Jimi pulled out all the stops for the Finsbury Park show. All the tricks he learned from the American R & B bands he had played with whipped the crowd into a near frenzy. They stomped and cheered as he reclined on stage, coaxing sounds from the guitar with his teeth. The show’s capper came when he lit the fluid-soaked guitar, gyrating around the flames like a shaman.
Hendrix later admitted that he had trouble getting the matches lit, but once he did, the guitar “went up like a mini meteorite striking earth.” The response from the press was immediate. With the sound of the crowd still roaring in the background, a press conference was quickly assembled backstage. Press agent Les Perrin blamed the fire on a short circuit in the guitar, not mentioning the lighter fluid lest it seem like a calculated attempt to steal the Walker Brothers’ thunder.
In the coming days and weeks, the Experience and Jimi’s scandalous onstage mischief became front-page news. The same press that had jeered at Jimi now proclaimed him to be “The Black Elvis.” The resulting publicity propelled the band’s new single “Purple Haze” to the upper reaches of the charts. After the pyrotechnic event, musician Curtis Knight stated that Jimi cryptically said he “succeeded in awakening some inner range of cosmic consciousness within that fucking guitar.”
Green Tambourine
The Lemon Pipers
A song that had been turned down by dozens of music publishers excited an executive at Buddah Records enough to order one of his bands to record it. They reluctantly agreed, scoring their only hit in the process. “Green Tambourine” took the Lemon Pipers to the top of the charts in 1968.
Shelley Pinz was a neophyte songwriter with a satchel full of lyrics but no musical arrangements. Paul Leka was a musician/producer who worked at Circle Five Productions. They were introduced by Stan Costa whose uncle was well-known record producer Don Costa. The pair hit it off, working hard to set music to Pinz’s extensive collection of lyrics. One afternoon, she showed up at the office with a new lyric inspired by a newspaper article she had read. It was a story about an elderly busker from England who played music on the street. He was a one-man band, entertaining passersby, collecting money in a tambourine he kept at his feet. Pinz came up with the phrase “green tambourine” after imagining a tambourine filled with money.
Dropping their other projects, the pair worked exclusively on “Green Tambourine,” sure they had a hit on their hands. The problem was, nobody else agreed. Leka shopped the tune to every publisher in New York, only to be turned down every time. All seemed lost until Gary Cannon (who, under the name Gary Katz, would later produce Steely Dan), a young executive for Buddah Records, heard the tune. He flipped out and convinced Buddah president Neil Bogart that it could be a smash. Now they needed a band to record “Green Tambourine.”
The Lemon Pipers were an Oxford, Ohio psychedelic band signed to Buddah. Bogart explained to Leka that he wanted to drop the band but had decided to give them one more chance if they would record “Green Tambourine.” It was Leka’s job to fly to Oxford, present the song and convince them to commit it to vinyl. He flew to Ohio and in the band’s rehearsal space, played them the tune on an upright piano. They hated it. It was too pop sounding for the band who favored longer, drug-influenced psychedelic works. Sensing he was losing his shot at getting this song recorded, Leka told the band that they would be dropped from the label if they didn’t accept it. The Lemon Pipers agreed to get back to him.
Leka took the next plane back to NYC and waited by the phone. The next day, the band called, having had a change of heart. Better than that, they wanted Leka to produce the song. He booked time at the Cleveland Recording Studio in Oxford and cut the tune along with several other tracks including “Jelly Jungle (Of Orange Marmalade)” and “Rice Is Nice,” both of which bubbled under the Top Forty. The recording — featuring the band playing foghorn, green tambourine, toys and other more conventional instruments — was rudimentary. Once back in New York, Leka doctored the track, replacing the drums and adding a string section.
The improved mix of “Green Tambourine” was rushed to radio stations in the New York area. Programmers were told they had an exclusive from a hot new band. The ploy worked, and the single broke big in the New York market. Weeks later, it entered the national charts. Seven weeks further, on February 3, 1968, it was Buddah Records’ first Number One.
The Lemon Pipers followed “Green Tambourine” with several psychedelic offerings, none of which captured the record-buying public’s imagination. Neil Bogart ultimately did drop the Lemon Pipers from the Buddah roster after a self-produced sophomore album failed to produce any chart action.
“MacArthur Park,” songwriter Jimmy Webb’s surreal seven-minute-and-twenty-one-second ode to lost love is actually based on a real place. Webb and girlfriend Susan used to meet for box lunches at MacArthur Park (at Alvarado and Wilshire), a thirty-two-acre patch of greenery in a now-shabby part of Los Angeles. When their relationship ended, he wrote a song about their picnics in the park. “That’s where the image of the cake comes from,” he told writer Joe Smith. “The image is, the rain comes, and the whole thing is going or melting, and then it is gone.”
(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay
Otis Redding
During a well-earned vacation, Otis Redding wrote a song he knew would be a hit. Unfortunately, he didn’t live long enough to see it become the biggest pop hit of his career. “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” was recorded just three days before he died in a plane crash on December 10, 1967.
Otis Redding was exhausted. He had just finished his record company’s promotional European shows, The Stax/Volt Tour. As the headliner, he had to work extra hard to provide a cap to a show that included Booker T & the MGs, Arthur Conley, Carla Thomas, Eddie “Knock on Wood” Floyd and Sam & Dave — showstoppers all. The response in Europe surprised the Memphites. Police intervened in Liverpool, England, nearly stopping the show, when the audience almost collapsed the theater’s balcony. Redding played some of his finest shows on this tour, the intensity of which is captured on the long-playing Live in Europe.
Once back in the United States, Redding had only one more concert commitment — a nonpaying gig at the Monterey Pop International Festival — before taking a rest. This one-off show would be the most important of Redding’s career. Sharing the bill with acts like the Association, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, this concert would bring his soul music to a whole new audience. Redding put in an electrifying show that brought together black and white music and saw him embraced by a primarily white crowd. Writer Kevin Phinney wrote, “… the bundled up energy of the sixties seemed to pour out through Otis and the band.” History records the event as the first major pop-music revolution since the Beatles. Redding was primed for rock superstardom.
In the weeks following his watershed performance at Monterey, Redding rented a houseboat just across from San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge in the small town of Sausalito. On the turntable was Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band, a record Redding listened to over and over, soaking up each note. Encouraged by the refined songwriting of the Beatles, he wrote a song, but it was a different sort of tune. He labored over the lyrics which were inspired by his surroundings. “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” was a moody, introspective tune with a folky feel that he hoped would appeal to the flower-power kids he had wowed at the pop festival.
Back home in Memphis, there wasn’t much enthusiasm for the tune. His wife Zelma particularly detested it. “I really couldn’t get into it,” she told writer Peter Guralnick. “I said, ‘Oh, God, you’re changing.’ ”
Stax Records owner Jim Stewart agreed with Zelma, telling Otis he didn’t think “Dock of the Bay” was nearly as strong as “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long,” Redding’s 1967 hit. Redding’s business partner Phil Walden felt the folky tune was too radical a change and tried to talk the soul singer out of recording it. In retrospect, he admitted that “Dock of the Bay” wasn’t that different from Red
ding’s back catalog, but at the time, it seemed a little too pop. Redding was adamant. “I think it’s time for me to change in my music,” he said. “People might be tired of me.”
“(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” was recorded on December 6 and 7, 1967. As usual, Redding entered the studio with a rough version of the tune, relying on guitarist Steve Cropper to flesh out his musical idea. Cropper took Redding’s intro and one verse, molding it into a finished song. The pair worked out an ad lib rap for Redding to sing over the fade-out. During recording, Redding, who often had trouble remembering the words to his songs, forgot what he was supposed to do. So he whistled instead, perfectly capping the tune. It was a perfect counterpoint to the laid-back surf sounds that swell as the song fades.
Redding never heard the finished recording of “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay.” Three days after recording it, he and all but two members of his band were killed when his twin-engine Beechcraft crashed into the icy waters of Lake Monona, just minutes away from their destination of Madison, Wisconsin. Otis Redding was twenty-six years old.
In the months following his death, Steve Cropper spent countless hours in the studio remixing the unfinished tapes Redding had left behind. The “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” track was completed and sent to Atlantic Records in New York. To Cropper’s surprise, it was rejected. Label head Jerry Wexler felt the vocal was buried too deep in the mix, and the surf sound effect was too predominant. Cropper doctored the tape to Wexler’s specifications, and the single was released in early March 1968. “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” reached Number One, sitting atop the charts for four weeks.
The tune is notable for two charts firsts. It was the first posthumous Number One single. In 1980, when the singer’s sons Dexter and Otis III, performing as the Reddings, brought the tune back to the Hot One Hundred, it became the first time a Number One single had been covered by an artist’s children. Their version hit Number Fifty-Five.
John Fogarty wrote “Proud Mary,” Creedence Clearwater Revival’s first gold disc, on the morning he was discharged from the Army.
Mony Mony
Tommy James and The Shondells
Tommy James had a problem. He had written and recorded a catchy track but was having difficulty coming up with words to go along with it. After a fruitless night of brain-storming with writing partners Ritchie Cordell and Bo Gentry, a fortuitous glance at the skyline of New York City provided the inspiration they were after.
Tommy James had been making music his entire life. Born Thomas Gregory Jackson in Dayton, Ohio in 1947, he began playing ukulele when he was three years old because a regular-size guitar was too large for his small hands. At age nine, he switched to guitar, and by thirteen, he had formed Tommy & the Tornadoes, recording his first single, “Long Pony Tale.” At nineteen, he hit the top of the charts with “Hanky Panky,” a party-rock gem that had been recorded two years previously. The next five years saw James place fourteen songs in the Top Forty including “I Think We’re Alone Now,” “Crimson and Clover,” “Crystal Blue Persuasion” and “Mony Mony.”
The early months of 1968 saw James in search of a Top Ten hit. It seemed that his good-time sound had been replaced on the charts by the Motown sound out of Detroit or acid rock from California. The New York-based singer needed a bona fide killer tune to reestablish his career. He had an upbeat instrumental track he thought could be a hit — just no lyrics.
James, Cordell and Gentry gathered at James’s Manhattan apartment to trade ideas. One thing they agreed on was that the hook of the song had to be an unusual-sounding girl’s name — something along the lines of “Bony Maronie” or “Sloopy” — something nobody had heard before. Time passed. The pressure mounted. James had to record the lyrics the next day, but no title was forthcoming. Searches through dictionaries and thesauri yielded nothing.
In frustration, James walked out to his terrace to take in the cool night air. Looking across the skyline of New York, Tommy James found what he was looking for. In the distance he saw a sign for a major insurance company. The forty-story Mutual of New York building at 1740 Broadway displayed a flashing sign spelling MONY with a dollar sign in the O. That was just the title they had been looking for. “If I had been looking in the other direction,” James told writer Parke Puterbaugh, “it would have been called ‘Hotel Taft.’ ” The lyrics flowed quickly, with James commenting later, “The song [is] kind of etched in stone in New York.”
Rounding up a posse of musicians, friends and people off the street to clap hands and lend a party atmosphere to the recording, James recorded the vocals the next day, confident of the song’s success. “A lot of people thought I was nuts to put out a record like ‘Mony Mony’ in the middle of the Vietnam War,” James said in the liner notes to the 1989 Rhino Records’ retrospective Tommy James & The Shondells Anthology. “How dare somebody come out with a dance record at a time when things were that serious! My feeling was, hey man, there’s enough garbage on the news every night. Who needs to be depressed anymore? If music can’t make you feel good, then what’s it for? We literally had a party going on in the studio. ‘Mony Mony’ was a party on top of a very simple track.”
“Mony Mony” reached Number Three on the Billboard charts. It proved even more popular in Britain where its garage-band sound shot to the top of the charts. The tune got another kick at the can in 1987 when Billy Idol’s live version reached Number One on the American charts.
The logo that saved Tommy James’s career: Manhattan’s Mutual of New York. The original flashing neon sign is gone now, replaced by a glistening chrome emblem, but the significant dollar sign remains.
Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Good-bye
Steam
Many bad records get played on the radio, but artists don’t often set out to make an inferior record. Gary DeCarlo, Dale Frashuer and Paul Leka did, only to see it climb to Number One in 1969.
After a failed stab at pop stardom in the early 1960s, the Chateaus split up. Paul Leka became a songwriter for hire, most notably penning the Lemon Piper’s 1967 hit “Green Tambourine.” He then hooked up with Mercury Records, convincing the label to sign his old Chateaus bandmate Gary DeCarlo to record four solo singles.
With Leka producing, the pair laid down four tracks, all of which were deemed hitworthy. The friends were sent back to Mercury Sound Studios to record a throwaway song to be used as the B-side for the first single. At six o’clock pm, Dale Frashuer, the third member of the Chateaus, dropped by to say hello. They started mulling over old times when someone brought up the 1961 Chateaus’ up-tempo ballad “Kiss Him Good-bye.”
They decided to record the tune, but it needed some work. It was only two minutes long, and Leka reckoned it had to be at least four minutes to discourage DJs from playing it as an A-side. Reworking the tune, Leka sat at the piano, singing “na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na” when he couldn’t think of new lyrics. Someone else chimed in with “hey hey hey.” Thinking they were banging off a quick and nasty B-side, the trio of friends quickly threw together “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Good-bye.”
To keep costs down, no additional musicians were brought into the session. A drum track was spliced together from another song, and Leka played keyboard while DeCarlo banged out the rhythm on a block of wood. The vocal track including the working lyrics — “na, na”s and all — were left in because nobody could think of anything better. However, Leka fattened it by overdubbing it several times, calling on DeCarlo’s cousin for assistance. He sang off key, but what the hell, it was never going to get played on the radio. Right?
Wrong. Mercury A&R head Bob Reno loved the song, insisting it be pressed as a 45 on their subsidiary Fontana label. Leka was appalled. In his words, “Na Na Hey Hey” was an “embarrassing record,” an “insult.” He didn’t want his name connected to the record. Neither did DeCarlo or Frashuer. Leka thought back to the night of the recording. Leaving the studio at five o’clock a.m., someone pointed out a manhole cover billowing steam. The wea
ry producer filed away “steam” as a possible group name for future use. Since no one wanted their name on this record, now seemed like a good time to use the epithet.
The recording of “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Good-bye” credited to Steam was released on Fontana in late 1969. As it rose on the charts, all four of DeCarlo’s singles, released under the stage name Garrett Scott, stiffed. Mercury Records shifted their focus from DeCarlo’s failing career to the rising fortunes of Steam. Leka and Frashuer pulled together some other Chateaus’ tunes and headed for the studio to put together an album for the nonexistent group.
DeCarlo, stung from the failure of his solo singles, refused to participate. Leka recruited a Bridgeport, Connecticut band to record and tour as Steam. They placed one song (“I’ve Gotta Make You Love Me”) in the Top Fifty before vaporizing. “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Good-bye” sold a million copies, hitting Number One in December 1969. DeCarlo, though bitter from the experience, wasn’t an all-around loser. Songwriting royalty checks continue to come in from the dozens of cover versions — including an Italian translation “Na Na Hey Hey Ciao Ciao” — of the song he didn’t want to be a hit.
Three Quick Hits from Burton Cummings: The mysterious “Albert Flasher” of the Guess Who song was a play on the “alert flasher” red light Cummings once saw flickering in a studio. The phrase “Break It to Them Gently” was borrowed from a detective movie. The zip code for Indianapolis, taken off the return address of a letter from a female fan, is the basis for the obscure “46201” reference in the ballad “Sour Suite.”
Who Wrote the Book of Love? Page 9
