The POP CULTURE Cantina

Philles Records (Part One)

2011-10-08T12:58:00.007-04:00

The Phil Spector Album Collection!

The Alley Cats, Bob B. Soxx & The Blue Jeans, Cher,

The Crystals, Darlene Love, The Righteous Brothers,

The Ronettes featuring Veronica and Ike & Tina Turner

Remixed and Re-Imagined

Part One

by Don Charles Hampton

For fans of 1960s Girl Group music in general, and Phil Spector Girl Group productions in particular, it was the biggest news of the spring: Sony Music’s Legacy imprint would reissue all the original Philles Records albums on CD for the very first time! That is, all but The Righteous Brothers and Ike & Tina Turner discs, whose masters Spector sold off back in the late ‘60s. (A raunchy comedy album by Lenny Bruce would be omitted as well.)

Originally scheduled to go on sale in June, the release date came and went. To be sure, Spector fans are used to such delays; a 1987 Rhino Records retrospective that promised extensive stereo remixing was cancelled after much ballyhoo; then Abkco Records’ Back To Mono boxed set was put off for several years. It finally appeared in 1991. At this writing, The Philles Album Collection is due to drop on 24 October 2011. Will it? As always, seeing is believing. At least the track selection has been made available, so buyers know what to expect. If you’ve been buying Spector reissues for a while like I have, though, you’re in for a letdown.

For the discerning collector, Legacy’s package offers very little value. There is a great deal of track duplication between the CDs (The Crystals' Twist Uptown and He's A Rebel are practically the same album, with only two unique tracks between them). Worse, every album will be presented in a mono mix, even though the Ronettes release was originally marketed in a stereo version, and the Christmas album was mixed to stereo decades ago. Most if not all Philles recording sessions were recorded in multi-track. An album collection would be the ideal place to debut stereophonic mixes that have only been available as bootlogs thus far; but Sony Music has not chosen that course of action. No doubt, they are following Phil "Back to Mono" Spector’s wishes in doing so.

Also, no rare bonus tracks have been programmed. There will be a “bonus CD” filled with the throwaway instrumentals that Spector habitually slapped on the flipside of singles, and a handful of album cuts have never been reissued; but essentially, fans will be paying for the packaging! When you think about what this box set might have been . . . how much excitement would’ve been generated just by the reissue of previously-available stereo cuts, you just have to shake your head in disgust. Think of the huge profits that might’ve been realized! Only hardcore Spector collectors are likely to shell out money for this set. These days, catalog A & R staff seem determined to give consumers the least amount of bang for their bucks; it’s a cynical and short-sighted strategy, to be sure.

You’ll see the vintage music blogosphere posting reviews galore of The Philles Album Collection once it hits the streets. Here at the Pop Culture Cantina, we’ve decided to approach this release a bit differently. We’re not going to review it at all! Instead, we present the following description of a virtual Philles box set, the kind we’d prefer to buy. The Righteous Brothers and Ike & Tina albums are miraculously restored to the catalog, tracks are re-sequenced for maximum listening pleasure, all song duplication is eliminated, and . . . well, you’ll see!

Gee Whiz (Carla Thomas)*

featuring La La Brooks

Oh, Yeah! Maybe Baby (Hank Hunter, Phil Spector)*

featuring Patsy Wright

There’s No Other Like My Baby (Leroy Bates, Phil Spector)*

On Broadway (Barry Mann, Cynthia Weil)**

I Love You, Eddie (Hank Hunter, Phil Spector)***

He Hit Me (Gerry Goffin, Carole King)*

He’s Sure The Boy I Love (Barry Mann, Cynthia Weil)

featuring Darlene Love

Frankenstein Twist (Kate Henry, Leo McCorkle)*

featuring La La Brooks

What A Nice Way To Turn Seventeen! (Jack Keller, Larry Kolber)***

Please Hurt Me (Gerry Goffin, Carole King)*

Uptown (Barry Mann, Cynthia Weil)**

Another Country, Another World (Doc Pomus, Phil Spector)***

No One Ever Tells You (Gerry Goffin, Carole King, Phil Spector)**

He’s A Rebel (Gene Pitney)

featuring Darlene Love

He’s A Rebel

The Crystals featuring Barbara Alston
*Arranged by Phil Spector and Arnold Goland
**Arranged by Phil Spector and Hank Levine
***Arranged by Phil Spector
Arranged by Jack “Specs” Nitzsche
A Phil Spector Production
Produced by Phil Spector
Recorded at Mirasound Studios, New York City
and Gold Star Studios, Hollywood
1961 - 1962

In the summer of 1962, Philles Records issued its first album, The Crystals’ Twist Uptown. As the title indicates, it capitalized on the success of the group’s recent big hit “Uptown”. There were eleven tracks; the twelfth song would certainly have been the withdrawn-from-sale “He Hit Me”, very conspicuous in its absence. By the time 1963 rolled around, The Crystals had scored two more best-sellers, “He’s Sure The Boy I Love” and the chart-topping “He’s A Rebel”. Twist Uptown was discontinued, and a new LP titled He’s A Rebel was rushed out that spring. Basically the same album, it restored “He Hit Me” to the line-up, but stingily deleted “Please Hurt Me” and La La Brooks' excellent cover of “Gee Whiz”. The new hits appeared in their place. What if Spector had tacked them on as bonus tracks instead? Then Crystals fans would’ve had a pip of an LP to enjoy, and it probably would’ve charted much higher than #131 on Billboard's album chart.

No matter the track line-up, this disc would’ve been a showcase for the serene vocal style of Barbara Alston. Arguably less than memorable, it was nevertheless a perfect sound for the Rock ballad records Spector was cutting at the time. Barbara was at her best with Latin-flavored accompaniment, and “On Broadway” (featuring the original, pre-Leiber and Stoller lyrics) is her standout performance, along with the aforementioned “Uptown”. A brisk Latin arrangement backs Patsy Wright on “Oh, Yeah! Maybe Baby” and enables a very weak singer to sound presentable. The cuts featuring Darlene Love and La La Brooks are a taste of Spector productions to come, sung with Gospel fervor and powered by a much more brash Wall of Sound. Again, Latin licks sell the numbers: “He’s A Rebel” is one of the best rock-a-tangos of the early ‘60s, while an echo-drenched cha-cha beat turns “Gee Whiz” into a song Carla Thomas, the original composer and vocalist, would hardly recognize. Before the end of ’63, Miss Brooks would distinguish herself as a true Latin Pop diva.

Let The Good Times Roll! (Leonard Lee)*

I Shook The World (Jackie DeShannon, Jack Nitzsche)

White Cliffs Of Dover (Nat Burton, Walter Kent)*

Why Do Lovers Break Each Other's Heart?

(Ellie Greenwich, Tony Powers, Phil Spector)

Here Comes My Baby (Phil Spector)*

featuring Bobby Sheen

My Heart Beat A Little Bit Faster

(Ellie Greenwich, Tony Powers, Phil Spector)

Everything's Gonna Be All Right (Phil Spector)*

featuring Bobby Sheen

Jimmy, Baby (Jackie DeShannon, Jack Nitzsche)

This Land Is Your Land (Woody Guthrie)*

Not Too Young To Get Married
(Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich, Phil Spector)

Do The Walk (Phil Spector)*

featuring Bobby Sheen

I Love You, Baby (Phil Spector)*

Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah (Ray Gilbert, Allie Wrubel)

Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah

Bob B. Soxx and The Blue Jeans
featuring Darlene Love
*Arranged by Arnold Goland
Arranged by Jack "Specs" Nitzsche
A Phil Spector Production
Produced by Phil Spector
Recorded at Gold Star Studios, Hollywood
and Mirasound Studios, New York City
1962 - 1963

Bob B. Soxx and The Blue Jeans, comprised of session singer Bobby Sheen with Darlene Love and Fanita James of The Blossoms, only had a trio of hits. It might’ve only been one hit single, had Spector not decided to extend the shelf life of the group’s name with two follow-ups led by Darlene Love; but the biggest by far was their remake of “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah”, and the only release that deserved to become the title track of an album. Still, fans must’ve been disappointed to find that the next biggest seller, “Not Too Young To Get Married” was missing from the track line-up. Had the LP been issued a little later in the year, it probably would’ve been included. In its place we find “Dr. Kaplan’s Office”, which had been the instrumental flipside of “Why Do Lovers Break Each Other’s Heart?” Instrumental tracks are fine, as long as they’re played by the artists they’re credited to; however, there’s nary a Blue Jean on “Kaplan”; it’s played entirely by Phil Spector’s studio cats, informally known as The Wrecking Crew. Its merits as a dance tune aside, it doesn’t belong on the album!

Let’s explore how the LP might’ve sounded if “Lovers” had been included, along with an unreleased tune that might be the most danceable thing Bobby, Darlene and Fanita ever cut together. In either form, Darlene Love’s voice is the main event; as good a singer as Bobby Sheen was, Spector just wasn’t interested in him with Darlene around! He successfully passes her off as teenage boy on both Bob. B. Soxx follow-ups, and lets her sing from an obviously female point of view on most of the album tracks. She shines on two Jackie DeShannon-penned cha-cha rockers, “Jimmy Baby” and “I Shook The World". Either would’ve made an excellent single. Lady Love aquits herself well on a cover of Woody Guthrie’s folk anthem “This Land Is Your Land”, and she brings down the house on a Gospel-cum-Blues tour-de-force, “My Heart Beat A Little Bit Faster”. The latter tune backed some copies of her debut single, “Today I Met The Boy I’m Gonna Marry”, and fully deserved getting a long-play showcase. (Curiously, the charting topside was left off Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah).

Bobby Sheen does get a few moments in the sun: A haunting Blues called “Everything’s Gonna Be All Right” and the frantic “Here Comes My Baby”, soon to be covered by Toni Jones on Smash Records. He also makes the best of his brief solo spots on “White Cliffs Of Dover”. Bobby’s wailing lead on “Do The Walk” would’ve challenged Darlene’s vocal dominance; but the track wouldn’t be issued until 1981, on a British-only compilation of Philles rarities. Soon, Bobby would be at Capitol Records, pursuing a solo career that never took flight. Always more successful as the member of a group, he’d later join The Coasters.

Anyone But You (Jeff Barry)*

Ruth Brown

Why Lead Me On? (Howard Guyton, Esther Navarro)**

The Top Notes

Hey, Memphis! (Doc Pomus, Mort Shuman)*

LaVern Baker

Hearts Of Stone (Rudy Jackson, Ed Ray)**

The Top Notes

A Kiss From Your Lips (Billy Davis, Russ Fratto)***

Billy Storm

When You Dance (Andy Jones)***

Billy Storm

Talk To Me, Talk To Me (Joe Seneca)*

Jean DuShon

Honey Love (Clyde McPhatter, Jerry Wexler)****

Billy Storm

Dear One (Fred Parris)***

Billy Storm

Tired Of Tryin’ (Jean DuShon)*

Jean DuShon

Twist And Shout (Bert Berns, Phil Medley)**

The Top Notes

The Basic Things (Derek Martin, Esther Navarro)**

The Top Notes

Puddin’ N’ Tain (Bryce Coefield, Gary Pipkin, Alonzo Willis)

The Alley Cats

Today’s Hits

Phil Spector Artists
*Arranged by Phil Spector
**Arranged by Teddy Randazzo
***Arranged by Lee Hazlewood and Hank Levine
****Arranged by Stan Applebaum
Arranged by Jack “Specs” Nitzsche
A Phil Spector Production
Produced by Phil Spector
Executive Producers:
Jerry Wexler and Lester Sill
Recorded at Atlantic Studios, New York City
and Gold Star Studios, Hollywood
1961 - 1963

If The Crystals’ He’s A Rebel was a rip-off for consumers, the various artists compilation Today’s Hits was even worse: It cannibalized songs from that album as well as The Crystals’ Greatest Hits collection (more about that album later), Bob B. Soxx and The Blue Jeans’ Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah set and The Ronettes’ forthcoming debut on long play. For his money, the buyer did get several non-LP tracks by The Crystals (“Then He Kissed Me”) and Darlene Love (A and B-sides, including one issued under the Bob B. Soxx moniker). This is the second (and final) Philles album Darlene’s vocals would dominate, and for that reason, it’s highly sought-after by her fans. Why shouldn’t she have had a collection of her own, though? We’ll address that oversight later on. For now, let’s re-imagine Today’s Hits as a showcase for both The Alley Cats and several artists Phil Spector worked with in the year he founded Philles Records, 1961.

Phil’s early productions were usually one-off projects released on small independent labels like Dunes, Trey, or Gregmark. However, he was a staff producer at both Liberty and Atlantic Records, and it was at Atlantic that he did most of his studio work. Under the supervision of Jerry Wexler, he cut sessions with two of the label’s biggest stars: Ruth Brown and LaVern Baker. He also tried to pull hits on three lesser-known acts: Former Valiants member Billy Storm, doo-wop duo The Top Notes, and Jazz singer Jean DuShon. In 1989, Japanese catalog A & R producers decided that the best of those releases would make one hell of a good album. They compiled Twist And Shout, a Japan-only compact disc that’s now so rare it’s almost frightening. So what if, instead of recycling masters and selling Darlene Love short on long-playing vinyl, Phil had given those non-hit Atlantic singles a second lease on life? He could have licensed them to fill up Today’s Hits, and tacked on “Puddin’ N’ Tain” as a bonus track and sample of his current work. OK, we know it’s a far-fetched concept, but it works!!!

These waxings may not have made the charts, but they kick ass! There's nothing second-rate about Billy Storm doing his dead ringer Clyde McPhatter impression over Phil’s deliciously Latinized backing tracks for “When You Dance” and “Honey Love”; nothing lacking in The Top Notes’ feverish Blues deliveries on “Hearts Of Stone” and “Twist And Shout” (the original version!); nothing shabby when Jean DuShon informs her lowdown, cheatin’ hubby that she’s “Tired Of Tryin’”; and when LaVern Baker reveals her cougar lust for Elvis Presley on “Hey, Memphis!” as Phil frets his electric guitar within an inch of its life, it sure ain't nothing to be ashamed of! The Ruth Brown record does drag a bit, but arguably, these Atlantic rarities are just as engaging as the Philles sides that ended up on Today’s Hits. By the way, Bobby Sheen scores one last star turn singing “Puddin’ N’ Tain”, a suggestively-titled update of the Gary “US” Bonds house party sound. Ironically, Phil hired Bobby to sing lead in place of Billy Storm, who’d recently left The Alley Cats to cut a solo album for Buena Vista Records.

Stereo

White Christmas (Irving Berlin)

Darlene Love

Frosty, The Snowman (Steve Nelson, Jack Rollins)

The Ronettes featuring Veronica

The Bells Of Saint-Mary’s (Emmett Adams, Douglas Furber)

Bob B. Soxx and The Blue Jeans

Santa Claus Is Coming To Town
(John Frederick Coots, Henry Gillespie)

The Crystals featuring La La Brooks

Sleigh Ride (Leroy Anderson, Mitchell Parish)

The Ronettes featuring Veronica

Marshmallow World (Peter De Rose, Carl Sigman)

Darlene Love

I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus (Tommie Connor)

The Ronettes featuring Veronica

Rudolph, The Red-Nosed Reindeer (Johnny Marks)

The Crystals featuring La La Brooks

Winter Wonderland (Felix Bernard, Richard Smith)

Darlene Love

Parade Of The Wooden Soldiers (Leon Jessel, Ballard MacDonald)

The Crystals featuring La La Brooks and Nedra

Here Comes Santa Claus! (Gene Autry, Oakley Haldeman)

Bob B. Soxx and The Blue Jeans

Christmas, Baby, Please Come Home!

(Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich, Phil Spector)

Darlene Love

Silent Night (Franz Gruber, Joseph Mohr)

Phil Spector

A Christmas Gift For You!

Phil Spector Artists
Vocal Arrangements by Phil Spector and Darlene Love
Arranged by Jack “Specs” Nitzsche
A Phil Spector Production
Produced by Phil Spector
Recorded at Mirasound Studios, New York City
and Gold Star Studios, Hollywood
1963

Here’s the album that’s been reissued so many times, it’s become a music industry cliché! Like most (all?) of the Philles masters, it was recorded on multiple tracks, but originally issued in a mono version only. Later, when Spector was working with individual members of The Beatles, he secured a reissue for his Christmas spectacular on their imprint, Apple Records. That pressing was also monaural. In 1974, Phil cut a deal that resulted in the short-lived Warner-Spector label, and the LP was reissued yet again. The cover said “authentic mono”, but this time, there was a surprise in store for loyal fans. When they lay their phonograph needles down in its grooves, glorious stereo sound burst forth for the very first time! Not long afterward, a stereo reissue surfaced in England on the Phil Spector International label. These are the only Christmas album releases that are worth tracking down; avoid like the plague the re-monaural-ized versions later issued by Rhino, Abkco and Sony Music! Their mono mastering sounds amateurish in comparison to Larry Levine’s bold mixes on the original Philles LP.

Now, there are mono-only snobs galore who circle the Spector catalog like a constellation of evil stars; they flare in outrage at the thought of a Wall of Sound heard on multi-tracks. As far as we're concerned, these people should be locked in a warehouse filled with old overstock transistor radios! The Christmas album should only be heard in stereo! What joy, to experience Darlene Love, Ronnie Spector, Bobby Sheen and La La Brooks in the aural equivalent of Technicolor: It’s great to hear the cross-speaker panning of footsteps on “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus”, stereo sound effects on “Sleigh Ride”, isolated handclappings on “White Christmas”, and isolated string sections shimmering like an aurora on “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town” and “Christmas (Baby, Please Come Home)”!

Needless to say, the vocal performances are perfect (except for Phil Spector’s, but maybe that’s an unfair assessment since he isn’t singing)! A Christmas Gift For You! is almost sequenced perfectly, too; even if there were bonus tracks available, we wouldn’t dare try to add them. The only change we'd make would be to switch the placements of “Here Comes Santa Claus” and “Christmas” on Side Two; Darlene Love’s most famous Philles record deserves to be the album’s penultimate track. A maudlin Spector monologue spoken over the strains of “Silent Night” is the only thing that should follow such a bravura performance!

And contrary to common mono snob wisdom, stereo does not break up the Wall of Sound! That massive rhythm section still exists in its own channel, instruments stacked on top of each other just the way Spector intended them to be heard. If he’d wanted vocals and strings to be part of that mix, he surely would’ve recorded them at the same time as everything else. Now, is a stereo Wall of Sound the same one people heard over their sound equipment in 1963? Of course not, but that exact sound will never be heard again unless you listen using 1960s-era sound systems. Who the @#%$ wants to do that? Modern mono mixes try to preserve Spector productions in amber, draining them of vitality and introducing a low-fi distortion that wasn’t present on the original sides. To our ears, none of the modern reissues measure up to them. Done with an ear for aural impact, stereo mixes would update Philles albums for the 21st century equipment they’d surely be played on.

Stereo

What'd I Say? (Ray Charles)

Walkin' In The Rain (Barry Mann, Phil Spector, Cynthia Weil)

Be My Baby (Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich, Phil Spector)

Do I Love You? (Pete Anders, Vini Poncia, Phil Spector)

The Best Part Of Breakin' Up (Pete Anders, Vini Poncia, Phil Spector)

So Young (Phil Spector, William Tyus)

I Wonder (Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich, Phil Spector)

You, Baby (Barry Mann, Phil Spector, Cynthia Weil)

Baby, I Love You (Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich, Phil Spector)

How Does It Feel? (Pete Anders, Vini Poncia, Phil Spector)

When I Saw You (Phil Spector)

Chapel Of Love (Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich, Phil Spector)

Presenting The Fabulous Ronettes

The Ronettes featuring Veronica
Arranged by Jack "Specs" Nitzsche
A Phil Spector Production
Produced by Phil Spector
Recorded at Gold Star Studios and United Western Recordings,
Hollywood
1963 - 1964

Phil Spector lavished more time and attention on the tracks that make up this album than any other Philles Records release save the Christmas album. Significantly, while he delayed mixing his holiday masterpiece in stereo, Presenting The Fabulous Ronettes was issued in stereophonic sound right from the start. In fact, it was the first Philles album made available in that format. Many if not most Spector fans consider it his finest LP production, and we wouldn’t be surprised if Phil agreed with them. Kinda calls into question the notion that he despised multi-track, doesn’t it?

What we know for sure is that he adored Veronica Bennett's baby doll voice, and he spent hours recording it at Gold Star and United Western Studios prior to their marriage in 1968. Arguably, he wanted to give it the best aural showcase he could devise; that meant stereo sound, and still does. We've heard the monaural version of The Ronettes LP: It sucks! 45 RPM singles are the best vehicle for mono, and that record proves it. Compared to the multi-track mix, it sounds flat and dull on modern sound systems. The extra reverb Spector dubbed onto the stereo version adds more majesty to majestic recordings like “Walkin’ In The Rain”, “Baby, I Love You”, “Be My Baby” and “I Wonder”. To my ears, “What’d I Say?” (a studio recording with fake “live-in-concert” sound effects) is much less exciting in mono; and the widescreen effect stereo provides is a tremendous enhancement to quivering Rock ballads like “So Young” and “Then I Saw You.” Veronica’s Spanish Harlem vibrato may have been sharp enough to pierce through waves of orchestrated noise, but we like how she sounded when it didn’t have to.

Both versions of the album left something to be desired in terms of sequencing, so Pop Culture Cantina staff imagines a track line-up that allows the mood of the selections to rise and fall, as music does during a classical concert. Classical music was Phil Spector’s main inspiration, after all . . . “What’d I Say?” makes for a splashy, colorful opening number. “Walkin’ In The Rain” and “Be My Baby” present the orchestra at its best. “Breakin’ Up” and “So Young” soothe the crowd. After the intermission, “I Wonder” thrills them with its spicy Flamenco flourishes. A sultry “You, Baby” gives the audience a chance to bask in serene choral harmonies; then those voices explode into the anthemic glory that is “Baby, I Love You”. The mood modulates down through “How Does It Feel?” and “When I Saw You”, and a superb concert ends in a crescendo of Latin percussion and doo-wop Soul: “Chapel Of Love”! There couldn’t be a more appropriate finale; Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich’s #1 smash closed the original track listing, too.

Would you believe that, after such a stunning debut, The Ronettes were denied a follow-up album? (A Ronettes Lp issued on Colpix Records the following year was a compilation of pre-Philles recordings.) Just like the lack of a Darlene Love album, this is an injustice that begs to be made right. Stay tuned!

I Wonder (Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich, Phil Spector)*

A Woman In Love (Barry Mann, Phil Spector, Cynthia Weil)

Mashed Potato Time
(Robert Bateman, Georgia Dobbins, William Garrett, Freddie Gorman,
Brian Holland, Kal Mann)

featuring Veronica

Da Doo Ron Ron (Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich, Phil Spector)

All Grown Up, Part One (Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich, Phil Spector)

Hot Pastrami (Dessie Rozier)

featuring Veronica

Then He Kissed Me (Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich, Phil Spector)

Look In My Eyes (Ritchie & Vinne Barrett)*

featuring Dee Dee Kennibrew

Girls Can Tell (Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich, Phil Spector)

The Twist (Hank Ballard)

featuring Veronica

Heartbreaker (Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich, Phil Spector)

All Grown Up, Part Two (Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich, Phil Spector)*

Wah-Watusi (Dave Appell, Kal Mann)

featuring Nedra

Little Boy (Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich, Phil Spector)

The Greatest Hits

The Crystals featuring La La Brooks
*Arranged by Phil Spector and Arnold Goland
Arranged by Jack "Specs" Nitzsche
A Phil Spector Production
Produced by Phil Spector
Recorded at Gold Star Studios, Hollywood
and Mirasound Studios, New York City
1961 - 1964

Pity the poor Crystals! Their biggest hits are recordings they had nothing to do with; Phil put out Darlene Love singles under their name, and didn’t even bother to tell them beforehand. They didn't find out until the singles got played on the radio. As you see, Darlene wasn’t the only Crystal who never was a Crystal, either. Adding insult to injury, Spector put very little thought into the group's albums. He dubbed their second (third?) long-player Greatest Hits, a curious move in the fall of ’63; they were on such a roll that releasing a hits compilation was certainly premature.

Cynically, Spector used this album as a vehicle to promote his newest act, The Ronettes. Ronnie Spector sings lead on “Mashed Potato Time”, “Hot Pastrami” and “The Twist”, while her cousin Nedra does the honors on “Wah-Watusi”. To complete this hodgepodge of old and new masters, Phil recycled already recycled material from the He’s A Rebel and Today’s Hits albums and added one new song: A previously-unreleased remake of The Chantels’ “Look In My Eyes”. Dee Dee Kenniebrew, a Crystal he didn’t get along with, sings the lead, and he mixed her vocal track so poorly, you can barely hear the lyrics! By contrast, Ronnie’s voice is front-and-center on her sassy covers of early ‘60s dance rockers. The real Crystals must’ve been hopping mad when they heard this so-called hits collection; once again, Phil had made illegitimate use of their name! However, there was nothing that the girls could do, because he owned their name.

It’s nearly 50 years after the fact, but let’s see if we can’t do right by The Crystals. Let’s imagine a Greatest Hits that’s as good as it could possibly be! To accomplish that feat, we’ll load it up with performances by The Crystals’ finest vocalist, La La Brooks. Despite her fabulous leads on “Da Doo Ron Ron” and “Then He Kissed Me”, La La (appropriately born with the Spanish name Dolores) has never gotten the credit she deserves. To this day, some listeners assume those aforementioned Top Ten smashes feature Darlene Love’s voice. Not so! Our Miss Brooks shared Darlene’s Gospel background, but she had a singing style all her own. We'd say it lay halfway between Darlene’s Sunday morning blaze and Veronica´s midnight smoulder.

She wasn’t particularly fond of Latin-flavored tunes, but she excelled at singing them; in Spain, the talented mulata would probably have been hailed as a master interpreter of the pasodoble. Just listen to her commanding vocals on castanet-laden gems like “I Wonder”, “Girls Can Tell”, the outstanding “Little Boy”, and the aforementioned tour-de-force, “Then He Kissed Me.” “Heartbreaker”, not released on wax until 1976, reveals La La as a mean Latin boogaloo singer, too! She dares to invade Ronnie Spector ballad territory with a Diana Ross-styled reading of Mann and Weil’s “Woman In Love”; Veronica cut the song, too, but many fans regard La La’s version as definitive. If you can't decide which one of her readings of "All Grown Up" is best, you don't have to; both are included here!

DOLORES "LA LA" BROOKS with PHIL SPECTOR

“The Phil Spector Album Collection” concludes with Part Two.

Philles Records (Part Two)

2011-10-06T10:41:00.410-04:00

The Phil Spector Album Collection!

The Alley Cats, Bob B. Soxx & The Blue Jeans, Cher,

The Crystals, Darlene Love, The Righteous Brothers,

The Ronettes featuring Veronica and Ike & Tina Turner

Remixed and Re-Imagined

Part Two

by Don Charles Hampton

Here we begin to expand on the Philles box set concept with album masters Sony Music couldn't (or, most likely, didn't want to) license. We also dig into the tape vaults and come up with a wealth of rarities: Three albums' worth, in fact, with nary a quirky instrumental in the bunch!

Stereo

Soul City (Bill Medley)

featuring Bill Medley

Over And Over (Bobby Day)

featuring Bobby Hatfield

The Angels Listened In (Sid Faust, Billy Dawn Smith)

Ko Ko Mo (Eunice Levy, Jake Porter, Forest Wilson)

Look At Me (Johnny Cole)

What'd I Say? (Ray Charles)

There's A Woman (Bobby Hatfield, Bill Medley)

Sick And Tired (Dave Bartholomew, Chris Kenner)

Summertime (George & Ira Gershwin, DuBose Heyward)

featuring Bobby Hatfield

Old Man River (Oscar Hammerstein, Jerome Kern)

featuring Bill Medley

You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'
(Barry Mann, Phil Spector, Cynthia Weil)*

You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'

Stereo

The Blues (Bill Medley)

Sticks And Stones (Hank Glover, Titus Turner)

See That Girl (Barry Mann, Cynthia Weil)**

featuring Bill Medley

You Are My Sunshine (Jimmie Davis, Charles Mitchell)

Guess Who? (Jesse & Jo Anne Belvin)

You'll Never Walk Alone (Oscar Hammerstein, Richard Rodgers)

Big Boy Pete (Don Harris, Dewey Terry)

Oo-Poo-Pah-Doo (Jesse Hill)

The Great Pretender (Buck Ram)

Unchained Melody (Alex North, Hy Zaret)

featuring Bobby Hatfield

Just Once In My Life (Gerry Goffin, Carole King, Phil Spector)**

Just Once In My Life

Stereo

Late, Late Night (Mike Patterson)

The Mike Patterson Band

For Sentimental Reasons (Pat Best, Deek Watson)**

featuring Bobby Hatfield

Without A Doubt (Bill Medley)

featuring Bill Medley

Hot Tamales (Bobby Hatfield)

featuring Bobby Hatfield

Hallelujah, I Love Her So (Ray Charles)

featuring Bill Medley

Ebb Tide (Robert Maxwell, Carl Sigman)***

featuring Bobby Hatfield

She's Mine, All Mine (Bobby Hatfield)

featuring Bobby Hatfield

Lovin' You (Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller)

featuring Bill Medley

White Cliffs Of Dover (Nathaniel Burton, Walter Kent)*

featuring Bobby Hatfield

God Bless The Child (Arthur Herzog, Jr, Billie Holliday)

featuring Bill Medley

Hung On You (Gerry Goffin, Carole King, Phil Spector)**

Back-To-Back

The Righteous Brothers
with The Blossoms and The Mike Patterson Band
Arranged by Woody Woodrich, Bill Baker
and Johnny Wimber
A Righteous Brothers Production
Produced by Bill Medley
*Arranged by Gene Page
**Arranged by Jack “Specs” Nitzsche
***Arranged by Perry Botkin, Jr
A Phil Spector Production

Produced by Phil Spector
Recorded at Gold Star Studios, Radio Recorders
and United Western Recordings, Hollywood
1964 - 1965

By the time he signed The Righteous Brothers to Philles Records in 1964, Phil Spector had nearly lost all interest in albums. Presenting The Fabulous Ronettes would be his last hurrah on long-playing vinyl until he started working with John Lennon, Yoko Ono and George Harrison in the ‘70’s. Even though three Righteous Brothers albums were issued on Philles, he didn’t produce any of them! Bill Medley, bass singer of the duo, produced the album tracks. Phil worked on the singles. At least, that’s what was supposed to happen. Spector produced one album cut, and Medley ended up producing one Philles 45. Its runaway success hastened the end of The Brothers’ time as Philles Records artists. That single was, believe it or not, “Unchained Melody”.

“You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” launched The Righteous Brothers as both a Philles act and a million-selling duo. Of course, that single (stunning in both its mono and stereo mixes) was totally a Phil Spector production. However, after it became an international chart-topper, Phil couldn't have cared less about cutting an LP with Bill Medley and Bobby Hatfield. Engineer Larry Levine had to cajole a budget out of him so that Medley could go in and produce an album session. He wasn’t an odd choice, because under the supervision of song publisher Ray Maxwell, he’d produced nearly all the pre-Philles Righteous Brothers records. Bill Medley was a very quick study: He closely observed Phil’s methods, and became a highly skilled record producer as a result. Ironically, the sides he cut for Philles are considered inferior to those he’d done for Moonglow Records in 1963-4.

His productions for the You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’ album are rather good, holding forth with a somewhat jazzy, somewhat laid-back atmosphere. On the next LP, Just Once In My Life, he’s just pimping Spector’s style with varying degrees of success. The Spector-produced sides (the title track and “See That Girl”, a ballad sung by Medley alone) sound far superior to the other cuts. Well, all but two of them: Played for laughs, Bill and Bobby's cover of “Ooh-Poo-Pah-Doo” is aurally exciting, and while the recording isn’t well-known, it’s one of the best Rock novelties of the ‘60s. “Unchained Melody”, on the other hand, is anything but a novelty. If you've listened to it closely, you know the backing track isn’t such a great Spector imitation, either; but for millions of record buyers, it was close enough.

Philles Records issued “Hung On You” as a follow-up to “Just Once In My Life” in the summer of 1965. Deejays weren’t too impressed with this Goffin/King song, and it stalled at #47 on Billboard’s Hot 100. They did go for the cover of a Roy Hamilton hit on the flipside, though, and in a big way. The stately arrangement, combined with Bobby Hatfield’s virtuoso performance, really knocked them out. The label listed no production credits, so everybody assumed Phil Spector had done the honors. It was a big ballad, and Spector specialized in big ballads, so . . . the single was flipped over, it got a ton of airplay, landed in the Top Ten, and somewhere along the way, Spector got credit for producing another Wall of Sound smash. Phil did and said nothing to disabuse anybody of that notion. Au contraire, he took credit for “Unchained Melody” from then on.

Ask Bill Medley, and he won't hesitate to tell you he produced “Unchained Melody” for the Philles label. Session notes (the correct ones) reveal it was cut at Radio Recorders, not at Gold Star or United Western; those were the studios Spector favored. Mike Patterson, The Righteous Brothers’ bandleader, conducted the session. Whether or not Medley tried to publicize these facts in 1965 is something we don’t know. What we do know is that his relationship with Spector became strained. After “Unchained” sold so well, Bobby Hatfield began singing solo on Spector productions. Then, all of a sudden, Bobby also stopped recording with Phil. Lawsuits flew back and forth! When the dust cleared, The Righteous Brothers had relocated to Verve Records with Medley firmly planted in the producer’s chair. He got sweet revenge on Phil when “Soul And Inspiration”, a song Phil had rejected, shot to #1 in early 1966. It was the near-perfect Wall of Sound copy that “Unchained Melody” aspired to be.

Medley had left session tapes at Philles in various stages of completion. Phil cobbled them together with “Hung On You” and the Hatfield-only singles he’d released (including “Ebb Tide”, a second Roy Hamilton cover that became another major hit) and slapped them on a compilation LP he titled Back-To-Back. It doesn’t hold up well as an album, but it features some great tracks: Bill Medley impersonates Ray Charles masterfully on “God Bless The Child” and “Hallelujah, I Love Her So”, and Bobby Hatfield is at his funkiest singing “She’s Mine, All Mine” and “Hot Tamales”(which had been a Moonglow Records single in 1963; Phil left it in mono, but we've programmed the rare stereo mix). By 1967, Verve Records had purchased the rights to all the Philles material, and the company issued what it considered the best of it as The Righteous Brothers’ Greatest Hits. None of Bill Medley’s Verve productions made the track line-up, but several of his weaker efforts from Just Once In My Life were programmed. So was “Unchained Melody” which, of course, is erroneously credited to Phil Spector. Seemingly as a consolation prize, Medley is listed as the producer of “See That Girl”! Any true Wall of Sound connoisseur can tell whose work that record is. These discrepancies have been repeated on every RB compilation that’s been released since. Keep in mind that The Righteous Brothers never owned their Philles master tapes, and had no say as to how they would be marketed . . .

In her 1998 book, My Name Is Love, Darlene Love stated matter-of-factly that “after ‘Lovin’ Feelin’, Bill had as much to do with the production as Phil did.” The lady was there, so she should know! Maybe someday, Phil Spector cultists (especially those who write and research CD liner notes) will be ready to acknowledge just how much . . . but we wouldn't advise holding your breath!

Stereo

You’re So Fine!
(Lance Finney, Willie Schofield, Bob West)

A Love Like Yours (Lamont Dozier, Brian & Eddie Holland)*

I Idolize You (Ike Turner)

Such A Fool For You! (Ike Turner)

Every Day I Have To Cry (Arthur Alexander, Jr)**

Make 'Em Wait (Ike Turner, Steve Venet, Toni Wine)

River-Deep, Mountain-High
(Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich, Phil Spector)***

Save The Last Dance For Me (Doc Pomus, Mort Shuman)*

A Fool In Love (Ike Turner)

Things Ain't What They Used To Be (Kent Harris)

Hold On, Baby! (Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich, Phil Spector)***

It's Gonna Work Out Fine (Rose Marie McCoy, Sylvia McKinney)

I'll Never Need More Than This

(Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich, Phil Spector)***

River-Deep, Mountain-High

Ike and Tina Turner
with The Ikettes
Arranged and Produced by
Ike Turner
*Arranged by Perry Botkin, Jr
**Arranged by Gene Page
***Arranged by Jack “Specs” Nitzsche
A Phil Spector Production

Produced by Phil Spector
Recorded at Gold Star Studios, Hollywood
1966

Philles Records died in 1967. The last single issued on the label, “I’ll Never Need More Than This”, didn’t even crack the Hot 100! Scheduled as the follow-up, “A Love Like Yours” never got past the deejay pressing stage. Both were Tina Turner singles, and the first one Phil cut with Tina, “River-Deep, Mountain-High”, drove the first nail into his record label's coffin. Spector spent an insane amount of money producing this song collaboration with Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, only to see American Pop radio turn a universal thumbs down the track. An ambitious fusion of Blues sensibility and symphony orchestra bombast, deejays just didn’t know what to make of it. In the original single mix, Tina Turner sounded as if she were screaming for her life from the bottom of a very deep chasm. It took the combined efforts of The Supremes and The Four Tops to finally make the song a Pop hit four years later. Phil was so demoralized at this rejection of what he regarded as his masterpiece, he decided to close up shop after completing the River-Deep album.

Even though Spector worked with Tina Turner alone, the records were credited to Ike and Tina. Not surprisingly, Ike Turner produced most of the album; once again, Phil preferred to concentrate on singles (which, by this time, he wasn’t producing anymore)! It wasn’t released in the United States until 1969, after Phil had cut a distribution deal with A & M Records. However, you could buy the LP in 1966 if you lived or traveled overseas. With the same cover photography by actor Dennis Hopper that would later grace the American issue, River-Deep, Mountain-High first appeared on London Records. The single may have floundered stateside, but British radio heartily embraced the single. It was a major BBC hit, so it made sense that Phil would only release the album in European territories. At that time, stereo was still a novelty in Europe, but a few stereo copies were pressed up and sold. Not only is the London LP available in stereophonic sound, it contains a track that doesn’t appear on the 1969 A & M version: A cover of The Falcon’s 1959 doo-wop oldie “You’re So Fine.” A strong argument can be made, though, that Spector wanted the album mixed as close to monaural as it could possibly be.

Our suspicion is that Larry Levine engineered both the Turner and Spector sessions, because all the London album cuts have similarly dense mixes. However, you can easily tell the difference in Ike Turner's work. He emphasizes his band's hip-shaking rhythm section and Tina’s dynamic call-and-response interaction with The Ikettes. Phil has settled into his heavily orchestrated phase, with emphasis on strings, brass and big vocal choruses enveloping (smothering?) the vocalist. The backing tracks for “A Love Like Yours”, “Every Day I Have To Cry”, “Hold On, Baby!” and “Save The Last Dance For Me” are every bit as cavernous as those on “River-Deep.” When you nearly succeed in burying a volcanic voice like Tina Turner possesses, that says something (and not necessarily something good). The small studio sound of Ike Turner’s productions make for quite a contrast. Listening to this British LP calls to mind the sound of a thunderstorm moving in and out of the area: The noise level either shakes the house or fills the air with a distant rumble. Needless to say, it’s a unique aural experience!

Yet, we have to admit that the more panoramic mixes heard on the later American version lets the songs breathe better. When you add “I’ll Never Need More Than This” as a bonus track, as we’ve done for our imaginary Philles release, the improvement in sound quality is quite pronounced. In any decent mix, “Save The Last Dance For Me” and especially “Hold On, Baby!” impress the listener as hit singles that got away. As for the non-hit single “River-Deep, Mountain-High”, Phil would never be satisfied with the mix. He’s commissioned a new remix nearly every time it’s been reissued. Most recently, he’s allowed it to be heard in stereo again. A sign of positive developments to come, perhaps?

Paradise
(Perry Botkin, Jr, Gil Garfield, Harry Nilsson, Phil Spector)*

Born To Be Together (Barry Mann, Phil Spector, Cynthia Weil)*

Soldier Baby Of Mine (Pete Anders, Vini Poncia, Phil Spector)*

Why Don't They Let Us Fall In Love?

(Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich, Phil Spector)*

Everything Under The Sun (Bob Crewe, Gary Knight)**

I Wish I Never Saw The Sunshine

(Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich, Phil Spector)**

You Came! You Saw! You Conquered!

(Irwin Levine, Phil Spector, Toni Wine)**

Keep On Dancing, Little Girl
(Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich, Phil Spector)*

Here I Sit (Harry Nilsson, Phil Spector)*

Is This What I Get For Loving You, Baby?

(Gerry Goffin, Carole King, Phil Spector)*

Baby, Let’s Be Lovers (Irwin Levine, Toni Wine, Phil Spector)***

I Can Hear Music (Barry, Greenwich, Spector)

I Can Hear Music

The Ronettes featuring Veronica
Arranged by Artie Butler
Produced by Jeff Barry

*Arranged by Jack "Specs" Nitzsche

**Arranged by Perry Botkin, Jr

***Arranged by Dee Barton and Perry Botkin, Jr

A Phil Spector Production
Produced by Phil Spector
Recorded at Mirasound Studios, New York City
and A & M Studios, Gold Star Studios,
and United Western Recordings, Hollywood
1965 - 1969

Between 1964 and 1966, the year when The Ronettes broke up, Phil Spector had Veronica Bennett in the recording studio constantly. “Phil made sure that I stayed in the studio,” she told interviewer Kingsley Abbott decades later. “He worked me so hard that sometimes, we wouldn’t get out of the studio until the sun was coming up!” She was his muse, his greatest star, and he lavished time and attention on her to the detriment of his other acts. The Crystals, Bobby Sheen and The Righteous Brothers abandoned Philles and signed with other labels. As for Darlene Love, she became strictly a background singer; Spector wouldn’t use her on lead again until the mid-1970s. Yet after the Fabulous Ronettes album was released, Ronnie featured on only three more Philles singles, one of them a Jeff Barry production. “He kept on telling me that we were making new hits,” Ronnie recalled, “but then he didn’t release things.”

In 1969, the year after Phil and Ronnie married, another 45 slipped out on A & M Records. (By then, the group only existed in name only.) None of these sides were hits, so the much-anticipated second album failed to appear. Dozens of masters were reportedly cut, but much to the chagrin of Ronettes fans, only a relative handful have sneaked out over the years. Sixty-nine was also the year The Beach Boys scored high on the charts with a cover of The Ronettes’ “I Can Hear Music.” That was the aforementioned non-hit (#100 Pop) produced by Jeff Barry. If Spector had been of a mind to do it, he might have marketed a new Ronettes album off that song. After all, The Beach Boys never issued an I Can Hear Music album.

Ronnie’s original waxing of the song might have closed an exceptional A & M Records LP. It would’ve boasted grandiose balladry like “Paradise” (later covered brilliantly by Bette Midler) and “I Wish I Never Saw The Sunshine” (later subjected to a dismal Stan Vincent-produced remake). The rockin’ sides would’ve included Mrs. Spector’s latest waxing “You Came! You Saw! You Conquered!” along with “Soldier Baby Of Mine”, “Here I Sit”, “Everything Under The Sun” (later cut with Tina Turner for possible release on Philles, but not by Phil: Its composer, Bob Crewe, would do the honors), “Keep On Dancing, Little Girl” and “Why Don’t They Let Us Fall In Love?”, a slow twist single that Phil test-marketed prior to the release of “Be My Baby”. The sultry “Baby, Let’s Be Lovers”, cut at the same sessions as “You Came . . .” is arguably the best of several Toni Wine compositions Ronnie waxed during the A & M period; leaving it off the LP would’ve been a crime! And after hearing the exuberant, churning drama of the failed Philles singles “Born To Be Together” and “Is This What I Get For Loving You, Baby?” in widescreen stereo mixes, everybody would’ve asked why they hadn't gone Top Ten.

Unfortunately, stereo mixes of these tracks aren’t currently available, unless you’re talking about aurally inferior bootlegs (and we're not talking about them) . . . but we can dream, can’t we? Look at the profusion of stellar composer credits: Harry Nilsson, Pete Anders, Vini Poncia, Barry Mann, Cynthia Weil, Gerry Goffin, Carole King, Irwin Levine, Toni Wine and, naturally, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich. The calibre of selections on I Can Hear Music would’ve been so extraordinarily high, it might have made Fabulous Ronettes sound like a rough demo!

Johnny, Baby, Please Come Home

(Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich, Phil Spector)

Strange Kind Of Love (Pete Anders, Vini Poncia, Phil Spector)

Stumble And Fall (Pete Anders, Vini Poncia, Phil Spector)

Wait 'Til My Bobby Gets Home (Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich, Phil Spector)

A Fine, Fine Boy (Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich, Phil Spector)

Take It From Me (Phil Spector)**

Lord, If You’re A Woman (Barry Mann, Cynthia Weil)*

Chapel Of Love (Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich, Phil Spector)

He's A Quiet Guy (Pete Anders, Vini Poncia, Phil Spector)

(Today I Met) The Boy I'm Gonna Marry
(Ellie Greenwich, Tony Powers, Phil Spector)

Run, Run, Run Away (Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich, Phil Spector)

A Long Way To Be Happy (Gerry Goffin, Carole King)

Playing For Keeps (Phil Spector)**

I Loved Him Like I Loved My Very Life

(Irwin Levine, Phil Spector, Toni Wine)***

Lord, If You’re A Woman

Darlene Love
with The Blossoms
*Arranged by Nino Tempo
**Arranged by Phil Spector
***Arranged by Perry Botkin, Jr
Arranged by Jack "Specs" Nitzsche
A Phil Spector Production
Produced by Phil Spector
Recorded at Gold Star Studios and A & M Studios, Hollywood
1962 - 1977

If you don’t count the records she sang on that were issued as Crystals and Bob B. Soxx and The Blue Jeans singles, Darlene Love only made the Top Forty once under her own name. 1963’s “Wait ‘Til My Bobby Gets Home” was her only bonafide hit. Yet if you do count those other singles, and also take into account her dominance of several albums, her extensive background vocal work for Spector, and the fact that Phil let her do vocal arrangements for his Christmas record, you’ll understand why she’s considered the Queen of Philles Records. The Ronettes may have been more favored, and The Crystals more successful, but the lovely and talented Miss Love (or Miss Wright, if you want to be fussy) had the sound everybody wanted on their Pop records. She logged studio sessions with everybody from Sam Cooke to Dusty Springfield to Elvis Presley.

Since her Philles heyday, Darlene has released a handful of albums, but in my opinion, none of them do her talent justice. Her devoted fans longed for an album of Spector productions, and in 1981, they finally got one, of sorts. Darlene Love Masters was a hastily thrown-together compilation that was only available as part of a nine-album British box set called Wall Of Sound. Predictably, it became quite the collector’s item, but in terms of track inclusions, sequencing, sound quality and sleeve artwork, it still wasn’t the kind of showcase she deserved. Let’s re-imagine it as a European-only Philles album called Lord, If You’re A Woman, issued on the heels of a rare 1977 single of the same title.

Naturally, we’d want to include those delectable Philles A-sides: “Today I Met The Boy I’m Gonna Marry,” “A Fine, Fine Boy”, the withdrawn-from-sale “Stumble And Fall” and the aforementioned torch-carrying rocker. We’d also want choice flipsides like “He’s A Quiet Guy” (Darlene’s personal favorite of her Philles recordings), the bluesy “Take It From Me” and “Playing For Keeps”. For the album-only tracks, we’d favor reverb-drenched rarities like “A Long Way To Be Happy” (wouldja believe a version cut by lounge singer Carolyn Day is in waltz time??!!), “Strange Kind Of Love” (a superb tango rocker) and Darlene’s bump-and-grind version of “Chapel Of Love” (hey, don’t knock it ‘til you’ve heard it). “Run, Run, Run Away” would give fans an idea of how she’d have sounded singing lead on The Crystals’s “Da Do Ron Ron”; the alternate version of "Christmas (Baby, Please Come Home)" features a pre-fame Cher, very audible in the background; and we’d finish on an unexpected note with the Country-flavored “I Loved Him Like I Loved My Very Life”. Classic Soul aficionados will recognize it as a number from the Carla Thomas catalogue. This Toni Wine-penned waxing obviously dates from an aborted A & M Records session; it hints at what stylistic direction Darlene might've taken had Phil’s interest in her voice remained constant.

Seven Million People (Howard Greenfield, Helen Miller)

George McCannon III

Arranged by Johnny Abbott

A Taylor-Gorgoni Production
Produced by Chip Taylor and Al Gorgoni
When I Get Scared (Pete Anders, Doc Pomus, Vini Poncia)

The Lovelites
An Anders-Poncia Production
Produced by Pete Anders and Vini Poncia

You’re My Baby! (Pete Anders, Vini Poncia, Phil Spector)

Gene Toone & The Blazers
Arranged by Arnold Goland

A Phil Spector Production
Produced by Phil Spector
Lover’s Wonderland (Perry Botkin, Jr, Johnny Cole, Gil Garfield)

The Sugar Plums
Arranged by Perry Botkin, Jr

A Botkin-Garfield Production
Produced by Gil Garfield and Perry Botkin, Jr

Kiss Me Now! (Marty Cooper, Bobby Susser)

Florence DeVore
Arranged by Horace Ott

A Cooper-Susser-Silberstein Production
Produced by Marty Cooper and Bobby Susser
You Can’t Grow Peaches On A Cherry Tree
(Estelle Levitt, Camille Monte)

George McCannon III
Arranged by Johnny Abbott

A Taylor-Gorgoni Production
Produced by Chip Taylor and Al Gorgoni
Down, Down (Ike Turner)

The Ikettes
Arranged and Produced by

Ike Turner

Act Naturally (Voni Morrison, Johnny Russell)

Betty Willis
Arranged and Produced by
Leon Russell

Home Of The Brave (Barry Mann, Cynthia Weil)

Bonnie & The TreasuresArranged by Nick De Caro
Produced by Jerry Riopell

Whatcha Gonna Do? (Ike Turner)

The Ikettes
Arranged and Produced by

Ike Turner

Oh, Baby!! (Doc Pomus, Phil Spector)

Harvey & Doc with The Dwellers

A Phil Spector Production
Produced by Phil Spector

Ringo, I Love You (Pete Anders, Vini Poncia, Phil Spector)

Bonnie Jo Mason
A Phil Spector Production
Produced by Phil Spector

We’re Not Old Enough
(Marty Cooper, Terry Sue Pinter, Bobby Susser)

Florence DeVore
Arranged by Horace Ott

A Cooper-Susser-Silberstein Production
Produced by Marty Cooper and Bobby Susser
Hold Me Tight (John Lennon, Paul McCartney)

The Treasures featuring Pete Anders
Arranged by Jack “Specs” Nitzsche

A Phil Spector Production
Produced by Phil Spector
Yesterday (John Lennon, Paul McCartney)

Al De Lory
An Atlas Artists Production
Arranged by Al De Lory
Produced by Fred Darian
under the supervision of Harry Maselow

The Phi-Dan Story

Phil Spector Artists
Recorded 1964-1965

Now, this is the kind of bonus compilation CD that would leave Spector fans drooling! The various releases on Phi-Dan, Annette and Shirley Records (all subsidiary labels to Philles) have never been properly compiled. Most were not supervised by Spector, but every one of them reflects his production ethic to a greater or lesser degree. The producers were some of his most valuable session musicians, along with people he didn’t employ like Marty Cooper, Al Gorgoni and Chip Taylor who nevertheless absorbed his stylistic influence.

“Oh, Baby!” is jokey throwaway track featuring novelty vocals by Phil and songwriter Jerome “Doc” Pomus, but most of the other singles are outstanding: The Lovelites track sounds like Spector producing Belinda Carlisle had she been of recording age in 1964; churning like a piston engine, “You’re My Baby” is a great, groovin' lost Doo-Wop treasure; “Home Of The Brave”, the work of Spector protegé Jerry Riopell, all but defines the Wall of Sound-a-Like genre; and The Ikettes’ “Whatcha Gonna Do?” is a rafters-rocking, street classy boogaloo disc featuring the Holloway sisters (Brenda and Patrice) on backing vocals.

That’s not all: “Ringo, I Love You” is not only Cher’s first single (“Bonnie Jo Mason” was a pseudonym), it’s also the most sought-after Beatles tribute record on the collector’s market. Despite the similarity to “She Loves You”, it ain't a bad song, either. Florence DeVore’s “We’re Not Old Enough” is so incredibly fabulous, it just may be the quintessential Latin-flavored Girl Group single; Pete Anders of The Treasures (a group soon to be renamed The Tradewinds) got his big moment in the sun crooning “Hold Me Tight” over a thunderous Jack Nitzsche arrangement; and Al De Lory’s glorious piano rendition of “Yesterday” is the kind of shimmering instrumental Phil should’ve put on his flipsides.

Now, wasn't that special? Don't you wish you owned a Phil Spector box set this comprehensive? This fanciful exercise of ours is certainly not meant to discourage anyone from buying The Philles Album Collection. If you want it and can afford it in these tough economic times, by all means buy a copy! That said, if you think Sony Music/Legacy aren’t providing exactly what you want in its new Phil Spector reissues, don’t hesitate to let them know. If earlier generations of Spector fans were able to enjoy high-fidelity mastering, previously-unreleased sides and stereophonic sound, there’s no good reason why you shouldn’t, too!

Special thanks to
Peter Richmond and Michael V. Skeen

Vintage Archie

2011-09-25T15:52:00.006-04:00

Archie: The Raunchy Years!

Pointy Breasts, Snarky Humor

and The Genius of Bob Montana

An AndruCharlz Production
Produced by AndruCharlz
Additonal Production and Remix by Don Charles Hampton

Like many of you, when I was growing up during the 1960s and '70s, Archie Andrews and company were constant companions. The comic books, the TV shows, the records, the occasional newspaper comic strip . . . I read, heard, and saw it all. Archie Andrews, the girl-crazy, happy-go-lucky, All-American kid with crosshatches in his hair . . . Jughead Jones, the wry, eccentric hamburger gourmand who had better things to do than chase girls . . . Reggie Mantle, the egotistical schemer whose main goal in life seemed to be to make things rough for Archie. He especially wanted to steal Arch's current girlfriend: Veronica Lodge, snobbish, spoiled, rich, gorgeous and proud of it! Then there was Betty Cooper, the blonde, pony-tailed semi-tomboy who resented being in Veronica's shadow, along with Big Moose, Dilton Doily, Pop Tate and all the other denizens of Riverdale. For better or worse, I knew them far better than I knew my real-life neighbors and friends.

Of course, in the Archie comics that I read, the humor was clean, wholesome and family-friendly, with precious few prickles or nettles to spoil the good vibes. I knew that "Archie" started ‘way back in 1941, but I just naturally assumed that Riverdale had always been that clean and that calm . . . after all, hardly anything changes in comic-dom!

But that was before I read Archie: The Complete Daily Newspaper Comics, 1946-1948. This huge, hardback collection, published by the Library of American Comics and IDW Publishers of New York, reprints the initial two-year run of Archie newspaper comic strips. Wow! It's like I climbed into the back seat of Archie’s jalopy "Old Bess" and, instead of the slow ride I expected, found myself careening down the highway at nearly 100 miles an hour!

All of a sudden, Archie became a wild-eyed speed demon, maniacally laughing and whooping as he held both feet down on the gas pedal! Slow the @##%~ down, Arch!!! Didn’t we pass Betty and Veronica back there? Man! When did they start looking like that? Talk about a couple of hot numbers . . . where's the seat belt? Say what? There's no seat belt??? Whoooooa . . . .

OK. The ride's over now! Let me calm down, take a few deep breaths, and reflect.

Seriously, these are not your father's Archie comic strips! Well, maybe they would be your father’s (or grandfather’s), but they’re not the ones you're used to. To be sure, most of these early storylines are the same ones that would keep popping up in years to come: Archie inviting both Betty and Veronica to the prom and trying to get Jughead to help him wiggle out of it; Archie trying his hand at golf, or football, or hockey, or whatever sport artist Bob Montana decided to make him stumble through; the gang getting chills and taking spills in a "haunted house"; Archie mistakenly asking witchy ol' Miss Grundy to the school dance; the boys at summer camp, trying to crash the all-girls camp next door . . . these plots and others would be laundered, wrung out, dried off and re-used over and over.

So what's different about these 1946-48 strips? Plenty! First, there's the sheer, unrestrained energy of these comics. Forget about 3-D: With no such gimmicks, the characters seem to jump through the panels and off the pages, tiring you out just by looking at them! At times, they remind me of "The Boy Friends," an obscure but energetic film short series from the Hal Roach laugh factory. The pure slapstick in these strips rivals anything Al Capp drew in his "Li'l Abner" prime, or any of Maggie's dish-throwing tantrums in "Bringing Up Father." (As quieter, more sophisticated strips like "Peanuts" gained prominence in later years, unhinged antics in the funny pages largely disappeared, and that's quite a loss! But I digress.)

Along with the slapstick, the humor in general is sharper, more pointed, even snarkier, than the later Archie comics. It’s the kind of humor you'd see decades later in teen comedies like Meatballs (which could've lifted its story straight from the 1947 summer camp sequence in this collection). While still basically a decent boy, Archie Andrews is wilder and much more of a smart ass; his occasional asides to readers remind me of Alfred E. Newman's "aphorisms" on the Mad Magazine contents page. Jughead Jones is also more aggressive, cynical and openly misogynist than he would be later on; he serves as a voice of reason, countering Archie's wild impulsiveness. Reggie, too, comes across much nastier than we'd see him act in the 1960s and '70s; his treatment of Archie in such storylines as the 1946 club initiation borders on sadistic!

All three boys are somewhat less handsome than they appear today, too. Aw, who am I kidding? Let me lay it right on the line for you: Frankly, Juggie is uglier than homemade sin, and one glance at Archiekins’ buck-toothed puss makes you wonder what in the world Betty and Veronica ever saw in him! With few exceptions, Riverdale High’s male student body during the 1940s was a scrawny, knock-kneed, dorky-looking bunch. Yipe! It doesn’t take a genius to guess what Bob Montana’s sexual preference was!

And what about those girls? Or should I say, those honeys! Yowsah! In the very first strip, which introduces Veronica Lodge as the new girl in school, the Dixie-born débutante is, except for her jet black hair, the spittin' image of the wartime starlet who inspired her character: Veronica Lake. And that's just above the neck. Both she and Betty Cooper look more like Hollywood glamour girls than the teenagers they're supposed to be. Believe you me, no chick I knew in high school (not even the ones that developed early and had growth spurts) looked like these two!

Rendered tall, full-figured and voluptuous (dig those pointed little breasts!), Archie’s girls circa 1948 are rich eye candy for admirers of the female form, especially when they wear swimsuits (or not . . . wait ‘til you see the discreet nude scenes Bob Montana sneaked past the censors! Sometimes, even the boys showed more skin than was common in '40s media). Don’t be surprised if you find yourself drooling at the sight of Ronnie in her black ballet leotard (ooooooweee!) or her leggy drum majorette uniform. Montana got away with sneaking other absolute babes into his strips as well, and most of them were supposed to be teenagers, too.

If you can tear your eyes away from Ronnie and Betty for a while, you’ll meet many unfamiliar characters that probably didn't make it into the comic books: Just to name three, zoot suit-wearing mechanical farmer Bobby Zocks, Hooky Hogan, a notorious hooky-player from school, and Streaky, a rival for Reggie in the bad-guy department. You’ll also see the gang interacting with adults a lot more (Zocks being one example), and grown-up foibles are fully on display. Turns out Archie’s dad thinks he can dance the Jitterbug, Mr. Weatherbee has an eye for the ladies, and you won’t believe how saucy Miss Grundy gets in some panels! Could it be teacher is hot for some red-headed schoolboy lovin’? Back in ’46, Bob Montana wasn’t beyond leaving that impression!

Most of all, this book is a tribute to Montana (real name: Robert William Coleman), who’s been overshadowed by Dan DeCarlo and other popular “Archie” artists who succeeded him. Despite the world-wide fame of his creations, he’s never quite gotten the credit he deserves. Publisher John Goldwater may have provided much inspiration, and scripters like Vic Bloom were always on hand to help out, but it was Bob Montana who designed and sculpted the world of Riverdale. It looks rather generic nowadays, but in the late ‘40s, he made that world as vivid as Al Capp's Dogpatch. It's only recently that the goateed cartoonist, who died in 1975, was inducted into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame for comic strip artists. The honor was long overdue.

BOB MONTANA

Though Montana was long past his own teens when he helped bring Archie to life, it's clear from these early strips that he had near total recall of those years. Pushing the boundaries of what was then acceptable in the funny papers, he had the courage to show teenagers as they really were: Devilish, conniving, lazy, petty, sarcastic and even sexually precocious. (To paraphrase screen legend Mae West: When Betty was good, she was very good. Ah, but when she was bad, as shown in a 1946 football-themed story, she was even better!) He’d almost certainly enjoy the raunchy gags found in 21st century teen fare, because they really aren’t that different from what he did 65 years ago.

For those who don't mind a little text with your pictures, the book contains some fine essays detailing the early history of Archie: The wartime comic books and the 1940s radio series as well as the newspaper strips. They contain some with surprising insights, like the fact that the series' slapstick sequences were informed by Bob Montana’s firsthand knowledge of stage comedy: His mom and dad had been vaudevillians.

Despite the initial shock, I'm glad I took this wild ride into the early history of Archie Andrews and Riverdale. Once you've taken it, I think you’ll be glad, too; and if you haven’t bought an Archie comic book for a while, you might even find yourself becoming a fan again! Wouldja believe an openly Gay kid has joined the gang? And did you know there’s now a magazine that envisions Archie’s future life as husband to Veronica . . . and Betty? I ain't makin' this up! Could it be a little bit of that edgy Bob Montana spirit is creeping back into the strip? See for yourself. Now, where did I put my Archie Comics Double Digest . . . ?

For a less expensive trip into Archie Comics past, grab hold of the new 400 page all-color paperback volume The Best Of Archie Comics, with 70 years’ worth of stories featuring The Archies, Josie and The Pussycats, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Li’l Jinx, That Wilkin Boy, Katy Keene and many other vintage characters.

All images © copyright Archie Comic Publications.

Jerry Leiber (Part One)

2011-09-02T12:20:00.004-04:00

Some Cats Know . . .

The Rock ‘n’ Roll Legacy of Jerry Leiber

A Remembrance by Don Charles Hampton

Jerry Leiber was one-half of a legendary songwriting team whose collaborations are so much a part of the DNA of life, it's impossible to visualize a world without them. Leiber's partnership with Mike Stoller endured for more than sixty years, longer than most marriages; longer than many friendships, in fact! They complemented one another perfectly; Leiber's words clicked into place with Stoller's music like the pieces of a puzzle. Try to imagine no "Hound Dog" or "Jailhouse Rock"! No "Stand By Me" or "Yakety Yak". No "Love Potion Number 9"; no "On Broadway"! You can't do it. Leiber and Stoller not only defined the songs of a generation, they changed its course irrevocably.

Jerry and Mike enjoyed their own special brand of synergy and uniqueness. Leiber himself was a unique physical specimen, in possession of one brown eye and one blue eye. The talent that resided in the brain behind those eyes blessed the world with a catalog of tunes that will endure for many years, written from the heart as well as the mind. Jerry Leiber was on this planet for 78 years, yet it doesn't seem long enough somehow. He will live on forever through his songs, but at this juncture, all I can do is ask with sadness: "Is That All There Is?" Rest in peace, Mr. Leiber . . . and thank you.

Laura Pinto,

founder of the Pop Culture Cantina and proprietor of Oldies Connection

One of the Godfathers of Rock ‘n’ Roll died on 22 August 2011. He was there in the early 1950s, when baby Rock was just emerging from the womb. Culturally, he anticipated a postwar generation of young people who rejected “White” Pop sounds as insipid, thrilling instead to the raw energy of “Black” Rhythm and Blues. “I felt Black,” Jerry Leiber often claimed. “I was, as far as I was concerned, and I wanted to be Black for lots of reasons. (The Black people I knew) were better musicians; they were better athletes; they were not uptight about sex; and they knew how to enjoy life better than most people.” A big part of enjoying life in the Black community had to do with the homegrown music. Leiber was aware of this and trained himself to write song lyrics in an authentically African-American vernacular. He preferred that his songs be interpreted by Black artists, so much so that when the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll, Elvis Presley, covered his R & B chart-topper “Hound Dog”, he complained that it sounded “too White!”

No, Jerome Leiber wasn’t Black. He just had an affinity for Black cultural idioms. He didn’t invent Rock ‘n’ Roll. He just put his own indelible mark on it. He didn’t invent the Brill Building Pop sound. He just lit a fire under it. He didn’t invent independent record production. His highly commercial productions just helped make it the industry norm. Nor did Leiber make stars out of Elvis Presley, Peggy Lee, The Drifters or any of the other big stars he worked with. He just made their stars shine a lot brighter.

The star shine man was born 25 April 1933 in Baltimore, Maryland. Raised by a widowed mother, he worked in her grocery store and interaction with her African-American customers exposed him to the Blues. Jerry fell head-over-heels for its rough-hewn sound, and soon found himself longing to write and sing tunes in that style. Accordingly, he took a few music lessons from his uncle. However, the uncle disapproved of his stylistic inclinations, so those studies didn't go very far! When Jerry's mother moved the family to Los Angeles in 1945, he took his love for the Blues with him. Going to work in a Fairfax Avenue record store, he began scribbling Blues songs on his breaks. However, his musical abilities were so meager at the time, he was obliged to seek out collaborators. After one songwriting partner deserted him for lack of interest, he took up with a semi-professional teenage piano player who was immersed in classical composition studies.

Michael Stoller resisted the collaboration, but he was unable to dissuade the eager Jewish boy with mismatched eye colors. Jerry Leiber had a wicked twinkle in both orbs and wicked tenacity to match. Recalling their first meeting to journalist Robert Palmer, Stoller revealed: “To me, songs meant a lot of junk you heard on the radio like hold me in your arms/and let me thrill to all your charms. I was very negative! ‘I don’t want to write songs,’ I told him . . . but he was very persistent.” Jerry showed Mike his notebook filled with Blues lyrics. Suddenly, the mood changed in the room. “I didn’t know you were talking about the Blues,” the 16-year-old piano prodigy exclaimed with undisguised delight. “I like the Blues.” He took Leiber’s notebook to his piano, sat down and started doodling. They began writing together that day in 1950, and their partnership lasted six decades.

Lieber had met Modern Records staffer Lester Sill while working at the music shop. Through Sill, the fledgling duo got a chance to audition their songs for some of Modern’s R & B acts. Before the end of 1950, Jimmy Witherspoon had waxed “Real Ugly Woman”, and by early 1951 The Robins had cut “That’s What The Good Book Says”. By the time they placed their first chart hit with R & B crooner Charles Brown (“Hard Times”) two years later, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller had earned the reputation of a hot new songwriting team. They were known as “the White boys who could write Black”. Leiber could even sing Black, doing so on demo recordings like “Shake ‘Em Up And Let ‘Em Roll”, and odd guest vocal turns like the rollicking 1959 Coasters B-side, “Baby, That Is Rock And Roll.” His gut-bucket snarl of a singing style might’ve taken him far in Blues clubs. However, it was as a lyricist on spicy numbers like Bull Moose Jackson’s “Nosey Joe” . . .

There’s a man in town all the women know

He goes by the name of Nosey Joe

Don’t care if they’re married

He takes his pick

As long as they’re women,

He’s ready to stick

His big nose in their business

That’s Nosey Joe

The nosiest guy I know*

. . . that Jerry Leiber would find his fame. Early efforts by Jackson, Little Esther (“Mainliner”), Milt Trenier (“Squeeze Me”), Wynonie Harris (“Destination Love”) and Little Mickey Champion (“Lovin’ Jim”) were very spicy indeed! Double entendre-laden songs like “Poison Ivy” notwithstanding, the innuendo toned down somewhat when Leiber and Stoller began writing for The Coasters in 1956. Understandably so, because by that time their songs were appealing to a largely White and teenage audience. Rock ‘n’ Roll was the latest trend in popular music, and Leiber/Stoller songs fit right into the new groove.

Jerry Leiber’s legendary collaborations with Mike Stoller include “Kansas City”, “Black Denim Trousers And Motorcycle Boots”(originally recorded by The Cheers and unexpectedly covered by legendary French chanteuse Edith Piaf), “Drip Drop, “Ruby Baby”, “I’m A Woman”, “Lucky Lips”, “DW Washburn”, “Framed!”, “Girls! Girls! Girls!”, “Fools Fall In Love” and the following million-sellers either written for or covered by Elvis Presley: “Hound Dog”, “Love Me”, “Loving You”, “Jailhouse Rock”, “Treat Me Nice”, “Baby, I Don’t Care”, “Don’t!”, “King Creole”, “Trouble”, “Santa Claus Is Back In Town”, “She’s Not You” and “Bossa Nova Baby”. What a haul!

Never exclusively partnered with Stoller, Jerry Leiber also scored best-sellers in collaboration with other composers: Phil Spector (Ben E. King’s “Spanish Harlem”), Billy Edd Wheeler (June Carter and Johnny Cash’s “Jackson”), and Artie Butler and Shadow Morton (The Shangri-Las’ “Past, Present And Future”). With Stoller, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, he co-wrote the Drifters smash “On Broadway” and Jay and The Americans’ “Only In America.” The BMI database assigns him credit for penning The Monkees favorite "She Hangs Out" with Stoller, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich. With Stoller and the aforementioned Mr. Wheeler, he updated the folk air “The Reverend Mr. Black”, providing both Johnny Cash and The Kingston Trio with chart singles, decades apart. To an original melody by Italian songwriter Carlo Donida Labati, he and Stoller wrote English lyrics to the mother of all angst-ridden ballads, “I Who Have Nothing”; and with Ben E. King and other co-writers(some of them rather dubious!), they kicked off The Drifters’ run of Top Forty radio favorites with “There Goes My Baby” and “Dance With Me.”

Jerry Leiber developed into a master songwriter, in every sense of the word. He mentored many of the young writers he collaborated with. To British compilation producer Mick Patrick, Billy Edd Wheeler described the process of crafting tunes with him: “He wouldn’t let me write lines down too soon. We’d come up with a line and I’d say: ‘That’s it! That’s perfect.’ But he’d say: ‘Wait a minute’ . . . and he would go back to previous lines, in his head, rewrite one of them and then come back to the line I said was perfect and improve it. Finally, I would be allowed to scribble the lines down on my yellow (legal) pad. Even then, we kept changing them and polishing them.”

Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, one of the best teams in the business with a 50-year track record of hits, were equally impressed with Leiber’s composing skills. “(Writing with him) was very exciting,” Mann told author Ken Emerson. “The way he just kept throwing lines out, and then he’d take them back! ‘Try this line!’ Then he’d say: ‘Let’s go to the third verse or the second verse.’” Weil chimed in: “It was like going to songwriter’s school!” Posting at the Leiber-Stoller website, Mike Stoller’s son Peter confirms: “Jerry (helped) elevate other good songwriters . . . (he) set a high bar at which to aim, if never to reach. Jerry’s balance of natural talent and hard-won craftsmanship, of lightning wit and serious purpose, of compact form and complex content, made him not just the quintessential Rock ‘n’ Roll lyricist, but the quintessential lyricist, period! In the history of popular songwriting, he has few equals (and) no superiors.”

Artie Butler, who worked with Leiber both as co-writer and music arranger, strongly concurs. “Jerry Leiber was one of the greatest American Pop music lyric writers of all time,” he declares. “Together with his partner, Mike Stoller, he created a treasure chest of musical magic . . . how lucky was I that I got to see much of their magic show unfold daily on a firsthand basis, when they gave me my start (in the business) at the age of sixteen?”

Although the Leiber-Stoller team seemed to crank out hit after hit, for every Gold record there were dozens of stellar near-misses like The Isley Brothers’ “Your Old Lady” and “Teach Me How To Shimmy”; Jay and The Americans’ “Drums” and “It’s My Turn To Cry”; The Soul Brothers’ “Keep It Up”; Gene Pitney’s “Take It Like A Man”; The Shangri-Las’ “Bull Dog”, Dino and Sembello’s “Neighborhood” and a sizzling withheld-from-release recording of “You’re The Boss” by Elvis and Ann-Margret, deleted from the soundtrack of Viva Las Vegas. Jerry Leiber never ran out of ideas; there are enough exceptional rarities floating around to keep reissue labels busy past the end of the century.

Leiber and Stoller owned five record labels during the years they were active in the music industry: Spark Records, founded in 1954 as a vehicle for their R & B songs, was the first. After two years, an offer they couldn't refuse led to them closing Spark down; Atlantic Records contracted the team to write and produce for its artists into the early 1960s. When that deal fizzled, Jerry and Mike tried the independent route again. In 1962, they launched Tiger Records and its subsidiary label, Daisy. Although both were unsuccessful, by 1964 Tiger and Daisy had evolved into the powerhouse Red-Bird imprint. That’s where young songwriters like Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich, Steve Venet, Shadow Morton and Chip Taylor, all groomed under Leiber and Stoller’s tutelage, scored a two year run of major chart records. Because Jerry and Mike’s song publishing firm (Trio Music) was housed in Broadway’s Brill Building, Rock historians call this creatively fertile period the height of the Brill Building Pop era.

MIKE STOLLER and JERRY LEIBER

“Some Cats Know . . . ” concludes with Part Two.

Jerry Leiber (Part Two)

2011-09-01T12:22:00.068-04:00

Some Cats Know . . .

The Rock 'n' Roll Legacy of Jerry Leiber

A Remembrance by Don Charles Hampton

Contrary to some reports, Leiber and Stoller’s creative input at Red-Bird (and its sister label, Blue Cat) was usually limited to executive roles. That said, the dynamic working environment they provided to their employees made chartbusters like “Chapel Of Love”, “Leader Of The Pack”, “Iko Iko” “I Wanna Love Him So Bad”, “New York’s A Lonely Town”, “Come Back, Baby” “Hold On, Baby” and “I Can Never Go Home Anymore” possible. They did keep a hand in, though, producing a large number of masters including The Ad-Libs’ 1965 chart-topper “The Boy From New York City.” The Red-Bird hit parade ended abruptly after producer George Goldner, their partner in the venture, linked the label to Mafia interests they wanted to no part of. The hitmaking duo sold their shares in the company for one dollar and went off to work with Tennessee Williams (on a theatre project that was aborted) and Peggy Lee (on recording projects that came to glorious fruition). Jerry Leiber's work with Ms. Lee resulted in “Is That All There Is?” one of the most sophisticated Pop records of the ‘60s.

That record’s evocative production values were as responsible for its success as the song. Naturally, Leiber and Stoller supervised the recording session. Jerry Leiber was also a master producer; those who’ve learned at his elbow include major hit makers like Burt Bacharach, Bert Berns, Artie Ripp, Jerry Ragovoy, Van McCoy, and the aforementioned Jeff Barry, Shadow Morton and Artie Butler. In partnership with Mike Stoller, Jerry began producing records in 1953; they were two of the first freelance A & R men, never affiliated with any one record company. R & B star Linda Hopkins was their maiden artist, and from her waxing of “Three Time Loser” on the tiny Crystalette label, the duo went on to score a truckload of chart hits for Big Top, United Artists, Scepter/Wand, Kapp, Capitol, Columbia/Epic, RCA Victor, Red-Bird/Blue Cat, and especially Atlantic/Atco Records artists, many of them with Leiber-Stoller compositions.

In addition to the Ad-Libs, their magic touch in the studio benefited The Robins (“Riot In Cell Block Number Nine”), Sammy Turner (“Lavender Blue”), Ben E. King (“Stand By Me”), LaVern Baker (“Saved”), Jay and The Americans (“She Cried”), Mike Clifford (“Close To Cathy”), The Exciters (“Tell Him”), Chuck Jackson (“I Keep Forgettin’), Alvin Robinson (“Something You Got”), Big Mama Thornton (the original version of “Hound Dog”), Stealer’s Wheel (“Stuck In The Middle With You”), The Clovers (“Love Potion Number Nine”) and The Drifters (a legendary hit streak including “There Goes My Baby”, “Save The Last Dance For Me”, “Up On The Roof” and “On Broadway”). To say that these records were influential would be a gross understatement; A & R men in locales as far away as Münich, Germany mined their grooves for ideas and pimped Mike and Jerry’s production style. The Latin rhythms found on most of the Drifters and Ben E. King sides touched off a Habanera Rock craze that dominated Pop/Rock arrangements for nearly a decade.

Leiber and Stoller’s best-known productions are arguably those waxed with The Coasters, a vocal group spun off from The Robins. “The Coasters were (Leiber and Stoller’s) creation and, in many respects, their alter egos,” observed writer James Ritz. “They produced, arranged, rehearsed, coerced and through sheer symbiotic charisma modeled (the group) into the premier musical comedy act of their generation.” Their classic Atco sides bear out Ritz’s claim: “Searchin’”, “Young Blood”, “Yakety Yak”, “Charlie Brown”, “Along Came Jones”, “Poison Ivy” and “Little Egypt” provided an irreverent soundtrack to the lives of many a teenager in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. A steady stream of Coasters cover versions both preceded and followed the revival of their catalogue in 1995 via the Tony Award-nominated musical revue Smokey Joe’s Café.

Jerry and Mike logged sessions with artists as diverse as T-Bone Walker, Roy Hamilton, Jack Jones, The Shirelles, piano wizards Ferrante and Teicher, actress Leslie Uggams, actor/singer/songwriter Anthony Newley and Jazz legend Chris Connor. Without credit, Leiber and Stoller supervised soundtrack sessions for the Elvis Presley movies Jailhouse Rock and King Creole. Their final charting Pop production, Elkie Brooks’ self-titled 1976 album, contained the maudlin “Pearl’s A Singer” and other favorites featured in their Broadway show.

Take my word for it: If you see the words “A Leiber-Stoller Production” emblazoned on a record label, nine times out of ten, the quality of the music will be excellent. Part of the excellence was how Leiber interacted with studio musicians. “(Jerry) always made you feel important, even if you were just the background singer,” recalls producer and former session vocalist Ron Dante, who logged a few Leiber-Stoller sessions. “He was a wonderful human being (and) a true legend of the Brill Building. He made history with his partner, Mike.” However history-making his work in the studio was, though, Jerry Leiber would no doubt call his three sons Jake, Jed and Oliver Leiber (the latter two having followed him into the music industry) his most excellent productions of all.

When a dude’s name can be found both on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, you know you’ve lost a major talent when he dies! The RROF induction took place in 1987; the Walk of Fame star was laid in 1994. Leiber had entered the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame in 1985. Jerry also received the National Academy of Songwriter’s Lifetime Achievement Award, the NARAS Trustees Award, the Johnny Mercer Award from the National Academy of Popular Music(most appropriate, since Mercer was another White man could write and “sing Black”), and the Ivor Novello Award.

In 1995, the aforementioned Smokey Joe’s Café took Broadway by storm, selling out night after night and winning a Best Cast Album Grammy award(the cast album was a Leiber-Stoller Production, of course). It went on to become the longest-running revue ever featured on the Great White Way, and will probably never stop being produced in regional theatres. Wherever it plays, the classic songs bring audiences to their feet.

A joint biography with Mike Stoller, Hound Dog, was published by Simon and Shuster in 2009. Unfortunately, Jerry's longtime desire to mount a show about 19th century British humorist Oscar Wilde went unrealized; Mike Stoller still hopes to find backers. In addition to his priceless legacy of songs, stage works and recording sessions, Jerry Leiber leaves behind Jake, Jed, Oliver, and two beloved granddaughters, Daphne and Chloë.

Having suffered heart problems for several years, Leiber knew the time he had left was probably short. He ended his 2009 autobiography with these words: “If my next medical report is (bad), then this is my plan: I’m going to buy a fifth of Maker’s Mark bourbon, a carton of Camels, and as many Billie Holiday records as I can carry.” Quoting one of the most famous lines from “Is That All There Is,” he promised: “I’m going to break out the booze and have a ball . . . if that’s all there is.”

But that’s not all there is; not by a longshot! When you’re responsible for as many enduring hits as Jerome Leiber created in his lifetime, the music never ends. In 1975, Peggy Lee committed to wax the some of the steamiest lyrics he ever wrote:

Some cats know how to stir up the feelin’

They keep foolin’ round ‘til you’re halfway to the ceilin’

Some cats know how to make the honey flow

But if a cat don’t know

A cat don’t know!*

Jerome Leiber was the kind of a cat who knew! He not only knew how to make the honey flow; he knew how to keep it flowing. You can believe what Laura Pinto says: The spicy and sweet taste he added to American popular music will certainly last forever.

Numerous Leiber and Stoller songbook compilations have been released over the years, but if you want to get a good overview of their songwriting work, these are the best:

There’s A Riot Goin’ On: The Coasters On Atco (Rhino M2 7740, 2007); The Leiber & Stoller Story: Hard Times (UK Ace Records 1010, 2004); The Leiber & Stoller Story: On The Horizon (UK Ace Records 1116, 2006); The Leiber & Stoller Story: Shake ‘Em Up And Let ‘Em Roll (UK Ace Records 1156, 2007); Elvis Presley Sings Leiber and Stoller (RCA Records 3026-2-R, 1991); There’s A Riot Goin’ On: The Rock & Roll Classics of Leiber & Stoller (Rhino 70593, 1991); Smokey Joe’s Café: The Songs of Leiber & Stoller(Atlantic Theatre 82765-2, 1995).

Special thanks to Artie Butler, Ron Dante, Laura Pinto and Peter Stoller for proofreading and other contributions.

Patrice Holloway

2011-06-16T12:52:00.004-04:00

CDKEND 354

Love and Desire

The Patrice Holloway Anthology

featuring Stolen Hours, Lucky My Boy, Ecstasy, Love And Desire, That's All You Gotta Do, Stay With Your Own Kind, Evidence, The Chance You Gotta Take, Black Mother Goose, Touch Of Venus, Those Deejay Shows, For The Love Of Mike, Stevie, My Two Arms Minus You, Come Into My Palace, All That's Good, I Gotta Change, Tall Boy, Flippity-Flop, The "Go" Gang, Love Walked Right In, Crying, Face In The Crowd, Surf Stomp and The Boy Of My Dreams

released in 2011

"Patrice Holloway's Buried Treasures"
An AndruCharlz Production

Reviewed by AndruCharlz

Additional Production and Remix by Don Charles Hampton

Well, let's see: Highly respected and beloved by the singers, musicians and producers she worked with, but treated with indifference by record-industry bigwigs . . . gainfully employed as a session singer, even making some TV history along the way, but never getting the public recognition she deserved . . . falling victim to a debilitating disease that ends her career and, ultimately, her life.

Such is the story of Patrice Holloway, who at last gets some of her due with Love and Desire: The Patrice Holloway Anthology, a new collection from Ace Records' Kent imprint. This is the first full-length album devoted entirely to Patrice's work, and it has some stunners.

Most of the CD is devoted to Patrice's 1963-65 work for Motown Records, most of which has just been liberated from the vaults. Barely a teenager, Patrice along with her older sister Brenda signed with Motown in 1963. They were the first West Coast artists to record for the label; but while Brenda went on to enjoy three Top 40 Tamla/Motown singles, including the sublime Top Twenty "Every Little Bit Hurts," only one of Patrice's Motown tracks would ever be released . . . and even that one, "The Boy Of My Dreams", was quickly withdrawn from sale. Reportedly, Motown boss Berry Gordy, Jr. advised Patrice to finish her schooling before going full-tilt on the career. Sage advice, to be sure . . . but in light of how her career stalled, could it have also been a warning?

Of the Motown tracks that finally see the light of day here, my favorites include "Tall Boy," "All That's Good" (one of several Patrice tracks written and produced by Smokey Robinson), the Diana Ross & The Supremes reject "Those Deejay Shows"(how many deejays would have used that one as a theme had it been released?), "Love Walked Right In," "Touch of Venus" and the Phil Spector-influenced "Face In the Crowd." I'm not quite sure what to make of two other songs: "Surf Stomp", a retread of an early single by Patrice's one-time boyfriend Stevie Wonder, and "The 'Go' Gang", a blatant rip-off of Dobie Gray's "The In-Crowd". To me, these cuts sound more appropriate for a second-string teen idol; yet Patrice and company do perform them with remarkable force and intensity. They're not bad, really, just kind of odd.

The future Pussycat's teenage vocals were every bit as strong as they would later be, but her phrasing was very unpolished . . . perhaps too much so for commercial purposes. Motown no doubt thought so. After letting her languish on the vine, the company cut Patrice loose in 1965. According to Brenda Holloway, Berry Gordy, Jr. wanted to groom her for a behind-the-scenes role in his business division, but her little sister turned him down. She was determined to sing! The next year, she landed at Capitol Records, where, with sibling writer/producers Gene and Billy Page at the helm, she finally got something released.

Three superb singles came out of Patrice's first stint at Capitol. "Stolen Hours", "Love And Desire" and "Stay With Your Own Kind" were all high-quality releases, but there was little or no chart action. "Stolen Hours" in particular was a tour-de-force, a proto-Disco stomper that debuted the alternately cooing and shouting vocal style that Patty became known for. The pounding "Love And Desire" sounded like a Motown outtake, and its Wall of Sound-drenched flipside "Ecstasy" might have been the session mate of "Face In The Crowd".

Lou Rawls's producer David Axelrod helmed "Stay With Your Own Kind", significant for being one of the first interracial love ballads; but Patty's smouldering performance of Willie Hutch's fabulous Northern Soul nugget "That's All You Gotta Do", hidden away on the flipside, was the real keeper. The improvement in Patrice's phrasing over the passage of two years, from the low point of "Surf Stomp" to the high point of "Stolen Hours", is just astonishing! Had Mr. Gordy persevered with her just a little longer, he might have found himself grooming a superstar instead of a business manager.

Upon leaving Capitol in '67, the Divine Miss H drifted into session work, participating in an excellent but unheralded album of Bob Dylan songs done Gospel-style. Released on Lou Adler's Ode label, Dylan's Gospel became an instant collector's item, just like most of the other waxings Patrice was involved with. During this period, she sang back-ups on several West Coast-waxed Motown hits including Diana Ross & The Supremes' "Someday We'll Be Together", and saw a Blood, Sweet and Tears recording called "You've Made Me So Very Happy" score a #2 Pop smash. The original version had been released by Brenda Holloway, with whom Patty had co-written the song. The following year(1970), she auditioned for "Josie and the Pussycats," a new Hanna-Barbera cartoon series based on an Archie spin-off comic strip. Songwriter/producer Danny Janssen was cutting a musical soundtrack for the show, and he needed girls to sing the parts.

Janssen was knocked out by Patrice's talent, and insisted, no, demanded that she be one of the singing voices on the show. Hanna-Barbera accomodated him by making Valerie Smith, one of Josie's Pussycats, the first African-American female regular on an American cartoon. (It should be pointed out, however, that Patrice did not provide Valerie's speaking voice. That role was filled by actress Barbara Pariot.) The other two girls who would sing as The Pussycats were aspiring opera diva Kathleen Dougherty(Josie James) and itinerant rocker Cheryl Jean Stoppelmoor(Melody Jones), later to become famous as Cheryl Ladd, my favorite Charlie's Angel.

Cheryl Jean was actually the group's frontwoman(Kathleen was more comfortable singing background harmonies), singing lead on most of the soundtrack numbers. However, Patty asserted herself in the studio, asking for and getting lead vocal duties on ten J&TP songs. Those performances include the show's frantic theme, "Josie"; both sides of the group's two Capitol singles ("You've Come A Long Way, Baby"/"Stop, Look And Listen" and "Every Beat Of My Heart"/"It's All Right With Me"); the rousing album tracks "Watch Out For The Roadrunner" and "Clappin' Your Hands"; the commercially unreleased "Clock On The Wall"; and everybody's favorite Pussycat track, "Voodoo." If only these gems had been included on Love and Desire! So far, their only CD appearance has been on a limited-edition Rhino Handmade compilation, just barely released ten years ago.

Patrice's work on the Josie project ended after a year, but Danny Janssen was so determined to work with her again, he persuaded Capitol to sign her for a second time. This second stint (1971-2) resulted in two singles co-produced by her friend and frequent session mate Clarence MacDonald: "Evidence", a funky Blues ballad co-written by "Dolemite" cult star Rudy Ray Moore, and the delightful "Black Mother Goose," an unusual (to say the least) combination of Bubblegum and Black pride! Sadly, these releases met the same cold reception as Patty's previous Capitol singles: Few heard, few bought, and Miss H was soon headed back to the session grind.

She wouldn't stay there much longer, though. Building up over several years, mental health problems began taking their toll. By 1975, she was forced to retire from music. An astute businesswoman who managed her own money as well as a single mother, Patrice had to leave her investments and the care of her son Nikko for others to manage. More mature in some ways than her older sister Brenda, in the end she was reduced to an almost childlike mentality. She spent the rest of her life in and out of treatment, and died of a heart attack in 2006. One of popular music's most exciting voices is now silent forever.

A sad ending, yes. A frustrated career, yes . . . but happily, Patrice Yvonne Holloway left behind a rich legacy of music that now, thanks to Ace/Kent, we can fully experience and enjoy. Love and Desire is an essential purchase for Patrice Holloway fans in particular and Soul aficionados in general; to paraphrase that million-selling song she co-wrote, it will make you so very happy! A general-release Josie and The Pussycats collection would delight us all even more; how's about it, Ace Records?

Ace Records' 2009 CD Brenda Holloway: The Early Years includes Patrice Holloway's rare first single, "Do The Dell-Viking, Parts One and Two" which features sister Brenda and producer Hal Davis on back-up vocals.

Seeco Records (Part One)

2011-02-09T13:56:00.002-05:00

Sidney Siegel's

House Of Gold

The Seeco Records Story

by Don Charles Hampton

¡Hey, señor!
Come this way
If I may be so bold
You will find treasure here
In my house of gold*

Glenn Miller, Count Basie, Benny Goodman and other legendary bandleaders plied the beat that set Americans Lindy Hopping in the 1930s and '40s. However, the popularity of big bands waned during the years immediately after the end of World War II. The end of the Swing era saw the rise of superstar balladeers like Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Perry Como, Nat "King" Cole and Rosemary Clooney. However, people still wanted to dance as much as ever! To satisfy this demand, Rhythm and Blues and Western swing came into their own on the West Coast and in the southern and midwestern United States, respectively. Meanwhile on the East Coast, swingin' mambo sounds fit the bill.

Jeweler Sidney Siegel noticed the growing popularity of Latin dance music during the height of the war. It was reportedly in 1943 that he poured the assets of his Casa Siegel jewelry store into the founding of a record label. Wartime vinyl rationing meant that record companies were terminating the contracts of all but their best-selling acts. A large number of Latin bands found themselves cut loose from the major labels. "All these recording stars in the Spanish (music) world were out of work," Howie Roseff told blogger Mark Schwartz. Roseff, Sidney Siegel's young cousin, worked at Casa Siegel and followed him into the record business. "Sidney knew who these popular artists were because he used to sell their records."

In addition to jewelry, Siegel's store also carried housewares and 78 RPM singles. His store was located in Spanish Harlem, and his clientele mostly Latino, so naturally he stocked Spanish-language music. "The next thing you know," Roseff remembered, "he gave up the jewelry business . . . and stuck with records." Seeco's first signing was the popular Cuarteto Marcano. The label's earliest releases were marketed in Canada due to the rationing problem; by the late '40s, Sidney Siegel had launched a full-fledged American operation.

SEECO RECORDING STAR

ALBERTO BELTRÁN

Latin music historian Max Salazar has interviewed Howie Roseff extensively about Seeco's operations. Roseff revealed to him that "the recordings took place at the Joe Smith studios at 57th Street . . . the recording scale was $25.00 for a four-hour session. Salesmen of jewelry and music . . . came to Casa Siegel and bought the records to re-sell. We never paid a cent for promotion! Program directors of radio stations dropped by the store to pick up free copies of the latest releases to air on their programs . . . in the late '40s, Art "Pancho" Raymond, Dick Sugar and Bob Harris aired our releases."

Seeco was selling to Puerto Ricans in New York, so Sidney Siegel began by recording lots of guitar trios from the island. However, his customers increasingly preferred music by Cuban groups. "Between 1943 and 1945, we recorded mostly Puerto Rican artists (but) eventually, Seeco catered more to the Afro-Cuban sound (because) it sold the most," Roseff confirmed. "The Seeco label (became) the most popular seller of Latin recordings until the early 1950s."

Seeco Records was devoted to the kind of Latin music that Siegel loved. Rival labels would spring up in later years (most notably, Tico Records in 1948) which tended to specialize in the "New York Latin" sound of the most popular mambo bands. Seeco and its sister label Tropical created a niche for themselves by seeking out (no pun intended) and recording only the most authentic sounds. If that meant Siegel had to travel to some far-flung locale to record an act, so be it! Unfortunately, primitive recording equipment was used, and the sound quality on many early Seeco releases leaves much to be desired. That mattered little, though, to Spanish Harlemites hungry for new releases by their favorite groups.

SEECO RECORDING STARS

THE JOE CUBA SEXTETTE

Seeco's catalogue included not only Afro-Cuban music(the foundation of mambo), but also native music from the French Antilles, South America, Western Europe, the Caribbean and all over the Latin diaspora. Over the next 25 years, Sidney Siegel would aggressively pursue distribution deals and fresh talent in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Haiti, The Dominican Republic, México, Spain and Argentina. His upstart independent label became famous both inside and outside the United States due to the pedigree of its product. The sleeve of each new release proclaimed in bold letters: "The Finest In Latin-American Recordings." While a fair amount of dross was issued by his label, Siegel did his best to make the claim ring true.

A "world music" label long before the term had been coined, Seeco was the direct forerunner of present-day companies like Putumayo and Island Records. Reportedly, it was the first Latin label to convert from the 10-inch album format to the 12-inch LP(in 1954). Although originally intended as strictly a Latin music label, by the late 1950s, its artist roster had diversified to include Jazz, music hall and cabaret artists such as Cy Coleman, Elsa Maxwell, Billy Maxted, Tony Scott, continental sex kitten Eartha Kitt, and cocktail pianist Hildegarde.

The Polyphonics, a trio of eclectic harmonica wizards, recorded for Seeco. A Celebrity Series was launched which featured comedian Alan King and Broadway star Chita Rivera, among others. At the height of its success, Seeco's A & R department was run by Jazz-based arranger/producers such as Joe Cain, Morty Hillman and Jerry Shifrin. Nevertheless, Latin music in its most exotic varieties, be it Spanish, French or Portuguese in origin, remained the bread and butter of Seeco/Tropical. Sidney Siegel surely wouldn't have wanted it any other way.

Anyone in the mood to take a musical trip around the world had to look no further than the international section of their nearest record outlet. There they'd find the latest Seeco product by indigenous singers such as Argentineans Lydia Scotty and Leo Marini, Haitian Nemours Jean-Baptiste, and Spanish flamenco queen Lola Flores; travelogue recordings by Arturo Chaite covering various European locales; romantic French and Italian ballads as played by pianist Pierre Dorsey, accordion wizard Aimable and The Aldo Bruschi Ensemble; and tropical Jazz from talented José Melis, a Seeco mainstay who moonlighted as music director for TV's "Jack Paar" talk show. The label's two top-selling artists both hailed from Havana, Cuba: Vicentico Valdés, formerly the featured singer with Tito Puente's orchestra, thrilled millions of female hearts with his smooth ballad style, while Celia Cruz delivered world-famous guarachas, rhumbas and cha-cha-chás with her unique brand of industrial strength vocalizing.

Housing the exotic treasures that Seeco marketed were eye-catching album sleeves that, in true Latin style, often depicted busty beauties dressed in costumes that barely concealed their feminine charms. Much like those bulging bodices, the Seeco/Tropical tape library is full-to-overflowing with a wealth of Latin music styles. What follows is a brief look at those styles which were favored in the United States, and the Seeco artists who specialized in them.

TANGO

The early part of the 20th century found wealthy Americans mesmerized by the tango, an Argentinean import with links to a Cuban rhythm called the habanera. (If you've been reading this blog for a while, that rhythm will be quite familiar to you!) Played on violin, guitar and accordion, tango music inspired a sensuous dance among the lower classes of Buenos Aires; but it quickly acquired a bad reputation because prostitutes danced to it in slit skirts while wearing no underwear! ¡Escándoloso!

The famed professional dance team of Irene and Vernon Castle cleaned up the tango, imported it to the United States during World War I, and promoted it to such an extent that its popularity swept the nation during the 1920s. Superstar Latin bandleader Xavier Cugat got his start playing tango accompaniment for early Hollywood movies, as well as for high society parties on the West Coast. Edmundo Rivero and Hugo Del Carril were perhaps the best known of several tango specialists who cut sides for Seeco, and authentic tango artistry can readily be found on Rivero's Tropical album El Gran Cantante Argentino.

MARIACHI

Mexican music is a combination of Native-American and European elements. Emigrants from the north of Spain brought their folk ballad tradition to México, and the French (who briefly controlled the country during the 19th century) brought the waltz and the polka. These forms can still be heard in the Tejano music popular among Spanish-speaking Americans in the southern United States. Ultimately, México became world-famous for its beautiful and melancholy corridos and ranchera ballads, as performed by guitar, trumpet, violin and accordion ensembles known as mariachis.

Mariachi music and artists were always welcome at Seeco, as were the compositions of famed Mexican composers like María Grever, Agustín Lara and José Alfredo Jiménez. In fact, the great Jiménez was briefly part of Seeco's artist roster. The label's other Mexican music exponents included Tony Pizarro, the Johnny Rodríguez Trio, Mariachi México, the celebrated Trío Los Panchos, and popular 1940s film stars Tito Guízar and Chucho Martínez Gil. Most of the aforementioned may be sampled on the Tropical anthology Canciónes de México. Guízar's Gay Ranchero album boasts a colorful, very collectible sleeve and delightfully spirited peformances of such numbers as "Yo No Me Caso, Compadre" and "¡Uy Uy Uy! Mariposa".

RHUMBA

El son, an infectious music based on a five-beat rhythm pattern, was developed in the Cuban countryside during the late 19th century. By the 1920s, it had migrated to Havana and formed the basis of rumba(spelled "rhumba" north of the border), a style of music and dance that grew out of neighborhood street festivals. While initially taken up by impoverished Cuban city dwellers, the rhumba gradually became popular in polite society.

Seven-piece musical ensembles formed to play this new music; one of the most popular was Septeto Nacional, led by composer and guitarist Ignacio Pineiro. Pineiro and his group cut a critically acclaimed album for Seeco in 1958. Americans vacationing in Cuba acquired a taste for this exotic new sound and brought it home with them. Rhumba also reached the United States via the great Cuban composer Ernesto Lecuona, in songs such as "Say Sí Sí" (known in Spanish as "Para Vigo Me Voy") and "Malagueña."

Among those principally responsible for the introduction and popularity of rhumba music in the USA were Noro Morales, Trío Matamoros, Miguelito Valdés, Machito and especially Xavier Cugat, the Rhumba King. More than any other Latin bandleader, Cugat, who first recorded for RCA Victor and later for Columbia, understood the importance of image and marketing. His shows featured beautiful girl singers in Spanish mantillas, flashy tango and flamenco dancers, virile and handsome conga drummers, musicians in ruffled pink sleeves, stage sets decorated with potted palms, and more often than not. . . miniature Chihuahuas! The colorful and flamboyant image he created for himself and his music captured the American public's fancy, and opened the door for other Latin artists to follow in his wake. Follow they did: Just as Cugat's popularity was peaking in the late '40s, Morales, Valdés and Trío Matamoros began laying down their classic Seeco sides. Machito waited just a little longer, signing with the label in the early '50s.

Miguel Matamoros founded his Trío in 1925 with Rafael Cueto and Siro Rodríguez. Trío Matamoros was one of the earliest Cuban groups to record in the United States(1927), and also one of the earliest to join the Seeco roster(1945). The Trío's touring band included the legendary Beny Moré on guitar; in the late '40s, Moré left the group to begin a much celebrated singing career. Practically all of Trío Matamoros' songs are considered standards today, and their Seeco sides include the much-recorded "Coco Seco," about as primitive an example of rhumba as you could ever hope to hear.

The product of a Cuban/Mexican cross-cultural marriage, Miguelito Valdés was arguably the Ricky Martin of his day. His impassioned conga-drumming and handsome Latin looks brought him many ladies' telephone numbers scrawled on cocktail napkins, not to mention numerous offers to appear in Hollywood films. He helped himself to both the women and the movie exposure, starring with the likes of Rita Hayworth and Fred Astaire. The 1945 film Pan-Americana was an excellent showcase for his hip-swiveling, hair-tossing bombast. Valdés' fame was consolidated in the 1950's when he toured the world his own band. Ironically, though, he was eclipsed in popularity by Desi Arnáz, who admittedly copied his stage persona and much of his repertoire.

Miguelito Valdés recorded the hit single version of Arnáz's signature tune "Babalú" in 1944, backed by Xavier Cugat's orchestra. One year later, he was in the studio with Noro Morales cutting tracks for Miguelito Valdés Sings, one of the finest and most collectible Seeco albums. With excellent selections like "Se Formo El Rhumbón" and "Amor Sagrado", this is an essential record for connoisseurs of vintage rhumba and bolero music.

The undulating "Zambia" (mistitled "Tremendo Cumban" on the Seeco album with the same title) is probably the most frequently licensed track in the Seeco catalogue. It was a signature tune of Machito and His Afro-Cubans. Machito, whose true name was Francisco Pérez Grillo, came to New York from Cuba in 1937 to seek his fortune as a singer. He worked briefly with the Xavier Cugat orchestra before joining brother-in-law Mario Bauzá to form his own band in 1940. The Afro-Cubans quickly became the most popular Latin dance music ensemble in New York City.

In 1943, Machito was drafted for service in World War II, and Bauzá sent to Cuba for his talented sister, Graciela Pérez, who fronted the band in his absence. She remained with the group following her brother's return, and their wry duet vocal style became a hit with both audiences and record buyers. Graciela became famous throughout Latin-America for her quivering performances of ballads like "Novio Mio", but she was no slouch in the rhythm department, as her energetic Seeco recording of "Adivinanza" clearly demonstrates. The siblings joined forces on sizzling tracks like "Mambo Infierno" and other successful marriages of hot Jazz and raw rhumba captured at Seeco recording sessions.

"Sidney Siegel's House Of Gold" concludes with Part Two.

Seeco Records (Part Two)

2011-02-08T13:08:00.161-05:00

Sidney Siegel's

House Of Gold

The Seeco Records Story

by Don Charles Hampton

By the late 1930s, Havana orchestras began to reflect the instrumentation of carnival parade bands. These ensembles included guitar, trumpets, piano, bass and conga drums, and were called conjuntos. The most influential of the Cuban conjuntos was led by blind guitarist Arsenio Rodríguez, another future Seeco recording artist. Songs with false endings, like the hilarious "Dolorcito de Mi China", were his specialty. When Rodríguez emigrated to the USA, he formed a band that, along with that of Machito, set the stage for the mambo craze of the late '40s and '50s. Seeco producers captured his musicians at their best on the album Clasicas de Un Sonero. Rodríguez's lead singer, Miguelito Scull, had a distinctive sandpapery sound to his vocals that nobody who heard it ever forgot.

By the mid-1940s, the great rhumba bands of Rodríguez, Machito, Noro Morales and Pupi Campo were holding forth at various New York nightspots, as was Xavier Cugat's orchestra, ensconced at the Waldorf Astoria Ballroom. A stylistic division was becoming apparent. "Uptown" bands like those of Machito and Rodríguez stressed rhythm more forcefully than did aggregations like Cugat's, which specialized in elaborate floor shows heavy on romantic ambiance. Strings were verboten with the new bands. Pianos and brass functioned as de facto rhythm instruments even while they carried the melody. Also, there was considerable Jazz influence.

Noro Morales, who emerged as Cugat's primary rival during this time, fell between the two camps. Known as "the Fats Waller of Latin music", the portly Morales courted society patrons with catchy piano-based melodies like "Bim Bam Boom" and "Walter Winchell Rhumba"(both of which were featured in wartime movie musicals), but he could also lay down some deadly rhythms, as evidenced by his Seeco recordings "Stop 21" and "Serenata Rítmica" from the excellent album Bailemos con Noro Morales. Morales holds the distinction of being Seeco's very first album artist. A handful of his sides feature a young Tito Rodríguez as vocalist; predictably, Sidney Siegel later reissued them under Rodríguez's name after he became famous.

When Siegel got the chance to record Pupi Campo's group in 1948, he couldn't believe his good luck; luring such a popular "Downtown" band to his label was a rare coup. Like Noro Morales, Campo split the difference between "sweet" and "hot" songs, but the sides he cut for Seeco were overwhelmingly "hot." Years later, they were compiled on a now rare Tropical album called Bailemos con Pupi Campo y Su Orchestra.

While there wasn't much original about Campo's music(his sound was copied from Stan Kenton's band, and his stage persona was modeled after Desi Arnáz), he swung his musicians hard on great dance tracks like "Son de la Loma", "¿Qué Te Parece, Cholito?", "Capullito de Aleli" and the risible novelty tune "Wha'Happen?". In Latin music circles, his band is best remembered for the stellar sidemen it boasted: Tito Puente, who arranged and played timbales; Joe Loco, who played piano; trombone player Johnny Mandel; and everybody's favorite Latin vocalist of the 1950s, Vitín Aviles. Today, Campo himself is remembered as the brother-in-law of singer Rosemary Clooney, when he's remembered at all.

MAMBO

As rhumba evolved into the mambo, the cream of Latin dance bands could be found playing several nights a week at New York's famed Palladium ballroom, which at the height of its popularity billed itself as "Home of The Mambo." As did other labels, Seeco capitalized on the dance hall's name with an album called Baile en El Palladium. The Machito band alternated with those of two talented young Puerto Ricans, Tito Puente and the aforementioned Tito Rodríguez to provide red-hot dance music for the Palladium's patrons.

In 1951, Pérez Prado traveled from his base in México City to the US West Coast and wowed audiences with his bubbly, comedic personality and avant-garde mambo/Jazz experiments. The numbers of talented Latinos visiting the United States to perform swelled. These included Beny Moré, Daniel Santos("the Puerto Rican Sinatra"), the exciting Orquesta Riverside, and La Sonora Matancera, the celebrated conjunto of Cuban radio fame which featured no less than three superstar vocalists: Celio González, Bienvenido Granda and the magnificent Celia Cruz.

Younger musicians like Joe Cuba and Charlie Palmieri followed the lead of upstarts Puente and Rodríguez, and established their own popular bands. Significantly, every one of the aforementioned artists is represented in the Seeco catalogue. La Sonora Matancera arguably became the label's most important signing, providing studio accompaniment for Daniel Santos, Miguelito Valdés and many other vocal stars as well as recording its own extremely popular releases. Of particular note is Seeco's Desfile De Estrellas album, on which Sonora members Lino, Elpidio, Angel, Manteca, Caito, Calixto, Pedro and leader Rogelio Martínez back twelve different Latin stars on superb sides like "Eso Se Hincha", "Piel Canela", "Todo Me Gusta de Tí" and "Rítmo, Tambó y Flores".

SEECO RECORDING STAR

FÉLIX CABALLERO

CHA-CHA-CHÁ and PACHANGA

In the mid-1950s, mambo gave way to a new rhythm, the cha-cha-chá. Like the rhumba and the mambo, this rhythm also came from Cuba, and grew out of the musical experiments of bandleaders like Antonio Arcaño, Enrique Jorrín and Rosendo Ruiz, Jr. They led traditional dance orchestras known as charangas, whose violin and flute-dominated sound hearkened back to Xavier Cugat's tango-playing Gigolos from the 1920s. Cha-cha-chá rhythms inspired a sexy hip-swiveling dance that proved much easier to learn than the mambo. By the late '50s, cha-cha-chá was the only Latin rhythm that mattered, and charanga orchestras multiplied in New York City.

Seeco's cha-cha-chá specialists included the Orquesta Cosmopolita, César Concepción, Chiquitín Socarrás and Luis Barretto, all of whom appear on the Tropical compilation Baile El Cha-Cha-Chá. One the most famous charanga bandleaders was Charlie Palmieri, and his version of "Lullaby Of Broadway" is one of the brightest gems in the catalogue. Ditto for La Plata Sextette Swings At The Raleigh Hotel, one of the first Seeco albums recorded in stereo; it holds forth with a wicked Rock/cha-cha fusion sound.

Around 1960, a fast cha-cha-chá style was invented by Dominican-born bandleader Johnny Pacheco. Dubbed pachanga by openly Gay Cuban songwriter Eduardo Davidson, it launched a brief but frantic dance craze which saw couples waving brightly colored scarves in the air as they twisted their hips. On Seeco, such artists as The Cuban All-Stars, The Joe Cuba Sextette, Conjunto Sensación (featuring future salsa star Pete "El Conde" Rodriguez) and the aforementioned La Plata Sextette became known as exponents of pachanga music.

PLENA and MERENGUE

Among New York's Puerto Rican population, a native form of dance music called plena became popular in the 1960s. Played on flat hand-held drums called panderetas, it was developed by 19th century Afro-Puerto Rican laborers. Puerto-Rican Americans considered the orchestra of César Concepción foremost among the importers of plena music, with Rafael Cortijo and his Combo running a close second. Ismael Rivera, who frequently appeared with Cortijo, was hailed as the best plena singer of all-time, and Joe Valle, who recorded with Concepción, was a perennial Puerto Rican favorite. Naturally, all of these artists recorded for Seeco. Rivera's "Alegría y Bomba" and Valle's "Para Salinas" were two of the biggest sellers in the catalogue.

From the Dominican Republic came a piquant mix of Spanish melody and African rhythm called the merengue, and an accompanying dance with distinctive hip-swaying steps. Cuban conjuntos added the popular merengue to their repertoires in the early '50s, sometimes adding an accordion to make the sound more authentic. Simón Damirón, teamed for years with singer José Ernesto "El Negrito" Chapuseaux, was probably the most famous of the many merengue artists signed to Seeco, which also included bandleaders René Grand and Mario Hernández, and composer Luis Kalaff. Some of the finest big band merengue ever recorded appears on an obscure Seeco album titled Programa Bailable, recorded by Chucho Sanoja and featuring the incredibly rich vocals of Alberto Beltrán on "Ritmo Del Amor" and the fabulous "Ven Acá Mi Amor". ¡Sabroso!

BOLERO

Since its début in the 1930s, the romantic bolero has been the most popular Latin music form. It remains so today, albeit in a severely watered-down version. In the 1950s, boleros became a staple of Mexican cinema, as well as a vehicle for countless male crooners south-of-the-border. Two men competed for the title of most commercial bolero singer at Seeco Records: The aforementioned Vicentico Valdés and Daniel Santos. When I spoke to him several years ago, veteran Latin music sideman and producer Richard Marín assured me: "Valdés and Santos were the artists who made Seeco."

Valdés was the first vocalist to become popular fronting Tito Puente's Orchestra, and his repertoire at that time consisted almost entirely of fiery mambos. He was so excellent at singing them, it was quite a surprise when he later emerged as a prime interpreter of the bolero. Vicentico Valdés scored massive Latin-American hits on Seeco: "Derroche de Felicidad", "Plazos Traicioneros", "Añoro" and "La Montaña", just to name a few. He got almost as much mileage out of the sizzling bedroom ballad "¿Cómo Fué?" as Beny Moré, who originated the song. He cut dozens of Seeco albums, a result of the dependable sales figures he always generated.

No less dependable, though, was Puerto Rican heartthrob Daniel Santos, whose name was legend from México City to Medellín, Columbia. (Reportedly, his string of illegitimate children stretched almost as far!) Santos's smoky, strangulated voice set hundreds of feminine hearts a-flutter with such melancholy fare as "Despedida", "Perdón" and "Dos Gardenias", but he could also light a fire under the mambo with funky hits like "Anacobero" and "Cómo Me Da La Gana". The majority of his 300+ albums were recorded for labels other than Seeco (every Latin label of any significance seems to have a Daniel Santos LP or two in its catalogue), but Sidney Siegel benefited from Santos's popularity long after he departed the label. So many of his recordings were reissued, it was like he'd never left!

Other bolero specialists who spun coin for Seeco's coffers included actor/operatic tenor Carlos Ramírez (his Tropical LP Este Es Carlos Ramírez is absolutely superb), former Chavales de España lead vocalist Félix Caballero, the great Bobby Capó, Tony Pizarro, Roberto Cantoral, and Joe Cuba Sextette sideman Jimmy Sabater, whose silky vocal on the English-language "To Be With You" launched his long solo career.

GUARACHA

Dating back to the 19th century, the guaracha is known for its rapid tempo and spicy Spanish lyrics. This chameleon call-and-response rhythm is arguably the most typical of Cuban dance forms, but only one Latin star's name is synonymous with it: Celia Cruz! When Doña Celia became featured vocalist with La Sonora Matancera in 1950, Cuban audiences booed her performances; they resented her for trying to replace their longtime favorite, saucy Puerto Rican songstress Myrta Silva. Sidney Siegel wasn't crazy about the new girl, either; reportedly, he resisted signing her to a contract. Before long, though, the satiny-skinned señorita overcame everyone's doubts with her rich and robust singing style.

Best-selling Seeco 78s like "Cao Cao Mani Picao", "Burundanga", "Me Voy A Pinar del Rio", "Caramelos" and "Mango Mangüe", which she performed on La Sonora's frequent South American tours, made Celia Cruz wildly popular. However, her most important recordings for Seeco were three albums of folkloric songs: Homenaje A Los Santos, Volumes One and Two, and Homenaje a Yemaya. These LPs, which feature La Doña singing praises to Afro-Cuban orishas(saints) are highly revered among devotees of the religion known as Santería. Their enduring popularity partially explains the intensity of the following she maintained until she died.

Another part of her appeal was the total absence of pretension in her personality, and the rest was pure star quality! With her elaborate hairdos and earrings and her churning hips sheathed in skintight fishtail gowns, Cruz was the visual template for Latin female vocalists in the '50s; by the 1970s, when her waxings for the Fania label made her an international superstar, she was also setting the standard for them vocally. There were girl singers on Seeco who were more dynamic(Celeste Mendoza and Lola Flores immediately spring to mind), but none of them had her knack for mixing salsa (sauciness) with azúcar(sweetness). You'll be hard pressed to find Celia Cruz performances sweeter than those found on the Yuletide album Navidades con La Sonora Matancera, on which she shares the vocal spotlight with Carlos Argentino and Celio González.

LATIN BOOGALOO

Near the end of Seeco's time as an active label, a new sound called Latin boogaloo burst onto the scene. It melded Rhythm and Blues stylings with Latin rhythms(as well as English with Spanish lyrics), and was so danceable that it showed great potential for crossover. Latin boogaloo was one of the precursors of '70s Disco music(along with rhumba, mambo and the cha-cha-chá).

By 1966, the Palladium ballroom had closed, and Big Apple dancers were flocking to the Cheetah Discothèque. There they could enjoy such boogaloo purveyors as Johnny Colón, Willie Colón, Pete Rodríguez, Pete Terrace and former Seeco recording stars The Joe Cuba Sextette(who by then were scoring massive Pop hits on the Tico label). With his preference for "pure" Latin music, Sidney Siegel couldn't have been too happy with this development! Even so, several boogaloo recordings found their way into Seeco's catalogue, most notably "El Matón" and other cuts by Ricardo Ray and Bobby Cruz.

Sadly, Siegel didn't live to see the resurgence of traditional rhumba in the form of "salsa" music. Starting in the '50s, Seeco was rocked by dozens of lawsuits from Famous Music and other song publishers, alleging non-payment of royalties. Also during that decade, Rock'n'Roll's rise knocked the wind out of the mambo/cha-cha-chá craze, negatively affecting the sales of all Latin music labels. More than one of Seeco's best producers and promotion men quit, complaining of low pay.

However, nobody ever made much money working for Sidney Siegel! To Max Salazar, the late Joe Cuba confirmed the famous line Siegel reportedly gave every potential signee: "I hear you didn't make money with your (previous) recordings. Well, you aren't going to make any money here, either. However, I'm going to put you on the map, I promise you!" More often than not, he kept that promise, and also gave his acts lots of creative freedom; for example, Machito and La Sonora Matancera were allowed to produce their own sides. However, musicians were known to complain about the "rinky-dink" studios Siegel booked where the whole band was obliged to record "with one microphone." Mainstays like Noro Morales and La Sonora Matancera notwithstanding, most artists didn't linger on the Seeco roster.

Siegel's biggest setback came in 1965 when his top female star, Celia Cruz, defected to Tico Records. (Cruz later revealed that he cried bitterly when she told him she was leaving.) These stress factors may have contributed to his early death sometime in the late 1960s, after which Seeco's world headquarters at 39 West 60th Street closed its doors forever. Fortunately, Met-Richmond Record Sales purchased the Seeco catalogue in 1969, and kept albums by the likes of Cruz, Ignacio Pineiro, Machito and Miguelito Valdés in print through the '70s and '80s. By listening to these classic recordings, salsa enthusiasts were able to trace the roots of their preferred sound. Many of those reissues can now be found for sale on eBay at quite reasonable prices.

In addition, reissue labels in England, Germany, Portugal, Spain and other European countries regularly mine the Seeco tape library for compilation material. Now that Gloria Estefan, Jon Secada, Jennifer López and Ricky Martin have crossed over to English-speaking Pop audiences in a big way, and other Latin artists are poised to duplicate their success, these vintage recordings will likely be more in demand than ever. Miami-based Codigo Music, which purchased the catalog in 2006, will presumably satisfy that demand; at the moment, though, the company seems preoccupied with reissuing tracks from Tico Records and other Latin labels it currently owns. With so much good stuff by the likes of La Sonora Matancera, Daniel Santos, Vicentico Valdés, The Joe Cuba Sextette and other Seeco stars begging to be rediscovered, let's hope Codigo won't tarry much longer.

Plucking Spanish melodies on a harp up in Heaven, Sidney Siegel is no doubt tickled pink to see that his faith in the longevity of Latin music has been vindicated. If you're curious about how well the music he recorded has held up, The Pop Culture Cantina recommends these vintage Seeco/Tropical compilatons: Seeco Sampler Of Latin Rhythms; Around The World In One Night; Una Noche en La Habana(A Night In Havana); The Most Spectacular Latin Dance Rhythms; Album Aniversario de La Sonora Matancera(Anniversary Album); Tributo a España(Tribute to Spain); 50 Años de la Musica Más Amada de la América Latina(Fifty Years of Beloved Latin Music); El Disco de Oro(The Golden Record), Volumes One and Two; and Grandes Exitos con Grandes Artistas(Great Hits By Great Artists), Volumes One and Two. Most of these collections were compiled by Howie Roseff, who ran the Tropical label for Sidney Siegel and became known as the uncrowned "King of Latin Music Compilations."

¡Hey, señor!
Now you smile
You like what you've been told
So señor
Come right into my house of gold*

*"House of Gold", words and music by Mark Barkan and Terry Phillips, copyright 1966 Patlene Music Products, Incorporated(BMI)

A shorter version of this article appeared in Cool and Strange Music! Magazine #21.

Thanks to Borders' Books and Music in Shawnee Mission, Kansas; the late Ron Rooks and his wife Nancy, Dave Conn, Charlie Stout, "El Mexicano" Darrell Edwards and Mark "Twelve-Inch" Reynolds who lived la vida loca at the late lamented Music Exchange in Kansas City, Missouri. Special thanks to Chuck Haddix and the staff of Marr Sound Archives at UMKC.

George Quaintance (Part One)

2010-10-13T16:03:00.119-04:00

Lest Old AcQuaintance Be Forgot:

The Legacy of

George Quaintance

by Don Charles Hampton

FAREWELL TO A TITAN

The death of George Quaintance from a fatal heart attack on November 9, 1957 has brought sadness throughout the entire physical culture world. For many years a portrait painter, Mr. Quaintance began to do physique work just as a hobby. With the publication of his first group physique study, "Havasu Creek", in the first issue of Physique Pictorial, the name of Quaintance caught the country by storm and an insatiable demand for his work began. A perfectionist, he drove himself unmercifully, slaving days and nights(and taking Benzedrine to stay awake) to finish a painting or a sculpture piece. His body couldn't take the beating, and his health broke down many times . . . still he was driven by the indomitable drive to create . . . throughout the world, he has been acclaimed as the trailblazer of a (male nude art) culture which has been almost ignored for twenty centuries . . . but Quaintance will never really die. In each of his paintings, he has put something of himself; it is almost as if he played out his life before its time by giving up so much of himself. Few have been able to leave a legacy so rich as he has.

This eulogy, written in late November 1957 by Bob Mizer, legendary physique photographer and publisher of the seminal Gay magazine Physique Pictorial, was a fitting tribute to a man who, like Mizer, was a true pioneer. Today there are hundreds, perhaps even thousands of artists who specialize in casting an erotic allure over the nude male form. These artists think nothing of depicting two or more nude males in graphically sexual poses. However, in the 1940s, when George Quaintance began creating art for a Gay male sensibility, homoeroticism wasn't graphic. It couldn't be. Attraction between two men could only be hinted at, because to actually visualize it was illegal. Being Gay was illegal, too.

So George Quaintance worked within the limits, turning out dozens of mildly homoerotic compositions for his largely Gay male clientele to drool over clandestinely(a clientele who hid behind the socially-sanctioned guise of "physical culture" enthusiasts) . . . but how he did it! Such vibrant color! Such mastery of light and shadow! Such elasticity of line! He was the first American painter who placed depictions of male-on-male desire on the same level as classic landscape and portrait artistry. George Quaintance's stellar craftsmanship has stood the test of time beautifully, and even though the best of his work in oil paint now looks quaint and dated, its restrained eroticism exerts a magnetic pull that fascinates to this day. A Quaintance painting is proof that what they say is true: Leaving certain things to the imagination can be ever so much sexier than showing it!

1956: SPARTAN SOLDIERS

Honolulu-based erotic artist Douglas Simonson knows a thing or two about implied eroticism: His stylish renderings of native Hawaiian, African and South American men are in the Quaintance tradition of emphasizing physical beauty over graphic sexuality. Rarely does he veer into pornographic territory. "I've been familiar with Quaintance since probably the early '70s," he told me recently. "I wasn't particularly influenced by him in terms of artistic style, (but) like Tom of Finland and a few others, he inspired me simply by having been a portrayer of the male nude at a time when almost no one had the courage to do so."

George Quaintance has been mistaken for Hispanic, no doubt because so many of his paintings feature images of Latino men; others have clamied that he came from French-Canadian roots. Whatever his ethnic background, he was a country boy, born and raised on a farm in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. His birthdate was 3 June 1902. When he wasn't busy helping his parents with farm work, he drew pictures every chance he got; the lush country setting inspired him. Some rural parents would have frowned on such unmanly activities, but fortunately for George, the Quaintances saw fit to encourage them; when he begged for art utensils, they sent away for some. Young George was overjoyed when the set of pencils, brushes and paints arrived. He began using them straight away to hone his budding talents.

At the age of 18, he traveled to New York City and enrolled at the Art Students League, a prestigious academy that Norman Rockwell, Jackson Pollock and Maurice Sendak would later attend. There he studied painting, drawing and both classical and modern dance. His family was very wealthy, and able to fund his studies. Upon graduating, Quaintance embarked on a career as a commercial illustrator, sculptor and professional portrait painter. Some of the landscapes he painted during this period (such as 1925's "Home On The Farm") still turn up occasionally at art auctions. He also created superb Art Deco sculptures, an example of which appears below. However, his most lucrative work came from freelancing as an illustrator for movie magazines; believe it or not, the man who'd become famous for his male nudes drew "girlie" pin-up art during his early career. He was capable of far more ambitious things, though; in 1933, during a trip back home, he fulfilled his mother's request to paint a religious mural for her church in Stanley, Virginia. The tableau, which features a stunning rendition of Jesus Christ, still exists.

But George Quaintance was like a fountain overflowing with creative energy; visual art could not contain his talent. In the 1920s and '30s, he toured the vaudeville circuit with a dance troupe called the Collegians. He also taught tap dance and ballet for a time. By the late 1930s, he had re-invented himself as a hairdresser based in Hollywood. He designed coiffures for major movie stars like Marlene Dietrich, Gloria Swanson and Helen Hayes (years later, he would style the haircuts of his male models). Working in the film colony apparently triggered directorial ambitions within him; periodically, he would return home to Virginia, round up some local talent, and stage elaborate musical revues that he wrote himself. By the early 1940s, he had also became interested in photography. George Quaintance was nothing less than a wunderkind, trying his hand and excelling at any number of creative endeavors. The one endeavor he didn't excel at during this period was marriage. A hasty union with one of his vaudeville dance partners, Miriam Chester, lasted less than a year.

If there's one thing George Quaintance's biographers can all agree on, it's the fact that he was a Gay man. Why on Earth would he marry up with a woman? He no doubt did so for one of the reasons Gay men still wed hetereosexually: Societal stigma placed on homosexual relationships; family expectations; the shame-based desire to force himself Straight; the delusion that his attraction to other men was just a phase. Certainly, Gay marriage wasn't even dreamt of in the 1930s: Men were expected to marry women, and that was that! Homosexual orientation was even less well understood then than it is today(the word "Gay" was relatively new, decades away from becoming common parlance). Nobody knew what it was, and few people knew what to call it, so it was easy for everyone to pretend that it didn't exist. As many Gay as Straight people took up this absurd pretense, and many still do.

If George Quaintance was one of these pretenders, he proved unable to make believe for very long. He found the female body aesthetically pleasing, but it held no erotic appeal for him. The male body was what excited him. In fact, his passion for male bodies was so strong, he would discover that he needed more than one lover at a time to satisfy it! When he began mixing business with pleasure later on in his life, that passion would come to dominate the kind of artwork he produced.

1957: THE FALCONER

Several years after his marriage dissolved, Quaintance began studying physique photography under Lon Of New York, among others. Lon Hanagan, whose work is highly revered today, was one of the pioneer physique photographers. While tutoring him, Hanagan took advantage of Quaintance's painting skill; in those days when total male nudity in commercial photographs was verboten, fig leaves had to appear over a nude model's genitalia(I kid you not). Taking paintbrush in hand, Quaintance diligently added these modesty-preserving adornments to many Lon of New York photo sets.

In all likelihood, Hanagan introduced Quaintance to the man who'd become his life and business partner. Puerto Rico-born Victor García had been one of Hanagan's models. By the mid-1940s, Victor and George had set up housekeeping together. This relationship would last until the end of Quaintance's life, but not without amendments! In 1953, their pairing would turn into a ménage à trois after Quaintance added a third man, Angel Avila, to their household. Quaintance had hired Avila to model for a series of matador studies. Evidently, García didn't cotton to the three-way relationship, and Avila moved out; however, he would have to learn to adapt. There would continue to be another man (usually a physique model, and usually Latino) in Quaintance's life and home up until his death. Eventually, Victor García fully embraced polyamory and took a second lover himself. Tall, Nordic-looking Tom Syphers kept him company when Quaintance's amorous attentions strayed. By 1956, Garcia, Syphers, Quaintance and whoever his new flame of the moment was were all living and sleeping together at Rancho Siesta, an Arizona property which became the latter's studio and business headquarters.

1956: CORAL REEF

Much of importance happened before George Quaintance's love life took such an exotic turn, though. In 1948, he and Garcia relocated from New York to California. Quaintance had decided to concentrate on physique photography and paintings, and he no doubt had heard of the thriving bodybuilding scene at Venice Beach(then known as Muscle Beach). He wanted to be in close proximity to the best male specimens. By 1951, Quaintance had set up a mail order business in order to market his product; he'd been honing his male nude technique since the early '40s, and now he believed he finally had something commercial to offer. The first compositions he offered for sale were "Havasu Creek", "Young Stallion", "Kanaka Fisherman", "White Captive", "The Crusader", "Pearl Diver", "In The Arms of Morpheus", "Night In The Desert" and "Dashing."

He mainly advertised through Bob Mizer's Physique Pictorial, the most famous of several precursors to today's Gay skin mags. There was really no other place suitable for advertising the kind of work he did! His physique paintings typically featured semi-nude male couples or groups of men, captured in suggestive attitudes or poses. When they wore pants, the trousers were skintight, with visible bulges in the crotch. Although he necessarily eschewed frontal nudity, Quaintance pushed the envelope as far as he dared. The result was paintings that were considered much too daring for general exhibition. Truth be told, concentrating on the male nude destroyed George Quaintance's chances for a career as a mainstream artist; the stigma placed on homoerotic art was that strong. However, once his mail order business became as lucrative as it did, he might not have cared much.

The prints and slides he made of his provocative paintings sold like hotcakes! He and Victor García could barely keep any in stock. Quaintance's online biographers Ken Furtado and John Waybright have attempted to explain the huge appeal his artwork had for Gay men in the '50s. They wrote: "Quaintance's male physique paintings (made) casual nudity among men . . . so expressive and so connotative, with never a (penis) to be seen, as to assume a potency previously associated only with pornography."

To non-sympathetic eyes, it proved to be quite potent indeed! His painting "Aztec Sacrifice", which depicted two bare-bottomed Indian braves dying from arrow wounds, touched off a royal furore among postal authorities when it appeared as a Physique Pictorial cover image in August 1952. Its distribution was reportedly banned in some locales. The controversy gave Bob Mizer lots of headaches, but it undoubtedly helped send Quaintance Studio sales figures through the roof.

1953: SUNRISE

"The Legacy of George Quaintance" concludes with Part Two.

George Quaintance (Part Two)

2010-10-13T13:05:00.118-04:00

Lest Old AcQuaintance Be Forgot:

The Legacy of

George Quaintance

by Don Charles Hampton

Quaintance’s world is a largely female-free dreamscape of perfectly-muscled glamour boys showing their bodies to one another but never doing anything so salacious as kissing. This is a utopia of good clean fun and, fifty years ago, was more than enough to pack an erotic charge for men starved of homoerotic imagery. From our perspective today it looks rather innocent . . . Quaintance (shows) us as much naked flesh as possible, (while) always ensuring that a shadow, wisp of smoke or trail of cloth falls across the forbidden area (this also ensures that your eye is drawn to that very place).

This assessment of George Quaintance's oeuvre comes from artist and blogger John Coulthart. While valid as far as it goes, it understates Quaintance's importance to the field of Gay erotic art. He was arguably the first American artist to adapt homoerotic scenes into a true art form; despite their suggestiveness, his compositions aren't "dirty pictures" by any stretch of the imagination. He was the first artist to portray men in Levis as sexy. He was the first artist to eroticize masculine archetypes such as the cowboy, the Indian brave, and the matador; without him, The Village People might never have been concieved! Like The Village People, Quaintance wasn't just selling homoeroticism, either. He was selling male iconography, as well as the romanticism that was attached to it.

George Quaintance was much more than a pin-up artist. He was a serious craftsman. The main purpose of his paintings was to depict sexual attraction between men, but that wasn't enough to make them legitimate works of art, and he knew that. Accordingly, he presented most of his male images against a backdrop of exotic cultural, mythological, pastoral or historical themes. What was going on behind the hunks was almost as interesting to look at as the hunks themselves.

"Mr. Quaintance is a devoted student of the folklore of (American) Indians and of the North and South American continents and has . . . prepared several dramatic paintings illuminating (them)", noted his publicist in 1953. "In the year to come, Quaintance will be working on a new series of Western paintings . . . his models will be men of the land, Navajo and Apache Indians, young ranchers and rodeo stars, and that fascinating cross-breed of Indian and Spaniard known as Mexican." These new paintings would be some of his most memorable: "Sunset" with its rambunctious outdoor shower scene, "Navajo", a more tranquil depiction of men bathing; "Saturday Night", probably the first time a Gay Western bar was depicted on canvas; the lakeside nudes of "Lake Apache"; and such smouldering chiaroscuro masterpieces as "The Bandit" and "Noise In The Night." Quaintance claimed that, on average, his compositions took "two weeks to a month to complete."

1953: THE BANDIT

Much has been written about the aggressive machismo of George Quaintance's male figures. This is certainly an exaggeration! His men were masculine enough, but they looked anything but macho. Like photos of Quaintance himself, they exhibited a visible blend of male and female. He conveyed this blended look through languidly effeminate poses and gestures, hard bodies with soft and fluid curves, and androgynous-looking faces . . . not to mention those Brylcreem-slick Tony Curtis hairstyles! "George Quaintance's men did look more angrogynous," agrees Douglas Simonson. "He was into those soft, 'blend-y' kinds of lines." The impossibly butch, Straight-acting men that Tom of Finland favored were nowhere to be found in George Quaintance's world. You could never imagine one of Tom's leathermen camping it up, but picturing a Quaintance cowboy with a switchy walk wasn't hard to do at all.

The idea of Gay men being persons of neutral gender(an idea that many Gay men reject to this day) was strongly embodied in George Quaintance's paintings. The combination of subtle androgyny with less-subtle homoerotic suggestion is probably what gave his artwork its unique appeal. Yes, there were artists who could draw the male figure as well or better than he did, but few could make them look so indentifiably Gay! On the other hand, there were physique artists whose drawings of men looked so stereotypically Gay, they were off-putting. Quaintance knew how to put the right elements together. His ability to create images of men that came across as both masculine and homosexual was ahead of its time; and unlike most of today's homoerotic artists, he knew how to convey Gay male sexuality without needing to show males engaging in sexual activity. Whether Quaintance would have if he could have is a question worth pondering: Would have wanted to tamper with his winning formula?

1954: LAKE APACHE

Quaintance's tantalizing way with male nudes became internationally popular among an underground community of Gay erotica collectors, and even though he's not as well-known as he once was, it has remained so. His nudes influenced nearly every physique artist who came after him, most notably Harry Bush, Etienne, Japanese erotic art legend Sadao Hasegawa, and Quaintance's most successful imitator, Tom of Finland. Finland, now recognized as the preeminent Gay erotic artist of all-time, is renowned for taking physique art into territory far more sexually explicit and aggressivley macho than Quaintance had ever dreamt of; even so, he was following a path that George Quaintance blazed.

It was his association with Physique Pictorial that made George Quaintance's reputation as a physique artist. His ads appeared right next to the contents page in early issues; many featured a dramatically-posed photo of himself, his well-developed biceps bulging out of a tight black sport shirt. (His marcel-waved hair was immaculate, of course.) He sold original paintings priced between $50.00 and $1,000.00, with photo prints and color slides at $1.50 a pop; a set of six slides was a bargain at $5.00(although these prices were considered rather hefty in the 1950s). A mere 25 cents would buy you a catalog of Quaintance model photos. He also penned occasional how-to guides on figure drawing for PP. His physique drawings graced every cover from November 1951 until October 1953, when Bob Mizer began opting for photographic covers. (The censorship uproar over "Aztec Sacrifice" may have precipitated this change.)

1952: AZTEC SACRIFICE

By popular demand, Quaintance paintings graced the Fall 1956 and Fall 1957 covers. Tom of Finland had debuted in PP by that time, and the two artists would surely have competed for cover honors for the rest of the decade had it not been for Quaintance's untimely death. But Quaintance didn't limit himself to a single outlet: in addition to Physique Pictorial, his work was featured on the inside and outside of Adonis, Vim, Demi-Gods, Body Beautiful, Grecian Guild Pictorial, Your Physique and other '50s physique periodicals. He was so popular, all the muscle mag editors wanted to work with him. Some of them commissioned him to do paintings of major bodybuilders of the day like Everett Sinderoff, John Farbotnick and Steve Reeves, who went on to find fame as the definitive cinema Hercules. These cover paintings are so dynamic, they fairly leap off the page; they easily rank with his best non-commissioned work.

Hollywood-based "Art-Bob" and Andrew Kozak were early imitators of the Quaintance style, as well as his main rivals for space in Physique Pictorial. By 1955, Mizer seemed to be favoring the cartoonish style of "Art-Bob" over Quaintance's more sophisticated renderings, but by then the man from Shenandoah Valley had more mailorder customers than he could handle. "Business has grown to fantastic proportions in the last few months," he wrote to a friend in the early '50s. "I'm practically out of my mind trying to keep up with it!" In addition to the highly popular color slides of his oil paintings, Quaintance sold nude sculptures and male physique greeting cards. These latter keepsakes were the precursor of the Gay sex greeting cards sold today; the set of twelve 4 X 9 color images was marketed toward the end of 1957, shortly before his death. Among them is one of his campiest compositions: A drawing of an impish blond man whimsically posed naked inside a giant champagne glass. It's an excellent example of how George Quaintance liked to infuse his work with an unambiguously Gay sensibility.

1957: QUAINTANCE GREETING CARDS

He almost always painted from photographs, and at any given time, a bevy of hunky male models were either disrobing or posing in his studio. His first regular model was Fred Boisiewick, who posed for early physique studies like "Crusader" and "Pearl Diver". Later on, the aforementioned Angel Avila became one of his favorite camera subjects. Other Quaintance models included British bodybuilder Ron Nyman, Jim Shoemaker, Jim Glasper, Bill Bredlau, Bob Kirkwood, Syrian emigré Ahmed Dene, Bob Jewett, Mexican model "Edwardo", George Coberly, Zaro Rossi and, infrequently, Quaintance himself, photographed by his lover, Victor García. He captured them all on canvas (and sometimes in bed, too) at Rancho Siesta, the studio he opened in Aztec Park, Arizona, sometime in 1953.

By then, George Quaintance had modified his personal appearance to reflect his interest in the Western man. He enthusiastically reclaimed his rural roots, adopting an early version of the Gay "clone" look which would become so popular in the 1970s: Boldy-colored western shirts, Levis, bandannas, and elaborately-tooled cowboy boots. His heart problems notwithstanding, he exercised regularly and maintained a trim and solid physique; all the better to show off the skintight clothing he increasingly favored. A strawberry blond toupée concealed what was left of his thinning brown hair; baldness wouldn't become a fashion statement for another 25 years or so, and at any rate, the former celebrity hairstylist couldn't bear to have anyone glimpse his bare scalp!

1955: RED DUST

The mailing address of Rancho Siesta was listed as Box 192, Phoenix, Arizona(zip codes had yet to be invented in the '50s). However, by 1957 Quiantance was again based in Los Angeles, listing his original Terminal Annex post office Box. Then, suddenly, he was gone. Bob Mizer announced Quaintance's fatal heart attack in the Winter 1957 issue of Physique Pictorial, shocking the many fans of his work. Mizer's obituary cited strain of overwork as the probable reason for his death, but the possibility of a serious drug addiction was also hinted at. He may have moved back to Los Angeles to seek treatment; the full circumstances surrounding George Quaintance's sudden demise have never been revealed and probably never will be. His body was cremated. It was reported that no funeral was held, but Victor Garcia's nephew disputes this claim: He remembers attending the service with his mother.

His estate, including countless photographs, sculptures and approximately 60 oil paintings, was left to Victor García and García's other lover, Tom Syphers. Somehow, most of this material ended up in the Tom of Finland archives, where it was found by Richard Hawkins, a photographer friend of Quaintance. From the art collection of two Hawaiian brothers came near-complete set of color negatives. These treasures belonged to another friend of Quaintance's, and they've all been restored. They are the source of most of the Quaintance artwork now in circulation, and they're also the basis of a long-overdue Quaintance retrospective that Germany's Taschen imprint will publish later this year.

So much of what comes out of the Gay arts community these days can be classified as "gotcha" art. Labeled "queer art" by those who create it (an insult both to Gay people and to artistic traditions), it's designed to shock, and can be counted on to be heavy on explicit sexual content and negative stereotypes. The classic work of George Quaintance serves as a reminder that Gay art doesn't have to come across that way. In addition to being provocative, depictions of same-gender sexuality can be subtle, beautiful, noble, fun and altogether fine. Even more important, the male nude, rendered with his kind of exceptional skill, can be every bit as respectable and valuable as any female nude.

In the 1940s and '50s, nobody could imagine Gay visual erotica being shown in a mainstream gallery; now such exhibits happen all the time. In fact, a retrospective of physique photos taken by George Quaintance and Victor García recently had a showing at a Paris art gallery. The artist would no doubt have greeted this renewed focus on his work with both pleasure and disappointment; after all, he didn't make his name as a photographer. He would've wanted the attention focused on his oil masterpieces. A major Quaintance painting exhibition is certainly long overdue; there's no American physique artist who's more deserving of the honor.

1952: SHORE LEAVE

Thanks to Douglas Simonson, Ken Furtado
and John Waybright.

See the complete surviving Quaintance Collection at:

www.georgequaintance.com/
Vintage photo of George Quaintance by Edwin Townsend, courtesy of the Finter-Salvino Archive. Watch for The Art of George Quaintance, a deluxe hardcover volume to be marketed by Taschen Books this Christmas.

Annette Funicello (Part Three)

2010-09-22T12:06:00.000-04:00

The Disneyland Diva

Annette:

A Musical Reunion with America's Girl Next Door

An AndruCharlz Production
Reviewed by AndruCharlz
Additional Production and Remix by Don Charles Hampton

Years ago, near the end of a 1975 "American Bandstand" reunion show, the guests (all "Bandstand" and Caravan of Stars tour veterans) took turns "roasting" and insulting the show's longtime host, Dick Clark . . . all except one! Even when goaded by her onscreen boyfriend Frankie Avalon, Annette Funicello sweetly refused to join in on the ragging.

That in itself shows why Annette was and is so unique, and, to today's generation, so improbable. Throughout her roughly 40-year career as a celebrity, she was nice! And Miss Ann stayed nice, no matter what temptations came her way. Sure, she knew that millions of boys were tuning in "The Mickey Mouse Club" only because "Annette's startin' to get big knockers," as a gang member in the 1978 movie Grease joyfully proclaimed. Everybody on the Disney backlot knew it, but she just smiled and stayed on the high road. She kept to that path even when it might've helped her career to veer off of it.

Part of it was her loyalty to Walt Disney, the beloved "Uncle Walt" who discovered her at a dance recital in 1955. However, most of it was her determination to model wholesome behavior, no matter what kind of snarky or suggestive shenanigans were going on around her. The teen exploitation movies she starred in between 1963 and 1967 seethed with surfside sexuality, but nobody ever wondered about her character's virginity! When she had to play a drunken scene in the awful hot rod flick Thunder Alley, it wasn't remotely believeable; it was obvious that she didn't even know how to act drunk. When Connie Stevens and Frankie Avalon were going potty mouth in the PG-rated reunion movie Back To The Beach, even when a male co-star flashed his thong bikini'd butt cheeks in her face, Annette's onscreen demeanor was never less than 100% ladylike. She always came out smelling like a rose.

Speaking of Annette and reunions, let's now discuss Annette: A Musical Reunion with America's Girl Next Door. First released in 1993, this 2-CD set is the best-yet compendium of the Disneyland Diva's music career, and Walt Disney Records' ultimate aural tribute to Uncle Walt's favorite niece. Because it's a Disney project, it focuses almost entirely on her work for that company: her Disneyland and Buena Vista singles, and her musical performances from Disney movies and TV shows. The track listing just barely acknowledges her songs from beach party movies. (Actually, those songs are controlled by Disney as well; producer Salvador "Tutti" Camarata frequently had Annette re-cut production numbers from the soundtracks of her American-International films.)

When a singing career was first proposed for Annette, she wasn't sure she had the ability to even carry a tune. Fortunately, she had a boyfriend at the time named Paul Anka, a dynamic singer and performer who ended up being to her what Frank Sinatra had been to Sammy Davis, Jr: The best vocal coach around! Anka rehearsed her and built up her confidence, and during 1959-60 at least, the results spoke for themselves: Five Top 40 hits, including two Top Tens! First came "Tall Paul" (#7), followed by "First Name Initial" (#20), "O Dio Mio" (#10), Anka's "Train of Love" (#36), and "Pineapple Princess" (#11). Miss Ann has also credited Tutti Camarata for being especially patient and encouraging with her in the studio. He kept the mood light and fun. Tongue-in-cheek Pop songs, more often than not penned by Bob and Dick Sherman, and a zany background chorus led by Gloria Woods helped make her recording sessions enjoyable, too.

Disc One of A Musical Reunion, my favorite of the two discs, covers the years 1959-61. It includes the aforementioned Top 40 hits, as well as lower-charting singles and worthy tunes from movie and TV soundtracks. This disc gives you a candid picture of teenage Pop during that time, far more accurate than you usually get from anthologies of big hits. Kicking off with the frantic "Tall Paul", it treats you to six more historic tracks from Annette, the actress's 1959 debut album. Why historic? This was "Bubblegum Rock," nearly a decade before that term was invented! Even more significant is the fact that Annette Funicello, a teenage girl, pioneered the sound. Ironically, we remember Bubblegum Rock today as a genre that was almost completely male-dominated.

Surprisingly, considering how little confidence she had in her vocal abilities, the best tracks on Disc One are the ballads. Annette's girlish winsomeness is a perfect fit for "O Dio Mio," the equally Italian "Mia Cara, Mi'Amore" and the Jimmie Dodd composition "Lonely Guitar", which was featured several times on the Disney TV series "Zorro". Her reading of "My Heart Became of Age" is just adequate, but when she sings "Please, Please, Signore" and the Spanish-language "¿Amo Qué Paso?" she brings believable passion and melancholy to the lyrics.

The disc's uptempo selections are a mixed bag. Among the highlights are "Wild Willie," the wickedly satirical "Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy," and the Paul Anka-penned "It's Really Love, Dear" (which, minus the words, later morphed into the theme song of "The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson"). There are even two tarantellas based on Italian folk melodies: "Dream Boy" and "Lucky, Lucky, Lucky Me." (I've heard Connie Francis's version of the latter tune, and hearing Miss Ann's rendition made me wonder what would've resulted if "big-sister" Connie and "kid-sister" Annette had ever gotten together on a single! Unfortunately, we'll never know.) These waxings, tinged with boppin' Rockabilly rhythms and tasty Neapolitan orchestrations, showcase the Disneyland Diva at her best.

Unfortunately, the disc's low points are the fake Hawaiian songs. Many Annette fans would disagree, but they absolutely made me cringe! They come dangerously close to kitsch. "Hawaiiannette," "Luau Cha-Cha-Chá," "Strummin' Song" (heard here in demo form) and even "Pineapple Princess" are much too cute for their own good. The material only improves when Annette dares to do an authentic Hawaiian tune, "Song of the Islands"; with Big Band accompaniment; she swings it, as if it were "Mack the Knife" and she were Bobby Darin (she imitates him right down to the staccato "Ho! Ho!" shouts). At least this number bears a faint resemblance to Rock 'n' Roll! The rest don't even come close.

True, the album that featured most of these tracks, Hawaiiannette, was a best-seller in 1960, but it hasn't aged well. If you enjoy records so campy they make your eyes roll, that collection certainly fits the bill; however, Annette was capable of more substantial music-making. Fortunately, she got the chance to rock out more convincingly in the second phase of her recording career.

Disc Two covers that second phase, the years 1961-65. As noted before, it barely acknowledges the Avalon/Funicello beach movies; there's one track each from the soundtracks of Beach Party (the title song), Bikini Beach (the song "Bikini Beach Party"), Pajama Party ("Stuffed Animal" . . . so that's where you got the name, huh, Don?) (editor's note: Yup!) and Muscle Beach Party ("Surfer's Holiday"). What little surf music there is was well-chosen, though; these Bubblegum fusion efforts sound great. Annette's aggressive readings of uptempo surf and hot rod sides made a provocative contrast with her good girl image.

Again, though, the high points are her ballads. The lovely stereo remake of "How Will I Know My Love" (her first single), the sublime tango argentino "Canzone d'Amore" (performed with accordionist Gianni Mazzochi), and the demo version of "Just A Toy" (from Walt Disney's production of Babes In Toyland) prove that what Paul Anka told her was true: she did know how to sing! Not only that, she could sell a song.

On "The Monkey's Uncle", her silly but fabulous collaboration with The Beach Boys, La Funicello is the center of attention; try they do, but the Wilson brothers' famous harmonies can't upstage her. Miss Ann also holds her own with The Wellingtons, a more traditional harmony group (and singers of the delightful "Gilligan's Island" TV theme); they support her on "Merlin Jones, The Scrambled Egghead", a madcap single from a madcap 1963 movie. "The Parent Trap", a tune recorded to promote the hit 1961 Hayley Mills film vehicle, finds her sharing the vocalist's booth with Babes In Toyland co-star Tommy Sands and acquitting herself like a Broadway musical veteran.

The Baroness of Bouffant also does a good job revamping familiar chart hits. Her version of "Music! Music! Music!" is far less saccharine than the 1950 Teresa Brewer original; the Bubblegum gloss she applies to Chubby Checker's 1961 smash "Let's Twist Again" does the tune good; and her quite adorable take on The Ska Kings' 1964 regional hit "Jamaica Ska" was novel enough to become an instant cult favorite. In 1987, Annette would reprise this proto-Reggae dance number for the soundtrack of Back To The Beach. Especially notable is her confident reading of "Blame It On the Bossa Nova" which, believe it or not, puts Eydie Gormé's performance to shame. That's mostly because Annette didn't deliberately sing it off-key, like Eydie did! Tutti Camarata deserves credit, too, though, for toning down the cacophonous Bob Mersey arrangement that clobbered the eardrums of Ms. Gormé's fans.

The finest uptempo track on Disc Two is "Walkin' And Talkin'", a vintage Bubblegum rocker that hails from a 1962 concept album called Teen Street; Miss Ann's performance really sparkles in a new, pristine stereo remix. This disc does have its share of clinkers, though: "The Rock and Roll Waltz", "The Flapper Flip," "The Rock-A-Cha" and . . . "Rock-A-Polka" ??? Yipe! These dated-sounding tracks from the 1962 Dance Annette collection try too hard to capitalize on dance crazes, or worse, create them out of whole cloth. "I Can't Do The Sum", for which La Funicello portrays a housewife trying in vain to balance her budget, is a competent reading of the Victor Herbert showtune, but taken out of its Babes In Toyland context, the song fails to impress. Obviously, the box set compilers included it to show how our favorite Mouseketeer was capable of handling "serious" music; but had they passed it over, few fans would've missed its absence. A couple more surf 'n' sand rave-ups would've substituted nicely in its place!

Annette's final single for Buena Vista Records in 1965 was another showtune called "Nowhere To But Up". It was the title song of a Broadway musical that had flopped a few years earlier; one of the composers, Stanley Ralph Ross, would go on to write scripts for the "Batman" and "Wonder Woman" TV series. This Phil Spector-ish beat ballad got a first-time stereo mix that was almost good enough to end the disc on . . . almost, but not quite. Instead, the disc and the box set close with a performance by Head Mouseketeer Jimmie Dodd: His 1956 single "Annette", written for and performed in a "Mickey Mouse Club" serial of the same title. This new version features overdubbed spoken tributes by Paul Anka, Shelley Fabares, Frankie Avalon, Tommy Sands and, at the very end, Mickey Mouse!

Anyone listening to them now might think these tributes were just a sweet gesture on the part of Annette's show business colleagues. Actually, they were expressions of love and concern for a woman who, everyone close to her knew, was fast succumbing to the ravages of multiple sclerosis. "Walkin' And Talkin'" is a painful song to hear today, because the Disneyland Diva has now completely lost the ability to walk and talk. The lady who deserves to be called Queen Mother of Bubblegum Rock (and who belongs in the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame) has gone into permanent seclusion; cared for 'round the clock by her devoted husband, Glen Holt, she's just a shadow of the vivacious actress, singer and Skippy Peanut Butter pitchwoman she once was.

That her friends cared enough to record what will ultimately be an audio kiss goodbye reinforces what I said at the beginning: Throughout her time in the public eye, Annette Funicello never stopped being the nicest of nice girls, even when not-so-nice people were satirizing and criticizing her for it. She earned the affection we all feel for her. Although her current circumstances are sad, she's still one of the best-loved Pop culture icons of the 1950's and '60s. Even though it's not a perfect compilation, Annette: A Musical Reunion contains many tuneful reasons why she deserves to be.

Connie Francis (Part Five)

2010-08-03T13:40:00.003-04:00

Lipstick On Your Collar

. . . and 59 More Reasons Why Connie Francis Belongs in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

by Don Charles Hampton

Lipstick on your collar/Told a tale on you
Lipstick on your collar/Said you were untrue
Bet your bottom dollar/You and I are through
'Cause lipstick on your collar/Told a tale on you*

When you think about the stars of early Rock'n'Roll, women's names don't immediately spring to mind. Instead, you remember male stars like Little Richard, Eddie Cochran, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Bill Haley and, of course, Elvis. There were plenty of women on the scene, though. You had femme songwriters like Deborah Chessler, Dorothy La Bostrie and Beverly Ross. You had femme members of otherwise male vocal groups like Rosalie Hamlin of Rosie and The Originals, Janet Vogel of The Skyliners and Zola Taylor of The Platters. You had non-Rock women who dabbled in the new sound, like Sarah Vaughn, Kay Starr and Patsy Cline. You had dozens of R & B female vocal stars like Ruth Brown, LaVern Baker and Faye Adams. You had youngsters like The Teen Queens, The Bobbettes, and The Chantels, setting the stage for a Girl Group explosion in the early '60s. You had up-and-coming talents like Jackie DeShannon, Jo-Ann Campbell and Brenda Lee, who flew under the radar in the beginning; and you had a smattering of successful Rock'n' Roll women like Connie Francis.

From the time she first began recording in 1955 until her first big Italian-language hit in 1960, Connie was a Rock act. She cut Rock'n'Roll singles and performed them at Rock'n'Roll venues. Then she shifted gears. The public's overwhelmingly positive reception to "Mama" and, following in rapid succession, the Country-flavored "Everybody's Somebody's Fool" and "My Heart Has A Mind Of Its Own" prompted her to concentrate on the Adult-Contemporary market. She correctly perceived a stronger fan base among Adults, and decided to cultivate it.

Contrary to what you may have heard, though, this Brooklyn-born Jersey girl never stopped cutting Rock tunes; she just didn't do it as often! At one of her last sessions for M-G-M Records, she covered "Reuben James", the 1969 hit for Kenny Rogers and The First Edition. A few months earlier, she'd seriously considered recording "Angel Of The Morning", which later charted for Merrilee Rush and The Turnabouts. Rock'n'Roll remained on the menu of music styles Connie Francis offered up to her fans, along with Country, Jazz, Latin, Pop standards, showtunes, children's songs and International repertoire.

True, albums that concentrated on Rock material were few and far between after 1959; but through the 1960s, Connie featured many Rock tunes on albums and singles that were released both inside and outside the United States. Here's a CD box set's worth of those tunes for your consideration:

Mister Twister

(John Berry, Don Covay, Mark Lewis)

Co-written by Soul legend Don Covay, "Mister Twister" is arguably Connie Francis's finest Rock'n'Roll record: it's a whole lot bluesy and a little bit spicy, with a bitchin' cha-cha beat that won't quit! Like Petula Clark's French chart-topper "Ya Ya Twist", it's one of the best Chubby Checker-inspired songs you've probably never heard. A Black male vocal group accompanies Connie on this side, but unlike when other White acts of the period harmonized with Black singers, her voice doesn't stick out like a sore thumb. The brothers are in the groove, and Sister Francis is right up in there groovin' with them! Connie was as much at home with Black musicians as she was with the decidedly whitebread Mitchell Ayres Orchestra, with whom she cut tunes for Armed Forces radio.

The Tiger And The Mouse

(Doc Pomus, Mort Shuman)

The 1950s was the golden era of Rockabilly, and several of Connie's hits fall into that category: Certainly "Stupid Cupid" and "Lipstick On Your Collar" do. Here's one slice of blue-eyed R & B that got away. "The Tiger And The Mouse" was cut as a possible follow-up to "Lipstick" but never released; Connie had no trouble nailing the song, but something about it didn't suit her. A pair of takes were completed at two separate sessions, but neither met with her satisfaction. If only she had decided to bear down on this Pomus/Shuman number instead of on "No One"(more about which will be said later).

Looking For Love

(Hank Hunter, Stan Vincent)

One of the few bad recordings Connie made during her M-G-M tenure was the 45 RPM version of "Looking For Love". The theme of her third movie was a highlight of the film soundtrack: Featuring Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich and other assembled backing voices, it was a funky boogaloo with a wild sax solo. Klaus Ogermann's swingin' arrangement was recycled when she re-cut the song for the soundtrack album. For some unknown reason, she and producer Danny Davis decided to wax a third version . After an aborted attempt in Nashville, New York arranger Alan Lorber came up with a new orchestration they liked; but the lugubrious march-time master they completed was just awful. It wasn't Rock'n'Roll, either (Ace Records' inexplicable decision to include it on a recent Connie Francis Rock retrospective notwithstanding), but somehow it got pressed up as a single. The public's response was decidedly lukewarm. When executive producer Bill Levenson forced me to accept this dog of a track on Connie's Souvenirs box set in 1996, it left a very bad taste in my mouth. Now it pleases me to call your attention to the cut I wanted programmed in its place; the movie version of "Lookin' For Love" is one of the best '60s Pop/Rock album cuts you'll ever want to hear.

Eighteen

(Brad Boobis, Neil Nephew)

Connie was much too convincing as a teen sexpot caught up in a maelstrom of hormonal lust when she recorded "Eighteen", her strongest bid for radio airplay prior to the release of "Who's Sorry Now?" If the track had featured any more of her libidinous squeals, it might've been banned for suggestiveness!

Telephone Lover

(Eddie Curtis)

The best thing about this jazzy rocker from Connie's Dance Party album is the comedic monologue she opens the song with: Why don't you come over to my house and talk me more of that sweet talk, hmmm? Darling? Hel-lo? Hel-lo? Hel-lo? It's a playful nod to the Big Bopper's 1958 smash "Chantilly Lace". Iconic though it may be, JP Richardson's record actually pales in comparison: He couldn't sing R & B like Connie, and he didn't have the Apollo Theatre's music director Sammy Lowe putting his studio band though its paces. Lowe's strategic use of strings and horns on this track is very effective.

Plenty Good Lovin'

(Connie Francis)

There was such a thing as a Rock 'n' Roll orchestra in the '50s, but the group playing on "Plenty Good Lovin'" certainly isn't an example of one. It's the kind of Swing-era big band Kate Smith would've been comfortable with 20 years earlier! Despite Ray Ellis's anachronism of an arrangement, Connie's song lyrics about hotrod cars and twangy guitars are bursting with '50s Rock sensibility; she delivers them with a winking eye and a cocky swagger.

It'll Never Happen Again

(Tim Hardin)

This is the lesser of two Tim Hardin songs Connie recorded with producer Pete Spargo in the fall of 1966. Clearly aimed at the same people who bought Little Anthony and The Imperials hits, it's something of a throwback to her '50s Rock ballad style.

It Happened Last Night

(Leonard Whitcup, Earl Wilson, Slugger Wilson)

There's undoubtedly an interesting story behind this song, one that has yet to be told. Here are the facts: In 1962, gossip guru Earl Wilson helmed a popular nightlife column for The New York Post; titled "It Happened Last Night", it ran until the early 1980s. Somebody, possibly Connie's manager, may have thought she'd do well to get in his good graces. Whatever the case, she agreed to cut a song that Wilson and his son had written to capitalize on his column's notoriety. All concerned probably expected a throwaway album track, and indeed it did end up on an LP(Second Hand Love). However, the track turned out great! Don Costa wrote a swirling Rock-a-Tango arrangement, and Connie graced it with a joyfully effervescent performance. In addition to the album exposure, M-G-M Records featured the tune on an extended play disc; in a review published on 14 July 1962, Billboard enthused that it "could give the EP the kind of action normally reserved for a single." That didn't happen, probably because plugging "Last Night" more aggressively would've invited nasty quid pro quo accusations! Yet even 48 years later, this wonderful waxing all but screams its hit record potential.

You Always Hurt The One You Love

(Doris Fisher, Allan Roberts)

A surprise UK hit, pulled from the Who's Sorry Now? album by M-G-M Record's British branch. Take note of how Connie introduces Country music phrasing as she nears the climax of this Rock ballad remake: You always break the ki-indest heart/With one hasty word you can't even re-member. If you're looking for stylistic purity, don't expect to find it on a Connie Francis album! The woman simply loved to blend styles. Her adventurous spirit never failed to confound critics with narrow concepts of what Rock'n'Roll should sound like.

Capatosta Sweet

(Leo Chiosso, Sandro Taccani)

Underneath the bubbly exterior of Connie Francis lay a dormant Punk Rock princess! Atypical songs like "Capatosta Sweet", with their raw interplay of drums and guitar, brought that secret side out in her. "Sweet" was issued in Italy on the flipside of "Aiutami A Piangere", one of La Franconero's continental hits. Rocking singles like this one, written as well as sung in a foreign language, helped spread the genre's popularity outside the English-speaking world. Connie wasn't the only recording artist who tailored product for foreign export this way, but the massive international following she commanded made a big difference in sales and airplay.

Where The Boys Are

(Howie Greenfield, Neil Sedaka)

Connie and her vocal coach Joe Sherman worked exceptionally hard on the voice tracks for "Where The Boys Are." She'd sung movie music before (in the films Rock, Rock, Rock, Jamboree, The Big Land and The Sheriff Of Fractured Jaw), but this was her first big movie theme; she wanted it to be perfect! This hit single previewed the slightly more nasal singing voice she'd start using regularly by the mid-1960s. While there's far more Pop than Rock'n'Roll influence in "Boys"(and the version cut for the movie isn't Rock-influenced at all), no retrospective of teen sounds from the early '60s would be complete without this international blockbuster. Like it or not, frothy ballads were an essential part of the early Rock scene, especially for women performers.

Tommy

(Hank Hunter, Stan Vincent)

By 1964, the kind of swooning Rock ballad Connie was famous for in the '50s and early '60s had fallen out of favor; few composers were even writing them anymore. However, when her staff songwriters Hunter and Vincent wrote a new song in this mold and played it for her, she couldn't resist cutting it. The vintage 1958 groove of "Tommy" all but begged for her indelible imprint. Hiring The Tokens to sing back-up, Connie produced it herself and sneaked it onto the flipside of her next single, a contemporary Pop ballad. Ironically, that ballad predated the Rock era: It was a lush update of Eddy Howard's 1952 smash "Be Anything".

Robot Man

(Sylvia Dee, George Goehring)

"Robot Man", a tune Connie despised with a passion, is typical of Rock novelties that were popular in the late 1950s; other examples include Sheb Woolley's "Purple People Eater", "Transfusion" by Nervous Norvus, and Dickie Goodman's wild science fiction send-ups. As her audience matured, she stopped cutting these kinds of records, but at the beginning of her career, she waxed no small number of them. Concetta Franconero was the kind of professional who never let personal tastes influence her choice of material, and who never gave any song less than her best efforts. Here, those efforts paid off with a British best-seller.

Toward The End Of The Day

(Leo Delibes, Ray Ellis, Al Stillman)

The only Rock ballad producer Ray Ellis is known to have written for Connie is a stone keeper: A langorous slow dance number that was guaranteed to get teenage couples necking furiously. A more staid Neapolitan version of "Toward The End Of The Day" appears on Connie's Italian Favorites album.

Fallin'

(Howie Greenfield, Neil Sedaka)

"Fallin" is one of the all-time great Habanera Rock songs, as well as one of the sexiest performances on record by a '50s Rock singer. Get that image of a poodle-skirted, pony-tailed Connie out of your mind! This is La Franconero coming across like Sophia Loren, oozing dark glamour and dangerous curves. Her bee-stung lips and mambo hips are extending an offer you can't refuse: "Wanna dance? The name ain't 'baby', though, it's Connie . . . Miss Francis, if you're nasty!"

Are You Satisfied?

(Homer Escamellia, Sheb Wooley)

My, what bad habits Concetta Franconera got into, performing Jazz standards on the "Startime Kids" TV show in the early '50s! That was no doubt where her downward slide into sultry Blues belting began. Underage performances in sleazy nightspots also took their toll, so it's no surprise that by 1955, she could lay down a shockingly mature vocal track like this one. Never before and seldom since has the character of a brazen hussy been conveyed so convincingly on wax! Having sunk to such melodic debauchery, it was only a matter of time before Connie added sinful songs like "Baby's First Christmas" and "Yiddishe Momme" to her repertoire . . .

Playin' Games

(Mark Barkan, Hank Hunter)

This album cut from Connie's 1965 For Mama album hails from the same sessions that produced her hit "I'm Gonna Be Warm This Winter". If both songs call to mind Del Shannon records, that's no accident: Shannon's regular music director, Bill Ramal, handled the arrangements. "Playin' Games" is one of many Connie Francis performances that could qualify as Country or Rock.

The Lovey Dovey Twist

(Eddie Curtis)

The most frantic rocker La Franconero ever recorded gathered dust in the tape vaults for three long decades. When Bear Family Records finally unearthed "Lovey Dovey Twist", inferior aural quality couldn't dull its sassy bite. There's simply no other Connie Francis record like it! When she's not reminiscing wickedly about a Twist-crazed boy named Chris who moves every-which-a-way (background singers all but hyperventilating behind her), Connie is tantalizing you with suggestive Southern belle repartée: I can Twist a while for you, honey . . . I mean to tell you, sugar. Noooo, not even for money, honey! Well, all right, then, just dig me. The overall suggestiveness of "Lovey Dovey Twist" is no doubt what nixed its release; it's obviously a Dance Party album outtake, but one that most other artists would surely have pressed up as a single.

No Better Off

(Bobby Elgin, Bert Keyes)

Connie's most ambitious Habanera Rock recording(one which might've taken Latin America by storm had anybody thought to dub a Spanish version) was hidden away on her 1965 album For Mama. She invests it with the raw passion that Latin music demands, and Bert Keye's thunderous Rock-a-Tango arrangement still packs a wallop 45 years after he wrote it.

I'll Get By

(Fred Ahlert, Roy Turk)

Like "You Always Hurt The One You Love", this cut from the Who's Sorry Now album was culled for 45 release in England, where it scored a hit. Connie's alternately lazy and aroused vocal, caressed by Tony Mottola's murmuring guitar chords, is a blessing for the ears; it's like a very satisfying cup of coffee that lasts a long time.

"Lipstick On Your Collar" continues with Part Two.

Connie Francis (Part Six)

2010-08-03T13:35:00.002-04:00

Lipstick On Your Collar

. . . and 59 More Reasons Connie Francis Belongs in The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

by Don Charles Hampton

Hey, Ring-A-Ding!

(Eddie Curtis)

This penultimate track from the Dance Party album starts out sounding incredibly goofy, but it ends with a powerhouse vocal finale. Connie Francis, that tiny wisp of an Italian woman, could coil and uncoil her singing voice like a Slinky toy: she'd charm you with an adorable Shirley Temple delivery one minute and stun you the next with a burst of mighty Maria Callas volume. That's what she does on "Hey, Ring-A-Ding", a song best described as half-lullaby/half-Blues shout! Not such a great tune for Twisting, really, but unforgettable once you've heard it.

It Would Still Be Worth It

(Clint Ballard, Jr, Fred Tobias)

Connie's stunning vocal performance on this number (recorded in 1960, but unreleased in the United States until 1987) demonstrates how she masterfully combined raw passion with fragile vulnerability to give her Rock ballads maximum aural impact.

Too Many Rules

(Don Stirling, Gary Temkin)

String sections were a given on femme Pop product in the early 60s', but then as now, seldom do they compliment Rockabilly rhythms! Try as he might, arranger Cliff Parman can't keep the strings on this track from sounding extraneous. Fortunately, Connie has no trouble rising above the distraction; she sells the parents-just-don't-understand premise with a cheesed-off vocal so convincing, you can practically see her pout.

No One

(Doc Pomus, Mort Shuman)

This was a song Connie had trouble capturing, and unfortunately, the version released in January 1961 was one of her failed attempts. Never before had a Doc Pomus song sounded so bland! To be fair, Brenda Lee's version, issued four years later, really wasn't much better. Little did the public know that in the M-G-M vaults lay a sublime, Hawaiian-flavored take of the tune, cut with Ray Ellis back in October of '59. On that near-masterwork, which wasn't released for nearly 30 years, Connie's keening tones compete with a steel guitar for the most poignant aural expression you've ever heard.

Don't Cry On My Shoulder

(Bennie Benjamin, Sol Marcus)

Never issued in the United States, "Don't Cry On My Shoulder" was the British flipside of "Mister Twister". Connie's background vocalists are a tad too loud for my taste, but not even the Mormon Tabernacle Choir could overshadow her surefooted reading of this movie soundtrack-calibre Habanera rocker.

Don't Ever Leave Me - Japanese version

(Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich, Kenji Sazanami)

When Connie felt it was time to dive back into the competitive Rock'n'Roll swimming pool, she didn't fool around. She engaged one of the hottest production teams in the business, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, to help limber up her backstoke! The swingin' pachanga rocker they crafted for her made a big splash internationally; on the hit Japanese version, she once again used her little girl voice to good effect.

Without Your Love

(Howie Greenfield, Neil Sedaka)

This kind of four-handkerchief ballad requires a big orchestra in order to be fully realized. Still, even with spare backing by a Rock combo, Connie takes ownership of this excellent Greenfield/Sedaka song, drawing maximum pathos out of the lyrics. Had her version of "Without Your Love" been released, even in this spartan form, it would easily have bested a rare recording by Wendy Hill, which topped out at #111 Pop in the fall of '61.

Let's Have A Party Tonight!

(Hank Hunter, Stan Vincent)

Connie's showcase rocker from the film "Looking For Love" pulled hit singles for her in Germany and other foreign territories. It sounds like a remake of "Vacation", recorded after the studio cats had knocked back a few Tequila shots! Miss Francis was a tee-totaller, of course, but she didn't need alcohol in order to make this kind of uninhibited music. Recent RRHOF inductee Jeff Barry provides the funky bass counterpoint to her wailing lead.

Don't Turn Around

(Howie Greenfield, Neil Sedaka)

Connie's pull-out-all-the-stops vocal on "Don't Turn Around" makes Gloria Gaynor's histrionics on "I Will Survive" sound embarassingly amateurish. This is what truly emotive singing sounds like, and this is the kind of song that brings it out. If Connie had to name the best Greenfield/Sedaka tune she ever recorded, I'd bet this feminist anthem would be a top contender for that title.

Lipstick On Your Collar

(George Goehring, Edna Lewis)

"Lipstick On Your Collar" is a song that fairly begs for embellishment with the comedic facial expressions and animated hand gestures Connie has long been known for. There was no acting-out at the recording session, though; that great singing voice of hers was the only interpretive tool needed. Her biggest original Rock'n'Roll hit is a full-bodied mambo that roars along on a Rockabilly-fueled piston engine; George Barnes lay his claim to Rock'n'Roll immortality with one of the wickedest guitar solos on wax.

Valentino

(Kadish Millet)

Concettina plays the Convent schoolgirl in love with a thuggish street urchin, singing to a track that's heavily marinated in Latin seasonings. Over the next few years, hundreds of Girl Group songs would be cast in a similar mold. Although "Valentino" appears on most copies of her American More Greatest Hits compilation, it was never a hit in America. The song's Apache dance rhythms caused quite a stir in French-speaking territories, though.

Johnny Darlin'

(Eddie Curtis)

Jive, Connie, jive! A tough-as-nails, finger-wagging rocker from the Dance Party album. Lady Gaga wishes she had material this good!

Mail Call

(Fred Karger, Sid Wayne, Ben Weisman)

This stomper was written for Connie to sing in her final M-G-M film, 1965's When The Boys Meet The Girls. Although "Mail Call" seems very Nashville in orientation, it was recorded on a Hollywood soundstage. She belts it out good and strong in an early scene where her character distributes mail to a group of young men. This song would not have sounded out-of-place in an Elvis Presley comedy from the same period.

My Best Friend Barbara

(Hank Hunter, Neil Sedaka)

Jump back, honey! Connie confronts a garishly-dressed boyfriend-stealer in this sprightly rarity from the Neil Sedaka songbook.

We Have Something More

(Emilio Daniele, Mickey Gentile, Jenny Lambert, Luciana Medini)

An English adaptation of an Italian Pop song ("Di La Verita") gave Connie a swingin' Rock-a-Tango flipside for the American release of "Don't Ever Leave Me." The Italian composers are listed here for the first time. Her ebullient vocal reading sparkles so brightly, it's no wonder "We Have Something More" charted in its own right. "No Better Off" was cut at the same Mickey Gentile-produced session, but held back for use as an album track.

Stupid Cupid

(Howie Greenfield, Neil Sedaka)

This is the song that established Connie's Rock'n' Roll credentials. It also kicked off her very rewarding professional and personal relationship with Howard Greenfield and Neil Sedaka, Rock'n'Roll's answer to Rogers and Hammerstein. Country legend Patsy Cline was evidently quite impressed by Connie's recording; two years after its release, she essayed her own version of "Stupid Cupid" for a rare Armed Forces radio broadcast. Believe it or not, La Franconero sang it better.

Part Of The Wind

(Tim Hardin)

Connie poured a lot of Soul into this bluesy snippet of a song from the Tim Hardin songbook; Hardin probably pitched it to her directly, as he was an M-G-M labelmate at the time. To date, a rare 1995 South African compilation is the only place you can find it.

Linda Muchachita

(Bill Newman, Don Stirling, Javier Valdés)

This Spanish translation of "Pretty Little Baby" (a track from Connie's 1962 album Second Hand Love) became a favorite of Chalypso dancers in Latin America. What they say about south-of-the-border diversions is true: They tend to be spicy! Maybe that's why our multilingual songbird gave "Linda Muchachita" a more flirtatious interpretation than you'll hear on the English original.

My Dream

(Richard Hayman)

The Platters recorded a song with this title in 1957. Even though the title is identical and it would've fit right into their repertoire, Connie's recording is of a different number altogether. More evidence of her Rock ballad mastery, "My Dream" hails from the same Hollywood sessions that produced "Valentino" and "Teddy".

Look At Him

(Ellie Greenwich, Tony Powers)

The late Ellie Greenwich, who regularly sang background for Connie in the early '60s, co-wrote this delightfully bouncy number. However, she didn't produce it, as has been erroneously reported. It was produced by Danny Davis at the same New York recording session that yielded "If My Pillow Could Talk" and "You're The Only One Can Hurt Me." Concettina's playfully pugilistic reading fits "Look At Him" like a (boxing) glove.

"Lipstick On Your Collar" concludes with Part Three.

Connie Francis (Part Seven)

2010-08-03T13:30:00.002-04:00

Lipstick On Your Collar

. . . and 59 More Reasons Why Connie Francis Belongs in The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

by Don Charles Hampton

Vacation

(Connie Francis, Hank Hunter, Gary Weston)

The summertime hit of 1962, "Vacation" was the kind of rousing, rollicking Pop rocker you might imagine Nat "King" Cole singing. Then again, who else but Connie Francis could lay down such an exuberant vocal track? She cut it in Nashville during sessions for the album Country Music, Connie Style. Both the album and single versions rock out, but methinks the 45 RPM mono mix packs a wee bit more punch! Material with such broad market appeal let Connie split the difference between Teen and Adult Pop crossover.

My First Real Love

(Bobby Darin, Don Kirshner, George Scheck)

There aren't a lot of songs out there which list the late Don Kirshner as co-writer. You won't find too many female vocalist sides with Bobby Darin's overdubbed voice in the background, either. Connie's 1956 foray into Doo-Wop territory shares both distinctions, though. Her Gospel-tinged vocalizing on this and other early singles yanks the rug right out from under critics of her supposedly "whitebread" singing style.

Baby Roo

(Howie Greenfield, Neil Sedaka)

Connie is a natural comedienne, and the deadpan way she sings over this tuba-infested track is just hilarious. Droll Pop novelties like "Baby Roo" are the type of song snooty Rock historians like to pretend never existed. Never mind that even Elvis cut them sometimes(as anybody who's heard "Do The Clam" surely knows)!

Edge Of Forgiveness

(Ritchie Cordell, Sal Trimachi)

People who only associate the names Cordell and Trimachi with late '60s Bubblegum tunes might be surprised to learn that this sophisticated beat ballad is one of their compositions. It's perfect for Connie, and would've made an excellent single.

If I Didn't Care

(Jack Lawrence)

Ray Ellis's update of this vintage 1939 soaper is quite over-the-top, to say the least! The anonymous bass singer comes on like a cross between Paul Robeson and Big Daddy from Tennessee Williams' play Cat On A Hot Tin Roof. You can easily imagine teenage boys rolling their eyes at his hammy ad-libs and jeering every time Connie's remake played on the radio. She does manage to cut through the histrionics, though. Her fiery performance of "If I Didn't Care" just missed Billboard's Top Twenty in the Spring of 1959. To this day, it remains the definitive Rock'n'Roll treatment of the Ink Spots classic.

Whatever Happened To Rose Marie?

(Hank Hunter, Stan Vincent)

Connie brought a sassy Country girl sensibility to urban Girl Group rockers like this one, and the combination was always pure dynamite.

Saturday Night Knight

(Rod McKuen)

Rod McKuen's career as a songwriter has been wide-ranging, encompassing movie themes like the one he composed for The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie, ambitious concept albums, and rare Pop singles like Jeff Barry's 1960 Decca single "Why Does The Feeling Go Away?". Connie sampled McKuen's songbook around the same time Jeff did, and found this twistable tune to wrap her Scarlett O'Hara singing voice around. First made available in South Africa, it has yet to gain worldwide release.

Send For My Baby

(Hy Heath, Fred Rose)

Connie claims she learned how to belt R & B from one-time boyfriend Bobby Darin, who coached her in Blues phrasing. However, long before meeting Darin, she was a teenage Jazz and Blues singer, paying her dues in nightclubs. Early singles like "Send For My Baby" gave her the chance to show off her formidable Red Hot Mama chops. Concettina once lamented that she couldn't sing R & B like LaVern Baker, the great Atlantic Records star of the '50s. I beg to differ, and so would anybody else who's ever heard this performance!

I Won't Be Home To You!

(Eddie Curtis)

Nobody would ever accuse Connie Francis of acting like a Mississippi Delta Black woman trapped in the body of a White Jersey girl! That isn't her style at all. However, listening to records like "I Won't Be Home To You" will make you wonder: Could there be an African-American strain in her Italian-American bloodline? Where does she get those Blues diva mannerisms from? The way she roars don't even call me on the phone! halfway through this cut evokes Big Mama "Hound Dog" Thornton at her most ferocious.

Lock Up Your Heart

(Ted Gary, Bernie Lowe, Kal Mann)

People who flipped over Connie's second hit single, "I'm Sorry I Made You Cry" found a track that made the topside sound positively lightweight in comparison. Tony Mottola's seriously soulful guitar licks combine with Connie's smouldering vocals to raise the temperature of this steamy Blues ballad up to fever pitch. A stereo alternate take exists, but stick with the mono master: It's steamier!

I'm Gonna Be Warm This Winter

(Mark Barkan, Hank Hunter)

One of Connie's biggest international hits, "Winter" demonstrates how she didn't always need to belt lyrics when she wanted to rock out. The little girl voice she reversed for novelties like "Pretty Little Baby" was plenty potent enough to sell this musical Popsicle.

Teddy

(Paul Anka)

Although written for Annette Funicello, and later the subject of a publishing dispute between Connie and composer Paul Anka, Connie's 1960 recording of "Teddy" is the one most people remember. It's also the only version that became a Top Twenty hit. In retrospect, it's easy to read the yearning interpretation she gave the song as a warm-up for her performance of "Where The Boys Are" a year hence.

Someone Else's Boy

(Hal Gordon, Athena Hosey)

This flipside of "Breakin' In A Brand New Broken Heart" is better known to Connie's continental fans in its hit German version, "Schöner Fremder Mann". However, the original English version shows off its Rockabilly pedigree to better effect. In search of a more authentic Country sound, La Franconero followed producer Jim Vienneau back to Nashville after they cut "Someone Else's Boy" in New York City. Her first date at Owen Bradley's famous quonset hut studio yielded her bluesy 1962 single "Hollywood" b/w "He's My Dreamboat", as well as "Pretty Little Baby".

It's A Different World

(Jimmie Crane)

Although Connie Francis's love for vintage styles of music was well-known, that didn't mean she was hopelessly tied to the Pop sounds of the past. "It's A Different World" was her quite credible bid for dominance of the mid-'60s discothèque scene. It was a stylistic departure both for Connie and her music director at the record date, Jazz legend Benny Golson. Despite being sold in a beautiful picture sleeve, the single met with massive indifference; her ballad-hungry fans just didn't want to know from a Mod dance tune! Someday, I hope a hot young independent filmmaker licenses this groovalicious track for his hot new flick, and turn it into the cult smash it was always meant to be.

Frankie

(Howie Greenfield, Neil Sedaka)

Some '50s Rock aficionados turn their noses up at lovelorn ballads like "Frankie"; they'd have you believe that blistering rockers like "Be-Bop-A-Lula", "Peggy Sue" and "Hound Dog" tell the whole story of Rock'n'Roll's fabulous first decade. The truth is that this kind of song, with its heavy appeal to teenage girls, was a staple of Rock'n'Roll radio back then. Nobody could sing these weepers better than Connie, either.

Ich Komm'Nie Mehr Von Dir Los

(Tobby Luth, Winfield Scott)

Using the name of a 17th century American war hero, singer/songwriter Robie Kirk wrote danceable Rock tunes like "Tweedle-Dee" for LaVern Baker and "Gee Whittakers" for Pat Boone, not to mention Elvis's 1962 smash "Return To Sender". He also wrote "Many Tears Ago" for Connie, but the song had a decidedly retro feel when M-G-M Records issued it in 1960. Few people regard it as one of her Rock'n'Roll recordings. Listen to this German version, though, with its foot-stomping, floor-shaking rhythm, and you'll hear the rowdiness her American A & R men failed to bring out.

You're Gonna Miss Me

(Eddie Curtis)

Black songwriter Eddie "Memphis" Curtis was Connie's strongest connection to Rhythm and Blues; it's a shame they stopped working together so early in her career. If she had cut more of his sizzling Blues ballads after "You're Gonna Miss Me", there'd be no question at all about whether she belonged in the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame. The benefits of their association didn't just flow in one direction, though. Curtis must've been over the moon at having his songs invested with such depth of feeling, not to mention the financial windfall he enjoyed as a result of pulling hits with an international Pop diva.

Groovy Movie Queen

(Colin Cooper)

Sounding like an Ann-Margret outtake from the soundtrack of Bye Bye Birdie, the ludicrous "Groovy Movie Queen" is an example of what later became known as Bubblegum Rock; Connie sampled it at its earliest stage of development, and did so often, if not always willingly! Girl singers like Connie, Annette Funicello and Dodie Stevens popularized this subgenre, which was later dominated by men.

Souvenirs

(Mark Barkan, Dick Heard)

Another catchy "urban cowgirl" record from Connie, with the late Ellie Greenwich quite prominent on backing vocals. For years, it was just an obscure album cut, but in 1996 "Souvenirs" was chosen for the title track of Connie's first (and, to date, last) American CD box set. Alan Lorber is credited with its lively rhythm arrangement, but to trained ears, it sounds more like the work of Lesley Gore's music director Klaus Ogermann. Regardless of who wrote the charts, the lyrics must've struck a familiar chord with Connie: She, like the song's protagonist, was fond of socking away keepsakes to remind her of happy events. That might explain the dewy-eyed reading she bestowed on this melancholy Mark Barkan composition.

Who's Sorry Now?

(Bert Kalmar, Harry Ruby, Ted Snyder)

Connie's first smash hit was a Rock/Jazz hybrid, the Dixieland era updated with Country-tinged vocals and Fats Domino piano triplets. It was a foretaste of the kind of fusion music-making she'd soon specialize in: Country mixed with Rock (1959's Rock and Roll Million-Sellers and Country and Western Golden Hits), Adult-Contemporary Pop spiced with Latin flavorings (1961's Never On Sunday), Folk music crossed with the Blues (1961's Folk Song Favorites), Rock blended with Jazz (1962's Dance Party), Italian and German Pop with a Country music sensibility (1963's Mala Femmena and German Favorites), showtunes with an International flavor (1966's Movie Greats Of The '60s) and Jazz fused with Country (1968's Connie And Clyde) or Brazilian music(1968's Songs Of Bacharach and David). That's the same kind of mash-up approach to music that gave birth to Rock 'n' Roll.

However, when the musical mash-up is heavy on Adult-Contemporary content, the Rock'n'Roll Hall Of Fame doesn't seem to like it. I suspect that's why important early contributors to Rock history like Pat Boone and Connie Francis are passed over for nomination time and time again. This is absurd! Any number of RRHOF inductees recorded a ton of Adult Pop: Dusty Springfield, Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson, Billy Joel, Gene Pitney, The Righteous Brothers and Brenda Lee, just to name a few. And let's not even talk about those quasi-operatic ballads Elvis was fond of cutting! The amount of non-Rock material in an artist's catalogue should have no bearing whatsoever on his or her qualifications for induction. Nor should music industry marketing or public perception of genre classifications. All that should matter is an artist's record of Rock'n'Roll performances and its historical significance.

"There wasn't an original Rock'n'Roll hit before (1958) by any White girl singer," Connie observed in a 1991 interview. "Sure, there were cover versions of things by Georgia Gibbs (and others), but I don't think there were any original rockers by White girls before (I sang) 'Stupid Cupid'." Because Rock was born into an era of musical segregation, it's necessary to take note of racial distinctions like that. It's also necessary to fully acknowledge the role female performers played in popularizing Rock'n'Roll.

It's time to acknowledge Connie Francis as a member of the Rock revolution's First Wave. Her string of hits from February 1958 to October 1959 blazed a commercial trail for female Rock acts who followed in her wake. She was the undisputed Queen of the Rock'n'Roll Ballad: Her unforgettable performances of "You Always Hurt The One You Love", "You're Gonna Miss Me", "If I Didn't Care", "I'll Get By", "It Would Still Be Worth It", "Who's Sorry Now?" and "Don't Break The Heart That Loves You" set the standard for everyone else! Prolonging her career meant distancing herself from the kind of music that first brought her acclaim. However, a change in direction to more Adult-oriented fare didn't erase the essential contributions she'd already made to Rock history.

Nor did that change stop her from making new contributions, particularly in the form of fusion records. Rockabilly was all but dead by the early '60s, but Southern Fried Rock was the wave of the future. La Franconero pointed the way with down-home up tempo sides like "Hollywood", "Gonna Git That Man!", "Love Is Me, Love Is You" and "Over-The-Hill, Underground". Contrary to her reputation as a "retro" artist, Connie was very much ahead of her time in this respect, and guess what? Girlfriend is still rocking in the country! On her most recent album, a 2000 tribute to Buddy Holly, she sings vintage Rockabilly classics saturated with Tex-Mex, Gospel and Country influences.

These reasons, in addition to the 60 recordings cited here, are more than enough to justify Concetta Rosa Maria Franconero's induction into the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame. Those of you out there who have the power to do it . . . what the Hell are you waiting for? Light a fire under your damn asses and git 'er done! Just like lipstick on the collar of a cheating boyfriend, your failure to honor this legendary lady will tell a tale on you!

In 1995, I was honored to co-produce and write liner notes for an historic box set called Connie Francis Souvenirs. From a hit singles standpoint, it remains the definitive retrospective of Miss Francis's M-G-M Records output. A definitive compilation of Connie Francis's Rock'n'Roll masters has yet to be marketed. Until one does exist, fans of her Rock recordings should seek out the following releases: Rock Sides(1957-64), Polydor Records 831698-2, released 1987; White Sox, Pink Lipstick And Stupid Cupid, Bear Family Records 15616E1 (5-CD box set), released 1993; Kissin', Twistin', Goin' Where The Boys Are, Bear Family Records 15826E1 (5-CD box set), released 1996; I Remember Buddy Holly, K-Tel Entertainment 3521, released 2000. All are highly recommended by Cantina staff.

Jeff Barry

2010-06-09T15:36:00.016-04:00

A Jeff Barry Record Date:

Vintage Album Reviews

An AndruCharlz Production
All Selections Composed by AndruCharlz
Arranged and Conducted by Don Charles Hampton
Produced by AndruCharlz and Don Charles Hampton
Recorded live! at The Pop Culture Cantina

Jeff Barry: "Is everybody here? Yeah, I see all my guys out there . . . Hugh McCracken, Sal DiTroia and Trade Martin on guitars, Russ Saunders on bass, Artie Butler on keyboards, and Gary Chester on skins. There's Art Kaplan, too . . . hey, Artie, did you bring your horn? I think we may want a sax solo in there . . . Ellie's rehearsing the background singers . . . she's got the harmonies sounding real tight. Neil, swallow that sandwich! I need you on mike. We're gonna get started now. Are we ready, Brooks? OK, everybody, let's do a take. "Hanky Panky", Take One! Ah-one, ah-two, ah-one-two-three . . . "

The Feel Of Neil Diamond

Neil Diamond

Arranged by Artie Butler
Produced by Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich
Bang Records STEREO 214
Released Autumn 1966

Lately, a couple of oldies deejays that I listen to have been introducing every Neil Diamond track they play as by "the real Neil Diamond." Now, maybe they're just being cute, but maybe they have a point! There are at least four different Neil Diamonds on wax: The Solitary Man of the 1960s, the Song Sung Bluesman of the '70s, the Comin' To America actor/singer of the '80s, and the 21st century living legend he's evolved into. Which Diamond is authentic? My vote goes to the Solitary Man. I recently had the chance to hear The Feel Of Neil, Mr. Diamond's début album for Bang Records. This was his very first LP, supervised by the very capable team of Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich. Jeff and Ellie built their stellar reputation writing and producing mega-hits for Girl Groups and Bubblegum acts; just as you'd expect, they brought their teen Pop sensibility to bear on Neil Diamond sessions. Hearing their maiden collaboration with Neil was a big nostalgia trip for me, but it also reminded me of a time when his music wasn't just exceptional. It was fun, too!

Does this mean he wasn't as brooding, as intelligent and as thoughtful as he's always been? Certainly not! All those words apply to such tracks as "Love to Love,"(soon to be covered by The Monkees), "Oh, No No (I Got the Feeling)", "Do It," "Solitary Man," "Someday, Baby," and "I'll Come Running" (destined to scale the British charts when released as a Cliff Richard single). That's more than half the album right there! But raucous, handclapping remakes of the Gary US Bonds classic "New Orleans" and Ritchie Valens' immortal "La Bamba" show that, in 1966, Neil could smile, laugh, shout, bust a move, and not have it look forced or unnatural when he did.

"Cherry, Cherry", his first Top Ten smash and the album’s centerpiece, sounds anything but forced. That whirling lariat of a guitar intro is the ultimate attention-grabber: it crackles with raw energy! Jeff and Ellie lay down handclappings, tambourines and backing vocals bathed in crisp reverb; before you know it, the track has become a fiesta on vinyl. Neil has captured a Spanish Harlem block party in song, and nobody’s partying harder than he is; just listen to him whoop and holler! Clearly, the boy's having a ball.

Elsewhere on the album, Neil injects much youthful enthusiasm into obligatory cover versions of recent hits: "Red Rubber Ball" is so lively, it almost makes The Cyrkle's original version sound lethargic; and with Ellie Greenwich's golden harmonies taking flight behind him, he all but steals "Monday, Monday" away from The Mamas & The Papas. He even dares to get silly, demolishing what few traces of seriousness there were in "Hanky Panky", Tommy James and The Shondells' recent chart-topper. Neil's delightful send-up of the song resulted when Jeff Barry tried to get him to record it (well, Jeff wrote "Hanky Panky", so why not?) and he resisted. He didn't think it was his kind of material. They reached a compromise, and Neil agreed to cut it as an "outtake" . . . but his performance was so hilarious, it ended up being chosen for an album cut. Four years later, the track would resurface on the B-side of Neil's penultimate Bang Records hit, a remix of "Do It." Knowing Jeff's offbeat sense of humor, he doubtless had a lot to do with "Hanky Panky" not being left to gather dust in a tape vault.

But think of it: Could you imagine Neil getting that silly, or that loose, on most of his later albums? Like I said before, on this LP, Neil Diamond is fun! There's a lightness and joy to his work here, even on the serious tracks, that would vanish as his career progressed. Neil made an unfortunate musical trade-off: his songs improved as he moved more aggressively toward the "theatrical Rock" he's known for today, but the degree of introspection got so heavy, they began to sag under their own weight. Only recently, with his hit CD Twelve Songs, has Neil's music started showing that happy, good-time side of him again. Maybe it's the side those deejays mean to evoke when they talk about "the real Neil Diamond" . . . ya think? Hear that side for yourself on The Feel Of Neil, his very first twelve song collection. That is, if you're lucky enough to lay hands on a copy; they’re kinda scarce!

Jeff Barry: "Brooks, bring up the bass. I really want to hear that bass groove."

The Night Is Still Young

Sha-Na-Na

Produced by Jeff Barry
Kama Sutra Records STEREO 2050
Released Summer 1972

Sha-Na-Na: Donny, Denny, Johnny, Lennie, Jocko, Gino, Ritchie, Vinnie, Bruno, Santini, Bowser and Screamin Scott! Those greasy-haired kids from Columbia University whose appearance at Woodstock (question: How much wood would a Woodstock stock . . .?) propelled them into a long and successful career. Years before their fondly-remembered variety show debuted in 1977, they'd already become undisputed kings of '50s Rock revivalism. With their flashy, campy stage show bursting with vintage cover tunes, Sha-Na-Na lit the fuse of a '70s nostalgia explosion that left the hit TV series "Happy Days" and the blockbuster movies American Graffiti and Grease among its cultural debris.

I never begrudged the boys their success; on stage, they were sensational. I just considered them a pale substitute for the real thing! That was especially true on records, where they didn't shine much at all. No, scratch that: they did shine once! Recently, I heard one of SNN's early albums, The Night Is Still Young, for the first time. I was very pleasantly surprised to learn that (a) Jeff Barry produced it (when Jeff produces something, y'all, attention . . . must . . . be . . . paid!) and (b) it wasn't all '50s covers. Indeed, of the album's 13 tracks, only three are straight-ahead '50s nostalgia: "In The Still Of The Night", "Sea Cruise," and the Doo-Wop medley "So Fine/You're So Fine." The latter two cuts don't even sound like moldy oldies; they’ve been refitted with gritty, garage-rocking arrangements circa 1970.

For the rest of the album, the Sha-Nas show off lots of what they'd never shown before . . . musical range! Country Rock holds forth on Screamin' Scott Simon's "Oh! Lonesome Boy". R & B/Funk busts loose on Donny York's performance of "Bless My Soul" and Johnny Contardo's soulful reading of "You Can Bet They Do", both Jeff Barry originals. For the first time, contemporary Pop/Rock rears its head on Rich Joffe's tuneful "Sleepin'On A Song". The band goes Gospel with "Sunday Mornin' Radio" and Calypso/Caribbean with "Bounce In Your Buggy"(the latter song another Barry original, culled for single release). Jocko Marcellino tries his hand at Paul Revere and The Raiders-style Hard Rock with "It Aint Love", and Donny returns for a second helping of Funk called "What'cha Do With What'cha Got". Playing piano, John "Bowser" Bowman surprises with a bit of lounge lizard musical comedy called "Glasses", and Denny Greene delivers some snarky political/social commentary in "The Vote Song"! Who broke open this cornucopia of genre diversity? Jeff Barry . . . obviously! He's the kind of producer who likes to nudge his artists in new directions; it's a safe bet that the lion's share of credit for the band's updated sound belongs to him.

Even though The Night Is Still Young cracked the lower half of Billboard's Top Pop Albums list without benefit of a hit single, it wasn't what you'd call a best-seller. If it had been, Sha-Na-Na might've avoided falling into that nostalgia-only rut they wound up having to plow for years and years afterward. They certainly made the most of it, but this excellent album gives us a tantalizing hint at the kind of versatile Rock group they might have become.

Jeff Barry: "Play that guitar part a little bit slower, Hugh. I want it to sound real laid-back."

How'd We Ever Get This Way?

Andy Kim

Arranged by Dean Christopher
Produced by Jeff Barry
Steed Records STEREO 37001
released Summer 1968

Many people only know the Jeff Barry-Andy Kim writing partnership for the million-selling Archies songs it produced. Many people only know the singer Andy Kim from his two biggest singles, "Baby, I Love You" and "Rock Me Gently." Many people are missing something! Everything they're missing can be found on How'd We Ever Get This Way?, the 1968 début album for both Andy and Jeff's independent record label, Steed.

Jeff produced the album (natch), and all but one of its dozen songs were written by Barry and Kim ("Pretty Thing", later a single for Ethan Frome and Then Some, was a leftover from the Jeff Barry-Ellie Greenwich catalog). With blockbuster productions like The Archies' "Sugar, Sugar" and The Monkees' "I'm A Believer" under his belt, Jeff more than earned his Bubblegum King credentials; but anybody who expects to hear Andy sing nothing but cheery Sugar Pop confections will be shocked by the diverse and sometimes quite dark sounds emanating from these grooves. Not that there isn't any cheer! The title tune, "Love That Little Woman" (buoyed along by an Ellie Greenwich-led background chorus), "Do You Feel It, Too?" (destined for revival by The Monkees) and "You Got Style" (a regional hit for Folk/Rock duo Jon and Robin) all have that same handclapping, tambourine-shaking sound that was so much a Jeff Barry trademark. On some of these tracks, Jeff even added marimba accents for a Caribbean touch à la "Sugar, Sugar". "You, Girl" and "Circus" carry the same Gospel-cum-Latin vibe, though not as intensely.

"Shoot 'Em Up, Baby", whose lyrics were inspired by the courtship of Andy's parents, bounces astride a Motown-ish backbeat; it wouldn't have sounded out of place on a Supremes album. Much to Jeff's surprise, when he decided to release this song on 45, college kids mistook it for an ode to recreational drug use! Fortunately, in the strung-out late '60s, misperceptions like that helped instead of hurt record sales; by late summer, Andy Kim had bagged his second Top Forty single, thanks to potheads everywhere! Though lacking in controversial content, "Ordinary Kind of Girl,"(the flipside of "Shoot 'Em Up, Baby"), "Pretty Thing" and "Just Like Your Shadow" would've made good singles, too; each one boasts a Beatlesque feel. On "Shadow," Andy sounds remarkably like Colin Blunstone, the whispery lead voice of the Zombies. By contrast, he sounds oddly menacing on "Sunday Thunder", belting the chorus over a grinding guitar groove that anticipates '70s Arena Rock. Then there's the big surprise at the end: "Resurrection", a Rock 'n' Roll dirge that's one of the darkest songs Jeff Barry ever wrote. Delivering a wrenchingly forlorn performance, Andy assumes the role of a man on the verge of suicide. I won't spoil the climax by revealing whether he does the awful deed or not; you'll just have to listen for yourself.

For better or worse, "Sugar, Sugar" and "Jingle Jangle" are the kind of songs Jeff Barry and Andy Kim will be best remembered for. How'd We Ever Get This Way reminds us how much more they were capable of; the sophisticated orchestrations of Dean Christopher (Jeff Barry's brother-in-law at the time) further ensured that there'd be no unwelcome comparisons to Archies records. Recorded for the most part at Century Sound, the studio Jeff co-owned with audio engineer Brooks Arthur, this début was a shining moment for Andy. It's far from his only one under Jeff's supervision, though: Just check out his follow-up Steed LP, Rainbow Ride, for which the former Andrew Joachim delved even deeper into progressive Rock territory. No sophomore slump there! And then came Baby, I Love You in 1969 . . .

Jeff Barry: "What's that, Neil? Do I know what doin' the Hanky Panky is? Don't sweat the small stuff, baby. I'll tell you after the session's over!"

The Bobby Bloom Album

Bobby Bloom

Produced by Jeff Barry
L & R Records STEREO 1035
released Winter 1970

Bobby Bloom achieved his greatest success as a songwriter, helping to pen such hits as "Mony Mony" for Tommy James & the Shondells, "Indian Giver" for The 1910 Fruitgum Company, and "Heavy Makes You Happy" for The Staple Singers. When he wasn't writing tunes, he kept himself busy behind the scenes as a session musician, working regularly with the likes of Jay & The Americans, The Monkees, The Archies, Tommy James, and the Kasenetz-Katz stable of acts. Bobby also cut numerous solo sides in the mid-to-late 1960s, but they were little noticed. Then came 1970 and The Bobby Bloom Album, released on Joey Levine and Artie Resnick's short-lived L & R imprint. This album is a crowning achievement for Bobby, and some folks think it's also the greatest artistic triumph of its producer, Jeff Barry(a recent Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame inductee, dont'cha know). Jeff and Bobby wrote and arranged all the songs and, except for Jimmy Calvert's lead guitar, played all the instruments; that's Bobby's righteous piano chords you hear ringing out over the rhythm section.

The LP kicks off with "Careful Not To Break the Spell," a surreal stroll down the boulevard where Mrs. Bloom's baby boy encounters a "medicine man" and a tough guy who claims to be a "son-of-a-gun" (Bobby dares him to lemme see you smoke). During the course of the song's five-minute-thirty-second length, Bobby morphs into an almost Messianic figure, commanding a body of water to run, river, run and urging a church choir composed of his own overdubbed voices to tell me again! Then he throws a hissy fit over some mojo lady named Sister Suzy . . . it's the wildest trip you'll ever take without smoking something illegal! This metaphysical Gospel rocker was born when Barry and Bloom cobbled two incomplete songs together; easily one of the most progressive recordings of the early '70s, it deserves to be better known.

"Spell" is followed by Bobby's hard-rocking original of the aforementioned "Heavy Makes You Happy," the Gospel-ish "Try A Little Harder," the gentle "Oh, I Wish You Knew", featuring acoustic guitar as the only accompaniment, and (closing Side One) the pounding, conga-driven instrumental "Fanta." If, when listening to the latter track, you momentarily believe you've put a Santana record on your turntable by mistake, you're to be forgiven: The Latin Rock rhythms sound uncannily similar. But it ain't nothin' but Jeff Barry and Bobby Bloom, digging deep down into the same musical trick bag they pulled The Archies' hit single "Sunshine" out of!

Side Two kicks off with a triple-dose of R-rated Funk! Lyrically, this trio of numbers seems to chart the course of a steamy one-night stand. First, Bobby hyperventilates over "Heidi," who sure ain't no vestal virgin: Bobby (nearly) talks dirty in bed to her, and even offers her a cigarette after the moaning stops! Then, he wonders how he can get out of "This Thing I've Gotten Into" (he looks for his guitar, but keeps finding her pantyhose instead)! He ends up getting into an argument with the girl, and deciding that this tryst is "A Little On the Heavy Side" . . . and after such shameful debauchery, what can a poor boy do but rush back to church and sing the hymn-like "Brighten Your Flame"? The haunting background music is provided by Jeff Barry on keyboards, who convincingly impersonates a Vatican cathedral organist. Not bad for a Hungarian Jew from Brooklyn!

Then there's "Give 'Em A Hand," a half-affectionate, half-sarcastic glimpse at a mediocre Rock band's struggle for attention. I personally feel this is the weakest track on the album, but I guess I'm in the minority; Polydor Records culled "Hand" for single release in several foreign territories. Naturally, the album closes with Bobby's signature hit, "Montego Bay," that rollicking, tuba-driven dose of sheer Jamaican fun. In the closing months of 1970, you heard it blasting out of every portable radio. The L & R single fades out rather abruptly, but this LP version ends with a spontaneous a cappella snippet of Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Oh, What A Beautiful Morning" from the musical Oklahoma! You wouldn't usually describe a Rock 'n' Roll number as charming, but really, there's no better description for this tune. "Montego Bay" has certainly charmed countless Reggae bands over the years!

Sadly, Bobby Bloom wouldn't get much more of a chance to show off his exceptional talent. During an argument with another man (over a woman, according to Jeff), he was shot to death in February of 1974. The Bobby Bloom Album is a worthy memorial to him, and essential listening! The same goes for most of the non-album singles Jeff produced for him, especially the Funk-fueled "We Need Each Other" and "Until They Say Mercy", the Disco-flavored "Island", and the eerily prescient "We're All Goin' Home", his final chart record. One of those single sides, "I Really Got It Bad For You," became Bobby's last hit song when The Persuasions waxed it a few months after his demise.

Jeff Barry: "Hey, it's been a great session, everybody. Ellie, Jeannie and Leslie, come back tomorrow night and we’ll do some overdubs.

ELLIE GREENWICH and JEFF BARRY
bust a move in the recording studio

Happy Father’s Day 2010 to Jeff Barry
from the Pop Culture Cantina staff and all of his fans
and friends!

The Angels (Part One)

2010-05-14T13:26:00.009-04:00

Starlets, Halos and Jersey Girl Jive
The Angels
The Amazing True Story of An Incredible
Morphing Girl Group
by Don Charles Hampton

He went away, and you came around
And bothered me every night.
When I wouldn't go out with you,
You said things that weren't very nice!*

When you hear that famous intro coming out of your iPod, recognition hits you in an instant. You're about to hear one of the world's most requested and broadcast Rock 'n' Roll songs: "My Boyfriend's Back!" That deliciously vengeful Bubblegum hit made famous by The Angels 'way back in the summer of 1963. It's arguably the flagship song of 1960s Girlpop, the one number that simply has to appear on any Girl Group compilation that claims to be definitive. How'd this legendary recording come to be? The story behind "My Boyfriend's Back" is actually the story of two singing groups, one male and one female; an incident at a New York soda fountain; and the happy accidentof being at the right place at the right time. Curious? Well, read on . . .

Bob Feldman and Jerry Goldstein were teenage Brooklyn neighbors who, by the late 1950s, had been bitten hard by the Doo-Wop bug. They were just as likely to break into song they were to engage in an afternoon game of softball. As Feldman told the story to interviewer Gil Asakawa, the whole neighborhood was a scene out of an M-G-M technicolor musical: "We used to doo-wop a lot on streetcorners," he said, "and a police car would screech to the corner. A cop would jump out, throw his hat down, and he was our first tenor!" Growing up in an atmosphere like that, it seems only natural that the two boys would begin writing songs together.

Their first taste of professional songwriting came when pioneering Rock 'n' Roll deejay Alan Freed hired them to pen the theme song for his daily TV show, "The Big Beat". From that auspicious beginning, they began cutting demo records and licensing them to record companies. Eventually, Feldman and Goldstein recorded sides for Columbia and Musicor Records as Bob and Jerry. In late 1960, the duo met Richard Gottehrer while hawking their songs to a Manhattan publisher. Noodling around on a piano, they discovered that Gottehrer's writing style meshed perfectly with theirs; shortly thereafter, they decided to make a go of it as a threesome. In time, Feldman, Goldstein and Gottehrer established themselves as independent writer/producers: Their names appear on numerous singles by such early '60s stars as Chubby Checker, Freddy Cannon, Little Eva, Bobby Vee and Pat Boone. By 1963, F-G-G had signed on with Blackwood Music as staff writers. However, their tenure at Blackwood would be brief. A girl group called The Angels was the reason why.

Not unlike many other teen vocal groups of the period, The Angels were family-based. The core of the group was Barbara "Bibbs" and Phyllis "Jiggs" Allbut, two enterprising sisters from Orange, New Jersey. And, like Bob Feldman and Jerry Goldstein, Rock 'n' Roll was in their blood. Singing in their school choir wasn't enough to satisfy their love of performing. "(We) got two other local girls together, and started a group," recalled Jiggs in Alan Betrock's 1982 chronicle Girl Groups: The Story Of A Sound. They named themselves The Starlets. The recruits were bubbly, blonde Bernadette Carroll, and sultry Gina Lollobrigida look-alike Linda Malzone. Linda became the group's lead vocalist, but Bernadette's contribution was just as significant, if not more so; she introduced the group to its first producer, Tom DeCillis.

The Starlets' first commercial recording session yielded a cover of the old Johnny Mercer standard "PS I Love You", backed with "Where Is My Love Tonight?", a Rock ballad written and arranged by Bibbs. The single was sold to Astro Records, a Newark, New Jersey label. While Astro knew how to sell Jazz sides well enough, the company was clueless about the teen Pop market. Tom DeCillis took matters into his own hands; he cut a distribution deal with Canadian-American Records, and the disc (Astro 202) started to make some noise. For two weeks in the Summer of 1960, it flirted with Billboard's Bubbling Under chart, peaking for a regional East Coast hit at #106. "It did OK locally," Jiggs acknowledged, "but it actually served as a demo for us to bring around to major record companies."

The majors didn't take the bait, so The Starlets busied themselves singing background sessions for other local acts. This side gig would prove to be a steady source of income for the Allbut sisters for years to come. Meanwhile, the group's composition changed for the first (but certainly not last) time. Tom DeCillis' wife introduced Jiggs and Bibbs to platinum blonde bombshell Linda Jankowski, who replaced Linda Malzone when she decided to leave. Soon afterward, DeCillis severed his professional ties with The Starlets and took Bernadette Carroll away with him. With his production support, she launched a solo career that culminated in 1963 with the mid-charting cult favorite "Party Girl"(Laurie 3238). However, Bernadette remained an unofficial member of The Starlets, often appearing on their background vocal dates.

Soon enough, though, The Starlets would be no more. A session musician that Jiggs and Bibbs knew arranged for them to meet Gerry Granahan. The ex-lead singer of Dickey Doo and The Don'ts was now a producer and co-owner of an independent label. After hearing The Starlets sing, he was impressed enough to offer them a recording contract. By now, Jiggs was in teacher's college, and Bibbs' budding skills as a musical arranger had gained her acceptance to the prestigious Juilliard School. However, academic considerations proved no match for the chance to become Rock stars! Crossing their fingers for luck, Jiggs, Bibbs and Linda Jankowski abandoned other pursuits to put all their time and energy into being successful Caprice Records vocal artists.

The song they auditioned for Granahan had been a Rock ballad version of "'Til", a number that had first charted in April 1957 for Percy Faith's Orchestra and Chorus. Bibbs had written the attractive vocal arrangement. Sensing a potential hit, Granahan immediately booked a studio date with music director Bob "Hutch" Davie. "'Til" (Caprice 107) would be the girls' first release under their new name, The Angels, and their recording of it was truly angelic. Linda's emotion-charged, heart-on-a-sleeve lead voice, Jiggs and Bibbs' ethereal harmonies, and a majestic string section conducted by Hutch fueled a ride up the charts to #14 Pop in September of 1961.

THE ANGELS CIRCA 1961:
BARBARA ALLBUT, LINDA JANKOWSKI,
PHYLLIS ALLBUT

Their next release, "Cry, Baby, Cry" (Caprice 112) was even stronger. The Allbut sisters bleated pitiably in the background like lost lambs while Linda Jankowski came across like a juvenile Johnnie Ray. Everyone expected it to do as well or better than "'Til", but this magic platter stalled near the bottom of the Top Forty. Subsequent singles charted even lower, or not at all; the most successful was a cover of Doris Day's 1958 smash "Everybody Loves A Lover". Issued as Caprice 116, it peaked at a heartbreaking #103. An album, And The Angels Sing (Caprice 1001), became a collector's rarity almost as soon at it hit the shelves. The Angels were more in demand than ever, but in the midst of promotional appearances, they discovered their Caprice recording career gone cold and lifeless. "Nothing much happened (after "'Til")," Jiggs confirmed twenty years later. "(So) we cut demos for people, sang backup on a lot of records, did commercials, and radio promos, including a couple for (deejay) Murray The K on WINS."

It was at WINS Radio that the sisters met Peggy Santiglia, who also sang jingles for the station. This girl was bursting at the seams with talent: She was a budding actress who'd landed a bit part on Broadway in Jule Styne's musical satire Do-Re-Mi; a budding songwriter who'd penned Murray The K's "Submarine Races" theme song; and a Girl Group veteran who'd paid her dues in a Belleville, New Jersey trio called The Delicates. With her girlfriends Arlene Lanzotti and Denise Ferri, Peggy had cut sides with producer Don Costa, harmonized with singer/songwriter Jeff Barry, and toured for a summer with teen idol Paul Anka.

THE DELICATES CIRCA 1959:
DENISE FERRI, PEGGY SANTIGLIA,
ARLENE LANZOTTI

Peggy's resumé impressed Jiggs and Barbara, but what they dug most was her cool, confident singing style. They were also pleased to learn that she was a Jersey native, like themselves. When a contractual dispute led Linda Jankowski to embark on a solo career near the end of 1962, the Allbut sisters recruited the pretty brunette as their new lead. Bob Feldman, Jerry Goldstein and Richard Gottehrer produced demos, The Angels sang them, and both trios were bouncing in and out of New York recording studios; it was inevitable that they work together sooner or later. They did so in the Spring of 1963, and this led to F-G-G producing the girls' final single for Caprice Records. That was the situation when Bob Feldman, enjoying an egg cream one afternoon in a Brooklyn soda fountain, got the idea for a great new song. It literally came screaming through the front door!

As Feldman related the story to Gil Asakawa, a young girl ran into the store and told off a startled boy who was sitting at one of the other tables. "(She screamed) 'My boyfriend's back and you're gonna be in trouble! You've been saying things about me in school that aren't true . . . he's gonna kick the (expletive deleted) out of you!' I grabbed a napkin, and started writing down what she was saying." Later, he took the hurriedly scrawled lyrics to his business partners. Over the next three months, the trio would tighten up the concept, and craft a melody to hang it on.

Then, in June, they booked a session with The Angels, who cut a demo of "My Boyfriend's Back" that was no less than fantastic. Blackwood Music subsequently earmarked the rowdy handclapper for The Shirelles, but its composers were adamant that the demo be issued as a finished master. They felt that The Angels' record had a spark that could never be duplicated. A legal standoff ensued, which resulted in F-G-G going independent again. Within weeks, a deal had been inked that freed the girls from their dormant Caprice Records contract and placed them with Mercury Records' Smash subsidiary. "My Boyfriend's Back" was issued as Smash 1834, and the rest is history.

"When we finished 'My Boyfriend's Back', I just knew it was a hit," Jiggs told Alan Betrock, "and there was a real buzz around town about the record. It came out in late July 1963, and just took off like crazy! Within a couple of weeks, it was #1 all over the country." Indeed, the song spread across the national airwaves like wildfire, and catapulted the girls to a level of success they'd only dreamt of with their earlier hits. They opened for Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons; toured both America and abroad; played Harlem's famous Apollo Theatre; appeared on numerous TV shows; and shared the bill with numerous Soul artists, including Bobby "Blue" Bland and Aretha Franklin's sister, Erma Franklin. (The Angels were a bonafide Rhythm and Blues act: "My Boyfriend's Back" crossed over from the Pop charts and broke for a Top Five R & B smash.) The enduring popularity of "My Boyfriend's Back" created a huge demand for personal appearances that would last well past the 1960s. The Angels also increased their lucrative backing vocal work, singing behind artists as diverse as Neil Diamond, Lesley Gore, Tony Orlando, Jackie Wilson, and even Frank Sinatra. Their most famous studio session came in 1965, when they supported Lou Christie on his #1 smash "Lightnin' Strikes" and its controversial follow-up, "Rhapsody In The Rain."

THE ANGELS CIRCA 1963:
BARBARA ALLBUT, PEGGY SANTIGLIA,
PHYLLIS ALLBUT

Over the course of the next twelve months, F-G-G, Peggy Santiglia (using the pen name "Peggy Farina") and such "celebrity" songwriters as Jan & Dean's Jan Berry, Jay & The Americans' Marty Sanders, and ex-Cadillacs singer Robert Spencer provided The Angels with a steady stream of raucous uptempo novelties, fun-filled sides with titles like "The Guy With The Black Eye"(an obvious sequel), "Wow Wow Wee!"(a wild roller coaster ride set to music), "I Adore Him" (a nod to Phil Spector and The Crystals), "Jamaica Joe"(an excursion into Jamaican Blue Beat, a precursor to Reggae), "The Boy From Crosstown"(a nod to Shadow Morton and The Shangri-Las), "My Boyfriend's Woody" (not what you think) and "Why Don't The Boy Leave Me Alone?" (believe it or not, a prequel to "My Boyfriend's Back"). Each one was duly imprinted with the girls' distinctive vocal stamp. Rock 'n' Roll had become a lot bolder since "PS I Love You", "'Til" and "Cry, Baby, Cry", and so had The Angels. While Linda Jankowski had been an excellent lead vocalist, Peggy Santiglia brought a much-needed missing element to the group: Attitude!

THE ANGELS CIRCA 1965:
BARBARA ALLBUT, PEGGY SANTIGLIA,
PHYLLIS ALLBUT

On "My Boyfriend's Back", her voice conveyed a (pardon the expression) devilish glee, ideal for portraying put-upon high school coeds bent on revenge. Thanks to her acting skills, she could also be flirtatious, sassy, boastful, or anything else a lyric required. For their part, Jiggs and Bibbs kept the energy level high, cavorting in the studio like adrenaline-crazed cheerleaders. The Angels were still Doo-Woppers at heart, but they weren't sob sisters any longer. On the cover of their best-selling My Boyfriend's Back album, issued in September of '63, they presented themselves as vivacious sex kittens in jungle print blouses and tight satin skirts. Mixing a little spice in with the sugar lent an exciting new gleam to their halos, and F-G-G's songs and productions were tailor-made for their hot new image.

"Starlets, Halos and Jersey Girl Jive" concludes with Part Two.