A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs

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…)

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.

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.

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…)

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 is 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. 

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.

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?

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. 

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.

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…)