In 1981 my friend Max and his associate (and our friend) Kathy, made an advertisement for the magazine Max worked for: Audio.
I have no recollection of how the whole thing came together, but at the end of the day three members of the Warren Street All Starz stickball team, Rafael Pizarro, Fleming Meeks and moi, were cast. Fleming as the delicate consumer, Rael and I as the Mono Brothers, the wild beasts of the street.
The “record store” was set up in the Cooper Square loft of Janet, a friend of other All Starz members.
I remember brutalizing my hair with a pair of scissors, trying to make it as spiky as I could, before heading over to the shoot, though it doesn’t look that spiky.
The image tells the rest of the story. This episode did not prove to be a stepping stone to a new career.
In 1958, I was first really hit by pop music and the radio. That is when I first heard Buddy Holly’s Peggy Sue, at the tender age of five. There are other tunes from around that period of my life that I remember–Gypsy Woman, Little Star, Sorry, I Ran All the Way Home, Come Softly to Me–but at that age I also played with army men and cowboys and well, I did not own a radio. Not to mention the radios we did have were controlled by my parents.
But, it was in the summer of 1962, when I was 10 and we were at a family camp near Lake Tahoe, I heard the incredible machine gun drums and droning saxes of what was the huge hit that summer, The Locomotion for the first time, and if Buddy Holly was the first nail of my rock and roll coffin, that moment was second.
The Locomotion was penned by Carole King and her then husband, Gerry Goffin, and was the first hit for their Dimension record label, but in reality, the team of Goffin and King had been cranking out hits as members of the Brill Building for years.
The Brill Building was the songwriting haven for luminaries that included Lieber and Stoller, Neil Sedaka, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, all of which is documented beautifully in the book Always Magic in the Air by Ken Emerson.
The Locomotion led to a request for a radio for the bedroom I then shared with my brother, and that Xmas we were given a white Packard Bell. As if that were not enough, our family also got a Motorola phonograph which played all speeds–16, 33.3, 45, and 78 RPM–of records.
We also got a copy of The First Familyalbum, a political parody of the Kennedy family that was a huge hit at the time, and that started me on my path to collections of records and CDs along with a room full of musical instruments and playing in bands and pretty much a lifelong love of music in all forms. It started me on parodies, too.
Though I would have probably been hooked by music pretty soon anyway (I’m thinking had it not been The Locomotion, it would have been the Rockin’ Rebels Wild Weekend a few months later).
Wild Weekend was not written by Goffin and King, but it was a seriously rocking aong and one that hit me at the time like my mate Steve here notes KISS hit him. Don’t forget, I was just 11-years old then.
But, back to Goffin and King, among the wonderful hits the pair wrote are:
Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? (The Shirelles)
Take Good Care of my Baby (Bobby Vee)
Might as Well Rain Until September (The Shirelles/Carole King)
One Fine Day (The Chiffons)
Pleasant Valley Sunday (The Monkees)
Up on the Roof (The Drifters)
I’m into Something Good (Herman’s Herrmits/Earl-Jean)
Don’t Bring Me Down (The Animals)
(You Make Me Feel Like a) Natural Woman (Aretha Franklin)
Now, you have to remember that at the time a lot of the rock and roll was laughable by today’s standards. The wonderful and visceral and sexual Little Richard, for example, was sanitized by the awful Pat Boone for white kids (remember too this music was burgeoning around the time of the Civil Rights movement in the early).
But, much like Hip Hop was developed by the African American community, and the form was then “appropriated” for even broader commercial exploitation (and believe me, I am not talking the Beastie Boys here) earlier, rollicking rhythm and blues was swiped a la Richard to Boone.
At the time, though, Tutti Fruitti as performed by Little Richard was akin to Jimi Hendrix humping his Strat-O-Caster, or Wendy giving Prince a quasi blow job in the Purple Rain film (she does play a Rickenbacker, though), or anything current from Beyoncé on out.
Still, pop music, which was not necessarily rock and roll, was similarly tamer, and more orchestrated, an off-shoot of Broadway and tin pan alley largely still without the dominance of the electric guitar. Though that was indeed coming.
And, whether it floats your boat or not, or if the songs sound horribly dated and silly, the tunes of Goffin and King, I think, are still just lovely little masterpieces, much in the same league of Phil Spector. In fact, John Lennon noted that he wanted his songs with Paul McCartney to of the same ilk as those of the Dimension duo.
I still feel Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow is among the sweetest of love songs.
One of the things that always nailed me about this production is the beautiful tremoly rake of the electric guitar on the “one” of each measure. Such a simple and sweet effect, and one that has impressed me to the tune that I try to employ it often when I am playing rhythm guitar.
By the time Pleasant Valley Sunday hit it, the Beatles had come and guitars were happening and even Hippies were here, criticizing the plastic life of the suburbs, so Goffin came up with this:
Oddly this is a song I always kind of wanted to cover in some band or another.
So, last week, Goffin passed away at the age of 75.
Though I have been so remiss at contributing here at the site–it is hard once my work week begins to find time for much else, but, well, 185 more calendar days–I could not let his passing go without honoring and thanking just a great songwriter and influence on my life.
So, I will close with one other tune from the pair, and the one that introduced me to the voice of Carole King:
I read about this band last year, and listened to some cuts at the time. Great name!
They played in the park by my house a few days ago, so I went to see them. I like girl bands. I’m looking forward to the day where we don’t notice a band is all girls, and I like watching videos of girls in bands acting goofy more than I like watching guys in bands acting goofy. Usually, though of course it depends.
The Beatles acting goofy almost always wins. REM, not so much.
But here’s the thing about Warpaint live on this night, they were ragged. On some songs the drums and bass were solid and strong, but the vocals and guitars and the whole shape of the song would shift, let’s say meander, toward the end.
I wasn’t going to write about them, but then today in the Times Jon Pareles did. He’s into them. He dropped a few clues about how sloppy they are, but he treated them like established artists. And, to his credit, put them in the lineage of Siouxsie Sioux and some other ladies bands of the 70s to 80s transition.
The band he didn’t mention that seems to pertain most is the Slits. The Warpaint studio recordings are fairly tight, but meandering. The live show was meandering and not tight at all. That’s a big difference. Let’s fix these guys up with Dennis Bovell and see what happens. But for now the name outstrips the tunes.
And still, I’m hearing this one in my head. Good night.
Back in the late 70s and early 80s my roommates and I used to host a lot of parties — Christmas parties, Kentucky Derby Day parties, Patriots’ Day (Boston Marathon) parties and summer barbeques. One of the features that made these bashes so popular was that everyone danced.
I would work on party mix tapes for weeks ahead of time, planning for just the right songs to come on at just the right moment. One of my “tricks” was to find a relatively obscure butt shaker that I knew would keep everyone on the dance floor.
Today’s SotW — Peggy Scott & Jo Jo Benson’s “Soulshake” (1968) – is a perfect example.
This is a flat out, foot stompin’, butt wigglin’ soul romp that’s made more interesting by using a sitar (I think) played with a country twang and pedal steel guitar played by Nashville’s Pete Drake. It’s so much fun that when it fades out after a brief 2:30 you just want to hear it again.
Scott and Benson actually had a couple of bigger hits with “Pickin’ Wild Mountain Berries” and “Lover’s Holiday” but “Soulshake” is the one I need to hear the most.
Delaney & Bonnie, no slouches when it comes to making black music, must have agreed. They released their own version of the song just about a year after the original came out on their album To Bonnie From Delaney. It had the great Duane Allman on guitar.
I can practically feel the sweat soaked bodies jiggling on the dance floor. Oh, the good old days!
I came across this story today, by Anil Dash, which celebrates the 30th anniversay of Prince and the Revolution’s Purple Rain by dissecting it. Full of excellent detail, it also illustrates our current linking problem. Many of his links are to Spotify tracks, which don’t play for me. I hope they do for you.
But what was weird and wonderful and included in Dash’s story was the video of James Brown, Michael Jackson and Prince on the same stage, maybe not at the same time but nearly so. You don’t want to miss this.
The first rock band I ever heard/saw live was the Sounds of Modification (the perfect band name for Nixon loving Long Island), who set up in the parking lot in Smithtown, outside Chess King (our jeans store) and rocked. At least a couple of them had been in my dad’s gym class at Sachem High School, and I’d met them, but now I was here with friends out on our own. When they played I stood as close to the band, who used a flat truck trailer as a stage, as I could, and was deafened by the volume. We walked home afterwards, overjoyed and exultant.
I’m awed that a song I heard that day I can hear again.
Yes, the Doobies singer, the white soul singer, the terribly popular terribly MOR singer everyone who had any taste hated. Harvey writes too about something called Yacht Rock, which we don’t usually cover here, but the clip of Cris Cross playing with the Roots wearing yachting caps is worth the click.
Been too busy to even read Remnants most of the time lately. Have two Steveslists that I thought of weeks ago but haven’t written yet (5 Bands I Used To Like A Lot But Never Listen To Anymore and 5 Favorite Rock Books) and I owe Peter the beginning of a dueling review of the new Fucked Up album (which no one will care about besides Peter and I).
But here’s a band I read about in the Rolling Stone yesterday who seem interesting. I now read Rolling Stone monthly but never buy it. I find a chair at Barnes & Noble (enjoy it while it still exists, Steve) at the Lehigh Valley Mall while my kids waste an hour walking around and pilfer the content for free.
These guys sound like Jonathan Richman mixed with the Violent Femmes (among other things) to me, but the comments mention Richard Hell, so I figured you guys might be interested. I’ll be stuck on Fucked Up and Off! for a while, so go ahead without me.
I had half a memory of Peter writing about these guys before. Perhaps I was just too ignorant to find it.
In 1981 my friend Max and his associate (and our friend) Kathy, made an advertisement for the magazine Max worked for: Audio.
