Crying My Heart Out For You

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



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

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

Sad but compelling account of doo wop greats

This is the biography of one of the great doo wop groups who, as Logan Pearsall Smith said of Edmund Waller, floated to immortality on the strength of a phrase - or maybe a few bass notes. Gerald Gregory, the original singer of those notes, died a few years ago, and now lead singer and creative force Pookie Hudson has gone (with, in the UK at least, what appeared to be brief and grudging obituaries).

As one who was turned on to doo wop by the Spaniels I'm writing this review in the hope that someone in the UK apart from Spencer Leigh (who wrote the only halfway decent obit) might read this book, which is not a hagiography but a particularly saddening example of the exploitation of African American performers in the early days of rock'n'roll; even if you're not particularly interested in doo wop, this tells you a great deal about 50s America. (See the biography of Sam Cooke by Peter Guralnick or Sweet Soul Music by Gerri Hershey for more about exploitation in this period, or seek out the novel The Day the Music Died by Joseph C Smith aka Sonny Knight).

Given all the opportunities missed and all the rightful earnings withheld - especially as Goodnight, Sweetheart, Goodnight has been exploited in film after film, so someone's obviously profiting - it is astonishing that the group persisted over the decades and that Pookie Hudson, even after a battle with cancer, continued to perform while in remission. The fact that there were two distinct groups of Spaniels (with Pookie at the helm in both) is also down to exploitation, as there was pressure on the original members to look after their families by taking regular jobs when it became clear after a couple of years that they weren't getting the rewards from singing. According to the book, the earlier group were more spontaneous, instinctive and the later one more technically able and correct but perhaps less warm (compare the two versions of Baby, It's You).

This book relies almost exclusively on the testimony of the members of the original group and their take on the others in their lives, so it's not a Peter Guralnick job, seeking out a variety of viewpoints, and there's not much analysis of why the Spaniels' records are so good - that's taken as a given - but what gives this account its strength is the sad consistency of the story the individuals have to tell, and the fact that there seems little attempt to whitewash the characters of group members - Gerald Gregory's problems with drink are discussed in detail and everyone seems frank about personal conflicts.

More than thirty years on, the original members came together to be inducted into a Rhythm and Blues Hall of Fame (I don't know whether they were finally honoured by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame) and to perform again; the pressures to support families having eased, this second chance was an unexpected bonus after so much disillusion. It must have been this version of the group I saw around 1992 in London and I recall that they stood out from the other acts in seeming still involved in the material: unlike the glitzy incarnation of a Frankie Lymon-less Teenagers or a Dion-less Belmonts, for example, Pookie, still at the centre, sang as though he was still feeling and exploring the songs. Now I know why: the original memmbers had no idea they were going to get a chance again, and the acapella version of Danny Boy which Pookie announced as having first sung with his friends at High School almost forty years before as a vocal warm-up must have felt as nostalgiac for them as it did for us.

In view of all the missing riches I don't know whether Pookie Hudson died a happy man, but I hope he did: he certainly continued to perform and to find an audience; the book even recounts how he made his peace with Vivian Carter (one of the owners of the 50s R&B label Vee Jay who issued Goodnight Sweetheart Goodnight) on her deathbed. And those Spaniels recordings on Vee Jay - now, ironically, public domain in the UK, so they can be reissued and reissued without the current owners profiting - ensure that James Pookie Hudson's tremulous voice will live on.


More on the Spaniels' London concert in Doo Wop Dialog[ue]: 20 plus a link to an interview with Pookie.

The review above was written for work then added to a well-known shopping website. I regret implying that the Spaniels will be remembered solely for Goodnight Sweetheart, Goodnight. There's no denying its ubiquity, but the strange gentleness with which Pookie handled Red Sails in the Sunset on one of those horrible pressings I picked up early on in my doo wop quest meant almost as much to me - to say nothing of the sort of cloudy cushioning provided by the other voices. Interesting to compare it to the impassioned, almost out of control account by Rudy West and the Five Keys - but please don't make me choose. It's not a Crewcuts/Chords situation. Or a Maguire Sisters/Spaniels one, come to that. I felt it as a personal affront when some girls at my former place of work were idly singing Goodnight, Sweetheart Maguire Sisters style. But I didn't say anything.

As mentioned in the Doo Wop Dialog[ue] post, Pookie did say in an interview with Matt the Cat of XM Radio that he had been getting some money, at least, from Goodnight Sweetheart, Goodnight since 1978 but the clear implication was nowhere near what he was due. The fact that he was reduced to asking the public for help with his final medical fees when that song can still be heard everywhere is a disgrace.

Edmund (not Thomas) Waller's carpe diem: Go, Lovely Rose. Does anyone remember or read Logan Pearsall Smith's Trivia collections these days? I loved them as a teenager and even read his autobiography where he talked about religion leaving him like leaves blowing off a tree (or something; apologies to the shade of one who cared so much about precision). I think there were three collections. Project Gutenberg will lead you to two of them (Trivia and More Trivia) but not, it seems, the final collection, which must have been the one which had the Waller piece and the aphorism which ran (forgive me, thou shade) something like:
All our lives we have been putting our goldenest pennies into penny-in-the-slot machines which invariably turn out to be empty.

One entry which I did, however, find in one of the Gutenberg books has a bearing on the Doo Wop Dialog[ue] and the tantalising promise of all those Sweet Dreams of Contentment in so many songs:

Beauty
Among all the ugly mugs of the world we see now and then a face
made after the divine pattern. Then, a wonderful thing happens
to us; the Blue Bird sings, the golden Splendour shines, and for
a queer moment everything seems meaningless save our impulse to
follow those fair forms, to follow them to the clear Paradises
they promise.

Plato assures us that these moments are not (as we are apt to
think them) mere blurs and delusions of the senses, but divine
revelations; that in a lovely face we see imaged, as in a
mirror, the Absolute Beauty--; it is Reality, flashing on us in
the cave where we dwell amid shadows and darkness. Therefore we
should follow these fair forms, and their shining footsteps will
lead us upward to the highest heaven of Wisdom. The Poets, too,
keep chanting this great doctrine of Beauty in grave notes to
their golden strings. Its music floats up through the skies so
sweet, so strange, that the very Angels seem to lean from their
stars to listen.

But, O Plato, O Shelley, O Angels of Heaven, what scrapes you do
get us into!

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]: 5

pismotality
(42/M/London, England)

Clarke,

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

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

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

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

Tony



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

Doo Wop Dialog[ue]: 3

pismotality
(42/M/London, England)

Bob,

Thanks for your kind comments. Rock'n'roll has always been big in Britain but never really doowop. I became interested in the early 70s, not through American Graffiti but a British film, That'll Be The Day, set in 50s England but the same rites of passage stuff. The soundtrack had some doowop - Why Do Fools, etc - and I began collecting 50s stuff by trial and error. But now, with Tower Records in London and Ace Records (roughly equivalent to Rhino) there's lots of stuff.

I absolutely agree with what you say about thinking and sharing. Listening to music is really a non-verbal thing - especially in doowop the lyrics are just a peg to hang those sounds that emanate from the heart - and it's impossible to convey that experience adequately. But trying to do so can make the experience keener.

For me, above all, listening to doowop is about entering another world, where emotions can be on show, however awkward and gauche, and the pangs of adolescent, idealised love are given a kind of dignity (think of the Dells' Sweet Dreams of Contentment). I'll never forget the excitement of seeing a doowop group for the first time in the mid 80s - 14 Karat Soul; known in US? - I went night after night, thinking: "This is it; this is exactly what I want." You're lucky having such free access to live doowop in the States. And cheaper CDs! Though I suppose a free health service is a minor consolation ....

Tony



Tower Records in the West End of London, along with all its Relic CDs which I stupidly didn't snap up, has gone.

Find a full tracklisting for the soundtrack album for That'll Be the Day here. These were the songs which first turned me on to rock'n'roll and doo wop. That'll Be the Day is not a cheap American Graffiti clone, incidentally, but a highly effective tale in its own right. I recently read, in a review of the John Lennon biopic Nowhere Boy, that the aimless hero of That'll Be the Day was based on the young Lennon. My review of That'll Be the Day, now issued on DVD with its less successful sequel, follows below:

First film is the more universal tale

That'll Be The Day is a modest but very satisfying rites-of-passage movie with 70s pop star David Essex (who'd already scored in the stage musical Godspell) playing a 1950s teenager with a string of conquests but no sense of direction until music starts to give his life a purpose.

He is careless of the feelings of others, so this is not a simple pop cash-in for the singer, and there are good actors around him (the exasperation and affection of mother Rosemary Leach is especially notable) and an excellent, well structured screenplay by Ray Connolly, where even small scenes - the action of a kindly policeman, for example, when Essex is drunk and lonely on his birthday - contribute to a coherent whole.

Ringo Starr must have been taken with the script, too, as he plays Essex's buddy/mentor when they are both working at Butlin's. And a young Robert Lindsay is his schoolfriend, watching in horror as Essex chucks all his books into the river prior to an exam. Lindsay later reappears in a truly fifties moment when he and his university chums are all listening to trad jazz, and the visiting Essex is made to feel left out; shades of the early Beatles having to pretend they were a jazz band to get gigs in Liverpool.

The aimless Essex, for so long indifferent to his mother's concern, eventually makes a stab at being the dutiful son but it does not last long: he cannot resist sleeping with Lindsay's girlfriend (the last in his long line of conquests) immediately before he is due to marry his friend's sister, nor is he able to sustain the marriage for long.

But his struggle throughout the film to make some kind of sense of his life, and way in which the answer - music - eventually comes into focus with an insistence which cannot be denied, keeps the character sympathetic, or at least understandable. And in case anyone misses the point, the film is bookended with the idea that he takes after his philandering father, unable to settle down to domesticity after the war. And the greyness (or, to judge from the decor of the family sitting room, the dark, suffocating browns) of a life of late fifties/early sixties conformity is well painted; taking over the family shop, or becoming like the smug Lindsay ("There's always night school," says his mother hopefully), convinces you that whatever is needed to feel fully alive cannot to be found in either of those options. There's a tiny scene using Bobby Darin's Dream Lover, for example, where the combination of the shot and the music really makes us feel his yearning for something else.

The sequel, however, which follows "Jim McLaine" into stardom, is, for me, far less appealing, and Ringo jumped ship (what was effectively his role was taken by Adam Faith). The trouble with this film is that a rites-of-passage story has a universal appeal; following a troubled star's decline when he's surrounded by material wealth (especially when his music is pretentious and high-blown tosh about the role of Woman and Mother) doesn't stir the same sense of general recognition.

Additionally, the focus is on the relationship between Essex and his manager so that the group, the Stray Cats (which seem to be all actors apart from muso Dave Edmunds) are not called to do that much, and Jim's wife reappears too briefly to make much of an impact. (Come to think of it, the one criticism which could perhaps be levelled at the first film is that we glimpse an underused band there, led by Billy Fury, but in that instance I could understand if they were largely edited out because they don't contribute significantly to Jim's journey.)

So essentially my advice is: don't expect too much from the sequel. Although I admit that maybe that's partly because for me, personally, the earlier film is a very important one as it alerted me to the hitherto unknown delights of early rock'n'roll and doowop; the soundtrack is liberally spattered with classics of the day, greatly enhanced by the fact that many of them are playing in the perfect setting of a fairground.

A footnote: as for the title of that first film, from a vague memory of reading Melody Maker when the film was just an idea, there had been an attempt to do a Buddy Holly biopic which was quashed for some reason - possibly I'm misremembering but they certainly didn't use, or weren't permitted to use, actual Holly recordings so the version of That'll Be The Day which plays over the closing credits is the Bobby Vee cover (with, I think, the Crickets backing him), and there is a scene where, reunited with his precious record player, Essex brandishes a Buddy Holly LP, saying "I've been waiting weeks to hear this," only for us to be treated to the strains of ... Richie Valens' Donna. But whether or not a biopic of Holly was originally intended, what emerged is a thoroughly worthwhile film which captures the sense of rootlessness which found an answer for many fifties teenagers in rock'n'roll.

Vee Jay, the Dells and chance with a small "c"

The photograph used for the cover of Cornered (see below), borrowed from Unca Marvy's history of the Dells

Following on from the notes about Golden Teardrops and the licensing of Vee Jay recordings by budget labels like Springboard in the late 60s, it occurs to me how much Vee Jay material I was fortunate enough to hear very early on in my infatuation with doo wop largely through the unfortunate circumstance of the company's financial difficulties.

In addition to Springboard International's ORIGINAL OLDIES Vol. 18 (block caps, always block caps) making its way from an American supermarket or drugstore to the bargain basement of Listen Records in Renfield Street, Glasgow, I once found a whole heap of LPs on the Joy label (distributed by UK's President Records) in a little newsagent's beside Motherwell Civic Centre (admittedly you will need a degree of familiarity with that West of Scotland town to appreciate quite how surreally unlikely such a discovery was).

The pressings turned out to be horrendous, but I bought them all up there and then, as they were doo wop, this music I had lately discovered, and they were cheap, at 50p a pop.

I noticed each LP mentioned it was a Vee Jay recording, and I read names like the Flamingos, the Spaniels, the Moonglows and the Magnificents; in short, I'd accidentally stumbled across a cache of the very best of Chicago doo wop, including Chance and Parrot recordings, without realising it. It was then that I first heard mysterious tracks like the Spaniels' Play It Cool, which seemed to be in a kind of impenetrable code, and the strange, lumbering rhythms and fragmented narrative of the Orchids' Newly Wed; both were a world away from the brightness of Frankie Lymon.

One group was absent, but at around the same time in a Glasgow-based musical instrument shop called Biggar's (which has only recently closed its doors) I found a bargain price double album on the DJM label (Dick James Music, as in the man who originally owned the Beatles' publishing) entitled Cornered, featuring a generous selection of the Dells' two stints at Vee Jay. It may even have been licensed through Springboard, as I remember buying some Scepter/Wand material on the same label.

With the Dells, again, I had no idea of what I was buying, but songs like Sweet Dreams of Contentment remain favourites: some of the missing posts from the Kewl Steve site involved lengthy debate about just what that word is which is dreamily intoned towards the end of the song - I'm still not sure and don't necessarily need to know: a sweet word of pismotality, intended for the lover's ear alone, is all; Vernon Green would surely have nodded in recognition.

But "dreamily" seems the right term, as you sense the whole group sort of happily dozing their way through the performance, entranced and entrancing; there's even a kind of background wail or drone which reminds me of the self-disparaging term used by a group member to describe their early work: "fish harmonies" - ie all moving roughly in the same direction but hardly what you'd call synchronised swimming. Though I'm sure I've also read a group member (the same one?) say that that recording is also particularly evocative of those days for the group itself.

I had to stop at that point to listen to the song again. An interesting recording; not muddy, exactly, but the lead, bass and the band are so prominent that it's almost as though the other singers are ghostly presences from adjoining radio station - but their contribution is still crucial, even if you sense it more than you hear it. And the moment when that tremulous lead takes off into the stratosphere, finally unshackling himself from language other than that final, unknowable but perfectly comprehensible word, is what makes the record: he has sung himself into an ecstacy of longing.

You too can listen to Sweet Dreams of Contentment and other Dells tracks of the era here, on the official Vee Jay website cited in the Golden Teardrops post, if you have realplayer. What I didn't mention before, however, is that the CDs so temptingly arrayed on the site were deleted long ago; they date from a brief resurgence in 1993. But Vee Jay are still licensing material, hence the continuance of the site.

There are currently several compilations of Vee Jay artists including the Dells on Shout Factory in the US and there are Charly/Snapper CDs in Britain - though when I tried to link to Charly's Dells comp just now it seemed to have disappeared, so instead here is a review by Geoff Brown of the Charly compilation on the mojo magazine website. I haven't heard any Shout Factory product, but my experience of the audio quality of Charly CDs has certainly been, let's say, variable And I've been spoilt by that lavish double album anyway, so that neither of those Dells CDs is an adequate substitute.

One track not on that album, however, is Darling I Know by the ur-Dells, otherwise known as the El Rays, which as someone once said is like saying "The The" -though not a bad name for a group. You can hear it here, though its interest for me is hearing all the elements of the Dells but not quite gelling. Somehow it seems naive and amateurish, whereas Tell the World is naive and endearing, even though there's probably not that much between them.

To the gentlemen above: I salute you, and your fallen comrade.

And I thank Springboard International and those other budget record companies; whatever their intentions in the matter, they brought the Dells and the Flamingos into my orbit.