Yeah Yeah Yeah

by Bob Stanley

  Gene Pitney wrote upbeat hits for others – Bobby Vee’s ‘Rubber Ball’ (UK no. 4, US no. 6 ’61), Ricky Nelson’s ‘Hello Mary Lou’ (UK no. 2, US no. 9 ’61), the Crystals’ ‘He’s a Rebel’ (UK no. 19, US no.1 ’62) – but picked other writers’ songs for himself that tended to see his composure gradually crumble inside three minutes, whether through love’s intensity (‘Twenty-four Hours from Tulsa’, UK no. 5, US no. 17 ’63) or through despair (‘I’m Gonna Be Strong’, UK no. 2, US no. 9 ’64); most extreme of all was 1968’s ‘Billy You’re My Friend’, a traumatic love triangle that sounded like it was being sung with Gene inside a straitjacket.

  Dion had previously been the leader of doo-wop act the Belmonts. He may have seemed all Little Italy machismo but, ‘The Wanderer’ aside, he was all too easily ground under the heel of some Bronx minx. There was ‘Runaround Sue’, ‘Sandy’ and – cruellest of all – ‘Little Diane’ (‘Bad girls like you are a disgrace’). His smile suggested he was in on a secret you couldn’t understand. It turned out he was – Dion was heroin-addicted long before the travails of Lou Reed, Marianne Faithfull or anyone from Elastica or Alice in Chains became public knowledge. At the time it was seen as shameful, unmentionable, and his sudden disappearance from the charts in 1964 after a run of twelve US Top 20 hits seemed inexplicable. He regrouped, discovered a love of folk and blues and, with Columbia producer John Hammond helming the sessions, cut the best records of his career: ‘Tomorrow Won’t Bring the Rain’, ‘Wonder Where I’m Bound’, ‘My Girl the Month of May’. Eventually, in 1968, he returned to the charts, clean and sober, with a harp-plucking peace anthem called ‘Abraham, Martin and John’ (US no. 4); its B-side, ‘Daddy Rollin’ (in Your Arms)’, was something else again, a lupine howl that made heroin sound both desirable and deathly.

  Roy Orbison was no one’s idea of a pin-up, so he hid behind his shades (many assumed he was blind), dressed in black, stood elegant and dignified. The Big O had a heartbreaking, almost operatic baritone that even Elvis struggled to match. The most intense Orbison single of all was ‘It’s Over’, a British number one at the height of Beatlemania in 1964 (opening line: ‘Your baby doesn’t love you any more’). It could be Roy talking to himself as he contemplates taking his life (‘you won’t be seeing rainbows any more’) or, worse, the world turning in on the singer, mocking his dreams, his belief in true love; the brief pause before the climactic cry of the title will make your heart drop into your stomach. All these hits pre-dated real tragedy in Orbison’s life – his wife died in a bike crash in 1966, his sons were killed in a fire that destroyed his home in 1969 – which unsurprisingly curtailed his run of hits.5 He soldiered on, though, barely changing his style, and when he was rightly deified in the late eighties his comeback hit ‘You Got It’ (UK no. 3, US no. 9 ’88) sounded just like his records had in 1960. With typical ill fortune, he died just weeks after ‘You Got It’ had made him a star all over again.

  ‘Runaway’, Del Shannon’s debut single, was the biggest hit in the US and the UK in summer 1961. It was, and remains, the ultimate fairground anthem, the 45 you’d most expect to turn up on a Wurlitzer jukebox in a forgotten suburban caff. ‘Runaway’ was all energy and mystery, from the dense, almost discordant opening guitar chords, through its falsetto hook (‘wah-wah-wonder’) to the eerie, space-organ solo. The lyric was beyond melancholy, filled with dread and paranoia; the run away girl may not even be alive. It was the kind of record you could build a career on, and Del Shannon didn’t disappoint. The existential angst of ‘Runaway’ became a template that he was still using at the far end of the decade on the ghostlike ‘Colorado Rain’. He couldn’t write any other way – the fear and the demons in Shannon’s music echoed the mind of its maker.

  In the beginning he was Charles Westover and he was from Battle Creek, Michigan. Two events shaped his future: when he bought his first electric guitar he practised in the bathroom, amp perched on the toilet lid, and discovered he liked the rumbling acoustics; a little later he asked a girl called Karen to the high-school prom, but she dumped him for another guy; young Charles was so cut up that he would still talk about this years later. He was drafted in the fifties, married Shirley, got a job in a carpet store and renamed himself Del Shannon in honour of a local wrestler. By night he played rock ’n’ roll covers in the Big Little Show Band at Battle Creek’s Hi-Lo Club.

  Stuck in Battle Creek, Shannon was already in his mid-twenties when a college kid from Kalamazoo called Max Crook joined the band. Crook brought with him a home-made, three-legged proto-synth that he called a ‘musitron’. Straight away, the two of them began writing great songs. One was called ‘Runaway’, the lyric penned by Shannon on the sly while working at the carpet store. Released on New York’s tiny Big Top label, it exploded in the spring of 1961 and became an international number one. In the anodyne Ankoid era, the intense, square-jawed Shannon cut a heroic figure, and he was swiftly elevated to the level of Orbison, Dion and Pitney.

  Invigorated by stardom, he followed ‘Runaway’ with two fabulously nasty rockers. ‘Hats Off to Larry’ (US no. 5, UK no. 6 ’61) again featured a Max Crook solo, but this was a spiteful riposte to an ex who has been ditched by her new beau. ‘So Long Baby’ was possibly the most relentless, tuneless Top 10 hit of the early sixties, fuelled entirely by bitterness: ‘I’ve got news for you, I was untrue too!’ Crook had left to make a solo single (the deathless ‘Twistin’ Ghost’), and so his musitron was replaced on ‘So Long Baby’ by what sounded like a giant electronic kazoo. While his profile dipped in the States, Del’s hits in Europe continued unabated. 1962’s loopy ‘Swiss Maid’ (Question: Will the yodelling, pig-tailed lass ever find true love? Answer: No.) reached number two in the UK but failed to even make the Hot Hundred; ‘Little Town Flirt’ was big enough in Britain to have been a prime influence on Merseybeat (imagine the Searchers singing it); ‘Cry Myself to Sleep’ was later revisited by Elton John as ‘Crocodile Rock’.

  In spite of all these hits, all this success, Shannon – like the Big O – was riddled with insecurities. Musically this manifested itself in some lame soundalike sequels (‘Two Kinds of Teardrops’ followed the tightly perfect ‘Little Town Flirt’, but was too jolly by half) or songs that clearly aped his contemporaries: ‘Sue’s Gonna Be Mine’ is basically a Four Seasons composite; Dion would surely have sued had Shannon’s ‘Mary Jane’ sold in quantity. These singles came in an eighteen-month barren patch which coincided with the first beat boom – he may well have been the first act to chart with a Lennon/McCartney song (‘From Me to You’, no. 77) in the US, but Del Shannon still felt the chill wind from the Mersey in ’63 and ’64 like pretty much every other American act. He sought solace in whisky.

  And that might have been the end of his career had he not remembered why ‘Runaway’ was so original and successful, and rediscovered his groove with ‘Keep Searchin’’ (US no. 9, UK no. 3) at the end of ’64. ‘Gotta find a place to hide with my baby by my side’ – the lyric was even bleaker, the sound more deeply shadowed than ‘Runaway’, newly toughened by the Brit beat influence. The cry of the fugitive, a possible abductor with his (underage?) girl who’s ‘been hurt so much, they treat her mean and cruel’, ‘Keep Searchin’’ ends with a desperate, beautiful falsetto wail of release.

  From this point until the end of the decade, Shannon’s recordings rarely stumbled. ‘Keep Searchin’’ had an even more paranoiac sequel in ‘Stranger in Town’, where a private detective, or maybe a hitman, was thrown into the equation. On ‘Break Up’ in 1965 he was so racked and tortured that he couldn’t even convey his fears in words, silently resigning himself to losing his girl, the misery completely internalised. The single was a flop (‘Stranger in Town’ turned out to be his last UK hit) and Del was devastated. He took boxes of the single and threw them tearfully into a Michigan river.6

  ‘That’s the Way Love Is’, a forgotten single from late ’63, put the Del Shannon story in a nutshell. It started up like a conventional love song, with gir
ly back-ups straight off a Steve Lawrence session. Then he started to remember his misery, and by the end of the song he was shaking, smashing things, putting his fist through doors, and still the pain wouldn’t go away.

  There was one last hurrah before Shannon’s semi-retirement in 1969. ‘Colorado Rain’ formed a neat circle in its tale of a runaway hippie girl who flitted into the singer’s life via a sinister piano motif, only to leave again just as unexpectedly as the rain, as ever, pours down. His suicide in 1991, just as he was set to reignite his career in the Traveling Wilburys, seems to have stymied reassessment. But Del Shannon, king of pain, was truly one of pop’s heavyweight champs.

  Looking at the 1960 charts through the prism of Del Shannon, Dion and Roy Orbison is ultimately misleading, though. They were very much exceptions. For every ‘Only the Lonely’ on the UK chart, there was Anthony Newley’s ‘Strawberry Fair’, Shirley Bassey’s ‘As Long as He Needs Me’ and the Kaye Sisters’ ‘Paper Roses’, a multitude of pre-rock throwbacks.

  It’s best to think of 1960 as a pause for breath. Unlikely green shoots were springing up in Hamburg, which nobody but a bunch of drunken sailors would have been aware of. More immediately, there was a revolution happening in the offices and studios on New York’s Broadway.

  1 Merseybeat: the Fourmost’s ‘A Little Lovin’’; punk: ‘Jilted John’ by Jilted John; new pop: Culture Club’s ‘The War Song’; rave: Shaft’s ‘Roobarb and Custard’; Britpop: Space and Catatonia’s ‘The Ballad of Tom Jones’.

  2 Preston was one of the few new names of 1960, and he was a very strange cove. ‘Running Bear’ was written by the Big Bopper, who had died the year before. He followed it with the nursery beat ‘Cradle of Love’ (US no. 7, UK no. 2) and a freakish cover of Shirley and Lee’s R&B hit ‘Feel So Fine’ before disappearing in 1961.

  3 Considering Bert Berns’s magic touch – he wrote ‘Twist and Shout’, Them’s ‘Here Comes the Night’, the Exciters’ ‘Tell Him’, Solomon Burke’s ‘Cry to Me’, the McCoys’ ‘Hang On Sloopy’, Tami Lynn’s ‘I’m Gonna Run Away from You’ – this is extraordinarily unlucky. Berns’s ‘It’s Gonna Be Morning’ is perfect for the swooping range of Lands, who turns it into a lament for the mid-sixties passing of New York as pop’s capital city.

  4 Like most of the hit-makers of this era, he continued to make records for many years after his star had dimmed. One stand-out was the cheeky soul smoocher ‘Ain’t Nothin’ Wrong Makin’ Love the First Night’ in 1975, which sounded like a more honest update of the boastful ‘Handy Man’.

  5 Orbison was of huge significance in Britain and parts of the Commonwealth, where he continued to score hits right through the sixties: ‘Ride Away’ went to number one in Canada in ’65, while the masochistic – even by Orbison’s standards – ‘Crawling Back’ made number two in ’66; the same year saw ‘It’s Too Soon to Know’ at number three in the UK; Australia remained especially loyal, sending 1969’s superficially chirpy ‘Penny Arcade’ (don’t be fooled, it’s about addicted gamblers – ‘roll up and spend your last dime!’) to number one.

  6 The intensity and hardness of mid-sixties singles like ‘Break Up’ and the tinnitus-inducing ‘Move It On Over’ betrayed a Rolling Stones influence. Coincidentally, Shannon was a heavy hero to their producer/manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, and the two got together for the Home and Away album in ’67. A record of full baroque beauty, it was shelved at the time, probably because none of its accompanying singles was a hit. Oldham pulled every Spectorian stunt from the box; songs like ‘Cut and Come Again’ and ‘He Cheated’ recast Del as a black orchid for the flower generation.

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  WALK WITH ME IN PARADISE GARDEN: PHIL SPECTOR AND JOE MEEK

  While the no-man’s-land of 1960 had made stars of Frankie Avalon and Bobby Vee, wipe-clean fifties faces who would inform future revivals like Grease, it had also allowed for a second, slower and less vaunted, wave of modern pop. Pop’s deceleration led to a dark, post-rock ’n’ roll sound, one which would became a fertile nursery for a pair of innovators who began experimenting in earnest, a pair who would give modern pop renewed vigour.

  If rock ’n’ roll’s initial blithe cacophony (1955–58) had liberated teenagers, then the period immediately after (1958–61), like the final scene of The Graduate, saw doubt and fear and a sense of agoraphobia creeping in. These were new and very real teenage emotions, and they needed an artistic outlet, away from the increasingly adult (Darin’s ‘Mack the Knife’, US and UK no. 1 ’59) and plain silly (Brian Hyland’s ‘Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini’, US no. 1, UK no. 8 ’60) records dominating the chart. The Aquatones’ ‘You’, a minor American hit from the tail end of ’58, had articulated this still, small need for calm. It was a 6/8 ballad that owed little to classic rock ’n’ roll beyond its heavy backbeat. The backing track was a mush of repetitive piano, thrummed acoustic guitars and dense, soupy bass. It sounded like the musicians were three rooms away. Over this, a keening female vocal, high and pure yet oddly emotionless, echoing in a well of loneliness, gave the record a hypnotic, womblike quality.

  The single’s eerie qualities would be exaggerated further by the Teddy Bears’ ‘To Know Him Is to Love Him’ (US no. 1, UK no. 2 ’58) a few months later; the vocal was softer but still pure, soothing, almost maternal, and the lyric sat halfway between a love song and a eulogy.1 Again the backing track had a half-speed, sludgy drum sound, everything was soft and heavy at the same time, creating a mantra-like feel. It was remarkable, and after it hit number one in America in late ’58 this sound was soon replicated: Ritchie Valens’ ‘Donna’, Donnie Owens’ ‘Need You’, Rosie and the Originals’ ‘Angel Baby’, all great, all big hits. There was even a Hawaiian variation, Santo and Johnny’s ‘Sleep Walk’, which was another US number one. We can safely assume that David Lynch bought these records.

  By ’61 the soft-heavy sound had been perfected and peaked with the skeletal, delicately terrifying ‘Tragedy’ by the Fleetwoods (US no. 10 ’61) and the Paris Sisters’ ‘I Love How You Love Me’ (US no. 5 ’61). Priscilla Paris had one of the sexiest female voices in all pop. ‘I love how your eyes close whenever you’re near me,’ she sang, in a super-suggestive whisper that, placed over the dense, muffled rock-a-bye backing, simultaneously suggested an eager sexuality and a return to the comfort of the cradle. This and the Teddy Bears’ sole hit were both the work of a young, five-foot-nothing New Yorker called Phil Spector, who was slowly mixing the ingredients for a vast, regal pop that would peak with the Ronettes’ ‘Baby I Love You’ and the Righteous Brothers’ ‘You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’’ three years later.

  In a separate but related proto-goth move, newly liberated teens – as well as yearning for sex and childhood – developed a taste for ‘death discs’ around 1960/61,2 possibly prompted by the early demise of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and Eddie Cochran. In the States, Mark Dinning’s ‘Teen Angel’ (girlfriend dies on a railroad track) and Ray Peterson’s ‘Tell Laura I Love Her’ (boyfriend dies in a stock-car race) were huge hits, but the ‘death disc’ monster was John Leyton’s ‘Johnny Remember Me’, the most thrilling, feverish pop record Britain had yet produced – the drums galloped and the skies darkened as Leyton’s echo-choked voice mourned the girl he ‘loved and lost a year ago’. In a year that also gave us Elvis Presley’s ‘Wooden Heart’ and Acker Bilk’s ‘Stranger on the Shore’, it was a lightning bolt, and with a primetime TV slot3 it couldn’t miss, giving its producer Joe Meek a number one that summer.

  Joe Meek was Britain’s first record producer.4 Before he started working as a studio engineer in 1955, the UK’s pop records were made by sticking a microphone in the middle of the room and placing singers and musicians strategically around it. Meek was the first to challenge this orthodoxy, the first to argue that records didn’t need to directly mimic a live performance, that they could sound more exciting – and more commercial – with a little mechanical manipulation. As an engineer, the Merrie Melodies bow-and-arr
ow effect (‘p-doiiiiing’) he added to Gary Miller’s 1955 single ‘Robin Hood’ (UK no. 10) was his first showcase; Anne Shelton’s ‘Lay Down Your Arms’ (UK no. 1 ’56) featured a shaken tray of gravel to mimic marching feet; on ‘Poor People of Paris’ (UK no. 1 ’56) he added a musical saw to jolly along Winifred Atwell’s ragtime pub piano. Clearly, he had commercial clout. The first record Meek produced on his own was Humphrey Lyttelton’s straight jazz instrumental ‘Bad Penny Blues’ (UK no. 19 ’56), on which he exaggerated the low notes on the piano to make it danceable, got the brushed drums to fizz, and gave Lyttelton his only hit – the Beatles later pinched its feel wholesale for ‘Lady Madonna’.

  Meek was in love with the future (space travel, satellites), Americana (teen idols and cowboys) and the world beyond – ghosts, death, deceased lovers returning as guardian angels. He sought to replicate these obsessions via overdubbing, compression, sound separation and distortion. With his I Hear a New World album (1960) and the Tornados’ trans atlantic number one ‘Telstar’ (1962) Meek’s mind was connected directly to the machinery.

  Along with being tone deaf, incapable of playing an instrument, and possessing a vicious temper that wasn’t helped by his daily diet of steak, coffee and pep pills, Meek was also gay, which gave him deep-seated, lifelong issues. Pop music was as much of an escape route for him as boxing would have been to a kid in Bethnal Green. As an ‘indoors’ child in rural Gloucestershire, Meek had rigged up speakers in the local orchards and played pre-rock 78s to entertain the cherry pickers. His bedroom overflowed with soldering irons and gadgetry. He worked at a radar station during his national service in the early fifties and, soon after, found himself at IBC and Lansdowne studios in London. A high proportion of the best British fifties records – Johnny Duncan’s ‘Last Train to San Fernando’, Lonnie Donegan’s ‘Cumberland Gap’ (no. 1 ’57) – had seen Meek’s hand on the controls. Yet once he became a fully fledged independent producer in 1960 things got serious.