As I Sit There Applauding From a Front-Row Seat

They say that every great song has a great story behind it, and that's certainly true with "I Wanna Be Around".

Sadie Vimmerstedt was a fifty-something grandmother living in Youngstown, Ohio in 1957, and she had a serious dislike for Frank Sinatra.  It wasn't his voice she didn't care for, but rather the fact that several years earlier, he had left his first wife, Nancy, in order to chase (and eventually marry...and then divorce) actress Ava Gardner.  Mrs. Vimmerstedt thought it was shameful that Sinatra had abandoned the wife and children who adored him so that he could make a fool of himself panting after Hollywood's reigning sex goddess.

One day, thinking about what Sinatra had done, words suddenly came to mind:  I wanna be around to pick up the pieces, when somebody breaks your heart.  She decided that would make a great opening for a song.  But as she wasn't very musical herself, and had never written a song in her life, she concluded it would be wiser to let a professional take over.  For her choice, she went straight to the top.

Johnny Mercer isn't as well remembered these days as such contemporaries as Gershwin, Harold Arlen and Cole Porter still are, which baffles me.  He wrote some of the greatest tunes in the 'Great American Songbook', including "Hooray for Hollywood", "That Old Black Magic", "One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)" and "Moon River", among dozens of others.  He was also a major recording star himself in the 1940s, wrote the songs for several Broadway musicals, and was nominated for no fewer than 18 Academy Awards for his film work (winning four Oscars over the course of his career).  Oh, and in his spare time, he co-founded Capitol Records, and discovered Nat King Cole.  But while he remains in relative obscurity these days, in the Fifties, he was as well known as almost any entertainer in America.  Mrs. Vimmerstedt decided he would be the perfect songwriting collaborator.  She wrote Mercer a letter, sharing the opening lyric she had come up with, and explaining the inspiration for the song.

She then addressed the envelope to:

Johnny Mercer

Songwriter

New York, NY

That's right, she didn't even have an actual address for Mercer, she just had faith it would find him.  Keep in mind that, then as now, New York was home to several million people.  Unfortunately at the time, Johnny Mercer wasn't one of them.  He had actually moved out to California back in the 30s.

This is exactly the sort of mail that is destined for the Dead Letter Office, almost never to find its recipient.  But miraculously, Mrs. Vimmerstedt's faith was well-placed; an employee at the NYC Post Office saw the letter, and knew that Mercer was living on the West Coast.  He forwarded the letter to Los Angeles, hoping that his counterparts there could get it to Mercer.  And they did!  Like I said, Mercer was a star back then, and the mailmen knew where he lived.

Johnny opened the envelope, read the letter, agreed that it was a good opener for a song, and a good premise overall...and then he put the letter in a desk drawer and forgot about it for a year or two.  But then one day when he had nothing else to do, Mercer happened to open the drawer, rediscover the letter, and decided to actually write the rest of the song.

Mercer wasn't one for sticky sentimentality (after all, the inspiration for his brilliant, soul-wrenching "One for My Baby" was in fact himself, written in the painful wake of the end of his love affair with Judy Garland.  He wouldn't even give himself a happy ending in his own song!), so he avoided the treacly trap of turning the song around in the final stanza and having the singer welcome his unfaithful lover back.  No, this was a song about sticking the knife in, and deep.  It was an anthem for everyone who had been wronged by love.  As far as I'm concerned, it might very well be the first punk rock song.  It's a loss to us all that the Ramones never got around to covering it.

     I want to be around to pick up the pieces
     When somebody breaks your heart
     Some somebody twice as smart as I

     A somebody who will swear to be true
     As you used to do with me
    Who'll leave you to learn
    That misery loves company, wait and see

    I mean, I want to be around to see how he does it
    When he breaks your heart to bits
    Let's see if the puzzle fits so fine

    And that's when I'll discover that revenge is sweet
    As I sit there applauding from a front-row seat
    When somebody breaks your heart
    Like you, like you broke mine

Honorably, Mercer gave Mrs. Vimmerstedt co-credit along with 50% of the royalties, which were enough to let her retire and pursue her lifelong dream of traveling the world.  It also made her a minor celebrity in her own right, and for a while she kept busy giving newspaper interviews and appearing on radio and television talk shows.  It was a dizzying pace for her, and after a few months she wrote another letter to her songwriting partner saying, "Mr. Mercer, I've just got to get out of show business...it's exhausting!"

The song was recorded by a number of artists, but it achieved it's first real and lasting fame in 1963, when Tony Bennett recorded what is today still acknowledged as the definitive version:

A great performance of a great song, truly.

(And for the record, Sinatra did his own version in 1964, with Count Basie and his band.  Whatever the inspiration, Frank wasn't about to let that stand in the way of singing a good song.)

Cover Me

Or, finding success the second time around

Sometimes an artist records a song that they have a great deal of faith in.  They just know in their heart that it's going to be huge.  They release it, and then...nothing.

Often, it's just a matter of timing.  Aerosmith's first 45 single, "Dream On", fell short of breaking into the Top 40 in 1973.  Re-released three years later after the band had put a couple of other hits on the charts, it went Top 10.

In some cases however, artists decide to take the radical step of actually re-recording the song, with the end result being the hit the original failed to be. 

Here are some of the better-known examples of that....

The Beach Boys released their TODAY album in March of 1965, and one of the tracks on it was a pleasant if relatively unremarkable ditty called "Help Me Ronda".

But almost immediately upon the LP's release, Brian Wilson began to reconsider it, and he came to the conclusion that it had the potential to be a hit single...but not in the version that was just released.  So as the group began recording songs for their next album, SUMMER DAYS (AND SUMMER NIGHTS!), Wilson had them cut an entirely new version of the song (with an 'h' now added to Rhonda's name, for some unknown reason).  This new take had a slightly quicker tempo and lusher instrumentation.  And Carl Wilson's guitar lick just pops right out of the vinyl.  Brian's instincts proved true, and this new version of the song, released as a single, peaked at #1 on the U.S. chart.

Of course, never one to be fully satisfied with his own monumental accomplishments, Brian Wilson later said that he had always felt he could have done even better with this song, and he wished he could record it a third time.

~~~

Rick Derringer had briefly tasted success in the mid-Sixties with his band, the McCoys, but their fame proved fleeting.  By 1970 he found himself the second guitarist in Johnny Winter's band, and it was there that he wrote "Rock & Roll, Hoochie Koo".  It was an album track on Winter's JOHNNY WINTER AND, and it proved to be a popular tune when performed live in concert, although it wasn't released as a single.  It popped up again two years later on a live album by Johnny's brother, Edgar Winter, with Johnny and Rick guesting on stage to perform it.

By 1973, Derringer had launched a solo career, based in no small part on his belief that "...Hoochie Koo" was a hit single waiting to happen.  So he cut his own version, speeding it up a tad and adding backing singers, and voila...instant Top 40 hit!

~~~

There was a time in the late 1950s and early 1960s when instrumental groups flourished and thrived in rock and roll.  In the Sixties, many of them were pioneering the 'surf sound', and one of the most successful were the Ventures.  Their very first hit, in 1960, was "Walk, Don't Run", a cover of an older jazz tune.  Their far more poppish version soared to #2 on the charts.

Then just four years later, the band decided to do a new version of the song (dubbed, appropriately enough, "Walk, Don't Run '64").  This take made use of the studio and recording technology in a way largely unheard at the time, with high-pitched organ riffs, and an early example of the fade-in intro.  In the midst of the first wave of the British Invasion, these 'old timers' managed to put this new take of the song into the Top 10.

~~~

Considering from what direction you look at it, Dave Mason's career has either been a series of unlikely mini-successes, or else a string of partial failures.  His first big break was as a founding member of Traffic in 1967, but he quit the band shortly after the release of their debut album.  He rejoined them the following year about halfway through their second LP, for which he contributed a track called "Feelin' Alright?".  This song was released as a single in both Britain and America, but failed on both sides of the Atlantic...which was probably just as well, since Mason had again quit the band by that point.

He bounced around mostly as a session musician (with credits...albeit occasionally un-credited...on the likes of BEGGAR'S BANQUET by the Rolling Stones and ALL THINGS MUST PASS from George Harrison.  He was also slated to be the second guitarist...alongside Eric Clapton, of course...in Derek and the Dominoes, but for one reason or another he took a pass on that, and Clapton picked up Duane Allman instead), until he finally launched a proper solo career in 1970.

In the midst of this, Joe Cocker memorably performed "Feelin' Alright?" at Woodstock, and went on to put a version of the song in the Top 40.  That got Mason thinking that maybe he ought to give the tune another spin.

Mason recorded his take in 1973, and while it was not a hit single, it did become an FM staple, and remains popular on classic rock radio stations to this day, making it undeniably Mason's most popular piece of work.

~~~

Honorable Mention

In 1962, producer George Martin was three-quarters satisfied with the new pop quartet he had just signed to Parlophone Records.  Taking the band's manager, Brian Epstein, aside, Martin told him that guitarists John Lennon and George Harrison, and bassist Paul McCartney were proficient enough on their instruments to play on the recordings, but that drummer Pete Best simply wasn't up to snuff.  As a result, when the Beatles came into the studio soon to record their very first single, Martin intended to have a session drummer there to take Best's place.

Epstein reasoned that Pete could continue playing with the group on stage, but that they would go on using a hired drummer for the records.  But that didn't sit well with John, Paul and George.  If they were good enough to perform in the studio, then they wanted their drummer to be that good as well.  Unfortunately, it was well-established that Pete was indifferent at best (no pun intended) at improving his playing, being perfectly satisfied to just bash away more or less in time.  As if his lack of dedication to his craft wasn't maddening enough to his bandmates, he and they were becoming estranged, as Pete more or less stopped hanging around with the other three, showing up for performances and then heading off with other friends while the three Beatles made their own way to a pub.  The writing was on the wall:  Pete Best had to go.

Strengthening this decision was the fact that the other Beatles already knew exactly who they wanted to replace him with.  Richard Starkey, a.k.a. "Ringo Starr", was widely acknowledged as the best rock and roll drummer in Liverpool.  He played steadily with the regionally successful Rory Storm & the Hurricanes, although he had grown dissatisfied that the group would never advance to greater success so long as Rory insisted they remain a cover band, instead of producing their own original songs.  Ringo would often jam with the Beatles after hours, and on a few occasions had even sat in with the group when Pete couldn't perform.  He got along famously with John, Paul and George, and envied the fact that they were making their own music.  So when they asked him to take Best's place, Ringo didn't hesitate, and he was there with his kit the very next day.  (Poor Brian had the unhappy task of having to inform Pete he was sacked, as the rest of the group made themselves scarce until the deed was done.  Best was shocked and saddened, but basically took it in stride.  His fans did not; one of Pete's more ardent female devotees slugged George Harrison, leaving him with a black eye for a few days!)

After a couple of weeks of daily live performances at the Cavern Club and elsewhere, Ringo knew their repertoire inside and out, and enthusiastically traveled down to London with them to record their very first songs, in EMI's Abbey Road studios.  But upon arrival, their shock was exceeded only by his disappointment when they walked into the studio and were informed that a professional drummer, Andy White, had been retained for the session; no one had informed George Martin that Pete had been fired and replaced, so he went ahead and did as he had promised, booking a session pro.  The Beatles argued that Ringo could play his drums as well, if not better, than anyone else, but Martin was dubious.  Besides, White would have to be paid regardless, so it made no sense not to use him.  The decision imposed upon the group, Ringo was unhappily relegated to playing a tambourine on the song.  The incident remained a source of great unhappiness and embarrassment for him for many years to come.

Flash forward 36 years, and Ringo Starr gets his revenge.  During the recording of his VERTICAL MAN CD, it dawns on Ringo that there was no good reason why he couldn't do his own version of "Love Me Do"...and, of course, get to play the drums on it this time!  And so he did, bringing himself closure at last.

He Could Play a Guitar Just Like Ringin' a Bell

We have rock & roll as we know it in large part because of Chuck Berry.

First and foremost, he made the electric solid-body guitar (a relatively new invention in and of itself) the primary instrument of the new musical form, steering the nascent musical style away from R&B piano and countrified hollow-body guitars as the musical vehicle of choice.  You don't get to Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page and Eddie Van Halen without Chuck.

Secondly, he was the complete artist.  He not only played and sang, but he composed his own material as well (frequently in collaboration with Johnnie Johnson).  Few performers wrote their own songs at the time; Elvis didn't, nor did Frank Sinatra or Tony Bennett or Bing Crosby.  New York City was full of songwriters who were turning out material for others to sing.  But Berry was a natural storyteller, who put his tales of dancing, dating, high school beauty queens and living the American dream to music in a way that was emotionally light years ahead of virtually anything else heard in rock & roll at the time.  He ushered in a new era of singers who wrote their own material, such as Carl Perkins, Buddy Holly and Roy Orbison.  Of course, some of his most successful spiritual offspring are Brian Wilson and Lennon and McCartney.

Lastly, he brought honest-to-God swagger.  Elvis may have oozed raw sex appeal on stage, but otherwise he was a shy country boy.  Little Richard was a wild man, but so much so that he almost seemed like a living cartoon.  The only other African-American rocker of Chuck's caliber in the Fifties was Fats Domino, who was a quiet, reticent man.  But Chuck was not shy.  He was handsome and witty and sharp, he dressed in fine clothes and he drove expensive cars.  We have a hard time understanding now just how seismically radical that was for 1950s white America.  Of course, he paid a steep price for that soon enough.

At the absolute peak of his fame, with a long string of huge hit songs behind him..."Maybelline", "Roll Over Beethoven", "Johnny B. Goode", "Sweet Little Sixteen" among them...Chuck found himself in prison.  Not surprisingly, he was the architect of his own downfall.  Maybe he had gotten too cocky, and figured his success made him untouchable.  He quickly learned otherwise.  He had opened a nightclub back in his native St. Louis, and for reasons unfathomable, he thought it was a good idea to drive an underage Apache prostitute from Arizona back to Missouri so she could work at the club.  That violated the Mann Act, which forbade transporting minors across state lines for immoral purposes, and that was a federal crime.

Chuck landed himself in the slammer for a couple of years, and in the meantime, rock & rock underwent a massive transformation.  Most of the first generation of stars disappeared from the charts, and the few who could hang on, most notably Elvis, began turning out syrupy ballads, which was what the corporate music industry had largely reduced rock & roll to, once they had gotten a better handle on the beast and tamed it.

So when Chuck finally got out of prison, he was bitter, and it looked as if he was forgotten.  Worse than forgotten, really...he saw himself being robbed; some lily white punk kids out in California calling themselves the Beach Boys had a Top 5 hit with a song called "Surfin' U.S.A."  The credit for writing the song was claimed solely by Brian Wilson, and thus 100% of the royalties were going to him.  The problem was, the entire melody, kicked off by a note-for-note copy of Chuck's signature guitar riff, was an exact duplicate of Chuck's own "Sweet Little Sixteen".  Chuck didn't hold out much hope for compensation, but after a couple of years of legal agitation, not only was the song re-credited as a Wilson/Berry composition, but Chuck's own music publishing company got the full rights to the song.  So, score one for the brown-eyed handsome man.

More daunting still was the prospect of rebuilding his own musical career.  America at the time wasn't well-known for giving black ex-cons a second chance, particularly when that chance meant letting their white teenaged daughters swoon over his songs.  There was also the fact that nearly a full decade had passed since he had his first hit song, and for a lot of young teens, Chuck Berry was seen as a relic of that ancient past known as the Fifties.  But he had the loyal support of his record label, Chicago blues giant Chess Records, and what's more, Chuck had some powerful arrows in his quiver.

It's pretty amazing that for all of the bitterness he felt for the hand fate had dealt him, Chuck didn't let it sour the inherent optimism of his songwriting.  As a result, he beat the odds, roaring up the charts with a couple of his best tunes, "Nadine", "No Particular Place to Go" and, greater still, "You Never Can Tell".  And he did it during the musical tsunami that was the British Invasion, when so many other American artists were washed away from America's own Top 40.  It certainly didn't hurt him any that the Beatles and Rolling Stones were not only proclaiming their love and admiration for Chuck, but recording their own versions of his tunes.

That's kind of the high water mark for Chuck Berry.  He was now firmly ensconced as an Elder Statesman of Rock, and given the deference and respect he was due.  He continued to tour successfully for decades to come, and his music became ingrained into the soul of global culture.  The People's Republic of China made a big deal out of banning "Roll Over Beethoven" because they felt it was disrespectful to the classical composer.  When NASA sent the Voyager probe off into the universe on the off-chance it might be found by some other species, they included a disc with examples of what the dominant species on Earth had accomplished to date, and they included "Johnny B. Goode".  When they launched the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986, Chuck was in the very first class of inductees.

I've got a Chuck Berry story of my own, although it's not a very fulfilling one.  Back around 2000 or so, I had the chance to see him and Little Richard play live.  Richard was astounding, singing with the energy of a 25 year old, pounding out song after song on his piano as he wailed and "Ooooooooo'd" with reckless abandon.

Chuck, sadly, seemed every bit a man in his seventies.  His voice was flat, and he didn't even bother to properly tune his guitar.  He never toured with his own band in those days; he simply required that promoters find a couple of local musicians to back him up.  As any halfway decent bar band can play the Chuck Berry repertoire, it shouldn't be difficult to find some competent sidemen.  And yet, this promoter managed to achieve an epic fail.  The bass player had his amp cranked up way too high, so that his thump-thump-thump nearly drowned out all other sounds.  Worse still was the guy behind the drum kit, who played as if he had never held two sticks before.  It probably didn't help any that he had a broken arm and his limb was in a cast.  If Chuck still cared about the music, I'm sure he would have told those two to get the hell off of his stage, and then just played and sang all by himself.  But sadly, he had stopped caring.  This was just another paycheck, and it didn't matter if the show was any good or not...the money would still be the same.

But I don't let that night spoil my love for Chuck Berry.  As far as I'm concerned, he contributed enough great art to our culture to get a lifetime pass for bad concerts.  And now that he's died (having lived multiple lifetimes in his 90 years), I think it's the perfect opportunity for people to explore his work.  Do yourself a favor and look beyond the usual hits, and seek out gems like "Thirty Days (To Come Back Home)", "Promised Land", "Reelin' and Rockin'", and what I think is the greatest rock & roll Christmas song (and why is it that rock & rollers so often fail at creating decent Christmas songs?  Hell, even Paul McCartney and Elton John couldn't pull it off.), "Run Rudolph Run".

Farewell Chuck, and thanks for everything.

Tell the folks back home this is the promised land callin'
And the poor boy's on the line

Albums with better names in Britain than in America

For some curious reason, from time to time record companies decide that when releasing an album from a British artist, a title change is in order.  Sometimes it can make sense; in 1964, the first LP from the Beatles that Capitol Records was releasing in the United States was actually their second release in the UK, WITH THE BEATLES.  But Capitol, not surprisingly, retitled it MEET THE BEATLES for America.  When they later got the rights to release the first album from the group, PLEASE PLEASE ME, Capitol dubbed it THE EARLY BEATLES for the U.S. marketplace.  Slightly confusing for the uninformed, but again, understandable from a marketing perspective.

Other times though, it just seems to make no sense, and indeed, the "solution" is invariably less logical or creative than the original title.

Here are three quick examples off the top of my noggin:

THE ROD STEWART ALBUM (1969) Rod Stewart

In Great Britian, Stewart's debut solo album was titled AN OLD RAINCOAT WON'T EVER LET YOU DOWN, after one of the songs on the LP.  It's a great name, something that sounds both frivolous and profound at the same time, like the very best English aphorisms.  The original even boasted a very nice cover.  There's really no logical reason why Mercury Records made such a drastic change.  It's not as if Stewart was already well known in America, so highlighting the fact that this was his first solo album would have meant anything to anyone.  Stewart was known by some fans in the U.S. as the lead singer of the Jeff Beck Group, but as the name suggests, Beck was the real star of that assemblage.

So, between the uninspiring name and the blandly generic cover, it might have been easy to overlook this album altogether.  And that would have been a shame, since it's a great record, containing such gems as "Handbags and Gladrags" and Rod's astounding cover of "Street Fighting Man".

PURE POP FOR NOW PEOPLE (1978) Nick Lowe

What does this title even mean?  It sounds like something that would have been used for one of those late '60s choral groups like the Ray Coniff Singers or the Mike Curb Congregation (two of Richard Nixon's favorite "rock and roll" outfits...which tells you everything you need to know about them).  The original UK title...JESUS OF COOL...captured the New Wave esthetic perfectly.  However, Columbia Records feared that a rock album with the name of Jesus in the title would anger Bible Belters, thus the title change.

Of course, they feared backlash over the album's original name, but they left a song on it called "Little Hitler".  Because who could find offense in that, right?

SECURITY (1982) Peter Gabriel

Following his departure from Genesis, Peter Gabriel released a solo album in 1977, and he called it PETER GABRIEL.  He released his second album in 1978, and called it PETER GABRIEL.  He put out a third album in 1980, and called it PETER GABRIEL.

Do you see a pattern emerging?  Fans did, and it didn't seem to confuse them any...each album was met by better and better sales.

But for his fourth LP, called PETER GABRIEL in the UK, Geffen Records suddenly seemed to think that naming yet another album after the person who made that album would just be too perplexing for American audiences.  Thus, they slapped a sticker on the sleeve that identified it as SECURITY.

Beyond the fact that fans up until then seemed to have had no problem differentiating between the various albums (particularly as they all had distinctly different covers), it's woefully clear that Geffen didn't understand what Gabriel had been doing.  It's not as if he was so egomaniacal that he needed to name every record after himself so that when he spoke about them, he could refer to himself in the third person.  Rather, Gabriel saw his solo records as something of an 'audio magazine'.  And like a magazine (such as Time or Rolling Stone), the name stays the same with each issue, even though the interior material changes.

Faced with Geffen's action, Gabriel gave up the practice, and then proceeded to release albums with some of the shortest titles ever:  SO, US, UP.