Crying My Heart Out For You

Staying in Brill mode (see previous post), thanks to the magic of the internet I have just been listening to a recording I haven't heard in about twenty five years: Crying My Heart Out For You by Neil Sedaka. Here's the best-sounding version I could find on youtube:



Not one which seems to feature on compilations and I don't want to splash out on the Bear Family box set - I like his pop confections but I don't want heartburn. Was it intended, like The Diary, for Little Anthony and the Imperials? The keening falsetto with which the lament begins and ends suggests it might be.

But why, with so much Sedaka material otherwise available, have I hungered for - well, not hungered, exactly, but certainly thought about and scanned many an identikit Sedaka CD compilation in many a record shop over the years for - this recording?

Doo Wop Dialog[ue]: 72

pismotality
(42/M/London, England)

(continued)

Looking for an echo, an answer to our sound,
A place to be in harmony,
A place we aImost found.

As we all know, young doowop singers sought out places that would return their sound to them, not just to enhance their voices but also, whether consciously or not, out of a greater need, as expressed in the song: a wish to be made whole, to connect not just with the reaI or imagined loved one but with each other and with the wider world of those who might respond and say: "I feel this too." An answer to our sound. A Fifth Satin who by bringing his or her attention to bear on the song is saying they aren't alone and who, by completing the circle, by becoming part of this global chain we discussed in ITSOTN, is also relieved of that burden.

But as both a singer and a listener you can never quite get there - or at any rate stay there for long enough. So moments in concerts when the quality of the audience's attention changes and suddenly everyone is participating in a real event, a shared experience, and off the wall moments on otherwise conventional records – often for me the wordless wailing at the end, as I've said - need to be treasured for what they promise, even if the full delivery doesn't follow through. There's an art in listening to echoes, a special skill in cultivating that generosity of mind – whether with a doowop record or indeed another human being - that will allow us to look beyond what is; and there's something about doowop, of all musical forms, that encourages us to make that kindly leap, given that frailty and vulnerability are so often at the heart of its recordings.

I knew we'd get to Vernon Green eventually.

(continues)

Doo Wop Dialog[ue]: 70

pismotality
(42/M/London, England)

Around 1990 I was discussing, with a colleague at school, my interest in doowop, and some of the matters we’ve been raising here. I spoke of my frustration: all that knowledge and love and wonder, and nowhere for it to go: what could I do with it?

His reply, by opening up a hitherto unthought possibility, changed my life: "It's a monologue," he said; and that set me on my first play, exploring matters which have been discussed at length in other posts, so there's no need to go through them again here.

The key point is that from the moment of putting pen to paper and very slowly feeling my way towards some semblance of a coherent tale I surrendered to the process, the excitements of the exploration. I felt in touch once again with the creative teenager and knew that even if I was only chipping away at some microscopic part of the very bottom of the cliff face of creativity it was infinitely better to be doing that than anything else: there were other happinesses in my life at the time, but nothing felt the same as that continually refreshed sense of discovery.

That play took two years while teaching full time and was, as I've said earlier, rejected. Part of the trouble was it was indeed a monologue, as my colleague said; although tricked up to look like a real play with genuinely interacting characters, all the interest is really in what the protagonist says. But with that character drawing on Ben E King, and with those early stirrings of the impulses I've been able to explore in a different form here, it still seems a worthwhile thing to have done, and all down to the decision of that colleague (now a close friend) to answer as he did.

Believe it or not, there's even a Fred Parris (!) connection at the very root of this. (Oh, will you never set me free?) The art school ran a film club - this was 77/78 – one film was a rock'n'roll concert which included Fred Parris in a bright pink or red frilly shirt with a rounded collar. Clarke (and others), I regret to say this was not a transcendent moment for me, with radio waves and nebulous connections adance in my head: nohow and contrariwise, as those original warring Everly Brothers used to say. I thought he looked faintly ridiculous, like those corny Stylistics or other acts I'd seen on TOTP with the dance routines we instinctively knew to be old hat. My memory is ITSOTN was thrown away as part of a medley; at any rate, the unfamiliar song made little impact on me.

And yet ... twelve years later, the suggestion about a play in my mind, relaxed and centred after a swim on a return visit to Scotland, I saw Fred - or someone like him. Making up, getting ready to perform - yes, in that ridiculous shirt. Now, not in his 50s heyday, and half aware of the figure he's cutting, beginning to doubt whether he can go on that night, even dare attempt to hit those notes.

But he goes on. And he opens his mouth to sing. The voice is cracked. But ... something like. Better, far better (as I can see now) to be some kind of artist than not.


That movie, friends, viewed more than thirty years ago in the lecture theatre designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, was Let the Good Times Roll - and watching the Five Satins' spot on youtube now, freighted with all that we have been discussing, Fred Parris doesn't seem quite so ridiculous.



At the end, he tells the audience: "I don'know if people believe this, but honest to God it feels like 1956."

Doo Wop Dialog[ue]: 62

pismotality
(42/M/London, England)

(continues)

I talked in a recent post about discovering, or fully appreciating with age, simple pleasures like being with a friend's family. Losing a layer of selfconsciousness and sort of - melting together, is how I think of it. And in its small but significant way doowop stands for the greater good when we can give ourselves up to something else and is therefore a powerful model for life. (I don't have Nowhere to Run to hand but my memory is that King uses the phrase "spiritual experience" [about his streetcorner singing days] and makes clear none of the later success was in the same league.)

The act of listening to ITSOTN is, as I've said, another part of the same thing: we acknowledge those needs, those romantic aspirations, in ourselves; we don't protect ourselves by mocking their naivete, because they are about our deepest feelings. Close to the bone.

And the act of sharing those feelings on this board (and it's been great, and very touching, to see so much positive proof that others are receptive too) is also a part of that melting, that blending together started by those four (or five) guys in New Haven on that night. Bruce is no doubt right about the number of the group but maybe there's a sense in which - though I'm not even going to attempt to claim this for Fred Parris' thought processes, though it's a neat idea - maybe there's a sense in which the listener, that other vital component, is the fifth Satin: part, finally (once it goes out over the literal airwaves) of that melting, that blending together initiated by those guys.

And the process of this sort of writing seems like a metaphor in itself. As I said when moaning about my cyberspace loss, I can't back these things up. I type direct onto that little rectangle, bit of checking for clarity (concision would take longer), then press "Post Message". It's always a slightly tense moment: will that sign come up saying the message is too long? Did I get too involved, reluctant to break the flow, and now face the tedium of having to check like for "real" writing? Will there be that horrific sign claiming I haven't logged in, and when I press "previous" the Message rectangle is returned, dazzlingly blank again?

Or will there be - and this is the magic, this is the doowop moment - the sign that my phone is dialling - the image of a telephone with red indicator arrows circling a globe, the word "connecting" plus three dots, then a melting of the screen – an anxious moment - a second, and then my message there, clear on the board? That moment of melting, and that satisfaction at the sight of the thought transmitted, public, shareable, both with you and our wider audience, within a breath of its being framed, feels like nothing but a doowop moment, a moment of harmony.

(continues)

Doo Wop Dialog[ue]: 61

pismotality
(42/M/London, England)

Clarke,

A fuller reply. As ever, all sorts of resonances as I reread your messages with the above title. Yes, I'm sure that doowp has the power to enrich our lives. You mention harmony, with its associations of being able to embrace all aspects of oneself and others. Yes. And for me it's very much about the possibility of contact with others opened up by doowop. I talked at the end of the ITSOTN sequence about three listeners being linked through the act of listening, being - appropriate for the radio analogy - receptive.

But as you say it's also about those five singers' (or four, as Bruce has just informed us) own ability to connect on some deep level that sets the ball rolling: they have to sublimate their egos to produce a song which will be an experience, not aural wallpaper; they must each be willing to become part of a magically bigger whole, one that will expand and expand as the recording becomes disseminated but for the moment is them standing - maybe sharing a single microphone? - in that basement.

So doowop is first of all about their contact, their ability to blend and become this new shade, bigger than the sum of their parts. And finding, in doing so, a better self, a nobler identity, than any one competing ego. The song (and delivery) is trite enough, but the sentiments are precisely right: "We were rough and ready guys, But oh, how we could harmonise..." In a play briefly on in London which explored the Everly Brothers’ split imaginatively (ie no pretence at documentary truth) the writer had Don and Phil reluctantly confessing to the truth that when their voices blend together they become something neither can be alone.

In my own play I wrote of the protagonist's encounter with the doowop group, borrowing a phrase from the Dells: "Stone hooligans but angels." Ben E King rhapsodises about his street corner days; I used his words more or less verbatim, and another singer's (quoted in Barney Hoskyns' The Popular Voice) to describe the process of bringing a song into being (my fictional take on the creation of Golden Teardrops). Leaning over the stairwell where they first sang, the singer tells his friends to go with him; he hums a few bars, and:

We got together on a key and just ... floated. Those guys knew when you were gonna breathe. One big heartbeat.

(continued)

Barney Hoskyns' book is actually entitled From a Whisper to a Scream: Great Voices of Popular Music. I don't have it to hand, so may expand this note later, but it's a very readable short book, relatively hard to obtain these days, in which Hoskyns, citing Roland Barthes' phrase "the 'grain' of the voice," groups together and analyses some of the most distinctive voices of jazz, pop, soul, gospel, doo wop etc.

Ever keen to expand my knowledge, I looked up Barthes' phrase just now on the net but quickly realised this might involve rather more time and effort than a brief note here would justify, although I may return to this subject on the blog proper. But as Hoskyns' Barthes-inspired book is so good, and as even my dim understanding tells me that Barthes' ideas may have some bearing on our discussions on that now-vanished messageboard, I'll give the gist of a definition, heavily abridged, from what appears to be an anonymous academic essay. The writer begins by quoting Barthes himself:

"The 'grain' of the voice is beyond (or before) the meaning of the words, their form and even the style of execution: something which is directly from the singer’s body”.

There is an important distinction between ‘grain’, in Barthes’s sense [the writer continues], and ‘graininess’, which might be understood as a primarily timbral quality at the other end of a spectrum of vocality to so-called vocal ‘purity’.

Barthes makes clear "the grain of the voice is not or is not merely – its timbre”. He describes it instead as the “friction between the music and something else, which something else is the particular language (and nowise the message).”

When I clicked on the essay title in Wikipedia's Roland Barthes bibliography I was told: "The Grain of the Voice page does not exist."

That Everly Brothers play, entitled Gone, Gone, Gone, has been haunting me since I saw it. Yet all trace of it seems to have ... exactly. It originated, I think, in the National Theatre Studio (a place for workshopping plays) and was performed, probably late 80s/early 90s, at the Lyric Studio at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith - ie it was a smallscale production which may only have been on for a few days - but all my attempts to find out more have failed.

The actors didn't play or sing onstage, as far as I remember - it wasn't a glorified tribute show - although selections from the Everlys' Roots album, which included snippets of the Everly Family show ("Mom, Dad, Don and Baby Boy Phil") were used between scenes. The only other thing I can remember is a programme note in which the playwright, I think female, said that her inspiration had been the mythology surrounding twins rather than the wish to tell all about the real Don and Phil. Anyone know anything else?
And in case you were wondering, the image above is indeed only Don.

Doo Wop Dialog[ue]: 60

bdbopper
(18/M/Lawrenceville, GA)

Boy, do I have a lot to catch up with (see what l can miss during a busy school day)!
Here we gooooo ......

ITSOTN:
Tony - You never cease to amaze - you should write some of those touching TV documentaries (that's what you are sounding like)!
Anyway, I believe whole-heartedly with your opinion of the recording quality. Who cares if the song was crudely recorded - I love it just the same & want to keep it the way it is! If technology gets so good to produce a "Clean" copy of the song - I don't want it. It's not going to mean didiley squat to me or most Doowop/Oldies lovers! Everybody has their own memory/place in time they link to this song - It'll be ruined by a clean Stereo recording!

Mark - I believe you hit the nail on the head, my man! Anybody who think this music is too old or thinks that only the "baby boomers" enjoy - IS WRONG!!!! The example of listening to ITSOTN on a walkman is a perfect argument to the opinion in question.
Now to Clarkes question .....

Clarke (or may I say Phineas) LOL :)
I don't care whether you are 3 or 93, the music will always keep you young (at heart, at least). 20 years from now, I'll still be 18 because that is where the music will take me. I'll be coming home from school, like I did today - & inserting change into my personal Jukebox....er....computer. May I edit a lyric from Chuck Willis' "Hang Up My Rock N' Roll Shoes” .....
"The music's got a beat that'll keep you alive, The kids are Rock N' Rollin' from 8 to (65)!"
Wherever we'll be, whatever we do in the future, we will always stay young, if we keep the music in our hearts!

That's what I believe is the bottum line - any comments fellow Doowoppers???

In Harmony
From the Bop Shop,
Brian "pittsburgh's BD Bopper"

Doo Wop Dialog[ue]: 59

markkozlowskim

The points you make about sound quality / the way we first hear music is very interesting.

When George Lucas made 'American Graffiti', he took advantage of the latest audio technology to allow one song to be heard in a number of different ways. Thus, as a scene progressed, a song would be heard coming out of the radios of passing cars, out of transistor radios, etc.

It achieved continuity, but in a far more natural way than if he had just played a master recording of a song as background music. The way Lucas did it, the music was simply there because it would have been there in real life - the background music of everyones' lives, and the heartbeat of the night.

Incidentally, 'Graffiti' was the first film to use so many original pieces of music in its score (the music is almost constant) and Lucas had to fight to be allowed to do that. It was so successful that many other films have used the same idea (Martin Scorsese always makes good use of music in his movies).

On a different note, Jerry Lee Lewis always played his new releases on a crummy little portable record player back in the Fifties, so that he would know how his fans would hear them (back then most teenagers didn't have expensive record players). It shows a lot of insight on his part to have done that.

In terms of listening to music, I always find it much more exciting to unexpectedly hear a great song on the radio than it is to deliberately put it onto the record / CD player. Whenever a song appears, by surprise, I'll turn up the radio and really focus on it.

I find the same thing with old cars. It's always more interesting to come across some great old chrome'n'fins cruiser just driving around than seeing a hundred of them parked together at a car show.

As for the sound of ITSOTN, it makes you wonder how much is actually lost through the quest for technical perfection. Let's be honest - that record wouldn't have been put out if it had been recorded today. It probably would have been treated as a demo, and the 'real' single would be recorded on about a hundred channels, with plenty of overdubbing, remixing, etc. And the world would be a poorer place for that!


I have read that Lucas wasn't allowed, or couldn't afford, to mix the soundtrack in stereo for the film's original release - which is an even greater tribute to his or his soundman's skill in conveying atmosphere. I don't know whether the standard DVD is stereo or not, but this rhapsodic review of a collector's edition indicates that a stereo version is certainly obtainable. Again, I don't know about the regular edition, but it is a film which demands widescreen.

Doo Wop Dialog[ue]: 54

pismotality
(42/M/London, England)

Alexandra,

Yes I agree with you 99% of time; my point was ITSOTN felt like a special case. When Degas said don't restore ML, he was (I presume) saying he didn't want HIS memory disrupted, not pretending that ML had started out like that. And ITSOTN has burnt itself into people's memories in a certain way, so that's what it "is" for us. (I'm quite fond, in any case, of the boxy, warm AM sound – I’m with Jonathan Richman's Roadrunner sentiments on this one, to step out of our era for a moment...)

I do like Ace, etc, but with some recordings from other companies, or with gleamingly fresh stereo tapes of 50s/60s music, the balance can seem different from the mono, less punchy and direct, so I do have some reservations. I'm also a fan of early jazz and very few transfers to CD (apart from John R.T. Davies, jazzland's Little Walter DeVenne equivalent), have worked out that you lose some essential ambience if you filter too much out. I have one Ravens CD totally flattened out sonically, and lifeless; another, with a fair degree of scratches, conveys the immediacy of their presence far more (Bless You... is a lovely track).

So to sum up my views: if clean master tapes available, great (except ITSOTN!).

But care needs to be taken when cleaning up imperfect sources.

Stuff in stereo not originally conceived as such can have the effect of altering the balance of elements we recall from the mono - we hear more, but it can feel "wrong." Though I suppose no record competes with the memory ...

Tony


Sound restorer John R.T. Davies died in 2004 but left a legacy of early jazz recordings sounding as good as they could be. You can find an in-depth interview about his methods here but what I take to be his essential point is made in my otherwise off-topic review of a Billie Holiday CD:

Like most CDs in the Jazz Greats series, transfers were made by the late John R.T. Davies, who really understood how to preserve the original sound: too many CDs of public domain (over fifty years old) recordings have the life drained out of them in an effort to obliterate the scratches; doing this, however, means that you destroy what Davies called the "air" in a recording - and in any case the listener's ear is able to tune out much of the noise anyway.

Davies worked for several companies, most notably JSP, and passed on his skills to Ted Kendall; both names are a guarantee of quality. The JSP site includes blues and some rhythm and blues, and even one CD of early doo wop (or music on the cusp of being doo wop), but be warned that remasters not specifically ascribed to one or other of those gentlemen can be variable, judging from my experience of a Billie Holiday set, and I haven't personally heard the doo wop CD.

Returning to the theme of the magic of the internet, and the connections which would not otherwise have been possible, I emailed John to say how much I'd appreciated his CD remastering of sides by Luis Russell which had been one of my first happy jazz discoveries on vinyl in Motherwell Library in the early seventies and got a charming reply almost immediately. A great man, who devoted his life to preserving great music for everybody.

Doo Wop Dialog[ue]: 53

alex_lowlands
(40/F/Holland)

I'm really enjoying all these postings by you, Clarke and that one from Mark. Love checking this board just to see the latest part in this fascinating continuing story.

I can't put it as beautifully as you guys, English not being my native language, but I still would like to react to your last remarks on the sound quality of ITSOTN.

I agree that the poor sound quality of that song is the sound we got used to and it does evoke that atmosphere you so well described. However, I personally am always happy when I get a very clean copy of a song, any song. In a way I think all these extra hissing sounds are a bit distracting. You would not have heard these additional sounds if you had heard Fred and the guys singing under their lamppost either, so to me it doesn't add anything 'original' to the record. When I hear a clean copy of a song I can really concentrate on the great harmony, the little off key way of singing, whatever of such a song.

It's the same way with cleaning up old paintings you briefly mentioned. Memories or not from the viewers, but they were not painted centuries ago with layers of dust. Nor had the artist intended them to look that way. They were sold at the time as fresh and sparkling looking paintings. When these paintings get the proper and careful treatment, things turn up that have been hidden for so long. Personally, I think this is great, like revealing something hidden for all of us to enjoy, just like the artist had done at the time.

To go back to the music. I didn't grow up with it, nor did I discover it in my teens, so I can't say I hold memories towards it, like most of you do. I just love it more than anything else for what it is: great music that you can feel, apart from hearing. That is one more reason why I prefer the freshly polished releases by Ace and the likes, over scratchy records.

Alexandra

Doo Wop Dialog[ue]: 52

plsmotality
(42/M/London. England)

(continued)

Now I don't want to turn the clock back (except for my lost posting) - I don't particularly want all my doowops to be imprisoned in a sonic murk. Let me hear the sighs, the intakes of breath if possible. And you can do wonders with poor sources - the most recent transfers of Robert Johnson put him in the room with you, apparently.

But there is something about some doowops, and certainly this recording, that make me never want to see a headline like "Master tape found in church basement." Don't tell me we've all been listening to a third generation copy for all these years, I don't wanna know. Because for good or ill, that IS ITSOTN - the thing that we have experienced, this strange sensation that several of us have been talking about on these posts - it's that sound and no other. Take away the murk and you risk taking away something else. Degas opposed the restoration of the Mona Lisa – he didn't want his memories messed with either. And we are part of ITSOTN, just as much as Fred Parris - I don't just mean those of us doing the postings, but everyone who listens, gathers it into themselves. Experiences it, as Mark says. The audience completes the circle.

Lots of doowops in my vinyl collection could do with a good sonic scrub down. But not this. So why ITSOTN in particular? Well, we've been talking about this elusive magic it holds for so many people. And I think it's because it lets us in in a way few other songs do. Just as you hear the friend on the cheapo tape recorder and somehow go through what you hear, flesh out the poor representation with all you know of that person, so ITSOTN encourages us to fill in the gaps, doesn't dazzle us with hifi brightness or slick singing. We take our memories and feelings and connect.

Besides, there's another reason why the sound of that record is totally right, couldn't be any other way. I compared it to an AM station, and I think, on some unconscious (until now!) level, we've somehow always responded to that association when listening to it, and that's why the muddy sound is not an issue (for most people). Even listening to it on CD, it feels like a transmission, being sent out right at that moment, emerging, laden with static, out of the mysterious, silent sky, out of the recesses of memory. It's Fred and the guys singing their hearts out right now, to you, reaching out through time and space from that church basement to touch and unite all of us: Brian in that star-filled bedroom, me walking over the bridge and looking up at the vast and unknowable night sky, Clarke, weaving the past and the present together with his rich, evocative images - strangers who haven't met, yet all mysteriously linked because on some level, despite our differences, we all feel Fred and the guys reaching out to us, answering a yearning in us.

And we tune in.

Tony

Doo Wop Dialog[ue]: 51

pismotality
(42/M/London, England)

The day is noisier - there was a perfect, early morning calm when I wrote the original, but I'll try to recapture the gist and hope that the good, unselfconscious rhythms kick in at some point and not worry that good phrases that popped up during the composition before are gone (I find I do feel quite annoyed about it still, because it brings in selfconsciousness to a way of communicating that's been very free for me up till now. Anyway...).

My posting was expanding, in part, what I'd already said in my reply to Mark, but is as much for Clarke, Brian, anyone who's into this conversation about ITSOTN.

Mark, you mentioned the mysterious thing going on with all these elements together and the way we don't just listen, we experience a song. It's the song, listener, group, past/present, yearnings, everything together.

But one thing we haven't touched upon in this series of postings is the sound itself - the actual technical quality of what was recorded in that New Haven church basement all those years ago. And we have to admit it's not, technically, "good," put up against the clarity of quite a few other records. Even on the best CD transfer I've heard it doesn't get much beyond an AM radio with the batteries low. But I think that's part of the magic, the mysterious. There are lots of "better," clearer records to like. But it's like hearing a friend's voice on a tape recorder. You don't care about the sound quality. Your mind fills in the gaps and you see the whole picture. And the amateurish quality seems to put it more within our grasp as well. There's no studio trickery - that is Fred and the boys, no more, no less.

But simple and unadorned as it is, there's something special about that recording. I heard a live version by the Nutmegs. And it was...fine. But it wasn't the Five Satins – and more to the point, it wasn't that murky recording.

When I first came on the net last month, I spent a mesmerising couple of hours at a website devoted to discussing which mono 45s could now be found in stereo on CD, and more or less saying that record companies had a moral duty to create a stereo version if the four track (or whatever) master tapes had survived, even if the recording had never, ever been issued in stereo on vinyl on LP reissues. I had some sympathy - two hours, after all - but I eventually tore myself away and haven't felt the urge to revisit since. There was an implicit love for the music in what they were doing, but it seemed to be getting lost by not being articulated clearly enough. Sure, I favour Ace and Rhino reissues (though there was a lot of bitching about Rhino favouring mono) and all hail Little Walter DeVenne, etc, but if all your energies are taken up agonising over the precise placing of the lead vocal in the stereo image that leaves out all the more elusive stuff that goes on when we listen, including - the essential point of this resurrected posting - the fact that how we first hear a record, the quality of the sound, can be an integral part of how we experience it ever after.

(continues - couldn't stand losing a mammoth posting again!)


I was referring to the Stereo Chat Board on Mike Callahan's Both Sides Now Publications website, which I have, ahem, returned to on occasion. (Set a timer before you explore.)

Doo Wop Dialog[ue]: 49

pismotality
(42/M/London, England)

Mark,

Great posting that sums up what we're all trying to do on this board. Sharing as far as we can that joy in the experience. "somehow it all melts together... " - yes, you can't separate the elements, including what we bring to it as listeners: maybe that's what the Flamingos guy meant when he called it "cohesive." What I love beyond all is the fact that it's just five voices producing this but it's bigger and more mysterious than that, though the fact it's recognisably real people, not a drum machine or whatever, is part of what reaches out to us. I'm still blown away by seeing five guys come on stage, adjust the mikes... then suddenly out of their mouths comes this thing that's bigger, and more mysterious, than anyone of them. And we share in a collective moment. Even odder that fifty year old recordings, especially with the clarity of CD, take you there too, past and present in one, as we've been saying on these postings: just been listening to the Ravens' Bless You for Being an Angel.

Thanks again for saying it so well.

Tony

Doo Wop Dialog[ue]: 48

markkozlowskim

All this talk about what certain songs mean to people makes it abundantly clear that our music being 'old' doesn't mean a thing. Music is timeless, plain and simple.

A good example is the mention of 'In The Still Of The Night' possibly being played on a Walkman - hardly 1950's, is it?

The reason that I mention this is that I always get annoyed when people criticise the stuff I listen to for being 'old'. The entire Marketing industry is geared towards making a virtue out of something being 'new', without really considering its quality.

But when did emotions get 'old'? I must have missed a meeting, cos the beautiful Doo Wop ballads that I love so much express many of the things that I simply don't have the words - or the voice! - to express myself.

But there is more to it than just the words. There is something amazing, something that you can't define, in the combination of the music, the voices, the atmosphere...Somehow it all melts together to produce something that becomes more than a song. It becomes an actual experience to the listener.

And that's the thing. I don't think that we just 'listen' to our favourite music. We experience it.

People always love comedians, because comedians make them laugh. And we love people who look after us, and do good things for us. So it's no wonder that we love the songs that make us forget where we are, forget everything, and just take us to somewhere special inside ourselves.

It would be foolish - and, I believe, profoundly wrong - to try and define exactly what it is that has that effect. It would be like trying to pin a beautiful butterfly down.

Instead, it is better, and more human, to simply talk about the joy that this music can bring. And – lo and behold - it seems that there are lots of us, all feeling similar things.

In closing, let me say that although I wasn't born until 1965, I don't see the music of the 1950's as 'old', or something from the past. It is a part of my 'present', and - more importantly - it is a part of my future.

Falling in love can never get old, and nor can Doo Wop.

All the best to all of you,

Mark

Doo Wop Dialog[ue]: 47

pismotality
(42/M/London, England)

Brian,
I know exactly what you mean about those moments when you hear a song and suddenly you're hearing it totally and then the song is linked to that place. I always associate it with a long walk home at night over a motorway bridge, trees in the distance, no one else around - and this great song reaching out and touching me. Can't remember if I was playing it on a Walkman, or remembering it, or singing it (badly) to myself when no one else could hear. ..but it's the song that reaches out in the night, just as it did to Fred Parris.
Tony

Doo Wop Dialog[ue]: 46

Bdbopper
(18/M/Lawrenceville, GA)

Phew!!
'Dis conversation just gets better with time!!

"In the Still of the Night" is one of 'dose songs nobody forgets whether 'dey heard it at a special time or not. The lyrics just transport yinz to a different place in time.

Although I can't see well enough to drive, I see myself sitting in a '57 T-Bird Convertable with my arms around someone special. I can't help it-It just comes over me every time!

Especially 'dis summer- I found myself in Minnesota on vacation. I was laying in bed in a room covered with 'dose Glow-in-'da-Dark stars. I was listening to my walkman & ITSOTN came on & I just went absolutely numb. I was transfixed by 'da wonder 'da song brang to me 'dat night. Very special moment-won't forget it ever!

Therefore, it is no small wonder 'dat ITSOTN happens to be a #1 Oldie time & time again.

As for "Unchained Melody"~1 have a special memory with 'dat song too. I was at 'da Homecoming dance a couple of years ago & had my first slow dance with an old girlfriend to 'da Righteous Bros version. We have since broken up (However we are still good friends). I heard many versions of 'da song since 'den. I especially like 'da Cookies version & Vito & Salutations version (although it's up-tempo).

Let's keep 'da conversation going! I really enjoy it!! :)

In Harmony
From 'Da Bop Shop,
Brian "Picksburgh's BD Bopper"

Doo Wop Dialog[ue]: 44

pismotality
(42/M/London, England)

According to Marsh (Buy the book and skip the postings!) Fred Parris was on guard duty "in the middle of a freezing Korean night" when the song came to him as he was thinking about Cole Porter's song (shades of Glorias 1 and 2!), so it sounds like the song was conceived out of nostalgiac need: a hunger for that sustaining image, however airbrushed the reality (just as at one point in Death of a Salesman Willy Lowman demands good news from his boys, and you feel he deserves it, even though he's really saying Lie to me "and I won't ask again...").

Your images in your last posting are really evocative and detailed but I like the fact that, although seeing a more complex reality than the songs, they too have a kind of roseate glow, a sense of heightened, poetically selective reality that sits well with the music - presumably down to a combination of your own distancing from the event and an awareness of audience in this public context, to say nothing of the fact that as soon as we pick up a pen (or incredible shrinking keyboard, as at this end) we become selective - can't pin down the whole of reality, anymore than you can definitively explain away the mysteries of Gloria or GT (though you made a pretty good fist of the former, I have to say). Nabokov said that "reality" is a word which can only exist in inverted commas. In the act of writing anything down we have to select, and therefore the act of remembering is to poeticise. Which brings us neatly (whew!) back to In the Still of the Night...


You're right. Magic. You can't really say any more, but it's fun, as you've shown, to try, so I'll follow your lead. You've said so much and so powerfully (as I'm sure our audience will agree) that I'll just bear down on a few points.

The vocals, backing and lead, are wonderful. Because they're all too human and flawed (we're not exactly talking the Platters or the Four Freshmen) they invest that simple song with themselves: frail humanity plus divine aspiration - the yearning for the loved one taking on a religious intensity, as so often in this gospel-derived genre - equals a winningly poignant combination, and what they most certainly do not lack is conviction.

There. Almost done (for now). The only other thing I want to mention is that line "hold me again, with all of your might.” That's the most affecting line of all, as you, I think, touched upon. Cause you can't ever hold on hard enough to make it alright, unchanging, forever: time, the light, are coming in to do their dirty work and all you can do is grasp at the memory and half remember and half invent, on a freezing cold Korean night.

And go down in doowop history because we all want someone to make it right, too.

Tony

Doo Wop Dialog[ue]: 43

Gingers57Chevy
(F/FL)

Pismotality; a 'coined' word, by/for You... NOW.

I enjoy your and Clarks bantering and explainations... I 'feel' so much of it personally, as I was there in my time too.

'In the Still Of The Night' ~ And 'Blue Moon'; will always be embedded in my memories, as times that I spent in NAM. To this day, I am in contact (again) with my 'Still Of The Night' Partner, and beg Him to sing 'Blue Moon', every chance I get! We re-met, after 32 years...

Other than that; 'Unchained Melody' does just as well...
Sighhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.......

My Parents were Foster Parents; and aided many unwed Mothers. Going on to care for the offspring until proper Adoptions were arranged, so I can also, feel and remember the heart ache and break, of many of these Young Ladies.... Most were by choice, as it was a two way decission between She and her Fella.

I myself, am one of the fortunates that my parents 'Hand Picked' Me... And, Fortunate, I was to have loving Parents that carried on with the process, of having Hearts big enough, to care for others beyond the call of duty.

I enjoy your disection of ideals, and the re-placement of wrond ideas.. (IF; any of what I said, makes sense!!)
Thanks, for the Memories~
Ginger
Always, the Romantic, at Heart.....

Doo Wop Dialog[ue]: 41

clarkedavis
(M/Dover, New Jersey)

I was foolhardy enough to take on Gloria, and have come out unscathed, thankfully. Who in his right mind would try to explain something of such grandeur?

One would think I should have learned a lesson in all this. You hit the target once; thank your lucky stars, close up the kit, and go home.

Ever a glutton for punishment I will proceed, coerced internally by the desire to communicate and possibly illuminate heretofore dark recesses of our collective sensibility.

The Five Satins. In The Still Of The Night. I can hear the groans now.

Why has this song attained the number one position on New York Oldies Sation WCBS FM, out of all the voted favorites, year after year? Answer really is quite simple. Magic. Two syllables. Big explanation.

Enter the teenage domain, circa mid to late fifties. A new culture emerges, with dungarees (not jeans), ponytails, "hops", frenetic DJ patter, shoo bop a loop on your radio as you drive to school in your customized hot rod, and the birth of Teenage Love. Parents thought that a contradiction in terms. If you were teenage, how could you love? If they only knew!

If you were lucky enough to find the right, daring, partner, you might find yourself driving your car deep into a brush, wooded area, far from prying eyes of others, and the police. Roll down the windows, move to the back seat, and let the magic begin. Moonlight, wind rustling the trees, the scent of nature in the air. Welcome, you have arrived at our destination, you are now In The Still Of The Night.

Is there anything more pleasurable than being with someone you are overpoweringly attracted to, and have that response returned in kind? Shoo doo, shoo dooby doo, in the still of the night, I held you, held you tight...cos I love you so, promise I'll never, let you go, in the still of the night. (An empty promise, at best.)

Remember that night in May? The stars were bright up a-bo-aa-aa-ove. I hope, dun dun, and I pray, dun, dun, to keep your precious love.

Well, before, the li-i-i-i-ght, promise I'll never let go of you tight, in the still of the night.

The words are simple, the arrangement and performance so sublime, replete with honking, almost, but not quite off key, sax bridge. There is a message in two parts. The actual event, of being with your lover in a private romantic place, and the remembrance of that eventful (hopefully) night under the stars.

I remember that night in May. May! School is just about over, and the restless summer is about to begin. The junior and senior prom where this song played, year after year, captured a moment in time so perfectly for so many of us.

Well, before the light. ..as we all know, morning must come, in spite of our wishes. Light representing not just the end of the night, but the awareness that this magical moment might not endure the harsh scrutiny of life after high school. In spite of it being almost unearthly in the early hours of a May morning, the ominous pangs of reality are lingering, just outside our current level of consciousness. Boy and girl, almost man and woman, mind dancing and showing an exchange of caress, kiss and force. Moving pleasurably toward an inevitable conclusion, but taking seemingly hours to get there.

Harmony of the most divine order, shared intimately by two, at their prime physical time of life, with intense affection being the bond that will make this a lasting memory.

In the still of the night is not just a physical place. It's a spiritual place, where the hush before the morning's light is captured and shared with your love. It's a very guilty pleasure. One that may never be repeated. A magic moment, reflected perfectly by an awkward sax break, simple, unpolished lyrics, and an almost amateurish performance. Teenage Love in a teenage world. Our parents just never had a clue, or else they never would have allowed that song to be playing in their daughter’s room after midnight.