chapter thirteen
The AFO Executives: (left to right) Melvin Lastie, John Boudreaux, Alvin “Red” Tyler, Peter “Chuck” Badie, and Harold Battiste.
(Courtesy of AFO Records)
As any pedant will tell you, the 1960s began at 12:01:00 on January 1, 1961, there being no year 0 in the Christian calendar. The media had already been frothing about the new decade for a year, and with the election of a new, young president, America seemed poised on the verge of a new era. The sixties, however, hadn’t started yet, even if the 1960s had; to paraphrase the outgoing president, Dwight Eisenhower, things were more like they were then than they ever had been. Various pompadoured Italian American boys were recording “good” music with slightly rockish beats that their producers hoped the kids would like, while their female equivalents, Connie Francis and Annette Funicello, made their own anodyne records. In fact, Disney, from whose Mouseketeers stable on the wildly popular Mickey Mouse Club program Annette had sprung, spent the largest part of 1961 promoting her Hawaiian records, presumably in an attempt to get the kids interested in the music being played by the longtime hit radio show Hawaii Calls. Close, Disney, but no cigar.
There was a ton of music being released. As the after-Christmas returns piled up, distributors complained that there were too many LPs being issued, not that anyone was listening to their woes; any random issue of Billboard confirmed that there were major labels in those days who thought the public wanted records of strolling mandolins, sing-along records in Yiddish, Charlton Heston narrating the life of Christ, and comedy records. Tons of comedy records: this was the year that saw Nichols & May, Shelley Berman, Bob Newhart, Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Belle Barth, Redd Foxx, and numerous others release albums. Comedy records were cheap to produce—one performer, one microphone, an unobtrusive recording setup in a club, hardly any editing and mixing, and it might be a hit. Bob Newhart’s records were; The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newharttopped the LP charts and stayed on them for 108 weeks, and its successor, The Button-Down Mind Strikes Back!, did likewise and endured for seventy weeks, providing much-needed revenue for the fledgling Warner Bros. label. They both won NARAS awards, too, a new distinction bestowed by the National Association of Recording Arts & Sciences, an institution formed in the wake of the payola scandal to monitor major-label ethics and form an industry lobbying group. The award was shaped like an old-fashioned gramophone, and before long they’d become known as Grammys. That Newhart’s first album won one of the first NARAS Record of the Year awards doesn’t reflect too well on the state of popular music at that point, though.
There were, however, some interesting things happening, and they tended to be regional and flying under the wire. Top Forty had become pervasive in a lot of places, and it was playing a large role in determining the hits on the charts. But as many labels had proven before, you could make a decent living selling records locally. Take Jay Miller, for instance. Located in the rice-processing town of Crowley, Louisiana, he operated an electronics store, with a little recording setup he’d been running since 1948 to record local Cajun musicians. Paying them a pittance and not mentioning royalties, Miller could break even on a couple hundred copies of a record, and sold them in his store, as well as distributing them to stores and jukeboxes around local towns like Eunice and Mamou. Baton Rouge wasn’t exactly in his backyard, but news travels quickly when there’s money to be made, and in 1954, Otis Hicks, a Baton Rouge bluesman who performed as Lightnin’ Slim, appeared and Miller recorded “Bad Luck Blues” for him. Miller saw the record begin to sell in quantities he couldn’t keep up with and he knew that WLAC out of Nashville had paid programs sponsored by record stores, one of which had its own labels, Nashboro and Excello. Miller began licensing his blues stuff to Excello, and Lightnin’ Slim became a local star. For one session in 1957, Slim showed up with his regular harmonica player, James Moore, and told Miller he was afraid that if he didn’t let Moore cut a record, he’d leave him, and he needed him in his band. Slim had written a song, “I’m a King Bee,” for Moore, so Miller devoted part of Slim’s session to him. After a couple of takes Miller suggested that Moore sing through his nose; he liked the song, but thought Moore’s voice was boring. Moore obeyed, and the results were astounding. “King Bee” only sold locally, but then, nobody expected more, and James Moore was christened Slim Harpo. He enjoyed popularity all over Louisiana and Texas, occasionally performing outside that circuit with or without Lightnin’ Slim, and then, out of nowhere, in early 1961, one of his records, “Rainin’ in My Heart,” suddenly took off nationally, hitting #14 on the R&B chart and even #34 on the pop chart.
New Orleans, too, was ripe for an uprising, and it got it. Fats Domino had been churning out hit after hit—nothing exciting, nothing challenging, the only identifiable New Orleans elements being his Ninth Ward accent and his piano playing—which helped keep Cosimo Matassa’s studio alive, but Joe Banashak, who owned A-1 Distributors, the city’s largest record wholesaler, said, “I was fed up making hits for other people,” and started Minit Records in 1958. Minit didn’t make national news until 1961, when it had its biggest hit so far, “Mother-in-Law,” by Ernie K-Doe. This being New Orleans, of course, it’s a complicated story, and it centers on Allen Toussaint, one of the many hot piano players around town, who had had a shot at success in 1958 when RCA Records showed up auditioning people for a recording contract, and liked the instrumentals he was playing. Before he knew what had happened, the twenty-year-old had an album, The Wild Sound of New Orleans, credited to Al Tousan, out on the label, which had no idea what to do with it. It did, of course, raise his profile locally, and he became in demand as a session player and arranger. Banashak came calling with his new label, and Ernest Kador, a popular local club act whose first Minit single, “Hello My Lover,” had flopped. Did Toussaint have any songs lying around for him? Why, yes, he did—a lot of them. So he assembled a bunch of musicians, among them Alvin “Red” Tyler on saxophone and Benny Spellman on bass voice, and made a catchy, funny record for the session, which, after Banashak had signed a distribution deal with United Artists, shot up the charts as “Mother-In-Law” by Ernie K-Doe.
Suddenly, there was a steady trickle of great music that didn’t sound like anything else coming out of New Orleans. The opening shot had come in April 1960, when local bandleader Jessie Hill had released the nonsensical but catchy “Ooh Poo Pah Do,” in two parts, on Minit, and a record by Joe Jones, “You Talk Too Much,” that Roulette turned into a hit that September, but except for teenage keyboard prodigy James Booker’s “Gonzo,” not much had escaped local circles until K-Doe’s hit, after which Clarence “Frogman” Henry, whose novelty hit “Ain’t Got No Home” had gotten some play in 1958, resurfaced with an old standard funked up with a New Orleans beat, “(I Don’t Know Why) But I Do” on Chess’s Argo subsidiary, in February. Now, things were cooking.
Nor was Joe Banashak the only New Orleans musical figure tired of making hits for others. Harold Battiste, who’d arranged a number of hits (including “You Talk Too Much”), had been doing a lot of reading about black self-determination, much of it published by the Nation of Islam, a strange, pseudo-Muslim group headquartered in New York. Battiste’s idea was simple: a musician-owned collective, sharing equally in profits and producing their own records, using black-owned distributors whenever possible. AFO was incorporated that spring, the initials standing for “all for one,” which was the basic concept. The shareholders were Battiste, Alvin “Red” Tyler (sax), Allen Toussaint (piano), Peter “Chuck” Badie (bass), John Boudreaux (drums), Roy Montrell (guitar), and Melvin Lastie (cornet), who was their connection to the Musicians’ Union so that they could release records and give the union its 2 percent, “which,” Battiste commented later, “was all they wanted.”
Now all they needed was money, and one day it just walked through the door. Juggy Murray was a black businessman from New York, just getting started with his new label Sue, which he intended to turn into the biggest black-owned label in the country. He already had Ike and Tina Turner, and he’d gone to Los Angeles looking for someone to be a talent scout for him, and looked up Sonny Bono, who told him to talk to Battiste in New Orleans. He did, and was very impressed with AFO’s determination, talent, and idealism, so he laid down some investment money on the spot. Now it was time to make a record, and Melvin Lastie’s uncle, Jessie Hill, showed up with two artists, a teenage girl, Barbara George, and a guitar player, Lawrence Nelson, who, for reasons having to do with black secret societies in the city, called himself Prince La La. La La had written two songs for the young woman, and outlined the first to the house band, who were calling themselves the AFO Executives—because they were. They settled into one of the slippery, herky-jerky rhythms that Battiste and Toussaint specialized in (although the pianist wasn’t on the session and they used Marcel Richards instead), and Barbara George stepped up to the microphone and nailed the song, “I Know,” in a couple of takes. Everyone knew they’d made a hit (Lastie blew a particularly inspired solo that sealed the deal), and now it was time to do the other song of La La’s. Try as she could, Barbara couldn’t do it. La La was tearing his hair out; it seemed so easy to him! Finally, he decided to do it himself, and AFO’s second hit, “She Put the Hurt on Me,” was in the can. Things were looking good.
The sound that was evolving in the New Orleans studios was just one of the new musics coming out of Louisiana, though. The other one had been coming together for a couple of years. Probably the first evidence of it heard nationwide was the release, on George Khoury’s Lake Charles label Khoury 703, of Cookie and the Cupcakes’ “Mathilda,” in 1959. Huey “Cookie” Thierry was a Creole who led the house band at a popular Lake Charles club, and the song had an unusual but pleasing beat, anchored by a bass line that alternated quarter notes and triplets: dum, duh-duh-duh dum. Cookie’s pleading delivery sold the song, and through some kind of bargaining, it went from Khoury’s label to Judd (owned by Sam Phillips’s brother), to Chess, where it stayed. George Khoury’s next stop was Phil Phillips, whose “Sea of Love” was a #2 smash in 1959, picked up for Mercury by a Nashville hustler named Shelby Singleton, who came to western Louisiana to see what else was happening.
A barber and part-time radio personality from Winnie, Texas, Huey P. Meaux, was also scouting the area for talent, and leased his very first production, Jivin’ Gene Bourgeois’s “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do,” to Mercury through Singleton and nearly went to jail for it; when he presented the check to his local bank, they called the local narcotics squad, because nobody who cut hair could have gotten that kind of money legitimately. But that “Mathilda” bass line did it again, and it, too, was a hit. Early in 1961, Meaux got a call from Floyd Soileau, a friend of his in the prairie Cajun town of Ville Platte; a singer named Joseph Barrios Jr., who performed as Joe Barry, had a strong local hit on Soileau’s Jin label (he was already dominating the local Cajun and Creole market with his Swallow label), and it was threatening to get out of hand. “I’m a Fool to Care” was an old Les Paul and Mary Ford song, and Meaux, who listened closely to voices, thought Barry’s voice bore an uncanny resemblance to Fats Domino’s, albeit a Fats with an edge, and made a deal with Mercury for the record. Meaux was also keeping tabs on Jimmy Donley, who was writing songs that he sold to Fats Domino for a pittance, and who was, like Barry, white. Donley’s problem was raging alcoholism, which is why he sold his songs for fifty bucks and some whiskey, but Meaux knew that if he could ever get him under control, he’d have something. Meanwhile, he found a left-handed guitar-playing woman who’d been playing in Houston clubs, Barbara Lynn. She wasn’t “swamp pop,” as some in the industry were calling this new music, but she had potential.
In fact, Barbara Lynn was at heart a blues player, and this was a very good time for blues, especially the new sounds that were mostly coming out of Chicago. Jimmy Reed continued to make hits for Vee-Jay—1961 was the year of both “Big Boss Man” and “Bright Lights, Big City”—and in late January, Junior Wells released his classic “Messin’ with the Kid,” yet another new voice from Chicago heard from, as was Freddie King, a Texan resident on the West Side whose instrumental “Hideaway” was picked up by would-be guitar virtuosos of all persuasions—including steel guitarists. In Houston, Don Robey’s Duke label continued to showcase Memphis talent, releasing two classics early in the year with Bobby “Blue” Bland’s “I Pity the Fool” and Junior Parker’s “Driving Wheel.” And the old-timers continued to produce worthy wax, even if it no longer made the charts; January saw Howlin’ Wolf release “Back Door Man” b/w “Wang Dang Doodle,” adding to his catalog of classics. Chess was paying a little attention to the new breed; they managed to get Otis Rush in for some sessions, one of which produced “All Your Love” and “So Many Roads, So Many Trains,” but the real action was on tiny labels like Cobra, Crash, Chief, Bobbin, and Profile, most of which were lucky to be distributed in Chicago, let alone elsewhere. Fortunately, Chicago had a couple of radio stations that played blues, particularly on weekend nights.
On March 13, in St. Louis, Chuck Berry’s legal woes continued. He was still represented by Merle Silverstein, and everyone concerned hoped that the Janice Escalanti matter would be settled at last. Just finding the witness was hard enough, and once found, they wound up putting her in a local convent, whose mother superior told them to hurry up and get the case over with; she wasn’t a particularly welcome guest. Silverstein laid heavily on some of Escalanti’s statements that someone would pay for what had happened, despite testimony that she hadn’t done the jobs Berry claimed he’d brought her to St. Louis to do in his nightclub—hat-check and selling photos—while the prosecution more or less repeated their previous version of events that showed Berry as a sexual predator. That apparently worked on the jury, who once again found Chuck Berry guilty of violating the Mann Act, and Judge Roy Harper sentenced him to three years in prison and a $5,000 fine. He would appeal the sentence and lose. Chuck Berry was headed to jail. He recorded a few more sessions for Chess in 1961, which included two of his best (and least typical) songs, “I’m Talking About You” and “Come On,” but they didn’t even dent the charts.
It was like the old guard was being forced into change. Little Richard was still in the seminary, Jerry Lee Lewis was still in purgatory (although he’d have a mild hit in April with a version of Ray Charles’s “What’d I Say”), Carl Perkins was an opening act for Johnny Cash and drinking a lot, and Elvis … well, Elvis was still making records, and they’d creep their way into the top ten for a few weeks before sinking back down. He was making soundtrack albums, too, for his two films this year, Flaming Star and Blue Hawaii, the latter of which not only had the semi-hit “Rock-A-Hula Baby,” but also such attractions as his version of “Aloha Oe” and the “Hawaiian Wedding Song,” along with “Ku-U-Ipo,” “Slicin’ Sand,” and “Ito Eats”—and, to be fair, his best ballad effort in a while, “Can’t Help Falling in Love.”
Rock & roll was in short supply, with only Ricky Nelson (who was getting better: his two-sided smash “Travelin’ Man” b/w “Hello, Mary Lou” brightened the airwaves in April and May) and the Everly Brothers sustaining careers from the old days. The new breed of teen crooners was downright spooky; Roy Orbison released “Running Scared,” an operatic bolero with chilling, paranoiac lyrics in March, and Del Shannon (real name Charles Westover) had two hits in the first part of the year, “Runaway,” which went to #1 in a hurry, and “Hats Off to Larry,” both of which featured a weird keyboard instrument called the Musitron, an early synthesizer whose solos made the records stand out on the radio.
There were still lots of vocal groups around, although the ones who had hits tended to produce novelty records like Little Caesar and the Romans’ “Those Oldies but Goodies,” the Marcels’ bizarre remake of the classic “Blue Moon,” or the Edsels’ “Rama Lama Ding Dong,” which would spawn Barry Mann’s answer record “Who Put the Bomp.” The Vibrations, a Chicago group, contributed “Stranded in the Jungle,” which followed up on their similarly African-themed “Watusi,” which wasn’t about tribesmen; it was a dance. There seemed to be a lot of dancing going on; Chubby Checker began the year by announcing that “It’s Pony Time,” and apparently it was, because that was yet another hit for him.
There seemed to be a lot of young girls making records, too: the Shirelles were four girls who went to school with Florence Greenberg’s daughter at Passaic (New Jersey) High School, and Mrs. Greenberg owned a record label called Scepter that was in need of a hit. She’d wisely hired a veteran music-biz guy, Luther Dixon, to find her artists and material, and he liked the Shirelles right off the bat. First, he’d had them record the “5” Royales’ “Dedicated to the One I Love” (they’d had a previous record, “I Met Him on a Sunday,” on Tiara, Greenberg’s short-lived previous label, which she sold to Decca), but it didn’t do too well, so he co-wrote “Tonight’s the Night” with lead singer Shirley Owens, and it did a bit better. At the end of 1960, he’d found the right song, co-written by a husband-and-wife team of professionals, Carole King and Gerry Goffin, which he’d whittled down from a seven-and-a-half-minute demo done as a country song with a recitation: “Will You Love Me Tomorrow.” It was a rather daring choice, since it all but makes explicit what every teenage girl knew was the subject: If you give in to your boyfriend’s desire for sex, will he love or respect you anymore? It went to #1 instantly, carrying over to the new year, and the girls followed it up by re-releasing “Dedicated,” which did very well, too, as did its follow-up, “Mama Said.” All of this before summer came, too. Lest New York hog the spotlight too much, Vee-Jay released “Every Beat of My Heart” by the Pips, four guys who were related, fronted by the sister of one of them, Gladys Knight. If she sounded self-assured, it was because she was seventeen and had made her recording debut at five with the Wings Over Zion Choir. Despite there being two versions of the song (both by the Pips) on two different labels, it was a hit, too.
A Billboard headline in the March 20 issue summed the situation up nicely: R&B RESURGENCE AN OMEN: LONG VIGIL IS FORECAST FOR FAITHFUL HARBINGERS OF “GOOD MUSIC” RETURN. Translated, that meant that teens were now buying R&B records in such quantity that if you were waiting for them to come to their senses and buy “good music,” you should be ready for a wait. Unheeding, the next week Cameo released Bobby Rydell Salutes the Great Ones, to wit Al Jolson, Bing Crosby, and Frank Sinatra. Al Jolson? Were they kidding? Rydell was nineteen years old! Were any nineteen-year-old Americans listening to Al Jolson? What the teenagers were buying was music that may not have been as wild as when Little Richard and company exploded onto the scene, but there was still the odd wild moment. The May 1 pop chart had “Runaway” at #1, “Mother-in-Law” at #2, Gene McDaniels’s “100 Pounds of Clay” at #4, the Marcels’ wacky “Blue Moon” at #5, and Frogman Henry’s “But I Do” at #6. The very next week, the Duals’ hot-rod themed “Stick Shift,” the Regents’ “Barbara Ann,” and Ben E. King’s magisterial “Stand by Me” were all issued, in anticipation of a hot summer to come, and come it did, with the help of events in Memphis and New York.
In Memphis, it was Packy Axton’s band who had figured out after long days and nights working on the studio Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton had leased that maybe the Royal Spades wasn’t such a good name and changed it to the Mar-Keys. (Mrs. Axton had suggested Marquis, but they didn’t like the q.) They threw together an instrumental based around a circular riff that keyboardist “Smoochy” Smith played on the organ, and after a couple of times around, the horns reinforced. Instead of a chorus, the music just stopped, and the band all went, “Aaaaaaaah! Last night!”
Actually, it wasn’t the band that had been playing around town; bassist Duck Dunn had to drop out because his father had money troubles, so he and a friend opened a business giving helicopter rides. In his stead Lewis Steinberg was on bass, scion of a venerable black Memphis music family going back a couple of generations. Steinberg was older than the rest of them, but he was amazed to discover the scene around Satellite Records and its studio. Mrs. Axton spun records from her candy-counter record store while kids danced on the sidewalk outside, and she kept scrupulous notes on who bought what. It was she who’d told Packy to get his band working on something the kids who danced on the sidewalk could get into, and it was she who took a dub of the resulting tape to a local radio station, which couldn’t stop playing it. The next day people dropped by her store and demanded a copy, even though they hadn’t manufactured any, and she later claimed she sold two thousand copies of it over that counter, one by one, after Satellite pressed it up and issued it. “Last Night” was a huge nationwide hit, eligible for the title of that summer’s smash, and with Atlantic’s help it sold a couple of million copies. The Mar-Keys went on tour, first with Carla Thomas and Mrs. Axton chaperoning, but soon without them. Of course, it was the all-white version of the Mar-Keys; what went without any comment on McLemore Avenue didn’t go in the clubs, black and white, that they’d been playing, so they rampaged around the South and had the summer vacation of their lives.
The thing that happened in New York was that a club opened. Big deal: clubs and bars opened and closed all the time in Manhattan, particularly close to Times Square, and particularly clubs owned by the Mob. In 1958, Johnny Biello was asked to take over a club at 128 West Forty-Fifth Street by his friend Sibbey Mamone, who found himself having to take a swift leave of absence for a while. Biello already ran another club, the Wagon Wheel, a couple of doors away, and to work out details of the deal (Biello paid $30,000 for 90 percent, the remaining money going to Mamone’s wife to pay the bills in her husband’s absence), he sat down there with some of his business associates and his son-in-law, Dick Cami. Biello wanted the new joint to make money—it’s hard to launder money if you’re not making some legitimately, after all—and it had a stage, so they had to book music. Cami noted that every other club in the neighborhood had some kind of jazz. He recommended rock & roll. This was not without self-interest; Cami had been trying to get his toe into the rock & roll business for some time and had financed a couple of flop records and knew a lot of musicians, so he had a pool to draw from. After the meeting, the businessmen wandered over to the new joint, which had been called the Gangplank. It needed a new name, of course, so after tossing a few around, one guy, Fat Jack Herman, who was forever popping candy, suggested the Peppermint Lounge, after the stuff he was currently chewing. Biello thought that was great—a red-and-white candy cane color scheme!—so that’s what it became. Cami started booking bands in there, but it took forever to take off. Eventually, though, out-of-towners, the kids New Yorkers call B&Ts (bridge-and-tunnel people), discovered it and kept it busy enough.
Biello, looking to put his Mob career behind him, moved to Florida to open a carpet business. Cami took care of the Peppermint Lounge from a nice house on Long Island. In October 1960, he found a decent group to serve as a house band. Northern New Jersey and western Long Island were hotbeds of musical talent, and in Lodi, New Jersey, Joey Dee and the Starliters had just finished a two-month run as the house band in a club when booking agent Don Davis approached them about a gig at the Peppermint. It was just a three-day engagement, but they did so well that they were immediately hired to play six nights a week for $600 a week.
They were very talented; Joey had gone to school with the Shirelles and backed them up on a couple of sessions, and over time the band had attracted some of the best talent in New Jersey, including vocalist David Brigati, his drummer brother Eddie, organist Felix Cavaliere, and guitarist Gene Cornish, although the lineup changed over the years. One key to being a house band in a popular teen dance club was the ability to keep up with the hits, and to anticipate them if you could. That’s why, when Chubby Checker (who clearly had a hipper A&R man than his labelmate Bobby Rydell) called out in June “Let’s Twist Again,” the Starliters took heed. By then, they had acquired some girls who danced on the stage, led by perky eighteen-year-old Veronica Bennett and her sister Estelle and cousin Nedra Talley. What they really wanted to do was sing—they’d made a record as the Darling Sisters already—but this was as good as anything for the moment, especially once they started getting paid for it.
Not all of America’s youngsters were twisting, though. Some were turning to folk music, and not just the folk-influenced music being purveyed by the Kingston Trio (who were awarded an unprecedented four gold albums in January), the Limelighters, the Highwaymen (who had a hit that summer with “Michael (Row the Boat Ashore)”) and the Chad Mitchell Trio, but something they perceived as more authentic. In Minnesota, Bobby Zimmerman had graduated from high school and headed toward the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, where he fell right into the nascent folk scene in Dinkytown, the student ghetto. There, he met people like Jon Pancake and Paul Nelson, who had record collections full of the music he’d been attracted to, including a copy of Folkways’ Harry Smith–edited Anthology of American Folk Music and another influential Folkways album, The Country Blues, which other students like John Koerner and Tony Glover were using as a source of songs to learn. Elektra Records, home to the folk popularizer Oscar Brand, had signed a young woman from Kentucky who played the dulcimer and sang the songs of the hills where she’d been raised, Jean Ritchie. These records had been out for a while, but Folkways kept coming up with more. Besides the contemporary revivalists the New Lost City Ramblers, they’d issued a tape that musicologist Ralph Rinzler had made in North Carolina featuring Folkways Anthology star Clarence Ashley and some of his friends, Old-Time Music at Clarence Ashley’s. It was exciting to hear not only Ashley, in fine fettle (well, his recordings had only been made some thirty years previously), but a young, blind guitarist named Arthel “Doc” Watson, whose fluency and speed was incredible. Everybody was getting guitars and banjos or, at very least, a Hohner Marine Band harmonica, which was the instrument of choice for blues harmonica players.
After absorbing as much as he could, and discovering Woody Guthrie—who’d been around since the first folk revival of the 1930s, writing songs with political messages on the frameworks of traditional numbers and who was now confined to a hospital in New Jersey with a neurological disease, Huntington’s chorea—Zimmerman knew what he had to do next and took off for New York, where he’d never been and knew nobody. He arrived in January 1961, an ideal moment. Israel G. Young had opened a storefront on Macdougal Street in Greenwich Village called the Folklore Center, where he sold sheet music, books, a few records, and the occasional instrument, and it was a magnet for the new folkies. Young also had a column in Sing Out!, a folk fan magazine that had been published since 1950 and gave notice of doings across the country, which attracted more people to his store. In December 1960, he’d promoted a concert by Elizabeth “Libba” Cotton, the left-handed guitarist who worked as housekeeper for the Seegers, and the New Lost City Ramblers. The concert drew well, and Young wanted to do more shows of young traditionalists and older artists, and thus, he, John Cohen of the Ramblers, Ralph Rinzler of the urban bluegrass band the Greenbriar Boys, Jean Ritchie (who lived in Brooklyn), and folk dancer Margaret Mayo formed the Friends of Old Time Music, which presented its first show on February 11, 1961, at P.S. 41 in Greenwich Village, with Roscoe Holcomb, a multi-instrumentalist singer from Kentucky, headlining over Ritchie, the Greenbriars, and the Ramblers. It was such a success that on March 25, they did another one at the same venue, with Clarence Ashley’s group and Doc Watson and a singer from Virginia, Anne Bird. This show got written up by Robert Shelton of The New York Times.
Nor was this sort of action limited to New York. Boston had a thriving folk scene, thanks to its several colleges and universities, and thanks to young Joan Baez, who was already recording her second album for Vanguard. Entrepreneur Albert Grossman opened a club in Chicago, the Gate of Horn, in the basement of the Rice Hotel, to accommodate local and touring folksingers. In Berkeley, a young man who’d been on his way to becoming minor Polish royalty when the war had broken out, Chris Strachwitz, was taking things into his own hands. His family had been put up by relatives in Chicago upon getting to the States one step ahead of the Nazis, and Strachwitz discovered blues on the radio there, unsurprisingly enough. He found that he preferred the more basic performers, people like John Lee Hooker and Lightnin’ Hopkins, who simply accompanied themselves on a guitar (and were still having hits and getting radio play), and, after he’d moved to California to go to college, decided to go find Lightnin’ Hopkins in Houston, armed only with a tape recorder. Not much came of that initially, but Mac McCormack, a Texan folklorist who’d befriended him, told him of a tenant farmer in Navasota with a virtuosic guitar style and wide repertoire stretching back to the songster tradition before the blues, Mance Lipscomb, and Strachwitz went to see him, befriended him, and recorded him. He put the resulting album out himself, on a label called Arhoolie, after a name for the cries black field workers made to help them work, and in April Arhoolie 1001, Mance Lipscomb, was released. It was a sensation among people who heard it; like Roscoe Holcomb, Lipscomb had been passed by when record labels were recording the kind of music he made. How many more like them were out there? For that matter, if Clarence Ashley were still alive and making good music, how many more Folkways Anthology and Country Blues performers might also be out there to be found?
This was the milieu Bobby Zimmerman found himself in, and he quickly told people that his name was Bob Dylan, that he’d grown up touring with a circus, played in Little Richard’s band (a lie, but it would be unhip to admit the truth, that he’d been in Bobby Vee’s band very briefly and been fired), and that he was making regular visits to Woody Guthrie, at whose bedside he’d perform songs, much to the old man’s apparent pleasure. By February, he’d started playing clubs in the Village and gotten to know some of the people on the scene: banjo/fiddle player Peter Stampfel, a gruff young man named Dave van Ronk, who’d started out playing with a Dixieland jazz band and soon moved on to blues, which he learned from a Harlem preacher, the Reverend Gary Davis, and Carolyn Hester, who’d started in Texas (where she’d had a song written for her by Buddy Holly) and moved to New York. The Twist mattered not to this crowd; they had far more important matters to pursue. Many were also involved in the nuclear disarmament issue and desegregation and voters’ rights in the South, and they were cheered by folkies from the previous folk revival of the late ’40s and early ’50s like Pete Seeger, who traveled and performed anywhere they’d have him, from church halls to college cafeterias, reminding his audiences that songs could heal and there was a lot of healing that needed to be done.
You’d never know it from the records teen America was dancing to, though. Billboard was right on the money in July with an article headlined R&B DISK JOCKEYS IN HIT-MAKING ROLE; BREAK SINGLES & SPAWN FRESH ISSUES. The “fresh issues” were reprints of oldies that had been selling again, and there were a bunch of brand-new vocal group records that sounded a lot like the old days: Curtis Lee’s “Pretty Little Angel Eyes,” with its prominent bass singer; “My True Story,” by the Jive Five with lead Eugene Pitt singing a song of teen love and loss; white Philly group the Dovells proclaiming hometown kids from Bristol “sharp as a pistol” when they did the “Bristol Stomp”; and Barry Mann’s rather self-referential “Who Put the Bomp,” in which he swore that the songwriter who put the bop in the bop-shoo-bop-shoo-bop had made his baby fall in love with him. Barry, of course, was an up-and-coming songwriter himself.
Solo artists, too, kept the summer warm, most notably Jerry Butler, who led off with “I’m A-Telling You” and then grabbed on to what was obviously the song of the year, from the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s, “Moon River.” Butler’s version was hardly the only one, but his smooth baritone sold it in a way that demolished all rivals. Dion, now without the Belmonts, told the tale of “Runaround Sue” (shocker: “Sue goes out with other guys!”), and Elvis managed a two-sided hit with “Little Sister” b/w “His Latest Flame,” which at least hit the top ten. In August, Atlantic thought they might have filled the void left by Ray Charles’s departure with a chunky young man from Philadelphia who’d done a few recordings for other labels while leading a church congregation and running a mortuary to make money. Solomon Burke’s debut for the label, “Just Out of Reach (Of My Two Empty Arms),” was a country song that had been recorded many times, but not like he did it, and it stormed the charts. Juggy Murray’s Sue label had another hit with Ike and Tina Turner’s “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine,” with Ike actually having a speaking role instead of just playing guitar.
In fact, Murray was at the center of one of the behind-the-scenes battles of the summer. Sue was just one black-owned label in New York. Another was Fire, owned by the colorful Bobby Robinson, who owned a record store very close to Harlem’s famed Apollo Theater on 125th Street, Bobby’s Records, founded in 1946. He’d played around with the record business as a label owner for years and claimed to have helped the Ertegun brothers set up Atlantic. What’s certain is that he had a knack for selling music you’d think sophisticated New Yorkers wouldn’t buy and then taking it national; in 1959, he’d taken Wilbert Harrison’s ramshackle version of Leiber and Stoller’s “Kansas City” to the top, and in 1960, he’d had a more modest hit with Elmore James’s “The Sky Is Crying,” following it up with yet another recording of his “Dust My Broom,” total anachronisms in that era. He put out records by Lightnin’ Hopkins, who would record for anyone who’d pay him, and had the distinction of releasing Lightnin’s only known Christmas record, “Santa.” In 1960, he went to New Orleans and came back with Bobby Marchan’s “There Is Something on Your Mind,” half a brooding meditation on a lover’s betrayal and half a grisly first-person murder story. Marchan was best known as the lead singer of Huey “Piano” Smith’s Clowns, but here he (actually, Marchan was transgender and also performed in drag as Bobbi) was on completely different ground. Radio sent part one of the song (the side without all the blood) to the top of the charts, and Robinson, after some success with the second Pips version of “Every Beat of My Heart,” went back to New Orleans for more. He found a guy with an auto body shop, Lee Dorsey, singing in a bar and offered him a record deal. All they needed was a song, and as they sat on the porch at Dorsey’s house drinking beer one afternoon, they heard some kids singing a jump-rope chant: “Sitting on the la-la, yeah yeah,” and with a little work turned it into a song. The next day, they took it to Harold Battiste at AFO, and he promised an arrangement the next day and musicians ready to record it. He was as good as his word, and the AFO Executives were ready for them with a typically funky arrangement that they knocked off along with a B side. Robinson returned to Harlem a happy man. Meanwhile, AFO released their first record, Prince La La’s “She Put the Hurt on Me,” which didn’t sell so well but served notice that there was a new sound in town. They followed it up with Barbara George’s “I Know,” which, with Juggy Murray’s help, did very well indeed. And so, when Bobby Robinson reactivated his Fury label to launch Lee Dorsey’s career with “La-La,” Murray heard the track and knew only one combo in New Orleans could have recorded it. He bode his time, and after making his money off George’s record, he called Harold Battiste, told him he’d signed her to Sue, and, alleging violation of his exclusive contract to use AFO’s talent through recording Dorsey for Robinson, declined to distribute any more of their records. AFO would soldier on as a solid local label, but it took a while for them to realize that this was a mortal wound.
If this sounds like small potatoes, remember that the civil rights movement was just coming to national attention, and black record executives, no less than other black businessmen, were fighting for inclusion in the American dream. Berry Gordy certainly was; everyone was paying attention to the Shirelles, and everybody wanted a girl group. There were so many singers in Detroit who wanted a break that Gordy was sure to find something, and sure enough, he did. There were kids hanging around the studio all the time, and one group of girls, the Primettes, had made a record for a small local label called LuPine. Now they wanted to be on Tamla-Motown. Berry didn’t encourage them at first—“Are you girls still hanging around?” was his routine greeting to them—but songwriter Brian Holland and Freddie Gorman, a postman who also hung around Hitsville writing songs, had something they thought the girls could do—“I Want a Guy”—so one day they grabbed him and made him listen. He got excited enough to perform some surgery on what Holland and Gorman had already done and decided to record it. One problem: the group’s name had to go. Lists were drawn up, and eventually one of the girls, Florence Ballard, chose the name the Supremes from one of them. They recorded “I Want a Guy” and it sank without a trace. They tried again, with “Buttered Popcorn,” about a gooey, salty, greasy treat that may indeed be the title subject, although hearing Ballard sing it one could be forgiven for thinking of other things. Gordy, who had co-writing credit on the song, hurriedly announced that the other side was the song being pushed, a lackluster Smokey Robinson number called “Who’s Lovin’ You,” sung unconvincingly by another of the girls, Diane Ross.
Gordy must have been distracted around this time; his next move was to start another label, Miracle, as a sort of farm-team outfit, its first signing being the other, male, half of the Primettes, the former Primes, now known as the Temptations. He must not have heard the hoary old music-biz joke about calling a label Miracle because “if it’s a hit, it’s a Miracle.” But he focused sharply when a high school guidance counselor from suburban Inkster drove some girls to Hitsville. They’d lost Inkster High School’s talent contest, but the counselor thought they deserved to audition, anyway. They sounded good, but the label insisted on original songs, so they handed up a sketch one of their classmates had started, and Brian Holland and Robert Bateman got to work on it, finally calling in postman Freddie Gorman. The result, “Please Mr. Postman,” upped the ante on girl groups and was Brian Holland’s first production. Again, the group’s name had to be changed from the Casinyets to the Marvelettes. The record took off almost immediately, becoming #1 on both the R&B and pop charts, a first for Hitsville.
The guy who would really put girl groups on the map, though, was having an uproarious year. At the end of January, Leiber and Stoller announced that they were setting up shop as an independent business, no longer under contract to Atlantic, and that they’d hire on to do production work, as well as starting two new publishing companies. They’d also be signing other production talent, and the first one signed was young Phil Spector, who’d been all but living in their offices, anyway. While his mentors were still with Atlantic, he’d contributed arrangements to some of Ben E. King’s hits, most notably “Spanish Harlem,” which he’d also co-written with Leiber, but he was still doing stuff on the side. He had an informal deal going with Dunes, a label owned by the Hill and Range publishing house that supervised Elvis’s material, and for them he cut “Corinna Corinna,” by Ray Peterson, which went top ten, and, with the company’s trepidation about a young producer allayed, he went into the studio with Curtis Lee, a white vocalist from Yuma, Arizona, backed up by a black group, the Halos, and cut “Pretty Little Angel Eyes.” Hill and Range then had him produce a number of records for their main label, Big Top, where he heard a songwriter named Bill Giant working with the Crystals, five high school girls he was developing. Spector took them into the studio, allegedly to run over some material, but Big Top felt they weren’t ready yet.
Despite his fear of flying, Spector was spending a lot of time in California, where he was hanging out with Lester Sill and Lee Hazlewood, who’d brought Duane Eddy to fame. During one of those trips, he and Sill formed a label called Philles (Phil and Les) and without telling anyone signed the Crystals to it. When Big Top tried to sign them, he just had them call Sill, and when they got off the phone, Spector was fired. Not that he cared; Sill had signed a vocal trio, the Paris Sisters, and, unable to sell them to any label, he formed one of his own, Gregmark, and hired Spector to produce them. Apparently trying to invoke the hushed sound of the Teddy Bears, he developed a blurry, indistinct sound for them, and his first production on them, “Be My Boy,” did modestly well, so they went back in the studio and came out with “I Love How You Love Me,” which was blurrier still. Sill claims Spector did thirty or more mixes on the strings alone, but it went into the top ten, so it was worth it.
In New York, Musicor, a subsidiary label of United Artists, paired him up with Gene Pitney, a songwriter who’d written “Hello Mary Lou” for Ricky Nelson, and they had a minor hit with “I Wanna Love My Life Away,” which gave them license to try again with “Every Breath I Take,” which again showed off Spector’s increasingly odd use of the studio. Where it really showed up, though, was on a record released at the end of October, “There’s No Other (Like My Baby),” by the Crystals, on Philles 100. A label and an era was being born.
Several eras, actually. The kids went back to school, the memory of the summer protracted by another echo-laden slow-dance hit by the Flamingos, “Lovers Never Say Good-Bye,” but the twist kept right on happening. The B&Ts at the Peppermint Lounge had caught on to it, and on September 21, Cholly Knickerbocker, one of America’s most-read gossip columnists, reported that Prince Obolensky had been seen doing the twist there (not true) and that “the Twist is the new teenage dance craze. But you don’t have to be a teenager to do the Twist” (true). Fictitious appearances by Russian royalty were soon displaced by real appearances by American royalty: Truman Capote, Noël Coward, Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland, and many others dropped in to see what the fuss was about. Phil Silvers was starring in a musical, Do Re Me, in one of the nearby theaters, and quickly added a twist number to the show.
Dick Cami was down in Florida relaxing with his father-in-law, Johnny Biello, when he got an incoherent phone call from New York about the club and … well, it was hard to tell. He needed to find out what was happening. He couldn’t call the club—because of wiretaps there was no phone there—but there was a pay phone in the lobby of the Knickerbocker Hotel next door, near the back entrance to the club. Dick called and got one of the bouncers, known only as the Terrible Turk, who was guarding the back because so many people were unable to get in the front door that they tried to sneak in the back way. (The Turk was a very efficient way to discourage that.) Finally, Dick got Louie Lombardi, the manager, on the phone. “I’m telling you,” Lombardi shouted into the phone, “this joint’s exploding! You know who I was just looking at? Greta Garbo. That broad who just wants to be left alone. She’s here tonight. You guys are the only ones who ain’t here.” He told Biello about the phone call, and they caught the first plane to New York. At the airport, they got into a cab and told the driver to head to the Peppermint Lounge, but he replied, “You kidding me? We can’t get within fifteen blocks of that place!” They made it as far as they could go and did the rest on foot. As Dick noted when they got inside, if the place burned down right then, only half of New York society would be wiped out because the rest were standing in line, hoping to get in.
Why the society attention? There were other discothèques in Manhattan, but they were tame compared to the Peppermint, carefully curated to simulate a wild experience, while the Mob joint on Forty-Fifth Street was a wild experience. Ahmet Ertegun had one foot in the world of funky music and one in high society; in 1961 he’d married Mica Grecianu, a socialite from a Romanian diplomatic family. Their crowd depended on Ertegun to show them where it was at, and he wasn’t above renting a bus to take a crowd to the Apollo Theater in Harlem for a show or to some dive nightclub like the Peppermint Lounge. Ertegun even tried to sign Joey Dee and the Starliters to Atlantic, but he was outvoted; Morris Levy of Roulette might not have gotten there first, but his vote canceled the others. Levy had strong ties to the Mob and had been acquiring record companies for years; Gee, End, and other rock & roll labels eventually came into his hands, he managed Alan Freed for a while, and Roulette was his crown jewel, having acquired Count Basie, among others. Levy’s headquarters was called Birdland, and it was New York’s top jazz club, the place you had to work if you wanted to be seen. Ahmet would have to be content with twisting the night away, and he was. Levy, meanwhile, called in Henry Glover, who’d worked at King when Hank Ballard had done the original “Twist,” and had him write a song Joey Dee could release, and with a little work, Glover came up with “Peppermint Twist,” and they recorded it—and a live album—while making a twistploitation film at the club. (Veronica Bennett and her friends weren’t in it, owing to their mixed-race heritage, replaced by nice blond girls.) Chubby Checker’s “Twist” came back into the charts and headed again to the top, the only record ever to have been #1 twice. It was reported that at parties at the White House, the Kennedys were doing the twist. Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower would never have behaved like that! Twist records started appearing by the dozen; Epic released Twistin’ in High Society by famed elite bandleader Lester Lanin, and Atlantic, which had been shamelessly re-packaging Ray Charles’s material, put out Do the Twist with Ray Charles. That was the cool thing about the twist: unlike the cha-cha or the stroll, it wasn’t dependent on any musical signature. Hit a certain tempo, and you could twist to it. Anticipating the season to come, in late November, the Marcels released “Merry Twist-Mas.” In a rare moment of clarity, the American public that had by now made TV stars of the Chipmunks, despite a long tradition of schlocky Christmas singles, did not make it a hit.
The end of the year saw a number of things happening that, in retrospect, would be important, although they were so scattered nobody knew just how important they were. The FCC, for one thing, was struggling to define standards for FM stereo radio. Ever since a ruling that any station with an AM and FM frequency had to present a certain percentage of separate programming on each band, a lot of stations had recognized that FM’s superior sound quality was something they could market to hi-fi buffs, and it was an ideal medium for jazz and classical music. Now, a technology called multiplex allowed for two signals, right and left, to be broadcast simultaneously and decoded at the receiver, and it was important to make it uniform, for the sake of hardware manufacturers. They spent most of the year wrestling with this, but in the end, it was a major breakthrough. There were other ideas floating around, too; the compact 33 single, which would have better sound, could be recorded in stereo and allow for a couple of extra songs on the B side. Thanks to jukebox companies’ unwillingness to replace every single jukebox in America, this idea died. So did a breakthrough by RCA, which invented a tape cartridge the size of a paperback book, but not as thick, which was as convenient as a record and delivered much better sound. This vanished within a couple of months, but the basic idea would return.
Musically, things were all over the place. In September, Billboard printed an article wondering why, if 38 percent of American radio stations played country music, country record sales were so pitiful, never taking into account that the largely rural audience had little time to play records, little money to spend on record players, and preferred to spend what little entertainment money they had on the country acts that frequently played the out-of-the-way towns near which they lived, and whom they could hear on the radio all the time. There was also the fact that country was, by and large, not crossing over to the pop market, with a couple of exceptions. Don Gibson’s Nashville Sound singles found their way to pop radio, but the real triumph belonged to Patsy Cline, who’d been making mediocre country records until Harold Bradley of Decca found a formula for her that worked. She’d had a hit in 1958 with “Walkin’ After Midnight,” which was hardly country at all, but her career had languished until the spring of 1961, when two of Nashville’s greatest songwriters, Hank Cochran and Harlan Howard, had given her a song that suited her emotional delivery, “I Fall to Pieces.” She almost did, too, a few months into the song’s run when she was in an automobile accident that killed a fellow passenger, but recovered to record “Crazy,” a distinctive song with odd chord changes by an unusual songwriter, Willie Nelson, who’d been Ray Price’s bassist for a while and, freshly out of the Army, had struggled as a songwriter and a DJ in Oregon (where he’d written a song about DJs, “Mr. Record Man,” which was a minor country hit for him on Liberty), and now was employed by Tree Music in Nashville to write more strange songs. “Crazy” was a pop top-ten hit, and it was also a country smash, but Cline was clearly headed to pop stardom.
Another indication of the prevailing anarchy showed itself in September, when jazz pianist Dave Brubeck released an album, Time Out, that would have been a gimmick if it hadn’t been so good. The idea was to record a number of compositions with unusual time signatures, instead of jazz’s prevailing 4/4 and 2/4. This happened from time to time—Fats Waller’s “Jitterbug Waltz” was a classic—but Brubeck was out of the West Coast “cool” school of white intellectual jazz (which also had plenty of black adherents). Time Out would have passed unnoticed except that hi-fi nuts picked it up, and Columbia, for some reason, released a single off it, a 5/4 tune called “Take Five.” (Most jazz artists released singles for the black urban jukebox market, but they got next to no radio play, usually being edited for the jukebox version, whereas jazz radio would rather play the unedited track.) Despite the odd meter, it caught on with pop radio, Paul Desmond’s alto sax floating a catchy melody over the lumpy groove, and it climbed up to #25 on the pop charts.
Out in California, a scene was coming into being on the Balboa Peninsula, part of Newport Beach. People had been surfing here since the 1920s, when a man named George Freeth rode the waves to promote Los Angeles’s streetcar to the beach, but it really took off after World War II, when a bunch of veterans who were having trouble fitting back into society used it as a sort of therapy, living in solitude near the water, taking odd jobs to support themselves, existing for the one-on-one communion—impossible to explain if you’d never done it—of man and ocean. These guys lived where the surf was good, which in California meant from Santa Cruz south and across the border into Baja. They had their own language and their own culture, and eventually they turned surfing into a sport with its own rules and learned to make boards lighter and more responsive to fluid dynamics and developed maneuvers like “hanging ten,” walking up to the front of the board and dangling your toes over it. The big deal about surfing was that it looked like fun, and so some of these guys found themselves mentoring teenagers who wanted to learn.
Malibu Beach was a place where excellent waves met easy accessibility to well-off LA teenagers, so a thriving social scene developed there, where older surfers, teenagers, their girlfriends, and curiosity seekers all mingled. Into this world strode five-foot-tall Kathy Kohner, fifteen, daughter of a screenwriter and a girl who wanted to learn how to surf. Because of her height, she had a nickname: Gidget—girl plus midget. The guys gave her grief, but she was sincere, she’d sneak food from her house nearby to feed them, and as it turned out, she actually had some talent for surfing. She kept a diary of the whole thing, and, in 1957, her father, with her help, turned it into a paperback novel, called, of course, Gidget. It sold five hundred thousand copies. In 1959, it was made into a film using Kohner’s buddies for the surfing scenes, and teenagers across the country were suddenly presented with a ready-made subculture made up of attractive young people (including other teenagers) wearing their own fashions (checked flannel shirts made by Pendleton were popular, bathing trunks were “baggies” for the boys and two pieces, if not outright bikinis, for the girls, and everyone wore sandals, particularly cheap Mexican-made huaraches), indulging in an activity that sure looked like fun if you could figure out how to do it—all in Technicolor. The big problem was that surfing was mostly limited to Southern California, and not everyone lived there. Still, it was the first new teenage culture since Elvis had appeared back in the distant past.
In 1959, an ice cream parlor in Balboa took a chance on an ambitious young guitarist, Dick Dale, who was looking for a place for a band he’d thrown together to play. Dale had been born Richard Mansour in Boston in 1937 and had moved with his family to LA in 1954. He exhibited plenty of musical talent from early childhood, playing traditional Lebanese music with his relatives. In California, he played trumpet in a country band, but he really wanted to play guitar, despite being left-handed, which required him to play the instrument upside down. With the support of his father, who formed Deltone Records to put out his son’s work, he quit his job at Hughes Aircraft and went into music full-time. Only a few people showed up for the first Dick Dale and the Deltones gig at the ice cream joint, but as his reputation grew, so did his audience, to the point where he and his father had to negotiate a deal with the nearby Rendezvous Ballroom, a cavernous relic of the big band era that was standing empty. By early 1961, Dale’s gigs were attracting four thousand people a night.
Dale’s life fell into a nice routine. He’d get up in the morning, go surfing on his custom Hobie board, change, go to work in the music store he’d opened in Balboa, and spend the afternoon there. Then he’d hand the store over to an employee, go surfing again, and get ready for the evening’s show at the Rendezvous. The music store not only helped bring in some cash, it was also a conduit to makers of instruments and equipment, and Dale was particular friends with Leo Fender, whose Fender Guitars was in nearby Santa Ana. Fender would present Dale with prototypes to test durability and viability, and Dale was responsible for testing the classic Fender Showman and Dual Showman amps, which, among other things, were louder than previous amps had been. In 1961, Fender gave him the first Fender Reverb Unit, and Dale’s sound was fixed—as was the sound of surf music.
Dale swears it was his audience that was responsible for calling the loud, reverb-laden, guitar-dominated music the Deltones played “surf music.” Surfers, who knew him from the beach and spread his reputation, were a large part of his audience, and the dance they did to the music was as primitive as their actions on the boards were sophisticated, hence its name: the surfer stomp. Dale’s 1961 “Let’s Go Trippin’” is frequently called the first surf record, and it’s a stomper, but there’s little else to distinguish it from numerous other instrumental records of the time, and its long sax solo is kind of an outlier in surf music. It didn’t even feature Dale’s famous reverb. The title, though, refers to surfing, “tripping” being a then-current term for riding the surf. It also managed to get to #60 on the national pop charts and spawn one surf-referencing instrumental after another, most of which remained local or regional hits: Dick Dale’s “Miserlou” and “Surf Beat,” “Pipeline” by the Chantays, “Wipe Out” by the Surfaris. The only way you could tell something was a “surf” instrumental was usually because of its title and/or some sound effects of waves or people having a good time; it was all about twangy guitars and that stomp beat. One thing surf music did, though, was very important: it established solid-body guitars and basses as the default instrumentation of the American rock band, something that, for all their importance, the Ventures couldn’t do alone from Washington. In changing the way guitars sounded by utilizing direct electronics (and the tremolo lever, or whammy bar) instead of amplified acoustic sounds, it laid the foundations for the next era of rock & roll.
At the end of 1961, a lot of things were in motion, although the trends were too indistinct to discern, hard as people tried. Berry Gordy had set up nationwide distribution and embraced the twist: the Marvelettes’ follow-up to “Please Mr. Postman” was “Twistin’ Postman,” and the Twistin’ Kings (the Motown house band in an early incarnation) delivered “Twistin’ Xmas” b/w “White House Twist.” He also continued to work with the Temptations and a young man who’d done some session work at Chess, including singing backup vocals with Etta James on Chuck Berry’s “Back in the U.S.A.,” Marvin Gay, whose voice Gordy thought was ideal for supper-club music, although his single of “The Masquerade Is Over” stiffed. In Chicago, the Impressions, whom Jerry Butler had fairly crippled when he went solo, released a new record with their guitarist, Curtis Mayfield, singing lead, and his sinuous guitar winds all through “Gypsy Woman,” the first of many hits for them. In Memphis, Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton had gotten a cease-and-desist notice from Satellite Records in California (which offered to sell them the name for $1,000), so they took the letters of their surnames and changed it to Stax. One of the kids who’d danced on the sidewalk came in one day with a song he’d written, and Stewart and Chips Moman heard a hit, a black record with a huge dose of country music in it, and that’s how William Bell got to cut “You Don’t Miss Your Water.” Folkies gathered around the Christmas tree wondering if that flat, square gift was a copy of Joan Baez II (featuring two cuts with the Greenbriar Boys, an album that Billboard had described as “stirring wax”), Dave van Ronk Sings (his debut for Folkways), the first album by a Denver folkie who was Baez’s first real competition, Judy Collins’s Maid of Constant Sorrow, or maybe even Pete Seeger’s How to Play the Five-String Banjo, another Folkways release that paired an album demonstrating the techniques being taught with a book (also available as a standalone from Oak Publications, which also published Sing Out!), yet another milestone in the growing folk revival. It probably wasn’t an album Columbia had quietly released in October, King of the Delta Blues Singers, by Robert Johnson, whose masters they’d discovered they owned, but that, too, would slowly grow in stature. And for good luck, Columbia had signed Pete Seeger to a non-exclusive contract, allowing him to record for Folkways while making more popular albums for them. If you wanted “good music,” it was still there, but Billboard had instituted a new chart to stand alongside the country and R&B charts and was calling it “easy listening.” Maybe that phrase was coined to warn teenagers off; they clearly wanted uneasy listening, and it was just around the corner.