Rolling Stone magazine loves to compile lists. And readers love to read them. Best this, best that. Let the debates begin. One of their lists is the "500 Best Songs of all Time." It's arbitrary and subjective, of course, but fun to look through. As I was browsing the list awhile back, I wondered about the backstory to some of the songs we grew up with and are engraved in our minds...
We know the first few bars and can recognize them immediately. We probably even know the lyrics by heart. But what do we know about them otherwise? Not every hit song has an interesting backstory, but many of them do. So I picked just 5 that I like and are quite familiar, and thought I'd do some digging. These are just 5 songs that I picked from the RS list. They are all great songs, though not the "top five."
Here are the stories behind them. If you know a great backstory about another familiar tune that is interesting, feel free to share it in the comments.
In may of 1955, a news item in the Miami Herald caught the attention of musician and songwriter Tommy Durden. An unidentified man, after destroying all of his personal identification, jumped to his death from his hotel window. Behind he left a suicide note which was as brief as it was mysterious: "I walk a lonely street." Durden wrote that line down on a blank sheet of paper, sure that it was the germ for a good song. Blues? Country? He wasn't sure, but those were the two styles he had in mind at first.
He was having trouble fleshing the song out, and turned to a friend, Mae Boren Axton. She was in Florida because she worked as a publicist for Colonel Tom Parker, who was Elvis' manager, and she was promoting a tour by Hank Snow with whom Elvis shared the bill. She was also a sometime songwriter, and had made it a goal to write a hit song for the budding singer. Durden showed her the article, and she thought for a moment and said that there needed to be a 'heartbreak hotel" at the end of that lonely street. They sat down and collaborated, and within an hour they had the finished song. They immediately asked another musician they knew to record it on Durden's tape recorder, in a style that he thought Presley might sing it.
When she played the demo for Elvis, he reportedly said to Mae "Hot dog, Mrs Axton, play that again!" He listened to it 10 times and memorized it, and began playing it at some of his live shows. By November of that year, an RCA exec by the name of Steve Sholes managed to lure Elvis away from Sun Records, buying his contract from Sam Phillips for $35,000. It was a lot of money at the time, and Elvis wasn't yet the super star he became. When he first went to RCA's studio in Nashville to cut his first recordings, Heartbreak Hotel was the song he most wanted to record.
Sholes brought in two side men, pianist Floyd Cramer and the already famous Chet Atkins. The studio was booked, so they recorded in a decommissioned church nearby, hoping to capture the echo/reverb effect of Elvis' Sun records. When the track was recorded, Sholes was unsure of the result. He shared it with the other execs at RCA, and they were less circumspect in their opinion. What the hell is this?, they asked. Internal memos at RCA showed that their was widespread fear that the song was going to be an utter flop. It didn't sound anything like what he had been doing up to that point. Sholes was told that if this deal with Presley ended up being a bust, his career with the company was over. He convinced them to release the record, and kept his fingers crossed. Even Durden and Axton later said they could hardly recognize their own song after Elvis had reworked it in the studio.
Heartbreak Hotel was Elvis Presley's first hit to sell over a million copies. In many ways it ushered in a new musical era. Keith Richard's says in his autobiography that the first time he heard it he woke up the next day somehow changed as a musician. Tom Durden reflected, decades later, that the song paid his rent for more than 20 years.
Bill Medley and Bobby Hatfield had been singing together in Los Angeles in 1961 as part of a group named The Paramours. They sang what became known as "Blue Eyed Soul." (Early in their career, radio listeners often mistook them as being Black) After one show, a Black marine shouted up to the stage, "that was righteous, brothers!" The name stuck, and they set out in 1962 on a career as a duo. There first big hit was a song that Phil Spector both co-wrote (with Barry Mann & Cynthia Weil) and produced for them in 1964. There is probably a whole generation now (and maybe two) out there who only know Phil Spector as the guy who got arrested for shooting some woman in his LA home. He was a great record producer, though.
When Bill Medley first heard the song song to him by Spector and Mann, who had rather thin, high pitched voices, he was unimpressed, and thought the song might be better suited for the Everly Brothers. But Spector had a vision, and when they began work on the song it revealed itself. Medley had a deep bass voice, while Hatfield sand the tenor parts. Specter started the song out at the lowest register that Medley could comfortably sing, and let the song slowly build up from there, working through the vocal ranges until Hatfield took over to sing the highest choruses. He incorporated his rich, "Wall of Sound" production technique, creating a symphonic sound that was his signature, and brought in a then relatively unknown duo for back up vocals...Sonny & Cher. (Glen Campbell was also one of the studio musicians on the original song)
Medley begins the song slowly, and in an incredible deep tone..."You never close your eyes...", and carries the song for quite a while by himself. So much so that Hatfield asked Spector, somewhat frustratingly, "what am I supposed to do for all that time?" Spector reportedly quipped to him "You can go straight to the fucking bank." Medley's opening lines were so slow and deep that many thought Spector had used trickery in the studio...slowing the tape speed down. He didn't.
The song was long by radio standards at the time...3:50. Radio programmers were loathe to play anything over 3 minutes long, so Phil Spector "mistakenly" transposed the run time on the single from 3:50 to 3:05. It worked, and by the time DJ's caught on, it was already a hit. BMI claims that this song was played on the radio more times than any other song of the 20th century. The Patsy Cline hit "Crazy" has reportedly been played more often on jukeboxes, but let's face it...all the good jukeboxes are usually in Country & Western dives.
Vanity Fair magazine has dubbed this song "the most erotic duo ever recorded by two men." At the time it was released, The Rolling Stones' manager, Andrew Oldham, took out the following ad in Melody Maker:
This advert is not for commercial gain, it is taken as something that must be said about the great new PHIL SPECTOR Record, THE RIGHTEOUS BROTHERS singing "YOU'VE LOST THAT LOVIN' FEELING". Already in the American Top Ten, this is Spector's greatest production, the last word in Tomorrow's sound Today, exposing the overall mediocrity of the Music Industry. Signed,
Andrew Oldham
Otis Redding is one of music's great "What if" stories. Most of you know that he died, tragically, in a plane crash just as his career was about to take off. You may not know that "Dock of the Bay" was the last song he was working on prior to his death and that it wasn't released until after his death. His co-writer, Steve Cropper, a guitarist then with Booker T & the MG's, helped him finish the song after he had gotten stuck, and saw to it that it got released after his death. Cropper, at the time, was also the A&R director for Stax Records.
In June, 1967, Otis Redding was enjoying the notoriety and acclaim that his performance at the Monterey Pop festival had garnered him. It had been a long road, and things were finally begining to break loose for him. He had several musical engagements lined up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and decided to rent out a houseboat in Sausalito for a temporary home base. As one who has lived in the Bay area before, I can only imagine how idyllic the setting must have been.
Steve Cropper had met him earlier, and insisted that Stax sign him to their label just on the power of his voice. He was not a trained musician...he couldn't even tell the band what key to play in for a song...but when he sang...well, what's there to say? Cropper worked with him on several songs, because, as he has said in subsequent interviews, Redding always had 100 ideas whirling around in his head, and had a problem with "mental traffic jams." He had an good idea...a few lines...but had a hard time writing a song through to the end. Cropper helped him do that.
His idea for Dock of the Bay came to him while sitting on that houseboat in Sausalito. He had the lines "Watching the ships roll in, and then I watch 'em roll away again". There was much more than that. Cropper filled in the rest, using biographical material from Redding's own life. Redding did leave his home in Georgia, headin' for the Frisco Bay. He did put in several hard years where "nothing seems to come my way".
Anyway, they completed the song together, and recorded it between late November and early December of 1967. Redding left on a tour through the Midwest with the Barkays, and died when their chartered plane crashed into Wisconsin's Lake Monona on Dec. 8. He and Cropper were actually still working on the lyrics, which is why one verse is famously whistled in the song as we know it. Redding had planned on adding another verse to the song after the tour was done before releasing a final version on record.
The Cropper finished work on the Redding album which shared the title with this song, and it became Redding's best selling album, reaching number 4 on the charts. The song won two Grammy's in 1968...the first time that a Grammy was awarded posthumously to a recording artist.
Unlike the other songs I've looked at, Ray Charles didn't actually sit down and write this song. He created it at a show he was doing one night in Pittsburg, after running out of material. He had sung every song in his repertoire, his contract stipulated that he had 12 more minutes to perform, and the crowd was still screaming for more. He turned to his band, after thinking for a moment, and said
Listen, I’m going to fool around, so y’all just follow me
It was pure improvisation. An example of musical spontaneous combustion. In his biography, Ray claims that he "could feel the whole room bouncing and shaking and carrying on something fierce." And, it was one of his more controversial songs.
After depleting his song list, Ray fell back upon what he, and his band, knew best: Black gospel. He initiated an improvisational song in the style of Black church music's "call and response" with his band and backup singers, and when the song was over fans rushed the stage clamoring to know where they could buy that record. At subsequent dates on the same tour, Charles performed the song again, always to wild enthusiasm. A song was born. He no doubt did some further polishing in the studio before releasing it, but for all intents and purposes he made it up on the fly during one stage performance. How's that for genius?
The song was immediately controversial. White audiences sort of assumed that something lascivious was going on in the lyrics, such as they were. There was something palpably orgasmic about the song. Black audiences, who grew up with gospel music, recognized the form of the song and the style, and some of them thought it to be blasphemous that he use a musical style tied to holy music to make such a blatantly carnal song. Radio stations in 1959 had their doubts about its appropriateness, even though there is nothing truly explicit in the lyrics...you just knew the song was about something naughty. But it was a huge hit...and understandably so. It earned Ray Charles his first Gold Record.
Rolling Stone magazine, love it or hate it, is not one to shy away from declarative statements that are supported by nothing more than their own opinion. Thus, they boldly claim that "Rock and Roll guitar begins here" when they speak of the song Maybellene. I certainly believe that Keith Richards would agree with that statement.
Maybellene is an interesting song in the annals of Rock, in that its beginnings probably go back to the early 1800's. Chuck Berry has said, many times, that the song was based upon an arrangement he used to do when playing to "salt & pepper" crowds during his early days as a musician...mixed crowds of both Blacks and Whites. He had to throw in a few Country tunes to suit the audience, and one of the songs he played was called "Ida Red", a very old fiddle tune that probably originated with Black fiddle players in the South. Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys had made a hit with it in 1939, but really it was an old standard.
When Berry signed with Chess Records in 1955, he pitched a song he had been playing for some time to Leonard Chess...his version of Ida Red. Chess liked the arrangement, but didn't want to release a recording of it because it was too rural, too associated with "hickdom", and said it needed to be revamped...modernized. Leonard Chess took Berry's arrangement and worked with him to write entirely new lyrics for the song because, as he said, young people wanted songs about fast cars, women and with a good beat.
He wrote the lyrics and worked on the song with Chuck, but they didn't have a working title for the tune. Looking down at the floor of the Chess recording studio, Chess noticed a discarded Maybelline mascara carton that one of the back up singers had discarded. "Let's call the song 'Maybellene'", he said, and they worked the name into the lyrics. The spelling was changed to Maybellene from Maybelline out of concern for any copyright suit from the cosmetic manufacturer.
Leonard Chess gave prominent disc jockey Alan Freed cowriting credits on the song in exchange for giving the record a heavy rotation on the radio station's playlist. This was a fairly common form of payola at the time, but it worked out extremely well for both Chess and Chuck Berry. Within days of it's first radio play, the song became a huge crossover hit, shooting up the R&B, Country and Pop charts. It launched Berry's career.
Since I loves me some Bob Wills, I might as well include a vid of Wills playing his version of Ida Red, so you can make your own comparison. When I check out these youtube videos, especially older ones, I enjoy reading some of the comments people leave. On this video there is a comment left by what I assume to be a younger listener...possibly even a "Millenial Generation" commenter, who found it and admitted that they were all prepared not to like it, but after listening they had to admit that "this shit smokes!"
Indeed, it does: