When I wrote about this play's imminent revival at the Finborough Theatre a few weeks ago I hoped for the best but wasn't sure what to expect. Would there be the appropriate balance of seriousness and comedy in the playing? Would contemporary theatregoers take this example of Milne's adult work to their hearts as readily as audiences of a hundred years ago, weaned on his pieces in Punch magazine?
If you are able to get to London's Royal Festival Hall there will be two performances of a new musical about R&B/rock'n'roll pioneer Lloyd Price on Saturday 11th October.
Audio of an extensive 2005 interview with Price can be found on Matt the Cat's site here, but for all the undoubted importance of Lawdy Miss Clawdy to the development of rock'n'roll (none of which seems lost on Price himself in that interview) Daniel Wolff's biography of Sam Cooke suggests that the recording was actually part of an ongoing process for Specialty Records owner Art Rupe, and that he'd already been experimenting with accentuating the beat on gospel recordings:
"Actually," Art Rupe has declared, "I dug gospel music even more than rhythm and blues," and the producer often made his own crucial modifications to the songs. In 1952, he seems to hear a new, beat-heavy sound on the horizon. A month after this [February] Stirrers's session, he'll go to New Orleans and cut "Lawdy Miss Clawdy," a run-away #1 r&b hit by Lloyd Price that sells to both white and black fans.
Here [Wolff continues], Rupe approaches from the gospel end, adding drums to the Stirrers's usual mix. At first, it's an awkward fit. Compare the single of "It Won't Be Very Long" to the alternative takes, and you can hear the predictable beat dumbing down the complex rhythms. But towards the end, an odd synthesis starts to happen. The lead voices jump with urgency, and the group seems to open up and let the drums in. Social critics have argued that the concept of the teenager was an invention of the 1950's. If so, here's evidence that it happened not just in the malt shop but across the street, in church.
This seems to be the take which Wolff is talking about:
And here is the original 1952 Specialty version of Lawdy Miss Clawdy, with Fats Domino on piano:
Links:
The information above was extracted from a longer post about Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers entitled Waxing/Waning Crescent Moon, which can be found here.
Matt the Cat's highly recommended Juke in the Back series, which provides excellent musical overviews of R&B artists and record labels, can be found here. I haven't listened to it yet but one programme is devoted to Lloyd Price's Specialty sides and includes excerpts from the interview mentioned earlier.
If the above has whetted your appetite details about booking for the Lloyd Price musical can be found on the South Bank Centre website here.
As with A.A. Milne's first novel (of sorts), Lovers in London, the mere fact of this play, Sarah Simple, being available again is welcome news. It's not included in the various collections which still crop up in secondhand bookshops, and I'd been searching for a copy for quite some time. Before the publication of Anne Thwaite's biography of Milne I had only come across a single mention of it, in a history of theatre published in the 1930s.
It is not, however, a neglected masterpiece - something which it has in common with that novel. If you're already familiar with Milne's work for the theatre there will be little here to surprise you: a wife, presumed to have divorced her husband, suddenly reappears as he is on the verge of marrying a somewhat more stolid partner. Once, long ago, I embarked on a dissertation on Milne's plays but my tutor was not keen, joshing about his struggles to remember which missing spouse featured in which play. (In the end I switched to Tennessee Williams and still slightly regret it).
If, like me, you've been tantalised by the many clips on youtube of a TV show entitled Rock & Roll Graffiti, the good news is that most of that show, hitherto available only as an expensive DVD box set, can now be obtained on two reasonably priced 3 disc sets; I'm based in the UK and ordered them from America for around £14 each around ten years ago though you will need to round that up to £20 or thereabouts now. These are the covers to look for:
For those unfamiliar with this show, DJ/producer Larry Black and singer Gene Hughes of the Casinos (Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye) assembled a number of rock'n'roll, pop and soul stars of the late 50s and early 60s in a TV studio in 1999, got them to reminisce over several days about their experiences and sing one or two of their most famous songs, backed by a versatile and sympathetic band called Sons of the Beach. With the performers given the dignity and context they deserve but don't always receive the results are, at times, deeply moving and never less than thoroughly entertaining and informative.
Today marks the centenary of the pioneering doo wop/R&B singer Sonny Til, lead singer of the Orioles. They are perhaps best known for Crying in the Chapel (1953) but here's the story of how the group came to record It's Too Soon to Know, now widely regarded as the first doo wop record, in 1948.
Deborah Chessler, the young songwriter behind it, had been trying to make sense of her feelings after a disastrous early marriage. It's Too Soon to Know wasn't her first song, though earlier pieces also had a direct and conversational tone in their titles and lyrics (Jerry Leiber was an admirer), and It's Too Soon to Know coaxed out a correspondingly fresh and emotional style of singing from Til and the group.
The number which kickstarted the whole doo wop shebang - or shboom? - came about when a supportive male friend who was helping with Chessler's divorce suddenly declared his own love for her. Normally it's parents who counsel caution in these matters but her mother was all for it; it was Deborah who told her mother: "How can he love me? It's too soon to know."
The poet who features in A.A. Milne's play The Truth About Blayds, soon to be revived at the Finborough Theatre in London, may have been Milne's own creation - but he did pinch the name.
A.A. Milne's 1921 play The Truth About Blayds is about to be revived at the Finborough Theatre in London. This is good news as Milne's plays for adults are rarely produced these days. William Gaunt is playing the Blayds of the title, an elderly, much-revered, poet; having played King Lear as well as sitcom patriarchs he ought to have the necessary gravitas.
Milne had a run of hit plays in Britain and America between the wars but Blayds, more serious in tone than most, did not receive the level of acclaim he thought it deserved, and it rankled: he dwelt upon its reception in his 1939 autobiography It's Too Late Now, his disappointment still keen almost twenty years after the event.
The problem, as he saw it, was that after the first act critics and audiences seemed to be expecting a different sort of play:
For those who don't own a copy of the original edition - and even for those who do - the first volume of Chris O'Leary's excellent song-by-song Bowie study is about to be published in a considerably revised and expanded version, as depicted above.
Based on posts in his blog Pushing Ahead of the Dame, Rebel Rebel originally appeared in 2015. I haven't yet read the refashioned tome but with ten years to amass more information, drawing on memoirs published after Bowie's death as well as the posthumous release of so many outtakes and demos, there will be a lot of new stuff to enjoy - and in addition to analysis of newly unearthed songs there has been an all-round revision.
I freely admit that I haven't researched this meticulously but it seems to me that, more and more, any new TV documentaries which revisit the familiar tale of some much-loved comedian or double act seek to entice viewers by incorporating the words "The Lost Tapes" or "The Unseen Tapes" into the programme's title.
More often than not this turns out to be misleading, to put it politely. Even if the tapes for some old show have not been seen for a while on telly they are often easy enough to find online. And in the rare cases where something unxpected has been unearthed we may be presented with no more than a few slivers of fresh material, the rest of the programme padded out with the usual well-worn anecdotes so the makers can get an hour out of it, frustrating though such superfatted displays may be for aficiandos.
Having got the above off my chest, rest assured I will not be talking in this post about batons left in Chicago or other reheated dishes. This is the first of a series about genuinely lost tapes which have some personal significance for me.
Hearing of Brian Wilson's death yesterday my immediate thought was of the duophonic cassette of Pet Sounds which had been my regular companion on late-night walks in the early eighties, slotted into one of the bulky Walkmans of the day. Water was an integral part of the scene - not a surf-tormented shore but a loch, centrepiece of the local country park, which I would circle.
I have just watched AKA Doc Pomus, a documentary about the songwriter best known for his partnership with Mort Shuman in the late 50s and early 60s. The mix of images, interviews and the obvious taking of pains has resulted in a compelling and satisfying account which feels like the last word: we see, for example, not only footage of Pomus's wedding but also the song ideas he scrawled on the backs of unused wedding invites - including the one which was to result in Save The Last Dance For Me, one of Ben E King's finest moments as well as its writers'.
And if that isn't enough Pomus's wife, the addressee of the song, is on hand to talk, with understandable emotion, about her response when first hearing it - although here and elsewhere you never feel the director is exploiting the situation, merely recording the depth of feeling which these songs and their creator evoked in so many.
Reasonable-quality pirate DVDs of The Blackpool Show have been available for some years but according to the Tony Hancock podcast Very Nearly an Armful a great deal of work was put into restoring The Rebel for a companion release, so here's hoping The Blackpool Show has received a bit of a boost too. (The above image is not from the new release.)
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Variety theatres had closed in the 1950s, but major seaside resorts still had what were in effect fixed variety bills with a major star headlining (the form later migrated to cruise ships, where it has stayed). Bob Monkhouse also appears on the show but seems a bit too wordy for the crowd; it's the psittacine one, on home ground, who makes the more audible impact (not only had he been appearing on the same stage every night but he was living in Blackpool at the time).
Compere is not a role Tony Hancock was best suited to, as several biographers have said. Nor was he comfortable with the terrain, as Freddie told me:
