chapter fourteen
Teen Pan Alley: Aldon Music songwriters, staff, and friends at an awards ceremony: (top row, left to right) Jack Keller, Artie Levine, Lou Adler, Al Nevins, Sheila Kirshner, Don Kirshner, Emil La Viola, Morris Levy, and Howard Greenfield; (bottom row, left to right) Barry Mann, Cynthia Weil, Gerry Goffin, Carole King, and Neil Sedaka.
(Photo by BMI/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)
Up at Chess Studios, they were working on doing a lot of recording with Chuck Berry in the summer of 1961. He’d exhausted all his appeals and was going to prison. On February 19, 1962, he entered the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, and was later transferred to Leavenworth Penitentiary in Kansas, and, toward the end of his sentence, to the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri, and he’d remain behind bars until his thirty-seventh birthday, on October 18, 1963. It wasn’t the end of his career—he’d have the English to thank for that initially, and he’d have hits again starting in 1963—but it was a notable hiatus, and a warning, it would seem, to those who thought they could buck society. On the other hand, his time away coincided almost perfectly with the rise of the civil rights movement, and, ironically, if he’d been just a little less successful and a little less associated with pop music, some of the white civil rights supporters among the folkies might have taken up his cause. As it was, Chuck sat in his cells, reading books on accounting and business management. And there were other songwriters on the rise.
In a 1991 interview with Diana Reid Haig, Florence Greenberg remembered the events surrounding “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” which she claimed was partially written at the piano in her office. “Mr. Kirshner, who was a real big-shot publisher, came to me and said he had a song for the Shirelles … I think the world of Donnie Kirshner, and he sure worked the record with us.” He hadn’t been a big shot long, and it’s not like he had to take a cab to Scepter’s offices, either; they were at 1650 Broadway, and Kirshner’s office was at 1619 Broadway. Both addresses were hotbeds of activity; among the other tenants at 1650 was Atlantic (who also had their recording studio there), and as for 1619, it was the Brill Building. Built in 1931 and named for Morris Brill’s clothing store on the street level, it soon became the central address of the music-publishing business, which had been scattered around midtown New York, particularly in the theater district near Times Square. The lobby card read like a Who’s Who of publishing: Mills Music, Famous Music, Fred Fisher Music, and loads of unknowns, including, starting in 1958, Aldon Music.
Don Kirshner was a hustling young songwriter who’d sold his first song to crooner Frankie Laine while working as a teenage bellhop at a resort, and in exchange Laine gave him enough knowledge to set himself up as a professional. It was Kirshner’s opinion that a lot of the music being written for the teenage market was unsuccessful because the middle-aged men who were writing it were so far away from their own teenage experiences, whereas in 1958, he was only twenty-three years old. He met Al Nevins, who was in his forties, an ex-singer, and co-author of “Twilight Time,” which had been a hit for the Platters that year. Having seen an old copyright of his given lucrative life by this new market, Nevins took Kirshner on as a partner, and they started looking for writers.
The first ones were Neil Sedaka and Howie Greenfield, whose “Stupid Cupid” was a big record for Connie Francis, a friend of Kirshner’s, in 1958. Sedaka had been part of the Tokens, a vocal group that had had a hit with “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” borrowed from a Pete Seeger favorite, “Wimoweh” (which had actually been written by Solomon Linda, a black South African artist). Greenfield, three years older, had been a friend of Sedaka’s since his early teen years. Then along came Barry Mann, of “Who Put the Bomp” fame, and his girlfriend and, soon, wife, Cynthia Weil. Carole King signed on in 1959, causing Greenfield and Sedaka to write Neil a top-ten hit, “Oh! Carol” (Sedaka had gone to the same high school as the former Carole Klein, and they’d gone out a couple of times), which of course prompted her answer record, “Oh! Neil.” Whatever teenagers might have thought, it wasn’t an Aldon office romance; Carole was married to another nineteen-year-old, Gerry Goffin, who was also her main writing partner, and, in fact, wrote “Oh! Neil.” In 1962, Aldon added another songwriting couple, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, both of whom had been writing for others, including a stint with Leiber and Stoller for Greenwich. Nor did Aldon only work with couples; Paul Simon was a short, intense figure from Forest Hills, Queens, who’d had a hit in 1957 with a childhood friend, Art Garfunkel, as Tom and Jerry, and, later, Aldon added aspiring folksinger Neil Diamond, another Brooklyn kid, to its lineup on Ellie Greenwich’s recommendation. If the Brill Building was already the headquarters of Tin Pan Alley (the name for New York’s songwriting district, starting in the 1920s, because the open windows and multiple pianos colliding in different keys sounded like cookware being bashed together), it was, under the aegis of Aldon and the various Leiber and Stoller companies, morphing into Teen Pan Alley. Aldon writers weren’t limited to their regular partners and sometimes helped each other finish or tweak a song. Then a demo was cut, with either the writer or studio musicians, to suggest the way the song might sound. Some of the demo recordings, particularly the ones featuring the vocal trio of Earl-Jean McCrea, Dorothy Jones, and Margaret Ross—the Cookies, as they were known—were good enough that they were released on Aldon’s in-house label, Dimension.
One of Aldon’s early customers was Phil Spector, who selected a Goffin-King song, “Every Breath I Take,” for his second try at producing Gene Pitney, which, although not much of a hit, finally got him a record company job when Snuff Garrett, a twenty-four-year-old wunderkind in California who’d been elevated to head of A&R at Liberty Records, made Spector the East Coast head of A&R. Spector was busy building up his own label with Lester Sill, Philles, in California, though, and in the short time he had the Liberty job, he managed a whopping three singles for the label, none of which did a thing. Spector’s office was well appointed, with an air hockey table that got lots of use, and he had a very respectable salary, especially considering he did nothing. Hired in March 1962, he made it all the way to July, at which point he was talking about taking a sabbatical in Spain. Instead, he left Liberty, taking his $30,000 advance with him, and used it to get serious about Philles.
Things were taking off. For the follow-up to the Crystals’ “There’s No Other Like My Baby” in February, he’d chosen a Barry Mann–Cynthia Weil number that was almost a protest song. “Uptown” had the singer’s boyfriend waking up each day and heading downtown, where he’s “a little man” and “just one of a million guys,” but he heads back uptown after work, where the singer makes him know he’s special. There were a lot of hidden codes in this song: minorities live in different areas in different cities, but in New York, “uptown” was clearly Harlem, and the singer was clearly black. The song only went to #13 on the pop charts, but it still sent a message about the way a record should sound and what kind of content resonated with kids. Then he almost blew it; who knows what Spector was thinking, but “Uptown”’s follow-up was “He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss),” a Goffin-King song. Given his insistence on instrumental B sides, it was all or nothing for a Philles record, and this was a big stumble, right at the time he left the Liberty job. It didn’t chart, it didn’t sell, it didn’t get airplay. Was he washed up at twenty-two?
Maybe he should have played it more conservatively and tried a twist novelty. After all, Hey! Let’s Twist, the film shot at the Peppermint Lounge starring Joey Dee and the Starliters and Jo Ann Campbell, had opened the first week of January, and on the next week’s album charts there were six twist albums, including three in the top ten. Despite the threat supposedly posed by the Popeye, a dance that started in New Orleans and, it was reported, was spreading as far as Baltimore, thanks to Eddie Bo’s irresistible “Check Mr. Popeye,” the twist was doing just fine. King Curtis had a hit with “Soul Twist,” Chubby Checker got intimate with “Slow Twistin’,” and Les Elgart released his Twist Goes to College album, Gary “U.S.” Bonds released Twist Up Calypso containing his latest hit, “Dear Lady Twist,” Sam Cooke released Twistin’ the Night Away album and single, Bob Wills alumnus Tommy Allsup came out with Twistin’ the Country Classics, and twist albums—or stuff that could be twisted to compiled by the record company—were released on Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley (who likely didn’t know it was happening and hadn’t recorded any explicitly twist-related material). Bobby Rydell and Chubby Checker also had “Teach Me to Twist,” although Bobby was a little late in asking, and Ahmet Ertegun told Billboard that the public would keep on twisting, no matter what, and as a constant presence at the Peppermint Lounge, he ought to know.
But the twist was no longer teenage once it had been adopted by the Ahmet Erteguns of the world, and teenagers were on the rise again. In Southern California, in Hawthorne, a suburb south of Los Angeles, teenagers were taking matters into their own hands. “Surfin’ is the only life, the only way for me,” they sang, “they” being three brothers and two of their cousins. Actually, out of all of them, only Dennis Wilson surfed, while his brothers, Carl and Brian, were more into music, as were their cousins, Al Jardine and Mike Love. But the Wilson family was headed by father Murry, a failed musician with a lot of contacts in the Los Angeles music world, and when the kids wanted to make a record out of “Surfin’,” he financed the pressing of the tape they’d made in their garage, with its engaging vocal interplay and stomp beat played (by Brian) on a garbage can. Released on the Candix label under the name the Beach Boys (they’d previously been the Pendletones, a reference to the plaid Pendleton flannel shirts that were part of the surfer uniform, and, before that, they’d been a vocal group, Carl and the Passions) the song only made it to #72 on the charts that spring, but that was pretty remarkable, considering what a shambles it was. (The B side was an instrumental, “Luau.”) Murry cashed in some favors and got the boys heard by some of his friends at Capitol, and they offered a deal.
At least in California, surf records were coming out regularly now; Snuff Garrett already had the Ventures on Liberty, and added the Marketts, a bunch of studio musicians who recorded “Surfer Stomp” in late 1961 as well as signing Jan and Dean, an act that Doré, the label that had released Phil Spector’s Teddy Bears, had been unable to break, while the Surfmen, formerly known as the Expressos, started recording instrumentals like “Paradise Cove” and “Malibu Run” for a small label, Titan, early in 1962. Del-Fi had signed the Sentinals [sic], and Bruce Johnston, another of the kids who’d witnessed John Dolphin’s murder, released “Do the Surfer Stomp” in March. It was a little early to be thinking about the beach back east, but the sun always shone in California, right?
Anyway, teenage trends never really popped up before summer, and in March, Ray Charles dropped a bombshell on the American pop music world. Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music was proof that Charles was still entitled to the “genius” title that Atlantic had given him so many years ago. Charles understood the classic country repertoire, since he’d played it in Seattle early in his career, but he’d also internalized it so that now, when he sang it, it came out as pure Ray Charles. His first single from the album was proof: “I Can’t Stop Loving You” was a 1958 hit for its composer, Don Gibson, and for Kitty Wells, both of whom communicated the regret the lyrics state over a medium shuffle rhythm. In Ray Charles’s hands, though, the regret begins to come through in the agonized delivery of the second line—“It’s useless, I’ve tried”—and the slow tempo makes it a far sadder song as he explores his pain. On the other side was “Born to Lose,” a Ted Daffan oldie from the ’40s, rendered in an even more funereal tempo, bringing out the blues in the song. Charles had jumped right into the middle of a genre most sophisticated pop listeners—the ones who were buying his jazz albums and who had celebrated his revision of Hoagy Carmichael’s “Georgia on My Mind”—thought was corny and trite, a novelty at best, and whose songwriters, certain exceptions like Gibson, Cindy Walker, Willie Nelson, and Harlan Howard notwithstanding, were currently churning out less-than-memorable songs. (In fact, once “I Can’t Stop Loving You” finally released its grip on the #1 position, his follow-up was a Cindy Walker song, “You Don’t Know Me.”) His discovery of the emotion one could get from this scorned material if one only took the time to see what was actually there was a rebuke to snobs everywhere, and, from the sales it generated, a very lucrative one.
In fact, a mini-movement of country soul was already happening in the South. As we’ve seen, William Bell’s “You Don’t Miss Your Water” was already out on Stax (although not selling), and in January, Dot released a single by Arthur Alexander, “You’d Better Move On,” which was the result of a bunch of white guys in Florence, Alabama (Sam Phillips’s hometown), who’d been messing with some country and rockish stuff in the hopes of recording something, since two of them, Rick Hall and Billy Sherrill, had set up a studio above a drugstore in downtown Florence. Alexander was a bellhop at the local Holiday Inn and was co-writing songs with some of this crowd, and in 1960, he recorded a song, “Sally Sue Brown,” on Jud Phillips’s Judd label in Memphis. In the summer of 1961, backed by a band called Dan Penn and the Pallbearers, Alexander cut “You’d Better Move On,” and Hall took it to Nashville to find someone to put it out. It was too black for country, and there was no black label worth approaching in Nashville (Excello was still only doing blues), but out of nowhere, a guy from Dot took a chance on it and turned it into a mild hit, which reached #24 on the pop charts. Hall made $10,000 out of the deal and used it to finish off a studio he was building in a former tobacco warehouse just out of town in nearby Muscle Shoals, calling it FAME, for Florence Alabama Musical Enterprises. Alexander would continue to record for Dot in Nashville (including a mild hit later in the year with “Anna,”) while Hall looked for other talent to record the songs his musician friends, including Dan Penn, were writing. Nor was Alexander the only black singer straddling country and rhythm and blues; Solomon Burke had already had a hit with the old country song “Just Out of Reach,” and his follow-up to that was “Cry to Me,” which was written and produced by a Jewish guy from New York, Bert Berns, but very much in the ballpark (its B side was Ivory Joe Hunter’s “I Almost Lost My Mind,” a relic of an earlier age’s country-blues fusion), and its follow-up was a rocked-up remake of a folk song, “Down in the Valley.” All of them sold better with black record buyers, too.
Berns and Burke may have been hoping that the folk crowd would help them have a hit with “Down in the Valley,” because folk was suddenly very hot. Joan Baez’s two albums, without the benefit of a hit single or any radio play to speak of, hovered around the mid-twenties of Billboard’s LP chart for weeks on end, and Johnny Cash’s management announced in mid-April that they were going to try to book him on college campuses as a folksinger (possibly because he wasn’t doing very well on the country charts). Then Columbia Records announced that their venerable A&R man, John Hammond, the man who’d discovered Count Basie and Billie Holiday, had signed Bob Dylan. Reviewing his first album, released in April, Billboard noted that “he plays, sings, and composes, and is one of the most interesting, and most disciplined youngsters to appear on the pop-folk scene in a long time … Dylan, when he finds his own style, could win a big following.” Maybe so, but the album was a dud, except in some folkie circles, although others abhorred his voice and didn’t see much to like about his guitar playing, either. No, the real hit came along almost simultaneously; Albert Grossman, whose Gate of Horn club was doing big business in Chicago, put together an act with two men and a woman—Peter, Paul & Mary—who had been doing solo gigs (Mary Travers and Peter Yarrow) and stand-up comedy (Paul Stookey) in New York. He rehearsed them for months before they made their debut at the Bitter End, a new folk club in the Village, and their album for Warner Bros. was an immediate hit in March—and stayed on the charts, including a seven-week stay at the top, for close to four years. Their first single, “Lemon Tree,” was a notch above what the other commercial folk groups were recording, and it, too, was a mild hit, but the second one was exactly what they were aiming for: “If I Had a Hammer” had been in the Weavers’ repertoire as “The Hammer Song” and had been written by Pete Seeger and Will Hays. There was a whole generation that hadn’t heard it, though, and PP&M put it into the top ten. It was a nod to the folk elders, a pro-peace song at a time when that was a somewhat courageous statement, and a jolly sing-along, all in one—but it was polished enough for pop radio. And although teenage girls were already ironing their hair to straighten it into a Baez-like do and teenage boys and girls were picking up acoustic guitars, folk music remained an activity largely outside the charts, since it relied so heavily on personal participation and live shows, which were becoming more frequent as a touring circuit developed.
Black pop, especially stuff aimed at teenagers, was in an interesting place in spring of 1962. For one thing, the interest in oldies, and the injection of vocal group classics into the oldies played on the radio, meant that this style still had currency. Vee-Jay released “Duke of Earl,” a very old-sounding record, in January, and while Gene Chandler’s name was on the label, it was actually a recording his group, the Dukays, had recorded the year before. It went straight to the top. More modern sounding was the Falcons’ “I Found a Love,” which arrived a couple of weeks later on Detroit’s LuPine label. The Falcons were a loose-knit group who’d had a hit a couple of years back with “You’re So Fine,” and singing lead on this throat-shredding, testifying song was Wilson Pickett, who’d done some time with Detroit-based gospel group the Violinaires. The backup group was the Ohio Untouchables, a Dayton-based band that worked constantly, backing up solo singers and playing clubs in the Midwest. In keeping with the gospel feel of the record, the Untouchables’ guitarist, Robert Ward, who kept going in and out of the band as he returned to, then left, the church, is all over the record. The Falcons’ next record would feature another vocalist, Mack Rice, though, because Pickett quit to try his luck with Detroit’s Correc-Tone label, and then Double L, run by Lloyd Price.
Over at Motown, things were nuts; the Marvelettes followed up their “Postman” hits with “Playboy,” which lead singer Gladys Horton co-wrote with some Motown staffers; Mary Wells had a hit with “The One Who Really Loves You”; and the latest Miracles record, “I’ll Try Something New,” was very much a classic vocal-group sound. The Miracles’ Ronnie White was introduced to a young blind kid, Steveland Morris, eleven years old, who played harmonica like no one’s business, and took him over to Hitsville to play for the folks. Berry Gordy allegedly heard him and said, “Boy! That kid’s a wonder!” thereby giving him the name Stevie Wonder, and handed him over to Clarence Paul, the younger brother of the “5” Royales’ Lowman Pauling, to develop some material. In no time, the kid had written “I Call It Pretty Music, but the Old Folks Call It the Blues.” It wasn’t a hit, but Paul didn’t give up. Elsewhere the Shirelles pulled on some traditional heartstrings with “Soldier Boy,” although there was no war going on (or so most people thought: the United States had “advisers” in Vietnam and were about to add some more), and for sheer wackiness, a group called the Rivingtons came out with “Papa Oom Mow Mow,” which was mostly nonsense syllables, although very cleverly arranged. It was a huge hit with the surfers, oddly enough.
Over at Atlantic Records, things were mighty quiet on the pop front. Nesuhi Ertegun continued to produce great jazz records with Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman, and John Coltrane, and Jerry Wexler struggled to break Solomon Burke and Ben E. King, while his older stars were either all but moribund, like the Coasters and the Drifters, or, like Ruth Brown, left for other labels in hopes of reviving their careers. It was Ahmet Ertegun who found the formula that would keep them afloat during 1962: foreign instrumentals. Mr. Acker Bilk (as he preferred to be known) went to the top of the charts with “Stranger on the Shore,” which was the theme song of a British television show featuring his chalumeau clarinet stylings (the Drifters recorded a vocal version), while Danish pianist Bent Fabric not only hit the top ten but also picked up a Grammy for rock & roll Record of the Year (which it certainly wasn’t) for “Alley Cat.” Records like this were easy enough to pick up; a record company would hear from one of their foreign distributors or go to a European confab like the San Remo Song Festival in Italy and make a cheap one-off deal with an option for a record (usually an instrumental, but everyone still remembered Domenico Modugno’s “Nel Blu Dipinto Di Blu (Volare)” #1 pop hit from 1958—and it didn’t have a word of English!) and put it out. If it didn’t hit, no option was exercised, and better luck next year. There seemed to be a lot of these storming the charts at this point, but only Kenny Ball’s Jazzmen from England managed to challenge Atlantic with “Midnight in Moscow” on Dot. Of course, most European hits weren’t salable in the States; Billboard reported in May that fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds in Belgium were buying a record by a nun who strummed an acoustic guitar while praising St. Dominic, the founder of her order, and French and Italian versions of rock & roll were … well, why bother?
Right on time as school let out, the summer records started. First out of the gate was “Twist and Shout,” by the Isley Brothers, a Cincinnati group who had had a pop hit in 1959 with a little bit of church business called “Shout,” and, with Bert Berns, reworked it, slowed it down, and put a Latin-ish beat behind it for their debut on Scepter. Was this the dance record of the summer? Miami was reporting a new dance called the bug, Dee Dee Sharp was reporting that it was still “Mashed Potatoes Time,” and her fellow Philadelphians the Orlons were doing the “Wah Watusi,” so the jury was still out. Someone named Little Eva popped up on Aldon’s new Dimension label with “The Loco-Motion,” where everyone got in a line and made like a train. It was a Goffin-King song, and the story was that Eva (Eva Narcissus Boyd to her mom) was the Goffins’ babysitter and they caught her doing the dance in their living room one day. Actually, she was a friend of the Cookies’ from North Carolina who finally gave in to her friends’ demands to move north, and the gig at the Goffins’ was as much a favor to the Cookies as anything; she spent as much time helping the Cookies cut demos as she did looking after Louise and Sherry Goffin. She also had an abusive boyfriend, who was the inspiration for “He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss).” “The Loco-Motion” was Dimension’s first record, and it went to #1, although whether the abuser was the guy she married to celebrate that fact is unknown. But probably the biggest dance record of the summer came from Motown’s Contours, who dropped into Hitsville one night on their way back from a gig to find Berry Gordy pounding out a new tune he’d written. “You guys seen the Temptations?” he asked them, figuring he’d finally found a tune to break the group at last. They hadn’t (the Temptations were at a church watching the Dixie Hummingbirds on a gospel program), so Gordy taught the Contours the song instead, and “Do You Love Me” became their first, and biggest, hit. The singer asks his girl if she loves him now that he can dance, and then the group goes through a list of different dances that they undoubtedly demonstrated onstage. It’s a total dance workout, and has the maddening addition of a fake fade toward the end, with the shouted “Do You Love Me” waking the record back up—and driving disc jockeys insane.
Out in California, school was out, giving the Beach Boys the opportunity to see what they could do with their new Capitol Records contract. Carl and Dennis Wilson were in high school, Al Jardine and Brian Wilson were going to junior college, and Brian was writing songs like crazy. By the time they went into the studio, though, Jardine had decided to go back to dental school, so he dropped out and a friend of Carl’s, David Marks, became a non-singing, guitar-playing member of the group. Nick Venet, the man who’d signed them to Capitol, insisted that they cut a song that appeared on the demo tape they’d put together for the label, “Surfin’ Safari,” a Brian Wilson–Mike Love number, but he wanted something non-surf for the B side, so Brian and Gary Usher, a songwriter who was also from the neighborhood and had been in a few bands, collaborated on the first of many tunes they’d write together and came up with “409,” an ode to an engine Usher wished was under the hood of his 348 Chevy. The car sounds were Usher’s 348, recorded as he drove past the Wilson house and captured on their tape recorder. As it turned out, the insurance was hardly necessary; “Surfin’ Safari” was the hit, going as far as #14 and lingering on the charts and the radio the entire summer, while “409” spent a week in the mid-70s and then vanished. But it did give Usher ideas, and he would be behind further car-oriented records by fake bands of studio musicians a year or so down the line. The fact of the hit made Capitol—virtually without pop acts at this point (having lost Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin to Frank’s Reprise label and then gotten sued over reissuing Sinatra’s Capitol stuff)—demand an album, and one was hastily thrown together, including a re-recorded “Surfin’,” a cover of the Gamblers’ influential 1959 instrumental “Moon Dawg,” and another of Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues,” a song all the garage bands had to know at that point. There weren’t any other surf songs besides the hits; Capitol thought this would exhaust the surf craze, and didn’t figure they’d have to deal with the Beach Boys—or Murry Wilson—much longer. The Surfin’ Safari album cover showed the band in a colorful surfer vehicle, an old pickup truck painted yellow with palm thatching for a roof, parked right at the ocean’s edge with David Marks, seated on the hood, pointing, presumably at a wave. All are attired in white Levis, blue Pendletons, and no shoes. Surf’s up!
The surf craze—which had yet to peak—was nationwide, although actual surfing was limited to California and a couple of places in Texas. It was not only about music but about accessories; even if you didn’t have a can of Sex Wax for your board (or a board), you could sport a T-shirt advertising it, or one with the enigmatic word “Hobie” (a brand of surfboard) on it. There was money to be made, and in July, the Small Business Administration published a pamphlet (a “small marketer aid”) on how to reach the fifteen million teenagers out there. Noting that fifteen- to nineteen-year-olds had ten to fifteen dollars a week to spend, it counseled that 1) you must treat them like adults; 2) cater to them; don’t ignore them or shoo them off if they show up in your store; 3) they want fast service; and 4) they like personal recognition. Catch them early and you have a customer for life: 25 percent of high school graduates go to work, 40 percent go to college, and 25 percent get married (presumably girls who drop out of the workforce picture to have families). These ideas may seem obvious to today’s retailers, but teenagers were still perceived by many as children.
Summer records were all over the place. Besides the usual up-tempo dance records like the Contours’, there were a lot of slow-dance records (no how-to lyrics necessary): breakup songs like “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do” by Neil Sedaka, “Make It Easy on Yourself” by Jerry Butler, and “You’ll Lose a Good Thing” by Barbara Lynn all showed possible ends to summer romances, and Carole King, speaking for the already jilted, opined that “It Might as Well Rain Until September.” There were also more optimistic ballads: the Jive Five’s “What Time Is It,” where the singer counts down the minutes until he sees his girlfriend, and Sam Cooke’s silky “Bring It On Home to Me.”
An indication of how confused things were included the fact that the Jamies, a vocal trio who made most of their money singing jingles, saw their 1958 “Summertime Summertime” become a hit all over again although they didn’t know at first that it had been re-released. The Valentinos, another brother act like the Isleys, came out with “Lookin’ for a Love,” their first secular record after going secular under the guidance of Sam Cooke and J. W. Alexander on Cooke’s SAR label; previously, they’d been the gospel-singing Womack Brothers.
The only sure trend visible was Motown; Hitsville was on fire, with the August 11 chart showing “You Beat Me to the Punch” (Mary Wells) at #73, “Beechwood 4-5789” (the Marvelettes) at #79, “Your Heart Belongs to Me” (the Supremes) at #96, and “Do You Love Me” (the Contours) at #100. That week also saw the label release “Stubborn Kind of Fellow” by Marvin Gaye, the e now affixed to his last name and the supper-club sound on abeyance. All of these except the Supremes’ record would go on to glory, but it was beginning to look like the Supremes weren’t going to be a very good investment.
That week also saw an instrumental, “Green Onions,” by Booker T. and the M.G.’s, on Stax, break in at #90. Booker T. was Booker T. Jones, the young prodigy who’d been hanging around the Stax studios, and the Memphis Group—that’s what M.G. stood for—was Al Jackson Jr., son of a prominent local bandleader, on drums, the similarly pedigreed Lewis Steinberg on bass, and Steve Cropper on guitar. Cropper had survived touring with the Mar-Keys and had watched Packy Axton dissolve further into alcoholism along the way. Stax had released several follow-ups to “Last Night”—“Morning After,” “About Noon,” “Foxy,” “Pop-Eye Stroll,” and “Whot’s Happinin’!”—and none of them had done anything at all. Neither had any of the other records Stax had released since, including an instrumental, “Burnt Biscuits,” by the Triumphs (actually Chips Moman), until this low-key, minimalist record based around a riff played on the Hammond organ’s lower register by Booker T. somehow caught the nation’s ears. By then, some changes were going on at Stax. In an argument over “Burnt Biscuits,” Moman, who felt it had sold better than he was being told, managed to make Jim Stewart mad enough to fire him, and he left in a huff for Nashville. As for Stewart’s sister, she had a nervous collapse, and the doctor had told her something would have to go, and what went was her job at the bank. As “Green Onions” grew into a hit, the M.G.’s were faced with a bizarre reality; they couldn’t play, legally, in Memphis, even when the reluctant Lewis Steinberg was replaced with Cropper’s friend Duck Dunn. They played shows up north, and in the Stax studios, race just plain wasn’t an issue. It may have been a coincidence, but Jim Stewart put up a sign at the old theater that, in contrast with Berry Gordy’s Hitsville U.S.A. sign, read Soulsville U.S.A.
Soul, that indefinable, know-it-when-you-hear-it quality that Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, and the “5” Royales’ Tanner brothers had pioneered, must have been a popular sound in the clubs, because young artists who would gain fame later were putting out their first, unsuccessful records. A duet from Florida, Sam and Dave, had stuff out on regional labels, and got one, “I Need Love,” picked up by Roulette. A refugee from her mother’s gospel group, Fontella Bass, was being recorded by Bobbin and playing clubs in St. Louis, while Little Milton, who’d recorded for Sun pre-Elvis, was still trying for a break on Chess, as was Etta James, another veteran, whose “Stop the Wedding” might have been a bigger hit if she’d been a little more reliable about showing up at gigs. And down in Nashville, Joseph Arrington Jr., who performed as Joe Tex, recorded Dan Penn’s “Meet Me in Church.” Most of these singers were playing with the latest trend in gospel, which was dramatic solo singing, sometimes supported by a group. The pioneer was Clara Ward, who began playing nightclubs with the Clara Ward Singers, who spun off another notable star of the era, Marion Williams, whose Stars of Faith were an off-Broadway sensation when they appeared in Langston Hughes’s 1961 show Black Nativity. The great heiress to Ward’s and Williams’s style was the daughter of one of Detroit’s most famous black ministers, the Reverend C. L. Franklin, whose LPs of sermons were the backbone of Chess’s gospel series. Aretha Franklin made her first recording for Chess live in church at fourteen, where an amazed listener can be heard saying, “Listen at her! Listen at her!” as her voice rises to the heavens, and at eighteen, she got her father’s blessing to pursue the same road as their friend Sam Cooke had. Shortly afterward, John Hammond signed her to Columbia, which should have been a ticket to fame. Unfortunately, Columbia’s longtime head of A&R, Mitch Miller, was notorious for his disdain of rock & roll and famous for his endless series of Sing Along with Mitch albums. Black music barely existed at the label, and Franklin was shunted off to the jazz division where she was backed by the Ray Bryant Trio and other light jazz combos. Her singles adorned upscale black jukeboxes along with the many other jazz 45s coming out at this point, but didn’t sell too much, and she played the supper-club and jazz-club circuits, never really attracting much of a following. Among those listening at her and no doubt grinding his teeth in frustration by how badly she was being served by her record company was Jerry Wexler at Atlantic, but she was locked tight into her contract, and Columbia kept renewing it.
Still, there was no stopping the future, which arrived in a number of ways. On August 12, at Stax, it came in a car driven by a big, lanky kid who was chauffeuring Johnny Jenkins, a guitarist with a wild live act who wanted to cut a record on Stax and had been recommended by Joe Galkin, a regional promo guy for Atlantic out of Atlanta. Jenkins went into the studio with the M.G.’s, and they played around for some time, and didn’t find much to agree on; Jenkins’s live act obviously didn’t translate to the studio, and he didn’t seem to have much good material. As the day wore on, Al Jackson Jr. came up to Steve Cropper and asked him if he could get the chauffeur off his back by letting him record a song; the guy’d been making a pest of himself. When it was obvious the session was a fiasco, Galkin told Jim Stewart, who was sitting behind the control board, that this big kid was also good—he did relief spots in Jenkins’s show—and maybe they should take a chance on him. He sweetened the deal by offering half the publishing in exchange for half the sales royalties, and Jim caved in. Cropper had to go outside to catch Steinberg before he left for his evening gig, and after dragging him back in as the kid was setting up, Booker T. played some chords, and the kid began to sing. “I’d never been with anybody that had that much desire to express emotion,” he said later. Said Estelle, “He had that different sound, but we didn’t know he was going to bust it wide open.” The song, which the kid had written, was “These Arms of Mine.” The kid was named Otis Redding. Four days later, Jim signed him. They put the record out in October, and it crept up to #20 on the R&B charts.
Make no mistake, though, “good music” was still with us, although Frank Sinatra wasn’t charting many single hits, and not even Tony Bennett’s Grammy-winning Record of the Year, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” troubled the top twenty for long. Another hot prospect, Bobby Darin, left Atlantic after four years and signed with Capitol. The record business as a whole was making out on albums, with 1962 seeing the release of several original cast albums—Oliver!, No Strings, I Can Get It For You Wholesale (featuring Columbia’s latest hot signing, Barbra Streisand), Stop the World—I Want to Get Off—sharing space with already established hits like Camelot, West Side Story, Fiorello, and The Sound of Music, which seemed nailed to the charts. And of course there were the Elvis soundtracks (this year’s was Girls! Girls! Girls!). Plus, there were signs of a new generation of “good music” stars: Bobby Rydell’s latest, a tribute to the big bands, wasn’t exactly shifting units, but in California, a couple of Phil Spector’s buddies, Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss, started a new label, A&M, to put out Alpert’s trumpet instrumentals with a group of studio musicians he called the Tijuana Brass, and a very sophisticated new sound from Brazil, a rhythm called bossa nova, appeared in the stores, first on a Stan Getz album with guitarist Charlie Byrd called Jazz Samba, then with various artists trying on “One-Note Samba” from the album. “Is the Bossa Nova the New Twist?” Billboard asked breathlessly in October. No, but the title of the second Joey Dee and the Starliters film had been changed from something with “twist” in the title to Two Tickets to Paris. As the Contours knew, there were a lot of dances out there now.
There were a lot more people buying popular music, too, with two generations now having been shaped by rock & roll. It wasn’t just Original Sound’s Oldies but Goodies records anymore; lots of labels were re-packaging their old records into albums with nostalgic packaging and either selling them as hits packages or under the name of a locally famous disc jockey, whose face appeared on the cover. Chess, for instance, scored Murray “the K” Kaufman, the fabled WINS jock from New York, whose live shows had taken over from Alan Freed’s as the showcase to be on, and whose riffs and catchwords were on teenagers’ lips, as epitomized by his album’s title: Murray the K’s Gassers for Submarine Race Watchers. What was a “gasser”? Murray’s listeners knew, like they knew that parking on the Palisades over the Hudson was the best way to watch those nonexistent submarine races with your girl. If you were doing singles, you hoped for trans-generational appeal—Ray Charles’s “I Can’t Stop Loving You” was at 1.5 million and still going in August—or something the kids would jump on. That’s where Phil Spector was putting his bets; after the success of the Crystals’ “Uptown,” he liberated a demo of a Gene Pitney song Liberty was going to get Vikki Carr to record, told Lester Sill to book Gold Star, his preferred Los Angeles studio, and grab the Blossoms, another girl group that did demos for publishers, and went in and cut “He’s a Rebel,” and put the Crystals’ name on the record. Liberty went ahead with the Vikki Carr version, but the punchy song about a guy who didn’t do what everybody else did—and got the girl’s love, anyway—was totally irresistible to teenagers, who were by nature rebellious, and, thanks to the new spirit in America that President Kennedy had unleashed, getting more so. Not content with putting out a Crystals record without the Crystals on it, Spector then issued an open letter to the record business as a whole: “I am pleased to advise that I have acquired complete and absolute control of Philles Records, Inc. I have purchased all other interests in this company. Lester Sill and Harry Finfer are no longer associated with Philles Records.” So Philles without Les. And like magic, “He’s a Rebel” went to #1.
Spector knew his teenagers, though, and certain songs spoke to them alone. For teenage boys, surfing or silliness was the key. Bobby “Boris” Pickett and the Crypt-Kickers (a bunch of Hollywood studio musicians, including Gary Paxton of “Alley Oop” fame and a pianist, Leon Russell, who would be on Phil Spector’s Gold Star A-team) topped the charts with “Monster Mash” (“It was a graveyard smash!”), a new dance done by horror-film characters, described in Pickett’s sleepy baritone recitation. And for all teens, Ruby and the Romantics assured them that “Our Day Will Come,” whose full-page ad in Billboard showed clasped hands, one white, one black. Kennedy had promised a “New Frontier,” which might very well be on its way, and the late-1962 records had their share of optimism. The Drifters (remember them? They hadn’t had a hit since “Save the Last Dance for Me” in 1960) went to the Goffin-King well and returned with their biggest record in ages, “Up on the Roof,” which showed one thing that uptowners were doing: escaping to a place with a good view and nobody to hassle them, an oasis as near as the stairway, as new a frontier as you were likely to reach in a tenement.
Once the Cuban Missile Crisis was over in October, the nation gave a mighty exhalation of breath and went into a kind of mass silliness. Allan Sherman, a schlubby, middle-aged Jewish comedian, released an album of comic songs and humorous routines called My Son, the Folksinger, on Capitol and stood by as it blasted off. Capitol even got a hit single, “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh,” out of it. Then the November 24 issue of Billboard noted another comedy album, The First Family, by someone named Vaughn Meader, on Cadence, of all labels, former home of the Everly Brothers. A satire on the Kennedy family—Meader’s JFK was almost perfect because he was from Maine, so the accent came naturally—was just what everyone seemed to have been waiting for: it shot to the #1 LP position in two weeks, having sold 2.75 million records in that time, the fastest-selling album ever. In the great record-biz tradition, there were imitators out as fast as they could be recorded—The Other Family (Khrushchevs) on Laurie, At Home with That Other Family (Khrushchevs again, starring George Segal, Gwen Davis, Joan Rivers, and Buck Henry) on Roulette, My Son, the President on Clan, another My Son, the President on Strand, The President Strikes Back on Kapp, and The Poor Family on Mercury all showed up in one week—but nobody could touch Meader. Kennedy may or may not have given copies to friends for Christmas, depending on who you believe.
So at the end of 1962, there were some different songs in the air. Folk music, both authentic (the urban bluegrass band that had backed Joan Baez, the Greenbriar Boys, released their first album, which would prove very influential, and Baez herself went into the top ten with Joan Baez in Concert), commercial (the Chad Mitchell Trio hoped to have a hit with Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” and the Rooftop Singers did have a hit with “Walk Right In,” a Gus Cannon jug band song from the ’30s, and, being on Vanguard and under the scrutiny of the folk crowd, gave him writing credit and presumably paid him), and a curious mixture of both (Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, one of the top bluegrass acts in the business, recorded “The Ballad of Jed Clampett,” the theme song for what turned out to be a highly successful television sitcom, The Beverly Hillbillies) was now part of the landscape, and a label called Dauntless released an album, Sit-In Songs, which alerted folkies to the use of music in the nascent civil-rights movement. Among those songs was a hymn that had been repurposed by Southern folkie Guy Carawan and tweaked by Pete Seeger, “We Shall Overcome.”
Blues was still going, and still selling, although the “Muddy Waters Twist” was a little late getting there. Chess was leaning more toward soul, although this was the year that Bo Diddley unexpectedly returned with “You Can’t Judge a Book (By Looking at the Cover).” It was Duke-Peacock who were releasing the cutting-edge blues: Junior Parker’s amazing Driving Wheel album, or Here’s the Man! by Bobby Bland, which helped push his remake of T-Bone Walker’s “Stormy Monday” and his own “That’s the Way Love Is” and “Call Me.” Country was at last showing signs of life as younger performers got a chance; Patsy Cline had a very good year, with four crossover hits, albeit mild ones, and Loretta Lynn, a friend of hers, newly arrived in Nashville, announced herself with the assertive “Success” and drove it into the country top ten. George Jones recorded a bunch of classic country, including “She Thinks I Still Care” and “Just Someone I Used to Know.” Nashville’s pop singers, one of whom was Cline, had a good year, with Roy Orbison releasing one of his spookiest songs yet, “Leah,” while the Everly Brothers paid a call at Aldon and came away with a Howard Greenfield / Carole King song, “Crying in the Rain,” that went into the top ten.
Soul was still establishing itself. Don Gardner and Dee Dee Ford went to church on “I Need Your Lovin’,” which was a hit on Bobby Robinson’s Fire label, and Ray Charles came out with a second volume of New Sounds in Country and Western Music. And, although Berry Gordy seemed to think soul alienated white teens, the next two Miracles singles, “Way Over There,” and especially its follow-up, “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me,” had a lot of churchy singing in them. Ike and Tina Turner were on their way to success when Ike decided to sue Juggy Murray for what he estimated was $330,000 in unpaid royalties, stopping their career cold. Spector obviously disagreed with Gordy; his new vocal discovery, the woman who sang on the Crystals’ record he’d just hit with, sang lead on his next release, “Zip-A-Dee-Do-Dah,” which came out as by Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans, although what you heard was Darlene Love. He also featured her on a single by the Crystals that came out at the end of the year: “He’s Sure the Boy I Love.”
And there were other, stranger, sounds out there. Bob Crewe, who’d been trying to make it as a teen idol for years, discovered a white vocal group from New Jersey, the Varietones, who’d made a couple of singles for RCA but were getting nowhere. Entranced by the lead singer, Frankie Valli, who had a piercing falsetto that stayed in tune with the other singers, he decided they could be a success if he co-wrote their songs with Bob Gaudio, the group’s main songwriter, and got them a deal with Vee-Jay, of all the labels, in Chicago. They christened themselves the Four Seasons, after a bowling alley, and their first record, “Sherry,” went to #1, as did “Big Girls Don’t Cry.” The Seasons were a polarizing group; you could either take the New York accents and the nasal singing or you couldn’t. And speaking of weird sounds, what was this bizarre instrumental with all the odd sounds in it? “Telstar,” named after the communications satellite, was apparently by the Tornadoes, and it was from … England?