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.

Clarke Davis shows on Top Shelf Oldies

I am delighted to share the news that the DJ Clarke Davis is back online, at Top Shelf Oldies. Clarke is currently presenting two shows, At the Hop and The Clarke Davis Experience, the latter dedicated to American pop of 1965.

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]: 74

pismotality
(42/M/London, England)

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 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

Doo Wop Dialog[ue]: 73

pismotality
(42/M/London, England)

(continued)

In the original posting yesterday I started by remembering some important records in my doowop education not yet discussed here. I'd forgotten about the happy discovery, c.1978, of two five-album sets of Roulette-related material in a Glasow record shop with the unlikely name of 23rd Precinct (American, rather than English, culture has always been been big in Scotland; the latter is perceived as imposed, but Country and Western and Rock'n'Roll have been joyfully embraced - to the point of mania, in some cases. We even have a Grand Ole Opry ... but that way madness lies. Keep at least in view of the road...).

Knowing what I now know of Morris Levy, I assume that such compendious sets are commomplace on TV commercials or sold in supermarkets or garages in America, but this was entirely new to me, and I leapt at the giveaway price. One set was ten tracks to a side so I was in an instant possessed of more rock'n'roll than I had ever come across before, and far beyond the usual American-Graffiti-rip-off soundtrack suspects. The sheer bulk of material compromised the recording quality but who cared? It was new and fresh (and cheap) and there was a generous helping of doowop.

I've never seen these kind of albums anywhere since, so maybe there is a divinity that shapes our doowoppin' ends - leading eventually to this series of postings – though the mystical experience angle is admittedly a little undermined by the fact that the record shop - in fact that whole odd little side street - had not mysteriously disappeared the next time I looked for it. In fact it's still there in the year 2000, though there are no more retro records of any sort in the shop, and for someone of my generation a distinctly chilly welcome.

A pity, as it was a great place to waste time. Interesting to speculate about the stages of its cruel metamorphosis - But that way too ... Keep to the road. Think Buick.

With the exception of a single album, also Roulette-linked, which introduced me to Gee, The Teenage Vows of Love and the Flamingos' Lovers Never Say Goodbye, and a series of LPs bought in a newsagent’s for 50p each (cheap even in 1978 for Britain) those two box sets were my main doowop education.

A word about those 50p albums: issued by a British company, President, in truly atrocious tinny sound (no nostalgia factor here), they nevertheless introduced me to a lot of (I presume) Vee Jay-owned material: the Spaniels' Play It Cool, the Orchid's Wonderful Newly Wed - one of the few songs that, like ITSOTN, I'm tempted to sing when in the open air and sufficiently distant from the rest of humankind to avoid causing unecessary suffering.


Incidentally, don't Newly Wed and the Jive Five's These Golden Rings tell strangely telescoped tales of love and loss? Quite apart from the plaintiveness of that lead, the Orchids' singer seems to have been deserted shortly after a honeymoon which gave no warning of what was to come - in fact, he seems to have been settling in for a period of cosy bliss in the new marital home (presumably before having to return to work?): "let the little time pass so slow," if I hear it correctly, then suddenly - BOOM! - "Heart broken, broken in two, Don't leave me here, What can I do?" At least Eugene never made it to the altar; as a former doowopper once put it, "A taste of honey is worse than none at all." Oh, I love that song. (And their You Have Two, I Have None, unissued till the 90s.)

There's always the possibility, of course, that the songwriter didn't think through the sequence of events logically, but I don't have to believe that if I don't want to. Besides; it “feels" logical, has the accelerated momentum of a dream/film sequence.

Blimey! The above was intended as a brief preamble to the discoveries on the box sets - things like the Valentines' Tonight Kathleen and, above all, the Medallions' The Letter. So: Vernon up next. Then I'm done.

Doo Wop Dialog[ue]: 72

pismotality
(42/M/London, England)

(continued)

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

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

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

I knew we'd get to Vernon Green eventually.

(continues)

Doo Wop Dialog[ue]: 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]: 70

pismotality
(42/M/London, England)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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



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

Doo Wop Dialog[ue]: 69

pismotality
(42/M/London, England)

Although the Beatles might have been thought to introduce me to rock'n'roll I don't recall the earlier LPs (with rock'n'roll covers) around the house; instead, my musical life was changed by seeing a Chuck Berry concert on TV c.1972, being forced to buy a Little Richard LP, there being no Chuck Berry available, and suddenly plugging into the excitement of Ready Teddy.

I recall the bewilderment of one elder brother - this was around 1972, the era of progressive rock, and groups like Tyrannosaurus Rex (the small scale precursor of T Rex with incomprehensible but poetic-sounding lyrics) popularised by the "underground" DJ John Peel on Radio One, the BBC station brought in as an answer to pirate radio in 1967. Rock'n'roll was not cool, but I persisted, finding more and more as I explored what LPs, usually deletions, I could afford.


The film That'lI be the Day referred to earlier was the first time I heard Frankie Lymon; a significant moment. I find the song barely listenable now through overfamiliarity but at the time there seemed such a purity and beauty about the way he hit a certain "why" that I was hooked. The soundtrack was mostly oldies rather than doowop and for several years I picked up whatever I could in that general area - in fact I can't place when doowop took over, but happy accidental discoveries like Golden Teardrops on an oldies LP in the basement of Listen Records in Glasgow in 1978, and a very cheap double album, worth taking a risk on, by a group called the ... Dells (luckily it was their Vee Jay stuff) definitely eased me towards it.

There were some ersatz rock'n'roll and even doowop groups hitting the British charts in the early 70s, presumably In the wake of that film and American Graffiti, and I even went to see one in concert: all cheap showmanship and the worst, most surreally out of tune version of Chuck Berry's Rock'n'Roll music I hope to hear in several lifetimes. (Even if it means nothing to you let them be named and shamed: Showaddywaddy. I think they still survive in some form - now available... )

In 1975 I became an art student; discos there were a mix, including a generous helping of rock'n'roll. That now seems a magical time, and more a kind of finishing school for adolescence than a place to work hard, especially after a staid school education.

But to cut a long and painful story short, I didn't progress beyond the second year, and later went to university instead. I still feel regret at the sense of opportunities wasted but the long shadow cast by that sense of failure, despite the later satisfactions of university, would undoubtedly be darker and less penetrable had it not been for the way in which doowop reawakened the creative impulse in me.

... which seems an ideal, indeed almost cornily preplanned, point at which to break again. On the home stretch now ...

Doo Wop Dialog[ue]: 68

pismotality
(42/M/London, England)

As I start typing this second part, it's 5.35 PM British Summer Time, though lashing with rain outside, and I shall stop and post this at six o'clock, however far it has or hasn't progressed, because on BBC TV's Top of the Pops programme there is a John Lennon birthday special. Both the programme and person are an integral part of my and my brothers' early lives. Just before six, I will phone my younger brother, to check he knows about it.

I was born in 1958. I have two elder brothers and two younger ones, with roughly two year gaps between each one. Long before I was interested enough to think about buying records, the Beatles were around: the excitement of She Loves You - well, no matter how doowop dedicated, you'll know the story. There are hundreds of books, and when you tire of them you can read Mark Shipman's Paperback Writer, a not unfunny Rutles-type account (eg Ringo Starr enjoyed hit record after hit record in the seventies, one of these being Philadelphia Freedom by Elton John) with some insights amid the facetiousness.

But this is about the Beatles in my, and my brothers’, lives. And Top of the Pops. This has been the only consistently shown pop music programme on British television since the 60s. Every Thursday night (as it was then) at 7.30 we would gather, praying that my father would not interrupt the programme (in those one-TV days) and that my mother would be able to arrange the making of his tea in a way that would overlap with this semi-religious broadcast. TOTP was something only shared between the five boys because there wasn't a great deal of music in our house. Half-heartedly tolerated by my mother, actively disliked by my father, who possibly saw the Beatles' financial success as unfairly earned, and who definitely saw its creed of pleasure as dangerous, the music united us. So I can remember Sgt. Pepper, bought or borrowed by my eldest brother, the excitement of hearing the White Album on a brand new stereo, and the paternal disapproval over the collage-type insert with bare flesh.
...

Taking the risk that the above lines would remain onscreen when I pressed the "internet" button on my TV remote, I took time out to watch the John Lennon Programme.


Seeing him sing Stand By me brought back a memory: dancing with my then girlfriend at a rock'n'roll club in 1975 as this came on, and the DJ saying: "John Lennon's coming home." Although the Beatles remain the fraternal glue to some extent (witness the phone call) my journey towards doowop was not one shared by them. That will be the subject of my next posting.


Rereading the above, one incident remembered from childhood bears out the "semi-religious" tag being applied to pop music for myself and my brothers. My father was advising a priest who was staying overnight, and we, the children, had a lot of opportunity to talk to him. I think (and this sounds like a lousy joke but isn't) he may have needed time off to reflect on his calling, as a later article in the Daily Express - evidently a class act even then - dignified his dark night of the soul with the heading:

VOCATION? NO - VACATION!

Anyway, the wide-ranging conversation came round to the subject of pop music, and this man of God shocked us by claiming that the Beatles regularly laughed themselves silly at the "cripples and hunchbacks" who would be waiting to greet them at airports; it was all there in the biography, he said, if we didn't believe it.

I can barely remember the incident, let alone the timescale; all I recall is at some point later my eldest brother proclaiming: "It doesn't matter - JL still is King."

Whether that meant he did or didn't believe it, I'm not sure; but I think on some level he'd worked out that that the priest's words were a salvo in a religious war, firing from the same side as my father. Our collective faith did not waiver - and later, reading Hunter Davies' biography, I could see that the claim was , at best, a mischievously distorted one.

Doo Wop Dialog[ue]: 67

pismotality
(42/M/London, England)

Clarke,
Again a really precisely captured sense of time: interesting that all the paraphernalia around the music - precise type, brand of record player, etc - is so much part of the experience.

I read Marsha's response to your post and I think it is more complex, as you say, than Girl-wants-romance and Boy-wants-IT. It's also, at least some of the time, about both wanting to believe in the dream, the delicious possibility, even if you know it's playacting: the willing suspension of disbelief, if only for the three minutes of that song.


Have you seen John Sayles' great movie Baby It's You, set in the 50s/60s (can't remember)? It's about an illusion that lasts a little longer - in fact, Clarke, it's precisely about what you said in an earlier post: romances not surviving high school. A "nice" girl falls in love with a “Fonzie" type at school, gets a kind of respect and status through doing so, but when she goes to a Sarah Lawrence-type establishment he's something to be disowned, mocked.

But the beauty of this totally convincing, small-but-big movie is the ending: Sheik's (the guy's) illusions about Sinatra-type stardom have been brought down to earth with an almighty bump, but meanwhile the girl is finding herself excluded in her new world: her Trenton, New Jersey roots make it harder for her to be accepted. He comes to see her once his world has fallen apart, trashes her room, angry at being excluded from her new life. But it ends with them agreeing to dance together at a college dance: her way of saying to snooty fellow students “This is part of who I am, deal with it"; and a way, too, of giving back some status to the battered Sheik: once again, as in high school, they're causing a sensation together.

But there's no way they'll get back with each other; it's about two damaged people realising that on that night, just for that moment, they can support each other. The film's not multi-protagonist, like American Graffiti, and less glamorous (no big cars) but it touches on a great deal of what we've covered in these postings. Because these two have (however uneasily and temporarily) reconciled past and present: living, for a moment, in the illusion which is also the truth of their bonding on some level: they had been an integral part of each other.

In a book of interviews, Sayles on Sayles, JS amusingly talks about the studio's reaction: despite his being totally upfront about his intentions, they were hoping to cash in with another Porky's! But it's a deeply moving, truly "adult" (ie offering no easy solutions) movie, and a story that has apparently resonated with many women trying to reconcile roots with aspirations. I also love his Passion Fish, another tale of two damaged lives. (Can't remember soundtrack for Baby It’s You, though.)

Still not onto my own childhood! Back after melting - or meltdown? Starting all over again is gonna be tough ... (=who, trivia fans?)

Totally agree about Mean Streets, by the way; my first encounter with the Chips’ Rubber Biscuit...

Incidentally, I've just worked out what I am: a doowop Helene Hanff. Or Frank Doel.


More discussion of Baby, It's You, which stars Rosanna Arquette and Vincent Spano, on Ned Merrill's film blog. To be fair (sort of) to the studio, I think Sayles says in the book that it was not until Porky's became such a huge and unexpected hit while Baby It's You was being made that the studio suddenly saw dollar signs, leading to an almighty battle about the edit; the Sayles-approved version was finally released with a conspicuous lack of promotional fanfare, but it is superb. I saw it in the mid eighties at my then local arthouse cinema, the GFT (Glasgow Film Theatre), so it did get an international release of sorts.

On the music front, it's worth mentioning that as they dance at the Sarah Lawrence-type college at the end (pictured above), a band is playing a so-so version of Strangers in the Night which gradually becomes, in their heads, the Sinatra recording they once smooched to a diner in the early days of their romance.

And the moment when Sheik's dreams are crushed is masterly: he's been working in a restaurant and occasionally doing a bit of miming to the jukebox (we see him ringadingdinging his way through that kitsch masterpiece Wives and Lovers), but always on the understanding that he'll get the chance to do some proper singing. One day a middle-aged guy comes in, asking for a microphone. When the penny drops, and Sheik protests that he is going to be the only one doing any singing, the guy replies: "Listen, if you think I could sing, do you think I'd be in a dump like this?" And that's when Sheik rushes off to the college to try to make it right again.

(Find the film trailer on the imdb site here; interesting to see that Chapel of Love also features here: the Rosanna Arquette characters' girlfriends chant it when they learn she's going out with Sheik - though I have a feeling that in the film, after a moment she joins in too, sharing the fantasy while half laughing at it, exactly like the girls in Be My Baby. George Goldner would have approved.

Starting All Over Again, if you need to be told, is by Mel and Tim. It touched something in the late English deejay John Peel, not normally a soul fan, who played it on his show in the seventies.

Doel/Hanff: There are still bookshops in Charing Cross Road, though less than when I first moved to London in the mid eighties. But number 84 is no longer one of them.

Doo Wop Dialog[ue]: 66

doowopsociety
(87/F/Wyoming, PA)

You give a great description of what it was like back when. I often wondered, from a female perspective, did we fall in love with the guy at the time or with the music that was playing? Many a times, I'd hear a tune and be dancing with a guy in high school and suddenly, I'm in love with the guy. Especially if they were playing, "Symbol of Love" - G-Clefs or something of that nature. As soon as one learns about the guy, love peters out. Compatibility was just not there.

Other times, the guy showed so much interest in a gal while the music was playing. You guys know. He'd say wonderful things while dancing, show you lots of attention and then boom - he'd be out in the parking lot of our high school, trying to pull a "funny". It seems like sex was the only thing on his mind from the beginning. Gals in those days, at least this one, was looking for something else. I think it was called "Marriage and living happily ever after".

It seems that back when, the music travelled down two roads - one road for the guys and another road for the gals. You brought out another aspect to the guys point of view that maybe it wasn't really two roads we were travelling and made me realize the guys had other feelings too. I concluded many years later, that the music brought on the feelings. After all, when you’re 16 years old, how can you not get emotionally involved with songs such as "You" or "I'm So In Love" by Infascinations or "Wonderful Girl"?

Dave is going to love the fact that you mentioned "You".

Marsha


Dave Goddard - aka aquatone58 - was a member of the Doo Wop Shop.

Doo Wop Dialog[ue]: 65

clarkedavis
(M/Dover, New Jersey)

As I grew to understand a little bit more about the attraction between the sexes, I noticed that I was beginning to feel a pull toward certain girls.

At twelve years old I discovered the "Canteen" a municipal project aimed at keeping the kids off the street after school. It was a hang out that sold cokes, and dogs and burgers. There was a jukebox with the volume turned up loud, and they turned the lights down so the juke box glowed even at four in the afternoon. There was a wispy blond girl named Barbara I knew from one of my classes. She was a year older than I was, but I got my courage up and asked her to dance when You by the Aquatones came on. What a great dance song! We danced, she put her cheek next to mine, and pushed close to me just like it was the most normal thing in the world to do. Which it was. I just didn't expect it. She thanked me when the song ended, and we parted. I don't think I ever danced with her again, and just said hello in the school halls.

That kind of thing was rather common then. A girl would show intimacy when she felt comfortable with a guy. Today, that kind of casual flirting would be thought of differently. Songs I remember from those dark afternoons include Quintones, Down the Aisle of Love, and Book of Love by the Monotones. Everyone stomped around when the latter came on, having fun in an entirely innocent manner.

Twelve turned to the true Teenage Years, thirteen, let's celebrate. Today I am a teenager! A true milestone. A true teenager. Now they really are singing all those songs about ME! A member of the club, a card carrying, doo woppin' teenager. What a great moment!

Junior high turned to actual high school. Roy Orbison was the guy churning out love song after love song that related to our lives. I go out with The Crowd. A Blue Angel is in love. Only the Lonely know how I feel. I'm Hurtin. Uptown. Our Summer Song. Love hurts. What beautiful music to dance to at teen parties, to celebrate a birthday or just to get together. Again, even in someone's living room, the lights were turned down, and the dancing was intensely close and erotic. The G-Clefs I Understand was the goodbye song of my first love. An intensely personal rendering to the strains of Auld Lang Syne. I Understand. Just How You Feel. Let Bygones be Bygones, but Remember, I'll Always Love You. I'll Always Love You. (Spoken Verse): And If You Ever Change Your Mind, My Dear, Come Back To Me, I'll Be Waiting Here, I Understand. A little too much understanding here, I think. But what a trip that song was. Beautifully Sad. There seemed to be a sense of beauty in that sadness. A kind of elevated longing that made you feel alive, even though you were in pain. To feel the pangs of hurt as you saw your love walking holding hands with someone new. Teenage Angst at its best.

Could it have been the same without the music? No, the music really did complement the activity, was more than just a soundtrack. Actually became part of the actual Film Of Life. In the motion picture, Mean Streets, the music was an integral part of the film. Simply wouldn't have been half as effective, if the music hadn't been there to puncture, illuminate, and illustrate the action of the characters. And so it was with the music of our time. How many of you made your ''Teen Age Vows Of Love" during similar circumstances?

Doo Wop Dialog[ue]: 64

pismotality
(42/M/London, England)

Great! This is definitely a good strand to get onto. I found my last two postings less satisfying to do as I had no time to type this morning - up in the morning and out to school - and made the mistake of writing my thoughts down while fresh. Only having to refer to pencilled notes means you lose the fun of not knowing your precise destination. So despite that "continued" in my previous, my next response will take up early days - though I need a break right now. And maybe, too, I'd really come to a conclusion for that one anyway. But yes, I'll look forward to responding – maybe I'll see your Part Two by then. Warning to afficionados: my story, like Clarke's, will contain traces of NON-DOOWOP ELEMENTS. (If symptoms persist, press next.)

Doo Wop Dialog[ue]: 63

clarkedavis
(M/Dover, New Jersey)

Don't know how you got started on the road to being a music maven, but here's how the music bug bit me, early on. I have to blame my great grandmother. A warm and friendly soul, she let me play "disc jockey" during my preschool era. I actually would line the 78's up, and play them, one at a time while she sat and listened. Tony Martin, There's No Tomorrow, was her favorite. We had a nice assortment of tunes, heavy on piano instrumentals and country. Those records seemed heavy at the time, (and they were to a four year old), once in a while one would break. They were much more fragile than the 45's which followed.

I seemed to have skipped a beat music-wise, because I don’t remember awakening to rock and roll til about fifth grade when Elvis was all the rage at Bayside elementary school in Warwick, Rhode Island. The girls loved him, the boys were jealous and hated him. I was barely aware of what he was about, as a ten year old in 1956. Like most kids of that age, I do remember listening to the radio Saturday nights, under the covers in my room. Grand Old Opry was on when I flipped the dial and heard other, more exciting things. Enter Gorton Junior High, imagine this. In seventh grade, the white haired music teacher put aside the last ten minutes for her students to play music on the large Hi Fi, in the back of the room. We were allowed to bring in records from home and share them with the class. I brought in Marv Johnson's You Got What it Takes. Someone else brought in an Annette recording of First Name Initial. Our notebook covers were plastered with the names of songs we liked, and the girls were all ga-ga over Ricky or Elvis. I actually carried a girl’s books home for her once.

The flavor of the times was Lloyd Price, I'm Gonna Get Married, and Johnny Horton, All For The Love Of a Girl. Tequila, and Pink Shoe Laces. The A &P where we bought our food, had a little place put aside where they sold 45's by the Parade Company of Newark, New Jersey, which were recordings of Top Hits, by unknown studio artists. You could buy two 45's containing 12 "Hits" which were sometimes pretty good. More often they were sadly lacking the punch of the originals. For 99 cents, all the top hits to play on your Sears Silvertone monaural single play phonograph in your room late at night after everyone was asleep.

Radio was a magical force to be reckoned with. Providence is fifty miles or so away from Boston, and Boston radio stations stayed on twenty four hours a day, when nothing was on locally. WCOP, and WMEX, AM giants at the time, were my stations of choice, with WCOP coming in better. I heard Jerry Lee Lewis the first time on WCOP in the wee hours.

I didn't know from doo wop, so you see I got a very late start. That kind of music was just part of the general mix, with no particular significance to me or anybody I knew. We did grow to love group harmony (the New York sound) as one of the local DJ's, Joe Thomas, liked to call it on his nightly show on WPAW in Pawtucket. And Carl Diggens had a weekly blues show Sunday afternoon on WRIB, a thousand watt daytimer that programmed religion, foreign language, and whatever you wanted as long as you bought the time. That blues sound was a little too deep for me, however, but they did program pop music during the week after school.

(to be continued)


Top image: single-play 4-speed Silvertone phonographs from the 1958 Sears Christmas Catalogue - hope one of them fits with Clarke's memories. Found at wishbookweb.

Update 27/8/13: Annette Funicello died on 8th April.  This is what Clarke wrote on a social networking website - hope he won't mind my adding it here:

I feel sad about Annette passing. She represented something very true and dear to so many of us, an ethic that seems to have washed ashore only to be abandoned in the Hollywood of today. She was part of our coming of age, and the sensibility that it brought with it, a sense of honor, respect and love. Classy music that blasted out of the tenement windows as well as suburban backyards that spoke softly of love and loudly about cars. There was always something inately sexy about "the girl next door" and stars like Debbie Reynolds as Tammy and Natalie Wood in Splendor in the Grass evoked. Today our last remaining girl next door might be aging. Sandra Bullock, please stay healthy.

Doo Wop Dialog[ue]: 62

pismotality
(42/M/London, England)

(continues)

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

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

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

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

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

(continues)

Doo Wop Dialog[ue]: 61

pismotality
(42/M/London, England)

Clarke,

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

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

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

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

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

(continued)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doo Wop Dialog[ue]: 60

bdbopper
(18/M/Lawrenceville, GA)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doo Wop Dialog[ue]: 59

markkozlowskim

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Doo Wop Dialog[ue]: 58

pismotality
(42/M/London, England)

Clarke,

As ever, I'm prompted to respond - in fact, I'm going to respond - but the great luxury of the last four days - ie no work - has come to an end and it's 11 .30pm in "real" (always inverted commas) time for me so I’ll have to pick the thread up tomorrow. But yes, harmony, unity - the blending of those five personalities... but I have to stop or I'll go on (logically enough). Odd having these two separate time frames ... but there I go again. Someone on this board asked for a standardised "Doowop Time." sadly, the tick-ticking of a more banal system is coming towards me - a bit like Captain Hook's nemesis - to whom the only response can be Bobby Charles's: "See you later ...


I have omitted the times from these reprinted messages for precisely that reason. And as posts were written over such a short period of time - 19th September-1st October 2000 - I also felt dates would be a distraction.

JM Barrie invented what we would now call a backstory for Captain Hook - confusingly, I found this online version on a fanfiction board, but it is Barrie's work, as I read it years ago in a book of essays. Peter and Wendy, Barrie's own novel written after the stage play, is darker than the numerous retellings. Hook's nemesis? Read chapter five.