Once Stoller stopped staring at Leiber’s eyes — one blue, one brown — the two bonded quickly. Referring to the battered notebook, Leiber sang his lyrics, dancing around the room, while Stoller banged out blues chords on the family’s upright piano. On the wall hung an autographed picture of George Gershwin, a mentor perhaps, whose presence lent support to the teenagers. One of their early songs came easily. “It was like spontaneous combustion,” says Leiber on the creation of “K.C. Lovin’,” a minor hit for Little Willie Littlefield in 1952. (Wilbert Harrison took the song, renamed “Kansas City,” to Number One in 1959.)
The success of that song brought them attention in music circles. Band leader Johnny Otis invited the nineteen-year-olds to one of Big Mama’s rehearsals — a meet-and-greet with the singer that would hopefully produce a new tune for her upcoming record. They watched her run through a few tunes when an idea hit them like a flash. By the time they reached the parking lot and Stoller’s 1937 Plymouth, they already had the genesis of the tune. Banging out the beat on the car’s hood, Leiber imagined Big Mama admonishing an unfaithful lover. “You ain’t nothing but a.…” He tried to come up with a low-down, dirty snub — one that would roll off Big Mama’s tongue. Then it came to him. “… nothing but a hound dog.” He scribbled lyrics furiously in the car on their way back to Stoller’s apartment. Once at the piano, it took less than ten minutes to write the tune. That same afternoon, they returned to the rehearsal with the finished song.
Leiber and Stoller were hyped teaching the band their parts while Big Mama learned her lines. They were sure this could be a hit. But during the first run through, something was wrong. It sounded like a ballad, not the low-down dirty blues they had envisioned. What should they do? Neither one wanted to tell Big Mama how to sing the blues, but somehow they needed her to get dirty and growl out the lyrics. “We can’t teach her,” they thought, “but we can show her what we had in mind.” The band howled as the two white boys played the song, with Leiber growling through the lyrics trying to impersonate a spurned woman.
A few days later at the “Hound Dog” recording session, with Leiber and Stoller producing for the first time, the singer changed her tune. Big Mama snarled the lyrics, singing the hell out of every line. The band ran through the tune twice, and Thornton delivered incredible readings both times. The second one made the cut. “It was killer,” said Stoller. By the time Leiber and Stoller turned twenty, in the spring of 1953, “Hound Dog” had reached the top of the R & B charts. Later that year, Cash Box named it Best Rhythm and Blues Record of 1953.
Three years later, a young singer named Elvis Presley would make “Hound Dog” world famous, selling seven million records in the process. Presley first heard the song in Las Vegas in 1956. It was his first time in Vegas, and he was keen to check out some of the local hot spots. Meandering into a casino lounge, he watched a band called Freddie Bell and the Bellboys perform a comic turn on “Hound Dog.” They had been playing the watered-down version of Big Mama’s hit for several years, even recording it for Teen Records in 1955. Elvis, amused by their humorous interpretation of the tune, decided to cover it on his next record.
The success of Elvis’s “Hound Dog” led to a profitable collaboration between Leiber and Stoller and the King of rock and roll. The pair scored several of Elvis’s films including Love Me Tender, Loving You and Jailhouse Rock. With Elvis behind the microphone, Leiber and Stoller charted with “Love Me Tender,” “(Let Me Be) Your Teddy Bear,” “Loving You,” “Jailhouse Rock” and “Treat Me Nice.” With their reputation as speedy workers (they pumped out the score for Jailhouse Rock in one night) and a golden touch in the studio, by 1957, they were the hottest songwriters in the business.
THERE’S A RIOT GOIN’ ON: Leiber and Stoller’s Top Fifteen
1. “Hound Dog” Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton — March 1953
2. “Riot in Cell Block Number Nine” The Robins — June 1954
3. “Black Denim Trousers and Motorcycle Boots”; The Cheers — August 1955
4. “Love Me” Elvis Presley — November 1956
5. “Charlie Brown” The Coasters — January 1959
6. “Kansas City” Wilbert Harrison — March 1959
7. “Love Potion Number Nine” The Clovers — August 1959
8. “Jailhouse Rock” Elvis Presley — September 1959
9. “Saved” LaVern Baker — March 1961
10. “Stand By Me” Ben E. King — April 1961
11. “I Keep Forgettin’ ” Chuck Jackson — July 1962
12. “I’m a Woman” Peggy Lee — December 1962
13. “Ruby Baby” Dion — December 1962
14. “On Broadway” The Drifters — March 1963
15. “I (Who Have Nothing)” Tom Jones — July 1970
I Put a Spell on You
Screamin’ Jay Hawkins
A brokenhearted Screamin’ Jay Hawkins penned “I Put a Spell on You” in hopes of wooing back an ex-girlfriend. The ploy didn’t work, but his song of love’s torment has been recorded many times since by acts as diverse as Nina Simone, the Alan Price Set and, most notably, Creedence Clearwater Revival.
In the summer of 1954, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, the former middleweight boxing champion of Alaska (1949), had retired from fighting for the less-grueling life of show business. At twenty-five, he was an accomplished sideman, playing piano with such luminaries as James Moody and Count Basie. However, his solo career was slow to take off. With a handful of failed singles under his belt, Hawkins was reduced to performing in honky-tonks and small clubs.
His love life wasn’t going so well, either. One night, while playing to a sparse crowd at a club called Herman’s in Atlantic City, his girlfriend paraded up, mumbled something in his ear and threw his house keys at him. Blowing him a kiss, she made a hasty exit out of the club. Cut the applause and dim the lights; Screamin’ Jay had just been dumped. Later that night, Hawkins returned home to find a message written in lipstick on his bathroom mirror. “Good-bye my love,” it read.
Hawkins was inconsolable. He had lost the best thing that had ever happened to him. Years later, he told one reporter that after reading the mirror’s message, he collapsed on the bed, letting out the “most painful scream” of his life. Pulling himself together, he decided to entice her to come back in the best way he knew. He wrote “I Put a Spell on You” — a simple R & B tune of unrequited love. “I don’t care if you don’t love me,” he wrote, “I’m yours.”
Securing some studio time with the tiny Grand Records in Philiadelphia, he recorded the tender love ballad, crooning it in his operatic bass voice. The single sunk without a trace and apparently had no effect on his ex-girlfriend since she was nowhere to be found.
But all was not lost. Jay included the tune in his club act. Live, the song really came to life. Gone was the mournful crooning of the Grand Records’ version. Hawkins pulled out all the stops for the audience, singing like a man who had lost everything, his soul stripped bare.
The live version impressed Columbia Records’ label chief Arnold Matson. It had soul. But more importantly, it had a good beat, and you could dance to it. Matson suggested to Hawkins that he rerecord the song for Columbia’s R & B offshoot Okeh. Hawkins leaped at the chance. Maybe this time, he would win back his woman.
In the studio, things didn’t go so well. Take after take seemed to fall flat. The magic of Hawkins’s live performance was missing. “What’s wrong?” Matson asked. “Well, I usually like to drink a little before I go onstage,” Hawkins replied. Matson stopped the session, went to the corner store and bought a case of Italian Swiss Coloney muscatel for Hawkins and the band.
Many bottles later, the session resumed. Hawkins was well oiled and let it rip. Screaming and hollering, Hawkins laid down one of the most outrageous vocal performances ever. It was the audible sound of a breaking heart. Rock historian Dave Marsh described “I Put a Spell on You” as “an R & B classic that explicitly defines itself in terms more African than Amer
ican, dabbling in voodoo imagery straight from ancient lands.” In layman’s terms, this was one wild record.
So wild, in fact, that it was banned immediately on most record stations. Hawkins’s moans and groans were dubbed “suggestive and cannibalistic,” unfit for public airwaves. To combat the bad press, Okeh issued a cleaned-up version, offering to compensate any DJ fired for playing the offending tune. All this was a surprise to Jay who didn’t hear the finished product until after it was pressed and in the stores. He claims to have gotten so hammered at the recording session that he could barely remember the session, let alone moaning in phony sexual ecstasy at the end of the song.
Just like in a fairy tale, there is a happy ending to Jay’s story. He got his girlfriend back. Ironically, it wasn’t the A-side of the single that cast a spell on her; she liked the B-side, “Little Demon.”
In the early days of his career, Paul Anka’s mother was his biggest benefactor. On many occasions, Mrs. Anka loaned her son the family car to drive to talent shows and always acted as a sounding board for his new tunes, suggesting changes to improve them. In return, when he started making big money, Anka bought her a new car and house. The young heartthrob adored his mother. He was on tour in Pittsburgh when he was informed of her death from a liver ailment. Only seventeen years old, he felt alone in the world despite his great success. That night in Pittsburgh, he wrote “Lonely Boy,” pouring out his grief in song. The tune reached Number One in July 1959.
Bo Diddley
Bo Diddley
He didn’t know diddly. The guitarist didn’t realize it at the time, but with the 1955 release of his eponymous first single, Bo Diddley was about to change the sound of rock and roll. His trademarked bomp, bomp, bomp-bomp, bomp beat — actually an African rhythm called “patted juba” — influenced hundreds of artists from Buddy Holly to the Sex Pistols. The tune “Bo Diddley” was Number One on the R & B charts in April 1955.
Otha Ellas Bates was born in 1928 in McComb, Mississippi. At age six, he was legally adopted by his mother’s cousin Gussie McDaniel and ended up living in Chicago. With Gussie’s encouragement, Otha studied violin while playing trombone in the church band. By his tenth birthday, Otha had taught himself guitar, hooking up an old acoustic to a radio for amplification. Soon he was busking on street corners with two friends, calling themselves the Hipsters.
His ambition to be a professional musician was put on hold while he attended Foster Vocational School, learning to build guitars and violins. On his off hours, Otha took up boxing as a defense against the city slickers who taunted him for being a country boy. Once, after a fight, a woman congratulated him, saying, “Man, you’re a Bo Diddly!” Much to Otha’s chagrin, the nickname stuck. However, a stage name was born. “I could never figure out what the hell that meant,” he said several decades later.
Returning to his first love, Diddley picked up the guitar as a diversion to working in dead-end unskilled-labor jobs. Forming a band called the Langley Avenue Jive Cats (after his home address of 4746 Langley), he took up a nighttime residency at the 708 Club on Chicago’s south side. His chops honed from constantly performing, Diddley auditioned for Vee Jay Records in 1955. “What is this shit?” asked label owner Ewart Abner before escorting Diddley out of the building. More successful was his tryout for Leonard Chess at 2120 South Michigan Avenue, the home of the legendary Chess Records. Founded in 1950, Chess Records was at the forefront of the Chicago blues sound by 1955, producing records by Willie Dixon, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf.
Chess was impressed with Diddley’s “muted sound,” his unique method of rhythm-guitar playing that he transposed from his training as a violinist. Diddley was invited back for a three-hour session to record four songs. His regular band were nonunion, and for the studio date, they were replaced with seasoned pros including Otis Spann on piano.
“Bo Diddley,” the third song recorded that day, wasn’t a completely new tune. Diddley had borrowed the distinctive beat from a record featuring the Hambone Kids with the Red Saunders Orchestra. “Hambone” featured the youngsters slapping out a rhythm on their chests, mimicking the West African chant known as hambone. Musicologists would call it the “patted juba,” but it is probably more familiar as the “shave and haircut, two bits” call-and-response beat popular at the time. Diddley and his new band exaggerated “Hambone’s” beat, with the drummer, maracas and harmonica player all keeping time with Bo’s homemade guitar. The effect was staggering. Almost totally without melody, “Bo Diddley” is all about the beat; it was a precursor to funk, although Bo called it a “jungle-type rhythm feel.”
Of course, Diddley, in an audacious move, also rewrote “Hambone’s” lyrics, placing himself directly in the center of the song. It was the first time in the rock era that an artist’s name had been used as the title of a record. This style of song writing — known as “toasting” — would become popular in later years, particularly in black music. But Bo was there first, blazing a trail for those who would follow.
“Bo Diddley” was coupled as a B-side with “I’m a Man,” another tune recorded that day, and released on Chess’s subsidiary label Checker in March of 1955. Both songs reached Number One on the R & B charts although “I’m a Man” fell off the charts seven weeks before its mate.
The release of the double-sided single was the first time Bo had used his stage name professionally. A printing error on the label added an “e” in Diddley, which became his public name. But even now, forty years after the release of the record, the guitarist privately still spells his name Diddly.
Songwriter Jean Dinning Surrey read an article by a disc jockey complaining that teenagers were getting a bad rap from the older generation. They weren’t “little devils,” he wrote. They were good kids, more like “teen angels.” Recognizing a good song title when she saw one, she borrowed the phrase, writing a 1959 hit for her younger brother Mark Dinning.
(We’re Gonna) Rock Around the Clock
Bill Haley and His Comets
Bill Haley is the first artist to score a Number One hit with a song that could be considered rock and roll. “(We’re Gonna) Rock Around the Clock” tanked on its original release, only to have a second shot at chart action when it was used as the theme for 1955’s juvenile delinquent film The Blackboard Jungle. The tune topped the charts for eight weeks in the summer of 1955.
“(We’re Gonna) Rock Around the Clock” would have remained a footnote in the history of rock and roll had it not been for the persistence of one man — Jimmy Myers, known professionally as Jimmy DeKnight. It was his single-minded determination and belief in the song that saved it from the delete bins.
Myers and Max C. Freeman penned the tune in 1953, immediately offering it to Bill Haley who had scored a pop hit that year with “Crazy, Man Crazy.” Haley liked “(We’re Gonna) Rock Around the Clock,” adding it to his live set that summer. Buoyed by good crowd response, the singer wanted to record the tune as his next single for Essex Records. He was thrice thwarted. Each time Haley tried to record the tune, Essex Records president David Miller vetoed it, reportedly because he disliked Myers and didn’t want to help advance his career. Sensing that Haley would never be able to commit the song to vinyl, Myers offered it to Sonny Dae and His Knights. They scored a regional hit with it but were kept from the national charts by a lack of proper distribution. Refusing to let “(We’re Gonna) Rock Around the Clock” fade away, Myers recorded his own big-band version under the name Jimmy DeKnight and His Knights of Rhythm. His fox trot-influenced version also failed to chart.
Luckily for Myers, Essex Records dropped Bill Haley at the end of 1953. With David Miller out of the picture, Haley was free to record “(We’re Gonna) Rock Around the Clock.” In the early months of 1954, Bill Haley and His Comets signed to Decca Records and were scheduled to record a single in April at New York’s Pythian Temple studio. Two songs were chosen: “Thirteen Women,” a Cold War fantasy about life after the bomb, as the only man in town, surrounded by a bevy of oblig
ing women; and the long-delayed “(We’re Gonna) Rock Around the Clock.” Haley and his band were over an hour late for the session, drastically cutting into their studio time. With only two hours left to set up their gear and record the songs, Haley was rushed and eager to get the session under way. They spent most of the allotted time cutting the mid-tempo “Thirteen Women,” a cover of an R & B song by Dickie Thompson. The original had been banned earlier that year because of its blues lyrics. Decca was counting on Haley’s clean image to sell the song and prevent a backlash from radio programmers.
As the clock ticked down to the end of the session, they had only half an hour left to do “(We’re Gonna) Rock Around the Clock.” Guitarist Danny Cedrone didn’t even bother to come up with a new guitar solo for the recording. Rushed, he recycled the solo from an earlier Haley tune, “Rock This Joint.” The band ran through the song twice, but each take was lackluster. Haley’s vocals were inaudible on the first take; on the second, the producer bumped up the vocal, drowning out the band. With no time left for a third try, producer Milt Gabler turned to some studio wizardry to save the tune. He took the first two unsuccessful takes, synchronized them, blending them into one master tape that was radio ready.
Decca shipped copies of the single, with “Thirteen Women” as the A-side, to stores in May 1954. The song about nuclear holocaust didn’t play well on radio, with most DJs ignoring the record completely. However, some radio stations flipped the 45, giving the B-side a shot. “(We’re Gonna) Rock Around the Clock” managed to hit the charts the week of May 29, but the next week, it was gone, sinking like a stone.
Who Wrote the Book of Love? Page 2