Book Review - Cowboys and Indies

                                      
                                                             

                                                
                                                      

 

 

Cowboys and Indies

The Epic History Of The

Record Industry

By

Gareth Murphy

This book is a definitive expose of the evolution of recorded music. It clocks in at a luxurious 357 pages with an additional 21 pages that include knockout bibliography and Index sections. Murphy has done his research well, never skimping or missing a beat with an incredible knack of narrative prose that keeps the reader on the edge of his seat. It takes a few days to assimilate all the interwoven plots and subplots that give this history a feel of a scripted storyline that fiction writers utilize to keep the reader on the edge of his seat. Murphy takes the reader back in time to the earliest moments of Gardner Hubbard’s development of the telegraph which led to Thomas Edison’s phonograph and the recording of the spoken word. Edison’s discovery was pure genius at work, without a road map, just an indelible intellect and a strong work ethic. But it was Alexander Graham Bell and his team that vastly improved Edison’s “talking machine.”  They named it the Graphophone, complete with waxy cylinders, a floating stylus and stethoscope tubes for listening. This marked the birth of the record Industry. The year was 1880.

Murphy brings the reader front and center into World War II and the birth of Sinatramania. It began in earnest in 1943 when Sinatra’s first solo recording sold a million copies. With the help of a wealthy benefactor (Columbia Records), Sinatra bought his way out of his contract with bandleader Harry James for $25,000. As the war raged on, Sinatra was classified as 4-F, registrant was not acceptable for military service (due to a perforated ear drum). At the time, a well-known journalist observed that Sinatra was the most hated man of WWII much more than Hitler!

According to the author institutional racism was particularly demeaning, even cruel. Many black musicians avoided conscription, claiming psychosis, drug addiction and other assorted maladies. It evolved from the mindset that a more militant branch of jazz emerged called Be-Bop. Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and Sonny Stitt all embraced this musical militancy. Gillespie stated, “The enemy by that period was not the Germans, it was above all the white Americans who kicked us in the butt every day, physically and morally.”

By 1947 record sales went from 275 million to 400 million. In April 1948 Ted Wallerstein created the 33 1/3 rpm 12 inch long record, the LP!

From that point forward, the author leads the reader through a roller coaster ride through several seminal events that led to the creation of rock & roll. Memphis was the connection to Beale Street and the birth of Sun Records and the enduring myth of the King of Rock & Roll, Elvis Presley and a triad of equally talented pioneers including Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins and Roy Orbison.

An entire chapter was devoted to the Beatles and Brian Epstein. They changed everything…forever. Rock music ascended to the top of the heap causing the careers of most of the Brill Building songwriters, producers and performers to disappear, so long to Doc Pomus; hello to John Lennon. The Beatles were the Tsunami and no one could stop their advance. The British Invasion was brutal but the music was incredible. Everything else in the rock & roll pantheon was a response to that initial wave of talented Brits including the Stones, Manfred Mann, the Hollies and the Dave Clark 5.

In the mid-sixties musicians found their muse both lyrically and musically. Bob Dylan led the way and helped expand the voice of folk music to include thoughtful protest about human liberties and the Vietnam war. This was a long chapter.

The author includes a treatise on Rap music and its ascendance in 1979 with the Sugar Hill Gang. They hit the bigtime with “Rappers Delight” and it help forever change the face of popular music. It was profane, sometimes violent but it was real. Rap spoke of truth and justice in a way that brought people together regardless of race, color or creed. Behind it all was gobs of money.

Gareth Murphy is credible in his assertion about the power of music, “In the big city, cut off from the elements, records have become our folklore, our spiritual medicine, our last sacred connection to the godhead.

Amen

Bo White

 

 

                                                              

Book Review - Always Magic in the Air Brill Building

                                            

                                                               

Always Magic In The Air

The Bomp and Brilliance

Of The Brill Building Era

By Ken Emerson

 

Ken Emerson fashioned an incredible family portrait of fourteen incredible songsmiths of that bygone era of the fifties and sixties. The music was all encompassing as Tin Pan Alley shifted and changed with the times.  Incredible craft and no small amount of competitive spirit merged with Baion Beats, augmented chords, polyrhythms and nonsense syllables just for fun. This was a multi-cultural melting pot of great music      

Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller wrote Youngblood, Searchin’ and Yakety Yak for the Coasters; Jailhouse Rock and Loving You for Elvis and collaborated with Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil for the hit On Broadway. They wrote over 70 charted hits

Burt Bacharach and Hal David worked almost exclusively with Dionne Warwick. She was a conservatory trained vocalist who helped interpret the writer’s deeper meanings in the lyrics. All told Warwick scored 38 charting songs written by her mentors including Walk on By, There’s Always Something There to Remind Me. They penned hits for Gene Pitney (The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence) , My Little Red Book (Manfred Mann) and Jackie Deshannon (What The World Need Now). They registered 73 hit records as one of the most successful songwriting teams in music history

 Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman wrote for Hill and Range Music and composed an incredible body of music that embodied the hit potential of blued based pop songs such as Turn Me Loose (Fabian), A Teenager in Love (Dion & the Belmonts), This Magic Moment (The Drifters), Little Sister and Viva Las Vegas (Elvis). Pomus struggled with post polio syndrome and often used a wheelchair to enhance his mobility. He performed onstage singing the blues, his favorite idiom.

 

 Neil Sedaka and Howie Greenfield were partners in chutzpah. Their early hits were a bit thin, songs like I Go Ape and The Diary were not well received but he hit his stride with Calendar Girl, Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen and his signature song Breaking Up is Hard to Do. By the time the British Invasion conquered America, Sedaka’s career as a songwriter and performer stalled. It wasn’t until he collaborated with future members of 10CC on an album entitled Solitaire that Sedaka’s career enjoyed an incredible resurgence. The comeback was complete as he enjoyed several chart topping hits such as Love Will Keep Us Together performed by Captain and Tennille as well as his own success with Laughter in the Rain, The Immigrant and Bad Blood

 Gerry Goffin and Carole King were in their teens when they married and forged a career as songwriters. King was a gifted arranger and knew how to build a song with hooks and subtle chord embellishments while her partner was a tuned-in lyricist. They were Aldon Music’s most bankable asset. They had an incredibly diverse canon of music from Don’t Let Me Down (The Animals) and Pleasant Valley Sunday (The Monkees) to The Locomotion (Little Eva) and One Fine Day (The Shirelles). Their union ended up in divorce as substance abuse and mental illness caused a fracture in their relationship

 Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil were a young married couple in 1961 when they started their ascent at the Brill Building. They became staff writers at Aldon Music which was owned by Don Kirchner and Al Nevin.  They tended to write songs that had a layer of social consciousness with such notable sons as Uptown (the Crystals), We Gotta Get Out of This Place (the Animals), Magic Town (The Vogues), Kicks (Paul Revere & the Raiders) and Shades of Gray (The Monkees). Mann and Weill co-wrote You’ve Lost that Lovin Feeling with Phil Spector. They also took the Righteous Brothers under their wings with two great songs You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feeling and (You’re My) Soul and Inspiration. They continue to write and perform.

Emerson’s narrative is an interwoven tapestry of life at the Brill Building. His writing is fluid, and suspenseful, keeping the reader on edge with more suspense and detail of these pioneers of early rock & roll. The Brill Building songwriters have been vilified in the past for writing silly songs on cue in order to sell more disposable product, yet as formulaic as the songs could be, the truth is that the songs were incredible and have stood the test of time. Perhaps it is the clash and melding of cultures that never gave a damn about ethnicity when it comes to great music. The song craft at 1650 Broadway was essential to the later development of Motown, The Beatles and the British Invasion. William Wordsworth once talked about nostalgia…

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive

But to be young was very heaven

Peace

Bo White

                                                               

Book Review - Louie Louie by Dave Marsh

                                                                        
                                                                   

                                                  

Louie Louie

The History & Mythology

Of the

World’s Most Famous Rock n’ Roll Song

As Dave Marsh recounts Louie Louie began as an innocent sea shanty about a lovesick Jamaican Sailor. It was authored by Richard Berry in 1956 and it was raised to glory status by Rockin’ Robin Roberts, Seattle’s resident Wildman. The Wailers would pack the house, 2000 strong. They would play in hamburger stand parking lots and on rooftops of drive-in theater concession stands. Just kids in hot cars drinking beer, and going out to dances. It was a magic time. In the summer of 1957, Richard Berry’s Louie Louie was all the rage.

Marsh makes a bid for the middle path, it’s a rock & roll song and it’s also a calypso song and it’s also a filthy obscene mess. Love it or hate it, Louie Louie  is a rock & roll treasure with that duh, duh, duh. Duh, Duh beat resting unobtrusively in many of our favorite songs. Frank Zappa weighed-in on it from his 1989 opus The Real Frank Zappa book. He wrote that his compositions using “stock modules” to create aural textures, among them sounds derived by the Twilight Zone, Mister Rogers, cornball bandleader Lester Lanin and things that sound either exactly like or very similar to Louie Louie. He also noted that Louie Louie is built around two basic 1950’s rock & roll chord patterns (I-IV-V).

 Dave Marsh has the cajones to create a story about the history of rock & roll through a single song and to a great extent he has succeeded. At a show in December 1970 Ray Davies performed with the Kinks and declared Louie Louie as the greatest rock & roll song ever made and then proceeded to tear it up to an almost indecipherable heresy without even one obscenity. That is the magic of Louie Louie. The most popular version of the released song was performed by the Kingsmen. Though not the best musicians on the block, the Kingsmen did it justice thanks to Jack Ely’s’ tortured indecipherable singing. You could make out “Louie Louie” on the verse and “Let’s give it to them right now” right before the instrumental break but that’s about it. The Kingsmen transformed Berry’s low key ballad into a rock & roll rave up with twangy guitar, background chatter and Ely’s vocals. Marsh felt it was Ely’s helium vocals and that command “Give it to ’em right Now” gave the recording its eternal greatness. Besides the Kinks, at least 1600 bands have used that tried and true riff that is so alluring -duh duh duh. duh duh including the Angels ,Paul Revere & the Raiders,  Beach Boys, Beau Brummels, the Cult and Don & The Goodtimes

Marsh could not reveal the actual lyrics written by Berry due to copyright laws. So the legend continues.

Louie, Louie,
me gotta go.
Louie, Louie,
me gotta go.

A fine little girl, she wait for me;
me catch a ship across the sea.
I sailed the ship all alone;
I never think I'll make it home

Three nights and days we sailed the sea;
me think of girl constantly.
On the ship, I dream she there;
I smell the rose in her hair.

Me see Jamaica moon above;
It won't be long me see me love.
Me take her in my arms and then
I tell her I never leave again.

 

 

As original Kingsmen member Dick Peterson later said in an interview: "Louie Louie" was just a harmless record.  Just a bunch of boys having a party, letting it all go. The F.B.I. made a big deal out of something that, those days ... well, listen to the lyrics on records today! We were tame. We were nothing. You couldn't even understand what was being said. Nowadays they're talking about killing women on records. Give me a break!

 

Marsh penned a real winner here in a brief 207 page manuscript that should stand as the Holy Grail for rock journalism. Buy it on eBay it is not expensive.

 

 

 

Book Review Paul McCartney - A Life

                                                               
                                                                            

                                                                      

Paul McCartney

A Life

By Peter Ames Carlin

I bought this book when it was published in 2009 but I didn’t get around to reading it until five years later. I don’t know what got in the way. I had consumed several Beatles books from Bob Spitz’s biblical volume to the Love You Make by Derek Taylor, Phillip Norman’s Shout and Hunter Davies 2^nd revised edition of The Beatles. I was decided to explore Carlin’s book to get a deeper understanding of why my favorite Beatle was becoming less intriguing to me especially with the deaths of John Lennon and George Harrison. I began listening to their back catalog of music and was intrigued by their individual accomplishments outside the Beatles canon and began to sour on McCartney’s silly love songs preferring Lennon’s Avant Garde edginess and Harrison’s spiritual sensuality.

Carlin begins his historical account with an overview of McCartney’s home life with loving parents and life-long friendship with Ivan Vaughn. Paul lost his mother when he was fourteen year old and he carried that loss for the rest of his life. The pain would be revisited again and again leaving McCartney scarred, staring into the abyss and losing his way by sheltering his emotions, unable to give a voice to his sorrow.

McCartney was the most beautiful Beatle but he was more than a pretty face. Carlin paints an honest portrait of the man and the musician, warts and all. It gives the narrative a sense of balance. He takes the reader for a ride through Beatlemania through the eyes and ears of McCartney offered through first-hand accounts from a cast of characters including lovers, musicians, managers, various thieves as well as McCartney himself.

The early stages of Beatlemania in 1963 and the later disaffection in 1969/70 are covered convincingly. The Decca Audition was unconvincing for George Martin. He felt that his young charges were not quite ready and that their songs were unprofessional, yet he saw something in the lads that was compelling, their humor and goof natured ribbing. So Martin plunged ahead and helped seal the Beatles fate.

Carlin is able to give nuance to the changes McCartney was experiencing as he became an adult. His first serious adult romance was with Jane Asher. He moved into the Asher home and learned about bourgeois values. Ultimately he proved to be an unfaithful lover and went on to a series of relationships. Women were drawn to his charm and incredible good looks. At this point of his life he was simply beautiful. He hid several long lasting affairs with a series of beautiful women including Peggy Lipton, Maggie McGivern and Francie Schwartz, his insecurity reached mammoth proportions.

The 1967 glory of Sergeant Peppers is a powerful testament to the genius of the Lennon/McCartney collaboration. They were the principal writers of the Beatles catalog, one fed the other and the inspiration could be a nod and a wink. It was a concept album in only a loosest form and the songs were linked not by a prominent theme but on a fundamental assumption that Lennon asserted in Strawberry Fields Forever, nothing is real. It was in this mindset that John and Paul created an enduring masterpiece, A Day in the Life.

By 1968, the cracks began to appear as each member of the band was growing into adulthood. Carlin was able to untangle the layers of growth as well as the ongoing ennui resulted from their self-imposed insularity. The world was not safe for them. The Beatles fan base was massive yet there was always a threat from the silly bourgeoisie, the authorities and the deranged. They were public figures, perhaps the most endeared group of musicians since Frank Sinatra. They were seekers and they tried acid, marijuana as well as transcendental meditation but the Maharishi proved to be only too human, Lennon named him sexy Sadie. The White album was created during the retreat and it revealed the growth of the Beatles. Paul was wild and free and desperately unhappy. All of Paul’s affairs ended in 1968 when Linda Eastman entered his life. He finally found a balance in a love relationship. They married on March 12, and never looked back.

The Get Back sessions began on January 2^nd 1969 with cameras filming everything. Tensions ran high as McCartney took on a self-anointed leadership role as the other Beatles seethed. At various times each of the individual Beatles left the sessions only to return. It was a fractious situation that did not provide a good vibe for creative ideas to be exchanged. They launched into jams that recalled their early catalog such as Every Little Thing and Strawberry Fields Forever. Despite the discord the final product was incredible – Get Back, Let it Be, Long & Winding Road, Two of Us, Don’t Let Me Down and I’ve Got a Feeling. The atmosphere was so smacked out and angry that the tapes gathered dust for several months until Phil Spector got the nod to work on the tapes. The result was mixed as Spector’s wall of sound buried the nuance of many of the songs.

Abbey Road became the phoenix rising from the ashes. The four Beatles were all onboard and the results were astonishing, a testament to their incredible craft. Harrison wrote two of the best songs on the album. Something and Here Comes the Sun. The youngest Beatle became a major player on the disc. McCartney was big brother to his protégé though Harrison didn’t welcome McCartney’s largesse with open arms.

Carlin eloquently writes about the losses in McCartney’s life starting with his mother Mary followed by the deaths of John Lennon, George Harrison, childhood chum Ivan Vaughn and Linda.  Linda’s diagnosis came in the same week that Free as Bird was released (from the Beatles anthology). It also coincided with the Anniversary of John Lennon’s death. The was a loving marriage that would teeter on the brink, often due to Paul’s demands yet it sustained itself for 29 years until Linda’s death in April 17^th  1998. Upon Linda’s death Paul released a statement, “The world is a better place because of her; I love you Linda. Paul  XXX XXX.

Carlin reported that in June 2007 Paul helped dedicate a monument to John. Yoko accepted the honor for her late husband. She referred to Paul as a magnificent man and all the surviving Beatles and their kin as family. She concluded “The Beatles family is a very very strong family.”

Carlin was able to give us all a glimpse of the real Paul McCartney, warts and all. He was a great songwriter, a philanthropist and an egomaniac. He was loved by many and loathed by some. He reached the zenith of a creative spark as a Beatle though he diluted his image as a solo artist, he is only human. Now he faces old age as a seventy-two year old man who dies his hair brown and keeps himself manicured for the press. He is a wonder and a blustery cad. In his collaboration with The Fireman, Paul helped create Electric Arguments. It is an incredible musical statement, Paul sings…

Listen to me…can you hear me

Feel the choir, feel the thunder

Everywhere a sense of childlike wonder!