sixties r&b

190. ‘The Last Time’, by The Rolling Stones

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We reach the Stones’ third UK number one, and a theme is starting to emerge. Every one of their chart-toppers – ‘It’s All Over Now’, ‘Little Red Rooster’ and now this – has opened menacingly. Something in the clanging chords, the deep, rumbling bass, the clashing cymbals, the ever-so-slight discordance of it all… Every time they come along it’s like they’re crashing a sedate little party. We’ve just had The Seekers’ campfire singalong, and Tom Jones’s cheesy cabaret. Now the Stones have hijacked the hi-fi, cracked out the Jack Daniels and dumped a big bag of weed on the table.

The Rolling Stones on stage USA 1965

The Last Time, by The Rolling Stones (their 3rd of eight #1s)

3 weeks, from 18th March – 8th April 1965

One other big difference between the Stones and everything else around at the time is the way that the vocals are blended right in amongst the other instruments. In pretty much every song since the charts began (discounting, of course, instrumental hits) the voice – the lyrics – was the most important thing. But here, Jagger’s voice is mixed right in. There are times when you can’t – shock horror – quite make out what he’s saying. My gran hated The Rolling Stones for this very reason…

Still, you can make out enough of the words to get the message. Mick is seriously considering breaking up with his girl. Well I’ve told you once and I’ve told you twice, But you never listen to my advice, You don’t try very hard to please me, With what you know it should be easy… and Sorry girl but I can’t stay, Feeling like I do today, Too much pain and too much sorrow, Guess I’ll feel the same tomorrow… Textbook treating them mean to keep them keen – a theme of early-Stones (see also ‘Heart of Stone’, ‘Play with Fire’ and the outrageous ‘Under My Thumb’.)

I love the non-committal chorus: This could be the last time, This could be the last time… I don’t know… It’s almost worse than saying ‘this is the last time’. He might break up with you, if he can be bothered. You’re probably not really worth breaking up with, though. Weren’t they awful…

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The chorus is poppier than either of their previous two hits, but this is still an out and out rock song. Keith Richards lets loose in the solo, and Jagger goes wild in the fade-out – screeching and hollering as the guitars clang, the cymbals smash and parents across the land tut disapprovingly. It’s easy to forget, in 2019, as the Septuagenarian Stones shuffle out onstage at the latest super-dome, like holograms of their former selves, just how shocking they must have been at the time. Doing this countdown, and listening to them making their mark at the top of the charts in ‘real time’, I can kind of get a glimpse of it. How much fun it must have been to be fourteen in 1965, pissing your parents off by playing the latest Stones single at full-blast.

This record probably isn’t one of the band’s best-remembered hits. They’re all still to come. But it does have quite the legacy – an orchestral version by Stones producer Andrew Loog-Oldham was sampled by The Verve in 1997 as the basis for their mega-hit ‘Bittersweet Symphony’, resulting in a court case that was just resolved earlier this year. It also – and I had no idea about this before now – appeared as a sample at the top of the charts as late as 2009, in the unlikely form of ‘Number 1’, by Tinchy Stryder ft. N-Dubz. Well, there you go… The Who covered it much earlier, in 1967, in support of Mick and Keith following their imprisonment on drug charges.

More importantly than any of that, ‘The Last Time’ can perhaps be seen as the arrival of The Rolling Stones Mk II. The cover versions are out – this was the first Jagger-Richards composition to be released as a single – and beefier production is in. They were rewarded with three weeks at the top, and The Beatles suddenly had competition for the title of biggest band in the country. Their next #1 will raise the stakes even further, but that’s a story for another day…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVLmqrpmpI0

Follow along with my handy playlist:

185. ‘Go Now!’, by The Moody Blues

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Hot on the heels of Georgie Fame & The Blue Flames’ snazzy ‘Yeh Yeh’, an equally quirky record pops up for a week at the top of the UK charts.

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Go Now!, by The Moody Blues (their 1st and only #1)

1 week, from 28th January – 4th February 1965

We’ve already sa-id… I like records that just get on with it – no drawn out intro, no nothing – and this is one such disc. Goodbye… Voice, then piano. A thumpingly, clumpingly unsubtle piano. I mean this with no disrespect, but the piano here sounds like it’s being played by an elephant. I’d bet they overlaid several tracks one on top of the other to get the rich, heavy sound. I love it. Since you gotta go, Oh you better go now…!

It’s a song about a break up. The singer doesn’t want to break up, but if it has to be done then he’d rather his S.O. just got on with it. Cos darlin, darlin’, Can’t you see I want you stay, yeah-ah-yeah-ah… The singer – Denny Laine – has a voice every bit as soulful as Georgie Fame before him, and he holds nothing back. The way he sings/spits out lines like I don’t want you to tell me just what you intend to do now…, for example, is great, and deceptively hard to recreate.

The production too is thick and soulful, with hints of Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound and the baroque minor keys that were about to become a big thing in sixties pop. (It’s actually a cover of an American R&B hit from earlier in the decade.) It’s also a very rough-and-ready recording – not perfect – with lots of crackly patches, as if the tape were struggling to contain the volume and the power of this band. I love the piano solo, one that rolls and cascades – a cross between a ship being tossed on stormy seas and Dante’s descent into hell. The ending is also a lot of fun, with a huge finish – the whole band appearing to shout out the title of the song before a very quick, slightly wonky fade.

‘Go Now!’ is another grown-up pop record – make that two in a row – and one that perfectly encapsulates the way pop music is now fragmenting and moving away from the Beat sound that has dominated for most of the past two years. New year, new sound etc. etc. It’s also a record that I’ve loved for many years – The Moody Blues being a staple of long family car journeys as a child. But, here’s the ironic bit… I really, really can’t stand any of The Moody Blues’ other songs…

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You see, after this – their one and only chart-topper – they started getting all experimental. Denny Laine left the band and a bloke called Justin Hayward came in, they ditched the pop/R&B and they went… (shudder)… progressive. Now, I love rock music. To me ‘rock’ is the foundation upon which all great music is made. Stick ‘garage’, or ‘hard’, or ‘glam’, or ‘electronic’, or ‘punk’, or ‘surf’, or even ‘yacht’, in front of ‘rock’, and I’m usually in. ‘Prog-rock’, though? I run a mile. Jethro Tull, Marillion, Pink Floyd, Yes!… No, no, no! Lock me in and call it ‘Room 101’. You can be experimental, and forward-thinking, as avant-garde as you like… but ‘Prog’? The minute you call yourself prog then your head’s gone too far up your arse. And The Moody Blues are the worst culprits for me because A) They started it and B) I had to sit through their ‘Best Of’ on many a long car journey, aged eleven.

It would start off well enough. Track 1 was ‘Go Now!’. Three minutes of pop bliss. But then there were nineteen other songs to sit through before it was over – none of which sounded anything like ‘Go Now!’. And prog-rock songs are never, ever as short as they should be… ‘Give me ABBA’, I would cry, ‘The Eagles or The Stones. Even Fleetwood Mac if you must. Anything but this.’ But my dad would stand firm, and we’d listen to the bitter end… I have especially painful memories of ‘Nights in White Satin’… And ‘Tuesday Afternoon‘…

Having studied The Moody Blues history ahead of this post, it seems that the blame can be laid squarely at this Justin Hayward fellow’s feet. Once he was in and Laine was out (Laine later joined Wings), ‘Go Now!’ seems to have been written out of the band’s history. They rarely performed it live, and it didn’t appear on any of their ‘Greatest Hits’ until the mid-1990s. (Which was precisely when my dad bought said CD for the car… Just think – there might easily have been no good songs on that album…)

Yes, let’s end this post on a positive note. Nineteen of the twenty tracks on The Moody Blues ‘Greatest Hits’ album may well be terrible songs. But the one good song on that album also happens to be their only #1 single. We won’t hear from them again on this countdown! We can just pretend that they were one-hit wonders! Pretend that the glorious ‘Go Now!’ was the only piece of music that the band ever offered to the world. Isn’t that a comforting thought…

184. ‘Yeh Yeh’, by Georgie Fame & The Blue Flames

/ UK #1s blog / 11 Comments

No sooner have I mentioned that 1965 might be a more eclectic year in terms of its chart-topping singles, when along comes one Georgie Fame with a swaying slice of Latin soul.

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Yeh Yeh, by Georgie Fame (his 1st of three #1s) & The Blue Flames (their 1st of two #1s)

2 weeks, from 14th – 28th January 1965

Wham and then Bam. In the space of three #1s we’ve gone Blues–Beat rock-Latin. I might even go so far as to describe this as a Bossanova, if I was at all certain what exactly a ‘Bossanova’ was… Whatever it is, it’s not a sound that we’ve heard very often at the top of the UK charts. After months of Merseybeat things are really starting to splinter in different directions.

The song is about a guy who, after finishing work every evening, calls up his baby and asks her what she wants to do… I mention movies, But she don’t seem to dig that, And then she asks me, Why don’t I come to her flat… ‘Yeh Yeh’ is his response. The words are spat out at a rapid pace, half-rapped (this might be the hardest number one yet in terms of making out the lyrics). But it still becomes clear just what his baby’s game is. She suggests supper and listening to some records, and soon the kissing starts: And when she kisses, I feel the fire get hot, She never misses, She gives it all that she’s got…

I love the break in the middle, when one long tongue twister line – We’ll play a melody and turn the lights down low so that none can see… – ascends to a natty drum fill and lots of We gotta do that’s! and Yeh Yehs! Then there’s a full-blown sax solo for all you hip cats out there.

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It’s a cool record, there’s no doubting that. I can imagine it as the soundtrack to a lot of groovy, hipster parties during the winter of ’64 – ’65. And Georgie Fame – before googling him I pictured him in a turtle neck and a pork pie hat, and after googling him I was slightly disappointed to find that he favoured suits and sharp ties. (He did like a cigarette, dangling all loose and louche, from the corner of his mouth, however.) Plus, finding out that he was born Clive Powell, in Lancashire, rather than Georgie Fame, New York City, took the shine off even further.

Still, despite being Clive from Lancashire, Fame has a real soulful voice. He goes fast then slow, loud then quiet, and – while the band are really tight – his voice is the most impressive instrument in the record. The way it blends together with the organ and the sax to draw out the final note is particularly cool. The Blue Flames had been the backing band for British rock ‘n’ roller Billy Fury, and Georgie Fame their piano player, but when they parted ways Clive AKA Georgie Fame became their leader and they went off down the path of R&B-slash-soul.

‘Yeh Yeh’ is nice, and funky; but it’s a hard record to classify. The best way I can describe is that it would sit perfectly next to ‘Green Onions’ by Booker T. & The MGs on a compilation called ‘Sexy Sixties’, or something. Plus, both Fame and The Flames will pop up sporadically as the sixties progress, so we’ll save any further bios for another day. In the meantime, sit back, grab a glass, and enjoy the sound of the swinging, sexy sixties floating through your earholes. Yeh Yeh!

Never miss a number one single with this playlist…

182. ‘Little Red Rooster’, by The Rolling Stones

/ UK #1s blog / 17 Comments

Pack your welly boots, your straw hat and some industrial strength bug spray – we’re off to the country. To a farm somewhere in the Miss’ippi Delta. With The Rolling Stones.

TV Rehearsal

Little Red Rooster, by The Rolling Stones (their 2nd of eight #1s)

1 week, from 3rd – 10th December 1964

It feels like the Stones’ arrival, earlier this year, passed us by. ‘It’s All Over Now’ sneaked a week at the top in the summer, but surrounded as it was by some colossal pop tunes from some legendary acts I had basically forgotten about it. The first Stones #1 should have been a bigger thing, I feel. So, they’re back. And this time they’re making sure we notice them.

Their tactic? To return with a song so unlike any of the one hundred and eighty-one previous chart-toppers that you instantly sit up and start listening. A slow, woozy blues riff comes along, reeling you in, lulling you into a vision of sipping ice-tea on a farmhouse veranda, before Mick Jagger’s languorous vocals… I am the little red rooster, Too lazy to crow for days… I am the little red rooster, Too lazy to crow for days… It’s an atmospheric song – the dusty, heat-hazed farmyard unfolds before your very eyes. Dogs begin to bark, And hounds begin to howl… All the while the hypnotic, twelve-bar blues riff continues to drag you along. Watch out strange cat people, Little red rooster’s on the prowl…

1964 has been a year, by and large, of peerless pop. But this is no pop song, not by any stretch of the imagination. There are no verses, or chorus, or bubble-gum bridge here. This is low-down and dirty blues. It’s like the band pressed record on a jamming session, a warm-up before recording the actual single, and decided to release it instead. I’m listening to it on repeat as I write this, and it’s very easy to miss when the song starts over. It could be three minutes long; or thirty minutes.

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While the lyrics might sound like the Mick Jagger manifesto – I am the little red rooster… Keep everything in the farmyard upset in every way… – one that he’s been following for the best part of sixty years, the real star here is Brain Jones and his slide guitar. The main rhythm is acoustic, but Jones’s electric guitar flirts, and slinks, and playfully cavorts around every line. One minute it’s making the sound of dogs barking, then horses rearing, then it’s the little red rooster itself. Jones was blues through and through, and felt some discomfort at the band ‘selling out’ and becoming a pop group. As the sixties progressed and the Stones moved further and further away from their bluesy roots, he became a marginalised figure on the edge of the band, until his tragic death. Looking back, it’s easy to forget that he was as much a part of the original Stones as Jagger and Richards. This record is perhaps his finest hour, and a kind of vindication. He had managed to get a full-on blues song to #1 in the British charts – the only time that has ever happened.

‘Little Red Rooster’ had originally been recorded by Howlin’ Wolf, one of the Stones’ biggest early influences, in 1961. But it’s a folk song at heart, handed down through the mists of time, probably from well back in the 1800s. His version is very raw, while another version by Sam Cooke is much more polished, with a snazzy organ doing the work of Brian Jones’s slide guitar. In those earlier versions the singer has a little red rooster, rather than being the little red rooster – which brings to mind some saucy connotations. I’m surprised Mick and the lads changed it…

Understandably, the band’s management was against releasing this as a single. It doesn’t exactly scream ‘#1 smash hit’. But it was. And I feel that this, along with all their earliest singles, have been somewhat erased from The Rolling Stones canon. For years I thought – according to the greatest hits CDs I had – that their career began with ‘Time Is On My Side’. But now I know. And while I would never name ‘Little Red Rooster’ as one of my favourite Stones songs, I am truly glad that they took this slice of Delta blues to the top of the charts for a cold and drizzly December’s week.

173. ‘It’s All Over Now’, by The Rolling Stones

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Lock up your daughters, the headlines screamed. It’s The Rolling Stones! And with a discordant, clanging intro – an intro that strongly hints at this being a band about to get up to no good – here they are.

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It’s All Over Now, by The Rolling Stones (their 1st of eight #1s)

1 week, from 16th – 23rd July 1964

Once the intro is out of the way, the song settles down into a jaunty, chugging rhythm. There’s a natty little bassline and jazzy drum-fills. In my previous post I billboarded this as Pt. II of the Great British Blues Invasion, following on from ‘The House of The Rising Sun’. But ‘It’s All Over Now’ sounds a little lightweight compared to The Animals’ record – a song that could have rattled the gates of hell. Anything would feel lightweight after that, to be fair.

Well baby used to stay out, All night long, She made me cry, She done me wrong… Lyrically this #1 follows a well-trodden path – the brave-face-on-a-break-up theme we’ve heard in discs like ‘That’ll Be the Day’, ‘Who’s Sorry Now’ and ‘Needles and Pins’ to name but a few. Except this is The Stones, authors of feminist anthems like ‘Heart of Stone’ and ‘Under My Thumb’, and so the barbs are aimed a little lower and hit a little harder than those fired by, say, The Searchers.

Well, She used to run around, With every man in town, Spending all my money… At this point we arrive at a momentous occasion in our countdown – the first genuine swear word!… Playing her half-assed game. (I know it’s nothing shocking in this day and age, but I bet the BBC weren’t playing it at the time.) She put me out, It was a pity how I cried, Tables turn and now, Her turn to cry…

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It’s a slightly sloppily written song: note the ‘cried’ being rhymed with ‘cry’, while the line about ‘every man in town’ is also recycled in the final verse. It wasn’t originally a Stones song either, as it had been released, in the US at least, in a much more soulful, funkier version by Bobby Womack & The Valentinos. In this sense, then, it is a Stones song – the ominous, passive-aggressive, arrogance of this version is all them. It’s a song with swagger. The Stones were here, with added swearing and no time for heartache.

We reach the solo – a manic, disjointed effort from Brian Jones which I don’t think would win any technical awards but which sums up the early-Stones perfectly. This and the solo from Elvis’s ‘Devil in Disguise’ were the two solos I wanted to learn guitar in order to play, aged sixteen. (I still haven’t got round to it…) Mick Jagger squawks and squeals in the background, in a manner we just haven’t heard over the past hundred and seventy two #1s. Then we fade to black with the same clanging chords from the intro, but only after Jagger has promised that he won’t be taken for that same old clown. Because he used to love her; but it’s all over now.

There we have it. Two debut number ones. Both of which managed only a solitary week at the top of the UK singles charts; but both of which changed the direction of British pop as we know it. The bad boys were on top! Listen to ‘It’s All Over Now’ and then ‘I Like It’ by Gerry and The Pacemakers and tell me who you think would win in a fight… One thing’s for sure – pop music was evolving at an astonishing rate in the mid-sixties and we can now safely declare that – barely a year after it broke through – Merseybeat is dead, trampled under Jagger, Richards, Jones and co’s wedge-heeled brogues.

Listen to every #1 so far in this handy playlist:

172. ‘The House of the Rising Sun’, by The Animals

/ UK #1s blog / 17 Comments

What have we here, then? A riff kicks in – and keeps on kicking for the next four and a half minutes – beckoning us towards a song about a whorehouse-slash-gambling den. Is this the moment in which the ‘and roll’ is dropped, and ‘rock’ strikes out on his own, with a capital R, O, C and K?

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The House of the Rising Sun, by The Animals (their 1st and only #1)

1 week, from 9th – 16th July 1964

It’s an ominous, minor-key intro. Nothing good is going to come of it. And when the vocals start, the mood darkens further. There is, A house, In New Orleans… They call the Rising Sun… (I’ve always liked the flamboyant way that the singer pronounces ‘New Orlay-ons’ in his sonorous voice.) And it’s been the ruin, Of many a poor boy, And God, I know, I’m one…

A young man, son of a tailor-woman and a gambler, heads into the latter-day Sodom and Gomorrah that is The Big Easy, and comes unstuck. How exactly he comes unstuck isn’t elaborated on – it is still only 1964, after all – but you can imagine. Cards, booze, women… If this were a movie, then the frenzied organ solo at the midway point would be the soundtrack to his descent into depravity.

Then comes a word of warning: Oh mother, Tell your children, Not to do what I have done… Except, the singer can’t heed his own advice – can’t resist the temptation of New Orleans: I got one foot on the platform, The other foot on the train, I’m going back to New Orleans, To wear that ball and chain… The organ grows more and more intense, the vocals wracked and howling – a voice that could cause avalanches. It’s completely different to Roy Orbison’s approach in the preceding #1, but it’s every bit as impressive. And the final, drawn-out horror movie chord that the song ends on is, frankly, terrifying.

This is something different… Every so often we arrive at #1s which feel like a level-up – chart-topping discs that raise the stakes (gambling pun very much intended). ‘Rock Around the Clock’, ‘Great Balls of Fire’, ‘How Do You Do It?’… and now this. After ‘House of the Rising Sun’ has blasted your eardrums, The Beatles and their Merseybeat chums sound like school kids. The Animals were men. The name alone is raw, and untamed. It’s also the longest number one single so far by some distance. The Animals didn’t edit their singles for nobody!

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They were a five-piece from Newcastle, and the lead singer with the voice of a wolf was one Eric Burden, a man who started smoking aged 10, fell in love with an older woman aged 13, and who preferred drinking ale to going to school (they breed them tough in the north-east.) He is, allegedly, The Eggman of ‘I Am the Walrus’ fame, due to an incident involving amyl nitrate and a fried breakfast… I really want to read his autobiography. Besides this disc, The Animals gave us two more ‘Best of the 60s’ perennials – ‘Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood’ and ‘We’ve Got to Get Out of This Place’. They weren’t ones for shortening their song titles either…

‘House of the Rising Sun’ has an equally interesting, and hard-edged history. Sources differ, but it seems certain that the song is as old as the 17th century. It originated either in England or France. The lyrics were originally about a woman led astray; The Animal’s version was the first to reverse the gender.

If this record hitting #1 is a game-changer – giving us pure, southern R&B at the top of the hit parade – then it has to be viewed as the first of a two-parter. While this is a seminal record; The Animals chart career didn’t last. Our next, bluesy chart-topper may not be as well-known, but the group that recorded it are perhaps the most famous rock ‘n’ roll band in history…