Cicadas and Flies: Bizarro Merseybeat World Down Under

Earlier, I wrote about the phenomenon I like to call Bizarro Shadows World Down Under. When it became unfashionable to emulate the Shads and The Ventures, bands in Australia (and they weren't the only ones around the world) caught the Merseybeat bug.

Here, Sydney musician and researcher Terry Stacey discusses Sydney band The Cicadas (pictured) in that context:

The Cicadas were one of the first of Australia's bands to be influenced by The Beatles. Other early Beatle bands were Melbourne's Flies (which gave the world Ronnie Burns), Sydney's Rajahs, who had transformed themselves from 50s rocker Dig Richard's backing band, The R'jays, by putting on Beatle wigs and turbans, and The D-Men, whose main claims to fame were that they were the first resident band at Sydney's first disco, Beatle Village, and came from the Sydney suburb of Liverpool (their lead singer Freddie Cooke later migrated to Melbourne, joined The Vibrants and changed his name to Marc Leon).

The Cicadas, formed in 1963, were originally an MOR band doing TV variety shows under the name The Hi-Fi’s until the Merseybeat boom arrived. They signed to RCA and released their first and most successful single, the Carter-Lewis song That's What I Want in 1964.

This had been a minor hit for UK band The Marauders in 1963 and, unusually, they covered both sides of the Marauders single, the flipside being Hey Wha' D'Ya Say, for their own single.

They then put out a second single, written by veteran rocker, then RCA's A & R manager, Johnny Devlin, with a similar Beatles title, I Need You. This was a minor hit in Sydney.

After a further, unsuccessful, single, a cover of another Marauders single, Carter-Lewis's Always on My Mind, they relocated to the UK and changed their name to The Gibsons. They released a number of singles on various labels there, including the catchy The Magic Book (rated elsewhere as one of 1966's better singles).

Although they outlasted their Beatle boom contemporaries back in Australia, none of their singles was successful. They put out their last single in 1967.

(Contributed)

The Lampe File

Since posting about the elusive Nicholas (aka Nick) Lampe I've had an email from Robert Thompson in Melbourne who has been trying to research the 70s singer-songwriter for some
time. He has contacted several personnel from the album, but they all say they lost contact in the 70s. One said Nicholas Lampe was working as a social worker on the East Coast in the 70s.

I posted a question to the Spectropop Group without any response, and there's usually somebody there who can answer just about anything.

It sounds as if Nicholas Lampe may've done a J.D. Salinger: as Robert points out, he might've just turned his back on the music business and chosen to be left alone. That sounds likely, and I guess that's as much as we can add to the Lampe file for now.

(Update: See At Last: The Nick Lampe Story.)

Shelley Pinz (Rochelle Pinz)

A first cousin of Shelley Pinz emailed last week to tell me more about the New York songwriter, poet and psychotherapist, born in 1944, who died last year.

As a songwriter Shelley Pinz is probably best known for the Lemon Pipers' 1968 hit Green Tambourine, written with her frequent collaborator Paul Leka. They wrote some follow-ups in a similar vein, including Rice Is Nice, Jelly Jungle (Of Orange Marmalade) and Pink Lemonade. This was was when Pinz and Leka were writing pop songs for Buddah, the Kama Sutra label's spin-off, and they continued writing together into the 70s.

In Australia, two other Shelley Pinz songs surfaced through local cover versions in 1968. She and Paul Leka also wrote You Are The One I Love, originally by Adam's Apples [listen], covered here by The Groove, and she co-wrote Happy Without You (this time with Kenny Laguna), originally by The Sound Judgment [listen] but remembered in Australia as a classic oldie by The Strangers. Both songs charted in Melbourne - the base city of both bands - and in Brisbane.

As Rochelle Pinz (using her full given name), Shelley Pinz was a psychotherapist specialising in the use of music, art and poetry. She held a Masters degree in social work, and in the late 90s she published a volume of poetry and lyrics, Courage to Think. WoodstockLive has some notes about this (although the audio link didn't work for me).

The best account I’ve found about Shelley Pinz the songwriter is in her own words from 1999 at StocksandNews.com (archived page), where she recalls how she got into the business while she was still a poetry-writing college student.

She tells about the inspiration for Green Tambourine, just before meeting with Paul Leka in the Brill Building precinct of New York:

In early Spring, 1966, while standing in front of the Brill Building I watched a man holding a tambourine begging for money. I wrote a poem about him and called the poem, 'Green Tambourine.' I added it to my lyric collection…. Sometimes I wonder what happened to the man in front of the Brill Building, holding a tambourine begging for money. I remember writing the lyric, ‘watch the jingle jangle start to shine, reflections of the music that is mine. When you toss a coin you'll hear it sing. Now listen while I play my Green Tambourine’ as if it were yesterday..; in the 60s, on the streets between Seventh Avenue and Broadway there was a magic one could only imagine.

Green Tambourine was a worldwide hit (#1 USA, Top 10 UK & Australia, #3 NZ), but Happy Without You and You Are The One I Love would be better known in Australia than in the US. The American originals are obscurities, although the Adam's Apples recording of You Are The One I Love has been given new currency by the Northern Soul movement.

Shelley Pinz is listed at BMI under four variations of her given name: Rochelle, Shelley, Shelly and Chele, but ‘Shelley’ seems to be the preferred spelling as a songwriting credit.

---

Update 7 March 2020:
Essential reading!
JCM, another friend of Rochelle 'Shelley' Pinz, has emailed his memories of her:

❝ I was in my mid teens in Atlantic beach when i and a friend met 'Shelley' ..we would shovel her snow & she'd invite us in and make us herbal tea. Some days, we'd stop by & say hello, she'd make us tea.. we were kids...to me, why not? I came from an abusive home and was out on streets most days/nights alone...i had music in my blood from early on and was just getting really into guitar and sound engineering (i was head audio visual student tech in hs by this time). She had even showed me her early patent designs for some really innovative electronic musical devices/interfaces way before they came into what we would probably refer to today as our DAWs. She was ahead of her time too. On some occasions, i'd go knock on her door during the day or even evening and she would invite me in and she knew i loved music and had ambitions and she'd let me noodle on her guitar and piano and we'd talk music and my dreams of becoming a musician, songwriter, and have my own studio someday. Just for me, she took me out for a surprise one night; i mustve been 17ish... i wont lie, she was the most BEAUTIFUL woman i ever saw ..secret crush on her i always had! She had the warmest face, the loveliest smile; i can still see it. Oh, the surprise, she took me to my first REAL recording studio! I was floored! I got the bug! Another time, we went to a friend of hers in the west end of long beach who had a recording studio...she told me to bring my guitar, which was an ovation deacon/breadwinner that i still have and play. I played as best i could then on a song part and left it at that. I was a nervous wreck then and didnt know nothing but loud and distortion. I have many fond memories of her; she asked to call her Rochelle. rather than her professional name(s). I know she had pictures of me shoveling her snow and some other in warmer times. i moved out on my own at 19 and sadly lost touch. When i finally did try and find her, i think she had moved by that point in time. As i grew up, becoming an audio visual engineer, sound engineer, multi instrumentalist, leader of my own long island hard rock band, i tried to find Rochelle. To no avail. Gave up looking. Then my day job was a computer engineer and the internet and this thing called a search engine came into being! Some time later, still involved with music, i looked for Rochelle again; this time, I succeeded, but sadly, the reply i got was that she had passed on. I CRIED.. she was SO KIND to me. Those years earlier, she told me what she saw, to keep going and never give up. I never gave up. I went searching for her to thank her, to show her what I became. Now with my own recording studio and putting out my own music. During a recent mixing/mastering session on a song, one that i put everything into, i dont know why, but at some final moment of working on this song, at the end of it, in a brief spot at the end, i just blurted out, in song voice, jubilantly, 'I DID IT'. It stayed in the recording. When that moment happened, I couldnt help but think of how proud Rochelle would have been to see what became of me. the song has nothing to do with her or about her; its actually a warewolf song. But i was so proud of hearing it when it was finished that i put in the songs liner notes, 'For R.Pinz, thank you'. I wish i could thank her, see her smile again, that beautiful glowing face. I'd blush like the teenage love struck boy i was in 1976/77. If I could, Id have said, 'Thank you Rochelle for inviting me into your home, inspiring me so much; I always wanted to let you know how much those little things you did musically for me set me on my musical journey. You never knew how important those times were to me; they were EVERYTHING.' I miss you. I wish i had a picture of her for my studio. If anyone ever comes here, if you have any pictures of her, please contact me. NO, i'm not a loon, she was very pivotal to my future and would like a picture of her for my studio wall because one should be hanging in it; I owe it to her memory.

Thank you Rochelle,

JCM ❞

---

Adam's Apples - You Are The One I Love.mp3

The Sound Judgment - Happy Without You.mp3

Label scan from Margaret G. Still, thank you.

Nail that original!

I can’t explain this obsession some of us have about tracking down the original version of every song ever recorded in the universe or, in my case, Australia. Either you get it or you don’t: maybe Arnold Rypens would have a better idea. But here are four rules of song history that I’ve learnt along the way:

1. After you nail an original, wait: someone, some day, will email you with an earlier version.

2. Ask the singer, producer or songwriter for information, but don't be surprised if they turn out to be wrong.

3. There's a bloke in Belgium or Finland who knows more about this stuff than Australia's Rock Brain of the Universe.

4. If you've dug up a really obscure original version of a well-known song, don't expect friends, family, neighbours or the guy at the post office to get excited about it or even understand why you bothered in the first place.

(Also on the About page.)

I've Been Everywhere: the penny drops

I may have discovered why there is currently so much interest in I've Been Everywhere, making it one of the most visited features at PopArchives.com.au.

The 1996 Johnny Cash version is being used in the US in advertisements for Choice Hotels. If you Google "choice hotels" + "i've been everywhere" you'll see that it's created some interest here and there.

I thought about emailing the sites that refer to "a Hank Snow song" (or worse, a Hank Snow "original") and telling them about Lucky Starr's 1962 original version, but maybe I'll let it rest. After all, in the States it's Hank Snow who is identified with the song, so I guess we can forgive them.

Flower Garden by Nick Lampe (aka Nicholas Lampe)

[UPDATE: See my later post At last: the Nick Lampe story which answers the questions raised here.]

If there were any justice in Pop Chart History Land then Nick Lampe's 1970 single Flower Garden would be one of those evergreens that you love to pieces but just wish your local oldies station would hold off playing for the 437,085th time.

As it is, this fine record, produced by Armet Ertegun and Jackson Howe at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, seems to have sunk without trace. Even at the time, Flower Garden charted at #16 in Melbourne, Australia, but didn't make the national charts in the US or Britain. I can't vouch, of course, for the charts of Portugal or Norway or Cedar Rapids, IA, so I won't say it didn't chart anywhere else.

You will find very few Web references to Nick Lampe (as on the single) or Nicholas Lampe (on the album) and I've yet to find any biographical information.

All Music Guide has track and personnel listings for what was apparently his only album, It Happened Long Ago (January 1971), but no other details. At the 60s And Further website, Gilbert Weingourt has a historic black and white photo entitled Nick Lampe and Friends (scroll right down: the topless friends are a bit of a distraction, but that would be Nick in the centre with the guitar). Both Sides Now lists the album on its discography for Cotillion, a subsidiary of Atlantic.

The personnel on It Happened Long Ago (Flower Garden was Track 1) were the famous Muscle Shoals Sound Rhythm Section which included the four founders of the studio, drummer Roger Hawkins, rhythm guitarist Jimmy Johnson, bassist David Hood and keyboardist Barry Beckett, along with lead guitarist Eddie Hinton.

Thus, the Nicholas Lampe album is mentioned at The Hideki Watanabe Archives on its pages about Eddie Hinton and engineer Marlin Greene. Pop-jazz singer-songwriter Kenny Rankin, acknowledged in the liner notes, has his own website, but the only reference there to Nicholas Lampe is in an unanswered question posted to the forum by an Australian. (The discographies at the Muscle Shoals website don't mention him, but they may focus on better-known artists: well worth browsing nevertheless.)

Apart from that, you are mainly left with tantalising references at the sites of record dealers who have the album or the single for sale on vinyl.

Audiophile, for example, includes a colour scan of the album cover. Undergroundalbums.com has it as a "very obscure item": '70 moody singer-songwriter w/ lots of electric piano, he credits Dion & Kenny Rankin as "Spiritual Advisors" on back. At the Last Vestige Music Shop it's a gritty twang folkrocker with the MUSCLE SHOALS crew, and a current Ebay auction lists the album as Rare Southern psych folk, a little fuzz.

And that, as far as I can see, is that, on the subject of Nick Lampe aka Nicholas.

Photo: Nicholas Lampe, from the cover of It Happened Long Ago.

[Updated in At Last: The Nick Lampe Story.]

More on the Bearded Beetle

Broadcaster and radio historian Wayne Mac emailed to tell me the Bearded Beetle's name was Dave Dexter. He was the panel operator at 3DB who recorded a song called The Bearded Beetle with announcer Barry Ferber in 1964. No other details yet, except that Wayne believes Dave Dexter died in a car accident in New Zealand. I did find a reprinted magazine article from the 70s about Radio Hauraki, the pirate station that became New Zealand's first commercial station, and there is a Dave Dexter amongst the station's disc jockeys. (Not to be confused, I should hardly need to add, with Dave Dexter the Capitol Records producer and executive.)

Aussie aircheck sites

As far as I can see we don’t have an Australian equivalent of Reel Top 40 Radio Repository, the site where you can listen to some 1500 audio clips of US deejay shows from the golden era of Top 40 radio. The British Pirate Radio Hall of Fame also has clips, from the stations that were Top 40 radio in the UK for a while in the 60s (and a surprising number of the disc jockeys were Aussies).

[Update: The Radio Antenna blog has a growing collection of Australian airchecks from several decades, See also their Facebook page.]

These clips are known as airchecks, meaning a recording of a live radio program. I first saw the word on CDs of big bands from the 40s, indicating that a track is from a broadcast rather than a studio session.

The Adelaide station 5KA had a site with a fine collection of airchecks, including many from the 60s and 70s, but it is no longer online. The good news is that the whole 5KA site, including the audio files, is archived at the National Library of Australia’s Pandora Archive. The files are in mp3 format. My favourites are the 1968 clips, which evoke the atmosphere of just about any commercial radio station of the era.

Also at Pandora is the archived Jingles Shrine website, where you can still hear old station jingles from all over Australia (RealAudio format UPDATE 2012: not all audio files work).

I recently mentioned Tony Sanderson’s pages of Australian and British audio files (mp3 and RealAudio) at Bluehaze Media. The real gems here are two complete programs, a 30-minute weekly Top 10 countdown from June 1962 by Ernie Sigley, and a 60-minute Top 20 of 1962 with Barry Ferber from January 1963. Both were broadcast on Melbourne station 3DB and its relay station in the Wimmera, 3LK.

(If those callsigns sound unfamiliar, 3DB became 3TT, then TT-FM, now known as Mix 101.1. 3LK was replaced by still-operating Horsham station 3WM).

The Top 10 is, as you would expect, a nice snapshot of what we were listening to in Vic at that time. At #1 is Toni Fisher’s West of the Wall, one of those Oz-only chart-toppers that Glenn A. Baker put on one of his Hard to Get Hits collections. After my recent post on the topic, I was delighted to find two Bizarro Shadows World Down Under tracks: The Joy Boys’ Southern ‘Rora and Rob E.G.’s 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, Zero.

And, I could hardly believe it, for the second time yesterday I found myself listening to I’ve Been Everywhere, a song that seems to be haunting me at the moment.

Popular at PopArchives

I don't have any traffic counters at the site, but early in April I started putting in links to HMV Australia if they stocked a listed song on CD. I can get traffic reports from HMV daily or over a longer period, so although it doesn't measure actual visits to my pages, it might be an indicator. Looking at the statistics so far, half a dozen songs have attracted the most on-clicks. The first two are way ahead of the others (about double the clicks for #3). 1. I've Been Everywhere What can I say? People still love this song, and it's also well-known through versions by Hank Snow and Johnny Cash. (See below: 'Obscurities? Forget 'em! We want 'I've Been Everywhere') We even heard it on one of our local radio stations this very morning. 2. The Lion Sleeps Tonight This might have something to do with the PopArchives page being linked from a PBS page about the history of the song. 3. Everlasting Love This makes sense: a hugely popular song world-wide, much recorded, and at least eight versions have charted around Australia. It even turned up on the soundtrack to the Bridget Jones sequel. 4. Je T'Aime (I Love You) This is Abigail's version of the Serge Gainsbourg song, Je t'aime moi non plus, which he recorded with Jane Birkin. Perhaps Jane Birkin's appearances in Australia have increased interest in it. 5. She Wears My Ring Another much-recorded song, including a version by Elvis. 6. Day By Day From the musical Godspell. I can't see any big, current production of this. Probably just another enduring favourite.

Barry Ferber and The Bearded Beetle.

The Bearded Beetle, a record by The Beetle Bashers (they spelt it beetle), came out on Melbourne's W&G label in 1964, one of numerous Beatles tribute and novelty records that surfaced world-wide in the wake of Beatlemania. Most sank without trace, but two versions of We Love You Beatles charted in Melbourne, and for some reason ex-Cricket Sonny Curtis’s A Beatle I Want To Be sticks in my memory.

The Bearded Beetle was written and sung by Melbourne disc jockey Barry Ferber. The title came from the nickname he gave to his bearded panel operator.

At a time when 3UZ was the dominant Top 40 radio station in Melbourne, Barry Ferber ran a record show over at the more traditional 3DB. He called himself the Mellow Fellow: the hip American deejay talk sometimes heard on 3UZ was not his style at all.

Ferber was a witty bloke who had a way of sending things up, a bit in the tradition of Graham Kennedy, so it wasn’t surprising when he put out a record that took the mickey out of the current teenage craze. These days, his name is still associated with the Beatles through George Harrison, whose 1964 message to him is anthologised on CD.

The Bearded Beatle and its flipside, The Beetle Bashers Beat, were both written by Barry Ferber, and W&G even issued a further Beetle Bashers single in 1965, co-written by Ferber, Don’t Make Love In The Cornfields. Neither was a hit, but I don’t imagine rival stations would’ve given them much airplay. (Both records are catalogued at Screensound Australia's Second Wave discography.)

Along with Don Lunn at 3UZ, whose American-influenced patter offered a complete contrast, Ferber was my favourite local deejay. So I was overjoyed to find a complete 60 minute Barry Ferber program archived at Bluehaze Solutions' Multimedia Vault.

This is good value: an unedited January 1963 countdown of 1962’s Top 20, sponsored by Love’s department store. It’s great to hear Ferber again, but he’s playing it straight here, plugging the sponsor, reading the commentary, keeping it tight, no send-ups. (It may even be a pre-recorded show.)

Barry Ferber went on to management, first at 4GG at the Gold Coast in Queensland when it first went on air, and later at Radio Fiji. More recently, he's filed columns from Las Vegas for the Gold Coast Bulletin (see above).

But who was that bearded panel operator? [For the answer see the follow-up post More on the Bearded Beetle. The comments are full of further information, too.]


Picture: Barry Ferber, columnist (story in the Melbourne Observer, 20 October 2004).

Bizarro Shadows World Down Under

Standing in the shadow of The Shadows:
Melbourne band The Phantoms, from Canetoad's W&G Instrumental Story.

How many Australian and New Zealand bands of the 60s started out playing instrumentals in the style of the Shadows but transformed themselves in the wake of Beatlemania? See, for a start, The Strangers, The Questions, The Cherokees and The La De Das.

When a bunch of teenagers formed a band in the early 60s their main passion was often to emulate The Shadows or The Ventures (not only in Australia: see my post ¡Viva Los Shads!). Apache and Walk, Don’t Run were standards of the repertoire.

In Australia, this amounted to something like a movement, a phenomenon I like to call Bizarro Shadows World Down Under.

Aussies were always fond of a guitar-based instrumental. The Shadows were as big here as they were in the UK, and they were still charting alongside the Beatles into the mid-60s: their last hit in Oz was Bombay Duck in 1967 (#3 Adelaide, #10 Brisbane). The Americans preferred The Ventures, but we liked them as well: best of both worlds, down here. When surf music came along we took to it in a big way, and it melded in nicely with the guitar instrumental genre.

We also had our local heroes. Sydney steel guitarist Rob E. G. was often on the radio and the charts in the early 60s, often (but not always) with his own compositions: Railroadin', Si Senor (I Theenk?) and 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, Zero. In 1963 Sydney band The Atlantics produced Bombora and The Crusher, two stunning examples of the surf instrumental that give Pipeline and Wipeout a run for their money. The Joy Boys - without Col Joye - had a national Top 5 hit in 1962 with Southern ‘Rora, inspired by, of all things, a new Melbourne-Sydney train service.

Melbourne band The Strangers first charted in their home town with a guitar version of Frankie Laine’s hit Cry of the Wild Goose (1963), a far cry from the soul-tinged vocal pop of 1968’s Happy Without You. Progressive New Zealand band the La De Das were, in their embryonic form, a high school band called The Mergers who played Shadows-styled instrumentals. At the website of guitarist Rod Stone, later with The Playboys and The Groove, you can hear a snatch of his 1962 version of Skye Boat Song, recorded in New Zealand as a 17-year-old in immaculate Shadows style.

It’s not that the instrumental bands didn’t sing at all, but looking back it’s hard to avoid the idea that it was cooler, even more manly, to pick out those precise guitar instrumentals than to sing soppy love songs.

There are a number of Bizarro Shadows World Down Under tracks on W&G Instrumental Story, released by the Australian reissue label Canetoad. W&G was a Melbourne record label.

Some of these tracks sound a bit cheesy, even clunky, at this distance, but that’s a feature of instro-guitar in general. Even so, there’s a good mix of remakes and originals that often stand up well beside their British and American models.

About half the tracks are by Melbourne showband The Thunderbirds, who were really too big, too brassy and too versatile to be put strictly in the mould of the Shads. Their version of The Rebels' Wild Weekend is an Aussie instrumental classic.

Otherwise, tracks by The Cherokees (Thundercloud), The Chessmen (The Rebel [Johnny Yuma]), The Breakaways (The Wheel), The Strangers (Undertow) and The Phantoms (Stampede) wouldn’t have sounded out of place on a Shadows or Ventures album.

When Beatlemania hit, many Aussie instrumental bands did just what the boys in my Australian town did: they shampooed their hair, brushed it down over their foreheads, and never again darkened the doors of traditional barbers’ shops.

Pictures of the Beatles before Ringo illustrate the contrast. Pete Best looked fine and he still had a loyal following. He had that detached, moody, brushed-back look that went back to James Dean and the late-50s teen idols, but (unless my perception is skewed by hindsight) he already looked oddly out of place.

More than just changing the idea of what looked cool, Merseybeat made singing an imperative. The Strangers developed a hip pop sensibility that gave them vocal hits in the late 60s with Melanie Makes Me Smile, Western Union and Happy Without You. The Cherokees dabbled in a number of styles, but they had their greatest success with the comic revivals Oh, Monah and Minnie The Moocher that for some reason never seemed out of place on the charts of the late 60s.

The Atlantics ventured into Brit Invasion recycled R&B with the likes of I Put A Spell On You, featuring Johnny Rebb, an experienced rock’n’roller who had joined the band, and Rob E.G. re-emerged as Robie Porter, this time singing on his records (When You’re Not Near). Sydney band, The Questions also hired a vocalist, and his name was Doug Parkinson.

You thought I was going to say, "And the rest is history...", didn't you?
.....................................................................................................
See also:
Cicadas and Flies: Bizarro Merseybeat World Down Under

See you 'round, like a record (2)

I asked Phil Chapman, one of the record's producers, about Little Nell's See You Round Like A Record. He confirms that co-producer Brian Thomson, a notable Australian stage designer, came up with the title and it was indeed based on the catchphrase of an Australian disc jockey.

The three producers met while working on The Rocky Horror Show in London: as I noted below, Little Nell was a cast member. The team cut a series of singles with Nell in the second half of the 70s.


Little Nell's round record

See you 'round, like a record

This breezy farewell always sounded to me like something an American disc jockey would use as a program closer. 

 I was half right. It was used by a disc jockey, but all the references I've found to it on the Net have an Australian connection: 

 1. The disc jockey would be Tony Withers, who was well-known on 2SM in Sydney for about ten years from 1953. He was even given a co-writer credit on Johnny O'Keefe's Wild One when it first came out, though his name was usually dropped from later versions. Tony Withers moved to Britain and worked on offshore pirate stations from 1964, firstly with Radio Atlanta. At Hans Knot's radio site Alan Hamblin recalls that he ended each show saying, "This is Tony Withers, Your Man With the Music, saying 'See you around, like a record' ." Later, with Radio London, he was known as Tony Windsor, and the Pirate Radio Hall of Fame has a Spotlight on Tony Windsor page, with photos and audio clips of his broadcasts [Edit: now archived]. 

2. There's also a record called See You Round Like A Record, by Little Nell, a 1976 single on A&M. Little Nell is Nell Campbell, an Australian from Sydney, best known for appearing on stage in The Rocky Horror Show and then in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975). She wrote See You Round Like A Record with Richard Hartley and Brian Thomson, who produced the track with Phil Chapman. 

 3. Apart from Rocky Horror sites, a Google search for 'see you round like a record' will tend to throw up links to tabs and lyrics for the Australian song I Was Only Nineteen by Redgum, posted by Armour Byte the Asciizer, whose work is signed Like hip jive dude... and see you round like a record, don't go square like the cover... I kinda like the bit about the record cover: I wonder if that's also from Tony Withers, or did Mr Byte came up with it himself? 

 4. The discography page of Bob Howe, Australian country music artist and producer, is headed See you 'round, like a record. [Edit: It was in 2005; no longer.]

There is a similar saying, See you 'round, like a rissole. My attention was drawn to this by Air & Angels, an Australian 'bloglet' by La Déesse where a connection is made between the two sayings [Edit: now archived]. Its usage on the Net seems to be largely from Australian sources.  Now I'm wondering whether See you 'round like a rissole is a traditional saying. Which came first: the rissole or the record?

¡Viva los Shads!

Elvis Schmelvis, Beatles Schmeatles. Viva los Shads!
- Nik Cohn on British instrumental band the Shadows, in his 1969 book Awopbopaloobopalopbamboom.

Thirty-five years or so later, it seems kind of early to have been publishing a history of pop in 1969, but Nik Cohn's little book remains one of the most exhilarating accounts by an enthusiast that you'll ever read. Otherwise, his main claim to fame may be for writing Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night, the New York magazine article that became the basis for Saturday Night Fever (1977).

This is how he nicely sums up the popularity of the Shadows outside Britain:

Even now, if you're traipsing around the backwaters of Morocco and you stumble across a local group, they'll sound exactly like the Shadows, flat guitars and jigalong melodies and little leg kicks and all. In Spain or Italy or Yugoslavia, they're regarded as the pop giants of all time. Elvis Schmelvis. Beatles Schmeatles. Viva los Shads!

I'm sure this is filthy, just wait while I figure out what he's saying

For me, Gary Larsen's Far Side cartoon, in which one elephant is teaching another how to play Louie Louie by pounding on the keys, just about sums up the song.

Louie Louie was originally released in 1956 by its composer Richard Berry. He based it on the opening to a Latino dance number called El Loco Cha Cha. The Louie Louie history at The Originals website discusses the influences and lists other versions.

It is, unaccountably, one of the most recorded songs ever. As Arnold Rypens puts it, covering this rock 'n roll classic became a sport. The list is endless and exotic.

You can buy whole albums made up of nothing but versions of Louie Louie, and Dave Marsh has written a book about it, Louie Louie : The History and Mythology of the World's Most Famous Rock 'n' Roll Song. There is at least one Louie Louie website dedicated to telling us more than we'll ever need to know about it.

It was the 1963 hit version by The Kingsmen that inspired complaints about the obscenity of its largely incomprehensible lyrics.

At The Smoking Gun you can read some of the documents from the FBI's investigation into whether anyone could be prosecuted for obscenity. The FBI had complaints from parents and the Governor of Indiana, and they had transcripts of rude lyrics. In fact, they had differing rude versions, none of which matched the genuine lyrics.

In the end the FBI sensibly decided that they could hardly lay charges over lyrics that nobody, not even the experts in their own Laboratory, could make out.

As to the offensive lyrics that were submitted to the FBI, they were apparently a product of the moral campaigners' own imaginations. They'd managed to offend themselves.

Heh, heh...

"Howlin' Wolf made Muddy Waters sound like David Niven"
- Greil Marcus.

Quoted by Neil Kellas in his liner notes to Blues Roots of Rock 'n' Roll (Performance, 2004). I can't find the original source.

Sir! Sir! He's copying!

When it comes to attribution I like to avoid such ugly terms as plagiarism, stealing, and blatant rip-off. Instead, I say that a song reminds me of another, or that a writer may have been influenced by somebody else's work. Perhaps they subconsciously borrowed, or they believed that an old melody was in the public domain anyway. I mean, who needs email from angry songwriters?

Will Shade, over at the music webzine Perfect Sound Forever, has no such qualms. He comes down hard on Jimmy Page for his role in the uncredited recycling of material, first by the later-period Yardbirds and then by Led Zeppelin. The article's title is unambiguous: The Thieving Magpie: Jimmy Page's Dubious Recording Legacy. In one or two cases, the claims have been pursued successfully in the courts, notably by Willie Dixon, who wrote the Muddy Waters song You Need Love (1962), the ultimate source of Led Zeppelin's Whole Lotta Love (1969), via the Small Faces' You Need Loving (1966).

Will Shade discusses a long list of Yardbirds and Led Zeppelin songs and their uncredited sources, mainly from blues artists. I hate to disillusion you completely, but not even Stairway To Heaven comes out of it unscathed.

To restore your faith in humanity, have a look at the Songs page at Snopes.com, the urban legends website. There you will find links to a number of pages that discuss song origins and related topics. It may raise your spirits to learn that Bob Dylan didn't steal Blowin' In The Wind from a high school student.

Before the age of mass communication and copyright law, none of this was much of an issue. Folk songs were by definition fair game, and blues artists routinely recycled traditional and contemporary material: that was part of their art.

The likes of Bach, Vivaldi and Handel happily nicked bits and pieces from each other, probably seeing it as a dip of the ol' lid to a fellow composer. (To get an idea of the extent of this in classical music, see the long annotated bibliography of Musical Borrowing at the University of Indiana.)

A songwriter's defence could be that there must be a finite number of possible tunes, so it would be surprising if there were no overlap among the millions of songs that have been written. On the other hand, one brave soul at Everything2.com has attempted to calculate that number, and it turns out to be a very big number indeed.

Still, when you consider all the songs and jingles and soundtracks and people whistling a tune in the street that a songwriter hears in a lifetime, it must be maddeningly easy to recycle a snatch of melody without realising it. Then someone hears your latest punk anthem and says, "Hang on, isn't that Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies?"

It can happen to anyone: browse the Google search results for plagiarism + "George Harrison". You can also read about the cases of Jerome Kern, Britney Spears, Michael Bolton and others listed at the Columbia Law School's Music Plagiarism Project . In the Tin Pan Alley era, songwriter Ira Arnstein became a serial filer of plagiarism suits against his contemporaries, no doubt aided by the fact that it if you set your mind to it, you can find similarities between songs.

No, no , no , no, no: betcha didn't know this:

You know Trevor Peacock, don't you, the actor who played Jim Trott on The Vicar of Dibley? Jim was one of the rustic members of Rev. Geraldine Granger's Parish Council , the one whose catchphrase goes "No, no, no, no, no... yes!"

Well, Trevor Peacock wrote not only the Herman's Hermits hit Mrs Brown You've Got A Lovely Daughter, but also one of the finest songs of pre-Beatlemania BritPop, That's What Love Will Do, a #3 UK hit in 1963 for Joe Brown and the Bruvvers.

His filmography at the Internet Movie Database covers a lot of bases, but in the pop context he was also the writer for Jack Good's late-50s British TV pop series Oh Boy! and he compered another pop series of the time, Drumbeat. He and John Barry wrote the music for the 1960 teen delinquency movie Beat Girl.

Strange but true...

I've Been Everywhere: Australian lyrics

These are the lyrics as reprinted in The All-time Favourite Australian Song Book (Angus & Robertson, 1986 edition), which I've amended slightly after listening to Lucky Starr's record.

There's more about the song and some of its versions at my website. The Wikipedia article on the song is thorough and probably mentions more versions than any other site.

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I've Been Everywhere by Geoff Mack©, as sung by Lucky Starr (1962)

I've been everywhere...

Well, I was humpin' my bluey on the dusty Oodnadatta road,
When along came a semi with a high and canvas-covered load.
(Spoken) "If you're goin' to Oodnadatta, mate, um, with me you can ride."
So I climbed in the cabin and I settled down inside.
He asked me if I'd seen a road with so much dust and sand, I said
"Listen, mate, I've travelled ev'ry road in this here land."

Chorus:
Cos "I've been everywhere, man,
I've been everywhere, man.
'Cross the deserts bare, man;
I've breathed the mountain air, man.
Of travel I've had my share, man.
I've been ev'rywhere.

Been to:
Tullamore, Seymour, Lismore, Mooloolaba,
Nambour, Maroochydore, Kilmore, Murwillumbah,
Birdsville, Emmaville, Wallaville, Cunnamulla,
Condamine, Strathpine, Proserpine, Ulladulla,
Darwin, Gin Gin, Deniliquin, Muckadilla,
Wallumbilla, Boggabilla, Kumbarilla,
I'm a killer.

Chorus
(Spoken) "Yeah but listen here, mate, have you been to..."

I've been to Moree, Taree, Jerilderie, Bambaroo,
Toowoomba, Gunnedah, Caringbah, Woolloomooloo,
Dalveen, Tamborine, Engadine, Jindabyne,
Lithgow, Casino, Brigalow and Narromine,
Megalong, Wyong, Tuggerawong, Wanganella,
Morella, Augathella, Brindabella, I'm the feller.

Chorus
(Spoken) "Yeah, I know that, but have you been to..."

I've been to Wollongong, Geelong, Kurrajong, Mullumbimby,
Mittagong, Molong, Grong Grong, Goondiwindi,
Yarra Yarra, Boroondara, Wallangarra, Turramurra,
Boggabri, Gundagai, Narrabri, Tibooburra,
Gulgong, Adelong, Billabong, Cabramatta,
Parramatta, Wangaratta*, Coolangatta, what's it matter?

Chorus
(Spoken) "Yeah, look that's fine, but how about..."

I've been to Ettalong, Dandenong, Woodenbong, Ballarat,
Canberra, Milperra, Unanderra, Captain's Flat,
Cloncurry, River Murray, Kurri Kurri, Girraween,
Terrigal, Fingal, Stockinbingal, Collaroy and Narrabeen,
Bendigo, Dorrigo, Bangalow, Indooroopilly,
Kirribilli, Yeerongpilly, Wollondilly, don't be silly.
ChorusI've been here, there, ev'rywhere, I've been ev'rywhere.

(Spoken) "Okay, mate, you've been ev'ry place except one, and ya don't need my help t'get there."
(Sound of door slamming and truck driving off.)

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* The standard pronunciation of Wangaratta, Victoria, has the WANG rhyming with SANG, but on the record it is pronounced "WONGaratta".