The Flamingos on Decca

More thoughts about the Flamingos - in particular their time at Decca Records (image from Marv Goldberg's highly recommended Flamingos page).

In between their stints at Chess Records in Chicago and George Goldner's End Records in New York, where they recorded the smash I Only Have Eyes for You, the Flamingos recorded a few sides for Decca in 1957-58, without much success.

What's odd about this is that even though the material is public domain in the UK it has not been issued on CD, as far as I know, with the exception of Ladder of Love, which can be found on the Jasmine CD Dream of a Lifetime (Rhino, willing to license material, had already issued it in the US on their Best of compilation). The Jasmine CD set is otherwise comprehensive for the group's pre-End work, so the omission is surprising.

I hadn't heard any of the other Decca sides till today but now I think I may have an explanation for their absence from CD. From the evidence of what's available on youtube, with the exception of Ladder of Love they're - well, variable, to put it kindly.  Some of the material and arrangements, are square. Like, uh, L7, Daddio. Kiss-a-Me and Helpless have female backing singers (white?) added to sweeten the mix. Kiss-a-Me isn't too bad but the climax of Helpless is dire: the voices of the Flamingos themselves are inaudible. It's a pity, because you can imagine how those songs might have been done with more restraint at Chess.
 

Doo Wop Dialog[ue]: 30

pismotality
(42/M/London, England)

Clarke,

Sparked off by what you were saying about difficult records, I want to take one and play about with its significance for me.

Dave Marsh is a great model: a thousand mini-essays in The Heart and Soul of Rock'n'RolI, no set pattern: three lines about a 45 or two pages; a wholly personal memory or a discussion of the recording date - no rules: it's whatever you want to say about a record, the only idea being it'll make people want to search it out - the whole point of this notice board, after all. Cause the record isn't just the record; it's you - your memories – the group then and now: "Cohesive," as Jake (or Zeke) said.

And the song I want to talk about is ... Golden Teardrops. My major doowop thrill.

Odd as it may seem, it wasn't that accessible to me when I first heard it. On a poor quality oldies compilation, c.1978, with muddy sound and a dubbed on guitar (Veejay version). Adjoining tracks, like Sonny Knight's Confidential or the Spaniels' Baby It's You, seemed far better: I got the point. But this - this was Ink Spots territory, wasn't it? That guitar. The Harptones' I Almost lost my mind, also on the LP, that was emotion; the Flamingos seemed out of reach, unfocused, somehow. I couldn't take the whole thing in on one listen.

And if all this seems odd to Americans, remember I had a very limited frame of reference: doowop was the brightness of Frankie Lymon or (dare I say it?) the Diamonds' version of Little Darling. And it's what you were saying, Clarke, about not getting a record on first hearing.

I don't particularly recall a moment of piercing clarity. But at some point the elements made sense - tremulous falsetto, out-of-tune-sounding yet absolutely right lead, odd lyrics (why "a cottage by the sea"?) and above all that sense at the beginning that we're being ushered into a holy place, cavernous and echoing as a great cathedral, and then drawn together in a moment of collective stillness, as though calmly taking stock of the sadness in things (Iacrimae rerum, appropriately enough: "the tears in things") before there's a collective sigh - at what life is?- and Sollie McElroy comes up to testify or confess: "Swear to God I'll stray no more ..."

But it's too late: although at one point he addresses the lost love directly - "Darling, put away your tears," – the burden (and howl) of the song is about regret: all he can do is try to take in fully the time he hurt her enough to make her cry: the time, now gone, when he mattered to someone, and the knowledge bearing down upon him that he's going to be carrying that memory to the grave and beyond: "Until the end of time, And throughout eternity - " Golden Teardrops. Cried, by her, for him. And the rest of the group, or congregation, seem to grab him there - we're almost at the end of the song now - try to hold him in that moment when he feels the enormity of what he's done. Maybe the wisdom will last. Who knows? But the sad, sweet pain - he was once loved - undoubtedly will, if the falsetto that weaves in and out of the reiteration of that painful vision of her tears at the end is anything to go by.

I've said before that doowop lyrics don't matter that much: a peg for emotions. They'd be trite enough here if read on their own (Ditto Danny Boy.) But they give the group a clarity of focus that inspires them to a height they never quite attained on any other song, for me. If any of you reading this haven't heard Golden Teardrops, download a file, buy a CD (Rhino), do something. It is, quite simply, the loveliest and the saddest of all doowop records. In his autobiography Chaplin talks of the day music entered his soul, or words to that effect . Golden Teardrops, like Danny Boy, seeped into me on some unknown date. But I never tire of it and always hear it afresh; for me it holds the whole mystery of doowop: it's religious, it's secular, it's... beyond words, actually.

So much for stopping... but I've needed to say all this for years.

Tony


This can also be found near at the start of the blog as a taster for the Doo Wop Dialog[ue] posts; click on that version, posted under the song's title, for all manner of diversions and discoveries which came to me as I wrote, thought and surfed for images. See also post 32 of the Dialog[ue] for a comparison of the original and overdubbed versions.

SPOILER ALERT: the original wins. Who could have seen that coming, eh?

As so often, the image above has been borrowed from Unca Marvy.

Doo Wop documentary

Having mentioned it in the previous post, this seems a good point to reproduce my review of this documentary about doo wop:

New Listeners Begin Here

A pretty good and faithful account of the rise and fall of the harmony group. Very little is said about the music's origins but you do see clearly how doo wop singing works in practice: footage of revival groups watching each other while singing bears out Ben E King's remark (in Gerri Hershey's Nowhere to Run) that singing in a streetcorner group was like "one big heartbeat ... those guys knew when you were going to breathe."

There's an impressive roster of interviewees including the late Pookie Hudson and Phil Groia, author of recommended doo wop history They All Sang on the Corner, but Canadian funding (presumably) means a member of the white group the Diamonds gets to rattle on at disproportionate length with no mention of the fact that his group covered songs by black groups and didn't take the form that seriously (though there is a telltale B&W clip where they seem to be goofing around while singing).

The rise and fall of Frankie Lymon (drawing on a PBS documentary), prejudice on the road and other aspects are covered too - some major stars are quite matter-of-fact about the way they were ripped off (though they've had decades to get their heads round it).

What unites almost all commentators, however, is a real love for the form, and the final sequence - a variegated bunch of singers harmonising on Smokey Robinson's My Girl ("Eat your heart out, Temptations!") tells you all you need to know about this singing, the teenagers (and at least one Teenager) caught up in a groundswell of simple joy - though there is an irony, unremarked and presumably unintended, about the fact that this is a Motown song - ie one of the companies who may have valued the voice but whose sophisticated production values and backing musos helped put paid to doo wop - though the British Invasion contributed too, as one DJ remembers: "Things changed," he says, simply - and again you have a sense that the afficiandos have had a long, long time to accept the fact that while this music may never go away it is unlikely ever to be a huge force again.

Doo Wop Dialog[ue]: 1

The Diamonds: sophomoric contempt?

Below is the first long post I sent to Kewl Steve's Doo Wop Shop messageboard on 19th September 2000. Maybe I should have put this in the introduction to this blog, as it still spells out how I feel about doo wop today. The post doesn't need much contextualising; a debate had been taking place on the board about just what constituted doo wop: Crewcuts vs. Penguins, Gladiolas vs. Diamonds etc.

Although I was addressing the board as a whole, this first attempt to articulate the difference between those groups for myself is what triggered the lengthy dialog[ue] with Clarke, so this is really where that correspondence begins. The last preserved post, incidentally, is dated 1st October 2000 - so the ninety-plus pages of printouts which will eventually all be posted here under the heading of Doo Wop Dialog[ue] were the result of less than a fortnight's fevered activity.

It's difficult to give a definition of doowop that won't have people reaching for their keyboards, but I'm going to try anyway, in the hope that thinking about the music may enhance the pleasure of listening; obviously when statements are offered as Holy Writ that's something else again. With that in mind, here goes:

Doowop is (or let's say tends to be) music sung by a quartet or quintet, often male, where the instrumentation, if any, is essentially secondary to the interplay of voices, and is fairly rudimentary: accentuating a beat or subtly enhancing the overall tone, not vying with the vocal display for attention. The voices may be said to mimic instruments - the bass voice can perform a similar function to a double bass, or think of the late Gerald Gregory's great bass saxophone-like intro to Goodnight Sweetheart, Goodnight - and there's also that trumpet-like sound that Phil Groia termed the "blow harmonies" of the Moonglows.

Sophisticated as these groups are, the appeal is of something homemade, within the reach of everyone: "Music you or your lover could have made," as a Rolling Stone essay said of Earth angel (Penguins version!).

For my money, once vocal group records became productions - ie, once the voices became part of the overall effect rather than the primary focus - they stopped being pure doowop. The Drifters' There Goes My Baby is a great record but the kettledrums and strings mean we admire the producers as much as the group. I wouldn't be so stupid as to say "That's when the rot set in"; it just became something else.

The only trouble is that my definition would include the instrument-emulating Mills Brothers, and I don't think anyone would consider them within the genre. So this brings me to the next, and crucial, part of the definition: the voices must be, to some degree, gospel-inflected. Mills Brothers, Inkspots don't make it; the Ravens and the Orioles, even when singing similar material, do: it's that sense of raggedness, of each performance being alive, new-minted at that moment as opposed to a smooth duplication.

With groups like the Crewcuts I'm reluctant to impose a blanket ban, but they do seem a long way from gospel: the feel matters less than a surface brightness and smoothness, whereas group like the Capris somehow seem to have a sense of flexibility in their performance that (again) has affinities with gospel, even though it's a long way from the raunchinesss of some groups.

But I freely admit that there is a grey area that is down to the listener's subjective impression: I don't much like the Platters but presumably they come from that gospel root, antiseptic as their performances seem to me. Perhaps the best I can say is that the doowop performances which move me display their church roots more prominently.

Which seems a good point to reveal my top 5 doowop (oldies is too difficult):

Golden Teardrops - Flamingos
Sunday Kind of Love - Harptones
All Mine - 5 Satins
Chimes - Pelicans
Crying in the Chapel - Orioles

Finally, on to the Diamonds/Gladiolas debate. Dave Marsh in The Heart of Rock and Soul (1000 records assessed, inc. lots of doowop) says that groups like the Diamonds were basically responding to the institutionalised bigotry of a market which wanted "more acceptable" versions of black hits. And apparently this college-educated group viewed R&B with "dripping sophomoric contempt." (Marsh is a fun read!) But he admits their version is nevertheless "as exciting as it is insincere": "When the thrill's the thing who gives a &*%! about intentions?"

Is it doowop? Don't know; but it's definitely a great example of the trashy wonderfulness of pop and doesn't have the politeness of other white covers. That said, it's the Gladiolas' version I have in my collection, though the Diamonds' version helped turn me on to 50s music as a teenager in the doowop desert of Scotland in the early 70s ...

Whew! What a long posting! Thanks if you've stayed with it - and hope my tentative attempt at defining, for myself, this genre we all love is of use to others.

Tony

I'm resisting the temptation to expand or revise the original Doo Wop Shop posts. It seems to make more sense to add notes at the end, which also has the fun effect - for me, anyway - of making this blog more than a storeroom. So I didn't add, when talking about the Inkspots, the sentence which would have summed it up: as far as I'm concerned doowop is essentially the difference between that group's rendition of When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano and the Dominoes' recording with Clyde McPhatter. And if nothing else I'm consistent, as this 2007 review of a Mills Brothers collection shows.
The Rolling Stone essay came from their Illustrated History of Rock'n'Roll, I presume the first edition, which had wonderful large format pictures. That had a big effect on me in the late seventies, devouring the essays about doo wop and the list of recommended recordings. 

There was also a wonderful picture of Gerry Marsden (of Gerry and the Pacemakers fame), grinning from ear to ear; a later edition of the book seemed to have scaled down that photo, or maybe the whole book was smaller format, or maybe the British invasion was too terrible a memory, after all. 

Anyway, that began my formal education in doo wop, and I don't have a copy to thank the author of that doo wop essay. But what a wonderful phrase, which helps explain the music's appeal: however strange it seems, it's also within reach: "music you or your lover could have made."
 
One of the Diamonds is a prominent interviewee in a fairly good, but annoying brief, documentary about doo wop available on DVD, Life Could Be a Dream: the Doo Wop Sound. I've reviewed it on a certain well known shopping website and will probably reproduce it here, but I have to say that, intelligent and articulate as he seemed, it just felt wrong to have him there, especially with Dave Marsh's phrase echoing in my head: "sophomoric contempt ... sophomoric contempt..." In my review, I've convinced myself that a brief bit of archive footage provides damning evidence he and the other Diamonds aren't taking the genre seriously, but who knows?
And re Clyde McPhatter recording When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano, there's a story which I read in Bill Miller's book on the Drifters which says that McPhatter, leaned upon to sing it "properly," blurted out that this was the only way he could sing it. There you have it; that's doo wop. Compulsion before craft.