Teardrops of Burnished Gold

By way of commemorating ten (count 'em!) years of this blog I've uploaded the rare 1961 Vee-Jay release of the Flamingos' Golden Teardrops to youtube, as it doesn't seem to be available there or on spotify or anywhere else. You can find any number of transfers of the original 1953 Chance recording in variable sound quality - as well as a spurious "echo version" which would have turned Bill Putnam's stomach - but not the Vee-Jay pressing, which features an overdubbed guitar. Readers who have explored the earliest posts here will know how significant that recording was to me.

I had no idea that I'd still be finding new thoughts to add to this blog a few weeks after I'd set it up in December 2009, let alone in a decade's time. My modest intention had been to provide a permanent online archive for posts I'd exchanged with the American DJ Clarke Davis on a music forum, Steve's Kewl Doo Wop Shop, which had closed for business not long after our dialogue - or dialog, if you're American.

Over a few frenzied weeks in the autumn of 2000 Clarke and I had compared notes on how, despite coming from very different backgrounds, we had both managed to arrive at a love for this wonderful and ridiculous genre, and Golden Teardrops played a major role in the discussion, along with In the Still of the Night and Gloria.

The Doo Wop Shop vanished without warning but luckily I'd saved a few printouts - though I did manage, over the years, to lose an especially precious sheet of one particularly precious post: Clarke's description of the Cadillacs' recording of Gloria. At some point the page disengaged itself from my pile, and unless someone else has kept a copy you will have to fill in the blanks for yourself.

As a prompt for those inclined, here is the record:





The exchanges between myself and Clarke seemed to be enjoyed by a lot of readers on the original forum. Tokens of appreciation, in the form of videos, CDs and cassettes, were sent my way by especially generous individuals, to whom I send my heartfelt thanks once again. Some, like the late Bruce Woolf, were even kind enough to say that our dialogue might be of interest to doo wop fans in general, and those seeking to learn about the form, which is why I decided, with Clarke's approval, to make the posts available online again in December 2009.

But as I began transcribing the pieces for a new readership one thing led to another. It seemed only natural to add a commentary to the posts, filling out what I'd said or adding new thoughts, and to add the occasionally new piece about some treasured record I hadn't got round to mentioning in 2000.

And then, having got the taste for this sort of writing again - the pleasure of searching for words to convey to others how this music had given me so much pleasure - there didn't really seem any reason to stop. Those old messages were an incomplete picture of my early musical enthusiasms, so why not discuss the other genres which had also inspired me? And occasionally I'd add other, non-musical, elements to the mix: whatever else of the past had retained its importance for me, such as the comedians revered in childhood. (One of them even asked me to help write his autobiography after he had read my encomium, which can be found here.)

At some point the phrase "rummaging in the record shop of memory" advanced itself as a subheading for the blog; it seemed apposite, and it stuck. The image at the top of this blog is of another vanished Doo Wop (and other genres) Shop: the late lamented Cheapo Cheapo Records in Rupert Street, London. (I have written about that too, here.)

But whatever matters have crept in, doo wop remains the foundation of this blog - how could it not, with a title like "Pismotality"? That had been my username on the vanished forum, a nod towards one of the greatest (and possibly stupidest) doo wops of all, the Medallions' The Letter, so it seemed only natural to resurrect it for a blog which revived my contributions under that name. And what word better sums up that mixture of idealised romance and plain idiocy which characterises the best of this genre? (More about The Letter here.)

As I write this I am still eagerly awaiting the arrival of Todd Baptista's new book on the Flamingos, the first full-length study of perhaps the greatest of all the doo wop groups; they certainly recorded the supreme doo wop song, and I still thrill to hear it.

I first heard it - in that overdubbed form - just over forty years ago. Presumably the 1961 sweetening was an attempt to cash in on the group's recent crossover success with End Records: the hitmaking arrangement of I Only Have Eyes For You is ushered in with a guitar.

Not that I was aware that I was listening to a reworked recording when I first heard it. I only registered that this seemed a more challenging listen than some of the other tracks on the compilation album I had picked up cheaply in the basement of Glasgow's Listen Records in Renfield Street. It took me a while to adjust to the Flamingos' sound, as I told Clarke on that Doo Wop Shop forum. I reproduce the post below with a ghost of an apology for its slightly overheated style, reflecting the elation I was then experiencing at finding other doo wop enthusiasts, like Clarke and Bruce, via the new magic of the internet:

Odd as it may seem, it wasn't that accessible to me when I first heard it around 1978, on a poor quality oldies compilation with muddy sound and a dubbed-on guitar. 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 in one listen.

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 (lacrimae 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 - the knowledge that he was once loved - undoubtedly will, if the falsetto weaving in and out of the reiteration of that painful vision of her tears at the end is anything to go by.

Doo wop lyrics don't matter that much: a peg for emotions. They'd be trite enough here if read on their own. But on this occasion they seem to give the group a clarity of focus which inspires them to a height they never quite attained on any other song: Golden Teardrops is, quite simply, the loveliest and the saddest of all doo wop records. In his autobiography Chaplin talks of the day music entered his soul. Golden Teardrops 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 doo wop: it's religious, it's secular, it's ... beyond words, actually.

At the time I knew the Flamingos' classic only through the Vee-Jay version until Clarke kindly sent a CD of one of his shows featuring the song "sans guitar" and I gradually learnt to wean myself off the doctored reissue. Now when I listen to it I can hear that the guitar is essentially an unnecessary underlining of what is already present in the restrained musical backing by Red Holloway and the other session musicians in 1953. (You can read more about Golden Teardrops in my song-by-song account of the Flamingos' early recordings here.)


That said, it does seem odd that the doctored side is so difficult to find in the digital era. Charly's ten disc box set of Vee-Jay recordings features the Chance original. So here, in order to commemorate the past Ten Glorious Years (other adjectives are available), is the overdubbed version of Golden Teardrops. Please note that sound quality is not optimal - this is taken from an old cassette I recently found, not directly from the original vinyl album depicted in the video, and the audio seems to have taken on a slightly corrugated effect over the years. But it's still worth hearing, if only to cement your opinion of the original.






A complete guide to posts about the Flamingos' Chance and Parrot sides, described by Marv Goldberg as "a wonderful analysis", can be found here. 

Or go straight to the piece on Golden Teardrops here.

A review of Todd Baptista's book about the Flamingos will follow in the New Year.

Flamingos # 3: Golden Teardrops & Carried Away

[Marv Goldberg]

Golden Teardrops ... avec la guitare!

If you have read earlier entries on this blog about the Flamingos' 1953 doo wop classic Golden Teardrops then you may be interested in this youtube clip of the 1961 Vee-Jay reissue with overdubbed guitar. Presumably this was done to lessen the gap between the group's Chcago recordings and their recently successful sides for End, most notably I Only Have Eyes For You.

Be warned it ends a second or two prematurely, so you miss the guitar rounding things off at the end. The sound isn't great on this particular clip, but you can hear enough to decide whether you like this reworked version. I've written about it on many occasions in this blog, such as here (about the overdubbed version versus the original) and here (an essay about the recording and notes about the oldies album where I heard it first) and even now I'm not sure how I feel - it was, after all, the form in which I first heard (and loved) it. How can you erase that completely?

Anyway, here is the youtube clip of the overdubbed Golden Teardrops, followed by a clip of the original, undoctored recording (sans guitars, as Clarke put it), if you fancy making a comparison. It's not really a fair competition, however, as the sound of the second youtube clip happens to be superior - and doesn't stop before the end. But it's a handy excuse to remind yourself of what a great record (or two) it is.

Listening to the two versions again, what I can hear is that the addition of the guitar masks or replaces what I presume is a very, very softly played (very softly indeed) sax. The original musicians were careful not to impose themselves on the beautiful vocal arrangement - something which I presume must have been obvious the first time the group sang it to them, so the redubbed version is not about the need to conceal something ungainly - like Uncle Phil camouflaging what is said to be Lennon's lousy bass playing on The Long and Winding Road, according to Ian Macdonald's Revolution in the Head.

Nevertheless, maybe a guitar is simply a more natural accompaniment for voices. But I dunno. I think you can say, however, that it's underlining something already there, or implicit, in the existing accompaniment - maybe a bit like Ringo adding some simple drumming in earlier Beatle days when a track had been bounced down several times. The only difference is that presumably Golden Teardrops was live, so the self-effacement of the musicians was presumably a conscious decision on their or the engineer's part - or whatever the technical term was in those days. So could it be said that the guitar is too on-the-nose, musically? I can't decide - but maybe you can.

Doo Wop Dialog[ue]: 75

pismotality
(51/M/London, England)

The piece about the Letter, from 1st October 2000, is the last printout I have from the Doo Wop Shop board.

Ending on that unceasing Ulyssean quest for the perfect record provides a neat conclusion - but I didn't stop posting, although it may have been the last of that flurry of extended pieces between Clarke and me. Thank you to those, then and now, who indulged us.

I can't check the board for other messages, however, as Steve's Kewl Doo Wop Shop was removed in its entirety from Yahoo in August 2001. If anyone has any more posts (especially Clarke's description of Gloria) please get in touch by clicking on my profile. I'd also love to hear from anyone else who contributed or just read it at the time; if nothing else, these messages reinforce the point that audiences are participants too.

Messages which may forever circle in cyberspace include a discussion of the Dells' Sweet Dreams of Contentment with much speculation about the mystical word intoned at the end (the posts' unreachability is poetically apt, perhaps), and my reference, in one message which was saved here, to the shameful British group Showaddywaddy led to an unexpected discussion with Alexandra about shared memories of Top of the Pops and kitsch 70s British pop. Equally baffling to me, with the whole range of American harmonisers past and present to choose from, someone else seemed quite unnaturally keen on UK doowoppers Darts (shades of the British Invasion groups firing Chuck Berry anthems right back at the Colonies ... ).

Other than those it's hard to recall particular posts, although what does remain is the sense of absolute immersion I felt writing, waiting for the quickly-appearing responses which would trigger off more thoughts ... They were things, as I wrote at the end of the piece on Golden Teardrops, I'd been needing to say for years, and the internet finally made it possible to connect with a likeminded group of people. I hope that some of that enjoyment, at least, has been transmitted through the static.

The piece about the The Letter was also published at the start of this blog as a taster for the series. You can click on that earlier version for additional notes plus links to arcane discussions about the meaning of "pismotality," if you have a few hours to spare ...

I'm joking. Sort of. But given that this has been a dialog[ue] between the US and the UK, perhaps it's fitting that what may be the simplest and best description of the word coined by the late Vernon Green for his immortal song can be borrowed from a British pop song of the period:

"Nothings that are meant for my love alone to hear."

Doo Wop Dialog[ue]: 71

pismotality
(42/M/London, England)

Well, it's a new day and I'm struggling manfully on, trying to make good my second cyberspace loss, hence the "echo" of the title. No doubt it's a metaphor anyway (is there anything that isn't?):

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter

- only right now, in this dimension, we're kind of stuck with those that do actually assail the eardrums: in music - as in writing or any form of art - the intention isn't the same as the actuality of the finished piece, although imagination and forbearance on the part of the "fifth Satin" can go a long way to bridging the gap. (And no, Clarke, this not special pleading for my play - well, only partly...)

This is actually not what I was going to start out doing - discussing some influential early record purchases, culminating in a discussion of The Letter - but I'll go with it. May get back on the main road eventually - and if not, I'll arrive at another destination. even if not the "'lost" route I was trying to recover. (We're travellers on Life's highway; enjoy the trip ... as Keats or someone said.)

For all my doowop purchasing life - some 22 years - I've been hoping to find the Numero Uno doowop song in the next compilation and have been mostly – almost invariably - disappointed. Obviously there have been great ones, as discussed here, but so many that in some hard to define way fall short. I used to think "All ballads good," and still sort of hold to that (so many compilations favour uptempo - don't they realise some follks want to wallow?), but then strange, hard to justify thoughts start to come in: is that lead voice just a little too affected? Isn't this just a rehash of their big hit? I think someone put A Kiss From Your Lips in their Flamingos Top Three for the Alan Freed concert - fair enough but can anything ever be more than an echo of the shimmerng perfection that is - but it's fair to say my thoughts on THAT song have been sufficiently rehearsed earlier in this dialogue.

What I'm getting at is that in dowop, as in art generally - life itself, come to that - very, very little comes close to the wonderful thing we imagine. Familiarity has dulled (for me, anyway) the excitement of Why Do Fools ... And maybe even the best songs, the highest manifestations of the doowop art, as good as it gets for a drugfree high, shoobopwise, are, in any case, pale imitations, faint echoes, of what the artist intended. Ringo used to say he'd sing I Wanna Be Your Man in the studio imagining he was Stevie Wonder, then he'd ear the playback and find out he was Bing Crosby all along (a pretty self-deluding claim in itself, but let that pass).

But the fifth Satin (or fifth Beatle) role is a vital one: if we don't want every musical experience to be as ashes in our mouth we have to, if we can, see beyond what's there to the doowop El Dorado (no, not doowop's El Dorados!) promised at fitful moments - the bending of a note; a wordless wail - during an otherwise underwhelming song. Besides, art can only go so far: it's a souvenir of the singer's (real or imagined) "emotion; it’s a time machine for your memories as well as enhancing the moment itself - as you’ve shown us so vividly, Clarke – but it’s not the thing, the emotion, itself, merely a way of evoking the emotion in us, if we're prepared to let it.

And this presumably mirrors what the singers are doing in the first place. There's a song I know in a version by the Persuasions:

(continues)


Heard melodies ... from Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn. Mini-lecture on youtube here.

Doo Wop Dialog[ue]: 38

pismotality
(42/M/London, England)

Clarke,

I didn't intend to write so much - I suppose I'm still in the process of discovering how much I need to say, though I think that having disgorged such a gargantuan chunk the worst may be over ... I was also lucky enough to have a free, sunny (and silent) morning to get those impacted thoughts out uninterrupted rather than losing focus over some longer, more disjointed period.

So doing that was right for me but please don't feel there's any urgency about the speed (or length, come to that) of your reply as a result. Knowing that there is someone reading this, that I'm not flinging my words into a void (unless I press the wrong button) is the most important thing. You most of all, of course, as my fellow conspirator but also our invisible audience (whom I thank if they lasted the course with my three-parter. No skimming!)

What really extended it was I wasn't just rehashing stuff I'd written down at the time of the play but suddenly seeing more clearly why that play was the way it was through the enhanced sense of the music which has come from this happy struggle of trying to articulate my responses during our conversation. So not just our different backgrounds: two separate ways within me of coming to an understanding of the music (a four way conversation if you include our vocal audience!).

On the Gloria front, I can see that I haven't even gotten on to the fact that it appeared in a different guise some years earlier, sung by Johnny Moore's Three Blazers (presumably not the Drifters guy ... Brian, can you help?) and covered by the Mills Brothers.

I think there's a grey area about whether it's the same song - vaguely remember reading about about Esther Navarro's name being whipped on, or off, the credits for reissues of the Cadillacs' version, but I'll need to dig out my Doowop: Forgotten Third ... book to check. Think they've got lyrics too. (Has anyone reading, possibly a native Picksburgher, heard either of these Gloria Mark Ones? Is it the same tune?) When I've checked the lyrics, it'll be interesting to see if they have the same teen sensibility - suspect not, but can't remember. Anyway, need to rest from my labours awhile...

Re Golden Teardrops: The Movie - or 30 minute radio play, anyway. It wasn't produced in the end. A BBC producer asked for rewrites on spec, which I did and learnt a lot from - especially when pruning - but no development money changed hands. Still, it proved a good calling card, so no harm done, though I also learnt the wisdom of Doowop Collection Theft Victim Lou Reed's dictum: "First thing you learn is that you always got to wait." So no tape. But email me your address and I'll be happy to send you a copy of the script. You've helped me to understand it myself so it's the least I can do.


I then added a postscript which I'm too ashamed to reproduce here, in effect touting for doo wop tape compilations in return for my play. I say "ashamed" because I can't now remember which items I may have received as gifts around this time and which ones had been sent specifically in order to get a copy of the play. I certainly sent one to Clarke, who was very complimentary about it; I kept intending to send a copy to Alexandra, aka alex_lowlands, who features later, and was very helpful when I was researching the song Stand By Me, but I never did. To her, and other readers such as Pam, who sent me a wonderful CD compilation, I thank you very much and I regret my behaviour.

I hope to put a link to a copy of the script soon - subject to finding the relevant disc. The only recording which was made of the play is too rough (believe me) for any other ears, but now that I'm aware of the magic of compressed files, and inspired by a British comic who's been putting material directly online rather than wait for a yea or nay from the BBC, I hope to arrange a new recording very soon. Watch this space - if, at this late stage, you can awake your faith.

Doo Wop Dialog[ue]: 36

pismotality
(42/M/London, England)

(continued)

The girl in the play, who becomes the woman the singer marries, is only referred to as Gloria," a fact which regally pisses her (. ..off, as we say in UK) - decades on, he still can't see the reality of her, just as he can't accept he's on the skids in his career.

As you know from earlier postings, I'm fascinated by the collision of past and present, and I kept thinking: what is it like to be singing those songs, especially the Gloria-type yearning ones, forty years on? Assuming you're not just the musical equivalent of a cab for hire, presumably part of you buys into the myth: the audience's need for the comfort of illusion is no greater than your own. And there is, as I've said re Dion and the Spaniels live, a dignity and a grace about sharing those needs, those vulnerabilities, with an audience, if you can see them for what they are. Brit playwright Dennis Potter (Pennies from Heaven) said you should look back at your past with "tender contempt," but stressed the importance of both parts.

But what if you're too caught up in those dreams - the grown man, as it were, still singing Gloria without that sense of distance? So I decided to make my lead character a fantasist who desperately needs those songs as a retreat from understanding life in the here and now, not a way of integrating the man and the boy.

Some details I took from the chapter on Ben E King in [Gerri Hirshey’s] Nowhere to Run, but King seems to me a very grounded individual: I saw him, reunited with the Drifters in the early 80s (pre the moderate resurgence of fame with the reissue of Stand by Me), and while the late Johnny Moore and the others were comporting themselves like so many manic starfish, projecting like crazy throughout, King sort of hugged himself as he quietly, naturally, sang his hits: "Hey, I can't be that person anymore," he seemed to be saying, "but this is as much as I remember. I'm not gonna embroider or patch it up, but what I tell you will be true for me now. If I made it any bigger, I couldn't feel it, so what would be the point?" And it worked; I remember the sense of him giving himself as a real person that night.

But that play was also a variant on my attempt to do the impossible earlier on this board, ie to pin down in words the experience of listening to Golden Teardrops and the mystery (to me) of its coming into being. Without any attempt to reflect the little I knew of the Flamingos as people (ie virtually zilch) I imagined the guy hurting his wife by some thoughtless remark, seeing her tears welling up, and being torn at that moment between the wish to comfort her - and the idea that is suddenly welling up, insistent, inside him. The idea wins; he assembles the guys - the stairwell they used to practise as kids - and Golden Teardrops bubbles joyfully into being: "We got together on a key and just - floated." They rush on to the prearranged session, he comes back late that night with an acetate of the song, exuberant, thinking she'll understand, be dazzled by the sheer beauty of this guilt-framed apology ... and she's gone.

There's not much else to say, except that the enormity of what he's done to her hits him at the end, as he hears GT properly for the first time. It’s about selfishness as well as love, two sides of him. A lifetime away from that first fine "Gloria" ...

Tony

Doo Wop Dialog[ue]: 35

pismotality
(42/M/London, England)

This is not, at all, to put Gloria down: we all forget (perhaps it's an act of kindness) the gale force of those adolescent pangs until the trigger of records like this one.

The full meaning of it came to me when I saw, about four nights running, the great New Jersey acappella group 14 Karat Soul perform it in Glasgow c.1983: the bass, "Briz" (?) loomed as the lead sang, one last time, of his yearnings, intoning over him those doomy notes that spelled out just one thing: You're alone, Bub; get used to it. The bass was reality, just as he often takes over on "baser" group sides (Pookie for the dreams; Gerald for the down'n'dirty), and his notes here were a death knell for the lead's tattered vision of togetherness ("Maybe she'll want me... "), a bell to toll him back to his sole self, alone in the less than tender night.

Briz was singing right into his face, with a sort of evil glee: maybe this message from the Reality Zone had to be given, but he was certainly enjoying the task, and the "teenage" lead was not much liking it, protesting his love and need to the end (similarly, is that last "Gloria!" on the Cadillacs' version - can't remember if same for Passions' - about acceptance of the situation, or a refusal to give up hope?).

This collision of dreams and reality, with that particular performance and image of the bass singer quashing all hope, were very much in my mind as I shaped my play which took Golden Teardrops as a title, and the distinction I've made in this posting (ie inc. Pt. 1) between Gloria and GT comes, I can see, from the way I employed the songs there. As a teenager, the protagonist does exactly the same as in Kat ... newly accepted into a group, he sees a girl walk by and launches into Gloria: "It wasn't her name but it was her."

Do you now see why I'm impelled, at least for the moment, to go on with this correspondence? Because there is so much of it - correspondence in our writing, that is. Which suggests we're trying in our different ways to work the same things out, and that in turn makes it likely that as we're connecting then others, whether content to look over our shoulders or join in, are too.

This is a bit of a digression from what I was going to expand upon in the play, but in a way this dialogue is a mirror of the doowop process: the initial, half-formed idea (vague thoughts of composing a song); the need to be inspired to greater heights by someone else (the group); the need for a wider connection, touching other lives (records and performing).

Maybe if I could carry a tune I wouldn't need to do all this but, as you say, the member of the audience has a role to play, whether it's bringing their rapt attention to the concert hall or - but this is the same thing, really, isn't it? It's saying to those groups: We really listen. And we care. Going back to 14 Karat Soul, maybe nobody else apart from the other group members noticed the night that the lead really tore into Annie had a Baby during that residency in Glasgow, making it a cry of anguish that far surpassed Hank Ballard's version, when I eventually heard it.

But I was there. I did.

(continues)

Go to the start of this blog for a brand new post about 14 Karat Soul and a mysterious onstage gesture. Image from Beaudaddy's vocal group site.

IMPORTANT: Beaudaddy's site links to what had been the official site for the later incarnation of the group, which includes the wording 14ksoul and dot and com. This was legit (I've opened it in the past) but recently I have received several anti-virus warnings when trying to open it. So don't do it.

Doo Wop Dialog[ue]: 34

pismotality
(42/M/London, England)

Clarke,

You excelled yourself on that one. Really lovely, and saying exactly what that feeling is when we hear any version of that song. Yes, this is the Long Goodbye (to be followed by the Big Sleep?) but don't blame me - you will keep insisting on writing about things that strike a chord in me, and I have all this reading and listening and love for the music bubbling up inside me that has never found a place to go. As Beatrice says in View from the Bridge (rather different context, admittedly), "Whatever happens, we all done it." Including our readers for encouraging us. So you can't pin this one on me! Not exclusively, anyway.

Yesterday I missed the writing recommended as a daily limbering up by Julia Cameron for the first time in six weeks. But I realise that these are, in effect, my Morning Pages for the moment: I can't think of anything I want to put down on paper (or up on screen) more strongly than this right now. And I have to trust that other stuff (like the play) is simmering away and that this is part of the process. (Denial? Me?) I certainly do have an ache to be read/heard right now, and the act of playwriting is delayed gratification, bigtime. (Only exceeded by Development Hell in Hollywood ...)

So ... Gloria. Yes, it's the only one l’d personally consider putting up there with GT. It feels more of an archetype, and the many recordings (Vito's a treat as yet denied to me) suggest that as a song, as a blueprint, it's more successful than Teardrops. (Or is it just that other groups realised you can't improve perfection? Even the Flamingos didn't remake it like they did lots of others...)

For me GT, as a performance, a recording, is more personally moving, and feels more "adult" – the knowledge of love and loss, the accepting of responsibility for the great hurt done, despite the attempts at self-exoneration: "I never realised... never knew.. ."

Obviously it's pointless to play winners and losers with two great songs; they're about different things. Gloria is the fiery passion of youthful longing captured to perfection (and yes, that includes a generous side order of self-pity, as you say); in Golden Teardrops, to use Nabokov's phrase about his later writing, "the fire of youth mingles with the ice of experience.... Whatever age Sollie McElroy was, he'd learnt: the chilly realisation that life is about causing pain - not deliberately, but the result is the same- and that happiness, love, isn't hanging around forever, so grab onto it for dear life, even though the odds are it'll go anyway, and you learn that for a moment but you keep forgetting it and putting yourself first and messing up again.

The teenager pining for Gloria has all that to come - oh, his pain is real enough to him, but the man would give anything to change places, to be back at the point where the unattainable idea had not transformed itself into that ugly mirror of his own shortcomings. Or he thinks he would. He can't, now, remember the full taste of that pain, evisceratingly real at the time.

(continues on separate posting)


Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, The Right to Write and other publications in the same vein (extracts here) can be useful in stimulating creativity, although her big idea is very simple: like a tap running clear, three sides of free writing first thing in the morning before selfconsciousness kicks in can get petty anxieties and other creativity-clogging thoughts out of your system - in her words, "minimise the censor" - increasing the possibility of genuine creativity later in the day. It's not a quick-fix solution but I've found it useful when I've adhered to it. Especially useful when you're trying to work out just what it is you want to write about. There's a religious or spiritual element underlying her approach but Ms. Cameron ingeniously invites you to see the word "God" as an acronym for "Good Orderly Direction."

Doo Wop Dialog[ue]: 32

clarkedavis
(M/Dover, New Jersey)

Just a quick note for everyone who has read Tony's post on Golden Teardrops. I am playing that tune tonight during my broadcast starting at ten p.m. Eastern time, if you want to hear for yourself what all the "shouting" Is about. Sans guitars!


Clarke very kindly sent me a CD of the show so I was able to share the experience, albeit at one remove. When I listen to the overdubbed Golden Teardrops now, incidentally, the guitar seems more intrusive, as I have become used to the 1953 version which has been used on every CD compilation I've come across - but the situation is perhaps complicated by the fact that I only have the overdubbed version on an elderly vinyl album rather than a scrubbed-up digital copy. Spoilt by Rhino, am I reacting to the strumming or the surface noise?

On balance, I suspect the guitar doesn't really serve any useful purpose other than providing a bit of unnecessary underlining of the original instrumental backing which had been so careful not to overwhelm this loveliest of all vocal arrangements that it's almost felt rather than heard; in Marv Goldberg's highly recommended Flamingos article (I bow before that man's industry), Sollie McElroy is quoted as saying: "If you listen to the background, there is very little music. It was almost a capella."

Whether adding that reinforcement can be artistically justified, the context of sending a 45 out into a crowded market in 1961, hoping (I presume) for a crossover hit perhaps meant that it was the right decision commercially - and whatever you feel about the overdub, if it meant more people got to hear the record, maybe that wasn't altogether a bad thing.

Having talked about it so much, perhaps now is the time (that guitarist apart) to namecheck those musicians who contributed by stealth (is that what's meant by negative capablility?) to the original Chance label classic (above). A a pdf file of a 1999 edition of Stop-Time, published by the Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College, Chicago, has a feature on the Chance label by (who else?) Robert Pruter and Robert L. Campbell. The relevant passage is as follows:

An August 1953 recording session brought the Flamingos into the studio again with the Red Holloway band (including Al Smith on bass, Horace Palm on piano, Al Duncan on drums,an unidentified trumpeter, and the ever reliable Mac Easton on baritone sax). The best of the four titles recorded at the session was "Golden Teardrops." The beauty of this song is marvelously enhanced by the intricate harmonizing,especially the way the voices are dramatically split in the intro and the close. McElroy's impassioned vocalizing helps immeasurably in in giving "Golden Teardrops" its reputation as a legendary masterpiece.

And finally, from the Marv Goldberg article already cited, Sollie McElroy's full acount of recording Golden Teardrops:

"We had a gentleman by the name of Bunky Redding who wrote the song, but we added a little bit here and there. [Bunkie Redding was a friend of the group; actually, he and Johnny Carter wrote the song.] We started rehearsing that song at my mother's apartment on 46th and Langley. I never will forget it. We rehearsed and we rehearsed. And we changed it and changed it and we were trying to get a beginning. And we began to put the song together like a puzzle. It took us about three months to do that song. Then we finally got it. If you listen to the background, there is very little music. It was almost a cappella. You could hear the notes, the blending of the voices. We rehearsed a long time on that song. In fact we were almost ready to give it up. We couldn't get it like we wanted to. And Johnny started bringing in that tenor and it started fitting in. And so when we felt like we were comfortable with it, we recorded it. We never sang it in public [before it was recorded]. Once we got it together, we went to the studio and recorded it. We never did pre-sing our songs to see how the audience would accept it. We rehearsed it and went to the studio."

Doo Wop Dialog[ue]: 31

pismotality
(42/M/London, England)

Barbara Ann,

Thanks for your post. Maybe the time was about being young enough to half believe in the sentiments - it seems better to have faith in the purity of love and longing than not, even though we also need an armour against the world. Though there were some raunchy songs among the idealising, remember! Maybe this is a question for Clarke as my memories are in a different key ...

My apologies to you and other readers for the compressed (ie no paragraphs) nature of my last posting, on Golden Teardrops. I had to cut it to fit, so sorry no breathing space.

I also had to cut my suggestion that other people have a go at writing about a particular record, whether it's a few lines or paragraph-guzzling effort like the Golden Teardrops one, but I'd love to read anything like that, just focusing in on one song and saying whatever. If it's an all-time fave, thoughts should just come bubbling to the surface ... Tony


When posting originally, space was really was at a premium; layout went by the board in order to have more room in which to cram deathless insights. Because I, for one, didn't know how long each post was when I started, quite often I would be obliged to cut before the message would be accepted. Not nice to have to think like an editor when you just wanted to write more.

As that doesn't apply here, I've rearranged some longer posts by myself, and occasionally Clarke, in paragraph form, in order to make them more digestible onscreen, but I've tried to err on the side of caution. The posts can still be seen in their original form if you click the sendspace link in this blog's introduction which will take you to a pdf file of printouts - and maybe, shorn of extra notes, that's the best way to read them and feel the momentum (these posts are the product of less than two weeks).

Spelling and punctuation are such personal things that I have left them untouched except in rare cases where I judged that an error might have proven distracting for the reader. If any contributor reading this wishes to reedit their posts, please let me know. There is an email address if you click on my profile.

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 Dialog[ue]: 27

pismotality
(42/M/London, England)

Clarke,

I've really enjoyed this business of our bouncing ideas off each other. This thread feels like it's drawing to a close - I need to get down to the serious business of annoying our returned friend Korrie with trivia and redirect my energies to the play I've been avoiding - but I want to reflect a little on what has been a pleasurable experience, especially for someone who has only been on the net for a month. (So glad I alighted on Steve's kewl site and not somewhere else.) And just as other people seem to have got something from our discussion, maybe this attempt to articulate what I've got from the internet/this dialogue may ring a few (mission?) bells.

The biggest thing is that, satisfying as putting all those thoughts into words over our series of postings has been, I wouldn't have been prompted to develop those ideas without your response - ie, just throwing them onto the net, hoping that someone might notice. So even though a lot has come out about our different life experiences, this has been a genuinely interactive experience. Some people bitch about Paul McCartney's revision of history, apparently trying to appropriate credit for songs they'd prefer to think sprang fully formed from John Lennon's unconscious. From working closely with another writer in the past (on our separate projects) I know how integral someone's comment or suggestion or example can be to one's own work. Not that I'm comparing us to the Beatles, but you brought out the best in me because of your own willingness to go the extra mile. And kind comments both here and in my personal mail suggest other people enjoyed that process and felt part of it.

Which brings me to my next point: that despite qualms about its not being appropriate for this forum, or too exclusively between us, actually it is public and appropriately so. When Doug V. said of one of your postings that it wasn't written to him but it felt like it was, that hit the nail on the head. For me, this is the conversation I'd always wanted to have about doowop but never had a partner and an audience to bring out in me. For me the audience is important: personally revealing as our exchanges have, to some extent, been it wouldn't have felt right for me on email, but it still needed the one to one of our dialogue in order to bring out something that has been meaningful for others too. It's the paradox I find as a writer: the more personal you are, the more you can give to others, if honestly exploring your own feelings as opposed to just displaying yourself. I have a writerly vanity (or, more charitably, sense of self worth) and the knowledge that more than one person might be reading this is part of what impels me to type all this in despite the discomfort of a keyboard like a GI Joe accessory, but it’s also the stimulus of seeing you going for it, no holds barred, and wanting to respond in kind. It seems to me that this odd mix of the public and private and the immediacy of contact (you type it up and it's out there, giving a momentum a newspaper correspondence could never have) is unique to the internet, so this has been a wonderful introduction for me. Credit, too, of course, to Steve for creating a supportive environment for everyone and to "Picksburgh's Own" for keeping postings fizzing along. We haven't spoken much, Brian, but I reallv apreciate vour incredible enthusiasm - and knowledge at only sev - sorry, EIGHTEEN.

This seems to be acquiring the air of a farewell address. I'm not going anywhere, but I will be striving to cut down for the reasons indicated. I just wanted to acknowledge formally that this has been an enriching experience for me, and to thank you, Clarke, and our faithful readers. I know I'll never fully unravel the mystery of a song like Golden Teardrops (who would want to?) but it's been fun trying; and thank you for encouraging me, by example, to write at the top of my voice.

Tony

Doo Wop Dialog[ue]: 5

pismotality
(42/M/London, England)

Clarke,

Many thanks - I'm touched by your kind comments. I wrote a radio play about a doowop group - the first piece of serious writing I did - and during that process tried to articulate what it was about the music that moved me so much. One thing which I didn't mention in my previous posting is the male bonding thing - that these emotions which couldn't be articulated directly to each other by adolescent males are "safe", able to be exposed and shared when turned into this rough, vital art form.

I'm also fascinated by the contradictions: the Dells, self-professed "stone hooligans" outside the studio yet capable of that achingly tender, ridiculous yet touching song I referred to. And the idea of the spontaneous, direct outpouring of emotion – can’t remember the source but the image of a group singing at a corner, the lead turning to see a girl go by and launching into "Gloria" became the starting point of the play: the protagonist's unreal dreams of this girl and the gradually unfolding reality of the less than perfect relationship he develops with the flesh and blood woman.

And the poignancy of a frozen, perfect moment also seems at the heart of doowop for me: One Summer night, In the Still of the Night: I think Fred Parris had to add "(I'll Remember)" to avoid confusion with Porter's song title but that parenthesis is a clue to that sad pleasure in this music: its importance, its transience, and therefore its preciousness, is only fully appreciated in retrospect: "I never realised," sings Sollie McElroy in Golden Teardrops. Even that Dells song: sweet dreams "bring back the memory of you." As you might deduce I go for the ballads ...

A final thought. Doowop, lyrically, is often ridiculously naive - and I'm aware my distance from it both in time (b.1958) and place lends enchantment/romanticisation. But (much as I feel about the music of Donovan at his best) it's about looking at the world, at the possibility of love, with a sense of wonder rather than cynicism. Back to Dave Marsh: he tells of a hip record store customer mocking the Students' I'm So Young. Marsh says: "That's somebody' life. Who cares if it's corny and misshapen?" Amen.

Tony



Listen to I'm So Young and learn about the Students here.

Doo Wop Dialog[ue]: 4

clarkedavis
(M/Dover, New Jersey)

Tony,

I just read your latest posting, and feel you have achieved a true understanding of what this genre is all about. Explaining these values represented in song to people who haven't lived it, is difficult. Today's world is a far different place than in the simpler times that spawned the tidal wave of intense and honest emotions reflected by this music.

The range goes from elegant (Golden Teardrops) to the ultimate good time party music, (Rama Lama Ding Dong) with so much more in between. Varying degrees of sophistication and naivete weave in and out of this florid genre, with spellbinding results at times. The values reflected, loving someone forever, unabashed weakness in power of another, and achieving a "nirvana" here on earth, with the vehicle for arriving at all this being the drive of the id to express itself in good measure. Is it any wonder this is music that will not go away?

The style of life conjured up by most of the doo wop mentality is one which lives on in the hearts of those who were there. Much like the literate dialogue that permeates film noir of the 40's, lyrics of the 50's takes a lofty notion, and brings it down to street level. A jukebox, a pretty girl, a darkened venue, dancing close to romantic falsetto tinged vocals drenched in harmony ... what more could a teenage boy wish for? Flashy cars, black leather jackets, macho tough swagger, are a perfect foil to the aforementioned romanticism. What a great time to be a teenager in America!

To think that you were able to recapture the essence of all that while living in London decades later, shows the power of evocation this music presents to those who have the talent and sensitivity to appreciate It. Cheers Tony for bringing all this out. This is truly a remarkable genre of music, that like its ideals, will go on for eternity, as long as there are torchbearers like you, who understand what it was all about, to pass it along.

Golden Teardrops

As a further taster for the complete dialog (or, to me, dialogue) with Clarke, here is one of my posts from September 2000, attempting to describe the sensation of listening to the Flamingos' Golden Teardrops.

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


Online version of The Heart of Rock and Soul here, although Golden Teardrops is not included. Had it been, I probably wouldn't have attempted the above.

Bradford Cox of Deerhunter talks about Golden Teardrops in an interview with Gordon Campbell in the December 2009 issue of Werewolf.

The interview page contains a link to Golden Teardrops on youtube; if you have realplayer, however, I'd recommend the official Vee Jay website's The Moonglows Meet the Flamingos page for a much higher quality streamed version (as well as the rest of the Flamingos' Chance recordings, including their sublime September Song), plus a link to downloads of of Vee Jay material. Scroll down the same page and click on the album artwork to read Billy Vera's liner notes, which include what may be the last word on the song's origins.

Neither version of Golden Teardrops, sadly, is the one I first learnt to love, the 1961 reissue on Vee Jay with overdubbed guitar, which doesn't seem to be available on CD. Ah well, I still have my original cheapo Springboard International LP. And while trawling the net for an image of that album (Vol. 18 in Springboard's ORIGINAL OLDIES series) I came across a useful summary of the company's acquiring the rights to Vee Jay here as part of Mike Callahan and David Edwards' The Vee-Jay Story, which covers not only the history of this great company but the tangled tale of the many companies who licensed this material. (The home page of Mike Callahan's excellent Both Sides Now Publications website, here, from which The Vee-Jay Story is drawn, will point you towards more scrupulously researched record label discographies and histories as well as the Stereo Chat board, a highly addictive forum for the discussion of good and bad practice in the remastering of oldies for CD and of what does, and does not, constitute true stereo.)

More bizarrely, however, I happened across an account of French artist Francis Baudevin utilising one of those cheapo Springboard ORGINAL OLDIES LPs in his work for a current exhibition. If you happen to be in France, the show is on till December 23rd at 16 rue Duchefdelaville, 75013 Paris, but I have to warn you that a) it is not the ORIGINAL OLDIES volume which contains Golden Teardrops and b) the gallery's account of the artist's intentions made my eyes bleed - though it does make more sense when you see that, among other things, he's simply appropriated the basic geometric shapes used throughout the album covers in that series. Wonder how the original designer (if still around) would feel about such an unlikely compliment, four decades on?

Though I suppose you could say those original album covers (see below) were, if not masterpieces, then certainly ideally suited to the places where they were originally sold. And many years ago when I was an art student, a tutor told us that good design was all about an object's being fit for its intended purpose with nothing extraneous; he rhapsodised, by way of illustration, over a lock for a gate shaped out of a single piece of metal. But it did what was required; and those album covers, never intended for lesiurely perusal in a record shop, likewise performed their function perfectly, I'd imagine, in supermarkets and the like: same shapes, so you know it's the same series; different colours, so you know it's not the same volume you bought last week (or month, depending on your pocket money/wages); and the clincher, those all-important song titles and artist names prominently on the front cover as you move in for a closer inspection:

Suprising that Andy Warhol never cottoned on to their graphic potential before M. Baudevin - but then, maybe he already had the original Vee Jay albums. Or could it be, in fact, that Warhol was the brains behind the notorious theft of Lou Reed's entire doo wop collection, only to find warring sensations of guilt and delight serving both to check his enjoyment of the purloined discs and stifle creative stirrings in the area of doo wop-related graphics ever after, for fear of inadvertantly exposing the source of his inspiration to Lou? A case, you might say, of The Tell-Tale Heartbeats ...

The above puerility discharged, I couldn't resist checking the chronology of Reed meeting Warhol and getting his records pinched. To my surprise (as I presumed it happened long before the two met) I found that his records (and his Gretch guitar) were stolen while he was performing as part of Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable in New York in April 1966 - so it is technically possible that Warhol could have been the culprit, sneaking off to do the deed when Lou was safely onstage. Unless it was some earlier theft of the teenage Reed's records which I'd vaguely registered while surfing and he was forever dogged by ill luck in the matter of vinyl retention.

Either way, I would love to know which particular doo wop records he favoured, although I strongly suspect that Dion and the Belmonts' insouciant Love Came to Me would have been among them: at one point Dion gives a kind of laidback chuckle during the bridge ("Love makes me, uh, makes me feel so good") which makes me think of Sweet Jane.

Anyway, getting back to the point, after a fairly extensive search on the net, I haven't been able to find an image of ORIGINAL OLDIES Vol. 18 (Springboard SPB 2018), the one which turned me on to the Flamingos, nor M. Baudevin's Vol. 19, but here's another in the series which, like Vol. 20 above, you can click to savour in all its trashy glory:

Introduction

 [This blog was  originally intended purely as an archive for messages exchanged in a doo wop forum which was no longer available online. Once they had all been reposted, however, I began to add new writing - not only about doo wop but other music and comedy plus a few other things.]

 

 

Welcome to my blog which features archived posts from deleted Yahoo group Steve's Kewl / Kewl Steve's Doo Wop Shop (KSDW) plus new entries about doo wop and other music. No downloads - only verbiage plus the occasional youtube clip.

The archived posts are mostly between myself - Tony, aka Pismotality - and Clarke Davis, now a DJ on rock-it radio. They first appeared on the KSDW messageboard in September 2000. We compare our first experience of doo wop (1970s Scotland for me; 1950s America for the more fortunate Clarke) and try to work out why the best examples of the genre (inlcuding Golden Teardrops, Gloria and In the Still of the Night) remain so affecting.

To read the basic version of the KSDW archive (original text only), click here.

To read the enhanced version (commentary, pictures and links) click here . They are headed "Doo Wop Dialog[ue]" (US/UK spelling) to emphasise that we are sharing quite different experiences of this music.

Some posts may be missing from the sequence. If readers have access to other messages, please contact me by clicking on profile. One glaring omission is Clarke's detailed description of the Cadillacs' recording of Gloria; I only have the final few lines.

Although new blog entries cover more than doo wop they still take their cue from the Doo Wop Shop posts: one of the topics Clarke and I discussed was how our tastes were formed and this is something I have been exploring further - in fact, if the newer entries on this blog had a strapline, it could be: Rummaging Through the Record Shop of Memory.

It's a voyage of adventure - for me, anyway. If you're a doo wop lover, you may find something to interest you. I'm an enthusiast rather than an expert, although I know where to point you should the need arise, such as Unca Marvy's (Marv Goldberg's) peerless R&B Notebooks, here, or Lex Jansen's online version of Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock and Soul, an inspiration for attempting to write about something as elusive as the experience of listening to a doo wop record. Read on, and all will be revealed (or not) about the true meaning of pismotality. That's a definite vague promise.

A word about Rock-It Radio: its archive features recent shows by Clarke Davis and others including doo wop authority Steve Propes; its deejays play a range of oldies but the emphasis is on doo wop and R&B. Clarke's programme, The Big Show, is currently exploring the forgotten hits of 1963, including lots of pop which never made it to the UK. You can download the most recent eighteen Rock-It programmes as lowish-fi but perfectly listenable MP3s (helps maintain the illusion you're listening on an AM radio). You can also buy merchandise including CDs of broadcasts from the 50s etc at the Launching Pad.

The Doo Wop Shop morphed into The Doowop Cafe, still active today (more detailed history here). They have a chatroom, a messageboard and a radio station plus a store with lots of fun merchandise, not to mention many great links. Click on "stories and articles" on the main page for Billy Vera's doo wop pieces.