PopArchives: The Blog

The Morning Crew

2012-01-11T08:25:00.033+10:00

Radio for breakfast in Australia:

New site about Toowoomba's Chapter III and Peter Wright

2011-02-18T21:00:00.013+10:00

Toowoomba researcher and broadcaster Jeff Black has written the definitive account of Chapter III and Peter Wright, notable 60s artists who came from Toowoomba.

Their stories are long and fascinating, partly because they take us beyond Toowoomba, a regional city in Queensland, Australia. (I have lived there on and off since 1975.)

Peter Wright's 1967 single House of Bamboo, his own composition recorded for Festival in Sydney, is a cult classic, a 60s artefact that has persisted beyond the short burst of recognition upon its original release. Peter's career intersects with that of Chapter III, not least because his brother Kerry was a key member.

Chapter III's history takes an unexpected turn when we read that they worked in New Zealand, including a stint as regulars on TV's Clickety Click 66. At this stage they were still known as The Defenders, but they recorded in New Zealand as Hubb Kapp and The Wheels. (See Bruce Sergeants' page on the Wheels from a New Zealand perspective.)

Australians and New Zealanders are accustomed to stories about New Zealand artists decamping to Australia, in many cases to become big stars: think Dinah Lee, Max Merritt, The La De Das, Split Enz... But here was an Aussie act that reversed that trend. Intriguing, huh?

Read the full stories at Jeff's site.

5KA Adelaide: 1968 airchecks

2010-09-20T17:50:00.063+10:00

Below are five audio clips from 5KA in 1968. They give you a good idea of how Australian commercial Top 40 radio sounded at the time.

5KA was an AM station in Adelaide (population then around 800,000), the capital city of South Australia. It eventually went to FM as KAFM, now Triple M Adelaide.

The mp3s were available for a while at the now defunct 5KA Reunion site (2001), along with dozens of other 5KA sound files from the 1950s to the 1990s.¹

An archived version of 5KA Reunion can be seen at Pandora, the Australian web archive. If you go here you will be redirected to the exact page. Fortunately, the audio files are still accessible: it's a treasure trove!

It's a shame that we have no thriving aircheck² sites in Australia. For the US there are many such sites, notably ReelRadio's Top 40 Depository where you can listen to hundreds of historic audio clips from all over the country (paid sub required). For the UK, for example, the Pirate Radio Hall of Fame has numerous airchecks from the pirate stations (including the voices of a surprising number of Australian deejays).

My tattered copy of the Australian Radio Almanac (c.1968), lists only Stuart Jay under 5KA. (The 5DN entry has details of eight announcers: maybe they paid up.) Mike Fewster, heard below on Breakfast at 5KA, is listed under 5KA's country affiliate 5RM in Renmark.

The 5KA Reunion site also had a page packed with jingles, including some from the 1960s created in the US by the PAMS organisation. Listeners to other stations around the world might recognise them, with the callsign of their local station substituted. I have posted one example from 5KA.

5KA 1968 - Mike Fewster [Breakfast].mp3
5KA 1968 - Jim Slade [Drive].mp3
5KA 1968 - Ian Sells [Night].mp3
5KA 1968 - Stuart Jay [Late Night].mp3
5KA 1968 - Lawrie Bruce [Midnight-Dawn].mp3

5KA jingle 1960s.mp3

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Footnotes:
1. At this YouTube page, Jim Slade recalls that the 1968 set of 5KA airchecks was prepared as a showcase for prospective advertisers. This explains the announcer who introduces each clip, but apart from that they do seem to be genuine recordings of on-air programs.
2. Aircheck: a recording of a radio broadcast (as opposed to a recording made for a broadcast). It can be, for example, a showcase for a professional broadcaster, or an unofficial recording made by a listener. Many CDs of artists of the past are taken from airchecks of live broadcasts. See, for example, the Wikipedia entry.

"The Music Goes Round my Head"

2010-09-17T20:54:00.026+10:00

Melbourne researcher, writer and musician David Johnston has just just published his book The Music Goes Round My Head, a history and commentary about Australian pop music 1964-1969.

Those dates pretty much coincide with my teenage years, so I guess I'm part of the core target audience, those who will easily spot the Easybeats reference in the title. David is also a friend of my site, PopArchives.com.au, and he has given me some nice leads from time to time.

(It was David who finally solved the mystery of The Bowery Boys' original song Just A Poor Boy, long misattributed to Graham Gouldman. I speculated about its writer credits for years; David just went ahead and contacted Kevin Godley, who checked with Gouldman. No more mystery: the story is here.)

Accustomed to having my research - even my words - circulated online without credit, I am full of admiration for David's scholarly approach. His work is properly footnoted, he sources his quotes, and he has cited me and my site in several places, something I find refreshing in this era of cut-and-paste.

So, having declared my slight connection with the author, I can go ahead and recommend this work, which covers just about every artist, famous or obscure, that you'll want to look up in the comprehensive index. (Blimey, even Horsham's Sonamatics get a guernsey!)

It's not all dry facts, as David has managed to get eyewitness accounts from many participants themselves. Quoting Garry Spry, David calls these first-hand sources "the horse's mouth", by contrast with the "the horse's arse". (I am mentioned amongst the latter, but I am in some distinguished company!)

David's commentary is also enriched by his own knowledge of music, a pay-off from his years as a musician. As a non-musician, I often struggle to find the right words to conjure up a song, but he doesn't seem to have this problem. We have both written about The Black Diamonds' See The Way, for example, but David's insights go beyond those of a mere fan like myself.

David has published The Music Goes Round My Head independently, in a limited edition of 1000, with half the proceeds going to Support Act, the charitable foundation for Australian musicians.

I hope, though, that it will eventually attract mainstream distribution, as it will become an indispensable source for this era in Australian pop music. If that happens, no redesign will be needed, as this is a professionally presented work, generously illustrated on every page.

In the meantime, you can order through RoundMyHead.com, 394 pages, $40:00 + handling. Highly recommended, obviously.

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Listen to Red Symons and David Johnston chatting about "The Music Goes Round My Head" on 774 ABC Melbourne this week: link.

Barbara Lynn - It's Better To Have It

2010-06-15T19:43:00.018+10:00

This live performance of Barbara Lynn's 1964 single It's Better To Have It is from only a couple of years later, in February 1966, but it shows.

Barbara Lynn's vocal styling and the instrumental groove are pretty much as they were in '64, but the live version has added a soulful brass section in place of the poppier backing vocals of the single. The fresh influence of the Stax-Volt sound, by this time familiar on records by the likes of Otis Redding, is evident in this fine performance.

I don't know whether Barbara Lynn recorded the song again in this style, but she should have, because it fits the song like a glove, and a stylish glove at that.

Enjoy this clip while you can: last time around it was removed from YouTube, where it was coupled with a very cool version of Ray Charles's What'd I Say from the same TV soul show, THE!!!! BEAT, hosted by Nashville disc jockey Bill "Hoss" Allen (aka "Hossman"). See my earlier post.

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Further reading:
1. THE!!!! BEAT appearances listed at The Video Beat! (Vols. 1 & 2: links to further volumes).
2. THE!!!! BEAT at Wikipedia.
3. Bill "Hoss" Allen at Wikipedia.
4. Mick Patrick's definitive account of Barbara Lynn at Cha Cha Charming.
5. Red Kelly's post on Barbara Lynn at The B Side.

The Town & Country Brothers: the definitive account

2009-09-11T22:03:00.028+10:00

After my recent post about The Town & Country Brothers and Sandy, Sandy, their 1963 Only In Oz hit, I heard from Ted Daryll, a member of the group and the writer of Sandy, Sandy.

Ted sent me his definitive account of the group. Not only does it retell the full recording adventures of Ted with Chip Taylor and Greg Richards, but it opens a fascinating window into a music business that no longer exists in quite the same form.

Rather than summarising it, I am giving you the whole document, a PopArchives exclusive, with Ted's approval.

Read the full story by clicking here (pdf).

The Town & Country Brothers: Ted (left) - Chip (right). 1962 photo taken at Adelphi Recording, 1650 Broadway, NYC (Image: Ted Daryll)

Only in Oz (14) The Town & Country Brothers - Sandy, Sandy

2009-07-17T21:14:00.058+10:00

Another in my series of posts about tracks that charted in Australia but not in their countries of origin.

14. The Town & Country Brothers - Sandy, Sandy
(Ted Daryll)
USA 1963
Tahoe single (USA) #2534 ("Distributed by London Records, Inc.")
London single (Australia) #HL-2123
Later anthologised on GAB (Sony) CD Hard To Get Hits Vol. 3, 1994
Australian charts: #7 Sydney (Gavin Ryan) or #2 Sydney (The Book) #1 Brisbane #29 Adelaide #17 Perth

I have some answers for anyone who has wondered about the identity of US group The Town And Country Brothers. They had a hit with Sandy, Sandy in 1963, but only in Australia. [listen]

Update: See my follow-up post for the exclusive, full story of The Town & Country Brothers as told by Ted Daryll, composer of Sandy, Sandy.

Let's start with Chip Taylor. Before he wrote Wild Thing, or Angel of the Morning or I Can't Let Go, that is to say, before he worked at 1650 Broadway writing songs for a long list of legends including Dusty Springfield, Baby Washington, and Evie Sands, and before he released his own singles including the original of Cliff Richard's On My Word...

Before that, back in the late 1950s, Chip Taylor and two friends formed a rockabilly-folkie-style trio called Wes Voight and the Town And Country Brothers.

This was also before Taylor changed his name from Wes Voight (and, of course, before his brother Jon, keeping the Voight, became a famous movie actor).

None of Chip Taylor's early singles was a hit in the US, not as Chip Taylor or Wes Voight, or with the Town & Country Brothers. In Australia, though, Sandy, Sandy did well and is remembered as a classic oldie by Aussies who were around then.

Sandy, Sandy was written by Ted Daryll (b. Teddy Meister), another member of the Town & Country Brothers.

The third member of the group was Greg Richards (b. Greg Gwardyak). Ted Daryll and Greg Richards also wrote together, notably She Cried, first recorded by Ted Daryll himself but later a hit for Jay & The Americans (1962, #5 USA).

Sandy Sandy was on Volume 3 of Glenn A. Baker's Hard To Get Hits CD series in 1994. At that stage (1994), Glenn was unable to give any background on The Town & Country Brothers, concluding that they had "eluded all pop scholars".

To read more on Chip Taylor, see Tony Wilkinson's Wes Voight-Chip Taylor page at Black Cat Rockabilly, Taylor's current label Train Wreck Records, and the entries at All Music Guide and Wikipedia.

The most detailed source, though, is the Spectropop interview with Chip Taylor by Norman Druker and Mick Patrick which starts way back, covers the obscurities as well as the hits, and brings it up to Taylor's later work in country music.

I've joined the dots between Sandy, Sandy, its writer Ted Darryl and his Town & Country Brothers bandmate Chip Taylor, but none of the above sources mentions Sandy, Sandy.

Town & Country Brothers - Sandy, Sandy.mp3

Thanks to Doug for asking about this one, and to Kees for further background.

Thane Russal

2009-06-10T17:10:00.026+10:00

Thane Russal's British version of Security (1966), a garage-style pop arrangement of the Otis Redding song, seems to have been popular nowhere except in Australia, where it was quite a hit (#7 Sydney #24 Melbourne #4 Brisbane #8 Perth). In fact, a lot of Aussie Boomers might even know it better than the original.

I left it out of my Only in Oz series, though, because it had already been given the full treatment by Glenn A. Baker in Hard To Get Hits, a CD series from the 1990s with a similar premise to Only in Oz. In fact, it was Baker, in his liner notes to Hard To Get Hits Vol. 1, who finally identified Thane Russal as Doug Gibbons.

Thane Russal's Security even inspired a 1976 dip o' the lid by Australian band Jo Jo Zep & The Falcons, their first single. This gave me an excuse to write about everything I've ever been able to find out about Russal/Gibbons and his Security, over here at the website.

I can't recall seeing a photo of Russal/Gibbons until I saw this New Musical Express ad from March 1966.

Thane Russal & Three - Security.mp3

Images: New Musical Express, 4 March 1966, p.5

Lee Haig

2009-05-25T19:04:00.008+10:00

Lee Haig was an announcer at 3SH Swan Hill around 1963. He later worked on-air at 3UL Warragul where I heard him one evening: his voice had matured, and he sounded great. After that I lost track of him.

Lee (Leyden) was our next-door neighbour's younger brother, so we often saw him at the time he started at 3SH. I was about twelve or thirteen, and he was probably about seventeen or eighteen, a cheerful, friendly, energetic kind of bloke.

My friends and I sometimes called him "Uncle Lee" because if he was on in the afternoons he would do the kids' show, so he would have to sign on as Uncle Lee. We were half-smart, cheeky young lads, and he must have found us pretty annoying.

Even so...

I was a radio nut: I used to stay up late picking up remote stations (they started to come in around sunset), and I would mark their locations on a map of Australia.

One Saturday I had a big length of aerial wire that I was trying to string up in the yard outside my window, but I couldn't get much height. Lee saw I was getting nowhere, so he grabbed the end of it and climbed up a tall pine tree, right to its skinny top so that he was swaying dangerously from side to side, and he tied my aerial up there. After that, I pulled in those after-sunset stations better than ever.

Two kinds of people: those who won't rest until they've solved the Whatever Happened To...? puzzle, and those who prefer to move on and stay pretty much in the present. I'm with the first group, who can't resist Googling old friends' names, or searching for them at FriendsReunited or Facebook.

Last week I was thinking about radio in the sixties, and about my aerial up the pine tree in the side garden. I wondered what had happened to Lee Haig, and I found him at the Herald-Sun's Tributes website. He died in Melbourne last October.

I was thinking: I'll write about him here, and anyone who ever Googles "lee haig" + 3sh or 3ul will easily find this page.

Bob Carmichael at 3NE Wangaratta

2009-05-09T11:18:00.006+10:00

Earlier, I mentioned the opening of 3NE Wangaratta in 1954. Bob Carmichael, who was on air at 3NE from its earliest days, has a page of reminiscences at his website. [Now offline, June 2001: here's a link to the archived version.]

And yes, there is a photo of Bob at a broadcast from a country ball: see also the radio memoirs of Frank Avis and John Pearce for anecdotes about this country radio staple.

"Frank Avis's Memoirs of 42 Years in Radio"

2009-04-28T22:05:00.008+10:00

A highlight of John Pearce's radio memoirs (see earlier post) is his remote broadcast from a country dance for 3SH Swan Hill, probably some time in the late 1940s.

I've just found another entertaining account of a country dance broadcast, this time from Frank Avis in The Ball Broadcast, recalling his time at 2LF Young in the mid-1950s. Avis, best known as a radio newsman, is publishing his memoirs as a blog at FrankAvis.com.

Frank Avis started in radio at 2MG Mudgee, and his latest post (15 February) takes his career up to 2DAY-FM Sydney in the 80s and 90s. Along the way, he's worked at 2LF Young, 3BO Bendigo, 7HO Hobart, 3UZ, 3XY, 3AK and 3DB Melbourne, 6PR Perth, 3MP Mornington Peninsula, and 2GB and 2MMM-FM Sydney.

Frank arrived at 3BO not long after the young John Laws left, and he tells a couple of good yarns about Laws's time at the station.

Great stories from a radio insider: highly recommended.

2QN Deniliquin

2009-04-28T20:39:00.014+10:00

In the last post I mentioned 2QN Deniliquin, where John Pearce started in radio in the 1940s before moving on to 3SH Swan Hill.

When we lived in Swan Hill in the 60s, 2QN was one of the stations I could pick up clearly if I was roaming the dial looking for pop music. Another was 2WG Wagga Wagga. Like most country stations at the time, they had their moments of good Top 40 programming, presented by disc jockeys who could sound just as good as their big city counterparts. One of the 2QN announcers had an American accent, something unusual on Aussie country radio.

This Melbourne Argus story from 23 February 1945 (via the NLA's Australian Newspapers archive) shows how a financially weak 2QN nearly lost its licence to Wangaratta, a town in north-eastern Victoria. Click here for larger image.

Wangaratta didn't get its own commercial station until 3NE opened in 1954.

John Pearce at 3SH Swan Hill

2009-04-27T21:20:00.023+10:00

[The Argus, 1932]

For the Love of Mike, the memoirs of Australian radio announcer John Pearce, were published online a few years ago. His radio career starts just after the War, when he chanced upon a job at 2QN Deniliquin after he was de-mobbed from the RAAF. He went on to 3SH Swan Hill, 7HO Hobart, and to 2GB Sydney, where he was one of the pioneers of Australian talk-back radio.

Pearce's site is no longer online, but fortunately we can still access the whole work at the Internet Archive [title page, table of contents].

Being a radio fanatic from way back, I find this insider's view of radio irresistible, especially the chapter on 3SH, our local station during my teenage years. Pearce seems to have been at 3SH around the late 40s to early 1950s.

Pearce calls 3SH a "fun station", a "happy station", and this comes through in his reminiscences. There are plenty of endearing characters and entertaining stories: the outside broadcast at a local dance (how quaint!), hillbilly amateurs on the Christmas Appeal radiothon, grappling with a local politician to make sure he stayed near the mike, locking the duty announcer in the outside dunny while a three-minute song was playing...

The station manager at 3SH was Harry Lithgow, still there when we moved to Swan Hill in 1961. I believe Chief Engineer Bernie Walsh was still around then too.

Since For the Love of Mike has disappeared from an active website, and does not seem to have been published as a book, I'm posting the chapter on 3SH, which gives a great insight into the workings of a country commercial station in the pre-rock'n'roll era.

Victorians to the North:

Chapter 7 of John Pearce - For the Love of Mike

In the days when broadcasting meant radio, and not television and/or radio, the Victorian Broadcasting Network consisted of a head office in Melbourne and three country radio stations.

The main one was in Hamilton, the second best was in Sale and what was left went to Swan Hill, way north on the River Murray, the dividing line between Australia and Victoria. I got a job as an announcer at the latter. I can't remember how I got it, not even how I learned about it. Read it in the paper, maybe. However, it was mine; and I arrived after the adventure of the drive in my vintage Hupmobile...

Continued here...

Boofhead book, 1945

2009-04-23T08:09:00.019+10:00

I found this ad for a Boofhead anthology in the Melbourne Argus, Saturday, 18 August 1945. The other bloke just has to look at Boofhead and his hat flies off.

This whole edition of the Argus is online at NLA's Australian Newspapers website. This was a big news week: the Japanese had surrendered a few days earlier, and the main headline is AUSTRALIANS FOR JAPAN: INCLUSION IN FORCES OF OCCUPATION.

(It says something about my preoccupations that I would bypass the end of the War in the Pacific to focus on a tiny ad for Boofhead. Oh, and if you want to go straight to the comics pages they're here and here.)

Australian Newspapers is one of a number of digitalised historical newspaper sites, some of which I've listed at this section of my links page.

For more on the Boofhead phenomenon, see my earlier post about this unique Australian comic strip.

Only in Oz (13) Buzz Cason - Adam And Eve

2009-03-15T19:55:00.067+10:00

Another in my series of posts about tracks that charted in Australia but not in their countries of origin.

13. Buzz Cason - Adam And Eve
(James E. "Buzz" Cason)
USA 1968
Elf single (USA) #90015
Stateside single (Australia) #OSS-8456
Australian charts: #4 Melbourne #3 Brisbane #1 Adelaide

For once, no doubts about this being a pure example of the Only in Oz phenomenon: no local USA chart appearances at (the inelegantly named) ARSA, no sneaking into the outer reaches of the Billboard Top 100. Nothing in the UK, nor in Europe. In the USA, this song didn't raise even a tiny blip on the radar, but in parts of Australia we loved it.

Adam And Eve is a Bonnie & Clyde story of a couple from a Mississippi farm, their Garden of Eden, who drive into town to stick up a bank. [Listen] It goes badly wrong (the bank teller made a wrong move), and they end up doing time. The chorus goes:

We can never go back to the Garden of Eden.
Adam and Eve have sinned.
We can't go back again. Oh no no. [Lyrics]

There are echoes of Ode To Billy Joe, both in the music and the setting. As Andrew Bergey puts it, Bobby Gentry meets Harry Nilsson in a party hosted by Leo Sayer.

Buzz Cason has done a bit of everything in the music business: singer, songwriter, producer, publisher, label owner...

One of his notable writer credits is for Arthur Alexander's Soldier Of Love (1961), written with Tony Moon, later performed by The Beatles and by Pearl Jam.

Cason is better known, though, for having co-written (with Mac Gayden) the much-recorded hit Everlasting Love. It charted nationally in the US in versions by Robert Knight (1967, the original), Carl Carlton (1974) and Rex Smith & Rachel Sweet (1981).

I know of at least eight versions of Everlasting Love that have charted in various parts of Australia, including local hit versions by The Town Criers (1968) and Doug Parkinson (1974).

Buzz Cason was also the originator of these songs that were hits in Australian versions:

Saturday Morning Cartoon Show - Hayride (Buzz Cason - Mac Gayden, 1968) on Elf #90021, label co-owned by Cason;
Australian version: The Flying Circus (1969) #3 Sydney #1 Brisbane #13 Perth [PopArchives page]

Saturday Morning Cartoon Show - La La (Buzz Cason - Mac Gayden, 1969) Elf #90028;
Australian version: The Flying Circus (1969) #5 Sydney #4 Melbourne #1 Brisbane #1 Adelaide #9 Perth [PopArchives page]

The Four Fuller Brothers - Groupie (Buzz Cason, prod. Cason-Gayden, 1969) Decca #32450;
Australian version: The New Dream (1969) #2 Melbourne #19 Adelaide [PopArchives page]

Gary Lewis & The Playboys - Sugar Coated Candy Love (Buzz Cason - Mac Gayden, 1969) Liberty album track;
Australian version: The New Dream (1969, as Candy Love) #44 Melbourne #22 Adelaide #36 Perth [PopArchives page]

Buzz Cason started out with Nashville rock'n'roll band The Casuals who recorded for Dot in the late 50s and became Brenda Lee's touring band. Cason's one charting single as a solo singer, Look For A Star (1960, #16 USA), used the name Garry Miles (confusingly, this was a cover of a British record by Garry Mills that also charted in the US).

Cason went into producing with Liberty Records in LA, working with Snuff Garrett. He produced (They Call Her) La Bamba (1964) by the post-Holly Crickets, arranged by Leon Russell, and when the single charted in the UK, Cason fronted The Crickets on a 1964 British tour.

With Nashville singer-songwriter Bobby Russell and Monument executive Fred Foster, Buzz Cason formed Rising Sons, the label and publishing company that released Robert Knight's Everlasting Love.

In 1967 Buzz Cason and Bobby Russell started the independent Elf label and the publishing and production company Russell-Cason Music: they published Russell's compositions Honey (the Bobby Goldsboro hit) and Little Green Apples (O.C. Smith, Roger Miller).

Bobby Russell's 1432 Franklin Pike Circle Hero (1968, #36 USA) was on Elf, for example, as were the two records by Saturday Morning Cartoon Show covered in Australia by The Flying Circus.

Buzz Cason is still working in Nashville, and he recently published his autobiography. For an update on his career since the 60s, see his website at BuzzCason.com or his MySpace page.

Buzz Cason - Adam And Eve.mp3

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Thanks to Paul Rivette for asking about this song. I'd forgotten it!

Chart positions from Gavin Ryan's Australian chart books.

References, further reading: 1. Bio page at BuzzCason.com 2. Buzz Cason bio at Rockabilly Hall of Fame. 3. The Us Four on Rising Sons label at Garage Hangover. 4. Soldier Of Love song review at AMG. 5. Recent interview with Buzz Cason at Music Business Radio. 6. Adam And Eve lyrics at HotLyrics.net. 7. Adam and Eve: brief review at Andrew Bergey's Bursts of Flavor page. 8. Elf label discography at Global Dog. 9. Rising Sons label discography at Global Dog.

Drift magazine cover, 1967

2009-02-27T09:43:00.011+10:00

This is from the cover of Drift, a short-lived Sydney magazine from the late 60s.

Phil Jones And The Unknown Blues had a minor but well-remembered local hit with their arrangement of If I Had A Ticket (1967).

The song's sources go way back to traditional gospel, with a recording at least as long ago as 1927, and jazz-r&b versions by Chris Barber outfits in the early 60s. There's more about the song's history and the band at the website.

Thanks to Terry Stacey for sending this.

Lynne from the Musical Notes blog says that the producers of Drift, who had met at the Uni of NSW, included 'Merv Rabies' (Tony Robinson), Ross Smythe-Kirk and Bill 'Florence Lawrence' Tranchitella [Link] The Musical Notes page on Phil Jones and the Unknown Blues is informed by local knowledge: highly recommended [Link]

Only in Oz (12) Bill Justis - Tamoure

2009-02-13T19:59:00.099+10:00

Another in my series of posts about tracks that charted in Australia but not in their countries of origin.

12. Bill Justis - Tamoure (with the Stephen Scott Singers)
(Heinz Hellmer - Wolf Petersen - M. Singleton - B. Everette; arranged by Bill Justis. Apparently based on a 1956 composition by Yves Roche)
Song also known as Tamouré (The Dance Of Love) or Vini Vini or Wini-Wini
USA 1963
Smash single (USA) #1812
Philips single (Australia) #BF-26
Australian charts: #1 Sydney #1 Melbourne #1 Brisbane #1 Adelaide #1 Perth

Strictly speaking, Tamouré has an acute accent over the 'e'. Most English databases - and the title printed on the 45 - leave it off, although it is restored on the record's sleeve.

In the annals of Only in Oz this is a classic case, an American record that made a big splash all over Australia¹ but only managed a ripple in the US: #7 in Chicago, #101 nationally.² As far as I can see it wasn't a hit in the UK, Europe, South Africa or even Canada where it peaked in the high thirties.

So, let's say Only in Oz.

Bill Justis (1927-1982) started out as a trumpeter, but from the early 60s he worked in Nashville as a producer, composer, arranger and musical director.³

To the record-buying public, though, Justis was probably best known for his earlier hit instrumental Raunchy (1957, #2 US), recorded at Sun Records in Memphis where he had been musical director before moving to Nashville. He played the sax on Raunchy and co-wrote it with the guitarist on the record, Sid Manker. It was the only single in Bill Justis's name to chart Top 40 in the US, but it has been much played and recorded over the years.

One notable Bill Justis enterprise in Nashville was his collaboration with keyboardist Jerry Smith as Cornbread & Jerry. Their first recording, made in Memphis before the move to Nashville, was Li'l Ole Me (covered in Australia by Warren Carr), but they later added a female chorus and put two singles onto the US charts as The Dixiebelles with Cornbread & Jerry: (Down At) Papa Joe's (1963, #9 USA) and Southtown USA (1964, #15 USA).

Bill Justis's Tamoure is an English-language version of a song known as Wini-Wini or Vini Vini. A version on German Polydor by Die Tahiti Tamourés, as Wini-Wini, was a hit in 1963 in Germany, The Netherlands and Belgium.

An earlier version, Vini Vini by Terorotua and His Tahitians, goes back to 1958, on their ABC-Paramount album, Lure Of Tahiti, with a writer credit to French composer Yves Roche. Arnold Rypens has a history of the song at The Originals ~~but, for now, he omits Bill Justis's Tamouré~~. Thanks, too, to Joop and Walter for lighting up this trail for me.

The writer credits on the German Polydor single are to Heinz Hellmer and Wolf Petersen, also credited on Bill Justis's single.

The other two writers on the Bill Justis Tamouré would be Bill Everette (he wrote Gitarzan with Ray Stevens) and - I'm guessing - Margaret Singleton, also known as Margie, first wife of Shelby Singleton.

Die Tahiti-Tamourés, 1963 European hit.

There was at least one further single in the US of this Tamouré, by Dick & Dee Dee, reverting to the title Vini Vini (1965), and another single on Almo by Manuia & Maeva, also entitled Vini Vini (1965), may well be the same song. Arnold Rypens at The Originals lists several other versions 1958-2005, including a 1963 hit in Italy for Betty Curtis.

The tamouré or tamure is a Tahitian dance, and there is no shortage of songs with variations of its name - or vini vini - in their titles,⁴ but I'm not about to research those in depth.

The sleeve of Bill Justis's single says THE FRENCH DANCE RAGE COMES TO AMERICA. Recordings by Les Kavika from 1962 are examples of the tamouré phenomenon in France: his 1962 EP on the French label Vogue Dansez le tamouré has four tamouré dance tracks, all arranged by Kavika-Barouh, including one entitled Tamouré Vini Vini. (See also the four tamouré compositions by Kavika on his 1962 EP Le Tamouré.)

Finally, a case of Not in Oz: Australians were also contrarian about Bill Justis's big hit, Raunchy (1957). It was a #2 on Billboard, #11 in the UK, but Australians preferred to put two cover versions - by Billy Vaughn and Ernie Freeman - onto the local charts. (Another version by Billy Strange popped up on our charts too, but not till 1965.)

Bill Justis - Tamoure.mp3

Die Tahiti Tamourés - Wini-Wini.mp3

Terorotua and His Tahitians - Vini Vini (1958).mp3

_____________________________________________
Footnotes:
1. Gavin Ryan's Australian chart books [store]. In this case the other chart books agree: The Book for Sydney and Thirty Years Of Hits for Melbourne both have Tamoure at #1.
2. The Smash Records Story at Both Sides Now.
3. Bill Justis biography at All Music Guide.
4. Just three examples of tamure/vini vini variations, different from the Bill Justis Tamoure:
(i) The Wikipedia article on tāmūrē (which seems to have been cut and pasted all over the Net, going by Google search results) mentions a post-World War II popularising version by Louis Martin.
(ii) As my friend Joop Jansen points out, there is a 1930s recording by Tino Rossi, Vieni Vieni [YouTube], also recorded, for example by The Gaylords in the 50s.
(iii) Les Kavioka's tamouré EPs on French label Vogue (1962), featured at Encyclopedisque.fr
5. Song history at The Originals by Arnold Rypens.

1960s promotional cards by EMI (Australia)

2009-02-06T10:38:00.009+10:00

David Walker, a frequent PopArchives source (especially on Adelaide music), has sent me these scans of postcard-size promotional photos from around 1966-68, featuring Australian pop stars of the day. They were issued by EMI (Australia) for distribution to customers at record bars.

On the reverse side of each photo is a then current discography for the artist. I've listed the singles only, with links back to those that have a page at my website.

Bobby & Laurie
Sweet And Tender Romance/Down In The Valley (1966)
Hitchhiker/You'll Come Round (1966)

Bryan Davies
You Won't Be The Last/The End Of Another Day (1967)

Johnny Farnham
Sadie/In My Room (1967)
Underneath The Arches/Friday Kind Of Monday (1968)
I Don't Want To Love You/Jamie (1968)

Cheryl Gray
The Real Thing/Move On (1966)
You Don't Love Me Any More/You Made Me What I Am (1967)
It's Not Easy Loving You/I'm Gonna Try (1967)

The Groove
Simon Says/With This Ring (1967)
Soothe Me/I See A New Day (1968)
What Is Soul/Goin'Back (1968)

Little Pattie
I'll Eat My Hat/Nothin' (1967)
I Knew Right Away/In Time (1967)

Chucklers Weekly (5): the small print

2009-01-04T10:04:00.018+10:00

The address of Chucklers HQ, 26 College Street, is now part of the building that includes the Sydney Marriott Hotel.

Rotary Colorprint is still around, in Surry Hills. It also printed, for example, Phantom comics and Larry Kent pulp detective novels.

Previous Chucklers Weekly posts: covers, comics, other content, club.

Chucklers Weekly (4): Charlie Chuckles Club

2009-01-03T07:29:00.010+10:00

I was a member of the Charlie Chuckles Club. I lost my badge long ago, but I like to think that the one I bought through eBay (below) is my own badge, mystically reunited with me after fifty years. Now, if only I could locate my old Argonauts' Club badge...

Previous Chucklers Weekly posts: covers, comics, other content.

Chucklers Weekly (3): Pat Boone, Bob Rogers and make a book cover!

2009-01-03T06:58:00.026+10:00

Previous Chucklers Weekly posts: covers and comics.

Apart from the comics, Chucklers Weekly included short stories, puzzles, general knowledge features, pop music news, competitions and readers' advertisements (Exchange Corner and Penfriends). The content was wholesome, even educational, fare. (Crystals are interesting!) There was nothing here that would upset parents at a time when comic books had had some bad press.

The pin-up boy of Chucklers Weekly was Pat Boone, the clean-cut American crooner and movie star who had hits with whitebread versions of Little Richard and Fats Domino songs and otherwise occupied the lighter end of the pop spectrum. He even wrote an advice book for the youngsters called 'Twixt Twelve and Twenty that I remember being promoted through Chucklers Weekly. In fact, looking back, Chucklers Weekly was nuts about Pat Boone, almost an Aussie branch of his PR team.

Of the two white-collar-and-tie disc jockeys featured here, Bob Rogers from 2SM in Sydney was the most famous nationally. Five years later, by then with 2UE, he was embedded with The Beatles' tour of Australia, an arrangement that was continually crashed by 2SM's Mad Mel, a wacky deejay from America who would have seemed shocking in 1959.

Click on an image to enlarge it.

Chucklers Weekly (2): comics

2009-01-03T06:53:00.053+10:00

About a third of the Chucklers Weekly was given over to full page comic strips, Australian and imported.

These comics appear in the two editions I have, each filling one or two pages:

Captain Justice (Australia, Monty Wedd)
King Comet and the Space Rangers (Australia, Monty Wedd)
The Blue Triangle featuring Dan Cooper (Belgium, Albert Weinberg, French-language comic, from Tintin magazine)
Rivets (USA, George Sixta)
Beetle Bailey (USA, Mort Walker)
Wendy and Jinx (UK, wr. Valerie or Michael Hastings, dr. Ray Bailey, from Girl magazine)
The Jackson Twins (USA, Dick Brooks)
All About Debbie Reynolds (Australia, Arthur Hudson)

There is also a single strip for younger children:

Joey Jumper Serial (Australia, Anonymous)

And a single panel cartoon:

Wilbert (USA, Gill Fox)

Australian illustrator, writer and animation artist Monty Wedd (b.1921) is a prolific creator of historical and educational comic strips. He began drawing the fictional bushranger comic Captain Justice in the late 1940s, before Chucklers Weekly, and he later continued it in the Australian Woman's Day in the 1960s. From the 1970s he produced well-researched comic strip series about real life Australian bushrangers, Ned Kelly and Ben Hall.

Monty Wedd's work was also seen in the Australian Children's Newspaper, published by the national broadcaster the ABC (it was the second magazine I ever subscribed to, after Chucklers Weekly).

Arthur Hudson who drew All About Debbie Reynolds (below) and Monty Wedd both contributed to the The Australian Children’s Pictorial Social Studies series of educational comics.

Click on an image to enlarge it.

References, further reading: 1. Dan Cooper at CoolFrenchComics.com. 2. Monty Wedd - Australian cartoonist by Greg Ray at Collecting Books and Magazines. 3. Dick Brooks, The Jackson Twins at Lambiek.com. 4. MortWalker.com and the Wikipedia entry on Beatle Bailey. 5. Wendy and Jinx: Valerie and Michael Hastings at Steve Holland's Bear Alley; Ray Bailey at Lambiek.net. 6. George Sixta, Rivets at Lambiek.com and ComicStripFan.com. 7. Gill Fox at Ger Apeldoorn's 50s blog. 8. John Ryan, Panel By Panel (1979).

Chucklers Weekly (1)

2009-01-02T22:42:00.018+10:00

Chucklers Weekly was a children's magazine published in Sydney that seems to have flourished in the mid- to late-50s. It was the first magazine I ever subscribed to, when I was 9 or 10 years old. I was a member of the Charlie Chuckles Club, named for the magazine's kookaburra mascot.

My childhood collection being lost forever, I bought these two copies online, from 9 January and 28 August1959.

Click on an image to enlarge it.

Percy Leason in the USA

2008-09-20T12:54:00.007+10:00

After I posted one of Percy Leason's Wiregrass cartoons, John Adcock over at the excellent Yesterday's Papers sent me some examples of Leason's illustrations from the time when he'd emigrated to New York.

Leason left Australia in 1937 and his family followed soon after. He stayed in the States until his death in 1959, painting, teaching, railing against modern art, and illustrating for books and magazines. (Garrie Hutchinson, Wiregrass: A Mythical Australian Town, 1986.)

These illustrations are from 1958, for the Golden Stallion series by North Dakotan writer Rutherford G. Montgomery.

Coincidentally, Percy Leason is currently included in an exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia until 19 October, Misty Moderns: Australian Tonalists 1915 -1950. The theme of the exhibition is the tonalist Australian painter Max Meldrum and his followers. At the ABC Melbourne website you can see a charming Leason portrait of his chidren, from the exhibition.

[Click on an image for larger view.]

The Vacant Lot

2008-09-08T20:09:00.008+10:00

I've just added a publicity photo of Sydney band The Vacant Lot to my page about Don't Let Me Sleep To Long (1966), their version of a song also known as Wake Me, Shake Me.

The song's history is a ripper, and as far as I know my research is original. It takes in Al Kooper and his Blues Project, the Carole King-connected Myddle Class, Lou Reed, The Golden Chords, Ersel Hickey, Rev. Gary Davis, The Coasters and The Staple Singers, not to mention The Original Five Blind Boys Of Alabama and a number of other gospel singers that go back as far as 1927, and that's only on record. (And look for the exclusive and, I guess, controversial quote from Al Kooper in the box about The Blues Project.)

Robert from The Vacant Lot, who sent me the photo, also sent this gig advertisement that I couldn't fit on the site.
[Click image for larger view.]

Percy Leason: "Back from the education conference..."

2008-07-21T11:39:00.006+10:00

This cartoon by Percy Leason (1889-1959), set in his fictional Australian country town of Wiregrass, would have appeared some time in the 1920s or 30s, but it still rings true.

The caption says:
BRAVE NEW WORLD - Back from the education conference with a head full of new ideas and enthusiasm.

(Click on image for bigger version.)

From Garrie Hutchinson, Wiregrass - A Mythical Australian Town: The Drawings of Percy Leason, 1986.

Principals wake up in new millennium!

2008-07-20T11:15:00.007+10:00

Brisbane's Sunday Mail reports today:

School principals are being taught how to use interactive websites like YouTube in a bid to combat the bullying epidemic.

In response to the phenomenon of recording schoolyard assaults and posting them on internet sites, Education Queensland has shown principals how to access and register as users of the sites so they can have the vision removed.

Access YouTube? You mean, like, actually find a website called YouTube?

That must have been tricky, but tackling the intricacies of a username and password probably needed a two-day conference at the Hyatt Regency, Coolum.

Still, it would have been a good opportunity for a refresher workshop on the Y2K bug.

Mike Stoller on the SS Andrea Doria

2008-07-09T11:15:00.065+10:00

Last week, updating my page on Poison Ivy, I wanted to write the briefest possible summary of The Coasters and their songwriter-producers Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. It ended up being a mere three paragraphs with a bunch of links for further reading, but I ended up reading a whole book about The Coasters along the way.

The Coasters, by British music journalist Bill Millar, was published in 1974 and it's probably still the best starting point. It's much more than a fan's bio of The Coasters: it's a history of a cultural and social revolution, a story that starts with the rise of marginalised, even improvised, R&B record labels in the 1940s and ends up with major labels on the mainstream charts by the end of the 50s. Bill Millar is a fastidious researcher but he's an enthusiast as well: an irresistible combination.

(Back then, Bill liked to chase up groups performing under famous names that didn't live up to their corporate branding. There's a photo in another of his books, The Drifters (1971), that shows him bailing up some members of a "New Drifters" group: he looks like a chap who's not going to give up till he nails the matter, no matter how discomfited his subjects may be.)

One night last week, when I'd only just started reading The Coasters, I was flipping around the vast wasteland of pay-tv and saw part of a documentary about an ocean collision off Massachusetts in 1956. On a foggy night a Swedish ship, the Stockholm, ran into the Andrea Doria, an Italian passenger liner heading for New York. I flipped away again when they were picking up the survivors (1660 out of about 1700 on board the Andrea Doria survived).

That turned out to be quite a co-incidence. Next day, I read Bill Millar's account of Leiber and Stoller's deal with Atlantic Records in New York, when they wound up their Los Angeles label Spark and started recording for Atlantic.

Here's how Bill Millar tells about the first time Mike Stoller met his new associates in New York:

With the royalties which had accrued from The Cheers' Black Denim Trousers ¹, Stoller had taken a vacation in Europe and after a stay of three months, he and one thousand others embarked for the USA on the Andrea Doria. Fifty-four passengers never arrived. On 25 July 1956 the Andrea Doria collided with a Swedish steamer, the Stockholm, near Nantucket island and sank during the early hours of the morning.

Survivors, including Stoller, were picked up by the Cape Ann, a fruit freighter from Bremerhaven, which headed for New York: "Jerry was in New York for a convention and he was waiting on the dock with the whole Atlantic crew. it was the first time I had met Ahmet Ertegun, Jerry Wexler, Herb Abramson because Jerry and Lester [Sills] had fixed the Spark deal while I stayed in LA. Anyhow I was OK because I'd been taken off the Andrea Doria by a lifeboat. So we talked and then we went back to California to record The Coasters."
(The Coasters, pp. 73-74)

Two members of The Robins, a vocal group who recorded on the Spark label, had decided to stick with Leiber and Stoller in their deal between West Coast and East Coast, and they formed the core of The Coasters (get it?). At this time they were still recording in LA for these early sessions which yielded their first two hits, Searchin' (#3 USA) and Young Blood (#8).

So it is that Mike Stoller, 23 years, appears with his first wife Meryl in many accounts of the Andrea Doria disaster: see, for example, this passenger list at AndreaDoria.0rg.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1. Peter Stoller (VP at Leiber/Stoller Productions) points out that the Stollers' European trip was in fact funded by royalties from another Cheers recording, Bazoom (I Need Your Lovin’) (1954). While in Paris, the Stollers heard Édith Piaf perform L'Homme à la Moto, her hit French version of Black Denim Trousers.

References:
Bill Millar, The Drifters, London, November Books, 1971 [Amazon]
Bill Millar, The Coasters, London, W.H. Allen, 1974 [Amazon]

Further reading:
Interview with Mike Stoller by Goldmine's Ken Sharp.
Pages linked from my Poison Ivy page.
AndreaDoria.org
SS Andrea Doria at Wikipedia.

Only in Oz (11) Bulldog - No

2008-06-29T21:28:00.012+10:00

Another in my series of posts about tracks that charted in Australia but not in their countries of origin.

11. Bulldog - No
(Billy Hocher - John Turi)
USA 1972
Decca single (USA) #32996
MCA album Bulldog
MCA single (Australia)
Australian charts: #2 Melbourne #7 Adelaide #13 Brisbane #5 Perth
New Zealand charts: #17 NZ

No, the opening track from Bulldog's self-titled debut album, did chart in parts of the US, but it appears to have been a minor hit on some regional charts, not enough to push it onto a national Top 40. On the charts posted to ARSA (which aren't comprehensive) it shows up 27 times: the best is a #3 at WIXY Cleveland. In parts of Australia it was a genuine hit: #2 in Melbourne ain't bad.

No is a muscular but melodic piece of early 70s pop-rock, with that gruff style of white soul singing that was common at the time. It can sound mannered or forced coming from some singers, especially at this distance, but Billy Hocher pulls it off. Hocher wrote the song with Bulldog keyboardist John Turi, who would later be associated with Cyndi Lauper in the band Blue Angel and on sessions for her Night To Remember (1989).

Also in Bulldog were Dino Danelli and Gene Cornish, former members of The Rascals (earlier, The Young Rascals), one of the top American bands of the 60s that had a dozen or so Top 40 hits in the US 1966-1969, including three at #1: Good Lovin' (1966), Groovin' (1967) and People Got To Be Free (1968).

Promising credentials, but there was no follow-up with Decca/MCA after the first Bulldog album. Before breaking up, Bulldog did release a second album in 1974, Smasher, this time on Buddah. This July 2007 post at Robots For Ronnie has some hard-to-find background on this rarity, but sadly the downloadable file has expired.

Bulldog - No.mp3

Red herrings: For more than you'll ever need to know about songs called No No No or No No No No or even No No No No No,
see this page at my website.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Chart positions from Gavin Ryan's Australian chart books and Dean Scapolo's NZ chart data.
Further reading: Joe Viglione's review of the album Bulldog at All Music Guide.

"Obtain a shot of rhythm & blues," he demanded.

2008-04-21T17:18:00.005+10:00

Classrooms used to have posters with lists of "Better Words to Use Instead of GET" and "More Interesting Words to Use Instead of SAID". Scholars were urged to avoid these simple, useful Anglo-Saxon words in favour of such formalities as received or obtained, remarked or observed.

Never mind that get or said were easily found throughout the works of professional, even great, writers. Shakespeare ended Sonnet VII with So thou, thyself out-going in thy noon/Unlook'd on diest, unless thou get a son: would they have preferred acquired a son?

In song, The Beatles might have written Proceed Back instead of Get Back, and Must Manoeuvre You Into My Life instead of Got To Get You Into My Life. Dave Edmunds' album would have been 'Procure It', not 'Get It', and Arthur Alexander would have thrown out the get and sung obtain a shot of rhythm & blues.

As for said:
Beatles: She Remarked.
Wings: Listen To What The Man Stated.
Van Morrison: Jackie Wilson Observed.
Neil Diamond: I Am... I Asserted.
Bernard Cribbins: Right Exclaimed Fred.

I'm being facetious, but in many contexts get and said are perfectly respectable. Substituting longer words can sound self-conscious, over-formal, or lacking in directness. It makes sense if the substitute offers an extra shade of meaning (bought for got), or if the context forces you to keep it formal, but often it adds nothing, especially in fiction: "Oh, look! The mother bird is leaving the nest," observed Mary.

As long ago as 1908, H.G. Fowler was offering this advice in The King's English:

ANY one who wishes to become a good writer should endeavour, before he allows himself to be tempted by the more showy qualities, to be direct, simple, brief, vigorous, and lucid.

This general principle may be translated into practical rules in the domain of vocabulary as follows:—

Prefer the familiar word to the far-fetched.

Prefer the concrete word to the abstract.

Prefer the single word to the circumlocution.

Prefer the short word to the long.

Prefer the Saxon word to the Romance.

A dream about the song APunk by Vampire Weekend

2008-04-20T18:43:00.012+10:00

The day I first heard Vampire Weekend's song APunk I couldn't get it out of my mind. I even dreamt about it:

We were in a crowded surfside hippy folk club at an old hall. There was a main hall inside but we were out in a smaller room, like an entrance hall.

A couple were singing a great, catchy, up-tempo song that I’d never heard: a girl with bright orange-dyed hair, straight & short, slightly pixie-like features, playing a big acoustic guitar, and on harmonies a woolly headed surfie guy, matted long fair hair, standing on the other side of her.

They finished and left, and I kept thinking, “I should’ve asked them what the song was.” I looked on gig posters on the walls to see if I could get a clue. There was music playing inside by now, and I was afraid the song would go out of my mind.

After a while I went outside and looked across the street to the beachfront: there were cars parked all along the curb, then a park and the beach. The couple were standing at the back of an old car with its boot up. They’d obviously been for a swim, and were towelling themselves dry.

I started to walk across to ask them about the song.

Then I woke up with it still playing in my head.

After I awoke properly, I realised that the song was A-Punk by Vampire Weekend, except that the folkie couple had been singing their own, dreamlike arrangement…

Photo from Vampire Weekend's MySpace where you can listen to APunk. It seems to have been taken in an old hall.

Trini Lopez - Up to Now: update

2008-04-15T22:01:00.012+10:00

The Paul Simon & Art Garfunkel FAQ at alt.music.paul-simon identifies the third writer of Trini Lopez's Up To Now, Terry Sue Pinter, as the wife of co-writer Marty Cooper. In fact, it throws more light on the whole connection between the writers of Up To Now (Bob Susser-Marty Cooper-Terry Sue Pinter) and Paul Simon:

Paul hooked up sporadically with a group called Tico & The Triumphs. Other members were Michael (Mickey) Borack, Howie Beck, Martin Nathaniel (Marty) Cooper, and his wife Terry Sue Pinter. Their manager was Robert Howard (Bob) Susser. "Tico" was Marty Cooper, although many sources incorrectly assert that Paul was. Most of the songs were written by Susser, Cooper and Pinter...

The group's origin can be traced to 1956, when Borack, then 10 years old, formed a group called The Crew Cuts. Later, when living in Queens, he joined with schoolfriends Cooper and Gail Lynn. One night in June 1960, Paul, still calling himself Jerry Landis, played a high school prom at the Forest Hills Jewish Center. Borack and Co. also performed I've Told Every Little Star, sufficiently impressing Paul that he suggested they all meet at summer's end to work together.

In September, the group joined Paul at his home in Flushing to rehearse the song Motorcycle. Paul also produced the single and sang lead. They named themselves after the Tico record label and the popular Triumph sports car of the day.

Their biggest success was with that first song, which reached number 99 on the Billboard charts on January 6, 1962. However, Paul also put out two songs (Lone Teen Ranger/I Wish I Weren't In Love) under his Jerry Landis alias that were actually Triumphs records. The former charted at #97.

There are also several songs credited by BMI to Susser/Pinter/Cooper that weren't released, and may not have been recorded either.

[For more details, see my original post and the FAQ quoted above.]

The Juanita Banana phenomenon

2008-04-03T22:16:00.070+10:00

The Peels - Juanita Banana
(Tash Howard - Murray Kenton)
Arranged & conducted by Charlie Fox.
A Howard-Smith Production
USA 1966
Karate single #522
Stateside (UK) single #513
Karate single in Australia (pictured) released through Astor

Juanita Banana is a comic song about a Mexican banana grower's daughter who makes it as a singing star in the big city [lyrics]. When "Juanita Banana" sings the chorus it is an operatic caricature, a worked-over version of Caro Nome, an aria from Giusseppe Verdi's Rigoletto.

The title echoes Chiquita Banana, the 1944 jingle about the cartoon mascot of the United Fruit Company, the international banana trader that evolved into the present-day Chiquita Brands International.

I first heard Juanita Banana when it was excerpted on a novelty record by Dickie Goodman, Batman And His Grandmother (1966). This was a cut-in or break-in record (a distant ancestor of the mashup), where a comedian would do a commentary as, say, a news reporter and snippets of current songs would be inserted to fit in with the story.

Although Juanita Banana has been reissued on the likes of 25 All Time Novelty Hits and Definitive 60s, Vol. 1 it never was a national hit in the USA, UK or Australia. Even on the sprinkling of regional US and Canadian charts posted to ARSA the best it manages is #16 at WIXY in Cleveland, and 30 Years of Canadian Charts has it peaking at #2 9.

So much for the Anglo world, where it seems to be one of those songs that has stuck in the memory longer than its initial popularity justifies. The extraordinary thing about Juanita Banana is the number of times it has been recorded in non-English-speaking countries. Even the Peels' original version was popular in The Netherlands, where it charted at #13.

When I started writing this post, I was going to compile a definitive list of versions, but I've given up that idea: the more I search, the more I find. Instead, here's a partial list. Some of the exact years are hard to pinpoint, but I believe these are all from the 60s:

The Peels (USA, 1966)
Henri Salvador (France)
Billy Mo (Germany)
Luis Aguile (Spain, by Argentinian singer)
Quartetto Cetra (Italy)
Het Cocktail Trio (Netherlands)
Mal Sondock (Germany, by US singer-deejay, 1966)
Georgie Dann (Spain, by French singer, 1966)
Los Beta (Spain, 1966)
J. R. Corvington (Argentina)
Los Tres Sudamericanos (Paraguayan group; on Spain's Belter label)
Raymond Boisserie (France, 1967)
Marcello Minerbi (Italy, 1966, #9 Austria)
German Moreno (Phillipines, 1968: he also appeared in a 1968 film called Juanita Banana. Details at IMDb are sparse.)
The Monks (single on Vogue. I don't think these are the Yanks in Germany we love so much, but a French band with J. C. Pelletier.)
Jean Bonal Et Son Orchestre (France)
Teddy Martin & His Las Vegas Boys (France?)
The Reels (Spain: not the Aussie band)

A completist would also include Huanita Banana:

7 Mladih (Yugoslavia, 1966)
Radmila Mikic Miki (Yugoslavia, 1967)

That's it for me, but if too much still isn't enough, feel free to browse the 41 000 hits at Google for "juanita banana" (and nearly 1000 for "huanita banana").

How about the small print?

The Mad Music Archive identifies co-writer Tash Howard as the
producer who put together The Peels, a studio group (not surprising, somehow), and gives some background about the business end of the song's publication.

Tash Howard (c.1941-1977), originally a drummer, had changed his name from Howard Tashman.¹ He has 147 compositions listed at BMI, including a follow-up single Juanita Banana Part 2 and (with Charlie Fox) its B-side Rosita Tomato on Karate #533. Between the two Juanitas was Scrooey Mooey on Karate #527, another Tash Howard song (registered title: Screwee Mooey) .

Murray Kenton has eleven songs in his BMI repertoire, the US Copyright Office gives his real name as Morris Temkin and that's about all I know. Howard's co-producer, Smith, is a mystery to me.

Arranger and conductor Charlie Fox is not Charlie Foxx of Mockingbird fame, but he does seem to be the songwriter and film composer Charles Fox, whose repertoire includes Roberta Flack's Killing Me Softly, Jim Croce's I Got A Name and the Happy Days theme (all with lyricist Norman Gimbell).

You can read about Charles Fox's distinguished career at the Songwriters' Hall of Fame which - alas! - offers no further insight into his contribution to Juanita Banana.

The Peels - Juanita Banana.mp3
Verdi - Caro None from Rigoletto.mp3
(Maria Callas 1952 - excerpt)
Dickie Goodman - Batman And His Grandmother.mp3
(Juanita first heard at 21 secs.)

Henri Salvador - Juanita Banana.mp3 (French)
Billy Mo - Juanita Banana.mp3 (German)
Luis Aguile - Juanita Banana.mp3 (Spanish)

.....................................................................................................
Footnote: 1. For confirmation that Tash Howard was born Howard Tashman, see the comment below from Holly, who adds some background about the co-writer and producer behind Juanita Banana. (Also mentioned at the Joey Powers page of Harry Young and Larry N. Houlieff.)

Not-to-be-confused-with Dept: There is also a London Indie/Pop/Rock singer called Tash Howard (see her MySpace). Tash Howard is also a character played by Barry Van Dyke in an episode of The New Dick Van Dyke Show.... But now I'm getting silly (unless the naming of the character is some kind of in-joke). Oh, and this 21st Century Seattle band called The Peels is not the Juanita Banana group.

The US Copyright Office shows that in 1990 the copyright of Juanita Banana by Tash Howard & Murray Kenton (Morris Temkin) was transferred to Gary Knight aka Harold Temkin who, as Gary Weston, co-wrote Vacation, the 1962 Connie Francis hit (see BMI repertoires). Further research, anyone?

Thanks to Josef Danksagmüller for Marcello Minerbi version alert.

Home of Gulch Radio

2008-03-31T17:37:00.023+10:00

Ric at Gulch Radio sent me this 1947 photo of the
same intersection in Jerome that is shown in my last post.

The corner building on the left in the colour photo is also seen here, but from another direction, behind the Liberty Cafe sign. Next to it, in both photos, you can see the taller building with urn-like decorations on its top corners.

1947: The guy with the newspaper could be reading about, say, Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier... Or the Soviets blockading Berlin... Babe Ruth's obit... I can just about hear the jukebox next door playing Tex Williams, Smoke, Smoke, Smoke That Cigarette...

Gulch Radio (Ghost Town Radio)

2008-03-26T22:29:00.032+10:00

The station I listen to most these days is Gulch Radio. It was the name that attracted me, but I quickly became hooked by their playlists, which often wander into the contemporary blues and country-rock neighbourhoods but are in fact truly eclectic: just about anything can turn up, and the mix is artfully put together.

Gulch Radio goes out on 1670AM from a transmitter up on Mingus Mountain, above Jerome, Arizona, an old mining town with a colourful past that had a population of 25 000 in the late 1920s but is now somewhere in the 300s or 400s, hence Gulch Radio's tag, Ghost Town Radio.

(You may hear a song called Ghost Town Radio on The Gulch, by Patrick Thomas: it fits in fine as an unofficial station theme song, but I believe it was just a nice coincidence.)

My radio over here on Australia's Great Dividing Range can't pull in the signal from Mingus Mountain. I listen on the Net through Winamp player where I first found The Gulch on the Shoutcast radio menu.

Gulch Radio seems to be run by two guys called Ric and Chaz. My head spins when I try to figure out the time differences and check the program schedule, but I think I'm often listening to Ric's breakfast slot, or their early early morning show The Night Train, or various mixes put together by Chaz. At other times I hear a couple of excellent syndicated programs: Gregg McVicar's Undercurrents and Tom Fallon's Motown Memories. I've also chanced on Gulch's own oldies show called The Geezer Rock Show.

It all sounds laid-back and friendly, small-town but tuned-in, just what you'd expect from Jerome if its Internet press is accurate: a bustling tourist magnet and artistic community... of artists, craft people, musicians, writers, hermits, bed and breakfast owners, museum caretakers, gift shop proprietors and fallen-down-
building landlords. (DesertUSA.com); small ghost town/artist colony/hippie hang-out..; a funky tourist destination with unique characters, stories and happenings. (JeromeAZ.com)

Okay, I'm a sucker for that charming picture postcard, but it's the music I come back for. In fact, most of the music I've discovered in recent months I first heard on Gulch Radio. It's at GulchRadio.com.

Photo by Andrew Dunn, 1992.

Ah, Barbara Lynn..!

2008-03-24T16:15:00.020+10:00

The video of Barbara Lynn (below) speaks for itself: I can't say what 'cool' is or was, but there it is, all right, 42 years ago and it hasn't dated a minute. (It's Ray Charles's What'd I Say, by the way.)

See update June 2010.

Barbara Lynn Ozen's records had simply 'Barbara Lynn' on them. I guess her best known song is her hit, You'll Lose A Good Thing (1962, #8 USA), slow and soulful, written when she was 14, so they say. The song of hers I love the most is (Oh Baby) We Got A Good Thing Goin' (1964): I already loved it when The Stones covered it on Out Of Our Heads (1965), but it's one of those cases where I went back later and found the original was the best.

Barbara Lynn is from Texas, born in 1942, and I assume that back in the early 60s she was unusual in being a female singer-songwriter who played guitar on her own records. (She plays left-handed: not sure if that's significant, but it's always mentioned.) Her earliest records, on Jamie and Tribe, are the ones I like the most, but don't let me put you off the records she put out on Atlantic from the late 60s.

She mostly wrote her own material, but when I looked up You'll Lose A Good Thing and (Oh Baby) We Got A Good Thing Goin' at BMI I found them under the name of Huey Meaux, her longtime manager and producer, although the US Copyright Office shows words & music by Barbara Lynn Ozen.

If you want to read more, skip the Wikipedia article this time (take my word!), and read Mick Patrick's story of Barbara Lynn at Cha Cha Charming: you won't find a better account or appreciation of her career. There's also a nice news article from 2000 at the Austin Chronicle's website. There is a Barbara Lynn MySpace page, though it looks a bit inactive, and of course it's hard to say whether she's running it in person. Huey Meaux is a whole other story, but Red Kelly tells it well from that angle over at his blog The B Side, where you can grab a nice song from her Atlantic days, Why Can't You Love Me (1968).

Or you can forgo the research ~~and just play that video again~~.

Barbara Lynn Ozen 1966

2008-03-21T21:39:00.001+10:00

Not even in Oz: Trini Lopez - Up To Now

2008-03-09T21:40:00.018+10:00

Trini Lopez - Up To Now
(Bobby Susser - Marty Cooper - Terry Sue Pinter)
1967
Single on Reprise #0574

I could take or leave most of Trini Lopez's hits. They were mainly pepped up versions of familiar songs, often showcased with nightclub audience noise: If I Had A Hammer, America, Lemon Tree, I'm Comin' Home Cindy... Okay, I could take the songs, but I could leave the party-time sound effects.

Then came Up To Now. This was a straight-ahead pop production with no hand clapping shenanigans. Up To Now didn't need any vicarious excitement: it screamed out excitement right from the opening bars, through a rhythmic drum, trumpet and strings arrangement. [Listen]

It's the type of song you can imagine the Northern Soul fans taking up. But (oddly, I've always thought) nobody much took it up at all. It's one of those first-rate songs that, in spite of everything, has ended up as an obscurity.

Up To Now had the same arranger and producer as the hits, Don Costa (1925-1983). Costa started out as a guitarist and continued to record in his own name (Never On Sunday, 1960, #19 USA), but he was renowned mainly as an arranger, producer and conductor, notably for Paul Anka, Sammy Davis Jr, Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme, Frank Sinatra and, yes, Trini Lopez.

Space Age Pop sums up Costa this way: He liked very dense arrangements - Billy Byers [pianist] called him "the Puccini of pop," saying that his arrangements were "seething with melody." That sounds to me like the Don Costa of Up To Now.

As to the writers, Marty Cooper was Tico of high school vocal group Tico & The Triumphs (see their history at DestinationDoowop.com). They put out some singles 1961-62 that were produced by the yet-to-be-famous Paul Simon with his friend Bobby Susser.

After Paul Simon moved on to other projects, Marty Cooper and Bobby Susser teamed up to write and produce: one of their compositions, Kiss Me Now, was released on Phil Spector's Phi-Dan label by Florence De Vore (1965) and was on Diana Ross's self-titled album in 1976 . In 1972 Bobby Susser and Lou Stallman's group Think had a #23 USA hit with their controversial anti-drug composition, Once You Understand.

This is the same Bobby Susser who is nowadays a successful writer and performer of children's songs: he has a website at BobbySusser.com, but his Wikipedia entry gives more information and a good overview of his varied career.

On Terry Sue Pinter, so far, I've drawn a blank. [Update: She was Marty Cooper's wife. See my follow-up post.]

Trini Lopez - Up To Now.mp3

Tommy Cooper's magic cloak

2008-03-01T21:13:00.000+10:00

Only in Oz (10) Julie London - I'm Coming Back To You

2008-02-23T21:22:00.045+10:00

Another in my series of posts about tracks that charted in Australia but not in their countries of origin.

10. Julie London - I'm Coming Back To You
(Arthur Kent - Ed Warren)
USA 1963
Liberty single #55605
Also on album The Wonderful World of Julie London
Australian charts: #34 Melbourne

Okay, to be accurate this should be "Only in Melbourne, Victoria" and (as a search of ARSA reveals) "also in Bakersfield CA" plus who knows what other US cities, towns and hamlets?

Even then, this hardly tore up the charts. Melbourne chart statisticians Gavin Ryan and Tom Guest agree on this one: Gavin has it at #34, Tom at #36. The KAFY chart posted to ARSA snapshots it at #27 in Bakersfield.

Let me plead sentimental value, then.

Probably because I grew up listening to those very Melbourne radio stations that nudged it into the local Top 40, I'm Coming Back To You has always been the song I associate with Julie London: not her famous hit Cry Me A River (1955, #9 USA, #22 UK, later reworked to good effect by Joe Cocker), and not Desifinado, her single that charted elsewhere in Australia (1962: #38 Sydney, #10 Brisbane).

Julie London's territory was always the adult-oriented album rather than the pop single: Cry Me A River was her only national Top 40 hit in the US, but she was a steady earner for Liberty Records with her LPs. She is also remembered for her acting, notably as Nurse Dixie McCall in Emergency (1972-1976), created by her ex-husband Jack Webb.

The opening "do-doo-doo-doo do-do do-do" from the girls' chorus [Listen] signals that the easy-going I'm Coming Back To You is more in a pop vein than much of Julie London's material, which tended towards sultry nightclub jazz.

The names of the producer and arranger-conductor here, Snuff Garrett and Ernie Freeman, are familiar credits on numerous pop records (including some by Johnny O'Keefe), and it shows. This is 1963, on the cusp of the British Invasion, and this style of nicely crafted pop production would just about sound dated within a year or so. The B-side is When Snowflakes Fall in The Summer,written by Brill Building greats Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil.

Arthur Kent and Ed Warren, the writers of I'm Coming Back To You, also wrote Take Good Care Of Her, the 1961 hit by Adam Wade (#7 USA), also recorded by Elvis Presley and Johnny Mathis, among others.

Arthur Kent wrote at least two well-known songs with Sylvia Dee: The End Of The World, Skeeter Davis's hit (1963, #2 USA), and Bring Me Sunshine, familiar to British comedy fans as the theme song of Eric Morecambe & Ernie Wise, but also recorded by numerous artists from The Mills Brothers to Willie Nelson.

By the way, a search at the US Copyright Office confirms that Arthur Kent's co-writer on I'm Coming Back To You was indeed Ed Warren. Some sources - including All Music Guide - have wrongly assumed that the Warren in the writer credit belongs to the more prolific and famous Diane Warren, born 1956, who would have been about 7 years old at the time of I'm Coming Back To You.

Julie London - I'm Coming Back To You.mp3
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Chart positions from Gavin Ryan's Australian chart books, with a glance at Tom Guest's Thirty Years of Hits 1960-1990: Melbourne Top 40 Research.

Further reading: Biographies of Julie London and Ernie Freeman at All Music Guide. Tom Simon's Snuff Garrett page. Review of The Wonderful World of Julie London by Greg Adams at AMG.

Only in Oz (9) Roger Roger & his Champs Elysées Orchestra - Dalilia

2008-02-22T19:26:00.048+10:00

Another in my series of posts about tracks that charted in Australia but not in their countries of origin.

9. Roger Roger & his Champs Elysées Orchestra - Dalilia
(Roger Roger)
France 19??
Festival single (Australia) #FK-296 (1962); re-released on FK-1680 (1967)
Australian charts: #8 Sydney #8 Melbourne #16 Brisbane

This spaced-out electronic instrumental was familiar in Australia during the 60s as radio filler and as background music on radio and TV. [Listen] I mentioned it in an earlier post as a likely Time-out Instrumental.

Roger Roger (1911-1995) was a prolific French composer for radio, TV and film whose music is often filed these days under Space Age and Library.

Dalilia seems to have started out as a "library" track, a ready-made theme or soundtrack piece, one of numerous tracks Roger Roger composed and recorded for the Chappell Music company's Mood Music series from the mid-50s.

At the time such albums would have been sold to radio and TV stations and film producers, but they are now collected by aficionados of Library music and have reappeared on CD: see, for example, the catalogue at MovieGrooves, which includes a Roger Roger collection (Roger Roger is to Library Music what James Bond is to spy movies...).

Some of Roger Roger's music (SpaceAgePop.com tells us) also fits into a further sub-genre, Test Card, since his work was often heard with test patterns on BBC-TV.

I suspect that the release of Dalilia as a single was an Australian initiative (although a US release, Delilah, could be the same track). The B-side was Cha Cha Charlie, an instrumental by Mel Young, another Chappell library artist.

Festival released the single twice, first in December 1962 on #FK-296, when it charted, and again in March 1967 on #FK-1680, again coupled with Mel Young. As I've pointed out previously, one thing Australians loved back then was an instrumental.

The Dalilia tune was used in 1963 for the British TV show The Desperate People, when it was known as The Desperadoes (Theme from Desperate People). Each title is registered to Roger Roger as a separate work at ASCAP, but they do appear to be the same composition. In Australia, The Playboys released a version as Desperado (1965). You can listen for yourself from the Playboys page at the excellent MusicPopHits.com.

I once heard another Australian version with vocals but I've had no success in remembering it or tracking it down this time around.

And the title, Dalilia? The only title resembling Dalilia amongst the hundreds of Roger Roger compositions registered at SACEM (France) is Dalila, the French form of Delilah. There was a Roger Roger single released in the US in 1963 called Delilah (TIME #1063) but, as far I can see, no Dalilia. The title Dalilia is, however, registered to Roger Roger at ASCAP, but so is Delila (another form of Delilah/Dalila). I'm wondering whether Dalilia might be an Anglo misprint for Dalila (Delilah).

Roger Roger & his Champs Elysées Orchestra - Dalilia.mp3
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Chart positions from Gavin Ryan's Australian chart books.

References: 1. Roger Roger page at SpaceAgePop.com 2. Roger Roger biography (and photo) at Robert Farnon Society 3. Chappell Mood Music database. 4. Examples of Roger Roger's Chappell Mood Music LPs at Vintage Library Emporium and Sounds of Champaign (Side 2) 5. ASCAP Title Search 6. The Australian Festival Record Company... 1961-1969, label discography by George Crotty 7. Library Music catalogue and Roger Roger blurb at MovieGrooves.com. 8. Composer search at SACEM, the French performing rights organisation.

End of Year Mystery Roundup (2) Cold Cases

2007-12-31T21:08:00.000+10:00

Having talked up the success rate, here now are some persistent PopArchives mysteries, mentioned in the hope that some emails will come in to clear them up.

If you have an answer, or even a vital clue, please email [link], or leave a comment at the end of this post. The links are to the relevant pages at The Website.

Question:
Just who was William Plunkett, composer of The Megatrons' Velvet Waters? For that matter, who were The Megatrons? And what was the full extent of Haywood Henry's role in all this?
[Link: Tony Worsley - Velvet Waters]

Question:
Did Johnny Curtis, composer of Picking Up Pebbles, record the original version, and who was Johnny Curtis, anyway?
[Link: Matt Flinders - Picking Up Pebbles]

Question:
How did Ray Brown & the Whispers get hold of Go To Him, and while you're there, can you clear up the chronology of this song for once and for all?
[Link: Ray Brown & The Whispers - Go To Him]

Supplementary question:
In which New South Wales town does Leicester-born Bess Coleman, co-writer of Go To Him, now live? (And why hasn't she already stumbled on my site while browsing the Web, and emailed me with deep insights into the story of Go To Him? Has she never tried a vanity search at Google? Come on, Bess, you can do it!)
[Link: Ray Brown & The Whispers - Go To Him]

Question:
How did that disparate group of Keith Reid, Andy Qunta, Maggie Ryder and Chris Thompson get together to write You're The Voice? I mean, were they all sitting together in a conference room somewhere, or did they mail each other (this was 1985), or was it a Round Robin where one started it off and passed it on, or what..?
[Link: John Farnham - You're The Voice]

Question:
Okay, I give up: who did record the original version of Sounds of Goodbye? I've gone for George Morgan, but there's always been a sneaking sense of doubt.
[Link: Kamahl - Sounds Of Goodbye]

Question:
Was Patricia Dahlquist the first to record the obscure Bertie Higgins composition Waiting For The Rain, or is there an earlier version lurking somewhere?
[Link: Emma Hannah - Waiting For The Rain]

Question:
Which came first: Your Love Still Brings Me To My Knees by Saundra Steele or Your Love Still Brings Me To My Knees by Dusty Springfield? I'm going for Saundra Steele, but they both seem to be from January 1980, so...
[Link: Marcia Hines - Your Love Still Brings Me To My Knees]

Question:
Who recorded the acetate of Happy Without You that Ron Tudor played to The Strangers before Peter Robinson rearranged it and they recorded it?
[Link: The Strangers - Happy Without You]

Question:
Who on earth were Our Patch Of Blue, who recorded the original version of Zoom Zoom Zoom? And who were the writers Bernard de Cesare and Pasquale Zompa?
[Link: Cam-Pact - Zoom Zoom Zoom]

Question:
Graham Gouldman didn't really write Just A Poor Boy, did he? It was an Aussie composition, written by members of The Bowery Boys, right?
[Link: Mike Furber & The Bowery Boys - Just A Poor Boy]

Any answers? Email [link], or leave a comment, please!

End of Year Mystery Roundup (1) Solved

2007-12-29T08:10:00.002+10:00

The Blog and The Website have a fair record in clearing up mysteries.

Sometimes it seems I just have to ask a question then sit back and wait for the answer to turn up in my Inbox.

Some examples:

Question: Did Jimmy Page play lead guitar on Security, a UK single by Thane Russal - actually Doug Gibbons - that was a hit in Australia and, as far as I can see, nowhere else?
Answer: No, that wasn't Jimmy Page, it was Bob Johnson (later with Steeleye Span).
The emailer: Mick Brill, who played bass on the record, a longtime associate of Doug Gibbons, now living in Italy.
See: The Security page at The Website.

Question: Who was (E. GOLDMAN), as he appears in the small print as the composer of Gene Pitney's lesser known gem Billy You're My Friend (1968)?
Answer: Ed Goldman, who wrote the song when he was still a piano major at the Juilliard School of Music.
The emailer: Ed Goldman. Can you imagine how excited I was to hear from him?
And Ed was delighted to learn that his song had charted in Australia, and to read comments at The Blog by a couple of Australians who had never forgotten Billy You're My Friend.
See: The small print: Ed Goldman, writer of Billy You're My Friend and earlier posts linked from there.

Question: Was Edward R. (Eddie) White the songwriter the same Edward R. White who appeared in some movie bit parts, notably Robert Duvall's Angelo My Love (1983)?
Answer: Yes, he was.
The emailer: John Sprung, who attended the premiere of Angelo My Love with his dad and Eddie White. Mr Sprung Sr and Eddie were old friends from the days when Eddie was in an orphanage where John's dad was a counselor. Following an exchange of emails with John, I ended up buying Eddie White's autobiography Yesterday's Cake, cleverly named from the practice of bakeries donating old cakes to orphanages. (It's a helluva story, something I'll save for a later post.)
See: Yesterday's Cake, Eddie White's autobiography and earlier posts linked from there.

Question: Who was the bearded panel operator for Melbourne deejay Barry Ferber, immortalised in their single The Bearded Beetle (1964)?
Answer: Dave Dexter, who later worked on air in New Zealand on Radio Hauraki.
The emailer: (1) Radio historian Wayne Mac identified Dave Dexter. (2) Dave's son Julian recently posted a comment, confirming our conclusions and providing some more background.
See: More on the Bearded Beetle, which includes Jake Dexter's comments.

Question: Who is Nick Lampe, whose fine single Flower Garden (1969) unaccountably charted in Melbourne, Australia and hardly anywhere else?
Answer: Singer-songwriter Nicholas Lampariello, who turned his back on the music business after one album on Atlantic, now a social worker in New York.
The emailer: Robert Thompson in Melbourne who read my post, persevered with his search for Nick Lampe, and ended up phoning him at his workplace in New York.
See: At last: the Nick Lampe story, probably the only biography of Nick Lampe on the Web, written with Nick as the primary source after Robert put him in touch with me. (Type "Nick Lampe" at Google, hit I'm Feeling Lucky, and you'll end up back here, at this very blog!)

There are others, but that's enough for now.

Next: some PopArchives mysteries that won't go away.

Ah, that Robinson Crusoe theme!

2007-12-28T21:38:00.000+10:00

Some lovely genius has posted to YouTube the opening 20 seconds of Les aventures de Robinson Crusoe (1964), a European series that was shown in Australia on ABC-TV. If you were there, you'll recognise the theme music, a stirring melody that I've never forgotten.

Internet Movie database lists three series composers, Robert Mellin, Gian Piero Reverberi and Georges Van Parys. A reviewer, Rob Neal, writes:

It is also worth noting that the haunting score is also now available in an expanded CD from Silva Screen. The original soundtrack was in mono, but it seems there was such a demand for this piece, that the composers recently recreated a medley with a full orchestra in stereo.

This was another of those series that the ABC used to show in the afternoons during school holidays. Sir Francis Drake was another: I wrote about it (and its equally haunting theme) last year.

[YouTube link]
[Soundtrack and series DVD at Amazon.co.uk]

Close 'N Play!

2007-12-19T14:52:00.000+10:00

After my post about Ol' Fatso by Augie Rios a commenter wrote: Don't know how, but I had the 45 of this in my "Close & Play" when I was a child.

I didn't know how, either, mainly because I'd never heard of a Close & Play, which turns out to be a record player for kids: CLOSE 'N PLAY AUTOMATIC PHONOGRAPH - CLOSE LID... RECORD PLAYS.

That would've been an exceptionally groovy present for a kid in the 60s or 70s.

Plugging Transport

2007-12-14T20:28:00.000+10:00

Over at the unpronounceable Brlogsbane, #3 Son Jamie has posted five mp3s from Inner Chimp, the previously mentioned new album by #1 Son Keir's band Transport. Excellent, of course. [Link]

You study 'em hard and hopin' to pass...

2007-12-07T11:31:00.000+10:00

CNN.com shows how to make James Brown sound tedious:

CNN Special Investigations Unit Classroom Edition: James Brown: Say it Proud ...
Teachers: Please preview this program, as its content may not be appropriate for all students.
Grade Level: 9-12, College
Subject Areas: Fine Arts, Social Studies
Objectives
The CNN Special Investigations Unit Classroom Edition: James Brown: Say it Proud and its corresponding discussion questions and activity challenge students to:
1. Examine the legacy of James Brown;
2. Identify the historical context of key events in Brown's life;
3. Design an exhibit for a memorial to James Brown.
Discussion Questions...

[Link]

That's our lad!

2007-12-05T17:07:00.003+10:00

To remind yourself of the excellence of Brisbane band Transport, watch these high quality live videos recorded in LA earlier this year. They're at Rehearsals.com, performances of The People Have Spoken, Soda Pop and This Infidelity. [Link] There's also a video interview and a text article. Transport haven't gigged lately, but their new album The Inner Chimp is now downloadable.

And to see a completely different side of Transport's singer-guitarist Keir Nuttall (vocals, guitar) and Steve Pope (drums), here they are in Kate Miller-Heidke's band performing Keir Nuttall's composition Space They Cannot Touch. No Parental Advisory necessary for this one:

(Okay, disclosure: I'm Keir's dad, but you probably knew that.)

Is 128kbps good enough for an mp3?

2007-12-01T20:02:00.000+10:00

A handful of years ago when I first started ripping mp3s it was commonly held that 128kpbs was as high as you needed to go, because after that the improvement in sound quality was unnoticeable.

I've stuck to that, and a recent online experiment at Cognitive Daily supports it. Read the full story here, and as usual the comments are worth reading too.

Cognitive Daily home: http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily
Cognitive Daily feed: http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/index.xml

Yesterday's Cake, Eddie White's autobiography

2007-11-29T21:39:00.000+10:00

As I was saying at the weekend: I have a feeling there is an interesting biography to be told about Eddie White. Maybe someone will email...

Sure enough, John Sprung emailed again to tell me about Yesterday's Cake, Eddie's autobiography that was published by Vantage Press in 1985.

The AbeBooks website lists a number of used copies. One of the booksellers quotes Joseph Heller: Eddie White's book reads like a Bronx Arabian Nights!

The title refers Eddie's time in an orphanage where the kids were given day-old cakes from the bakeries. A synopsis at AbeBooks says Yesterday's Cake is the story of a boy raised in various orphanages who became a songwriter and met the rich and famous even though his father was a small time hood.

Think I'll have to order a copy. More later...

One more thing: John Sprung, my informant on these matters, is a folk singer and music writer with an interesting resumé himself.

Eddie White, songwriter and actor

2007-11-24T06:51:00.000+10:00

In September I mentioned Edward R. (Eddie) White, the prolific New York songwriter (1919-1996) who collaborated at some stage with each of the three writers of Acker Bilk's The Harem, particularly with Mack Wolfson.

I wondered whether he was the same Eddie White (aka Edward R. or Eddie R. White) whose filmography at Internet Movie Database includes a role in Robert Duvall's Angelo My Love (1983).

These days it seems I just have to ask, and somebody who was there emails with an answer. (Like this: Question. Answer. Neat, huh?)

John Sprung emailed to confirm that the songwriter and bit-part actor were indeed the same Eddie White. In fact, John was at the premiere of Angelo My Love with Eddie, who knew John's father, a counselor at an orphanage where Eddie was a ward.

I have a feeling there is an interesting biography to be told about Eddie White. Maybe someone will email...

[Somebody did email: see my follow-up post.]

Are you a hippy?

2007-10-21T20:56:00.001+10:00

Barry McKay, who compiled the online Go-Set charts (1966-1974), has cleverly adapted this magazine quiz from 1967 so that you can answer it online.

Some of the choices were a bit obscure to me after all this time, but it told me I'm "half way to San Francisco", even if I am running 40 years late.

Come on, answer honestly: would you rather go to a love-in or a drive-in? A nice bit of retro-fun. [Link]

The small print: Ed Goldman, writer of Billy You're My Friend

2007-10-20T13:59:00.001+10:00

Last month I wondered about the writer of Billy You're My Friend, Gene Pitney's minor hit from 1968. It's one of those unique songs that you never forget, the one-off that comes out of nowhere and leaves you with few clues about its background story.

A couple of days ago Ed Goldman emailed me, after he'd read my post.

Ed tells me he wrote Billy You're My Friend when he was a piano major at the Juilliard School of Music in New York. He’d worked in music publishing as a staff songwriter, usually working with a regular lyricist partner, but when producer Bob Schwartz was looking for a song for Gene Pitney, “a single that would bring him more into what was then the current style”, Ed ended up writing both words and music himself.

This is how it came about, as Ed tells it:

My partner at the time and I had interested a producer at Musicor Records in a kind of poetic, Sergeant Pepper's type tune called Poor Richard, which I demonstrated on the piano, improvising a fugue-like break.

The producer, Bob Schwartz, loved it, but it was already published by another company. He said Gene Pitney was going into the studio in a few days… and he wanted something in the style I had demonstrated on the piano.

The next day I sat down with my lyricist, but we couldn't see eye to eye (or ear to ear) on anything that day. I already had most of the tune and the first verse of the lyric, but he didn't relate to it, and he wasn't coming up with anything either, so I finished it on my own and brought it to Bob the next day.

Bob said, “That's it!” and went on to bring in an arranger... Joe Scott to soup up the break and arrangement into this big orchestral sound. He billed it as 'symphonic rock' and the record was made about a week later.

Although he was quite excited about the finished product, Ed comments on the interpretation and arrangement:

I felt to a degree that the song was made too grandiose for what it was, and who Gene was as a song stylist. My feeling about the song was that it was a kind of chamber piece that first expressed the innocence and trust a young man had for his best friend, then the anger he felt when he discovered that both his friend and girlfriend had betrayed him.

Ed Goldman’s heart was in jazz and the classics, and for many years he played piano around the New York area before returning to Juilliard in the 90s to study composition and orchestration. He has written music for TV soap operas and advertising jingles, but he now concentrates on writing and recording in his home studio, putting down all the parts himself - and he still writes his own lyrics. Ed’s current projects include a Broadway show, a CD of his own songs, and recordings of classical piano pieces including his own compositions.

On the uniqueness of Billy You’re My Friend, Ed comments:

My approach to that song, and most of those I wrote, was to be true to what the song itself seemed to want to say, even if I sometimes had to transcend pop songwriting conventions to do so. This is what I believe gave the song its individualistic flavour.

As a compulsive reader of the small print on record labels, I can't tell you how satisfying it is to have heard from (E. Goldman) and to be able to write about him here.

Wikipedia

2007-10-20T08:48:00.001+10:00

This is a good article + discussion at Cognitive Daily that focuses in large part on Wikipedia's strengths and weaknesses: Is there really wisdom in crowds?

It helps explain why some Wikipedia articles are excellent while others are hopeless.

I can hardly bring myself to read many music articles at Wikipedia these days: I grab the trivia and run with it, check it somewhere else, but too many music entries are written by The Fan who has no idea about writing a reference article. The riposte to that is, "Why don't you edit it?" but I don't have the time or energy to be constantly cleaning up this stuff, especially when The Fan is likely to go back and mess it up again anyway.

Some excerpts from Cognitive Daily's discussion:

I think Wikipedia works pretty well when it is only discussing the dry technical details of some theory, such as the lambda calculus, because only those who actually know something about it will tend to contribute. It works less well when the subject is controversial.

The key is this: if only experts are interested in a topic, then they will be the only ones to contribute. But if the topic is of interest to those who know nothing about it, that's a situation ripe for bad Wikipedia articles.

and:

They say that while Wikipedia is fine for basic factual information you might find in a newspaper, when you get to the level of serious academic research, the information quality breaks down. ...

This is very true. It's particularly true in scientific areas where there are large, vocal, pseudoscientific activists. Autism is one area. Vaccination is another. Evolution, too. This results in "edit" wars, with activists trying to push their pseudoscience. In fact, this "selection" in Wikipedia actually can work against accuracy, because the "selective forces" (I.e., editors altering or correcting what they think to be incorrect or poorly stated information) tend to favor the cranks (creationists, quacks, Holocaust deniers, 9/11 conspiracy theorists, etc.), who tend to have a lot more time and passion to edit and create Wikipedia articles than those who would remove their dubious information have to correct them. An inherent admission of this problem comes in the form of how many Wikipedia articles tend to have moratoriums on new edits in these topics.

and

The worst part of Wikipedia's physics coverage, in my experience, has been the introductory stuff. The really knowledgeable people aren't interested in writing material at the high-school level, and it's easier to write about some facet of advanced mathematics than it is to organize a useful presentation of a topic like "force" or "energy".

I suspect that this may be contributing to the woes of your "physicist friend" and his misinformed students.

and

I'd be interested to know what kinds of physics errors the students are getting from Wikipedia, and as for the historian, does he know he can correct the errors?

These are busy people, with grants and book contracts. Why would they waste their time correcting something that will likely be "corrected" back by someone with fewer qualifications but more time than them?

That's my point about music articles, though I can't say it's "grants and book contracts" holding me back.

Obscure topics can also be a problem: for some little known musicians the Wikipedia article - and its writer - might be the only source on the planet, which makes peer review almost redundant, but any little clues are valuable when you're researching a difficult topic, and if I find them at Wikipedia I'm grateful, however much I have to proceed with caution.

In spite of misgivings and annoyances, Wikipedia is still often my first stop for basic information, and if I'm lucky I'll find some decent links to use as a springboard.

Reliability

2007-10-20T08:46:00.000+10:00

People who rail against the unreliability of Internet sources can make it sound as if before the Net we lived in a golden age when texts had been checked and rechecked before publication, all footnoted and referenced, and could be relied upon for their authority. (Books! With a capital "B"!)

In fact, amongst the millions (billions?) of books and journals and pamphlets printed before and since the Net there are plenty of dodgy sources, and we've always had writers and publishers who are sloppy or ignorant or just barking mad. We've always had to question our sources, whether it's in a Book or at a website. As my History lecturer said in our first tutorial, over thirty years ago (and it wouldn't have been an original thought), "When you pick up a book, the first thing you ask is, 'Who wrote it?' "

One positive thing about the Net is that a glaring mistake at a website won't stay there for long, provided the site is responsive to feedback, is frequently updated and has a reasonable amount of traffic. At my website (which satisfies those criteria), if I make even a small typographical error in someone's name I'll often get an email within days of posting the page and it can be fixed within minutes. (I'll still check that the correction is valid. Even in the case of spelling a name it's not always straightforward.)

By contrast, I have music reference books on my shelves that having glaring mistakes, but they'll stay there until the next edition of the book is published. That's if the book goes to another edition, and if someone has contacted the writer. In the past, that meant writing a letter, with a stamp, to the publisher. At least now you might be able to track down an email address and contact the author quickly, but it's still a more complicated and drawn-out process than clicking the Contact button at a website.

Only in Oz (8) Susan Christie - I Love Onions

2007-10-18T21:39:00.002+10:00

Another in my series of posts about tracks that charted in Australia but not in their countries of origin.

8. Susan Christie - I Love Onions
(Donald Cochrane - John Hill)
USA 1966
Columbia single (USA) #43595
CBS single (Australia) #BA-221298
Australian charts: #24 Melbourne

This is one of those songs that is remembered as a hit, and it may well have been in some neighbourhoods, but it was never a "hit" in the sense of making the Top 40 in the States, for example. I remember it because I was listening to Top 40 radio from Melbourne, the only major Australian city where it charted. Even then, it looms larger in my memory than #24.

Perhaps its reputation has something to do with its later appearance on collections of novelty songs, and it really is a novelty, with cute, screwy lyrics delivered in a breathy flapper's voice (or do I hear Marilyn Monroe?), backed by kazoo and tent show band. In the States, I Love Onions also became better known through the children's TV show Captain Kangaroo, which apparently gave it a good run.

There was a fair bit of this droll retro stuff around in the 60s. For some reason the jazz era was seen as a source of hilarity by some of the post-war generation, and there was a familiar line of ironic approximations of trad jazz, jugbands, Tin Pan Alley crooners and dancehall spruikers, a line that stretched at least from the Temperance Seven (You're Driving me Crazy, #1 UK 1961) to the New Vaudeville Band (Winchester Cathedral, #4 UK 1966) and beyond. Oh look: there was The Eggplant That Ate Chicago by Dr West's Medicine Show (1966), and Hello Hello by Sopwith Camel (#26 USA 1967).

You know the sort of thing I mean: slightly old fashioned music with its tongue in its cheek, and I usually adored it.

I don't know that there was ever a satisfying name for this tendency, but it was pervasive enough to be found in the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper - visually as much as musically - and in the op shop side of Swinging London fashions. The Beatles had quite a line of their own in retro schtick: the spoken intros to Honey Pie ("Now she's hit the bigtime...") and Magical Mystery Tour ("Roll up, roll up, step right this way.."), and whole songs like Your Mother Should Know and When I'm 64.

The 60s throwbacks were really a selective parody of the past, as if Rudy Vallee with a megaphone were the only singer from the old days. Anyone who actually explored the music of the pre-war years would have found a rich popular culture that easily matched the 60s for its innovation and influence. In the 60s we were entertained by a comic book version of the real 20s and 30s, lots of fun but a bit sloppy with its references.

About Susan Christie not a lot seems to be known. Some sources repeat the theory that she is the sister of Lou Christie, but I'm not convinced that this is true. She released an album in 1970, Paint A Lady, produced by John Hill who back in '66 had produced and co-written I Love Onions. Although Paint A Lady has been reissued by Finders Keepers Records Susan Christie has retained a low profile, as in no profile.

The notes on Paint A Lady at Finders Keepers are pretty much what you'll find around the Net. Bruce Eder at All Music Guide adds that Susan Christie, from Philadelphia, had been in a folk ensemble called The Highlanders and that she attended Boston's Berklee College of Music, but he also concedes that "she has been something of a mystery, as to her fate and career". The mp3 blog Weird, Obscure, Twisted & Bent includes the lyrics of I Love Onions.

Nothing at YouTube this time, although someone has posted Yesterday Where's My Mind? a 9-minute track from Paint A Lady. Don't get too excited: the video is mainly a shot of the album cover and some sepia artworks.
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Chart positions from Gavin Ryan's Australian chart books.

Only in Oz (7) Joe & Eddie - There's A Meetin' Here Tonite

2007-10-17T07:33:00.001+10:00

7. Joe & Eddie - There's a Meetin' Here Tonite
(Bob Gibson)
USA 1963
GNP Crescendo (USA) #195
GNP Crescendo album There's A Meetin' Here Tonite: Joe & Eddie In Concert
Vocalion single (EMI Australia) #V-1001
Australian charts: #4 Melbourne #1 Adelaide

I'd have sworn that this foot-stomper, this stirring rally to worship, was a genuine piece of meetinghouse gospel.

Then I followed the songwriter credit to the influential folk popularizer Bob Gibson. His 1958 original version turns out to be more in the hootenanny neighbourhood, a mainstream folk song with banjo accompaniment. Still, all credit to Gibson as writer, and to whoever saw that it could be reworked for Joe & Eddie in this way.

Joe & Eddie were Joe Gilbert and Eddie Brown. They recorded for Capitol and then for GNP Crescendo, where they issued several LPs before Joe's accidental death in 1966. Eddie Brown is still around, as a performer and producer, and he has a website at Joe&Eddie.com.

I'm surprised that There's a Meetin' Here Tonite wasn't a hit in the USA. At least where it did chart in Australia it was quite a hit. It charted in Melbourne (my neck of the woods) in May 1964, at the height of Beatle craziness. I remember the folkies at my school championing its cause over the likes of the Beatles ("This is real music!"), but even to a Brit Invasion fanatic like myself it was a fine record indeed.

A sidelight: In the early 70s, when two ex-Turtles emerged as Flo & Eddie, I assumed the name was a take on Joe & Eddie, something I can't now confirm. Perhaps it was just a nice coincidence: it had initially been The Phlorescent Leech & Eddie.

~~Someone has posted a nice clear video of There's a Meetin' Here Tonite at YouTube, where these days it seems you can find just about any song you search for.~~

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Chart positions from Gavin Ryan's Australian chart books.

More lifted tributes

2007-10-13T08:55:00.002+10:00

~~Lachie's Lifted Tribute site, where he spotlights musical soundalikes, has a bunch of updates, including a possible musical echo of The Angels' Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again.~~

A highlight is his list of silent pieces that came before and after John Cage's 4' 33" (1952). I'd heard about (but didn't entirely believe in) the suit against Mike Batt for copying Cage's silence, and I'd recently seen a silent piece being staged on TV, a tired and unoriginal musical joke that the studio audience nevertheless found hilarious. I didn't realise, though, that it can be traced back to 1884 and Alphonse Allais's Funeral March for an Illustrious Deaf Man, and there was a further pre-Cage example in 1919 by dadaist Erwin Schulhoff.

Lachie's main source is A Better Silence, a great article at Tux Deluxe that goes into the history of the silent work, including details of Mike Batt's (real) trouble with Cage's people.

Only in Oz* (6) Nick Lampe - Flower Garden

2007-10-12T08:54:00.008+10:00

6. Nick Lampe - Flower Garden
(Nick Lampe)
USA 1969
Cotillion single (USA) #44066
Cotillion album It Happened Long Ago
Atlantic single (Australia) #3740
Australian charts: #16 Melbourne #54 Go-Set Magazine

I've already written about Nick Lampe and Flower Garden in detail so I won't go over old ground. In fact, a Google search for "Nick Lampe" will usually give you this very blog at the top of the results.

~~Robert Thompson, Australia's no, the world's most dedicated Nick Lampe fan, has alerted me to a rare video of Flower Garden, at YouTube.~~ No longer available 11/08. See here for substitute. Update 06/09: The video of Nick has reappeared here, but the previous "slideshow" version has better quality audio.

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Chart positions from Gavin Ryan's Australian chart books and Barry McKay's Go-Set chart collection.

*Did I say only in Oz? For an example of a regional US entry, see the WLAV Grand Rapids chart at Airheads Radio Survey Archive: #17 on 14 August 1970, Previous Week #9.

Only in Oz (5) Gene Pitney - Billy You're My Friend

2007-09-21T08:18:00.001+10:00

5. Gene Pitney - Billy You're My Friend
(Edward Louis Goldman)
USA 1968
Musicor single #51331.
CBS (Australia) single #BA-152275.
Australian charts: #13 Melbourne, #24 Brisbane,
#13 Adelaide.

Gene Pitney's lesser known song Billy You're My Friend (1968) is like a slice of opera, with mood swings from lightheartedness to anguish, pumped up by ersatz classical orchestration and pointed tempo changes.

I've sneaked it into Only in Oz, my random list of songs that were hits in Australia but not in their home countries. True, it wasn't a national hit in the USA or Britain, but it was hardly a hit down here either: #13 in Melbourne, #24 in Brisbane, #13 in Adelaide, and #32 on Go-Set Magazine's national chart.

In fact, we can see five examples of Billy You're My Friend charting modestly in US cities, on charts posted at the Airheads Radio Survey Archive: Bakersfield CA (#43), Allentown PA (#36), Saint Charles MO (#13), Springfield MA (#51), Wilkes-Barre PA (#39) and New Haven CT (#15).

No doubt there were other cities, not enough to turn it into a national hit but enough to get it to #92 on both Billboard and Cash Box. Not enough, either, to get it onto your average Gene Pitney Best of collection.

The writer is listed at BMI as Edward Louis Goldman, about whom I can find nothing. (Eddy Goldman? Ted Goldman?) His modest repertoire at BMI includes some cues for Another World, which I take to be the TV soap opera. [I've since heard from Ed Goldman: see my update of 20 October about the writing of Billy You're My Friend.]

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Australian chart positions from Gavin Ryan's Australian chart books and Barry McKay's Go-Set chart collection.
US charts: Charts at Airheads Radio Survey Archive from October-December 1968 for KAFY Bakersfield CA, WAEB Allentown PA, KIRL St Charles Missouri, WHYN Springfield MA, WARM Wilkes-Barre PA, and WAVZ New Haven CT. Billboard chart positions at AMG; Randy Price's Cash Box charts site.

Only in Oz (3) Cliff Richard - Just Another Guy and (4) Cliff Richard - Angel

2007-09-18T18:57:00.002+10:00

Two more songs that charted in Australia but not in their home country. Their origins are more straightforward than examples (1) and (2).

3. Cliff Richard - Just Another Guy
(Neil Diamond)
UK 1965 (recorded in USA 1964)
Columbia single #DB 7496.
Australian charts: #5 Melbourne, #2 Brisbane,
#4 Perth (all with the A-side The Minute You're Gone)

4. Cliff Richard - Angel
(Sid Tepper-Roy Bennett)
UK 1965 (recorded in USA 1964)
Columbia album Cliff Richard, #SX 1709;
Columbia single #DC 762.
Australian charts: #6 Melbourne, #9 Sydney, #4 Brisbane,
#8 Adelaide #3 Perth.

On the British Top 40 charts you won't find either of these among the dozens of Cliff Richard hits. You will find the A-side of Just Another Guy, the #1 hit The Minute You're Gone, in March 1965. It was followed by On My Word in June, but on the Australian charts Angel is squeezed in between The Minute You're Gone/Just Another Guy and On My Word.

The name Neil Diamond might jump out at you here, as the writer of Just Another Guy. Cliff recorded this a couple of years before Neil Diamond charted with his own Cherry Cherry (#6 US) and with his composition I'm A Believer by The Monkees (#1 US), both in 1966.

Angel was written by Sid Tepper and Roy Bennett, veteran American songwriters who had written earlier hits for Cliff, including the #1s Travellin' Light and Please Don't Tease. They also wrote a lot of songs for Elvis Presley movies, including Angel: Elvis's was the original version, in Follow That Dream (1962).

Cliff recorded both Just Another Guy and Angel in Nashville in 1964, produced by Bob Morgan & Billy Sherrill, with backing by The Jordanaires of Elvis fame. Co-producer Billy Sherrill is a notable Country producer, A&R man and songwriter best known for his career-building work at Epic in Nashville with Tammy Wynette and Charlie Rich . His co-writer credits include Wynette's Stand By Your Man (1968) and Rich's The Most Beautiful Girl (1973).

Just Another Guy and Angel are two of my favourite Cliff Richard songs, well-written pop songs with crisp, rhythmic arrangements and high quality production.

This was during a period in the mid-60s when Cliff showed that he was no relic from the pre-Fab era by recording some up-to-date pop records that are among his finest. Also from this period are I Could Easily Fall (written by The Shadows, December 1964, #6 UK), The Time in Between (August 1965, #22 UK) and Blue Turns to Grey, a Mick Jagger-Keith Richards composition (March 1966, #15 UK), all of which move forward from Cliff's sound of the late-50s and early 60s.

An Australian footnote: Western Australian band The Times released a rearranged, guitar-based version of Just Another Guy in November 1965.

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Chart positions from Gavin Ryan's Australian chart books.

References: For details of these songs and their sessions, see the excellent Cliff Richard Song Database, which tells us that Angel as a single was intended for foreign distribution. Searching for the song titles at PopMusicInfo.com also throws up some useful release histories and other data.

Only in Oz (2) P.J. Proby - Mission Bell

2007-09-11T17:05:00.012+10:00

Another record that was a hit in Australia but not in its country of origin. More at Only in Oz (1).

2. P.J. Proby - Mission Bell
(William Michael-Jesse Hodges et al)
UK 1965
Liberty album (UK) P.J.Proby, #LBY 1264;
Liberty single (USA Australia) #55791.
Australian charts: #3 Melbourne, #7 Sydney, #4 Brisbane,
#2 Adelaide #3 Perth.

This rearrangement of a #7 US hit from 1960 is a jawdropper, especially if you're familiar with the pleasant but unremarkable original by Donnie Brooks. This is the quintessential example of a remake transforming the original and overshadowing it.

An expansive, dramatic recording, with soaring strings and brass orchestration, and an urgent, soulful female chorus, Mission Bell was produced in London by Ron Richards during P.J. Proby's mid-60s sojourn in the UK.

Born James Marcus Smith in Houston in 1938, P.J. Proby was more popular in the UK and Australia than he was back home in the US. In the UK he had ten Top 40 hits 1964-68 (including three in the Top 10), but in the USA Niki Hoeky was his only Billboard Top 40 record, at #23 (1967).

Mission Bell was one of Proby's biggest hits in Australia, but it remained an album track in the UK and the single didn't chart nationally in the US.

P.J. Proby's career was plagued by poor judgment and overexcited media attention of the worst kind: in Australia he became a figure of fun, sent up in Oz Magazine ("Probe me, P.J., probe me!").

Nevertheless, he often had the benefit of top notch producers, arrangers and songwriters, and his rich, idiosyncratically delivered baritone could rise to the occasion and produce the odd pop gem.

As well as Mission Bell, Ron Richards produced some of Proby's better-known records:

his mannered hit versions of Maria and Somewhere from West Side Story;
That Means A Lot, a Song The Beatles Gave Away, arranged & conducted by George Martin;

and such overlooked delights as:

Just Like Him, an exquisite Jacki DeShannon song to be discovered on the B-side of Somewhere; and
To Make A Big Man Cry, written by Pete Callander and Les Reed and delivered relatively straight by Proby in the style of the big-production ballad of the day (no surprise that it was also recorded by Tom Jones).

An EMI producer and A&R man, Ron Richards is best known for having signed The Hollies and for producing their biggest hits. He was also in on the earliest Beatles sessions at Abbey Road.

The unsung hero of Proby's Mission Bell is the arranger, who is uncredited on the record. Of all the unsung heroes of pop music, arrangers are even more overlooked than producers and songwriters (at least some of them have become famous names) and yet many a great pop record owes its greatness to its arrangement.

Naming the writers of Mission Bell isn't straightforward. William Michael is often credited alone as the writer (on the original Donnie Brooks label and on the US copyright), but Jesse Hodges also appears in some places (at BMI, for example) and there were contributions by others along the way.

William Michael had a day job in stockbroking. He submitted his original version of Mission Bell - then called Wishing Well - to Jesse Hodges, whose speciality was to quickly and economically work up and record songs by semi-professional or amateur writers. (In fact, we're just about into song-poem territory with Mission Bell.)

Hodges was a songwriter, producer, arranger and singer, an associate of Donnie Brooks since their days at the Fable label in the late 50s when Donnie was still known as as Johnny Faire.

Quoting Brooks, Greg Adams writes that Mission Bell was an example of how Hodges "would take songs, horrible songs by these amateur writers and rewrite them into something recordable."¹

Gary Myers, who interviewed Donnie Brooks in the late 70s, mentions contributions to the rewrite by Dorsey Burnette (whose Tall Oak Tree is alluded to in the final version), guitarist Scotty Turnbull, and probably the songwriter John Marascalco.² Howard Thomason, at Rockabilly Hall of Fame, has Donnie Brooks and Herb Newman of Era Records also contributing.

William Michael, the stockbroking songwriter, has 24 compositions listed at BMI. Wishing Well was extensively rewritten on its way to becoming Mission Bell but he was keen to have his name on the song, no matter what rewrites and percentages were involved. Can't blame him, really.

One more thing: there was a connection between P.J. Proby and the original version of Mission Bell. Before he was brought to the UK by pop TV producer Jack Good, Proby had worked around Hollywood for years, acting a little, writing songs, recording demos for Elvis, and making records under other names (Jett Powers, Orville Woods). Spencer Leigh, in The Independent's 2007 obituary of Donnie Brooks, writes:

In 1960, Brooks scored with Mission Bell, which included a jokey reference to Dorsey Burnette's hit Tall Oak Tree.
P.J. Proby had first met Brooks two years earlier, on a radio show in Hollywood. "We hung around with the same gang," Proby recalls, "the Hollywood Brat Pack of its day, which included Ricky Nelson, Johnny Burnette, Eddie Cochran and Sharon Sheeley. I liked Mission Bell very much and, when I did it myself, my version got to No 1 in Australia. Donnie said to me, 'How can you do this to me, Jim?' "

Let's not be picky: maybe it wasn't quite a #1 in all of those collections of radio playlists we like to call the Aussie charts, but for some of us down here it's still #1 in our hearts.

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Recommended reading:

Nik Cohn devoted a chapter to P.J. Proby in Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom (1969):

He was intuitive, fast, hysterical, paranoid, generous, very funny, hugely imaginative, original, self-obsessed, self-destructive, often impossible, just about irresistible and much more besides. Truly, he was complicated. (p.196)

Michael Lane Heath has a Proby appreciation and history at Perfect Sound Forever, Get Hip to My Conflagration:

...take the most outrageous, profligate, American loud-hearted-unto-operatic attitude, pour it into the hip-swing shing-a-ling of a Presley-shaped vessel, dress it up in Errol Flynn/Captain Blood pony-tailed pirate drag, multiply it by a thousand... and you still don't approach the maximum velocity of P.J. Proby.

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Chart positions from Gavin Ryan's Australian chart books.

1 Liner notes to Hard To Find 45s on CD, Vol. 10 (Eric, 2007), cited by S.J. Dibai, post to Spectropop Group #40745, 12 September 2007.
2 Gary Myers, post to Spectropop Group #40742, 12 September 2007. See also post #40773, 14 September 2007 Re: quasi-legit song publishers by Phil Milstein, who has also given me further background on Mission Bell.

Only in Oz (1) Acker Bilk - The Harem

2007-09-08T15:13:00.007+10:00

These are records that were hits in Australia but not in Britain or the USA where they originated. They're not Australian records, but they took the fancy of someone at an Australian radio station, got some airplay, and climbed the Aussie charts while remaining obscure in their home countries. More than this, they're records that could have been hits anywhere, they were good enough, but this was not to be.

1. Acker Bilk and his Paramount Jazz Band - The Harem
(Dorothy Hodas-Mack Wolfson-Eddie Cooper)
UK 1963 Columbia single #DB7129.
Australia 1963 Columbia single #DO4447
Australian charts: #2 Melbourne, #4 Sydney, #3 Adelaide.

I wrote about The Harem earlier, in connection with Time-out Instrumentals. Then, I said it was a standout amongst Acker Bilk's recordings, a stirring, whirling, percussive instro that builds to a climax.

This track is a bit of a mystery, not least because it is an outstanding instrumental by a popular artist that unaccountably failed to make the same splash on the British charts as it did in Australia.

Acker Bilk had ten Top 40 hits in the UK between 1960 and 1963, but this wasn't one of them. His Stranger On The Shore was a big hit everywhere (#2 UK, #1 USA) and he was popular in the MOR instrumental market. The odd thing is, Acker Bilk's countless albums and reissues have never been hard to find in the bargain bins, but I've never found The Harem on any of them.

The Harem is an American composition, copyrighted in the US in March 1963. The 1963 single of The Harem by Don Costa and his Orchestra on US Columbia #42705 is the same work, and may well be the original version. (On the other hand, the B-side is Jerry Lordan's Diamonds, a UK hit for Jet Harris & Tony Meehan, suggesting Costa might've been doing a double-sided cover of UK instrumentals.)

We do know something about the writers' other works, thanks in part to ASCAP's database:

Mack Wolfson (aka Maxwell A. Wolfson) built up a fair repertoire in the 50s and 60s. He often wrote with the prolific Tin Pan Alley composer Eddie White (Edward R. White)*, for example on Happiness Street (Corner Sunshine Square), recorded by Georgia Gibbs and Tony Bennett (both versions charted in 1956); C'est La Vie, a much-recorded song that was a #11 hit for Sarah Vaughan in 1955; Crazy Otto Rag by Johnnie 'Crazy Otto' Maddox, a co-write with the famous Hugo & Luigi that was heard in the film Reds; and Smarty Pants, on disco group First Choice's 1973 debut album.

Eddie Cooper, not so prolific, also wrote with Eddie White: of his 13 compositions at ASCAP, 6 were co-writes with White. (There are 4 additional Eddie Cooper songs listed at BMI.)

Dorothy Hodas (full name Dorothy Gertrude Hodas) has only one other song in her ASCAP repertoire, Love Of My Life, and that was written with Mack Wolfson and, yes, Eddie White.

The Harem could be a faux-Eastern genre piece, but it sounds as if it could be based on a folk tune. I believe I hear something reminiscent of Hava Nagila.

(UPDATE: See the comment below from Anonymous who suggests the Turkish song Usku Dara as a source. Listen to Eartha Kitt's famous version at Youtube.)

ASCAP shows an alternative title, The Harem: Schoene Geschic, which may or may not be a clue. Could Geschic be a database truncation of Geschichte? Schoene Geschicte means Beautiful Story.

There are at least two 1960s guitar versions of The Harem, by Rotterdam instrumental group The Explosions (1964), and by New Zealand guitarist Graeme Bartlett, better known as Gray Bartlett (1963 or 64).

Acker Bilk & His Paramount Jazz Band - The Harem.mp3

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Chart positions from Gavin Ryan's Australian chart books.

*Could this be the same Edward R. (Eddie) White (1919-1996), a New Yorker listed at IMDb in some bit parts?

Dutch sleeveshot from plaatzegel.nl.

Buffalo Tom - Dry Land

2007-09-01T20:35:00.000+10:00

Dry Land is on Big Red Letter Day, the 1993 album by Boston band Buffalo Tom. I've listened to it too many times today so I'm gonna quit before I spoil it forever.

Like some other great pop songs, it manages to convey both joy and regret, with lyrics that seem to be about someone's real life without spelling it all out. There are chiming guitars and a full-ahead beat that remind me of a couple of other bands of the day, but I won't say which because I hate doing that to musicians.

Dry Land is the kind of song that makes me want to quit my job, pick up a guitar, and play in a rock'n'roll band.

Okay, I'm listening one more time tonight, and that's it.

Music in the lab

2007-09-01T11:47:00.000+10:00

Music Matters is a blog by Henkjan Honing about music cognition. It looks at music from a scientific point of view, something that instinctively sounds off-putting to me, but this is so interesting, so full of variety, that I couldn't resist reading on. Also, this guy is clearly a music enthusiast, not just a clinical analyst, and his writing is accessible. (I found it via the excellent Cognitive Daily.)

Some recent posts:

Why do people sing so shamelessly out of tune?
When somebody sings out of tune, we might infer that he or she has no talent for music. That is of course a misunderstanding...

A 2006 recording of Glenn Gould?
The recording was made using measurements of the old recordings and then regenerating the performance on a computer-controlled grand piano, a modern pianola.

Why does it sound slow?
We know that it is not simply the number of notes (or event-rate) that defines a listeners impression of tempo. There are quite a few musical examples that have a lot of notes but that are generally judged to have a slow tempo (e.g, Javanese gamelan music).

Is it a male or female performer?
This week an interesting new web-based experiment... Can listeners determine the gender of the performer on the basis of a recording? Do the experiment by clicking....

Associate Professor Honing is head of the University of Amsterdam's Music Cognition Group. As his CV explains: He conducts research in music cognition, with a special focus on the temporal aspects of music (such as rhythm, timing, and tempo), using theoretical, empirical and computational methods.

Anyone who writes (and, like me, neglects) a blog can sympathise with this post from 30 July last year:

Yet Another blog?
Still wondering —on a Sunday afternoon at home— whether yet another blog is of any use.

Henkjan, my answer in your case is a loud Yes.

The Blue Ridge Mountain Dancers

2007-05-15T13:45:00.005+10:00

You never know what will pop up on that overlooked miscellany ABC2, the ABC's digital TV channel.

Last night they showed Festival, Murray Lerner's 1967 documentary about the Newport Folk Festival 1963-1966. It's a bit like a black-and-white Jazz on a Summer's Day. (In one sense especially: the crowd shots stay in the mind as much as the music.)

Every minute of it is full of interest, and everybody seems to be there: Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Odetta, Buffy Sainte-Marie. Peter Paul & Mary. Howlin' Wolf, and Son House, Dylan going electric. Bluegrass bands, jugbands, kids in the parking lot with home-made instruments. A marvellous old-time gospel choir called the Sacred Harp Singers.

But I wasn't prepared for this joyous slice of Americana. It's perfect: no commentary needed, just press Play... The Blue Ridge Mountain Dancers at YouTube

Beyond the Yarra: Johnny Broome & the Handels

2007-05-06T21:43:00.000+10:00

I had an email from Michael who wondered why there is no mention at the website of mid-60s Adelaide band Johnny Broome & The Handels, also known as The Handel.

It's a good question, and I had no ready answers except that I don't set out to mention every one of the 4,003,221 bands in the history of Australian pop music, and that the site is really about songs and not bands. I could've mentioned the demands of the day job, but I didn't want to sound pathetic.

Michael's real point, though, was that browsing Aussie websites might give the impression that, as he put it, "Australia stops at the Yarra".

On reflection, the history of Aussie pop music does seem to be East Coast-centric. (And Mainland-centric: a Tasmanian once asked me why I had omitted some key Hobart bands. I ended up writing about The Kravats, but in the end I couldn't find out much about the 60s scene in Hobart.)

The South Australian artists mentioned at the site - Bev Harrell, The Vibrants, Drummond - are there because they moved east and had hits outside of South Australia.

In a way, that answers the question: the pull of bigger markets worked on the artists themselves and that's how they wrote themselves into the broader histories of Aussie pop music. The same would be true of such Western Australians as Johnny Young and Robbie Snowden who - even when they recorded at home for Clarion - had an eye on the Eastern states and ended up moving there.

On the other hand, it's easy to see why somebody from Adelaide could be dismayed that a seminal local band had been overlooked, especially (as Michael says) a very progressive band that was one of the best live shows around and finally went to the UK off their own bat before the Twilights.

Not only that, but the band's line-up was a distinguished one. The Handels' bassist Alan Tarney was later in the James Taylor Move and the Tarney-Spencer Band. After that, he was with The Shadows for a while, and he wrote and produced for Cliff Richard and wrote and played for Olivia Newton-John. Laurie Pryor, the drummer, famously joined The Twilights, and later played with Healing Force, Genesis (Oz) and Chain. Guitarist Kevin Peek had been in the original Twilights line-up and later joined James Taylor Move, but he is best known for being in the pop-classical fusion group Sky with John Williams.

As for Johnny Broome, his name was actually Dave Parsons and he went on to produce The Vibrants, among others.

As it turned out, I had an airtight excuse for omitting The Handels, because I discovered that both sides of their only single, Didn't Know Her Name/Dos and Don'ts (1965, on W&G) were originals, written by Tarney, and the main focus of my site is on non-original songs and their sources.

Never mind: in a second email Michael listed several Adelaide bands whose songs might lend themselves to song histories at PopArchives: Buffalo Drive, The Hergs, The Midnights, The Mystics, The In-sect and The Why Four. (By now I was starting to think that Michael might actually be from Adelaide himself.)

So, then: one point of this post is to give me an excuse to mention Johnny Broome and The Handels. The band name alone is a classic, and so is the title of The In-Sect's album: In-Sect-A-Sides.

PopArchives: The Blog

The Morning Crew

New site about Toowoomba's Chapter III and Peter Wright

5KA Adelaide: 1968 airchecks

"The Music Goes Round my Head"

Barbara Lynn - It's Better To Have It

The Town & Country Brothers: the definitive account

Only in Oz (14) The Town & Country Brothers - Sandy, Sandy

Thane Russal

Lee Haig

Bob Carmichael at 3NE Wangaratta

"Frank Avis's Memoirs of 42 Years in Radio"

2QN Deniliquin

John Pearce at 3SH Swan Hill

Boofhead book, 1945

Only in Oz (13) Buzz Cason - Adam And Eve

Drift magazine cover, 1967

Only in Oz (12) Bill Justis - Tamoure

1960s promotional cards by EMI (Australia)

Chucklers Weekly (5): the small print

Chucklers Weekly (4): Charlie Chuckles Club

Chucklers Weekly (3): Pat Boone, Bob Rogers and make a book cover!

Chucklers Weekly (2): comics

Chucklers Weekly (1)

Percy Leason in the USA

The Vacant Lot

Percy Leason: "Back from the education conference..."

Principals wake up in new millennium!

Mike Stoller on the SS Andrea Doria

Only in Oz (11) Bulldog - No

"Obtain a shot of rhythm & blues," he demanded.

A dream about the song APunk by Vampire Weekend

Trini Lopez - Up to Now: update

Top 3 amusing go-go videos

The Juanita Banana phenomenon

Home of Gulch Radio

Gulch Radio (Ghost Town Radio)

Ah, Barbara Lynn..!

Barbara Lynn Ozen 1966

Not even in Oz: Trini Lopez - Up To Now

Tommy Cooper's magic cloak

Only in Oz (10) Julie London - I'm Coming Back To You

Only in Oz (9) Roger Roger & his Champs Elysées Orchestra - Dalilia

End of Year Mystery Roundup (2) Cold Cases

End of Year Mystery Roundup (1) Solved

Ah, that Robinson Crusoe theme!

Close 'N Play!

Plugging Transport

You study 'em hard and hopin' to pass...

That's our lad!

Is 128kbps good enough for an mp3?

Yesterday's Cake, Eddie White's autobiography

Eddie White, songwriter and actor

Are you a hippy?

The small print: Ed Goldman, writer of Billy You're My Friend

Wikipedia

Reliability

Only in Oz (8) Susan Christie - I Love Onions

Only in Oz (7) Joe & Eddie - There's A Meetin' Here Tonite

More lifted tributes

Only in Oz* (6) Nick Lampe - Flower Garden

Only in Oz (5) Gene Pitney - Billy You're My Friend

Only in Oz (3) Cliff Richard - Just Another Guy and (4) Cliff Richard - Angel

Only in Oz (2) P.J. Proby - Mission Bell

Only in Oz (1) Acker Bilk - The Harem

Buffalo Tom - Dry Land

Music in the lab

The Blue Ridge Mountain Dancers

Beyond the Yarra: Johnny Broome & the Handels