About This Time 60 Years Ago…

It’s The Hits Of September-ish 1965!

The Hottest Hit On The Planet…

The last time we checked in on John, Paul, George and Ringo, they had released the song – and movie – “Hard Day’s Night.” A song – or at least a title– about how hard they’d been working. They followed it up with “Eight Days A Week”, another song – or at least a title – about how hard they’d been working. Both songs – or at least titles – had been inspired by something that Ringo had said. Ringo was constantly coming up with creative ways of complaining they were working too hard. Ringo was obviously feeling stressed.

Not as stressed as John it seems. But we’ll get to that (“Eight Days A Week” is a 7.)

And weren’t they working really hard?!? Let’s have a look at the Beatles itinerary in 1965.,

They’d gone on a world tour, played Shea Stadium. Where the teenage girls were screaming so loud that Ringo couldn’t hear the rest of the band and had to keep time by watching them bob up and down. Not that it really mattered, because the teenage girls couldn’t hear them either.

They’d received MBEs (or the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire… yes, that’s really what it stands for.)

Ringo got married. John got his driver’s license.

They bonded over the pressures of fame. “It used to get pretty scary at times,” Elvis said.

“And you’re just one,” John replied “At least we’ve got each other up there. If somebody pushed me on stage and said ‘You’re on your own,’ like they did with you, I’d just break up”

“Help!” is the sound of John breaking up.

The sound of John, in the middle of the great big whirl of Beatlemania, breaking up, and simultaneously writing the best Beatles song of the pre-LSD era.

“Help!” is also the theme song to a Beatles movie –

Whilst Hard Day’s Night had been all about the insane experience of being a Beatle and having girls chase after you all the time, Help! was simply insane.

One thing hadn’t changed however: The Beatles were still being chased. Except that in Help! they are being chased by:

Indeed, it did start here, as would George’s obsession with Indian music…he’d buy his first sitar soon after). And:

Neither of these groups is chasing The Beatles because they are Beatles’ fans. They are chasing The Beatles because of a ring. A sacrificial ring. A sacrificial ring that needs to be worn by the sacrificial victim of a sacrifice to Kali.

It turns out, you see, that the sacrificial victim is a Beatles fan and has sent to ring to Ringo. And now Ringo can’t get the ring off his finger! Holy Calamity!!! How will the Fab Four get themselves out of this mess?!?

Now remember, this was 1965, which means that they made all of this without psychedelic drugs. Instead, they were all on pot.

John – and probably the other three – was having marijuana for breakfast at the time, having been introduced to the natural plant by Bob Dylan who mistakenly thought they were singing “I get high” in “I Want To Hold Your Hand.” No wonder he was feeling a bit paranoid.

It’s quite astonishing really, given that John was given the title of the movie – which was originally called Eight Arms to Hold You, another Ringo suggestion, although George was lobbying for Who’s Been Sleeping in My Porridge – and then expected to write a theme song for it, that he came up with something so personal.

Particularly given that John wasn’t intending to write a personal statement. He was trying to write a song to be played at the start of a film – a film involving a religious cult and a mad scientist – and yet, all of this stuff, all of this personal stuff, just came flooding out.

When I was younger so much younger than today
I never needed anybody’s help in any way
But now these days are gone, I’m not so self-assured
Now I find I’ve changed my mind and opened up the doors

All of which was accompanied by an accompaniment with more “BIFF!!!”, “BAM!!!” and “POW!!!” than the movie itself!!! With more implied exclamation marks than the movie itself!!!!

That’s an intro as attention grabbing as an emergency flare. Which makes it so sad that no-one seemed to realize that John was literally crying for help.

Some have argued that this was inappropriate.

John himself thought that “Help!” would have been better if it were slower. Something like “You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away.” Or like so many of those songs about lonely people and lonely situations and how lonely it was to be a Beatle, that The Beatles would soon begin to write: “Nowhere Man”, “Eleanor Rigby”, “Norwegian Wood,” “In My Life”, that sort of thing.

But the fact that this jingle-jangly happy sounding silly little Beatles’ song has such a dark anxiety-laden underbelly is the best thing about it.

It makes John sound as though he’s trapped inside of Beatlemania, so trapped he can only disguise his coded S.O.S. messages as yet another “yeah, yeah, yeah” song.

You can have your “Yesterday” and all of its most-covered-song-in-history status. They are both quite similar songs. They are both cries for help. They both look back upon the past as a simpler time when they had no problems. Both could quite conceivably be just about a girl. (“Yesterday” is a nice song, but it’s not Coldplay, it’s not “Fix You,” it’s an 8).

If I had to choose between covering one or the other, I definitely go for “Help!”.

It doesn’t need to be a deceptively happy jingle-jangle; a decade and a half later Australian national-treasure John Farnham would belt out an orchestral backed version of “Help!” that kicks any version of “Yesterday” you’ve ever heard’s ass.

So of course: “the video” had to feature the Fab Four sitting on a wooden plank, playing their instruments. All except for Ringo, because you can’t fit drums on a wooden plank. So he gets to hold an umbrella instead.

But John is at the front, so he gets snowed upon. Ringo’s umbrella turns out to be no help at all. It all feels as though it means something but I can’t for the life of me imagine what.

“Help!” is a 10.

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Meanwhile, in Deep Soul Land…

Look at those dance moves. All that arm waving and jerking back and forth. What is that jerking little dance?

It’s a dance that is literally called The Jerk. And “In The Midnight Hour” was the ultimate song to do The Jerk to.

I know, it seems weird, and it seems wrong, sacrilegious almost, to consider a soul classic such as “In The Midnight Hour” as a 60s dance craze song, as though it were “The Twist” or “The Locomotion” or “The Monster Mash”, but that’s pretty much what it was. A dance-craze song was what was needed in order for Wilson Pickett:

For it had been a long journey for Wilson Pickett to get to a point where a hit dance-craze record might be possible.

Wilson Pickett originally came from Alabama, but he left there as soon as possible to go live with his father in Detroit.

His father had moved up there because he could earn more money in Detroit than in his previous side-gig as a moonshiner, and also, not end up in jail for his efforts. Wilson had moved up there to escape his mother who beat him up so badly and so often that he’d previously run away into the woods with his dog for a week. And cried.

Detroit in the late 50s turned out to be the perfect place to be if you aspired to become a gospel singer, as young Wilson did.

Which meant that late 50s Detroit was also the perfect place to be if you aspired to become a soul singer, and before too long, young Wilson did.

It was the by now familiar transition of moving from gospel to secular a la Sam Cooke; to take advantage of the opportunity to both make more money and to bed more girls… although singing gospel in the 50s had never stopped anyone from doing that!

Up until “In The Midnight Hour”, Wilson had been a promising young lad on the soul scene, but frustratingly little more. He had made a bit of a splash with The Falcons in 1962, having a bit of a hit with “I Found A Love.”

To give you just a taste of how good a place by-now-it-was-the-early-60s Detroit was if you happened to be an aspiring soul singer, The Falcons had been founded by Eddie “WAR! WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?!!” Floyd.

Wilson got the job as the new lead singer because the group couldn’t convince Marvin Gaye to join. There were soul legends all over the joint!

A few years had passed, and Wilson was now signed to Atlantic, who sent him down to Memphis to record at Stax.

Wilson wouldn’t be signed to Stax or anything, but sometimes Atlantic would send artists down there, if they thought the record would benefit from that soulful Stax sound.

At this point Stax was still mostly famous for Booker T & The MG’s “Green Onions”, but that had been three years earlier. But Stax had an easily recognizable sound. They also had an easily recognizable recording studio.

Most recording studios do not look particularly impressive from the outside.

But Stax! Stax was an old movie theatre!

When you have a recording studio that looks like this from the outside, how could you not be making stacks of hits on the inside?

And yet, for the longest time, Stax weren’t.

They had Otis Redding, whose records – “These Arms Of Mine” and “Pain In My Heart” and the original “Respect” – were scraping the charts, but he wasn’t exactly a star yet.

So Wilson Pickett went down to Memphis, and Jerry Wexler, mover and shaker at Atlantic Records went with him, to tell the assorted Stax musos about a dance called The Jerk. All the kids were doing it, and they were doing it to The Jerk by The Larks, a completely forgotten song that had made the Billboard Top Ten! (“The Jerk” is a 5.)

It required that they emphasize the second beat of the bar, instead of the first, thereby creating the songs jerky rhythm. The Stax band went hard on that rhythm, which is why “In The Midnight Hour” became the big “Jerk” song. Also because it’s simply a much better song.

But “In The Midnight Hour” is more than just a dance-craze song.

Although the lyrics are clearly just Wilson sharing his intent to give you a booty-call, the phrase sounds mythical. It recalls other such phrases as “the witching hour,” which also happens to be the midnight hour.

The title came from something that Wilson had previously sung, possibly back in his Falcons days.

Or perhaps it came from even further back, from one of his old gospel songs, something about Jesus coming in the midnight hour. In keeping with his whole moving from gospel to soul trajectory, it only makes sense that Wilson might change it from singing about Jesus to singing about taking you girl and holding you and doing all the things he told you.

A year later of course, Wilson would record the ultimate dance-craze song; one with 1,000 dances!!!

“In The Midnight Hour” is a 9.

If “In The Midnight Hour” sounds vaguely Biblical, it has NOTHING on our next song…

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Meanwhile, in Jazz Land…

Nina’s mother was a Methodist preacher. She preached at revival meetings.

You might like to think of “Sinnerman” as Nina following in her mother’s footsteps. Kind of. Ironic perhaps since Nina Simone is not the name that her mother gave her at birth.

Nina had to perform under a pseudonym. Not because Eunice Waymon is nobody’s idea of a pop star name, but because she was scared that otherwise her mother might find out that she was playing the devil’s music.

Nina Simone’s mother is the only person that Nina Simone appears to have ever been cowered by. Other than her mother, Nina Simone never took shit from no-one. Particularly white folk.

This was demonstrated at an early age; 12 years old to be exact. On this occasion, Nina’s first piano recital, in the local church, Nina’s parents were asked to move from the front row so that a white couple could sit there instead. Nina refused to play until this slight was rectified.

Nina was such a prodigy that, following a summer at Julliard for piano-training purposes, she applied to study at the terribly exclusive Curtis Institute Of Music.

Which was a shame, since Nina’s family had already moved to Philadelphia, convinced that she would get in. Nina did however get private training from one of the professors there, so it wasn’t a total waste of time. Still, Nina Simone was a woman who knew how to hold a grudge, and she would hold that grudge for the rest of her life.

Sometimes Nina wrote songs, when she had something that she wanted to say.

Nina really had something she wanted to say the day she wrote “Mississippi Goddamn.” It only took her an hour to write it, she was so pissed off; about the shooting of Civil Rights activist Medgar Evers in Mississippi and the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Alabama.

In a perfect world, “Mississippi Goddamn” would be the Governor Wallace-referencing song forever on the radio instead of “Sweet Home Alabama.”

But then again, in a perfect world “Mississippi Goddamn” would not need to exist.

And indeed it did not get played, despite the record company providing radio stations with a blasphemy bleeped-out radio edit… some radio stations smashed their copies and sent them back.

But mostly Nina did covers. Covers of everything from “The Twelve Of Never” to “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” to a whole lot of Bessie Smith, to “Cotton Eyed Joe” to “I Put A Spell On You”. As the title of her 1964 album put it so well, she sang “Broadway-Blues-Ballads”

In the same way as most of Nina’s songs were covers, most of her albums were live.

“I want to shake people up so bad”, she once said “that when they leave a nightclub where I’ve performed, I want them to be in pieces.” That’s the kind of performance you want to wax.

The album was famous at the time for her cover of Gershwin’s “I Loves You, Porgy”, but it’s probably more famous now for her cover of “My Baby Just Cares For Me”

“I Loves You, Porgy” had been a proper pop hit, Top 20 on the Hot 100 and everything. It was admittedly a good time to cover a Broadway musical number: on the week “I Loves You Porgy” peaked, Bobby Darin was at Number One with “Mack The Knife.”

“I Loves You, Porgy” was not just Nina’s first hit record, but the first pop song that she had ever performed live, one night in Atlantic City. It’s a cute story; here it is:

Nina was working in a vocal studio for children, playing piano accompaniment and teaching the children popular songs. One of her –  presumedly – older students had a job, playing piano in a supper club in Atlantic City. Nina didn’t know what that meant exactly – she had lived a strangely sheltered existence up until then – but she knew they paid twice as much as she was earning teaching, so she asked: “can you get me work in a supper club?”

Nina got the job in what turned out to be an Irish pub. But the only way Nina knew how to dress for performances came from her classical recital days, so she went in a chiffon gown.

The second night the owner comes in – chomping on a big cigar – and informs her that this simply won’t do. That she’ll have to sing. Can you sing? Nina’s like, “I’ve never sung before, but I know one little song…” and she sings “I Loves You, Porgy.”

Following that first hit album, Nina’s records stubbornly refused to chart.

Except, for a minute, in 1965, when a handful of hits snuck in. Nina released the I Put A Spell On You album, taking “Feelin’ Good” – a song from a flop British musical titled The Roar of the Greasepaint,The Smell of the Crowd – and turning it into a standard.

And Nina released Pastel Blues, widely regarded as her protest album after the assassination of Malcolm X and her performance at the Selma-to-Montgomery March, where she played “Mississippi Goddamn.”

Nina claimed to have heard her mother singing “Sinnerman” in her preaching capacity, when Nina was just a kid.

“Some of my most fantastic experiences – experiences that really shake me, now that I think of them – happened in the church when we’d have these revival meetings.

I’d be playiNnNnNnNnNng, boy! I’d REALLY be playing. I loved it! Folks would be shoutin’ all over the place. Now, that’s my background!”

There’s one problem with this narrative though. This would have been in the 1940s, and – officially anyway – “Sinnerman” had not been written yet!

Written by, I kid you not, Les Baxter!

Or, at least, it’s his name on the credits.

We’ve met Les Baxter before, the inventor of exotica, aka fake-world-music, composer of such classics as “Monkey Dance Of Bali,” “Harem Silks From Bombay” and “Bangkok Cockfight.”

And Les recorded “Sinner Man.”

It’s not very good. You could not possibly imagine a whiter version of “Sinnerman.”  But it had legs. Within a couple of years all sorts of people would be covering it, most notably The Weavers.

But did Les actually write it?

Or did he figure that, since nobody had claimed the copyright – what with it quite possibly being so very, very old – that “Sinnerman” was up for grabs?

I honestly have no idea. It’s a mystery. When you have a song as famous and beloved as “Sinnerman” you’d have to assume musical ethnologists must have spent decades researching its origins, locking themselves up in libraries, scouring through plantation melody song books and field holler recordings, but all they’ve seemed to find prior to the 1950s, is a couple of vaguely similar lines on a record from 1928, and Nina’s memories of her mother singing it at revival meetings. And then suddenly… Les Baxter!

Also… the Sensational Nightingales.

Who, a couple of years earlier, in 1954, had made a record that’s sort of “Sinnerman”, and very sort of isn’t. A record featuring lyrics that ask a sinnerman where he’s gonna run to? That mentions a rock, behind which the sinnerman would like to hide. Clearly these themes were in the air. Then again, they were also in the Bible.

“Sinnerman” is basically The Book Of Revelations with a hypnotic house piano riff, decades before hypnotic house piano riffs were even invented. It’s apocalyptic shit!

There’s a lot of debate over which passage of the Bible is being referenced in “Sinnerman”.

Some say it’s The Book Of Exodus, specifically the Ten Plagues Of Egypt, but that doesn’t sound right. Others say Psalm 78, but I’m not convinced. The lines “I run to The Rock. Please hide me!” seem most likely a reference to Revelation 6:

“And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains; And said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb.”

Nina picks up the story at this point and imagines the strained conversation between the Sinnerman and the Rock

“I can’t hide you,” the Rock cried out
“I ain’t gonna hide you guy”

Nina’s not having any of this. As I said, Nina doesn’t take shit from no-one: “I said ROCK. WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH YOU ROCK? DON’T YOU SEE I NEED YOU ROCK?”

The Rock is being very un-Rock-like.

It’s worth noting that these are not the same lyrics as in Les’ version, in which the Rock is the Moon. I don’t know what is going on with that.

“Sinnerman” is a song that sounds a zillion years old and yet still so far ahead of its time that whenever it’s been remixed – and “Sinnerman” has been remixed A LOT! – they all end up sounding more or less like Nina did in 1965… just with a 4/4 house beat under it, instead of a frazzled 4/4 jazz beat rattling along faster than human limbs should physically be able to play. A lot of that is because of the hypnotic house piano. Piano that hypnotic is timeless.

“Sinnerman” is a 10. 10 minutes of 10!

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