Rock 'n' roll quotes for today

"I wonder why our records sound so scratchy?"



"Rock ’n’ roll smells phony and false. It is sung, played, and written for the most part by cretinous goons and by means of its almost imbecilic reiteration, and sly, lewd, in plain fact, dirty lyrics, it manages to be the martial music of every side-burned delinquent on the face of the Earth. It is the most brutal, ugly, desperate, vicious form of expression it has been my misfortune to hear."--Frank Sinatra, quoted in Western World, 1958.

"Who are we to say what the kids should like?"--Perry Como, quoted in Look, 1956.

"I guess it's O.K., man. At least, it has a beat."--Benny Goodman, quoted in Look, 1956.


http://box.net/public/lee/files/180667.html All I Want Is a Seat to See the Beatles (Sammy Cahn), Paul Anka, 1964.


Please save, rather than open, file for best results. Thanks!

Lee

The end of the world (two versions)

Not the Skeeter Davis hit, sorry. These two songs are about the real thing--the end of the Earth and all (or, rather, most) of the human life on it. Such a heavy and serious topic, of course, calls for the silliest possible approach. And, so, we have Billy Sherrill's 1959 tale of American and Soviet monkeys going to the Moon and watching their home planet blow itself up. The Billy Sherrill? you ask. Yup, same guy--the creator of "Countrypolitan" (some people credit Chet Atkins and/or Owen Bradley, instead) and the writer or co-writer of Stand By Your Man, Almost Persuaded, Sugar Lips, and I Don't Wanna Play House. The artist is Eddie Hill, whose small discography includes singles on Mercury and RCA. Interestingly, this pre-Countrypolitan country single sounds more modern, in terms of production and arrangement, than most of what was going on in late-'50s rock and roll. Gosh, I thought all of pre-Countrypolitan country sounded like Hank Williams. (I've got to stop turning to NPR for my music history.)

http://box.net/public/lee/files/449751.html Monkey Business (Billy Sherrill), Eddie Hill, 1959 (University Records 206/7).

Our second end-of-the-world song is Thirteen Men, which had previously been recorded in 1954 by both Bill Haley and its songwriter, Dickie Thompson, as Thirteen Women. Thompson's version was released on the Herald label, and Haley's on Decca (as the A side of something called Rock Around the Clock). Shore's version has all kinds of "Exotica" touches, which is to say that it sounds like progressive 1940s jazz, only in hi-fi and with lots of echo. And there's a hokey, "wordless" vocal chorus . (See the Leepedia definition of Exotica.)

http://box.net/public/lee/files/447746.html Thirteen Men (Dickie Thompson), Dinah Shore, w. Harry Zimmerman's Orch. and Chorus, 1958 (RCA 47-7138).

Two late-'50s classics from MYPWHAE, your source for musical bombs. I mean, music that's the bomb.

Lee

"Creep"-y mystery number two

So sooner had I posted my post that I noticed another mystery. The Creep was written by Ken Macintosh, Brian Fahey, and Gordon Langhorn.

So, why does the Bell label read "Burton-Sigman"???

(See mysterious attribution, above.)

Andy Burton and Carl Sigman, to be precise. This, according to several sites, including The Sheet Music Warehouse, which has a copy of The Creep for sale ("Sorry--No Image Yet."). Category: 20th Century Songs. Perhaps the category should be "20th Century Mysteries."

Just what is going on here? Did Carl Sigman, whom ascap.com calls "one of the great American songwriters of the 20th century," feel the need to swipe a British bandleader's inane novelty lyrics? Sigman had just written the words to Ebb Tide, so maybe his inspiration was all washed-up for the year. "First the tide rushes in, Plants a kiss on the shore, Then rolls out to sea, And the sea is very still once more."

Hm. Actually, The Creep might not be that inane, after all.

But I feel as if I'm poking into things Bloggers Weren't Meant to Know. Maybe we'd best leave this one be. I'm going to creep slowly out of here....

Lee

Three blocks from my old address!

So, the cab-riding, husband-and-wife Tennessee fugitives were caught in Columbus, Ohio--three blocks from where I used to live. That's creepy.

(Segue Alert) Speaking of creepy, The Creep was a hit for Stan Kenton in 1954. Which doesn't really work as a segue, because there's nothing creepy about The Creep, except in the literal sense of dancers inching across the floor like newborns--which, come to think of it, is actually pretty creepy. I've never seen the dance enacted by anyone, but that's how the lyrics describe it, i.e. as people creeping like caterpillars, which is kind of hard to picture, really, unless a lot of alcohol is involved. British bandleader Ken Macintosh, who co-wrote the song and had a big hit with it in England, concocted the words without knowing anything about the dance--for all we know, "the Creep" might look like something out of the Cirque du Soleil. Without words, the music sounds kind of depressing, especially in Kenton's big, brooding version. And, so, I never knew it was a dance. Or that it had words.

But it is, and it does. Or it was, and it did. And here's Larry Clinton's excellent cover on the cheap but highly musical Bell label:

http://box.net/public/lee/files/338479.html The Creep, Larry Clinton and His Orchestra, with the Carillons, 1953. (Both sides joined in one file.)

Hm.... 12/53 was the date for this, and for Kenton's version. So, Mackintosh's original must have come out in 1953. But, if it didn't become a UK hit until 1954, why was it covered in late 1953?

I just checked a number of Internet sites, and they all report that the song hit it big on the UK charts in 1954. So, again, why was it covered prior to that event? I've discovered a genuine mystery here, and it's one that absolutely no one cares about. Just my luck. Why can't I discover pop music mysteries that anyone cares about?

The Creep is in the standard twelve-bar blues form, of course. Tonic (four bars), subdominant (two bars), tonic (two bars), V/IV cadence (two bars), tonic (two bars). (Information from Leepedia.)

Lee

In defense of Miss America

I'm here to defend Miss America. The song, that is. Let's review Bernie Wayne's words:

There she is, Miss America
There she is, your ideal
The dreams of a million girls who are more than pretty
May come true in Atlantic City
For they may turn out to be the Queen of femininity.
There she is, Miss America
There she is, your ideal
With so many beauties, she took the town by storm
With her all-American face and form
And there she is
Walking on air, she is
Fairest of the fair, she is
Miss America.

It's tempting to call these the most unbelievably awful lyrics ever written, but there have been worse. "There's a lady who's sure all that glitters is gold," for example. Or, "Oh, it seems to me that sorry seems to be the hardest word." Wayne wasn't even in the ballpark. No, as bad as his words are, they work beautifully for the intended purpose, which is to hawk a pageant more awkward and plastic than any set of verses dreamed up in one minute (Wayne claimed one hour, but that's hard to believe). And they go splendidly with the melody, creating a perfect match that either accentuates the idiocy of the lyrics or dampens same, depending on your point of view, or state of awakeness at 1 A.M. when the crowning finally happens.

And, as we all heard on the news, network television has dropped the pageant after a full half century of carrying it. The official reason is that MA is no longer relevant, but that's hard to swallow. I mean, when was it relevant? The truth is that MA, as grotesquely hokey as it may be, is too honest a piece of entertainment to survive in today's TV environment of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, American Idol, and Trading Spaces. Of course, the move to cable will change the show. In time, MA will become louder, more compact, and flashier. It will conform to cable's standard format: lots of noise and motion sandwiched between even noisier commercials.


Anyway, it's time for us to listen to Johnny Desmond, the ex-Glenn-Miller singer who introduced Bernie Wayne's song to lucky Philco Television Playhouse viewers in 1955. The song, it seems, was part of a play about Miss America ("The Miss America Story"). In other words, the MA theme song started out as a fictional MA theme song. After which, it became the "real" thing, to the extent that a Miss America theme song can be called real. My brain is starting to hurt....

http://box.net/public/lee/files/345048.html Miss America! Johnny Desmond, 1955.

His "lyrics" aside, Bernie Wayne was a gifted tune writer, as evidenced by the following selections, Blue Velvet, a hit for Tony Bennett in 1951, and The Magic Touch, a hit for Hugo Winterhalter in 1954. These might help you recover from the above file. Or maybe not:

http://box.net/public/lee/files/427033.html Blue Velvet (Wayne-Morris), Tony Bennett, w. Percy Faith and His Orch., 1951.

http://box.net/public/lee/files/427034.html The Magic Touch (Bernie Wayne), Hugo Winterhalter and His Orch., 1953.

I wonder who's doing the great guitar work on the Winterhalter side? Wish I knew.

Another thing I'd like to know is, how come after all of these years, including 50 years on TV, the Miss America pageant has failed to make so much as a dent in world hunger, childhood illiteracy, or lack of education for women in impoverished countries? You'd figure these maladies would have yielded to all the cliches by now....

(Please save, rather than open, files for best results. Thanks!)

Here he goes,

Lee Hartsfeld