by Bob Stanley
Doo wop had its roots in the thirties. The Ink Spots were a vocal group who scored several international hits (‘Whispering Grass’, ‘Do I Worry’, ‘If I Didn’t Care’, ‘Don’t Get around Much Anymore’) which set a secular template, with Bill Kenny’s high tenor lead at its heart, and the novelty of Hoppy Jones’s basso profundo, which would often drift into a lengthy spoken section. They were widely imitated – Elvis copped their style on ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight’ – and they even made it to Hollywood, appearing in a movie called Pardon My Sarong.
As well as the secular Ink Spots and Mills Brothers, doo wop also had sacred roots, which lay in two different kinds of vocal group – jubilee (multi-voice harmony lead) and quartet (solo lead with harmony backing). Post-war, a bunch of groups emerged who were influenced by both sacred and secular strands, notably the Orioles. If R&B was earthy, then the Orioles were all air: led by the light and clear voice of Sonny Til, they sounded sophisticated, they made girls scream rather unreligiously, and this helped them to cross over from the R&B charts to the US Top 20 with ‘It’s Too Soon to Know’ (1948) and ‘Crying in the Chapel’ (1953).
The Orioles were from Baltimore, and took their name from the Maryland state bird. In their wake, partly as a tribute and partly hoping lightning would strike twice, came a vast number of ‘bird’ groups: the Larks (‘My Reverie’), the Crows (‘Gee’), the Penguins (‘Earth Angel’), the Flamingos (‘I Only Have Eyes for You’), the Robins (‘Smokey Joe’s Cafe’). As with later genres which largely thrived on one-shot, one-hit wonders – girl groups, garage punk, disco, rave – anonymity was built in, and almost seemed prized, as if the groups were just happy to be part of an ongoing scene.
The classic story of a doo-wop act was that a gang of kids would be dragged off the street to record two songs in a shack of a studio. Their ‘manager’ – a local businessman with little feel for the music – then pressed a single which, nineteen times out of twenty, sold locally and maybe made him a few bucks. Typical were the Five Sharps, from the Jamaica housing project in Queens, New York. They recorded a maudlin version of ‘Stormy Weather’ as their sole single.2 Tenor Bobby Ward remembers they were paid in hot dogs and soda pop, and sales were so bad they had to buy their own copies.
Every so often, one of these singles would catch fire. The manager got richer, the group received assurances and, when they turned twenty-one, they realised they’d been turned over. Songwriting credits were falsified, publishing royalties never materialised. None flew higher or fell harder than Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers.
Their influence extends well beyond the range of their recorded legacy. It’s hard to imagine the Jackson Five without the Teenagers; the entire sixties girl-group genre is based on their sound. Lymon was born in Washington Heights in 1942. In 1956 he sold two million copies of ‘Why Do Fools Fall in Love’. The answer to the song’s question is simple – because we’re alive. And few records make you feel more alive than ‘Why Do Fools Fall in Love’.
It starts as a conventional doo-wop single: the bassman sets the beat, and later on there’s a cacophonous sax break. But in between it’s entirely Lymon’s song, fresh and exuberant and unbelievably youthful. It was only the second rock ’n’ roll record to reach number one in Britain. The combination of almost feminine high tenor and bubbling bass was instant fun; anyone could get in on the act and, within a year, there were over seventy groups in the States who featured a black male lead on the edge of puberty.
Unfortunately, the group were hustled by George Goldner, one of the era’s toughest wheeler-dealers but also an inveterate gambler. To give him his due, he was also a fan who understood pop instinctively, and did more to unite black and white in early-fifties America than almost anyone. Originally he was a mambo teacher with a string of dancehalls across New York. Increasing interest from black New Yorkers in the mambo led him to start an R&B label, Rama, in 1953. Pretty soon he realised that black vocal groups could cross over to a white audience if they steered a little closer to pop and a little further away from the church. The Crows’ basic but beautiful ‘Gee’ (‘My my, oh gee. Oh gosh, oh gee. How I love my girl!’) gave him a million-seller, a number-fourteen hit in 1954, appealing to white kids who were just starting to switch their radio dials from Martin Block’s Make Believe Ballroom to Alan Freed’s Moondog show. Sales in New York alone were strong enough to give Goldner low national-chart placings for the Cleftones, the Regents, the Channels; beyond that he scored further Top 20 hits with the Chantels (‘Maybe’, US no. 15 ’58), Little Anthony and the Imperials (‘Tears on My Pillow’, US no. 4 ’58) and the Flamingos (‘I Only Have Eyes for You’, US no. 11 ’59). Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers earned him his first international hit.
Lymon was working in grocery stores by the time he was ten and smoking reefers before he started grade school. He was no doe-eyed innocent. Once the single was a huge hit, Goldner tried to prise him away from the Teenagers, presumably to double his money-making potential, and unfortunately he succeeded – torpid 45s followed, recorded in the UK while he was on tour. Lymon’s and his erstwhile schoolmates’ careers quickly withered on the vine.
On February 28th 1968 Frankie Lymon’s body was discovered on the bathroom floor of his grandmother’s apartment. Three times married, an international star earning $5,000 a week at the age of thirteen, he was dead from a heroin overdose at twenty-six. His last disc, ‘I’m Sorry’, was released posthumously.
Given the naivety, the yearning for serenity in the centre of the city, and its childish love of nonsense syllables, it isn’t surprising that collectors have obsessed over doo wop for so long.3 Its romantic nature – like the love it celebrates, it can never die – is inherent in the music. For this reason, it was also the first form of modern pop to undergo a revival; this was the very first sign that modern pop could feed on its own past. Beyond this, it could get nostalgic.
The rock ’n’ roll explosion had been a narrowing as well as a revelation, as it had dismissed out of hand much of what had gone before, baulking at the sight of Frankie Laine or Mantovani appearing on the same hit parade as Carl Perkins or Frankie Lymon. Part of the unfolding story of modern pop would be that rock ’n’ roll grew up, and over the years it would struggle to reintroduce elements that had been cast aside in the process of its social and commercial breakthrough.
The second generation of doo-wop acts were a clear early signal of this doubt and re-evaluation. The revival came almost entirely from the north-east, where white European immigration had been greatest and the vocal tradition ran deepest. Eschewing the lewder, R&B side of doo wop (the Checkers’ ‘I Wasn’t Thinkin’, I Was Drinkin’’, or the Toppers’ ‘Baby Let Me Bang Your Box’), they focused on rosiness and reveries. Mostly the new groups were Italian, but Spaniards, Poles and Puerto Ricans rode doo wop’s second wave too, using a purity of tone that Smokey Robinson would later make into an art form but which had been beyond the ability of many of the earlier, rougher groups.4 The Elegants’ ‘Little Star’ (US no. 1 ’58), the Mystics’ ‘Hushabye’ (US no. 20 ’59), the Crests’ ‘Sixteen Candles’ (US no. 2 ’59), the Skyliners’ ‘Since I Don’t Have You’ (US no. 12 ’59) and the Capris’ ‘There’s a Moon Out Tonight’ (US no. 3 ’61) are musical wedding cakes, beautifully constructed, very sweet and very poignant, and – though slightly out of sync with the world even when they came out – have become default signifiers of fifties America.
Unlike first-generation doo wop, the new wave existed in something of a bubble, a self-perpetuating, cyclical sound with a solid fanbase – for a while, enthusiasts formed new acts to keep the sound alive. The revival peaked in 1961 with a glut of huge doo-wop hits; the rock ’n’ roll era was effectively over in America, and this was its last gasp. The Marcels’ delicious proto-gabber ‘Blue Moon’ was an odd throwback and a transatlantic number one. There were two more cosmic US number ones in Gene Chandler’s ‘Duke of Earl’ and Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs’ ‘Stay’, both of which pointed to a wa
y forward with early soul stylings, evidenced by a new freedom in the lead vocal. But it is against modern pop’s nature for a genre to consciously sustain itself; eventually it will spoil. When Little Caesar and the Romans scored a telltale US Top 10 hit in 1961 with ‘Those Oldies but Goodies (Remind Me of You)’, it was the sound of people in mourning for doo wop, trying to revive its corpse.5 All that remained was to move on.
1 The term wasn’t in common usage until the seventies, and its origins are disputed. It’s safe to say that ‘doo wop’, ‘boo wop’ and ‘doo wah’ are vocal approximations of a horn section, but the nonsense syllables ‘doo wop’ first appeared on a modern pop single in 1954 – ‘Never’ by Los Angeles group Carlyle Dundee and the Dundees; the first hit with a prominent ‘doo wop’ backing was the Turbans’ ‘When You Dance’ (US no. 33 ’55) a year later. The late New York DJ Gus Gossert is credited with first using ‘doo wop’ as a descriptive term for group-harmony music in the late sixties, but Gossert, maybe out of modesty, claimed it was already being used in California.
2 Extremely rare and only issued on 78, a copy of ‘Stormy Weather’ was discovered and sold at an auction in 1977 for $3,866. This, the only extant copy of the record, is now in a bank vault. Its owners listen to it once every five years. Doo-wop collectors are a fierce breed. Bob Hite, of blues-rockers Canned Heat, used to buy spare copies of any rare record he owned just to smash them and make his copy rarer.
3 Doo-wop fans and nascent record archivists first gathered in Irving ‘Slim’ Rose’s Times Square record shop in Manhattan at the turn of the sixties.
4 A rare example of primitive second-wave doo wop is the Metallics’ ‘Need Your Love’, a west-coast production which featured the imploring falsetto of J. D. ‘Wimpy’ Wright. Wright was already thirty but the other Metallics were teenagers, barely competent, and the production is all wool and wail. And yet, the single has an intangible magic that can bring tears to my eyes every time I hear it.
5 A few flop sequels later, Little Caesar and the Romans released a self-referencing single called ‘Memories of Those Oldies but Goodies’, a sentimental echo of a hit which was already an echo of ‘In the Still of the Nite’.
9
1960: IT WILL STAND
With rock ’n’ roll, three gulfs had temporarily vanished: the gulf between black and white, the gulf between child and grown-up, and the gulf between the US and the UK. This shouldn’t be forgotten, but it often is. What happened at the tail end of the fifties would set up how the memorialisation of this amazing event, its replay in the sixties, seventies and eighties – in American Graffiti, or Happy Days, or a Levi’s ad, or even among hardcore record collectors – would often be at the expense of the feel of the fact.
1960 was a hiatus in modern pop. To kids who had grown up with the shrill call to arms of ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’ or ‘Rave On’, turning on the radio and hearing the lightweight pleasures of Frankie Avalon’s ‘Why’ (US no. 1 ’60), or Cliff Richard’s ‘Voice in the Wilderness’ (UK no. 2 ’60), it might have seemed the moment to move on to different interests: American students like Minnesota’s Robert Zimmerman had their intellect tickled by folk; in Britain, mods and beatniks eschewed pop for various kinds of jazz. In their callow way, these bright kids turned to musics that seemed more overtly clever, less trivial, apparently less disposable than pop. In one way they were right – their intellect was going to be needed to take modern pop out of its post-rock ’n’ roll slough. In another way, they were wrong: pop was going to be the vessel – not folk, not jazz – for the transformation. Besides, there were a number of stronger characters, occupying Top 20 space, who weren’t about to be trampled underfoot by the new vogue for pre-rock forms. They would not idly stand by and watch the rebuilding of walls between age and race. They had the Showmen’s ‘It Will Stand’ as their ‘We Shall Overcome’, possibly the first song to give modern pop – or rock ’n’ roll, at least – the stature of a religion: ‘Some folks don’t understand it, that’s why they don’t demand it. They’re out trying to ruin. Forgive them for they know not what they’re doin’.’
Let’s take a look at the baddies in this part of the story. By 1959 chart-friendly rock ’n’ roll had become formulaic enough for two American promoters to try and invent the perfect pin-up by sending out a questionnaire to three thousand girls. Joe Mulhall and Paul Neff remain a footnote as their computer-printout pop star, a fifteen-year-old Italian American weightlifter called Johnny Restivo, only had one minor hit (‘The Shape I’m In’, US no. 80 ’59). Over the years others would try and improve on Mulhall and Neff’s piece of social engineering, with varying degrees of success.
This new pop process – the streamlining of fifties rock ’n’ roll, tailoring it to teenage girls and blending its more parent-friendly aspects with pre-rock smoothness – had begun with the rise of Paul Anka in 1957. He was an Italian American pin-up with the trappings of a rock ’n’ roll singer, exactly the kind of kid Mulhall and Neff would have been looking for when they dug up Restivo, and he cut a string of huge hits in the late fifties: ‘Diana’ (UK and US no. 1) was the biggest-selling single of 1957, and he followed it with ‘I Love You Baby’ (UK no. 3 ’57), ‘You Are My Destiny’ (US no. 7, UK no. 6 ’58), ‘All of a Sudden My Heart Sings’ (US no. 15, UK no. 10 ’58), ‘Lonely Boy’ (US no. 1, UK no. 3 ’59) and ‘Put Your Head on My Shoulder’ (US no. 2, UK no. 7 ’59), and outsold Elvis in most of Europe. Some of his records – like the comically unhinged ‘Crazy Love’ – sounded more like a John Waters rewrite of the fifties than the genuine article.
Tame and slick, smarmily good-looking and clearly more in thrall to the Rat Pack than Fats Domino, Paul Anka became the prototype for a bunch of coiffed identikit idols who, by 1960, had filled the vacuum left by rock ’n’ roll’s sudden decline: there was Frankie Avalon (‘Venus’) and Bobby Rydell (‘Swingin’ School’) in the States, Mark Wynter (‘Venus in Blue Jeans’) and Craig Douglas (‘Pretty Blue Eyes’) in Britain, all well groomed and milky, enjoyable enough but not especially exciting. Modern pop would see their like recurring whenever times got tough and inspiration was low.
How had rock ’n’ roll dipped so fast? It’s standard practice to say that rock ’n’ roll’s decline began with Buddy Holly’s death, and the contemporaneous disappearance from the scene of Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Eddie Cochran, Little Richard and Elvis. In fact, it had been in decline since mid-1958, when Ricky Nelson’s ‘Poor Little Fool’ ushered in the rock-ballad era: the only new rockers to first appear in ’58 were Bobby Darin, the American equivalent to Anthony Newley, who switched from rock ’n’ roll (‘Queen of the Hop’, ‘Dream Lover’) to Rat Packery within a year; Jack Scott, who history has largely forgotten; and Duane Eddy, an instrumentalist.
The curtain fell on the rock ’n’ roll era – as it would with other glorious pop eras to come1 – in a rather embarrassing wave of novelty records: the Champs’ ‘Tequila’ and Sheb Wooley’s ‘Purple People Eater’ – both US number ones in ’58 – had a slight whiff of self-parody, even if they were hard not to love. Johnny Preston’s ‘Running Bear’,2 the Hollywood Argyles’ ‘Alley Oop’ and Larry Verne’s ‘Mr Custer’ were all history lessons delivered comic-book style, and were all US number ones in 1960. On records like Steve Lawrence’s ‘Footsteps’ (US no. 7, UK no. 9), the archetypal 1960 hit, the production almost sounds sarcastic: the male back-ups go ‘well-uh well-uh’, the girls sing through their noses like eight-year-olds, and Steve himself has a giveaway high-society tone to his voice that somehow sneaked past ABC-Paramount’s youth experts.
By 1960, then, with so many of pop’s independently minded practitioners out of the picture and few new names to keep up the pace, the music industry re-established its grip and attempted to reverse the very real progress of the fifties. Beach movies provided hit singles for the well-groomed Frankie Avalon and curvy ex-Mouseketeer Annette Funicello, the drive-in set’s Fred and Ginger. Symbolically, Bobby Rydell covered Dean Martin’s ‘Volare’
and took it to number two in the US charts, Bobby Darin did the same in Britain with Hoagy Carmichael’s ‘Lazy River’, and Elvis took a thirty-year-old country song – ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight’ – to number one in both countries.
And yet not all of 1960 was bad. On the distaff side, Brenda Lee broke through with ‘Sweet Nothin’s’, and Connie Francis wrung out her hanky on ‘Mama’ (US no. 8, UK no. 2) and ‘My Heart Has a Mind of Its Own’ (US no. 1, UK no. 3) as country and western began to make its post-rock ’n’ roll presence felt. A trio of talented singers emerged, all direct descendants of the Orioles’ Sonny Til: Hoagy Lands, who worked closely with Brill Building writer Bert Berns,3 and deserved but never scored a hit; Jimmy Jones, who had two monsters with the rickety ‘Handy Man’ (US no. 2, UK no. 3 ’60) and ‘Good Timin’’ (US no. 3, UK no. 1 ’60) but faded fast;4 and Dee Clark, screwed up and intense, who usually saved his best, inhumanly high notes for the last thirty seconds of hits like the sweetly harrowing ‘Raindrops’, a US number two in 1961.
Though the major beneficiaries of 1960’s hiatus were the smooth teen idols, floating in and around the makeweights were some new, more durable names: Roy Orbison (‘Only the Lonely’, US no. 2, UK no. 1), Dion (‘Lonely Teenager’, US no. 12), and a year later Gene Pitney (‘Town Without Pity’, US no. 13, UK no. 32) and Del Shannon (‘Runaway’, US and UK no. 1). They were men, not boys; they walked alone, self-sufficient with their songwriting and instrumentation, and in this they were unwitting pointers to the future. All of them seemed to live harder, hurt harder, than the Anka-ites and their music was solidly emotive. Let’s take a closer look.