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| Mickey & Sylvia |
The Hit
It neither lasted all that long nor rose all that high – just two weeks atop Billboard’s R&B charts, and only to No. 11 on the Pop charts – Mickey & Sylvia’s “Love Is Strange” has enjoyed a long, lingering run in pop culture. Movies that want to hearken to a certain time, place and/or mood in the length of an snippet of a song – the short-list includes Badlands, Casino and, most famously, Dirty Dancing – have used it, but it also lives on in reinterpretations by Paul McCartney, the Everly Brothers (gave ‘em a UK hit), and Peaches & Herb...and I recommend sticking with the original, for what it's worth.
The plucked, twanging, yet rich and variegated guitar stands out, along with the shuffling Latin beat and undertones and the vocals, which pine almost theatrically. They go back and forth in a playful call-and-response in the single’s bridge, but it’s mostly a dreamy duet with the two of them singing like two lovestruck kids holding hands...as they explore the pain and ecstasy of love in song. Despite being released in 1957 and has rock-guitar tones all over it, “Love Is Strange” listens more like a spin rock-influenced pop tune than rock-‘n’ roll. And what’s that than another way of saying Mickey & Sylvia’s most famous single grew from different roots. To borrow a quote from 2014 retrospective on Sylvia in Dazed Digital:
“Mickey and I were working at the Howard Theatre in Washington. Bo Diddley was on the same bill and he would play this chant where Jerome Green, his maraca player would say to him, 'Bo? How do you call your woman?' And Bo would say, 'C'mere woman!' And it went on like that until Bo finally says, 'Baby, my sweet baby'. I told Bo that he should record that tune, but when he took it to Leonard Chess, he told him it was nothin'.” Undeterred, and with Bo's approval, Sylvia rearranged the song to fit into the Mickey and Sylvia mode and then took the track to RCA subsidiary, Groove. That label too was unimpressed and it was only when Sylvia threatened to leave them all together, that they let her record ‘Love Is Strange.’ The result was a sensual, latin-flavoured call and response groove that became an overnight jukebox and radio sensation. All of a sudden they were the number one pop band in America.”
Another source, She Shreds, tightened the back-story into this thesis:
“’Love Is Strange’ is a reworking of a Bo Diddley original that included the same spoken interlude, with Diddley gruffly beckoning his lover, ‘C’mere woman.’ With a gender-flipped version, Mickey & Sylvia created a softer take on the song’s raucous attitude and gently pushed an affirmative message of women’s sexuality into public consciousness.”
Sylvia Robinson made a career of pushing boundaries. Mickey Baker played a major role in her career, but it’s fair to say he falls out of the larger plot at the end of the first act.
The Rest of the Story, Briefly
“Mickey ‘Guitar’ Baker, a versatile, influential and often unsung guitarist who helped lay the groundwork for rock ‘n’ roll and half of the pop duo Mickey & Sylvia...”
- 2012 obituary for Mickey Baker in Billboard
“What is certain though, is that Sylvia Robinson has always had the gift of spotting talent and setting trends – from the rhythm and blues of Bo Diddley and Ike and Tina to the soul of Al Green and Marvin Gaye, through funk and disco to early electronic dance – her life is a timeline of the African American tradition that has come to dominate global culture.”
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| Mickey. Later. |
Baker’s actual career started as a session guitarist. He played with enough big names – e.g., Ray Charles and Louis Jordan (profiled here) – and on enough notable tracks – e.g., Ruth Brown’s “(Mama) He Treats Your Daughter Mean” and Big Joe Turner’s “Shake, Rattle & Roll” – and with enough distinction for him to attempt a solo act in the early 1950s. My handful of sources don’t have much to say about this period, but Baker did take on the odd pupil for guitar lessons. And that’s where Sylvia Vanterpool enters the picture.
Vanterpool was far from a newbie when she met Baker. With a unique voice to bring to auditions – “her honey-drenched warble wavered on the verge of cracking, with a jovial warmth suggesting she had a cheeky story to tell after the song was over” - she scored a recording deal with Columbia by age 15. That relationship produced a minor hit called “Little Boy,” which she recorded as Little Sylvia, but Vanterpool was already looking a step or two ahead. The label that actually released the single, Savoy Records, happened to use Baker for session work. However he and Sylvia met and fell to talking, most sources make it clear she approached him. She’d seen enough of the industry by then to believe that the path to controlling her own destiny ran through learning how to play and write her own material. It didn’t take long for the lessons to turn into a partnership and that’s how Mickey & Sylvia started in 1954.
The duo released their first single, “I’m So Glad,” in 1955 on Rainbow Records. That one didn’t go far, as would nothing else until “Love Is Strange” dropped in 1957, but even that hit didn’t open all that many doors. They released a couple more singles in 1957 – “Dearest” and “There Ought to Be a Law” (the latter went to No. 10 on the R&B charts) – but those came out on Vic Records, not Rainbow, which says things about their salability, Vanterpool checked out for a solo career by 1958, and, to skip the narrative still further forward, Baker moved to France in the 1960s. Mickey & Sylvia did reunite for a second run that lasted from 1960 to 1965 – and some really interesting stuff happened during this period (see POI No. 2) – but only Sylvia’s at the center of those stories.
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| There is a great story behind that single, fwiw. |
Sylvia Robinson retired to private life after that. And she lived for quite some time, doing normal things and indulging in the simple and good pleasures to the end. After briefly trying to rebuild the act – with a singer named Kitty Noble in Mickey & Kitty – Baker released a solo album in 1959 called The Wildest Guitar. Mickey & Sylvia 2.0 followed and, as noted above, Mickey moved to Europe and, a steady stream of performances aside, largely kept to himself. They died within one year of each other, Robinson in 2011 and Baker in 2012. I have to imagine that someone reached out to Mickey Baker when Sylvia Robinson died...but there’s no final farewell noted.
And now....
3 Points of Interest (aka, 3 POI)
1) But He Did Not Keep His Opinion to Himself
I doubt I failed to fully convey how seriously Baker took his craft up above. His first love was jazz guitar and it appears he released a number of instructional books about it. That is instructional, though not necessarily inspirational. From the preface of his 1973 reissue of his two-volume 1955 music book:
“If you come across a lesson which you find a little hard, don’t skip it. Study it for two weeks. Because if you cannot understand one lesson, you surely will not understand the one that immediately follows.”
2) The Highlight of Mickey & Sylvia 2.0
During the Mickey & Sylvia revival (i.e., the 1960-65 period), Sylvia wrote a song she liked called “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine.” She tried to sell Baker on it, but he didn’t see the hit. So, one night, she pulled aside a young Tina Turner...
“Mickey and me were working at the Apollo theatre with Ike and Tina. I had written “It's Gonna Work Out Fine” but I couldn't get Mickey to like the song. I said, “this is a smash!”, but he just used to laugh at it you know. To prove him wrong, after one of the shows, I took Tina into my dressing room and I played it for her on the guitar and she fell in love with it. Well I think it was the next night that I went to the A&R studio and recorded her on the tune. Ike wasn't even there; he had nothing to do with that. That's me playing the guitar and Mickey that's talking with her on the record. We didn't get paid, hell I paid for the session just because I wanted to prove to Mickey that it was a smash. A while later, Mickey and I were at a diner after one of our shows and the song came on the jukebox and everyone started jumpin'. Well, Mickey was so pissed off he didn't even eat, he just slammed down his food and ran right out.”
On the one hand, small wonder they didn’t stay together. On the other, it takes a mensch to take a hit. Related, one source notes that Robinson didn’t get credit for production or her guitar work on “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine.”
3) Bigger than "Rapper's Delight." In Some Circles...
“I didn’t think it was going to get much response. Fever was really a dance club. But people kept dancing. That’s when I knew it had legs.”
That's Melle Mel of Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five remembering the time Sylvia Robinson debuted "The Message" in a nightclub called Disco Fever. Yep, Sugar Hill Productions handled one of hip hop's founding acts, along with other back-in-the-day acts like The Funky Four Plus One (oof, that name) and a very early all-female act called The Sequence. With that, the honors of releasing the "original" "conscious" hip hop song falls to the same woman who committed the genres first theft to vinyl. Which is oddly impressive.
Sources
Wikipedia – Mickey & Sylvia (adequate, but colorless)
Wikipedia – Mickey Baker
Billboard Obituary for Mickey Baker (2012; has a bit of life at least)
She Shreds – Sylvia Robinson Retrospective
Dazed Digital – Sylvia Robinson Retrospective (2014; both sources on Robinson are good reads)
The Sampler
I skipped a sampler for the simplest reason of all: so long as one focuses on the act, Mickey & Sylvia, they simply didn’t put out a lot of material. As such, I let a collection on Spotify (and presumably elsewhere) titled Love Is Strange and It Will Make You Fail in School (both named for singles) stand in. A fair number of the tracks are sprinkled above, as always and along with some random bonus tracks (also, as always), but here are the rest:
“Se De Boom Run Dun,” “Forever and a Day,” “Rise Sally Rise,” “Where Is My Honey?,” “Seems Just Like Yesterday,” “No Good Lover,” “Walkin’ in the Rain,” “I’m Going Home,” “Love Will Make You Fail in School,” “Peace of Mind,” “Who Knows Why,” “Too Much Weight,” “A New Idea of Love,” “I’ve Got a Feeling (in My Heart),” and “Shake It Up.”
For all the justified praise Sylvia’s ear got across the sources I read, it’s fairly clear that she tuned it toward finding the next big thing. And that’s what I got when I listened to Mickey & Sylvia’s catalog: an act that found something that worked and kept on trying it. Some songs above sound like “Love Is Strange” with new lyrics, some sound closer to rock ‘n’ roll, but there’s nothing in there that melts your mind.
Till the next one...which swerves back to rock ‘n’ roll.
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