Stuck in the Sixties, Musically

I imagine that the great majority of pop music fans favor inordinately the music of their youth, the major exception being (perhaps) those who were young musicians and were always impatiently finding fault with the music of the day.

My own experience was that with the arrival of heavy metal I "dropped out" when it came to keeping up with contemporary music. It's not as if I've *never* listened to or liked newer artists, only that at one time I was on top of things, so to speak, and since then my exposure to new artists and new music has been pretty much accidental.

Thus, this post, devoted to pop music related trivia, will focus pretty much on the fifties and sixties. Here are some tidbits for you:

• The Animals: The original members were a tax collector, a ship's instrument maker, a postman, an illustrator, and a salesman.
  
  
• Seven different artists reached the top forty with Mack the Knife, aka Theme from the Three Penny Opera.
  
  
• The Ronettes, The Crystals, and The Chiffons were all sixties girl groups. In the 1986 remake of Little Shop of Horrors, three black women are occasionally seen and heard in musical numbers and in the credits are identified as Ronette, Crystal, and Chiffon.
  
  
• The Bobbettes: If you're old enough, you may recall their only hit, Mr. Lee.
  
  One, two, three,
  Look at Mr. Lee.
  Three, four, five,
  Look at him jive.
  
  Well, the truth is that the Bobettes were aged 11 to 13, Mr. Lee was their fifth grade teacher, and they didn't like him at all. The above lyrics are the cleaned up version of their original recording, I Shot Mr. Lee, which began
  
  One, two, three,
  I shot Mr. Lee.
  Three, four, five,
  I got tired of his jive.
  
  
• Pat Boone and Roy Orbison were classmates at North Texas State University.
  
  
• Sky Pilot was slang for a military chaplain. When Eric Burdon & the Animals released their song of that name in 1968 it went to number one among the troops in Vietnam and stayed there for six months.
  
  
• Johnny Cash had a big hit with A Boy Named Sue, written by Shel Silverstein. You may recall the verse in which Sue finally finds his father and they get into a fight, Kickin' and a-gougin' in the mud and the blood and the beer.
  
  Silverstein later wrote and recorded Father of a Boy Named Sue. In this version, told by the Sue's father, Sue is gay and when they meet and fight, they do so Kickin' and a gougin' in the mud and the blood and the creme de menthe.
  
  And yes, that Shel Silverstein - A Light in the Attic and other children's books.
  
  
• With a Little Help From My Friends, it was reported, was Vice President Spiro Agnew's favorite pop song until someone told him that the friends were drugs.
  
  
• Fats Domino, with eighteen Billboard Top 20 hits, never made it to number one. The closest he came was with Blueberry Hill, which reached #2.
  
  
• Tommy Edwards reached #18 in 1951 and #1 in 1958 with It's All in the Game, written as Melody in A Major in 1911 by Charles Dawes, who was elected Vice President in 1912.

Doo Wop. Umm, Maybe Next Time

I grew up in New England, which was largely what you might call a white bread area. In the sixth grade (Portsmouth, New Hampshire) I met a black person for the first time, a classmate named Harry. That's pretty much how life went for me until I joined the Army.

In my teens (Beverly, Massachusetts) my friends and I listened to rock and roll on the radio and began to be exposed to music by black artists. At first the Boston area stations played almost entirely songs by white artists. When blacks had hits on the R&B charts the songs were covered by white artists such as Pat Boone and Georgia Gibbs, whom I consider the King and Queen of Cover Artists, based entirely on the number of black artists' songs they jumped on.

In 1955 the flood gates opened when the Platters became the first black artists to reach number one on the pop charts, which they accomplished with The Great Pretender.

As a result, some popular R&B singers such as Big Joe Turner, Clyde McPhatter, and Ivory Joe Hunter began to be heard on stations that were previously devoted pretty much to whites, the exceptions being singers of ballads and blues, such as Nat King Cole, and suddenly the charts really showed a mixture of black and white. Fats Domino, Little Richard, The Coasters, The Platters, and others often reached the top of the pop charts, not only with rock and roll but with slower music as well, and we white teenagers not only liked it, we liked it a *lot* more than white cover versions.

Here it must be noted that things were very different on the music charts in those days. It was not unusual for there to be two or three versions of the same song in the top twenty. Occasionally this was simply due to several white artists or groups recording the same songs, but often it was a matter of white artists covering tunes by black artists.

I think the reason we preferred the the black artists is that the white artists didn't know what the Hell they were singing about. If you'd like to hear a classic example, listen to Long Tall Sally by Little Richard and then listen to it by Pat Boone. Another? Listen to Shake, Rattle and Roll by Big Joe Turner and then by Bill Haley & His Comets.

There's no getting around it: the white versions fail in two respects. First there's the style of the playing and singing, with black artists displaying emotion and excitement. Second there's the bowdlerization of the lyrics. Consider, for example, Little Richard's

Long tall Sally, she's built for speed.
She got everything that Uncle John needs.

And now Pat Boone's

Long tall Sally's got a lot on the ball
And nobody cares if she's long and tall.

Similarly, there is Big Joe Turner's

Way you wear those dresses, the sun comes shinin' through.
Way you wear those dresses, the sun comes shinin' through.
I can't believe my eyes, all that mess belongs to you.

And Bill Haley's

Wearin' those dresses your hair done up so nice;
Wearin' those dresses your hair done up so nice;
You look so warm but your heart is cold as ice.

My absolute favorite comment on a "cover" situation involved the song Earth Angel, recorded by both The Penguins (black) and The Crew Cuts (white). I'd love to attribute the quote, but I don't remember who wrote it and I can't find it on google. It went something like this:

On the pop charts the Crew Cuts version reached number three and the Penguins version reached number eight. On the R&B charts the Penguins reached number one and the Crew Cuts were nowhere in sight.

I didn't want to clutter up this post with images of videos, or even with links, so I'll leave it to those of you who are interested to search YouTube for the songs and artists. You'll find everything mentioned here.

Well, I intended to write about doowop, but you can see what happened. Doowop will be next up.

Early Rock and Roll

Many polls and surveys have been taken in attempts to determine the "first" rock and roll song. Fairly predictably, they have reached a number of different conclusions. One poll resulted in a song from the 1920's.

Safe to say, however, is that rock and roll took off with the 1955 success of "(We're Gonna) Rock Around the Clock" by Bill Haley and His Comets. They had released it a year or so earlier and it had gone nowhere. Then it was used as the theme song for a movie about an inner city school, "Blackboard Jungle," and whoosh! Over the years it has sold more than 25 million copies.

Rock and roll was on its way, and soon there were road shows - "concerts" today - made up of a few different artists and groups. Traveling by bus, they hit all the major cities. When I was 15, one arrived in Boston.

Mechanics Hall, razed several years later, was then a 75 year old building that might today be called a "convention center." It was host to conventions, shows, exhibitions, and gatherings of all kinds. It was, however, on its last
legs.

A friend, I no longer remember which one, learned that a rock and roll show was coming to Boston and Mechanics Hall. We lived about 18 miles north of Boston, and one Saturday afternoon five of us, all boys, took the train into Boston. We haggled with a cab driver, who agreed to take us from North Station to Mechanics Hall for a flat fee a little less than his meter would run, and sure enough he had to turn the meter off a couple of blocks from the hall.

On the card were Fats Domino, Bill Haley and His Comets, Chuck Berry, Shirley and Lee, and the G-Clefs. Tickets were $5.00 apiece. At a guess, most of you over 40 have heard of the first three, and possibly the fouth.

The G-Clefs were a local group (Roxbury, a suburb of Boston) ranging in age from one to five years older than the five of us, at that time enjoying the success of the first of their two top 40 hits, an upbeat number called "Ka-Ding Dong." (On the recording, Freddy Cannon played lead guitar.) The song ultimately reached #24 on the pop charts.

(If this link goes bad - it would probably be from the video being removed from YouTube - please post a comment about that. The comment will trigger an email to me and I'll replace the video.)

Ka-Ding Dong

At the beginning of the show the MC mentioned the age of the building and asked that our enthusiasm be limited to clapping and cheering lest we bring the roof and walls down on our heads.

I no longer recall the order in which the artists performed. We thought they were all great, and I recall being much taken with Shirley of Shirley and Lee. But the G-Clefs stole the show, of course.

Not only did they have the advantage of being a home town group, but they were the *first* artists from the Boston area to have a rock and roll hit. When they left the stage everyone wanted an encore. We cheered and clapped and whistled to no avail. Then we remembered the MC's warning and began stamping our feet, roof and walls be damned. The MC came out in a panic and claimed that the G-Clefs had left the building. We'll never know whether that was true, but we calmed down and eventually made it home alive.