Copyright © Richard Crouse 1998
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior consent of the publisher — or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Reprography Collective — is an infringement of the copyright law.
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Crouse, Richard, 1963–
Who wrote the book of love?: the stories behind the hits
— from Chuck Berry to Chumbawamba
eISBN: 978-0-385-67442-3
1. Popular music — History and criticism. I. Title.
ML3470.C952 1998 781.64’09 C98-930073-0
Published in Canada by
Doubleday Canada Limited
One Toronto Street,
Toronto, Ontario,
M5C 2V6
v3.1
“Credo Elvem ipsum etiam vivere.”
—Anonymous
“The monkey speaks his mind. Yeah.”
—Dave Bartholomew
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
FIFTIES
1 “The Fat Man” Fats Domino
2 “Rocket 88” Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats
3 “Hound Dog” Big Mama Thornton
4 “I Put a Spell on You” Screamin’ Jay Hawkins
5 “Bo Diddley” Bo Diddley
6 “(We’re Gonna) Rock Around the Clock”
Bill Haley and His Comets
7 “Maybellene” Chuck Berry
8 “Tutti Frutti” Little Richard
9 “Heartbreak Hotel” Elvis Presley
10 “Blue Suede Shoes” Carl Perkins
11 “Great Balls of Fire” Jerry Lee Lewis
12 “Tequila” The Champs
13 “Book of Love” The Monotones
14 “The Purple People Eater” Sheb Wooley
15 “To Know Him Is to Love Him”
The Teddy Bears
SIXTIES
1 “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” The Tokens
2 “Can’t Buy Me Love/“Twist and Shout”/“She
Loves You”/“I Want to Hold Your Hand”/
“Please Please Me” The Beatles’ Top Five
3 “Rag Doll” The Four Seasons
4 “Leader of the Pack” The Shangri-Las
5 “Oh, Pretty Woman” Roy Orbison
6 “Wooly Bully” Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs
7 “Hang On Sloopy” The McCoys
8 “When a Man Loves a Woman” Percy Sledge
9 “Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind?”/
“Summer in the City” Lovin’ Spoonful
10 “Hold On, I’m Comin’ ” Sam & Dave
11 “They’re Coming to Take Me Away,
Ha-Haaa!” Napoleon XIV
12 “Fire” Jimi Hendrix
13 “Green Tambourine” The Lemon Pipers
14 “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” Otis Redding
15 “Mony Mony” Tommy James and The Shondells
16 “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Good-bye” Steam
SEVENTIES
1 “American Pie” Don McLean
2 “Mother and Child Reunion” Paul Simon
3 “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” Jim Croce
4 “Smokin’ in the Boys’ Room” Brownsville Station
5 “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet” Bachman-Turner
Overdrive
6 “Fame” David Bowie
7 “How Long” Ace
8 “Philadelphia Freedom” Elton John
9 “Only Women Bleed” Alice Cooper
10 “Jive Talkin’ ” The Bee Gees
11 Variety Is the Spice of Life: A 1970’s Top Five
12 “More, More, More” Andrea True Connection
13 “Who Are You” The Who
14 “My Sharona” The Knack
15 “I Don’t Like Mondays” Boomtown Rats
EIGHTIES
1 “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” Queen
2 “Whip It”/“Satisfaction”/“Jocko Homo” Devo
3 “Take Off” Bob and Doug McKenzie
4 “Burning Down the House” Talking Heads
5 “Maniac” Michael Sembello
6 “Billie Jean” Michael Jackson
7 “She Blinded Me With Science” Thomas Dolby
8 “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” Eurythmics
9 “Jump” Van Halen
10 “Blasphemous Rumours” Depeche Mode
11 “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go: Wham!
12 “Panic” Smiths
13 “Public Enemy Number One” Public Enemy
14 “Love Rescue Me” U2
15 “One” Metallica
NINETIES
1 “Smells Like Teen Spirit” Nirvana
2 “Jeremy” Pearl Jam
3 “Rhythm of My Heart” Rod Stewart
4 “Tears in Heaven” Eric Clapton
5 “Under the Bridge” Red Hot Chili Peppers
6 “Cop Killer” Body Count with Ice-T
7 “Informer” Snow
8 “Creep” Radiohead
9 “Spoonman” Soundgarden
10 “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” R.E.M.
11 “The Macarena” Los Del Rio
12 “Ironic” Alanis Morissette
13 “Anybody Seen My Baby?” Rolling Stones
14 “I’ll Be Missing You” Sean “Puff Daddy”
Combs with Faith Evans
15 “Tubthumping” Chumbawamba
Selected Bibliography
Introduction
The research for this book has taken twenty-five years to complete. I didn’t spend the whole time in a cramped room poring over music magazines and spinning vinyl — the process was a little more organic. From the time I purchased my first record (a 45 of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity”) when I was nine years old, I have always been bewitched with popular music and the people who created it. Hit Parader, Creem and Rolling Stone became my textbooks. I investigated and learned about my fave raves, stockpiling much of the information that appears in this book.
If I had to pinpoint the day the research began, it would be August 25, 1977. It was a big day, an exciting day, just a week before I was set to go back to school, entering the eighth grade. After much thought, my father decided I was old enough to do a solo shop for school supplies. With five $20 bills in my pocket, I was set loose at the shopping mall. All these years later, I can still remember walking past the clothing stores and the department stores with all their loose-leaf binders and Bic pens and making a beeline to the nearest bookstore. Walking through the travel section, the Canadiana shelves, past the stacks of children’s books, I settled in at the music area. You can probably guess the rest of the story. When I left the bookstore, I had a stack of music books and a few crumpled bills. I started that school year with eight 75-cent notebooks, $2 worth of pens and HB pencils, one $14 T-shirt, $80 worth of books on Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Elton John, the Rolling Stones and David Bowie — and a new mistrust from my father. It was a long time until I was allowed to shop on my own again.
Now, a little more than twenty years later, those books still sit on my shelf, along with hundreds of others gathered over the years. They form the basis of Who Wrote the Book of Love?. I love those books and the stories they contain. I have been entertained by them and educated about the artists who made my favorite music. I am reminded of that youthful shopping trip every time I go to a bookstore. I still enjoy leafing through the new musi
c biographies, and I still spend too much money on them. I should thank my parents for not making me take back all those books in 1977. If they had, I might have paid more attention to my schoolwork, and this book might not exist today.
I also wish to thank Don Sedgwick whose early enthusiasm for this book encouraged me to proceed. Kathryn Exner handled the rough manuscript with great care and intelligence, sculpting the words into presentable form. I look forward to working with her again. Doubleday’s Gloria Goodman, Christine Innes, Heather Hodgins and Dara Rowland offered invaluable assistance when I needed to tap their expertise.
Many people helped in the photo research. Thanks to Greg Jones, Tommy Cavalier, John Beaton, Allison at Mutato Muzika, Kirstan Andrews at Peg Productions and Pegi Cecconi at Anthem Records.
The following I would also like to thank for their generous contributions to the book: Stuart “word count” McLean, Scott Dobson, Blair Packham, Marjorie Wingrove, Karin Chykaliuk, John Sebastian, Mark Mothersbaugh, Bob Ezrin, Jerry Samuels, Hilly Kristal, Marc Jordan, Cub Koda and Kathleen Scheibling.
This listing of acknowledgments does not begin to intimate the support, the advice and the many hours that considerate people gave me for this book.
The Fat Man
Fats Domino
Fats Domino was the biggest-selling R & B artist of the 1950s. On his very first visit to a recording studio, he cut a track that would become his signature. “The Fat Man” reached Number Two on the R & B charts in February 1950.
Lew Chudd, the owner of Imperial Records, was looking to expand his label’s sound. Based in Los Angeles, Imperial had tapped into the strong Mexican music scene in that city at the time. In December 1949, he visited Louisiana, hoping to discover some talent in the New Orleans’ clubs. Setting up a temporary office in the Crescent City, Chudd’s first order of business was to hire local trumpeter Dave Bartholomew as his tour guide and artists-and-repertoire man.
During one of their first meetings, Chudd asked Bartholomew if there were any hot, young unsigned talents currently playing in the clubs. Bartholomew paused for a moment, considering a list of talented New Orleans-based players. “I’ve heard about a guy called Fats Domino down at the Hideaway Club,” he said. “I hear he’s pretty good.”
The next night, the pair headed down to Desire Street to hear Domino play piano with Billy Diamond’s combo. As they walked into the club, Domino was doing a solo set, singing “Junker’s Blues,” a New Orleans standard extolling the pleasures of reefer and cocaine use. It was a classic Domino performance — cool and jovial, one part rock and two parts roll. Chudd was impressed with Domino’s laid-back style and instructed Bartholomew to set up a meeting. At this meeting, Domino walked away with a tentative recording deal and a date to lay down eight tracks at a local studio.
In mid-December 1949, Domino made his way to the J & M Studio at the corner of North Rampart and Dumaine streets in New Orleans. Located at the back of a record store, it was a bare-bones setup — a tiny room with only three microphones and three electrical outlets. The musicians were forced to crowd around Domino, the saxophonists sharing the piano mike while the bassist and guitarist shared a second. Domino sang directly into the third as the drummer tried to pound the traps loud enough to be picked up by any of the mikes at all.
First up was “The Junker.” Chudd liked the melody but resisted releasing a tune about drug use. It was 1949, and while the term “junkie” wasn’t yet in wide use, the tune’s lyrics left nothing to the imagination. Chudd asked Domino to keep the tune but lose the lyrics. Not wanting to blow his shot at a recording deal (he was only making $3 a week at the Hideaway), Domino obliged, erasing all references to heroin and cocaine and replacing them with details of himself instead. The original “they call me a junkie, because I’m loaded all the time” transformed into the self-effacing “they call me the fat man, because I weigh two hundred pounds.” The two verses of nonsense lyrics were peppered with Domino’s falsetto impression of a muted trumpet — a vocal trick he used in the clubs — and topped off with a round of barrelhouse piano in the style of his idol Fats Waller.
The band quickly moved on, laying down seven more tracks on that same December afternoon. Several of those cuts were released as singles, but “The Fat Man” was the lone hit from the December 1949 sessions. The revamped tune hit Number Two on the R & B charts in early 1950. But it would be two years before Domino really hit his stride, starting with “Goin’ Home,” a Number One in 1952. After that, he seemed unstoppable, writing and recording constantly, earning the 1955 and 1956 Billboard awards as America’s Favorite R & B Artist and appearing in several films including the teen classic The Girl Can’t Help It. The hits stopped in 1963, but by then, he had racked up an impressive fifty-eight R & B chart entries and thirty-seven Top Forty pop tunes including “Ain’t That a Shame,” “Blueberry Hill” and “I’m Walkin’.”
In 1986, Domino was elected to the Rock-and-Roll Hall of Fame, and the following year, he was granted the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.
Tommy Edwards’s 1958 chart topper “It’s All in the Game” is the only single to feature music written by a vice president of the United States. In 1912, Charles Gates Dawes (later VP under Calvin Coolidge) penned “Melody in a Major,” a piece for flute. Forty years later, song-writer Carl Sigman added lyrics, and it climbed to the top of the hit parade.
Rocket 88
Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats
Recorded on March 5, 1951, “Rocket 88” was the first hit produced at the famed Sun Studios in Memphis. It was also the first Number One R & B hit released by Chess Records on their fledgling label. If that wasn’t enough, many music scholars call it the first rock-and-roll record.
By his own admission, Jackie Brenston wasn’t much of a saxophone player when he met Ike Turner in the late 1940s. The pair got together in Clarksdale, Mississippi when Turner was gathering musicians for his new band. Turner was a perfectionist, and he didn’t unveil the Kings of Rhythm until extensive rehearsals had whipped them into a top-notch club band. During one of their fiery shows in Chambers, Mississippi, B.B. King happened to catch their set. He recommended they head off to Memphis to check out Sun Studios where he had recently recorded some sides.
The band arrived in Memphis after a trip fraught with mishaps. Turner claimed they were arrested three times on the drive from Mississippi, adding that the bass guitar blew off the top of the car, and that they were ticketed for speeding. They arrived in Memphis late at night on March 4, 1951 and had to scramble to find a place to stay.
The next day, they gathered all their instruments and made their way to 706 Union Avenue, Sun Studio’s storefront office. The misfortunes continued. As they were unloading their gear, guitarist Willie Kizart dropped his amplifier, damaging the cone. The hole in the cone distorted any sound pumped through it, giving the band’s guitar a fuzzy edge. Sun owner-producer Sam Phillips liked the sound, although it was toned down a bit by stuffing paper in the hole. When Kizart strummed his guitar, it sounded more like a saxophone than a six-string. Always after a new sound, Phillips miked the broken amp, turning it up in the mix, hoping it would accentuate Kizart’s boogie-woogie guitar riff. Purely by accident, they may have created one of the staples of future rock and rollers — the fuzz guitar.
Once the tape was rolling, the band ran down two numbers, with Turner taking lead vocals and Brenston on alto sax. After a short break, the band reconvened, with Brenston on lead vocals for two songs: “Come Back Where You Belong” and “Rocket 88,” a tune the band had written just the night before as they drove into Memphis. As they were stopped at the roadside with mechanical trouble, a Good Samaritan, driving a 1950 Hydra Matic Drive V-8 Oldsmobile 88 (nicknamed the Rocket 88), came to their rescue. It was a low-end luxury car, and its advertisements boasted a “rocket engine” and “sleek Futurmatic hood.” Inspired by the late-model car, the musicians passed the time working up the tune on the remainder of the drive. Brenston, who grabbed the writer’s
credit on “Rocket 88,” was clearly influenced by Jimmy Liggins’s 1947 “Cadillac Boogie,” liberally borrowing the melody and beat, but adding a blues sensibility not found in the original.
Phillips paid each of the musicians $20 for the session and promised to keep in touch. In 1951, Sun Studios was still a recording service, not a record label. Phillips would record bands and then sell or lease the tapes to record companies for distribution. His main customer, Modern Records in Los Angeles, had slighted him on past business deals, so he decided to send the Kings of Rhythm tunes to Chess Records in Chicago.
The Chicagonians released the two Brenston tracks in April 1951, earning Ike Turner’s ire. Not only had they kept his songs in the vault, but his name wasn’t anywhere on the label. Chess renamed the band Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats. Insult was added to injury as “Rocket 88” zoomed up the charts, while Turner’s two songs were released to less-than-enthusiastic response. This caused a rift between the two that broke up the original Kings of Rhythm. Brenston split to tour the country, cashing in on the immediate success of “Rocket 88.” The singer spent the next two years driving from gig to gig in his own Olds Rocket 88, a gift from General Motors to show their appreciation for all the free advertising the song had given them.
Several more Brenston releases followed, but nothing matched the heat of that first single. By 1960, an alcoholic Brenston reteamed with Ike Turner, only this time he was a paid employee, playing sax for the Ike and Tina Turner Revue. Jackie Brenston died, drunk and homeless, in 1979.
Hound Dog
Big Mama Thornton
When band leader Johnny Otis contracted Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller to write a song for Willie Mae Thornton, they were frightened. Thornton, known as “Big Mama,” was a foul-mouthed, three-hundred-pound R & B singer who looked like she could eat the songwriters for lunch. They forged a tune to fit her personality — brusque and badass. “Hound Dog” topped the R & B charts for seven weeks in 1953.
In Los Angeles in 1950, Mike Stoller had just received a phone call from a friend of a friend. “I hear you play piano,” Jerry Leiber said. “I’d like to get together and collaborate on some songs.” Stoller was skeptical. He was a jazz baby and not interested in writing songs, which he took to mean Top Forty fluff. Leiber was insistent. He had a notebook full of lyrics and needed a piano player to help flesh out his ideas into songs. Twenty minutes later, Leiber was knocking at the door to where Stoller lived with his parents.
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