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Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Volume 33 No. 4. 7 April 1970

...To Turn..

page 22

...To Turn...

any greasy haired, drape-suited teddy who lurched onto the stage, you had a hard time. Del Shannon looked tough, downright villainous, but he dared to launch into falsetto at odd moments—not a Tiny Tim coo, but an ear-busting wail. Del Shannon will always be around.

So will Franki Valli. He was lead singer for the Four Seasons, and in fact still is. The Seasons all looked like local Mafia representatives but they brought out wonders like Big Girls Don't Cry, Walk like a Man and Sherry— about 30 hits all told—right through to last year. Typically American, they were typically pop—lead singer up front wailing in falsetto, big beard out back rumbling in a bass monotone—and the rest of the group wah—waning somewhere in the middle. Curiously enough, they've been imaginative, and are probably one of the most underrated pop groups around.

Then there were Pitney and Orbison—two vocalists who've always cut a clean figure. Roy Oribson had a voice like an opera singer's—often jumping about two octaves in one go. He's been very popular in Britain where he's now cutting lightweight Country and Western-type singles. His best songs were things like Crying, Running Scared and It's Over.

Gene Pitney has always been a little harder to take. From the beginning he affected a nasal whine that occasionally verged on the painful. Through it all he's kept his hair neat, smiled and played it cool. He's a bit of a shark—owns God knows how many companies in the States, and still manages, occasionally, to fill the house.

In England, the scene was much the same; the vocalists, however, were even more lightweight. Cliff Richard, who'd started off in 1959 as an imitation Presley, had quietened down, and (backed by the Shadows) was turning out tuneful but rather twee love songs. Before him, there was only skiffle, more skiffle and even more skiffle with a little bit of trad jazz. The kids could hardly swoon at the sight of Lonnie Donegan or Kenny Ball. True, Tommy Steele had been the No. 1 idol in Britain in the 50's, but he'd graduated to singing Little White Bull and What a Mouth, tap dancing and talking professional Cockney. Richard at least looked wild—he wasn't, but that was beside the point. He greased his hair, wore a shoestring tie and roared into Move It. Everybody screamed. How he's lasted is beyond me—he's got good looks, a nice voice, a little talent and a flair for the right song—even with that stacked against him he's made it.

Along with Cliff Richard came Adam Faith, John Leyton, Marty Wilde, Joe Brown and Billy Fury. Fury wore irridescent coloured socks, Marty Wilde flogged second-rate cover versions of American hits, Joe Brown didn't do anything much. John Leyton sang Johnny Remember Me and nothing else. The best of them, and certainly the most individualistic, was Adam Faith. He was slight, fair-haired, rather small and very intelligent. Pushed by John Barry, who provided the pizzicato strings for his first hits. Faith sang with a lilt in his voice that somehow got to you even if you fought it. Songs like What do you Want, Made You and Someone Else's Baby established him, despite a couple of mediocre albums. Whatever else he didn't do he sang How About That! which has always been a standout.

Nevertheless, however intelligently Adam Faith might talk, and however coolly Cliff Richard might sing, pop music was still taking its time in becoming established and respectable.

What the pop singer was gaining was notoriety, Terry Dene, an over-publicised and rather timid rock'n'roller who came in with abangand finally petered out after a bad time with the British press, summed it up: "One week I was a quiet boy with no girl friends, a non-drinker who earned four pounds a week and went to bed early. The next, I was pocketing thirty pounds or more, being mobbed by hundreds of fans. There were parties and late nights, there was booze and flattery."

After 1959-60 came the big depression. Sandy Nelson, Neil Sedaka, Johnny and the Hurricans, Paul Anka, Bobby Darin and the like were making hard work of it—the music was hardly compulsive. Looking back on a lot of it, you can tend to become sentimental, recalling with nostalgia songs like Poetry in Motion, Rubber Ball, North to Alaska, Walk Right Back, Baby Sittin' Boogie and Calendar Girl. There was relief, of course, gems like the Temperance Seven's You're Driving me Crazy, Hit the Road Jack from Ray Charles and Dion Dimucci's The Wanderer, But there was mostly just Hayley Mills, Charlie Drake, Acker Bilk, Connie Francis, The Highwaymen, Nina and Frederick, Bernard Cribbens and Burl Ives. All depressing enough.

So up came Chubby Checker. In 1962, everybody twisted. Checker found himself touring the world demonstrating the new dance craze. This was wild—big business even in New Zealand. New Zealand Broadcasting refused to play The Twist because it was too wild. Then, when the whole thing busted here, and Chubby Checker was giving twisting demonstrations tothrill-starved suburban housewives in a local department store, they relented. Following the Twist came the Monkey, the Pony, the Hully Gully and various other backbreakers. Once your mother started to learn it, it was out. All this dragged on up to the Beatles.

PAinting of Buddy Holly

Well, perhaps not quite. In the USA there was a hang-over period from the 'High School' term of 1959-60. The mainspring of this were the Beach Boys. Led by composer Brian Wilson, they had a syrupy sound that was all theirs, and all-American. Surfing, hot-rods, hot-dogs, bikinis—everything but Annette Funicello. Close harmony work calculated to conjure up visions of sun-bleached sands and fun, fun, fun; and songs like Surfin' Safari, Surfin' U.S.A., Surfer Girl and Dance, Dance, Dance. It's a wonder that they made it so big in Britain, but it was fast, light and tuneful music, and they did make it big—at one period they were as big as the Beatles. The rest of the surf-cum-hot-rod groups that succeeded the Beach Boys were not accepted in Britain, however—outfits like Jan and Dean, Ronnie and the Daytonas, the Hondas, Paul Revere and the Raiders, and the Rivicras. They bombed in Britain, and they soon flaked in America too, for by 1964 the English had their own scene.

1964—the Golden year—the year when everything burst and there was good, solid, imaginative pop music. The year of the Animals, Manfred Mann, the Kinks, the Searchers, the Hollies, the Mojos, Peter and Gordon, Brian Poole and the Tremeloes, Dusty Springfield and Cilia Black—a list as long as a Sunday sermon. And the biggest of them have always been the Beatles and the Stones. Not much you can say about it all now, really—the Beatles were raw and they hit the scene at the right time, the Stones were raw too, but they couldn't go the same way as the Beatles. For a start, they didn't have that much talent—it was all concentrated in Jagger. And they just couldn't look cute like the Beatles—they were too ugly. Musically, the Beatles have always been well ahead of them, although Jagger and Richard at their best (as in Lady Jane, As Tears Go By or Paint it Black) have at least equalled Lennon and McCartney. What the Rolling Stones have always had is a sort of carefully nurtured roughness—it's natural, but it's laid on a bit. Of course there was the hair—a revolution in itself.

Brian Beresford - Craccum

Brian Beresford - Craccum

So the Beatles sold six million pound's worth of records in six months. There were plenty of others, however, out to do the same thing. The Animals, for instance, had a magnificent first hit but didn't know what to do next. Manfred Mann had, as load singer, Paul Jones; he was awkward, sang with a gruff voice, was pockmarked and couldn't miss. The Kinks, with leader Ray Davies, were one of the most inventive groups around and still sounded dated. The Searchers were very talented and very polished—a little too polished for their own good as it turned out. Besides them, there were Billy J. Kramer and Tommy Quickly, Freddy and the Dreamers, Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Honeycombs, the Applejacks, Lulu, the Dave Clark Five, Herman's Hermits, and the Four Pennies. Most of them have lasted, some, like Herman's Hermits, getting progressively worse.

As the English rock revolution had relied mainly on negro rhythm'n'blues influences, so the American reaction relied heavily on their own folk and Country and Western traditions. It was never a conscious reaction, so much as an extension of musical ideas thrown up by the Beatles, the Zombies, the Animals and other such musically sound groups. The Americans translated it into what was called folk-rock. 1965 was its big year and leading it was Bob Dylan. As Donovan (England's only folk-poet of note at the time) said that year: "It's time for songs of sincerity sung with a bit of soul." Dylan had soul and he was certainly sincere. He began by singing socially committed, folk-orientated works influenced by the like of Woody Guthrie (songs like Blown' in the Wind and Don't Think Twice, it's All Right.) When he became influential, Dylan moved into free-form, whimsical works such as Subterranean Homesick Blues, Highway 61 Revisited and Can I Please Crawl out your Window? Previously his singing had been pretty dire, but when he moved further into rock'n'roll his voice mellowed. He still slurped his way through a song, but now there was a softness about it that often belied the lyrical content of the particular work.

Second to Dylan was P.F. Sloan, a young songwriter/singer who wrote pretty scathing social commentaries as well as very attractive lyrical songs. Then there were the Byrds, with soft harmonics and jangling guitars, and the Byrds have remained ever since.

Through all of this period was running what came to be known as 'soul' music. It was really hotted up rhythm'n'blues (or, as Ian Christie put it, "rock'n'roll with beards".) And it was selling. There had always been a market for coloured music, but it wasn't until 1963-64 that it had become commercially acceptable, and this was due almost solely to two record corporations, Atlantic and Tamla Motown. They spawned dozens of coloured soul acts, most of which were pretty basic but also pretty good. My personal favourites have always been the Miracles, Wilson Pickett and Joe Tex. But besides these, thcte were the Supremes, Four Tops, Temptations, and soloists like Marvin Gaye, Percy Sledge, Stevie Wonder, Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin. Probably more distinctive though were those artists outside the mainstream companies—James Brown, Bobby Bland, Tina Turner, Jackie Wilson, Jerry Butler and, the only whites to be admitted, the Righteous Brothers.

After all this came the March of the Flower People with the soft sounds of Simon and Garfunkle, the Mamas and Papas and Scott McKenzic. West Coast rock had its day with exponents like Jefferson Airplane, Love, Moby Grape, Country Joe and the Fish, and the Doors, Today, things are much the same, apart from the fact that nobody really knows quite where they're going.

Whatever the label, it's all rock'n'roll. Marty Wilde put it well 10 years ago: "These London scssionccrs arc great musicians when it comes to the technical stuff. But it takes youngsters of 18 or 19 to play, and feel the rock beat."