Like his hero, Buddy Holly, Joe Meek wouldn’t “Fade Away.”

After the stratospheric heights of “Telstar,” it was inevitable that Joe Meek would plummet.  But no one saw how far he would fall… as you’ll discover in this episode of NOTES.

Of satellites… Tornados… and flushed toilets.

Joe Meek’s greatest success came with the release of a bizarre pre-Beatles instrumental track inspired by the launch of a communications satellite. Learn more about the magic of “Telstar” in this episode of NOTES.

304 Holloway Road: The site of magic… and horror.

He was an ambitious promoter of talent… a groundbreaking producer… the world’s biggest Buddy Holly fan… and also bleeding bonkers. Learn what made Joe Meek, in this, the very first episode of NOTES.

People scare better when they’re dying.

His music has enhanced films of every genre… and even video games!  Discover more about the amazing Ennio Morricone… and especially his aural contribution to Sergio Leone’s masterpiece, ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST… in this installment of NOTES.

To some, the study of popular music may seem the very model of a trivial pursuit. 

After all, BILLBOARD’s charts are often littered with flash-in-the-pan fashion fads and jejune novelties.  In the pop domain, art can be eclipsed by P.R. and talent can be trumped by spin.  For every Beatles there is a Pipkins, for every U2 a Right Said Fred, for every Michael Franti a Kevin Federline.  It is a world where the forgettable and insubstantial frequently elbow their way to the front of the V.I.P. line, a world where the A-list is all too commonly dominated by the Z-grade.

Nevertheless, there is much to be learned about our nation in the study of popular song.  Sometimes, like the shadows on Plato’s cavern wall, the hits of the day reflect the history and zeitgeist of the universe which spawned them. 

Submitted for your consideration is the old baptismal hymn, “Wade in the Water” — a song that has been covered by literally hundreds of artists and which has crossed effortlessly from its gospel origin into the genres of rock, soul, jazz and easy listening. 

For a song that is more than 150 years old, “Wade in the Water” has proven remarkably spry.  In 1966, it was a hit for jazz pianist Ramsey Lewis.  It has been dressed in blues by Big Mama Thornton and Dr. John… funkified by Billy Preston and Booker T. & the MGs… and folked up by Bob Dylan and Odetta.

As with other American negro spirituals (like “The Gospel Train” and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”), “Wade in the Water” had a dual meaning for the slaves who sang it in the mid-19th century.  Although it served as an accompaniment to baptism, the song’s lyrics were also codified instructions for black runaways seeking freedom via the so-called “Underground Railroad.” Until 1850, slaves fleeing the plantations of the south could find independence just north of the Macon-Dixon line.  Gospel songs like “Follow the Drinking Gourd” reminded the runaways to steer north using the Big Dipper (the titular “Drinking Gourd”), while “Wade in the Water” exhorted them to evade the pursuing bloodhounds by running by night through streams and rivers. 

Even the biblical locales mentioned in the song were encrypted references to specific checkpoints along the Railroad.  For instance, in the song’s third lyric:

Jordan’s water is chilly and cold.
God’s gonna trouble the water.
It chills the body, but not the soul.
God’s gonna trouble the water.

Jordan represents the Ohio River, which slaves would cross on their way to one of southern Ohio’s several African-American settlements or further north to Canada.

It’s possible that some who sing “Wade in the Water” today are unaware of its Underground Railroad roots.  Many have enjoyed the song for its spiritual message, timeless melody and rhythmic possibilities.  But like other popular American hits, it also tells an important story about a part of our national history that must not be forgotten.

Please join us in this space when we discuss “Wade in the Water” again in future weeks.

Tailgunner Joe: The King of HUAC n’ Roll.

Even as it went nuclear nuts, America also went commie crazy. While Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy ferreted reds out from under our beds, conservative country singers and right-wing rockers gave musical voice to our nationalistic nightmare. Find out more in this edition of NOTES.

How pop music learned to stop worrying and love the bomb.

After the Soviet Union developed their own hydrogen bomb, America’s dreams of an atomic future morphed into nightmares of nuclear annihilation instead. Once again, the popular music industry was right there, simultaneously reflecting — and feeding — the now-terrified U.S. zeitgeist.

America in the 1950s dreamed of atomic cars like the proposed Ford Nucleon.

There was a time in the mid-20th Century that America believed atomic power would cure virtually all ills. Our spacecraft… our superheroes… even our cars would be fueled by the splitting of the atom. And pop music wasn’t immune to the nation’s atomic fever. Learn more in this episode of NOTES.

[And for further exploration, be sure to check out the amazing site, conelrad.com – an encyclopedic resource for all things Cold War-related!]

The travails of the working class have often proven fruitful territory for American pop music. 

In 1962, for instance, Roy Orbison lamented “Workin’ for the Man.”  Twenty-one years later,  Donna Summer scored big with “She Works Hard for the Money,” her paean to the service employee.  And while Lee Dorsey sweated his ya-ya off “Working in the Coalmine” in 1966, the ultimate exultation of hard labor was another song about coal-mining that spent eight weeks perched at the peak of BILLBOARD’s pop charts more than a decade before Dorsey’s descent down the mineshaft. 

With its dark combination of violent braggadocio and fatalistic class consciousness, no other hit has limned the paradoxical pride of the American laborer like “Sixteen Tons.”  Although the song was written by country great Merle Travis, it was the deep, mellifluous voice of Tennessee Ernie Ford that first made the song a crossover hit, and eventually a national standard.

In truth, Ernest Jennings Ford never lugged number nine coal, and while he often described himself as “a little ol’ pea-picker,” he didn’t grow up on a farm either — although he did spend the summers of his teen-aged years working on a relative’s acreage near his hometown of Bristol on the Tennessee-Virginia border.  Upon graduating from Bristol High School in 1937, Ford landed a job as staff announcer at local radio station WOPI, the first of many gigs that would draw on his unique baritone voice.  From there, the young radio personality moved to a station in Atlanta, and then Knoxville, Tennessee.  Ford enlisted in the Army following the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, rising to the rank of captain in the Army Air Corps as a bombardier trainer stationed in California.  (It was while there that Ford met military secretary Betty Heminger, who would soon become his wife until her death in 1989.)

Upon his discharge in 1945, Ford’s career shifted into overdrive.  When he was hired to host a country music show for a San Bernardino, California radio station, Ford developed the fast-talking, hopped-up hillbilly persona of “Tennessee Ernie,” which caught the ear of California radio mogul Loyal King, who brought him to Pasadena’s KXLA.  It was there that the fledgling singer and announcer first teamed with Speedy West and Jimmy Bryant (the guitar duo who would give his forthcoming boogie singles their rockin’ oomph) in the orchestra of popular disc jockey Cliffie Stone.

Stone’s connections at Capitol Records knew talent when they heard it, and signed Ford to a contract on January 21, 1949.  That same day, he cut his first hit record, “Tennessee Border.”  Within a few years, Ford had charted over a dozen hits, including two songs that made it into the Pop Top Ten in 1955: “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” and the forementioned “Sixteen Tons.”  In 1953, Ford initiated a new phase of his career when he first appeared in the reoccurring role of “Cousin Ernie” on the popular “I Love Lucy” sitcom.  Ford would eventually host his own popular variety show from 1956 until 1961.

We’ll talk more about the bucolic baritone Tennessee Ernie Ford — and his guitar cohorts, Speedy West and Jimmy Bryant — in this space in future weeks.  Bless your pea-pickin’ hearts if you can join us then. 

He made dada rock.

He died in flames — but for decades, he burned with the incandescent glow of his own off-kilter brilliance. Learn about the singular Vivian Stanshall… the man who had his fingers in mainstream and oddball classics like the Bonzo Dog Band’s “Rhinocratic Oaths,” Mike Oldfield’s “Tubular Bells,” Stevie Winwood’s ARC OF A DIVER and his own RAWLINSON’S END in this edition of NOTES.

And you can read more about the Bonzos in “The Missing Link Between the Beatles and Monty Python.”

As Craven posts this, we are less than two weeks from the day in the United States when ghosts and monsters can kick up their bony heels and revel in all things ghastly… but we should remember that ghouls in other parts of the world are not so lucky.

For instance, there is no Halloween in Italy.

But there is “Ognissanti” (All Saints’ Day) on November 1st, followed by “Il Giorno dei Morte” (the Day of the Dead) on November 2nd.  It is on this latter date that families bake cookies called “Ossa dei Morte,” or “Bones of the Dead”… a culinary indication that — even without a Halloween — Italians enjoy a pronounced sense of the macabre.

For further proof, one need travel no further than to the local “cinema teatro,” or movie theater, where for more than 40 years, Italian audiences have thrilled to the baleful shocks of the so-called “giallo.”  Giallo is the Italian word for “yellow,” and its use to describe horror mysteries dates back to 1929, when Italian publisher Mondadori issued a series of novels bedecked in bright yellow covers and inspired by American hardboiled detective literature.

In 1963, the giallo leapt to the silver screen when cinematographer-turned-director Mario Bava — already a 24-year veteran of the Italian film industry — helmed his story of serial murder called LA RAGAZZA CHE SAPEVA TROPPO, or THE GIRL WHO KNEW TOO MUCH.  Starring American genre favorite John Saxon (and featuring characters with the noble name of Craven), THE GIRL WHO KNEW TOO MUCH established some of the stylistic markers that would come to characterize gialli, and additionally would prove to be a big influence on Sean S. Cunningham’s influential slasher opus FRIDAY THE 13TH nearly 20 years later. 

Over the next few decades, Bava would continue to churn out gialli and was soon joined by other filmmakers like Lucio Fulci and Dario Argento.  Argento (whose previous credits included co-writing Sergio Leone’s masterpiece ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST) in particular became associated with the giallo genre, and was soon dubbed “the European Hitchcock” for his visually stylish — and relentlessly gory — thrillers.

In 1975, a relatively unsuccessful Italian progressive rock band called Cherry Five was hired to compose the soundtrack for Argento’s latest giallo, the now-classic DEEP RED.  Led by keyboardist Claudio Simonetti and guitarist Massimo Morante, Cherry Five changed their name to Goblin for the project — and landed the biggest hit of their career thus far.  The soundtrack to DEEP RED topped the Italian pop charts for 12 weeks, and marked the beginning of a long working relationship with Argento. 

We’ll talk more about Goblin in future weeks.  Please check back for more on these “dons of the dead.”

And while I’m speaking to you spammers: Why is it that you folks only target the blog-post entitled, “The Race of Ernest Hogan?”  At the time of this writing, Craven has deleted nearly three-thousand spam comments, most of them affixed to this particular post.  Stop it, please.  Bad spammers!  Bad!  

(However, if you’re not a spammer, do check out that post.  It’s Craven’s personal favorite.)

See you soon. 

Besides Wanda, Janis and Lorrie, there were other great — but lesser-known — female rockabilly singers.

The rockabilly era also saw many great singles released by more obscure female artists.  Learn about some of these lesser-known lasses — including the amazing Sparkle Moore — in this episode of NOTES.

She may have been young when she recorded with brother Larry in the 1950s, but Lorrie Collins was a real “Rock Boppin’ Baby.”

The Collins Kids were young and squeaky clean — but that didn’t stop thousands of rockabilly fans from fantasizing about pretty Lorrie Collins.  Learn more about Lorrie and her brother Larry in this episode of NOTES.

Cock your pistol and rooty-toot-toot: Janis Martin was a musical straight-shooter.

Less well-known than Wanda Jackson to the general public, Janis Martin is nonetheless revered by rockabilly fans for the vivacious, hot-rockin’ singles she released in the 1950s and early 1960s.  Learn more about “the female Elvis” in this episode of NOTES.

Well you could talk about her, say that she was mean.  She’d blow your head off, baby, with nitroglycerine.

They were red hot and icy cool.  The ladies of rockabilly redefined the role of the female singer in the nascent days of rock n’ roll.  Our four-part look at the hep kittens begins with the story of Wanda Jackson, the original “Fujiyama Mama.”

For more on the ladies of rockabilly, see “Praising the Ladies of Rockabilly.”

Here’s a question you won’t find in Trivial Pursuits:  What was the the first American pop hit?

The answer, as Bill Clinton might tell you, depends on your definition of terms.  The earliest songs to sweep the nation were political ditties that date back to the nascent days of the United States.  For example, there was the “Liberty Song,” the lyrics of which were printed in 1768 in the BOSTON GAZETTE, and which became a rallying cry for colonists seeking to establish a new country.  Another example is the more familiar “Yankee Doodle,” which began its long life as a Dutch harvest song in the 15th century.  British army surgeon Richard Schuckburgh adapted the tune into an anti-American air during the French and Indian War, and it was originally sung by English troops until the very Yanks it ridiculed adopted it as the patriotic standard we know it as today.  In 1775, the first sentimental song to infiltrate the national psyche was “Banks of the Dee,” which told the tale of a Scottish soldier who leaves his lover to fight in America. 

But in its more modern sense of “music industry bestseller,” the first American pop hit was an 1892 sentimental tearjerker called “After the Ball.”  Written and self-published by an enterprising and self-taught Milwaukee song-scribe by the name of Charles Kassel Harris, the song’s story of lost love apparently spoke to many.  “After the Ball” became the first sheet music to sell several million copies, and was translated into many languages and published the world over.  The overwhelming success of “After the Ball” led Harris to move his songwriting company to New York City, and specifically the Union Square area where other music publishers, like M. Whitmark & Sons and F.B. Haviland, were also settling. 

Although its physical setting would eventually move uptown a few blocks to West 28th Street, it was this aggregation of music publishers that formed the nucleus of what was to become known as “Tin Pan Alley,” that New York neighborhood where America’s greatest songwriters churned out standards that are still well-known today.  Protected by then-new copyright laws, publishers began to see the moneymaking possibilities of popular music, and this formerly chaotic line started to stabilize into a rule-bound industry wherein songs were written to order by staff composers following the latest musical trends, and driven by market surveys and statistical analysis. 

 Songs like “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” “Shine On, Harvest Moon” and “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” originated in Tin Pan Alley (which was christened thusly by reporter Monroe Rosenfeld for the constant piano clatter that emanated from its storefronts).  Among the great American songsmiths who got their starts in Tin Pan Alley were Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern and George Gershwin.

We’ll examine the history of Tin Pan Alley, as well as its best- and least-known songwriters (including the prolific Yankee Doodle Boy, George M. Cohan), in this space in the near future.  Join us then as we explore the era when the art of music morphed into an industry.

In space, everyone can hear you sing.

In this final installment of our look at the music of STAR TREK, we examine how Gene Roddenberry’s mythos has beamed down over the years to inspire and inform modern pop acts.

“I left my heart… on Rigel II…”

Many of STAR TREK’s stars have enjoyed double lives… as pop music singers.  Hear the dulcet tones of Kirk, Spock and Data, among others, in this episode of NOTES.

Even Vulcans like music.

Science fiction television music, the final frontier.   These are the soundtracks of STAR TREK, Gene Roddenberry’s sometimes brilliant, sometimes daffy 1960s series that spawned spin-offs and motion picture franchises .  Your five-minute mission: to explore strange new worlds of music.   To seek out interesting composers and musical arcana.  To boldly go where this blog has only once gone before!

For more on the music of STAR TREK, see “Sing Long and Prosper.”

Listen, pal.  They say, “The best revenge is a life well-lived,” and — sitting here in 1959, in Don the Beachcomber’s Dagger Bar, one of Hawaii’s best-known Tiki lounges, sipping Mai Tais from ceramic moai mugs — who are we to question such wisdom?

Revenge.  It drives a lot of people into lives well-lived and otherwise, even here in Waikiki.  That’s right, even here, in as close to an island paradise as you or I will ever see, bad blood can flow like the Mai Tai you almost spilled ogling that hula dancer a few minutes ago.  You don’t believe me?  If you’ll unwrap your lips from your umbrella straw long enough to look up at the man behind the piano over there, you’ll see the poor schmo who was backstabbed by a billionaire.

That’s Martin Denny, the pianist who coined the musical genre of “exotica” — and here on the brink of the 1960s, he’s busy living his life very well indeed… to retaliate against Henry J. Kaiser, the filthy rich industrialist who tried to take Denny down a couple years ago.

Y’see, back then, Denny was a prime attraction at Kaiser’s Shell Bar in his Hawaiian Village Resort near here.  Denny had put together a crackerjack jazz ensemble that included percussionist Augie Colon (whose bird calls and frog croaks, you’ll undoubtedly recall, helped propel Denny’s cover of Les Baxter’s “Quiet Village” to the top of the pop charts this year), and a prodigious, young vibist named Arthur Lyman, who Denny had discovered working as a desk clerk at the Halekulani Hotel.  Backed by talents like these, Denny was the toast of Oahu.  By 1957, he was courting invitations to play the Mainland and had landed a recording contract from Liberty Records.

But Kaiser (who had himself poached Denny’s band from Don the Beachcomber in ‘56) didn’t take kindly to the notion of his star crossing the ocean.  When blustery browbeating failed to intimidate the pianist, Kaiser got dirty.  Before Denny had even booked his passage to the States, Kaiser engaged Arthur Lyman in negotiations sub rosa, offering Denny’s young vibist his departing bandleader’s spot at the Shell Bar. When Lyman left Denny’s group in 1957, he took bass player John Kramer and drummer Harold Chang with him, leaving Denny to scramble for replacements.

Luckily enough, he drew a pair of aces in jazz drummer Roy “the Kidd” Harte and, especially, Julius Wechter, who replaced Lyman on the mallets.  Wechter would contribute much to Denny’s subsequent recordings, before moving on to a career that included stints in Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass (for whom he wrote “The Spanish Flea”) and the Baja Marimba Band.

We’ll discuss the Denny-Lyman imbroglio — as well as other blood feuds of exotica — in this space in future weeks.  Join us then as we learn more about America’s passion for all things Polynesian at the midpoint of the 20th century.  Now, please pass the pupu platter, pal.  Because unlike revenge, pupus are not best served cold.

Lawrence Beitler’s photograph of an awful 1930 double-lynching in Marion, Indiana, fertilized “Strange Fruit.”

Some songs entertain… others change the world.  Learn about one of the latter — a song inspired by an awful, true event, written by a leftist organizer and immortalized by one of the greatest voices in jazz — in this episode of NOTES.

For more on “Strange Fruit,” see “The Importance of Strange Fruit.”

Cowabunga!

Rock n’ roll inspiration lurks in many odd places.  Jungle rhythms… military cadences… barnyard squawks… and electronic bleeps — all of these have triggered great rock songs during the genre’s half-century existence.   But in the late 1950s and early 1960s, west coast rockers found their muse on the beaches of southern California. 

Although the sport of surfing first came to California from Hawaii in the late 19th century, and gained a real foothold in 1907 when it was promoted by the Pacific Electric Railway as a means of drawing tourists to Redondo Beach via the company’s famous “red car” trolleys, it was in 1959 that surfing became a bona fide craze, thanks to its depiction in the hit motion picture GIDGET.  The film starred Sandra Dee and James Darren as hot, young surfers, and sparked renewed interest in the sport — as well as a spate of imitative “beach movies.”  (Future Academy Award-winner Cliff Robertson also appeared in GIDGET as “the Big Kahuna,” a nickname nicked by the film’s screenwriters from Duke Kahanamoku, the Hawaiian swimming champ credited with inventing the modern form of surfing.)

In the months following the release of GIDGET, the beaches of California were swarmed by “gremmies” and “grommets” “carving” and “boosting” off briny “bumps” and “dunes.”  And with the teenaged hordes with boards came peculiar forms of speech, apparel… and, of course, music.

To many people, the phrase “surf rock” will conjure memories of the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean.  These bands were exemplars of the “vocal” school of surf rock, and derived their tight harmonies from the doo wop groups of the previous decade. 

But genuine surf enthusiasts know that the real surf rock action was found on records by instrumental rockers like Boston-born Richard Monsour, who under his better-known identity as Dick Dale stunned his generation with the guitar attack of “Let’s Go Trippin’” in 1961.  This record is generally considered the first true surf rock single, and it was quickly followed by other instrumental classics like the Surfaris’ “Wipe Out,” the Chantays’ “Pipeline,” the Pyramids’ “Penetration” and the Tornados’ naughty “Shootin’ Beavers.”  

With the popularity of these and like-minded records, labels quickly began assembling their ace sessions men into ad hoc surf combos like the Revells (which included Glen Campbell and Phil Spector’s favorite drummer, Hal Blaine) and the Marketts (who were the collective brainchild of Joe Saraceno, the producer who had already helmed some of the best albums of the Tacoma, Washington-based instrumental group, the Ventures, for Liberty Records). 

During the first half of the 1960s, the wave of surf rock grew into a tsunami, traveling far inland before cresting.  Bands that hailed from landlocked states like the Trashmen from Minnesota scored surf hits such as “Surfin’ Bird” and “My Woodie.”  Even Colorado produced one of the great surf rock songs, when the Astronauts — five young Boulder musicians — touched down on the charts with their reverb-soaked version of Lee Hazlewood’s “Baja.”

A Bert and two Chucks: Just three musically minded game show hosts…

They’ve won their place in the public imagination by hitting gongs… tattling tales and making love connections… but many of television’s best-known game show hosts have led shadowy, alternative lives — as pop singers!  Come on down — and learn more about the recording histories of Barris, Convy and Woolery, et al., on this episode of NOTES.

For more on the musical lives of game show hosts, see “Game Show Hosts Come on Down.”

The world has shrunken. 

So goes a popular platitude… and in an age that has seen cheap and ubiquitous air travel, giant Wal-Marts swollen with NAFTA-enabled foreign goods, widespread international outsourcing of labor and an Internet that allows a toy store in Hong Kong to reach customers in Peoria, this is one saying that rings true today. 

Nor has popular music been entirely immune to this trend.  Witness, for example, the astonishing career of pop polyglot Manu Chao.

Since emerging as the leader of the influential French rock band Mano Negra in the late 1980s, Chao has perched on the peak of a globe-girdling tsunami of performers and artists willing to draw from the musical palettes of many different countries in the pursuit of their art.  The 44-year-old singer-songwriter is a multi-linguist’s dreamboat, his songs an entoxicating blend of French, Spanish and English lyrics set to an equally eclectic montage of relentless dance beats, South American folk flourishes and comically flatulent synth riffs, leavened liberally with musique-concrete samples galore.  Listening to one of his albums is like undertaking an international tour at supersonic speeds — around the world in 80 minutes.

His role as a global synthesist came naturally to the young man born as Oscar Tramor in Spain, but raised in France, the son of well-regarded novelist and journalist Raymond Chao.  As a teenager, Chao the younger came under the influence of U.S. rockabilly and British punk rock — especially the Clash.  He was also inspired by the music of the Spanish Revolution.  He formed his first band, a French rockabilly combo called Les Hot Pants, in the early 1980s. 

But in 1986, Chao came together with his brother Tonio and his cousin Santiago Casiriego to create the band that would secure him a place on the world stage of popular music.  Mano Negra (named after a Spanish anarchist organization) scored a major French hit with the song “Mala Vida” from their 1988 debut album PATCHANKA, drawing the attention of Virgin Records, which signed the band worldwide the following year.

Over the next five years, Mano Negra became huge stars the world over… except in the United States, where their glossological dexterity made them a marketing challenge.  The band called it quits in 1994.  But Chao’s career was far from over.  Four years later, he issued his debut solo album, CLANDESTINO, which included the huge international hit, “Bongo Bong,” a re-recording of an old Mano Negra number that benefited greatly from its lazy, insistent hook and silly, sotto voce lyrics. 

Since then, Chao has continued to defy generic boundaries with subsequent releases like his sophomore effort, PROXIMA ESTACION: ESPERANZA, which found the artist sprinkling Caribbean rhythms into his unique musical stew.  Already a superstar in much of the world, and with his profile growing within the United States, it is safe to say there will be more border-crossing to come from this musical alchemist.

We’ll further examine the career of Manu Chao in this space in the near future.  Join us then for a look at an artist who, in helping shrink the globe, has enormously expanded the world of pop music.

From their start in the late 1940s, the Staple Singers had a sound all their own.

Gospel… rhythm n’ blues… soul music… you name it.  For more than half a century, the Staple Singers transcended generic boundaries with their groundbreaking, funky grooves and relentlessly positive message.  Find out more about the family that merged the blues of Charley Patton with the swing gospel of Thomas A. Dorsey and taught a generation to respect itself.

Like some unholy rubber monster from a Japanese daikaiju movie, punk rock of the late 1970s and early ’80s was a chaotic, multi-headed creature. 

Sprouting from one wire-hoisted vinyl neck were the pop stars — bands like the United States’ Ramones, Britain’s Buzzcocks and Ireland’s Undertones, whose notion of punk was bubblegum pop played at blistering speed on buzzsaw guitars.  Bobbing violently next to them were the political bands like the Clash and Stiff Little Fingers, who saw in punk rock’s populist ethos a platform for their anti-racist, anti-imperialist jeremiads.   And then there were the nihilists, the punks whose sloppily played pogo rock and boozy, self-destructive lifestyle were inspired by the pessimistic puke-in-public shenanigans of the Sex Pistols.

The latter camp represented the punk rock that struck the loudest chord in the United States, especially on the west coast.  The spirit of late-1970s American youth was typified by director Jon Landis’ cinematic celebration of inarticulate anarchy, ANIMAL HOUSE, which grossed more than 60-million stateside dollars.  Simultaneously, the rise of skateboard culture in California set the seedy club stage for bands like the Germs and Henry Rollins’ Black Flag, whose  songs like “Lexicon Devil,” “TV Party” and “Six Pack” glorified anomie and apathy in 4/4 time.

But standing out amidst the believe-in-nothing bands that burst onto L.A.’s late-’70s music scene was one group that not only rejected their fellow punkers’ easy indifference, but did so with uncharacteristic instrumental virtuosity and a nod to pop music’s past.  X, the Los Angeles-based quartet formed by married couple John Doe and Exene Cervenka, was unlike any other California punk band in almost every way.  Eschewing the juvenile profanity of Black Flag in favor of a lyrical poetry that had more to do with Rimbaud and Kerouac than Rotten and Vicious, and substituting the rhythmic precision of rockabilly guitarist Billy Zoom’s amped-up fretwork and classically-trained drummer D.J. Bonebrake’s pounding gallop for the discordant din of their peers, X started to develop a devoted following almost as soon as they formed in 1977. 

And they set themselves apart again three years later when they enlisted ex-Doors keyboard player Ray Manzarek to produce their first album, LOS ANGELES, for the independent label Slash Records.  Manzarek would go on to helm three more long-players for X, becoming almost a fifth member by supplying sinewy organ to songs like “The World’s a Mess (It’s in My Kiss)” and their adrenalized cover of the Doors’ “Soul Kitchen.”

Although X signed with Elektra Records in 1982, saw their music videos placed in high rotation on MTV and even secured a gig on Jerry Lewis’ Muscular Dystrophy telethon(!), they never managed to escape the ghetto of critical adulation.  Doe and Cervenka divorced in the late 1980s (with Cervenka later remarrying LORD OF THE RINGS actor Viggo Mortensen), but X never officially broke up, and the band still performs sporadically.

We’ll talk about X’s incendiary career again in this space.  I hope you can join us when we further examine a band whose “unheard music” still excites almost 30 years after its recording. 

Why did Dean, Sammy and Frank attended the wedding of Angelo Bruno’s daughter?  Because they had to.

When Philadelphia’s “gentle Don,” Angelo Bruno, wanted to make his daughter’s wedding special, he called his old buddy, Sam Giancana… who, in turn, told Frank, Dean and Sammy to be there, capish?  Learn how, when Sam said, “Jump!” the Rat Pack asked, “How high?” in this episode of NOTES.

When Sam Giancana called, the Rat Pack came a-runnin’.

There wasn’t much Frank wouldn’t do for his old friend, Sam.  So why did Sam eventually want to put a bullet in Frank?  In this episode of NOTES, we explore the unhealthy friendship of singer/actor Frank Sinatra and mob boss Sam Giancana.

For more on the relationship of Frank Sinatra and Sam Giancana, see “With Friends Like That….”

For more on the music of Frank Sinatra, see “The Concept Albums of Frank Sinatra.”

Let your mind travel for a moment to the New York City of 1905. 

Let it drift over the nocturnal bustle of the city, illuminated by the white-hot light of the gas luminaires that hang from the gooseneck masts of the new mantle lamps now rising over each of the five boroughs.  Let it waft uptown, into Harlem, and then alight at the corner of 134th Street and Seventh Avenue, outside the ostentatious facade of Barron Wilkens’ Club, the members-only cabaret that caters to some of New York’s most affluent citizens.  At this time, in the early days of the 20th century, Harlem is still a segregated community with a large Irish contingent… but this year has seen a rapid influx of New Yorkers of color, and Barron Wilkens’ has already become noteworthy as “the rich man’s black and white club.” 

There on the curb outside sits a seven-year-old white boy, bopping his round head to the syncopated rhythms pulsing from inside the club.  That’s a young George Gershwin, who will be mightily affected in his later life as a songwriter by the music he now hears emanating from Barron Wilkens’.  This music, with its swinging cadences and brassy bombast, is heady stuff indeed.  It is the music of a man who will go on to help invent jazz, develop the fox trot and fight for his country in the trenches of France. 

You see, that’s the music of the great James Reese Europe, an American hero by any standard.

Reese was born in 1881 in Mobile, Alabama to Henry and Lorraine Europe, themselves musicians who lost no time inculcating their only son in all matters musical.  After moving to Washington, D.C. in 1891, the young Europe studied with violin virtuoso Enrico Hurlei of the Marine Corps Band.  When he was 22, Europe moved to New York and sought work as a professional violinist.  Frustrated by the color bias he encountered in the world of classical music, Europe took on piano-playing gigs in cabarets and speakeasies.  During these journeyman years, Europe befriended many other black musicians in New York, including songwriter Bob Cole and his prodigious partners, the brothers J. Rosamond Johnson and James Weldon Johnson.  In 1907, when Cole and the Johnsons needed a musical director for their latest black musical  THE SHOO-FLY REGIMENT, they turned to Europe, inaugurating a career that would eventually see the young bandleader become the conductor for world-famous dancers Vernon and Irene Castle.  It was with the Castles that Europe helped develop the fox trot, a dance craze that swept the nation (and — unlike the other so-called “animal dances” of its time like the horse trot and the chicken scratch — survived to become a staple of DANCING WITH THE STARS).

In the future, we’ll tell the whole story of a man who became an American war hero and who jazz great Eubie Blake called “the Martin Luther King of music” (including how he was brutally murdered in 1919) in this space.  Please join us then in celebrating a man whose name should be better known today. 

Could Klaatu have barada niktoed Gort without Dr. Samuel Hoffman?

Although he invented the instrument that bears his name, Leon Theremin was by no means the only theremin virtuoso.  In this episode of NOTES, we take a look at some of the other great theremin players, including Theremin’s own pupil, Clara Rockmore, and the podiatrist-turned-thereminist, Dr. Samuel Hoffman.

Leon Theremin toiled in the horrible gulag of Kolyma.

In this episode of NOTES, we learn how the inventing prowess of a man once lauded as a hero of Russia’s Communist revolution caused him to wind up doing hard time in a Siberian gulag… and how that same engineering genius brought about his eventual release.

Leon Theremin invented the world’s first electronic musical instrument.

In this episode of NOTES, the first of a two-part look back at the truly flabbergasting life story of Leon Theremin, we examine the meteoric rise of a humble inventor who became a favorite of Lenin and the toast of New York’s intelligentsia… before his world crumbled below his feet.

For more on Leon Theremin, see “The Astonishing Theremin.”

Today’s headlines once again shout that the scientific theory of evolution is being buffeted by theist challenges, most recently under the rubric of “Intelligent Design” (or ID, as its proponents often abbreviate it).  Despite its reputation as a new idea, the basic precepts of ID date back to 1802 — more than 50 years before Charles Darwin published THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES – when Anglican theologician William Paley posited his famous “watchmaker analogy,” which compared the complexity of the human race to that of a pocket watch found in a field.

But of course there have been other alternatives to Darwin’s theory as well, including one that has been publicly disseminated in the world of pop music for nearly three decades.  I speak of the “theory of de-evolution,” a notion that germinated at the site of a shameful American tragedy, then was kindled by an obscure Christian pamphlet, forged in the crazed writings of a racist German monk and that gave its name to the rock band that has espoused it since the early 1970s… Devo.

Devo was formed in 1972 by Kent State students Mark Mothersbaugh and Jerry Casale.  After witnessing the infamous shootings of student protesters by National Guardsmen two years earlier, Mothersbaugh and Casale came across a 1930s-era religious tract printed in nearby Rogers, Ohio.  Entitled “Jocko Homo, Heaven Bound King of the Apes,” the pamphlet was a mocking fundamentalist anti-Darwin diatribe.  About the same time, the pair were exposed to a recent book called THE BEGINNING WAS THE END: KNOWLEDGE CAN BE EATEN by Teutonic lunatic Oscar Kiss-Maerth.  Kiss-Maerth’s bizarre thesis was that mankind had evolved from sex-crazed, brain-eating apes. 

With their tongues lodged deep into their cheeks, Mothersbaugh and Casale combined the wild-eyed imagery of the religious pamphlet with the pseudo-scientific contentions of Kiss-Maerth to form their theory of de-evolution, which suggested that mankind was moving back toward its primate roots by way of corporate culture and lifestyle conformity.  The duo were soon joined by their brothers Bob Mothersbaugh and Bob Casale, as well as drummer Alan Myers, to set their satirical philosophy to the strange melange of punky beats, jagged guitar riffs and insistent synthesizer chords that characterized the Devo sound.

From their first single “Jocko Homo” — the most explicit statement of their de-evolution theory — through subsequent albums like FREEDOM OF CHOICE (which included their one Top 40 hit, “Whip It”), Devo’s songs were sharpened by a subversive anti-authoritarian edge that was not always understood by critics of the time, some of whom labelled the band “fascist.”  (A similar fate would befall filmmaker Paul Verhoeven in 1997 when his anti-fascist sci-fi satire STARSHIP TROOPERS was misperceived as advocating the very totalitarianism it criticized.)

We’ll look at the protest roots of Devo in this space in the near future.  I hope you can join us then as we examine the band of Spudboys who made plastic hair a fashion accessory and who urged a complacent United States to “use your freedom of choice.” 
 

He wrote the best songs about decapitation ever.

When Hasil Adkins recorded songs like “No More Hot Dogs” and “She Said,” he wanted to be a pop star, like his hero, Elvis Presley.  Instead, he invented psychobilly and gave the world the Cramps.  Here is the story of a musician like no other.

In 1954, when French filmmaker and critic Francois Truffaut launched the so-called “auteur theory” of filmmaking in the pages of CAHIERS DU CINEMA, he lobbed the first volley in an argument that has transfixed cinema buffs ever since.  Can a film that is produced through the collaboration of dozens of actors, artists and craftsmen be properly judged as the work of a single author?

Without question, cinema history has seen dozens if not hundreds of directors whose blandly competent works defy auteurial analysis.  Deprived of screen credits, could even the most perceptive film buff discern the difference between the work of journeymen like, say, Chris Columbus and Charles Shyer? 

But every once in a great while, there emerges that rare movie-maker whose personal vision so resonates in his or her work that it’s as if the director’s fingerprints are stamped into the celluloid between the sprockets.  Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Preston Sturges, Akira Kurosawa, David Lynch… these are a few of the directors who have imbued their works with their own unique, utterly individual personalities. 

Not all such auteurs have occupied respectable Hollywood studio offices, however, or basked in the glow of industry accolades.  Not all have mingled with the rich and famous at post-Oscar parties, or shared rostrums with politicians and community leaders.  Some have patrolled the outer fringes of filmmaking, thumbing their noses at the arbiters of taste and doyens of culture. 

Take, for example, the late Russ Meyer.

For the average film fan, the mention of Meyer (who died  in 2004 from pneumonia after battling Alzheimers) conjures images of the anatomically astonishing actresses who populated the sexy features he helmed between 1959 and 1979.  Certainly, the filmmaker dubbed as “King Leer” by the WALL STREET JOURNAL will never be popular with the proper, the prudish and the politically correct.  Meyer’s movies gleefully skewer sacred cows and poke persistently at the boundaries of the acceptable. 

But if ever a director personified the auteur theory, it was Meyer.  His movies could never be confused with the work of any other director.  From 1965’s FASTER, PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL! — which unspools like a noir thriller shot by and starring the gods of Olympus  — to his steroidal sudser BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS (one of three Meyer flicks that benefited from a script penned by Roger Ebert), Meyer’s movies are unmistakeably, indelibly Meyer.

That these films, which relentlessly revel in the rude and raunchy, were the work of a celebrated WWII veteran (who also played a part in the creation of THE DIRTY DOZEN) is  but one of the many contradictions that riddle the life-story of Russ Meyer, a story that is well-told in the pages of BIG BOSOMS AND SQUARE JAWS (Crown Publishers), Jimmy McDonough’s 2005 biography of Meyer.

In upcoming weeks, we’ll look at the music of Russ Meyer’s films in this space.  Join us then when we learn what the gender-boggling record producer Z-Man of BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS meant when he said: “It’s my happening and it freaks me out!”

James P. Johnson mediated the transition from ragtime to jazz.

He taught Fats Waller how to play… inspired Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk… gave the world symphonies and dance crazes… and forged a style of jazz that continues to shape the works of 21st century pianists.  Learn more about the hugely influential James P. Johnson in this episode of NOTES.

All roads lead to Rome, or so goes the old saying.  But in the disparate domains of music, theatre and literature, all roads lead to Ron Dante.

Few people can claim to have scored Top 40 hits as a member of three different bands… won multiple Tony Awards for producing top-notch Broadway fare like AIN’T MISBEHAVIN’ and CHILDREN OF A LESSER GOD… produced platinum-selling songs by one of the 1970s’ most successful artists…  and published the PARIS REVIEW, the esteemed magazine that has delighted literati with the fiction and poetry of authors like Philip Roth and Samuel Beckett.  His name may not be well-known, but Dante’s salient status as a triple-threat performer, producer and publisher is unparalleled.

Dante was born in New York City 60 years ago as Carmine Granito, but changed his name in the late 1950s while playing with his first band, the Persuaders.  After being signed with manager (and former child actor) Bobby Breen, Dante came to the attention of pop music impresario Don Kirshner, who hired Dante as a demo singer.

Meanwhile, in 1964, Dante began to record singles (as “Ronnie Dante”) for Gene Pitney’s label, Musicor.  But popular success was elusive until the following year, when Dante sang lead on a one-off novelty record for Roulette Records.  “Leader of the Laundromat” was a parody of the Shangri-Las’ hit “Leader of the Pack,” and was credited to the Detergents.  Dante’s dopy delivery of the song’s lyrics of love amidst the dryers helped land it at #19 on Billboard’s Hot 100.  At the time, Dante could have no idea that his future would be dramatically shaped by the man who wrote the song on which “Laundromat” was based.

Jeff Barry wrote “Leader of the Pack” with his then-wife Ellie Greenwich, along with other classics of the girl group era like “Da Doo Ron Ron,” “Baby I Love You” and “Chapel of Love.”  In the mid-1960s, Barry produced hits by the Monkees and Neil Diamond for Kirshner who, after the Monkees began to assert their creative autonomy, put Barry in charge of creating a pop band that would never talk back.

After signing a deal with Archie Comics, Barry and Kirshner began searching for the musicians who would give voice to Archie Andrews and the other Riverdale High regulars who comprised the cartoon combo, the Archies.  In three years, the Archies produced five albums and six hit singles, including the timeless “Sugar Sugar.”  But the only musician who remained a constant fixture in their recordings was the voice of Archie himself, Ron Dante, who also continued singing with other bands even while bopping next to Betty and Veronica.  In 1970, while “Sugar Sugar” was still dominating pop radio playlists, Dante found himself in the unique position of singing lead on two Top 10 hits by different bands when the Cuff Links’ confection “Tracy” went to #9.

In the 1970s, Dante’s musical success continued when he formed a musical partnership with singer-songwriter Barry Manilow.  Dante manned the knobs for all of Manilow’s best-selling albums from 1974 to 1981.  Also during the 1970s, the pop polymath branched out… first into publishing when he took the reins of the PARIS REVIEW, and then into theatrical production when he teamed with former soap opera actor and now oft-parodied host of INSIDE THE ACTORS’ STUDIO James Lipton to mount the original Broadway run of AIN’T MISBEHAVIN’, based on the works of Fats Waller.

For more on the music of Saturday morning cartoons, see “This is Your Brain on Cartoon Music.”

Who else can drop 50 feet off a clock tower and sing in at least four languages?

Jackie Chan is well-known the world over for his work as a film action hero.  But few in the west are aware of his status as a musical pop star.  Learn more about singer Jackie Chan in this episode of NOTES.

Composer James Wong put the blues in Tsui Hark’s PEKING OPERA BLUES (1987).

During the latter half of the 20th Century, Hong Kong rose to prominence as a major player in the world film industry thanks primarily to its hugely popular cinema of martial arts.  In this episode of NOTES, you’ll learn more about the music behind the mayhem.

Some record producers would do anything to elicit a proper performance from a player. 

Some cajoled.  Some bribed.  Some sputtered and blustered.  But only the infamous British producer Joe Meek, having grown frustrated with the playing of the late Mitch Mitchell one day, whipped a pistol out of his drawer, pointed it at the drummer’s head, and threatened to shoot Mitchell between the eyes if he didn’t nail the take.

Mitchell survived the recording session and went on to great success as part of Jimi Hendrix’s Experience.   But he never forgot the day Joe Meek threatened his life, and he was one of many musicians not terribly surprised to hear the tragic news that emerged from Meek’s home studio at 304 Holloway Road in London on February 3, 1967.   It was on that day, exactly eight years after Meek’s idol, Buddy Holly, perished in a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa, that Meek wigged out for the final time.   After a night spent popping pills and penning paranoiac notes, Meek murdered his landlady, then swallowed the barrel of his shotgun and stained the walls of his studio with his own tortured brain.  It was a grievous (but sadly predictable) end for a man who revolutionized the pop music recording industry.

Meek was born Robert George Meek in 1929, and grew up in the bucolic countryside of Gloucestershire, England.  His brothers were all strapping, manly types, but young Joe was more effeminate (perhaps thanks to his mother, who always wanted a daughter and therefore dressed Joe as a girl during his earliest years).  While still living on the family farm, Joe became enamored of electronics and began to craft his own radio sets.  He even built the first television set seen in his hometown. 

After a stint in the Royal Air Force (where he was trained as a radar technician), Joe moved to London and landed a job with IBC Studios.  Although many of the more established engineers at IBC scoffed at some of his outlandish recording techniques, there was no denying his ability to elicit new, unusual sounds, and he eventually worked his way up to producing records for the likes of Petula Clark and Lonnie Donegan.

But Joe was never much of a team player, and he became convinced that the other technicians at IBC were stealing his ideas.  After he wrote “Put a Ring on Her Finger” (which guitar great Les Paul turned into a Top 50 hit in the United States), Meek had the wherewithal to build his own London studio above a leather goods shop.  It was from here that Meek produced his best-known work. 

In 1962, Meek (a life-long science fiction fan) was inspired by the recent launch of the world’s first communications satellite, and wrote a song for the band with which he had been working for much of the past year, the Tornados.  That song, “Telstar,” sold more than five-million copies and became the first song by a U.K. rock band to top the American charts, a good year before the Beatles officially launched the British invasion.  Although Meek scored other hits in the next few years, his growing alcoholism, drug addiction and mental illness would eventually send him spiralling downward to his wretched end.

We’ll further detail the tragic story of Joe Meek in the future.  Check back here in future weeks for the story of a man whose talent was only exceeded by his psychoses.

The Runaways skated the fine line between pioneering and pandering.

In the 1970s, Kim Fowley’s most famous project was producing and managing the Runaways, the groundbreaking all-girl band that made the world safe for acts from the Go-Gos to the Donnas.  In this episode of NOTES, learn more about the controversial act that introduced the world to a young Joan Jett.

Coolidge, Zelig, Hoover — Page, Fowley, Plant

No artist’s career transverses so many disparate corners of the rock n’ roll world as Kim Fowley’s does.  From the Argyles to Frank Zappa, Fowley has been there, done that.  Learn more about the amazing Kim Fowley in this episode of NOTES.

Its sound is unlike any other man-made object.  In one moment, it can soar through the stratospheric upper climes of the musical register, wafting on a sustained F above high C… then plunge in a breakneck glissando, sinking as many as eight octaves to plumb the abyssal bottom of the human range of hearing. 

It is built in garages and played in concert halls, and has enthralled both ostentatious opera house audiences and bemused B-movie buffs. 

It was given to the world of art by a man of science, whose reward was years of darkness and back-breaking toil in one of the world’s most cruel prisons.

It is the theremin, among the most unusual musical inventions conceived by the mind of man.  Invented in 1917 by Russian radio engineer Lev Sergeyevitch Termen (or “Leon Theremin,” as he was known here in the United States), the theremin is the only musical instrument that is played without being touched.  It’s a simple contraption, really, comprised of two radio oscillators, usually encased in a wood or plastic box,  that are modulated by the proximity of the player’s hands as they wave nearby.

When Termen invented his unique instrument, he was hailed as a genius by the rulers of the still nascent Soviet Union.  Its first chairman, Vladimir Illyich Lenin himself, regarded the theremin as a splendid example of Soviet innovation and a metaphor for state commodification of the arts.  In 1927, at the behest of Lenin’s tyrannical successor Josef Stalin, Termen was commissioned to visit Europe to demonstrate his device. 

Termen’s European tour was a bona fide box office bonanza.  First the Germans, then the French and British, were wowed by this remarkable invention.  Not only was the theremin the first major instrument to emerge from the still-arcane realm of electronics, but its musical breadth was astonishing.  To Europe’s concert audiences, the theremin seemed to marry the sentimental resonance of a string quartet with the harmonic acrobatics of a coloratura soprano.

Such was the success of Termen’s tour that he was next sent to the United States.  Termen ended up staying in New York for more than a decade, eventually marrying celebrated black ballerina Lavinia Williams.  But in 1938, Termen was forced to emigrate back to the U.S.S.R., either by the growing debt he had accrued in New York, or by Soviet agents, who may have persuaded the inventor to leave the U.S. unwillingly. 

Once a hero in his home country, Termen returned a pariah, and was thrown into the infamous gulag at Kolyma, Siberia, where he languished until World War II, when Stalin’s minions decided the talented engineer might better serve the state inventing spy gear — like the listening “bug” that the Soviets lost no time installing into ambassador Averell Harriman’s office at the U.S. Embassy.

We’ll further detail the tragic life of Lev Termen — and examine the great theremin play