadn’t been contributing that much so it didn’t have that major an impact. Coincidentally, I started to hit my stride around the same time, and with Pig Pen sick, there was a need for me to do more." While he was at home, he was working on some songs for a possible solo album, or maybe to contribute to the next Dead album. But as it turned out, they would never see release. Pig Pen died, alone, at home, of an internal haemmorage brought on by too much alcohol consumption, on the eighth of March 1973. So it goes. He was twenty-seven. And this leads me to another thing I need to say. There is an utterly pernicious concept called the twenty-seven club, based around the fact that several musicians died at that age. We've already seen one of these, Jesse Belvin, but we're sadly going to see a number more of them between now and episode two hundred, including one next episode. Various conspiracies and attempts at adding mystical significance have become attached to this idea -- an idea which has no basis in truth. Musicians, even famous ones, are no more likely to die aged twenty-seven than at any other age. But there *is* some suggestion that some of the later ones, especially those who died by suicide or overdose, were motivated in part by the romanticising of these deaths. So I want to say clearly, this is the *only* time I will ever mention the "27 Club". Like the Grateful Dead's keyboard players dying, this is not a fun pattern that one can play enjoyable games with, this is talented, often troubled, young people, scarcely more than children, dying in horrible ways. I will have no part, however small, in adding to the belief that great art requires self-destruction or that one should die young and leave a beautiful corpse. [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "It Hurts Me Too"] Pig Pen's death was, in many ways, the end of the Grateful Dead as they had been to that point. But there were other changes afoot. The group had decided to set up their own record label, Grateful Dead Records. Initially this was planned to be something that would allow the group to be totally independent and be distributed entirely through channels other than the mainstream record industry. As Garcia said "It’s dumb to complain about all that record company [bullshit]. I mean, if you’re enough of an [asshole] to stick it up where they can shoot at it, you can’t complain for getting shot. It was our blunder and we’ve been living with our mistake all these years. Now, hopefully we’re free to make our own mistakes." As it turned out, their own mistakes would be just as bad as any that Warners had made, and Grateful Dead Records would shut down in 1976. It would later be revived in the nineties as an archive label. But it did mean that the band were in total control of their next few studio albums, with no oversight, which led to unfortunate missteps like Weir and Barlow's "Money Money", a song which complains about women being gold-diggers, but also about feminism: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Money Money"] In truth, the group's studio albums were increasingly becoming afterthoughts -- as Garcia said in 1973 "There are a lot of people on our payroll, and we can’t really count that much on record royalties to take care of business. The live shows we do are the main source of income for the band, and we’ve been playing an awful lot to pay off our overhead." Part of the reason for starting Grateful Dead Records had been to try to increase their share of the revenue from the records, but as it turned out they wanted neither to be in the record business nor to be in the studio. The group recorded six studio albums between 1973 and 1981, and of course as with every band of their size some of them have their ardent defenders, but even among that relatively small portion of Grateful Dead fans who defend their studio work, most agree that their great period in the studio ended with American Beauty. But the band was becoming very successful on tour, and developing a devoted fanbase. They were helped in this by the packaging of the Skull and Roses album, which included a message saying "Dead freaks unite. Who are you? Where are you? How are you? Send us your name and address and we’ll keep you informed.” Within a couple of years, the group had a mailing list of forty thousand people, who got sent "Dead Head Newsletters" (which popularised the term "Deadhead") which of course contained information about tour dates and new releases, but which also included the kind of stuff that bands would now have on their social media pages, the kind of thing that builds what is now called a parasocial relationship. Hunter was particularly involved in this, creating cartoons and anecdotes about Hypnocracy and the teachings of St. Dilbert, many of which involve him giving "hot foots", a kind of practical joke that involves setting the victim's shoes on fire when they're not looking. Many of these stories also said a lot about the band's attitude to authority and to the kind of people who looked to them for authority, as in one that reads "St. Dilbert was walking in the market one day when up staggered a Bozo to ask his opinion on whether the king, Who had been caught with his hand in exchequer, ought to abdicate, be deposed, have his hand cut off, or be given a medal. With very little pondering, the Dilbert is said to have replied: "You Bozos slay me. You pick a king who best represents the sum of your individual lameness to rule you, and then complain because he has a big red nose." While considering this reply, the Bozo smelled smoke, and looking down realized that the Dilbert had, once again, placed a lighted match between his toes." [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Grayfolded"] Even though they were only a middling success on record, the group were becoming ridiculously successful, to the extent that in 1973, on a bill with the Band and the Allman Brothers Band in Watkins Glen, they played to an audience which for decades held the Guinness record for the largest attendance at a festival ever, and according to some was the largest gathering of humans in American history to that point. The highways around the area had to be closed because of the traffic, with people making it on foot. A hundred and fifty thousand people had bought tickets, but most got in free. Estimates put the crowd size at somewhere near six hundred thousand, which if true and given the age of the people attending would mean that roughly one in every three people in their late teens and early twenties from the area stretching from Boston to New York were there. The crowd for that event was so big that new technologies had to be introduced in the sound systems -- delay lines that allowed speakers to be placed further apart to account for the speed of sound. And this kind of thing was the problem. The group were touring to try to make money, but to play to huge crowds you needed more equipment, and if you wanted crowds of this size to hear you properly, you needed equipment that had never been developed before. Eventually Owsley and sound engineer Dan Healey came up with a system they called the Wall of Sound which would give perfect sound in any venue. That is, in any venue it could fit in. It consisted of 641 speakers, and needed five trucks to get it to a venue. Many venues couldn't take its weight. It also took two days to set up. Which meant that they needed *two* walls of sound, and two whole crews -- one to go ahead to set up the next show while the Dead were playing one the other crew had set up. This is a period when the shows were generally considered exceptional, but the band were supposed to be doing this to earn a living, but they found that as the audience grew, the costs associated with playing to an audience that size grew. And it just wasn't fun any more, not least because half the band were dealing with serious cocaine problems by this point. So in October 1974 the group decided to just stop. They played a final concert at the Winterland, which was filmed for a film that Garcia later edited, and declared they were going on hiatus. Much to Kreutzmann's chagrin, Mickey Hart turned up and was invited to rejoin them for this last show: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Eyes of the World (live at the Winterland)"] By this time there were creative and personal splits in the band and the crew, everything from the drugs they preferred (some of the Dead were by this point trying to be clean-living while others were taking everything they could, and several people involved were annoyed by the insistence of the crew at the last show that nobody could go on stage without taking acid first) to what kind of music they should be making. They sacked a big chunk of the crew, dismantled the Wall of Sound, and spent eighteen months off tour, only playing a small number of one-off shows. But they found that they didn't know what to do if they weren't touring, and ended up getting back together, with Hart in the band once more, as he would be for the rest of its career, and touring again, starting off by playing smaller venues with a smaller crew. But something was missing. Some of the shows were as good as they'd ever been -- a 1977 show at Cornell University is often cited as their best show ever: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Dancing in the Street"] And there were other shows, like a performance at the pyramids in Egypt, which were fondly remembered for reasons other than the musical. But something about the spirit of the shows was generally lacking, which can probably be summed up best by saying that between 1976 and 1984 they only played "Dark Star" five times. When asked about it, Garcia would say that he felt that the group had said everything they could say with that song, but that they felt obliged to try it every so often just in case. The sets tended to be far more structured, with rigidly defined areas of improvisation, rather than the loose, smooth, movement between ideas of the earlier performances. Part of the problem was that several of the band had developed heroin addictions -- Garcia would struggle with his until the day he died -- and part of it was that after the hiatus, Keith Godchaux's playing no longer seemed to fit with the band the way it had. By mutual agreement, Keith and Donna left the band in February 1979, and formed their own band, but tragically Keith died in a car accident in July 1980. So it goes. Keith's replacement was Brent Mydland, who had played in Bob Weir's side band Bobby and the Midnites, and he was considered a better fit, and that change led to the band being somewhat reinvigorated: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Grayfolded"] In early 1976 Bob Weir had said "If it turns out that to avoid problems we have to play the big indoor places again, we just won’t do it. We won’t go out on the road. We’ll just stay home and make records." By late 1976, the Grateful Dead were playing the big indoor places again. And they continued playing bigger and bigger places. As the group were reliant on money from live shows, of course the venues they were playing grew, and they hit upon a totally different way of making money from what anyone else in the rock business was doing at the time. They didn't make a studio album between 1981 and 1987, but in that time they became a bigger and bigger live act, because they finally figured out some of what was giving them a fanbase, and started to exploit it. People had always traded tapes of Dead shows, but up until the early eighties, the group had discouraged this, as all bands did, fearing bootlegging. What they realised was that since they weren't making much money from records anyway, traded tapes weren't cutting into their profits much. What they *were* doing was acting as advertising for the live shows, where they *were* making money. They went from cutting the mics of tapers to setting up special "tapers areas" at shows, reserved areas where people could record the shows, so long as they only traded the recordings, never sold them. These tapes being traded led to the creation of a whole fan culture, analysing the different shows, and commenting on what was the best version of each song, what was the best era of the band, and so on. People started to go to *every* show they could, travelling to see each show on a tour, sometimes seeing literally hundreds of shows. A thriving ecosystem of small businesses started to follow the group, selling home-made merchandise (and the group brought the best of these people in to make their own merchandise, which they sold through their mailing list) or food in the parking lots to concert-goers. The parking lots themselves became party spaces, so much so that a lot of people would follow the band from town to town not to go to the gigs, but to party in the parking lots. The group encouraged this kind of thing by setting up their own ticketing company, and allocating chunks of tickets to people on their mailing list, which encouraged more people to sign up for the list, which encouraged them to think of themselves as "Dead Heads". The Dead didn't understand their fanbase -- everything you read about them suggests that they didn't really get *why* this was happening -- but between good luck and good management they'd managed to hit on a formula which is now the one used by every single artist who makes a living in the Internet era, thirty years before it started to become just the way you do things. Build a core audience by making work available for free or cheap, and then charge the true fans for extras, like live shows or merchandise or Patreon bonuses. And there's a reason that everyone working in a creative field is following the example set by the Grateful Dead: [Excerpt: Grayfolded] The Grateful Dead's fanbase were intimately connected with the Internet from even before the World Wide Web became a thing. LONG before. The group's geographic connection to the Bay Area, and its connection to psychedelic drugs -- many of the 70s generation of computer scientists were interested in expanding their own intelligence as well as that of their computers -- and vague science fictional leanings, meant that they were a natural fit for the kind of person who was online when there were only a handful of networked computers in the world. The first web page came online in August 1991. The first Grateful Dead email list was started in the seventies, by researchers in the AI department in Stanford. When Usenet came along, originally there was just one newsgroup for music, but so many people were posting about the Grateful Dead that the moderators of that newsgroup eventually suggested that a separate Dead newsgroup be set up so anyone who wanted to talk about any other bands could get a word in edgewise, and they became the first band to have their own newsgroup. A 1994 book called Skeleton Key -- a guide to the culture of Dead fandom -- has a whole appendix called "How to Become a Nethead", which lists phone numbers of nineteen Grateful Dead bulletin boards along with their modem bitrates, and which says that there were at the time forty thousand subscribers to the Grateful Dead newsgroups, at a time when almost nobody was yet online. Rather charmingly, it says of the newsgroup "before you post your first message, take stock: Writing to tens of thousands of people at once is not quite like writing a personal letter. You should take care that the information you are publishing is accurate." The bulletin board The WELL, set up in 1985 by Stewart Brand, one of the organisers of the Trips Festival, became a huge gathering place for Dead fans, and for people in the group's organisation, especially Barlow, who got into talks on the WELL that led to him co-founding the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the first civil liberties organisation devoted to speech on the Internet, and Brand sat on the board. Brand's slogan "Information wants to be free" became a rallying cry on the Internet well into the new millennium, and the culture of the Internet, and of Silicon Valley, grew up *heavily* influenced by the Grateful Dead's fan culture, and in particular by their encouragement of tape trading. *Everything* about the way that music technology, and entertainment technology more broadly, evolved -- the growth of filesharing, the embrace by record companies of streaming as a way to provide music free at the point of listening to meet that demand, and the fact that where thirty years ago mid-level bands made a modest income from recordings and toured to promote them, while now they make a modest income from touring but release records to promote the tour... all of that comes back to the fact that it was Grateful Dead fans who were the first online, and who shaped the culture of the Internet in ways, good and bad, that we're still seeing today. It may not be an exaggeration to say that the Grateful Dead have had a more lasting, and greater, cultural impact than the Beatles, despite not even having a thousandth of their fanbase or their specifically musical influence. The whole Californian ideology, in all its self-contradictory complexity, is in many ways an outgrowth of Deadhead ideology, for better and for worse. And *that* is why I had to cover the Grateful Dead in such depth here. Because without them, the very model I use to fund this podcast would not exist. If it had been fans of Frank Zappa or the Velvet Underground who had been working in Stanford's AI lab, rather than the Dead, the world would be unrecognisable now. [Excerpt: Grayfolded] But while the Dead were growing their audience, they were not doing well. And much of that was down to Jerry Garcia. Garcia's heroin addiction was getting worse, to the point where he was nodding off on stage at times, and the man who had spent most of the seventies desperate to play music was now starting to resent being on stage, because the crowds had grown too big. Once again they were touring not because they wanted to, but because they had obligations to all their employees to keep the show on the road no matter what their health, playing more to support the crew than for pleasure. Eventually, Garcia collapsed. His health had deteriorated thanks to his heroin use, he had undiagnosed diabetes, and he dehydrated on a hot day. He was rushed to hospital, and given Valium, which the doctors didn't know he was allergic to. He was in a coma for several days, and when he came out of it his memory was scrambled. He had to relearn how to play the guitar and banjo, spending months with the help of his friend Merl Saunders, slowly piecing his skills back together. And for a while, at least, he came off the heroin and controlled his diet. The group started rehearsing again, and at first it seemed like Garcia wouldn't be good enough, but then one day in October 1986, Mickey Hart came into the Dead's office smiling and saying "We just did a really good ‘Dark Star'. It's back." They started booking a comeback tour the same day. Garcia's first show back with the group opened with a song which they'd been playing for ages, but which took on a new life as an anthem of Garcia's recovery, and which would become the lead-off single for their first studio album in six years: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Touch of Grey"] And that, twenty-two years after the band formed, gave them their first and only hit single. In part it was because the time was ripe. 1987 saw a lot of media coverage of the twentieth anniversary of the Summer of Love, and also as the Tralfamadorians among you will know, the late eighties saw mini career peaks for a host of the Dead's contemporaries, with the period between late 1986 and late 1989 seeing Paul Simon, Neil Young, Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, and George Harrison all making commercially successful albums that were hailed as returns to form after a patchy decade, and Dylan and Harrison's supergroup the Travelling Wilburys become a minor phenomenon. Other than Simon, the Dead were very slightly ahead of the curve in appealing to an audience of Boomers starting to enter middle age and get nostalgic for the musicians of their youth, and while "Touch of Grey" is not an entirely happy lyric, lines like "a touch of grey kind of suits you anyway" will have given it appeal. But the success was also helped, even more, by the video, the first one the group ever did, which was filmed after one of the group's shows and featured life-size skeleton puppets, modeled after the skeletons that had appeared on many of the group's album covers, playing the song in front of the audience (with a fun moment on the line "dog has not been fed in years" when a dog runs on to the stage and steals Mickey Hart's legbone, and a roadie has to chase the dog down and reattach the bone to the drummer) before turning into the real Dead lipsynching their hit. It was huge on MTV, and got the record into the top ten, making the Grateful Dead finally a one-hit wonder: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Touch of Grey"] But that success brought its own problems. The group's audience became even more massive, with an influx of new fans who the Deadhead culture found it difficult to absorb and enculturate. But at least at first, the Grateful Dead were enthusiastic about their new audience, and that enthusiasm was infectious. They did a co-headlining tour that year with Bob Dylan, acting as his backing band as well as his support act. The shows weren't great, and the live album that resulted has often been called the worst thing either the Dead or Dylan has ever done: [Excerpt: Dylan and the Dead, "All Along the Watchtower"] But Dylan was enthused enough by the experience of performing with the group, and by their evident enjoyment of performing on stage, that he started what has come to be known as the "Never-Ending Tour" the next year, and other than a break in 2020 at the height of the covid-19 pandemic he's kept an intense concert schedule ever since, having played over three thousand shows in the thirty-five years since then. The late eighties also saw a change in the sound of the Grateful Dead, as the group started to experiment more with MIDI controlled instruments. Oddly this meant that Brent Mydland, on keyboards, moved steadily more towards playing patches that sounded like "real" acoustic instruments, while Mickey Hart, for example, would be playing percussion that triggered a whole bank of different sounds. Garcia was particularly pleased with the ability to use his guitar as a MIDI controller and play sounds like a soprano sax -- he talked in interviews about how he would use it to imitate Eric Dolphy. For a while, "Dark Star" came back into the set, now augmented by MIDI, but its place as the part of the set that encouraged the group to improvise had been taken by a piece called "Space", and while they played it a lot it never took off the way it used to. But the group were having problems. Now they had a hit, their already fanatical audience was being joined by another group of new fans, who hadn't previously been part of the Deadhead culture and didn't know its unspoken rules. And they were playing the biggest venues in America -- by now they were far and away the most financially successful touring act around. By late 1987 Garcia was already saying "The audience requires the band, the band requires the audience, you know what I mean? And anything short of live performances is short of live performances. So some sort of video isn’t going to get it. Bigger venues isn’t going to get it. When you’re at the stadium, that’s it, that’s the top end, and that’s already not that great … As far as I can tell, we’re at the cul-de-sac, the end of popular music success. It doesn’t mean there’s no place to go from here. But now we have to be creative on this level as well, and invent where we’re going to go." MTV did a Day of the Dead, where they devoted a whole day to the group, and that included a lot of coverage of the party scene in the parking lots, and suddenly *those* became exponentially greater, filled with people who didn't even intend to see the group live, but were just there to hang out outside and get drunk and stoned. This started to cause problems for the infrastructure of any city and venue where the group played, and required yet more work from their staff. According to some in the Dead's management team at that point, if they played a sixty-thousand-seat stadium there'd be a further thirty-thousand people outside. They were back in the position they'd been in in the seventies, playing to massive audiences not for the pleasure of playing, but because now they were a multi-million-dollar industry. They had to perform to pay the roadies, and the staff in their ticket company, and the promoters, and the staff on their mailing list... there were hundreds of people relying on the group for a pay-cheque, and the bigger they got, the bigger the organisation behind them. By 1989 Robert Hunter was saying "This is our big, big problem now: what to do with the unruly factor now that’s causing a large group situation to become aggravated and exhibit mob behavior. I don’t know; I don’t know that anybody’s ever known, short of imposing absolute authoritarian control, and that is of course the opposite of what the Grateful Dead stand for. Will we be forced to become our own opposites? Interesting philosophical question." [Excerpt: Grayfolded] By 1989 the group started to clamp down on the people selling merchandise outside the shows, in order to cut down on the number of people outside causing a nuisance. This led to a huge backlash from the fans, which led to the group and their organisation deciding the fans were just entitled. At the end of 1989, Brent Mydland had his first overdose. Like all the group's official keyboard players, Mydland was a retiring, quiet, submissive personality, and nobody in the band up to that point seems to have even known he was using heroin, though they all knew he also had a drinking problem. When it happened, he was put on probation by the band and told to clean up, but he didn't, and in July 1990 he had his second, fatal, overdose. So it goes. Garcia was particularly hit by this death. He'd been the closest in the band to Mydland, but also, to quote Dennis McNally, who at the time was the group's publicist (and was closer to Garcia than to the other members) "My theory was that Jerry to some extent took some responsibility for Brent’s death. He recognized that the internal dynamics of the Grateful Dead—the way they treated each other as human beings—was a fraud, was non-supportive, non-anything that any human being would want to be a part of. Look how these guys managed to pick the same personality four times. Pigpen was the starter: all three of his successors had the same emotionally vulnerable personality... But they were so devastated, and being “manly men,” they wouldn’t talk about it, they wouldn’t confront it, they just tried to put themselves in total denial, get another keyboard player, and keep going. It was almost archetypal, the way they failed to deal with what had just happened to them. I think Jerry knew this, whether he wanted to admit it out loud or not, and it put him in a bad place, and you can hear it in his guitar playing for the rest of his life." The group were meant to be on tour four weeks after Mydland's death, and they had such a huge staff that cancelling the tour was not an option. They had four weeks to find a keyboard player. They ended up choosing two. The Dead had had two keyboard players for much the seventies -- even when Tom Constanten had left but before Keith Godchaux joined, various other players, especially Lesh's friend Ned Langin, had played with them on stage though hadn't formally joined the band, and Langin had played with the group consistently for a period up to the hiatus -- and they went back to this for their first summer tour of the nineties. For many of the shows they were joined by Bruce Hornsby, a longtime Deadhead who had become a star a few years earlier with his hit "The Way it Is": [Excerpt: Bruce Hornsby and the Range, "The Way It Is"] Hornsby was a big star in his own right, but still played with the group for about a hundred shows in the early nineties. The official story as it's always told is that Hornsby was never an official member of the group and was just there to help them ease the new guy in, but reading between the lines of various statements -- always a dangerous thing to do -- it seems like Hornsby was trying to push the group out of their comfort zone and towards playing more experimentally, and the group were happy going through the motions, and he eventually tired of this. That new guy -- who did become a full member of the group, and would stay with them until the end -- was Vince Welnick. Welnick came from a very different sort of music to anything the group had done before -- he was a founder-member of the wonderfully camp art-pop proto-punk glam band the Tubes: [Excerpt: The Tubes, "Don't Touch Me There"] After seventeen years with the Tubes, Welnick had left them to tour with Todd Rundgren, who he played with for a few months before joining the Dead. Welnick wasn't hugely familiar with their music, but had been casually friendly with Garcia since the early seventies, when the Tubes had played on the same bill as Garcia when he did some solo shows. Welnick took a scholarly attitude to the music, and studied it carefully, listening back to shows every night and taking notes. But Garcia's mental health went downhill after Myland's death, and it took a further knock when in October 1991 Bill Graham died in a helicopter crash. So it goes. Soon Garcia was back on the heroin, and according to Welnick would sometimes fall asleep on stage in the middle of guitar solos, wake up, and then carry on playing. Hornsby would occasionally rejoin them as the nineties went on, and he wasn't flattering about what he saw. He said later "I sat in with them a couple of times. In ’94, I remember playing with them at Giants Stadium, and it was just horrifically bad. They all knew it, the [band members] were all bummed and embarrassed. I’m looking out at the audience, I’m playing accordion, and I’m standing there in the midst of a sea of mediocrity on the bandstand. Everyone knew it—it wasn’t just me—and you’re looking out and seeing these people going completely crazy, and you’re going, “This is surreal and strange.” It was hard. It was tough for everybody, because no one seemed to be able to reach Garcia. That was tough." The last time Jerry Garcia ever performed "Dark Star" was at the Omni in Atlanta in 1994. Far from the extended jams of old that could last forty minutes, it was only ten minutes long. He only sang the first verse. The song would remain forever unfinished: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Dark Star (Omni 1994)" same clip as at the start] Garcia was clearly very ill at this point, and would only tour for another year or so before checking himself into a stint in rehab which, as it turned out, he would never leave, and which would end the Grateful Dead. But it wouldn't end their organisation, because having already invented the way that all new up-and-coming artists now have to build a career, they now invented, twenty years early, the way that all rock stars of their age monetise their intellectual property. By the early nineties, the group had discovered that there was money to be made from their old live recordings, recordings that nobody had thought had any value. They started releasing albums of classic old shows, most of which most Deadheads already had tape copies of, and were astonished to find that they sold in phenomenal amounts, so much so that in the years after Garcia's death the group actually made more money from archive CDs and sales of merchandise than they had from touring while he was alive. Indeed, they were so successful that at one point many of the band members threatened to sue archive.org, the epitome of the "Information must be free" idea, which had a vast trove of the recordings the group had previously encouraged fans to share, to get them to take them down. But Lesh, who had become estranged from the other three, had something of a Damascene conversion to the Deadhead cause and now thought of himself as the fans' representative and a representative of integrity -- he had earlier said "The Grateful Dead have never accepted corporate sponsorship or venture capital money, and I remain unalterably opposed to any deal that would lease, license or otherwise collateralize the music in the vault”. When he heard about the proposed lawsuit he went ballistic and posted a statement on his website saying “I was not part of this decision-making process and I was not notified that the shows were going to be pulled. I do feel that the music is the Grateful Dead’s legacy and I hope that one way or another all of it is available for those who want it,” The group reversed course and came to a compromise which allowed archive.org to keep the soundboard tapes as streaming only, with the lower-quality audience recordings still available for free download, a compromise which is still in place. They also tried to do some interesting things with the archive material, even before Garcia's death. For example Phil Lesh invited the avant-garde composer John Oswald, who made music using sampling in what he called "Plunderphonics", to do an extended composition using versions of "Dark Star", mixing and matching different performances from over the decades, putting some in reverse, layering them on top of each other. The result was the only Grateful Dead recording on which every official member of the band -- Garcia, Lesh, Weir, Kreutzmann, Constanten, Pig Pen, Keith and Donna-Jean Godchaux, Brent Mydland, and Vince Welnick, all appeared: [Excerpt: Grayfolded] In 2006, the Grateful Dead leased all their intellectual property to Rhino Records, a subsidiary of Warners, for thirty million dollars for a ten-year lease -- a lease that has since been renewed. Mickey Hart said “I think it was a common thought that if we got rid of the business, we might become friends again, we might actually play again. We really love each other, and, deep down, we’re tied at the heart." The same week, Ram Rod, the roadie who had been considered the heart and soul of the group's crew, died of lung cancer. So it goes. Vince Welnick had continued touring with Bob Weir's side band Ratdog for a while after the Grateful Dead had split, but had been sacked from Ratdog after a suicide attempt -- he was replaced by, of all people, Chuck Berry's old piano player Johnny Johnson. He'd been suffering from depression ever since the group split, and would struggle with it for the rest of his life. He did play occasionally with some of the other ex-members for a couple of years after the split, but was not invited to take part in partial reunions advertised as "featuring the former members of the Grateful Dead", under names like The Other Ones and The Dead, and he'd been heartbroken not to be included. As far as he was concerned, he *was* a member of the Grateful Dead - he said “I am and always will be a member of the Grateful Dead. It’s a lifetime thing that Jerry bestows upon a person.” Two weeks after the Vault was moved to Warners, Welnick, who hadn't spoken with the other members of the band in years, died by suicide. So it goes. Phil Lesh performs with a group called Phil Lesh and Friends. Weir, Kreutzmann, and Hart have spent the last few years performing as Dead & Company with singer and guitarist John Mayer. They recently announced a farewell tour for this summer, and even more recently announced that Kreutzmann will not be joining the tour, though they didn't say why other than a "shift in creative direction". In 1994, 1995, and 1996 the composer John Oswald released, first as two individual CDs and then as a double-CD, an album called Grayfolded, which the composer says in the liner notes he thinks of as existing in Tralfamadorian time. The Tralfamadorians in Vonnegut's novels don't see time as a linear thing with a beginning and end, but as a continuum that they can move between at will. When someone dies, they just think that at this particular point in time they're not doing so good, but at other points in time they're fine, so why focus on the bad time? In the book, when told of someone dying, the Tralfamadorians just say "so it goes". In between the first CD's release and the release of the double-CD version, Jerry Garcia died. From August 1942 through August 1995, Jerry Garcia was alive. So it goes. Shall we go, you and I? [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "I Bid You Goodnight" into very end of Grayfolded]

Apr 3, 2023

Episode 164 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “White Light/White Heat” and the career of the Velvet Underground. This is a long one, lasting three hours and twenty minutes. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-three minute bonus episode available, on “Why Don’t You Smile Now?” by the Downliners Sect . 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…)

Feb 27, 2023

Episode 163 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay”, Stax Records, and the short, tragic, life of Otis Redding. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-three minute bonus episode available, on “Soul Man” by Sam and Dave . 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…)

Jan 31, 2023

Episode 162 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Daydream Believer”, and the later career of the Monkees, and how four Pinocchios became real boys. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-minute bonus episode available, on “Born to be Wild” by Steppenwolf . 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…)

Jan 13, 2023

Episode one hundred and sixty-one of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Alone Again Or”, the career of Love, and the making of Forever Changes . Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-minute bonus episode available, on “Susan” by the Buckinghams 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…)

Dec 29, 2022

As we’re in the period between Christmas and New Year, the gap between episodes is going to be longer than normal, and the podcast proper is going to be back on January the ninth. So nobody has to wait around for another fortnight for a new episode, I thought I’d upload some old Patreon bonus episodes to fill the gap. Every year around Christmas the bonus episodes I do tend to be on Christmas songs and so this week I’m uploading three of those. These are older episodes, so don’t have the same production values as more recent episodes, and are also shorter than more recent bonuses, but I hope they’re still worth listening to. (more…)

Dec 28, 2022

As we’re in the period between Christmas and New Year, the gap between episodes is going to be longer than normal, and the podcast proper is going to be back on January the ninth. So nobody has to wait around for another fortnight for a new episode, I thought I’d upload some old Patreon bonus episodes to fill the gap. Every year around Christmas the bonus episodes I do tend to be on Christmas songs and so this week I’m uploading three of those. These are older episodes, so don’t have the same production values as more recent episodes, and are also shorter than more recent bonuses, but I hope they’re still worth listening to. (more…)

Dec 27, 2022

As we’re in the period between Christmas and New Year, the gap between episodes is going to be longer than normal, and the podcast proper is going to be back on January the ninth. So nobody has to wait around for another fortnight for a new episode, I thought I’d upload some old Patreon bonus episodes to fill the gap. Every year around Christmas the bonus episodes I do tend to be on Christmas songs and so this week I’m uploading three of those. These are older episodes, so don’t have the same production values as more recent episodes, and are also shorter than more recent bonuses, but I hope they’re still worth listening to. (more…)

Dec 22, 2022

Episode 160 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Flowers in the Rain" by the Move, their transition into ELO, and the career of Roy Wood. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-minute bonus episode available, on "The Chipmunk Song" by Canned Heat . 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/ Note I say "And on its first broadcast, as George Martin's theme tune for the new station faded, Tony Blackburn reached for a record." -- I should point out that after Martin's theme fades, Blackburn talks over a brief snatch of a piece by Johnny Dankworth. Resources As so many of the episodes recently have had no Mixcloud due to the number of songs by one artist, I’ve decided to start splitting the mixes of the recordings excerpted in the podcasts into two parts. Here’s part one and part two . There are not many books about Roy Wood, and I referred to both of the two that seem to exist -- this biography by John van der Kiste, and this album guide by James R Turner. I also referred to this biography of Jeff Lynne by van der Kiste, The Electric Light Orchestra Story by Bev Bevan, and Mr Big by Don Arden with Mick Wall. Most of the more comprehensive compilations of the Move's material are out of print, but this single-CD-plus-DVD anthology is the best compilation that's in print. This is the one collection of Wood's solo and Wizzard hits that seems currently in print, and for those who want to investigate further, this cheap box set has the last Move album, the first ELO album, the first Wizzard album, Wood's solo Boulders , and a later Wood solo album, for the price of a single CD. Transcript Before I start, a brief note. This episode deals with organised crime, and so contains some mild descriptions of violence, and also has some mention of mental illness and drug use, though not much of any of those things. And it's probably also important to warn people that towards the end there's some Christmas music, including excerpts of a song that is inescapable at this time of year in the UK, so those who work in retail environments and the like may want to listen to this later, at a point when they're not totally sick of hearing Christmas records. Most of the time, the identity of the party in government doesn't make that much of a difference to people's everyday lives. At least in Britain, there tends to be a consensus ideology within the limits of which governments of both main parties tend to work. They will make a difference at the margins, and be more or less competent, and more or less conservative or left-wing, more or less liberal or authoritarian, but life will, broadly speaking, continue along much as before for most people. Some will be a little better or worse off, but in general steering the ship of state is a matter of a lot of tiny incremental changes, not of sudden u-turns. But there have been a handful of governments that have made big, noticeable, changes to the structure of society, reforms that for better or worse affect the lives of every person in the country. Since the end of the Second World War there have been two UK governments that made economic changes of this nature. The Labour government under Clement Atlee which came into power in 1945, and which dramatically expanded the welfare state, introduced the National Health Service, and nationalised huge swathes of major industries, created the post-war social democratic consensus which would be kept to with only minor changes by successive governments of both major parties for decades. The next government to make changes to the economy of such a radical nature was the Conservative government which came to power under Margaret Thatcher in 1979, which started the process of unravelling that social democratic consensus and replacing it with a far more hypercapitalist economic paradigm, which would last for the next several decades. It's entirely possible that the current Conservative government, in leaving the EU, has made a similarly huge change, but we won't know that until we have enough distance from the event to know what long-term changes it's caused. Those are economic changes. Arguably at least as impactful was the Labour government led by Harold Wilson that came to power in 1964, which did not do much to alter the economic consensus, but revolutionised the social order at least as much. Largely because of the influence of Roy Jenkins, the Home Secretary for much of that time, between 1964 and the end of the sixties, Britain abolished the death penalty for murder, decriminalised some sex acts between men in private, abolished corporal punishment in prisons, legalised abortion in certain circumstances, and got rid of censorship in the theatre. They also vastly increased spending on education, and made many other changes. By the end of their term, Britain had gone from being a country with laws reflecting a largely conservative, authoritarian, worldview to one whose laws were some of the most liberal in Europe, and society had started changing to match. There were exceptions, though, and that government did make some changes that were illiberal. They brought in increased restrictions on immigration, starting a worrying trend that continues to this day of governments getting ever crueler to immigrants, and they added LSD to the list of illegal drugs. And they brought in the Marine Broadcasting Offences Act, banning the pirate stations. We've mentioned pirate radio stations very briefly, but never properly explained them. In Britain, at this point, there was a legal monopoly on broadcasting. Only the BBC could run a radio station in the UK, and thanks to agreements with the Musicians' Union, the BBC could only play a very small amount of recorded music, with everything else having to be live performances or spoken word. And because it had a legal obligation to provide something for everyone, that meant the tiny amount of recorded music that was played on the radio had to cover all genres, meaning that even while Britain was going through the most important changes in its musical history, pop records were limited to an hour or two a week on British radio. Obviously, that wasn't going to last while there was money to be made, and the record companies in particular wanted to have somewhere to showcase their latest releases. At the start of the sixties, Radio Luxembourg had become popular, broadcasting from continental Europe but largely playing shows that had been pre-recorded in London. But of course, that was far enough away that it made listening to the transmissions difficult. But a solution presented itself: [Excerpt: The Fortunes, "Caroline"] Radio Caroline still continues to this day, largely as an Internet-based radio station, but in the mid-sixties it was something rather different. It was one of a handful of radio stations -- the pirate stations -- that broadcast from ships in international waters. The ships would stay three miles off the coast of Britain, close enough for their broadcasts to be clearly heard in much of the country, but outside Britain's territorial waters. They soon became hugely popular, with Radio Caroline and Radio London the two most popular, and introduced DJs like Tony Blackburn, Dave Lee Travis, Kenny Everett, and John Peel to the airwaves of Britain. The stations ran on bribery and advertising, and if you wanted a record to get into the charts one of the things you had to do was bribe one of the big pirate stations to playlist it, and with this corruption came violence, which came to a head when as we heard in the episode on “Here Comes the Night”, in 1966 Major Oliver Smedley, a failed right-wing politician and one of the directors of Radio Caroline, got a gang of people to board an abandoned sea fort from which a rival station was broadcasting and retrieve some equipment he claimed belonged to him. The next day, Reginald Calvert, the owner of the rival station, went to Smedley's home to confront him, and Smedley shot him dead, claiming self-defence. The jury in Smedley's subsequent trial took only a minute to find him not guilty and award him two hundred and fifty guineas to cover his costs. This was the last straw for the government, which was already concerned that the pirates' transmitters were interfering with emergency services transmissions, and that proper royalties weren't being paid for the music broadcast (though since much of the music was only on there because of payola, this seems a little bit of a moot point). They introduced legislation which banned anyone in the UK from supplying the pirate ships with records or other supplies, or advertising on the stations. They couldn't do anything about the ships themselves, because they were outside British jurisdiction, but they could make sure that nobody could associate with them while remaining in the UK. The BBC was to regain its monopoly (though in later years some commercial radio stations were allowed to operate). But as well as the stick, they needed the carrot. The pirate stations *had* been filling a real need, and the biggest of them were getting millions of listeners every day. So the arrangements with the Musicians' Union and the record labels were changed, and certain BBC stations were now allowed to play a lot more recorded music per day. I haven't been able to find accurate figures anywhere -- a lot of these things were confidential agreements -- but it seems to have been that the so-called "needle time" rules were substantially relaxed, allowing the BBC to separate what had previously been the Light Programme -- a single radio station that played all kinds of popular music, much of it live performances -- into two radio stations that were each allowed to play as much as twelve hours of recorded music per day, which along with live performances and between-track commentary from DJs was enough to allow a full broadcast schedule. One of these stations, Radio 2, was aimed at older listeners, and to start with mostly had programmes of what we would now refer to as Muzak, mixed in with the pop music of an older generation -- crooners and performers like Englebert Humperdinck. But another, Radio 1, was aimed at a younger audience and explicitly modelled on the pirate stations, and featured many of the DJs who had made their names on those stations. And on its first broadcast, as George Martin's theme tune for the new station faded, Tony Blackburn reached for a record. At different times Blackburn has said either that he was just desperately reaching for whatever record came to hand or that he made a deliberate choice because the record he chose had such a striking opening that it would be the perfect way to start a new station: [Excerpt: Tony Blackburn first radio show into "Flowers in the Rain" by the Move] You may remember me talking in the episode on "Here Comes the Night" about how in 1964 Dick Rowe of Decca, the manager Larry Page, and the publicist and co-owner of Radio Caroline Phil Solomon were all trying to promote something called Brumbeat as the answer to Merseybeat – Brummies, for those who don't know, are people from Birmingham. Brumbeat never took off the way Merseybeat did, but several bands did get a chance to make records, among them Gerry Levene and the Avengers: [Excerpt: Gerry Levene and the Avengers, "Dr. Feelgood"] That was the only single the Avengers made, and the B-side wasn't even them playing, but a bunch of session musicians under the direction of Bert Berns, and the group split up soon afterwards, but several of the members would go on to have rather important careers. According to some sources, one of their early drummers was John Bohnam, who you can be pretty sure will be turning up later in the story, while the drummer on that track was Graeme Edge, who would later go on to co-found the Moody Blues. But today it's the guitarist we'll be looking at. Roy Wood had started playing music when he was very young -- he'd had drum lessons when he was five years old, the only formal musical tuition he ever had, and he'd played harmonica around working men's clubs as a kid. And as a small child he'd loved classical music, particularly Tchaikovsky and Elgar. But it wasn't until he was twelve that he decided that he wanted to be a guitarist. He went to see the Shadows play live, and was inspired by the sound of Hank Marvin's guitar, which he later described as sounding "like it had been dipped in Dettol or something": [Excerpt: The Shadows, "Apache"] He started begging his parents for a guitar, and got one for his thirteenth birthday -- and by the time he was fourteen he was already in a band, the Falcons, whose members were otherwise eighteen to twenty years old, but who needed a lead guitarist who could play like Marvin. Wood had picked up the guitar almost preternaturally quickly, as he would later pick up every instrument he turned his hand to, and he'd also got the equipment. His friend Jeff Lynne later said "I first saw Roy playing in a church hall in Birmingham and I think his group was called the Falcons. And I could tell he was dead posh because he had a Fender Stratocaster and a Vox AC30 amplifier. The business at the time. I mean, if you've got those, that's it, you're made." It was in the Falcons that Wood had first started trying to write songs, at first instrumentals in the style of the Shadows, but then after the Beatles hit the charts he realised it was possible for band members to write their own material, and started hesitantly trying to write a few actual songs. Wood had moved on from the Falcons to Gerry Levene's band, one of the biggest local bands in Birmingham, when he was sixteen, which is also when he left formal education, dropping out from art school -- he's later said that he wasn't expelled as such, but that he and the school came to a mutual agreement that he wouldn't go back there. And when Gerry Levene and the Avengers fell apart after their one chance at success hadn't worked out, he moved on again to an even bigger band. Mike Sheridan and the Night Riders had had two singles out already, both produced by Cliff Richard's producer Norrie Paramor, and while they hadn't charted they were clearly going places. They needed a new guitarist, and Wood was by far the best of the dozen or so people who auditioned, even though Sheridan was very hesitant at first -- the Night Riders were playing cabaret, and all dressed smartly at all times, and this sixteen-year-old guitarist had turned up wearing clothes made by his sister and ludicrous pointy shoes. He was the odd man out, but he was so good that none of the other players could hold a candle to him, and he was in the Night Riders by the time of their third single, "What a Sweet Thing That Was": [Excerpt: Mike Sheridan and the Night Riders, "What a Sweet Thing That Was"] Sheridan later said "Roy was and still is, in my opinion, an unbelievable talent. As stubborn as a mule and a complete extrovert. Roy changed the group by getting us into harmonies and made us realize there was better material around with more than three chords to play. This was our turning point and we became a group's group and a bigger name." -- though there are few other people who would describe Wood as extroverted, most people describing him as painfully shy off-stage. "What a Sweet Thing That Was" didn't have any success, and nor did its follow-up, "Here I Stand", which came out in January 1965. But by that point, Wood had got enough of a reputation that he was already starting to guest on records by other bands on the Birmingham scene, like "Pretty Things" by Danny King and the Mayfair Set: [Excerpt: Danny King and the Mayfair Set, "Pretty Things"] After their fourth single was a flop, Mike Sheridan and the Night Riders changed their name to Mike Sheridan's Lot, and the B-side of their first single under the new name was a Roy Wood song, the first time one of his songs was recorded. Unfortunately the song, modelled on "It's Not Unusual" by Tom Jones, didn't come off very well, and Sheridan blamed himself for what everyone was agreed was a lousy sounding record: [Excerpt: Mike Sheridan's Lot, "Make Them Understand"] Mike Sheridan's Lot put out one final single, but the writing was on the wall for the group. Wood left, and soon after so did Sheridan himself. The remaining members regrouped under the name The Idle Race, with Wood's friend Jeff Lynne as their new singer and guitarist. But Wood wouldn't remain without a band for long. He'd recently started hanging out with another band, Carl Wayne and the Vikings, who had also released a couple of singles, on Pye: [Excerpt: Carl Wayne and the Vikings, "What's the Matter Baby"] But like almost every band from Birmingham up to this point, the Vikings' records had done very little, and their drummer had quit, and been replaced by Bev Bevan, who had been in yet another band that had gone nowhere, Denny Laine and the Diplomats, who had released one single under the name of their lead singer Nicky James, featuring the Breakaways, the girl group who would later sing on "Hey Joe", on backing vocals: [Excerpt: Nicky James, "My Colour is Blue"] Bevan had joined Carl Wayne's group, and they'd recorded one track together, a cover version of "My Girl", which was only released in the US, and which sank without a trace: [Excerpt: Carl Wayne and the Vikings, "My Girl"] It was around this time that Wood started hanging around with the Vikings, and they would all complain about how if you were playing the Birmingham circuit you were stuck just playing cover versions, and couldn't do anything more interesting. They were also becoming more acutely aware of how successful they *could* have been, because one of the Brumbeat bands had become really big. The Moody Blues, a supergroup of players from the best bands in Birmingham who featured Bev Bevan's old bandmate Denny Laine and Wood's old colleague Graeme Edge, had just hit number one with their version of "Go Now": [Excerpt: The Moody Blues, "Go Now"] So they knew the potential for success was there, but they were all feeling trapped. But then Ace Kefford, the bass player for the Vikings, went to see Davy Jones and the Lower Third playing a gig: [Excerpt: Davy Jones and the Lower Third, "You've Got a Habit of Leaving"] Also at the gig was Trevor Burton, the guitarist for Danny King and the Mayfair Set. The two of them got chatting to Davy Jones after the gig, and eventually the future David Bowie told them that the two of them should form their own band if they were feeling constricted in their current groups. They decided to do just that, and they persuaded Carl Wayne from Kefford's band to join them, and got in Wood. Now they just needed a drummer. Their first choice was John Bonham, the former drummer for Gerry Levene and the Avengers who was now drumming in a band with Kefford's uncle and Nicky James from the Diplomats. But Bonham and Wayne didn't get on, and so Bonham decided to remain in the group he was in, and instead they turned to Bev Bevan, the Vikings' new drummer. (Of the other two members of the Vikings, one went on to join Mike Sheridan's Lot in place of Wood, before leaving at the same time as Sheridan and being replaced by Lynne, while the other went on to join Mike Sheridan's New Lot, the group Sheridan formed after leaving his old group. The Birmingham beat group scene seems to have only had about as many people as there were bands, with everyone ending up a member of twenty different groups). The new group called themselves the Move, because they were all moving on from other groups, and it was a big move for all of them. Many people advised them not to get together, saying they were better off where they were, or taking on offers they'd got from more successful groups -- Carl Wayne had had an offer from a group called the Spectres, who would later become famous as Status Quo, while Wood had been tempted by Tony Rivers and the Castaways, a group who at the time were signed to Immediate Records, and who did Beach Boys soundalikes and covers: [Excerpt: Tony Rivers and the Castaways, "Girl Don't Tell Me"] Wood was a huge fan of the Beach Boys and would have fit in with Rivers, but decided he'd rather try something truly new. After their first gig, most of the people who had warned against the group changed their minds. Bevan's best friend, Bobby Davis, told Bevan that while he'd disliked all the other groups Bevan had played in, he liked this one. (Davis would later become a famous comedian, and have a top five single himself in the seventies, produced by Jeff Lynne and with Bevan on the drums, under his stage name Jasper Carrott): [Excerpt: Jasper Carrott, "Funky Moped"] Most of their early sets were cover versions, usually of soul and Motown songs, but reworked in the group's unique style. All five of the band could sing, four of them well enough to be lead vocalists in their own right (Bevan would add occasional harmonies or sing novelty numbers) and so they became known for their harmonies -- Wood talked at the time about how he wanted the band to have Beach Boys harmonies but over instruments that sounded like the Who. And while they were mostly doing cover versions live, Wood was busily writing songs. Their first recording session was for local radio, and at that session they did cover versions of songs by Brenda Lee, the Isley Brothers, the Orlons, the Marvelettes, and Betty Everett, but they also performed four songs written by Wood, with each member of the front line taking a lead vocal, like this one with Kefford singing: [Excerpt: The Move, "You're the One I Need"] The group were soon signed by Tony Secunda, the manager of the Moody Blues, who set about trying to get the group as much publicity as possible. While Carl Wayne, as the only member who didn't play an instrument, ended up the lead singer on most of the group's early records, Secunda started promoting Kefford, who was younger and more conventionally attractive than Wayne, and who had originally put the group together, as the face of the group, while Wood was doing most of the heavy lifting with the music. Wood quickly came to dislike performing live, and to wish he could take the same option as Brian Wilson and stay home and write songs and make records while the other four went out and performed, so Kefford and Wayne taking the spotlight from him didn't bother him at the time, but it set the group up for constant conflicts about who was actually the leader of the group. Wood was also uncomfortable with the image that Secunda set up for the group. Secunda decided that the group needed to be promoted as "bad boys", and so he got them to dress up as 1930s gangsters, and got them to do things like smash busts of Hitler, or the Rhodesian dictator Ian Smith, on stage. He got them to smash TVs on stage too, and in one publicity stunt he got them to smash up a car, while strippers took their clothes off nearby -- claiming that this was to show that people were more interested in violence than in sex. Wood, who was a very quiet, unassuming, introvert, didn't like this sort of thing, but went along with it. Secunda got the group a regular slot at the Marquee club, which lasted several months until, in one of Secunda's ideas for publicity, Carl Wayne let off smoke bombs on stage which set fire to the stage. The manager came up to try to stop the fire, and Wayne tossed the manager's wig into the flames, and the group were banned from the club (though the ban was later lifted). In another publicity stunt, at the time of the 1966 General Election, the group were photographed with "Vote Tory" posters, and issued an invitation to Edward Heath, the leader of the Conservative Party and a keen amateur musician, to join them on stage on keyboards. Sir Edward didn't respond to the invitation. All this publicity led to record company interest. Joe Boyd tried to sign the group to Elektra Records, but much as with The Pink Floyd around the same time, Jac Holzman wasn't interested. Instead they signed with a new production company set up by Denny Cordell, the producer of the Moody Blues' hits. The contract they signed was written on the back of a nude model, as yet another of Secunda's publicity schemes. The group's first single, "Night of Fear" was written by Wood and an early sign of his interest in incorporating classical music into rock: [Excerpt: The Move, "Night of Fear"] Secunda claimed in the publicity that that song was inspired by taking bad acid and having a bad trip, but in truth Wood was more inspired by brown ale than by brown acid -- he and Bev Bevan would never do any drugs other than alcohol. Wayne did take acid once, but didn't like it, though Burton and Kefford would become regular users of most drugs that were going. In truth, the song was not about anything more than being woken up in the middle of the night by an unexpected sound and then being unable to get back to sleep because you're scared of what might be out there. The track reached number two on the charts in the UK, being kept off the top by "I'm a Believer" by the Monkees, and was soon followed up by another song which again led to assumptions of drug use. "I Can Hear the Grass Grow" wasn't about grass the substance, but was inspired by a letter to Health and Efficiency, a magazine which claimed to be about the nudist lifestyle as an excuse for printing photos of naked people at a time before pornography laws were liberalised. The letter was from a reader saying that he listened to pop music on the radio because "where I live it's so quiet I can hear the grass grow!" Wood took that line and turned it into the group's next single, which reached number five: [Excerpt: The Move, "I Can Hear the Grass Grow"] Shortly after that, the group played two big gigs at Alexandra Palace. The first was the Fourteen-Hour Technicolor Dream, which we talked about in the Pink Floyd episode. There Wood had one of the biggest thrills of his life when he walked past John Lennon, who saluted him and then turned to a friend and said "He's brilliant!" -- in the seventies Lennon would talk about how Wood was one of his two favourite British songwriters, and would call the Move "the Hollies with balls". The other gig they played at Alexandra Palace was a "Free the Pirates" benefit show, sponsored by Radio Caroline, to protest the imposition of the Marine Broadcasting (Offences) Act. Despite that, it was, of course, the group's next single that was the first one to be played on Radio One. And that single was also the one which kickstarted Roy Wood's musical ambitions. The catalyst for this was Tony Visconti. Visconti was a twenty-three-year-old American who had been in the music business since he was sixteen, working the typical kind of jobs that working musicians do, like being for a time a member of a latter-day incarnation of the Crew-Cuts, the white vocal group who had had hits in the fifties with covers of "Sh'Boom" and “Earth Angel”. He'd also recorded two singles as a duo with his wife Siegrid, which had gone nowhere: [Excerpt: Tony and Siegrid, "Up Here"] Visconti had been working for the Richmond Organisation as a staff songwriter when he'd met the Move's producer Denny Cordell. Cordell was in the US to promote a new single he had released with a group called Procol Harum, "A Whiter Shade of Pale", and Visconti became the first American to hear the record, which of course soon became a massive hit: [Excerpt: Procol Harum, "A Whiter Shade of Pale"] While he was in New York, Cordell also wanted to record a backing track for one of his other hit acts, Georgie Fame. He told Visconti that he'd booked several of the best session players around, like the jazz trumpet legend Clark Terry, and thought it would be a fun session. Visconti asked to look at the charts for the song, out of professional interest, and Cordell was confused -- what charts? The musicians would just make up an arrangement, wouldn't they? Visconti asked what he was talking about, and Cordell talked about how you made records -- you just got the musicians to come into the studio, hung around while they smoked a few joints and worked out what they were going to play, and then got on with it. It wouldn't take more than about twelve hours to get a single recorded that way. Visconti was horrified, and explained that that might be how they did things in London, but if Cordell tried to make a record that way in New York, with an eight-piece group of session musicians who charged union scale, and would charge double scale for arranging work on top, then he'd bankrupt himself. Cordell went pale and said that the session was in an hour, what was he going to do? Luckily, Cordell had a copy of the demo with him, and Visconti, who unlike Cordell was a trained musician, quickly sat down and wrote an arrangement for him, sketching out parts for guitar, bass, drums, piano, sax, and trumpets. The resulting arrangement wasn't perfect -- Visconti had to write the whole thing in less than an hour with no piano to hand -- but it was good enough that Cordell's production assistant on the track, Harvey Brooks of the group Electric Flag, who also played bass on the track, could tweak it in the studio, and the track was recorded quickly, saving Cordell a fortune: [Excerpt: Georgie Fame, "Because I Love You"] One of the other reasons Cordell had been in the US was that he was looking for a production assistant to work with him in the UK to help translate his ideas into language the musicians could understand. According to Visconti he said that he was going to try asking Phil Spector to be his assistant, and Artie Butler if Spector said no. Astonishingly, assuming he did ask them, neither Phil Spector nor Artie Butler (who was the arranger for records like "Leader of the Pack" and "I'm a Believer" among many, many, others, and who around this time was the one who suggested to Louis Armstrong that he should record "What a Wonderful World") wanted to fly over to the UK to work as Denny Cordell's assistant, and so Cordell turned back to Visconti and invited him to come over to the UK. The main reason Cordell needed an assistant was that he had too much work on his hands -- he was currently in the middle of recording albums for three major hit groups -- Procol Harum, The Move, and Manfred Mann -- and he physically couldn't be in multiple studios at once. Visconti's first work for him was on a Manfred Mann session, where they were recording the Randy Newman song "So Long Dad" for their next single. Cordell produced the rhythm track then left for a Procol Harum session, leaving Visconti to guide the group through the overdubs, including all the vocal parts and the lead instruments: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "So Long Dad"] The next Move single, "Flowers in the Rain", was the first one to benefit from Visconti's arrangement ideas. The band had recorded the track, and Cordell had been unhappy with both the song and performance, thinking it was very weak compared to their earlier singles -- not the first time that Cordell would have a difference of opinion with the band, who he thought of as a mediocre pop group, while they thought of themselves as a heavy rock band who were being neutered in the studio by their producer. In particular, Cordell didn't like that the band fell slightly out of time in the middle eight of the track. He decided to scrap it, and get the band to record something else. Visconti, though, thought the track could be saved. He told Cordell that what they needed to do was to beat the Beatles, by using a combination of instruments they hadn't thought of. He scored for a quartet of wind instruments -- oboe, flute, clarinet, and French horn, in imitation of Mendelssohn: [Excerpt: The Move, "Flowers in the Rain"] And then, to cover up the slight sloppiness on the middle eight, Visconti had the wind instruments on that section recorded at half speed, so when played back at normal speed they'd sound like pixies and distract from the rhythm section: [Excerpt: The Move, "Flowers in the Rain"] Visconti's instincts were right. The single went to number two, kept off the top spot by Englebert Humperdinck, who spent 1967 keeping pretty much every major British band off number one, and thanks in part to it being the first track played on Radio 1, but also because it was one of the biggest hits of 1967, it's been the single of the Move's that's had the most airplay over the years. Unfortunately, none of the band ever saw a penny in royalties from it. It was because of another of Tony Secunda's bright ideas. Harold Wilson, the Prime Minister at the time, was very close to his advisor Marcia Williams, who started out as his secretary, rose to be his main political advisor, and ended up being elevated to the peerage as Baroness Falkender. There were many, many rumours that Williams was corrupt -- rumours that were squashed by both Wilson and Williams frequently issuing libel writs against newspapers that mentioned them -- though it later turned out that at least some of these were the work of Britain's security services, who believed Wilson to be working for the KGB (and indeed Williams had first met Wilson at a dinner with Khrushchev, though Wilson was very much not a Communist) and were trying to destabilise his government as a result. Their personal closeness also led to persistent rumours that Wilson and Williams were having an affair. And Tony Secunda decided that the best way to promote "Flowers in the Rain" was to print a postcard with a cartoon of Wilson and Williams on it, and send it out. Including sticking a copy through the door of ten Downing St, the Prime Minister's official residence. This backfired *spectacularly*. Wilson sued the Move for libel, even though none of them had known of their manager's plans, and as a result of the settlement it became illegal for any publication to print the offending image (though it can easily be found on the Internet now of course), everyone involved with the record was placed under a permanent legal injunction to never discuss the details of the case, and every penny in performance or songwriting royalties the track earned would go to charities of Harold Wilson's choice. In the 1990s newspaper reports said that the group had up to that point lost out on two hundred thousand pounds in royalties as a result of Secunda's stunt, and given the track's status as a perennial favourite, it's likely they've missed out on a similar amount in the decades since. Incidentally, while every member of the band was banned from ever describing the postcard, I'm not, and since Wilson and Williams are now both dead it's unlikely they'll ever sue me. The postcard is a cartoon in the style of Aubrey Beardsley, and shows Wilson as a grotesque naked homunculus sat on a bed, with Williams naked save for a diaphonous nightgown through which can clearly be seen her breasts and genitals, wearing a Marie Antoinette style wig and eyemask and holding a fan coquettishly, while Wilson's wife peers at them through a gap in the curtains. The text reads "Disgusting Depraved Despicable, though Harold maybe is the only way to describe "Flowers in the Rain" The Move, released Aug 23" The stunt caused huge animosity between the group and Secunda, not only because of the money they lost but also because despite Secunda's attempts to associate them with the Conservative party the previous year, Ace Kefford was upset at an attack on the Labour leader -- his grandfather was a lifelong member of the Labour party and Kefford didn't like the idea of upsetting him. The record also had a knock-on effect on another band. Wood had given the song "Here We Go Round the Lemon Tree" to his friends in The Idle Race, the band that had previously been Mike Sheridan and the Night Riders, and they'd planned to use their version as their first single: [Excerpt: The Idle Race, "Here We Go Round the Lemon Tree"] But the Move had also used the song as the B-side for their own single, and "Flowers in the Rain" was so popular that the B-side also got a lot of airplay. The Idle Race didn't want to be thought of as a covers act, and so "Lemon Tree" was pulled at the last minute and replaced by "Impostors of Life's Magazine", by the group's guitarist Jeff Lynne: [Excerpt: The Idle Race, "Impostors of Life's Magazine"] Before the problems arose, the Move had been working on another single. The A-side, "Cherry Blossom Clinic", was a song about being in a psychiatric hospital, and again had an arrangement by Visconti, who this time conducted a twelve-piece string section: [Excerpt: The Move, "Cherry Blossom Clinic"] The B-side, meanwhile, was a rocker about politics: [Excerpt: The Move, "Vote For Me"] Given the amount of controversy they'd caused, the idea of a song about mental illness backed with one about politics seemed a bad idea, and so "Cherry Blossom Clinic" was kept back as an album track while "Vote For Me" was left unreleased until future compilations. The first Wood knew about "Cherry Blossom Clinic" not being released was when after a gig in London someone -- different sources have it as Carl Wayne or Tony Secunda -- told him that they had a recording session the next morning for their next single and asked what song he planned on recording. When he said he didn't have one, he was sent up to his hotel room with a bottle of Scotch and told not to come down until he had a new song. He had one by 8:30 the next morning, and was so drunk and tired that he had to be held upright by his bandmates in the studio while singing his lead vocal on the track. The song was inspired by "Somethin' Else", a track by Eddie Cochran, one of Wood's idols: [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, "Somethin' Else"] Wood took the bass riff from that and used it as the basis for what was the Move's most straight-ahead rock track to date. As 1967 was turning into 1968, almost universally every band was going back to basics, recording stripped down rock and roll tracks, and the Move were no exception. Early takes of "Fire Brigade" featured Matthew Fisher of Procol Harum on piano, but the final version featured just guitar, bass, drums and vocals, plus a few sound effects: [Excerpt: The Move, "Fire Brigade"] While Carl Wayne had sung lead or co-lead on all the Move's previous singles, he was slowly being relegated into the background, and for this one Wood takes the lead vocal on everything except the brief bridge, which Wayne sings: [Excerpt: The Move, "Fire Brigade"] The track went to number three, and while it's not as well-remembered as a couple of other Move singles, it was one of the most influential. Glen Matlock of the Sex Pistols has often said that the riff for "God Save the Queen" is inspired by "Fire Brigade": [Excerpt: The Sex Pistols, "God Save the Queen"] The reversion to a heavier style of rock on "Fire Brigade" was largely inspired by the group's new friend Jimi Hendrix. The group had gone on a package tour with The Pink Floyd (who were at the bottom of the bill), Amen Corner, The Nice, and the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and had become good friends with Hendrix, often jamming with him backstage. Burton and Kefford had become so enamoured of Hendrix that they'd both permed their hair in imitation of his Afro, though Burton regretted it -- his hair started falling out in huge chunks as a result of the perm, and it took him a full two years to grow it out and back into a more natural style. Burton had started sharing a flat with Noel Redding of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and Burton and Wood had also sung backing vocals with Graham Nash of the Hollies on Hendrix's "You Got Me Floatin'", from his Axis: Bold as Love album: [Excerpt: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, "You Got Me Floatin'"] In early 1968, the group's first album came out. In retrospect it's arguably their best, but at the time it felt a little dated -- it was a compilation of tracks recorded between late 1966 and late 1967, and by early 1968 that might as well have been the nineteenth century. The album included their two most recent singles, a few more songs arranged by Visconti, and three cover versions -- versions of Eddie Cochran's "Weekend", Moby Grape's "Hey Grandma", and the old standard "Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart", done copying the Coasters' arrangement with Bev Bevan taking a rare lead vocal. By this time there was a lot of dissatisfaction among the group. Most vocal -- or least vocal, because by this point he was no longer speaking to any of the other members, had been Ace Kefford. Kefford felt he was being sidelined in a band he'd formed and where he was the designated face of the group. He'd tried writing songs, but the only one he'd brought to the group, "William Chalker's Time Machine", had been rejected, and was eventually recorded by a group called The Lemon Tree, whose recording of it was co-produced by Burton and Andy Fairweather-Low of Amen Corner: [Excerpt: The Lemon Tree, "William Chalker's Time Machine"] He was also, though the rest of the group didn't realise it at the time, in the middle of a mental breakdown, which he later attributed to his overuse of acid. By the time the album, titled Move, came out, he'd quit the group. He formed a new group, The Ace Kefford Stand, with Cozy Powell on drums, and they released one single, a cover version of the Yardbirds' "For Your Love", which didn't chart: [Excerpt: The Ace Kefford Stand, "For Your Love"] Kefford recorded a solo album in 1968, but it wasn't released until an archival release in 2003, and he spent most of the next few decades dealing with mental health problems. The group continued on as a four-piece, with Burton moving over to bass. While they thought about what to do -- they were unhappy with Secunda's management, and with the sound that Cordell was getting from their recordings, which they considered far wimpier than their live sound -- they released a live EP of cover versions, recorded at the Marquee. The choice of songs for the EP showed their range of musical influences at the time, going from fifties rockabilly to the burgeoning progressive rock scene, with versions of Cochran's "Somethin' Else", Jerry Lee Lewis' "It'll Be Me", "So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll Star" by the Byrds, "Sunshine Help Me" by Spooky Tooth, and "Stephanie Knows Who" by Love: [Excerpt: The Move, "Stephanie Knows Who"] Incidentally, later that year they headlined a gig at the Royal Albert Hall with the Byrds as the support act, and Gram Parsons, who by that time was playing guitar for the Byrds, said that the Move did "So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll Star" better than the Byrds did. The EP, titled "Something Else From the Move", didn't do well commercially, but it did do something that the band thought important -- Trevor Burton in particular had been complaining that Denny Cordell's productions "took the toughness out" of the band's sound, and was worried that the group were being perceived as a pop band, not as a rock group like his friends in the Jimi Hendrix Experience or Cream. There was an increasing tension between Burton, who wanted to be a heavy rocker, and the older Wayne, who thought there was nothing at all wrong with being a pop band. The next single, "Wild Tiger Woman", was much more in the direction that Burton wanted their music to go. It was ostensibly produced by Cordell, but for the most part he left it to the band, and as a result it ended up as a much heavier track than normal. Roy Wood had only intended the song as an album track, and Bevan and Wayne were hesitant about it being a single, but Burton was insistent -- "Wild Tiger Woman" was going to be the group's first number one record: [Excerpt: The Move, "Wild Tiger Woman"] In fact, it turned out to be the group's first single not to chart at all, after four top ten singles in a row. The group were now in crisis. They'd lost Ace Kefford, Burton and Wayne were at odds, and they were no longer guaranteed hitmakers. They decided to stop working with Cordell and Secunda, and made a commitment that if the next single was a flop, they would split up. In any case, Roy Wood was already thinking about another project. Even though the group's recent records had gone in a guitar-rock direction, he thought maybe you could do something more interesting. Ever since seeing Tony Visconti conduct orchestral instruments playing his music, he'd been thinking about it. As he later put it "I thought 'Well, wouldn't it be great to get a band together, and rather than advertising for a guitarist how about advertising for a cellist or a French horn player or something? There must be lots of young musicians around who play the... instruments that would like to play in a rock kind of band.' That was the start of it, it really was, and I think after those tracks had been recorded with Tony doing the orchestral arrangement, that's when I started to get bored with the Move, with the band, because I thought 'there's something more to it'". He'd started sketching out plans for an expanded lineup of the group, drawing pictures of what it would look like on stage if Carl Wayne was playing timpani while there were cello and French horn players on stage with them. He'd even come up with a name for the new group -- a multi-layered pun. The group would be a light orchestra, like the BBC Light Orchestra, but they would be playing electrical instruments, and also they would have a light show when they performed live, and so he thought "the Electric Light Orchestra" would be a good name for such a group. The other band members thought this was a daft idea, but Wood kept on plotting. But in the meantime, the group needed some new management. The person they chose was Don Arden. We talked about Arden quite a bit in the last episode, but he's someone who is going to turn up a lot in future episodes, and so it's best if I give a little bit more background about him. Arden was a manager of the old school, and like several of the older people in the music business at the time, like Dick James or Larry Page, he had started out as a performer, doing an Al Jolson tribute act, and he was absolutely steeped in showbusiness -- his wife had been a circus contortionist before they got married, and when he moved from Manchester to London their first home had been owned by Winifred Atwell, a boogie piano player who became the first Black person to have a UK number one -- and who is *still* the only female solo instrumentalist to have a UK number one -- with her 1954 hit "Let's Have Another Party": [Excerpt: WInifred Atwell, "Let's Have Another Party"] That was only Atwell's biggest in a long line of hits, and she'd put all her royalties into buying properties in London, one of which became the Ardens' home. Arden had been considered quite a promising singer, and had made a few records in the early 1950s. His first recordings, of material in Yiddish aimed at the Jewish market, are sadly not findable online, but he also apparently recorded as a session singer for Embassy Records. I can't find a reliable source for what records he sang on for that label, which put out budget rerecordings of hits for sale exclusively through Woolworths, but according to Wikipedia one of them was Embassy's version of "Blue Suede Shoes", put out under the group name "The Canadians", and the lead vocal on that track certainly sounds like it could be him: [Excerpt: The Canadians, "Blue Suede Shoes"] As you can tell, rock and roll didn't really suit Arden's style, and he wisely decided to get out of performance and into behind-the-scenes work, though he would still try on occasion to make records of his own -- an acetate exists from 1967 of him singing "Sunrise, Sunset": [Excerpt: Don Arden, "Sunrise, Sunset"] But he'd moved first into promotion -- he'd been the promoter who had put together tours of the UK for Gene Vincent, Little Richard, Brenda Lee and others which we mentioned in the second year of the podcast -- and then into management. He'd first come into management with the Animals -- apparently acting at that point as the money man for Mike Jeffries, who was the manager the group themselves dealt with. According to Arden -- though his story differs from the version of the story told by others involved -- the group at some point ditched Arden for Allen Klein, and when they did, Arden's assistant Peter Grant, another person we'll be hearing a lot more of, went with them. Arden, by his own account, flew over to see Klein and threatened to throw him out of the window of his office, which was several stories up. This was a threat he regularly made to people he believed had crossed him -- he made a similar threat to one of the Nashville Teens, the first group he managed after the Animals, after the musician asked what was happening to the group's money. And as we heard last episode, he threatened Robert Stigwood that way when Stigwood tried to get the Small Faces off him. One of the reasons he'd signed the Small Faces was that Steve Marriott had gone to the Italia Conti school, where Arden had sent his own children, Sharon and David, and David had said that Marriott was talented. And David was also a big reason the Move came over to Arden. After the Small Faces had left him, Arden had bought Galaxy Entertaimnent, the booking agency that handled bookings for Amen Corner and the Move, among many other acts. Arden had taken over management of Amen Corner himself, and had put his son David in charge of liaising with Tony Secunda about the Move. But David Arden was sure that the Move could be an albums act, not just a singles act, and was convinced the group had more potential than they were showing, and when they left Secunda, Don Arden took them on as his clients, at least for the moment. Secunda, according to Arden (who is not the most reliable of witnesses, but is unfortunately the only one we have for a lot of this stuff) tried to hire someone to assassinate Arden, but Arden quickly let Secunda know that if anything happened to Arden, Secunda himself would be dead within the hour. As "Wild Tiger Woman" hadn't been a hit, the group decided to go back to their earlier "Flowers in the Rain" style, with "Blackberry Way": [Excerpt: The Move, "Blackberry Way"] That track was produced by Jimmy Miller, who was producing the Rolling Stones and Traffic around this time, and featured the group's friend Richard Tandy on harpsichord. It's also an example of the maxim "Good artists copy, great artists steal". There are very few more blatant examples of plagiarism in pop music than the middle eight of "Blackberry Way". Compare Harry Nilsson's "Good Old Desk": [Excerpt: Nilsson, "Good Old Desk"] to the middle eight of "Blackberry Way": [Excerpt: The Move, "Blackberry Way"] "Blackberry Way" went to number one, but that was the last straw for Trevor Burton -- it was precisely the kind of thing he *didn't* want to be doing,. He was so sick of playing what he thought of as cheesy pop music that at one show he attacked Bev Bevan on stage with his bass, while Bevan retaliated with his cymbals. He stormed off stage, saying he was "tired of playing this crap". After leaving the group, he almost joined Blind Faith, a new supergroup that members of Cream and Traffic were forming, but instead formed his own supergroup, Balls. Balls had a revolving lineup which at various times included Denny Laine, formerly of the Moody Blues, Jackie Lomax, a singer-songwriter who was an associate of the Beatles, Richard Tandy who had played on "Blackberry Way", and Alan White, who would go on to drum with the band Yes. Balls only released one single, "Fight for My Country", which was later reissued as a Trevor Burton solo single: [Excerpt: Balls, "Fight For My Country"] Balls went through many lineup changes, and eventually seemed to merge with a later lineup of the Idle Race to become the Steve Gibbons Band, who were moderately successful in the seventies and eighties. Richard Tandy covered on bass for a short while, until Rick Price came in as a permanent replacement. Before Price, though, the group tried to get Hank Marvin to join, as the Shadows had then split up, and Wood was willing to move over to bass and let Marvin play lead guitar. Marvin turned down the offer though. But even though "Blackberry Way" had been the group's biggest hit to date, it marked a sharp decline in the group's fortunes. Its success led Peter Walsh, the manager of Marmalade and the Tremeloes, to poach the group from Arden, and even though Arden took his usual heavy-handed approach -- he describes going and torturing Walsh's associate, Clifford Davis, the manager of Fleetwood Mac, in his autobiography -- he couldn't stop Walsh from taking over. Unfortunately, Walsh put the group on the chicken-in-a-basket cabaret circuit, and in the next year they only released one record, the single "Curly", which nobody was happy with. It was ostensibly produced by Mike Hurst, but Hurst didn't turn up to the final sessions and Wood did most of the production work himself, while in the next studio over Jimmy Miller, who'd produced "Blackberry Way", was producing "Honky Tonk Women" by the Rolling Stones. The group were getting pigeonholed as a singles group, at a time when album artists were the in thing. In a three-year career they'd only released one album, though they were working on their second. Wood was by this point convinced that the Move was unsalvageable as a band, and told the others that the group was now just going to be a launchpad for his Electric Light Orchestra project. The band would continue working the chicken-in-a-basket circuit and releasing hit singles, but that would be just to fund the new project -- which they could all be involved in if they wanted, of course. Carl Wayne, on the other hand, was very, very, happy playing cabaret, and didn't see the need to be doing anything else. He made a counter-suggestion to Wood -- keep The Move together indefinitely, but let Wood do the Brian Wilson thing and stay home and write songs. Wayne would even try to get Burton and Kefford back into the band. But Wood wasn't interested. Increasingly his songs weren't even going to the Move at all. He was writing songs for people like Cliff Bennett and the Casuals. He wrote "Dance Round the Maypole" for Acid Gallery: [Excerpt: Acid Gallery, "Dance Round the Maypole"] On that, Wood and Jeff Lynne sang backing vocals. Wood and Lynne had been getting closer since Lynne had bought a home tape recorder which could do multi-tracking -- Wood had wanted to buy one of his own after "Flowers in the Rain", but even though he'd written three hit singles at that point his publishing company wouldn't give him an advance to buy one, and so he'd started using Lynne's. The two have often talked about how they'd recorded the demo for "Blackberry Way" at Lynne's parents' house, recording Wood's vocal on the demo with pillows and cushions around his head so that his singing wouldn't wake Lynne's parents. Lynne had been another person that Wood had asked to join the group when Burton left, but Lynne was happy with The Idle Race, where he was the main singer and songwriter, though their records weren't having any success: [Excerpt: The Idle Race, "I Like My Toys"] While Wood was writing material for other people, the only one of those songs to become a hit was "Hello Suzie", written for Amen Corner, which became a top five single on Immediate Records: [Excerpt: Amen Corner, "Hello Suzie"] While the Move were playing venues like Batley Variety Club in Britain, when they went on their first US tour they were able to play for a very different audience. They were unknown in the US, and so were able to do shows for hippie audiences that had no preconceptions about them, and did things like stretch "Cherry Blossom Clinic" into an eight-minute-long extended progressive rock jam that incorporated bits of "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring", the Nutcracker Suite, and the Sorcerer's Apprentice: [Excerpt: The Move, "Cherry Blossom Clinic Revisited (live at the Fillmore West)"] All the group were agreed that those shows were the highlight of the group's career. Even Carl Wayne, the band member most comfortable with them playing the cabaret circuit, was so proud of the show at the Fillmore West which that performance is taken from that when the tapes proved unusable he kept hold of them, hoping all his life that technology would progress to the point where they could be released and show what a good live band they'd been, though as things turned out they didn't get released until after his death. But when they got back to the UK it was back to the chicken-in-a-basket circuit, and back to work on their much-delayed second album. That album, Shazam!, was the group's attempt at compromise between their different visions. With the exception of one song, it's all heavy rock music, but Wayne, Wood, and Price all co-produced, and Wayne had the most creative involvement he'd ever had. Side two of the album was all cover versions, chosen by Wayne, and Wayne also went out onto the street and did several vox pops, asking members of the public what they thought of pop music: [Excerpt: Vox Pops from "Don't Make My Baby Blue"] There were only six songs on the album, because they were mostly extended jams. Other than the three cover versions chosen by Wayne, there was a sludge-metal remake of "Hello Suzie", the new arrangement of "Cherry Blossom Clinic" they'd been performing live, retitled "Cherry Blossom Clinic Revisited", and only one new original, "Beautiful Daughter", which featured a string arrangement by Visconti, who also played bass: [Excerpt: The Move, "Beautiful Daughter"] And Carl Wayne sang lead on five of the six tracks, which given that one of the reasons Wayne was getting unhappy with the band was that Wood was increasingly becoming the lead singer, must have been some comfort. But it wasn't enough. By the time Shazam! came out, with a cover drawn by Mike Sheridan showing the four band members as superheroes, the band was down to three -- Carl Wayne had quit the group, for a solo career. He continued playing the cabaret circuit, and made records, but never had another hit, but he managed to have a very successful career as an all-round entertainer, acting on TV and in the theatre, including a six-year run as the narrator in the musical Blood Brothers, and replacing Alan Clarke as the lead singer of the Hollies. He died in 2004. As soon as Wayne left the group, the three remaining band members quit their management and went back to Arden. And to replace Wayne, Wood once again asked Jeff Lynne to join the group. But this time the proposition was different -- Lynne wouldn't just be joining the Move, but he would be joining the Electric Light Orchestra. They would continue putting out Move records and touring for the moment, and Lynne would be welcome to write songs for the Move so that Wood wouldn't have to be the only writer, but they'd be doing it while they were planning their new group. Lynne was in, and the first single from the new lineup was a return to the heavy riff rock style of "Wild Tiger Woman", "Brontosaurus": [Excerpt: The Move, "Brontosaurus"] But Wayne leaving the group had put Wood in a difficult position. He was now the frontman, and he hated that responsibility -- he said later "if you look at me in photos of the early days, I'm always the one hanging back with my head down, more the musician than the frontman." So he started wearing makeup, painting his face with triangles and stars, so he would be able to hide his shyness. And it worked -- and "Brontosaurus" returned the group to the top ten. But the next single, "When Alice Comes Back to the Farm", didn't chart at all. The first album for the new Move lineup, Looking On, was to finish their contract with their current record label. Many regard it as the group's "Heavy metal album", and it's often considered the worst of their four albums, with Bev Bevan calling it "plodding", but that's as much to do with Bevan's feeling about the sessions as anything else -- increasingly, after the basic rhythm tracks had been recorded, Wood and Lynne would get to work without the other two members of the band, doing immense amounts of overdubbing. And that continued after Looking On was finished. The group signed a new contract with EMI's new progressive rock label, Harvest, and the contract stated that they were signing as "the Move performing as The Electric Light Orchestra". They started work on two albums' worth of material, with the idea that anything with orchestral instruments would be put aside for the first Electric Light Orchestra album, while anything with just guitar, bass, drums, keyboard, and horns would be for the Move. The first Electric Light Orchestra track, indeed, was intended as a Move B-side. Lynne came in with a song based around a guitar riff, and with lyrics vaguely inspired by the TV show The Prisoner, about someone with a number instead of a name running, trying to escape, and then eventually dying. But then Wood decided that what the track really needed was cello. But not cello played in the standard orchestral manner, but something closer to what the Beatles had done on "I am the Walrus". He'd bought a cheap cello himself, and started playing Jimi Hendrix riffs on it, and Lynne loved the sound of it, so onto the Move's basic rhythm track they overdubbed fifteen cello tracks by Wood, and also two French horns, also by Wood: [Excerpt: The Electric Light Orchestra, "10538 Overture"] The track was named "10538 Overture", after they saw the serial number 1053 on the console they were using to mix the track, and added the number 8 at the end, making 10538 the number of the character in the song. Wood and Lynne were so enamoured with the sound of their new track that they eventually got told by the other two members of the group that they had to sit in the back when the Move were driving to gigs, so they couldn't reach the tape player, because they'd just keep playing the track over and over again. So they got a portable tape player and took that into the back seat with them to play it there. After finishing some pre-existing touring commitments, the Move and Electric Light Orchestra became a purely studio group, and Rick Price quit the bands -- he needed steady touring work to feed his family, and went off to form another band, Mongrel. Around this time, Wood also took part in another strange project. After Immediate Records collapsed, Andrew Oldham needed some fast money, so he and Don Arden put together a fake group they could sign to EMI for ten thousand pounds. The photo of the band Grunt Futtock was of some random students, and that was who Arden and Oldham told EMI was on the track, but the actual performers on the single included Roy Wood, Steve Marriott, Peter Frampton, and Andy Bown, the former keyboard player of the Herd: [Excerpt: Grunt Futtock, "Rock 'n' Roll Christian"] Nobody knows who wrote the song, although it's credited to Bernard Webb, which is a pseudonym Paul McCartney had previously used -- but everyone knew he'd used the pseudonym, so it could very easily be a nod to that. The last Move album, Message From The Country, didn't chart -- just like the previous two hadn't. But Wood's song "Tonight" made number eleven, the follow-up, "Chinatown", made number twenty-three, and then the final Move single, "California Man", a fifties rock and roll pastiche, made the top ten: [Excerpt: The Move, "California Man"] In the US, that single was flipped, and the B-side, Lynne's song "Do Ya", became the only Move song ever to make the Hot One Hundred, reaching number ninety-nine: [Excerpt: The Move, "Do Ya"] By the time "California Man" was released, the Electric Light Orchestra were well underway. They'd recorded their first album, whose biggest highlights were Lynne's "10538 Overture" and Wood's "Whisper in the Night": [Excerpt: The Electric Light Orchestra, "Whisper in the Night"] And they'd formed a touring lineup, including Richard Tandy on keyboards and several orchestral instrumentalists. Unfortunately, there were problems developing between Wood and Lynne. When the Electric Light Orchestra toured, interviewers only wanted to speak to Wood, thinking of him as the band leader, even though Wood insisted that he and Lynne were the joint leaders. And both men had started arguing a lot, to the extent that at some shows they would refuse to go on stage because of arguments as to which of them should go on first. Wood has since said that he thinks most of the problems between Lynne and himself were actually caused by Don Arden, who realised that if he split the two of them into separate acts he could have two hit groups, not one. If that was the plan, it worked, because by the time "10538 Overture" was released as the Electric Light Orchestra's first single, and made the top ten -- while "California Man" was also still in the charts -- it was announced that Roy Wood was now leaving the Electric Light Orchestra, as were keyboard player Bill Hunt and cellist Hugh McDowell. They were going to form a new group with Rick Price and the two drummers from Mongrel, Charlie Grima and Keith Smart, plus saxophone players Mike Burney and Nick Pentelow. Of course, ELO, as the Electric Light Orchestra soon became known, went on to have a string of hits through the seventies and eighties, featuring Lynne on vocals and guitar and Bevan on drums, like "Mr. Blue Sky": [Excerpt: ELO, "Mr. Blue Sky"] and "Don't Bring Me Down": [Excerpt: ELO, "Don't Bring Me Down"] And it's very likely Jeff Lynne will turn up in future episodes, and we'll get more of his story then. Bev Bevan, once ELO split up, led a band called ELO Part II for a while, then led a band calling itself The Move, much to Wood's disgust, sometimes with Trevor Burton involved. He also played briefly with Black Sabbath, and is currently in a country-folk band called Quill. Wood and Price's new band, though, went in a different direction altogether. After having done psychedelic pop, heavy rock, and orchestral progressive music, Wood now wanted to make music inspired by that of Phil Spector and Brian Wilson -- wall of sound pop music -- and the riffs of the fifties rock and roll he'd always loved. And that's what Wizzard did. Wizzard's first single, "Ball Park Incident", came out in November 1972 and made the top ten, meaning Wood had had top ten singles with three different bands in the space of six months: [Excerpt: Wizzard, "Ball Park Incident"] While Wizzard were a glam-pop singles group making catchy three-minute pop records, their albums were something else. Their first album, Wizzard Brew, was their only one to chart -- it only made number twenty-nine, and contained tracks like the thirteen-minute jazz-rock epic "Meet Me at the Jailhouse": [Excerpt: Wizzard, "Meet Me at the Jailhouse"] Their second album, Introducing Eddie and the Falcons, was a collection of fifties rock pastiches, while the third, Main Street, didn't get released at all at the time, as it was just considered too strange. Which is odd, because Wood was simultaneously working on an even stranger album, one he'd started work on while the Move were still going. Wood later said of the album in question, Boulders, "This was at the time when people were leaving bands and going out on their own, and then bringing an album out and calling it a solo album. And I thought 'Well, that's not a solo album! A solo album is when you write all the songs, you do all the arrangements, you play all the instruments yourself, you design the album cover, drive the van, and make the sandwiches and the tea, you know? That's a solo album.' Which is what I was determined to do." And he certainly managed. Other than a harmonium part that opens the first track, which is played by one of the album's engineers, every note on Boulders is written and performed by Wood, who is credited with banjo, bells, cello, cowbell, double bass, drums, glockenspiel, guitar, bass, harp, harp guitar, piano, recorder, saxophone, sitar, slide guitar, tambourine, trumpet, violin, washboard, water bowl, lead and backing vocals, production, liner notes and cover art. The single from Boulders, "Dear Elaine", made number eleven on the charts: [Excerpt: Roy Wood, "Dear Elaine"] But rather astonishingly Boulders itself became the biggest hit album of any that Wood was ever involved in, reaching number twelve. This despite it having songs like "Miss Clarke and the Computer", a song sung from the perspective of a computer who's in love with a maintenance engineer who has been sent out to dismantle it: [Excerpt: Roy Wood, "Miss Clarke and the Computer"] While he was working on that, though, he'd also continued working with Wizzard, and Wizzard's second single was also Wood's second number one, "See My Baby Jive": [Excerpt: Wizzard, "See My Baby Jive"] Just before that had come out, ELO had put out a cover version of "Roll Over Beethoven" which EMI had publicised as "the follow-up to California Man", and so the B-side to "See My Baby Jive" was an instrumental whose full title was "Bend Over Beethoven (the official follow-up to "California Man")" "See My Baby Jive" was followed up by "Angel Fingers", another number one, while "Dear Elaine" was followed up by "Forever", a pastiche of Neil Sedaka and the Beach Boys which the Beach Boys themselves liked so much that Wood was invited to join them in the recording of their hit "It's OK". Wood has talked about visiting Brian Wilson's house and being greeted by Wilson's daughters Carnie and Wendy, later of Wilson Phillips, singing "Forever": [Excerpt: Roy Wood, "Forever"] That came out at the end of 1973 and made the top ten in the UK in early 1974. In total, from singles released in 1973 either by Wizzard or by Wood solo, Wood spent fifty-two weeks in the charts at the time. I say "at the time" because the last Wizzard single released in 1973 has spent a lot more time on the charts since. In 1972, John Lennon had released "Happy Xmas (War is Over)", and for the first time British rockers had realised that there was money to be made in Christmas songs. And so after nearly a decade of no Christmas-themed records worthy of note, suddenly Elton John was asking us to "Step into Christmas", the folk-rock band Steeleye Span were charting with an a capella recording of the carol "Gaudete", and Slade were at number one with "Merry Xmas Everybody". And just below them, at number four, were Wizzard, with "I Wish it Could Be Christmas Every Day": [Excerpt: Wizzard, "I Wish it Could Be Christmas Every Day"] That track became a perennial on Christmas radio and TV, a reissue of it made the top thirty in 1984, and since downloads started counting towards the charts it has made the top forty in 2007, 2008, and then every year from 2011 on. It's at number twenty-three on the charts right now as I say this. But that would be the peak of Wood's, and Wizzard's, success. He changed record label in 1974, and some contractual difficulties made him lose a bit of momentum, though he still managed a couple more top ten hits and a fair few in the top forty. But Wizzard had become associated with the glam-rock movement, and musical fashions were changing. Not only that, Wood was simply too musically eclectic for his own good. You never knew what you were going to get with a Roy Wood album. You'd hear a single on the radio, so you knew what you were in for, but if you bought a Wizzard album you might get a collection of fifties rock pastiches or jazz skronking. And if you bought a Roy Wood solo album you might get songs about a computer in love with its killer, or you might get a note-perfect Andrews Sisters pastiche with Wood's vocals sped up to sound like women, as on the title track to his second solo album Mustard: [Excerpt: Roy Wood, "Mustard"] Wood's last charting single was in 1975, and by 1977 he was saying "I've written something like 30 hit songs, you know? It's not easy now to accept that I'm not a success anymore" He carried on making new records for another decade, with no commercial success and little critical success, but gave up after a brief cluster of releases in 1987 and 88 came to nothing. Since then, the only new recordings he's released have been a live version of "I Wish it Could be Christmas Every Day", and in 1999 a rather bizarre mashup called "I Wish it Could be a Wombling Merry Christmas Every Day", which married his Christmas hit with another seventies Christmas record by the children's group the Wombles. Rather staggeringly, that did chart. Wikipedia also credits him as being part of a charity Christmas record by the DJ Mike Read under the name Shooting Stars in 2009, but Wood's credit on that seems to be just a songwriting credit, presumably because the song is just Wood's hit "Angel Fingers" slightly rewritten. Wood apparently still writes the occasional song. He tours most years around Christmas (though hasn't since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic) and always plays exactly the same setlist, in the same order, unchanged since at least 2009, and in that set are three songs that have never had an official release -- a rockabilly song called "Kiss Me Goodnight, Boadicea", a blues track called "Big Girl's Blues", and a jazz instrumental called "Roy's Revenge". But while he occasionally talks about making a new album, he's apparently decided that his body of work is OK to stand as it is without further addition. And who can blame him? But, as it's the Christmas season now, and as it's on the charts again, let's leave the episode with the song which every British person has heard in every public space every December for nearly fifty years. And if you celebrate it, a Merry Christmas to you all. [Excerpt: Wizzard, "I Wish it Could Be Christmas Every Day"]

Dec 18, 2022

Transcript This is just to let people know what's happening with the podcast over the next few weeks, as we head into a season which has holiday celebrations for many people, including me. The podcast has been keeping to a fortnightly schedule for the last few months, but at this time of year I have commitments to visit family and friends for Christmas and New Year, and I've learned that when I'm away from home I can't record and shouldn't even make the attempt. Also, a lot of people don't have time to listen to new podcasts over the Christmas period. So here's what's going to happen with the podcast between now and the beginning of the year. I'm recording a full podcast episode today, and that will be going up either Tuesday night or Wednesday morning, depending how long it takes to edit, so two weeks after the last episode, and then there will be a gap for Christmas and New Year. I will be doing Patreon bonuses during that time on a weekly basis as normal -- they take much less recording time than the main episodes, and I can prerecord them in advance -- but the next main episode of the podcast after this week's will go up on Monday the ninth of January, a little less than three weeks after the last one, rather than the normal two. However, to fill in the gap I'm going to put up a few old Patreon bonus episodes over Christmas week. Every year around this time my Patreon bonus episodes tend to be about something seasonal, and so I'll put up a few of the old ones on the main feed for those of you who haven't heard them. These are older bonus episodes, some from four years ago, and so not in the same style as my more recent work, and mostly around ten minutes or so in length, but they'll hopefully be of interest to anyone who is looking for something seasonal to listen to. Happy holidays to those who celebrate a winter holiday at this time of year, and my sympathies to those who don't or for whom it's a difficult time for whatever reason. I'll see you in a couple of days for the next proper episode.

Dec 7, 2022

Episode 159 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Itchycoo Park” by the Small Faces, and their transition from Mod to psychedelia. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-five-minute bonus episode available, on “The First Cut is the Deepest” by P.P. Arnold . 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…)

Nov 23, 2022

Episode one hundred and fifty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “White Rabbit”, Jefferson Airplane, and the rise of the San Francisco sound. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-three-minute bonus episode available, on “Omaha” by Moby Grape . 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…)

Nov 8, 2022

Episode one hundred and fifty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “See Emily Play”, the birth of the UK underground, and the career of Roger Barrett, known as Syd. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-five-minute bonus episode available, on “First Girl I Loved” by the Incredible String Band . 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…)

Oct 25, 2022

Episode one hundred and fifty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “I Was Made to Love Her”, the early career of Stevie Wonder, and the Detroit riots of 1967. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-minute bonus episode available, on “Groovin'” by the Young Rascals . 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…)

Oct 21, 2022

Transcript You'll have noticed that my experiment with timings has been only a qualified success. While my buffer did allow me to get episodes going out weekly for a while, they've started to lag again, as events and health have derailed things -- though I have managed to get a bonus episode up for Patreon backers every week. As the upcoming episode is the second one in a row to have a significant delay, I've decided that that's a sign the weekly rate for the main podcast is clearly unsustainable with these longer episodes, even with the skip weeks -- but it's also clear that I can do a main episode every two weeks without any problem, and can get a bonus episode done every week, and that that is very, very sustainable even in times of stress. I now know for sure what my productivity rate can be. So this is an official announcement that for the foreseeable future, this is a fortnightly podcast, with episodes going up every other Monday, but with backer bonuses every week. It may return to the weekly schedule at some point, but for now that's the plan. Episode 156, on Stevie Wonder, will be up on Monday, and then the episode after that, on Pink Floyd, will be on the seventh of November. See you then.

Oct 11, 2022

Episode one hundred and fifty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Waterloo Sunset” by the Kinks, and the self-inflicted damage the group did to their career between 1965 and 1967. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a nineteen-minute bonus episode available, on "Excerpt From a Teenage Opera" by Keith West . 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 Kinks songs. I’ve used several resources for this and future episodes on the Kinks, most notably Ray Davies: A Complicated Life by Johnny Rogan and You Really Got Me by Nick Hasted. X-Ray by Ray Davies is a remarkable autobiography with a framing story set in a dystopian science-fiction future, while Kink by Dave Davies is more revealing but less well-written. The Anthology 1964-1971 is a great box set that covers the Kinks’ Pye years, which overlap almost exactly with their period of greatest creativity. For those who don’t want a full box set, this two-CD set covers all the big hits. And this is the interview with Rasa I discuss in the episode. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon . Why not join them? Transcript Before I start, this episode has some mentions of racism and homophobia, several discussions of physical violence, one mention of domestic violence, and some discussion of mental illness. I've tried to discuss these things with a reasonable amount of sensitivity, but there's a tabloid element to some of my sources which inevitably percolates through, so be warned if you find those things upsetting. One of the promises I made right at the start of this project was that I would not be doing the thing that almost all podcasts do of making huge chunks of the episodes be about myself -- if I've had to update people about something in my life that affects the podcast, I've done it in separate admin episodes, so the episodes themselves will not be taken up with stuff about me. The podcast is not about me. I am making a very slight exception in this episode, for reasons that will become clear -- there's no way for me to tell this particular story the way I need to without bringing myself into it at least a little. So I wanted to state upfront that this is a one-off thing. The podcast is not suddenly going to change. But one question that I get asked a lot -- far more than I'd expect -- is "do the people you talk about in the podcast ever get in touch with you about what you've said?" Now that has actually happened twice, both times involving people leaving comments on relatively early episodes. The first time is probably the single thing I'm proudest of achieving with this series, and it was a comment left on the episode on "Goodnight My Love" a couple of years back: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin, "Goodnight My Love"] That comment was from Debra Frazier and read “Jesse Belvin is my Beloved Uncle, my mother’s brother. I’ve been waiting all my life for him to be recognized in this manner. I must say the content in this podcast is 100% correct!Joann and Jesse practically raised me. Can’t express how grateful I am. Just so glad someone got it right. I still miss them dearly to this day. My world was forever changed Feb. 6th 1960. I can remember him writing most of those songs right there in my grandmother’s living room. I think I’m his last living closest relative, that knows everything in this podcast is true." That comment by itself would have justified me doing this whole podcast. The other such comment actually came a couple of weeks ago, and was on the episode on "Only You": [Excerpt: The Platters, "Only You"] That was a longer comment, from Gayle Schrieber, an associate of Buck Ram, and started "Well, you got some of it right. Your smart-assed sarcasm and know-it-all attitude is irritating since I Do know it all from the business side but what the heck. You did better than most people – with the exception of Marv Goldberg." Given that Marv Goldberg is the single biggest expert on 1950s vocal groups in the world, I'll take that as at least a backhanded compliment. So those are the only two people who I've talked about in the podcast who've commented, but before the podcast I had a blog, and at various times people whose work I wrote about would comment -- John Cowsill of the Cowsills still remembers a blog post where I said nice things about him fourteen years ago, for example. And there was one comment on a blog post I made four or five years ago which confirmed something I'd suspected for a while… When we left the Kinks, at the end of 1964, they had just recorded their first album. That album was not very good, but did go to number three in the UK album charts, which is a much better result than it sounds. Freddie "Boom Boom" Cannon got to number one in 1960, but otherwise the only rock acts to make number one on the album charts from the start of the sixties through the end of 1967 were Elvis, Cliff Richard, the Shadows, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and the Monkees. In the first few years of the sixties they were interspersed with the 101 Strings, trad jazz, the soundtrack to West Side Story, and a blackface minstrel group, The George Mitchell Singers. From mid-1963 through to the end of 1967, though, literally the only things to get to number one on the album charts were the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, the Monkees, and the soundtrack to The Sound of Music. That tiny cabal was eventually broken at the end of 1967 by Val Doonican Rocks… But Gently, and from 1968 on the top of the album charts becomes something like what we would expect today, with a whole variety of different acts, I make this point to point out two things The first is that number three on the album charts is an extremely good position for the Kinks to be in -- when they reached that point the Rolling Stones' second album had just entered at number one, and Beatles For Sale had dropped to number two after eight weeks at the top -- and the second is that for most rock artists and record labels, the album market was simply not big enough or competitive enough until 1968 for it to really matter. What did matter was the singles chart. And "You Really Got Me" had been a genuinely revolutionary hit record. According to Ray Davies it had caused particular consternation to both the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds, both of whom had thought they would be the first to get to number one with a dirty, distorted, R&B-influenced guitar-riff song. And so three weeks after the release of the album came the group's second single. Originally, the plan had been to release a track Ray had been working on called "Tired of Waiting", but that was a slower track, and it was decided that the best thing to do would be to try to replicate the sound of their first hit. So instead, they released "All Day And All Of The Night": [Excerpt: The Kinks, "All Day And All Of The Night"] That track was recorded by the same team as had recorded "You Really Got Me", except with Perry Ford replacing Arthur Greenslade on piano. Once again, Bobby Graham was on drums rather than Mick Avory, and when Ray Davies suggested that he might want to play a different drum pattern, Graham just asked him witheringly "Who do you think you are?" "All Day and All of the Night" went to number two -- a very impressive result for a soundalike follow-up -- and was kept off the number one spot first by "Baby Love" by the Supremes and then by "Little Red Rooster" by the Rolling Stones. The group quickly followed it up with an EP, Kinksize Session, consisting of three mediocre originals plus the group's version of "Louie Louie". By February 1965 that had hit number one on the EP charts, knocking the Rolling Stones off. Things were going as well as possible for the group. Ray and his girlfriend Rasa got married towards the end of 1964 -- they had to, as Rasa was pregnant and from a very religious Catholic family. By contrast, Dave was leading the kind of life that can only really be led by a seventeen-year-old pop star -- he moved out of the family home and in with Mick Avory after his mother caught him in bed with five women, and once out of her watchful gaze he also started having affairs with men, which was still illegal in 1964. (And which indeed would still be illegal for seventeen-year-olds until 2001). In January, they released their third hit single, "Tired of Waiting for You". The track was a ballad rather than a rocker, but still essentially another variant on the theme of "You Really Got Me" -- a song based around a few repeated phrases of lyric, and with a chorus with two major chords a tone apart. "You Really Got Me"'s chorus has the change going up: [Plays "You Really Got Me" chorus chords] While "Tired Of Waiting For You"'s chorus has the change going down: [Plays "Tired of Waiting For You" chorus chords] But it's trivially easy to switch between the two if you play them in the same key: [Demonstrates] Ray has talked about how "Tired of Waiting for You" was partly inspired by how he felt tired of waiting for the fame that the Kinks deserved, and the music was written even before "You Really Got Me". But when they went into the studio to record it, the only lyrics he had were the chorus. Once they'd recorded the backing track, he worked on the lyrics at home, before coming back into the studio to record his vocals, with Rasa adding backing vocals on the softer middle eight: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Tired of Waiting For You"] After that track was recorded, the group went on a tour of Australia, New Zealand, and Hong Kong. The flight out to Australia was thirty-four hours, and also required a number of stops. One stop to refuel in Moscow saw the group forced back onto the plane at gunpoint after Pete Quaife unwisely made a joke about the recently-deposed Russian Premier Nikita Khruschev. They also had a stop of a couple of days in Mumbai, where Ray was woken up by the sounds of fishermen chanting at the riverside, and enchanted by both the sound and the image. In Adelaide, Ray and Dave met up for the first time in years with their sister Rose and her husband Arthur. Ray was impressed by their comparative wealth, but disliked the slick modernity of their new suburban home. Dave became so emotional about seeing his big sister again that he talked about not leaving her house, not going to the show that night, and just staying in Australia so they could all be a family again. Rose sadly told him that he knew he couldn't do that, and he eventually agreed. But the tour wasn't all touching family reunions. They also got into a friendly rivalry with Manfred Mann, who were also on the tour and were competing with the Kinks to be the third-biggest group in the UK behind the Beatles and the Stones, and at one point both bands ended up on the same floor of the same hotel as the Stones, who were on their own Australian tour. The hotel manager came up in the night after a complaint about the noise, saw the damage that the combined partying of the three groups had caused, and barricaded them into that floor, locking the doors and the lift shafts, so that the damage could be contained to one floor. "Tired of Waiting" hit number one in the UK while the group were on tour, and it also became their biggest hit in the US, reaching number six, so on the way home they stopped off in the US for a quick promotional appearance on Hullabaloo. According to Ray's accounts, they were asked to do a dance like Freddie and the Dreamers, he and Mick decided to waltz together instead, and the cameras cut away horrified at the implied homosexuality. In fact, examining the footage shows the cameras staying on the group as Mick approaches Ray, arms extended, apparently offering to waltz, while Ray backs off nervous and confused, unsure what's going on. Meanwhile Dave and Pete on the other side of the stage are being gloriously camp with their arms around each other's shoulders. When they finally got back to the UK, they were shocked to hear this on the radio: [Excerpt: The Who, "I Can't Explain"] Ray was horrified that someone had apparently stolen the group's sound, especially when he found out it was the Who, who as the High Numbers had had a bit of a rivalry with the group. He said later "Dave thought it was us! It was produced by Shel Talmy, like we were. They used the same session singers as us, and Perry Ford played piano, like he did on ‘All Day And All Of The Night’. I felt a bit appalled by that. I think that was worse than stealing a song – they were actually stealing our whole style!” Pete Townshend later admitted as much, saying that he had deliberately demoed "I Can't Explain" to sound as much like the Kinks as possible so that Talmy would see its potential. But the Kinks were still, for the moment, doing far better than the Who. In March, shortly after returning from their foreign tour, they released their second album, Kinda Kinks. Like their first album, it was a very patchy effort, but it made number two on the charts, behind the Rolling Stones. But Ray Davies was starting to get unhappy. He was dissatisfied with everything about his life. He would talk later about looking at his wife lying in bed sleeping and thinking "What's she doing here?", and he was increasingly wondering if the celebrity pop star life was right for him, simultaneously resenting and craving the limelight, and doing things like phoning the music papers to deny rumours that he was leaving the Kinks -- rumours which didn't exist until he made those phone calls. As he thought the Who had stolen the Kinks' style, Ray decided to go in a different direction for the next Kinks single, and recorded "Everybody's Gonna Be Happy", which was apparently intended to sound like Motown, though to my ears it bears no resemblance: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Everybody's Gonna Be Happy"] That only went to number nineteen -- still a hit, but a worry for a band who had had three massive hits in a row. Several of the band started to worry seriously that they were going to end up with no career at all. It didn't help that on the tour after recording that, Ray came down with pneumonia. Then Dave came down with bronchitis. Then Pete Quaife hit his head and had to be hospitalised with severe bleeding and concussion. According to Quaife, he fainted in a public toilet and hit his head on the bowl on the way down, but other band members have suggested that Quaife -- who had a reputation for telling tall stories, even in a band whose members are all known for rewriting history -- was ashamed after getting into a fight. In April they played the NME Poll-Winners' Party, on the same bill as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Animals, the Moody Blues, the Searchers, Freddie And The Dreamers, Herman’s Hermits, Wayne Fontana & The Mindbenders, the Rockin’ Berries, the Seekers, the Ivy League, Them, the Bachelors, Georgie Fame & The Blue Flames, Cilla Black, Dusty Springfield, Twinkle, Tom Jones, Donovan, and Sounds Incorporated. Because they got there late they ended up headlining, going on after the Beatles, even though they hadn't won an award, only come second in best new group, coming far behind the Stones but just ahead of Manfred Mann and the Animals. The next single, "Set Me Free", was a conscious attempt to correct course after "Everybody's Gonna Be Happy" had been less successful: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Set Me Free"] The song is once again repetitive, and once again based on a riff, structured similarly to "Tired of Waiting" but faster and more upbeat, and with a Beatles-style falsetto in the chorus. It worked -- it returned the group to the top ten -- but Ray wasn't happy at writing to order. He said in August of that year “I’m ashamed of that song. I can stand to hear and even sing most of the songs I’ve written, but not that one. It’s built around pure idiot harmonies that have been used in a thousand songs.” More recently he's talked about how the lyric was an expression of him wanting to be set free from the constraint of having to write a hit song in the style he felt he was outgrowing. By the time the single was released, though, it looked like the group might not even be together any longer. There had always been tensions in the band. Ray and Dave had a relationship that made the Everly Brothers look like the model of family amity, and while Pete Quaife stayed out of the arguments for the most part, Mick Avory couldn't. The core of the group had always been the Davies brothers, and Quaife had known them for years, but Avory was a relative newcomer and hadn't grown up with them, and they also regarded him as a bit less intelligent than the rest of the group. He became the butt of jokes on a fairly constant basis. That would have been OK, except that Avory was also an essentially passive person, who didn't want to take sides in conflicts, while Dave Davies thought that as he and Avory were flatmates they should be on the same side, and resented when Avory didn't take his side in arguments with Ray. As Dave remembered it, the trigger came when he wanted to change the setlist and Mick didn't support him against Ray. In others' recollection, it came when the rest of the band tried to get Dave away from a party and he got violent with them. Both may be true. Either way, Dave got drunk and threw a suitcase at the back of a departing Mick, who was normally a fairly placid person but had had enough , and so he turned round, furious, grabbed Dave, got him in a headlock and just started punching, blackening both his eyes. According to some reports, Avory was so infuriated with Dave that he knocked him out, and Dave was so drunk and angry that when he came to he went for Avory again, and got knocked out again. The next day, the group were driven to their show in separate cars -- the Davies brothers in one, the rhythm section in the other -- they had separate dressing rooms, and made their entrance from separate directions. They got through the first song OK, and then Dave Davies insulted Avory's drumming, spat at him, and kicked his drums so they scattered all over the stage. At this point, a lot of the audience were still thinking this was part of the act, but Avory saw red again and picked up his hi-hat cymbal and smashed it down edge-first onto Dave's head. Everyone involved says that if his aim had been very slightly different he would have actually killed Dave. As it is, Dave collapsed, unconscious, bleeding everywhere. Ray screamed "My brother! He's killed my little brother!" and Mick, convinced he was a murderer, ran out of the theatre, still wearing his stage outfit of a hunting jacket and frilly shirt. He was running away for his life -- and that was literal, as Britain still technically had the death penalty at this point; while the last executions in Britain took place in 1964, capital punishment for murder wasn't abolished until late 1965 -- but at the same time a gang of screaming girls outside who didn't know what was going on were chasing him because he was a pop star. He managed to get back to London, where he found that the police had been looking for him but that Dave was alive and didn't want to press charges. However, he obviously couldn't go back to their shared home, and they had to cancel gigs because Dave had been hospitalised. It looked like the group were finished for good. Four days after that, Ray and Rasa's daughter Louisa was born, and shortly after that Ray was in the studio again, recording demos: [Excerpt: Ray Davies, "I Go to Sleep (demo)"] That song was part of a project that Larry Page, the group's co-manager, and Eddie Kassner, their publisher, had of making Ray's songwriting a bigger income source, and getting his songs recorded by other artists. Ray had been asked to write it for Peggy Lee, who soon recorded her own version: [Excerpt: Peggy Lee, "I Go to Sleep"] Several of the other tracks on that demo session featured Mitch Mitchell on drums. At the time, Mitchell was playing with another band that Page managed, and there seems to have been some thought of him possibly replacing Avory in the group. But instead, Larry Page cut the Gordian knot. He invited each band member to a meeting, just the two of them -- and didn't tell them that he'd scheduled all these meetings at the same time. When they got there, they found that they'd been tricked into having a full band meeting, at which point Page just talked to them about arrangements for their forthcoming American tour, and didn't let them get a word in until he'd finished. At the end he asked if they had any questions, and Mick Avory said he'd need some new cymbals because he'd broken his old ones on Dave's head. Before going on tour, the group recorded a song that Ray had written inspired by that droning chanting he'd heard in Mumbai. The song was variously titled "See My Friend" and "See My Friends" -- it has been released under both titles, and Ray seems to sing both words at different times -- and Ray told Maureen Cleave "The song is about homosexuality… It’s like a football team and the way they’re always kissing each other.” (We will be talking about Ray Davies' attitudes towards sexuality and gender in a future episode, but suffice to say that like much of Davies' worldview, he has a weird mixture of very progressive and very reactionary views, and he is also prone to observe behaviours in other people's private lives and make them part of his own public persona). The guitar part was recorded on a bad twelve-string guitar that fed back in the studio, creating a drone sound, which Shel Talmy picked up on and heavily compressed, creating a sound that bore more than a little resemblance to a sitar: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "See My Friend"] If that had been released at the time, it would have made the Kinks into trend-setters. Instead it was left in the can for nearly three months, and in the meantime the Yardbirds released the similar-sounding "Heart Full of Soul", making the Kinks look like bandwagon-jumpers when their own record came out, and reinforcing a paranoid belief that Ray had started to develop that his competitors were stealing his ideas. The track taking so long to come out was down to repercussions from the group's American tour, which changed the course of their whole career in ways they could not possibly have predicted. This was still the era when the musicians' unions of the US and UK had a restrictive one-in, one-out policy for musicians, and you couldn't get a visa to play in the US without the musicians' union's agreement -- and the AFM were not very keen on the British invasion, which they saw as taking jobs away from their members. There are countless stories from this period of bands like the Moody Blues getting to the US only to find that the arrangements have fallen through and they can't perform. Around this time, Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders were told they weren't notable enough to get permission to play more than one gig, even though they were at number one on the charts in the US at the time. So it took a great deal of effort to get the Kinks' first US tour arranged, and they had to make a good impression. Unfortunately, while the Beatles and Stones knew how to play the game and give irreverent, cheeky answers that still left the interviewers amused and satisfied, the Kinks were just flat-out confusing and rude: [Excerpt: The Kinks Interview with Clay Cole] The whole tour went badly. They were booked into unsuitable venues, and there were a series of events like the group being booked on the same bill as the Dave Clark Five, and both groups having in their contract that they would be the headliner. Promoters started to complain about them to their management and the unions, and Ray was behaving worse and worse. By the time the tour hit LA, Ray was being truly obnoxious. According to Larry Page he refused to play one TV show because there was a Black drummer on the same show. Page said that it was not about personal prejudice -- though it's hard to see how it could not be, at least in part -- but just picking something arbitrary to complain about to show he had the power to mess things up. While shooting a spot for the show Where The Action Is, Ray got into a physical fight with one of the other cast members over nothing. What Ray didn't realise was that the person in question was a representative for AFTRA, the screen performers' union, and was already unhappy because Dave had earlier refused to join the union. Their behaviour got reported up the chain. The day after the fight was supposed to be the highlight of the tour, but Ray was missing his wife. In the mid-sixties, the Beach Boys would put on a big Summer Spectacular at the Hollywood Bowl every year, and the Kinks were due to play it, on a bill which as well as the Beach Boys also featured the Byrds, the Righteous Brothers, Dino, Desi & Billy, and Sonny and Cher. But Ray said he wasn't going on unless Rasa was there. And he didn't tell Larry Page, who was there, that. Instead, he told a journalist at the Daily Mirror in London, and the first Page heard about it was when the journalist phoned him to confirm that Ray wouldn't be playing. Now, they had already been working to try to get Rasa there for the show, because Ray had been complaining for a while. But Rasa didn't have a passport. Not only that, but she was an immigrant and her family were from Lithuania, and the US State Department weren't exactly keen on people from the Eastern Bloc flying to the US. And it was a long flight. I don't know exactly how long a flight from London to LA took then, but it takes eleven and a half hours now, and it will have been around that length. Somehow, working a miracle, Larry Page co-ordinated with his co-managers Robert Wace and Grenville Collins back in London -- difficult in itself as Wace and Collins and Page and his business partner Eddie Kassner were by now in two different factions, because Ray had been manipulating them and playing them off against each other for months. But the three of them worked together and somehow got Rasa to LA in time for Ray to go on stage. Page waited around long enough to see that Ray had got on stage at the Hollywood Bowl, then flew back to London. He had had enough of Ray's nonsense, and didn't really see any need to be there anyway, because they had a road manager, their publisher, their agent, and plenty of support staff. He felt that he was only there to be someone for Ray Davies to annoy and take his frustrations out on. And indeed, once Page flew back to the UK, Ray calmed down, though how much of that was the presence of Rasa it's hard to say. Their road manager at the time though said "If Larry wasn’t there, Ray couldn’t make problems because there was nobody there to make them to. He couldn’t make problems for me because I just ignored them. For example, in Hawaii, the shirts got stolen. Ray said, ‘No way am I going onstage without my shirt.’ So I turned around and said to him, ‘Great, don’t go on!’ Of course, they went on.” They did miss the gig the next night in San Francisco, with more or less the same lineup as the Hollywood Bowl show -- they'd had problems with the promoter of that show at an earlier gig in Reno, and so Ray said they weren't going to play unless they got paid in cash upfront. When the promoter refused, the group just walked on stage, waved, and walked off. But other than that, the rest of the tour went OK. What they didn't realise until later was that they had made so many enemies on that tour that it would be impossible for them to return to the US for another four years. They weren't blacklisted, as such, they just didn't get the special treatment that was necessary to make it possible for them to visit there. From that point on they would still have a few hits in the US, but nothing like the sustained massive success they had in the UK in the same period. Ray felt abandoned by Page, and started to side more and more with Wace and Collins. Page though was still trying to promote Ray's songwriting. Some of this, like the album "Kinky Music" by the Larry Page Orchestra, released during the tour, was possibly not the kind of promotion that anyone wanted, though some of it has a certain kitsch charm: [Excerpt: The Larry Page Orchestra, "All Day And All Of The Night"] Incidentally, the guitarist on that album was Jimmy Page, who had previously played rhythm guitar on a few Kinks album tracks. But other stuff that Larry Page was doing would be genuinely helpful. For example, on the tour he had become friendly with Stone and Greene, the managers who we heard about in the Buffalo Springfield episode. At this point they were managing Sonny and Cher, and when they came over to the UK, Page took the opportunity to get Cher into the studio to cut a version of Ray's "I Go to Sleep": [Excerpt: Cher, "I Go to Sleep"] Most songwriters, when told that the biggest new star of the year was cutting a cover version of one of their tracks for her next album, would be delighted. Ray Davies, on the other hand, went to the session and confronted Page, screaming about how Page was stealing his ideas. And it was Page being marginalised that caused "See My Friend" to be delayed, because while they were in the US, Page had produced the group in Gold Star Studios, recording a version of Ray's song "Ring the Bells", and Page wanted that as the next single, but the group had a contract with Shel Talmy which said he would be their producer. They couldn't release anything Talmy hadn't produced, but Page, who had control over the group's publishing with his business partner Kassner, wouldn't let them release "See My Friend". Eventually, Talmy won out, and "See My Friend" became the group's next single. It made the top ten on the Record Retailer chart, the one that's now the official UK chart cited in most sources, but only number fifteen on the NME chart which more people paid attention to at the time, and only spent a few weeks on the charts. Ray spent the summer complaining in the music papers about how the track -- "the only one I've really liked", as he said at the time -- wasn't selling as much as it deserved, and also insulting Larry Page and boasting about his own abilities, saying he was a better singer than Andy Williams and Tony Bennett. The group sacked Larry Page as their co-manager, and legal battles between Page and Kassner on one side and Collins and Wace on the other would continue for years, tying up much of the group's money. Page went on to produce a new band he was managing, making records that sounded very like the Kinks' early hits: [Excerpt: The Troggs, "Wild Thing"] The Kinks, meanwhile, decided to go in a different direction for their new EP, Kwyet Kinks, an EP of mostly softer, folk- and country-inspired songs. The most interesting thing on Kwyet Kinks was "Well-Respected Man", which saw Ray's songwriting go in a completely different direction as he started to write gentle social satires with more complex lyrics, rather than the repetitive riff-based songs he'd been doing before. That track was released as a single in the US, which didn't have much of an EP market, and made the top twenty there, despite its use of a word that in England at the time had a double meaning -- either a cigarette or a younger boy at a public school who has to be the servant of an older boy -- but in America was only used as a slur for gay people: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Well Respected Man"] The group's next album, The Kink Kontroversy, was mostly written in a single week, and is another quickie knockoff album. It had the hit single "Til the End of the Day", another attempt at getting back to their old style of riffy rockers, and one which made the top ten. It also had a rerecorded version of "Ring the Bells", the song Larry Page had wanted to release as a single: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Ring the Bells"] I'm sure that when Ray Davies heard "Ruby Tuesday" a little over a year later he didn't feel any better about the possibility that people were stealing his ideas. The Kink Kontroversy was a transitional album for the group in many ways. It was the first album to prominently feature Nicky Hopkins, who would be an integral part of the band's sound for the next three years, and the last one to feature a session drummer (Clem Cattini, rather than Avory, played on most of the tracks). From this point on there would essentially be a six-person group of studio Kinks who would make the records -- the four Kinks themselves, Rasa Davies on backing vocals, and Nicky Hopkins on piano. At the end of 1965 the group were flailing, mired in lawsuits, and had gone from being the third biggest group in the country at the start of the year to maybe the tenth or twentieth by the end of it. Something had to change. And it did with the group's next single, which in both its sound and its satirical subject matter was very much a return to the style of "Well Respected Man". "Dedicated Follower of Fashion" was inspired by anger. Ray was never a particularly sociable person, and he was not the kind to do the rounds of all the fashionable clubs like the other pop stars, including his brother, would. But he did feel a need to make some kind of effort and would occasionally host parties at his home for members of the fashionable set. But Davies didn't keep up with fashion the way they did, and some of them would mock him for the way he dressed. At one such party he got into a fistfight with someone who was making fun of his slightly flared trousers, kicked all the guests out, and then went to a typewriter and banged out a lyric mocking the guest and everyone like him: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Dedicated Follower of Fashion"] The song wasn't popular with Ray's bandmates -- Dave thought it was too soft and wimpy, while Quaife got annoyed at the time Ray spent in the studio trying to make the opening guitar part sound a bit like a ukulele. But they couldn't argue with the results -- it went to number five on the charts, their biggest success since "Tired of Waiting for You" more than a year earlier, and more importantly in some ways it became part of the culture in a way their more recent singles hadn't. "Til The End of the Day" had made the top ten, but it wasn't a record that stuck in people's minds. But "Dedicated Follower of Fashion" was so popular that Ray soon got sick of people coming up to him in the street and singing "Oh yes he is!" at him. But then, Ray was getting sick of everything. In early 1966 he had a full-scale breakdown, brought on by the flu but really just down to pure exhaustion. Friends from this time say that Ray was an introverted control freak, always neurotic and trying to get control and success, but sabotaging it as soon as he attained it so that he didn't have to deal with the public. Just before a tour of Belgium, Rasa gave him an ultimatum -- either he sought medical help or she would leave him. He picked up their phone and slammed it into her face, blacking her eye -- the only time he was ever physically violent to her, she would later emphasise -- at which point it became imperative to get medical help for his mental condition. Ray stayed at home while the rest of the band went to Belgium -- they got in a substitute rhythm player, and Dave took the lead vocals -- though the tour didn't make them any new friends. Their co-manager Grenville Collins went along and with the tact and diplomacy for which the British upper classes are renowned the world over, would say things like “I understand every bloody word you’re saying but I won’t speak your filthy language. De Gaulle won’t speak English, why should I speak French?” At home, Ray was doing worse and worse. When some pre-recorded footage of the Kinks singing "Dedicated Follower of Fashion" came on the TV, he unplugged it and stuck it in the oven. He said later "I was completely out of my mind. I went to sleep and I woke up a week later with a beard. I don’t know what happened to me. I’d run into the West End with my money stuffed in my socks, I’d tried to punch my press agent, I was chased down Denmark Street by the police, hustled into a taxi by a psychiatrist and driven off somewhere. And I didn’t know. I woke up and I said, ‘What’s happening? When do we leave for Belgium?’ And they said, ‘Ray it’s all right. You had a collapse. Don’t worry. You’ll get better.’” He did get better, though for a long time he found himself unable to listen to any contemporary rock music other than Bob Dylan -- electric guitars made him think of the pop world that had made him ill -- and so he spent his time listening to classical and jazz records. He didn't want to be a pop star any more, and convinced himself he could quit the band if he went out on top by writing a number one single. And so he did: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Sunny Afternoon"] Or at least, I say it's a single he wrote, but it's here that I finally get to a point I've been dancing round since the beginning of the episode. The chorus line, "In the summertime", was Rasa's suggestion, and in one of the only two interviews I've ever come across with her, for Johnny Rogan's biography of Ray, she calls the song "the only one where I wrote some words". But there's evidence, including another interview with her I'll talk about in a bit, that suggests that's not quite the case. For years, I thought it was an interesting coincidence that Ray Davies' songwriting ability follows a curve that almost precisely matches that of his relationship with Rasa. At the start, he's clearly talented -- "You Really Got Me" is a great track -- but he's an unformed writer and most of his work is pretty poor stuff. Then he marries Rasa, and his writing starts to become more interesting. Rasa starts to regularly contribute in the studio, and he becomes one of the great songwriters of his generation. For a five-year period in the mid-to-late-sixties, the period when their marriage is at its strongest, Ray writes a string of classic songs that are the equal of any catalogue in popular music. Then around 1970 Rasa stops coming to the studio, and their marriage is under strain. The records become patchier -- still plenty of classic tracks, but a lot more misses. And then in 1973, she left him, and his songwriting fell off a cliff. If you look at a typical Ray Davies concert setlist from 2017, the last time he toured, he did twenty songs, of which two were from his new album, one was the Kinks' one-off hit "Come Dancing" from 1983, and every other song was from the period when he and Rasa were married. Now, for a long time I just thought that was interesting, but likely a coincidence. After all, most rock songwriters do their most important work in their twenties, divorces have a way of messing people's mental health up, musical fashions change… there are a myriad reasons why these things could be like that. But… the circumstantial evidence just kept piling up. Ray's paranoia about people stealing his ideas meant that he became a lot more paranoid and secretive in his songwriting process, and would often not tell his bandmates the titles of the songs, the lyrics, or the vocal melody, until after they'd recorded the backing tracks -- they would record the tracks knowing the chord changes and tempo, but not what the actual song was. Increasingly he would be dictating parts to Quaife and Nicky Hopkins in the studio from the piano, telling them exactly what to play. But while Pete Quaife thought that Ray was being dictatorial in the studio and resented it, he resented something else more. As late as 1999 he was complaining about, in his words, "the silly little bint from Bradford virtually running the damn studio", telling him what to do, and feeling unable to argue back even though he regarded her as "a jumped-up groupie". Dave, on the other hand, valued Rasa's musical intuition and felt that Ray was the same. And she was apparently actually more up-to-date with the music in the charts than any of the band -- while they were out on the road, she would stay at home and listen to the radio and make note of what was charting and why. All this started to seem like a lot of circumstantial evidence that Rasa was possibly far more involved in the creation of the music than she gets credit for -- and given that she was never credited for her vocal parts on any Kinks records, was it too unbelievable that she might have contributed to the songwriting without credit? But then I found the other interview with Rasa I'm aware of, a short sidebar piece I'll link in the liner notes, and I'm going to quote that here: "Rasa, however, would sometimes take a very active role during the writing of the songs, many of which were written in the family home, even on occasion adding to the lyrics. She suggested the words “In the summertime” to ‘Sunny Afternoon’, it is claimed. She now says, “I would make suggestions for a backing melody, sing along while Ray was playing the song(s) on the piano; at times I would add a lyric line or word(s). It was rewarding for me and was a major part of our life.” That was enough for me to become convinced that Rasa was a proper collaborator with Ray. I laid all this out in a blog post, being very careful how I phrased what I thought -- that while Ray Davies was probably the principal author of the songs credited to him (and to be clear, that is definitely what I think -- there's a stylistic continuity throughout his work that makes it very clear that the same man did the bulk of the work on all of it), the songs were the work of a writing partnership. As I said in that post "But even if Rasa only contributed ten percent, that seems likely to me to have been the ten percent that pulled those songs up to greatness. Even if all she did was pull Ray back from his more excessive instincts, perhaps cause him to show a little more compassion in his more satirical works (and the thing that’s most notable about his post-Rasa songwriting is how much less compassionate it is), suggest a melodic line should go up instead of down at the end of a verse, that kind of thing… the cumulative effect of those sorts of suggestions can be enormous." I was just laying out my opinion, not stating anything as a certainty, though I was morally sure that Rasa deserved at least that much credit. And then Rasa commented on the post, saying "Dear Andrew. Your article was so informative and certainly not mischaracterised. Thank you for the ’history’ of my input working with Ray. As I said previously, that time was magical and joyous." I think that's as close a statement as we're likely to get that the Kinks' biggest hits were actually the result of the songwriting team of Davies and Davies, and not of Ray alone, since nobody seems interested at all in a woman who sang on -- and likely co-wrote -- some of the biggest hit records of the sixties. Rasa gets mentioned in two sentences in the band's Wikipedia page, and as far as I can tell has only been interviewed twice -- an extensive interview by Johnny Rogan for his biography of Ray, in which he sadly doesn't seem to have pressed her on her songwriting contributions, and the sidebar above. I will probably continue to refer to Ray writing songs in this and the next episode on the Kinks, because I don't know for sure who wrote what, and he is the one who is legally credited as the sole writer. But… just bear that in mind. And bear it in mind whenever I or anyone else talk about the wives and girlfriends of other rock stars, because I'm sure she's not the only one. "Sunny Afternoon" knocked "Paperback Writer" off the number one spot, but by the time it did, Pete Quaife was out of the band. He'd fallen out with the Davies brothers so badly that he'd insisted on travelling separately from them, and he'd been in a car crash that had hospitalised him for six weeks. They'd quickly hired a temporary replacement, John Dalton, who had previously played with The Mark Four, the group that had evolved into The Creation. They needed him to mime for a TV appearance pretty much straight away, so they asked him "can you play a descending D minor scale?" and when he said yes he was hired -- because the opening of "Sunny Afternoon" used a trick Ray was very fond of, of holding a chord in the guitars while the bass descends in a scale, only changing chord when the notes would clash too badly, and then changing to the closest possible chord: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Sunny Afternoon"] Around this time, the group also successfully renegotiated their contract with Pye Records, with the help of a new lawyer they had been advised to get in touch with -- Allen Klein. As well as helping renegotiate their contracts, Klein also passed on a demo of one of Ray's new songs to Herman's Hermits. “Dandy” was going to be on the Kinks' next album, but the Hermits released it as a single in the US and took it into the top ten: [Excerpt: Herman's Hermits, “Dandy”] In September, Pete Quaife formally quit the band -- he hadn't played with them in months after his accident -- and the next month the album Face To Face, recorded while Quaife was still in the group, was released. Face to Face was the group's first really solid album, and much of the album was in the same vein as "Sunny Afternoon" -- satirical songs that turned on the songwriter as much as on the people they were ostensibly about. It didn't do as well as the previous albums, but did still make the top twenty on the album chart. The group continued work, recording a new single, "Dead End Street", a song which is musically very similar to "Sunny Afternoon", but is lyrically astonishingly bleak, dealing with poverty and depression rather than more normal topics for a pop song. The group produced a promotional film for it, but the film was banned by the BBC as being in bad taste, as it showed the group as undertakers. But the single happened to be released two days after the broadcast of "Cathy Come Home", the seminal drama about homelessness, which suddenly brought homelessness onto the political agenda. While "Dead End Street" wasn't technically about homelessness, it was close enough that when the TV programme Panorama did a piece on the subject, they used "Dead End Street" to soundtrack it. The song made the top five, an astonishing achievement for something so dark: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Dead End Street"] But the track also showed the next possible breach in the Kinks' hitmaking team -- when it was originally recorded, Shel Talmy had produced it, and had a French horn playing, but after he left the session, the band brought in a trombone player to replace the French horn, and rerecorded it without him. They would continue working with him for a little while, recording some of the tracks for their next album, but by the time the next single came out, Talmy would be out of the picture for good. But Pete Quaife, on the other hand, was nowhere near as out of the group as he had seemed. While he'd quit the band in September, Ray persuaded him to rejoin the band four days before "Dead End Street" came out, and John Dalton was back to working in his day job as a builder, though we'll be hearing more from him. The group put out a single in Europe, "Mr. Pleasant", a return to the style of "Well Respected Man" and "Dedicated Follower of Fashion": [Excerpt: The Kinks, “Mr. Pleasant”] That was a big hit in the Netherlands, but it wasn't released in the UK. They were working on something rather different. Ray had had the idea of writing a song called "Liverpool Sunset", about Liverpool, and about the decline of the Merseybeat bands who had been at the top of the profession when the Kinks had been starting out. But then the Beatles had released "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny Lane", and Ray hadn't wanted to release anything about Liverpool's geography and look like he had stolen from them, given his attitudes to plagiarism. He said later "I sensed that the Beatles weren’t going to be around long. When they moved to London, and ended up in Knightsbridge or wherever, I was still in Muswell Hill. I was loyal to my origins. Maybe I felt when they left it was all over for Merseybeat.” So instead, he -- or he and Rasa -- came up with a song about London, and about loneliness, and about a couple, Terry and Julie -- Terry was named after his nephew Terry who lived in Australia, while Julie's name came from Julie Christie, as she was then starring in a film with a Terry, Terrence Stamp: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Waterloo Sunset"] It's interesting to look at the musical inspirations for the song. Many people at the time pointed out the song's similarity to "Winchester Cathedral" by the New Vaudeville Band, which had come out six months earlier with a similar melody and was also named after a place: [Excerpt: The New Vaudeville Band, "Winchester Cathedral"] And indeed Spike Milligan had parodied that song and replaced the lyrics with something more London-centric: [Excerpt: Spike Milligan, "Tower Bridge"] But it seems likely that Ray had taken inspiration from an older piece of music. We've talked before about Ferd Grofe in several episodes -- he was the one who orchestrated the original version of "Rhapsody in Blue", who wrote the piece of music that inspired Don Everly to write "Cathy's Clown", and who wrote the first music for the Novachord, the prototype synthesiser from the 1930s. As we saw earlier, Ray was listening to a lot of classical and jazz music rather than rock at this point, and one has to wonder if, at some point during his illness the previous year, he had come across Metropolis: A Blue Fantasy, which Grofe had written for Paul Whiteman's band in 1928, very much in the style of "Rhapsody in Blue", and this section, eight and a half minutes in, in particular: [Excerpt: Paul Whiteman, "Metropolis: A Blue Fantasy" ] "Waterloo Sunset" took three weeks to record. They started out, as usual, with a backing track recorded without the rest of the group knowing anything about the song they were recording -- though the group members did contribute some ideas to the arrangement, which was unusual by this point. Pete Quaife contributed to the bass part, while Dave Davies suggested the slapback echo on the guitar: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Waterloo Sunset, Instrumental Take 2"] Only weeks later did they add the vocals. Ray had an ear infection, so rather than use headphones he sang to a playback through a speaker, which meant he had to sing more gently, giving the vocal a different tone from his normal singing style: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Waterloo Sunset"] And in one of the few contributions Rasa made that has been generally acknowledged, she came up with the "Sha la la" vocals in the middle eight: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Waterloo Sunset"] And the idea of having the track fade out on cascading, round-like vocals: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Waterloo Sunset"] Once again the Kinks were at a turning point. A few weeks after "Waterloo Sunset" came out, the Monterey Pop Festival finally broke the Who in America -- a festival the Kinks were invited to play, but had to turn down because of their visa problems. It felt like the group were being passed by -- Ray has talked about how "Waterloo Sunset" would have been another good point for him to quit the group as he kept threatening to, or at least to stay home and just make the records, like Brian Wilson, while letting the band tour with Dave on lead vocals. He decided against it, though, as he would for decades to come. That attitude, of simultaneously wanting to be part of something and be a distanced, dispassionate observer of it, is what made "Waterloo Sunset" so special. As Ray has said, in words that seem almost to invoke the story of Moses: "it’s a culmination of all my desires and hopes – it’s a song about people going to a better world, but somehow I stayed where I was and became the observer in the song rather than the person who is proactive . . . I did not cross the river. They did and had a good life apparently." Ray stayed with the group, and we'll be picking up on what he and they did next in about a year's time. "Waterloo Sunset" went to number two on the charts, and has since become the most beloved song in the Kinks' whole catalogue. It's been called "the most beautiful song in the English language", and "the most beautiful song of the rock 'n' roll era", though Ray Davies, ever self-critical when he's not being self-aggrandising, thinks it could be improved upon. But most of the rest of us disagree. As the song itself says, "Waterloo Sunset's fine".

Sep 29, 2022

Transcript Hi. We're still on a skip week, the main podcast will be back next week, but as we've now reached a point in the podcast where more of the people discussed are living than dead, I'd just like to say something, and make a request. I've seen several people asking people mentioned in the podcast if they're listeners, on Twitter and other social media, and I would very much rather people stop doing that. Please don't tag any living subjects of my podcast episodes into tweets about those episodes. I can't stop you, of course, and I'm not meaning to shame anyone who has, as they've done it for the best of reasons, but it makes me extremely uncomfortable. I've had people take offence before at things I've written about their work which I didn't intend to be offensive. Creative people will often focus on a single negative aside in what is otherwise a wall of praise, and it can cause them real upset. I can't stop any subjects of podcast episodes from listening to them, but the podcast is not ultimately for them. The very best case scenario is that knowing those people are going to hear the podcast makes me uncomfortable and restricts what I say, making the podcast less good. The worst-case scenario is someone takes legal action because of something I've said, and the podcast has to end altogether. But mostly, I just know that if someone I've talked about is going to listen to my podcast, there's a good chance that they'll pick up on one casual remark I didn't even think about and ruminate about it all day. And I don't want to make people I admire have bad days. So please, do keep telling your friends about the podcast, but don't tell the stars I talk about. I know you all mean well when you do it, but it can cause far more harm than good.

Sep 21, 2022

Episode one hundred and fifty-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs is the last of our four-part mini-series on LA sunshine pop and folk-rock in summer 1967. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifteen-minute bonus episode available, on “Baby, Now That I’ve Found You” by the Foundations. 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…)

Sep 13, 2022

Episode one hundred and fifty-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Heroes and Villains” by the Beach Boys, and the collapse of the Smile album. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a sixteen-minute bonus episode available, on “I Had Too Much to Dream Last Night” by the Electric Prunes. 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…)

Aug 30, 2022

Episode 152 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “For What It’s Worth”, and the short but eventful career of Buffalo Springfield. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-five-minute bonus episode available, on “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” by Glen Campbell . Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata: I say Moby Grape never recorded the song “On the Other Side”, but someone in the comments has pointed me to a demo of it which was released under the name “Stop”. I also say Buffalo Springfield were the third white act to sign to Atlantic, after Bobby Darin and Sonny and Cher. They were the fourth, as the list I saw didn’t include the Young Rascals (more…)

Aug 22, 2022

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/ Errata: An incorrect version of the file was previously uploaded, with the wrong section edited in at approximately 57 minutes. This was fixed about three hours after uploading, but some streaming services may have cached the wrong file. Also I say that John Phillips wrote “No, No, No, No”. I got this from an interview with McKenzie, but he must have been misremembering — the song is a cover version of “La Poupee Qui Fait Non” by Michel Polnareff, with English-language lyrics by Geoff Stephens (more…)

Aug 14, 2022

Transcript This is the official announcement that episode one hundred and fifty-one will be up in precisely one week. I’ve just finished recording it, and am now in the process of recording episodes one hundred and fifty-two through one hundred and fifty-four while Tilt edits one hundred and fifty-one. For those of you who are Patreon backers, the Patreon-only Q&A is up now. This will be the start of season four, which is going to work slightly differently from previous seasons, because of the time off I gave myself. I now have a better idea of how much work I can do in parallel, and I’ve come to the conclusion that the most sustainable release pattern is going to be two weeks on, one week off, so you’ll be getting four episodes every six weeks. I will still release Patreon bonuses on the weeks I don’t release a mainline episode. The episodes are going to be written and recorded in batches of four, and the general plan is going to be that every batch of four will have a long episode — a ninety-minute or two-hour one — a short half-hour episode, and two other episodes which will probably be about an hour but can vary depending on time constraints. In this batch, episode 151 is going to be the long one, episode 154 the shortest, and the two in the middle will be middling length. So, join us back here in a week, for the ghost of James Dean, a prediction of the future, and the start of the summer of love.

Jul 30, 2022

While I’m still on hiatus, I invited questions from listeners. This is an hour-long podcast answering some of them. (Another hour-long Q&A for Patreon backers only will go up next week). 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/ There is a Mixcloud of the music excerpted here which can be found at https://www.mixcloud.com/AndrewHickey/500-songs-supplemental-qa-edition/ Click below for a transcript: (more…)

Jul 16, 2022

This episode is part of Pledge Week 2022. Every day this week, I’ll be posting old Patreon bonus episodes of the podcast which will have this short intro. These are short, ten- to twenty-minute bonus podcasts which get posted to Patreon for my paying backers every time I post a new main episode — there are well over a hundred of these in the archive now. If you like the sound of these episodes, then go to patreon.com/andrewhickey and subscribe for as little as a dollar a month or ten dollars a year to get access to all those bonus episodes, plus new ones as they appear. Click below for the transcript (more…)

Jul 15, 2022

This episode is part of Pledge Week 2022. Every day this week, I'll be posting old Patreon bonus episodes of the podcast which will have this short intro. These are short, ten- to twenty-minute bonus podcasts which get posted to Patreon for my paying backers every time I post a new main episode -- there are well over a hundred of these in the archive now. If you like the sound of these episodes, then go to patreon.com/andrewhickey and subscribe for as little as a dollar a month or ten dollars a year to get access to all those bonus episodes, plus new ones as they appear. Click below for the transcript Transcript Today we're going to look at a record which I actually originally intended to do a full episode on, but by an artist about whom there simply isn't enough information out there to pull together a full episode -- though some of this information will show up in other contexts in future episodes. So we're going to have a Patreon bonus episode on one of the great soul-pop records of the mid 1960s -- "Rescue Me" by Fontella Bass: [Excerpt: Fontella Bass, "Rescue Me"] Fontella Bass was actually a second-generation singer. Her mother, Martha Bass, was a great gospel singer, who had been trained by Willie Mae Ford Smith, who was often considered the greatest female gospel singer of the twentieth century but who chose only to perform live and on the radio rather than make records. Martha Bass had sung for a short time with the Clara Ward Singers, one of the most important and influential of gospel groups: [Excerpt: The Clara Ward Singers, "Wasn't It A Pity How They Punished My Lord?"] Fontella had been trained by her mother, but she got her start in secular music rather than the gospel music her mother stuck to. She spent much of the early sixties working as a piano player and singer in the band of Little Milton, the blues singer. I don't know exactly which records of his she's on, but she was likely on his top twenty R&B hit "So Mean to Me": [Excerpt: Little Milton, "So Mean to Me"] One night, Little Milton didn't turn up for a show, and so Bass was asked to take the lead vocals until he arrived. Milton's bandleader Oliver Sain was impressed with her voice, and when he quit working with Milton the next year, he took Bass with him, starting up a new act, "The Oliver Sain Soul Revue featuring Fontella and Bobby McClure". She signed to Bobbin Records, where she cut "I Don't Hurt Any More", a cover of an old Hank Snow country song, in 1962: [Excerpt: Fontella Bass, "I Don't Hurt Any More"] After a couple of records with Bobbin, she signed up with Ike Turner, who by this point was running a couple of record labels. She released a single backed by the Ikettes, "My Good Loving": [Excerpt: Fontella Bass, "My Good Loving"] And a duet with Tina Turner, "Poor Little Fool": [Excerpt: Fontella Bass and Tina Turner, "Poor Little Fool"] At the same time she was still working with Sain and McClure, and Sain's soul revue got signed to Checker records, the Chess subsidiary, which was now starting to make soul records, usually produced by Roquel Davis, Berry Gordy's former collaborator, and written or co-written by Carl Smith. These people were also working with Jackie Wilson at Brunswick, and were part of the same scene as Carl Davis, the producer who had worked with Curtis Mayfield, Major Lance, Gene Chandler and the rest. So this was a thriving scene -- not as big as the scenes in Memphis or Detroit, but definitely a group of people who were capable of making big soul hits. Bass and McClure recorded a couple of duo singles with Checker, starting with "Don't Mess Up a Good Thing": [Excerpt: Fontella Bass and Bobby McClure, "Don't Mess Up a Good Thing"] That made the top forty on the pop charts, and number five on the R&B charts. But the follow-up only made the R&B top forty and didn't make the pop charts at all. But Bass would soon release a solo recording, though one with prominent backing vocals by Minnie Ripperton, that would become one of the all-time soul classics -- a Motown soundalike that was very obviously patterned after the songs that Holland, Dozier, and Holland were writing, and which captured their style perfectly: [Excerpt: Fontella Bass, "Rescue Me"] There's some dispute as to who actually wrote "Rescue Me". The credited songwriters are Carl Smith and Raynard Miner, but Bass has repeatedly claimed that she wrote most of the song herself, and that Roquel Davis had assured her that she would be fairly compensated, but she never was. According to Bass, when she finally got her first royalty cheque from Chess, she was so disgusted at the pitiful amount of money she was getting that she tore the cheque up and threw it back across the desk. Her follow-up to "Rescue Me", "Recovery", didn't do so well, making the lower reaches of the pop top forty: [Excerpt: Fontella Bass, "Recovery"] Several more singles were released off Bass' only album on Chess, but she very quickly became disgusted with the whole mainstream music industry. By this point she'd married the avant-garde jazz trumpeter Lester Bowie, and she started performing with his group, the Art Ensemble of Chicago. The music she recorded with the group is excellent, but if anyone bought The Art Ensemble of Chicago With Fontella Bass, the first of the two albums she recorded with the group, expecting something like "Rescue Me", they were probably at the very least bemused by what they got -- two twenty-minute-long tracks that sound like this: [Excerpt: The Art Ensemble of Chicago with Fontella Bass: "How Strange/Ole Jed"] In between the two albums she recorded with the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Bass also recorded a second solo album, but after it had little success she largely retired from music to raise her four children, though she would make the odd guest appearance on her husband's records. In the 1990s she made a few gospel records with her mother and her younger brother, the R&B singer David Peaston, and toured a little both on the nostalgia circuit and performing gospel, but she never returned to being a full-time musician. Both she and her brother died in 2012, Peaston from complications of diabetes, Bass from a heart attack after a series of illnesses. "Rescue Me" was her only big hit, and she retired at a point when she was still capable of making plenty of interesting music, but Fontella Bass still had a far more interesting, and fulfilling, career than many other artists who continue trying to chase the ghost of their one hit. She made music on her own terms, and nobody else's, right up until the end.

Jul 14, 2022

This episode is part of Pledge Week 2022. Every day this week, I’ll be posting old Patreon bonus episodes of the podcast which will have this short intro. These are short, ten- to twenty-minute bonus podcasts which get posted to Patreon for my paying backers every time I post a new main episode — there are well over a hundred of these in the archive now. If you like the sound of these episodes, then go to patreon.com/andrewhickey and subscribe for as little as a dollar a month or ten dollars a year to get access to all those bonus episodes, plus new ones as they appear. Click below for the transcript (more…)

Jul 13, 2022

This episode is part of Pledge Week 2022. Every day this week, I’ll be posting old Patreon bonus episodes of the podcast which will have this short intro. These are short, ten- to twenty-minute bonus podcasts which get posted to Patreon for my paying backers every time I post a new main episode — there are well over a hundred of these in the archive now. If you like the sound of these episodes, then go to patreon.com/andrewhickey and subscribe for as little as a dollar a month or ten dollars a year to get access to all those bonus episodes, plus new ones as they appear. Click below for the transcript (more…)

Jul 12, 2022

This episode is part of Pledge Week 2022. Every day this week, I’ll be posting old Patreon bonus episodes of the podcast which will have this short intro. These are short, ten- to twenty-minute bonus podcasts which get posted to Patreon for my paying backers every time I post a new main episode — there are well over a hundred of these in the archive now. If you like the sound of these episodes, then go to patreon.com/andrewhickey and subscribe for as little as a dollar a month or ten dollars a year to get access to all those bonus episodes, plus new ones as they appear. Click below for the transcript (more…)

Jul 11, 2022

This episode is part of Pledge Week 2022. Every day this week, I’ll be posting old Patreon bonus episodes of the podcast which will have this short intro. These are short, ten- to twenty-minute bonus podcasts which get posted to Patreon for my paying backers every time I post a new main episode — there are well over a hundred of these in the archive now. If you like the sound of these episodes, then go to patreon.com/andrewhickey and subscribe for as little as a dollar a month or ten dollars a year to get access to all those bonus episodes, plus new ones as they appear. Click below for the transcript (more…)

Jul 10, 2022

This episode is part of Pledge Week 2022. Every day this week, I’ll be posting old Patreon bonus episodes of the podcast which will have this short intro. These are short, ten- to twenty-minute bonus podcasts which get posted to Patreon for my paying backers every time I post a new main episode — there are well over a hundred of these in the archive now. If you like the sound of these episodes, then go to patreon.com/andrewhickey and subscribe for as little as a dollar a month or ten dollars a year to get access to all those bonus episodes, plus new ones as they appear. Click below for the transcript (more…)

Jul 10, 2022

The Facebook community I talk about is at https://www.facebook.com/groups/293630102611672/ The post for asking Q&A questions is here The Patreon post for Q&A questions is here Transcript Hello and welcome to the start of 2022’s Pledge Week. For those of you who don’t know, this podcast is my full-time job, and I can only do it because of listener support, and the best way people can support me is to set up a regular donation through patreon.com, and to reward those supporters I do short bonus podcasts that only backers can access, as well as doing occasional other bonus things for them. Now, I have been very, very, lucky when it comes to people backing me. For the first couple of years of the podcast I had to take on additional work because this wasn’t paying enough, but now I have enough very generous backers that I can pay my mortgage, buy all the books and CDs I need for the research, pay Tilt for his time editing the podcast, and generally do the work without worrying about my finances the way I had to at first. This has been especially useful in the last year, when as you may have gathered everything *else* went wrong in my life — to have that basic financial security because of people’s generous donations has literally saved my life. I’m making that clear now because I don’t want anyone to give a single penny they can’t afford. If my Patreon donations continue at the same level they have been, I can continue making the podcast indefinitely without worrying, so don’t give me money you can’t afford. But, of course, the only way I can keep the donations at the same level is to remind people occasionally that the Patreon exists — otherwise, the levels will slowly go down, as people lose their jobs or retire and can’tafford that extra dollar a month, or the podcast gets past the era of music they’re interested in, or I say something that causes offence, or they just decide the podcast isn’t for them any more. So, every year or so, for a week I do a pledge week, where every day for a week I put up one of the old backer-only ten-minute or so podcasts, that Patreon backers have had access to for a year or so. There are well over a hundred of these now, and only a tiny selection of them get posted in these Pledge weeks, so if you want to hear the rest of them you have to subscribe for as little as one dollar a month — or ten dollars for a year. Again, I want to emphasise — as long as donation levels stay around where they are now, the main podcast will always remain free, and will have no ads or any of the other things people do to monetise their podcasts. Nobody is under any obligation to pay me a penny, and you should only give what you can afford after looking after yourself and your loved ones and any charitable donations or so on. There are many more important uses for your money than my podcast, especially in difficult times like this, and I don’t begrudge anyone listening for free. I’m making enough, and while it’s always nice to have more, there’s no pressure on anyone. But if you have a little spare cash left over after all that, and you want to help out, for the next week you’ll get a taste of what you can get. Also, two weeks from today I will be doing two question and answer podcasts. One will be for backers only, and will be answering questions on a Patreon post I’m going to make, which only backers will be able to access. The other will be for the general public, and will be answering questions posted in the comments for the admin post I made a couple of weeks back. I’ll link both posts in the notes to this episode. Also, while I’m here I’d just like to mention that my friend Shawn has set up a Facebook discussion group for the podcast, which I’ll also link. I’m not on Facebook myself, and while I’m not looking at it myself, Shawn will pass on anything she thinks I should know about the discussions there — but you can also use it to talk about my podcast without worrying that I’m looking over your shoulder. Anyway, for the next seven days, enjoy these old Patreon backer bonus episodes.

Jun 26, 2022

This week’s episode looks at “All You Need is Love”, the Our World TV special, and the career of the Beatles from April 1966 through August 1967. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a thirteen-minute bonus episode available, on “Rain” by the Beatles . 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/ NB for the first few hours this was up, there was a slight editing glitch. If you downloaded the old version and don’t want to redownload the whole thing, just look in the transcript for “Other than fixing John’s two flubbed” for the text of the two missing paragraphs. (more…)

May 22, 2022

Episode 149 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Respect”, and the journey of Aretha Franklin from teenage gospel singer to the Queen of Soul. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifteen-minute bonus episode available, on “I’m Just a Mops” by the Mops . Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Also, people may be interested in a Facebook discussion group for the podcast, run by a friend of mine (I’m not on FB myself) which can be found at https://www.facebook.com/groups/293630102611672/ (more…)

Apr 30, 2022

Episode one hundred and forty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Light My Fire” by the Doors, the history of cool jazz, and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. 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 “My Friend Jack” by the Smoke . 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…)

Apr 16, 2022

Episode one hundred and forty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Hey Joe” by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and is the longest episode to date, at over two hours. Patreon backers also have a twenty-two-minute bonus episode available, on “Making Time” by The Creation . 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…)

Mar 25, 2022

Episode one hundred and forty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Good Vibrations” by the Beach Boys, and the history of the theremin. 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 “You’re Gonna Miss Me” by the Thirteenth Floor Elevators . 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…)

Mar 5, 2022

This week’s episode looks at “Tomorrow Never Knows”, the making of Revolver by the Beatles, and the influence of Timothy Leary on the burgeoning psychedelic movement. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifteen-minute bonus episode available, on “Keep on Running” by the Spencer Davis Group. 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…)

Feb 15, 2022

Episode 144 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Last Train to Clarksville” and the beginnings of the career of the Monkees, along with a short primer on the origins of the Vietnam War. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a seventeen-minute bonus episode available, on “These Boots Are Made For Walking” by Nancy Sinatra, which I mispronounce at the end of this episode as “These Boots Were Made For Walking”, so no need to correct me here. 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…)

Feb 7, 2022

Episode 143 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Summer in the City’”, and at the short but productive career of the Lovin’ Spoonful. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Any More” by the Walker Brothers and the strange career of Scott Walker. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

Jan 31, 2022

Episode one hundred and forty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “God Only Knows” by the Beach Boys, and the creation of the Pet Sounds album. 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 “Sunny” by Bobby Hebb . 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…)

Jan 16, 2022

Episode 141 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “River Deep Mountain High’”, and at the career of Ike and Tina Turner. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Also, this episode was recorded before the sad death of the great Ronnie Spector, whose records are featured a couple of times in this episode, which is partly about her abusive ex-husband. Her life paralleled Tina Turner’s quite closely, and if you haven’t heard the episode I did about her last year, you can find it at https://500songs.com/podcast/episode-110-be-my-baby-by-the-ronettes/ . I wish I’d had the opportunity to fit a tribute into this episode too. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Wild Thing” by the Troggs . 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…)

Dec 25, 2021

Episode one hundred and forty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Trouble Every Day” by the Mothers of Invention, and the early career of Frank Zappa. 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 “Christmas Time is Here Again” by the Beatles . 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…)

Dec 22, 2021

Episode one hundred and thirty-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Eight Miles High” by the Byrds, and the influence of jazz and Indian music on psychedelic rock. This is a long one… 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 “Winchester Cathedral” by the New Vaudeville Band . 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…)

Dec 12, 2021

Hi, This is not a proper episode of the podcast. Rather, this is an explanation, at least in part, of why there have been fewer episodes than normal this year, and what I plan to do about that. One of the things I promised myself when I started this podcast was that I would not do the thing that many podcasters do of waffling on for fifteen minutes at the beginning about their lives, in an attempt to build up a parasocial relationship with the listeners. I pride myself on the work I do, and part of that is making the podcast about the work, rather than about me. I do enjoy the friendships I have made through this podcast, but I don't want the podcast to be about anything other than the history and the music. But that does mean that you haven't all had an explanation why, after two years of me getting the podcast out weekly on the dot, the podcast has averaged an episode every ten days or so this year, including some gaps of two weeks. A small part of that is that the episodes have been getting longer. It takes more time to write, record, and edit a ninety-minute episode than a half-hour one, and while I keep promising I'll try to get the episodes back to the shorter length I prefer, there's just a lot of material to cover in some of these. But a much larger part is that this last year has been the worst year of my life, without exception. There have been a whole series of stressful events, most of which I'm not at liberty to talk about because they involve other people, but the year started with one of those awful life-changing events that only happen once or twice in your life, and astonishingly managed to throw a couple of other curveballs almost that bad. And that's on top of the stuff that everyone has been having to deal with, with the political situation in the world and with covid. But there's also my health, and I can talk about that because it only affects me. I have multiple chronic illnesses and disabilities, which among other things meant that I had to spend the first five months of this year totally isolated, not seeing another human being, until I could get fully vaccinated. And it turns out that being totally isolated from the world for months, while multiple catastrophes happen in your life and the lives of those around you, is not great for chronic illnesses. I have had a number of flare-ups this year, and to give you some idea, yesterday my blood pressure read as 196/120. Getting all five hundred episodes of this podcast done is my highest priority, but in order to do that I have to live to see episode five hundred. And sadly, making sure I live to see episode five hundred means not working on days when any kind of extra stress could give me a stroke. Which has been the case on several days this year. I am working out some new things with my doctor, which I hope and believe will make my chronic illnesses more like they were in 2018 through 2020 -- just annoyances rather than anything more worrying. I am fairly certain that 2022 will be much better. So my plan is to get two more episodes out before Christmas -- episodes on the Byrds and Frank Zappa, both of which are mostly written and should be able to get out in fairly short order. Those two are again going to be very long ones. I'm then going to take a few days off between Christmas Eve and New Year, and not do any new work for that week. I'm going to try to relax, get used to my new medication regime, and get my blood pressure down to normal. And then, all being well, we'll start the new year as I mean to go on, with episodes coming out once a week on a regular schedule. Thank you all for your patience and support during what has not been an easy year for anyone. And I don't want to leave this without a quick acknowledgement of the sad death yesterday of Michael Nesmith. He was one of my personal musical heroes, and you can be sure that when the podcast gets to the Monkees, they'll be treated with the respect they deserve.

Dec 7, 2021

This is just to let everyone know that the second volume of the book based on the podcast should be available by the time you get this episode in your podcast app. It's been a long, long, time coming, because the last year and a bit has been far more difficult, for far more reasons, than I can go into here, but the book is now done. It's called "From the Million Dollar Quartet to the Fab Four", and contains versions of the scripts for episodes fifty-one through one hundred, revised for the book format rather than audio, along with a rewritten version of the Patreon episode on the Big Bopper, an introduction summarising the first book, and a bibliography. The ebook should be available from every major ebook store, though it might take time to filter through to all of them. I'll be including a link in the blog post for this episode which, if you click it, will take you to your preferred ebook store if the book's available there. The paperback is currently only available from Amazon. It should eventually also be available from other retailers, as it will enter all the standard distribution catalogues, but it's self-published through Amazon's service, so those of you who boycott Amazon, completely understandably, might not want to buy that version. The ebook link will also take you to the Amazon page for the paperback. The hardback is available from lulu.com. That too will eventually also be available from other online bookstores, but I make more money, and you get it quicker, if you buy it from Lulu rather than a third party. Again, I'll link that in the notes here. The physical books are relatively expensive -- twenty-five dollars for the paperback, and fifty dollars for the hardback -- but they're *big* books -- six hundred and fifty-three pages counting the indexes -- and paper is expensive right now because of supply chain issues, so I hope you'll consider them good value for money, as they're literally priced as low as I can make them. If money's tight, the ebook is only $5. And speaking of good value for money, for one week only I've reduced the cost of the ebook of the first book to just one dollar. That's a limited-time offer to promote the series, so if you've not got that and want it, now's your chance. Patreon backers at the five-dollar-a-month level and higher have already received copies of the ebook. Those at higher levels will be receiving their copies of the physical books shortly -- they'll be being sent out in waves over the next few weeks. It's because of those backers that I am able to do this podcast at all, and I can't thank them enough for their generosity.See you all in a couple of days, when we'll be looking at the Byrds, and "Eight Miles High". Links to buy the book: Ebooks (and paperback through Amazon) Hardback Link to buy the first book (only $1 in ebook this week) The ebook for Patreon backers

Dec 1, 2021

Episode one hundred and thirty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “I Fought the Law”, and at the mysterious death of Bobby Fuller. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifteen-minute bonus episode available, on “Hanky Panky” by Tommy James and the Shondells . 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…)

Nov 15, 2021

Episode one hundred and thirty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” by James Brown, and at how Brown went from a minor doo-wop artist to the pioneer of funk. 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 “I’m a Fool” by Dino, Desi, and Billy . 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…)

Nov 3, 2021

Episode one hundred and thirty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs is a special long episode, running almost ninety minutes, looking at “My Generation” by the Who. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifteen-minute bonus episode available, on “The Name Game” by Shirley Ellis . 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…)

Oct 21, 2021

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/ (more…)

Oct 13, 2021

Episode 134 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “In the Midnight Hour”, the links between Stax, Atlantic, and Detroit, and the career of Wilson Pickett. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifteen-minute bonus episode available, on “Mercy Mercy” by Don Covay . 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…)

Sep 24, 2021

Episode one hundred and thirty-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “My Girl” by the Temptations, and is part three of a three-episode look at Motown in 1965. 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 “Yeh Yeh” by Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames. 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…)

Sep 8, 2021

Episode one hundred and thirty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “I Can’t Help Myself” by the Four Tops, and is part two of a three-episode look at Motown in 1965. 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 “Colours” by Donovan. 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…)

Aug 25, 2021

Episode one hundred and thirty-one of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “I Hear a Symphony” by the Supremes, and is the start of a three-episode look at Motown in 1965. 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 “Rescue Me” by Fontella Bass . 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…)

Aug 14, 2021

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

Jul 30, 2021

Episode 129 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones, and how they went from being a moderately successful beat group to being the only serious rivals to the Beatles. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have an eleven-minute bonus episode available, on "I'll Never Find Another You" by the Seekers . 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 I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. i used a lot of resources for this episode. Two resources that I’ve used for this and all future Stones episodes — The Rolling Stones: All The Songs by Phillipe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesden is an invaluable reference book, while Old Gods Almost Dead by Stephen Davis is the least inaccurate biography. When in doubt, the version of the narrative I've chosen to use is the one from Davis' book. I’ve also used Andrew Loog Oldham’s autobiography Stoned , and Keith Richards’ Life , though be warned that both casually use slurs. Sympathy for the Devil: The Birth of the Rolling Stones and the Death of Brian Jones by Paul Trynka is, as the title might suggest, essentially special pleading for Jones. It's as well-researched and well-written as a pro-Jones book can be, and is worth reading for balance, though I find it unconvincing. This web page seems to have the most accurate details of the precise dates of sessions and gigs. And this three-CD set contains the A and B sides of all the Stones’ singles up to 1971, including every Stones track I excerpt in this episode. 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 one of the most important riffs in rock and roll history -- the record that turned the distorted guitar riff into the defining feature of the genre, even though the man who played that riff never liked it. We're going to look at a record that took the social protest of the folk-rock movement, aligned it with the misogyny its singer had found in many blues songs, and turned it into the most powerful expression of male adolescent frustration ever recorded to that point. We're going to look at "Satisfaction" by the Rolling Stones: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Satisfaction"] A note before we start this -- this episode deals with violence against women, and with rape. If you're likely to be upset hearing about those things, you might want to either skip this episode, or read the transcript on the website first. The relevant section comes right at the end of the episode, so you can also listen through to the point where I give another warning, without missing any of the rest of the episode. Another point I should make here -- most of the great sixties groups have very accurate biographies written about them. The Stones, even more than the Beatles, have kept a surprising amount of control over their public image, with the result that the only sources about them are either rather sanitised things made with their co-operation, or rather tabloidy things whose information mostly comes from people who are holding a grudge or have a particular agenda. I believe that everything in this episode is the most likely of the various competing narratives, but if you check out the books I used, which are listed on the blog post associated with this episode, you'll see that there are several different tellings of almost every bit of this story. So bear that in mind as you're listening. I've done my best. Anyway, on with the episode. When we left the Rolling Stones, they were at the very start of their recording career, having just released their first big hit single, a version of "I Wanna Be Your Man", which had been written for them by Lennon and McCartney. The day after they first appeared on Top of the Pops, they were back in the recording studio, but not to record for themselves. The five Stones, plus Ian Stewart, were being paid two pounds a head by their manager/producer Andrew Oldham to be someone else's backing group. Oldham was producing a version of "To Know Him is to Love Him", the first hit by his idol Phil Spector, for a new singer he was managing named Cleo Sylvester: [Excerpt: Cleo, "To Know Him is to Love Him"] In a further emulation of Spector, the B-side was a throwaway instrumental. Credited to "the Andrew Oldham Orchestra", and with Mike Leander supervising, the song's title, "There Are But Five Rolling Stones", gave away who the performers actually were: [Excerpt: The Andrew Oldham Orchestra, "There Are But Five Rolling Stones"] At this point, the Stones were still not writing their own material, but Oldham had already seen the writing on the wall -- there was going to be no place in the new world opened up by the Beatles for bands that couldn't generate their own hits, and he had already decided who was going to be doing that for his group. It would have been natural for him to turn to Brian Jones, still at this point the undisputed leader of the group, and someone who had a marvellous musical mind. But possibly in order to strengthen the group's identity as a group rather than a leader and his followers -- Oldham has made different statements about this at different points -- or possibly just because they were living in the same flat as him at the time, while Jones was living elsewhere, he decided that the Rolling Stones' equivalent of Lennon and McCartney was going to be Jagger and Richards. There are several inconsistencies in the stories of how Jagger and Richards started writing together -- and things like what the actual first song they wrote together was, or when they wrote it, will probably always be lost to the combination of self-aggrandisement and drug-fuelled memory loss that makes it difficult to say anything definitive about much of their career. But we do know that one of the earliest songs they wrote together was "As Tears Go By", a song that wasn't considered suitable for the group -- though they did later record a version of it -- and was given instead to Marianne Faithfull, a young singer with whom Jagger was about to enter into a relationship: [Excerpt: Marianne Faithfull, "As Tears Go By"] It's not entirely clear who wrote what on that song -- it's usually referred to as a Jagger/Richards collaboration, but it's credited to Jagger, Richards, and Oldham, and at least one source claims it was actually written by Jagger and the session guitarist Big Jim Sullivan -- and if so, this would be the first time of many that a song written by Jagger or Richards in collaboration with someone else would be credited to Jagger and Richards without any credit going to their co-writer. But the consensus story, as far as there is a consensus, seems to be that Oldham locked Jagger and Richards into a kitchen, and told them they weren't coming out until they had a song written. And it had to be a proper song, not a pastiche of something else, and it had to be the kind of song you could release as a single, not a blues song. After spending all night in the kitchen, Richards eventually got bored of being stuck in there, and started strumming his guitar and singing "it is the evening of the day", and the two of them quickly came up with the rest of the song. After "As Tears Go By", they wrote a lot of songs that they didn't feel were right for the group, but gave them away to other people, like Gene Pitney, who recorded "That Girl Belongs to Yesterday": [Excerpt: Gene Pitney, "That Girl Belongs to Yesterday"] Pitney, and his former record producer Phil Spector, had visited the Stones during the sessions for their first album, which started the day after that Cleo session, and had added a little piano and percussion to a blues jam called "Little by Little", which also featured Allan Clarke and Graham Nash of the Hollies on backing vocals. The songwriting on that track was credited to Spector and Nanker Phelge, a group pseudonym that was used for jam sessions and instrumentals. It was one of two Nanker Phelge songs on the album, and there was also an early Jagger and Richards song, "Tell Me", an unoriginal Merseybeat pastiche: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Tell Me"] But the bulk of the album was made up of cover versions of songs by Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Rufus Thomas, Marvin Gaye, and other Black American musicians. The album went to number one in the UK album charts, which is a much more impressive achievement than it might sound. At this point, albums sold primarily to adults with spending money, and the album charts changed very slowly. Between May 1963 and February 1968, the *only* artists to have number one albums in the UK were the Beatles, the Stones, Dylan, the Monkees, the cast of The Sound of Music, and Val Doonican. And between May 63 and April 65 it was *only* the Beatles and the Stones. But while they'd had a number one album, they'd still not had a number one single, or even a top ten one. "I Wanna Be Your Man" had been written for them and had hit number twelve, but they were still not writing songs that they thought were suited for release as singles, and they couldn't keep asking the Beatles to help them out, so while Jagger and Richards kept improving as songwriters, for their next single they chose a Buddy Holly B-side: [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, "Not Fade Away"] The group had latched on to the Bo Diddley rhythm in that song, along with its machismo -- many of the cover versions they chose in this period seem to have not just a sexual subtext but to be overtly bragging, and if Little Richard is to be believed on the subject, Holly's line "My love is bigger than a Cadillac" isn't that much of an exaggeration. It's often claimed that the Stones exaggerated and emphasised the Bo Diddley sound, and made their version more of an R&B number than Holly's, but if anything their version owes more to someone else. The Stones' first real UK tour had been on a bill with Mickie Most, Bo Diddley, Little Richard, and the Everly Brothers, and Keith Richards in particular had been amazed by the Everlys. He said later "The best rhythm guitar playing I ever heard was from Don Everly. Nobody ever thinks about that, but their rhythm guitar playing is perfect". Don Everly, of course, was himself very influenced by Bo Diddley, and learned to play in open-G tuning from Diddley -- and several years later, Keith Richards would make that tuning his own, after being inspired by Everly and Ry Cooder. The Stones' version of "Not Fade Away" owes at least as much to Don Everly's rhythm guitar style as to that of Holly or Diddley. Compare, say, the opening of "Wake Up Little Suzie": [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Wake Up Little Suzie"] The rhythm guitar on the Stones version of "Not Fade Away" is definitely Keith Richards doing Don Everly doing Bo Diddley: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Not Fade Away"] That was recorded during the sessions for their first album, and was, depending on whose story you believe, another track that featured Phil Spector and Gene Pitney on percussion, recorded at the same session as "Little by Little", which became its B-side. Bill Wyman, who kept copious notes of the group's activities, has always said that the idea that it was recorded at that session was nonsense, and that it was recorded weeks later, and Oldham merely claimed Spector was on the record for publicity purposes. On the other hand, Gene Pitney had a very strong memory of being at that session. Spector had been in the country because the Ronettes had been touring the UK with the Stones as one of their support acts, along with the Swinging Blue Jeans and Marty Wilde, and Spector was worried that Ronnie might end up with one of the British musicians. He wasn't wrong to worry -- according to Ronnie's autobiography, there were several occasions when she came very close to sleeping with John Lennon, though they never ended up doing anything and remained just friends, while according to Keith Richards' autobiography he and Ronnie had a chaste affair on that tour which became less chaste when the Stones later hit America. But Spector had flown over to the UK to make sure that he remained in control of the young woman who he considered his property. Pitney, meanwhile, according to his recollection, turned up to the session at the request of Oldham, as the group were fighting in the studio and not getting the track recorded. Pitney arrived with cognac, telling the group that it was his birthday and that they all needed to get drunk with him. They did, they stopped fighting, and they recorded the track: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Not Fade Away"] "Not Fade Away" made number three on the UK charts, and also became the first Stones record to chart in the US at all, though it only scraped its way to number forty-eight, not any higher. But in itself that was a lot -- it meant that the Stones had a record doing well enough to justify them going to the US for their first American tour. But before that, they had to go through yet another UK tour -- though this isn't counted as an official tour in the listings of their tours, it's just a bunch of shows, in different places, that happened to be almost every night for a couple of months. By this time, the audience response was getting overwhelming, and shows often had to be cut short to keep the group safe. At one show, in Birkenhead, the show had to be stopped after the band played *three bars*, with the group running off stage after that as the audience invaded the stage. And then it was off to the US, where they were nowhere near as big, though while they were over there, "Tell Me" was also released as a single to tie in with the tour, and that did surprisingly well, making number twenty-four. The group's first experience of the US wasn't an entirely positive one -- there was a disastrous appearance on the Dean Martin Show on TV, with Martin mocking the group both before and after their performance, to the extent that Bob Dylan felt moved to write in the liner notes to his next album “Dean Martin should apologise t'the Rolling Stones”. But on the other hand, there were some good experiences. They got to see James Brown at the Apollo, and Jagger started taking notes -- though Richards also noted *what* Jagger was noting, saying "James wanted to show off to these English folk. He’s got the Famous Flames, and he’s sending one out for a hamburger, he’s ordering another to polish his shoes and he’s humiliating his own band. To me, it was the Famous Flames, and James Brown happened to be the lead singer. But the way he lorded it over his minions, his minders and the actual band, to Mick was fascinating" They also met up with Murray the K, the DJ who had started the career of the Ronettes among others. Murray had unilaterally declared himself "the fifth Beatle", and was making much of his supposed connections with British pop stars, most of whom either had no idea who he was or actively disliked him (Richards, when talking about him, would often replace the K with a four-letter word usually spelled with a "c"). The Stones didn't like him any more than any of the other groups did, but Murray played them a record he thought they'd be interested in -- "It's All Over Now" by the Valentinos, the song that Bobby Womack had written and which was on Sam Cooke's record label: [Excerpt: The Valentinos, "It's All Over Now"] They decided that they were going to record that, and handily Oldham had already arranged some studio time for them. As Giorgio Gomelsky would soon find with the Yardbirds, Oldham was convinced that British studios were simply unsuitable for recording loud blues-based rock and roll music, and Phil Spector had suggested to him that if the Stones loved Chess records so much, they might as well record at Chess studios. So while the group were in Chicago, they were booked in for a couple of days in the studio at Chess, where they were horrified to discover that their musical idol Muddy Waters was earning a little extra cash painting the studio ceiling and acting as a roadie, helping them in with their equipment. (It should be noted here that Marshall Chess, Leonard Chess' son who worked with the Stones in the seventies, has denied this happened. Keith Richards insists it did.) But after that shock, they found working at Chess a great experience. Not only did various of their musical idols, like Willie Dixon and Chuck Berry, as well as Waters, pop in to encourage them, and not only were they working with the same engineer who had recorded many of those people's records, but they were working in a recording studio with an actual multi-track system rather than a shoddy two-track tape recorder. From this point on, while they would still record in the UK on occasion, they increasingly chose to use American studios. The version of "It's All Over Now" they recorded there was released as their next single. It only made the top thirty in the US -- they had still not properly broken through there -- but it became their first British number one: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "It's All Over Now"] Bobby Womack was furious that the Stones had recorded his song while his version was still new, but Sam Cooke talked him down, explaining that if Womack played his cards right he could have a lot of success through his connection with these British musicians. Once the first royalty cheques came in, Womack wasn't too upset any more. When they returned to the UK, they had another busy schedule of touring and recording -- and not all of it just for Rolling Stones work. There was, for example, an Andrew Oldham Orchestra session, featuring many people from the British session world who we've noted before -- Joe Moretti from Vince Taylor's band, John Paul Jones, Jimmy Page, Andy White, Mike Leander, and more. Mick Jagger added vocals to their version of "I Get Around": [Excerpt: The Andrew Oldham Orchestra, "I Get Around"] It's possible that Oldham had multiple motives for recording that -- Oldham was always a fan of Beach Boys style pop music more than he was of R&B, but he also was in the process of setting up his own publishing company, and knew that the Beach Boys' publishers didn't operate in the UK. In 1965, Oldham's company would become the Beach Boys' UK publishers, and he would get a chunk of every cover version of their songs, including his own. There were also a lot of demo sessions for Jagger/Richards songs intended for other artists, with Mick and Keith working with those same session musicians -- like this song that they wrote for the comedian Jimmy Tarbuck, demoed by Jagger and Richards with Moretti, Page, Jones, John McLaughlin, Big Jim Sullivan, and Andy White: [Excerpt: Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, "We're Wastin' Time"] But of course there were also sessions for Rolling Stones records, like their next UK number one single, "Little Red Rooster": [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Little Red Rooster"] "Little Red Rooster" is a song that is credited to Willie Dixon, but which actually combines several elements from earlier blues songs, including a riff inspired by the one from Son House's "Death Letter Blues": [Excerpt: Son House, "Death Letter Blues"] A melody line and some lines of lyric from Memphis Minnie's "If You See My Rooster": [Excerpt: Memphis Minnie, "If You See My Rooster"] And some lines from Charley Patton's "Banty Rooster Blues": [Excerpt: Charley Patton, "Banty Rooster Blues"] Dixon's resulting song had been recorded by Howlin' Wolf in 1961: [Excerpt: Howlin' Wolf, "Little Red Rooster"] That hadn't been a hit, but Sam Cooke had recorded a cover version, in a very different style, that made the US top twenty and proved the song had chart potential: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "Little Red Rooster"] The Rolling Stones version followed Howlin' Wolf's version very closely, except that Jagger states that he *is* a cock -- I'm sorry, a rooster -- rather than that he merely has one. And this would normally be something that would please Brian Jones immensely -- that the group he had formed to promote Delta and Chicago blues had managed to get a song like that to number one in the UK charts, especially as it was dominated by his slide playing. But in fact the record just symbolised the growing estrangement between Jones and the rest of his band. When he turned up at the session to record "Little Red Rooster", he was dismayed to find out that the rest of the group had deliberately told him the wrong date. They'd recorded the track the day before, without him, and just left a note from Jagger to tell him where to put his slide fills. They spent the next few months ping-ponging between the UK and the US. In late 1964 they made another US tour, during which at one point Brian Jones collapsed with what has been variously reported as stress and alcohol poisoning, and had to miss several shows, leaving the group to carry on without him. There was much discussion at this point of just kicking him out of the band, but they decided against it -- he was still perceived as the group's leader and most popular member. They also appeared on the TAMI show, which we've mentioned before, and which we'll look at in more detail when we next look at James Brown, but which is notable here for two things. The first is that they once again saw how good James Brown was, and at this point Jagger decided that he was going to do his best to emulate Brown's performance -- to the extent that he asked a choreographer to figure out what Brown was doing and teach it to him, but the choreographer told Jagger that Brown moved too fast to figure out all his steps. The other is that the musical director for the TAMI Show was Jack Nitzsche, and this would be the start of a professional relationship that would last for many years. We've seen Nitzsche before in various roles -- he was the co-writer of "Needles and Pins", and he was also the arranger on almost all of Phil Spector's hits. He was so important to Spector's sound that Keith Richards has said “Jack was the Genius, not Phil. Rather, Phil took on Jack’s eccentric persona and sucked his insides out.” Nitzsche guested on piano when the Stones went into the studio in LA to record a chunk of their next album, including the ballad "Heart of Stone", which would become a single in the US. From that point on, whenever the Stones recorded in LA, Nitzsche would be there, adding keyboards and percussion and acting as an uncredited co-producer and arranger. He was apparently unpaid for this work, which he did just because he enjoyed being around the band. Nitzsche would also play on the group's next UK single, recorded a couple of months later. This would be their third UK number one, and the first one credited to Jagger and Richards as songwriters, though the credit is a rather misleading one in this case, as the chorus is taken directly from a gospel song by Pops Staples, recorded by the Staple Singers: [Excerpt: The Staple Singers, "This May Be The Last Time"] Jagger and Richards took that chorus and reworked it into a snarling song whose lyrics were based around Jagger's then favourite theme -- how annoying it is when women want to do things other than whatever their man wants them to do: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "The Last Time"] There is a deep, deep misogyny in the Stones' lyrics in the mid sixties, partly inspired by the personas taken on by some blues men (though there are very few blues singers who stuck so unrelentingly to a single theme), and partly inspired by Jagger's own relationship with Chrissie Shrimpton, who he regarded as his inferior, even though she was his superior in terms of the British class system. That's even more noticeable on "Play With Fire", the B-side to "The Last Time". "The Last Time" had been recorded in such a long session that Jones, Watts, and Wyman went off to bed, exhausted. But Jagger and Richards wanted to record a demo of another song, which definitely seems to have been inspired by Shrimpton, so they got Jack Nitzsche to play harpsichord and Phil Spector to play (depending on which source you believe) either a bass or a detuned electric guitar: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Play With Fire"] The demo was considered good enough to release, and put out as the B-side without any contribution from the other three Stones. Other songs Chrissie Shrimpton would inspire over the next couple of years would include "Under My Thumb", "19th Nervous Breakdown", and "Stupid Girl". It's safe to say that Mick Jagger wasn't going to win any boyfriend of the year awards. "The Last Time" was a big hit, but the follow-up was the song that turned the Stones from being one of several British bands who were very successful to being the only real challengers to the Beatles for commercial success. And it was a song whose main riff came to Keith Richards in a dream: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction)"] Richards apparently had a tape recorder by the side of his bed, and when the riff came to him he woke up enough to quickly record it before falling back to sleep with the tape running. When he woke up, he'd forgotten the riff, but found it at the beginning of a recording that was otherwise just snoring. For a while Richards was worried he'd ripped the riff off from something else, and he's later said that he thinks that it was inspired by "Dancing in the Street". In fact, it's much closer to the horn line from another Vandellas record, "Nowhere to Run", which also has a similar stomping rhythm: [Excerpt: Martha and the Vandellas, "Nowhere to Run"] You can see how similar the two songs are by overlaying the riff from “Satisfaction” on the chorus to “Nowhere to Run”: [Excerpt “Nowhere to Run”/”Satisfaction”] "Nowhere to Run" also has a similar breakdown. Compare the Vandellas: [Excerpt: Martha and the Vandellas, "Nowhere to Run"] to the Stones: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"] So it's fairly clear where the song's inspiration came from, but it's also clear that unlike a song like "The Last Time" this *was* just inspiration, rather than plagiarism. The recorded version of "Satisfaction" was never one that its main composer was happy with. The group, apart from Brian Jones, who may have added a harmonica part that was later wiped, depending on what sources you read, but is otherwise absent from the track, recorded the basic track at Chess studios, and at this point it was mostly acoustic. Richards thought it had come out sounding too folk-rock, and didn't work at all. At this point Richards was still thinking of the track as a demo -- though by this point he was already aware of Andrew Oldham's tendency to take things that Richards thought were demos and release them. When Richards had come up with the riff, he had imagined it as a horn line, something like the version that Otis Redding eventually recorded: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"] So when they went into the studio in LA with Jack Nitzsche to work on some tracks there including some more work on the demo for “Satisfaction”, as well as Nitzsche adding some piano, Richards also wanted to do something to sketch out what the horn part would be. He tried playing it on his guitar, and it didn't sound right, and so Ian Stewart had an idea, went to a music shop, and got one of the first ever fuzz pedals, to see if Richards' guitar could sound like a horn. Now, people have, over the years, said that "Satisfaction" was the first record ever to use a fuzz tone. This is nonsense. We saw *way* back in the episode on “Rocket '88” a use of a damaged amp as an inspired accident, getting a fuzzy tone, though nobody picked up on that and it was just a one-off thing. Paul Burlison, the guitarist with the Rock 'n' Roll Trio, had a similar accident a few years later, as we also saw, and went with it, deliberately loosening tubes in his amp to get the sound audible on their version of "Train Kept A-Rollin'": [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette and the Rock 'n' Roll Trio, "Train Kept A-Rollin'"] A few years later, Grady Martin, the Nashville session player who was the other guitarist on that track, got a similar effect on his six-string bass solo on Marty Robbins' "Don't Worry", possibly partly inspired by Burlison's sound: [Excerpt: Marty Robbins, "Don't Worry"] That tends to be considered the real birth of fuzz, because that time it was picked up by the whole industry. Martin recorded an instrumental showing off the technique: [Excerpt: Grady Martin, "The Fuzz"] And more or less simultaneously, Wrecking Crew guitarist Al Casey used an early fuzz tone on a country record by Sanford Clark: [Excerpt: Sanford Clark, "Go On Home"] And the pedal steel player Red Rhodes had invented his own fuzz box, which he gave to another Wrecking Crew player, Billy Strange, who used it on records like Ann-Margret's "I Just Don't Understand": [Excerpt: Ann-Margret, "I Just Don't Understand"] All those last four tracks, and many more, were from 1960 or 1961. So far from being something unprecedented in recording history, as all too many rock histories will tell you, fuzz guitar was somewhat passe by 1965 -- it had been the big thing on records made by the Nashville A-Team and the Wrecking Crew four or five years earlier, and everyone had moved on to the next gimmick long ago. But it was good enough to use to impersonate a horn to sketch out a line for a demo. Except, of course, that while Jagger and Richards disliked the track as recorded, the other members of the band, and Ian Stewart (who still had a vote even though he was no longer a full member) and Andrew Oldham all thought it was a hit single as it was. They overruled Jagger and Richards and released it complete with fuzz guitar riff, which became one of the most well-known examples of the sound in rock history. To this day, though, when Richards plays the song live, he plays it without the fuzztone effect. Lyrically, the song sees Mick Jagger reaching for the influence of Bob Dylan and trying to write a piece of social commentary. The title line seems, appropriately for a song partly recorded at Chess studios, to have come from a line in a Chuck Berry record, "Thirty Days": [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "Thirty Days"] But the sentiment also owes more than a little to another record by a Chess star, one recorded so early that it was originally released when Chess was still called Aristocrat Records -- Muddy Waters' "I Can't Be Satisfied": [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, "I Can't Be Satisfied"] “Satisfaction” is the ultimate exercise in adolescent male frustration. I once read something, and I can't for the life of me remember where or who the author was, that struck me as the most insightful critique of the sixties British blues bands I've ever heard. That person said that by taking the blues out of the context in which the music had been created, they fundamentally changed the meaning of it -- that when Bo Diddley sang "I'm a Man", the subtext was "so don't call me 'boy', cracker". Meanwhile, when some British white teenagers from Essex sang the same words, in complete ignorance of the world in which Diddley lived, what they were singing was "I'm a man now, mummy, so you can't make me tidy my room if I don't want to". But the thing is, there are a lot of teenagers out there who don't want to tidy their rooms, and that kind of message does resonate. And here, Jagger is expressing the kind of aggressive sulk that pretty much every teenager, especially every frustrated male teenager will relate to. The protagonist is dissatisfied with everything in his life, so criticism of the vapidity of advertising is mixed in with sexual frustration because women won't sleep with the protagonist when they're menstruating: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"] It is the most adolescent lyric imaginable, but pop music is an adolescent medium. The song went to number one in the UK, and also became the group's first American number one. But Brian Jones resented it, so much so that when they performed the song live, he'd often start playing “I'm Popeye the Sailor Man”. This was partly because it wasn't the blues he loved, but also because it was the first Stones single he wasn't on (again, at least according to most sources. Some say he played acoustic rhythm guitar, but most say he's not on it and that Richards plays all the guitar parts). And to explain why, I have to get into the unpleasant details I talked about at the start. If you're likely to be upset by discussion of rape or domestic violence, stop the episode now. Now, there are a number of different versions of this story. This is the one that seems most plausible to me, based on what else I know about the Stones, and the different accounts, but some of the details might be wrong, so I don't want anyone to think that I'm saying that this is absolutely exactly what happened. But if it isn't, it's the *kind* of thing that happened many times, and something very like it definitely happened. You see, Brian Jones was a sadist, and not in a good way. There are people who engage in consensual BDSM, in which everyone involved is having a good time, and those people include some of my closest friends. This will never be a podcast that engages in kink-shaming of consensual kinks, and I want to make clear that what I have to say about Jones has nothing to do with that. Because Jones was not into consent. He was into physically injuring non-consenting young women, and he got his sexual kicks from things like beating them with chains. Again, if everyone is involved is consenting, this is perfectly fine, but Jones didn't care about anyone other than himself. At a hotel in Clearwater, Florida, on the sixth of May 1965, the same day that Jagger and Richards finished writing "Satisfaction", a girl that Bill Wyman had slept with the night before came to him in tears. She'd been with a friend the day before, and the friend had gone off with Jones while she'd gone off with Wyman. Jones had raped her friend, and had beaten her up -- he'd blackened both her eyes and done other damage. Jones had hurt this girl so badly that even the other Stones, who as we have seen were very far from winning any awards for being feminists of the year, were horrified. There was some discussion of calling the police on him, but eventually they decided to take matters into their own hands, or at least into one of their employees' hands. They got their roadie Mike Dorsey to teach him a lesson, though Oldham was insistent that Dorsey not mess up Jones' face. Dorsey dangled Jones by his collar and belt out of an upstairs window and told Jones that if he ever did anything like that again, he'd drop him. He also beat him up, cracking two of Jones' ribs. And so Jones was not in any state to play on the group's first US number one, or to play much at all at the session, because of the painkillers he was on for the cracked ribs. Jones would remain in the band for the next few years, but he had gone from being the group's leader to someone they disliked and were disgusted by. And as we'll see the next couple of times we look at the Stones, he would only get worse.

Jul 22, 2021

Episode one hundred and twenty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Mr. Tambourine Man” by the Byrds, and the start of LA folk-rock. 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 “I Got You Babe” by Sonny and Cher. 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…)

Jul 13, 2021

This week’s episode looks at "Ticket to Ride", the making of the Beatles' second film, and the influence of Bob Dylan on the Beatles' work and lives. 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, o n "The Game of Love" by Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders . 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 the Beatles. I have read literally dozens of books on the Beatles, and used bits of information from many of them, but the ones I specifically referred to while writing this episode were: The Complete Beatles Chronicle by Mark Lewisohn , All The Songs: The Stories Behind Every Beatles Release by Jean-Michel Guesdon , And The Band Begins To Play: The Definitive Guide To The Songs of The Beatles by Steve Lambley , The Beatles By Ear by Kevin Moore , Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald , and The Beatles Anthology . For material on the making of the film, I referred to Getting Away With It by Steven Soderbergh , a book which is in part a lengthy set of conversations between Soderbergh and Richard Lester. Sadly the only way to legally get the original mix of "Ticket to Ride" is this ludicrously-expensive out-of-print box set, but the 1987 remix is widely available on the CD issue of the Help! soundtrack . The film is available on DVD . Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon . Why not join them? Transcript When we last looked at the Beatles, they had just achieved their American success, and had appeared in their first film, A Hard Day's Night. Today, we're going to look at the massive artistic growth that happened to them between late 1964 and mid 1965, the making of their second film, Help!, the influence, both artistic and personal, of Bob Dylan on the group, and their introduction both to studio experimentation and to cannabis. We're going to look at "Ticket to Ride": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Ticket to Ride"] 1964 was a tremendously busy year for the Beatles. After they'd finished making A Hard Day's Night, but even before it was released, they had gone on yet another tour, playing Denmark, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, Australia, and New Zealand, though without Ringo for much of the tour -- Ringo had to have his tonsils removed, and so for the first eight shows of the tour he was replaced by session drummer Jimmy Nicol, the former drummer with Colin Hicks and his Cabin Boys, who had played on several cheap soundalike records of Beatles songs. Nicol was a competent drummer, though very different in style from Ringo, and he found his temporary moment of celebrity hugely upsetting -- he later described it as the worst thing to ever happen to him, and ended up declaring bankruptcy only nine months after touring with the group. Nicol is now a recluse, and hasn't spoken to anyone about his time with the Beatles in more than thirty years. After Ringo returned to the group and the film came out they went back into the studio, only two months after the release of their third album, to start work on their fourth. They recorded four songs in two sessions before departing on their first full US tour. Those songs included two cover versions -- a version of "Mr. Moonlight" by Doctor Feelgood and the Interns that appeared on the album, and a version of Little Willie John's "Leave My Kitten Alone" that didn't see release until 1995 -- and two originals written mostly or entirely by John Lennon, "Baby's In Black", and "I'm a Loser": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I'm a Loser"] "I'm a Loser" was an early sign of an influence that had particularly changed Lennon's attitude to songwriting -- that of Bob Dylan. Dylan had been on the group's radar for some time -- Paul McCartney in the Anthology book seems to have a confused memory of seeing Madhouse on Castle Street, the TV play Dylan had appeared in in January 1963 -- but early 1964 had seen him rise in prominence to the point that he was a major star, not just an obscure folk singer. And Lennon had paid particular attention to what he was doing with his lyrics. We've already seen that Lennon had been writing surreal poetry for years, but at this point in his life he still thought of his songwriting and his poetry as separate. As he would later put it "I had a sort of professional songwriter's attitude to writing pop songs; we would turn out a certain style of song for a single, and we would do a certain style of thing for this and the other thing. I'd have a separate songwriting John Lennon who wrote songs for the meat market, and I didn't consider them (the lyrics or anything) to have any depth at all." This shouldn't be taken as Lennon saying that the early Beatles songs were lacking in quality, or that he didn't take the work seriously, but that it wasn't about self-expression. He was trying to do the best work he could as a craftsman. Listening to Dylan had showed him that it was possible instead to treat pop songwriting as art, in the sense Lennon understood the term -- as a means of personal expression that could also allow for experimentation and playing games. "I'm a Loser" is a first tentative step towards that, with Lennon for one of the first times consciously writing about his own emotions -- though careful to wrap those feelings both in a conventional love song structure and in a thick layer of distancing irony, to avoid making himself vulnerable -- and the stylistic influence of Dylan is very noticeable, as much in the instrumentation as in the lyrics. While several early Beatles singles had featured Lennon playing harmonica, he had been playing a chromatic harmonica, a type of harmonica that's mostly used for playing single-note melodies, because it allows the player to access every single note, but which is not very good for bending notes or playing chords. If you've heard someone playing the harmonica as a single-note melody instrument with few or no chords, whether Stevie Wonder, Larry Adler, or Max Geldray, the chances are they were playing a chromatic harmonica. On "I'm a Loser", though, Lennon plays a diatonic harmonica -- an instrument that he would refer to as a "harp" rather than a harmonica, because he associated it with the blues, where it's often referred to as a harp. Diatonic harmonicas are the instrument of choice for blues players because they allow more note-bending, and it's easier to play a full chord on them -- the downside, that you have a smaller selection of notes available, is less important in the blues, which tends towards harmonic minimalism. Diatonic harmonicas are the ones you're likely to hear on country, blues, and folk recordings -- they're the instrument played by people like Little Walter, Sonny Boy Williamson, Charlie McCoy, and Bob Dylan. Lennon had played a diatonic before, on "I Should Have Known Better", another song which shows Dylan's influence in the performance, though not in the lyrics. In both cases he is imitating Dylan's style, which tends to be full of chordal phrases rather than single-note melody. What's interesting about “I'm a Loser” though is contrasting John's harmonica solo with George's guitar solo which follows immediately after: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I'm a Loser"] That's a pure Carl Perkins solo, and the group would, in their choices of cover versions for the next few months, move away somewhat from the soul and girl-group influences that dominated the covers on their first two albums, and towards country and rockabilly -- they would still cover Larry Williams, Little Richard, and Chuck Berry, but there were no more covers of contemporary Black artists, and instead there were cover versions of Buddy Holly, Carl Perkins, and Buck Owens, and Harrison switched from the Rickenbacker that had been his main instrument on A Hard Day's Night to playing a Gretsch -- the brand of guitar that Chet Atkins and Eddie Cochrane played. The consensus among commentators -- with which, for once, I agree -- seems to be that this was also because of the influence of Dylan. The argument is that the Beatles heard Dylan's music as a form of country music, and it inspired them to go back to their other country-oriented influences. And this makes a lot of sense -- it was only fifteen years earlier, at the same time as they replaced "race" with "rhythm and blues", that Billboard magazine chose to rename their folk chart to the country and western chart -- as Tyler Mahan Coe puts it, "after years of trying to figure out what to call their “poor Black people music” and “poor white people music” charts". And Dylan had been as influenced by Hank Williams as by Woody Guthrie. In short what the Beatles, especially Lennon, heard in Dylan seems to have been three things -- a reminder of the rockabilly and skiffle influences that had been their first love before they'd discovered R&B and soul, permission to write honestly about one's own experiences, and an acknowledgement that such writing could include surrealistic wordplay. Fundamentally, Dylan, as much as being a direct influence, seems to have given the group a kind of permission -- to have shown them that there was room in the commercial sphere in which they were now operating for them to venture into musical and lyrical areas that had always appealed to them. But of course, that was not the only influence that Dylan had on the group, as anyone who has ever read anything at all about their first full US tour knows. That tour saw them playing huge venues like the Hollywood Bowl -- a show which later made up a big part of their only official live album, which was finally released in 1977: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Things We Said Today (live at the Hollywood Bowl 1964)"] It was nine days into the tour, on the twenty-eighth of August 1964, that they met Bob Dylan for the first time. The meeting with Dylan is usually called the first time the Beatles ever smoked cannabis -- and that's true, at least if you're talking about them as a group. Lennon had tried it around 1960, and both Lennon and Harrison had tried it at a show at the Southport Floral Hall in early 1962, but neither had properly understood what they were smoking, and had both already been drunk before smoking it. According to a later interview with Harrison, that had led to the two of them madly dancing the Twist in their dressing room, shouting "This stuff isn't doing anything!" But it was at this meeting that Paul and Ringo first smoked it, and it also seems to have been taken by Lennon and Harrison as their "real" first time, possibly partly because being introduced to cannabis by Bob Dylan in a New York hotel sounds a lot cooler than being introduced to it by your support band's drummer in Southport, possibly because it was the first time that they had all smoked it together as a group, but mostly because this was the time when it became a regular part of the group's life. Oddly, it happened because of a misheard lyric. Dylan had loved "I Want to Hold Your Hand", and had misheard "I can't hide" as "I get high", and thus just assumed that the British band were already familiar with cannabis. The drug had a profound effect on them -- McCartney later recalled being convinced he had discovered the meaning of life, writing it down on a bit of paper, and getting their roadie Mal Evans to hold the paper for safekeeping. The next morning, when he looked at the paper, he found it merely said "there are seven levels". Lennon, on the other hand, mostly remembered Dylan playing them his latest demos and telling them to listen to the words, but Lennon characteristically being unable to concentrate on the lyrics because in his stoned state he was overwhelmed by the rhythm and general sound of the music. From this point on, the use of cannabis became a major part of the group's life, and it would soon have a profound effect on their lifestyles, their songwriting, the production on their records, and every other aspect of their career. The Beatle on whom it seems to have had the strongest and most immediate effect was Lennon, possibly because he was the one who was coping least well with success and most needed something to take his mind off things. Lennon had always been susceptible to extremes of mood -- it's likely that he would these days be diagnosed as bipolar, and we've already seen how as soon as he'd started writing personally, he'd written "I'm a Loser". He was feeling trapped in suburbia, unsuited for his role as a husband and father, unhappy about his weight, and just generally miserable. Cannabis seemed, at least at first, to offer a temporary escape from that. All the group spent much of the next couple of years stoned, but Lennon probably more than any of them, and he was the one whose writing it seemed to affect most profoundly. On the group's return from the US, they carried on working on the next album, and on a non-album single designed to be released simultaneously with it. "I Feel Fine" is a major milestone in the group's career in a number of ways. The most obvious is the opening -- a brief bit of feedback which Lennon would always later claim to be the first deliberate use of the technique on a record: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I Feel Fine"] Feedback had, up until this point, been something that musicians generally tried to avoid -- an unwanted sound that could wreck a performance. But among guitarists in London, especially, it was becoming the fashionable sound to incorporate, in a carefully controlled manner, in order to make sounds that nobody had heard before. Jeff Beck, Dave Davies, and Pete Townshend would all argue about which of them was the first to use the technique, but all were using it on stage by the time the Beatles recorded "I Feel Fine". But the Beatles were, if not the first to deliberately use feedback on a record (as I've said in the past, there is no such thing as a first anything, and there are debatable examples where feedback may be deliberate going back to the 1930s and some records by Bob Wills), certainly the most prominent artists to do so up to that point, and also the first to make it a major, prominent feature of a hit record in this manner. If they hadn't done it, someone else undoubtedly would, but they were the first to capture the sound that was becoming so popular in the London clubs, and as so often in their career they were able to capture something that was at the cutting edge of the underground culture and turn it into something that would be accepted by millions. "I Feel Fine" was important to the Beatles in another way, though, in that it was the first Beatles original to be based entirely around a guitar riff, and this was if anything a more important departure from their earlier records than the feedback was. Up to this point, while the Beatles had used riffs in covers like "Twist and Shout", their originals had avoided them -- the rhythm guitar had tended to go for strummed chords, while the lead guitar was usually reserved for solos and interjections. Rather than sustaining a riff through the whole record, George Harrison would tend to play answer phrases to the vocal melody, somewhat in the same manner as a backing vocalist. This time, though, Lennon wrote an entire song around a riff -- one he had based on an R&B record from a few years earlier that he particularly loved, "Watch Your Step" by Bobby Parker: [Excerpt: Bobby Parker, "Watch Your Step"] Parker's record had, in turn, been inspired by two others -- the influence of Ray Charles' "What'd I Say" is very obvious, but Parker had based the riff on one that Dizzy Gillespie had used in "Manteca", a classic early Afro-Cuban jazz record from 1947: [Excerpt: Dizzy Gillespie, "Manteca"] Parker had played that riff on his guitar, varied it, and come up with what may be the most influential guitar riff of all time, one lifted not only by the Beatles (on both "I Feel Fine" and, in a modified form, "Day Tripper") but Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, the Allman Brothers Band, and many, many others: [Excerpt: Bobby Parker, "Watch Your Step"] Lennon took that riff and based a new song around it -- and it's important to note here that "I Feel Fine" *is* a new song. Both songs share the same riff and twelve-bar blues structure, but Lennon's lyric and melody are totally different, and the record has a different feel. There's a blurry line between plagiarism and homage, and to my mind "I Feel Fine" stays on the right side of that line, although it's a difficult issue because the Beatles were so much more successful than the unknown Parker. Part of the reason "I Feel Fine" could be the Beatles' first single based around a riff was it was recorded on a four-track machine, EMI having finally upgraded their equipment, which meant that the Beatles could record the instrumental and vocal tracks separately. This allowed Lennon and Harrison to hold down the tricky riff in unison, something Lennon couldn't do while also singing the melody -- it's noticeable that when they performed this song live, Lennon usually strummed the chords on a semi-acoustic guitar rather than doubling the riff as he does on the record. It's also worth listening to what Ringo's doing on the drums on the track. One of the more annoying myths about the Beatles is the claim made by a lot of people that Starr was in some way not a good drummer. While there has been some pushback on this, even to the extent that there is now a contrarian counterconsensus that says he was the best drummer in the world at the time, the general public still thinks of him as having been not particularly good. One listen to the part Starr played on "I Feel Fine" -- or indeed a close listen to any of his drum parts -- should get rid of that idea. While George and John are basically duplicating Parker's riff, Ringo picks up on the Parker record's similarity to "What'd I Say" and plays essentially the same part that Ray Charles' drummer had: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I Feel Fine (isolated drum part)"] There are copies of that posted on YouTube, and almost all of them have comments from people claiming that the drumming in question must be a session drummer, because Starr couldn't play that well. Several of the Beatles' singles for the next two years would feature a heavy guitar riff as their main instrumental hook. Indeed, it seems like late 1964 is a point where things start to change a little for the Beatles in how they conceptualise singles and albums. Up to this point, they seem to have just written every song as a potential single, then chosen the ones they thought of as the most commercial as singles and stuck the rest out as album tracks. But from autumn 1964 through early 1966 there seems, at least on Lennon's part, to be a divide in how he looked at songs. The songs he brought in that became singles were almost uniformly guitar-driven heavy rockers with a strong riff. Meanwhile, the songs recorded for albums were almost all based on strummed acoustic guitars, usually ballads or at most mid-tempo, and often with meditative lyrics. He clearly seems to have been thinking in terms of commercial singles and less commercial album tracks, even if he didn't quite articulate it that way. I specify Lennon here, because there doesn't seem to be a comparable split in McCartney's writing -- partly because McCartney didn't really start writing riff-based songs until Lennon dropped the idea in late 1966. McCartney instead seems to start expanding his palette of genres -- while Lennon seems to be in two modes for about an eighteen-month period, and not really to venture out of either the bluesy riff-rocker or the country-flavoured folk rock mode, McCartney starts becoming the stylistic magpie he would become in the later period of the group's career. The B-side to the single, "She's a Woman" is, like the A-side, blues-based, but here it's McCartney in Little Richard mode. The most interesting aspect to it, though, is the rhythm guitar part -- off-beat stabs which sound very much like the group continuing to try to incorporate ska into their work: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "She's a Woman"] The single went to number one, of course, as all the group's singles in this period did. Beatles For Sale, the album that came out of these sessions, is generally regarded as one of the group's weaker efforts, possibly because of the relatively large number of cover versions, but also because of its air of bleakness. From the autumnal cover photo to the laid-back acoustic feel of much of the album, to the depressing nature of Lennon's contributions to the songwriting -- "No Reply", "I'm a Loser", "Baby's in Black", and "I Don't Want to Spoil the Party" all being a far cry from "I Feel Fine" – it's not a fun album by any means. I've always had a soft spot for the album myself, but it's clearly the work of people who were very tired, depressed, and overworked. And they were working hard -- in the four months after the end of their American tour on the twentieth of September, they recorded most of Beatles For Sale and the accompanying single, played forty-eight gigs, made TV appearances on Shindig, Scene at 6:30, Thank Your Lucky Stars, Ready Steady Go, and Top of the Pops, radio appearances on Top Gear and Saturday Club, and sundry interviews. On top of that John also made an appearance on Peter Cook and Dudley Moore's show "Not Only... But Also", performing versions of some of his poetry with Moore and Norman Rossington, who had co-starred in A Hard Day's Night: [Excerpt: John Lennon, Dudley Moore and Norman Rossington, "All Abord Speeching"] They did get a month off from mid-January 1965 through mid-February, but then it was back to work on a new film and accompanying soundtrack album. The group's second film, Help!, is generally regarded with rather less fondness than A Hard Day's Night, and it's certainly the case that some aspects of the film have not dated at all well -- in particular the way that several characters are played by white actors in brownface doing very unconvincing Indian accents, and the less than respectful attitude to Hindu religious beliefs, are things which will make any modern viewer with the slightest sensitivity to such issues cringe terribly. But those aren't the aspects of the film which most of its critics pick up on -- rather they tend to focus only on the things that the Beatles themselves criticise about the film, mostly that the group spent most of the filming stoned out of their minds, and the performances are thus a lot less focused than those in A Hard Day's Night, and also that the script -- written this time by Richard Lester's regular collaborator Charles Wood, from a story by Marc Behm, rather than by Alun Owen -- is also a little unfocused. All these are fair criticisms as far as they go, but it's also the case that Help! is not a film that is best done justice by being viewed on a small screen on one's own, as most of its critics have viewed it most of the time. Help! is part of a whole subgenre of films which were popular in the 1960s but largely aren't made today -- the loose, chaotic, adventure comedy in which a nominal plot is just an excuse for a series of comedy sketches strung together with spectacular visuals. The genre encompasses everything from It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World to Casino Royale to The Pink Panther, and all of these films are meant to be seen on a big screen which allows the audience to appreciate their visual inventiveness, and in a communal audience which is laughing along with them. And when seen in that light, Help! is actually a remarkably entertaining example of the type. Yes, it doesn't hold together as well as A Hard Day's Night, and it doesn't resolve so much as just stop, but structurally it's remarkably close to the films of the Marx Brothers, especially their Paramount films, and it's odd that the Marx comparisons get made about A Hard Day's Night, a slice-of-life film inspired by the French New Wave, and not about the screwball comedy that ends in a confused chase sequence. There is one thing that is worth noting about Help! that is often obscured -- part of the reason for its globetrotting nature was because of the levels of taxation in Britain at the time. For top earners, like the Beatles were, the marginal rate of income tax was as high as ninety-five percent in the mid-sixties. Many of us would think this was a reasonable rate for people who were earning many, many times in a year what most people would earn in a lifetime, but it's also worth noting that the Beatles' success had so far lasted only two years, and that a pop act who was successful for five years was remarkably long-lived -- in the British pop industry only Cliff Richard and the Shadows had had a successful career as chart artists for longer than that, and even they were doing much less well in 1965 than they had been in 1963. In retrospect, of course, we know that the Beatles would continue to sell millions of records a year for more than sixty years, but that was not something any of them could possibly have imagined at the time, and we're still in a period where Paul McCartney could talk about going into writing musicals once the Beatles fad passed, and Ringo could still imagine himself as the owner of a hairdresser's. So it's not completely unreasonable of them to want to keep as much of their money as they could, while they could, and so while McCartney will always talk in interviews about how many of the scenes in the film were inspired by a wishlist from the group -- "We've never been skiing", "We've never been to the Bahamas" -- and there might even be some truth to that, it's also the case that the Bahamas were as known for their lax tax regime as for their undoubted charm as a tourist destination, and these journeys were not solely about giving the group a chance to have fun. But of course, before making the film itself, the group had to record songs for its soundtrack, and so on February the sixteenth they went into the studio to record four songs, including the next single, "Ticket to Ride": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Ticket to Ride"] While "Ticket to Ride" is mostly -- or possibly solely -- John's song, the record is very much Paul's record. For most of 1964, McCartney hadn't really been pulling his weight in the songwriting department when compared to John -- the handful of songs he had written had included some exceptional ones, but for the most part he hadn't written much, and John had been the more productive member of their partnership, writing almost all of the A Hard Day's Night album, most of the better tracks on Beatles For Sale, and the non-album single "I Feel Fine". But now, John was sinking into one of his periodic bouts of depression -- he was still writing strong material, and would produce some of the best songs of his career in 1965, but he was unfocused and unhappy, and it was showing in his slowed productivity -- while McCartney was energised by living in London, the cultural capital of the world at that point in time, and having a famous girlfriend who was exposing him to vast areas of culture he had never been aware of before. I say that "Ticket to Ride" is written by John, but there is some slight dispute about who contributed what to the writing. John's statement was that the song was all him, and that Paul's main contribution was the drum pattern that Ringo plays. Paul, on the other hand, claims that the song is about a sixty-forty split, with John being the sixty. McCartney's evidence for that is the strong vocal harmony he sings -- usually, if there's a two-part harmony like that on a Beatles song, it came about because Lennon and McCartney were in the same room together while writing it, and singing the part together as they were writing. He also talks about how when writing it they were discussing Ryde in the Isle of Wight, where McCartney's cousin ran a pub. I can certainly see it being the case that McCartney co-wrote the song, but I can also easily see the musicianly McCartney feeling the need to harmonise what would otherwise have been a monotonous melody, and adding the harmonies during the recording stage. Either way, though, the song is primarily John's in the writing, but the arrangement is primarily McCartney's work -- and while Lennon would later claim that McCartney would always pay less attention to Lennon's songs than to McCartney's own, in this middle period of the group's career most of their truly astounding work comes when Lennon brings in the song but McCartney experiments with the arrangement and production. Over and over again we see McCartney taking control of a Lennon song in the studio and bringing out aspects of it that its composer either had not considered or had not had the musical vocabulary or patience to realise on his own. Indeed one can see this as part of the dynamic that eventually led to the group breaking up. Lennon would bring in a half-formed idea and have the whole group work on it, especially McCartney, and turn it into the best version of itself it could be, but this would then seem like McCartney trying to take over. McCartney, meanwhile, with his greater musical facility, would increasingly not bother asking for the input of the group's other members, even when that input would have turned a mediocre song into a good one or a good one into a great one. But at this point in their careers, at least, the collaboration brought out the best in both Lennon and McCartney -- though one must wonder what Harrison and Starr felt about having their parts dictated to them or simply replaced. In the case of "Ticket to Ride", one can trace the evolution of McCartney's drum pattern idea over a period of a few months. He was clearly fascinated by Hal Blaine's drum intro to "Be My Baby": [Excerpt: The Ronettes, "Be My Baby"] and came up with a variation of it for his own song "What You're Doing", possibly the most interesting song on Beatles For Sale on a pure production level, the guitar part for which, owing a lot to the Searchers, is also clearly a pointer to the sound on “Ticket to Ride”: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "What You're Doing"] "Ticket to Ride"s drum part is a more complex variation on that slightly broken pattern, as you can hear if you listen to the isolated drum part: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Ticket to Ride (isolated drums)"] Interestingly, Ringo doesn't keep that precise pattern up all the way through in the studio recording of the song, though he does in subsequent live versions. Instead, from the third verse onwards he shifts to a more straightforward backbeat of the kind he would more normally play: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Ticket to Ride (isolated drums)"] The mono mix of "Ticket to Ride", which is how most listeners of the time encountered it, shows much more than the stereo mix just what the group, and particularly Paul, were trying to do. It's a bass-heavy track, sluggish and thundering. It's also a song that sounds *obsessed*. For the first six bars of the verse, and the whole intro, the song stays on a single chord, A, only changing on the word "away", right before the chorus: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Ticket to Ride"] This obsession with one chord was possibly inspired by soul music, and in particular by "Dancing in the Street", which similarly stays on one chord for a long time: [Excerpt: Martha and the Vandellas, "Dancing in the Street"] We'll be looking more at how soul music was increasingly doing away with chord progressions in favour of keeping to an extended groove on a single chord when we next look at James Brown in a few weeks' time. But in its single-chord focus and its broken drum beat, "Ticket to Ride" is very much a precursor of what the group would do a little over a year later, when they recorded "Tomorrow Never Knows". Of course, it was also around this time that the group discovered Indian music for the first time. There are scenes in the film Help! which feature musicians playing Indian instruments, and George Harrison became fascinated by the sound of the sitar and bought one, and we'll be seeing the repercussions of that for much of the next year. But it's interesting to note that a lot of the elements that make Indian classical music so distinctive to ears used to Western popular music -- the lack of harmonic movement, the modal melodies, the use of percussion not to keep a steady beat but in melodic interplay with the string instruments -- were all already present in songs like "Ticket to Ride", albeit far less obviously and in a way that still fit very much into pop song conventions. The Beatles grew immensely as musicians from their exposure to Indian music, but it's also the case that Indian music appealed to them precisely because it was an extension of the tastes they already had. Unlike when recording Beatles For Sale, the group clearly had enough original material to fill out an album, even if they ended up not doing so and including two mediocre cover versions on the album -- the last time that would happen during the group's time together. The B-sides of the two singles, John's "Yes It Is" and Paul's "I'm Down", both remained only available on the singles, even though the previous film soundtrack had included the B-sides of both its singles. Not only that, but they recorded two Lennon/McCartney songs that would remain unreleased until more than thirty years later. "If You've Got Troubles" was left unreleased for good reason -- a song written for Ringo to sing, it's probably the single worst Lennon/McCartney song ever attempted by the group, with little or nothing to redeem it. McCartney's "That Means a Lot" is more interesting. It's clearly an attempt by McCartney to write a "Ticket to Ride" part two, with a similar riff and feel: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "That Means a Lot"] It even has a sped-up repurposing of the hook line at the end, just as "Ticket to Ride" does, with "Can't you see?" taking the place of "My baby don't care": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "That Means a Lot"] The group spent a couple of sessions on that track, but seem to have given up on it. While it's far from the best thing they did, it's not worthless or unreleasable, and one suspects that they ended up thinking that the track couldn't go on the same album as "Ticket to Ride" because the two songs were just too close. Instead, they ended up giving the song to P.J. Proby, the American singer who had been brought over by Jack Good for the About The Beatles show, and who had built something of a career for himself in the UK with a string of minor hits. Lennon said "we found we just couldn't sing it. In fact, we made a hash of it, so we thought we'd better give it to someone who could do it well". And Proby *could* have done it well -- but whether he did or not is something you can judge for yourself: [Excerpt: P.J. Proby, "That Means a Lot"] Somehow, Proby's version of the song made the top thirty. When the group started filming "Help!", the film was still going under the working title "Eight Arms to Hold You", which absolutely nobody involved liked -- the title was even included on the label of some copies of "Ticket to Ride", but Lennon and McCartney particularly disliked the idea of writing a song to that title. Some have suggested that the plan was to use McCartney's "Eight Days a Week", an album track from Beatles For Sale that had been released as an American single, as a title track, but it seems unlikely that anyone would have considered that -- United Artists wanted something they could put out on a soundtrack album, and the song had already been out for many months. Instead, at almost the last minute, it was decided to name the film "Help!". This was actually close to the very first working title for the film, which had been "Help, Help". According to Lester, "the lawyer said it had already been registered and you mustn’t use it so we had Beatles Two and then Eight Arms to Hold You". The only film I've been able to discover with the title "Help, Help", though, is a silent film from 1912, which I don't imagine would have caused much problem in this case. However, after the group insisted that they couldn't possibly write a song called "Eight Arms to Hold You", Lester realised that if he put an exclamation mark after the word "help", that turned it into a different title. After getting legal approval he announced that the title of the new film was going to be "Help!", and that same day John came up with a song to that title: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Help!"] Lennon later said that the song had started out as a slow, intense, ballad, and he had been persuaded to speed it up in the studio somewhat against his will. The song being performed as an upbeat pop song possibly made it harder for the public to see what was obvious to Lennon himself, that the song itself was a cry for help from someone going through a mental health crisis. Despite the title not being his, the sentiments certainly were, and for the first time there was barely even the fig-leaf of romantic love to disguise this. The song's lyrics certainly could be interpreted as being the singer wanting help from a romantic partner, but they don't actually specify this, which is not something that could be said about any of the group's other originals up to this point. The soundtrack album for Help! is also notable in other ways. George Harrison writes two songs on the album, when he'd only written one in total for the first four albums. From this point on he would be a major songwriting presence in the group. It also contains the most obvious Dylan homage yet, with Lennon impersonating Dylan's vocal style on "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away", recorded three days after "Ticket to Ride": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away"] "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away" was notable in another way as well -- it was the first time that a musician other than the Beatles or George Martin was called in to work on a Beatles record (other than Andy White on the "Love Me Do" session, which was not something the Beatles chose or approved of). The flute player Johnny Scott overdubbed two tracks of flute at the end of the recording: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away"] That was a sign of things to come, because in June, once filming had completed, the group went into the studio to continue recording for the non-soundtrack side of the soundtrack album. This was the height of the group's success and embrace by the establishment -- two days earlier it had been announced that they were all to be awarded MBEs -- and it's also the point at which McCartney's new creative growth as a songwriter really became apparent. They recorded three songs on the same day -- his Little Richard soundalike "I'm Down", which ended up being used as the B-side for "Help!", an acoustic country song called "I've Just Seen a Face", and finally a song whose melody had come to him in a dream many months earlier. McCartney had been so impressed by the melody he'd dreamed that he'd been unable to believe it was original to him, and had spent a long time playing it to other people to see if they recognised it. When they didn't, he eventually changed the lyrics from his original jokey "Scrambled eggs/Oh my baby how I love your legs" to something more appropriate, and titled it "Yesterday": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Yesterday (Anthology 2 early take)"] "Yesterday" was released as a Beatles track, on a Beatles album, but it had absolutely no involvement from John, George, and Ringo -- nobody could figure out how to adapt the song to a guitars/bass/drums format. Instead George Martin scored it for a string quartet, with some assistance from McCartney who, worried that strings would end up meaning something Mantovani-like, insisted that the score be kept as simple as possible, and played with almost no vibrato. The result was a Beatles track that featured five people, but only one Beatle: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Yesterday"] The group's next album would see all the band members appearing on every track, and no musicians brought in from outside the group and their organisation, but the genie was now out of the bottle -- the label "The Beatles" on a record no longer meant that it featured John, Paul, George, and Ringo, but just that at least one of them was on the track and the others had agreed it could go out under their name. This would lead to immense changes in the way the group worked, and we'll be seeing how that played out throughout the rest of the 1960s.

Jul 1, 2021

Episode 126 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “For Your Love”, the Yardbirds, and the beginnings of heavy rock and the guitar hero. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-minute bonus episode available, on “A Lover’s Concerto” by the Toys. 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…)

Jun 21, 2021

This is a bonus episode, part of Pledge Week 2021. Patreon backers get one of these with every episode of the main podcast. If you want to get those, and to support the podcast, please visit patreon.com/andrewhickey to sign up for a dollar a month or more. Click below for the transcript. (more…)

Jun 20, 2021

This is a bonus episode, part of Pledge Week 2021. Patreon backers get one of these with every episode of the main podcast. If you want to get those, and to support the podcast, please visit patreon.com/andrewhickey to sign up for a dollar a month or more. Click below for the transcript. (more…)

Jun 19, 2021

This is a bonus episode, part of Pledge Week 2021. Patreon backers get one of these with every episode of the main podcast. If you want to get those, and to support the podcast, please visit patreon.com/andrewhickey to sign up for a dollar a month or more. Click below for the transcript. Today, we're going to look at a record that, like the record we looked at in the main podcast this week, has connections to Kim Fowley and to the Beach Boys, who covered it just as they did "Moon Dawg". But we're going to look at it as a way to say goodbye to Gaynel Hodge, who has appeared in so many of our previous episodes. Hodge played piano on "Alley Oop", which we've done a bonus podcast on before, and which is also very briefly discussed in this week's main episode, and while I was writing that, I heard from a Twitter follower that he had died. We've already covered all the records we're going to look at in which he had a major involvement, so today we're going to look at another one on which he was just a session musician. This one is actually from 1962, when we're still in 1960 in the main podcast, but it's not jumping so far ahead that it's unreasonable, and I wanted to tip my hat to him with the last record he played on which I was planning on discussing -- if you remember the Patreon episode on "Little Bitty Pretty One", I said we'd be looking at Thurston Harris' backing group when we got to 1962. So today, let's look at "Papa Oom Mow Mow" by the Rivingtons: [Excerpt: The Rivingtons, "Papa Oom Mow Mow"] The history of the Rivingtons is a convoluted one, as the story of so many vocal groups is. They started out as a group called the Lamplighters, who were formed by Willie Ray Rockwell, who had been an original member of the Hollywood Flames. The first lineup of the Lamplighters also included Leon Hughes, who left before they started recording, to *join* the Hollywood Flames (Hughes of course later went on to join the Coasters). Hughes was replaced by Thurston Harris, and they made their first recordings for Federal records, with Ralph Bass and Johnny Otis. "Be-Bop Wino", their second single and the most impressive of these early recordings, was by a lineup of Rockwell, Harris, Al Frazier, and Matt Nelson: [Excerpt: The Lamplighters, "Be Bop Wino"] They also recorded backing Jimmie Witherspoon: [Excerpt: Jimmie Witherspoon and the Lamplighters, "Sad Life"] Various changes happened in the lineup, as people fell out with each other, got jailed for non-payment of child support, or just generally became too difficult to work with. For a while, the group became made up of Al Frazier, Carl White, Sonny Harris, and Matthew Nelson, and were recording, still for Federal, as the Tenderfoots: [Excerpt: The Tenderfoots, "Kissing Bug"] After four unsuccessful singles, Thurston Harris rejoined the group, and they became the Lamplighters again, recording a few more singles, starting with "Don't Make it So Good": [Excerpt: The Lamplighters, "Don't Make It So Good"] Then they decided to fire Harris again, as he was extremely unreliable. They took on a new singer, Rocky Wilson -- the lineup now was Al Frazier, Carl White, Sonny Harris, and Rocky Wilson. This lineup's first recording was backing, of all people, Paul Anka, on his first ever recording, a session paid for by Anka's father: [Excerpt: Paul Anka, "I Confess"] Lester Sill renamed the group The Sharps, and they started making records under that name, like "Six Months, Three Weeks, Two Days, One Hour": [Excerpt: The Sharps, "Six Months, Three Weeks, Two Days, One Hour"] They also backed their old bandmate Thurston Harris on his big hit "Little Bitty Pretty One": [Excerpt: Thurston Harris, "Little Bitty Pretty One"] Lester Sill started getting them backing vocal jobs -- it's them on "Rebel Rouser" by Duane Eddy: [Excerpt: Duane Eddy, "Rebel Rouser"] They briefly renamed themselves the Crenshaws, and released a record of the old standard "Moonlight in Vermont", this was a Kim Fowley production, and their first work with him: [Excerpt: The Crenshaws, "Moonlight in Vermont"] They then renamed themselves the Rivingtons -- still with a lineup of Frazier, White, Harris, and Wilson, and Kim Fowley got them to start recording novelty songs, with the normal group of people that Fowley used on novelty records, like Gary Paxton and Gaynel Hodge. Their first record, "Papa Oom Mow Mow", made the top fifty on the charts: [Excerpt: The Rivingtons, "Papa Oom Mow Mow"] There followed a variety of records with similar backing vocals, of which my favourite is the Coasters-flavoured "Kickapoo Joy Juice": [Excerpt: The Rivingtons, "Kickapoo Joy Juice"] But the only one to have any success at all was "The Bird's the Word", which went to number fifty-two on the charts, and was their only R&B hit, making number twenty-seven on the R&B charts: [Excerpt: The Rivingtons, "The Bird's The Word"] Shortly after that, their songs moved from the world of LA R&B groups into the world of surf music, through, of all people, a white group from Minnesota. The Trashmen put together a medley of the Rivingtons' two biggest hits, and called it "Surfin' Bird". Their record originally credited their drummer as the songwriter, but a few lawyers letters later the Rivingtons got the credit they deserved, as "Surfin' Bird" made number four in 1963: [Excerpt: The Trashmen, "Surfin' Bird"] That brought the Rivingtons' original recordings back to mind, for those surf groups like the Beach Boys who had also been influenced by the LA R&B vocal group scene, and "Papa Oom Mow Mow" entered the Beach Boys' regular setlist, and featured on their album Beach Boys Concert, which was the Beach Boys' first number one album, as well as the first number one live album by anyone: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Papa Oom Mow Mow"] The Beach Boys loved the song, and it was also included on their Beach Boys Party! album, as well as on numerous live recordings that have been released on archive sets. To this day, the current touring Beach Boys perform part of the song during their extended performances of "Barbara Ann". The Rivingtons continued to tour for many decades in various lineups. Unfortunately, they remained so obscure that I can't find much more about them after Carl White died towards the end of the seventies, though the other three continued at least into the nineties. There are no compilation CDs of their music in print, and you can only find their hits incongruously placed on various-artists surf albums. It's a shame, as their best recordings are as good as any doo wop out there. The Rivingtons intersected with so many of the great musicians of the period -- Johnny Otis, the Hollywood Flames, Duane Eddy -- that it's really a shame their work is never placed in that context. But at least their hits *are* remembered, and there are very few records that can be more likely to bring pure joy to listeners. And Gaynel Hodge, the piano player on their biggest record, will be remembered too.

Jun 18, 2021

This is a bonus episode, part of Pledge Week 2021. Patreon backers get one of these with every episode of the main podcast. If you want to get those, and to support the podcast, please visit patreon.com/andrewhickey to sign up for a dollar a month or more. Click below for the transcript. (more…)

Jun 18, 2021

Episode 125 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Here Comes the Night", Them, the early career of Van Morrison, and the continuing success of Bert Berns. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-minute bonus episode available, on "Dirty Water" by the Standells . 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, I’ve created a Mixcloud playlist , with full versions of all the songs excerpted in this episode. The information about Bert Berns comes from Here Comes the Night: The Dark Soul of Bert Berns and the Dirty Business of Rhythm and Blues by Joel Selvin. I've used two biographies of Van Morrison. Van Morrison: Into the Music by Ritchie Yorke is so sycophantic towards Morrison that the word "hagiography" would be, if anything, an understatement. Van Morrison: No Surrender by Johnny Rogan , on the other hand, is the kind of book that talks in the introduction about how the author has had to avoid discussing certain topics because of legal threats from the subject. I also used information from the liner notes to The Complete Them 1964-1967 , which as the title suggests is a collection of all the recordings the group made while Van Morrison was in the band. 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 band whose lead singer, sadly, is more controversial now than he was at the period we're looking at. I would normally not want to explicitly talk about current events upfront at the start of an episode, but Van Morrison has been in the headlines in the last few weeks for promoting dangerous conspiracy theories about covid, and has also been accused of perpetuating antisemitic stereotypes with a recent single. So I would like to take this opportunity just to say that no positive comments I make about the Van Morrison of 1965 in this episode should be taken as any kind of approval of the Van Morrison of 2021 -- and this should also be taken as read for one of the similarly-controversial subjects of next week's episode... Anyway, that aside, today we're going to take a look at the first classic rock and roll records made by a band from Northern Ireland, and at the links between the British R&B scene and the American Brill Building. We're going to look at Van Morrison, Bert Berns, and "Here Comes the Night" by Them: [Excerpt: Them, "Here Comes the Night"] When we last looked at Bert Berns, he was just starting to gain some prominence in the East Coast recording scene with his productions for artists like Solomon Burke and the Isley Brothers. We've also, though it wasn't always made explicit, come across several of his productions when talking about other artists -- when Leiber and Stoller stopped working for Atlantic, Berns took over production of their artists, as well as all the other recordings he was making, and so many of the mid-sixties Drifters records we looked at in the episode on "Stand By Me" were Berns productions. But while he was producing soul classics in New York, Berns was also becoming aware of the new music coming from the United Kingdom -- in early 1963 he started receiving large royalty cheques for a cover version of his song "Twist and Shout" by some English band he'd never heard of. He decided that there was a market here for his songs, and made a trip to the UK, where he linked up with Dick Rowe at Decca. While most of the money Berns had been making from "Twist and Shout" had been from the Beatles' version, a big chunk of it had also come from Brian Poole and the Tremeloes, the band that Rowe had signed to Decca instead of the Beatles. After the Beatles became big, the Tremeloes used the Beatles' arrangement of "Twist and Shout", which had been released on an album and an EP but not a single, and had a top ten hit with their own version of it: [Excerpt: Brian Poole and the Tremeloes, "Twist and Shout"] Rowe was someone who kept an eye on the American market, and saw that Berns was a great source of potential hits. He brought Berns over to the UK, and linked him up with Larry Page, the manager who gave Rowe an endless supply of teen idols, and with Phil Solomon, an Irish manager who had been the publicist for the crooner Ruby Murray, and had recently brought Rowe the group The Bachelors, who had had a string of hits like "Charmaine": [Excerpt: The Bachelors, "Charmaine"] Page, Solomon, and Rowe were currently trying to promote something called "Brum Beat", as a Birmingham rival to Mersey beat, and so all the acts Berns worked with were from Birmingham. The most notable of these acts was one called Gerry Levene and the Avengers. Berns wrote and produced the B-side of that group's only single, with Levene backed by session musicians, but I've been unable to find a copy of that B-side anywhere in the digital domain. However, the A-side, which does exist and wasn't produced by Berns, is of some interest: [Excerpt: Gerry Levene and the Avengers, "Dr. Feelgood"] The lineup of the band playing on that included guitarist Roy Wood, who would go on to be one of the most important and interesting British musicians of the later sixties and early seventies, and drummer Graeme Edge, who went on to join the Moody Blues. Apparently at another point, their drummer was John Bonham. None of the tracks Berns recorded for Decca in 1963 had any real success, but Berns had made some useful contacts with Rowe and Solomon, and most importantly had met a British arranger, Mike Leander, who came over to the US to continue working with Berns, including providing the string arrangements for Berns' production of "Under the Boardwalk" for the Drifters: [Excerpt: The Drifters, "Under the Boardwalk"] In May 1964, the month when that track was recorded, Berns was about the only person keeping Atlantic Records afloat -- we've already seen that they were having little success in the mid sixties, but in mid-May, even given the British Invasion taking over the charts, Berns had five records in the Hot One Hundred as either writer or producer -- the Beatles' version of "Twist and Shout" was the highest charting, but he also had hits with "One Way Love" by the Drifters: [Excerpt: The Drifters, "One Way Love"] "That's When it Hurts" by Ben E. King: [Excerpt: Ben E. King, "That's When it Hurts"] "Goodbye Baby (Baby Goodbye)" by Solomon Burke: [Excerpt: Solomon Burke, "Goodbye Baby (Baby Goodbye)"] And "My Girl Sloopy" by the Vibrations: [Excerpt: The Vibrations, "My Girl Sloopy"] And a week after the production of "Under the Boardwalk", Berns was back in the studio with Solomon Burke, producing Burke's classic "Everybody Needs Somebody to Love", though that track would lead to a major falling-out with Burke, as Berns and Atlantic executive Jerry Wexler took co-writing credit they hadn't earned on Burke's song -- Berns was finally at the point in his career where he was big enough that he could start stealing Black men's credits rather than having to earn them for himself: [Excerpt: Solomon Burke, "Everybody Needs Somebody to Love"] Not everything was a hit, of course -- he wrote a dance track with Mike Leander, "Show Me Your Monkey", which was definitely not a big hit -- but he had a strike rate that most other producers and writers would have killed for. And he was also having hits in the UK with the new British Invasion bands -- the Animals had made a big hit from "Baby Let Me Take You Home", the old folk tune that Berns had rewritten for Hoagy Lands. And he was still in touch with Phil Solomon and Dick Rowe, both of whom came over to New York for Berns' wedding in July. It might have been while they were at the wedding that they first suggested to Berns that he might be interested in producing a new band that Solomon was managing, named Them, and in particular their lead singer, Van Morrison. Van Morrison was always a misfit, from his earliest days. He grew up in Belfast, a city that is notoriously divided along sectarian lines between a Catholic minority who (for the most part) want a united Ireland, and a Presbyterian majority who want Northern Ireland to remain part of the UK. But in a city where the joke goes that a Jewish person would be asked "but are you a Catholic Jew or a Protestant Jew?", Morrison was raised as a Jehovah's Witness, and for the rest of his life he would be resistant to fitting into any of the categories anyone tried to put him in, both for good and ill. While most of the musicians from the UK we've looked at so far have been from middle-class backgrounds, and generally attended art school, Morrison had gone to a secondary modern school, and left at fourteen to become a window cleaner. But he had an advantage that many of his contemporaries didn't -- he had relatives living in America and Canada, and his father had once spent a big chunk of time working in Detroit, where at one point the Morrison family planned to move. This exposed Morrison senior to all sorts of music that would not normally be heard in the UK, and he returned with a fascination for country and blues music, and built up a huge record collection. Young Van Morrison was brought up listening to Hank Williams, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Jimmie Rodgers, Louis Jordan, Jelly Roll Morton, and his particular favourite, Lead Belly. The first record he bought with his own money was "Hootin' Blues" by the Sonny Terry Trio: [Excerpt: The Sonny Terry Trio, "Hootin' Blues"] Like everyone, Van Morrison joined a skiffle group, but he became vastly more ambitious in 1959 when he visited a relative in Canada. His aunt smuggled him into a nightclub where an actual American rock and roll group were playing -- Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks: [Excerpt: Ronnie Hawkins, "Mary Lou"] Hawkins had been inspired to get into the music business by his uncle Delmar, a fiddle player whose son, Dale Hawkins, we looked at back in episode sixty-three. His band, the Hawks, had a reputation as the hottest band in Canada -- at this point they were still all Americans, but other than their drummer Levon Helm they would soon be replaced one by one with Canadian musicians, starting with bass player Robbie Robertson. Morrison was enthused and decided he was going to become a professional musician. He already played a bit of guitar, but started playing the saxophone too, as that was an instrument that would be more likely to get him work at this point. He joined a showband called the Monarchs, as saxophone player and occasional vocalist. Showbands were a uniquely Irish phenomenon -- they were eight- or nine-piece groups, rhythm sections with a small horn section and usually a couple of different singers, who would play every kind of music for dancing, ranging from traditional pop to country and western to rock and roll, and would also perform choreographed dance routines and comedy sketches. The Monarchs were never a successful band, but they managed to scrape a living playing the Irish showband circuit, and in the early sixties they travelled to Germany, where audiences of Black American servicemen wanted them to play more soulful music like songs by Ray Charles, an opportunity Morrison eagerly grabbed. It was also a Black American soldier who introduced Morrison to the music of Bobby Bland, whose "Turn on Your Love Light" was soon introduced to the band's set: [Excerpt Bobby "Blue" Bland, "Turn on Your Love Light"] But they were still mostly having to play chart hits by Billy J Kramer or Gerry and the Pacemakers, and Morrison was getting frustrated. The Monarchs did get a chance to record a single in Germany, as Georgie and the Monarchs, with another member, George Jones (not the famous country singer) singing lead, but the results were not impressive: [Excerpt: Georgie and the Monarchs, "O Twingy Baby"] Morrison moved between several different showbands, but became increasingly dissatisfied with what he was doing. Then another showband he was in, the Manhattan Showband, briefly visited London, and Morrison and several of his bandmates went to a club called Studio 51, run by Ken Colyer. There they saw a band called The Downliners Sect, who had hair so long that the Manhattan members at first thought they were a girl group, until their lead singer came on stage wearing a deerstalker hat. The Downliners Sect played exactly the kind of aggressive R&B that Morrison thought he should be playing: [Excerpt: The Downliners Sect, "Be a Sect Maniac"] Morrison asked if he could sit in with the group on harmonica, but was refused -- and this was rather a pattern with the Downliners Sect, who had a habit of attracting harmonica players who wanted to be frontmen. Both Rod Stewart and Steve Marriott did play harmonica with the group for a while, and wanted to join full-time, but were refused as they clearly wanted to be lead singers and the group didn't need another one of them. On returning to Belfast, Morrison decided that he needed to start his own R&B band, and his own R&B club night. At first he tried to put together a sort of supergroup of showband regulars, but most of the musicians he approached weren't interested in leaving their steady gigs. Eventually, he joined a band called the Gamblers, led by guitarist and vocalist Billy Harrison. The Gamblers had started out as an instrumental group, playing rock and roll in the style of Johnny and the Hurricanes, but they'd slowly been moving in a more R&B direction, and playing Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley material. Morrison joined the group on saxophone and vocals -- trading off leads with Harrison -- and the group renamed themselves after a monster movie from a few years before: [Excerpt: THEM! trailer] The newly renamed Them took up a regular gig at the Maritime Hotel, a venue which had previously attracted a trad jazz crowd, and quickly grew a substantial local following. Van Morrison later often said that their residency at the Maritime was the only time Them were any good, but that period was remarkably short -- three months after their first gig, the group had been signed to a management, publishing, and production deal with Philip Solomon, who called in Dick Rowe to see them in Belfast. Rowe agreed to the same kind of licensing deal with Solomon that Andrew Oldham had already got from him for the Stones -- Them would record for Solomon's company, and Decca would license the recordings. This also led to the first of the many, many, lineup changes that would bedevil the group for its short existence -- between 1964 and 1966 there were eighteen different members of the group. Eric Wrixon, the keyboard player, was still at school, and his parents didn't think he should become a musician, so while he came along to the first recording session, he didn't sign the contract because he wasn't allowed to stay with the group once his next term at school started. However, he wasn't needed -- while Them's guitarist and bass player were allowed to play on the records, Dick Rowe brought in session keyboard player Arthur Greenslade and drummer Bobby Graham -- the same musicians who had augmented the Kinks on their early singles -- to play with them. The first single, a cover version of Slim Harpo's "Don't Start Crying Now", did precisely nothing commercially: [Excerpt: Them, "Don't Start Crying Now"] The group started touring the UK, now as Decca recording artistes, but they almost immediately started to have clashes with their management. Phil Solomon was not used to aggressive teenage R&B musicians, and didn't appreciate things like them just not turning up for one gig they were booked for, saying to them "The Bachelors never missed a date in their lives. One of them even had an accident on their way to do a pantomime in Bristol and went on with his leg in plaster and twenty-one stitches in his head." Them were not particularly interested in performing in pantomimes in Bristol, or anywhere else, but the British music scene was still intimately tied in with the older showbiz tradition, and Solomon had connections throughout that industry -- as well as owning a publishing and production company he was also a major shareholder in Radio Caroline, one of the pirate radio stations that broadcast from ships anchored just outside British territorial waters to avoid broadcasting regulations, and his father was a major shareholder in Decca itself. Given Solomon's connections, it wasn't surprising that Them were chosen to be one of the Decca acts produced by Bert Berns on his next UK trip in August 1964. The track earmarked for their next single was their rearrangement of "Baby Please Don't Go", a Delta blues song that had originally been recorded in 1935 by Big Joe Williams and included on the Harry Smith Anthology: [Excerpt: Big Joe Williams' Washboard Blues Singers , "Baby Please Don't Go"] though it's likely that Them had learned it from Muddy Waters' version, which is much closer to theirs: [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, "Baby Please Don't Go"] Bert Berns helped the group tighten up their arrangement, which featured a new riff thought up by Billy Harrison, and he also brought in a session guitarist, Jimmy Page, to play rhythm guitar. Again he used a session drummer, this time Andy White who had played on "Love Me Do". Everyone agreed that the result was a surefire hit: [Excerpt: Them, "Baby Please Don't Go"] At the session with Berns, Them cut several other songs, including some written by Berns, but it was eventually decided that the B-side should be a song of Morrison's, written in tribute to his dead cousin Gloria, which they'd recorded at their first session with Dick Rowe: [Excerpt: Them, "Gloria"] "Baby Please Don't Go" backed with "Gloria" was one of the great double-sided singles of the sixties, but it initially did nothing on the charts, and the group were getting depressed at their lack of success, Morrison and Harrison were constantly arguing as each thought of himself as the leader of the group, and the group's drummer quit in frustration. Pat McAuley, the group's new keyboard player, switched to drums, and brought in his brother Jackie to replace him on keyboards. To make matters worse, while "Baby Please Don't Go" had flopped, the group had hoped that their next single would be one of the songs they'd recorded with Berns, a Berns song called "Here Comes the Night". Unfortunately for them, Berns had also recorded another version of it for Decca, this one with Lulu, a Scottish singer who had recently had a hit with a cover of the Isley Brothers' "Shout!", and her version was released as a single: [Excerpt: Lulu, "Here Comes the Night"] Luckily for Them, though unluckily for Lulu, her record didn't make the top forty, so there was still the potential for Them to release their version of it. Phil Solomon hadn't given up on "Baby Please Don't Go", though, and he began a media campaign for the record. He moved the group into the same London hotel where Jimmy Savile was staying -- Savile is now best known for his monstrous crimes, which I won't go into here except to say that you shouldn't google him if you don't know about them, but at the time he was Britain's most popular DJ, the presenter of Top of the Pops, the BBC's major TV pop show, and a columnist in a major newspaper. Savile started promoting Them, and they would later credit him with a big part of their success. But Solomon was doing a lot of other things to promote the group as well. He part-owned Radio Caroline, and so "Baby Please Don't Go" went into regular rotation on the station. He called in a favour with the makers of Ready Steady Go! and got "Baby Please Don't Go" made into the show's new theme tune for two months, and soon the record, which had been a flop on its first release, crawled its way up into the top ten. For the group's next single, Decca put out their version of "Here Comes the Night", and that was even more successful, making it all the way to number two on the charts, and making the American top thirty: [Excerpt: Them, "Here Comes the Night"] As that was at its chart peak, the group also performed at the NME Poll-Winners' Party at Wembley Stadium, a show hosted by Savile and featuring The Moody Blues, Freddie and the Dreamers, Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames, Herman’s Hermits, Cilla Black, Donovan, The Searchers, Dusty Springfield, The Animals,The Kinks, the Rolling Stones, and the Beatles, among others. Even on that bill, reviewers singled out Them's seven-minute performance of Bobby Bland's "Turn on Your Love Light" for special praise, though watching the video of it it seems a relatively sloppy performance. But the group were already starting to fall apart. Jackie McAuley was sacked from the group shortly after that Wembley show -- according to some of the group, because of his use of amphetamines, but it's telling that when the Protestant bass player Alan Henderson told the Catholic McAuley he was out of the group, he felt the need to emphasise that "I've got nothing against" -- and then use a term that's often regarded as an anti-Catholic slur... On top of this, the group were also starting to get a bad reputation among the press -- they would simply refuse to answer questions, or answer them in monosyllables, or just swear at journalists. Where groups like the Rolling Stones carefully cultivated a "bad boy" image, but were doing so knowingly and within carefully delineated limits, Them were just unpleasant and rude because that's who they were. Bert Berns came back to the UK to produce a couple of tracks for the group's first album, but he soon had to go back to America, as he had work to do there -- he'd just started up his own label, a rival to Red Bird, called BANG, which stood for Bert, Ahmet, Neshui, Gerald -- Berns had co-founded it with the Ertegun brothers and Jerry Wexler, though he soon took total control over it. BANG had just scored a big hit with "I Want Candy" by the Strangeloves, a song Berns had co-written: [Excerpt: The Strangeloves, "I Want Candy"] And the Strangeloves in turn had discovered a singer called Rick Derringer, and Bang put out a single by him under the name "The McCoys", using a backing track Berns had produced as a Strangeloves album track, their version of his earlier hit "My Girl Sloopy". The retitled "Hang on Sloopy" went to number one: [Excerpt: The McCoys, "Hang on Sloopy"] Berns was also getting interested in signing a young Brill Building songwriter named Neil Diamond... The upshot was that rather than continuing to work with Berns, Them were instead handed over to Tommy Scott, an associate of Solomon's who'd sung backing vocals on "Here Comes the Night", but who was best known for having produced "Terry" by Twinkle: [Excerpt: Twinkle, "Terry"] The group were not impressed with Scott's productions, and their next two singles flopped badly, not making the charts at all. Billy Harrison and Morrison were becoming less and less able to tolerate each other, and eventually Morrison and Henderson forced Harrison out. Pat McAuley quit two weeks later, The McAuley brothers formed their own rival lineup of Them, which initially also featured Billy Harrison, though he soon left, and they got signed to a management contract with Reg Calvert, a rival of Solomon's who as well as managing several pop groups also owned Radio City, a pirate station that was in competition with Radio Caroline. Calvert registered the trademark in the name Them, something that Solomon had never done for the group, and suddenly there was a legal dispute over the name. Solomon retaliated by registering trademarks for the names "The Fortunes" and "Pinkerton's Assorted Colours" -- two groups Calvert managed -- and putting together rival versions of those groups. However the problem soon resolved itself, albeit tragically -- Calvert got into a huge row with Major Oliver Smedley, a failed right-libertarian politician who, when not co-founding the Institute for Economic Affairs and quitting the Liberal Party for their pro-European stance and left-wing economics, was one of Solomon's co-directors of Radio Caroline. Smedley shot Calvert, killing him, and successfully pled self-defence at his subsequent trial. The jury let Smedley off after only a minute of deliberation, and awarded Smedley two hundred and fifty guineas to pay for his costs. The McAuley brothers' group renamed themselves to Them Belfast -- and the word beginning with g that some Romany people regard as a slur for their ethnic group -- and made some records, mostly only released in Sweden, produced by Kim Fowley, who would always look for any way to cash in on a hit record, and wrote "Gloria's Dream" for them: [Excerpt: Them Belfast G***ies, "Gloria's Dream"] Morrison and Henderson continued their group, and had a surprise hit in the US when Decca issued "Mystic Eyes", an album track they'd recorded for their first album, as a single in the US, and it made the top forty: [Excerpt: Them, "Mystic Eyes"] On the back of that, Them toured the US, and got a long residency at the Whisky a Go-Go in LA, where they were supported by a whole string of the Sunset Strip's most exciting new bands -- Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band, The Association, Buffalo Springfield, and the Doors. The group became particularly friendly with the Doors, with the group's new guitarist getting thrown out of clubs with Jim Morrison for shouting "Johnny Rivers is a wanker!" at Rivers while Rivers was on stage, and Jim Morrison joining them on stage for duets, though the Doors were staggered at how much the Belfast group could drink -- their drink bill for their first week at the Whisky A Go-Go was $5400. And those expenses caused problems, because Van Morrison agreed before the tour started that he would be on a fixed salary, paid by Phil Solomon, and Solomon would get all the money from the promoters. But then Morrison found out how much Solomon was making, and decided that it wasn't fair that Solomon would get all that money when Morrison was only getting the comparatively small amount he'd agreed to. When Tommy Scott, who Solomon had sent over to look after the group on tour, tried to collect the takings from the promoters, he was told "Van Morrison's already taken the money". Solomon naturally dropped the group, who continued touring the US without any management, and sued them. Various Mafia types offered to take up the group's management contract, and even to have Solomon murdered, but the group ended up just falling apart. Van Morrison quit the group, and Alan Henderson struggled on for another five years with various different lineups of session men, recording albums as Them which nobody bought. He finally stopped performing as Them in 1972. He reunited with Billy Harrison and Eric Wrixon, the group's original keyboardist, in 1979, and they recorded another album and toured briefly. Wrixon later formed another lineup of Them, which for a while included Billy Harrison, and toured with that group, billed as Them The Belfast Blues Band, until Wrixon's death in 2015. Morrison, meanwhile, had other plans. Now that Them's two-year contract with Solomon was over, he wanted to have the solo career people had been telling him he deserved. And he knew how he was going to do it. All along, he'd thought that Bert Berns had been the only person in the music industry who understood him as an artist, and now of course Berns had his own record label. Van Morrison was going to sign to BANG Records, and he was going to work again with Bert Berns, the man who was making hits for everyone he worked with. But the story of "Brown-Eyed Girl", and Van Morrison going solo, and the death of Bert Berns, is a story for another time...

Jun 17, 2021

This is a bonus episode, part of Pledge Week 2021. Patreon backers get one of these with every episode of the main podcast. If you want to get those, and to support the podcast, please visit patreon.com/andrewhickey to sign up for a dollar a month or more. Click below for the transcript. (more…)

Jun 16, 2021

This is a bonus episode, part of Pledge Week 2021. Patreon backers get one of these with every episode of the main podcast. If you want to get those, and to support the podcast, please visit patreon.com/andrewhickey to sign up for a dollar a month or more. Click below for the transcript. (more…)

Jun 15, 2021

This is a bonus episode, part of Pledge Week 2021. Patreon backers get one of these with every episode of the main podcast. If you want to get those, and to support the podcast, please visit patreon.com/andrewhickey to sign up for a dollar a month or more. Click below for the transcript. In this week's main episode, we're taking our first trip to Jamaica, and having our first look at ska music. But of course, ska wasn't the only music to come out of the Caribbean, and calypso music had already had a great impact on the wider music world. Today we're going to look at a major R&B hit from 1963 that had its roots in a calypso song from decades earlier. We're going to look at the career of the great Trinidadian Calypsonian Roaring Lion, and the tragic story of Jimmy Soul, and "If You Wanna Be Happy": [Excerpt: Jimmy Soul, "If You Wanna Be Happy"] Jimmy Soul started his career as a gospel singer, but was signed to SPQR Records with a specific mandate -- sometimes Frank Guida, the producer for Gary "US" Bonds' hits, would come up with something that Bonds didn't want to record. When that happened, Soul got to sing them instead. This meant that Soul would often get saddled with novelty songs, like his first hit, "Twistin' Matilda", which managed to make number twenty-two in the charts: [Excerpt: Jimmy Soul, "Twistin' Matilda"] That was originally a Calypso song from the 1930s, and had been a hit for Harry Belafonte a few years earlier, in a non-Twist version. Soul recorded a follow-up, “When Matilda Comes Back”, but that had no success: [Excerpt: Jimmy Soul, “When Matilda Comes Back”] So they tried to repeat the formula, with was another 1930s calypso song that Bonds had rejected, this time a remake of a song from 1933, originally written and performed by the great Calypsonian Roaring Lion. Roaring Lion was one of the most important Calypsonians of the pre-war era, and wrote many classics of the genre, including his paeans to other singers like "The Four Mills Brothers": [Excerpt: Roaring Lion, "The Four Mills Brothers"] and "Bing Crosby": [Excerpt: Roaring Lion, "Bing Crosby"] Those of you who know Van Dyke Parks' album of calypso covers, Discover America, will probably recognise both those songs. "Ugly Woman" was another song by Roaring Lion, and it advised men to marry ugly women rather than beautiful ones, because an ugly woman was more likely to stay with her husband: [Excerpt: Roaring Lion, "Ugly Woman"] History does not relate what Mrs. Lion thought of that advice. Jimmy Soul's version, retitled "If You Wanna Be Happy", credited three writers along with Roaring Lion -- Frank Guida, Carmella Guida, and Joseph Royster -- though the song has very little difference from the original: [Excerpt: Jimmy Soul, "If You Wanna Be Happy"] The main difference between Soul's record and the original was a brief dialogue at the end, presumably included to give the other writers some reason for their credit: [Excerpt: Jimmy Soul, "If You Wanna Be Happy"] That dialogue was largely inspired by Bo Diddley's earlier "Say Man": [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, "Say Man"] "If You Wanna Be Happy" made number one on the Billboard charts, and made the top forty in the UK, where it was also covered by an instrumental group, Peter B's Looners: [Excerpt: Peter B's Looners, "If You Wanna Be Happy"] That group, with the addition of vocalists Beryl Marsden and Rod Stewart, would later morph into Shotgun Express, before the guitarist and drummer went on to form a blues band, and we'll be hearing more about Peter Green and Mick Fleetwood in a year or so. While "If You Wanna Be Happy" made number one, the follow-up was less successful, and I'm not going to excerpt it here. I did excerpt Wynonie Harris' "Bloodshot Eyes" in the main podcast, and had to think long and hard about including a song that trivialised domestic abuse the way that song does, but Jimmy Soul's next single, "Treat 'Em Tough", goes much further. It is essentially the same tune as "If You Wanna Be Happy", but rather than the dated but arguably humorous misogyny of advocating marrying an ugly woman, which is pretty much par for the course for 1930s humour, it just flat-out advocates beating up women to keep them in line. I won't excerpt that, and I don't suggest you seek it out. It's a quite vile record. That only went to number one hundred and eight, and Soul never had another hit, and joined the army. He became a drug addict, and died in prison in 1988, aged forty-seven. Roaring Lion had a rather happier ending, dying in 1999, aged ninety-one, after sixty-five successful years in the music business.

Jun 15, 2021

Transcript About a year ago I did a pledge week, to encourage people to back me on Patreon. This seemed relatively successful, so I'm going to do it again. For those who don't know, the podcast is supported by listeners pledging money on the crowdfunding site Patreon. Listeners can give $1 a month or more, and I use that to fund the project. They also get various other bonus things, like the ability to send me private messages, free copies of my books for those on higher tiers, and so on. Some of those bonuses haven't been that frequent in the last few months, as between the pandemic, various things in my personal life and health, and the disruption caused by a false DMCA claim, this has been the single most difficult six months of my life to date, as you can probably tell from the disrupted schedule recently, though I'm now trying to get back on track with everything. But one bonus they always get, and have for two years, is a ten-minute or so extra podcast along with every regular episode. Anyone backing the Patreon at a dollar a month or more gets access to those as they come out, plus to the ninety or so old ones I've already done. So this week, like last year, I'm going to give everyone a taste of what the backers get -- every day for a week I'm going to upload an old Patreon bonus episode, in the hope that some of you like what you hear enough to sign up for the Patreon. However, I want to make something very clear -- I only want you to sign up *if you can afford to*. New signups mean I can afford to do this podcast without having to add advertising and so on, but I know that a lot of people are having financial problems right now. If you have enough money after looking after yourself and your family, and after any charitable giving and so on to actual important causes, that you feel able to throw a dollar a month to someone talking about music, great. If you don't, then please don't feel obliged, and the podcast will continue to be free. The next proper episode of the podcast, on "Here Comes the Night" by Them, will be up in a day or two -- I'm recording it right after I upload this and the first of the Pledge Week episodes, which will be on "If You Wanna Be Happy" by Jimmy Soul, and it'll be up as soon as it's edited. In the meantime, enjoy the free bonuses.

Jun 8, 2021

Episode 124 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “People Get Ready”, the Impressions, and the early career of Curtis Mayfield. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-minute bonus episode available, on “I’m Henry VIII I Am” by Herman’s Hermits . 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…)

May 25, 2021

Episode 123 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'", the Righteous Brothers, Shindig! and "blue-eyed soul". 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 "Wooly Bully" by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs . Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Erratum I say the music in the bridge drops down to “just the bass”. Obviously there is also a celeste on that section. Resources No Mixcloud this week due to the number of Righteous Brothers songs. A lot of resources were used for this episode. Time of My Life: A Righteous Brother's Memoir i s Bill Medley'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 Brill Building scene, and I used it for bits about how Mann and Weil wrote their songs. I’ve referred to two biographies of Spector in this episode, Phil Spector: Out of His Head by Richard Williams and He’s a Rebel by Mark Ribkowsky . This two-CD set contains all of the Righteous Brothers recordings excerpted here, all their hits, and a selection of Medley and Hatfield's solo work. It would be an absolutely definitive set, except for the Spector-era tracks being in stereo. There are many compilations available with some of the hits Spector produced, but I recommend getting Back to Mono , a four-CD overview of his career containing all the major singles put out by Philles. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon . Why not join them? Transcript Today we're going to look at a record that according to BMI is the most-played song of the twentieth century on American radio, and continued to be the most played song for the first two decades of the twenty-first as well, a record that was arguably the artistic highpoint of Phil Spector's career, and certainly the commercial highpoint for everyone involved. We're going to look at "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'" by the Righteous Brothers: [Excerpt: The Righteous Brothers, "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'"] In this episode we're going to take one of our first looks at an American act who owed their success to TV. We've seen these before, of course -- we've talked in passing about Ricky Nelson, and there was an episode on Chubby Checker -- but there have been relatively few. But as we pass into the mid-sixties, and television becomes an even more important part of the culture, we'll see more of this. In 1964, ABC TV had a problem. Two years before, they'd started a prime-time folk TV show called Hootenanny: [Excerpt: Jack Linkletter introducing Hootenanny] That programme was the source of some controversy -- it blacklisted Pete Seeger and a few other Communist folk musicians, and while Seeger himself argued against a boycott, other musicians were enraged, in part because the term Hootenanny had been popularised by Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and other Communist musicians. As a result, several of the top names in the folk scene, like Joan Baez and Ramblin' Jack Elliott, refused to appear on the show. But plenty of performers did appear on the show, usually those at the poppier end of the spectrum, like the New Christie Minstrels: [Excerpt: The New Christie Minstrels, "This Train (live on Hootenanny)"] That lineup of the New Christie Minstrels featured, among others, Barry McGuire, Gene Clark, and Larry Ramos, all of whom we should be seeing in future episodes. But that in itself says something about the programme's problems, because in 1964, the music industry changed drastically. Suddenly, folk music was out, and rock music was in. Half the younger musicians who appeared on Hootenanny -- like those three, but also John Sebastian, John Phillips, Cass Elliot, and others -- all decided they were going to give up singing mass harmony versions of "Go Tell it on the Mountain" accompanied by banjo, and instead they were going to get themselves some electric guitars. And the audience, likewise, decided that they'd rather see the Beatles and the Stones and the Dave Clark Five than the New Christie Minstrels, the Limeliters, and the Chad Mitchell Trio, if that was all the same to the TV companies. And so ABC needed a new prime-time music variety show, and they needed it in a hurry. But there was a problem -- when the music industry is shifting dramatically and all of a sudden it's revolving around a style of music that is based on a whole other continent, what do you do to make a TV show featuring that music? Well, you turn to Jack Good, of course. For those of you who haven't listened to all the earlier episodes, Jack Good had basically invented rock and roll TV, and he'd invented it in the UK, at a time when rock and roll was basically a US-only genre. Good had produced a whole string of shows -- Six-Five Special, Oh Boy!, Boy Meets Girls, and Wham! -- which had created a set of television conventions for the presentation of rock and roll, and had managed to get an audience by using a whole host of British unknowns, with the very occasional guest appearance by a visiting American rocker. In 1962, he'd moved to the US, and had put together a pilot episode of a show called "Young America Swings the World", financed with his own money. That programme had been on the same lines as his UK shows, and had featured a bunch of then-unknowns, like Jackie DeShannon. It had also featured a band led by Leon Russell and containing Glen Campbell and David Gates, none of whom were famous at the time, and a young singer named P.J. Proby, who was introduced to Good by DeShannon and her songwriting partner Sharon Sheeley, whose demos he worked on. We talked a bit about Proby back in the episode on "LSD-25" if you want to go back and listen to the background on that. Sheeley, of course, had known Good when he worked with her boyfriend Eddie Cochran a few years earlier. "Young America Swings the World" didn't sell, and in 1964, Good returned to England to produce a TV special for the Beatles, "Around the Beatles", which also featured Millie singing "My Boy Lollipop", Cilla Black, Sounds Incorporated, the Vernons Girls, and Long John Baldry singing a Muddy Waters song with the Beatles shouting the backing vocals from the audience: [Excerpt: Long John Baldry, "Got My Mojo Working"] The show also featured Proby, who Good had brought over from the US and who here got his first TV exposure, singing a song Rufus Thomas had recorded for Stax: [Excerpt: P.J. Proby, "Walking the Dog"] Around the Beatles obviously sold to the US, and ABC, who bought it, were suddenly interested in Jack Good's old pilot, too. They asked him to produce two more pilots for a show which was eventually named Shindig! Incidentally, I've seen many people, including some on the production staff, say that the first episode of Shindig! was an episode of Ready Steady Go! with the titles changed. It wasn't. The confusion seems to arise because early in Shindig's run, Around the Beatles was also broadcast by ABC, and when Dave Clark later bought the rights to Around The Beatles and Ready Steady Go!, he released a chunk of Around the Beatles on VHS as a Ready Steady Go special, even though it was made by a totally different production team. Good got together with Sharon Sheeley and her husband, the DJ Jimmy O'Neill, and they started collaborating on the pilots for the show, which eventually credited the three of them as co-creators and producers. The second pilot went in a very different direction -- it was a country music programme, hosted by Roy Clark, who would later become a household name for co-hosting Hee-Haw, and featuring Johnny Cash, along with PJ Proby doing a couple of cover versions of old folk songs that Lonnie Donegan had made famous -- "Rock Island Line" and "Cumberland Gap". But for the third pilot, Good, Sheeley, and O'Neill went back to the old Oh Boy! formula -- they got a couple of properly famous big guest stars, in this case Little Richard and the Angels, who had had a number one the previous year with "My Boyfriend's Back", and a rotating cast of about a dozen unknown or little-known musical acts, all local, who they could fill the show with. The show opened with a medley with all or most of the cast participating: [Excerpt: Shindig Pilot 3 Opening Medley] And then each artist would perform individually, surrounded by a dancing audience, with minimal or no introductions, in a quick-paced show that was a revelation to American audiences used to the polite pacing of American Bandstand. For the most part, they performed cover versions -- on that pilot, even the Angels, rather than doing their own recentish number one record, sang a cover version of "Chapel of Love" -- and in a sign of the British influence, the pilot also featured what may be the first ska performance by an American group -- although they seem to think that "the ska" is a dance, rather than ska being a style of music: [Excerpt: the Hollywood All-Stars, "Jamaica Ska", plus Jimmy O'Neill intro] That show featured Delaney Bramlett, who would later go on to become a fairly well-known and important performer, and the Blossoms, who we've talked about previously. Both of those would become regular parts of the Shindig cast, as would Leon Russell, Bobby Sherman, Jackie and Gayle, Donna Loren, and Glen Campbell. That pilot led to the first broadcast episode, where the two main star acts were Sam Cooke, who sang a non-waltz version of "The Tennessee Waltz" and "Blowin' in the Wind", both from his cabaret act, and the Everly Brothers -- who as well as doing their own songs performed with Cooke at the end of the show in a recording which I only wish wasn't so covered with audience screams, though who can blame the audience? [Excerpt: Sam Cooke and the Everly Brothers, "Lucille"] Shindig was the first prime-time pop music show in the US, and became massively popular -- so much so that it quickly spawned a rival show on NBC, Hullabaloo. In a sign of just how much transatlantic back-and-forth there was at this time, and possibly just to annoy future researchers, NBC's Hullabaloo took its name, though nothing else, from a British TV show of the same name. That British TV show was made by ABC, which is not the same company as American ABC, and was a folk and blues show clearly patterned after Hootenanny, the show Shindig had replaced on American ABC. (And as a quick aside, if you're at all interested in the early sixties British folk and blues movements, I can't recommend Network's double-DVD set of the British Hullabaloo highly enough). Shindig! remained on air for two years, but the show's quality declined markedly after Jack Good left the show a year or so in, and it was eventually replaced on ABC's schedules by Batman, which appealed to largely the same audience. But all that was in the future. Getting back to the first broadcast episode, the Everlys also appeared in the opening medley, where they sang an old Sister Rosetta Tharpe song with Jackie and Gayle and another unknown act who had appeared in the pilot -- The Righteous Brothers: [Excerpt: Jackie and Gayle, The Righteous Brothers, and the Everly Brothers, "Gonna Build a Mountain/Up Above My Head"] The Righteous Brothers would appear on nine out of sixteen episodes broadcast between September and December 1964, and a further seventeen episodes during 1965 -- by which time they'd become the big breakout stars of the show, and had recorded the song that would become the most-played song, *ever*, on American radio, beating out such comparatively unpopular contenders as "Never My Love", "Yesterday", "Stand By Me" and "Can't Take My Eyes Off of You", a record that was played so much that in thirty-six years it had clocked up forty-five years of continuous airtime. The Righteous Brothers were a Californian vocal duo consisting of baritone Bill Medley and tenor Bobby Hatfield. Medley's career in the music business had started when he was nineteen, when he'd just decided to go to the office of the Diamonds, the white vocal group we mentioned in passing in the episode on "Why Do Fools Fall in Love?" who much like the Crew Cuts had had hits by covering records by Black artists: [Excerpt: The Diamonds, "Little Darlin'"] Young Bill Medley fancied himself as a songwriter, and he brought the Diamonds a few of his songs, and they ended up recording two of them -- "Chimes of My Heart", which remained unreleased until a later compilation, and "Woomai-Ling", which was the B-side to a flop single: [Excerpt: The Diamonds, "Woomai-Ling"] But Medley was inspired enough by his brief brush with success that he decided to go into music properly. He formed a band called the Paramours, which eventually gained a second singer, Bobby Hatfield, and he and Hatfield also started performing as a duo, mostly performing songs by Black R&B artists they grew up listening to on Hunter Hancock's radio show. While Medley doesn't say this directly in his autobiography, it seems likely that the duo's act was based specifically on one particular Black act -- Don and Dewey. We've mentioned Don and Dewey before, and I did a Patreon episode on them, but for those who don't remember their brief mentions, Don "Sugarcane" Harris and Dewey Terry were an R&B duo signed to Specialty Records, and were basically their second attempt at producing another Little Richard, after Larry Williams. They were even less successful than Williams was, and had no hits themselves, but they wrote and recorded many songs that would become hits for others, like "Farmer John", which became a garage-band staple, and "I'm Leaving it Up to You", which was a hit for Donny and Marie Osmond. While they never had any breakout success, they were hugely popular among R&B lovers on the West Coast, and two of their other singles were "Justine": [Excerpt: Don and Dewey, "Justine"] And "Ko Ko Joe", which was one of their few singles written by someone else -- in this case by Sonny Bono, who was at that time working for Specialty: [Excerpt: Don and Dewey, "Ko Ko Joe"] Hatfield and Medley would record both those songs in their early months working together, and would also perform them on Shindig! The duo were different in many ways -- Medley was tall and Hatfield comparatively short, Medley sang in a deep bass-baritone and Hatfield in a high tenor, and Hatfield was gregarious, outgoing, and funny while Medley was self-effacing and shy. The duo would often perform comedy routines on stage, patterned after Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, and Hatfield was always the comedian while Medley was the straight man. But on the other hand, Hatfield was actually quite uncomfortable with any level of success -- he just wanted to coast through life and had no real ambition, while Medley was fiercely driven and wanted to become huge. But they both loved R&B music, and in many ways had similar attitudes to the British musicians who, unknown to them at the time, were trying to play R&B in the UK. They were white kids who loved Black music, and desperately wanted to do justice to it. Orange County, where Medley and Hatfield lived, was at the time one of the whitest places in America, and they didn't really have much competition on the local scene from authentic R&B bands. But there *was* a Marine base in the area, with a large number of Black Marines, who wanted to hear R&B music when they went out. Medley and Hatfield quickly became very popular with these audiences, who would address them as "brother", and called their music "righteous" -- and so, looking for a name for their duo act, they became The Righteous Brothers. Their first single, on a tiny local label, was a song written by Medley, "Little Latin Lupe Lou": [Excerpt: The Righteous Brothers, "Little Latin Lupe Lou"] That wasn't a success to start with, but picked up after the duo took a gig at the Rendezvous Ballroom, the surf-rock venue where Dick Dale had built his reputation. It turned out that "Little Latin Lupe Lou" was a perfect song to dance the Surfer's Stomp to, and the song caught on locally, making the top five in LA markets, and the top fifty nationally. It became a standard part of every garage band's repertoire, and was covered several times with moderate success, most notably by Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, whose cover version made the top twenty in 1966: [Excerpt: Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, "Little Latin Lupe Lou"] The Righteous Brothers became *the* act that musicians in Southern California wanted to see, even though they were very far from being huge -- Elvis, for example, would insist on his friends coming to see the duo when he was in LA filming, even though at the time they were playing at bowling alleys rather than the more glamorous venues his friends would rather visit. Georgie Woods, a Black DJ in Philadelphia who enjoyed their music but normally played Black records coined a term to describe them -- "blue-eyed soul" -- as a way of signalling to his listeners that they were white but he was going to play them anyway. The duo used that as the title of their second album, and it soon became a generic term for white people who were influenced by Black music -- much to Medley's annoyance. As he put it later "It kind of bothers me when other singers call themselves “blue-eyed soul” because we didn’t give ourselves that name. Black people named us that, and you don’t just walk around giving yourself that title." This will, of course, be something that comes up over and over again in this history -- the question of how much it's cultural appropriation for white people to perform in musical styles created by Black people, and to what extent it's possible for that to be given a pass when the white musicians in question are embraced by Black musicians and audiences. I have to say that *to me*, Medley's attempts to justify the duo's use of Black styles by pointing out how much Black people liked their music don't ring *entirely* true, but that at the same time, I do think there's a qualitative difference between the early Righteous Brothers singles and later blue-eyed soul performers like Michael Bolton or Simply Red, and a difference between a white act embraced by Black audiences and one that is mostly appealing to other white people. This is something we're going to have to explore a lot more over the course of the series, and my statements about what other people thought about this at the time should not be taken as me entirely agreeing with them -- and indeed it shouldn't be taken as me agreeing with *myself*. My own thoughts on this are very contradictory, and change constantly. While "Little Latin Lupe Lou" was a minor hit and established them as locally important, none of their next few singles did anything at all, and nor did a solo single that Bobby Hatfield released around this time: [Excerpt: Bobby Hatfield, "Hot Tamales"] But the duo picked up enough of a following as a live act that they were picked for Shindig! -- and as an opening act on the Beatles' first US tour, which finished the same week that Shindig! started broadcasting. It turned out that even though the duo's records hadn't had any success, the Beatles, who loved to seek out obscure R&B records, had heard them and liked them, and George Harrison was particularly interested in learning from Barry Rillera, the guitarist who played with them, some of the guitar techniques he'd used. Shindig! took the duo to stardom, even though they'd not yet had a hit. They'd appear most weeks, usually backed by a house band that included Delaney Bramlett, James Burton, Russ Titelman, Larry Knechtel, Billy Preston, Leon Russell, Ray Pohlman, Glenn Hardin, and many other of the finest studio musicians in LA -- most, though not all, of them also part of the Wrecking Crew. They remained favourites of people who knew music, even though they were appearing on this teen-pop show -- Elvis would apparently regularly phone the TV company with requests for them to sing a favourite song of his on the next week's show, and the TV company would arrange it, in the hopes of eventually getting Elvis on the show, though he never made an appearance. Medley had a certain level of snobbery towards white pop music, even after being on that Beatles tour, but it started to soften a bit after the duo started to appear on Shindig! and especially after meeting the Beach Boys on Shindig's Christmas episode, which also featured Marvin Gaye and Adam Faith. Medley had been unimpressed with the Beach Boys' early singles, but Brian Wilson was a fan of the Righteous Brothers, and asked Medley to accompany him into the men's toilets at the ABC studios -- not for any of the reasons one might imagine, but because the acoustics in the room were so good that the studio had actually installed a piano in there. There, Wilson asked Medley to listen to his group singing their version of "The Lord's Prayer": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "The Lord's Prayer"] Medley was blown away by the group's tight harmonies, and instantly gained a new respect for Wilson as an arranger and musician. The two became lifelong friends, and as they would often work in adjoining rooms in the same studio complex, they would often call on each other to help solve a musical problem. And the reason they would work in the same studios is because Brian Wilson was a huge admirer of Phil Spector, and those were the studios Spector used, so Wilson had to use them as well. And Phil Spector had just leased the last two years of the Righteous Brothers' contract from Moonglow Records, the tiny label they'd been on to that point. Spector, at this point, was desperate to try something different -- the new wave of British acts that had come over were swamping the charts, and he wasn't having hits like he had been a few months earlier. The Righteous Brothers were his attempt to compromise somewhat with that -- they were associated with the Beatles, after all, and they were big TV stars. They were white men, like all the new pop stars, rather than being the Black women he'd otherwise always produced for his own label, but they had a Black enough sound that he wasn't completely moving away from the vocal sound he'd always used. Medley, in particular, was uneasy about working with Spector -- he wanted to be an R&B singer, not a pop star. But on the other hand, Spector made hits, and who didn't want a hit? For the duo's first single on Philles, Spector flew Mann and Weil out from New York to LA to work with him on the song. Mann and Weil took their inspiration from a new hit record that Holland-Dozier-Holland had produced for a group that had recently signed to Motown, the Four Tops: [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "Baby I Need Your Loving"] Mann and Weil took that feeling, and came up with a verse and chorus, with a great opening line, "You never close your eyes any more when I kiss your lips". They weren't entirely happy with the chorus lyric though, considering it a placeholder that they needed to rewrite. But when they played it for Spector, he insisted that "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'" was a perfect title, and shouldn't be changed. Spector added a long bridge, based around a three-chord riff using the "La Bamba" chords, and the song was done. Spector spent an inordinate amount of time getting the backing track done -- Earl Palmer has said that he took two days to get one eight-bar section recorded, because he couldn't communicate exactly how he wanted the musicians to play it. This is possibly partly because Spector's usual arranger, Jack Nitzsche, had had a temporary falling out with him, and Spector was working with Gene Page, who did a very good job at copying Nitzsche's style but was possibly not as completely in tune with Spector's wishes. When Spector and Mann played the song to the Righteous Brothers, Bill Medley thought that the song, sung in Spector and Mann's wispy high voices, sounded more suitable for the Everly Brothers than for him and Hatfield, but Spector insisted it would work. Of course, it's now impossible to think of the song without hearing Medley's rich, deep, voice: [Excerpt: The Righteous Brothers, "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'"] When Mann first heard that, he thought Spector must have put the record on at the wrong speed, Medley's voice was so deep. Bobby Hatfield was also unimpressed -- the Righteous Brothers were a duo, yet Medley was singing the verses on his own. "What am I supposed to do while the big guy's singing?" he asked. Spector's response, "go to the bank!" But while Medley is the featured singer during Mann and Weil's part of the song, Hatfield gets his own chance to shine, in the bridge that Spector added, which for me makes the record -- it's one of the great examples of the use of dynamics in a pop record, as after the bombast of the chorus the music drops down to just a bass, then slowly builds in emotional intensity as Medley and Hatfield trade off phrases: [Excerpt: The Righteous Brothers, "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'"] The record was released in December 1964, and even though the Righteous Brothers didn't even perform it on Shindig! until it had already risen up the charts, it made number one on the pop charts and number two on the R&B charts, and became the fifth biggest hit of 1965 in the US. In the UK, it looked like it wasn't going to be a hit at all. Cilla Black, a Liverpudlian singer who was managed by Brian Epstein and produced by George Martin, rushed out a cover version, which charted first: [Excerpt: Cilla Black, "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'"] On their second week on the charts, Black was at number twelve, and the Righteous Brothers at number twenty. At this point, Andrew Oldham, the Rolling Stones' manager and a huge fan of Spector's work, actually took out an ad in Melody Maker, even though he had no financial interest in the record (though it could be argued that he did have an interest in seeing his rival Brian Epstein taken down a peg), saying: "This advert is not for commercial gain, it is taken as something that must be said about the great new PHIL SPECTOR Record, THE RIGHTEOUS BROTHERS singing ‘YOU’VE LOST THAT LOVIN’ FEELING’. Already in the American Top Ten, this is Spector’s greatest production, the last word in Tomorrow’s sound Today, exposing the overall mediocrity of the Music Industry. Signed Andrew Oldham P.S. See them on this week’s READY, STEADY, GO!" The next week, Cilla Black was at number two, and the Righteous Brothers at number three. The week after, the Righteous Brothers were at number one, while Black's record had dropped down to number five. The original became the only single ever to reenter the UK top ten twice, going back into the charts in both 1969 and 1990. But Spector wasn't happy, at all, with the record's success, for the simple reason that it was being credited as a Righteous Brothers record rather than as a Phil Spector record. Where normally he worked with Black women, who were so disregarded as artists that he could put records by the Ronettes or the Blossoms out as Crystals records and nobody seemed to care, here he was working with two white men, and they were starting to get some of the credit that Spector thought was due only him. Spector started to manipulate the two men. He started with Medley, who after all had been the lead singer on their big hit. He met up with Medley, and told him that he thought Bobby Hatfield was dead weight. Who needed a second Righteous Brother? Bill Medley should go solo, and Spector should produce him as a solo artist. Medley realised what was happening -- the Righteous Brothers were a brand, and Spector was trying to sabotage that brand. He turned Spector down. The next single was originally intended to be a song that Mann and Weil were working on, called "Soul and Inspiration", but Spector had second thoughts, and the song he chose was written by Goffin and King, and was essentially a rewrite of "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'". To my mind it's actually the better record, but it wasn't as successful, though it still made the US top ten: [Excerpt: The Righteous Brothers, "Just Once in My Life"] For their third Philles single, Spector released "Hung on You", another intense ballad, very much in the mould of their two previous singles, though not as strong a song as either. But it was the B-side that was the hit. While Spector produced the group's singles, he wasn't interested in producing albums, leaving Medley, a decent producer in his own right, to produce what Spector considered the filler tracks. And Medley and Hatfield had an agreement that on each album, each of them would get a solo spot. So for Hatfield's solo spot on the first album the duo were recording for Philles, Medley produced Hatfield singing the old standard "Unchained Melody", while Medley played piano: [Excerpt: The Righteous Brothers, "Unchained Melody"] That went out on the B-side, with no production credit -- until DJs started playing that rather than "Hung on You". Spector was furious, and started calling DJs and telling them they were playing the wrong side, but they didn't stop playing it, and so the single was reissued, now with a Spector production credit for Medley's production. "Unchained Melody" made the top five, and now Spector continued his plans to foment dissent between the two singers. This time he argued that they should follow up "Unchained Melody" with "Ebb Tide" -- "Unchained Melody" had previously been a hit for both Roy Hamilton and Al Hibbler, and they'd both also had hits with "Ebb Tide", so why not try that? Oh, and the record was only going to have Bobby Hatfield on. It would still be released as a Righteous Brothers record, but Bill Medley wouldn't be involved. That was also a hit, but it would be the last one the duo would have with Philles Records, as they moved to Mercury and Medley started producing all their records. But the damage had been done -- Spector had successfully pit their egos against each other, and their working relationship would never be the same. But they started at Mercury with their second-biggest hit -- "Soul and Inspiration", the song that Mann and Weil had written as a follow-up to "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'": [Excerpt: The Righteous Brothers, "(You're My) Soul and Inspiration"] That went to number one, and apparently to this day Brian Wilson will still ask Bill Medley whenever they speak "Did you produce that? Really?", unable to believe it isn't a Phil Spector production. But the duo had been pushed apart. and were no longer happy working together. They were also experiencing personal problems -- I don't have details of Hatfield's life at this period, but Medley had a breakdown, and was also having an affair with Darlene Love which led to the breakup of his first marriage. The duo broke up in 1968, and Medley put out some unsuccessful solo recordings, including a song that Mann and Weil wrote for him about his interracial relationship with Love, who sang backing vocals on the record. It's a truly odd record which possibly says more about the gender and racial attitudes of everyone involved at that point than they might have wished, as Medley complains that his "brown-eyed woman" doesn't trust him because "you look at me and all you see are my blue eyes/I'm not a man, baby all I am is what I symbolise", while the chorus of Black women backing him sing "no no, no no" and "stay away": [Excerpt: Bill Medley, "Brown-Eyed Woman"] Hatfield, meanwhile, continued using the Righteous Brothers name, performing with Jimmy Walker, formerly the drummer of the Knickerbockers, who had been one-hit wonders with their Beatles soundalike "Lies": [Excerpt: The Knickerbockers, "Lies"] Walker and Hatfield recorded one album together, but it was unsuccessful, and they split up. Hatfield also tried a solo career -- his version of "Only You" is clearly patterned after the earlier Righteous Brothers hits with "Unchained Melody" and "Ebb Tide": [Excerpt: Bobby Hatfield, "Only You"] But by 1974, both careers floundering, the Righteous Brothers reformed -- and immediately had a hit with "Rock and Roll Heaven", a tribute to dead rock stars, which became their third highest-charting single, peaking at number three. They had a couple more charting singles, but then, tragically, Medley's first wife was murdered, and Medley had to take several years off performing to raise his son. They reunited in the 1980s, although Medley kept up a parallel career as a solo artist, having several minor country hits, and also having a pop number one with the theme song from Dirty Dancing, "I've Had the Time of My Life", sung as a duet with Jennifer Warnes: [Excerpt: Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes, "I've Had the Time of My Life"] A couple of years later, another Patrick Swayze film, Ghost, would lead to another unique record for the Righteous Brothers. Ghost used "Unchained Melody" in a crucial scene, and the single was reissued, and made number nineteen in the US charts, and hit number one in many other countries. It also sparked a revival of their career that made "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'" rechart in the UK. But "Unchained Melody" was only reissued on vinyl, and the small label Curb Records saw an opportunity, and got the duo to do a soundalike rerecording to come out as a CD single. That CD single *also* made the top twenty, making the Righteous Brothers the only artist ever to be at two places in the top twenty at the same time with two versions of the same song -- when Gene and Eunice's two versions of "Ko Ko Mo" had charted, they'd been counted as one record for chart purposes. The duo continued working together until 2003, when Bobby Hatfield died of a cocaine-induced heart attack. Medley performed as a solo artist for several years, but in 2016 he took on a partner, Bucky Heard, to perform with him as a new lineup of Righteous Brothers, mostly playing Vegas shows. We'll see a lot more blue-eyed soul artists as the story progresses, and we'll be able to look more closely at the issues around race and appropriation with them, but in 1965, unlike all the brown-eyed women like Darlene Love who'd come before them, the Righteous Brothers did become the first act to break free of Phil Spector and have hits without him -- though we will later see at least one Black woman Spector produced who became even bigger later. But still, they'll always be remembered primarily for the work they did with Spector, and somewhere, right now, at least one radio station is still playing "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'", and it'll probably continue to do so as long as radio exists.

May 18, 2021

Episode 122 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs is a double-length (over an hour) look at “A Change is Gonna Come” by Sam Cooke, at Cooke's political and artistic growth, and at the circumstances around his death. This one has a long list of content warnings at the beginning of the episode, for good reason... 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 "My Guy" by Mary Wells . Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. For this episode, he also did the re-edit of the closing theme. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources No Mixcloud this week due to the number of songs by one artist. My main source for this episode is Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke by Peter Guralnick. Like all Guralnick’s work, it’s an essential book if you’re even slightly interested in the subject. Information on Allen Klein comes from Fred Goodman's book on Klein . The Netflix documentary I mention can be found here . This is the best compilation of Sam Cooke’s music for the beginner, and the only one to contain recordings from all four labels (Specialty, Keen, RCA, and Tracey) he recorded for. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start this episode, a brief acknowledgement -- Lloyd Price plays a minor role in this story, and I heard as I was in the middle of writing it that he had died on May the third, aged eighty-eight. Price was one of the great pioneers of rock and roll -- I first looked at him more than a hundred episodes ago, back in episode twelve -- and he continued performing live right up until the start of the coronavirus outbreak in March last year. He'll be missed. Today we're going to look at one of the great soul protest records of all time, a record that was the high point in the career of its singer and songwriter, and which became a great anthem of the Civil Rights movement. But we're also going to look at the dark side of its creator, and the events that led to his untimely death. More than most episodes of the podcast, this requires a content warning. Indeed, it requires more than just content warnings. Those warnings are necessary -- this episode will deal with not only a murder, but also sexual violence, racialised violence, spousal abuse, child sexual abuse, drug use and the death of a child, as well as being about a song which is in itself about the racism that pervaded American society in the 1960s as it does today. This is a story from which absolutely nobody comes out well, which features very few decent human beings, and which I find truly unpleasant to write about. But there is something else that I want to say, before getting into the episode -- more than any other episode I have done, and I think more than any other episode that I am *going* to do, this is an episode where my position as a white British man born fourteen years after Sam Cooke's death might mean that my perspective is flawed in ways that might actually make it impossible for me to tell the story properly, and in ways that might mean that my telling of the story is doing a grave, racialised, injustice. Were this song and this story not so important to the ongoing narrative, I would simply avoid telling it altogether, but there is simply no way for me to avoid it and tell the rest of the story without doing equally grave injustices. So I will say this upfront. There are two narratives about Sam Cooke's death -- the official one, and a more conspiratorial one. Everything I know about the case tells me that the official account is the one that is actually correct, and *as far as I can tell*, I have good reason for thinking that way. But here's the thing. The other narrative is one that is held by a lot of people who knew Cooke, and they claim that the reason their narrative is not the officially-accepted one is because of racism. I do not think that is the case myself. In fact, all the facts I have seen about the case lead to the conclusion that the official narrative is correct. But I am deeply, deeply, uncomfortable with saying that. Because I have an obligation to be honest, but I also have an obligation not to talk over Black people about their experiences of racism. So what I want to say now, before even starting the episode, is this. Listen to what I have to say, by all means, but then watch the Netflix documentary Remastered: The Two Killings of Sam Cooke, and *listen* to what the people saying otherwise have to say. I can only give my own perspective, and my perspective is far more likely to be flawed here than in any other episode of this podcast. I am truly uncomfortable writing and recording this episode, and were this any other record at all, I would have just skipped it. But that was not an option. Anyway, all that said, let's get on with the episode proper, which is on one of the most important records of the sixties -- "A Change is Gonna Come": [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "A Change is Gonna Come"] It's been almost eighteen months since we last looked properly at Sam Cooke, way back in episode sixty, and a lot has happened in the story since then, so a brief recap -- Sam Cooke started out as a gospel singer, first with a group called the Highway QCs, and then joining the Soul Stirrers, the most popular gospel group on the circuit, replacing their lead singer. The Soul Stirrers had signed to Specialty Records, and released records like "Touch the Hem of His Garment", written by Cooke in the studio: [Excerpt: The Soul Stirrers, "Touch the Hem of His Garment"] Cooke had eventually moved away from gospel music to secular, starting with a rewrite of a gospel song he'd written, changing "My God is so wonderful" to "My girl is so lovable", but he'd released that under the name Dale Cook, rather than his own name, in case of a backlash from gospel fans: [Excerpt: Dale Cook, "Lovable"] No-one was fooled, and he started recording under his own name. Shortly after this, Cooke had written his big breakthrough hit, "You Send Me", and when Art Rupe at Specialty Records was unimpressed with it, Cooke and his producer Bumps Blackwell had both moved from Specialty to a new label, Keen Records. Cooke's first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show was a disaster -- cutting him off half way through the song -- but his second was a triumph, and "You Send Me" went to number one on both the pop and R&B charts, and sold over a million copies, while Specialty put out unreleased earlier recordings and sold over half a million copies of some of those. Sam Cooke was now one of the biggest things in the music business. And he had the potential to become even bigger. He had the looks of a teen idol, and was easily among the two or three best-looking male singing stars of the period. He had a huge amount of personal charm, he was fiercely intelligent, and had an arrogant selfishness that came over as self-confidence -- he believed he deserved everything the world could offer to him, and he was charming enough that everyone he met believed it too. He had an astonishing singing voice, and he was also prodigiously talented as a songwriter -- he'd written "Touch the Hem of His Garment" on the spot in the studio after coming in with no material prepared for the session. Not everything was going entirely smoothly for him, though -- he was in the middle of getting divorced from his first wife, and he was arrested backstage after a gig for non-payment of child support for a child he'd fathered with another woman he'd abandoned. This was a regular occurrence – he was as self-centred in his relationships with women as in other aspects of his life -- though as in those other aspects, the women in question were generally so smitten with him that they forgave him everything. Cooke wanted more than to be a pop star. He had his sights set on being another Harry Belafonte. At this point Belafonte was probably the most popular Black all-round entertainer in the world, with his performances of pop arrangements of calypso and folk songs: [Excerpt: Harry Belafonte, "Jamaica Farewell"] Belafonte had nothing like Cooke's chart success, but he was playing prestigious dates in Las Vegas and at high-class clubs, and Cooke wanted to follow his example. Most notably, at a time when almost all notable Black performers straightened their hair, Belafonte left his hair natural and cut it short. Cooke thought that this was very, very shrewd on Belafonte's part, copying him and saying to his brother L.C. that this would make him less threatening to the white public -- he believed that if a Black man slicked his hair back and processed it, he would come across as slick and dishonest, white people wouldn't trust him around their daughters. But if he just kept his natural hair but cut it short, then he'd come across as more honest and trustworthy, just an all-American boy. Oddly, the biggest effect of this decision wasn't on white audiences, but on Black people watching his appearances on TV. People like Smokey Robinson have often talked about how seeing Cooke perform on TV with his natural hair made a huge impression on them -- showing them that it was possible to be a Black man and not be ashamed of it. It was a move to appeal to the white audience that also had the effect of encouraging Black pride. But Cooke's first attempt at appealing to the mainstream white audience that loved Belafonte didn't go down well. He was booked in for a three-week appearance at the Copacabana, one of the most prestigious nightclubs in the country, and right from the start it was a failure. Bumps Blackwell had written the arrangements for the show on the basis that there would be a small band, and when they discovered Cooke would be backed by a sixteen-piece orchestra he and his assistant Lou Adler had to frantically spend a couple of days copying out sheet music for a bigger group. And Cooke's repertoire for those shows stuck mostly to old standards like "Begin the Beguine", "Ol' Man River", and "I Love You For Sentimental Reasons", with the only new song being "Mary, Mary Lou", a song written by a Catholic priest which had recently been a flop single for Bill Haley: [Excerpt: Bill Haley and the Comets, "Mary, Mary Lou"] Cooke didn't put over those old standards with anything like the passion he had dedicated to his gospel and rock and roll recordings, and audiences were largely unimpressed. Cooke gave up for the moment on trying to win over the supper-club audiences and returned to touring on rock and roll package tours, becoming so close with Clyde McPhatter and LaVern Baker on one tour that they seriously considered trying to get their record labels to agree to allow them to record an album of gospel songs together as a trio, although that never worked out. Cooke looked up immensely to McPhatter in particular, and listened attentively as McPhatter explained his views of the world -- ones that were very different to the ones Cooke had grown up with. McPhatter was an outspoken atheist who saw religion as a con, and who also had been a lifelong member of the NAACP and was a vocal supporter of civil rights. Cooke listened closely to what McPhatter had to say, and thought long and hard about it. Cooke was also dealing with lawsuits from Art Rupe at Specialty Records. When Cooke had left Specialty, he'd agreed that Rupe would own the publishing on any future songs he'd written, but he had got round this by crediting "You Send Me" to his brother, L.C. Rupe was incensed, and obviously sued, but he had no hard evidence that Cooke had himself written the song. Indeed, Rupe at one point even tried to turn the tables on Cooke, by getting Lloyd Price's brother Leo, a songwriter himself who had written "Send Me Some Lovin'", to claim that *he* had written "You Send Me", but Leo Price quickly backed down from the claim, and Rupe was left unable to prove anything. It didn't hurt Cooke's case that L.C., while not a talent of his brother's stature, was at least a professional singer and songwriter himself, who was releasing records on Checker Records that sounded very like Sam's work: [Excerpt: L.C. Cooke, "Do You Remember?"] For much of the late 1950s, Sam Cooke seemed to be trying to fit into two worlds simultaneously. He was insistent that he wanted to move into the type of showbusiness that was represented by the Rat Pack -- he cut an album of Billie Holiday songs, and he got rid of Bumps Blackwell as his manager, replacing him with a white man who had previously been Sammy Davis Jr.'s publicist. But on the other hand, he was hanging out with the Central Avenue music scene in LA, with Johnny "Guitar" Watson, Eugene Church, Jesse Belvin, and Alex and Gaynel Hodge. While his aspirations towards Rat Packdom faltered, he carried on having hits -- his own "Only Sixteen" and "Everybody Loves to Cha-Cha-Cha", and he recorded, but didn't release yet, a song that Lou Adler had written with his friend Herb Alpert, and whose lyrics Sam revised, "Wonderful World". Cooke was also starting a relationship with the woman who would become his second wife, Barbara. He'd actually had an affair with her some years earlier, and they'd had a daughter, Linda, who Cooke had initially not acknowledged as his own -- he had many children with other women -- but they got together in 1958, around the time of Cooke's divorce from his first wife. Tragically, that first wife then died in a car crash in 1959 -- Cooke paid her funeral expenses. He was also getting dissatisfied with Keen Records, which had been growing too fast to keep up with its expenses -- Bumps Blackwell, Lou Adler, and Herb Alpert, who had all started at the label with him, all started to move away from it to do other things, and Cooke was sure that Keen weren't paying him the money they owed as fast as they should. He also wanted to help some of his old friends out -- while Cooke was an incredibly selfish man, he was also someone who believed in not leaving anyone behind, so long as they paid him what he thought was the proper respect, and so he started his own record label, with his friends J.W. Alexander and Roy Crain, called SAR Records (standing for Sam, Alex, and Roy), to put out records by his old group The Soul Stirrers, for whom he wrote "Stand By Me, Father", a song inspired by an old gospel song by Charles Tindley, and with a lead sung by Johnnie Taylor, the Sam Cooke soundalike who had replaced Cooke as the group's lead singer: [Excerpt: The Soul Stirrers, "Stand By Me, Father"] Of course, that became, as we heard a few months back, the basis for Ben E. King's big hit "Stand By Me". Cooke and Alexander had already started up their own publishing company, and were collaborating on songs for other artists, too. They wrote "I Know I'll Always Be In Love With You", which was recorded first by the Hollywood Flames and then by Jackie Wilson: [Excerpt: Jackie Wilson, "I Know I'll Always Be in Love With You"] And "I'm Alright", which Little Anthony and the Imperials released as a single: [Excerpt: Little Anthony and the Imperials, "I'm Alright"] But while he was working on rock and roll and gospel records, he was also learning to tap-dance for his performances at the exclusive white nightclubs he wanted to play -- though when he played Black venues he didn't include those bits in the act. He did, though, perform seated on a stool in imitation of Perry Como, having decided that if he couldn't match the energetic performances of people like Jackie Wilson (who had been his support act at a run of shows where Wilson had gone down better than Cooke) he would go in a more casual direction. He was also looking to move into the pop market when it came to his records, and he eventually signed up with RCA Records, and specifically with Hugo and Luigi. We've talked about Hugo and Luigi before, a couple of times -- they were the people who had produced Georgia Gibbs' soundalike records that had ripped off Black performers, and we talked about their production of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight", though at this point they hadn't yet made that record. They had occasionally produced records that were more R&B flavoured -- they produced "Shout!" for the Isley Brothers, for example -- but they were in general about as bland and middle-of-the-road a duo as one could imagine working in the music industry. The first record that Hugo and Luigi produced for Cooke was a song that the then-unknown Jeff Barry had written, "Teenage Sonata". That record did nothing, and the label were especially annoyed when a recording Cooke had done while he was still at Keen, "Wonderful World", was released on his old label and made the top twenty: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "Wonderful World"] Cooke's collaboration with Hugo and Luigi would soon turn into one that bore a strong resemblance to their collaboration with the Isley Brothers -- they would release great singles, but albums that fundamentally misunderstood Cooke's artistry; though some of that misunderstanding may have come from Cooke himself, who never seemed to be sure which direction to go in. Many of the album tracks they released have Cooke sounding unsure of himself, and hesitant, but that's not something that you can say about the first real success that Cooke came out with on RCA, a song he wrote after driving past a group of prisoners working on a chain gang. He'd originally intended that song to be performed by his brother Charles, but he'd half-heartedly played it for Hugo and Luigi when they'd not seen much potential in any of his other recent originals, and they'd decided that that was the hit: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "Chain Gang"] That made number two on the charts, becoming his biggest hit since "You Send Me". Meanwhile Cooke was also still recording other artists for SAR -- though by this point Roy Crain had been eased out and SAR now stood for Sam and Alex Records. He got a group of Central Avenue singers including Alex and Gaynel Hodge to sing backing vocals on a song he gave to a friend of his named Johnny Morisette, who was known professionally as "Johnny Two-Voice" because of the way he could sound totally different in his different ranges, but who was known to his acquaintances as "the singing pimp", because of his other occupation: [Excerpt: Johnny Morisette, "I'll Never Come Running Back to You"] They also thought seriously about signing up a young gospel singer they knew called Aretha Franklin, who was such an admirer of Sam's that she would try to copy him -- she changed her brand of cigarettes to match the ones he smoked, and when she saw him on tour reading William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich -- Cooke was an obsessive reader, especially of history -- she bought her own copy. She never read it, but she thought she should have a copy if Cooke had one. But they decided that Franklin's father, the civil rights leader Rev. C.L. Franklin, was too intimidating, and so it would probably not be a good idea to get involved. The tour on which Franklin saw Cooke read Shirer's book was also the one on which Cooke made his first public stance in favour of civil rights -- that tour, which was one of the big package tours of the time, was meant to play a segregated venue, but the artists hadn't been informed just how segregated it was. While obviously none of them supported segregation, they would mostly accept playing to segregated crowds, because there was no alternative, if at least Black people were allowed in in roughly equal numbers. But in this case, Black people were confined to a tiny proportion of the seats, in areas with extremely restricted views, and both Cooke and Clyde McPhatter refused to go on stage, though the rest of the acts didn't join in their boycott. Cooke's collaboration with Hugo and Luigi remained hit and miss, and produced a few more flop singles, but then Cooke persuaded them to allow him to work in California, with the musicians he'd worked with at Keen, and with René Hall arranging rather than the arrangers they'd employed previously. While the production on Cooke's California sessions was still credited to Hugo and Luigi, Luigi was the only one actually attending those sessions -- Hugo was afraid of flying and wouldn't come out to the West Coast. The first record that came out under this new arrangement was another big hit, "Cupid", which had vocal sound effects supplied by a gospel act Cooke knew, the Sims twins -- Kenneth Sims made the sound of an arrow flying through the air, and Bobbie Sims made the thwacking noise of it hitting a target: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "Cupid"] Cooke became RCA's second-biggest artist, at least in terms of singles sales, and had a string of hits like "Twistin' the Night Away", "Another Saturday Night", and "Bring it On Home to Me", though he was finding it difficult to break the album market. He was frustrated that he wasn't having number one records, but Luigi reassured him that that was actually the best position to be in: “We’re getting number four, number six on the Billboard charts, and as long as we get that, nobody’s gonna bother you. But if you get two or three number ones in a row, then you got no place to go but down. Then you’re competition, and they’re just going to do everything they can to knock you off.” But Cooke's personal life had started to unravel. After having two daughters, his wife gave birth to a son. Cooke had desperately wanted a male heir, but he didn't bond with his son, Vincent, who he insisted didn't look like him. He became emotionally and physically abusive towards his wife, beating her up on more than one occasion, and while she had been a regular drug user already, her use increased to try to dull the pain of being married to someone who she loved but who was abusing her so appallingly. Things became much, much worse, when the most tragic thing imaginable happened. Cooke had a swim in his private pool and then went out, leaving the cover off. His wife, Barbara, then let the children play outside, thinking that their three-year-old daughter Tracey would be able to look after the baby for a few minutes. Baby Vincent fell into the pool and drowned. Both parents blamed the other, and Sam was devastated at the death of the child he only truly accepted as his son once the child was dead. You can hear some of that devastation in a recording he made a few months later of an old Appalachian folk song: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "The Riddle Song"] Friends worried that Cooke was suicidal, but Cooke held it together, in part because of the intervention of his new manager, Allen Klein. Klein had had a hard life growing up -- his mother had died when he was young, and his father had sent him to an orphanage for a while. Eventually, his father remarried, and young Allen came back to the family home, but his father was still always distant. He grew close to his stepmother, but then she died as well. Klein turned up at Cooke's house two days after the baby's funeral with his own daughter, and insisted on taking Cooke and his surviving children to Disneyland, telling him "You always had your mother and father, but I lost my mother when I was nine months old. You’ve got two other children. Those two girls need you even more now. You’re their only father, and you’ve got to take care of them." Klein was very similar to Cooke in many ways. He had decided from a very early age that he couldn't trust anyone but himself, and that he had to make his own way in the world. He became hugely ambitious, and wanted to reach the very top. Klein had become an accountant, and gone to work for Joe Fenton, an accountant who specialised in the entertainment industry. One of the first jobs Klein did in his role with Fenton was to assist him with an audit of Dot Records in 1957, called for by the Harry Fox Agency. We've not talked about Harry Fox before, but they're one of the most important organisations in the American music industry -- they're a collection agency like ASCAP or BMI, who collect songwriting royalties for publishing companies and songwriters. But while ASCAP and BMI collect performance royalties -- they collect payments for music played on the radio or TV, or in live performance -- Harry Fox collect the money for mechanical reproduction, the use of songs on records. It's a gigantic organisation, and it has the backing of all the major music publishers. To do this audit, Klein and Fenton had to travel from New York to LA, and as they were being paid by a major entertainment industry organisation, they were put up in the Roosevelt Hotel, where at the time the other guests included Elvis, Claude Rains, and Sidney Poitier. Klein, who had grown up in comparative poverty, couldn't help but be impressed at the money that you could make by working in entertainment. The audit of Dot Records found some serious discrepancies -- they were severely underpaying publishers and songwriters. While they were in LA, Klein and Fenton also audited several other labels, like Liberty, and they found the same thing at all of them. The record labels were systematically conning publishing companies out of money they were owed. Klein immediately realised that if they were doing this to the major publishing companies that Harry Fox represented, they must be doing the same kind of thing to small songwriters and artists, the kind of people who didn't have a huge organisation to back them up. Unfortunately for Klein, soon after he started working for Fenton, he was fired -- he was someone who was chronically unable to get to work on time in the morning, and while he didn't mind working ridiculously long hours, he could not, no matter how hard he tried, get himself into the office for nine in the morning. He was fired after only four months, and Fenton even recommended to the State of New Jersey that they not allow Klein to become a Certified Public Accountant -- a qualification which, as a result, Klein never ended up getting. He set up his own company to perform audits of record companies for performers, and he got lucky by bumping in to someone he'd been at school with -- Don Kirshner. Kirshner agreed to start passing clients Klein's way, and his first client was Ersel Hickey (no relation), the rockabilly singer we briefly discussed in the episode on "Twist and Shout", who had a hit with "Bluebirds Over the Mountain": [Excerpt: Ersel Hickey, "Bluebirds Over the Mountain"] Klein audited Hickey's record label, but was rather surprised to find out that they didn't actually owe Hickey a penny. It turned out that record contracts were written so much in the company's favour that they didn't have to use any dodgy accounting to get out of paying the artists anything. But sometimes, the companies would rip the artists off anyway, if they were particularly unscrupulous. Kirshner had also referred the rockabilly singer/songwriter duo Buddy Knox and Jimmy Bowen to Klein. Their big hit, "Party Doll", had come out on Roulette Records: [Excerpt: Buddy Knox, "Party Doll"] Klein found out that in the case of Roulette, the label *were* actually not paying the artists what they were contractually owed, largely because Morris Levy didn't like paying people money. After the audit, Levy did actually agree to pay Knox and Bowen what they were owed, but he insisted that he would only pay it over four years, at a rate of seventy dollars a week -- if Klein wanted it any sooner, he'd have to sue, and the money would all be eaten up in lawyers' fees. That was still better than nothing, and Klein made enough from his cut that he was able to buy himself a car. Klein and Levy actually became friends -- the two men were very similar in many ways -- and Klein learned a big lesson from negotiating with him. That lesson was that you take what you can get, because something is better than nothing. If you discover a company owes your client a hundred thousand dollars that your client didn't know about, and they offer you fifty thousand to settle, you take the fifty thousand. Your client still ends up much better off than they would have been, you've not burned any bridges with the company, and you get your cut. And Klein's cut was substantial -- his standard was to take fifty percent of any extra money he got for the artist. And he prided himself on always finding something -- though rarely as much as he would suggest to his clients before getting together with them. One particularly telling anecdote about Klein's attitude is that when he was at Don Kirshner's wedding he went up to Kirshner's friend Bobby Darin and told him he could get him a hundred thousand dollars. Darin signed, but according to Darin's manager, Klein only actually found one underpayment, for ten thousand copies of Darin's hit "Splish Splash" which Atlantic hadn't paid for: [Excerpt: Bobby Darin, "Splish Splash"] However, at the time singles sold for a dollar, Darin was on a five percent royalty, and he only got paid for ninety percent of the records sold (because of a standard clause in contracts at that time to allow for breakages). The result was that Klein found an underpayment of just four hundred and fifty dollars, a little less than the hundred thousand he'd promised the unimpressed Darin. But Klein used the connection to Darin to get a lot more clients, and he did significantly better for some of them. For Lloyd Price, for example, he managed to get an extra sixty thousand dollars from ABC/Paramount, and Price and Klein became lifelong friends. And Price sang Klein's praises to Sam Cooke, who became eager to meet him. He got the chance when Klein started up a new business with a DJ named Jocko Henderson. Henderson was one of the most prominent DJs in Philadelphia, and was very involved in all aspects of the music industry. He had much the same kind of relationship with Scepter Records that Alan Freed had with Chess, and was cut in on most of the label's publishing on its big hits -- rights he would later sell to Klein in order to avoid the kind of investigation that destroyed Freed's career. Henderson had also been the DJ who had first promoted "You Send Me" on the radio, and Cooke owed him a favour. Cooke was also at the time being courted by Scepter Records, who had offered him a job as the Shirelles' writer and producer once Florence Greenberg had split up with Luther Dixon. He'd written them one song, which referenced many of their earlier hits: [Excerpt: The Shirelles, "Only Time Will Tell"] However, Cooke didn't stick with Scepter -- he figured out that Greenberg wasn't interested in him as a writer/producer, but as a singer, and he wasn't going to record for an indie like them when he could work with RCA. But when Henderson and Klein started running a theatre together, putting on R&B shows, those shows obviously featured a lot of Scepter acts like the Shirelles and Dionne Warwick, but they also featured Sam Cooke on the top of the bill, and towards the bottom of the bill were the Valentinos, a band featuring Cooke's touring guitarist, Bobby Womack, who were signed to SAR Records: [Excerpt: The Valentinos, "It's All Over Now"] Klein was absolutely overawed with Cooke's talent when he first saw him on stage, realising straight away that this was one of the major artists of his generation. Whereas most of the time, Klein would push himself forward straight away and try to dominate artists, here he didn't even approach Cooke at all, just chatted to Cooke's road manager and found out what Cooke was like as a person. This is something one sees time and again when it comes to Cooke -- otherwise unflappable people just being absolutely blown away by his charisma, talent, and personality, and behaving towards him in ways that they behaved to nobody else. At the end of the residency, Cooke had approached Klein, having heard good things about him from Price, Henderson, and his road manager. The two had several meetings over the next few months, so Klein could get an idea of what it was that was bothering Cooke about his business arrangements. Eventually, after a few months, Cooke asked Klein for his honest opinion. Klein was blunt. "I think they're treating you like a " -- and here he used the single most offensive anti-Black slur there is -- "and you shouldn't let them." Cooke agreed, and said he wanted Klein to take control of his business arrangements. The first thing Klein did was to get Cooke a big advance from BMI against his future royalties as a songwriter and publisher, giving him seventy-nine thousand dollars up front to ease his immediate cash problems. He then started working on getting Cooke a better recording contract. The first thing he did was go to Columbia records, who he thought would be a better fit for Cooke than RCA were, and with whom Cooke already had a relationship, as he was at that time working with his friend, the boxer Muhammad Ali, on an album that Ali was recording for Columbia: [Excerpt: Muhammad Ali, "The Gang's All Here"] Cooke was very friendly with Ali, and also with Ali's spiritual mentor, the activist Malcolm X, and both men tried to get him to convert to the Nation of Islam. Cooke declined -- while he respected both men, he had less respect for Elijah Mohammed, who he saw as a con artist, and he was becoming increasingly suspicious of religion in general. He did, though, share the Nation of Islam's commitment to Black people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and presenting themselves in a clean-cut way, having the same vision of Black capitalism that many of his contemporaries like James Brown shared. Unfortunately, negotiations with Columbia quickly failed. Klein believed, probably correctly, that record labels didn't have to do anything to sell Sam Cooke's records, and that Cooke was in a unique position as one of the very few artists at that time who could write, perform, and produce hit records without any outside assistance. Klein therefore thought that Cooke deserved a higher royalty rate than the five percent industry standard, and said that Cooke wouldn't sign with anyone for that rate. The problem was that Columbia had most-favoured-nations clauses written into many other artists' contracts. These clauses meant that if any artist signed with Columbia for a higher royalty rate, those other artists would also have to get that royalty rate, so if Cooke got the ten percent that Klein was demanding, a bunch of other performers like Tony Bennett would also have to get the ten percent, and Columbia were simply not willing to do that. So Klein decided that Cooke was going to stay with RCA, but he found a way to make sure that Cooke would get a much better deal from RCA, and in a way which didn't affect any of RCA's own favoured-nations contracts. Klein had had some involvement in filmmaking, and knew that independent production companies were making films without the studios, and just letting the studios distribute them. He also knew that in the music business plenty of songwriters and producers like Leiber and Stoller and Phil Spector owned their own record labels. But up to that point, no performers did, that Klein was aware of, because it was the producers who generally made the records, and the contracts were set up with the assumption that the performer would just do what the producer said. That didn't apply to Sam Cooke, and so Klein didn't see why Cooke couldn't have his own label. Klein set up a new company, called Tracey Records, which was named after Cooke's daughter, and whose president was Cooke's old friend J.W. Alexander. Tracey Records would, supposedly to reduce Cooke's tax burden, be totally owned by Klein, but it would be Cooke's company, and Cooke would be paid in preferred stock in the company, though Cooke would get the bulk of the money -- it would be a mere formality that the company was owned by Klein. While this did indeed have the effect of limiting the amount of tax Cooke had to pay, it also fulfilled a rule that Klein would later state -- "never take twenty percent of an artist's earnings. Instead give them eighty percent of yours". What mattered wasn't the short-term income, but the long-term ownership. And that's what Klein worked out with RCA. Tracey Records would record and manufacture all Cooke's records from that point on, but RCA would have exclusive distribution rights for thirty years, and would pay Tracey a dollar per album. After thirty years, Tracey records would get all the rights to Cooke's recordings back, and in the meantime, Cooke would effectively be on a much higher royalty rate than he'd received before, in return for taking a much larger share of the risk. There were also changes at SAR. Zelda Sands, who basically ran the company for Sam and J.W., was shocked to receive a phone call from Sam and Barbara, telling her to immediately come to Chicago, where Sam was staying while he was on tour. She went up to their hotel room, where Barbara angrily confronted her, saying that she knew that Sam had always been attracted to Zelda -- despite Zelda apparently being one of the few women Cooke met who he never slept with -- and heavily implied that the best way to sort this would be for them to have a threesome. Zelda left and immediately flew back to LA. A few days later, Barbara turned up at the SAR records offices and marched Zelda out at gunpoint. Through all of this turmoil, though, Cooke managed to somehow keep creating music. And indeed he soon came up with the song that would be his most important legacy. J.W. Alexander had given Cooke a copy of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, and Cooke had been amazed at "Blowin' in the Wind": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Blowin' in the Wind"] But more than being amazed at the song, Cooke was feeling challenged. This was a song that should have been written by a Black man. More than that, it was a song that should have been written by *him*. Black performers needed to be making music about their own situation. He added "Blowin' in the Wind" to his own live set, but he also started thinking about how he could write a song like that himself. As is often the case with Cooke's writing, he took inspiration from another song, this time "Ol' Man River", the song from the musical Showboat that had been made famous by the actor, singer, and most importantly civil rights activist Paul Robeson: [Excerpt: Paul Robeson, "Ol' Man River"] Cooke had recorded his own version of that in 1958, but now in early 1964 he took the general pace, some melodic touches, the mention of the river, and particularly the lines "I'm tired of livin' and scared of dyin'", and used them to create something new. Oddly for a song that would inspire a civil rights anthem -- or possibly just appropriately, in the circumstances, "Ol' Man River" in its original form featured several racial slurs included by the white lyricist, Oscar Hammerstein, and indeed Robeson himself in later live performances changed the very lines that Cooke would later appropriate, changing them as he thought they were too defeatist for a Black activist to sing: [Excerpt: Paul Robeson, "Ol' Man River (alternative lyrics)"] Cooke's song would keep the original sense, in his lines "It's been too hard livin' but I'm afraid to die", but the most important thing was the message -- "a change is gonna come". The session at which he recorded it was to be his last with Luigi, whose contract with RCA was coming to an end, and Cooke knew it had to be something special. Rene Hall came up with an arrangement for a full orchestra, which so overawed Cooke's regular musicians that his drummer found himself too nervous to play on the session. Luckily, Earl Palmer was recording next door, and was persuaded to come and fill in for him. Hall's arrangement starts with an overture played by the whole orchestra: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "A Change is Gonna Come"] And then each verse features different instrumentation, with the instruments changing at the last line of each verse -- "a change is gonna come". The first verse is dominated by the rhythm section: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "A Change is Gonna Come"] Then for the second verse, the strings come in, for the third the strings back down and are replaced by horns, and then at the end the whole orchestra swells up behind Cooke: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "A Change is Gonna Come"] Cooke was surprised when Luigi, at the end of the session, told him how much he liked the song, which Cooke thought wouldn't have been to Luigi's taste, as Luigi made simple pop confections, not protest songs. But as Luigi later explained, "But I did like it. It was a serious piece, but still it was him. Some of the other stuff was throwaway, but this was very deep. He was really digging into himself for this one." Cooke was proud of his new record, but also had something of a bad feeling about it, something that was confirmed when he played the record for Bobby Womack, who told him "it sounds like death". Cooke agreed, there was something premonitory about the record, something ominous. Allen Klein, on the other hand, was absolutely ecstatic. The track was intended to be used only as an album track -- they were going in a more R&B direction with Cooke's singles at this point. His previous single was a cover version of Howlin' Wolf's "Little Red Rooster”: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "Little Red Rooster"] And his next two singles were already recorded -- a secularised version of the old spiritual "Ain't That Good News", and a rewrite of an old Louis Jordan song. Cooke was booked on to the Johnny Carson show, where he was meant to perform both sides of his new single, but Allen Klein was so overwhelmed by "A Change is Gonna Come" that he insisted that Cooke drop "Ain't That Good News" and perform his new song instead. Cooke said that he was meant to be on there to promote his new record. Klein insisted that he was meant to be promoting *himself*, and that the best promotion for himself would be this great song. Cooke then said that the Tonight Show band didn't have all the instruments needed to reproduce the orchestration. Klein said that if RCA wouldn't pay for the additional eighteen musicians, he would pay for them out of his own pocket. Cooke eventually agreed. Unfortunately, there seems to exist no recording of that performance, the only time Cooke would ever perform "A Change is Gonna Come" live, but reports from people who watched it at the time suggest that it made as much of an impact on Black people watching as the Beatles' appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show two days later made on white America. "A Change is Gonna Come" became a standard of the soul repertoire, recorded by Aretha Franklin: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "A Change is Gonna Come"] Otis Redding: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "A Change is Gonna Come"] The Supremes and more. Cooke licensed it to a compilation album released as a fundraiser for Martin Luther King's campaigning, and when King was shot in 1968, Rosa Parks spent the night crying in her mother's arms, and they listened to "A Change is Gonna Come". She said ”Sam’s smooth voice was like medicine to the soul. It was as if Dr. King was speaking directly to me.” After his Tonight Show appearance, Cooke was in the perfect position to move into the real big time. Allen Klein had visited Brian Epstein on RCA's behalf to see if Epstein would sign the Beatles to RCA for a million-dollar advance. Epstein wasn't interested, but he did suggest to Klein that possibly Cooke could open for the Beatles when they toured the US in 1965. And Cooke was genuinely excited about the British Invasion and the possibilities it offered for the younger musicians he was mentoring. When Bobby Womack complained that the Rolling Stones had covered his song "It's All Over Now" and deprived his band of a hit, Cooke explained to Womack first that he'd be making a ton of money from the songwriting royalties, but also that Womack and his brothers were in a perfect position -- they were young men with long hair who played guitars and drums. If the Valentinos jumped on the bandwagon they could make a lot of money from this new style. But Cooke was going to make a lot of money from older styles. He'd been booked into the Copacabana again, and this time he was going to be a smash hit, not the failure he had been the first time. His residency at the club was advertised with a billboard in Times Square, and he came on stage every night to a taped introduction from Sammy Davis Jr.: [Excerpt: Sammy Davis Jr. introducing Sam Cooke] Listening to the live album from that residency and comparing it to the live recordings in front of a Black audience from a year earlier is astonishing proof of Cooke's flexibility as a performer. The live album from the Harlem Square Club in Florida is gritty and gospel-fuelled, while the Copacabana show has Cooke as a smooth crooner in the style of Nat "King" Cole -- still with a soulful edge to his vocals, but completely controlled and relaxed. The repertoire is almost entirely different as well -- other than "Twistin' the Night Away" and a ballad medley that included "You Send Me", the material was a mixture of old standards like "Bill Bailey" and "When I Fall In Love" and new folk protest songs like "If I Had a Hammer" and "Blowin' in the Wind", the song that had inspired "A Change is Gonna Come": [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "Blowin' in the Wind"] What's astonishing is that both live albums, as different as they are, are equally good performances. Cooke by this point was an artist who could perform in any style, and for any audience, and do it well. In November 1964, Cooke recorded a dance song, “Shake”, and he prepared a shortened edit of “A Change is Gonna Come” to release as its B-side. The single was scheduled for release on December 22nd. Both sides charted, but by the time the single came out, Sam Cooke was dead. And from this point on, the story gets even more depressing and upsetting than it has been. On December the eleventh, 1964, Sam Cooke drove a woman he'd picked up to an out-of the-way motel. According to the woman, he tore off most of her clothes against her will, as well as getting undressed himself, and she was afraid he was going to rape her. When he went to the toilet, she gathered up all of her clothes and ran out, and in her hurry she gathered up his clothes as well. Some of Cooke's friends have suggested that she was in fact known for doing this and stealing men's money, and that Cooke had been carrying a large sum of money which disappeared, but this seems unlikely on the face of it, given that she ran to a phone box and called the police, telling them that she had been kidnapped and didn't know where she was, and could they please help her? Someone else was on the phone at the same time. Bertha Lee Franklin, the motel's manager, was on the phone to the owner of the motel when Sam Cooke found out that his clothes were gone, and the owner heard everything that followed. Cooke turned up at the manager's office naked except for a sports jacket and shoes, drunk, and furious. He demanded to know where the girl was. Franklin told him she didn't know anything about any girl. Cooke broke down the door to the manager's office, believing that she must be hiding in there with his clothes. Franklin grabbed the gun she had to protect herself. Cooke struggled with her, trying to get the gun off her. The gun went off three times. The first bullet went into the ceiling, the next two into Cooke. Cooke's last words were a shocked "Lady, you shot me". Cooke's death shocked everyone, and immediately many of his family and friends started questioning the accepted version of the story. And it has to be said that they had good reason to question it. Several people stood to benefit from Cooke's death -- he was talking about getting a divorce from his wife, who would inherit his money; he was apparently questioning his relationship with Klein, who gained complete ownership of his catalogue after his death, and Klein after all had mob connections in the person of Morris Levy; he had remained friendly with Malcolm X after X's split from the Nation of Islam and it was conceivable that Elijah Muhammad saw Cooke as a threat; while both Elvis and James Brown thought that Cooke setting up his own label had been seen as a threat by RCA, and that *they* had had something to do with it. And you have to understand that while false rape accusations basically never happen -- and I have to emphasise that here, women just *do not* make false rape accusations in any real numbers -- false rape accusations *had* historically been weaponised against Black men in large numbers in the early and mid twentieth century. Almost all lynchings followed a pattern -- a Black man owned a bit of land a white man wanted, a white woman connected to the white man accused the Black man of rape, the Black man was lynched, and his property was sold off at far less than cost to the white man who wanted it. The few lynchings that didn't follow that precise pattern still usually involved an element of sexualising the murdered Black men, as when only a few years earlier Emmett Till, a teenager, had been beaten to death, supposedly for whistling at a white woman. So Cooke's death very much followed the pattern of a lynching. Not exactly -- for a start, the woman he attacked was Black, and so was the woman who shot him -- but it was close enough that it rang alarm bells, completely understandably. But I think we have to set against that Cooke's history of arrogant entitlement to women's bodies, and his history of violence, both against his wife and, more rarely, against strangers who caught him in the wrong mood. Fundamentally, if you read enough about his life and behaviour, the official story just rings absolutely true. He seems like someone who would behave exactly in the way described. Or at least, he seems that way to me. But of course, I didn't know him, and I have never had to live with the threat of murder because of my race. And many people who did know him and have had to live with that threat have a different opinion, and that needs to be respected. The story of Cooke's family after his death is not one from which anyone comes out looking very good. His brother, L.C., pretty much immediately recorded a memorial album and went out on a tribute tour, performing his brother's hits: [Excerpt: L.C. Cooke, "Wonderful World"] Cooke's best friend, J.W. Alexander, also recorded a tribute album. Bertha Franklin sued the family of the man she had killed, because her own life had been ruined and she'd had to go into hiding, thanks to threats from his fans. Cooke's widow, Barbara, married Bobby Womack less than three months after Cooke's death -- and the only reason it wasn't sooner was that Womack had not yet turned twenty-one, and so they were not able to get married without Womack's parents' permission. They married the day after Womack's twenty-first birthday, and Womack was wearing one of Sam's suits at the ceremony. Womack was heard regularly talking about how much he looked like Sam. Two of Cooke's brothers were so incensed at the way that they thought Womack was stepping into their brother's life that they broke Womack's jaw -- and Barbara Cooke pulled a gun on them and tried to shoot them. Luckily for them, Womack had guessed that a confrontation was coming, and had removed the bullets from Barbara's gun, so there would be no more deaths in his mentor's family. Within a few months, Barbara was pregnant, and the baby, when he was born, was named Vincent, the same name as Sam and Barbara's dead son. Five years later, Barbara discovered that Womack had for some time been sexually abusing Linda, her and Sam's oldest child, who was seventeen at the time Barbara discovered this. She kicked Womack out, but Linda sided with Womack and never spoke to her mother again. Linda carried on a consensual relationship with Bobby Womack for some time, and then married Bobby's brother Cecil (or maybe it's pronounced Cee-cil in his case? I've never heard him spoken about), who also became her performing and songwriting partner. They wrote many songs for other artists, as well as having hits themselves as Womack and Womack: [Excerpt: Womack and Womack, "Teardrops"] The duo later changed their names to Zek and Zeriiya Zekkariyas, in recognition of their African heritage. Sam Cooke left behind a complicated legacy. He hurt almost everyone who was ever involved in his life, and yet all of them seem not only to have forgiven him but to have loved him in part because of the things he did that hurt them the most. What effect that has on one's view of his art must in the end be a matter for individual judgement, and I never, ever, want to suggest that great art in any way mitigates appalling personal behaviour. But at the same time, "A Change is Gonna Come" stands as perhaps the most important single record we'll look at in this history, one that marked the entry into the pop mainstream of Black artists making political statements on their own behalf, rather than being spoken for and spoken over by well-meaning white liberals like me. There's no neat conclusion I can come to here, no great lesson that can be learned and no pat answer that will make everything make sense. There's just some transcendent, inspiring, music, a bunch of horribly hurt people, and a young man dying, almost naked, in the most squalid circumstances imaginable.

May 6, 2021

Episode one hundred and twenty-one of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “The Leader of the Pack", the rise and fall of Red Bird Records, and the end of the death disc trend. 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 "California Sun" by the Rivieras . 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, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I used a different Shangri-Las compilation for this episode, but Myrmidons of Melodrama is generally considered the best collection of their work, and while it's been out of print for a while it's coincidentally getting reissued tomorrow. Two of my major sources for this episode were actually the liner notes for two CDs I used -- Sophisticated Boom-Boom: The Shadow Morton Story contains a good selection of Morton's work (though oddly not "Leader of the Pack", his single most famous record), while The Red Bird Story is an excellent three-CD set of the best work put out on the label and its subsidiaries. Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz tells Leiber and Stoller’s side of the story well, while I cross-checked their telling of the story of the meeting that ended Red Bird with The Last Sultan: The Life and Times of Ahmet Ertegun by Robert Greenfield. And most of the biographical information about the group came from this thesis . 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 one of the great death discs of all time -- a record that was the epitome of the genre, and one that rendered it more or less defunct, because nothing was ever going to top that record. We're also going to look at the career of a group that are often called the quintessential girl group, but who despised the term, and at how the Mafia shut down a great record label. We're going to look at "Leader of the Pack" by the Shangri-Las: [Excerpt: The Shangri-Las, "Leader of the Pack"] To tell the story of the Shangri-Las, we need to return for the last time to Leiber and Stoller. After their time at Atlantic, working with the Drifters and the Coasters, the duo had had a falling out with the Ertegun brothers and Jerry Wexler over what they considered to be unpaid royalties, and spent a couple of years less successfully working at United Artists, but they'd got the urge to start up their own label again, like the one they'd run in the fifties, Spark Records. Their main reason for doing this was financial -- while they'd produced most of the hit records they'd written, the only actual money they made from any of them came from the songwriting royalties they got, which came to about two cents per record, split between them. As Leiber put it, "After a while, we got to thinking, why should we settle for two cents when we could have our own record and get twenty-one cents?" They started a label called Tiger Records, and their first release was by Tippie and the Clovers -- one of two groups that had formed around ex-members of the classic doo-wop group the Clovers when they'd split a couple of years earlier. Leiber and Stoller wrote and produced it, but the record went nowhere: [Excerpt: Tippie and the Clovers, "Bossa Nova Baby"] The record wasn't a dead loss though -- a couple of months afterwards, Elvis recorded a soundalike cover version. Elvis wasn't allowed to work directly with Leiber and Stoller any more, because Colonel Parker saw them as a threat to his domination of Elvis, but he still liked their material and would record it. Elvis' version featured in the film Fun In Acapulco, and made the top twenty: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Bossa Nova Baby"] So they were still making hits, but still making only their two cents a record -- less, actually, because Elvis always took a cut of any song he recorded. After Tippie and the Clovers' record flopped, Leiber and Stoller put their label on hold. A year later, they started another label, Daisy, and announced it with a blaze of publicity. They signed writing and production deals with Barry and Greenwich, Bacharach and David, Robert Bateman, and more, and were going to write and produce stuff themselves as well. The first record on Daisy Records, "Big Bad World" by Cathy Saint, seemed like a likely winner: [Excerpt, Cathy Saint, "Big Bad World"] It might have been a success, except that it came out the week that Kennedy was killed, and the radio stations dropped anything remotely upbeat. Daisy only put out four singles in total, because the Kennedy assassination stalled its momentum completely, and so Leiber and Stoller revived the Tiger Records label instead. They put out several great records, such as "Go Now" by Bessie Banks, a song written by Banks' husband, and produced by Leiber and Stoller: [Excerpt: Bessie Banks, "Go Now"] But that wasn't a hit either -- though it was a hit for the Moody Blues a year later. Of course, as Leiber and Stoller hadn't written that one, they didn't even get their two cents a copy for the Moody Blues record. Leiber and Stoller came up with yet another label for their company – Red Bird – but had a realisation -- they knew how to make records, but didn't know how to sell them. But they knew someone who did. George Goldner is someone who has come into the narrative many times before, of course. He had been the owner of the record labels for whom the Chantels, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, and many others had first recorded, and he was someone with taste that was regarded as simultaneously terrible and great by the music industry, for one reason -- the stuff he liked matched uncannily what the average fourteen-year-old girl enjoyed. And this is something that needs to be emphasised at this point -- we've looked quite a bit at what are termed "girl groups" in recent months, but it's important to note that that wasn't what they were called at the time -- they were just vocal groups, rock and roll singers, just like any other rock and roll singers. The distinction between "girl groups" and doo-wop singers -- and the distinction between both of those and rock music more generally -- is something that was imposed in the seventies, mostly by male music journalists, as part of a process of revisionist history which retroactively defined rock and roll as music made by white male singer-instrumentalists. But what is very definitely the case is that immediately before the British invasion, the American music industry was in a position it had never really been before, and hasn't been since, in that not only were the audience predominantly teenage girls, but the industry was making money by selling recordings *by* teenage girls, singing about the things that teenage girls cared about. The power was still all with the older men who owned the record companies and produced the records, of course, but this was the high point for the active involvement of the target demographic in making the records they were being sold. Once the Beatles hit and were properly assimilated into the industry, the record companies started to concentrate on selling young male performers, but at this time, more than any other, having a feeling for what teenage girls liked was an advantage, and that was something that George Goldner absolutely had. Jerry Leiber had gone out for a drink and bumped into Hy Weiss, the owner of a medium-sized record label, who introduced him to Goldner. Goldner was, at the time, short of money, as his gambling habit had once again caught up to him, and he was begging Weiss for a job, and Weiss was using this as a way of making himself look important in front of Leiber, mocking Goldner, blowing smoke in his face, and saying things like "Would you pay this schmuck $350 a week?" while Goldner plaintively insisted he was worth at least five hundred. When Weiss went off to the toilet, Leiber offered Goldner something better than a job -- he offered him an equal share in what was at that point a failing business, but one that could pay him more than that three hundred and fifty dollars, if he could find a hit. He'd get the share only if the first record he picked out was a hit for the label. Goldner went up to Red Bird's offices, and listened through all the acetates overnight, and in the morning he was absolutely certain that he'd found a sure-fire hit. So sure he said he'd bet his life on it. This horrified Leiber, as the record was one that he thought was utterly dreadful, and the worst thing that the label had. "Chapel of Love" had been a song that Barry and Greenwich had written with Phil Spector, and Spector had cut a version of it with Darlene Love on lead vocal: [Excerpt, Darlene Love, "Chapel of Love"] However, at the time, Spector would record vastly more material than he could actually use, and he didn't release that track. Barry and Greenwich had thought that the song still had some potential, and when they started working at Red Bird they'd brought it in for a new group they were working with, the Mel-Tones. Leiber had hated the song, but Stoller had thought there was something to it, and had worked on the session. With most records on Red Bird, there is more than a little disagreement as to who did what. This one is credited as a Leiber and Stoller production, but Leiber freely admitted that he had nothing to do with a record he loathed. The production was by some combination of Stoller, Barry, and Greenwich, while the arrangement was some combination of Stoller, Greenwich, Wardell Quezergue [kaz-air] and Joe Jones, a New Orleans musician whose band had played on Roy Brown's original version of "Good Rockin' Tonight", and who was the manager of the Mel-Tones. The Mel-Tones were quickly renamed the Dixie Cups, and their version of "Chapel of Love" went to number one: [Excerpt: The Dixie Cups, "Chapel of Love"] George Goldner was now a partner in Red Bird Records, and Leiber and Stoller were so disgusted that a record like that was a hit that they basically washed their hands of the creative side of the label. They remained the owners of two thirds of the label, and were a vital part in bringing the people who made the records together, but for the most part they just made little R&B records for the subsidiary label Blue Cat, and left the hit-making to other people. George Goldner and his new young assistant Seymour Stein would do all the promotion, and the records would mostly be produced by Barry, Greenwich, Joe Jones, and a young man named George Morton, who everyone called "Shadow". Shadow Morton had been around the fringes of the music industry for years, but had never had any success. He'd started out as a teenager in the late fifties with a vocal group called the Markeys (this is not either of the two similarly-named groups we've looked at so far), who'd recorded a handful of tracks: [Excerpt: The Markeys, "Hot Rod"] He'd spent a few years making similarly-unsuccessful records, but his ambition never properly matched up with his ability -- he had ambitious musical ideas, and was seriously into jazz, but he wasn't an instrumentalist or a particularly talented vocalist. He seems to have been trying to model himself on Phil Spector at this time -- someone who got by on personal brand and ideas rather than on any particular abilities -- and he was going for novelty records. The most notable record he made up until this point was a song called "Only Seventeen" by the Beattle-ettes, which was rushed out in late February 1964: [Excerpt: The Beattle-ettes, "Only Seventeen"] Even with the credit "produced by George Morton" -- accurate, but very similar to the Beatles' production credits -- that didn't have any success, and Morton was fairly desperate when an old friend mentioned that Ellie Greenwich, that girl who'd been at high school with them, had been making hit records. Morton called her up, and out of politeness she invited him to drop in at the Trio Music office -- Trio was the publishing company owned by Leiber and Stoller, and to which Barry and Greenwich were signed as songwriters. Morton went to the office and was quite intimidated by the number of gold records on the walls, and also took an instant dislike to Jeff Barry's attitude -- Barry was quite obviously unimpressed by Greenwich's down-on-his-luck old schoolfriend. Barry eventually said to him "So what *is* it you do for a living?" Morton replied "Same thing as you. I write songs." "What kind of songs?" "Hit songs." Barry said that if Morton wrote hit songs, he should bring them one, basically daring him. Morton walked out of the room, then came back and said "do you want a fast hit or a slow one?" Barry laughed and told him to bring them a slow hit, and Morton said he'd have one for them by Tuesday. To make a demo, he turned to his former bandmates from the Markeys. Two of them, Joe and Marty Monaco, owned a recording studio that Morton often used, while another one, Tony Michaels, had gone into songwriting and management. He was managing a group of teenage girls -- two pairs of sisters, Betty and Mary Weiss and the identical twins Margie and Mary Ann Ganser. We don't have as much information as we'd like about how the group came together and got a manager -- neither of the Weisses has given many interviews, and both Gansers are sadly dead -- but they grew up in the same area of Queens, and were singing together from their pre-teen years, particularly influenced by the Everly Brothers and the Ink Spots. Michaels had discovered the group and recorded them singing several of his songs, and they'd come up with the name "Shangri-Las" after seeing it as the name of a restaurant on the way to their first session, although when this was eventually released, the name was misspelled as "Shangra-Las": [Excerpt: The Shangra-Las, "Simon Says"] That session, and their second session, were intended as just demos, but Michaels had contacts with Kama Sutra, an independent production company run by a former doo-wop singer named Artie Ripp, and Kama Sutra shopped the recordings around. The second session, for more Tony Michaels songs, was interesting because both songs recorded started with a spoken intro, which is something that would happen with almost all their later records, and is often thought of as something that Morton created, but it's clearly something that the group were doing before they met him -- one of the many cases in stories like this of the man who was good at promoting himself as a genius being credited for something that someone else came up with: [Excerpt: The Shangri-Las, "Hate to Say I Told You So"] Morton decided to use these girls that his friend was managing, gave them the address of the studio, and got another friend to book in a few musicians. It was apparently only on the way to the studio that he realised that he also needed an actual song, so he pulled over to the side of the road and quickly worked out something, which he later realised was loosely based on his favourite Modern Jazz Quartet track, "Sketch": [Excerpt: The Modern Jazz Quartet, "Sketch"] The piano player on the session was a fourteen-year-old kid playing his first ever session, and he later described Morton's production technique -- “He's a pretty strange guy, Shadow. He's wearing this big cape and dark glasses and he played the producer role to the hilt. I think he had a thing about Phil Spector. He wanted to be the Phil Spector of the East Coast. And he talked in these wild, dramatic, theatrical terms – he wanted more 'thunder' and he wanted more 'purple' in the record. He's waving his arms in the air saying 'give me more PURPLE'. And I'm sitting there kinda nervous – this is my first time ever in a recording studio – and I'm hissing to the other musicians, What does that mean? How do I play "purple"? And the guitar player leans over and says, 'Oh, just play louder, kid.'” Billy Joel would later claim that Shadow Morton never paid him the sixty-seven dollar fee he was owed for the session, but apparently it's him playing the portentous opening chords on the record: [Excerpt: The Shangri-Las, "Remember (Walkin' in the Sand)"] According to most sources, the original recording of that track was seven minutes long, but even so Barry and Greenwich could hear that Morton had indeed brought them a slow hit like he'd promised. Morton was signed up as a songwriter and producer, and the Shangri-Las as artists. Barry, Greenwich, Morton, and Artie Butler went back into the studio with a two-minute edit of the recording -- some sources say they recorded a whole new backing track, but most say it was an edit of the demo -- and put together a shortened version of the song that was suitable for radio play, having the girls resing the vocals, with Mary taking the lead, as she would for most of their recordings. Most notably, they overdubbed a lot of sound effects of waves and seagulls on the chorus, and sound effects would become a regular feature of the Shangri-Las' records from this point on: [Excerpt: The Shangri-Las, "Remember (Walkin' in the Sand)"] The record came out, and was a success -- but then Artie Ripp came calling, claiming that the Shangri-Las were under an exclusive contract to Kama Sutra productions. There had been no contract, but... and I have to be careful exactly what I say here because Ripp is still alive... Ripp had got his start working with George Goldner and Morris Levy, and his business was apparently backed financially by some associates of Goldner's. The end result was that Morton and Greenwich's names were taken off the record as producers, and the production was now credited to Jeff Barry and Artie Ripp, and Kama Sutra would get a percentage of the Shangri-Las' earnings. The group were suddenly big. "Remember (Walkin' in the Sand)" made the top five, and they got booked on to Murray the K's Brooklyn Fox shows. They were towards the bottom of the bill, but given that the bill also featured The Searchers, Millie, Martha and the Vandellas, Marvin Gaye, the Temptations, Jay and the Americans, the Contours, the Ronettes, the Supremes, Little Anthony and the Imperials, Dusty Springfield, the Miracles and the Dovells, all on the same show, being near the bottom wasn't too much of an insult. A few weeks later they also performed at the bottom of the bill at a Beatles concert, and they toured on bills with the Beach Boys and the Rolling Stones. They were going places, and they made an impression on at least some of the other acts. Chris Curtis of the Searchers would later talk about them, saying "It’s quite a weird presentation they’ve got...the lead singer stands right over on one side of the stage, and the three others stand in the middle, instead of the other way round. It’s because when they sing ‘remember’ and she goes ‘walkin’ in the sand’, she turns her head away and looks down all dispassionately, and they wave their arms about. They do a lot of weird actions, it’s like choreography with arms, if you can have such a thing. One girl’s hand goes down, then the next, then the next. I’ve never seen anything like it before." But when the group toured the UK a few months later, Curtis was disappointed to find that, in his words, "the prettiest one" wasn't there. In late 1964, Betty Weiss became pregnant. At that time, even more than today, there was no way that an unmarried seventeen-year-old pregnant girl could be presented as a member of a big pop group, and so for a few months she was gone from the group in public, with no explanation, which is why you'll see a number of publicity photos of the group with only three members, though she continued recording with them. At this point, the group's repertoire, other than "Remember", was pretty much all rock and roll standards -- their first album, a mixture of their early singles and live recordings, contains live performances of "Maybe", "Twist and Shout", "Shout", and "Goodnight My Love" -- but they obviously needed a follow-up single. The song that they ended up recording had been intended by Morton for another group, the Goodies (not, sadly, the British comedy trio of the seventies), but the song was given to the Shangri-Las, and became another record with a spoken intro, a portentous piano opening, and sound effects: [Excerpt: The Shangri-Las, "The Leader of the Pack"] "The Leader of the Pack" brilliantly fused two very different but equally melodramatic pop subgenres. The song starts off as if it's going to be a song much like "He's a Rebel", about being in love with someone the world thinks is bad, but who you know has a heart of gold, but with elements of other Spector records -- and while Morton is the principal songwriter, Barry and Greenwich are also credited, and it's easy to hear their musical fingerprints in the bass riff in the verse: [Excerpt: The Shangri-Las, "The Leader of the Pack"] But where a song about being in love with a bad boy would normally end up with everyone seeing how the bad boy wasn't really all that bad, this one instead turned into a death disc, and one with a painful twist -- where normally the boy who dies in a death disc does so knowing that his girlfriend loves him, here the girl is forced by her father to dump him, and he drives off with tears in his eyes, and immediately crashes and dies: [Excerpt: The Shangri-Las, "The Leader of the Pack" (spoken section)] It is in many ways the ultimate death disc, and it's not surprising that the genre largely died after that -- though there would be one final death disc hit in the UK a couple of months afterwards, when a one-hit wonder singer called Twinkle released a song called "Terry", which sounds like it took more than a little inspiration from the Shangri-Las' record: [Excerpt: Twinkle, "Terry"] "Leader of the Pack" went to number one. The Shangri-Las were now one of the biggest groups in the country, and one of the few new American acts to break through in a year when British bands dominated the American charts. Meanwhile, Morton was working with the Goodies on another song, "Give Him a Great Big Kiss", intended to be their first single since "Leader of the Pack" had been taken from them. But again, it was given to the Shangri-Las -- the first the Goodies knew that the song had been taken from them was when one of them was phoned by a friend and told she'd heard their song on the radio. The song was in a very different style from the Shangri-Las' earlier singles, being far more up-tempo, but continues their tradition of having a spoken intro -- this time Mary starting the song with the immortal line : [Excerpt: The Shangri-Las, "Give Him a Great Big Kiss" intro] and had this wonderful bit of dialogue in the middle: [Excerpt, The Shangri-Las, "Give Him a Great Big Kiss"] You'll be pleased to know that the Goodies did eventually get to record a single with Morton. Both sides of the record were later covered by the Shangri-Las, but the Goodies did at least get to put them out first. The A-side, "The Dum Dum Ditty" is a bit of a case of too many cooks -- it's written by Morton with three other songwriters: Steve Venet, Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart. But the B-side, "Sophisticated Boom Boom" is a wonderful piece of fun pop: [Excerpt: The Goodies, "Sophisticated Boom Boom"] Unfortunately, Red Bird didn't put any real effort into promoting that, and the Goodies split up. For the Shangri-Las, though, "Give Him a Great Big Kiss" was another hit, making number eighteen, but the next few singles didn't do particularly well -- they all made the Hot One Hundred, but only one of their next four singles made the top forty. But they made the top ten again in October 1965 with another song that amped up the melodrama to even higher levels than "Leader of the Pack". In "I Can Never Go Home Any More", the protagonist again falls in love with a boy her parents don't approve of, but this time she has a row with her mother and runs away from home, only to immediately split up with the boy. But she can't go back home, because her mother has died of loneliness in the meantime: [Excerpt: The Shangri-Las, "I Can Never Go Home Any More"] The Shangri-Las and Morton had hit on a winning formula -- think of the saddest possible thing that could happen, and put it over the most intense music they could, and they were bound to have a hit. But Red Bird Records had a problem, and that problem was named George Goldner. Leiber and Stoller had become increasingly concerned about Goldner's debts, and his unsavoury practices. They'd noticed a large number of business associates of Goldner's hanging round the Red Bird offices, and those people didn't seem to be the kind of people they wanted to be associates of. Not only this, but Goldner had apparently taken to getting the pressing plants to press up thousands of extra copies of records, which he was letting his gangster friends sell to pay for his gambling debts. Leiber and Stoller came up with a plan. They didn't want to be having to supervise their business partner all the time, but *someone* needed to supervise him. Then, out of the blue, Jerry Leiber got a phone call from Jerry Wexler. While Leiber and Stoller had left Atlantic holding something of a grudge over their business differences, they still basically thought of Wexler and the Ertegun brothers as being their type of people -- they were all East Coast people from marginalised ethnicities who loved Black culture and had got into the music business because of their love for jazz and blues music. At this point, Atlantic was in a bit of a commercial slump. Ray Charles and Bobby Darin had left, the Drifters and the Coasters weren't selling like they had been a couple of years earlier, and they hadn't yet signed the acts that would make them the huge success they once again became in the late sixties. Their only real success at this point was as distributors for the records that were coming out of Stax. But they did still have that massive distribution and sales team -- they were *great* at the business side of the music business, but just didn't have the artists, writers, and producers at present. Red Bird, on the other hand, was producing more great hit records than they knew what to do with, but had nobody involved who had the first clue about business. Wexler wanted to know if Leiber would be interested in talking about a merger between the two labels. Leiber and Stoller thought this sounded like a great idea -- they could be equal partners with their old friends, and Jerry Wexler would be able to supervise George Goldner in a way that they wouldn't. They agreed to a meeting in a restaurant -- Ahmet and Neshui Ertegun, Jerry Wexler, and Atlantic's lawyers, plus Leiber, Stoller, Goldner, and Red Bird's lawyer, Lee Eastman. We've mentioned Eastman a few times before, but as a refresher, he was a longstanding entertainment lawyer who had been in the business for decades -- his one-year-old daughter had been the subject of the 1942 standard "Linda", which had been a hit for numerous people, most recently Jan and Dean: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "Linda"] Everyone who was at that meeting told the story a different way, and only Mike Stoller is still alive to tell it, so nobody except him knows for sure exactly what happened, but this is the closest I can get to what seems to have happened -- I'm largely following here the account from Leiber and Stoller's autobiography, but also looking at a biography of Ertegun. What seems to have happened is that Goldner immediately proceeded to get very drunk. Wexler then said something to the effect of "this could be a good partnership -- you've got what we need, and we've got what you need". Goldner responded "who needs a label that's going down the toilet?" Ahmet Ertegun protested that the label weren't going down the toilet, and Goldner responded that "With the" -- and here he used an expletive which I can't use if I want to keep my clean rating on the various podcast platforms -- "that you've been releasing, it won't be long". Lee Eastman then also started saying that he didn't see that it was in Red Bird's interest to merge with Atlantic. Wexler responded that Eastman didn't even know what they were going to offer yet. Eastman said that Atlantic had nothing to offer that would be worth Red Bird's while. Wexler said "Wait til you hear the offer", and then Ahmet Ertegun said "I didn't know we were prepared to make a formal offer!" Goldner then said that Wexler and Ertegun each clearly didn't know what the other was doing -- "they’re just jerking each other off. Aside from a free lunch, this is a goddamn waste of time". Eastman agreed, and the Erteguns walked out of the meeting. Leiber and Stoller later decided that Goldner had been sabotaging the meeting because he didn't want the oversight that might have exposed his corruption, while Eastman had backed Goldner up because he was worried that the post-merger organisation wouldn't need his services and was trying to keep his own job safe -- I hasten to point out that this is their interpretation of those people's motives, and that Eastman in particular may well have had a different take on things. Not only did the merger fall through, but it created a huge amount of distrust among everyone involved. Ahmet Ertegun decided, based on Wexler's comments about "wait til you hear the offer", that Wexler had been conspiring with Leiber and Stoller behind his back, and that he had been trying to force the Erteguns out. Leiber and Stoller would no longer be welcome to work for Atlantic at all, and Ertegun and Wexler, while they were still both at Atlantic, were not on speaking terms for many years. Leiber and Stoller decided they just needed to get out. They went up to Goldner and told him they were giving him the company because they wanted to get back to making records. They had papers drawn up to sell their shares to him for the nominal fee of a dollar. When Goldner didn't have a dollar, Leiber lent him one, which Goldner then handed back to him to pay for Red Bird. Within a year, the label had been sold off to Shelby Singleton at Mercury Records to pay for Goldner's debts. And this is where we leave Goldner, Leiber and Stoller. Goldner would start one more label, but it had no success, and he died of a heart attack in 1970. Leiber and Stoller, meanwhile, continued working successfully in the music industry, but we won't be looking at them any further. In later years, they'd write "Is That All There Is?" for Peggy Lee, co-write and produce "Pearl's a Singer" for Elkie Brooks, and produce "Stuck in the Middle With You" for Stealer's Wheel: [Excerpt: Stealer's Wheel, "Stuck in the Middle With You"] But their period of importance in the development of rock music was over. Jerry Leiber died in 2011, aged seventy-eight, and Mike Stoller still occasionally writes songs. They left behind a body of work as songwriters and producers that's unparalleled in rock and roll music history, and there's no way adequately to sum up their contributions except to say that even in the nine episodes that have largely looked at their work, we've barely scratched the surface. During the last year that Red Bird struggled along, the Shangri-Las continued to release music, but the turmoil at the company meant that none of it was as successful as their previous recordings. Even the monumental "Past, Present, and Future", a dramatic recitation over music based on Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata", only scraped its way to number fifty-nine: [Excerpt: The Shangri-Las, "Past, Present, and Future"] When Red Bird was sold to Mercury, the Shangri-Las moved along with it, although at this point Marge left the group, leaving them as a trio of Mary, Betty, and Mary Ann, but the records they made for Mercury didn't chart, and after two singles they were dropped. Morton, meanwhile, was more interested in the new artists he'd signed to his production company, like the Vanilla Fudge, and Janis Ian, whose first hit he produced: [Excerpt: Janis Ian, "Society's Child"] Morton apparently also served as the uncredited producer on a record by a new group called Iron Butterfly, who he thought were too tight in the studio and needed to play sloppier. He told them the equipment was malfunctioning and just to practice the song and jam a bit, while secretly recording them. The seventeen-minute result made up one side of their album, while the three-minute single edit became their biggest hit: [Excerpt: Iron Butterfly, "In-a-gadda-da-vida"] Morton would go on to work with groups like the New York Dolls, but his career was essentially destroyed by his alcoholism, and he did little of note in the last forty years of his life. He died in 2013. After being dropped by Mercury Records, the Shangri-Las were involved in a tangled web of litigation that meant that for ten years none of them could record. The group split up, but remained friendly, but Mary Ann was having problems with drugs and alcohol. She was hospitalised, and for a while she got herself clean, but then one night in 1970 she and her sister went round to visit Betty Weiss. While she was there, she relapsed and overdosed -- Betty didn't have a telephone, and Mary Ann died before medical help could get there. She died one month to the day before George Goldner. In 1977, the legal problems that had stopped the group from recording finally resolved themselves, and they decided to take a chance at a comeback. They called Seymour Stein, who they'd known from his days at Red Bird and who now owned Sire records. Stein was enthusiastic about working with them again, as their music had been a huge influence on groups like the Cramps and Blondie, who were now becoming popular as part of the new punk scene around CBGBs. Stein put the group together with a songwriter and producer named Andy Paley, who was part of the punk scene and had worked with people like the Ramones, but who also had a sensibility for the melodic pop styles of the pre-Beatles sixties, as you can hear from his recordings as part of the duo the Paley Brothers: [Excerpt: The Paley Brothers, "Jacques Cousteau"] Paley put together a backing band for the group consisting of himself on guitar with Lenny Kaye and Jay Dee Daugherty of the Patti Smith Group on bass and drums, and they played one show at CBGBs, which was apparently a huge success. But the sessions fizzled out -- it seems that the group weren't really all that interested in making any more records, they just wanted to prove to themselves that they could. There were tentative approaches to other labels for a couple of years, but most of the record companies wanted them to go disco, while Mary wanted to do something more in the style of the New York art punks who were so influenced by the group, and nothing came of it. The Shangri-Las would only play one more show together, in 1989, when they became aware of another group performing under their name and so did a show to establish their ownership of the trademark. They eventually settled with the management of the fake group, who were allowed to continue touring as the Shangri-Las so long as they paid a royalty for use of the name. Marge died in 1996, and Betty has largely chosen to stay out of the spotlight, to the extent that Mary, who is very protective of her sister, won't answer questions about her. After decades of avoiding the music industry herself, Mary eventually recorded a solo album in 2007: [Excerpt: Mary Weiss, "You're Never Gonna See Me Cry"] Mary now occasionally performs live, and will give the occasional interview, though she never reveals much about herself or the group. She detests them being called a "girl group", saying that they were rock and roll singers and shouldn't be defined by their gender -- after spending her whole life since she was fifteen having her public image controlled by other people, and for much of that time not being able to work in her chosen field, and after seeing the damage that was done to her sister and their friends, she will now only do things and talk about her life on her own terms. And who can blame her?

Apr 27, 2021

This week's episode, the first on the new host, looks at "A Hard Day's Night", and the making of the film that would define music cinema for decades to come. 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 "Tobacco Road" by the Nashville Teens. 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, I have created a Mixcloud playlist containing every song heard in this episode (though not the Goon Show, Bridge Over the River Wye, or A Show Called Fred recordings, all of which would take up half an hour each) I have read literally dozens of books on the Beatles, and used bits of information from many of them, but the ones I specifically referred to while writing this episode were: The Complete Beatles Chronicle by Mark Lewisohn , All The Songs: The Stories Behind Every Beatles Release by Jean-Michel Guesdon , And The Band Begins To Play: The Definitive Guide To The Songs of The Beatles by Steve Lambley , The Beatles By Ear by Kevin Moore , Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald , and The Beatles Anthology . For material on the making of the film, I referred to A Hard Day's Night by Ray Morton, and Getting Away With It by Steven Soderbergh , a book which is in part a lengthy set of conversations between Soderbergh and Richard Lester. Information on the Goons came from various sources, but mostly from The Goon Show Companion by Roger Wilmut and Jimmy Grafton. A Hard Day's Night is available on DVD , while the music is of course on this album . 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 has one of the most striking opening chords of any song ever recorded, the title song to a film that was described on its release as "the Citizen Kane of jukebox musicals", and which captured the Beatles at the height of their early success. We're going to look at how Beatlemania hit America, and at how the Beatles went from being merely a very popular pop group to being a cultural phenomenon that changed the world. And most importantly, we're going to look at how they changed how music is portrayed on screen forever. We're going to look at "A Hard Day's Night": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "A Hard Day's Night"] The sixteenth of January, 1964, seemed at first to be the first misstep in the Beatles' career. After their run of Christmas shows, they'd travelled to Paris to play the Olympia -- the same venue where, a little over two years earlier, John and Paul had seen Vince Taylor play and tried unsuccessfully to blag their own way on to the stage. This time, they were topping the bill, for the first of eighteen nights in a row -- or at least they were equally billed with Sylvie Vartan and Trini Lopez, with none of the promotional material actually saying who was highest billed. But they went down something like a lead balloon, with the audience, mostly made up of VIPs there for opening night, not responding to them, and with their amps failing three times during the show (George Harrison apparently suspected sabotage). It was the first time in almost three years that they'd faced an unappreciative audience, and they were apparently despondent after the show. They were despondent, at least, until they got a telegram after the show, giving them the good news -- "I Want To Hold Your Hand" had jumped up forty-three places on the Cashbox chart. They were number one in America. It was already planned, of course, that they would be going to the US in February to make three appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show, but now they knew they were big over there. After that, the shows in Paris became somewhat easier for the group, and while the press for the first night was fairly awful, once they started playing to their own audiences rather than VIPs they won the French crowds over as well as any other audience they'd had. While they were in France, they also made what would be their only studio recordings outside London. They'd been asked by the German branch of EMI to record German-language versions of "She Loves You" and "I Want to Hold Your Hand", as at the time it was felt that they didn't have much chance of selling in Germany with English-language recordings. While in the studio, they also recorded a song of Paul's, which became their next single -- the first to only feature a single voice: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Can't Buy Me Love"] But while Paul took the lead on that single, John was dominating in the writing for the duo, who were also working on writing their next album while they were in Paris. That album would be their first to consist entirely of original songs, and the only one to consist entirely of Lennon/McCartney songs, but of its thirteen tracks, ten would be primarily or solely John's work, and only three written mainly by Paul. But before they could record it, they had a trip to the US to make. The Beatles' first trip to the US has had a huge amount of coverage over the years, but it involved a surprisingly small amount of actual work for them -- they made three appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show, plus two live performances, one in Washington -- filmed for a closed-circuit cinema broadcast along with shows by the Beach Boys and Lesley Gore -- and one at Carnegie Hall. But it was those Ed Sullivan show performances that became legendary. Sullivan's show was always the most popular thing on American TV, and always featured a variety of acts. February the ninth 1964 was no exception, as he featured among others the comedian and impressionist Frank Gorshin (who is now best known for his later role as the Riddler in the Batman TV series) and the cast of Lionel Bart's musical Oliver!: [Excerpt: Davy Jones and Georgia Brown: "I'd Do Anything"] The young man playing the Artful Dodger there said later "I watched the Beatles from the side of the stage, I saw the girls going crazy, and I said to myself, this is it, I want a piece of that." But it would be two years before Davy Jones would become famous as one of the Monkees. But, of course, it wasn't songs from the musicals sung in fake Cockney accents, or the impersonation skills of Frank Gorshin, that had people tuning in that night. And there were a lot of people tuning in -- seventy-three million of them, the highest audience figure for any TV show in US history to that point. And they were tuning in to see this: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I Want to Hold Your Hand (live on the Ed Sullivan Show)"] It is impossible to explain or even really comprehend just how big the Beatles were in America after their Ed Sullivan appearances. They may not even have fully realised it themselves, as they were only over there for two weeks at that point and made relatively few appearances -- though they were soon booked in for a full-length tour that summer. But almost every American rock musician who came to prominence in the ten years after those appearances has said that it was seeing the Beatles on Ed Sullivan -- and the reaction to them from the girls in the audience -- that made them want to become musicians. Guitar-based rock and roll had basically been dead in the US since 1957, with the only real exceptions being surf bands and Duane Eddy. Now, as a result of one TV show, it was back with a vengeance, and the guitar would dominate American music for a generation. The Beatles became even bigger after their return to the UK, though. In the first week of April, they actually had the whole top five of the Billboard charts to themselves, and seven more records in the hot one hundred -- and not only that, but there were two songs about the Beatles also in the hot one hundred. They also had the number one and two spots in the album charts. The week after that, while they no longer had all five top spots, they did have two more singles in the hot one hundred, making fourteen in total. The reason they had so many records in the charts was that Capitol hadn't licensed their early recordings, and so they had been licensed to a couple of small labels, who were releasing everything they could from their small stockpile, and VeeJay, the label that had licensed their first album, were putting out album tracks as singles in the hope of getting as much of the market as they could. And the three companies putting out their records were soon going to be joined by a fourth. Because in an echo of how the Beatles had only been signed to EMI because of their publishing subsidiary, United Artists Records wanted to put out Beatles records, and had realised that there was probably no provision in their contract with EMI for film soundtracks. If their film division signed the Beatles to make a film, and they made it quickly and cheaply enough, they could get a soundtrack album out of it that would more than cover the cost of making the film, and would hopefully be pure profit for them. EMI turned out to have other opinions about this, after the contracts were signed, and United Artists ended up only getting the rights to the soundtrack album in America, but that was the thinking at least when United Artists approached Brian Epstein with a proposal in the autumn of 1963, for a film to be made as early as possible in 1964, to be released before the bubble burst and this Beatle fad was over. The Beatles had actually had multiple proposals to appear in films before, but these had all been for jukebox musicals -- the kind of film we've talked about earlier, where some kids put on a benefit show to save the local youth centre, and twenty different bands mime to one or two songs each. They didn't like that kind of film, and didn't want to be in one, and so those proposals had not gone anywhere. But they became interested when they were told who UA had in mind to direct -- Richard Lester. Much as George Martin had been, Richard Lester was a serendipitous choice, the one person in Britain who could have made the Beatles' film on a low budget and still make it a genuinely worthwhile film. Lester was an American former child prodigy, who had gone to university when he was only fifteen, and had paid his way through university by playing jazz piano, which made him able to work well with musicians. After getting his degree, he had started working in TV in the US in 1950, working his way up from being a stage hand to directing in under a year, as the TV industry was so new then that there were no experienced directors in the industry. He moved to the UK in 1953, and started directing over here, where again the industry was still in its infancy. He'd directed several episodes of a low-budget detective series called Mark Saber, and had also tried his hand at performance -- he starred in a variety show called The Dick Lester Show, which featured himself and another performer, Alun Owen. The show was live, and never recorded, so we have no idea what it was like, but we do know that the show was cancelled after one episode due to it being apparently miserably amateurish. But we also know that the next day Lester received a call from Peter Sellers, who told him "Either that’s the worst television programme that I have ever, ever seen or I think you’re on to something that we are aspiring to." Lester's reply was that if there was a choice, it was definitely the latter. Sellers was, at this time, one of the biggest stars in Britain, but was not yet the major film star he later became. Rather he was primarily known for his work on a radio programme, the Goon Show. We've mentioned the Goon Show in passing before, but never really looked at it in any detail, but it was probably the single most important cultural influence in Britain in the 1950s. It was a series of surreal half-hour comedy shows starring Harry Secombe, Sellers, and Spike Milligan, and written by Milligan, often with the assistance of other writers like Eric Sykes and Larry Stephens. Its style is impossible to summarise in words, and so it's best to give an example -- here's a portion of 1985, their episode about life under the Big Brother Corporation, or BBC for short: [Excerpt: The Goon Show, "1985" 25:20-26:25] The Goons were, through most of the 1950s, the most inventive and creative comedy team on the radio, and they had a huge fanbase which included all four of the Beatles, with John Lennon being the biggest fan of the show. As well as working as the Goons, though, both Milligan and Sellers did other comedy work. Most notably for our purposes, they made many comedy records, together and separately, often with production by George Martin -- it's often said that Martin produced the Goons, but he only produced one or two Goon records, but he produced a lot of work by Sellers and Milligan, like this with Sellers as the skiffle singer Lenny Goonigan: [Excerpt: Peter Sellers, "Putting on the Smile"] or the 1962 album "Bridge Over the River Wye", by MIlligan, Sellers, Peter Cook, and Jonathan Miller, which was meant to be called "Bridge Over the River Kwai", until the film's makers threatened to sue, so George Martin had to go and edit out the "k"s from every "Kwai" in the record: [Excerpt: Bridge Over the River Wye] So Sellers and Milligan were branching out into other areas throughout the late fifties and early sixties, and Sellers wanted to do a Goon Show for TV, and thought that Lester would be the perfect person to direct it. The show couldn't be called The Goon Show, because it was being made for ITV rather than the BBC, and so they named it The Idiot Weekly, Price 2d. At first, Milligan didn't want to be involved, saying that his kind of comedy wouldn't translate to the TV, as images would make it too concrete, and so the first episode only involved Sellers, and was written by other members of Associated London Scripts, the writer's co-operative that Milligan and Sykes worked for. Shortly after the first episode was broadcast, Milligan called Lester and told him that he'd got most of the script for the second episode done -- he never admitted to having changed his mind, but from that point on Milligan was the main writer and co-star of The Idiot Weekly, Price 2d, though other writers from ALS continued to contribute, including Sykes, Terry Nation, and a young writer named John Junkin, who had to start a performing career at no notice when Sykes became ill and Junkin had to step in and play a role written for him. The show ran for three series, all in 1956, all under different names -- the first series was The Idiot Weekly, Price 2d; a month after that finished it came back for six more episodes as A Show Called Fred, and then later in the year it returned again as Son Of Fred. Only one episode survives, but from that episode it seems a quite remarkable programme: [Excerpt: A Show Called Fred, 05:40-06:29] As well as parodying other TV formats, it also has characters from one sketch wander into another, sketches ending without a punchline, and at one point has characters riding into shot, as if on horseback, but clopping two coconuts together to make the sound of hooves. The Monty Python team have often said that Milligan's 1969 series, Q5, did everything they were going to do a few months before them, but as it happens it seems that Milligan was doing everything they were going to do thirteen years before them. After their work on these three series, Lester, Milligan, and Sellers had gone off to do other things, but a couple of years later Sellers had bought a 16mm film camera, and asked Lester if he wanted to make a film with it. Over the course of two weekends, Sellers, Milligan, and Lester, plus various performer friends of theirs such as Norman Rossington and Leo McKern, put together an eleven-minute silent comedy, The Running, Jumping, and Standing Still Film, for which Lester was credited as co-director with Sellers, and for which Lester also wrote and performed the music and co-wrote the script, such as it was. The Running, Jumping, and Standing Still Film, which only cost seventy pounds to make in total, ended up being nominated for an Academy Award, and gave Lester a valuable credit as a film director, though he spent the next couple of years mostly making commercials. His first feature film, though, was one we've talked about briefly before. A couple of years back we looked briefly at the film Rock! Rock! Rock!, a film starring Alan Freed and featuring several musicians we've dealt with. The writer and producer of that film, Milton Subotsky, had since moved to the UK and started up a new company, Amicus Films, which would soon become known for making horror films starring people like Peter Cushing. But Amicus' first film was going to be one of those cheap, quick, jukebox musicals, It's Trad, Dad! It's Trad, Dad! was written by Subotsky -- or at least Subotsky is the credited writer -- and is clearly intended to be exactly along the lines of Subotsky's earlier films. When the Mayor of a small town tries to ban jazz music from his town, two teenagers, played by the pop stars Craig Douglas and Helen Shapiro, decide to persuade the DJs Pete Murray, Alan Freeman, and David Jacobs to put on a concert to convince the crotchety old people that this trad jazz thing isn't as bad as it sounds. They gather up Mr. Acker Bilk and His Paramount Jazz Band, Terry Lightfoot and His New Orleans Jazz Band, the Dukes of Dixieland, Chris Barber, and The Temperance Seven to perform the exciting hits of the day: [Excerpt: The Temperance Seven, "Everybody Loves My Baby"] As well as the trad performances, the film also features several people we've looked at previously in this series -- John Leyton singing one of his Joe Meek hits, Chubby Checker performing "The Lose Your Inhibitions Twist", Del Shannon singing "You Never Talked About Me", and Gene Vincent, just before he went to Hamburg to appear at the Star Club with the Beatles, singing "Spaceshp to Mars": [Excerpt: Gene Vincent, "Spaceship to Mars"] This was clearly intended to be a cheap film with no attention paid whatsoever to the quality of the film, and Richard Lester was picked to direct it as his first feature. He later recalled that when he was given the script that Subotsky had written, it was only eighteen pages long, and that seems like it is if anything a generous estimate based on Subotsky's script for Rock! Rock! Rock! Lester absolutely transformed it. The result is a bizarre film. It's not quite a good film -- it's still the exact same structure that Subotsky used for Rock! Rock! Rock!, right down to scenes of the kids watching musicians on TV as an excuse for musical numbers, and Shapiro and Douglas can't act at all. But Lester included a lot of additional visual jokes, and I strongly suspect he rewrote the script a great deal. There's now a cartoonlike quality to it -- characters repeatedly argue with the omniscient narrator, and also ask the narrator for favours. At one point, the two main characters want to get to the city from their small town, and ask the narrator to help them. There's a sped-up noise, we see film sprockets behind the characters as the film moves behind them, and they end up in their new location. But more than that, Lester and his cinematographer Gilbert Taylor created a whole new visual language for how to present pop music in that film. Taylor was one of the most innovative cinematographers in the business -- he would go on to be a crucial part of the look of such visually striking films as Dr. Strangelove, Repulsion, and Star Wars -- and he and Lester came up with a way of filming musicians that is now the standard for musical performances, but at the time was unlike anything seen before. There were lots of deep-focus shots with one musician's face in the foreground while the rest of the group were visible in the background, lots of close-ups on instruments, and a lot of quick cutting. I won't go on about this too much in what is, after all, an audio medium, but in the same way Jack Good had revolutionised the TV presentation of rock and roll music in a way that would influence every music TV show since, so Lester and Taylor revolutionised the way musical performances were filmed, and created a language in It's Trad Dad! that is now the absolute standard way to show musicians on the big screen, so much so that it's only if you watch any rock and roll film made before it that you realise how astonishingly imaginative it is, because all its innovations have been so thoroughly incorporated into standard technique. But they weren't incorporated because of It's Trad, Dad!, which nobody paid any attention to. It was a cheap quickie that wasn't meant to be studied or reviewed, and was just an excuse to have Helen Shapiro sing her latest single: [Excerpt: Helen Shapiro, "Let's Talk About Love"] But this meant that Richard Lester was someone who had worked with the Beatles' very favourite comedians and understood their sense of humour, who was a musician himself and knew how to talk to musicians, who had a visually innovative way of presenting music on screen that nobody else was doing, and who could make films quickly on a shoestring budget. He'd managed to turn the sow's ear of a script that Subotsky had given him for It's Trad, Dad! into, if not a silk purse, at least a sturdy carrier bag. He was perfect, in short, to make a British music film on the cheap, but make it just that little bit better than it needed to be. But of course, a film requires more than just a director. And Lester had an idea who he wanted to write the script, as well. After Alun Owen had acted with Lester in The Dick Lester Show he'd moved from acting into writing, and he had a particular interest in writing about Liverpool -- he was born in Wales, but moved to Liverpool as a small child, and Lester would later joke that Owen would be Irish, Liverpudlian, or Welsh depending on what he thought you wanted him to be. He'd written a TV play set in Liverpool, Last Tram to Lime Street, and he was currently working with Lionel Bart on a musical based on "Maggie May", the old folk song about a sex worker in Liverpool. That musical, when it hit the stage, featured another old colleague of Lester's, John Junkin. It wasn't a massive success, but it did lead to an EP of songs from the musical by Judy Garland, with a delightfully bizarre performance of a song that uses the trades union congress as a not so subtle metaphor for other kinds of congress: [Excerpt: Judy Garland, "There's Only One Union"] However, there were delays in staging Maggie May, and that meant that Owen was free to write the script. Owen was a less universally-acclaimed choice among the Beatles, but acceptable -- McCartney had enjoyed Last Tram to Lime Street, but Lennon thought of Owen as a professional Liverpudlian, a species of person he despised. Owen followed the group around while they were on tour in the latter part of 1963, including the trip to Paris, and took notes about their personalities -- though he later admitted that he'd had to exaggerate the differences between the group's personalities significantly, because at this time they were so close that they acted almost like a single individual. While Owen took these notes and wrote the script, though, the basic idea for the film came from a comment Lennon made to Lester. When asked about how he'd liked Sweden after the group performed there, he made a comment which Lester has paraphrased a few different ways over the years, but amounted to "it was a plane and a room and a car and a room". This comment was given in the script to the fictional character of Paul's grandfather: [Excerpt: "A Hard Day's Night" film soundtrack] It became the structuring principle for the whole film. Other than brief moments where they escape, the group are constantly shown as being indoors, in tight enclosed spaces, prisoners of their fame, and responding to it mostly in sarcastic one-liners -- responses that also meant that none of the group had to learn more than a line or two per shot, with most of the dialogue being taken up by the supporting cast, like Wilfred Bramble, Norman Rossington, and John Junkin, who had made the opposite journey from Alun Owen and had moved into performance from scriptwriting. Junkin put on a fake Liverpool accent for the film, and kept it up off-camera, as apparently the Beatles wanted real Liverpudlians around them, and so Junkin attempted to fool them for the duration of the shoot. The film's title actually has two different sources. The phrase "a hard day's night" actually turned up in a short-short story John had written, "Sad Michael", which had recently been published in his first book, "In His Own Write", a collection of nonsense poetry and stories inspired by the Goons and Lewis Carroll. There's no recording of Lennon reading much of the book, but he did appear on Peter Cook and Dudley Moore's TV show Not Only But Also, reading one of the stories, "The Wrestling Dog", with interjections from Norman Rossington: [Excerpt: John Lennon, "The Wrestling Dog"] "A hard day's night" turned up in the story of Sad Michael, a night watchman, or "cocky watchtower" in Lennon's phrasing, but the phrase only came to the group's attention as a possible title when Ringo independently reinvented the phrase as a malapropism on the set of the film. Ringo had a habit of this kind of thing -- saying things slightly wrongly and coming up with a phrase that was rather more interesting than what he'd meant to say -- and this wouldn't be the only song whose title he provided that way. Lennon wrote the song the night after Ringo made his slip-up, and finished it off with McCartney the next day, and later said it was inspired by Bob Dylan, though Dylan's inspiration is hard to hear. It is, though, a slightly more sophisticated lyric than the group's previous singles. It's still a love song, but about a more adult relationship -- the protagonist has a job, and comes home at night to his love. It's not "I Want to Hold Your Hand", but a song about the relief of getting home at the end of a hard day at work: [Excerpt: The Beatles, “A Hard Day's Night” second verse] But what really made the record special was something that they created in the studio -- that chord. [Excerpt: The Beatles, "A Hard Day's Night", opening chord] 17) The opening chord of "A Hard Day's Night" has been analysed in a million different ways, but it seems to have been made up of three elements. First, there is the chord that George is playing on his twelve-string, and which John is also playing on six-string acoustic. That chord is an Fadd9 -- an F chord with a G on top, the notes F, A, C, G: Paul, meanwhile, is playing a D in the bass: [D bass note] And George Martin, on piano, is playing D, G, D, G, and C: Put them all together, and you have this: Or, of course, this: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "A Hard Day's Night"] The song, of course, went to number one, and the film also became one of the most successful films of the year, both commercially and critically. It was nominated for two Academy Awards, for the screenplay and for George Martin's score, and received almost universal praise from critics -- for example when the Village Voice did its end-of-year roundup of the best films of 1964, it came in second, after Dr. Strangelove, a film whose cinematographer, Gilbert Taylor, had done the same job on A Hard Day's Night, and which starred George Martin and Richard Lester's old colleague, Peter Sellers. Sellers would himself later record his own version of "A Hard Day's Night", produced by Martin: [Excerpt: Peter Sellers, "A Hard Day's Night"] A Hard Day's Night was a pivotal moment in film, and is now generally regarded as one of the finest examples of British cinema taking cues from the French New Wave, and to have invented a whole new visual language for music in the cinema and on TV. It's also a film that inspired thousands of other people to form rock bands -- it defined the band as gang mentality for millions, and despite being an attempt to show how oppressive the Beatles' life already felt, it made many, many people envy that life and want it for themselves. Over the next month or two we'll see how that worked out for a whole host of musicians, and when we next return to the Beatles themselves we'll see how they coped with a level of fame that had never been experienced by anyone else in the world -- and how you follow up that level of success in both music and film.

Apr 14, 2021

A quick admin note about why the podcast has changed hosts. Click through for the transcript. Transcript This is a brief admin podcast to explain why a new episode of the podcast won't be up for a few days, why the podcast wasn't available for a couple of days, and also why some of you might have seen all the old episodes turn up again in your podcast app. On Monday, i woke up to find that the Recording Industry Association of America had made a DMCA complaint against episode 112, the episode on "She Loves You", claiming that it violated copyright law. Now, of course, the podcast does not violate copyright law -- everything I do is within fair use rules for the US and fair dealing rules for the EU and UK -- but the DMCA is a stupid law that says that as soon as a complaint is received the host company has to take down a file until a counterclaim is made. I'd expected this kind of thing to happen sooner or later -- while I stay clearly within the bounds of copyright law, the RIAA is known for sending bogus takedown notices, and I have always been willing to reedit episodes as soon as a complaint was made, just to avoid hassle. It's something I factored into my plans, as a tiny podcaster doing a music history podcast. So it would have been fair if podbean had taken down that single episode -- and I did an edited version removing all the music clips, so it could be restored. But instead of taking down that one episode, they took down the entire podcast, and refused to put it back online even though I'd reedited the one episode complained about. They also refused to answer my emails, kept replying to my tweets on the subject and deleting the replies when other people pointed out the absurdity of what they were saying, and eventually became actively abusive. It took two days of social media pressure for them to reverse their decision and put the podcast back, but obviously I can't keep using them. So I have migrated the podcast to wordpress.com . The feed has already migrated here, and over the next few days I'll be sorting out the website and getting the domain redirected. Wordpress, unlike most hosting companies, takes freedom of speech seriously, and rejects invalid DMCA claims -- and when it does receive a valid one it only takes down the infringing file, not the entire site. Dealing with Podbean's incompetence and buffoonery has taken two full days -- the days I had planned to spend recording and editing the next podcast episode -- and I am going to have to spend more time getting the new website into shape, because images and formatting from old posts have been lost in the import. I also have a family commitment this weekend, so I won't be able to get the new episode recorded until Sunday night -- hopefully it will be up on Monday or Tuesday, and then I'll be back to a regular posting schedule, all else being well. Anyway, everything is pretty much sorted now, but I would advise that anyone who worries that their podcast might receive a bogus or malicious DMCA complaint use literally any podcast host in the world except Podbean, unless you really enjoy having your blood pressure raised to dangerously high levels. For the next couple of days things might look a little shoddy on the website and so on, until things are totally sorted, so bear with me. Thanks for listening.

Apr 5, 2021

Episode one hundred and nineteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “You Really Got Me” by the Kinks, and the song that first took distorted guitar to number one. 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 “G.T.O.” by Ronny and the Daytonas . 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…)

Mar 28, 2021

Episode 118 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Do-Wah-Diddy-Diddy” by Manfred Mann, and how a jazz group with a blues singer had one of the biggest bubblegum pop 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 thirteen-minute bonus episode available, on “ Walk on By” by Dionne Warwick. 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…)

Mar 20, 2021

Episode one hundred and seventeen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Don’t Worry Baby” by the Beach Boys, and how the years 1963 and 1964 saw a radical evolution in the sound and subject matter of the Beach Boys’ work. 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 “ You’re No Good” by the Swinging Blue Jeans. 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…)

Mar 10, 2021

Episode one hundred and sixteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Where Did Our Love Go?” by the Supremes, and how the “no-hit Supremes” became the biggest girl group in history. 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 “She’s Not There” by the Zombies . 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…)

Feb 27, 2021

Episode one hundred and fifteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “House of the Rising Sun” by the Animals, at the way the US and UK music scenes were influencing each other in 1964, and at the fraught question of attribution when reworking older songs. 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 “Memphis” by Johnny Rivers . 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…)

Feb 18, 2021

This week’s episode looks at “My Boy Lollipop” and the origins of ska music. 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 “If You Wanna Be Happy” by Jimmy Soul . 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…)

Feb 8, 2021

This week’s episode looks at “Needles and Pins”, and the story of the second-greatest band to come out of Liverpool in the sixties, The Searchers. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a sixteen-minute bonus episode available, on “Farmer John” by Don and Dewey . 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…)

Jan 30, 2021

This week’s episode looks at “She Loves You”, the Beatles in 1963, and the start of Beatlemania in the UK. 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 “Glad All Over” by the Dave Clark Five. 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…)

Jan 20, 2021

Episode one hundred and eleven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Heat Wave” by Martha and the Vandellas, and the beginnings of Holland-Dozier-Holland. 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 “My Boyfriend’s Back” by the Angels . 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…)

Jan 9, 2021

Episode 110 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Be My Baby”, and at the career of the Ronettes and Ronnie Spector. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Little Saint Nick” by the Beach Boys. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

Jan 3, 2021

I just heard the sad news that Gerry Marsden, of Gerry and the Pacemakers, has died today aged seventy-eight. As the latest episode of the podcast is late due to personal issues, I thought I’d make this available to the general public – this is a ten-minute Patreon bonus episode I did back in October, on Gerry and the Pacemakers, so it’s here as a little tribute. He’ll be missed. (more…)

Dec 23, 2020

Episode one hundred and nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Blowin’ in the Wind”, Peter, Paul and Mary, Bob Dylan, the UK folk scene and the civil rights movement. Those of you who get angry at me whenever I say anything that acknowledges the existence of racism may want to skip this one. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “ Santa Claus is Coming to Town” by the Crystals . 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…)

Dec 16, 2020

Episode 108 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “I Wanna Be Your Man” by the Rolling Stones and how the British blues scene of the early sixties was started by a trombone player. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have an eight-minute bonus episode available, on “ The Monkey Time” by Major Lance. 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…)

Dec 16, 2020

The third in the occasional series of ten-minute looks at topics in the news during the time we’re looking at covers the Kennedy assassination. Click through for the transcript: (more…)

Dec 8, 2020

Episode 107 of A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs looks at “Surf City” and the career of Jan and Dean, including a Pop Symphony, accidental conspiracy to kidnap, and a career that both started and ended with attempts to get out of being drafted. 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 “Hey Little Cobra” by the Rip Chords . 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…)

Dec 2, 2020

Episode 106 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Louie Louie” by the Kingsmen, and the story of how a band that had already split up accidentally had one of the biggest hits of the sixties and sparked a two-year FBI investigation. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have an eight-minute bonus episode available, on “It’s My Party” by Lesley Gore . 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…)

Nov 24, 2020

Episode 105 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Green Onions”, and how a company started by a Western Swing fiddle player ended up making the most important soul records 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 “He’s So Fine” by the Chiffons. 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…)

Nov 16, 2020

Episode 104 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “He’s a Rebel”, and how a song recorded by the Blossoms was released under the name of the Crystals. 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 “Sukiyaki” by Kyu Sakamoto. 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…)

Nov 16, 2020

This month’s ten-minute extra bonus episode on news events at the time we’re looking at is on the Profumo Affair, and how a sex scandal transformed Britain. Click through to the full post to read a transcript. (more…)

Nov 5, 2020

Episode one hundred and three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Hitch-Hike” by Marvin Gaye, and the early career of one of Motown’s defining artists. 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 “Any Other Way” by Jackie Shane . 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…)

Oct 26, 2020

Episode one hundred and two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Twist and Shout” by the Isley Brothers, and the early career of Bert Berns. 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 “How Do You Do It?” by Gerry and the Pacemakers. 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…)

Oct 17, 2020

Episode 101 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs is the first one of the podcast's third year. This one looks at "Telstar" by the Tornados, and the tragic life of Joe Meek, Britain's first great pop auteur. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Apologies for the lateness of this one -- my two-week break got extended when my computer broke down. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Wipe Out" by the Surfaris . 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 always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Most of the information here comes from The Legendary Joe Meek: The Telstar Man by John Repsch . Some bits come from Clem Cattini: My Life Through the Eye of a Tornado . This compilation contains most of the important singles Meek produced, with the notable exceptions of the Tornados' singles. This, meanwhile, contains the early records he engineered before going into production. This is probably the best compilation of the Tornados' music available. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon . Why not join them? Transcript Welcome to the third year of A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, and welcome to the future! Although for this particular future we're actually going backwards a couple of months. This episode and the next one are both about records that were released a little before "Love Me Do", which the most recent episode covered, and that's something I should point out -- the podcast is never going to be absolutely chronological, and in this case it made sense to tell that story before these ones. Before we start this episode, I need to give warnings for a whole lot of different things, because we're looking at one of the most tragic stories we'll see during the course of this podcast. This story contains discussion of occultism, severe mental illness, legalised homophobia, an unsolved probably homophobic murder, and a murder-suicide. I am going to try to deal with all those subjects as sensitively as possible, but if you might become distressed by hearing about those things, you might want to skip this episode, or at least read the transcript before listening. I also want to make something very clear right now -- this episode deals with a mentally ill man who commits a murder. He did not commit that murder *because* he was mentally ill. Mental illness is far more likely to make someone the victim of a crime than the perpetrator, and I have known many, many people who have had the same symptoms but who have not committed such awful acts. It is impossible to talk about the events in this episode without the risk of increasing stigma for mentally ill people, but I hope by saying this I can reduce that risk at least somewhat. Today we're going to look at the first British rock and roll record to make number one in the USA, and at the career of the first independent record producer and engineer in Britain. We're going to look at the sad life and tragic end of Joe Meek, and at "Telstar" by the Tornados: [Excerpt: The Tornados, "Telstar"] Joe Meek is someone who has become something of a legend among music lovers, and he's someone whose music is more talked about than listened to. People talk about him as a genius, but rather fewer of them explain what it was that he did that was so impressive. This is partly because, more than much of the music of the era, it requires context to appreciate. Meek was a producer above all else -- he had no real knowledge of music, and had no ear for singers. What Meek did know was sounds, and how to achieve sounds in the recording studio that could not be achieved anywhere else. Meek had, from a very young age, been fascinated by the possibilities of both sound and electronics. He had experimented with both as a child, and when he'd moved to London he'd quickly found himself jobs where he could make use of that -- he'd started out as a TV repairman, but quickly moved on to working at IBC, one of the few independent studios in existence. There he was given the job of assistant engineer on a Radio Luxembourg show that was recorded live in theatres up and down the country -- he had to plug in all the mics and so on. He soon moved on to editing the tape recordings, and then to working the controls himself. As well as being main engineer on the radio show, though, he was also still an assistant engineer in the studio for music sessions, and for a long time that was all he was doing. However, he kept trying to get more involved in recording the music, and eventually to shut him up the studio boss gave him the chance to be the main engineer at a session -- for a twenty-piece string section. The boss assumed that Meek wouldn't be able to handle such a complicated assignment as his first engineering job, and that he'd be kept quiet if he knew how hard the job was. Instead, he did such a good job balancing the sound that the musicians in the studio applauded the playback, and he was quickly promoted to senior balance engineer. The world got its first small inkling of what Meek could do in 1956, when he created the unique sound of "Bad Penny Blues", a record by the trad jazz trumpet player Humphrey Lyttleton. "Bad Penny Blues" actually happened more or less by accident, at least as far as the musicians were concerned. There was a five-piece band in the studio, but the saxophone player had to leave early, and so they were stuck for what to record once he was gone. Denis Preston, the producer in charge of the session, suggested that they just play a blues, and so they improvised a boogie woogie piece, based around something they played in the clubs -- Johnny Parker, the piano player, played somewhat in the style of Dan Burley, the man who had coined the term "skiffle". But what made the track wasn't the group or the producer, but the engineering: [Excerpt: Humphrey Lyttleton, "Bad Penny Blues"] These days, that doesn't sound all that revolutionary, but when they heard it back the group were furious at what Meek had done to the sound, because it just didn't sound like what they were used to. There were several innovative things about it, at least for a British record, but one of the most important was that Meek had actually bothered to mic the drum kit separately -- at this point in British studios, which were several years behind American ones, it was considered unnecessary to mic the drums properly, as their sound would get into the other microphones anyway, because the musicians were all playing together in the same room. If you really wanted a good drum sound, you'd hang a single mic over the drummer's head. Meek was using separate mics for each drum on the kit. Because of this, Meek had managed to get a drum sound which was unlike anything that had been heard in a British record before. You can actually *hear* the kick drum. It sounds normal now, but that's because everyone who followed Meek realised that actually bothering to record the drums was something worth doing. There was another thing Meek did, which again you will almost certainly not have noticed when listening to that recording -- he had added a lot of compression. Compression is a standard part of the sound engineer's toolkit, and a simple one to understand. All it does is make quiet sounds louder and loud sounds quieter. Used sparingly, it gives a recording a little more punch, and also evens out the sound a bit. So for example, when you're listening to a playlist on Spotify, that playlist applies a little compression to everything, so when you go from a Bach piece for solo piano to a Slayer track, you can hear the Bach piece but your earbuds don't make your eardrums bleed when the Slayer record comes on. By the way, this is one of those words that gets used confusingly, because the word "compression", when referring to Internet sound files such as MP3s, has a totally different meaning, so you might well see someone talking about compression of a recording in ways that seem to contradict this. But when I refer to compression in this episode, and in any of the episodes in the foreseeable future, I mean what I've talked about here. Generally speaking, recordings have had steadily more compression applied to them over the decades, and so the moderate use of compression on "Bad Penny Blues" might not sound like much to modern ears -- especially since when older recordings have been reissued, they almost always have additional compression on them, so even when I've excerpted things in these episodes, they've sounded more compressed than the original recordings did. But Meek would soon start using a *lot* more compression, even than is used these days, and that drastically changed the character of the sound. To show what I mean, here's me playing a few bars on the guitar, recorded with no compression whatsoever: Here's the same recording with a touch of compression: And the same recording with a *lot* of compression: This was one of the things that Meek would do over the course of his career, and which very few other people were doing at the time in the UK. "Bad Penny Blues" became one of the most important British jazz records ever -- probably *the* most important British jazz record ever -- and it made the top twenty, which never happened with jazz records at the time. Meek's reputation as an innovative engineer was set. Shortly after "Bad Penny Blues", Meek was given his first opportunity to indulge his love of sound effects, on what became one of the biggest-selling British records of the year. Anne Shelton was recording a military-themed song, and the producer suggested that they needed the sound of marching feet. Rather than play in something from a sound-effects album, which was what the producer expected but which wouldn't have been in time with the music, Meek got a box of gravel and had someone shake it in time with the music. The result did sound exactly like marching feet, though the dust from the gravel apparently made Shelton's new suit into a mess, and the record went to number one for a month: [Excerpt: Anne Shelton, "Lay Down Your Arms"] Another hit Meek engineered in the mid-fifties has led to an urban myth that's been repeated unquestioningly even in the Guardian, even though a second's thought proves that it's nonsense. Frankie Vaughan's "Green Door" went to number two in 1957: [Excerpt: Frankie Vaughan, "Green Door"] That line, "When I said 'Joe sent me' someone laughed out loud" has been taken to be referring to Meek himself, and a whole elaborate mythology has been spun around this. As Meek was gay, and as there was a lesbian club called The Gateways in London which happened to have a green door, people have stated as fact that the song is about that club, and that the people in there were laughing because a man was trying to get into a lesbian club. There's only one slight problem with this, which is that it's complete nonsense. For a start, while Meek was gay, he saw being gay as an affliction, something to be ashamed of, and was hardly likely to make a whole jokey record about that — at least at this time. He did some things later on. Then there's the fact that Meek was at the time only a moderately-known engineer, not the famous producer and songwriter he became later. But more important than either of those things -- the song was a cover of an American hit record by Jim Lowe, written by songwriters who had almost certainly never even been to Britain. And the line about "Joe"? That was in the original, and was a reference to a 1954 hit on the same lines, "Hernando's Hideaway": [Excerpt: Ella Fitzgerald, "Hernando's Hideaway"] During this early period of his career, Meek was recording all sorts of music. While the bread-and-butter work of a recording engineer at the time was orchestral pop covers of American records, he also engineered skiffle records by Lonnie Donegan, with a stinging guitar sound he would later use on many other records: [Excerpt: Lonnie Donegan, "Cumberland Gap"] Calypso records by people like Lord Invader or the Mighty Terror: [Excerpt: Mighty Terror, "T.V. Calypso"] And jazz records by Chris Barber, Acker Bilk, and Humphrey Lyttleton, usually produced by Denis Preston, who after "Bad Penny Blues" insisted on using Meek for all of his sessions. Because of this connection, Meek also got to engineer some of the very first blues records cut in Britain. Barber would bring over American folk-blues artists to tour with him -- and we'll be looking at the consequences of that for much of the next three years -- and Preston arranged sessions, engineered by Meek, for Big Bill Broonzy: [Excerpt: Big Bill Broonzy, "When Do I Get To Be Called A Man?"] And Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee -- who wouldn't seem a natural fit with Meek's very artificial style, but the echo he applies to Terry's harmonica, in particular, gives it a haunting feel that really works, to my ears at least: [Excerpt: Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, "Key to the Highway"] But while Meek was becoming the best engineer in Britain, he was not getting on at all well with his boss. In large part this was because of the boss in question being extremely homophobic, so when Meek refused to work with assistants he perceived as incompetent and insisted on other ones, the boss assumed he wanted to work with people he fancied. In fact, Meek was just being a perfectionist -- but he was also very prone to mood swings and stubbornness, and bursts of paranoia. He started to think that the people he was working with were stealing his ideas. And he was having a lot of ideas. As well as close-micing instruments, adding compression as a sound effect, and adding extra echo, all of which were almost unknown in British studios at the time, he was also the first person in Britain to deliberately add distortion to a sound, and he also came up with a primitive method of multi-tracking, at a time when everything in British studios was recorded straight to mono. He would record a backing track, then play it back into the studio for the musicians to play along with, rerecording the backing track into another microphone. This way of working round the limitations of the studio ended up giving some of the records a swimmy sound because of loss of fidelity, but Meek leaned into that, and it became a signature of his music even after he eventually gained access to multi-track recording. So Meek knew he would have to move on from just being an engineer, working for a homophobe who also didn't appreciate his talents. He needed to become a producer, and this is where Denis Preston came in. Preston was himself an independent record producer -- the only one in Europe at the time. He would make records and only after they were recorded would he make an agreement with a record label to release them. Meek wanted to go even further than Preston -- he wanted to become the first independent producer *and engineer* in the UK. Up to this point, in Britain, the jobs of producer and engineer were separate. Meek had recently built a tiny studio in his flat, for recording demos, and he had cowritten a song, "Sizzling Hot", that he thought had hit potential. He recruited a local skiffle band to record a demo of the song, and Preston agreed it had potential, and funded the recording of a proper version of the song: [Excerpt: Jimmy Miller, "Sizzling Hot"] Jimmy Miller, the singer of that song, was present at an event that shaped much of the rest of Joe Meek's life. Now, I need to emphasise that when he reported this, Miller was talking many years later, so he may have exaggerated what actually happened, and I have no reason to think that what I'm about to describe actually involved anything supernatural. But the way Miller told the story, he, Meek, and a friend of Meek's named Faud were conducting a seance in January 1958. Miller was shuffling and dealing tarot cards with one hand, while holding Meek's hand with the other. Meek in turn was holding one of Faud's hands, while Faud held a pen in the other hand and was performing automatic writing. As Miller told it, at one point he felt strange and gripped Meek's hand so hard it drew blood, and at the same moment Faud wrote down the words "Feb 3, Buddy Holly dies", in what looked to Miller like Miller's own handwriting rather than Faud's. Meek tried to get the record labels and publishers to warn Holly, but they didn't. February the third 1958 came and went with no problem, but Meek was still worried, and so when Holly and the Crickets toured Britain in March that year, Meek waited outside the stage door and slipped Holly a bit of paper warning him. Holly apparently treated him politely, but he was later heard to joke on the radio about some of the strange things that had happened to him on tour, including being slipped this note. And then, on February the third 1959, Buddy Holly did die. Now, again, we only have Miller's after the fact word that the seance predicted the exact date of Holly's death, but it's very clear that something happened that day that affected Meek deeply, and that he did make efforts to warn Holly. Meek was severely disturbed when Holly died, and while he had already been a fan of Holly's, he was now something more. He was convinced that Buddy Holly was *important* to him in some way, and that Holly's music, and Holly's personality, were something he needed to study. Later on, he would become convinced that Holly's ghost was talking to him. But for the moment, this, and Meek's mood swings, didn't affect things too much. He quit working at IBC and started his own studio, Landsdowne studio, which was funded and owned by Preston, but with equipment designed by Meek, who was to have the run of the place. His songwriting was starting to pay off, too. While "Sizzling Hot" hadn't been a hit, Meek had written another song, "Put a Ring on Her Finger", which had been recorded by Eddie Silver, and had been unsuccessful. But then Les Paul and Mary Ford had covered it in the US, and it had made the US top forty: [Excerpt: Les Paul and Mary Ford, "Put a Ring on My Finger"] And Tommy Steele had covered their version as the B-side of his top-ten UK hit cover of Richie Valens' "Come on Let's Go". But that success as a songwriter led to Meek leaving Lansdowne studios in November 1959. Denis Preston owned the publishing company that published Meek's songs, and Meek started pestering him to take more songs. He did this in a recording session, and Preston told him to concentrate on the session and leave pitching songs to afterwards. Meek stormed out, leaving his assistant to finish the session, and Preston told him not to bother coming back -- Meek was a great engineer and producer, but was just too difficult to work with. Luckily for Meek, his firing came at a time when he was in high demand in the industry. He'd just co-produced "What Do You Want to Make Those Eyes at Me For?" by Emile Ford and the Checkmates, which became both the first number one of the sixties and the first number one by a Black British artist: [Excerpt: Emile Ford and the Checkmates, "What Do You Want To Make Those Eyes At Me For?"] He had two more records in the top ten as well. But even so, he found it hard to get any more work, and so he spent his time working on an experimental album, I Hear a New World, which was inspired by the launch of the first Sputnik satellite and by his getting hold of a clavioline, the same kind of keyboard instrument that had been modified into the Musitron on "Runaway". I Hear A New World wasn't a success, but it was the first attempt at something that would later become very big for Meek: [Excerpt: The Blue Men, "Magnetic Field"] I Hear a New World was eventually released as a limited-pressing EP and an even more limited pressing album by a new label that Meek set up with William Barrington-Coupe, Triumph Records. Triumph lasted less than a year. While working at the label, Meek did produce three hit singles, including "Angela Jones" by Michael Cox, which made the top ten: [Excerpt: Michael Cox, "Angela Jones"] But Meek soon became paranoid about Barrington-Coupe, and for once he may have been right. Most of the businesses Barrington-Coupe was involved with collapsed, he spent some time in prison for tax fraud in the mid-sixties, and he would later become involved in one of the great scandals to hit the classical music world. Before linking up with Meek, he had married the minor concert pianist Joyce Hatto, who had a reputation as being moderately, but not exceptionally, talented, and who recorded for Barrington-Coupe's Saga Records: [Excerpt: Joyce Hatto and the New York Pro Arte Symphony, "Rhapsody in Blue"] While Hatto's career continued into the seventies, both she and Barrington-Coupe then disappeared from public view. Then, in 2002, Hatto started releasing what was the most extraordinary outpouring of music from any classical musician. She released over a hundred CDs in the next four years on a label owned by Barrington-Coupe, performing almost the entire major classical piano repertoire. She was only working in the studio -- she was very ill -- but she became a legend among lovers of classical music: [Excerpt: "Joyce Hatto" (Vladimir Ashkenazy), Brahms Piano Concerto #2] It was only after her death in 2006 that the truth came out -- none of the recordings from her late golden period were actually of her. Barrington-Coupe had simply been taking other people's recordings of these pieces -- often recordings by relatively obscure musicians -- and reissuing them under her name, with made-up conductors and orchestras. That's the kind of person that Barrington-Coupe was, and it suggests that Meek was correct in his suspicions of his business partner. But for a short time, Meek was happy at Triumph, and he set up a fruitful working partnership with Charles Blackwell, his young co-writer on "Sizzling Hot", who worked as his arranger and would translate Meek's ideas into music that other musicians could understand -- Meek couldn't play an instrument, or read music, or sing in tune. To write songs, Meek would often take an old rhythm track he happened to have lying around and record a new vocal on it, la-laing his way through a melody even if the chords didn't go with it. Blackwell would take these demos and turn them into finished songs, and write string arrangements. So he was creatively happy, but he needed to move on. And while he quickly decided that Barrington-Coupe was a chancer who he shouldn't be having any dealings with, he didn't feel the same about Major Banks, who had provided the funding for Barrington-Coupe's investment in Triumph. Banks came to Meek with a new idea -- rather than have a record company, they would do like Denis Preston did and make records which they would then lease to the major labels. Meek would deal with all the music, and Banks with the money, and Banks would pay for Joe to move into a bigger flat, where he could have his own professional recording studio, which would be cheaper than recording in other studios, as he had been since he'd left Lansdowne. RGM Sound was born. Meek's new studio was something utterly unheard of in Britain, and almost unheard of in the world. It was a three-storey flat above a shop on a residential street. He was recording in a normal home. The live room he used was a bedroom, and sometimes musicians would play in the hallway or the bathroom. Other than odd amateur disc-cutting places, there was no such thing as a home studio in the Britain of the 1950s and sixties. Studios were large, purpose-built facilities run by very serious pipe-smoking men employed by major multinational firms, who wore lab coats if they were doing technical work or a suit and tie if they were on the creative side. The idea of making a record in someone's bedroom was just nonsensical. Meek started making records with a new young songwriter named Geoff Goddard, who took on the stage name Anton Hollywood, and found a lucrative opportunity in a young Australian manager and agent named Robert Stigwood. Stigwood had a lot of actors on his books who had TV careers, and he wanted to promote them as all-round entertainers. He started sending them to Meek, who was good enough in the studio that he could make even the worst singer sound competent, and then one of them, John Leyton, got a part in a soap opera as a pop singer. Whatever his next record was, it would get the kind of TV exposure most acts could only dream of. Goddard wrote a song called "Johnny Remember Me", Blackwell came up with the arrangement, and Meek produced it and managed to get Leyton sounding like a singer: [Excerpt: John Leyton, "Johnny Remember Me"] It went to number one and sold half a million copies. But those lyrics about hearing a dead person's voice were a sign of something that was eventually going to lead to tragedy. Goddard shared many of Meek's obsessions. Goddard, like Meek, was a spiritualist, and he thought he could talk to the dead. The two started to hold regular seances, in which they would try to contact Buddy Holly, who Goddard believed had sent him "Johnny Remember Me" from the spirit world. Meek's obsession with the undead also showed in some of the other records he was making, like the instrumental "Night of the Vampire" by the Moontrekkers: [Excerpt: The Moontrekkers, "Night of the Vampire"] The Moontrekkers did have a singer, but after hearing him audition, Meek came running into the room flapping his arms and blowing raspberries, because he thought he was too awful to record. Rod Stewart would have to wait a while longer for his recording career. In 1961, Meek put together a group for studio work. The group started because the lead guitarist of the Outlaws, one of the bands Meek produced, got sacked. Their bass player, Chas Hodges, later more famous as half of Chas & Dave, switched to guitar, and Meek had tried to replace him with a new bass player, one Heinz Burt. Heinz was someone who Meek was very attracted to -- reports differ on whether they were lovers or not, but if not then Meek definitely wanted them to be -- and Meek was moulding Heinz to be a future star, despite his lack of musical ability. While he was being groomed for stardom, he was made the bass player in the group -- until Hodges decided he was going to switch back to bass, because Heinz couldn't play. Alan Caddy, formerly of Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, became the new guitarist for the Outlaws, and then the group lost their drummer, who was replaced with Clem Cattini, Caddy's old Pirates bandmate. By this point Chas Hodges was the only Outlaw left, and Meek really wanted to give Heinz a job, and so he took Caddy and Cattini and made them into a new group, for studio work, who were to be known as the Tornados, with Heinz on bass. Soon they added a rhythm guitarist, George Bellamy, and a keyboard player, Norman Hale. Larry Parnes was, as we saw in the last episode, always on the lookout for bands to back his stars, and so in 1962 the Tornados became Billy Fury's backing band -- something that was to cause problems for them more quickly than they imagined. At the time, it seemed like a great opportunity. They were going to record for Meek -- both their own records and as the backing musicians for anyone else that Meek thought they'd work with -- and they were going to tour with Fury, so they'd have regular work. And Meek saw it as an opportunity for him to possibly get involved with Fury's recording career, which would have been a great opportunity for him had it worked out. The Tornados' first single, "Love and Fury", seems to have been named with this new association in mind: [Excerpt: The Tornados, "Love and Fury"] Unfortunately for the group, it wasn't a hit. But then Meek got inspired. In July 1962, the first ever communications satellite, Telstar, was launched. For the first time in history, people could see events on the other side of the world broadcast live, and so Europeans got to see, in real time, a speech by President Kennedy and part of a baseball game. It's hard now to imagine how revolutionary this was at the time, but this was a time when things like the Olympics were shown on twelve-hour delays or longer, as to show them the TV companies had to film them on actual film, and then fly the film over to the UK. Telstar was the future, and Meek, with his interest in space, was going to commemorate that. He took a song he'd recorded with Geoff Goddard, “Try Once More”: [Excerpt: Geoff Goddard, “Try Once More”] As was always his way with writing, he took that backing track, and sang a new melody over it: [Excerpt: Joe Meek, “Telstar (demo)”] He then got the keyboard player Dave Adams to work out the melody based on that demo, and recorded Adams playing that melody over a different pre-recorded backing track: [Excerpt: Dave Adams, “Telstar demo”] He then used that as the demo to show the Tornados what to play. They spent twelve hours in the studio recording the backing track, between Billy Fury shows, and then Meek got Goddard in to play piano and clavioline, and do some wordless vocals, as the Tornados didn't have enough time between shows to finish the track by themselves. Meek then overdubbed the track with various backwards-recorded and echoed sound effects: [Excerpt: The Tornados, "Telstar"] "Telstar" entered the charts on the fifth of September, and reached number one on the tenth of October, the week after "Love Me Do" came out. It stayed there for five weeks, and as well as that it went to number one in America -- the first British rock and roll record ever to do so. The follow-up, "Globetrotter", also charted -- and got into the top ten while "Telstar" was still there: [Excerpt: The Tornados, "Globetrotter"] Unfortunately, that was to be the high point for the Tornados. Larry Parnes, who was managing them, didn't want them to take the spotlight away from Billy Fury, who they were backing -- he let them play "Telstar" on stage, but that was it, and when they got offers to tour America, he insisted that Fury had to be on the bill, which caused the American promoters to back out. Not only that, but the other Tornados were getting sick of Meek putting all his attention into Heinz, who he was still trying to make into a solo star, recording songs like the Eddie Cochran tribute "Just Like Eddie", written by Geoff Goddard and with a new young guitarist called Ritchie Blackmore, who was the guitarist in Chas Hodges' latest lineup of Outlaws, playing lead: [Excerpt: Heinz, "Just Like Eddie"] And then in March 1963, the composer of a piece of French film music, "Le Marche d’Austerlitz", sued Meek over "Telstar"s similarity to that tune: [Excerpt: Jean Ledrut, "Le Marche d’Austerlitz"] It was a frivolous suit -- Meek had no way of having heard that piece, which was from a film which hadn't been released in Britain -- but it tied up all Meek's royalties from “Telstar” for the next four years. Meek was still having hits -- "Just Like Eddie" eventually made number five – for example, but in 1963 with the rise of Merseybeat he was having fewer and fewer. Not only that, but his mental health was getting worse and worse, especially after he was arrested for soliciting. He started getting more and more paranoid that people were stealing his ideas, and one by one he cut ties with business associates like Larry Parnes and Robert Stigwood. Heinz got a girlfriend, and everyone was in Meek's bad books. But he was still turning out the hits, like "Have I The Right" by the Honeycombs: [Excerpt: The Honeycombs, "Have I the Right"] That went to number one, but meant the end of Meek's association with Goddard -- Goddard claimed that he had written the song, which was credited to the Honeycombs' managers, and Meek thought he was just claiming this so he could avoid being associated with Meek now that his homosexuality was public knowledge after his arrest. Goddard ended up suing over the song. Meek was also just producing too much music in an attempt to remain on top. He's often compared to Phil Spector, but in a three-year period Spector had twenty-one hit singles out of twenty-four releases. Meek, in the same period, had twenty-five hit singles -- but released 141 singles, almost one a week. His failure rate in turn made record labels more and more wary of buying his tapes. By the mid-sixties, the hits were well and truly drying up. Meek was still producing a group called the Tornados, but it had none of the original members in and now featured guitarist Ritchie Blackmore and drummer Mitch Mitchell . This lineup of Tornados split up shortly after Meek pulled out a shotgun in the studio and aimed it at Mitchell's head, saying he'd shoot him if he didn't get the drum part right. Meek's final important record was in mid 1966, when he finally jumped on the Merseybeat bandwagon two years late, with "Please Stay" by the Cryin' Shames, the most popular band in Liverpool at the time: [Excerpt: The Cryin' Shames, "Please Stay"] Unfortunately, that only made the lower reaches of the top thirty. Meek was getting deeper and deeper in debt, and his mental health was getting worse. He was seriously considering quitting as an independent producer and taking a steady job with EMI instead. And then, a tragic event happened which eventually led to the unravelling of Meek's entire life. Meek was already in a very low place when he learned of the murder of sixteen-year-old Bernard Oliver, a young gay teenager who Meek had known (reports vary on how well they knew each other, with some saying that Oliver had done some work for Meek at his studio, while others say they just vaguely knew each other). The murder, which has still never been solved, was a major news story at the time, and it led to a massive increase in police harassment of anyone who was known to be gay, especially if they knew Oliver -- and Meek had a conviction. Meek already believed he was being spied on and that his phone was being tapped, and now the world started giving him reason to think that -- strange cars parked outside his house, almost certainly undercover police spying on him. On February the second, 1967, the PRS received a letter from the French performing rights society, saying that Meek's problems with the Telstar lawsuit would soon be over -- the court had determined that no matter what had happened, the composer of “Le Marche d'Austerlitz” would only be entitled to a small percentage of the royalties from "Telstar" at most. Frederick Woods, the assistant general manager of the PRS and a friend of Meek's, put the letter aside intending to call Meek and tell him the good news -- all he had to do was to write to the PRS and they'd be able to give him an advance on the money, and soon almost all of it would be coming through. He'd soon be getting the bulk of the £150,000 he was owed -- nearly three million pounds in today's money. But Woods got distracted and didn't make the phone call, and Meek never found out that his money troubles were nearly over. Ritchie Blackmore's wife Margaret called round to see Joe, as she sometimes did. He was apparently not in his right mind, talking a lot about black magic and comparing Margaret to Frieda Harris, one of Aleister Crowley's associates. He was convinced people were stealing his ideas from his mind, and asked her to leave. While she was there, she saw him destroying correspondence and paintings he owned. The next morning, February the third, Meek asked his assistant to get his landlady, Violet Shenton, up to Meek's office. There was some shouting from Meek, and then he turned a gun he had, which was owned by Heinz, on Mrs. Shenton and killed her. Meek's assistant ran into the room, but before he could get to Meek, Meek shot himself, dying instantly. It was the eighth anniversary of Buddy Holly's death. The lawsuit over "Telstar" was finally resolved just three weeks later, in Meek's favour. There's a plaque now at the building where Meek's studio was. It says that Joe Meek, "the Telstar man", "Lived, worked, and died here". It doesn't mention Violet Shenton. After all, she wasn't a great male genius, just the male genius' female victim.

Oct 6, 2020

This is the first of a new monthly feature that will run alongside the main podcast — once a month I’ll be doing a ten-minute bonus episode looking at non-music news from the time we’re covering in the podcast. These can be skipped if you’re only interested in the music, but add valuable context about the culture in which those records were made. This month’s is on the Cuban Missile Crisis. Year three of the podcast starts in a few days’ time, with “Telstar”. Click through for the episode transcript: (more…)

Sep 26, 2020

This week there are two episodes of the podcast going up, both of them longer than normal. This one, episode one hundred, is the hundredth-episode special and is an hour and a half long. It looks at the early career of the Beatles, and at the three recordings of “Love Me Do”. 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 “Misirlou” by Dick Dale and the Deltones . 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…)

Sep 25, 2020

This week there are two episiodes of the podcast going up, both of them longer than normal. This one, episode ninety-nine, is on “Surfin’ Safari” by the Beach Boys, and the group’s roots in LA, and is fifty minutes long. 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 “Misirlou” by Dick Dale and the Deltones . 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…)

Sep 15, 2020

Episode ninety-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “I’ve Just Fallen For Someone” by Adam Faith, and is our final look at the pre-Beatles British pop scene. 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 “San Francisco Bay Blues” by Jesse Fuller. 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…)

Sep 10, 2020

Episode ninety-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Song To Woody” by Bob Dylan, and at the Greenwich Village folk scene of the early 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 “ Sherry” by the Four Seasons. 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…)

Sep 1, 2020

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…)

Aug 27, 2020

Episode ninety-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “You Better Move On”, and the sad story of Arthur Alexander. 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 “Mother-In-Law” by Ernie K-Doe. 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…)

Aug 24, 2020

This is a special extra episode of the podcast, not one of the “proper” five hundred. A book I’ve written, on the TV series The Strange World of Gurney Slade, has just become available for pre-order from Obverse Books , so to publicise that I’ve done an extra episode, on the pop music career of its star, Anthony Newley. The next normal episode will be up in a day or two. Transcript below the cut. Erratum: In a previous version of this episode, I mentioned, in passing, my understanding that Newley was an alcoholic. This has been strongly questioned by some fans, who took offence at the suggestion, and as it was utterly irrelevant to the point I was making I have deleted those three words rather than cause further offence. (more…)

Aug 18, 2020

Episode ninety-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Stand By Me” by Ben E. King, and at the later career of the Drifters. 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 “If I Had a Hammer” by Trini López . 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…)

Aug 10, 2020

Episode ninety-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Please Mr. Postman” by the Marvelettes, and the career of the first group to have a number one on a Motown label. 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 “ Take Good Care of My Baby” by Bobby Vee . 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…)

Aug 2, 2020

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…)

Jul 25, 2020

Episode ninety-one of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “The Twist” by Chubby Checker, and how the biggest hit single ever had its roots in hard R&B. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Viens Danser le Twist” by Johnny Hallyday , a cover of a Chubby Checker record that became the first number one for France’s biggest rock star. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Also, people have asked me to start selling podcast merchandise, so you can now buy T-shirts from https://500-songs.teemill.com/ . That store will be updated semi-regularly. (more…)

Jul 19, 2020

Welcome to the seventh and final in the Pledge Week series of episodes, putting up old bonus episodes posted to my Patreon in an attempt to encourage more subscriptions. If you like this, consider subscribing to the Patreon at http://patreon.com/join/andrewhickey . I’m glad to say that this pledge week has been successful enough that I may do another of these in a year or so. This one is about “Sixteen Tons” by Tennessee Ernie Ford, a record that was a huge influence on many, many artists in the mid fifties. (more…)

Jul 18, 2020

Episode ninety of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Runaway” by Del Shannon, and at the early use of synthesised sound in rock music. 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 “Blue Moon” by the Marcels. 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…)

Jul 18, 2020

Welcome to the sixth in the Pledge Week series of episodes, putting up old bonus episodes posted to my Patreon in an attempt to encourage more subscriptions. If you like this, consider subscribing to the Patreon at http://patreon.com/join/andrewhickey . This one is about “Black Denim Trousers and Motorcycle Boots” by the Cheers, one of the first Teen Tragedy records, and Leiber and Stoller’s biggest hit. Content warning — contains mentions of deaths in accidents, and of false rape accusations. Click the cut to view a transcript of this episode: (more…)

Jul 17, 2020

Welcome to the fifth in the Pledge Week series of episodes, putting up old bonus episodes posted to my Patreon in an attempt to encourage more subscriptions. If you like this, consider subscribing to the Patreon at http://patreon.com/join/andrewhickey . This one is about “Ain’t Got No Home” by Clarence “Frogman” Henry, a classic of both novelty music and New Orleans R&B. Click the cut to view a transcript of this episode: (more…)

Jul 16, 2020

Welcome to the fourth in the Pledge Week series of episodes, putting up old bonus episodes posted to my Patreon in an attempt to encourage more subscriptions. If you like this, consider subscribing to the Patreon at http://patreon.com/join/andrewhickey . This one is about “Shake a Hand” by Faye Adams, a classic of gospel-tinged R&B that influenced Little Richard, Elvis Presley, and Paul McCartney among others. Click the cut to view a transcript of this episode: (more…)

Jul 15, 2020

Welcome to the third in the Pledge Week series of episodes, putting up old bonus episodes posted to my Patreon in an attempt to encourage more subscriptions. If you like this, consider subscribing to the Patreon at http://patreon.com/join/andrewhickey . This one is about “Blue Yodel #9” by Jimmie Rodgers, but it’s really about two great women who shaped twentieth century popular music without much credit — Lil Hardin and Elsie McWilliams Click the cut to view a transcript of this episode: (more…)

Jul 14, 2020

Welcome to the second in the Pledge Week series of episodes, putting up old bonus episodes posted to my Patreon in an attempt to encourage more subscriptions. If you like this, consider subscribing to the Patreon at http://patreon.com/join/andrewhickey . Click the cut to view a transcript of this episode: (more…)

Jul 13, 2020

Welcome to Pledge Week! I’m doing a week of posting some of the Patreon bonuses I’ve done, to encourage those who can to sign up to my Patreon. ERRATUM: My understanding when I did this episode was that “White Lightning” was recorded right after the Big Bopper’s death. That is not actually the case — Jones just turned up drunk to the session because he was drunk, not because of his friend’s death, and they *released* the record a few days after Bopper’s death. Every day of Pledge Week will start with the same section, which I’ll transcribe once, below, before the cut. Pledge Week Intro This is not a proper episode of the podcast. Rather, this is something else. I’ve decided to hold a pledge week, to try to get a few more subscribers to my Patreon. So every day this week I’ll be putting one of the backer-only episodes I’ve done over the past year up on the main podcast feed, so people can hear what it is you get if you sign up for the Patreon, with this little introductory piece before them. If you’re already a backer, you will already have this episode, so you can skip this and everything else labelled “pledge week”. I do one of these every week for my backers, and backers even at the lowest levels get them — if you sign up for a dollar a month you get each new one as it comes out, and access to all the old ones. There are fifty-nine of them up so far, as well as a few other things like the monthly Q&As I’ve been doing for backers. I’m only making seven of these available on the public feed, so there’s a lot still there for you to listen to. If this works well, I might do another one next year, when there’ll be another fifty-odd episodes to choose from. None of this is meant to put any pressure on anyone who can’t afford it to back the podcast — the podcast will always remain free to listen to, and I hope it will remain ad-free as well. I know times are especially tough right now, and many of you literally can’t afford the money you’re already spending, let alone paying any more out. I only want backers who can spare the money. But if you can afford it, and you like these bonus episodes enough, then go to patreon.com slash andrewhickey, that’s spelled h-i-c-k-e-y, or follow the link in the shownotes, and sign up, and you’ll get one of these the same day as every new episode. If you can’t, well… enjoy this extra free bonus, and don’t worry about it. Transcript behind cut (more…)

Jul 10, 2020

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…)

Jul 2, 2020

Episode eighty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Cathy’s Clown” by The Everly Brothers, and at how after signing the biggest contract in music business history their career was sabotaged by their manager. 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 “Poetry in Motion” by Johnny Tillotson . (more…)

Jun 23, 2020

Episode eighty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Apache”, by the Shadows, and at the three years in which they and Cliff Richard were on top of the music world. Patreon backers also have a fifteen-minute bonus episode, on “Handy Man” by Jimmy Jones . My apologies for the lateness of this episode, which is due to my home Internet connection having been out for a week. 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…)

Jun 10, 2020

Episode eighty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “LSD-25” by the Gamblers, the first rock song ever to namecheck acid, and a song by a band so obscure no photos exist of them. (The photo here is of the touring lineup of the Hollywood Argyles. Derry Weaver, the Gamblers’ lead guitarist, is top left). Patreon backers also have a fifteen-minute bonus episode, on “Papa Oom Mow Mow” by the Rivingtons . 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…)

Jun 5, 2020

Episode eighty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Three Steps to Heaven” by Eddie Cochran, and at the British tour which changed music and ended his life. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifteen-minute bonus episode, on “Quarter to Three” by Gary US Bonds. 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…)

May 28, 2020

Episode eighty-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Shakin' All Over" by Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, and how the first great British R&B band interacted with the entertainment industry. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifteen-minute bonus episode, on "Under Your Spell Again" by Buck Owens. 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, I have put together a Mixcloud mix with every song excerpted in this podcast. Only one biography of Kidd has been written, and that's been out of print for nearly a quarter of a century and goes for ridiculous prices. Luckily Adie Barrett's site http://www.johnnykidd.co.uk/ is everything a fan-site should be, and has a detailed biographical section which I used for the broad-strokes outline. Clem Cattini: My Life, Through the Eye of a Tornado is somewhere between authorised biography and autobiography. It's not the best-written book ever, but it contains a lot of information about Clem's life. Spike & Co by Graham McCann gives a very full account of Associated London Scripts. Pete Frame's The Restless Generation is the best book available looking at British 50s rock and roll from a historical perspective. Be warned, though -- his jokey and irreverent style can, when dealing with people like Larry Parnes (who was gay and Jewish) very occasionally tip over into reinforcing homophobic and anti-semitic stereotypes for an easy laugh. Billy Bragg's Roots, Radicals, and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World is one of the best books I've read on music at all, and gives far more detail about the historical background. And a fair chunk of the background information here also comes from the extended edition of Mark Lewisohn's Tune In, which is essential reading for anyone who is interested in the Beatles, British post-war culture, and British post-war music. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript As we get more into this story, we're going to see a lot more British acts becoming part of it. We've already looked at Lonnie Donegan, Cliff Richard, Tommy Steele, and Vince Taylor, but without spoiling anything I think most of you can guess that over the next year or so we're going to see a few guitar bands from the UK enter the narrative. Today we're going to look at one of the most important British bands of the early sixties -- a band who are now mostly known for one hit and a gimmick, but who made a massive contribution to the sound of rock music. We're going to look at Johnny Kidd and the Pirates: [Excerpt: Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, "Shakin' All Over"] Our story starts during the skiffle boom of 1957. If you don't remember the episodes we did on skiffle and early British rock and roll, it was a musical craze that swept Britain after Lonnie Donegan's surprise hit with "Rock Island Line". For about eighteen months, nearly every teenage boy in Britain was in a group playing a weird mix of Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie songs, old folk tunes, and music-hall numbers, with a lineup usually consisting of guitar, banjo, someone using a washboard as percussion, and a homemade double bass made out of a teachest, a broom handle, and a single string. The skiffle craze died away as quickly as it started out, but it left a legacy -- thousands of young kids who'd learned at least three chords, who'd performed in public, and who knew that it was possible to make music without having gone through the homogenising star-making process. That would have repercussions throughout the length of this story, and to this day. But while almost everyone in a skiffle group was a kid, not everyone was. Obviously the big stars of the genre -- Lonnie Donegan, Chas McDevitt, the Vipers -- were all in their twenties when they became famous, and so were some of the amateurs who tried to jump on the bandwagon. In particular, there was Fred Heath. Heath was twenty-one when skiffle hit, and was already married -- while twenty-one might seem young now, at the time, it was an age when people were meant to have settled down and found a career. But Heath wasn't the career sort. There were rumours about him which attest to the kind of person he was perceived as being -- that he was a bookie's runner, that he'd not been drafted because he was thought to be completely impossible to discipline, that he had been working as a painter in a warehouse and urinated on the warehouse floor from the scaffolding he was on -- and he was clearly not someone who was *ever* going to settle down. The first skiffle band Heath formed was called Bats Heath and the Vampires, and featured Heath on vocals and rhythm guitar, Brian Englund on banjo, Frank Rouledge on lead guitar, and Clive Lazell on washboard. The group went through a variety of names, at one point naming themselves the Frantic Four in what seems to have been an attempt to confuse people into thinking they were seeing Don Lang's Frantic Five, the group who often appeared on Six-Five Special: [Excerpt: Don Lang and his Frantic Five, "Six-Five Hand Jivel"] The group went through the standard lineup and name changes that almost every amateur group went through, and they ended up as a five-piece group called the Five Nutters. And it was as the Five Nutters that they made their first attempts at becoming stars, when they auditioned for Carroll Levis. Levis was one of the most important people in showbusiness in the UK at this time. He'd just started a TV series, but for years before that his show had been on Radio Luxembourg, which was for many teenagers in the UK the most important radio station in the world. At the time, the BBC had a legal monopoly on radio broadcasting in the UK, but they had a couple of problems when it came to attracting a teenage audience. The first was that they had to provide entertainment for *everyone*, and so they couldn't play much music that only appealed to teenagers but was detested by adults. But there was a much bigger problem for the BBC when it came to recorded music. In the 1950s, the BBC ran three national radio stations -- the Light Programme, the Home Service, and the Third Programme -- along with one national TV channel. The Musicians' Union were worried that playing recorded music on these would lead to their members losing work, and so there was an agreement called "needletime", which allowed the BBC to use recorded music for twenty-two hours a week, total, across all three radio stations, plus another three hours for the TV. That had to cover every style of music from Little Richard through to Doris Day through to Beethoven. The rest of the time, if they had music, it had to be performed by live musicians, and so you'd be more likely to hear "Rock Around the Clock" as performed by the Northern Dance Orchestra than Bill Haley's version, and much of the BBC's youth programming had middle-aged British session musicians trying to replicate the sound of American records and failing miserably. But Luxembourg didn't have a needle-time rule, and so a commercial English-language station had been set up there, using transmitters powerful enough to reach most of Britain and Ireland. The station was owned and run in Britain, and most of the shows were recorded in London by British DJs like Brian Matthew, Jimmy Savile, and Alan Freeman, although there were also recordings of Alan Freed's show broadcast on it. The shows were mostly sponsored by record companies, who would make the DJs play just half of the record, so they could promote more songs in their twenty-minute slot, and this was the main way that any teenager in Britain would actually be able to hear rock and roll music. Oddly, even though he spent many years on Radio Luxembourg, Levis' show, which had originally been on the BBC before the War, was not a music show, but a talent show. Whether on his original BBC radio show, the Radio Luxembourg one, or his new TV show, the format was the same. He would alternate weeks between broadcasting and talent scouting. In talent scouting weeks he would go to a different city each week, where for five nights in a row he would put on talent shows featuring up to twenty different local amateur acts doing their party pieces -- without payment, of course, just for the exposure. At the end of the show, the audience would get a chance to clap for each act, and the act that got the loudest applause would go through to a final on the Saturday night. This of course meant that acts that wanted to win would get a lot of their friends and family to come along and cheer for them. The Saturday night would then have the winning acts -- which is to say, those who brought along the most paying customers -- compete against each other. The most popular of *those* acts would then get to appear on Levis' TV show the next week. It was, as you can imagine, an extremely lucrative business. When the Five Nutters appeared on Levis' Discoveries show, they were fairly sure that the audience clapped loudest for them, but they came third. Being the type of person he was, Fred Heath didn't take this lying down, and remonstrated with Levis, who eventually promised to get the Nutters some better gigs, one suspects just to shut Heath up. As a result of Levis putting in a good word for them, they got a few appearances at places like the 2Is, and made an appearance on the BBC's one concession to youth culture on the radio -- a new show called Saturday Skiffle Club. Around this time, the Five Nutters also recorded a demo disc. The first side was a skiffled-up version of "Shake, Rattle and Roll", with some extremely good jazzy lead guitar: [Excerpt: Fred Heath and the Five Nutters, "Shake, Rattle, and Roll"] I've heard quite a few records of skiffle groups, mostly by professionals, and it's clear that the Five Nutters were far more musical, and far more interesting, than most of them, even despite the audible sloppiness here. The point of skiffle was meant to be that it was do-it-yourself music that required no particular level of skill -- but in this case the Nutters' guitarist Frank Rouledge was clearly quite a bit more proficient than the run-of-the-mill skiffle guitarist. What was even more interesting about that recording, though, was the B-side, which was a song written by the group. It seems to have been mostly written by Heath, and it's called "Blood-Red Beauty" because Heath's wife was a redhead: [Excerpt: Fred Heath and the Five Nutters, "Blood Red Beauty"] The song itself is fairly unexceptional -- it's a standard Hank Williams style hillbilly boogie -- but at this time there was still in Britain a fairly hard and fast rule which had performers and songwriters as two distinct things. There were a handful of British rock musicians who were attempting to write their own material -- most prominently Billy Fury, a Larry Parnes artist who I'm afraid we don't have space for in the podcast, but who was one of the most interesting of the late-fifties British acts -- but in general, there was a fairly strict demarcation. It was very unusual for a British performer to also be trying to write songs. The Nutters split up shortly after their Saturday Skiffle Club appearance, and Heath formed various other groups called things like The Fabulous Freddie Heath Band and The Fred, Mike & Tom Show, before going back to the old name, with a new lineup of Freddie Heath and the Nutters consisting of himself on vocals, Mike West and Tom Brown -- who had been the Mike and Tom in The Fred, Mike, & Tom Show, on backing vocals, Tony Doherty on rhythm guitar, Ken McKay on drums, Johnny Gordon on bass, and on lead guitar Alan Caddy, a man who was known by the nickname "tea", which was partly a pun on his name, partly a reference to his drinking copious amounts of tea, and partly Cockney rhyming slang -- tea-leaf for thief -- as he was known for stealing cars. The Nutters got a new agent, Don Toy, and manager, Guy Robinson, but Heath seemed mostly to want to be a songwriter rather than a singer at this point. He was looking to place his songs with other artists, and in early 1959, he did. He wrote a song called "Please Don't Touch", and managed to get it placed with a vocal group called the Bachelors -- not the more famous group of that name, but a minor group who recorded for Parlophone, a subsidiary of EMI run by a young producer named George Martin. "Please Don't Touch" came out as the B-side of a Bachelors record: [Excerpt: The Bachelors, "Please Don't Touch"] One notable thing about the songwriting credit -- while most sources say Fred Heath wrote the song by himself, he gave Guy Robinson a co-writing credit on this and many of his future songs. This was partly because it was fairly standard at the time for managers to cut themselves in on their artists' credits, but also because that way the credit could read Heath Robinson -- Heath Robinson was a famous British cartoonist who was notable for drawing impossibly complicated inventions, and whose name had become part of the British language -- for American listeners, imagine that the song was credited to Rube Goldberg, and you'll have the idea. At this point, the Nutters had become quite a professional organisation, and so it was unsurprising that after "Please Don't Touch" brought Fred Heath to the attention of EMI, a different EMI imprint, HMV, signed them up. Much of the early success of the Nutters, and this professionalism, seems to be down to Don Toy, who seems to have been a remarkably multi-talented individual. As well as being an agent who had contracts with many London venues to provide them with bands, he was also an electrical engineer specialising in sound equipment. He built a two-hundred watt bass amp for the group, at a time when almost every band just put their bass guitar through a normal guitar amp, and twenty-five watts was considered quite loud. He also built a portable tape echo device that could be used on stage to make Heath's voice sound like it would on the records. Heath later bought the first Copicat echo unit to be made -- this was a mass-produced device that would be used by a lot of British bands in the early sixties, and Heath's had serial number 0001 -- but before that became available, he used Toy's device, which may well have been the very first on-stage echo device in the UK. On top of that, Toy has also claimed that most of the songs credited to Heath and Robinson were also co-written by him, but he left his name off because the credit looked better without it. And whether or not that's true, he was also the drummer on this first session -- Ken McKay, the Nutters' drummer, was a bit unsteady in his tempo, and Toy was a decent player and took over from him when in April 1959, Fred Heath and the Nutters went into Abbey Road Studio 2, to record their own version of "Please Don't Touch". This was ostensibly produced by HMV producer Walter Ridley, but Ridley actually left rock and roll records to his engineer, Peter Sullivan: [Excerpt: Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, "Please Don't Touch"] It was only when the session was over that they saw the paperwork for it. Fred Heath was the only member of the Nutters to be signed to EMI, with the rest of the group being contracted as session musicians, but that was absolutely normal for the time period -- Tommy Steele's Steelmen and Cliff Richard's Drifters hadn't been signed as artists either. What they were concerned about was the band name on the paperwork -- it didn't say Fred Heath and the Nutters, but Johnny Kidd and the Pirates. They were told that that was going to be their new name. They never did find out who it was who had decided on this for them, but from now on Fred Heath was Johnny Kidd. The record was promoted on Radio Luxembourg, and everyone thought it was going to go to number one. Unfortunately, strike action prevented that, and the record was only a moderate chart success -- the highest position it hit in any of the UK charts at the time was number twenty on the Melody Maker chart. But that didn't stop it from becoming an acknowledged classic of British rock and roll. It was so popular that it actually saw an American cover version, which was something that almost never happened with British songs, though Chico Holliday's version was unsuccessful: [Excerpt: Chico Holliday, "Please Don't Touch"] It remained such a fond memory for British rockers that in 1980 the heavy metal groups Motorhead and Girlschool recorded it as the supergroup HeadGirl, and it became the biggest hit either group ever had, reaching number five in the British charts: [Excerpt: Headgirl, "Please Don't Touch"] But while "Please Don't Touch" was one of the very few good rock and roll records made in Britain, it wasn't the one for which Johnny Kidd and the Pirates would be remembered. It was, though, enough to make them a big act. They toured the country on a bill compered by Liverpool comedian Jimmy Tarbuck, and they made several appearances on Saturday Club, which had now dropped the "skiffle" name and was the only place anyone could hear rock and roll on BBC radio. Of course, the British record industry having the immense sense of potential it did, HMV immediately capitalised on the success of Johnny Kidd and the Pirates doing a great group performance of an original rock and roll number, by releasing as a follow-up single, a version of the old standard "If You Were the Only Girl in the World and I Were the Only Boy" by Johnny without the Pirates, but with chorus and orchestra conducted by Ivor Raymonde: [Excerpt: Johnny Kidd, "If You Were The Only Girl in the World"] For some reason -- I can't imagine why -- that didn't chart. One suspects that young Lemmy wasn't quite as fond of that one as "Please Don't Touch". The B-side was a quite good rocker, with some nice guitar work from the session guitarist Bert Weedon, but no-one bothered to buy the record at the time, so they didn't turn it over to hear the other side. The follow-up was better -- a reworking of Marv Johnson's "You've Got What it Takes", one of the hits that Berry Gordy had been writing and producing for Johnson. Johnson's version made the top five in the UK, but the Pirates' version still made the top thirty. But by this time there had been some changes. The first change that was made was that the Pirates changed manager -- while Robinson would continue getting songwriting credits, the group were now managed through Associated London Scripts, by Stan "Scruffy" Dale. Associated London Scripts was, as the name suggests, primarily a company that produced scripts. It was started as a writers' co-operative, and in its early days it was made up of seven people. There was Frankie Howerd, one of the most popular stand-up comedians of the time, who was always looking for new material; Spike Milligan, the writer and one of the stars of the Goon Show, the most important surreal comedy of the fifties; Eric Sykes, who was a writer-performer who was involved in almost every important comedy programme of the decade, including co-writing many Goon episodes with Milligan, before becoming a TV star himself; Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, who wrote the most important *sitcom* of the fifties and early sixties, Hancock's Half Hour; and Scruffy Dale, who was Howerd and Sykes' manager and was supposed to take care of the business stuff. In fact, though, most of the business was actually taken care of by the seventh person and only woman, Beryl Vertue, who was taken on as the secretary on the basis of an interview that mostly asked about her tea-making skills, but soon found herself doing almost everything -- the men in the office got so used to asking her "Could you make the tea, Beryl?", "Could you type up this script, Beryl?" that they just started asking her things like "Could you renegotiate our contract with the BBC, Beryl?" She eventually became one of the most important women in the TV industry, with her most recent prominent credit being as executive producer on the BBC's Sherlock up until 2017, more than sixty years after she joined the business. Vertue did all the work to keep the company running -- a company which grew to about thirty writers, and between the early fifties and mid sixties, as well as Hancock's Half Hour and the Goons, its writers created Sykes, Beyond Our Ken, Round the Horne, Steptoe and Son, The Bedsitting Room, the Running, Jumping, Standing Still Film, Til Death Us Do Part, Citizen James, and the Daleks. That's a list off the top of my head -- it would actually be easier to list memorable British comedy programmes and films of the fifties and early sixties that *didn't* have a script from one of ALS' writers. And while Vertue was keeping Marty Feldman, John Junkin, Barry Took, Johnny Speight, John Antrobus and all the rest of these new writers in work, Scruffy Dale was trying to create a career in pop management. As several people associated with ALS had made records with George Martin at Parlophone, he had an in there, and some of the few pop successes that Martin had in the fifties were producing acts managed by Dale through ALS, like the Vipers Skiffle Group: [Excerpt: The Vipers Skiffle Group, "Don't You Rock Me, Daddy-O"] and a young performer named Jim Smith, who wanted to be a comedian and actor, but who Dale renamed after himself, and who had a string of hits as Jim Dale: [Excerpt: Jim Dale, "Be My Girl"] Jim Dale eventually did become a film and TV star, starting with presenting Six-Five Special, and is now best known for having starred in many of the Carry On films and narrating the Harry Potter audiobooks, but at the time he was still a pop star. Jim Dale and the Vipers were the two professional acts headlining an otherwise-amateur tour that Scruffy Dale put together that was very much like Carroll Levis' Discoveries show, except without the need to even give the winners a slot on the TV every other week. This tour was supposed to be a hunt for the country's best skiffle group, and there was going to be a grand national final, and the winner of *that* would go on TV. Except they just kept dragging the tour out for eighteen months, until the skiffle fad was completely over and no-one cared, so there never was a national final. And in the meantime the Vipers had to sit through twenty groups of spotty kids a night, all playing "Don't You Rock Me Daddy-O", and then go out and play it themselves, every night for eighteen months. Scruffy Dale was unscrupulous in other ways as well, and not long after he'd taken on the Pirates' management he was sacked from ALS. Spike Milligan had never liked Dale -- when told that Dale had lost a testicle in the war, he'd merely replied "I hope he dropped it on Dresden" -- but Frankie Howerd and Eric Sykes had always been impressed with his ability to negotiate deals. But then Frankie Howerd found out that he'd missed out on lucrative opportunities because Dale had shoved letters in his coat pocket and forgotten about them for a fortnight. He started investigating a few more things, and it turned out that Dale had been siphoning money from Sykes and Howerd's personal bank accounts into his own, having explained to their bank manager that it would just be resting in his account for them, because they were showbiz people who would spend it all too fast, so he was looking after them. And he'd also been doing other bits of creative accounting -- every success his musical acts had was marked down as something he'd done independently, and all the profits went to him, while all the unsuccessful ventures were marked down as being ALS projects, and their losses charged to the company. So neither Dale nor the Pirates were with Associated London Scripts very long. But Dale made one very important change -- he and Don Toy decided between them that most of the Pirates had to go. There were six backing musicians in the group if you counted the two backing vocalists, who all needed paying, and only one could read music -- they weren't professional enough to make a career in the music business. So all of the Pirates except Alan Caddy were sacked. Mike West and Tony Doherty formed another band, Robby Hood and His Merry Men, whose first single was written by Kidd (though it's rare enough I've not been able to find a copy anywhere online). The new backing group was going to be a trio, modelled on Johnny Burnette's Rock and Roll Trio -- just one guitar, bass, and drums. They had Caddy on lead guitar, Clem Cattini on drums, and Brian Gregg on bass. Cattini was regarded as by far the best rock drummer in Britain at the time. He'd played with Terry Dene's backing band the Dene Aces, and can be seen glumly backing Dene in the film The Golden Disc: [Excerpt: Terry Dene, "Candy Floss"] Gregg had joined Dene's band, and they'd both then moved on to be touring musicians for Larry Parnes, backing most of the acts on a tour featuring Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran that we'll be looking at next week. They'd played with various of Parnes' acts for a while, but had then asked for more money, and he'd refused, so they'd quit working for Parnes and joined Vince Taylor and the Playboys. They'd only played with the Playboys a few weeks when they moved on to Chas McDevitt's group. For a brief time, McDevitt had been the biggest star in skiffle other than Lonnie Donegan, but he was firmly in the downward phase of his career at this point. McDevitt also owned a coffee bar, the Freight Train, named after his biggest hit, and most of the musicians in London would hang out there. And after Clem Cattini and Brian Gregg had joined the Pirates, it was at the Freight Train that the song for which the group would be remembered was written. They were going to go into the studio to record another song chosen by the record label -- a version of the old standard "Yes Sir, That's My Baby" -- because EMI had apparently not yet learned that if you had Johnny Kidd record old standards, no-one bought it, but if you had him record bluesy rock and roll you had a hit. But they'd been told they could write their own B-side, as they'd been able to on the last few singles. They were also allowed to bring in Joe Moretti to provide a second guitar -- Moretti, who had played the solo on "Brand New Cadillac", was an old friend of Clem Cattini's, and they thought he'd add something to the record, and also thought they'd be doing him a favour by letting him make a session fee -- he wasn't a regular session player. So they all got together in the Freight Train coffee bar, and wrote another Heath/Robinson number. They weren't going to do anything too original for a B-side, of course. They nicked a rhythm guitar part from "Linda Lu", a minor US hit that Lee Hazelwood had produced for a Chuck Berry soundalike named Ray Sharpe, and which was itself clearly lifted from “Speedoo” by the Cadillacs: [Excerpt: Ray Sharpe, "Linda Lu"] They may also have nicked Joe Moretti's lead guitar part as well, though there's more doubt about this. There's a Mickey and Sylvia record, "No Good Lover", which hadn't been released in the UK at the time, so it's hard to imagine how they could have heard it, but the lead guitar part they hit on was very, very similar -- maybe someone had played it on Radio Luxembourg: [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, "No Good Lover"] They combined those musical ideas with a lyric that was partly a follow-on to the line in "Please Don't Touch" about shaking too much, and partly a slightly bowdlerised version of a saying that Kidd had -- when he saw a woman he found particularly attractive, he'd say "She gives me quivers in me membranes". As it was a B-side, the track they recorded only took two takes, plus a brief overdub for Moretti to add some guitar shimmers, created by him using a cigarette lighter as a slide: [Excerpt: Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, "Shakin' All Over"] The song was knocked off so quickly that they even kept in a mistake -- before the guitar solo, Clem Cattini was meant to play just a one-bar fill. Instead he played for longer, which was very unlike Cattini, who was normally a professional's professional. He asked for another take, but the producer just left it in, and that break going into the solo was one of the things that people latched on to: [Excerpt: Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, "Shakin' All Over"] Despite the track having been put together from pre-existing bits, it had a life and vitality to it that no other British record except "Brand New Cadillac" had had, and Kidd had the added bonus of actually being able to hold a tune, unlike Vince Taylor. The record company quickly realised that "Shakin' All Over" should be the record that they were pushing, and flipped the single. The Pirates appeared on Wham!, the latest Jack Good TV show, and immediately the record charted. It soon made number one, and became the first real proof to British listeners that British people could make rock and roll every bit as good as the Americans -- at this point, everyone still thought Vince Taylor was from America. It was possibly Jack Good who also made the big change to Johnny Kidd's appearance -- he had a slight cast in one eye that got worse as the day went on, with his eyelid drooping more and more. Someone -- probably Good -- suggested that he should make this problem into an advantage, by wearing an eyepatch. He did, and the Pirates got pirate costumes to wear on stage, while Kidd would frantically roam the stage swinging a cutlass around. At this point, stagecraft was something almost unknown to British rock performers, who rarely did more than wear a cleanish suit and say "thank you" after each song. The only other act that was anything like as theatrical was Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages, a minor act who had ripped off Screamin' Jay Hawkins' act. The follow-up, "Restless", was very much "Shakin' All Over" part two, and made the top thirty. After that, sticking with the formula, they did a version of "Linda Lu", but that didn't make the top forty at all. Possibly the most interesting record they made at this point was a version of "I Just Want to Make Love to You", a song Willie Dixon had written for Muddy Waters: [Excerpt: Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, "I Just Want to Make Love to You"] The Pirates were increasingly starting to include blues and R&B songs in their set, and the British blues boom artists of the next few years would often refer to the Pirates as being the band that had inspired them. Clem Cattini still says that Johnny Kidd was the best British blues singer he ever heard. But as their singles were doing less and less well, the Pirates decided to jump ship. Colin Hicks, Tommy Steele's much less successful younger brother, had a backing band called the Cabin Boys, which Brian Gregg had been in before joining Terry Dene's band. Hicks had now started performing an act that was based on Kidd's, and for a tour of Italy, where he was quite popular, he wanted a new band -- he asked the Pirates if they would leave Kidd and become the latest lineup of Cabin Boys, and they left, taking their costumes with them. Clem Cattini now says that agreeing was the worst move he ever made, but they parted on good terms -- Kidd said "Alan, Brian and Clem left me to better themselves. How could I possibly begrudge them their opportunity?" We'll be picking up the story of Alan, Brian, and Clem in a few months' time, but in the meantime, Kidd picked up a new backing band, who had previously been performing as the Redcaps, backing a minor singer called Cuddly Dudley on his single "Sitting on a Train": [Excerpt: Cuddly Dudley and the Redcaps, "Sitting on a Train"] That new lineup of Pirates didn't last too long before the guitarist quit, due to ill health, but he was soon replaced by Mick Green, who is now regarded by many as one of the great British guitarists of all time, to the extent that Wilko Johnson, another British guitarist who came to prominence about fifteen years later, has said that he spent his entire career trying and failing to sound like MIck Green. In 1962 and 63 the group were playing clubs where they found a lot of new bands who they seemed to have things in common with. After playing the Cavern in Liverpool and a residency at the Star Club in Hamburg, they added Richie Barrett's "Some Other Guy" and Arthur Alexander's "A Shot of Rhythm and Blues" to their sets, two R&B numbers that were very popular among the Liverpool bands playing in Hamburg but otherwise almost unknown in the UK. Unfortunately, their version of "A Shot of Rhythm and Blues" didn't chart, and their record label declined to issue their version of "Some Other Guy" -- and then almost immediately the Liverpool group The Big Three released their version as a single, and it made the top forty. As the Pirates' R&B sound was unsuccessful -- no-one seemed to want British R&B, at all -- they decided to go the other way, and record a song written by their new manager, Gordon Mills (who would later become better known for managing Tom Jones and Englebert Humperdinck). "I'll Never Get Over You" was a very catchy, harmonised, song in the style of many of the new bands that were becoming popular, and it's an enjoyable record, but it's not really in the Pirates' style: [Excerpt: Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, "I'll Never Get Over You"] That made number four on the charts, but it would be Johnny Kidd and the Pirates' last major hit. They did have a minor hit with another song by Mills, "Hungry For Love", but a much better record, and a much better example of the Pirates' style, was an R&B single released by the Pirates without Kidd. The plan at the time was that they would be split into two acts in the same way as Cliff Richard and the Shadows -- Kidd would be a solo star, while the Pirates would release records of their own. The A-side of the Pirates' single was a fairly good version of the Willie Dixon song "My Babe", but to my ears the B-side is better -- it's a version of "Casting My Spell", a song originally by an obscure duo called the Johnson Brothers, but popularised by Johnny Otis. The Pirates' version is quite possibly the finest early British R&B record I've heard: [Excerpt: The Pirates, "Casting My Spell"] That didn't chart, and the plan to split the two acts failed. Neither act ever had another hit again, and eventually the classic Mick Green lineup of the Pirates split up -- Green left first, to join Billy J Kramer and the Dakotas, and the rest left one by one. In 1965, The Guess Who had a hit in the US with their cover version of "Shakin' All Over": [Excerpt: The Guess Who, "Shakin' All Over"] The Pirates were reduced to remaking their own old hit as "Shakin' All Over '65" in an attempt to piggyback on that cover version, but the new version, which was dominated by a Hammond organ part, didn't have any success. After the Pirates left Kidd, he got a new group, which he called the New Pirates. He continued making extremely good records on occasion, but had no success at all. Even though younger bands like the Rolling Stones and the Animals were making music very similar to his, he was regarded as an outdated novelty act, a relic of an earlier age from six years earlier. There was always the potential for him to have a comeback, but then in 1966 Kidd, who was never a very good driver and had been in a number of accidents, arrived late at a gig in Bolton. The manager refused to let him on stage because he'd arrived so late, so he drove off to find another gig. He'd been driving most of the day, and he crashed the car and died, as did one person in the vehicle he crashed into. His final single, "Send For That Girl", was released after his death. It's really a very good record, but at the time Kidd's fortunes were so low that even his death didn't make it chart: [Excerpt: Johnny Kidd and the New Pirates, "Send For That Girl"] Kidd was only thirty when he died, and already a has-been, but he left behind the most impressive body of work of any pre-Beatles British act. Various lineups of Pirates have occasionally played since -- including, at one point, Cattini and Gregg playing with Joe Moretti's son Joe Moretti Jr -- but none have ever captured that magic that gave millions of people quivers down the backbone and shakes in the kneebone.

May 22, 2020

Episode eighty-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Only the Lonely” by Roy Orbison, and how Orbison finally found success by ignoring conventional pop song structure. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have two bonus podcasts — part one of a two-part Q&A and a ten-minute bonus on “Walk Don’t Run” by the Ventures . 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…)

May 14, 2020

Episode eighty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" by Elvis Presley, and the way his promising comeback after leaving the Army quickly got derailed. This episode also contains a brief acknowledgment of the death of the great Little Richard, who died just as I was recording this episode. 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 "Muleskinner Blues" by the Fendermen. 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 Apologies for the delay this week -- I've been unwell, as you might be able to tell from the croaky voice in places. Don't worry, it's not anything serious... No Mixcloud this week, as almost every song excerpted is by Elvis, and it would be impossible to do it without breaking Mixcloud's rules about the number of songs by the same artist. My main source for this episode is Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley , the second part of Peter Guralnick's two-volume biography of Elvis. It's not *quite* as strong as the first volume, but it's still by far the best book covering his later years. I also used Reconsider Baby: The Definitive Elvis Sessionography 1954-1977 by Ernst Jorgensen. The box set From Nashville to Memphis contains all Elvis' sixties studio recordings other than his gospel and soundtrack albums, and thus manages to make a solid case for Elvis' continued artistic relevance in the sixties, by only including records he chose to make. It's well worth the very cheap price. And Back in Living Stereo , which rounds up the 1960s public domain Elvis recordings, contains the gospel recordings, outtakes, and home recordings from 1960 through 1962. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Errata I say that by the time “Stuck on You” had come out, Elvis had already made his TV appearance with Sinatra. In actual fact, he was still rehearsing for it, and wouldn't record it for a few more days. I also say that the Colonel had managed Gene Austin. In fact the Colonel had only promoted shows for Austin, not been his manager. Transcript Before I start this week's episode, I had to mark the death of Little Richard. We've already covered his work of course, in episodes on "Tutti Frutti" and "Keep A Knockin'", and I don't really have a lot to add to those episodes in terms of his importance to twentieth-century music. We can argue about which of Elvis, Chuck Berry, or Little Richard was the most important artist of the fifties, but I don't think you can make a good argument that anyone other than one of those three was, and I don't think you can argue that those three weren't the three most important in whatever order. Without Little Richard, none of the music we're covering in this podcast after 1955 would be the same, and this podcast would not exist. There are still a handful of people alive who made records we've looked at in the podcast, but without intending the slightest offence to any of them, none are as important a link in the historical chain as Richard Penniman was. So, before the episode proper, let's have a few moments' noise in memory of the force of nature who described himself as the King and Queen of Rock and Roll: [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Ooh! My Soul!"] Now on to the main podcast itself. Today we're going to take what will be, for a while, our last look at Elvis Presley. He will show up in the background of some other episodes as we go through the sixties, and I plan to take a final look at him in a hundred or so episodes, but for now, as we're entering the sixties, we're leaving behind those fifties rockers, and Elvis is one of those we're definitely leaving for now. Elvis' two years spent in the Army had changed him profoundly. His mother had died, he'd been separated from everyone he knew, and he'd met a young woman named Priscilla, who was several years younger than him but who would many years later end up becoming his wife. And the music world had changed while he was gone. Rockabilly had totally disappeared from the charts, and all the musicians who had come up with Elvis had moved into orchestrated pop like Roy Orbison or into pure country like Johnny Cash, with the exception of a handful like Gene Vincent who were no longer having hits, at least in the US. Elvis had, though, continued to have hits. He'd recorded enough in 1958 for RCA to have a tiny stockpile of recordings they could issue as singles over the intervening two years -- "Wear My Ring Around Your Neck", "Hard-Headed Woman", "One Night", "I Need Your Love Tonight", and "A Big Hunk O' Love". Along with those hits, they repackaged several single-only recordings into new albums, and managed to keep Elvis in the spotlight despite him not recording any new material. This had been a plan of the Colonel's from the moment it became clear that Elvis was going to be drafted -- his strategy then, and from then on, was to record precisely as much material for RCA as the contracts stipulated they were entitled to, and not one song more. His thinking was that if Elvis recorded more songs than they needed to release at any given time, then there would be nothing for him to use as leverage in contract negotiations. The contract wasn't due for renegotiation any time soon, of course, but you don't want to take that chance. This meant that Elvis didn't have long to relax at home before he had to go back into the studio. He had a couple of weeks to settle in at Graceland -- the home he had bought for his mother, but had barely spent any time in before being drafted, and which was now going to be inhabited by Elvis, his father, and his father's new, much younger, girlfriend, of whom Elvis definitely did not approve. In that time he made visits to the cinema, and to an ice-dancing show -- he went to the performance for black people, rather than the one for whites, as Memphis was still segregated, and he made a brief impromptu appearance at that show himself, conducting the orchestra. And most importantly to him, he visited the grave of his mother for the first time. But two weeks and one day after his discharge from the Army, he was back in the studio, recording tracks for what would be his first album of new material since his Christmas album two and a half years earlier. We talked a little bit, a few weeks back, about the Nashville Sound, the new sound that had become popular in country music, and how Chet Atkins, who had produced several of Elvis' early recordings, had been vitally responsible for the development of that sound. Many of the Nashville A-team, the musicians who were responsible for making those records with Atkins or the other main producer of the sound, Owen Bradley, had played on Elvis' last session before he went into the Army, and they were at this session, though to keep fans from congregating outside, they were told they were going to be playing on a Jim Reeves session -- Reeves was one of the country singers who were having hits with that sound, with records like “He'll Have to Go”: [Excerpt: Jim Reeves, “He'll Have to Go”] So with Chet Atkins in the control booth, the musicians were Hank "Sugarfoot" Garland -- the great guitarist who had briefly replaced Scotty Moore on stage when Elvis and his band had split; Floyd Cramer, who had been playing piano with Elvis on record since his first RCA session, Buddy Harman, who had doubled DJ Fontana on percussion on Elvis' last session from 58, on drums, and Bob Moore, who had played bass on those sessions, back on bass. And of course the Jordanaires were at the session as well -- as well as having sung on Elvis' pre-Army records, they were also part of the Nashville A-Team, and were the go-to male backing vocalists for anyone in Nashville making a country or pop record. Scotty and DJ were there, too, but they were in much reduced roles -- Scotty was playing rhythm guitar, rather than lead, and DJ was only one of two drummers on the session. Bill Black was not included at all -- Black had always been the one who would try to push for more recognition, and he was now a star in his own right, with his Bill Black Combo. He would never record with Elvis again. The session took a while to get going -- the first hour or so was spent ordering in hamburgers, listening to demos, and Elvis and Bobby Moore showing each other karate moves -- and then the first song they recorded, an Otis Blackwell number titled "Make Me Know It" took a further nineteen takes before they had a satisfactory one: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Make Me Know It"] Elvis' voice had improved dramatically during his time in the Army -- he had been practising a lot, with his new friend Charlie Hodge, and had added a full octave to his vocal range, and he was eager to display his newfound ability to tackle other kinds of material. But at the same time, all the reports from everyone in the studio suggest that these early sessions were somewhat hesitant. The best song from this initial session was Pomus and Shuman's "A Mess of Blues": [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "A Mess of Blues"] But it was a song by Aaron Schroeder and Leslie McFarland that was chosen for the first single -- a mediocre track called "Stuck on You": [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Stuck on You"] Such was the demand for new Elvis material that the single of "Stuck on You" backed with "Fame and Fortune" was released within seventy-two hours. By that time, RCA had printed up 1.4 million copies of the single, just to fulfil the advance orders -- they came out in sleeves that just read "Elvis' 1st New Recording For His 50,000,000 Fans All Over The World", because when they were printing the sleeves the record company had no idea what songs Elvis was going to record. By that time, Elvis had already made what would turn out to be his only TV appearance for eight years. The Colonel had arranged for a TV special, to be hosted by Frank Sinatra -- The Frank Sinatra Timex Show: Welcome Home Elvis . Most of that special was the standard Rat Packisms, with Sinatra joined by Joey Bishop and Sammy Davis Jr. Sinatra had not been at all complimentary about Elvis before he'd gone into the Army, and in later years would continue to be insulting about him, but money was money, and so Sinatra put on a grin and pretended to be happy to be working with him. The train trip to Florida to record the TV show was something Scotty Moore would always remember, saying that at every single crossroads the train tracks went past, there were people lined up to cheer on the train, and that the only comparisons he could make to that trip were the funeral journeys of Lincoln and Roosevelt's bodies. Scotty also remembered one other thing about the trip -- that Elvis had offered him some of the little pills he'd been taking in the Army, to keep him awake and alert. Elvis, Scotty, and DJ were friendly enough on the train journey, but when they got to Miami they found that during the week they were in rehearsals, Scotty, DJ, and the Jordanaires were forbidden from socialising with Elvis, by order of the Colonel. The TV show was one of a very small number of times in the sixties that Elvis would perform for an audience, and here, dressed in a dinner jacket and clearly attempting to prove he was now a family-friendly entertainer, he looks deeply uncomfortable at first, as he croons his way through "Fame and Fortune". He gets into his stride with the other side of his single, "Stuck on You", and then Sinatra joins him for a duet, where Sinatra sings "Love Me Tender" while Elvis sings Sinatra's "Witchcraft". Watching the footage, you can see that by this point Elvis is completely comfortable in front of the audience again, and frankly he wipes the floor with Sinatra. Sinatra is trying to mock "Love Me Tender", but Elvis takes Sinatra's song completely straight, but at the same time knows exactly how ridiculous he is being: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra, “Love Me Tender/Witchcraft”] There's a passage in Umberto Eco's book about writing The Name of the Rose , where he talks about the meaning of postmodernism. He explains that an unsophisticated writer like Barbara Cartland might write "I love you madly". A sophisticated modernist writer would recognise that as a cliche, and so choose not to write about love at all, having no language to do it in, and mock those who did. And a postmodernist would embrace and acknowledge the cliche, writing "As Barbara Cartland might say, 'I love you madly'". This, crucially, means that the postmodernist is, once again, able to talk about real emotions, which the modernist (in Eco's view) can't. By this definition, Sinatra's performance is modernist -- he's just showing contempt for the material -- while Elvis is postmodernist, sincere even as he's also knowingly mocking himself. It comes across far more in the video footage, which is easily findable online, but you can hear some of it just in the audio recording: [Excerpt: Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley, "Love Me Tender/Witchcraft"] A week later, Elvis was back in the studio, with the same musicians as before, along with Boots Randolph on saxophone, to record the rest of the tracks for his new album, to be titled Elvis is Back! Elvis is Back! is quite possibly the most consistent studio album Elvis ever made, and that second 1960 session is where the most impressive material on the album was recorded. They started out with a version of "Fever" that easily measured up to the original by Little Willie John and the most famous version by Peggy Lee, with Elvis backed just by Bobby Moore on bass and the two drummers: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Fever"] Then there was "Like a Baby", a song originally recorded by Vikki Nelson, and written by Jesse Stone, who had written so many R&B classics before. This saw some of Elvis' best blues vocals: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Like a Baby"] The next song was a huge departure from anything he'd done previously. Elvis had always loved Tony Martin's 1950 hit "There's No Tomorrow": [Excerpt: Tony Martin, "There's No Tomorrow"] That had become one of the songs he rehearsed with Charlie Hodge in Germany, and he'd mentioned the idea of recording it. But, of course, "There's No Tomorrow" was based on the old song "O Sole Mio", which at the time was considered to be in the public domain (though in fact a later Italian court ruling means that even though it was composed in 1897, it will remain in copyright until 2042), so Freddy Bienstock at Hill and Range, the publishing company that supplied Elvis with material, commissioned a new set of lyrics for it, and it became "It's Now or Never". Elvis did several near-perfect takes of the song, but then kept flubbing the ending, which required a particularly powerful, sustained, note. Bill Porter, who was engineering, suggested that they could do a take of just that bit and then splice it on to the rest, but Elvis was determined. He was going to do the song all the way through, or he was not going to do it. Eventually he got it, and the result was extraordinary, nothing like any performance he'd given previously: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "It's Now Or Never"] That would go to number one, as would another non-album single from this session. This one was the only song the Colonel had ever asked Elvis to record, "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" That song had been written in 1926, and had been a hit in several versions, most notably the version by Al Jolson: [Excerpt: Al Jolson, "Are You Lonesome Tonight?"] But the Colonel had two reasons for wanting Elvis to record the song. The first was that, while the Colonel didn't have much interest in music, he associated the song with Gene Austin, the country singer who had been the first act the Colonel had managed, and so he had a sentimental fondness for it. And the second was that it was the Colonel's wife Marie's favourite song. While the studio was normally brightly lit, for this song Elvis made sure that no-one other than the few musicians on the track, which only featured acoustic guitar, bass, drums, and vocals, were in the studio, and that all the lights were off. He did one take of the song, on which the Jordanaires apparently made a mistake. He then did a false start, and decided to give up on the song, but Steve Sholes, RCA's A&R man, insisted that the song could be a hit. They eventually got through it, although even the finished take of the song contains one mistake -- because the song was recorded in the dark, the musicians couldn't see the microphones, and you can hear someone bumping into a mic during the spoken bridge: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Are You Lonesome Tonight?"] Despite that flaw, the track was released as a single, and became a massive success, and a song that would stay in Elvis' repertoire until his very last shows. During that one overnight session, Elvis and the band recorded twelve songs, covering a stylistic range that's almost inconceivable. There was a Leiber and Stoller rocker left over from "King Creole", a cover version of "Such a Night", the hit for Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, the old Lowell Fulson blues song "Reconsider Baby", the light Latin pop song "The Girl of My Best Friend", a Louvin Brothers style duet with Charlie Hodge -- in one session Elvis managed to cover every style of American popular song as of 1960, and do it all well. In total, between this session and the previous one, Elvis recorded eighteen tracks -- three singles and a twelve-track album -- and while they were slicker and more polished than the Sun recordings, it's very easy to make the case that they were every bit as artistically successful, and this was certainly the best creative work he had done since signing to RCA. All three singles went to number one, and the Elvis Is Back! album went to number two, and sold half a million copies. But then, only three weeks after that session, he was in a different studio, cutting very different material. His first post-Army film was going to be a quick, light, comedy, called "GI Blues", intended to present a new, wholesome, image for Elvis. Elvis disliked the script, and he was also annoyed when he got into the recording studio in Hollywood, which was used for his film songs, to discover that he wasn't going to be recording any Leiber and Stoller songs for this film, for what the Colonel told him were "business reasons" -- Elvis seems not to have been aware that the Colonel had made them persona non grata. Instead, he was to record a set of songs mostly written by people like Sid Wayne, Abner Silver, Sid Tepper, and Fred Wise, journeymen songwriters with little taste for rock and roll. Typical of the songs was one called "Wooden Heart", based on an old German folk song, and with a co-writing credit to the German bandleader Bert Kaempfert (of whom we'll hear a little more in a future episode): [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Wooden Heart"] Now, one should be careful when criticising Elvis' film songs, because they were written for a specific context. These aren't songs that were intended to be listened to as singles or albums, but they were intended to drive a plot forward, and to exist in the context of a film. Taking them out of that context is a bit like just writing down all the lines spoken by one character in a film and complaining that they don't work as a poem. There's a habit even among Elvis' fans, let alone his detractors, of dunking on some of the songs he recorded for film soundtracks without taking that into account, and it does rather miss the point. But at the same time, they still had to be *performed* as songs, not as parts of films, and it was apparent that Elvis wasn't happy with them. Bones Howe, who was working on the sessions, said that Elvis had lost something when compared to his pre-Army work -- he was now trying, and often failing, to find his way into a performance which, pre-Army, he would have been able to do naturally. But when you compare his performances from the Elvis is Back! sessions, it's clear that the time in the Army wasn't the problem -- it's just that Elvis had no desire to be singing those songs or appearing in this film. [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “GI Blues”] Elvis told the Colonel that at least half the songs for the film soundtrack had to be scrapped, but the Colonel told him he was locked into them by contract, and he just had to do the best he could with them. And he did -- he gave as good a performance as possible, both in the film and on the songs. But his heart wasn't in it. He was placated, though, by being told that his next couple of films would be *proper films*, like the ones he'd been making before going into the Army. These next two films were made back-to-back. Flaming Star was a Western with a rather heavy-handed message about racism, starring Elvis as a mixed-race man who felt at home neither with white people nor Native Americans, and directed by Don Siegel, who would go on to direct Dirty Harry. Elvis' role was originally intended for Marlon Brando, his acting idol, and he only sang one song in the film, other than the title song which played over the credits. [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Flaming Star”] And then he made Wild in the Country, which featured only a very small number of songs, and had Elvis playing a troubled young man who has to get court-ordered psychological counselling, but eventually goes off to college to become a writer. There's quite a bit of debate about the merits of both these films, and of Elvis' acting in them, but there's no doubt at all that they were intended to be serious films, even more so than Jailhouse Rock and King Creole had been. After filming these three films, Elvis went back into the studio for another overnight session, to record another album. This time, it was a gospel album, his first full-length gospel record. His Hand in Mine was possibly the purest expression of Elvis' own musical instincts yet -- he had always wanted to be a singer in a gospel quartet, and now he was singing gospel songs with the Jordanaires, exactly as he'd wanted to: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "His Hand in Mine"] So in 1960, Elvis had recorded two very different, but hugely artistically satisfying, albums, and had made three films, of which he could reasonably be proud of two. Unfortunately for him, it was the film he didn't like, GI Blues, that was the big success -- and while Elvis Is Back had gone to number two and sold half a million copies, the soundtrack to GI Blues went to number one and stayed there for eleven weeks, and sold a million copies -- an absurd number at a time when albums generally sold very little. His Hand in Mine only made number thirteen. The same pattern happened the next year -- a studio album was massively outsold by the soundtrack album for Blue Hawaii, a mindless film that was full of sea, sand, and bikinis, and which featured dreadful songs like "Ito Eats": [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Ito Eats"] There would be a couple more films in 1961 and 62, Kid Galahad and Follow That Dream, which tried to do a little more, and which weren't as successful as Blue Hawaii. From that point on, the die was cast for Elvis. The Colonel wasn't going to let him appear in any more dramatic roles. The films were all going to be light comedies, set somewhere exotic like Hawaii or Acapulco, and featuring Elvis as a surfer or a race-car driver or a surfing race-car driver, lots of girls in bikinis, and lots of songs called things like "There's No Room To Rhumba in a Sports Car". When Elvis got a chance to go into the studio and just make records, as he occasionally did over the next few years, he would make music that was as good as anything he ever did, but starting in 1962 there was a routine of three films a year, almost all interchangeable, and until 1968 Elvis wouldn't be able to step off that treadmill. After 68, he did make a handful of films in which, again, he tried to be an actor, but after twenty or so lightweight films about beaches and bikinis, no-one noticed. As a result, Elvis mostly sat out the sixties. While the music world was changing all around him, he was an irrelevance to the new generation of musicians, who mostly agreed with John Lennon that "Elvis died when he went into the Army". We'll pick up his story in 1968, when he finally got off the treadmill.

May 4, 2020

Episode eighty-one of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Shout” by the Isley Brothers, and the beginnings of a career that would lead to six decades of hit singles. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Tell Laura I Love Her” by Ray Peterson. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

Apr 27, 2020

Episode eighty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Money” by Barrett Strong, the dispute over its authorship, and the start of a record label that would change music. 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 “Alley Oop” by the Hollywood Argyles. 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…)

Apr 22, 2020

Episode seventy-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Sweet Nothin’s” by Brenda Lee, and at the career of a performer who started in the 1940s and who was most recently in the top ten only four months ago. 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 “16 Candles” by the Crests. 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…)

Apr 13, 2020

Episode seventy-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “What’d I Say” by Ray Charles, and at Charles’ career in jazz, soul, and country. 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 “Sea of Love” by Phil Phillips . 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…)

Apr 7, 2020

Episode seventy-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Brand New Cadillac” by Vince Taylor and the Playboys, and the sad career of rock music’s first acid casualty. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers have two bonus podcasts this week. There’s a half-hour Q&A episode , where I answer backers’ questions, and a ten-minute bonus episode on “The Hippy Hippy Shake” by Chan Romero . Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

Mar 31, 2020

Episode seventy-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Stagger Lee” by Lloyd Price, and how a barroom fight 125 years ago led to a song performed by everyone from Ma Rainey to Neil Diamond. 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 “That Crazy Feeling” by Kenny Rogers . I have also beeped out some expletives in the song excerpts this week, so as not to be censored by some podcast aggregators, and so I’ve uploaded an unbeeped version for backers. 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…)

Mar 23, 2020

Episode seventy-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “There Goes My Baby” by the Drifters, and how a fake record label, a band sacked for drunkenness, and a kettledrum player who couldn’t play led to a genre-defining hit. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Rebel Rouser” by Duane Eddy Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

Mar 17, 2020

Episode seventy-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “It Doesn’t Matter Any More” by Buddy Holly, and at the reasons he ended up on the plane that killed him. 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 “Chantilly Lace” by the Big Bopper . 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…)

Mar 9, 2020

Episode seventy-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “La Bamba” by Ritchie Valens, and is the first of a two-part story which will conclude next week with an episode on Buddy Holly. 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 “Kansas City” by Wilbert Harrison . 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…)

Mar 2, 2020

Episode seventy-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Trouble” by Elvis Presley, his induction into the army, and his mother’s death. 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 “When” by the Kalin Twins . 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…)

Feb 24, 2020

Episode seventy-one of A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs continues our look at British music TV by looking at the first time it affected American R&B, and is also our final look at Johnny Otis. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Short Shorts” by the Royal Teens , a group whose members went on to be far more important than one might expect. Also, this is the first of hopefully many podcasts to come where 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…)

Feb 17, 2020

Episode seventy of A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs looks at "Move It" by Cliff Richard, and the beginning of rock and roll TV in the UK. 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 "Poor Little Fool" by Ricky Nelson , another artist whose career was made by TV, and one who influenced Cliff Richard hugely. ERRATUM: I say Cliff Richard was sixteen when he first heard “Heartbreak Hotel”. He was fifteen. Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. This four-CD set contains all the singles and EPs released by Cliff Richard and the Shadows, together and separately, between 1958 and 1962. This MP3 compilation, meanwhile, contains a huge number of skiffle records and early British attempts at rock and roll. Much of the music is not very good, but I can't imagine a better way of getting an understanding of the roots of British rock. Pete Frame's The Restless Generation is the best book available looking at British 50s rock and roll from a historical perspective. Be warned, though -- his jokey and irreverent style can, when dealing with people like Larry Parnes (who was gay and Jewish) very occasionally tip over into reinforcing homophobic and anti-semitic stereotypes for an easy laugh. Billy Bragg's Roots, Radicals, and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World is one of the best books I've read on music at all, and gives far more detail about the historical background. And Cliff Richard: The Biography by Steve Turner is very positive towards Richard, but not at the expense of honesty. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon . Why not join them? Transcript We've looked a little bit at the start of rock and roll in Britain, which was so different from the American music that it feels absurd to talk of the two in the same breath. But today we're going to have a look at the first really massive star of British rock and roll -- someone who is still going strong today, more than sixty years after he released his first record: [Excerpt: Cliff Richard, "Move It"] When we've looked at British rock and roll to this point, it's been rather lifeless, and there's a reason for that. There were, in the mid-fifties, two different streams of music in Britain that were aiming to appeal to young people. One was skiffle, and that's the branch of music that eventually led to all British rock and roll from the sixties onwards -- we looked at that with Lonnie Donegan, but the skiffle craze was a big, big thing for about two years, and when it finally died down it splintered into three different, overlapping, groups -- there were the folk revivalists, who we'll talk about when we get to Bob Dylan; the British blues people, who we'll look at when we get to the Rolling Stones; and the rock and rollers. Skiffle had everything that people found exciting and interesting about American rock and roll -- at least, it had much of the excitement of the rockabilly music. But it wasn't marketed as rock and roll, and it tended to aim at a slightly more bohemian audience. Meanwhile, British rock and roll proper -- the stuff that was being marketed as rock and roll -- was mostly being made by longtime professional musicians who had switched from playing anaemic copies of swing music to anaemic copies of Bill Haley and the Comets. Groups like Tony Crombie and the Rockets were making records like "Let's You and I Rock", which copied the formula of Haley's less good records: [Excerpt: Tony Crombie and the Rockets, "Let's You and I Rock"] The idea of rock and roll in the British music business in those early years came entirely from the film Rock Around the Clock, which had featured Haley, the Platters, and Freddie Bell and His Bellboys -- who were a second-rate clone of Haley's band. As we discussed in the episodes on Haley, his particular style of music had few imitators in American rock and roll, so while British groups were copying things like Freddie Bell's one hit, "Giddy-Up A Ding-Dong", British teenagers were instead listening to American records by Buddy Holly or Little Richard, the Everly Brothers or Elvis, none of whose recordings had anything to do with anything that was being made by the British commercial rock and roll industry. For British rock and roll to matter, it had to at least catch up to what the American records were doing. It needed its own Elvis -- and that Elvis would ideally be someone who came from the skiffle scene, but was more oriented towards rock and roll than most of the skifflers, who were very happy playing Lead Belly songs rather than "Blue Suede Shoes". Tommy Steele had been a good start, but he'd jumped the gun a little bit. He was essentially still a pre-Elvis performer, although he was one who followed the rockabilly pattern of a young man with a guitar. His records were still novelty songs with the word "rock" thrown in, like "Rock With the Caveman", and when he tried to copy Elvis' vocal mannerisms, while it brought him a number one hit, it didn't really sound particularly credible: [Excerpt: Tommy Steele, "Singing the Blues"] In the wake of Steele came a whole host of other teen idols along the same lines, most of them managed by Larry Parnes -- Adam Faith, Mary Wilde, Terry Dene, Vince Taylor, Johnny Gentle, Billy Fury, Duffy Power, Dickie Pride, and many more. Some of these went on to have interesting careers, and a few made records that we'll be looking at in future episodes, but one of them -- one of the few not managed by Parnes -- managed to have a career that would outlast almost all of his American contemporaries, and outsell many of them. [Excerpt: Cliff Richard, "Move It"] One of the things that will be a recurring theme in this podcast as Britain becomes a bigger part of rock history is the end of the British Empire. It is literally impossible to understand anything about Britain for the last eighty years without understanding that at the start of the 1940s the British Empire was the largest, most powerful empire that had ever been seen in human history, while by the early 1970s Britain was a tiny island that was desperately begging to be allowed into the EEC -- the precursor of the EU -- because it had no economic or political power at all on its own. The psychic shock this change in status gave to multiple generations of British people cannot be overstated, and almost all British history since at least 1945 can be explained in terms of Britain trying and failing to convince itself and the world that it was still important and still mattered. And one of the people whom that change in status hit most dramatically was a young boy named Harry Webb, who was born in India in 1940, to a family who were of British descent, but who had been in India for a couple of generations. Like most white people in India at the time they benefited hugely from the Empire -- although they were only moderately well off by white British standards in India, they lived in what for most people would seem absolute luxury, with servants looking after them, and the people of India being deferential to them. But then, after World War II came Indian independence and partition, and the Webb family found themselves in Britain, a country they'd never lived in, homeless and jobless. Harry, his parents, and his three sisters had to live in one room of a three-bedroom house, with the other rooms of the house occupied by another family of eight. Not only that, but while Harry had been a beneficiary of racism in India, in Britain he was a victim of it -- while he was white, he had a dark complexion, an Anglo-Indian accent, and came from India, so everyone assumed he was Indian -- except that the only Indians that his schoolmates knew anything about were the ones in cowboy films, so he kept getting asked where his wigwam was. Eventually the Webb family managed to get a house to themselves, and young Harry managed to get rid of his accent, ending up with an accent that reflected neither his Indian origins nor his London upbringing, but rather a generic regionless middle-class accent with a trace of the mid-Atlantic behind it. Webb's accent would later become almost the default for people in the media, edging out the received pronunciation that had dominated in previous decades, but at the time it gave him a distinct advantage when he finally became a pop star, because he didn't sound like he was from a particular place. When he was sixteen, he heard the record that would change his life: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Heartbreak Hotel”] Young Harry became obsessed with Elvis Presley, and tried to make himself look as much like Elvis as possible. His first public performance was with a vocal group he formed at school, and he took a solo on "Heartbreak Hotel". On leaving school, having failed almost all his exams, he decided that he wanted to become a rock and roll star. He had no idea how he was going to go about it until one day his bike broke, and he had to get the bus into work. On the same bus was an old schoolfriend, Terry Smart, who was the drummer in a skiffle group. Their singer had recently been drafted, and they needed a new one. He remembered that Harry could sing, and invited him to join the group. Harry's musical tastes didn't really run to skiffle, which by this time had become a very formalised genre, with the instruments almost always consisting of acoustic guitar, teachest bass, and washboard, and a repertoire that was made up primarily of songs by Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie, and Big Bill Broonzy (who was the one blues musician that even the least knowledgable skiffler could name, despite his relative lack of commercial success in the US). There would also be a good chunk of traditional folk and sea shanties thrown in. A typical example of the style would be the Vipers Skiffle Group's version of "Maggie May": [Excerpt: The Vipers Skiffle Group, "Maggie May"] Skiffle was both too rowdy and too intellectual for young Harry Webb, whose main interest other than music was sports rather than digging up old folk songs. Other than Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis, his tastes ran to smoother American soft-rockers like Ricky Nelson and the Everly Brothers -- he never had much time for the R&B styles of people like Little Richard, let alone for anything as raw as Lead Belly or Big Bill Broonzy. But Harry Webb was an unusual person. On the one hand, he was amazingly old-fashioned and prudish even for the period -- he refused to smoke, drink, or blaspheme, he was very softly spoken, and as a teenager when asked if he had a girlfriend he would say "Yes, I've got a picture of her in my pocket" and would pull out a photo of his mother. But on the other hand, he was incredibly driven, and was willing to make use of anyone around him for precisely as long as it would take for them to help him achieve his goals. If the musicians around him wanted to play skiffle, he would play skiffle -- for the moment. So Harry Webb joined Dick Teague's Skiffle Group, and became their lead singer. He applied himself diligently to learning the skiffle material -- songs like "Rock Island Line", "This Train", "This Little Light of Mine", and "Don't You Rock Me Daddy-O" -- and he would rehearse every single night, and got to know the material intimately. But he insisted on singing in an imitation of Elvis' voice, and thrusting his hips like Elvis did. But an Elvis-style vocal simply didn't work with songs like this: [Excerpt: The Vipers Skiffle Group, “Don't You Rock Me Daddy-O”] After a short period with the group, he started scheming with Terry Smart -- they were going to continue with the skiffle group for the moment, but they secretly put together their own rock and roll group. Harry's friend Norman Mitham started turning up to the group's rehearsals, and watching the guitarists' fingers intently -- he was learning their material for the new group. Webb and Smart left the Dick Teague Skiffle Group, and with Mitham they formed a new rock and roll group. Inspired by the recent launch of Sputnik, they thought of calling themselves The Planets. But they decided that wasn't quite right, and looked up the etymology of "planet", and found it came from the Greek for "wanderer" or "drifter", and so they became the Drifters, unaware there was an American group of the same name. On one of their very early gigs, a man named John Foster came up and introduced himself to them. Foster had no music business experience -- he worked in a sewage farm -- but he became the group's manager based on two important factors. The first was that he had a telephone, which in 1958 meant he was clearly a figure of some importance -- *no-one* in Britain had a telephone! And the second was that he was a nodding acquaintance of the managers of the 2is, the famous coffee bar where the Vipers used to play, and where both Tommy Steele and Terry Dene had been discovered, and he was pretty sure he could get them a gig there. He managed to get them a two-week residency at the 2is, and during the first week, a young man named Ian Samwell came up and asked them if they needed a lead guitarist. They said yes, and he was in the group. A booking agent who saw the group in their second week decided he wanted to book them for some shows in the North, but he had two problems. He didn't want them to be booked as a group, but as a lead singer and his backing group, and he thought Harry Webb wasn't a good enough name. So the Drifters became Cliff Richard and the Drifters, and Harry Webb soon told everyone in his life that he was only to be addressed as Cliff from now on. Foster and Samwell got the group an agent, and the agent in turn got them an audition with Norrie Paramor at Columbia Records. But there was one more thing to do. By this time Cliff *did* have a girlfriend -- while according to those around him he was never that interested in dating or sex, they did go out with each other for a little while and claimed to be in love with each other. But he knew that if he was going to be a rock and roll star, he had to appear available to the teenage girls, so he dumped her. She understood -- he'd had to choose between his career and love, and he'd chosen his career. Paramor was interested, and he wanted the group to record a song which had been a hit in the US for Bobby Helms: [Excerpt: Bobby Helms, "Schoolboy Crush"] That song was co-written by Aaron Schroeder, who we've seen before as the co-writer of some of Elvis' tracks for Jailhouse Rock, and of Carl Perkins' "Glad All Over". Cliff learned the song straight away, and soon the Drifters were in Abbey Road studios ready to record their first single -- but only Cliff Richard's name was on the recording contract. While the record label would say "Cliff Richard and the Drifters", the other group members were only going to get a flat session fee for the record, while Cliff was going to get artist royalties. Also, not all of the Drifters were present. Ian Samwell had persuaded Cliff that there was no need to keep Norman Mitham in the band. Mitham was just playing rhythm guitar like Cliff was, and Samwell thought there was no point having three guitarists and splitting the money three ways instead of two. So Mitham, who had been friends with Cliff since they were both nine, was out of the group. Cliff didn't play guitar especially well, so for the session Samwell switched to rhythm and a session player, Ernie Shear, was brought in to play lead. The group was also augmented in the studio by a double bass player, Frank Clarke, and the Mike Sammes singers on backing vocals. The track they cut that day was not hugely inspiring: [Excerpt: Cliff Richard and the Drifters, "Schoolboy Crush"] But the B-side was more interesting. It was the first song that Ian Samwell had ever written -- an angry response to an article in the Melody Maker arguing that rock and roll was dead. It was stuck on the B-side of the proposed single mostly for lack of anything better, and it was knocked off quickly. Indeed, the main engineer on the session didn't stick around for the recording -- he wanted to go to the opera, and so it was left to the junior engineer Malcolm Addey to actually record the song. And that made a big difference -- Addey was young enough to have some idea himself as to what a rock and roll record should sound like, and he came up with a much louder, more resonant, sound than anything that had been heard in a British recording session -- a record that didn't sound all that dissimilar to the records that Sun was putting out: [Excerpt: Cliff Richard and the Drifters, "Move It"] That track was still intended for the B-side, until the point that Jack Good heard it. Jack Good was possibly the most important person ever to be involved in music TV -- not just in Britain, but in the world. Good had been an actor, until he saw "Rock Around the Clock" in the cinema, and saw the way that the audiences reacted to the film. He became immediately convinced that the audience response was a crucial part of rock and roll, and that if done properly rock and roll performances could lead to the kind of catharsis that classical Greek drama aimed at. He took this idea to the BBC, who were at the time looking to put on a new teenage show. Up until mid 1956, the practice in British TV had been to stop transmitting for an hour, from six until seven in the evening, in order to let parents put their kids to bed -- this was known as the Toddlers' Truce. But after the commercial network ITV began broadcasting in 1955, the practice became controversial. While the BBC saved money by not putting on any programmes between six and seven -- they got the same amount in TV license fees however much they broadcast -- an hour without programmes for a commercial channel meant an hour without advertising fees. Eventually, ITV managed to get the rules changed, and the BBC decided that at five past six on a Saturday, they would put out a programme for young people, but young people allowed up that late -- and it was to be called Six-Five Special. [Excerpt: The Bob Cort Skiffle Group, "The Six-Five Special"] Six-Five Special embodied many of Good's ideas about how to broadcast rock and roll music -- it had the audience as an integral part of the programme -- there was very little distinction between the audience and the performers, who would perform among the crowd rather than separated from them. By all accounts it had some fantastic moments, including an appearance by Big Bill Broonzy, and a live broadcast from the 2Is coffee bar itself. But Good wasn't the sole producer, and he had to compromise his vision. As well as rock and roll and skiffle, the programme also included light music of a kind parents would approve of, educational items, and bits about sport. Good kept trying to persuade the people at the BBC to let him have the show be just about rock and roll, but his co-producer wanted Hungarian acrobats and features on stamp collecting. So Good moved over to ABC, one of the ITV stations, and started a rival show, "Oh Boy!" On "Oh Boy!" the focus was entirely on the music. Good had very strong ideas on what he wanted from the show, ideas he'd got from sources as varied as a theatrical company who put on performances of Shakespeare with all-black backgrounds and no sets, and a book he'd read on the physiology of brainwashing. He wanted to make something powerful. Unlike on Six-Five Special the audience wouldn't be mixing with the performers, but this time the performers would be picked out by a white spotlight on a black background. After two pilot episodes in June 1958, the programme started its run in September, with appearances from Marty Wilde, the John Barry Seven and more, and with instrumental backing for the solo performers provided by Lord Rockingham's Eleven, a studio group who would go on to have a novelty hit with "Hoots Mon!" as a result of their appearances on the show: [Excerpt: Lord Rockingham's XI, "Hoots Mon!"] And Cliff Richard was to be added to that show. It was Jack Good who, more than anyone else, came up with the image of the rock and roll star, and his influence can be seen in literally every visual depiction of rock and roll music from the early sixties on. And from the evidence of the two surviving episodes of Oh Boy! he, and the director Rita Gillespie, one of the very few female directors working in TV at the time, did a remarkable job of creating something truly exciting -- something all the more remarkable when you look at what they had to work with. Most of the British rock and roll acts at the time were small, malnourished, spotty, teenage boys, who were doing a sort of cargo-cult imitation of American rock and rollers without really understanding what they were meant to be doing. But the lighting and the visuals of the show were extraordinary -- and in Cliff Richard, Good had found someone who, if he was nowhere near as exciting as his American models, at least could be moulded into something that was the closest thing that could be found to a real British rock and roll star -- someone who might one day be almost as good as Gene Vincent. Good insisted that the song Cliff should perform on his show should be "Move It", and so the record label quickly flipped the single. Good worked with Cliff for a full week on his performance of the song, instructing him in every blink, every time he should clutch his arm as if in pain, the way he should look down , not straight at the audience, everything. Good chose his shocking pink outfit (not visible on black and white TV, but designed to send the girls in the audience into a frenzy) and had him restyle his hair to be less like Elvis'. And so in September 1958, a few weeks before his eighteenth birthday, Cliff Richard made his TV debut: [Excerpt: Cliff Richard, “Move It”] "Oh Boy" was the most fast-paced thing on TV -- on the evidence of the surviving episodes it was one song after another, non-stop, by different performers -- as many as seventeen songs in a twenty-five minute live show, with no artist doing two songs in a row. It was an immediate hit, and so was "Move It", which went to number two in the charts. There was a media outcry over Cliff's brazen sexuality, with the NME accusing him of "crude exhibitionism", while the Daily Sketch would ask "Is this boy TV star too sexy?" Cliff Richard was suddenly the biggest star and sex symbol in the UK, but there were problems with the band. Cliff was no longer playing guitar while he sang, and the group also needed a bass player, so Ian Samwell switched to bass, and they went looking for a new guitarist. The original intention was to audition a young player named Tony Sheridan, but while John Foster was waiting in the 2is to meet him, he started talking with someone who had just left the Vipers, and said that he and his friend would be happy to join the group, and so Cliff's backing group now consisted of Ian Samwell, Terry Smart, Hank Marvin and Bruce Welch. The new group recorded another Ian Samwell song, "High Class Baby": [Excerpt: Cliff Richard and the Drifters, "High Class Baby"] What Samwell didn't know when they recorded that was that Cliff was already planning to replace him, with Jet Harris, who had played with Marvin in the Vipers. Now he was playing with better musicians, Samwell's shortcomings were showing up. Cliff didn't tell Samwell himself -- he got John Foster to fire him. Samwell would go on to have some success as a songwriter and record producer, though, most famously producing “Horse With No Name” for America. Shortly after that, Foster was gone as well, first demoted from manager to roadie, then given two weeks' notice in a letter from Cliff's dad. And then finally, Cliff replaced Terry Smart, his old school friend, the person who had invited him into his group, with Tony Meehan, another ex-Viper. By Cliff's nineteenth birthday, the only thing left of the original Drifters was the name. And soon that would change too, as Cliff Richard and the Drifters became Cliff Richard and the Shadows.

Feb 10, 2020

Episode sixty-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Fujiyama Mama” by Wanda Jackson, and the first rock and roller to become “big in Japan” 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 “Purple People Eater” by Sheb Wooley. (more…)

Feb 4, 2020

Episode sixty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Yakety Yak'” by The Coasters, and at the group’s greatest success and split, and features discussion of racism, plagiarism, STDs and Phil Spector. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Tears on My Pillow” by Little Anthony and the Imperials . (more…)

Jan 27, 2020

Episode sixty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Johnny B. Goode” by Chuck Berry, and the decline and fall of both Berry and Alan Freed. 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 “Splish Splash” by Bobby Darin . (more…)

Jan 20, 2020

Episode sixty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Great Balls of Fire" by Jerry Lee Lewis. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. This one comes with a bit of a content warning, as while it has nothing explicit, it deals with his marriage to his thirteen-year-old cousin. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Rumble" by Link Wray . Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode (with one exception, which I mention in the podcast). The Spark That Survived by Myra Lewis Williams is Myra's autobiography, and tells her side of the story, which has tended to be ignored in favour of her famous husband's side. I'm relying heavily on Sam Phillips: the Man Who Invented Rock and Roll by Peter Guralnick for all the episodes dealing with Phillips and Sun Records. Books on Jerry Lee Lewis tend to be very flawed, as the authors all tend to think they're Faulkner rather than giving the facts. This one by Rick Bragg is better than most. There are many budget CDs containing Lewis' pre-1962 work. This set seems as good an option as any. And this ten-CD box set contains ninety Sun singles in chronological order, starting with "Whole Lotta Shakin'" and covering the Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, and Carl Perkins records discussed here. There are few better ways to get an idea of Lewis' work in context. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them ? Erratum: I say “Glad All Over” was written by Aaron Schroeder. In fact it was co-written by Schroeder, Roy Bennett, and Sid Tepper. Transcript We've looked before at the rise of Jerry Lee Lewis, but in this episode we're going to talk about his fall. And for that reason I have to put a content warning at the beginning here. While I'm not going to say anything explicit at all, this episode has to deal with events that I, and most of my listeners, would refer to as child sexual abuse, though the child in question still, more than sixty years later, doesn't see them that way, and I don't want to say anything that imposes my framing over hers. If you might find this subject distressing, I suggest reading the transcript before listening, or just skipping this episode. It also deals, towards the end, with domestic violence. Indeed, if you're affected by these issues, I would also suggest skipping the next episode, on "Johnny B. Goode", and coming back on February the second for "Yakety Yak" by the Coasters. We're hitting a point in the history of rock and roll where, for the first time, rock and roll begins its decline in popularity. We'll see from this point on that every few years there's a change in musical fashions, and a new set of artists take over from the most popular artists of the previous period. And in the case of the first rock and roll era, that takeover was largely traumatic. There were a number of deaths, some prosecutions -- and in the case of Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry, scandals. In general, I try not to make these podcast episodes be about the horrific acts that some of the men involved have committed. This is a podcast about music, not about horrible men doing horrible things. But in the case of Jerry Lee Lewis, he was one of the very small number of men to have actually faced consequences for his actions, and so it has to be discussed. I promise I will try to do so as sensitively as possible. Although sensitivity is not the word that comes to mind when one thinks of Jerry Lee Lewis, generally... [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Great Balls of Fire"] When we left Jerry Lee Lewis, he had just had his first really major success, with "Whole Lotta Shakin'". He was on top of the world, and the most promising artist in rock and roll music. With Elvis about to be drafted into the army, the role of biggest rock and roll star was wide open, and Lewis intended to take over Elvis' mantle. There was going to be a new king of rock and roll. It didn't quite work out that way. "Whole Lotta Shakin'" was such a massive hit that on the basis of that one record, Jerry Lee was invited to perform his next single in a film called Jamboree. This was one of the many exploitation films that were being put out starring popular DJs -- this one starred Dick Clark, rather than Alan Freed, who'd appeared in most of them. They were the kind of thing that made Elvis' films look like masterpieces of the cinema, and tended to involve a bunch of kids who wanted to put a dance on at their local school, or similar interchangeable plots. The reason people went to see them wasn't the plot, but the performances by rock and roll musicians. Fats Domino was in most of these, and he was in this one, singing his minor single "Wait and See". There were also a few performances by musicians who weren't strictly rock and roll, and were from an older generation, but who were close enough that the kids would probably accept them. Slim Whitman appeared, as did Count Basie, with Joe Williams as lead vocalist:… [Excerpt: Joe Williams, "I Don't Like You No More"] The film also featured the only known footage of Lewis Lymon and the Teenchords, who we talked about briefly last week. More pertinently to this story, it featured Carl Perkins: [Excerpt: Carl Perkins, "Glad All Over"] That song was one of the few that Perkins recorded which wasn't written by him. Instead, it was written by Aaron Schroeder, who had co-written the non-Leiber-and-Stoller songs for Jailhouse Rock, and who also appeared in this film in a cameo role as himself. The song was provided to Sam Phillips by Hill and Range, who were Phillips' publishing partners as well as being Elvis'. It was to be Carl Perkins' last record for Sun -- Perkins had finally had enough of Sam Phillips being more interested in Jerry Lee Lewis. Even little things were getting to him -- Jerry Lee's records were credited to "Jerry Lee Lewis and his Pumping Piano". Why did Carl's records never say anything about Carl's guitar? Sam promised him that the records would start to credit Carl Perkins as "the rocking guitar man", but it was too late -- Perkins and Johnny Cash both made an agreement with Columbia Records on November the first 1957 that when their current contracts with Sun expired, they'd start recording for the new label. Cash was in a similar situation to Perkins -- Jack Clement had now taken over production of Cash's records, and while Cash was writing some of his best material, songs like "Big River" that remain classics, Clement was making him record songs Clement had written himself, like "Ballad of a Teenage Queen": [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, "Ballad of a Teenage Queen"] It's quite easy to see from that, which he recorded in mid-November, why Cash left Sun. While Cash would go on to have greater success at Columbia, Perkins wouldn't. And ironically it was possible that he had had one more opportunity to have a hit follow-up to "Blue Suede Shoes" at Sun, and he'd passed on it. According to Perkins, he was given a choice of two songs to perform in Jamboree, both of them published by Hill and Range, but "I thought both of them was junk!" and he'd chosen the one that was slightly less awful -- that's not how other people involved remember it, but he would always claim that he had been offered the song that Jerry Lee Lewis performed, and turned down "Great Balls of Fire": [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Great Balls of Fire"] That song was one that both Lewis and Phillips were immediately convinced would be a hit as soon as they heard the demo. Sam Phillips' main worry was how they were going to improve on the demo by the song's writer, Otis Blackwell, which he thought was pretty much perfect as it was. We've met Otis Blackwell briefly before -- he was a New York-based songwriter, one of a relatively small number of black people who managed to get work as a professional songwriter for one of the big publishing companies. Blackwell had written "Fever" for Little Willie John, "You're the Apple of My Eye" for Frankie Valli, and two massive hits for Elvis -- "Don't Be Cruel" and "All Shook Up". We don't have access to his demo of "Great Balls of Fire", but in the seventies he recorded an album called "These are My Songs", featuring many of the hits he'd written for other people, and it's possible that the version of "Great Balls of Fire" on that album gives some idea of what the demo that so impressed Phillips sounded like: [Excerpt: Otis Blackwell, "Great Balls of Fire"] "Great Balls of Fire" seems to be the first thing to have been tailored specifically for the persona that Lewis had created with his previous hit. It's a refinement of the "Whole Lotta Shakin'" formula, but it has a few differences that give the song far more impact. Most notably, where "Whole Lotta Shakin'" starts off with a gently rolling piano intro and only later picks up steam: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Whole Lotta Shakin'"] "Great Balls of Fire" has a much more dynamic opening -- one that sets the tone for the whole record with its stop-start exclamations: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Great Balls of Fire"] Although that stop-start intro is one of the few signs in the record that point to the song having been possibly offered to Perkins -- it's very reminiscent of the intro to "Blue Suede Shoes": [Excerpt: Carl Perkins, "Blue Suede Shoes"] I could imagine Perkins recording the song in the "Blue Suede Shoes" manner and having a hit with it, though not as big a hit as Lewis eventually had. On the other hand I can't imagine Lewis turning "Glad All Over", fun as it is, into anything even remotely worthy of following up "Whole Lotta Shakin'". Almost straight away they managed to cut a version of "Great Balls of Fire" that was suitable for the film, but it wasn't right for a hit record. They needed something that was absolutely perfect. After having sent the film version off, they spent several days working on getting the perfect version cut -- paying particular attention to that stop-start intro, which the musicians had to time perfectly for it not to come out as a sloppy mess. Oddly, the musicians on the track weren't the normal Sun session players, and nor were they the musicians who normally played in Lewis' band. Instead, Lewis was backed by Sidney Stokes on bass and Larry Linn on drums -- according to Lewis, he never met those two people again after they finished recording. But as the work proceeded, Jerry Lee became concerned. "Great Balls of Fire"? Didn't that sound a bit... Satanic? And people did say that rock and roll was the Devil's music. He ended up getting into an angry, rambling, theological discussion with Sam Phillips, which was recorded and which gives an insight into how difficult Lewis must have been to work with, but also how tortured he was -- he truly believed in the existence of a physical Hell, and that he was destined to go there because of his music: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis and Sam Phillips, Bible discussion] Sam Phillips, who appears to have had the patience of a saint, eventually talked Lewis down and persuaded him to get back to making music. When "Great Balls of Fire" came out, with a cover of Hank Williams' ballad "You Win Again" on the B-side, it was an immediate success. It sold over a million copies in the first ten days it was out, and it became a classic that has been covered by everyone from Dolly Parton to Aerosmith. It's one of the records that defines 1950s rock and roll music, and it firmly established Jerry Lee Lewis as one of the greatest stars of rock and roll, if not the greatest. Jack and Sam kept recording everything they could from Lewis, getting a backlog of recordings that would be released for decades to come -- everything from Hank Williams covers to the old blues number "Big Legged Woman": [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Big Legged Woman"] But they decided that they didn't want to mess with a winning formula, and so the next record that they put out was another Otis Blackwell song, "Breathless". This time, the band was the normal Sun studio drummer Jimmy Van Eaton, Billy Lee Riley on guitar -- Riley was also furious with Sam Phillips for the way he was concentrating on Lewis' career at the expense of everyone else's, but he was still working on sessions for Phillips -- and Jerry Lee's cousin J.W. Brown on bass. J.W. was his full name -- it didn't stand for anything -- and he was the regular touring bass player in Lewis' band. "Breathless" was very much in the same style as "Great Balls of Fire", if perhaps not *quite* so good: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Breathless"] To promote the record, Jud Phillips, Sam's brother, came up with a great promotional scheme. Dick Clark, the presenter of American Bandstand, had another show, the Dick Clark Show, which was also called Dick Clark's Saturday Night Beechnut Show because it was sponsored by Beechnut chewing gum. Clark had already had Jerry Lee on his show once, and he'd been a hit -- Clark could bring him back on the show, and they could announce that if you sent Sun Records five Beechnut wrappers and fifty cents for postage and packing, you could get a signed copy of the new record. The fifty cents would be more than the postage and packing would cost, of course, and Sun would split the profits with Dick Clark. Sun bought an autograph stamp to stamp copies of the record with, hired a few extra temporary staff members to help them get the records posted, and made the arrangements with Dick Clark and his sponsors. The result was extraordinary -- in some parts of the country, stores ran out of Beechnut gum altogether. More than thirty-eight thousand copies of the single were sent out to eager gum-chewers. It was around this time that Jerry Lee went on the Alan Freed tour that we mentioned last week, with Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Larry Williams, the Chantels, and eleven other acts. The tour later became legendary not so much for the music -- though that was great -- but for the personal disputes between Lewis and Berry. There were two separate issues at stake. The first was Elmo Lewis, Jerry's father. Elmo had a habit of using racial slurs, and of threatening to fight anyone, especially black people, who he thought was disrespecting him. At one show on the tour, a dispute about parking spaces between Berry and Lewis led to the elder Lewis chasing Berry three blocks, waving a knife, and shouting "You know what we do with cats like you down in Ferriday? We chop the heads off them and throw it in a lake." Apparently, by the next day, Elmo and Chuck were sat with each other at breakfast, the best of friends. The other issue was Berry's belief that he, rather than Lewis, should be headlining the shows. He managed to persuade the promoters of this, and this led Lewis to try more and more outrageous stunts on stage to try to upstage Berry. The legend has it that at one show he went so far as to set his piano on fire at the climax of "Great Balls of Fire", and then walk off stage challenging Berry to follow that. Some versions of the story have him using a racial slur there, too, but the story in whatever form seems to be apocryphal. It does, though, sum up the atmosphere between the two. That said, while Lewis and Berry fought incessantly, Berry was one of the few people to whom Lewis has ever shown any respect at all. Partly that's because of Lewis' admiration for Berry's songwriting -- he's called Berry "the Hank Williams of rock and roll" before now, and for someone who admires Williams as much as Lewis does that's about the highest imaginable praise. But also, Lewis and his father were both always very careful not to do anything that would lead to word of the feud getting back to his mother, because his mother had repeatedly told him that Chuck Berry was the greatest rock and roller in the world -- Elvis was good, she said, and obviously so was her son, but neither of them were a patch on Chuck. She would have been furious with him, and would definitely have taken Chuck's side. After the tour, Jerry Lee recorded another song for a film he was going to appear in. This time, it was the title song for a terribly shlocky attempt at drama, called High School Confidential -- a film that dealt with the very serious and weighty issue of marijuana use among teenagers, and is widely regarded as one of the worst films ever made. The theme music, though, was pretty good: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "High School Confidential"] That came out on the nineteenth of May, 1958, and immediately started rising up the charts. Two days later, Jerry Lee headed out on what was meant to be a triumphal tour of the UK, solidifying him as the biggest, most important, rock and roll star in the world. And that is when everything came crashing down. Because it was when he and his entourage landed in the UK, and the press saw the thirteen-year-old girl with him, and asked who she was, that it became public knowledge he had married his thirteen-year-old cousin Myra. And here we get to something I've been dreading talking about since I decided on this project. There is simply no way to talk about Jerry Lee Lewis' marriage to Myra Gale Brown which doesn't erase Brown's experience, doesn't excuse Lewis' behaviour, explains the cultural context in which it happened, and doesn't minimise child abuse -- which, and let's be clear about this right now, this was. If you take from *anything* that I say after this that I think there is any possible excuse, any justification, for a man in his twenties having sex with a thirteen-year-old girl -- let alone a thirteen-year-old girl in his own family, to whom he was an authority figure -- then I have *badly* failed to get my meaning across. What Lewis did was, simply, wrong. It's important to say that, because something that applies both to this episode and to the downfall of Chuck Berry, which we'll be looking at in the next episode, is the way that both have been framed by all the traditional histories of rock and roll. If you read almost anything about rock and roll history, what you see when it gets to 1958 is "and here rock and roll nearly died, because of the prurient attitudes of a few prudes, who were out to destroy the careers of these new exciting rock and rollers because they hated the threat they posed to their traditional way of life". That is simply not the case. Yes, there was a great deal of establishment opposition to rock and roll music, but what happened to Jerry Lee Lewis wasn't some conspiracy of blue-nosed prudes. It was people getting angry, for entirely understandable reasons, about a man doing something that was absolutely, unquestionably, just *wrong*. And the fact that this has been minimised by rock and roll histories says a lot about the culture around rock journalism, none of it good. Now, that said, something that needs to be understood here is that Lewis and most of the people round him didn't see him as doing anything particularly wrong. In the culture of the Southern US at the time, it was normal for very young girls to be married, often to older men. By his own lights, he was doing nothing wrong. His first marriage was when he was sixteen -- Myra was his third wife, and he was still legally married to his second when he married her -- and his own younger sister had recently got married, aged twelve. Likewise, marrying one's cousin was the norm within Jerry Lee's extended family, where pretty much everyone whose surname was Lewis, Swaggart, or Gilley was married to someone else whose surname was Lewis, Swaggart, or Gilley. But I don't believe we have to judge people by their own standards, or at least not wholly so. There were many other horrific aspects to the culture of the Southern states at the time, and just because, for example, the people who defended segregation believed they were doing nothing wrong and were behaving according to their own culture, doesn't mean we can't judge them harshly. And it's not as if everyone in Jerry Lee's own culture was completely accepting of this. They'd married in secret, and when Myra's father -- Jerry Lee's cousin and bass player, J.W. Brown -- found out about it, he grabbed his shotgun and went out with every intention of murdering Jerry Lee, and it was only Sam Phillips who persuaded him that maybe that would be a bad idea. The British tour, which was meant to last six weeks, ended up lasting only three days. Jerry Lee and his band and family cancelled the tour and returned home, where they expected everyone to accept them again, and for things to carry on as normal. They didn't. The record company tried to capitalise on the controversy, and also to defuse the anger towards Lewis. At the time, there was a craze for novelty records which interpolated bits of spoken word dialogue with excerpts of rock and roll hits, sparked off by a record called "The Flying Saucer": [Excerpt: Buchanan and Goodman, "The Flying Saucer"] Jack Clement put together a similar thing, as a joke for the Sun Records staff, called "The Return of Jerry Lee", having an interviewer, the DJ George Klein, ask Jerry Lee questions about the recent controversy, and having Jerry Lee "answer" them in clips from his records. Sam Phillips loved it, and insisted on releasing it as a single. [Excerpt: George and Louis, "The Return of Jerry Lee"] Unsurprisingly, that did not have the effect that was hoped, and did not defuse the situation one iota -- especially since some of the jokes in the record were leering ones about Myra's physical attractiveness -- the attractiveness, remember, of a child. For that reason, I will *not* be putting the full version of that particular track in the Mixcloud mix of songs I excerpted in this episode. This is where we say goodbye to Sam Phillips. With Jerry Lee Lewis' career destroyed, and with all his other major acts having left him, Phillips' brief reign as the most important record producer and company owner in the USA was over. He carried on running Sun records for a few years, and eventually sold it to Shelby Singleton. Singleton is a complicated figure, but one thing he definitely did right was exploiting Sun's back catalogue -- in their four-year rockabilly heyday Sam Phillips and Jack Clement had recorded literally thousands of unreleased songs by Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Carl Perkins, Conway Twitty, Charlie Rich, Billy Lee Riley, and many more. Those tracks sat in Sun's vaults for more than a decade, but once Singleton took over the company pretty much every scrap of material from Sun's vaults saw release, especially once a British reissue label called Charly employed Martin Hawkins and Colin Escott, two young music obsessives, to put out systematic releases of Sun's rockabilly and blues archives. The more of that material came out, the more obvious it became that Sam Phillips had tapped into something very, very special at Sun Records, and that throughout the fifties one small studio in Memphis had produced staggering recordings on a daily basis. By the time Sam Phillips died, in 2003, aged eighty, he was widely regarded as one of the most important people in the history of music. Jerry Lee Lewis, meanwhile, spent several years trying and failing to have a hit, but slowly rebuilding his live audiences, playing small venues and winning back his audience one crowd at a time. By the late 1960s he was in a position to have a comeback, and "Another Place, Another Time" went to number four on the country charts, and started a run of country hits that lasted for the best part of a decade: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Another Place, Another Time"] Myra divorced Jerry Lee around that time, citing physical and emotional abuse. She is now known as Myra Williams, has been happily married for thirty-six years, and works as a real-estate agent. Jerry Lee has, so far, married four more times. His fourth and fifth wives died in mysterious circumstances -- his fourth drowned shortly before the divorce went through, and the fifth died in circumstances that are still unclear, and several have raised suspicions that Jerry Lee killed her. It's not impossible. The man known as the Killer did once shoot his bass player in the chest in the late seventies -- he insists that was an accident -- and was arrested outside Graceland, drunk and with a gun, yelling for Elvis Presley to come out and settle who was the real king. Jerry Lee Lewis is still alive, married to his seventh wife, who is Myra's brother's ex-wife. Last year, he and his wife sued his daughter, though the lawsuit was thrown out of court. He's eighty-four years old, still performs, and according to recent interviews, worries if he is going to go to Heaven or to Hell when he dies. I imagine I would worry too, in his place.

Jan 13, 2020

Episode sixty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Maybe” by the Chantels, and covers child stardom, hymns in Latin, and how to get discovered twice in one day. 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 “Don’t You Just Know It” by Huey “Piano” Smith and the Clowns . (more…)

Jan 6, 2020

Episode sixty-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Reet Petite” by Jackie Wilson, and features talent contests with too much talent, the prehistory of Motown, a song banned by the BBC, and a possible Mafia hit. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Get a Job” by the Silhouettes . (more…)

Dec 30, 2019

Episode sixty-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Susie Q” by Dale Hawkins, and at the difference between rockabilly and electric blues. 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 “ Shake a Hand” by Faye Adams. (more…)

Dec 22, 2019

Episode sixty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Jailhouse Rock” by Elvis Presley, and at his relationships with Colonel Tom Parker, Leiber and Stoller, his band members, and the film industry. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on Santa Claus is Back in Town , also by Elvis, which ties in more than most to this episode. (more…)

Dec 16, 2019

Episode sixty-one of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "That'll Be the Day" by The Crickets. 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 "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" by Gene Autry Errata I say in here that Larry Welborn lent Holly a thousand dollars. That money was actually lent Holly by his brother, also called Larry. I also at one point say "That'll Be the Day" was co-written by Joe Allison. I meant Jerry Allison, of course -- Joe Allison was also a Texan songwriter, but had no involvement in that song. Resources As usual, I've created a Mixcloud mix with all the recordings excerpted here. I've used two biographies for the bulk of the information here -- Buddy Holly: Learning the Game , by Spencer Leigh, and Rave On: The Biography of Buddy Holly by Philip Norman. There are many collections of Buddy Holly's work available, but many of them are very shoddy, with instrumental overdubs recorded over demos after his death. The best compilation I am aware of is The Memorial Collection , which contains almost everything he issued in his life, as he issued it (for some reason two cover versions are missing) along with the undubbed acoustic recordings that were messed with and released after his death. A lot of the early recordings with Bob, Larry, and/or Sonny that I reference in this episode are included in Down The Line: Rarities , a companion set to the Memorial Collection. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them ? Transcript And so, far later in the story than many people might have been expecting, we finally come to Buddy Holly, the last of the great fifties rockers to appear in our story. Nowadays, Holly gets counted as a pioneer of rock and roll, but in fact he didn't turn up until the genre had become fairly well established in the charts. Which is not to say that he wasn't important or innovative, just that he was one of the greats of the second wave -- from a twenty-first-century perspective, Buddy Holly looks like one of the people who were there when rock and roll was invented, but by the time he had his first hit, Bill Haley, Carl Perkins, and Gene Vincent had all had all their major chart hits, and were on their way down and out. Little Richard was still touring, but he'd already recorded his last rock and roll record of the fifties, and while Fats Domino was still making hit records, most of the ones he's remembered by, the ones that changed music, had already been released. But Holly was arguably the most important figure of this second wave, someone who, more than any other figure of the mid-fifties, seems at least in retrospect to point the way forward to what rock music would become in the decade after. So today we're going to look at the story of how the first really successful rock group started. Because while these days, "That'll Be The Day" is generally just credited to "Buddy Holly", at the time the record came out, it didn't have any artist name on it other than that of the band that made it, The Crickets: [Excerpt: The Crickets, "That'll Be the Day"] Charles Hardin Holley grew up in Lubbock, Texas, a town in the middle of nowhere that has produced more than its fair share of famous musicians. Other than Buddy Holly, the two most famous people from Lubbock are probably Waylon Jennings, who briefly played in Holly's band in 1959 before going on to his own major successes, and Mac Davis, who wrote several hits for Elvis before going on to become a country singer of some note himself. Holly grew up with music. His elder brothers performed as a country duo in much the same style as the Louvin Brothers, and there's a recording of Holly singing the old country song, "Two Timin' Woman", in 1949, when he was twelve, before his voice had even broken: [Excerpt: Charles Holley, "Two Timin' Woman"] By his mid-teens, he was performing as "Buddy and Bob" with a friend, Bob Montgomery, playing pure country and western music, with Buddy on the mandolin while Bob played guitar: [Excerpt: Buddy and Bob, "Footprints in the Snow"] He would also appear on the radio with another friend, Jack Neal, as "Buddy and Jack". Some early recordings of that duo survive as well, with Jack singing while Buddy played guitar: [Excerpt: Buddy and Jack, "I Saw the Moon Crying Last Night"] When Jack Neal, who was a few years older than Buddy, got married and decided he didn't have time for the radio any more, the Buddy and Jack Show became the Buddy and Bob Show. Around this time, Buddy met another person who would become important both to him and the Crickets, Sonny Curtis. Curtis was only a teenager, like him, but he had already made an impression in the music world. When he was only sixteen, he had written a song, "Someday", that was recorded by the country star Webb Pierce: [Excerpt: Webb Pierce, "Someday"] Buddy, too, was an aspiring songwriter. A typical early example of his songwriting was one he wrote in collaboration with his friend Scotty Turner, "My Baby's Coming Home". The song wasn't recorded at the time, but a few years later a demo version of it was cut by a young singer called Harry Nilsson: [Excerpt: Harry Nilsson, "My Baby's Coming Home"] But it wasn't until he saw Elvis live in 1955 that Buddy Holly knew he didn't want to do anything other than become a rock and roll star. When Elvis came to town, the promoter of Elvis' show was a friend of Buddy and Bob, and so he added them to the bill. They became friendly enough that every time Elvis passed through town -- which he did often in those early years of his career -- they would all hang out together. Bob Montgomery used to reminisce about going to the cinema with Elvis to watch Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and Elvis getting bored with the film half an hour in, and leaving with the rest of the group. After seeing Elvis, Buddy almost immediately stepped up his musical plans. He had already been recording demos with Bob and Sonny Curtis, usually with Bob on vocals: [Excerpt: Buddy and Bob, "I Gambled My Heart"] The bass player on that song, Larry Welborn, believed in Buddy's talents, and lent him a thousand dollars -- a *massive* amount of money in 1955 -- so he could buy himself a Fender Stratocaster, an amp, and a stage suit. Holly's friend Joe B. Mauldin said of the Strat that it was the first instrument he'd ever seen with a gear shift. He was referring there to the tremelo arm on the guitar -- a recent innovation that had only been brought in that year. Buddy kept playing guitar with various combinations of his friends. For example Sonny Curtis cut six songs in 1955, backed by Buddy on guitar, Larry Wellborn on bass, and Jerry Allison on drums: [Excerpt: Sonny Curtis, "Because You Love Me"] Curtis would later talk about how as soon as Elvis came along, he and Buddy immediately switched their musical style. While it was Buddy who owned the electric guitar, he would borrow Curtis' Martin acoustic and try to play and sing like Elvis, while Curtis in turn would borrow Buddy's Strat and play Scotty Moore's guitar licks. Buddy was slowly becoming the most popular rock and roll singer in that part of Texas -- though he had an ongoing rivalry with Roy Orbison, who was from a hundred miles away in Wink but was the only serious competition around for the best local rock and roller. But while Buddy was slowly building up a reputation in the local area, he couldn't yet find a way to break out and have success on a wider stage. Elvis had told him that the Louisiana Hayride would definitely have him on at Elvis' recommendation, but when he and Sonny Curtis drove to Shreveport, the radio station told them that it wasn't up to Elvis who got on their show and who didn't, and they had to drive back to Texas from Louisiana without getting on the radio. This kind of thing just kept happening. Buddy and Bob and Sonny and Larry and Jerry were recording constantly, in various combinations, and were making more friends in the local music community, like Waylon Jennings, but nothing was happening with the recordings. You can hear on some of them, though, exactly what Sonny Curtis meant when he said that they were trying to sound like Elvis and Scotty Moore: [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, "Don't Come Back Knockin'"] These songs were the recordings that got Buddy a contract with Decca Records in Nashville, which was, at the time, one of the biggest record labels in the country. And not only did he get signed to Decca, but Buddy also got a songwriting contract with Cedarwood Music, the publishing company that was jointly owned by Jim Denny, the man in charge of the bookings for the Grand Ole Opry, and Webb Pierce, one of the biggest country music stars of the period. So it must have seemed in January 1956 as if Buddy Holly was about to become a massive rock and roll star. That first Decca recording session took place in Owen Bradley's studio, and featured Sonny Curtis on guitar, and a friend called Don Guess on bass. The session was rounded out by two of the regular musicians that Bradley used on his sessions -- Grady Martin on rhythm guitar, so Buddy didn't have to sing and play at the same time, and Doug Kirkham on drums. The songs they cut at that initial session consisted of two of the songs they'd already demoed, "Don't Come Back Knockin'" and "Love Me", plus "Blue Days, Black Nights", a song written by Ben Hall, a friend of Buddy's from Lubbock. But it was the fourth song that was clearly intended to be the hit. We've talked before about the Annie songs, but that was back in March, so I'll give you a brief refresher here, and if you want more detail, go and listen to episode twenty-two, on "The Wallflower", which I'll link in the show notes. Back in 1954, Hank Ballard and the Midnighters had recorded a song called "Work With Me Annie", a song which had been, for the time, relatively sexually explicit, though it sounds like nothing now: [Excerpt: Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, "Work With Me Annie"] That song had started up a whole series of answer records. The Midnighters recorded a couple themselves, like "Annie Had a Baby": [Excerpt: Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, "Annie Had a Baby"] Most famously there was Etta James' "The Wallflower": [Excerpt: Etta James, "The Wallflower"] But there were dozens more songs about Annie -- there was "Annie Met Henry", "Annie Pulled a Hum-Bug", even "Annie Kicked the Bucket": [excerpt: the Nu Tones, "Annie Kicked the Bucket"] And the fourth song that Buddy recorded at this first Decca session, "Midnight Shift", was intended to be another in the Annie series. It was written by Luke McDaniel, a country singer who had gone rockabilly, and who recorded some unissued sides for Sun, like "My Baby Don't Rock": [Excerpt: Luke McDaniel, "My Baby Don't Rock"] Jim Denny had suggested "Midnight Shift" for Buddy -- though it seems a strange choice for commercial success, as it's rather obviously about a sex worker: [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, "Midnight Shift"] Perhaps the label had second thoughts, as "Blue Days, Black Nights" was eventually chosen as the single, rather than "Midnight Shift". When the paperwork for it came through for Buddy to sign, he discovered that they'd misspelled his name. He was born Charles Holley -- h-o-l-l-e-y -- but the paperwork spelled it h-o-l-l-y. As he was told they needed it back in a hurry, he signed it, and from then on he was Buddy Holly without the e. For the rest of 1956 Buddy continued recording with Owen Bradley for Decca, and kept having little success. Bradley became ever more disillusioned with Holly, while Paul Cohen, the executive at Decca who had signed Holly, at one point was telling his friends "Buddy Holly is the biggest no talent I have ever worked with." One of the songs that he recorded during that time, but which wasn't released, was one that Owen Bradley described as "the worst song I've ever heard". It had been written by Holly and Joe Allison after they'd been to see the John Wayne film The Searchers -- a film which later gave the name to a band from Liverpool who would become hugely influential. Holly and Allison had seen the film several times, and they kept finding themselves making fun of the way that Wayne said one particular line: [Excerpt: The Searchers, John Wayne saying "That'll Be The Day"] They took that phrase and turned it into the title of a song. Unfortunately, the first recording of it wasn't all that great -- Buddy had been told by Webb Pierce that the way to have a hit single was to sing in a high voice, and so he sang the song far out of his normal range: [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, "That'll Be The Day"] Around this time, Sonny Curtis stopped working with Holly. Owen Bradley didn't like his guitar playing and wanted Holly to record with the session musicians he used with everyone else, while Curtis got an offer to play guitar for Slim Whitman, who at the time was about the biggest star in country music. So as 1956 drew to a close, Buddy Holly was without his longtime guitarist, signed to a record company that didn't know what to do with him, and failing to realise his musical ambitions. This is when Norman Petty entered the story. Petty was a former musician, who had performed crude experiments in overdubbing in the late forties, copying Les Paul and Mary Ford, though in a much less sophisticated manner. One of his singles, a version of Duke Ellington's "Mood Indigo", had actually been a minor hit: [Excerpt: The Norman Petty Trio, "Mood Indigo"] He'd gone into the recording studio business, and charged bands sixty dollars to record two songs in his studio -- or, if he thought the songs had commercial potential, he'd waive the charge if they gave him the publishing and a co-writing credit. Petty had become interested in rockabilly after having recorded Roy Orbison and the Teen Kings' first single -- the version of "Ooby Dooby" that was quickly deleted: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison and the Teen Kings, "Ooby Dooby", Je_Wel Records version] When he heard Sam Phillips' remake of the song, he became intrigued by the possibilities that echo offered, and started to build his own echo chamber -- something that would eventually be completed with the help of Buddy Holly and Buddy's father and brother. Petty recorded another rockabilly group, Buddy Knox and the Rhythm Orchids, on a song, "Party Doll", that went to number one: [Excerpt: Buddy Knox and the Rhythm Orchids, "Party Doll"] When the Rhythm Orchids passed through Lubbock, they told Buddy about Norman Petty's studio, and Buddy went there to cut some demos. Petty was impressed by Holly -- though he was more impressed by Sonny Curtis, who was still with Buddy for those demo sessions -- and when his contract with Decca expired, Petty and Holly agreed to work together. But they had a problem. Buddy's contract with Decca said that even though they'd only released two singles by him, and hadn't bothered to release any of the other songs he'd recorded during the year he was signed to them, he couldn't rerecord anything he'd recorded for them for another five years. Buddy tried to get Paul Cohen to waive that clause in the contract, and Cohen said no. Holly asked if he could speak to Milt Gabler instead -- he was sure that Gabler would agree. But Cohen explained to him that Gabler was only a vice president, and that he worked for Cohen. There was no way that Buddy Holly could put out a record of any of the songs he had recorded in 1956. So Norman Petty, who had been secretly recording the conversation, suggested a way round the problem. They could take those songs, and still have Holly sing them, but put them out as by a group, rather than a solo singer. It wouldn't be Buddy Holly releasing the records, it would be the group. But what should they call the group? Buddy and Jerry Allison both really liked New Orleans R&B -- they loved Fats Domino, and the other people that Dave Bartholomew worked with -- and they particularly liked a song that Bartholomew had co-written for a group called the Spiders: [Excerpt: The Spiders, "Witchcraft"] So they decided that they wanted a name that was something like the Spiders. At first they considered "the Beetles", but decided that that was too creepy -- people would want to squish them. So they settled on The Crickets. And so the version of "That'll Be The Day" that Buddy, Larry, Jerry, and Niki Sullivan had recorded with Norman Petty producing was going to be released as by the Crickets, and Buddy Holly's name was going to be left off anything that the heads at Decca might see. Amusingly, the record ended up released by Decca anyway -- or at least by a subsidiary of Decca. Norman Petty shopped the demos they'd made around different labels, and eventually he took them to Bob Thiele. Thiele had had a similar career to Milt Gabler -- he'd started out as a musician, then he'd formed his own speciality jazz label, Signature, and had produced records like Coleman Hawkins' "The Man I Love": [Excerpt: Coleman Hawkins, "The Man I Love"] Like Gabler, he had been taken on by Decca, which of all the major labels was the only one that really understood the way that the music business was changing. He'd been put in charge of two labels owned by Decca -- Coral, which was being used mostly for insipid white cover versions of black acts, and Brunswick, which was where he released rockabilly tracks by Johnny Burnette and the Rock and Roll Trio. The Crickets were clearly a Brunswick group, and so "That'll Be the Day" was going to be released on Brunswick -- and the contract was sent to Jerry Allison, not Buddy Holly. Holly's name wasn't mentioned at first, in case Thiele decided to mention it to his bosses and the whole thing was blown. Norman Petty had assumed that what they'd recorded so far was just going to be a demo, but Thiele said that no, he thought what they had was fine as it was, and put this out: [Excerpt: The Crickets, "That'll Be The Day"] But the Crickets had still not properly finalised their lineup. The core of Holly and Allison was there -- the two of them had been playing together for years -- and Niki Sullivan would be OK on rhythm guitar, but they needed a permanent bass player. They eventually settled on Joe B. Mauldin, who had played with a group called The Four Teens that had also featured Larry Welborn. Joe B. had sat in on a gig with the other three, and they'd been impressed with his bass playing. Before "That'll Be the Day" was released, they were already in the studio cutting more songs. One was a song that had originally been written by Holly's mother, though she refused to take credit for it -- she was a fundamentalist Southern Baptist, and rock and roll was the Devil's music. She was just about okay with her son playing it, but she wasn't going to get herself involved in that. So Buddy took his mother's song and turned it into this: [Excerpt: The Crickets, "Maybe Baby"] And at the same time, they also made an agreement that Holly could record solo material for Coral. That would actually be recorded by the same people who were making the Crickets' records, but since he was coming up with so many new songs, they might as well use them to get twice as much material out -- there was no prohibition, after all, on him recording new songs under his own name, just the ones he'd recorded in 1956. And they were recording a ludicrous amount of material. "That'll Be The Day" still hadn't been released, and they already had their next single in the bag, and were recording Buddy's first solo single. That song was based on "Love is Strange" by Mickey and Sylvia, a favourite of Holly's: [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, "Love is Strange"] Holly took that basic musical concept and turned it into "Words of Love": [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, "Words of Love"] That wasn't a hit for Holly, but even before his version was released, the Diamonds, who usually made a habit of recording tracks originally recorded by black artists, released a cover version, which went to number thirteen: [Excerpt: The Diamonds, "Words of Love"] The Crickets were essentially spending every second they could in Petty's studio. They were also doing session work, playing on records by Jim Robinson, Jack Huddle, Hal Goodson, Fred Crawford, and more. In the early months of 1957, they recorded dozens upon dozens of songs, which would continue being released for years afterwards. For example, just two days after "That'll Be the Day" was finally released, at the end of May, they went into the studio and cut another song they had patterned after Bo Diddley, who had co-written "Love is Strange", as a Crickets side: [Excerpt: The Crickets, "Not Fade Away"] and, on the same day, a Holly solo side: [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, "Every Day"] All these songs were written by Holly and Allison, sometimes with Mauldin helping, but the songwriting credits didn't really match that. Sometimes one or other name would get missed off the credits, sometimes Holly would be credited by his middle name, Hardin, instead of his surname, and almost always Norman Petty would end up with his name on the songwriting credits. They weren't that bothered about credit, for the moment -- there was always another song where the last one came from, and they were piling up songs far faster than they could release them. Indeed, only a month after the "Not Fade Away" and "Every Day" session, they were back in the studio yet again, recording another song, which Buddy had originally intended to name after his niece, Cindy Lou. Jerry, on the other hand, thought the song would be better if it was about his girlfriend. And you'll be able to find out what happened after they decided between Cindy Lou and Peggy Sue in a few weeks' time...

Dec 9, 2019

Episode sixty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “You Send Me” by Sam Cooke Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Little Darlin'” by The Gladiolas . Also, an announcement — the book version of the first fifty episodes is now available for purchase. See the show notes, or the previous mini-episode announcing this , for details. (more…)

Dec 9, 2019

Transcript This is just a quick announcement that the book based on the first fifty episodes of the podcast is now available for purchase. From Savoy Stompers to Clock Rockers covers forty-nine of the first fifty episodes – I’ve replaced the episode on Bill Doggett with a version of the Patreon-only bonus episode on Johnnie Ray. It’s currently available in paperback ( UK ) ( US ) and ebook versions, and there’ll be links to buy it in the liner notes to this announcement and in the notes to every episode going forward, or search on Amazon for my name and the podcast title. I’ll be putting out a hardback version shortly, for those who prefer that. Patreon backers at the $5 and above level have ebook copies already , and I’ll be sending out their physical copies over the next few weeks. Thank you.

Dec 2, 2019

Episode fifty-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” by Jerry Lee Lewis. 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 “So Long I’m Gone” by Warren Smith. (more…)

Nov 25, 2019

Episode fifty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Mr. Lee” by the Bobbettes, and at the lbirth of the girl group 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 “Little Bitty Pretty One”, by Thurston Harris. (more…)

Nov 18, 2019

Episode fifty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Flying Saucers Rock ‘n’ Roll” by Billy Lee Riley and the Little Green Men, and at the flying saucer craze of the fifties. 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 “Silhouettes” by the Rays, and the power of subliminal messages. (more…)

Nov 11, 2019

Episode fifty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Bye Bye Love" by The Everly Brotherss, and at the history of country close harmony. 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 "Short Fat Fannie" by Larry Williams . Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. There are no first-rate biographies of the Everly Brothers in print, at least in English (apparently there's a decent one in French, but I don't speak French well enough for that). Ike's Boys by Phyllis Karp is the only full-length bio, and I relied on that in the absence of anything else, but it's been out of print for nearly thirty years, and is not worth the exorbitant price it goes for second-hand. How Nashville Became Music City by Michael Kosser has a good amount of information on the Bryants. The Everlypedia is a series of PDFs containing articles on anything related to the Everly Brothers, in alphabetical order. There are many, many cheap compilations of the Everly Brothers' early material available. I'd recommend this one , because as well as all the hits up to 1962 it has the complete Songs our Daddy Taught Us. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript [Intro: Ike Everly introducing the Everly Brothers] We've talked before about how vocal harmonies are no longer a big part of rock music, but were essential to it in the fifties and sixties. But what we've not discussed is that there are multiple different types of harmony that we see in the music of that period. One, which we've already seen, is the vocal group sound -- the sound of doo-wop. There, there might be a lead singer, but everyone involved has their own important role to play, singing separate backing vocal lines that intertwine. One singer will be taking a bass melody, another will be singing a falsetto line, and so on. It's the sound of a collection of individual personalities, working together but to their own agendas. Another style which we're going to look at soon is the girl group sound. There you have a lead singer singing a line on her own, and two or three backing vocalists echoing lines on the chorus -- it's the sound of a couple of friends providing support for someone who's in trouble. The lead singer will sing her problems, and the friends will respond with something supportive. Then there's the style which Elvis used -- a single lead vocalist over a group of backing vocalists, mostly providing "oohs" and "aahs". The backing vocals here just work as another instrumental texture. But there's one style which would be as influential as any of these, and which was brought into rock and roll by a single act -- a duo who, more than anyone else in rock music, epitomised vocal harmony: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Bye Bye Love"] Don and Phil Everly were brought up in music. Their father, Ike Everly, had been a coalminer in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky, but decided to quit coal mining and become a professional musician when he was trapped in his second cave-in, deciding he wasn't ever going to go through that a third time. He had learned a particular guitar style, which would later become known as "Travis picking" after its most famous exponent, Merle Travis -- though Travis himself usually referred to it as "Muhlenberg picking". Travis and Ike Everly knew each other, and it was Ike Everly, and Ike's friend Mose Rager, who taught Travis how to play in that style, which they had learned from another friend, Kennedy Jones, who in turn learned it from a black country-blues player named Arnold Schultz, who had invented the style: [Excerpt, Ike Everly, "Blue Smoke"] Ike Everly was widely regarded as one of the greatest country guitarists of all time, and his "Ike Everly's Rag" was later recorded by Merle Travis and Joe Maphis: [Excerpt: Merle Travis and Joe Maphis, "Ike Everly's Rag"] But while Ike Everly was known as a country player, Don Everly would always later claim that deep down Ike was a blues man. He played country because that was what the audiences wanted to hear, but his first love was the blues. But even when playing country, he wasn't just playing the kind of music that was becoming popular at the time, but he was also playing the old Appalachian folk songs, and teaching them to his sons. He would play songs like "Who's Going to Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet?", which was most famously recorded by Woody Guthrie: [Excerpt: Woody Guthrie, "Who's Gonna Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet?"] The Everly family travelled all over the South and Midwest, moving between radio stations on which Ike Everly would get himself shows. As they grew old enough, his two sons, Don and Phil, would join him, as would his wife, though Margaret Everly was more of a manager than a performer. Don soon became good enough that he got his own fifteen-minute show, performing as "Little Donnie", as well as performing with his family. The Everly family would perform their show live, first thing in the morning -- they were playing country music and so they were supposed to be playing for the farmers, and their show began at 5AM, with the young boys heading off to school, still in the dark, after the show had finished. The radio show continued for many years, and the boys developed all sorts of tricks for keeping an audience entertained, which would stand them in good stead in future years. One thing they used to do was to have both brothers and their father play the same guitar simultaneously, with Phil fretting the bass notes, Ike Everly playing those notes, and Don playing lead on the top strings. I've not found a recording of them doing that together, but some footage does exist of them doing this with Tennessee Ernie Ford on his TV show -- Ford, of course, being someone whose biggest hit had been written by Ike Everly's old friend Merle Travis: [Excerpt: Tennessee Ernie Ford and the Everly Brothers, "Rattlesnake Daddy"] That kind of trick was fairly common among country acts at the time -- Buck Owens and Don Rich would do pretty much the same act together in the 1960s, and like the Everlys would play fairly straightforward blues licks while doing it. But while Ike Everly was primarily an instrumentalist, his sons would become known mostly as singers. People often, incorrectly, describe the Everly Brothers as singing "bluegrass harmonies". This is understandable, as bluegrass music comes from Kentucky, and does often have close harmonies in it. But the Everlys were actually singing in a style that was around for years before Bill Monroe started performing the music that would become known as bluegrass. There was a whole tradition of close harmony in country music that is usually dated back to the 1920s. The first people to really popularise it were a duo who were known as "Mac and Bob" -- Lester McFarland and Robert Gardner. The two men met in Kentucky, at the Kentucky School for the Blind, where they were both studying music, in 1916. They started singing close harmony together in the early 1920s, and while they sang in the overly-enunciated way that was popular at the time, you can hear the roots of the Everlys' style in their harmonies: [Excerpt: McFarland and Gardner, "That Silver Haired Daddy of Mine"] The style is known as "close harmony" because the singers are singing notes that are close to each other in the scale, and it was the foundation of country vocal harmonies. Usually in this style, there are two singers, singing about a third apart. The lower singer will sing the melody, while the higher singer will harmonise, following the melody line closely. This style of harmony was particularly suited to the vocal blend you can get from siblings, who tend to have extremely similar voices -- and if done well it can sound like one voice harmonising with itself. And so from the 1930s on there were a lot of brother acts who performed this kind of music. One duo who the Everlys would often point to as a particular influence was the Bailes Brothers: [Excerpt: the Bailes Brothers, "Oh So Many Years"] But at the time the Everly Brothers were coming up, there was one duo, more than any other, who were immensely popular in the close harmony style -- the Louvin Brothers: [Excerpt: The Louvin Brothers, "Midnight Special"] The Louvin Brothers, Charlie and Ira, were cousins of John D. Loudermilk, whose "Sittin' in the Balcony" we heard in the Eddie Cochran episode a few weeks ago. They were country and gospel singers, who are nowadays probably sadly best known for the cover of their album "Satan is Real", which often makes those Internet listicles about the most ridiculous album covers. But in the mid fifties, they were one of the most popular groups in country music, and influenced everyone -- they were particular favourites of Elvis, and regular performers on the Grand Ole Opry. Their style was a model for the Everlys, but sadly so was their personal relationship. Ira and Charlie never got on, and would often get into fights on stage, and the same was true of the Everly Brothers. In 1970, Phil Everly said "We've only ever had one argument. It's lasted twenty-five years", and that argument would continue for the rest of their lives. There were various explanations offered for their enmity over the years, ranging from them vying to be their father's favourite, to Don resenting Phil's sweeter voice upstaging him -- he was once quoted as saying "I've been a has-been since I was ten". But fundamentally the two brothers were just too different in everything from temperament to politics -- Don is a liberal Democrat, while Phil was a conservative Republican -- and their views on how life should be lived. It seems most likely that two such different people resented being forced into constant proximity with each other, and reacted against it. And so the Everlys became another of those sibling rivalries that have recurred throughout rock and roll history. But despite their personal differences, they had a vocal blend that was possibly even better than that of the Louvins, if that's possible. But talent on its own doesn't necessarily bring success, and for a while it looked like the Everlys were going to be washed up before the brothers got out of their teens. While they had some success with their radio show, by 1955 there was much less of a market for live music on the radio -- it was much cheaper for the radio stations to employ DJs to play records, now that the legal ban on broadcasting recordings had been lifted. The Everly family's radio show ended, and both Ike and Margaret got jobs cutting hair, while encouraging their sons in their music career. After a few months of this, Margaret decided she was going to move the boys to Nashville, to try to get them a record deal, while Ike remained in nearby Knoxville working as a barber. While the family had not had much success in the music industry, they had made contacts with several people, and Chet Atkins, in particular, was an admirer, not only of Ike Everly's guitar playing, but of his barbering skills as well -- according to at least one account I've read, Atkins was a regular customer of Ike's. Atkins seems to have been, at first, mostly interested in Don Everly as a songwriter and maybe a solo performer -- he carried out some correspondence with Don while Don was still in school, and got Kitty Wells, one of the biggest country stars of the fifties, to record one of Don's songs, "Thou Shalt Not Steal", when Don was only sixteen: [Excerpt: Kitty Wells, "Thou Shalt Not Steal"] That became a top twenty country hit, and Don looked like he might be on his way to a successful career, especially after another of his songs, "Here We Are Again", was recorded by Anita Carter of the famous Carter family: [Excerpt: Anita Carter, "Here We Are Again"] But Margaret Everly, the Everlys' mother and the person who seemed to have the ambition that drove them, didn't want Don to be a solo star -- she wanted the two brothers to be equal in every way, and would make sure they wore the same clothes, had the same toys growing up, and so on. She took Don's royalties from songwriting, and used them to get both brothers Musicians' union cards -- in the same way, when Don had had his own radio show, Margaret had made Don give Phil half of his five-dollar fee. So solo stardom was never going to be in Don Everly's future. Margaret wanted the Everly Brothers to be a successful duo, and that was that. Chet Atkins was going to help *both* her sons. Atkins got them a deal with Columbia Records in 1956 for a single, "Keep A-Lovin' Me", written by Don: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Keep A-Lovin' Me"] That record flopped, and the Everlys were later very dismissive of it -- Phil said of the two songs on that single "they were stinko, boy! Really stinko!" Columbia weren't interested in putting out anything else by the Everlys, and quickly dropped them. Part of the reason was that they were signed as a country act, but they already wanted to do more, and in particular to incorporate more influence from the rhythm and blues music they were listening to. Don worshipped Hank Williams, and Phil loved Lefty Frizzell, but they both also adored Bo Diddley, and were obsessed with his style. Don, in particular -- who was the more accomplished instrumentalist of the two, and who unlike Phil would play rhythm guitar on their records -- wanted to learn how Diddley played guitar, and would spend a lot of time with Chet Atkins, who taught him how to play in the open tunings Diddley used, and some of the rhythms he was playing with. Despite the brothers' lack of success on Columbia, Atkins still had faith in them, and he got in touch with his friend Wesley Rose, who was the president of Acuff-Rose publishing, the biggest music publishing company in Nashville at the time. Rose made a deal with the brothers. If they would sign to Acuff-Rose as songwriters, and if they'd agree to record only Acuff-Rose songs, he would look after their career and get them a record deal. They agreed, and Rose got them signed to Cadence Records, a mid-sized indie label whose biggest star at the time was Andy Williams. The first single they recorded for Cadence was a song that had been rejected by thirty other artists before it was passed on to the Everlys as a last resort. "Bye Bye Love" was written by the husband and wife team Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, who had been writing for a decade, for people such as Carl Smith and Moon Mullican. Their first hit had come in 1948, with "Country Boy", a song which Little Jimmy Dickens took to number seven on the country charts: [Excerpt: Little Jimmy Dickens, "Country Boy"] But they had not had much chart success after that, though they'd placed songs with various Nashville-based country singers. They were virtual unknowns, and their most recent song, "Bye Bye Love", had been written for a duo called Johnny and Jack. They hadn't been interested, so the Bryants had passed the song along to their friend Chet Atkins, who had tried to record it with Porter Wagoner, who had recorded other songs by the Bryants, like "Tryin' to Forget the Blues": [Excerpt: Porter Wagoner, "Tryin' to Forget the Blues"] But when Atkins took the song into the studio, he decided it wasn't strong enough for Wagoner. Atkins wanted to change a few chords, and Boudleaux Bryant told him that if the song wasn't strong enough as it was, he just shouldn't record it at all. But while the song might not have been strong enough for a big country star like Porter Wagoner, it was strong enough for Chet Atkins' new proteges, who were, after all, hardly going to have a big hit. So Atkins took the multiply-rejected song in for the duo to record as their first single for Cadence. In one of those coincidences that seems too good to be true, Ike Everly was Boudleaux Bryant's barber, and had been bragging to him for years about how talented his sons were, but Bryant had just dismissed this -- around Nashville, everyone is a major talent, or their son or daughter or husband or wife is. Two things happened to change the rather mediocre song into a classic that would change the face of popular music. The first was, simply, the brothers' harmonies. They had by this point developed an intuitive understanding of each other's voices, and a superb musicality. It's interesting to listen to the very first take of the song: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Bye Bye Love (take 1)"] That's Don singing the low lead and Phil taking the high harmony. Now, if you're familiar with the finished record, you can tell that what Phil's singing there isn't the closer harmony part he ended up singing on the final version. There are some note choices there that he decided against for the final record. But what you can tell is that they are instinctively great harmony singers. It's not the harmony part that would become famous, but it's a *good* one in its own right. The second thing is that they changed the song from the rather sedate country song the Bryants had come up with, radically rearranging it. Don had written a song called "Give Me a Future", which he'd intended to be in the Bo Diddley style, and one can hear something of Diddley's rhythm in the stop-start guitar part: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Give Me a Future"] Don took that guitar part, and attached it to the Bryants' song, and with the help of Chet Atkins' lead guitar fills turned it into something quite new -- a record with a rockabilly feel, but with country close harmony vocals: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Bye Bye Love"] The brothers were, at first, worried because almost as soon as it came out, a cover version by Webb Pierce, one of the biggest names in country music, came out: [Excerpt: Webb Pierce, "Bye Bye Love"] But they were surprised to discover that while Pierce's version did chart -- reaching the top ten in the country charts -- it was nowhere near as successful as their own version, which went to number one on the country charts and number two in pop, and charted on the R&B charts as well. After that success, the Bryants wrote a string of hits for the brothers, a run of classics starting with "Wake Up Little Suzie", a song which was banned on many stations because it suggested impropriety -- even though, listening to the lyrics, it very clearly states that no impropriety has gone on, and indeed that the protagonist is horrified at the suggestion that it might have: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Wake Up Little Suzie"] These records would usually incorporate some of Don's Bo Diddley influence, while remaining firmly in the country end of rock and roll. The Bryants also started to give the brothers ballads like "Devoted to You" and "All I Have to Do is Dream", which while they still deal with adolescent concerns, have a sweetness and melody to them quite unlike anything else that was being recorded by rock and roll artists of the time. After the first single, everything else that the Bryants wrote for the Everlys was tailored specifically to them -- Boudleaux Bryant, who would attend more of the sessions, would have long conversations with the brothers and try to write songs that fit with their lives and musical tastes, as well as fitting them to their voices. One of the things that's very noticeable about interviews with the brothers is that they both tend to credit Boudleaux alone with having written the songs that he co-wrote with his wife, even though everything suggests that the Bryants were a true partnership, and both have solo credits for songs that are stylistically indistinguishable from those written as a team. Whether this is pure sexism, or it's just because Boudleaux is the one who used to demo the songs for them and so they think of him as the primary author, is hard to tell -- probably a combination. This was also a perception that Boudleaux Bryant encouraged. While Felice was the person who had originally decided to go into songwriting, and was the one who came up with most of the ideas, Boudleaux was only interested in making money -- and he'd often sneak off to write songs by himself so he would get all the money rather than have to share it with his wife. Boudleaux would also on occasion be given incomplete songs by friends like Atkins, and finish them up with Felice -- but only Boudleaux and the original writer would get their names on it. The result was that Boudleaux got the credit from people around him, even when they knew better. One of my sources for this episode is an interview with the Bryants' son, Dane, and at one point in that interview he says "Now, lots of times I will say, 'My father.' I mean Dad and Mom". As the Everly brothers disagreed about almost everything, they of course disagreed about the quality of the material that the Bryants were bringing them. Phil Everly was always utterly unstinting in his praise of them, saying that the Bryants' songs were some of the best songs ever written. Don, on the other hand, while he definitely appreciated material like "All I Have to Do is Dream", wasn't so keen on their writing in general, mostly because it dealt primarily with adolescent concerns. He thought that the material the brothers were writing for themselves -- though still immature, as one would expect from people who were still in their teens at the start of their career -- was aiming at a greater emotional maturity than the material the Bryants wrote. And on the evidence of their first album, that's certainly true. The first album is, like many albums of the time, a patchy affair. It pulls together the hit singles the brothers had already released, together with a bunch of rather mediocre cover versions of then-current hits. Those cover versions tend to support Don's repeated claims that the brothers were as interested in R&B and blues as in country -- apart from a version of "Be-Bop-A-Lula", all the covers are of R&B hits of the time -- two by Little Richard, two by Ray Charles, and one by the relatively obscure blues singer Titus Turner. But among those songs, there are also a handful of Don Everly originals, and one in particular, "I Wonder if I Care as Much", is quite an astonishing piece of songwriting: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "I Wonder If I Care As Much"] Don's songs were often B-sides – that one was the B-side to “Bye Bye Love” – and to my mind they're often rather more interesting than the A-sides. While that first album is rather patchy, the second album, Songs Our Daddy Taught Us, is a minor revelation, and one of the pillars on which the Everly Brothers' artistic reputation rests. It's been suggested that the album was done as a way of getting back at the record company for some slight or other, by making a record that was completely uncommercial. That might be the case, but I don't think so -- and if it was, it was a gesture that backfired magnificently, as it's still, sixty years on, a consistent seller. Songs Our Daddy Taught Us is precisely what it sounds like -- an album consisting of songs the brothers had been taught by their father. It's a mixture of Appalachian folk songs and country standards, performed by the brothers accompanied just by Don's acoustic guitar and Floyd Chance on upright bass: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Who's Gonna Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet?”] It's quite possibly the most artistically satisfying album made in the fifties by a rock and roll act, and it's had such an influence that as recently as 2013 Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day and the jazz-pop singer Norah Jones recorded an album, Foreverly, that's just a cover version of the whole album: [Excerpt: Billie Joe Armstrong and Norah Jones, “Who's Gonna Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet?”] So as the 1950s drew to a close, the Everly Brothers were on top of the world. They'd had a run of classic singles, and they'd just released one of the greatest albums of all time. But there was trouble ahead, and when we pick up on their career again, we'll see exactly how wrong things could go for them.

Nov 4, 2019

Episode fifty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Searchin'” by The Coasters, and at the lineup changes and conflicts that led to them becoming the perfect vehicle for Leiber and Stoller. 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 “Raunchy” by Bill Justis. (more…)

Oct 28, 2019

Episode fifty-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Keep A Knockin'” by Little Richard, the long history of the song, and the tension between its performer’s faith and sexuality. 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 “At the Hop” by Danny and the Juniors . (more…)

Oct 21, 2019

Episode fifty-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “I Put a Spell on You” by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, and the career of a man who had more than fifty more children than hit records. 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 “Since I Met You Baby” by Ivory Joe Hunter (more…)

Oct 14, 2019

Episode fifty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Twenty Flight Rock” by Eddie Cochran, and at the first great rock and roll film 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 “Teen-Age Crush” by Tommy Sands . (more…)

Oct 7, 2019

Episode fifty-one of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Matchbox” by Carl Perkins, and at the session that turned into the historic Million Dollar Quartet jam session. 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 “Blue Yodel #9” by Jimmie Rodgers. (more…)

Sep 30, 2019

This week’s episode of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs is the second of two bonus episodes answering listener questions at the end of the first year of the podcast. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a bonus podcast, answering even more questions. (more…)

Sep 23, 2019

This week’s episode of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs is the first of two bonus episodes answering listener questions at the end of the first year of the podcast.. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. (more…)

Sep 16, 2019

Episode fifty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Honky Tonk” by Bill Doggett, and uses his career to provide a brief summary of the earlier episodes of the podcast as we’re now moving forward into the next stage of the story. 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 “Sixteen Tons” by Tennessee Ernie Ford . (more…)

Sep 9, 2019

Welcome to episode forty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs . This one looks at “Love is Strange” by Mickey and Sylvia, and how a reluctant bluesman who wrote books on jazz guitar, and a failed child star who would later become the mother of hip-hop, made a classic. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a bonus episode available . This one’s on “Ain’t Nobody’s Business” by Jimmy Witherspoon, and is about blues shouting and the ambition to have a polyester suit. (more…)

Sep 2, 2019

Welcome to episode forty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs . This one looks at "Rock With the Caveman" by Tommy Steele, and the birth of the British rock and roll industry. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a bonus episode available . This one's on "The Death of Rock and Roll" by the Maddox Brothers and Rose, in which we look at a country group some say invented rock & roll, and how they reacted badly to it Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. This double-CD set contains all Steele's rock and roll material, plus a selection of songs from the musicals he appeared in later. This MP3 compilation, meanwhile, contains a huge number of skiffle records and early British attempts at rock and roll, including Steele's. Much of the music is not very good, but I can't imagine a better way of getting an understanding of the roots of British rock. Pete Frame's The Restless Generation is the best book available looking at British 50s rock and roll from a historical perspective. Billy Bragg's Roots, Radicals, and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World is one of the best books I've read on music at all, and covers Steele from the skiffle perspective. Fings Ain't What They Used T'Be: The Life of Lionel Bart by David & Caroline Stafford gave me a lot of information on Steel's songwriting partner. Steele's autobiography, Bermondsey Boy, c overs his childhood and early stardom. I am not 100% convinced of its accuracy, but it's an entertaining book, and if nothing else probably gives a good idea of the mental atmosphere in the poor parts of South London in the war and immediate post-war years. And George Melly's Revolt Into Style was one of the first books to take British pop culture seriously, and puts Steele into a wider context of British pop, both music and art. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon . Why not join them? Transcript Let's talk a little bit about the Piltdown Man. Piltdown Man was an early example of a hominid -- a missing link between the apes and humans. Its skull was discovered in 1912 in Piltdown, East Sussex, by the eminent archaeologist Charles Dawson, and for years was considered one of the most important pieces of evidence in the story of human evolution. And then, in 1953, it was discovered that the whole thing was a hoax, and not even a particularly good one. Someone had just taken the jaw of an orang-utan and the top part of a human skull, and filed down the orang-utan teeth, and then stained the bones to make them look old. It was almost certainly the work of Dawson himself, who seems to have spent his entire life making fraudulent discoveries. Dawson had died decades earlier, and the full extent of his fraud wasn't even confirmed until 2003. Sometimes researching the history of rock and roll can be a lot like that. You can find a story repeated in numerous apparently reliable books, and then find out that it's all based on the inaccurate testimony of a single individual. The story never happened. It was just something someone made up. [Excerpt: "Rock With the Caveman", Tommy Steele and the Steelmen] We talked a little while ago about the skiffle movement, and the first British guitar-based pop music. Today, we're going to look at the dawn of British rock and roll. Now, there's an important thing to note about the first wave of British rock and roll, and that is that it was, essentially, a music that had no roots in the culture. It was an imitation of American music, without any of the ties to social issues that made the American music so interesting. Britain in the 1950s was a very different place to the one it is today, or to America. It was ethnically extremely homogeneous, as the waves of immigration that have so improved the country had only just started. And while few people travelled much outside their own immediate areas, it was culturally more homogeneous as well, as Britain, unlike America, had a national media rather than a local one. In Britain, someone could become known throughout the country before they'd played their second gig, if they got the right media exposure. And so British rock and roll started out at the point that American rock and roll was only just starting to get to -- a clean-cut version of the music, with little black influence or sexuality left in it, designed from the outset to be a part of mainstream showbusiness aimed at teenagers, not music for an underclass or a racial or sexual minority. Britain's first rock and roll star put out his first record in November 1956, and by November 1957 he was appearing on the Royal Variety Show, with Mario Lanza, Bob Monkhouse, and Vera Lynn. That is, fundamentally, what early British rock and roll was. Keep that in mind for the rest of the story, as we look at how a young sailor from a dirt-poor family became Britain's first teen idol. To tell that story, we first have to discuss the career of the Vipers Skiffle Group. That was the group's full name, and they were just about the most important British group of the mid-fifties, even though they were never as commercially successful as some of the acts we've looked at. The name of the Vipers Skiffle Group was actually the first drug reference in British pop music. They took the name from the autobiography of the American jazz clarinettist Mezz Mezzrow -- a man who was better known in the jazz community as a dope dealer than as a musician; so much so that "Mezz" itself became slang for marijuana, while "viper" became the name for dope smokers, as you can hear in this recording by Stuff Smith, in which he sings that he "dreamed about a reefer five foot long/Mighty Mezz but not too strong". [Excerpt: Stuff Smith, "You'se a Viper"] So when Wally Whyton, Johnny Booker, and Jean Van Den Bosch formed a guitar trio, they chose that name, even though as it turned out none of them actually smoked dope. They just thought it sounded cool. They started performing at a cafe called the 2is (two as in the numeral, I as in the letter), and started to build up something of a reputation -- to the point that Lonnie Donegan started nicking their material. Whyton had taken an old sea shanty, "Sail Away Ladies", popularised by the country banjo player Uncle Dave Macon, and rewritten it substantially, turning it into "Don't You Rock Me Daddy-O". Donegan copyrighted Whyton's song as soon as he heard it, and rushed out his version of it, but the Vipers put out their own version too, and the two chased each other up the charts. Donegan's charted higher, but the Vipers ended up at a respectable number ten: [Excerpt: The Vipers, "Don't You Rock Me, Daddy-O"] That recording was on Parlophone records, and was produced by a young producer who normally did comedy and novelty records, named George Martin. We'll be hearing more about him later on. But at the time we're talking about, the Vipers had not yet gained a recording contract, and they were still playing the 2is. Occasionally, they would be joined on stage by a young acquaintance named Thomas Hicks. Hicks was a merchant seaman, and was away at sea most of the time, and so was never a full part of the group, but even though he didn't care much for skiffle -- he was a country and western fan first and foremost -- he played guitar, and in Britain in 1955 and 56, if you played guitar, you played skiffle. Hicks had come from an absolutely dirt-poor background. Three of his siblings had died at cruelly young ages, and young Thomas himself had had several brushes with ill health, which meant that while he was a voracious reader he had lacked formal education. He had wanted to be a performer from a very early age, and had developed a routine that he used to do around the pubs in his early teens, in which he would mime to a record by Danny Kaye, "Knock on Wood": [Excerpt: Danny Kaye, "Knock on Wood"] But at age fifteen he had joined the Merchant Navy. This isn't the same thing as the Royal Navy, but rather is the group of commercial shipping companies that provide non-military shipping, and Hicks worked as wait staff on a cruise ship making regular trips to America. On an early trip, he fell in love with the music of Hank Williams, who would remain a favourite of his for the rest of his life, and he particularly loved the song "Kaw-Liga": [Excerpt: Hank Williams, "Kaw-Liga"] Hicks replaced his old party piece of miming to Danny Kaye with a new one of singing "Kaw-Liga", with accompaniment from anyone he could persuade to play guitar for him. Eventually one of his crewmates taught him how to play the song himself, and he started performing with pick-up groups, singing Hank Williams songs, whenever he was on shore leave in the UK. And when he couldn't get a paid gig he'd head to the 2is and sing with the Vipers. But then came the event that changed his life. Young Tommy Hicks, with his love of country music, was delighted when on shore leave in 1955 to see an advert for a touring show based on the Grand Ole Opry, in Norfolk Virginia, where he happened to be. Of course he went along, and there he saw something that made a huge impression. One of the acts in the middle of the bill was a young man who wore horn-rimmed glasses. Tommy still remembers the details to this day. The young man came out and did a three-song set. The first song was a standard country song, but the second one was something else; something that hit like a bolt of lightning: [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, "Peggy Sue"] That song was young Thomas Hicks' introduction to the new music called rock and roll, and nothing would ever be the same for him ever again after seeing Buddy Holly sing "Peggy Sue". By February 1956 he had finished working on the cruise ships, and was performing rock and roll in London, the very first British rock and roller. Except... There's a reason why we're covering Tommy Steele *before* Buddy Holly, the man who he claims as his inspiration. Buddy Holly *did* perform with a Grand Ole Opry tour. But it didn't tour until May 1956, three months after Thomas Hicks quit his job on the cruise ships, and about a year after the time Tommy claims to have seen him. That tour only hit Oklahoma, which is landlocked, and didn't visit Norfolk Virginia. According to various timelines put together by people like the Buddy Holly Centre in Lubbock Texas, Holly didn't perform outside Lubbock until that tour, and that's the only time he did perform outside West Texas until 1957. Also, Buddy Holly didn't meet Peggy Sue Gerron, the woman who gave the song its name, until 1956, and the song doesn't seem to have been written until 1957. So whatever it was that introduced young Tommy Hicks to the wonders of rock and roll, it wasn't seeing Buddy Holly sing "Peggy Sue" in Norfolk Virginia in 1955. But that's the story that's in his autobiography, and that's the story that's in every other source I've seen on the subject, because they're all just repeating what he said, on the assumption that he'd remember something like that, something which was so important in his life and future career. Remember what I said at the beginning, about rock and roll history being like dealing with Piltdown Man? Yeah. There are a lot of inaccuracies in the life story of Thomas Hicks, who became famous under the name Tommy Steele. Anything I tell you about him is based on information he put out, and that information is not always the truth, so be warned. For example, when he started his career, he claimed he'd worked his way up on the cruise ships to being a gymnastics instructor -- something that the shipping federation denied to the press. You find a lot of that kind of thing when you dig into Steele's stories. In fact, by the time Hicks started performing, there had already been at least one British rock and roll record made. He wasn't bringing something new that he'd discovered in America at all. "Rock Around the Clock", the Bill Haley film, had played in UK cinemas at around the time of Hicks' supposed epiphany, and it had inspired a modern jazz drummer, Tony Crombie, to form Tony Crombie and the Rockets and record a Bill Haley soundalike called "Teach You To Rock": [Excerpt: Tony Crombie and the Rockets, "Teach You To Rock"] However, Crombie was not teen idol material -- a serious jazz drummer in his thirties, he soon went back to playing bebop, and has largely been written out of British rock history since, in favour of Tommy Steele as the first British rock and roller. Thomas Hicks the merchant seaman became Tommy Steele the pop idol as a result of a chance meeting. Hicks went to a party with a friend, and the host was a man called Lionel Bart, who was celebrating because he'd just sold his first song, to the bandleader Bill Cotton. No recording of that song seems to exist, but the lyrics to the song -- a lament about the way that old-style cafes were being replaced by upscale coffee bars -- are quoted in a biography of Bart: "Oh for a cup of tea, instead of a cuppuchini/What would it mean to me, just one little cup so teeny!/You ask for some char and they reckon you're barmy/Ask for a banger, they'll give you salami/Oh for the liquid they served in the Army/Just a cup of tea!" Heartrending stuff, I'm sure you'll agree. But Bart was proud of the twenty-five guineas the song had earned him, and so he was having a party. Bart was at the centre of a Bohemian crowd in Soho, and the party was held at a squat where Bart, a card-carrying member of the Communist Party, spent most of his time. At that squat at various times around this period lived, among others, the playwright John Antrobus, the actor Shirley Eaton, who would later become famous as the woman painted gold in the beginning of Goldfinger, and the great folk guitarist Davey Graham, who would later become famous for his instrumental, “Angi”: [Excerpt: Davey Graham, “Angi”] We'll hear more about Graham in future episodes. Another inhabitant of the squat was Mike Pratt, a guitarist and pianist who would later turn to acting and become famous as Jeff Randall in the fantasy detective series Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased). Hicks, Bart, and Pratt started collaborating on songs together -- Hicks would bring in a basic idea, and then Bart would write the lyrics and Pratt the music. They also performed as The Cavemen, though Bart soon tired of playing washboard and stuck to writing. The Cavemen became a floating group of musicians, centred around Hicks and Pratt, and with various Vipers and other skifflers pulled in as and when they were available. The various skiffle musicians looked down on Hicks, because of his tendency to want to play "Heartbreak Hotel" or "Blue Suede Shoes" rather than "Bring a Little Water Sylvie" or "Rock Island Line", but a gig was a gig, and they had to admit that Hicks seemed to go down well with the young women in the audience. Two minor music industry people, Bill Varley and Roy Tuvey, agreed to manage Hicks, but they decided that they needed someone involved who would be able to publicise Hicks, so they invited John Kennedy, a PR man from New Zealand, to come to the 2is to see him. Hicks wasn't actually playing the 2is the night in question – it was the Vipers, who were just on the verge of getting signed and recording their first single: [Excerpt: The Vipers Skiffle Group, “Ain't You Glad?”] While Hicks wasn't scheduled to play, at the request of Varley and Tuvey he jumped on stage when the Vipers took a break, and sang a song that he, Bart, and Pratt had written, called "Rock With the Caveman". Kennedy was impressed. He was impressed enough, in fact, that he brought in a friend, Larry Parnes, who would go on to become the most important manager in British rock and roll in the fifties and early sixties. Kennedy, Parnes, and Hicks cut Varley and Tuvey out altogether -- to the extent that neither of them are even mentioned in the version of this story in Tommy Steele's autobiography. Hicks was renamed Tommy Steele, in a nod to his paternal grandfather Thomas Stil-Hicks (the Stil in that name is spelled either Stil or Stijl, depending on which source you believe) and Parnes would go on to name a whole host of further rock stars in a similar manner -- Duffy Power, Johnny Gentle, Billy Fury, Marty Wilde. They had everything except a record contract, but that was why Kennedy was there. Kennedy rented a big house, and hired a load of showgirls, models, and sex workers to turn up for a party and bring their boyfriends. They were to dress nicely, talk in fake posh accents, and if anyone asked who they were they were to give fake double-barrelled names. He then called the press and said it was "the first high society rock and roll show" and that the girls were all debutantes. The story made the newspapers, and got Steele national attention. Steele was signed by Decca records, where Hugh Mendl, the producer of "Rock Island Line", was so eager to sign him that he didn't check if any studios were free for his audition, and so Britain's first homegrown rock idol auditioned for his record contract in the gents' toilets. A bunch of slumming jazz musicians, including Dave Lee, the pianist with the Dankworth band, and the legendary saxophone player Ronnie Scott, were brought in to record "Rock With the Caveman": [Excerpt: Tommy Steele, "Rock With the Caveman"] The single went to number thirteen. Tommy Steele was now a bona fide rock and roll star, at least in the UK. The next record, "Elevator Rock", didn't do so well, however: [Excerpt: Tommy Steele, "Elevator Rock"] That failed to chart, so Steele's producers went for the well-worn trick in British record making of simply copying a US hit. Guy Mitchell had just released "Singing the Blues": [Excerpt: Guy Mitchell, "Singing the Blues"] That was actually a cover version of a recording by Marty Robbins from earlier in the year, but Mitchell's version was the one that became the big hit. And Steele was brought into the studio to record a soundalike version, and hopefully get it out before Mitchell's version hit the charts. Steele's version has an identical arrangement and sound to Mitchell's, except that Steele sings it in an incredibly mannered Elvis impression: [Excerpt: Tommy Steele, "Singing the Blues"] Now, to twenty-first century ears, Steele's version is clearly inferior. But here was the birth of something particularly English -- and indeed something particularly London -- in rock and roll music. The overly mannered, music-hall inspired, Cockneyfied impression of an American singing style. On Steele's subsequent tour, a nine-year old kid called David Jones, who would later change his name to Bowie, went to see him and came away inspired to become a rock and roll star. And we can hear in this performance the roots of Bowie's own London take on Elvis, as we can also hear a style that would be taken up by Anthony Newley, Ray Davies, and many more masters of Cockney archness. I don't think "Singing the Blues" is a particularly good record compared to Mitchell's, but it is a prototype for something that would become good, and it deserves recognition for that. Mitchell's version got out first, and went to the top of the charts, with Steele's following close behind, but then for one week Mitchell's record label had a minor distribution problem, and Steele took over the top spot, before Mitchell's record returned to number one the next week. Tommy Steele had become the first British rock and roll singer to get to number one in the UK charts. It would be the only time he would do so, but it was enough. He was a bona fide teen idol. He was so big, in fact, that even his brother, Colin Hicks, became a minor rock and roll star himself off the back of his brother's success: [Excerpt: Colin Hicks and the Cabin Boys, "Hollering and Screaming"] The drummer on that record, Jimmy Nicol, later had his fifteen minutes of fame when Ringo Starr got tonsilitis just before a tour of Australia, and for a few shows Nicol got to be a substitute Beatle. Very soon, Tommy Steele moved on into light entertainment. First he moved into films -- starting with "The Tommy Steele Story", a film based on his life, for which he, Bart, and Pratt wrote all twelve of the songs in a week to meet the deadline, and then he went into stage musicals. Within a year, he had given up on rock and roll altogether. But rock and roll hadn't *quite* given up on him. While Steele was appearing in stage musicals, one was also written about him -- a hurtful parody of his life, which he claimed later he'd wanted to sue over. In Expresso Bongo, a satire of the British music industry, Steele was parodied as "Bongo Herbert", who rises to fame with no talent whatsoever. That stage musical was then rewritten for a film version, with the satire taken out of it, so it was a straight rags-to-riches story. It was made into a vehicle for another singer who had been a regular at the 2is, and whose backing band was made up of former members of the Vipers Skiffle Group: [Excerpt: Cliff Richard, "Love" (from Expresso Bongo)] We'll talk about both Cliff Richard and the Shadows in future episodes though... Tommy Steele would go on to become something of a national treasure, working on stage with Gene Kelly and on screen with Fred Astaire, writing several books, having a minor artistic career as a sculptor, and touring constantly in pantomimes and musicals. At age eighty-two he still tours every year, performing as Scrooge in a stage musical version of A Christmas Carol. His 1950s hits remain popular enough in the UK that a compilation of them went to number twenty-two in the charts in 2009. He may not leave a large body of rock and roll work, but without him, there would be no British rock and roll industry as we know it, and the rest of this history would be very different.

Aug 26, 2019

Welcome to episode forty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs . This one looks at “Goodnight My Love” by Jesse Belvin, and at the many groups he performed with, and his untimely death. . 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 podcast, on “In the Still of the Night” by the Five Satins (more…)

Aug 19, 2019

Episode forty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” by the Chuck Berry Combo, and how Berry tried to square the circle of social commentary and teen appeal. 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 “Rock and Roll Waltz” by Kay Starr. . (more…)

Aug 11, 2019

Episode forty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Blueberry Hill” by Fats Domino, and at how the racial tensions of the fifties meant that a smiling, diffident, cheerful man playing happy music ended up starting riots all over the US. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Birmingham Bounce” by Hardrock Gunter . (more…)

Aug 5, 2019

Episode forty-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Train Kept A-Rollin'” by Johnny Burnette and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, and how a rockabilly trio from Memphis connect a novelty cowboy song by Ella Fitzgerald to Motorhead and Aerosmith. 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 “Jump, Jive, an’ Wail”, by Louis Prima . (more…)

Jul 29, 2019

Episode forty-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “I Gotta Know” by Wanda Jackson, and the links between rockabilly and the Bakersfield 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 “Bacon Fat” by Andre Williams . (more…)

Jul 22, 2019

Episode forty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Ooby Dooby” by Roy Orbison and the Teen Kings, and the time when Sam Phillips got things badly wrong.. 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 “Blue Yodel #9” by Jimmie Rodgers . (more…)

Jul 15, 2019

Episode forty-one of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Be-Bop-A-Lula” by Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps, and how Vincent defined for many what a rock and roll star was. 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 “Smokestack Lightning” by Howlin’ Wolf . (more…)

Jul 7, 2019

Episode forty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Drugstore Rock ‘n’ Roll”, by Janis Martin, an early rockabilly classic by the woman known as “the Female Elvis”. 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 “Fever” by Little Willie John (more…)

Jul 1, 2019

Episode thirty-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Please Please Please” by James Brown, and at the early rock and roll career of the Godfather of Soul. 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 “Come Go With Me” by the Del Vikings. (more…)

Jun 24, 2019

Episode thirty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Heartbreak Hotel” by Elvis Presley, and is part three of a trilogy on the aftermath of Elvis leaving Sun, and the birth of rockabilly. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “The Flying Saucer” by Buchanan and Goodman. Also, it came too late for me to acknowledge in the episode itself, but I have to mention the sad news that Dave Bartholomew died today, aged 100. He will be missed. (more…)

Jun 16, 2019

Episode thirty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “I Walk The Line” by Johnny Cash, and is part two of a trilogy on the aftermath of Elvis leaving Sun, and the birth of rockabilly. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a thirteen-minute bonus episode available, on “Don’t Be Angry” by Nappy Brown . (more…)

Jun 9, 2019

Episode thirty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Blue Suede Shoes” by Carl Perkins, and is part one of a trilogy on the aftermath of Elvis leaving Sun, and the birth of rockabilly. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Black Denim Trousers and Motorcycle Boots” by the Cheers . (more…)

Jun 3, 2019

Episode thirty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, and at the terrible afterlife of child stardom. 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 “Space Guitar” by Johnny “Guitar” Watson. (more…)

May 28, 2019

Episode thirty-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Tutti Frutti" by Little Richard, and at the rather more family-unfriendly subject the song was originally about. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Also, a reminder for those who didn't see the previous post -- my patreon backers are now getting ten-minute mini-episodes every week, and the first one is up , and I guested on Jaffa Cake Jukebox this week, talking about the UK top twenty for January 18 1957. Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Most of the information used here comes from The Life and Times of Little Richard: The Authorised Biography by Charles White , which is to all intents and purposes Richard's autobiography, as much of the text is in his own words. A warning for those who might be considering buying this though -- it contains descriptions of his abuse as a child, and is also full of internalised homo- bi- and trans-phobia. This collection contains everything Richard recorded before 1962, from his early blues singles through to his gospel albums from after he temporarily gave up rock and roll for the church. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon . Why not join them? Transcript There are a handful of musicians in the history of rock music who seem like true originals. You can always trace their influences, of course, but when you come across one of them, no matter how clearly you can see who they were copying and who they were inspired by, you still just respond to them as something new under the sun. And of all the classic musicians of rock and roll, probably nobody epitomises that more than Little Richard. Nobody before him sounded like he did, and while many later tried -- everyone from Captain Beefheart to Paul McCartney -- nobody ever quite sounded like him later. And there are good reasons for that, because Little Richard was -- and still is -- someone who is quite unlike anyone else. [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Tutti Frutti", just the opening phrase] This episode will be the first time we see queer culture becoming a major part of the rock and roll story -- we've dealt with possibly-LGBT people before, of course, with Big Mama Thornton and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and with Johnny Ray in the Patreon-only episode about him, but this is the first time that an expression of sexuality has become part and parcel of the music itself, to the extent that we have to discuss it. And here, again, I have to point out that I am going to get things very wrong when I'm talking about Little Richard. I am a cis straight white man in Britain in the twenty-first century. Little Richard is a queer black man from the USA, and we're talking about the middle of the twentieth century. I'm fairly familiar with current British LGBT+ culture, but even that is as an outsider. I am trying, always, to be completely fair and to never say anything that harms a marginalised group, but if I do so inadvertently, I apologise. When I say he's queer, I'm using the word not in its sense as a slur, but in the sense of an umbrella term for someone whose sexuality and gender identity are too complex to reduce to a single label, because he has at various times defined himself as gay, but he has also had relationships with women, and because from reading his autobiography there are so many passages where he talks about wishing he had been born a woman that it may well be that had he been born fifty years later he would have defined himself as a bisexual trans woman rather than a gay man. I will still, though, use "he" and "him" pronouns for him in this and future episodes, because those are the pronouns he uses himself. Here we're again going to see something we saw with Rosetta Tharpe, but on a much grander scale -- the pull between the secular and the divine. You see, as well as being some variety of queer, Little Richard is also a very, very, religious man, and a believer in a specific variety of fundamentalist Christianity that believes that any kind of sexuality or gender identity other than monogamous cis heterosexual is evil and sinful and the work of the Devil. He believes this very deeply and has at many times tried to live his life by this, and does so now. I, to put it as mildly as possible, disagree. But to understand the man and his music at all, you have to at least understand that this is the case. He has swung wildly between being almost the literal embodiment of the phrase "sex and drugs and rock and roll" and being a preacher who claims that homosexuality, bisexuality, and being trans are all works of the literal Devil -- several times he's gone from one to the other. As of 2017, and the last public interview I've seen with him, he has once again renounced rock and roll and same-sex relationships. I hope that he's happy in his current situation. But at the time we're talking about, he was a young person, and very much engaged in those things. [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Tutti Frutti", just the opening phrase] Richard Penniman was the third of twelve children, born to parents who had met at a Pentecostal holiness meeting when they were thirteen and married when they were fourteen. Of all the children, Richard was the one who was most likely to cause trouble. He had a habit of playing practical jokes involving his own faeces -- wrapping them up and giving them as presents to old ladies, or putting them in jars in the pantry for his mother to find. But he was also bullied terribly as a child, because he was disabled. One of his legs was significantly shorter than the other, his head was disproportionately large, and his eyes were different sizes. He was also subjected to homophobic abuse from a very early age, because the gait with which he walked because of his legs was vaguely mincing. At the age of fourteen, he decided to leave school and become a performer. He started out by touring with a snake-oil salesman. Snake oil is a traditional Chinese medicine, about which there have been claims made for centuries, and those claims might well be true. But snake oil in the US was usually a mixture of turpentine, tallow, camphor, and capsaicin. It wasn't much different to Vicks' VaporRub and similar substances, but it was sold as a cure-all for serious illnesses. Snake-oil salesmen would travel from town to town selling their placebo, and they would have entertainers performing with them in order to draw crowds. The young Richard Penniman travelled with "Doc Hudson", and would sing the one non-religious song he knew, "Caldonia" by Louis Jordan: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, "Caldonia"] The yelps and hiccups in Jordan's vocals on that song would become a massive part of Richard's own vocal style. Richard soon left the medicine show, and started touring with a band, B. Brown and his orchestra, and it was while he was touring with that band that he grew his hair into the huge pompadour that would later become a trademark, and he also got the name "Little Richard". However, all the musicians in the band were older than him, so he moved on again to another touring show, and another, and another. In many of these shows, he would perform as a female impersonator, which started when one of the women in one of the shows took sick and Richard had to quickly cover for her by putting on her costume, but soon he was performing in shows that were mostly drag acts, performing to a largely gay crowd. It was while he was performing in these shows that he met the first of his two biggest influences. Billy Wright, like Richard, had been a female impersonator for a while too. Like Richard, he had a pompadour haircut, and he was a fairly major blues star in the period from 1949 through 1951, being one of the first blues singers to sing with gospel-inspired mannerisms: [Excerpt: Billy Wright, "Married Woman's Boogie"] Richard became something of a Billy Wright wannabe, and started incorporating parts of Wright's style into his performances. He also learned that Wright was using makeup on stage -- Pancake 31 -- and started applying that same makeup to his own skin, something he would continue to do throughout his performing career. Wright introduced Richard to Zenas Sears, who was one of the many white DJs all across America who were starting to become successful by playing black music and speaking in approximations of African-American Vernacular English -- people like Alan Freed and Dewey Phillips. Sears had connections with RCA Records, and impressed by Richard's talent, he got them to sign him. Richard's first single was called "Every Hour", and was very much a Billy Wright imitation: [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Every Hour"] It was so close to Wright's style, in fact, that Wright soon recorded his own knock-off of Richard's song, "Every Evening". [Excerpt: Billy Wright, "Every Evening"] At this point Richard was solely a singer -- he hadn't yet started to play an instrument to accompany himself. That changed when he met Esquerita. Esquerita was apparently born Stephen Quincey Reeder, but he was known to everyone as "Eskew" Reeder, after his initials, and that then became Esquerita, partly as a pun on the word "excreta". Esquerita was another gay black R&B singer with a massive pompadour and a moustache. If Little Richard at this stage looked like a caricature of Billy Wright, Esquerita looked like a caricature of Little Richard. His hair was even bigger, he was even more flamboyant, and when he sang, he screamed even louder. And Esquerita also played the piano. Richard -- who has never been unwilling to acknowledge the immense debt he owed to his inspirations -- has said for years that Esquerita was the person who taught him how to play the piano, and that not only was his piano-playing style a copy of Esquerita's, Esquerita was better. It's hard to tell for sure exactly how much influence Esquerita actually had on Richard's piano playing, because Esquerita himself didn't make any records until after Richard did, at which point he was signed to his own record deal to be basically a Little Richard clone, but the records he did make certainly show a remarkable resemblance to Richard's later style: [Excerpt: Esquerita: "Believe Me When I Say Rock And Roll Is Here To Stay"] Richard soon learned to play piano, and he was seen by Johnny Otis, who was impressed. Otis said: "I see this outrageous person, good-looking and very effeminate, with a big pompadour. He started singing and he was so good. I loved it. He reminded me of Dinah Washington. He did a few things, then he got on the floor. I think he even did a split, though I could be wrong about that. I remember it as being just beautiful, bizarre, and exotic, and when he got through he remarked, “This is Little Richard, King of the Blues,” and then he added, “And the Queen, too!” I knew I liked him then." Otis recommended Richard to Don Robey, of Peacock Records, and Robey signed Richard and his band the Tempo Toppers. In early 1953, with none of his recordings for RCA having done anything, Little Richard and the Tempo Toppers went into the studio with another group, the Deuces of Rhythm, to record four tracks, issued as two singles: [Excerpt: Little Richard and the Tempo Toppers with the Deuces of Rhythm: "Ain't That Good News"] None of these singles had any success, and Richard was *not* getting on very well at all with Don Robey. Robey was not the most respectful of people, and Richard let everyone know how badly he thought Robey treated his artists. Robey responded by beating Richard up so badly that he got a hernia which hurt for years and necessitated an operation. Richard would record one more session for Peacock, at the end of the year, when Don Robey gave him to Johnny Otis to handle. Otis took his own band into the studio with Richard, and the four songs they recorded at that session went unreleased at the time, but included a version of "Directly From My Heart To You", a song Richard would soon rerecord, and another song called "Little Richard's Boogie": [Excerpt: Little Richard with Johnny Otis and his Orchestra, "Little Richard's Boogie"] Nobody was very happy with the recordings, and Richard was dropped by Peacock. He was also, around the same time, made to move away from Macon, Georgia, where he lived, after being arrested for "lewd conduct" -- what amounted to consensual voyeurism. And the Tempo Toppers had split up. Richard had been dumped by two record labels, his father had died recently, he had no band, and he wasn't allowed to live in his home town any more. Things seemed pretty low. But before he'd moved away, Richard had met Lloyd Price, and Price had suggested that Richard send a demo tape in to Specialty Records, Price's label. The tape lay unlistened at Specialty for months, and it was only because of Richard's constant pestering for them to listen to it that Bumps Blackwell, who was then in charge of A&R at Specialty, eventually got round to listening to it. This was an enormous piece of good fortune, in a way that neither of them fully realised at the time. Blackwell had been a longtime friend and colleague of Ray Charles. When Charles' gospel-influenced new sound had started making waves on the charts, Art Rupe, Specialty's owner, had asked Blackwell to find him a gospel-sounding R&B singer of his own to compete with Ray Charles. Blackwell listened to the tape, which contained two songs, one of which was an early version of "Wonderin'", and he could tell this was someone with as much gospel in his voice as Ray Charles had: [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Wonderin'"] Blackwell and Rupe made an agreement with Don Robey to buy out his contract for six hundred dollars -- one gets the impression that Robey would have paid *them* six hundred dollars to get rid of Richard had they asked him. They knew that Richard liked the music of Fats Domino, and so they decided to hold their first session at Cosimo Matassa's studio, where Domino recorded, and with the same session musicians that Domino used. Blackwell also brought in two great New Orleans piano players, Huey "Piano" Smith and James Booker, both of whom were players in the same style as Domino. You can hear Smith, for example, on his hit "The Rockin' Pneumonia and the Boogie-Woogie Flu" from a couple of years later: [Excerpt: Huey "Piano" Smith, "The Rockin' Pneumonia and the Boogie-Woogie Flu"] All of these people were veterans of sessions either for Domino or for artists who had worked in Domino's style, like Lloyd Price or Smiley Lewis. The only difference here was that it would be Bumps Blackwell who did the arrangement and production, rather than Dave Bartholomew like on Domino's records. However, the session didn't go well at all. Blackwell had heard that Richard was an astounding live act, but he was just doing nothing in the studio. As Blackwell later put it "If you look like Tarzan and sound like Mickey Mouse it just doesn’t work out." They did record some usable material -- "Wonderin'", which we heard before, came out OK, and they recorded "I'm Just a Lonely, Lonely, Guy" by a young songwriter called Dorothy LaBostrie, which seemed to go OK. They also cut a decent version of "Directly From My Heart to You", a song which Richard had previously recorded with Johnny Otis: [Excerpt: Little RIchard, "Directly From My Heart to You"] So they had a couple of usable songs, but usable was about all you could say for them. They didn't have anything that would make an impact, nothing that would live up to Richard's potential. So Blackwell called a break, and they headed off to get themselves something to eat, at the Dew Drop Inn. And something happened there that would change Little RIchard's career forever. The Dew Drop Inn had a piano, and it had an audience that Little Richard could show off in front of. He went over to the piano, started hammering the keys, and screamed out: [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Tutti Frutti", just the opening phrase] On hearing Richard sing the song he performed then, Bumps Blackwell knew two things pretty much instantly. The first was that that song would definitely be a hit if he could get it released. And the second was that there was no way on Earth that he could possibly put it out. "Tutti Frutti" started as a song that Richard sang more or less as a joke. There is a whole undercurrent of R&B in the fifties which has very, very, sexually explicit lyrics, and I wish I was able to play some of those songs on this podcast without getting it dumped into the adult-only section on iTunes, because some of them are wonderful, and others are hilarious. "Tutti Frutti" in its original form was part of this undercurrent, and had lyrics that were clearly not broadcastable -- "A wop bop a loo mop, a good goddam/Tutti Frutti, good booty/If it don't fit, don't force it, you can grease it, make it easy". But Bumps Blackwell thought that there was *something* that could be made into a hit there. Handily, they had a songwriter on hand. Dorothy LaBostrie was a young woman he knew who had been trying to write songs, but who didn't understand that songs had to have different melodies -- all her lyrics were written to the melody of the same song, Dinah Washington's "Blowtop Blues": [Excerpt: Dinah Washington, "Blowtop Blues"] But her lyrics had showed promise, and so Blackwell had agreed to record one of her songs, "I'm Just a Lonely Lonely Guy", with Richard. LaBostrie had been hanging round the studio to see how her song sounded when it was recorded, so Blackwell asked her to do a last-minute rewrite on “Tutti Frutti”, in the hope of getting something salvageable out of what had been a depressing session. But there was still a problem -- Richard, not normally a man overly known for his modesty, became embarrassed at singing his song to the young woman. Blackwell explained to him that he really didn't have much choice, and Richard eventually agreed to sing it to her -- but only if he was turned to face the wall, so he couldn't see this innocent-looking young woman's face. (I should note here that both Richard and LaBostrie have told different stories about this over the years -- both have claimed on several occasions that they were the sole author of the song and that the other didn't deserve any credit at all. But this is the story as it was told by others who were there.) LaBostrie's new lyrics were rudimentary at best. "I got a girl named Sue, she knows just what to do". But they fit the metre, they weren't about anal sex, and so they were going to be the new lyrics. The session was running late at this point, and when LaBostrie had the lyrics finished there was only fifteen minutes to go. It didn't matter that the lyrics were trite. What mattered was that they got a track cut to salvage the session. Blackwell didn't have time to teach the piano players the song, so he got Richard to play the piano himself. They cut the finished track in three takes, and Blackwell went back to California happy he at last had a hit: [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Tutti Frutti"] "Tutti Frutti" was, indeed, a massive hit. It went to number twenty-one on the pop charts. But... you know what comes next. There was an inept white cover version, this time by Pat Boone. [excerpt: Pat Boone, "Tutti Frutti"] Now, notice that there, Boone changes the lyrics. In Richard's version, after all, he seems interested in both Sue and Daisy. A good Christian boy like Pat Boone couldn't be heard singing about such immorality. That one-line change (and a couple of other spot changes to individual words to make things into full sentences) seems to be why a songwriter called Joe Lubin is also credited for the song. Getting a third of a song like "Tutti Frutti" for that little work sounds like a pretty good deal, at least for Lubin, if not for Richard. Another way in which Richard got less than he deserved was that the publishing was owned by a company owned by Art Rupe. That company licensed the song to Specialty Records for half the normal mechanical licensing rate -- normally a publishing company would charge two cents per record pressed for their songs, but instead Specialty only had to pay one cent. This sort of cross-collateralisation was common with independent labels at the time, but it still rankled to Richard when he figured it out. Not that he was thinking about contracts at all at this point. He was becoming a huge star, and that meant he had to *break* a lot of contracts. He'd got concert bookings for several months ahead, but those bookings were in second-rate clubs, and he had to be in Hollywood to promote his new record and build a new career. But he also didn't want to get a reputation for missing gigs. There was only one thing to do -- hire an impostor to be Little Richard at these low-class gigs. So while Richard went off to promote his record, another young singer from Georgia with a pompadour and a gospel feel was being introduced with the phrase “Ladies and gentlemen—the hardest-working man in showbusiness today—Little Richard!” When James Brown went back to performing under his own name, he kept that introduction... Meanwhile, Richard was working on his second hit record. He and Blackwell decided that this record should be louder, faster, and more raucous than "Tutti Frutti" had been. If Pat Boone wanted to cover this one, he'd have to work a lot harder than he had previously. The basis for "Long Tall Sally" came from a scrap of lyric written by a teenage girl. Enotris Johnson had written a single verse of lyric on a scrap of paper, and had walked many miles to New Orleans to show the lyric to a DJ named Honey Chile. (Bumps Blackwell describes her as having walked from Opelousas, Mississippi, but there's no such place -- Johnson appears to have lived in Bogalusa, Louisiana). Johnson wanted to make enough money to pay for hospital for her sick aunt -- the "Aunt Mary" in the song, and thought that Little Richard might sing the song and get her the money. What she had was only a few lines, but Honey Chile had taken Johnson on as a charity project, and Blackwell didn't want to disappoint such an influential figure, so he and Richard hammered something together: [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Long Tall Sally"] The song, about a "John" who "jumps back in the alley" when he sees his wife coming while he's engaged in activities of an unspecified nature with "Sally", who is long, tall, and bald, once again stays just on the broadcastable side of the line, while implying sex of a non-heteronormative variety, possibly with a sex worker. Despite this, and despite the attempts to make the song uncoverably raucous, Pat Boone still sold a million copies with his cover version: [Excerpt: Pat Boone, "Long Tall Sally"] So Little Richard had managed to get that good clean-cut wholesome Christian white boy Pat Boone singing songs which gave him a lot more to worry about than whether he was singing "Ain't" rather than "Isn't". But he was also becoming a big star himself -- and he was getting an ego to go along with it. And he was starting to worry whether he should be making this devil music at all. When we next look at Little Richard, we'll see just how the combination of self-doubt and ego led to his greatest successes and to the collapse of his career.

May 20, 2019

Welcome to episode thirty-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs . This one looks at “Mystery Train” by Elvis Presley. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. (more…)

May 13, 2019

Welcome to episode thirty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs . This one looks at “I Got A Woman” by Ray Charles. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. (more…)

May 6, 2019

Welcome to episode thirty-one of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs . This one looks at “Only You” by the Platters. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. (more…)

Apr 29, 2019

Welcome to episode thirty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs . This is the last of our three-part look at Chess Records, and focuses on "Bo Diddley" by Bo Diddley. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.I accidentally used a later rerecording of "I Wish You Would" by Billy Boy Arnold on the playlist, but I use the correct version in the podcast itself. Sorry about that. As this is part three of the Chess Records trilogy, you might want to listen to part one, on the Moonglows , and part two, on Chuck Berry, if you haven't already. Along with the resources mentioned in the previous two episodes, the resource I used most this time was Bo Diddley: Living Legend by George R. White , a strong biography told almost entirely in Diddley's own words from interviews, and the only full-length book on Diddley. This compilation contains Diddley's first six albums plus a bunch of non-album and live tracks, and has everything you're likely to want by Diddley on it, for under ten pounds. If you want to hear more Muddy Waters after hearing his back-and-forth with Diddley, this double CD set is a perfect introduction to him. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon . Why not join them? Transcript Welcome to the final part of our trilogy about Chess Records. Last week, we looked at Chuck Berry. This week, we're going to deal with someone who may even have been more important. One of the many injustices in copyright law -- and something that we'll have a lot of cause to mention during the course of this series -- is that, for the entire time period covered by this podcast, it was impossible to copyright a groove or a rhythm, but you could copyright a melody line and lyric. And this has led to real inter-racial injustice. In general, black musical culture in the USA has emphasised different aspects of musical invention than white culture has. While white American musical culture -- particularly *rich* white musical culture -- has stressed inventive melodies and harmonic movement -- think of, say, Burt Bacharach or George Gershwin -- it has not historically stressed rhythmic invention. On the other hand, black musical culture has stressed that above everything else -- you'll notice that all the rhythmic innovations we've talked about in this series so far, like boogie woogie, and the backbeat, and the tresillo rhythm, all came from black musicians. That's not, of course, to say that black musicians can't be melodically inventive or white musicians rhythmically -- I'm not here saying "black people have a great sense of rhythm" or any of that racist nonsense. I'm just talking about the way that different cultures have prioritised different things. But this means that when black musicians have produced innovative work, it's not been possible for them to have any intellectual property ownership in the result. You can't steal a melody by Bacharach, but anyone can play a song with a boogie beat, or a shuffle, or a tresillo... or with the Bo Diddley beat. [Very short excerpt: “Bo Diddley”, Bo Diddley] Elias McDaniel's distinctive sound came about because he started performing so young that he couldn't gain entrance to clubs, and so he and his band had to play on street corners. But you can't cart a drum kit around and use it on the streets, so McDaniel and his band came up with various inventive ways to add percussion to the act. At first, they had someone who would come round with a big bag of sand and empty it onto the pavement. He'd then use a brush on the sand, and the noise of the brushing would provide percussion -- at the end of the performance this man, whose name was Sam Daniel but was called Sandman by everyone, would sweep all the sand back up and put it back into his bag for the next show. Eventually, though, Sandman left, and McDaniel hit on the idea of using his girlfriend's neighbour Jerome Green as part of the act. We heard Jerome last week, playing on "Maybellene", but he's someone who there is astonishingly little information about. He doesn't even have a Wikipedia page, and you'll find barely more than a few paragraphs about him online. No-one even knows when he was born or died – *if* he died, though he seems to have disappeared around 1972. And this is quite astonishing when you consider that Green played on all Bo Diddley's classic records, and sang duet on a few of the most successful ones, *and* he played on many of Chuck Berry's, and on various other records by Willie Dixon, Otis Spann, the Moonglows... yet when you Google him, the third hit that comes up is about Robson Green and Jerome Flynn, a nineties soft-pop duo who span out of a soap opera. At first, Jerome's job was to pass the hat around and collect the money, but McDaniel decided to build Jerome a pair of maracas, and teach him how to play. And he learned to play very well indeed, adding a Latin sound to what had previously been just a blues band. Jerome's maracas weren't the only things that Elias McDaniel built, though. He had a knack for technology, though he was always rather modest about his own abilities. He built himself one of the very first tremelo systems for a guitar, making something out of old car bits and electronic junk that would break the electronic signal up. Before commercial tremelo systems existed, McDaniel was the only one who could make his guitar sound like that. The choppy guitar, with its signal breaking up deliberately, and the maracas being shook frantically, gave McDaniel's music a rhythmic drive unlike anything else in rock and roll. McDaniel and his band eventually got their music heard by Leonard Chess at Chess Records. Chess was impressed by a song called "Uncle John", which had lyrics that went "Uncle John's got corn ain't never been shucked/Uncle John's got daughters ain't never been... to school"; but he said the song needed less salacious lyrics, and he suggested retitling it “Bo Diddley”, which also became the stage name of the man who up until now had been called Elias McDaniel. The new lyrics were inspired by the black folk song "Hambone", which a few years earlier had become a novelty hit: [Excerpt: "Hambone", Red Saunders Orchestra with the Hambone Kids] Now, I have to be a bit careful here, because here I'm talking about something that's from a different culture from my own, and my understanding of it is that of an outsider. To *me*, "Hambone" seems to be a unified thing that's part song, part dance, part game. But my understanding may be very, very flawed, and I don't want to pretend to knowledge I don't have. But this is my best understanding of what “Hambone” is. "Hambone", like many folk songs, is not in itself a single song, but a collection of different songs with similar elements. The name comes from a dance which, it is said, dates back to enslaved people attempting to entertain themselves. Slaves in most of the US were banned from using drums, because it was believed they might use them to send messages to each other, so when they wanted to dance and sing music, they would slap different parts of their own bodies to provide percussive accompaniment. Now, I tend to be a little dubious of narratives that claim that aspects of twentieth-century black culture date back to slavery or, as people often claim, to Africa. A lot of the time these turn out to be urban myths of the "ring a ring a roses is about the bubonic plague" kind. One of the real tragedies of slavery is that the African culture that the enslaved black people brought over to the US was largely lost in the ensuing centuries, and so there's a very strong incentive to try to find things that could be a continuation of that. But that's the story around “Hambone”, which is also known as the “Juba beat”. Another influence Diddley would always cite for the lyrical scansion is the song “Hey Baba Reba”, which he would usually misremember as having been by either Cab Calloway or Louis Jordan, but was actually by Lionel Hampton: [Excerpt: Lionel Hampton, “Hey Baba Reba”] But the important thing to note is that the rhythm of all these records is totally different from the rhythm of the song "Bo Diddley". There's a bit of misinformation that goes around in almost every article about Diddley, saying "the Bo Diddley beat is just the 'Hambone' beat", and while Diddley would correct this in almost every interview he ever gave, the misinformation would persist -- to the point that when I first heard "Hambone" I was shocked, because I'd assumed that there must at least have been some slight similarity. There's no similarity at all. And that's not the only song where I've seen claims that there's a Bo Diddley beat where none exists. As a reminder, here's the actual Bo Diddley rhythm: [Very short excerpt: Bo Diddley, “Bo Diddley”] Now the PhD thesis on the development of the backbeat which I talked about back in episode two claims that the beat appears on about thirteen records before Diddley's, mostly by people we've discussed before, like Louis Jordan, Johnny Otis, Fats Domino, and Roy Brown. But here's a couple of examples of the songs that thesis cites. Here's "Mardi Gras in New Orleans" by Fats Domino: [Excerpt: "Mardi Gras in New Orleans, Fats Domino] And here's "That's Your Last Boogie", by Joe Swift, produced by Johnny Otis: [Excerpt: Joe Swift, "That's Your Last Boogie"] As you can hear, they both have something that's *sort of* the Bo Diddley beat, but not really, among their other rhythms. It's most notable at the very start of "That's Your Last Boogie" [Intro: "That's Your Last Boogie"] That's what's called a clave beat -- it's sort of like the tresillo, with an extra bom-bom on the end. Bom bom-bom, bom-bom. That's not the Bo Diddley beat. The Bo Diddley beat actually varies subtly from bar to bar, but it's generally a sort of chunk-a chunk-a-chunk a-chunk a-chunk ah. It certainly stresses the five beats of the clave, but it's not them, and nor is it the "shave and a haircut, two bits" rhythm other people seem to claim for it. Most ridiculously, Wikipedia even claims that the Andrews Sisters' version of Lord Invader's great calypso song, "Rum and Coca Cola", has the Bo Diddley beat: [Excerpt: "Rum and Coca Cola", the Andrews Sisters] Both records have maracas, but that's about it. Incidentally, that song was, in the Andrews Sisters version, credited to a white American thief rather than to the black Trinidadian men who wrote it. Sadly appropriate for a song about the exploitation of Trinidadians for "the Yankee dollar". But none of these records have the Bo Diddley beat, despite what anyone might say. None of them even sound very much like Diddley's beat at all. The origins of the Bo Diddley beat were, believe it or not, with Gene Autry. We've talked before about Autry, who was the biggest Western music star of the late thirties and early forties, and who inspired all sorts of people you wouldn't expect, from Les Paul to Hank Ballard. But Diddley hit upon his rhythm when trying to play Autry's "I've Got Spurs That Jingle Jangle Jingle". [excerpt, Gene Autry, "I've Got Spurs that Jingle Jangle Jingle"] No, I don't see the resemblance either. But this ties back into what we were talking about last week, with the influence of country musicians on the blues and R&B musicians at Chess. And if you become familiar with his later work, it becomes clear that Diddley truly loved the whole iconography of the Western, and country music. He did albums called "Have Guitar Will Travel" (named after the Western TV show "Have Gun Will Travel") and "Bo Diddley is a Gunslinger". Diddley's work is rooted in black folklore -- things like hambone, but also the figure of Stagger Lee and other characters like the Signifying Monkey -- but it should be understood that black American folklore has always included the image of the black cowboy. The combination of these influences – the “Hambone” lyrical ideas, the cowboy rhythm, and the swaggering character Diddley created for himself – became this: [Excerpt: “Bo Diddley” by Bo Diddley] The B-side to the record, meanwhile, was maybe even more important. It's also an early example of Diddley *not* just reusing his signature rhythm. The popular image of Diddley has him as a one-idea artist remaking the same song over and over again -- and certainly he did often return to the Bo Diddley beat -- but he was a far more interesting artist than that, and recorded in a far wider variety of styles than you might imagine. And in "I'm A Man" he took on another artist's style, beating Muddy Waters at his own game. "I'm A Man" was a response to Waters' earlier "Hoochie Coochie Man": [Excerpt: "Hoochie Coochie Man", Muddy Waters] "Hoochie Coochie Man" had been written for Muddy Waters by Willie Dixon and was, as far as I can tell, the first blues record ever to have that da-na-na na-na riff that later became the riff that for most people defines the blues. "Hoochie Coochie Man" had managed to sum up everything about Waters' persona in a way that Waters himself had never managed with his own songs. It combined sexual braggadocio with hoodoo lore -- the character Waters was singing in was possessed of supernatural powers, from the day he was born, and he used those powers to "make pretty women jump and shout". He had a black cat bone, and a mojo, and a John the Conqueror root. It was a great riff, and a great persona, and a great record. But it was still a conventionally structured sixteen-bar blues, with the normal three chords that almost all blues records have. But Bo Diddley heard that and decided that was two chords too many. When you've got a great riff, you don't *need* chord changes, not if you can just hammer on that riff. So he came up with a variant of Dixon's song, and called it "I'm a Man". In his version, there was only the one chord: [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, "I'm a Man"] Willie Dixon guested on bass for that song, as it wasn't felt that Diddley's own bass player was getting the feeling right. There were also some changes made to the song in the studio -- as Diddley put it later: "They wanted me to spell 'man', but they weren't explaining it right. They couldn't get me to spell 'man'. I didn't understand what they were talking about!" But eventually he did sing that man is spelled m-a-n, and the song went on to be covered by pretty much every British band of the sixties, and become a blues standard. The most important cover version of it though was when Muddy Waters decided to make his own answer record to Diddley, in which he stated that *he* was a man, not a boy like Diddley. Diddley got a co-writing credit on this, though Willie Dixon, whose riff had been the basis of "I'm a Man", didn't. [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, "Mannish Boy"] And then there was Etta James' answer record, "W.O.M.A.N.", which once again has wild west references in it: [Excerpt: Etta James, "W.O.M.A.N."] And that… "inspired" Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller to write this for Peggy Lee: [Excerpt: Peggy Lee, "I'm A Woman"] Of course, none of those records, except Muddy Waters', gave Bo Diddley a writing credit, just as Diddley didn't credit Dixon for his riff. At the same session as the single was recorded, Diddley's harmonica player, Billy Boy Arnold, recorded a single of his own, backed by Diddley and his band. "I'm Sweet on you Baby" wasn't released at the time, but it's a much more straightforward blues song, and more like Chess' normal releases. Chess were interested in making more records with Arnold, but we'll see that that didn't turn out well: [Excerpt: Billy Boy Arnold, "I'm Sweet on you Baby"] Despite putting out a truly phenomenal single, Diddley hit upon a real problem with his career, and one that would be one of the reasons he was never as popular as contemporaries like Chuck Berry. The problem, at first, looked like anything but. He was booked on the Ed Sullivan Show to promote his first single. The Ed Sullivan Show was the biggest TV show of the fifties and sixties. A variety show presented by the eponymous Sullivan, who somehow even after twenty years of presenting never managed to look or sound remotely comfortable in front of a camera, it was the programme that boosted Elvis Presley from stardom to superstardom, and which turned the Beatles from a local phenomenon in the UK and Europe into the biggest act the world had ever seen. Getting on it was the biggest possible break Diddley could have got, and it should have made his career. Instead, it was a disaster, all because of a misunderstanding. At the time, the country song "Sixteen Tons" by Tennessee Ernie Ford was a big hit: [Excerpt: "Sixteen Tons", Tennessee Ernie Ford] Diddley liked the song -- enough that he would later record his own version of it: [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, "Sixteen Tons"] And so he was singing it to himself in his dressing room. One of the production staff happened to walk past and hear him, and asked if he could perform that song on the show. Diddley assumed he was being asked if he would do it as well as the song he was there to promote, and was flattered to be asked to do a second song. [Excerpt: Ed Sullivan introducing "Dr Jive", with all the confusion about what words he's using] When he got out on to the stage he saw the cue card saying "Bo Diddley Sixteen Tons", assumed it meant the song "Bo Diddley" followed by the song "Sixteen Tons", and so he launched into "Bo Diddley". After all, why would he go on the show to promote someone else's record? He was there to promote his own debut single. So of course he was going to play it. This was not what the production person had intended, and was not what Ed Sullivan wanted. Backstage, there was a confrontation that got so heated that Diddley had to be physically restrained from beating Sullivan with his guitar after Sullivan called Diddley a “black boy” (according to Diddley, “black” at that time and in that place, was a racial slur, though it's the polite term to use today). Sullivan yelled and screamed at Diddley and told him he would be blacklisted from network TV, and would certainly never appear on Sullivan's show again under any circumstances. After that first TV appearance, it would be seven years until Diddley's second. And unlike all his contemporaries he didn't even get to appear in films. Even Alan Freed, who greatly respected Diddley and booked him on his live shows, and who Diddley also respected, didn't have him appear in any of the five rock and roll films he made. As far as I can tell, the two minutes he was on the Ed Sullivan show is the only record of Bo Diddley on film or video from 1955 through 1962. And this meant, as well, that Chess put all their promotional efforts behind Chuck Berry, who for all his faults was more welcome in the TV studios. If Diddley wanted success, he had to let his records and live performances do the work for him, because he wasn't getting any help from the media. Luckily, his records were great. Not only was Diddley's first hit one of the great two-sided singles of all time, but his next single was also impressive. The story of "Diddley Daddy" dates back to one of the white cover versions of "Bo Diddley". Essex Records put out this cover version by Jean Dinning, produced by Dave Miller, who had earlier produced Bill Haley and the Comets' first records: [Excerpt: Jean Dinning, "Bo Diddley"] And, as with Georgia Gibbs' version of “Tweedle Dee”, the record label wanted to make the record sound as much like the original as possible, and so tried to get the original musicians to play on it, and made an agreement with Chess. They couldn't get Bo Diddley himself, and without his tremelo guitar it sounded nothing like the original, but they *did* get Willie Dixon on bass, Diddley's drummer Clifton James (who sadly isn't the same Clifton James who played the bumbling sheriff in "Live and Let Die" and "Superman II", though it would be great if he was), and Billy Boy Arnold on harmonica. But Billy Boy Arnold made the mistake of going to Chess and asking for the money he was owed for the session. Leonard Chess didn't like when musicians wanted paying, and complained to Bo Diddley about Arnold. Diddley told Arnold that Chess wasn't happy with him, and so Arnold decided to take a song he'd written, "Diddy Diddy Dum Dum", to another label rather than give it to Chess. He changed the lyrics around a bit, and called it "I Wish You Would": [Excerpt: Billy Boy Arnold, "I Wish You Would"] Arnold actually recorded that for Vee-Jay Records on the very day that Bo Diddley's second single was due to be recorded, and the Diddley session was held up because nobody knew where Arnold was. They eventually found him and got him to Diddley's session -- where Diddley started playing "Diddy Diddy Dum Dum". Leonard Chess suggested letting Arnold sing the song, but Arnold said "I can't -- I just recorded that for VeeJay", and showed Chess the contract. Diddley and Harvey Fuqua, who was there to sing backing vocals with the rest of the Moonglows, quickly reworked the song. Arnold didn't want to play harmonica on something so close to a record he'd just made, though he played on the B-side, and so Muddy Waters' harmonica player Little Walter filled in instead. The new song, entitled "Diddley Daddy", became another of Diddley's signature songs: [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, "Diddley Daddy"] but the B-side, "She's Fine, She's Mine", was the one that would truly become influential: [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, "She's Fine, She's Mine"] That song was later slightly reworked into this, by Willie Cobbs: [Excerpt: Willie Cobbs, "You Don't Love Me"] That song was covered by pretty much every white guitar band of the late sixties -- the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Allman Brothers, Steve Stills and Al Kooper... the list goes on. But Cobbs' song itself was also slightly reworked, by Dawn Penn, in 1967, and became a minor reggae classic. Twenty-seven years later, in 1994, Penn rerecorded her song, based on Cobbs' song, based on Bo Diddley's song, and it became a worldwide smash hit, with Diddley getting cowriting credit: [Excerpt: Dawn Penn, "You Don't Love Me (No, No, No)"] And *that* has later been covered by Beyonce and Rhianna, and sampled by Ghostface Killah and Usher. And that's how important Bo Diddley was at this point in time. The B-side to his less-good follow-up to his debut provided enough material for sixty years' worth of hits in styles from R&B to jam band to reggae to hip-hop. And the song “Bo Diddley” itself, of course, would provide a rhythm for generations of musicians to take, everyone from Buddy Holly: [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, “Not Fade Away”] to George Michael: [Excerpt George Michael, “Faith”] to U2: [Excerpt: U2, “Desire”] Because that rhythm was so successful – even though most of the success went to white people who didn't credit or pay Diddley – people tend to think of Diddley as a one-idea musician, which is far from the truth. Like many of his contemporaries he only had a short period where he was truly inventive -- his last truly classic track was recorded in 1962. But that period was an astoundingly inventive one, and we're going to be seeing him again during the course of this series. In his first four tracks, Diddley had managed to record three of the most influential tracks in rock history. But the next time we look at him, it will be with a song he wrote for other people -- a song that would indirectly have massive effects on the whole of popular music.

Apr 22, 2019

Welcome to episode twenty-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs . This is the second of our three-part look at Chess Records, and focuses on “Maybellene” by Chuck Berry. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. (more…)

Apr 14, 2019

Welcome to episode twenty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs . Today we’re looking at The Moonglows and “Sincerely”. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. (more…)

Apr 7, 2019

Welcome to episode twenty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs . Today we’re looking at LaVern Baker and “Tweedle Dee”. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. (more…)

Apr 1, 2019

Welcome to episode twenty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs . Today we’re looking at Fats Domino and “Ain’t That A Shame”. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. (more…)

Mar 26, 2019

Welcome to episode twenty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs . Today we’re looking at “Earth Angel” by the Penguins. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. (more…)

Mar 18, 2019

Welcome to episode twenty-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs . Today we’re looking at “Ko Ko Mo” by Gene and Eunice. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. (more…)

Mar 11, 2019

Welcome to episode twenty-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs . Today we’re looking at “Pledging My Love” by Johnny Ace Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Also, remember I’m three-quarters of the way through the Kickstarter for the first book based on this series. (more…)

Mar 4, 2019

Welcome to episode twenty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs . Today we’re looking at “The Wallflower” by Etta James. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Also, remember I’m halfway through the Kickstarter for the first book based on this series. (more…)

Feb 25, 2019

Welcome to episode twenty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs . Today we’re looking at “Rock Island Line” by Lonnie Donegan. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. (more…)

Feb 18, 2019

Welcome to episode twenty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs . Today we’re looking at “Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley and the Comets. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. (more…)

Feb 11, 2019

Welcome to episode nineteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs . Today we're looking at "That's All Right Mama" by Elvis Presley. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Elvis' 1950s catalogue is, at least in the UK, now in the public domain, and can thus be found in many forms. This three-CD box set contains literally every recording he made from 1953 through 1955, including live recordings and session outtakes, along with a handsome book. This ten-disc set, meanwhile, charts the history of Sun Records, with the A- and B-sides of ninety of the first Sun singles, including all Elvis' five Sun releases in their historical context, as well as "Bear Cat" and a lot of great blues and rockabilly. And this four-CD box set of Arthur Crudup contains everything you could want by that great bluesman. I've relied on three books here more than any others. The first is "Before Elvis" by Larry Birnbaum. which I've recommended many times before. The other two are by Peter Guralnick -- Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock 'n' Roll , and Last Train to Memphis . The latter is the first volume of Guralnick's two-volume biography of Elvis. The second volume of that book is merely good, not great (though still better than much of the nonsense written about Elvis), but Last Train to Memphis is, hands down, the best book on Elvis there is. (A content warning for both Guralnick books -- they use racial slurs in reported speech, though never in anything other than a direct quote). Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start, I just want to emphasise that in this episode I talk about some of Sam Phillips' ideas around race and how to end racism. I hope I make it clear that I disagree with his ideas, but in trying to be fair and present his thinking accurately I may have given a different impression. I'm sure people listening to this in the context of the series as a whole understand where I'm coming from, but I'm aware that this will be some people's first episode. There's a reason this comes after the episode on “Sh'Boom”. If you come out of this episode thinking I think the way to end racism is to have white people perform black people's music, go back and listen to that one. Anyway, on with the show... The Starlite Wranglers were not a band you would expect to end up revolutionising music -- and indeed only some of them ever did. But you wouldn't have expected even that from them. They were based in Memphis, but they were very far from being the sophisticated, urban music that was otherwise coming from big cities like that. Their bass player, Bill Black, would wear a straw hat and go barefoot, looking something like Huckleberry Finn, even as the rest of the band wore their smart Western suits. He'd hop on the bass and ride it, and tell cornpone jokes. They had pedal steel, and violin, and a singer named Doug Poindexter. Their one record on Sun was a pure Hank Williams soundalike: [excerpt of "My Kind of Carrying On" by Doug Poindexter and the Starlite Wranglers] Again, this doesn't sound like anything that might revolutionise music. The single came out and did no better or worse than thousands of other singles by obscure country bands. In most circumstances it would be no more remembered now than, say "Cause You're Always On My Mind" by Wiley Barkdull, or "Twice the Loving" by Floyd Huffman. But then something unprecedented in modern music history happened. Sun Records was the second record label Sam Phillips had set up -- the first one had been a very short-lived label called Phillips, which he'd started up with his friend, the DJ Dewey Phillips (who was not related to Sam). After his experiences selling masters to other labels, like Modern and Duke and Chess, had caused him more problems than he'd initially realised, he'd decided that if he wanted to really see the music he loved become as big as he knew it could be, he'd have to run his own label. Because Sam Phillips had a mission. He was determined to end racism in the US, and he was convinced he could do so by making white audiences love the music of black people as much as he did. So the success of his new label was a moral imperative, and he wanted to find something that would be as big as "Rocket 88", the record he'd leased to Chess. Or maybe even a performer as important as Howlin' Wolf, the man who decades later he would still claim was the greatest artist he'd ever recorded. Howlin' Wolf had recorded several singles at Sam's studio before he'd started Sun records, and these singles had been leased to other labels. But like so many of the people he'd recorded, the record labels had decided they could make more money if they cut out the middle-Sam and recorded Wolf themselves. Sam Phillips often claimed later that none of the records Wolf made for Chess without Sam were anything like as good as the music he'd been making at 706 Union Ave; and he may well have been right about that. But still, the fact remained that the Wolf was elsewhere now, and Sam needed someone else as good as that. But he had a plan to get attention – make an answer record. This was something that happened a lot in blues and R&B in the fifties -- if someone had a hit with a record, another record would come along, usually by another artist, that made reference to it. We've already seen this with "Good Rockin' Tonight", where the original version of that referenced half a dozen other records like "Caldonia". And Sam Phillips had an idea for an answer song to "Hound Dog". There had been several of these, including one from Roy Brown, who wrote “Good Rockin' Tonight” -- "Mr Hound Dog's in Town" [excerpt: Roy Brown “Mr Hound Dog's In Town”] Phillips, though,thought he had a particularly good take. The phrase "hound dog", you see, was always used by women, and in Phillips' view it was always used for a gigolo. And the female equivalent of that, in Phillips' telling, was a bear cat. And so Sam Phillips sat down and "wrote" "Bear Cat". Well, he was credited as the writer, anyway. In truth, the melody is identical to that of "Hound Dog", and there's not much difference in the lyrics either, but that was the way these answer records always went, in Phillips' experience, and nobody ever kicked up a fuss about it. He called up a local Memphis DJ, Rufus Thomas, and asked him to sing on the track, and Thomas said yes, and the song was put out as one of the very first records on Phillips' new record label, Sun. [excerpt of "Bear Cat" by Rufus Thomas] What was surprising was how big a hit it became -- "Bear Cat" eventually climbed all the way to number three on the R&B charts, which was a phenomenal success for a totally new label with no track record. What was less phenomenal was when Duke Records and their publishing arm came to sue Sam Phillips over the record. It turned out that if you were going to just take credit for someone else's song and not give them any of the money, it was best not to have a massive hit, and be based in the same city as the people whose copyright you were ripping off. Phillips remained bitter to the end of his life about the amount of money he lost on the record. But while he'd had a solid hit with "Bear Cat", and Joe Hill Louis was making some pretty great blues records, Sam was still not getting to where he wanted to be. The problem was the audiences. Sam Phillips knew there was an audience for the kind of music these black men were making, but the white people just wouldn't buy it from a black person. But it was the white audiences that made for proper mainstream success for any musician. White people had more money, and there were more of them. Maybe, he started to think, he could find a white person with the same kind of feeling in their music that the black people he was working with had? If he could do that -- if he could get white people to *just listen* to black people's music, *at all*, even if it was sung by a white person, then eventually they'd start listening to it from black people, too, and he could break down the colour barrier. (Sam Phillips, it has to be noted, always had big ideas and thought he could persuade the world of the righteousness of his cause if everyone else would *just listen*. A few years later, during the Cuban missile crisis, Phillips decided that since in his mind Castro was one of the good guys -- Phillips was on the left and he knew how bad Batista had been -- he would probably be able to negotiate some sort of settlement if he could just talk to him. So he got on the phone and tried to call Castro -- and he actually did get through to Raul Castro, Fidel's brother, and talk to him for a while. History does not relate if Phillips' intervention is what prevented nuclear war.) So Sam Phillips was in the right frame of mind to take advantage when history walked into his studio. Elvis Aaron Presley was an unlikely name for a teen idol and star, and Elvis had an unlikely background for one as well. The son of a poor sharecropper from Mississippi who had moved to Memphis as a young man, he was working as a truck driver when he first went into Memphis Recording Service to record himself singing a song for his mother. And when Phillips' assistant, Marion Keisker, heard the young man who'd come in to the studio, she thought she'd found just the man Phillips had been looking for – the white man who could sing like a black man. Or at least, that's how Keisker told it. Like with so many things in rock music's history, it depends on who you listen to. Sam Phillips always said it had been him, not Keisker, who "discovered" Elvis Presley, but the evidence seems to be on Keisker's side. However, even there, it's hard to see from Elvis' original recording -- versions of "My Happiness" and "That's When Your Heartaches Begin" -- what she saw in him that sounded so black. While the Ink Spots, who recorded the original version of "That's When Your Heartaches Begin", were black, they always performed in a very smooth, crooner-esque, style, and that's what Presley did too in his recording. He certainly didn't have any particular blues or R&B feel in his vocal on those recordings. [excerpt: "That's When Your Heartaches Begin" -- Elvis Presley] But Keisker or Phillips heard something in those recordings. More importantly, though, what Sam Phillips saw in him was an attitude. And not the attitude you might expect. You see, Elvis Presley was a quiet country boy. He had been bullied at school. He wore strange clothes and kept to himself, only ever really getting close to his mother. He was horribly introverted, and the few friends he did have mostly didn't know about his interests, other than whichever one he shared with them. He mostly liked to listen to music, read comic books, and fantasise about being in a gospel quartet like the Jordanaires, singing harmony with a group like that. He'd hang around with some of the other teenagers living in the same housing block -- Johnny and Dorsey Burnette, and a guy called Johnny Black, whose big brother Bill was the bass player with the Starlite Wranglers. They bullied him too, but they sort of allowed him to hang around with them, and they'd all get together and sing, Elvis standing a little off from the rest of them, like he wasn't really part of the group. He'd thought for a while he might become an electrician, but he kept giving himself electric shocks and short-circuiting things -- he said later that he was so clumsy it was a miracle that he didn't cause any fires when he worked on people's wiring. He didn't have many friends -- and no close friends at all -- and many of those he did have didn't even know he was interested in music. But he was absorbing music from every direction and every source -- the country groups his mother liked to listen to on the radio like the Louvin Brothers, the gospel quartets who were massive stars among the religious, poor, people in the area, the music he heard at the Pentecostal church he attended (a white Pentecostal church, but still as much of a Holly Roller church as the black ones that SIster Rosetta Tharpe had learned her music from). He'd go down Beale Street, too, and listen to people like B.B. King -- young Elvis bought his clothes from Lansky's on Beale, where the black people bought their clothes, rather than from the places the other white kids got their clothes. But he wasn't someone like Johnny Otis who fitted in with the black community, either -- rather, he was someone who didn't fit in anywhere. Someone who had nobody, other than his mother, who he felt really close to. He was weird, and unpopular, and shy, and odd-looking. But that feeling of not fitting in anywhere allowed him to pick up on music from everywhere. He didn't own many records, but he *absorbed* songs from the radio. He'd hear something by the Ink Spots or Arthur Crudup once, and sing it perfectly. But it was gospel music he wanted to sing -- and specifically what is known euphemistically as "Southern Gospel", but which really means "white Gospel". And this is an important distinction that needs to be made as we go forward, because gospel music has had a huge influence on rock and roll music, but that influence has almost all come from black gospel, the music invented by Thomas Dorsey and popularised by people like Sister Rosetta Tharpe or Mahalia Jackson. That's a black genre, and a genre which has many prominent women in it -- and it's also a genre which has room for solo stars. When we talk about a gospel influence on Ray Charles or Aretha Franklin or Sam Cooke, that's the gospel music we're talking about. That black form of gospel became the primary influence on fifties rhythm and blues vocals, and through that on rock and roll. But there's another gospel music as well -- "Southern Gospel" or "quartet gospel". That music is -- or at least was at the time we're talking about -- almost exclusively white, and male, and sung by groups. To ears that aren't attuned to it, it can sound a lot like barbershop music. It shares a lot of its repertoire with black gospel, but it's performed in a very, very different style. [excerpt: "Take My Hand, Precious Lord", the Blackwood Brothers] That's the Blackwood Brothers singing, and you can hear how even though that's a Thomas Dorsey song, it sounds totally different from, say, Mahalia Jackson's version. The Blackwood Brothers were young Elvis Presley's favourite group, and he was such a fan that when two of the group died in a plane crash in 1954, Elvis was one of the thousands who attended their funeral. He auditioned for several gospel quartets, but never found a role in any of them -- but all his life, that was the music he wanted to sing, the music he would return to. He'd take any excuse he could to make himself just one of a gospel group, not a solo singer. But since he didn't have a group, he was just a solo singer. Just a teenager with a spotty neck. And *that* is the feature that gets mentioned over and over again in the eyewitness descriptions of the young Elvis, when he was starting out. The fact that his neck was always filthy and covered in acne. He had greasy hair, and would never look anyone in the eye but would look down and mumble. What Sam Phillips saw in that teenage boy was a terrible feeling of insecurity. It was a feeling he recognised himself -- Phillips had already been hospitalised a couple of times with severe depression and had to have electric shock therapy a few years earlier. But it was also something he recognised from the black musicians he'd been working with. In their cases it was because they'd been crushed by a racist system. In Phillips' case it was because his brain was wired slightly differently from everyone else's. He didn't know quite what it was that made this teenage boy have that attitude, what it was that made him a scared, insecure, outsider. But whatever it was, Elvis Presley was the only white man Sam Phillips had met whose attitudes, bearing, and way of talking reminded him of the great black artists he knew and worked with, like Howlin' Wolf or B.B. King, and he became eager to try him out and see what could happen. Phillips decided to put Elvis together with Scotty Moore and Bill Black, the guitarist and bass player from the Starlite Wranglers. Neither was an impressive technical musician – in fact at the time they were considered barely competent – but that was a plus in Phillips' book. These were people who played with feeling, rather than with technique, and who wouldn't try to do anything too flashy and showboaty. And he trusted their instincts, especially Scotty's. He wanted to see what Scotty Moore thought, and so he got Elvis to go and rehearse with the two older musicians. Scotty Moore wasn't impressed... or at least, he *thought* he wasn't impressed. But at the same time... there was *something* there. It was worth giving the kid a shot, even though he didn't quite know *why* he thought that. So Sam Phillips arranged for a session, recording a ballad, since that was the kind of thing that Elvis had been singing in his auditions. The song they thought might be suitable for him turned out not to be, and nor were many other songs they tried, until eventually they hit on "That's All Right Mama", a song originally recorded by Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup in 1946. Arthur Crudup was a country-blues singer, and he was another of those people who did the same kind of record over and over -- he would sing blues songs with the same melody and often including many of the same lyrics, seemingly improvising songs based around floating lyrics. The song "That's All Right Mama" was inspired by Blind Lemon Jefferson's classic "Black Snake Moan": [excerpt: "Black Snake Moan", Blind Lemon Jefferson] Crudup had first used the line in "If I Get Lucky". He then came up with the melody for what became "That's All Right", but recorded it with different lyrics as "Mean Ol' Frisco Blues": [excerpt: "Mean Old Frisco Blues", Arthur Crudup] Then he wrote the words to "That's All Right", and sang them with the chorus of an old Charley Patton song: [excerpt: "Dirt Road Blues", Arthur Crudup] And then he recorded "That's All Right Mama" itself: [excerpt "That's All Right Mama", Arthur Crudup] Crudup's records, as you can hear, were all based on a template – and he recorded several more songs with bits of “That's All Right” in, both before and after writing that one. Elvis, Scotty, and Bill, however, didn't follow that template. Elvis' version of the song takes the country-blues feel of Crudup and reworks it into hillbilly music -- it's taken at a faster pace, and the sound is full of echo. You have Bill Black's slapback bass instead of the drums on Crudup's version. It still doesn't, frankly, sound at all like the black musicians Phillips was working with, and it sounds a hell of a lot like a lot of white ones. If Phillips was, as the oversimplification would have it, looking for "a white man who could sing like a black one", he hadn't found it. Listening now, it's definitely a "rock and roll" record, but at the time it would have been thought of as a "hillbilly" record. [excerpt “That's All Right Mama, Elvis Presley] There is, though, an attitude in Presley's singing which is different from most of the country music at the time -- there's a playfulness, an air of irreverence, which is very different from most of what was being recorded at the time. Presley seems to be treating the song as a bit of a joke, and to have an attitude which is closer to jazz-pop singers like Ella Fitzgerald than to blues or country music. He wears the song lightly, unafraid to sound a bit silly if it's what's needed for the record. He jumps around in his register and sings with an assurance that is quite astonishing for someone so young, someone who had basically never performed before, except in his own head. The B-side that they chose was a song from a very different genre -- Bill Monroe's bluegrass song "Blue Moon of Kentucky": [excerpt: Bill Monroe "Blue Moon of Kentucky"] Elvis, Scotty, and Bill chose to rework that song in much the same style in which they'd reworked "That's All Right Mama". There's nothing to these tracks but Elvis' strummed acoustic, Black's clicking slapback bass, and Scotty Moore's rudimentary electric guitar fills -- and the secret weapon, Sam Phillips' echo. Phillips had a simple system he'd rigged up himself, and no-one else could figure out how he'd done it. The room he was recording in didn't have a particularly special sound, but when he played back the recordings, there was a ton of echo on them, and it sounded great. The way he did this was simple. He didn't use just one tape recorder -- though tape recorders themselves were a newish invention, remember -- he used two. He didn't do multitracking like Les Paul -- rather, what he did was use one tape recorder to record what was happening in the studio, while the other tape recorder *played the sound back for the first recorder to record as well*. This is called slapback echo, and Phillips would use it on everything, but especially on vocals. Nobody knew his secret, and when his artists moved off to other record labels, they often tried to replicate it, with very mixed results. But on "Blue Moon of Kentucky" it gave the record a totally different sound from Bill Monroe's bluegrass music -- a sound which would become known, later, as rockabilly: [excerpt "Blue Moon of Kentucky", Elvis Presley] Phillips took the record to his friend, the DJ Dewey Phillips, who played it on his R&B show. When Elvis found out that Dewey Phillips was going to be playing his record on the radio, he was so nervous that rather than listen to it, he headed out to the cinema to watch a film so he wouldn't be tempted to turn the radio on. There was such a response to the record, though, that Phillips played the record fourteen times, and Elvis' mother had to go to the cinema and drag him out so he could go on the radio and be interviewed. On his first media interview he came across well, largely because Phillips didn't tell him the mic was on until the interview was over – and Phillips also asked which school Elvis went to, as a way of cluing his listeners into Elvis' race – most people had assumed, since Phillips' show normally only played records by black people, that Elvis was black. Elvis Presley had a hit on his hands -- at least as much of a hit as you could get from a country record on a blues label. Sadly, Crudup had sold the rights to the song years earlier, and never saw a penny in royalties – when he later sued over the rights, in the seventies, he was meant to get sixty thousand dollars in back payments, which he never received. I've seen claims, though I don't know how true they are, that Crudup's total pay for the song was fifty dollars and a bottle of whisky. But it was at the band's first live performance that something even more astonishing happened, and it happened because of Presley's stagefright, at least as Scotty Moore used to tell the story. Presley was, as we've mentioned, a deeply shy young man with unusual body language, and he was also unusually dressed -- he wore the large, baggy, trousers that black men favoured. And he was someone who moved *a lot* when he was nervous or energetic -- and even when he wasn't, people would talk about how he was always tapping on something or moving in his seat. He was someone who just couldn't keep still. And when he got on stage he was so scared he started shaking. And so did his pants. And because his pants were so baggy, they started shaking not in a way that looked like he was scared, but in a way that was, frankly, sexual. And the audiences reacted. A lot. Over the next year or two, Presley would rapidly grow utterly confident on stage, and when you look at footage of him from a few years later it's hard to imagine him ever having stage fright at all, with the utter assurance and cocky smile he has. But all his stage presence developed from him noticing the things that the audience reacted to and doing more of them, and the thing they reacted to first and most was his nervous leg-twitching. And just like that, the unpopular poor boy with the spotty neck became the biggest male sex symbol the world had ever seen, and we'll be seeing how that changed everything in future episodes.

Feb 4, 2019

Welcome to episode eighteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs . Today we’re looking at “Sh-Boom” by the Chords. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. (more…)

Jan 28, 2019

Welcome to episode seventeen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs . Today we’re looking at “Money Honey” by the Drifters. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. (more…)

Jan 21, 2019

Welcome to episode sixteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs . Today we’re looking at “Crazy Man Crazy” by Bill Haley and the Comets. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. (more…)

Jan 14, 2019

Welcome to episode fifteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs . Today we’re looking at “Hound Dog” by Big Mama Thornton. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. (more…)

Jan 7, 2019

Welcome to episode fourteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs . Today we’re looking at “Jambalaya” by Hank Williams. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. (more…)

Dec 31, 2018

Welcome to episode thirteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs . Today we’re looking at “(Mama) He Treats Your Daughter Mean” by Ruth Brown. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. (more…)

Dec 23, 2018

Welcome to episode twelve of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs . Today we’re looking at “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” by Lloyd Price. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. (more…)

Dec 16, 2018

Welcome to episode eleven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs . Today we’re looking at “Rocket 88” by Jackie Brenston and the Delta Cats. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. (more…)

Dec 9, 2018

Welcome to episode ten of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs . Today we’re looking at “Double Crossin’ Blues” by Johnny Otis, Little Esther, and the Robins. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. (more…)

Dec 3, 2018

Welcome to episode nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs . Today we’re looking at Les Paul and Mary Ford, and “How High The Moon”. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. (more…)

Nov 26, 2018

Welcome to episode eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs . Today we’re looking at Fats Domino and “The Fat Man”. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. (more…)

Nov 19, 2018

Welcome to episode seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs . Today we’re looking at Wynonie Harris and “Good Rockin’ Tonight” (more…)

Nov 12, 2018

Welcome to episode six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs . Today we’re looking at the Ink Spots and “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin” (more…)

Nov 5, 2018

Welcome to episode five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs . Today we’re looking at Sister Rosetta Tharpe and “This Train” (more…)

Oct 29, 2018

Welcome to episode four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs . Today we’re looking at Louis Jordan and “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie” (more…)

Oct 21, 2018

Transcript This is not a full episode of A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs . The full episode will also turn up in your podcatcher. But I thought I should do a separate episode as a disclaimer. I’m placing this one here because in the next epsiode proper I talk about “the king of Western swing” and I don’t refer to Spade Cooley, and I thought I should explain why. You see, there were two people who were generally called “the King of Western Swing”, both had a good claim for it. One of them was Bob Wills, and I’m going to talk about him in the episode. The other was Spade Cooley, and Cooley was a domestic abuser who eventually murdered his wife. Now, this is a history of rock and roll, and so I am going to have to deal with a lot of abusers, sex criminals, and even a few murderers. You simply can’t tell the history of rock and roll without talking about Ike Turner, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Phil Spector, Jimmy Page… I could go on. But suffice to say that I think the assumption one should make when talking about rock music history is that any man discussed in it is a monster unless proved otherwise. I’m going to have to talk about those men’s work, and how it affected other things, because it’s so influential. And I admire a lot of that work. But I never, ever, want to give the impression that I think the work in any way mitigates their monstrosity, or do that thing that so many people do of excusing them because “it was a different time”. But in order for this to be a history of rock music, and not a prurient history of misogynistic crime, I’m probably not going to mention every awful thing these people do. I’m going to deal with it on a case by case basis, and I *will* make wrong calls. If I don’t mention something when I get to one of those men, and you think it needed mentioning, by all means tell me about it in comments. But please don’t take that lack of mention as being endorsement of those people. However, in the case of Spade Cooley, he needed mentioning here, because I’m talking about Western swing in the next episode. But Cooley’s overall influence on rock and roll is basically zero, so in that episode, I’m going to pretend he never existed. If you want to hear about him, check out a podcast called Cocaine and Rhinestones . The episode there is horrifying, but it puts him in his proper context. But I thought I should make this disclaimer now and have it count for every episode of the podcast going forward. Thank you.

Oct 21, 2018

Welcome to episode three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs . Today we’re looking at Bob Wills and “Ida Red”. (more…)

Oct 14, 2018

Here’s the second episode, on “Roll ‘Em Pete” by Big Joe Turner and Pete Johnson. One erratum before we continue — in the episode, I say that “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” follows a particular formula common in hokum songs. That’s not actually true for the original version — it is true for Bill Haley’s cover version, and Elvis’ and the versions after them, but in Joe Turner’s version the part we now know as the chorus didn’t come in until near the end. Sorry about the mistake. (more…)

Oct 7, 2018

Welcome to the first episode proper of A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs ! As this is the first real episode, you may notice a couple of flaws in the production — those will hopefully get ironed out in the coming weeks. In the meantime, sit back and listen to the story of “Flying Home” by the Benny Goodman Sextet! (more…)

Sep 30, 2018

Welcome to A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs ! Episode 1, the first episode proper, is coming next week, but for now here’s an introduction, laying out my plans for the series. As I say in the tag at the end of every episode, please, if you like this episode, tell someone about it — word of mouth is important, especially with these early episodes. Resources Mentioned in the Podcast My book, California Dreaming: The LA Pop Music Scene and the 60s , available here . Transcript Rock and roll as a cultural force is, it is safe to say, dead. This is not necessarily a bad thing, and nor does it mean that good rock and roll music isn’t being made any more. Rather, rock, like jazz, has become a niche musical interest. It’s a large niche, and it will be so long as there are people around who grew up in the last half of the last century, but the cultural influence it once had has declined precipitously in the last decade or so. These days, various flavours of hip-hop, electronic dance music, manufactured pop, and half a dozen genres that a middle-aged man like myself couldn’t even name are having the cultural and commercial impact that in previous decades was mostly made by guitar bands. And this means that for the first time, it’s possible to assess rock music (or rock and roll — the two terms are not quite interchangeable, but this is not the place for a discussion of the terminology, which will come later) in a historical context. In fact this may be the best time for it, when it’s still interesting to a wide audience, and still fresh in the memory, but it’s not still an ongoing story that will necessarily change. Almost all of the original generation of rock and roll musicians are now dead (the only prominent exceptions at the moment being Jerry Lee Lewis, Don Everly, and Little Richard, although numerous lesser-known musicians from the time are still working occasionally), but their legacy is still having an impact. So in this podcast series I will look at the history of rock and roll music, starting with a few pre-rock songs that clearly influenced the burgeoning rock and roll genre, and ending up in 1999 — it makes sense to cut the story off there, in multiple ways. I’ll talk about the musicians, and about the music. About how the musicians influenced each other, and about the cultural forces that shaped them. In early episodes, you’ll hear me talk about the impact the Communist Party, a series of strikes, and a future governor of Texas would all have on rock and roll’s prehistory. But more importantly you’ll hear me talk about the songs and the singers, the instrumentalists and the record producers. I shall be using a somewhat expansive definition of rock or rock and roll here, including genres like soul and disco, because those genres grew up alongside rock, were prominent at the same time as it, and both influenced and were influenced by the rock music of the time. I’m sure we’ll look, when the time comes, at the way the words “rock and roll” were slowly redefined, from originally meaning a form of music made almost entirely by black people to later pretty much explicitly excluding all black musicians from their definition. But the most important thing I’ll be doing is looking at the history of rock in terms of the music. I’ll be looking at the records, and at the songs. How they were made and by whom. I’ve chosen five hundred songs in total, roughly a hundred per decade from the fifties through the nineties. Some of these songs are obvious choices, which have been written about many times before, but which need to be dealt with in any history of rock music. Others are more obscure tracks which nonetheless point to interesting things about how the music world was developing at the time they were recorded. I say “I’ve chosen”, but this is going to be a project that takes nearly ten years, and no doubt my list will change. I’ll be interested to see what suggestions listeners have, once I get them. Each podcast will be accompanied by a blog post, with a transcript of the episode (actually the script from which I’m working — I won’t be transcribing any of my mistakes) and links to sources, along with any notes — for example, I’ve already noticed a mistake in episode two which I’ll put in that episode’s notes. I’ll also be compiling an accompanying mixcloud post for each podcast. Those mixclouds will have the full versions of every song I excerpt in these podcasts, and I encourage you to listen to them. The podcasts are planned to be about twenty-five minutes on average, with the occasional shorter one, like this, as a bit of housecleaning. I’ll also, every two years, be publishing a book based on these scripts, which will eventually become a five-volume work. Anyone who backs me on patreon, at patreon.com/andrewhickey — that’s a n d r e w h i c k e y — will get free access to those books, as well as backing my blog and my other podcast. Those of you who have read my earlier work California Dreaming: The LA Pop Music Scene and the 60s will be familiar with this narrative technique I’m using here, and this series is in many ways an expansion of that book’s approach, but it’s important to note that the two works aren’t looking at precisely the same thing — that book was dealing with a particular scene, and with people who all knew each other, in a limited geographic and temporal space. Here, on the other hand, the threads we’ll be following are more cultural than social — there isn’t a direct connection between Little Richard and Talking Heads, for example, but hopefully over the course of this series we will find a narrative thread that still connects them. Obviously, just as there’s no definitive end to the time when rock had cultural prominence, there’s no definitive beginning either. The quest for a “first rock and roll record” is a futile one — rock and roll didn’t spring fully formed into existence in Sam Phillips’ studio in 1951 (when he recorded “Rocket 88”) or 1954 (when he recorded “That’s All Right”) — music evolved, and so we’ll look at R&B and country, at Merseybeat and punk, and try to find the throughlines. But to start with, we want to take a trip back to the swing era…