One Hit No More, No. 78: A Sliver of Silver...Wham Bam

That sticker contains multitudes.

The Hit
If you sat through Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2 and paid enough attention, you would have heard Silver’s “Wham Bam Shang-A-Lang.” I’m pretty sure I heard it, but can’t make any promises.

Like everything on the Guardians soundtracks, it is very damn 70s - that smooth, warm production, the keening treble of the guitars, the layered vocals, etc. etc.

There’s a little disconnect in the history of the song, at least based on what I’ve read. In Wikipedia’s telling, Silver’s label, Arista Records, handed them the song because everything else they’d recorded lacked “single potential.” In this telling, Clive Davis, the head of Arista Records, co-produced it with Tom Sellers (who did the rest of the album). In the other telling - this from a very long interview with Silver’s bassist, Tom Leadon - another member of Silver, John Batdorf, had “cut” the single with his earlier act, Batdorf & Rodney. Part of that same story, though, lends some credence to Wikipedia’s phrasing: once Davis got his hands on the audio, he cut out Rodney’s vocals and had the three original members of Silver - that’s Batdorf, Greg Collier and Brent Mydland - and had “studio people” (what the hell? “Dean Parks on guitar, Jim Gordon [on ?], Scott Edwards on bass”) handle the recording session. This went unmentioned in the record.

The Rest of the Story
What’s above is, in a lot of ways, the rest of the story - at least when it comes to Silver. Based on the few bios I could find, most members had been knocking around the latter days of the Laurel Canyon scene (Leadon gives a full accounting of his innumerable connections), all this while various record labels squeezed that area/sound for everything they could get out of it. Batdorf had moved out to LA in 1967 and formed Batdorf & Rodney with Mark Rodney in 1971; that group managed a minor hit with “Somewhere in the Night” in 1975. Mydland actually came on as a member by way of a mutual friend and Arista was Batdorf & Rodney’s label, and they just stuck with Arista (or were kept on) when they became Silver.

Crash Course Timeline, No. 19: Fats Waller, the "Son of Stride Piano"(?)

The maniacal look is on- and off-brand.

I didn’t dive too deep into stride piano - for instance, I didn’t even touch back to James P. Johnson, one of its originators - but I did take some notes on what typifies its sound. Most simply:

“Proper playing of stride jazz involves a subtle rhythmic tension between the left hand which is close to the established tempo, and the right hand, which is often slightly anticipatory.”

Next, a little more on the technical side:

“The left hand characteristically plays a four-beat pulse with a single bass note, octave, major seventh or major tenth interval on the first and third beats, and a chord on the second and fourth beats. Occasionally this pattern is reversed by placing the chord on the downbeat and bass notes on the upbeat. Unlike performers of the ragtime popularized by Scott Joplin, stride players' left hands span greater distances on the keyboard.”

That last note matters because, like a lot of American popular music, stride piano borrowed defining elements from ragtime - e.g., syncopation - and it started as the original form faded out of popular music. It had its pioneers - someone dubbed James P. Johnson the “Father of Stride” - but one of his pupils would out-strip him. And by some distance.

“Fats was the most relaxed man I ever saw in a studio, and so he made everybody else relaxed. After a balance had been taken, we'd just need one take to make a side, unless it was a kind of difficult number.”
- Gene Sedric, clarinetist and long-time collaborator

“Larger than life with his sheer size and magnetic personality, [Fats] Waller was known to enjoy alcohol and female attention in abundance.”
- A Biography biography

One Hit No More, No. 77: Henry Gross, Shannon...Sha Na Na...

Damn...

The Hit
I don’t know Henry Gross’ “Shannon,” but you might if you frequent pet shelter openings…I’ll get to it.

The song has good “mellow-70s-pop” bones - sparkling picked strings with nice reverb, a bass sound that literally slides between passages, gently troubled vocals…and, pow(!) a chorus powered by a falsetto that comes outta nowhere with a harmonic backing vocals to raise it a little higher, all of it goosed with production warm as an Indian summer - but it still strikes me as an odd candidate for a hit. Then again, I was only five years old when it dropped, so what do I know about what the needed to hear? It climbed as high as No. 6 on the Billboard, No. 5 on Cashbox and comfortably went gold.

As for the pet shelter openings, Gross wrote the song in honor of the Beach Boys’ Carl Wilson’s departed dog, Shannon. And, for what it's worth, he wrote some evocative poetry for it. From among the other things he told Goldmine in 2018:

“I had toured with the Beach Boys and Carl Wilson invited me to his home in Beverly Hills for lunch, but two husky dogs knocked our intended meal to the floor. Carl apologized, and I told him not to worry about it as I have an Irish setter at home, named Shannon, and it could have happened there too. Then Carl got quiet. He said that he also had an Irish setter named Shannon and that she was hit by a car and killed a month ago. That was the inspiration for the song on Terry Cashman and Tommy West’s Lifesong label.”

Maybe it wasn’t so odd. Based on what I know about 1976, the world probably needed a sonic equivalent of a hug and a cry…

One Hit No More, No. 76: The One Time Elvin Bishop Fooled Around and Fell in Love

A portrait of the artist with "Red Dog" (the guitar).

The Hit
I have no recollection of ever hearing Elvin Bishop’s “Fooled Around and Fell in Love.” By Bishop’s count, it has appeared on about 20 movie soundtracks - including Guardians of the Galaxy and Boogie Nights, both of which I’ve seen (and liked!)…but, nope.

Musically, it listens like a 1950s rock slow-jam with 1970s production - e.g., a little something to make the instruments sound warmer, smoother, and with a goose of echo (especially on the guitar solo) - something that certainly applies to Bishop’s famously…limited singing voice. 1950s nostalgia was all the rage when it came out as a single in 1976 (fwiw, Spotify shows the album it appears on, Struttin’ My Stuff, coming out in 1975), so the combination isn’t all that surprising.

Apart from him denying it took him just 20 minutes to write - as he told Rock & Blues Muse in 2019, he wrote that song like any other (“I kind of got a little groove going and started up with the lyrics. Once you get a strong central idea, it’s kind of like hanging clothes on a line, verse-by-verse.”) - there aren’t any great stories about the making of the song. The inspiration came from the most natural place you can imagine - the preamble for a 2002 Swampland interview says he wrote it about his love affair with his first wife, Jenny Villarin - which brings up the only sad thing you’ll read in this post: Jenny Villarin and their daughter, Selina Bishop, were murdered in 2000 in connection with an extortion scheme gone wrong by the younger Bishop’s then-boyfriend. Only the tiniest sliver of humanity deserves that kind of hell and, based on everything I’ve read, Elvin Bishop deserves it less than most.

The only other point of interest was the guy who produced it. As noted in an interview with Guitar World (2011), a guy named Bill Szymczyk produced that one and that gave him his only hit. Szymczyk did the same for B. B. King. Bishop’s aside on Szymczyk’s name struck me as a nice introduction to the man himself: “big waste of consonants.”

The Rest of the Story
“Everything that has happened to me in the music business over the years has been a complete surprise to me. I just try I just try to play to my taste and hope somebody likes it.”
- Elvin Bishop, Guitar World (2011)

Crash Course Timeline, No. 18: Boogie-Woogie in the Pinetops

A glimpse ahead...and mind the names.

With boogie-woogie, we finally have a genre with a fairly specific origin story. Most sources name north Texas as the birthplace, with Marshall, Texas as the specific locale and the lumber/turpentine camps on the Texas/Louisiana border as petri-dish of its evolution. With those camps situated near the lumber - aka, the middle of nowhere - the men they employed left their homes to work in the camps. As noted in a short 1986 history on an old UK program called South Bank Show, they spent long days alternating between working lumber and turpentine. They needed to unwind after they knocked off work, so juke joints and barrel houses popped up near the camps to serve the familiar entertainment of dancing and drinking. It moved on from those hard-scabble beginnings in no time: some of the blues greats like Blind Lemon Jefferson, Jelly Roll Morton and Lead Belly, recall hearing it in the various joints and venues they played.

A second factor, and one often cited as an inspiration for the sound, was the introduction of the railroad to northeast Texas shortly after the Civil War. Marshall was the hub for a semi-independent railroad system (you keep doing you, Texas) that came up by way of New Orleans and reached out into the lumber region known as Piney Woods. As the rails grew to service not just the lumber industry, but also oil and cattle industry, traveling boogie-woogie musicians would hop trains from one camp to the next, spreading the boogie-woogie style as they went. As the rails expanded, they carried it to east Texas’ major cities - e.g., Dallas, Houston and Galveston, places where it was also known as “fast western” - and from there to New Orleans (where, incidentally, a different sub-genre took root) and later to north to Chicago.

The theory goes that the anchor of the boogie-woogie sound - a left-hand bass figure, per Wikipedia’s entry, “’eight to the bar’…much of it written in common time (4/4) using eighth notes” and an original standard chord progression of I-IV-V-I (later with “many formal variations”) - got its inspiration from the steady rocking of the trains moving through that country. Many of those “formal variations have names - e.g., “the Marshall,” a simple form named for the city, “the Jefferson," also four-beats-to-the-bar, but goes down a pitch on the last note in each four note cycle,” or other like “the Rocks” or “the Five.” Whatever the variation, that grounded, rhythmic and repetitive bass-line made boogie-woogie ideal for popular (as opposed to formalized) dancing; boogie-woogie is the blues when it wants to get up and dance, basically. As it moved into the cities, the genre became popular for house-rent parties - i.e., parties where guests paid a small fee to get in and the musician(s) and hosts split the door money - spreading its popularity further still.

One Hit No More, No. 75: Nazareth & The Odd, Winding Story of "Love Hurts"

Look, it just feels right.

The Hit
You might know Nazareth’s “Love Hurts” from commercials for Aspercreme, Esurance, or mabye even a vintage Gatorade ad; all you NHL fans out there might recognize it from a promo for…some season or another. That’s all I could find easily, but I’m confident that’s the short list of buyers.

Older fans, or even just fans of Scotland’s Nazareth, might actually recall hearing it on the radio, maybe pulling that special someone close. I don’t know, maybe you don’t listen closely to lyrics. No judgment.

One thing I can say for sure is that, unless you bought your album in the U.S. market you did not hear “Love Hurts” on Nazareth’s sixth album, 1975’s Hair of the Dog, because that’s the only release of the album that includes it. It only ended up there thanks to a savvy intervention by A&M Records’ Jerry Moss. As recalled by Pete Agnew, the band’s bassist and only remaining original member, the original 45 offered the title track (“Hair of the Dog,” but there’s a story there) b/w a song called “Guilty.” In a couple interviews (the quote below comes from a site called The College Crowd Digs Me), Agnew explained how bands released singles back in Nazareth's hey-day - e.g., “So what bands started doing was to record just B-sides. Just throwaway tracks that they didn't necessarily spend a lot of time on.” In any case, Moss heard “Love Hurts” before he heard all of Hair of the Dog, and he gave dropping “Guilty” (a Randy Newman song, btw) for their eventual hit as his first piece of advice. Agnew remains graciously grateful for the tip.

The original came from the Boudleaux-Bryant songwriting team by way of The Everly Brothers, but Agnew says the band listened to a version by Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris during the long nights on the road touring around Europe. All members of the band loved it, something that helped it come readily to mind when they knocked about for one of their B-sides. And yet there’s more to the story. As the album was coming together, Agnew and Nazareth front-man, Dan McCafferty, traveled north for a wedding, leaving the remaining members, Manny Charlton (guitar) and Darrell Sweet (drums) alone in the studio for a night. As related to Classic Bands in 2008:

"So, when we came down the next day, they recorded it and recorded it in exactly the same key as Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris. Of course in the octave they were singing, it's too low, far too low. Then you have to take that up an octave. So that's how it ended up being sung in that key. If we had been in the studio when they did that, it probably would never have been a hit 'cause we would have never have done it in that key.”

Accident upon accident upon oddity; that’s what it takes sometimes. For Nazareth, it took the better part of a decade...

Crash Course Timeline, No. 17: Lead Belly, The Man Who Sang His Way to Freedom*

Per the saying, build the statue

They turned Lead Belly’s life-story into a newsreel back in 1935 - according to Open Culture, the site that posted it, said newsreel “is the earliest celluloid document of American folklore.” Both Lead Belly and John Lomax, the famous musicologist and folklorist who recorded him at Louisiana’s Angola state penitentiary, appear in it, each playing himself. It's more artifact than art - i.e., a film short starring two men who can't act chewing stiff dialogue  - and it's a white-savior narrative on top of that. Fascinating as it is to see the real Lomax and Lead Belly interacting, it elides and sanitizes too much of the story, not to mention their actual relationship, to work as actual history. Now, here’s my stab at the same.

“When he give it to me,’ Ledbetter recalled, ‘glory to God, I was gone some.’”
- Lead Belly, remembering getting his first guitar from his father

As with most blues artists, and most Black Americans in the Jim Crow South, some uncertainty surrounds Lead Belly’s actual date of birth, but nearly all place it either in 1888 or 1889. All sources agree he was born Huddie (“hew-die”) William Ledbetter and on a plantation near Mooringsport, Louisiana, a town in that state’s northwest corner. While he took an early interest in music - an uncle gave him his first accordion around the age of five and he played the church organ as well; that first guitar came later - Ledbetter married somewhere around 1908, held a day-job, and, for a while, didn't take any clear steps on the path that led to becoming Lead Belly.

There appears to be some overlap between those two lives: most sources have him playing Shreveport, Louisiana’s red-light district (suggestively named St. Paul’s Bottom) by age 15 (circa 1903), but the closest any source I read comes to naming the moment he left the straight life behind comes from Wikipedia, which went with his early 20s. He spent enough time in and around St. Paul’s Bottom that people now refer to it as Ledbetter Heights, but few details from that period go beyond montage-esque placeholders like “He began to develop his own style of music after exposure to various musical influences.” Ledbetter continued to work throughout this time, mostly as a laborer and a good one; as noted in the bio posted on the Lead Belly Foundation’s website “he was legendary for picking 1,000 pounds of cotton a day.”

When he played, Ledbetter played in rough rooms - e.g., the juke joints and “sukey jumps” (phrase lifted from the Lead Belly Foundation bio) of the South - something that mixed fatefully with his reported short temper. He picked up his first conviction in 1915 on charges of carrying a pistol. He escaped, even lived and worked under the surname Walter Boyd for a while, only to run violently afoul of the law in 1918 when he killed a relative, Will Stafford, in a fight over a woman somewhere in Dallas. [Ed. - Just to note it, some sources speak to Lead Belly’s criminal past more directly than others.] The state handed down a 30-year sentence and sent Ledbetter to either Imperial Farm, a prison near Sugar Land, TX (now called Central Unit), or some unnamed prison in Huntsville, TX, which may or may not have been where he killed a fellow inmate in self-defense (Wikipedia’s phrasing is loose). That incident left him with a scar on his neck, which he took to concealing with a scarf or bandana.