chapter seventeen
The Beach Boys in a woody on an actual beach: (left to right) Carl Wilson, Mike Love, Dennis Wilson, Brian Wilson, and David Marks.
(Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Stringer)
The new year started off with a bang for some people. Ricky—sorry, he was now Rick—Nelson signed a million-dollar contract with Decca, and at the end of January, BMI’s songwriting awards saw a huge sweep by Aldon artists, with Jobete, Motown’s publishing company, coming in second. In fact, Jobete looked like they’d be doing pretty well in ’63: they’d sneaked out Marvin Gaye’s “Hitch Hike” single at the end of 1962, capitalizing on yet another dance craze, and in mid-January three girls who’d been doing backup vocals on a lot of Motown sessions (and working as secretaries and in other jobs around Hitsville) finally got the chance to step in front of the microphones as a kind of test run for a songwriting/producing team. Brian and Eddie Holland and Lamont Dozier wanted to streamline the recording process by having one team in charge from writing the song to supervising the session. They grabbed a song Lamont Dozier had started writing a couple of years back for Loretta Lynn, one of the more dynamic young country singers coming up whose “Success” had been a summertime country hit in 1962, and finished it. Dozier thought “Come and Get These Memories” was a good country title, but when the team got through with it, it was something else indeed. Rosalind Ashford, Annette Beard, and Martha Reeves became Martha and the Vandellas, and when they played the song back, Berry Gordy said, “That’s the Motown Sound! That’s the sound I’ve been looking for.” Dozier agreed. “I’ve always thought that the Motown Sound started with ‘Come and Get These Memories’ because that one song had a mixture of all those musical elements—gospel music, pop, country and western, and jazz.” The Holland-Dozier-Holland partnership was off to a good start, and because the Supremes were going nowhere fast, Motown finally had a hit girl group. And another interesting songwriting team, Burt Bacharach and Hal David in New York, had written a harmonically fascinating song for former gospel singer Dionne Warwick, “Don’t Make Me Over,” another match of performer and songwriter/producers that had a lot of promise.
Phil Spector, too, was doing quite well. January saw another Bob B. Soxx single, “Why Do Lovers Break Each Other’s Hearts,” and another hit by the Crystals, “He’s Sure the Boy I Love,” followed quickly by a Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans album, Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah, and the Crystals’ He’s a Rebel album, with a cute cartoon hoodlum on a motorcycle on the cover. And of course there was surf music, with Dick Dale’s “Misirlou,” leading to Capitol, which saw a future in surf music all of a sudden, signing Dale and buying out his Deltone label, which they would distribute, as well as his new album Surf Beat. Dion, newly signed to Columbia, put out “Ruby Baby,” the Four Seasons continued their hit run with “Walk Like a Man,” Roy Orbison continued to be spooky with “In Dreams,” and the Orlons, in Philadelphia, asked the musical question “Where do all the hippies meet?” The answer, of course, was “South Street,” and “hippies” must have been local slang for young hip kids, because those other people were still a couple of years in the future.
The folkies continued to get stronger, with talk in the television industry of a hootenanny-type weekly show, and the Chad Mitchell Trio releasing a version of “Blowin’ in the Wind” that went nowhere, while its author, Bob Dylan, recorded a single of “Mixed-Up Confusion” b/w “Corinna” that featured a raucous rock & roll band—a single that was quickly withdrawn and would remain unheard for some years to come. Now, what you want from a folk act is Peter, Paul & Mary’s latest single, “Puff the Magic Dragon,” whose “hidden message” (Puff? Little Jackie Paper?) was later discovered by pot smokers, but denied, probably with some justification, by its co-writer Lawrence Lipton (with Peter Yarrow).
On March 5, a plane crash near Nashville in bad weather killed Cowboy Copas, Hawkshaw Hawkins, and the bright hope of Nashville’s pop crossover, Patsy Cline, as they returned from a benefit concert for the family of Cactus Dick Call, an important DJ. And on the way to the services, Jack Anglin, of the duo Johnny and Jack, was involved in a fatal one-car accident. Copas and Hawkins were pure 1950s Nashville, as was Anglin, whose partner, Johnny Wright, was married to Kitty Wells. Country music was losing its fascination with rockabilly and trying to cross over in a more traditionally pop way after seeing how Roy Orbison and Patsy Cline (and Brenda Lee, another Nashville-based singer who wasn’t strictly country, but straddled the line) were doing, but finding that a good traditional sound mixed with up-to-date lyrics could do well. Loretta Lynn, a friend of Cline’s, had blown into town from Oregon, where she’d been living, and signed up with Harold Bradley at Decca, and the songs she was recording were challenging the status quo. “Success,” she claimed, was breaking up her marriage, and “The Other Woman,” her follow-up hit in June, put a different spin on cheating songs. Texas songwriter Willie Nelson had a contract with Liberty, and he, too, was doing interesting work, like “Half a Man,” which, like most of his Liberty material, only had minor sales but made people in Nashville pay attention. After all, he’d written one of Patsy Cline’s big hits, “Crazy.” And country fans were beginning to pay attention to the stuff that was coming out of Bakersfield if they could get it. Buck Owens had been having hits since 1959 in a fairly traditional style that didn’t sound too far from Nashville, but under the influence of the music coming out of the clubs (most notably the Blackboard) in Bakersfield he began crafting a harder honky-tonk style that emphasized the Fender electric guitars he and Don Rich, of his band the Buckaroos, played. Rose Maddox, who’d barnstormed the west for years with her family act, the Maddox Brothers and Rose, also fit naturally into this style, as did Buck’s wife, Bonnie. Fuzzy Owen and Lewis Talley were musicians who made enough money in the bars to invest in some recording equipment, and the Tally label started recording some of the talent, including a young ex-con, Merle Haggard, who had some powerful songs in his repertoire like “Skidrow,” which he recorded for Tally in early 1963. Capitol immediately came calling, but he turned them down, saying Lewis Talley had believed in him too long for him to turn his back on him. But that was okay; Capitol was about to release Buck Owens’s “Act Naturally,” his first #1 country record.
Avoiding crossover was actually a pretty smart move. There was more than enough pop music to fill the airwaves, and Ray Charles was still doing his “modern sounds” with country material, the latest of which was “Take These Chains from My Heart,” from the ever-dependable pen of Hank Williams. Girl groups were everywhere; besides Spector’s Crystals and Scepter’s Shirelles, the Cookies were requesting you “Don’t Say Nothin’ Bad About My Baby,” and the Chiffons were noting that “He’s So Fine.” There were dance crazes aplenty, too. Rufus Thomas did “The Dog,” which did well until Jocko Henderson’s TV show broadcast dancers actually doing the dance, which involved some snooping down low that was plenty scandalous (and ended Jocko’s syndication), Chubby Checker suggested, “Let’s Limbo Again,” which nobody seems to have taken him up on, and Freddie King probably thought he’d covered all the bases with “Bossa Nova Watusi Twist,” which must have carried a medical warning from the American Chiropractic Association.
The March 16 issue of Billboard carried a small story on page 37 that announced that “Vee-Jay Records, through its tie with EMI, has the U.S. rights to the two leading records in last week’s British charts—Frank Ifield’s ‘The Wayward Wind’ (Columbia) and the Beatles’ ‘Please Please Me’ (Parlophone).” That’s not quite what happened, of course; Capitol had turned the records down, and Vee-Jay had done business with Transglobal. But again, Ifield was at #1 in Britain, and the Beatles weren’t far behind at #5. By the time Vee-Jay got its ad in the trades it was #2, and in its haste to get “Please Please Me” out, they misspelled the band’s name as the “Beattles” in the trade ads and on the record. The laugh was on Capitol, though—Ifield’s record sold! Certainly nobody was expecting much from the Beatles—a rock & roll band from a provincial city in England?—and Ifield had already hit for Vee-Jay the year before with “I Remember You,” a nice middle-of-the-road song. But Brian Epstein was hard at work; he’d added Gerry and the Pacemakers and Helen Shapiro to his stable of stars and was fast becoming the impresario of the north. Laurie Records, the company that had given Dion and the Belmonts to the world, released “How Do You Do It” in Gerry and the Pacemakers’ version in early May to no great effect, despite its rampaging up the U.K. charts and doing battle with the Beatles. Hey, it was another world, one that provided novelty records like Lonnie Donegan’s “Does Your Chewing-Gum Lose Its Flavour (On the Bedpost Overnight?)”
In America, black music was changing rapidly (a fact that didn’t get past these English folks, who still crowded the record stores looking for black American music), and alongside the teen girl group songs, a steady stream of more sophisticated material was coming from both veterans (the Drifters’ magnificent “On Broadway,” a Leiber/Stoller/Mann/Weil top tenner produced by Leiber and Stoller, who’d also been producing Jay and the Americans, who weren’t from Philadelphia, but might as well have been with their “good music” sound, to pay the rent) and newcomers (Irma Thomas’s sophisticated non-hit “Two Winters Gone,” Barbara Lewis’s “Hello Stranger,” Doris Troy’s “Just One Look,” and two versions of “If You Need Me,” by Wilson Pickett and Solomon Burke, both of which charted, but with King Solomon rising higher). James Brown had his biggest hit in a while with “Prisoner of Love,” slow enough to almost stop time, with a small string section (a first for Brown), and he was getting disgusted. He knew that the best way to show what he was doing would be to record him live, but Syd Nathan at King was predictably saying he couldn’t afford to. Fine—Brown took $5,700 he’d been saving for a forthcoming tour and paid to record his show at the Apollo Theater in Harlem on October 24, 1962. He spent some time working on the tape and then helped King’s chief recording engineer, Chuck Seitz, boil it down for an album. Seitz injected some screaming and crowd noise from a white sock hop, and they both made sure that moments that were mostly visual were edited so that it kept going and there was no dead space. Nathan still didn’t like it, but Brown had some acetates made up and made some strategic gifts to DJs. Jerry Blavat, the influential Philadelphia jock, visited James backstage at a show in early 1963 and he handed him one, and Blavat took it home, played it, and then played it on the air the next day. A second copy went to Allyn Lee in Montgomery, Alabama, who did the same thing, and his phones went wild. Crucial to the success of the album was the fact that, except for cutting the show into two pieces so it fit on two sides of the LP, there were no individual tracks—you had to play it all. Nathan began to get phone calls; disc jockeys wondered why they hadn’t been sent a copy—it wasn’t out? Release it! And so, in May, he did. “Prisoner of Love” whetted the appetite; Live at the Apollo was a feast. It was also a way for young white kids to experience James Brown without going to a scary show in an unfamiliar part of town (although they began doing so right about this time), and it went on to the album charts and stayed there for sixty-six weeks. James Brown had arrived. It had only taken him seven years.
Perhaps sensing this energy, a bunch of investors decided that this sort of gospel frenzy was the next big thing, and in mid-May opened a nightclub, Sweet Chariot, in Times Square. Robe-clad waitresses—excuse me, “angels”—served drinks, and a search was on for rather secular gospel groups. Clara Ward was fairly broad-minded about these things and did a short stay there, and the house group made an album, but the idea was doomed from the start. Why not book gospel-oriented singers, ones who were doing this so-called soul music? Probably they wanted to keep too many black folks from turning it into an all-black scene. At any rate, the club failed in a couple of months, and the angels flew on to other venues.
In May, the RIAA announced the Grammys, a good snapshot of where the music industry was at the time: Record of the Year went to Tony Bennett for “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” Best Vocal Group and Best Folk Record was Peter, Paul & Mary for “If I Had a Hammer,” Best Rock and Roll Record was Bent Fabric’s “Alley Cat,” believe it or not, Best Rhythm and Blues Record went to Ray Charles for “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” a country song, and the Album of the Year was of course The First Family, a second volume of which was just hitting the stores. In other words, the music industry was just a bit, but not totally, out of touch, as it was to remain. At least it wasn’t as out of touch as whoever presented that year’s British National Record Awards, presented a week earlier, whose trophy for Best Light Vocal Record went to the George Mitchell Minstrels, a blackface duo. That’s right: blackface in 1963. But Britain had only lately acquired a black population as it welcomed West Indians from its colonies in the late ’40s to come work in low-level positions, mostly in transportation as conductors and the like on buses, the Underground, and British Rail. Thus, the Rolling (or was it Rollin’?) Stones’ appropriation of American black music wasn’t hailed as a racial thing at all, at least in Britain. The band was struggling and inching its way upward. In January, Charlie Watts reluctantly joined, and Bill Perks adopted a new surname for the stage. From now on he would be Bill Wyman. Brian Jones, in his role as bandleader, wrote letters to the press about rhythm and blues, and Ian Stuart, the only guy in the band with a phone, albeit at his workplace, took the bookings, such as they were. They had their regular gig in Ealing and went for a second one on Tuesdays, but early in the year they lost their regular stints at the Flamingo and the Marquee. Taking any one-offs they could get, they were performing at the Red Lion in Sutton in February when an affable bearded gent Brian had met and invited to see them introduced himself as Giorgio Gomelsky, and he told the boys he was running an R&B club on Sunday nights at the Station Hotel in Richmond, where Dave Hunt’s band was the regular. (One bit of interest about Hunt was that his guitarist was a youngster named Ray Davies.) Gomelsky was knocked out by the Stones and told them, “The first time Dave goofs, you’re in.” And thus it happened; Brian and the guys went down one Sunday, and Hunt was late showing up. Gomelsky admitted this wasn’t the first time, and Brian was furious, offering the Stones for free, something he was wont to do in fits of missionary passion and which promoters often took him up on. Gomelsky, though, was a man of the world, and he called Stu at work that week and offered the Stones the coming Sunday, guaranteeing them £1 apiece and, perhaps, a residency. Then Ken Colyer, who was running R&B afternoons at his club in Soho, offered them a steady Sunday gig, so Sundays saw the Stones rushing from Soho to Richmond. Wednesdays at the Red Lion, too, were doing well, and suddenly girls were asking for their autographs. In April, Gomelsky gave his Sunday night club a name: the Crawdaddy. There, a second generation of R&B musicians would see them: members of the Roosters, for instance, whose members included Eric Clapton and Tom McGuinness, who’d soon be joining the Manfred Mann group. “They drew a cross-section,” he remembered later. “Mods, guys in smart Italian suits, bohemians, art students, mixed couples, everyone. The venue was a dingy, hot, sweaty function room—all tobacco-stained everywhere.”
On April 14, Gomelsky went to Twickenham to watch the Beatles film the Thank Your Lucky Stars television show and approached them about letting him put them into a film. He also invited them down to the Crawdaddy club, and that night Bill Wyman was plunking along during their first set when he saw something that almost caused him to fumble his rock-hard pulse: the four Beatles, in identical leather jackets, staring up at him. They stayed for the entire evening, and, in fact, after the show, went back to the flat on Edith Grove and stayed up almost to sunrise talking music and listening to the Stones’ record collection. They left after issuing an invitation to their Thursday night show at the Royal Albert Hall. Of course, there was no such thing as a guest list, so the Stones came in the back door, carrying the Beatles’ instruments. Said Jagger of this show, “I’d never seen hysteria on that level before. We were so turned on by those riots.” They wanted a riot of their own.
As spring turned into summer, in America, thoughts turned to surfing. Now that Capitol had Dick Dale as well as the Beach Boys, they began a promotion; apologizing for the sound, they mounted a flexible single of Dale’s latest, “Misirlou,” in ads in the trade magazines, which was unprecedented, and it was announced that Beach Party, a film starring Frankie Avalon and former Mouseketeer Annette, with Bob Cummings and Dick Dale, had started shooting. Jan and Dean, now on Liberty, released an album called Jan and Dean Take Linda Surfin’, in hopes that their single “Linda” would do better than it did, and it had the Beach Boys (whose “Surfin’ U.S.A.” had just stormed the charts, borrowing Chuck Berry’s melody for “Sweet Little Sixteen,” and paying for it) providing instrumental help on the backing tracks. Their next single, “Surf City,” co-written with Brian Wilson, followed along shortly. The Chantays based an album on their “Pipeline” single, and June saw the release of the Surfaris’ “Wipe Out,” which immediately found its way into the repertoires of thousands of wannabe surf bands.
And Murry Wilson explained surf music to Billboard in a special section they printed devoted to the new genre: “The basis of surf music is a rock & roll bass beat figuration, coupled with a raunch-style, weird-sounding lead guitar, an electric guitar plus wailing saxes. Surfing music has to sound untrained with a certain rough flavor to appeal to the teenagers. As in the cases of true country and western, when the music gets too good, and too polished, it isn’t considered the real thing.” Thanks, Dad! Why, even Bo Diddley and Freddie King released surfing albums, although in both cases it was a question of their record companies’ jumping on the bandwagon and throwing together old instrumental recordings rather than any actual change in their music.
For those who took their guitars acoustic, folk music was picking up steam, too. In early March, ABC-TV announced that it would air a weekly Hootenanny program, emceed by Jack Linkletter. It ran into trouble immediately when it was revealed that the most beloved of all the current folksingers, Pete Seeger, had been asked—and refused—to sign a loyalty oath before he could perform on it. Banjoist Billy Faier led a fan boycott, which Seeger himself downplayed, even babysitting his stepbrother Mike’s kids so that his group, the New Lost City Ramblers, could do a taping. In April, Bob Dylan (who hadn’t even been asked to appear on Hootenanny) played the Town Hall in New York, and Columbia announced his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, would appear in May, but his appearance on Ed Sullivan’s phenomenally popular Sunday night television show was canceled after he wasn’t allowed to perform “Talkin’ John Birch Society Blues,” a track satirizing a radical right-wing political organization that was subsequently removed from future pressings of Freewheelin’. George Wein announced the year’s Newport Folk Festival lineup, and the first Monterey Folk Festival was announced, with the New Lost City Ramblers, the Greenbriar Boys, Bob Dylan, Peter, Paul & Mary, Roscoe Holcomb, Mance Lipscomb, and Clarence Ashley. And it was announced that a proposed bossa nova film was being shelved, the production money going to a hootenanny film, staring the Gateway Singers, the Brothers Four, Judy Henske, Cathy Taylor, Sheb Wooley, Johnny Cash, Buck Owens, and George Hamilton, a lineup not exactly calculated to set Sing Out! talking, but not too different from Hootenanny’s idea of folk music, either.
Traditional pop music was doing okay, too. In March, Screen Gems Music, a huge music publisher, bought Aldon Music outright for $2.5 million, wisely leaving everything intact, including Dimension Records and that amazing lineup of songwriters. A new duo, the Righteous Brothers, appeared with a catchy record, “Little Latin Lupe Lu,” which their tiny record label wasn’t able to push as hard as it deserved, but Phil Spector was listening. He had his hands full at the moment, though, with Bob B. Soxx and the Crystals, whose “Da Doo Ron Ron” was as catchy as it was silly. Seventeen-year-old Lesley Gore, from New Jersey, zeroed in on teenage girls’ secrets—as she would make a career of doing—with “It’s My Party (And I’ll Cry If I Want To).” Nor was Rick Nelson the only old-timer doing well; Imperial Records sold Fats Domino’s contract to ABC-Paramount, which promised him $50,000 a year and sent him straight to Nashville to cut his next record. A newly re-secularized Little Richard, who hadn’t done too well with gospel music on Mercury, switched over to Atlantic, where he promptly disappeared after one single. Jerry Lee Lewis announced he was thinking of switching record labels, and did, to Mercury, which put him on their Smash subsidiary. On the other hand, Chuck Berry (whose never-ending court case had made him radioactive) released an excellent record that was ignored, “Talkin’ About You,” and for the first time, an Elvis Presley single, “One Broken Heart for Sale,” never went near the top ten. He was probably too busy making his next movie to notice.
Motown was having the time of its life. The year 1963 established the label commercially and in which many of its stable of stars recorded their first iconic hits. With the debut of Martha and the Vandellas kicking the year off, the Miracles were on the charts with “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me,” and Marvin Gaye showed up in the spring with “Pride and Joy.” The Motortown Revue was knocking them dead whenever it toured, so much so that when it hit the Regal Theater in Chicago, so many people wanted tickets that the theater’s management put the show on four times a day instead of three. Stevie Wonder had recorded an instrumental called “Fingertips” on his album The Jazz Soul of Little Stevie, and, shorn of the studio musicians, he performed it as the finale of his segment of the Revue, causing pandemonium in the audience; he was a tough act to follow. Hearing that the number was going over so well, Berry Gordy dispatched a mobile recording unit to a Revue show in March; maybe this was the hit Gordy knew Stevie had in him. The resultant recording was so long it had to be split in two parts, one on each side of the record, and it was the second part that drew the attention: Stevie exhorting the audience, playing with them, tossing off a fragment of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” on his harmonica, and slowly leaving the stage, although teasing that he might be back. The show was already running overtime, the Marvelettes were next, Stevie’s bass player had already unplugged, and the Marvelettes’ bassist, Joe Swift, was getting ready when sure enough, on walked Stevie, playing up a storm. The band started riffing, Swift can be heard asking, “What key? What key?” (and you can barely hear the piano player say, “In C,” and play a couple of arpeggios to orient him), and the whole thing rises to yet another climax. Suitably promoted, the single of “Fingertips, Part 2” went to the top of the pop and R&B charts, the first Motown release to do that since the Marvelettes eighteen months previously. No need to stop now; the Supremes tried a Smokey Robinson tune, “A Breath Taking Guy,” but for some reason it stalled at #75 pop and disappeared. Would they ever have a hit? In mid-June, however, Martha and the Vandellas, with help from Holland-Dozier-Holland, blew the door open, making the coming summer even hotter with “Heat Wave,” a top-ten smash.
Yes, it was summer, all right. The first slow-dance hit, the Tymes’ “So in Love,” came out in June, and Capitol Records added cars to surf with an album called Shut Down, with contributions from the Beach Boys, including their new hit single “Little Deuce Coupe,” although it wound up getting overtaken by its other side, another slow-dance sensation, “Surfer Girl.” Jack Nitzsche, a mysterious guy who’d been doing some arranging for Phil Spector, released a lovely instrumental led by a six-string bass, “The Lonely Surfer,” but who knows what Al Casey was thinking with “Surfin’ Hootenanny.” This was the full flowering of surf music, with such mostly local hits as “Surf Bunny” by Gene Gray and the Stingrays, the Astronauts’ “Baja,” “Soul Surfer” by Johnny Fortune, and “Shoot the Curl” by the Honeys, a female vocal trio, Ginger Blake and the Rovell sisters, Diane and Marilyn, who were actual surf bunnies signed to Capitol and backed by an all-star band, including Al Jardine, Billy Strange, Carl Wilson, Leon Russell, and David Gates, and produced by Beach Boys producer Nik Venet and Brian Wilson, who soon married Marilyn.
There were some amazing records coming out, with a new sound, brighter, more aggressive, all across the board. In pop, you had the Crystals’ “Then He Kissed Me,” Trini Lopez rocking up Pete Seeger’s “If I Had a Hammer” and reviving “La Bamba,” Dion singing about “Donna the Prima Donna,” and R&B not only had the James Brown Live at the Apollo album selling almost like a single throughout the summer, but brother-sister team Charlie and Inez Foxx’s odd but catchy “Mockingbird,” Chris Kenner’s “Land of 1000 Dances” coming out of New Orleans, Garnet Mimms and the Enchanters’ “Cry Baby,” Major Lance celebrating “The Monkey Time,” Arthur Alexander noticing “Pretty Girls Everywhere,” and the Jaynettes’ haunting, mysterious “Sally Go Round the Roses.” Even country music seemed to be waking up and getting tough again; at the end of July, the top three country records were Buck Owens’s “Act Naturally”; Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire,” written for him by his new sweetheart, June Carter, of the by-now-second-generation Carter Family; and Dave Dudley’s “Six Days on the Road,” a song depicting the life of a truck driver, thereby kicking off a new genre of country songs. Who knew truck drivers bought so many records? And mixed in with all of this was a fresh-faced lad from Cincinnati, Lonnie Mack, with two instrumentals played on his odd Gibson Flying V guitar, Chuck Berry’s “Memphis” and his own “Wham!” getting airplay. Folk music didn’t really show up on the pop charts (although Joan Baez’s latest tour had grossed $100,000), but Peter, Paul & Mary did, grabbing the lead track off Bob Dylan’s Freewheelin’ album and having the hit Chad Mitchell didn’t get with “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and following it up with another from the same album, “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” And folksinger Oscar Brand decided to go on the Hootenanny TV show “with misgivings,” stating that “I have never seen any evidence that Pete Seeger has tried to overthrow the government with his banjo.” In Cincinnati, WCPO announced it was going “100% hootenanny” in its programming.
All of this hot hootenanny action may seem silly in retrospect, but it’s emblematic of a change that had overtaken America’s teenage record buyers—and teenage America at large. Coarsely stated, there was a divide between the people singing “Blowin’ in the Wind” and the ones singing “My Boyfriend’s Back.” “Blowin’ in the Wind” is a notoriously noncommittal song; it asks a bunch of questions about important issues and unjust conditions, and then declares that the answer is out there somewhere, in the wind. But it asks those questions, no matter how vaguely they’re stated. This was something new. Furthermore, the folk thing was about participation, be it a Carnegie Hall audience singing along with Pete Seeger or a bunch of kids with guitars in a basement trading favorite songs. Didn’t like Peter, Paul & Mary’s arrangement of “Blowin’ in the Wind”? Come up with your own. Or, for that matter, write your own song. And people were buying guitars (or banjos—Pete Seeger’s instruction book had never been selling better) and gathering to play them. This had been going on in New York’s Washington Square Park (where a ban on folksingers led to a riot) for long enough that a news item claimed that a “folk statue” was being planned there. (Nothing came of it.) But teenagers seeking social engagement and doing it in public was a new thing, utterly so. It was, depending on which side of the fence you were on, either scary or a cause for optimism.
And Americans were asking some of the same veiled questions Bob Dylan was. On August 28, a quarter million people gathered by the Lincoln Memorial to hear a young Baptist preacher who’d been making headlines, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., deliver a speech he’d delivered before, but never to so many people. Enshrined in history as the “I Have a Dream” speech, it, like the rest of the program, had been recorded, and the record business leaped into action, resulting in King having to sue the Mr. Maestro, 20th Century-Fox, and Motown labels over releasing albums of the speech—and retracting the suit against Motown, with which, it turned out, he actually had a deal to record his stuff. Motown’s barely active Divinity gospel label also prepared a single of “We Shall Overcome” (credited to George Fowler and Clarence Paul) by Liz Lands and the Voices of Salvation, but, distracted by the lawsuit, shelved it for five years until after Dr. King’s assassination.
Nor is this to disparage the other kids, happily surfing and working on their cars and worrying about their girlfriends and boyfriends and buying records they had no interest in making themselves. After all, they were still minors, many people considered Dr. King and his followers to be inspired by communism, including many of their parents, and as has always been the case, there was always a large part of the teenage cohort that was terrified of being considered weirdos. But surfing (even if you didn’t do it) and cars (even if you didn’t have one) and thinking about boys and girls (again, even if you didn’t have one—maybe especially if you didn’t) were teenage preoccupations that were gaining their own vocabulary (especially surfing and cars: what on earth was a “deuce coupe” or a “gremmie” or a “woody”?) that, as it always had, encouraged solidarity of the group. When, next January, Bob Dylan released “The Times They Are A-Changin’’’ as the title track of his latest album and sang, “Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command,” he wasn’t just talking about the folkies; a larger, more diverse and inclusive teenage nation was forming.
In May, a music industry group announced that there were 230 singles and 100 albums released each week. Naturally, not all of them, especially the albums, were aimed at teenagers, and in fact, not all teenagers were making rock & roll. This was the year that Barbra Streisand, a teenage fixture on Broadway, made her first album, which caused a sensation (although she was twenty at the time of its release, no longer a teenager). Nor were all the albums in predictable categories; Phillips Records released a version of the Catholic Mass, brilliantly recorded in Brussels, performed by Congolese singers and percussionists, Missa Luba. Hi-fi enthusiasts scooped it up; it was a much better demonstration of what your equipment could do than those silly Provocative Percussion discs. Encouraged, the company then released the album by the Dominican nun that had been selling like crazy in Europe, calling it (and her) The Singing Nun. But a glance at any week’s listings of single releases in Billboard will just confirm that overall, the record business was as clueless as ever, throwing records at the wall and hoping one of them would stick, and this applied not only to the independent labels but to the majors as well.
This was very different from what was happening in England, although there were some deep commonalities. England had come out of the war with strict food rationing still in effect, but this was ended at last in 1955. Teenagers like John Lennon and Paul McCartney, living in middle-class households, witnessed this as a sudden improvement in their lives, and the psychological effect was that a generation suddenly saw a future without the scarcity they’d been raised in, which resulted in a similar teenage nation forming there. These were the kids at the Cavern’s lunchtime sessions and the Sunday R&B club nights at the Crawdaddy club. They were hoping that the new economic recovery would allow them to participate more openly in British society, while chafing under the restrictions British tradition and the older generation imposed on them. As we see in the stories of the youths who joined bands, getting an education or signing on to an apprenticeship or training program in a trade was essential. Since nobody in the upper classes went into bands (Mick Jagger, son of a physical education instructor and a student at the London School of Economics, was as close as they came), the stories of those who did find them learning trades (George Harrison and, intermittently, Paul McCartney) or using an art school degree to find work in an ad agency (Charlie Watts, Bill Wyman). There was no going it alone unless you were very eccentric. Brian Jones stands out in this regard in his monomaniacal devotion to blues and R&B, a middle-class kid with no intention of becoming an apprentice or pursuing academic matters. This is why the events in England, although they were ignored in America at first, were just as important as what was going on in the States, as well as why they were ignored: the adults, youthful though they were, some of them, had enough on their hands trying to figure out how to sell these arcane hootenanny and surf cultures outside their home turf. Clearly, if Joan Baez could gross a hundred grand on tour, the little girls in Iowa City and Phoenix were getting it, but how on earth to sell Bob Dylan, her closest analog? How do you sell surfing to kids in landlocked Dayton?
So the Brits went their merry way. George Martin had wanted an album from the Beatles, and in February he’d gotten one, recorded in one session of nine hours and forty-five minutes. They’d only come up with nine tracks, and he’d wanted ten, so at the last minute, John Lennon, his voice shredded from the day’s work, did a one-take recording of “Twist and Shout.” The album, Please Please Me, was rush-released, topping the U.K. album charts on April 11, just as their new single, “From Me to You” (title inspired by NME’s letters column, “From You to Us”), hit the top of the singles chart, the first of an unprecedented eleven consecutive #1s from eleven different releases. The group toured constantly and signed a deal with the BBC for a series of regular radio shows called Pop Go the Beatles, and in August they appeared for the last time at the Cavern; they’d just gotten too big. (Not for Vee-Jay Records, who released “From Me to You” Stateside to the predictable indifference, although at the time the company was going through some huge changes, as longtime president Ewart Abner stepped down and the company was wrestling with the demands the unanticipated popularity of the Four Seasons made on them.)
For the Rolling Stones, the world changed when a brash nineteen-year-old hustler named Andrew Loog Oldham, who’d been working in the fashion industry for Mary Quant and in pop PR with an older man, Eric Easton, dropped in with Easton in tow at the Crawdaddy club on April 28 to see what all the noise was about. “I was probably forty-eight hours ahead of the rest of the business” getting to the Rolling Stones, he later remarked. “The combination of music and sex was something I had never encountered in any other group.” He moved fast; on May 1, he and Easton signed the band to a management deal with the Impact Sound company, which they’d just formed for the purpose. Among the demands Oldham and Easton made at first was the restoration of the g to Rolling Stones and the demotion of Ian Stewart, who looked too ordinary for the group, and anyway, their reasoning went, five boys was the maximum that any teenage girl could be expected to keep up with. (Stewart took it well, continuing to play keyboards with the group onstage until his death in 1985.) Having signed them, Oldham covered the next vital step and took them to buy identical clothing—skinny black jeans and black turtleneck sweaters—and get them booked for a charity show sponsored by the News of the World newspaper. Now to get them a record deal. Fortunately for him, Dick Rowe, of Decca, was up in Liverpool helping to judge a talent contest with George Harrison. “You know,” Rowe said to George, “I really got my backside kicked for turning you lot down.”
“Well,” said George, “why don’t you sign the Rolling Stones?”
Rowe said he’d never heard of them, and George told him to go see them in Richmond. He did, on May 5, and took his wife. It was so dingy in the room that he could hardly see anything, but his wife told him the lead singer looked pretty good. Two days later, Oldham, Easton, and Rowe met to begin talks on a record contract (Impact would lease tapes to Decca), and Andrew and the band had already decided on a debut record, an obscure recent Chuck Berry title, “Come On.” They recorded it on May 10, and Decca released it on June 7. The band hated it, and in fact it wasn’t an auspicious debut. It went to #20 on the NME charts and then vanished. Then another problem arose: the brewery to which the Station Hotel was tied (pubs and hotels signed contracts with breweries, which then supplied beers they made and distributed) became concerned about what they saw as the goings-on at the venue, and there had been numerous complaints to the fire marshal about overcrowding, so Gomelski’s Crawdaddy club there was shut down. Brian Jones immediately contacted a man named Ronan O’Rahilly, a promoter with his own club in Soho who was also managing Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies, and the Stones’ residency moved to Thursday nights there. The more central location, plus the buzz building around the band, brought in larger audiences; around five hundred showed up on the first night.
The Stones needed a follow-up record to their non-hit, and they needed it fast; their popularity as a live act was growing, and their managers were working on getting them onto a major tour. On August 11, they played a jazz festival in Richmond, and the promoter reported a fifty-fifty split between the thousands of jazz fans and the thousands of Stones fans who had just shown up for their favorite band and left afterward. Their next single would come from a seemingly unlikely source. Lennon and McCartney had uncorked an unstoppable flow of songwriting, and Brian Epstein’s clients were getting first pick of the numbers the group wasn’t recording: Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas got “Do You Want to Know a Secret?,” “Bad to Me,” and “I’ll Keep You Satisfied,” and Cilla Black got “Love of the Loved” and only Gerry and the Pacemakers had “How Do You Do It”’s Mitch Murray producing songs for them. (Late in the year, they recorded a Broadway show tune, “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” which was turned into an anthem for Liverpool’s football team, thereby eventually making the Pacemakers the second-richest Liverpool band.)
On September 10 during a lull in a seventy-eight-shows-in-seventy-six-days tour, Oldham walked into a Stones rehearsal in London with John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and a song. “I said to Mick, ‘Well, Ringo’s got this track on our album, but it won’t be a single and it might suit you guys,’” Lennon said later. “I knew Mick was into maraccas from when I saw them down at the Crawdaddy.” And so “I Wanna Be Your Man” became the next Stones single. American showbiz was waking up to some of this excitement. Ed Sullivan went to England in July and signed Cliff Richard and the Shadows, Frank Ifield, the Dallas Boys, Mayo Henderson, and Kenny Ball for appearances on his show come fall. Somehow he missed the foofaraw over the Beatles’ “Twist and Shout” EP selling 150,000 copies despite two other versions on the market. The group did even better than that in late September, when their next single, “She Loves You,” was released and sold five hundred thousand copies in its first eight days out. In America, Capitol passed again, but the chaos at Vee-Jay, which had just replaced its two top executives, coupled with the complete indifference to their first two singles the label had picked up, caused them to pass, too, and it was released on a shady Philadelphia label, Swan, again without any significant action.
And why would America need the Beatles, after all? There were plenty of good records coming out domestically in the fall of 1963. Rufus Thomas came up with “Walkin’ the Dog,” which would keep Stax solvent for a while longer, Paul Revere and the Raiders, formerly an instrumental act, released “Louie Louie,” an old Richard Berry track, only to be challenged by another band from the Northwest, the Kingsmen, a week later, with their version on Scepter. The folk thing kept on rolling. Billboard ran an article on October 19 headlined FOLK TREND SHOWS NO SIGN OF LET-UP, and its album chart for November 2 showed Peter, Paul & Mary at #1, #2, and #6. Elektra had signed Koerner, Ray, and Glover, an acoustic blues act who’d come out of the same Minneapolis scene as Bob Dylan, as well as New York’s Even Dozen Jug Band, featuring guitar virtuoso Danny Kalb and a fetching female vocalist, Maria d’Amato, while a ham-handed ricky-tick jazz band called the Village Stompers tried to ride the fad with their single “Washington Square.”
Pop music continued its mixture of silliness and seriousness as Don Robey announced he’d eat his hat, as promised, since Billy Bland’s “Sometimes You Gotta Cry a Little” hadn’t made top twenty on all the charts, and was photographed doing so while promising to do the same thing for his shoes if Bland’s next record, “The Feeling Is Love,” and Al “TNT” Briggs’s “Drip Drip” didn’t succeed similarly. The pop gospel fad may have fizzled, but the church was still in the air, as Marvin Gaye released a title based on a common gospel trope, “Can I Get a Witness?” and the Impressions, who hadn’t had a hit in two years, came up with a #1 record in “It’s All Right.” Phil Spector took a slightly different approach to religion when he released an album that eventually became a classic: A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector, which featured the Ronettes, the Crystals, Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans, and Darlene Love singing a mixture of pop Christmas classics (“Frosty the Snowman,” “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”) and originals (Darlene Love singing a Phil Spector / Ellie Greenwich / Jeff Barry song, “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home).”) Weirdly, though, the fastest-moving single in the country was “Dominique” by the Singing Nun, which had reached #9 on the pop charts in only three weeks; her album was #8.
Then something awful happened. On November 22, President Kennedy, riding in a motorcade in Dallas, was shot dead. The last presidential assassination had been William McKinley in 1901, long enough for the public to have forgotten such things, and before the birth of modern communications, particularly television, which broadcast film from Kennedy’s visit as well as the murder, live on air, of the alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, as he was being transferred to another jail from his holding cell, by Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner with Mob ties whose connections also supported some of the Dallas teen-club scene. The national trauma was on a level the United States hadn’t felt since Pearl Harbor had been attacked. In pop music, the people hardest hit were the folkies, many of them deeply politically engaged thanks to the young president’s support for civil rights and nuclear disarmament, the two causes young people were particularly attracted to, but there were other reactions. Brian Wilson withdrew for a couple of days and emerged with his first contemplative masterpiece, “The Warmth of the Sun,” and in San Antonio, where Kennedy had stopped the day before Dallas to generally adoring (and largely Hispanic) crowds, the radio stations played “Why, Why, Why,” a song by local hero Doug Sahm, an Anglo kid who played with West Side soul bands, over and over. The Singing Nun’s sales skyrocketed. Archie Bleyer got ready to take back lots and lots and lots of First Family albums.
The show, as they say, had to go on, and go on it did. It probably wouldn’t be much of a Christmas season for the record business, but there were those Singing Nun records, and hey, look on the bright side: there’d be JFK memorial product to flog, and sure enough, two weeks later there were three albums out there, pasted together from Kennedy’s speeches and news broadcasts. One Millicent Martin wrote and performed a song, “In the Summer of His Years,” on the BBC, and versions (including one by Mahalia Jackson) appeared Stateside almost immediately, only to face a near-universal ban by radio, a ban not faced by a gospel release, “That Awful Day in Dallas,” by Thurman Ruth and the Harmoneers, which didn’t sell, anyway. Motown released a Christmas album by the Miracles—good thing Christmas albums were perennials—and the Beach Boys reworked “Little Deuce Coupe” into “Little St. Nick.”
Almost unnoticed in all of this were two carloads of men leaving New Orleans and driving to Los Angeles. In December 1963, the AFO executives, confronted by a New Orleans union that would not desegregate and join the “colored” union into the main one, gave up in disgust. There were opportunities out there for musicians, and so Harold Battiste, with his composing and arranging skills, Alvin “Red” Tyler, with his prowess on the saxophone, and especially Earl Palmer, the man who’d invented rock & roll drumming behind Little Richard back at what now seemed like the dawn of time, headed west. In a few short weeks, they’d be reconvened in Gold Star Studios in Hollywood, most of them impatient for Battiste to finish the song their client—Art Rupe’s young talent scout, Sonny Bono—wanted to record with his teenage girlfriend, Sherilynn Sarkosian, something about the beat going on. As it would.
England wasn’t as traumatized by Kennedy’s death, but their music business was becoming traumatized by the Beatles. Along with the singles, there was their first album, Please Please Me, which had sold 250,000 copies for a gold record, and a similar number of advance orders were on hand for the next one, already announced, With the Beatles. Brian Epstein had approached Ed Sullivan and gotten contracts for TV appearances for the Beatles and Gerry and the Pacemakers for early 1964. The December 14 issue of Billboard reported that Capitol had suddenly had the blinders removed from its eyes and was going to start negotiating exclusive rights to the band, shutting down Vee-Jay and Swan’s contracts with Transglobal-licensed product. The group’s latest single would be released in mid-January 1964, but they probably moved things up once 950,000 advance orders flooded in to their distributors. Sure enough, the year’s last issue of Billboard had a full-page ad showing four haircuts and the words “The Beatles are coming!” And that single was officially released on December 26, 1963. Reviewing it in 1964’s first issue, Billboard said of “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” “This is the hot British group that has hit gold overseas. Side is driving rocker with surf on the Thames sound and strong vocal work from the group. Flip is ‘I Saw Her Standing There.’”
Whenever an event like the Kennedy assassination occurs, talk of a conspiracy surfaces, and it certainly did this time. But when analyzing a conspiracy, the best question to ask is “Cui bono?”—who benefits? The four lads from Liverpool were thousands of miles away, and Britain couldn’t have foreseen the immense financial benefits of their, and others’, success, so they’re off the hook. And if 1963 needed a theme song, it would have been Skeeter Davis’s latest, “The End of the World,” a country hit that was a smash crossover at the beginning of the year, even showing up on the R&B charts. In it, she marvels that stars still shine, birds still sing, and life goes on, even though her boyfriend has dumped her. Marveling at it all, she cries, “Don’t they know it’s the end of the world?” It never really is, except for teenagers in love, of course, but the American record business was facing something it had never seen before: an invasion from overseas. The Beatles’ success would kill Vee-Jay Records and relegate the Philadelphia boy crooners to even further irrelevance. It would also spur electric guitar sales even faster than the Ventures’ ascendance and surf music ever did, and, perversely, set up a false dichotomy between the ultra-successful Beatles and the not-so-successful Rolling Stones, which, in turn, would focus some folkies’ attention to the rich, as-yet-unexplored heritage of Chicago and Southern electric blues. It would also eventually change youth culture in unimaginable ways all over the world, but for now, let’s put on Phil Spector’s Christmas album and listen to the present receding into the past. Something amazing was on its way, and the ever-increasing number of teenagers would bring it on.