b) The incredulous shop owner called newspapers himself.
c) The rule applies not only to ballcocks, but to stopcocks, too. (They have to be called “stop-valves.”) “This is political correctness gone mad,” said the head of the National Plumbers’ Association. One plumber responded with an announcement that he would now charge $22 to fit a stopcock, but $45 to fit a stop-valve.
In about 250 B.C., Archimedes invented the screw
ANSWERS TO ROCK QUIZ (from page 39)
1. b. “Hound Dog” was written in 1952 by Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller specifically for Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton. Her record went to #1 on the R&B charts in 1953. Then a lounge act named Freddie Bell and the Bellboys made a joke out of it in 1955. That’s the version that Elvis copied.
How did he first hear it? In 1956, after “Heartbreak Hotel” had hit #1, Elvis was signed to do his first gig in Las Vegas. Later he’d be king of the town. But the first time around, he was fired—a two-week engagement at the Frontier Hotel was shortened to one week when audiences failed to respond to the hip wiggler. But Elvis still lucked out: he wandered into the lounge and watched Freddie Bell’s group perform their humorous takeoff of “Hound Dog.” He thought it was hilarious…and decided to do it himself. Note: The Bellboys had already recorded the song, and Elvis may have picked up a copy of their record to refresh his memory before he recorded his own version.
2. c. Blackwell had just taken a job writing for a publisher called Shalimar Music when Moe Gayle, the head of the company, called him into his office with an unusual offer: Elvis Presley was interested in recording “Don’t Be Cruel,” but the deal was contingent on Blackwell giving up half his writer’s credit (and thus half the royalties) to Presley. “Elvis Presley?” Blackwell answered. “Who the hell is Elvis Presley?”
Blackwell recalls: “I just felt that I was getting the shaft, man. It took them about two weeks to convince me. They pointed out that if Elvis did become big, I would make a good deal more money this way than not doing it at all. And if he didn’t become big, I really wasn’t losing anything…so I said okay.”
It may have been an unjust arrangement, but it wound up an extremely lucrative one for Blackwell. “Don’t Be Cruel” was released in July 1956 as the flip side of “Hound Dog.” The double-sided hit reached #1 in August and stayed there for over two months; it was on the charts for six months, becoming the year’s #1 record and Elvis’s favorite early record. Blackwell was instantly established as a major songwriter. He went on to write “All Shook Up,” “Great Balls of Fire,” “Return to Sender,” and many more hits.
The filaments for the first electric lamp were made of bamboo.
3. a. Fats Domino wrote the song from real life: “I was walkin’ down the street and I saw a little lady spankin’ a baby. And I heard somebody say ‘Ain’t That a Shame.’” But Pat didn’t relate to it—he objected to it because the grammar was bad.
“[When the record company asked me to record] ‘Ain’t That a Shame,’ I balked,” Boone says. “I said, ‘Look, I just transferred to Columbia University, I’m an English major. I don’t want to record a song called “Ain’t That a Shame.’ ” I mean, ‘ain’t’ wasn’t an accepted word. It is now in the dictionary, but I was majoring in English and I felt that this was going to be a terrible thing if it was a hit. I tried to record it ‘Isn’t That a Shame,’ but it didn’t work.’ ”
He finally gave in and used the original lyrics. It hit #1 on the charts. Domino’s version was a hit, too—but with Boone taking the lion’s share of sales away, it only reached #10.
4. a. In the mid-1950s, “respectable” people—including Mrs. Kern—thought doo-wop rock was a travesty. According to one account, she was so appalled and outraged by the Platters’ treatment of the song that she explored ways of stopping it legally. Of course, when the Platters’ record became a hit—and sold more copies of “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” than anyone had before—her opinion changed. And she never turned down a royalty check.
5. c. Hard to believe, but although he may have been the most influential rock musician ever, Berry only had one #1 song—a novelty tune full of sophomoric sexual innuendo called “My Ding-a-Ling.” He’d been using it to close his concerts and did it as “My Tambourine” on a live album in the mid-1960s. Then in 1972 he recorded it live again, in London. For some reason his record company released it as a single. As Bob Shannon and John Javna wrote in Behind the Hits: “It’s kind of depressing for music fans that the biggest single Chuck Berry ever had was this…this...thing! But what the hell, at least Chuck got a hit out of it.”
6. a. Radio stations found all kinds of reasons not to play it: it was too suggestive, he cursed on it (the part where he goes “We-ell-a” sounded like he was saying “Weh-hell-a”), he sounded black (most stations didn’t play songs by black artists). But when the record was banned by BMI (Broadcast Music Inc., which licenses music for airplay) because it was “obscene,” the record died.
The official definition of a “jiffy” is 1/100 of a second.
Sun Records knew it could be a hit—and Jerry Lee Lewis could be another Elvis—if it was handled right. So they took Lewis to New York to try to get him on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” They flew to New York, but Sullivan wouldn’t listen—Lewis didn’t have a hit, and Sullivan didn’t like that kind of music, anyway. So they called NBC and got the talent coordinator there to set up a meeting with the producer of “The Steve Allen Show” (a variety program that ran head to head with Sullivan’s). Allen’s biggest coup had been to introduce Elvis Presley as a guest after Sullivan had turned him down the first time. Now the Sun people hoped they could get Allen to do it again. They took Lewis with them to the meeting. When the TV execs asked to hear a record, Lewis stepped out and played in person. The NBC execs were blown away and scheduled him for that Sunday night.
What people at NBC never found out was that the song Jerry Lee was going to play—“Whole Lotta Shakin’”—had been banned. Why? Because after NBC agreed to have Lewis on, the head of promotion for Sun Records called BM1 and convinced them that if NBC didn’t mind about the lyrics, why should they? He neglected to add that no one at NBC had actually heard the lyrics. But BMI gave in, and the way was clear for Jerry Lee’s appearance.
On July 28, 1956, America was introduced to Jerry Lee Lewis and “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” on “The Steve Allen Show.” Jerry went crazy, playing piano with his feet and inadvertently involving Allen himself. At one point he jumped off his piano stool to play standing up and sent the stool careening across the stage: Allen, who was stomping and clapping with the rest of the audience, tossed it back toward Jerry. Then Allen grabbed another piece of furniture and tossed it. Reportedly, he was about to throw a potted plant when Jerry finished playing. The exposure sent the record zooming up the charts. By the end of August it was a million-seller and Jerry Lee was the hottest new rocker in America.
7. b. Little Richard was so incensed by Boone’s cover version of “Tutti Frutti” (which outdid Richard’s on the charts), he purposely made the follow-up, “Long Tall Sally,” too fast for Boone to sing. Nonetheless, Boone figured out how to adapt “Long Tall Sally” and gave Richard a run for his money. Little Richard’s version did beat out Boone’s—barely. Richard hit #7 in Billboard, Boone hit #8.
In some Northwest forests, the edible mushrooms are more valuable than the timber.
ANSWERS TO ROCK QUIZ #2 (page 347)
1. a. The story told in Grace Slick’s biography is that members of the Great Society (Slick’s first band) kept trying to get her to write music. Finally they practically locked her in a room and told her she couldn’t come out until she’d written some songs. She emerged with several, including “White Rabbit,” which was loosely based on a classical piece by Ravel called “Bolero.” However, Slick has said repeatedly that “White Rabbit” isn’t about drugs. Her explanation: “We were talking about opening up, looking around, checking out what’s happening. We were also tal
king about the fifties mentality, which was really bottled up.” She added: “Feeding your head is not necessarily pumping chemicals into it.”
Most of the imagery she used came directly from Lewis Carroll’s two books, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and Through the Looking Glass (see page 79). Three examples from the book Behind the Hits:
1. “One pill makes you larger.” Alice was about three inches tall and wandering around Wonderland when she spotted a caterpillar. It was about the same height as her, except that it was sitting on top of a mushroom, smoking a hookah. She asked it how she could get big again; as the caterpillar was walking away, it turned back and said, “One side makes you larger, the other side makes you smaller.” Alice asked, “One side of what?” The caterpillar replied, “The mushroom.” There weren’t any pills in the story, but maybe they were magic mushrooms.
2. “When the men on the chessboard get up and tell you where to go.” The premise of Through the Looking Glass: Alice is trying to get her cat to play chess with her; she falls asleep and dreams that she’s a pawn on the chessboard and has to get to the other side to become a queen. Each chapter of Through the Looking Glass takes place on a different square of the chessboard, and the characters in it are characters in a game of chess. Occasionally they do tell her where to go (of course, she’s lost). At one point, the White Knight guides her across a brook that turns out to be the space between the squares on the board.
3. “When logic and proportion have fallen softly dead.” Everything is out of whack in Wonderland (although Carroll wrote a book about symbolic logic). What could be more illogical than the dialogue at the Mad Hatter’s tea party? About proportion—Alice goes from three inches to 15 feet high. Hard to keep a sense of proportion with that pening. She mentions that it’s rather uncomfortable to be so many different heights in one day.
Explosive fact: The 3,000 calories you might eat are equal in energy to about 6 pounds of TNT.
By the way: The dormouse, who’s sitting in a teacup at the Mad Tea Party, says, “Twinkle twinkle little bat. How I wonder where you’re at.” He doesn’t say, “Feed your head.”
2. b. In 1966 there was an amusing story coming from Lawrenceville Academy, a New Jersey prep school: People said that a student named Mark Sebastian—John’s 15-year-old brother—had submitted the poem that became “Summer in the City” to his English teacher …and had gotten an “F.” It might well have been true—John Sebastian didn’t particularly like the poem when he first saw it, either. But he did like the chorus—the part that went, “But at night there’s a different world.” Mark gave it to John and asked if he could do anything with it. John said he’d see. He put Mark’s poem aside for a few months and in the interim came up with a little piano figure that he liked but didn’t have a song for. Then one night as John was going to sleep, Mark’s chorus, his own piano riff, and a set of new lyrics popped into his head.
“[Bassist] Steve Boone contributed a middle section,” Sebastian says, and the song was done. His first impression of the song: certain notes sounded like car horns. “I said, ‘Gee, this sounds sort of like Gershwin—sort of like “An American in Paris.” Maybe we could put traffic on it.’ ”
The band went into New York’s Columbia Studios for two nights. On the first, they did the entire instrumental track. The second night was for vocals…and sound effects. Sebastian says, “I remember this hilarious old sound man who’d never had a job with a rock ’n’ roll band before looking at us quite puzzled as we auditioned pneumatic hammers to find the one that had the right intestinal tone to it.” For car sounds, the old man brought in tapes of traffic jams and horns that he’d used when he worked in radio. The band listened to them for hours, then chose their favorites. John wanted the automobiles to start off softly, so the sound-effects man threw in a Volkswagen horn at the beginning.
The song was released in the summer, of course, and within a few weeks was #1 in America. It was the Spoonful’s only #1 hit in their phenomenal string of seven consecutive Top 10 records between September 1965 and December 1966.
The Atlantic Ocean is saltier than the Pacific.
3. a. It started with a shopping trip. Roy and Billy Dees, a songwriter Orbison had been collaborating with, were sitting in the Orbisons’ house when Orbison’s wife, Claudette, announced she was going into town to buy some groceries. “Do you need any money?” Roy asked. Dees said, “A pretty woman never needs any money.” Then he turned to Roy and said, “Hey, how about that for a song title?” Orbison liked the idea of doing a song about a “pretty woman,” but not the part about the money. After Claudette left, they began turning the phrase into a song. And when she returned, carrying bags of food, she was greeted by the debut performance of her husband’s second #1 tune.
4. b. The Four Seasons and a bunch of side musicians were in a recording studio in the Abbey Victoria Hotel on Seventh Avenue in New York City, recording “Walk Like a Man.” After a few takes, it was obvious to everyone in the studio that something was wrong. But Bob Crewe, the producer, refused to pay attention. “Another take,” he kept saying. Here’s the story of the unusual session, as told by a participant, guitarist Vinnie Bell:
As we were recording, there was a sudden pounding on the door. And there was the smell of smoke. And plaster was starting to fall from the ceiling. And water was leaking in…while we’re recording! And there’s this pounding on the door of the studio, and Bob Crewe wouldn’t unlock it—he kept saying, “We’ll open it in a second, there’s one more take.” And the water’s pouring onto us, and we’ve got electric guitars in our hands—we were afraid we were gonna be electrocuted. Finally, the [firemen] axed their way right through the door—and Crewe’s trying to push them out! And then we could see the smoke pouring through. It seems that the floor above us in that hotel was on fire! It was barely audible from inside the studio, but you could hear fire engines and all that—the whole bit. And this guy was so intent on making the record—on getting another take—that he kept trying to push these guys out…until they knocked him on the floor.
And that was it for the recording session.
5. b. The story behind this record—which was certified gold in 1969 and still refuses to die—is almost unbelievable. Paul Leka was a producer at Mercury Records in 1969. He persuaded the label to sign a friend named Gary De Carlo, and they did a recording session together. They thought everything they recorded was good enough to be a hit, so they decided to record one really cheesy song for the B side of De Carlo’s first single release. That way they’d save the good stuff for later.
Poll results: 28% of Southerners refer to mothers as ““Mama.” 9% of non-Southerners do.
The day of the B-side session, Leka ran into a friend he once wrote songs with. They remembered a tune called “Kiss Him Good-by” they’d written years earlier and decided to make that the stinker. The only problem: It was just two minutes long. They wanted to make it twice as long to make sure it never got on the air—no disc jockey would dare play a four-minute record—so they added a chorus…except they couldn’t think of any words for it. So Leka just started singing “Na-na-na…” and someone else started singing “Hey-hey.” And that was it. They didn’t bother with lyrics because it was just a B-side.
To Leka’s astonishment and embarrassment, when Mercury heard it, they decided to release it as an A-side. The musicians all agreed it should come out under an alias—and came up with Steam because at the end of the recording session, they’d seen a humongous cloud of steam coming out of a New York manhole cover.
6. c. Satchmo was making an album of show tunes, and David Merrick was trying to promote his new musical, so he encouraged performers to sing it. Armstrong had never heard of “Hello Dolly.” And though he liked the tune, he was appalled that after all the innovative work he’d done in his career, his biggest hit was this silly, simple song.
7. a. Percy Sledge worked as an orderly at Colbert County Hospital in Alabama during the day and sang with a band called
the Esquires Combo at night. One evening, the Esquires Combo was playing at a club in Sheffield, Alabama, and Sledge just couldn’t keep his mind on the songs he was supposed to be singing. He was upset about a woman. Overcome by emotion, he turned to bass player Cameron Lewis and organ player Andrew Wright and begged them to play something he could sing to. Anything—it didn’t matter what. The musicians looked at each other, shrugged, and just started playing. And Percy made up “When a Man Loves a Woman,” one of the prettiest soul ballads ever written, on the spot.
Force exerted by the human jaw: 175 pounds. By the jaw of an African lion: 937 pounds.
Here are the answers to “It’s the Law…Or Is It?” (page 301), according to the book Legal Briefs.
1. b. Nice try, Bill, but no dice. A number of debts can’t be discharged by bankruptcy, including alimony, child support, certain tax fines and claims, most student loans, court fines and penalties, and court-ordered restitution.
Another note: If Bill goes on a spending spree right before he declares bankruptcy (within 40 days), he’s stuck with those debts, too, if
• The purchase totals more than $500
• It was payable to a single creditor
• The money was spent on luxury goods or services
2. c. At last count, 31 states say “No” to marriages between first cousins. But Tom and Sue can still get married in Alabama, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, and a bunch more.
Notes: Cancel your tuxedo rental and send the caterers home if the proposed marriage is between a brother and sister, a parent and child, an aunt and nephew, or an uncle and niece. No state allows these marriages.
Uncle John’s Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader Page 55