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Every track has a story. Classic songs from the rock music, pop, reggae & soul archive and the stories behind them with Simon Tesler, founder and former editor of 1980s music, media and pop culture magazine BLITZ.
Hello, this is Simon Tesler with more classic Sounds from the Rock and Soul Archive and a few of the stories behind the songs. This week my theme is MUSIC: more than 20 tracks about music and being a musician from Madonna, The Clash, Santana, Dire Straits, Queen, Elvis Costello and many more. But first, let's play that funky music.
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So yes, our theme this week is music in all its different forms and especially what happens when you try to make a career out of it. There are few things that musicians like more than writing songs about being a musician, and that was a perfect example, one of the great one-hit wonders of the 1970s: Play That Funky Music by Wild Cherry.
And of course the story is pretty much autobiographical. In 1976, Wild Cherry were a heavy rock covers band on the bar and club circuit, playing songs by Kiss, Led Zeppelin and Foghat as well as a few of their own tunes. But bookings were getting harder to find.
"We played songs that would bring in the good looking girls," the band's founder, singer and guitarist Rob Parissi told the Tampa Bay Times newspaper. "If we got the good-looking girls, the guys would be there. But the girls were starting to go to discos. Rock clubs were closing down and discos were opening up. And we were a hard-working band playing four, five, six nights a week.” Parissi suggested to his bandmates they should start playing dance music instead. "They went nuts," he said, "We don't want to be in a disco band."
At one show at one of their regular venues in Pittsburgh, they started getting heckled by a couple of black guys in the audience. "You white boys gonna play any funky music?" So Parissi grabbed a bar order pad and jotted down some lyrics. "It probably took me five minutes to write the whole thing," he said. For the music, he borrowed a few ideas from the song Fire by the Ohio Players but with a little hint of the Led Zeppelin track How Many More Times stirred into the mix.
The only problem was that all the other band members were a little nervous about the "white boy" line. "Even my father when I played it for him for the first time," remembered Parissi. "He took the needle off the record and said ‘oh no you can’t do that. You have to take it out.’ I said no, if you take that out it’s gonna kill the record. That’s the song." Parissi won his battle and on the strength of that one song, Wild Cherry got signed to a subsidiary of CBS Records. Funky Music was their first single and it was a huge hit; so was their first album. Industry bible Billboard named Wild Cherry best pop group of the year. But lightning failed to strike twice, and Wild Cherry never had another hit and broke up three years later.
But let's face it, funky music doesn't do it for everyone. A trio of songs now for three bands for whom rock & roll has always been the golden rule. One night in 1976, Tom Petty and his writing partner and fellow guitarist in the Heartbreakers Mike Campbell went to see Kiss play live. They'd just had a big hit with Rock n Roll All Nite. Campbell later remembered, "I made a comment to Tom that ‘All you have to do these days is put the words rock ‘n’ roll in a song and it’ll get on the radio.’ The next day Tom came in with this song, ‘Anything that’s rock ‘n’ roll’s fine.’ I can’t take credit for that, but I do remember saying it." In a few minutes, The Rolling Stones and then Bob Seger but this is Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers and Anything That's Rock n Roll.
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After Tom Petty we had the Rolling Stones of course with It's Only Rock & Roll But I Like It and then Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band with Old Time Rock n Roll. Now, oddly enough, those official credits are not entirely accurate. Only a handful of the Rolling Stones are actually on that track - more about that in a minute - and virtually none of the Silver Bullet Band on theirs. Bob Seger had been recording a couple of tracks for his upcoming album Stranger In Town with the revered inhouse session band at the famous Muscle Shoals studio in Alabama. "Got any other good songs I could use," he asked them. One of the guys suggested a song by a couple of local musicians they knew called Old Time Rock & Roll. Seger liked the tune and the chorus but he wasn't sure about the rest of the lyrics, so he rewrote them.
"I rewrote the verses and I never took credit. That was the dumbest thing I ever did... But I just wanted to finish the album. I rewrote every verse you hear except for the choruses. I didn't ask for credit. My manager said: 'You should ask for a third of the credit.' And I said: 'Nah. Nobody's gonna like it.'"
At first, the members of his Silver Bullet Band weren't too happy either. "The band didn’t really like it," Seger said, "because they felt like it wasn’t deep gut-bucket rock ’n’ roll like they liked to do." They changed their minds as soon as they saw how live audiences reacted to it, but by then it was too late to re-record the song for the album.
Released as a single in 1979, it was a big hit at the time, but was reborn as an absolute monster of a song four years later when Tom Cruise mimed to it in his underpants for the movie Risky Business. In 1996, the association which oversees jukeboxes in the US named it the second most played jukebox record of all time, topped only by Patsy Cline's Crazy. It made the song's original composers a fortune in writers' royalties, but Seger himself only got his share of performance royalties.
And The Rolling Stones' It's Only Rock n Roll was also born out of an impromptu session. In 1973, Ronnie Wood was still a member of Rod Stewart's band The Faces - it would be another three years before he officially joined the Stones - but he'd just bought a big mansion outside London and had installed a recording studio in the basement to record tracks for his first solo album. One night, he invited a bunch of mates around for a jamming session. The precise line-up in unclear, but Mick Jagger was definitely there along with Wood's Faces colleagues Kenney Jones and Ian McLagen, and American bassplayer Willie Weeks. According to some versions, David Bowie was there as well.
Whatever the lineup, they all started jamming music and lyrics. Jagger was bristling over the hostile reception the band was then getting in the British press and had the bare bones of some lyrics about it. "The idea of the song," he said later "had to do with our public persona at the time. I was getting a bit tired of people having a go, all that, ‘oh, it’s not as good as their last one’ business. It was a light-hearted, anti-journalistic sort of thing."
He came up with the line “If I could stick my pen in my heart/ And spill it all over the stage. Would it satisfy ya, would it slide on by ya". According to one version of the story, the chorus hook "It's Only Rock & Roll But I Like It" was suggested by David Bowie as a jokey nod to the catchphrase of the then hugely popular TV comedian Dick Emery: "Ooh You Are Awful ... But I Like You!"
That was one of a couple of songs they recorded demos of that night. The other was a reggae-style track I Can Feel The Fire. But Jagger was particularly pleased with Only Rock & Roll, so he and Ronnie Wood came to an arrangement. "Mick and I cut a deal,” Wood recalled. “He said: ‘You keep I Can Feel The Fire, I’ll keep It’s Only Rock ’N Roll.’” Jagger took the tape back to play to Keith Richards, who thought it was a killer song. He added his own guitar track to the demo, but left everyone else's contribution intact, including Ronnie Wood on 10-string acoustic guitar, Kenney Jones (rather than Charlie Watts) on drums, Willie Weeks (rather than Bill Wyman) on bass, and according to most accounts Bowie on backing vocals. That's him and Wood singing "Like it like it yes I do". All the non-Stones musicians had contracts with other labels so none of them could be credited on the song.
Four more tracks now about life in the music business and hearing songs on the radio. In a few minutes, the Velvet Underground - I bet you can guess which song - but first British band Be Bop Deluxe and Modern Music.
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Rock & Roll from the Velvet Underground, and before that the title track from Be Bop Deluxe's 4th album, and the first part of a suite of songs on that album that were inspired by the band's first experience of touring in the US, in which they were bizarrely mismatched as the support act for Ted Nugent and Barclay James Harvest.
"Modern Music came directly from my experiences on the American tour," Nelson later told Guitarist magazine. "I’d been exposed to American culture for years, through movies and television and music so I imagined that when I got there it would be something very familiar. But it was so foreign that it seemed almost like being on another planet."
Nelson's most abiding emotions during the tour were he said of isolation and homesickness. That opening sequence of the radio being tuned gives us snippets from three earlier Be Bop Deluxe tracks as well as a few of the things he missed, via sound clips of the 1976 Montreal Olympics, of the much-loved DJ John Peel, and of comedians Tony Hancock and Sid James on Hancock's Half Hour.
For Bill Nelson then and also for virtually every one else in the age before the internet, the formative musical influence for us all was what we heard on the radio. And of course that's the dominant theme of the Velvet Underground's track Rock & Roll, written by Lou Reed shortly before he quit the band to launch a solo career. In the song, Jeanie's life is saved by rock & roll, but Reed said later he was actually talking about himself.
"Rock and Roll is about me. If I hadn't heard rock and roll on the radio, I would have had no idea there was life on this planet. Which would have been devastating - to think that everything, everywhere was like it was where I come from. That would have been profoundly discouraging. Movies didn't do it for me. TV didn't do it for me. It was the radio that did it."
Two more songs about radio now, but these two aren't so positive. We started the show with Wild Cherry's reaction to the way disco was taking over from rock & roll on the live music circuit. In a similar fashion, by the beginning of the 1980s, many artists were aware of the changes taking place at radio stations, especially in the UK. The first impact came from the launch of commercial radio in the UK in the 1970s, in which good music was held hostage to the demands of advertisers for lowest common denominator music that would attract the widest audiences. The Clash had plenty to say about this with their track Capital Radio, but I'm going to play Radio Radio from Elvis Costello. He originally wrote the song in 1974 as Radio Soul about the joys of listening to the radio, but as the commercialisation of the airwaves gained pace during the decade he rewrote the song to file, as it were, a formal complaint.
The situation hasn't improved. In 2003, he told Rolling Stone magazine, "Radio has nothing to do with music anymore — it's in the advertising business. There's a real skill to programming in an intelligent way, but nobody does that anymore. It's all done by computer, by committee. Radio is absolutely the enemy of music. They are my sworn and mortal enemy, and I will have nothing to do with them."
In a few minutes, Queen with Radio Ga Ga, which reflected the arrival of a new enemy to radio airplay, but first here's Elvis Costello and Radio Radio.
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Radio Radio from Elvis Costello and then Queen with Radio Ga Ga. By 1984, when that came out, there was a new villain in town: MTV and the rise of music video. Buggles had already said it more bluntly than anyone else in 1979 with Video Killed The Radio Star, but back then they were virtual newcomers to the business. In the early 1980s even the top-selling acts were bemoaning the commercialisation of radio and feeling the pressure to be constantly video-friendly.
“That’s part of what the song’s about, really,” said Queen drummer Roger Taylor, who penned the song. “The fact that music videos seem to be taking over almost from the audio side, the visual side seems to be almost more important.”
He originally wrote the song as Radio Ca Ca, after something his young son said about lousy radio stations. But the rest of the band felt this title was a little too edgy, so Freddie Mercury changed it to Ga Ga. Back then in the days before Stefani Germanotta, the word 'gaga' had two meanings: to be either foolishly excited about something, to be gaga about radio, for example; or alternatively to be senile and unable to think clearly, in the way that an old person could be described as gaga. The song hits both bases, celebrating the golden days of radio when you could justifiably be gaga about it, as well as the modern day in which radio had itself gone gaga.
Of course, nowadays, since 2008, Gaga has only one meaning, and she named herself after the Queen hit. Just imagine if they hadn't changed the name of the song. Would she now be Lady Caca? We shall never know.
Let's move on. Here's something else you can do while listening to music. The next track was originally written in 1965 as an advertising jingle for Diet Pepsi with the slogan 'The girls girl watchers watch drink Diet Pepsi'. A producer named Bob Crewe expanded it into an instrumental and released it as a single in 1967. Later the same year, a different writer added lyrics for the American easy listening singer Andy Williams. This is Music To Watch Girls By.
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That was Andy Williams with Music To Watch Girls By. We're just heading up to the break in a few minutes. I will be back with you again after the news with more songs about MUSIC and being a musician. But first I'm going to take that advice that Wild Cherry offered at the start of the show to play that funky music white boy.
So far this hour we've been talking almost exclusively about rock & roll, so it's time now to have some sweet soul music. Literally. First up, a classic tribute song of that name that was the first and more or less only hit for the American singer Arthur Conley. It's actually surprising that Conley didn't achieve more in his career in the music business, considering the power and range of his voice, and also one particular famous friend. After releasing a couple of minor singles in the early 60s he was spotted by the soul legend Otis Redding, who signed Conley to his own Jotis Records label in 1967.
They started working together on a new track that would pay tribute to some of the other star names of soul, like Lou Rawls, Sam & Dave, Wilson Pickett, James Brown... oh and also Otis Redding himself. Cheekily, they borrowed the music from Sam Cooke's song Yeah Man, released a couple of years earlier, and the opening horn riff was lifted from Elmer Bernstein's title theme for the classic western The Magnificent Seven. The song ended up being a huge hit for Conley, not just in the US but across Europe. A couple more singles followed without much success but then tragically Otis Redding was killed in a place crash at the end of the year, and without his mentor, Conley's career fizzled out.
After that a crucial cut of funk from the New Orleans collective The Wild Magnolias. Now, this is an act unlike any other I'm playing on this or indeed any other show, because they aren't - they're still going - actually really a performing or touring band so much as a ceremonial tribe of so-called Mardi Gras Indians.
This is a New Orleans subculture that emerged in the late 19th century among Creole and African Americans after the abolition of slavery. They're not themselves native Americans or so-called Indians, but they adopted the Indian name to honour the indigenous people of Louisiana who had protected freed or escaped slaves from persecution. In the early days of the Mardi Gras festival, black people were prohibited from gathering in public, so they masked as native Americans to participate in the celebrations. Mostly these Mardi Gras Indians only performed at Mardi Gras itself, but in the mid-1970s, a group of musicians led by Big Chief Bo Dollis released a couple of fine albums. Here's their most celebrated track, Soul Soul Soul.