by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
My “feature” last night was yet another PBS pledge-break
special with the typically awkward title My Music: Rock, Rhythm and Doo-Wop, whose entry on PBS’s Web site denotes that it was
aired November 10, 2016 but doesn’t say how old the show is — a significant
omission for this type of program, which presents old rock ’n’ roll, rhythm-and-blues
and doo-wop acts in recent concert but it would be nice to know how recent it was. After all, these acts are, shall we
say, venerable, and in particular
I’d like to know if anyone who was featured on this show has died since it was
filmed. From my point of view the program — directed by T. J. Lubinsky as one
of his innumerable forays into programming the pop music of the 1950’s and
early 1960’s for PBS — was weighted too heavily towards doo-wop and not enough
towards rock and rhythm, though it did have one advantage over some of Lubinsky’s previous productions. This
time he didn’t show any dead people; in some of his shows he’s represented
deceased artists via film clips, which had the ironic effect of presenting the
dead performers more advantageously than the live ones, since we were seeing
the dead ones in clips from their artistic and commercial primes while we were
seeing the living ones as they appear now (or at least as they appeared when
Lubinsky filmed them — the title Rock, Rhythm and Doo-Wop is not to be confused with Rock, Pop and Doo-Wop, which Lubinsky made in
2011 with some of the same performers he featured here). The show opened with a
pure rock ’n’ roller, and one of the greatest of all time, Little Richard — he may not have
quite invented rock (as Jerry Butler, who MC’d the show but oddly didn’t
perform himself), and there are arguably people who were doing what became rock
’n’ roll even earlier than he was (like Louis Jordan, Roy Brown, Sister Rosetta
Tharpe, Professor Longhair and his disciple, Fats Domino), but he’s one of the
great practitioners of the form and the only one left from a classic rock show
I saw in San Francisco in 1971 that also featured Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley.
What I remember about that show is that Berry and Diddley were content to work
with a pick-up band (the guitarist in it was cute but overall they were
uninspired; occasionally an audience for a Chuck Berry show got to see him play
with a then-unknown musician who’d later become a star in his own right, like
Steve Miller in San Francisco in 1966 or Bruce Springsteen in New Jersey in
1973, but those dates were few and far between) but Richard brought his own
group and benefited handsomely by it. Last night he did the song “Keep
A’Knockin’,” the last piece he recorded in 1958 before he abruptly (and,
blessedly, temporarily) quit the music business to study for the ministry — it
was a 57-second tape he gave to his producer, Art Rupe of Specialty Records,
who repeated sections of it and thereby stretched it out to 2:17, and it got
even more stretched out in the Rock, Rhythm and Doo-Wop show as Richard kept on repeating it for about five
minutes, periodically shutting up so the fine saxophonist in Lubinsky’s studio
band could show off and solo.
Little Richard’s only concession to age is that
he hardly moves around on stage at all anymore — he basically stood still at
the piano but he could still hammer out those power-chord triplets he learned
from the gospel records of singer-pianist Arizona Dranes in the late 1920’s
(Richard himself named her as one of his biggest influences, which probably had
a lot of rock fans scratching their heads and thinking, “Who the hell is
Arizona Dranes?”) — and that shrieking voice of his is as intense and
viscerally grabbing as ever. Indeed, I wondered why T. J. Lubinsky had put
Little Richard on first because just about anything else would sound weak and
wimpy by comparison — ideally Richard should have been on last — but at least Lubinsky was savvy enough to put on
as his second act a group that wasn’t even trying to mine the same territory Richard had. They were
the white group Kathy Young and the Innocents, and they did the closest thing
they ever had to a hit, a song called “A Thousand Stars” that was light,
innocent and a nice depiction of teenage love. Then the Rays came on and did their big hit, “Silhouettes” (an interesting revamping of
the same theme Bing Crosby and his
songwriters had trolled in the early 1930’s with a song called “Shadows on the
Window,” though in the Rays’ version — unlike in Bing’s — the singer who thinks he sees silhouettes on the window shade of his
girlfriend making out with another guy turns out to be “on the wrong block”),
after which one of Berry Gordy’s early signings from Motown, The Contours, tore
through their one hit, “Do You
Love Me (Now That I Can Dance)?” I remember reading about this song in Herbert
Kohl’s book 36 Children, in which
he as a well-meaning young white Jewish teacher in a Harlem grade school
naïvely asked his students about that song, thinking it shouldn’t really matter
to a young girl whether her boyfriend can dance, and got a thorough taking-down
of his white-boy naïveté when the kids told him, “Dancing is a soul thing.” I also remember first hearing the
song in the Dave Clark Five’s cover on their first album, Glad All
Over, and thinking it was one of the best
things on the disc — and then I heard the Contours version, and of course the
Black Detroiters totally blew away the white Londoners on this one!
After the
Contours came a doo-wop group called the Duprees, a Black group covering the
white song “You Belong to Me,” a big hit for Jo Stafford on Capitol in 1952 —
though to my mind the very best version ever was by Judy Garland, also in 1952,
when she was substituting for Bing Crosby on his radio show while Bing was with
his wife, Dixie Lee, who was in a hospital dying of cancer. The Duprees’ cover
was pleasant but hardly in a league with either of the solo white women who
made this song special! Then came the first of the interminable pledge breaks that
make these shows, and PBS in general, incredibly annoying — and which we’ll
probably have to endure more of (along with commercial interruptions in the
middle of PBS’s major programming as well) once the Republican Congress and the
Trump administration have their way and totally defund PBS — and afterwards
they showcased a singer-songwriter I’d never heard of, Earl Townsend, who in
1958 instead of having to record for teeny-tiny labels with substandard sound
quality and chancy distribution, got a crack at a major-label contract when Joe
Zerga of Capitol Records heard a demo he’d made of a song called “For Your
Love” (a romantic ballad and not
the similarly titled but far more rocking song that became the Yardbirds’ first
hit). Townsend saw himself mainly as a songwriter and was hoping Zerga would
give “For Your Love” to a Capitol artist to record — instead, much to
Townsend’s astonishment, Zerga suggested that Townsend record it himself.
Townsend got the full Capitol treatment — not only a single deal but an entire
album with no less than Nelson Riddle as his arranger/conductor, though it was
another big-band veteran, ex-Lunceford arranger and trumpeter Gerald Wilson,
who arranged “For Your Love.” (Incidentally, I got most of that information
from an online obituary on the Los Angeles Times Web site, http://articles.latimes.com/2003/aug/16/local/me-townsend16,
which states that Townsend died in 2003 — which really dates this program and shows just how far in the
past it was filmed.)
Townsend’s other big hit was for another artist: he
co-wrote and co-produced Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On.” Incidentally, a
YouTube posting of “For Your Love” features a cover scan of a Townsend-Riddle
album called glad to be here (the
all-lower case spelling is on the original) in which Capitol’s photographer
seemed to be aiming him towards the “Black Sinatra” image, complete with hat —
and on the Rock, Rhythm and Doo-Wop show
the arrangement was close to the original and Townsend’s voice, though lower,
rougher and gravellier than it had been in 1958, certainly communicated the
song’s moving message of commitment. Townsend had three women backup singers in
back of him and was wearing a baseball cap emblazoned with the legend “Big
Poppa” — a bit of bravado one wouldn’t associate with the singer of such a
romantic ballad, though maybe it’s more understandable when you realize this
guy did co-write “Let’s Get It
On.” After Townsend’s number (both the original recording and the clip from
this program are available on YouTube, in case you’re interested: the 1958
original on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuBTt8cVHt8
and the Rock, Rhythm and Doo-Wop
version on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6qAUpN2ge8)
came what I thought was the most interesting number on the program performed by
white artists: the Reflections, of whom I’d never heard of before, who had a #6
hit single in 1964 with a song called “(Just Like) Romeo and Juliet.” Given
what happened to Romeo and Juliet at the end of Shakespeare’s play, I’m
surprised that any young teenage
lovers would want to compare themselves to them, but the song itself is great. The Reflections were from Detroit but I suspect
their record filtered out to the New Jersey music scene, if only because it
sounds so much like an early Bruce Springsteen song it seems likely to me the
Boss heard it when it was new and was influenced by it.
After that they brought
on Lou Christie for his one hit,
“Lightning Strikes” from 1966, and though he doesn’t have the killer falsetto
that made the original record so much fun (when the song had to go high, the
three women backup singers — I think the same ones Townsend had used — had to
cover for him), Christie’s normal male-range voice is actually quite nice even
though it’s more Sinatra-lite than a real rock voice. Then Little Anthony and
the Imperials came out and did three
songs — a rare privilege in a show like this, whose message to most of the acts
seems to have been, “You only made one record anybody remembers. Sing that and
then get off the stage” — “Tears on My Pillow,” “Shimmy-Shimmy Ko-Ko Bop,” and
probably their best record, the lovely ballad “Going Out of My Head.” Little
Anthony’s voice was hard to hear at first — the sound engineers on this program
didn’t always get the lead singer loud enough for the first few bars — but once
they got the mix adjusted he was in excellent form, one singer who has kept his falsetto from his glory days. After yet
another pledge break Bobby Lewis came out for two songs, one of which I didn’t
write down in time but the other was his great hit, “Tossin’ and Turnin,” and he too had held up surprisingly
well vocally. Then the Fleetwoods, one of the better white doo-wop groups, did
their haunting hit “Mister Blue,” following which another group I’d never heard
of before, Larry Chance and The Earls, did a song called “Remember Me” — not the one Bing Crosby so beautifully recorded in 1938
and Tommy Dorsey’s most underrated male singer, Stuart Foster, revived with the
Dorsey band in the late 1940’s. After that a Black vocal group called the
Limelights (whom I remembered getting confused with the white folk group The
Limeliters — I mistakenly typed the name “The Limelighters” into a search
engine and kept getting references for the Limelights) did their biggest hit by far, “Daddy’s Home.”
After yet
another pledge break Lloyd Price, the singer who’d been having hits since his
1952 song “Lawdy, Miss Clawdy” became Specialty Records’ first crossover hit
(label owner Art Rupe recalled that he’d see white people buying it throughout
the South and saying, “Oh, it’s for my chauffeur,” or, “It’s for my maid,” when
of course they really wanted it for themselves) and who previously had been
seen on the show co-MC’ing with Jerry Butler (original lead singer for The
Impressions, who broke through with the haunting R&B ballad “He Will Break
Your Heart” and was the first singer to record “Moon River” — it wasn’t Andy
Williams, and having Butler sing either “He Will Break Your Heart,” “Moon
River” or both would have considerably boosted this show’s quality: instead he only MC’d), came out and did “Stagolee.” I hadn’t
realized until I saw the recent folk documentary American Epic that the first record of what I’d always regarded as
such a quintessentially Black song came from a white artist, West Virginia coal miner and part-time
singer Frank Hutchison in 1928 (though Mississippi John Hurt covered it a year
later for the same label, Okeh, and thereby established it as a Black song).
What I did know was that this was
the first record Lloyd Price made after he jumped from the Specialty label to
ABC, a major company then (they’d also lure Ray Charles from Atlantic), and
that he recorded it in two versions. The first rocked the song up but stuck
closely to the original folk lyrics, in which Stagolee shoots his friend Billy
Lyons after Billy accused Stagolee of cheating him in a craps game. The second
was made after Dick Clark told ABC’s promotion people that he loved the record
musically but couldn’t play on his American Bandstand show such a raunchy record that seemed to be
glorifying murder, so someone wrote a cleaned-up lyric in which Stagolee and
Billy were two teenagers arguing over a girl and ultimately making up as
friends. Fortunately on Rock, Rhythm and Doo-Wop Price sang the original, uncompromised version — and
belted it out beautifully.
After that came another group I’d never heard of, Lenny Coco and the Chimes,
doing another doo-wop cover of a standard: “Once in a While,” written in 1937
by Michael Edwards and Bud Green and stunningly recorded by Sarah Vaughan in
1947 — her version swoops up and down the scales in her trademark style and
manages to blend astonishing technique with intense emotion. It was actually
introduced by Louis Armstrong and covered by quite a few great singers,
including Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Patti Page and Mose Allison
(on his last album, The Way of the World), but to my mind young Sassy owns this song and a doo-wop version,
however cleverly arranged (which this one was), was hardly going to come even
within hailing distance of the great Sarah. Afterwards they brought on another one-hit wonder group, Gene Hughes and the Casinos
(like Earl Townsend, Hughes died early in the 2000’s — February 3, 2004, age
67, from complications following an auto accident), a nine-piece doo-wop group
from Cincinnati whose one hit was a hauntingly beautiful ballad called “Then
You Can Tell Me Goodbye.” I’ve heard this song other places because other
oldies cover groups have done it, and interestingly it became a hit in 1967 — a
bit late in the day for the doo-wop style given that the sounds that were
ruling the charts just then were psychedelic rock and the blues-rock style that
eventually became heavy metal — and the song itself was written by country
singer-songwriter John D. Loudermilk, a bit of a departure for him given that
his most famous piece was the anti-poverty plea “Tobacco Road.” According to
their Wikipedia page, “The Casinos were playing in a Cincinnati club where WSAI
disc jockey Tom Dooley liked to visit. Dooley had a song he wanted to record
but needed a band to provide the music. The Casinos had been getting great
reaction to ‘Then You Can
Tell Me Goodbye’ at the club and wanted to record it. Dooley offered
to pay for studio time at Cincinnati’s King Records Studio for the group to
record their song if they would back up Dooley on his song. While Dooley’s song
didn't see success beyond WSAI, the Casinos’ tune quickly became a national
hit.”
The finale of the show was much-ballyhooed — we were breathlessly
promised a reunion of a famous band in such fulsome terms one would have
thought we were going to see a Beatles reunion with a spirit medium channeling
John Lennon, but instead it was Fred Parris rejoining the Five Satins to sing
lead on their biggest hit, “In
the Still of the Night,” which Parris wrote in 1954 while stationed with the
U.S. Army in Germany: the song was inspired by the long nights during which he
was on watch duty and therefore had to stay up all night. (Johnny Cash wrote his first song, “Hey Porter,” in Germany when he was
serving with the U.S. Air Force in 1954.) Parris’s voice was in excellent form
and “In the Still of the Night” is one of the greatest doo-wop songs, a
heartfelt ballad that challenges and transcends the rather stupid clichés of
the form and achieves the emotional power of the later soul style. My previous
impression of shows in the My Music
(or, as PBS sometimes spells it in obeisance to the ridiculous nomenclature of
computer programs, MyMusic
without the space) series had been that of the veteran singers brought back on
stage for these programs, the Black singers’ voices have generally held up
better than the white singers’ voices — which I attributed to the fact that
most of the Blacks who sang this music began in African-American churches and
were given professional vocal training by the church choir directors, while
white singers who took up this sort of music bought into the myth that the
Black singers’ voices were “untrained” and quickly destroyed their voices thinking
that all they had to do to sing soul was to scream. (Exhibits A and B: Bonnie
Tyler and Stevie Nicks.) This time around, the survival rate (or lack of same)
among the Black and white voices sounded pretty even, and the overall show was
pretty good even though I’d have liked more clarity as to just when this was recorded (according to an Internet search
it was 2001) and, as I said at the start of this piece, I’d have liked more
rock and rhythm and less doo-wop!
