Flamingos # 17: Get With It & I Found a New Baby

The Flamingos had a larger backing band than usual for two numbers in their final session for Al Benson's Parrot Records. The website devoted to the Parrot and Blue Lake labels notes:

They had been recently performing with Paul Bascomb's group at Martin's Corner on the West Side, but Al Benson preferred to use a studio band led by Al Smith on the date. A four-horn front line (Sonny Cohn, trumpet; Booby Floyd, trombone; Eddie Chamblee, tenor saxophone; and Mac Easton, baritone sax) lent a big-band atmosphere to the two uptempo numbers: "I Found a New Baby," which was held back from release, and "Get with It."

There is no mention of Red Holloway who, it may be remembered, was present, according to the same website, on the other two numbers from that session:

On "Ko Ko Mo" and the ballad, "I'm Yours," the group was accompanied by just Red Holloway, with Horace Palm (piano and organ), Quinn Wilson (bass), and Paul Gusman (drums).

Did Holloway also contribute to the two big band-style numbers?

Return of radio show about the Flamingos (Matt the Cat's Juke in the Back)

This is another post which involves recycling, prompted by seeing that Matt the Cat's radio show on the Flamingos is currently available once more on the Rock-it Radio website and can be downloaded for free while it's there. 

It's the first of three programmes, and Matt promises all the Decca recordings in a later episode. Go to the Rock-it Radio Archives Page here, and scroll down to show #5021 to download or stream. Shows are only online for a few weeks before they are displaced, so it may have gone or a later episode may be up, depending on when you read this. But there are always good things to listen to on the Rock-it website anyway, and you can support them by buying vintage radio broadcasts here.

If you have explored further than the most recent posts in this blog, you will know that it was originally set up to archive posts from a doo wop messageboard, and that a favourite subject of those messages was the Flamingos' recording of Golden Teardrops. This was recorded in 1953 for the small Chicago label Chance, before the group went to Parrot Records then found success at Chess Records.

Farewell to the Dells

Have just read in Record Collector magazine that the Dells, who haven't performed since the death of Johnny Carter just over three years ago, are now going to bow out. Marv Goldberg's Dells page refers to one final gig at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in June of this year, so presumably the decision was taken not to do this.

Not a surprise - "his leaving has left such a huge void," says Chuck Barksdale of Johnny Carter's 48 years in the group which he joined after the Flamingos - although the demand is still there and "their voices remain in great shape", according to Garth Cartwright, writer of the Record Collector article, which draws on his book More Miles Than Money: Journeys Through American Music as well as a more recent interview in which Chuck Barksdale considers the group's achievement.

Doo wop documentary Street Corner Soul Episode 3 now on BBC iplayer for one week

What? No, that's just a screengrab. Find a direct iplayer link for Street Corner Soul Episode 3 here, assuming you are reading this within a week of its posting. I'm going to drop any pretence of critical assessment of this radio documentary series and simply urge you to listen to it if you want to learn, or to learn more, about doo wop. Each episode is on BBC iplayer for a week and you should be able to access it in America  as well.

Street Corner Soul (Radio 2 documentary about doo wop) now on BBC iplayer

Street Corner Soul, a four-part documentary series about the rise of doo wop, is currently being repeated on BBC Radio 2 on Sundays at 8pm and can be recommended very highly indeed. Episode 1 was broadcast today (Sunday 22nd July 2012) and will be available on bbc iplayer for one week.

Over its four 30 minute programmes the series really does a great job in setting out the whole story, from doo wop's roots to the British invasion which did for it. Here's how the episodes are summarised on the Radio 2 website:

1/4. The beginnings of doo-wop, with the emergence of vocal harmony groups such as The Ink Spots, The Dixie Hummingbirds and The Mills Brothers.

2/4. Flying High. With the success of The Ravens and The Orioles, vocal groups became familiar names in the charts.

3/4. Sh-Boom: As doo wop took root in cities like New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and LA, the mainstream music industry moved in for a slice of the action.

 4/4. The Price of Fame: An invasion of British acts was about to change the music business forever.

I don't know whether producer Owen McFadden conducted original interviews or had access to a cache of material, nor do I know how extensive the source material might have been. But, having listened periodically to the series since its first broadcast, what I can say is that the selection process is an intelligent one: many of the interview snippets make you feel like a spectator, or an eavesdropper, at some key moments in the development of the form.

In the first episode, for example, we hear from Deborah Chessler, composer of It's Too Soon to Know, the song recorded by the Orioles which is generally believed to be the start of doo wop.

Did you know that Chessler had gotten into trouble with her employer for selling clothes to Ella Fitzgerald in the Baltimore shop where she worked? Or that her songwriting stemmed from her efforts to make sense of her feelings after a disastrous early marriage? It's Too Soon ... wasn't her first song, but there were others with similarly questioning titles.

The song which kickstarted the whole doo wop shebang - or shboom? - came about when a supportive male friend offered to help pay for her divorce and suddenly declared his love. Normally it's parents who counsel caution in these matters but Chessler's mother was all for it; it was Deborah who told her mother "How can he love me? It's too soon to know."

Then, going to the toilet, inspiration struck but, with no paper in the house, she was obliged to scribble down the words on toilet paper. She sang it twice to a group she had been drafted in to help, the Vibranaires (as the Orioles were originally called) at their next practice session. The group got the harmonies "almost immediately" then she gave the lead sheet (on sturdier paper, I trust) to Sonny Till who, she says,

sang it like he had been singing it all his life.

The Ravens

Just found the Ravens' 1955 recording of On Chapel Hill on youtube and had to include it here: like the Del-Vikings' Wilette, it's another overheated doo wop fave which I have only come across on one CD (below), despite the current proliferation of Ravens collections.

As is customary with that group, the performance is odd mix of emotion and refinement, which at one time would have had me agonising about whether it really constituted "true" doo wop, but now I don't care. If you too have doubts, just hang on in there for the ending: overblown anguish framed with a kind of dignity.

They Turned Me On - Part One: Ian Whitcomb

I quoted from Ian Whitcomb's amusing and touching essay Bill Haley's 1957 Hellbound Train to Waterloo, about the rock'n'roll pioneer's ill-fated UK tour, a few posts ago. It's available to read in full, along with other pieces by him, on the Sonic Boomers' website here. Ian Whitcomb's own website can be found here, with links to all sorts of goodies including CDs and songbooks.

It would be misleading, despite the evidence above, to describe Whitcomb as an untarnished Golden Rock God on the level of Robert Plant - in fact it would be plain wrong - but he did have US hits during the British Invasion including You Turn Me On, and he's interesting in the context of the themes to which I keep returning in this blog: unlike Haley himself, he has not had to resign  himself to being an oldies act - or only in one sense.

Stand by him

As a footnote to the posts about Stand By Me, two youtube clips with a bearing on my comments about seeing Ben E King with the Drifters in the eighties.

Stand By Me - Part One

I can't remember when I first heard Stand By Me. It may even have been the Lennon reworking, as my earliest definite memory is of dancing to his version during one of the regular rock'n'roll nights at Tiffany's, Glasgow, in 1975, the enduring Rollin' Joe reassuring us (or himself): "John Lennon's coming home."

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]: 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]: 9

philmorew
(55/M/Wayne, N.J.)

Clarke,

I agree 100% with what you said about the Flamingos. About two years ago when Zeke was alive they appeared on Staten Island at what I believe was the Lane Theater. Doug McClure, who is now a preacher in Conn. but who had sung with them from the late 50's til the mid 70's and had not seen Zeke in 25 yrs. found out that they were singing nearby and surprised Zeke by showing up at the theatre for afternoon practice.

I don't know if he actually sang at all with them in the afternoon but at night during the concert Zeke stopped the show in the middle of his performance to recognize Doug. He then called him onto the stage and had Doug do his lead on I'll be Home. I'm dead serious. It was a religious experience. My date was crying her eyes out and people all over the theater were reaching for handkerchiefs. I have often wondered since Zeke, the last original died shortly after Doo Wop 50, if anyone has tried to get McClure back with the group for special appearances. I'm going to have to get some video tapes of their performances.

Walt



Unca Marvy's history of the Flamingos (where I found the above picture) mentions that "Sometime after those sessions [in March 1963 for The Sound of the Flamingos], they added tenor Doug McClure to make a sextet of singers again."

Steve Walker says of a Doug McClure lead: "In the spring of 1964 the Flamingos returned to Checker for a few sides. They recorded an incredible Latin-rhythmed version of Oscar Hammerstein's 'Lover Come Back to Me' that would have established a whole new legion of Flamingos followers had radio given it a chance to be heard."

Doug McLure's myspace page promoting his Love Letters CD allows you to listen to his jazz-tinged new recording of I Only Have Eyes For You.

The Letter

As a taster for the Doo Wop Dialog[ue] posts, here is the entry from 1st October 2000 describing the Vernon Green classic from which I filched my username:

The Medallions' The Letter is one I'm also tempted to put in the pantheon. More than most others mentioned it's hard to be certain of any particular vocal skill (haven't heard other Medallions tracks, including Buick 59). It seems – not even a demo, but the faintest sketch of an idea: an echo of an echo. Yet it works; it's one of the good ones.

What intrigues more than anything is the sense that the singer is slightly sending himself up in that spoken section or feeling an inflated, self important pleasure at the beauty of his own delivery, never losing that awareness of the public arena - a record which people will hear - while supposedly suffering the torments of love:

What is there worse on this earth
Than to be unable to stop loving you,
Knowing well that I should?

I mean, the language doesn't exactly sound torn from the heart like the disjointed plea in [The Orchids'] Newly Wed - and yet ... Well, there's something appealing about the sense that the performer or his persona (both?) is nevertheless letting it all out, talking all out of his head, though intoxicated with nothing more than a sense of the public occasion of this "letter.” And this is the missive that might sway things, so who can blame him for a few verbal flourishes to attract his girlfriend's attention? (Though I can also hear, in the tone of his voice, Vernon far from shyly inviting us to admire his handiwork.)

I just love the way the song sort of trickles to a halt, as though, having just spent himself with the effort of this confessional, Vernon and his alter ego/echo simply stop ... Or is it that the suddenness of the epiphany - he loves her but she "just won't be true" floors him/them at the end?

I also like, and it's part of why this ridiculous record has a place in my heart, the way that Vernon has, despite the care in creating this fancy composition, travelled lunar distances beyond words as we understand them. There's a particular neologism (if that's the right word) I'll return to, but what exactly is the "purportance" of Love whereof our hero speaks? Is Vernon thinking of purport, which my dictionary has down as a claim, "esp. false", to be something?

That doesn't feel right: this record may be naive, but it's not cynical. Which is why Steve Miller's hijacking of the phrase and roping it in with other more swaggering steals from other songs seemed plain wrong: Vemon ain't no Gangster of Love, nor was meant to be; he is, I'd say, a fifteen year old alone in his bedroom, struggling to take upon himself the mystery of things - hey, as you do, after a spot of girlfriend trouble.

Which leaves us only with that other coining. If "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture," as (I think) that doowop fan Frank Zappa said, then I'm especially aware of the presumption in trying to net - in both senses - this elusive specimen. But my joshing tone comes out of deep affection and I'm fully aware that Green's is the mastery (and mystery), not mine. Besides, didn't he invent "pismotality"? So maybe, like Alice, I'm only a thing in his dream – or, to stand back further, a drop in that vast ocean of golden teardrops which is The Whole Damn Thing: singers, listeners, lovers, scribes, memories, impulses and - at the heart of it all - a girl, real or imaginary, who still represents, as she always did, a future dazzling with possibilities, sweet dreams of contentment. Meanwhile, I'll keep hoping, as doubtless we all are, to catch the echo of those all-solving, all-healing sweet words of pismotality from that ideal doowop record which nestles somewhere in the track listing on the next CD compilation I buy.

Or the one after that ...

Tony


A full history and discography of the Medallions and other Vernon Green groups can be found in Marv Goldberg's R&B notebooks series here. I have now heard the wonderfully uncoordinated Buick 59, part of an Ace Records compilation called Speedin' which seems the most comprehensive Vernon Green and the Medallions collection you can get; I'm both ashamed and proud to say I effectively bullied a group of students into buying me a copy when I left my former job.

There's a lot of good doo wop material on it, although nothing quite matches the wonder of The Letter, including a retread/sequel entitled The Telegram. One of the original readers of that post on the Kewl website very kindly sent me a video of Vernon Green performing that song in later life; it was heartwarming to hear the whoop of recognition and appreciation which went up at the mention of "pismotality" and what I would now call the "puppeteuse" of love, especially (as the full set of posts will make clear) for me, growing up in Scotland in the seventies, doo wop was a private pleasure: I had no idea that others had heard, let alone been been moved by, that ridiculous yet affecting song.

Talking of "puppeteuse," "pompatous, " "pulpitudes," "purportance," etc, there are many explanations on the net. This article by Cecil Adams on the Straight Dope website, prompted by the release of the 1996 move The Pompatous of Love, is the fullest and most amusing account I can find, especially as the writer's assistant, J.K. Fabian, actually had the chance to speak to Green. There are even more variants of the famed words in the article, but J.K. notes that "Green wasn't much for writing things down, so the spellings are approximate."

The reason I personally favour "puppeteuse" is that I discovered that spelling of it in a separate article on the gangster-of-love website a few years ago. The site seems to have gone but that particular piece is still floating around, often reproduced or quoted when the meaning of The Letter is being debated yet again (and yes, it really does happen quite a lot).

The material in it seems to derive from the article I've linked to, however, as part of Green's interview is quoted verbatim, so maybe the creator of the gangster-of-love site accepted the rest of the information but just decided to go with his own ears.

It's more felicitous, somehow, maybe because it echoes the word "purpose"; "puppetutes" in the Adams article seems more formal, with a possible echo of "statutes" - and surely love is not about being rulebound but purposeful?

Well, it's a theory, anyway - although in revising these notes I have just come across a far more detailed etymological exploration by Mark Liberman on the Language Log website, which quotes at length from an article by Greil Marcus in Los Angeles magazine. Amazingly, "pompatus" is an actual word, according to Marcus, albeit only "a faint line" in the OED: "to act with pomp and splendor--exactly what, in 'The Letter,' a teenage Vernon Green tried to do." But on the "puppeteuse" front Liberman quotes some details I'd forgotten from what I presume to be the vanished website:

Vernon Green, the author of The Letter, says, "You have to remember, I was a very lonely guy at the time. I was only fourteen years old, I had just run away from home, and I walked with crutches." The uneducated but imaginative youth was prone to fantasy, so he just made up the lyrics. 'Pismotality' described words of such secrecy that they could only be spoken to the one you loved.

"And it's not pompitous," he emphasizes. "What I said was 'puppetuse', which is a term I coined to mean a secret paper doll fantasy figure."

So this could explain the tone of The Letter: less exhibitionism, perhaps, than a kind of daffy, unanchored desire which is touching as well as being slightly ridiculous; it would certainly fit with the idea of someone given to practising his recitations on the speaking clock.

Marcus then proceeds - or affects? - to hear "pismotality" as "dismortality," and it's hard to tell whether Liberman is running after him to offer support for this theory or making rude gestures behind his back. Either way, Liberman's playful article offers no definitive answers (how could it?) but concludes, by way of promise or threat: "Frank Zappa may be dead and gone, but the linguists are still on the case."

My tip? Adams and Unca Marvy (who associates pompatus with "pulchritudes") are all you really need but please, please mentally substitute the word "puppeteuse" at the relevant moments in both pieces for the full effect. Thank you.

And before you ask, there's no point in checking for an official published version: trying to find the sheet music, Adams' assistant only came up only with that identically titled but unequivocally purposeful ("Ain't got time to take a fast train ...") 60s hit by the Box Tops. Anyway ...

Sadly, Adams ends with the information that Vernon Green died on Christmas Eve 2000.

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.