▶︎ Bigger in Oz (15): Glen Campbell - The Universal Soldier (1965)

Bigger in Oz: tracks that were more popular in Australia than in their countries of origin.

See also: Only in Melbourne.

15. Glen Campbell - The Universal Soldier
(Buffy Sainte-Marie)
USA 1965
Capitol single (USA) # 5504
Capitol single (Australia) #CP-1622

US charts: #45 Billboard, #61 Cash Box 
Australian charts: #5 Melbourne, #26 Sydney, #11 Brisbane, #3 Adelaide, #8 Perth (Kent: #16 Australia) 

Co-charted with version by Donovan in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Adelaide (see end of page)

On the face of it, The Universal Soldier seems like an unlikely song for Glen Campbell. Written by pacifist folk artist and activist Buffy Sainte-Marie, it fitted into the current genre of the protest song, and it carries an uncompromising anti-war message. Campbell was a conservative kind of guy, as songwriter Jim Webb found upon first meeting him: I had long hair. I'll never forget the first thing he said to me. He said, "Why don't you get your hair cut?" He and I were on the opposite sides of, I guess, the political spectrum at that time. [Listen to Webb's full anecdote at Spotify]

Campbell's works, though, defied pigeonholing. Many of his hits had a country sound, and he did well on the country charts, but he could also record Guess I'm Dumb, a sublime piece of classic pop written and produced by Brian Wilson [YouTube]. An artful creation like Wichita Lineman comfortably sat on both the country and the pop charts.

I suspect that Campbell's reputation widened over the years as pop connoisseurs became aware of how much skillful, uncredited session musicians contributed to the familiar recordings of the 60s. A fine example is the loose LA group now known as The Wrecking Crew which Campbell played in before his solo career took off.

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In Australia in 1965, military conscription had just been re-introduced the year before. Australia's commitment to the Vietnam War was not far off, and soon after that it would be made possible to send conscripts to Vietnam.  The Australian tradition of anti-conscription sentiment was also stirring although the bitter divisions over conscription and Vietnam were still to come.  

One station where I heard the song in 1965 was ABC Radio, back-announced with That was Glen Campbell, repeating the fallacy that it takes two sides to start a war. Being realistic, it's hard to argue with that, and my father, a WW2 veteran, warmly agreed with the announcer. Even so, some younger audiences might have found some idealistic hope in Buffy Sainte-Marie's uncomplicated vision of soldiers ending all wars by declining to fight. 

In 1965 Australians didn't mind a song with topical or political themes. The obvious example is Barry McGuire's recording of P.F. Sloan's Eve of Destruction which takes aim at conscription, nuclear arms and racial prejudice (1965, #1 USA #6 Sydney #2 Melbourne #1 Brisbane #2 Adelaide #1 Perth). A more interesting case is Wake Up My Mind, a band original by Birmingham's Ugly's (their apostrophe). Their song about middle-class complacency in the face of war and injustice was a hit only in Australia (1965, #6 Sydney #34 Melbourne #9 Brisbane #1 Adelaide #4 Perth), earning it a place in Glenn A. Baker's Hard To Get Hits compilations of similar cases.

The Universal Soldier might even have reminded some listeners of  Ed McCurdy's song Last Night I Had The Strangest Dream, first recorded by Pete Seeger (1956, as Strangest Dream) and then by many others including Simon & Garfunkel (1964): I dreamed the world had all agreed / To put an end to war... / And guns and swords and uniforms / Were scattered on the ground.

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The Universal Soldier has been overshadowed by later Glen Campbell hits such as Galveston (1969), Honey Come Back (1970), and Rhinestone Cowboy (1975). His 1967 recordings of the Jim Webb compositions By the Time I Get to Phoenix (1967) and Wichita Lineman (1968) are landmarks in Webb's distinguished songwriting career. 

By the time of his first Top 10 hit in Australia with Galveston (1969), Campbell had already had four Top 5 hits in the US, beginning with By the Time I Get to Phoenix (1967). His Australian chart performance had been surprisingly lukewarm before Galveston, when even his US #1 and towering classic Wichita Lineman (1968) made only the lower end of the Top 20 in Australia.

Further listening and viewing: Glen Campbell commentary and appreciation by Wings of Pegasus at YouTube.

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• Donovan
A version of The Universal Soldier on an EP by British folk singer Donovan co-charted with Glen Campbell in four of the five Australian cities covered by Gavin Ryan's chart books (only Melbourne stuck with Campbell alone). The track was not released as a single in Australia.

Donovan's EP, also called The Universal Soldier, was a hit on the UK EP charts. No single was released in the UK but the EP also did well on the singles chart (#14 UK).

Donovan's version was released as a single in New Zealand, and in the US where Donovan's and Campbell's versions were on both the Billboard and Cash Box charts at the same time. Neither was a big hit there.

• The Roemans
Tommy Roe's backing band The Roemans released a version of Universal Soldier in August 1965, the month before Glen Campbell and Donovan released theirs. It was reviewed well in Billboard but made little impact (with at least one exception in Roe's hometown of Atlanta GA). Florida band The Roemans had tweaked their name from Romans when they started working with Tommy Roe.

 

▶︎ Only in Melbourne: (4) Gene McDaniels - It's A Lonely Town (Lonely Without You) (1963)

Only in Melbourne: tracks that didn't chart Top 40 in their countries of origin but did better in the capital of my home state, Victoria. See also: Bigger in Oz.

(4) Gene McDaniels - It's A Lonely Town (Lonely Without You) 
(Doc Pomus - Mort Shuman)
USA 1963
Liberty single (USA) #55597
Liberty single (Australia) #LIB-55597
Australian charts: #10 Melbourne #58 Adelaide (#43 Australia)
US charts: #64 Billboard

ARSA's random samples of radio surveys show Lonely Town charting at half a dozen stations in the US: a #8 at KOSA Odessa TX, a #15 at WRIT Milwaukee WI... It's a familiar story: a scattering of regional chart placings, but only enough to make it a minor national hit (#64 on Billboard).

Because I was in Victoria at the time, listening to Melbourne radio, I've always had a false idea of its overall popularity. A #10 in Melbourne is respectable, but it was no more a national hit in Australia than it was in the US.

Gene McDaniels was a staple of pop radio in Australia in the early 60s. To stick with Melbourne as an example, he had eight Top 40 hits there, notably A Hundred Pounds Of Clay (1961, #4), Tower Of Strength (1961, #4), Chip Chip (1962, #2) and Point Of No Return (1962, #8). The pattern was similar in the other Australian capitals, and it pretty much reflected his US chart record. (In the UK, he managed to chart only once, with Tower of Strength at #49.)

For me, this is a perfect pop record. Writing, arrangement, production and performance are all immaculate: every detail counts. 

McDaniels' singing here is superb, and showcases why he was so popular down here. It's an assured, disciplined, but nuanced performance: note how his voice falters ever so slightly at the end of the line I feel like crying. 

The rest of the personnel are distinguished. You can read their biographies elsewhere, but even a selection of credits tells us a lot. 

The writers Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman (together):

A Teenager In Love (Dion & The Belmonts)

I Count The Tears (The Drifters)

Save The Last Dance For Me (The Drifters)

This Magic Moment (The Drifters)

Little Sister (Elvis Presley)

Sweets For My Sweet (The Drifters, The Searchers)

Suspicion (Elvis Presley, Terry Stafford)

Viva Las Vegas (Elvis Presley)

• See Pomus & Shuman resources at shrout.co.uk

The producer Snuff Garrett

Johnny Burnette - You're Sixteen

Gene McDaniels - A Hundred Pounds Of Clay, Tower Of Strength

Bobby Vee - Take Good Care Of My Baby, Run To Him, The Night Has A Thousand Eyes

Gary Lewis and the Playboys - This Diamond Ring, Count Me In, Everybody Loves A Clown 

• See Tom Simon's Snuff Garrett page

The arranger and conductor Ernie Freeman

Bobby Vee - The Night Has A Thousand Eyes

The Blossoms - That's When The Tears Start

Dean Martin - You're Nobody Till Somebody Loves You

Johnny Burnette - Little Boy Sad

Frank Sinatra - Strangers In The Night

Petula Clark - This Is My Song

Vikki Carr - It Must Be Him

The Vogues - Turn Around, Look At Me

• See Richie Unterberger's Ernie Freeman bio at All Music

I was surprised to discover that another Only in Melbourne track from 1963, Julie London's I'm Coming Back To You, was also produced by Snuff Garrett with arranger and conductor Ernie Freeman.

▶︎ The greatest song in the universe?

This is the greatest song in the universe, our youngest son recently said to me in a dream, and I awoke with the song still playing in my head. 

You can allow some hyperbole in a dream, but it was Bryan Ferry's Don't Stop The Dance, and there are days when I do believe it is the greatest song in the universe. 

In the late 1980s when I was almost 40, two university students used to babysit for us. Rosie had worked with me as a student teacher in my classroom, and her friend Sam turned out to be our neighbour's boarder. Rosie was a serious Beatles fan, at a time when a student was more likely to be a fan of… what? Michael Bolton? Bros?

One winter vacation they asked us to babysit their children (as they said), and they lugged over some crates of their most cherished vinyl LPs. They were worried about burglars making off with them while they were away. 

Big responsibility, but I was welcome to listen to them. It was clear that, as well as the Beatles, Rosie was into Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music. 

These albums were a revelation. I mainly knew them through hits like Love Is The Drug (Roxy, 1975), and Ferry's retro-remakes Let's Stick Together and The Price of Love (1976), but I'd never explored them properly. 

The stand-outs for me were Roxy's Flesh And Blood (1980) and Ferry's Boys and Girls (1985). Tracks like Slave To Love, Don't Stop The Dance, and Flesh And Blood, with their layers of instruments and inventive arrangements, felt close to a multi-sensory experience.

Although Don't Stop The Dance appeared in a dream as the greatest song in the universe, recording or track or might be more accurate. I'm not surprised that there are few covers of the song, because its attraction seems inseparable from the production.¹

When we say we love a song, we often mean we love a recording, whether it's an original version or an inspired remake. That's been true ever since a hit song stopped being measured in sheet music sales.  When I say I love Be My Baby I mean that extraordinary artefact from 1963, the recording by The Ronettes, not the unadorned melody and lyrics. 

The great pop producers of the 50s and 60s, people like Bob Crewe, Phil Spector and Brian Wilson, understood that it was the recording, that unique one-off artefact, that was important.² 

Spector had a genius for an arranger, Jack Nitzsche, who is usually overlooked by the average listener, but in a way Spector's name was shorthand for a collaborative enterprise that included songwriters, arrangers, session musicians, producers, engineers as well as the upfront talent. 

It's extraordinary that I still listen to Don't Stop The Dance at least once a week some 35 years later, and hard to imagine that the five- and six-year-olds I was teaching at that time would have turned 40 themselves last year.

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1. Ferry himself may have been following this line of thought when he remade Don't Stop The Dance in an instrumental trad jazz arrangement on The Jazz Age (The Bryan Ferry Orchestra, 2012). He was "fascinated to see how [the songs] would stand up without singing" (interview in Daily Telegraph, quoted at Wikipedia).

2. Michael Campbell & James Brody cite songwriter-producers Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller: "We don't write songs, we write records." (Rock and Roll: An Introduction, course notes, University of Minnesota, 1999, 2008.)

▶︎ Disappearing acts

The other day some bloke tweeted, "Anyone remember Dionne Warwick?"

Dionne Warwick answered, "Doesn't ring a bell."

When I wrote about a Top 20 hit by Sydney singer Jennifer Ryall I said that she was "lost to history". I hadn't been able to find out much about her, and there was nothing after the mid-1970s. 

Jennifer Ryall

Jennifer Ryall finally emailed to tell me she wasn't lost, and her own history turned out to be rich and varied. In the following days she gave me a lot of information, full of interest, which I used to write up a decent account of her career. 

I now avoid suggesting that people are lost, or that they disappeared or vanished, just because they haven't released any music for a while. 

It's a trap that fans can easily fall into. When a performer we know only through their media persona stops performing, there is a sense that they have literally disappeared. 

We might even sympathise with them for their downfall, even if we have no idea what they are doing these days. However fulfilling their life away from the music (or film or TV) business might be, their absence suggests that they no longer do anything. They exist for us on the public stage and when they've gone it's as if they don't exist. 

The jazz trumpeter, composer and bandleader Red Perksey migrated to Sydney via France in 1951. He soon established himself on radio and records, and in live gigs, and he became Musical Director for a Sydney record company. 

Red and his orchestra had a hit with (A Little Boy Called) Smiley from the film Smiley Gets A Gun (1958), and they backed Vic Sabrino on his version of Rock Around The Clock (1955), a record some call as the first Australian rock'n'roll record. He was clearly a bright and likeable personality who pops up here and there in the newspaper archives. 

Red Perksey 1950s

In 1958 he was photographed joshing around poolside at a deejays' convention, and he was giving lunchtime concerts at a Sydney music store. 

Then there is nothing. No more listings in the radio guides, no more gigs advertised, no more affectionate write-ups. He disappeared?

I had written what I believed was the definitive biographical sketch of Red Perksey. He was born Siegbert Perlstein in Berlin in 1921, of Jewish German-Polish background. I traced his progress from Berlin in the 30s, to Palestine in the mid-40s and Paris in the late 40s. He and his wife Zizi came to Australia by refugee ship in the early 50s, and were later naturalised here. The only later date I had was his death, in 1995, but from 1958 until then, nothing. 

Eventually, someone emails. A niece, his closest living relative, emailed from Paris with some answers. 

To Australian audiences, to the Sydney newspapers, and (retrospectively) to this archival forager, Red Perksey had disappeared. 

Meanwhile, a couple known as Bert and Anne were living in a remote French village where Bert painted, sculpted and made furniture. They grew vegetables and spoke to their dog Lassie only in English. Bert was also a musician, and sometimes he joined in with local groups.

To us, they had disappeared; in France, Red Perksey and his wife were in plain view to their fellow villagers. 

I guess my point is, there are more places in this world than the public stage. 

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Links

• My series Obscure Originators collects pieces about lesser-known artists who recorded a song that was later covered in Australia. Most of them fit into the theme of this post.

• Dionne Warwick's tweet 30 January 2023

Full stories at my website:

• Jennifer Ryall - Everything’s Alright (1972)

• Red Perksey & His Orchestra - (A Little Boy Called) Smiley (1956)

Images: Jennifer Thomson, Mia Cahen, with thanks.

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Update: Thanks to Jamie for alerting me to a parallel in novelist Thomas Pynchon who has intentionally disappeared himself from public scrutiny. He carries on an unremarkable life in a Manhattan neighbourhood and dismisses the idea that he is reclusive. Pynchon told CNN he believes recluse is a "code word generated by journalists... meaning, 'doesn't like to talk to reporters.'" (linked from Wikipedia).