Tag Archives: Ray Charles

FESTIVE FIFTY YEARS AGO 1962 – PART TWO
27
Dec

December 27th, 2012

Welcome to the second part of the rundown of the Festive Fifty from 1962, or more accurately, my version of what might have appeared in the Festive Fifty in that year if John Peel had been (a) in the country (b) working for the BBC and (c) compiling a Festive Fifty. Enjoy!

40. LORD BLAKIE – Maria.

Lord Blakie was one of the lesser-known calypsonians to come out of Trinidad in the late fifties. Always in the shadow of the global superstar Mighty Sparrow, this was his finest hour, winning the first official “road march” with this song. He is so damn cool in this clip, too.

39. JET HARRIS – The Man With The Golden Arm.

Debut solo hit from the former Shadows bass player.

An off-the-cuff remark by Shadows guitarist Bruce Welch about Harris’ wife’s ongoing affair with Cliff Richard(!) led to Harris quitting the band in April 1962.

A mere four months later he was in the chart with this brilliant, searing arrangement of the theme from the 1955 Frank Sinatra film.

The subject matter of the film – heroin addiction – could be seen as a statement from Harris about his own addiction problems, although these involved the bottle rather than the needle.

38. GINO PARKS – Fire.

A massive blast of angry noise which was very much out of sync with the vast majority of Motown’s early 60s output.

Gino Parks can be said to have been ahead of his time – this record certainly was, by two or three years.

Unfortunately Berry Gordy’s ideas about what the “Motown sound” should be meant no place for this kind of record , and Parks had few further opportunities at the label.

37. THE EVERLY BROTHERS – I’m Not Angry.

A B-side which would undoubtedly have received more airplay on Peel’s show than its more famous A-side “Crying In The Rain”.

In 1977 Elvis Costello included a track with the same title on his debut album, and the similarities go beyond the title to include the meaning and intent of the protagonist.

By the end of both songs, the listener is left in no doubt that the guy in the song is fooling nobody, let alone himself.

36. THE VENTURES – My Bonnie Lies
Never massive in their home country in the same way their UK rivals The Shadows were in theirs, nevertheless The Ventures laid the instrumental groundwork for the surf sound that formed the second (ahem) wave of American rock’n’roll music.

This record, a hepped-up reworking of an old weepie, was only a minor hit, but its inclusion here can be traced to another, vocal version of the song that was popular in this year (in the UK at least).

35. RAY CHARLES – Half As Much

In which Ray Charles really pulls out all the showstopping stops and creates a huge, fat middle of the road record that is a million miles away from “What I’d Say”. The piano playing and voice are more restrained but still classic.

34. GENE CHANDLER – Duke Of Earl

In a later era, the likes of Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey would make careers out of doing voice exercises to music, but this was probably the first worldwide hit record to be created out of a doo-wop band’s warm-up routine.

Neither a fast doo-wop number or a slow ballad, its intermediate pacing made it stand out and it went to No. 1 in the early weeks of 1962.

33. ELVIS PRESLEY – Return To Sender

Elvis’s career was at least as much about making films by 1962 as it was about making music, and this song was one of the highlights from the bikini classic “Girls Girls Girls”.

32. BOB DYLAN – Talkin’ New York

If you can argue – and you can – that the truest work of an artist is in his early, penniless, hungry years, then how much truer is that of folk music, where honesty is the most prized, maybe the only, virtue?

This is one of the two self-compositions on Dylan’s first album, and it’s a cracker, honest and true, detailing Dylan’s experiences on arriving in the Big Apple as a 20-year-old singer and trying to get noticed.

“New York Times said it was the coldest winter in seventeen years
I didn’t feel so cold then”

31. LITTLE OTIS HAYES – I Out-Duked The Duke

Answer Records were a great tradition of the fifties and sixties, briefly being revived as a record industry stunt with “F.U.R.B”, a record which didn’t really live up to it’s illustrious predecessors of two or three generations ago.

This one is a belter. Little Otis takes the basis of the tune of “Duke Of Earl” and gleefully rips out a derogatory lyric about how he “popped the Dook’s girl” while he was out of town. Magnificent.

So, tomorrow evening it’s numbers 30-21. See you then.

FESTIVE FIFTY YEARS AGO 1962– PART ONE (50-41)
26
Dec

December 26th, 2012

I was idly musing about music the other day, while listening to Brian Matthew’s still excellent Sounds Of The Sixties on Radio Two.

If you’re not aware of the show, give it a go.

It’s not quite the parade of obvious, familiar hits you might find on a commercial station, and they cover every sixties genre from surf to psychedelia, Motown to early metal and all points inbetween.

I got to thinking about what sort of music John Peel, or his equivalent, would have played if he’d been on the radio in the early sixties and the phrase “Festive Fifty, Fifty Years Ago” popped into my head.

It seemed so obvious, I couldn’t believe nobody had ever done it before. A quick search on the Interweb confirmed that no, they hadn’t.

(not that I could see, anyway – if I am mistaken then please send me the links so I can check out how it differs from my take)

It seemed to happily coincide with me turning fifty this year.

So here is my take on what the Festive Fifty might have looked like in 1962 if John Peel – or somebody with similar eclectic tastes in music – had been on BBC Radio in 1962, and if he had invited his listeners to write in with their favourite tracks of the year.

The general consensus among music fans about 1962 seems to be that it was not a great year.

The initial surge of rock’n’roll had run out of steam a couple of years previously.

Elvis Presley had gone into the army in 1958 and although he came out in 1960 he wasn’t really making records with the same raw power.

The charts were full of crooners.

The great years of Stax and Motown lay ahead, and the British Beat Boom was only happening in one port town in the North-West of England.

Not a classic year, then?

I beg to differ. Here is part one of the evidence, m’lud.

50. SAM COOKE – Bring It On Home To Me

One of the pioneers of soul music, that is to say, singing with a lot more raw emotion than was traditional for black singers  of the forties and fifties, Sam Cooke became a huge star, with hits not only in the black record charts but also in the pop charts, thus paving the way for the likes of  Marvin Gaye, Bobby Womack and Al Green.

This song, about infidelity, was written by Cooke against the backdrop of a troubled marriage in which both himself and his wife Barbara had a number of extramarital affairs.  Several other artists, notably Eddie Floyd and The Animals, were later to have hits with the song, which would become a standard.

In 1962 it reached No.13 in the US chart but failed to chart in the UK, although it just sneaked into the Festive Fifty.

 

49. LITTLE STEVIE WONDER – Wondering

The twelve-year-old prodigy Stevland Hardaway Morris was signed to Berry Gordy’s Tamla label and recorded his first, instrumental album, “The Jazz Soul Of Little Stevie Wonder” in 1962.  Little Stevie didn’t sing on it and most of the tracks were written by his mentors Clarence Paul and Henry Cosby but this track is one of two to be co-written by the boy genius, and features a searing keyboard solo which was entirely Stevie’s creation.

 

48. GINO PARKS – For This I Thank You.

Berry Gordy’s theory for selling records was much the same as Lee “Scratch” Perry’s a few years later – churn them out in sufficient quantity and some of them will be hits. In a year when Marvin Gaye and Mary Wells, among others, were hitting the high numbers, records like this Northern Soul classic remained unjustly ignored. Gino Parks never had a hit, but he deserved one.

 

47. THE EVERLY BROTHERS – How Can I Meet Her

By 1962 Phil and Don Everly were expanding their style to include polished pop records like this one as well as their more traditional country-rock sound. The gorgeous vocal harmonies are still intact here, though. Lennon and McCartney were big fans, and I don’t think it’s too fanciful to see the influence of this record in some of the early Beatles songwriting efforts over the next couple of years.  Lyrically, this song is the natural grandfather of  “Fit But You Know It” by The Streets. (link).

 

46. DAPHNE ORAM – Four Aspects

Daphne Oram was a sound engineer at the BBC during and after World War II. She was largely responsible for setting up the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in 1957, becoming its first director.Realising her heart lay in creating her own compositions for their own sake and not merely as background or incidental music, she left the BBC, continuing to write music and inventing a system of drawing on strips of 35mm film which were read by photo-electric cells and converted into sound. She dubbed this system “Oramics” and this short piece is an early, eerie example of the possibilities of electronic music.

 

45. BYRON LEE AND THE DRAGONAIRES – Jump Up

The world first superstar of Jamaican music, Byron Lee and his band the Dragonaires had been around since 1956 but got their first big break when they appeared in a cameo in the first ever James Bond film “Dr No”, as the hotel band performing this song. Seen by movie-goers worldwide both at the time and to the present day, it gave the sort of exposure to Jamaican music that could not be bought for money.

44. BOB DYLAN – Fixin’ To Die

Bob Dylan’s first album contained very few originals, and this is a cover of an old Bukka White song, the lyrics of which examine the effect of the protagonist’s death on his family, which is most unsual for blues songs of the time. Dylan adjusted the melody and added a few of his own (uncredited) verses, which could either be seen as a young artist taking his first tentative steps to writing his own songs, or simply continuing the folk tradition of perpetually adding verses to existing songs.

43. THE TORNADOS – Jungle Fever

I like to think Peel would have approached playing records on his show like he did in the seventies, and play the B-side of a single as frequently as the A-side. Bet he’d have said he preferred this to the more illustrious A-side, too. Does “Telstar” get into the Festive Fifty of 1962? You’ll have to wait and soo

 

42.RAY CHARLES – It Makes No Difference Now

From the “Modern Sounds in Country And Western” album which saw Ray Charles make a deliberate and wildly successful attempt to cross his more usual blues and soul music with country and western. His rich tones perfectly suit country music, and the instrumentation brings a cool, jazzy feel which is being milked by artists on Radio Two to this day. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

 

41. THE BEATLES – Love Me Do

One of the lesser Liverpool groups of the very early 60s, the Beatles’ management were, however, close friends with the publisher of Mersey Beat, who featured the band heavily during 1961 and 1962.

There was some controversy when they unexpectedly won the paper’s readers’ poll in January 1962, when  favourites Rory Storm And The Hurricanes were found to have attempted to rig the vote. The Beatle’s young manager, Brian Epstein, has done exactly the same thing, but was not found out (Rory Storm’s manager had foolishly used a distinctive green pen for his multiple votes …)

The head of steam behind The Beatles grew throughout the year, and this record finally charted for them in October. There were rumours that Epstein had bought ten thousand copies of the record with his own money, but these were strenuously denied by the band.

Tomorrow, it’s the countdown from 40 to 31. Stay cool, hep cats.