Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
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 great Sounds from the Rock and Soul Archive and a few of the stories behind the songs. This week my theme is DOCTORS: we have medics, fever and ailments of all sorts with tracks from Robert Palmer, Kylie, Joy Division, Led Zeppelin, Goldfrapp and many more. But where do we start? Down at the doctors of course.
**
Dr Feelgood of course with Down At The Doctors, possibly their finest moment. Now if you were there at the time you'll know that the golden years of Dr Feelgood were very much a game of two halves, or in simple terms, pre and post Wilko. That was their original guitarist Wilko Johnson, famed for his man-in-black suits, his scowls and his pudding bowl haircut, his wild chopping playing style and the way he would stalk the stage at live shows wielding his instrument like a machine gun.
Back then in the early days of Dr Feelgood, from 1975 to early 1978, Wilko was a spiky, intense and often difficult character, and during the recording of the Feelgoods' 4th album Sneakin' Suspicion there was a spectacular fallout between him and the other three members of Dr Feelgood, resulting in his abrupt ejection from the band.
Both incarnations of the band, pre and post Wilko, have their very considerable merits, and each has its own band of cheerleaders. With Wilko, the Feelgoods were gritty and grimy, blues purists from Canvey Island in Essex with a distinct tang of its oil refineries, its gambling dens and its cheap fish and chip shops in their music. Wilko's replacement as guitarist was John "Gypie" Mayo and he brought with him a looser, more flexible style and - dare I say it - perhaps a more accomplished musical ability. If I'm forced to choose sides, I'd have to say that his first album with the band, Be Seeing You, is my personal favourite out of the Feelgoods discography.
But that post-Wilko high didn't last long. Down At The Doctors comes from Be Seeing You's follow-up, Private Practice, which delivered their greatest commercial success but also the beginning of the end of those Golden Years. Down at The Doctors was a modest hit, but the next track taken from the album, Milk & Alcohol, made the Top 10 in 1979, the band's highest ever position on the singles chart. After that, nothing cracked even the top 30 in the UK. The less said about the subsequent Dr Feelgood albums the better, though probably they too have their own band of diehard fans.
So what was Wilko Johnson up to during all this? Well he eventually became the guitarist for another band of renegade misfit, Ian Dury's Blockheads, but not before enjoying his own short period in the limelight with Wilko Johnson's Solid Senders. They too had doctors on their mind, and their debut single was a song titled Dr Dupree.
Wilko originally came up with the riff for that track just before the fractious recording sessions for the Sneakin' Suspicion album, but he couldn't write anything that would work for Dr Feelgood's vocalist Lee Brilleaux. He told Songwriting magazine, "It just wasn’t his line of country." And then he was thrown out of the band.
"I had this tune," he said, "And I asked my friend the poet Hugo Williams to see if he could make anything of it. Hugo said he had once written a song – or tried to write a song – called Dr Dupree. And I went “Wow! that sounds great!” Then Hugo wrote the first two verses. And there’s all this stuff about somebody crashing in flames, really. And then I wrote the final verse which is about suicide, I think. This was all in the aftermath of Dr Feelgood breaking up. And I think, it’s about all that. And it’s about... I don’t know. Being famous and then crashing down in flames."
In a few minutes, another Dr Feelgood, but that's the song by Aretha Franklin. First, here are Wilko Johnson's Solid Senders and Dr Dupree.
**
That's a very different style of Dr Feelgood, isn't it. Aretha Franklin wrote the song with - and probably about - her husband at the time, Ted White. Her own very special kind of Dr Feelgood, if you like, a doctor of looove. And in fact that's the original meaning of the term Dr Feelgood.
In the later 1970s, in America, especially, the term came to refer to the sort of unscrupulous physician who could be relied on to prescribe whatever mood-enhancer you might require, and there are many instances of drug dealers referring to themselves explicitly as Dr Feelgood. But there's no doubt that the term was originally conceived for a good lovin' man. The first recorded usage seems to be in 1962 by the American blues pianist Willie Perryman, who performed the first known version of a song called Dr Feelgood under the name Dr Feelgood & The Interns.
Here's just a snippet from that track...
**
It's there rather than with Aretha Franklin that Wilko Johnson and Lee Brilleaux got the name.
In truth, offstage, many musicians probably utilised the services of the pill-pushing sort of Dr Feelgood, but they tended to sing about Dr Feelgood the doctor of love. Here are two more examples. In a few minutes, Robert Palmer, but first, a classic from the American rock and blue-eyed soul group The Young Rascals. This is Good Lovin'
**
Good Lovin' from the Young Rascals, followed by Robert Palmer with Bad Case Of Loving You, a sizeable hit for him in 1978, but actually a cover of the song originally written and recorded a year earlier by the American singer Moon Martin.
Now, Robert Palmer has raised the temperature a little with that track, so let's stay in the same groove for two more rockers. In a few minutes, a song by Frank Zappa that will give you all the explanation you ever needed for one particular physical ailment. First, though an absolutely wild track from Van Halen's second album, even though it was actually one of the first songs the band ever wrote, long before they got a record deal. "It's about being high and feeling good, which everyone can relate to," said Eddie Van Halen. Rolling Stone magazine agreed, calling it "perhaps the most upbeat song ever penned about overdosing on either pills and booze". This is Somebody Get Me A Doctor.
**
What more can I say? Who other than Frank Zappa could ever have written a song called Why Does It Hurt When I Pee and still made it so good. It comes from his satirical triple album rock opera Joe's Garage, about the many unfortunate adventures of ordinary guy Joe in a version of America in which rock music is slowly being outlawed. As it happens, Why Does It Hurt is actually one of the less controversial songs on the album compared to others that launch pot shots at the Catholic church, scientology, big government, the prison system, the music industry and censorship, among other targets. It's an extraordinary piece of work, even if Zappa does often let his occasionally childish eagerness to be provocative get the better of him.
A complete change of pace now for a trio of tracks from three classic British bands of the 1980s. Actually I say British, but all four members of Propaganda, the first I'm going to play, hail from Duesseldorf in Germany. However, it was in Britain where they forged their career after they signed to ZTT Records, the record label launched by superstar producer Trevor Horn and music journalist Paul Morley. Their debut single, produced by Horn, was Dr Mabuse, named after the anti-hero of three films by the celebrated German film director Fritz Lang, perhaps best-known for his silent science fiction masterpiece Metropolis.
Actually, I'm cheating my theme a little here because Dr Mabuse is not a medical doctor at all but a criminal mastermind, the German counterpart if you like to Moriarty of the Sherlock Holmes stories. The track launched Propaganda with a bang in 1983 but ZTT were too focused on the stratospheric success of Frankie Goes To Hollywood to give the band the attention they deserved. There were also arguments over money between the band and the label because of the huge cost of recording Propaganda's album, A Secret Wish, using the latest cutting edge computerised technology. So sadly their career gradually fizzled out, but it was great while it lasted.
After Propaganda, we'll have The Smiths with Girlfriend in A Coma and then Joy Division and She's Lost Control. More about them in a few minutes, but this is Dr Mabuse.
**
After Dr Mabuse from Propaganda that was Girlfriend In A Coma, the final single from The Smiths and indeed the one that precipitated the break-up of the band, though not for the reasons you might expect. Guitarist Johnny Marr quit just days before its release, not because of the song itself, which he and Morrissey wrote together, inspired - weirdly - by a reggae cover version of Nina Simone's To Be Young Gifted & Black. But no, Marr quit because Morrissey insisted on putting a cover version of a Cilla Black song on the B-side. "That was the last straw, really," Marr told Record Collector magazine in 1992. "I didn't form a group to perform Cilla Black songs. That was it, really.... I never saw Morrissey again." The subject matter didn't help though. Songs about your girlfriend being in a coma don't tend to get played on the radio, however pretty they sound.
And then of course, the classic She's Lost Control by Joy Division, inspired by the experiences of singer Ian Curtis while he was working in his day job at an occupational rehabilitation job centre in Macclesfield in 1978. One of his regular clients was a girl who suffered from epilepsy and she had on several occasions suffered fits while at the job centre. One day he noticed that she had stopped coming; it turned out that she had suffered a fit in her sleep and tragically had died. Soon afterwards, Curtis was himself diagnosed with epilepsy. It's a sad back-story to one of the most anthemic tracks of Joy Division's career.
Let's shift gears into a lighter mood for a beautiful track from a man who was for a short period of time in the late 1970s and early 1980s regarded as one of the new kings of Jamaican reggae, the so-called cool ruler Gregory Isaacs. He was, said the New York Times, the most exquisite vocalist in reggae, and all his skills were utilised to their utmost on the album he released in 1982 on Island Records, Night Nurse.
It's perhaps needless to say that despite Isaacs' suave personal style, his personal life was fraught with problems, especially after the success of Night Nurse. There were repeated run-ins with the police in Jamaica and in the UK -- it was reported in 2007 that he had been arrested more than 50 times over the previous 30 years for different offences -- and in 1982 he was unable to promote the Night Nurse album because he was serving a six month prison sentence in Kingston for owning unlicensed firearms. He also suffered serious drug problems for decades. Yet none of that should detract from his undoubted skill as a singer, reggae's original Mr Loverman. Here's perhaps his finest moment. This is Night Nurse.
**
We're just coming up to the break now. I will be back with you after the news for another hour of great songs on the theme of DOCTORS. You might want to get out your dancing shoes, because we're going to get funky, with Kylie, Gwen Guthrie and the Bee Gees among others.
But first, to take us to the break, a fabulous track from the electronic duo Lemon Jelly. All the tracks on the three albums released by Fred Deakin and Nick Franglen between 1998 and 2007 were based around oddball samples borrowed from other recordings. Few of those samples are quite as central to the final track as the self-help lessons recited by the Australian-born magician and stage hypnotist Peter Reveen which formed the basis for the track I'm going to play now, from their debut album KY.
"The Man They Call Reveen" as he billed himself, or sometimes Reveen The Impossibilist, is an interesting story in his own right. He looked like a rather extravagant and flamboyant rock star, like Liberace turned to the dark side, with frilly shirts, black velvet suits, a bouffant hairdo, goatee and ever-present piercing gaze. In the 1960s he became a big name in North America, and especially in Canada, with his dramatic magic shows, but like many such illusionists he ended up adapting his hypnotic skills for self-help courses, just as British illusionists Paul McKenna and Derren Brown have done more recently. A series of records in the 1970s offered courses in giving up smoking or over-eating, or gaining confidence or simply just relaxing.
Time now for us all to relax as we concentrate our minds... this is Lemon Jelly with Reveen The Impossibilist and Nervous Tension.