Beat ’66 Show #5 – The Blurb

The Yardbirds “Shapes Of Things”

If the A-side pointed to the future musically with its proto-psychedelic Jeff Beck guitar solo then the B-side was a prescient anthem of peace and love, “You’re A Better Man Than I”

Also covered by punk band Sham 69 in the late seventies

The Four Shells “Hot Dog”

Incredibly, this was a B side. I repeat, that was a B side. This was the A-side – not bad either.

The Great!! Society!! “Free Advice”

The Great!! Society!! were far from the only alternative band of the era that took their name from Democrat US President Johnson’s Great Society project, a series of domestic programs aimed at combating poverty and racial injustice in the USA.

Although The Great!! Society!! only lasted a year, their style helped define the early San Francisco sound.

Formed by married couple Grace and Darby Slick, and Darby’s brother Jerry, the band released only one single during its lifetime, the Darby Slick penned “Someone to Love”, of which “Free Advice” is the B-side.
The single was issued in February 1966 on Autumn Records’ tiny Northbeach subsidiary label and made little impact outside of the Bay Area. While signed to Autumn Records, the band worked with the label’s staff producer, Sylvester Stewart (better known as Sly Stone), who at the time was still in the process of forming his own band, Sly and the Family Stone.

Sly seemingly quite as the band’s producer after it took them over fifty takes to record a version of “Free Advice” that was suitable for release.

The band never really settled on a stable lineup and after a particularly chaotic Hallowe’en gig in late 1966, Grace Slick quit to join Jefferson Airplane, taking “Someone To Love” with her as well as another song that Airplane would cover to pretty decent effect!

Carla Thomas “Let Me Be Good To You”

Great slow-burner from Carla Thomas.

Definitely not in any way based on this tune (incidentally, check out Diana Ross dive-bombing the mike on 7 seconds)

nv Groep 65 “Pipe And You Like It”

I am indebted to the excellent Dutch music fansite nederbeat.nl for the following information on nv Groep ’65.

“The singer of this band Warner Landkroon was somewhat of a celebrity in Amsterdam. This was mainly attributed to his strange appearance due to his Ultra long hair and beard. In the unofficial contest of longhaired man he claimed to be the man with the longest hair in town, although there were several beatniks who disputed his claim.

In 1965 and ‘66 the band played regularly in and around Amsterdam. They toured the same places like dutchbeat icons The Oudsiders such as The Rembrandtpleintheater and at the Double Wow club organized by the Hitweek magazine. One band member Tom Krabbedam who left the band in 65 would later join The Outsiders as guitarist player.

In 65 they released two singles at the Deltalabel, Dankzij de Heer/Tanger and Pipe and you like it/Lost. Both are pretty weird anthems. The first Danzij de heer (With the help of the Lord) (below) wasn’t supposed to be blasphemous, on the contrary, but Christians didn’t see it that way and the record was banned”

Landkroon was arrested in the summer of 1966 for drug offences, leading to the breakup of the band. It has been reported that after many years in the wilderness, he eventially found solace in the Bible and became a Christian.

Junior Walker And The All Stars – Shoot Your Shot

B-side to their hit single I’m A Road Runner was to all intents and purposes a reworking of Shotgun – a “version” if you like.

“Shoot Your Shot” appears on the 1965 album “Shotgun”, released to coincide with the success of the Big Hit and featuring a collection of A and B sides, including this little-heard classic:

Goldie “Don’t Look Back”

Next a song made famous by Dusty Springfield but it was first a hit, albeit a minor one, for Goldie.

Goldie was lead singer with the excellent all-female group Goldie And The Gingerbreads. Born Henya Raven in Poland she came to the USA in 1947 with her parents and sister after surviving incarceration by the Nazis in a prison camp. The nickname Goldie came from her mother who thought adopting a more American sounding name would help her fit in.
Goldie and The Gingerbreads toured with the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, the Kinks, and Manfred Mann. They reached the charts with their hit “Can’t You Hear My Heart Beat” in 1965. The song reached #25 on the UK Singles Chart. The band stayed in London for two years.

Billed as “Goldie”, she released the original version of the classic Carole King-Gerry Goffin composition “Goin’ Back” in the spring of 1966. However this single was withdrawn within a week by producer Andrew Loog Oldham when he heard that Dusty Springfield had recorded it – Dusty’s version went Top Ten.

Paul Revere And The Raiders “Kicks”

Written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil for the Animals, who turned it down on account of its perceived puritanical anti-drugs message. Ironically, questions were asked by some radio censors on account of the title.

People are stupid sometimes.

Millie Small “Be My Guest”

The Blues Busters “Wings Of A Dove”

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Both these tracks are taken from the album “Ska At The Jamaica Playboy Club” which came out in February 1966 and includes some excellent tracks – more on Beat ’66 Show #6 next week.

Stevie Wonder “Uptight (Everything’s Alright)”

After “Fingertips” had hit No 1 for Stevie in 1963, launching his career as a Motown hitmaker when he was just twelve years old, the following two and a half years saw his career meandering from inferior copies of The Hit to jazz to show tunes to recording tracks rejected by other artists.

But he had time on his side and a record company who knew the value of persevering from the lesson with the “No Hits” Supremes who had transformed into an act that could boast a run of five successive number one singles. And Stevie had time on his side – and in late 1965 the follow up chart topper was duly delivered, ushering in his golden period which would last the rest of the sixties, and indeed the rest of the seventies.

The B-side is a bit of a gem, too – a lovely soul ballad of a type you wouldn’t normally reckon would suit Stevie’s voice – see what you think.

Nashville Teens “The Hard Way”

Most famous for “Tobacco Road”, Nashville Teens made a few songs that, like “The Hard Way”, either just scraped into the nether regions of the charts or missed them completely. Another single in this category was this one from late 1965:

Harper – Main Theme – Johnny Mandel

Johnny Mandel’s main theme from the Paul Newman spy thriller “Harper” released in 1966.

After leaving the New York Military Academy as a Band graduate, Mandel composed jazz tunes for the likes of Woody Herman, Count Basie and this one for Chet Baker:



Don Covay And The Good-Timers “See Saw”

Don Covay died a year ago (almost to the day at the time of writing this). His career covered the entire spectrum of black music, from doo-wop through R and B to soul and funk.

This is the title track from his “See Saw” album of February 1966, an album largely co-written with Steve Cropper of Booker T and the MGs and hundreds of Stax / Atlantic soul tunes.

One of the best known tracks on the record is “Sookie Sookie”, covered among others by Steppenwolf (in a rock stylee) and a jazzed-up take from Grant Green. This is Don Covay’s original
version.

Mary Wells “Dear Lover”

What a difference two years makes. When “My Guy” hit Number One in March 1964, Mary Wells’ status as the Queen of Motown seemed assured. By February 1966, she had left the label at the instigation of her manager for a better deal at 20th Century Fox when she turned 21 (as was her right as a minor signing a recording contract), and her career as a hit-maker was in terminal decline amid rumours of Motown allegedly bribing radio stations to NOT play her records.

This was her last R&B Top Ten hit – the album it appeared on, “The Two Sides Of Mary Wells” also featured a decent Staxtastic take on the Stones’ “Satisfaction”:

Jean Shepard “Many Happy Hangovers To You”

Jean Shepard was one of the first women to forge a successful career in country music, kicking off in 1953 with “A Dear John Letter”, a half-spoken duet with Ferlin Husky about the Korean War. She had hits in the US country charts until 1978 and has recently celebrated 60 consecutive years as a member of the Grand Ole Opry, a feat only matched by the late LIttle Jimmy Dickens. Jean still performs to this day at the tender age of 82 8=)

This is her other country number one single of 1966 – no woman in country music has a better, more believabl and natural delivery, for my money.

The Outsiders “Time Won’t Let Me”

Most of The Outsiders had been in an R and B band called the Starfires. When the Beatles arrived in the USA and everything changed, they morphed into what to these ears sounds like a garage rock’n’roll band with added horns.

“Time Won’t Let Me” was the first of their two hits, the band’s sound perhaps falling between too many stools to be enthusiastically adopted by the record-buying public. The choice of B-side seems to indicate that the record company also thought this, since it features no horn section. IMHO it would be massively improved by one.

The Barbarians “Moulty”

One of the strangest records to surface in th eearly part of 1966, part country-style talking lament, part garage noise, it almost predicts grunge 20 years early.
Victor “Moulty” Moulton, the subject of the song, was drummer of The Barbarians, despite having list his left hand when at the age of 14, a homemade pipebomb prematurely detonated while it was in Moulton’s grip.

The hand was amputated, and subsequently replaced with a metallic prosthetic device that Moulton could hold a drum stick in.

When Moulton formed the group in 1964, his disability added an unusual allure to the band’s rebel image.

Moulty is the only member of the band to actually appear on the record, the backing being provided by members of The Hawks (later The Band).

Originally, the song was only intended to be released under the consent of Moulton, who was opposed to its distribution. However, Laurie Records released “Moulty” along with “I’ll Keep On Seeing You” in February 1966 as a single. Upon discovering the distribution of the song, Moulton was infuriated with president of Laurie Records, Robert Schwartz, reportedly quarreling with him, and destroying some copies of the single.[6]

“Moulty” still got to the respectable lower reaches of the US charts and became something of an inspirational anthem.
However, The Barbarians were so disgruntled with management for releasing the song, despite Moulton’s insistence against it, that the band ceased relations with the company

Bob Dylan “One Of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later)”

Released on February 14th, 1966 as the lead single from the “Blonde On Blonde” album, this song performed poorly in the charts. I’m scratching my head as to exactly why – perhaps folks had proper love songs on their mind.

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

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.

Waving Flags

I do love the old Queen. Still just as classy as ever as you can see from this video clip here

If you caught any of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee concert last week, you will have seen an array of popular British music acts from down the years. It all seemed very pleasant in the middle of an extended Bank Holiday weekend, with everyone in such a good mood.

There was Cliff Richard, Paul McCartney and Tom Jones (and of course Elton John!)  representing the old guard, Madness on top of Buck House and Jessie J and JLS among the current acts. Grace Jones and her amazing hula-hoop stole the show for me but that could be because deep down I suspect I am a gay man trapped in a straight man’s body.

And all I’ve heard since then is either “That was fantastic, what a great selection of bands” or “What a load of rubbish, we’ve got way better bands than that they could have had”. Polar opposite views, but they share a common assumption – we do pop music better than the rest of the world combined. You’ve only got to look at their charts – they’re all full of British music.

Erm – newsflash. The reason we, as English speaking people, think our music is better than the rest of the world’s is that we can’t speak French, Russian, Swahili, Punjabi, Dutch, Chinese or Swedish.

And the reason the charts in so many other countries have so many English speaking records is that a large percentage of the world’s population learns English from the cradle.

And you know why they speak English? That’s right. Its because the most powerful nation of the past 100 years is English speaking. And it ain’t England, or Britain, its the USA.

I listen to a lot of music. A lot. Because I’ve lived my whole life in England most of it is British or American. Its easy to get parochial on this point, but its also incorrect.

You only have to spend a short time abroad (and by that I mean mixing with the locals, not just staying in the Brit bars) to realise that there is a hell of a lot of music out there – some good, some bad, some great, but all of it worthy of a listen, and worthy of consideration in exactly the same way “our own” music is. And in the cases where different countries’ music has fused, its interesting to see the different takes on a familiar beat.

There’s a huge project to be done by somebody  on the music of the world (NOT “World Music” which in this country simply means another bunch of obsessives with another exclusive musical club – the arrogance of lumping the entire non-English speaking world into one category is so damn English)

Unfortunately, this is not that project. I don’t have the time as I have a day job and a relationship to hold down.

But over the next few weeks, to coincide with the 2012 European Football Championships, I will be featuring a random sample of music from each of the sixteen countries taking part. There is absolutely no plan or rhyme or reason for the selections, other than I love them all, and they won’t be bands everyone knows (so if you guessed Abba for Sweden, Demis Roussos for Greece and James Last for Germany, then guess again)

All are well worthy of your attention although it has to be said it isn’t always for purely musical reasons (you’re gonna LOVE Russia!)

To kick off, then, here are a couple of vids from great European bands whose countries unfortunately didn’t make it to Euro 2012 :

Its a mystery to me how Belgium, with Vincent Kompany and Eden Hazard, managed to avoid qualifying. They would have graced the tournament. It is also a mystery to me why this band are not huge. They even sing in English fer Chrissakes.

This lot are brilliant – saw them at the Thekla in Bristol a few weeks ago. They will go further than the Norn Iron football team ever will, with or without Neil Lennon.

And finally, ending on an “up”, Norway didn’t quite sneak in but Katzenjammer are the best band I’ve seen in a very long time. Dig this cheesy madcap trumpet ride!


Okay, back tomorrow with the first of the sixteen countries, ahead of the first day’s matches.

One last thing about Elton. I was so relieved when he didn’t do Candle In The Wind with the Diana words. That would have been awkward turtle and no mistake.