About This Time 60s Years Ago… It’s The Hits Of August-ish 1964!!!

The Hottest Hit On The Planet:

The Supremes could have been called something different. Motown had come up with a list.

They could have been called The Darleens, despite not a single one of them possessing the name of Darleen. They could have been called The Sweet Ps. They could have been The Melodees.

Or, if they had been feeling fancy, they could have been The Royaltones or The Jewelettes. Some of those names may have suited them better.

They went with The Supremes! I added the exclamation point.

When you have a name like The Supremes on your record, those records have got to sound like money. And The Supremes records did sound like money.

Even with their newly-minted-fancy-name, it took The Supremes a while to have hits. This was partially because they were still in high school, and Berry Gordy kept on telling them to go back and learn something. Then it was because Motown was throwing all its good songs – and a lot of its marketing budget – at the already successful, and equally as aspirationally titled, The Marvellettes.

Where Did Our Love Go?, for example, was initially supposed to be a Marvellettes song. But The Marvelletes thought it was a rubbish song. They were wrong. Maybe that’s why they wouldn’t be getting the good songs for very much longer.

Where Did Our Love Go? is, very clearly, not a rubbish song. It’s a very simple song though.

…has said that he sourced his song ideas from scribbling down what bickering couples said to each other whilst he was eavesdropping on them in restaurants. Imagine this conversation if you will:

“I’ve got this burnin’, burnin
Yearnin’ feelin’ inside me
Ooh, deep inside me
And it hurts so bad”

“I’m sorry honey, but I’m confused. Are we breaking up, or do you have indigestion?”

The Supremes thought that Where Did Our Love Go? was rubbish too, but that was largely because they had heard the rumour that The Marvellettes had thought it was rubbish first.

Diana could tell that the song had not been written with her in mind, because it had been written in the wrong key. So she was upset about that as well. This is the reason – and not because she’s wondering where her baby’s love went – for Diana sounding so sad.

Diana Ross was good at sounding sad. Diana wasn’t necessarily the best singer in The Supremes. She wasn’t necessarily the prettiest member of The Supremes.

But Diana sounded more delicate, and more fragile, than any other pop singer of her generation. The Supremes would be given a lot more songs about feeling fragile and delicate in the years to come.

Although “Where Did Our Love Go?” is clearly a sad song, it’s so light and breezy that it’s easy to forget just how sad it is. Sometimes you just can’t help but smile.

Particularly if Berry has sent you on tour to Paris. And you record a video in which you dance in the traffic, almost get run over by a car – look out Diana! – and are pushed around by police.

Holland-Dozier-Holland had written a few hits before “Where Did Our Love Go?:” Most notably, Heat Wave for Martha and The Vandellas, but also Can I Get A Witness? for Marvin Gaye – but Where Did Our Love Go? was when they finally hit upon a formula.

A formula that would see them dominate the charts to an almost Beatles-like extent, all the way through to 1967. The Supremes would be carried along with them.

Within a couple of months, The Supremes would already be about as big as The Beatles. Although that’s no excuse for knocking off a quick mostly-British-songs-album cash-in. Although to be fair, a lot of British acts were covering American songs at the time. (see more below).

Where Did Our Love Go? is a 9.

---

Meanwhile, in Soul Land:

Solomon Burke is so happy to be here tonight! So glad to be in your wonderful city! And he has a little message for you…

Solomon Burke had been preachin’ for a very long time. Solomon Burke was born to be a preacher. It was, you might say, pre-ordained. His grandmother ordained him as a bishop on the day that he was born. She’d had a dream about it twelve years earlier. This is the sort of thing that happens to you when you are the godson of the founder of the United House of Prayer for All People of the Church on the Rock of the Apostolic Faith.

Solomon started preaching by the time he was six, quite often whilst wearing a cape that he made out of his “blankie.”

Exactly what wisdom Solomon was espousing at such a young age, I don’t know. But one quote later in his life demonstrated where his heart was at: “I realised being a bishop was good,” he said, reflecting on his childhood. “because bishops got two or three pieces of chicken when everybody else only got a leg.”

Solomon may have been the one who coined the phrase “soul music,” since – being a child preacher and all – he didn’t want to sing dirty R&B songs.

Following lengthy negotiations with Atlantic as to how they would market him – and after checking with his church to see if they were fine with the term – everybody agreed that “soul music” was the perfect fit.

And what is Solomon teaching us this evening, in our beautiful city? He’s telling us that everybody needs somebody. Somebody to love. Somebody to kiss. Someone to tease. He needs you, you, you.

And that is why people called him King Solomon. Also because it’s a good pun.

By the time Solomon died in 2010, he had 21 children, 90 grandchildren, and a congregation of 40,000 believers. And I truly believe the man loved each, and every one of them. He loved you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you…

Everybody Needs Somebody is a 9.

---

Meanwhile, in Burt Land:

Dionne Warwick was feuding with Cilla Black.

Cilla Black’s real name? Priscilla White… see what she did there?

There was a logical reason for Cilla’s version going to #1 in the UK in 1964. She was signed to Brian Epstein’s management. That’s The Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein. John Lennon had introduced them. Cilla came from Liverpool. She had a bowl haircut. She was basically a female Beatle. How could she possibly lose?

Dionne believed – with great big dollops of justification – that she had been robbed.

Dionne was particularly miffed because Cilla didn’t just cover Anyone Who Had A Heart, she had copied Dionne’s every inflection and mannerism. The way Dionne puts it, Cilla impersonated her so closely that if Dionne had accidentally coughed on the record, Cilla would have coughed as well.

Dusty Springfield was another matter, though. Dionne seemed to get along fabulously with Dusty Springfield.

Dusty and Dionne had a lot in common. “Both were mad about shopping” the NME said, “both hated getting up late in the morning (surely that’s a typo?), and both loved eating cockles, whelks and eels down at Petticoat Lane.” Dusty took Dionne down the East End where she drank some “genuine British bitter beer – straight from the barrel!” Presumedly it was poured into a mug first.

It’s quite fortunate that Dusty and Dionne got along well, since Dusty was singing an awful lot of Burt Bacharach/Hal David hits.

That she was shirty with Cilla makes sense, but she would later extend that shirtiness to Dusty and Sandie Shaw for the crime of covering songs that she hadn’t even recorded yet!

Dusty had recorded Burt’s Wishin’ And Hopin’ – which Dionne herself had recorded a couple of years earlier, but nobody had noticed, probably because it was a B-side –  and thus found herself in New York meeting with the man himself.

Burt had to talk Dusty into releasing Wishin’ And Hopin’ as a single, as she wasn’t so keen on it. That’s possibly because it features lyrics that were very clearly written by a man: “show him that you care, just for him, do the things, he likes to do, do your hair, just for him”… I do like the fact that Dusty is singing about how awesome her hair is. Wishin’ And Hopin’ is an 8.

Burt also gave Dusty another old song that nobody had noticed the first time around, and which they clearly just didn’t know what to do with.

Dionne hadn’t recorded I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself.  It had been recorded by various people, multiple times, a few years before, and had been a complete flop each and every time. Burt was not yet regarded as a pop genius.

Only one person in the world seemed to believe that Burt was a pop genius; a rather older woman by the name of Marlene Dietrich.

Marlene was clearly onto something. Burt was a pop genius, and I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself is a masterpiece. An emotional epic that starts its life as a shy little country-shimmer, before gradually building itself up into an all-encompassing Spectral Well of Sadness, where movies and parties – and all the other things that Petula Clark would very soon inform us would make us happy again – simply do not work!

Dusty wasn’t the only British songbird rifling through the Bacharach back-catalogue.

With her pixie-cut and her arms-folded protectively in front of her, Sandie Shaw was a timid, almost mousey, version of Dusty Springfield. The ultimate every-girl pop star. The kind that British Svengalis liked to claim they found working as waitresses in cocktail bars.

…before sprinkling around a little fairy-dust and transforming them into super-relatable pop stars.

Instead of not being able to go to parties, Sandie can’t even go to the small café where you used to dance at night. I like how Hal David’s lyrics so often paint a picture of an entire neighbourhood filled with parties and cafes and nooks and crannies. Compared to the settings of most pop songs only a couple of years earlier – sock hops and malt shops and so on– these songs must have sounded so grown-up and chic.

Dionne hadn’t sung on the original version of There’s Always Something There To Remind Me.

Also singing back-up? Doris Troy – of Just One Look fame (it’s a 9) and Cissy Houston! Here he is on a Halloween recording of American Bandstand.

And that’s how, in less than a year, Burt Bacharach put the British girl-singer orchestral-pop scene in a chokehold, all whilst working remotely from his office in the Brill Building, New York. He did visit London in December though, when Marlene was in need of his baton again.

Always Something There To Remind Me is a 9.

I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself is a 10.

---

Meanwhile, in British Blues Land:

Things were changing fast in the UK.

It feels as though it’s only been a matter of months since we covered the arrival of The Beatles, and already the charts had become flooded by a deluge of mop-tops with guitars going “yeah-yeah-yeah” all the time, most of whom were embarrassingly, if endearingly, naff.

Most of whom sported the goofiest of goofy grins. The Dave Clark Five? The Searchers?

Newly-famous man-about-town Mick Jagger went on the record: In Melody Maker – to state “I HATE phoney beat-groups who scream like mad to try and create excitement. You know, the ones that yell their heads off in the middle of a record and think they are being hip and with-it. Loathe that. It lacks any subtlety.”

This from the guy who had recently recorded this advertisement for Kellogg’s “Rice Krispies.”

If phoney beat-groups with big goofy-grins were old-hat, then that left a vacuum which needed to be filled by something new. Something new that sounded like something really old.  Something like… The blues! Someone like: The Animals.

The Animals were perfect billing.

As for something that sounded old, well, songs don’t get much older than The House Of The Rising Sun, an old folk song that seems to have existed for about as long as people have felt the need to sing a cautionary tale about the temptations of spending time in a house of ill-repute.

It may have been a folk song from ye olde England centuries before that. Or that may have been a completely different song. It’s hard to tell. That’s the problem with folk songs. They change. Over the course of multiple centuries, they change a lot. Even the Clarence’s 1933 version is barely recognisable.

The British blues scene was not as old as The House Of The Rising Sun. But it wasn’t exactly new, either.

The roots of the British blues scene can be traced back to about ten years earlier, when the UK had its skiffle boom.

Washboards were popular, gut-bucket basses, cowbells… all whilst singing old folk songs. Mostly old American folk songs. Lonnie Donegan had a huge hit with “Rock Island Line”, a lesson in how to fool a toll-collector on an American railroad. Not, one might think, the most promising topic for a pop song, but the kids loved it.

Many of those kids became obsessed with American folk songs. Which led them to become obsessed with old blues songs.

Which led to a conversation in which Mick and Keith decided to start a band. Which led to The Rolling Stones.

A couple of other ex-skifflers would also get into the blues and open up their own pokey little bar: The Ealing Jazz Club:

A scene in which every blues fan in London – which at the time was only about one hundred – would soon find themselves, and pretty much call home.

Also, Elton John. But that feels like another story.

Soon Black American blues legends were coming over to Britain to play. Thereby giving the music rags an opportunity to arrange historical meetings between the fresh-faced British blues stars and their considerably more-rugged looking American heroes.

So, there was this whole thing going on in London even before The Beatles exploded and sent the global music industry on a quest to see what else they could dig up there. But as bubbling as the blues scene was in London, it was nothing compared to the scene up in gloomy, coalmining, brown-ale drinking, Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

The Animals came from Newcastle-upon-Tyne. In Newcastle-upon-Tyne, people seemed to listen to nothing but the blues! They had their own Top 20 chart, and John Lee Hooker managed to reach the Top 5! Imagine that! John Lee Hooker with a nearly-chart-topping single!! Presumedly it was Dimples (it’s an 8)

Newcastle had a long history making of gloomy music. Hank Marvin, the lead guitarist of The Shadows – by some distance the coolest band in Britain prior to The Beatles – had also come from Newcastle. There was something about Newcastle that inspired gloomy music. Maybe it was the weather. Maybe it was the coal.

The House Of The Rising Sun was notably long. Four-and-a-half-minutes long. Which, by the standards of a mid-60s pop single, was an eternity. But – being a single – it was far shorter than how The Animals played it live. Or how The Animals played anything live.

Not all of their audiences appreciated that. The Animals tended to get a bigger applause at the beginning of their shows than they did at their conclusion, presumedly because the audience had been lulled asleep by their extended jam-session version of John Coltrane’s modal-jazz version of My Favourite Things.

The Animals were familiar with The House Of The Rising Sun because Bob Dylan had covered it a couple of years earlier. But they didn’t want to just be known for recording American songs set in American cities. They wanted to write about their own cities. They realized however that they had a problem: “Up to now” Eric observed “it’s seemed a bit ridiculous to write songs about towns like Chipping Sodbury.”

He’s got a point: “there is… a house… in Chipping Sodbury” just doesn’t have the same ring. Still, writing extremely British songs about extremely British places would soon become extremely popular. Sadly, for all their other undeniable qualities, The Animals weren’t especially good at writing songs – pretty much every hit they ever had was a cover – so it wouldn’t be they who would bring that plan to fruition.

Not everybody was a fan of The House Of The Rising Sun. Mick Jagger, in the same Melody Maker article in which he slagged off “phoney beat-groups”, also slagged off his more immediate chart competition, like he was Noel Gallagher or something.

Mick was clearly kidding himself. In addition to being one of the longest, most evil-sounding, and just plain freaky, chart-toppers of all-time, The House Of The Rising Sun was also a turning point. It was the moment that British blues went fully mainstream. Its impact was immediate: the song that replaced The House Of The Rising Sun at the top of the UK charts, was by Mick and the boys themselves! It was their cover of Bobby Womack’s “All Over Now. It was their first Number One! (it’s an 8)

Something was changing. British blues was no longer an underground scene. British blues was now competing with The Beatles!

The House Of The Rising Sun is a 10.

---

Meanwhile, in British Land:

But what do you get when a blues band decides that it wants to be a “phoney beat-band”?  

You get the mayhem of Manfred Mann!

The same way as Dave Clarke Five had been named after the drummer – who didn’t sing – Manfred Mann were named after their keyboardist, who also didn’t sing. But his name truly was Manfred. Manfred is a popular German name. Mann wasn’t his last name though. There’s no way his parents would have been so cruel. Manfred’s last name was Lubowitz.

Manfred Mann is an excellent name for a person, and an even better name for a band. Initially however, Manfred Mann overdid it a tad: calling themselves Manfred Mann and The Manfreds. One of those Manfreds had to go.

Manfred Mann – the band, not just the titular keyboard player – looked like bookish intellectuals.

Like a lot of British jazz bands at the time, Manfred Mann were gradually finding themselves drawn to the blues. It looked as though they were going to be a serious blues band. They seemed to spend a lot of time at the Ealing Jazz Club.

For a little while they used The Surfaris Wipe Out! as their theme music, but they soon realized that they needed a proper theme song to call their own.

Just before Christmas in 1963, Manfred Mann were asked to come up with said proper theme song, and 5-4-3-2-1 was the result. It became their first hit! It’s a 7.

Once you have a hit with something like 5-4-3-2-1 there’s really no point in continuing to be all snooty about pop music and acting like bespectacled jazz-and-blues-nerds. Once you write something like “5-4-3-2-1” you might as well record the silliest sounding song you can find. And sure, there are a lot of songs sillier than Do Wah Diddy, but Do Wah Diddy is still a silly song.

Manfred Mann didn’t come up with Do Wah Diddy themselves. That was Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, way over in America.

Do Wah Diddy had previously been recorded by The Exciters, them of such certified bops as Tell Him and the problematic He’s Got The Power (both of which are 8s). Their version is fun, but – surprisingly for such a usually rip-roaring girl (plus one dude) group – disappointingly restrained.

Like so many Jeff and Ellie songs – Then He Kissed Me, Da Doo Ron Ron – Do Wah Diddy Diddy was an entire romance-in-microcosm. The two tune-smiths had just gotten married, so they were simply writing what they knew. Jeff and Ellie songs of this period seemed to follow much the same plot-points: A couple meet. They kiss. They usually end up getting married. At which point, they kiss again.

More than that: Do Wah Diddy is a good news story with nonsense lyrics. More than that even, it’s a good news story with nonsense lyrics, which, if they mean anything, do not mean singing Do Wah Diddy. Paul sings in the character of a dude bragging about getting laid.

Manfred Mann’s Do Wah Diddy is so overcome with excitement that it only makes sense that they added an extra “diddy” to the title.

And dear God, do they ram that song title home or what? They ram it home until Do Wah Diddy Diddy loses all sense of meaning.

Do Wah Diddy Diddy is an 8.

• As an aside, “Record Mirror” ran a story about a rumour that Manfred Mann were being considered as hit song writers for Tamla-Motown, which seems… unlikely?

Let the author know that you liked their article with a “Green Thumb” Upvote! 

Views: 67