Hugo and Luigi brought in opera singer Anita Darien to supply the high soprano part, while drummer Panama Francis was told to pile newspapers on top of his drum kit to muffle the sound. The single was released in October. In the meantime, Siegal got married and started a day job to help pay the bills. When the record started to sell, his manager called advising him to quit working. “ ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’ is going to be a smash,” he said.
With the help of DJ Dick Smith at WORC in Worchester, Massachusetts, who pumped the song mercilessly on his show, “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” broke nationally, becoming a Number One hit in December 1961. The success of that song was never equaled by the Tokens who only managed to place two more singles in the Top Forty. Their greatest triumph came as producers of other people’s records. While “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” was racing up the charts, the band signed a production deal with RCA that would eventually yield the Chiffons’ “He’s So Fine,” “Tie a Yellow Ribbon” for Tony Orlando and Dawn and a remake of their biggest hit by Robert John which hit Number Three in 1972.
Those Are People Who Died: Dion’s 1968 Top Five folk-rock hit “Abraham, Martin and John” was written by Dick Holler as a eulogy to a quartet of American heroes – Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King and the Kennedy brothers John and Robert. The younger Kennedy was also memorialized by Crosby, Stills and Nash in the album cut “Long Time Gone.”
Can’t Buy Me Love/Twist and Shout/She Loves You/I Want to Hold Your Hand/Please Please Me
The Beatles’ Top Five
For one week in 1964, the Beatles accomplished something unheard of in the history of pop music. Riding the wave of Beatlemania that was sweeping North America, the Fab Four were breaking sales records, monopolizing the charts in a way that no band before or since has been able to do. In the week of April 4, 1964, they were the “toppermost of the poppermost,” with a staggering ten singles in the Hot One Hundred — and all the positions on the Top Five.
CAN’T BUY ME LOVE: Number One
This song was composed in January 1964 in Paris during an eighteen-night stand at the Olympia Theater. The band was put up at the ritzy George V Hotel, just off the Champs Elysees. They were virtual prisoners in their rooms, having attained such a degree of popularity that venturing out in public presented a risk to their security. To pass the hours, Paul had a grand piano moved into his suite so he and John could work on songs. At the hotel, they collaborated on “One and One Is Two” for Billy J. Kramer while Paul wrote “Can’t Buy Me Love.”
They entered Paris’s Pathe Marconi Studio on George Harrison’s twenty-first birthday to record the song. Producer George Martin rearranged the tune, suggesting they kick it off with the chorus. The simple twist in song structure gave the song an exciting start that grabbed listeners from the opening notes. “Can’t Buy Me Love,” originally released as a single, was later included on the sound track for A Hard Day’s Night.
In 1966, McCartney laid to rest the rumors that “Can’t Buy Me Love” was inspired by the prostitutes the band met in Hamburg in their early career.
“Absolutely not,” was his answer, “that’s going a bit too far.”
TWIST AND SHOUT: Number Two
“Twist and Shout” was the final number recorded for the Please Please Me long player. After an intense day of recording, George Martin needed one more song to round out the album. Lennon had almost lost his voice from singing nonstop but agreed to do one more tune. The boys chose the Isley Brothers’ “Twist and Shout” (written by Bert Russell and Phil Medley), a song they had covered in their early club gigs. John’s throat was sore and raw, so he was only able to run through the song once. He delivered a fine raspy vocal but could be heard hacking and coughing at the end of the tune. A live version of “Twist and Shout” recorded at the Star Club in Hamburg, Germany in 1962 was released in 1977.
SHE LOVES YOU: Number Three
McCartney wanted to try something a little different with this song. Holed up at the Turk’s Hotel in Newcastle while on tour in June 1963, John and Paul sat on their beds strumming guitars. Previous tunes had been written as statements of love — “Love Me Do,” “Please Please Me,” “From Me to You.” This time, he wanted to add a third party. Together, they wrote a tune about a broken relationship, offering advice to a friend on how to mend it. The “woo woo” section was borrowed from the Isley Brothers’ hit “Twist and Shout,” a refrain that Lennon says “we stuck into everything — “From Me to You,” “She Loves You” — they all had that ‘woo woo.’ “Paul’s father recommended changing the now-famous “yeah, yeah, yeah” to the more proper “yes, yes, yes” to maintain some sense of British dignity. The boys luckily rejected this idea.
I WANT TO HOLD YOUR HAND: Number Four
The Beatles’ first US Number One hit was written in the basement of McCartney’s girlfriend’s home. He and John would spend hours at Jane Asher’s house working out tunes on the family’s piano. One afternoon, while they were hanging out, they worked out the structure and lyrics of “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” with Paul on piano and John on pedal organ. For the chorus, John borrowed a technique from an LP loaned to him by a friend — a record of French experimental music with a musical phrase repeated over and over as though the needle was stuck in the groove. John appropriated this effect on the “I can’t hide, I can’t hide, I can’t hide” part of the tune. At the time of its release, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was the biggest-selling British single of all time, with advance orders of 940,000 copies. Worldwide sales now have exceeded fifteen million.
PLEASE PLEASE ME: Number Five
John Lennon claimed complete credit for this song. Sitting in his bedroom at 251 Menlove Avenue in Liverpool, he intended to write a song in the style of Roy Orbison. He started off with an idea lifted from a 1932 Bing Crosby song called “Please.” He was intrigued by the double use of the words “please” and “pleas” in this Leo Robin/Ralph Ranger tune. Then, after listening to a 45 of Orbison’s “Only the Lonely,” he penned “Please Please Me,” trying to emulate Orbison’s style. When the song was presented to producer George Martin, he thought it sounded so much like Orbison that he changed the arrangement to avoid any comparison to the American rock legend. “Please Please Me” was the Beatles’ first Number One hit in Britain.
On the stereo remix of “Please Please Me,” careful listeners will note a mistake as John and Paul sing different words.
Three Tunes About One Woman; George Harrison’s first A-side single release, 1969’s “Something,” was a tender love song in tribute to his wife Patti Boyd. Eric Clapton hit the charts twice with songs about Boyd. “Layla,” the 1972 Top Ten hit for Clapton’s group Derek and the Dominoes, was written as a locution of love for Boyd who was still married to the Beatle. Several years later, after Boyd had left Harrison for Clapton, he penned “Wonderful Tonight.” On the surface, it was a gentle gem of a song, but bubbling underneath was Clapton’s true meaning. He wrote the song to voice his aggravation in waiting for Boyd to finish getting dressed to go out. Apparently, it took her some time to put on her face, and she wouldn’t leave the house without positive feedback from her husband. Tired of waiting, the frustrated guitarist would always reply, “Darling, you look wonderful tonight.”
Rag Doll
The Four Seasons
A young girl who made her living washing car windows at a stoplight in Hell’s Kitchen inspired Bob Gaudio to write “Rag Doll,” the Four Seasons’ last big hit of the sixties.
In 1964, Gaudio, a former member of the Royal Teens (who joined the Four Seasons after scoring a Number Three hit in 1958 with the Teens’ “Short Shorts”), was on his way home to New Jersey after a recording session with the Four Seasons in New York City. Driving through the Lincoln Tunnel, he exited on Westside Highway near 10th Avenue in an area known as Hell’s Kitchen. While stopped at a traffic light, a kid approached his car, washcloth in hand. In that neighborhood, youths streamed into the streets, cleaning windshields, hoping for a qua
rter tip for their trouble. He couldn’t tell whether the kid was a boy or a girl until he saw her unwashed face, with a little cap perched on her head. He took in her whole appearance — ragged clothes, holes in her stockings — and immediately felt sorry for her. Digging in his pockets for something to give, he was embarrassed to discover he didn’t have any change. The smallest he had was a $5 bill, an astronomical amount to a street kid in 1964.
He hesitated to give her the bill, but a second look at her dirty, sad face convinced him to turn over the cash. She took the money without saying thank-you. Instead, tears welled up in her eyes. Pulling away, he caught one last look at her in his rearview mirror, standing in the road, staring in amazement at the $5 bill.
Over the next two weeks, he worked on “Rag Doll,” turning the story of the street waif into a ballad about class struggle. Written from the singer’s point of view, Gaudio wrote about a man in love with a young woman who is scorned by his family and society. But the creative process wasn’t a smooth one. Suffering from writer’s block, Gaudio found himself unable to finish the song and considered shelving it. Enlisting the help of producer Bob Crewe, they fleshed out the story, wrote musical arrangements and presented it to the Four Seasons.
The recording session for “Rag Doll” almost didn’t happen. Unable to use their usual studio or engineer, the band had second thoughts about doing the song. However, they decided to go ahead with the session. Instead, they used a New York demo studio, and worked with an engineering crew they had never met before.
Despite their qualms, the session was fruitful, producing a song Dave Marsh called a “gorgeous blast of Italian R & B.” Complete with Frankie Valli’s gliding falsetto and Bob Crewe’s grandiose Phil-Spectorized production, the tune — all crashing drums and thick-layered harmonies — soon roared out of radios and rose to the top of the charts. However, the sublime American pop of “Rag Doll” was knocked out of the Number One position by “A Hard Day’s Night,” beckoning the beginning of the British Invasion. The Four Seasons continued to place songs in the Top Twenty, but they were never again able to hit the top spot in the 1960s.
Leader of the Pack
The Shangri-Las
Two sets of sisters, Mary and Betty Weiss and Marge and Mary Ann Ganser, were billed as “The Queens of the Musical Melodrama.” Working under the name the Shangri-Las, they released a string of mid-sixties’ hits that featured sound effects in their songs of teen angst and rebel boyfriends. “Leader of the Pack” was their crowning achievement, reaching Number One on the Billboard charts in October 1964.
August 1964 was a thrilling time for the two sets of sisters from Queens, New York. “Remember (Walking in the Sand),” a teen soap-opera song complete with the plaintive cries of seagulls in the background, was quickly climbing the charts. The fresh-faced teens were becoming overnight stars. “One day they’re eating pasta,” said producer George “Shadow” Morton in Alan Betrock’s book Girl Groups: The Story of a Sound, “the next day they’re eating chateaubriand, and they don’t even know how to pronounce it.”
In the early summer of 1964, Morton had bluffed his way into the studio after a meeting with crack songwriter/producer Jeff Barry. The brash Morton talked Barry into giving him some studio time to record a “hit song.” The only problem was, he had never written a song. He couldn’t even play an instrument, pretty much a prerequisite for a songwriter/producer. He could, however, hear the song in his head, and he was convinced he could come up with a hit.
Booking studio time and rounding up musicians (including a fifteen-year-old Billy Joel on piano and, if you believe the rumors, a teenage Iggy Pop on drums), Morton headed to record a demo. On the drive there, he pulled the car to the side of the road and in twenty minutes, wrote “Remember (Walking in the Sand).” Once at the studio, he described the sounds in his head to the musicians. “You play boom boom boom,” he instructed the piano player, and so on. At the end of the session, he had produced a seven-minute version of the tune. It was too long for the radio, but he had proved he could do the job. After editing and rerecording a tighter version of the song, it was released and took off like wildfire. Now they needed a follow-up.
Even Morton hadn’t expected success so quickly, and he didn’t have another tune ready. When Barry asked what he planned to do for the next single, he said the first thing that popped into his head. “It’s called ‘Leader of the Pack.’ ” The record company hated the idea. They said that a song about a girl falling for a biker who is killed in a motorcycle crash had no commercial appeal. Morton insisted it could be a hit, and with “Remember (Walking in the Sand)” riding high on the charts, the company couldn’t refuse him. He was offered time at Ultra-Sonic Studios.
The day of the session, with twenty-two musicians being paid scale to wait around for Morton to show up, he had yet to write the song. The studio manager called in a panic. “Where are you?” he demanded. “I’ll be right there,” replied Morton. He poured a bath, and accompanied by two bottles of champagne and two cigars, Morton wrote “Leader of the Pack” on a shirt cardboard insert with his kid’s crayons.
Finally, in the studio, Morton applied his unusual method of arranging the song. Showing the cardboard lyric sheet to the singers, he instructed one set of sisters to sing the blue lines and the others to vocalize the red lines. The young singers, barely sixteen years old, were so green that they were intimidated by the studio and Morton’s peculiar directions. Jeff Barry had to sit across from Mary Weiss and mouth the words along with her to keep her in sync with the music. Once familiar with the song, she became so caught up in the drama of the lyrics that she began to cry. A careful listen to the record reveals her audible sobs.
A suggestion from Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich added extra drama to the song. They asked Joey Veneri, a studio engineer, to bring his motorcycle to the echo chamber and recorded its revving for the opening of the song. The recommendation earned them a writing credit on the tune (and, no doubt, hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties). As sound effects were not the norm on Top Forty records, the realistic motorcycle din, the addition of the noise of screeching tires and the collision of the vehicles set this record apart from anything else heard on the radio in 1964.
The tragic tale of girl meets boy and girl loses boy to a terrible traffic accident was an instant hit with record buyers. But the mainstream press wasn’t as enthusiastic. Editorials dubbed the tune “teenage trash,” and “Leader of the Pack” was banned at some radio stations. Despite the controversy (or perhaps because of it), the “death disc shocker” nonetheless reached the peak of the Billboard charts only six weeks after its release.
Baby boomer President Bill Clinton named his daughter Chelsea after a Joni Mitchell song, “Chelsea Morning.”
Oh, Pretty Woman
Roy Orbison
Roy Orbison’s first wife Claudette inspired two songs during their nine-year marriage. The first, “Claudette,” recorded by the Everly Brothers, barely made the Top Thirty, but the second one was enormous, selling over seven million copies and becoming a rock-and-roll classic in the process. “Oh, Pretty Woman” was Number One for three weeks in November 1964.
“Oh, Pretty Woman” was written one afternoon at the Orbison home in Nashville. Writing partner Bill Dees and Roy were in the living room, trying to come up with a song. The Big “O” was a regular visitor to the charts, placing fourteen songs in the Top Thirty between 1960 and the spring of 1964. His glass-shattering falsetto propelled a series of tragic teen operas like “Only the Lonely (Know How I Feel),” “Crying,” “In Dreams” and “Blue Bayou” into the public consciousness. After the Top Ten success of 1964’s “It’s Over,” the duo had to come up with another chart topper.
As Orbison and Dees strummed their guitars, Claudette interrupted, announcing that she was going downtown to do some shopping. “Do you have any money?” Roy asked. “A pretty woman never needs any money,” Dees said, laughing at his own joke. The three of them thought the remark
was funny, but when the laughter had died down, Dees said, “Hey, that would make a great song title.” “No,” said Roy, “but ‘Pretty Woman’ would.”
By the time Claudette left to do her errand, the men were already working on the song. Roy picked at the guitar as Dees banged out a rhythm on the coffee table. Forty-five minutes later, Claudette returned, and Orbison and Dees had written “Oh, Pretty Woman,” a tune that would become the biggest hit of Orbison’s career.
Wearing his trademark dark-tinted glasses, Roy Orbison performs at Kitchener, Ontario’s Center in the Square in 1981. “In 1975, when I went into the studio to make Born To Run,” said Bruce Springsteen, “I wanted to make a record with words like Bob Dylan that sounded like Phil Spector. But most of all, I wanted to sing like Roy Orbison. Now, everybody knows that nobody sings like Roy Orbison.”
Orbison liked to keep his recording sessions loose. He rarely wrote out arrangements for the band, preferring to leave room for improvisation. This method paid off for him during the recording of “Oh, Pretty Woman,” resulting in the tune’s most distinctive vocal tics. Roy was known around the studio for saying “Mercy” as the reply to a rude joke or comment. As they were committing the song to tape, they came to a note that wasn’t in Orbison’s range. Instead of straining for the note, he substituted “Mercy.” Everyone in the studio smiled, thinking it sounded hip, so it was left in. In a playful mood, he added the growls before the tune’s famous guitar riff in an effort to make the band laugh. Later, he remarked that the “Mercy” line had an interesting effect on foreign audiences. “In France,” he said, “ ‘Mercy’ sounds like I’m saying ‘thank-you.’ ”
Who Wrote the Book of Love? Page 6
