Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
I came into jazz and folk music first...all into Alan Lomax and
taking classical guitar lessons from a jazz guitarist who had me go
see Peter Nero and George Shearing for my first concert experience.
Then I went to see Bob Dylan as my own first choice and then the
Beatles when they first came to D.C., by then it was all blues and
rock and roll for me.
  

    
That American Graffiti soundtrack was, I believe, coordinated by Kim
Fowley, who would have been meticuclous about the selections, so
yes, that would have been oldies programming, which Wolfman Jack
specialized in, targetting Chicanos in LA in particular, since for
that crowd, that music never went away. And the balance is pretty
good for regular programming, too, including two integrated groups:
the Del-Vikings and Booker T and the MGs, although some of the
studio bands on the major-label or big-label records would have also
been biracial. 
  

    
It's funny to think that, at the time, the soundtrack felt *old*, as if
music had come so far since then. It was only ten years later, of course.

I suppose it created a kind of revival in popularity at the time? I see
it was followed by two other collections of "oldies."

On the other hand, I suddenly remember that Sha Na Na was at Woodstock.
  

    
Right, and "oldies" albums had been a thing way before then.  

Morris Levy was in that business, right Ed?  

The song "Those Oldies but Goodies Remind Me of You" was a hit in
1961.  Talk about instant nostalgia.

So by the time American Graffiti came along, there had already been
several waves of nostalgia.
  

    
Sha Na Na lasted considerably longer that the era they tribute.
  

    
Whereas Flash Cadillac didn't last very long at all. Camping up '50s
music wsa a cheap fad, but as <rik> says, Sha Na Na plugged along at
it forever. 
  

    
One of the things I'm re-learning by reading the book is that you
can fool yourself by looking at broad trends in history and jumping
to the assumption that because period X was characterized by Y, it
was all Y all the time everywhere you went.

For example, the story of Slim Harpo’s discovery wasn’t really all
that different from the discovery of Charlie Patton or Robert
Johnson – who would think that the guy in a store looking for local
musical talent thing was still going on in 1961? (Granted a music
store rather than a grocery store, but still.)

And from that we got two songs that every serious rock music fan
knows (or should): “I’m a King Bee” and “Baby Scratch My Back.”
  

    
And "Te-Na-Ne-Na-Ne-Na-Ne!"

But a *lot* of people were still doing that in 1961, and even later:
there were a bunch of guys I haven't gotten to yet doing that in
Louisiana, where Harpo was from, resulting in hits from Phil
Phillips' "Sea of Love" to Cleveland Crochet's "Sugar Bee" to all
manner of great stuff in New Orleans. The lucky guys got to license
nationally, the unluchy guys drove record collectors nuts from the
'80s on. And when soul came in, there were loads of local labels, as
we learn today. 
  

    
Yeah, I note that someone going to New Orleans in search of novel
sounds and finding a hit or two or three - and maybe going back for
more - is a recurring story in the book.

The influence of New Orleans was enormous.  I get the impression
that the amount of money that ended up in New Orleans as a result
was not so enormous.
  

    
One way or another, you're right. Fats was chained to the Mob
through compulsive gambling (like "Col. Tom Parker"), and some of
those licensing deals weren't so hot, either. But the book ends as
one era of New Orleans musicians hits the road for LA, giving
another generation the chance to get cheated, too. 
  

    
Hah!

But we got that great "Dr. John the Night Tripper" record out of it.

We were talking a couple of days ago about those breakout moments
when rock went mainstream, and I think we missed the obvious – the
Twist.  It certainly wasn’t the first breakout moment and I guess
you could quibble about whether the Twist was “real” rock and roll. 


But it utterly conquered the mainstream.  Everybody did it, hip,
square, young and old.  Greta Garbo!

I think it’s hard to understand how truly huge it was unless you
were there.  There certainly hasn’t been a dance craze like that
since.
  

    
The twist was a very important moment. It started as a midwestern
teenage black thing, Hank Ballard picked up on it and wrote a song
to do it to, Syd Nathan at King Records, in his all-knowingness,
stuck it on the b-side of Hank's next single. And it died. But
Chubby Checker, a very ambitious young teenager in Philadelphia,
knew it had come out, knew how to do the dance, and, tired of doing
records where he imitated other performers' voices, recorded it
himself. 

Now, why it took off like that is anybody's guessm except that
Cameo-Parkway, for whom he recorded, was a big-time mobbed up label
in Philadelphia that had been cranking out Bobbys, and they pushed
it because it was so simple and catchy. At the same time, the
discotheque fad was starting among the Kennedy-era East Coast elite.


Quick segue into the next volume: the discotheque originated in
Marseille, where sailors would park their favorite records on shore
leave so they could dance with the French girls to them when they
returned. These bars were among the most popular in town because
they really were a library (bibliothèque) of records (disques). The
concept went to Paris, where Richard Burton's ex-wife, Sybil, went
to the one called Whisky au Go-Go and came back to Manhattan and
opened Sybil's as a very exclusive club. Naturally, being exclusive
and all, everyone wanted in, so she also opened the Cheetah, less
upscale, more popular. 

The concept, though, had already kind of shuddered into life when
the Mob opened hte Peppermint Lounge just off Times Square. They
were mostly live entertainment, but the band played the twist, and,
being around the corner from all the Broadway theaters, people
tended to go there after the show. And while Sybil's and the Cheetah
featured all kinds of dances, the twist reigned supreme at the
Peppermint Lounge, whose house band, Joey Dee and the Starliters,
spun off a bunch of musicians, most notably the Young Rascals, but
also, some time later, I believe there were a couple of Velvet
Fudges there. The legend that Hendrix was a Starliter, however, is
false. 

As I note int he book "The Twist" by Chubby Checker, is the only
record to be number one on the charts twice. Later, noting that he'd
been a minor when he signed the contract, he sued Parkway for
royalties. 
  

    
Did he collect?
  

    
I love the story of how Dick Cami (who was perhaps not mobbed up as
such, but certainly knew some guys) decided running a mob money
laundry/dance joint might be his entrée into the rock biz and ended
up starting a worldwide dance craze.

A minor trivia note: Cami died some years back, but he later became
a successful restaurateur and his name lives on in the Delaware
shore at "Crabby Dick's," home of the "I got crabs at Crabby Dick's"
T-shirt.

Meanwhile, I'm not sure how much we care about the Rock and Roll
Hall of Fame, but I believe Chubby Checker is not in it.  Still
working Vegas last I heard, but that was a while back. 
  

    
Ed can you talk about distribution....and payola, like Alan Freed:
http://www.modestoradiomuseum.org/payola.html This all started in
the 50's and probably earlier, and was still in play in the 80's and
90's when my cousin owned a hip hop studio in Manhattan...it's kind
of the underbelly of the music industry...and I imagine you will
talk some in the second volume about how Independent studios and
artists releasing their own music on the Internet has been a move
around all this...



There's the music, and then how it got on the "air" and how it got
to the record shelves....a lot of it mobbed up...very little money
coming to the artist, etc.

And then there's the album tour and concert venues, ticket sales,
t-shirts and bling...when did that all start to become an industry
in its own right?
  

    
I just read a biography of Freed a few months ago.  A scapegoat and
his own worst enemy is what it sounds like (not least because he was
an alcoholic).

Others, then and later, put payola on a much more serious footing -
and I'm sure still do.  I'm not sure if Freed's ambitions extended
much beyond having a roll of bills that would choke a horse in his
pocket.

Of course, then as now "But everyone's doing it!" wasn't such a
great defense.
  

    
Last I heard Chubby Checker was suing some website or product that
referred to an erection as a "chubby" and were using it in their
site or product name. It seemed like a sad and desperate move. 

Part of the problem of addressing payola is defining it, which has
become infinitely more complicated as the stakes grew higher. In the
'50s, it wasn't as big a deal: you'd take a DJ out to dinner --
often the only hot meal he'd had all week -- and/or give him an
inexpensive gift. A bottle of Scotch at Christmas. He'd play athe
record, but if there were no requests, there wasn't much he could
do. 

Of course, with a guy like Freed, it was a bit more complicated. How
did his name appear on the credits of "Maybelline" and "Sincerely"?
Easy: the Chess brothers cut him in for publishing so he was
motivated to play both records, which were smashes. Ahmet Ertegun
paid for the pool at his house in Scarsdale. I forget who paid for
the remote studio so he could do his show from home. 

The problem that Congress faced when they held their hearings was
that yes, everyone was doing it, but their real agenda was to shut
down this degenerate, negro-originated music that innocent white
teens had been conned into liking. They just couldn't get it through
their heads that you can pay someone to play a record on the radio,
but you sure can't pay teenagers to buy it. Management also knew
that leaning on a dud record too heavily could produce dial-outs if
there were a competing station in the market: I switched back and
forth between WINS and WMCA all the time. Playing Sinatra? Bye! (I
had a big-ass walnut console radio with a record player and
shortwave I got from my grandmother, and it had preset buttons on
it, like a car). 

As far as merch and all goes, that's way off in the future, although
country music stars, not least Elvis' managment starting with Bob
Neal, sold glossies and the stars would stand outside their buses at
the end of the show and sign them. Given how cheap it was to produce
them, selling them for a dollar, which included the autograph, was a
fine income stream. Willie did that up until a few years ago, and
for all I know other artists still do it.
  

    
Dragging us back to the Twist era, I was amazed by the number of
things going on at that time.  The casual observer who didn't live
through the era might think it was the Twist and a bunch of lame pop
records, but at the same time as the Twist you have the peak of the
softer/safer folk revival (the Kingston Trio et al), and the
beginnings of the scene that would lead to Dylan’s stardom – all
those people who listened to the Harry Smith Anthology and decided
to go for the weirder more “authentic” stuff.  

And woven through it, all those, wonderful songs coming out of New
Orleans we were just talking about.

And King and Goffin write and the Shirelles record “Will You Still
Love Me Tomorrow,” which is certainly one of the first (if not the
first) song to address a teenage audience in an intelligent way
about a serious subject.  And Willie Nelson is writing hits for
Patsy Cline.

So yeah, I guess we’ve sort of laid the “nothing much was happening
until the Beatles came along” thing to rest.  And driven a stake
through its heart.
  

    <scribbled by jonsson>
  

    
New Orleans.  Regionlism saw to it that We didn't get much New Orleans on 
back country New England radio in the late 1950s.  Fats, because he was on 
Bandstand, and national because of it, but not much else.  We could pull 
in WWVA on good nights so I had country to listen to and I was already 
coveting banjos because of the pop folk thing that was big on college 
campuses.  But New Orleans was a foreign country.

I was sitting in the car one evening, waiting for my uncle, who was 
shopping in the Western Auto, and I heard the weirdest thing I'd ever 
heard come on the radio, faintly, as if from a distance. 

"Ah hah hah hah
 Ay yay yo
 Dooba dooba dooba dooba
 Ah hah hah hah
 Ah hah hah hah
 Ay yay yo"

My first taste of really funky New Orleans was a faint shot of "Don't You 
Just Know It".  Nobody I talked to had ever heard of it, and I pretty much 
forgot about it until 1960 when I heard it coming from the record player 
of a guy from Alabama at the boarding school I went to.  It was just as 
weird in lo-fi on a portable stereo.  New Orleans was a foreign country.  
I just youtubed it, and it's as almost as weird today as it was then.  
And just as infectious. Butimagine the effect on a very white Kingston 
Trio fan, prep school boy at a school just a bit south of Montreal.

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sxnXO2RjVg>
  

    
Rik, great big grin on my face in the first three notes!!! Had
completely forgotten that one....it's amazing the power of music to
evoke a flood of memories right off the bat. Thanks.

Not to get too metaphysical here Ed, but can you reflect a bit on
the cultural melange that all these threads of music were bringing
together in the "gumbo" of Rock and Roll....it's more than just
hearing a new tune, discovering a new group. What were some of the
cultural impacts of all of this music, in the early days, 40's and
50's, as kids were hearing it for the first time and parents were
getting some new to listen to aside from the Top 40 of the Andrews
Sisters and Frank Sinatra.

And wasn't the evil cannabis sneaking across cultural lines here as
well? I'm not blaming it on the music, but I know my crowd went from
Vodka to grass parallel to the music we were listening to...maybe
that would have occurred no matter what was on the radio, and we
just tend to map these things backwards. The impact of WWII and all
the black americans who served, now returning from Gay Paree had a
huge societal impact...they were not exactly mainstreaming, that all
hit the fan right about where this volume ends, but having grown up
in the North, New York, and the South - Florida, North and South
Carolina and Virginia, I watched a lot of boundaries drop quickly.
And the music bled through.
  

    
Another example of the sort of local entrepreneurialism we've been
talking about is, of course, Motown.  

It later became such a huge force that it’s easy to forget how much
floundering around they did at the beginning.  And in many ways they
remained a charmingly local business until Gordy picked up and moved
to L.A.  

They’ve probably turned it into a professional museum by now and
ruined the experience, but when I toured the Motown studios in
Detroit 20 years ago, you could still see the scuff marks on the
linoleum from people tapping their feet behind the recording console
– and my tour guide was Marvin Gaye Gordy!
  

    
Now THAT'S cool.   I had a similar frisson when we recorded at Muscle 
Shoals.   They'd already move to a big slick studio down by the river, but 
we had to check out the old place at 3614 Jackson Highway.   Pilgrimage. 
It's a dump of a store front and had been stripped of the good gear, but 
out in the studio was this big rectangular section of the carpet that 
looked brand new compared to the funky, faded rattiness around it.  That 
was where the put Hood's bass amp when they loaded in for the first time, 
and never moved it until they moved out.

The Beatles changed recording with their budget busting explorations in 
studios built for orchestras, but think of All the multi-million dollar 
hits that were recorded in dumps like that store-front out on the highway.
  

    
A laundromat I sometimes use in New Orleans was the storied J&M
Recording Studio in a past life.
http://www.nola.com/music/index.ssf/2010/09/cosimo_matassas_jm_recording_s.htm
l
  

    
How did you find out?  Word of mouth, or is there a plaque?