Who Wrote the Book of Love?

by Richard Crouse

  Released on Monument Records in the fall of 1964, “Oh, Pretty Woman” was an instant hit. “Great dance beat coupled with a fine arrangement,” said Billboard magazine. Legendary guitarist/producer Chet Atkins raved it was the best commercial record he had ever heard, but, more importantly, record buyers snapped up seven million copies of the tune, pushing it to Number One.

  It was to be Orbison’s last Top Five record. Shortly after the release of the single, Roy left Monument, the home of his past success, for MGM Records, hoping for a greater opportunity to appear in films, like his contemporaries Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis. One movie followed — The Fastest Guitar Alive — proving that Roy was no actor. The hits dried up. Roy’s next Top Ten hit was the posthumously released “You Got It” in 1989.

  Like so many aspects of Orbison’s life, “Oh, Pretty Woman” was tinged with tragedy. On June 7, 1966, his muse Claudette was killed in a motorcycle accident. Two years later, a fire destroyed his home in Tennessee, claiming the lives of firstborn son (by Claudette) Roy Jr. and his half brother Tony (from Orbison’s second marriage).

  On a happier note, Van Halen took a rocky version of “Oh, Pretty Woman” to the Top Fifteen in 1982.

  Wooly Bully

  Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs

  For Domingo Samudio, coming up with a Top Five hit was as easy as “uno, dos, one, two, tres, cuatro.” Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs broke out of obscurity in Texas to place “Wooly Bully” at the top of the charts in 1965.

  Domingo Samudio (his friends called him Sam) always wanted to be in show business. At his Dallas high school, he formed a rock-and-roll band with Trini Lopez who later scored a Top Five hit with “If I Had a Hammer” in 1963. After graduation, and following a four-year stint in the Navy, Sam studied classical music, moonlighting as a rock and roller in the evenings. The rigid regimen of college wasn’t for him, and, after two years, he quit to become a carny. But the draw of music was stronger than the lure of carnival life, and soon he was back in the clubs, playing keyboard for a variety of bands.

  In 1963, he decided to start his own group. He needed a catchy name. One night, a musician gave Sam a new nickname. Watching Sam gyrate around the stage when he sang, the guy called him a sham artist — R & B slang for someone who dances, shaking his hips as he performs. Sam the Sham — he liked the sound of it. It was a good start, but he still needed a name for the backup musicians. A trip to the local bijou solved that problem. Taking in The Ten Commandments, the band members thought the king of Egypt looked rather hip. That next day, they became the Pharaohs, investing a few dollars in brightly colored material to make flamboyant Arab-inspired stage clothes.

  Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs’ good-time shows quickly gained a following in the Texas clubs, and a handful of independent single releases fared well locally. In 1964, MGM Records came calling, offering to bring Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs’ rollicking sound to a larger audience. Sam had the perfect song for the first single. It was a dance song, featuring a heavy beat provided by drummer Jerry Patterson. With words based on “The Hully Gully,” a popular dance that had been the subject of several hits (“Baby Hully Gully” by the Olympics, “Hully Gully Again” by Little Caesar and the Romans and “Hully Gully Baby” by the Dovells), Sam was sure he had a song that couldn’t miss.

  In the studio, just minutes before they were set to record, an MGM executive notified the band that MGM wasn’t interested in releasing another “Hully Gully” record. They would have to come up with something else. Sam counted in the band, making up new lyrics on the spot. Wooly Bully was the name of his cat and fit the meter of “Hully Gully,” so he started from there. He improvised a whole new set of lyrics as the band recorded three takes of the song. The now-famous Tex-Mex “Uno, dos, one, two, tres, cuatro” countdown to the song was also done on the spur of the moment. Sam wanted it taken off the record, but the rest of the band loved it. So the bilingual opening stayed.

  The danceable novelty struck a chord with record buyers who lapped up a million copies of the single in 1965. Radio programmers were a little more cautious. Convinced that Sam’s nonsense lyrics were obscene, the tune was banned by many stations. This only piqued the public’s curiosity, and it propelled “Wooly Bully” to Number Two in May 1965. Later that year, it was nominated for Best Contemporary Performance by a Group at the Grammys, losing to the Statler Brothers’ “Flowers on the Wall.” Billboard magazine named it Record of the Year for 1965.

  Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs placed several more songs in the Top Forty before splitting up in 1968. Sam continued a career in music — after a brief stint as a street preacher in Memphis — writing songs for others and scoring films.

  Procal Harum’s “A Salty Dog” was inspired by a wood carving in a Cleveland bar that read “Good God, Skipper, We done run aground!” and not by some ancient tale of mariner mishap.

  Hang On Sloopy

  The McCoys

  In the music business, timing is everything. Nobody learned this lesson better than Rick and the Raiders who, under the name the McCoys, registered a Number One hit with 1965’s “Hang On Sloopy.”

  This is a story of two bands. In Dayton, Ohio, a combo of teenage musicians called Rick (Zehringer) and the Raiders were enjoying local success playing sock hops, school dances and local clubs. The 1965’s single “You Know That I Love You” sold well in Dayton but failed to make any impact on the national charts.

  Meanwhile, another group, the Strangeloves, had a single — “I Want Candy” — in heavy radio rotation. As the name intimates, the Strangeloves were a bizarre group. Their public persona was that of three brothers — Miles, Giles and Niles from Armstrong, Australia — who wore garish suits and aboriginal headgear. The catch was that they weren’t siblings, and they weren’t Australian. In reality, they were American writer/producers Bob Feldman, Jerry Goldstein and Richard Gottehrer. The writers for hire operated out of New York’s renowned Brill Building, producing a Number One hit in 1963 with “My Boyfriend’s Back” by the Angels. Like many American rock and rollers, the writers were bumped off the charts in the early sixties by the wave of British talent led by the Beatles. They concocted their Australian band as the exotic “Down Under” answer to the British Invasion.

  Their first 45, “I Want Candy,” fusing a Bo Diddley beat with the band’s mimicry of African Masai tribal percussion patterns, became fashionable enough for them to embark on a tour. The stint on the road proved to be wildly successful. The pseudo-Aussies were greeted in most cities by throngs of fans waving “Welcome to the US” signs. The Australian Invasion was a hit, but they needed a follow-up single. Dusting off a song that had been written in 1954 by their boss, Bang Records’ label head Bert Berns (with Wes Farrell), “My Girl Sloopy” became their next planned single. The Strangeloves added the song to their live set.

  Back in Dayton, Rick and the Raiders were honing their craft, building up a repertoire of pop and soul covers that guaranteed them work every weekend. A chance meeting with the Strangeloves at a mid-summer concert for station WING in Ohio was about to change their lives. Retained as a backup band for the Strangeloves, Rick and the Raiders belted out a raucous set that impressed the canny New Yorkers despite drummer Randy Zehringer having to stand to play so his foot could reach the kick drum pedal.

  The timing couldn’t have been better for the young band. The counterfeit Aussies had just received word that after hearing the response “My Girl Sloopy” garnered at the Strangeloves’ shows, British Invasion act the Dave Clark Five planned to rush release a cover of the tune. This would effectively squash any chance of the Strangeloves’ version seeing any chart action. It was a real catch-22. They couldn’t release “Sloopy” without cutting into the sales for “I Want Candy” which was still climbing the charts. The timing couldn’t have been worse.

  Then Feldman, Goldstein and Gottehrer had a brainstorm: Hire the Raiders to rerecord a vocal track on the existing Strangeloves’ track, thereby scooping the DC5. The Raiders w
ere an obvious choice. They were a good band, but more importantly, they had teen appeal with Beatle-style mop-top haircuts. In a scene that could have been ripped out of a Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland flick, after the show, as the roar of the crowd still rang in their ears, Rick and the Raiders were offered a recording deal with Bang Records. Because they were minors, the producers had to convince Mr. and Mrs. Zehringer to let the youths go to New York. The parents agreed, booked time off from work and left the next day for the Big Apple.

  Many changes were to come. The producers felt that the band’s name was too similar to another up-and-coming group — Paul Revere and the Raiders — and asked the boys to come up with a new moniker. A family photo album showed the young Raiders in a previous incarnation as the McCoys in tribute to a Ventures’ song the boys favored. The Raiders once again became the McCoys. The producers were so pleased with the name that they briefly discussed pairing the lads up with an all-female act called the Hatfields to get some free publicity.

  Also, they felt that Rick Zehringer wasn’t a catchy enough name for the lead singer of their next chart buster. But the sixteen-year-old wasn’t keen to change his name. He wanted his parents to be proud of their family name’s good fortune, but he softened after seeing a small derringer gun on Bang Records’ logo. Rick Derringer was similar enough to his real name to satisfy his parents and hip enough to appease the producers. Finally, the title of the song was changed from “My Girl Sloopy” to the groovier-sounding “Hang On Sloopy.”

  On arrival in Manhattan, the newly christened Derringer was given a copy of the instrumental track and guidelines on how to sing it. Several days of rehearsal, with brother Randy singing harmonies, followed. At the recording session, the brothers added a vocal track, with Rick throwing off a now-classic garage-rock guitar solo after the second chorus. When the track was complete, the brothers could see the producers through the control-room window jumping up and down, yelling, “It’s gonna be a Number One!”

  Less than two months later, “Hang On Sloopy” was at the top of the charts, and the McCoys became teen idols. It just goes to show, being in the right place at the right time makes some rock-and-roll dreams come true.

  When a Man Loves a Woman

  Percy Sledge

  A hospital orderly with woman troubles improvised a heart-tugging soul ballad live on stage. “Wasn’t no heavy thought to it,” he said in Gerri Hershey’s Nowhere To Run. “I was just so damned sad.” “When a Man Loves a Woman” was Number One for two weeks in May 1966.

  By day, Percy Sledge worked as an orderly at Colbert County Hospital. On Sundays, he sang in the choir at the Galilee Baptist Church in his hometown of Leighton, Alabama. Most nights, though, he could be found onstage at any one of the area’s local clubs, singing lead in the Esquires Combo. They played Motown and Beatles’ covers and were a popular draw with the dance set.

  One night, other band members noticed Percy was off. He flubbed the lines to songs he had sung dozens of times. Finally, he stopped completely, unable to sing the band’s usual repertoire. After a lengthy pause, with the eyes of the audience burning through him, he asked the band to play something. Anything. It didn’t matter. Bass player Cameron Lewis and keyboardist Andrew Wright chose a key and played a slow blues. Sledge, upset about a love gone wrong, improvised lyrics that sprung deep from his broken heart. Tears stained his face as he bared his emotions for all to see. The crowd went crazy. They loved the tune.

  Weeks later, he was able to control his emotions and work on refining the song. After a few hours of rehearsal, the band molded Sledge’s improvised rap into a polished ballad. Sledge gave song-writing credit to Lewis and Wright, a move that earned them hundreds of thousands of dollars in the decades to come. With the song in good shape, Sledge approached Quin Ivy, a well-known Alabama producer, in hopes of committing the song to vinyl.

  Ivy was swayed by both Sledge and “When a Man Loves a Woman,” as the tune was now called. After an audition at Ivy’s Tune Town, a record shop, a deal was struck to record the tune, using engineer Marlin Greene on guitar and Rick Hall’s Muscle Shoals musicians from Fame studios as backup. They laid down the track at Ivy’s South Camp Studios, with Sledge turning in an impassioned vocal that, as Dave Marsh wrote, makes it “… easy to forget that there’s anybody on earth except him, his girl and you.”

  Fame studio honcho Rick Hall was so taken with the song that he submitted it to a friend at Atlantic Records, fishing for a national distribution deal. They picked up the demo, turning it into a Number One record, selling a million copies in 1966. The deal also reaped benefits for Hall. As a result of the runaway success of “When a Man Loves a Woman,” his session men became in demand. Atlantic Records was so keen to cash in on the Fame Studio’s Muscle Shoals sound that they sent their latest soul sensation to Alabama in hopes that some of the magic would rub off on him. His name was Wilson Pickett, and under Rick Hall’s tutelage, he would turn out a stunning string of soul hits including “Land of 1,000 Dances,” “Funky Broadway” and “Mustang Sally.”

  “When a Man Loves a Woman” was Sledge’s only Top Ten hit, although he continued to produce fine soul records into the eighties.

  Al Kooper maintains that the 1968 hit “I Can’t Quit Her” that he wrote for Blood, Sweat and Tears was the only song in rock-and-roll history to contain the word “proselytized.”

  Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind?/ Summer in the City

  Lovin’ Spoonful

  Like many musicians, John Sebastian was motivated to put together a rock-and-roll band after seeing the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964.

  The night of the broadcast, Cass Elliott invited Sebastian and Canadian-born Zal Yanovsky to her apartment. As they (and seventy-three million others) watched the show, John and Zal were excited by the potency of the Beatles’ four-piece rock-and-roll setup. The two young men played guitars for hours afterward, cementing a personal and professional friendship that would blossom over the next four years.

  In 1965, subsequent to a brief stint with Cass Elliott and Denny Doherty (later of the Mamas and the Papas), John and Zal enlisted bassist Steve Boone and drummer Joe Butler. Taking their name from a Mississippi John Hurt blues song which included the verse, “I love my baby by the lovin’ spoonful,” songwriter Sebastian merged a unique blend of jug-band, rock-and-roll, folk and blues influences into a winning formula of electric good-time music that Rolling Stone called “effervescent pop.”

  During their heyday — 1965-67 — the Lovin’ Spoonful placed ten Sebastian-penned tunes in the Billboard Top Twenty. “I only wrote songs out of desperation,” says Sebastian. “I can’t say that I came at it with high aspirations. I didn’t consider myself a songwriter [when] I was writing several of those songs that were visible at the time [1965-66]. It was mainly that we were running out of material. I was just trying to supplement with feels we didn’t have. We needed to play a lot of different things.”

  Here are the stories of two of the Lovin’ Spoonful’s biggest hits.

  DID YOU EVER HAVE TO MAKE UP YOUR MIND?: Number Two, May 14/66

  “Nothing was ever consummated,” chuckles Sebastian, on the teenage crushes that inspired the Lovin’ Spoonful’s hit “Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind?” “This was a time before that kind of thing started to happen. We were a little young.”

  One of Sebastian’s most sparkling pop offerings was the Spoonful’s fourth single in May 1966. Two sets of sisters — the Robinson girls and the Lorch twins — were Sebastian’s co-muses.

  Jump back to summer vacation 1960. During the school year, sixteen-year-old Sebastian discovered that playing Duane Eddy-style rock and roll — twanging guitar and squealing sax — was a good way to meet girls. “I was using this band experience as a way of having a life while I was going to prep school,” he said. He signed on as a drama counselor at Apple Hill Camp with the idea of wowing women with his rock-and-roll attitude.

  “I went up to this summer camp thinking
, ‘I’m going to pull my collar up and grease my hair back, and these girls are going to go crazy,’ ” he said. “Well, nothing could be farther from the truth. Nobody was even interested. What was happening was that all these girls from Massachusetts and New York were actually into folk music.”

  He rethought his strategy, threw away the Brylcream and eventually learned to play the Autoharp to impress the folk-loving vacationers. “I was crazy for two different sets of sisters over the course of five years that I was a summer camp counselor,” he said. “These sisters worked as counselors as well and, in fact, had many things in common. Their parents were all educators, and they were very worldly New York kids. I was falling in love, usually with the first sister and then the second.”

  Six years after his first summer at Apple Hill Camp, Sebastian recalled his unrequited teenage love triangles in music, penning the song in the back of a cab on the way to a recording session. A near flawless guitar pop song, “Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind?” secured Sebastian’s reputation as a mainstream rock-and-roll songwriter of exceptional quality. The tune settled at the Number Two spot on the Billboard charts for two weeks in 1966, held out of the top position by the Rolling Stones’ “Paint It Black.”

  “Sometimes things don’t pay off right away,” he said, reflecting on the song’s success. “They pay off in the long run. Although nothing ever happened [with the sisters, the song] was one of the ways that those unconsummated love affairs paid off.”

  SUMMER IN THE CITY: Number One, July 23/66

  Lovin’ Spoonful legend has it that the lyrics to this 1966 Number One hit were written as a school project by John’s brother Mark who received a failing mark for his efforts. Three decades after the release of “Summer in the City,” John Sebastian wanted to set the record straight.