Stolf's Oldies… jan 2012
Rock & Roll Hit or Myth
Buddy Holly's signature eyeglasses were just for show. A myth...in fact, Holly didn't want to wear glasses, fearing it would detract from his rebel image. But he had horrible eyesight...a guitar pick dropped on stage was lost forever. And he couldn't tolerate contacts for more than a few hours. Of course in the 1950s, they were quite primitive, covering almost the entire eyeball. But according to an article in the Wall Street Journal last month, his vision in both eyes was 20/800.
Now if you can only read the top line of the standard chart, your vision is 20/200. That's the threshold for legal blindness, but only if your corrected vision is no better than that. Buddy's vision was correctable…but how bad exactly is 20/800? If your visual acuity goes off the standard chart, they'll use the CF method...count fingers…as in ”How many am I holding up?” If you can see the fingers at 10 feet, but not 11 feet, you're 20/800. This scale goes all the way up to 20/8000, meaning you can't count fingers any further away than a foot.
So according to J. Davis Armistead, Holly's Lubbock, Texas optometrist…who is still alive at age 96... the plan was for Buddy to wear the most “boring,” nondescript frames available. He found them with the “everyman” glasses Phil Silvers wore on TV as Sgt. Bilko, and offered Buddy a choice of black or brown. He chose black, and that was that. Iconsville.
The Beach Boys recorded a song written by Charles Manson. Strange but true, a harrowing sidebar to the history of our music. After his release from prison in 1967, having spent more than half his life behind bars, Charles Manson gravitated to the hippie scene in San Francisco, then Los Angeles. While in jail, he had learned to play the guitar from Alvin "Creepy" Karpis of the Ma Barker gang, and he was convinced he could be "twice as big as the Beatles." Opinions varied, but some really liked his songs, including Neil Young and Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys. It was Dennis who took him in for a recording session and also let Manson and his followers crash, and trash, his mansion.
One song Dennis especially liked was called "Cease to Exist." He changed the line to "cease to resist," retitled the song "Never Learn Not to Love," and it came out on the Beach Boy LP "20/20" in 1968. Despite the typical Beach Boys sheen, it's not much of a song, altho again, some people seem to really like its weird intensity. But by this time, the friendship was souring. In exchange for giving up writing credits, Manson was given cash and sent packing. Within a year, well, you know what happened. But if you sample a few Manson songs on YouTube, he wasn't that bad a singer. In fact, if all you've ever heard from him is the rambling prison interviews that come out from time to time, you'd hardly believe it was the same person…which I guess was the scary part...
The Beatles never recorded a Christmas record. Half-way between a hit and a myth. Relatively few Top 40 artists recorded Christmas LPs back in the day…most that did are legendary: the Beach Boys, the Supremes, Paul Revere and the Raiders, the Four Seasons, the Royal Guardsmen, the Ventures, and of course Elvis. Others recorded Christmas 45s...like Simon and Garfunkel, the Blues Magoos, Canned Heat, Elton John, the Kinks, Bob Seger (“Sock it to Me, Santa” from 1966). But far more never did, and the Beatles can be included in that group...well, sort of. What the Beatles did do was issue flexible plastic “Christmas Greetings” discs to their fan club members at the end of each year, and these contained unfinished Christmassy song fragments, sounding more like demos or jam sessions.
The best-known is “Christmas Time Is Here Again” from 1967, mainly because a complete 6-minute version has been circulating on bootlegs for ages. Back in 1995, when Capitol Records emptied out their Beatles vault for the Anthology series, a shortened version came out as the flip side of "Free As a Bird." So technically, it can be considered the Beatles' Christmas song...altho it's really no more than a chant set to music, repeated over and over. And of course, it wasn't generally available, nor played on the radio, when the Beatles were a real group in the Sixties, so you make the call.
Tommy James & the Shondells had connections to organized crime. A hit, no pun intended (none taken)…at least to the extent that their label Roulette Records was indeed a front for the Genovese crime family, involved in money laundering and other unsavory sidelights. In his recent book "Me, the Mob, and the Music," Tommy James lays it all out…and this isn't some sensationalized memoir, blown out of proportion to sell copies. If anything, James and the band weren't fully aware at the time just how dangerous their "bosses" really were, these Italian businessmen with names like Fat Tony Salerno and Vincent "The Chin" Gigante. They knew something was "up," but they were naive young pop stars, and it's probably just as well that they were as oblivious as they were to the "business" end of it all.
But another interesting revelation is that the “Crimson and Clover" we all know and love was actually an unfinished version, what's called a "rough mix." James had intended it to be much more elaborate, but when he played it for a Chicago DJ…and it ended up being played on the air all over the country, swapped around from radio station to radio station…Roulette decided to release it just as it was, much to Tommy's consternation. He says that at the time, he hated the released version, but has come to think that "it isn't really so bad." I agree with him!
The Rolling Stones made a TV commercial for Corn Flakes. Not so much a myth as a mistake, because in 1963 they did write and record a 30 second jingle for Kellogg's Rice Krispies. It went: "Wake up in the morning there's a Snap around the place / Wake up in the morning there's a Crackle in your face / Wake up in the morning there's a Pop that really says: Rice Krispies for you and you and you…" They do not appear in the commercial, just the recording, being judged on a "Juke Box Jury"-type panel show. Look for it as a CD bonus track…it's out there!
Where Corn Flakes do come in is the fact that “Good Morning, Good Morning” on the Beatles "Sgt. Pepper" LP was inspired by Kellogg's “The Best to You Each Morning” jingle on TV at the time, both in the US and UK. And yes, the Who really recorded a commercial for Coca Cola, and the Yardbirds did one for Great Shakes powdered mix…seriously.
And it looks like a "hit"…Thanks for all the nice comments I've received on my 3-7 afternoon show on 1340 WMSA in Massena. Catch the blogs at stolf.wordpress.com and deepfriedhoodsiecups.wordpress.com. Haven't been any new podcasts in a while at stolfpod.podbean.com, but there are over 50 old ones that are pretty cool, according to Cool Daddy...and old Fourth Coast Entertainment columns are at travelingcyst.blogspot.com. Till next time, let a smile be your umbrella…you'll be happy…and wet…and rock on!
