American Hot Wax revisited (Alan Freed biopic)

Saw American Hot Wax today for the first time in about thirty years. Enjoyable enough, although more bitty than I remembered. There are good moments when Tim McIntyre as Alan Freed shows that the music matters to him, but as the film is given over to a concert after around the one hour point there isn't a lot of time to develop character.

Stand By Me - Part One

I can't remember when I first heard Stand By Me. It may even have been the Lennon reworking, as my earliest definite memory is of dancing to his version during one of the regular rock'n'roll nights at Tiffany's, Glasgow, in 1975, the enduring Rollin' Joe reassuring us (or himself): "John Lennon's coming home."

Stand By Me - Part Two

By the mid to late 50s, artists like Ray Charles and Sam Cooke were beginning to realise there was a lot to learn from the stripped down language of gospel songs as well as the singing which McPhatter had already introduced to a wider audience. They developed a new kind of music, with words cut to the bone, giving the singer space to linger over them, put more of himself into the performance: what was to become known as soul music.

Some say that There Goes My Baby is the first soul record; others go back to Ray Charles' I Got a Woman (1954), based on a gospel song; Charlie Gillett (author of the first serious study of Rock'n'Roll, The Sound of the City) has pointed out that the horns on this record are effectively doing the job of backing singers in a gospel quartet.

Doo Wop Dialog[ue]: 44

pismotality
(42/M/London, England)

According to Marsh (Buy the book and skip the postings!) Fred Parris was on guard duty "in the middle of a freezing Korean night" when the song came to him as he was thinking about Cole Porter's song (shades of Glorias 1 and 2!), so it sounds like the song was conceived out of nostalgiac need: a hunger for that sustaining image, however airbrushed the reality (just as at one point in Death of a Salesman Willy Lowman demands good news from his boys, and you feel he deserves it, even though he's really saying Lie to me "and I won't ask again...").

Your images in your last posting are really evocative and detailed but I like the fact that, although seeing a more complex reality than the songs, they too have a kind of roseate glow, a sense of heightened, poetically selective reality that sits well with the music - presumably down to a combination of your own distancing from the event and an awareness of audience in this public context, to say nothing of the fact that as soon as we pick up a pen (or incredible shrinking keyboard, as at this end) we become selective - can't pin down the whole of reality, anymore than you can definitively explain away the mysteries of Gloria or GT (though you made a pretty good fist of the former, I have to say). Nabokov said that "reality" is a word which can only exist in inverted commas. In the act of writing anything down we have to select, and therefore the act of remembering is to poeticise. Which brings us neatly (whew!) back to In the Still of the Night...


You're right. Magic. You can't really say any more, but it's fun, as you've shown, to try, so I'll follow your lead. You've said so much and so powerfully (as I'm sure our audience will agree) that I'll just bear down on a few points.

The vocals, backing and lead, are wonderful. Because they're all too human and flawed (we're not exactly talking the Platters or the Four Freshmen) they invest that simple song with themselves: frail humanity plus divine aspiration - the yearning for the loved one taking on a religious intensity, as so often in this gospel-derived genre - equals a winningly poignant combination, and what they most certainly do not lack is conviction.

There. Almost done (for now). The only other thing I want to mention is that line "hold me again, with all of your might.” That's the most affecting line of all, as you, I think, touched upon. Cause you can't ever hold on hard enough to make it alright, unchanging, forever: time, the light, are coming in to do their dirty work and all you can do is grasp at the memory and half remember and half invent, on a freezing cold Korean night.

And go down in doowop history because we all want someone to make it right, too.

Tony

Doo Wop Dialog[ue]: 42

pismotality
(42/M/London, England)

Clarke,

I've decided not to worry for the moment about starting, stopping or whatever. This is whatever it is, and will end whenever it ends. All I know is that the satisfactions of writing these posts and responding to yours are pretty considerable, akin to my "real" writing, and the immediacy (can't save and refine it) is definitely an antidote to my normal writing process. For the moment I've got the time to pursue it (even though the full size keyboard for this web TV won't be on sale till sometime later this month - maybe even this stabbing urgently at tiny letters is part of the process).

I think you're spot on with the "empty promise at best" bit - and maybe both sides know it. Someone said (poss. Marsh yet again) that the plea in Goffin-King's Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow - "Tell me now and I won't ask again" - is the girl wilfully deceiving herself: she knows there's only heartbreak ahead "when the night meets the morning sun" but still needs the formulaic reassurance at that moment – he owes her that, at least, if she's doing this for him.

The play I'm currently writing (or not writing, given that I'm doing this) is for the Soho Theatre in London, and a few months ago they had a production that moved me deeply: set in a home for expectant unmarried teenage mothers in 60s England, it showed them listening to girl groups and sending up the sentiments (eg mockingly echoing, with gestures, the Shangri-Las' portentous "Cause that can never...happen...AGAIN!") but at the same time needing, and half-believing, those dreams, despite the transparent fact they'd been let down by boys. Maybe believing in two contradictory things at once, a la Alice in wonderland, is a deep human need, and dooowop sums it up.

What you were saying about the light made me think of American Graffiti and the way the move from night into day, especially tor the Richard Dreyfuss character, is also a stripping of illusions: you can't go on living forever in that indeterminate, protective dimness, even if your name Is Blanche Dubois. And of course AG is about that post High School test of affections you were talking about.

I can see there's so much more I want to say (but the right words won't - ) and I've barely responded to, or conveyed my enjoyment of, your piece, let alone my response to the performance itself, but I'll take a break there to ensure this instalment will fit. No flipping - unless it's the Marcels' Blue Moon (Goodbye to Love).


The play, Be My Baby by actress and playwright Amanda Whittington, is still regularly revived and now taught as a school text; her website will direct you towards explanatory notes and a facebook page so that those involved in productions of the play can also help each other.

In what was for me the most touching scene, the girls are obliged to work in the laundry when Chapel of Love comes on the radio, gradually uniting them in a kind of happy frenzy: a girl stirring the boiling sheets with a pair of wooden pincers improvises a microphone; a (dry) sheet is wrapped around another girl and they all proceed to act out the lyrics with whatever comes to hand and celebrate the instant bride.

As well as being great fun it has a dramatic point because it shows how these girls from different social background actually have the same things in common, the same hopes and dreams, underneath, and it took the music to break down the protective barriers we'd seen earlier in the play.

If I'm not mistaken (and I could be, because I can't find my copy of the book), it was said of George Goldner that he had the emotional sensibility of a thirteen year old girl, and that when he first heard Chapel of Love he repeatedly thumped the table in his insistence that this was a massive hit. Maybe he cried, too, at the vision of eternal happiness ("never be lonely anymore") therein limned; I'd like to think so. But until I can relocate Ken Emerson's great book about the Brill Building, Always Magic in the Air, I can't be sure.

Doo Wop Dialog[ue]: 5

pismotality
(42/M/London, England)

Clarke,

Many thanks - I'm touched by your kind comments. I wrote a radio play about a doowop group - the first piece of serious writing I did - and during that process tried to articulate what it was about the music that moved me so much. One thing which I didn't mention in my previous posting is the male bonding thing - that these emotions which couldn't be articulated directly to each other by adolescent males are "safe", able to be exposed and shared when turned into this rough, vital art form.

I'm also fascinated by the contradictions: the Dells, self-professed "stone hooligans" outside the studio yet capable of that achingly tender, ridiculous yet touching song I referred to. And the idea of the spontaneous, direct outpouring of emotion – can’t remember the source but the image of a group singing at a corner, the lead turning to see a girl go by and launching into "Gloria" became the starting point of the play: the protagonist's unreal dreams of this girl and the gradually unfolding reality of the less than perfect relationship he develops with the flesh and blood woman.

And the poignancy of a frozen, perfect moment also seems at the heart of doowop for me: One Summer night, In the Still of the Night: I think Fred Parris had to add "(I'll Remember)" to avoid confusion with Porter's song title but that parenthesis is a clue to that sad pleasure in this music: its importance, its transience, and therefore its preciousness, is only fully appreciated in retrospect: "I never realised," sings Sollie McElroy in Golden Teardrops. Even that Dells song: sweet dreams "bring back the memory of you." As you might deduce I go for the ballads ...

A final thought. Doowop, lyrically, is often ridiculously naive - and I'm aware my distance from it both in time (b.1958) and place lends enchantment/romanticisation. But (much as I feel about the music of Donovan at his best) it's about looking at the world, at the possibility of love, with a sense of wonder rather than cynicism. Back to Dave Marsh: he tells of a hip record store customer mocking the Students' I'm So Young. Marsh says: "That's somebody' life. Who cares if it's corny and misshapen?" Amen.

Tony



Listen to I'm So Young and learn about the Students here.

Doo Wop Dialog[ue]: 1

The Diamonds: sophomoric contempt?

Below is the first long post I sent to Kewl Steve's Doo Wop Shop messageboard on 19th September 2000. Maybe I should have put this in the introduction to this blog, as it still spells out how I feel about doo wop today. The post doesn't need much contextualising; a debate had been taking place on the board about just what constituted doo wop: Crewcuts vs. Penguins, Gladiolas vs. Diamonds etc.

Although I was addressing the board as a whole, this first attempt to articulate the difference between those groups for myself is what triggered the lengthy dialog[ue] with Clarke, so this is really where that correspondence begins. The last preserved post, incidentally, is dated 1st October 2000 - so the ninety-plus pages of printouts which will eventually all be posted here under the heading of Doo Wop Dialog[ue] were the result of less than a fortnight's fevered activity.

It's difficult to give a definition of doowop that won't have people reaching for their keyboards, but I'm going to try anyway, in the hope that thinking about the music may enhance the pleasure of listening; obviously when statements are offered as Holy Writ that's something else again. With that in mind, here goes:

Doowop is (or let's say tends to be) music sung by a quartet or quintet, often male, where the instrumentation, if any, is essentially secondary to the interplay of voices, and is fairly rudimentary: accentuating a beat or subtly enhancing the overall tone, not vying with the vocal display for attention. The voices may be said to mimic instruments - the bass voice can perform a similar function to a double bass, or think of the late Gerald Gregory's great bass saxophone-like intro to Goodnight Sweetheart, Goodnight - and there's also that trumpet-like sound that Phil Groia termed the "blow harmonies" of the Moonglows.

Sophisticated as these groups are, the appeal is of something homemade, within the reach of everyone: "Music you or your lover could have made," as a Rolling Stone essay said of Earth angel (Penguins version!).

For my money, once vocal group records became productions - ie, once the voices became part of the overall effect rather than the primary focus - they stopped being pure doowop. The Drifters' There Goes My Baby is a great record but the kettledrums and strings mean we admire the producers as much as the group. I wouldn't be so stupid as to say "That's when the rot set in"; it just became something else.

The only trouble is that my definition would include the instrument-emulating Mills Brothers, and I don't think anyone would consider them within the genre. So this brings me to the next, and crucial, part of the definition: the voices must be, to some degree, gospel-inflected. Mills Brothers, Inkspots don't make it; the Ravens and the Orioles, even when singing similar material, do: it's that sense of raggedness, of each performance being alive, new-minted at that moment as opposed to a smooth duplication.

With groups like the Crewcuts I'm reluctant to impose a blanket ban, but they do seem a long way from gospel: the feel matters less than a surface brightness and smoothness, whereas group like the Capris somehow seem to have a sense of flexibility in their performance that (again) has affinities with gospel, even though it's a long way from the raunchinesss of some groups.

But I freely admit that there is a grey area that is down to the listener's subjective impression: I don't much like the Platters but presumably they come from that gospel root, antiseptic as their performances seem to me. Perhaps the best I can say is that the doowop performances which move me display their church roots more prominently.

Which seems a good point to reveal my top 5 doowop (oldies is too difficult):

Golden Teardrops - Flamingos
Sunday Kind of Love - Harptones
All Mine - 5 Satins
Chimes - Pelicans
Crying in the Chapel - Orioles

Finally, on to the Diamonds/Gladiolas debate. Dave Marsh in The Heart of Rock and Soul (1000 records assessed, inc. lots of doowop) says that groups like the Diamonds were basically responding to the institutionalised bigotry of a market which wanted "more acceptable" versions of black hits. And apparently this college-educated group viewed R&B with "dripping sophomoric contempt." (Marsh is a fun read!) But he admits their version is nevertheless "as exciting as it is insincere": "When the thrill's the thing who gives a &*%! about intentions?"

Is it doowop? Don't know; but it's definitely a great example of the trashy wonderfulness of pop and doesn't have the politeness of other white covers. That said, it's the Gladiolas' version I have in my collection, though the Diamonds' version helped turn me on to 50s music as a teenager in the doowop desert of Scotland in the early 70s ...

Whew! What a long posting! Thanks if you've stayed with it - and hope my tentative attempt at defining, for myself, this genre we all love is of use to others.

Tony

I'm resisting the temptation to expand or revise the original Doo Wop Shop posts. It seems to make more sense to add notes at the end, which also has the fun effect - for me, anyway - of making this blog more than a storeroom. So I didn't add, when talking about the Inkspots, the sentence which would have summed it up: as far as I'm concerned doowop is essentially the difference between that group's rendition of When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano and the Dominoes' recording with Clyde McPhatter. And if nothing else I'm consistent, as this 2007 review of a Mills Brothers collection shows.
The Rolling Stone essay came from their Illustrated History of Rock'n'Roll, I presume the first edition, which had wonderful large format pictures. That had a big effect on me in the late seventies, devouring the essays about doo wop and the list of recommended recordings. 

There was also a wonderful picture of Gerry Marsden (of Gerry and the Pacemakers fame), grinning from ear to ear; a later edition of the book seemed to have scaled down that photo, or maybe the whole book was smaller format, or maybe the British invasion was too terrible a memory, after all. 

Anyway, that began my formal education in doo wop, and I don't have a copy to thank the author of that doo wop essay. But what a wonderful phrase, which helps explain the music's appeal: however strange it seems, it's also within reach: "music you or your lover could have made."
 
One of the Diamonds is a prominent interviewee in a fairly good, but annoying brief, documentary about doo wop available on DVD, Life Could Be a Dream: the Doo Wop Sound. I've reviewed it on a certain well known shopping website and will probably reproduce it here, but I have to say that, intelligent and articulate as he seemed, it just felt wrong to have him there, especially with Dave Marsh's phrase echoing in my head: "sophomoric contempt ... sophomoric contempt..." In my review, I've convinced myself that a brief bit of archive footage provides damning evidence he and the other Diamonds aren't taking the genre seriously, but who knows?
And re Clyde McPhatter recording When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano, there's a story which I read in Bill Miller's book on the Drifters which says that McPhatter, leaned upon to sing it "properly," blurted out that this was the only way he could sing it. There you have it; that's doo wop. Compulsion before craft.

You Have Two (I Have None)

Stately is, I think, the word to describe this 1955 recording by the Orchids on Parrot Records: the tempo feels unrushed, processional. I was wrong to describe their more famous Newly Wed as "lumbering" earlier, as that implies clumsiness; what can, perhaps, be said is that the change in Newly Wed's tempo between the wordless opening and the entry of the lead vocal (Gilbert Warren?) is unusual - to these ears, anyway. (I did say I wasn't an expert. Unlike Billy Vera, who describes it properly here.)

You Have Two (I Have None) seems marginally faster, but the disjointed feel of Newly Wed, which fits perfectly with what little we can glean of the couple's story ("Hearts broken - broken in two, / Don't leave me here ..."), is replaced by what sounds like calm assurance or resignation, though at the point of highest emotion ("Tell me you love me, Show me that you care") it becomes clear that the song is a plea for union rather than a celebration of a union already achieved; we aren't given any indication of her feelings either way.

But maybe the singer's air of calm comes about simply because there is nothing left to hide: this is his ultimate declaration that he's totally in this woman's power - he has, indeed, given his heart to her - and if the response should be a cold one, then at least he knows he has done all he possibly can to plead his case.

Unlike the Orchids' raunchier I Can't Refuse, it's not a song, or a performance, with undercurrents of raw sexuality. The tempo may be stately but the tone is courtly, as in the courtly love associated with Elizabethan poetry. I'm sure there are lots of other examples, but the one I'm familiar with is My True Love Hath My Heart - though that, perhaps, ought to ring warning bells for the singer, as that poem celebrates an equal, agreed exchange: "... and I have his", the first line concludes.

What I'd tentatively describe as the throwaway style of the lead vocal is also interesting. In British dee jay Charlie Gillett's The Sound of the City, one of the first full length accounts of the rise of rock'n'roll, he cites the late Pookie Hudson's vocal in Goodnight, Sweetheart, Goodnight as an example of the rise of what he calls the "cool" voice in rock'n'roll, meaning that you can't actually tell for sure what the singer is feeling.

Not sure if I agree - Pookie emotionless? - but there's certainly a restraint in many of his performances which can also be found in the Orchids' lead here. Maybe, in You Have Two..., there's an implied sense of weariness in the delivery, the message being something like: "I'm putting myself on the line, spelling it out the depth of my abject love for you, and then I'm just going to have to wait and hope, though there's probably no point. But here goes. (sighs)"

Well, that's what I hear, anyway. Or think I do. And if it's a wooing, then it's certainly not a very active or aggressive one: if you don't believe he's throwing away the words, I'm not sure you could counterclaim that he's hammering them home. But I love the sound either way, and I love that voice, slightly slurred, but simply so right, and whatever I succeed or fail in conveying here won't alter the beyond-words perfection of this performance.

And it's a beautiful composition as well, which unfurls like a flag. Technically it's odd, as you get a little verse at the beginning ("I love you baby...") then several choruses strung together (from "Don't you know God above ...") before the briefest of bridges ("Tell me you love me ...") before turning back to the chorus ("Yes, I had a heart ...").

That's why I think of it as stately: a kind of deliberate tread, with minimal interruption, all the way through the song, as though the singer's objective is to deliver himself of this longing in front of his mistress without let or hindrance: the doo wop equivalent, as it were, of Brando's painful walk at the end of On the Waterfront. (I also hear, as I reread these words, a possible echo of the Soul Stirrers' The Last Mile of the Way.) And the rest of the group sound like supportive friends in this venture - or, less charitably, possibly imaginary voices in the lovestruck fool's head, urging him on to this final, wretched act of humiliation.

And what about the simplicity and deliberateness of that saxophone solo, almost like the drumming of fingers or a ticking clock before the rest of the group break out in the momentary release of the bridge, the most directly emotional moment in the recording ("Tell me you love me, / Show me that you care,") before the singer, as it were, quietens them, and returns to his theme: "Yes, I had a heart ..."

And finally, though it's not really rational, when I hear this I see lush pastoral images, rich woodland. I presume this is because of my having had to study Elizabethan poetry at an impressionable age, leading to my association of the song with the imagery of courtly love mentioned earlier. But maybe it's also about the power of doo wop to take all of us to some kind of Nirvana. I don't have the original book to hand, and I've just found out that the Dave Marsh site mentioned earlier only reproduces his entries for the first 100 of his choices, but in Marsh's entry for Lover's Island by the Blue Jays (Number 434) he has a moment of wonder about just how the group, growing up in urban squalor, were able to imagine the leafy paradise in the song. Need is universal, I suppose. Billy Vera says that "two of the Magnificents ... recalled that the Orchids were 'hoodlums' and the kind of guys who might have stuck up a gas station on the way to the studio."

And just so that I don't leave anyone thinking that Elizabethan poetry is all about passionless contentment, here is a poem by Sir Thomas Wyatt which relates to the song even more directly than the Sir Philip Sidney verses quoted above - except that the speaker in this case, having already given his heart away, has realised his mistake and wants out of the deal.

The very best place to find out about the Orchids (and many other groups on Parrot, Chance and Vee Jay) is in Robert Pruter's excellent and highly readable Doo Wop: the Chicago Scene. I don't know whether it's still in print but it still seems generally available. In JC Marion's online magazine Doo Wop Nation you can find brief reviews of Robert Pruter and some others.

Pruter (along with Armin Buttner and Robert Campbell) has created an extensive (and I mean extensive) online discography for the Parrot/Blue Lake labels. This complements, rather than duplicates, the information in Doo Wop: the Chicago Scene as the focus is who played what on which session; buy or borrow the book anyway if you love this music. There are related sites, easy enough to find, which seem to focus on the contribution of individual musicians who backed the vocal groups. This massive and ongoing task (updated as recently as December 10th) is clearly a labour of love and an invaluable resource. Donn Fileti of Relic Records (who issued two excellent but now deleted Parrot and Parrot/Blue Lake comps) revised the discography. Using the reproductions of record labels as your signposts, croll about three quarters of the way down what is a very long page to find info about two Orchids sessions, both backed by a group led by Al Smith. Coincidentally, the September 1955 date which yielded You Have Two (I Have None) was the last vocal group session at Parrot; I'd like to think the general consensus was you couldn't improve on perfection.

You can hear You Have Two (I Have None) under its other title, the misnomer Happiness, streamed here, along with other Orchids sides, which are just about all equally good.

According to Pruter's book the Orchids split up when Parrot Records collapsed in 1956 and none of the members joined other groups. Amazingly, You Have Two ... wasn't even issued until its discovery in 1993 in the Vee Jay vaults, possibly having been sent to Vee Jay as an audition for the group (the image at the top of this piece is a none-too-subtle mockup on youtube).

Talk about a missed opportunity: You Have Two (I Have None) is, as Robert Pruter says, "a minor masterpiece and represents the highest level of doo wop creativity."

Golden Teardrops

As a further taster for the complete dialog (or, to me, dialogue) with Clarke, here is one of my posts from September 2000, attempting to describe the sensation of listening to the Flamingos' Golden Teardrops.

Clarke,

Sparked off by what you were saying about difficult records, I want to take one and play about with its significance for me.

Dave Marsh is a great model: a thousand mini-essays in The Heart and Soul of Rock'n'RolI, no set pattern: three lines about a 45 or two pages; a wholly personal memory or a discussion of the recording date - no rules: it's whatever you want to say about a record, the only idea being it'll make people want to search it out - the whole point of this notice board, after all. Cause the record isn't just the record; it's you - your memories – the group then and now: "Cohesive," as Jake (or Zeke) said.

And the song I want to talk about is ... Golden Teardrops. My major doowop thrill.

Odd as it may seem, it wasn't that accessible to me when I first heard it. On a poor quality oldies compilation, c.1978, with muddy sound and a dubbed on guitar (Veejay version). Adjoining tracks, like Sonny Knight's Confidential or the Spaniels' Baby It's You, seemed far better: I got the point. But this - this was Ink Spots territory, wasn't it? That guitar. The Harptones' I Almost lost my mind, also on the LP, that was emotion; the Flamingos seemed out of reach, unfocused, somehow. I couldn't take the whole thing in on one listen.

And if all this seems odd to Americans, remember I had a very limited frame of reference: doowop was the brightness of Frankie Lymon or (dare I say it?) the Diamonds' version of Little Darling. And it's what you were saying, Clarke, about not getting a record on first hearing.

I don't particularly recall a moment of piercing clarity. But at some point the elements made sense - tremulous falsetto, out-of-tune-sounding yet absolutely right lead, odd lyrics (why "a cottage by the sea"?) and above all that sense at the beginning that we're being ushered into a holy place, cavernous and echoing as a great cathedral, and then drawn together in a moment of collective stillness, as though calmly taking stock of the sadness in things (Iacrimae rerum, appropriately enough: "the tears in things") before there's a collective sigh - at what life is?- and Sollie McElroy comes up to testify or confess: "Swear to God I'll stray no more ..."

But it's too late: although at one point he addresses the lost love directly - "Darling, put away your tears," – the burden (and howl) of the song is about regret: all he can do is try to take in fully the time he hurt her enough to make her cry: the time, now gone, when he mattered to someone, and the knowledge bearing down upon him that he's going to be carrying that memory to the grave and beyond: "Until the end of time, And throughout eternity - " Golden Teardrops. Cried, by her, for him. And the rest of the group, or congregation, seem to grab him there - we're almost at the end of the song now - try to hold him in that moment when he feels the enormity of what he's done. Maybe the wisdom will last. Who knows? But the sad, sweet pain - he was once loved - undoubtedly will, if the falsetto that weaves in and out of the reiteration of that painful vision of her tears at the end is anything to go by.

I've said before that doowop lyrics don't matter that much: a peg for emotions. They'd be trite enough here if read on their own (Ditto Danny Boy.) But they give the group a clarity of focus that inspires them to a height they never quite attained on any other song, for me. If any of you reading this haven't heard Golden Teardrops, download a file, buy a CD (Rhino), do something. It is, quite simply, the loveliest and the saddest of all doowop records. In his autobiography Chaplin talks of the day music entered his soul, or words to that effect . Golden Teardrops, like Danny Boy, seeped into me on some unknown date. But I never tire of it and always hear it afresh; for me it holds the whole mystery of doowop: it's religious, it's secular, it's... beyond words, actually.

So much for stopping... but I've needed to say all this for years.

Tony


Online version of The Heart of Rock and Soul here, although Golden Teardrops is not included. Had it been, I probably wouldn't have attempted the above.

Bradford Cox of Deerhunter talks about Golden Teardrops in an interview with Gordon Campbell in the December 2009 issue of Werewolf.

The interview page contains a link to Golden Teardrops on youtube; if you have realplayer, however, I'd recommend the official Vee Jay website's The Moonglows Meet the Flamingos page for a much higher quality streamed version (as well as the rest of the Flamingos' Chance recordings, including their sublime September Song), plus a link to downloads of of Vee Jay material. Scroll down the same page and click on the album artwork to read Billy Vera's liner notes, which include what may be the last word on the song's origins.

Neither version of Golden Teardrops, sadly, is the one I first learnt to love, the 1961 reissue on Vee Jay with overdubbed guitar, which doesn't seem to be available on CD. Ah well, I still have my original cheapo Springboard International LP. And while trawling the net for an image of that album (Vol. 18 in Springboard's ORIGINAL OLDIES series) I came across a useful summary of the company's acquiring the rights to Vee Jay here as part of Mike Callahan and David Edwards' The Vee-Jay Story, which covers not only the history of this great company but the tangled tale of the many companies who licensed this material. (The home page of Mike Callahan's excellent Both Sides Now Publications website, here, from which The Vee-Jay Story is drawn, will point you towards more scrupulously researched record label discographies and histories as well as the Stereo Chat board, a highly addictive forum for the discussion of good and bad practice in the remastering of oldies for CD and of what does, and does not, constitute true stereo.)

More bizarrely, however, I happened across an account of French artist Francis Baudevin utilising one of those cheapo Springboard ORGINAL OLDIES LPs in his work for a current exhibition. If you happen to be in France, the show is on till December 23rd at 16 rue Duchefdelaville, 75013 Paris, but I have to warn you that a) it is not the ORIGINAL OLDIES volume which contains Golden Teardrops and b) the gallery's account of the artist's intentions made my eyes bleed - though it does make more sense when you see that, among other things, he's simply appropriated the basic geometric shapes used throughout the album covers in that series. Wonder how the original designer (if still around) would feel about such an unlikely compliment, four decades on?

Though I suppose you could say those original album covers (see below) were, if not masterpieces, then certainly ideally suited to the places where they were originally sold. And many years ago when I was an art student, a tutor told us that good design was all about an object's being fit for its intended purpose with nothing extraneous; he rhapsodised, by way of illustration, over a lock for a gate shaped out of a single piece of metal. But it did what was required; and those album covers, never intended for lesiurely perusal in a record shop, likewise performed their function perfectly, I'd imagine, in supermarkets and the like: same shapes, so you know it's the same series; different colours, so you know it's not the same volume you bought last week (or month, depending on your pocket money/wages); and the clincher, those all-important song titles and artist names prominently on the front cover as you move in for a closer inspection:

Suprising that Andy Warhol never cottoned on to their graphic potential before M. Baudevin - but then, maybe he already had the original Vee Jay albums. Or could it be, in fact, that Warhol was the brains behind the notorious theft of Lou Reed's entire doo wop collection, only to find warring sensations of guilt and delight serving both to check his enjoyment of the purloined discs and stifle creative stirrings in the area of doo wop-related graphics ever after, for fear of inadvertantly exposing the source of his inspiration to Lou? A case, you might say, of The Tell-Tale Heartbeats ...

The above puerility discharged, I couldn't resist checking the chronology of Reed meeting Warhol and getting his records pinched. To my surprise (as I presumed it happened long before the two met) I found that his records (and his Gretch guitar) were stolen while he was performing as part of Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable in New York in April 1966 - so it is technically possible that Warhol could have been the culprit, sneaking off to do the deed when Lou was safely onstage. Unless it was some earlier theft of the teenage Reed's records which I'd vaguely registered while surfing and he was forever dogged by ill luck in the matter of vinyl retention.

Either way, I would love to know which particular doo wop records he favoured, although I strongly suspect that Dion and the Belmonts' insouciant Love Came to Me would have been among them: at one point Dion gives a kind of laidback chuckle during the bridge ("Love makes me, uh, makes me feel so good") which makes me think of Sweet Jane.

Anyway, getting back to the point, after a fairly extensive search on the net, I haven't been able to find an image of ORIGINAL OLDIES Vol. 18 (Springboard SPB 2018), the one which turned me on to the Flamingos, nor M. Baudevin's Vol. 19, but here's another in the series which, like Vol. 20 above, you can click to savour in all its trashy glory:

Introduction

 [This blog was  originally intended purely as an archive for messages exchanged in a doo wop forum which was no longer available online. Once they had all been reposted, however, I began to add new writing - not only about doo wop but other music and comedy plus a few other things.]

 

 

Welcome to my blog which features archived posts from deleted Yahoo group Steve's Kewl / Kewl Steve's Doo Wop Shop (KSDW) plus new entries about doo wop and other music. No downloads - only verbiage plus the occasional youtube clip.

The archived posts are mostly between myself - Tony, aka Pismotality - and Clarke Davis, now a DJ on rock-it radio. They first appeared on the KSDW messageboard in September 2000. We compare our first experience of doo wop (1970s Scotland for me; 1950s America for the more fortunate Clarke) and try to work out why the best examples of the genre (inlcuding Golden Teardrops, Gloria and In the Still of the Night) remain so affecting.

To read the basic version of the KSDW archive (original text only), click here.

To read the enhanced version (commentary, pictures and links) click here . They are headed "Doo Wop Dialog[ue]" (US/UK spelling) to emphasise that we are sharing quite different experiences of this music.

Some posts may be missing from the sequence. If readers have access to other messages, please contact me by clicking on profile. One glaring omission is Clarke's detailed description of the Cadillacs' recording of Gloria; I only have the final few lines.

Although new blog entries cover more than doo wop they still take their cue from the Doo Wop Shop posts: one of the topics Clarke and I discussed was how our tastes were formed and this is something I have been exploring further - in fact, if the newer entries on this blog had a strapline, it could be: Rummaging Through the Record Shop of Memory.

It's a voyage of adventure - for me, anyway. If you're a doo wop lover, you may find something to interest you. I'm an enthusiast rather than an expert, although I know where to point you should the need arise, such as Unca Marvy's (Marv Goldberg's) peerless R&B Notebooks, here, or Lex Jansen's online version of Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock and Soul, an inspiration for attempting to write about something as elusive as the experience of listening to a doo wop record. Read on, and all will be revealed (or not) about the true meaning of pismotality. That's a definite vague promise.

A word about Rock-It Radio: its archive features recent shows by Clarke Davis and others including doo wop authority Steve Propes; its deejays play a range of oldies but the emphasis is on doo wop and R&B. Clarke's programme, The Big Show, is currently exploring the forgotten hits of 1963, including lots of pop which never made it to the UK. You can download the most recent eighteen Rock-It programmes as lowish-fi but perfectly listenable MP3s (helps maintain the illusion you're listening on an AM radio). You can also buy merchandise including CDs of broadcasts from the 50s etc at the Launching Pad.

The Doo Wop Shop morphed into The Doowop Cafe, still active today (more detailed history here). They have a chatroom, a messageboard and a radio station plus a store with lots of fun merchandise, not to mention many great links. Click on "stories and articles" on the main page for Billy Vera's doo wop pieces.