The Iceman Writeth

 

If you're reading this blog then you will probably know that Jerry Butler was a member of the Impressions, a doo wop/soul group which also featured his childhood friend Curtis Mayfield. For Your Precious Love, which Butler cowrote and sang lead on, was a meld of doo wop and gospel which sounded as though it had been recorded in a cathedral; it was a big hit on Vee-Jay Records in 1958 and is now regarded as a doo wop classic. 

Butler was unexpectedly given top billing on that release, which created some bad feeling within the group and eventually led to his decision to go solo. Apparently the distinction had been made on the record because the company reasoned that having two acts on their books would be better than one, having already made what they considered a mistake by not giving Pookie Hudson top billing with the Spaniels. 

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.

New Flamingos compilation includes Decca sides

Wow! At last there is a Flamingos compilation which includes the sides they recorded for Decca.

It's issued by public domain label Jasmine, responsible for the earlier Dream of a Lifetime 2CD set, and the perfect complement to it in terms of track selection as it collects the End label recordings they missed out before - there was just a selection - so if you have both sets I presume that that will cover everything commercially issued by this superlative group up until the end of 1962.

Rather cannily, that earlier collection ended with I Only Have Eyes For You on the End label, thus ensnaring the casual purchaser, but at the expense of chronology as their Decca sides came in between Chess and End.They only included Ladder of Love from Decca.

There is an earlier post about the Dream of a Lifetime collection here. But to cut a long story short, it was the first compilation to assemble their Chance, Parrot, Chess and a selection of their End recordings in one place and was fairly cheap, as befits a public domain issue.

To my ears, however, sound quality was okay rather than great. If you listen to the Flamingos CD issued as part of the Chess 50th anniversary celebrations, or the Chance recordings issued alongside those of the Flamingos in 1993 (by what seems to be Vee Jay itself) then you can hear just how clear and full those original recordings really are. Jasmine, by contrast, don't seem to want to get too trebly and exposing of their (presumably vinyl) sources.

A Distant Love - the Dells

One of my all-time faves from the Dells' doo wop years. One of the sides on the double album of Vee-Jay material licensed by Dick James's DJM which I found in Biggars music shop in Glasgow around 1976 - and a few days ago I was surprised to find it (the shop) was still there. I think the recording on that album was an alternate take as at the end of the record I possess you can clearly hear one of the singers start to sing the wrong words ("Across the -"). This is almost witlessly simple as a piece of songwriting but the singing has a nightclub kinda feel, reminding me that they recorded with Sarah Vaughan. Or possibly Dinah Washington. I won't check, as I'm still hurting from having been told that a friend won't read my blog; I'm only sorry the rest of you out there have to suffer. Anyway, this is such a simple song that on occasion I've taped the bass part and sung over it: along with In the Still of the Night one of the doo wop numbers which feels graspable by someone who can't sing in any accepted sense of the word. But I love this song for its directness.

Golden Teardrops ... avec la guitare!

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

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

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

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

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

A Man Like Curtis Mayfield

For anyone who is reading this near the time it's being written (12 January 2010) a four-part radio series about Curtis Mayfield, A Man Like Curtis, began last night on BBC Radio 2 in the UK. You can listen to it online for one week then it will be replaced by Part 2 and so on. Unlike a DVD about the Impressions which I'll discuss below, Jerry Butler contributes, and there are pleasing small details in the first episode, such as tales of the young Curtis being a pest in his zeal to learn about singing and be part of a group, and the fact that when he found a guitar in, I think, his grandmother's house he instinctively tuned it to a certain key (related to the black keys on the piano, as he later discovered) which subsequently meant that if the greatest guitarists in the world ever were so forward as to borrow his axe even they would struggle to get anything decent out of it. And presumably it was that tuning which helped make his playing the liquid, lovely thing it was.

Although I suppose my first exposure to Curtis Mayfield would have been my eldest brother singing some vaguely obscene variation of the lyrics of It's Alright (and, I think, playing the single around the same time, along with Chris Montez's Let's Dance), the first time I really became aware of Curtis Mayfield was when listened to a recording was on that same budget Springboard International LP, ORIGINAL OLDIES Vol. 18, which introduced me to Golden Teardrops.

(If you read the earlier post about this, I didn't make the pilgrimage to Paris over Christmas, tarrying instead with some female surrealists at Manchester Art Gallery but did artist Francis Baudevin extract as much richness, I wonder, from his engagement with the subsequent volume?).

The song on this cheapo album of licensed Vee-Jay material was Jerry Butler's Find Another Girl and that guitar playing, rich and resonant as Butler's voice was, seemed - to coin phrase - the other half of the sky.

Probably this first episode, covering Vee-Jay and recordings immediately afterwards will be of the most interest to the likely readership of this blog, but the whole series will certainly be worth a listen. (One final, irresistible detail: did you know that Gypsy Woman was written after Curtis had been watching a cowboy film?)

As mentioned elsewhere here, Radio 2 did an excellent series on doo wop, Street Corner Soul, and in general the station presents intelligent, well researched music documentaries. If you're unfamiliar with BBC radio in general then Radio 2's peculiar power is that former listeners to Radio 1, the youth-oriented BBC station which was originally willed into being in the late 1960s to combat the evil of pirate radio, have grown older just as the extreme end of the natural listenership of Radio 2 has begun to die off, to put it rather too bluntly. So what had been a station aimed at a much earlier nostalgia market - the 1930s onwards and the politer side of pop pap, essentially - has gradually come to embrace a broader audience, banished from their former home of Radio 1 (following an infamous culling of dinosaur deejays), and of an age and an inclination to explore more fully the music they grew up with. Parts of Sundays are still reserved for the old Radio 2 with British Dance Bands of the thirties, etc, but by and large most types of popular music are covered at least some of the time, especially at night when the station is less likely to act as aural wallpaper. So try it.

And in addition to Curtis Mayfield, readers may enjoy Shake, Rattle and Roll presented by Mark Lamarr - the programme is rock'n'roll in general, but always with some doo wop, and with lots of enjoyably odd obscurities. He may not be much of a singer, as evinced by the Leiber and Stoller concert, but his vast personal collection of platters, musical knowledge and audible enjoyment of all he plays must be more than somewhat of a consolation. There are only six programmes in the current series which ends mid February, and like all programmes on BBC radio, you can only listen to it up to one week after its original broadcast, so as with A Man Like Curtis, please hurry.
Also recommended is this well produced DVD which tells the story of Curtis Mayfield's career both with his group the Impressions and his successful solo years. Not much on his personal life (though his widow is among the contributors) but plenty about his music in the context of the times (60s and 70s) - Ambassador Andrew King is on hand to link his songs firmly to the civil rights movement.

Unlike some other music documentaries you get the full performances of songs in the TV show extracts and promos. Most bizarre is the one existing clip of People Get Ready, recorded for the Dick Clark show: the trio are filmed lipsynching to the song on a paddleboat in a lake with lots of touristy types in similar boats. Dignified it ain't, but it's all that's available - although the floaty, ethereal sound of Mayfield's music almost justifies the choice. Almost.

Interesting to hear that Mayfield was attuned to the times but also cupped an ear to his rivals' music, so the change in style when he went solo which led to songs like Don't Worry If There's a Hell Down Below We're All Going to Go came about through listening to Norman Whitfield's work with the Temptations. The surviving Impressions contribute (although Jerry Butler is conspicuous by his absence) and arranger Johnny Pate, whose use of brass enhanced the Impressions' sound, is given an appropriately sizeable chunk of time; one of the Impressions dubs him the fourth member of the group, a comment also made in the Radio 2 programme.

There are no dissenting voices in this documentary but it doesn't feel too much like a puff by the record company, though some other commentators like Carlos Santana sound like besotted fans - understandable though that may be - and don't add a huge amount. Mayfield himself features in archive interviews. There was, a few years ago when Mayfield was still alive, a programme on BBC TV by Caryl Phillips which included conversations with Curtis's mother and was a much more personal, "authored" piece, so this DVD documentary isn't the last word on this remarkable musician, but as an introduction to the range of what he's done - and with those all-important uninterrupted performance clips (including his appearance on The Old Grey Whistle Test, another semi-religious programme for myself and some of my brothers), it's understandable if the tone is essentially celebratory.

Caryl Phillips, incidentally, wrote a radio play about Marvin Gaye's time in Ostend, produced by Ned Chaillet. Based on a single hearing, I'm not sure whether the play was perfect, but my judgment in this matter may well be suspect, for the following, rather embarrassing, reason - but hey, honesty if not dignity (there's probably a Latin tag for that) ...

I recall finding a description of Gaye's relationship with his father in a glossy magazine once, available for general perusal on the shelves of a cafe at the Brunswick Centre in Russell Square, London. In the moment of reading it a play, or rather the promise of a play, unfolded itself to me, so perfect and terrible was Marvin's description of their being locked together, and only a few lines long - but (as I fear is becoming a motif in this blog) my intention to write it down or steal the magazine was not translated into action ... or I threw away the paper on which I may have scribbled some indecipherable note. Or something. Parlons d'autre chose, as M. Baudevin might say.

Anyway, the play - the real play, that is, actually written by someone who laboured over it and brought it into being rather than some lobster-sluggard idly considering the possibility of doing all manner of things - dealt with the father-son relationship in between the cracks of describing the protective, fatherly figure in Belgium and his relationship with the resting superstar. So it was neatly done. And I think Marvin's mother was given a line at the end about the Belgian bringing him home, or allowing him to come home, or simply words to make him understand that the soujourn in Belgium was truly over now that Marvin was being laid to rest with his family. There was a poetic neatness and precision about those final words of the mother that makes me want to listen again to the whole thing before I venture any further opinions. It was called A Long Way From Home, and you can read details about it on the BBC Radio 3 website here, although that online-for-one-week-only rule works for all the BBC's stations so you won't be able to listen to it.

A final thought, as I listen yet again to Find Another Girl: how to describe that guitar playing properly? Impossible, other than by listening, but as this whole blog is about the idea that there's a worth in trying, if only to help make the experience of listening keener, I will say that it's distinctive, probably for the reasons outlined above - self-taught before being of an age when selfconsciousness could creep in - but it's not ostentatious: an accompanying voice which doesn't insist on its equality but draws the attention anyway. And presumably that's his actual voice in the background too: Curtis's widow, I think, talked about recognising his voice, his flavour, in lots of the recordings he did with others in those early Chicago days.

And one of the songs played on last night's programme was Monkey Time. Simple, or simple-ish, yet sophisticated. As may be another motif, the more I add to this blog, I can't remember the source, but I seem to recall reading or hearing of someone, possibly in America rather than Britain, facing a tough class - possibly a trainee teacher taking a lesson where he had to regain control or go under - and he brought in a guitar and played, acoustically and quietly, Monkey Time. I don't remember how well or badly it went, for sure - though I think it was badly - but I understand and applaud the impulse: here's this little bit of perfection; try to absorb it and learn from it. And just as the English singer who sang Marvin Gaye's Wherever I Lay My Hat said of Sam Cooke's songs that when you sing one you feel as though a great weight has been lifted, I'd like to think that whatever happened to that teacher, even if he got battered to a pulp, that he didn't lose faith in the song, his talisman, and that the message of hope and optimism which permeates so much of Curtis Mayfield's work didn't diminish for him.



Lastly, I recall a few years ago staying one night with a friend, now dead, out in the wilds of Scotland - or a few miles, at any rate, from the lights of North Berwick and environs, which amounted to the same thing. Searching through his record collection, he finally pulled out This is Sue, a soul compilation well known in the UK. It would be rather too neat if there had been an Impressions or a Mayfield or even a Jerry Butler-with-Curtis-in-the-background track on that album, but there was a great and deep pleasure in listening to songs which we had become acquainted with separately but we both knew well: the voice of Shirley, as in Shirley and Lee (or Shirley and Company, come to that) was a particular favourite of his, and in another case of double exposure memories, my chance hearing of disco era Shirley's Shame, Shame, Shame in the inappropriately named Cafe Select at Edinburgh's Waverley Station while waiting for my friend on one occasion has nudged earlier memories of cavorting to that and other tracks in the disco above the Glasgow Apollo into the background; now, whenever I hear that track, I remember most my relish, on that day, waiting in a station cafe, and hearing clearly, as I could not have done when bopping in my thirty inch pinstripe flares in 1974 (no images available) all the gospel which infused those two singing voices in friendly combat.

But I digress - and I've rather missed the opportunity for a neat conclusion. But I'll go for it anyway. It's both true and too neat. There wasn't, as I said, a Curtis-related track on the album, but there was Shirley and Lee's Let the Good Times Roll with that squeak to which my friend was drawn; there was Barefootin', there was Bony Moronie (Specialty, so you probably couldn't get those artists together on a CD now), there was You Can't Sit Down ... and there was Harlem Shuffle. My friend said, as though it was a revelation - which it wasn't, except in the sense of really understanding what it meant as we listened together, and were aware of each other's enthusiasm making this occasion more important than idly hearing one of those songs on the radio - "now that is uptown soul." I would like to imagine him listening to any early Curtis Mayfield and saying the same thing as emphatically, as delightedly: not bouyant at some wonderful new discovery but with the kind of renewed recognition that you see, or used to, in some of the less well made TV ads for beer, where he who had strayed from the brand has a foaming tankard raised to his lips and, after a moment, gives a slight nod. Yes. Of course. Monkey Time. Find Another Girl. It's Alright. His oeuvre is practically a dictionary definition of the term.

And in this impossible scenario we would listen, as I have broken off to do so just now, to He Will Break Your Heart, and the lightness and ease of those two voices, then back to the consolation of Find Another Girl and the unique comfort of that oddly tuned guitar which feels like nothing so much as a caress.

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!

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.