BIRMINGHAM RECORD COLLECTORS
DEDICATED TO THE COLLECTING OF MUSIC, ITS PRESERVATION AND LASTING FRIENDSHIP
THIS MONTH’S MEETING THE FIRST SUNDAY, MAY 5TH 2:30 PM
HOMEWOOD PUBLIC LIBRARY 1721 OXMOOR RD BIRMINGHAM, AL 35209
NEXT MEETING, JUNE 9TH 2:30 PM THE SECOND SUNDAY
THE MAY MEETING IS ON THE 1ST SUNDAY OF THE MONTH
THIS MONTH’S MEETING
We had a great time listening to Bob Friedman playing his Doo Wop 78’s. As a person who actually sang in Doo Wop groups and grew up in New York listening to the genre, Bob knows his stuff. At his request I brought some of my Doo Wop 45’s, gave him the list I was bringing and he choose songs that went along with what I played, recorded many years before mine were recorded. Did I say he knows his stuff. Here is small sample of what he played.
The Poets
1958 Flash label
The Diamonds’
1953 Atlantic label
Scheduled to be with us this month is Larry Parker. Larry came a few months back but wanted to finish up some on early rock in the Birmingham area. If you grew up in Birmingham you will remember Eli’s Drive-In, The Sky Castle, The Good Guys, Ed Salem’s and more. Larry was a part of all these and will share his memories with us.
Also, we will have with us Travis Morgan. Travis has a project underway that he needs help with. Travis Morgan is a local music historian and independent scholar working on a large-scale Birmingham music preservation project and he needs the expertise of the BRC. Travis is working on a Birmingham Music Archive which he hopes to be housed at UAB’s Lister Hill Library. He’s spent the last 18 months interviewing local music figures and collecting the highest resolution imagery (photos, flyers, posters, ephemera) and audio/video content for the purpose of longtime preservation that can be accessed by the public and used by folks performing research to help write books, produce music documentaries, produce podcasts and release record albums. Travis is looking to connect with folks in the BRC and in the community who possess considerable physical items that could be viewed and potentially scanned. Because so much of local music history remains in people’s closets, attics and basements, he hopes to ensure that local music history be saved for people of the future. He is looking for printed photos, posters of local venues and events, ephemera featuring local venues, about local recording studios, record stores, and other items that help tell Birmingham music history. When possible Travis has tracked down the original photo negative used in head shots, but that’s not always possible. He is also interested in locating reel to reel tapes (master tapes if possible) from older recording sessions that can be sorted and potentially digitized. In some cases, he has located great unreleased music and he hopes to help find ways that the music may be released. Travis has a background running record labels (Skybucket, Communicating Vessels), co-founding and curating Secret Stages Music Discovery Festival and managing national artists over the past two decades. He has become genuinely interested in local music preservation and has recently been awarded a grant from Alabama Folklife Association to research local music. Hopefully we can help Travis with his project.
THINGS YOU MAY OR MAY NOT NEED TO KNOW
I am using a book entitled Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Plunges Into Music this month to get some trivia and info for your reading enjoyment…..or not. Hope some of it makes you go ‘I didn’t know that’ and not ‘I wish I didn’t know that’.
Song Trivia
Buddy Holly & The Crickets recorded a song they called ‘Cindy Lou’. Drummer Jerry Allison asked Buddy to rename the song to ‘Peggy Sue’ so he could impress his girlfriend Peggy Sue Rackman. It worked. Peggy Sue and Jerry eloped a year later, prompting Holly to follow up with ‘Peggy Sue Got Married’.
Aerosmith had a big hit with ‘Walk This Way’. Guitarist Joe Perry and bassist Tom Hamilton were exhausted from rehearsing the new riff they had written, so they took a break to see a movie
Young Frankenstien. Says Hamilton, “There’s that part in the movie where Igor says, ‘Walk this way’, and the other guy walks the same way with the hump and everything. We thought it was the funniest thing we had seen.” After the movie, they told singer Steven Taylor that the name of the song had to be ‘Walk This Way’. Tyler rushed out and scribbled the lyrics to the song on the walls of the studio stairway, and the band recorded the sing right then.
While Led Zeppelin was recording their second album, guitarist Jimmy Page came up with a bluesy riff and the rest of the band started jamming around it. Singer Robert Plant ‘improvised’ some words, but they weren’t really his. He borrowed them from a song called ‘You Need Love’, written by blues legend Willie Dixon. And although Led Zeppelin had credited Dixon for two songs on their first album, they kept the writing credit on ‘Whole Lotta Love’ for themselves. Why? “We decided that it was so far away in time” explained Plant. (Actually, it had only been seven years since Dixon wrote it). ‘Whole Lotta Love’ became the only Zeppelin song ever to reach the Top 10 in the United States. Fifteen years later, Dixon heard the song for the first time and noticed the resemblance. Dixon sued the band and settled out of court in 1987. He used the proceeds to set up the Blues Heaven Foundation to promote awareness of the blues.
The songs ‘Something’, Layla’ and ‘Wonderful Tonight’ are all tied together. Here’s how. In 1966 George Harrison married model Pattie Boyd, who inspired him to write the ballad, ‘Something’ (Frank Sinatra called it ‘the greatest love song ever written’). Harrison later became close friends with another famous guitarist, Eric Clapton. When Boyd and Harrison had marriage problems, she confided in Clapton, who fell in love with but, because of his friendship with Harrison, was unable to act on it. So he wrote a song about Boyd, ‘Layla’, named for a Persian love poem about unrequited love. Harrison and Boyd divorced in 1977, and she married Clapton two years later. Clapton then wrote ‘Wonderful Tonight’, also about Boyd. While ‘Wonderful Tonight’ is widely believed to be a sweet love song about a man telling his wife how beautiful she looks, it was actually based on Clapton’s complaints about how long it took Boyd to get ready for a party.
In 1963 Neil Diamond was reading a magazine and saw a picture of President John F. Kennedy and his daughter, six-year-old Caroline. Caroline was dressed up in horse riding gear and standing next to her pony. “It was such an innocent, wonderful picture.” Diamond said. “I felt there was a song in there”. But he didn’t actually write the song until four years later, when he was sitting in a Memphis hotel room suffering from writer’s block. He remembered the picture of the carefree little girl, and he wrote the song in an hour. ‘Sweet Caroline’ was released in 1969 and reached #4 on the chart, one of the biggest hits Diamond ever had. But the inspiration behind ‘Sweet Caroline’ was a mystery until 2007. Always having a fondness for the song, Kennedy asked Diamond to perform it live at her 50th birthday party. He did, and afterward he told Kennedy—and the world– that she was the real ‘Sweet Caroline’.
Johnny Cash performed ‘Ring Of Fire’ but his future wife, June carter wrote it – about him. In 1962 singing partners Carter and Cash were married to other people, but their relationship was deepening. One night, Carter came up with the song while she was driving around aimlessly, worried that Cash’s drinking and drug abuse would lead him to death and destruction – and because she was so attracted to him, would bring her down along with him. Carter’s sister Anita first sang the song, but Cash added a horn arrangement (an idea he said came to him in a dream), rerecorded it, and made it one of his signature songs. Cash and Carter married in 1968 (and he credits her with helping him beat drugs). FYI: New Johnny Cash LP coming this summer. 11 unreleased songs recorded in 1993 will be on the album, ‘Songwriter’.
From the new Johnny Cash LP Songwriter
BRC RADIO
And don’t forget that BRC radio is still on the BRC website. We have three different “DJ’s” if you will. Joe Reddick, Tom Faison and myself play all kinds of music including, hit songs from the 1950’s – present, LP cuts, songs that got little or no air-play, and all genres. Check out some of the shows. Just go the birminghamrecord.com and click on the ‘RADIO’ icon.
See ya,
Charlie